Joy Division's Pop Moment

For some reason, people consider Joy Division above criticism... in the same way that for baby boomers, Jimi Hendrix is beyond criticism. They are artists who share similar trajectories and legacies, death punctuating their careers (I say "punctuated" because their careers have continued long after the deaths of Hendrix and Curtis). I'm not a terribly big fan of either, but I do understand why people tend to eulogize and worship them.

My discovery of Joy Division came with their compilation album Substance, which was basically a collection of random songs and singles which had not been featured on their two proper albums, Unknown Pleasures (1979) and Closer (1980). I loved Substance, partly because it had a clear arc from its punk-ish first song ("Warsaw") to the inevitable and obvious concluding song "Love Will Tear Us Apart." People not into Joy Division but who are somewhat familiar with the name will know the latter song. It is famous for many reasons. The singer, Ian Curtis, after all, committed suicide only weeks after recording the song which ostensibly captured some inescapably poignant moment in his descent into desperation. But the song is also hummable, with a melancholy and maddeningly catchy melody, not difficult to dance to, aided by a propulsive drum beat advancing the minutes along. It's first and foremost a pop song, even if it emerged from the heart of the post-punk moment when discord and dissonance were the central aesthetics. "Love Will Tear Us Apart" was for people who didn't really like or take to punk (or post-punk) but who could claim some modicum of hipness. Sort of like when liking R.E.M. in the eighties made you "edgy," you know, so you didn't actually have to listen to Husker Du or Mission of Burma. The song was made for a movie featuring John Cusack.

Yet, yet, yet, the song is undeniably beautiful and brilliant. It's not the best Joy Division song (probably "She's Lost Control" or "Isolation") but it may be the only song they ever recorded which had an emotionally vulnerable center. Ineffably sad. Like Polka dot sounded on the phone.

Here, then, is Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart" followed by a version by (the?) Swans. The latter has been completely disavowed by Michael Gira as a horrible misstep but I find it strangely poignant in itself. Maybe it's because I know Gira's story too, which while not as terminally dramatic as that of Ian Curtis is still a story of sadness.

Joy Of Speed EP (song 1)

Invisible

In my first science fiction novel
I wrote myself cartwheeling over a deserted highway
In a brand new spaceship
That flew over my father's car

He drove for miles past the lights
In the backseat I rolled down the window just a little
Pushed my nose against the glass
But I couldn't make out any stars

And then the boy left his home
He grew arms as big as his memories
But they never could reach far enough
when he looked down from his spaceship
He was now invisible

I need to get up, I need to wash my face
I need to make constant plans to travel from place to place
Arriving and departing all at once
I fall asleep the moment I wake up

And in my dreams, I'm with my dad again
Packed into the backseat on a trip across the state
I'm blowing air on the window
Blotting out the sky outside up above

And then the boy left his home
He grew arms as big as his memories
But they never could reach far enough
As he looked down from his spaceship
I was now invisible

Joy -- Invisible [mp3]

Top 10 Movies of the '00s

My Top 10 Movies of the '00s

10. The Family Man (2000)
9. The Wicker Man (2006)
8. National Treasure (2004)
7. Ghost Rider (2007)
6. Knowing (2009)
5. Next (2007)
4. Lord Of War (2005)
3. Matchstick Men (2003)
2. The Weather Man (2005)
1. Adaptation (2002)

Am excitedly waiting for Season of the Witch (2010).

Life is good.

So It Goes

I have a terrible headache, a bad cold, you know, the usual. It is a Friday night and I'm considering what to do. Not that there are that many options. I mean, there are basically two options, stay in or go out. The 'out' option is not terribly exciting and involves meeting up with a person, probably downtown somewhere even though I want to stay uptown. And conversation will inevitably be stilted. And let's face it, I don't really want to go out, I mean what's the point? I will spend money pointlessly, forget about the obvious shittiness of my life for a coupla hours, and then feel bad physically (and otherwise) tomorrow. And I don't want to stay in because I don't like 'in.' Long story.

