Popcorn Culture
Ruminations on TV Shows, Comics, And Music
I'm pretty much precisely the right age to love Pearl Jam, and understand why some others don't. I was fourteen when Ten came out, Vs seemed to come out immediately after, and had a different feel, then Vitalogy. They released three albums while I was in high school, and I loved all three, and convinced the record store I was working for that we should do a midnight opening for the release of No Code. It was not a huge success. But I still loved the band. They faded out of my interest in the 21st century with less frequent albums, and less-focused writing. Their music sounded blander to me for a few years, returned to interesting, and then disappeared completely from my radar. When the first track from their impening release showed up on Youtube, I was excited. I'm a little less excited with their second pre-release single, but I'm intrigued to see what they do with this album. In that spirit, I decided it was time to give a bit of a primer for people who loved the band but lost track, or people who are curious why so many GenXers still care about a grunge band in 2020. The first album is way extended. I owned all the singles from the album, with all the B-Sides. I bought a bunch of Pearl Jam Bootlegs from record stores, including the legendarry Bad Radio Sessions of Eddie Vedder. I certainly haven't included all the material from that era. No weeping original version of "Betterman" or the Oh So 1991 "Bee Girl" song. But they had some fun non-album tracks, ad some interesting outtakes from Temple Of The Dog (which would be on my Chris Cornell discography, not Pearl Jam's). This album is my version of a story hinted at by Vedder's lyrics. It starts from the idea of the song / video for "Jeremy" but takes it in different directions. It's not a story I would consider writing now. It's peak Angsty Teen In The 90s. But that was the album Ten. It was so suicidal. So contemplative. So what happens next. So the problems in my life aren't women's faults, and yet women and fathers are at the crux of them. The bookending of this album is pretty essential to how I hear albums, and how I reorganize them. So I have preserved Once as the opening track, with it's slow climbing intro before the guitars crash in. If you want to read Vedder's story of the songs on this album, there are plenty of articles. That's not what I'm going to do here. This is a reimagining based on his lyrics. This opening track is our narrator, a teenager absolutely at the end of his tether. He's looking for anything to latch on to and get himself under control, but it is not happening. It's not hard to imagine the angry destructive sequences a video for this song would have.
There's a lot on this kid's mind as he gets on the bus to school, and he and his friends (not all sociopaths are loners) joke around about Dirty Frank the bus driver, saying that he's a serial killer and probably a cannibal. They don't seem to suspect what the main character of this story is up to. State Of Love & Trust was one of the first Pearl Jam songs I heard, as it was on the Singles Soundtrack that my roommate and I each bought. It's how I was introduced to Pearl Jam, Alice In Chains, The Smashing Pumpkins, Chris Cornell, Soundgarden, and Screaming Trees. The narrator is thinking of the awful things he's done, and listening to the voice inside (his) head. He's considering ending his own life instead of going through with massacring his school. And he decides to live. One of the voices that helps him get through the situation is from a girl he met when he was briefly institutionalized. He doesn't even know what her name is. They talked once. She told him about being abused by her father, and how when she lashed out, her mother had her committed. How her mother wants her to "get better" and go home, but Why Go back, knowing she'l just be abused again? She decides her version of "getting better" will be different. Neither he nor we ever find out what happens to her. But he loved her, and imagines being with her again, and that keeps him moving forward. "Why Go" fades beautifully into Black on both the original album, and this reimagining. Here the narrator imagines a romantic encounter with the girl from "Why Go", and gets flustered. So he goes outside to get some fresh air to clear his head. But it doesn't quite work, as he remembers that the second time he saw her, she didn't acknowledge him, and he doesn't know why. Wash is still walking outside. Still thinking. Still wishing. Still will he. Still won't he. Still hormonal response to girl he doesn't really know, and yet knows her most intimate secret. Still isn't sure anything he's ever done is right. Still. Still. Still walking. He reaches the school's Garden. How has he not run into everyone on his little walk around the school? How is he still thinking about this girl who probably hasn't thought of him in months? He decides the way back to her is violence. And he heads back towards the school. He reaches the Porch and uses a payphone (Hey, it's 1991 here), and checks the messages on his machine (ibid). There are none. He decides he's going to go for it. Go into the school and make the news. But he doesn't. The crux of this idea. The crux of the album. The video that changed how seriously kids myage watched videos was Jeremy, and in that video an abused kid decides to bring weapons to school and ends up killing himself in front of his horrified class. Things happen differently there. Our narrator isn't Jeremy, but he's in class with him. And they're not friends. But they're similar people. Only this Jeremy doesn't kill himself, but reads a story about killing himself in front of his class. I can't imagine that won't, at least, end up with him in the guidance counselor's office. He's not our concern, though. Jeremy goes off to live his best life. Meanwhile, the teen we've been following decides not to do anything. Today. Tomorrow is not a promise. But today, everybody lives. Nobody has to know what he never quite planned. The kid goes back to the porch after class, debates whether it would be worth getting in trouble if he smoked a cigarette, and decides against it. He's thinking about that girl again. He's imagining them meeting outside of the hospital. A beach would be great. Yellow Ledbetter has him pndering whether (he's) the boxer or the bag. He writes her off. In his head, of course. In real life, there's no real way to write off someone who probably hasn't thought of him. He grabs a bus, not a school bus, a city bus, to the beach to blow off some steam, and to Not Be Home. He needs to be on the beach so he can't hear her voice or her Footsteps in his head anymore. Instead, he ends up with the voice of his hospital assigned therapist talking to him. He confessed things to her that he wishes he hadn't but she'd been kinder than anyone else in the hospital. Still, she'd reported some things back to his family that he wishes she hadn't. He walks into The Ocean to be dramatic. Not suicide dramatic. Floating in the ocean dramatic. Thinking about her again dramatic. But it's deliberate now. It's not voices. It's not hoping for any actualization. He's just drifting, and letting his mind unravel. When I was in high school, my roommate had a mixtape from a friend called Windowsills. It was songs to listen to while being melodramatic and dreaming out a window. There were many references to suicide. And, while not being suicidal at all myself, I asked a bunch of people on my floor, what song made them think of suicide. That this didn't get me sent to a therpaist myself is remarkable. Deep was on my mix because it even references windowsills. For the purpose of this album, the kid is still in the ocean, diving down and swimming under water for as long as his breath holds. Then gasping back up into the air. Breath is not about the gasping in the ocean. But about going home. About having skipped the last half of school and being pretty sure his horrid parents know. It's about it now being past curfew and his not having even done anything bad. No violence. No alcohol. He didn't even smoke. Just cut classes to calm himself, and take a dip in the ocean. And then he just walked home instead of taking a bus. We leave him at the door, and see his father's view of the day Alone. His girlfriend has left him. Just like his wife left him. Because he's awful. And he knows he's awful. And he knows he's a lousy father. And he was an awful husband. And he might just be a awful person. And he walks around the town, and the beach, the same way his son did. And he saw him cutting class. And he saw him doing nothing destructive. And he went home. And he got there first. And he's just as suicidal. The story that the teenager told the therapist? He knows that his father is not his father. That the guy that's been poorly raising him is just some guy his mother married. Some guy that was better than his real father was. That his real father is no longer Alive, that he will never get a reconciliation there. He remembers the conversation with his mother. How she left. How she left him with the man who doesn't know how to raise him. The album ends here as the original album ends. Though I don't like how it flows out of "Alive", Release brings us to the kid sitting on a windowsill. (Which once again gets referenced in the song.) Once agan, he's considering suicide. He's considering the legacy of his dead father. He's considering the legacy of the man who's raising him. He's considering the mother who left, the stepmother who left, the father who left, the acting father who he wishes would leave. We don't get an answer about what happens to any of these people. We fade out to credits. Because it was the nineties, and everything was edgy and ambiguous, and dark.
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I respect the hell out of a good novelty band or artist. I was fourteen when my mother tried to convince me not to waste my money on Right Said Fred's album Up. When I first started hosting potry slams, the prize I gave to the last place finishers was a copy of the MC Skat Kat album. You know, the cartoon who danced with Paula Abdul in the "Opposites Attract" video. I love and fully support Weird Al Yankovic's near half-decade career of weird. But. But I can't listen to their music for too long. I haven't been able to listen to a full Yankovic album since probably the same year I bought into Right Said Fred. I'll occasionally hear and appreciate a new song by him, but I don't need to hear it again, or buy the album. Even the old albums that I loved and owned when I was younger. In many ways, They Might Be Giants is a novelty band. Their music is often fun, often weird, and sometimes written specifically for children or commercials. But, unlike other bands of their style, I do find myself wanting to sit down and listen to a full album of their work. But. But I don't like how they're structured. This is especially true of Apollo 18, which concludes with twenty-one songs between seven and thirty seconds. The brief songs are great, but, if they had to be grouped together, I'd rather have them at the beginning, as though you were flipping through commercials to get to the rest of the album. That's not what I've chosen to do here, though. Instead I've used those "Fingertips" songs to bridge the other tracks on the album. I think it gives the whole thing more cohesion, while maintaining some of the weird. I hope you appreciate it as much as I do. Start your space dreams young. Dream moongrab. Dream starwish. Dream astronaut. Dream aliens. Get your dreams into some science. Make your wishes improbably possible. Reach for stars. See The Constellations (I Walk Along Darkened Corridors). Rock out with your meteorite out. Dance a comet tail. Do that thing all teenagers do, where they imagine the citylights are constellations. Don't be original. Be a fun, familiar, weird. Not offputting. Celestial. This is such a fun mantra filled declaration of teenage wont. Grab it. Dance it around your room.
Some day mother will die, and I'll get the money. I Palendrome I (Hey Now Everybody) continues the weird. It's an insectile guitar. It's chirpy percussion. It's a chorus of crickets singing about snakes. I wish I could call it a lunar luau, but it's too cold. Too dancing in the vacuum of space. There's barely any air in this song, so don't waste any time breathing. It's all sci-fi in here as My Evil Twin (Who's That Standing At My Window) has a touch of brass in its montagey and only slightly sinister keyboards. I wish this was somewhere in the Leslie Nielsen movie Naked Space (aka The Creature Wasn't Nice), a movie which terrified me when I was six. Death is twangy. Death is punk background vocals. Death is wonk organs. Every time you call my name / I hear the angels sing. Death is Dig My Grave (Come On Wreck My Car). Death is two mercifully short songs stitched together. Everything comes down a notch. Dirgey. Circus dirgey. Bass-lickey. If I Wasn't Shy (All Alone), is a series of humdrum confessions that sound decreasingly fantastical. But you just want to snap your fingers to this tune, as you slowly walk down a darkened alley. Muppet vocals. George Takei promises. Superhero snippet song. Ohhhhhh. Spider (I've Found A New Friend) is the kind of bizarre that would have seemed right at home on Queen's soundtrack to The Flash. Leave Me Alone (Which Describes How You're Feeling All The Time) brings that circus vibe back. A carousel of conflcting constant feelings. Blissful nausea. Solipsism. Relgious questioning. Everything vague. But in rhyme. Which describes how you're feeling all the time. Ehhh. The intro is straight out of Rocky Horror Picture Show. Particularly Columbia from the Official Sountrack. And then, Brad takes the vocals for a song about The Fifty Foot Woman. (Someone Grab A Hold Of Me) She's Actual Size. It's a lovely sci-fi romp with a prominent brass section. (Mysterious Whisper) The Statue Got Me High is a climb not a trip. It's scrambling atop the fifty foot woman. The monumantal woman. The atomosphere explodes. (Who's That Knocking On My Door) Hypnotist Of Ladies infers that maybe that monumental woman used to be an actual woman, but she was hypnotized by some gross dude who is charming, but otherwise no damned good. If you're looking for more narrative in your TMBG songs, look no further than (What's That Blue Thing Doing Here) Turn Around. Oh, it's still a bit vague about what the narrative is trying to say, other than some interpretive dancing guy is pushed into a grave by his dancing instructor, and lands on a skull. Typical Thursday. Dinner Bell (I Heard A Sound) mentions what happend when you turn around, and then, the dinner bell rings. Have you ever had a parent with a literal dinner bell? Before cell phones, or pagers, even, my mother used to ring this ludicrously loud bell to get me to go home. When we moved (down the street and to the left), she gave the bell to the people who moved into our old house, and the mom in that family was crackers crackers and would ring that bell and screech for so long, parents offered their children money and video games to dress up as this woman's daughter and get her to shut the shut up. This song is not nearly as annoying as that. Ding Ding Ding!!! Romantic tropes were alread boring in the eighties. Gender norms were tired in the nineties. And tha narrator of this song doesn't want to be a traditional suitor, so he asks you (Aren't You The Guy Who Hit Me In The Eye) to Narrow Your Eyes, and see his love from a different perspective. Then they'll have a nice friendly breakup because their relationship is totally not working. After some brief lyrics from the parenthetical title, (I Hear The Wind Blow) Space Suit, we get a cool, sci-fi instrumental that really does sound a bit like how early-twentieth century writers who didn't understand space might imagine wind sounded in space. The reason I originally purchased this album was for The Guitat (I'm Having A Heart Attack / I Just Don't Understand You). I love this update of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" with its brass beat, its disaffected background vocals, and its enthusiastic lead vocalist. I epescially love its brass noise break, followed by the drums and guitar bridge. And it's lovely bass riff, of course. It's just a super fun happy song. But then it gets thrown into the subdued statements of everything going awry. (Everything Is Catching On Fire) Hall Of Heads is very very very Futurama. Or, rather, Futurama is very this song. The Hall Of Heads seen through a keyhole, then heads pitched at you whle you try and leave. Try not to picture Fry and Leela at some point. It can be done, but it's difficult. I drop the rest of the (Fingertips) songs here. There aren't that many, and they thematically link from one to the next before arriving at Mammal, which feels like a callback to the scientific research of "Why Does The Sun Shine" or "Why Does The Sun Really Shine". I'm unclear why this didn't end up on their Here Comes Science album. Closing out the album is more spy-themed eighties movie than sci-fi, but I really love the bouncy quality of Happiness Doesn't Have To Have An Ending. But the album does have to come to a close. Don't worry! There are plenty left. Thirty years ago, They Might Be Giants put out their first major label album, Flood. It's astounding. It's totally upbeat. It's weird, but not offputting. It would clearly make a great lover. But when you listen to the lyrics, it becomes something else. Anxiety. It's almost like one long panic attack. Sure everything seems inoccuous. But that's the thing. Almost anything anxiety inducing can seem innocuous. That's how it gets you. We open with the Opening Theme, naturally. But it quickly segues into Istanbul (Not Constantinople). Arguably their most timeless song. A surprisingly fantastic background tune for a doughnut store shootout, and help with a very basic trivia question. I'm imagining most people know this song. But if not, it's a cover of a Four Lads song with heavier drums, more modern sounding vocals, better production, and a slightly faster tempo, but otherwise, a faithful fun cover. A song to play at a party. A song you can dance awkwardly to. It's the only way to dance to it.
Man, if there was ever a song from the 1980s that rings true in the 2010s and 2020s, it's They Might Be Giants's Your Racist Friend. This could be the theme song for the very few parties I attend. It should be the anthem of so so so so so so so so so many people I know. It has a killer basic-bones guitar solo that leads into a festive trumpet solo. And it's just so consistently relevant. I think of the racist friend as Mister Horrible, who is also the lead character of Someone Keeps Moving My Chair. The chair is tolerance and basic human dignity, and the racist Mister Horrible keeps moving the chair (or goalposts) to get under the skin of the other people at the party. It's a technique that totally works on most people, as they get so frustrated at the constantly changing goalposts that they give up even trying to reason with Mister Horribles. In fact the frustration makes you feel like a returned bag of groceries. Or Dead tired. What were the people who witnessed the confrontation thinking of? Why didn't they intervene? Why didn't they warn you how awful that person would be? Or is it you? Oh god. Were you overreacting? No. No. Mister Horrible was a bigoted asshole. Why are you feeling bad about this? Ok. You need to stop isolating yourself and actually start antagonizing people like that. Or ... or will that make you like them? You're just going to have to stay home an only socialize with people you trust forever. You've still got this on my mind as you head back to your Minimum Wage job. A muzak based up-tempo carnival blah. Lucky Ball And Chain breaks through the instrumental. It's about realizing that the perfect person left you because you didn't have your shit together. You totally took them for granted while you were being your own mess of anxiety. Oh God. This happy album is just constantly battling the depression of every day life. Your inability to handle conflict or properly appreciate loved ones is ruining your life in totally avoidable ways. What are you doing with your life? The thing is ... the person who left you? She's not the most important in the world. You're not the most important person in her world. But she wants to see you again. Slowly Twisting. Life is constantly like this. People wanting imperfect things. It's okay to be imperfect. Not everyone can be stable. Oh sure, We Want A Rock to lash our life to. But it's not out there. Everything is a mess of jangly string instruments and Casio keyboards. Life is upbeat soft rock songs about how terrible life is, and how we always want what we don't have. It sounds relentlessly happy if you don't pay any attention to the lyrics. Scattershot xylophone and ringing Sapphire Bullets Of Pure Love will hit you if you're not careful. Love won't save you, though. Certainly not if you're imagining them as a violent explosion of gunshots. Best not to dwell on it for more than a minute and a half or so. It's best to just to try and be the best you you can possibly be, right? Isn't that what all self-help is really about. And your anxiety means you need help. But you don't want anybody else to help because you hate asking people for help, so self-help is the best way to go, right? It's not just Whisling In The Dark, is it? But what ... if ... you don't know which part of your self is the best part? Nevermind. Everything will be fine. Is fine. Whistling. Whistling. Dark. Dark. We take a break from your regularly scheduled anxiety to present some scientific facts. In this peppy number we explain Why Does The Sun Shine. Doesn't it feel great to talk about something you're an expert at that certainly won't ever be proven wrong. Science! Enjoy these permanent facts about the sun! Good work, Particle Man. Yeah, that's right. You used to get teased in school because you liked science. So many stupid nicknames. Oh, and you liked geometry. Why was everything you loved so derisible? Oh well. Don't dwell on the past. School if so far in your rearview. OH NO. It turns out that everything you knew about the sun has been proven wrong. The education system is constantly failing us because the present, on its way to becoming the future from sci-fi novels keeps presenting us with new information that helps us understand Why Does The Sun Really Shine. Ugh. Everything everything everything is always changing. How can you handle now without knowing how the future will change the prespective on what you've done? (You)'ll never know what you'll find When you open up your Letter Box tomorrow. Anxiety is so stressful. Sometimes you just want to put some bacon on the oven and walk away from your life without explanation. Hot Cha. The piano and the kick drums shake your shoulders as you imagine just escaping. Let's put on some traveling music, and sneak out this glass of bourbon and drink along to your new life as A Road Movie To Berlin. Oh dear. The bourbon is messing with your sense of self and reality. Everything is starting to sound weird. Your voice is hiccuping. There's some strange birdsong. The lyrics kaleidoscope. They could be important. Or They Might Be Giants. Boy. Put in your reality Hearing Aid and start trying to make sense of things again. Sober up. Go home. Or, at least, somewhere where people could use you. Oh no. Work. Ooof. Yea, that will sober you up. The job you're not paid enough to survive at, overseen by someone who doesn't know what they're doing, either. Is this some sort of weird The Bad Place type of deal you're living in? The music fades out. There is a constant drumming. An explosion of noise. A fuzzy guitar. Like, a fan blade or something? Something miniscule at work scrapes your brain. Then, you get distracted from the tedius fan blade by a procession of Women And Men who present you with positive reasons to keep going. At work. At your house. Everywhere you go. You're through it. You can make a Birdhouse In Your Soul. You can move on. Hooooooooooooooooooooooo. Not to put too fine a point on it. I was at a party in Allston in 2005 with Ben, when some wax mustached wannabe skateboard punk walked into the room, stood directly between me and Ben, and began talking about some band he'd seen puke in a similar basement a few weeks before. The subject of Beck's then new album, Guero, came up, and I said "I really like it. It's a little top heavy, but there aren't any songs I actively dislike." He made the thumbs down gesture with both hands. "'Hell Yes' is okay, but the rest of it? Nah. Nah. It's like Beck's dad music." I've seen that guy in the past couple of years, still riding his penny-farthing bicycle. Now with two kids in tow, probably named Smock and Duckfart, and like every other person who's ever seen that bicycle, they long to see it and its rider slowly crushed under a steamroller. I would argue that Guero is Beck's last full on fun album. The Scott Pilgrim Vs The World Soundtrack is a blast, but Beck's contribution is basically an EP, that I included on Midnite Vultures Afterparty. The lyrics are still inventive here, the music is mostly upbeat, and you could put it on the background of a party that wasn't quaalude themed. "Jackass" isn't even my favorite song on Odelay but the mariachi version, Burro, is a joyous fucken delight that I wouldn't deprive of any Beck fan. It helps set the unusual tone for this summer festive album.
