Some Stray Thoughts
For someone who pays a little too much attention to the music in television commercials, it's distressing to see so many self-consciously "indie" ads modeled on the hottest trends of 3 years ago. And unlike the bad old days when a young Daniel Faraday told us that a Subaru was "just like punk rock, except it's a car," it's easier to sell consumer goods with twee posturing and cramming in all the whistling, ukeleles, and handclaps that your 25-49 demo can handle. Gerber: forward-thinking that's pre-approved by the bourgeoisie! (Also: fuck, they market baby food for preschoolers now?)
Advil also has a new ad using the exact same gimmick with fully-grown humans and a simpatico soundtrack (though I couldn't find video of it on the Internet, just the song). Peter Bjorn and John wannabes from the cradle to the grave...such is life in Ad America.
Alphabeat
Of course, there's nothing wrong with cute if you can pull it off like Alphabeat does on their self-titled debut. When you're front-loading a sunny pop album, you can't do much better than the depression-leavening "10,000 Nights of Thunder," four minutes of pure uplift.
Suspiciously cheap-looking videos, classic boy-girl vocals, and a song titled "Fascination" - are we sure this isn't a long lost Human League record? Well, probably not. Alphabeat is more versatile than its first 10 minutes might lead one to believe, notching a Britpop opus about condoms and/or raincoats ("Rubber Boots/Mackintosh") and a Nordic-accented country ballad ("Nothing But My Baby") before playing us out with a "hidden" 10-second piano instrumental. The album is all the exhilarating wonder and vigor of youth, a properly noncommittal debut with a charming let's-try-everything quality.
For The Beat Is..., Alphabeat's second album, the band commits hard. To electronica. Such dedication is admirable in theory but in practice it's like returning from a global culinary tour to nothing but Hot Pockets. The line "I need something I can dance to" repeats throughout "DJ" and is the album's keystone. I'm not sure where the imperative comes from. Alphabeat was plenty danceable, whereas The Beat Is... is like Ace of Base discovering auto-tune. The results are horrible, by the way.
But an acoustic cover of "Digital Love"? That's as unhorrible as you can get.
Alphaville - "Forever Young"
Surprise pop standard, unlikely hip-hop bedrock, and forever a reminder of the school dance thanks to the Saturn Ion and Napoleon Dynamite and the sentiment of the song itself. Do not confuse it with an inferior Rod Stewart song of the same name.
Amanda Blank - I Love You
Amanda Blank is part of the new wave of female rappers that has stormed hip-hop's boys club over the past few years in a movement that is as cyclical as the tides and fickle as pop music success. There are probably a dozen Amanda Blanks for every Queen Latifah or M.I.A.
I Love You boasts a few distinguished party songs such as "Might Like You Better" and "Make It Take It" and energetic production from the likes of Diplo. As a whole, though, it's not built to last. Part of that's to blame on Blank's attempts to show us the softer side of Sears, culminating in a risible "interpolation" (the new synonym for "rip-off") of LL Cool J in "A Love Song." It's schizophrenic at best. I guess I should give her credit for at least attempting to break up the monotony of sex-and-sports braggadocio, but a party rapper's music is only as valuable inasmuch as it instructs us on how to release our inhibitions in relaxed and informal social settings. This record lasts longer than a quickie should.
America
Far too pretentious a name for actual Americans, though they did do us all a service by preventing U2 from claiming it (you know it could happen). "Horse With No Name" is the gateway despite its labored rhymes and even more labored storytelling (crying at a dry riverbed - really?). "Ventura Highway" is just as sweet and mellow with better polish; "Sister Golden Hair" is the group's true opus, a tour de force of romantic détente spoken in layman's terms: "meet me in the middle."
Monday, October 18, 2010
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Alan Parsons Project to Allman Brothers Band
Alan Parsons Project
The Alan Parsons Project has the distinction of being the only prog rock group to crack the infamously snobbish and exacting quality control standards of the Jock Jams franchise. It's difficult not to listen to the hypnotic instrumental "Sirius" and have your mind fill in the 'lyrics': "at shooting guard, from North Carolina, number 23...."
