The Christian Side-Hug is the Stupidest Fucking Thing I Have Ever Seen

The above picture is the result of a Google image search for “The dumbest thing ever.” Why would I search for the dumbest thing ever on Google Images? Because I believe I have found the dumbest thing ever and it is the Christian Side-Hug. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, watch this helpful music video. My pal Zac, who can be relied upon for pointing me towards things that destroy my already wavering faith in humanity, had a link to this video in his G-chat status message this morning. Being an idiot, I clicked on it.

Now, there are several problems with the Christian Side-Hug, not least of which is their assertion in the video that “Jesus never hugged nobody like that.” To the extent that we know whether or not Jesus hugged anyone at all, it is probable that he hugged them the normal way, what the idiots in this video refer to as “front hugging.” Why? Because side-hugging is fucking stupid and, from what I’ve read, Jesus wasn’t known for doing fucking stupid things.

So why side-hug? Because, the high-functioning retards (before you complain, I’m not making fun of people with cognitive disabilities: I really think that you must have a certain lack of proper brain function to be okay with side-hugging. I guess, though, calling the nimrods in this video “high-functioning” is probably a stretch) in this video explain, “front hugging” is sinful unless you’re married. Because apparently, all normal hugs involve the potential for your naughty bits to make contact with the other person’s naughty bits. Now, let’s think about this: do you really get turned on every time you hug someone? I know I don’t. And it’s a good thing too, because I hug my grandparents every time I see them. As far as I know, none of us are particularly aroused by it. If these good little youth group fuckers can’t hug anyone normally without pitching a tent, maybe it’s not hugging that’s the problem. Just sayin’.

But this is a music blog and, as my apartment’s leading music critic, I should evaluate the Christian Side-Hug song on its musical merits. I can do this fairly succinctly: musically, this song is an abortion… and you’d think these good Christian Side-Huggers would be against that sort of thing.

An Attempt to Discuss Riceboy Sleeps Without Sounding All New-Agey and Stupid

Because I like a challenge, I will now attempt to articulate why I like the Riceboy Sleeps album (I’ve sometimes heard the artist referred to as Jonsi and Alex, the names of the two dudes in the band – one of whom is in Sigur Ros – but I first saw them listed on the Dark Was the Night comp as “Riceboy Sleeps” and that’s what I’ll call them. If they don’t like it, well, they probably won’t do anything about it because, if this music is any indication, they are two exceedingly mellow people) without sounding like some sort of mystical new-age weirdo who likes to lay in bed listening to CDs of flutes and whale-fucking on repeat. And I feel like I have to put that kind of disclaimer up because Riceboy Sleeps (the eponymous album by the band that consists of Jonsi & Alex) is a really lovely album that is almost entirely unlike any other thing I like at all. If this is your first time reading Bollocks!, you might want to skip around the archives a bit; you’ll find that liking subtle, beautiful music is not a common event ’round these parts.

But I do like Riceboy Sleeps. I also like Jonsi’s other band, Sigur Ros – though the latter does not necessarily dictate the former. After all, Riceboy Sleeps makes Sigur Ros sound like the fucking Ramones. I’ve heard the album described as “ambient”, a word I don’t like to use when discussing music because, for me, it conjures up the image of music that is intentionally boring – but I suppose, in terms of strict dictionary definitions, I’ll allow that there are some ambient qualities to Riceboy Sleeps. Pitchfork’s biggest dickhead, Ian Cohen, bashed the album for sounding “indecisive” about how ambient it is, which… no, wait. I’ll let you decide. Here is the exact quote from Cohen’s review: “But what struck me as most frustrating about 20 minutes in was just how indecisive it sounds about its ambience…” I tend to trust that people who have bothered to find Bollocks! in the massive pile of porn and…well, whatever else the internet has on it, are pretty astute readers. So how fucking stupid is it to accuse an album that you yourself have declared “ambient” to be indecisive about how ambient it is? That Cohen is so hung up on how on-again/off-again Riceboy Sleeps gets with the ambience says more about the way he labeled the album than it does about the album itself. But, to work at Pitchfork, you have to give everything an irritatingly pretentious label (like “post-rock”, another meaningless label that makes me want to go on a killing spree. I mean, what the fuck does that even mean? Rock music still exists, so it can’t mean music that came after the end of rock music. So does it mean any music that was made since the birth of rock music? And if so, isn’t nearly everything post-rock? And isn’t rock itself “post-blues”? Seriously, if someone out there can provide a substantive definition of post-rock, I’ll stop complaining about people using the phrase. Wait. No, I won’t) so Cohen is really just protecting his job there. Cohen also complains about the album being too loud to work as background music and, as you read the review, you sort of get the feeling that Cohen’s inability to categorize Riceboy Sleeps is really the reason he dislikes it so much.

But maybe he just never found the right context in which to listen to it. I first listened to the album in my car, which is entirely wrong for an album like this (and potentially dangerous – you might nod off while driving with music like this on). Then, earlier this fall, I happened to be house-sitting for one of my bosses when I popped the disc into his home stereo system, turned the volume up pretty loud, and let the sound spill out into the empty house. That turned out to be the right move. Now, I’m not saying you need a big house in the hills and a nice stereo to enjoy Riceboy Sleeps. I’ve since blasted it in my tiny apartment and on my headphones and found it very satisfying. What you need to enjoy Riceboy Sleeps is volume and time. It’s the kind of album you have to let wash over you. And I know that sounds kinda like new-age hippie bullshit, but I assure you it’s not. People who are familiar with the works of Gavin Bryars (whose beautiful Jesus’s Blood Never Failed Me Yet features a cameo by none other than Tom Waits, whose music has never failed me yet) will probably get what I’m talking about here. There’s a certain amount of stillness required to take in Riceboy Sleeps and, when put in the proper context, the album is stirring and gorgeous. Is it a little pretentious? Yeah, but so is Sigur Ros and I’m willing to forgive so long as the sonic beauty outweighs the pretension.

Of course, I am not daring to suggest that anyone who puts on Riceboy Sleeps at top volume and really tries to digest it will like it. Far from it. Probably very few people will really dig this record – I’m guessing people who are more into mainstream pop music and who read words like “ambient” and “post-rock” for the first time ever in this review will probably find the album kind of dull or annoyingly slow-paced. But there’s real treasure to be found in it for people who are able to give it a chance. I hate telling people to listen to an album nine or ten times before they decide if they like it and I’m not going to tell you that about Riceboy Sleeps. You’re big kids now, you can figure out for yourselves if you want to listen to an album more than once. But I can say with all certainty that this album is deserving of that first time through your speakers.

