P.I.M.P. The S.I.M.P. to Pala Tute

"P.I.M.P. The S.I.M.P."  Rick James  Anthology
"Pa Huele"  Eddie Palmieri  Latin Lounge Jazz: Havana
"Pain"  Danger Mouse/Sparklehorse  Dark Night of the Soul
"Pain In My Heart"  Otis Redding  The Complete Stax/Volt Singles 1959-1968
"Paint"  Galactic  Ruckus
"Paint a Vulgar Picture"  The Smiths  Strangeways, Here We Come
"Paint It Black"  The Rolling Stones  Hot Rocks 1964-1971
"Painting the Town Blue"  X  More Fun In The New World
"A Pair of Brown Eyes"  The Pogues  Rum Sodomy & the Lash
"Pala Tute"  Gogol Bordelo  Trans-Continental Hustle

 Johnny Marr, Keith Richard, and Billy Zoom just completely steal all three of their songs from their singers.  This is not unique to these songs.  (To be fair, I don't think anyone has ever tried to claim Exene & John Doe's vocals were the thing that made X great.  Now Moz & Mick, those are different stories).

Today the "Rock Hall" announced their inductees for 2014. From the short list of "finalists" they picked Peter Gabriel, Kiss, Linda Ronstadt, Hall & Oates, Cat Stevens, and Nirvana.  Passed over were (among others) Chic, The Meters, and The Replacements.

I stopped caring about the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame a while ago.  I wish it was longer ago, and I wish it was a more complete disregard, because every year the artists selected, and those overlooked, demonstrate utter stupidity and uselessness of what could be an urgent and useful source of interpretation of a significant pop culture contribution to the latter half of the 20th century and beyond.  Instead, it is a castle to baby boomers' vision of themselves as the greatest generation in history.  Every year, the hall picks artists based on some arcane criteria that remain unpublished and incalculable.   There is no reasonable measure by which Kiss matters.  They were a delusion, a bizarre, inexplicable phenomenon on a par with Loverboy.  Frankie Goes to Hollywood ruled the world briefly - I promise they will never be inducted in that weird, disappointing pyramid.  Hell - literally every artist on the little playlist above is more worthy of inclusion than Kiss or Hall & Oates.  (I recognize that H & O has their gen-x defenders - these are my people, and they are wrong).

It is easy to beat on the Rock Hall because it has taken on, in some ways, an impossible task. It is a museum dedicated to an interactive art.  The purpose of popular music is to engage the audience - the performer is consistently in communication with the audience. Maybe this is the essence of all art, and especially all performing art.  With "rock," though, it is particularly true - the music was (is?), at its source, intended to be heard live, and the mythology of rock has always involved live performance in many of its important moments.  The Moondog Ball, Ed Sullivan's presentations of Elvis and The Beatles, Hendrix at Woodstock, even the tragedies of Altamont & The Who in Cincinnati.  There is, in live music, always the sense of the unknown, the unexpected, the idea that even though you, as the audience, have heard these songs before . . . This time, this show, something different, something amazing, something different will happen, and you will be there for it.  [see - this]  The Grateful Dead became a famous live act based on this suggestion of the unknown, and the Replacements became an infamous one for the same reason.  Yet the Rock Hall is charged with trying to codify, solidify, render known and permanent this fluid, amorphous art.  To name something is in some ways to kill it.  A dictionary for a living language is obsolete the moment it is published.

Even recognizing this natural limitation, the Rock Hall in Cleveland misses the target so badly as to be willfully useless.  In fact, it doesn't seem to fight against this stasis, this pointlessness.  It embraces it.  There is no effort to contextualize, to modernize, to render the place useful in any way whatsoever.  It is not a "museum" in the sense of a learning institute - a place to learn and contextualize the art in either history or a broader culture.  It is a shrine, holding sacred items for a handful of pilgrims who need to come and genuflect before Jerry Garcia's bong and Jim Morrison's codpiece.

