I saw the Meat Puppets

One perk of being in (or around) Washington D.C. so far: I find myself, for perhaps the first time in my life, faced with more concerts to go to than I have time for. Those who have been in big cities for longer than I can testify whether or not this is a mixed blessing, but I find especially due to the fact that D.C. isn’t really that huge, that the overall community here is less noxious.

(Mendy visited me in D.C. a little more than a week ago and one thing that we both happened to observe independently is the lack of noticeably straight-edge people walking around, at concerts or on the Metro. We were both under the impression, given that this is where straight-edge was born and the hometown of Minor Threat, Bad Brains, Rites of Spring et al, that such observances would happen at least occasionally. So far, nothing. Too bad I can’t shuttle back and forth from here to c. 1985 or so on weekends, to play catchup.)

So I went to see the Meat Puppets, along with Retribution Gospel Choir, at a tiny venue called the Rock ‘N’ Roll Hotel (spelling “rock ‘n’ roll” is always awkward, isn’t it?). Meanwhile, Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood were playing nearby at the Verizon Center, with tickets there going for $50+, a fact I am only aware of because I heard a bunch of drunk blooze goobers on the way back on the Metro (a guy with spray-on hair striking up a conversation with an Italian woman, yelling, “I’m a guitarist, I’m a blues player! I’m a big fan of soul—Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye—have you heard of them?” Italian lady: “Do you know Ben Harper?”).

Now, Clapton and Winwood both have their shiny guitar moments (Winwood is tragically known mostly as a keyboard player today, maybe for his association with Hendrix on “Voodoo Chile,” but his slow-burning solo on “Dear Mr. Fantasy” is a psychedelic classic and certainly Traffic’s finest moment [and I would know, having heard plenty of Traffic vis-à-vis my father]). Neither of them can compare with Curt Kirkwood in his 1982-1987 prime. Not in terms of skill, not in terms of formal/melodic invention, whatever. My opinion about this is very resolute, even though I know I keep dumping on Clapton and yet I’m a pretty big fan of the Yardbirds, Cream, Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Blind Faith and Derek & the Dominoes (Delaney & Bonnie can suck it, however). Curt Kirkwood is an enormously skilled player, and he is easily the best and perhaps only reason to see the Meat Puppets today, particularly when he takes liberty with the material at hand and does his fingerpicking thing.

The opening act was Retribution Gospel Choir, starring another guy people don’t often think as a guitar god, Alan Sparhawk of Low. As a matter of fact, this band is pretty much Low as far as I can tell. Same bassist, at least. My own theory is that this band would not exist if not for the fact that drummer Mimi Parker needed to stay home and fulfill her Mormon duty by taking care of her and Sparhawk’s children, so Sparhawk just started a new band with a new drummer, who by the way was all right. I am not familiar with Retribution Gospel Choir’s album, but it did not take me long to figure out that the first song they were playing was simply a heavy, power-trio version of the Low song “Breaker,” from Drums and Guns. At the time, I thought, Wow, what a rocking improvement over the original, but having gone back to the original song since, which happens to have this amazingly intense simplicity to it, I now am in a continuous state of oscillation, being predisposed towards power-trio sounds anyway. At their core, though, Retribution Gospel Choir functions basically the same way as Low: songs that sound generic, or slow and boring, that you realize are actually clever and full of killer melodies, often injected with heartbreaking sounds. Amp up the “generic” factor a little bit, but not enough to be offensive, and you basically have Retribution Gospel Choir. If I heard any of this on classic rock radio however many decades from now, I wouldn't be too surprised.

After that, the Meat Puppets came on, the brothers Kirkwood looking harried and bored, although Cris Kirkwood kind of took on the role of resident goofball, in that he actually looked at and acknowledged the presence of an audience. Also, they had a new rent-a-drummer named Ted Marcus, apparently a former sound engineer for MTV. Those who know me know my intense physical displeasure whenever musicians, but particularly drummers, are rotated out of bands I like and audiences are presumed not to notice or care, but in this case I was simply unable to convince myself that their original drummer Derrick Bostrom was really a key ingredient on par with Grant Hart, Steve Shelley, Earl Hudson, or even Murph, what with his fairly rudimentary time-keeping skills. Anyhow, Ted Marcus did a good job.

I said before that Curt Kirkwood was really the only reason to pay $16 for this, as the band started their set with the title track from their latest album Sewn Together, this was made abundantly clear. I listened to it once, but I will defer to Curt Kirkwood’s expert assessment of the material, saying something to the effect that it sounds like a kid’s fruit juice commercial. Mind you, this is the actual artist describing his own music in this way, and not some critic. Not a good sign. And “Sewn Together” is a fairly generic mid-tempo county song that bears the dubious distinction of being really bad. When Curt started playing a solo, though, my ears perked up, and you could tell that Curt suddenly got a lot more interested, very occasionally indulging in guitar posturing and reacting with pleasure at crowd noise.

Those of you who like me are mostly fans of the Meat Puppets for their first three albums were rewarded intermittently with classic tracks. They played quite a lot from their 90s repertoire, which isn’t that bad but doesn’t have the singular vibe that Meat Puppets, II and Up On The Sun have. They did play the Nirvana-mandated “big three” from Meat Puppets II—being “Oh, Me,” “Plateau,” and “Lake of Fire,” in that order. All three were played somewhat differently and benefited from reworkings that highlighted Curt’s substantial guitar improvisations. As I was standing basically in front next to Curt, I could see him at work on the effects pedals, of which I noticed there were fewer than J. Mascis had. His way of playing through multiple registers is harder than one thinks (think of the first few bars of “Plateau” or “Aurora Borealis”) and you could tell that he changed some of the keys the songs were in to make them easier to play (or maybe sing).

Nevertheless. The undoubted highlight was an extended jam of “Up On The Sun,” played amazingly even faster than it was on record (let no one doubt that Curt can play the lead lines as clean and well-phrased as ever). The audience seemed to eat it up, even as the rhythm section started going in places that didn’t really resemble the original song at all. Another highlight for me was the instrumental “I’m A Mindless Idiot,” filtered through some sort of volume/phase pedal that finally explained to me how Curt got some of the effects that have eluded me for so long. Also, the encore of “Lost” was exhaustingly good, and they finished with their biggest hit “Backwater,” a remnant of the post-Nirvana years that is all right as a song but is fantastic as an example of how influence in the underground rock world is often reciprocal.

Tragically not represented at all was their first, most legitimately hardcore album, an album that few people seem to like. It certainly isn’t much of a gem, songwriting-wise, but I always liked it because it shows even then how inimitable a guitar style Curt Kirkwood has. If anyone ever tells you that the 80s don’t have the guitar gods to stack up to previous decades, tell them how full of shit they are simply by citing any of a number of bands from Our Band Could Be Your Life: D. Boon, Bob Mould, Roger Miller, Greg Ginn, Bob Stinson, and J. Mascis. Add to this the slightly more dubious proposition of Paul Leary, or Thurston Moore/Lee Ranaldo, or Ian MacKaye/Guy Picciotto. Add to this Dr. Know and Curt Kirkwood, absent from the book. Who among these is not brilliant, singular, a true hero of the form? Who are these morons who continue to propagate the theory that punk was the domain of the harmonically simple-minded? Rolling Stone, probably. Even when the songwriting is lax, which one can say of the original Meat Puppets as well as Sewn Together, one can still derive some sort of rudimentary pleasure in identifying the style of someone who couldn’t play otherwise if he or she tried. This is the key to the artistic success of the Meat Puppets, and the reason why they deserve just as much as Clapton to play at the Verizon Center, cranking out another solo for the zillionth time of some classic tune that, at its best, can remind you of why you found it revelatory in the first place.

