Crossing Manhattan Bridge this morning on the D-train, listening to the Flaming Lips on my mp3 player, listening to the echoing words "the sun eclipsed behind the clouds", I admired the awkward off-balance perch of brown-haired nerdy girl with her hair in a bun and her black glasses close to her eyes, looking like an emaciated turtle in her blackish-green ribbed high-necked sweater, as she leaned against the door crammed into place by me and the rest of the commuting crowd. I admired the high clouds, puffy and distant, as if spying on the weather on the far-away land of the Bronx. I watched the cars skate up and down the FDR and was filled with one of the strongest feelings of being monkey-man-me that I have felt in a long time. Thinking that everyone of those driving apes has his own banana tree to worry about, or maybe some don't have one and that is their worry, but here is one thing that is true: Most of them have forgotten, maybe never known, that it is all just bananas.
Just friggin' bananas.
The Flaming Lips ask "Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die?" And for a second I do, and then consider all the ape-people that have come and gone and are now forgotten. How many generations does it take for the average person to be completely forgotten? I mean, it must vary from person to person and how close they were with their families, how close and/or large their circle of friends was - but still it cannot be very long. I would think three would be a lot for most people. But how many spinster aunts and bachelor uncles, crotchety old grandfathers and weird loner guys that lived in the basement apartment that everyone called "Slosky", even though it said "Rodgers" on his mailbox are never thought of again by any living person, unless it might be wondering who they are when their photo is come across in an old shoebox when your own parents die. There you are at age 6 making a funny face for the posed pictures beside the Christmas tree in 1977 with your brother and sister and this strange person. . . There is no one left to ask.
I once heard mi abuela bemoaning the fact that her large collection of family photos will likely be thrown away when she dies because no one else cares, and even if they did no one knows who all those people are anymore; no one but her. But I want those photos. It is strange how I have little desire to meet most of my extended family, but I don't want to lose the tenuous connections themselves - the relations. . . I want to go through all those albums with mi abuela and tape little index cards beneath each photo listing who is in the photo and their relation to each other and to my immediate family.
But it is really hard to sit down and do something with your grandma that is for when she dies - even if the fact that she will die eventually and probably (even hopefully) sooner than the rest of the family is undeniable. She has lore, but sometimes it is difficult to harvest. She gets tired, and even I find the process of the telling of stories and the answering of my questions emotionally draining. So much of it comes down to how fucked up people can be to each other, and how people coped when fucked up shit happened. Murder, rape, child abuse, spouse abuse, rumor, innuendo, infidelity, poverty, alcoholism - those are the stories my grandma has to tell. And yet, there is still something beautiful about them - like the spiraled sparkles in a shattered window glass.
My mind wandered back to when I first started listening to Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. I remember liking the first three or four songs, but thinking the rest of the album kind of all blended together. It took a while before I discovered the gems of that second half of the record - realizing the texture and layered depth of sound they had - the obvious almost cheesy almost cliche almost simple lyrics - that somehow cuts through all those things to just be earnest and raw.
And it struck me that that time it took to discover that second half was the unintended consequence of unintended consequences.
I am an album listener. Rarely am I in the mood for a single song - and I never use the random feature on a playlist on iTunes or whatever - I like hearing a record from beginning to end - and when I hear a song taken out of the context of its album I automatically begin to hear the next song on the album as the song ends - as if it were to start up - I anticipate it.
Because of this, most often when I do not have time to hear an entire album in a short time, the next time, I listen to it from the beginning again - with CDs and records this is no problem - but I grew up in the era of the tape - of rewind and fast-forward and flipping. Because of the pain in the ass of that - back in the days, it was more likely to hear a single side of an album at a time and when you came back to it - listen to the other side. Album sides had themes and feels of their own - think about how overrated side one of Led Zeppelin IV is compared to side two . . . This flip requirement had the unintended consequence of making me listen to songs on a second side more often - or even prefer a second side - so the unintended consequence of the tape cassette machine - the laziness or impatience of not wanting to wait for a tape to rewind led to one thing - and then the loss of that with the advent of CDs led to another.
