defrog | Entries tagged with teenage kicks

Fox News is flipping out over Dr Seuss and Neanderthals. Because those are the REAL problems facing America.

The Neanderthal thing is of course silly. And, you know, so is the Dr Seuss thing, but it’s the more bloggable of the two, since it involves books, censorship and the whole cancel culture “debate”.

So:

1. Let’s start with the acknowledgment that “cancel culture” is already a politically loaded (and thus meaningless) term. Conservatives use it the same way they use the term “political correctness”: a catch-all defense for racist/sexist/homophobic behavior in the name of some vague freedom to do and say anything you want with no social consequences whatsoever.

2. Whatever you think “cancel culture” is, the Dr Seuss saga hardly qualifies. For one thing, Dr Seuss Enterprises (i.e. the organization that controls the copyrights of Geisel’s works) made the decision on their own to stop printing six books. No one pressured them to do so. And they’re also fine with the decision to decouple Reading Across America from Dr Seuss books – which I am also fine with because believe it or not, there are plenty of great children’s books out there that are not written Dr Seuss, so why focus on just one author?

3. Also, as has been pointed out, no librarians (as far as I know) are pulling Dr Seuss books from library shelves – not even the six that will be discontinued.

4. We also have to acknowledge the elephant in the room: Geisel did use racist stereotypes in his work. Not all of it – most of it can be found in his WW2 propaganda cartoons, which were both decidedly anti-fascist and horribly racist in terms of depicting Asians. Of course, most of his books don’t contain racist stereotypes, so there’s that. And sure, you can find a number of ethnic people who aren’t offended by those images and take it in stride as the embedded racism of the times. But some are. And anyway, there’s a bigger point here: America can’t get past its racism problem until it admits that it has one, and that this problem didn’t spring up out of nowhere but is arguably by design. That includes acknowledging that books like the Seuss Six have racist stereotypes in them.

5. Which is why, for me, all of this is the latest instalment in the ongoing debate of how we should be looking at racist pop culture in the modern world. In a way, it’s also part of the adjacent discussion of whether art created by racists, sexists, homophobes, misogynists and other awful people should still be acknowledged as part of legitimate pop culture. (Or to put it another way, can I still like Woody Allen movies or Roald Dahl books with a clear conscience?)

The general worry is that once we brand a particular book, film or song as racist/sexist/homophobic, it will be deleted from the pop-culture canon (either literally or through people refusing to consume it). Which does present a paradox of sorts: can we acknowledge our racist past whilst simultaneously deleting or omitting pop-culture evidence of that past? At the same time, should a society that values free speech be deleting or omitting ideas it finds offensive?

As I say, it’s an old debate. Personally, I like the approach of Warner Brothers, which owns the Looney Tunes cartoons, as well as Tom & Jerry. Both series include cartoons using racist stereotypes, and the studio had to decide whether to censor those scenes or keep them intact for home video releases. They decided to leave them uncensored but include a pre-roll disclaimer (first as a slide, later as a Whoopi Goldberg intro) that says this:

The cartoons you are about to see are products of their time. They may depict some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that were commonplace in the U.S society. These depictions were wrong then and they are wrong today. While the following does not represent the Warner Bros. view of today's society, these cartoons are being presented as they were originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming that these prejudices never existed. [Italics mine]

(Disney+ is doing something similar, though they're arguably doing it a bit too quietly.)

Maybe Dr Seuss Enterprises might consider a similar approach for the Seuss Six.

Not that it would make the Fox News heads any less calm. But then they're paid to be indignantly outraged over this stuff.

The doctor is in,

This is dF

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While I was putting together the “Albums You Probably Haven’t Heard” list, I kept coming across albums that weren’t necessarily obscure or overlooked per se, but were well-known only because of the one hit song on it.

Which got me to thinking about one-hit wonders, and the baggage that accompanies this label. Lots of people equate “one hit wonder” with “bands that only had that one good song in them” – which is of course sometimes the case. But sometimes it’s not.

For a start, the term “one-hit wonder” is a strikingly US-centric one – for example, a lot of “one hit wonders” in the 80s were actually quite successful in their native country and had a string of hit songs.

More to the point, charts are by definition a measure of popularity, not quality, although we can argue all the live-long day about the quality of the average Top 10 hit. The point is that a song doesn’t have to be a chart hit to be a good song.

And as it happens, a lot of “one hit wonders” come from albums that do have lots of other good tracks on them. The albums themselves may not be essential 5-star masterpieces, but at the very least they offer a lot of other tracks worth checking out.

So I made a list of 20 such albums.

PRODUCTION NOTE: The objective isn't to convince people that these albums are underrated – lots of people like these albums already. The objective is to curate evidence that one-hit wonders also make good albums. Indeed, some of them went on to make even better albums than the ones I've selected.

METHODOLOGY:

The obvious challenge of a list like this is: what counts as a one-hit wonder?

Chart performance is the obvious metric – the problem is that even for designated one-hit wonders, the criteria varies. Up to around the 90s, you were considered a one-hit wonder if your song made the Hot 100 or the Top 40, but some bands are considered a one-hit wonder if that hit made the Top 40 but other singles made the Hot 100.

Then you have crossover hits, where an artist might have several hits on a genre chart (say, R&B or C&W) but only one on the pop chart. This seems especially true after the 1990s, when Billboard created more charts to mirror radio formats (alternative rock, modern rock, urban, dance, etc).

And then there are bands (especially in the early 80s) that didn’t chart that highly in the US, but were in constant rotation on MTV …

At which point I decided to hell with it and established my own simplified criteria:

1. Any band/artist that gets consistently pegged as a one-hit wonder.

2. The “one hit” in question comes from an album (as some one-hit wonders released singles only).

20 GOOD ALBUMS THAT PRODUCED ONE-HIT WONDERS

1. A Flock of Seagulls, A Flock of Seagulls

A Flock of Seagulls were one of those 80s New Wave bands possibly more famous their haircuts than their music (not coincidentally, lead singer Mike Score was working as a hairdresser when he started the band in 1979). That said, their song “I Ran (So Far Away)” was a huge hit (and probably the biggest hit song about alien abduction). But the rest of their eponymous debut album is just as good, for the most part – some filler, but lots of great tracks with that almost perfect mix of cheap synths, guitar echo and space-age tech lyrics.

2. Wild Cherry, Wild Cherry

The funkiest band ever to emerge from Mingo Junction, Ohio. Wild Cherry started off as a rock band, but eventually turned to funk in the mid-70s after audiences kept requesting more dance music. One such request famously led to lead singer Rob Parissi writing “Play That Funky Music”, which is undoubtedly funky. But so is the whole debut album it comes from – it even sports a decent cover version of the Commodores’ “I Feel Satisfied” (which was originally supposed to be an A-side, with “Play That Funky Music” as the B-side, and the former noticeably serves as a formula for the latter). It never got that good for Wild Cherry again, but it was good while it lasted. Wild Cherry is a minor but highly danceable funk classic.

3. Missing Persons, Spring Session M

This is one of my go-to albums when people ask me to name one-hit wonders that were better than people think. Technically Missing Persons had a few MTV hits off this album, but none of them ever cracked the Top 40, and really everything is good here. Missing Persons had just the right mix of guitars, cheap synths and satirical humor, and of course they had an ace drummer in Terry Bozzio (who was good enough to play in Frank Zappa’s band – as was guitarist Warren Cuccurullo).

4. Katrina and The Waves, Katrina and The Waves

“Walking On Sunshine” has been ubiquitous for over 30 years now, so I can understand if you’re sick of hearing it. But I have to go to bat for the album it comes from – their major label debut featuring re-recordings of songs from their earlier indie releases – because it’s one of the better pop-rock albums from the 80s. I bought a copy while I was stationed in West Germany – it was so new that “Walking On Sunshine” wasn’t yet a hit single, and I thought it was a pretty solid album. I still do. Their secret weapon was guitarist and songwriter Kimberly Rew (formerly of The Soft Boys), who also wrote “Going Down To Liverpool”, which the Bangles covered before KotW went large. Their second album (on which Rew only wrote a couple of songs) tanked, but they stayed active and then staged an improbable comeback in 1997 by winning the Eurovision Song Contest with “Love Shine A Light” – after which they broke up. Anyway, the US was pretty much the only country where it didn’t chart, so they still qualify for this list.

5. The Jimmy Castor Bunch, It’s Just Begun

Percussionist Jimmy Castor tends to get lumped into the novelty-record category with songs like “Bertha Butt Boogie” and “Troglodyte (Caveman)”, the latter of which was his most successful single with The Jimmy Castor Bunch. But Castor was no novelty comedian – he was a brilliant percussionist and songwriter, and the album “Troglodyte (Caveman)” comes from is an underrated funk masterpiece. Bookended by two orchestral themes, It’s Just Begun is one killer funk tune after another.

6. The Trashmen, Surfin’ Bird

You knew that the Bird Is The Word, but you may not know that The Trashmen were actually one of the better surf-rock bands of the early 60s – which in itself is an accomplishment, since they were from Minneapolis and not Southern California. Most of the songs here aren’t as weird as the famous title track (which in itself was a mash-up of two songs by The Rivingtons) – it’s mostly the usual types of cover songs you’d expect to hear on a surf album. That said, their taste in song selection is admirable and their musical chops a lot better than you might think.

7. Shocking Blue, At Home

Shocking Blue were a psychedelic band from the Netherlands, and sold 13 million records in their seven years together, but they only had the one hit song in the US: “Venus”. It’s a great song, of course – just ask Bananarama, whose cover version was nearly as successful globally as the original. But Shocking Blue were actually one of the better pop-psychedelic bands of their time – especially once they recruited lead singer Mariska Veres as their version of Grace Slick. At Home is their second album and their first with Veres, and while the original album didn’t include “Venus” (which was released as a single only), later pressings included it to capitalize on its success and lead off Side 2, so I’m counting it because really, you ought to hear this.

8. Yello, Stella

Swiss synth-pop duo Yello have racked up quite a few hits in their career, but they’ve only had one hit in the US – and chartwise it’s not actually “Oh Yeah” from their fourth album Stella, but “Vicious Games” from the same album. But weirdly, “Oh Yeah” is their most famous song thanks to its appearance not only in a Twix TV commercial, but also on the soundtrack for Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Uncle Buck, The Secret Of My Success and just about every other mid-80s comedy. In fact, I know lots of people who absolutely hated Yello in the 80s because this song was so ubiquitous. Their loss – I think Yello is one of the more inventive and weird synth-pop duos then and now, and Stella is good a showcase of their talent. Who else would sample barnyard animals for a dance song?

9. Ozark Mountain Daredevils, It’ll Shine When It Shines

“Jackie Blue” was probably the first 45 single I bought with my own money, and one thing I found interesting about it was that the B-side, “Better Days”, was a country-rock song that sounded nothing like the A-side. I found out later that pretty much nothing else on the album It’ll Shine When It Shines – or indeed any OMD album before or since – sounded like “Jackie Blue”, and that “Better Days” was more representative of their general early-mid 70s output. Indeed, OMD were signed to A&M by David Anderle who wanted a country-rock band in the same ballpark as the Eagles on the label. That said, OMD were more versatile and loose than the Eagles, and had more of a sense of humor. Anyway, if 70s country rock is your jam, It’ll Shine When It Shines is a good place to start with OMD. Then again, if 70s country rock is your jam, odds are you already know all this.