My Top Ten of '08 (for The Cornellian)

Though 2008 saw the release of several high-profile and heavily hyped new albums from the likes of Fleet Foxes, No Age, and Vampire Weekend, it occurred to me as I was compiling this list that the majority of my favorite albums from 2008 were made by veterans of all sorts of fringe music scenes from the past 20 years. It was a good year, I think, for comebacks, although their aesthetic success in my mind doesn’t necessarily match up to the sort of critical and commercial success I think should be bestowed on these ten albums. I call 2008 the year of the rock vets resharpening their tools and making sounds that seem to transcend both what they were capable of in the past as well as the majority of popular sounds in this past year. Unfortunately, Axl Rose is not among them.

10. Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks, Real Emotional Trash. Malkmus’ former band, Pavement, had a slight predilection towards lengthy jamming onstage, but they were diplomatic enough of a band most of the time to always make pop songcraft their primary focus (which is why the rock journalist tag of Pavement being the “indie Grateful Dead” never really stuck). Since then, Malkmus has forged a decent enough solo career that has veered increasingly into aimless but often wonderful noodling. Real Emotional Trash is the apotheosis of Malkmus’ gift as an improviser, which is partly why I wasn’t very impressed with the album the first few times I heard it, being predisposed towards ignoring the songs. As far as these things go, Real Emotional Trash is extremely listenable and tuneful, and has a good half-dozen or so incredible guitar solos from Malkmus himself. I don’t believe, after this album, that anyone can argue that Malkmus isn’t one of the key guitarists of this or any era.

9. The Magnetic Fields, Distortion. This is another album I didn’t really like at first, but subsequent listens have proved to me how wrong I was, initially. While I’m not a hardcore Magnetic Fields fan and I’m not one of those people that listens to the entirety of 69 Love Songs on a regular basis, this album struck me for several reasons. First, and most importantly, as is suggested in the title, this is a very distorted album with a lovely sort of fuzz pallor. Yet it’s a very simple sort of distortion, not heavily processed like you find on lots of hard rock albums, but more of a less abrasive, more fuzzy sort of distortion. The album is most directly comparable to the Jesus and Mary Chain, and several of the songs here are perhaps even better. “California Girls” and “Too Drunk To Dream” are just two songs that make it clear that when Stephin Merritt feels like it, he can produces dozens of good songs in a very short period of time.

8. Nine Inch Nails, The Slip. No one realizes this, but Trent Reznor keeps making albums that are better in almost every way than Nine Inch Nails during their mid-90s heyday. I believe that, partially inspired by Radiohead’s model for making music with In Rainbows, Reznor was inspired to make the kind of music he wanted to make, which in this album results in probably the most abrasive and most metal-oriented album to date. Unlike many notorious pop perfectionists, Reznor’s music is capable of sounding airy and unpolished, and is all the better for it. The best thing about this album, though, was the price: nobly, Reznor decided to put the album for free online as Radiohead did. The results were far less successful, which is a shame, because we need to support artists like Reznor. I never thought I’d say that.

7. Portishead, Third. The last Portishead album to be released was their self-titled album, in 1997. Since then, main instrumentalist and producer Geoff Barrow became horrified to find that Portishead’s debut album Dummy, once considered the paragon of the musical sub-genre known as trip-hop, had become an easy listening standard that people would play in massage parlors. At the same time, he became witness to a British club scene that had become sanitized and robbed of most of its vitality. When Third came out, no one was sure whether or not Portishead would fall on its face using the same tropes it did a decade earlier. No worries, though: Portishead managed to retool their sound while keeping the spy movie theatrics and adding a heavy industrial beat to awesomely intense songs like “Machine Gun.” Of course, that’s not the only trick they utilize, and as a songwriter and singer, Beth Gibbons continues to get better. This album also has one of the best ukulele interludes I have ever heard.

6. Jay Reatard, Matador Singles ’08. I’m not sure that this counts as an album proper, but it’s probably too good to not mention. Jay Reatard, real name Jay Lindsay, is another sort of post-punk renaissance man who has involved himself with all sorts of different garage and punk groups; his recent solo album Blood Visions was so good that I wasn’t sure how he would be able to top the level of quality of that album’s noisy and devilishly vulgar garage revivals. The new collection of singles, which were released over the last couple years on Matador Records, shows a slightly more composed and reflective Jay Reatard, even if that isn’t really saying much. Many of the songs don’t really rock at all, but stand out as incredibly moving and provocative (and certainly well-sung) pop songs. I’m not sure that this is the direction I would like to see Reatard go in in the future, but these singles make a nice detour and they are almost uniformly of high quality.

5. Q-Tip, The Renaissance. Q-Tip’s first album in nine years is appropriately titled: most of us were aware of his verbal dexterity, but he has also blossomed into an excellent producer during those years, and on The Renaissance, every song is produced by Q-Tip, save for one track, “Move,” which was produced by the late J. Dilla. Unfortunately, the rap music industry is particularly uninterested in its veteran players, no matter how vital they may still be, so The Renaissance didn’t get nearly the play it should have. That is a shame, because the album is almost completely excellent from beginning to end, and it does so partially by defying our expectations about rap music as well as what we expect from Q-Tip. For instance, a song like “Life is Better,” which has Norah Jones singing the hook, seems at first to be one of those saccharine “I’ll Be There For You”-sort of love songs. Instead, the hook leads into one long verse from Q-Tip where he discusses his influences as a rap artist as well as paying homage to a new breed of rappers. Similarly, a song like “Gettin’ Up” sounds at first like a sex goof, but then it becomes a somewhat moving and powerful meditation on the spiritual goodwill that can result from sex and intimacy. The production is uniformly great and Q-Tip’s voice is one of the most pleasurable things to listen to, no matter what he’s saying. And just prematurely: don’t accuse me of tokenism. If there were more decent rap albums I liked, I’d put them here.

4. TV On The Radio, Dear Science. Having now become the leading lights on the New York scene, I wasn’t sure what could be expected from TV On The Radio anymore. Dear Science was the band’s opportunity to show the country that they were now officially one of the great album bands of their era, and I believe they succeeded with perhaps their best album to date. The usual production tricks—loud, booming polyrhythms that utilize acoustic and electric drums simultaneously, non-descript background ambient noises, heavily processed guitar effects—are all there, but there seems to be a degree more of instrumental interplay between the members of the band. Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone trade off singing songs like Strummer and Jones, and in songs like “Dancing Choose” and “Shout Me Out,” you see a band chipping away at the foundations of their own song structures, creating mutated, dilapidated sound-creatures on a conducive yet organic assembly line.

