Last week I interviewed a woman named Katy Perry. In late June her single "I Kissed A Girl" was the #1 song in the country, I think: I mean, there are now so many different charts and whatnot, who knows what the real #1 is. Plus, I never saw the cassingle for the song anywhere, so I couldn't tell you what physical presence the song has. I do know that in prepping for my interview and doing some research, I realized that a lot of people on the internet think that she is satan incarnate, which I can almost understand (although she was super nice and I think her new record rules).
A review I found of her new album on allmusic.com ended with the following kiss-off: "She sinks to crass, craven depths that turn One of the Boys into a grotesque emblem of all the wretched excesses of this decade." Whoa! Personally, if I was managing an early-20's female pop singer, I would encourage her to do things to further represent the "wretched excesses of this decade", if only because doing so usually means that you've hit a cultural zeitgeist vein and that would, I assume, mean $$$$, right?
A day after interviewing Ms. Perry I was at a drive-in theater in Central New York's Leatherstocking Region, in line for popcorn behind a gaggle of 12-15 year old girls, when one of their cell phones rang: and guess what the ringtone was?
I suppose a grumpier dude than myself would probably at this point go on a tirade lamenting the inevitability of the ringtone as the ultimate format of musical product in the future-- but really, is there anything more tiresome than endless discussion of musical formats? What I find funnier is that I almost stepped in to say "Hey, I talked to that woman that sings your ringtone yesterday, imagine that!"-- but it occurred to me that besides the obvious letch factor that would be involved in such a move, I would imagine that the girls would probably be pretty non-plussed anyway: who cares? Does anyone really want to know who sings that song, or what she's like, or what her musical ambitions are, etc? Do people really care about that sort of thing any more? I'm generalizing here, but still.
In talking to Ms. Perry, I asked her about her cover of The Outfield's "Your Love" (which appears as "Use Your Love" on her UR So Gay EP which preceded the actual album). My asking about this song was kind of a trap, in that I had seen a few interviews where she discussed why she covered the song: sure enough, I got a pretty canned answer that was almost word-for-word the same as this one here:
I like the part where her label told her that she had to do a cover, and I really like that she is blunt and honest enough to just tell us that her label told her that she had to do a cover. *And* that she just wanted to do a song with some kind of mass appeal. Her cover of "Your Love" is pretty awesome, she definitely makes it her own, and I can see why she left it off the album: since she considers herself a songwriter first, putting this song on the album proper would pretty much torpedo the record, since its awesomeness smokes the rest of the rekkid.
I'm sure an essay could be written about how her 80's recidivism here is in line with that decade's echoing of the "wretched excesses of this decade", but a decade ain't nothin' but a number, right.
Is it just me, or has the classic rock color guard been going into over-drive with the Top100All-time500Greatest Guitar SongsRiffsLists ofAwesomeBob DylanAwesomeness moves lately? Don't get me wrong, I loved I'm Not There as much as the next guy who came of cultural age in the post-1984 classic-rock-is-everything rockist landscape,but I mean, come on. I can't be the only one who senses a certain desperation at work here: The Man can roll out all the Scorcese-directed Stones/Dylan bullshit they want in order to mythify the 60's, but good luck getting people to continue buying the re-re-re-re-remastered catalog of these old vets, esp. in the internet age. And *especially* when Web 2.0 means that blog after blog after blog rolls out, pulling the blindfold off the classic-rock-addled newb.
I mean, seriously: do you have any idea how much awesome shit came out in the 60's and 70's alone? And on major labels? And in, say, Japan? Somehow while we were forced to watch the 40 bazillionth media genuflection towards The Beatles and Bob Dylan and Led Zeppelin (all awesome, don't get me wrong), due was never given to a whole world of insanely incredible music that was, say, made on major labels during the 60's and 70's but has never made it onto classic rock's15-song-a-day playlist. Or to put it another way: why is it that I've never heard Dark of Sir Lord Baltimore on ZLX, but I heard *this* 10 times a day?
Aaanyway, the point here is that if you go to google, type in a genre of music you are interested in, and follow it with "blog" and "download", or something like that, and surrender a few hours of your life, you will soon realize a) that there are more incredible albums made in decades past than you ever had any clue, and that b) you can very easily *shhh* listen to them for free, if you want to and you are open-minded enough. For myself, that meant not only finding out a shitload about so-called "world music" (which prior to the web I only knew as "Peter Gabriel music"), but also continually mining for 60's and 70's prog/psych/proto-stoner records.
