Premature Obituaries: An Idea Whose Time Has Come

I think it was right around the time that Scott Weiland, the self-thrashing, hollow-veined singer of rock legends Stone Temple Pilots and Velvet Revolver, did a herky-jerky dance of this mortal coil. At the time of his death, Weiland's musical life was considered to be, or so it seemed according to the popular wisdom of the time, a bad joke. Yet within hours of his body hitting the floor, music-scribblers rushed to pen tributes to, if not his genius, then at least how much his music had meant to them. Usually their love was written in the past tense, a hedging of elegiac bets if you will. And as I don't believe in cognizant afterlives, angelic, supernatural, or otherwise, it seemed a goddamn shame to me that old Swingin' Scotty Weiland died without ever getting to read such glowing tributes to his music. Thinking about all the other music artists who will one day die without knowing the depths of audience/critical love that exists for them, I had the idea for a running column: the Premature Obituary. I pitched it to Magnet, since they tend to traffic in music artists on the verge of death (note to aspiring music-content providers--don't put that in your pitch), but they didn't respond. I even included an example, because I recognized that the concept might sound a little strange on the surface. Ladies and Gentleman, I present a Premature Obituary for David Gahan written a few years ago. It wasn't good enough for Magnet, but maybe it will be good enough for you.

Premature Obituary: RIP David Gahan (1962-2016)

I guess we’ll all remember where we were when we heard the shocking news about David Gahan, the legendary Depeche Mode singer who died yesterday at the age of 54. If his band was the Rolling Stones of synthpop, well he commanded a stage better than Jagger ever did, and he gave Richards a run for his money in the chemical department as well.

A lot of people today are going to talk about Gahan’s legacy in terms of top ten hits. They’ll tell you about his decades of commercial success, the role his band played in the evolution of techno, of IDM, of EDM. And everything those people say will be important, but today I can’t stop thinking of the role Depeche Mode played in my life, how their music pulled me out of one life and into another so dramatically that I still to this day believe that inter-dimensional travel is possible.

I was 15 years old in the winter of 1988 and all I wanted to do was play one day for the Boston Celtics, or barring that, become a sports columnist for The Boston Globe. I’d been living in Southern California for two years and still didn’t fit in. Everyone around me seemed tanned and muscular and understood everything going on around them. I had none of those things. At 6’ 3” and 145lbs, my existence on the JV basketball team—at the end of the bench, to be used only in case of emergency—had more to do with my willingness to show up than any incredible physical gifts. And yet there I was, practicing six days a week and wearing a uniform that hung on me like a powder-blue shower curtain, hoping that manhood would kick in any day now and give me muscles and all the social benefits that came with being a star athlete at Granite Hills High School.

Tom and Tim Underwood were also on the team—twin brothers, I think fraternal twins, and their dad was the asst. coach. A lot kinder and quieter than our head coach, the improbably named Joe Roos, a screamer from Texas whose angry voice I can still hear booming ‘MOVE THE BALL BLUE!’ Coach Roos was a great coach in many ways, and his time at GHHS coincided with the basketball team’s greatest success (our JV team went 15-1 that year). He then got promoted to varsity coach, only to be fired my senior year after he tried to forfeit the team’s playoff game because he didn’t think they deserved to be there.

I was long gone by the time all that went down though.

I wasn’t friends with Tim or Tom—I wasn’t really friends with anyone on that team. I spent my sophomore year skinny and awkward and lost in a weird fog of confusion. So I remember thinking it was weird one night after practice when Tom asked if I wanted a ride home. When I told him I had my bike with me, he said that was cool, we could just throw it in the back of his truck. None of my friends had cars, let alone a truck, and Tom’s truck was even nicer than my dad’s car.
I sat in the back of the extended cab while Tim rode shotgun. I can clearly and vividly, almost in slow-motion, see Tim turning on the radio, and the song that came out of the speakers changed my life forever.

I didn’t recognize the song. I mostly listened to Top 40 and mainstream rock—Springsteen, Def Leppard, Van Halen, etc,—around that time. Tom got excited when he realized what song it was, or maybe it was Tim, or maybe it was both of them. I listened closer, to try and hear it the way they were hearing it

Granite Hills Drive is a curving road that twists left and right and then left again, and it can be disorienting if you’ve been playing basketball for two hours and you’re badly in need of fluids/food/sleep. No one said anything as we drove. It was the most exciting music I’d heard in my life—dramatic & forceful, but without any of the histrionics or over-emoting I was used to hearing. And the song wasn’t about girls, or sex, neither of which I had much experience with at that point. The song was about riding in a car and watching the world go past you. 

Which is something I knew all too well. And yet the singer of ‘Route 66’ made it sound like the coolest thing in the world. My embarrassing life pulled through the looking class and turned into something cool. Travel my way, take the highway that’s the best.

For better or worse, Depeche Mode still have the reputation of being effete synthpoppers, but the guitars on ‘Route 66’ were louder and more powerful than anything I’d heard before. It wasn’t rock as I knew it. There was no guitar solo, with notes all frantic & squealing & bent. The singer didn’t scream like the heavy metal guys, or shout in a faux-hick voice like Springsteen. This guy sounded calm and confident, like he knew things nobody else knew, and he had all the time in the world to tell his story.

We pulled into my apartment complex and I thanked Tom for the ride. I made sure to get two pieces of information: Depeche Mode (the name of the band) and 91X (the name of the radio station). And that was all I needed.

‘Route 66’ turned out to be the b-side on the ‘Behind the Wheel’ single—it took me forever to find it. And 91X turned out to be a station broadcasting out of TIjuana that played what was then called ‘alternative’ music (their slogan was ‘The Cutting Edge of Rock’), the kind of station that was as likely to play a band’s b-side as play their ubiquitous hit. And so I got to discover hidden gems like The Cure’s ‘2 Late,’ Morrissey’s ‘Hairdresser On Fire,’ New Order’s ‘1963,’ on the radio.

And it’s also where I discovered Depeche Mode’s ‘Never Let Me Down Again’ Have you ever seen the version from the movie 101?

