BEA ULL #3: sp4cetiger

[sp4cetiger]

9:30 AM Thursday

I wake up this morning to discover that my wife has scrobbled three and a half hours worth of Lady Gaga and show tunes from my Spotify account. We share the account, so she didn’t do anything wrong, but it’s annoying that it gets mixed in with my stats. I guess I could tell her to turn scrobbling off...

Anyway, she’s exhausted, so I’m charged with watching my son before I go to work. I always try to avoid really noisy or angry stuff when in mixed company, but there’s an awful lot of punk on my list, so I decide that Armed Forces (Elvis Costello) is a good compromise. The first few tracks are great, but I don’t even get halfway through before life and toddler care interrupt. I make it back in time to hear about peace, love, and understanding, concepts that seem really abstract in the din of domestic life.

2:30 PM

My son wants to play outside, and I decide to play music from my smartphone to blunt the monotony. I’m at the perfect time in history for this kind of listening, cause nothing plays better on tinny portable speakers than punk rock. I put on The Clash (The Clash).

I remember having an argument with a friend in grad school -- an audiophile who dumped ridiculous amounts of money into fancy audio equipment for listening to his Led Zeppelin and Ladytron. One day he caught me in my office jamming out to Nirvana on cheap Wal-Mart headphones, so he brought in his fancy noise-cancelling headphones and told me to compare. I had to tell him that, in all honesty, I preferred the sound on the cheaper headphones. He didn’t believe me, so we brought in another student to come in and do the same comparison. Cheapo headphones again.

Thing is, dirty music is dirty music and sometimes the important thing isn’t capturing the details so much as capturing the spirit. Punk or grunge rockers didn’t make their music for rich bastards and intellectuals, they made it for the half-sober night stocker at the local grocery store. They don’t value flawless musicianship and they sure as hell don’t care if you can hear them gasping for breath between verses. So yeah, tinny punk rock kicks ass.

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[sp4cetiger]

8:00 PM Thursday

The evening started innocently enough, me streaming a YouTube rendition of Highway to Hell (AC/DC) on my headphones. I was about two-thirds through it when my wife comes into the bedroom and tells me that one of our close family friends has pancreatic cancer. There really are very few albums I could have been listening to at that moment that would have felt less appropriate than Highway to Hell, so I cut it short and go with silence for a while. Unfortunately, at that moment my son, who was now sick with a fever of 101 F (33 C), started screaming after only an hour of sleep. My wife is desperately tired, so I go in and rock with him for a while.

He likes music well enough -- I think I’ve conditioned him so that he can listen to just about anything. He listens to the usual music that toddlers listen to, but I also expose him to the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and even some punk rock. At one point, I had the Ramones playing in the background and he comes up to me and says, “Daddy. Music off.” This kinda cracked me up, but I shut off the tunes and let him go with quiet for a while. About a half hour later, I tried playing the same record (I think it was playing “Ramona” from Rocket to Russia) and he was hoppin and boppin like it was his birthday. Kids adjust quickly.

Anyway, I go in to rock with him for a while and turn on Saxophone Colossus (Sonny Rollins), one of my favorite bop records from the ‘50s. As I’m rocking him, I mull over the possible absurdity of a toddler relaxing to improvisational music. They have no concept of what’s conventional… even everyday things carve out new pathways in their brains, like a living dream. Adults, by contrast, get so used to their surroundings that I imagine we sometimes crave the unpredictability of jazz solos. It doesn’t seem to bother him, though, so I put it out of my mind.

Instead, I start trying to picture the music in my head. Mid-50s bop makes me think of a smokey cafe cluttered with wealthy white urbanites, each massaging their brains with the saxophonist’s trendy velvet. In one moment it strikes me as a new form of enslavement -- the white people have compartmentalized and catalogued an otherwise liberating African American tradition. They judge it positively or negatively based on their stodgy classical music training and only accept the black man on the stage because he interests them. He is an object of display, like a painting. In the next moment, the picture shifts and I see a talented black man using his god-given gift to communicate ideas that are both new and exciting to a crowd of curious white people. He holds them in his sway like a military commander, breaking through cultural boundaries and centuries of institutional racism. The white people may not completely understand him, but they’re a step closer. Which picture is the truth? Neither. Both. I think we need both.

When it’s over, he still hasn’t gone to sleep. Maybe something simpler will help, so I put on Lubbock (On Everything) (Terry Allen). It’s a first listen, but I immediately fall in love with Allen’s simple medodies and twisted sense of humor. I leave you with a snippet from “Beautiful Waitress”:

Quote:

[She] always liked horses, I said “I did too” But they're hard to draw, she said, ‘Yes, that was very true” Said she could do the body okay, but never get the head, tail or legs, I told her she was drawing sausages, not horses She said no, they were horses

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[BrandonMiaow]

This is incredible Sp4cetiger! I Think you ought to get this in depth on the forums anytime you listen to music, your perspective is fascinating. I'm very sorry about your close family friend, and that your son is sick.

[sp4cetiger]

[sp4cetiger]

04/04
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8:00 PM Friday

Another list.

Unknown Pleasures (Joy Division) - As much as I appreciate the brilliance of this album, I gotta say that it’s a real downer. It kind of regresses me to 9th grade when I was an angsty teen in the pits of depression and cynicism. I don’t see myself being in the mood to listen to it very often now.

The Undertones (The Undertones) - Solid British punk rock, but it doesn’t really resonate with me after two listens.

We Are Family (Sister Sledge) - Second listen, still enjoy it. Likely in my top 10 for the year.

GI (The Germs) - Now this is cool. It’s the first hardcore punk album to appear on my lists and definitely one of my favorite listens from 1979. My general impression of how BEA views hardcore punk: “It’s cool what the hardcore scene did for indie music and the DIY ethic, but why the fuck would I want to listen to it?”

I can understand why hardcore punk would seem alien to a lot of indie kids, especially considering just how fucking angry and frustrated it is. I had a friend in grad school who introduced me to hardcore punk by taking me to CBGB to see Leftöver Crack (2005, I think). I distinctly remember standing in the pit and not knowing how to respond to it -- I mean, I couldn’t tap my foot to it and the melody was either non-existent or indistinguishable. Eventually the kids around me just started banging into each other, so I joined in.

More than a lot of other types of music, hardcore punk is an experience. It’s tough to convey on a record and even tougher to notate on paper. To me, a hardcore punk concert is a raw and visceral demonstration of the suffocating nature of mainstream Western civilization, a venting of demons more alike to primitive exorcism rituals than we may want to admit. Some might say that middle class white kids don’t know the first thing about real frustration, but if they don’t, they do an awfully good impression.