Mediocre Masters: Loudon Wainwright III

Jesus, its been awhile.

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.

This Confangled Blog Business

You may have noticed that I didn't blog here at all last week. That was intentional on my part - I've been negotiating trying to find time to listen to the music and blog about it. Its hard to do the two simultaneously in any other format than a lame-ass play by play style, which I don't think anybody should be forced to experience. I'm still chugging away at the unlistened tunes:

I'm down to 145 gb!

However, for the purposes of this blog, I've vacillated on the best form of the posts, timing, and what not. I typically write late at night (its 2:22 a.m. right now) because I'm part-robot, part-night owl, and a little crazy. Right now my living situation just doesn't support doing that very well. Eventually I'll have more control over my living situation (things like privacy, personal habits, environment). Right now I have to go with it.

So, for the time being I think what I'll do is try to select an album to write about each week. Of course I'll listen to more than one album, but a constraint like this will keep writing here manageable. Thanks for checking in, and I'll be back with new content soon.

Cheers,
Bodhisvaha

Day 26: Black

Things began with the strangest sequence of artists yet: The Fiery Furnaces to Biz Markie, Bjork to The Dandy Warhols to Jay-Z, then a lone Kronos Quartet prelude to Depeche Mode. This slid me into the "black" albums that I have, including two simply called The Black Album (looks at Jay and Dandy), and Black Market Clash, among others. Try out Lucifer below:

I found Lucifer quite appealing. As some well-padded, 20-something, white, college guy, I'm not going to attempt any pretense of intelligent discussion about the content of this song. I will say I think it sounds awesome. There's some really effective atonal counterpoint about two-thirds of the way through the song, where he starts singing over the female lead.

Moving on, I thought I had already gotten my fill of Muse, especially in the pretentious waters of a post-The Resistance milieu. However, it would seem that I skipped over this little gem from Black Holes and Revelations, called Assassin:

The brutal opening sets the song off to a blistering pace, a violent tarantella exploding in full instrumentation. What's neat is the way they weave together a standard call/response structure over the top of this without deadening the intensity of the instrumentation. I'm sure somewhere in the lyrics Muse actually gets to making the title of the song relevant, but of course that's not why I enjoyed it. It seems to be a terrible struggle for any band - often the enjoyment from their work has nothing to do with the lyrical content so much as the tone and feel. However, people rarely go crazy for just pure instrumental work, or for wordless music. Their songs need the words even though  no one listens to the words themselves. They listen only to the fact of the song having words.

Music left: 153.32gb

Cheers, Bodhisvaha 

Day 25: Ayn-uh Minuten, Bitte

I've been keeping myself pretty busy these past few days, juggling an installation piece (which went quite well, and I'll put the results online soon), my internship, a branding project, my first adventure into tumblr, and I started reading Ulysses for the first time (pro tip: no what the hell an omphalos is).

And in the midst of all this frenetic activity I was pushed and pulled by Gary Schyman's score work for Bioshock and Bioshock 2. For those who "aren't into games," the Bioshock games have explored the consequences of an objectivist society according to the precepts of Ayn Rand in the marvelous fictional city of Rapture. While accurate, that description utterly fails in capturing the faded, glorious allure of running through the ghosts of man's aspiration frozen as architecture. Instead of geeking out about his aggressive use of dissonance and atonal composition techniques, I'll simply say that he made some very compelling music.

Apart from my journey under the sea I enjoyed som XTC, Hiromi, and something called The Bird & The Bee. They're a technically-oriented indie pop duo, building up thick vocal harmonies over jazzy chord progressions that consistently twist and bend in ways you're not quite expecting. For the most part their lyrics sucked ass, with pieces that bemused me in their obviousness such as Again & Again and Fucking Boyfriend. However, the music was slick enough that I found myself still humming along, only to curse when I had discovered they had gotten me again. I'll be interested to see where they go, because I think their overall sound is pretty swank.

After that light-hearted frolic, I got slammed by the tandem titans of Jaco Pastorious and Miles Davis. And not just any Miles Davis, but Bitches Brew Miles Davis. The album that, excepting one four and a half minute piece, contains no jams shorter than eleven minutes. Sadly, this project of mine has nudged me begrudgingly toward the direction of not liking jazz as much. I enjoy long form work. If you make something that's a good solid hour of music, I won't condemn it for its length. However, I just can't process that much codified improvisation at once (which is what jazz is - ad lib within a specific contextualization). I did get a quaint little surprise, though:

 Music left: 157.36gb

Cheers,

Bodhisvaha

Day 24: The best of everything.