A little radio and car transient noise builds into Rental Car, it has garage fuzz vocals and a nice distorted guitar riff. It's one of the few songs on the album that I couldn't tell you what it's about without actively looking at the lyrics. I can't sing along with it, apart from the yea yea yea and the la la la la la la la parts. But it keeps me moving quickly down the street when I'm listening to it. (It turns out to be a song about a rental car trip that seems like it will end in death.) So I guess it makes sense to transition it into Farewell Ride. It might be an alternate version of the previous song, but it's more Westerny. Clearer lyrics. Classic American harmonica and string arrangement. Horses in place of rental cars. Some may say this might be your last farewell ride. Emergency Exit continues the driving to death saga. It feels like another part of the previous track. The tempo barely changes, the instrumentation is similar. It's a little too much / To ask of faith it's a little late / To wait for fate /So tell the angels / What you seen / Scarecrow shadow / On Nazarene is not a terrible epitaph or Beck lyric to go out on. There is no bad place or bad album for that gorgeous intro lick to Loser to land. I know this is way late in the discography for this, the song that made him famous, but it just fits better on this album than any others. Though, I kind of want it on all of his albums. I remember arguing about the chorus in high school. "It's not nonsense, it's Spanish. Don't you take Spanish? How do you not know the word loser in Spanish? Isn't it what the teacher calls you when you scratch your head into piles of dandruff on your desk?" Get crazy with the Cheez-Whiz. Electric Music And The Summer People is a dance party classic that they never play. It's got the 70s danceability of "New Pollution" with a late 60s summer clean lyric sound, and some Odelay effects. That's what I like. The track spirals out into the top-heavy section of Guero. E-Pro is a banger. The first time I listened to this album played, I had to fight myself from just clicking the back button and listening to this again. This was a few years before it became apparent that Boston's WFNX was going to, like most good rock radio stations, disappear, and I would crank this every time it played. Suck it Penny-Farthing Bicycle Dad. Que Onda Guero is a joyous celebration of Latin American street festival summer days with classic Beck lyrics. Guero, being one of his childhood nicknames. The track closes with Guero being lightly teased as he walks by. I saw her, yeah I saw her with her black tongue tied / Round the roses / Fist pounding on a vending machine / Toy diamond ring stuck on her finger / With a noose she can hang from the sun / And put it out with her dark sunglasses /Walking crooked down the beach / She spits on the sand where their bones are bleaching / And I know I'm gonna steal her eye / She doesn't even know what's wrong / And I know I'm gonna make her die / Take her where her soul belongs /And I know I'm gonna steal her eye / Nothing that I wouldn't try / Hey, my sun-eyed Girl. Missing has me changing up my rhythm of my fast walking along with my boots full of rocks to this album. But it doesn't slow me down. It's the last of the tracks that were originally at the beginning of the album. Look, Penny Farthing Guy was a moron, but Hell Yes is one of the best songs on the album. And I thought that, even before I knew that the female vocalist is Cristina Ricci. It's definitely the song that most seems like it could have been on Midnite Vultures. Totally Confused, on the other hand, is pure Odelay, maybe even One Foot In The Grave. It's a downer folk ballad with a female backup vocalist. It certainly seems written by a younger Beck, one unsure about love, and one who expresses it directly instead of using fractured imagery to tell his story. We up the tempo back to "E-Pro" level with Black Tambourine. It's purely a slightly lighter version of that song, with less catchier lyrics. But with an oh-oh-ohhh that I just didn't want to leave off the album. Penny Farthing Guy might have been right about this track. Broken Drum is one of those songs that I love but never remember the name of. Or the lyrics. Unless I'm listening to it. In which case, I know all the words. It could have been from Sea Change as it's got sweeping sleepy riffs and vocals. Forget the Jack White appearance, Go It Alone is just a magic song to listen to. While it also has the instrumentation that recalls "E-Pro", it puts the vocals first in both the mix, and in importance. It's spare use of various effects before White crunches in with guitar, is *chef kiss*. Scarecrow dolphins into the previous song's fade out. It's also a lyric popping song. But it's much more upbeat, despite the nasally downer vocals. Closing out the album is Earthquake Weather, which hits us with a scratch, and some people talking in the background. It's another song that would have been at home on Odelay but is a welcome closer here, as it leaves us with effects instead of a fade out or a sharp vocal cutoff. If Odelay was a declaration of weird intent, and Mutations was a lament about how bad relationships can crumple you into a man-smelling ball, then Midnite Vultures Afterparty is the ridiculous dance party you use to shake the Bottle Of Blues away. The original Midnite Vultures is all weird, bubbly, and bright. I have excised the most repetitive of them, and replaced them with the fuzz bangers off of Scott Pilgrim Vs The World Sountrack, a couple of acoustic tracks from One Foot In The Grave, and the song from Sea Change that I accidentally left off of Mutations. I think it ends up making a more complex, but equally fun album. There are two tracks on Midnite Vultures that could start, end, or be placed on any album by Beck, and they're guaranteed hits. The original album starts with one of them, I've opted for the otheer. Debra is a lost Prince song. I would absolutely believe it, if Beck claimed that Prince wrote it for him. It's an all falsetto song about wanting to have a threesome with someone he met at JC Penny. And her sister. I think her name's Debra.
Mixed Bizness perfectly meshes the sound of Midnite Vultures with the lyricism of Odelay. Word up to the man thing / She's always cold lamping / Visine at the canteen / I just want to watch you dance. And it's hard not to dance to this ridiculous album with is beeps, blorps, and doo-dooo-doos. Our first scruffy garage song is Threshold, which proudly lets you know where the beginning of the song is while fuzzing the fuzz out of some fuzzy guitar. It's technically by fictional band, Sex Bob-omb, but Beck wrote it, and he performs the fuzz out of it. On rethinking this album, there are actually three songs that could be hits, and can work as any part of the album. Get Real Paid is a mellow banger which closes with the often missung, rarely understood line, Touch my ass if you're qualified. Summertime is another Sex Bob-omb song With my peacock hands and my tangerine skulls / And my grizzly bear face and my voice from Target. It doesn't make me fondly recollect any summers of my youth, or invoke what scene in the movie it was from, but it is a fun sing-along fuzzy song. I've included the first third of Milk & Honey as it has a nice progressive rise from the previous track into Sexx Laws! The other surefire hit song. Only prudes and depraved, in-denial Republican Senators don't sing along to this absolute classic about sexual freedom. Let me your chaperone / to the halfway home / I'm a full grown man / but I'm not afraid to cry-y-y-y-y is one of my all-time favorite lyrics. When Beck was but a wee youngin' in 1994, he dropped not one, not two, but Three albums. And out of those albums, only one track made the radio. Mighty Good Leader is not that song. It's an acoustic sneery dirge off of One Foot In The Grave that's actually a cover of a Skip Jones blues song. I think early folk Beck is important, but not enough that anyone should be forced to listen to a whole album of it. But this is one of two songs from that era that I absolutely love. Then we get back to the bloop bleep fun part with Pressure Zone, a song I never paid much attention to from the original Midnite Vultures album but which I find much stronger than some of the songs I used to know all the lyrics to. I don't know how I managed to leave Golden Age off of Mutations, but I actually like that it was available to pop onto this album. It's a classic downtempo Beck ballad, and it's nice to have one well-produced ballad to mix in with the fuzz mantras, the bloopy bleep pop, and the acoustic doldrums. I'll feed you fruit that don't exist / I'll leave graffiti / Where you've never been kissed / I'll do your laundry / Massage your soul / I'll turn you over / To the highway patrol. I love Nicotine & Gravy. I can't explain why. Another fun song that I absolutely adore is the Sex Bob-omb anthem Garbage Truck, which doesn't at all remind me of that time I got caught in a couch. Peaches & Cream is a song that falls somehwere between "Debra" and "Nicotine & Gravy", so I've edited it down to just the first verse because I didn't want to entirely lose the way Beck shouts Peaches and creeeeeeeeam! The first time I heard Beck's Asshole*, it was being covered by Tom Petty on the She's The One Soundtrack. I love both versions equally. Closing out the album is another Sex Bob-omb song. There are two versions of Ramona on the Scott Pilgrim Vs The World Soundtrack but I prefer the more orchestral version that appears here. It's a sweet little lament for a truly magical girl. * - If you hold Beck's Asshole to your ear, you can hear Rick James singing the chorus to Sexx Laws There are those who will tell you that Beck's Mutations and Sea Change are two masterpieces. And the thing is, if you're really sleepy, or want to be really sleepy, they're both good albums. But, at the end of the day, you can cut off some detritus, and end up with a sweet, and varied, low-tempo album that is also fun to quietly sing along to (there are loud sing alongs on other albums). The only track that I really like that I ended up cutting off of this is "Golden Age", which will likely show up on another album. When I was talking with a friend about the most recent Beck albums (Colors and Hyperspace), she mentioned that she really enjoyed the first single from Hyperspace because it was upbeat. Lyrically, maybe, but it's got a snoozy rhythm, which is fine, but which I don't consider "upbeat". This is a downbeat album. And I've arranged it as such. I've tried to give it some variety via musical influences and instruments, since the whole album has a despairing feel. I think this is a good song to listen to when you're at home, sad, and not looking to get happy any time soon. It's okay to have days like those. And I hope this works as a worthwhile soundtrack for those times. As a bridge to Odelay, we're starting this off shoulder shaking with some low key white folk rap Elevator Music. Slipshod rhyming lyrics and background whats. Keyboard chintzes over actual piano. Busy signal percussion.
We're lulled to the country honkytonk piano of Cancelled Check, a breakup song for the end of a friendship with a rotten egg. / It's crystal clear your time is nearly gone. It's nice when someone breaks up with a friend, and not a romantic partner. Sorry, bucko, you're a pain in the neck. There's also some interesting background moaning before the final chorus. Your sorry eyes cut through the bone / They make it hard to leave you alone / Leave you here wearing your wounds / Waving your guns at somebody new / Baby you're lost / Baby you're lost / Baby you're A Lost Cause. A great moving on song. That friend who done you wrong? Sure, you still care about them, but you can't spare the energy without ruining yourself. So you're going to stop ruining yourself and wave goodbye. And even though you were hurt, you can't point all your fingers at your former friend. It's Nobody's Fault But (Your) Own. When the road is full of nails / Garbage pails and darkened jails / And their tongues / Are full of heartless tales / That drain on you / Who would ever notice you / You fade into a shaded room. The strings saw away at your heart. And when you're on a roll, Sing It Again. For those moments when you just want to be alone to think about how everything ended badly, but at least they ended. Right? The imagery is a bit more straight-forward than Odelay Beck, but sometimes you don't have the energy to be all cryptic-like, y'know? Just pull out your harmonica and blow a melancholy blues. We stay solidly in country piano territory with O Maria, everybody knows the fabric of folly / is falling apart at the seams. This is a sing-along song in a sad country bar anywhere along the timeline. It blows a horn solo. It na na na na nas Then we get some robot twang country. Cold Brains / Unmoved / Untouched / Unglued. This is one of those, I guess upbeat, downtempo songs about depression that harmonicas against an optimistic bassline and then throws some more effects at you until you wonder if you maybe ate some edibles before you laid down. If "Cold Brains" was a charcoaled portrait of general sadness, Lonesome Tears paints some watercolor over it. It's more about getting beyond a relationship using questions than "getting over" a relationship by finding answers. If the lyrics were a computer language, it'd be Basic, but it's a pretty simple that then ramps out with some Beatles White Album style effects. Bottle Of Blues was the song that convinced me that soft Beck was still good Beck. For some reason, I just picture by him by a lake or a river, with a band floating on a nearby dock, singing this song about how he's just generally sad about how he has unrequieted love for someone he probably doesn't even know very well. It's still nobody's fault. But now it's not even really directional like a tired soldier / with nothing to shoot. (And now I'm picturing Neil Patrick Harris saluting, and saying "General Malaise!") If Little One is a lullaby for a child, it's a depressing listen. I like to think that "Little One" is one of his shorter friends. This previously unmentioned friend was listening to the last few Beck songs, and tells Beck that he's bringing him down, and Beck plays this little ditty expressing his emotions. And the friend rolls over and goes to sleep, knowing that Beck is going to keep Becking. All the country influence is ok, but Beck is going to get more various influences, so for now let's go somewhere between Jimmy Buffet Florida and steel drum Carribean music with Tropicalia. Beck gets outside of himself so that he can watch what depressed Beck looks like from the outside. Misery waits in vague hotels / to be evicted. That slightly upbeat track might give you the feeling that you Guess (You're) Doing Fine. You can be sad and still be healthy. I bade a friend farewell / I can do whatever pleases me. What a nice sentiment to end a sad album on. I'm not great, but I'm fine. Except it wouldn't be true would it? "Guess I'm Doing Fine" was still a sad ballad. Fine is a low, low bar. It ain't happiness. It's Static. We end on this acknowledgement that we might someday we'll be able to laugh about the sadness we're currently feeling, but that doesn't mean we aren't allowed to be sad now. One of my favorite artists at the turn of the millennium, both when I was a 90s kid, trying to avoid the Kid Rockification of rock, and when I was depressed in Burlington, Vermont, looking for some smooth ballads, was Beck. The two of us were always on the same page. When I was happy, Beck was happy, when I needed to sit in my room and write about love, he was there to croon about how awful it was. Then, at some point in the 2010s, he lost me. I still enjoyed the way his mind works, but he'd entered the 80s Bob Dylan phase of his career. There were still some interesting tracks, but it was mostly just mediocre singer songwriter tunes that didn't live up to his earlier work. Today, at work, I saw an article about how the new Beck album was very good again. Not a masterpiece, the writer suggested, but no longer just mid-tempo melancholia. So I bought the album, and I'll be toying with that and his more recent albums in the next couple of days. Until then, I'll share my reimagined albums from him. Beck is another artist, where I'm less concerned with chronology, and more with how an album sounds together. I'm going to alternate between the more playful albums, and the more sweeping lowkey albums. And there will be many fewer of them than there are actual Beck albums. You're bored with music. All the rock on the radio sounds like Kurt Cobain is dead, and everyone's raiding his vault. The boy bands are cracking out of their Faberge eggs. Alternative rock makes no more sense. U2 is alternative. Kid Rock is alternative. Green Day is alternative. Marilyn Manson is alernative. Oasis is alternative. Pavement is alternative. Blink 182 is alternative. None of this makes sense to you. Country is almost alternative music as Garth Brooks goes pop, and Shania Twain exists. All the straight up pop is anthemic white ladies or young blonde Mouseketeers. Every R&B song on the radio is either fighting about a guy, hating on a guy, or remembering that Biggie and Tupac are dead. This does make sense, but sometimes you're in a rock mood, and that's what's disappointing you.
