| My favorite local commercials |
[Aug. 24th, 2008|01:39 pm]
sodakhobo
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I love local commercials, but my favorite are definitely the ones for the Wild Card Casino. You've almost got to wonder whether this are willfully bad. It certainly doesn't help that I saw the second one first. Enjoy.
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| New Music Blog! |
[Aug. 8th, 2008|04:19 pm]
sodakhobo
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I know you were all waiting with bated breath, so you'll all be excited to know I did in fact start the music blog I was talking about.
Check it out! I even made the first (rather short) post. It's about country cover bands, so you know it'll be good.
I decided to go with "Music: The Universal Sandwich" as a title, as it was just dumb enough for me to find funny and as far as I can tell, not yet a taken title. I googled "universal sandwich" and all that came up was a patent for something calleda universal sandwich adapter and threaded nipple, which sounds truly, truly frightening.
I checked, and the domain name universalsandwich.com is not yet taken. I toyed with the idea of registering it, but figured I'd wait to do such a ridiculous thing until I figure out how often I actually use this thing.
My guess is this blog will be seeing much fewer posts in the future as most of my energy will be taken with the new one, so be sure to add that whatever aggregator you use if you have any interest in what I have to say about music.
Anyway, enjoy, and let me know what you think of this whole process. |
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| (Not) Dancing about Architecture: or, What's in a name? |
[Jul. 31st, 2008|03:35 pm]
sodakhobo
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I've had this particular livejournal account for some unrecallable number of years now. Anymore, the way that I operate it seems to make less and less sense. Most of what I feel motivated to write about on it happens (by no big surprise) to be about music. That's really what I care to write about, and if things go well, writing about music may in fact be my career path. But interspersed with musical reflections in this journal are random autobiographical outbursts that usually serve only to update friends and acquaintences with whatever traumatic or life changing events have just recently occured.
I've toyed with the idea for a long time of starting some kind of music specific blog but have yet to act on the notion. For now I think it would just be a sort of fun side project with little or no serious aspirations. This may end up being a jumping off point for a bonafide music blog/publication that I might try to start in the future. For now, however, with a busy grad-school schedule I'll stick to something where I can make infrequent posts and not feel as though I'm slacking off.
I briefly considered naming said blog after the famous but difficult to attribute quote (Elvis Costello and Steve Martin are among the long list of possible originators) "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture, it's a stupid thing to want to do." As clever a name for a blog as "Dancing about Architecture" might have been, it's already been taken and it has too many characters to be a working livejournal account. The other problem with that name is that, of course, dancing about architecture isn't as out there an idea as one might assume.
So that leaves me with the looming question of what clever name to give a blog about music. I call upon my friends to help me with the naming process by suggesting suitable names for a blog about (mostly) popular music especially indie rock, punk and hip-hop. What say ye? |
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| Relief |
[Jul. 25th, 2008|11:36 pm]
sodakhobo
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Things have improved greatly for Rebekah and I. We had originally been told that we'd never see the inside of our apartment again after the fire because of asbestos. But this week, somebody finally convinced the property managers that instead of declaring the whole building a loss because asbestos was found, that perhaps they should pay to have samples taken in each unit. Well, as it turns out, the first through third floors were found to be clear of asbestos contamination (We lived on the third floor).
So, my parents made an emergency trip down from South Dakota and we spent the entire day today trying to salvage things from the old apartment. As it turns out, we were able to salvage a lot. Some clothes and linens were ruined by water and mildew and our bed and couch were too big to get out and are probably ruined anyway. Other than that, almost everything else was able to be salvaged.
Despite the fact that there was supposed to be 24 security on the building, some obvious looting had taken place. My ipod was stolen (it was sitting in plain sight on our kitchen counter) and someone had taken it upon themselves to stash their pot pipe on our coffee table.
The building itself is a pretty big wreck. Floors were so warped that two and three inch tall bumps in the flooring were everywhere in the building. Walls had obvious water damage, all doors were kicked in and the entire building reeked of mildew, smoke and rotting food.
I want to again thank everyone who offered kind words and support over the past two weeks. At this point, any further offers of donations are not necessary. If you feel like helping out, I'd encourage you to instead donate either money or volunteer hours at the local Red Cross, an organization that was also very helpful in getting us on our feet after the fire.
