Rolling Stone's 500 Album Marathon

#323 Ghost in the Machine - The Police

2016-07-07T21:25:00.001-07:00

Starbucks saved my life on the morning of July 7, 2005 when I was eighteen, studying abroad in London. If it wasn't for a shitty mocha or whatever it was I drank exactly eleven years ago today, I might have made it to South Kensington station that Thursday in time to be bombed in the Underground. But no, I had to have my American materialist ritual- and thanks to the line, the whipped cream, the indecisive girl in the FCUK shirt with a nose ring who scratched her ass, bummed a fag from her boyfriend, twisted the filter back and forth between anxious fingers like a nipple while her boyfriend searched his pocket for the extra quid she needed- I didn't get to "play the part of a statistic on a government chart."

When we finally got to the South Kensington Station, armed Police were running out shoulder to shoulder and began to scream at people that there was an electrical problem and we had to keep walking. And so we walked to the Victoria and Albert Museum. We were having a class about the height of the British Empire, the great exhibition, the tea, the dresses, the artifacts raped from India, the revolts.

The construction was so loud that day - we never heard any of the bombs. After taking notes in our journals and looking at tiny corsets for Victorian dresses we all went to the lobby for lunch. A few people left but the rest of us stayed in the museum. An employee with a megaphone got up on the desk in the lobby and begged everyone's attention.

He yelled, "BOMBS ARE GOING OFF ALL OVER LONDON. NO ONE IS ALLOWED TO ENTER OR EXIT THE BUILDING." I remember everything about that moment. He was a black guy. My stomach dropped. My first thought was we are being held hostage. One of the girls stole a water from the museum cafe. She was the only one with an international cell phone plan. She called her mom. We all couldn't call our parents because the cell towers were overworked and we couldn't call out of the UK very well. Busy Signal. Busy Signal. Busy Signal. It was 4:00 am in New Jersey or something insane. By the time her mom called my parents for me it was 5 or 6 am in Texas. What if there is a bomb in the bathroom. I have to pee. Should I pee right now in my pants. Am I going to die in the V&A. I am going to die a week before Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is released. I am going to die without having read Proust or Faulkner.

But mostly we just sat in a circle. And we talked about our all time favorite Christmas. And if we were going to die in a group this wouldn't be that bad of a group to die with. People of all different languages sat in circles in the lobby. They all prayed in their own way. Nobody charged for food at the cafe. And we sat. Rachel let me borrow her phone. She snuck it to me and I went to the bathroom. I checked behind the toilet to make sure there wasn't a bomb and I called my Dad on his office phone. I don't remember what I said sitting on a toilet of the Victoria and Albert Museum, but I know I told him that if I die today I loved him.

Hours later we were let us out of the museum. A policeman gave us a map on the roads we could walk on to get home. We walked in a haze. There was nobody on the streets.

One of the professors said, "If you have to get bombed at least you are in London. They have a lot of experience being bombed." We didn't think it was funny. Not even in a Kurt Vonnegut kind of way. Because we had to ask her to repeat what she said over all the sirens.

The sirens played all night.

I've wanted to write about this day for a long time and just never really did. Someone else from our trip was asked to write it in some TCU magazine thing that I think you can still google; so I just never bothered. One of the professors did too.

What I found so fascinating about the experience is everyone else who wasn't actually there while the city was being bombed seemed to know more about what was going on than I did. All the news stations say their happy little morsels, interview grieving families, ramble off names and statistics. Point fingers at brown people. But as far as I am concerned, it was a ghost in the machine that did it. I never saw people with bombs. I never heard bombs. I never saw smoke or fire. I didn't bleed. If nobody told me about the bombs, I may not have known they even existed.

When I began to listen to this album, I wondered what The Police meant by the Ghost in the Machine. Was he referring to Descartes' mind/body dualism? Was he discussing the rise of technology in the 80s? Referring to the soul extracted from the use of different electronic instruments needed to compose this album? Or is the ghost in the machine something less tangible than all of that? Was the ghost in the machine on the morning of July 7, 2005 the one who whispered, you are a white American girl, and you drink Starbucks because you have been programed that way. It's ok, you need to be late for your lecture because you won't be allowed on the tube this morning. You just have to buy a mocha. Make your friends wait for you. You do you, Katy Garrison. Go individualize your coffee.

A&M, 1981

Here, the previously punkish trio added synth strings and politics, and blew up even further. "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic" is a pop smart bomb, and "Invisible Sun," about the violence in Northern Ireland, is genuinely moving.

#313 Unplugged in New York - Nirvana

2016-06-03T20:23:00.001-07:00

I woke up last September with a leash wrapped around my wrist standing in the middle of the street around midnight with this album on repeat shrieking through my veins. I hate running; I hate it almost as much as airport security or when pimply teenagers try to hit on me at Jimmy Johns and I realize, with a jolt of left over high school insecurity, that I am old enough that they might just be making fun of me instead.

It was kind of like that, but there I was around midnight with a panting pomeranian and the two of us had just been running because I was drunk or something and creatively blocked and my grandfather had died and I was remembering earlier that summer when this calf died out in the field for my job. Rightfully, they don't allow firearms on location, and to put him out of his misery, the boss from our office was called to the sight to slit his throat open right there with a pocket knife. Some idiot, probably texting, had hit the little thing with a work truck. And they all stood around it and watched it suffer like cowards. When the phone call came, he left the office went out there. All the men just stood there, nobody admitting to driving a car. Someone said, he is sick. We found him like this, he's just sick, we didn't do nuthin. When he came back, I could see it in his eyes. That horrid act of God glistening like a drunken film after a night of beer. A glassy spirit evaporating off the whites and into the sky.

I thought about how the Victorians took pictures of Jack the Ripper's victims because they believed a photograph would show them a mirror reflection of who the killer was because photography was so new. But they had it wrong. It's in the other guy's eyes.

Weeks later someone brought a garden cantaloupe to the field office and he pulled out his pocket knife to cut it open. It was so juicy it wept at the cut mark and someone told him he better wash that knife and he said, this knife has only been in good places. Maybe that was true.

That sort of thing used to bring me to absolute furious tears not too long ago. So maybe I was grieving for the cow, or grieving for the shaken man who came back upset to the right-of-way office with a linear/scatter plot spurt of blood up his shirt. Or maybe I was grieving for the child who died in me several seasons ago, back when the zombies ate the first person on our squad and we couldn't get the image out of our heads.

But I'm not that person anymore. I'm not a vegetarian anymore. And cows fucking die, either at the hands of heroes or at the hands of idiots. I sat on the curb with my dog and thought back to that incident, while "All Apologies" was playing. I was astounded that I was free of the emotional torture I used to feel when animals died. When I saw a picture of an animal dying, or a hunter's murdered beast, I could physically feel the animal's pain. It would make me ill with overwhelming anger. This fear and terror was based somewhere deeper than empathy. It was based in my absolute fear of death and being alone.

Maybe the culmination of the amount of shock and symbolic death I have gone through in the last two years, the marriage I suicided, closing the door on the life I had created and built, the dreams that turned to nightmares before my eyes left me with empty pockets carrying no more fucks to give for a cow.

That's not entirely true. But my relationship with the animal's death was a healthier one. As Kurt screamed "Shiver- the whole night through." My focus on death turned to his. I began to walk home in the darkness, in lulu shorts, singing at the moon. Perhaps souls are not the sum of their emotions, actions, or intentions. Maybe they are simply the sum of their unbridled experiences set to return and know what it is like to be hunted if they were hunters. To know what it is like to be in a freak accident. To know what it is like to worry if you tell the truth about hitting a cow you will be sent back to Mexico.

If Kurt went out with a bang, what did that mean? Maybe the point, which seems like such an obvious one now after so many months - is that we all die; we have all died before; and we will all die again.

So rather than be afraid of death - maybe the point of life is to make death afraid of you. As I walked gently, into that good night, with "About a Girl" beginning again, I thought: do not rage, rage, against the dying of the light. Make that fucking light rage violently against you.

What Rolling Stone Mag had to say about this album:

Geffen, 1994

Nirvana shine brightly on this striking live set because the volume is turned down just low enough to let Kurt Cobain's tortured vulnerability glow. The powerful, reverent covers of Lead Belly, David Bowie and (three) Meat Puppets songs sum up Nirvana as a haunted, theatrical and, ultimately, truly raw band.

#466 A Rush of Blood to the Head - Coldplay

2015-07-18T08:36:00.002-07:00

In a yoga class, a block from the Alamo, my hardest position was to remain calm while Coldplay was playing and simply allow the sorrow of Chris Martin's haunting voice to enter my consciousness while not affecting me. I kept trying to focus on the way my hands squished the green mat, the way my breath sounded in my face, the way the accelerated roar of the tour busses passing outside rattled the pipes of the old lofted studio. I kept imagining an umbrella over my little rectangle of space like noise cancellation headphones for Coldplay. And I failed miserably. You see, I picked this album months ago to write about but for many reasons I couldn't bring myself to express any thoughts on it. I would play portions of it and put it down because it resonated such pain like the band wasn't playing guitars--they were playing my heart strings instead.

While in downward facing dog, tears began to drop silently on my mat and rather than tuning it out, which was all I wanted in the world, I slowly allowed the inevitable to happen. I leaned in unwillingly at first and opened up. Purposefully, I agreed to feel every A minor chord and then the instructor's voice began to fade, the tour busses disappeared, the sound of my breath evaporated and there I was contemplating the death of relationships to the sound of Coldplay playing through my cells and bouncing through every neuron in my head, occupying the space between my fingers and the mat, the space between the touching soles of my feet, the space between my back and the ceiling and then there was something like resignation as I allowed all experiences triggered by my body and the music to bubble up with force and I watched them flash at me and pop as the next one appeared. puppy breath. A hair on my pillow in waking sunlight. Explosions in the Sky Concert. A Kaleidoscope of Monarch Butterflies. The frying hair on the back of my neck in a hot air balloon. Sweating summer leather seats. Cold Concrete. Red carpet. A mountain top. Books. The comforting smell of a fat grey cat rescued from the Cooke County Courthouse. The vibration of the sound of the metal trim when the note D was played and knowing it must be tuned if the vibration was absent. The fluttering of birds with a single step. Smoke and Coughing and Coughing and Coughing. Wiping away Fingerprints on a glass table.

I was constantly asked, all the time, what was I thinking. It made me feel as powerless as the day I listened to Coldplay while practicing yoga. Maybe thoughts occur differently to everyone. I wonder if some people only see colors or smells or just perceive general feelings. Some people can take thoughts and simply acknowledge them without judgment and watch them dissapate to the depths of consciousness. Others allow thoughts to take control of their physicality and act out with impulsivity. And some of us turn them into tears to water their yoga mat.

I guess we can all blame it on a rush of blood to the head.

The entire album seems to ask this question: At what point does attraction turn to love and love turn into possession and inevitably to loss? In one inhale and exhale it is over and we are already looking back at the silent resentments that formed, the hatred created in a night of a perfect storm, the personal concessions, compromises, and sacrifices made for the sake of staying together and after a knock-down, drag-out hurricane one person still wants to "get back to the start." To maintain the ideal and the fantasy of who each other were when first glances, first hand touches, first smells were appreciated more than breath itself. But you've already shredded each other to puddles of nothingness to grasp at ghosts of feelings that were there only when you first noticed how beautiful one another was. Noticed, but not touched.

Perhaps the only love stories are the ones that never happen.

This is the very reason I cannot stand being given flowers as a gesture of love. Here are beautiful blooming life forms that I've killed and put in a vase for you to enjoy. And when you've enjoyed all the remaining life out of them they become desiccated and withered and putrid. And the receiver is left with just an empty vase to be either discarded or placed under the kitchen sink ready to be full of beautiful colorful quiet agony again. Osho once said about love, "If you love a flower, don't pick it up. Because if you pick it up, it dies and it ceases to be what you loved. So if you love a flower, let it be. Love is not about possession. Love is about appreciation."

When I left the yoga class, certain everyone had noticed my silent suffering - when in fact nobody had - I ran into two very good friends of mine here in San Antonio. In their separate ways, they both push me to exceed the expectations I have for myself every week. They have each made me a stronger more confident person. After this emotional hour that felt like an exorcism, there they were at the foot of the stairs looking up at me not knowing that I appreciated them so much in that moment; not having a clue about the symbolic meaning their presence had to me in my private universe. How very significant they were. One of them has an eye for beauty and takes beautiful photographs, and through her free spirit and creativity turns everyone into works of art in photos and creates human sculptures with her students on their yoga mats. The other is strong enough to hold the weight of the world on his shoulders without wavering and absorb the suffering through humor and light-heartedness and although I have lost my ego in front of him before - in the midst of working out so hard my whole body shakes uncontrollably- he still sees me as I am without judgment. And I was so dumb-struck by their presence - In that moment I felt something like love and appreciation for them. And after greetings and small talk were exchanged, I walked passed them and to my car in the same way I would walk by two beautiful flowers on a walking trail that I noticed and appreciated but didn't feel the need to pick.

