The Beatles, Album by Album--Magical Mystery Tour

Somewhat of an anomaly in the Beatles' catalogue, Magical Mystery Tour is an American-only LP. It consists of the shorter British Magical Mystery Tour double-EP combined with other 1967 singles which were not included on an LP. This gives it a somewhat hodgepodge feel and it lacks the unified vision of Revolver and Sgt. Pepper. It does consist of several great songs, though the album does have a sort of "greatest hits" feel to it that the more cohesive LPs lack. I actually think it's a rather interesting album for a number of reasons. I've heard it called the sequel to Sgt. Pepper, which can often be a tag of disdain, but I find the sound of it to be different, although related. There is certainly more variety to the songs on here and the group feels more comfortable using all manners of sound effects and esoteric instrumentation to fit the nature of the song, instead of having everything sound the same. "Blue Jay Way" has a heavier, darker psychedelic feel to it, while "Penny Lane" uses bright, sparkling instrumentation to recreate the semi-fantasy world of Paul's childhood. I like the variety of sounds on here, which is one of the album's strongest attributes. Also the songwriting has taken a step up since Sgt. Pepper.

"Magical Mystery Tour" and "The Fool on the Hill" do somewhat feel like Sgt. Pepper's spiritual children--they both have that lightweight feel of the previous album combined with similar instrumentation. Not my favorites, but not bad songs. "Flying" represents a whole new sound for the Beatles. It opens with a very heavy, murky groove with fine bass playing and drumming. It reminds me of a blues instrumental by someone like the Stones (something like "2120 South Michigan Avenue"). The sound of the Beatles playing their own instruments was largely lacking on the previous album, besides the title tracks (which have pretty cool heavy riffs for their time). "Blue Jay Way" also has a unique sound. It combines George's Eastern influence with a dark psychedelia. The drumming by Ringo on here is very trippy and although it has too long of an outro, it's an underrated song in my opinion. "Your Mother Should Know" is a favorite of mine. As I've said before, any song that features Paul's wordless ad libs is alright in my book. Doesn't everyone want to take Paul home to meet their mom? "I Am the Walrus" closes out the songs featured in the television film Magical Mystery Tour (these six songs are also the ones featured on the original British double-EP) and is perhaps their finest straight psychedelic song. It has so much atmosphere that was lacking on the more lightweight Sgt. Pepper tunes. It's hilarious that music critics actually tried to decipher the nonsense lyrics of this back in the day. It also features the first great Beatles outro, complete with some King Lear thrown in at the end, as well as God knows what else. A great example of how to use crazy strings and sound effects effectively. But what obviously makes it a great song is simply that--it's a great song, beneath all of the sound effects.

The second side of the album is the side which rounds up all the singles, but almost all of them are great. "Hello Goodbye" is a bit lightweight, but that ending almost makes up for it. "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane" I have mentioned earlier as being perhaps the finest single of all time and they are obviously the highlights on this side. Both attempt to capture aspects of their songwriters' childhoods (John and Paul, respectively), and the ways that they are different showcases the two diametric personalities of their creators. "Strawberry Fields" is ghostly yet beautiful. It seems to be more about a fantasy world, perhaps away from the pressures and alienation of being famous, than it is about childhood. "Penny Lane" is Paul's great portrait of an idealized suburban England where a fireman keeps "in his pocket a portrait of the queen" and a pretty nurse "feels as if she's in a play." Though both are rather fantastical, John's song feels like a retreat into fantasy to escape the drudgery of the real world, while Paul's feels like a celebration of the everyday details that make life beautiful. It is interesting that John sings, "Living is easy with eyes closed/Misunderstanding all you see," while at the same time singing about some sort of fantasy retreat where he is in his own tree. He says he knows when it's a dream, but I'm not sure if that is necessarily true. Anyways, the differences between these two songs serve as a great comparison between their creators.

Finally, "Baby You're a Rich Man" and "All You Need Is Love" close out the album. The former is a satire of richness and famousness itself, complete with a snake-charmer sounding instrument in there. "All You Need Is Love" is an anthem for the Summer of Love, but as Paul has noted, John throws in some confusing (obscurantist?) lyrics into the verses (which are sung beautifully over what sounds like a harpsichord). Really, "Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game"? This seems like a Bob Dylan trick, to throw in that catchy, simple chorus to get everyone to sing along and gloss over the ambiguity and cloudiness of the verses. Perhaps this shows John's skepticism at the hippies he saw springing up left and right who looked up to him as their leader and mouthpiece. I'm not really sure. Maybe those verses mean something to him. The outro throws in a bunch of musical quotes, including John's spectral version of his own "She Loves You," which again adds a darker feeling to a song supposedly about free love. I almost feel like the whole thing was a big joke meant to trick all of the naive hippies. While I feel like Sgt. Pepper represents the blind, naive optimism of the '60s, there is a darker undercurrent to parts of Magical Mystery Tour which I like ("I Am the Walrus" or "Blue Jay Way," for instance). Of course, no band better captured the quick death of the '60s optimism better than the Stones with songs like "Gimme Shelter" and albums like Let It Bleed, but that's another story for another day.

--Edward

The Beatles, Album by Album--Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

Sgt. Pepper is undoubtedly the most famous and important pop/rock album of all time. It started every trend from taking LSD to concept albums to printing your lyrics in the liner notes to grandiose album covers. Most importantly, this was the point in which "serious" music critics and other members of society previously above such insubstantial matters as pop music began to take the genre seriously as an art form. Although many great records came before it, Sgt. Pepper was the point in which the pop album crossed over the bridge into art.

Do I feel that the music itself in this album justifies its lofty reputation? No, I do not. To me, almost everything about this album feels lightweight. Whereas I said other albums (and especially Revolver) were "songs albums," this one is more of a sound album. Most of the songs on here aren't particularly memorable in comparison to the last few albums, but the sound itself is very unique and innovative. Unfortunately, the Beatles were at their best as songwriters, and that's why I turn to them. I will agree with what Rolling Stone had to say about this album: "It's a masterwork of sonics, not songwriting." On here, the Beatles have turned away from the emotional depth and exploration that characterized Revolver towards self-indulgence. I'm not sure if this is because the record seems to be largely Paul's or not. After seeing Paul's tremendous songwriting growth on the last album, he seems to have taken a step back here. I have read that "She's Leaving Home" was considered in the past to be one of the Beatles' finest songs, but I find it rather ridiculous that the entire story of a girl running away from her parents is oversimplified by the last lines about her going away to have fun, because "Fun is the one thing that money can't buy." There was so much more room to develop emotional depth here, but instead all we have is a story about a girl who abandons her parents because she wants to have fun? As you can see, gone is the depth of "Eleanor Rigby." The Beatles wit and caustic edge is missing almost entirely on this album.

The opening trio of the title track, "With a Little Help from My Friends," and "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" is great pop music, of course. Maybe I've just heard these too much on the radio, for they are perhaps the most overplayed songs of all time, but they just don't do much for me anymore. George takes another, deeper stab at Indian classical music with "Within You Without You," which is actually one of the more interesting songs on the album. And then we have the closer, "A Day in the Life," which is the only real classic on this album. Somehow the group manages to top its previous closer with this, their most apocalyptic and world-changing track. Those ghostly Lennon verses remind me of "Strawberry Fields Forever" from the same time period, and no one can ever forget the "musical orgasms" from the orchestra that take us into another plane entirely. This track almost feels out of place on the album, placed after the reprise of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonelly Heards Club Band," because it is so substantial. It is rightfully often considered their finest song.

This album indeed would have been stronger had they included their double A-side single of the time, "Strawberry Fields Forever"/"Penny Lane" (perhaps the finest single of all time), but instead it was placed on the following LP, Magical Mystery Tour, a move George Martin apparently regrets to this day. Those are psychedelic songs of real depth and insight (not to mention they have stronger melodies). I don't want to paint this as a bad album, but coming after the growth of everything since Beatles for Sale, it just feels a little too cute for me. The sound on this is very baroque. Geoff Emerick, recording engineer on Sgt. Pepper, said, "The Beatles insisted that everything on Sgt. Pepper had to be different. Sounds were either distorted, limited, heavily compressed, or treated with excessive equalization. We had microphones right down in the bells of the brass instruments and headphones turned into microphones attached to violins." That may be so, but that doesn't make the songs any better.