10. Modern English, After The Snow

This may be the most difficult entry of the series, if only because so many people of a certain age became so emotionally invested in “I Melt With You” that no other song in the band’s repertoire can ever hope to live up to it. I know people who were furious when the song started appearing in Burger King ads – it was like their precious teenage memories had just been sold off to Corporate America like a crate of apple juice. On the other hand, if you're kind of sick of hearing that one song by Modern English, the good news is that they were actually one of the better (if slightly poppier) bands on 4AD. You wouldn't know it from “I Melt With You”, but Modern English started off musically somewhat closer to Joy Division. Their second album After The Snow (where that song comes from) sees them making a transition away from that to something closer to Psychedelic Furs and Duran Duran. If that interests you, I recommend checking it out.

11. The Buggles, The Age of Plastic

In a way The Buggles are the poster child for 80s one-hit wonders – it’s tough to find a 1HW list that doesn’t include “Video Killed The Radio Star”. And of course, the video was perfect for MTV even before MTV went on the air. The Buggles was a project by Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes – both of whom would go on to join Yes, after which Horn became a top producer and Downes would form supergroup Asia. Which is interesting since musically the Buggles were almost the opposite of those bands, and was conceived as being a “plastic” group, with inspiration ranging from Kraftwerk to JG Ballard. “Video Killed The Radio Star” comes across to a lot of people like an 80s novelty song, but it’s part of a concept album about anxieties over modern technology and its impact on humanity. It’s a bit too polite and nostalgic to qualify as proto-cyberpunk – but it’s a good album in its own right.

12. The Knack, Get The Knack

For me, this is almost too obvious a choice, since The Knack’s debut has long since been re-evaluated as a power-pop classic. But they still make just about every “one-hit wonder” list that covers the 70s/80s, which for my money distracts from the fact that almost every song on here is a stripped-down rock’n’roll gem. Are any of them as good as “My Sharona”? Maybe not, but it’s not like there’s a huge drop-off between that song and the second-best song on here. Anyway, the album is so good that The Knack never managed to make another one quite as solid, but tons of bands wish they could make just one album as good as this.

13. Zebra, Zebra

Does anyone even still remember these guys? Zebra were a New Orleans prog-power trio who formed in 1975, but it wasn’t until the early 80s that they got a record deal and released their debut eponymous album. The single “Who’s Behind The Door” got a lot of airplay on MTV and made it on the Hot 100, and the album not only went gold, but was also one of Atlantic’s fastest-selling debuts ever. They released a few more albums after that, but it never got that good again, saleswise. I remember liking it at the time, and listening to it now, I feel it actually holds up as pretty strong album – you know, for early 80s prog-rock with falsetto vocals and laser effects. But it works in large part because Zebra didn’t come across as pretentious – they also did quite a new straight rock numbers too. Anyway, it’s worth checking out if you dig “Who’s Behind The Door”.

14. Blues Magoos, Psychedelic Lollipop

Mid/late 60s America was swamped in psychedelic garage bands churning out one-hit wonders then disappearing into obscurity. The wonderfully named Blues Magoos were no different in that sense – their debut single “(We Ain't Got) Nothin' Yet” was a Top 5 hit and its host album Psychedelic Lollipop just missed the Top 20, and though they lasted for five albums, they’d already peaked chartwise. That said, unlike a lot of their psych-garage peers, their debut was more killer than filler, and more garage than psych.

15. Thin Lizzy, Jailbreak

Unlike a lot of bands on this list, Thin Lizzy have received their due as one of the great 70s rock bands – so much so that it’s easy to forget that they only ever had one hit song in the US – you know, the one that every movie trailer uses for a sequel when favorite characters return for another film. Yes, Thin Lizzy had quite a few hits in the UK, but “The Boys Are Back In Town” is the only song by them most people can name. Which is a shame, because they actually made several great records, and Jailbreak (the album that song comes from) is one of their best.

16. Nazareth, Hair Of The Dog

Nazareth is one of those 70s hard-rock bands I always assumed were more successful than they actually were, at least chart-wise. To be sure, Nazareth had a decent fanbase and a string of good albums (or at least good singles), but that was mainly in the UK. In the US, their only chart hit was their cover of Boudleaux Bryant’s “Love Hurts”, which is actually the closing track of their sixth album Hair Of The Dog. Sure, classic rock stations play the title track fairly regularly these days, but “Love Hurts” is still the one song everyone knows. (Which is strange, given Dan McCafferty’s voice isn’t exactly Top 40 material. Then again, his voice is a good fit for that song – he sounds like his heart has been broken so badly he’s howling in pain.) Anyway, if you like either of those songs, I recommend checking out the whole album, which features gritty originals and covers of songs by Crazy Horse and – no, really – Randy Newman.

17. Falco, 3

A huge star in his native Austria (and across Europe), Falco was the pop star’s pop star – preposterously larger than life and born to entertain, whether because he wanted to do nothing else or because he wasn’t suited for any other occupation. Anyway, he came to America’s attention via After The Fire’s cover of “Der Kommisar” (after which MTV played Falco’s original version, while – bizarrely – radio stations played a hybrid version with bits from both versions spliced together). Falco followed that up with “Rock Me Amadeus” and became the international pop star he’d always wanted to be – for a while, anyway. He never hit that big in America again, but “Rock Me Amadeus” is a hell of a legacy that remains part of the US pop culture landscape (albeit sometimes ironically). Meanwhile, the album it comes from is a fine showcase of Falco’s particular blend of 80s hip-hop and slightly overbaked Eurocheese pop.

18. Jeannie C Riley, Harper Valley PTA

Thanks in part to the Barbara Eden TV movie of the same name, Jeannie C Riley’s “Harper Valley PTA” got a lot of airplay in the late 70s when I was a kid. But of course it was originally a hit in 1968, when Tom T Hall wrote it for Margie Singleton who wanted something along the lines of Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode To Billie Joe”. Although both she and Billie Jo Spears recorded versions of it, it was Riley’s version that became a #1 crossover hit. It launched Riley’s country music career, and while she had quite a few hits on country music stations, she never topped the pop charts again. Anyway, when the song was a hit she recorded an album to go with it, and it’s actually pretty good – although the title track is the only one written by Tom T Hall, the album is practically a concept album about small-town hypocrisy with a few recurring characters (to say nothing of that opening twangy guitar riff). Even with oddities like “Satan Place” (a play on “Peyton Place”), which is practically the same song with different characters, it’s an album that deserves as much attention as the single.

19. Warren Zevon, Excitable Boy

It took until close to the end of his life for Warren Zevon to get the respect he deserved as a singer/songwriter, but outside of his dedicated fanbase (and probably groups like this), Zevon mainly remains known for “Werewolves Of London”, which was his only Top 40 hit and still gets written off as a novelty song. Which is just wrong. Zevon’s whole body of work is worth exploring, and while he made better albums afterwards, his 1978 album Excitable Boy (where “Werewolves” comes from) is still a good place to start, not least because it includes “Lawyers, Guns and Money”, arguably Zevon’s second-most well-known song, which got some airplay on AOR stations and is a classic-rock staple now.

20. Spacehog, Resident Alien

Some of you may remember Spacehog. Or not. They were one of dozens of bands in the 90s that had “that one hit” on alternative rock radio or 120 Minutes and then faded away. But I’ve always had a soft spot for Spacehog – in an era dominated by post-grunge Alternative™ bands and Britpop, they were the oddballs obsessed with 70s concept glam rock. Their appropriately epic debut Resident Alien yielded a hit with “In The Meantime”, but it was diminishing returns after that, chartwise. Maybe they were a little too derivative at a time when they should have (and arguably could have) taken 70s sci-fi concept glam rock to new levels. Maybe that’s asking too much of a band that seemed to have a pretty good sense of who they wanted to be. Either way, I keep coming back to them. There’s just something about this album that works for me and makes me think these guys should have been bigger than they were. Even if you write them off as a Ziggy tribute band, the point is that they were a really good Ziggy tribute band.

Inevitably, here’s the Spotify playlist for this series, featuring tracks from these 20 albums.

One for the money,

This is dF

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After doing that list of Great Unloved Albums By Good Artists, I was inspired once again by bedsitter23 to do a list of “unheard” albums – i.e. albums you’ve never heard, or possibly even heard of.

Right away I noticed a key challenge:

What exactly counts as “unheard”?

The easiest criterion is obscurity, but one interesting thing I realized in putting this together is that obscurity is relative. I’ve seen a lot of “obscure albums you’ve never heard” lists that include, say, Fairport Convention, King Crimson and The Faces. So obviously, what’s well-known to me isn’t as well known to, say, Gen Z. This in turn raises the question of whether the artist should be as obscure as the album. For example, everyone knows The Kinks, but how many people have heard, say, Arthur?

That got me to thinking about how I could tweak this list for a month and still have people say, “Obscure? Dude, I have all these albums and play them regularly, and they were in rotation on MTV for like ten years straight” or the only definition of obscure or unheard they’ll accept is: “This band is so underground they’ve never heard of themselves.”

At which point I decided I was overthinking it.

So I finally decided on some guidelines that are so arbitrary I’m not even going to bother to write them down. Suffice to say I think this list fulfils the objective of the headline. If you disagree, feel free to tell me, or better yet, make yr own list.

NOTE: It’s not a comprehensive list by any means – there’s quite a few I left off because it was getting too long. Also, I have lots of stuff in my racks more obscure than this, – but one criterion I imposed was that all albums should be available on Spotify (partly so I can make the inevitable playlist, and partly because there’s no sense urging people to listen to these albums if there’s no way to listen to them).

20 ALBUMS YOU MAYBE HAVEN’T HEARD BUT TOTALLY SHOULD

1: Fanny, Fanny Hill

Fanny weren’t the first all-girl rock band, but they were the first to get a major label deal and have a moderate amount of success. But there’s not a classic-rock station in America who will put any of their stuff in rotation – you’d be lucky to hear them on a college radio block show (and one that probably specializes in women musicians). I’ll admit I find some of their songs a bit pedestrian for the era, but there’s enough good stuff that I think more people ought to hear them. The one album that truly knocks me out is their third album, Fanny Hill, which musically delivers just about everything you'd want from an early 70s rock album.

2: Michael Nesmith and the First National Band, Magnetic South

Michael Nesmith wasn’t the first of the Monkees to quit, but he was the first to go solo. Predictably, he never got a fair shake because of the Monkee label, which is a shame – partly because the Monkees eventually became a real band, and partly because he was at the forefront of the ‘country rock’ trend pioneered by the likes of Gram Parsons and Flying Burrito Brothers. His albums with the First National Band didn’t sell, nor did his work with the Second National Band, or really any of his solo albums – and that’s a shame, since in my opinion pretty much all of them have at least a handful of songs that are better than the entire Eagles discography. It’s hard to pick just one – I’m tempted to go with Tantamount To Treason (with the Second National Band) for its psychedelic edge – but I’ll go with his first album, which is as good a starting place as any.

