A song for every year of my life #28: 2004

I haven't done one of these for almost a year. I usually unintentionally abandon every series I start on this blog, but here it is, back from the grave. I want to post more frequently here, even though the nonspecific journal-style blogs seem to be dying (I'm a sucker for any medium or piece of the culture that's slowly dying), and this old series came to mind today. I'm almost always thinking about music anyway, and music is the only healthy thing that makes me feel better when I have convinced myself I'm a piece of shit loser. I'm going through a bit of a phase (13 years and counting is still a phase, right?) where I feel like an unsuccessful, perpetually broke, missed-my-calling, unable-to-communicate-verbally-with-humans, sad, angry, bitter, jealous failure, but music stops those thoughts and is better than my other means of coping (alcohol, television, food, repressed rage). Movies and books are also amazing things, but I have to be in an okay place to really engage with them. Music is some kind of voodoo-salve, cosmic gloom squeegee that can turn the room purple if you play it loud enough and give it your full attention. It's the only thing that works unconditionally in a world that is mostly complete and utter bullshit. (Well, my wife and my cats are pretty great, too, but I take the good things in my life for granted because I have problems.)
How cruel that 2004 is my next stop. Looking at the big list of records released in 2004, I don't see much I care about. I'm sure there are tons of local, below-the-radar 2004 records waiting to melt my face off, but the ones I've heard don't have the juice, except for a big pile of records by people I've already written about in this series (I'm trying to do just one song per artist) and a smattering of others. One of those others is the only musical hero of mine who follows me on Instagram, Doug Gillard. Gillard has played guitar for a metric fuckload of quality bands including Guided By Voices (who broke up again today, goddamn it), Cobra Verde, My Dad Is Dead, Death of Samantha, Gem, Bill Fox, Nada Surf, and Lifeguards. The guy is a guitar wizard who is really good at playing hot guitar sounds on the guitar for guitar aficionados, but never at the expense of a song. He's also a damn fine songwriter, with three damn fine solo albums and a damn fine solo EP. Here is the song "(But) I See Something" from his 2004 album Salamander. This song has a lot to recommend it. It's subtle, pretty, and catchy, with a girl group/early Pretenders/indie pop/classic rock swirl of sounds joining together into a nice little whole, and I dig the old-school parenthetical in the title. I'm a man who enjoys parentheticals.


Alternate choice: Melvins/Lustmord - "The Bloated Pope"
I love the Melvins. They're still a vital band putting out great records and trying new things three decades into their career. They're like the metal Yo La Tengo. This song is from their unfairly neglected collaboration with electronic noise terrorist Lustmord, Pigs of the Roman Empire, that is better than most 2004 records, especially the boring ones by Arcade Fire, Eminem, Kanye West, U2, Green Day, Sufjan Stevens, et cetera and so on that were getting all the attention from the critics that year. I like this song because it kicks ass and sounds good, and also because Lustmord got his start by going to high-profile shows and just getting on stage before the opening band and performing until someone figured out he wasn't on the bill and kicked him off the stage, and finally because I was raised Catholic and forced to go to church as a kid even though I never bought into that organized religion malarkey so you can probably guess the song title warms my heart. Ted Nugent sucks.

A song for every year of my life #27: 2003

It's been a while since I did one of these, so I'm going to kick this one off with a band that makes most people I know sigh exasperatedly, mutter angrily under their breath, or just involuntarily exhibit a look of mild disgust when confronted with an audible mention of their name. The Fiery Furnaces are a band I love, one of my favorite bands of the last decade and change, and a band that suffers from Rodney Dangerfield Syndrome among most of my local peer group. I tell you, they get no regard. Oh well. People are wrong about almost everything. People, eh? Can't live with them, can't buy beer without them. By the way, if the more challenging/irritating/proggy/musical theater aspects of this band drive you a little nutty but you do find some things to like about them, I urge you to check out Eleanor Friedberger's two solo albums. One of them is a catchy, poppy, gorgeous '80s new wave and indie-pop inspired record that reminds me of late fall, and the other is a catchy, poppy, gorgeous '70s singer-songwriter inspired record that reminds me of summer. Here's "Leaky Tunnel" for you curmudgeons.