Some of us make others stronger, some of us take photographs, some of us facilitate moments of quiet reflection on accident, some of us sing haunting music that trigger emotional responses, some of us cook, some of us think alone in a smokey garage...

And some of us write.

Ironically, what was written about this album made me laugh out loud.

Capitol, 2002

Coldplay churn out bighearted British guitar rock on their second album – what Chris Martin aptly called "emotion that can make you feel sad while you're moving your legs."

#372 Late for the Sky - Jackson Browne (now #375)

2015-02-04T21:32:00.000-08:00

There are two mirrors in my place that face each other and when I stand in front of this domestic concept of infinity, I wonder how many other souls came before me to be vibrated between them like a ball on a never-ending ping pong table. There I was this morning and tomorrow morning forever reflected, and forever forgotten in the bright moment when I simply step in and out of their battle field visions.

I walked on battle fields and my ancestors' cemetery in breathless fall in the deep south through a labyrinth of forgotten guts. No music. No cell phone. Just the beat of my rapid heart and the thrumming hearts that once ago stopped all around me in another time. Swirling mist raptured down the streets in cold blasts rolling over beds of crunching golden leaves, encasing the accidental pearls on spiderwebs beneath every rowed mailbox. But all this was in silence. It will happen next year, this rolling fog I've never seen before. It happened decades ago before rowed mailboxes, where men poured out the blood that paved these streets in Civil War. Some of that blood is mine.

As I stood in a very old family cemetery, I thought about how blood connects us, begins life, stops life, lets us know when new life doesn't exist inside us. It's hot and sticky and smells like the iron skins of the earth we mine and is layered with carnal knowledge; it knows to return to earth when we die.

I went without music for months. It is hard to clear one's mind when it is shrouded with distraction and the involuntary downpour of emotional turmoil music tangentially brings. I had wandered into my own labyrinth encompassed with fog and it never occurred to me how deeply lost I was until I finally faced my largest fear and watched Stanley Kubrick's The Shining as an adult- the only movie that is a labyrinth inside a labyrinth of its own. Not unlike every breathing individual. I saw portions of this movie with my brother, accidentally - and without even understanding it, my precocious eight-year-old brain unconsciously understood that we are all incredibly alone, always. And nobody, not even our parents can save us from the buried past karmically pulsating through our borrowed veins, the layered past in our minds from lifetimes ago, and the unbridled civil wars that rage ever on and on in the minds of the people we love and perceive to know. And it took almost a decade for me to be able to sleep normally after my first encounter with Kubrick because of the amount of panic and cold sticky terror that hovered over my dark room at night as a child like the stale, incarnadine fog that rolled down Tennessee hills years after a raging war, this unconscious force of past and future, this crimson wave of death that flushed through the hotel in a movie and entered the audience - this ominous symbol begging itself from beyond eternity to imprint in my skulled labyrinth for future reference. Your premonition. My premonition. Wake up.

How long have I been sleeping?

Because it was the future for which I was afraid; although I couldn't yet know it. Alas, forgotten. Like an Indian Burial ground, or the murder of one's family with an ax, or a civil war battlefield where a Panera Bread now stands. Doomed to be repeated.

We listen to albums, watch movies and read books because we identify with something sleeping just below the surface of us all; something encapsulated that exists within our beings rather than without. The essential question of who am I and what am I doing here? We search for guidance from beyond without knowing for which path we are to take, which direction do we turn, are we the hero this time, or the scoundrel? Are we the child waiting for an abrupt rape of our innocence? My experience of watching The Shining as an adult awoke something of clarity inside me. For a movie that probably confuses everybody, it brought the taste of lucid, sweet sanity to my life. Crisp and clear like the pearly dew-beads on spiders' webs, a life-force of water outlining a trap I should have seen. I remembered the day I scrambled backwards up the stairs when I watched Wendy do the same as Jack screamed, "Do you have any idea what a moral and ethical principle is?!" I began to notice the ax that marked the exit to the room where mysterious tinkering happened into the night for no various purpose at all- "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." And in that scene, suddenly the air around me became heavy and I could recognize the feelings of distrust and dislike for me or any new comer or anyone in the vicinity at all. The paranoia that for some reason deserved reverence began to breathe down my spine. Suddenly millions of eggshells appeared on cold concrete floors. I could taste my constant feeling of dread and anxiety metallic like blood, and I remembered the countless dreams I would have about trying to scream but no sound would come out. And the isolation, the isolation, the fucking isolation oppressive like quicksand.

I felt like Danny, standing in front of a mirror (or two) watching the blood of the past and the future fill up my house awakening in me the time I watched this movie as a child but couldn't yet understand. Do we disobey and unlock the room 237 of our minds? Yes. Break every egg shell; unlock every door; pry into the buried past; the burked future; and battle the proverbial minotaur, Jack, in the labyrinth of your archetypal journey.

And closer to Bluebeard's last wife than Browning's "Last Duchess" I left. And started a new life.

I tried several albums for what I've been through but nothing seemed to fit. Normally, I just randomly pick an album and allow it to be on in the background all month; but I couldn't do that this time because if I touched too deep a nerve, the volcano of emotion wouldn't be worth this project. I tried to remember how I felt at the height of my alienation, but so much memory escaped me like water running through my fingertips. Then I recalled this scene from Taxi Driver. Where Robert de Niro holds a gun to his head as he watches a couple dance on screen. I've felt that disconnect before. What was that song, I thought. It resonated something deep within my gut- the labyrinth within. Whatever song that was would be the album for this piece. When I found it and listened to "Late for the Sky" not a single other album would do. I just had to wait for the right moment to let it hit me.

The album differs from other break up albums because it is so specific in the idea of feeling completely alienated from the other person. There doesn't seem to be the same sort of denial, sorrow, anger, one gathers when they listen to Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, or Fleetwood Mac. It jumps into moments that make you feel that two people are coexisting and yet living two completely different realities. The individuals cannot comprehend, connect, or truly understand the other no matter how many times they discuss the issues. The extreme disconnect and alienation resonates well with the Shining. All these people coexist, yet are going crazy in their own way because of the concept of "pastness in general."

Such an empty surprise, to feel so alone.

What Rolling Stone thought of Jackson Browne's Late for the Sky:

Asylum, 1974

On his dark third album, Browne explored, in the words of one Rolling Stone reviewer, the "romantic possibility in the shadow of an apocalypse." There's an undercurrent of dread on Late for the Sky, from "Before the Deluge" to "For a Dancer" – not to mention a lot of obvious songwriting genius.

#491 All the Young Dudes -- Mott the Hoople (Now #484)

2014-09-20T12:33:00.001-07:00

I've begun to think that each album is given to me at the appropriate time in my life by the grace of fate to help me understand, in a new way - if it is even possible, a meaning to this life I have been given. What started off as a project to sort of "collect" a musical canon so that I would have a repertoire of knowledge about something I previously had almost no knowledge of, has turned into this bizarre way of life for me. And considering I am only 56 posts in, this will be a lifetime achievement for me. Spanning through my 30s and 40s, through deaths and births, and maybe when I am approximately 66, even if nobody actually reads this - I spent good creative energy on something that inspired me. What might the Notorious BIG or Otis Redding mean to me when I am in my 60s vs. what they might mean when I get to them in another 17 months? Who will I be in another decade? My life will be measured out from album to album, for whatever that is worth.

Each month, a new album begins to blossom out to me to divulge some sort of knowledge of another time and place. I anticipate these albums now, hoping to uncover some divine truth through this art, this energy, that was created for what seems like the culmination of only my enjoyment. I wait and anticipate how this music is a medium for some larger purpose or knowledge spoken out through the creativity of the band and I'm overpowered by a sense that music can drastically alter a mood or force me to wallow in misery or lift me up to a height that I haven't felt in a long time if I let myself get lost in it- music takes you to feelings you didn't know could possibly exist - and I guess I knew that before this project, but I didn't really feel it the way I do now.

This month I picked All the Young Dudes by Mott the Hoople. I had never heard of the band before, never had a clue what I was about to listen to, didn't know the genre or the era but I felt right at home and I laughed because I knew "Sweet Jane," because I love Lou Reed, and I could feel David Bowie's presence right away. It gave me this crazy sense of connectedness - that once you know a few things, you begin to see and feel the patterns of influence across a genre of art. And that this huge musical web isn't hard to navigate after even 56 albums under one's belt.

I usually do my very best not to look up background information on the band or the album before discussing it in this blog because I want an organic listening experience - music for music's sake. But if I am being perfectly honest, I was having a hard time relating to the album on multiple levels even though I enjoyed the music. In sticking with my newfound mantra that each one of these albums is here to present a truth to me, I had to wait until it was uncovered in some sort of way. So I did a little bit of research and found out that this was the 5th studio album for this British band, and that they weren't selling many albums and were on the verge of breaking up before David Bowie stepped in and said, hang on - let me give you the song, "All the Young Dudes," which was originally meant for Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. It saved the band and provided them a position on this list. The song is pretty rad and will put you in a good mood even though it's about a group of young people who don't fit in. The song has this feeling of being torn between a lament and an anthem of that "not fitting in" experience (imo).

But the whole album has this hopeful, transitional feeling as well - and I think that has more to do with Bowie's action than it does with the lyrics. The music is upbeat throughout - but it's this background story that reminds listeners that it's always the darkest hour right before the dawn. That right when we feel like life is hopeless, and we should give up, someone or something can step in and influence, give hope, save, and in some way provide the encouragement needed to continue on the path. So, thanks Bowie, the unconventional savior for helping me hear this badass album and reminding me of this truth.

Rolling Stone had this to say:

Columbia, 1972

Mott were a hard-rock band with a Dylan fixation until David Bowie got ahold of them. He penned the androgyne title track and had them cover Lou Reed's "Sweet Jane." Mott would sound more soulful but never more sexy or glittery.

#4 Highway 61 Revisited -- Bob Dylan

2014-08-13T12:59:00.001-07:00

When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You're invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal
How does it feel?

It was not my intention to tackle Highway 61 Revisited this early in the project, but the unyielding tempestuous summer drove me to keep "Desolation Row" on repeat with such force, I felt like the stars had sufficiently aligned for this masterpiece's review.

Collapsed in summer grass, while surrendering my sweating ivory legs to bugs of all kinds who mercilessly chomped, I immersed myself in "Like a Rolling Stone," and voiced out into the oppressive sun that Bob Dylan had written this one, on behalf of everyone she unintentionally killed, for women like Helen of Troy.

My complexion she said is much too white

I feel for you, Robin Williams. Robin, so many people can't understand how someone who makes everyone laugh would kill himself. But I wasn't shocked by the manner of death you chose. It's been one of those summers, you know?

When your gravity fails
and negativity don't pull you though

I also wasn't shocked by your ability to be a delightful genie in my childhood favorite, Aladdin, and then turn around and make the crassest of jokes in a standup act either. It makes perfect sense.

That you're tired of yourself and all of your creations

Comedians- those who have the uncanny ability to see into raw human conditions and reflect them back with irony, cruel sarcasm, or insight, can draw that thundering reaction as easily as breathing - because they know comedy's darkest secret. Tears and laughter are intertwined; they are the same. They come from the same place in the brain; we laugh to keep from crying. Making people laugh keeps us far away from the raw terror of our own isolated sorrow. Each joke is a secret selfish cry for help. It's a basic ego mask. Until you take it off and realize:

It Takes a lot to Laugh, it Takes a Train to Cry

And so for the first time, I watched Good Will Hunting in Robin Williams's honor last night. When Mormon Face made the reference to Helen of Troy in his therapy session, I thought of "Like a Rolling Stone" having myself been marinated in weeks of Highway 61 Revisited burning through my brain- I daydreamed about what it would look like if Helen herself were sitting in with therapist Robin Williams. Would he repeat, "It's not your fault?" over and over until she collapsed even though thousands died in her feckless wake? Would she claim Daddy issues and plead that Zeus was an emotionally absent workaholic father? Would she admit that she didn't--

have the strength to get up and take another shot?

Or would our beauty throw up Spartan gang signs and say, "not my fault I got 99,999 man problems" and defend herself saying that--

Everyone said they'd stand behind me when the game got rough but say she didn't think about what that might actually mean.

And although such a scenario might be amusing as a daydream, it reminds me that just like laughter and tears are the same, Love and Hate come from the same place too. The two conflicting emotions are so married, only a comedian could see it.

Everybody is making love or else expecting rain

And nobody knew these secret truths better than Bob Dylan.