3. Les Rita Mitsouko, The No Comprendo

Huge in France, but mostly unloved in America, Les Rita Mitsouko were one of the great 80s duos, and certainly one of the most oddball. Instrumentalist Fred Chichin drew from a reasonably wide range of musical influences, while singer Catherine Ringer wasn’t your average chanteuse, with eccentric on-stage performances and a goofy sense of humor. They never made it big in America, but Sparks and Iggy Pop were fans and made guest appearances on a couple of albums, though not this one – this is their second album (and their first collaboration with Tony Visconti), and it’s a good intro to their music. No Euro synthpop collection is complete without it.

4. Shuggie Otis, Freedom Flight

Shuggie Otis (son of Johnny) is of course most famous for “Strawberry Letter 23” (covered by the Brothers Johnson in 1977), but the song was probably more famous than he was until recently. He was a guitar prodigy who was playing in his dad’s band at age 11, and his solo career took off after releasing an album with Al Kooper. 1974’s Inspiration Information (his third and last album for Epic before he faded out of the spotlight to do session work) was cited by Prince as his greatest accomplishment, but I think it’s a little overdone – I prefer his second album, Freedom Flight, which not only has “Strawberry Letter 23” on it, but strikes a nice middle ground between the more straightforward blues of his debut and the creative excess of Inspiration Information. It was moderately successful in 1972, but I think more people should hear it today, if only to hear the original version of “Strawberry Letter 23”.

5. Loudon Wainwright III, 10 Songs For The New Depression

With John Prine’s recent passing, I couldn’t help but thinking about Loudon Wainwright III – another of the “New Bob Dylans” who got a record deal around the same time Prine did. I never got into Dylan or Prine, but I did like Wainwright – admittedly because I first heard his songs on a couple of early episodes of MASH when he did a few guest appearances. He can be a mixed bag – he’s an underrated lyricist, but he tends to wear his heart on his sleeve to devastating effect in his confessional songs, and even his humorous songs sometimes have an uncomfortable edge to them. Maybe that’s why he’s remained more of a cult figure while his children Rufus and Martha are probably more famous than he is. But I keep coming back to him. I was tempted to go with Attempted Mustache, which is one of his best early-career albums, but instead I’ll go with 2010’s 10 Songs For The New Depression. It’s just him and a guitar (and occasional ukulele), and it’s probably the best protest album about the 2008 economic crash you’ve never heard.

6. eX-Girl, Back To The Mono Kero!

The great thing about eX-Girl is that they’re almost impossible to describe in just a couple of adjectives – psychedelic space-opera noise punk? From Japan? Or the planet Kero Kero? Whatever you call it, it’s pretty bonkers, and I adore them. So did Mike Patton and Jello Biafra, which is why if you’ve heard them at all, it’s either via their 2001 album Back To The Mono Kero! (on Patton’s Ipacec label) or their 2004 album (and final one) Endangered Species on Alternative Tentacles. Both are a lot of fun, but I recommend Back To The Mono Kero! – partly because it’s weirder, and partly because it has a wonderful cover of “Pop Muzik”.

7. The Monks, Black Monk Time

The story of the Monks is the stuff of legend – US soldiers stationed in West Germany playing primitive satirical rock while dressed as monks, released one album that Polydor refused to distribute in the US because of songs criticizing the Vietnam war, and broke up two years later. Virtually ignored at the time, the Monks are pretty much heralded as proto-punk pioneers these days. But have you actually heard the album? It’s wonderfully and joyously unhinged, and possibly the only garage-rock band to feature a banjo. And Gary Burger is arguably the source material for Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist of The Hives. It’s absolutely nutso glorious.

8. The Undisputed Truth, Higher Than High

The Undisputed Truth were one of the outliers of the Motown empire circa 1970 in that they were (1) a full band, not a singing group, and (2) were assembled by producer Norman Whitfield partly because he needed a band that he could use to hone his psychedelic-soul production techniques. They were good, but they tended to mostly do psychedelic-soul covers of Motown hits, particularly the ones originally recorded by Whitfield’s other cash cow, The Temptations. This album was the first to feature an altered line-up that included former members of The Magic Tones, a Detroit group similar musically to George Clinton’s Parliament. And it makes a big difference – the music is heavier and funkier than UT Mk1 and oh so much fun.

9. The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, The Doughnut In Granny’s Greenhouse

I don’t know how many people are aware The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band even existed – maybe they saw their appearance in the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour film, but might have assumed they weren’t a real band. They were, and they were as delightfully oddball as the name suggests, as prone to playing Dixieland jazz and lounge music as psychedelic garage rock, with surreal spoken-word vignettes thrown in for no real reason – and sometimes all of that was just one song. More often than not, their rockier songs parodied the hits of the day – which would serve member Neil Innes well in his later work with Monty Python and The Rutles. I like all of their albums, but their second album, The Doughnut In Granny’s Greenhouse, is one I seem to come back to quite a bit.

10. The Cambodian Space Project, Electric Blue Boogaloo

The Cambodian Space Project (CSP) was started by Cambodian nightclub singer Kak Channthy and Australian musician Julian Poulson around 2011 in Phnom Penh, with the intention of celebrating local singers like Ros Serey Sothea, Pan Ron, Sinn Sisamouth and other artists who were pop stars in the 60s and early 70s whose careers (and lives) were ended in the Khmer Rouge. CSP did a mix of covers and originals, and recorded six albums before Channthy was killed in a traffic accident in 2018. Pretty much all their albums are worth investigating, but this one is among the best – it’s a dance party end to end.

[Also, I would highly recommend listening to the original artists that inspired Cambodian Space Project. For that, the place to start is the Cambodian Rocks, the original Cambodian pop comp that initially emerged in 1994 on limited vinyl (featuring 13 songs taken from old cassettes). At the time it came out, none of the songs or bands were identified – it was like listening to a distant radio station with no DJ to explain it. Since the emergence of the internet, we now know all the song titles and artist names, and the current version has 22 songs, many of which have been enhanced with overdubbed drums and such. I have MP3s of the original, which I found fascinating. The Cambodian style of singing may not be for everyone, but it’s a great window into the pop culture of another time and place.

11. Ivor Cutler Trio, Ludo

Ivor Cutler was the eccentric poet’s eccentric poet, writing surreal child-like verse that were sometimes serious but often humorous, and often performing them accompanied by a harmonium. His albums are a mix of spoken-word and songs, and they’re all reasonably obscure outside of the UK, but I’ll pick Ludo, which was my intro to him via an office colleague. Released in 1967 and produced by George Martin, it’s his only album credited to the Ivor Cutler Trio (comprising Cutler and two other musicians) so that it’s more of a trad-jazz approach to Cutler’s material. But it’s just as delightfully bonkers.

12. Lee Hazlewood, The N.S.V.I.P's (Not So Very Important People)

Lee Hazlewood has to be one of the most underrated singer/songwriters ever. He had some fame in the 60s via his work with Duane Eddy and Nancy Sinatra, but his solo work is largely unknown outside of his cult fanbase. He never fit comfortably in the pop-rock landscape, and his sense of humor was too oddball for the country music scene, and he was often morose enough to make Townes Van Zandt sound like Roger Miller. I could pick any one of his albums without Nancy Sinatra’s name in it and odds are you haven’t heard it. A favorite of mine is his second album, The N.S.V.I.P's (Not So Very Important People), where he starts each track with a humorous anecdote that typically has almost nothing to do with the song that follows.

13. Dog Party, P.A.R.T.Y!!!

Dog Party was started in 2005 by sisters Lucy and Gwendolyn Giles when they were both in primary school, and the band was as stripped down as it gets – one guitar, one drum kit, two singers. So far so White Stripes, but musically it’s a different story – Dog Party started off playing pop-punk influenced by Ramones, X and Bikini Kill. Eleven years later, they’re still doing that, but mixing it up with more classic rock influences like the Beatles and Wanda Jackson. Even though they’re not exactly innovators musically, they're every bit as good as whoever your favorite SoCal pop-punk band is right now, and it’s a shame they’re not as big as (and I’m gonna pull a name right out of thin air here) Blink-182. I like all their stuff, but I recommend their second record (and first full-length album) P.A.R.T.Y!!! partly for the joy of listening to kids clearly having a blast rocking out, but also to show how even junior-high kids can make a fun rock album.

14. Ken Nordine, Colors

With his lush, deep, mellow voice, Ken Nordine made a good living working in radio and doing voice-overs for TV commercials – but on the side he also did spoken-word albums, reciting surreal and satirical story poems set to beatnik jazz – sort of like Lord Buckley, but without the stream-of-consciousness theatrics. Somewhere back in the 90s I got a copy of the re-release of his 1967 album Colors, which features short word-riffs about 34 different colors. It got its start as an ad campaign for a paint company but the ads were so popular that Nordine wrote and recorded an album’s worth of them. It made me an instant fan, and while I could recommend some of his more seminal records, I’ll go with this one, which is one of his more playful albums.

15. 50 Foot Wave, Free Music EP

Throwing Muses are well known in alt-rock circles, as is frontwoman/songwriter Kristin Hersh via her solo albums – perhaps less known is Hersh’s power-trio side project 50 Foot Wave, which she started in the early 2000s. It’s a form of riff-heavy math rock that’s more louder and complex than anything else Hersh has done, which might throw off people who came into Throwing Muses via “Not To Soon” or Hersh via Hips and Makers. But for my money it’s every bit as good as her other stuff (which is to say, it’s good to great). Consequently, I’m spoiled for choice in picking an album, although there aren’t many to choose from. But I’ll select their second EP Free Music, which is the first one I heard, thanks to the band being one of the first to embrace the internet and Creative Commons, offering much of their music as free downloads.

16. Shel Silverstein, Inside Folk Songs

Shel Silverstein was a polymath of the first order, known for his cartoons, poems, children’s books, and songs like “A Boy Named Sue” – to say nothing of Dr Hook & The Medicine Show’s first few albums and hits like "Sylvia's Mother" and "The Cover Of The Rolling Stone". He wrote a number of famous songs, actually, but his own music albums are relatively obscure – possibly because he couldn't really sing, but he made up for it with over-the-top storytelling pizazz. Still, he may not be for everyone, but you can either start with some of his children’s records, or this (his second album), which proves that folk music doesn’t have to be serious to be good.

17. Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Gospel Train

It’s only recently that Sister Rosetta Tharpe has gotten her due recognition as a progenitor of rock and roll – and rightfully so. A great singer and an underrated guitarist, Sister Rosetta influenced a lot of white kids to pick up guitars, but was still pigeonholed as a gospel singer – between that and her being a woman, she never became as big as she probably should have. And while she’s certainly getting a lot of posthumous respect, I don’t know how many people are actually listening to her music beyond what’s on YouTube. Personally I recommend her third album, Gospel Train – it’s an exhilarating listen that rocks as well as anything else that came out in 1956 (or much of the 50s, for that matter). If nothing else, it’s proof that Christian songs can rock if you really want them to.

