Nico

The Right-wing’s in need of a Rock Star
words and music by Dr. BLT (c)2006
http://www.drblt.com/music/right.mp3

I may not be that rock star, and I humbly acknowledge my shortcomings in that regard. But I wonder why there are not more

Republican Rock Stars
words and music by Dr. BLT (c)2006
http://www.drblt.com/music/repubrockstars.mp3

BLOG ‘N’ ROLL!

Bruce
aka Dr. BLT, The Original Blog ‘n’ Roller

Robert in Arizona

After thinking about it, I thought: is that just ordinary bubblegum? Lord knows what kind of trip you might end up on if it’s not. Also, isn’t it cool to have the gum in the original packaging? all nice and pristine next to its bubblegum colored vinyl brother.

It didn’t matter either way as my three year old daughter answered both questions for me by chewing the gum herself. Thankfully, it was just ordinary bubblegum. I hope it tasted good.

Kids.

Rob –

If you mean Marc Time from the Jars/Rather Ripped/Music Faucet/Univ…

Anyway, I’ll be playing this musical assault on the mind out in manchester bars now, blowing peoples’ minds out of their ears. Cheers!

BTW: I actually have a bunch of photographs of 444 Grove, took ‘em last August when I was in SF. (My fiancee and I even stayed at the Days Inn Civic Center). What I DON’T have are pics of the building when Ralph was in it. Perhaps we can chat about what the building looked like in those days? Drop me an email.

Howard

What’s up with that?

Well…um…the thing is I didn’t find Blood on the Fields to BE particularly melodic. It strikes me as meandering and directionless for the great majority of its three hours. In fact, the only real melody I can find is “Juba and the Old Brown Squaw” (I think that’s the title), the one with Jon Hendricks on vocals.

So I was a little bit surprised when it DID win a Pulitzer.

Following in the footsteps of other great American songwriters (Fred Durst, Britney Spears) Randy Newman’s decided to give this blogging thing a whirl. These post excerpts are sorta old, but I thought you’d get a kick out of ‘em (thanks…

Check my blogs:

http://punkfreejazzdub.blogspot.com
http://disolucion.blogspot.com
http://potlacht.blogspot.com

Julio

It wouldn’t be a stretch to say: when you’re listening to any jazz that’s not Dixieland, you’re on Louis’s turf. (For starters.)

As for “Do You Know What It Means,” I think it really was sentimental. Armstrong was nostalgic about New Orleans (at least old New Orleans) for most of his life outside of it, told story after story of life and music there when he was growing up, and worked tirelessly to promote its elder jazz statesmen–the people who were his idols when he was growing up. I suspect he would have told you that the New Orleans of his youth was the greatest place and time of his life.

cheers, and thanks for the nice cuts!

(2) Since you mention Fitzgerald, and Universal, you should must certainly read all of this … start here:
http://sunshine.dubtribe.com/punk/

Hope your doing well.

You’re right, shoulda checked. Lesson learned and pronoun changed on the entry.

…his show just felt a little too pre-meditated. He’s got a lot of excellent songs but there is something about seeing him live where his humor seems more manipulative than sincere or
self-deprecating. It was clearly a warm-up show for a tour. The band was on the sloppy side. The song selection/pacing were pretty scattered. We’d get two or three songs and he’d get us excited… then we’d get a couple clinkers….and the breaks between each song were too long. The crowd threw me. Teenage Walnut Creek and Novato were
peppered with Berkeley young’uns in dreads and thirtysomethings who looked like they drive Subarus and play in soccer leagues. A group of
the latter jumped back into conversation ten seconds into EVERY ballad. At times, with his kind of hippy/everyman/funky anthem sound, I wondered if Beck isn’t just a craftier Dave Matthews. The sound was terrible at
the beginning but they did get it dialed in pretty well by the end. They were filming, so they had these blue lights shining down from the
sides of the auditorium that “killed my buzz, man”. There we some good moments but the missed potential left me feeling like I could just as
happily stayed at home and done stuff. I don’t know….I’m just way too picky (and crotchety), I think. I know for sure I am spoiled by the
likes of the Fillmore. BGCA is out, that is for sure.

Postscript:
I didn’t even bother mentioning the guaranteed-to-please-the-pre-IPOD
era giant boom box lowered (belatedly a la Spinal Tap) from behind the proscenium, the dancing percussionist whose repertoire of moves was dominated by rhythmic sports mime or the percussion dinner theater scene. (The latter could have been much better if it didn’t feel so…..as you said, contrived.)