Next time, I’ll get back to basics and review a nice ambient/no-wave/pre-punk/alt.country/post-rock/neo-ska/shoegaze record (“shoegaze” is a real genre – it’s for people who like to do heroin). As soon as I can find one.

The Case Against Green Day

It’s actually pretty hard to describe how much I dislike Green Day. I’m serious – this is the fourth draft of this post that I’ve started because it’s also really hard to decide where to start discussing all the things I don’t like about them. Do I start with all the better bands they’re ripping off? Do I start with the black-dominated wardrobes and guyliner? Do I start with some of the laziest, most cringe-inducing songwriting I’ve ever heard? Do I start with the fact that they’re considered by some people who may or may not have cognitive disabilities (including themselves) to be a punk band?

Maybe I’ll start there, because that bugs the living shit out of me (and because I have a lot of love for good punk music. A lot of love). When I think of punk bands, I think of (who doesn’t?) the Clash, the Stooges, the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, the Dead Kennedys, the Jim Carroll Band, early Bad Religion, and – for some current reference – the Thermals, the Old Haunts, Titus Andronicus, and the Future of the Left. Green Day is, at best – at best – a dull, lifeless distillation of the style of music those awesome (and vastly superior) bands play(ed). The Clash gave us, “Let fury have the hour/ anger can be power”; Green Day’s “Know Your Enemy” (one of the most repetitive, godawful songs I’ve heard all year. Billy Joe Armstrong knows one word that rhymes with enemy: “enemy.” Oh wait. That’s the same word. I hate this band) literally waters that down to “Violence is an energy” and “Bringing on the fury” and maybe I’m paranoid, but that seems a little close to be coincidence. Am I accusing Green Day of callously ripping of their betters? You bet your ass I am. And even their peers – one of 21st Century Breakdown’s many awful tracks is “East Jesus Nowhere” which features a guitar riff eerily similar to (and by “eerily similar to”, I mean “shamelessly ripped off from”) Marilyn Manson’s “Disposable Teens.” Have you left no sense of decency, Green Day? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

When American Idiot came along back in 2004, lots of people loved it because they hated the President and all the bullshit he was up to. But what did that album really say about…well, anything? The answer is (drum roll please) fuckall. Sure, they got their best line ever on the title track (“I’m not a part of a redneck agenda”) but the rest of that album was generic suburban alienation bullshit. They spent 13 tracks saying nothing the Clash didn’t say better in “Lost in the Supermarket”.  The best moment of that album is “American Idiot” and it’s eclipsed in every way by (take your pick) “White Riot” by the Clash, “California Uber Alles” by the Dead Kennedys, “Anarchy in the U.K.” by the Sex Pistols, and even “Time for Heroes” by the Libertines*.  And Green Day’s utter lack of ability to handle anything approaching substance led them to squander a great song title in “Wake Me Up When September Ends.” Any punk band worth a damn (hell, any kind of band with any kind of sense) doing a song with that title in 2004 could’ve made an awesome song about how frustrating it is, only a few years after 9/11, to be constantly reminded to “never forget.” But what does Green Day give us? “The innocent can never last.” Really? That’s all you got? And this was their Big Meaningful album, folks. Not only does that fail to scratch the surface, it fails to come anywhere near the surface. It floats around in space, consulting maps and charts in a futile attempt to determine the location of the surface. And it’s fucking banal, musically and lyrically. Especially lyrically. In the span of one song, we get that prize-winner about the innocent and “here comes the rain again/ falling from the stars/ drenched in my pain again/ becoming who we are.” That might be fine for any given 8th grader’s Live Journal entry, but it doesn’t cut it for discerning listeners of rock music (much less bands that claim to make rock music). It’s like Armstrong just pulled words from his copy of Poetic Imagery for Dummies Pretentious Assholes. And don’t even get me started on “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.” By itself, that song puts Green Day at the top of the list of bands that need a serious cock-punching.

But people are buying their shit at an ungodly rate. Rolling Stone, a magazine whose irrelevance actually increases exponentially with every review, raved about 21st Century Breakdown’s “rage filled punk anthems.” The Los Angeles Times called the album a “dazzling musical journey.” If “Know Your Enemy” and “21 Guns” are rage-filled punk anthems and/or dazzling musical journeys, we’re in trouble. You can like whatever you want, but I’m warning you: if you let bands like Green Day (or My Chemical Romance or any other band that is just dying to write the anthems of your prepubescent/adolescent/adult angst) climb to the top of the punk and/or rock heap, you’re running the risk of creating a nation of black-clad, whiny dullards who are capable of expressing their feelings/desires/politics only in the most vague and offensively bromidic terms. That’s a nation where Green Day dominates the radio, every television show and movie is about emo vampires, and people think Dane Cook is funny. Believe me, America: we can do better than that. We must do better.

*This song features the line, “Did you see the stylish kids in the riot,” which I mention only because it occurs to me that Green Day are the stylish kids in the riot (the kids who show up to say they were there, but don’t expect them to hurl any bricks, thank you very much). For the sake of contrast, Joe Strummer, who wrote “White Riot” actually participated in a riot. He and Paul Simonon attempted to set a police car on fire while the British cops beat up some black kids. I’m not advocating destroying cop cars in hilarious ways, but it’s certainly nice to know that Strummer and the Clash weren’t afraid to put their money where their mouths were.

Best Albums of My Life #22: Combat Rock

I’ve realized two things recently: 1) I’ve been neglecting my sporadic countdown of the 29 best albums released in my lifetime. I’ll be 30 in a couple months, so I should probably wrap this up before then; 2) Combat Rock, the last real Clash album, is fucking awesome (I know, I know: Bernie Rhodes pushed through Cut the Crap after the band ousted Mick Jones, but if you think that’s a real Clash record, we’re gonna have words. Fighting words).

