I Want My MTV: The promo spot as short film in the DVD age

I think every American my age (early 30s) can remember a specific period in their lives when MTV mattered. Even if we weren't particularly fond of the more mainstream fare, there were always specialty shows (120 Minutes, Yo! MTV Raps, Alternative Nation/Postmodern MTV) that showed the videos we wanted to see, plus the occasional treat of an unexpected breakout success. Personally, I've never even had cable television, but whether it was getting tapes of last Sunday's 120M from J— every week or staking out the dormitory's TV lounge before the Star Trek geeks got there to make sure we'd get to watch 120M, MTV was always a part of my pop cultural consciousness from about 1989 to, say, 1994.

The secret to MTV's enduring cultural relevance was its blunt refusal to age with its audience. The channel continuously moved on to the latest flavour of the month while its audience replenished itself with a never-ending supply of teenagers. You don't grow up with MTV; you outgrow it. I haven't actually seen the channel in several years, but that's okay; I have little interest in it. As far as I know, they no longer even show videos, having long since relegated those to their satellite-only offshoots in order to make room in the schedule for Road Rules marathons and the like.¹

What's interesting about MTV's cultural hegemony is that my memories of it are just as much of the channel's branding as they are of the content. Other than ESPN, I can't think of any other specialty cable channel that's achieved that. And the secret to that lasting impression was, more than anything else, the ubiquitous promo spots that ran at the front and back of almost every commercial break. They'd come in groups of about a half-dozen or so, saturate the channel for a few months at a time, then vanish into the ether.

I recently picked up a used VHS tape called I Want My MTV. It's a 40-minute compilation of the aforementioned 30-second promo spots that ran during the channel's maddeningly frequent ad breaks. While it satiated my appetite for vintage MTV footage, it's also something of a cruel tease: it's non-chronological, woefully incomplete and devoid of annotation.² The DVD age has spoiled me.

What jumps out about the program more than anything is just how edgy MTV was. The spots are like the channel's main programming on fast-forward: a blur of disconnected images and broad cultural references. They weren't even ads so much as disorientingly brief experimental films with a corporate logo tacked on to the end. Do you remember the one where the little animatronic skeleton cuts that dude's high-top fade into an "M"? How 'bout the one where all the little doll-people get sucked out the window? The one where the butler keeps twisting his head into all manner of vague cultural artifacts, eventually settling on a sardine tin that rolls open to reveal the familiar logo?

The biggest disappointment was the paucity of spots I most wanted to see, and the reason I bought the tape in the first place. Do you remember Jimmy McBride, the Boston cabbie who regales his nonplussed fares with rambling descriptions of current videos? Four spots, not too bad. How 'bout the Sinatra impersonator crooning loungy versions of the latest pop hits? Two spots. Randee of the motherfucking Redwoods, people? Two spots. The video box even promises clips of Randee's quixotic (1988?) presidential campaign, but the tape delivers none of these. Could it really have been that much of a struggle to secure the rights to campaign theme song "Just Say Whoa!"?³

Who's gonna move into the White House?
Who's gonna have to mow the big green lawn?
Randee! Randee! He's the man we need!

Come on.

All of this leads me to my main point here: stuff that needs to be compiled on DVD, pronto. What follows is a partial list, stuff I thought of in the last hour or so.

• A complete collection of MTV promos
  Watching these on VHS is a painful reminder of what a perfect fit stuff like this is for DVD. You could organise it into groups (all the Jimmy the cab driver bits, stand-alone short films, Rock the Vote spots, etc.), include interviews and commentaries with the stars, directors, etc. These promos were an important stage in the evolution of visual branding into an pop-art form of its own, a shift from product awareness to simple brand reinforcement, and deserve to be properly documented.
• The complete Norm McDonald SNL Weekend Updates
  Due respect to Dennis Miller and Tina Fey, but Norm was the greatest Update anchor of all time, hands down. The fact that he baffled half the audience was part of what made him so great. I can remember countless moments spent in a dorm room full of drunk/stoned kids laughing our asses off while the awkward silence of the studio audience emanated from the television. Who can forget the episode after the OJ verdict was handed down?

  Ladies and gentlemen, the verdict is in. Murder...
  ...is legal in the state of California!

  Lorne Michaels, if you're reading this⁴, put this set out and I'll personally buy ten copies. I'm sure I can think of nine people for whom this would make a treasured gift.
• Get a Life
  Inexcusable. There are two four-episode DVDs out now, but the whole show needs, needs, to be reissued. One of the most bizarre shows ever broadcast on "network"⁵ television, Get a Life was a short-lived showcase for the self-humiliating talents of Letterman-alum/future SNL-other-guy Chris Elliott, one of the great comedy idiot-savants of his era. The second volume of the available DVDs, to its credit, does contain three crucial episodes ("Zoo Animals on Wheels", the one where he goes to the big city, the one with the model submarine), but for God's sake, where the fuck is the one where he hits his head on a disco ball and becomes psychic?
  Besides Elliott's persona, the show was notable for the fact that the main character dies at the end of at least a third of the episodes, possibly more. In the four episodes mentioned in the previous paragraph, he dies at the end of three of them.
• Shadow Chasers
  This short-lived 80s flop is just the kind of forgotten treasure that tends to find a second life on DVD. Think of it as a kind of proto-Firefly, although in terms of premise it was really a precursor to The X-Files. It's about these two dudes who investigate paranormal occurrences. One of them is the wacky, carefree American guy who always thinks it's the supernatural at work, the other is the uptight British guy who always thinks there's a rational explanation for everything. I think it lasted about a dozen episodes, and I'm pretty sure I watched all of them.
• A collection of presidential campaign television commercials
  Several years ago I saw a 30-minute-or-so program of these at the Museum of Television and Radio, and it was riveting. They had the Goldwater one where the camera zooms in on that kid's pupil and you see a mushroom cloud.⁶ They had several Gerald Ford ones, in none of which he was allowed to actually speak to the camera, a telling sign if I've ever seen one. A collection like this would be crucial for so many groups of viewers (political science students, advertising students, journalism students), it just has to come out sometime, right?

