Minutemen | Project: Mersh
My long overdue mission of owning all of the Minutemen records that are not Double Nickels on the Dime begins with this, the cheapest one. When I set out on this mission, I realized why I did not already own these records: they are not readily available as dirt cheap used copies. (A large bulk of my collection.) It’s not hard to figure out why. People who buy Minutemen records tend to know what they are getting into, first, and once they have the records, they are actually good, second, and third, the band is consistently well-regarded over decades by fans and critics alike, so their records are non-embarrassing to own and therefore resistant to purge, even if you never listen to them.
This is not a very typical record for the band, it’s more of a proof-of-concept EP, which I like. In particular the opening track The Cheerleaders, because it illustrates perfectly why I hate the band Cake so much. Here they take all of the political message of their earlier work over a much simplified and easy to swallow version of their music. The band Cake would then take this kind of sound, with the semi-funky clean guitar and the trumpet, and remove the political message, which is not the worst music in the world by any means, but what’s the point? I guess the point is that is the kind of thing that could get mainstream radio play. Not this so much. It’s like they took all the notes that people had been telling them was “wrong” with their music and applied them literally. No one really wanted to say they didn’t agree with the message, or the overall package so they would pick apart the rough edges of the music. Remove all those rough edges and there should be nothing holding it back!
There’s some other songs—they cover Steppenwolf, they were a good band, it’s not entirely ironic. C’mon.
Tour-Spiel is my favorite track. The words alone, repeated as a mantra, could almost be any words without reading along. I heard “torch me out” the first several times. I dunno what it means, but it seems evocative of what happens when you jam econo too long. The jam turns literal(ly figurative) on More Spiel, which seemingly runs the concept off the rails, but is similar to the ‘Bonus beats’ tracks of the day, which also turn up on Watt’s collab with Sonic Youth The Whitey Album, but that’s something else entirely.%
buy mp3s on amazon 4 cheap or I guess it's regular price, there's only 6 songs
Numerical Notation vs. Scientific Pitch Notation
I’ve been hoping to come up with something snappier than “Numerical Notation”, but it seems to be sticking so maybe it’s snappy enough. I think it’s unique enough to avoid confusion with other notation systems that may use numbers but not numbers exclusively. For example, Scientific Pitch Notation.
Scientific Pitch Notation is not to be confused with regular old Scientific Notation and it won’t be, so let’s stop worrying that. And don’t think I’ve got some beef with science over 4ths and 5ths. I’m not saying it’s magic, it’s just something very interesting that does not have an easy, intuitive explanation. If it did, every music teacher would just tell you the first day of class and every book on music would have in the first few pages, instead of just trudging you through all the stuff to memorize and hoping you don’t notice until it’s far too late for you to do anything else with your life but teach the exact same system and the whole cycle perpetuates.
Is it so bad? Maybe. Can you make through the second paragraph of this entry without your eyes glazing over? Because that’s a less subjective question. Giving numbers to each octave on the piano is a great idea, but there’s just this silliness with starting the octave on C I can’t get over. A is the first letter and the first key. Why not make more of those last high notes the freak notes? (What I’m trying to do here is make this system sound even less “scientific” than my own fudging of the term. Is it working? Works for me.)
Ah, and there’s the staff. SPN changes nothing about that. Trad bass and treble clefs. Can’t improve on that. Could improve on the tone of these posts, probably, but is that important, and can I end this sentence without making it another annoyingly rhetorical question—a habit that I can’t believe I’ve picked up as it annoys even me—I think I can. I’ve done it, yes. No, not that. Designed a new staff system. Well, I haven’t really done it, I’ve just thought about a lot. (Not a metaphor.) It’ll have to wait for another post. %
DJ 0.000001 | Racin’ Music
Here’s one from March of ’10, actually released some time in ’09. Originally had it under a V/A credit, but it’s one of those gray areas where it’s mostly remixes of remixes, but there are some original tracks and it all has has the same stamp on it that it feels enough like a real album to give him marquee credit.
