Posts Tagged 90s
Fugazi | Kansas City, KS USA, 8/28/93
This is my first dive into the live Fugazi vault. I never got to see them so one’s as good as any. I saw a lot of shows as a…youth. It was mostly a random thing back then. I remember mostly buying walk up tickets to shows that had no hope of selling out. Fugazi shows, unlike the band itself, always sold out, fast. They were popular and cheap. You had to have your shit together to get those tix. I did not, as they say, have the straight edge. Sometimes I think about how things might have been different…if I had gotten into one of these shows. It was that time in life when any little thing can Change Everything. I definitely had one of those moments when I bought my first Fugazi albums on cassette at the local comic book shop. First the Margin Walker EP, then Repeater. Mind-blowing stuff, but not the same as a live show. Certainly not the same as a Fugazi show, which by most accounts was a very guided experience. I used to get pretty wild at shows, not violent—I was not into the hardcore scene—but it got dumb. Crazy. A bit much, perhaps. Maybe if someone I respected gave my a stern talking to I would have toned that shit down. But for a time, getting completely retarded at shows was like all I had. It was a lot of fun. I could imagine instead that whole time just hanging back, shaking my head, feeling superior…everything coulda turned out different!
Or maybe not. I’m basing that whole idea on what I thought these shows were like. It’s a space that lives in my head, built up over the years by second-hand reports, that Instrument movie, bootleg tapes of out-of-context stage banter, and seeing Ian talk in person once at the Wetlands. He’s a completely reasonable man who seemingly can back up every suggestion with both a warm heart and cold logic. But you know he has this wild screaming alter-ego that can swing into this weird recess monitor mode. How did all these things resolve in reality?
I have looked for the answers in YouTube clips, as one does. Of course there’s plenty of live clips, but there’s plenty of Ian talks. They’re all pretty good if you need a general motivation boost, he’s good at that kind of thing, and you know he’s not bullshiting you with some positive thinking nonsense or made-up stories. It’s the real Punk ideas. But it’s even better when he gets real specific:
You’re gonna wanna watch this whole thing, but it’s at around the 40 minute mark that he describes the details of this Kansas City gig. With the magic of the internet and this meticulous archive, the full show was easily found, and upon the clearing of my meager paycheck, purchased and downloaded.
What comes through in these recent talks and the full shows in context is the band’s sense of humor. Even the strictly enforced $5 ticket price, which people are still today having friend and career-ruining arguments over after 20 years of inflation, was originally done because they “thought it was funny” (and perhaps more importantly for any note-takers: “because they could”).
Although there are some serious and practical matters behind some of the banter (around the 1 hr mark in the above talk Ian discusses some very real and unfortunate consequences of show violence), there’s times when you listen to some tapes of the stuff when you have to ask, “are these guys fucking kidding?” YES. When you listen to the whole show it’s clear they are at times actually attempting to lighten the mood. Like this thing with making the audience sign a petition? It happens pretty much exactly like he tells it in the story. And then turning all the lights off is just fucking with people—these guys are having a ball. That is Rock’n’Roll. That’s all Punk is, right? It’s about what’s possible with the reality in front of you. That’s so great that you can hear this story and then hear the actual thing and it all matches.
Oh, and there’s the music. I don’t know if they had any bad gigs, really, but this is good one. Great recording. I’m reminded that, even tho I’ve gotten all the albums over the years, I barely remember the ones that were not on Margin Walker (more commonly known now as the second half of 13 Songs) or Repeater. Played the shit out of those tapes, still have em. I’m also reminded of the song Rend It, which was put on a mixtape for me once. A mixtape I may have missed the point of, but which I also played the hell out of and still have. I’m not really a hidden message guy. It might seem stupid but my message is usually “check this music out”. I mean at times it could be “let’s have sex”, but that really seems better left to the moment, and would be said in those words. Rarely it could be “I am eternally devoted to you and there’s nothing you, or even I, can do about it” but that is almost always taken as deeply creepy, and rightly so. Never would you get that message in a Fugazi song. These guys are on that level level. Comparatively speaking. I’m way off. Sorry.
This is like when, uh, your lover turns over to you on the pillow and says ‘but now I can’t see your genitals’, it’s a lot like that. That ever happen to you?
—Guy Picciotto, on turning off all of the lights
Great version of Waiting Room. Bang, pow, smash.