18. Caterwaul, Pin And Web

Phoenix-based Caterwaul was one of several late 80s indie bands that probably should have been bigger than they were. Or maybe it’s just me – I have yet to meet someone who remembers them or have even heard of them, let alone liked them. I’ve always been knocked out by their “gothadelic” musical style, particularly Betsy Martin’s unearthly vocals and Mark Schafer’s wobbly Edge-ish guitar sounds. They had a minor college-radio hit from this album (their first full-length for IRS), “The Sheep’s A Wolf”, which is one of my favorite songs ever, but the whole album is worth a listen. I suppose their sound was too rooted in its time to transition past the grunge era, but I still love the sound of it.

19. David Lynch, Crazy Clown Time

This entry might be a bit of a risk, as David Lynch is pretty well known. On the other hand, he’s known far more for his films than his music, for a few reasons: (1) his musical projects tend to be collaborations with other people, (2) he didn’t start doing solo albums until 2011 (and has only done two of them), and (3) his music is as accessible and mainstream as his films – possibly less so, as I know plenty of people who love his films and Twin Peaks but have never tried his musical albums apart maybe from soundtracks to his films and TV work. But if you like those, I recommend checking out his solo albums – they’re characteristically dark twisted and surreal takes on electro-pop, blues and Roy Orbison-era rockabilly, and all of them would fit perfectly with any of his movie soundtracks. And you may as well start with his debut, Crazy Clown Time, which starts off easy with a Karen O guest vocal and just gets weirder from there.

20. Bodeco, Bone Hair and Hide

Huge in Louisville, KY, and perhaps nowhere else, Bodeco were doing indie roots rock in the late 80s/early 90s around the same time as Southern Culture On The Skids and (over in Australia) The Cruel Sea, but didn’t make it nearly as big, for whatever reason. Which is too bad – Bodeco traded in unwashed, stripped-down, straight-up, Bo Diddley-inspired rock’n’roll, and there was nothing remotely innovative about it. But then Bodeco never claimed to be geniuses. It’s like a restaurant that only makes one dish, and it’s fundamentally the same dish lots of other restaurants offer, with no fancy innovations or special sauces. But it makes that one dish well and you always come back for more. Possibly the most criminally underrated band on this list.

And now, as promised the Spotify playlist of sample tracks from each entry.

Not only has this playlist been crafted to provide exactly one hour of music, but consists entirely of tracks that are completely different from the tracks posted here.

Feels like the first time,

This is dF

Current Mood: awake
Current Location: Tung Chung
Current Music: See above
Crossposts: https://def-fr0g-42.livejournal.com/1647749.html

For those who don't know, my dad was the guitarist for The Bluenotes, the rockabilly house band for Colonial Records of North Carolina in the 50s and early 60s. They backed artists like Doug Franklin and George Hamilton IV, and released a few singles of their own. Dad also wrote and arranged many of the songs they recorded.

A lot of Colonial 45s are now popping up on Spotify and other streaming services via some compilations that have been released in the last couple of years. This is the most comprehensive one – if you want to hear an obscure but interesting chapter in the 50s rockabilly scene out of North Carolina, now’s your chance.

PRODUCTION NOTE: I don't know how many of these Dad played on. Certainly a bunch of them, but not necessarily all.

Meanwhile, here’s the only 45 he released under his own name on Colonial.

A-side:

Watch on YouTube

B-side:

Watch on YouTube

FULL DISCLOSURE: Dad died in 1984, so I do get royalties whenever these songs get played. Which is hardly ever, since these records are pretty obscure, so the cheques aren't very big. Now that they're on digital services, that might change, but I just got my first statement since BMI started including digital royalties, and it's like literally $0.01 per stream. So you won't make me rich by listening to these.

BONUS TRACK: Dad was also A&R for Monument Records for a spell, which how Roy Orbison ended up recording one of his songs.

Watch on YouTube

It wasn’t a hit at the time, and of course it doesn’t hold up to Orbison’s huge hits. But a lot of Orbison fans seem to dig it nowadays. So that’s nice.

Dad rock,

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You can thank Bedsitter23 for this. He had been putting together a playlist of “unheard” albums, and that got me to thinking about a related category: great unloved albums by otherwise good artists/bands. You know, the duds that disappointed fans and offended music critics, the albums that just don’t make the top of the average fan list – and yet I like them a lot.

One thing I found is that it’s harder to do this kind of list these days, because lots of albums that were flops or critical failures at the time have since been re-evaluated and found to be better than people thought at the time – Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk being a go-to example. Also, there’s a difference in ratings between the established fan base and the general public. What exactly counts as a “bad” album – is it all about units sold, critical maulings, fan alienation, the weight of the back catalog?

Eventually I just decided to go with my own experience – these are ten albums that I remember fans, music critics or friends hating at the time (and in many cases still hate to this day) that I happen to like. I’m not saying these are the best works of that particular artist/band – I’m just saying I don’t think they’re nearly as bad as other people do.

In no particular order:

1. Kiss, Music from The Elder
Kiss tries to go back to its hard-rock roots and instead makes corny concept album – what could go wrong? I ended up with a tape of this somehow in 1985 (probably abandoned by a former roommate) – and at the time, my knowledge of Kiss was limited to the hit singles and their TV appearances (including Phantom of the Park, yes). Maybe it’s because I liked the idea of concept albums, or maybe I was expecting it to be far worse, but I thought it was alright – the “concept” is naff and there’s a lot of filler, but there’s also some decent songs here, and Kiss have made far worse albums before and after this, IMO. Also, Lou Reed has three co-writing song credits on this thing, so there’s that.

Name one good track: “Only One”

2. Lou Reed, Mistrial
Speaking of Lou, like with a lot of artists that started in the 60s, a lot of people dismiss Reed’s entire 80s catalog as disposable and unnecessary up to 1989’s New York. I wouldn’t agree with that completely – I think New Sensations is an underrated masterpiece – but I’m going to go to bat for Mistrial because it’s the most “80s” sounding album of the bunch. But listening to it, I think Reed transcends the 80s production issues better than a lot of his peers (Bowie’s Never Let Me Down comes to mind).

Name one good track: “Mama’s Got A Lover”

3. U2, Pop
U2 goes Eurodisco! A lot of people bag on this album, and probably for good reason, but for me it was sort of the logical next step of the musical-expansion journey that started with Achtung Baby, and it works better than people give it credit for. Like a lot of latter-era U2, it’s too long and the energy fades by the second half, but there’s some really solid songs on here.

Name one good track: “Gone”

4. Neil Young, Everybody’s Rockin’
When you’re as prolific and iconoclastic as Neil Young, the problem with picking a “worst album” is that there’s so many to choose from so it depends who you ask and at what point in his career they first started listening to him. That said, Young’s infamous rockabilly album Everybody’s Rockin’ (with the Shocking Pinks) tends to make a lot of “worst Neil Young albums” lists – it certainly pissed off the suits at Geffen Records. And, you know, I won't say it’s his best record ever, but I think it’s one of his most misunderstood albums – to me, it’s equal parts in-joke, tribute to Young’s musical influences and middle finger to Geffen for trying to tell him what music to play. As rockabilly tribute albums go, it’s pretty good. And it only runs for less than 25 minutes, so it won’t waste too much of your time.

Name one good track: “Kinda Fonda Wanda”

5. The Doors, The Soft Parade
It seems most Doors fans agree that the worst Doors albums are the post-Jim albums. No argument here. But of their six studio albums with Jim Morrison, The Soft Parade is the one that is most consistently ranked last. So naturally it’s among my favorite Doors albums. I’ll admit the title track has a lot to do with that – it’s one of my all-time favorite Doors tracks, and worth the price of admission alone – but I also appreciate that they were willing to mess around with the formula and take chances at that point in their career.

Name one good track: “The Soft Parade”

6. The B-52s, Good Stuff
This is the B-52s album you were most likely to find in the bargain bin shortly after it came out, or so it seemed to me. My assumption is that while Cosmic Thing was a huge comeback for them, it was also somewhat overproduced, and it was so ubiquitous that when Good Stuff came out, offering more of the same but without Cindy Wilson, the euphoria had worn off and everyone was all about The Grunge. But I still like to listen to it – for the most part, it’s as fun and goofy as Cosmic Thing.

Name one good track: “Hot Pants Explosion”

7. The Go-Gos, Talk Show
Not just the most underrated Go-Gos album, but one of the most underrated albums ever. The album didn’t do well commercially and a lot of people thought the band peaked with their debut, Beauty and the Beat. I wouldn’t say this is better, but it’s hard to compare them because B&TB had a bigger cultural impact and broke new ground. So Talk Show has to get by mainly on the songs, but it does just that – listening to it now, it’s enjoyable power-pop that has aged as well as B&TB.

Name one good track: “Turn To You”

8. Warren Zevon, Mutineer
This was Zevon’s least successful album, and one that tends to be near the bottom of online fan lists. I can sort of see why. It’s his most experimental album that’s miles away from the standard Laurel Canyon 70s rock he built his career on – so much so that even CMJ gave it a good review it when it came out in 1995. Accordians! Piano fights! Doomed clowns! Carl Hiassen! I love it, obviously – in fact, it’s probably my favorite Zevon album. If nothing else, it contains some of his best one-liners (“They say these are the good times / but they don’t live around here”), and only Zevon could come up with a song about the afterlife called “Monkey Wash Donkey Rinse”.

Name one good track: “Something Bad Happened To A Clown”

9. Van Halen, Diver Down
I stopped listening to Van Halen when David Lee Roth left, and it may be no coincidence that most of the Van Halen albums that make the bottom of fan lists tend to be the ones with other singers (the exception being Sammy Hagar’s inaugural VH album 5150). So while Diver Down tends to be near the top of the fan lists, it’s usually dead last if you limit yourself to Diamond-Dave-era VH. Even Eddie Van Halen has been critical of it, mainly because it was a rush job and almost half the songs are covers. But I’ve always liked it – it’s relatively more diverse musically, and VH were no slouch when it came to covers.

Name one good track: “The Full Bug”

10. Queen, Hot Space
Fans sometimes disagree which album is the worst one their favorite band has done, but ask any Queen fan, and 99 times out of 100 they’ll say Hot Space, a.k.a. The WTF Gay Disco Album. I’m the 1 out of 100, because honestly I don’t think it’s as bad as people say. That’s probably because I grew up listening to a lot of disco and funk on the radio, which I liked, so that part doesn’t put me off. And frankly, Queen’s take on club disco was more interesting musically than most proper disco acts. Besides, there are several “proper” Queen songs on it that are as good as most things they’ve done. And of course it’s the one with “Under Pressure” on it.

Name one good track besides “Under Pressure”: “Dancer”

LISTEN TO IT: Here’s a sampler if you don’t believe me.

Indefensible,

This is dF

Current Mood: accomplished
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Crossposts: https://def-fr0g-42.livejournal.com/1620652.html

Devo's Freedom of Choice LP is 40 years old, apparently.

FoC was my first Devo album, but I’d seen Devo on SNL before this came out, so I was already kind of aware of who they were and that their live act wasn’t your average rock show. And yes, “Whip It” was the gateway drug that convinced me to buy the album.