That little bit of insight is what makes this album so utterly profound. We are all on some sort of archetypal journey in each life and the next, and there are rare artists who understand this perfectly well. Throughout this album, Bob Dylan- our gentle Virgil, guides us through the Desolation Row of our brains. We are all passengers on Highway 61. And it will be revisited many times until we learn our lessons.

Many songs, academy award winning movies, and stories upon stories of embedded myths are so programmed into the human psyche that it takes an eternity to sort them all out. But I cannot think of much art better than each song on this album. Because each word is laced with applicable life, love, hate, laughter, tears, and putrid knowledge of surrender to something greater than yourself.

It might take you a road trip from Boston to Stanford, or the entirety of Highway 61, or depression behind a career of laughter with a belt and a chair, or a backyard surrender to the sun - but your story is written in his immortal words, somewhere.

All these people that you mention
Yes, I know them, They're quite lame
I had to rearrange their faces
and give them all another name

Columbia, 1965

Bruce Springsteen described the beginning of "Like a Rolling Stone," the opening song on Highway 61 Revisited, as the "snare shot that sounded like somebody'd kicked open the door to your mind." Folk singer Phil Ochs was even more rhapsodic about the LP: "It's impossibly good... How can a human mind do this?"

Recorded in a staggering six days, Highway 61 Revisited – named after the road that runs from Bob Dylan's home state of Minnesota down through the Mississippi Delta – is one of those albums that changed everything. In and of itself, "Like a Rolling Stone," rumored to be about Andy Warhol acolyte Edie Sedgwick, forever altered the landscape of popular music – its "vomitiﬁc" flow (Dylan's term), literary ambition and sheer length (6:13) shattered limitations of every kind. "Ballad of a Thin Man" delivered the definitive Sixties comment on the splintering hip-straight fault line: "Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is/Do you, Mister Jones?" If anyone questioned whether or not Dylan had truly "gone electric," the roaring rock & roll of "From a Buick 6" and "Tombstone Blues" – powered by guitarist Mike Bloomﬁeld – left no doubt.

The album ends with "Desolation Row," a surrealist night journey that runs 11 minutes. Dylan evokes a Hieronymus Bosch-like season in hell that seems to foretell all the Sixties cataclysms to come. "The Titanic sails at dawn," he sings wearily. "Everybody is shouting, 'Which side are you on?'" That "Desolation Row" is an all-acoustic track – a last-minute decision on Dylan's part – is one final stroke of genius: a spellbinding new vision of folk music to close the album that, for the time being at least, destroyed folk music.

#395 Sound of Silver -- LCD Soundsystem

2014-06-01T18:27:00.000-07:00

Sound of Silver explodes the senses in a frenzy of frantically organized mania. Part Beck, part Talking Heads, a dash of Lou Reed and dripping with knife-edge truths about shattered dreams in a Sylvia Plath style confession bursting at the heart seams, it leaves you shaking and confused but dying to unlock another door to the inner workings of the creative spirit that spawned it.

Each song begins with a steady crescendo that unfolds something steadily miraculous before your eyes, like the moment a butterfly unfolds wet wings dripping with new, or the first cry of a child welcomed into the world -- and I got this crazy feeling as I fell under this album's spell that this creative expression was like the musical representation of watching a soul wake up before your eyes.

Like the time I snuck my adorable pomeranian as a four month old puppy into walmart and when I was at the cash register, the woman who barely looked up and repeated the same phrases to every person whose face she wouldn't remember suddenly burst out of her self and smiled. Without caring that they have a no dog policy she reached out to pet the creature who wiggled with excitement because he was so elated that this stranger wanted to touch him. These moments when two souls collide, if ever so briefly, to light up like fireflies - are the moments we live for. And this album reminds us that between the magic of the unique sound, it's different enough to jar you into constant present consciousness.

The song "All My Friends," is a lament and reminder of the fragility and brevity of life and human experience balled up in perfectly constructed chaos that will make you remember what it feels like to have those nights with your greatest friends, with people you fell in love with, when all senses are heightened either via substance or by sheer wonder and love for each other -- and to lose those moments sometime in your twenties when you succumb to the staggering loss of control by the destructive forces of responsibilities even though you cannot see this because you are blinded by your individual marriages, children, job, and desire for self-worth and thusly you are distracted by those beautiful events as you watch the life you set up and thought you wanted slowly imprison you and before you know what is happening to you, you are sewn into submission. And then one day you wake up. That's how it starts.

When I finished that song, and repeated it over and over, I clutched my heaving chest because the welling of feeling was almost so overpowering to me. Youth is indeed wasted on the young, and I thought back to all my friends and really wondered where they were at that moment. What were they doing? Are their lives full of excitement and moments of hope and joy? Do they remember the night the TCU bookstore burned down? Or the rugby party with jello wrestling when I brought my friend from Baylor who tried to have a philosophical discussion about metaphysics to look sober outside the building in front of flashing lights? Or the time we thought it would be a great idea to have a foam party on a concrete floor? Toga party? That time in London when Rachel stole that guy's wallet because he slipped something in her drink? Or the time in Ireland when we crept to the edge of the cliff on our bellies to hang our heads over the side of the Aran Islands to feel the sea air and watch the waves crash against the cliff? Or in Scotland when we drank too much Vodka and puked in the street and a local asked what we had and we said Vodka and he said we shoulda had the scotch in a thick accent? The white out party when Alana pretended to have just woken up and explained to the cops she didn't know any of these people and they should believe her because she was in pajamas? Where are all of you - how are your children, your phds, what are your dinners like, who are you when nobody is around? What songs do you sing when you get ready in the morning instead of getting ready to go out? I miss you, all of you. Where are you this Sunday night besides getting older?

This album reminds us to have more moments where we wake up and spark to life. Because reality is such a drag, being a rat in a cage - pulling minimum wage. Go outside and look at the sun, marvel at it. Do yoga. Call your best friends. Fall in love. Have experiences that are not normal and mundane.

Invigorate your soul by really hearing this album.

What RS had to say:

DFA/Capitol, 2007

New York electro-punk kingpin James Murphy makes his masterpiece: Every track sounds like a different band's greatest hit, from the political punk goof "North American Scum" to the elegiac synth-pop breakup lament "Someone Great."

#91 Goodbye Yellow Brick Road - Elton John

2014-04-08T20:02:00.001-07:00

Some days the lava lamp on my desk represents the expansion and contraction of the universe, the beginnings of single-celled life, raw fresh earth spewing out of the unknown depths beneath us, the ebb and flow of the ocean, the life force flowing through our lungs -- and other days it's just a blob of hot wax moving through water in an upside-down glass vase.

Both avenues of thought are true and co-exist in reality in the same way you and I are abundant miracles of endless consciousness, electric current, sacred vessels capable of heroic journeys, boundless love and the like. But we are also blobs of wax, bobbing around pointlessly and bumping into other blobs of wax. All for the amusement of an unknown creature some would venture to call God. Or maybe not.

I stared at my lava lamp while Elton John sang "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" (which was easily my favorite song on the whole album) and wondered what if each gene in our bodies represented a note on the piano- what would our individual songs sound like? Then I wondered if this in any way influences people to write the kinds of music they do, and what makes them so original. Maybe the sounds come from within the language of our genes. I couldn't imagine Green Day or Elvis inventing Elton John songs, or vice versa. There are only so many notes on the spectrum of sound that humans can hear, and yet endless combinations of songs. Only so many genes, and yet endless combinations of humans. All crafted with the same material, more or less, but brilliant in their own regard.

I cleaned out my closet this weekend and with a pang in my heart I uncovered a trash bag full of dead point shoes, tights, leotards, and a worn pair of ballet shoes. My first inclination was to just put it back where it was in the depths of my closet, hidden out of sight. But as Elton sang, I began to rummage and dump them all out on the floor. Ribbons askew, old elastic stretched out and mealy. It had already been a full decade since I wore any of these things. I was a 17 year old person staring back at my face in the mirror and wondering who I was and why I was here at a different capacity for comprehending that question the last time I wore this stuff.

I found the hardest pair of shoes and put them on. I didn't have gel pads, so I just put them on my feet without padding inside so I could feel the floor even more. I wrapped the ribbons about my ankles unconsciously, like I had done it yesterday. Then I said fuck it, and put on my favorite violet leotard and tights. As Elton John blared through my ipod, I danced around in my bathroom-closet area, absorbing leather and satin and glue. The smell of my teenage self through the fabric artifacts that could likely survive me.

I made body art in my bathroom and then it was washed away. Like when I roll up my yoga mat or throw away a doodle, or stop playing the piano, turn off my lava lamp at the end of the work day, when buddhist monks wipe away a mandala, or when a person exhales for the last time. It was gone as soon as it had come, this moment in time when I danced for nobody but myself to Elton John in a bathroom.

When I took them off, I remembered little things about that pair of shoes. I had burned the ribbons with a blue lighter I borrowed from a friend while they were on my feet and realized for the first time how stupid that was as I shook my foot violently to put out the fire. I also remember the argument with my mother that, yes, I was going to sew them with green dental floss because that worked better than thread. Who cared if it matched?

The weirdest part about the experience was afterwards, I stared in my bathroom mirror at the moment Elton sang "Look in the mirror and stare at myself and wonder if that's really me on the shelf."

Would my DNA song be an Elton John song? Probably not, I think I jive more with David Bowie or Lou Reed- but he held a moment for me worth writing about, already worth thinking back on, locked up in the same closet area I discovered the shoes that unlocked a buried lifetime.

Maybe that pair of shoes is just fabric, glue, and leather. Or maybe something a little bit more.

Rolling Stone Mag:

Elton John compared this double album to the Beatles' White Album, and why not? By this point he was the most consistent hitmaker since the Fab Four, and soon enough he would be recording with John Lennon. Everything about Goodbye Yellow Brick Road is supersonically huge, from the Wagnerian-operalike combo of "Funeral for a Friend" and "Love Lies Bleeding" to the electric boots and mohair suit of "Bennie and the Jets." "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting" is strutting rock & roll, "Candle in the Wind" pays tribute to Marilyn Monroe, and the title track harnesses the fantastic imagery of glam to a Gershwin-sweet melody.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/500-greatest-albums-of-all-time-20120531/elton-john-goodbye-yellow-brick-road-20120524#ixzz2yM2eHC36
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#30 Blue - Joni Mitchell

2013-12-30T18:58:00.005-08:00

I am so bored with fiction.

It dawned on me a few months ago that ever since we were very small children we wanted to know The Story; but every fiction book is the same story with endless variations and we are supposed to gain something insightful about the human condition through analysis/synthesis and maybe glimpse something divine about our own souls. some sort of truth. But we are looking outward; not inward; not presently. The past and future are made up in our heads. Our memories deceive us, always. And with every conjuring of memory, we fabricate them unintentionally. We are projecting ourselves, try as we might not to, onto the hero, the antihero, the archetype we are most alike to satisfy some obscure egoic need to live a better life, a more adventurous life, a more meaningful life than the one we have. ex: "I am like Larry David because I have Larry David moments all the time." It is frightening that we do this through all music too. This is why we only care for music that reflect something about our past. Through Joni Mitchell, 99% of people relive some past encounter with a person who is no longer in our lives. Not for Joni, although she might be appreciated, but it's an ego feed. A self-identification that brings validation.

This revelation made me pause in the middle of my walk and clutch my chest while "Case of You" blared in my ears. Like being unplugged from the ever present illusion I try to escape and realizing that its pervasiveness surrounds something I held so dear to my soul, my precious literature. It was kind of like discovering that Victoria's actual Secret is that they don't make bras for people with large boobs, regardless of how tiny one's ribcage may be.

Or maybe it is because of my new yoga journey that I have started to think this way. I am learning how to meditate and awaken the inward happiness we are born with, and I am reading the works of Osho and other unconventional great thinkers who have unintentionally made me feel like searching for meaning in fiction is a futile effort. It feels almost silly to me now. There is a quiet place between an inhale and an exhale where happiness and bliss wash over you in the present moment. When you can shut off your mind, the way you can tell your leg not to move. It was what I searched for when I escaped life to dive between pages of novels, but now those feelings exist within me at the pause after a breath. And one must, as Yoda advised, learn to let go of all that you fear to lose (in each exhale). Your illusioned and misguided goals, your silly desires, those you have left behind, those who left you behind, your memories, your wants, your attachments, your future. And anxiety disappears, fear disappears. It is like that amazing scene in "Gravity" when Sandra Bullock comes up for air out of what seems like a lifetime of terror and oppression. and I am beginning to realize that we were always here, will always be here, we will come back for another life or two probably with the same set of folks playing different roles in our lives, and only experience evolves the soul. I feel prepared for a new level of consciousness; I am ready to leave this meatbag-shell of vibrating matter and try something out of my body.