The schizophrenic weather around here is really getting me down. I'm pro-snow, so the rain is just miserable, both because its freezing cold and because it, well, freezes. I'm reduced to walking to my classes instead of biking, the result of a comic series of foibles and circumstances arranged to render my bike inoperable. But, enough bitching.

One phenomenon I didn't think about when starting this project was the deluge of compilation albums that use "The Best of..." convention for their titles. David Bowie, Carly Simon, Depeche Mode, even the double-take worthy Dramarama and Fad Gadget have respective "Best of's" to throw into the mix.

Here's the complete list of "Best of" artists, in the order I heard them:

Blondie

Blur

David Bowie

Carly Simon

David Bowie (again, but this time 1969-1974)

Depeche Mode

Dramarama

Fad Gadget

Larry Graham and Graham Central Station

Marvin Gaye (let's get it on)

Pixies

Rockapella

Silverchair

Simon & Garfunkel

Styx

The Beach Boys

The Smiths

The Spinners

Warren Zevon

SO. MUCH. BEST. MUSIC.

I'm glad that I actually listened to Pixies. I mean, mutilating waves are great and whatnot, but I'm sure the band had a little more substance.

And now, something completely different.

Yes, that's Panjabi MC, off his album Bhangra. I thought you'd like it. I have this strange soft spot for anything pseudo-spoken in another language in music. Its like a kryptonite-esque weakness of mine. The other thing I get all goofy for are women talking lyrics over a really heavy baseline, à la CSS, Duchess Says, or even (don't hate me) The Ting Tings (sometimes, when its a full moon). Things rounded off today with some more Hiromi (who's funky piano I will always fawn over) and The Black Keys with The Big Come Up. 

Music left: 159.38gb

Cheers,

Bodhisvaha

Day 23: Mediocre Masters: Brian Eno.

Welcome to another installment of Mediocre Masters! This has been a long time coming. Brian Eno, your time is now. Eno, or more pretentiously, Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno (yes, that's really his name) is credited by some with the pioneering of ambient music. Since 1948 he has graced our dimension with his rare gift for tedium and a bizarre semblance of what the generous would call taste.

Really? Also, surprise palm frond.

The only thing more puzzling than his semi-drag charm and ninja-fern compatriot is the gray zone where a hairline should be. Granted, this photo is outdated.

There. Now I can direct my disdain just at the aimless buzzing he pimps as music. After drenching Eno in so much of my juicy ire, it might seem inappropriate to merely call him mediocre. However, as we shall see soon, an artist couldn't manage to be truly bad and sustain such a long lasting career. This is the strange enigma that is Eno: everyone seems to want to work with him. He tangled himself up with Talking Heads, David Bowie, Devo, U2, Coldplay, and others. He's participated in various acts over time, proliferated into writing, installation, and other, more esoteric projects (such as a deck of cards that uses randomness and quotation). He's been producing culture for over forty years now, and it would seem that everyone missed out on the joke behind his practice: his shit is cold. At his most energetic we get no better than the Microsoft opening sound. No, really.

Wow! That sounded like the beginning of something potentially intriguing. Too bad it was only some 3 seconds long. He even had this idea of doing lots of mini-pieces like this, which I think is neat, too. He seems to regularly have interesting ideas that get smelted through his forge of banality into something you can't quite believe is happening only because so little actually is happening. Let's study one of his fully developed pieces, 

2/2 (from his Ambient I: Music for Airports)

Its almost like watching a sunrise, if the sun were insufferably lame and had a questionable history of cross-dressing. And please don't think I'm hating on him just because his sound is "avant-garde", or "experimental." I can get my groove on to some pretentious shit with the best of them. Ghost Opera? I'm down. A saucy threnody? Sign me up. One of the largest tone clusters ever composed? Let's pop some popcorn. But please, I beg you, please don't make music where the most engaging thing you could add would be a soft voice intoning "You are a valuable person. People like you..."

Protest

Stop SOPA/PIPA