Never one to hyperbolize, I thought I’d title this entry

Music. Gods.
I truly believe the world would be a better place if everyone in it owned this record.

The Dirtbombs, hey! And the record’s Ultraglide in Black, and it’s freaking me out. Every album of theirs has a totally different sound, something I’d distrust if this one hadn’t already stolen my soul and sucked the marrow out. At any rate, in Ultraglide, the Detroit outfit takes old R&B songs and does waay more than simply cover them. They take the ideas of these songs and make them into things of their own and, in this charmingly succinct album, do the same to you.

I tell you: Making dinner the other night, I found myself going over to the old boombox and hitting “play” once, twice, three times, the volume rising, my roommates drawn to the kitchen for an impromptu groove-off. Every song totally rules, and this group is obviously having such a silly amount of bad-ass fun, you will get jealous. Jealous, even as your own hips shake. Stand-outs are “Underdog,” “Kung Fu” and “Ode to a Black Man.”
Dancedance revoluuution, indeed.


Oh, and their website’s q&a page is also totally funny. Two sample questions:
“Q: Blah blah blah Detroit scene?
A: If there was a 'Detroit Scene', we'd tell you all about it. However, there's not. It's a nice media delusion, but that's about all it is.”

“Q: Blah blah blah the White Stripes?
A: If you want to know about the White Stripes, ask the White Stripes.”
(This last one, with a link to that little band’s website which, once it opens, remains within the frames of the Dirtbombs’ site. Har.)

The beginning of this end.
Someone tells me Thurston Moore has called iPods the fluorescent lighting of music, and I’m inclined to agree; then again, my agreeing might just be in that sad, petty way of someone who doesn’t own an iPod. Yet.

It’s this “yet” that depresses me, Henshaw, like it’s fate, but more than that—my doom—to listen to all music in this broken-up-by-“tracks” (Whatthafuck happened to songs?) picking-and-choosing Impatient, Important Consumer way. One of the best experiences in zee mundo has to be listening and listening to an album until each song makes sense to you in its context. Especially because everyone makes that context up for himself. It’s beautiful; it’s dying.

The iPod and its MP3-playery ilk (Can you really blame Apple? No matter what, it would have been some brand, right? Some something, in our rearview manifest destiny mirror, at any rate) have steadily decreased the likelihood of being at a party and listening to an album all the way through, having it drunkenly explained to you by the person who loves it, or meeting someone wonderful and talking and talking and later you hear this album again. And having it remind you. I know you. There are records you still can’t listen to. There are records you will always listen to when you want to be reminded. Or whatever, any of the other thousands of things a record can do when it’s a record. Of an event. Of people playing music in a room. As one artist once said. Not me.

I think all this began with the internet, with being able to find music on the internet. Screw whole albums when we can just hear the one song, right?
It’s my fault, too. The other week I ran across the Very First Mix CD a friend made for me that was entirely from ripped internet tracks. This guy worked with me at my first job, this nonprofit in Atlanta. I also had a little crush on him, which may or may not have been reciprocated, but it was all very sweet, somehow, our friendship, which never turned into anything more than our doing goofy seated dances in his Volkswagen as he found new routes all over Atlanta, just driving and driving around, trying to eat at every burrito joint in that town. I was right out of college.

Right before Christmas of 2000, he emailed me and asked me what songs I’d want on a CD if I could have any songs in the world. Any songs—in the world???

Do you remember this, Henshaw? How mind-blowing it was?

I wasted the rest of the day then, wracking my brain and coming up with songs I liked but had forgotten about till then—songs from my childhood and from old high-school mix-tapes and from more recent years. The final CD was my Christmas present, labeled: “Xmas 2K.”

I’m listening to it now and feeling all kinds of nostalgia. So mix-tapes/CDs can do the same thing as regular albums, sure. But that’s because it’s a set list, reminding you of a specific time period. Particular set people you may never see again, or at least never see like you did the first time you heard that song.