I am so bored with fiction.

and now the discipline of yoga and Joni Mitchell.

These blissful thoughts and feelings, most ironically, came about while listening to Joni Mitchell's Blue album. She didn't make me sad like I expected and dreaded, she made me fortified and resolved. I couldn't really empathize with her like I could with others like Pink Floyd. I had a different mind all those months ago. It doesn't mean I didn't understand her; it doesn't mean I haven't felt like her before. It means I don't want to dwell on past lives and wallow in sorrows of what happened or what could have been. In order to achieve brilliant art like she created, she had to pull out parts of her soul through a trance and look upwards to grasp pieces of the collective unconscious to make it meaningful to others. She succeeded. I understand it, please don't misjudge me.

But it felt like a turning point in my life absorbing this album I spent three months listening to. It feels good to be cathartic, but then catharsis consumes you and you stir in it and stew in it and become all prunny fingered and wrinkled in it. There is a time to let go. Let go of all attachments. She taught me a grand lesson. I could appreciate her and not get sucked in with her howling regrets. I was already learning to let go.

She is right that there are only pretty lies. Your whole world is written and created around pretty lies. Some you believe, some embolden you and feed your ego, others you disregard. I walked my precious pomeranian through streets lined with Christmas lit homes, a frozen terrain from the wrath of Cleon, imagining a frozen river we were skating away on as "Case of you" followed in an ideal sequence. It was a perfect moment. And then it was no more. The ice has since melted and we have breathed so many stillnesses since then. And now my memory perceives it as a perfect moment. Do you see?

Where do all those people go, these people who know intimate details about our souls but no longer have the right to? Do they float away down Joni's river or are they all somewhere in between the fibers of a map of Canada?

In yoga the other day, during the chanting after shavasana, a woman near me sounded like a wailing Joni Mitchell. I smiled because I had been so infused in Joni it felt like the universe was joking with me. Like energy was elbowing me in the side. I was in a place of such peace and happiness that I have never found in this life until now, and here was this reminder of sadness. It made me remember that tears and laughter start in the same place in the brain when we are babies. But maybe that was a pretty lie I picked up somewhere.

And now for a new chapter in this fiction of life. and the discipline of yoga.

The Mag says:

"The Blue album, there's hardly a dishonest note in the vocals," Joni Mitchell told Rolling Stone in 1979. "At that period of my life, I had no persona defenses. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes. I felt like I had absolutely no secrets from the world, and I couldn't pretend in my life to be strong. Or to be happy." With song after song of regrets and sorrow, this may be the ultimate breakup album. Its whispery minimalism is also Mitchell's greatest musical achievement. Stephen Stills and James Taylor lend an occasional hand, but in "California," "Carey," "This Flight Tonight" and the devastating title track, Mitchell sounds utterly alone in her melancholy, turning the sadness into tender, universally powerful art.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/500-greatest-albums-of-all-time-20120531/joni-mitchell-blue-20120524#ixzz2p15lBr1F
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#20 Thriller -- Michael Jackson

2013-09-14T10:20:00.001-07:00

I love Michael Jackson's Thriller album the way I love Lisa Frank artwork and this cat shirt: in absolute secret even further buried behind gay west texas baptist boys under piles of dirty rainbow bright clothing in the back-most corner of the universal closet.

So I guess I'll go ahead and come out now to confess that Michael Jackson is sort of amazing. If I hadn't grown up always knowing who he was, I would not have guessed, based on its voice, that the singer was male. And I might not have guessed that he was black either, the opposite problem Van Morrison has. And if you don't believe me about Van Morrison, one of the ways people find my blog is by googling "Is Van Morrison a black man?" But all those jokes about MJ have been belabored to death. (for those of you who just googled 'Is Van Morrison a black man and were brought to my page the answer is no. He's Scottish-ish, but born in Belfast, Ireland and shares Harry Potter's birthday- not that any of those things could make him un-black.)

I'm not interested in discussing whether or not Michael Jackson was killed by illuminati, obviously he was. Nor do I want to discuss the accusations that he diddled children. I doubt he did such a thing. People hate minds they don't understand, and MJ's was a bit hard to comprehend. Believe me, I am empathetic to children who have been molested, but it usually comes from sources people don't suspect (priests, everyone's favorite uncle, etc.) and sorry MJ, everyone suspected you because you went cray-cray the way Britney Spears and the recent Miley Cyrus alien did too; only you were a man, despite evidence to the contrary.

So, now that those unpleasantries are behind us, let's discuss the music in my own meandering way: Once I asked the husband what the shampoo bottles do when we are not using them. He responded that the whole purpose of said shampoo bottles was that it meet my needs as a tool and it was created specifically for my use and perhaps they don't actually exist when we are not using them. Good answer, because I am a leo and everything revolves around me. Then I added, "Just like Michael Jackson." And explained that Michael Jackson might not exist if we've never met him. To which the husband responded, "Every time me and MJ tried to get together he was always busy doing his thing and I was always busy doing mine." I began to laugh my maniacal laugh and said, "Michael gets it. You know, he's one of the only people who actually beat the system. Everyone is laughing at him, but really he's laughing at everyone else. He got to sing and dance and have a chimp and live in a theme park and doesn't have to answer to anyone. And being a child forever would be amazing. Totally above the sheeple." And that thought made me wonder if we are the crazy ones, living totally normal lives trying to make ourselves feel better by making fun of celebrates. *Miley Cyrus, aside - she nasty.*

Anywho- Obviously the best songs on this album are Thriller, Beat it, and Billie Jean. It wasn't until recently that the lyrics to Billie Jean were cleared up to me. I used to think he was wailing, "But Lu Chan is not my son." and thought he just had a thing for Blasian women like everyone else.

As a part of this Michael Jackson week, I also watched countless youtube videos to learn how to dance Thriller. Which I am proud to say I know the dance, but nobody can move like Michael and so I will not provide the video of my experiences here.

What Rolling Stone Mag had to say about Michael Jackson's Thriller Album:

Epic, 1982

Michael Jackson towered over the 1980s the way Elvis Presley dominated the 1950s, and here's why. On Thriller, the child R&B star ripened into a Technicolor soulman: a singer, dancer and songwriter with incomparable crossover instincts. He and producer Quincy Jones established the something-for-everyone template with 1979's Off the Wall, a crisp fusion of pop hooks and dance beats. On Thriller, the pair heighten the sheen ("The Girl Is Mine"), pump up the theater ("Thriller") and deepen the funk. But the most thrilling thing was the autobiography busting through the gloss: the hiss of denial on "Billie Jean"; the to-hell-with-haters strut of "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'." Jackson was at the peak of his art and adulthood.

#266 Quadrophenia - The Who (now #267)

2013-08-10T19:32:00.001-07:00

My husband told me the other day that he had heard a theory by Edgar Cayce who believed that everything we perceive as matter are actually vibrations - much like different frequencies give off different colors to our eyes-- but actually we can take it a step further and assume that animals, plants, water, and rocks all give off different types of vibrations. That our very cells vibrate at different frequencies, all the time.

It was a very compelling thought, especially since I've read portions of The Miracle of Water by Masaru Emoto, where he asserts that our thoughts and intentions can actually change the structure of water molecules. It's worth a google if you are a shitbag worthless naysayer; that's right I'm restructuring your water molecules as you read this, bitch. And considering most of us, excluding the aliens from Signs, are made up of water, our thoughts and intentions can alter the vibrations of people, plants, and things. Which is why it is so terrible that we allow people with awful personalities to become authority figures. but, I digress.

Perhaps this is why when we listen to music it alters our mood so immediately; and perhaps this is also why music seems to be the grand equalizer. It doesn't matter if you are the Queen of England or a homeless man sleeping in the gutter, it is very possible that both of these drastically different people could enjoy a band like The Who because these two people could happen to enjoy the way the band makes them feel regardless of class/age/race/gender etc.

Maybe people are so compelled to listen and create music because everything is a vibration. And it's important to get lost in those vibrations. There isn't a better band to get lost in than The Who. This whole album gives off a majestic, epic Vibe (ration) that made me envision lions running down critters, people winning different competitions, people marching off to battle, and someone saying his last words before slipping back into the air.

The whole album felt like it was the end all to albums. The band plays so vigorously and with such purpose it is hard not to like them or feel them and the power behind the instruments and the singing. They used such interesting sounds in Quadrophenia that I couldn't stop listening to it. Sometimes it felt like a little too much stimulation because they were playing so quickly. My favorite songs were the last two, The Rock and Love, Reign O'er Me. They both vibrated at such a frequency that made me feel overwhelmed with passion and love and helped me to appreciate the beautiful 105 degree day while out on a jog.

If you have to run away from the police and need some motivation, this album will do the trick.

The Who - Quadrophenia Album Cover

The album that brought back Vespa scooters, parkas and uppers: Pete Townshend drew on the Who's roots in the London mod scene of the early Sixties and composed this expansive, messy rock opera about a lonely teenage boy looking for love in the city. It gets even better when you check out the movie.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/500-greatest-albums-of-all-time-20120531/the-who-quadrophenia-20120524#ixzz2bcj5xOkM
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#110 The Bends -- Radiohead (now #111)

2013-07-13T14:33:00.001-07:00

The Bends awakens feelings that are only found in the extremely rare moments of simultaneous joy and sorrow. Like when someone makes a comment at a funeral that the deceased person would have said, knowing that had he been there, he would have appreciated and laughed at the comment at his own funeral. Almost like from the great beyond, he channeled that thought through a living vessel to convey the small silver lining to his friends that he still remains alive in many ways. The weirdest thing is, I can't even give you an example of this in the music, but it is there, between the raw virgin vibrations of the sound that bring you both ecstasy and depression. A place in your head you'd like to visit, but if you stay there too long, you could be lost forever in some dream you couldn't tell anyone about because nobody would understand you or believe you.

This was one of those albums where after I had listened to a song, I wanted so badly to play it over again before moving on to the next song; and while I was listening to other songs I couldn't stop thinking about previous songs I just heard--almost to the point where I wanted to listen to them all at once to quench the thirst this album creates. And what a thirst this album creates! The Bends isn't great like anything The Beatles, The Stones, or Bob Dylan ever created--it's so far out in left field, i don't know how someone has the balls to categorize it. haha "alternative" can mean a million and one things.

The Bends represented a milestone for me. If you've ever fallen in love with something, like movies, literature, music, painting, for example, you begin to get all the little references, allusions, and inside jokes among the artists who created them; you can see between the lines, brush strokes, and vibrations to see inside the artist's mind, to his soul and see who influenced him, what he might have been feeling, who might have abused him as a child and so on and so forth. This was the first album where I could really grasp that for this genre of art. I could see that sometimes they sounded a little bit like U2, with a Pink Floyd undertone, but they created art so differently and taped into the kinds of emotions we don't really like to talk about. I listened to OK Computer, already two summers ago, but I couldn't hear any of what I've just described to you. Much of it felt like noise I couldn't place or decipher. It was like finally being able to carry on a conversation with someone in a foreign language you've been studying. I can't even read some early posts from this blog because I'm baffled at how ignorant I sound. But that's what makes this project so beautiful and important to me. The human mind has this exceptional ability to adapt. It creates the paradox of the more you know, the more you realize you don't know, but simultaneously, your capacity to know continues to grow exponentially...

When I was a teacher, I could see into that rare student's soul. The one who liked bands like Radiohead and while others ignored them, I got lost in an enigma of overwhelming helplessness toward them. You just want to tell them, not everything sucks; life outside of this prison will get better. But that might have been a lie. They didn't have a choice to be there like I did, and in the end, I quit that job.

When I listened to "Fake Plastic Trees," I couldn't help but think of the college I graduated from. I remember my first encounter with other students that led to a crying, frantic, phone call to my parents in a panic, "I picked the wrong school! I'm not like these people! Can I change it?" Just weeks before I was due to start classes. I had never seen so many blond and orange skinned people in my life. I had this overwhelming urge to scrape my fingernails across their faces to see how much make up I could remove. I thought about this, not because of the amount of fake people who attend TCU, but because of the first friend I made there. We had to play one of those highly infantile "Icebreaker" games wherein, everyone says something about herself when she is thrown a ball and then she throws the ball to another person who in return reveals some greater truth about her person and so on...

We heard things like, "I love volleyball," "I once met Brad Pitt" "I'm a Chi-O legacy" "Fashion Merchandising major!" and then it was passed to a guy who said, "Radiohead is my favorite band and I was an extra in Big Fish," who passed it to me and I had to awkwardly say the only thing I could think of, "I've never eaten a hamburger because they smell really bad to me." He and I struck up a conversation later on, where based off of the things we talked about (mostly being the only two people in our respective high schools who read all the novels we were assigned like 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 etc), he promised me that I would really like Radiohead if I gave them a shot. We bonded over the fact that we were not orange and we could talk about things other than bullshit. He was totally right about Radiohead, and now that memory will be forever framed by the sounds of Fake Plastic Trees, a name which TCU should strongly consider adopting.

