A Timeless Wavelength

The Decemberists – The Wanting Comes in Waves / Repaid

Last September I caught The Decemberists on tour in support of their new album The Hazards of Love. I found it to be easily the best live show I’d seen in years.  And much of the reason for this is that the show was a throwback to a time when rock bands weren’t afraid to be entertaining.

The album in question was a concept album, and a rather convoluted one at that.  It seems to be set in some vague “olden times” somewhere between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century.  Its story is structured like a classic myth or fairy tale, though the actual plot is almost impossible to unravel.  It seems to have something to do with a mortal man who’s adopted by a fairy queen and can turn into a fawn and falls in love with a mortal woman and gets her pregnant (hopefully while he’s still in human form) and then she gets kidnapped by a rake who is haunted by the ghosts of his murdered children and… you know, it’s probably best not even to try to sort it out.

Musically, the album is all over the place, with baroque instrumentation interspersed with chunky, distorted ’70s hard rock guitar.  The heroine and the fairy queen are voiced, respectively, by guest vocalists Becky Stark and Shara Worden, both of whom accompanied the Decemberists on this tour.  While the stage show did not feature a full theatrical production as originally planned, just seeing the stage packed with musicians and vocalists was stunning enough — especially since many of them did not confine themselves to a single instrument. During “The Rake’s Song,” for instance, almost every member of the band was pounding away at drums or other percussion instruments in union, producing a wonderfully garish cacophony.  Other tracks were only a flute solo away from being a lost Jethro Tull hit.  The track featured here gives a pretty good glimpse of the grandeur of this album, featuring harpsichord, electric guitar, and an operatic dialogue between Worden and lead singer Colin Meloy.

The reason this live show was so spectacular was because it flew in the face of the “back to basics” ethos that has dominated rock music for the past thirty years.  It seems like every few years has spawned another musical movement that preached simplicity and shied away from grandstanding or virtuosity.  From punk to New Wave to grunge, complexity and showmanship were the enemies.  But by now the “back to basics” movement has become hegemonic in its own right, and it’s quite refreshing to see a small army of musicians in fancy suits wailing away on accordion and bouzouki to the tune of an epic rock opera.

Vic Chesnutt – Supernatural

Sometimes, when tragedy strikes, I think our minds try to distract us from the pain by going to inappropriate places.  When  I first heard the news that legendary Athens singer and songwriter Vic Chesnutt had taken his own life on Christmas Day, my immediate thought was, “Damn.  Now I’ll never get to see him perform live.”

Since moving to Athens, I had had several opportunities to see him live, and passed them all up, always assuming that the opportunity to see such a fixture of the local music scene would present itself again.  (Of course, I also passed up a chance to see the Grateful Dead in 1995.  You’d think I’d learn.)  Now people are saying that his suicide was “foretold in song,” but they always say that when a musician takes his own life.  I was aware of no such foreshadowing, though admittedly I had not kept up with his most recent work.

Like most people, I knew that he had been wheelchair-bound from the age of eighteen.  I didn’t know about his ongoing health problems or his struggles with medical debt.  I unfortunately did know, first hand, the mental stress that those struggles can cause.  In fact, I probably still owe money to some of the same people as Vic.  Like every suicide, he undoubtedly took his true motivations to his grave, but people are already seizing the opportunity to politicize Chesnutt’s death, claiming he was “murdered” by the American health care system.

I have every reason to be dissatisfied with our health care system, but I can’t help but think there’s something both naïve and ghoulish about using this suicide as a political call to action.  Vic must have had various and complex reasons for his suicide, and while his medical debt certainly added to his mental anguish, the decision to take his life was ultimately his and his alone.  If all this death means to you is that it lends support to your pet political cause, you do a great disservice to the man’s memory.

This song is, I believe, the first Vic Chesnutt song I ever heard.   The band Live covered it on their appearance on MTV Unplugged, and singer Ed Kowalczyk called it “absolutely the most beautiful song ever written by a human being.” In it, Chesnutt, a longtime atheist, speaks dismissively of such phenomena as out-of-body experiences, but still hedges his bet:  “It ain’t supernatural… maybe.”  I can’t help but recall the time I awoke from my own surgery, hearing voices and seeing a shining blue light.  It turned out one of the hospital staff had left the TV on and tuned to Fox News, and I was not being welcomed into the afterlife, but was instead seeing Sean Hannity complain about illegal immigrants.  Let’s hope Vic Chesnutt, atheist or not, received a warmer welcome wherever he went.

The Breeders – New Year

No, for real.  I’m serious this time.  I’m starting the blog back up, and I’m going to post something every day.