After being one of the first punk bands to actually say stuff with their music (I sometimes think “White Riot,” “Career Opportunities,” and “White Man at Hammersmith Palais” say it all), the Clash headed out into new territory, whipping up delightful mixtures of their influences (one such recipe became London Calling, the best album ever. Of course, one of them also became Sandanista!, an album that has its moments but is about three times longer than it needs to be. Yes, like Shakespeare before them, the Clash were capable of cranking out the rare bad work) and serving them up as piping hot records of rock, reggae, punk, and even early hip-hop. In the process, they went from Best Punk Band Ever to one of the best bands ever in any genre.

Even as Mick Jones’s ego and Topper Headon’s drug use (and, to be fair, the ego and drug use of the rest of the band too – to quote Joe Strummer, “We were always a drug band. Always.” If you read Return of the Last Gang in Town, you’ll find that he wasn’t too proud of that fact) began to tear the Clash apart, they managed to cobble together (not without some internal strife) Combat Rock, which would feature two of their biggest commercial hits (“Rock the Casbah” and “Should I Stay or Should I Go,” which – I’ve read – Mick Jones wrote about Ellen Foley, a.k.a. the girl who sang on Meatloaf’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.” Apparently, Mick enjoyed a romantic affair with Foley and even produced her solo debut, which tanked like a Kevin Costner movie with a score by Steven Seagall’s country band) and a host of other awesome songs. In fact, here’s a little history lesson for you kids who heard “Paper Planes” on the Slumdog Millionaire trailers last year: “Paper Planes” actually samples “Straight to Hell” from Combat Rock. So if you’re diving into M.I.A.’s catalog because of that song, do yourself a favor and listen to the Clash while you’re at it. In fact, I don’t care if you have no idea what I’m talking about right now – listen to the Clash.

Combat Rock is the Clash’s poppiest album, but that’s hardly a bad thing. In fact, it only proves that, had they stuck together longer (an impossibility which will discuss further in a minute), the Clash would’ve dominated the 80s with awesome pop goodness. Combat Rock also points to where Strummer and Jones would eventually end up post-Clash: “Overpowered by Funk” and “Red Angel Dragnet” point toward the work Mick Jones would do with Big Audio Dynamite, “Death is a Star,” and “Straight to Hell” indicate the direction that Joe Strummer would explore with the Mescaleros. Of course, Strummer’s death in 2002 (at the tender age of 50) means that we’ll never really know the impact he could’ve made with his second great band (have you heard Streetcore? It’s awesome). Jones is still running around producing various albums (including the first Libertines record, which owes a not-tiny debt to the Clash) and even recently collaborated with Topper Headon on a re-recording of “Jail Guitar Doors” for a prison charity in the U.K..

Originally titled Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg, Combat Rock had a long struggle to even see the light of day. It was originally 15 tracks, 65 minutes, and growing. Mick Jones was happy with this situation, Joe Strummer was furious with it, and from there, you can see that this was a band not long for the world. In a 1984 interview with Creem, Joe Strummer pointed out, “I don’t believe anyone is that great they don’t write crap sometimes.” In Strummer’s opinion, the album that would be Combat Rock was in bad need of an editor and an outside producer – things I think would have benefited Sandanista!. When CBS heard the Rat Patrol tapes, they were not happy and suggested Glyn Johns to mix the record. Johns hacked the album down to twelve tracks with a decidedly pop bent (Strummer was on a mission to make a pop album that wasn’t all “Stuff ‘er on the bed and shove it to her” in an ambitious attempt to lure meat-heads away from the burgeoning hair metal scene), a move that led Jones to abandon the sessions, apart from re-recording his vocal on “Should I Stay or Should I Go?”  Clash biographer Marcus Gray (author of the aforementioned Return of the Last Gang in Town, a must-read for fans of the band) accuses Strummer of perhaps going too far toward a mainstream sound on Combat Rock, but Strummer biographer Chris Salewicz (whose Redemption Song is also a must-read; taken together, Gray’s book and Redemption Song paint portraits of Joe Strummer and Mick Jones as two very gifted men with strong wills, strong egos, and maybe an even stronger need to be loved by a wide audience) points out that Strummer kind of stuck his neck out, “having seized the reins” for the album, and was understandably nervous about how it would be received.

Combat Rock was, of course, adored both in the U.S. and in the U.K., but that would not be enough to keep the Clash together. Topper Headon was out of the band before they went on tour in 1982 and Jones was kicked out at the end of the tour. On its musical merits alone, Combat Rock is easily one of the best albums of the 1980s and it holds up well to this day. And, if we’re being honest, we must admit that its musical greatness is due to the talents of all four members of the Clash: from Give ‘Em Enough Rope to Combat Rock, Topper Headon, Paul Simonon, Mick Jones, and Joe Strummer matured together as musicians and made some of the best rock music ever recorded.

Incidentally, the “countdown” (it’s not really a countdown, since I do it in the order of my choosing whenever I feel like adding an album to the list) is not even half way over. If you want to catch up, you can find the entire list right here. I’ll try to update it more regularly, since I was supposed to have this all done by the end of 2009.

A Conversation with Sarah Palin About the Future of the Left

I got really excited when I heard Travels with Myself and Another by the Future of the Left for the first time. Here, finally, is a modern album that deserves to be classified as punk. Andy Falkous (who was in McLusky, a band I have never listened to) has found the ball that was dropped when Jello Biafra left the Dead Kennedys, picked it up, and ran off with it. In searching for someone with whom to share my excitement, I cast my net far and wide, seeking someone who doesn’t shy away from a strong opinion and who, more importantly, has nothing better to do. Finally, I settled on former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, who was gracious enough to join me for this conversation about the Future of the Left.

Bollocks!: Good morning, Governor. Or Former Governor, I guess. Anyway, good morning. Welcome to Los Angeles.

Sarah Palin: Hollywood needs to know: we eat, therefore we hunt.

Bollocks!: Okay. We’re in Van Nuys, but I’ll be sure to tell Hollywood the next time I’m down there. To be honest, I’m a little surprised that you agreed to do this, given your well-documented disdain for the media (of which I’m only barely a part) and the fact that I volunteered for the guy who handed you and John McCain your asses in last year’s election.

Palin: Don’t underestimate the wisdom of the people.

Bollocks!: Well said. So let’s talk about the Future of the Left. Travels with Myself and Another is the first I’ve heard of them. Have you listened to any of their other stuff? I know Andy Falkous was in McLusky, for instance.

Palin: He’s also known as The Maverick.