That guy who had the song that people didn't understand the lyrics to drops an album with The Dust Brothers, and, ohhh, this doesn't make sense, but in a Glorious way. Heads are hanging from the garbageman trees / Mouthwash, jukebox, gasoline, / Pistols are pointing at a poor man's pockets / Smiling eyes with 'em out of the sockets. Please. Please more. Devil's Haircut has no bullshit for you. Drum loop background growlers high hat a horn that sounds like a mosquito singing through an elephant's trunk. Scream the chorus at the end. Then another scream before the twang of aphorisms and geee-tar, Lord Only Knows why this title track isn't called by the album title's name as it Odelays into a Titanic hammock. Don't call us when the new age gets old enough to drink. A rare fade out. Whistling a tune of country inertia when my neck is broken / and my pants ain't getting no bigger. The emergency broadcast system for line dancers? Sissyneck has the toe touch down to the rhinestone boots. Sweet chorus harmony. Pretends he doesn't care about your problems. Wails over congos. There's a vinyl hiss. Empty boxes in a pawn shop brain. Spare spare and breakdown. Guitar out of nowhere turns elevator music and the elevator is stuck forever. Twang that mouth harp. Pick that guitar like it's Readymade. High 5 [Rock The Catskills] hip hops techno. Samples samples vocal fuzz music stops and starts like who is directing the symphony for this silent film? Rap verse. Screamy chorus. Shaming breakdown then bring back the music. Say oooooo la la. Bring it down. String an alternative (there it is there's that word that stupid nonsense doesn't describe any music I've ever heard label) lullaby. Something's in the way of this slightly countrified every 90s downtempo Ramshackle lament. Your train's in the sand / Ramshackle land /Let the rats watch the races. From silence, a blues riff country. I like pianos in the evening sun. Truly, the sequel to the first hit that doesn't appear on the album. Spanish chorus untranslated. Harmonica solo metal. Boop your beep in a gleep gleep record scratch. Hotwax residues / you never lose in your razorblade shoes. says The Enchanting Wizard Of Rhythm. Tom Waits drags a set of junkyard windchimes through a swamp, shooting venom at the passersby. Derelict Dylan steals a sitar packed a suitcase and threw it away. Passes the cashed song to the left. An organ will see you out, folk. Disco the funk into some colored lights and dance your chaos to The New Pollution. Alternawhat? Alternawho? Saxaphone in the alternawhich. Keyboard jangle. She's got a paradise camouflage / Like a whip-crack sending me shivers / She's a boat through a strip-mine ocean / Riding low on the drunken rivers. Let your chaos wind down to sway. Novacane is back to samples and simple strings. Wait, no. Harmonica and buzz guitar. Wait, no. Disco hook. No, wait. Keep on talking like a Novocaine hurricane / Low static on the poor man's short-wave. Radio jumps into Beastie Boy fuzz. Scratch the record. Change the channel. This chaos. This buzzsaw. This Moog? This tonal atonal. This Daft Punk is listening. This wind down stereo out. Tropicalia melancholia. I've been drifting along in the same stale shoes. / Loose ends tying the noose in the back of my mind. Is none of this album actually the happy the music makes? Somber bombast. Bob Dylan harmonica. Beck beck bob. Beck beck dust. Donkey donkey donkey. Jackass. Record hiss skip. Record hiss. Needle down. Sweet sweet samples and tones are Where It's At. That was a good drum break. Here we go here we go Nirvana 90s. Alternathis, I guess. Grunge Minus vinyl pops. It's a sensation / A bankrupt corpse / In the garbage classes / With the crutches of frogs / Frogs! Frogs! Frogs! Fizzle. Twang. Out. Ween fandom is sketchier than Saturday Night Live. I can not, in good conscience, recommend anyone get Really Into Ween. They're a band that I won't think about for years, and then someone will mention a word that shows up in one of their songs, and that song is stuck in my head for a week. Very rarely are they songs I would ever sing in public. I didn't know about Ween until I lived in a house full of drug dealers in Vermont. I was not a drug dealer, I was barely a casual drug user. But rent was cheap, the room was offered to me, and they were all, in addition to being drug dealers, creative and interesting people with a variety of non-drug centered jobs. Also, all but one of them only dealt weed, nobody was breaking down our doors with submachine guns for bananas and blow. After about six months living in the house, I needed to take a trip to Chicago, and was not looking forward to Greyhounding it. As ... luck ? would have it, one of my roommate's girlfriends (as in "my many roommates were all dating people", not "one of my roommate's various girlfriends") was on her way to Columbus, Ohio, where I would still have to grab a bus, but I would be on it for ten fewer hours. The thing was ... she and two of her friends were going to see a band I didn't know much about, Ween. But they weren't just three random people going to see a rock show ten hours away from home, they were three white girls who were dressing up as geishas to go see a band ten hours away. Even in 2000, I was, like "Naaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah." But I needed the ride. The ride kinda sucked, and I should have just taken the bus. But before the trip, I decided to bone up on Ween. Three of my four roommates had Ween records. Not CDs, not tapes, records. So I got to listen to them on Vinyl, hook them up to my cassette deck / CD player, and record my own mix, pretty much precisely as I do with these Reimagined Discographies, but decidedly more lofi. Ween is ... not always my thing. They're super talented, but they try on different genres of music like they're pairs of shoes at a used clothing shop. Some consistently work, some work sporadically, and some tracks I bowed out of superquick. One of their hooks is Shock Humor. Which is not my thing at all. But a bunch of their music overcomes it, or is just falsely shocking. There's a track I'll get to in the description that has a sweet origin, but sounds like it's tacky. And then there are some tracks that ARE tacky or problematic as Adam Corolla's fetid (that's a thought not worth completing). Some of their tracks are tacky or problematic. With one exception, I've only included offensive tracks that are targeted at a demographic I'm part of. And there's only one that is a diss track. It's filled with anti-gay terminology in its lyrics, but Ween isn't anti-gay or homophobic, they were a couple of party-focused music nerds with queer friends who filled a song with deliberately outdated stereotypes and put it to catchy music. I will totally understand if you hate it / never want to listen to it. But if it were hateful, I would be the person the song was targeting, and I think it's too ridiculous (and non-threatening, or I wouldn't bother with it) to be taken seriously, and the music is a joy. We'll start with a song you could play out in public, provided someone wasn't listening too too closely to the lyrics. There are no swears, no overt sexuality (I mean, it's all about sex, but in a radio friendly way). Voodoo Lady is just a really catchy dance track about ... ummm ... is it about being pegged? That tracks. It does use the word voodoo, which could be viewed as appropriation, but it doesn't attempt to talk about voodoo, it just uses it as an adjective frequently used in rock classics. It's dancey as jitter. (Triggers: somewhat subtle reference to being pegged, innuendo, geographically prejudice suggesting that someone might "make love" to gators.)
12 Country Classics is probably my favorite Ween album. They really nail the country sound, musically, and somewhat thematically, while deliberately getting the words completely wrong in often, but not always, delightful ways. Don't Shit Where You Eat My Friend is a profane song filled with good advice. Who doesn't need one of those in their life? And then there's a little surf acoustic rock tacked on the end. Yee-ha? (Triggers: the word "shit" is in the title so there's naughty language but they're not actually talking about eating shit, so it's not as gross as the title might have you fearing.) The band goes all grungey both musically and vocally for I Can't Put My Finger On It, perhaps, the best song ever about not being able to identify why you do or don't like a gyro. (Triggers: fuzzed out vocals, it's totally inoffensive.) Ok. I get why you wouldn't trust an often provocative band to put out something called The HIV Song. I totally understand. But I read an interview where either Dean or Gene Ween talked about living in New York City, and having most of their friends be queer members of the theater and music communities, and how watching them get sick and die was terrifying. They coped by cutting a ridiculously circus jingle where the only lyrics are the alternating HIV and AIDS at the end of each instrumental verse. Is it weird? Yes. Is it offensive? No. (Trigger warning: if the words "HIV" and "AIDS" offend you just by existing, this song is super not for you. But there's no commentary about it at all, there are just those two words blandly said at the end of instrumental verses.) There's a late 70s / early 80s funk vibe melded with 90s alternative rock in Exactly Where I'm At that I love. It's a song about dealing with fame. There are no trigger warnings for this song. It's totally safe to play in public. Take Me Away is more funk-infused alternative rock. It's a generic, misogyny tinted song. And, by misogynic, I mean in the way pretty much all bland rock and R&B and disco and funk and country and opera and folk and polkas and rap songs can be misogynist. A guy asks to be taken away from a girl that's "driving him crazy". That's it. No objectivity, or name calling, or insults. He never calls her "crazy". He is just driven crazy because of unrequited love. (Trigger warning: If you're the kind of person who finds the casual use of "crazy" as ableist and unlistenable, you should already be ten miles away from this album.) Just the title Waving My Dick In The Wind tells you whether or not you're probably in the right frame of mind to listen to the song, right? It's a take on Mr. Bojangles, where, presumably, the dance move involves waving genitalia in appreciation of someone you love. (Trigger warning: the title, getting old sucks.) The most offensive song on the album is almost definitely Mister Richard Smoker. It's a series of dated references to homosexuality. It's just 2:30 seconds of telling someone who is out and gay that they're out and gay. But in dated language. It makes no judgement. But it sets it to country blues piano and strings. Why? Who. Knows. But it's delightful. (Trigger warning: It's easy to see this as homophobic based on the terminology, even though there are no slur words, just slur terminology like "poopy poker" and "velvet coker". Terms not at all meant to be taken seriously.) Another country twang song that is lyrically weird but thematically country is the hangover jamboree Help Me Scrape The Mucus Off My Brain. The most problematic part of the song is the sound of the word "mucus", so if you can handle that word, you'll be fine. (Trigger warning: He spent the dog food money. Also, he's totally hungover.) You are well within your right to skip Spinal Meningitis. It's a type of song that Ween has done a few times, but this is the only one I've included. It's a dark alternative / new wave brood with creepy child voiced verses and a draggy chorus. It's guitar riff at the end comes out of nowhere. Like many an 80s metal riff. (Trigger: spooky child voiced lyrics about dying.) If Jimmy Buffet collaborated with Ween ... what's that, you're leaving? Come Back! ... it would have produced the steel-drum tropical dance song Bananas And Blow. This is the Ween song that most gets stuck in my head. (Trigger warnings: drugs are bad, kid. This song is less blatant and offensive than Eric Clapton's "Cocaine" or, literally, anything by The Weeknd.) Happy Colored Marbles is incredibly reminiscent of the music of "Bananas And Blow". It's actually from the very limited Weendow of time after I stopped listening to Ween but before they stopped producing new music. It's a song about not "losing your marbles" but temporarily giving them away when you don't want to deal with them. Either way, its lyrics are entirely unproblematic. This is another song that it's completely okay to play in public, though the end gets instrumentally heavy and plodding. The lyrics are fine. No trigger warning. Another song to completely judge by the title is Flies On My Dick. The singer has a partner that wants to do drugs with him but doesn't want to fuck, hence the title. In the end, he "knows what (he) must do" and jerks off. (Trigger warning: Sex references, the word "dick" is right there in the title. But he never judges the person for not having sex with him.) Do you need a country song satirizing the trope of asking a partner to leave because she's a nag? Do you need it filled with mild mostly radio friendly profanity until the chorus which includes the "B" word? You really don't but I still like this song. Piss Up A Rope is filled with deliberately misogynist language. It's satire, but it's not gentle satire. (Trigger warning: Country songs are often misogynist, particularly when they try and be funny songs about the end of relationships. Objectification. Suggestions that the person have sex with them if they want to stay. The words "shit" and "bitch".) Much the way you can imagine their country songs are legitimately country musicians singing heartfelt lyrics, Don't Get 2 Close 2 My Fantasy could definitely be confused for a Bowie-derivative New Wave band sincerely singing about a father advising his son about one of their deaths ? (Trigger: Some people think this song is about molestation. I think that's a difficult leap to make, but it's not completely out of nowhere.) Transdermal Celebration is another "past my time" Ween song that I like. It sounds like Stone Temple Pilots singing about crustaceans growing out of their shells. So ... maybe it's about the band outgrowing the reputation they achieved from their Mollusk album? No triggers. Dean Ween is one half of the band. So Gene Ween sings about What Deaner Was Talking About. A song that seems to me to be about anxiety and having your first panic attack, which someone close to you has told you about, and now you get what they meant. But that's a stab in the dark. It's not a very direct song about anything. No triggers, which is kind of surprising for a song about panic attacks. Ween's only actual hit was Push The Little Daisies, a vocally tweaked song about death and girls where the lead singer sounds like Cartmen, even though the song predates "South Park" by five or six years. While it's definitely their biggest hit, it's not even close to their best song. But it's fun. (Triggers: The lead singer sounds like Eric Cartmen.) Casual misogyny is the basis for the music industry. Seriously. It just it. Pandy Fackler is a song about loving a prostitute. Not saving a prostitute. Not degrading her. Just mentioning that she's a working girl. It does also suggest she's either homeless or high enough to eat cotton candy from a garbage can. It doesn't frame it as being gross. The music is keyboard pop. (Trigger: one of the lyrics is "sucking dick under the promenade" which is a ridiculous phrase.) When I made the original version of this mix back in 2001, I was making it from vinyl, so I was able to play with speeds, so I recorded Drifter In The Dark at its original speed for the first two verses, and then bumped it up a speed so the main vocals were pitched fast, but the echo vocals were at normal speed. The actual version has the main vocals at regular speed, with echo vocals slowed down. I prefer hearing the song both ways, but I don't have either a record player or this record to recreate it. (Triggers: vocals played at the wrong speed.) Buenos Tardes Mi Amigo is a Western film sung from the perspective of a Mexican character. I don't know Michael "Mickey" Melchiondo (Dean Ween)'s nationality. He could be Latino. But this is definitely a put-on accent comparable to what you'd hear in an American Western (or Spaghetti Western) film. You could see this ending up on the second Kill Bill soundtrack. It's perfect in its faithfulness to the genre. And it's a cool narrative. I forgot most of the lyrics. The second time I listened to it this year, I was at work (after the store was closed) and said "Don't poison the chicken!" to the song, which my coworker overheard, and, as she wasn't listening to the lyrics, had no idea what I was talking about. (Trigger: fake Mexican accent in service of genre.) I don't have to understand Freedom Of '76 to like it. It's vaguely about how fake and awful America is without making any controversial statements? (Triggers: falsetto. "Mannequin was filmed at Woolworth's.") Japanese Cowboy has one offensive line that it repeats three times. Hands down. Yeup. It's ungentle satire where the lead singer talks about things that ain't right. One of them is the title, the other is brothers on skates, which was a shitty 90s joke about the whiteness of hockey, but I prefer to imagine is about how weird it would be to see a monk figure skating. If you cut out the two references I've mentioned, this is a perfectly wonderful country satire song. But I guess that's the hook, that country is a problematic genre. (Triggers: already mentioned. It's a shitty repeated line.) This mix ends with another song post-my time listening to Ween. Hey There, Fancypants is delightful. It is non-problematic. It's also not a ballad. I know I usually end albums on a mellow fade out, but since most Ween songs are, at their core, honest but surfacely insincere, I decided to end on a nice, bouncy song about how soul crushing it is to be a performer. As you might have guessed from the month long intermission, I wasn't especially stoked to go through the final phase of REM. Up came out during my Must Buy Every CD From Every Artist I Love phase of my 20s, and I listened to it repeatedly, trying to will myself to like it more. I had recently transitioned out of working in a record store an into working in a chocolate store, and had also started blogging / sending out e-newsletters to fans. My very first one mentioned listening to this album while waiting for a manager to unlock the shop. I believe I referenced trying to slit my wrists with a crisply folded dollar bill. The blogs got happier. The REM albums did not. Reveal never appealed to me. I bought it, I listened to if a couple of times, and then I forgot about it. So much so, that it turns out that I never uploaded it to my computer, and have just now realized that there are no tracks from that album at all represented here. That's ... fine. I do remember enjoying "All The Way To Reno", as well as "Bad Day" from their Greatest Hits around this time. But I didn't miss them when I put this together, so I'm not going to redo the album. I thought Around The Sun was okay, but it felt like the way I feel when I'm done writing something, feel content, then look at it and think "Oh God, I've already written this before. And I wrote it much better back then." It feels a bit like a B or C-side release. I appreciated Accelerate's return to early REM rock sound, but after a few tracks, the songs started to sound the same, just A Better Same than the previous two albums. And while I've included some songs from that album that I really enjoy listening to, I couldn't quote a single lyric. I didn't even know Collapse Into Now had come out, nevermind that it was the band's final album, until one of the songs came up on a friend's playlist in the car. This is no fault of REM, 2011 was not my favorite year. But Collapse Into Now, while never going to be in contention for my favorite REM album, certainly felt more like one of their classic albums than the preceding three. I don't want to give the impression that this reimagined album doesn't have its own unique sound. It does. I think it holds together nicely, and I like it much better than I imagined I would. But most of my descriptions are going to be talking about which previous album I think it would fit well on. This is both an attempt to be helpful to REM fans who couldn't stick with it, and also as a bit of an homage to their final album, which was a deliberate attempt to revisit certain eras of their history. I thought that was a cool conceit. REM came back soft and grieving from their diminishing. Reviewers dubbed their new sound "keyboard farts" and it was easy to hear the whole album as a dirge. I don't want that feel. So I'm starting with one of my favorite rockers from their later work, Horse To Water. It's got the upbeat guitar of Monster if you squeegeed all the grunge off and tried to toss it gently back to Fables Of The Reconstruction.
Alligator, Aviator, Autopilot, Antimatter is "Shiny, Happy, People" if it didn't suck. The lyrics are delightfully early REM, the background vocals are punk rock, the guitars have picked up a little bit of the grunge that was shed from the previous track. It's fast, loud, and joyous, without feeling cloying. I guess if I were going to put it on an earlier REM album, I would have to slice it in half Solomon style, and send it back to Green and Chronic Town. Those two tracks were heavily influenced by their earliest work, but as I mentioned, their first two post-Berry era albums were more Automatic For The People / New Adventures In Hi-Fi but with drum machines and keyboards. It's not my favorite era by a long stretch, but there were some good tracks on those albums, including Electron Blue. Stipe's vocals are further up in the mix on these first two albums, which I quite enjoy. I understand that pushing his vocals back make the rock tracks feel more retro, but I enjoy how the reverb on vocals like this one make you feel like you're at a concert, and the vocals are hitting you at different times from different speakers. Outsiders is a song that just sounds like the album it's from, Around The Sun. Doubled vocals and Stipe harmonizing with himself usually doesn't work for me, but he nails it here. There's a breakdown, and then Q-Tip sets down a verse. It's not my favorite rap verse on a rock song by a long stretch, but it's 1,000% better than KRS-One on "Radio Song". A piano ballad? On an REM album? No. Hollow Man's acoustic piano intro quickly waves back and forth between piano and guitar soft rock. It does sound like a re-recording of something off of Green with better production value. Blue definitely could have worked from the Automatic For The People era. It's got Stipe doing spoken word over guitar and effects before Patti Smith, who also appeared on "E-Bow The Letter", has her vocals crawl over his poetry. Crawling is also how Lotus arrives. A wriggly, vocally doubled shimmy that definitely would have felt at home on Automatic For The People. This was the song from Up that made me hold out hope for what would become the slow wind-down of REM's career. It's a sad song about being happy again. Haven't you noticed? I don't know where I'd put It Happened Today in the spectrum of previous REM albums. Maybe Murmur. Sure Stipe's voice is gruffer, and Buck and Mills are more masterful than jangly, but this track definitely has an experimental flair that a lot of their later work didn't bother with. A drum track and a jangly guitar and an echoey keyboard set this solidly in Monster territory. Suspicion could be "Tongue"'s mature sibling. It's occasional surfish guitar is also a great feature, a trick that the band rarely uses, but which always feels welcome. Supernatural Superserious brings the rock guitar back. This song could really have come from almost any REM album except Automatic For The People and Up. It feels like a song they sat on for years, while also sounding 21st century fresh. We are dropped back into New Adventures In Hi-Fi with Boy In The Well. The acoustic guitar line is fantastic. The drums are played loud, but set back in the mix. The keyboards fade forward and back, while Stipe's vocals sit clearly in the center. A slightly different mix would make this feel ethereal, but I think its refusal to go full Ballad while only having half a foot in rock works really well. If I were a slightly bigger jerk, Diminished would have been the title track for this album. It works for both quantity of band members, and overall quality for their last four albums. But 3/4 Time is mean enough. This feels very Document to me. I do love the effects laid over strings, and the more prominent than usual bass. "Diminished" has a false ending and an acoustic hidden track actual ending that works as a perfect bridge to At My Most Beautiful, the piano ballad that "Hollow Man" threatened to be. This is another clear Automatic For The People throwback. The background doo doo doo doo vocals are a perfect accent to another sad song about being happy and in love. This was in consideration for final track of the album, as it, too, has a false ending, and a satisfying fade out. But ... Discoverer gives us a booming bass drum that has been long absent from REM's catalogue. This is Chronic Town all day and night, and I love it. I didn't want the back half of the album to feel like a complete wind-down, and this is a nice pick up in tempo. If you don't consider Uberlin, "Drive (Part Two)", then I don't know how to talk to you about this song. It just feels like it's "Drive"'s sequel, if it had been placed on New Adventures In Hi-Fi. It's more uplifting, but it's all about the Hey now that made "Drive" so catchy. The album closes out with the band's first post-Berry era single, Daysleeper. I didn't know if I liked this song when I first bought the album. I was worried that this Automatic For The People happy maudlin was going to be the new normal for REM, and while it was for a while, they did eventually evolve out of it so much that I found myself really enjoying this song. The most recent two Radiohead albums, as they are, King Of Limbs and Moon Shaped Pool are underwhelming. Each of them contains some good songs, but there is no urgency in the way they're laid out. Whereas Hail To The Thief and In Rainbows felt like long trips with no maps, and no certainty of destination, King Of Limbs and Moon Shaped Pool feel like standing still and waiting for something to happen. Let's harness that lack of energy. Let's turn it to nervous fuel. Let's daydream a story where place is more important than plot. Let's stand still and listen to the wind and the traffic fight to be the sky's melody. Let's draw ourselves a nice warm bath in the middle of a busy intersection. Let's see what the future holds when we refuse to move or be moved. Hey / it's me is not Yorke starting his probably amazing cover version of Adele's "Hello". It's the beginning of Glass Eyes. Yorke is getting off a train. We have traveled some distance from the previous album's contradictory post-relationship love songs. We are at the beginning of something new, something very unsure.