It’s a masterclass in stadium singing. There’s none of Jagger’s hyperactive neediness, none of Bono’s macho pomp, Chris Martin’s faux-humility. He’s completely immersed in the song. It’s an emotional performance, and incredibly brave. His bandmates, barely lit, are all standing behind their instruments while Gahan’s out there all by himself. On one side of the stadium you have three musicians with their heads down, and on the other side you have 60,000 screaming people, and in the middle of it all stands David Gahan, an emotional conduit, overcome by the beauty of it all.

At the three minute mark, he gets so caught up in the song that he looks like he’s about to burst into tears, so when he stands up and throws his arms open towards the crowd, it doesn’t feel like a messiah-move, it feels like a desperate need to communicate, like he’s saying are you feeling this too? 

At the end of that basketball season Coach Roos pulled me aside and told me if I put on 20lbs of muscle that I’d start varsity next season—I was that good of a basketball player. Inspired, I convinced my dad to get me a gym membership and an endless supply of protein shakes, but my metabolism raged on regardless and I actually ended up losing two pounds that summer. You could actually see my ribs poking out right above my abdominal muscles. Forget about having a six-pack, I had a suitcase. Coach took one look at me when school started and decided I was lazy and unmotivated. He spent the next season screaming at me and challenging my manhood, which considering my dad—also a screamer—had just kicked me out of our apartment a couple of months earlier, was an exceptionally bad motivational strategy. And that was the end of my basketball career.

But by that point, a new world was opening up to me courtesy of the radio, and I was learning there were ways of being a man that were more interesting, and more rewarding, than simply being tough. And that maybe the star athletes at my school didn’t act confident because they had all the answers, but because they hadn’t gotten around to asking any questions. And it turned out there was a world out there a lot bigger than my high school, a world where being awkward, or lost in one’s thoughts, or confused about sex & masculinity and all the baggage that came with it, were things to be valued, weaknesses that could be turned into strengths because they were, in their own way, a form of truth, a truth that most people didn’t have access to.

Depeche Mode was never my favorite band, but looking back on it today, in the wake of their lead singer’s death, I realize that no band had a bigger impact on my life. I imagine how dull & desperate & small my life might have been if I hadn’t heard David Gahan’s voice that night. And I just wish I could have told him thank you while he was still here..

It’s strange. When a singer dies, it feels like all of their songs become ghosts, haunting us with the singer’s absence. I've thought more about David Gahan today than I have in the past 15 years. His every word recontextualized by the void and I still can’t believe he’s really gone. 

What a beautiful goddamn voice.

Teddy Adorno and the Influence of Anxiety

Don't get me wrong. I've got nothing against old Teddy Adorno. Band I used to play in even named an album of ours after one of his books--we were furiously scanning our bookshelves after a band member vetoed 'Sleazo Trance Imperative' because she though it made us sound sleazy. Wasn't my title idea, so I don't want to hear about any of your objections. But we were familiar with T.A. Frankfurter's cultural analysis--I don't come to bury Teddy, I come to dialect at him. For while he was never necessarily totally wrong about any of his music critic theories (certainly righter than, say, one of the biggest fans of this blog's chutzpah), that's only because they were so fucking cynical and closed-ended that they couldn't be disproven. Like, the whole big appeal of morbid cynicism is that nobody can ever prove you wrong--and any disagreement can be dismissed as mere sentimentality, or naivete, i.e. weakness. Which is why so many insecure wounded boy types flock to Teddy's writings like moths to a belsen burner. But the point, that is to say, the POINT getting to--wait, one more point before I get to THE POINT: in these political days you can't be cynical enough, am I right? I mean, even I, someone who has been accused of being a joyless worrywart scab-picker (as a writer--in person I am nothing but buttercups and silk pajamas), even I was certain Ms. Clinton would be elected president, that J. Corbyn would at least make it close, that D. S(trump)et would be seen as the conjob shitbox that he oh so obviously is. So let us all acknowledge that there can be value in cynicism, and a danger in sentimentality.

Having sort of said all that, my big objection to Teddy A's protests against the culture industry is that he saw the influence running more or less one way--the culture shaped the society. He had all kinds of valid biographical reasons to do this. After you've seen a propaganda machine destroy your way of life, kill camploads of your friends, and instigate global warfare, any pop song that isn't explicitly against fascism is probably going to trigger all kinds of PTSD. But I was thinking just now in the bathtub that one of the redeeming things about the current pop/rock/indie/genre-dissolution music landscape we now inhabit is that, while most of it is faux-nihilistic blankness, that blankness does, as the old bourgeois-shockers used to say, hold up a mirror to society man.

So our current music landscape that is mostly populated by careerist neoliberal blandouts, or homeschooled rich kids willing to work themsevles into a premature grave, or outliers willing to represent the false ideal that 'anyone can make it' (if they work hard enough) isn't going to create those conditions. It's going to reflect what's already there.

Let's consider the fleeting face of this particular pop moment (and child laborer) Billie Eilish. Take away the contemporary flourishes, and all you've got is a 21st century version of the Carpenters (right down to the inferior-talented sibling). The album itself is pretty much a snoozefest of barely-veiled showbiz glop, except for the grammy-winning hit, which I'm willing to admit sounds catchy & hooky. There hasn't been an underage hitmaker so desperately begging to offend someone since Ms. Spears, though Britney's "hit me" was far more ambiguous than the bloody nose and bruised knees, to say nothing of the BSDM-lite of Bad Guy's protagonist.

Of course because this is 2020 now, and the first goal of every artist, or every influencer, of every CEO of their very own Personal Brand Inc. is to sell one's self, to appeal to the broadest possible audience, even the line about seducing the father of the song's antagonist feels obvious and cheap. Even the edgiest, most uncomfortable moment of the Eilish clan's big hit owes more to a ubiquitous porn trope than any real transgression. I'll spare you the hyperlinks by giving you a screenshot.

We live in a society that fetishizes female youth, that condones violence, especially sexual violence, against women. A 2018 Esquire article identified Incest Porn as the fastest growing trend in porn (the fastest receding trend? friendly handshakes). Girls being sexually abused by their stepfathers isn't just a porn category, it's a real-life hellish nightmare landscape. We live in an age where we have easy access to everything except for financial security, safety, and compassion.

