Five reasons McSweeney’s San Francisco Panorama is a thing of beauty

January 4, 2010


Five reasons McSweeney’s San Francisco Panorama is a thing of beauty:

1. Stephen King on the World Series
2. The comics page
3. The Panorama Magazine and the Panorama Book Review could stand on their own
4. In a time when more newspapers are trying to look more like CNN.com, McSweeney’s chose to design the Panorama like a classy magazine
5. A pull-out Stephan Curry poster

I’ll obviously post a full review of the “newspaper” when I’ve finished its 300+ pages. But until then, go read it – AND LOVE IT – for yourself.

Tags: Books, Journalism, Literature, The Top..., What I've Been Reading, Writing |

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BMOWP’s Favorite Album of the Decade

December 28, 2009


The Moon and AntarcticaOh, come on. Let’s be honest. You don’t want to read another list. You’re absolutely ecstatic that I chose only one album.

That’s good. I’ve skipped a lot of them this year, understanding that everyone’s “best of the year” or “best of the decade” collections are created through the ether of personal taste. One person’s Kid A is another person’s “How can you choose Kid A as the best album of the decade when it’s barely Radiohead’s third best record overall?”

I was about to enter the fray, actually. My ten favorite albums of the decade:

#1 – Modest Mouse, Moon and Antarctica
#2 – Er… Um…

Well, there was a problem.

Call it a shift in execution. This was the decade in which I started listening to songs instead of albums. My personal trends were driven by college radio and the Internet instead of touring punk bands and my friends’ CD players. My tastes expanded to the point that I could no longer devote enough attention to specifics, looking for the quick fix over the long play.

Which is not to say that I completely forgot the album format. Jets to Brazil, Arcade Fire, Wilco, The Strokes and The White Stripes all threw out great albums that I listened to as a whole. Some of my favorite bands released albums that I certainly paid attention to: bands like Built to Spill and Hot Water Music put forth a great effort, but nothing compared to the albums they released in the 90s. Even recently, MGMT and The Antlers alerted me to defining music that, given another ten years, could rival the albums I’ve already deified.

For me, there’s only one album that stood strong enough for the entire ten years. And it was all rooted in a time and a situation: the summer of 2000. It was a trip to England. It was a realization of whatever I thought my talents would become. It was my first year out of the dorms thanks to a year in limbo and a year as an RA.

And while Modest Mouse’s The Moon and Antarctica works well both as a collection of spacey, intense songs and as a concept album on the meaning of life, it never would have become quite the life-altering force without the situation in which it played a part: the soundtrack to a generational change, from grown-up child to aspiring adult.

The top 10 list wilted, a strong top album unsupported by the willing (though not necessarily able) albums below it. Paired up against #1, no album really stood a chance.

I guess I knew that from the beginning.

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5, 10, 15, 20…

August 13, 2009


I’ve love the new 5, 10, 15, 20 columns from Pitchfork, wherein some pseudo-famous indie rocker details the albums that made his or her life what it is at each five-year-increment.

So I’m stealing it.

A word to the wise – I’ve cheated. But for good reason. Often, you’ll see two – or even three – albums. Chalk it up to a wildly changing focus on genres. I’ve passed through several different phases, and these phases all seem to peak a few years AFTER the five-year-interval. In fact, ages 10, 15 and 20 served more as a crossroads between phases, where two genres mixed.

Let’s go.

Age 5
USA For Africa: “We Are The World”

Outside of The Monkees and various cartoon theme songs, I’m sure I was uninitiated in the ways of music back in 1984. Of course, I don’t remember. I was only five.

I do vividly remember my father requesting “Happy Birthday” by the Beatles on the radio for my sixth or seventh birthday, and I remember Phil Collins’ “Mama” and “That’s All” playing a lot, but “We Are the World” probably served as my initiation.

It was the first time I actually wanted to be part of a song – to be one of the singers. I used to imagine my stuffed animals and toys singing a benefit song together. Because I apparently didn’t have many friends.

