The new Ghostface album has so many lines on it that will make you wanna shake a random stranger passing by and scream "Listen to this fucking shit!" that I could fill the whole front page of this blog with 'em. But I think the two that are destroying my world with the most vigor right now are both from "The Champ":
"He's a bulldozer! With a wreckin' ball attached!"
"Niggas want me dead but they scared to step to me/Rippin' out they guts like a hysterectomy"
Go buy Fishscale right now. Come back and read the rest of this entry later.
Other things that are kicking my ass, to a much lesser degree:
First, the new Boris album Pink. (Pink should have called her new album Boris. Missed opportunity there. Oh, well.) Boris have bored me in the past; I tried to like Amplifier Worship and Absolutego and their Merzbow collab Sun Baked Snow Cave because all the right people worshipped them and I wanted to be down wit it, but they were just pastiche artists like too many Japanese performers, grabbing random riffs from the Seventies Hard Rock bag and making sure they had just the right amps and guitars and pedals and haircuts. This became even more clear when I saw them live at the Knitting Factory. They wanted to be Grand Funk Railroad so fucking bad that night, and simply weren't. I bailed about half an hour in. My buddy swears they got better after I left, but he said that about the Mars Volta, too, and the first two hours of that show were possibly the greatest live rock experience I've ever had, top five easy, so I know he's lying because if they had actually gotten better after what I saw, he would have dissolved into pink goo and been unable to report back to me. But anyway, Pink is a really good album. The first track is beautiful almost shoegazery psych-doom, then the majority of those after it are ultra-fuzzed but also skull-powderingly heavy garage-rock stomp-attacks. Everything you've always read that they are, they actually became this time. It'll be out soon on Southern Lord - it's currently available, with no extra tracks, as a pricey import. Hold out.
I'm also digging Rodrigo y Gabriela. They're a pair of Mexican acoustic guitarists who play what sounds like flamenco influenced by Yngwie Malmsteen, and the latter comparison is probably more accurate than the former; inside the CD, they swear they're not flamenco players. They cover Metallica's "Orion" and Led Zeppelin's "Stairway To Heaven" on their new CD, but their originals will make you wanna peel off your skin and jump into the nearest stucco wall.
Dub Trio remind me of Blind Idiot God; their new album New Heavy has big riffs, nice cymbal/hi-hat work during the dubby bass breaks, and vocals by Mike Patton on the weakest cut.
Nuru Kane is a guitarist from Dakar who plays music that's somewhere between the North African desert and Junior Kimbrough's trance blues. His album Sigil (Riverboat) is fucking gorgeous. Etran Finatawa do something similar, with a little more Tinariwen to 'em; they're just okay.
I bought the Bug's latest thing, the 2CD set Killing Sound, credited to Razor X Productions. If you wish dancehall sounded like someone setting off a shape charge in your transverse colon while a belt-sander gently caresses your ears, this is your album. The first disc is crazed singles featuring deejays like Daddy Freddy, Warrior Queen, Mexican and a bunch of others; the second disc is dub versions. The louder you play it, the more your neighbors will gnash their teeth and dream of setting their dogs on you in your sleep. Especially if they like "regular" dancehall.
Thursday, April 06, 2006
Thursday, March 30, 2006
HACKING AWAY AGAIN
This week in the Cleveland Scene: Municipal Waste. I admit these guys took awhile to win me over, but now, when one of their tracks pops up on my iPod, I let it pummel me with a smile on my face.
Last week I wrote about God Forbid (yes, again) and reviewed the new From First To Last album.
Last week I wrote about God Forbid (yes, again) and reviewed the new From First To Last album.
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
BIG SCIENCE
So...midgets. Little people, if you like. Like most folks of average height or above (I'm 6'2"), I'm somewhat fascinated by them. Not as much as some other people I know, for whom the only thing with more inherent comedy value than a little person is a monkey wearing clothes, but somewhat. Well, the other night I was watching a reality show on the Discovery Channel about a family of little people and their teenaged son's difficulties in becoming social with females. It made me wonder about how, exactly, we're wired w/r/t sexual attraction.