It seems to me that so much of life is like that - handling an inconvenience in one way which leads to something potentially positive - but when the inconvenience is eliminated that is lost and you miss the coping mechanism. Heh, in some cases that leads to addiction.
We stumbled out of the D train on Broadway-Lafayette and I climbed the steep steps two at a time as I always do weaving in and out of lines of one step-at-a-timers and I could not help but laugh out loud momentarily filled with joy for this personal moment of awareness of the finite nature of my life, my memory, my ability to take in information of all kinds of a day to day basis. The thought and the moment felt better than any moment I could wait for or even imagine.
Somehow, the almost unbearable, almost crushing, almost soul-numbing, often enraging aspects were cut right through by being.
Thursday, September 29, 2005
Friday, July 22, 2005
You Can Feel It All Over
I love music.
I mean, as much as I love sex, and anyone that knows me knows how much I love that ridiculous mix of humping, submission, domination and hilarity, I would still have to rank music just above it. I mean, music is great because the emotional and intellectual components are equally valid in the appreciation of it.
When I am listening to a song I love I just want the world to stop. I want nothing to interrupt it. It might be the only quality of mine that has remained constant from my teen years. I remember more than one argument with my mom stemming from her coming into my room while I was listening to music and talking to me. I'd always say, "Can't you wait for the album to be over? Or at least wait for the gap between songs?"
It always annoyed me that people might be hesitant to interrupt you if you are watching a movie, and wait for a commercial if you are watching TV, and might even apologize for the interruption if you are in the middle of reading a book, but listening to music? It seems to be rated very low in importance to people. It is often viewed as a background kind of thing. . . but not for me. I am boggled by people I see on the subway reading while they listen to their iPods. How can you concentrate on the music? Oh yeah, I forgot, most popular music these days does not have much depth to it musically or lyrically, and when it does it is easily ignored. We search for similarities and the replaying of patterns in all things, not for the uniqueness of it.
The thing with music for me is that I have this desperate need to try to share the experience that I cannot understand. When I listen to a particular song and I get a particular feeling or set of feelings from it, and when I can appreciate some musical aspect of it, or some set of aspects that intertwine in such a way to instigate that chemical rush of joy in my brain, I want someone else to listen to it and get that exact same feeling. In other words, I want an impossibility.
Example: One of my favorite songs lately has been David Byrne's "Glass, Concrete and Stone". When he sings, "So I'm puttin' on aftershave / nothin' is out of place / gonna be on my way / Try to pretend, it's not only / Glass and concrete and stone. . ." There is just something that resonates with me and how I see the world, or how I try to see the world when it does not overwhelm me. I feel like everyday I must force myself to pretend that this is not all just glass and concrete and stone, that the stuff people make has meaning and matters. And there is something about the timbre of his voice when he sings it, something plaintive and real that shakes me down deep inside with echoes of both joy and sadness.
And then there are songs that so tightly parallel my own mind that I can only feel envy that I did not write it myself. "Civilization", also from David Byrne's "Grown Backwards" album is an example of this. I mean, a song that questions what it means to be human/civilized and the rituals and customs we take for granted and examines them from a point of view that is both detached and intimately involved in terms of the "story" of the song (The narrator of the song is on a date at a restaurant) is not an easy thing to make work, and he makes it work so well, I cannot help but admire it, even as it melts me and steels me to the world at the same time. When he sings, "Part of me wants to jump and shout / Part of me wants to tear it down" I always smile, because I think the same thing about society every friggin' day.
But is not just about lyrics and singing. I can listen to a production of Beethoven's 6th Symphony, the Pastoral (my favorite) and the awe I feel is never diminished by the number of times I have listened. For me, the key to appreciating music on intellectual/technical level is being able to break apart a piece of music into its component elements mentally as you are listening to it and then slowly have your ear bring the individual parts together seeing how they fit, setting mood and theme, by means of becoming more than the sum of its parts. This is a skill I trained myself to have when I began listening to jazz in my late teens, and when I figured out that I could apply it to all kinds of music it was like a whole new world was opened up to me. I remember Zooey and I used to play this game where we'd be listening to music and challenge each other, "Listen to the bass line", or "Listen to the high hat", or "Just high hat and bass drum". The best part about doing this was discovering sounds seemly hidden in the melange of instruments. "What is that?" Or, "Wow. That third harmony sounds like was recorded down a long hallway. I wonder what made him record it that way?"
