Hello and welcome to week two of this project where I get to spew opinions into the void, just in case the void is interested in hearing some new music. If you love a song, or the playlist, or hate it, or maybe have a suggestion for a song to include next time, or even an idea for a general theme (basically, anything to say at all save hate speech and so on) please feel welcome to drop a comment and/or a like. So, with that said, let’s get to it.
Happy Wasteland Day, by Open Mike Eagle: The fact that Open Mike Eagle gets only 172,000 monthly listeners on Spotify is an upsetting revelation. The album this track is off of, Brick Body Kids Still Daydream (a concept album about the demolishing of a housing project in Chicago), garnered a fair amount of attention critically when it was released, making it onto more than a couple ‘top albums of the year’ lists in 2017. The production on his songs is consistently interesting and sonically diverse, and his lyrics are excellent both in content and delivery. This song’s inclusion in the list this week is partially to refocus on a broader issue- the quarantine, the self-isolation, the absurd fight against science and reason, and the lack of any semblance of mourning from our President in regards to the loss of life- are all just symptoms of a far deeper problem. “When the king is a garbage person” has been the reality of our situation for years now, and the pleading for “one day without violence, one day without fear” has been a reality, particularly for the more socioeconomically beleaguered, for the entire span of recent memory (and, arguably, all the length of our country’s history). Ironically, the current crisis that sits on our collective psyche has answered, at least partially, Open Mike’s requests- this March was the first in eighteen years to not have a single school shooting. All it took was for all the schools to be closed first.
Prisencolinensinainciusol, by Adriano Celentano: “What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.” This song is brilliant, exploring the concept of communication barriers, of hearing without comprehension, through the use of a linguistic uncanny valley. The entire song is made to sound like it is spoken in English, as American rock and pop music had very been influential on the Italian artist Adriano Celentano. That being said, save the phrase “all right,” the entire song is nothing more than a pastiche of American sounds and cadences delivered with such apparent authenticity that your brain struggles to piece the words that aren’t actually there together.
SPRORGNSM, by Superorganism: I kind of love this song simply because, when recommending it to others or telling them the song that is playing, I get to say the phrase “oh this is the song SPRORGNSM of the album Superorganism. By the band Superorganism.” Of course, the appeal goes far deeper than that. This song, and the album as a whole, is fantastically produced, incredibly layered and sonically diverse and engaging. The music itself is an extension of the core message of this song (which, for the sake of argument, I will take to be a sort of manifesto for the band as a whole) with barnyard animal sounds, detuned and distorted guitars (distorted in the sense of an Escher clock more than in the sense of a rock guitar), a voice speaking like a Wikipedia entry gaining sentience, and a thousand other incidental noises all combining into a musical superorganism. The song seems almost intentionally reminiscent of Marshall McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Massage,” both in its message of joining into a superorganism through our new technologies- or, as McLuhan put it, “Electric technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement”- and in the production sensibilities as a whole, taking McLuhan’s belief that “When two seemingly disparate elements are imaginatively poised, put in apposition in new and unique ways, startling discoveries often result,” and running with it.
Girl!, by Terror Pigeon: This a sweet song about being in love. The music flows fantastically, from the subdued opening bearing the feeling of an intimate moment of conversation that swells into a loud, bold string of declarations of love that quickens like a lover’s heartbeat when they first touch their crush's hand. Plus, hey, the song is pretty catchy. I like it, and more people should listen to it, and here it is, on this list.
Germ Free Adolescents, by X-Ray Spex: It’s almost May 2020. If you are reading this when it comes out, or close to it, you know full well why this song would be on my mind. If you are reading this in the future, hello, hi, thanks for reading this, and for your aided comprehension, I’ll let you know that there’s a bit of a pandemic on at the moment. Poly Styrene’s lyrics and vocals on this track carry a tone of detachment and melancholy that feel more than moderately prescient in today’s times. X-Ray Spex were one of the original wave of the British punk scene, finding themselves in the company of bands such as Joy Division, the Smiths, the Slits, the Clash, and more, all united by the fact that they started a band after seeing the Sex Pistols live.
John Wayne Was a Nazi, by MDC: This song exists in my mind as the Platonic ideal of a punk song. It is fast, angry, political, hyperbolic, irreverent, and bursting at the seams with raw energy. The opening bass line is so immediately recognizable and unforgettable that, I must admit, it is one of the primary reasons I took up playing bass myself. This song is illustrative of the weird cultural divide I bounced on either side of in my childhood, with my grandparents and great grandparents (whom I spent a lot of time around) being very much the country and western type (musically, aesthetically, even hobby-wise) to the point that my great grandparents had a framed photo of John Wayne in their home, while my parents brought me up in such a way that it produced the vocally communist hipster you see today. I grew up loving country music and watching westerns and riding horses and so on, which if anything added a bit more impish delight at the attack at a western idol whenever I heard Dave Dictor’s vocals hitting the perfect tone to deliver the best line in all of punk: “Well John, we ain’t got no regrets/ as long as you died a long and painful death.”
Festival Song, by Jeff Rosenstock: I had never heard of this song, or this artist, until last week. The comedian James Acaster (best known for the meme of him on Great British Baking show saying “Started making it. Had a breakdown. Bon appetite”) was recommended to me by a friend two years ago, and has since become one of my favorite comedians. Recently, while going down the YouTube rabbit hole for what must have been at least three hours, I discovered that he had just recently released a book. As a bookish person in general, I was already intrigued. Upon discovering that it was about music (namely, how 2016 was the best year for music ever), and how he got very into listening to music during a protracted emotional breakdown, well, you can likely imagine how that was clearly a must-buy in my mind. That book, “Perfect Sound Whatever,” (which I bought used online (from not-Amazon because I don’t really want to add another cent to Papa Bezos’s pockets whenever I can avoid it) turned out to be signed, which is really cool) takes its name from the last song on the album this song is off of, called Worry. I checked out the album, as it was the first one mentioned in the preface of the book, and I was immediately hooked. Once I hit this song, which is only the third one on the album, it was hard for me to actually listen to the rest of the album because I just kept restarting this one; a conservative estimate of how many times I’ve listened to this song in just this one week is still well past twenty. The lyrics are fantastic, the song is fantastic, listen to it.
And there we have it, week two out and written up. You can find this playlist on Spotify and Apple. Once again, please like and drop a comment if you want, share this around if you want to help feed my malnourished self-esteem, and check out the rest of this site for new articles and other stuff of interest that will be coming out in the near future. See you next week.
Thank you for your time.