Age 10
“Weird” Al Yankovic: UHF
Motley Crue: Dr. Feelgood

Speaking of no friends, I was utterly devoted to “Weird” Al Yankovic when I was 10. Naturally – he was the soundtrack to the lives of many future dorks, and I was no different.

However, this is also the age when I branched out a bit, so giving the entire year to “Weird” Al is a little deceiving. It’s funny to think that this was the year that produced Paul’s Boutique, Doolittle and Bleach, but my unpracticed ear was drawn to the blossoming hair metal scene, thanks in part to a cassette purchase of Motley Crue’s Dr. Feelgood.

Age 15
Metallica: Live Shit: Binge and Purge
Green Day: Dookie

Hair metal really took hold of my attention when Poison’s live album – Swallow This Live (1991) – came out, and I then focused primarily on safe, radio-friendly rock bands: Poison, Motley Crue, Warrant, Ugly Kid Joe, Van Halen. Boring. Predictable. Awful, now that I look back.

And then, ramping up to age 15 – and my first days in high school – something else happened: Metallica. Metal got serious, and the Metallica juggernaught culminated with their first live box set, Live Shit: Binge and Purge. I had never been so excited for a musical project in my entire life. Come to think of it, I probably never have been since, and may never again. It allowed my love for Metallica to coast on for several more years, even after they got all shitty and cut their hair.

Of course, this was the time I became more interested in both alternative music and a renewed era in pop punk. This is the year Kurt Cobain died, the year Ill Communication and The Downward Spiral and Weezer’s debut album were released. So R.E.M. and Nine Inch Nails and whatever else was considered “left of center” at the time became awesome in my mind. Green Day’s Dookie gets the nod for pointing me in the future direction of Bad Religion and NOFX.

Age 20
Braid: Frame and Canvas
The Get Up Kids: Red Letter Day EP
Hot Water Music: Forever and Counting

We skip Sunny Day Real Estate, Texas is the Reason, Sense Field and the rest of the Revelation Records/Post-punk emo-ness that led me to want to be in a band and sing warbled whining about tortured teenage angst, and we go right to the tail end of that movement – my sophomore year in college, spanned across two cities, when Hot Water Music and Braid and The Get Up Kids fueled a period of manic inter-state concert attendance.

This was the year I learned how to drink, and it was the year that led me to my final genre change – from that warbly emo kid to the sophisticated indie rock aficionado, or, at least, an aficionado-in-training.

Age 25
Modest Mouse: Moon and Antarctica

I had graduated college and moved back to Sioux Falls and gotten married and had a dog and two jobs I hated and was a very busy person in general.

And in the two years between moving from St. Cloud (November 2002) and signing up for Sirius Satellite Radio (December 2004) I nearly completely forgot about music. I didn’t listen to anything new. I didn’t pay attention to the scene, didn’t go to many shows, and hardly purchased CDs.

I was stuck, just like those aging rock fans who still cling to their Journey and Tesla albums. Except I was clinging to northwest indie – Modest Mouse, Built to Spill. Foremost was The Moon and Antarctica, an album I still love to this day.

(Sirius saved me, though – specifically Sirius 26: Left of Center.)

Age 30
Ween: Chocolate and Cheese

This is me right now. According to last.fm, Modest Mouse holds the top six spots in terms of most listened to albums (not counting those I use as “concentration music,” which often loop over and over again in the background: jazz, Thom Yorke, Sigur Ros). Ugly Cassanova – an Isaac Brock spin-off – sits at #7.

But to claim Modest Mouse again would be boring. And not fair to the rest of the stuff I listen to. Now, for better or worse, my tastes have branched and become so varied that I no longer have favorite bands or albums, and my reliance on Modest Mouse and Built to Spill as easy fallback choices is probably a remnant from my lost days of music. Age 25. See above.