2009 was a rough year for me.  I guess I used that as an excuse not to post.  Then I realized that the exercise of sitting down every day and producing some written content, however meager, was part of what made the earlier months of that year more bearable.  2010 promises to be a much better year, and I hope it lives up to its promise.  Having some regular creative outlet will go a long way towards ensuring that.

And so, I bring you this year-opener from the Breeders’ 1993 album Last Splash.

The Dead Milkmen – Stuart

The Dead Milkmen have a few songs that are mostly a bizarre spoken word piece over music, but “Stuart” is easily the best.  It’s got everything:  trailer parks, carnival death, and a bizarre conspiracy theory about what the queers are doing to our soil.  But one of my favorite parts is the reference to an animal called a “burrow owl,” which everyone but that Johnny Worster kid knows lives in a hole in the ground.

After years of having heard this song, I found out that the Dead Milkmen didn’t make up the burrowing owl.  It’s a real animal, and not only that, it’s native to parts of Florida where I once lived.  It’s even the mascot for Florida Atlantic University, which I’m sure does nothing to engender team spirit from anyone who’s heard this song.  There have even been lawsuits when condo developers bought some land only to find it was protected burrow owl habitat, so they can’t build anything on it, and they can’t grow anything on it.

This was almost as exciting as finding out there’s a bitchin’ Camaro that you really could drive up from the Bahamas.  Maybe you can learn things from Dead Milkmen songs after all.  Nevertheless I probably still shouldn’t try smoking banana peels or drinking bleach.

Pearl Jam – Unemployable

It’s strange how the passage of time can change how you perceive things.  Back in the early 1990s when the Seattle scene first gained nationwide attention, there was some sort of rivalry between Nirvana, with their primitive fuzz-pedal sound, and Pearl Jam, with a more polished studio sound.  It was made out to be like punk rock versus ’70s arena rock, Fenders versus Gibsons, keepin’ it real versus just an act.

Though I enjoyed the music of both bands, I was firmly on the side of Nirvana in this little feud.  It didn’t help that Pearl Jam were always damaging their credibility by going out of their way to seem “underground”:  after winning several MTV Video Music Awards the band stopped making videos, after their feud with Ticketmaster it became harder to attend their concerts, and at one time they (perhaps jokingly) insinuated they were going to start releasing albums on vinyl only.  I was sure that any day they were going to live up to Todd Snider’s parody and “be the only band that wouldn’t play a note”.  Nirvana, on the other hand, were The For-Real Deal.  You could tell because when Kurt Cobain went on the cover of corporate magazine Rolling Stone he wore a T-shirt that said “Corporate Magazines Still Suck”.  How alternative! And of course, that whole suicide thing.  I mean, top that, Eddie Vedder.  The best you ever did was unwittingly become the focus of an Internet rumor that you had died of a heroin overdose.

Years passed, and Nirvana’s music did not age well.  Their songs are all pretty simple and formulaic, just fuzzed-out taco riffs and a loud-soft-loud dynamic even they admitted was just ripping off the Pixies.  Cobain’s lyrics are rather trite, and riddled with half-successful attempts at wordplay (“afterbirth of a nation”?).  His voice isn’t the easiest to listen to, either.  Plus Dave Grohl’s post-Nirvana success with the Foo Fighters shows that Cobain wasn’t the real creative talent in that band.  Just about the only artifact of Nirvana’s brief career that still stands out is their appearance on MTV Unplugged, when they toned down their troglodyte grunge sound, added cello and accordion, and made what actually sounded like music.

Meanwhile, Pearl Jam released a series of albums nobody bought, and had thoroughly dropped off my radar until 2006, when, for reasons I still don’t understand, I bought an issue of that infamous corporate magazine Rolling Stone that featured Eddie Vedder on the cover.  The gist of the article was that Vedder wasn’t nearly as much of a tool as he had been in the ’90s, and that their new album was actually pretty good.  So I bought a copy, and to my surprise, Rolling Stone was right.  The album consists of several really tight, riff-based songs that play up the same strengths we saw back on their first two albums.  “Unemployable,” a song about the plight of the blue-collar worker, has one of the catchiest riffs of the band’s career, and quickly became one of my favorites.  Plus the lyrics make way more sense than “Scentless Apprentice”.

10,000 Maniacs – What’s The Matter Here

Suzanne Vega – Luka

For all we stereotype the era’s music as a bunch of empty, feel-good party rock, the 1980s were by no means short on rock stars attempting to give their music a social conscience.  It was the era of Live Aid and “We Are the World,” of U2 singing about violence in Belfast and Phil Collins lamenting the plight of the homeless.  And who can forget Michael Jackson in his weird Napoleonic disco band director outfit, shaking hands with Ronald Reagan as he receives an award for helping to keep our children safe (from drugs, anyway)?

