Delirious

You’re all probably losing sleep wondering why I don’t like Prince. Uh, I’m not sure why he hasn’t caught on with me. He’s just my type. I always go for a purple ruffle-wearing sex munchkin, right? Um, I don’t too much about him, except that Prince is his real name, and I hear now he’s a Jehovah’s Witness, which is just plain bizarre. I guess Prince is just waiting to be discovered. Come back in a year. Maybe I’ll be all over him.

Elements

Yeah, found those lyrics on YouTube, no idea if they’re right or not. Gives you the general idea though. Sometimes I don’t know the words to a song because the singer has mumbling issues, and sometimes the singing is clear as day but I have no idea the words because I’m not paying attention. This is the latter case. I just get into the spirit of the song and don’t even think about the literal word meanings. Not important, sometimes.

I Look up to the sun, to see if the day is done,to see my future that lies within. I Look up to the Sun,Now the day is done, the LOVEing night,spread its wings like a Dove.But in my vision I see:The tune of melody, The song we used to sing, The Joy LOVE can Bring. In my future lies ahead, the struggle of my bread. The LOVE I feel I think its so ReaLLLL.
I Look up in the stars it so near yet far,It gives a Light to the World we live in.I look up to the moon to see its beauty Gloom, to see the Brightness of that light. But in JAH GLORY as you see, the Mystic and Beauty, the Sun, the Moon,the Stars, it shows LOVE’s not far.In the Nature LOVEing flight, the LOVEing,Peaceful Lark, We shall Live as O1NE from the start. I look up to the Clouds,its so high at Ground, it makes the day as green as the sea. I look up to the Sun,to see if the day is done, to see my future that lies within.
But in JAH GLORY as you see,The tune of melody, The song we used to sing, The Joy LOVE can Bring.In my future lies ahead the struggle for my bread. The LOVE I feel I think its so Real.I Look up to the stars its so near yet far. It gives a Light to the World we Live in. I look up to the moon to see its Beauty gloom, to see the Brightness shining on Meeeeee!!!!!!!

Dear Avery

So, I’ve been a little mystified about the striking success of an unpicturesque and literate band who took their name from a political event that took place in 1825. I was wasting brain cells. Obviously, what we have to thank is the ungodly proliferation of the urban hipster. I’d like to think Colin Meloy is putting The Decemberists out to pasture because he’s ashamed to be a hero for these people, but in all likelihood he’s one of them too. You know who I’m talking about. I’m talking about the kids who look like Buddy Holly (regardless of anatomical gender). Ok, I realize it’s not Colin Meloy’s fault and I’m still thrilled to death The Decemberists are selling records, because they so obviously deserve to. I’ve just really rreeaalllyyy had it with the pretentious hipster douchebags who comprise the dating pool in this town.  It was only yesterday that I was completely alone with my interests. Now it seems everyone and their dog is reading Kurt Vonnegut, listening to obscure bands from the seventies, eating exotic cheeses and wearing big dorky glasses. But they’re only doing those things because it’s ‘hip’ and everyone else is doing them too.  They look so appealing on the surface, but underneath the converse, the fancy headphones and the big dorky glasses there’s a howling void of someone who has absolutely no idea who they are. What a bunch of goddamn phonies! Poseurs! Newsflash: having an enormous playlist doesn’t make you an interesting person. And uh, I’m getting carried away. This isn’t supposed to be about me or my misadventures in dating. Um. The Decemberists. They’re a good band. You should buy one of their albums. All the cool kids are doing so.

Elemental Child

Another day, another rhapsodic ode to Marc Bolan. Boy, that boy could play. That boy could strut. And when he went electric he did so with a vengeance. You can practically see T.Rex mutate from faerie beastie to electric monster. T.Rex made the transformation from sixties twee to seventies decadent seem not only natural but inevitable, though it was as radical an about-face as could be done. Imagine Donovan trying to launch a second act with glitter on his face and platforms on his feet. Generally, the barefoot-in-the-dirt types stuck to what they did best, strumming away in the face of looming irrelevance. Fair enough though, neither Bolan nor Bowie – the only two who managed to skip from cross-legged hippie to beglamored space being – neither was exactly selling gazillions of records singing about laughing gnomes and questing moles. If Bolan had sold millions of records as Tyrannosaurus Rex, bongos and all, well… I’d like to think he’d still have smelled which way the wind blew and realized that the seventies needed a new breed of rock star, one who doesn’t have dirt between his toes.

Day of the Lords

And now for something genuinely depressing.

There are these magazines, which are entertaining but not of a very high journalistic standard. They’re aimed at the digital-ADD afflicted younger generation of readers. Those who prefer to ingest information in the form of very small sound bytes. These magazines used to flourish (they don’t anymore, not in this economy) by publishing scads of silly lists of the Top-50-[adjective]est-[plural noun]- that-ever-[verb] type. A popular theme being crazy things done by crazy-ass crazy rock stars. Admittedly, few things in this world are more entertaining than the exploits of crazy-ass crazy rock stars. However, I find that it’s in very poor taste (not that these things are held to very high standards of taste, mind you) to lump on such a list – alongside the merely flamboyant but basically sane (i.e. Elton John*) and the Iggys and Ozzys whose misbehavior stemmed from substance abuse and who turned out to be quite normal once they’d cleaned up – someone like Ian Curtis, who really had some very serious mental health issues and for god’s sakes hanged himself. That’s a tad bit offensive. There’s drug addled, and there’s eccentric, and then there’s honest-to-god suicidal.