So, here it is. Remember: This is from that period when there was still the possibility, it seemed, of Never Hearing a Song again. Of its being lost, forever. The kids, they were less automatically-hip, then. There was none of this Sirius Radio. None of this Pitchforkity madness. With that obvious apologetic preamble, here it is, the list of songs the 22 or 23-year-old me, chose:

Xmas 2K Mix circa Dec. 2000

1. “Tennessee” – Arrested Development
Say what you will, you snob. The beginning of this song totally rules.

2. “Blackbird” – Paul McCartney
Soon after this, my sister had her second child and I made her a mix CD with this song on it For Her Labor, which I now think is pretty funny. The thing stayed in her duffle bag the whole time, turns out. It also turns out Thirtysomething beat me to this idea.

3. “Blue Monday” – New Order
This song seemed so dark and sensitive in that creepyfake Iron Curtain-y Unbearable Lightness of Being-y way. All new wave songs in the early 80s tried to sound just as dark and jaded, but this one wins. Along with that Cure song about “I saw you look like a Japanese baby.” Har. I have a soft spot for such songs.

4. “Carry On” – CSNY
I am a small child. There’s my cool ex-hippie uncle and warmth and all things good. Everything else is foggy, but I still love this song. So. Much.

5. “Clap Hands” – Tom Waits
First boyfriend intro’d me to Tom Waits. I can sing every word to this in my sleep.

6. “Everest” – Ani Difranco
Yes, I was one of Those college girls. But listen: This song stands. This song is so beautiful, it will still make me cry without much prompting if no one’s around.
“And when church let out, the sky was much clearer/And the moon was so beautiful that the ocean held up her mirror.”

7. “Queen of Las Vegas” – The B-52s
When I was 13-ish, I went through a mad, early-new-wavey-B-52s-lovin’ phase. I bought that bio book Party Out of Bounds and cursed God for not planting me in Athens, GA in 1979. At some age other than one.

8. “Hold On” – En Vogue (Those “Never Gonna Get It” folks.)
Lord, so, at the start of this, the ladies do an acapella first verse of “Who’s Lovin’ You,” and it’s just awful. Straight-up flat. But the actual song itself is still pretty good, for a 90s radioland R&B tune. Though I admit, I’ve been skipping over this one on recent listens.

9. “I Wanna Be Adored” – The Stone Roses
In high school, my friend Janice put this on a mix-tape that I wore out. I remember sitting at my desk at the nonprofit and remembering its existence and absolutely freaking out. It’s a great song; you know it as soon as you hear the initial build-up and the metallic guitars that start it out.

10. “Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems – Notorious B.I.G.
Undergrad parties, plain and simple. Plastic keg cups of Budweiser you paid four dollars for. Bee-eye-gee, pee-oh-peepee-aye.

11. “Spring” – Kristin Hersh
Her first solo album is flawless, and I love the second one for nostalgia’s sake. The third one is patchy, populated by KH’s once-just-inscrutable lyrics gone silly. But this song stands out. Perfect structure. Pretty Kristin and scary Kristin and still just pretty. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring as interpreted by Throwing Muses.

12. “Stepping Out” – Joe Jackson
Okay, so I’m four years old. And I’m in my big sister’s room, and she’s letting me draw in the red pen on her cube notepad in all the pastel colors while she gets ready to go out with her friends. Red, shag carpet, Garfield poster on the wall and this song, alwaysalways, on her record player or radio.
“We are young, but getting old before our time/We’ll leave the TV and the radio behind; don’t you wonder what we’ll find?”

13. “Trism” – B-52s

14. “Wanna Be Starting Something” – Michael Jackson
Mama-say! Mama-saw! Yeah, you know the rest…

15. “When U Were Mine” – Cyndi Lauper (Prince)
Always my favorite song of hers on her first record. Remember how, when she first came out, it was all “Who’s better? Madonna or Cyndi Lauper?? Who? Who?” I voted for Cyndi. I always dressed as a gypsy for Halloween.