None of which is the concern of Billie Eilish, or her family. The uncomfortable parts of her song are (I'm assuming--if I'm assuming wrong, then she's got bigger problems here) meant to be 'provocative,' or 'controversial,' or 'edgy.' What they actually are--and in this sense, her art mirrors all mass-marketed rebellion these days--are 'predictable,' 'way too common,' and 'exploitative.' So while I don't think, as Teddy A. obsessively fretted, that her cultural artifact is going to drive society into a ditch, it's worth remembering that mirrors, even the ones that reflect the world we live in, tend to be two-dimensional, flat and only illuminated by the narcissism of the person gazing into it.

I should say that another thing that Adorno got right is that cultures and societies are inherently unstable, and that each can amplify the worst aspects of the other in a cycle that leads to dehumanization and genocide. Eilish Inc.'s lack of ethical POV re: anything is disturbing, not because it doesn't exist, but because it's not-existing-ness feels like an essential part of its marketing, like if having an ethical POV seemed more cash-effective, then that would have been in the song. Which is just the ultimate empty nihilistic gesture when you think about it, like a corporation destroying the planet for profit then donating $15million to climate research or something.

 And since I'm just some un-esteemed cultural critic who worries too much, I'll just go ahead and assume that Billie Eilish's future will be an exception to what usually happens, and that her life will unfold along the smooth, emotionally healthy path that most child stars seem to travel. And that working a 16-year-old harder than most adults will ever work in their lives, while under the scrutiny of millions, will have zero negative ramifications for anyone, and one of us will ever have to regret anything when the day comes that we're winning the awards and have at last achieved our deeply-held ambitions.

Houdini Mansions

I'm a hip guy. Can you smell the hipness? I say things, in my best hick voice, like, "Awww yeah, I like that experimental music. You know...Merzbow...Sonic Youth." But truth be told, I've always had a soft spot for melody. Blame my mom for playing all that Neil Diamond/Carpenters/ABBA 70's schlock. Blame my dad for having a soft spot for Paul Simon. Blame the radio, my truest and deepest friend from ages 10-17. Anyway, there's great experimental stuff all over the cyber-diaspora of the Houdini Mansions label. They're based out of Easley, South Carolina (Easley is easily the closest decent-sized town to Greenville, which is home to the closest minor league baseball affiliate of my beloved Boston Red Sox, G'ville being a 1 1/2 hour drive from my driveway).

House of Cake is as much a collage as a compilation. It bleeps and bloops and drones in all the right places, and in all the wrong places which also happen to be right--don't you know how the universe is chaos and yummy in your (quan)tummy?

But the emotional high point for me is the sweet simple three-note descending bass-tone on track four, which I'm 99.4% sure is titled "Sugar Boys." The vocal melody goes up as the bass melody goes down, and the result is one of those weightless free-floating moments that isn't a million miles away from Dancing Queen. Because the universe also knows how to repeat, and coalesce, and spin slowly enough for you to observe its beauty with wonder and awe.

Artist Of The Decade

Nobody asked me, and I didn't ask anybody, but here's my favorite song from this just-about-over decade. Or maybe my favorite video. Or maybe the video that best embodies the decade, our simultaneous numbness and desperation, horror and entertainment, laughter and death. I'd say Danny Brown is the Artist Of The Decade if I had any confidence in those kinds of proclamations (and Kanye is probably more emblematic, straight-down to his mental illness and lack of critical thinking).

I don't have the authority to give out awards, nor do I have the ability to believe in them. But Danny Brown, in this and other songs throughout the decade (he just put out an album in October! it's got a metacritic score of 83!), embodied the thrill of chasing one's contradictions all over the room. The attempt to confront your traumas and to avoid confronting your traumas, and how it's more fun to believe in nothing, except believing in nothing is a big part of why you can't stop bleeding. The fact that his music makes you want to move your body is just an added bonus. The numbed-out cool in other people feels like a pose; Danny Brown's freaked-out screaming is real*, and sounds like a natural response from anyone who's paying attention to anything.

* - Real as in it-feels-real-to-me, as in it connects on a visceral level that causes me to feel actual feelings that are felt in the places still able to feel. And I can't believe that the debate around "authenticity" (more of a top-down hectoring than a debate, a way to shut up any criticisms of the spoiled-brat private-schooled child-star artistes that are positioned as vital, necessary music makers) has devolved to the point where "realness" that invites scorn. If it doesn't matter whether an artist has anything to say, or makes music that moves you emotionally, then an artist who comes along with those qualities has no reason to be valued. What is valued?, you might ask. I hoped you would. Let's just assume that you did. An artist with something to sell. Which isn't always bad, but just, uh, note who gets excluded. And remember that when sellers (or art, or anything) try to imagine what the public wants to buy, they always envision more-of-the-same, easy-to-digest, and unlikely-to-offend. That goes for prose vendors as well.

An Update For The Dozens

...Of people who follow this blog. Turned in the manuscript a month ago, and it looks like a book will appear in 2020 on an academic press with my name on it. A well-researched, co-written bio of a well-known band. The writing filled every non-working, non-parental moment since July, and after my Domestic Partner lost her job in August, meant that I had to both up my hours at work and write a (rough draft) chapter a week. Then edit, etc.

Thankfully, my DP started a new job in November that will pay enough for us to get out from under the debt we accumulated Aug-Oct. We are lucky beyond belief.

Anyway, I may go back to doing this blog again as a place to anonymously experiment with some stuff, though less anonymously, it turns out, than I had initially hoped.

Never tell anyone a secret if you want it to remain a secret. Lalalala.

A poem for today

The Future

The future is a joke

My idea of a joke

That is to say, dark and filthy

Riddled with corruption

And corrupted by riddles

The future is murder

Same as the past

Only now more indirect

Less culpable

Easier than ever to follow

Someone else’s order

The future is hope

Felt for fleeting moments

Surely the potential exists

Even by the fluke of random occurrence

For something humane

A collective ascent

But no

But know

The future is distraction

Words and identity

Disappearing into a void

Plummeting through a bottomless well

A shared dream

We experience separately

Answering Guardian Headlines #1

Here's a feature that will be (possibly) mutually fulfilling, and easily attainable in spite of the looming contractual writing deadline which, coupled with my actual income-producing gig, has consumed nearly every free minute for the last several months.