But perhaps the most bizarre example of the socially conscious rock trend came in 1987, when Susanne Vega released Solitude Standing, and 10,000 Maniacs released In My Tribe. What’s wierd about this is that both albums prominently featured upbeat, happy-sounding songs about child abuse, songs which would go on to become among the artists’ most recognizable singles.

“Luka” very effectively communicates the tragedy of growing up in an abusive home:  it is told in the first person by the abused child, who tries to apologize or make excuses for his bruises.  It focuses less on the physical trauma of abuse and more on the deep psychological scars that would cause the abused child to believe his sad fate is his own fault.  And it does so without being preachy; the song lets Luka speak for himself.

By contrast, “What’s the Matter Here?” is more self-righteous and far less effective.  It’s actually less about child abuse and more about what Natalie Merchant thinks about child abuse.  The song is told from the perspective of someone else observing the abuse, saying “I’m tired of the excuses everybody uses” and “I don’t approve of what you did to your own flesh and blood.”  It’s as if she’s giving a lecture to the perpetrator of the abuse, except in reality she does no such thing:  the last refrain of the chorus states “But I don’t dare say, ‘What’s the matter here?’”  In other words, Natalie saw some brute smacking his kids around, but she didn’t have the courage to stand up to him, so in her passive-aggressive way she goes off to the studio and records a song about how angry she is about child abuse, knowing full well that the abusive father will probably never hear it.  Meanwhile, those of us who do hear the song are treated to a lecture for something we didn’t do.

I don’t know whether either artist ever did anything more concrete to help abused children, or whether either song inspired anyone to change their ways.  I do know that at least the Susanne Vega song has a ring of sincerity to it.  And they’re both pretty catchy.

Fish Karma – The Customer Is Always Right

No phrase strikes terror in the hearts of the retail worker more than “The customer is always right.”  That phrase even inspired the name of the premier blog for trading horror stories about customers.  It inspires a sense of consumer entitlement that boggles the imagination, justifying the belief that one can have one’s every whim granted by the sales staff simply because one might potentially spend an unspecified amount of money.  And it’s a ridiculous rule on the face of it:  if a customer demanded that the store pay him to haul off a truckload of merchandise, he’d be wrong, wouldn’t he?

Far more disturbing to me than the mere existence of this phrase is the fact that everyone seems to think it has the force of law, or at the very least company policy, yet few can tell you where they heard this fact.  It’s just one of those things everyone knows, like they know you get a 4.0 if your college roommate commits suicide.

Well, thanks to an advanced technology called Wikipedia, I have learned two things:  First, SEAN IS TEH GHEY LOL, and second, the origins of this phrase are unclear, but it is believed to have been popularized by Harry Selfridge as a slogan for his department stores.  It apparently never even had the force of company policy, let alone law.  Yet whenever a customer wants some ridiculous service to be performed free of charge, or wants to exchange an item that was purchased back in the Gilded Age when the receipt clearly states the thirty-day return policy, they always drag out this phrase as if it proves the retail employee has no choice but to comply.

Somehow this reminds me of the incident last year in which a man was stripped of nearly everything he owned because someone posted a fake craigslist ad claiming the guy was giving away all his stuff for free.  When he arrived at home and demanded that everyone stop taking his stuff, the scavengers produced a printout of the craigslist ad as proof.  The unfortunate homeowner was shocked:  “They honestly thought that because it appeared on the Internet it was true.”  In both these cases people believe they are entitled to an absurd degree of accommodation on the basis of a statement whose origins and authority they know nothing about.

If I were still teaching critical thinking (which I’m really glad I’m not), I’d use these as examples of the argument from improper authority.  (Or maybe an altogether new fallacy:  the argument from unknown authority.)  But since I’m not, I’ll just post this song by Fish Karma that expresses the woes of the retail employee much more succinctly.

The Pixies – Theme From Narc

Music isn’t simply listened to; it can also be put to use, and sometimes new uses for music dictate new types of music.  The need to keep marching troops in sync gave rise to marching band music, with its distinctive 2/4 meter.  The need for cheap, reliable tools for long-distance communication gave rise to bugle and post-horn calls, with their notes limited to the harmonic series playable on valveless instruments.  Gospel music can trace its origins in part to songs sung by laborers in the field, and sailors once worked to the rhythm of sea shantys.

