The Beatles White Album (1968)
A Random CD Review from the Stutzman Memorial Archive
The Beatles (White Album) by The Beatles (1968)
So, the Excel spreadsheet spit out #44 today-
The White Album. Talking about this album, (or just about any album by the Liverpool lads), is kind of overwhelming. Mostly everything’s already been said by critics, academics like Walter Everett, and fan boys like me. I talked about The Beatles and this album in particular as musical influences very early on in this blog. You can find those posts if you want to. What’s left to say? “The Beatles were great. This is one of their great albums…Welp, see you later.”
I haven’t heard this album in a while. When I was in high school, there was a point where I listened to the tape I dubbed just about every other day, in my jeep with cow seat covers. While it’s not a “perfect album,” (What is?) it’s certainly way up there in my estimation. What sets it apart from other Beatles albums? Basically, the lack of polish in the production, (only exceeded by
Let It Be.) A lot of the record sounds like they were in a rush just to get the songs down, rather than use the studio’s tricks to create a mind-blowing, aural cornucopia a la Sgt
. Pepper or “Strawberry Fields.”
To me, this record kind of sound like self-aware hippies—the endless possibilities of love are tempered here by relationships not working, (insert comment about Yoko Ono breaking up the band.) The lyrics betray this as well: for all of McCartney's pie-eyed optimism found in songs like "Mother Nature's Son" and "Honey Pie," "Martha My Dear," there can conversely be seen depression ("Im So Tired), dark imagery, (just listen to some of the stuff in “Happiness is a Warm Gun”), and George Harrison’s acerbic social commentary on “Piggies.” These guys needed MORE than love.
To go back to my original thought about the monolithic legacy of the Beatles--In an
Onion interview a couple months ago, an interesting question was posed: Is it possible to even
listen to The Beatles' music anymore? That was an appropriate question for me. I know this music so well. I’ve heard this stuff thousands of times, studied some of the scores, listened and listened listened. Can I ever hear it anew? Probably not.
Can I even enjoy this music anymore? I really don’t know. I happen to be so methodical in how I listen to music, (for instance, I’ll chronologically listen to the Frank Zappa albums in the car over weeks), that maybe “enjoyment” is a loaded word. Or consider this; whenever I buy a new CD, I refuse to listen to it in any manner other than with a pair of decent headphones, so as to hear as many details as possible. As freakish as that sounds, though, the methodology and order is comforting to me. God is in his heaven when there is a rational structure supporting the activities of my life. I suppose that was way too much information. I just revealed a couple of my quirks just to make the point that my "enjoyments" are possibly another person's "homework."
Anyway, I think there is something to the idea that over-familiarity with a work of art can render it impotent. I think my ability to listen to these Beatles albums and songs is fading. What’s scary is that I’m less and less frequently finding new artists to listen to with as voracious an appetite. I think the last time that happened; it was with Elvis Costello about six or seven years ago. Very rarely do I hear some new artist and feel this compulsion to
acquire and hear every artistic statement they've made.
Whatcha' Readin'?
Sorry, my babies, if you’ve been looking for updates on here lately. The temperamental firewall filters here at work have been disallowing me to post. So, if I go an inordinate amount of time between posts, you’ll at least know why. It’s not because I don’t like you.
I’ve read a couple, actually three, books since last we spoke. One was called
Bobos in Paradise by David Brooks, recommended by dear old dad. “Bobos” is short for “Bourgeois Bohemians,” a supposedly new group that Brooks identifies—a class of people beginning in the 90s that eschews traditional crass consumerism for more “politically correct” consumption, for example. He goes to great lengths to describe these folks and at various points I thought “I know people like that.” However, written in the late 90s, his idealistic, flowery, “everybody’s happy” political assessment of the future could not have been less prescient in the post 9/11 world, which is quite sad to me.
I also read Malcolm Gladwell’s
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, and I must say, I was largely unconvinced by the things he was saying. He proposes that humans are capable and wired to make rapid, correct decisions much more quickly than we give ourselves credit for. This was really more a book about the snap judgments that experts in various fields are able to make.
And finally, I’m now ¾ of the way through the Chuck Klosterman oeuvre.
Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story was a bit of a disappointment to me, largely since I don’t know what he was trying to do with it. Is it a death travel-novel a la Sarah Vowell’s
Assassination Vacation? Is it a love story confessional? The one question I had to qsk myself through the whole book was “Why should I care about Chuck Klosterman’s love life, again?”
Sure, he’s a pretty clever pop culture commenter but that doesn’t earn him permission to tell the stories of his personal life as if they have some greater meaning. It seems a little presumptuous. And presenting them side-by-side with the stories of “rock n’ roll deaths” like Kurt Cobain, Sid and Nancy, the Allman Brothers and the big Bopper is just forced. This book read like a writer struggling with deadline pressure and an inflated self-importance.