Bollocks!: Andy Falkous is known as the Maverick? Is that why you listened to his album? I noticed during the 2008 campaign that you seem to have a Maverick fetish.

Palin: That’s why John McCain tapped me…

Bollocks!: He what?

Palin: I’m all for contraception and I’m all for any preventative measures that are legal and safe.

Bollocks!: Fine, I guess. But too much information. Let’s talk about the Future of the Left…

Palin: You’re gonna see anti-hunting, anti-second amendment circuses from Hollywood.

Bollocks!: Perhaps I should be more specific. I meant the band the Future of the Left and their new album, Travels with Myself and Another. I think it’s one of maybe two or three truly decent punk albums of the last few years.

Palin: There is much good in store further down the road.

Bollocks!: You really think so? Or are you just saying that because Creed reunited?

Palin: They’re our next door neighbors.

Bollocks!: That makes sense in a perverse way. What did you think of Travels with Myself and Another?

Palin: I see the hand of God in this beautiful creation.

Bollocks!: You do? It strikes me as pretty secular album. How do you feel about the line in “The Hope that House Built” where Falkous sings, “Re-imagine God as just a mental illness”?

Palin: I think there’s a lot of mocking of my personal faith.

Bollocks!: Well, I don’t think Falkous was going after you personally –

Palin: This is not a man who sees America like you and I see America.

Bollocks!: That’s probably because he’s British.

Palin: We’re gonna do what we have to do to protect the United States of America.

Bollocks!: From the British? I think we were done doing that after the war of 1812. What was your favorite – or least favorite – thing about the Future of the Left record?

Palin: I think that’s been probably the most hurtful and nonsensical blast that we have taken. It’s been an embarrassment.

Bollocks!: Wow, you really took this album personally. Why?

Palin: We are facing tough challenges in America, with some seeming to just be hell-bent maybe on tearing down our nation, perpetuating some pessimism and suggesting American apologetics, suggesting perhaps that our best days were yesterdays.

Bollocks!: Um. “Apologetic” is an adjective. You just used it as a noun.

Palin: How ‘bout, in honor of the American soldier, ya quit makin’ things up?

Bollocks!: I assure you that “apologetic” is an adjective. And why would you bring up the troops in this discussion? Is it because it’s Veteran’s Day? Even if that’s the reason, what makes you think we honor our soldiers by speaking like fucking morons?

Palin: It will make us a more peaceful, prosperous, and secure nation.

Bollocks!: What will? Talking like idiots?

Palin: It should be so obvious to you.

Bollocks!: You’re not making sense. I know that’s kinda your thing, but you’re making less sense than usual today. Care to explain?

Palin: God is gonna tell you what is going on.

Bollocks!: Really? Okay. Let’s just sit here and wait for God to tell me what’s going on.

 

 

[HOURS LATER. MANY HOURS LATER]

Bollocks!: Still not getting anything. While we were waiting, though, I had the chance to listen the whole album again – twelve times – and I’m really struck by the sense of humor evident on it. It’s obviously angry and aggressive, but there are some laugh-out-loud lines, like “the night might hide my shame/ but shame won’t dry my balls” and “slight bowel movements preceded the bloodless coup.”

Palin: I have that within me also…

Bollocks!: What? A sense of humor? A slight bowel movement?

Palin: Things are perculating…

Bollocks!: I think you mean “percolating.” Do you need to use the restroom?

Palin: I believe I’m a heckuva lot better off putting my life in God’s hands.

Bollocks!: You can put your life wherever you want, but you’d better put your feces in the toilet. It’s just down the hall there.

Palin: That’s reckless.

Bollocks!: Placing your turds in the proper receptacle is reckless?

Palin: I haven’t spoken with anyone who disagrees with my position on that.

Bollocks!: You’re speaking to someone now who disagrees with your position on that. You’re not gonna crap on my rug, are you?

Palin: What I need to do is strike a deal with you guys…

Bollocks!: Look, there is no deal we can strike where I will let you drop a loaf on my floor. I rent this space, lady, and I hope to get my cleaning deposit back. Maybe we should wrap this up so you can go do your business elsewhere. Anything else you’d like to say about the Future of the Left?

Palin: I’m just so extremely proud of Track, my son… on his calf, he has a big ol’ Jesus fish.

Bollocks!: You’re son has a Jesus fish tattoo? Is that like the evangelical equivalent of the tramp stamp?

Palin: You’re absolutely right on.

Bollocks!: Great. Well, I’d like to thank you, Mrs. Palin, for stopping by and torturing the English language with me for a bit. Also, thanks for not pooping on my floor.

In retrospect, I guess we didn’t talk much about the Future of the Left in that interview, so let me just wrap up by saying that Travels with Myself and Another is an aggressive joy of an album and you should check it out if you were wondering what happened to all the good punk bands.

The Ego’s Last Stand

If you have read other reviews of the new Flaming Lips record, Embryonic, you might be worried. You might have read about how “experimental” Embryonic is and you might have thought, “Hey, wait a minute – isn’t ‘experimental’ the term critics use to try to praise something that is bad, but bad in a perversely interesting way?” And you’d be right to think that. But Embryonic is really not that big of a leap for the Flaming Lips to have made from At War with the Mystics. In fact, if you look at their entire 20-something year career, it’s kinda hard to pin down their sound anyway. But I’m speaking as a guy who actually owns their awesomely underrated early albums like In a Priest-Driven Ambulance and Hit to Death in the Future Head.

The Pitchfork kids like Embryonic, which shows some rare good taste on their part, but they try to praise the album by damning the Lips’ other recent works, as if Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots and The Soft Bulletin aren’t skull-crackingly magnificent listens in their own right (or in anyone’s own right, for that matter. Who out there has listened to both of those albums and found them lacking in melodious mind-blowing beauty?). The P-forkers even try to scare off the non-hipster-douchebag crowd by comparing Embryonic favorably to the Lips’ real experimental album, Zaireeka. While Embryonic does some sonic stuff that you haven’t heard from the Lips before, I’ve always understood the Flaming Lips as the best band ever at trying stuff they’ve never tried before. They’re willing to fail in a way almost no other band is, and I think that’s why they fail so rarely (or never, really, by my count). Am I about to say that Embryonic is a noble failure? No. It’s actually an incredibly compelling, noisy, psychedelic rock record that gets more splendid with each listen. I literally hear something new every single time I listen to Embryonic. I’m listening to it on headphones as I write this and am having a very good time indeed.