Anyway, it’s hard to understate the influence Devo had on me as a teenager. In this article, Gerald Casale talks about how FoC was a deliberate move away from their punky basement origins to something a bit more conventional (by Devo standards, anyway), and it probably took that move for me to get what they were doing. Either way, Devo were probably the first contemporary band I got into that showed me how rock could be a vehicle for art, social satire and political commentary all at once – and STILL be fun.

As for the title track and Casale’s comment that the lyrics are just as relevant today as they were 40 years ago, I think he’s even more right than he mentions here. Today we are so overwhelmed with choice that people want freedom from choice not just in terms of government, but in consumerism, media and just about every other aspect of life. Psychological journals are full of case studies about the “paradox of choice”, and sociology professors have written plenty about how the Internet was supposed to lead to freedom of information but instead has led to new age of media manipulation by meddling with trust – a new form of censorship where speech is not muzzled but simply drowned by other media competing for your attention, whether the intention is disinformation or simply getting you to click ads.

Or, if that’s too heavy, think of it this way: do we really need ten damn streaming video services?

We are indeed Devo.

So, yes, Devo weren’t just a bunch of art nerds with flowerpot hats – they were way ahead of the curve.

Watch on YouTube

Don't be tricked by what you see,

This is dF

Current Mood: nostalgic
Current Location: Tung Chung
Current Music: See above

I know concert guitar solos are supposed to be uncool, indulgent and pretentious – and sometimes they are – but sometimes they’re thrilling.

This is one of those.

Watch on YouTube

As a teenager I listened to Live Killers a lot, and the stuff Brian May was doing with his guitar and his amps onstage sounded alien and dangerous to me. (The psychedelic breakdown during "Get Down Make Love" alone gave me the most amazing nightmares.)

But this – THIS – was just insanely amazing to listen to, not just for the music but the craftsmanship of taking two modified Echoplex tape-delay boxes and running them through separate amps, resulting in a triple-echo that enabled May to harmonize with the echoed notes and recreate that layered guitar harmony sound he does in the studio. It’s hard to understate how tricky this is to get right in terms of timing and the structure of the riffs, etc.

This is probably the only live guitar solo I’ve committed to memory, and it haunts me to this day. Which is partly my own fault because I listened to it on Spotify the other day and it’s still ringing in my head. Glory be.

Also, Roger Taylor's timpani solo is a surprisingly nice touch.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

ADDENDUM: For what it's worth, this is for me the definitive version of "Brighton Rock", most likely because I listened to Live Killers for several years before I managed to get a copy of Sheer Heart Attack and hear the original.

A little magic in the air,

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Crossposts: https://def-fr0g-42.livejournal.com/1597754.html

Millennials and Gen Z may not know this, but MTV used to play music videos.

From the early 80s until somewhere around the mid-90s, MTV became a cultural touchpoint of sorts for almost every teenager in America whose household could afford basic cable (or knew someone who had cable at their house), particularly once it started producing dedicated genre shows like Headbangers Ball, Alternative Nation, Yo! MTV Raps and 120 Minutes.

Robert Dean at Consequence of Sound wants to bring that back. His reasoning: in the age of Spotify, Pandora, YouTube and generic commercial radio, it’s ironically harder than ever to discover new music, in large part because there’s no shared community to hip you to new stuff and force you out of your comfort zone:

Like our politics, everything exists in an echo chamber; we’re not sharing a space to find things anymore. We link directly to a Spotify playlist and let it do the work. There’s no unexpected magic. It’s not rock and roll. It’s safe.

Dean argues that MTV served this purpose admirably in its heyday:

Those shows worked on the simple premise of if you like this thing, let us show you these other things like it. There are blogs curated to tastes and algorithms that help us to discover similar artists, but the shared cultural experience of the music video, not knowing what would come next, the charisma of the host … all of those things played a role in the growth of the music. There’s value to that magic.

And that’s why we need to make MTV all about music again and become that central cultural community, he says.

I agree that some kind of community is essential to discovering new music. I strongly disagree with the proposition that MTV is the solution.

1. For a start, I think MTV’s role as community enabler is overstated. I mean, yes, programs like Headbangers Ball or Yo! MTV Raps had a fan base. But a shared cultural experience is not the same thing as a community. Communities are generally local and interactive. MTV was not that – it was a standard top-down model where tastemakers are telling you what cool bands you should be checking out (most of which are already signed to majors or imprints of majors). Personally, I’ve gotten more worthwhile music recommendations from actual people I’ve met and hang out with than from MTV block programming.

2. To be sure, MTV played a role as an aggregator to play music their audience might not have heard before, and then those people would go and report to you, or you’ll watch it together and share that moment of discovery. But radio can serve the same purpose – and in fact did just that at one point before everything became computer-generated playlists from corporate HQ distributed to the local affiliates.

Yes, radio is also a top-down tastemaker model, but it has the potential to be much more responsive to the community, and it’s more interactive in the sense that you could phone up the DJ, particularly for block programming shows where the DJ presumably loved this music as much as you did.

Nowadays, maybe MTV could do that by leveraging social media channels. But again, radio can do that too. NPR already does it, to astonishing effect via things like Tiny Desk Concerts, Viking’s Choice and All Songs Considered – and while NPR is a national network, it makes use of hundreds of local affiliates to explore more localized music options (or be the place to catch someone like Jeff Lynne while he's in town).

3. In fact, thanks to social media and the internet, I think the “community” hasn’t disappeared so much as fragmented into smaller tribes that defy geography and genre. I participate in several Facebook pages that serve as an example of what modern music communities look like – a bunch of people from similar but slightly different musical backgrounds sharing what they love. It might be fairly eclectic or highly specific (for example, I’ve seen various pages dedicated to fans of Syd-Barret-era Pink Floyd). But it’s still a community – and IMO it’s more of a community than any MTV block program ever was.

4. Which is why I don’t think MTV can serve as the music-discovery community Dean thinks it used to be – at least not by simply by returning to its music roots and focusing more on block programming, which is what Dean is suggesting. MTV came of age in an era when linear broadcast TV was the only option and hardly anyone else was doing what MTV was doing. We don’t live in that era anymore, and the Millennial/Gen Z crowd grew up with a completely different reality. You might as well ask a teenager to trade in their iTunes account for a Walkman.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I should confess I wasn’t a big fan of most of MTV’s specialty shows in the first place, although 120 Minutes was alright, but I didn’t tune in regularly. To be honest, the only 90s era MTV show I watched regularly was Liquid Television, which wasn’t even a music show.

In terms of discovering new music (and I’m old enough to say this), I have to say that MTV was at its most interesting in the early 80s when it first started – partly from the novelty, but mostly from the fact that not many bands were making music videos, so MTV would literally play almost anything to fill up 24 hours, so you would end up seeing all kinds of nifty bands you’d never hear on the radio, especially late at night.

So for my money, MTV broke more new bands for me in its first couple of years than it ever did on a given block show that only aired for two hours per week.

Money for nothing and chix for free,

This is dF

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Terry Jones has passed away and it’s very sad, not least because he’d reportedly been suffering from severe dementia the last few years.

If you haven't guessed by now, I’ve been a Monty Python fan pretty much since high school (so 35 years or so, then). It’s hard to pick just one of his wonderful performances and characters, so here’s a less obvious choice. The Meaning Of Life may not have been Python’s best film, but this is arguably the best bit in that film.

Watch on YouTube

I also ought to mention that Jones was impressive beyond Python – he was also a scholar of medieval history and a writer of children’s stories. Somewhere on my shelves is a copy of one of his fairy-tale books, Fantastic Stories, as well as his novelization of Starship Titanic (a computer game created by Douglas Adams) and a collection of his newspaper columns ridiculing George W Bush, Tony Blair and their War On Terror.

“What really alarms me about President Bush's "war on terrorism" is the grammar. How do you wage war on an abstract noun? It's rather like bombing murder.”

Anyway, between Jones and Neil Innes (the “7th Python” who passed on a few weeks ago), I’ve been revisiting a lot of Python lately – particularly the record albums (most of which I have), and much of it actually within my head, because I listened to them so much when I was younger that I memorized a great deal of them.

For those I didn’t memorize, I still have little snippets of them rattling around in my brain, some of them buried so deep that when they occasionally resurface, I don’t remember exactly where they came from.

Such as this sketch from Matching Tie and Handkerchief, which features professors discussing medieval farming practices in the form of reggae, call-and-response glam rock and bombastic rock opera.

Terry Jones isn’t in this particular sketch, but Neil Innes is – he was responsible for writing and performing the music parts, and it’s yet another example of just how brilliant he was at musical parody. The songs here are necessarily short, but no less entertaining.

On a broader note, only Python could think of combining a radio program on medieval agrarian history with Top of the Pops. And if anyone could release a music album about legal frameworks for 12th-century farming and make it enjoyable, it's Innes, innit?

Watch on YouTube

Sowing with as many oxen as he shall have yoked in the plough,

This is dF

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Two weeks ago it was Neil Innes – this week it’s another influential Neil who left us – Neil Peart of Rush.

And, you know, damn.

Where to begin?

Everyone – well, maybe not everyone, but a lot of people had their favorite band in high school – the one that they obsessed over, listened to repeatedly, that band who meant something to them beyond the music itself. For me, Rush was that band.

All three band members – Peart, Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson – had a profound influence on me musically. In the case of Peart, in addition to making me want to take up the drums (which I sorta did for a while, but never made it beyond the Phil Rudd difficulty level), his lyrics also influenced me as both a songwriter and a writer in general. Rush meant a lot to me in large part because – via Peart’s words – they had something to say to me, things I arguably needed to hear in my impressionable teen years about suburban loneliness, fear, non-conformity, censorship, liberty vs totalitarianism, the magic of radio, etc.

I mean, yes, there were also prog-rock space operas, Frazetta-like monster battles, Lord of the Rings references, well-meaning tributes to Ayn Rand, and talking trees. But by that time I was heavily into sci-fi/fantasy and totalitarian dystopian fiction, so in that sense Rush was letting me know you could totally be a nerd and still rock out.

Peart himself seemed like a bit of a nerd in interviews – which surprised me because on the album covers and on stage, he was this serious-looking tall guy with a stone face, but in video interviews he was this kind of awkward yet ebullient geek who would enthusiastically chew your ear off about whatever topic you wanted to talk about

I can relate to that.

It wasn’t all great, of course – I fully admit Rush lost me in the mid-80s after Grace Under Pressure (which I liked), which was my problem and not theirs. I thought their crisp, chrome-polished sound lacked the oomph of their earlier stuff, and by the time they started leaning back towards a more guitar-driven sound, I’d already moved on to other music that was more relevant to me. Listening to some of their 80s/90s releases on Spotify now, I may have been justified, but I missed some good stuff too.

Rush officially called it quits in 2016 after their 40th anniversary tour in support of what turned out to be their final album, Clockwork Angels, though in reality it was Peart who called time. He was entitled – he’d endured a lot of personal tragedy in the late 90s, and during the final tour had foot problems that made it difficult for him to play. But play he did, and though I didn’t get to see that tour apart from the YouTube clips, I was happy that the band I loved went out on such a high note (to include Clockwork Angels, which was their best album in years).