--Edward

The Beatles, Album by Album--Revolver

This is the point where the Beatles leave the rest of the pack behind forever. This is by my tally the second masterpiece from the Fab Four (go Hard Day's Night!) and their first Grand Artistic Statement. One of three great albums from '65 and '66 that changed rock music forever (along with Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited and the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds), with Revolver we find a band maturing emotionally as they innovate stylistically. I have said earlier that the joy of the Beatles is watching them grow album by album. On this we find them reaching the emotional ambiguity and confusion of young adulthood. But along with this comes the grand ambition of a group of four guys who really want to leave their mark on popular music forever.

I'll admit that this album was not a favorite of mine upon first listen. It is very unlike everything that came before it in that it doesn't feel like a pop album. Their songwriting seems much less catchy than normal as they try to veer away from traditional pop songcraft towards something new and untapped. But through many repeated listenings I have come to discover that this is a "state of mind" album. (Paraphrasing here, something not worth listening to twice isn't worth listening to once.) While perhaps it does not cover as many musical styles as the White Album would, Revolver's songs each have their own emotional/intellectual state which remains sealed off from everything around them. They are each like individual short stories or films. I love that about this album. And that really pushes forward the idea that this is a band reaching adulthood, that they want to try to document everything around them and especially what is happening inside of them. There are songs on here about their reaction to fame. There are songs on here about the desire to connect with other people. There are songs in here about the essential meaninglessness of human ego. And there are songs on here about yellow submarines. No album manages to be as broadly encompassing of the human condition in 35 minutes or so as Revolver does. Each song has its own unique world of sound and lyrics, something which was a first for this (and any) group.

What enabled this great leap forward for the Beatles was a greatly increased devotion towards the process of album-making itself. There was a gap of eight months between Rubber Soul and Revolver, with only one single ("Paperback Writer"/"Rain") released in the gap, which did show signs of the path the group was heading down. This was the longest gap ever between releases for a group which was previously cranking out hits faster than their audience could consume them. Feeling increasingly withdrawn due to the pressures of their relentless touring/filming/recording schedule, the group would play their final tour dates immediately after Revolver and then begin to work solely in the studio. This was an unprecendented step, to say the least. But it showed their increasing focus on creating music instead of just being a financial act there to make money. Revolver is right when this happens.

The increasing time in the studio led to a quantum leap forward in sonic experimentation. Right from the first seconds as Harrison's "Taxman" starts with studio chatter and a loose countdown, the Beatles have abandoned the crisp productions of their previous efforts for something more organic and free-form. Like all great records, Revolver has its own sound. Where Blonde on Blonde has "that thin, that wild mercury sound," Revolver has a bright, brassy, trebly, clear sound, showcased best on songs like "And Your Bird Can Sing" and "Got to Get You Into My Life" and "She Said She Said." To me the edgy, angry sound is somehow mixed with the black and white picture on the cover. That perfectly illustrates it. It's an acid-rock sound that cuts through the air from your speakers or headphones into your brain. It represents a group full of increased attitude (George's bitter rant against the England's taxation system in "Taxman"; Lennon's "Queen Jane Approximately"-like dirge against materialistic women in "And Your Bird Can Sing"), increased uncertainty (the stuttering disconnect between internal feelings, intellectual ideas, and external communication in George's "I Want to Tell You"), and increased ambitions (all of it). There are almost too many aural moments on this record for me to try to talk about, but it should be noted that all are used to add to the atmosphere and character of the song. Everything is in service of the songwriting. Note the beautiful backwards guitar solo in "I'm Only Sleeping," a song about a disconnect from the outside world and a retreat into dreams. Note the chaste, virginal quality of "Here, There and Everywhere," which is perhaps McCartney's prettiest song, written about long-time girlfriend Jane Asher. It was purportedly inspired by Pet Sounds and perhaps specifically "God Only Knows," and while it can't reach the high summits that that track inhabits, what song can? The melody is so delicate it feels like it could fall apart at any second. I love the Eastern-sounding guitar part as Paul sings "And if she's beside me I know I need never care."

The lyrics on here are also a giant leap forward. Gone are the mostly earnest romantic tracks of their past. Instead there are songs about any number of subjects that had never been tackled before in popular music. "Love You To" is a song about the temporal nature of reality and human existence complete with an entirely Indian orchestration. "Doctor Robert" is about a drug dealer. I can't even tell what "She Said She Said" is about. At this point, you can tell the Beatles felt comfortable enough with their own abilities that they could tackle anything and everything and turn it into great music. I think out of all the Beatles, Paul benefitted the most from their transformation into a studio band. Inspired by Brian Wilson, Paul took to the studio with great enthusiasm and a willingness to try new things. His songwriting on here shows tremendous maturity, especially on "Eleanor Rigby" and "For No One." "Eleanor Rigby" showcases his tremendous ability at writing songs about other people that can shape a portrait of a life in only a few, well-chosen lines. He is like a great short story writer in his deft characterization and his ability to emphathize with others. John was able to create great songs about himself and his own personal demons, while McCartney could great ones about other people he saw around him. Perhaps this is finally the ultimate difference between a happy person who could emphathize with others and an unhappy person who we ourselves could sympathize with. "For No One" is one of the most emotionally devastating songs ever about a relationship gone sour. What makes this song so wrenching is that the two former lovers don't even recognize each other anymore: "And in her eyes you see nothing/No sign of love behind her tears cried for no one" and "She says that long ago she knew someone but now he's gone." Paul perfectly depicts the feeling of loss--loss of one's lover, but most of all of a part of him/herself--that really is the hardest part of a breakup, and he manages to do this in just over two minutes. The musical accompaniment for this is absolutely gorgeous.

Nothing quite says "Revolver" like the closing track on here, "Tomorrow Never Knows." I usually try not to put up a video of the obvious songs on these records, but in this case I couldn't help myself. Driven headlong on to the bowels of hell once again by Mr. Starr's fine drumming, this must have been an absolutely fucking mindblowing song when it came out back in '66. It still blows me away. I consider it to be the greatest psychedelic song of all time. The Chemical Brothers and many others have based their whole careers around trying to surpass this song, but I question whether anyone will. Lennon sings like a banshee on here, quoting Timothy Leary quoting the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Sound effects (largely created by Paul) blow out of your speakers as you feel external reality slipping away as you float downstream.

While no song up until this point had attempted to capture the psychedelic state like this one, I think it bears mentioning that, though drug-influenced, I don't find this to be a druggy record. The songwriting is too concise and focused on here. Sgt. Pepper I do think is a fairly druggy record, and for that reason I find it a bit unfocused compared to the diamond clarity of this record. Drugs and Timothy Leary-style psychedelia were just one of the many influences on Revolver, along with Eastern philosophy and music, showtunes, the Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, soul music, and God knows what else. This is really one of the first times where all of the Beatles' many influences were subsumed into their own style. Everything sounds completely their own here. And at this point, no one else sounded like the Beatles (not that they weren't trying). Their time in the studio paid off as they came out sounding like no one else in the world. For a long time this album wasn't given enough credit compared to Sgt. Pepper, because until the Beatles records were released on CD in '87, America could only listen to Revolver in a different version than its original British LP release (it was fairly commonplace for American versions of British records to be different--don't ask me how it was different, since I have only listened to the CD version). When people finally heard the original version of Revolver, its critical and public reception has steadily increased until the very high pinnacle where it's at now. And I genuinely feel that that reputation is deserved.

--Edward

Merry Christmas!

And for Christmas, the people want Cooooooxxxxxx

Christmas Band Names!

