A Timeless Wavelength

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.

Fishbone – Sunless Saturday

In my last post I examined Joshua Glenn’s alternate generational/decade scheme, in which each decade spans a “4″ year to a “3″ year, so that, say, “the Eighties” really ranged from 1984 to 1993 inclusive.  I preferred this to the standard way of dividing up the decades, but suggested I was uncomfortable allowing this decade to span so far into the 1990s, what with the grunge-and-flannel days being the beginning of the end in my view.  After pondering this issue further, I’ve gotten in touch with my inner computer geek and arrived at an elegant solution:  the octade.

All I do is convert the decimal years of the Gregorian calendar into base-8, or octal.  You can do the same with this handy converter. Instead of decades and centuries, this gives us eight-year “octades” and sixty-four-year larger epochs that I haven’t come up with a catchy name for yet, but should be something better than “quattuorsexagentury”.  By this reckoning, my birth year of 1976 becomes 3670, a nice round number and the start of an octade we could call the Octal Seventies, from 3670-3677 (decimal 1976-1983 inclusive.)* This scheme gives us an octade we could call the Octal Aughts, from 3700-3707 (decimal 1984-1991 inclusive).  It also makes this bright era of musical wonder the first of a new quatturo… a new octury.** The Octal Aughts begin with the debut albums of The Smiths and Run-DMC, and ends with the “metal meltdown” and the beginning of grunge rock,  gangsta rap and post-Garth Brooks country.  It is followed by the Octal Teens, which itself would be a great name for a band if it didn’t comprise some of the worst music made in my lifetime:  3710-3717 (decimal 1992-1999 inclusive).

As a definitive example of the music of the Octal Aughts, I give you “Sunless Saturday” from Fishbone’s 1991 album The Reality Of My Surroundings. The band epitomizes the anything-goes attitude of this era:  a group of black musicians who could move effortlessly between ska, metal, and other genres, they are reminders of an era when musicians were far less likely to be pigeonholed by race and genre.  The group’s sound recalls a time when instrumental virtuosity and big production values weren’t to be apologized for or swept aside in favor of atonal low-fi rumblings.  It’s hard to believe that so soon after this album was recorded, it would become nearly impossible to find a black musician who didn’t do rap or R&B, unthinkable for a rock band to sound like it wasn’t composed of a bunch of teenagers in a garage, and completely unfathomable for any mainstream band to have a horn section.

*Special note to would-be math sticklers: Yes, I started the octade on a zero instead of a one.  People who are swayed by the (quite valid) argument for starting the millennium in 2001 instead of 2000, because the Gregorian calendar started in Year 1 and therefore 2000 was the last year of the second millennium rather than the first year of the third, sometimes get a big head and go around rechristening decades as well, insisting that, say, the 1980s should start in 1981 and include 1990.  These people are wrong.  If it were common practice to refer to “the ninth decade” then yes, I suppose it would span those years.  But we don’t say that.  We say “the 1980s.”  The closer analogy in English is the word “teenager,” which consists of people from age 13 to age 19 inclusive — all the numbers that end in “-teen”.  Nobody in their right mind would argue that “teenagers” should be 14- to 20-year-olds, though I’d wager that right now someone on the Internet is doing exactly that.

**The downside of all this octal-based nomenclature, catchy though it may be, is that it reminds me of the horrible moniker the media assigned to the extremely fertile Nadya Suleman to make her sound like a Spider-Man villain.

Jellyfish – That Is Why

This semester I’m taking a course on the philosophical problem of vagueness — the idea that many of the entities we refer to in everyday language lack sharp definitions or boundaries.  There is no definite point at which “red” becomes “orange” or “short” becomes “tall,” yet most of the time we have no trouble applying these terms.  This is problematic for the methodology of analytic philosophy, which thrives on precise definitions.

One area where the problem of vague boundaries is particularly thorny is in the pop-sociological practice of assigning people to “generations” based on their birth years.  Intuitively, people of certain age ranges have a lot in common based on shared life experiences:  those who were between the ages of, say, seventeen to twenty-five at the bombing of Pearl Harbor were affected by the event in radically different ways from those who were in their late fifties, or those who wouldn’t be born for another ten years.  Those who were teenagers in 1964 enjoyed music and movies quite foreign to the teenagers of 1998.  Yet drawing generational boundaries is notoriously difficult to do.  The popular media like to refer to “the Greatest Generation,” “the Lost Generation,” “the Baby Boomers,” “Generation X,” and all sorts of other crazy categories, with extremely imprecise and often conflicting dates demarcating them.

Neil Howe and William Strauss attempted a robust theory of generations in their 1991 book Generations:  The History of America’s Future, 1584-2069. They posited a cycle in which four generational “archetypes” are repeated over and over again (though we apparently skipped a generation around the time of the Civil War).  The whole thing is very Jungian, and more than a little reminiscent of astrology:  give someone a description of a generation with the dates and identifying cultural references edited out, and probably everyone will think it applies to them.