And yet, these experiences and feelings of music (I guess, like all experiences and feelings) are unique to me and not really conveyable. In a way, it is a lot like a feeling I get in "serious" romantic relationships, an inability to feel like I can truly convey the depth of my feelings - a sense that expressions of feelings do not so much echo as they are swallowed into the abyss of human solitude never to return. And of course, I am an abyss as well. But that doesn't really matter much anymore as I feel all but a complete inability to love - so if that feeling ever returns I should be happy just to have it.
Just like I should just be happy to have songs and pieces of music that speak to me so profoundly, and not worry about how it makes anyone else feel.
But I guess we all want something or someone to legitimize our feelings. . .
I mean, as much as I love sex, and anyone that knows me knows how much I love that ridiculous mix of humping, submission, domination and hilarity, I would still have to rank music just above it. I mean, music is great because the emotional and intellectual components are equally valid in the appreciation of it.
When I am listening to a song I love I just want the world to stop. I want nothing to interrupt it. It might be the only quality of mine that has remained constant from my teen years. I remember more than one argument with my mom stemming from her coming into my room while I was listening to music and talking to me. I'd always say, "Can't you wait for the album to be over? Or at least wait for the gap between songs?"
It always annoyed me that people might be hesitant to interrupt you if you are watching a movie, and wait for a commercial if you are watching TV, and might even apologize for the interruption if you are in the middle of reading a book, but listening to music? It seems to be rated very low in importance to people. It is often viewed as a background kind of thing. . . but not for me. I am boggled by people I see on the subway reading while they listen to their iPods. How can you concentrate on the music? Oh yeah, I forgot, most popular music these days does not have much depth to it musically or lyrically, and when it does it is easily ignored. We search for similarities and the replaying of patterns in all things, not for the uniqueness of it.
The thing with music for me is that I have this desperate need to try to share the experience that I cannot understand. When I listen to a particular song and I get a particular feeling or set of feelings from it, and when I can appreciate some musical aspect of it, or some set of aspects that intertwine in such a way to instigate that chemical rush of joy in my brain, I want someone else to listen to it and get that exact same feeling. In other words, I want an impossibility.
Example: One of my favorite songs lately has been David Byrne's "Glass, Concrete and Stone". When he sings, "So I'm puttin' on aftershave / nothin' is out of place / gonna be on my way / Try to pretend, it's not only / Glass and concrete and stone. . ." There is just something that resonates with me and how I see the world, or how I try to see the world when it does not overwhelm me. I feel like everyday I must force myself to pretend that this is not all just glass and concrete and stone, that the stuff people make has meaning and matters. And there is something about the timbre of his voice when he sings it, something plaintive and real that shakes me down deep inside with echoes of both joy and sadness.
And then there are songs that so tightly parallel my own mind that I can only feel envy that I did not write it myself. "Civilization", also from David Byrne's "Grown Backwards" album is an example of this. I mean, a song that questions what it means to be human/civilized and the rituals and customs we take for granted and examines them from a point of view that is both detached and intimately involved in terms of the "story" of the song (The narrator of the song is on a date at a restaurant) is not an easy thing to make work, and he makes it work so well, I cannot help but admire it, even as it melts me and steels me to the world at the same time. When he sings, "Part of me wants to jump and shout / Part of me wants to tear it down" I always smile, because I think the same thing about society every friggin' day.
