“In my younger and more vulnerable years,” I thought She’s the One (1996!), directed by Ed Burns, was a great movie. It was about urban adults having affairs and feeling big important emotions, like guilt, lust, greed, and envy. To a nerdy teenager going to Catholic boys school in the suburbs, this all seemed so authentic. It also starred Jennifer Aniston and Cameron Diaz (and Amanda Peet, and Leslie Mann) at the heights (or at least what I thought at the time were the heights) of their lady powers. This was a serious film, and I was a serious young man.
So yeah, the trailer doesn’t necessarily age well (that voice over is baaaaaad), but the movie’s still pretty decent, and the song in the background holds up. Tom Petty did the score for the movie, and “Walls” is my favorite of his songs from the 1990s. Yes, I know he had some classics in the early 1990s, but I stand by my statement. Do any of those other songs have Lindsey Buckingham on backing vocals? No? I rest my case. Enjoy the weekend (and this weird Eastern circus-themed video that probably cost a shitload of money to make), folks.
Notwithstanding all the tweed and brown shoes I go in for, I also like to beat up my ’95 Camry’s flypaper speakers with nasty bass like this. The verse that starts around 2:00 is an especially hot ride on a hot, hot beat. Blow like early-mornin’ flights, indeed. Watch out for the weed references and gently onanistic misogyny. Happy autumn, all!
By the late 1970s the musical residue of the late 1960s had become troublesome ground, given the passage of time’s ability to turn the cool into the passé as well as the rise of genres that challenged first-wave rock’s popular ascendance, some of them enduring (punk) and others (disco) not so much. To be honest, postwar rock had taken some gross turns, like prog. And the musically abetted idealism of “The Sixties” hadn’t done much in terms of, you know, preventing Nixon or a terrible recession. And a lot of great postwar bands were gone (the Beatles), close to disintegrating (Zeppelin), or on the early slopes of a long decline (the Kinks). And really, the Sixties in general *did* suck (ewww, Baby Boomers as young people are even worse than Boomers as anything else).
The Rolling Stones endured these winds with their standard vulgar genius, so different from the Beatles’ awkwardly self-conscious, cerebral magic. In 1978, as the Clash exploded toward London Calling (1979), the Stones dropped Some Girls. You’ve heard the lead song from this honky-tonk scumbag-disco masterpiece a thousand times, but I’ll bet “Miss You” still feels as urgently dirty as it did the first time you heard it bump. What’s a matter, man? We’re gonna come round at 12 with some Puerto Rican girls that’s just dyyyyyyin to meet you.
Picking the best RS albums is like picking the best Shakespeare, as in about fifty percent of the work they did in their prime could legitimately be called their “best.” On the other hand, this album clears most of the decks: Some Girls is their second-best album, after Sticky Fingers, and I will fight anyone who says otherwise, which is probably, like, eighty percent of Stones fans, given the above-noted reality of all those classics.
One of the worst things that happens when a really talented artist commits suicide (you know other than the fact that they have committed suicide and are dead FOREVER), is that critics and fans often come to view all of their prior art through the lens of this single, destructive act. There’s nothing funny or subtle about suicide, so Sylvia Plath’s verses get read as odes to how awful the patriarchy is, and her depression comes to stand-in for the poet herself. But Plath’s depression (much less her suicide) didn’t write one of my favorite similes ever; a complex, witty, mean, smart, fucked up, whole woman thinking about motherhood as both entirely natural and unnatural at once did. From “Morning Song”:
Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
As I’ve told many students, there are essays within essays contained in that single line. But the popular sense of Plath is that she was the living last line of “Daddy” stripped of any possible irony. She was pure ladyrage driven to its boiling point by the evil Ted Hughes. That version of Plath is not a real person, and we’re worse off as a culture for not coming to grips with all of Plath.