Many of you donated or loaned us items to replace those that we thought we were lost in the fire. Since we were able to salvage so much more than we had anticipated, we now have duplicates and triplicates of some items. There were a few items that we were specifically told were meant to be loans, and we will return those to their proper owners as soon as possible. For many of the rest of the items, we will probably donate the extras to the salvation army or to some other charitable organization. For those of you who gave us stuff, if you would like any items returned or would like something else to be done with them, let me or Rebekah know and we will get that taken care of.
Again, I don't think I can say thank you enough to everyone of my friends who showed us support over the past two weeks. I can't help but get a little emotional when I think about how fortunate I am to have friends who are willing to help me out so much when I am in need. I assure you, if you are ever in a bind, I'll be there to do whatever I can. |
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| And now for something completely different (and Silly) |
[Jul. 24th, 2008|11:18 am]
sodakhobo
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Okay, to begin with if you haven't seen the video for V.I.C. (feat. Soulja Boy) "Get Silly," then get yourself caught up:
Finally, a dance craze that I could probably participate in without fear of looking like an idiot (since looking like an idiot is a pretty important part of the dance it seems).
But there's more! V.I.C. wants to know how you "Get Silly":
Apparently his idea of "gettin' silly" involves a tablefull of expensive tennis shoes, and I suppose I have to admit that that is pretty silly indeed. But I know that the people I hang around with have very different ideas of "gettin' silly" that might add some diversity to his video contest. For example, my musicology friends might be sitting in the library with all the volumes of Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music spread out on the table, and then they look up at the camera and say something like "Awww Yeaaah! That's how I get silly!" John E., I expect a get silly juggling video out of you.
I've given you your task, now I wanna see how all you dorks out there get silly! |
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| Update |
[Jul. 14th, 2008|11:12 pm]
sodakhobo
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So since the last post, we had some terrible news followed by a string of good news.
First, the bad:
The apartment has been found to be contaminated with asbestos, which according to Colorado law necessitates an independent contractor to come in and clean things up. The end result of this for us is that we will never see the inside of our apartment again. Anything porous (clothes, furniture etc.) is a complete loss. Everything else has to be professionally located, catalogued, cleaned, tested and retested, meaning it might cost thousands of dollars just to get a few choice items out of the apartment, and since we didn't have renters insurance there's a possibility we'd have to pay for it ourselves (something neither of us can afford). So, we have to face the very real possibility that we will never see any of our belongings again.
Now the good:
We spoke with the managers of the apartment we were scheduled to move into on August 1 (yeah, if you are counting, we missed avoiding disaster by 2 weeks) has given us the okay to move in to our new apartment tomorrow, thus ending our 72 hours of homelessness (okay, we've been put up free of charge in a swanky hotel, but I'm still counting it). So we have an apartment but nothing to put in it. We have also been given more assistance than we could ever have asked for. To begin with, the Red Cross was kind enough to set up a relief center for everyone involved in the fire and gave people some money to help get basic supplies. We've also been getting tons of help from friends including a lot of additional money and clothing. So, we've gone from owning only my computer (which I grabbed on my way out the building) and the clothes on our backs, to now owning about the equivalent of 2 or 3 suitcases worth of clothing and a few basic toiletries. A damn good start if I do say so myself.
Bekah and I really appreciate everything people have done for us the last few days. We are extremely lucky to have a strong support system of friends and family to keep us above water. Some people in this fire don't. At this point, the biggest thing we need from people is simply moral support. Your thoughts and well wishes keep us going. Our emotional states have been pretty fluctuating since the fire. One minute we might be in good spirits and laughing (homeless jokes tend to be our favorites) and the next minute we remember another thing we've lost and break down in tears. Over the past year Rebekah and I had started to build a home, or at least the things you surround yourself to make yourself feel at home. Now we're starting all over again, with less than we started with. It's extremely humbling and it makes you appreciate absolutely everything you have going for you.
Finally, for any of you reading this, please PLEASE make sure you are properly insured if you are renting. You can't imagine how much you would kick yourself for not having it after something like this. It's not going to make a fire or other disaster easy to deal with, but it will at least make sure that you'll have someplace to start. Bekah and I are holding desperately onto the hope that my parents' homeowner's insurance will help out, but we also realize that our poor planning may cost us dearly. |
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| Excitement |
[Jul. 13th, 2008|11:44 am]
sodakhobo
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Just to keep you all informed this happened to us yesterday. Both Bekah and I are fine. I was in the apartment at the time, but got out without incident. After a trip to Target for supplies, the entirety of our belongings fit inside 3 Target shopping bags.
We don't know how the fire started, and we haven't found out what happened to our stuff, but things don't look promising.