16. “Africa” – Toto
Why? Why because, little kid/1980s, “Sure as Kilimanjaro rises like a lepress above the Serengeti.” At some point, I debated with my sisters over whether “lepress” referred to a female leper. And I just looked it up, and it’s spelled “leprous,” and it does. Well, "suffering from leprosy." Either way, whole new meaning.

Also?
How can the CD which accompanies Oxford American’s new southern music issue be so relentlessly perfect?* How and how? The blues! The country! The old and new timey rock ‘n roll! As the cheesy record-review cliché goes, the first tune--“If I Were A Carpenter” by Eldridge Holmes--alone, is worth the price of the whole shebang. But then there’s so much more sheer happiness here. Rundon'twalk. Gah-!

(*Well, except for one or two tracks near the end which are just relentlessly really nice.)

Is it True I can spread my wings?

Meanwhile, in one eastern Carolina town, the obsession with Abba’s “The Eagle” resurges with a fresh energy and passion. The colors of that passion are shimmery, shining purple and gold, the colors featured in a 1977 video for the song my roommate, Carmelita, sent to me. And yes, my god, is it ever dull, but you’ve got to remember: this was pre-MTV, pre-Janet Jackson dancing in the streets shoulder-to-shoulder with all the townsfolk, pre-Twisted Sister guy showing up in your bedroom to lay down the law.
Before all that, there were people lip-synching, joyous, into a camera. And excellent T-shirts.

So of course I emailed it straightaway to Marshall, who shares my embarrassing love of many things Abba, who in fact was the person to correct me on the chorus of “Take a Chance on Me” as we painted his bathroom and I sang along, loud and characteristically unheeding of modesty. “Alice, it’s ‘when the pretty birds have flown”.
Oh. Not “would it really hurt, so call!’” I blame the Swedish. I can enunciate just fine.

Anyway, back to the important thing—our “Eagle” emails.

Alice:
Okay, so, for the best moment, go to 2:52-ish, and check out Non-Bjorn’s facial expression. It’s all “I can’t believe I’m in this freaking video.”

Marshall:
I swear, Frida was about to eat that psychedelic eagle flying around in front of her mouth.

Did you see their outfits? You can’t tell until the end, but one is wearing a shiny, shiny shirt with a huge bunny on it, and the other is wearing a coyote shirt not to dissimilar to yours. Well, maybe a bit more polyester.
Glorious.

Alice:
Yes; their shirts basically rule. And it looks like there’s a video for “The Name of the Game,” too, but I haven't watched it yet. I'm saving it for a special occasion. Then again, it’ll probably be some variant of blonde lady and brunette lady singing and the less-attractive Bjorn and not-Bjorn coming in every now and then, n-B trying not to laugh.

You know, I think Bjorn is to me what Orson Welles was to the girls in Heavenly Creatures. "It." He’s so repugnant to me and always has been.

Marshall:
If you didn't know they were named Agnetha and Anni-Frid, you might well think they were office workers from St. Paul. Shiny, shiny office workers telling magical tales in front of their mesmerizing disco ball.

Also, “Eagle” is not much of a disco song. How do you categorize something like that? Pseudo-mystic Swedish synthesizer pop? Could any other band have produced this song?

My favorite line from the YouTube description:
“Eagle” did not perform that well in the charts.

The Candyman Cometh.
We, all of us, have people we rely on to be our musical drug dealers. Sure, there are friends we share music back and forth with, but, and this is if you’re lucky, there’s that one person from whom you take an awful lot more than you give. That person who knows just exactly what you like, what you need, baby, and doles it out little by little till you’re begging for more.
Something like that, anyway.
I am not too modest to admit that a lot of friends have told me I’m that person for them, and that’s great and that’s nifty, but you know what? I’ve got an even purer source. At least one. And that’s where I get my personal stash.