Even minus the suicide, any band whose name purportedly refers to prostitution in the death camps is bound to take home the gold for depressing the hell out of their listeners. This song, whatever horrible thing it may be about (suicide, probably), is depressing to me because it reminds me of having the most absolutely unfestive Thanksgiving dinner of my life. That was fall 2010. I had Thanksgiving at work.  Though the food was good, without a doubt, no one wants to have their Turkey Day turkey sitting on a bin of sugar in a windowless kitchen, surrounded by (much as I love ‘em) coworkers who insist on wrapping everything in a tortilla before they’ll eat it, listening to Joy Division. I suppose I could’ve skipped the Joy Division, but somehow it felt like the perfect touch of death-icing on my gloom cake.

*Don’t try to tell me about Elton John’s suicide attempt. He left the gas on – and the window open. Don’t try to tell me he hasn’t got his self-preservation shit together.

Electric Slim & the Factory Hen

Marc Bolan, among his many talents, had a strange knack for conveying deep emotion whilst being childishly silly. There’s nothing in the words of this song to account for the sadness it makes me feel. It’s not just a sentimental reaction to the music of someone who died unfairly young. If it were, then everything he ever did would be cause for depression. Many of the best Bolan songs are nothing less than blissful, many others are sorrowful, and some may be a little of both. And most of the time, the words are completely irrelevant. Let’s be frank, on paper Bolan’s songbook is largely gibberish. The words come alive in the delivery. That’s what makes the T-Rex legacy so powerful. Anybody (almost) can write catchy songs with nonsensical lyrics and prance about in shiny pants, and call themselves a rock star. Marc Bolan remains so much more than a shiny rock star, or a relic of the glam era, because he could do all of the above things (exceedingly well) but like no one else he put his whole soul into it, and it’s impossible not to feel it. His music is so directly straight from the heart it’s impossible not to have an emotional reaction when you hear it. It’s more than just the glamor of being dead. He remains a feverishly beloved icon because of some sense of truthfulness in his voice, some yearning honesty, something that’s very easy to become attached to. Bolan is simply lovable in a way other shiny-pants-wearing glam rock icons are not.

David

Nellie McKay is so precocious. She’s that smarty-pants college dropout who knows too many big words and like to wallop you with them. She plays frothy champagne jazz, sometimes raps in a charmingly awkward manner, and writes lyrics overstuffed with vocabulary words, quips, and big ideas. She’s so smart you want to smack her. And too cute by half, with that lopsided grin and penchant for Doris Day dressing. It’s hard to tell if her songs are pure pastiche or, in some post-ironic way, meant to be taken seriously. David is a love song. Disregarding the buoyant melody and clunky Bush joke, it’s a love song, made slightly creepy by Nellie’s confession that she wrote it about stalking one of her teachers at the Manhattan School of Music. She gets some caustic thoughts out there under the disguise of cocktail music.

Electric Guitar

“Never listen to electric guitars”

A residual sentiment from the bad old days when it was thought degenerate to listen to electric guitar music? Makes you wonder what people did with electric guitars before rock ‘n roll was invented. There’s also a reference in there about a guitar brought in to court – is the guitar up on trial, or music in general? But really, the lyrics make about zero sense, so make of it what you will.

Dancing On My Own

Look! Robyn got on the cover of Elle! (Wearing Prada!) A major magazine cover is big publicity for a little-known star. Though, sadly for Robyn, her cover isn’t exclusive  - Elle simultaneously released covers featuring Gwen Stefani, Adele, Nicki Minaj, and others. Elle’s covering all the bases, so to speak. Robyn still isn’t getting airplay on Kiis FM, because she’s better than that, obviously. But she’s opening Katy Perry’s big summer tour, so it’s only a matter of time before she breaks big. Whether she’ll lose some of her appeal if she becomes a celebrity remains to be seen. It’s easy to like Robyn because she very pop without being annoyingly ubiquitous. Without her outsiderness will she just get lost in the crowd? If her failure to make it big in the teen pop nineties is any precedent, there’s something in Robyn’s personality that resists being marketed to sell. She owns her own label, writes her own songs and presumably makes her own business decisions, so she’s not about to let herself be made into another automaton whose function is to promote the interests of an anonymous production team.

Electric Blues/An Old-Fashioned Melody

I don’t know how realistic this is a portrayal of a sixties ‘happening’, but it looks very appealing in the Hair movie. Most likely real happenings weren’t choreographed by Twyla Tharp, nor so highly populated by pretty people. I suppose the movie rather glamorizes the hippie movement that swept America in the 60s/70s. There’s plenty of survivors around who never stopped congratulating themselves on how cool they were in ’69, but it’s probably true that the majority didn’t ‘tune in’ or ‘drop out’ and witnessed the counterculture from the safety of their suburban rec rooms. Happenings still happen, though diminished in cultural prominence, and their elders are sticking admirably to the values they established. It’s a social movement like any other; faulty and complex, enduring and memorable. It takes a shiny movie musical to make you sit up and go “damn I wish I was there!”