I got an e-mail from an old friend of mine in Bangladesh yesterday who wrote to me to remind me of the songs we used to listen to as kids. Apparently, I had a cassette tape (!) which had a song by the band called Poco. Yes, Poco, that Poco. Think of 1970s-era sub-Eagles feel-good California music that flows over you. As soon as the song is over, you've forgotten it, but it felt good to listen to it for a few minutes, especially 'cause when you first heard it you were 15 years old and had a crush on some girl. The song in question, "Crazy Love," is actually not as bad as I make it sound. It still conjures up little feelings buried somewhere in my keenly sharped indie brain. "Crazy Love" was perfect for being 15 and being, um, of the sensitive ilk.

Anyway, the dude who wrote me the e-mail is exactly my age, has the same name. We followed very identical paths in our adolescence, smoking our first cigarettes together, having our first girlfriends, discovering Houses of the Holy at the same time, reading Slaughterhouse Five simultaneously, etc. etc. One might say that he was my best friend at that time. We were two clowns, he the witty optimistic and me the sardonic foil. (Although when we argued, it was always because I accused him of using my jokes, which were better than his, to impress people and pick up chicks). I have not had much contact with him since we were about 18 although I've seen him on and off over the years, sometimes at parties, once in a bar in the West Village, another time at the international airport in Calcutta (Kolkata). He remains perfectly frozen in time, maybe not physically but his personality and his presence. He's just as full of optimistic one-liners and has nary a dark strand in his entire body. He has no time for melancholia or navel-gazing or yearning or any such thing. Life is good and it is what it is. In his free time, he seems to follow English soccer and posts youtube videos of forgotten seventies bands on his Facebook page. ("California" by Manfred Mann, anyone?).

I have my headphones on, listening to stuff on random. Am listening to an old Verve song, the one called "So It Goes." He ends the song with the obvious lines.

"....another drink and I won't miss her
another drink and I won't miss her..."

Yeah Yeah Yeahs -- Skeletons

I can't get over how awesome this song is. From their recent album It's Blitz.

The Knife

In my haste to do a top 75 list of the '00s, I forgot a lot of really awesome albums, including, of course, Silent Shout (2006) by The Knife, those folks from Sweden--actually two people--who make the weirdest most interesting electronic music this side of Burial. They have this whole shtick in which they never appear in public and don't give interviews. I don't really know how to describe their music but lazy reviewers always say "electro pop." Whatever. One of the people in The Knife lists her influences as:

David Lynch
Aki Kaurismaki
Korean cinema
Trailer Park Boys
Donnie Darko
Doom
Black Hole

Hmm..

Anyway, recently, they decided to write an opera for the Danish performance group Hotel Pro Forma. The opera, entitled Tomorrow, In A Year, is based on Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. They recently released the first product of this work, an 11-minute track called "Colouring of Pigeons" which is a collaboration with Mt. Sims and Planningtorock.

It's mind-blowing.

The Knife -- Colouring of Pigeons [mp3]

Jay Reatard (1980-2010) R.I.P.

Very Sad.

I Was Buying Some Feelings

Yes, Nick McCabe was awesome. This is from 1997

Birthday Gal

Not to continuously go on about Paul W., but I just noticed that he turned 50 yesterday. Fifty! Wow. There's a very nice understated article in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune here.

I was thinking today about what music has meant the most to me in my whole life, and I would have to narrow it down to two, perhaps three bands. I don't listen to any of them that much anymore, but I doubt that any other music will ever have that kind of an effect on my life again. There's something about absorbing music (or movies or literature or whatever) in your twenties that cannot be repeated. And so, with the Smiths, the Replacements, and possibly, with Nirvana, I experienced something deeply traumatic. Not, life-changing but certainly life-reflecting. I was obsessed with each of these bands, enough to track down EVERY SINGLE SONG they had ever released or indeed, recorded. (Ever heard the extremely rare and brilliant live version of "Some Girls are Bigger Than Others" that was released on the b-side of the 12" of "I Started Something I Couldn't Finish" in 1987? Thought So. Yes, I have it somewhere). But that's just the technical part. I was also so obsessed with these bands that I could hardly go a day by without listening to them or thinking about what they were singing about.