Tangents & Clarifications

1. It's worth wondering whether today's youth see MTV as anything more than a lifestyle channel. I haven't asked any. I can remember being in college when I heard that Curt Cobain had died. We didn't turn on CNN, we turned on MTV and got the news from Kurdt Loder. I wonder if any analogous cultural event would cause people to turn on MTV today. [Return]
2. The reason DVDs are so perfect for material like music videos and commercials (redundancy?) is the non-linear possibilty of its format. This is why I get so pissed off when artists release DVDs that are either (a) non-comprehensive or (b) non-chronological, and two of the biggest musical acts of the video age have done it. R.E.M.'s video collection doesn't include "Drive" or "Star*69", and U2's collection is in some random order. If the viewers want to re-order the videos or skip certain ones, they can! It's a DVD! These things shouldn't be artistic statements, they should be first and foremost archival. [Return]
3. Currently the great void of the YouTube era, by the way. [Return]
4. And I know you aren't. [Return]
5. This was Fox in the 80s, after all. [Return]
6. Memorably parodied on The Simpsons in the episode where Sideshow Bob tries to blackmail the people of Springfield into giving up television. If you've seen the episode I'm talking about, believe me, the campaign ad looks exactly like that. [Return]

Mix Musings: Fabuteck in the tete, part 2

Part two of S—'s play mix. For part one and an explanation of the track headers, click here. Things got a lot worse before they got better as far as the trivia-test aspect went, but she charitably threw me a few bones toward the end, so I made out alright.

1. M. Ward, "To Go Home"
   Johnston
   2006

Clearly included for the benefit of our fearless leader, a big Johnston fan.

This whole exercise is beginning to highlight for me the fact that I simply don't listen to enough music. Ward falls into the crowded category of artists on this mix I've read about and never actually heard. I was about to write something along the lines of "maybe I spend too much time listening to processed-sugar-teen-pop," but we all know that's like, not possible. The answer is clearly "more", not "different". Maybe I ought to get me one of them iPod thingies all the kids are running around with these days. Get the hell off my lawn.

Heard it? No.
Own it? No.
Like it? It's fine, I guess. I think there was a time I used to dig on this sort of stuff, but now I lean more towards bigger or weirder sounds. This is just an average folk-rock combo chugging along averagely. They're good enough at it I suppose, but generally speaking if something doesn't get my butt shakin', my head bangin' or my brain melting, I get easily distracted. There are exceptions, of course. There always are.

2. Django Reinhardt [Les Paul], "Georgia On My Mind"
   ca. 1936

ALRIGHT! Now this is more my speed. I think this came out when I was in high school, or like... the war. The Good War.

My first guess was Les Paul when I hear the opening guitar solo but no, it's Reinhardt. Man, he really shreds, and it goes on for over a minute.

I've always hated the idea that older music is automatically better, but I think I'm turning into one of those old curmudgeons. It's not that I don't like music today, I like a lot of it. There was plenty of mediocre tripe clogging record stores fifty years ago as well, but most of it's gone now, washed away by time, and what's left are the classics. Time is a brutally effective aesthetic filter, n'est-ce pas?

Heard it? No.
Own it? Do not.
Like it? Oh mais oui. The guitar solo alone makes this one of my favourites on the mix.

3. ?

Absolutely stumped. No idea who or what this is. They sound British, recent vintage, that's all I can tell.

Rhythm section's pretty strong, but the guitarist really needs to step it up a bit more. Needs to listen to Parklife a few times, really. Coxon could always paint all manner of elaborate riffs across the backdrop without ever threatening to take over the song.

Heard it? No.
Own it? No.
Like it? Pleasant, though not especially distinguished.

4. ?

Again, stumped. Twice in a row. This is getting pathetic. I don't know any of these songs. Which, in a way is good, because I'm hearing all this new music, which is the whole point of a mixtape, right? But for God's sake I have a great deal of pride at stake here, and this is turning into quite an eye-opener.

Anyway, this sounds like a relic from about 1965 which, given the contents of the rest of this mix, means it was probably recorded some time last week. Actually, this one may be authentically old, a guess based entirely on the brevity of the intro; generally speaking, a newer retro act would have dragged it out for a few bars, but back in the day they used to get right down to business. Other than that I have nothing to guess.

Oh, and I think they're British. But I could be wrong.

Heard it? No sir.
Own it? No ma'am.
Like it? I do, rather. Nice little first-wave British Invasion vibe going on here. I like the "bababum-bum-bum"s especially. They're kind of silly in a Herman's Hermits sort of way, but the song doesn't last long enough for them to get cloying.

5. Pas/Cal, "I Wanna Take You Out in Your Holiday Sweater"
   2003

I figured it out, but I still have no idea who these guys are. I've never been a fan of the whole twee-pop thing, and this is no exception.

Heard it? No.
Own it? And no.
Like it? Cute enough if that's your thing I suppose, but I'm just into stuff that's a little more obnoxious.

6. Electric Light Orchestra, "Livin' Thing"
   Lynne; p: Lynne/Clark [Lynne]
   A New World Record [Olé ELO], Jet [Columbia¹], 1976

Ah, ELO. Due for a critical reappraisal, methinks, and perhaps they'll get it in the wake of Stylus's head-scratching choice of them as the inaugural inductees into their rather confusing Hall of Fame pantheon². I've always thought of ELO as a band with a great sound and not many great songs, but on the other hand I've never given them much time. I tried when that Stylus article posted and just wasn't that into it.

Still, of the few songs by them I've always liked this one's certainly up there. I've always had a soft spot for massive overproduction, particularly when it involves gobs of wildly unnecessary string sections, and this tracks got 'em in spades.

Heard it? Yes.
Own it? On a best-of cassette, I think.
Like it? You betcha.

7. Brian Jonestown Massacre
   Newcombe

The funniest thing about that movie DiG! is all the testimonials from people talking about what an unheralded genius Anton Newcombe is, but if he's ever written a single above-average, let alone great (or even good), song, I have yet to hear it. He strikes me as little more than a remarkably prolific hack with an ego the size of Oklahoma. This sounds like all of his half-assed output: tossed off and half-baked.

I was unable to confirm that this actually is the BJM, and have no interest in sifting through their monstrous catalogue to find out, but suffice to say that if it's not then it's some BJM knockoff, in which case they're even worse.

Heard it? It sounds familiar; if it's in DiG!, then yes. On the other hand, if you've heard one of BJM's "songs", you've heard most of them.
Own it? Pass.
Like it? Guess.

8. Monty Python, "Sit On My Face"
   Idle/Parr-Davies [Monty Python]
   Monty Pyton's Contractual Obligation Album [The Monty Python Matching Tie & Handkerchief], 1980³

Fuck YEAH! My inner nerd is dancing with joy right now. Dancing with joy, reciting entire scenes from Monty Python and the Holy Grail and emphatically not getting laid. All while laughing his ass off.