3. Marnie Stern, This is It… An unlikely success story by any standard, Marnie Stern has managed to make an album that is simultaneously more harmonically expressive than most of her math/noise peers as well as more tuneful and interesting than most indie-pop albums. Stern is also, of course, an amazing guitarist, and one of the few that still manages to do anything interesting with fret-tapping techniques. However, the guitar theatrics are never merely theatrical, and in fact create a sort of hypnotic tape-loop effect that characterizes her songs as slightly off-kilter if at the same time surprisingly pleasant to listen to. Stern’s voice is an acquired taste, but I think I’ve got it by now, even if her lyrics for the most part aren’t the most coherent part of her act. Nevertheless, Marnie Stern represents the future: a fusion of mathy guitars and pleasant melodies.

2. Fucked Up, The Chemistry of Common Life. A Canadian hardcore punk band with an unfortunate name, Fucked Up basically surprised everyone with their unconventional method of piling on guitar overdubs for The Chemistry of Common Life. Ostensibly a hardcore album with a suitably abrasive lead vocalist who calls himself Pink Eye, it’s a piece of music covered with layers of sound, a style utilized by My Bloody Valentine but in this context can be compared more accurately to Smashing Pumpkins. It’s also rare among hardcore albums for several other reasons: it starts with a long flute solo, for instance, and the lyrics often deal with themes of religious alienation and spiritual longing, which are hardly the most apropos of hardcore subject matters. The larger point, however, is that the music present is heavy and thick with overdubs but also uniformly good, and listening to the entire thing at a loud volume (especially "Black Albino Bones") is an almost unreasonably cathartic experience. Some hardcore kids might not like the direction Fucked Up is going in, but it’s the perfect type of music for someone like me, I guess.

1. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! If there was a fear that Nick Cave was putting his renaissance man image in jeopardy by spreading himself too thin (not only writing and performing music but also publishing two novels and having a screenplay filmed), those fears were quickly put to rest by Cave’s side project Grinderman, which involved only the core members of the Bad Seeds and put made Cave relevant again. Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! Is his first album back with the Bad Seeds after the Grinderman project, but it’s encouraging to see that he’s kept much of the Grinderman spirit alive, transposing it to songs with slightly more expansive orchestration but are still, at their very core, gritty, dirty rock songs. It is, to my mind, the best album of 2008: an almost unparalleled aural experience that pays tribute to its twin totem roots of American blues music and the experimental path initially forged by the Velvet Underground, whose songs are heavily referenced throughout the album.

I like to think that the albums I love most are the ones that I judge on a most micro level, where I can recall with fondness not only specific songs but also specific parts of songs that blew my mind when I first heard them and caused me to repeat them endlessly. Here is a short list of some of those moments: Cave’s keyboard solo right after the break towards the end of “Today’s Lesson,” a noise so simultaneously cacophonous and tinny that it’s almost reveling in its “Nuggets”-like splendor; the incomparably sexy (there’s no other word to use, really) drumming in the post-apocalyptic composition “Moonland”; The part in “Albert Goes West” when Cave joins the chorus of “sha-la-la” vocals, which is followed by two mind-busting tom beats; The lyrics for “We Call Upon the Author,” which to my knowledge is the greatest song ever written about literary criticism (with the line, “Prolix! Prolix!/Another pair of scissors you can’t fix” becoming an anthem for the ages); the beginning of “Midnight Man,” which manages over a reciprocal bass line to make a noise approximating an orchestra warming up utilizing just a guitar and keyboard. However, I think the best song, and one of the best songs on the year, is “Lie Down Here (And Be My Girl),” a distillation of all the themes we expect from the new Nick Cave, now an aging, sexually-frustrated lothario who is also extremely self-aware about such matters. It’s an incomparable hard rock composition, with an ascending keyboard line of an almost absurd simplicity, and it also allows the lead singer to vent the vapidity of his maleness. If nothing else, Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! has the power to unite sexually and emotionally maladjusted boy-men of any race or creed.

Ephemera

A couple of notes, all of them oscillating wildly on my own personal relevance scale:

1. My buddy Greg just started a blog here, that I am both obliged and delighted to link to. It's good to have someone else to link to, to be honest. Though it might seem bizarre given that there are seemingly millions of blogs created every second, the blogosphere can be an awfully lonely place with little discursive reward unless you really whore yourself out like Perez Hilton or Drudge or whomever. Greg, by the way, played McCullough in "Dino & McCullough: The Legend Begins," if you haven't seen that yet. I have a big role in it as well, as an erratic homosexual police chief.

I think Mendy needs to get a blog, too, if only to expound on some of the more mystifying choices he made in his top ten list, like the Hold Steady, and explain why he puts Nick Cave so low on his list.

2. My predictions regarding Secret Invasion: strangely, not that far off, at least compared to the complete misfire that was my prediction for Civil War. If you recall, I claimed that the Skrulls would win the fight by detonating the Wasp using whatever growth formula the fake Hank Pym gave her, and would take out the rest of the group with the help of Norman Osborn. I was wrong in that respect: the Skrulls got their asses handed to them (and, judging from what I've read in the latest issue of New Avengers, Bendis still seems to have no moral qualms with annihilating the remainder of Earth's Skrull populace, with extreme prejudice), but Norman still got to look like the hero while Tony Stark ran off, and now he is running not S.H.I.E.L.D. or S.W.O.R.D. but a new organization called H.A.M.M.E.R., which I believe is an acronym yet to be determined. I was right that the Wasp died, but I was wrong in predicting that Jessica Jones would die trying to save her baby from Skrull-Jarvis: instead, Skrull-Jarvis just ran off with the baby, which I think is a pretty ballsy move on Bendis' part, to leave the possibility of infanticide as a dangling plot thread. Unfortunately, this still doesn't explain why Norman Osborn knew what was going on with Captain Marvel when he barged into Thunderbolts mountain, which is one of many inconsistencies and gaffes in this book. The Dark Avengers, as far as I can tell, won't be Skrulls but rather Norman Osborn's Thunderbolt's rejiggered as classic Avengers. From what I can guess, you got Moonstone as Ms. Marvel, Bullseye as Hawkeye, Venom as Spider-Man (how is he going to pull off not having the tongue thing?), and Osborn himself as the new "Iron Patriot," alongside Wolverine's son Daken, Marvel Boy, the Sentry, and Ares.

I'm actually pretty pumped for what might happen in "Dark Reign," particularly with Tony Stark now on the run from the government and Osborn having a government sanctioned band of grade-A psychos as his nu-new Avengers. However, I'm actually more interested right now in what has been going on with Final Crisis, which has managed to be blowing my mind further and further as Secret Invasion has gotten more and more formulaic. That comic is being written by Grant Morrison, one of my favorite comic writers, and after reading the entirety of his Seven Soldiers and seeing how it relates to what's going on now, I've realized that Morrison is basically recasting the entirety of the DC universe in his own crazy, narcotics-enhanced vision--this is entirely a good thing. In the future, I need to devote an entire post to the oeuvre of Morrison, which I find I can't get enough of these days.

3. My own top ten list is forthcoming. I'm in the midst of reading through all of Infinite Jest right now--my one goal for the break--and as expected, it's taking a while.

4. My father got two DVDs for Chanukah the other day, 24-Hour Party People and Joy Divison (not Control, the fictional Anton Corbijn movie, but the documentary that was released with it). I am extremely jealous, but I got a book of Tobias Wolff short stories, so I'm good for now.

5. Philip Roth project is going fine, I got 25+ pages with it and my sponsor seems happy with it. I had somewhat of a hurdle getting it past certain members of faculty who took umbrage with my lack of specificity, which is a problem with my writing I always have as well.