But is not just about lyrics and singing. I can listen to a production of Beethoven's 6th Symphony, the Pastoral (my favorite) and the awe I feel is never diminished by the number of times I have listened. For me, the key to appreciating music on intellectual/technical level is being able to break apart a piece of music into its component elements mentally as you are listening to it and then slowly have your ear bring the individual parts together seeing how they fit, setting mood and theme, by means of becoming more than the sum of its parts. This is a skill I trained myself to have when I began listening to jazz in my late teens, and when I figured out that I could apply it to all kinds of music it was like a whole new world was opened up to me. I remember Zooey and I used to play this game where we'd be listening to music and challenge each other, "Listen to the bass line", or "Listen to the high hat", or "Just high hat and bass drum". The best part about doing this was discovering sounds seemly hidden in the melange of instruments. "What is that?" Or, "Wow. That third harmony sounds like was recorded down a long hallway. I wonder what made him record it that way?"And yet, these experiences and feelings of music (I guess, like all experiences and feelings) are unique to me and not really conveyable. In a way, it is a lot like a feeling I get in "serious" romantic relationships, an inability to feel like I can truly convey the depth of my feelings - a sense that expressions of feelings do not so much echo as they are swallowed into the abyss of human solitude never to return. And of course, I am an abyss as well. But that doesn't really matter much anymore as I feel all but a complete inability to love - so if that feeling ever returns I should be happy just to have it.
Just like I should just be happy to have songs and pieces of music that speak to me so profoundly, and not worry about how it makes anyone else feel.
But I guess we all want something or someone to legitimize our feelings. . .
Thursday, April 7, 2005
Dig if you will the picture. . .
It must be springtime, because I have been listening to Prince almost non-stop.
Prince, no matter what his name was at the time, has been my most consistant love in music since I was 11 years old. I remember being home alone playing with my LEGOTM Galaxy Explorer on the living room floor, listening to the little radio I had gotten for Christmas that year, when "1999" came on and I was like "Wow, what is this music?" I wouldn't listen to the whole album for many years, but the title track and songs like "Little Red Corvette" were enough for me to be paying attention when "Purple Rain" came on the scene a couple of years later.
Damn, Purple Rain is one of the best albums of all time. When I think about 26 year old Prince fucking rocking the world with that collection of songs and blowing people away with live performances, and how tight a band the Revolution was I feel a streak of envy rise in me. I mean, sure the movie is ridiculous and the only moral I have ever been able to gleen from it, is that when your dad abuses you mom and tries to kill himself, and your girlfriend is on the verge of leaving you for your scummy rival Morris Day after you slapped her around, your band hates you and your career is going nowhere because you only want to do things on your own terms, if you play "Purple Rain" at a show everything will turn out okay.
And not only is the album great, but the B-sides off the singles from that ablum are among his best, I mean, come on "Erotic City"? (on the flip of "Let's Go Crazy"), or "God" (on the flip of "Purple Rain"), or "Another Lonely Christmas" (which accompanied "I Would Die 4 U") or the under-rated "17 Days" (on the other side of one of the best songs ever produced "When Doves Cry")
Oh and speaking of "When Doves Cry" I remember spending the summer with my older brother and his then wife in 1984, and this video show used to come on right around my bedtime, but when the video for the song would come on, my sister-in-law would come and get me to watch it because she knew how much I loved it. I remember being a little disturbed by his crawling naked on the bathroom floor, but at the same time I was so fascinated by Prince's style and his mix of soul, R&B, rock and "new wave" elements.
But there is so much Prince to listen to. . . Both "Around the World in a Day" and "Parade (Music from the second worst movie ever made, uh. . . I mean, 'Under the Cherry Moon')" have some great songs on them, but it is "Sign o' the Times" which followed those two which is probably my favorite Prince album.
Oh, step back: While "Kiss" is the song everyone knows off of Parade - "Mountains" is the best song on that album.
Anyway, while Prince produced his own albums from the very beginning (he would only sign to a label that gave him full control - even though he was only 19 or 20 at that time, and Warner Bros were the only ones that would do it) it was not until "Sign o' the Times" when his production moved from serviceable to masterful - and his varying stripped down and lush and layered arrangements impress me every time - and this actually gets me to the point of this whole diatribe which suffers from a digression into my chronological exposure to Prince's music - which is, that from that point on listening to any Prince album on headphones, or on a really good stereo is a divine aural experience.