Honorable mention: Pernice Brothers - "Blinded by the Stars"
I love the drums and how they're recorded. I love how Joe Pernice structured this song and how beautifully he sings it. I love the tone and the subtle yet awesome flourishes in the background from the guitar. This song's like a big hunk of enticing candy to me.

A song for every year of my life #26: 2002

Another Miami Vice post will be coming later tonight as my Valentine's Day gift to you, but I'm going to ease you into the past gently by going back to 2002 before I plunge you into the cool pastel and neon waters of the mid-1980s.
Catherine Irwin's "Hex" is one of the greatest country songs, and it can totally stand up to the hyperbole I just threw at it. It has a timeless world-weary Hank Williams ancient country classicism filtered through too many nights in indie-rock clubs and bars in the late '80s and '90s. This is the sound of the lights coming up at last call and the couch and cigarette mouth the next morning. This song will never age and was always older than time. YouTube again screwed the pooch, so here is a link to the song on something called MySpace.



Alternate choice: Dalek - "Forever Close My Eyes"
These guys have the verbal and lyrical flow of guys like Chuck D or Rakim in their prime with this incredible wash of sound backing it up that brings to mind Faust, Neu!, Kevin Shields, Throbbing Gristle, Harmonia, etc.

A song for every year of my life #25: 2001

YouTube failed me. My choice for 2001 was going to be The Dirtbombs' beautifully fierce cover of a Phil Lynott solo jam called "Ode to a Black Man," but the only versions on the site are poor quality live takes recorded from a phone. Fortunately, the rest of that ridiculously great soul covers album, Ultraglide in Black, is on YouTube, so here's "If You Can Want," a worthy substitute.



Alternate choice:
Oneida - "All Arounder"
I think Oneida is one of the four or five best bands of the last fifteen years. They do not stagnate. They do not care about alienating their fans. They will never stop moving. Their body of work makes me vomit with envy, awe, terror, and pleasure.

A song for every year of my life #24: 2000

I escaped from the 1990s, much like Snake Plissken escaped from New York, only to find myself in the 2000s, much like Snake Plissken found himself in LA. This was the decade where everything got quicker, shorter, and smaller, except for my waistline, and where we all decided to make our private lives public, on several different websites and electronic devices. Turn on your television. Someone is probably yelling at someone else. If no one is yelling, someone is either crying, looking into a mirror shirtless, falling down stairs drunk, or about to yell. Change the channel. You will see a talent competition involving dancing, singing, weight loss, weight gain, bug-eating, catwalk-prancing, Bret Michaels-sexing, pretend policing, inspirational home building, dog whispering, storage shed buying, wife swapping, briefcase-guessing, Donald Trump-enabling, or strategic insult placement. If you are unable to locate any yelling or competition-based programming, get your bearings and take a closer look at the immediate vicinity. You are probably looking out your window and not at your television.

Smog - "Dress Sexy At My Funeral"

 

Alternate choice: J Mascis + The Fog - "Same Day"
This song provides the chocolate and peanut butter-worthy combination of J Mascis, Robert Pollard, and Kevin Shields.

A song for every year of my life #23: 1999

Aphex Twin's "Windowlicker" is one of his strongest pieces of music and my favorite music video. Besides the way the editing and physical movements of the participants and the camera's framing of those movements complement and reinforce the threateningly propulsive yet lasciviously slithery music, the video succeeds at being both hilarious and unsettling and takes mainstream R&B and hip hop videos of the period to their logical conclusion. Nice work, people.


Honorable mention: Built to Spill - "Carry the Zero"
I'm a sucker for melancholy guitar weepers that combine the post-punk and classic rock traditions, and this one does it better than most.

A song for every year of my life #22: 1998

Sparkle and R. Kelly's "Be Careful" is a he-said/she-said smackdown worthy of Tammy and George or Conway and Loretta. No one believes they can fly here.