My new discovery is not my new discovery, but one that my Musical Drug Dealer heard first, and knew would be right up my alley. I'm not saying you would like it, only demonstrating my MDD's uncanny ability to get inside my brain. Anyway, the band is from Ohio they call themselves Wussy, and they play nifty lo-fi (low-fi? lo-fih? Har) style rawk that makes my little heartstrings vibrate all crazylike.

La Musica-!
I love the music, but I’m pretty damn picky with it. This is something my MDD understands. He knows I like acoustic music, but only when it’s kind of unprocessed and that I prefer the minimalist-sounding stuff. He knows I like the poppish rock, but only when it contains this particular brilliant originality and cutthroat lyrics. Same with hip-hop. I mean, but seriously: Did that just make sense? Probably not, and I probably left a lot out. This is what is great about a musical drug dealer: He(or she) gets you in a way that can’t be articulated. It is greatness in the world when some other person can do that with any part of who you are. Trying to explain my taste to you in words, Henshaw, is like trying to tell you what a poem “means.” This poem means: screw it.

“Oh, you’re a ‘Music Person.’ Do You Like Coldplay?” and other frustrations.
I resent people assuming I’ve heard of certain bands or that because I like music, that I like it in that competitive asshole, Chunklet magazine, record-clerk way (though the above heading may belie that fact.) To take that a step back, I resent people taking a look at me and assuming any thing about my general aesthetic or what kind of person I must be. (An aside: Just because a person has a couple tattoos doesn’t mean she wants to sit around for hours or even minutes and talk about them, not hers or yours. Do-! Not-! Trap such a gal at a party with someone who does this-! Please?)

The fact is that I care for the music I love with a ferocity that embarrasses me; at times there persists a not-very-still, small voice within me that says: Hey! What’s the deal? You’re not supposed to be this way outside your teens, you odd duck, you. That voice is biznullshit and to be ignored, though. It’s just Self-Doubt saying Hello. Mostly, I just feel lucky to have this force available to me that affects me so strongly any time I want it to. And so, conversely, there is just so much music that I hate. I hate more than I love, just because I love what I love so much. I feel completely indifferent to just about every new band that I hear, because there are just too many of them, now, and I'm just not interested anymore, in keeping up. I'm feeling lazy, lately. I'm willing to rely on people who know my specific tastes to recommend things; otherwise, I'll just sit at home and listen to Guided By Voices some more.

Just Another Teenager at the Doc Martin Sock Hop
Because it's changed.
I came of age at a very lucky time. When you expose a music-spazzy, in many other ways spazzy, adolescent girl to 1990s culture, she just might explode. Zines! Wacky dress that's purely inventive! That has nothing to do with fashion (Whee flannel and Doc Martins and Kool Aid dyed red hair)! There was this Brand New third-wave feminism thing; there was this Sassy magazine-thing (forever a sigh deep inside now, an RIP now.) There were these rock shows, and if you went to these shows, you’d meet other creative freaky dorky people like you. For a time, my teenage friends and I completely lost our heads over it all.

Then of course you grow older, and a wave of underground music becomes commercially co-opted and fast-forward to today, when a whole lot of forces—the aforementioned commercialization being one, the widespread availability of all information, music included, being another—and of course the loss of shine that comes with time; all these have worked together to make finding inventive music an activity more akin to flipping through cable channels than excavating for shiny diamonds. You don’t have to work hard to find anything anymore, and with online saturation, some small band from Ohio, maybe, blows up and becomes huge waaay before it probably should, maybe. Before it’s ready to. And there are copycats way too soon and it’s confusing, too, because everyone’s heard that rare Pavement EP and it doesn’t mean that they feel the same way about it as you do.
And nothing’s rare, really.

This is why I keep my passion a bit private. This is why I don’t like to make it competitive. I don’t like every new band that comes along, and the ones I do like, I tend to think of as my secret life soundtrack. I still try to allow myself that privilege, even if it’s a lie. I like to sit down with you and see if you feel the same way, not by talking about this band versus that one, but by hitting play, by whispering, “Listen.”