This one falls into the category of mixtape classics, those ninety-second-or-less kneeslappers you'd always throw at the end of a side when there's no room for a full song. Good for a laugh every time the tape plays.⁴ Top ten mixtape classics, in no particular order:

• Bad Brains, "Pay to Cum"

Hard to believe this was once like the fastest song imaginable. The rhythm still sounds absolutely relentless with that skipped half-beat at the end of the fourth measure in the main riff. I read that this used to be a pretty standard audition song for early-80s hardcore bands; if the singer could sing fast enough to pull it off, he was in.
• The Minutemen, "Ack Ack Ack"

Classic. Basically just a sixty-second build to nothing.
• The Art of Noise, "Snapshot"

Best appropriation of the "Baba O'Riley" riff ever.
• Bikini Kill, "In Accordance to Natural Law"

Second-best appropriation of the "Baba O'Riley" riff. Also well-worth hearing at half speed if you've got the seven-inch.
• They Might Be Giants, "Minimum Wage"

Nerd-pop at its most gut-bustingly lush. I'm not gonna say there's never been a bad song with a whipcrack sample, I'm just saying I haven't heard it yet.
• God Is My Co-Pilot, "Su Vot² Esta Su Voz"

Let me just say I know someone who's never laughed harder in his life as when he listened to this song on acid about a dozen times in a row. Anything beyond that and I plead the fifth.
• De La Soul, "A Little Bit of Soap", "Can U Keep a Secret", "Take it Off"

3 Feet High and Rising had some of my favourite fragment songs of hiphop's golden age. Any one of these still gets a laugh to this day; the dated fashion references in "Take" only add layers to the humour.
• Any song from the Dwarves' Blood Guts & Pussy album

Besides having one of the greatest titles and album covers of all time, this one's just loaded with mixtape classics. Just about every song is under two minutes, and all of them rock. The finest of an unstoppable bunch includes "Back Seat of My Car", "Drug Store", "Skin-Poppin' Slut" and "Motherfucker". But really, you can't go wrong with any of 'em.

What ever happened to the Dwarves, anyway? They may still be around, but they were never the same after Sub Pop dropped them for faking the lead guitarist's death. Ah well.

• Napalm Death, "You Suffer"

Closed out my own mix with this one, one of the greatest songs ever recorded because not only is it one second long, but within that sliver of time lurks an actual song. It has a beginning and an end (in that they start playing and quickly stop again) and two lines of lyrics, which go as follows:

You suffer!
But why?

And really, isn't that what life's all about? Flipper⁵ used to take at least six minutes to say the same thing.
• Monty Python, "Sit On My Face"

If you've ever been able to parse the penultimate line of the lyrics, you've got one up on me.

Heard it? Oh yeah.
Own it? On more than one cassette, I think. Store-bought cassettes, not mixtapes. Nerd power!
Like it? You better believe it baby.

9. Elvis Presley, "Don't Be Cruel"
   Blackwell [Axton]; p: Sholes [Phillips]
   (single, b/w "Hound Dog"), RCA [Sun], 1956

Seeing as I just finished Guralnick's biography, I'm a little embarrassed that I mistook this for a Sun cut, but had I known it was RCA I totally would have got Steve Sholes as the producer. And hey, I got the b-side (or, in this case aa-side) right, so that's worth half a bonus point, right?

What else can one say about this number? The King didn't record a single less-than-terrific song in '56, and this one holds up as one of the best of an unstoppable bunch. Thank God it's not the Cheap Trick cover.⁶

Heard it? Hell yeah.
Own it? Believe it or not, I may not have the original version anywhere, but I know I've got several live versions.
Like it? And how.

10. Madness, "House of Fun"
    Stiff [Two-Tone], 1982

The nutty boys! Love 'em! I'm also a bit embarrassed for getting the label wrong on this one, as I just read that Simon Reynolds book earlier this year, but hey, I've gotta save a few brain cells for school.

Worth noting that the boys' rendition of "One Step Beyond" barely missed the cut for my own mix. Can't go wrong with any of the old singles, really. Great video, too. I love the goofy choreography in all those old Madness videos.

Heard it? Hell yeah.
Own it? No, but it's on Rhapsody.
Like it? If you don't like it check y'pulse.

In conclusion...

Solid mix. Holds together pretty well from one song to the next for the most part, at least until the end, when there's a palpable sense of "running out of space, gotta get this one on somewhere!". Like all the best mixtapes. More than half the songs I'd never heard before, and several of those were by acts I'd been meaning to check out, so bonus points there.

As for the no-tracklist challenge, I think I did pretty well, considering my advanced age and all. I don't think I got a single one from this decade, which should tell you something right there. Oh wait, I got the Art Brut one. And I think I counted three absolute stumps. But it's the game that counts, not the results.

When my wife and I were first dating I made her a mixtape without a tracklist, the idea being that if she really liked a song she could ask me what it was and we'd, like, talk about music. Yeah, I was lame, so what, she married me, so who's laughing now? Anyway, she was pissed, thought it was a dumb idea and just wanted to know what the songs were, not talk about them.⁷ We still talk about music sometimes, though. Or at least I do. She just smiles politely and pretends to listen.

Tangents & Clarifications

1. I'm pretty sure Columbia was distributing Jet in those days, so I should get partial credit for this. [Return]
2. The pedestal has since been expanded to include Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis and the Boredoms, to give you an idea of the aesthetic at work here. Or lack thereof. [Return]
3. The song probably dates from an earlier year, but that's the year of the first album to include it, so I'm counting my guess as correct, even though I got the album wrong. [Return]
4. It just occured to me that there's a whole generation of kids now who've neither heard nor made a mixtape. Hell, the really young ones probably don't even bother burning CDs anymore, they just email each other iTunes playlists or something. Lost charms of the tape: two side-openers/-closers, difficulty of skipping a track, gradual sonic deterioration... Those were the days... [Return]
5. Irrelevant trivia note: I dated Flipper bassist Will Shatter's cousin in college. So there. [Return]
6. Of course, S— may not have been born yet during during that insufferable video's run of MTV ubiquity, but anyone my age will certainly groan at the memory of that stupid remote control gimmick before the last chorus. See? [Return]
7. Interesting little I-should-have-known-even-then note: I put Yo La Tengo's "Sugarcube" near the beginning of the tape, a surefire winning move. I mean, you could never go wrong putting Yo La Tengo on a mixtape for a girl. To my shock and disappointment, she thought it was kind of cheesy(?!?). A few cuts later was the Fall's "Free Range", a risky move for a girl mix^a, but she recognised it right away and said she loved the Fall. I mean, should there have been any question after that? [Return]
1. Not that that ever stopped me; I always believed, and still believe, that the best mixtapes are the ones you make for yourself first and foremost, and anyone else can take it or leave it. This may be a small step toward explaining my long run of lousy luck with girls, but why dwell on the past?