Alternate choice: Shellac - "Didn't We Deserve a Look at You the Way You Really Are"
I like repetition in music. I'm not talking about the same hoodly-woodly guitar solo from some finger-tapping poodle-sniffer or a Miley Cyrus chorus or a radio jingle. I'm talking about those songs that lock into a minimal, sustained repeating pattern. When exposed to this repetition, the concentrated hypnosis laser brain picks up on the tiniest, subtlest changes in the pattern, which in their turn completely rewire the subconscious freak zone of the pleasure hemisphere, creating a reversal of accepted cultural listening habits and turning the careful listener into a glowing blue flesh computer. It's called science, jerk, look it up.

A song for every year of my life #21: 1997

A new house, two new kittens, an old rock band, and a newish job that is probably the most stressful experience I've ever had barring family tragedy have pretty much spelled box office poison for this blog. But I'm back, baby. Back and way behind on my musician obituary posts. Before I continue with the business at hand, R.I.P. to the following people who won't get posts of their own because there are too many of them and I'm lazy: Donald "Duck" Dunn, bassist with Booker T. & The MGs who also backed Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, and Neil Young, among many others; banjo player and bluegrass and country rock pioneer Doug Dillard of The Dillards and Dillard & Clark (not to be confused with Doug Gillard, who is alive); Donna Summer, whose mid-to-late '70s electro-disco collaborations with Giorgio Moroder are like a much hornier Kraftwerk and deserve to overshadow some of the cheesier stuff she did later; Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees, who wrote and sang the lead parts on a lot of the melancholy baroque pop of their early years, which has been partially buried by the revisionist media historians who pretend the Bee Gees were only a late-'70s disco thing (though a lot of those songs are really good, too); John Harrison, first bassist for Hawkwind; Doc Watson, legendary country/bluegrass/folk guitarist and singer; Pete Cosey, who played guitar for Miles Davis in the early '70s and was also the house guitarist for Chess Records; Dennis Flemion of the Frogs, a band whose records should be next to hollowed-out Bibles containing dirty secrets in every good home; Lol Coxhill, a big, bald improv saxophonist who played with everyone from Kevin Ayers to Rufus Thomas to The Damned (I know that's a false range, but fuck it, it's not, really); the mighty Jon Lord from Deep Purple (we can all pretend he was never in Whitesnake, right?); Kitty Wells, who should need no introduction; and two of Motown's Funk Brothers, bassist Bob Babbitt and trumpeter Maurice D. Davis.

On to 1997. Robert Wyatt's music is a gorgeous, dangerous, mysterious thing. I love his voice and his ideas and his assemblages of surprisingly compatible musicians and his songs, and he just gets better and more interesting as he ages. I don't have to tell you that's a rare thing. I'm not generally a lyrics guy, and I tend to fixate on the sound of words rather than their content when they are part of a piece of music, but "Free Will and Testament" is a sharp bit of poetry as well as a fine piece of organized sound.


Alternate choice: Belle & Sebastian - "Lazy Line Painter Jane"
I had a hard time seeing the appeal in this band when my coworkers at the record store were losing their minds over them. I thought they were delicate, fussy, and lacking in abandon and immediacy. Gradually, I became an admirer of at least some of their work. The world could use a little more fuss and delicacy.