Before I get too much into the nuts and bolts of why Embryonic is arguably the best rock album of the year, I want to take a second to discuss the Pitchfork modus operandi for a second. If you’re blessed enough to inhabit a universe wherein you don’t know what the hell Pitchfork is, I suggest you pop on over to http://pitchfork.com, read a couple of their reviews, and see for yourself the kind of pretentious douchebaggery that is their bread and butter. See, they can’t stand the idea that other people might like the music they like, so they find the most unlistenable shit on earth and sing its praises, practically daring us lowly peasants to like it. For instance, they love Wavves, a band rational people would like to stuff into the business end of a wood-chipper. But that’s the whole Pitchfork shtick. If a band becomes too well-known, they can kiss the Pitchfork-love goodbye (see My Morning Jacket for examples of this). Of course, every once in a while, Pitchfork can’t help but honestly love something that is unassailably awesome, like the Hold Steady. Or the Flaming Lips. But with Embryonic, the P-forkers seem to think they’ve found a Flaming Lips album that only an internet hipster can love. And they’re wrong. My fiance, known to those who know her as the absolute antithesis of the internet hipster, likes Embryonic. Because it’s weird. Point is, Pitchfork is always wrong – even when they’re right, they say it in a wrong sort of way. Except this one time, when they created what may actually be my favorite album review of all time. I never get tired of posting that link.

Anyway, let’s talk Embryonic. Thematically, it’s the same as every Flaming Lips album ever: good, evil, life, love, and death. The Lips like to talk about the big stuff and they do it better than most bands (sorry, 8th grade girls, but “Your Body Is a Wonderland” is not deep, big picture stuff. Nor is, I dunno, anything by Green Day), but there’s a new philosophical wrinkle running throughout Embryonic that I happen to like very much: it deals a lot with annihilating the ego, which is a subject I think is very worthy indeed. Perhaps that’s (partly) because I have a pretty huge, exceedingly healthy ego, and it gets me into mostly avoidable trouble. So a soundtrack for its demise is literally music to my ears.

Embryonic, then, is kind of an existential/psychological freak-out (on the moon? I don’t know why I wrote that, but it fits, dammit, and I’m keeping it), starting with “Convinced of the Hex,” a song whose female subject says, “‘You think there’s a system/ that controls and affects/ You see, I believe in nothing/ and you’re convinced of the hex’”, setting up another strong through-line for the album: there’s no reason we’re here except the reasons we make (“no one is ever really powerless,” Coyne sings on – naturally – “Powerless”), and the good or ill we do in the world is a matter of choice (the beautiful and sparse “If” turns on this point, that humans are evil but can be gentle “if they decide”). That might sound kinda depressing, but the Lips don’t squander their opportunity to point out how freeing it is to live in a universe governed by chaos, chemistry, and luck. “Powerless” could be said to be half of the centerpiece of the album, the other half being the splendiferous “The Ego’s Last Stand,” which explicitly addresses the shattering effect that honest perspective can have on your assumptions, set to the tune of a sinister bass lick and a sparse vocal that builds to an awesome, drum-propelled (props to the Lips for drafting drummer Kliph Scurlock as an official fourth Flaming Lip) noise orgy which must be the sound your ego makes when it’s being crushed under the weight of unfiltered awesomeness.

Does that sound new-agey and weird? Does it sound like spaced-out hippie bullshit? Or the bummingest bummer of all time? However my description of Embryonic strikes you, it says more about you and I than it ever could about the album (and, if we’re being honest with ourselves, we should admit that criticism always tells you more about the critic than what they’re critiquing). The truth is, I’ve spent the last week trying to figure out what to say about the new Flaming Lips album and, in the mean time, I’ve listened to it obsessively. I still can’t say anything that will make you like this album, but I’ll make a bet with you (and the goodish people at Pitchfork): I’m betting that, as weird as it may seem on the surface, if everyone who reads Bollocks! (that’s between 15 and 30 people, on average – this has increased from an average of 6 to 9 readers about  a year ago and I thank all of you, whoever you are, for that) listens to Embryonic all the way through at least one time, more people will like than not. And, if you’re like me (you poor bastard), you’ll find yourself wanting to listen to it with an almost alarming frequency.

 

Not Really a Review of the New Bob Dylan Album (Mostly an Excuse to Praise Tom Waits Effusively)

Why is this not really a review of Bob Dylan’s new album, Together Through Life? Because I’ve listened to that album several times now and I cannot connect it to any of the things that I associate with Bob Dylan. It almost seems unfair to review Together Through Life because album reviews tend to compare the new stuff to the old stuff and, in Bob Dylan’s case, that’s a trap you’d chew your leg off to escape. Can you really imagine pitting Together Through Life against Highway 61 Revisited and comparing notes? It’d be a musical Tiananmen Square where Highway is the tank and Together is the lone dude bravely facing down said tank. But this time, everyone is kind of embarrassed by the lone dude and will be (only somewhat) secretly thrilled when he’s reduced to a gooey paste beneath the tracks (pun!) of the mighty tank (album).

Bob Dylan apparently won’t cop to it (this is rumor only, because I’m too lazy to read his book), but there was a time when he was not only capable of getting down to the real shit, he was the real shit. He didn’t have to cut right down to the bone because he lived there, carved his home out of the marrow, and used the shavings to build his songs. That’s how you become the voice of your generation (not by giving yourself the job, Kanye West). Blonde On Blonde, Blood On the Tracks, and Highway 61 Revisited are still killer albums, resonating as clearly with me today as they ever did with anyone who heard them when they were new. Those albums still shake people to the core because Dylan was so utterly on top of his game when he recorded them.

But if we’re being honest with ourselves, really laying it all out there for everyone to see (is that what Dylan used to do? Sometimes yes and sometimes no), we have to admit that the artist formerly known as Robert Zimmerman has fallen far from the top of his game and has not aged gracefully at all. I know Modern Times got good marks from the critics, but they were ignoring the fact that it was largely a cringe-inducing, corny affair. Love and Theft was pretty all right, but that was more than 10 years ago and still doesn’t hold a candle to his earlier work.