Hey Summer, Where ya Been?
A= This is moving week. Yes, it’s adieu to ye olde artsy garret in favor of a portion of giant old mansion built in the nineteen-teens, with my two pals, Ginger and Carmelita. It’s not that I don’t need, love and crave solitude, Henshaw; it’s that too much of it in an enforced way magnifies my weird little proclivities to the max. Soon, the decoupage is everywhere and things are organized in a ROY G BIV sorting system made up in a fit of 2 a.m. inspiration. You understand. Merely having people in the next room, or the next wing, as this gigantor apartment will allow, is comforting. It tells me there’s order, and there’s dinner taking place at a normal hour in the next room, which I am welcome to join, or to decline, politely.

The folks moving out left things in the mansion house—which I may just call the place here—with a wink and nod to a great Jenny Lewis tune—anyway, they left it kind of a mess. This means that Carmelita and Ginger and I have spent the past two weeks dumping things and scrubbing things and shouting, “Oh god, that’s disgusting!” a lot, upon revealing items such as particularly gigantic dead cockroaches, rat droppings and dog turds in kitchen cabinets.
No one ever said the road to the life of beauty was a smooth one.

So, we’ve been cleaning. Meanwhile, I’ve been in the early stages of trying to put together a syllabus for my classes this fall, and-! working on two stories I want to have ready for workshop when classes start up again. This, between: putting in many a mind-numbing, but necessary hour at ye olde call center of doom and writing articles for various local publications. That and I can’t seem to shake this weirdo summer cold which tells me that all I really want to do is sleep all the time.

Meanwhile, I’ve suggested to Carmelita and Ginger, the notion of creating some Uruk-hai from the pits of the steamy swamps west of Beach Town to help us move things from our two apartments to the new one, come Saturday. Seems their only close male friend is outta town for the weekend, which brings our collective grand total of close male friends here in town to zero.
Not that we need the menfolk. The three of us have enough moves under our belts to be able to move our big unwieldy wooden furniture in our damn sleep at this point, anyway, I suspect. We’ll be fine. Freaking exhausted, but fine.
Gotta go, now. See ya.

(Meanwhile: Listening nonstop to these songs on the National’s newest record that Marshall keeps feeding me, one by one. Argh.)

Oh, and the new John Doe single, "The Golden State"? The cathartic number he duets on with Kathleen Edwards? That one? Is something I can't stop listening to. You should check it out.

(I'm trying to buy the CD, but every music store in Beachtown is sold out for now. So I have just the one song, and I'm seriously considering just burning it onto a CD so that I can drive around the places I need to go today and just listen to it over and over. I am a wasteful American. Not that I'm actually gonna do it. Ha. Haha..err.)

Things Seen Along the Way
This weekend I drove down to Charleston, South Cacalacka to work on a story. The great thing about the drive is that you’re actually on a road, rather than an interstate, and that actual road winds through actual towns. You know you’re really traveling, rather than just relying on duplicate green signs to tell you.
Anyway. A couple things.

1. The whole sign-with-cartoon-pig-outside-the-barbecue-place has been made fun of, pretty much to death. You know, “Come partake of me! I am deeelicious!” But I saw one on Route 17 that I think brings the whole thing to a new level. The cartoon pig not only was parked before a heaping plateful of bbq, but underneath were the words, “Gut-Bustin’ Portions!” And Sir Pig’s expression as he looked up toward the viewer, clutching a fork, was that of bug-eyed horror, something akin to looking like he was about to:

a-vomit
or
b-bust a literal gut.

That is, die an excruciating death like that gluttony guy in the movie Seven, or like a duck whose insides are intended for pate, and good god this is a horrible line of thought, so I’ll stop there…

2. Around dusk yesterday, I drove by a golf course that looked like it hadn’t been mowed for a number of months. Right there, at the side of the road, and for some reason, really inviting, somehow. It made me want to pull over and have a picnic and then roll down one of its manmade hills, now soft with weeds and flowers, human negligence having robbed it of some of it manicured bite.

