One Stupid Mop

We like music. You should too.

The Misfits - Children in Heat

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A kid in middle school today would never believe it, but there was a time when it was actually offensive to say something, well, offensive on a record.

The Misfits were only around from '77 to '83, and that was a mere 21 years after half the country lost its mind over a white kid who ripped off blues artists for moving his hips from side to side while doing it. Sure, they'd been through the 60s by then, but people were still plenty uptight."Fuck" had only made it in the Oxford dictionary 5 years before the band got together (despite having been around at least 500), and only 12 years had passed since they tried to hang Ken Tynan for saying the same on the BBC.

They were never the first to come out and say things to upset others' delicate sensibilities, but they were definitely on the front end of doing it so fluidly. Talk about the president's skull splattered all over a Texas street while his wife drinks semen? Yeah, they can do that - and it'll be damn catchy too.

For "Children in Heat," they conjure up the most taboo of topics for tight-assed society: the fact that kids are having sex. Not just that, but your kids are also out-of-control lunatic street-urchins, twisted and diseased so that their piss turns to blood. Good thing they weren't very popular, or the PTA would have had their heads on a pike.

Despite the fact that the band members hated each other's guts, and they put together the six years of the most puerile, debased and sometimes just plain disgusting thematic content ever set to music, there was something special there. They made it fun to listen to.

It's like the great wine steward who's asked what the world's best bottle is: "The label is meaningless. The best wine in the world is the one you like to drink."

The Hold Steady - Cattle And The Creeping Things

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All the End of the Decade lists are pointing to either Almost Killed Me or Boys and Girls in America as The Hold Steady's contribution of their albums to the last 10 years. I say that Separation Sunday was head and shoulders better, even if all you've got is the first three tracks ("Hornets! Hornets!," "Cattle and The Creeping Things," and "Your Little Hoodrat Friend.").

Boys and Girls in America was what Hold Steady frontman and songwriter Craig Finn had seen and felt, as the crowds coming to his shows got huge and the record was buzzed massively. It's a real feeling. But Separation Sunday was balls to the wall, everything he had, everything we've all seen down in the dirt. It's the ups and downs of life to a soundtrack that thoroughly kicks the listeners ass (a sentiment that, to be fair, is true of every one of the albums from The Hold Steady).

Somewhere along the way, people started making Springsteen comparisons. Maybe because the Hold Steady jams the way they say the E Street Band used to. Aside from that - which may or may not be true - I don't see the comparison because where Springsteen is putting it on for whatever the common man is supposed to be, Finn is singing about the underbelly of the teen years and early 20s and probably beyond. You know, the ones that everybody pines for. The ones that so-called adults like to act like they've forgotten about, even as they try desperately to reclaim them.

I dug the The Hold Steady at half Finn's age because he sings ironically about smoking pot and soaking up rock and roll and weaves bible stories into modern tales of suburban growing up. "I always like the guy at door," Finn sings, "cause he always knows what you came to his house for." Separation Sunday is full of wordy anthems with lines like that from start to finish. Words that everyone from the 70s on know about. Yeah, Finn "can't stand it when the banging stops," and neither can we.

But by the time The Hold Steady got to Boys and Girls in America, one of the best albums of the decade for sure, for a couple years he'd been watching 20-year-olds and 40-year-olds that hate each other now get down together to jams about stuff one is living and one used to live but doesn't remember how to get back to. Boys and Girls in America is about both of them. Separation Sunday, among other things, is about the times that both love and hate and never want to give up, and that alone makes it a better album.

(In reality, all the band's albums do this. My preference has more to do with bitterness that Separation Sunday is getting no attention due either to these bloggers "their first album was the best" or "thier biggest album is the best" sentiments. In reality, YOU should download all of them.)

Bad Religion - Supersonic

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Despite the song posted above, I've had one of the verses from "Materialist" in my head for several weeks now.* Not sure why - I do occasionally think about concepts bigger than I - but it made me pull out BR's 12th, The Process Of Belief. Or, as I like to call it, their comeback album.

Decent as the preceding two albums may be (No Substance and The New America), drummer Bobby Schayer's career-ending shoulder injury is one of two things that contributes to The Process of Belief working as well as it does. New drummer Brooks Wakerman returned the speed and pounding to the original melodic hardcore punk rockers, and brought a sense of youth to a clearly greying but no less intense rhythm and vocal section.

The other is the full reunion of the Greg Graffin-Brett Gurewitz writing team. Graffin did more than well on the hugely underrated The Gray Race, but two albums that followed made one wonder if the band was on its last legs.

