I CANNOT TELL A LIE

I had a dream last night that I needed to perform “Baby Got Back” for some serious purpose (like a preventing-the-end-of-the-world purpose; like Jeff Goldblum as Quirky Scientist was there, dumbing it down for me, and I slowly repeated it back to him, but in that sassy yet streetwise way that I have, when – oh snap! –it suddenly made sense how the fate of the world depended on me) – and then I could not remember the first line of the song.

Re: Beastie Boys

There are several historic musical moments that are probably destined to make my generation (hitting our mid-30s/early 40s now) the most annoying generation to hear wax poetic about the music of our youth since the Baby Boomers. One of those moments is the mainstreaming of rap and hip-hop: Licensed To Ill (along with Run DMC’s King of Rock) was one of the first albums I felt I little afraid of, that I had to listen to quietly and hide from my parents, because music was dangerous and misunderstood, and prompted soul-churning debates among my elementary school and junior high nerd cohort about what constitutes “music” – while Bon Jovi could clearly play their instruments, the Beastie Boys were “just saying stuff”. My first (ironic airquote) “band” (unairquote) started in the 4^th grade, reaching our commercial peak in the sixth – at which point we decide we should actually learn to play instruments, prompting me to pick up a guitar for the first time. We reached the lunchroom consensus that “rap” was not “music” and therefore we did not like it – and almost immediately we started writing raps. Licensed to Ill was funny, groundbreaking, dumb, and exhilarating. I once had a cassette with Paul’s Boutique on one side and I have no idea what on the other, because I fast-forwarded through Side B every time to get back to Paul’s Boutique. Check Your Head challenged expectations during a time of ever-changing expectations, inspired everyone I knew to start wearing stocking caps year-round, and was a great record. Ill Communication was one of the albums that completely defined the Summer of 1994, my first summer after high school, in all its wonder and awfulness. My 20s arrived and with it a black cloud of depression – not the cool, teenage, Cure-listening, “this makes me more interesting” sort of depression, but a seemingly groundless and frequently debilitating void. I hid it from everyone I cared about, until about four years later, temping at a pharmaceutical I wrote to my brother: “I’ve been depressed.” I spent a little time working for my dad, primarily driving around replacing the fire extinguishers in a drugstore chain in all grayest cities in Upstate New York. It afforded my long hours in the van by myself, which was exactly what I wanted. Drifting between radio stations, I heard “Intergalactic” for the first time. It was that weird drifting time for the collective pop culture of music – hearing the song, which resemble nothing so strongly as the rhymes we wrote in my sixth grade band, with the time honored but dated flow of “Lead-MC-says-a-line, Everyone-else-shouts-the-last-word/the-rhyme” – I assumed I was hearing a Fun Lovin’ Criminals song. My cohort was graduating college and we were all deep in the funk of post-collegiate what-to-do, despite the fact that it was the Late 90s Internet Boom, and we gathered regularly at a local bar that serve 50-cent juice glasses of the local brewery’s bilgiest bilge, playing shuffleboard. Most of my friends were about to enter the cocoon of Law or Medical school – for the next couple years we’d have relateable stories for each other about middle-class subsistence living, but ultimately they emerged as doctors and lawyers, all at once burning the sweatshirts of their undergad universities and buying houses outside Boston about the same time that I – pursuing the music dream without any real gusto – moved into a hallway. Over juice glasses of beer, my friend Ryan, always savvier and smarter than me, explained to me why Hello Nasty was a great record – but it was too late. The nineties – our Goonies-time of chasing buried treasures hidden beneath the ordinariness of our lives – were nearly over, and I simultaneous hit the moment where I didn’t really care for the Beastie Boys and talking about music became a thing I did with my friends instead of listening to it. And so the Beastie Boy has taken me from the first flush of love at 11 years old, through danger, through angst, through unexpected beauty, and there I was at 22 – jaded and unhappy. Looking back, on my involvement in music as a very young man (say 16-26), I realize that I didn’t have the fire, the energy, the good taste, the skill, or the desire for it. Released from those dreams, as a person in my mid-late 30s – I can acknowledge how happy it makes me to be content with being a fan and a dilettante. But I was involved in the music scene, wherever I lived, and I’ve met some very talented people, people much more knowledgeable and skilled than me. Still, even the most famous band that ever travelled in my orbit is just barely famous - making their living on their fifth mediocre album of increasingly banal pop-punk; yet they were the ones who “made it” and in them I can very clearly see a drive for success and slightly brighter spark of talent than anyone else possessed. To that end, I cannot imagine how wonderful it must have felt to live life as Adam Yauch – to be there for those exhilarating moments (the birth of hip-hop, the birth of hardcore, the alternative explosion) and to have leapt into the fray in those moments, to literally be one of the people pointing the direction that the future of music would take. Perhaps because the Beastie Boys so frequently acknowledge – from the plain-spoken, self-centered, and boastful podium of hip hop – that they’re incredibly lucky; that they’re professional goofballs; that they won the lottery, I'm not bitterly envious. Their swaggering always belied an ever-present nervous shrug of “why me?”  As fans we wordlessly answered – in the face of their innovation, their refusal to play it boring or safe, and their open invitation to join them for the length of a record – “because you’re great.”