While we're on the subject, I think more professional sports teams need to adopt official songs from the outdated pop canon, a la soccer clubs, and they should be chosen by the same type of person who impishly reintroduced a pretentious prog opus as a pro wrestling-style intro song. The rest of the world understands this. Why don't we?
Without the Bulls, though, APP is basically the kinder, gentler, more commercial Pink Floyd (Parsons was the sound engineer on the seminal Dark Side of the Moon). "Eye in the Sky" is proof that, even if he jazzes it up with hieroglyphic window dressing and interstellar mythology, a guy with a guitar is always going to write a breakup song. Same with "Games People Play," though it is distinguished by its heavy disco feel and decent appropriation of the best parts of the Hall and Oates formula.
Alan Silvestri - "Back to the Future Theme"
Silvestri is best known as Robert Zemeckis's go-to composer, and is therefore more of an unknown to the general public as Zemeckis has gone full Lucas on us in the past decade and interest in his films has waned. Like most film composers, he is also very prolific and tends to work on projects that are big and loud for reasons that have little to do with the score.
But his work on the BTTF trilogy should give him a lifetime pass. There are few precious blockbuster themes not written by John Williams that have the evocative power of Silvestri's. It's just as much of a part of the trilogy's iconography as DeLoreans and hoverboards and moonwalking in Wild West saloons.
Albert Hammond - "It Never Rains In Southern California"
One of the great post-60s hangover songs. Only five years elapsed between the Summer of Love and this beautiful slice of bubblegum melancholy. What a difference a Nixon makes. It also established a leitmotif of musicians warning people how, despite all appearances, what a terribly perverse and dangerous place SoCal is, though recently the pendulum has swung the other way.
Alice Cooper
Journalists are bound by a covenant to refer to Cooper exclusively as "70s shock rocker Alice Cooper," but this was an image forged primarily by his appearance and live show and least of all by his music. In reality, "No More Mr. Nice Guy" and "School's Out" are as edgy as the fifth-grader egging the principal's house, but they are great shorthand for the rebellion of the petulant as opposed to that of the truly disturbed or downtrodden. "School's Out" in particular feels like the bratty cousin of the much darker schoolboy remembrances that pepper the first half of The Wall (Pink Floyd reference counter: 2).
Yet Cooper can get away with this because of his great charisma and, especially, his self-awareness - "School's...out...for...summer/School's...out...for...ever" wouldn't work from someone who didn't know what he was doing in being so dopey and so eternally sly.
Alien Ant Farm - "Smooth Criminal"
In an alternate universe, ANThology is a track-for-track punk cover of Michael Jackson's Bad. I mean, why the hell not? It's not like Alien Ant Farm was going out on a limb here. It wasn't, say, like covering an obscure Leonard Cohen or Bernie Taupin composition. This was some of the lowest-hanging fruit from the goddamn King of Pop.
So AAF is forever in that dubious pantheon of artists famous primarily for performing someone else's high profile hit. They also presaged the process of "Lambertizing" a song, a technique made famous by American Idol runner-up Adam Lambert and consisting of taking a popular song that worked just fine and making it all hardcore and screeching and craaaazy! Because we can.
This video is a more loving tribute to Michael than his overproduced public funeral.
Allister - "Fraggle Rock"
Imagine arranging a conference call with Sid Vicious, Joe Strummer, and Lou Reed circa 1977. The topic is the future of punk rock. "At the turn of the millennium," you say, "punk's not dead. In fact, it's one of the most influential and most popular cultural movements in the world. Contrary to what pundits are saying today, it is not a fad and has remained critically and commercially viable for all these years and moved into realms far beyond music."
"Oh, and also, punk musicians will be judged on the caliber of their dick jokes and the heartiness of their party, culminating in this cover of a 1980s children's television show theme." And you'll play it and say, "But to be fair, the Fraggles were themselves a de-facto disenfranchised underclass struggling to make themselves heard. As Muppets. Yeah, man, Y2K messed with everybody."