Now, I could easily claim MGMT’s Oracular Spectacular, or Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago, or Okkervil River’s The Stand-Ins. Hell, even Girl Talk could stand a chance to land #1. (Ben Folds’ Songs for Silverman – an older one – should also be mentioned.)

But despite the wide array of choices, one album did take a higher stage: Ween’s Chocolate and Cheese, the album on which I wrote a book proposal to Continuum’s 33 1/3 series, and the album that allowed Ween to creep into the upper echelon of my listening habits.

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BMOWP’s Top 10 Albums of 2008, kind of

December 30, 2008


New music, to me, is a foreign concept. Being outside of the music release scene, I rarely grasp onto new music during the year it’s released. Instead, I discover and rediscover music only after I’m unable to forget it. After three singles have washed through the Sirius XMU cycle, or after a book reminds me of its relevance.

Which makes a “top 10 albums of 2008” list a little difficult.

What I’ve done in the past with my end of the year reading lists (coming tomorrow!) is review my year in listening. I dive into the entire catalog, bringing up new favorites, discovering forgotten gems, finally getting around to listening to something I picked up last years. My favorite books of 2008 weren’t actually published in 2008, for the most part, and my favorite music follows that same

Which is to say, in an off-handed way, that years do nothing for me. I understand the value of a top albums of 2008 list, but that’s not how I listen to music; year by year, with a conscious knowledge of when an album came out. Instead, I know of three types of music: music I just got, music I’ve had for a while, and music from a long time ago.

With that said, my top 10 albums of 2008 are all over the place, from all sorts of years, and they prove two things:

1. The nature of shuffling an iPod. It brings back old favorites, and, like my personal tastes, it knows no time frame. One song on shuffle might lead me to finding the entire album, listening to it several times and, without fail, wondering how I had ever forgotten about it.

2. My lag in discovering new music. Regardless of how religiously I read Largehearted Boy or Paste, I am desperately behind on discovering new music. Chances are, if a great album came out in 2007, I’m just finding out about it now. Or, more importantly, just caring about it. (Not always the case, but indeed common.)

Those albums:

Band of Horses – Cease to Begin (2007)
As is the case with a good majority of the albums on this list, Band of Horses forced me into submission after numerous plays on Sirius XMU. Something about the guy’s voice reminds me of Doug Martsch’s dreamy alto stylings, and the reverb sends me back to last year’s awesome Neon Bible. I had always loved “Is There A Ghost,” but it wasn’t until I heard the entire album (twice) at Michelle’s in downtown Sioux Falls that I made it my own.

Beastie Boys – Paul’s Boutique (1989)
Pixies – Doolittle (1989)
Through research for a book proposal for Continuum’s 33 1/3 book series, I picked up four of the series’s most interesting selections. Before reading each book, I went back and lightened to the album again and – lo and behold – found myself completely re-in-love with both Paul’s Boutique and Doolittle. They’re brilliant albums, and the insight gleaned from the books make both albums even better, creating a nagging longing for a re-do back in 1989: as I was listening to Def Leppard and Poison, this ridiculously great underground (and not so underground) music was being released. I missed out.

Ween – Chocolate and Cheese (1994)
And, in listing the two albums most affected by 33 1/3 research, I’d be remiss in leaving out the actual 33 1/3 research subject – Chocolate and Cheese, Ween’s most sprawling and brilliant album (though, for the record, not my favorite – The Mollusk, thanks.) To say that this research got me back into music would be an understatement. I’ve re-learned more about music writing – and about music itself – over the past two months to qualify for reintroduction into the scene.

(Just kidding. I went to a show the other night and felt more out of place than ever.)

Beck – Guero (2005)
I’ve gone back to Guero a few times, but this time it’s for keeps. Better than Odelay, more fun than Modern Guilt and more accessible than Sea Change. It’s the perfect Beck album because it’s totally awesome.