We will answer (without reading, b/c that's the way we do things in the 21st century) headlines in that day's Guardian that are, for traffic-driving reasons, framed as questions, some more rhetorical than others. We'll also include our favorite hot-take Op-Ed headline at the end as a bonus.

(worth mentioning that it's cool The Guardian isn't hidden behind a paywall. They do some great journalism, and deserve our gratitude and, depending on the balance in your bank account, our financial support).

US healthcare is booming. So why do one in five workers live in poverty?

Because US healthcare is, like most US things, driven by profits. And underpaying your workers is a (simple, stupid) way to make more money.

'Like a sunburn on your lungs': how does the climate crisis impact health?

It makes it worse.

Toy stories: can a woke makeover win Barbie and Monopoly new fans?

Anyone who seriously gives a fuck one way or another should be ashamed of themselves. Note: this isn't an article, it's a free commercial for a multinational conglomerate.

Hollow boom: why black Americans feel left out of US’s robust economy

Not technically a question, but we'll answer it anyway. Because the US is a white supremacist police state is built on the exploitation of all manual labor.

Saved by the Bell: Will the revival be 2020's Most Depressing Show?

No. That will be the election night broadcast. Also pretty sure this is also an ad.



And here's the hot-take Op-Ed of the day that makes us fear for the future of humanity:

Why Ivanka Trump's new haircut should make us very afraid

(Honorable mention goes to To decarbonize we must decomputerize: why we need a Luddite revolution)

Don't Eat The Rich, Tax Them

The rich aren't like you and I. They're stupid, self-absorbed, petty, and desperately looking for meaning in their otherwise empty lives.

Okay, they're a little like you and I. But you get the point.

I'm reading today, courtesy of a hijacked NYTimes digital subscription, the story of Cordelia Scaife May. A Pittsburgh-born heiress to a massive fortune, Ms. May was, shall we say, quite the fucking piece of work. Here's a link. It's worth using one of your six free monthly articles or whatever it is to read it (plus it's really long, which makes it a bargain).

The point of this post isn't how Ms. May's dedication to reproductive rights slid ever so gradually into a hatred of immigrants, especially the dark immigrants. It's not the story of her miserable-ass empty life either. Though the part where her new husband, a Pittsburgh DA facing corruption charges, killed himself on the day he was formally indicted, and May blamed her brother for turning on the DA guy, and severed their relationship, losing in one quick swoop the only two people she was close to on the planet, and then secluded herself in an Arizona cabin where a year or two later she emerged as a full-blown bigot dedicated to giving her fortune to hate groups, I mean anti-immigration groups--that part was pretty incredible, as a kind of 19th century novel kind of thing.

No, the point of all this is talking about the cycle of grifting and suck that warps our society. The other NYT article that caught my eye was the story of Stephen Miller, trump advisor and full-blown anti-immigration con man. Miller was born into a SoCal life of private school privilege, but his wealth wasn't anything compared to Cordelia Scaife May (Miller only had two names, for example). But he did figure out the quickest way to an adult life of leisure and comfort--embracing an extremist ideology under the cloak of patriotism or whatever, and getting people to give him money for it.

Because what we call the right-wing information complex, or the Fox News company picnic, or the extremist propaganda punditocracy, isn't anything more than a way to fleece rich people from their money. So much so that it doesn't matter whether Hannity, Carlson, Miller, Jones, whoever, believe the shit they're selling. They found the shortest, quickest way to a life of power for an underachieving dipshit--good enough to get into any Ivy League caliber college, but not nearly good enough to excel once they get there--is to stake out a wealth-friendly ideological position that is in opposition to the dominant (informed, humane, liberal) position that pervades on campus. Rich people will throw fucking yacht-loads of money at you. Set yourself up a non-profit and watch those tax-deductible dollars flow in. Call it Turning Point USA or the Leadership Institute.You'll never have to worry about money ever again.

Because wealthy people--and we're talking REAL wealthy, like generational billions--hate two things in this world: paying taxes, and their empty aimless drift through their 80-ish years on the planet. They are naive, stupid, and looking for something to spend their money on. They are easy marks for hustlers and con artists (or con content providers, if you prefer). The whole thing would be funny and adorable if it didn't result in the unconscionable suffering of millions. Stephen Miller couldn't run a fucking Burger King morning shift if you gave him three years to try, but he knew how to suck up to the powerfully-stupid powerful (his first D.C. job was working for Michele Bachmann, whose first three auto-fill suggestions on my google are, in order: corn dog, bikini, and young--should we all kill ourselves together or take turns?). And that's why I type transcriptions of notes called in by financial advisors and insurance agents for $10 an hour while Stephen Miller lives a life of financial comfort and figures out how to profit from his ugly ideologies. But at least I don't look like a semi-sentient bowl of pudding that hasn't slept in a week, and whose ejaculate is made up of (I imagine) a hastily thrown-together mix of saliva, mosquitos and paste.

One solution, what we in the rich-guillotine business call a good start, would involve a Wealth Tax.

Cantos For David Berman: Part None

Excerpt from a poem in D. Berman's Actual Air, a book I've owned since 1999:

There were long days of bad ideas
when he felt his book was ineffective
like a watercolor of a fire engine
or a statue of the fastest man alive,

and he would go to the window
and watch the fireflies
criss cross wihout insight,
then turning around
sometimes notice his wife Asterisk
lifting dinner to the table.

One night, up considering dead realms,
he heard the sustained woof of a dog.
It drew him up and propelled him outside
to walk cowed under the fierce starlight.

Some brief, stray unconnected thoughts:

It is not easy to live a life so deeply; it's not easy to live any kind of life, really.