Also, this happened about 2 days after the engine on my vehicle died, so you might say I've had a wonderful couple of days. I will keep you all informed when we learn anything useful. |
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| Death or Glory |
[Jun. 29th, 2008|04:44 pm]
sodakhobo
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There have been so many attempts at compiling "best of" lists in music (i.e., best album, best song, best band etc.) that it seems every possible category has already been exhausted. Yet, I have a submission for a category that to my knowledge has not yet been explored: Best Rock and Roll verses.
I'm sure all of you will be completely unsurprised to learn that my top pick is from a Clash song. Specifically the verse in question is from the song "Death or Glory," a relatively lesser known track from London Calling (which incidentally, is my pick for best album of all time). The song isn't on any "Greatest Hits" albums, and is often overlooked among Clash fans. All of the verses are great, but the one that I think says more than any other verse in a Rock and Roll song is the second one, which goes like this:
'N' every gimmick hungry yob diggin gold from Rock 'N' Roll
Grabs the mike to tell us he'll die before he's sold
But I believe in this - and it's been tested by research
That he who fucks nuns will later join the church
It's easy to dismiss the verse as simply a punchy little joke, and admittedly the last two lines are pretty hilarious. But I'm being completely serious when I say that I could easily write my dissertation about this verse, or at least a damn good paper.
The verse is obviously a joke about selling out, something the Clash were (and still are) often accused of. The reason they were called sellouts was because after playing only a few live gigs in support of the Sex Pistols in 1976 and 1977, the Clash signed a contract with CBS records. And so here they were, one of the most radical and left-leaning bands of the era signed to a major record label. The Clash recorded all of their output on major labels, and by 1982 they were so popular that they played a sold-out concert at Shea Stadium in support of the Who. Nevermind that both the Sex Pistols and the Ramones had signed to major labels before them, for a Punk band like the Clash, this was tantamount to betrayal among punk purists for whom DIY wasn't simply an aesthetic it was a way of life.
The Clash's response was not simply to ignore the cries of sellout or to deny that they had made a deal with the devil, instead they laughed in the face of critics' hypocrisy.
I'm reading a book on the history of post-punk right now called Rip it Up and Start Again by Simon Reynolds and it's hilarious to me to see from the book just how much he clearly hates the Clash. What's annoying though, is not that he hates the Clash, but that he seems somehow embarrassed to admit that he does, choosing instead to channel his frustrations with the band into little disguised jabs like: "While the Mekons upturned both traditional rock heroics and its punk successor (the Clash's guitarst-as guerrilla shtick), Gang of Four gradually acquired a reputation as a sort of new, improved Clash, agit punk with a proper grounding in theory." (I had to skim to find the previous quote because, despite the fact that the Clash are mentioned by name in similar fashion in nearly every chapter in the book, they are suspiciously absent from the index) The underiding current throughout all of Reynolds' little backhands is that the Clash were false prophets of left-wing politics because they had a major record contract.
Herein is where I think lies the pure genius of the verse in "Death or Glory." With four cheeky little lines the Clash were exposing Reynolds and all other detractors for the fools that they were. No need to make excuses for something that was in the past, instead the Clash pointed out that everyone eventually has their price. No amount of moral posturing will change the fact that when they time comes everyone has to make some kind of sacrifice for their art. The Clash were here to remind you that "Death or Glory becomes just another story." The band had also already addressed their bitter sweet relationship with newfound money and fame with a song on their second album called "All the Young Punks (New Boots and Contracts)." And while none of the band members grew up poor per se, at the time they signed the contract with CBS they were all squatting in bombed out buildings in the worst neighborhoods in London. It's not too hard to understand how a contract that allowed them to pursue music and make some money might be tempting. They didn't like that they had to kneel before corporate muscle to get heard, in fact they explicitly chided record companies with songs like "Capital Radio" and "Complete Control." But in the end, they were able to make the music they wanted without languishing in obscurity on an independent label with poor distribution. Not that I think that releasing albums independently isn't a noble and worthwhile cause, for some bands that is the only feasible option. But if you can make the record you want to make, and still be sure that people can actually find it in record stores, what's so wrong with that?