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En Vogue | Best Of
I was looking through Who Sampled to research my HALCALI samples for my Spotify playlist which should get at least a post or two of its own. I wasn’t sure about LL Cool J’s Boomin’ System. Isn’t the chorus a vocal sample from a previous song? I should include both songs maybe. Couldn’t find that but it turns out that song samples the beat from Hold On…[or both songs sample James Brown’s The Payback…yep.]
Damn, Hold On was a great song. I took my case to twitter, with multiple tweets of praise for the song and group in general. As is usual, The twitterverse stood silent in awe. For a normal person, this would be enough. “Hey, remember this group? They were pretty good.” Fine and dandy. But nope, I can’t just leave it at that. What am I talking about, liking En Vogue so much? I don’t have any En Vogue records. What kind of asshole poseur am I? I needed to buy at least one En Vogue record to back up this outlandishness.
Specifically, I was praising early En Vogue. Because I was there, man. Hold On was the first single. I needed to get the first album. Ahh, but Never Gonna Get It is not on that one? Jeez…how deep am I going into this?
Sidenote: Remember this started with an inquiry on Hip-Hop references in J-pop songs. In addition to praising the group in general, I suggested that J-pop acts should be trying to rip-off En Vogue more. (Early En Vogue.) But Check out the mp3 samples on that first record. Impossibly Corny skits, horrible throw-away ballads, a 40s Jazz tune? J-pop albums are already like this. Or they were until recently. Hold On, with its soulful intro, smooth natural harmonies, modern (non-80s cheese) production, and minor key shift in the pre-chorus (challennnge meee), is the outlier on this album. So why didn’t I just say they should copy that one song? And spare myself agony and embarrassment? Because I was thinking of Namie Amuro’s In the Spotlight (which is not a bad video, I’m a jerk, whatever. I also assume you regularly read and recall my opinions, it’s a total ego trip. Anyway.) It has the same kind of minor key shift in an uplifting song. I like that. Every song should be like that, and I don’t see how I could regret that statement.
So…I just bought the Best Of, of which there are several. This one has the best cover. Why bother with CD? Used, it was cheaper than the files. Plus, full liner notes. Did you know Grover Washington, Jr. is playing sax? Of course not, the people who edit wikipedia do not give a fuck about Grover Washington, Jr. Well, some of them so, but not the same ones that like En Vogue. (I obviously do not give a fuck about him because I just found out he was dead.) Produced and written by Thomas McElroy and Denzil Foster. Most of their good songs were, it turns out.
So I’ve got my hard copy of both Hold On and Never Gonna Get It, twenty-something years after I first heard them. These songs are now as old as the Led Zeppelin I was listening to at the time. So I rip the CD, put it on my iPod, and take the dog for a walk. Even tho these are quality songs and not what you might call a guilty pleasure, I felt a little odd listening to them on purpose without the video. You know, those videos are pretty good. And the girls…I don’t have to tell you Terry is my favorite, but I will. I mean, they are all amazingly hot. But Terry, c’mon. Clearly remember that face in the Whatta Man video, something about her is just cute to me. Wait, she does have a cute face but there’s some other stuff in this video which obviously distracted me from the song because at this point in the record I fully hate myself for listening to this and it’s only 3 songs in. (I think the other best ofs don’t include it because it’s really a Salt-N-Pepa song, but I wanted this one. It’s not the worst song ever, but these raps, they are not so good. They were better in other songs, right? I’m not even checking.)
Then there’s Free Your Mind which begins with an In Living Color reference, wow. It’s one of those kind of message songs you can’t argue with but man there’s some corny lines. It’s overall a good…it’s basically a rock song. Which they never came back to as a style as far as I know, but I’m admitting I don’t have the entire discography. And yeah it’s probably all on Spotify. That’s great. I do have Spotify. Yes, thank you, normal person. That must be great.
Don’t Let Go (Love) is a good song. Forgot about that one. I like the guitar line. It’s played by…Tommy Martin. Or Martin Terry. I guess it doesn’t matter.