I processed his death with a grimace, a sigh, and a "well what else would you expecting" shrug. That's part coping mechanism (defense mechanism?), part tragedy fatigue, and part a calloused something or other inside of me which may or may not be a good thing. Perspective can be healthy, but it's worth keeping in mind that distance facilitates that perspective. And distance is a thing that is lonely and cold.

A person in pain who exits this world (and I am aware that there are all kinds of way to exit the world--shove that needle far enough in, and you are no longer here) may no longer be in pain, but that pain is then diffused out among the living to take up residence in their hearts.

Hipster Transient

Just gotta say, about this Guardian article about people in California living out of their cars, that I was doing this back in 1993 before it was cool. And I'm sure this trend (like most things Californian) will soon be spreading across the country, what with rents rapidly spiraling upwards and all. Did you know real estate is a good investment? You, the person with the money, put a down payment on a house, and then you charge other people to live there. You have these people--people who make less money than you--pay more in rent than you pay for your mortgage, and then you just get to sit back and earn "passive income." It's amazing! It's way more reliable than the stock market! Because while markets can fluctuate, and are subject to unpredictable volatility, people are always going to need a place to live!

It's not so much that humanity is living through the end of capitalism. It's that capitalism is living through the end of humanity.

We now resume our irregularly scheduled deprogramming...

Though who knows how long it will last. School starts tomorrow here in the more collegiate areas of northeast georgia, in a town where the local university so dominates our town that even the public K-12 system adheres to the same Aug-May schedule. Nothing quite like kids playing outside in 90-plus temps to get that education flowing, I guess. Anyway, the schedules have been cleared for a more-or-less daily writing routine. Though that's subject to change b/c the other income-producing member of our household just saw her planned income stream dry up when the UGA professor she was going to be working for starting next week asked her to forego another month of pay while continuing to work on the project. The nature of this project involved our cohabitant securing funding through grants and donation for the professor's annual conference to promote STEM learning among young women. Turns out the conference is basically a neoliberal grift masquerading as a charity (please secure us over $20,000 in very small, barely detectable donations in order to send 10 lucky high school girls to attend my conference). In return for my cohabitant's participation--the location and securing of said money--my cohabitant would be paid somewhere from $2,000 to $2,500 for six, or maybe five months. It was all quite vague. And so after the meeting where the cohabitant was told she wouldn't be getting paid until next month, but in the meantime keep working on the project, and also please sign this NDA for me, my cohabitant--being no fool, and having recently completed her PhD--bailed on the project and alerted university officials. Ah messy life. So out plan of scraping by for a few months on a couple grand a month while she worked 20 hrs, and we completed our legitimate contracted work on our book about a prominent music group--manuscript due Nov. 1st--was uh...what's the word...totally fucked.

We have options. We are planning. One of us will probably be working full-time. The other will be working full-time on the book (the research is all completed, and most chapters exist in a sort of vomitous rough draft state). Or we'll both be working part-time, and juggling the writing. But that manuscript will be delivered, and it will be great. And until I'm hired, I'll be occasionally typing here to get my writing skills and speed more up to, uh, speed.

Oh yeah. This blog supports Elizabeth Warren for president, but it would vote for a semi-sentient ferret at this point provided it wasn't a white-supremacist swill merchant huckster.

The only optimism I can muster about anything is that this government--its policies, its laws, the way it conducts itself--in no way represents the will or the desire of the people who live here. Maybe one day that will change. The only solution is voting out republicans, voting in democrats, and then holding their feet to the fire and forcing them to do the right thing.

The Number Fortys: Billy Ocean - "Loverboy"

We meet again, Mr. Ocean. You last song reached #1 (Caribbean Queen, we wrote about it a couple of times already), but this one will only reach #2. Which is a goddamn shame because Loverboy is a fucking incredible piece of art.

Not that it matters whether a song does, or does not, reach #1. Or if it even reaches the charts at all. That stuff is so arbitrary, and dependent on factors that have nothing at all to do with the quality, or lack thereof, in the actual music itself, that any quantitative method of evaluating art is inherently meaningless. And yea, and yet, people who have been given money to write about music will cite streaming numbers to support their claim that a song, or an artist, is somehow more important than another.

But getting back to Billy, like most people around my age who got into underground music in the late 80s, I felt that mainstream 80s sounds were synthetic and fake. I totally bought into the narrative that the closer a recording sounded to people in a room, the more real it was (you can read real in quotes if you want). Paula Abdul was fake. The Smiths were real. One sang about things that were fake (real love), and one sang about things that were real (fake love). I carried this prejudice against 80s mainstream production nearly a decade into the 21st century until someone put this song on at work one day. By now I was listening to avant-garde electronic music, and that opening flurry of electronics--that droning synth into the exploding stabs of sound--came across so glorious that I started laughing. Then the song kicked in with a horsey beat so obvious that someone had Billy riding a horse in the video, and, uh, holy shit.

I have never heard 80s music the same way since.

Loverboy isn't just a sonic delight. The pre-chorus (starts at 1:12 if you don't know what a pre-chorus is) floors me every time, the way it just keep ratcheting up the tension. Billy sings the shit out of it. He sounds genuinely anguished, and the "yeah-yeah"s as he arrives at the chorus are so ecstatic that they manage to evoke the beauty and the euphoria of frustrated lust as well as, say, The Smiths ever did.

Billy plays it cool for the chorus, supported by stop-start distorted guitars.You have to love how he spends the verses/pre-chorus working himself into a frenzy, only to hit the chorus and just croon Want to be your... loverboy. Compare the smooth control when he sings "yeah" in the chorus to the unhinged "yeah"s in the pre-chorus.

We're all set up for your typical guitar solo, but instead we get what is essentially a technology solo made up of scratching, samples that are so randomly placed as to sound avant-garde. It brings the song to a thrilling stop like a train slamming into a wall over and over again. The noise subsides and we get a quiet verse, now with that guitar solo. But the verse is shortened to get us to the pre-chorus faster, this time even more unhinged than before, and then the chorus arrives and--

Billy drops out, the song and these near-falsetto voices sing the chorus and it's all just so dramatic and cool. It's the finest moment of Billy Ocean's musical life. And a couple of years later when I made an "Eightiesbilly" mix that had songs from that decade by Idol, Joel, and Ocean, you'd better believe this song was prominently featured.