And what I found was that, in a perfect world, my childhood obsession with Led Zeppelin should have led me to unearthing Flower Travellin' Band's Satori, or Elias Hulk's Unchained, or Buffalo's Volcanic Rock. I dunno: it seemed in the 80's and early 90's that, Velvet Undergound aside (for some reason they were the one "obscure" act that one was allowed to know about), a typical music geek was supposed to burrow downward into the Dylan discography instead of sideways to find more and more awesomeness. And that inevitably led to side projects of famous classic rock bands (see: Delaney and Bonnie and Friends, that sort of shit), or bands that were composed of associates of famous classic rock artists (see: you know, Gram Parsons, that sort of thing). Again, all well and good, except that it would have been nice to know that if I liked Black Sabbath, I might have liked Lucifer's Friend and Necromandus.
Well, luckily for the budding music dorks of tomorrow's today, none of this is true anymore. So my misspent youth caring about the Traveling Wilburys won't be repeated by today's more intelligent children, who can so easily get into the real deal stuff. Why wasn't there someone there when I was younger to tell me "Look, I know that 'The Loco-motion' gets old really quickly, but trust us when we tell you that 'Sin's A Good Man's Brother' from Closer To Home proves that Grand Fund Railroad were one of the most righteous rock bands of all time"?
Anyway, to put this in terms that fit with the Rolling Stone hegemony, here's what I would consider the Top Eleven Albums Of Righteous 70's Rock I Discovered Within The Last Couple Of Years On The Internet That Proved To Me That I Knew/Know Absolutely Nothing About Music:
2. Buffalo: Volcanic Rock (1973) In college I had a cd promo single by the Screaming Trees that contained a hidden track (typical 90's alterna-CD-move in retrospect) that a 12-minute long jam that sounded like it was probably called "Freedom". What I didn't know until recently was that it was a cover by 70's Australian rock gods Buffalo. What I further didn't know was that the album that it comes from rules hard front to back, and that instead of wasting my youth listening to, I dunno, whatever CSN album "Southern Cross" is on, you know, the one with the incongruous space aliens on the cover, I should have been rocking out hard to this. Also, "I'm a Skirt Lifter, Not a Shirt Raiser" from their next album, 1974's Only Want You For Your Body, is as awesome a song as it is a song title.
The rest of the stuff on this list is somewhat, how shall I say this, "hippie music". Not this record. And no, this isn't the band fronted by Exene Cervenka featuring Howdy Doody on guitar; this is a band from Australia, and they released this masterpiece whilst that other (arguably inferior) X was getting all the headlines in the Northern Hemisphere. Two things that rule here: 1) the first ten seconds of the first song, "Suck Suck", wherein you have a rhythm section that makes the Jesus Lizard sound like slackers led by a guitarist who makes Andy Gill sound like a well-mannered session dude, and 2) penultimate tune "Waiting", a dirge time-bomb with a mid-tune scream that, IMHO, beats "Careful With That Axe, Eugene" for best rock scream ever. Seriously, where was this album all my life. Proof that punk hegemony is just as crusty and lame as classic rock hegemony: how many times do we need to hear a rundown of how great the Ramones and Blondie were, while records like this and The Wipers' Youth Of America are left out of print and unloved?
4. Groundhogs: Thank Christ For The Bomb (1970) One of the most truly anarchic rock albums I've ever heard: although rooted in some kind of blues/folk idiom, when this thing runs off the rails it makes "out" bands like Hawkwind sound tame by comparison. The title track is one of the most frizzling anti-war anthems ever.
5. Left End: Spoiled Rotten (1974) Mid-70's Cleveland yobs who awkwardly straddle a line between hard rock theatricality and what-would-become-punk ferocity. If you like this you'd probably like Sir Lord Baltimore, and that sort of thing. They are absolutely ridiculous but so nasty and awesome. Album opener "Bad Talking Lady" is just retarded, in the best possible way.
6. Cargo: Cargo (1972) This record is all instrumental, sort of prog-meets-jazz-y, and made by Dutch people. Oof, sounds awesome, right? But it is! Seriously, this is an amazingly smoking album, just some incredible guitar workouts that never veer into cheese. It's closer to Curtis Mayfield than it is to, say, Weather Report, if that makes any sense.
