We hope that wherever you’re spending the holiday, the weather is crisp but not frigid; the afternoon’s sky is interesting; the drinks are abundant (pro tip: try not to have more than 15); the cuisine is fatty and starchy and meat-oriented; the sticky pre- and postprandial greens are smoking; the NFL games are on, because you rarely get to see the Raiders play their special brand of boring, hapless football on national TV; the family is hale and hearty; the traffic stays tolerable; your jeans remain unstained by gravy. And whether or not you face a Sunday comedown, enjoy this Tom Waits joint, which, like the Donald Justice poem we posted earlier, comes from sweet 1973.
Category Archives: Weekend Beats
Weekend Beats: Ludes and Chardonnay
This is not my favorite Fleetwood Mac song. Not by a mile. Rumors is one of the albums that gets better as I age, and pretty much every song on that record is better than this one, with the exception of “Don’t Stop,” which I just find cheesy and embarrassing. I blame the Clintons for this.
I’ll spare you a recap of the Mac’s history, though I think it’s worth pointing out that they’re one of the few bands that was pretty popular, then completely changed their sound by adding new members, and went on to become massive. In all honesty, only the Black Eyed Peas spring immediately to mind as another group that has pulled this off, but they sucked before Fergie and are even worse now.
I love this song because it reminds me of dentist office waiting rooms, buttery chardonnay, Reagan, Mix 106 in rush hour, perms on every mother, and the dread of Sunday afternoon at 5 when the smell of onions frying for the night meal reminded me that I’d have to go to school the next morning. Whether I was lying in my living room listening to this, or laying on the seafoam carpet in my friend’s living room as he threw a tennis ball against the wall above his fireplace, I didn’t want the song to end. I still don’t.
Long-Weekend Beats
History first: Chrissie Hynde is publicly OK with Rush Limbaugh featuring this Veterans Day weekend’s amazing song prominently (and for years!) on his hate-talk show. She went through some real casuistry to get there, but she still got there. That is gross, because the republic has enough problems without a xenophobic cyst like Rush, and good music is always in relatively short supply. (Fact: as a nerdy and eager pre-teen, I purchased and [twice] read RL’s seminal release See, I Told You So, thanks to lobbying from older relatives, but I have since made peace with that.)
Yet as a snob like me has to constantly remind himself, art doesn’t belong to anyone. That is why the Romantics could so intentionally misread Paradise Lost and decide that Lucifer was a hero and good guy after all; that is why the twentieth century’s most important poem, T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” so carefully appropriates and distorts the West’s detritus; that is how chains of theft can clear pasture for genius (cf. the Stones & Zeppelin/the blues, The Ramones/British punk, Greek sculpture/Apple’s matte products); and unfortunately that is how somebody like the aforementioned demagogue can share tastes with you, me, and all manner of progressives who like “vinyl,” coffee made in French presses, and Lou Reed.
But whatever. Just listen, maybe comment, then click back out into the Internet.
Seriously, isn’t this track fantastic? Are you not moving a hip or two? That bassline is in the empyrean with cuts like “Another One Bites the Dust” and “Hypnotize.” It is a thick existential burden, a rich man’s text. Go forth and prosper, y’all.
Weekend Beats: I’ll Streak His Blood Across My Beak
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about something in Joan Didion’s essay “On Keeping a Notebook.” She writes:
I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be; one of them, a seventeen-year-old, presents little threat, although it would be of some interest to me to know again what it feels like to sit on a river levee drinking vodka-and-orange-juice and listening to Les Paul and Mary Ford and their echoes sing “How High the Moon” on the car radio. (You see I still have the scenes, but I no longer perceive myself among those present, no longer could even improvise the dialogue.) The other one, a twenty-three-year-old, bothers me more. She was always a good deal of trouble, and I suspect she will reappear when I least want to see her, skirts too long, shy to the point of aggravation, always the injured party, full of recriminations and little hurts and stories I do not want to hear again, at once saddening me and angering me with her vulnerability and ignorance, an apparition all the more insistent for being so long banished.
This quote is one of the many reasons Didion is, in my opinion, the greatest essayist I’ve ever read. Feel free to think I’m nuts, or that I’m discounting James Baldwin, Christopher Hitchens, DFW, Maxine Hong Kingston, or some other writer you favor; they’re all great. But Didion’s my kind of Californian, and I spent a lot time reading her when I was living alone in Santa Cruz, a year that it dumped down rain and was gray from about October to March. It was awesome, and that person I used to be is actually someone I sometimes wish I was in touch with more than I am. I’ll spare you a nauseating explanation of why I miss him and why we don’t talk much, but I can say that he would have loved this Songs: Ohia tune, had it been imagined and released when he was me and I was him. It wasn’t, and sadly the guy who wrote the song won’t write any more. But maybe next time that person I used to be comes round again, I’ll play this one for him.