Joshua Glenn has proposed an alternate scheme for dividing up the generations, and I find it more realistic, and far more entertaining, than Strauss and Howe’s.  (I do have some gripes:  Born in 1976, I should fit squarely within the “Net Generation,” yet I identify far more with the slightly older “PC Generation.”  I certainly would like to think I’m more similar to Chuck Klosterman than to Perez Hilton.)  Of particular interest to me is the fact that he posits ten-year generations, and takes issue with the notion that “decades” as popularly construed should always be divided by calendar years ending in zero.  Instead, he goes for the 3-4 boundary:  the “Sixties” were 1964-1973, the “Seventies” from 1974-1983, and so forth.

This makes a lot of sense to me:  The music of the early 1960s was a lot more like what we’d call “Fifties music” than the psychedelia and protest music that would come later in the decade.  There’s an old saying that “most of the Sixties happened in the Seventies,” meaning that things like widespread protests against the Vietnam war, the Kent State shootings, and Watergate didn’t happen until after 1970.  It also explains why, when people are supposed to spend their lives nostalgic for the culture of their teens and young adult years, I’ve always felt like the 1990s were the most depressing and culturally barren era in living memory.  It turns out the decade where I really feel at home is the Eighties:  not the 1980s, but the period from 1984-1993.  (I might even be tempted to shave a couple of years off of this, since it seems like things started going downhill the first time someone in the media uttered the phrase “grunge rock.”)

The Eighties (at least the pre-grunge part of them) are something of a lost decade:  When people say “’80s music,” they generally mean early 1980′s stuff like Devo or Bananarama, or Michael Jackson and Madonna.  When they say “the early 90s,” they mean slackers, grunge, goatees, flannel, and really bad movies.  It’s easy to forget that the tail end of the 1980s and the pre-”Smells Like Teen Spirit” 1990s were one of the most creative periods in popular music.  It’s when indie- and college-rock mainstays like Sonic Youth, The Pixies, and Dinosaur Jr. released some of their most memorable works, and N.W.A. and Public Enemy were forcing critics to take rap music seriously.  Even mainstream music was more fun:  the much-ridiculed “hair metal” bands had more genuine enthusiasm and musicianship than the flannel-clad slackers who replaced them, and without any of the pretentious hipster irony.  (Uncomfortable truth:  Alice In Chains were a hair-metal band, boys and girls.  They just had the extremely good fortune to be a hair-metal band from Seattle at just the right time to survive a grunge rebranding when all the other hair bands were dying off.  They were like the Archaeopteryx of hair-metal dinosaurs.)

So for the next few days I’d like to examine the music of the Eighties (as opposed to the 1980s) and revisit some forgotten gems of this neglected decade.  I’ll start with a song that was an MTV staple for a while in 1990 or so, but few people I talk to seem to remember it:  “That Is Why,” by Jellyfish.  They were a Supertramp-esque band formed from the ashes of Beatnik Beach, and their keyboardist Roger Joseph Manning Jr. later became one half of The Moog Cookbook.  They were also one of the few bands whose drummer was the lead vocalist, and to my knowledge the only such band whose drummer-vocalist looks like a hippie version of Sawyer from Lost. Enjoy.

Guns N’ Roses – Street of Dreams

Well, I’ve had a long hiatus from the blog.  The last four months have been a very trying time for me, and I simply didn’t feel motivated to post anything.  I was giving serious thought to discontinuing this blog, and maybe doing something else entirely.  I did manage to put a few more videos of songs up on YouTube. I even gave thought to making that my main creative outlet, and maybe starting a “vlog.”  Then I realized that “vlog” is perhaps the ugliest neologism of the Internet age, and decided to go back to this “blog” instead.

So to celebrate my return to blogging, I give you this offering from another act who’ve taken an extended creative hiatus.  “Street of Dreams” is from Chinese Democracy, the very long-awaited, semi-mythical comeback album from Guns N’ Roses, a band that now pretty much consists of Axl Rose and whomever he can persuade to share a studio with him for a day or so.  For an album that had to survive a decade of personnel changes, temper tantrums, and all manner of setbacks, it’s actually really good.  It’s nowhere on par with the  group’s definitive double album Use Your Illusion I & II, but it does feature some pretty good songs.  “Street of Dreams” (formerly titled “The Blues”) is probably my favorite on the album, because it demonstrates that Axl Rose is at his best when he’s not trying to be heavy metal and just lets his inner ’70s singer-songwriter shine.

Six months after the release of Chinese Democracy, video game developer 3D Realms announced that the development team for Duke Nukem Forever had been let go, thus effectively quashing all hopes that the video game industry’s most famous unfinished product would ever see the light of day.  It can’t have been comforting for that development team to realize that they’re less organized and productive than Axl Rose.

Devo – Speed Racer

With my interest in computer-generated synth music newly rekindled, it was natural that I’d revisit the godfathers of ’80s New Wave synth-pop:  DEVO.