The drums rise through the sweetness, and Yorke isn't sure if this new experience is maybe just a ... yea ... it's probably also a dream. Separator continues the questioning of the future of a relationship. He's falling out of bed, off of birds, out of water, out of dreams, open. He's falling. Falling. Even as the music seems to rise around him like a drizzle filling a bathtub. This is absolute chant mantra soft rock tableau. Floating in the aforementioned tub, which is also the sky, which is blood, which is the arms of someone new. Don't Give Up The Ghost echoes and whispers. It mutters to itself while looking you in your eyes. It wants you to know that it doesn't know what it wants. It mutters to itself while looking you in your eyes to tell you that it doesn't feel safe looking into your eyes. It doesn't trust you. It lays itself at your feet. Deck's Dark is helpless to resist. We know nothing about the You or the Us in this album apart from You is cruel. Yorke is a toy. You monster. Yorke chewed. You laughter at Yorke's expense. The song chimes and warbles, casting chunks of the story away. We crumble. Yorke crumbles. You crack Us open like a fortune cookie, without examining what's inside. Desert Island Disks is a podcast that a friend has recommended to me. And Yorke has appeared on it. You know the drill. You're trapped forever on a desert island with a limited amount of music what do you take with you? Why is it always music or movies or books? Who are the people? What are the buildings you'd take? What mountain ranges? What flavors of ice cream? What emotions do you cast to the boiling sea? You wake up on a desert island. Where did You fall asleep? Who would hate You enough to leave You here, but love You enough to give You music? Why a desert island? Surely deserted islands could be lush with grass. Could be all pools and mountains. Is the island just part of this terrible dream of Us? An ocean steals the sand and crushes it to the muck of seafloor. The sun steals the water from the salt to create clouds to hide behind. The clouds leak fresh water on the sand. This is the trickling of chimes from salt crystals. This is the shimmer of the freshest water. This is The Numbers raining down on Us. A humid drench of math. Not a storm. A slow deluge. This is opening your mouth to the sky to try and drown yourself, only to find the flavor of life delicious. You may pour us away like soup. The tape warps. The film hits a melted frame. We are trapped in a cycle. Yes the rain the rain the rain. Of course. Yes rain is a cycle. Yes the piano is deliberate and won't leave Us alone. Why is Our Daydreaming so this again? So always. So tinnitus. So yes here we are broken again. So trapped in piano. How did the desert island get so vast. How did it become round? How do we keep circling back to where we first washed up? How is this island also a bathtub? How are We also Us? Trapped in warped tape. Melted cycle. Broken tinnitus. Why are we so miserable to be loved a little? Why is it never enough? The strings fly in like pterodactyls with swan necks. Mosquito proboscises. They roar more than honk. They gruff while we fade out. There is a false start before the piano, of course, the piano comes back. Codex is slight of hand. Marked pterodactyls out of the sky. We keep waking up on this beach. This lip of the tub. This imagining of Us to be or was. Dragonflies / fantasize / No one gets hurt / You've done nothing wrong. The piano is the bassline. The piano is the drums. The beach is the piano. The water is the false. You are the start. There is only constant. There is no crescendo. There is no fade out. There is chord chord note. There is breath. The breath cycles cold breeze. Pterodactyl sized mosquitoes circle and you are swatless. You've got some nerve coming here. Good Morning Mr Magpie has stolen all the magic. You are left with a terror that lacks awe. It is just now. It is just a drum beat and guitar strum. It is wordless oooohing. It is nervous muttering. Rub your hands together. The fantasy is dripping away. This is not a desert island. This is the parking lot of a busy Target. You are standing in the middle, unable to do anything but hope the cars continue to dodge you. The cars driving by. The cars raining out of the sky. The cars lapping at your shore. The cars leaving behind only the salt. The parking lot shatters apart. This is a low flying panic attack. You are the bathtub filling with islands. You are the piano. The magic is gruff. Burn The Witch. Avoid all eye contact / Do not react / Shoot the messengers. Oh god, all this cycle. All this water. All this shatter. This is all just potential. This is all possible futures. This is your own swatless. Your own deluge of strum. You are still at the beginning. Your heart of course hearts and the pterosquitoes circle and the cars are all warped tape and the mountains are what the sun creates to hide itself and you are standing in the bathtub watching the panic attack go by as the eye contact continues to dodge you and you really messed up everything and the piano is completely absent. A drum loop. Pterosquitoes echo gruff tinnitus. Truth will mess you up. Ful Stop. So far, whether they've been combinations of albums, or just retrackings, all of the Radiohead albums have been about an hour long. Hail To The Thief is going to be the one album in the discography to buck that trend. Neither the original Hail To The Thief nor In Rainbows is my favorite album. Despite being excited by the "return to rock" buzz around Hail To The Thief, and surprised by the arrival and affordability of In Rainbows, neither album floored me. They both have songs I really enjoy, but neither had the cohesion or thematic resonance of their previous albums. Therefore, I haven't attempted to give them a cohesion. I've let them be one sonic scattershot Radiohead album. That's a nice way to start Jonny, a nice jangly guitar ballad that builds to the rockiest section of a Radiohead song since The Bends. Don't question my authority or put me in a dock. This song also has Yorke coming as close to Eddie Vedder vocals as I ever thought possible. 2 + 2 = 5 (The Lukewarm) is an intriguing beginning to an album that isn't as easily boxed up as any of their other albums.
The raindrops / the raindrops /the raindrops / the raindrops / the raindrops / the raindrops of Stand Up Sit Down are a beautiful frenetic ending to a song that begins entirely subdued. Yorke sings the raindropsso many times that it starts to lose all meaning, and I hear it as "arrange us", "a radius", and "in rainbows". It's also got some of the best use of piano on a Radiohead album. In discussing the first two Radiohead albums, I mentioned Yorke's ability to construct a love song wherein the object of desire is neither objectified nor vilified. This continues with You're All I Need where the focus of the song is desire. Not desire for the person. But how his desire has put him in a shitty relationship where he's desperate for someone who puts up with him out of habit. It's pretty much The World Is A Friendzone And I Am Okay With Just This Level Of Relationship Even Though It's Probably Unhealthy For Both Of Us. Where I End And You Begin wobbles drunkenly through the end of the previous track to let you know that not only are you all Thom Yorke needs, he will also eat you alive. At least he apologizes for the entire concept of us. Once again, the guitar sounds right out of The Bends, and I love it. In high school, one of the professors who roamed the dormitory nights used to refer to the music I listened to (Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, and Alice In Chains) as chanting mantra music. "It's just the same lyrics over and over." That certainly applies to a ton of songs on this album, especially The Gloaming where words are repeated 2-4 times in a verse. Weird Fishes/Arpeggi bucks that trend. It doesn't give me the sense of the deepest ocean / the bottom of the sea, but, rather, a crowded aquarium. Betta fish rush hour. A UFC brawl of glossily finned dudes with boundary issues. Less swimming. More wriggling. Atonal chaos climax barely resolves before the nasal harmonies of I Will make us realize how far we've strayed from unusual love ballads to ... whatever is happening here with little baby's eyes. A childlike fable rings in in the form of A Wolf At The Door. It's a rare Radiohead song with profanity, in this case dance you fucker / dance you fucker which is one of the more unnecessary but not uncomfortable swears I can think of in rock music. Yorke sings this unlike any other song I can think of. A staccato non-falsetto gatling gun of violent images give way to classist fable talk. It's a lovely little journey. I recently finished reading Terry Pratchett's Witches Abroad, which is mainly about the rules of storytelling and the powers it wields, but also featured a feline lothario who briefly gets to spend some time as a human. Myxomatosis. could completely be that cat's theme song. The falsetto asks us, justifiably, how come I end up where I started? as we move into 15 Steps. This is totally a follow up to the previous song which is about a cat who feels tongue tied, as the lyrics here present the cliche about the cat having your tongue, and the narrator is obsessed with string. We reach the halfway point at a catchy little piano Punchup At A Wedding. Now we're back to love problems. But this one is all about blame. The pointless snide remarks / of hammerhead sharks as Yorke declares both himself and the target of his rage hypocrite opportunist. The pot will call the kettle black. The whole song is rife with cliches, as a fight scene at a wedding during a romantic comedy would be an absolute cliche. Oh no no nos rain down into Scatterbrain, just another song about the weather. Nothing but the weather. No, siree. Is this the Scarecrow's song for Dorothy Gale? Should we talk about the weather? Yesterday's headlines / blown by the wind ? Go To Sleep is one of those songs where the lyrics don't really matter, which is convenient, since they're nigh-indecipherable. The vocals are mixed just far back enough that they almost become a background instrument to the guitars' lead. And it is the guitars in this song that I most enjoy, so I guess it was the right choice. The piano breaks through the previous track's fadeout. Possibly the best raindrop piano chord progression the band has come up with. Videotape hides the vocals behind the piano, introduces a spare miliatary drum line that feels purposefully off, and then has the last verse crawl out of a haunt of Yorke's moany background oohs, which then disappear, eventually leaving just the piano. There's barely a chord change is we transition to Sail To The Moon, another soft piano ballad, this one bringing to mind an old black and white animation. A literal boat flying to the literal moon of Earth. Scratchy film cells. Jagged journey. There's nothing on the moon to greet them. The camera pulls back from the characters all separated, searching the vast nothingness. We don't even know what they're looking for. Still more piano. We Suck Young Blood is a song of questions that aren't answered. A vampire lullaby. Backdrifts puts an end to the medley of piano music and returns us to the Kid Amnesiac haunting effects and loops. I enjoy that a song about backtracking returns to an earlier music style that they mainly avoid on the rest of the album. And if you miss the piano, don't worry, it shows back up near the end. Faust Arp brings us back to guitarland, with an orchestral backdrop. This song is an enough is enough end of relationship song where Yorke doesn't spin cliches, but rather presents the cliches in rapid fire succession, but never at the end of a line, so they feel like a camera panning over a series of visual cliches, rather than hearing someone spout the cliches at you. We descend back into Radiohead noise chaos with Bodysnatchers where Yorke seems to be questioning if he and the person he's reached the end of a relationship with are on the same page. Have the lights gone out for you? / 'cause the lights have gone for me. At the end of any relationship, you expect the narrator to get really sad and go on an extended walking pity party. So ,of course, Yorke must go on a longer, sadder walk. Reflecting that just cause you feel it / doesn't mean it's there. There There, Thom, I'm sure you'll find someone new to be sad about soon. There's always a siren /singing you to shipwreck. House Of Cards is just on here for the atmosphere. It's about ... five and a half minutes long. It's a person who doesn't want to be friends with someone that they're in love with, which is pretty much the antithesis of every other Radiohead song that delves into relationships. But it paints itself in a very 1970s place, hinting at key parties and electrical problems that aren't discussed much in the modern era. We close out on Last Flowers, where the narrator just wants to speak his piece in a house that is literally falling apart. He's clearly ingested something toxic to him, as what's keeping him from speaking is that it's too much / too bright / too powerful for him to face the evening straight. All in all, this album has a bunch of love songs that, collectively, don't mean anything. There's no narrative throughline here, and while I've made the tracks flow into each other, they don't have one cohesive sound the way The Bends, OK Computer, and Kid Amnesiac each have their own sounds. I like this as an album of chaos leading us from the sullen, effect heavy Kid Amnesiac to the sullen and spare Heart Shaped Limbs, which follows. I was living in Burlington Vermont when Kid A was released. My roommates and friends were really into Ween, Phish, and The Grateful Dead, apart from one guy who successfully got me into The Beautiful South. I was in the midst of my own Terrible Music Phase, as I found myself trying to find something salvagable in bands like Creed and Days Of The New, while also making time for albums I still listen to, such as Moby's Play and The O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack. Both of those albums were approaching on the horizon, but this was the first album I purchased in VT that I actually enjoyed (I'm looking at you Dave Matthews Band Busted Stuff, you turning point in my ability to listen to that band.) I kept hearing "new sound", "spacey", "spare", and "departure" used to describe Kid A, and they were all accurate terms. I was still in Vermont, and still musically bored when Amnesiac came out, and, like many Radiohead fans, I thought "Between these two albums, there is one Really Good Album. I wish they'd just released that instead of these two perfectly fine albums." I think most fans with time on their hands and access to cassette players / blank CDs / Spotify / audio editors, probably have their version of Kid Amnesiac. Here's mine. Pretty much every song on both Kid A and Amnesiac would qualify as Songs Adam Was Likely To Use To Start An Album. They've all got slow builds with a focus on unusual beats. Their vocals and lyrics mostly build out of despair to something else. I particularly enjoy the Think about the good times and never look back aspect of I Might Be Wrong, as I think it puts the previous two albums in the rearview, and allows you to acknowledge their existence while realizing you are headed down the waterfall into a completely new story.
The rock and roll myth around How To Disappear Completely involves a younger Thom Yorke, on tour with REM, asked how to handle rock stardom, and Stipe suggested shutting out the entire world and making I'm not here / this isn't happening his mantra. This song was the end result of that conversation, which Stipe heard, and then wrote "Disappear". This song continues Kid Amnesiac's narrative of a person completely shedding their past in an attempt to find a new person in their future. It's a slow, orchestral process. If you fuck to it, you must both be really sad. Pakt Like A Sardine In A Crushd Tin Box is a relaxed percussionist's dream song, with looping and autotune, and a narrator asserting I'm a reasonable man / get off my case so many times that he can't possibly be seen as reasonable. It reminds me of time spent on my grandfather's boat when I was younger (mainly because of the oceanic percussion) and trying to assert my independence from my unreasonable grandfather by being an unreasonable pre-teen. A roommate of mine, in 2006, lamented that Kid A and Amnesiac were both written by Yorke putting a bunch of lyrics in a hat, and drawing them at random while playing weird atmospheric rock and strange vocals in the background. He was mostly angry because he declared "Bjork did it first AND BETTER!" First, certainly. But the lyrics on this album are actually great, and definitely not drawn at random. You And Whose Army? is a haunting (like every song on this album) indictment of 21st century politicians without being overt or didactic. I also enjoy that around the time of these albums, Yorke was working with Bjork (say that ten times fast) on Dancer In The Dark. Kid A logically spirals out of the previous track with a late 20th century Tom Waits feel (instrumentally, not vocally). I wouldn't know the lyrics if I hadn't looked them up. They're very much secondary to the feeling of this song as art rock, but they do line up with the earlier mentioned shedding of one's past, as the future Pied Pipers your ass into the unknown. The musical smorgasbord that is the beginning of The National Anthem, and the almost unnecessary lyrical repetion of It's holding on because it reminds me of how desperately the nations where i live, and where Yorke is from are currently run by dying old men, desperately holding to a past that no longer exists. I can't wait for them and their pasts to be fully fucken dead. The people we used to be can not ever come back So Knives Out / cut him up. Yea, Radiohead suggests you eat the person you used to be. Don't swallow them whole. Prepare them as a delicious meal. And slowly eat yourself to become someone new. Don't write down the recipe. Pyramid Song is a piano ballad. The most straight forward sounding song on the album, and also the one recorded closest to the completion of Ok Computer tour. It also feels the most like it could have been from Moon Shaped Pool. It has the late jarring anti-pop pop-rock feel of 2010s Radiohead, despite having been written very early in the late 90s. Idioteque is my, and I think most people's, favorite track from this era of Radiohead. This song actually was created by cutting up various lyrics and putting them in a hat. I assumed this was my ex-roommate's fantasy, but while he was incorrect in thinking the entire album was composed in this fashion, it turns out that this track totally was. There are two versions of The Morning Bell. One from Kid A, one from Amnesiac. I'm using the Kid A version that climbs out of "Idioteque". It's another cut-up song where Yorke takes a bunch of cliches and re-assembled them by random draw. It feels like someone surrendering to the chaos of their mundane life while still dreaming of something better, but not imagining it's attainable. If there's a 22st century theme song for having a mental breakdown, it's Everything In Its Right Place. The feeling of chaos continues, while a building but never cracking voice tries to figure out what's happening around them. It's the sound of a cocoon being drawn around someone who can't take any more of their current life. This album closes with a funeral song. Specifically, a New Orleans funeral. Goodbye, old self. Everyone sees who used to be, as you lived your Life In A Glass House. The song feels like no other Radiohead song. Of course I'd like to sit and chew the fat / but someone's listening in, and it's time to move on to something entirely new. Most people experience The Most Important Year Of Their Lives between ages 16 and 22. They fall in love with someone. They discover a hobby. There's a devastating death in their family or circle of friends. They frequently trace their life's path to an event that falls in this age range. For me, the end of 1997 until the summer of 1998 was my Most Important Year. So, the music that came out at that time looms larger than any other year. Pretty much any rock album that kept me from having to listen to Boy Bands caught my attention. I listened to The Verve's Urban Hymns and Semisonic's Feeling Strangely Fine ad nauseum. My favorite Madonna album, Ray Of Light exceeded all my expectations for a pop album. And, of course, Ok Computer hit. I was working in a record store at the time, so I had early access to this album, as well as REM's New Adventures In Hi-Fi, Pearl Jam's No Code, Soundgarden's Down On The Upside, and The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill. All of these were albums I was super excited for, and came to love (New Adventures In Hi-Fi took me a few years to appreciate, but the rest I loved instantly). Putting together an improved version of Ok Computer was super easy for me. I've reordered the album several times over the year for various reasons. In 2009ish, a DJ friend told me about the 0110 album theory that Ok Computer and In Rainbows, which was released ten years later, are complementary albums, where you're meant to alternate tracks to create a Super Radiohead album. While I do enjoy that Super Album, it requires no work from me, and exists on several other websites, you can totally check them out. I don't enjoy all of the In Rainbows tracks, so I've pooled them with Hail To The Thief to make that a rounder album. OK Computer doesn't need the fleshing out. I also haven't added any B-sides or any of the songs that have accompanied OKNOTOK. While rearranged, this is still Very Much just the original album. I just don't think it needs the upgrade the way their other albums do. I also prefer it isolated from In Rainbows because I see this as complementary to The Bends, a manic sounding album about depression, with this being a depressing sounding album about being manic. Side A I imagine Lucky rising out of "Street Spirit (Fade Out)" from The Bends. This character spent that whole album trying to figure out some way that his despair isn't his own fault, but ends up giving up. But out of his acceptance (not resolve, nothing was resolved with the last album, but there does seem to be a bit of acceptance), comes the feeling of being pulled out of the aircrash and the lake and becoming likable to the world around him. Electioneering has the newly reborn character determined to move forwards in the proper way in order to earn your trust. Mr. Yorke, and Mr.s Greenwood, Selway, and O'Brien, you have my vote. I'll take depressed dudes worried about technology over an over-confident blowhard too stupid to tie his shoes or shut his mouth any day of the century. But something is definitely off about their smile. In Climbing Up The Walls, a nearly falsetto monotone start that builds into the frantic primal growl that The Bends never gave us. We are being watched by everyone all the time. Watched by technology every time we leave the house. It's tough to keep the smiling facade without seeming ... oh, this isn't contentedness or acceptance at all. This is mania. Karma Police spins my favorite part of The Bends on its head. The protagonist is having a full-on breakdown and desperately searching for someone besides himself to blame. At the end of the track, he's apologizing for having "lost himself" and is pretty sure he has everything under control. Airbag suggests otherwise. It's a false moment of control and safety. A belief in immortality that isn't supported by reason. If the most recent breakdown didn't kill him, then surely nothing can. The original album's fade from "Airbag" into Paranoid Android really shouldn't be fucked with. It's a great transition from the repetitive prattling about being immortal to the high cry/wine vocals begging the world around him to shut up. In the background, Marvin The Paranoid Android from Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide quintology keeps introducing himself. The operatic changes over the course of the song are super reminiscent of Queen, although Thom Yorke is no Freddy Mercury (who is?). I have probably spent over a full day of my life listening to this song. Maybe more. I think this is a solid break in the narrative. And it's about at the halfway point for a two-sided album. Side B Apart from Marvin The Paranoid Android, the only guest artist on the album is Fred, the voice of 1990s Macintosh's SimpleText program, who does lead vocals for Fitter, Happier, a depressing cycle of 20th century self-help sloganeering. It's a great restart to the story. I envision the narrator having come out of some sort of rehab between Side A and Side B and this is the only glimpse we ever get of their time being treated.