Bonus Beats: Lou Reed Lives On
As you are no doubt aware, Lou Reed died yesterday at the age of 71. I won’t bore you with a “Lou Reed was super important to me when I was in college” story. He was, especially when I moved to Santa Cruz and didn’t really know anyone. But Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground were super important to a lot of people, at least most of the people I know, and I’m hardly a VU fanatic. They were simply a great, really influential band. So here’s a little something sweet for your Monday.
Weekend Beats: Brown Sugar
Snowed in with grading here, even though it’s 70 degrees. Wacka wacka! More posts about books and school later this week, we promise.
In case you need cheering up as the days shorten and the cooler dark comes on, enjoy this pristine classic that you’ve sung and danced along to alone before (admit it), and also probably lied about having sex to (if you are over 25). As a fellow Virginian I can’t help but catch some residual pride off D’Angelo, and I wish the man well with his career’s evolution.
Summer gets sticky in the VA, especially in eastern cities like Richmond, D’Angelo’s hometown. Lucky for us that riparian mosquito-molasses vibe sweetens the song just right.
1.8 million “likes”? Should be more like 1.8 billion.
Weekend Beats: No Static
Given both TGR editors’ love of Steely Dan, it’s surprising that it has taken so long for this to happen: “F.M. (No Static at All)” (1978), an exemplary blurp of suede decadence. Man. The Carter era! Quaaludes and sideburns.
Named after a gigantic dildo in a William Burroughs novel, Steely Dan made sure to never be as entirely repulsive and boring as an “experimental” text like a Burroughs novel. They understood that pleasure is an art, and this oleaginous cut exemplifies how SD made some of the world’s best driving music.
Weekend Beats: Numbers on the Boards
I try not to carry too much water for Slate by continually linking to stuff they publish, because they are a behemoth and do not need my slavish attention, but this is tough because they’re a great magazine (or website, or what have you), even if a neoliberal demigod owns them now. With that in mind . . . Over at Slate, Jack Hamilton has two fine pieces about Pusha T’s new album My Name Is My Name, in the latter of which Hamilton deftly annotates Pusha’s/Clipse’s “strange anti-charisma,” that Virginia blend of “brute creativity and dizzying swagger.” On the working top-ten list Hamilton assembles, one finds this new blood diamond, “Numbers on the Boards” (prod. at least in part by Kanye West):
The production showcases Kanye’s ability to chisel out beats that are simultaneously appealing and unnerving: it’s poltergeist pop. Good luck getting it out of your head. Buy King Push’s album, too. He has been one of the best MCs around for over a decade without ever making the Scrooge McDuck money he deserves.
Aaaaand because My Name is My Name is so good, here is another track, “Suicide,” a chilling diss of Drake, et al. Assuming you aren’t the kind of person who clutches their pearls (Ohmygod he’s cussing and just talking about money and drugs stuff and objectifying women) when confronting anything that isn’t piously middle-class—in which case you should not be reading this blog—you will enjoy it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXMTFNBfrjk
As one of the Web’s best vernacular hip-hop critics, Big Ghost (who has a new website and is not, despite some early rumors, actually Ghostface), puts it with his usual demotic verve (WARNING: salty urban language ahead):
Niggas at Def Jam musta lost they damn minds yo… This shit is reckless b. This is REALLY like some Hell Hath No Fury shit all over again. I aint eem playin when I say this shit make me wanna cop a kilo on consignment n snort the whole brick right muthafuckin now. Im liable to do some irresponsible shit while listenin to this muthafucka b. Ya boy liable to make some bad decisions n act out in a very irresponsible way right now yo. The sound of that money countin machine dont help matters none my nigga. I cant be held accountable for my actions right now…not if niggas is gon make songs like this n release em to the public. Yall reckless for that… Ionno how Pharrell can go from makin electro french disco n happy ass Captain & Tennille type shit to joints this filthy son. This shit jus dirty bruh. Im disgusted. Im makin faces like I jus walked into a room witta dead raccoon hangin off the ceiling fan right now. I might gon order a pizza jus so I can punch somebody in the face right now dawg. Word is bond I might gon bicycle kick the pizza man thru the skylight if this shit is playin again when he get here. The boy Push takin aim at certain inviduals in these bars too. [. . .] Ab Liva did his Ab Liva thing on this shit too. He might actually be the last rapper on earth still doin the Young Chris whisper flow that Hov made famous. Bars was on point as usual tho. Not like it really need to be said it but I all the way fucks wit this shit right here.
Me too, Ghost. Happy weekends everywhere, everyone.
The General Reader 