Archive for category Ａｂｏｕｔ
The great thing about record reviews
…is you can’t go completely off the fucking rails making up details or pulling stuff from memory that only you experienced. That’s all I’m going to say about that. This has been a strange journey. A strange journey filled with mostly bad writing. I think I can fit what I have to say about music in the review format now. Got whatever else coming up, we’ll see what happens. %
More useless thoughts
So I think about Shonen Knife a lot. Maybe more than can or should fit into a single concert review. But I’ve thought about them even more since then. And I don’t want to take anything away from the people that set up the concert, those were the nerds, the GCC Manga & Anime club. They also led the dancing. They might not know how to start a mosh pit, but there’s usually not really much of one at most SK shows. There’s usually not anyone doing the Worm or any kind of Soul Train inspired set-up either, or anything close to square dancing, or Para Para. It was more like a party than how people usually dance at a show. In another context, I’d even say they were ironic hipster dancing, which would be awful. But I was there, and there was genuine fun being had. But I don’t know any of those people. The rest of their convention doesn’t seem like my thing, but if they do more with music I’m definitely into that. It was really cool of them to book this show since there was no stop in Philly this tour and it was cool of the band and their management to add the date last minute.
I just had to add some more to this because I mentioned the lineup and I also mention Metallica a few posts ago…I don’t mean to compare the two at all, making it seem like the band is crap now. And they don’t have anything like the internal political polarization of the Ramones. (They don’t, right?) No, SK is more like Motorhead. One person has always been most of the band. There’s a leader who picks quality replacements and the band continues more or less the same. (Ignoring the period when the band was a duo, altho that was not a bad period.) But I still have this thing for Michie. It’s not that she was hotter or cuter anything (she wasn’t at all…not everything is about cute). I think that she made the music for the same reason that I like it: it’s cheerful. I don’t think she was like the other members who are naturally cheerful people, she needed to make music to cheer herself. Since she quit and has never done solo stuff, she must’ve found something else that worked better. Probably got one of those “real jobs” I hear about. Or just married. That happens. None of my business.
And it’s not like that one aspect of it really mattered that much to my liking it, but it made it more justified to me. Not that I really gave a fuck at the time. I was full into the thing, I wore the shirts, I sang the songs, blasted the music. I did not care. But at the time, you were a pussy if you didn’t wear a neon pink cartoon cat on your shirt. Dudes were wearing floral print dresses. (“What, are you afraid to wear a dress?” “Well…my girlfriend doesn’t wear them…”) Things changed pretty quick. I’m just saying, every so often you’d think about what the people you were hanging out with only a year or two ago would think. So when you find yourself at a show involving loud guitars and the woman in the plastic yellow dress is about to start a song about a cat that lives in outer space, literally…even though you’ve been listening to that song everyday since you got the record and seeing it live by itself is a great experience, that little look of “am I really singing a song about a cat in outer space?” …is just what you need at that exact moment.%
Shonen Knife@Gloucester County College
So Shonen Knife played my (almost) town yesterday and I found out just hours before. And it looks like I’m doing live write ups. And I need a new camera or something. I took several shots that all came out little too “artsy” for a Shonen Knife show. I used to able to get good shots without a flash, guess I’m out of practice. But check out Ritsuko’s Johnny Ramone stance. Perfection.
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More meta
- Gotta try harder on the titles.
- I said “counter-reform” when I guess I meant “counter-counter-reform”, thus destroying whatever I was trying to say. This chart (via) sums it up pretty well. It might even oversimplify the whole thing.
- I thought about Dirty not making my Sonic Youth Top 10 again. The weird thing about this list is it’s assumption you know nothing about Sonic Youth albums but know everything about the album Dirty (which is entirely possible judging by high school t-shirts of the time). If this was true you could have easily guessed I cut off the song “Youth Against Fascism” not because I’m a fan of totalitarian governments, but because it’s a lousy song. It also calls attention to the fact that it kinda sucks, but your kinda lame if you think it sucks because it’s politically correct. Which was half the shit in the 90s and it got old real fast. I also cut “Chapel Hill” which has one on the worse lyrics ever: “the hair in the hole in my head/too bad the scene is dead.” Some random dumb line and then, “sorry kid, everything good already happened.” I didn’t know he was talking about North Carolina, where they let the ear hair fly free, or used to. Then someone posted a picture of the cassette on tumblr. That whole second side is pretty weak. But that first side is great. I need to get it on vinyl and never flip it over. I stand by it not making the list.
- Nah, I’m being a total cock. Two songs have dumb lyrics? Compared to Goo? I like those other b-side songs. I just never had a real copy. I think when I finally went to buy it, it was already reissued with more tracks. More tracks! My dub version with two less is clearly the best version. Why don’t they reissue albums with the bum tracks taken off? They fulfilled the contract or whatever, give the people a break. So I’d figure, “why don’t I buy an album I don’t have?” One of those times I bought the rarely mentioned Hold That Tiger, which is basically a glorified bootleg from the Sister-era (I think it’s official…). The banter and Ramones covers are worth it even if the sound quality is not great. The performance is pretty close the records but it shows off their sense of humor which is sometimes easy to forget. Like if you listed to their first 3 records every day for a year-and-a-half, for example, this would be a good antidote to your resultant worldview. Let’s say Dirty is my 11 and Hold That Tiger is my 12.
- It should go without saying that the Ciccone Youth album is not counted in this list.
- I also talked about a “weird bunch” of metalheads that also listened to the Doors. That’s not that weird. It was pretty standard at that time for the most sterotypical seeming denim-jacketed longhairs to be into a wider range of music than most. And I suggest the paintballing had anything to do with musical taste. It was utterly random mayhem I avoided through sheer luck. One of out mutual friends got hit once (these were drive-bys, mostly aimed at stop signs) we all laughed about it and kept hanging out. Until graduation day, then you never saw or heard from em again. Just the way it was…then. I think they’re all scientists now, for real. Here’s a conversation that did not take place:
metalhead1: Dude, let’s get that dude.
metalhead2: Naw dude, I know that dude. His favorite Metallica album is Kill Em All.
metalhead1: Dude!
metalhead2: Yes, Master of Puppets is clearly their strongest work (to date) yet I respect his bold and divergent opinion.
metalhead1: Agreed. - In this post I said something about not understanding Africa (or Russia!). This suggests I understand Europe or even America outside of the Tri-State area. My whole tone about the UK situation is odd. Leaving it there.
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