The Tourist is the closing track on the original album, and I understand why. It's quiet, and feels more isolated from the chaos of the rest of the album. But, like The Bends, I don't see this album as being resolvable. I prefer this song as a moment of introspection where, as he exits the rehabilitation center, the singer freezes while the world speeds around him. He shouts Idiot / Slow down to no avail. It's the bipolar moment where someone who's been manic, realizes that they need to contain themself (sometimes I get overcharged / that's when you see sparks) to start processing their environment. This feeling continues into No Surprises as Yorke does a lower version of the near-monotone from the "Climbing Up The Walls". But this time, instead of building up to a growl, he's winding down to calm. This is my final bellyache, Yorke declares. And that's true of this version of the album. There are two tracks to go, and they take us to a different place. Even when you've been successful, be it as a rock band, or a person battling depression, it's sometimes tough not to wonder how other people work, what makes them so cruel, or happy, or aloof, or unhinged, whatever attribute they have that weirds you out. Subterranean Alien Homesick Blues is a perfect late twentieth century reimagining of Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" where, instead of being able to talk to your counter-culture friends about how wrong the world feels, you have to keep it locked up inside or else risk that they'd shut you away. Of course not trusting your friends and peers to enough to share your feelings would be a Let Down. But you stay hanging out with them because you fear there aren't any other options for you. The world moves around you while you feel hysterical and useless. Like "Paranoid Android", Exit Music (For A Film) is one of my favorite Radiohead songs. Yorke says it's the Romeo & Juliet story he wanted. The night after the two teens consummate their relationship they decide "Fuck it. Our families are terrible. Let's get out of here." I love that idea. For the narrative of this album, though, there is no love interest, so I view it as the narrator's mania speaking to his depression, and figuring out how to get himself together enough to leave this (house / relationship / town / planet) where he doesn't feel comfortable or supported. The way the song jangles out is actually a perfect blend into "The Bends", the first track from the reimagined The Bends making for a terribly cyclical storyline about being bipolar. The Chicago Tribune gave The Bends, which was on my employee pick wall for the duration of my time as employee and then assistant manager at a record store on Cape Cod, one star. Instead of linking to the archived review, here is the complete text: Along with Beck's "Loser," Radiohead's smash single "Creep" made up a sort of low self-esteem hit parade for disaffected pop fans. Lacking that dubious appeal, there's little on the British group's second record to suggest they'll be more than one-hit wonders. Thom Yorke's ethereal vocals and woebegone melodies are tuneful enough, but too self-absorbed to be catchy. The sweeping, extravagant choruses and Seattle wanna-be guitar parts are similarly heavy-handed and excessive: the clumsy, unpleasant guitar scorch of "Bones" and "My Iron Lung" are particularly cringe-inducing. If the band had dispensed with the grandiose dramatic effects, songs like "The Bends" and "Black Star" could have been catchy little rockers. Instead, Radiohead's overwrought, pompous music makes them sound like alternative rock`s answer to the Moody Blues. Apart from the not-stradamus prediction that the band would be a One Hit Wonder, much of the rest of this reviewers critique have followed the band through the last nearly thirty years of their highly successful rock career. Thom Yorke's voice is weird. They keep changing how they play their instruments. Their effects are too grandoise. They pick their lyrics out of a hat. Bjork did it better. REM did it better. Pink Floyd did it better. Ya da. Ya da. Ya da. I've been on board with the band since ... not Day One ... but since I was a drunk teenager at a work party, rocking out to "Creep" with people I mistakenly thought were cooler than me. A year later, they'd be back to the Black Crowes and Dave Matthews Band (and I'd be with them for a while). In two years, though, we'd be completely split apart as they went full Grateful Dead / Phish / Ween, and I decided to stick with Pearl Jam / Radiohead / and U2. We shan't speak of our regrettable Jimmy Buffet concert. AHEM. We shan't. Ok. Maybe eventually. But not now. I love the art rock mystique of Radiohead. The Bends was one of the first reimagined albums I made. And when I started this project, I intended to present their discography right after Prince's. Alas, my Radiohead discography had suffered from sort of iPod malfunction. I had made a Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame playlist for work, and instead of copying the selected songs to the playlist, it deleted them. Sure, I still had all the tracks on a backup harddrive, but I really loved the flow of the reimagined playlists I'd already made, and didn't really want to go to the effort of remaking them. While putting together a Spacehog and a Soul Asylum reimagining, I noticed that, while my backup drive didn't have the individual tracks from my Radiohead discography, they had each album as one whole file, so I didn't need to restructure the albums, I just needed to set the starting and stopping point of each track and re-export them. And that's a breeze! Unlike much of my reimaginings, there isn't Too Much combining of albums. There's some, but it's not as excessive as Prince's, REM's, or The Weeknd's. The Bends holds on to each track, but recontextualizes them around three tracks from Pablo Honey that I couldn't bear to lose. They are, in my opinion, the only three tracks from Pablo Honey worth listening to. And even one of the ones I saved is of dubious quality. Phase One of Radiohead was kind of a British wannabe-Nirvana or REM. But, unlike, say Bush, they grew. I don't think The Bends sounds in any way derivative of their contemporaries the way Pablo Honey did. While this is no longer even my favorite Radiohead album (Team Ok Computer 4 Life), it's still the album that made me fall in love with the band. And I think it aged better than many of the other bands I grew up listening to. Much like the way they structured their middle albums, this version of The Bends is a sonic journey. Songs rise out of each other, not at the radio fade out level, but as though this album was two complementary tracks. Relentless. The album starts in a fairly Beatlesque fashion with a tinkling, talking, hint at classical parade music beginning. Then the driving guitars of The Bends kicks in. Where do we go from here? / The words are coming out all weird / Where are you now when I need you? seem like a good opening to Thom Yorke's writing as anything else from the album. Unlike some of the reimagined albums, which features dudes being creepy about women not being into them. Thom Yorke is pretty up front that he's the weirdo, and he's going to work on himself instead of trying to figure out anybody else.
Where are you now when I need you? repeats as a wind gathers beneath the vocals and gives way to Planet Telex, which switches the narrative point from first to second person, but is about being powerless in pretty much every situation. Everything is broken / Everyone is broken. The guitars swell into wave patterns as Yorke asks Why can't you forget? The Gallagher Brothers (aka Oasis) totally hate Radiohead. Not, like, in their feud with Blur sort of way, more in a complete dismissal of Radiohead's talent. Which amuses me, because Anyone Can Play Guitar could have easily come off of Definitely Maybe. The guitars are fuzzier. And while the vocals are too high for either Gallagher brother, the weird nasal grind of I want to be Jim Morrison is totally in their wheelhouse. Except, obviously, they both wanted to be Lennon and McCartney. Like, Real Bad. Like, they are still Not Over It. Their continued belief that they're the best musicians of their generation was a pretty bad look in their twenties is a really gross condemnation of who they are now that they're in their fifties and are mostly remembered as The Band That Wrote One Of The Most Annoying Songs Of All Time ("Wonderwall"). There was a show during the early days of the cable TV station FX, where the future host of Survivor, and Mr. Nancy from American Gods talked about new music. It was a fantastic show. It's where I learned of bands like James, The Dust Brothers, and Daft Punk. And while I already knew about Radiohead, it's where I first saw the video for Fake Plastic Trees, and knew I had to own the album. It starts with acoustic guitar that, indeed, anyone can play, and expands the feeling of "I'm terrible at everything" to acknowledge "But everything around me is fake as hell, so why do I care so much?" which neither the song nor the album ever try and resolve. The music seems like it's getting more upbeat with High And Dry but the vocals let you know that any attempt to appear happy means you're turning into something you are not. You are as much fake plastic as the trees from the last song. It's the kind of message 17 year old Adam could rock out to, even if the midtemponess doesn't leave much rocking space. Bones is coiled and waiting to strike at the end of "High And Dry". It's got the echoey Monster / New Adventures In Hi-Fi guitar sound that REM adopted at the same time. But it allows itself to get louder than "What's The Frequency Kenneth", even burying Yorke's vocals in the chorus. I confess that it was years before I realized he was singing When you've got to feel it in your bones. I had no clue what the chorus was. This album has been super heavy on despair. So they love me like I was their brother / they protect me / make me happy feels like things are going to go in a ... oh, it's not real it's just a (Nice Dream) that threatens to launch into a primal scream, but Yorke cuts off his vocals, and lets the guitars scream for him. You do it to yourself you do / and that's what really hurts. Nobody on this album is ever blamed for Yorke's loneliness, anger, or sadness. You might think this song is him calling out someone else for martyrdom, but in the context of the album, he's clearly addressing himself in second person. Just was one of many songs that led the more vulturish members of the 1990s rock press to predict that Yorke would be another rock and roll suicide. My Iron Lung ponders We're too young to fall asleep / Too cynical to speak / We are losing it, can't you tell? This is the end of the first of the two tracks, it's at the 2/3rd point as opposed to the halfway point, but Radiohead has always had a specific structural pattern that favors utilitarianism over tradition. Stop Whispering is the second of the Pablo Honey songs. The production quality is noticabely poorer, but I love the basic chorus and how the guitars sounded before the band figured out how to divvy up the guitar parts so it sounded more symphonic and less Wall Of Sound. I couldn't listen to a whole album of songs like this, but hearing one placed in the midst of the superior The Bends tracks works for me. I also enjoy that the chorus is Stop whispering / Start shouting which is sort of the anti-Radiohead career trajectory. They definitely progress from shouting to whispering. My go-to karaoke song of the late 90s / early 2000s is the final Pablo Honey song. Creep is another unrequited love song where Yorke acknowledges that he's the problem in the dynamic, and gets all sad about it. There have been some insanely good covers of this track on singing competition reality shows. Some explore it as a haunting ballad, some turn it into a screamo anthem. I like that this song works in many different forms. I also enjoy that every karaoke machine I ever looked at during the chorus had the lyrics as I'm a creep / I'm a widow. No, dude. I'm a weirdo. It's pretty obvious from the context of the song, even if it's in a British accent. Though putting the entire album in the perspective of Yorke recovering from a dead spouse does kinda work. Unlike "Anyone Can Play Guitar" and "Stop Whispering", "Creep" is on-par, production-wise with The Bends, which makes it easy for it slide into Bullet Proof (I Wish I Was), the most ballady track on the album. If there is a filler song on the album, I think it's Sulk. I still enjoy listening to the song, particularly the transition from chorus to guitar solo around the 2:30 mark. But I had no idea what any of the lyrics were for the first decade or so that I listened to the album. Perhaps longer. I like that it ends with You'll never change, because, again, I enjoy this album for its refusal to ever resolve its depression. Blackstar comes right out there and tells you to blame your problems on technology, astrology, whatever you want that isn't another person. Every time they're reminded of the person they love, they have a panic attack, and they're searching for someone to blame for this feeling other than themself, so rather than blaming the person they can't have, they're going to list a bunch of possibilities that aren't other people with feelings. The album closes with Street Spirit (Fade Out), a precursor to the next album's "Exit Music (For A Film). Any set of videos or throughline for this album would be too depressing to write about. Like a Lars Von Trier film. You could appreciate it once, but having the emotional energy to rewatch it would make you superhuman. Having no context, or viewing the album as a set of connected vignettes make it much more digestible and redigestable. And even though the song, as the title suggests, fades out, it does feel like something should be coming next. But I enjoy that there's nothing there but silence. Revisiting Automatic For The People was kind of a downer for me. Dreary Music For Teenagers didn't age as well as I'd hoped. And while I still enjoy several of the songs from that album, I don't imagine I'll listen to that album as a whole very much, unless I'm looking for inoffensive background music. On the other hand, I love this version of New Adventures In Hi-Fi. This is a combination of the two albums that followed Automatic For The People: Monster and New Adventures In Hi-Fi. REM's return to rock. Much harder than their previous three albums, and more interesting than any of their 90s and 21st century output, this album ditched the mandolins and whine for echoey guitars and mellotrons. The lyrics were more in-line with their earlier material, and Stipe appeared to be having more vocal fun. The reason the two albums that I combined for this Reimagined Album work so well is because the original New Adventures In Hi-Fi is actually just a series of songs recorded during the sound checks for the tour they did in support of Monster. Of course they're of the same ilk. These are also the two albums that I once owned the fancy hardcover collectors editions of. The first I bought in a Greenfield music store when I was in high school, the second I ordered from behind the counter when I worked at a music store on Cape Cod. I'd planned on posting this a day earlier, but there was a static noise near the middle of "Bittersweet Me", and when I went to fix it, it somehow added about half a second of silence to every track from 'What's The Frequency Kenneth?" all the way to the end, so I had to de-glitch this starting with "Wake Up Bomb". It was worth it, even if it took over an hour to remove clicks caused by a >1 second sound issue. To balance out the Vaseline-lensed balladry of Automatic For The People, REM released Monster, a fuzzy guitar album that I bought the day it was released. It's fine. Their following album, New Adventures In Hi-Fi was a better blend of rock and the new REM sound. I got an early copy of it, as I was working in a record store when it came out. This reimagined New Adventures In Hi-Fi is meant to honor the band's desire to shake off the aura of Automatic For The People, so it starts with Departure a more modern rock guitar sound but a more old-school Stipe vocal. If this version of this album, instead out of Out Of Time had come out after Green, I think REM would have been an even bigger band in the 90s.
Crush With Eyeliner has Lou Reed's cigarette ashy bootprints all over it. I love the echoey guitar riff, and the effect that makes it sound like Stipe is singing through a megaphone (which was an absolute cliche in the 90s). I also really love the line She's a sad tomato. I just really love the piano and whistle combination on How The West Was Won And Where It Got Us. The vocals are also good, but, apart from the chorus, I've never really listened to the lyrics. I also can't say that I love Jesus but I do really enjoy New Test Leper. It's one of my favorite musical contrapuntals. It's a weird little song about talk shows and their hosts' relationships with their guests and reality. What a sad parade. Like Until The End Of The World and Singles, The Coneheads is a 1990s soundtrack that I much prefer to the movie it came from. There was a great Red Hot Chili Peppers song ("Soul To Squeeze"), and It's A Free World Baby, which, while recorded during the Out Of Time sessions, fits much better in this echoey guitar album. Bang And Blame seems like the updated version of "It's A Free World Baby" based purely on the guitars. Is it about a closeted celebrity Stipe used to fling with? Almost definitely. But it's not my thing / so let it go. Electrolite is an almost Radioheadish composed country piano track. (Radiohead has, in fact, covered the song. And the two bands have toured together and heavily influenced one another.) Its spare but reference-heavy lyrics have Yorke's writing flair, and the background vocals sound Yorkeish. In contrast with Bono's not very good cover of "Hallelujah", we come to our second Leonard Cohen song in these reimagined discographies. This time it's the wonderful First We Take Manhattan. I heard it as the B-side to "Drive", and was excited to see it pop up on a Leonard Cohen tribute album. This is my second favorite Cohen cover of all-time. And I have heard several albums' worth of Cohen covers in my day. Tongue was my favorite song on the album when I went home and listened to Monster. This is not at all proportionate with my love of the song's subject, cunnilingus. This is also the most falsetto song in any of the reimagined discographies since Prince. It's a solid and impressive falsetto performance. But it ain't Prince. I look good in a glass hat but the rest of the fashion mentioned in Wake Up Bomb don't really suit me. This is another return to old school REM with Stipe's vocals being reasonably low tenor and inconsistent, which suits the song just fine. The first single from this album was meant to let you know that this was Not Automatic For The People. I don't think it will be controversial to say that What's The Frequency Kenneth?, this echoey guitar song is the finest piece of music to ever come out of a disturbed person's brutal attack of television journalist Dan Rather. Things wind down near the end of "What's The Frequency" and give way to Bittersweet Me which moves across the room with a heart full of gloom. There's a cool mellotron in the background the plays off the *checks notes*, echoey guitar. A countdown brings us to the Southern American/Spaghetti-Western Italian Zither. A nice, brief instrumental, akin to "New Orleans Instrumental No. 1" but not as sleepy. The guitar here is more surfey than echoey, making this the R.E.M. song most likely to end up in a Tarantino film. Crunching out of the end of "Zither" is E-Bow The Letter, a haunting song that features Patti Smith on background vocals. This came out in the same general time as Metallica's "The Memory Remains", which featured Marianne Faithful on background vocals. Though no one involved in any of these projects sounds like anyone else, I often see "The Memory Remains" video in my head, whenever I hear "E-Bow The Letter". For an album that started with "Departure", it's taken us a long time to get to Leave, the final song on the album. One of the major subjective biases of this project where I recreate different artists' catalogue is When I First Heard A Particular Album. Sure, now that I'm in my 40s, I can acknowledge that an album I loved when I was sixteen might be garbage. But I might include more songs on an album that hit when I was more musically vulnerable to schmaltz. Which is mostly to say that I didn't edit out "Everybody Hurts" from this album, even though it's one of the schmaltziest, over-the-top ballads from the nineties, a decade made of extravagant, over-the-top ballads. I don't even particularly like the song, and it was never one of my favorite tracks on this, one of my Favorite Albums Ever the year it came out. I was a teacher's aid to fourth graders when this song came out, and even They made fun of the lyrical delivery on the song. But it has enough legs to be the go-to-tune for ironic sadness, so I'm going to let it live here, in the same discography where I cut "Shiny, Happy People" for, essentially, having precisely contrary lyrics to "Everybody Hurts" but ultimately having the same meaning. If there's an orchestral intro, I pretty much have to use that as a starting point, even if its just musicians tuning up, hence Nightswimming is the first track. I once started singing this song in the most on-the-nose way (although we were not naked) by singing it while swimming in Lawrence Pond with a few fellow camp counselors until one of them dunked me under water. I resurfaced a few feet away, and continued singing. This is just one of the reasons my coworkers probably hated me. The combination of the piano and the strings on this song are such a departure from previous albums that it's a good Oh Hey We've Got A New Sound announcement. Even if that new sound is a home on adult contemporary soft rock radio.