The first few times I went, I left feeling frustrated and angry that the museum was not living up to the promise of what I thought it ought to be.  It could be a place dedicated to embracing, pursuing, contextualizing, hell even advancing popular music.  But no - it was just a nightmare shitshow capturing a brief period of the past and doing that poorly.  There is no legitimate live music space in the Rock Hall.  I have seen shows there twice, and they set up folding chairs and a stage in the lobby.  This alone speaks volumes - there is a theater with three giant screens playing clips of the "inductees" - the music of the past.  But there is no space for the music of the present or the future.

I gave up on the Rock Hall when I realized that the problem was me.  If you have ever watched The Beverly Hillbillies or The Addams Family you understand that the central conceit is that other people come into the homes of the Clampetts or the Addamses and they are frustrated, befuddled, and frequently overwhelmed by the experience.  But this is always because those people are bringing in their own expectations to the house.  It isn't the fault of the Clampetts or the Addamses that others don't get them.  It is the same thing with the hall.  Morticia is cutting off her roses. Granny is just cooking her stew.  Jann Wenner is masturbating onto Robert Plant's fringe jacket.  This is their home, and it isn't my place to tell them what they are doing is wrong.

Part of the issue is that the term "rock & roll" itself is vague and undefined - is it a particular style of popular music, guitar-driven, 4/4 time?  Is it a more expansive definition encompassing most forms of electrified popular music?  Something in between?  Apparently it includes shitty quasi-folk music by American white men (James Taylor - inducted 2000).  But it won't include black american artists like Chic, NWA or the Meters.  It also does not include any electronic artist like Can, Kraftwerk, or Giorgio Morodor. Most galling personally is the refusal to acknowledge the music of my own youth.  Nirvana is a step, a necessary one, and a given. The Replacements, Husker Du, Black Flag, X . . . the frustrated rock music of the Reagan 80s (and the concurrent rage in Thatcher's England - Joy Division, Wire . . .) is without representation.  To see Hall & Oates inducted over the 'Mats is just to relive the frustration between the mainstream radio and the music I and my friends were actually listening to at the time.

All that said, I have no use for the Rock Hall as it is. I want it to be more than it is, and it won't be.  It is too narrow, too stationary, too . . . ancient.  We now have over 100 years of recorded sound, and are at least 60 years into the "rock & roll" era. Despite this, the Rock Hall looks only at a very narrow slice of that time (and heaven forbid it expand its vision geographically beyond the US and England - Neil Young and Rush excepted). I want it to be more than it is, and it won't be.  So I am tired of frustrating myself by expecting more from it. In the meantime . . . I like some Peter Gabriel and Cat Stevens.

O'Keefe's Slide to O.P.P

"O'Keefe's Slide"/"An Suisin Ban"/"The Star Above the Garter"/"The Weavers"  The Chieftains
       The Chieftains 4
"O Caminho Do Bem"  Tim Maia
       World Psychedelic Classics 4: The Existential Soul of Tim Maia: Nobody Can Live Forever
"O Kanawailua Lani"  The Pahinui Brothers  The Pahinui Bros.
"O Stella"  PJ Harvey  Dry
"O Superman (For Massenet)"  Laurie Anderson  Big Science
"O Valencia!"  The Decemberists  The Crane Wife
"O, Dana"  Big Star  Third/Sister Lovers
"O.D."  The Last Poets  This Is Madness
"O.N.E."  Yeasayer  Odd Blood
"O.P.P."  Naughty By Nature  Whatever: The '90s Pop and Culture Box

So the Jackson Five's "ABC" is unquestionably one of the great hooks in pop history. A throwaway rap about infidelity is rendered awesome based on clever sampling.