Bon Iver – For Emma, Forever Ago (2008)
Okervill River – The Stand-Ins (2008)
I guess I’m showing my indie rock love by putting these two albums on the list, and one might think I’m doing so in order to claim whatever small piece of relevancy is left in the Best of 2008 market. But I really like both of these albums for their killer songwriting – Bon Iver writes from the insides of an abandoned whale, and Okervill River is as meta as you can get – songwriting about songwriting, I guess.

Girl Talk – Feed the Animals (2008)
Me likey mashups * giggle *

Spoon – Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (2007)
“The Underdog” is song of the year for me – both because I love it and because iTunes refuses to make a Genius play list without it.

They Might Be Giants – Flood/Apollo 18 (1990/1992)
It’s not cheating if I give each album only ½ of a place on the list, right? I went through this nostalgic 1990s alternative kick this past summer, led by the geekitude that is They Might be Giants. They’re irrelevant and silly and not something an adult should listen to, but Sierra loves them and, I guess, so do I.

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A top ten list of Ben Folds

July 10, 2008


I’m not ashamed to admit that, unlike many, I actually really really like Ben Folds. Both his solo stuff and with the Five.

There. I said it. Take away my cool kid badge.

(Or wait. Is it cool to like him? Or not cool? He, like Sufjan Stevens, Death Cab for Cutie and any other indie singer/songwriter/group that caters to a more sensitive side, are often reviled in popular culture. Which would make them perfect for indie rock. But then indie rockers are, at times, tired of their cuteness, which makes them perfect for popular culture. Help, I don’t know if I’m supposed to like or hate him! What’s Pitchfork claiming this week?)

Ahem.

As happens with some of my favorite musical artists, I have had a slight renaissance with Ben Folds. You know how it is – one of his songs popped up on my iPod, and I remembered, “Hey, I really like this guy,” and then I listened to an entire album and BAM, there you go, I was back in the thick of it, getting to know the EPs that I only barely listened to and making new judgment calls on songs I didn’t care much for a few years back.

But why? Why Ben Folds? Admittedly, he’s a little too cute at times. He’s overly sarcastic, and 85% of his songs are about the meaningless lives of people you don’t care about and never would remember if you met them.

And maybe that’s what I like about it. Those people. Those situations. Ben Folds writes snarky songs that at times are touching. He’s not a piano player looking for heart strings – he’s a comedian that happens to be great at writing songs, and at times those songs are nearly heartbreaking.

Look through his catalog. There are a lot of names, there. Old friends and fictional characters and people you wouldn’t expect outside of an episode of Arrested Development. There’s an entire cast of craziness and longing and friendship and nostalgia wrapped up in those songs.

Nostalgia. That’s it. Every song is emotional, whether funny or clever or sad. And every song brings another tale. Ben Folds isn’t a songwriter – he’s a storyteller. Which is, to say, he’s a songwriter who tells stories. Which is, to say, he’s the best kind of songwriter there is.

My top ten Ben Folds songs, whether with and without the Five (in no order):

1. “Army (live)” – Ben Folds Live
The only really great song off of The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner is made better without the rest of the band by enlisting the help of the crowd to stand in as the horn section.

2. “Best Imitation of Myself” – Ben Folds Five
We all have a façade, and “Best Imitation of Myself” describes it.

3. “Eddie Walker” – Naked Baby Photos
My favorite of Ben Folds’ characters, “Eddie Walker” takes a look at his life, seemingly validating his existence.

4. “Evaporated” – Whatever and Ever Amen
Every Ben Folds album has a sappy closing song that makes you think that, yes, the guy has bad days. This is the best of them.

5. “Fred Jones, Part 2″ – Rocking the Suburbs
A company newspaperman, forced out after 30 years, takes a long look at himself and realizes that he’s viewed as nothing more than dead space. A classic tale of experience being trumped by fresh, upstart talent, Fred Jones comes to terms with the fact that he’s “forgotten but not yet gone.” Shades of About Schmidt.

6. “Landed” – Songs for Silverman
This is just a nice song. That’s all.

