Bring It On, Antipasta!

Big Red on the possibilities of me quitting my job, from the Rolling Stone blog:

“When Phish broke up, I made some comment about how I’m not gonna go around playing ‘You Enjoy Myself’ for the rest of my life," Anastasio said with a laugh. "And it’s so funny because Fish and Mike and Page have been talking to each other a lot lately and now — it’s not that I can’t believe that I said that, but its symbolic of how much I lost my mind or how much I lost my bearings or something. Because at this point in time I would give my left nut to play that song five times in a row every day until I die. I certainly thought about that while I was in jail."

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Jeply Unthree Fourplay: KrissKross

in genial response to the eloquest writings of mr. pinecone...

my idea with manifesto in fandom (tedder 2008), i think -- and i don't want to go back and read it--was questioning where this idea of fandom comes from using sky blue sky as a laboratory.

coming from the guy who most used to use arbitrary and exaggerated rankings with every band, song, show, and whatever, i am trying my best not to give out rankings (e.g. x is my favorite band, or z is in my top 5, or even y was my favorite show ever). furthermore, i am trying to disassociate with the very idea of 'fandom'. liking a band and saying you are a fan of a band are completely different things. the latter involves the idea of outsourcing your identity, which i think i presented well in the last writing. let me elaborate on this whole thing with some of my thoughts on rankings and callings fav's. And mind the gap, this is not aimed at anyone, or is it negative, so dont feel the urge to flame--(unless you want to, ya quare!).

how the hell can i know what my favorite show ever is? how can I ever compare a moment to a moment? memories are not moments, rather they are only neural impulses that haven't atrophied. i guess stronger memories--those that are stimulated and reinforced most often--are likely to manifest themselves higher in rank than faded memories, but what the hell does that say about anything other than my emotional impressionability (ever variable dependent on a million different things) at moment of source sensation/perception and your ability to maintain the memory?

i guess i started feeling pigeon-holed to my own systems. i got locked in my mental grid--> "well I said the rollingstones in durham was my favorite show, i guess i have to compare that to every other show i see." "well i'm drunk and having a fucking blast seeing the joe blow locals with a bunch of my friends. Is this better than the rolling stones? i think so. really? than the fucking stones?"

it's not that it takes that much effort to rank or call fav's, but it doesn't allow for free space in the thoughts for new things. It traps you into a mold and a system. mike harrison said it best one time, "hey fuck off, i think i like maroon 5." being a 'loyal' fan (whatever that means) and being a connoisseur [having a very discerning view of a subject] is certainly a fine ideal, but to take a step back and say "fuck it, I will listen to whatever and find something good in everything, because hey, generally I like most things" is very liberating. as an aside, i of course am disgusted at the level of banality in a lot of popular music, movies, and tv which are driven by the 'boardroom-bullshit-marketed media industries'

i think all I am really wanting to put forth is that in life, it comes down to what makes you happy and what makes you feel good. dis-attaching from things (which I have a very hard time with) is certainly the way to go and accepting everything as they come at you is the way to go. I will try not to add too mny coments like this on this blog, but that's where my beliefs lie.

that being said, sky blue sky is not my most favorite wilco album and it is not my least favorite. it completely depends on the moment: my mood, having just eaten, the weather outside, or if i busted or did not bust a nut recently. i can say this with certainty though. sky blue sky is the wilco album i will probably listen to the least in the time to come.

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Deaner's Dublin-Friendly Blarney Stone

From 5/18/08 ... Recall that Mickey broke his ankle(s) pulling a Dan the Man and jumping a 10-foot fence

Enjoy.

There's vinegar and blood, that explodes from my ass
Diarrhea and whiskey and bangers and mash

My cock is all shrivelled, I ain't getting laid
The dollar is worthless, Ween ain't gettin paid

My ankles are broken and I can't scratch the itch
And when I phone home, my wife is a bitch

But tonight I am drinkin, with Paddy and Mick
And after the concert, I'll beat on my dick...

aye, aye, aye!

Click for pic

Thanks to Parker for the heads-up on this

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Something Old and Something...well...Also Old

Foxboro Hot Tubs - Stop Drop and Roll!!!

I have always thought there was a lot of a intelligence and sincerity hiding in the three minute blasts of pop/punk Green Day have been throwing at us for nearly 20 years now. I heard "When I Come Around" in a bar the other night, and it sounded just as fresh and relatable as it did when I was 12. I could barely eat my cheese fries!

Green Day has a history of releasing albums that sound like reactionary opposites to the preceding album. After the (mostly) sunny, lighthearted Dookie, the band released Insomniac. An album filled with drug fueled, walls-closing-in paranoia. I actually like Insomniac more than Dookie, even though I know I'm wrong. The easygoing, and not as good, Nimrod followed Insomniac two years later.