SOMETHING SOMETHING BURT WARD… THIS THING WRITES ITSELF

We had a baby. From what I’ve heard – and now learned firsthand in the couple weeks – this changes everything. Indeed, I have picked up a guitar about three times in the past two weeks and only when baby is sleeping. The sweet albeit modestly appointed recording space I’d begun putting together – as the oasis, the “me time” escape, the geographical separation of family and music – has been getting more use storing boxes (from car seats, strollers, etc.) than as a home studio. This was probably inevitable. When my wife and I met, working as summer camp counselors, seven years ago, the head counselors described – as staff orientation ended – that the coming weeks would be “the longest days of the shortest summer of your life”. With parenthood the days are ten times longer; the summers will inevitably be shorter.

Eventually, I’m sure we’ll reclaim some semblance of personal time from parenthood. Not much, I’m sure – but I’m actually excited about the prospect of forced time limits on my long-standing Achilles’ Heel of interminable recording, mixing, and remixing. My friends who have some to parenthood before me still make music – the drummer of my last “serious” band toured for three years while raising a 2-5 year old and having another child in that time. I would inevitably be a poor, frustrated, and distracted parent if I failed to continue doing things I love and sharing that aspect of life with my child.

For now though, the Kiddo is King. We sleep in short shifts, we cry unexpectedly, we are thrilled by wet diapers (after an early dehydration scare, you’ve never seen two people give a child with more encouragement for regularly peeing himself), we shower baby with praise over his 1lb weight gain at his two-week pediatric check-up, we survive on water and saltines and the meals that arrive in foil and take-out containers. In the end, I hope that fatherhood makes me a better and more prolific musician – providing me a reason to try to be happy and satisfied with my music and a reason to get things done, in order to get on to the more important job at hand.

IN THE POURING RAIN

(February 2012 - since I wrote this post, Lana Del Rey has become a sort of national punchline. In writing this post during the fall, I think I failed to recognize that she was becoming something significantly bigger than a blogosphere curio. Anyway, the biggest bandwagon jump with LDR seems to be in deriding her, damning her for some of the points I raise below and others of even less significance. In retrospect, I wanted to clarify that my disappointment with LDR stemmed from the fact that there was a kernel of greatness in "Video Games". Mostly, her rise and her recorded output reminded me of a now-moot relic in the history of music fandom: that disappointment of buying a record for the hit single, only to discover 10 lump-of-coal songs surrounding the diamond. We always want to find greatness, that's what spurs our undying love of music; its the long and frequently unrewarding search for greatness that gives rise to our persistent pessimism.)

I was enamored with the song “Video Games” by Lana Del Rey. It was stuck in my head – toeing that line between welcome obsession and sheer annoyance – for weeks. She exists wholly (for now) on the internet – and in the rumors and speculation heard through the (perhaps purposely) unreliable grapevine of that world, I’ve felt a little conflicted about different things I’ve learned about Miss Del Rey. On one hand, I’ve read that LDR herself compiles and edits her cut-n-paste videos which (in the case of “Video Games”) combine a perfect amount of vintage film/ cartoon/ whatever snippets with disparate tabloid footage of a drunk Paz de la Huerta and stock footage of young lovers, presumably outtakes from an American Eagle Outfitters commercial. On the other hand, I’ve read rumors of “handlers” – some black hand launching an insidiously premeditated and secretly well-funded viral “Most Popular Girl in School” campaign on behalf of Del Rey’s career.

In part, her buzz reflects my broader concerns about blog-generated popularity: that style beats substance every time. You get a few people to repeat your carefully-curated talking points and soon enough they’re being repeated as an organic, free-wheeling, and compelling truth.