Giving Him Something He Can Feel is the only other song I really remember by them. Which is a Curtis Mayfield cover, and it’s well done, because they are good singers. And it’s even further out from something I would normally be listening to in that it’s not either really, really good, or strange in some way. So I get that feeling from it that is not full-on self-hate, but the odd feeling of being in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing. Which is a feeling I used to go for as much as possible, but now that I’ve listened to every type of music, I get it from music I’ve heard before and neither love nor hate. Because there’s not really a reason to listen to it, not because I’m not supposed to be listening to it. It’s not quite the same feeling. I’m not breaking some kind of self-imposed taboo, I’m just wasting time.
This album goes on for over an hour. It almost includes their cover of the Beatles’ Yesterday, but then it doesn’t. It’s just part of Give It Up, Turn It Loose, which is not a James Brown cover. It’s ok. It’s pretty good. I’m starting to like it a lot. It would be a lot better without the Beatles/skit in the beginning.
The whole thing is not at all chronological, so you’ve got an another song from the first album later on (Lies, a decent song with an awful rap in it for no reason) and there’s some other early singles later on that were supposedly hits but I don’t remember them. And Runaway Love which was supposedly their only single to really flop, I’m gonna say deservedly. Let It Flow is an odd later album cut, like that one.
I just noticed my mp3s are mistagged. Don’t know how that happened. Someone entered it into the database wrong. It’s not an important detail for you to know, but it does increase my time spent with this record, cause I’ve gotta fix that shit and I guess I’m taking it out on you. It’s completely uncalled for, sorry.
Whatever was a good later single. With the BUM BUM BUM BUMMMs and some nice production touches…I’m a complete asshole. “Early En Vogue”, jeez. It’s mostly all good. There’s no irony about it. There was no irony. I’m glad I bought it. Would buy again.
Oh man, I forgot about the awful remixes at the end. I actually deleted the mp3s of those. No reason for that. %
Tricky | Pre-Millennium Tension
I thought I’d do a list for 1999 before the Mayan “apocalypse”. Isn’t a fake end of the world the ultimate in 90’s nostalgia? This was the first record I thought of including, but I soon realized (not soon enough, I spent at least an hour on the thing) two things: 1). This record came out in 19-fucking-96. It was in heavy rotation for like 3 years. Or was it? When did I buy it? I don’t remember. 2.) This list fills in way too many blanks. It fills in all of the blanks. There’s the question of why I’m doing it or if it should be done, and there’s the question of if I have the correct answers for the questions. Right?
I think I got it through Columbia House. It might have been after seeing the Christiansands video (which, for real is not on youtube?), but I also just bought a lot stuff back then because I liked the cover or the name. I know I got it before Maxinquaye, I was not hip to that. Everybody seems to like that one best, but this is the one for me. It might not be as good musically—lyrics that are barely lyrics, songs that are barely songs—but it’s a solid statement. Half of the booklet is literally pictures of nothing. That’s so cool. C’mon. That’s a statement. You make that into a pdf, it’s bullshit. You gotta get fingerprints you can’t wipe off onto your frantic search for answers, more information. Why was this record made like this? You can just look it up now. I like that he’s fighting his own nature here and his intention fails completely. “Trip-hop” fits this guy perfectly.
This CD could be on repeat for days in those years. Really set a mood. Seems hard to recreate now. Of course, I was really depressed in those days. Clinically; there was no reason for it. And I was on a lot of drugs that kept me generally fuzzy. Thus the futility of specific details of this era. I was into a lot of music that was heavily weed-influenced because it fit with my general demeanor tho I hardly touched the stuff.
I dunno how much you can talk about this music. I remember around this time getting disgusted with music writing, at least the way people had started writing about this kind of music. It’s just a mood, you kinda kill it but talking it to death. I still don’t know what the guy in Ghetto Youth is talking about and it just does not matter. It’s just like a slice of reality you can relive.
New Year’s 2000 wasn’t any kind of Armageddon, but that whole year was a turning point.
There’s a before and after, no going back.
Rodan | Rusty
Rodan’s Rusty
Dug this record out when I heard Jason Noble was sick. I didn’t think too much about it tho, beyond, “wow, medical bills, that sucks”. Cause he was still pretty young to actually die from cancer. Not the case. He would have been 41 today. And I didn’t know him or anything, but it’s impossible to not feel some kind of way about that.
I didn’t really know his other bands either. I mean I know Rachel’s and The Shipping News but I don’t have those records. They were not a big deal to me like Rodan, or just this record really, since that’s all there is, except for some 7-inches and whatnot. But this is one of those bands that kind of loom in my mind…I don’t even know what they look like, forget any chance of having seen them live. Like a lot of these type bands I seemed to hear about them just as they were breaking up. I feel like I’m a couple years younger than I should be if that makes any sense. But enough about me. AV Club has a proper obit.