7. “Late” – Songs for Silverman
About Elliot Smith. The first time I heard it was at a Ben Folds concert in Sioux Falls a few months before the album came out. He announced it as a song about a friend, and we all figured it was Elliott, who had just passed away. And then, he sang “Elliot, man, you played a fine guitar. And some dirty basketball.” And we knew. And I’ll disclose, with the song played live and the emotion in the room and great lyrics about a great musician, I had to fight back a tear or two. They didn’t come out, mind you. But there were there. Stinging.

8. “One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces” – Whatever and Ever Amen
The first song I ever heard from Ben Folds, “One Angry Dwarf” is a tale of comeuppance. Those people who thought they were so cool before? Well fuck ‘em.

9. “Philosophy” – Ben Folds Five
I also think this is a really nice song. It’s the “Brick” of the first album – the song everyone knows and everyone wants to hear.

10. “Zak and Sara” – Rocking the Suburbs
It’s scary how similar this couple – Zak without a “c,” Sara without an “h” – is to other couples I’ve met in real life. That is, until Sara turns out to be crazy.

And an honorable three-way mention, as well:
11. “Bitches Ain’t Shit” – Supersunnyspeedgraphic: The LP
12. “Get Your Hands Off My Woman” – Super D
13. “Twin Falls” – Naked Baby Photos
Two hilarious, yet beautiful covers (of Dr. Dre and The Darkness, respectively) followed by a cover of Built To Spill.

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BMOWP Classic Album – Flood

May 20, 2008


FloodFlood by They Might Be Giants

Today, I rediscovered Flood.

It’s not that I forgot it existed – it’s just that I forgot I’d liked it. I rediscovered it in a very specific way: I plugged the CD in, turned up the volume, and sang along with “Birdhouse In Your Soul” as loud as I could. In doing this, I discovered that, after at least a decade since last listen, I still knew all the words.

All of them.

This is by far the most embarrassing thing I’ve done this year.

In case you haven’t been keeping track, it’s not cool to like They Might Be Giants. Aside for a brief time in the early 90s, it’s never been cool to like They Might Be Giants. In fact, during that brief time it was only tolerated – it was an appreciated side-route that ultimately ended in a dead end, a funny little hobby disc on the level of “Detachable Penis” by King Missile.

Somewhere along the line, TMBG realized this. Fortunately for them, they had a built in talent for creating catchy and obscenely childish songs – perfect for, you know, writing children’s albums. Which is the path they’re headed down now – children’s artists with a fruitful background in alternarock.

However, during the Brief Time of Tolerance, TMBG put out two fantastic albums: Flood and Apollo 18. Flood is the most memorable, easily lifted by some of the band’s most recognizable songs – the aforementioned “Birdhouse In Your Soul,” “Particle Man,” “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)”.

After that, Flood seems pretty light – you’ve got the songs that everyone knows, and you’ve got a bunch of filler. Yet, that’s not the case. As I’d listen to each song, I’d remember the hooks, the lyrics and the subtle humor that, during a career as “gifted and misunderstood student,” I naturally latched on to. It was a mix of intelligent lyrical talent, goofy-ass music and pop sensibilities.

Amazingly, Flood tackles some pretty deep subjects, and does so in a way you wouldn’t expect – not through quirky wordsmithing but through pointed questions and statements, poignant in their simplicity. “Dead” takes a look at the legacy of death (“Now it’s over I’m dead and I haven’t done anything that I want”). “My Racist Friend” highlights the embarrassment of being associated with an overly bigoted friend (“Out from the kitchen to the bedroom to the hallway/Your friend apologizes, he could see it my way/He let the contents of the bottle do the thinking/Can’t shake the devil’s hand and say you’re only kidding”). “Lucky Ball and Chain” laments the loss of a long-time love (“Confidentially/I never had much pride/But now I rock a bar stool/and I drink for two/just pondering this time bomb in my mind”).