In our own time, the development of the home computer, and in particular the video game, gave rise to another distinctive form of music.  Nowadays, when games can handle CD-quality sound, it is not uncommon for them to be accompanied by popular songs from established musicians.  But in the pre-Playstation days of the 1980s and 1990s, video game music had to contend with a number of constraints.  The memory in early game systems was limited, and so most game music consisted of a few measures repeated ad infinitum. The 8-bit sound chips couldn’t synthesize realistic instrument sounds or human voices, and so the songs had to be instrumental numbers that sounded OK on square and triangle waves.  Usually only two to four voices were possible at once — if that.  So video games had to be very stripped-down and simplified, yet engaging enough not to get too annoying when endlessly repeated.  Add to that the fact that most early video game music was composed by computer programmers rather than professional composers or musicians, and you have the makings of a decidedly wierd genre of music.

Lately there’s been a strange sort of nostalgia for this minimalist game music, with entire bands devoted to performing covers of classics first heard on Ataris and Nintendos.  Even established artists have dabbled in the genre.  Here indie superstars the Pixies cover the theme from the late-’80s DEA propaganda shooter NARC.  Musically it’s roughly in the same vein as the surf-rock that forms the basis for the Pixies’ sound, but with shades of Japanese glam-metal thrown in.  Its alien chord progression and utter refusal to follow a verse-chorus-verse structure provided an interesting challenge for the band.  And somehow, even though they’re using real, live instruments, the Pixies manage to retain some of that classic 8-bit sound.

Vic Chesnutt – Band Camp

What is it about band camp that fires the American cultural imagination?  Where did we get the idea that this bivouac of musical pedagogy was a secret hotbed of debauchery?  And why did I encounter absolutely none of it when I went to band camp?

To this day I still haven’t seen the classic lowbrow comedy movie American Pie. I say it was “classic” in the sense that the siege of Guernica was a classic Blitzkrieg: the first in a long line of very unpleasant experiences.  I guess those movies serve their purpose, in that thirteen-year-old boys have to have someplace to learn the vocabulary they’ll need when they’re bragging to their friends about all the sex they haven’t had.  But even though I haven’t seen the movie, and am in no rush to do so, I couldn’t help but hear people reference Alyson Hannigan’s notorious “One time, at band camp. . .” line.  I won’t finish the line, and most of you have probably heard it anyway; if you haven’t, let’s just say she described something that sounded both uncomfortable and unsanitary.  If it ever happened to anyone while I was at band camp, I remain blissfully ignorant of it.

Then we have this litte — ha!  I almost called it a “chestnut”! — by Vic Chesnutt.  It tells a story involving band camp, vodka, and sanitary products that the writers of American Pie are probably slapping themselves for not thinking of first.  (Actually, now that I listen to the song again, it seems the incident in question didn’t actually occur at band camp, but since band camp is mentioned in the song we’ll include it in the “band camp as devil’s playground” canon.)  I should probably say the song is NSFW, but who listens to MP3 blogs at work?

I hate to be the one to disillusion fans of the American Pie franchise (assuming any of them read this blog, which further assumes any of them read) but band camp isn’t like that.  In my own personal experience, band camp involved standing in the hot sun for hours on end marching to two bars of music at a time back and forth between two little flags stuck on a football field, after which we returned to the dorms far too tired and dehydrated even to ponder any hijinks.  If band camp is some den of iniquity, Parris Island must be Caligula’s palace.

The Flaming Lips – Knives Out

Two modern bands that seem to inspire almost cult-like devotion are Radiohead and the Flaming Lips, so when one of them covers the other’s song, it’s worth noting.  The Flaming Lips’ cover of Radiohead’s “Knives Out” (from the latter’s 2001 album Amnesiac) is one of those covers that manages to be far better than the original.

The Radiohead song emerged out of a difficult period for the band when Thom Yorke’s career-crippling writer’s block intersected with the band’s desire to start dabbling in electronic music.  (For rock bands that have been around more than ten years, this is the quintessential “jump the shark” moment, the musical equivalent of having Ted McGinley guest-star on your sitcom.)  The two albums Kid A and Amnesiac (generally considered two halves of one double album) end up being a sort of audio knockwurst, cobbled together from discarded bits of other songs that weren’t big enough or tasty enough to become songs in their own right.  “Knives out” was the exception, a song that actually sounded like a song instead of a malfunctioning drum machine with whining dubbed over it.

The Flaming Lips take this standout song and make it even better, basing their version around a slow piano progression that wonderfully complements Steven Drozd’s thick distorted drumbeats.  While the Radiohead version has a polished, overproduced feel to it, the Lips’ version evokes a small, crowded club where a band you’ve never heard of plays cover songs in the corner.  It’s comfortably familiar, a welcome antidote to the strangeness of the Kid A era.