But Noble was not the sole contributor to the group. Jeff Mueller, later of June of 44 brings a lot of the drama. Without him I think it would be much more straight ahead post-rock, which was not quite established then but I think you get the idea. From the almost orchestral opener Silver Bible Corner to the almost hardcore Shiner you get introduced to these two dichotomies, which then fight it out and at times resolve throughout the album.
This is most emo record I own. They might not get put under that tag, they are more compared to Slint and math-rock. Slint is not emo to me, they’re too arty for that. Rodan takes the Slint blueprint and brings a more direct emotional honesty to it. When Brian McMahan of Slint gets all shouty, he’s playacting the character of this weird story he’s telling. I don’t think those guys have been literally shipwrecked on a weird island or whatever.
I can’t believe there’s only 6 songs on this thing. I guess I’ve always taken it as whole. The long songs seem like shorter songs stitched together, giving the effect of later “songs” referring back to earlier ones in the album. The Pixies get credit for creating the extreme loud/soft dynamics in indie rock but this takes it much further. The catchiest song on this record clocks in at almost 12 minutes: The Everyday World of Bodies.
Oh man, that is the stuff. The strongest vocal hooks on this album are the mantra-like verses with Tara Jane O’Neil, “everything changes, everything changes”, then the two loud choruses, “COME ON COME ON COME” and “I WILL BE THERE I SWEAR”. Just damn. I dunno, too much for some people. I think I was ruined after this. Nothing else like this sounded as good. Plus the girl in the band helps a lot. Most emo bands are like four dudes broing down over one guy’s breakup, I could never get that. I’m generalizing, but I’m just saying. I think this transcends in a way the other stuff does not. It goes beyond coping mechanism/bonding ritual with music into…art? Art.
So it sucks to have to talk about about the record in this context, but you can still help benefit Noble’s family by buying the tribute album (which I’m not going to review, just buy it) and/or a shirt from Shirtkiller. %
V/A | Now That’s What I Call Slam
That’s right, a mixtape download. From Invisible Oranges (via the internet infamous Sergeant D of Metal Inquisition / StuffYouWillHate). Right now I’ve got this thing playing on my old laptop I use for backup and it sounds awful on these speakers. It’s best on headphone with some decent bass response; a fantastic soundtrack for cleaning toilets (more than likely inspiration for many of these bands.) That’s how it gets on my realworld listening list, the only way a digital album can at the moment. A good comp is as good as an album to me and a well-thought out mixtape is as good as real comp—they have potential to be even better than real comps, with no commercial or label concerns. And I’m pretty slow getting on the digital train but being able to make a mixtape that sounds as good as the original CDs (under the right circumstances, and no, none of this came out on vinyl and yes my ears are probably ruined) …well, it’s exciting to me.
Plus, of course, I don’t want these song titles stinking up my last.fm charts. I think extremes in art are always defensible and much of this music is stylistically ground-breaking and technically astounding. But I’m a grown goddamn man. Even if I was 14 again, I would hesitate to broadcast the content of these records and back then I thought Deicide were making valid points about religion and Cannibal Corpse was being funny. These guys, I dunno what their deal is exactly. I don’t feel plugged into to it enough to say “these guys don’t actually want to kill people”. Like, a Cannibal Corpse t-shirt is gonna freak out some squares which is awesome, I love that aesthetic and attitude, but these guys are on some next level with some of this artwork. I’m ok on this level right here, where I will not post it. But I’ve got this thing on set up to repeat on Windows Media Player (which i never use but nothing else is set up on this other machine) just displaying the album art because I’d rather not even look at the song titles and uh, whatever, I guess is what I’m trying to say here. I believe there’s a certain segment of the internet population that uses last.fm primarily to transmit song titles at people, but I’m a believer in the pure sonic experience, my primary exposure being late-night college radio. I didn’t have a lot friends back then into the extreme stuff…
It’s…all clear to me now. All this time it was having friends holding me back from superior musical taste! What with their “fun” and “hanging out” and “having meaningful and sexually fulfilling relationships”. Bah! Try and stop me now! I can listen to whatever I want! Haha!
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