Try Not To Breathe does not rock any harder. In fact, this was one of the few albums listened to in high school that my parents liked. Which might be why almost no one younger than my age group thinks of REM as a rock band. This particular song comes off as an endearing high school musical number by a kid who can't sing particularly well but can sort of hold a tune. I think the slight background vocals are the best part of the song, which is pretty rare for an REM track. (Part of the reason I spent nearly a week before posting this is because I didn't like the transition between these two tracks, and spent hours trying to fix it. I eventually worked it out by cutting some of the intro from "Sidewinder".) Feel free to hate The Sidewinder Sleeps On Its Back with its unnecessary falsetto and it's unironic mentioning of payphones, which didn't know they were soon to be on the endangered species list. A song about being hung up on by someone being annoyed at a late night phone call is frivolous in a way that doesn't seem as cloying as some other silly REM songs. A friend of mine mistook the lyrics only to wake her up as only Terwilliker, the evil piano teacher from The 5000 Fingers Of Doctor T, a lovely live action movie by Dr. Seuss. I'm grateful for his mishearing, as without it, I might never seen that wonderful little film. Drive was the original single, and lead-off song of the real version of Automatic For The People, and it's easy to see why. It's one of the only songs from the album that I could imagine being on Green or Out Of Time. It's not nearly as good a song as I imagined as a teenager. I don't have much nostalgia for this monotone dirge. While this was definitely my favorite R.E.M. album growing up, it's probably not even in the top five ... maybe ten looking at it through the lens of their whole discography. None of it is bad, it's all just sort of ... deliberately lifeless in a way that makes me think of these songs being used in Made For TV Movie. I much prefer the cello of Automatic For The People to the mandolins of Out Of Time, but Sweetness Follows is still more of a song to put on in the background if you're trying to make out with someone in 1994 than a rock song. But, bad news, once you put on this song, they are totally not making out with you. The only slightly rock song on the whole album is Ignoreland. It sounds like it could come out of their IRS years, meaning it's pretty poorly recorded, and difficult to understand Stipe's lyrics. Said lyrics are much more overtly political than other songs from this album or the two that envelope it. And, yet, due to the fact that it sounds like he recorded it through a dying amp, you can't really tell what he's singing about. Here is the song by REM that gets the most hate. And while, again, Everybody Hurts is not my least favorite song, it is definitely the song that your aunt Nicole cried along to when her first and second and third boyfriends broke up with her. And anyone who knew she did this rolled their eyes and never mentioned it to her. But definitely told the person she broke up with. Nicole's friends were jerks. New Orleans Instrumental No. 1 is like listening to a river float by your window while you're moderately tipsy. I don't advocate ever playing Twister or Risk, and I don't believe in Heaven, so Man On The Moon isn't my theme song. The best thing to come out of this song, for me, personally, was that I learned who Andy Kaufman was. If only there had been a more accessible internet at the time, I could have watched videos of him to get a better understanding that, despite some of his epic contributions to pop culture, I probably would have found him more annoying than interesting. I have not seen the Jim Carrey movie about him that shares a title with this song. Sanity willing, I will die without ever having seen it. I bought the Until The End Of The World soundtrack because it had U2 on it, and I was just falling down the rabbit hole of U2 fandom that led them to being the first Reimagined Discography that I posted. I love the album. It's how I first came to know of Neneh Cherry, Nick Cave, and Crime And The City Solution, and got a better understanding of KD Lang, Lou Reed, and The Talking Heads. Fretless is from that soundtrack, and it's a shame that it didn't make the real version of Automatic For The People as it has the right feel for the album, but has better lyrics. The Lion Sleeps Tonite is such a great B-side cover. It's so on-the-nose and Muppety. I'm pretty sure I used this song to torture my roommate, later neighbor, in high school. Both by playing it, and occasionally singing along with it. If you like Find The River, do yourself a favor and check out the song in its original form, "Stay" by Lisa Loeb. It's peppier, and wears more stylish glasses. This is still a solid song, even though it was the band's Worn Out Welcome single, being the first single since their Green album that they released that didn't make the Billboard Top 40. I'd never really listened to the lyrics to Monty Got A Real Deal, and just took a friend's word for it when he mentioned that it was probably about Monty Hall. It's ... uhhh ... not. This is actually a cool little song about sexuality in the mid-twentieth century written very poetically, but it's neither a scorcher nor a catchy torch song, so it's easy to overlook it. Star Me Kitten is very much the outro to a movie soundtrack, and works as a cool closer here. The Good Place is easily my favorite series currently playing on TV. I love its twisting narrative, its exploration of ethics, its very specific sense of humor, and the entire cast of the first three seasons, with one exception. During a recent rewatch of the show, a particular scene caused me to wonder what if Chidi, one of four humans possibly torturing each other for all of eternity, is not a human at all, but is actually God trying to better understand humanity by studying humans who, at the beginning of the series, think they're in something akin to Heaven, and soon discover that there being there is a mistake. I decided to rerewatch using that a recontextualization point. Obviously, there are Mad Spoilers in every one of these posts. The last paragraph completely spoils the first season, so this is not for people who aren't pretty much caught up with the show, which has just started its fourth and final season. Cast, if you're watching the episode for the first time:
Eleanor Frostrap: recently deceased woman mistakenly sent to The Good Place, kinda selfish Michael: Figurehead of The Good Place, trying to help people acclimate to their new environs. Nervous about everything going wrong. Chidi: Moral philosophy professor and Eleanor's soulmate. Only person who appears to know Eleanor's presence in The Good Place is a mistake. Tahini: Do-er of good deeds. Fashion Do. Desperately wants her soulmate to speak to her. Jiyanu: A Buddhist Monk who has taken a vow of silence. Tahini's soulmate. Janet: Database of helpful knowledge with a human appearance. Always in Incognito Mode. Teacup: Construct of a dog. Doesn't feel pain. Or love. I mean, of course he feels love. Do you want a dog who will love you more? Gunnar and Antonio: Dumpster target practice. Literally, Everyone Else: Window dressing! "Eleanor, this place is a perfectly made Swiss watch, and you are a wrench in the gears. Actually you're a hammer, just smashing the gears into dust." are Chidi's opening lines in this second episode. You could argue that Chidi is merely being expository to bring the audience up to speed, in case they missed the first episode, but it is such a perfect encapsulation of Eleanor's relationship to "The Good Place" that is should seem suspect coming from someone who gets stomachaches at the least sign of stress, and who wears boots he can't stand, for years, rather than offend a close friend. His entire first scene is him explaining to Eleanor every minute detail about why she's responsible for "The Good Place" going completely haywire at the close of the last episode. He's mostly calm and reasonable, as if his speech is prepared, except when Eleanor interjects with judgemental criticisms of the other people in the "The Good Place", which seems to genuinely surprise and disappoint him. When defending herself, Eleanor declares herself "a Medium Person", and points out that she should be in "a Medium Place". Chidi flinches at this. Perhaps, storing this idea for later. He does not flinch when Eleanor comes up with the idea of Chidi teaching her ethics. Instead, he goes into quandry mode, announcing a stomachache. Watch Chidi's face as Michael stresses out about the chaos around him. His faces aren't shock or disgust, but disapproval. When Michael decides to lick his sweat off a damp cloth because he doesn't understand how human bodies work, Chidi makes a face similar to when Eleanor is frustrating him. As if he believes Michael is taking his performance too far. When Chidi is debating whether or not to teach Eleanor ethics, he writes on the board Is this a test for me? Her? Ethics? This isn't referenced in the dialogue. Instead, Eleanor commandeers the conversation for a bit, until Chidi confronts Eleanor with the fact that she doesn't know anything about him, but he knows a ton about her. Is it really just because he's a good listener? Or is he nearly omniscient? "This is what I fear about you, Eleanor, you are too selfish to ever be a good person." Eleanor and Chidi are part of a task force to clean up the neighborhood after the destruction caused by Eleanor. While they are cleaning, other residents (actually demons) take Flying Lessons. In an attempt to be able have some time taking flying lessons, Eleanor hides a bunch of trash instead of throwing it away, causing a literal garbage storm. Chidi asks her what she's done "this time", and she lies. He clearly knows she is lying, and she is almost immediately struck by something akin to lightning, which then inspires her to confess her role in the garbage storm. That's some serious Zeus shit, Chidi. And Chidi has been talking about Greek philosophers all episode. That night, on her own, Eleanor decides to go clean up the trash, Chidi "catches her". When Eleanor asks how he knew she was doing it, he claims that he was watching her from his house which is (he points) up .. where there is a doorway and an apartment BUT he didn't come from that direction, and everyone else in "The Good Place" lives in their ideal house. Why is he in an apartment above some of the froyo shops? Or does he have no home of his own and is always just watching Eleanor from above? **** The Hammer In The Gears: The trash pickup, which Chidi volunteers himself and Eleanor for, to prevent Eleanor from taking flying lessons, is Tahani's idea. So far the series suggests that she is also a selfish person, who only did good deeds as a way to compete with her sister. But, at this point in the narrative, she doesn't know she is competing with anyone in "The Good Place", so why does she suggest everyone clean up The Neighborhood? Could Chidi have orchestrated this? How? It would seem to hint that Tahani is, like most of the residents in "The Good Place", also a demon. All of her time with Michael, having things explained to her, in the first two episodes, are done in front of Jiyanu/Jason, opening the possibility that Tahani and Michael's interactions are all played out for his benefit, not hers. The giant crack in this theory is that the two of them will eventually have some alone time, in which Michael clearly does not know / think that Tahani is a demon. So she can't be working for him. BUT ... what if she is a different kind of actor in this scenario. What if Chidi (God) has placed Michael and the Demons as the main way of testing Eleanor and Jason, with Tahani being a non-demon entity working for him, who is there to run interference and keep the somewhat incompetent demons in check. She is responsible for many of the events that put Eleanor at risk of being outed. Maybe Eleanor is right to hate her. In 1988, REM, the darling of the college radio airwaves signed a massive contract with Warner Brothers records, which gave them complete creative freedom over all of their albums. They responded by releasing the dullest two albums they made in the twentieth century. Sure, Green had a couple of hits, and Out Of Time gave them mainstream radio supremacy for a couple of years, but overall, each album felt like a few singles and B-sides thrown together for no reason. The writing on Green is, compared to all their previous albums, atrocious. They gave up on imagery for straight-forward political chants, and it didn't work. While the lyrical content vastly improved for Out Of Time, and the mandolins and other string instruments went from "a thing we're experimenting with" to "the driving force of an album", it still didn't hold up for me. In some sense, I think both "Radio Song" and "Shiny Happy People" were attempts to recreate "The One I Love" by making poppy sounding music with upbeat lyrics that were dripping with irony that most radio DJs and music fans wouldn't get. For me, they both failed, and I can't listen to them. Even with my favorite B-52 doing the background vocals for "Shiny Happy People", it's just too saccharine for me. And while I'm pretty sure I'd hate "Radio Song" even if it didn't have a pedophile-apologist, wannabe-prophet as its guest rapper, it sure is easier to hate knowing that KRS-One is involved. Neither song, even though they were radio hits, are on this album. I have managed to put "Stand" on, even though it was the theme song to one of the worst television shows ever aired, "Get A Life". I had a couple of previous versions of this reimagined album that was merely, Out Of Time. But I didn't like the flow, so I spent some time rearranging the tracks, and the idea of "Belong" being the focus of the album, with all other tracks referencing that story really appealed to me. So, instead of a mix of songs that I somewhat enjoy, this is a concept album about parental relationships after a politically divisive apocalypse. It might involve fish people. I'm not sure. World Leader Pretend gives us a preview of R.E.M.'s more countrified sound. It still has the feel of early R.E.M. but there's a pedal steel guitar wonnnnnnnnnnng that comes in from time to time that hints at the musical changes taking place on this album. The lyrics could fit well, thematically, on Document, though they're a bit too straight-forward. They also foreshadow that something pretty terrible is about to happen.
Stipe transitions us into a love poem, while using the same basic imagery from the first track, in Belong. This is a weird little fable about using the word belong as a spell to keep her child alive and apart from whatever drastic world change she heard about before she folded the newspaper and silenced the radio. The woman from "Belong" has left her child behind to be with her people overseas. She, and a group of her friends, are singing this very contradictory song, Orange Crush, to her child, who is older now, and who she hasn't heard anything about in years. There is a political chanting breakdown in the middle of this song that reinforces that something awful happened in "World Leader Pretend' that has broken up families, and insinuates that it may have changed the way humans have evolved. There's a little bit of a calliope break, and then we move to see the son from "Belong", who is starting to see cracks in the capitalist, suburban society he's been living in. Every sign he sees advises him to Stand in the place where he lives and works. But his interior voice is suggesting that he needs to leave and start questioning everything around him. Texarkana is the place where the mother has ended up. Because some people would need an apocalyptic scenario to take place before they ended up in Arkansas. This song mentions the stars falling out of the sky. Metaphor? Or is this scenario as science-fiction based as "Belong" suggests? Joy! The mother and son are reunited, and he sort of recognizes her. But what on earth will they talk about? Pop Song 89 suggests the weather, the government, and a few other options. Sadly, she is on her deathbed, and occasionally loses coherency, and apologizes to the man she is no longer sure is her son. Losing My Religion is a pretty straight-forward ballad. The son is losing his faith as his dying mother doesn't recognize him. He has work to do for the revolution, but he also wants to stay near his mother before she passes. This song is delivered to a doctor who may not share the son's political affiliations. The doctor the son has been confessing to has fallen in love with him, and they are spending a ton of time together both in and out of the hospital, but she knows she's going to have to report him to the authorities. But, damn, yo, the sex is great. It gets her Near Wild Heaven. Me In Honey is the son's response to finding out the doctor narced on him, and he has to go on the run again. (If Stipe plays the son, then Kate Pierson from the B-52s plays the doctor). Country Feedback is the two lovers trying to come to sort of agreement as to whether or not to have a relationship. But in the end, the doctor kills him and just keeps repeating It's crazy what we could have had / I need this. We close out the musical (the dark political sci-fi apocalypse musical starring 80s musicians) with Low, a rumination from the child who was born from the doctor and the son's relationship. His world is subterranean because his mom's side won, and pretty much destroyed the world. He's been the narrator (though this is his first song) for the whole show. This last track is sung through some sort of mask that allows him to go up to the surface, where he's visiting his mother's grave. In many ways, he feels as abandoned as his father had. His mother didn't leave him physically behind anywhere, but her feelings for his father and her role in his death made her distant. I really wanted to call the second album in the discography, Fables Of The Reconstruction, but I'd really stripped that album for Murmur, and there's not a ton of material here relevant to the Post-American Civil War Reconstruction. This is a decidedly more political album than the first, though it's not as didactic and potentially off-putting as the Rock The Vote era R.E.M. Instead, it uses images and language in such a way that, over thirty years later, people still find the Document-era R.E.M. to be politically relevant. Probably the best opening track in the band's history, The Finest Worksong is a nearly perfect example of how the band could take bright instrumentation in a minor key, drape non-traditional narrative lyrics around it, and arrange unusual but not challenging background vocals to enhance Stipe's voice. It really was the finest hour.
That's great it starts with an earthquake, and it follows it up with Stipe's fastest lyrical gatling gun. Imagine if Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start The Fire", instead of being a shitty middle aged turd blaming his parents' generation for all of the world's problems, was a guy nearing thirty, trying to come to terms with world events and why he isn't doing anything to change them. It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) is probably the most lyrically brilliant thing Stipe ever penned. I'm pretty sure that's a consensus opinion, though. Swan Swan H is more Murmur style lyrics, but delivered clearly. I mean that both in the way that you can hear Stipe articulate the words, and that the message is evident, even though it's still told with more focus on imagery than the traditional pedantic narrative of rock. While we're talking about non-traditional lyrics painting a clear story, Begin The Begin, the opening track from Life's Rich Pageant, advises the listener to follow the leader, run and turn into butter. If you ever want to give yourself an aneurysm, go to SongMeanings.com, type in any REM song, and read what various people think Stipe is trying to say (especially fun when it's a song that Stipe didn't write the lyrics for). Carnival Of Sort (Boxcars) probably should have been on Murmur, not just because it's a very early R.E.M. song, but also because the lyrics are difficult to decipher. The calliope intro and laughing outro make this one of the band's creepier efforts. We uplift a bit for I Believe. Musically, not lyrically. My inane interpretation of this song, were I to make a video of this song, would focus on a terminally ill kid who is housebound, but not bedridden, mostly seeing a surreal world outside his window, reading a ton of books, and being visited by an assortment of normal looking family members and creepy doctors wearing horrifying masks and blood soaked scrubs. I don't usually like to include a song twice, but it's going to happen on this album. The studio version of Time After Time (Annelise) has some cool background effects, and the drums sit at such a weird place in the mix that it almost sounds like you're listening to one song on Youtube, not realizing that you have another tab open, and it's playing something that complements the song, but feels as though it doesn't actually belong. My imaginary video for Pretty Persuasion is a man watching other people in a bar pair off into unlikely couples. We see subtitles for their various pickup lines and techniques, all of which are either shockingly bold, or else seem destined for failure. But they all work. The background vocals for There She Goes make it sound like an early 20th century folk song. I am embarrassed to say that I was completely unfamiliar with the original version by The Velvet Underground. I knew this was a cover but never placed the original until well after I thought of it as an R.E.M. song. When I was in elementary school, I joined a competition called Future Problem Solvers. The problem we fourth and fifth graders were expected to solve? Acid rain. Someone else in the group found some research (probably with a huge assist from our advisor) about Black Backed Gulls, and how their droppings counteracted the effects of acid rain. As I can't find said research or anything like it online, I'm going to guess it was disproven. But we worked hard on our concept, and we lost to the Home Team (the team representing the school where the competition was held) who thought you could beat acid rain with the power of positive thinking. Well, their approach didn't work, either, but it was good enough to crush our team, and I dropped out of the group before our next meeting. R.E.M.'s solution to the problem sing Don't Fall On Me in the acid rain's general direction, didn't work, either. So I guess Michael Stipe and I have that in common. Talk About The Passion is the final studio track on the album. It's a highly repetitive anti-prayer, and a passionately sung song about losing passion. It devolves into applause. The last three tracks are actually a medley. Someone in the audience requests that they sing Time After Time (Annelise), and Stipe starts acapella. The guitar track rises up to meet him and then the background vocals come. The song building itself around him is a really cool effect. There several verses in before Stipe starts singing the chorus to Peter Gabriel's Red Rain, and the audience applauds thinking the song, and perhaps the show, is coming to an end. But, surprise, the opening riff to So Central Rain kicks in and ... there's no percussion in this track, anywhere to be found. Was Bill Berry in the bathroom? ... then strings it back into "Red Rain". It's a really beautiful journey. The second and final album of The Cars discography is twice as long but half as good. It's still really solid, and it's filled mostly with songs I listen to with some frequency, but the first album is just fucken classic, and spans only three years of creativity. This album starts with material from the early 80s and ends with the band's final album (sans bassist and vocalist Benjamin Orr who passed before the band got back together) from 2011. The wide scope of years means there's a lot of variety in the instrumental and production style of the various tracks, which makes for a cool album overall, but Let The Good Times Roll was a laser focused moment in a band's career, and I could listen to it on repeat. I might have even done so at work earlier this week. But there's a lot of great here, too. Only a smattering of hits, but they're the hits that I heard on the radio growing up. I didn't hear the band's earlier albums until I was in high school, which was well after the band broke up (they released no new material between 1989 and 2011). I'm not precisely sure why I've done both album covers with The Jokerman font, but it's probably close to something from one of their videos. Side A Heartbreak City is the previous album's sound being swept into a pile of classic rock. The synths are highly reminiscent of Corey Hart's "Sunglasses At Night", mentioned in my last post. But it's much more laid back, with a quiet spoken set of bridges instead of an intense shouty chorus. It probably sounded retro even when it was released. Go Away falls into every category and trope of the last track. It's a mediocre The Cars track, but it exemplifies that mediocrity in a way that warrants listening to, if you like the band. Of all the songs that just sound like quintessential The Cars album tracks, this is the most memorable. The first actual hit from this album is Magic, which returns us to the full blown 8-bit feel of the first album with the wonderful grind of a simple 80s guitar riff. I rank Uh-oh it's magic with Oops, I did it again for my favorite pop lyrics that acknowledge the need for apology by using infantile language. That this track hasn't been mashed up with Insane Clown Posse's "Miracles" is a travesty. It's Not The Night keeps its fists wrapped tightly around that 8-bit heart with an almost Hall & Oates vocal. I imagine a video for this song would just include Ric Ocasek constantly discorporating and reappearing in different eras because of the jingly transition effect that begins the song and recurs throughout. This is The Most 80s Movie Montage Theme the band ever recorded. It should have been the theme for a sci-fi fantasy movie about skateboarding. Coming Up You is obviously meant for an 80s rom com. A bunch of twenty-somethings shrugging after they do something silly, and then throwing their arms around each other, and maybe doing the lean-in, edge of lips kiss that was so popular at the time. It would never make it a single, but everyone would remember the scene fondly, or ironically. It's the closest thing The Cars have to a Too Many Cooks moment. Eeping through the previous song's fade out, You Are The Girl hits you with an incredibly noticeable but not very memorable bassline, and a soft rock vocal style that hair bands used when recording their one ballad on every heavy metal album from the late 80s. I'm not sure whether it's because they're purposefully so vague, but I really appreciate that every The Cars song about unrequited love or breaking up with someone manages to have aged well. There's never a friendzoney feel or blaming someone else for not loving them enough, it's always more like this song You are the girl of my dreams even though you point to the door. Why? It doesn't matter, we're left to assume that it's probably the singer's fault, but he's not going to be a martyr about it. Why Can't I Have You keeps this aesthetic. Oh sure, she's always breaking my heart in two but it's because I tripped and stumbled, not because she's a jerk. While I appreciate that their love lyrics are never problematic, they're also often not very good. They're inoffensive fluff rhyming end and bend, down and around. The highlight of Too Late is the rhyming of line and clementine. The rest is pretty standard pop lyrics. The 2011 track, Free, owes its guitar riffs to 21st century pop punk and its chorus to late 90s Beatles inspired Britpop. With harder vocals, it could be a Vines song. But the 8-bit synth it owes to the band's own legacy. I'm Not The One feels like the closing theme for a Legend Of Zelda game with an 80s chorus going round and round. Wound Up On You has the least smooth transition of the album. It's almost too bright with its synths. I almost cut the song several times. But it has a cinematic depth to it that feels necessary on this album. It doesn't feel like a particular movie. There are parts that remind me of a traveling scene from a puppet based fantasy movie, and the chorus belongs in a melodramatic film about two Wall Street investors that accidentally fall in love, even though they're both trying for the same promotion. Stranger Eyes is a kind of steampunky masterpiece suited for the opening theme of a cartoon, probably with elves or dwarves. I mean, the song is clearly about sex, but in that way that you could still use it in a kids movie, and they'd have no idea. It would be a better fit than that time they used Third Eye Blind's "Semi-Charmed" to promote The Tigger Movie. One of the most Carsiest The Cars songs ever recorded is You Might Think. I'm not sure it's possible to even like The Cars if you don't love this weird little love song. Closing out Side A is one of those brooding 80s stalker ballads, Fine Line. Though, with this song, it's hard to tell if it's an unrequited love, or if he's actually singing it to his equally weird partner.I like this track, but it definitely makes me sleepy. Side B Unlike the other album, Side A and Side B are nowhere near the same length. Side A being thirteen minutes longer. If it helps, imagine the thirteen minutes of silence are at the beginning of Side A, making the opening Hello of "Hello Again" all the more relevant.