FPT University has a nice ring to it.

The additional crap I failed to mention about this album ( I thought I connected U2 all on my own, bastards):

The first half of Nineties rock was shaped by Nirvana, and the second half was dominated by Radiohead. Their second album married a majestic and somber guitar sound to Thom Yorke's anguished-choirboy vocals, drawing on the epic grandeur of U2 and the melancholy of the Smiths.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/500-greatest-albums-of-all-time-20120531/radiohead-the-bends-20120524#ixzz2YxmETGqf
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#464 The Blueprint -- Jay-Z (now #252)

2013-06-09T09:42:00.001-07:00

Recently, I have been completely obsessed with Jay-Z's soundtrack to The Great Gatsby, which I think was brilliantly assembled, constructed, as poignant, eerie, and melancholy as the movie, and full of color and life in its limitless imagination. Getting Jack White to cover "Love is Blindness" was the icing on the cake.

So, I decided to try Jay-Z's album "Blueprint" out for size.

I don't know what I was expecting, but this whole album felt like one big self-serving ego stroke. I've never heard such blatant narcissism before and wondered how anyone could perceive this album as anything other than a giant stroke-off session. But, most rap is like that, right?

If we could translate portions of his album into Icanhascheezburger language, its synopsis would be something like this:

1. thx 4 buying my albem, becuz it is da only 1 in existence. Next time buy 2 of them. kthxby
2. I gets all the females all over the world. none 4 you, muhahaha.
3. I is the 8th wonder of the world.
4. I have piles of moneyz taller than you.
5. all other rappers suck. cept Eminem and someone named ROC

But, if I'm being completely honest here, I couldn't get some of the songs out of my head and while playing it to and from work it made me somehow feel important--like I too, was on a vast ego kick. To his credit, he doesn't talk about murdering bitches or really hurting anyone. So what do I care if he wants to talk about how great he is and how much everyone else sucks?

My husband warned me before I began to write this blog. He said, make fun of all the whiny white retards from the 80s all you want, but don't fuck with Jay-Z because he's liable to show up here and make you disappear. And you know what, the funny thing is--I totally believe that. Because whether I want to contribute to his ego or not, there is something so mysterious about Jay-Z, so mythological, that you think-- this is a guy who can make anything happen because he sees through the threads of the system and in his own way--he's a bit like Gatsby, no? (well, someone did fuck with Gatsby, but whatever) The man has more money than God, he freaking married Beyonce, was able to buy a barbie doll with a dress made out of REAL diamonds for his one-year-old, self-made billionaire, rags to riches all the way...

And, although there were many rumors about Gatsby, you can't deny all of the strange mason, secret-society shit Jay-Z has locked up in his albums. Even NPR did an "all things considered" about his eerie occult symbolism that you can read or listen to RIGHT HERE.

All in all, the album was fun to listen to although I tired of hearing about how great he thinks he is. At least Gatsby was somewhat humble. Humility goes a long way, methinks.

What Rolling Stone had to say:

If Frank Sinatra had been born a Brooklyn rapper, The Blueprint is the album he would have made. It's all flash and bravado, with Jay-Z dissing rivals, talking smack about his troubles with the cops and flossing hard with ladies all around the world.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/500-greatest-albums-of-all-time-20120531/jay-z-the-blueprint-20120524#ixzz2VjotIZNP
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#41 Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols

2013-05-22T20:51:00.005-07:00

I tried. I tried. I tried. I tried so hard to like the Sex Pistols. I really wanted to. I thought I could fake it too and pretend to be in love with the Sex Pistols. Deep down, I thought a part of me will emerge and love Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious. I know they are important. I know they are a raw awesome punk band who called it like they saw it, expressed anger for a generation, hooray they were controversial and banned, they lyrically bitchslapped the queen, etc. All good things I thought I'd enjoy, but when it got right down to it, it all sounded the same to me. I thought I was on the same song for 20 minutes and then I realized I was halfway done with the album. And by the time I forced myself to listen to it for a fourth time, I was so impatient for it to end.

And there is a language barrier; laugh all you want, there really is one. Besides having to look up "Bollocks" which, I'll have you know has six different definitions, I couldn't understand a word of this rubbish (that means trash, Katy, in case you want to look it up). And what I could understand sounded so juvenile and silly, I was embarrassed to listen to it very loud--and it being punk music, I suppose listening loudly comes with the territory. *shrug*

Meh, all in all, not my cup o' tea.

I think I wrote a poem about a teacher once who was not a human being either (not as noteworthy as the queen). But I was in the 8th grade. I also recall writing a short story about Fetus Fajitas that was way better than their crappy abortion song. Mine had a point to it too. I didn't just throw darts at the dictionary to come up with phrases.

This album made me feel like one of those creepers who never leaves their high school town the more I listened. Or like when Blink182 toured in their late thirties and were making poop jokes and fucking someone's mom jokes and shouting "boobies" for the squeals of delight from thirteen-year-old girls. Just constantly stuck in an adolescent brain and angry for no reason. Bitching at things just to bitch and blaming everyone else for their made up problems. You get to do whatever you want and not work a real job? You can't name the Prime Minister but you're wealthy as hell because you can make one song sound like twelve and call it an album? You get drunk and make money off of angry retards who buy your albums just because they got banned? My friends, you have first world problems. This is not something to be angry about. Drop your little anarchist act and go home. Wash your gimmicks off and take a nap or read a book or something. Jesus H.

The Clash totally kicked your asses, Sex Pistols. I don't think any punk band will impress me after The Clash rocked my world.

And none of you sound intimidating enough for me to think you're anarchists or antichrists. FAIL.

In truth, I don't have anything to say about this album. I seriously couldn't think of a single thing that would make this entry interesting or worth reading in anyway. Or even funny in putting them down. The album was so far removed from me that it had nothing to do with my life whatsoever. It didn't spark any brain waves or remind me of anything important enough to write down. It kind of made me feel like being stuck in a shitty dream where everyone is yelling in a different language; and I don't have too many of those dreams, thankfully.

Maybe if I am given a more interesting base material to work with, I'll write better. For examples, please refer to all other blog entries.

Stones Website:

Never Mind The Bollocks Here's The Sex Pistols --Album Cover

Warner Bros., 1977

"If the sessions had gone the way I wanted, it would have been unlistenable for most people," Johnny Rotten said. "If you want people to listen, you’re going to have to compromise." But few heard it that way at the time. The Pistols' only studio album sounds like a rejection of everything rock & roll had to offer. True, the music was less shocking than Rotten himself, who snarled about abortions, anarchy and hatred. But Never Mind. . . is the Sermon on the Mount of U.K. punk – and its echoes are everywhere

#16 Blood on the Tracks - Bob Dylan

2013-04-23T20:37:00.000-07:00

My first impression of this album was, oh man, Bob wrote this for girls like me. And it kind of made me smirk because I think most people hear this album and they direct Dylan's anger, raw knife-edged emotions, and empty despair at someone else, someone they are trying to dehumanize try as they might, and can't; but I've never really felt that way about anyone because I always did the breaking up.

But I guess that's not even true either. Sexy image, I suppose, but probably not realistic. You see, to trivialize this album and call it a break up album, cathartic as it might be, seems to miss the point entirely. The point is about perspective. And we don't get to see his ex's.

To make it all more confusing, I grew up with this album deeply ingrained in my brain before I could understand what the lyrics meant. My childhood was imbued in the sounds of Dylan's harmonica. But I gave it a shot and did my best to listen with fresh ears.

It occurred to me that the reason Blood on the Tracks is so very successful, is because Dylan gets at the heart of human feeling without making it totally gay. You can feel the universe's pain and healing process and all the simpering threads of memory from anyone else who listened to this album and felt their heart strings tug too much to be comfortable. But the songs are so surreal, mostly Tangled up in Blue, You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome when You Go, and Shelter from the Storm they feel like they have always been here (and that's true for me in this lifetime) but Dylan found a vein in the collective unconscious and sucked it dry for the sake of this saturated star in a galactic sea of musical milky ways.

But did he puss out like James Joyce after Finnegan's Wake? Or get worn out from whiskey dick like Faulkner did after Absalom, Absalom? No fucking sir. That man is still making awesome music because he GETS it. He's here, probably like Shakespeare and Milton were, to make us understand ourselves better. Yeah, Harold Bloom, I just made that comparison. Get over it.

So shut the fuck up and stop whining about how he sounds like a belching pig and pick up this album before you die a miserable life without a glimpse of your own soul.

The new epiphany I had when I tried to listen to it anew was the idea that what makes Bob Dylan so dynamic are his perspective changes and paradigm shifts visible from album to album as he's grown up. It made me think that, every few years we should shed our programming and start fresh. Get some new values, be different people, start making different decisions, get some Descartes' Fireside action. I think I do that, rather a lot and can appreciate things like Dylan's Christian album because I get it. It's all about perspective.

And it's also weird to think that two people can be in the same car listening to the same song and have drastically different experiences and memories and day dreams. Paradoxically, both are sharing in the music and are connected, but they are both disconnected from each other.

For example:

My Dad and I were driving through the dirt, rugged roads in northern Idaho a few days before my wedding with sirius radio cutting in and out through the forty foot tall pine trees and mountain interference. We were singing along to "Tangled up in Blue" on one of the classic rock stations. The song would cut out but we'd keep singing and Dylan would chime in and out to check on us to make sure we were keeping good time.

When we got to the end of the song, my dad said, "I never understood what he meant by that ending; "some are mathematicians, some are carpenter's wives..."

(don't know how it all got started
I don't know what they do with their lives
but me, I'm still on the road,
headed for another joint,
we always did feel the same
we just saw it from a different point of view
tangled up in blue.)

My interpretation came so naturally to me; I tried to control my excited tone. I said, "well, you are a geologist. Your point of view is to see the earth as a living organism on a timeline most people cannot comprehend. You can see what it was and what it might be. That's how you understand 'being,' thus, that's your perspective. I see the world in poetic moments full of irony (like schooling my father on a song he's heard for 30 years), understandings, misunderstandings, human interactions, and philosophical ideas. We can both listen to this song and take drastically different things away from it; yet we're sharing the experience together. We can't see the world through other perspectives, but we all feel the same sometimes about the direction our lives are heading or the way we feel about people and each other; I guess, sometimes Dad, we all get tangled up in blue."

We continued to drive and I wondered what this song might have reminded him of. Probably his days of living in New Orleans or further back in Kentucky, or sleeping on the floor in someone's house in Kalamazoo. or rocks, rocks, and more rocks.
But me, I'm still on the road...

Blood on the Tracks Album Cover

Columbia, 1975

Bob Dylan once introduced this album's opening song, "Tangled Up in Blue," onstage as taking him 10 years to live and two years to write. It was, for him, a pointed reference to the personal crisis – the collapse of his marriage to Sara Lowndes – that at least partly inspired this album, Dylan's best of the 1970s. In fact, he wrote all of these lyrically piercing, gingerly majestic songs in two months, in mid-1974. He was so proud of them that he privately auditioned almost all of the album, from start to finish, for pals and peers including Mike Bloomfield, David Crosby and Graham Nash before cutting them in September – in just a week, with members of the bluegrass band Deliverance. But in December, Dylan played the record for his brother David in Minneapolis, who suggested recutting some songs with local musicians. The final Blood was a mix of the slow, pensive New York sessions and the faster, wilder Minneapolis dates. Together, they frame the gritty anguish in some of Dylan's most passionate, confessional songs – from adult breakup ballads like "If You See Her, Say Hello" to the sharp-tongued opprobrium of "Idiot Wind," his greatest put-down song since "Like a Rolling Stone." "It's hard for me to relate to people enjoying that type of pain," Dylan said after the album became an instant success. Yet he had never turned so much pain into so much musical splendor.

#87 The Wall - Pink Floyd

2013-03-15T19:06:00.000-07:00

"Look Mummy, there's a drone up in the sky..." :)

My encounter with this album evoked the most surreal experience I have had yet throughout this project. I should have expected that with Pink Floyd, but I'm not talking about the way my brainpiece processed their information the way they wanted me to perceive it. I'm talking about something else entirely.

