HEAVY TUNES: Records I Listened to The Last Couple Days, as of June 26, 2020

June 21

1. Deltron 3030, Event 2
2. Minutemen, Introducing the Minutemen
3. Bob Dylan, Bringing It All Back Home
4. Phoebe Bridgers, Stranger in the Alps
5. Roger Manning, Roger Manning 2

I bought the Roger Manning album in maybe 244, at Green Noise Records in Portland—same day I bought Situationist Comedy, if I remember right—and have always liked it a lot. I think it's a secret precursor to the Mountain Goats, with percussive abused acoustic guitar and a high voice keening a lot of syllables, but I've never seen it cited as an influence.

Today, these lyrics from 1992 seem as prescient and depressingly still relevant as the scene from Do the Right Thing where a cop kills a Black man with a choke hold and a neighborhood responds by chanting the names of other victims of police violence.

walk the pigs once around the park
they're looking for a fight
don't give it to 'em
don't give 'em anything they want
no more donuts, no more pizza
pigs out of odessa
get your asses off the green grass
and while you're at it
eat all of that horseshit

fuck you have a nice day
fuck you have a nice day
fuck you have a nice day
fuck you

and while you're at
quit your stupid wasteful job
so we can hire back some teachers
and feed old folks in the bronx
and keep the pools open
and keep recycling
and all that shit that's being thrown away
so we pay
you to sit on your
stupid
fascist blue butt
in the park
rehearsing for bigger riots to come
in which you'll get your asses kicked severely
...
fuck you have a nice day
fuck you have a nice day
fuck you have a nice day
fuck the pba

June 22

1. The Paranoid Style, Rolling Disclosure
2. Funkadelic, Funkadelic
3. Wand, Plum
   Another one I listened to a LOT last year.
4. Destroy Boys, Sorry, Mom
   There are people out there still trying to come up with good song titles after Destroy Boys called a song "I Threw Glass At My Friend's Eyes And Now I'm On Probation".
5. Kowloon Walled City, Grievances
6. A Giant Dog, Pile
7. fIREHOSE, flyin' the flannel

June 24

No entry today, as I killed my pen—Bic Crystal, natch—and had to mourn.

June 25

1. Ted Leo, The Brutalist Bricks
2. Hot Snakes, Audit In Progress
3. Future of the Left, The Plot Against Common Sense
4. Solar Halos, Coiled Light
5. Deltron 3030, Event 2
6. El-P, Cancer 4 Cure
7. Windhand, Eternal Return
8. Captain Beyond, Captain Beyond

I don't read a lot about music anymore, but I was really enjoying Event 2, so I thought I'd look up its reviews. I saw one that said, in part, "this hip-hop concept album has bad skits and a plot that is obscure and hard to follow", which I found deeply notable, as it seemed to identify a record using genre descriptors, and then be disappointed when the features of the genre—dumb plot on a concept album, bad skits on a hip-hop record—actually showed up on the record. But whatever: bad skits are bad skits, and can be called out, and it's true that Event 2 is maybe a little shaggy, story-wise. The review also claimed, though, that the song "Nobody Can" was unclear. To be clear: the album is about music saving the world, and the chorus is "Deltron is our hero, if he can't do it nobody can". This ... doesn't seem that complicated. But, hey, nobody asks ME to review records, so what the fuck do I know about anything.

June 26 (apparently at some point today it became 1996?)

1. Russian Circles, Blood Year
2. The Paranoid Style, Rock and Roll Just Can't Recall
3. Alice Donut, Mule
4. Sonic Youth, Washing Machine
5. Radiohead, OK Computer
6. Sneaker Pimps, Becoming X

Fat's HEAVY TUNES of the Year 2016

Introductionalizing Maunderings

Just in time for the year to be more than half over, it's the latest installment of of my yearly roundup of HEAVY TUNES. (Sorry so late: right when I would normally have typed this up, I broke my hand. As my hand was healing, I changed jobs. Enough excuses.)

If I'm honest, the song of the year was a toss-up between Roundabout and Starship Trooper. I spent a lot of time this year defaulting to Pandora and that meant I spent a lot of time this year defaulting to the "Classic Prog Radio" station I thought was a joke at first. Anyway, I spent the bulk of my year humming to myself IN AND AROUND THE LAKE (bawmp bawnp bawmp baaawmp) MOUNTAINS COME OUT OF THE SKY -- AND THEY STAND THERE! (I spent roughly an equal amount of time doing grooving chair-dances to the "Wurm" section of Starship Trooper. It's a very groovy section.)

Also worth noting is that I listen to a LOT of podcasts. More accurately, I listen a lot to a couple podcasts, meaning that I have heard the theme songs to The Flop House and The Best Show more times the last few years than I've heard probably any other songs over that time.