Hell, he put on a decent show. It truly would have been 50% better if he’d just been in a reasonable venue.

Amazing stuff. Don’t know how I ever missed it.

Thanks for the education!

Oh yeah, the CD swap was sweet. Thanks for inviting me in.

Thanks for writing. I was at a “Writing About Music” seminar on Sunday night where I learned a lot, and when you’re comment came the next day, well, let’s just say you hit me at the right time.

There was a lot of discussion about what really is the job of the music critic. And it came down to this — informing and conversing with your reader about what enraged, enlightened, enraptured, left you bored, left you cold, left you elated about the music you hear. And doing it in an articulate and accessible way. I agree with you that I am not always the best at doing that. I am, after all, an amateur with an extremely limited audience. I think you are right about my first bullet point, which I think is the one that incensed you most, the one about NIN’s lyrics. You’re right, the way it was written was too derogatory. But I stand by my basic point (which I didn’t make well) which is that there is a fine line between simplicity and inarticulateness. I would aver that Trent falls back & forth over that line with regularity, and that on a lot of his songs mostly towards the latter. Too many of his songs sound like tantrums. When he hits it right, though, as on Hurt or (shoot, don’t remember the name of the song on Natural Born Killers), he can be effective. (BTW, here is a nice story that talks about how Johnny Cash chose his songs for the American sessions: http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/_/rnd/1117220631783/has-player/true/id/5933533)

My post, however, was not intended to be a review of NIN’s music or albums; in fact, I was laudatory on The Downward Spiral, which I still love. (Have you picked up the remixed edition yet? It’s great). I was writing about the performance and the unusual experience of getting to see them in such a small venue. I got to notice things that I never would have noticed in a festival environment, and of course that’s what their show is really geared for. Nobody at Glastonbury is going to notice (or care about) the bizarre water bottle roadie situation, for example. I go to a lot of shows, though, and it really was bizarre to see nobody playing their instruments and the crowd going nuts — as the song played at full blast! It looked more like a pep rally, with the band standing at the front of the stage all clapping over their heads together. I go to 30+ shows a year, and I’ve never seen any band simply stand in front of their click track like that and dance & clap without being at least a little ironic or funny about it. (Admittedly I’ve never seen any of the pop spectacle tours like Madonna, Britney and such where this is standard practice; honestly, I’d rather see a Broadway show.)

So in the end, how did I feel about the performance? Stupidly, I never really came out and said it in this write-up. So here goes: started fast, tailed at the end, band was still rough as was first gig in a hella long time. Occasionally brilliant, occasionally unintentionally comic, it’s a good show and will play well on the festival circuit this year.

As to your point about my being narrow-minded about music: dude, you’re just flat-out wrong on that one. My blog represents a very narrow view of the music I enjoy and get excited about, but even there I talk about artists as disparate as Bill Frisell, Tuxedomoon and Nine Inch Nails. I’ll be the first to admit that industrial is not my cup of tea — my girlfriend pleaded with me to go — but I’ve seen enough shows and heard so many many hours of music to feel like I can responsibly separate from the wheat from the chaff. Attending opening night of a highly anticipated tour … Gotta write about that, regardless of my biases, for or against. And there _are_ industrial bands and albums I like, The Downward Spiral for one. (Hey, whatever happened to Nitzer Ebb?) Does this look like a closed-minded guy to you? http://www.last.fm/user/entroporium

Of course I’m biased. That’s the job of a critic, and it’s a worthwhile one. To sift through it all and let people know what the good stuff is and why you’re excited about it, and possibly to avoid the other stuff. We all work hard for our money and free time, and there’s no reason we should let each other waste those precious assets on substandard stuff. In the corporatized world we live in, to separate what’s hot today because a company needs to make profits from what’s hot today because it’s good is a really important role that we ALL need to play for each other. I’m sure you’ll be burning a few copies of With Teeth for your peeps, while I burn copies of The Avalanches for mine, and that’s all cool. (Except for the artists’ lost revenue, but that’s yet another story.)

One last aside: they’re still playing Starfuckers. It’s not that great a song and piling on to Courtney at this point just seems unfair. That poor chick is a shell of her former self. Let’s leave Courtney alone!