The first time I listened to it, I was invigorated and awestruck. There were moments when I felt like crying--because (ironically) I thought, these people feel the same way as I do when they perceive an institution and those who wander around like zombies. They also could understand the appealing nature of building a proverbial wall against all the other breathing thoughtless creatures who occupy my immediate space, or identify with how good it feels to just shut people out while scrambling to paradoxically not be alone. Of course, Roger Waters and his friendies are in their box feeling just as alone as all those people plugged into their phones (listening to PF!) or those of you watching trash tv with a box of wine. or two. Ironically, we are all as alone as the next guy; try as we might to "stay connected." Obviously, we can invert this entire paragraph and claim that no person is an island, try as they might to get away. Like someone chatting with babes on the Interwebz is actually alone and not at the same time.

But this album resonated with me on such an eerie level. God, I thought, I must really be screwed up to identify with Pink Floyd, of all the bands so far. When I heard "Another Brick in the Wall pt 2" I immediately thought of my short-lived teaching experience. Quitting teaching was sort of the best thing that ever happened to me; Roger would OBVIOUSLY agree. I'm glad I don't have to indoctrinate people anymore or lie to them and tell them they can be whatever they want to be when they grow up as long as they work hard and try. Or tell them college will help them get a job. Or encourage them to take out student loans to go to school, which only enslaves them into the system to spend their lives paying it back with time at a soulless job under fluorescent lights that smell like burnt skin and fried dreams. Whatever happened to teaching people to just grow up and be happy? And why the fuck do they still make people respond to bells? And when will people learn that time is an illusion and they've all been programmed to respond to clocks (thanks to the public education system!)?

This album made me realize that hopefully, I'm not the only person walking around so lost inside my own head that I feel like I can't function normally sometimes in social situations. Maybe everyone feels so incredibly alone that they mask it with their own walls and distractions. Like drinking or watching grown-ass men in colorful foamwear mount one another homosocially to fight for an oblong shaped brown ball with laces grunting over gained yardage. My tactic for distraction is no better; I mask it with humor. Like making someone laugh creates a semi-real bridged connection with another being to distract from the constant isolation. So I just make people laugh and I think, is this normal? Is this real life? Am I interacting just fine with these people? And then I just keep piling bricks upon bricks. Or feeling at odds about things other people find to be so normal, like sleeping, eating meat, or old horror movies, for example.

"Is there anybody out there" made me recall the five minutes I stood frozen by the inundating waves of shock and fear when as a child, I walked into the living room while my brother was watching The Shining. And something inside of me broke that night in those five minutes, and I felt so utterly alone for the first time. I've never seen the whole movie, but there was an aura about being so helpless and alone that not even your parents could save you and it fed my childhood realization that maybe nobody is ever really connected to another person. We are all so alone and I, at the time, was more alone than anyone else because the images in that movie built a wall around me that didn't allow comfort or compassion to enter when it came time to sleep. Whereas, my brother processed the information like he was watching just another cartoon. And that disconnected and unshared experience isolated me further and reenforced the terror that movie (and this album) creates because he was able to just blow it off when I wasn't.

And then, as an eight-year-old, the lights went out and I was in bed. There were expectations of sleep. And the suffocating anxiety about sleeping crept up, like a cloudy hand from under the bed to pin me down by the chest and force me to stare up at the ceiling in tears until dawn because sleeping was so unnatural to me. We willingly shut down, like machines with dead batteries and give up all of our power to become vulnerable and exist in a mind state without senses. On purpose! (some crazies even take NAPS) And I thought, I might not wake up tomorrow. I might not wake up ever again. And then like always, I succumbed, after exhaustion took its toll and night after night, in a struggling battle against sleep--I would fail and as sleep took me into the night, I acquiesced to the fact that I was going to die alone again tonight like the night before and the night before that.

That feeling is almost as terrifying as being around a lot of people--because the more people that are around, paradoxically, the more alone one feels. Like being at a concert, which I believe is the very idea that inspired the concept for this album.

Understand me a little better now, college roommates? Childhood friends who I bailed on for sleepovers? Sorry Mumsey for never napping as an infant.

Many years later, I listened to a This American Life podcast about the Fear of Sleep, and someone else had an experience with The Shining that was similar to mine and I wondered how many terrified youngsters were out there unable to sleep for decades because of just FIVE whole minutes of the movie. You are not alone, my fearful friends. Get the mother fucking twins out of the mother fucking hallway. nuff said.

So, in the midst of all this thinking, I asked my husband if he would watch the movie "The Wall" with me. He looked at me, shaking his head and said that if I chose to watch it for this project, I'd have to do it alone because it really creeped him out and he'd rather not see it "or the marching hammers" again.

um, after watching the trailer, that's just out of the question.

After the dreadful recollection of my childhood hypnophobia, I relistened to the album but this time, I couldn't suppress the memories of my bedtime rituals that would help to stave off the anxiety I associated with sleeping (i.e. turning on and off the lights 15 times. Kissing all of my stuffed animals over and over etc. Like the little narrator in Proust's Swann's Way, begging Mumsey to come up and check on me before she went to bed) nor could I disassociate my reoccurring Zombie nightmares from the album--I forgot to mention those; I have them often. So, take all that unnecessary baggage and top it with the idea of a fascist regime taking over a population, inspired by my husband's description of "The Wall" and watching the trailer and you probably wouldn't want to listen to Pink Floyd again either.

So I reached down and touched the pause bottom halfway through the song "The Trial" and left all that weight, bad energy, baggage, and bullshit lying in the middle of the sidewalk behind me as I changed the music to Bob Dylan, who pretty much makes everything better, and kept walking.

Leave the childhood fears behind. We don't need no friggin triggers.

The album is amazing, literally seamless, flawless, and hits so close to home that I just couldn't bear it any longer. I have nothing bad to say against the album but I don't think I can handle listening to a song from them again because I just get so heavy with angst and bad energy that I could never get "comfortably numb" to Pink Floyd. The surreal experience was the drastic change in perception from the first listen to the last. I went from loving this album to being completely unable to listen to it--and my fascist 1984 private room 101 hell would be at this concert plus Jack Nicholson, a sleepover and some hallway twins (and pickles). Which was pretty much what they were going for, it felt.

I hate your Lonelier than Thou attitude, Pink Floyd. I'm so creeped, I don't want to look up the album cover to put on this entry.

Columbia, 1979

Pink Floyd's most elaborately theatrical album was inspired by their own success: the alienating enormity of their tours after The Dark Side of the Moon [see No. 43]. As the band played arenas in 1977, bassistlyricist Roger Waters first hit upon the wall as a metaphor for isolation and rebellion. He finished a demo of the work by July 1978; the double album then took the band a year to make. Rock's ultimate self-pity opera, The Wall is also hypnotic in its indulgence: the totalitarian thunder of "In the Flesh?," the suicidal languor of "Comfortably Numb," the Brechtian drama of "The Trial" and the anti-institutional spleen of the album's unshakable disco hit, "Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. 2." Rock-star hubris has never been more electrifying.

#3 Revolver -- The Beatles

2013-03-03T18:32:00.001-08:00

Revolver is an intimidating album to cover, because I actually know a lot about it but don't really want to share the knowledge with you about how they came up with this or that name, or which song helped to influence the psychedelic movement, WTF is Yellow Submarine about anyway, yadda yadda ya. That kind of music talk is so boring to me, and it's the only kind people even find anymore. I'm more interested in what you felt when you heard the album. Where were you when you heard Revolver? It's like when people talk about authors and poets and not the fucking books. Example: William Faulkner's life wasn't really that interesting, contrary to his novels. He didn't know how to mail letters at his job and he had such alcoholism that he was often found covered in vomit passed out on toilet seats, he was short, he got old and wrote his nobel prize speech on the airplane on his way to get the award. BFD. Moving on.

Not to mention, everyone already knows everything about the Beatles anyway. So if you want to learn that shit, go to wikipedia or find you a music blog that doesn't talk about the life that happens around the music.

I recently saw "Lars and the Real Girl" and that movie was so profound that I thought about it while I listened to Revolver over and over again. The two meshed in my head and I came up with an idea about music that has probably been thought before, but probably nobody was inspired by the supporting actress in Lars and the Real Girl (she's a life size "love doll") to come to this thought.

So, in Lars and the Real Girl, Lars has had a difficult childhood full of abandonment and as an adult, he suffers from this delusion that he has fallen in love with a woman named Bianca, who is actually a life size doll. About half way through the movie, there is a point where we begin to notice that life happens all around this doll, because of this doll, and in spite of this doll. The town comes together to assist in the delusion, by having Bianca volunteer around town, hang out with church women, etc. etc. By treating her as a real person, Lars finally realizes that they care about and love him. Thus, this hunk of plastic begins to bridge the gap between Lars and people.

And I believe that's what music does. And not just music, but bands as well known as the Beatles specifically. It doesn't matter what nationality you are, you've heard the Beatles, and they mean something to you. Even if it's nothing. My Venezuelan Brother, Daniel (long story) once told me that back in Venezuela, one of the songs they learned in their English class was "yellow submarine" and they had to learn to sing it in English. It totally makes sense to use that song. It distinguishes between sky and sea, and there are loads of colors to learn...(woot! go ringo!) but anyway,

Albums are tangible things; they are not alive. But life happens because of the music they repeat, in spite of the music and all around it. All the people who have heard Revolver will take that music with them and when they hear Eleanor Rigby, they will think of an old woman they once new, or the person they met in a car while the song was playing and wonder how those people are doing. Maybe when people hear "Tomorrow Never Knows" they will think about that one time in India when they dropped acid or whatever. who knows? Probably tomorrow doesn't.

I thought about how Eleanor Rigby is one of the best songs they ever wrote. They all supposedly contributed lyrics to it too (if you cared). I had the string trio I hired play it at my wedding. And it'll be at my funeral too.

And your bird can sing:

"I don't see too much difference between Revolver and Rubber Soul," George Harrison once said. "To me, they could be Volume One and Volume Two." Revolver extends the more adventurous aspects of its predecessor – its introspection, its nascent psychedelia, its fascination with studio artistry – into a dramatic statement of generational possibility.

The album, which was released in August 1966, made it thrillingly clear that what we now think of as "the Sixties" was fully – and irreversibly – under way.

The most innovative track on the album is John Lennon's "Tomorrow Never Knows." Attempting to distill an LSD trip into a three-minute song, Lennon borrowed lyrics from Timothy Leary's version of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and recorded his vocal to sound like "the Dalai Lama singing from the highest mountaintop." Tape loops, a backward guitar part (Paul McCartney's blistering solo on "Taxman," in fact) and a droning tamboura completed the experimental effect, and the song proved hugely influential. For his part, on "Eleanor Rigby" and "For No One," McCartney mastered a strikingly mature form of art song, and Harrison, with "Taxman," "I Want to Tell You" and "Love You To," challenged Lennon-McCartney's songwriting dominance.

Part of the album's revolutionary impulse was visual. Klaus Voormann, one of the Beatles' artist buddies from their days in Hamburg, Germany, designed a striking photo-collage cover for Revolver; it was a crucial step on the road to the even trippier, more colorful imagery of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which would come less than a year later.

Revolver signaled that in popular music, anything – any theme, any musical idea – could now be realized. And, in the case of the Beatles, would be.

#35 The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars - David Bowie

2013-02-19T21:15:00.000-08:00

What the fuck did I just listen to and why was it so awesome?

This album was easily one of the greatest musical accomplishments, ever. Without hyperbole or sarcasm, Ziggy Stardust has it all: Great tunes, aliens, mentions of spiders, just someone named Ziggy gets like 250 points, and the imagery of a cat from Japan. Kick. Ass.

I have spent the last two weeks totally married to this album. We drove to Dallas together, drove to work together, whilst jogging to "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide," I stopped in the middle of the trail and vehemently exhaled, "Oh No, Love! You're not alone!" to the amusement of our village idiot, a Boo Radley of sorts who vagabonds around the park all day in the same clothing, staring at clumps of dirt or the sky for hours at a time...

and I shuttered and wondered; Hark, I am not much different from this being. for I am the crazy shouting to myself and constantly constantly constantly living under the shadow of an impending doom of ongoing existential angst that began with my first heartbeat, anyone's first heartbeat, all of our last heartbeats and stand alone in the park channeling Eliot through the immortal vibe of Bowie:

I have measured out my life with music albums;
I know the singing ceases with an ending drawl
Bowie contemplates the limits of his ego.
So how should I presume?*

Ahem. I know how. So, if I could ask David Bowie one question, it would be, "If you could go back in time and have sex with ANYONE, who would you pick?"

Many chew on the question, taking it rather seriously and try to come up with something clever like, "I'd be Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Rider" or "Watch out Audrey Hepburn, Holly doesn't come lightly" or what have you.

But Bowie would probably answer this question with the same force and vigor of a God answering the question of the meaning of life to a mere mortal. He would stoically respond, "Why, I would of course fuck myself, my child."