There is an art to aging gracefully, especially in rock ‘n’ roll. Tom Waits has mastered it, but he started early (about the time he realized that being a boozed-up lounge singer was a dead end). Waits turned his music inside out and when that wasn’t enough, he ground it in the dirt with his boot heel, mixed it with some other dust and blood, and sculpted an entirely new beast out of it. I’m not just saying this to plug my favorite musician – Waits and Dylan have a lot more in common than you might think. They’re both (at their best) unrivaled songwriter/poets with a unique view of the American experience and a (formerly, in Dylan’s case) unique way of presenting it. I’m not just talking about their supposedly “bad” voices either. But if we wanna talk voices, I’ll take Tom Waits or Bob Dylan over Josh Groban any day of the week – sure, Groban can hit all the pretty notes but his music doesn’t tell you a goddamn thing about life, love, or where to buy pornographic playing cards in Singapore. In other words, Josh Groban doesn’t tell you anything you need to know. On the other hand, if you listen carefully to Tom Waits, he will tell you everything you need to know. I feel the same way about Blood on the Tracks, which makes it really hard to listen to Together Through Life.  And, in case you couldn’t tell, it makes it hard to stay on task when merely discussing this album.

The whole album consists of songs I’ll classify as Clean White Blues* (not a compliment), which might almost – almost – be bearable if the lyrics sounded like they came from Bob Dylan. But I refuse to believe that the same guy who wrote “Desolation Row” penned the godawful “It’s All Good” that closes Together Through Life. There’s just no way. Dylan’s legacy is so solid right now, he could literally do anything he wanted. I’m not saying he has to starting aping Tom Waits, but he could take a page  from the Waits playbook and try to push his sound beyond its limits. Instead, Dylan has crafted what might as well be a Jimmy Buffet record with fewer laughs (it hurt me more to write that, Bob Dylan, than it will hurt you to never read it). The instrumentation is almost always the same (Clean White Blues standards – soft drums, maybe an accordion and/or piano, and clean – always clean – electric guitar) on every song which, again, might be bearable if Dylan were saying anything worth repeating.

Dylan has certainly earned the right to record whatever kind of album he wants (he’s also earned the right to legally murder My Chemical Romance for their blasphemous cover of “Desolation Row” that showed up on the Watchmen soundtrack earlier this year) and, if Together Through Life is what he wants to be doing right now, bully for him. But I don’t want to hear it. Dylan used to be strident and funny and obnoxious and whimsical and weird,  but Together Through Life is dull and predictable and lifeless and, because it is those three things, also depressing as hell. To cope, I’m pretending Bob Dylan died in 1978 and will henceforth refer to him as the late Bob Dylan.

*What do I mean by Clean White Blues? This might hurt some people’s feelings, but – in the immortal words of George Carlin – fuck ‘em. Clean White Blues is what tends to pass for regular blues today. Its main purveyors are Eric Clapton, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, John Mayer, and B.B. King. That’s not a joke. For the last few years, King has been playing some serious CWB. Now, “Clean White Blues” is merely a descriptor – I’m not saying you have to be black to play the blues well (although, being a form of music born out of slavery, it does kinda help). There has never been a moment in Rock ‘n’ Roll’s lifetime where it wasn’t borrowing something from the blues (to quote George Carlin again, “All music is the blues”), but somewhere in there, probably toward the end of the 1970s, people (mostly white people) started exhibiting a disturbing tendency to clean up their blues, to water it down, to scrub the dirt, grime, sweat, blood, and sex right off of it (if you doubt the heavy element of sex in all great blues, listen to the way Elmore James played slide guitar and tell me he wasn’t thinking about fucking with every note he picked). This paved the way for people like Jonny Lang and other would-be blues guys (and gals – looking at you, Susan Tedeschi) who could play the notes but were otherwise soulless. The blues is an endangered beast nowadays, and we’re running out of people to whom we can turn to save it. Tom Waits has probably done it the best of late; he tucks little bits of the blues into the dark spaces of his songs, as if he’s trying to smuggle them to safety, like a crafty Alexandrian librarian stashing scrolls away from the fiery wrath of Theophilus. Waits mutated the blues to save it, a trick he’s also turned with folk music. Some time after the late Bob Dylan vacated his home down amongst the marrow, Tom Waits moved in. He knocked down all the walls, blew the roof off the joint, and found a way to go deeper than anyone else dared.

Portugal. The Man Makes Crappy. The Album

Okay. There’s no point beating around the bush here. I really don’t like Portugal. The Man. I hate the pretentious period in their name, which would be a stupid name without the superfluous punctuation. I hate their stupid, redundant album title, The Satanic Satanist. And I hate the fact that words like “lovers” and “golden” appear roughly 90,000 times in the space of 11 songs. I don’t really have anything nice to say about The Satanic Satanist and I know you’re inclined to suggest that I say nothing at all because of that. But that cliche imperative could use a 21st century update and that is this: if you don’t have anything nice to say, post it on the internet.

I don’t honestly even remember how I got this album. I read that Stupid. The Band Name was from Portland (which is only partly true – they’re originally from Wasilla, Alaska, a place from whence, thankfully, no other unbearably stupid people have emerged) and I think that prompted me to check them out. I have a great deal of pride in the music that my old hometown is cranking out these days (and no small amount of pride in the fact that my beloved Oregon Ducks just handed the USC Trojans the worst ass whoopin’ of Pete Carroll’s tenure there. I don’t want to rub USC’s noses in it too hard, though – they’ve given Oregon so much already. Like 613 yards of offense. 386 of which came from our tiny, spry quarterback) and so I’m usually willing to check out a Portland band. But Portugal. The Pretentious is giving me reason to revise this strategy.

In many ways, The Redundant Album Title is a prototypical Album I’m Not Going to Like At All. Among its many offenses, it strives to revive the 1970s, or some TV dream of the 1970s, in much the same way Amazing Baby tried to do earlier this year (you’ll remember that I despised them as well). They come off as the kind of people who will futilely argue with me that the Bee Gees were fun and that “Stayin’ Alive” is “catchy.” I don’t care; fuck the Bee Gees. On top of that, Portugal Period The Man traffics in that annoying white-bread funk that was made more popular by Maroon 5. There are several reasons that this is a crime against music and possibly humanity. I’ll just list the first few that come to mind: 1) George Clinton 2) Curtis Mayfield 3) early Stevie wonder 4) As a rule, you should never do anything that Maroon 5 beat you to the punch on.  Do you really want to be accused of riding those coattails?

