Semi-New Song Sunday: Haim on Rhye feat. Mustard

I’ve been thinking of the “Semi-New Song Sunday” experiment as a failure, because it hasn’t been turning up a non-stop stream of My New Favorite Bands. But really, it’s been an unexpected success. Pushing myself to find new (to me) music every week has meant I’m seeing more of what’s out there, and I’m learning more about what exactly I like.

For instance: I’d much rather watch a good video for a middling song, than listen to a good song with no video.

I like the band HAIM just fine, but I rarely go out of my way to listen to them, and I’m not sure I’d be able to recognize any of their songs apart from “The Wire.” But this performance of their song “3AM” from Late Night With Seth Meyers has a video call from Robert Pattinson driving them to become a pop band made up of vampire brides, which is just objectively cool and memorable.

When it became clear that COVID lockdowns were going to make it impossible for shows to have live audiences, I expected everything to go the telecommuting route, like NPR’s Tiny Desk concerts or those episodes of SNL. It’s been neat to see more people taking advantage of it, with stuff like the Apple presentations that are so much slicker and more interesting than their old keynotes, and these concerts that give musicians (or more likely, their labels) more freedom to be creative than a simple live setup on a talk show stage. I hope it’s one of those things that they keep doing going forward, realizing that the only reason they’ve been doing the exact same thing since the Ed Sullivan show is that they were never forced to come up with an alternative.

“Black Rain” by Rhye is an even stronger example, though, because this “80s version of disco” is so forgettable on its own that it passes right through me like bran flakes. But put a preternaturally ripped actor out there dancing like nobody but his wife who directed the video is watching, and you’ve got my attention.

This video has more 2020 energy behind it, if you can ignore the fact that people who aren’t in super-hero movies don’t have bodies like that. It feels like that One Guy who’s there early at every single concert, alone on the dance floor just losing his shit to the opening act. And because all the concerts have been shut down, he’s got no recourse but to go out to his deck every night, take his shirt and shoes off, and rock his body to music that only he can hear.

The other reason I’d call this experiment a success is because learning what I like also means learning what I don’t like. For instance: “Pure Water” by Mustard and Migos. I watched every video by Mustard that I could find, because I was desperate to make a Dad Joke in the title of this post, and none of it is for me at all. I just think it’s all repetitive, auto-tuned to hell, and astoundingly dull. This collaboration with Migos was the most tolerable one I could find, and I’m still not a fan.

I always knew that by the time I hit 50, I’d hate all the music that was popular. Even when I was a teenager, there was only a window of a couple of months in the early 80s that I did like popular music. But I imagined I’d be like the middle-aged, white, TV writers at Hanna-Barbera, trying to skewer The Beatles with “Bug Music” in The Flintstones. I thought I’d find the music-the-youths-listen-to-these-days to be too loud, too violent, too dumb, or too harsh for me. I never expected that I’d find it so god-awful boring.

I’m not interested in wasting time talking about stuff I don’t like, because taste is subjective, and it’s time better spent amplifying the things I love. But this was a great example for the “Semi-New Song” experiment. I went in assuming that there was all this great music out there that I just wasn’t cool enough to be aware of. It’s nice to be reminded that my verifiable lack of coolness doesn’t have much of anything to do with what music I like.

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Kutiman Around the World

Two of Kutiman’s post-Thru You videos, celebrating the cooperation and creativity of humans living in cities

“Thru Tokyo” is part of a series that musician and filmmaker Kutiman started after his wonderful “Thru You” projects. The idea is similar to “Thru You,” in that he’s taking disparate audio and video samples and remixing them into a new composition. The big differences are 1) this isn’t found footage, but is deliberately recorded for the purpose of the video; 2) each composition is made in celebration of a city; and 3) most of the samples are from artists and musicians who live in the city.

As far as I’m concerned, Kutiman alone justifies the existence of YouTube (if not the internet in general). Each video he makes is such a joyful celebration of collaboration and cooperation, creativity and talent. There is such a feeling of optimism and belief in humanity implicit in every one of these compositions, that if we ever make another Voyager probe, I want Kutiman in charge of making the next golden record.