A song for every year of my life #20: 1996

Boy, I've been away from this blog for awhile. You know why? I'm fuckin' tired, that's why. My new job is exhausting (in both good and bad ways), my wife and I are buying a house, and I've rekindled my love affair with falling asleep on the couch. Don't worry, chum-mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmps, this time I'm falling asleep on the couch on a regular basis because I'm actually sleepy, not because I'm praying for death. I spent the first part of 1996 praying for death and sitting aimlessly on the floor in my dorm room's walk-in closet and sleeping and watching 17 movies in one sitting and taking only three classes and barely getting by. That was a rough time. Then I reconnected with a friend from the previous year's unsuccessful dorm experiment and made a bunch of new friends and spent the second half of the year having the antics, mirth, hijinks, shenanigans, hoopla, fracases, melees, barnburners, and disco infernos that young people are supposed to have as sophomores in college. Long story short, box socials every night. I've been slacking on these posts in recent days because I'm kinda tired of the '90s. I'm not that tired of the next two jams in the series, though.
Silkworm is so goddamn underrated. That's what happens when you consistently make good music and present yourselves in the least sensational way possible. No one gives a shit except rabid weirdo shut-ins like yours truly. The surviving members of Silkworm are in another great band now, Bottomless Pit, that gets even less attention than Silkworm. Bigger crimes have been committed, but not much bigger.
Silkworm fun fact: I picked up an accidental hobby of collecting awkward conversations with members of seminal indie rock bands in bathroom lines. I sprung an effusive fanboy gush on Silkworm bassist Tim Midgett while he was waiting to use an outdoor facility at a SXSW several years ago. Others in this series include Mike Watt, Clawhammer's Bob Lee, Pavement's Steve West, and, most recently, Ted Leo. Collect them all in a limited-edition box set. Every 12th box contains a stick of unwrapped, pre-moistened gum.



Alternate choice: R.L. Burnside - "Goin Down South"
This song makes me want to fire a mini-cannon out of a full-sized cannon and then drive a tank through a couple of miniature golf courses while arm-wrestling a bear for a flask of gin. Fuck yeah it does.

A song for every year of my life #19: 1995

Remember all that jive I was laying down about the fancy new phones of the day destroying society, human interaction, and life as we know it? Boy, is my face red. When I was volunteering for a film festival back in October, the twentysomething manboys and womangirls made fun of my outdated cell phone, which I used only under protest in highly specific circumstances. They told me to get hip. I told them to fuck off. Nevertheless, when a pretty 20-year-old makes fun of your technology, you have two choices: 1) put on some suspenders, check into a nursing home, and watch sitcoms until you die of inertia or 2) get with the now and buy the items that today's metrosexuals, extreme sports stars, reality celebutantes, and screamo bands need to survive in the future of the now. Well, I got one of these Satanic new robot droid smart phones because I was tired of feeling like Andy Rooney, and I take back all the bad things I said about them. Since age 21, when I decided I liked things the way they were, I have violently resisted every technological advance. When it becomes more work to fight than to join, I reluctantly join. I'm always wrong. I need to be more like the Scorpions and embrace the winds of change. I get it now. I like this phone. It makes my life better. I can avoid all kinds of small talk by pointing my face at it in public. I can check the Internet and play games and shit. But you know all this already. You bought one two years ago.
Here's an epic 1995 dinosaur jam from yesteryear, Yo La Tengo's "Blue Line Swinger," loved by me, one of today's oldtimers.



Alternate choice: Pavement's "Half a Canyon," another classic oldie from the sock hop and cave stomp days of the mid-1990s, back when we were all swinging on the flippity flop and macking on lizard butts. I think I finished high school at some point in this song's six-plus minutes. Matt Pinfield is in the trunk of my car.