Hello Again is a fun, bouncy 8-bit song about ... oh, it doesn't matter, just bop your head and enjoy the weird, little ride. What if The Cars tried to play a Metallica song? Well, it might sound like Door To Door. In that it sounds nothing like Metallica, but has furious drums, relatively loud and simple guitar riffs, and it buries the eeps and synths in the mix. Still, it's The Cars song most likely to get people displaying devil horns. Looking For Love is another generic love song that benefits from the unusual vocals, and what sounds like a slightly vocoded occasional background vocal. But building out of the end of the track is another The Cars hit, Shake It Up! It's so 80s that every time you listen to it, you'll find a sweat band or a leg warmer mixed in with your laundry. Jelly bracelets will show up in your sock drawer. The cabinet beneath your sink will fill with Aquanet. It will all be worth it. Woah. We have left the 80s. Sure, there are some eeps and hand claps in Blue Tip, but it is definitely twenty-first century production. Ocasek is higher in the mix. The rhymes, however, are just as basic as ever. That's a good thing. The world doesn't really want or need a serious, well-crafted, political The Cars song. Is there some electric glockenspiel mixed in with the chimy keyboards of Strap Me In? Worth it, if so. They clash so wonderfully with the driving guitars. This almost sound like an 80s remix track. Again, it would work really well for a motivational scene from a movie. This time, it's a time travel adventure, and the last time they used the machine someone died. Will the protagonist survive this trip? It doesn't look good for our hero. Take Another Look thuds out of "Strap Me In" before bright guitars let us know that everything is going to be okay. I mean, someone might have died, but, if so, they've gone to a happier place. Montreal, perhaps. In the summer. You can totally eat cotton candy or poutine to this song. It's your call. We're still in Montreal. We're with someone we care about. We have healthcare. But, oh ,we'll have to return to our regular horror show Soon, so we best enjoy this chill moment for as long as we can. This Could Be Love is that point in a video game when you're not quite at the final boss, but you're close enough that you're getting spammed by lesser villains and the music is getting more intense, and your health bar keeps getting lower no matter how many pills, turnips, cheeseburgers, or wrenches you eat. What if you don't even make it to the boss. Oh god, you don't want to have to go through this level again. Victim Of Love returns us to the world of hand-clapping percussion. The lyrics seem almost taunting. They talk about a woman who done you wrong, but it almost sounds sarcastic, like, get over yourself. Yea, she broke your heart. Why did you give her your heart? She told you she didn't want it. This is totally your fault. Closing out the album and the discography is one of my all-time favorite The Cars' songs, Drive. It's a song about questions. Evaluate yourself. What will happen if you break up with that special someone? Will it be worth it? I mean, you don't have a driver's license. Who's gonna drive you home tonight? If I had to give The Cars their own genre, it would be 8-bit New Wave. They didn't always have squelchy arcade sounds in their music, but when they did, it made sense. When I was an elementary school student going to my first ever sleepaway camp, we had a lip synch night that was about as close to an elementary school drag show as you could get in the 80s without a Christian Right parent calling the authorities. And while my cabin ended up performing Corey Hart's "Sunglasses At Night", our counselor first made us go through pretty much every song on The Cars' debut album. The Cars' actual debut album, The Cars, is great as it is. It's thirty-five minutes of songs that, with only one exception, have been played on classic rock stations for decades. The joke is that they could have called their first album Greatest Hits, as neither of their next two albums came close to that level of quality. I, of course, want the album to be longer, so I've rearranged the order, and added songs from those two albums that I mentioned not being nearly as good. But, for this album, I gave it a proper A-side and B-side, not by quality of song, but providing a break at about the halfway point. This is only going to be a two disc discography, so I might post the follow-up later on today. Side A You know I love a slow build of music, so Cars aficionados shouldn't be surprised that Moving In Stereo kicks off the album, with the band singing about the effects as they use them in the song. This is also one of the few routines that I remember from the camp lip sync show because it's the only one where we all had a turn at pretending to be lead singer, each of us strumming our dining hall brooms, except for one kid who was playing a table like drums, and another who was playing keyboards on a pillow, I think. This is a shitty song for a lip sync competition, though, as its strength is its instrumental section, and there are minimal vocals. Maybe our counselor just thought we were bad at lip syncing, and this was to save face. The song naturally fades into All Mixed Up. This track has its feet planted firmly in the land of progressive rock. It's barely an octave blow Rush's range, and it's got a nearly Queen section of background vocals at points ... not "Bohemian Rhapsody" Queen, something from the first album. There's also a sax outro, which was unusual for the band, and seems to come out of absolutely nowhere. We go back to the 8-bit keyboards as the lead instrument as The Cars go for the love and shoes classic, Lust For Kicks. In addition to the Mario-jumps-over-barrels guitar effects, I like how the song always seems about a half tone from going completely flat, which is a nice way to balance the fact that Ric Ocasek was one of the best terrible singers in rock. Seriously, this song is so 8-bit that I always assume it's going to end with the Q-Bert swearing sound. The first time I heard The Smashing Pumpkins' cover of You're All I've Got Tonight, my memory misattributed the song to Devo. It's got that spare quality with the trilling guitars. This song factors into Let Lie The Dogs Of Rock And Roll, so I've been listening to it quite a bit lately, and I'm sad that I'm posting it here as part of a tribute to Ocasek, rather than just part of the fictional rock world I'm working on. The first super hit from the original album to make this reimagining is Just What I Needed, one of my favorite ever New Wave love songs. The balance between synth and guitar is perfect, and Orr on lead vocals, sounding a bit like Ocasek, is a neat touch. Touch And Go is more spare and less rocky than the songs that precede it. It's the first track I'm using from Panorama, which is a fine rock record but seems mostly boring compared to the successful risks of The Cars and the mostly unsuccessful risks of Candy-O. This track is a standout, in that it's one of the more boring songs on this album, but it's an upbeat and steady rock song that could easily be a template for any band trying to satirize New Wave music. And yet, it's still a great song. I'm In Touch With Your World has a countrified sound, much like some of REM's early work. It's almost difficult not to imagine it being covered by an 80s country musician. Without the keyboard eeps and echoes, of course. Another unusual song for the album is You Wear Those Eyes which has a cricket chirping percussion with a thunder drum effect. It almost sounds like it comes from a 70s stage musical. And when the guitar moves to the front, it's electric AND twangy. It's such a weird little ditty, and it fades out as the final track from Side A. Side B Kicking off Side B is another one of the megahits from the first album, My Best Friend's Girl. The bass intro. The hand clap percussion. The lyrics about watching his best friend's girlfriend dance, his best friend's girlfriend who used to be (his) is written and sung without pangs of jealousy or entitled sense of possession (used to be mine is used as shorthand for used to be my girlfriend, which is possessive, but in a way that's ingrained in our language, not meant to imply actual ownership). It's more of a Wow, She Is Still Wonderful Even Though We're Not Together Anymore, which you don't expect from a late 70s pop song.
Up And Down has heavier guitars than most of the tracks on Side A. It sounds more like a mid 80s video console game than a late 70s arcade game. It could totally have been the background for a level of Contra, especially if they changed the lyrics to Up Up Down Down / Left Right Left Right / B A Start. Which would fit. The effects spin right into the title track, Let The Good Times Roll. Our routine for this song was to look incredibly sad (while wearing sunglasses). Each of us standing at different parts of the dining hall, doing a minimal amount of dancing, shoulder rolling and such, while shaking our heads. Since I Held You is a typical Please Don't Go song. Sort of. While repeatedly lamenting that it's been a while since he's had physical affection, there's no Fuck You, and no begging that she comes back, Instead the singer notes Something in the night, just don't sit right. So something feels wrong, but it's probably not her or him, it's just the overall situation. What a healthy perspective. Let's Go is the first of two songs on this album that is almost a Tom Petty song. Strip away the synth line, and this is absolutely something off Damn The Torpedos. I am sad that neither of these artists is still alive (the lead vocalist on this track, Benjamin Orr died in 2000) to trade vocals. Orr could totally have done "Here Comes My Girl" or "Don't Do Me Like That" with the Heartbreakers, while Petty rerecorded this song with The Cars. What a lost opportunity. I love the echo delay on Double Life. I didn't intentionally keep all but one of the songs I used from Candy-O all together, but I guess they do flow really well. Don't Tell Me No is the second Petty And The Heartbreakers soundalike. This one would sound more at home on You're Gonna Get It. The synth and guitar trading rhythms on Getting Through before the Galaga sound effects eep through are a really cool balance. And then Ocasek sort of screams near the end! Wrapping up the album is It's All I Can Do. It's no more ballady than the rest of their songs, but it has a good fade out to close out the album. I also enjoy that it's a pop love song, but it points out that the reason he is in love with this person is not that they're great, but that he is crazy. Her qualities are never mentioned. Like most people around my age, I wasn't cool enough to listen to REM when they were and up and coming New Wavey band. I was in middle school when "Losing My Religion" hit, and everybody went out and bought Out Of Time. Around the same time, I was performing in a Community College production of The Crucible with a bunch of actors about a decade or so older than me. And early on in the rehearsal process, we were hanging out in the parking lot when someone started playing "It's The End Of The World As We Know It" from their car stereo. "Is this REM?" I asked. "Uh. Yea." said one of the techies, trying desperately to climb the social footstool of community theater, "Everyone knows that. What are you fourteen?" "Uh." I said with less conviction. "Yea. Actually." I don't recall him climbing very far. It was highschool before I could say I "got into" REM. I had too much spending money for a kid who didn't buy drugs, cigarettes, comic books, or pogs, so I bought CDs like a completist. The IRS Years CD collections were pretty cheap around the time I thought "How did REM go from 'End Of The World As We Know It' to 'Losing My Religion'?" I was still in the midst of this journey when Automatic For The People came out, and I became an REM stan. This discography is only mildly chronological. Unlike the Prince, Queen, and The Weeknd discographies, it's not just a trimmed down version of their albums, in order of release. And, unlike the U2 discography, it's not an expansion of their albums with all of my favorite bonus material. This is how the songs go together in my head. An even more headcanon chronology than usual. Murmur was the name of their first album, but apart from its first track (also the first track here), there are no other songs from that album. This is a collection of early songs that have Stipe's early murmury low vocals, usually set against bright guitars and horns. Eponymous was the collection I bought from Columbia House, before my deep dive into REM's IRS albums. So I originally heard the slightly cleaner and brighter mixes of their early hits. IN some cases, I prefer those reimaginings, but the original version of Radio Free Europe is a perfect introduction to early R.E.M. Thanks to Seattle and Nirvana, it would be a mistake to call it grungy, so I guess I'll go with grimy. The instrumentation sounds deliberately sloppy. They're doing what the band wants them to do, and the lyrics sound too low in the mix. I mean, what the fuck is Michael Stipe singing about? It was years before I knew the chorus was Calling in on radio transit. This was some straight up marbles in the mouth 80s basement music.