Amnesiac by Radiohead (2001)
A Random CD Review from the Stutzman Memorial Archive
Amnesiac by Radiohead (2001)
The computer spit out #460 for today—Radiohead’s
Amnesiac. I have quite a few gut instincts associated with this album, but I felt that I owe you, dear reader, a little more than that. I shall listen to this album one more time before I commence with the commentary…
****
Since it had been a long time since I listened to this album and since Radiohead is such an “important” band, I wanted to be as fair as possible. Critiquing Radiohead negatively is like saying Princess Diana looked mannish and was a harlot. But the fact that I haven’t heard this disc in a while should be your first clue as to what I think about it. And I must admit, upon listening to it last night, I wound up not hating it as much as I expected to. Be that as it may, in a word,
Amnesiac, is underwhelming to me for a variety of reasons.
One, it’s widely noted for its’ dearth of guitars, as is
Kid A, the album before it. That’s never really been an issue for me, except for what logically follows when there’s not a lot of guitars—digital doodaddery and the dreaded loop-based composition. One seemingly inescapable byproduct of creating music with software samplers and loop recorders is non-dynamism. When you’re creating a piece of music with a bunch of audio puzzle pieces that repeat at such and such times, obsessing over mere placement of parts, it is really difficult to mold that into an overarching composition that takes you somewhere. That is one of my problems with a lot of the music on this album—it just kind of sits there taking up time, (not to mention the nebulous song titles that have very little to do with the songs or with anything: “Dollars and Cents,” “Hunting Bears,” “Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box.”) These songs have no presence for me unless they are playing right now. I can’t imagine anyone saying “Dude, ‘Hunting Bears’ totally turned my life around.” Anyway, I was speaking of dynamics and Radiohead music without dynamic contrast is a waste of talent in my opinion.
Another waste of talent is the fact that this was the second album in a row featuring what I’m going to call the “anti-song.” I could be here all day trying to answer the following question: “What is a song?” At its most simple, I think a “song” is a collection of words set to a melody that can be fairly easily realized by a girl or guy accompanying him/herself on a guitar or piano. That’ll be my working definition for now, as limiting as it is. A track like the hideously titled “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors” is almost the exact opposite of that. For those of you like me who don’t remember what this composition sounds like—it’s a pretty static drum loop with very little harmonic information and a tweezed robotic voice talking about all kinds of “doors.” This is the most unnervingly pretentious bullshit on the album. There is very little difference between the sounds on this track and Ross Geller’s vocoder performances with his Casio keyboard at Central Perk. But the fact that Thom Yorke is associated with it somehow turns it into some important statement.
Now, rock critics often talk about “departure” and artists’ “growing,” so theoretically my problems with this version of Radiohead not sounding like my darling Radiohead’s first three albums is really more my problem than theirs. But let’s deal with the matter of historicity. These tracks were the results of the same recording sessions as those for
Kid A. That, to me, suggests that these were the songs that weren’t good enough for that album, or were at least not the ones that the band was most excited about. The typical response to that accusation is that these songs just didn’t fit the overall vibe or theme of
Kid A. Really? Are Kid A and Amnesiac really that different sounding? I don’t think so. The name Amnesiac describes this album’s ideal audience—those who forgot what
Kid A sounded like.
Another amusing aspect of this album is its’ heavy minor key tendencies. I think every song at least starts in a minor key, (except for the aforementioned “Pulled Pork/ Revolving Doors,” or whatever it’s called, which doesn’t really count since it’s only vaguely tonal anyway.) Listening to this album is like a forty-five minute funeral dirge. At times I just want to shake Thom Yorke and say, “OK! I get it! You’re brooding and artistic!”
Now, with the last five paragraphs said, let me offer what this album does well. Despite all my rattling on, there are some really interesting moments for me as well. I really do believe that the best moments from this album and the best moments from
Kid A would make a pretty incredible disc. “Knives Out” and “You and Whose Army” are stand-out tracks for me, and not surprisingly, they are the two most traditionally Radiohead-esque songs on here: jazzy guitar harmonies, memorable melodies, a real band sound. They just groove along really nicely, like if the beatnik band from
Pee-Wee’s Playhouse got a little bit more angst-ridden.
And then there is the beautiful “Like Spinning Plates,” one of the least analog moments on the album, yet it is way more than just chopped up beats and some non sequitur lyrics thrown on top. There is harmonic motion, chord changes and even a melody, (even though it’s backward vocals for a lot of the song), but it goes somewhere. The backwards synth arpeggios are a little disorienting at the beginning, but it develops, grows in volume, the lyrics become distinguishable and all of it is covered by some stringy synth-swells. If John Lennon had not been assassinated, I could hear the Beatles sounding like this in the 90s. The only thing missing is a drum set and some guitar. To me, this piece is the culmination of the new electronica-aware Radiohead.