Allman Brothers Band
The nomadic Allmans were frequently singing about movement, like the gypsy wanderer yearning for "Melissa" and the ambulatory male of "Ramblin' Man." They heavily inspired the fictional band Stillwater in Almost Famous, and if you're familiar with the movie, it makes sense. There's a good deal of tension in these songs, pitting the pureness of the band's country-bluegrass roots against the polish of the rock production on their recordings. Plus, the original Allman lineup burned out relatively quickly after seven Southern rock template-defining years. If nothing else, I appreciate them for giving me a lot to chew on during those guitar solos.
The Alan Parsons Project has the distinction of being the only prog rock group to crack the infamously snobbish and exacting quality control standards of the Jock Jams franchise. It's difficult not to listen to the hypnotic instrumental "Sirius" and have your mind fill in the 'lyrics': "at shooting guard, from North Carolina, number 23...."
While we're on the subject, I think more professional sports teams need to adopt official songs from the outdated pop canon, a la soccer clubs, and they should be chosen by the same type of person who impishly reintroduced a pretentious prog opus as a pro wrestling-style intro song. The rest of the world understands this. Why don't we?
Without the Bulls, though, APP is basically the kinder, gentler, more commercial Pink Floyd (Parsons was the sound engineer on the seminal Dark Side of the Moon). "Eye in the Sky" is proof that, even if he jazzes it up with hieroglyphic window dressing and interstellar mythology, a guy with a guitar is always going to write a breakup song. Same with "Games People Play," though it is distinguished by its heavy disco feel and decent appropriation of the best parts of the Hall and Oates formula.
Alan Silvestri - "Back to the Future Theme"
Silvestri is best known as Robert Zemeckis's go-to composer, and is therefore more of an unknown to the general public as Zemeckis has gone full Lucas on us in the past decade and interest in his films has waned. Like most film composers, he is also very prolific and tends to work on projects that are big and loud for reasons that have little to do with the score.
But his work on the BTTF trilogy should give him a lifetime pass. There are few precious blockbuster themes not written by John Williams that have the evocative power of Silvestri's. It's just as much of a part of the trilogy's iconography as DeLoreans and hoverboards and moonwalking in Wild West saloons.
Albert Hammond - "It Never Rains In Southern California"
One of the great post-60s hangover songs. Only five years elapsed between the Summer of Love and this beautiful slice of bubblegum melancholy. What a difference a Nixon makes. It also established a leitmotif of musicians warning people how, despite all appearances, what a terribly perverse and dangerous place SoCal is, though recently the pendulum has swung the other way.
Alice Cooper
Journalists are bound by a covenant to refer to Cooper exclusively as "70s shock rocker Alice Cooper," but this was an image forged primarily by his appearance and live show and least of all by his music. In reality, "No More Mr. Nice Guy" and "School's Out" are as edgy as the fifth-grader egging the principal's house, but they are great shorthand for the rebellion of the petulant as opposed to that of the truly disturbed or downtrodden. "School's Out" in particular feels like the bratty cousin of the much darker schoolboy remembrances that pepper the first half of The Wall (Pink Floyd reference counter: 2).
Yet Cooper can get away with this because of his great charisma and, especially, his self-awareness - "School's...out...for...summer/School's...out...for...ever" wouldn't work from someone who didn't know what he was doing in being so dopey and so eternally sly.
Alien Ant Farm - "Smooth Criminal"
In an alternate universe, ANThology is a track-for-track punk cover of Michael Jackson's Bad. I mean, why the hell not? It's not like Alien Ant Farm was going out on a limb here. It wasn't, say, like covering an obscure Leonard Cohen or Bernie Taupin composition. This was some of the lowest-hanging fruit from the goddamn King of Pop.