The touches that can be heard; the layered voices in gospel swoon, each one an example of his four octave voice that projects with equal strength whether it is his low bass growl or his falsetto soprano ringing - the rich and varied instrumentation, whether it be a funky-fat-ass bassline, or arpeggiated strings. Listen to that distorted over the top bass drum on "Housequake" or chilling vocals on "Adore" and you will know what I mean. . .and speaking of "Adore", it is also a great example of his lyrical proficiency. I mean, the playfulness he allows himself in an otherwise straightforward lover-man ballad shows an ability to poke fun of himself in his music, even if he comes off as not being able to do that in his life. His growled little aside in that song, that follows his singing, "You can burn up my clothes / Smash up my ride" that goes "Well, maybe not the ride" is like a little parenthetical reality check.
Or his cute little reference to Joni Mitchell's "Catch me I Think I'm Falling (in Love)" in "The Ballad of Dorothy Parker" which works so well is another example (and interestingly the song has nothing to do with the real Dorothy Parker - and from what I have read he did not even know who she was - he just liked the name).
I can come up with a ton of examples from nearly every one of his albums after that - and after countless times listening to all of them I still discover new things layered in the production that amaze me in not only how they sound and work for the song - but in how the hell he even thought to do it to begin with. Check out "Jam of the Year" on Emancipation - which starts with a cheesy sounding drum machine, becomes a live drum kit somehow without ever giving away the transition unless you are just waiting and listening for it, and then I discovered years later that later in the song the drum kit become congas for four measures before going back. Flawless.
I know some people tend to say that they like Prince's early stuff the most, but usually when they say that they are really talking about his middle period (let's say "1999" thru "Batman"), as his first five albums are very different (and no less brilliant), but his later albums have some great great stuff and whatever he lost in pop sensibility he made up for with craftsmanship and risk-taking. Hell, even his bizarre inconsistent Jehovah's Witness opus "The Rainbow Children" has some incredible stuff on it (like "Family Name") and definitely is the furthest out there - and ostensibly throw-away albums made to fulfill his contract and "get his name back" have some hot tracks, like "Come". And Musicology's "If Eye Was The Man In Ur Life" is what pop music should sound like. Yes, there are Prince albums I do not like - like "Chaos & Disorder" (aptly named) and "New Power Soul".
So, all I am trying to say is that spring and summer are my times when my obsession with Prince's music comes back and I listen to his albums endlessly. I love an afternoon spent in the park or on the fire escape just listening to album after album on the headphones and doing nothing but taking it all in and discovering new things that make me gasp. And plus, aside from Marvin Gaye, who's catalog is not as deep due to his untimely death and other career issues, who else are you going to find as many dirty songs as you are song about god/love?
"Mama's in the short dress, blowing in the breeze / Papa's just praying for the gust that'll bust that butt out, Please!"
Prince, no matter what his name was at the time, has been my most consistant love in music since I was 11 years old. I remember being home alone playing with my LEGOTM Galaxy Explorer on the living room floor, listening to the little radio I had gotten for Christmas that year, when "1999" came on and I was like "Wow, what is this music?" I wouldn't listen to the whole album for many years, but the title track and songs like "Little Red Corvette" were enough for me to be paying attention when "Purple Rain" came on the scene a couple of years later.Damn, Purple Rain is one of the best albums of all time. When I think about 26 year old Prince fucking rocking the world with that collection of songs and blowing people away with live performances, and how tight a band the Revolution was I feel a streak of envy rise in me. I mean, sure the movie is ridiculous and the only moral I have ever been able to gleen from it, is that when your dad abuses you mom and tries to kill himself, and your girlfriend is on the verge of leaving you for your scummy rival Morris Day after you slapped her around, your band hates you and your career is going nowhere because you only want to do things on your own terms, if you play "Purple Rain" at a show everything will turn out okay.And not only is the album great, but the B-sides off the singles from that ablum are among his best, I mean, come on "Erotic City"? (on the flip of "Let's Go Crazy"), or "God" (on the flip of "Purple Rain"), or "Another Lonely Christmas" (which accompanied "I Would Die 4 U") or the under-rated "17 Days" (on the other side of one of the best songs ever produced "When Doves Cry")Oh and speaking of "When Doves Cry" I remember spending the summer with my older brother and his then wife in 1984, and this video show used to come on right around my bedtime, but when the video for the song would come on, my sister-in-law would come and get me to watch it because she knew how much I loved it. I remember being a little disturbed by his crawling naked on the bathroom floor, but at the same time I was so fascinated by Prince's style and his mix of soul, R&B, rock and "new wave" elements.But there is so much Prince to listen to. . . Both "Around the World in a Day" and "Parade (Music from the second worst movie ever made, uh. . . I mean, 'Under the Cherry Moon')" have some great songs on them, but it is "Sign o' the Times" which followed those two which is probably my favorite Prince album.Oh, step back: While "Kiss" is the song everyone knows off of Parade - "Mountains" is the best song on that album.