In 2000, Green Day released their biggest curveball of an album to date with Warning. I can still recall the confused feelings in my 16-year-old brain after hearing Warning for the first time. No songs at a breakneck speed. More pop than punk. A mellow album that owes more to Rubber Soul-era Beatles than Rocket to Russia-era Ramones. A song-focussed pure pop album that bests any pop/rock album put out this decade. Basically, I'm not going to argue with anyone who says Warning is the best Green Day album.

One month before the 2004 presidential election, Green Day released the ambitious American Idiot. A fucking 13-song punk rock opera! When you unashamedly name your Bush-bashing concept album American Idiot and it goes on to sell a bizillion copies, I am happy. If all goes as planned, the million 14-years-olds who bought American Idiot in 2004 will say, "Fuck you, Mom and Dad," and make a progressive decision when they vote this November.

Ah, and now that brings us to the present. So, how do you follow one of the most successful albums of the decade? You secretly change your band name to Foxboro Hot Tubs and release an amazing garage rock revival album. Bop! Green Day have never hidden their affection for the Kinks and 60s garage rock, but it has never been as clear as it is on Foxboro Hot Tubs' Stop Drop and Roll!!!. Thirty-two minutes of pure garage-pop bliss. Yeah, yeah, "Didn't this whole grarage rock revival thing burn out like six years ago?" Well, none of those bands ever made anything as completely enjoyable as this album. Stop Drop and Roll!!! could very well end up being the best 32 minutes of your day everyday this summer.

Sharing is caring.

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Wilco SUCK NOW AND I HATE THEM

A delicate and inoffensive response to Blake's comments on Wilco.
I toyed with the title "Impossibly Germane" but found it too thesaurus-y... and couldn't make sense of the pun, really

The music blogosphere's infatuation-and-immediate-rejection of Vampire Weekend was so swift I was a third of the way through my first listen of their album before the TRON was already telling me it sucked and they were prettyboys. I was naked at the Stephen Malkmus show last month in DC without a pair of horn-rimmed glasses and tight clever t-shirt, but was more singled out by the fact that I actually seemed to be enjoying the music and rocking out.

So certainly image will control expectation. People at the 9:30 club who knew about Pavement expected the guys and gals on stage to be as indifferent as they were; the reality is that Stephen Malkmus has grown into a very serious musician and talented guitar player.

Yeah. A lot of times expectation vs. output is unfair to both parties. Maybe I'd enjoy the Green Album infinitely more if it were just a great pop album by a band that hadn't made Pinkerton. So is that me being a good Weezer fan or a bad Weezer fan? Am I not loyal to a band for criticizing or disliking something they've done just because it is different? What if they just make a worse version of the same thing?

A.M. was one of my first "independent" music purchases... not readily-accessed by everyone, not popular in the sense of radio play and record sales.. It was part of me wanting to identify myself as an "alt.country fan," and Blake's observations on fandom certainly applied here. I liked it because it was exactly what I wanted out of a band that had been half of Uncle Tupelo, the founding fathers of the movement.

And then for a long time, I also could very easily "get" Being There, as two-faced as the album is... but nothing else. Even as YHF clicked over 20 or 30 listens and the Mermaid Avenues are very accesible, Summerteeth still is vaguely-defined. I can picture an album cover and get an overall feeling of an album. You can too, just think of Abbey Road or Dark Side. But with Summerteeth, something is hidden between the desolation of "She's a Jar" and the Sunday-afternoon murmur of the title track. It is both poppy and painful with roots firmly entrenched in both the two-minute radio song and mournful country ballads. I think of the album cover and I still can't put my finger on it. It is the turning-point in Wilco's discography where they quit writing songs and start putting together soundscapes and albums... even if those soundscapes are stacked on top of really normal folk songs, they grew up as a band on Summerteeth and it is an amazing listen.

It is uncompromisingly honest as an album and as individual songs and this is what has always defined Tweedy's music to me. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot upped the ante, but Summerteeth was the first sign of Tweedy's limitless ceiling as a songwriter and musician.

So with Wilco, I can ignore "folk" and I can even ignore "challenging," but the one thing I think you can always hold an artist accountable for is honesty. And with such a track record of both musical and lyrical honesty, shouldn't Wilco's bar be higher? Dropping fandom and dropping expectation, how do I feel about Sky Blue Sky? When the best compliment you can come up with for an album is that the band "feels comfortable playing together" (something I said trying to get myself to like it after seeing the comment in a review), then something's missing.

For me, anyway. If I picture the album cover of SBS in my head, I come away with a feeling of dull. It feels dishonest for Wilco to be so dull, and that, fan or not, I am having a hard time reconciling.

