Reading and writing

Music

Thanks to everyone who showed up at Quimby’s to listen to me read, and pretended like you didn’t notice all the porn comics on the shelves around you. The literary crowd was all at Printer’s Ball that night, so the crowd was sparse, save for all of you. So thanks for filling up those seats.

Thanks also to the grey-haired gentleman who, as I came off stage, asked me to take his iPod and create a playlist for him. That was a treat, though I usually prefer to have 3-4 hours to spend quality time with such a task. And props to the two dudes who stopped looking at the porn comics to listen to what I had to say.

And thanks to Kelsey who gave me a Colt 45 before I started. Oh and asking me in the first place.

For those of you who couldn’t make it, I’m posting the piece here. Enjoy.

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The other day, I installed something called Last.FM on my computer.

For those that don’t know, Last.FM is a sort of social networking software that constructs a profile of you, based on what songs you listen to on your computer. This same profile is then published on its website for the entire world to see. As far as Last.FM is concerned, you are what you listen to.

After your install Last.FM, it scans your iTunes and other audio software to come up with a list of your most recently played tracks, favorite artists, etc. My top five most played artists ended up looking like this:

1 Johnny Cash
2 The Who
3 The Police
4 James Brown
5 The Faces

I was surprised to see Johnny Cash at number one but certainly not disappointed. It was now clear to all that I liked his music, and I didn’t need one of those t-shirts of him flipping the bird to prove it.

Most of the rest of that list was pretty respectable, and dead-on. The songs of The Who, The Police and James Brown are practically a part of my DNA, and I have a tendency to get drunk on whiskey and crank up The Faces, so that makes sense as well. Last.FM and I both agreed on who I was, and what I liked.

The problem began the other day when I turned on the iTunes party shuffle, which is guaranteed to play the lousiest music you own. For people who pride themselves on having good taste in music, it’s the equivalent of your parents pulling out a book of naked baby pictures in front of your Prom date. Sure enough, less than five songs in I was hearing “Into The Void” by KISS, a song that’s so awful, it doesn’t show up until Disc 5 in their boxed set. Two songs later, it got worse: my apartment filled with the sounds of Aersosmith’s “Don’t Want To Miss A Thing.”

Normally, this would be a minor annoyance. But with Last.FM humming in the background, my heretofore stellar music taste could now be called into question by the entire Internet. Sadly, there was no “I was listening to this ironically” button.

(As an aside, there’s no such thing as listening to a song “ironically.” If you are alone, and purposely cue up a song and hit play? You like that song. Irony doesn’t enter into it. And the same thing goes for mustaches.)

I quickly discovered I could delete songs from my Last FM profile, and couldn’t right-click fast enough to clear those two musical atrocities. I bailed on the party shuffle and cued up Carole King’s Tapestry so I could have a few minutes to think and not feel betrayed.

There are few things one can do that cultivate more self-intimacy than listening to music alone. No matter what the world tells you about yourself or whatever façade you try to present to the world, you can be secure in the knowledge that no judgment is being passed over you while you cue up songs from Kansas, Men at Work, or Sheryl Crow’s latter albums (her earlier stuff still holds up).

I realized that Last.FM now had me putting all those private moments I’ve kept to myself on display for the world to see. I might be fine with the Internet knowing I love Johnny Cash, but I’d prefer it never found out I own not one, but two Kylie Minogue albums.

After thinking about it some more, I realized that ever since high school, I’ve defined myself by music.

When I started dating my high school girlfriend, she would get countless notes from me filled with nothing but song lyrics. It would literally be a piece of paper upon which I’d written the title of the song, the name of the band and then the lyrics. I wouldn’t even bother to write “Dear Colleen” or “Hey baby, I heard this song and it made me think of you.” We had a rather rocky relationship, and broke up and got back together numerous times. I don’t remember much about the details behind most of those numerous breakups, except for one. Why? Because as we were breaking up, the song “I Know I’m Losing You” by The Temptations was playing in the background. Sure, it was painful. But you don’t get better timing than that, and when I tell the story of our Big Breakup, that’s the detail I use to illustrate it. Even though it probably wasn’t our Big Breakup at all, but more likely Three Breakups Before The Big Breakup.

It was this kind of musical myth-making that I started to cultivate in college.