So AAF is forever in that dubious pantheon of artists famous primarily for performing someone else's high profile hit. They also presaged the process of "Lambertizing" a song, a technique made famous by American Idol runner-up Adam Lambert and consisting of taking a popular song that worked just fine and making it all hardcore and screeching and craaaazy! Because we can.
This video is a more loving tribute to Michael than his overproduced public funeral.
Allister - "Fraggle Rock"
Imagine arranging a conference call with Sid Vicious, Joe Strummer, and Lou Reed circa 1977. The topic is the future of punk rock. "At the turn of the millennium," you say, "punk's not dead. In fact, it's one of the most influential and most popular cultural movements in the world. Contrary to what pundits are saying today, it is not a fad and has remained critically and commercially viable for all these years and moved into realms far beyond music."
"Oh, and also, punk musicians will be judged on the caliber of their dick jokes and the heartiness of their party, culminating in this cover of a 1980s children's television show theme." And you'll play it and say, "But to be fair, the Fraggles were themselves a de-facto disenfranchised underclass struggling to make themselves heard. As Muppets. Yeah, man, Y2K messed with everybody."
Allman Brothers Band
The nomadic Allmans were frequently singing about movement, like the gypsy wanderer yearning for "Melissa" and the ambulatory male of "Ramblin' Man." They heavily inspired the fictional band Stillwater in Almost Famous, and if you're familiar with the movie, it makes sense. There's a good deal of tension in these songs, pitting the pureness of the band's country-bluegrass roots against the polish of the rock production on their recordings. Plus, the original Allman lineup burned out relatively quickly after seven Southern rock template-defining years. If nothing else, I appreciate them for giving me a lot to chew on during those guitar solos.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Air to Alan Jackson
Air - Love 2
One of many albums that I collected for collecting's sake from my gig at KSCR (now KXSC). I'd bring a laptop into the studio and rip maybe 4 or 5 CDs in the downtime I spent not listening to the songs I had chosen to play that week. It was a classic left brain ("I need to stay current and find new things to play")/right brain ("FREE STUFF!") rationalization.
ANYWAY, Air is a pair of Frenchmen specializing in chillout electronica whose name has come to stand for "Amour, Imagination, Rêve" - or love, imagination, dream - which should really be the title of a Euro Disneyland parade. But most of the songs on Love 2 would, I think, be an appropriate soundtrack for a designer showcase that didn't have its heart set on being incongruously aggressive (unless they wanted to use "Eat My Beat," which lands too much on the side of abstract and unenforceable commands, e.g. "Smile with your eyes"). It's a fashionable record that sounds like a moon safari (the album-defining "Love") and manages to appear pleasingly vapid while retaining a certain degree of aloofness; ergo, "So Light Her Footfall" is a seductive score that's perfect for the anti-Tyra runway.
Air - "So Light Her Footfall"
You can summarize Love 2 in one word: gentle. "Sing, Sang, Sung" is the best example of this mood, a cross between music for beatific sun worshipers and a Baby Einstein DVD. And there's nothing wrong with that. Sometimes that's what you need the most - tunes that swaddle you in smooth and tell you it's going to be all right. Especially if you're tweaking.
Air Supply
From one gentle foreign duo to another (minus the club drugs)...
Graham Russell and Russell Hitchcock's names make up for what ever their music lacks in versatility. They would be perfect for either a Wheel of Fortune 'Before and After' puzzle or as pitchmen for a multi-disc soft rock compilation. By the way, one of these things actually happened.
The Russell & Russell specialty is the soporific love song that's appealing enough to reach No. 2 on the charts. It is an especially poetic ranking for the two Air Supply songs on my playlist: "All Out of Love," a maddeningly pushy ballad that's the pop song equivalent of someone asking you to decipher what went wrong in a breakup that you had no part in (though I realize a lot of pop songs are like this), and "Making Love (Out of Nothing At All)," which is the real operatic jam.