In a discussion about doing the reimagined discography of REM, my friend Alex said "I'm curious what you're going to do with them. All of the early REM albums are flawless." "Even Dead Letter Office?" I queried. He put his drink down. "That's not an album. It's product." It is, definitively, my least favorite of the IRS years, as it's a collection of C-sides and live tracks with a few unusual covers thrown in. But I've always loved The Voice Of Harold where Michael Stipe reads liner notes over the music of "Seven Chinese Brothers". I prefer the lyrics in this version, as well as enjoying that Stipe's voice is more forward in the mix. Plus, it ends with whistling. How do you say no to whistling? Driver 8 starts a mini-journey within the album. With my own writing, I sometimes struggle to find a narrator who isn't quite like me, and doesn't have my experiences. I'm intrigued when musicians are able, in three minutes, to tell a story that is unlike their own and also isn't trying to tell some Important Fable Of Our Time, a la Billy Joel. This story of a train conductor watching the landscape go by, while his coworker lets him know he has time to take a break. "Driver 8" ends with we can reach our destination, whereas Maps And Legends beings by letting us know he's not to be reached. I enjoy this contradiction, especially as it gives the previous song the connotation that the driver wasn't just trying to get to the train's destination, he was trying to get to someone who is now unattainable. What happened? Did he take his coworker's advice and fall asleep and the person got tired of waiting for him? This song seems to hint that he arrived where he was supposed to when he was supposed to, but the person he wanted to meet wasn't there, and the coworker is trying to comfort him with the possibility that the other person just got lost. Therefore, the ghosted train conductor replies with You Can't Get There From Here. No matter the maps either party used, the world wasn't built for their meeting. I like to imagine this trio of songs (which is not at all a trio, though they all come from Fables Of The Reconstruction) is about young Michael Stripe trying to come to terms with his sexuality, but not having the energy for it. Taken from their Chronic Town EP, Gardening At Night is a song that I enjoy purely for the music. What is Stipe singing about? Go to Wikipedia, or an interview. It is nigh impossible to decipher the lyrics of this song your first ten or fifteen tries. as it is ankled up the garbage sound. Having looked up the story behind the song, I had a bit of a chuckle, but I think it's superfluous to enjoying the track, so decide yourself if you'd like to know what Night Gardening is. Crashing through the chord dissolution of "Gardening At Night" is Disturbance At The Heron House, a song that Stipe talks about being part of his decision to have more direct political lyrics. But, go ahead, and try and tell me what this song is about without looking up interviews with him, or people looking back at the album ten or twenty years later with the benefit of those interviewing. Oh, you KNEW it was an Orwell reference, and that the song was about Reaganomics and Animal Farm? Fuck off, liar. It's a song that stands well on its own, but does seem a little more Important than the average 80s REM song ... once someone explains the references to you. The One I Love is a classic 80s medium rock ballad. In typical closet case fashion (this isn't a call-out, coming out is difficult and should be done at the most comfortable time for a person, whether they're famous or not), the subject is gender neutral, and has no discernible features (another prop to occupy my time), making this song available for anyone to sing about anyone! Except the prop line suggests this is less a love song, and more a takedown of love songs. And did you know that the chorus is just the word Fire sung so incomprehensibly that, for over twenty-five years, I thought it was I am? For a good time, go check out other peoples' interpretations of what this song is "really about". I've seen pyromania, the destruction of a beloved restaurant, a response song to The Police's "Every Breath You Take", and a few other wild takes. All of them mention this being about Stipe's girlfriends. So ... uhh ... their theories probably weren't well researched. Who doesn't have a song about not wanting to back to where you're from? Well, REM tweaks it, as it's more about telling someone you love not to go back where they're from. (Don't Go Back To) Rockville was Mike Mills (the bassist)'s song about not wanting his girlfriend to move back in with her parents. Not a single Orwellian reference or indistinguishable lyric in the whole song. But there are indistinguishable lyrics aplenty in Green Grow The Rushes, another song I love purely for the instrumentation. Apart from the chorus, I couldn't tell you a single lyric. I haven't looked up the song's backstory. And that's fine. This is a perfect murmury early REM song. Closing out the album is So Central Rain. Before I ever heard the studio version, I heard the live version of "Time After Time (Annelise)", "Red Rain", and "So Central Rain" that will appear on the next album. I actually prefer that version, but it wouldn't exist without its studio counterpart. and I do like the buried vocal sound on this particular track. Plus, listening to a grown man singing I'm sorry over and over again, prepared me for twenty years of poetry slam. I have watched The Good Place all the way through a number of times. I've seen the first season at least five times, twice mostly by myself, and three times introducing it to other people. I made it through the second season with one of those groups of people, so I've seen that three times. So far I've only watched the third season while it was airing, but I'll get to it. I was having a lousy week, and decided to watch a random episode, and ended up on Season 1, episode 3, when I started noticing some things I hadn't picked up on before, and it gave me an idea. What if Chidi isn't actually an indecisive human philosophy professor who accidentally gets Soul Mated with Eleanor, a woman who gets into The Good Place by mistake (according to the narrative we are presented with at the beginning of Season 1). His uncanny knack of picking up on what's happening around him only when it's convenient to teach Eleanor things at first had me wondering if he was a demon. But then I wondered What If Chidi Is God. Some very basic Googling showed me that I wasn't the first to think of this. There are a ton of Good Place theories as we ramp up to the final season. This show has had major twists up its sleeve since the very first episode, and while it will be difficult for a final episode twist as big as the one at the end of Season One, it is possible. Is this it? Will the final twist be Chidi Is God? His name, in Igbo, means "God Exists", and names are super important in The Good Place, just ask Congratulations You're Beautiful (the translation of Tahani Al-Jamil). While there is no consensus on what Chidi's last name, Anagonye (also an Igbo name) translates to, if you break it apart, you get "ana", the ground, "go" to make, and "nye" means "for". So a possible translation cold be Creator Of Your Earth (direct translation "Maker Of The Ground For You". For the next few weeks, I'll be rewatching the entire series with this angle in mind. This means there will be massive spoilers for a series defined by unexpected plot twists, so you should really watch the entire series yourself (not by yourself, invite some friends over, buy some frozen yogurt and clam chowder) before reading any more of this. Cast, if you're watching the episode for the first time:
Eleanor: recently deceased woman mistakenly sent to The Good Place. Michael: Figurehead of The Good Place, trying to help people acclimate to their new environs. Chidi: Moral philosophy professor and Eleanor's soulmate. Tahini: Party host. Jiyanu: A Buddhist Monk who has taken a vow of silence. Janet: Database of helpful knowledge with a human appearance. Chidi is the first character Eleanor meets who comes to her, instead of her going to them. She's in the midst of being shown her new home by Michael when Chidi knocks, introduces himself, and then Michael invites him in. He gives a quick bio, which includes his birth in Nigeria where Igbo is one of the primary languages. He interrupts his own quick bio to ask Eleanor about herself, thus establishing himself as a listener, and keeping him from having to give a too in-depth background story. Or is he just being polite? He already knows that The Good Place has TARDIS rules so that you hear everything in the language that you speak. When did he have time to learn this? Eleanor hasn't even seen all of her tiny house yet. She certainly doesn't know the rules of the neighborhood yet. He also knows the rules about cursing immediately. He is genuinely excited to spend all of eternity with Eleanor "in pursuit of the fundamental truths of the universe ... together, as soulmates." He promises her he will "never do anything to cause (her) harm." The camera then shows Eleanor explaining that she doesn't belong in The Good Place, so that we don't see Chidi's reaction until she finishes, and he gives a low key "Wait, what?" which, later, would be an uncharacteristically chill response to such a big conundrum. When he learns that Eleanor's job in life was to defraud the elderly into buying fake medicine, he doesn't seem surprised, his focus is on making Eleanor understand why her being good at her job makes her a worse person. This is BEFORE he agrees to teach her ethics or help her. But he is already invested in getting her to question her behavior from when she was alive. They go out for froyo later, and he suggests that Eleanor confess everything to Michael, explaining that her predicament might just be a test. When she expresses her fear that Michael will send her to The Bad Place if he finds out, Chidi summons Janet (Again, Eleanor knows nothing about Janet yet ... How long was Chidi in The Good Place before Eleanor arrives? Because Eleanor is under the impression, according to episode three, that they all arrived in The Good Place at approximately the same time), to ask what The Bad Place is like. They hear an audio clip of people screaming, including the phrase "That bear has two mouths!" which Eleanor points out "doesn't sound awesome." When Eleanor asks for Chidi's help in keeping her secret, he comes out as a moral philosophy and ethics professor who "just doesn't like to be dishonest". He then mentions "I'm in a perfect Utopia and I have a stomach ache. I think I have to tell Michael (about Eleanor not belonging in The Good Place)." But before he can go to Michael, BOOM, Michael shows up with Tahani and Jiyanu (whose name means Builder Of The Universe ... similar to the meaning of Chidi's last name, hmmmm...). Is this Michael the Director (or Michael the Demon, as we discover later) keeping Chidi from making a decision, or is this Chidi God summoning a distraction before Eleanor tips him into making a decision about helping her? At the Welcome To The Neighborhood party that Tahani throws, Chidi asks Eleanor to tell him about one "decent act" she performed during her life. When she has trouble coming up with an answer immediately, he downgrades "decent act" to "something neutral". He seems genuinely surprised when Eleanor has her first realization, as she wonders if anyone cared about her death. And is appropriately terrified at Eleanor's clown door. When the neighborhood goes haywire at the end of the first episode, he tells Eleanor what she should already know, but somehow doesn't: "This is all happening because of you." **** Those were all observations that could have been made during a first watchthrough of the episode (they weren't, I didn't pick up on any of them), when there was no reason to believe any part of the show was being misleading. But, of course, the big spoiler at the end of Season One is that they aren't even in The Good Place, they're in The Bad Place. Michael's entire character journey throughout the season turns out to be a giant lie. Nothing we knew about him was accurate. So, apart from Eleanor, who is our point-of-view-protagonist, why are we to believe anyone's story? Cast, With All The Info Acquired From The First Three Seasons: Eleanor: Recently deceased terrible person being tortured by every other member of the cast. Michael: Head torturer of this neighborhood of The Bad Place. Demon. Chidi: Recently deceased indecisive philosopher being tortured by every other member of the cast. Tahani: Recently deceased self-obsessed socialite being tortured by every other member of the cast. Jason Mendoza: Recently deceased failed DJ and drug dealer pretending to be a Buddhist Monk who took a vow of silence. Being tortured by every other member of the cast. Janet: Stolen database designed for use in a Good Place neighborhood. Actually trying to be useful. Still not a robot. Still not a person. We aren't even given any information about Chidi in this episode. Everything we hear about his life comes from him telling Eleanor about himself, much the same way everything we learn about Michael comes from his own expository dialogue. Now, this will quickly change. We do get a ton of glimpses into Chidi's so-called life, as the series expands. But what if he's spending this episode getting a better feel for post-death Eleanor, so that he can design better and more complex tests for her? Unlike Michael's lies, I don't think Chidi is interested in whether or not Eleanor is qualified for the good afterlife. Clearly, he thinks she isn't. For him, this isn't a test about how a person's behavior affects where they go when they die. It's an exploration of a person's behavior when the consequence goalposts are constantly being moved. She's Job, and Michael is the gleeful adversary. But, unlike Job, she isn't a devout follower of anything in the beginning. He keeps building her into someone who believes in things (his goodness, her own potential for improvement, that there will be shellfish in The Good Place), only to keep stripping it away from her. Each time he does this, it's a little more agonizing for her. The things that bother her later in the series wouldn't even phase Episode One Eleanor, if Chidi wasn't constantly making her aware of how her behavior affects others. Michael didn't do that. Chidi did. Sure, the narrative Michael puts forth at the end of the season, beginning of Season Two, is that he arranged for all these people to come together, but I don't buy that Michael is an incompetent demon or Satan, I think his goalposts are constantly being moved, too. And I think Chidi is the person behind it. I haven't decided if I think Michael *knows* that Chidi is God, and if everyone but Eleanor is in on it. This would have a fantastic meta-consequence, as well, as, according to the lore they've built around the series, Kristen Bell, who plays Eleanor, and Ted Danson, who plays Michael, were the only actors who knew that the characters were actually in The Bad Place. What if William Jackson Harper, who plays Chidi, is the only actor who knows he's God? I really want to watch the next episode to see what else presents itself, but I'm going to limit myself for now. If you only heard The Weeknd on the radio, then the song you heard was from this album. I remember being in a store somewhere when "Feel My Face" came on, and thinking "Are they playing The Weeknd? Are they playing a song by The Weeknd about doing blow until your face goes numb? They ARE." That song was also nominated for a Nickeloden Kids Choice Award because we live in a strange world. This is also the first time in a reimagined discography that I haven't done anything except change the order of the tracks. I didn't cut anything. I didn't add anything. It's the laziest work I've done, but it's mainly because I think this is a solid album. I enjoy an album that builds up from nothing before the music and / or the lyrics kick in, which is why I moved Shameless to the beginning of the album. I also imagined it was a single for some reason. While it still has the I Am Awesome And You're A Fool For Not Letting Me Fuck You All The Time, You Suck atmosphere of the previous two albums, but it's more radio friendly, which is in, in some ways, worse. While the refrain is about how he has no shame, he is mainly dragging her for not loving him unconditionally, and, dude, The Weeknd had a lot of work to do before he was capable of non-toxic love. Musically, there's an uncharacteristically great guitar riff out of nowhere near the end of the song.
Real Life is the opening track on the original album, and it serves as a better thesis for the album, as it acknowledges that he is the problem in most of his relationships, which, NO SHIT. Every woman that loved me / oh yea / I seemed to push them away. If the first two albums are to be believed, yuppers. We echo into Tell Your Friends, which is the bragaddocio My Life As A Rock Star Track, which features, appropriately, Kanye MAGA West. Except it's not in my version. I don't remember if I edited it out, or if this is a glorious accident, but I was waiting for the Kanye bridge, and it ain't there. It's instrumental. Sweet. The Hills was The Weeknd's first #1 hit, and it's easy to see why it was #1. From the crunchy beginning to the bouncing back and forth between his spoken tenor and falsetto singing. I'm not too amped about having a song with the term "friendzoned" on the album, but people do feel that way. The first time I heard it, I assumed he was coming out as bisexual, Frank Ocean Style. But it's just that he's cheating on people with people who are cheating on people and he's worried that people will find out. Ugh. It's a really catchy and haunting somng about how terrible The Weeknd is. Speaking of terrible, Earned It (which is not terrible, or I could have cut it) is frome the movie Fifty Shades Of Grey, which is terrible. Oh, but it's about an abusive relationship poorly disguised as BDSM, so putting The Weeknd on that soundtrack makes perfect sense. In The Night continues the abused love theme, but in this one The Weeknd is telling a third person story. Despite its upbeat tempo and vocals, it reminds me of living at The actual Crooked Treehouse. The downstairs neighbor had a partner with major sexual trauma, who used to scream on a regular basis. I knew there was mental illness involved, but it was several years before I encountered the person who did the screaming while they were doing the screaming. They immediately modulated their volume and profanity usage, and explained why they were always screaming and how it wasn't my neighbor's fault. I don't think you'd understand is something they actually said to me. I love the hand clapping and spoken vocal quality of the beginning of Losers before the actual beat and effects kick in. As someone with a lifelong distrust of the American Education System, and a fan of lines like Because stupid's next to 'I Love You', this is my favorite set of lyrics on the album. And Labrinth's verse and version of the chorus is fantastic. This is tied for my favorite all-together track with "Can't Feel My Face". "Losers" drizzles right into Prisoner, which has a perfect Lana Del Ray feature, and a perfect sing-along chorus for people sitting at home, worried about what they're doing with their lives. Angel is the final track on the original track listing, but it's not heavy enough of a closer for my liking. It's a perfectly good song about hoping his lover can move on, and it's much less toxic than his early stuff. I like it as part of his evolution as a songwriter, but I don't feel like it's an honest ending to this album. I do love Maty Noise on echo background vocals, though. Acquaintance brings back The Weeknd we know and are critical of. We're back to a woman done him wrong, and him deflecting any blame with his penis. The piano outro of "Acquaintance" bleeds into the synth waves of Can't Feel My Face, the best #1 dance hit about doing coke I've ever heard (there's way more than you're currently thinking of). The beat is, and I know this is a cliche, but, infectious. And the rising vocals into the shoulder shaking chorus is amazing every time. Of course kids love this song. I'm not an Ed Sheeran fan. I'm not NOT an Ed Sheeran fan, I just haven't been exposed to him that much. His pop vocals with country guitar pluck combined with The Weeknd's background effects on Dark Times is a perfect haunting album track, and makes me consider checking out his discography, past the hits that have managed to break into my world. The background effects are fairly Zooropa-ish in quality, which I quite enjoy. As You Are is this albums's Saving A Stripper With Your Dick song. There's no actual stripper, just a "broken" woman, who he's going to fix by taking her as she is. Uh-huh. But will she also accept him as he is? So they can sex all night. Oooof. Often is a dark closer. Not just because it's a Weeknd slow jam, which is not a love ballad, but a fucking on drugs song, but because it doesn't give him the redemption that he'd have if the album ended on "Angel". He's back in his pattern here. I think, based on the next album, that that's a more honest truth. The narrative around rock music in the nineties was one of competition. MTV started the decade a brash consumer paradise, shaping the music people would buy by having Carson Daley and screaming teens cheer for the most radio friendly hit while Matt Pinfield whispered of Underground Music that would soon end up on Daley's show, and Kurt Loder would feed us a stream of future Trivial Pursuit info about all the bands inbetween. I can't say it was a great or glorious time for music, as I'm hugely biased as having been a massive ball of hormones and spending money at the time. It seemed like an exciting time for music. Rock and roll had gone from summertime screaming hair metal of Guns N Roses to the wintry grunge of Nirvana. It was natural music evolution. And hip hop had gone from an autumnal symphony of samples twisted into new sounds to a One Sample Per Song streamlined spring pop fest. Not through natural music evolution, but through lawyers and copyright law. It was during the cultural awareness doldrums between Civil Rights Support and Wokeness, so while I'm sure there must have been a proliferation of articles (many probably rejected by Spin, Rolling Stone, and MTV News) about the racism behind the abrupt change of how artists sampled, due to financial restricitions, I never read them. So I thought the evolution was natural. By the end of the 90s, MTV was declaring the death of Rock & Roll by pushing boy band pop, and the pop rock of 1970s influenced bands like Smashing Pumpkins. The hip-hop narrative they set was all 1980s (and therefore, also the 1950s) pop flavored nostalgia tracks as Lauryn Hill and The Fugees focused on reliving their adolescence through a more adult lens, and Sean Coombs and Faith Evans crooned about their recently killed peers. By the time we reached the early 2000s, the joke about "Remember when MTV used to play music videos?" to "Remember when MTV 2 used to play music videos." Everything seemed to revolve around the nascent reality TV revolution that MTV had helped birth. Rock was sullen, and ready to be made fun and poppy again. But that's not really what happened. Instead, Radiohead's Kid A hit, and rock was still sullen and heavy but it sounded slicker. It was a natural less-poppy follow-up to their previous album, OK Computer. But with less narrative, and a focus on the sonic possibilities of rock and roll. It was a necessary shot in the arm to rock music. Not a lot of bands followed suit, but production techniques shifted, and a wider variety of rock started charting again. What late 90s Radiohead did for rock, the early work of The Weeknd did for hip-hop. It's not a perfect parallel. Radiohead was allowed to be experimental because they'd already been successful sounding like their peers. They were in their mid-30s and mid-career. The Weeknd was a 21 year old who came out of nowhere (Toronto, or Youtube, depending on your point of view), and he was experimenting with his voice because he hadn't settled into his own yet. And while his lyrics were as problematic towards women as most 21 year old males' are, his production was next level, and his Michael Jacksonesque vocals, occasionally shifted down or slightly up in a more Prince-like fashion than Cher or T-Pain. The title, and opening track, Odd Look, is actually a remix of a Kavinsky song with The Weeknd rapping over it. Imagine the "Stranger Things Theme" with lyrics about how great he is with women. All you girls tryin to be saints / I'll make you roll with a sinner. It's the same rock and roll lifestyle lyrics from the previous album but with a retro pop hook.
It drops out into the percussive Tears In The Rain, which, surprise, is about how his ex is better off without him. Which, yea. Did you hear what he said about his exes on that last album? Run. The dude has a problem seeing partners as anything more than future song lyrics, and this is coming from a writer who once dated ten guys and referred to them, to their faces, not by their names, but by the order in which he met them. They all feel the same / adjust to the fame indeed. The Professional sunrises out of "Tears In The Rain" and eventually hits its thesis in the breakdown. I love /You love / This love / We're professional / I know /You know /We're sophisticated /At lovin', lovin', lovin', lovin', lovin', lovin', lovin', lovin' / Lovin', lovin', lovin', lovin', lovin', lovin', lovin', lovin' / Lovin', lovin', lovin', / We're professional at lovin', lovin', lovin', lovin', lovin' / Lovin', lovin', lovin', lovin', lovin', lovin', lovin', lovin' / Lovin', lovin', lovin'. We go back to an 80s computer sound for Gone, with the drums and bass knocking at the door throughout the whole song. Lyrically, we're still partying and making questionable decisions with women, but in this narrative, The Weeknd is the one fucked up, not the woman he's trying to go home with. Pr...og...ress? The music gets really spare in the middle, and stays that way for a deliberately uncomfortable amount of time. Birds (Part 1) marches through the sparsity. With The Weeknd resuming his "don't fall in love with me" narrative. He's a really bad boyfriend, ladies. Really. Really bad. Probably worse than Prince. Probably worse than Freddy Mercury. Ugh. It bothers me how much I like The Weeknd's music, given how utterly hedonistic and destructive his lyrics are, particularly towards women. Life Of The Party is another drugs rule my life, but let's fuck anyway, song. I like it as the middle of the Birds sandwich. It's still part of his warning, this way. Not just a red flag, but a red flag with a picture of a skull and crossbones roofying your drink. It's actually surprising that Birds (Part 2) isn't already on a Quentin Tarantino soundtrack. It has the echoey surf guitar foundation, unnecessary violence, and liberal use of the N word. Really, all it needs to do is smack a paparazzo and give a self-righteous interview about it, and it could be Tarantino's personal theme song. The screeching birds lead us into the Drake drenched part of the album as The Weeknd tells us what he Lives For. He got sober for an entire day to write this song about kissing bitches in the club. Sigh. Good to see that sobriety has him branching out of his comfort zone. Hey, this is the shit that he lives for. And what Drake lives for, too, I guess. While the guitar plucks its way to the end of "Live For", the drums and The Weeknds haunting wails being us into The Zone. Drake says Whoa, all these broken hearts on that pole / Man, if pole dancing's an art, you know how many fuckin' artists I know? Yea, we get it Degrassi TNG. You're hard now. You've been hard the whole time. There comes a time in a man's life /Where he must take responsibility / For the choices he has made / And there are certain things that he must do / Things that he must say / Like I love you / And I need you / I only want you / And nobody's going to know if it's true, ooh. Is this the bridge to a future, less objectifying Weeknd? We'll probably have to wait until the next album to see. We opened up with a "Stranger Things" vibe. And that's how Pretty begins but it then becomes more like a track from the Natural Born Killers soundtrack. The closing verse (which is in French) gives the impression that this album is not about current issues, but The Weeknd looking back at their adolescence, which is slightly better. We were all terrible in high school. |
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