The first time I had sex, was with a girl named Angela while we were listening to Meatloaf’s Bat Out Of Hell album. Anyone who has ever heard this album knows that it doesn’t exactly create the ideal backdrop for losing one’s virginity. It’s akin to saying that Def Leppard’s Hysteria was playing when you had your First Communion. To be honest, I didn’t have much choice in the musical selection that evening. We started getting down to business in her dorm room, and I hadn’t known in advance that this was going to happen so I hadn’t thought to bring any “mood music.” She had a few tapes, most of which were lousy. The only one that seemed palatable to me was Bat Out Of Hell. Perhaps I thought the ten minute title track that led the album would be loud enough to keep the people in the hallway from overhearing the sounds of our ecstasy. If so, I admire the moxie I had that led me to think the experience was going to last much more than ten seconds, nevermind ten minutes.

A few years later, I attempted to rewrite this portion of my sexual history by claiming that it was not Meat Loaf, but Marvin Gaye who was the soundtrack to my first fumbling attempts at lovemaking. Of course, the first time I said this I was pretty drunk, so what actually came out of my mouth was “The first time I had sex was with Marvin Gaye.”

So there it is: rather than stick to the truth of a situation, I chose to describe my entrance into manhood as being accompanied by a soul legend, rather than an obsese, sweaty screamer prone to Wagnerian musical excess.

People who define themselves by the music they listen to, worry about what Last FM says about them, while people who don’t, have nothing to fear.

The thing is, I listen to my share of “bad” music. The very first live show I ever went to was The Monkees Reunion tour in 1987, with “Weird Al” Yankovic opening for them. I have, on occasion, psyched myself up by listening to songs by The Alan Parsons Project. And, swear to God, I will knock you to the ground for saying anything bad about “Sussudio” by Phil Collins. So I
don’t exactly have an impeachable record of coolness when it comes to music.

Let me be clear: people define themselves by the music they listen to, aren’t really interested in making sure their taste in music is seen as particularly cutting edge. It has more to do with tracking your personality or the personality of others by how they relate to music. Deleting those Aerosmith and KISS songs from my Last.FM profile was just like telling people I lost my virginity to Marvin Gaye. So to speak. I didn’t do it because those songs are terrible. They are, but that’s not why it bothered me. I just didn’t want to claim them as my own. They weren’t part of who I considered myself to be.

I know there are people out there who don’t use musical taste as a means of discovering things about other people. Whereas me? I am sure I can tell everything about you by asking you which Beatles album is your favorite. I know whether or not we’re going to get along by your preference for either the German or American version of “99 Luftballoons.” Or whether you even have a preference at all. I’m also a firm believer in the notion that you can tell how much fun someone might be at a party by whether or not he or she can sing the chorus of “Jungle Love” by The Time.

I know there are other people out there like me. In fact, it’s given me an idea for a speed-dating service called MixDate. You will sit down at a table across from someone, and they will hand you a CD of their favorite songs, and you will hand them one of yours. And then you’ll get up, and move to the next table. After you listen to all the CDs, you tell MixDate which ones you liked the best, and they’ll tell you who liked yours. If there’s a match, you trade phone numbers. I guarantee this would be the most successful dating service of all time.

Best thing all week

Media, Uncategorized, , ,

Most of you probably saw the Create Your Own Simpsons avatar activity on The Simpsons Movie website. The site allowed you to create a Simpsons character that supposedly looked like you. I came close, but it was never quite right.

Today my co-worker Margaret sent me a link to Simpsonizeme.com, which allows you to do essentially the same, but with a picture of yourself, thereby offering a more lifelike depiction of yourself as…er, a cartoon.

I ended up with this:


Seriously, how much does that look like me? The eyebrows aren’t quite right, and my normally lantern-jawed chin is given short shrift, but otherwise: damn. You probably have a picture of me (drunk) making that exact face.

And if you’re saying to yourself “Say, I don’t remember you looking quite that way,” then perhaps you ought to show up here:

It’ll be fun, I promise. If not, you’ll get a beer for your trouble.*

* Offer good only for Old Style

Oblivious Living Part 1.13: "C30, C60, C90, Go" by Bow Wow Wow

Music

MP3 – “C30, C60, C90, Go” by Bow Wow Wow
Lyrics – “C30, C60, C90, Go” by Bow Wow Wow

First, a message for the kids: there is nothing here about Bow Wow. Sorry, blame Google.