The lyric police

The bad

I think the first lyrics I ever found genuinely offensive were those to the Ying Yang Twins' "Wait". Yes, this will be another post about how I'm getting old now. I didn't give a shit when I was younger. I thought Dre and Snoop's "Bitches Ain't Shit" was a harmless lark. I thought N.W.A.'s "Don't Bite It", with it's extended intro about "the art of sucking dick" was pretty damn hilarious. I thought 2 Live Crew was... well, talentless. In fact, downright awful. But ultimately harmless.

First time I heard "Wait" I thought it was terrific, and I still do. I wasn't yet familiar at the time with any of the Atlanta duo's earlier second-rate crunk hits, but they never would have adequately prepared me for "Wait". The song stands entirely apart from the rest of Twins' calalogue and, for that matter, from the work of their peers as well. The first version I heard was with the accompanying video, which is hilarious, especially the champagne bit. You can watch it at their website¹. The song is simple and spare with very few individual elements, each of them perfectly placed. The minimal beat is crisp and spacious, right down to the finger snaps where the snares should go². The bassline is prominent, atonal, disorienting... and very smooth. The whispering gimmick is marvelously effective, evoking a mood that's either intimate or menacing, depending more on the listener than the song. And then there's that "oh!", as in "Wait'll you see my-- oh!", in the chorus, my favourite detail in the whole track. The only fully-voiced syllable surrounded entirely by whispers, it leaps out from the vocal line, coyly winking at the listener while highlighting the rather obvious dirty word it's covering up. Of course, you don't know for certain that they're actually saying "dick", but it's obviously that or some variation thereof, e.g. "cock", "jimmy", what have you. It immediately invokes a naughty charm and cheek that keeps the listener grinning while the line "I'ma beat dat, beat dat up" slips past unnoticed.

Curious as to what they were actually saying and too lazy to sit and listen closely, I found the lyrics³ online and was surprised to find myself shocked at the explicit language in the uncensored version⁴. When I heard it, the song was tranformed from a wry bit of fun to a disturbing threat. I was not alone in my discomfort; the song sparked reams of debate within online music communities, and writers lined up to condemn or excuse it. Some saw it as an ode to rough but consensual sex, carefully pointing out lines like "yo ass look soft/Mind if I touch it... Naw I'm just playin less you say I can." Others focused on the violent tone of "beat dat pussy up" and "But it depend on the swing of the baseball bat," some going so far as to read the song as a threat of rape.

Stepping down from my moral soapbox, I still think the whole thing works overall as a pop song, especially the whispering gimmick, but I much prefer the video version, and not just due to my newly-sprouted prudishness. Just as a Victoria's Secret catalogue is much sexier than Penthouse, hearing the Twins censor themselves with a wink and an "oh!" is way more erotic than just hearing them say "Wait'll you see my dick." Those "oh!"'s made all the difference. Well not all. You'll notice that the dirty version includes the words "Hey bitch" between every other line of the chorus, which only adds to the song's misogynistic atmosphere; the video version, rather than trying to cover it up, cuts this out entirely. Also, "I'ma beat dat, beat dat up" has a better syllabic rhythm than "I'ma beat dat pussy up," which is not only disgusting, but drags a little in the third trochee.⁵

The good

Several months later I was relieved to find that I had not grown completely into a crotchety old schoolmarm when I stumbled upon the genius that is Spank Rock. I can't remember where I first heard "Put That Pussy On Me", but I'm sure it was an mp3 blog⁶ of some sort. The point is, I was hooked after one listen. For a while it was posted at the redoubtable Aurgasm (it's since been taken down⁷), and I would listen to it several times a day while at work.

Every detail of the song is note-perfect, from the back-to-back Snoop Dogg and Beach Boys samples to the old-school stutter samples ("P-P-Put--," etc.). I found the song both hilarious and endlessly catchy, an unbeatable combination in my book. Exactly why the song grabbed my fancy so mercilessly can't possibly be explained, and what's more I didn't choose to give it much thought; with brief obsessions like these, reason is never the point.

What struck me, however, was the fact that the lyrics didn't bother me at all⁸. Now that the Ying Yang Twins had exposed me as the doddering old prude I've become, why did Spank Rock make me feel so gloriously immature all over again?

The difference

I gave it a lot of thought, and the answer I came up with is threefold. First what it's not. The most obvious answer here, the white elephant in any discussion of hip-hop amongst white Americans, is race. I'm a white male, and my middle-class suburban upbringing means I grew up with minimal direct contact with urban African-American culture, particularly southern (the Twins are from Atlanta; me, New England). So the most immediate conclusion would be that I find the Twins' expression of black male sexual aggression threatening, and from there you can take all kinds of tangents from white liberal guilt to Freudian inferiority complex blah blah blah. These are all well-worn topics.

But I don't think that's it. For one thing, sexually aggressive rap lyrics have never bothered me in the past. For another, I don't find the Twins threatening (though, granted, I'm not a woman), just rather distasteful. I don't fear them, I disapprove of them.

Rapper Naeem Juwan of Spank Rock is black, but the rest of the band is multi-racial. Unlike the Ying Yang Twins, Juwan explicitly addresses race in his lyrics, closing the song's lone verse with the line "Some white boys surely imitate that⁹," repeated several times. Still, the colour of the rappers' skin doesn't carry nearly as much weight as the images they (choose to) project. The Ying Yang Twins come off as ghetto-fabulous Dirty South thugs; their image makes their lyrics somewhat believeable. Spank Rock, on the other hand, are nerds through and through, and their image makes them sound like a bunch of horny but harmless teenagers noodling with samplers in their mother's basement, who don't get one-tenth as much play as they rap about. Both these impressions may have little or no connection with reality, but that's not the point; it's the perception that influences my response to each song.

Beneath this surface impression is the issue of lyrical content. "Wait" articulates a fantasy of male aggression so forceful that the object (or target, or even victim) of the narrator's affections (and I use that term with a healthy dose of irony) is powerless to resist; she succumbs the his "charms" (again...) in spite of herself. Add to that the inferences of violence and the song is well outside the bounds of social acceptability. Ladies, suppose a handsome man approaches you in a club and, as his pickup line, says, "Excuse me, bitch. Allow me to beat the shit out of your vagina with my penis." Not a very tasteful opening.

"Put That Pussy On Me" presents almost the exact opposite scenario: here the male is fantasising about a female aggressor, picturing himself as the helpless (albiet more than willing) victim of a paramour who knows what she wants and knows how to get it. "Put that pussy on me," he begs. "Push me in the corner/Put that pussy on me". Hardly the words of an overt sexual predator.