6. Just quickly, I want to gauge if there's any interest if I were to put some short stories of my own writing up here. Actually, more generally I want to see if I can gauge any response regarding anything at all.

7. Finally, R.I.P. Harold Pinter, one of those guys that really did deserve a Nobel Prize for literature. I remember buying a copy of The Room and The Birthday Party and enjoying them very much, and now (as I am wont to do whenever an author dies) I am inclined to read more.

My review of Chinese Democracy

My review of Chinese Democracy, uncut. The reason I put albums in quotes as opposed to italicizing them is because that's The Cornellian policy.
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It would be unwise to review Guns N’ Roses’ new, unprecedentedly delayed album “Chinese Democracy” without first putting it into historical perspective. GnR’s last album, “Use Your Illusion,” came out in 1991. Bush 41 was waging war in Kuwait, and I was just entering kindergarten. Over the following decade and a half, Guns N’ Roses has been whittled down to frontman Axl Rose and a series of increasingly anonymous studio musicians. Izzy Stradlin, the rhythm guitarist who wrote all the best songs on “Appetite For Destruction,” left the band not long after, citing the fact that Axl would never show up to gigs on time. Lead guitarist Slash, bassist Duff McKagan and drummer Matt Sorum held on for a bit longer, but after observing Rose managing the simultaneous feat of becoming more lazy and demagogic at the same time, they bailed and formed their own horrible band, Velvet Revolver.

Meanwhile, Axl Rose had been smart enough to retain creative ownership of the name “Guns n’ Roses” and started recruiting instrumental foils who would be smart enough not to question his genius or subvert his spotlight. In 1995, while I was in fourth grade, he started initial recording sessions for what would become “Chinese Democracy.” His new stable of musicians would include, among hundreds of others, keyboardist Dizzy Reed, multi-instrumentalist Chris Pittman, drummer Josh Freese, guitarists Paul Tobias, Robin Finck, Buckethead and Bumblefoot, and, most inexplicably, former Replacements bassist Tommy Stinson, whose transformation from archetypal anti-establishment rocker to paid employee of the biggest authoritarian in the business still makes me depressed. The average life span of a musician in Guns N’ Roses was something like three months and understandably so: Rose possessed something of a work ethic, but he was famously temperamental and an ardent perfectionist, given to recording hundreds of takes of each of his songs and discarding them at roughly the same rate.

Thirteen years later, I am a senior in college and “Chinese Democracy” has cost Geffen Records at least $13 million. In the past few years, one or two songs would occasionally leak on the Internet, to be followed by Rose and his team of lawyers demanding extreme litigious action to be taken against whoever leaked tracks with ridiculous names like “The Blues,” “Catcher In The Rye” and “I.R.S.” And yet, here it now is, in its final form: 14 tracks of new official GnR (making Rose’s songwriting average of about one per year significantly below what we generally expect of serious musicians). It was inevitable that the album would come out sounding as overdone as one would imagine a thirteen-year-old album would, but not even I was prepared for how truly insular Axl Rose had become in this past decade: This album will probably best be appreciated as an unintentionally hilarious series of extremely poor musical choices. Fortunately, we have no one to blame but Rose himself.

The album is a terrible, barely listenable mess with D-grade songwriting, utilizing state-of-the-art production values that already sound dated even a day after the album has been officially released. For a band that, despite their less than stellar work ethic, managed to produce remarkably consistent albums up to now, it is disheartening to see Axl Rose strike out fourteen times in a row, although some songs are more worthy attempts at capturing the old GnR magic than others. The reason for this is simple: Rose has simply no one in his fold with the temerity to try editing his more ridiculous impulses. Rose’s new army of five guitarists can all shred perfectly fine, but they are all drowned in a mix meant to subvert any means of displaying personality or character. Compare this to the Guns N’ Roses of old. Sure, Slash was a cheese merchant and not the most original guitarist in the world, but at least he played with flair and an intuitive blues vocabulary that was entirely his own. I can’t tell if the guitar solo in “Shackler’s Revenge,” for instance, is Buckethead, Bumblefoot or some other fret-wanker with a stupid name, but it doesn’t matter because it sounds like a solo played by ProTools and fed through a soul-sucking Lazarus machine. If nothing else, this new album is symptomatic of a popular genre I like to alternately call either “meathead rock” or “autotune rock.” “Chinese Democracy” resembles less the albums of the band’s past than it does the new breed of terrible establishment rockers like Mudvayne or Staind. I attribute this to Rose’s infatuation with the industrial stylings of Nine Inch Nails: though he may have found it novel to combine industrial beats with heavy, processed guitars, he ends up making an album only one step removed from that most dated of sub-genres, nu-metal.

“Chinese Democracy” is full of terrible attempts at genre cross-pollination. The opening title track and first single opens with a full minute of vaguely eastern-sounding droning (kind of like how Led Zeppelin’s “In Through The Out Door” starts, actually) followed by a ferociously dumb riff of the “Louie, Louie” sort. This is understandable, but then it is repeated for virtually the whole song. I’m not the biggest GnR fan, but I know Rose is capable of better songwriting than this. There was a time in their history when they were capable of throwing off pretty good riffs with abandon that would all make sense within the context of the song. You might not notice in a track like “Sweet Child O’ Mine” because of its ubiquity, but Slash was brave enough to discard the opening “carnival” riff, as good as it was, halfway through the song in favor of a more expansive and interesting song comprised of a chorus and verse that functioned interdependently, in addition to several memorable solos and an eerie breakdown toward the denouement. Rose is completely incapable of doing this anymore, so he instead tries to distinguish different parts of his songs with expensive ideas like gigantic choirs, ill-advised electronic noises, flamenco guitars, Pink Floyd-esque programmed soundscapes and hoary balladry. Often, all of these elements will appear within the same song. To say that the album sounds schizophrenic does a disservice to schizophrenics capable of producing great art. The only word I care to use for it, really, is “awful.”

Even the songs with a few bright moments, such as “Better” (not a cover of the Regina Spektor song, unfortunately), with its arresting vocals and catchy harmonics, are offset by moments of sheer ludicrousness, with Rose overstepping his meager talents at almost every turn and showing his true face as a meathead, chest-thumping rocker with nothing relevant to say. The lyrics themselves are filled with Rose’s usual boastful come-ons, alternating about every third song with an almost unnerving sentimentality. What’s weird is that several of the songs here could be about the process of the making of “Chinese Democracy,” such as when Axl says in “Catcher In The Rye” (trying to paint himself as the Salinger of rock, I guess), “All at once a song I heard/No longer wouldn’t play for anybody/Or anyone.” True, and funny, but for all the struggling rock musicians trying to make it by through their dedication and talent, watching someone like Rose burn limitless amounts of money on such a useless album and then boast about it is enough to make anyone want to give up the dream.

“Chinese Democracy” is already getting a few good reviews from media outlets—the always dependably rock establishment-reverent “Rolling Stone” gave it four stars, for example—but the chances of this album holding up the way “Appetite For Destruction” did are roughly congruent to the chances of Slash and Axl settling their differences in a WWE-style steel cage match. This is one of the worst albums I have ever forced myself to listen to multiple times. It is a disservice to the legacy of Axl Rose and company, and obviously proof that Rose either needs a genuine musical foil or needs to get out of the business altogether. I would suggest that this album should be forgot about altogether, but that seems unlikely. The only distinguishing characteristic of “Chinese Democracy” is its inherent “Heaven’s Gate”-ness, in that it will be forever characterized by just how bloated and unprecedented of a failure it turned out to be.