Now then: Raise your hand if you ever bought those K-Mart blank cassette tapes that were a buck each. Ah, what a relic this song is.

Or is it…

It’s impossible to be a consumer of music these days, and not think this song has a renewed relevance. Back in the 80s, the record industry was freaking out because people were recording music off of records and the radio, and onto magnetic cassette tapes. Yes, kids, off the radio, and didn’t I saw there was no Bow Wow here? Consider it the very first version of time-shifting programming. Nevermind that music on the radio was – and largely still is – often of lesser sound quality than most records. And nevermind that more often than not, you had to put up with inane DJ chatter that made Eric and Kathy sound like Rhodes scholars. Or at least scholars from the Rhode Island School of Design.

No matter: record execs were convinced they were going to lose scads of money. Needless to say, it didn’t happen. But what it did lead to was a new format: the compact disc. Eventually, the CD led to the downfall of the cassette format, but home taping (or mixtape making, if you will) continued apace until the arrival of recordable CDs and then came MP3s and…well, you know the rest of that story.

But the salient point here is this: people will not be bound by formats and technology when it comes to the consumption of music. Especially now. And this doesn’t just extend to music. The iPhone was barely a week old before someone cracked the encryption on it that forces the user to activate it with AT&T. Building a business model around a format just doesn’t work anymore.

As for the song, Bow Wow Wow had one trick, but Lord, it was a good one.

BWW was another of Malcolm McLaren’s pre-fab rock acts. Three-quarters of the band were once Ants of the Adam variety, and its lead singer was Annabella Lwin, a brash 14 year old who managed to fashion her own personality, despite MacLaren’s Swengali routine.

BWW had a knack for reflecting culture back at itself. The songs were a mish-mash of pop touchstones, with an immediacy delivered through Lwin’s me-me-me vocal style and an insistent island rhythms straight out of a Sandals resort. Not the first band I’d pick to represent the 80s, but an apt one.

Early warning

Uncategorized,

I’ll be reading at Quimby’s (1854 W. North Ave) on Friday July 20th at 7 p.m. The reading is part of MachineFest, which works to make local music and art accessible to everyone in Chicago. The ‘fest is put on by Machine Media, and include rock shows, DJ sets, and readings throughout July. You can get info on all the shows (prices are free to $6) at their site.

As for what I’ll be reading, it won’t be Corgan-related like last year, but most likely will be about music. If that sound vague, it’s because…well, I haven’t quite finished my piece. But it’ll be hilarious, I promise. If it isn’t, I’ll buy you a beer at the Double Door show afterwards.
– 30 –

Oblivious Living: Part 1.12 – "2-4-6-8 Motorway" by Tom Robinson Band

Music

If you’re coming late to the party, this is a 37-part series on the first two volumes of the Living In Oblivion collection, which are available pretty much nowhere.

MP3 – “2-4-6-8 Motorway” by Tom Robinson Band
Lyrics – “2-4-6-8 Motorway” by Tom Robinson Band

Name an contemporary openly gay rock singer. Melissa Etheridge, right? But then who? It took me a minute to come up with Tegan and Sara, who have been open about their sexuality from the start. But I’m still racking my brain to come up with a guy other than Rufus Wainright. Outside of anyone in dance music, there’s…who? Rob Halford? I don’t think it’s quite proper to refer to Halford as a contemporary rocker, no offense to him or his leather chaps (same with Elton John though the chaps don’t really figure in there).

In any case, it rarely happens, which is why it’s really saying something that Tom Robinson had any career at all in America in the 1970s.

In point of fact, Robinson was hardly a rock star here. His albums languished in the bottom fourth of the Billboard Top 200 here, while his singles never charted. In the UK, he fared much better, with “2-4-6-8” ending up in the top 5, while the album from whence it came, Power In the Darkness, topped out at #4. This was largely due to The Tom Robinson Band being featured on the cover of NME a whopping eight times.

I imagine it was Robinson’s political outspokenness that earned him a lack of success here. Robinson not only sang “Glad To Be Gay” but he also spoke out against Britain’s conservative government, and helped form Rock Against Racism. Other song titles from Darkness include “Don’t Take No For An Answer,” “Better Decide Which Side You’re On” and “Up Against The Wall.” This was in 1978. “Shadow Dancin'” it ain’t.