Score: 10.

THE NUMBER ONE

 

We get two outstanding time capsules of 80s production for the price of one in this installment of The Number Fortys. Out of Touch features all kinds of cutting edge digital sampling, to the point where this song resembles the Art of Noise (less than a year old at this point) as much as Hall & Oates. They brought in Arthur Baker to help with the sonics. Baker had already worked on visionary early 80s stuff like Afrika Bambaataa's Planet Rock (it's a 9), and Freeze's I.O.U. (an 8), and credit to H & O for recognizing the coolness of what he was doing.

Of course being songwriting pros, H & O fashion a genuine moving, anguished melody/lyrics about the draining soullessness of decadence. This was a theme that a more respected writer like Elvis Costello had covered extensively a few years prior, and it says a lot about H & O that their song holds its own lyrically while incorporating avant-gardeish sonics makes a serious case for their artistic credentials--especially compared to a musical reactionary like E. Costello.

Score: 9.

The Number Fortys: Ray Parker Jr. - "Jamie"

In The Number Fortys, we review whatever song was sitting at #40 on the Billboard charts. We began in the first week of January 1984, right around the time this writer became cognizant/obsessive about music, and will continue until we get bored. The seeds for the idea came from Tom Breihan's Number Ones column over at Stereogum. However, we here at k-postpunk believe that the bottom is more interesting than the top (and obscurity is more interesting than either). Also, if you want to read the Number in the title as meaning "more numb," I think that's totally understandable at this point.

Songs land at #40 for all kinds of reasons, but the one I'm most fascinated by is the type we'll call:

Their last single was a big hit so even though this one's not nearly as good it's still going to scrape the bottom of the chart just because the last one did so well

A lot of songs we've encountered on this journey have fallen into this category. John Waite, Dan Hartman, Night Ranger, Matthew Wilder. These songs are usually the worst because they sound like a cyncial attempt to have a hit. They lack whatever freshness and originality the hit had, and are usually just the blind fumblings of a career artist trying to "crack the marketplace" or some shit.

Ladies and gentleman, I present the follow-up to Ray Parker Jr.s #1 hit Ghostbusters. It's called Jamie.

This one eventually reached #14, presumably because people recognized Ray's voice. Because the song itself is, um, barely a song at all. It could exist. It could not exist. It starts, it ends, and all our lives are emptier for the time we could have spent listening to something else. At times, it feels more like a song about a guy trying to convince someone of two things:

1. Yes, I really did used to go out with (date? fuckity-fuck? cohabitate with?) Jamie.

2. And, despite Jamie's androgynous name, this person was definitely a girl, not a boy.

As usual in break-up songs--or in this case, a broken-up song--the singer seems oblivious to any part they may have played in the de-coupling (we call this the Jonathan Richman effect). So when Ray says, "I trained her just the way I wanted her," most non-sociopaths go, wait a second. When Ray then adds that, because of the amount of time he put into sculpting and molding (controlling) her, it "ain't fair for her to give it to some other guy," we, the non-sociopaths in the audience, go, holy fuck Jamie I hope you don't get murdered.

For a song about heartbreak, and how it's not fair that a person who "has to have it every night, every night" would prefer to get it from, or in the case of the song "give it to" (nice de-personalization there Ray) someone else (HOW DARE YOU MAKE YOUR OWN DECISIONS JAMIE), Jamie (the song) is pretty breezy and non-dramatic. The lyrics may be about heartbreak and perceived betrayal, but the music is about a little girl skipping rope on a spring day. Go fucking figure.

Score: 1.


THE NUMBER ONE

We continue last week's excerpt from Wham!'s 1983 interview with Paul Morley, as featured in his book Ask. PM is Paul; G is George; A is Andrew Ridgeley. It is a fascinating argument about pop music. The use of "it's only pop music" as a way to justify/excuse the lack of anything interesting in an artist's music is especially prescient. Today, critics play the part of G and A, and isn't that something.

Paul Morley: How can you feel in any way satisfied or inspired being a prime part of he current charity gay abandon, all this flimsy jingly sing-along?
George and Andrew: That's what pop music is all about?
PM: What, a sing-song?
A: That's what makes pop songs popular, because everyone can sing along with them. There's nothing wrong with that.
G: What fucking right have you got to say that we should sing something that is socially important?
PM: I haven't said that, don't insult me!
G: What are you saying then?
PM: I'm just wondering about the extent of your ambition. You must at times get pissed off with music that is popular, not just indifferent, because everyone can sing along with it. You have to draw the line somewhere -- do you have standards?
G: What are you talking about . . . your standards are what you enjoy.
PM: Tell me something about your standards.
A: If you like it, it's all right. What you enjoy it's all right.
PM: Comprehensive stuff. No second thoughts, no doubts, no feelings of restlessness.
G: What are you talking about? There's obviously a great difference between the way you look at music and the way we look at music. We look at music as something to enjoy, not as what the pop song means or what it represents, or whether it's better than pop music made five years ago. All that's not for us.
PM: I'm just an argumentative bitch. I just have this feeling that it's positive for energy to be used in a different way than how it has been in the past; I like movement rather than self-satisfaction.
G: Look . . . we like pop music . . . we make pop music . . why do you expect something from us other than pop music?
PM: I don't expect anything else, certainly not moral action -- I sometimes think -- this is all -- that within the pop song context you might want to appear a little less common. . . .
A: But we're not writing songs for you or for anyone else fro that matter, so we don't give a toss what you say because we like what we do. . . .
G: What the hell you going on about?
PM: I'm finding it hard to be polite. Instead of just having people sing along with your songs, and blink in the glare of your teeth, wouldn't it please you to think that maybe you'd intrigued, provoked and enlivened your audience?
A: Why do we have to intrigue, provoke and . . . whatever else it is you're going on about. . . .
PM: So what do you want to do then? Sorry I'm so curious.
G: Why the fuck should we do anything?
A: Fucking hell, we play music for ourselves.
G: We enjoy it, our audience enjoys it, why the fuck should we provoke them? What the fuck's that about? Ego, that's what this is about. For Christ's sake, most people have an ego, most people who are in pop music are there because they have an ego . . . the whole business is built on ego, vanity, self-satisfaction, and it's total crap to pretend that it's not.
PM: The "ego" you're talking about seems pretty threadbare to me -- it's hardly as though you have the nerve to pretend you're God, just the courage to revel in your own small-minded big-headedness -and if there's ego, self-satisfaction and vanity, why not initiative, inspiration and irritation as well? Wouldn't it be more fulfilling to your ego if you were bolder, bitter, better - you talk of ego but you just mean self-congratulation; you don't want your ego fuelled because of any candour and brilliance.
G: What the hell are you talking about?