Anyway, while Prince produced his own albums from the very beginning (he would only sign to a label that gave him full control - even though he was only 19 or 20 at that time, and Warner Bros were the only ones that would do it) it was not until "Sign o' the Times" when his production moved from serviceable to masterful - and his varying stripped down and lush and layered arrangements impress me every time - and this actually gets me to the point of this whole diatribe which suffers from a digression into my chronological exposure to Prince's music - which is, that from that point on listening to any Prince album on headphones, or on a really good stereo is a divine aural experience. The touches that can be heard; the layered voices in gospel swoon, each one an example of his four octave voice that projects with equal strength whether it is his low bass growl or his falsetto soprano ringing - the rich and varied instrumentation, whether it be a funky-fat-ass bassline, or arpeggiated strings. Listen to that distorted over the top bass drum on "Housequake" or chilling vocals on "Adore" and you will know what I mean. . .and speaking of "Adore", it is also a great example of his lyrical proficiency. I mean, the playfulness he allows himself in an otherwise straightforward lover-man ballad shows an ability to poke fun of himself in his music, even if he comes off as not being able to do that in his life. His growled little aside in that song, that follows his singing, "You can burn up my clothes / Smash up my ride" that goes "Well, maybe not the ride" is like a little parenthetical reality check.Or his cute little reference to Joni Mitchell's "Catch me I Think I'm Falling (in Love)" in "The Ballad of Dorothy Parker" which works so well is another example (and interestingly the song has nothing to do with the real Dorothy Parker - and from what I have read he did not even know who she was - he just liked the name).I can come up with a ton of examples from nearly every one of his albums after that - and after countless times listening to all of them I still discover new things layered in the production that amaze me in not only how they sound and work for the song - but in how the hell he even thought to do it to begin with. Check out "Jam of the Year" on Emancipation - which starts with a cheesy sounding drum machine, becomes a live drum kit somehow without ever giving away the transition unless you are just waiting and listening for it, and then I discovered years later that later in the song the drum kit become congas for four measures before going back. Flawless.I know some people tend to say that they like Prince's early stuff the most, but usually when they say that they are really talking about his middle period (let's say "1999" thru "Batman"), as his first five albums are very different (and no less brilliant), but his later albums have some great great stuff and whatever he lost in pop sensibility he made up for with craftsmanship and risk-taking. Hell, even his bizarre inconsistent Jehovah's Witness opus "The Rainbow Children" has some incredible stuff on it (like "Family Name") and definitely is the furthest out there - and ostensibly throw-away albums made to fulfill his contract and "get his name back" have some hot tracks, like "Come". And Musicology's "If Eye Was The Man In Ur Life" is what pop music should sound like. Yes, there are Prince albums I do not like - like "Chaos & Disorder" (aptly named) and "New Power Soul".So, all I am trying to say is that spring and summer are my times when my obsession with Prince's music comes back and I listen to his albums endlessly. I love an afternoon spent in the park or on the fire escape just listening to album after album on the headphones and doing nothing but taking it all in and discovering new things that make me gasp. And plus, aside from Marvin Gaye, who's catalog is not as deep due to his untimely death and other career issues, who else are you going to find as many dirty songs as you are song about god/love?
"Mama's in the short dress, blowing in the breeze / Papa's just praying for the gust that'll bust that butt out, Please!"
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