Why I hate Van Halen (a dissection of "Jump")

I just put this on my last.fm blog. Check me out sometime.
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Van Halen gets too much respect these days and I want to know why. I have my guesses, mainly that the people who enjoy this band grew up in the 80s and have an unhealthy attachment to anything heard on the radio during their formative years; additionally, we are starting to deal with the rise of young music listeners who faced a similar predicament, if only because their parents are those same listeners from the 80s. Surely, Van Halen had a few virtues far beyond those of the average cheese metal band (although its influence on the most horrid examples of the genre, such as Poison, Mötley Crüe, and Ratt, cannot be denied), but such modest virtues consisted solely of Eddie Van Halen's novel approach to guitar playing, which I will grant that, at the time of their debut album in 1978, may have seemed like a logical extension of the sort of things Led Zeppelin was doing, even as Led Zeppelin's better years were behind them, with Jimmy Page devoting himself full time to heroin and Aleister Crowley. Some believed that Eddie's chops were enough to offset David Lee Roth's horrible lyrics and even worse vocals in those days, but by the time something like "Jump" came around, I don't think anyone was attempting anything resembling good songwriting.

People seem to have a special spot in their heart for "Jump" among all Van Halen songs. I really can't figure out why. It's anchored by a keyboard riff that is as shockingly pedestrian as any that has been replayed over and over on classic rock radio, and you better believe that is saying a lot. It is a textbook case of beating a bad riff into the ground. "Jump" was part of Eddie Van Halen's opus 1984, which was a poor attempt on his part to master the keyboards in the same way that he had proven himself to be a master of guitar. Obviously, something went horribly wrong.

I begin with, as I must, with the lyrics. You might ask, why bother? Even the biggest David Lee Roth fan in the world has to admit that he is one of the two or three worst lyricists of all time (this is assuming that Roth is writing these lyrics, which I'm not sure--if it's Eddie, there's another reason for him to quit his day job). Roth of course was an amateurish singer, a preening prima donna of a showman, an incomparable chauvinist asshole, and, from all records, an impressive martial artist. Roth brings all these experiences and more to this beautiful opening aphorism:

I get up
and nothing gets me down

Whether or not it is true that it is difficult to get Roth down once he gets up, you have to wonder what he means by "getting up." Knowing Roth, it possibly has something to do with drugs but more likely is just Roth trumpeting his own irrepressible (read: annoying) personality, refusing to let all the haters hold him back. This opening line would make a lot of sense in a Viagra commercial, but beyond that, come on. Let's see if Roth can follow up this claim.

You got it tough
I've seen the toughest around
And I know, baby, just how you feel
You've got to roll with the punches to get to what's real

This is Roth's statement of purpose, foregrounded by Eddie's already gratingly repetitive keyboard riff. As far as I can tell (and by doing this I am putting more thought into David Lee Roth's lyrics than anyone else in the history of the world, certainly more than Roth himself), Roth is trying to cheer up a woman who's not doing too well, telling her to "roll with the punches to get to what's real." This means, as far as I can tell, that if she just keeps taking it, eventually something good will come out of it. Thanks a lot, Roth.

Let's continue with what I guess is the bridge part, a blessed respite from that fucking tinny keyboard, kind of:

Oh can't you see me standing here, I've got my back against the record machine
I ain't the worst that you've seen
Oh can't you see what I mean?

Record machine? Surely he isn't referring too, I don't know, a record player of some sort? Perhaps a jukebox, which would suggest that Roth's players are in some communal place like a bar, or perhaps a local soda fountain. Then he says, "I ain't the worst that you've seen," which perhaps could be construed as an attempt by Roth at self-deprecation, until he says, "Can't you see what I mean?" So, he isn't the worst that you've seen, wink wink nudge nudge? Does that mean that he is, actually, the worst thing that you've seen? I doubt it. More likely, Roth believes that any sentence followed by ,"if you know what I mean" qualifies as a pickup line. He is entitled to think that as the singer of a successful rock band (albeit, apparently, an ungrateful one).

So after this is the chant. "You might as well JUMP!" which is followed by someone else yelling, "JUMP!" Every time Roth says the title of the song, someone else (Eddie?) responds in turn. I find this to be one of the most annoying aspects of the song, particularly because Roth has to continue shouting nonsense like, "Yeah, jump! Go ahead, jump! Might as well jump!" etc. I'm willing to postulate that, to people who grew up with this song, this may be the most affecting part. That is, if one can put aside what some could construe to be a casual message of encouragement to those who consider suicide. Others could possibly take it to mean, I don't know, doing something crazy because you're young and invincible. Or something like that. It seems a lot of terrible songs from the 80s cover the same topic.

The rest of the song's lyrics basically repeat the bridge and the chorus over and over again, although there is one more verse that is, as you'll see, complete nonsense:

Aaa-ooh, hey you! Who said that?
Baby, how you been?
You say you don't know, you won't know
until we begin.

Christ, I don't even feel like going into this any more. Obviously it's just stupid, and it's not even the most egregious example of Rothian nonsense. I have a theory for why he wrote lyrics like this (seriously, did he just make them up on the spot?). David Lee Roth once said something to the effect of, "Rock critics love Elvis Costello more than me because they all look like Elvis Costello." It seems that me that this brilliant realization of Roth's inspired him to be everything that Elvis Costello is not, and so, to counter Costello's proclivity to write intelligent lyrics, Roth chose the meathead route. He must have figured that the quality of an individual's lyrics is inversely proportional to how much said individual gets laid; for all I know, he could be correct (although Costello was no slouch).

By now you will be arguing, "well of course the music is more important than the lyrics." I agree with you, so let's take the music on its own terms. The entire production sounds, at this point, phenomenally dated, in the same way in which similar "classics" like Born In The USA and Thriller sound dated. As products of the 80s, all the levels are reduced to car stereo quality, making everything sound tinny and inexpressive; additionally, keyboards are front and center and all the non-electronic instruments sound as if they are electronically augmented, even if they are not. As a result, the music sounds as inauthentic and "non-live" as traditional rock music can get, in a way that Led Zeppelin or even previous Van Halen never did.

Let's talk about the overall arc of the songwriting. For someone considered an incredible virtuoso, one of the crowning princes of his instrument, Eddie Van Halen surely doesn't extend his experimental edge to his songwriting. I think this has to be intentional, and a good reason why he is far more popular and revered than more esoteric players like Yngwie Malmsteen and Steve Vai (or progenitors like Zappa). Not that there's anything wrong with that: in fact, I think it's probably a good thing that Eddie tried to temper his virtuosity by channeling it into typical pop structures. Still, even as a pop song, "Jump" is really nothing special. If you listen to both the verses and the chorus (this is one of many, many mainstream 80s songs where the verse and the chorus are the exact same thing), you'll notice that what you have is a I-IV-V progression--which, as songs from "Louie, Louie" to "Get Off Of My Cloud" to at least every other Ramones song will attest, is as typical a chord progression as is possible. In "Jump"'s case, you got C, then F, then G. It's really as simple as that. Over this progression is the keyboard riff, which overpowers every other instrument to an absurd degree. It's the same thing over and over again. Obviously, that's the point, it's a riff, but let me explain my distaste. I feel as if I have different responses to keyboard riffs than I do with guitar riffs: with a good guitar riff, you can at least feel the joy of expressing that sort of thing through repetition, whereas with this keyboard there's no real way to tell if Eddie didn't just play it once, put it on repeat, and make a song out of it. The fact that he tries changing it to some degree once in a while doesn't really do much for me, as even when he does that, the rhythm doesn't change at all, as if the whole tune has been preset.