I have this theory that back before there was much intercontinental travel, all the people in various parts of the world pretty much looked like each other. Africans looked like Africans, with slight regional variations; Scandinavians looked like Scandinavians, with even slighter regional variations; South American Indians the same; etc., etc., etc. So it seems logical to me that human beings back then would have been hard-wired to find people who looked like them sexually attractive, because otherwise the race would die out. No fucking, no new members of the tribe.
So it seems to me, evolution being a slow process and all, that a fairly large element of that hard-wiring is probably still in our brains. Isn't it? Or has it been scrubbed away by a few centuries of human migration and consequent interbreeding between populations of various regions? I think there's a little bit of both going on. I'll use myself as an example - I am, as I said, about 6'2". I am blond (though my hair's gradually getting darker as the years go on), with blue eyes. My wife is pretty much the opposite of me, physically - she's 5'3", with dark brown hair and brown eyes and olive/cinnamon skin.
Though I've found women of almost every ethnicity sexually attractive at one point or another, from giggling Japanese girls to the imperious black beauties of NYC, from Audrey Tautou to Salma Hayek, I've never been very into blond girls. So am I an aberration for disregarding my own physical type when it comes to sexuality, or am I the norm? And if I am the norm, when and how, evolutionarily speaking, did that become the norm?
And to bring this around to little people: are they hard-wired to find other little people sexually attractive, thus propagating the little-person gene? Or is it a crapshoot - could a little person find him/herself only attracted to tall/normal-sized people?
I have no answers, because I've done no research. This is just something that popped into my head the other day. I'm considering tracking down an anthropologist or someone who can help me figure it out.
I have this theory that back before there was much intercontinental travel, all the people in various parts of the world pretty much looked like each other. Africans looked like Africans, with slight regional variations; Scandinavians looked like Scandinavians, with even slighter regional variations; South American Indians the same; etc., etc., etc. So it seems logical to me that human beings back then would have been hard-wired to find people who looked like them sexually attractive, because otherwise the race would die out. No fucking, no new members of the tribe.
So it seems to me, evolution being a slow process and all, that a fairly large element of that hard-wiring is probably still in our brains. Isn't it? Or has it been scrubbed away by a few centuries of human migration and consequent interbreeding between populations of various regions? I think there's a little bit of both going on. I'll use myself as an example - I am, as I said, about 6'2". I am blond (though my hair's gradually getting darker as the years go on), with blue eyes. My wife is pretty much the opposite of me, physically - she's 5'3", with dark brown hair and brown eyes and olive/cinnamon skin.
Though I've found women of almost every ethnicity sexually attractive at one point or another, from giggling Japanese girls to the imperious black beauties of NYC, from Audrey Tautou to Salma Hayek, I've never been very into blond girls. So am I an aberration for disregarding my own physical type when it comes to sexuality, or am I the norm? And if I am the norm, when and how, evolutionarily speaking, did that become the norm?
And to bring this around to little people: are they hard-wired to find other little people sexually attractive, thus propagating the little-person gene? Or is it a crapshoot - could a little person find him/herself only attracted to tall/normal-sized people?
I have no answers, because I've done no research. This is just something that popped into my head the other day. I'm considering tracking down an anthropologist or someone who can help me figure it out.
Monday, March 27, 2006
EVERY LITTLE BIT HELPS
This Bloomberg piece mentions my book. Sure, he gets my [first] name wrong, but he gets the book's title right, and that's what really matters.
Saturday, March 25, 2006
MEN IN BLACK
I have a conflicted relationship with Johnny Cash. I suspect many others do, too. On the one hand, I gotta love the guy – I’m an American, and it’s pretty much the law; has been since the first volume of American Recordings came out. (Even though only the second volume in that series, Unchained, was anything really special.) On the other hand, as I’ve already started to admit, his latter-day output was pretty deadly at times. No one should sing “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” Ever. Period.