Now it is more than twenty years later. I discovered the Smiths and Replacements in '86. I found Nirvana in '91. That's over two decades ago. I'm much much older, not even like a cool older uncle, but just a hasbeen old guy who hasn't taken good care of himself in the past coupla decades, and just complains about his back and mumbles under his breath about how "the kids these days, they just don't get it, do they?"

Now, I'm not sure if Paul is like that these days, but he sure doesn't seem to give a shit about anything, and when he does emerge from his dark dank basement, he sounds like a curmudgeon. He's married, lives in a suburb of a big midwestern city, barely goes out or listens to anything in the outside world, probably watches sports, goes to see his son play baseball, maybe complains to his wife about having to take so many Goddamn anti-depressants every day. He could give two shits about Radiohead, probably still listens to albums by Sonny and Cher, and rarely smiles. He remembers very little of the Replacements, and why should he remember any of it?

Happy Birthday Paul.

You were always kinda young to me, but like an older brother who was about 25 or something. But still young. Without blemishes. Now you're 50. Ain't so young anymore. Just like me.

Here's a song you wrote a long time ago, never bothered to release, until your record company forced you to about 20 years later. It is called "Birthday Gal." It is as sad as all the girls who wanted to sleep you and the boys who wanted to be you.

"Wax is dripping from the frosting on the cake
Come on, girl, buckle up, and don't hesitate
Take a deep breath and blow 'em all away
...
Birthday gal, do you wish that
There weren't quite as many candles that you had to blow away?"

The Replacements -- Birthday Gal [demo]

Top 75 Albums of the '00s

OK, here it is, my decade-end list of the top 75 albums of the past decade, the '00s. Hard to believe that a decade has passed since the oh-so-innocent panic of Y2K hysteria. My general feeling is that music, at least the kind of music I tend to like, was pretty stellar in the past ten years. But, as a point of reference, looking back at the past 50 years of popular music, it's hard to rank the past decade as anything particularly special. I still continue to think that there hasn't been a period as creative as the late 1970s/early 1980s but I would actually rank the '00s as a decade much better than the '90s and probably as good as the '80s.

Just a quick scan through the list suggests that I ranked very few artists from the babyboomer era as still producing good music. And let's face it, the only two real candidates in that category are Bob Dylan and Neil Young, both of whom continue to be as weird, iconoclastic, and inaccessible as ever but seemed to have cooled off in terms of producing sublime music. (And no, I don't like Leonard Cohen and maybe Scott Walker's doing some good stuff too). Neil Young's last peak was sometime in the mid-nineties while Dylan's "Love and Theft," which ranked on my top 75, was released in 2001 (actually, September 11, 2001, to be precise). Most of the other folks on the list came of age in the nineties.

In terms of genres, I can't really draw any firm conclusions besides the fact the '00s had a lot of derivative music (see Interpol, the Strokes, etc.) but that doesn't necessarily mean that it was bad music. I concede one can enjoy a copy of the copy of the copy. After all, I think we can all agree that authenticity is vastly overrated. Sometimes it's more fun to listen to the Rolling Stones than Robert Johnson, ya know?

It's also surprising to see so many of my picks from the early part of the decade rather than the later. The general trend seems to be that the decade began pretty well in 2000 (8 albums), reached a peak in 2003-2004 (about 12 each), then had a steady decline to 2009 (only three records from this year).

Finally, the issue of consistency. Very few bands/artists on the list had multiple showings, i.e., it was one good album and then done. I don't have an explanation for this but it seems to me that in the '60s, '70s, and '80s, you could probably easily find an artist (Joni Mitchell from the '70s, the Smiths from the '80s) who could be counted on to consistently deliver good albums, one after the other. Nowadays it ain't so, although I wonder if that has something to do with the attention span of the audience than the work of the artist.