I heard of it through the Daly City Records mailing list, which I was on just for Mochipet, who I knew through MySpace, and/or maybe he used to post on Giant Robot. The website credits Mochi, but oddly the album itself doesn’t on any individual tracks. I know he did the Easy-E track. Thought it might be some alter ego in-joke thing like Madlib/Quasimoto or Kool Keith/Dr. Octagon/Etc. It is but only in the case of Th’ Mole/DJ 0.000001 who is real separate person, with his own website. Mochi’s credit just got lost in the shuffle. Enough. The songs:
Captain Ahab starts it off with Ride, or rather dude starts it off with a remix of such. I am not familiar with this song or group, it might as well be another alias. (It’s not, and last.fm is telling me I have listened to them on some of DJ Donna Summer’s Cock Rock Disco comps. I find the name unfortunate; I think some of the tracks I scrobbled may be another band. Whatever.) It starts of pretty good, with triumphant trumpet samples. Then the vocals start out pretty bad, but the momentum of the thing takes it into so-bad-it’s-epic, like “yeah, man, conquer your own terribleness, I can dig it”—I was getting back into bike riding when I got this, which is something I need to back into again now, and this did the trick of getting pumped right out of the gate. I’m probably going with something else in the future cause it kinda loses steam halfway through. In fact, the whole thing sounds different than how I remember. If it was on tape I would think it was the tape wearing out, but mp3s do not age, only the music itself and (I guess) me. I think it was also partly early 00s nostalgia. A few years ago I was thinking I had merely stumbled and needed to get back to where I was then. Now I’m pretty sure I was a total moron—not about everything, but yeesh, I can do some other stuff, what the hell am I thinking.
Anyway, it recovers and goes on. It never really lets up, there are just moments of exhaustion, even if you are sitting still, mentally so. Sidenote: this is all breakcore as far as I’m concerned, some of these artists went onto dubstep but if the music on this album can be considered dubstep, I don’t know anything about anything. And the only reason I might know anything about anything is from Jason Forest a/k/a DJ Donna Summer’s show Advanced D&D on WFMU. Things get much more hardcore than this record, but I think it’s the same style, even if this one crosses over into a bit lighter, fun, pop direction.
What was said about the Captain Ahab vocals go double for those of Th’ Mole himself. He goes for dumb and gets there. Altho I like the force of his delivery and he records better. It sounds like a real song, like he’s sampled from another recording and blended it all together. But there’s really only a couple tracks like that and it’s still mostly a mixtape. I don’t need to run it down track-by-track but highlights include Bone Thugs-N-Harmony outroing into an explosion of shitty stock drum machine cymbals, an appearance by the music of Jean-Jacques Perry, JJ Fad even tho they are pretty played out… Foxdye’s One Leg in the Booty Shorts sounds has some Venga Boys in there; Enya gets mixed with the steel drums from 50 Cent’s Wanksta—pure stunt mixing. The Drumline soundtrack is a nice inclusion, marching band music is classical maximalism; man vs. machine, that whole thing. And the Easy-E track, this is a much different version of 24 Hrs. To Live. Ridiculous.
Closer Bouncy Ball crosses the line into pure annoyance, but it is the last track so it’s not so bad. I kinda like an endurance test sometimes.
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Unlike my other dumb mixtape posts, this one is still available from Daly City Records so you are not like reading this for no reason.
Numerical Notation and the 4ths vs. 5ths Paradox
There’s a smart sounding title, wonder if I’ve got anything to back it up.
Here’s the clock again from last post. The idea of naming the notes with numbers within an octave is dead simple. Scientifically speaking, two notes with a 2:1 ratio might as well be the same note.
YET,
It is not so. 0+5=the perfect 4th; 5+0(the octave above)=a perfect 5th. A simple counter-intuitive fact I have never heard explained or even alluded to in any music class or lesson. There are the Circle(s) of Fifths/Fourths presented to be memorized, but never explained. (This post is no exception.) But the simpler image of the clock with numbers can help. The 5th is thought of as the center of the diatonic scale, but chromatically it is the tritone. From any numbered note, we can see its tritone directly opposite on the clockface. And the fourths and fifths are not merely about counting semitones but knowing which direction they are coming from and going. 5 places clockwise is the 4th and 7 is the 5th and vice versa. Then when you get into extended chords and intervals you can see the value of the 24hr clock. Memorizing these values is much simpler than letters with arbitrary accidentals. So there. %
GWAR | Scumdogs of the Universe
Thisssssssszzzzzzzzsssssssssszzzssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss is not the only or last GWAR album that I have purchased, but it’s the only one I currently own. I sold the others a while ago, and haven’t kept up with the new ones for at least a decade. Can’t say I regret it all that that much, but there are a couple things I do regret—1: repairing my keyboard at the beginning of the draft and just leaving it in there like people would think it was funny or something. There’s nothing funny about that. But what can you do, there’s no going back, man. 2: Looking up the wiki for the album after I had most of the thing written in my head. This might not seem like a big deal, but I’ve wasted precious mental real estate assembling my hard-won observations over the years, when all has been previously laid out in the plainest of prose. Depressing.