Thanks for your note. Have a great 3-day!

Best,
Shawn

Trent Renor is a very talented musician. He writes all of the music/lyrics for NIN. He’s been doing this for over 20 years. He’s worked with other esteemed artists like David Bowie and Maynard James Keenan. Heck, Johnny Cash even performed “Hurt”. They respect his work. Let me tell you that writing music is very hard work. Sometimes the right word is the simplest word to explain how someone feels in a song. Haven’t you heard the saying “Simplicity Sells”? I’ve heard a lot of Trent’s work and he has a plethora of rhetoric. His music has been successful his whole career.

To hear you “knock” his music is an insult to everyone involved in his success. Including his fans and people he’s worked with. Music critics will forever be the scum of the entertainment industry because they have very persuasive ways to lure fans away from a certain artist or genre of music. Not to mention very narrow minds.

Last note, when you said, “Nobody was playing their instrument” that may have been true for that one song. Musicians do get tierd and sweaty and sometimes may take a break for one song. How do you know half of it wasn’t done on their keyboards? Synthesizers do have loop functions and the capabilities to run without the musician actually playing evey note. Leave musicians alone. Your review may have been constructive critisism in your eyes, but it came off as “muy derogitorio”.

Enjoying the blog!

That is so great. And wow, what an ambitious project that must have been.

Thank you for posting.

Respectfully and….guilty as accused of picking nits.

There is something in the tone of your assessment that made me think of an arc with Emerson, Lake & Palmer or Yes at one end and the Sex Pistols and maybe the New York Dolls at the other. I?m aware that connecting these dots aims a wild, punch-drunk accusation your way but fuck it, I?m going to spend a few paragraphs trying to back it up.*****

As to Mr. King?s lack of wind, the man is in his forties. Late forties, I imagine. I?ve seen performers young and old with a bent towards stage antics and all of them get winded. When given the choice between a cool, distant artiste and a pinwheeling fool, I?ll take the fool, thank you. Meanwhile, you and I were standing about with our earplugs in.*****

As for the jacket and midriff, someone please call Iggy Pop. Jim, you?re embarrassing yourself in front of hundreds of women who want to fuck you. Hmm? wait a minute.*****

I commiserate with you about the sound although for me it was the bass (I was center leftish and it felt weak.) The vocals sounded great to me and I understood the lyrics just fine but then, why do we have to understand the lyrics? Most of us know them by heart. And I can tick off any number of singers that I wouldn?t understand if I were standing in front of them with a translator.*****

I must disagree somewhat about the defining sound of Mr. Gill in that his style was a, not the, defining element of the band?s sound. One quarter, to be exact. The drummer for Oxbow, a bodhisattva of the skins in his own right, once played a split second fill courtesy Mr. Burnham in ?If I Could Keep It For Myself? about seven times in a row and by way of explanation just looked at me with a baffled look that said ?I will never be that good. Why do I keep playing??*****

(Please forgive that last anecdote. It blew several music geek fuses and must have been somewhat unpleasant.)*****

To me, Gang of Four are a revolution, black humor and high art all in the same moment. It really goes without saying that they loom large in the history of what I think of as a golden age in music of any kind.*****

I had a small, wretched feeling in my stomach as we waited for them to come onstage that I was about to have it all ruined for me. I ended up smiling so hard my face hurt and crying at one point out of sheer joy. For the record, I?ve never felt that way about a musical performance. It?s a bit much.*****

Yes, they were not perfect. Fuck perfect. Everything that Gang of Four has meant to me since I was a geeky little punk rocker in the suburbs transfixed by ?Outside The Trains Don?t Run On Time? leapt off the stage at the Fillmore and made me feel better than I have in years. *****
Of course, this is just an opinion. But even with the irony of a Clear Channel venue hosting them folding the dollars in its dry hands, my money was well spent. An essence rare indeed.
*****

I?m really very sorry about the tape deck.

Seriously, I thought the sound was mixed poorly. The vocals seemed buried. I was dead-center halfway back and I couldn’t understand plenty of the lyrics. I also thought Andy Gill’s guitar playing was lazy. I liked it as much as the next person when he stood at the front of the stage and opened up the feedback caterwaul. But something bugged me as the show progressed. I put Entertainment into the tape deck (you read that right) on the way home from the show…. to see if I could figure out why I was so down. It was obvious right away. In the day, Gill was not only the defining element of the band’s sound, he held the rhythm drum-taut with light fills and runs. Those were absent for this show. Too often he’d hit one or two notes and let the sustain wail when he should have been working. When the rhythm section was performing poorly, as Shawn notes above, the absence of his control was fatal.