The less said about the ineffectual rhythm section running behind Van Halen and Roth, the better. It's really a shame how inferior Alex Van Halen is compared to his brother, and yet it's moving to see him try to become some sort of drum legend when all the chips are stacked against him. That number one chip being, of course, bassist Michael Anthony, who as far as I can tell has a hard time playing more than one note for an indefinite period of time. Well, so did Dee Dee Ramone, you claim, but Dee Dee didn't have a drummer who played copious and poorly considered fills all the time. Alex's drumming is famously flashy, yet counter-intuitive given the nature of the song. On "Jump," neither of them can play worth shit, which is good because Eddie is clearly running the show here, and you can tell by what instruments are prominent.

Oh, but Eddie...there are several things wrong with this song's structure. Apart from actually giving us some audible guitar during the bridge (the "record machine" part), the most prominent guitar playing is during the solo, which, I must say, is pretty piss-poor. It sounds like Eddie recorded it in bits and pieces and edited it together at the last second after realizing he forgot to put in a solo, like a pimply teenager who tries to desperately rub one out before his prom date arrives. I was disturbed to read on Wikipedia that Eddie considers this to be his finest solo, although I couldn't find any evidence of him pointing out why. It comes out of nowhere, has nothing to do with the rest of the song, is completely unmemorable, and (his greatest sin) sounds like it's just trying to waste time. It's this kind of onanistic chaff that deservedly gives virtuoso guitar playing its bad rap.

Eddie's keyboard solo, which immediately follows the guitar solo, is embarrassingly bad for an entirely opposite reason. Here, it seems he can barely get a hang on the instrument, and his "solo" is nothing more than a quick succession of triplets, rather than the full chord at once. I don't know if Eddie got a bit better at the instrument later in his career (I hear he did), but at that point, it seems he is stuck with the most rudimentary of chords--triads--and he is not adventurous enough to try anything else.

So it seems we have Eddie Van Halen exemplifying the two opposite poles of bad instrumental soloing: total incompetence, of course, as well as super-competence, and the resulting high self-regard for what is essentially aimless noodling.

By the way, I personally prefer this video of Van Halen playing. It includes a noble attempt at "Iron Man":



Children of the 1980s, guitar enthusiasts, lovers of shitty lyrics, hear my plea. The next time you hear "Jump" on the radio, ask yourself these questions: why is this a good song? Why is it even on the radio? Has this aged well? Maybe you should consider that it was that stupid video on MTV, coupled with its aggressive airing on commercial radio, that foisted this upon you, and as such you are not required to like it at all. Just think about it. There's nothing worthwhile in this song. It's just a piss-poor excuse for a synthesizer riff that must have taken Eddie Van Halen five seconds to come up with. It is aural boredom. If you want a great keyboard lick from the 80s, might I suggest "Enola Gay" by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark? And, of course, "Take On Me" by a-ha.

Quotes, for the sake of wasting time

"These seances are intercut with concert footage, during which the band typically sings the lyrics through once and then gets mired in endless loops of instrumental repetition that seem positioned somewhere between mantras and autism. The music is shapeless, graceless, and built from rhythm, not melody; it is amusing, given the undisciplined sound, to eavesdrop later as they argue in a van about whether they all were following the same arrangement."
-Roger Ebert, on the music of Neil Young & Crazy Horse

"I always treat life and death with respect, but most people don't...Look, I love the Coen brothers; we all studied at NYU. But they treat life as a joke. Ha ha ha. A joke. It's like, 'Look how they killed that guy! Look how blood squirts out the side of his head!' I see things different than that."
-Spike Lee, offering the most ridiculous generalization masquerading as criticism I've heard in a while, and I'm not even that big of a Coen brothers fan.

"astenou6 you's da faygot spiderman is teh greatest marvel superhero character ever not because of his powers but, because of what he represents your to much of a noob to get taht!"
-Youtube user Ace48071, spreading the Spider-Man gospel in ways I could only hope to emulate.

"So here is the problem. Homo sapiens has been on the planet for 100,000 years, but apparently for more than 95,000 of these years he accomplished virtually nothing. No real art, no writing, no inventions, no culture, no civilization. How is this possible? Were our ancestors, otherwise mentally and physically undistinguishable [sic] from us, such blithering idiots that they couldn't figure out anything other than the arts of primitive warfare?"
-Dinesh D'Souza, undeservedly proud of his new counter-theory against "the atheists" claiming that it makes no sense that God would only choose to intervene in human affairs sporadically over the last 5,000 years (I generally have little regard for anything anyone says over the internet, and I include myself, but I was heartened to see people on D'Souza's site ripping apart this argument fairly readily).

My top 50

This is a last.fm meme I had been meaning to do for a long time. I would post it on my last.fm blog but I thought I'd do it here as well. I'm always interested to look at my top 50, in order to see what it perhaps says about me. Numbers here are rankings based on number of tracks scrobbled from each artist.

1. How did you get into 29? Big Black

Read about them in Michael Azzerad’s book, naturally. I think of the 13 bands profiled in the book, Big Black was one of the last bands I listened to and got into. I think only Beat Happening and Butthole Surfers came later. Anyhow I got Songs About Fucking first, because it was recommended by Pitchfork, and of course I was blown away. I was aware at the time of Albini’s producing (sorry, engineering) work for plenty of bands I admired.

2. What was the first song you ever heard by 22? Wire
It would have to be “Reuters” because the first time I ever listened to Wire I listened to Pink Flag all the way through.

3. What’s your favorite lyric by 33? Kyuss

“My hair is real long/No brains, all groin/no shoes, just thongs/I hate slow songs” is a good one.

4. What is your favorite album by 49? Jeff Beck

My iTunes counts Truth as a Jeff Beck album as opposed to a Jeff Beck Group album, so I will say Truth.

5. How many albums by 13 do you own? Game Theory.

Just one, actually. I should get more, but Lolita Nation has a lot of tracks and all of them are excellent, even the 14-second ones.

6. What is your favorite song by 50? Crime

“Instrumental Instrumental” always gets me going.

7. Is there a song by 39 that makes you sad? Johnny Thunders

Oh, yes. His entire repertoire is pretty heartbreaking in light of what happened to him. Obviously, “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around A Memory” comes to mind, but I would probably choose “So Alone,” cause Thunders’ guitar can always make me a bit weepy.

8. What is your favorite album by 15? Guitar Wolf

J-J-J-Jet Generation!

9. What is your favorite song by 5? The Clash.

This has to be the hardest question yet. I’ll say “Charlie Don’t Surf,” but as I say it, all these songs from London Calling come welling back—shit, let’s say “Charlie Don’t Surf.”

10. Is there a song by 6 that makes you happy? Minutemen

There’s several, but one that comes to mind is “History Lesson-Part II,” a heartwarming story of friendship and band harmony that is unprecedented in its autobiographical candor as well as its kind disposition.

