Who's Worse, Lenny Kravitz or the Wallflowers?; Science-Fiction Theme Music; Slumber Party; Neil Young Lumbers in with Another Live Album
"I Heard the News..." So ran the caption under a photo in one of the dailies of a teenager mourning John Lennon's death. When I read that line, I hummed the rest of the tune to myself and literally started to cry. Not because of Lennon's death, but because on the next page there was a shot of the Backstreet Boys with the caption "Back on Top." Say what you want about the Beatles, they could write a fucking pop song. The fact that their The Singles LP hit #1 on the charts proves it, and I'd rather spend three months in solitary with only "Octopus's Garden" for company than live three more minutes in a Britney Spears world.
One of the many problems with the arts today is the grandfather clause on celebrity. Hank Williams III's debut album had buzz, even though, as we say back home in wife-beatin' country, that dog won't hunt, not to mention Hank (who admits to having taken his family name/persona only when his music wouldn't sell) is too smacked out to make his own shows. Jesus, didn't we learn our lesson from Bocefus? Stop the fucking insanity! Then yesterday my boss Spencer Ackerman (a man who for years thought the ELO song was "Medieval Woman," and is strictly FUP) put Lenny Kravitz's greatest hits album on my desk. Lenny, dude, your mom was in The Jeffersons, so culturally your family should be spending the next 50 years as Germany did after WW II?quietly hoping the rest of the world will forgive and forget. Instead, you saw this as license to destroy the Guess Who's "American Woman."
The saddest part about Lenny, besides the fact that he enables privileged, Upper East Side whores to wear leather, is this: the crap he puts out now makes "Always on the Run" sound like "Tumbling Dice." I used to hate "Always on the Run." Now the rock 'n' roll bar has been lowered to such an extent that when it comes on the radio I think, "Hey, that song wasn't so bad." Giving people's kids record contracts ends in mediocre albums like the Wallflowers' latest. If Jakob weren't related to Bob, his career probably would have ended where it ought to have?in a dorm room sophomore year when his mom talked Jake into being a marketing major. The cover, a fake set made to look like L.A., says it all. Even if they think they got the joke, trust me, they didn't, because they are the joke.
So why do celebrity kids usually miss the artistic mark? Maybe it's because to be a great artist, you need to have a shitty childhood under your belt. And no, a shitty childhood with rich parents doesn't count (unless you're Carrie Fisher). But never fear, ye who see the ruse (and that means you, Slim Shady), because you're not alone, and it's not just coke talk when I say you're probably a hell of a lot more talented than the people who don't see it. So, in parting, I'll leave you with a few words from the new live album by Oasis, a brother act whose father still lives in the Scotland council flat where they grew up, as he's too drunk and ornery to leave: "I think you're the same as me/We see things they'll never see/You and I we're gonna live forever."
Tanya Richardson
I was in the office having a conversation with a writer the other day with the Creature from the Black Lagoon music on behind us. It went like, "Well, see, my idea for a new column?" Bwaaangh bwaangh! "...And, you know, I was thinking it was time for a raise?" Bwa bwaa BWAANGH!!
Everybody should live his life to science-fiction theme music once in a while. Which I suppose is one of the ideas behind this box set, another one of those lavish Rhino boxes you'd feel guilty buying for yourself (at the suggested $99.98 retail) but would love to get as a gift. It's five CDs of sci-fi or sci-fi-inspired music, brilliantly packaged in a metallic cube in which a hologrammic brain appears to be floating. The CDs and the fat, hardbound booklet fit into slots inside.
It's a given that at least half the appeal of sci-fi movies is the music, which, especially in the earlier and cheaper ones, is responsible for providing all the atmosphere and melodramatic tension that the actors, sets and f/x cannot. The first CD here is a great sampler of movie themes and scores, from the electronic bloops and whizzes of Forbidden Planet and Fantastic Voyage to the creepily majestic The Day the Earth Stood Still to the nerve-wracking martial pulse of the Terminator, Aliens and Predator scores. Plus The Thing, The Time Machine, The Fly, First Men in the Moon, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and the great, gallumphing Mars Attacks! theme. And more?but not everything. As usual, licensing problems kept some people's favorites?Fahrenheit 451 and Blade Runner for me, maybe Star Wars for you?out of the mix.
Another CD is outer-space-themed exotica and lounge music, with titles like "Frozen Neptune" (a fine, Twilight Zone-ish orchestral piece) and "Lunar Rhapsody," by the likes of Ferrante & Teicher and Les Baxter and Raymond Scott, plus some bad kitsch (Leonard Nimoy) and some sort-of art (Sun Ra, David Garland with John Zorn). The theremin and Moog abound on this one.