Ye olde Christmas tradition! These were two lists where it was mentioned that we should write holiday-themed band names; note Zack was really the only one to write such names, but wow were they Christmassy. Season's Greetings y'all! (Note that they were written on the back of some stickers and on a napkin, hence the titles)

Sticker List

- Timmy cried on Jesus’ birthday
- Joseph’s ass is my favorite out of those
- As he rocketed through the sky in a ball of flame, we realized right then how cool Rick really was.
- Bachelor of the minute: Jackson Moses Burton
- Left to his own devices, big jerk Jeremiah wiped his butt with torn out Bible pages
- How the Grinch spread smallpox
- John smiled when he realized what had happened to Jodie – she had been devouring poop for three weeks
- Happy Quanza Charlie Brown
- Good riddance Grover, the world will be better off without you
- Steve puts the “vagina” in “crowd pleaser”
- Children, I have some bad news, Santa is dead
- Shit Wailers
- Creamy Buttocks


Napkin List

- When told by the prophet God meant for him to be crucified, Jesus responded, “That two timing whore”
- Smokey Fireborn Ass Crack
- Smokey Robinson smelled like pampers
- That baby pooped in Greg’s mouth
- Christmas killed my dad
- Rick sleepwalked into my bedroom and then he slapped the dog
- Roger puts the rape in “buttrape”
- Spell-bound Negro
- Grandma farted and everything got quiet
- Steve uses a walker in the bathroom to stable himself
- Old Churchie MacWiggers farts when he sleeps
- We all thought it was funny when the lunch lady dressed like Hitler
- By the toll of the bell, meet me over at Charlie’s
- The Christmas tree ate the dog
- Spices and Cornmeals flowed out of Greg’s pants
- John’s got that funky hip groove going. Maybe I should greet him.
- Sweat poured out of Rob’s brow as his friend and neighbor gasped, constipated, in the next room.

The Beatles, Album by Album--Rubber Soul

Rubber Soul is probably the earliest album chronologically in the Beatles' career that most people buy. That is probably because critics have been bowing at its feet for quite some time now. It's a great album, no doubt about that, especially in relation to other artists' catalogues. But whether it's quite as good as people make it out to be, I'm not so sure. Rolling Stone has it as their number five album of all time, ahead of the White Album and Abbey Road and countless other albums (all but four of them, in fact) by others. Now I don't want to sound like I'm bashing Rubber here, but of course my opinion is that you should try their albums before this too.

This is vintage mid-period Beatles, complete with a trippy-looking cover and the introduction of the biting humor in their lyrics that marked the mature Beatles (plus the first appearance of a sitar on "Norwegian Wood"!). On here we see the lyrics catch up to the musical innovations that had been bubbling for a few albums now, but especially on Help!. The first two songs illustrate this point well. Both are about the kind of dominant, aggressive women that were not typically depicted in the very male-oriented early years of rock, full of girls waiting by the phone for a call from their boyfriend and always eager to please. On "Drive My Car" and "Norwegian Wood," Paul and John, respectively, paint a very different picture of women, and both wind up being the ones feeling used at the end of the song, instead of the other way around. "Norwegian Wood" is especially notable for having an interesting and slightly Eastern-sounding melody to go along with the sitar in it (George apparently saw this in a shop and liked it so much that he stuck it on their next record). John said he wrote this song to try to disguise an affair he had with another woman from his wife, but really, did he even try very hard to disguise it? Seems pretty obvious to me. I do like how they turn the sexual tables upside down on these first two songs. Even without the lyrics, though, these are classic tunes.

George returns here with a vengeance, and though there are varying opinions on his two numbers on here ("Think for Yourself" and "If I Needed Someone"), I for one think they are great. Both are in the classic fuck-you genre that he seemed to love. "Think for Yourself" has a thunderous fuzzbox bass riff that propels the song, which features George berating a girl for seemingly no reason. Though George was known as the quiet Beatle, the opening lyric really sums up what happened when he did have something to say: "I've got a word or two to say about the things that you do." I can't imagine any girl (or guy, because it might be about one for all I know) liking this having been written about them. "If I Needed Someone" is almost equally nasty, but its lyrics are surrounded by beautiful ringing guitar lines and harmonies. This was apparently George's tribute to the Byrds, who like I said earlier, seemed to base their whole career off George's Rickenbacker 12-string guitar sound and the Beatles for Sale song "What You're Doing" (this isn't too fair to the Byrds, I'll admit, but you can tell how much they were influenced for sure). But it's a nice way for George to pay tribute, since this does sound very Byrdsy.

Lennon had stepped up his lyrical game, from the quintessential lost-in-young-adulthood song "Nowhere Man" to the biting portrayal of love-domination in "Girl." "Nowhere Man" is one of the Beatles brightest sounding songs (especially that guitar solo--that last harmonic note is like a teardrop of an angel!), full of stacked harmonies. I think this is a rather interesting accompaniment for a song about someone feeling empty inside, but it has grown on me. "Girl" is a pretty brutal song about a kind of girl that everyone has known, one that takes out her internal pain on a guy who loves her through subtle emotional manipulation. Apparently this was John singing about some sort of idealized girl, a woman that he loved though he hadn't even met yet but would find in Yoko. Weird stuff. He obviously had some issues with women, especially when you get to a song like "Julia" that combines his feelings for his dead mother who left him and the earth spirit/idealized mother he found in Yoko. It all makes for good songs though! "Run for Your Life" was perhaps his most despised song that he ever wrote. I can see why, since those are some pretty misogynistic lyrics, but oh well.

"What Goes On" is your obligatory Ringo-gets-shit-on number of the lot and it takes the verbal beating farther than it had ever gone. "You didn't even think of me as someone with a name. Did you mean to break my heart and and watch me die? Tell me why." Wow, brutal stuff. If this came out of Lennon's mouth it would be emotionally devastating, but when Ringo sings it, you just want to give the big guy a hug. "Michelle" is often bashed for being sentimental, but it clearly preys on my love for European women and has a beautiful melody. John could write some cool and oftentimes very emotional songs, but no one write a bitchin' melody quite like Paul.

Finally we have "In My Life," which was perhaps the last great composition written in large part by both Paul and John. I love the romantic image of these two sitting nose-to-nose writing all-time classics, as they supposedly did while banging out "I Want to Hold Your Hand" by the piano at Paul's girlfriend's house. From this point forward, the group's members would increasingly work on their own. This was a gradual process, though, which would hit its culmination in the White Album/Let It Be time. "In My Life" is absolutely stunning, with some beautiful guitar, a wistful lyric, and a great sped-up piano/harpsichord solo from the one and only George Martin. This manages to capture both a feeling of nostalgia and the joy of new love in one fell swoop. It is a remarkable illustration of a band just beginning to hit the emotional maturity of adulthood, able to look back and look forward at the same time, and to condense their life experiences into artistic form through the gift of their bodacious, kick-ass songwriting talent.

--Edward

Favorite Music Videos: "Weapon of Choice"

This video really epitomizes the joy of music videos. Although a catchy, enjoyable song with plenty to show for itself in audio format, when this tune is in sync with Christopher Walken (as happens with most things when in sync with that man), magic happens. There was a period of time when I'd wake up to catch the bus and have maybe ten or so minutes to eat breakfast in front of the TV, and I'd either watch the super condensed NBA highlights from the ESPNews channel (even more condensed than SportsCenter), or I'd watch the MTV and VH1 morning wake-up music video countdown/mix. Now I know of the outrage at these stations for playing filth and no longer music videos, but I will submit that they do still play videos either at 4 am or somewhere around there and in the early morning. Granted, nowadays, it's not that great because all of these new videos playing are from bands that are knockoffs of Nickelback, which is a knockoff of Creed, which was a knockoff of Bush, which was actually a good band that basically looked up to the even better Pearl Jam and Nirvana.

Anywho, this is the setting when I'd find myself the music videos that would stick with me, and this video in particular stands above most all of them. Christopher Walken basically just dances his ass off around an empty and gigantic hotel, and I won't spoil the end if you haven't seen it, but it somehow gets even better at the end. Apparently Walken did dancing and probably a ton of theater before the likes of Deer Hunter, and it shows here. The man's got moves, moves we all wish we had.

(They removed the embedding capability for this video and sorry for the advertisement - stupid Youtube trying to actually make a buck, I mean come on!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AqFBSf4xS4

Do Fries Go With That Shake?

As the new year approaches, I am reminded of how I spent my last New Year's Eve: in a motel in Midlothian, Virginia on acid and salvia with a friend who had dropped out of college to pursue a career in construction. After staring at the carpet for awhile and remarking on how Bruce Willis looks like a video game character, we discovered something wonderful. In 1986, Parliament-Funkadelic's George Clinton continued his solo career with the gem "Do Fries Go with That Shake". Deciding to base the video off of the story of Snow White, replacing the evil step-mother with a fast food monger added to George Clinton's brilliance, as well as my friend and my entertainment as we watched in amazement.

This week, I had been in California for two days, shallowly hoping to see a celebrity, when I received a call from my mother that she just went Christmas caroling with a member of Parliament-Funkadelic. Instead of asking her just how she managed to do this, I made the connection of P-Funk once again coming around in time to spread cheer for the New Year.