So let this post serve as tribute to both Rush the band and Peart the drummer, storyteller, seeker, philosopher and pointed social observer. I might have survived high school without them, but there’s no doubt in my mind I would have been a different person today – and not necessarily a better one.

A few side notes:

1. Yes I did see Rush live. Twice. Once in 1982 (the Signals tour) and again in 1984 (the Grace Under Pressure tour, a.k.a. the show where I left Nashville Auditorium to find my bike had been stolen and I had to walk from downtown all the way back to Inglewood, my ears still ringing. Took about three hours. The next day, I joined the Army.)

2. Yes, I did end up reading some Ayn Rand as a result of listening to 2112, which credited her work as inspiring the title track. Up to then, the only thing I knew about her was that Atlas Shrugged was a regular feature on our high school’s English Lit reading lists. I didn't read that, but I did read Anthem. I remember liking it, mainly for its takeaway of rejecting totalitarian control in favour of individual freedom. I later read We The Living and found it okay but too melodramatic, especially the ending.

Anyway, it was only much later I found out that (1) Rand was considered by some people (mainly socialists) to be pro-fascist, and (2) the British media branded Rush as ultra-right-wing after a journalist for NME (said to be a hard-left socialist) asked Peart to defend Rand’s supposed “genius”. You can read that article here, although for context, Alex Lifeson said in a recent interview that the band mainly appreciated Rand for her themes about individualism and not letting people tell you what to do or how to do it, and that for Peart, his discussion with the journalist was for him more of a thought exercise than any serious advocacy of far-right politics.

3. It's probably been said elsewhere, but to get an idea of how utterly unique Rush was as a band, consider what they managed to accomplish – written off early in their career as Zeppelin wannabes, they managed to play together for over 40 years with the same line-up (not counting Peart replacing John Rutsey after their first album), built up a huge following with relatively limited radio support until they hit it big in 1980 with “The Spirit of Radio”, and put out decent to great albums late in their career. How many bands can claim the same? For that matter, how many bands have lasted that long where their only tabloid scandal of any note was their drummer arguing about the merits of Ayn Rand?

4. It’s interesting to me that as the tributes to Peart come in on the social medias, people are posting their favorite Rush song, and the selections are all over the map rather than focused on their “classic” period. I was surprised at first, but then my first exposure to Rush was Moving Pictures, which is probably still my favorite album of theirs, so it seems natural to me that fans would focus on that era or before. But it actually depends more on which decade you started listening to Rush – and Rush was around long enough to pick up fans from across four decades.

Anyway. I don’t know which Rush song I should post – there are just so many to choose from.

So here’s a clip of Neil Peart playing big band jazz as part of his Buddy Rich tribute project in 1994.

Watch on YouTube

And if it’s Rush content you want, here’s a great instrumental that’s not “YYZ”.

Watch on YouTube

And also, here’s one of my favorite Rush songs in terms of lyrical content that went a long way in shaping my views on censorship.

Watch on YouTube

Closer to the heart,

This is dF

Current Mood: nostalgic
Current Location: Tung Chung
Current Music: See above
Crossposts: https://def-fr0g-42.livejournal.com/1585694.html

Like most of this blog, I’ve let this series lapse, and I don’t know that I have the time to keep it going regularly after this instalment, but Ric Ocasek is gone, and this seemed like a good time to mention that my first Cars record was the 45 single for “Let’s Go”.

"The Cars : Let's Go (HQ)" (Watch on YouTube)

Most people of course know The Cars from the MTV hits from Heartbeat City – “All I Want Is You”, “Magic” and “Drive” were ubiquitous at the time, and still get airplay to this day even on adult contemporary stations. Personally, I’m not that big a fan of Heartbeat City for that very reason. The first two albums (The Cars and Candy-O) capture the essence of what made The Cars so appealing in the late 70s, while their fourth album (Shake It Up) was a more satisfying pop album – overall it’s not as good as the first two, but it still has a few of their better songs on it.

The Cars stood out partly because Ocasek was a sharp songwriter, but also because they were basically New Wave before New Wave was a thing – which is ironic since they were Americans, not Brits. But they were the perfect bridge from the back-to-basics punk scene of The Ramones to synth-driven 80s pop.

For my money, they were also one of the first bands to create that blend of guitars and cheap synths that bridged rock’s evolution from the 70s to the 80s. Sure, bands like Devo, The B-52s and Talking Heads were doing it too (and possibly better), but The Cars were one of the first to take it mainstream. They were very much at the vanguard of the 80s pop culture landscape before it became infused with dayglo, hairspray, shoulderpads and Miami Vice fonts.

Or at least they were for me. “Let’s Go” was my intro to them, or at least the song I remember noticing first – I don’t remember if the radio stations in my neighbourhood played songs from the first album before then, but they certainly did afterwards.

FUN FACT 01: I always thought the lyric went, “She's got wonderful eyes and a whiskey mouth.” Which sounded like a delightful thing when I was 14. I kind of like my version better.

FUN FACT 02: I was today years old when I realized that “Moving In Stereo” is the song playing during the pool scene in Fast Times At Ridgemont High. Which is another way of saying that the music was the last thing I was paying attention to. If you see what I’m saying.

""Fast Times At Ridgemont High" on CBS (Pool Scene - TV Version)" (Watch on YouTube)

PRODUCTION NOTE: Don’t worry, that’s the edited-for-TV version, so it’s reasonably safe for work, depending on how strict your office is about that kind of thing.

BONUS TRACK: It’s also worth mentioning that Ocasek was also a top-notch producer who was willing to work with underground bands like Bad Brains, Suicide and Romeo Void. Oh, and Weezer.

She’s a frozen fire,

This is dF

Current Mood: nostalgic
Current Location: Pacific Coffee
Current Music: See above
Crossposts: https://def-fr0g-42.livejournal.com/1552837.html

As you know, Adam West is gone.

Like a lot of people, West was a pop culture icon of my childhood thanks to the syndication of Batman. And whatever his qualities as an actor, he was perfect for the role – too perfect, perhaps, although West was able to reconcile himself with it. And that’s good.

Also, like a lot of people, he was my first Batman experience – in my case, it was the TV show that led me to read the comic books, rather than the other way round. And of course there will always be debate about how “authentic” West’s Batman was – after all, the whole show was meant to be ironic camp fun for 60s hipsters who laughed at Batman’s ultra-square demeanor.

And yet it wasn’t. While the show was essentially conceived as a sort of superhero sitcom, they were serious about Batman’s squareness, if only because he was meant to be the sane centerpiece of an insane crooked world of flamboyant supervillains, and a counterpoint to Robin’s youthful impulsiveness to do what feels right vs what is right – even if it’s a detail like pedestrian safety or being too young to legally enter a nightclub.

Here’s one way of looking at it – college-age hipsters watched it in the 1960s and laughed at Batman’s goody-two-shoes squareness. Primary school kids in the 1970s like me watched the reruns and saw Batman as the ultimate role model – the guy who stands for justice, defends the defenseless, obeys rules and laws (apart from the ones against vigilantism, of course, but who thinks of that when yr eight?), and generally does the right thing for the Greater Good of society.

In other words, we didn't see the irony – we saw the superhero we thought Batman was supposed to be. And we aspired to that. As you do when yr a kid.

Of course we grew up, and in my case I did see the goofy, hokey side of it all (and as Mark Hamill has pointed out, it says a lot that West was able to play the role for laughs and seriously at the same time).

By that time, too, we had The Dark Knight and characters like Wolverine, the first of many bad-ass superheroes who were perfectly fine with killing bad guys and delivering snappy one-liners while doing it – which Adam West’s Batman would never have done in a million years.

Don't get me wrong – gritty realism and graphic violence has its place in comics. I liked Frank Miller’s take on the Dark Knight, and it’s an aspect of the character worthy of exploration, and one that has been explored well, possibly to the point of ad nauseum. But it’s just one aspect of a multifaceted and contradictory character. And West’s Batman is arguably at the core of the character – he may be an orphan who dresses up like a bat to punch the crap out of criminals, but he is also grounded in a very clear sense of right and wrong, and there are lines he will not cross.

Naïve and oversimplistic? Probably. But why not? For my money, superhero stories don’t have to be “realistic” in order to be entertaining or meaningful. They also work as basic good vs evil stories where good generally wins, eventually – and does so on its own terms rather than stooping to the level of evil. And the “terms” can be generally defined as what we think of as ideals of morality, citizenship and justice – where crime never pays and the bad guys never get away with it, but ensuring that without breaking the confines of a fair and impartial justice system. The fact that the real justice system is neither fair nor impartial – to say nothing of the fact that vigilantism technically is by definition extrajudicial – is beside the point. Classic superheroes tended to operate according to the principles of that system regardless of whether the system itself did or not.

We need stories like that, just as we need stories that focus on what happens when the system fails us. Because I don’t think you can really appreciate the significance of the latter without appreciating the aspirations of the former.

Also, as Neil Gaiman intimated in a Riddler story, the former is just more fun. And it’s evident we’re starting to see a backlash at least in DC films that have gone for gritty realism vs Marvel’s lighter approach. I personally love the Nolan Batman films, but that was a specific cycle of films. There’s no need to make the whole universe like that. Anyway, you know you’ve gone too far with the Dark Knight angle when the Lego films are making fun of you.

I suppose some might point to Joel Schumacher’s Batman and Robin as proof that light-hearted cartoony Batman doesn’t work. I don’t think it’s a fair comparison, partly because Schumacher went against the expectations of franchise fans at the time who expected Tim Burton’s version, but also because the problem with Batman and Robin wasn’t the one-liners, overacting villains and cartoon sound effects – it was a bad story, too many supervillains, a very clumsy and forced attempt to shoehorn Batgirl into the franchise and Robin basically acting like a petulant jerk.

So, anyway, respect to Adam West for helping create a square, straight-edge Batman that we could look up to and yet not take too seriously, all at once.

Go West,

This is dF

Current Mood: awake
Current Location: Disco Bay
Current Music: DiCaprio, "I Went To The Mall Yesterday And Got Sick"
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Chris Cornell is gone.

And of course I have to blog about that because the very first time I heard Soundgarden … I wasn’t that impressed.

Not that I thought they sucked. Far from it. I just didn’t quite get what they were doing.

This was 100% my problem. I was writing album reviews for the college newspaper at the time, and I was very heavily into punk and underground music at the time. The way it worked was, the local mall record store would let me take a couple of new records home to listen to, and then I would choose which one I thought made enough of an impression (good or bad) to write about, then bring them back.

One week, one of the options was Soundgarden’s Loud Love. I forget what the other album was, but I wrote about it instead, because I could at least get a handle on it. I really didn’t know what to make of Soundgarden – they were long-haired guys with no shirts on and they sounded (to me) like a heavy Led Zeppelin tribute band. I suppose they didn’t fit within my narrow punk aesthetic so I kind of blew them off.

Less than a year later, some friends turned me on to Nirvana’s first album, Mudhoney and Mother Love Bone from someplace called Seattle. I liked them a lot. Then someone else reintroduced me to Loud Love again, and I gave it another chance and THEN it clicked. I got it. And I was both amazed at the music, at Cornell’s vocals, and at myself for being so thick as to not like it on first listen.

