A Whole Lot of Junk Food Analogies Regarding Asobi Seksu

I really don’t want to talk about Charlie Sheen. At all. When I turn on the news, I want to know about Libya and the current federal budget negotiations and what’s going in in Wisconsin (apparently, this is going on in Wisconsin. I don’t know how you feel about unions, but I think you should maybe be upset about the precedent established by politically motivated budget cuts. Also, Sean Hannity is in a union). I don’t care about a clearly mentally ill, drug-addled millionaire who lost his job playing an obnoxious prick on a television show by being an obnoxious prick in real life. But I’ve been listening to the new Asobi Seksu record, Fluorescence, and I keep thinking to myself that every batshit crazy notion that passes through what’s left of Charlie Sheen’s blow-cooked brain is probably soundtracked by music eerily similar to what I’ve been hearing. Of course, that doesn’t mean that listening to Asobi Seksu will send me off on a drug-fueled, uncomfortably public cry for help.

Will it?

Here are some things I learned about Asobi Seksu in preparation for this article – they belong to a genre of music called “dream pop” (it’s kind of fitting) and, when they started out, they were called Sportfuck. I couldn’t find the lyrics for Fluorescence anywhere (my $4.99 used copy doesn’t contain any) and that’s actually okay because it enables me to cling to the fantasy that at least a few of these songs are about fucking unicorns and killing white people (and/or fucking  white people and killing unicorns). So why the hell did I buy this thing anyway?

Well, it was early February, which ain’t exactly a time of shimmering abundance in terms of new music, and I saw that Asobi Seksu had put out a new album. Pitchfork seemed to chide the band for not sounding more like My Bloody Valentine, a band that I view as overrated on a par with the Police. So naturally, I was inclined to reward a band that pointedly doesn’t sound like My Bloody Valentine. And I remembered that I had heard Asobi Seksu years ago, when I worked at Tower Records in Harvard Square. It was just a month or two before I moved to Los Angeles and one of the newish clerks, I want to say her name is Holly (I’ll be a little embarrassed if that’s not the case. I remember she was really awesome and I think her boyfriend was in some kind of swing/steam-punk band) brought in one of their albums. I don’t remember much about it, but I remember thinking it was a nice thing to hear on a sticky, humid Boston summer evening. Probably because it sounded exactly like this Sprite commercial looks. It’s a dumb commercial, and yet so stimulating. This is why I hate commercials.

Where was I?

Oh yeah: so then I found Fluorescence for five bucks at Amoeba. Lo and behold, Asobi Seksu does not sound like My Bloody Valentine. Unlike those shoegaze (it’s a genre; you don’t need to know what it is unless you do lots of heroin) pioneers, Asobi Seksu actually sounds good. Although I get the impression that too much of this stuff will rot my teeth. As I said, “dream pop” is a very accurate way to describe Fluorescence. It’s very pretty from start to finish, with hazy, overdriven guitar bits and Yuki Chikudate’s J-Pop diva vocals riding your dopamine reward pathway like Charlie Sheen rides a porn star. Only with less choking (one more thing on the Sheen-inator before I drop it: why is it that the producers and various network nitwits behind Two and a Half Men watched Sheen perpetrate several episodes of domestic violence – and paid him – without firing him but they kicked him to the curb for badmouthing one of the show’s creators? Is the rule at CBS that you can beat up as many women as you want as long as you don’t talk smack about your boss? Because that’s a shitty rule).

The reason I worry that too much Asobi Seksu will give me auditory diabetes is that I get the feeling that their music doesn’t add up to a whole lot more than its ample prettiness. You might think pretty is great and it is for a while, but it doesn’t stick to your ribs. You can eat all the red velvet cupcakes you want, but if you don’t get some fruits and veggies in there, you’ve got a whole lot of scurvy in your future. That’s why you should get the dark chocolate-covered “powerberries” (a.k.a. “berries with antioxidants”) from Trader Joe’s instead of the red velvet cupcakes, which are a vastly overrated food in my humble opinion (Oh shit. Now he thinks he’s a food critic).

But as much as I think Asobi Seksu is pretty and sugary and all the things you would expect “dream pop” (which must always be written in quotes) to be, I have a really hard time being upset about anything when I’m listening to Fluorescence.  And I strongly feel that sometimes we need to be upset about things. Like when asshole actors beat women up and don’t lose their $2 million-an-episode jobs for it. (Okay, I’m really done now. I promise.) Songs like “Sighs” and “My Baby” are just too much fucking fun; the latter features the cutest refrain you’ll ever hear of “My baby doesn’t love me anymore/ my baby doesn’t love me at all.” That’s the problem with food that’s really bad for you – it is, by a wide margin, the most delicious. I’d love to eat a soup of dark chocolate-covered berries in a broth of Ninkasi Oatis oatmeal stout but, being a responsible adult, I know that would be really really awful for me.

Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your perspective), it’s much easier to stop ingesting empty musical calories than it is to stop devouring real empty calories (as I type this, a mostly eaten bag of Cool Ranch Doritos is whispering sexy things to me from the cupboard. Leave me be, Doritos! “Ranch” isn’t even a food). Also fortunately, Fluorescence has its dull moments. “Deep Weird Sleep” is a throwaway instrumental and the only reason I’m glad it’s there is because it reminds me that there are things I definitely don’t like about this album, which occasionally enables me to stop listening to the thing.

You might get the idea from my words that I consider Fluorescence a guilty pleasure. But here’s the thing: I don’t believe in guilty pleasures. You like what you like, you should own it, and that’s that. So this new Asobi Seksu record is a pleasure pure and simple, with emphasis on the “simple.” And I think “meretricious” is probably a more apt modifier for “pleasure” than “guilty” in this case. Fluorescence is the only Asobi Seksu album I own and I think it’s probably safer to keep it that way. In fact, if I’m smart, it will the only “dream pop” album I own, lest I devolve into some sort of insubstantial sonic hedonist.

And starting tomorrow, no more Cool Ranch Doritos.

The Worst Songs I Have Ever Heard #1: “Waiting On the World to Change”

Well, folks, the new year is officially here and Bollocks! is coming off a pretty satisfying 2010; this blog was viewed 19,000 times last year, which probably ties into the unemployment numbers somehow, but I don’t want to dig too deep into that lest I start feeling all depressed. Since I’m always looking for ways to improve your Bollocks! experience, I decided to come up with a new feature called “The Worst Songs I Have Ever Heard” to shed some light on some of the worst individual songs of all time. Why would I do this? Because I have heard all of these songs (some of them occasionally get stuck in my head) and I need you to share my pain. This is not a countdown – like my much-vaunted (well, by me) Great Fucking Albums feature, The Worst Songs I Have Ever Heard is listed in the order that these things occur to me. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the first installment – I’ll put up a page so you can gain easy access to your (least?) favorites as the list grows. Because believe me, it will grow.

The reason I decided to do this feature is because I hear bad fucking songs all the time, when I’m out shopping or dining somewhere with my wife or when her alarm clock goes off in the morning and the radio station it’s set on greets us with the Ataris cover of Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer” (which, I mean, it should just be the soundtrack to a book called How to Make Bad Things Worse). But that’s not the song I wanted to start off my list with.

No, there was a clear favorite for the first song against the wall when I started thinking about The Worst Songs I Have Ever Heard: “Waiting On the World to Change” by John Mayer. Released in 2006 on his Continuum album, “Waiting On the World to Change” is a great way to find any reason you can think of to dislike John Mayer’s music (and maybe him as a person just a little bit).

Musically, the song is not that noteworthy, unless you’re noting that it is a ripoff of Curtis Mayfield’s vastly superior “People Get Ready” (you might have noticed that I sing the late Mr. Mayfield’s praises quite frequently here. Listen to his music and you’ll see why). But the music mostly keeps to the background so as to better highlight the “gee-ain’t-I-deep” lyrics which are some of the most laughably stupid I’ve heard this side of the first Hanson album. Mayer starts out singing about how he and all his friends “just feel like we don’t have the means/ to rise up and beat”… um… well, whatever it is he’s talking about. Oh: “everything that’s going wrong.” Well, John, let me tell you a little secret: nobody, in the entire history of everything, has changed anything by attempting to tackle “everything that’s going wrong.” So your problem is all in your approach. Why don’t you start small by maybe recycling or protesting a war or something? John Mayer and his friends are content to sit at home and wait for the world to change because they can’t solve every problem all at once, and the chorus, complete with an airy gospel choir, tells us that Mayer & Friends are willing to sit on the sidelines as long as necessary to get the job done. Imagine if Ghandi or Martin Luther King, Jr. or Rosa Parks had thought that way.

“Just you wait,” thinks Rosa as she dutifully moves to the back of the bus, “In about fifty years, we’ll have a black president, and then you honky motherfuckers are gonna get it!”