Now, before I am labeled a curmudgeon,I really am not judging and certainly am not arguing that all hip hop or sampling is merely theft. Quite the opposite. I vehemently defend the turntable as a legitimate musical instrument to all comers. The isolation and integration of loops and samples is the great musical contribution of the last 30 years. Sampling has evolved to its own art form - DJ shadow and Girl Talk are both ostensibly sampling artists but what they do both is legitimate independent art and unrelated to the other in any real way. 

That said, you can't listen to naughty by nature and NOT hear the hook from "ABC" - is it homage? Is it theft? Does it matter? ( I assume it might matter to the Jacksons)

So I have been working at my job for a year. I think on the whole it was a good move to leave the court. I don't know that private practice is ultimately where I end my life - the commitment to the dollar is necessary in a way that is sometimes a bit overwhelming. I don't mean that getting paid is wrong. I mean more that chasing dollars from clients is both constant and frustrating. The life of a private practice attorney seems to be one of constant conflict - with opposing counsel, with the court, and even with your own clients. I am not sure I am built for it.

Of course, with all of that said, I just keep doing it.  In fact I am trying to take on more criminal cases, because those folks will be so much more pleasant than the civil clients I have currently been dealing with.  I actually have a new scale for measuring lawyer horribleness.  When I meet a lawyer, I try to picture him as a criminal defense attorney, and then I try to figure out what kind of criminal he would have to represent that would make me want to spend time with the lawyer rather than his client. 

Na Na Na to Nan

"Na Na Na"  The Knife  Silent Shout
"Nadine"  Chuck Berry  Chuck Berry:  The Anthology
"Naima [alternate take]"  John Coltrane  Giant Steps
"Naked As We Came"  Iron & Wine  Our Endless Numbered Days
"Naked Cousin"  PJ Harvey  The Peel Sessions 1991 - 2004
"Naked Eye"  Luscious Jackson  Whatever: The 90s Pop & Culture Box
"Naked Eye"  The Who  Who's Next [bonus cd track]
"Names" Cat Power  You Are Free
"A Namorada [Afro Latin Edit]"  Carlinhos Brown  The Best Latin Party Album  . . . Ever
"Nan"  Booker T. Jones  Potato Hole

So it has been a long time since I wrote anything.  Not apologizing or harping on it, just saying.

An old set of songs - I think the most recent song on the list is by a 70-year old organist.  The weirdest, most dated thing about the videos is the way everyone in the Luscious Jackson video is just wandering around the airport.  If they made it now, the song would be over before anyone got their shoes back on.

I saw Booker T. with my dad not long ago.  My dad had no idea who he was, but I think he had a good time.  He and I went to see John Lee Hooker when I was about 20, and he bestowed a great collection of blues & rock records on me some time ago (He is most proud of the Chess and Checker singles). He has no reference for Stax/Volt though (or Motown or Fame or much in the way of soul at all . . . ).  So it was nice to introduce him to  someone & something I knew and appreciated and that I thought he would enjoy.  Now this is always a dicey prospect with my father because he is . . . not like other humans.  Most people can find their way through an event that someone else brings them to without feeling threatened or without needing to demonstrate their own superiority.  If they don't like something on its merits, so be it, but I think most folk can find their way to like something even if it is not something they brought to the table.  Not so my father - generally if he is not at the center of it, it is of no value, or at the very least inferior.  But I invited him, and he came.  As I said, he knows and loves Chess blues, so it is clearly the best music ever.  Everything else doesn't really exist.

So we met at this little jazz club in Cleveland and caught the early show.  Booker T. played a wide range of material - from "Green Onions" & "Hip Hug-Her" through things off Potato Hole (the album he made with the Drive-By Truckers) and newer material.  He played guitar on a couple of numbers, and even sang "All Along The Watchtower".  His backing band were all much younger, and his drummer rapped during a few songs.  I had a great time, and I think my dad enjoyed himself as well.  I was worried throughout that he was not enjoying himself, but (except for a brief moment when he was talking with the gentleman at the table behind us about Gestalt psychology . . . another issue) he was engaged and enthusiastic.  