I find Lana Del Rey’s empowered/ aggressive/ frank ( /fan-boy-fantasy-embodiment) sense of sexuality a little dull. A little contrived A little predictable. Its not unsettling and it doesn’t feel genuine – its calculated, fabricated; launched from a internet marketing standpoint. Ultimately, that makes it unsexy. It’s a little sad seeing her live performance of “Born 2 Die” linked on Pitchfork and captionedwith the breathless, artistic-merit-negating subheader “Skip to 1:24 or 3:07 for this choice line: "Let me fuck you hard in the pouring rain, you like your girls insane." Yeah, yeah, of course – here’s the real draw: just skip ahead to the pretty girl saying she wants to fuck you.

Watching the video, even she seems a little afraid or embarrassed to sing the line. Perhaps its just a bit of stage fright; a young artist finding her live performance footing. But – living that fear myself – I think its because of some failures to really nail her own formula with “Born 2 Lose”:

(A) For starters, it is a mediocre crib of her own “Video Games” lyric of: “Heaven is a place where you/ tell me all the things you want to do/ I heard that you like the bad girls/ Honey, is that true?” Bad girls are presumably or at least occasionally insane, and on the list of Things I Want To Do, most of us – by crassly and lovingly treating our paramour as a sex object – want to fuck or be fucked or mutually fuck/get fucked, hard (and soft, piano, forte, with crescendos and glissandos), by them. To that end, “tell me all the thing you want to do… I hear you like the bad girls” is a subtler and dirtier come-on than the bald proclamation of “I want to fuck you hard”. Though it is certainly direct, and direct expression has its own charm and cache, but not in this case not in this song. It’s a misstep: a calculated expression of desire that comes across as toothless.

(B) However much we all want fuck/get fucked/mutually fuck, hard, doing so “in the pouring rain” is just plain old cheeseball lyrical flop. Its lame. On some level maybe it’s slightly clever to combine the “I want to fuck you hard” lyric with a such a stock, toss-off, Cole-Porter-would-never-touch-it romantic prepositional supposition as “in the pouring rain” – a contrast of the unexpectedly crass and the banal cliché. But I think LDR was just lazy; she failed to take the time to consult a Haiku collection and find a different five syllables. Every songwriter or lyricist writes a lazy line and has to forgive themselves, and as a listener, you can hear when someone doesn’t nail it – you can hear their failing and personal disappointment in not finding something better. Sometimes a songwriter can rely on forward momentum, on the impatience of the listener to get them through, on the transitional, fleeting essence of any song. And I’m sometimes genuinely exasperated listening to songwriters like Stephen Merrit or John Darnielle pile one clever couplet on top of the other. But in this case, LDR just fell short – and I can hear her disappointment and, in the video, see it in her body language. Since very little sex is candlelit, rose-petaled, and vanilla-scented, and she’s making the compelling effort to say so, she only undercuts her blunt lyrics by invoking banality from the “Sex-Scene-in-Top-Gun” cookbook.

(C) On her third and final stumble through this lyric, she changes it to “let me kiss you hard…” – perhaps revealing that she is uncomfortable with the preceding variation, hasn’t gotten it quite right, and feels a little vulnerable expressing it – to the point that she changes it. She’s declawing the sentiment, changing a single word and reducing the entire chorus to the diet, sinless, sugar-free version. Then there isn’t a tooth left in the entire jawbone of this chorus.

I haven’t made up mind about Lana del Rey. On one hand “Video Games” really was in my head for about three weeks straight, in a good way, fulfilling every piece of good press her performance received: laconic and sexy, perverse, successfully evoking modern context while delivered with Capitol-era Sinatra melancholy. “Video Games” was simultaneously a come-on and a kiss-off. Conversely, most of her other songs are obvious, seams-exposed pastiches of a carefully manicured retro-vintage aesthetic developed for iPhone apps and Facebook distribution and Internet music-blog buzz. Her subsequent music (especially “Born 2 Die”) seems like the most calculated attempt to cash in and recreate on what she’s done well, instead of expanding and building on it as a departure point.