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A Manifesto on Fandom After Thinking About 'Sky Blue Sky'

Essay by Blake Tedder

I think Wilco's new album Sky Blue Sky has come around to be a good listen for me. It's no Ghost is Born but the band changed every album and since A.M. and Uncle Tupelo before that. There have been people dissenting to their direction and then eventually accepting and even liking more their new stuff. I think there is a problem with wrapping a band up in an image and a packaging of what we think the band is and what it means to us. That is what propels popular music, and is essentially the aesthetic of any thing.


Let me start by looking at the band as a whole and asking, how do we reconcile the differences between A.M. and YHF? the dynamic of the songs is wildly different: concise chord/verse/bridge/solo in a folk country paradigm on A.M. to songs that lead you everywhere other than what you would expect from A.M. on YHF. A.M. is also filled with sing-songs and general pop steadies while YHF is filled with dissonance and production with lots of noise, halfnonsense and richly metaphorical and imagistic lyrics. The band has obviously changed, some say for the better--some not. Additionally, there is essentially a whole new cast of players, and you can tell Tweedy's style has evolved and is ...well ... just different. But the question for me from an anthropological/psychological standpoint is 'What has happened here with the listenership?'

Is it that Wilco fans like all kinds of music? The drastic change from A.M. to YHF was on a gradient propped on the backs of being there and summerteeth but the differences for the fan base certainly would be polarizing. Or is it that Wilco fans have just believed whatever it is that Wilco is doing is good--sort of follow the leader? Or is it that the individual listener has changed and just happened to progress from liking country based music to the wild panoramas of rock style independent of the band's similar progression? Or is it that there are no more A.M. fans around and that Wilco's worldwide popularity is from there new sense of style. There are other questions along these lines. I don't know the answers to these but what I do notice in the nature of fandom i think is interesting that undoubtedly at nearly every step the average listener shrugs at the new material and eventually accepts it and likes it [ i know this is not always the case].

The only reason we have trouble talking about why Sky Blue Sky not being as good as the other albums is because we are attached to the idea of Wilco, the image. We are scared of any sort of corruption of the image, because it is a corruption of ourselves and our ideas, associations and identity that are wrapped up in being a 'fan.' Wilco is wilco regardless of how and how long you are and will be a fan. (note: I could just as easily be talking about Phish or Paul McCartney or Clapton, or anyone who seemingly lost it). The artist must evolve and live a life independent of his art, lest he become completely entrenched in that art. What he or she produces will be a reflection of his life. This is the nature of creativity and how experience fills the subconscious and the subconscious reveals itself in conscious intention or art.

For the 'non-artist' the nature of creativity or this experience that fills the subconscious and reveals itself has less intention, and thus is not art in the conventional sense; however, it may have just as much fervor to reveal itself in another way. This is way can be fandom. Fans identify themselves with the emotions they produce while listening or watching someone else present their own emotions. Among these emotions are the way a song makes you feel; the energy you receive from a band rocking out; the wish to be them, etc. We as fans want to sustain these emotions--this happiness and individuality and connectedness--so we build an image with a sturdy outer shell and protect it from any threats (e.g. this is x band and i am a fan of x band because they do x-characteristic things and make me feel x-emotions; and i am not a fan of y band because they do y-characteristic things and make me feel y-emotions. well what if x band produces something that sounds like y band, where the hell do you stand? there is a problem in fandom, you see).

Fans must adapt and not be bent out of shape when an artist does something. An artist owes the fan nothing. It is the fan's choice to be caught up in a frenzy of misplaced identities and a weird posiive feedback system of stardom/fandom. I mean think of Phish fans. Here we have one of the nations biggest bands ending sourly and abruptly and the fans were not only outraged, many didn't know what to do. Not only did they wrap there identities in the band, they wrapped there life, finances, happy times, sad times, sometimes lot-birthing a child in the context of the band and not the greater world--it's mental fucking illness man

Sky Blue Sky has the dynamic range of A.M., the quirks of YHF, a hint of Ghost, rarely, and is most akin to Being There/Summerteeth... sort of on the other side of the evolutionary curve, but certainly IMO not devolving. In fact, there is no such thing as deevolution, because it's like an absolute value, you can only evolve--it doesn't mean better or worse. It being better or worse is a characteristic of the fan and not the artist, because if the artist is true to himself, he is only producing from himself and not for the fans. I think the album is a good listen and it's pleasing to hear them in a live studio recording, after the heavy production of Ghost and YHF, which are awesome but also offensively enveloping at times. And I also think if we can possibly drop the conception of Wilco or any band as an 'image' and us with the identity of 'fans' just for a moment every now and again, it's a refreshing way to hear all music for the first time, everytime.

I like Sky Blue Sky the way I like Round Room. If Wilco broke up or went on an indeterminate hiatus, I bet you'd learn to love it too.

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