He almost made it, too.  I almost got away through the entire evening just enjoying something someone else had done, without turning it back on himself.  After we left the club, and walked through the parking lot, as he was about to open his car door, he turns to me and says, "He is no Howlin' Wolf."

Here is a video of Booker T singing "Sittin' On The Dock Of The Bay" With the DBTs behind him.  Awesome^3.

Macarena to The Madness of Love

"Macarena [Bay Side Boys Mix]"  Los Del Rio  The Best Latin Party Album in the World . . . Ever
"Machine Gun"  Slowdive  Souvlaki
"Machito Forever [Cut Chemist Remix]"  Tito Puente  Brazil Classics: Belaza Tropical Vol. 2
"Madder"  Groove Armada  Lovebox
"Madder Red"  Yeasayer  Odd Blood
"Madeline"  Yo La Tengo  And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out
"Madison Square"  Lettuce  Fly
"The Madison Time"  Ray Bryant Combo  Hairspray [Original Soundtrack - 1988]
"Madness"  Miles Davis  Nefertiti
"The Madness of Love"  Graham Parker  Beat The Retreat: Songs by Richard Thompson

Another cover of which I don't currently own the original.  Which is particularly strange because there was a point in the past where I had practically everything in Richard Thompson's catalog - including this, which was on a cassette-only collection of RT obscurities.  But the grind of time, travel, and a general disrespect for most of my possessions and things go away.  The cassette - Doom and Gloom from the Tomb, Vol. 1, was a fan-club only distribution that the owner of this record store I went to all the time offered up to me in the late-80s because he noticed I kept coming in and buying Richard Thompson and Fairport stuff.  When you are catching up on a 25-year catalogue in a matter of months, I guess.  I regret the loss of a lot of my old music (it feels like I have somehow built-up and lost my music collection several times through my life, and then had to re-create it from memory), but this one in particular stings.  My rule of downloading the original when faced with only having the cover is thwarted - the Doom and Gloom cassette doesn't show up anywhere on the internet.  The version on that tape is a Richard & Linda recording that is not available anywhere else.  There is a live version available as a bonus-track on later reissues of Live, Love, Larf & Loaf by French, Frith, Kaiser, Thompson, so getting that might be as close as I get . . . but the bonus tracks are not available for download.  So I might be getting that whole album - which isn't all bad since it is one that I used to have (pre-bonus tracks) and needs replaced anyway.

For all the music of the 80s I have lost, so much music of the 90s just kind of went past me the first time through.  Shoegaze is becoming something of an infatuation recently, about 20 years too late, but just in time for a new MBV album for the first time in a thousand years.  We may also be reaching a shoegaze revival ("newgaze?") in the nostalgia/influence cycle - see Tamaryn - so maybe I can keep up with this sudden new trend the second time.  I can take solace in the idea that if the radio seems content to have missed most music in the last 40 years, trying to catch up to shit that I missed 15-20 puts me ahead of the curve.

It is a testament to its ubiquity that even my sad self could not miss the Macarena, and '94-'95 was probably as deep into my cave as I ever was.  Having a well-marketed earworm is as good a path to financial security as any I guess.

L Y F to La Collectionneuse

"L Y F"  Wu Lyf  Go Tell Fire To The Mountain
"L.A. County"  Lyle Lovett  Pontiac
"La Bamba"  Ritchie Valens  The Best of Ritchie Valens
"La Bayamesa"  Buena Vista Social Club  Buena Vista Social Club
"La Belle S'Est Etourdie"  Kate & Anna McGarrigle  The French Record
"La Bikina"  Esquivel  Music from a Sparkling Planet
"La Califfa"  Ennio Morricone  Film Music by Ennio Morricone
"La Camisa Negra"  Juanes  Mi Sangre [studio & live]
"La Camisa Negra (Sonida National Remix)"  Juanes/Sonida National  Mi Sangre
"La Collectionneuse"  Charlotte Gainsbourg  IRM