Clearly the superior of the two songs, "Making Love" is soft rock foreplay that teases and builds until ending in a hilariously euphoric verse boasting of the Russells' prowess in making "all the stadiums rock" and several other abilities that don't seem particularly special or are entirely fabricated, like making the night "disappear by the dawn." Keep shilling that AM gold, but don't you dare take credit for the music of the spheres, Air Supply!
Al Green
A few years ago USC opened the Galen Center, a new multipurpose sports arena, and one of the first events held there was an Al Green concert. Several times during each home football game that season, the stadium PA system would blast an ad that included snippets of "Let's Stay Together" (which was an old favorite of mine) and "Tired of Being Alone" (which was a new discovery) for the crowd in attendance.
If I'm accepting the power of the mellow as a leitmotif in this post, I must say it's oddly cathartic to watch thousands of drunk football fans get their kumbaya on for 90 seconds and hum a few bars of classic soul together, then return to rooting for one man to concuss the other.
Alan Jackson - The Greatest Hits Collection
Country music has a statistically insignificant presence in my library and it's usually not there without a utilitarian justification - I borrowed this particular record to create a playlist for a Memorial Day barbecue - but listening to 23 tracks of Alan Jackson's delicate wallflower-y voice is, in the grand scheme of this project, simple due diligence.
That said, I am a big fan of "Chattahoochee," an effective and evocative song that unabashedly uses the term "hoochie-kootchie." The most intriguing (and revealing) part of the song is the twice-appearing verse that describes Jackson's girlfriend rebuffing his polite request for sex. He does the conscionable, respectful thing and returns her home, but not before dragging her to some local chow house for a hamburger and a grape snow cone. Something about Alan Jackson slaking his intense sexual thirst with syrup and shaved ice really, really gets me. I fancy him the Mister Rodgers of county music.
Maybe, though, Jackson just has gigantic balls; several of these greatest hits are deliberately antagonistic, like a comedian that not only telegraphs his punchlines, but also cracks up before he can even get there. See: "Home," which is a straight-up autobiography that could've been kinda clever if he didn't spoil it in the first few lines or "Dallas," savoring the exquisite irony of someone named after a geographic location going on a road trip.
It behooves me to stop there, before I start making generalizations about country music as a whole. Frankly, the country music artist and the country music fan live in a alternative reality, a completely different local where what seems cornpone is lauded for its sincerity. And just as rock's obsession with New York and L.A. (or places and situations that consciously aspire to reflect the culture of one of the other) both narrows (bad) and deepens (good) the perspective of that idiom, I'd also point to country's hesitancy to acknowledge the world north of the Mason-Dixon line and west of Texas as evidence of this separate sphere. To each his own.
One final highlight from Mr. Jackson - "Mercury Blues," a fun bit of freewheeling consumerism later reworked (with little difficulty) as the Ford truck jingle that it was always meant to be.
Not a lot of country fans are out there driving Montegos and Villagers, I imagine, but they do waterski while wearing cowboy hats.
One of many albums that I collected for collecting's sake from my gig at KSCR (now KXSC). I'd bring a laptop into the studio and rip maybe 4 or 5 CDs in the downtime I spent not listening to the songs I had chosen to play that week. It was a classic left brain ("I need to stay current and find new things to play")/right brain ("FREE STUFF!") rationalization.
ANYWAY, Air is a pair of Frenchmen specializing in chillout electronica whose name has come to stand for "Amour, Imagination, Rêve" - or love, imagination, dream - which should really be the title of a Euro Disneyland parade. But most of the songs on Love 2 would, I think, be an appropriate soundtrack for a designer showcase that didn't have its heart set on being incongruously aggressive (unless they wanted to use "Eat My Beat," which lands too much on the side of abstract and unenforceable commands, e.g. "Smile with your eyes"). It's a fashionable record that sounds like a moon safari (the album-defining "Love") and manages to appear pleasingly vapid while retaining a certain degree of aloofness; ergo, "So Light Her Footfall" is a seductive score that's perfect for the anti-Tyra runway.