On an even more subtle level, and this is the distinction I find most interesting, is the perceived distance between the vocalist and the listener. The whispering in "Wait" gives the song an immediate and intensely personal quality, as though the Twins are addressing you directly. This serves to highlight the inappropriateness of the lyrics, as well as adding a layer of menace that rapping in a regular voice lacks. If you can hear them whispering, they must be close, close enough to grab you, which makes the danger that much more real. Not only that, but the whispering also means that no one else around you can hear; these sweet nothings are for you alone. "Put That Pussy On Me" not only features Juwan's voice at a normal volume, but opens with the song's lyrical hook being cut up by a DJ: "P-P-Put--/Put that pussy on me". The effect is to make the vocalist seem less real; he's not only not near you, he's not even in the same room. Whereas "Wait" sounds like someone standing right next to you, "Put That Pussy On Me" sounds like your buddy playing you a record of someone reciting the lyrics, and everyone in the room is free to have a good laugh over it. Relax, it's not real; it's just a recording.

Tangents & Clarifications
1. The website is all Flash, so I can't direct link to the video; to find it, click on "Music" along the top banner, then click the third album from the top in the thumbnails running down the right side; click the "Watch" link next to "Wait". [Return]
2. A neat trick that has since been codified into a sub-genre all its own and produced a slew of shitty mid-level hits, but at the time was still pretty fresh. [Return]
3. As you can see, the transcriber was at times as confused as I was; give the guy a break, man, the whole thing's whispered. There are numerous variations floating around the web; I just chose this one because it didn't come with any pop-up ads.Anyway, you get the basic idea. [Return]
4. You can hear a clip of the dirty version's chorus by clicking the "Listen" to the immediate left of the link to the video. [Return]
5. To add insult to queasiness, there is a third version^a of the song on the clean version^b of the album; rather than simply putting the video mix on the clean album, they re-recorded the vocals with altered lyrics. Thus "Wait'll you see my dick/I'ma beat dat pussy up" becomes "Wait'll I show you this/You will never get enough," which is unfathomably lame. So lame, in fact, that it's possible to read the clean version's lyrics as a broad parody of re-written clean-version lyrics in general, and of the very idea of the Wal-Mart-ified clean album phenomenon. But that's a whole other topic. [Return]
1. And that's not even counting the so-called remix, which just has a bunch of guests rapping over the same track, and became a hit in its own right.
2. If you're still in the "Music" section of their website the clean version is the fourth thumbnail from the top, immediately beneath the dirty version; you can listen to a clip from the chorus there.
6. Spank Rock are nothing if not a textbook Internet phenomenon: hip underground sound (they're sort of an odd variant of Baltimore Club, a genre known for its flagrantly illegal samples; get familiar) with a hefty nerd-appeal factor (old school synths, terrifically awful glasses). [Return]
7. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a full version to which to link, but if you go here and click on the "Listen" button next to "SPANK ROCK : 01" you can hear a thirty-second clip^a, which is at least enough to hear the vocal hook and the main Beach Boys sample. [Return]
1. NSFW, BTW.
8. The other track posted on Aurgasm, however, made me a little queasy, but not for moral reasons. "Backyard Betty" opens with the lines "Ass-shakin' competition champ/Ooh dat pussy gets damp." Damp? Doesn't that mean, like, cold and wet? Am I nitpicking here or does this sound somewhat unappealing? [Return]
9. Admittedly, I have no idea what this line means, with or without context. In fact the whole verse baffles me, as does the oft-repeated line "Make me wanna, make me wanna/Grab my buck-stick[?]". Truth be told, the lyrics to "Put That Pussy On Me" as a whole don't really make much sense, which may be another reason I don't find them partticularly offensive. [Return]

Another piece of my childhood, gone

After 42 years, the BBC chart show Top of the Pops is going off the air. And it's not being retired with dignity or anything like that, it's just getting flat-out cancelled. For low ratings. I mean, come one, man. The BBC is like the UK's national network; surely presenting the weekly pop charts, particularly in a country in which they mean so much to so many, must count as some sort of invaluable public service. Is it really just about the ratings? Is that what we've come to?

As a young lad, I lived in London for a few years in the early 80s¹, where I followed the pop charts obsessively. I would buy some music magazine² the day it hit the stands so I would know the results before they were broadcast every Thursday. I actively rooted for songs I liked over ones I didn't, as though the bands were sports teams or something. I can recall being particularly invested in the success of Duran Duran, whom I found incredibly cool. In contrast, I lived for the weeks when Wham! did not make it to number one. My sister liked Wham!; they were for girls. Being a boy, I was into tougher bands. Like Duran Duran. I'm older now³.

There was only one TV in our house⁴, so the evening's entertainment choices had to be debated and settled upon by the kids, and every Thursday I insisted on TOTP. My younger siblings, who didn't care nearly as much about pop music as I, would occasionally be tempted by some imported American tripe over on the ITV network in the same time slot. Street Hawk, for example, essentially a Knight Rider knock-off revolving around a futuristic arsenal-equipped motorcycle, springs to mind as one such point of contention. Fortunately, for both myself and for the public at large, the show was quickly cancelled, and TOTP resumed its unopposed rule of Thursday nights.

I can still distinctly remember some of the singles I saw "performed" on TOTP for the first time, like the Smiths doing "What Difference Does It Make?" and Depeche Mode's "People Are People", and years later, back in the US, felt lucky to have witnessed moments some of my high school peers would have killed to have seen.

My plan in writing this post was to track down a few YouTube.com posts of classic performances (and they are myriad) and link to them with a bit of wry commentary. But viewing these grainy videos exposed a rather surprising universal trend throughout the performances: most of them are terrible. (You're welcome to sift through them if you like.) Bad sets, bad lights, bad studio audiences dancing, bad pantomiming. And the worst part: guests on TOTP don't actually play. The singers sometimes sing (and sometimes not), so it's not just a lip-synch show, but the instruments aren't plugged in. In fact, the only really good TOTP performances I've seen are ones by snotty bands taking the piss out of the show. If you've ever seen Nirvana's Live! Tonight! Sold Out!⁵, you'll certainly remember the band's withering desecration of "Smells Like Teen Spirit", in which Cobain sings in a shitty Jim Morrison impersonation while Novoselic and Grohl hop around and make no attempt to pretend they are actually playing. And the Stone Roses video retrospective features the band's rendition of "Fool's Gold" during which Ian Brown holds the microphone over his head, flaunting the fact that he's not singing a word⁶.

So with that in mind, is it really so bad that the show is gone? Is it really necessary, or is it one of those institutions that has long outlived its usefulness and now gets by on reputation alone, like CBGB's? I say the former: England needs TOTP. The singles chart still means something to British music fans⁷, and the show continues to represent a career benchmark for British bands great and small. With the loss of first John Peel and now TOTP, to what shall young Britpoppers aspire? And what will the kids watch on Thursday nights? Even Street Hawk is but a memory.