A song for every year of my life #18: 1994

Like a lot of misfit teenage music-loving loners stuck in small towns in the early 1990s, I was obsessed with Kurt Cobain. I'm embarrassed to admit I was devastated by his 1994 suicide, taking it almost as hard as a death in my own family. Really, I just needed a girlfriend, but any of you who shared my circumstances can probably relate. Now, I think of Kurt Cobain as a selfish, immature celebrity junkie who wasted his talent and cruelly left behind a young daughter, and I think of Nirvana as a really good band who made a few really good records and probably could have made even more instead of as one of my primary reasons for living. Teenagers are some melodramatic, inexperienced fools, and that's why I have affection for them. Still, my pain was real, though misguided, and Nirvana's records got me through my naive period of mourning for the famous man-boy who created those records. Music can get you through some hard shit.
Now that I'm a grown man ("grown-ass man" now needing to be retired in the storage shed of overused white hipster slang alongside forebears like "batshit" and "word up"), I've had to cope with bigger problems than teen angst and celebrity death. My parents' divorce, deaths in the family, unemployment, depression, real adult alienation from the world replacing mannered teen ennui, lack of opportunity, money troubles, periods of strained relationships with both parents, Zooey Deschanel's divorce from Ben Gibbard (gotcha), et al. These problems put my teenage depression into perspective and taught me that life is mostly hard and brutal, though it's spattered with fleeting beautiful moments where the light comes in and the bullshit temporarily disappears.
What happened to an acquaintance less than a week ago, a close friend of several of my close friends, on New Year's Eve has put my difficult last four years in the same kind of perspective those difficult years put on my immature teen angst. A stranger murdered this woman in her own home after she celebrated the new year watching bands play two blocks from where she lived. I didn't know her well, only enough to say hello in the grocery store or a rock club or a friend's party in those hello-friend-of-friend moments of recognition, but many of my good friends in this usually safe city adored her. She was a friend to one of my bandmates, and she saw us play a few times. Like me, she was a drummer and a music freak who had planned to be a teacher. She was a special education assistant in an elementary school and a volunteer at a rock camp for pre-teen and teen girls. She was only 29, and I don't understand it. I've always been fascinated by true crime and real-life murder mysteries, but I hate this one. I hate it.
We lie to ourselves sometimes, but most of us know the deal. We know that death is part of the gamble of getting out of bed and getting on with our lives, day following day. We could drive too fast, step off a curb without looking, fall off a balcony, get some disease from smoking or drinking or sitting on our asses too much or just having lousy genes. Most of us just get too damn old. But each one of us should have the right to take this gamble without some pigfucking cretin fixing the odds just because he can. She deserved to get home safe and didn't because this world is such an unfair place. The news channels are calling this murder a tragedy and it is, but I don't like this juxtaposition of her life and name next to the word "tragedy." She made my friends happy and taught young girls to rock and inspired her students and supported tons of great local bands. That's not a life of tragedy. The tragedy is that her killer's mother didn't have an abortion.
My 1994 song, and my alternate choice, is dedicated to my friends and her. I hope I didn't pick a song she hated.

Sebadoh - "S. Soup" This is a real shit soup of a new year so far.



Alternate choice: The Magnetic Fields - "Swinging London"

A song for every year of my life #17: 1993

I got my driver's license in 1993. I didn't have a car so I spent a lot of time driving my parents', a brown station wagon that was nobody's idea of any adjective used to describe an automobile worth describing. I drove it alone at night many times, feeling sad and bitter and self-righteous and lonely and superior and inferior, antsy to finish high school and get the fuck out of town. I dubbed a lot of my favorite CDs onto cassette and listened to them as I drove the brown station wagon aimlessly around town and on nearby highways and country roads. Frank Black's first album, Miles Davis' Bitches Brew, and Dinosaur Jr's Where You Been got heavy repeat play. 1993 was also the year I started listening to a lot of female artists. The grunge boys club of my recent private hit parade started making room for PJ Harvey, Liz Phair, and Kim Deal, among many others. Music journalists at the time often wrote about how blunt and scary and intimidating Harvey and Phair and Kathleen Hanna's lyrics were. I never understood all this verbal pantswetting from grown men (if rock critics can ever really be grown men). I felt a kinship to Harvey, Phair, Deal, etc., and idolized them just like I did their male counterparts. I didn't find them or their words scary. On the other hand, high school girls terrified the shit out of me. They were the scary ones. I didn't know where they were coming from, and most of the time I felt like they were brazenly making fun of me in code. Oh, the terror. High school is a bad four years that can go on forever if you let it. On a related note, no one really understands what the fuck happened to Liz Phair.
Hey everybody, it's The Breeders' "Invisible Man."



Alternate choice: "My Curse." One of the most male of bands, The Afghan Whigs, give a woman, Marcy Mays from Scrawl, the floor for five minutes on one of their most male of albums (Gentlemen), and it's probably the greatest five minutes of her career as well as a definite highlight from one of my favorite records of the 1990s.