My favorite of this series (and everyone else’s favorite, if the 7.3 million views is any indication) is “Mix Tel Aviv”1Technically, I believe these were different projects with different sponsors, so I mean “series” more in the sense of a creative connection. I believe that Tel Aviv is Kutiman’s home city, or at least it was at the time, and I think that several of the musicians involved are his friends. Regardless, the video shows a love of the city and its people that’s undeniable. In a just universe, Kutiman would’ve gotten the patronage to make videos like this for dozens more cities.

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    Technically, I believe these were different projects with different sponsors, so I mean “series” more in the sense of a creative connection

Semi-New Song Sunday: Aunty Donna

Aunty Donna is an Australian comedy group that has been aggressively promoting their new Netflix series. I heard about them via an Australian video/podcast channel I watch regularly called “Mr. Sunday Movies,” so now YouTube believes I’m the world’s biggest fan, and is recommending them constantly. “Everything’s a Drum” is from a two-year-old live benefit performance and has been running in a near-constant loop in my head since I first saw it.

I mean, it’s absurdist improv-oriented sketch comedy, so it’s hit or miss. But they’re always 10,000% committed to the bit, which keeps it moving. And when they do hit, it’s fantastic. If you’ve got Netflix, check out at least Episode 6, which has a silly sketch about the boys buying a jukebox, with Paul F Tompkins as a guest. It’s got what might be my favorite gag of anything in the past five years.

Maybe my “new-to-me music on Sundays” pledge has already gone off the rails, but I assure you it’s not for a lack of trying. I keep looking for stuff, but so little of it interests me. (Apologies to YouTube, Apple Music, and several of her fans on Twitter, but I just can’t get into Phoebe Bridgers no matter how many times I listen to her songs). I guess my tastes are a lot more narrow than I ever suspected.

Whatever the case, I’ve spent a good bit of time over the last week looking for new artists I might like. And instead, I keep just singing the line “I got a synonym book and it makes me pleased” from “Chuffed (Dad Song)”. I guess the heart wants what it wants.

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Track Two’s Too Terrific

Digging through my iTunes library to find my favorite track twos and celebrate never being cool.

My favorite song from Come Away With Me by Norah Jones is the second track, right after the hit “Don’t Know Why” that you heard at least 1000 times during 2002, especially if you went into a Starbucks or a book store.1To be clear, I love “Don’t Know Why,” but it suffered the same fate of over-exposure as other great songs like “Hey Ya” and “Get Lucky.” It’s called “Seven Years”, and it’s the first song in this at-home live performance, one of many that Jones has been posting to YouTube during the pandemic.

Buying that album stands out as a significant personal milestone for me, oddly enough. As I remember it, I’d turned 30 and was barreling towards 31, I felt like I’d lost control of how my life was going, and I was having a crisis in a Borders book store in San Rafael, CA. Buying this album felt like I would finally be admitting that I was nothing more than a suburban, thirty-something white guy who’d drive his Volkswagen Jetta to a Borders to get middle-of-the-road singer-songwriter music that appeared on Starbucks playlists. And as I remember it — which is probably inaccurate but is true to the spirit of it — the song “Seven Years” came over the store’s audio system, and it was profoundly calming. No, I was never going to be cool, but who cares?2And no matter how popular Come Away With Me may be, it’s still extremely underrated.

Going back to find it tonight, I was surprised that it was the second track on the album. That lyric “a little girl with nothing wrong, and she’s all alone” is such a perfect lyric in such a simple, confident song, that I would’ve thought it’s something you build up to over the course of a set list.