Also: Favorite song lyric from favorite song at present: "I had this friend, his name was Marc with a C./His sister was like the heat coming off the back of an old TV."
Because you needed to know that.

This world is big and wild and half insane
I'd like to reiterate: No matter the mood I'm in, a listen to the Kinks song "Animal Farm" always makes things okay. It's the Song of Happiness. The one thing I could imagine destroying my dogged spunk forever (if I may be so brazen as to claim I possess dogged spunk) would be for something truly bad to happen while "Animal Farm" was playing.
But, no. Only good things happen with Ray Davies.

Broken Language: The Mysterious Disappearance of The Natural History
Some music albums are linked, inextricably, to particular periods of your life. It’s a Shame About Ray by our dear old Lemonheads, will always be about my high school contingent of friends, about the hours spent drawing on our Chuck Taylors with Sharpies and shouting out car windows at the top of our voices, “She’s the puzzle-piece behind the couch/that makes the sky compleeeeete!”

And then there are some records you never, ever tire of listening to. The album I’ve had in mind I’ve only owned for five years, so it may be too early to classify it as Timeless.

But there’s a second component to this sense of fascination. There are bands who put out a really stellar first album, and then an all-right second album followed by a so-so Record #3, the bands who just sort of peter out of your life. And then there are the bands who shine so hard that they’re difficult to look at directly. To use a worn-out turn of metaphor, these bands explode. And then just disappear.
Like, Eddie and the Cruisers style.

On the Dark Side
I first saw The Natural History perform at the Earl in Atlanta in 2002, when my boyfriend-at-the-time’s band opened up for them. Following his band, a group of us all stood around the stage, politely waiting for this headlining band we’d never heard of instead of going home, because that’s what rock ‘n roll etiquette calls for. Then they came on and started playing. And we all did that looking-at-each-other-thing. That Oh, my god; who are these people? thing.

I’m bad at writing about the direct experience of music, but I’ll try to describe The Natural History: Three young men from NYC, a guitar-bass-drums deal, and their music was an angular, muscular, extremely-rhythmic thing. The chords were all jangly and broken up weirdly and the whole thing, put together, was insanely catchy. If you wanted a real idea of exactly what the hell the above is supposed to mean, I guess I’ll just list influences I heard: I’d guess early Elvis Costello and Gang of Four and I heard others say early XTC, but I don’t know about all that.

They were also really enthusiastic about what they did. The singer, Max Tepper, played guitar and wooed the audience like freaking Elvis. He and his brother, Julian, who played bass, would shoot each other glances before pounding down on these cathartic chords together—and Derek Vockins, the drummer, was all the right mix of understatement and brashness and complexity. Just mesmerizing to watch.

So they rocked our world; turned The Earl on its head that night. It also helped that they were really nice guys; they gave Hunter a copy of their five-song EP, which took up permanent residence in my car’s cd player for weeks. It managed to sound just like the band did live: really raw and energetic and barely restrained and catchy and poplike, too. In the months that followed, I felt myself becoming something of a groupie. I was keenly aware of this and tried to play it cool, but still, every time the band came to Atlanta, I found myself back at the Earl, right there in front, dancing and dancing and singing along, loud.
Beatlemania.

It would be misleading if I kept from you the fact that these were not wholly unattractive gentlemen.

They came out with a full-length album, Beat Beat Heartbeat, which lacked some of the raw spontaneity of the EP, but the songs were still great. Then they stopped touring, said they were putting together a second full-length record. Their website said they were looking for a new drummer, and then there were these articles about shows they were playing in New York with larger and larger ensembles; they were trying for a new sound. This didn’t sound good to me, but I waited, still. Waited months. And then their website went down. And then, nothing.

And still. Every now and then, I search the web for something, for any piece of news online about what happened to this band, which, whenever I hear them I’m forced to declare to be my very favorite: The Natural History. What happened? Where’d you go? Jeez; give a fan some closure, at least. Don’t just disappear without a word.