And why did it take me so long to notice the Al Jourgensen and Paul Barker of Ministry co-produced? (They are actually credited with their real names if you read all the fine print, unlike any member of the band.) But who is this mysterious “Ron Goudie”? Hoho, Wikipedia, you can tell everyone what they already know but remove what we don’t. I’ve got the info of Ron Goudie alright, that you think you can hide! Turns out he is a guy. Some kind of musician. Well.
Wait, there’s probably something I can say about this besides trivia. It’s good, right? In my opinion? Yeah, it’s the best. There’s some good songs on the other albums but this is the only real classic full album. Look, I compared Gwar to Mastodon and maybe it averages out, like Gwar is 80% live experience 20% album and Mastodon is the reverse, but it’s kinda the same thing. BUT. IS. IT. ?. Oh, I see what’s going on here. You’re trying to get me to admit that Gwar’s songs are not that good and it’s basically a joke band. Mastodon is not a joke band. What kind of asshole would even suggest that.
I will not admit it. I do not think it’s true. The good songs on this album are as good as anybody’s. They are completely credible Metal songs. At least the one’s Brockie sings. He was a real guy, man. And non-Metal people will praise the band at a distance, like, “they play live in those rubber suits every night, that’s dedication, gotta give those guys credit”…because the problem for some people is the authenticity vs. a regular clothes-wearing, non-pretending-to-be-space-aliens band like Mastodon.
And let’s talk about the artwork for a second. Wiki’s got nothing to say about that. In addition to everything else, there was also a Gwar comicbook that they sold at their shows. I was always too broke and covered in fake bodily fluids to get a copy. The integration of that art to the inside of the album was reason alone to hold onto it. I love the super-deformed versions on the characters and the bios. (“Balsac the Jaws of Death: Has a beartrap for a face, but why?”)
But there are the songs. Yes. I love the songs. There are the obvious joke songs: NWA take-off The Salaminizer, what I’m going to call a “spoken-word piece” Slaughterama, and show-stopper, Sexecutioner. These tracks may not hold up in the harsh glare of adulthood. They may have been the only tracks you have heard. And probably Sick of You. That was like, a single.
So they do these dumb(?) singalongs and these joke songs. Why do I take them seriously?
Take a song with fairly typical Metal lyrics like The Years Without Light. If they made a whole album of songs like this it would be better than most Anthrax albums, admit it. 95% of Thrash albums are attitude and stringing riffs together, most bands don’t always try make each song so individual and able to stand on its own. Thr broken gallop beat, the vocal cadence, it’s great.
Then you’ve got the songs like Maggots, King Queen, and Horror of Yig, my personal favorites, incorporating theatrical flourishes and sound effects that take you into the world of their unique live experience, but never leaving the musical world of Metal. Except for the bagpipes, which Korn stole. I don’t get the reason for either, but I like the instrument. Is there some kind of gay connotation? There’s a lot of gay references on the album that I don’t get why they’re there. (The printed lyrics are annotated by a member of “The Morality Squad” with things like “shocking!”) Maybe the live show originally had Oderus cross-dressing? If so they dropped that by the time I saw them in…’97, w/ the Misfits. And Mephiskapheles. And Earth Crisis?!? That was a thing that happened.
Then you’ve got (not in this order) Vlad the Impaler, Love Surgery and Death Pod, all solid standards. Black and Huge has the most obvious Ministry-like touches, with porn movie samples, not so obviously dropped in there, but woven into the texture, or perhaps layered, like a delicious industrial metal lasagna. Possibly the least defensible lyrics, because they don’t really make enough sense to be offensive. I’m not going to try to explain someone else’s in-joke. This one and album closer Cool Place to Park, a total vocal departure sung in high screams by Beefcake, always puzzled me as far fitting into the concept of the album. It all ends with the sound of sinking underwater. Maybe I need to read more Lovecraft.
Donate to the Dave Brockie Foundation or buy a t-shirt in an unresonable size b/c you waited too long
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