Some would say shit hit the fan, but I think in my case its more accurate to say the shit got piped through a meat grinder and turned into little shit sausages. Instead of elaborating on that ill-conceived imagery, we can just play catch-up, and then get to the goodness.
I've still been plowing through this stack of music, and I've made a lot of progress. As of this writing, I have 83.85gb to go. This means in turn that I've waded through about 100gb of music. Its had its highs and its lows. My appreciation for Andrew Bird has grown a little. My weariness with XTC has increased substantially. Job for a Cowboy screamed some. Lhasa seduced me. The world kept turning.
However, my life has simplified itself a bit in the past few weeks, and I encountered - one might hesitate to say serendipitously, but regardless - I encountered the wangsty warbling of Loudon Wainwright III. If the emo genre strayed into a bondage dungeon with Garth Brooks, dear Loudon might be the comically-inept, defect ridden fuck child (I hesitate to say "love child," because that would imply that, on some level, what transpired could have been misconstrued as good).
Now, I typically pour the haterade on thick when I pour. "Hey," you might say, sniffling. "You haven't heard his good stuff! You're cherry picking dear Loudon at his lowest!"
Fair enough. After all, he has written some 22 albums, and in his own words:
"you could characterize the catalog as somewhat checkered, although I prefer to think of it as a tapestry."
-source
And I would prefer to circumcise my ears so that they would be numb to your incessant whining, dear Loudon. Oh well.
In the interest of (some) fairness, I've also checked out some of his top hits. Let's start with the positives: Loudon has a pretty good voice, with clear tone and diction. He can obviously play a guitar. When he is straightforward with his lyrics, they readily convey whatever pathos he's aimed for. Um... his songs are pretty short.
Sadly, Loudon seems to have an intractable fondness for slipping and sliding tonally around the melody, and this has only grown with time. Now, I don't expect auto-tune levels of pitch perfection, but dear Loudon is not Bob Dylan. No one is Bob Dylan. Not even Bob Dylan should be Bob Dylan. Even then, I'm willing to let some weird vocal antics slide if the lyrics themselves can carry the burden of expression. Oops.
When your singles revolve around either you bitching about lamentable circumstances or metaphor-free fantasy about a dead skunk he ran over, the lyrics need to be pretty good to sustain you for 22 albums. Poetically, the songs sit right at the Christian rock band, worship service level of textual quality. Its a classic case of content superseding form. There's a reason why we'd want to hear an artist sing about his heartbreaking divorce, instead of just talking to Jim after work before he goes back to the hotel. The form the artist supplies in itself expands upon the content. Loudon never seemed to have grasped this. And this is him at his best.
At his worst, we get something like his album The Last Man On Earth. Jesus. This album carries the emotional weight of a bowl of tapioca left out in the rain. Loudon's attempt at poetic construction is like a Shyamalanian twist: unjustified, bemusing, and eye-rolling. Let's take a sample from the opening of Bridge, which I cannot find a recording of online that I can link to directly. Please, take a moment and check this song out on last.fm, grooveshark, or something similar. Go on.
Great, now that we've all heard the opening which is definitely not Stairway to Heaven, let's reflect on that opening line again:
Its that time of the month/ That month being the second one/ When old feelings ache and bleed/ and hearts are being reckoned on
Wow, what an inventive, unique way to say "I'm obnoxiously single and have to call February 14th 'Singles Awareness Day.' Shoot me!" This also displays Loudon at his most offensively Dylan-esque, at least from what I've heard of dear Wainwright's oeuvre. You'll have to give me a moment, as my ears were trying to forcibly give themselves enemas again. The mind-blowing thing for me was realizing that this Wainwright really has a son named Rufus. Yes, that Rufus Wainwright.
To wrap this up, here's a song where he sings about the satisfactory smallness of the penis Michelangelo sculpted on David:
God, that face is so hot.