And that’s just off the top of my head.

Also, the best bits on The Satanist (fixed that for you, Portugal. The Repetitive) are sue-ably close in melody and sound to the best bits of MGMT’s Oracular Spectacular, an album I appreciate more and more after hearing shitty bands like Amazing Baby and Portugal The Seriously, I’m Not Putting A Fucking Period After the First Word of Your Stupid Band Name. If Joe Satriani could get a nice settlement from Coldplay over whatever stupid song of theirs (allegedly) ripped off a stupid song of his, MGMT could probably fund their next three albums and tours with the money owed them by PTM. If I had the technology, I’d do a mash-up of PTM’s “The Sun” and MGMT’s “Weekend Wars” that would be particularly instructive. And, what PTM isn’t taking from MGMT’s songbook, they’re taking from Curtis Mayfield’s playbook (you know, the guy who supplied the “People Get Ready” part to Bob Marley’s “One Love/ People Get Ready”. Also, the guy who wrote fucking “Superfly”). If Mayfield were alive today, I imagine “music” like he’d find on The Satanic Satanist would kill him.

Which brings me to perhaps the biggest crime committed by PTM on The Satanic Scientologist (see, that’s at least funny. Did you know Scientologists hate gay people? That’s why the guy who directed Crash left their flock.) is one of prioritizing style over substance to a harmful degree. Now, I’m not saying that substance is better than style – good bands (and artists like the aforementioned Curtis Mayfield) have both. The Clash, a.k.a. the best band ever, welded the two together in a way few bands have been able to manage since. But it seems like, at least lately, a lot of bands are coming out aping their favorite old records without actually saying anything. PTM, for instance, offers this line in the annoyingly repetitive song “Lovers in Love”: “Lovers loving love just like these lovers are loving in love.” Unless you have some odd combination of Autism and Obsessive/Compulsive Disorder, that’s just plain lazy and you should either be kicked in the crotch or forced to watch Suzanne Somers blather on about how bad vaccines are for you (I thought about linking to some of that, but that would be cruel). And every other song on this pastiche-and-shit sandwich has that same, lumbering, white-bread funk beat and an annoying, Scissor Sisters-esque falsetto, courtesy of singer John Baldwin Gourley. I propose a new rule, kids: if you use a white-funk falsetto, your song has to be at least as awesome as Beck’s “Debra.” If it isn’t, you’re instantly classifying yourself as a douchebag.

Douche. The Bag’s defenders (assuming they have any) will probably accuse me of taking the band too seriously and say, “They’re just fun, man!” That’s fine. People think that about Jack Johnson, Jason Mraz, Maroon 5, and Jimmy Buffet too. That doesn’t mean I have to like any of that shit (and, in case you missed where I’m going with this, I don’t). One man’s fun is another man’s torture (not to beat a dead Trojan horse here, but I’m guessing Jeremiah Masoli’s fun last Saturday was not fun for a USC defense that had, until they met the Ducks, allowed just under 80 rushing yards a game) and you’re well within your rights to have “fun” listening to Period. The Used Incorrectly. If you do, however, pray that you never encounter the music of Curtis Mayfield; the experience will illuminate your folly with such blinding clarity that you’ll set fire to your house to get rid of your copy of The Satanic Satanist and the stench that it left there.

12 Songs of Desire

Anyone who has heard one Eels song should not be surprised that Mark Everett (known as E to his fans) gave his new album, Hombre Lobo, the subtitle 12 Songs of Desire. Pretty much every Eels song you can think of is a song of desire: desire for love, desire for good times, desire for E’s loved ones to not be dead (this is not a joke – dude found his dad dead in bed in 1982, his sister died in 1996, and his mom died of lung cancer in 1998. If there’s a dude who’s entitled to some musical grieving, it’s Mark Oliver Everett). In that respect, then, Hombre Lobo’s subtitle isn’t setting a bar too high for E to reach.

The last few Eels records haven’t done much for me – I’m still living in the past with Daisies of the Galaxy, the stellar Eels release from way back in 2000. And I’ve gotta be honest with you: the thing that gave me a lot of hope for Hombre Lobo is the fact that Pitchfork rated it a 4.6. First off, you need to know that their numbering system is 1) pretentious, 2) lame, and 3) completely fucking arbitrary (you can put those in the order that suits you).  But you also need to know that, on many occasions, an album that rates between about a 4 and a 7 on Pitchfork’s little scale has a good chance of being loved by me. Once you get above 7, there is an increasing chance that I will loathe whatever it is they love (although they are smart enough to routinely score Tom Waits above an 8. Even Pitchfork isn’t all stupid all the time). So, by at least one metric, I was ready and willing to love Hombre Lobo.

And I don’t not like Hombre Lobo, but I’m starting to realize something about every Eels album I’ve heard since Daisies (with the exception of the Live with Strings album, which is fucking gorgeous): I’m no longer listening to Eels primarily because I like their music. I’m listening to them now to see how Mark Everett is doing. I want him to be okay and I check in with him every so often to ensure that he is. He seems to be doing all right on Hombre Lobo, although he’s still better than a lot of people at doing the heart-on-sleeve-loneliness thing (especially since he does it without sounding unbearably emo). And Hombre starts with some real life to it, opening with one of its best tunes, “Prizefighter.” Three of the first four tracks are, in fact, actually good. And the rest are, well, only mediocre, but that’s not the point. I’m not here to listen to quality songs. I’m on the Mark Everett Suicide Watch and I’m happy to report that, for a guy who had 12 whole songs of desire in him, the guy seems to be coping pretty well with life. Good on you, Mr. Everett. You are still on the list of people I would totally buy a beer.

Eels diehards will possible take issue with my characterization of Everett as a mopey loner who tends to do the same thing musically at every outing, but I would remind them that this didn’t used to be the case. Though I stopped caring about the music after 2000, the albums that precede Daisies of the Galaxy are all deeply enjoyable (“Last Stop, This Town” is amazing and I wish he would do more things like that), but the ones that follow it range from mediocre to bad, although Everett manages to craft at least one real gem per album. Most of Hombre Lobo is a cut above mediocre (there are maybe 5 or 6 gems on this one, but I’m still not going to give the guy a pretentious, arbitrary number score) and I’ll probably keep this album around because I like half of it so much.

