Midnight Oil was the first band to teach me that a singer doesn’t need to sound polished, slick or appealing to be good. I could have learned that lesson from Bob Dylan, but the first Dylan performance I consciously encountered was "We Are the World". What an indictment on my generation.
The first time I heard "Beds are Burning", I thought, "Who the hell thought it was a good idea to give Peter Garrett a microphone?" Then my friends subjected me to the entire album, and eventually I gave in. The music was so urgent and awesome that I found myself championing the band.
When Sony Legacy remastered Diesel and Dust, I played it in excess all over again.
I got rid of most of my cassette tapes in 2002, when I moved into a smaller apartment for a year and a half. One cassette I kept was a compilation titled No Place to Play, which featured ’80s punk bands from Hawaiʻi. I considered digitizing that cassette so I could listen to it on the computer, but I was curious to see whether someone beat me to it.
And someone has.
Dave Carr, a guy who was heavily involved with scene, curates the Hawaii 70s-80s Punk Museum, which features artwork, photos and — most importantly — audio files from bands of that era. It’s the first time I’ve heard more from these bands than what’s on No Place to Play, which is included on the site.
Funny thing: I didn’t like most of what I heard on No Place to Play when it was first released. The sound quality is mostly terrible, and at the time, the extent of my post-punk knowledge was Midnight Oil and U2. Today, I have a better grasp of what influenced these bands and can hear snatches of the Smiths, Jesus and Mary Chain, Bauhaus and Joy Division in the music. And the bands weren’t too bad themselves.
A few weeks back, it seemed I hit a dry spell with finding new listening. So indulged in a little catch-up with catalog releases and a lot of Mozart, Beethoven and Haydn.
Now I’ve got a playlist crossing the full work-week threshold, which pretty much means I really ought to start clearing some stuff up.
I’m hoping a relatively bare August will allow that to happen.
In producing their most punchy album in about, oh, 20 years, R.E.M. has also provided Exhibit A in the Loudness War.
As glad as I am the band finally kicked a decade’s worth of dreary writing — I didn’t even make it through the first two tracks of 2004’s Around the Sun — Accelerate is really, really FUCKING LOUD.
I guess someone on producer Jacknife Lee’s engineering team thought, "Oh, look, a compressor/limiter plug-in. Let’s just crank this motherfucker up to 11, shall we?" (Yes, I know that’s not how compressors work, but surely you get the reference.)
Nuance? Maybe on the softer tracks, but Accelerate is mostly devoid of any dynamic range. And it’s a welcome change, really.
If I were to apply James Ulmer’s concept of The Hot List to my music collection, NUMBER GIRL, Shiina Ringo and UA would occupy my A-list. Quruli has been hovering around the B+ list for the last two albums, while THE BACK HORN could probably be considered a C-list band.
ASIAN KUNG-FU GENERATION, for the most part, has been a B-list band for me.
Kita Kensuke’s voice certainly puts him the same class of singers as SPITZ’s Kusano Masamune and Remioromen’s Fujimaki Ryouta. But the band’s highly-polished post-emo music tends to blur after a while. It’s melodic as hell and very appealing in measured doses. But historically, I’ve perceived AKFG’s sound as little more than watered-down eastern youth.
I read vaguely somewhere that reaction to news of Madonna working with Pharrell Williams went along the lines of "OH NOES! MADONNA HIP-HOP ALBUMZ! DO NOT WANT!"
This from a woman who has sung Andrew Lloyd Webber, got Björk to write the title track of Bedtime Stories and jumped on an electronica bandwagon that ultimately went nowhere (Ray of Light not withstanding)? Should working with Pharrell or Timbaland or Justin Timberlake be that much of a stretch?
Honestly, I’m surprised such a collaboration hasn’t happened sooner.
More pixels and ink seem to be expended over the fact Hard Candy is the last album Madonna will record for Warner Bros., as she embarks on a new-fangled 360 deal with LiveNation. Never mind the music — this album can already be seen as a significant marker in both the career of Madonna and the history of the major label business.
It’s easy to assume both parties would feel like phoning it in since the album notes the end of a relationship. Can’t speak for the efforts of Warner Bros., but Madonna certainly didn’t slouch on this one. If anything, Hard Candy is her most listenable album since Ray of Light.
I wanted to stand by Janet Jackson during Nipplegate in 2004 — really, I did. I had intended to march down to the music shop on the day Damita Jo was released to show my support for Miss Jackson, to stand against the histronics of a conservative agenda run amok.
But I hedged my bets.
I jumped on the Evil Sharing Networks to see if I could afford to spend the cash to show such support, and after listening to the album, I couldn’t bring myself to subsidize it. In the same manner that I wouldn’t buy a Dixie Chicks album just because they pissed off some conservative blowhards, taste overrode political action.
Janet’s 2006 follow-up, 20 Y.O., garnered the same response. But the problem stems much further back — as far back as 1997 and The Velvet Rope. The production team that struck platinum with Control, Rhythm Nation 1814 and (to a lesser extent creatively) janet. started to show signs of wear. By 2001’s All for You, the well was tapped dry.
Ruts are comfortable, and for most of the new millennium, Janet has been very comfortable. After some very high-profile label changes, she finally did what she should have done a decade back — work with new people.
Terry Lewis and Jimmy Jam have done much to foster Janet as a talent in her own right, but at some point, kids need to move out of their parents’ house. Discipline is the much-delayed sound of Janet exerting independence once again.
I’ve been doing the very bare minimum in trying to get enigmatics released — my marketing plan is essentially bugging my family and co-workers — and it was still enough to keep me distracted from writing much here. I warned as much a while back, but even I wasn’t prepared for the amount of work that goes into getting a release launched. And I don’t even have distribution.
As a result, my playlist is once again crossing the threshold of a full work week in length. It’s time to prune the list, which means some of the entries I had vaguely planned are just not meant to be.
Even though Annie Lennox is the voice behind some of the most memorable singles in pop music history, her output can be a bit spotty.
Her solo albums Medusa and Bare sometimes dragged under the weight of their aching themes, while Diva managed to garner accolades despite being stiff, cold and distant. She sounded far warmer on Eurythmics’ Savage, and that’s saying a lot.
So after a solo career spanning 15-plus years yielding only four albums, Lennox offers Songs of Mass Destruction, the most invigorating album she’s done since her days with Eurythmics.
The playlist is slowly inching back to the 40-hour threshold, which means I really ought to do some writing in the next few weeks.
I haven’t bought much in the way of CDs this past month — one title, that’s it — and I only recently blew through this month’s eMusic quota.
I’m concerned about a persistent ringing in my left ear. It’s not anything painful, but it’s a level of audible that’s difficult to ignore. At first, I thought it was just all the electronics in my apartment giving off some sort of high frequency, but when I cover my ears, the ringing doesn’t die down.
So I’m going to spend the next few weeks with a mostly 18th Century playlist to see how much I can mitigate it. I hope I don’t have to give up my iPod during workouts.