Let the record show that George Michael died at age 53. According to Michael's partner, not only was the death a suicide, this was his fifth attempt. At the time of his death. he had sold over 100 million records around the world.

The Number Fortys: Toto - "Stranger In Town"

In The Number Fortys, we review whatever song was sitting at #40 on the Billboard charts. We began in the first week of January 1984, right around the time this writer became cognizant/obsessive about music, and will continue until we get bored. The seeds for the idea came from Tom Breihan's Number Ones column over at Stereogum. However, we here at k-postpunk believe that the bottom is more interesting than the top (and obscurity is more interesting than either). Also, if you want to read the Number in the title as meaning "more numb," I think that's totally understandable at this point.

This week's song is bullshit and horrible, so we're not going to spend too much time on it. It's forgettable the way that shitty job you worked at for a month to save up money so you could move was shitty. It's just a thing you did. I've listened to this song five times now, and there is absolutely nothing there.

As long as I'm here though, I might as well say that Toto sucks. Rosanna sucks. Africa (the song) sucks. I'm not going to argue these things. It's a stupid song about a stupid thing. Toto were soulless session musicians--Steely Dan without the wit or melody, and I am not a fan of Steely Dan. They provided some decent backing on some of Michael Jackson's Thriller. Congratulations, Toto.

Score: 1.

THE NUMBER ONE

From my copy of Ask: The Chatter of Pop by Paul Morley, An interview he conducted with Wham--excuse me, Wham!--that appeared in the October 23, 1983 edition of Blitz Magazine, roughly a year before this song reached #1 in the UK and US. Q's are Paul. A's are G. Mike.

Q:You're banal, George.
A: Yeah, I'm banal, as far as what goes on the record. . . but I enjoy the music and a lot of other people enjoy the music, so I don't care."
Q: What do you care about?
A: I care about me, I care about my family. I care about making sure that I'm still here in five or ten years' time. Y'see, I'm about as human as most people are. I don't think you have a grasp of how human most people are. I don't think that you have a grasp of basic human requirements. You seem to use the word "banal" as derogatory. But life if banal . . . if you understand, you know that it is banal and that there's nothing wrong with that. . . . It's just life. It's just the way people are, people are banal, their lives are boring, and they just try to get through life as enjoyable and as simply as possible.
Q: I . . the content of an aimless consciousness is weak and colourlesss . . . the work is futile, the joys ephemeral, the howls helpless and the agony incompetent, the hopes are purchased, the voice prerecorded, the play is mechanical, the rules typed, their lines trite, all strengths are sapped, exertion anyhow is useless, to vote or not is futile, futile . . . it is the principal function of popular culture - though hardly its avowed purpose - to keep people from understanding what is happening to them . . . in every way they are separated from the centres of power and feeling. . . .
A: I do enjoy this kind of conversation . . . I like coming up against questions like these. But I don't think it means anything to people. No one wants to know about the things you're going on about. Enjoyment is what matters.
Q: But doesn't such single-minded attention on the juices of enjoyment become repetitive and desperate? Doesn't such small determination to enjoy, enjoy, enjoy actually nullify the possibilities of pleasure? Don't curiosity, complication, adventure play their parts. . .
A: Yeah, those things, but why should we be the ones to put it about? Why should we? I want us to be happy.

In 1984, a year after this interview, George Michael appeared on a kids TV show and announced that Joy Division's Closer was his favorite album. We'll excerpt some more from this interview as the song continues its reign atop the charts.

Fuck Fleetwood Mac

It's not that there's anything wrong with them. It's not that their music sucks. Is it a little bland? A little boring? Yeah. I mean, if that's what heartbreak sounds like to you, then I envy you your porcelain life. But my big beef with Fleetwood Mac is their status (along with the Eagles, Billy Joel, Phil Collins, et. al.) in the underground. A friend and I were eating breakfast in the local vegetarian joint yesterday morning, when our server--a kind cool young person covered in tattoos--yelped with joy when Fleetwood Mac came on. "Oh, I'm so glad I get to listen to Rhiannon this morning." And yeah, I get that most contemporary songwriters, mainstream or underground, aren't capable of utilizing the minor verse to major chorus shift that the Mac does so effectively in that song (even though it's really easy). But if you're a young person who gets excited about hearing Fleetwood Mac, that just tells me you didn't start listening to music, or the radio, until your senior year in high school. I assume you were raised by christians, or possibly a cult, because Fleetwood Mac has been inescapable on the radio--as have all the other 70's schlock--for the past 40 years.

Again, this isn't anything against F. Mac. Here. I'll post a song I like, one that never gets played on the radio.

It's something you listen to. Me, I listened to it a lot when I was 10 (I went through my Eagles phase when I was 8). That wasn't because I was super cool. It was because I heard it on the radio and liked it. But after hearing it again (and again, and again), it got kind of boring. I wanted to hear more stuff, stuff that made me feel as captivated and stunned as when I first heard Hotel California, a song that, as an eight year old contained vast quantities of mystery and drama. When I last heard it, also yesterday during my vegetarian breakfast, let's just say that it contained significantly less mystery or drama. I told my friend just to concentrate on the kinda sorta cool bassline and we'd get through it together.