I wrestle with my own snap judgment of “This song ‘Video Games’ is great; too bad the singer is so 'hot' – that totally undermines her credibility” – because what kind of nonsensical and ultimately sexist statement is that? Lana Del Rey can’t help her good looks and has every right to use them for all they’re worth – especially if it gets Pitchfork’s career-making blood up. She pointedly seems to be using the bloggy, fan-boy kneejerk response and the coupling of female sexuality and genuine talent to her advantage. Good for her: for the past 30 years indie/alternative/underground/whatever music has been blatantly sexist and simultaneously afraid of women. But from a musical perspective, however, I fear that “Video Games” is the fluke – the gem amongst the filler in Del Rey’s repertoire – and the fingerprints of a coldly-calculated marketing scheme seem too obvious to dismiss. Considering “Lana Del Rey” is an invention to begin with might just protect her from that particular criticism. Her real name is Lizzy Warren – she grew up a couple hours from me, near Lake Placid NY, and I rather hear her write about getting drunk in the woods at fifteen, which is how you pass the time in Upstate NY, instead of her fake switchblades & trailer parks & bourbon guise. But that invention protects and emboldens her as an artist. Perhaps she’ll deliver on that boldness; perhaps she’ll merely sound "handled". Considering the forgettable “Born 2 Die” is the lead single and title-track on her forth-coming album, that leaves me with low expectations. And as a rule, you shouldn’t use “2” for “to” unless you’re Prince and its sometime before 1989.

MURDERGRAM

I often forget it sometimes but The Misfits' Walk Among Us is one of my favorite albums. I'm not sure exactly how  - because on many, many levels its just terrible. Bad production, bad lyrics, bad playing, bad conceptual idea for a band. Oh god, its awful. But even as I write this, while listening to Walk Among Us straight through for the first time in probably 10 or 12 years (via Spotify), I'm laughing and smiling and utterly transported (I'm off to Narnia! Thanks, Glenn!).

Already past the age of taking The Misfits seriously - in 1999, done with college, living alone for the first time, working a temp job with a giant pharmaceutical company - some friends of mine bought me a copy of Walk Among Us after I looked after their two-year old son one afternoon. The preceding year, I had only listened to one cassette in my car - Radiohead's Ok Computer on one side, Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique on the other. I always fast-forwarded through the Ok Computer side - not sure why. Paul's Boutique is another one of those albums that's absolutely genius but captures some growing pains - the Beasties weren't yet doing ironically terrible lyrics: Paul's Boutique frequently features rhymes that are bad and sincere. The point is that I was obsessing; I was unhappy with music and life in general, and looking backwards. I didn't get TV in my apartment and I was scared to be there by myself, because I'd just seen the Blair Witch Project and The Sixth Sense, so I just listened to The Misfits and read comic books until I was too tired to stay awake anymore.

Holy crap - Spotify's constant commercials are horrible. Their business model must be based on annoying people into paying for their service. Ok - every song on this album is awesome and horrible. Such a come-hither velvety croon on the lyric "collect the heads of little girls and put them on my wall."Also, it takes like 22 minutes to listen to this whole album. I think a brilliant musical undertaking would be reworking all the lyrics to Walk Among Us so that they actually become the romantic-movie cliches that all the horror-movie cliches seem to partially imply.

CRANKYPANTS

In reading over my posts from the past year or so, I noticed I've gone from "moderately cranky" to "super cranky". Considering I pretty much write about myself and music, that's kind of alarming, indicating a much deeper level of unhappiness than I think I'd actually admit to. In the past six months, we've started looking to leave Texas; however, in the current economic climate, and as grown-ups, we can't simply uproot, throw out clothes in a duffle bag and just go. So for the first time in my life, I'm being tortured by the itch to leave a place and the inability to do so. So also, for the first time in my life, my crankiness seems tied to broader Concerns About Life, rather than Generalized Failure as an artist/ musician/ whatever.

But I finished my three songs (see previous post) and that was a load off my back. I did something; I whittled some little sliver off the fencepost of my ambition. The immediate effects - well - I can't really tell. I'm not really any happier I guess, but at this point, music hasn't been a daily focus of my life. But also, I'm not as cranky - on a daily basis - as this blog might lead you to believe.

R.E.M. BREAK UP

Arguing “This is Awesome” vs. “This Sucks” about REM’s “Stand” song and video in my junior high cafeteria drew philosophical lines in my head and heart that went way beyond music and – for better or worse – went on to define my life in probably too many ways. Like many folks, I’ve probably written off REM for at least ten years – but watching this video reminds me how much I love them. Absolutely fell in love with these guys in the last 30 seconds of the video – when they make their only appearance: the bad haircuts, the anti-fashion, the genuine human ugliness of their faces that so clearly separated them from Jon Bon Jovi and George Michael. I remember my best friend in high school calling up after he’d bought Automatic for the People to describe it to me, song by song, and telling me “Everybody Hurts” was the “worst, dumbest, cheesiest song you’ve ever heard – except its incredible.” Though I kind of wish they’d called it quits before Mike Mills started wearing Nudie suits or maybe when Bill Berry quit, that was their decision. Enjoy your break-up, you amazing bastards.