But can you fuck with most of the earlier stuff people know him best for? I submit that you cannot. The live version of “Cocaine Blues” from Folsom Prison is one of the most aggressive and harrowing musical performances I’ve ever heard, in any genre. And “Sunday Morning Coming Down” is simply beautiful.
I just got a three-CD set of Cash’s Sun recordings in the mail from Time-Life this week. The box, compiled and liner-noted by Colin Escott (who put together a superlative Hank Williams triple disc last year) advertises itself as featuring the rawest versions of these songs available – so, in some cases, backing vocals and strings that were tacked on after the initial session have been shaved away, revealing the songs as simple guitar-guitar-bass rumbles. And in that form, they’re astonishing. Stark, convulsively alive, and almost impossible to stop listening to once you’ve begun, these 61 songs are a chunk of on-the-fly brilliance up there with the Hot Five sides or the BYG sessions of August 1969. There are classics identified with Cash – “Cry, Cry, Cry,” “Hey Porter,” “Folsom Prison Blues,” “I Walk The Line,” “Guess Things Happen That Way,” and a shitload more – but there are also takes on canonical cuts like “I Forgot To Remember To Forget,” “Hey, Good Lookin’” and “Rock Island Line,” among others. What’s more, they posit Cash as someone who emerged into the world virtually fully formed. His image as a stoic, somewhat gloomy and haunted man was in place from the first note he rumbled into the microphone.
Similarly, Roy Orbison was who he was almost from the dawn of his career. Sure, there were a couple of upbeat rockabilly-esque tunes early on (“Ooby Dooby,” “Go, Go, Go”) at Sun, but by the time he landed at Monument, he had found his path to glory. Where Cash was stripped down, his monochromatic wardrobe indicating his artistic single-mindedness, Orbison was a high priest of torment, and dressed the part. I recently wrote that most emo bands were singing the same old lovelorn lyrics that have been on offer in pop music from Frankie Lymon to Ian Curtis, but Roy Orbison took teenaged torment to a level perhaps imagined by, but utterly out of reach of, all peers and putative competitors. His frankly unearthly voice – again, the opposite of Cash’s nearly subterranean rumble – inflated his lyrics to operatic scale. The Essential Roy Orbison, 40 tracks on two CDs out this week from Sony/Legacy, gathers all most will ever need from the guy, and listening back to his classic singles is a breathtaking experience. If teenagers from time immemorial have believed their love problems to be unlike those experienced by anyone before or since, they have their eternal anthem in his track "Crying." At the climax, when Roy Orbison sings, “Yes, now you’re gone/And from this moment on/I’ll be crying,” with the strings rising almost to a roar behind him, it’s like the fucking Apocalypse. Cash was manly restraint, but Orbison was equally masculine in his florid ecstasies of agony. And while both men worked with producer Rick Rubin, Orbison got the better results. The last song on Disc Two of The Essential Roy Orbison is “Life Fades Away,” from the soundtrack to the movie Less Than Zero. Co-written by Orbison and third-generation dark rocker Glenn Danzig, it’s got all the soaring strings and thundering drums and acoustic-guitar-the-size-of-a-building of the classic Monument sides, along with a lyric that takes off from doomed love, incorporates a little “Seasons In The Sun” I’m-dying-now-but-remember-our-love weeping, and winds up as sort of the ultimate Roy Orbison track because it’s so clearly aware of all the ones that led up to it. And when he, by then middle-aged, hits the incredible high notes on the song’s final chorus, if chills don’t run up and down your body, check your pulse.
So yeah – Johnny Cash, American icon, noble guy, cooler than a very cool thing, yeah. But it’s that very coolness, that far-from-effortless façade, that makes his work something I only listen to once every few years. Roy Orbison, on the other hand, tore open his chest and exposed his bleeding heart on every one of his classic singles (okay, maybe not “Workin’ For The Man”), and that kind of lush, grandly quixotic statement seems to me somehow even more quintessentially American, and something I’m much more likely to wallow in on a regular basis.