Also powerful that I would otherwise have forgotten: Dio. Also also: Diamonds and Rust. Also also also: Patti Smith doing Bob Dylan (and then writing about it.)

That's what was clear from looking back at the year from here in the middle of December (when I drafted this). Also clear: I listened to very, very, very little new music in 2016.

The Awards

Newer-music highlight was absolutely the four-song set Andrew Cashen and Sabrina Ellis played on The Best Show, introducing me to the undisputed Song of the Summer 2016: "Too Much Makeup". I mentioned this amazing set once before, and hinted at their songs' power elsewhere and I recommend you check it out.

The Album of the Year was, of course, Emma Ruth Rundle's excellent Marked for Death.

The Song of the Year 2016 came from previous HEAVY TUNES of the Year provider B.D.s, who you may remember as the Bad Daddies. Their demo was brilliant: Camille's vocals were more scathing than ever, also prettier; Matt's guitar was noisier and racketyier than ever, also also prettier. And nothing they did on their demo was better than "How Do You Like Your Coffee"—great melodies, huge fuzz, tumbling anarchs of pure noise.

The Year

Crucially, 2016 began with and was saturated by a great deal of David Bowie. I never really got to Blackstar; The Next Day, somehow, made incredible sense all year long, though it was often too intense for me to turn to often. Yet another reason to think Spotify sucks: The Next Day ain't on there.

Other than Bowie, most of my year was older stuff I've talked about before: Windhand, Okkervil River, Future of the Left. Records I really enjoyed this year that I hadn't really before included Richard / Linda Thompson's I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight, Anthrax, Spreading the Disease, and Vince Staples, particularly Summertime '06 and Prima Donna.

Nobody gave me anything free this year.

Two Problems with Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize for Literature

1. The elevation and sanctification of the strange and pernicious middlebrow belief that "songwriting" is essentially and importantly the writing of lyrics, or, to put it slightly differently, that the important and meaningful parts of songs are their words. The best way to dispel this one is to dive into this cover of "Outlaw Blues" by Thin White Rope, in which the guitar lines that come in after "I feel just like Jesse James" manage to convey that sentiment (cocky strutting) and "I got a woman in Jackson" (randy as fuck howling) substantially better than the words do (which is itself well). In rock and roll, it's almost always the guitars that get the best words.
2. A parallel misapprehension about songwriting: that it is fundamentally an individual act, and that the players of songs are somehow secondary or subordinate. An easy way to correct this misapprehension would be to start your own fucking band, which would quickly revise your mental model of songwriting through the tool of practical experience.

If you're into easier, less rewarding modes, you could correct both of these mistaken notions simultaneously by reading historical accounts of the process of recording Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone", probably as responsible for the award as any other single song:

Tom Wilson invited Al Kooper to stop by the next day's session simply to watch, but he had far bigger plans. "Taking no chances, I arrived an hour early and well enough ahead of the crowd to establish my cover," he wrote in his 1998 book Backstage Passes and Backstabbing Bastards. "I walked into the studio with my guitar case, unpacked, tuned up, plugged in, and sat there trying my hardest to look like I belonged." Soon enough, [British blues player Mike] Bloomfield walked in and began practicing. "[He] commenced to play some of the most incredible guitar I'd ever heard," Kooper wrote. "And he was just warming up! I was in over my head. I embarrassedly unplugged [his guitar], packed up, went into the control room, and sat there pretending to be a reporter from Sing Out! magazine."

With Kooper in the control room, the same group from the previous day launched into "Like a Rolling Stone," though with Paul Griffin moving from organ to piano. Kooper knew so little about the organ that he didn't even know how to turn it on, but he was desperate to play on a Dylan song and when a distracted Wilson didn't give him a firm "no" he walked into the studio, sat down at the instrument and was delighted to see Griffin hadn't turned it off. "Imagine this," Kooper wrote in his book. "There is no music to read. The song is over five minutes long, the band is so loud I can't even hear the organ, and I'm not familiar with the instrument to begin with. But the tape is rolling, and that is Bob-fucking-Dylan over there singing, so this had better be me sitting here playing something."

Wilson may have been shocked when he saw what was happening, but Dylan dug Kooper's sound and asked for the organ to be turned up. "You can hear how I waited until the chord was played by the rest of the band before committing myself to play in the verses," Kooper wrote. "I'm always an eighth note behind everyone else, making sure of the chord before touching the keys." The unique style of playing not only gave the song a signature component, but it also introduced Dylan to a musical collaborator he would return to time and time again in the coming years.

In "Like a Rolling Stone", the organ is an unmistakeable carrier of meaning, and it was an accidental, improvisatory addition. Occluding these facts is one consequence of Dylan's Nobel.