A song for every year of my life #16: 1992

Guided By Voices' "Over the Neptune/Mesh Gear Fox" is the greatest anthem of Midwest teenage bedroom air guitar stale beer ditch weed unrequited emotion explosion church of rock and roll praise and worship in the history of sound, recorded or otherwise, on this planet or any other, in any time predating, concurrent with, or postdating 1992, forever and ever. I can say, without hyperbole, that this song will destroy an entire metro area if played on more than 20 simultaneous ghettoblasters.



Alternate Choice: Faith No More - "Caffeine"
I don't really understand why Faith No More is such an object of sneering derision for most people I know. I think their music has aged better than a lot of other stuff from the 1989-1996 era, and I also think they were a boundlessly creative band that wrote really good songs and played those songs really well. Too many people lump them in with either the horrible funk-metal or even more horrible nu-metal thing based on their one novelty hit, but these people are categorizing the band inaccurately based on their own limited knowledge and experience of their work. The essence of their sound, to me, was a singular and unexpected combination of the best parts of heavy metal, prog rock, mainstream pop, and late-night cable access TV, and an openness to try anything. This was a band, in the true sense of that term, made up of disparate, contradictory individuals with different musical tastes and interests who somehow managed to collaborate effectively. As Andy Rooney said, moments before passing away: "Faith No More are way better than most of that other shit. I could never say shit on television."

A song for every year of my life #15: 1991

In 1991, as all of you know, one album by one band came along and changed everything about popular music. This year marks its 20th anniversary, and the articles, reissues, and tributes have been numerous. In one week, the hair metal bands died forever and the boy bands took a six-year hiatus. The pop culture landscape changed overnight, and an underground movement became commodified by the mainstream. This album was hugely important to me, and millions like me. It was my first year of high school. Three years later, the primary architect behind this record was dead by his own hand and the radio and MTV were full of dreary, shitty copycats. Of course, that record I'm talking about is MC Skat Kat's The Adventures of MC Skat Kat and the Stray Mob. I'm not going to play anything from that record because the wounds are still too deep, so fuck it, here's a far more important band: Mudhoney.



Alternate choice: Since I can't find anything from Mindfunk, here's a funk-metal classic from Vic Chesnutt, "Lucinda Williams," instead. If that previous sentence is bullshit, the following one isn't. This man's songs are so beautiful they're painful.

A song for every year of my life #14: 1990

1990 really was a time of weeping, metaphorical or otherwise. At the year's start, I was short, cadaver-skinny, mulleted (I thought I had long hair but I didn't know you had to grow out the front part, too), lousy at sports, invisible to girls, easily intimidated, and short-changed by the slow onset of puberty. It was not my favorite year, though most of them have been lousy if we're going to be honest about life and its inherent crumminess, but it taught me a lot about how power is structured and acquired and how weak and puny most people's ethics are when they're insecure about whether or not other people think they're hot stuff. Plop! By year's end, I remained cadaver-skinny, lousy at sports, and invisible to girls, but I was much taller, no longer easily intimidated, funnier, and my haircut was better. I'm still lousy at sports, but now I have a beer-drinker's paunch and some muscle tone. Plus, anyone who cares about sports is as boring as the sex life of a fundamentalist preacher's wife. Weep with me, peers.
Blixa Bargeld and I shared an awful haircut in 1990. He was probably having a better time, though. Paddling around with Nick Cave and singing songs about weeping is higher on my list of possible fun times than listening to a redneck math teacher tell me I looked like a woman and would probably do poorly in his class because I was a shitty athlete. Teachers could still say these things out loud in 1990. It didn't hurt my self-esteem because just look at that guy with his crew-cut and dim, poorly ventilated classroom. Just look at him.



Alternate choice: Motherfuckin' "Painkiller" by Judas Fuckin' Priest, because why the fuck not?