And I thought it’d be mildly interesting to find other cases where the strongest song on the album (or at least my favorite) is on track two. Here’s what I found from my own library, instead of working on more important things I should be doing tonight:

  • “Dirty Back Road” by The B-52s, the second track on Wild Planet
  • “Cannonball” by The Breeders, on Last Splash
  • “Wait in the Car” by The Breeders, on All Nerve
  • “Song 2” (duh) by Blur on Blur
  • “The Distance” by Cake on Fashion Nugget
  • “Daddy’s Car” by The Cardigans on Life
  • “I Am Stretched on Your Grave” by Sinéad O’Connor on I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got
  • “Cruel” by St. Vincent on Strange Mercy
  • “Love is Stronger Than Death” by The The on Dusk
  • “Overkill” by Men at Work on Cargo
  • “The Rain Song” by Led Zeppelin on Houses of the Holy
  • “Hounds of Love” by Kate Bush on Hounds of Love
  • “Photograph” by Def Leppard on Pyromania
  • “We Used To Be Friends” by The Dandy Warhols on Welcome to the Monkey House
  • “Walking on Broken Glass” by Annie Lennox on Diva

Taken all together, this shows… well, not much of anything. (I did only promise “mildly interesting,” after all). Sometimes it’s an artist using track one as an intro to build up to their strongest track. Sometimes it’s a song that probably wouldn’t be a pop hit, but is still strong enough to put up front. Sometimes, I just like a song better than the artist or producer did.

The one artist in my library who seems to do it (somewhat) consistently is Indigo Girls. So many of my favorites — “Secure Yourself,” “Galileo,” “Get Out the Map,” and “Crazy Game” — are the second track on their album. And so is “Least Complicated” from Swamp Ophelia, which is kind of thematically perfect: for my entire adult life, they’ve been making songs to remind me that it’s okay not to have everything figured out, and to remind me that I’ve never been cool. (And I don’t need to be).

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    To be clear, I love “Don’t Know Why,” but it suffered the same fate of over-exposure as other great songs like “Hey Ya” and “Get Lucky.”
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    And no matter how popular Come Away With Me may be, it’s still extremely underrated.

Tuesday Tune Two-fer: Jeremy Blake (Red Means Recording)

Two tunes from an artist who showed what you can do with synthesizers and gave me calm when I needed it

Jeremy Blake is the musician behind (or maybe just slightly underneath) the brilliant YouTube channel Red Means Recording. He does really clever tutorials for various synthesizers and other musical instruments, predominantly the Teenage Engineering OP-1, along with their Pocket Operators. I imagine he’s tricked a ton of people into buying an OP-1, because he always makes it look like it’s easy to just sit down and get a fantastic track of out of the device every time.

He’s got a new album out called Hindsight, along with a great music video for the title track that combines footage from the Black Lives Matter protests with stock footage he didn’t pay for. It’s an ingenious trick to use humor to make the horror stand out; the super-heightened vapidity of stock footage contrasted against the surreal footage of police brutality that we’ve been seeing.

In March of last year he made a video called Opulent Polished Zircon, one of two videos demonstrating the capabilities of the Teenage Engineering OP-Z. It’s pretty great. If you don’t have time to listen to the whole 50-minute set, my favorite part is at the 27:50 mark. (It’s also available on Apple Music, where my favorite is the track titled “Oh, Luck”).

It’s unlikely to have the same impact on you as it did on me, but that’s for the best. I listened to it back in early February, at the lowest point of the worst year, when I was having to fly back to California on my own. Listening to this with headphones let me just get completely lost in the music. A wave of calm washed over me. It was a reminder that I could still enjoy something, and I was going to go on discovering new things to enjoy. I could see a glimmer of optimism again.

And then the pandemic started a few weeks later. But for a while there, I was hopeful, and I’ll always appreciate this track for it.

Semi-New Song Sunday: First Aid Kit

Hearing First Aid Kit for the first time makes me wish I’d grown up in their version of the 1970s, instead of the real one

In a rare victory for the YouTube algorithm, it recommended out of the blue the beautiful “Come Give Me Love” by First Aid Kit. The song is a cover of a Swedish pop song from 1973 by Ted Gärdestad. I’d never heard of the song or the artist, or First Aid Kit, for that matter, but they’re quoted describing why the song is significant to them in a post from Clash magazine1(Which I also have never heard of):

Ted Gärdestad is a Swedish national treasure. Just like us he started his music career when he was only a teenager and wrote songs with his older brother Kenneth. […] The original track was produced by none other than Björn and Benny from ABBA, with ABBA on backing vocals. We are huge fans of the original production and wanted to stay close to that 70s folky sound. This is an homage to that time period and recording style.