I think what Mr. E really needs is a good collaborator. His music is deeply personal (if I didn’t like the guy, I’d accuse him of crawling up his own ass and building a house there, but I do like the guy and, as I’ve said, he’s been through some shit) and it usually has the feel of being made by a dude in his basement studio, surrounded by instruments. What made his live album so enchanting, in part, was the sense I got that he was finally getting out of the house. Also, the arrangements for the live album were robust and beautiful – they showed E’s musical chops. So maybe Everett should phone up Danger Mouse, make an album with him, and then let EMI refuse to put it out. Or he could work with the Flaming Lips or someone else who’s lively and weird. Really, he just needs someone who will inspire him out of his comfort zone (notice I didn’t say “rut” – because I like Eels, remember) and let him explore his everydude loneliness in new and creative ways.

The aforementioned Eels diehards (and they do exist, and I’m glad they do) will probably like Hombre Lobo just fine, just as they like every Eels record just fine. If you’re new to them, you’re still better off with Daisies of the Galaxy. And, if that album rocks your world entirely, you could do lots worse than following it up with the purchase of Hombre Lobo.

Let’s Talk About Us

Sometimes, I review an album just to take the piss out of it – like Chris Cornell’s Scream or like I intend to do with the forthcoming Creed reunion record. It’s fun and easy and allows me to vent a lot of frustration in a short amount of time (usually while drinking quality brews). A friend recently asked me why I don’t do similar take-downs of, say, 50 Cent albums. I pointed out to him that I usually play the fish-in-a-barrel game with rock albums because a lot of people seem to understand that there is a wide variety of rock music (I’m including indie here as well because, generally, “indie” just means “rock music that the radio is too dumb to play” – and it doesn’t always even mean that) that is good and that I’m just poking fun at its most egregious offenders. I don’t do that with hip-hop artists because I’ve met too many people who immediately dismiss that genre as completely worthless, full of misogyny and violence. So when it comes to hip-hop, I like to focus my energy on showing people the really awesome performers who are out there waiting to blow your mind.

So let’s talk about Brother Ali, shall we? Based on his voice, some have compared him to Pharaohe Monch. I can kinda see the comparison, in that both artists are aggressively awesome, but I think Ali sounds more like Lyrics Born back when he was still doing rap (New Rule for Hip-Hop: if you’re an awesome MC, that doesn’t mean you’re going to make a good soul/pop record), if he sounds like anyone. The more I listen to Us, his recent masterpiece, the more I hear Brother Ali’s distinctive voice and the happier I am about it.

For those of you who value such ephemeral concepts as “cred,” Us starts with a sermon by a true hip-hop luminary: Public Enemy’s Chuck D. Of course, Chuck D’s endorsement is meaningless if Brother Ali doesn’t earn it, but he does so almost immediately, launching into “The Preacher,” with relish, working the beat like I imagine Muhammad Ali worked a punching bag back in the day (you thought I was going to make a Parkinson’s Disease joke there, didn’t you? I’m not quite that tasteless, although I did just remind myself to listen to the new Shaky Hands album).

Part of the reason mainstream hip-hop blows is that there is a long list of sins that rappers commit. One of the biggest is piling song after song about how awesome they are on their albums. We get it – you have healthy self-esteem. Shut the fuck up. (DOOM, formerly known as MF Doom, is one of the very few rappers who self-deprecates as much as he self-aggrandizes. Also, he did song about how Batman and Robin are gay which gives him a free pass on a lot of stuff.) Now Us does have songs about how awesome Brother Ali is but it also has songs about how grateful he is to have the life he has (“Fresh Air”), a song that calls out society for hating on homosexuals (Brother Ali gets it. Fucking Iowa gets it. Why doesn’t California get it?), a song about slavery (“The Travelers”), and songs about how he was hated on by white kids for being an albino (as such, I’d like to point out, Brother Ali is a pretty awesome “post-racial” rapper. He’s so good at it that the press used to think he was black. I’m not gonna rip on ‘em for it, though, because I thought he was the first time I heard him too. Take that, assumptions!). Ali is, in fact, brimming with a positivity and gratitude that a lot of rappers like. Rather than pulling a Kanye and saying God chose him to be the voice of his generation, Brother Ali is working ass off and being happy about where it gets him. Kinda reminds me of some certain other Minnesota musicians I can think of right now (*cough* Hold Steady *cough*)…

In fact, I’m just gonna spend a paragraph here handing some props to Minnesota. They have the best radio station on earth, America’s best freshman senator, they’re the birth place of Mystery Science Theater 3000, and they’ve given us the Hold Steady, Atmosphere, Brother Ali, Bob Dylan and Prince. So thank you, Minnesota. Now can you get rid of that crazy bitch Michele Bachmann?

Rap, historically, is a political beast (I know you wouldn’t know it from listening to 50 Cent or Eminem, but it’s true. It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, perhaps the best hip-hop album ever recorded, is largely not about how great money and bitches are) and Brother Ali’s stuff addresses the political through the prism of the personal, spinning tales of deep human complexity while not letting the listener (or himself, for that matter) off the hook fortheir part in a bloody history. In very few lines of “Tight Rope,” he, among many topics, manages a substantive discussion of homosexual equality in just one verse ( featuring the couplet “there ain’t no flame that can blaze enough/ to trump being hated for the way you love”) in a way that has a lot less to do with the left/right stuff of American politics than it does with simple empathy. Ali’s gift is his ability to identify with the people in his songs (some of whom are probably people who listen to his albums and come to his shows) and the best tracks on Us are the ones that tackle the thorniest subject matter.

Given that subject matter, you might get the idea that Us is a total downer, but it’s not. It’s actually exceedingly uplifting, which you can credit both to Ali’s unsurpassed delivery and Ant’s (you might know him as the other half of Atmosphere) stellar production. At 16 tracks, Us avoids being unwieldy and ends up feeling like a party album for people who are more likely to discuss*, rather than run from, the world’s problems while they’re throwing back drinks and hanging out.

* A discussion is this thing rational people can have where they may politely disagree about things but are interested in hearing and respecting the other person’s viewpoint. Scientists think the discussion will actually become extinct sometime near primary season in 2012.