I tended to do this a lot when I was younger. (Heck, I probably still do it now.) There was a long list of bands I didn’t really “get” the first time I heard them, but give it a year and I’d hear them again and go, “Wow, this is great, what was I thinking?”

Anyway.

Here’s a true story: I saw Soundgarden live when they were promoting the Badmotorfinger album. My best friend and I drove from Clarksville, TN to Nashville to watch them open for Skid Row. The played for something like 40 minutes and absolutely blew the roof off the dump. We danced in the aisle and as soon as Soundgarden finished their set, we got out of the building before Skid Row could get anywhere near the stage.

It’s probably the only time in my life I ever paid full price for a concert ticket just to see the opening band.

Watch on YouTube

That’s Soundgarden, of course. As for Cornell himself, I admit I didn’t buy his solo stuff, but I did like the first Audioslave album – it was basically Rage Against The Machine with a new lead singer, but it blended perfectly.

Even his James Bond theme song was pretty decent. That was a surreal pop culture moment for me as well, having grown up with Bond films, where one of the big deals about any new film was who would they get to sing the theme song – at one time, it was a sort of a career signpost signaling you’d finally made it. That arguably stopped being true by the time The Living Daylights came out. Still, they didn’t give the job of singing the latest Bond theme song to just anyone. Anyway, Cornell wasn’t an obvious choice – if you were going to go with “former grunge singer does Bond theme” atall, I’d have thought Eddie Vedder would be yr go-to guy.

In any case, admit it – “You Know My Name” was arguably the best Bond song since Duran Duran’s “A View To A Kill”.

Anyway, he was one of the iconic singers of my college years, and I’m saddened and shocked to hear he’s gone so soon.

Say hello 2 heaven,

This is dF

Current Mood: awake
Current Location: Disco Bay
Current Music: See above
Crossposts: http://def-fr0g-42.livejournal.com/1311109.html

Haven’t done one of these for awhile, and it features questions I haven’t answered before, so why not?

Senior year of high school

The year: 1983

1. Did you know your spouse?
No.

2. Did you carpool to school?
If the school bus counts as carpooling, then yes.

3. What kind of car did you have?
I had no car. I occasionally borrowed my mom’s AMC Rambler station wagon with unreliable brakes and required a screwdriver to open the doors.

4. It's FRIDAY night football, were you there?
No. And why is Friday in all caps?

5. What kind of job did you have?
I didn’t. I was generally unemployable. I mostly mowed lawns for pocket money.

6. Were you a party animal?
No. I was never invited to parties, and probably wouldn’t have gone if I had been.

7. Were you in band, orchestra, or choir?
None of the above. I was in the Drama Club.

8. Were you a nerd?
Let’s just say I got beat up behind the portables a lot.

9. Did you get suspended or expelled?
No.

10. Can you sing the fight/school song?
I don’t remember what it was. I’m not 100% sure we even had one.

11. Where did you eat lunch?
The cafeteria.

12. What was your school mascot?
A commando.

13. If you could go back and do it again, would you?
Never.

14. Planning on going to your next high school reunion?
I haven't been to any of them, so why start now?

15. Are you still in contact with people from high school?
I’m in contact with a couple of people who I knew while I was in high school, but they didn't go to the same school as me.

16. Do you know where your high school sweetheart is today?
No idea.

17. What was your favorite subject?
Art.

18. Do you still have your High School Ring?
I never got one. That was for kids with money. Also, I’ve never been one for jewelry.

19. Do you still have your yearbook?
I don’t know. If I do, it’s in storage in my mom’s house somewhere, gathering dust, cobwebs and mold. I’m not in any hurry to dig for it.

School’s out completely,

This is dF

Current Location: Disco Bay
Current Music: Ambient cafe soundtrack
Crossposts: http://def-fr0g-42.livejournal.com/1303753.html

And now Carrie Fisher is gone.

And somehow this pic just seems appropriate.

I don’t know what I can add to everything else being said about her. Obviously she was part of my pop culture landscape with Star Wars – Leia was one of the first female characters I saw onscreen who wasn’t a frail damsel in distress. She was smart, tough and funny.

Fisher was also a good writer (I’ve only ever read Postcards From The Edge, but it’s a very funny book), and a funny person. I also loved the fact that she brought her dog Gary along to interviews.

It’s sad that she’s gone, but it’s good that she was here. Not only did she embody one of the great female icons of my generation, she also did a lot of good works offscreen by talking about her addiction and mental illness issues. (One of my family members is a recovering alcoholic who has also been diagnosed as bipolar, so I’m not a disinterested bystander in the that regard.)

In closing, I’ll honor her request to report that she died the way she wanted to go – drowned in moonlight and strangled to death by her own bra.

A princess in a world full of dragons,

This is dF

EDITED TO ADD [29 Dec]: And a day later, her mom Debbie Reynolds has also passed, because that's how 2016 rolls.

Current Mood: awake
Current Location: Tung Chung
Current Music: n/a
Crossposts: http://def-fr0g-42.livejournal.com/1277195.html

Greystoke Trading Company:Star Wars by George Lucas, 1977. Cover art by John Berkey.

I have loved this book cover since I was 12.

And it gets me to thinking about how I was impressed at the time that George Lucas wrote the novel version himself. One reason I remember this is because around the same time, Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters Of The Third Kind came out, and I had the novel version of that, too.

And of course I’m thinking, “Wow, so they both made films out of their own novels.”

Did I mention I was 12?

Eventually I learned of the concept of ghostwriters. But I didn't put much thought into the Lucas/Spielberg novels until, thanks to the internet, I found out that the Star Wars novel was ghostwritten by Alan Dean Foster.

Which is wild because Star Wars is what got me into reading SF novels, and I read a lot of Foster’s SF books in the 80s. And the book that actually got me started with Foster was Splinter Of The Mind’s Eye, which was written as a sequel to Star Wars EP 4 before The Empire Strikes Back came out. (Apparently Foster’s contract for the first book included a sequel regardless of how well the film did.)

Anyway, that explains why the Star Wars novel is actually pretty good as SF novels go, let alone novelizations of screenplays, which Foster has done a lot of in his career – I read pretty much all the ones he did in the 80s, as well as the ones he did for Star Trek: The Animated Series in the 70s.

As it turns out, the one big novelization project he didn't do at the time was Close Encounters – that was done by Leslie Elson Waller.

It’s interesting that someone made the decision in both cases to credit the books solely to the writer/directors of those films. I’m not aware that this was done previously (giving a film director sole credit for the ghostwritten novelization), and I don’t think it’s been done since. And I’ve no idea why it was done for those two specific films – maybe because they were massively successful films that also happened to be auteur-driven?

Whatever the reason was, it’s probably slightly dishonest, but Foster has said in interviews he didn’t mind Lucas getting the credit for the novel since the basic story and characters were his anyway. And ghostwriting is basically designed for the purpose of letting someone take credit for someone else’s work (or to keep a franchise going). And it’s not all that bad when the person taking credit did at least come up with the ideas and characters and the storyline.

I’ll take that over strange projects like, say, those tie-in novels for the TV show Castle (the one where the murder-mystery novelist helps a sexy lady cop solve cases). If you don’t know, part of the promotion for that show includes actual mystery novels ghostwritten under the name Richard Castle. He has his own Amazon page and everything.

It may be the first time a mystery series has been credited to a fictional TV character. Anyway, it annoys me. Of course I’m not a fan of the show, so I would say that. But who would want to read a book by someone who only exists in a TV show?

Then again, Franklin W Dixon and Caroline Keene – the authors of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries, respectively – didn’t exist either. So who am I to be critical?

Ghostwritten,

This is dF

Current Mood: awake
Current Location: Causeway Bay
Current Music: Meco, "The Empire Strikes Back"
Crossposts: http://def-fr0g-42.livejournal.com/1196562.html

ITEM: Playboy magazine will stop publishing pictures of nude ladies.

It will still publish sexy pics, but they’ll be more the kind of stuff you find in FHM, Esquire or Loaded – only, you know, classy.

The reasons are simple enough: (1) thanks to the interpr0nwebs (or even just Tumblr), you can see nude ladies anywhere, and see them doing all kinds of things they never did in Playboy, and (2) Playboy’s circulation is down so much that it doesn’t have much to lose by dropping the nudity.

Arguably they should have done it a long time ago. As both a champion of First Amendment issues (both in terms of nude pics and in-depth articles addressing censorship issues) and an up-market single man’s lifestyle magazine, Playboy is not the relevant pop-culture force it once was – and it hasn’t been for a long time.

Part of that is because its reputation and editorial direction was built around an affluent bachelor lifestyle/philosophy – especially in regards to attitudes towards women – that has been outdated more or less since Reagan left office. Playboy’s mission statement played well in the 1950s and 1960s, but by the 80s it mainly got by via college kids and yuppies, as well as serving as a foil to the Moral Majority (or at least a classier foil than Hustler). To its credit, Playboy did try to evolve with the times, but they never really succeeded.

And while tastes may vary, IMO Playboy’s pictorials haven’t been sexy since 1982. They have tried to maintain a level of relative classiness, but it’s hard to be classy when the models look like shiny plasticine Photoshop mannequins. Feminists have always taken Playboy to task (and not always unfairly) for treating women as unrealistic fun-loving sex objects, but this actually became true aesthetically as well as philosophically.

I will say that while “I only read Playboy for the articles” is one of the great old jokes (and The Daily Beast’s Emily Shire will go out of her way to remind everyone that no one ever read them because Playboy is spank-bank material and nothing else), Playboy did put a lot of effort into the non-pictorial content. It published fiction from some of the top writers of the time, and the interviews were considered to be some of the most in-depth and insightful to be found anywhere. Even their stereo reviews were taken seriously. Sure, no one read Playboy just for the articles ever, but that’s not to say they didn’t read the articles, or that the articles weren’t worth reading.

So if that’s what they’re going to trade on now, it’s good that they’ll focus on that, though whether it will save the brand, I don’t know. And I confess, I don’t care that much.

As for the nudity, some people have waxed nostalgic about how Playboy was practically a rite of passage for guys my age – you never forget the first time you found yr dad/uncle’s secret stash and found out what ladies look like with their clothes off, etc. For me personally, there was no dad-stash. My first skin mag was either Penthouse or Oui (there was a lot of soft-focus, I remember that), and I found it whilst dumpster-diving. I was 13. It had an effect – it was definitely a step up from the lingerie section of the Sears catalog.

Interestingly, the Big Score was acquired during a youth church retreat. I was 17 by then, and we went camping by a river on the property of someone one of the advisors knew. The property included a cabin we were allowed to access, and inside the cabin someone discovered a crate full of Playboys.

Hallelujah, etc.

I guess it’s true that we’ve long since passed the age when young heterosexual men in puberty have their first Playboy moment on the path to sexual discovery. These days it’s probably “my first Tumblr account”, or “The first day I got a Pornhub link in my search results”. It’s not really the same. At least with Playboy you got some decent literature and journalism to go with it.