When I first saw their other videos, I got a heavy Heart vibe, but as I watch more, I realize it’s more like “What if Ann and Nancy Wilson had grown up in Sweden instead of Seattle, and instead of Led Zeppelin they’d really gotten into Simon & Garfunkel and Emmylou Harris?” At which point I’m probably stretching the comparison too far, but I still like it.

I often feel like my generation and the one immediately after are responsible for so much pointless disdain and negativity, getting all worked up about “authenticity” and “appropriation,” which is really nothing but self-righteous ignorance about how culture actually works. It makes me extremely happy to see examples of artists who don’t waste any time worrying about that nonsense, and just celebrate the stuff they love.

First Aid Kit’s songs and videos — hell, even their typography — are homages to the 1970s, and 1970s America in particular, that aren’t tainted by the self-awareness of nostalgia. So they’re allowed to be purely enthusiastic celebrations of the aesthetic itself. Too often when people try to make an homage to the 70s or 80s (or now, I guess, 90s and 2000s), they include all the artifacts like scan lines, film grain, and record hiss: implicit acknowledgements that they’re calling back to something that’s now quaint and dated. But when you present it in high resolution and high fidelity, it’s an admission that “No, I just genuinely love this stuff. And I want to present it the same way they would have, if they’d had easy access to the technology we’ve got.”

Another really nice video is “It’s a Shame”, which has a similar feel to Cibo Matto’s “Sugar Water,” but its gimmick is the much simpler “one of these sisters is having a much better night than the other.” It’s also just a really great song.

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    (Which I also have never heard of)

My Possession

The latest Dirty Projectors song seems as close as 2020 is going to let us get to a collective exhale.

Still no plans to switch over full-time to a Dirty Projectors fanpage, but I was happy to see that their final EP of 2020, Ring Road, came out today, along with a video for “My Possession.”

I’m not savvy enough to recognize whether the beginning is a Google promotion, or just a gag about how some of us have been listening to “Overlord” non-stop since we first heard it. Either way, it’s a nice acknowledgement of late November 2020, setting aside a lovely song about fascism in favor of gentle harmonies about letting go of self-destructive obsession, complete with references to The Exorcist.

P.S. My favorite song from the last EP is still “Searching Spirit.”

Tuesday Tune Twofer: Songs for my Mother

Remembering the early 1970s, and two songs my mother liked to sing when I was a kid.

My friend Chris just commented that his daughter liked a song I’d included in a post, which made me wonder if this blog might be a bad influence on children, which made me think of the songs I remember liking when I was little. I loved ABBA, but the first song I clearly remember loving was “Top of the World” by The Carpenters.

Really, I remember a medley of songs, including “Close to You” and “Sing.” But “On Top of the World” was my favorite, and I still can’t think about it — even the Me First and the Gimme Gimmes version — without thinking of my mother singing it.

She also liked to tell a story over and over — that I don’t remember at all — of my getting out a portable microphone and sitting on a stool and singing “Sing” while crossing my leg and turning to face a non-existent camera, like I’d probably seen somebody do on the Mike Douglas show. In retrospect, I realize that that story, plus my love of ABBA, make it seem like I should’ve recognized some things about myself before I turned 33, but I’ll just say the 70s were a simpler time.

My mother also loved Neil Diamond, and eight times out of ten, you could find her either playing or singing “Sweet Caroline,” “I’m a Believer,” “America,” “Song Sung Blue,” or the one I remember her singing the most often: “Cracklin Rosie.Everybody knows the “Bom! Bom! Bom” from “Sweet Caroline,” but only the true fans could be found walking through the kitchen, seemingly at random, singing “Say it now! Say it now! Say it now!”

Also: that version of “Sing” I linked to above is one I’d never seen before, with Karen Carpenter and a small chorus of children singing the song in Japanese. Which is so rad that I’m going to include it as a unprecedented third song for Tuesday Twofer.

Semi-New Song Sundays: Nada Surf

Nada Surf is new to me but is still making me nostalgic for my college years.