Favorite Music Videos: "Maybe Not" and "I Found a Reason"

I had been planning to post these some time, but in light of watching "Falling Down" last night with Michael Douglas, it is decidedly time to do it now.

These two videos are by Cat Power, who I found by way of the Juno soundtrack (OMG LMAO OKTHXBAI). She's got a really sultry voice, has apparently had problems with alcoholism, and is beautiful. I'm not sure how long she's been singing but probably for a while, maybe since the late 90s? I don't know, but these videos I found on Youtube when starting out at my job, and they always manage to calm me/put me in a deep sleep of EMOTIONS. Anywho, I like them a lot so more on each:

"Maybe Not"

The user disabled the ability to embed this video, so here's the link instead:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skreabVrMRk

Although it's really only a bunch of clips from movies put to music, I love the ones they picked and how the music syncs up to them. From the poor quality Shawshank to Donnie Darko to The Way of the Gun to Punch Drunk Love to Sin City. It also includes a clip from the movie Falling Down, which I finally watched, about a white collared dude that I guess just lost his job ("my job lost me"), and he basically just takes out his frustrations on all of society wielding uzis and missiles and a shotgun - although he doesn't actually kill as much as he disrupts and makes a stand for the somewhat common (white) man - all while trying to make his way back to his daughter who is having a birthday and his wife who has a restraining order against him. A wild, preposterous, but great movie. Makes sense to have the sweet voice of Cat Power sing as he waves his briefcase at some Hispanic street toughs (who are the worst ever documented and executing a drive by shooting).

-------

"I Found a Reason"

This is the second video on the double feature of fan-made Cat Power videos (I believe this is fan-made), and it is basically stunning. Whatever filter, or just extreme sunlight that's coming into the camera has turned this water into a shimmery yellow alternate world, where silhouettes of women paddle gently across the water on their surfboards (ala half of the Kappa brand logo). I also love the song for this and it again helps to melt the cubicle environ when listening. Beautiful video.

The Beatles, Album by Album--Help!

Soundtrack to the Beatles' second film (within one year!), Help! is often considered the final Beatles "early album." However, I like to think of it as the first of the Beatles mid-60s experimental albums. You could make a case either way, but to me it shares more in common with the experimentalism of Rubber Soul and Revolver than it does with albums like Beatles for Sale and With the Beatles. I will try to make the case why in this essay.

Though the album isn't all original, the number of covers on here is only two (in my memory, they had more, but this only proves the point that they were making strides here). The album opens with an all-time classic, the title track. Famous for disguising Lennon's insecure cries for help amid joyful pop music, this is, simply put, a great song. I love George's backing vocals on here. And the lyrics really were great for the time period. The energy on this is so infectious. Lennon dishes out a second classic on "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away." I always read that this is very Dylan-influenced, and perhaps it is with the introspective lyrics, but Dylan could not write a song this catchy to save his life. The descending chords before the chorus are so beautiful. Note the use of an ocarina (I believe it's this) at the end here, foreshadowing the group's extensive use of a variety of instruments. The most famous instrumental innovation on here is the use of a string quartet in "Yesterday," which is perhaps the Beatles' most perfect song. George Martin's idea for this was brilliant and would again point the way towards their increasing use of strings. What separates the strings in a Beatles song from the strings in the typical American pop/soul hits of the day was that the Beatles displayed more of a classical bent in their use of strings (no doubt because of George Martin's influence), in which the orchestration would change to suit the nature of the song. Also, using strings in rock music as opposed to more "adult" fare was a radical innovation. "Yesterday" is devastatingly gorgeous, strings or no. This was also the first track to feature only one Beatle on it.

"Ticket to Ride" just feels like a mid-period Beatles single ("Day Tripper," "We Can Work It Out," "Paperback Writer," etc.) instead of an early one. The group is definitely getting heavier and louder. This song is absolutely propelled by Ringo's thunderous drumming. "I've Just Seen a Face" is a song seemingly unique in the Beatles' catalogue. I've never heard a song better capture the delirious and headlong fall into love like this one. That guitar intro is great and then it just drops away into the undeniable rhythm and vocal melody of Paul's. This song seems to veer away from rock/pop into a folksy influence. As the Beatles' career progressed, they would explore a wider variety of styles like this.

Even the more "Beatles-sounding" songs show innovations here, from the electric piano of "Tell Me What You See" to the volume pedal swells of George's unusually earnest "I Need You" to the saloon-sounding piano solo in "You Like Me Too Much." George is back to writing, and although his songs are not as strong as they would later be, it's always nice hearing the style of another writer on here. While I don't like "You're Going to Lose That Girl" emotionally because it makes me think of having my girlfriend stolen, objectively you can't deny that it's a slammin' song, complete with John's wailing vocals, Ringo on the bongos, and pulsating piano. An underrated aspect of the Beatles is the strength of their rhythm section. They were always coming up with interesting percussion or rhythm guitar parts, and Paul was one of the all-time great bassists.

Even the two covers on here are great. "Act Naturally" is a vehicle for Ringo singing in his preferred country-western genre about starring in a "film about a man that's sad and lonely," and that he'll nail the part because all he's gotta do is "act naturally." How can someone not love Ringo? Is that possible? George's guitar on here is delightful. I love when bands of this time did genre numbers like this. "Dizzy Miss Lizzy" is one of the last remnants of their affection for old-time rock 'n' roll, but it's a great one, full of George's stinging guitar lines and a rhythmic heaviness that updates '50s rock to a new era.

While Rubber Soul always gets all the credit for being the Beatles' first foray into musical innovation--and I can't deny that it took it much farther than this album--I think Help! should get a little more credit for serving as a jumping pad for future experimentation. This began the mid-60s trilogy that culminated in the shockingly new and mature Revolver, which is perhaps the Beatles' finest album.

--Edward

Favorite Music Videos: "Virtual Insanity"

Jamiroquai - "Virtual Insanity"



Before Napoleon Dynamite moon-booted his way across the stage to Jamiroquai's "Canned Heat", a poofy-hatted Jamiroquai dance himself across a room with a moving floor (or moving room frame) in an equally, if not more, iconic dance sequence in his music video for "Virtual Insanity". This was a huge video growing up, because it was basically cashing in on music videos' peak of popularity in the 90s before people would get music leaked from artists online, and before people started choosing fan-made videos set to photos and words rather than wait out the 15 seconds of solitude during the commercials that precede the Vevo and more commercial Youtube videos for artists.

Not only was this the best time to get your face time AND promote your album, this was the time when artists were compelled to make more creative and captivating videos to battle it out in TRL's cheesy studio. Jamiroquai obviously knew exactly what he was doing releasing this, because it contains some of the best music video elements: fixed-camera-angle-in-a-room, awesome clothing, and warped reality. Music videos were the video games of music in that they allowed artists and viewers to go and do whatever they wanted within this little world they created. Finally, Jamiroquai is singing of the pending doom for music videos, for CDs, and for all media outlets for the 90s on the whole - the virtual insanity of an internet-obsessed culture. A prophet with a funny hat and slick moves.

"Futures made of virtual insanity
Now always seem to be governed by this love we have
For useless, twisting of our then new technology
Oh now there is no sound for we all live underground"

White kid's music: Eminem

The first time I can remember listening to Eminem was driving with my just of age sister, Katie, to a neighbor's house. We were in the car and listening to music when "The Real Slim Shady" came on. I'll admit, it didn't grab me, but my sister somehow knew all the words and that made it cool to me.

The next thing I can remember was coming home after school and sneaking some t.v. time (which in those days was always MTV). "Stan" was the featured song. I will admit again that the song wasn't the first thing I noticed. No, I noticed that the dude playing Stan was the guy from the movie Casper. I guess I am trying to say that I don't remember the first time I really got into Eminem-like it wasn't some see the light moment. It just seems like I had always been into him.

I do know that he was my favorite artist in high school. I pirated his albums and listened to the songs repeatedly. I could rap all the lyrics, though in those days I replaced 'fuck' or 'bitch' with F or B. I would tenaciously argue anyone that he was a genius and was better than anybody else. I still think the man is a genius and I still think he is better than everybody else ( in the rapper world). I mean the dude can rhyme ANYTHING come on!