Plath’s fate is no different from Kurt Cobain’s. Nirvana’s In Utero (the band’s best album, in my opinion) turns 20 this year, and of course that means it’s being rereleased with all kinds of extras and stray bits attached. It also means that the Cobain as poete maudite narrative will likely be rehashed. Obviously the guy was depressed. But he was also this:
From this and other accounts, Cobain doesn’t seem like he was the easiest person to deal with. But even saying that is a lot more complex that saying he personified teenage angst or something pat like that. Artists aren’t symbols. Symbols don’t do anything. Only people can. And really talented people do things like this:
Hope y’all are having a good weekend. Whether you empathize in a literal or figurative sense with the concept of “blow[ing] big blunts on the way to brunch,” I hope that, on a poetic level, you can dig a man, one Danny Brown, who enjoys the possibilities of alliteration and assonance.
It’s disgusting in LA right now. We’re just a sweaty mess. Temps in the 90s, regionally inappropriate humidity, and not a breath of wind. At least the Santa Anas move the detritus of the city around. This past week has just cooked it deeper into the pavement. So here you go, folks. Hot music for hot weather. Eddie Murphy, Glenn Frey, Glenn Frey’s stubble, a vaguely androgynous lady playing a saxophone. As a kid I had this song on a Pocket Rocker cassette. I’d blast it (as loud as one could blast a Pocket Rocker) while eating Doritos and reading the World Book Encyclopedia. Thus academia. Stay cool, kids.
It’s way too hot here in Los Angeles this weekend. We live on the second floor, so our apartment is just gross today. Still, we have a marginally functional air conditioner, which makes staying in better than going out, giving me a lot of time to pore over Grantland‘s “Battle for the Best Song of the Millennium” feature. It’s an utterly pointless exercise, but they admit as much. Songs are given seeds and pitted against one another in an NCAA-style bracket, and readers vote to determine the “winner.” Some of the results have been disheartening. That “Stay Fly” by Three 6 Mafia was given a 15 seed, and that people with ears think “Drop It Like It’s Hot” is a better song by almost a 3 to 1 margin really shake my faith in humanity. But M83 and Phoenix upsetting Taylor Swift and Katy Perry, respectively, are reasons for hope. In any event, you should follow the action.
In a follow-up feature discussing the bubble songs that just missed the cut, the NIT songs, if you will, the always insightful Steven Hyden diagnoses what is wrong with the bracket’s composition: very few mid-major songs made the field. He writes:
Let’s acknowledge a few of the biases inherent in the creation of this bracket. There is no metal. There is only a smattering of country. Rock music is consistently relegated to the lowest seeds. Pretty much anything played on an acoustic stringed instrument is apparently verboten. Bands you might like — Spoon, the National, the Hold Steady, Queens of the Stone Age, the Flaming Lips, Modest Mouse, Drive-By Truckers, Bon Iver, Mastodon, Fucked Up, TV on the Radio, Muse — are nowhere to be found. This is a list where “great song” is synonymous with “rap and pop bangers that were popular on the radio once.” That doesn’t mean the bracket is terrible, necessarily — just that if you happen to be among the troglodytes for whom “rap and pop bangers that were popular on the radio once” does not constitute quality listening, sorry, you are left out.
He says this before recommending the Shins’ “New Slang,” a song that most of the folks who read this blog probably listened to on repeat in their college bedrooms while pining away after people who weren’t in fact as cool, smart, or attractive as they seemed. It’s the perfect song for that sort of thing, and as such deserved to be included in the field over something like Britney Spears’ “Toxic,” which is just another serviceable, and frankly boring, pop song. It’s like when a 19-12 Illinois team with a .500 record in Big Ten play gets invited to the tournament over a 26-6 Long Beach State squad from the Big West. Both teams are likely to lose in the first round, but I’d rather see how the team from the small conference and that runs an unorthodox system fares against a tough opponent. We’ve all watched enough middling Big Ten basketball and heard enough middling pop music.
So here’s a mid-major gem some of you might know, and some of you might not. It’s from 2011 and merits a Parental Advisory sticker for its adult content: lyrics acknowledging that there are some things in life you can’t come back from. Not kids’s stuff. Then again, Gillian Welch was no Mouseketeer.
The General Reader 