While listening to this album, I was told by several people, "well, you know he and Mick Jagger had a thing, right?" So, after careful pondering, I came to the conclusion that the closest thing our dear solipsist, David Bowie, could get to copulating with himself was to have sex with the only person on the planet cooler than him, gender be damned. It probably wasn't even sex. It was probably a way to call the rest of their alien brethren to earth for a jam session.

I was all on a cloud about this album until I watched the movie of the 1973 concert. And it was like someone ripped the beating heart right out of my chest and ate it while I tried to scream. As I watched a 90 pound creature prance around the stage in wallpaper, it occurred to me that the spread of the AIDS virus was not because of government experiments on monkeys in Africa, nor was it God's punishment to the gay community, but it was caused directly because of the Ziggy Stardust tour. Every time Bowie flipped up his kimono, it was not for rapturous applause, but it was to secrete microscopic spore-puffs from his ballsack, thus gassing the virus out onto an enthralled community of coked-up unsuspecting teens.

I do not think that he will sing to me... *

Anyheum-- what the spiders from Mars have to say:

This album documents one of the most elaborate self-mythologizing schemes in rock, as David Bowie created the glittery, messianic alter ego Ziggy Stardust ("well-hung and snow-white tan"). The glam rock Bowie made with guitarist Mick Ronson on tracks like "Hang on to Yourself" and "Suffragette City" is an irresistible blend of sexy, campy pop and blues power. The anthem "Ziggy Stardust" is one of rock's earliest, and best, power ballads. "I consider myself responsible for a whole new school of pretensions," Bowie said at the time. "They know who they are. Don't you, Elton? Just kidding. No, I'm not."

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/500-greatest-albums-of-all-time-20120531/david-bowie-the-rise-and-fall-of-ziggy-stardust-and-the-spiders-from-mars-20120524#ixzz2LPfGwZ7M
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#390 Elephant -- White Stripes

2013-02-07T20:29:00.000-08:00

Jack White reminds me of that creepy Tim Burton creation from A Nightmare before Christmas. I was expecting manic songs declaring "this is halloween" around every turn; but instead, well actually, that was pretty much what I got.

Only kidding. The album declares that it is a concept album of sorts. I read so in the little booklet that came with my one cent cd that I ordered off of amazon. It deals with "the death of the sweetheart." So, you know when it's like 2 am and drunk o'clock and your lazy ass was SUPPOSED to make the long rambling paper tie into all the things you learned in class? And give it important attributes like a thesis statement and some themes for good measure, but you didn't? So you "muhahahaha-ed" to your clever little self and you erase your shitty turd of an introduction and then you rewrite it with this sentence: "THIS PAPER IS ABOUT ____________." even though it isn't? That happened in this album. But, that doesn't take away from its awesomeness. It just felt like they had a lot of after thoughts and tried to make those work.

I was very confused, because when I heard the song about a man talking to himself in his mind behind a cigarette, I was like, "is he going to kill his sweetheart? why is she breaking up with him?" oh, right, because he looks like he stick-walked himself off a Tim Burton storyboard, I remember.

But none of this prattle is important. Everyone knows that with music it's not so much about the lyrics but the feelings it creates. So you can be like homeboy and just use the pronoun "it" over and over as a subject and elementary rhyming, but blow everyone away with your killer music. The truth is, they are a very talented group. None of the songs remotely resembled the previous one and I was very impressed how they drew from jazz, older genres of music, and even folk music. The only song that I didn't really care for was the last one where they sang back and forth at one another and tried their best at humor with singing. The banter was annoying and sounded like junior high flirting. Their lyrics still beat the hell out of Mark Knopfler's though. hands down.

Seven Nation Army, for whatever reason, reminded me of the time I was stuck in the Victoria and Albert museum during the London Bombings of 2005. It was July 7th and it was a Thursday morning. I didn't hear a whole lot throughout the album that resembled their purported theme, but I felt the terror of losing one's safety net; and that's what this album made me feel all over again. Although neither Jack White, nor I, have enough evidence to write a convincing argument that the song, "Seven Nation Army" argues for either the death of the American sweetheart, or the sick feeling that burgeons up as you leave what might be your last phone message on your father's office phone saying, as calmly as you can, "I think we are being held hostage. Bombs are going off all over London. I don't know how many more will go off or if they have one in the museum. I know it's too early for you to be at work yet, but I had to call anyway. If I don't make it home, I love you Dad." Neither theme really works and I would fail both of us heartlessly if I were still a slave behind a podium with a red pen. But everyone with a brain cell knows grades are a crock of shit, so let there be terrible themes and wonderful music, and anxious stories that are dropped at the end of a blog entry like a bomb and don't have a conclusion...

What those who don't get paid to ramble had to say about Jack and Meg White:

Jack and Meg White proved their minimalist garage rock had more depth and power than anyone expected. On tracks like the slow-burning "Seven Nation Army" and "The Hardest Button to Button," Jack's songwriting finally matches his blues-fanboy, art-school shtick.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/500-greatest-albums-of-all-time-20120531/the-white-stripes-elephant-20120525#ixzz2KHKZKD57
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#297 Weezer -- Weezer (now #299)

2013-01-25T20:13:00.000-08:00

Ironically, sometimes my favorite albums are the hardest to write about. I've been listening to Weezer this entire month and I have sat down to write about this album four times. I think I have something interesting and then I reread it and it sounds forced and confusing. Like I tried to say so many things that I say nothing at all. Reader beware: This post will be some version of that.

And then I came across this article that I will come back to in a few paragraphs that made me rethink and reframe everything I thought I felt when I listened to Weezer. It also pretty much had nothing to do with Weezer.

At first, Weezer brought back a lot of good feelings. Overall the songs are upbeat, catchy, and whimsical, even. I remember listening to Weezer on my drives to high school and ballet. There seems to be a presence of Weezer throughout my teenage years, specifically the summer between my junior and senior year when I hung out with my best friend Kristi a lot and we went to the nasty beaches of corpus christi and swam in our pool. Weezer came along for the ride.

When I first started listening to the album this month, my husband and I shared a moment in the car driving home from our favorite pizza place. I put on "the sweater song" and he recalled a great memory from college and shared how that song made him feel. As I glanced over at him throughout the song, his smile grew until his dimples showed and as we pulled into the driveway we were building up to the final climax and singing along and I was pretending to play the drums and the music was as loud as it could be and then as it ended and we were pulled back down from feelings and memories that neither one of us shared together, but in that moment they fused and somehow became mutual. And I smiled at the commonality of uncommonality and he just said, "man, Weezer can deliver. Most other bands build and then just fizzle, but Weezer really hands you a climax."

And so I kept listening to the album, trying to return to that high. And then I read an article two days ago from New York Magazine called, "High School is a Sadistic Institution" by Jennifer Senior, who argues that through several different sociological and scientific studies of the prefrontal cortex's development in adolescents that high school is the worst idea in the history of human socialization and how in many ways, we never leave high school because it forms our identities whether we ever wanted that or not. So basically, life is one awful Lord of the Flies cluster fuck. and nobody can actually grow up anymore. It's a pretty amazing article and I strongly suggest looking into it. But there was one paragraph that caught my eye. It was about music. We all listen and relisten to the music we heard as adolescents--and that music becomes so intertwined with our identities that it defines the type of music we listen to for the rest of our lives. So if you don't believe how much high school can impact your identity, check your playlists, doods. It's because teenagers feel everything so much more than when their brains are in any other state in their lives. So that high, those feelings music evokes, stay with you. forever.

The article also talked about how teenagers cannot navigate the emotions and intentions of others. I won't go into it, but she sights many studies to support this thesis. So, I began to wonder. This music that I loved so much--perhaps I should lay down the pointless nostalgia and listen to it as an adult.

And I was shocked at what I found. I knew "My name is Jonas" was freaking hard on guitar hero, but I never listened to the lyrics before. They are incredibly sad, about a child who is working all day and a child who is below the poverty line who gets bad news from his brother...

Also, I had no idea, for instance, that "say it ain't so" was about an alcoholic father and his relationship to his son. As a teenager, I just sang along and took no notice of the meaning. The song was badass. Now it's just as badass, but for a deeper meaning. It worries me how much the melodies hooked me, and I didn't even know what the song was about.

I think on a small level, I somehow felt betrayed even though I appreciate the band more for it. I got creeped out because the song never matched the feelings it created in me.

It sort of felt like that time I watched Ren and Stimpy when I was 18 instead of 5. And had a serious what the fuck moment.

When it came out, Weezer's debut was merely a cool, quirky power-pop album with a couple of hit singles – "Buddy Holly" and "Undone (The Sweater Song)." But Rivers Cuomo's band influenced a legion of sad-sack punkers. Today, they stand just a step below Nirvana in the alt-rock canon.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/500-greatest-albums-of-all-time-20120531/weezer-weezer-20120524#ixzz2J3CZI2sH
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#351 Brothers in Arms--Dire Straits (now #352)

2012-12-27T21:45:00.000-08:00

This album was kinda like getting really excited for a massage and then realizing, mid-massage, that the massage therapist is going to talk the entire time and mostly about your back tattoo. And you have to talk to her because she is slaving away. And you can't complain about it because then you're the asshole who complained about being burdened by talking to the person who spent the last hour giving you a massage.

In other words, it was great, but shut the fuck up Mark. Your lyrics don't say anything but nonsense and you can't sing. You sang about appliances. fucking appliances. and you said "be bop a lula baby" more than once. Just play the guitar and shut your face.

There is a special place in hell for people who spoil good massages and music with their excessive mouth noises.

I thought that "So Far Away" and "Why Worry" were the best songs on the album. I could feel the emotion, once I turned down the blathering singer in my EQ, and felt at peace and some sadness too.

It occurred to me though, that so much of this project, becomes the glue in my day-to-day life. The songs that I listen to throughout each period of time marinate and stick in the cracks of my reality. They take all the little things that happen and tint them with their melodies. They play in the background while I receive pictures of my newborn nephew, they gloss over words on title opinions that I read daily, and this album was played all through this Christmas season showering baby Jesus with color-tvs and be bop a lulas. Maybe certain songs and albums mean so much to us, not because they are great, but because they remind us of good chapters from previous eternities or specific mind-states. They are one of the only links back to those memories, long forgotten by those who shared parts in them. I never knew that a person could go through so many lives in just one lifetime. Cats may have nine, but I believe we have nine hundred.

You see, my beloved cat, Socrates (Socats), disappeared on the 16th. He and I have been traveling companions to the grave together since 2008 when I found him in my first apartment complex right after I graduated college. Or, he found me. Together, we set off on our new adventure. He slept with me, purred at me when I was sad, pushed beer boxes around with his head, walked with me in the mornings, would drink water with his paw out of my bathtub, would sleep on my books, killed a rabbit once, and shat on the carpet many a time. The two days before he left, he was unnaturally affectionate, preferring to lay all over me and sleeping the whole night through right next to my head. Then I let him outside, like always. and poof. he was gone.

The last eleven days, I have tirelessly scoured my neighborhood. I get a glimmer of hope and am immediately shot down in an exhausting roller coaster of despair.

All of life is letting go of it. Letting go of your childhood, of the toys you played with as a child, all of your dreams as they one by one slip through your fingers, of your denial, of your favorite cat, of your mistakes, your childhood friends, your high school friends, your college friends, your post-college friends, your grudges, your anger, your failures, your hopes, your family members, and christmas once again. And with each set of let-gos, a new chapter begins.

I played "why worry" from this album over and over as I searched for lost Socats. His life, if it is still with us, has changed and begun a new chapter. His fate is out of my hands. I don't know if he was adopted by an old ass lady who never leaves her house, eaten by a coyote, got a letter from Hogwarts, or ran into Gandalf who asked him to carry the ring of power to Mordor. All I know is that worrying about the most likely answer won't bring him back to me anymore than wishing I were a child again will make me ten.

We pass through so many doors and so many people (and animals!!) before we finally part this world in this lifetime. But we are all traveling companions to the grave, as Charles Dickens once said...So, why worry?

Thanks Dire Straits for playing music through yet another dreary december.

Warner Bros., 1985

Mark Knopfler started writing "Money for Nothing" when he overheard a New York appliance salesman's anti-rock-star, anti-MTV rant. The song, of course, became a huge MTV hit, and this album shows off Knopfler's incisive songwriting and lush guitar riffs on "Walk of Life" and "So Far Away."

#126 Remain in Light - Talking Heads (now #129)

2012-11-28T20:27:00.001-08:00

There is a Southpark episode where any new music or television that Stan is exposed to sounds and looks like big piles of shit. I felt a lot like Stan this week while listening to this cacophony of suck. If you haven't noticed, dear reader, I have been trying very hard to stick it out with albums, even if I don't like them at first and do my best to appreciate the album for the band's goal and what it tried to accomplish. I have been very successful, even with genres that I wouldn't normally like. But this is stretching my optimism too far.