But can you fuck with most of the earlier stuff people know him best for? I submit that you cannot. The live version of “Cocaine Blues” from Folsom Prison is one of the most aggressive and harrowing musical performances I’ve ever heard, in any genre. And “Sunday Morning Coming Down” is simply beautiful.
I just got a three-CD set of Cash’s Sun recordings in the mail from Time-Life this week. The box, compiled and liner-noted by Colin Escott (who put together a superlative Hank Williams triple disc last year) advertises itself as featuring the rawest versions of these songs available – so, in some cases, backing vocals and strings that were tacked on after the initial session have been shaved away, revealing the songs as simple guitar-guitar-bass rumbles. And in that form, they’re astonishing. Stark, convulsively alive, and almost impossible to stop listening to once you’ve begun, these 61 songs are a chunk of on-the-fly brilliance up there with the Hot Five sides or the BYG sessions of August 1969. There are classics identified with Cash – “Cry, Cry, Cry,” “Hey Porter,” “Folsom Prison Blues,” “I Walk The Line,” “Guess Things Happen That Way,” and a shitload more – but there are also takes on canonical cuts like “I Forgot To Remember To Forget,” “Hey, Good Lookin’” and “Rock Island Line,” among others. What’s more, they posit Cash as someone who emerged into the world virtually fully formed. His image as a stoic, somewhat gloomy and haunted man was in place from the first note he rumbled into the microphone.
Similarly, Roy Orbison was who he was almost from the dawn of his career. Sure, there were a couple of upbeat rockabilly-esque tunes early on (“Ooby Dooby,” “Go, Go, Go”) at Sun, but by the time he landed at Monument, he had found his path to glory. Where Cash was stripped down, his monochromatic wardrobe indicating his artistic single-mindedness, Orbison was a high priest of torment, and dressed the part. I recently wrote that most emo bands were singing the same old lovelorn lyrics that have been on offer in pop music from Frankie Lymon to Ian Curtis, but Roy Orbison took teenaged torment to a level perhaps imagined by, but utterly out of reach of, all peers and putative competitors. His frankly unearthly voice – again, the opposite of Cash’s nearly subterranean rumble – inflated his lyrics to operatic scale. The Essential Roy Orbison, 40 tracks on two CDs out this week from Sony/Legacy, gathers all most will ever need from the guy, and listening back to his classic singles is a breathtaking experience. If teenagers from time immemorial have believed their love problems to be unlike those experienced by anyone before or since, they have their eternal anthem in his track "Crying." At the climax, when Roy Orbison sings, “Yes, now you’re gone/And from this moment on/I’ll be crying,” with the strings rising almost to a roar behind him, it’s like the fucking Apocalypse. Cash was manly restraint, but Orbison was equally masculine in his florid ecstasies of agony. And while both men worked with producer Rick Rubin, Orbison got the better results. The last song on Disc Two of The Essential Roy Orbison is “Life Fades Away,” from the soundtrack to the movie Less Than Zero. Co-written by Orbison and third-generation dark rocker Glenn Danzig, it’s got all the soaring strings and thundering drums and acoustic-guitar-the-size-of-a-building of the classic Monument sides, along with a lyric that takes off from doomed love, incorporates a little “Seasons In The Sun” I’m-dying-now-but-remember-our-love weeping, and winds up as sort of the ultimate Roy Orbison track because it’s so clearly aware of all the ones that led up to it. And when he, by then middle-aged, hits the incredible high notes on the song’s final chorus, if chills don’t run up and down your body, check your pulse.
So yeah – Johnny Cash, American icon, noble guy, cooler than a very cool thing, yeah. But it’s that very coolness, that far-from-effortless façade, that makes his work something I only listen to once every few years. Roy Orbison, on the other hand, tore open his chest and exposed his bleeding heart on every one of his classic singles (okay, maybe not “Workin’ For The Man”), and that kind of lush, grandly quixotic statement seems to me somehow even more quintessentially American, and something I’m much more likely to wallow in on a regular basis.
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