disgusting

kiss: "we have more money than some small countries"

i sincerely hope that hell reserves a special place for gene simmons.

and soundtracks, generally

lately, i've been deliberately gorging on jazz and instrumental music in hopes of pulling myself at least halfway out of a riff rut i've been in when it comes to my relationship with the guitar. when i say 'riff,' by the way, i'm referring to repeated, predominantly single note figures that tend to be rigid in their relationship to a song's beat -- one of the essential building blocks in rock and pop music.

anyways, i loaded up "jazz impressions of a boy named charlie brown" on my ipod today, and was struck, as i always am, by its pensive, understated elegance. i find it impossible to think about either charlie brown or its soundtrack alone without thinking about the other ... so rooted are they both in fostering a very particular mood and a particular mind-set.

it got me to thinking: what other soundtracks are just as indelible from the movies / tv shows they accompany?

lalo schifrin's soundtrack to 'dirty harry' comes to mind ... particularly the pounding, fuzzed-out bass and how it communicates an unstoppable calamity, and the shivering, ghostly vocal lines, so quintessential in a decade where so many movies addressed the supernatural, but which also serve as a quietly-menacing reminder of humans' capacity for violence.

not too big a leap from there: ennio morricone's soundtracks to the spaghetti westerns, with vocals coming on like the exhortations of the Furies, and echo effects stretching the soundscape into the realm of the epic.

finally, what about Harold Faltermeyer's soundtrack to 'fletch'? fitting and expanding the movie's theme, it's quirky to the point of goofiness in parts, but there's times when the bass dips real low and imparts a sense of the forboding, and when the drums strike with the intensity of gun shots.

sometimes, justice

backstreet boys and n'sync creator sentenced to 25 years in prison

ps - sexy never went away to begin with, and even if it had, it wouldn't be goldilocks that brought it back.

blues and bbq

beyond the alliteration, there seems to be something almost tactile that draws these two things together. like, a bottleneck slide and a stinging vibrato together could very easily evoke the sizzle of a fat steak hitting a hot grill. likewise, you could very aptly describe a particular kind of blues singer's rich, haunting tones as "smoky," or a blues guitarist's slippery slide technique as "greasy."

also, and maybe i'm just fucking nuts, but big, rollicking blues boogies seem to be a fat man's music. i could be drawing subconsciously from bill swerski's superfans and its appropriation of "sweet home chicago,", but as a carefree celebration of all things carnal, it just fits.

ramones mania

i don't think i would ever want to be in a tribute band, save maybe for playing a single halloween tribute show or something, but man, it was a trip checking out the ramoniacs over at the abbey lounge last thursday night.

funny, the first ramones song i ever heard was "beat on the brat", and the mental picture of the band that it painted for me at nine or ten years old was one of perfectly typical american teens banging away in the garage against their common enemy, some cheeky little nuisance who got away with pulling crap because he could use his cuteness to appeal to authority figures. as exhilarating revenge fantasy, it made so much sense. here were the guys who sat in the back of the class, relishing the prospect of one day serving up proper punishment to the teacher's pet.

in reality, of course, the ramones resembled a warped combination of 50's greasers and 70's burnouts with thousand yard stares. it's odd to consider, but in terms of creating a distinct band image, they actually had a hell of a lot in common in kiss: sharing the exaggerated beatles mop tops, the leather jackets and the surname, they created a larger-than-life, surreal 'other,' just as gene simmons inc. had done with their rock superheroes from parts unknown.

the similarities end there, though, and the images these bands cultivated came to mean two very different things to their fan bases. where kiss asked its kiss army to literally buy into its mythos, the ramones, by contrast, pulled the myth down to earth; their deliberately lockstep, homogenized look effectively laid bare an absurdity inherent in the archetype of groups that preceded them, leaving it to the listener to make what he or she would of the band, its music and its message.

indeed, "gabba gabba hey" is a nonsensical rallying call, but in its meaninglessness lies a great accessibility; whatever that means, and whatever the ramones are supposed to be, doesn't really matter in the end, because the music itself is FUN -- come as you are. the image matters only in so far as image does not actually matter.

the ramoniacs, like any great tribute act should, do a great job of conveying the spirit of the original band's total package. check them out below:

the name

sights and smells sync up with memory, and sounds are no different.

and because music is this jiggly, malleable thing, there's a natural concomitant there; we can align a piece of music with a memory with just a little bit of wiggling, just as we can allow a piece of music to affect the apparent reality of a memory when see fit.

overstating the obvious: everyone has songs that they connect to moments from their lives.

perhaps not so far removed from the obvious: those songs can take on a summarizing effect, granting us instant access points to all the different feelings and thoughts that a full memory comprises. they're something that play as the credits roll and the house lights go up, and we are left to fresh rumination, even if we're pondering an experience that's long past.

i don't just fancy that analogy. i sometimes quite literally see credits rolling over slowly-blurring and fading scenes in my mind's eye.

i think this is special, and i'd like that kind of pure goodness and feeling to inform every word i put down here.

is music criticism a kind of fascism?

i think it can be.

and like most systems (viewed in the sense of constructs, that's what it is), the bigger it gets, the more easily corruptible it becomes. a tangled mass of expectations imposed by reader and writer and advertisers and a perception of the world at large create the tone, which takes on the function of a master volume knob; a swirl of images and icons, sometimes conflated, sometimes subverted, but almost always whose meaning becomes this entrenched, static thing; the filtering process -- what gets covered and what doesn't?.

what this all amounts to is a framework, a rosetta stone by which a user interprets content. think about what it would be like to read a pitchfork review in rolling stone, and vice versa.

and yet, even on a smaller scale, almost all these things still hold true, right down to a solitary music blogger such as myself.

i took several journalism classes in college that grappled with objectivity, both as a concept and as something that could potentially be measured in practice (at least, in that latter regard, as something that could be judged in so far as it was blatantly violated).

ultimately, the conclusions we arrived at were pretty clearly visible from the outset: objectivity is a practical impossibilty.

the best we can do in the pursuit of perfection is exactly that: the best we can do. with that in mind, i'll do my best to establish context wherever i think it's helpful or illuminating to what i have to say here, all while doing my best to abstain from a cute or indulgent take on gonzo journalism.

i encourage discussion and disagreement here, because in the end, one person's opinion is one person's love, and this project would be best restricted to a diary if that's all that came through.

most of all, i hope that you find this as worthwhile as i think it will prove to be for me.