I’ve heard of Nada Surf before, but to the best of my knowledge, I’ve never actually heard any of their songs. “Song for Congress” is from their 2020 album Never Not Together, and even though it’s not at all subtle, it’s pretty nice. Vocals that vaguely remind me of 60s British pop, jangly guitars, and some nice string arrangements: I’ll allow it.

Probably appropriate for a band that formed in the 1990s, this sounds like exactly the kind of music that was ubiquitous in my college years. Or probably more accurately, during my first job immediately after college, listening to Atlanta “alternative” radio on my commute to work. It would’ve played in between Luscious Jackson, Veruca Salt, and the Crash Test Dummies.

I don’t think I’m going to rush out to get one of their records. If I’m being honest, the reason their music sounds so familiar could very well be because I’ve heard them before and found it completely forgettable. But right now, there’s something comforting seeing a guy who’s grayed almost as much as I have, still making music that immediately takes me back to a better time. The biggest difference is back then, a lot of us were fooled into thinking the Clinton Administration had our best interests at heart, so there were fewer somber pop songs about the leadership vacuum.

Another track from their new album is “Something I Should Do”, which is even more the kind of song that seemed to playing constantly somewhere in Athens, sometimes following you from store to store. Based on the older songs I’ve heard, I’m guessing that the spoken-word-verse — which for “alternative rock” seems to date it to the 1990s as much as if they were making Martin references — is a recurring thing with the band. This time it’s about finding unity in a year with so much deep division. It makes me miss the days when bands could be unapologetically earnest, back before a D-list TV host could demand to see a President’s birth certificate and the people who voted him into office would act aghast that you’d insinuate that they’re racist.

Tuesday Tune Two-fer: Music to Feel Bad To

Today’s theme is feeling gross and going back to bed

I woke up around five am feeling lousy, fitfully slept for a couple more hours and felt even worse, and then over the course of the afternoon felt it turn into a massive headache. I’ve gone back to bed, but I still can’t let an early attempt at blog continuity die so soon.

Thankfully I’ve been having much fewer headaches in 2020 than I did in 20191Turns out allergy medicine does work after all, as long as I take it daily, so I’ve been hearing a lot less of Frank Black’s song in my head. I’ve liked the song ever since I first heard it, and I especially love the video which I somehow don’t remember ever seeing before, but it’s not a great one to have going on a constant loop in your brain when it feels like it’s swollen up and trying to burst through cracks in your skull.

Another video I’d never seen before today is the alternate video to Bruno Mars’s “The Lazy Song.” Bruno Mars songs already seem catchy but completely empty; I feel like he’s a genius pop musician who could be making incredibly memorable songs (but likely incredibly less money) if he’d team up with a lyricist who aimed for more weight. “The Lazy Song” has always felt twee to the point of being insufferable, probably because I can’t hear it without seeing that stupid video with all the monkey masks. It’s so much better paired with this alternate version, where the meaningless catchiness of the song is paired with Leonard Nimoy just no longer giving a shit.

Speaking of not giving a shit: I’ll try to come up with some better songs next week.

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    Turns out allergy medicine does work after all, as long as I take it daily

Semi-new Song Sunday: Run the Jewels

New-to-me: Run the Jewels make revolution look like a fun street party

Edited to add: Re-reading this, I noticed I’d carelessly used an idiom without thinking of the implications of it. Instead of silently correcting it, I’d rather draw attention to it as a reminder to be conscious of the connotations of what we write. Below, I wrote that Mike’s speech was about “how far black people have come,” which not only sounds condescending, but also makes it sound as if they were overcoming some internal limitation, or somehow “catching up.” What I should have written was “how much black people have accomplished, even in a system designed to keep them down.”

I’ve tried to get into Run the Jewels a few times, but it never “took” until “Ooh LA LA,” released earlier this year but super-appropriate for watching on repeat over the past week.

The image of dozens (hundreds?) of people dancing in the streets as the excesses of capitalism burn around them may be a little on-the-nose, but that doesn’t make it any less awesome to see.