But it’s not all somber; the serious messages aren’t as common as, say, round-about lyrics about science. And that’s okay with me – the entire legend of TMBG is built upon songs that are embarrassingly catchy. Catchy to a fault, almost – so good that it’s impossible to take them seriously. They’re pure pop boiled down to the molecular level: short, funny parodies of real music.

Here’s the thing: They Might Be Giants is a fun band. Seriously fun. Foot-stomping, geek-inducing, science-based dorky fun. No, it’s not cool to like them. But it wasn’t cool to like chemistry either, and those people are making a good living being eggheads.

If only listening to They Might Be Giants was equitable to learning chemistry on a professional level.

To which I say, “Minimum Wage!”

“Yah!”

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The differentiation of fans

May 16, 2008


REMSince it’s release, I’ve been getting a lot of play out of the newest REM album, Accelerate. It’s good. Not Automatic for the People or Life’s Rich Pageant good, but good all the same – a return to when REM was making their style of music, when Out of Time and Automatic for the People had propelled them into the rock stratosphere.

Though I am one of the few who enjoyed Monster, I understand how many didn’t care for that album. For those people, Accelerate may be a godsend – it seems to be the album that was meant to come between Automatic for the People and New Adventures in Hi-Fi. This is what Monster could have been. What it should have been.

Listening to the album, and in turn filtering throughout the entire REM canon, I’ve been thinking about the differentiation of fans, and how the longer a band has been around, the more diverse their fans become.

In the early days of a band, most fans are similar. They like a band because they like the first album, or the first single, or whatever. There’s less to choose from, so every fan is essentially a carbon copy of the next. They’ve all been brought together by one set of songs, creating a community of support for the band that’s near fanatic.

Take that band and look 20 years into the future. The fans aren’t carbon copies anymore. Some have left. Others have grown. The bandwagon has taken on more and more fans until the originals are shoved to the back. Tastes diverge and branch out again, until one fan is hardly recognizable from next.

There are currently three generations of REM fans. The first generation is filled with lifelong fans – those that caught on with REM when they were still a smaller, more independent band – the IRS years through the initial major label signing; Murmur through Document.

The second generation – my generation – caught on somewhere between Green and Automatic for the People. We’re the generation that grabbed a hold of them as radio classics and hung on for dear life. We’ve held on because we still hold great memories from those songs and from the band at its peak.

The new generation probably views REM with a longing nostalgia. I doubt many fans are created through the albums alone, instead relying on an older sibling or coworker who loved the band in the 80s and 90s, or though rock radio (or classic rock radio).

Even with fans grouped together like this, there’s a vast differentiation. If you ask 100 REM fans what their ten favorite REM songs are, you’ll get 100 completely different answers, with the total number songs reaching the hundreds.

It shows the power of a non-tangible creative outlet. There are no right or wrong choices – it’s all dependent upon tastes. Though fans are often lumped in together, the longer a band has been together, the more every fan is different. Like a musical fingerprint, every fan is unique.

What it comes down to is that the larger you get, the more wide sweeping your fan base becomes.

And the harder it becomes to satisfy everyone.

Someday I’ll talk about the REM mixtape that set me up as a fan – and why my favorites are so heavy with IRS year classics even though I’m more of a second generation, Automatic for the People guy.

Until then, here are my choices for the 15 best REM songs. How different are they from yours?

“Begin the Begin” – Life’s Rich Pageant
“Belong” – Out of Time
“(Don’t Go Back to) Rockville” – Reckoning
“E-Bow the Letter” – New Adventures in Hi-Fi
“Electrolite” – New Adventures in Hi-Fi
“Fall on Me” – Life’s Rich Pageant
“Find the River” – Automatic for the People
“Finest Worksong” – Document
“Man on the Moon” – Automatic for the People
“Perfect Circle” – Murmur
“Swan Swan H” – Life’s Rich Pageant
“Try Not to Breathe” – Automatic for the People
“Walk Unafraid” – Up
“What’s the Frequency, Kenneth” – Monster
“World Leader Pretend” – Green

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