11. What is your favorite album by 40? Jay Reatard.

Blood Visions is the only one I got.

12. What is your favorite song by 10? Frank Zappa

Jesus, another hard one. “Trouble Every Day” is so magnificent, even if it is on his first album. It also has probably his best, least random lyrics.

13. What is a good memory you have involving 30? Butthole Surfers

I actually have a wonderful memory of being at Chameleon’s in Mt. Vernon with some friends and everyone was playing shit music on the jukebox (Lynyrd Skynyrd and the like) and me and my friends sunk a bunch of money into it and played “Who Was In My Room Last Night” first. We ended up waiting about an hour listening to terrible music until finally we heard the “I’m flying, I’m flying” part. Then we all started headbanging.

14. What is your favorite song by 38? The La’s

“I Can’t Sleep” is the jumpiest and happiest of many jumpy and happy cuts.

15. Is there a song by 19 that makes you happy? Elvis Costello

Elvis isn’t the kind of lyricist who writes “happy” lyrics—nevertheless, the music for “The Impostor” is pretty cheerful for what it is (ska).

16. How many times have you seen 25 live? Queens of the Stone Age.

Never, but I would love to.

17. What is the first song you ever heard by 23? Meat Puppets.

Obviously it must have been “Lake of Fire” via Nirvana, and it was also the Meat Puppets cut on the Rhino 80s underground box set.

18. What is your favorite album by 11? Dinosaur Jr.

Has to be You’re Living All Over Me. Stiff competition from Bug and that’s about it, although all Dinosaur Jr. albums have good tracks.

19. Who is a favorite member of 1? Bad Brains.

Dr. Know is the MVP of all Bad Brains albums, at least until that Soul Brains nonsense when H.R. took over. As much as I love every member of the band, consummate musicians all, if forced to take one on a desert island I would choose Dr. Know, for his consummately brilliant soloing abilities as well as his ability to play really, really fast. Like Johnny Ramone and Van Halen rolled into one.

20. Have you ever seen 14 live? Frank Black.

No, but I will in a few weeks in Des Moines hopefully, although this time under the sobriquet “Black Francis,” so who knows if that counts.

21. What is a good memory involving 27? Fugazi

Any memory involving Fugazi is a good one. Walking around campus while listening to “Public Witness Program” on repeat seems like a good one, it was like my way of calming down after my music theory classes.

22. What is your favorite song by 16? Radiohead

Currently, I’m partial to “All I Need,” because I have a lot of very good memories associated with it. Apart from that, “Paranoid Android” will always have a good place in my heart, despite its ubiquity.

23. What is the first song you ever heard by 47? The Rolling Stones

Who knows? The earliest I remember is dancing to “Jumping Jack Flash” as a youngster.

24. What is your favorite album by 18? The Replacements

I’ll say Pleased To Meet Me, an album that continually surprises and moves me—not only does it have the awesome opener “I.O.U.”—a piss-take on all the Replacements fans bitching about their moving to a major label—but it also has the perfect ending in “Can’t Hardly Wait.” In between, it has “The Ledge,” “Skyway” and of course the mighty “Alex Chilton.” I even listen to “Nightclub Jitters” when I’m in the mood.

25. What is your favorite song by 21? R.E.M.

Anything from their first five albums is tops, but I’ll choose “Harborcoat” because it embodies the two aspects of R.E.M. I always liked the most—the jittery, off-kilter dance rhythms and the anthemic (if obscure) chorus.

26. What is the first song you ever heard by 26? 999

“Homicide,” via its placement on No Thanks: The 70s Punk Rebellion, which was my bible for a while back in high school. Of all the songs that I played and replayed, “Homicide” is definitely one I listened to often.

27. What is your favorite album by 3? Steely Dan

The Royal Scam. Maybe a month ago I would have said Aja, but I can’t get over those first two songs, especially the end of “The Caves of Altamira” when the horns start going crazy. Plus, all of them have amazing lyrics, including “Haitian Divorce.”

28. What is your favorite song by 2? The Stranglers

This might be the hardest one to do yet. As much as I deeply love pretty much every part of the Stranglers’ discography, particularly the first three albums, I will go out on a limb and say I am particularly enamored with “Down In The Sewer.” If you haven’t heard it before, you should, it’s like the best sort of punk “rock opera” or whatever they call it, and it has this really righteous and exciting ending. It keeps building and topping itself, which is the sort of thing I like (that’s why I like the Wipers so much).

29. What was the first song you ever heard by 32? Magazine

“Shot on Both Sides,” also via No Thanks. I should add, though, that the stupid Rolling Stone record guide said that Magazine never made anything nearly as good as “Shot on Both Sides,” a simply stupid assumption. If you haven’t heard Magazine, you must. Great, probably the best, post-punk.

30. What is your favorite song by 8? The Germs

I know their discography by heart, and I can tell you pretty easily what my least favorite song is (that would be “Shut Down (Annihilation Man)”. As for my favorite, “Let’s Pretend” comes to mind. Some of Pat Smear’s best work there.

31. How many times have you seen 17 live? Warren Zevon

0, and it looks like I never will.

32. Is there a song by 44 that makes you happy? Led Zeppelin

Anything off Led Zeppelin III. Particularly, “Bron-Y-Aur Stomp.”

33. What is your favorite album by 12? Pixies

Impossible question. Can’t answer it.

34. What is the worst song by 45? Stiff Little Fingers

“Here We Are Nowhere,” if only because it’s too short.

35. What was the first song you ever heard by 34? Sonic Youth

I remember hearing about Goodbye, Old Century on NPR but the first Sonic Youth song proper I heard was probably “Tom Violence” off EVOL. I remember being not that impressed, shows how stupid I was in middle school.

36. What is your favorite album by 48? Neil Young

On The Beach is the one I listen to the most, so I’ll say that.

37. How many times have you seen 42 live? Tom Waits

Never, but boy would I love to.

38. What is your favorite song by 36? The Jam

The one I listen to the most is probably their cover of “Heat Wave,” but considering that’s not a Jam original I’ll say “Set The House Ablaze,” which by the way Bloc Party completely ripped off verbatim.

39. What was the first song you ever heard by 28? Wu-Tang Clan

“Gravel Pit,” I think. I think I saw the video. Very weird video, if you haven’t seen it.

40. What is your favorite album by 7? Husker Du.

Once again, an absolutely impossible question to answer. What the hell, Zen Arcade.

41. Is there a song by 31 that makes you happy? David Bowie
Bowie generally doesn’t generally make me cheery, but I guess “Modern Love” might fit the bill.

42. What is your favorite album by 41? Battles

Easiest question yet. Mirrored by default. I suppose I could choose one of the EPs but I’m not going to.

43. What is your favorite song by 24? Stevie Wonder

“As,” though I’ve completely overplayed that song over the course of the last year. Gets me going, I guess.

44. What is a good memory you have involving 46? Of Montreal
The first time I heard “Disconnect the Dots” and proceeded to spend the next few weeks listening to only that song.

45. What is your favorite song by 35? Big Star

“Feel,” I guess. Never topped that.

46. Is there a song by 9 that makes you happy? At The Drive-In
Oh, hell yeah. “Rolodex Propaganda” has great, loopy backing vocals by Iggy Pop and is of course righteous like everything else they do.