Ultimately, what Reynold's and his lot so foolishly forget is how amazing the music was despite it being on a major label. The Clash were able to record five of the most enduring Rock and Roll albums ever written, many of which received significant radio airplay despite the fact that they were pretty radical when it comes right down to it. And that's one of the most interesting parts of the Clash's story, that they were able to bring radical ideas into every living room. Which is something that doubtfully would have happened had the Clash decided to release their music independently. It was precisely because the Clash signed to CBS that a young (at the time) Republican kid in South Dakota was able to pick up a copy of London Calling at an On Cue because there were no good record stores in his hometown. And there it was, wrapped in its slick collectible packaging, the record that would eventually change not only the way that I thought about music, but politics as well. |
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| Six Degrees of Separation from the Strokes to Schoenberg |
[Jun. 4th, 2008|05:20 pm]
sodakhobo
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A good friend recently gave me Paul Morley's book Words and Music over spring break. I only just now started reading it, and on the whole, I like it very much so far.
There was a part, however, that bothered me. He was talking about bands/musicians with decidedly retro leanings like the Strokes and Oasis. His basic point (as I remember it) was that bands like this are an ultimately pointless repackaging of old musical ideas. To his ear, the Strokes' conservative approach to music was no more (perhaps less) innovative than a Britney Spears single because they ultimately failed to take music any further forward.
To a certain extent, I think I understand Morley's point, but to me it is a continuation of the approach to writing music history that ultimately ruined classical music. It's an approach that views music history as a long string of innovations that pave the way for further innovation. It's a history that is based on a linear trajectory model, something that is not only wrong but destructive. Musicologists and historians have written like this for several centuries now (although some who thought they were being particularly clever, talk about history as being cyclical, an idea ultimately just as reductive as the linear model). But intellectual history does not work this way. If you were to try and represent history graphically, it would weave erratically, branch and reconnect, bend backwards, stop and start randomly, vanish and reappear miles away from where you saw it last. Knowledge is not simply one innovation moving to the next. Ideas are constantly being created, lost, forgotten, replaced, rediscovered and reinvented. It is damaging to think that every artist has to somehow reinvent the wheel to be worthwhile.
Unfortunately, lust for innovation ran roughshod over musicology beginning with nineteenth century Germany. German music critics, fed up with seeing French and Italian composers wooing German audiences started to fight back by instituting new standards by which good music should be judged. Paramount in these standards was innovation, a trait deemed to be uniquely German. Anything deemed not innovative enough (or German enough) was passed over. This ultimately codified a canon of "Great" composers and works. As a result, many fantastic non-German composers (and even works by German composers that were not sufficiently forward looking) were left out of the history books.
What Morley seems to be missing is that great art can still be conservative. There are plenty of great pieces that use older techniques or even sound old, that are not simply a rehashing of the same ideas. What made composers like Schoenberg or Stravinsky so great was not their innovative approach to composition, but the way that they used modern concepts to make music that had a decidedly backward facing outlook. Schoenberg of course created and entirely new musical language for his compositions, but his compositions owed more to Bach than they did to Strauss. And although sonically speaking a Schoenberg is further from Bach than the Strokes are from the Beatles (after all, the span between the former is 150 years larger than that of the latter), they both are purposefully playful reinterpretations of their musical predecessors.
I'm no ardent Strokes apologist (and I certainly have no strong predilection for Schoenberg) but I did like the album Is This It? a lot. I liked it because it had good song writing, but it was also dripping in irony. They sounded like a Beatles or a Rolling Stones that had lived to see the 60's counterculture fall flat on its face, witnessed white flight, race riots, AIDS and Reaganomics. In a way, the Strokes sounded like the Beatles had fathered a child with the Ramones and neglected it its entire childhood.
What killed the Strokes was not their lack of innovation, it was that their gimmick was only good for maybe one album. Boredom only works as an aesthetic for so long. But I do not think that the Strokes were a mindless rehashing of used goods. Like their musical mother the Ramones, the Strokes knew exactly how to take the old with the new. |
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| Sex and Music at 56 kilobytes per second |
[May. 20th, 2008|12:08 pm]
sodakhobo
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I was twelve years old in the winter of 1996 when my dad bought my family's first real computer. We brought it all the way home to South Dakota from an electronics store at the Mall of America. It was a Packard Bell with an Intel 486 processor and windows 3.1.1. Al Gore had only just recently invented the internet and it was slow to catch on in my conservative midwestern hometown, but eventually we installed a free trial of AOL from a cd-rom we got in the mail (still a novel idea at the time).