A song for every year of my life #13: 1989

I'm still trying to find a job and still trying to blast through the degradation, frustration, and monotony of that search, but I thought I'd been managing okay when I got sideswiped a few weeks ago by the return of my depression. It came on gradually. My wife noticed it before I did. Last night, it got so thick I could physically feel this imaginary murky, brown soup surrounding my brain, making my thinking paranoid and incoherent. Unfortunately, I was hanging out with a crowd of people. Bad timing. That's one of my many middle names.
I stumbled onto a trailer for a book (they do those now?) by a doctor dying of cancer. He passed away a few days ago. The book is about his gradual peaceful acceptance of his terminal illness and how he learned to live with it instead of fight with it. It became another part of his life, rather than something from the outside destroying it. This trailer made me feel ashamed of my lack of enthusiasm for my own life. I'm here now. It's not all going to be a good time, but I need to love it more. I need to be a little more present. This is basic stuff, and I'm an idiot to have to keep relearning it all the time, but this fog just comes in and surrounds my brain and I have to work to get rid of it.
You know what's good, though? Music.
"In the mind of Ronald Reagan/Wheels they turn and gears they grind/Buildings collapse in slow motion/And trains collide/Everything is fine/Everything is fine."



Alternate choice: John Zorn w/ Naked City - "I Want To Live"

A song for every year of my life #12: 1988

I heard a few Dinosaur Jr songs when I was 14 and wasn't impressed. 14-year-olds are idiots. I heard some more Dinosaur Jr songs when I was a weary, battle-scarred, streetwise 15-year-old, and it all made sense. J Mascis is my spirit guide. Maybe that's why I'm unemployed, depressed, and kind of a failure, but I wouldn't trade my Dinosaur Jr albums for happiness or a job or even a never-ending supply of tacos and donuts. Get your own Dinosaur Jr albums, I say. "Yeah We Know."



Alternate choice: Womack & Womack - "Teardrops"
Sorry to those of you sobbing because I didn't choose The Beach Boys' "Kokomo" or something from Y Kant Tori Read. The culling is brutal around here. Some of you may find this song cheesy. It does have a slight Velveeta quality to it, but I don't care. I like it. It was a rare late 1980s R&B song that didn't suffer from massive overproduction and soulless gloss. I like the unarguably cheesy video, too. 1980s videos made the studio look like a great place to be. Everyone was having a good time, nodding their heads and twiddling various knobs and dancing around. We should all be twiddling knobs instead of working for the man. Knob twiddle!

A song for every year of my life #11: 1987

Mainstream top 40 radio was at one of its lowest points in 1987. The first half of the 1980s was full of great pop singles, but look at this lackluster collection of overproduced inessentiality. The late 1980s was the first time in my tiny little life that pop radio stopped meaning something to me. I turned off my radio and began listening to a lot of hard rock and metal instead. It would have been a fine choice, except I listened to a lot of shitty metal instead of the good stuff, though I wouldn't figure that out until I became the embittered, prematurely aged curmudgeon of today's future yesterdays of tomorrow today you all know and love/hate/ignore/like/have no opinion about/are planning to kill, cook, and eat. 1987 became an important musical year for me in the mid-1990s, when I discovered a lot of records I missed out on while I was listening to Whitesnake and Faster Pussycat, including the debut albums from Guided By Voices, Eric B. & Rakim, and Public Enemy, Big Black's Songs About Fucking, Negativland's Escape from Noise, Dinosaur Jr's You're Living All Over Me, Prince's Sign O the Times, and Sonic Youth's Sister. And so on.
I did listen to the shit out of one great record in 1987, Guns N' Roses' Appetite for Destruction. "It's So Easy" is a weird song. It doesn't sound like anybody else's stuff, though you can hear the influences, none of which should belong together this cohesively. I don't feel like getting into a debate, internal or otherwise, about the lack of political correctness in the lyrics, because I really don't give a fuck about that shit in art, except when I do. Some of the lines make me wince, but I'm a form and structure guy, not a subject matter guy, and I think it's better to creatively spew your inner dirtbag instead of suppressing it. I just want people to be honest in their work. A lot of hip hop artists are just as sexist but get more of a free pass from cultural critics because of white liberal guilt. It's a lot less complicated for Pitchfork writers, etc., to criticize Axl Rose. I'm off the subject, though. This record is so finely produced compared to the expensive wall of shit, cavernous yet empty sound prevalent in 1987. It's a big rock record, but it's stripped down. The drums sound like drums. The guitars sound like guitars. It hasn't dated like so many records from this time period have dated. These guys had their own thing going. They weren't Poison. I'm still on board. I just don't get tired of this record.