47. What is your favorite album by 4? Wipers.

Shit, yet another impossible question to answer. If pressed, I choose Youth of America. Chances are if you don’t like it I don’t like you.

48. Who is a favorite member of 37? The Who
Keith Moon is undoubtedly the greatest instrumental powerhouse of the Who, and of course that is saying a lot. I am feeling dubious about this Keith Moon biopic with Mike Myers (who will play Townshend? Adrien Brody? Who has the nose?).

49. What is the first song you ever heard by 43? Pink Floyd
Again, it’s difficult to remember. It might be “Learning To Fly” because of my dad. Ick.

50. How many albums do you own by 20? Portishead

All three of the studio albums proper. There's a band that should record more often.

Reconciling myself

Well, I certainly dropped the ball on this thing. I was seized, unfortunately, by one of those Salinger (or Residents!) moments where I felt like being a bit more anonymous. In fact, I don't even know what I'm trying to do right now. I'll give you a brief lowdown on what you may have missed, had you not been present during every moment of my life and don't happen to be a nu-nu. This is in relatively chronological order.

-On what I believe was 4/20, I delivered my symposium project on Philip Roth. Entitled "Telling a Man by the Songs He Sings: Claims and Counterclaims of Anti-semitism in Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus and Letting Go," I had spent the last several months, reading through as much of Roth's work as I could while simultaneously producing a 15-page paper that my sponsor would find of enduring quality. Luckily, she didn't find my thesis or anything I said to be that bad (I was probably helped by the fact that, even as an American literature professor, and a Jew to boot, she wasn't that familiar with Roth). Of course, the day before I had to pare down the fucking thing to a manageable 10 minutes. It turns out that reading my entire 15-page paper took something like 25 minutes, so I spent all of Friday hacking it until I was pretty sure I had produced something utterly unintelligible. No matter: very, very few people showed up. I would wager there were maybe 10 people there, and that includes the three students also speaking during my session (entitled "Literary Landscapes: Paradise, Politics, and Religion"--check out my abstract and stuff here) and their respective sponsors, although my sponsor couldn't be there because, irony of ironies, she had to go home for Passover.

Anyhow, I finally did it, and at least my moderator seemed to like it, and was particularly impressed that I did all the research outside of class. I asked her if (as department chairman) this would be good to go as an honors thesis, and she said yes. So at that point I was pretty happy.

-All of the internships I applied for--and I won't bother naming them all here--turned me down. Every single last one of them. So, faced with few other ideas, I decided to go back home once again for the summer. Turns out this was a bad idea.

-I did, however, receive an academic award from the school, which was cool because along with the prestige (I'm aware, don't laugh at me) of it I got $100. It was the Winifred Van Etten award, in case you were wondering. It's not a big deal, there are enough of these to make me feel not so special. Still, it was nice, particularly because I had no idea what I was getting until it was announced at the English awards/Open Field party. Mouton, or someone in the English department wrote a lovely introduction for me too. The only reason I enjoyed it was because it was poetic justice for none of my stuff getting into Open Field, which is the campus literary magazine. This is even though Freeman thought one of my stories was good enough to be entered into the Nick Adams short story contest (which I lost unsurprisingly, although I should add deservedly--I read the story that won, and it is actually an amazing piece of work). Apparently, my peers didn't think anything I did was good enough. I was depressed, but that made it a bit better.

Weirdly, I was invited to attend the English awards night as well as the interdepartmental awards night. Since I had already gotten my award previously, I was just asked to stand up to be recognized. There was no reason why I should have gone. The whole thing was like three hours and nearly unbearable, despite what was supposed to be fancy food. Apparently, there are a lot of awards here.

-Got hired to be the new Arts & Entertainment editor of The Cornellian, which, unlike my job back in high school, actually pays a salary. I was going for Opinions editor but I'm not surprised that they didn't choose me. To date, I have written pieces about the new Portishead album, the new R.E.M. album, and Iron Man. As is custom, the new editorial staff does one issue at the very end of the year, and it ended up not going so well for me as the result of some advertising mishaps, so I basically had to do the whole thing over again. The result: an epic piece on Iron Man that took up the entire page. It wasn't my proudest moment, and it was sort of another reason to be depressed. I couldn't look at it afterwards, that was for sure.

-I saw Iron Man. Loved it. I don't think my review is online, but I'll post it at some point.

-Took two classes, both of which fucked me up in unexpected ways: Grammar & The Politics of English turned out to be a mind-blowingly frustrating class, although not so much with the politics part as it was with the grammar. I don't know if anyone here has ever had to diagram sentences. I certainly hadn't before, but now I can say that it is a loathsome, disgusting, and surprisingly helpful activity. I think I am a better writer for taking the class, and it was sort of nice to have a professor who didn't like anything I did at all. I definitely needed that, but too bad it killed my straight-A winning streak for the semester. I'm not as concerned with that as I am with the way I was demoralized--somehow, even as someone with enough knowledge and passion of issues pertaining to language politics and linguistics, I found I had little of value to say. I did, however, get to do a paper on Salman Rushdie, who readers will know I am a big fan of. I think my thesis was something like the Ayatollah couldn't have possibly read The Satanic Verses before he issued his fatwa, and he definitely didn't read it afterward either. I know, it's so obvious. Story of my life.

Contrast this with Contemporary Fiction, a class I owned unequivocally. I found, astonishingly, that I was more in my element doing literary analysis, and what's more, I found myself enjoying the theory--yes, the theory--of postmodernists like Jean Baudrillard and Roland Barthes. Plus, we got to read some wonderful books, including one of my favorites, If on a winter's night a traveler. We also read Breakfast of Champions and J.M. Coetzee's Foe, amongst selections from a big Norton anthology of postmodern literature from the likes of Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Sherman Alexie, Marilynne Robinson, Maxine Hong Kingston, and others. Philip Roth was in the anthology (excerpting The Ghost Writer) but we did not read him in class. I felt very much on top of things and was very proud of the writing I did in the class. In fact, I feel like I might put it on here, except it doesn't seem that profound on the internet as it did in the classroom. Anyway, my professor seemed to like it, and me, a lot. I think he liked that I would actually talk about some of the postmodern theory while most would complain it was impenetrable. As he would likely say, that's the point.

-I keep chugging away at Philip Roth. Just finished Deception, by the way, so I'm entering the home stretch. In my next post I'll talk about The Counterlife through Exit Ghost, assuming I can remember anything about them.

-I ended my junior year by doing my take-home final while having an extreme headache, and later, after attending quarter draws night at the bar, getting extremely feverish. Also, I hate packing and I knew I would miss my roommate, Jeremiah, although I'll see him again next year.

-Came home for the summer. The drive back was excruciating. Not only was I feeling extremely sick, to the point where I couldn't eat anything, but it was raining as hard as I've ever seen, to the point where I couldn't really see on the road. It was risky business, but I made it home okay. I've looked, in vain, for a job. It's hard, because pretty much everything has been filled up by people who came back for summer long before I did, as a result of Cornell ending pretty late. I need money and I don't know what to do.

So that's it. I'll get back into the swing of things, slowly. My question is this: from reading this, does this constitute a life well-lived? Obviously I'm not including stuff that is personal, but let's just say that that part is covered. Am I doing enough with my life? What should I be doing? What am I doing wrong?