The vast majority of our 500 free minutes (there was no such thing as a monthly plan back then) was used up by me. Being twelve and completely new to this internet phenomenon, I naturally gravitated to the AOL chat rooms. I was initially bewildered by all the activity and at a loss to understand the jargon being used. I contented myself at first to sit back and watch the text quickly scrolling across the screen. When I felt I had finally gotten a handle on what was going on, I mustered the courage to write my first chat room message.
"Who here likes Oasis?" (my favorite band at the time)
I had first heard of the band Oasis a couple months previous. The music video for their song "Champagne Supernova" was in heavy rotation on MTV. There was a catchy chorus, vague drug references, trippy lyrics, British accents and cool haircuts. I was hooked. Their album (What's the Story) Morning Glory? graced the top of my Christmas wish list that year and I was a happy twelve year old when I found it in my stocking on Christmas morning.
My request for musical validation went unanswered in the chat room. I quickly shifted gears.
"Who here likes Green Day?"
I didn't actually own any of Green Day's albums. Green Day cursed a bit more than Oasis did and their album Dookie was a reference to feces. Being an income-less preteen, I was at the mercy of my parents when it came to buying cd's. I knew what the answer would be if I asked my parents to buy anything with a parental advisory sticker on it. But a few of my friends had managed to get their hands on Dookie and what little I heard I liked.
My repeated attempts at polling the musical interests of chat rooms went largely unanswered. Eventually, however, I learned that the real action wasn't in the chat rooms themselves but in p2p (short for person to person) chatting. P2p allowed you to single out an individual that you deemed worthy of talking to and gave you their undivided attention. The chat room lobbies were generally overrun with requests from people wanting to p2p, advertising themselves with phrases such as "NE1 want to chat with a 13/F/Arizona? p2p me." P2p messages were generally met with a request for a/s/l (age, sex, location) followed by awkward flirting and a bizzare internet phenomenon known as cyber sex.
I wasn't interested in cyber sex, I just wanted to talk about music.
"NE1 want to talk to a 12/m Oasis fan? p2p me."
Needless to say, I was slow to get the hang of chat rooms. Eventually I caught on that I was supposed to flirt with girls. And so, whenever a girl my same age would put out a request for people to p2p with, I would quickly send her a message asking what her favorite band was. I was still trying to figure out how regular sex worked and had no desire to attempt to unravel the mysteries of having sex over a dial-up internet connection. As a result, my p2p conversations with girls generally revolved around music, sports and other hobbies. One time a girl from Illinois asked me if I wanted to go out with her. I was confused. Did she not see when I typed my location (South Dakota)? So I asked her how we could date if we lived in different states. This, apparently, was not the response she was looking for as she immediately logged off. That was the first time a girl asked me out on a date. I would not receive a similar offer until college.
Another memorable p2p session I had was with someone with the screen-name soccerdude16. As his name suggested, he was sixteen years old and played soccer. He asked me if I liked to play soccer too. I was by no means an athletic kid, but if I had been forced to choose a sport, soccer would have been it, so I said yes. Soccerdude16 was older than me, which automatically made him seem cooler, and he must have thought Oasis was an ok band because I was content to talk to him even though he was not a girl. I was not prepared for what he would ask me next though.
"Hey man, do u like to jerk off?"
A mixture of confusion and homophobia (a trait that every junior high kid I knew had) caused me to panic and sign out as quickly as possible. I had to warn everybody in the chat room about soccerdude16.
"Soccerdude16 is GAY!!!"
I typed the word "gay" as if it was the worst insult imaginable (to me it was).
The fact is, most of the people in the chat rooms I frequented were bored, sexually frustrated teens and preteens, many of whom also lived in small towns throughout the country and were surreptitiously logging on to their parents' AOL accounts to experience the illusion of human contact outside of the kids who picked on them at school. For them, the internet was not an information super highway, it was their way of finding solace in the fact that they were not the only lonely teenagers in the world. Validation through a 56k modem. As for me, I just wanted to know what people's favorite bands were. (Incidentally, it dawned on my years afterwards that many of the people in those chat rooms were actually middle-aged sexual predators, but I was too naive and music-obsessed to understand this at the time)
Eventually my father became fed up with the bill I racked up on AOL and canceled our subscription. A few years later we got a new computer with Windows 98 and a monthly subscription to Earthlink. By that point I'd moved on from chat rooms and indulged my musical fetishes by going to Yahoo or Dogpile and typing in the names of my favorite ska bands (I'd also moved on from Oasis). I'd sit enthralled by the animated gifs of dancing rudeboys and mope about the fact that Less than Jake would never play a show in Pierre South Dakota. |
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