Alternate choice: Butthole Surfers - "Sweat Loaf"
I wish my father would have had this talk with me. I regret too many things I haven't done. For example, I was at the park one day, and I thought maybe I should SATAN SATAN SATAN!

A song for every year of my life #10: 1986

Aside from my favorite heavy metal album of the decade, Slayer's Reign in Blood, not much happened musically in 1986 that captivated my interest. Wait, I just remembered. Don Johnson released Heartbeat that year. 1986 is the greatest year in music history.

Slayer's "Angel of Death" wasn't the only great song of 1986, despite my lukewarm feelings toward this particular year. "Pink Frost" by the Chills is worth anyone's time. So is this pajama jammy jam by one of my favorite bands in music history, Sonic Youth. "Expressway to Yr Skull" aka "Madonna, Sean, and Me." Ask your great-grandparents about that alternate song title, youth of today.



Alternate choice: The Go-Betweens - "Twin Layers of Lightning"
This is some beautiful, mysterious stuff. An underrated band with two wonderful songwriters who played off each other's strengths and minimized each other's weaknesses.

A song for every year of my life #9: 1985

Hey, look. Pitchfork stole my idea, though it took 15 of their writers to handle what this guy is doing alone. Even the introduction is slightly similar. I think I'll sue. Two unrelated entities have never been known to have a similar idea that wasn't that original anyway. It's never happened in history.

1985. Cultural changes happen gradually, but I like to think of 1985 as the year a lot of records started sounding shitty. I mean the production value, I don't mean the quality of the music, though plenty of bad music came out in 1985. The sound of most records recorded in the 1920s through the mid-1980s are pleasing to my ears. I'm not an audiophile that can tell you about microphones and speakers and turntables, but I do know what I like. These records, with some exceptions, serve the musicians and songs, have a dynamic range, have spaces between the notes, convey the time period without sounding dated, and have mood, atmosphere, and the indescribable essence that Neil Young calls "the spook." 1985 seemed to mark a turning point. Technology was used just because it existed, even if it damaged the work. The snare drum got too loud and echoey. The music got compressed with that early digital thinness. Albums were mixed too quiet in the early CD days and are now mixed too loud. The dynamic range is missing. The sound is too busy. Space between notes is lost. Atmosphere and mood are gone, replaced by simulations of atmosphere and mood. It's not all bad. There are still records that have come out every year since 1985 that sound great. A lot of indie records aren't overproduced, and a lot of hip-hop and electronic records use the technology in smart ways that fit the sound. Also, to be fair, a lot of mainstream pop and classic rock records in the 1970s were too clean and bloodless and overproduced and over-arranged. But some of the voodoo disappeared in 1985 and never came back. Where did it go? Did Don Henley steal it and lock it in a vault?



The Replacements - "Left of the Dial"
God, I love this band. I grew up in the Midwest, and The Replacements capture some indescribable invisible Midwest ozone aura. Separate from the hardcore scenes on either coast, ignored, landlocked, "flyover-state" (gag), raised on classic rock, turned onto punk rock, never had to abandon classic rock, just folded punk rock into the aesthetic, bored, drunk, bleary-eyed poets, hangover geniuses, juvenile delinquents, four reincarnations of Hank Williams covering the New York Dolls, embarrassed by how great their ballads were, here comes a regular. I'll be a regular at the Replacements discography until I'm dead. These guys are my Beatles and Monkees in one band. I don't even have a favorite record of theirs. Just throw their first six on repeat, over and over.

Alternate choice - The Mekons - "Chivalry"
"I was out late the other night/Fear and whiskey kept me going" is one of my favorite opening lines to a song. The rest of it's pretty damn great, too.