So his lack of status made his outspokenness all the more daring, although it probably gave his A&R man fits.

Since then, Robinson got married – to a woman – and later began hosting a BBC Radio 6 show, which he continues to this day. He remains outspoken about GLBT issues, and hosts a site called Having It Both Ways. He holds a yearly party in Belgium (!!) for his European fans, offers several of his solo albums for free on his website, and archived many articles about him from NME and other sources, which I’ve spent the better part of the evening perusing. I’ve certainly entertained thoughts of hanging of with famous rock stars, and have done so occasionally. But this is the first time I ever thought it’d be nice if one hung out at my local pub so we could casually shoot the crap from time to time.

As for the song itself, I’m still not quite sure what it’s about. But I think Ted Leo probably heard it as a kid, bought Darkness and found it got him thinking.

Synchronicity, too: The Police at Wrigley

Music,

Initially, I thought I wasn’t going to end up seeing The Police when they came to Chicago. Tickets were too far out of my price range, and attempts to parlay my Time Out employment into a press pass, failed (though I did manage to get us a photo pass). But last night my sister called and said she had an extra ticket in the set her work had been given by a vendor (think about that what you will).

In any case, it was a great show. I’m going to resist going on about it for my usual 1000 words (especially since Greg Kot is pretty dead-on here). But a few thoughts:

* I need to pull out the Live disc from a couple years ago*, but the set (full list after the jump) was pretty similar to what they played on the Synchronicity tour. The difference here was that the horn section and backup singers they brought with them then were left behind. Best I could tell, they weren’t playing to backing tracks, and still kept a full, muscle-y sound. **

* Sting isn’t hitting the high notes anymore, and this has led to new arrangements. Some are good (“Every Little Thing…” and “Roxanne” really cook in a way they don’t on record), but a lot of them rob the originals of all their fire (I would rather have not heard “Don’t Stand So Close To Me” than listened to the run-through here). Some of the song were a bit limp, but almost everything from “Can’t Stand Losing You” until the end of the show was spot-fucking-on. For some reason, I have no memory of hearing “Every Breath You Take” even though my notes say they played it, which leads me to believe it wasn’t very memorable or was lost between the amazing bookends of “So Lonely” and “Next To You.”

* People who say The Police don’t seem to enjoy playing together onstage haven’t looked at old footage recently. They were never particularly chummy as a live act, and the perfectionism that shows up in the studio manifests itself as a stern concentration in a live setting.

* Stern concentration does not mean boredom though. Holy fuck, Andy Summers was on fire. Stu was hot, too, but Summers left both he and Sting in the dust.

* Kudos to The Police for not stretching out the audience applause during encores unlike some bands I could name (Lynyrd Skynyrd in 1991 prior to coming back out and playing “Freebird,” I’m looking at you).

* Seeing a concert at Wrigley is a lot like going to a Cubs game. Same people, same level of interest in what’s going on in the outfield.

* Sting’s son’s band Fiction Plane opened. They led the crowd through a Harry Caray-style version of “Take Me Out To The Ballgame” and that tells you almost everything you need to know about their set except this: if you thought Sting’s voice was annoying, his son Joe will give you a new appreciation for his father’s skill, and you’ll also note that cheesy stage banter is genetic.

Here’s the set list from the July 6th Police show in Chicago:

Message in a Bottle
Synchronicity 2
Walking on the Moon
Voices Inside My Head/When The World Is Running Down
Don’t Stand So Close To Me
Driven To Tears
Truth Hits Everybody
The Bed’s Too Big Without You
Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic
Wrapped Around Your Finger
De Doo Doo Doo, De Da Da Da
Invisible Sun
Walking In Your Footsteps
Can’t Stand Losing You/Regatta De Blanc (best song of the night)
Roxanne
ENCORE:
King of Pain
So Lonely
Every Breath You Take
ENCORE 2:
Next To You

* A couple? This disc actually came out 12 years ago. God, I’m old.

** Tankboy notes here that they did use backing tracks. Frankly, the sound wasn’t that great from where I was sitting so I could be wrong about this.