My life hasn't been hard, but saying that doesn't mean I haven't fallen on a few hard times- I've always put his stuff on. He mixes anger with sadness with humor to form a web of music that can get you through any difficult time. Look past all his misogynistic tendencies and he really does strike a chord with any sort of mood you're in.

Sorry- I get bored writing all this stuff and I don't organize my thoughts well. I'll try to post some more about this. There are so many songs I can write about. But just know that the dude keeps rapping, and keeps making awesome music- maybe not the same as his earlier stuff (which I loved everything), but he hits some spots in all of us- and if it's not your emotions its probably because you are a girl and he is hitting you in the face- cause he fucking hates women

The Beatles, Album by Album--Beatles for Sale

This is the most troubling LP of the Beatles' career, with the possible exception of Let It Be (now that I think about it, with the very likely exception of Let It Be). I think that this is because it is the first album they made without a sense of musical growth. It feels like a step back from A Hard Day's Night. Beatles for Sale would've been a perfectly acceptable follow-up to With the Beatles, but after the tremendous sophistication and development of A Hard Day's Night, one can't help feeling short-changed by this. It reminds me of Dylan's The Times They Are a-Changin'. That would've been an acceptable, even great second album but from him, but coming after The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, it feels like a step back. Beatles for Sale also feels like this, but that doesn't mean there isn't some goodness on here to be mined.

Although this is the first album without any sense of musical growth, the key innovation on here is John Lennon starting to find his voice as a lyricist via a strong Bob Dylan influence. This is best seen in the opening trilogy that serves as not only a rocking intro to the album, but also as its highlight. "No Reply" is possibly my favorite Beatles opener ever (its only real contender is on the next album), creating a sense of high drama through the quiet-loud verse-chorus contrast that Kurt Cobain would milk for all it was worth in Nirvana (actually, Kurt was very strongly influenced by the Beatles). The bridge amps up the romantic desperation of John even further, and the way it settles back into that verse again, only to explode with the final chorus, is John at his finest. As I've said before, no one sold the desperation of love quite as well as Lennon. It's interesting that Lennon was writing all these songs about romantic insecurity at the same time as he was married with a kid. He was probably the Beatle least playing the field and, from my understanding, he felt very trapped in his marriage and would often stay at home and get loaded (Matt voice). "I'm a Loser" takes the desperation even further into a sense of self-loathing, something unthinkable in the pop music of past. It must have been rather shocking to hear a member of the world's biggest rock band singing, "I'm a loser, and I'm not what I appear to be." This introspection and psychological insight/honesty was not possible in popular music before Bob Dylan. I love the lyric, "She was a girl in a million, my friend. I should have known she would win in the end," because this idea that love is a game that will eventually screw you over, instead of being something mutual and beautiful, that is so John Lennon. We all feel that insecurity sometimes, and John was always the best one at putting it out there in the open. I also love the way his vocals dip into those depressing low notes. "Baby's in Black" concludes the opening trilogy on a fine note. I like the dual-singing of John and Paul on this one, and of course it's a depressing one.

At this point, it feels like the Beatles should not be doing covers. Obviously after A Hard Day's Night, they proved they could deliver an album of consistently strong originals, which was a first at this time (I think even Buddy Holly or Beach Boys albums where they wrote everything were completely full of filler), other than maybe Dylan's Freewheelin', but he was really a folk musician at this point, so that doesn't count (Bringing It All Back Home would change this). It doesn't help that their covers are from increasingly outdated early rock 'n' rollers (made outdated by the Beatles themselves). Regardless, there are some good covers on here. "Rock and Roll Music" finds John delivering the fire to Chuck Berry's original (Chuck Berry seems like the most covered '50s rock artist at this point--everyone was doing his shit), and I find it better than the original with its storming piano and bass. "Mr. Moonlight" is perhaps the most maligned Beatles song, but I like it, partly because it's so over the top (listen to that organ solo!). I love Lennon's vocals on it too. He puts the blade to the heat. Carl Perkins is covered twice on here, and both songs are decent enough. George tellingly sings "Everybody's Trying to Be My Baby," which is full of a sense of tiredness and distanced bemusement at the craziness of Beatlemania. The album title Beatles for Sale itself is rather ironic: this is not only a new Beatles album up for sale, but the Beatles themselves felt like commodities merely there for the rabid consumption by their fans. Just look at that album cover!

"Honey Don't" is the other Perkins cover on here, and Ringo lends characteristic charm to the vocals. Ringo provided so much comic touch in all of his wounded lover songs (which was most of them), because he could somewhow seem both funny and noble when he was self-deprecating. Lennon provided the high drama; Ringo provided the tragic Woody Allen-style comedy. "Words of Love" is another fine, Buddy Holly cover. What I like about this one is the way those vocals are hummed beautifully by John and Paul, really illustrating the soft-spoken words of reassurance that they are singing about. I've never heard the Buddy Holly original, so I'm not sure how much of this they borrowed from him. "Kansas City/Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey!" is my least favorite song on here probably. It seems like it's not something Paul would have picked to sing. John always seemed more fit to do the old rockers, and anyways, this is not my favorite kind of rock 'n' roll song from the '50s.

I'm sure I've made the album seem pretty good by now and someone is asking, "Why did you say it was troubling then?" Like I said, this just feels like another good early Beatles album instead of a step forward into deeper terrain. I feel that the original songwriting is not as strong as it could be by this point. Obviously the Beatles were absolutely worn out by this point. After all, this was a band that gave up touring at the height of their popularity two short years from now. "I'll Follow the Sun" is a pretty but slight ballad from Paul. "What You're Doing" is decent, and the way its ringing guitar riff repeats throughout seems to have inspired the entire career of the Byrds (along with Bob Dylan's lyrics--exactly how many fucking Dylan songs did they cover again?). "Eight Days a Week" would be a great song on their first two albums, but the Beatlemania feel seems a bit outdated by this point. Still, nothing matches the opening barrage of Lennon's songs, and for that reason it's hard not to view this album as a step down from the summit of A Hard Day's Night.

--Edward

Mediumus Maximus

I think it's interesting how "modern music" means something so different than "modern" pieces of most any other type of medium at this time. I hardly consider myself equipped to begin trying to compare it to all mediums, but I feel like music, more than any other medium, stands so much taller as it leans over our shoulder from the 50s, 60s, and 70s. For the amount of incredible, life-altering music that came out during those decades, listening and searching for music in the 2000s, well now 2010s, is tough to do without letting in the demons, whispering in your ear that you're never ever going to find anything as good.

It's every stupid story told about a kid trying not to live his dad's life, but knowing that even though he wants nothing to do with career his dad had, he identifies on a deeper level with the man whether he wants to or not. You can't deny the past. Well you can, but then you're an idiot. The point is, there is a shit ton to live up to from past music - and not just any music, but music that echoes from our parents' generation, what we grew up hearing on the radio, what we found later in great films also from their generation, and what influenced every goddamn thing we hear today - except autotune, that's different.

But that's why I love music, and why I love trying random things that come along, because, more than almost any other medium, the experience hits you before you know you've been hit. If you're really listening, really letting go of your ears, then the world opens anew, and the best part is, is that this works for every and any decade of music. Of course the stuff from before our parents' generation is a bit tougher, but I'm sure it would come in time (and as Edward says, discipline - too true).

I like saving things, knowing that they'll be there when I come back, while I keep them in reserve. This is the way I find myself with older music. I know it well enough to trust it, and keep my heart with it. But at the same time, I use that security to push on and throw whatever crap I find onto the speakers, to push farther into oblivion, leaving threads connecting all the way back to what I know won't go away. I know we posted a lot at the beginning of this blog about music, how it's heard, and where it's going. I think it's fitting that this month has come back to music.

There's something about the medium that manages to change at a fast enough pace on the surface that the catchy and engrossing will keep our attentions in the filler, while the overarching changes in the genres and artists and styles define the greater movements of our generations. I can feel this more than with movies, more than with TV, and more than with books. Everyone is pretty much aligned somewhere along the spectrum with music. It defines regions, eras, and art. It manages to be relevant from all times, all the time.

The Beatles, Album by Album--A Hard Day's Night

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Eminem-

Just to let all you know- I have finals and once I am finished getting raped and recover, I will write a long post on EMINEM. I don't care if any of you like it

Triptown: Music Artist Stream-of-Consciousness

Dave Matthews Band was implanted as my first musical icon by my sister, reinforced by my Dad, established some time in early elementary school.