Air - "So Light Her Footfall"
You can summarize Love 2 in one word: gentle. "Sing, Sang, Sung" is the best example of this mood, a cross between music for beatific sun worshipers and a Baby Einstein DVD. And there's nothing wrong with that. Sometimes that's what you need the most - tunes that swaddle you in smooth and tell you it's going to be all right. Especially if you're tweaking.
Air Supply
From one gentle foreign duo to another (minus the club drugs)...
Graham Russell and Russell Hitchcock's names make up for what ever their music lacks in versatility. They would be perfect for either a Wheel of Fortune 'Before and After' puzzle or as pitchmen for a multi-disc soft rock compilation. By the way, one of these things actually happened.
The Russell & Russell specialty is the soporific love song that's appealing enough to reach No. 2 on the charts. It is an especially poetic ranking for the two Air Supply songs on my playlist: "All Out of Love," a maddeningly pushy ballad that's the pop song equivalent of someone asking you to decipher what went wrong in a breakup that you had no part in (though I realize a lot of pop songs are like this), and "Making Love (Out of Nothing At All)," which is the real operatic jam.
Clearly the superior of the two songs, "Making Love" is soft rock foreplay that teases and builds until ending in a hilariously euphoric verse boasting of the Russells' prowess in making "all the stadiums rock" and several other abilities that don't seem particularly special or are entirely fabricated, like making the night "disappear by the dawn." Keep shilling that AM gold, but don't you dare take credit for the music of the spheres, Air Supply!
Al Green
A few years ago USC opened the Galen Center, a new multipurpose sports arena, and one of the first events held there was an Al Green concert. Several times during each home football game that season, the stadium PA system would blast an ad that included snippets of "Let's Stay Together" (which was an old favorite of mine) and "Tired of Being Alone" (which was a new discovery) for the crowd in attendance.
If I'm accepting the power of the mellow as a leitmotif in this post, I must say it's oddly cathartic to watch thousands of drunk football fans get their kumbaya on for 90 seconds and hum a few bars of classic soul together, then return to rooting for one man to concuss the other.
Alan Jackson - The Greatest Hits Collection
Country music has a statistically insignificant presence in my library and it's usually not there without a utilitarian justification - I borrowed this particular record to create a playlist for a Memorial Day barbecue - but listening to 23 tracks of Alan Jackson's delicate wallflower-y voice is, in the grand scheme of this project, simple due diligence.
That said, I am a big fan of "Chattahoochee," an effective and evocative song that unabashedly uses the term "hoochie-kootchie." The most intriguing (and revealing) part of the song is the twice-appearing verse that describes Jackson's girlfriend rebuffing his polite request for sex. He does the conscionable, respectful thing and returns her home, but not before dragging her to some local chow house for a hamburger and a grape snow cone. Something about Alan Jackson slaking his intense sexual thirst with syrup and shaved ice really, really gets me. I fancy him the Mister Rodgers of county music.
Maybe, though, Jackson just has gigantic balls; several of these greatest hits are deliberately antagonistic, like a comedian that not only telegraphs his punchlines, but also cracks up before he can even get there. See: "Home," which is a straight-up autobiography that could've been kinda clever if he didn't spoil it in the first few lines or "Dallas," savoring the exquisite irony of someone named after a geographic location going on a road trip.
It behooves me to stop there, before I start making generalizations about country music as a whole. Frankly, the country music artist and the country music fan live in a alternative reality, a completely different local where what seems cornpone is lauded for its sincerity. And just as rock's obsession with New York and L.A. (or places and situations that consciously aspire to reflect the culture of one of the other) both narrows (bad) and deepens (good) the perspective of that idiom, I'd also point to country's hesitancy to acknowledge the world north of the Mason-Dixon line and west of Texas as evidence of this separate sphere. To each his own.
One final highlight from Mr. Jackson - "Mercury Blues," a fun bit of freewheeling consumerism later reworked (with little difficulty) as the Ford truck jingle that it was always meant to be.
Not a lot of country fans are out there driving Montegos and Villagers, I imagine, but they do waterski while wearing cowboy hats.
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