Hail to the Thief would come afterwards to try to integrate this technology with the soul of the first three albums, but this tune reminded me of just what heights they are capable of reaching, albeit a bitter reminder. This track is still not Radiohead-the
band, but rather Radiohead-the experimenters with noise.
Whatcha' Readin'?
This morning I finished Chuck Klosterman’s
Fargo Rock City, his first book. This is basically a “metal music apology.” Klosterman sees himself as an outcast from mainstream pop culture critics and thinkers because of his genuine love for the music of his childhood—namely, “glam” or “hair” bands like Guns n’ Roses, Cinderella, Skid Row, Motley Crue, the list goes on and on…
His reasoning behind all this is a little murky. While it’s obvious that he legitimately loves a lot of this music, he also realizes the stupidity and vapidity of it all at the same time. While it would be easy to thus pigeonhole him as one of those “ironic detachment”-type hipsters, Klosterman’s childhood identity is too wrapped up with the music for that to be the case. His pleasant retelling of key events in his life and their corresponding soundtrack betrays how important the music really was and still is to him. To me, this is kind of refreshing. While I really don’t enjoy most of the music he is talking about, (big exception being Van Halen), I have to give him props for actually LIKING something, as a person who gets paid to write about music and entertainment. So much of criticism is a recitation of why certain bands or movements or ideas are overrated or subversive, or just crappy in general. Very rarely do you get to hear about a critics’ odd, personal likes—the things that they listen to when they don’t have to impress anyone or worry about deadlines and “trends.”
While this book isn’t as funny as the last book I read, it makes up for it by taking me back to similar points in my life. We are of the same general age range, so I experienced some of the same music growing up, but, as I discussed early on in this blog, my musical education around the same time was a little more eclectic and scattershot. In general, I think I tended to look backwards the older I got, while Klosterman seems to have been purely a man of his times.
I highly recommend this book to Aaron Copeland because Klosterman’s musical home is of the same construction and location as his.
I figure that, since his books are such easy, enjoyable reads, I’ll go ahead and read his other two books. Full report to follow in the near future…
I'm 30.
Today's my birthday and a few people up here at work have been bringing me small foodstuffs and cards as gifts.
I feel kind of like a volcano god being appeased by my minions.
Fables of the Reconstruction by REM (1985)
A Random CD Review from the Stutzman Memorial Archive
Fables of the Reconstruction by REM (1985)
My faithful Excel spreadsheet spit out random # 484 today, which corresponds to REM’s
Fables of the Reconstruction. This is certainly not one of my favorite albums.
Consider this: due to the surreal artwork, I’m still not sure if the title is
Fables of the Reconstruction or
Reconstruction of the Fables. This fundamental misunderstanding is pretty much representative of my appreciation, (or lack thereof), of the album as a whole. For one thing, I have absolutely no clue what any of the songs are about. Now, even though I can say that about pretty much every REM song and even though ambiguous lyrical content doesn’t necessarily preclude my enjoyment of songs, there comes a point where something’s gotta give. The overall vibe of this album is kind of odd. To call the anemic and angular “Feeling Gravity’s Pull” guitar figure that starts the album a “riff” would be too kind, but for me, it serves as the marker of the subdued production throughout this disc.
Typically, when lyrics fail to catch my attention, (which is about 95% of the time), I can usually fall back on the purely musical content. But on this album, I’m not exactly sure what either department is trying to do. Obscure lyrics, obscure music. “Driver 8” is probably the most well-known song, which I understand is some kind of college radio landmark. It’s got a nice enough riff, memorable some two or three years since I last heard it and there are some nice electric twelve-string jangles on “Green Grow the Rushes,” foreshadowing the REM to come a few years into the future. Other than the album closer “Wendell Gee,” I can’t really remember much else from this album, other than some white boy funk and dark production.
All that said, this reminds me of a curious phenomenon—the album that, no matter how often you play it, you never seem to get to “know.” I’ve owned this disc since it was given to me by a friend in high school more than ten years ago. I’ve probably heard it all the way through about 35 times, which really isn’t a lot for my listening habits. And I think there’s something to be said for music that you seem to “discover” anew with every listening. However, this particular album has a tendency to fade to the background with me every time. And I realize that there are some instances when that’s what you want-- audible wallpaper. But that’s not the case for me most of the time.
Anyway, REM’s a weird band and this is one of the weirdest albums I’ve heard from them.