Anyway, I do think Hugh Hefner deserves credit for shaking up the establishment and paving the way for America’s sexual liberation. But we should also probably admit that the Playboy clubs with cocktail waitresses dressed as bunnies were just silly.

BONUS TRACK: One interesting by-product of the Playboy legacy was Playboy After Dark, a TV show that ran from 1969 to 1970. There was no nudity in it – it was basically a televised posh cocktail party at Hef’s place with some surprisingly decent musical guests that you don’t normally see playing at posh cocktail parties.

Like Peter-Green era Fleetwood Mac.

"Fleetwood Mac - "Rattlesnake Shake" - Playboy After Dark" (Watch on YouTube)

All that AND Arte Johnson drunk on a pool table.

No photographs,

This is dF

Current Mood: nostalgic
Current Location: Causeway Bay
Current Music: See above
Crossposts: http://def-fr0g-42.livejournal.com/1190953.html

The Muppets returned to the televisions this week.

I didn’t watch it, because I don’t live in the USA. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned as an American citizen, it’s this: just because you haven't actually seen a TV show or a film doesn’t mean you can’t criticize the content.

Sure. That’s what Franklin Graham and One Million Moms do.

Apparently they’re expecting lots of sex, drugs and full frontal nudity. I have a feeling it’s going to fall short of that mark – after all, this is ABC, not HBO.

On the other hand, if the promo material is anything to go by (and that is what these people are going by), The Muppets ain’t exactly a kids show, either. Even the producers have promoted it as a more “adult” show, which means edgy realism humor, uncomfortable relationship situations, double entendres and Grindr jokes, evidently.

None of which is a reason for ABC to cancel the show as Graham and 1MM are demanding. They generally demand the same of 85% of any given prime-time line-up, so it’s hard to take them seriously even before you factor in the fact they haven’t even watched the shows they want taken off the air.

Probably a more pertinent question is: is this really the Muppet show we want? (And by “we” I mean “me”, of course.)

Some of the more sober commentary I’ve read suggests that while the new show is clever and probably what the franchise needs to succeed in 2015, fans of the original show may find it jarring, if not sacrilege, or at least depressing.

For myself, I can tell you from the promo material that I’m not that enthralled with the new direction for a couple of reasons.

1. The mockumentary concept has been done to death (and just because they’re mocking the mocumentary concept doesn’t mean we need more of it). Even the idea of a mockumentary of a late night TV show isn't that original – The Larry Sanders Show covered this ground in the early 90s.

2. I don’t really want a Muppet show that goes for edgy realism or delves into their personal relationships. The Kermit/Miss Piggy angle of the original show was fun and made sense because it played to Piggy’s stage-diva character. Turning it into an ugly public tabloid drama with new girlfriend/ex-girlfriend tension doesn’t really entertain me or make me laugh.

Maybe all of this gels in the current jaded TV landscape. I don’t really watch much TV anyway, so that’s at least one reason for the disconnect here, I admit. Maybe Muppet fans who do watch lots of TV will get more out of the new show, or see the humor in it. Or maybe they’re just glad that the Muppets will be relevant to new generations of fans.

The thing is, they’re not the same Muppets I grew up with. The same characters, yes – but portrayed and presented in a much different way. Let me put it this way: as far as I know, the Muppets were always an all-ages proposition – that doesn’t mean it was just for kids, but that everyone who watched would get something out of it. Making it more “adult” alters that equation. Which might be fine except that the Muppets have always been marketed as being appropriate for kids. To suddenly bump them up to PG levels is inevitably going to confuse people.

It’s also fair to ask: is this what Jim Henson would have wanted? Lisa Henson thinks so, at least in terms of the Muppets being back on prime time and being popular again. But while Jim Henson always had something of a subversive streak to his work, he also understood the importance of subtlety.

Anyway, I'll be the first to admit my reservations don’t mean anything – as I say, I haven't seen the show, so I’m just kind of riffing and dithering here via a promo and second-hand info. And to be clear: even if it’s as bad as I imagine, I wouldn’t support a boycott like what Graham and 1MM are demanding.

Also, it’s not fair to judge a whole show on one episode. By some accounts, Episode 2 is a lot better than the premiere. So it could still grow into something that’s worthy of the Muppet legacy.

In any case, it does sound like one of those cases where parents should be given fair warning. If you already let yr kids watch (say) South Park, it’s probably a non-issue. If you keep them at the level of Pixar films or Frozen, you might want to dial up some parental supervision. Maybe a lot of the “adult” stuff will fly right over their little heads and they’ll just laugh at the silly bits. Still, I have my misgivings.

This is because I am old and decrepit, I know. Fair enough. I can’t say this is the Muppet show we need, but given the state of TV in 2015 – and the general culture of Fear, Hate and Cynicism that pretty much defines social media – maybe it’s the Muppet show we deserve.

It’s not easy being green,

This is dF

Current Mood: awake
Current Location: Causeway Bay
Current Music: Algiers, "Claudette"
Crossposts: http://def-fr0g-42.livejournal.com/1188307.html

[Via Matt Fraction]

There’s something marvelous about this. I gather in Old Days Of Televisions the networks would publish an industry programming report and hire an artist to do some cover art for one of the hot new shows that looked hip in a New Yorker/Village Voice kinda way rather than actually representing the show’s look.

Because there’s absolutely nothing here that gives you an idea of what The Monkees show would be like – apart maybe from “it’s about four guys in a rock group”, but that’s like promoting a show like Knight Rider with a cartoon of a guy driving a car. I mean, the guys in this picture could be the Beatles. Or the dozens of Beatles clones that emerged around that time.

Maybe that’s the whole point. It’s like if you took electromagnetic samples of Mickey, Davy, Mike and Peter’s souls and fed the data into a radioactive heat projector and seared the resulting image onto a wall, the very essence of the show is revealed: “Shameless Beatles Cash-In”.

Or something.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I love The Monkees – the show and the band. I don’t care what that does to my alt.cred.

Here we come,

This is dF

Current Mood: awake
Current Location: Causeway Bay
Current Music: Dave Cloud and the Gospel Of Power, "400 Girls"
Crossposts: http://def-fr0g-42.livejournal.com/1185926.html

If you’ve been following this series, by now you’ve noticed the pattern and the general timeframe involved, and naturally yr starting to wonder:

“Where’s the Kiss records? Surely you have some?”

Fair question. And yes, though actually I wasn’t all that big on Kiss at the time. They were arguably the most popular rock band in my junior high school, with the exception of Lynyrd Skynyrd. (And I’ll admit, it was only much later that I appreciated the irony of my male 8th Grade classmates beating up kids for being [allegedly] queer whilst their favorite band was four guys in make-up, leather, high heels and fishnet stockings.)

Anyway, I liked what songs I heard, and I enjoyed their TV special and that Phantom Of The Park thing, but I wasn’t trying to paint my face like them or anything.

And given the nature of many of the other songs in this series, I guess it says a lot that the one Kiss 45 I bought was the disco cash-in.

"KISS - I Was Made For Lovin' You [Official Music Video]" (Watch on YouTube)

That said, I didn’t really think of it as a disco song. Probably because of all the guitars.

In my defense, I did end up spending more time listening to the more hard-rockin’ B-side.

"Kiss - Hard Times (with lyrics)" (Watch on YouTube)

I think the B-side holds up better, overall.

FUN FACT #1: Looking these songs, I learned for the first time that Peter Criss didn’t play drums on these songs. They used a session guy – Anton Fig, a.k.a. the drummer in David Letterman’s band.

FUN FACT #2: I did have one other Kiss song I listened to a lot.

"Kiss - Calling Dr. Love" (Watch on YouTube)

This is probably my favorite Kiss song. But I had it on a Ronco comp, not on 45, so it doesn’t count for this series.

The first step of the cure,

This is dF

Current Mood: awake
Current Location: Causeway Bay
Current Music: See above
Crossposts: http://def-fr0g-42.livejournal.com/1183113.html

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May 2025

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DR SEUSS AND THE LOOSE GOOSE IN MY CABOOSE
IF YOU LIKED THE SINGLE, YOU’LL LOVE THE ALBUM ...
YOU GOTTA HEAR THIS: 20 ALBUMS YOU MAYBE HAVEN’T HEARD BUT TOTALLY SHOULD
THIS IS A FATHER’S DAY POST ... WITH GUITAAAAAAAAAAAAAUR!
BAD FOR GOOD: 10 GOOD WORST ALBUMS BY GREAT BANDS
AND IF I REALLY WANTED TO LEARN SOMETHING I’D LISTEN TO MORE DEVO
THERE’S SUPPOSED TO BE A GUITAR SOLO HERE …
MTV STAY OFF THE AIR
THE COMEDY OF FISH AND MEDIEVAL AGRARIAN HISTORY
A FAREWELL TO KINGS
dEFROG ON 45 #82: DRIVING AWAY WITH THE DIM LIGHTS ON
BATMAN IS DEAD, LONG LIVE THE BATMAN
HIS LOVE WAS LOUD
THE MEME INTERVIEWS (HIGH SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL EDITION)
REBEL GIRL
GEORGE LUCAS IS NOT A NOVELIST AND OTHER REVELATIONS
NOW GUYS REALLY WILL READ PLAYBOY JUST FOR THE ARTICLES
KERMIT THE FROG IS WEARING NO PANTS: FILM AT 11
HEY HEY WE’RE AN ARTIST’S ALTERNATIVE INTERPRETATION OF THE MONKEES
dEFROG ON 45 #78: EVERYDAY LIFE IN THE CITAAAAAAYYY!

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Entries tagged with teenage kicks

DR SEUSS AND THE LOOSE GOOSE IN MY CABOOSE

IF YOU LIKED THE SINGLE, YOU’LL LOVE THE ALBUM ...

YOU GOTTA HEAR THIS: 20 ALBUMS YOU MAYBE HAVEN’T HEARD BUT TOTALLY SHOULD

THIS IS A FATHER’S DAY POST ... WITH GUITAAAAAAAAAAAAAUR!

BAD FOR GOOD: 10 GOOD WORST ALBUMS BY GREAT BANDS

AND IF I REALLY WANTED TO LEARN SOMETHING I’D LISTEN TO MORE DEVO

THERE’S SUPPOSED TO BE A GUITAR SOLO HERE …

MTV STAY OFF THE AIR

THE COMEDY OF FISH AND MEDIEVAL AGRARIAN HISTORY

A FAREWELL TO KINGS

dEFROG ON 45 #82: DRIVING AWAY WITH THE DIM LIGHTS ON

BATMAN IS DEAD, LONG LIVE THE BATMAN

HIS LOVE WAS LOUD

THE MEME INTERVIEWS (HIGH SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL EDITION)

REBEL GIRL

GEORGE LUCAS IS NOT A NOVELIST AND OTHER REVELATIONS

NOW GUYS REALLY WILL READ PLAYBOY JUST FOR THE ARTICLES

KERMIT THE FROG IS WEARING NO PANTS: FILM AT 11

HEY HEY WE’RE AN ARTIST’S ALTERNATIVE INTERPRETATION OF THE MONKEES

dEFROG ON 45 #78: EVERYDAY LIFE IN THE CITAAAAAAYYY!

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