Once again it has been just about forever between posts.  To the extent it is kind of ludicrous to even try to explain why, or to even suggest that it will get better.  Whatever.  The problems remain the same - the music comes in a little faster than I can keep up and catalog it.  The Wu Lyf album is a prime example - the songs I come across, this one included, are consistently engaging when they float to the top, but then they disappears and gets lost behind the rest of life and other songs and go knows what all, and suddenly it is an album I have had for over a year and have not played in 8 months.

It is kind of true with everything, and maybe it is a part of getting older - you just get busy.  Life gets more demanding as you get older - the job becomes more involved, your daily life becomes more . . . occupied.  The stuff piles on, but the days don't get any longer.  And you just . . . and this really sucks . . . you just aren't as young as you were.  The days actually become shorter because suddenly you have to sleep at night.  Partly because your job is no longer just a job, but a career, and if you don't show up and you get fired there isn't another shitty food-service job that is going to pay you the same amount just around the corner.  There are people and things that depend on you, and you accept that responsibility.  So something has to give, and maybe that something is your ability to go to shows a few nights a week, to just buy and listen to new music on a whim just because you read a review, or heard a clip or just liked the name or needed to get out of the house.  And you certainly don't waste whole weekend days or late nights just trying to catch up on the music you may have missed.  You just don't have time.

Or maybe that is all bullshit.  It hasn't been my job that has gotten in the way of me doing this - other leisure activities - reading, TV, video games, just sitting around doing nothing, all at turns have taken more of my energy and focus over the past year than traversing my music library.
 
Regardless, here we are again.  Since the first of the year, I have been trying to get out to more shows, and see more bands, and am again trying to get a grasp on the music collection. That is going reasonably well. It isn't exactly a resolution, it is just more a feeling of giving myself permission to go out. Sometimes it is easy to fall into a routine of staying at home, or at least being home at a reasonable hour.  And reasonable hours and bar shows do not always go hand-in-hand.  Another part of that is trying again to get a firmer grasp on the music I have (and still keep growing my collection).

I do want to keep discovering new music.  I just hate "CLASSIC ROCK" - not the music itself, I actually really like a lot of that late 60s, early 70s guitar rock that has been pushed down my throat for the entirety of my life.  But the title, and the attitude.  I despise the idea that somehow there is a period of music that is intrinsically better, more important, more pure, than any other, and particularly anything that came later.  I don't think it is an attitude inherent to baby boomers, but because they are the most abundant generation on the planet, they are the most visible, and have been able to control the narrative of music for a long time.

But that isn't really the issue here.  The issue is that I don't want to be that guy - I don't want to be an '80s-'90s guy whose musical taste has calcified around a few bands from Minneapolis and Seattle a thousand years ago.  I really think we are entering a golden age for music - in terms of its availability, its variety, its vibrancy.  I don't want to miss it because I am playing Tim for the millionth time.

It is hard to reconcile, when for years I was among the youngest people at a show, that suddenly I might well be the oldest.  I am trying to embrace that - I stay in the back now (no one wants to see their dad in the pit).  I buy better beer.  I tip well.  I try to buy merch (CDs, not a t-shirt I am never going to wear) because these kids half my age probably could use the cash.

On the other hand . . . I still really like Tim.  There are songs in everyone's life that they know so well that at their mere mention - the title, a lyric - they not only hear it, but have an emotional response.  You have to keep time for those songs.  Just because I know every note to "I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts" doesn't keep me from playing More Fun In The New World every month or so.  I am just trying to find a balance - I don't want to become rigid, but I don't want to be looking for new music just because it is new.
 
Anyway - a  lot of foreign language songs here, given iTunes' inability to strip articles in French or Spanish the way it throws away "the."

So . . .