Mayer’s assertion basically amounts to “I don’t wanna do anything about any problems because doin’ stuff is hard.” First of all, you fuck, you play guitar for a living. Your job is to rip off Stevie Ray Vaughan and wallow up to your neck in celebutante pussy – and you can’t take a few minutes on your day off to, I dunno, clean up a beach? Fuck you! There are people with real goddamn jobs who make time constantly to try to help other people, which is world-changing shit. There are people whose whole job is helping people. And none of them got to fuck Jennifer Aniston.

My favorite part of “Waiting On the World to Change” – and by “favorite part”, I mean the part that sends me into a nearly homicidal fury – is the part where Mayer sings, “One day our generation/ is gonna rule the population/ so we keep waiting (insert gospel chicks with a “Waitin’” right here)/ waiting on the world to change.”  Now I’m guessing that John Mayer, being 33, is part of my generation and I’m happy to say that none of us elected John to lead the charge on this whole “ruling the population thing.” Many of the very good people in my generation don’t even think in those terms, and I’m glad. It seems to me that John Mayer has created a convenient way to never do anything meaningful or helpful for humanity. After all, if he and his pals are operating on the premise that the time for action is after the world has already changed, can’t they just keep saying that it hasn’t change yet? “Hey John, can you take out the trash?” “Nah, I’m still waiting for the world to change.”

In an interview with the Advocate, Mayer said that “I know that if I were engaged in changing anything for the better, or the better as I see it, it would go unnoticed or be completely ineffective.” So Mayer doesn’t wanna try because he’s afraid no one would notice. Well, John, I’ve got something you could do that would not only change things for the better, but would be immediately noticeable: stop making music, you fucking hack.

Of course, right after Mayer said the above sentence, he added, “A lot of people have that feeling.” And what pisses me off is that he’s right - a lot of people don’t lift a finger for anyone else because they feel like nothing they do will help. They see a vast sea of troubles and don’t feel like there’s a vast sea of people who can do anything about it. The problem is, if we all did simple stuff that was completely within our means (like just being kind to each other, for starters), it could make a big difference (is that naive? Fuck you, we’ve never tried it, have we?). And I get that it’s tough to know what to do to help humanity (that’s a pretty general term to start with), but writing an anthem that excuses apathy (“It’s not that I don’t give a shit, I’m just waiting on the world to change”) is fucking pathetic. John Mayer has made plenty of music to be ashamed of, but I don’t think any of his songs tops “Waiting On the World to Change” in terms of audacious stupidity and general suckitude.

With A Buzz in Our Ears, We Play Endlessly

There’s not a lot I can say about the new Sigur Ros album. I can’t even spell the name of it using the keys on my keyboard and the modest tools provided by the good folks at WordPress. It translates to “With A Buzz in Our Ears, We Play Endlessly,” which is a pretty badass thing to say. I think from now on, when rehearsing with my band (name to be determined), I will start every practice with: “With a buzz in our ears, we play endlessly.”

By now, you’ve probably made up your mind about Sigur Ros and, if you’re smart, you’ve decided to like them. Yeah, no one knows what the fuck that positively elvish fellow is singing about; sure,  the songs can be a bit melodramatic at times, but at the end of the day, Sigur Ros cranks out uniformly beautiful music.

The new record, which I’ll just call Gobbledigook (that’s the name of the first track), continues their trend of making beautiful music and, though I (as previously stated) have no clue what the dude is singing about, the songs have a bit more of a pop feel than the tunes on Takk, Sigur Ros’s best record (and the one before this one). “Goobledigook” and “The Second Song” (Not it’s title, but again, my limited tools prohibit me from spelling it out. It’s, roughly, “Inni mer syngur vitleysingur.” Clears it right the fuck up for you, doesn’t it?) signal the ray-of-sunshine feel of this album and it doesn’t really let up after that. Sure, there are some traditional Sigur Ros tunes on Gobbledigook; “Festival” (that’s really its name! Thanks for throwing me that bone, Sigur Ros! You guys are swell!) is a nine-minute, slow-building epic of the type you’re used to from these dudes who hail from the sunny shores of Iceland.  But most of the album is more concise than Sigur Ros’s previous output.  It’s their pop album, or as close to one as they’re ever gonna make. I don’t think Sigur Ros will ever approach “radio-friendly,” or even all that “accessible” but if they were ever gonna get close, this is the album that does that.

There’s not much else to say about this album; it’s really fucking good, you’ve not heard anything like it, and you should be listening to it right now. Go. Listen. With a buzz in your ears.

Oh, one last thing: It would be impossible to regret getting super high and seeing this band live, outdoors, in the summertime. Impossible.