Tangents & Clarifications
1. Which, as you probably know, was a terrific time to be a pop music fan in the UK. If you didn't know, read this. [Return]
2. I can't remember what it was called, but it had glossy photos, puff-piece Q&A's, and lyrics to the latest hits. Can you imagine? [Return]
3. Though, curiously, heterosexual. Just a little tidbit for the whole nature/nurture debate. [Return]
4. Y'know, in the UK you have to pay for a TV license. Just to have rabbit ears and a regular ol' TV. That's how they fund the BBC and provide the public with much-needed news programming like Top of the Pops. I don't know whether it costs extra to have multiple sets in the house, nor do I know whether that's the reason we had only one. [Return]
5. It's unbelievable that this still isn't out on DVD. But not a travesty. The travesty is that this still isn't on DVD. [Return]
6. Incidentally, if you've ever heard live recordings on which he actually sings, you know this was the right call. [Return]
7. Contrast them with their American counterparts. Do you even know what the Number One song in the US is right now? Do you care? Click here to find out, then come back. Have you ever heard the song? Better yet, have you heard of it? How 'bout the rest of the top ten? [Return]

A hip-swing down memory lane

My high school philosophy teacher Karl Meyer¹ once posed a question to the class about his favorite golf club. It seemed that every other year he had the grip replaced. Once, after a particularly errant swing, he had knocked the head clean off, and had to have it replaced. And another time, following another bad swing, he had snapped the shaft over his knee in frustration; this too had been replaced. His question to the class: with none of the original parts remaining, was it the same club? Is there a single element of the club that bestows identity? Or does each new part become absorbed into the intangible whole of the club?

More recently, I blew out the motherboard on my computer. The warranty period had passed, but I'm apparently still entitled to tech support over the phone for as long as I own the machine. But having already replaced the hard drive and the operating system, in addition to several other upgrades, was it still the same machine? Rather than trying to have it repaired, I simply bought a new CPU, motherboard and chassis, then built a new machine using parts from the old one (memory, disc drives, PCI cards, etc.). Or did I simply replace those three parts (keeping in mind that one of them is the case, for heaven's sake) on the old machine? Is it still the same machine? The original memory chip, CD-ROM drive and other parts mentioned above have all been replaced. The only part remaining from the original machine is the 3.5" floppy drive. More to the point, am I still entitled to that eternal tech support?

Believe it or not, there is a point to all this. Last month I purchased a ticket to see a live performance by a band billed as "Guns N' Roses". Perhaps you remember them. And whom, might I ask, do you remember exactly? Surely you recall bilious frontman W. Axl Rose. And of course that perpetually shirtless lead guitarist known to the world only as Slash. Dishevelled rhythm guitarist Izzy Stradlin'? Ex-punker bassist Duff McKagan? Perhaps your memory even reaches back far enough to conjure up traces of drummer Steven Adler, the first of the original lineup to be unceremoniously dismissed, presumably for possessing a recognisably legitimate first name.

Exactly one of the aforementioned individuals appeared onstage at New York's Hammerstein ballroom on the night of the event. Which begs the question: what constitutes Guns N' Roses? What constitutes any band? Is it the music or the musicians? The people onstage or the sounds they make? If the replacement parts play the old songs in the same style as their original counterparts, and the band sounds essentially the same, is it the same band? Bands such as Radiohead and U2 have evolved to create music in a style that differs so drastically from that of their earlier work that one could not possibly have predicted how their later work would sound based only upon evidence of the earlier. And yet no one questions whether they are actually the same band, as the members themselves haven't changed. "Guns N' Roses", as it were, currently include one original member, but they play the same songs in the same style as the old lineup. Steven Adler currently plays in a Guns N' Roses tribute band² called Adler's Appetite. They too play old Guns N' Roses songs in the same style as the old lineup, and have just as many original members as "Guns N' Roses" (i.e., one). Are they any more or less Guns N' Roses than the band I saw the other night? How close is Mr. Brownstone to being Guns N' Roses? The have just one member fewer than the band I saw, and sound pretty much the same. And just whom exactly did I see on the night in question? Guns N' Roses? Or Axl and His Employees?

Setting aside for a moment the band's burning identity issues³, the music was just as you'd expect it to be: tight, energetic and above all professional. He's Axl fucking Rose, for God's sake; the man doesn't work with hacks.

The real standout was Robin Finck, charged with the unenviable task of filling Slash's size-50s. He apparently used to tour with Nine Inch Nails, and did a stint with Cirque du Soleil(?!). His obligatory solo turn⁴ was an unexpectedly spare and rootsy little number that bore more than a passing resemblance to Neil Young's work on the soundtrack to Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man, and none of the sub-Eruption histrionics one typically expects from such spotlight moments⁵. When the rhythm (third) guitarist, whose name I didn't catch and can't be bothered to look up, had his solo moment, he was joined by Finck for an instrumental rendition of Christina Aguilera's "Beautiful", easily one of the evening's highlights.

Rounding out Finck's hat trick of good decisions, he played the solo in "Sweet Child O' Mine" pretty much note-for-note, demonstrating his inherent understanding that it's one of the finest and most unfuckwithable guitar leads ever composed, and best to treat it with the reverance it deserves. The rest of the solos, for the most part, he made his own, but respect was paid to Slash when it counted. Bravo.

As for Axl himself? Well, his goatee looked sad and dated (anyone care to bet on whether there's an extra chin or two hidden beneath it?), and his trademark auburn mane, while unfortunately still bound by those ridiculous cornrows, remained tied back in a nice conservative ponytail for the show's duration, preventing, as you can no doubt imagine, any truly authentic headbanging⁶. Hair aside, he seemed to have at least bothered to work out this time, enabling the appearance of the old Axl dance we all remember so well, to the obvious delight of the crowd. His voice sounded fine, perhaps not quite as menacing as in the old days but certainly better than I'd been led to believe by recent reports, and he sounded like he was hitting all the notes.

Good heavens, man, never mind the technical commentary, you gasp from the edge of your seat, tell us about the new material! Briefly: four new ones, the only one I recognised ("Chinese Democracy") saved for the encore, and with good reason. Not only was it far and away the most well-known of the new songs, prompting a roar of recognition from the crowd as Finck teased the riff, it was also the only good one. The others I can't remember so well, other than to report they do not bode well for the new album⁷. Before the show, I figured I would have been perfectly happy to hear an entire set of new material⁸. This is different band, I reasoned, let's hear their music. But having heard the cream of it I think sticking to the classics was a good call. Regardless of who exactly that band was up there playing them.