Counting Crows weren't far off, my sister had a crush on a guy from upstate NY who liked them as well. I eventually saw them while at college some 12 or 15 years later, and I was disappointed that the dreadlocked lead singer didn't even try to speak to the crowd or even really sing to us; he was in his own world.

I often consider Moby in his own world, as we were when we took a trip one time and listened to Play on looping repeat for some 63:11(13?) minutes and seconds.

I used to shuffle in and out songs from my blossoming downloaded music library from burn-to-CD queues to try and fit as close to 80 minutes as I could manage; I had themed mix CDs, the more modern, miscellaneous songs labeled as Imported 1, Imported 2,... etc., the classic rock as Classic 1, Classic 2,... etc., some more specialized like Electric Feel for more dance, techno, electric type music, List 1, List 2,... etc. for instrumental songs, and various other groupings; I scribbled their artist names all over the CDs in weird fonts and styles, all for the pleasure of my own weird head; only a couple artists managed to get their own CDs, Led Zeppelin being one.

Greg and Edward were responsible for Zeppelin's entrance into my life, along with a steady stream of artists notching their songs on someone's Top 100 Guitar Solos of all time list - Possibly my favorite of those songs: "Comfortably Numb" by Pink Floyd

I threw "Comfortably Numb" into Jake and my 2nd movie for our English class project about "figuring out what we were going to do in life" or some shit; we made the teacher and certain girls in the class cry.

The movie also contained the song, "Where is My Mind" by The Pixies, that I used while pretending to faint giving a speech; I of course was infatuated with the song ever since I'd watched the credits of Fight Club on the little TV with a built-in VCR set in front of our treadmill, which I sat on, contemplating the strangeness of the modern man. The movie (and probably to a small extent, the song) would become the torch carried by all the scrappy, scraggily boys of our generation wanting a reason to feel both noble and animalistic in our confused teenage endeavors as modern boys.

"Modern Man" is a song from the most recent album by Arcade Fire, The Suburbs. I like it a lot.

Arcade Fire is an absurdly large band led by a icy white, fish-skinned, Tim Burton character looking guy with hair that is usually wetted down in some strange way, and it all makes you wonder where the hell he came from and how.

I got into Arcade Fire freshman year when I discovered that the dorms had a program called "MyTunes" available to share and steal other students' music from those also living in the building. Funeral looped constantly in my earphones as I cursed Chemistry, banging my head into the book while games of Super Smash Bros. looped constantly beside me in our room with the friendly, foul-mouthed nerds from our side of the hallway.

The owner of Super Smash Bros. (and, creepily, every Mario sports game ever made for the Game Cube - you'd be surprised how many there actually are) was really, really into techno remixes of random shit, that often got played at Six Flags the Chicago White Sox stadium and/or in DDR, notably "Listen to Your Heart" by DJ Inphinity.

I'm pretty sure Joe was obsessed with that song (and probably all of Cannon for that matter - for those who don't know, they were a youth soccer team, very into themselves and Kelly Clarkson, I spent a year with them, and despite feeling like a cult when talking with others outside of the team, it was a shit ton of fun), as he often got obsessed with one song never ever ever ever stopped playing it.

Some of these I can recall include "Gangster's Paradise", "Bartender (Sittin' At A Bar)", and "Wagon Wheel", although I know there were hundreds of others, which were also adopted by Sam Elliot, the Wences, and T. Dooley - 80s hair metal, cheesy ballads, and prolifically pro-Uncle Sam/anti-terrorist/anti-minority/pro-large American made truck country music.

"Canyonero", a song for the fictional vehicle of the same name on the Simpsons is probably the best parody of this niche I've ever seen.

The Simpsons have some of the funniest and best songs I've ever heard, period. And that will end this random rant on music.

Favorite Music Videos: "NYC"

This is going to be far from comprehensive just because there are so many damn videos out there for songs, but as I go through the days I'll pick one or two and write some stoff on them. Note that these could be fan-made or artist-made.

Starting it off:

Interpol - "NYC"
First, the fan-made one, because it's just so ridiculous and yet important which clips of shit this person picks to put to this song.



When I first saw this (hungover and loopy-headed), I had rarely seen something so obscure that seemed to match up so well to the many obscure things I've seen but just generally don't bring up. I mean, granted, the whole superhero costume wearing people and the Indian dancing I haven't seen, but like Short Circuit (although I think this is Short Circuit 2) and Batman and Jordan - well those last two aren't that obscure, but they moved me (like whoa!).

Some highlights - Batman, Short Circuit 2, Jordan in "the escape" when he dunks on Ewing and when he dunks a rebound from a free throw shot, the dance-offs by the really enthusiastic guys, the car pulling a 360 degree plus parking job, the wavy screen of Hulk after it, and that this video includes clips of both A Knight's Tale and some cheesy romance movie with Keanu Reeves and Charlize Theron(?).

The artist-made video to this song is actually quite good too. It's basically what you'd expect to match the song in a sort of artsy collection of nightvision, fast-moving montages of big machines, close-ups, and an airport (music video staple of a locale).

The Beatles, Album by Album--With the Beatles

The Beatles' second album, With the Beatles, was also their second LP released in '63. It came out at the height of Beatlemania in England, as their third single, "She Loves You," which basically is Beatlemania in concise song form, pushed them to unprecedented heights of popularity in their home country. They had not, however, broken into the American shores yet. Their fourth single, "I Want to Hold Your Hand," and their subsequent appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show and stadium tour in the States, would break down the Atlantic wall in '64, but this time had not yet come to pass when With the Beatles was released at the end of 1963. This seems almost like a time of purity for the Beatles--they were bestsellers and beloved musical figures, but not yet the Christ-like icons that they would become in the coming years. Things were still about the music, the girls, and the fun back then.

Following a practice which they would sometimes use on later albums, the Beatles released no singles from this album. This was rather unusual, and displays a band full of confidence, not only that their current singles would sell, but that their LP could stand up on the strength of its songs. And it is indeed a songs album. Though it lacks the boundless energy and zest of the first album, it has a more consistent lineup than its predecessor. Though I've heard claims that this has a darker, more bitter feel than Please Please Me (mostly here), I can't say I really agree. Perhaps these claims are influenced by that iconic cover of the four lads half-covered in dark. I can see why someone would make this statement, though, because With the Beatles is much more R&B/soul-influenced than Please Please Me. We see a lot more John Lennon on this album, and less of the quirky covers that made the first album unique. This isn't a bad thing, though, because the Beatles, with songs like "You Really Got a Hold on Me" and "All I've Got to Do," proved they were an adept and soulful R&B band. One of the most underrated aspects of the Beatles for me is their strength as a straightforward, rocking ensemble back when they started. Although their songwriting was not always up to the standards they would set for all of rock music later on in their careers, they had a unique and thrilling power and energy especially in their rhythm section early on that set them apart from their peers.

Note the awesome rhythm guitar in "All My Loving." This is the most Beatlesmania-esque song on the album, but that guitar really takes it to another level. Paul didn't do as much of the writing on this album as John, but he delivered a classic with this. Their album opener is another killer, slamming itself out of those speakers even harder than "I Saw Her Standing There." "It Won't Be Long" rides itself to victory on the call-and-response chorus and Ringo's clashing cymbals. However, the second song, "All I've Got to Do," really sets the tone of the album for me. It's slightly stuttering rhythm and John's passionate vocal tells us that this will be a John-dominated R&B album.

John displays his love for American Motown proudly on here. "Please Mr. Postman" somehow comes near to toppling the great original by the Marvelletes (one could say I'm perhaps a bit biased towards girl groups, and even more biased that the original was used in Mean Streets in the best fight scene ever involving Harvey Keitel and a young, spry Bob DeNiro) through John's incredibly passionate, sometimes hilarious vocal performance ("Deliva da lettah, da soona da betta!"). Smokey Robinson (America's greatest living poet, according to Bob Dylan [!!]) also gets similar treatment from John with the awesome cover of "You Really Got a Hold on Me," featuring great harmony vocals from George and Paul. The only cover that I feel doesn't really stand up is their version of Chuck Berry's "Roll Over Beethoven." George's opening is a pretty weak version of the classic Chuck Berry double-stop opening (how many songs exactly did he write that have this intro?), and the whole thing just sounds like a purile version of a classic Berry song. But John's love for Berry is noble, considering just how much of an influence he had on rock and roll (I would say he is the #2 influence on early rock after Elvis). This is what John had to say on the subject: ""If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it 'Chuck Berry.'"