Maybe my expectations were too high and I’m being unrealistic. [Or I could just be wrong...:)] These guys wrote some gems, though. At a point, the best songs are not about the band as much as they are gifts that they were lucky enough to channel. If you’re going to step on stage and resurrect songs like that live, at least practice enough so you do them the justice they deserve. Makes me feel sorry for those folks at the Royal Albert Hall this week.

All of the above is strictly personal opinion and not to be taken as anything more than a “poo poo” shot in return.

1) As an example of sampling, it’s pretty great and if that’s what the Library was seeking to preserve, they’ve probably picked one of the Top Three ever. Personally, if we were looking for an apex or an epitome, I’d vote Paul’s Boutique.

2) PE’s political stance is/was deeply important, for sure. But it is/was deeply out of the mainstream. As a half-Jew (full disclosure), there’s not a lot of question in my mind that there is a lot of anti-semitism on this record. On the other hand (and as I subtly point out in the illustration for this entry), Al Jolson in blackface was also part of the Library’s selection this year. As far as political import combined with sampling, I’d take Fight The Power or Apocalypse 91 over Fear Of A Black Planet. Fight The Power absolutely epitomized what was going on in 1989, and Do The Right Thing was a really important look into the racial climate of that year. On a more broad palette, Apocalypse 91 addressed slavery, current events and black political activism in a more direct way; I’d take Can’t Truss This over any of those, a truly majestic modernistic work about the lingering effects of slavery. Fear has some truly terrible tracks (Reggie Jax, Meet The G That Killed Me); the hit rate is much higher on Nation Of Millions and Apolocalypse. Fear doesn’t even represent (by far) the best of PE.

1a and 2a) In terms of cultural historic import, to me Paul’s Boutique tells an extremely compelling story about the Jews’ indoctrination, adaptation to, adoption of and diaspora through mainstream American culture, more so than does Fear Of A Black Planet, which likely represented (and still represents) the views of a niche of a minority population.

So if I’m in the Library panel, I’m rolling with Paul’s Boutique In Brooklynnnnn.

I hope if they continue to select sample-based music that perhaps they do so as “paired selections” to show the richness, complexity and importance of the art of sampling. When 3 Feet High & Rising gets selected, hopefully the original Turtles track will at least be added as an appendix. Or god forbid, Biz Markie and Gilbert O’ Sullivan.

this might interest you – i used to live in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates in the Middle East from around ’91 to ’98. you still can’t really buy non-commercial western music out there, because records generally need mass appeal and international distributors to get all the way out there… so it’s pretty interesting to see what passes for “commercial” music. of course, by ’98 you could buy Fugazi and Sonic Youth and even Stockhausen if you searched hard enough… but my point is: i remember walking into what used to be a popular CD store (in a shopping mall) – it was known for its super discount prices and music no one wanted to buy (ha ha, making it non-commercial, i.e. THE GOOD STUFF), which eventually made it go bankrupt so they were having a massive ultra-mega-discount closing sale!… and i remember seeing an entire 10 ft. long shelf of Tuxedomoon reissues, there must’ve been at least 500 copies at around $2 each.

just a little anecdote in case you ever wondered what really happens to some of the gazillions of CDs produced each year!

peace.

NME to Wed Babyshambles (via Stereogum) Boring Boring via Boing Boing Bob Dylan RIP RIP Waldo (of Hatebeak) The Grates are Coming Fool of it! April Fools’ Day has disputed origins…

i have to recommend Les Georges Leningrad to any and every Residents fan, in the least because Les Georges are huge Residents fans, but the music shares the same sense of innocent ubsurdity.

su.
bloggin @ http://nb1.be

ha ha, i remember my first non-commercial, non-parentally influenced record was Ice Cube’s “Kill At Will”, that was like 1990 i think? … at least i don’t think Ice Cube was all that commercial at that point!

peace.
su.
bloggin @ http://nb1.be

oh boy…it’s funny, everyone who went to the show had completely different descriptions. No one seem elated, though, although I was probably the most content.

thanks for the linkage, standing next to each other, shame we didn’t meet.

http://www.rickshawstop.com