ADDENDUM 4 JULY 2006: Worth noting that one of the two keyboardists present on the night in question was none other than Dizzy Reed, official GN'R keyboardist for the Use Your Illusion albums and, if you count it, The Spaghetti Incident? So the new lineup had maybe one-and-a-half original pieces? Beats Adler's band by a nose, anyway.

ADDENDUM 3 OCTOBER 2007: Re: my computer, the monitor died and I bought a used one off craigslist for $10. The spacebar on the keyboard started getting squirrelly so I just broke down and bought a phat new keyboard with a backlight, LCD display and macro keys. Only the 3.5" floppy drive remains from my original Gateway purchase. I'm actually not entirely certain that Gateway is still in business, which would render the whole question moot.

Tangents & Clarifications:

1. Carl Meijer, perhaps? I have no idea how it's spelled, actually. One of the best teachers I ever had at any level of schooling, by the way. Wonder what he's doing these days? Still golfing his way through retirement, I hope. [Return]
2. And if that ain't rock bottom, I dunno what is. Ah, what the hell, I'm sure he's having fun. [Return]
3. And I'm sure they're just as concerned as I am, particularly when Axl's handing out the paycheques. [Return]
4. Oddly, while all three guitarists took solos, no one else did. I mean come on man, no drum solo? That's Brain up there! Nor was there a bass solo from punk legend Tommy Stinson (resplendent in a red plaid suit), but I'm not sure we missed out on much there beyond the potential morbid-curiosity-value of the whole thing. [Return]
5. These were left to new guitarist Bumblefoot, a recent replacement for the departed Buckethead, and whose contributions led me to believe he was chosen largely for his name. [Return]
6. Worth noting that Axl was thoroughly outheadbanged by "surprise" guest Sebastian Bach, who showed up for an enthusiastic duet of "My Michelle". Bach sounded absolutely terrific, and did not appear, from our seats, to have aged so much as a single hour since the heyday of Skid Row. It's enough to make one wonder whether there lurks a classically-styled painting of a portly, bald and wrinkled Sebastian in some dark corner of the attic of casa Bach. [Return]
7. This sentence appears to imply a belief on my part that said album may in fact ever be released, an impression it is by no means my intention to give. [Return]
8. At least up until a good long encore. I'm not crazy. [Return]

Requiem for the Flaming Lips

I can very distinctly recall the day that I heard on the radio that Camper Van Beethoven had broken up. I was immediately depressed beyond consolation, moping about for the rest of the day. I was a freshman in high school at the time¹, and in the space of about a year they had become my favorite band in the world.

When I was in the eighth grade, I was already obsessed with music, having recently graduated from the Top 40 pop of my youth to the more serious classic rock sounds of Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, etc. Then one day my friend Justin introduced me to the magic of what was at the time known as "college rock". I didn't have cable television at the time, but Justin would periodically loan me a few tapes of MTV's 120 Minutes, the channel's 2-hour Sunday-night showcase for the latest the underground had to offer.² They even showed indie stuff back then; I can remember seeing a Meat Puppets video from when they were still on SST. It was here I discovered many of the bands who would become my favorites throughout high school: Soul Asylum, R.E.M., Sonic Youth, the Cure.

And Camper Van Beethoven. They were so perfect, they seemed to exist solely for my entertainment. Or possibly their own. Their latest album at the time was Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart, which I listened to non-stop. I still love every song on it. Every one. By the time the next one came out, I had all of their albums. The goofy non sequiturs, the droll irony, the carefree self-referentialism, the omnivorous genre-hopping all combined to create a circus of nods and winks I would listen to day after day, a goofy grin plastered to my face. I had some friends who were sort of into them, but none to the degree I was. They were my best pals, they just didn't realise it.

I made a point to buy Key Lime Pie the day it hit stores and, while it wasn't as perfect as Our Beloved³, it was good enough for constant listening. I was already looking forward to their next one when I heard they had called it a day. Apparently some long-simmering resentments had at last come to a head during a tour of Europe. I think the worst part of it was the realisation that I would never get to see them play live.

When I got to college, my appetite for new sounds grew exponentially, and I spent four years discovering as many new sounds as I could. In that time, I found three more bands that had a similar effect on me: Pavement, Guided By Voices and the Flaming Lips. What these bands had in common with Camper Van Beethoven, besides being fun and funny, having a gift for endless melodies both breezy and inspiring, was that these were the sounds of guys I wanted to chill with. There was no sheen of untouchable rock god-hood to them and no tortured-artist pose either; they sounded like guys I could hang out, get high and jam with. The unstable line-ups of each one helped to feed the fantasy that I could even be in one of these bands, a key element of each one's appeal. They were making exactly the kind of music I wanted to make.⁴

Three things made the Lips stand apart from the other two. First, while Pavement and the Voices had that tossed-off devil-may-care vibe to their haphazard recordings, the Lips were studio craftsmen of the highest order. Even when they splattered ungodly noise over their charming pop songs, it was clearly studied and calculated noise. As a lifelong Beatles fan, this appealed to me immensely.

Second, Pavement were absolute pillars of the unrelenting irony that came to define the popular culture of their era, a trait so prevalent that it makes their music sound oddly dated today in a way that I never could have imagined it sounding at the time. The Voices seemed a bit more sincere, but there was still a definite wink to their classic rock poses. But the Lips, in all their lysergic bliss, came off sounding hopelessly naive. You just couldn't help but believe that Wayne Coyne really was fascinated by the moth crawling up his window, and just had to write a song about it.

Third, Pavement and the Voices were consensus gods of indie cool, but no one I knew liked the Flaming Lips. My friends, by and large, hated them, and would respond with disgust when I played their records. In fact, I've probably seen them in concert by myself more than any other band (at least five shows I can think of off-hand), simply because I couldn't find anyone to go with me. The Flaming Lips, like Camper Van Beethoven, made music just for me.

Pavement and the Voices eventually let me down. I hated Brighten the Corners, and still do. Terror Twilight was okay, but I gave up on Malkmus after the first solo album. I listened to Mag Earwhig once and never bought another Voices record. They were depressing albums to listen to because these bands had, for a few albums in a row, really delivered. I would anticipate the new album for months and it would be fantastic. I can still remember hearing an advance copy of Under the Bushes, Under the Stars and being so thrilled that they had pulled it off!

The Lips, by contrast, not only never let me down, they kept getting better. I listened to Transmissions From the Satellite Heart ceaselessly when it came out, and was tickled to no end when, almost a year later, "She Don't Use Jelly" became and alt-rock "hit". I never fretted about them selling out; they had been on a major label since I had been listening to them. Unlike some of my other favorite bands, I wanted them to get popular, I wanted everybody to like them. I loved it when they were on Beverly Hills 90210. There's just something infectious and inclusive about them that I wanted everybody to share with me.