My experience with this album was very short. Like listening to the Smiths, I did my exact two times through, and to be perfectly honest, I couldn't listen to the last two songs on the album again. My anxiety and frustration would build up and control me and would only be abated if I turned off the disjointed, pointless noise.

How on earth did this album make it to #126? I really felt that this was a joke. It honestly didn't even sound like music to me. It just made my blood pressure raise because I was so impatient for the next song to begin. There is all this twinkling and clanging and then someone begins to moan followed by women wailing a chorus in return and then they cue the last yelps of six one-eyed capybaras in a-cappella. I could feel my left eye twitching and my right leg bouncing as I stared at the seconds decreasing across my iPhone screen for each song.

I tried to think, well, each genre and generation of music has certain sounds and beats and rhythms that they adapt to and grow up with. And that sounds like music to them. I tried my hardest to get into the mindset of a person who prefers to listen to the Talking Heads more than any other band and I just couldn't even picture a single person or what he or she might look like. Maybe he was someone who twitched a lot while flaring his nostrils and alternated speaking German phrases at parties for attention and commenting on topics like which black lights were better for finding stains on his little brother's sheets vs. which black lights might be more efficient for heating the closet where he keeps his Komodo Dragon collection. But what do I know.

The ray of sunshine in the whole album was "Once in a Lifetime" which was probably the only tract that resembled anything like music. If that song wasn't in there, there is no way this album would have made it to the list because everyone would have clawed their eyes out.

In Sum,

This was how my subconscious interpreted all of these bizarre sounds thrown together:

A Wild Snorlax +

This Dr. Seuss Instrument +

This Awkward Family Photo +

Dr. Ian Malcolm's discovery of Jurassic Shit

Here is what the Rolling Stone Mag had to say (nothing good. The author totally doesn't know what to say and tries to be original with his description, but mine are clearly better; afropop, come on, cacophony of suck and 6 one eyed capybara is way more descriptive. I win.):

On this New Wave watershed, the avant-punk avatars became polyrhythmic pop magicians. David Byrne and Co. combined the thrust of P-Funk, the kinky grooves of Afropop and the studied adventurousness of producer Brian Eno – and they still had a pop hit with "Once in a Lifetime."

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/500-greatest-albums-of-all-time-20120531/talking-heads-remain-in-light-20120524#ixzz2Da8XAuuj
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#258 American Beauty -- The Grateful Dead (now #261)

2012-11-16T19:59:00.000-08:00

I don't think you can just like the Grateful Dead. I think that the correct interpretation for the meaning of "like" when dealing with the Grateful Dead is that you are somewhere on your journey to becoming a Deadhead. You might not officially be one, but once you've been exposed, you are inevitably on your way. If you die before fully becoming indoctrinated into its awesomeness, Jerry Garcia and all his laid-back fandom would probably say, "sucks dude, you totally ran out of time in this life. Maybe on your next journey through the cosmic void, a Deadhead you will become."

Now, unlike all other bands, there is a cult following to this one that outdoes the cult following of even the most hardcore World of Warcraft Fans. When you hear two deadheads engulfed in a conversation, it's almost like they are speaking a different language between dropping phrases like "the pizza tapes" or "naw dood, nothing beats Attics of my life from the live concert of June 1970 man." The second part I made up, please, brother, don't crucify me if that's an incorrect statement.

My brother explained that The Grateful Dead is a way of life and wished me luck and best of karma on listening to the American Beauty album. He hyped them up so much that when I heard the album for the very first time on my drive to work, I was... well, I was a little let down. Maybe not let down, but certainly underwhelmed. I stuck with it though. I kept them on as background music, stole a pair of speakers from an empty office, played them so low I couldn't hear them if I moved or rustled paper, even just a little...

Then, although my ears had already warmed up to the album for a whole day on repeat, I heard "Ripple" for the first time. I sat quietly at my desk and I let the song inundate me with peace. Then, on my drive home, I turned up the volume and played Ripple over and over with the windows down. I was so strongly reminded of the moment when I read Faulkner for the first time. I was so obsessed with Charles Dickens and the Victorians, and others who perfected the classic novel, that when I read something that was so out of this world, and yet so real at the same time, it blew my mind open. When I read my first Faulkner novel, I remember looking up after a paragraph and shaking my head in disbelief. Then reading parts outloud to myself, just to hear how it rolled off the tip of my tongue. I couldn't believe that someone could reinvent something so straightforward as a novel. And then heighten its importance in the world and how we think of our life's purpose and those around us.

And then I understood. The Grateful Dead is a mantra; it's a reinvention of the band. Here's a band that makes you feel good because the tunes are happy, they are singing their feelings out, and not in a way that makes you identify with a song in the classic sense, but in a way that takes you to another place mentally. You can leave the world without leaving it and feel good in the process.

I thought, if I die, I'd like Ripple to be played at my funeral. Then I thought, naw, I can't do that, I'm not a Deadhead; other Deadheads would be snobby and turn their noses up at me. But that's not who Deadheads are. They're not like Eric Clapton fans--who totally suck, ps. I really haven't met a Clapton fan I truly liked or admired. Dead fans accept you no matter where you are on your Deadhead journey. Just as long as you share your drugs.

Here are some good Deadhead resources, for the veterans and the neophytes:
The Deadpod
Deadlistening

What the Rolling Stone Mag had to say:

Warner Bros., 1970

The Dead were never better in the studio than on the down-home stoner country of American Beauty. Released just six months after the folky classic Workingman's Dead [see No. 264], it has some of the band's most beloved songs, including "Box of Rain" and "Friend of the Devil."

#245 Bryter Layter - Nick Drake (currently removed from list)

2012-11-04T16:09:00.002-08:00

This album made me discover one universal truth. Nobody ever grows up. There are no adults, some of us just learn to act like them--most of us don't. Because everything is always new to us, because we've never been 26, 40, or 75 before (to our recollection), it feels like the first time. Just like the first time you eat, go to school, fall in love, get a job, etc. We all feel like new souls now and then.

This album felt like something brand new. Not just in genre (although it's not, of course) but it evoked a feeling of childlike innocence and first discovery. And a rejoice in the fragility of a moment. I felt calm and at peace, and I remembered moments of blossoming into something new, shedding my skin, and starting over. Or moments of seeing something grand for the first time. I was 18 before I ever saw snow. It was the oddest miracle, it began snowing on Christmas Eve in Portland, Texas (south texas) and didn't stop until early christmas morning. All I ever wanted since I was a child was to see and play in snow. And the first time I watched its frothy grandeur, snow's heavy and delicate flakes blanketing cacti and palm trees; feeling the sensation of something silently accumulating on my hat, some new experience was born inside of me and filed away in my memory. I picked up a handful of it, and remarked, like an idiot, "holy crap; it's a lot colder than in pictures." And I wasn't 5, I was 18. The next morning, nobody wanted to open presents, everyone was out in the streets making snow angels, snowmen with palm tree arms, throwing it at each other, remarking to one another what an amazing Christmas miracle. Neighbors we hadn't seen all year were just staring at their yards in disbelief. It hadn't snowed in South Texas in over 100 years; and we had a white christmas in 2004. rad.

I haven't heard anything like this album. Nick Drake is such a gentle soul, I am personally insulted that this album has been removed from the list. His music would spread so much happiness if people would take the time to listen to it. I feel like I must advocate for him. I couldn't find it in the revised version of the list, but it was #245 in 2003. If anyone is going through the list online and sees that I've overlooked its new position, please comment below.

Bryter Layter was so peaceful and serene that listening to it was almost like borderline meditation. He has a sonorous voice that forces you to feel happy. It's like he sings at the frequency monks chant, or something. During a fit of road rage, (a nasty woman pulled out in front of me and then braked really hard for no reason) his "Hazey Jane I" song came on and I found myself taking a deep breath and thinking, "you are not a stupid bitch. You are a divine human being. and I'm not going to let you ruin this minute in my life. It's not your fault that you are uneducated, eat microwaved 'food' and drink fluoridated water. I'm not going to pray for your ignorant ass or anything, but I won't honk my horn at you and call you a fugly c*nt face either."

All because of the Drakester. It's ironic because, according to his wikipedia blurb, he suffered from serious depression, and yet his music is such a reflection of serenity. He reminded me of an English Jack Johnson, with better music. Even the most introverted people must find a way to express themselves, and his fear of becoming famous makes me like his music even more. He created music for the goodness of music, not to "become something or someone." He didn't have to be heard, but he should be heard. He will make you feel better about life.

The album cover made me jump though. I felt a little creeped out looking at it. I thought the album would be creepy and radiohead-like when I saw the cover. It was the exact opposite. Especially because I recently saw "The Ring" for the first time and watching that movie felt worse than the time I made a horcrux. It really was like taking a razor-blade and cutting a portion of my soul off and hiding it in a murdered body. Anyway, his face reminds me of the creepy girl in the movie. And I can't, for the life of me, get her twitchy-ass movements out of my head. Bitch came right out the TV!!! Unprepared for that shit. It didn't matter that I was 26; or that I am "an adult." After watching that movie, I felt like a child again, and wanted to cry in a corner and sleep with the lights on.

But instead, I just listened to Nick Drake, and he made it better. plus hugging a kitty.

They took it off the website, so I can't quote Rolling Stone for you.

#305 Odelay -- Beck (now #306)

2012-10-12T09:23:00.002-07:00

Beck made me think of Jackson Pollock.

And imagination.

The album wasn't so much about the music, but rather, Odelay represented a musical space that proved vast imagination took place. Much like a Jackson Pollock painting isn't so much about the end product, but the proof that a man used his imagination to create something that fit into our *updated* perception of art. Or at least that's one justification for why people like shitty paintings.

In Beck's defense a five-year-old could not have created Odelay.

Odelay is an odd hodgepodge of music. I couldn't tell if it was all made through a series of keyboards, turntables, or computers--but yet, it was surprisingly enjoyable. I got the sense that these were highly motivated people searching to find something new to create, whatever the cost may be and in the process created an imaginary space that carried the listener out to uncharted waters. There wasn't a single song that stuck out to me as the best on the album. They are actually all quite unique from one another and yet, are produced with the same sort of gusto and inspiration. It sounded a little like grunge, electronica, a medley of rock, punk, and indie music, all made with unconventional sounds.

Most importantly, this album made me think of how difficult it is to find one's little space in the great web of creativity and imagination. While listening to this album, I began to process my love for writing from the beginning. When I was about six-years-old, I remember dictating to my father, while he chicken-pecked at our DOS computer, the "great" story of a cat, a sloth, and a giant snail who were on an adventure in the rainforest. It was imperative that my father get down every detail of how the cat and the sloth could fit inside the snail--which really wasn't an important detail to the story that lacked conflict and character development. Not to mention themes. Or direction.

But the turning point of all of this was when I was in the 8th grade, I got grounded for failing algebra over my two week christmas break. I took all my anger and angst for my inability to do math well, and my frustration that I was being grounded because I was having difficulty learning something and released it on a primitive laptop I stole from my father. I wrote a 70 page story. I mean, it's terrible and you couldn't pay me to reread it now. But the point is, I created something. I wrote 70 pages when I was 13. Even though it is all crap, it was a creation. It represents that imagination was used. I would have killed to be able to write so much in college, but worries of "what will the professor think, what will my peers say?" inhibited my ability to create. Perhaps, I've finally unlearned all of that to not care anymore.

(I would also like to take this time to say, I forgive you, Mrs. Alma Martinez of Gregory-Portland Junior High school for telling me, "The will is there, but the ability isn't." I remember that, 13 years later. It's not your fault you were as bad at teaching as I was at algebra. I might have failed algebra, but you failed your students. I just have to live with the fact that I can't find the value of X. You have to live with the fact that you left deep scars in people during their most tender years.)

But anyway. If it wasn't for that "teacher," I never would have found the motivation to write. Even if nobody read the 70 page story I produced. And it begged the question to me, does it matter if nobody notices a creation? Is it enough that imagination took place? Writing for writing's sake? Music for Music's sake? If nobody ever listened to Beck's Odelay, would it diminish the fact that they created something nobody had tried before, put it together and suffered painstaking thought processes for the sake of imagination?

I don't know why this album made me think of that. Perhaps too many artists are so preoccupied with trying to "make it" or finding themselves in the world and becoming famous that they forget first and foremost, it is most important to create. Who cares if other people read, listen, or see it? And so, I've decided that at all costs, I will write once a week. Just for myself. So perhaps I will blog more from now on.

Thanks Beck.

What the rolling stone peoples had to say:

DGC, 1996

Burrowing into the studio with sampledelic producers the Dust Brothers, Beck came back with a Technicolor version of his Woody Guthrie-meets-Grandmaster Flash vision, demonstrating to his rock peers that turntables had a brighter future than refried grunge.