Girls  "Lust For Life"  Album

  A long while ago, maybe 20 years, my old man (father, not male partner) was faced with one of many challenges to his early boomer worldview (class of '60).  As a member of a Unitarian Universalist church in the suburbs of Cleveland, he was faced with a number of his peers, now in their forties, suddenly divorcing their wives and taking up with new partners who just happened to be men.  My dad, being still a bit awesome . . .

  It has been a steady decline in awesomeness for my old man From teenage early-adopter of Chess and Checker Blues and Rock, to mid-life embracer of the white-liberal faith of Unitarian-Universalism to second-divorce visitor of "singles camps" to septuagenarian global-warming denier, he has been on a strangely wrong trajectory . . .

  As I was saying, while still awesome, my old man reflected upon this seemingly more than occasional occurrence of his baby-boomer friends leaving their long-term relationships for a mid-life, same-sex partnership, and he told me, "I guess I get it.  Frankly, at this point, I don't really care who is lying in the bed next to me as long as they leave me the fuck alone."

  Also, on November 6, for the first-through-fourth time ever, same-sex marriage was upheld at the ballot box in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, and Washington.  And the supreme court justice in Iowa that conservatives were trying to oust because he had upheld marriage equality through the state constitution won reelection.

  And there is this video for this song, which I like not because it is porn (which I guess it is if singing into a penis like it is a microphone is porn), but because everyone in it is young and dumb and full and it doesn't much matter who it is they are rolling around with.  "Maybe if I really tried with all of my heart, then I could make a brand new start in love with you . . ."

  That is the bottom line and why I have never (and really never) given a shit about a person's sexual identity.  It is really hard to find someone you want to be with for more than even a drink, let alone an evening or god forbid a lifetime.  To have someone else telling you that the person you choose is somehow wrong . . . who needs to deal with that.  If there has ever been an even quasi-legitimate reason for nosing into someone else's bedroom beyond a parent's selfish fear they may not get grandkids, I don't see it. Even that is based solely in vengeance, and therefore pretty base.

  It doesn't matter your damage, which comes in all shapes and sizes.  And it doesn't matter your cure, which are equally as varied.  Everyone is looking for the person(s) that make(s) them complete and helps them get through the next few hours, next days, next months, years, decades.  As my old man slides into an ultra-conservative convalescence, I guess we can take heart that the nation as a whole is moving more toward awesome and no one much cares who is lying in bed next to you, even if they don't just leave you the fuck alone.

Kangaroo to Katalon

"Kangaroo"  Big Star  Third/Sister Lovers
"Kansas City"  Albert King  Born Under A Bad Sign
"The Kansas City Song"  Buck Owens  The Very Best Of Buck Owens, Vol. 1
"Kashmir's Corn"  Victoria Williams  Musings of a Creek Dipper
"Katey vs. Nobby"  Galactic  Ya-Ka-May
"Kathelin Gray"  Ornette Coleman & Pat Metheny  Song X
"Kathy's Song"  Simon & Garfunkel  Sounds of Silence
"Kathy's Waltz"  Dave Brubeck Quartet  Time Out
"Katie's Been Gone"  The Band  The Basement Tapes
"Katolon"  Salif Keita  Moffou

So I have been paralyzed about writing for a while.  Some things have been keeping me busy, but mostly I just get on the site and stare at the screen and feel overwhelmed.  I am going to try to keep the posts [a bit] shorter and [much] more frequent from here on out - it may well mean some posts just kind of suck.  But maybe something is better than nothing at all.  Hopefully some will be Sometimes it can just be the rantings of a madman - that is the essence of the internet, after all.

The Song from this set is without doubt "Katey vs. Nobby" - New Orleans rhythms, P-Funk synthesizer, two Sissy Rap MCs . . . everything about it just beats you up, and it has a verse about Popeye's Chicken . . . wish there was a decent video.  Instead, all you get is ass everywhere.