George puts out his first song on this album, called appropriately "Don't Bother Me," which might as well be his motto. It's not a great song, but I like it, partly because I love that whole fuck-you vibe of George around this time period. At a later date, it could get somewhat tiresome and annoying as he got more and more preachy, but at this point he just seemed like an angry young man. This is made even more interesting by the fact that he was in the biggest rock and roll band in the history of the world, so it's nice to think about someone who liked privacy and yet probably had absolutely none at this point. Lord knows he was getting laid a lot, though. From my memory, he won't have another song on an album for a good while, which is a shame, because even at this stage I think he showed some promise (others could probably debate that this isn't a great song, but oh well). I love the minor chords in here that go along with the lyrics.

"Till There Was You" is pure schmaltz, but no one in the entire world could pull off schmaltz like Paul, and he does so perfectly on it. Listen to that crisp guitar solo! There are some lesser songs on here ("Little Child," "Hold Me Tight"), but there is nothing that really stands out as terrible (I guess that is the Beatles for you). All of these early albums get better as you listen to them more. I would suspect that they are not nearly as tolerable to modern ears as the later Beatles albums, which sound incredibly modern (not surprising given how influential these albums were), but you have to realize that an album like Abbey Road was just not possible at this early date. The Beatles changed popular music itself as they advanced. They were at the top of their--and therefore everyone else's--game as each album came out. You have to try to keep that in mind listening to the early Beatles albums. But I personally love all of their early stuff. It's refreshing, when you are so used to hearing "Come Together" or "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" on the radio or on TV every day of your entire life. This is yet another reason to dig into their albums, because they have so many great songs that you never, ever hear on the radio (for unknown reasons).

--Edward

Desert Lives

There's not a whole lot to say about breaking into the post-college, post-school world of what is, the rest of your life. It's kind of like what I would imagine trying to describe a desert would be like (having not ever been to a desert); it's simply to vast to limit your perception well enough to take something away from the site. There's no longer anything that contains your life, nicely boxed up in five years of Elementary, three years of Middle, four years of High, or four years of Undergrad (variations on all apply). No, this is like a liquid set free on a surface, only to discover you kind of liked being held from spreading so thin. This is all not to say that this sort of outlandish new world I find myself in is somehow reportedly negative, but it is to address the true wild potential of the new world fearfully from a cubicle in a desert. (Sort of unrelated - I heard that British guy quote something I liked about deserts in a Planet Earth DVD, that the sands never stop shifting and being blown around on the surface, but the actual bases for the greater mountains of sand in the desert haven't moved in thousands of years.)

Now, you feel like you need to find something to build up from the ground to do something, because otherwise you might end up building yourself up from underground; like if we don't do something soon we'll have latched onto some sort of greater problem with life-girl, health, career, family, etc. and there will be no room to see anything else. I mean I guess that may be the big sort of hallucination of this desert, the big dreams of youth that appear hazy in the distance and when you get to them you're no longer providing for yourself, it's all for the next generation's chance to chase their undulating fantasies on the horizon. That may sound kind of sad, but in all honesty, I feel like at the rate I've been going over this year and a half into the desert I will probably be just fine with slowing it down. Don't get me wrong, I wanna live it up and see things and do things and all that, but I feel like I already have and already am. Not that I've led a glamorous life, but I tend to chronicle things with writings, pictures, and memories in me kopf, and each part of those, every little place/person/thing was like a little universe in itself. I feel like a life is a rather deceptive concept in that it pretends to be something that it's not: one entity that is complete and whole. School makes sense in a lot more ways than the after-school world because of those ~4 year intervals. Four years is about the length of time that my memory holds up, if that. Four years feels much more like a life than an entire life does. Childhood even feels like I lived three or four lives because of this, all of which were millenia ago, and I'm not even that old compared to a good chunk of the population. And the fact that I don't even have a distinct beginning of it all, no start of all memories that led to now, but rather a strange mythical past meshed between actual memories and fabricated memories from pictures and others' tales, that makes it all the stranger.

I guess I'm in the middle of something like my 6th life already based on those terms, and maybe in that sense of things I've got a couple years left of doing whatever I'm doing now before I'll just blank it all out and start over again with something else. People worry too much about the ultimate direction of things. People worry too much in general. I like that things can and do change, it puts things in perspective, as weird of a perspective that may be over time. I guess I've just spent so long trying to carve out something so defined in school that it ends up being a lot easier now to carve out much smaller things instead some grand, oppressive Career/voyage/journey that in reality is impossible to steer, control, or even hold onto. Unless you have the capacity for it, the education system we spent our lives (many at that) in was built to ship us out at a velocity and trajectory for the sun (when extrapolated). "It. just. don't. make. sense." It's a lot better to catch those fucking sand winds in some kinda sand-sailing type vessel and just ride those suckers out until you can ride them no more.

The Beatles, Album by Album--Please Please Me

The success of the Beatles' second single, "Please Please Me," led to their first LP in 1963, Please Please Me. It has one of the all-time great intros with the "One, two, three, faww" countdown by Paul bursting into the youthful exuberance of "I Saw Her Standing There." This song really sets the tone for the whole album. The Beatles' debut is an album of adolescent love, bursting with excitement at the possibilities to come. While relationships seems to be the theme (and will be for about the first half of Beatles albums), you can just as easily read this to be the excitement of creating and playing music. Lennon and McCartney start dipping their feet into the waters of songwriting here, and from the very get-go all of their singles were self-penned, which was rather unusual at the time. Their producer George Martin (the only true candidate for the Fifth Beatle as far as I'm concerned) initially pushed for them to record covers and release them as singles, but quickly learned that nothing they could cover could match up to the Lennon/McCartney originals. Still, at this point, John and Paul weren't the polished hits-makers that they would become later. As is the tradition of all of their early albums other than A Hard Day's Night, there are 6 covers on here and 8 originals. On a lot of these early albums, I love their covers just as much as the originals (sometimes more). Even though their songwriting wasn't always at its peak on these earlier albums, they brought more energy and enthusiasm than anyone else wallowing around in the post-Fifties wasteland of rock and roll before the British Invasion.

To me, this is not so much of a great songs album as much as it is just a great fucking rock 'n' roll record to put on at a party or when you want to have a good time. The two real classics here are the bookends. As mentioned earlier, "I Saw Her Standing There" explodes out of the gates full-throttle (something the Beatles specialized in). This was already a fairly musically advanced band, since they had been perfecting their chemistry by playing their infamous multi-set live shows in Liverpool and Hamburg. The guitar, bass, and drums were all pretty complex for the time, but of course it's the singing that is always the hook in Beatles songs. Paul uses plenty of his patented "Whoo's!" in this one. "Twist and Shout" is the finest song on the album, and one of John's most famous vocal performances. He absolutely tears the shit out of this one, nailing it in two takes with shredded vocals, since this was the last song recorded in a monster 18-hour session in which they cut the entire LP. As with several of their other covers, they managed to top the Isley Brothers original here. The energy is so damn infectious on here.

Elsewhere on this album, there abounds great gems waiting to be discovered. I have always loved "Misery," because of the way the catchy, upbeat music perfectly reflects the fleeting nature of teenage heartbreak and of course John's final doo-woop "Wah wah wah wah." "Anna (Go to Him)" has a great laid-back rhythm and a patented love-sick vocal from John. I love the transition from the choruses to the verse by John: "What am I, what am I supposed to do? Oh oh oh oh." John brought some of the most soul and fire to his vocals out of any white singer of that (or any) era. In fact, his singing on the early albums is what set the band apart from its peers. He was able to bring a lot of credibility and verve to American rock 'n' roll and R&B covers, and was clearly influenced immensely by Chuck Berry, Elvis, and Motown. Paul brought lots of soul to his later vocal performances with the band, but in my opinion John was the first stand-out vocalist.

The two singles on here--"Love Me Do" and "Please Please Me"--don't do particularly much for me, but maybe that's just because they've been so ingrained in my ears and head for all these years that I don't think about them too much anymore. That is certainly the case with a lot of Beatles hits. Both feature John's harmonica, which was apparently a big selling point for Beatles fans back then? Who knows.