7. Elias Hulk: Unchained (1970) So many of these bands/albums I find myself describing as "retarded", is that a musical turn-off? I dunno, I don't find any of this stuff any more lunkheaded than "The Lemon Song", you know? Right? Anyway, this record is fucking retarded, in the best way. Drum solos. Riffs on top of riffs. Ugly British dudes back then must have felt like they were on top of the world or something. This sounds like if the dancer from Happy Mondays went back in time and cloned himself and formed a metal band in 1970, or something like that.
Okay, I'm fudging a little here, since this one I didn't discover through a blog recently, but through a friend that found this on cd years ago. It blew my mind then, because it was so incredibly great, and so weird, with such incredible guitar work, and I had never ever ever heard of it. And all I could think was "There must be ten hundred zillion records out there like this, but they just aren't on cd or anything". And I was right. But seriously, "Maypole" on this is the fucking jam. Who names their band "Dark"? So fucking genius.
9. Luv Machine: Luv Machine (1971) Imagine if a band today could play something even a zillionth as insane as "Witches Wand", from this album? The rest of this record has its dated moments, but holy shit when this band hits it. The guitar playing is so weird and rumbling and inept-yet-slaughtering.
10. The Nazgûl: The Nazgûl (1976) In the days of my youth I thought that Robert Plant knew how to make an effective LOTR allusion; of course, it hadn't occured to me then that 15-minute doom/gloom/dread ambient epics by a band called The Nazgûl was about a zillion times scarier and more awesomer. Listen to this record on headphones in the dark, if you dare...
11. Elektriktus: Electronic Mind Waves (1976) One spends so much of one's 20's looking for music as mind-frying as possible (well, "one" does if "one" is "me")-- if only "one" had been able to find this record earlier on. Track 3, "Power Hallucination", is pretty much the pinnacle of music-as-nightmarish-entrances-to-hell. No drugs necessary. The mystery of this band is somewhat diminished when you find out it's just some Italian guy from the 70's, I had an image of ten or twenty dudes in cloaks recording this in a chapel whilt wearing wire-rim glasses and slowly stroking their fu manchu beards. Oh wait that's Tangerine Dream except they are only three dudes.
P.S.:
I intended this piece as a post-script of my sidebar on this Boris article, where I listed some indispensible Japanese rock albums of the past 40 years or so. I had to leave a lot of awesomeness off, of course--especially from the 70's, where there is a literally limitless batch of awesome records: the most painful cuts I had to make were definitely:
Ah, it's summer, the time when school is out and Boston's rocker-aged population puts down their books and starts dreaming up hypothetical bands with crazy gimmicks that will take Boston (or at least PA's Lounge) by storm. Having trouble coming up with a High Concept project that will, maybe, perhaps, join the vaunted ranks of The Bentmen, The Upper Crust, Kaiju Big Battel, and a million other Boston Idearock pioneers? Here's a few to get started:
EASTER ISLAND - band members all wear 3-foot styrofoam Easter Island heads on their heads, and ever song is a heavy metal testament to the power of Easter Island - hand out those hawaiian flower necklace thingys - acquire opening slot on Slipknot tour
MNML - 10-member band all play songs that consist of single notes repeated forever with no build or anything - all posters, album covers, websites, etc are all black with any text in courier font as small as possible
BOOK CLUB - every song is an Iron Maiden-esque Cliff Notes adaptation of a book into power metal - new song every week, play song live, discuss themes afterwards in musical rounds - first song: "A Separate Peace" - first gig: Newton Mobile Book Fair
THEME PARK LAND - put together 4 or 5 bands, and instead of them playing, say, the Mid East Up one after another like a bunch of trad rock dudes, they all set up in different corners of the club, with sound partitions, and play at once - each band's repetoire is themed around, say, ADVENTURE, or PIRATING, or FOREIGN LANDS. admission to the show gets you a map - oh, audience has to wait in long lines - "You must be x inches tall to enter"
TRDNGSPCZ - skinny dudez press play on their laptops and then in fast-motion remodel the stages of boston's most famous local bar band dives - first gig: TT's
THE BOSTON OIRISHES - band comprised of paper-mache replicas of america's favorite irish stereotypes, fronted by the lucky charms guy - at mid-set audience gets to spray band and everyone else with beer** - set-closing singalong to the song they do in the middle of "Titanic", you know the scene