Previous albums, and I do mean all of them, balance a mix of introspection and worldly vague political discourse. Sometimes this was something a little more direct, as on "Operation Rescue," "American Jesus," "Fertile Crescent," or even this album's "Kyoto Now," but mostly the scientific and societal statements could stand separate from current events. Almost entirely, though, The Process of Belief is very much a band taking a look at itself.

Both Graffin and Gurewitz spend the album lyrically examining themselves from a religious standpoint, or under the guise of self-perceived failure, or even from age, as I'm pretty sure Graffin is doing on "Supersonic." 

The song finds Graffin opening the album wondering if the world is passing him by, and that the solution is to simply speed up. For me then, at 20, as it does now, the "Supersonic" is a mantra. To a certain extent, I am a careerist workaholic and always have been. I have long had some sort of direction and, when I'm at my best, speed forward with a smooth burn.

Interestingly, the song kicks off an album proving the same to be true of Bad Religion. 

*The verse in my head: "The process of belief is an elixir when you're weak/I must confess at times I indulge it on the sneak/But generally my outlook's not so bleak." 

David Bowie - Lady Stardust

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Wednesday morning, I went into surgery to have an infection drained - a somewhat solo mission if ever there has been one - a little freaked out but, thankfully, significantly drugged up. Heh, as if there's any other way to go into surgery.

When I woke up, after asking what is apparently a standard question - When do we get started? - the band in my head slammed into "Lady Stardust." I didn't hum it, or try to remember the words. I heard the song. 

"And he was all right/The band was altogether/Yes he was alright/The song went on forever/Yes, he was awful nice/Really quite out of sight..."

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust being the first Bowie album to obsess me, over and over, as I imagine it has millions of others, it's not surprising that the song popped into my head at all. 

The song is about Ziggy hitting the big time. This is when he hits the stage and the audience gets it, despite his outlandishness and own brand of art - his ascension. The music is a bit dreamy and comforting, a scene fit for the high, good times of that part of the album and for the high, weird times of coming out of surgery.

The night before, I had begged my wife to bring my iPod to the hospital when she came by. I threw it on the nightstand and didn't touch it, at least partially because I assumed I'd need a full charge on it the next day. I also had a feeling that something would pop into my head because it always does.

When I came out of surgery, after the line of visitors ended and the nurses gave me the strongest of painkillers I'd have during my stay, when I knew I wouldn't pass out, I lunged for the iPod and spun immediately to Bowie's name, that album and "Lady Stardust." I listened to it twice - it was the first sound I wanted to pump through the headphones into my drug-rocked brain - and then again when I listened through to the entire album.

Whatever my body needed that brought that song to me, in a moment of being swirlingly lost, it must have found it. I've listened to the song at least a dozen more times since Wednesday trying to figure it out and what I keep coming back to is that there is something to be said for stepping out from behind the curtain and getting (back) on stage.

I'm pretty sure I can live with that. 

The Dead Weather - So Far From Your Weapon

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By now, everybody has heard of The Dead Weather: Jack White, Alison Mosshart from The Kills, Jack Lawrence from The Raconteurs and Dean Fertita from Queens of the Stone Age. 

The album is great and hasn't left my iPod since it leaked. But sitting in the car, outside a store, watching trees and bushes whip around, something about this sinister movie-soundtrack-sounding track caught me. 

The fact is, there's not much menace in any of White's other bands. There's lots of other things, but little if any menace. The heavy menace of "So Far From Your Weapon" has had this song on repeat for me for days now.

Dr. Octagon - Earth People

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I've always wondered how Kool Keith felt about the fact that so many more people like his music when it's in character of someone who camped out under a family of bats after Thanksgiving feast.

Probably how any artist feels when people say they like their work: pretty damn good.

Dr. Octagon has always been one of my favorite forces in the hip-hop/rap game. In a market flooded with self-aggrandizing jackasses, nothing is ever taken seriously when he comes into the picture. Granted, it's hard to take things seriously when you're talking to a time-traveling gynecologist from Jupiter that has a pink fro, yet it's simpler than not groaning at the latest "my net monetary worth greatly exceeds that of many with similar demographic characteristics" song every five seconds - as that seems to be their current rate of creation.

It's not all just space doo-doo pistols, either. With Dan the Automator and DJ Qbert, Keith manages to produce an album thats wildly funny and wildly good at the same time.

 
So much of it is simply the freedom that "underground" music provides (presented in quotes because if it were truly underground, no one would have heard it). The ability to ignore marketability is often the very thing that creates something easy to market, and not thinking about how a record will sell until you actually start selling it is exactly what the creative process needs to function.