Speaking of capitalism, that’s been the thing keeping me from getting into Run the Jewels for a while. They just seem like they’re trying way too hard to sell me something. I mean, I know that self-promotion is a huge part of hip hop, but they keep banging the same notes over and over again — the fist and the gun, and yeah we get it, you smoke — so often that it feels more like a commercial than a music video.

The reason I gave them another look is because I respect the hell out of Killer Mike for his heartfelt and reasoned call for peace in response to the protests of the George Floyd murder, at a press conference with his school friend, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms. It was inspiring as hell. Not conciliatory, not compromising, vividly angry and disgusted, but reminding us how far black people have come — especially in Atlanta — and reminding everyone to respect the work of generations of people fighting against injustice and to stop tearing down the things that their work had built. After seeing so many white people tsk-tsking and saying “well I don’t see what looting could possibly accomplish,” it was amazing seeing someone calling for peace while still screaming at a system that callously crushes people with no recourse for justice.

I don’t agree with Killer Mike on a lot of political issues, gun control in particular, but those are the kind of political issues about which reasonable adults can disagree. Regardless, I’ve got to respect anybody using his voice and his platform to promote political activism and progressivism. It probably would be a lot easier just to make a fortune making songs about self-promotion.

Like, say, “Call Ticketron” from 2017. There’s not much to it, as far as I can tell, but it’s catchy and it gives Killer Mike a chance to go nuts with the rhymes. Sometimes that’s all you need.

Tuesday Tune Twofer: What a Wonderful Time to Be Alive

Two tenuously and tangentially related tunes every Tuesday, with a hopeful Election Day reminder that we’re living in the best time

For this pair of videos, the basic idea is that each of them made me gasp the first time I saw them, and think “What a wonderful time to be alive.” The first is “Like Sugar” by Chaka Khan, which undeniably calls back to Soul Train dance lines, but probably wouldn’t exist without modern editing suites. It’s a marvel every time I see it, just a pure celebration of music and dance and polyester.

Second is “Because I’m Me” by The Avalanches, which could’ve been overlooked as just a sample-heavy stab at nostalgia if it weren’t for the cinematic video about a boy and his crush. The way it keeps building still manages to make me gasp.

The other thing that both these songs have in common is that they could only exist in the time they were made. Not just because of video editing software, or a music industry and streaming platform structured to make cinematic videos possible, but because they call back to the past.

When I left Telltale Games the first time,1Yes, I was foolish enough to go back for more. it was part way through production of the season of Sam & Max games that I’d put the most of myself into. I’d thought of the season as pulling together many of the things from entertainment that I loved: Night Gallery,2For me, all of the Lovecraftian stuff came from a single episode of Night Gallery, since I was never a big fan of the original material. Battle of the Planets, Space: 1999, Zardoz, The Beast Must Die!, the Richard Donner Superman movies, Portal, film noir, Murder on the Orient Express and The Last Express, Hammer horror movies, the Haunted Mansion, and of course, the Sam & Max and Toybox comics by Steve Purcell. When I was talking about the season outline with the director of one of the episodes, he pushed back on that idea, saying he didn’t want his episode to be just a pastiche of references.

It was a little jarring at the time, and obviously it’s stuck with me, because it’s such an alien concept to me. Obviously, there’s a right way to do it and a wrong way, and there’s not much value in simply regurgitating stuff that everyone’s seen before. That doesn’t result in “Like Sugar,” but “I Love the 70s.” But taking disparate sources and making something new means that you’re taking all your enthusiasm about a new idea, and combining it with your love for the source material. I believe that that much excitement inevitably comes through in the final result.

And by that measure, right now is always the best time to be alive, because it’s the time when we have the most to draw from.

This post is scheduled to go up on Election Day, but I’m writing it a couple weeks ahead, before the thought flies out of my mind. I don’t even know what things are going to look like two weeks from now, but I want to stay optimistic and hopeful. We’re always drawing from the past, building on what we have, always improving, and appreciating everything that we have right now.

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    Yes, I was foolish enough to go back for more.
  • 2
    For me, all of the Lovecraftian stuff came from a single episode of Night Gallery, since I was never a big fan of the original material.