In the minds of most people, they faded into the one-hit wonder where-are-they-now bin soon after that, but I knew they kept going. I went to the boombox concert at Wetlands; I tried listening to as much of Zaireeka as available resources would allow. I even wrote them a fan letter after seeing them at Maxwell's around Cristmas '95, still one of the best shows I've ever seen, if not the best.

I had a friend living in England send me a copy of The Soft Bulletin; it came out a month earlier there, and with a slightly different track list. I was floored from the first listen. And with The Soft Bulletin, it finally happened: the Lips got their due. They made year-end best-of lists. They had glowing profiles written about them, framing them as the little band that could, making wildly ambitious records in the face of mass indifference. Friends of mine who hated them came around to the new album. I couldn't have been happier for them. The band and my friends.

I can still remember when "Do You Realize?" was posted on the band's website. I don't know how many times in a row I played it the first day I discovered it, but I know I watched it several times a day for about a week. And when Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots finally came out, I bought it the first day, raced home and was... a little disappointed. It's good, but Flaming Lips albums aren't good, they're great, transcendentally great.

I listened more and it grew on me. I respected the sonic experimentalism of it; it certainly didn't sound like any of their other albums, or like any other band, so they were still pushing forward. But other than "Do You Realize?", Wayne's songs just didn't seem quite as hummably perfect as they had in the past. Some of the lyrics sounded like he was running out of ways to gush effusively about the wonder of existence. I couldn't shake the feeling that the praise being heaped upon it was a little excessive. For the first time, the Lips seemed a little... overrated. Still, they were trying new things, and that's what counts, so I eagerly awaited At War With the Mystics, expecting a full return to form.

The SpongeBob song is pretty lame. But whatever, the Lips'll do anything for a buck, something I've never held against them. "Mr. Ambulance Driver" is mediocre at best, by-the-numbers lite-rock from aging hippies. I didn't think either would be on the new album, but "Ambulance" is. The advance single, "The W.A.N.D." has a cool riff but that's about it, and the vocals are buried. None of this was a good sign.

When I finally heard the new album, it was okay, but the magic is clearly gone. Steve Drozd and Dave Fridmann have assembled some interesting tracks, but nothing nearly as unique as the ones on Yoshimi, and Wayne contributes exactly zero memorable songs. I think he's phoning it in at this point, focusing his creative energy in his long-running movie project and the band's increasingly elaborate stage shows. Maybe he's just run out of ideas. He had, in hindsight, an unbelievably long peak.

Today I watched the VOID DVD, the Lips' video retrospective, and was struck by a feeling I'd never had about the Lips before: nostalgia. For the first time in my life, I found myself looking back on the good ol' Lips. For the first time, I thought of them as a great band that was, rather than a great band that is.

What hurts so much about this is that they were the last band from my youth that was still delivering, year after year. I'm over 30 now, and pretty much all new bands who might be coming into their prime are younger than me. I've heard too much music to be as impressed as I was ten years ago. I honestly don't think it's possible, at my age, to start loving a new band as much as I loved the Lips, and Camper, and Pink Floyd, and the Beatles. You have to be young to invest so much of yourself in fanhood. I don't know exactly why that is, and I've tried to avoid losing it, but it's inevitable. Of all the bands I ever truly loved, bands I would have walked a hundred miles barefoot to get their new album or see them live, the Lips were the last ones standing, the last ones still pulling it off. Of all the bands I ever loved, they were the last to fall.

When I went to see one of Camper Van Beethoven's two reunion shows at the Knitting Factory two years ago, it felt in some ways like I had come full circle in my fanhood. They were the first band I felt was my own, and now I had finally seen them live. It was good. In fact, it was really good. But it was still nostalgia. They made a new album, and I liked it, a lot, in fact. But it was no Our Beloved.

I'll still buy At War With the Mystics as soon as I can find it on vinyl. And I'll buy their next one. And I'll go see Christmas on Mars the day it opens. They may have let me down, but I'm too old to be bitter. It was a great ride and I appreciate everything they did for me. In fact, I'll probably buy everything they put out until I die or they do. But from here on out, it's just nostalgia.

Notes:

1. I think; I don't actually remember the exact date, it may have been the summer after.
2. The show may still be on; I haven't seen MTV in a few years and have no idea whether or not they still show music videos.
3. With the benefit of hindsight, I think it was probably their best. I didn't realise this until years later, though.
4. Worth noting that I was in a band at the time that had none of these traits, but instead buried depressive, monotonous vocals under minor-key drones and excessive guitar effects. Still don't know why I couldn't just loosen up. Best not think too deeply on this one.

R.E.M., reconsidered, yet again

Fine piece by Ian Mathers on Stylus this week reassessing R.E.M.'s Up, an album I discovered only recently. I ignored it on its release, figuring the band were well past their expiration date at that point, but have come to realise that the problem was not them, but rather me: I had outgrown them.

As a generation of rock critics younger than me begins to emerge, I've come to an interesting realisation about R.E.M.: everyone's favorite R.E.M. albums are the ones that came out when they were teenagers. This may seem obvious, but I don't think there are many bands who have kept this up as long as R.E.M. have. At the same time, this may seem counterintuitive because R.E.M. have always been assumed to appeal to an older audience. They were the prototypical college rock band, but sounded as though they should appeal to an even older crowd than that, like adult-contemporary for slightly hipper adults.

And yet R.E.M., despite sounding perennially uncool on the surface, seems to appeal perpetually to teenagers, the amazing part of that statement being "perpetually". Their early records appealed the those in college and, to some extent, high school at the time. As those fans grew up, they grew dismissive of the band's subsequent work, particularly when R.E.M. signed a big money deal with Warner Bros. But the band simply found a new generation of fans for their next few albums.

This was my R.E.M. heyday, Document and the early Warners albums, through about Automatic or so, also the band's commercial peak. I think Out of Time was the last one I bought right when it came out and, like all R.E.M. albums, it was a little bit different and a little bit disappointing. I stopped paying attention to them entirely around New Adventures, and assumed that everyone else did as well.

But little did I know the band was still making new fans, like Mathers, younger than me. Now that that generation of fans is beginning to produce its own music writers, the critical re-assessment of post-Berry R.E.M. has begun. Mathers is not alone, mind you; the response to his article in the comments section is a non-stop outpouring of love for Up, with several proclaiming it their favorite R.E.M. album. I'm curious to see whether, eight years or so from now, another generation of young writers begins defending the much-derided Around the Sun as a lost classic.