There’s been a recent spike in the popularity of a genre known as “nerdcore,” which combines elements of rap, metal, and punk with lyrics about Star Wars and programming the Commodore 64.  I guess it started as an ironic joke:  let’s take a bunch of musical styles that are normally associated with aggressive posturing, and turn them into the voice of the guys who were always getting shoved into lockers in high school.  It’s a variant on the old “isn’t it funny when lame white guys try to rap?” trope.

Devo weren’t like that.  To paraphrase the fictionalized Lester Bangs from Almost Famous:  they were pasty nerds who had the courage to be pasty nerds, which made them poetic.  With the opening track on their album New Traditionalists, they declared that they were “through being cool,” and they showed that nerds didn’t have to pretend to be tough.  They wore thick glasses and ridiculous hats they called “energy domes”.  They reveled in (and helped define) the ’80s synthesizer sound,  reveling in the simple sequencer rhythms that earlier artists would have derided for “lacking soul”.  They were members of, and evangelists for, the Church of the SubGenius,  a religion based around the age-old nerd fantasy of getting revenge on all the cool people and “normals”.  And they guest-starred on ’80s nerd sitcom Square Pegs.

This track, from their 1982 album Oh, No!  It’s DEVO!, is a beautifully surreal example of the band’s style.  Each verse introduces some character with a different funny voice (“I’m Speed Racer and I drive real fast,” “I’m a big pirate and I like to steal”), and I can’t help but think the idea for this song came from watching little kids play with mismatched toys.  You can just picture the little tykes, sitting on the floor in their miniature energy dome hats, with a Speed Racer action figure, a LEGO pirate, a barbie doll, and a game of Operation!, doing silly voices for this diverse cast of characters.  This track also shows, incidentally, that DEVO were in on the very nerdy “Talk like a pirate” meme a good twenty years before everyone else.

Commodore Amiga featuring Aegis Sonix – Jay’s Song

Sorry for the weeks-long blog hiatus.  I could quite legitimately claim to have been busy, it being the end of the semester and all.  But in reality, I just haven’t quite felt like blogging.  I had no idea when I started this thing just how tedious it could get, going through one’s music collection every day and finding something meaningful to say about a song.  I’ve even given thought to diversifying this blog, giving myself something to talk about besides just songs.  Good idea?  Or should I just stick with the present format?

That being said, it’s not like I could ever really run out of songs to talk about.  One of the non-blog activities that’s been occupying me the past couple of weeks has been playing around with an Amiga emulator.  As I’ve mentioned before, back in the late ’80s I had an Amiga 2000 and a copy of Aegis Sonix, which gave me my first exposure to creating computer music.  The software wasn’t all that feature-laden, but to this day I haven’t found a program that matches it for ease of use.  The built-in sound had the unavoidably tinny quality of 8-bit audio, but the Amiga managed to get as much performance as possible out of those 8 bits.  With the addition of a MIDI interface and a good tone generator (such as my trusty Yamaha TG-55), you could make professional-quality music with a pretty simple setup.

Sadly, my original Amiga was a casualty of Hurricane Katrina,  and I haven’t yet managed to get MIDI output working with the emulator.  But I can still get the original 8-bit-tastic sounds!  This is “Jay’s Song”, the demo song that came with Sonix, which was often used to showcase the Amiga’s then-extraordinary sound capabilities.

(As much as I liked my Amiga, I was always kind of jealous of Atari ST owners.  Said machine had built-in MIDI, and a better selection of music software.  The ST version of Cubase is prized by many even today over the bloated, feature-rich Cubase VST.  There’s a pretty good ST emulator out there, with MIDI capability… I’ll have to see if I can get it to cooperate with some external controllers and synthesizers.)

Queensrÿche – Synchronicity II

One of the standout tracks from the Police’s farewell album Synchronicity is the side one closer, “Synchronicity II”.  It tells a tale of suburban alienation from the standpoint of Jungian analysis, and throws in a bit about the Loch Ness Monster for good measure.  It stands out as well because it’s a marked departure from most of the Police’s other works.  Unlike the reggae verse/ rock chorus dynamic of their early works, or the pure guitar pop of “Every Breath You Take,” this track is epic in scope.  Its screaming intro and beefy guitar riffs seem more like something you would hear on a period heavy metal album, albeit the presence of Sting takes the metal credibility down several pegs.  It might make you wonder what the song would sound like if an actual metal band covered it.

Well, fear not, it’s Queensrÿche to the rescue!  In 2007, Seattle’s favorite umlaut-clad warriors released Take Cover, a (what else?) cover album in which they lend their talents to tracks from the likes of Pink Floyd, Queen, CSNY, and the soundtrack to Jesus Christ Superstar. Most of these songs work surprisingly well as Queensrÿche songs, and sound as if they were made for Geoff Tate’s vocal style.  But this cover of “Synchronicity II” is enough to make you stop and wonder how different the world would be if Sting had taken his post-Police career in a far less Adult Contemporary direction.

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”.