I blame Best Coast. I blame Poptimism Inc. The only thing more obnoxious than people singing the praises of the same exact thing that everyone else is singing the praises of is the way they pat themselves on the back, as if somehow their championing of F. Mac, or Beyonce, makes them interesting. It takes serious ideological pretzel contortions to think you're a badass for liking the most popular music ever recorded, but that's your 21st century music critic for you. What's the point in championing the counterculture, the more challenging, the marginalized when all distinctions between types of music are arbitrary. You like the thing that's popular then more people are going to read what you wrote. Eyeballs are power, and, much like music, all eyeballs are exactly the same.

I can accept this desperate scrambling by critics for relevance, and the attendant (small, dwindling, insubstantial) paycheck that comes with that relevance. But imagine being a cool guy in your early 20s with aspirations to being an artist, in a public space where you could play anything you want, you have pretty much the entire recorded history of music at your fingertips, you can signify your aesthetic stance for all the artistic influencers in town, and you put on Fleetwood fucking Mac. That's a hell of a statement. It's a statement that you're boring.

Today, I walked into the local outpost of a regional convenience store chain to grab some soda water and some Takis (product placement alert!). You know what their piped-in corporate-approved speakers were playing? Fucking It's My Life by Talk Talk. And this is something that has happened to me again and again over the last few years. If you want to hear The Cure you go to McDonald's. If you want to hear Pearl Jam Pandora, you go to the local independent coffee shop. And you can fucking forget about hearing anything more obscure than any of those artists I just mentioned. If I heard the Go-Betweens (who were also pretty good at that minor/major thing F. Mac did) in public, or fuck it, if I heard The Bastards of Fate, my legs would probably fall off from shock (I am a cultural critic; I am not a doctor).

I've been listening to F. Mac for three decades now, but I've been listening to the Go-Betweens for nearly two. I've never gotten tired of them the way I got tired of the Mac. I'm going to post a song that could have been, in its musical style, a Mac song. It was never a hit. I have never heard it on the radio. I have never heard it in public unless I was the one playing it (at the same coffee shop that rocks Pearl Jam Pandora, back in the day). It still stops my breath. I wonder what the guy in the restaurant would think of it.

Both this song and Rhiannon are about ghosts, or people who are both inhabiting the "spectral" realm. F. Mac's song is about a Celtic (or Welsh, I forget) witch. The G. Betweens song is about G. McLennan's dead father. It has never failed to move me. There's a performance I want you to watch. I find it stunning. I want to share it with you. It has 22,000 views. The Youtube video for Rhiannon--just the song with a picture of the album, mind you--has 38,000,000. There is more in this musical heaven and earth than is dreamed of in your Fleetwood Mac people.

The Number Fortys: Rebbie Jackson - "Centipede"

In The Number Fortys, we review whatever song was sitting at #40 on the Billboard charts. We began in the first week of January 1984, right around the time this writer became cognizant/obsessive about music, and will continue until we get bored. The seeds for the idea came from Tom Breihan's Number Ones column over at Stereogum. However, we here at k-postpunk believe that the bottom is more interesting than the top (and obscurity is more interesting than either). Also, if you want to read the Number in the title as meaning "more numb," I think that's totally understandable at this point.

The oldest of the 10 Jackson children, yes those Jacksons, Rebbie was 34 when she released her debut album. This was the first single, and the only Top 40 song she would ever have (it would reach #24). It is incredible, both exciting and strange all at the same time.

Her brother Michael, at this time the most famous musician on the planet, wrote and produced it. And yes, it sounds like he contributed some background vocals too. On the back of the single, Michael dedicated the song to his "mannequin friends." Here's his crazy-ass lyrics in full.

Your love is like a raging fire
You’re a snake that’s on the loose
The strike is your desire
But when the centipede is hot
You’re bound to feel the fire
But when the centipede is hot
You’re bound to feel the fire

I feel, oh yeah, a longing for your touch
Like you crawled into the bathroom window
To give him all your love
Like a centipede that’s hot
The fire is in your touch
Just like a centipede you’ve got
A lot of loving to touch

Don’t you know
In the quiet of the night
Is when the snake is in the crawlin’
And the moon starts to glow then disappear
When the time is really right
Is when the centipede is crawlin’
You’ll be crying in the night
So many tears
And crawlin’ like a centipede
(Centipede)

You came to strike him with your love
Like you crawled into the bathroom window
To bite him with your love
Like a centipede that’s hot
The fire is in your touch
Just like a centipede you’ve got
A lot of lovin’ to touch

(Chorus X 3)

Beats the shit out of me. The video's just as weird (what does a tiger have to do with...anything?). But regardless of all that, the song is pretty fucking great. I love the syncopated guitar, and that synth run at the end of the chorus is divine. Is it the greatest song ever written? Nah. But it's exactly what I was hoping I'd find when I started this column, a song from out of nowhere that grabs me.

Interesting note about Rebbie, she was groomed for music stardom just like the rest of her siblings, but she bailed on all that to get married when she was 18 and move to Kentucky. Like most people who grow up in abusive domestic shitshows, she could not wait to get out of there. Rebbie's dad, Joe, whose punches led Michael to develop the moonwalk in order to avoid being hit so much, not only objected, he refused to walk her down the aisle. Rebbie and her husband had three children, and stayed married until her husband's death of cancer in 2013. All of this suggests that Rebbie was a very smart woman with a good head on her shoulders.

Anyway, Centipede is a jam, a surreal disturbing jam.

Score: 7

THE NUMBER ONE

You like candy? Of course you like candy. Everyone loves candy. Even if it's empty. Even if it makes your teeth falls out and causes type 2 diabetes and mood crashes. This song isn't a pastry. It isn't a donut or a cake. It's Fun Dip. It's flavored powdered sugar you shovel down your throat with a stick made out of solid sugar that you eat after you run out of the powder. Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go (I tried not to type the words; I feel stupid typing the words) is gloriously, deliriously empty. It is a never-ending pleasure that quickly sickens. It's impossible not to enjoy. It's impossible to be moved. It's too catchy, too perfect, not to have been a hit. It's too devoid of anything else to do anything at the top of the charts besides sit there. How do you evaluate something that is simultaneously inescapable and effervescent? You put it right in the middle, the statistical average of a 10 for form and 0 for content.

Score: 5.