There's plenty of other musical gems on here. This and A Hard Day's Night are probably the two most joyful albums in the Beatles catalogue, and while this doesn't have the songwriting perfection of that album, there is no album more raw and innocent of that or any other era than Please Please Me.

--Edward

Take Away Shows - What do Indie Hipster Musicians Acting Locally Have to Give to the World?

Having a lot of time to find music to blare in my head all day, I go on various journeys across Youtube's landscape, and being a fan of various so-called Indie fare, I often stumble upon these live-in-the-streets, impromptu shows. Sometimes dubbed "Take Away Show" or "They Shoot Music" or "Blogotheque", these videos showcase all the various Indie/Folk/AlternativeRunning-out-of-generic-genre-descriptors-for-20-somethings-with-hand-me-down-clothes-and-old-time-values-and-manners artists of today, in the flesh. They take everything out to the streets, on a bus, in a stairwell, or whatever places that are not in a studio.

As much of a gimmick as this may be to make these musicians look like they really are just shooting the shit and are as laid back as ever, while all the money and fame and major labels of modern music are as far away as the clouds in the distance, these videos, nonetheless, do reach a place that is hidden away from the iTunes library; from the remixed covers of covers; from the music video desensitized and auto-tuned digital world that has held a grip on modern music ever since MTV started falling apart in the late 90s. But most of all, it tries to pull you as far away from the internet as you can be while being on the internet watching these videos. It proposes to viewers that the outside world is still a part of our world, and it tempts people to go out and see it. Most importantly it creates something great out of something small.

By having the impromptu shows, these talented hipster-what-have-yous (to be fair, I'd only consider some of these as hipsters in the pure sense, others more vagabonds, and others still just shyer less glamorous artists than your run-of-the-mill KanyeWeezyTaylorSwift, and others just some random dudes and girls) are pleading in a very relaxed manner for people to forget our phones and our screens and simply go for a walk. If music is to move forward in some way, shape, or form, maybe it's best to stop worrying about the incessant voices that plague sites like Pitchfork and Youtube comments and forums and get out. I enjoy a lot of these artists because you can see that they make music because they love it, and they'll take that where ever it goes. I also think that getting outside to play music on the streets has a very subtle but strong way of embracing the ability music has to bring people together and put many different strangers into the same experience seamlessly. This, again, takes us away from our earbuds listening independently to our own song and own playlist, because while there is a time and place for delving deep into music with only yourself and some high quality headphones, music should also be heard with a lot of people, together, just like seeing an epic film in a theater with a huge crowd when it comes out. Live music means that much more because even though you may have heard the song before, when you hear it live, it is new and different. It is renewed. I'm not sure where exactly the take away shows will go in the future, but I'm happy they've made a place to escape to for now.

Here's a random collection of some of my favorite take aways among other similar performances:

Beirut - "Nantes": this may be the first one I ever saw (thanks to Jim), and at the time I didn't really know it was something done with multiple bands, so I thought it was just a Beirut thing - not that it wouldn't be because it suits their style anyhow. The singer in this is pretty much king. I love the many instruments too, a staple of the folk/indie music these days, just throw as many people and as many instruments up there as possible and have fun (see Arcade Fire and Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes).

Phoenix - "1901": they sing in a circle in front of the Eiffel Tower (they're French ya know, how cute! but seriously, it kind of is), and I love that they can get away with that without that many, if any, recognizing them as Phoenix who has taken a pretty big step into radio, at least in the states, and I would think even more so over there. It helps that the camera has a really cool contrast for lighting and movement throughout.

Ben Lee - "Kids" (cover of MGMT): did I bash covers earlier in the post? Nah, I meant to only make fun of the absurdity of new artists covering old "classics" with weird remixed noises and farts here and there. But overall, I generally love covers, because who doesn't want to sing their favorite songs? Apparently, nowadays all of the artist cover each other, which is a nice way of giving it up to your peers. "Ben Lee just covered our song? Marfuggin' sweet."

Grizzly Bear - "Knife": the fact that they're kind of laughing and self-conscious throughout only helps this.

Johnny Flynn - "Brown Trout Blues": sounds of water and traffic and a calming song if there ever was one. Also, here he is in a cab as part of a whole other series - Black Cab Sessions: "Wayne Rooney"

The Morning Benders - "Excuses (Yours Truly Session)": even though it's actually not out on a street, it brings the collective feeling into the studio with three times as many artists than usual, as the singer explains in the beginning. Thanks to Edward on this one and the "some girl" that gave it to him.

Arcade Fire - "Neon Bible" or "Neon Bible live in an elevator!": pretty much all because that title is hilarious and exactly staples the gimmick to your head, setting the hipster roast aflame. But ah, what the hell, might as well have fun with these weirdos. For an actual better performance by them: "Wake Up"

Jason Mraz - "Live High": absurdly silly, I can't really take this guy seriously, but I still like the song, and this is a fine example of the take away show.

Bon Iver - "Skinny Love": because it's fucking great song, but also it's prime small venue gathering with a cross-legged sleepy tipsy audience that the cameraman creepily and steadily but assertively pans over. Also, I love that originally, this guy apparently recorded an entire album about heartbreak alone in a cabin somewhere in a (presumably snowy) forest. And for good measure, "Flume" (don't ask me what happens at the end).

Noah and the Whale - "Give a Little Love": for getting the look of a hipster/Timbo Cotter down perfectly. The song's great though.

Jose Gonzalez - "Fold": I love this guy. Apparently he started out in a Metal group and then started doing his own acoustic stuff.

Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes - "Home": because Letterman makes fun of there being fifty of them and even though this isn't necessarily a "take away show" it still has that feel because of how gypsy these gypsies are. That woman is so happy it's nuts.

The stars are projectors, projecting our lives down to this planet Earth....

Two words, Modest Mouse. If this band could take the form of a single man and he could speak the poetry that is their lyrics and his voice could soothe my soul, yet instill a wondrous rage deep down inside me as they do, I would marry that man today. I started listening to MM about eight years ago but, did not truly fall in love until I shed my adolescence and delved into my passion for music in general. I remember it was Beth Murdock who actually introduced them to me and we went as a group my junior year of high school to see them play in D.C. They had just recently released their album, Good News For People Who Love Bad News, which happens to be one of my favorites. Sitting in the stands at Constitution Hall, I felt as if Isaac was speaking directly to my brain whilst tugging on my heart strings. I was obviously a fan before and after that show but, still was uneducated on most of their past albums and their beginnings. When I entered college, their music became my constant companion. Late nights were spent watching YouTube videos in my dorm room whilst trying to block out the sound of chattering sorority girls. I also walked EVERYWHERE in Richmond and always had them singing in my ears via my ipod nano (which was later ruined from an "accidental" beer spill by some asshole at a rugby party freshman year). After leaving college the first time and moving back home in 2007, I started my official Modest Mouse library and collected all of their albums. I would drive around in my car for hours on end with my good friend and companion, "Maryjane", exploring back roads while I was exploring their music.

"I drove around for hours, I drove around for days, I drove around for months and years and never went no place." -From Interstate 8

I personally feel that the sounds and phrases they have created are ground breaking, to say the least. I have yet to find a band I feel so connected to, so familiar yet strange at the same time. Each album they come out with is like a time machine for escaping harsh reality, a portal to some awesome abyss that I can get lost in for days. I often take out blank pieces of paper and just write their lyrics over and over, lyrics that are as beautiful to me as some Shakespearean sonnet to another.

"Language is the liquid that we're all dissolved in, great for solving problems after it creates the problem"-From Blame it on the Tetons

To wind down this post, I will just say that their music has been the soundtrack to my life for sometime now and will continue to be until I leave this world. I dream of the day I can see them live again, unfortunately they are on a European tour at this time and haven't announced any more tour dates in the U.S. as of yet. My dedication to them as creators and masters of music is undying. I just recently got some of their lyrics I am especially passionate about tattooed on my arm and I plan to get more of their words forever imprinted on my body in the near future....

"Change my mind so much, I can't even trust it. My mind changed me so much, I can't even trust myself."-From Talking Shit about a Pretty Sunset

I hope this post inspires those of you who aren't fans to take a listen, I promise you won't be disappointed with the absolute art that is their music.

Fin.