So, my list:

75. Iggy Pop - Skull Ring (2003)
74. Ariel Pink - Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti (2005)
73. Burial - Untrue (2007)
72. Sonic Youth - Rather Ripped (2006)
71. Caribou - Up In Flames (2003)

70. AA Bondy - When The Devil's Loose (2009)
69. Kanye West - The College Dropout (2004)
68. Badly Drawn Boy - Born In The UK (2006)
67. Bob Dylan - "Love And Theft" (2001)
66. Tangemeenie - Faust (2001)
65. A Silver Mt. Zion - He Has Left Us Alone But Shafts Of Light Sometimes Grace The Corner Of Our Rooms... (2000)
64. Paul Westerberg - Stereo/Mono (2002)
63. School Of Seven Bells - Alpinisms (2007)
62. Zero 7 - Simple Things (2001)
61. Rachid Taha - Tekitoi (2004)

60. Eluvium - Talk Amongst The Trees (2005)
59. Lemon Jelly - '64-'95 (2005)
58. The White Stripes - Elephant (2003)
57. A Perfect Circle - Mer De Noms (2000)
56. M.I.A. - Arular (2005)
55. The Album Leaf - One Day I'll Be On Time (2001)
54. Tinariwen - Aman Iman (2007)
53. Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Yanqui U.X.O. (2002)
52. Sea Ray - Stars At Noon (2003)
51. Yo La Tengo - And Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out (2000)

50. King Khan & The Shrines - The Supreme Genius Of (2008)
49. Califone - Roots & Crowns (2006)
48. Steely Dan - Two Against Nature (2000)
47. Ellen Allien & Apparat - Orchestra Of Bubbles (2006)
46. Verbena - La Musica Negra (2003)
45. LCD Soundsystem - LCD Soundsystem (2005)
44. New Order - Get Ready (2001)
43. Fujiya & Miyagi - Transparent Things (2006)
42. TV On The Radio - Return To Cookie Mountain (2006)
41. Radiohead - Amnesiac (2001)

40. Dead Meadow - Feathers (2005)
39. Sonic Youth - Murray Street (2002)
38. Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2002)
37. The Strokes - Is This It (2001)
36. Boards Of Canada - The Campfire Headphase (2005)
35. The Secret Machines - Now Here Is Nowhere (2004)
34. Massive Attack - 100th Window (2003)
33. Phoenix - Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix (2009)
32. Nine Inch Nails - Year Zero (2007)
31. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Dig Lazarus Dig! (2008)

30. Mogwai - Happy Songs For Happy People (2003)
29. Four Tet - Rounds (2003)
28. Outkast - Speakerboxx/The Love Below (2003)
27. Atlas Sound - Logos (2009)
26. Buffalo Daughter - I (2001)
25. Royksopp - Melody A.M. (2001)
24. The Shins - Chutes Too Narrow (2003)
23. Primal Scream - XTRMNTR (2000)
22. Xiu Xiu - Fabulous Muscles (2004)
21. Adem - Homesongs (2004)

20. Ulrich Schnauss - A Strangely Isolated Place (2004)
19. M83 - Saturdays = Youth (2008)
18. Bloc Party - Silent Alarm (2005)
17. Diplo - Florida (2004)
16. Modest Mouse - Good News For People Who Like Bad News (2004)
15. LCD Soundsystem - Sound Of Silver (2007)
14. Beck - Sea Change (2002)
13. Deerhunter - Microcastle (2008)
12. The Arcade Fire - Funeral (2004)
11. Radiohead - In Rainbows (2007)

10. Boards Of Canada - Geogaddi (2002)
9. Interpol - Turn On The Bright Lights (2002)
8. The Books - The Lemon Of Pink (2003)
7. Pinback - Summer In Abbadon (2004)
6. Sigur Ros - () (2002)
5. Explosions In The Sky - The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place (2003)
4. PJ Harvey - Stories From The City Stories From The Sea (2000)
3. Sleater-Kinney - The Woods (2005)
2. Radiohead - Kid A (2000)

1. Godspeed You Black Emperor! - Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven (2000)