Transformers: Significantly less than meets the eye

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Regular readers of this space may have noticed that this week’s installment of Oblivious Living was not posted in its regular Monday slot. The reason for this was, in part, because I was busy preparing for a guest co-host appearance on Filmspotting, the weekly film podcast and radio program, regularly hosted by Adam Kempenaar and Sam Van Hallgren. I’ve been a fan of the show ever since I interviewed them for Chicagoist a couple years back, and was honored to be asked back a fourth time. I understand that if I make it to five, I get a special badge.

You can hear this week’s show here. Adam and I discuss Sicko and Transformers. I gave Sicko a generally positive review, though I expressed reservations with Moore’s style. I maintain he’d be a better filmmaker if he dialed back some of the shtick. As for Transformers, I really disliked it, as did Adam. During one of the breaks, he predicted that the show would get a lot of mail from people claiming that we didn’t get it or that we expected more out of a film that features giant robots fighting each other before turning into cars. Yet I expected little more than that, and even with that relatively simple premise, Michael Bay still managed to fuck it up.


The biggest problem is that there isn’t a single memorable character in Transformers, though Bumblebee comes close to having a Herbie-The-Love-Bug-style personality thanks to the constant sound bites issuing forth from his radio. (Explain to me again how a car radio would be able to broadcast movie clips?) Of the Autobots, Optimus Prime’s a stiff, Jazz is a shuck-and-jive caricature, and Ironhide…likes guns. We’re also never given a decent villain since Megatron doesn’t show up until very late in the film along with most of the other Decepticons who all look the same in robot form. They might as well be wearing t-shirts with their names on them like the bad guys in the old Batman TV series.

But at least they’re consistently – if lamely – written. The human characters fare much worse since their dialogue serves only to move the plot ahead. So you end up with characters who act as if they’re suffering from multiple personality disorder or, at the very least, have forgotten to take their meds. I know I’m supposed to be happy that the characters played by Megan Fox and Rachel Taylor are the smartest people in the movie, but when I’m constantly reminded that they are Really Really Hot, how can I be expected to notice anything else? (Note to Michael Bay: it’s kind of overkill to have your actors AND THE CAMERA giving elevator eyes to your actresses.)

The plot’s flat-out confusing, which is really a depressing thing to admit for someone with a college education. I’m still not sure if The Cube/Allspark was supposed to bring life back to Cybertron, give ultimate power to whichever robot contingency captured it, or make julienne fries. Plus, Transformers seems to borrow elements from several other (better) movies: Raiders of the Lost Ark, Independence Day, Signs, Men In Black, and Terminator 2. (credit where credit is due: the alternate explanation for Hoover Dam was original and clever.)

But I could leave all my reservations aside if the action sequences rocked. And they didn’t.

Look, I’m 32 years old now. But I own an Xbox that gets regular use. On my desk is a Flash action figure along with several plastic miniature ninjas. To my right is a James Bond calendar. On my DVD shelf, along with some high-brow picks, are genre movies and shows like Raiders, Buffy, Star Wars, Goonies, The Incredibles, Superman and many Dude Classics like Old School, Tombstone, Swingers, and almost every Kevin Smith film. In short, though I’ve grown up, I still enjoy things that are the province of people half my age. I want – nay, I long – to see giant robots fight each other, turn into very fast cars and then turn back into robots again before throwing each other into buildings throughout downtown Los Angeles. But Michael Bay couldn’t even give us a final well-staged action sequence that brought the dreams of every 14 year-old in the 1980s to life. Instead, he gave us muddled set pieces with characters so badly drawn that when one of the Autobots dies, we don’t even care (I’m still not entirely sure who bites it and neither does Optimus Prime as he intones “We lost a comrade today, but gained many others.” Way to shed a tear, bro. I know he’s a robot but damn, that’s some cold shit.)

So I don’t need to be told that I’m too old to appreciate this film or that my expectations were way too high. My expectations were pretty low, and Bay managed to subvert them by flubbing the basics. I’m all for explosions, as long as I know and care about what’s exploding.

The course of human events

Politics

Though it’s a hobby and interest of mine, I won’t often be using this space for political discussion. Yet I can’t ignore the meaning of today, with everything that’s going here and abroad. While most people consider today to be about history, I try to make it a point to read the Declaration of Independence every fourth of July. I’m sad to say this text has as much relevance today as it did in 1776:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

The rest is here.