Two CDs are dedicated to pop and novelty songs. Some of these grate (didn't need to hear Nilsson's "Spaceman" again), but there's a lot of fine stuff here: Louis Prima's "Beep! Beep!," the Ventures ("Fear") and Tornadoes ("Telstar") and Marketts ("Out of Limits"), Jimmy Durante doing a thing I'd never heard called "We're Going UFO'ing," Mojo Nixon's "UFOs, Big Rigs & BBQ," the Rubinoos' funny "Surf Trek," T Bone Burnett's nicely sardonic "Humans from Earth," Webb Wilder's rockin' "Rocket to Nowhere," Stan Ridgway's "Beyond Tomorrow," Parliament's "Unfunky UFO," Kathy McCarty's spooky version of Daniel Johnston's "Rocket Ship." It is here demonstrated that sci-fi attracts geeks like They Might Be Giants, B-52's and Lothar & the Hand People, but also cool characters like Roky Erickson (the unavoidable choice of "Creature with the Atom Brain").
I could do without most of the fifth CD, which is all tv themes. Though I've always like those for One Step Beyond, the original Outer Limits and of course Twilight Zone, it makes me twitchy to listen to hyper-upbeat jingles like the Jetsons or Astro Boy song out of context. The accompanying booklet is 200 pages, loaded with full-color illustrations, and will keep the sci-fi nerd happily occupied for a few hours all by itself.
John Strausbaugh
I can't get enough of this album. Slumber Party is a four-piece girl group from Detroit led by Aliccia Berg (most recently seen helping map out the human genome as part of her degree in molecular biology). They supply the missing link between a certain strain of mid-80s British indie pop known as cutie, Galaxie 500's echo-laden, moody New York soundscapes and riot grrrl, with such seamless grace I'm just astonished no one has managed it before. The problem with cutie pop was that it seemed both dangerously (schoolyard) retro and lacking in sexual charge. There was nothing political about wearing plastic hairslides and skipping rope onstage, yet it seems that somehow?perhaps as a reaction against the continuing preference of the music industry for PVC and Britney pinups over a modicum of talent?that nowadays the opposite can apply. You return to the time when you most felt part of a gang, outside of authority. Children can be bratty and irritating; why not use it to your own advantage.
That is an aside. It has nothing to do with my love for Slumber Party's engorged four-part harmonies or the way Aliccia's singing and the minimalist, Mo Tucker-style drumming on the somnambulist "3 Strawberry Sunday" remind me irretrievably of my own Chosen Ones from the 80s, Edinburgh's 60s girl group/Ramones-influenced Shop Assistants. Indeed, I haven't even seen a picture of this mysterious Michigan group. Yet their similarities to certain aspects of riot grrrl?you ever hear the quieter songs from Bikini Kill??are inescapable. That's why I mention the schoolground?although this is actually blanket pop, best listened to with the covers pulled over your head at 4 p.m. (Hence the name, perhaps?)
Slumber Party's links to that whole naive pop, Jonathan Richman-influenced scene are very apparent, too. I mean, Jesus. A band that simultaneously sounds like Shop Assistants, Galaxie 500 and the quieter moments of the Velvet Underground rolled into one glorious song called "I Don't Mind." Yes, I think we can safely term this "naive pop."
I dunno. I'm babbling on and on, because records as beautiful as this are so thin on the ground. I wish I had more to tell you, beyond noting that Slumber Party play the tape-echo saturation ambience card to its fullest and that there is never anything twee or cloying about music that sounds this fresh and of itself. Sometimes, a song like "I'm an Example" will remind me of early Stereolab before they became a little too studious, other times "Retaliation" sounds like the distant cousin of the Shangri-Las' gothic-intense bedroom hate song "Dressed in Black."
Sure, this music is instantly familiar. That's part of its appeal. But I'm damned if I can recall many other groups who blink so fully formed into the light, with such an enviably strong identity. Sometimes I wish I did give marks at the end of reviews. Yes, this is a 10-out-of-10 album. This I rate alongside the Shaggs, Psychocandy and a handful of other post-Spector naive offerings. Is this as good as the first Ramones and Shangri-Las albums? It's a little too Mazzy Star for that. It's still absolutely gorgeous, though. Sigh.
Everett True
On his fourth live set in a decade, Dinosaur Sr. delivers a predictably competent set of tunes compiled from various dates of last summer's tour. While his other recent live releases have focused on one shade of Neil at a time?Weld's thrash or Unplugged's gentle folk?Road Rock is a return to the balance he mastered with 1979's Live Rust. The selection here ranges from a lumbering, maybe definitive "Cowgirl in the Sand," which holds up surprisingly well for its 18-minute-plus running time, to a quietly searing "Peace of Mind." When playing in these two modes, his band, a ragtag assortment of session players and family members, nearly matches the ragged glory of Crazy Horse or the country-Zen of his Stray Gators backup.
Unfortunately, they don't pass muster when they try to tackle some of Neil's more eccentric tangents. Hesitancy butchers the long-awaited return of his rarely heard classic-soul tribute "Walk On," and if the new, bluesy "Fool for Your Love" is any good, there's no way to tell from the sloppy, flat performance heard here. And though Neil's continually transcendent guitar squeezes a few last drops out of "All Along the Watchtower," it also bulldozes Chrissie Hynde's guest vocals into a wasted opportunity.
Still, considering the nostalgic sheen on recent live sets by Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles, maybe we should be thankful Road hits some potholes. At the very least, Neil never seems to be playing a tune just because some folks want to hear it. When he remembers his dead friend by singing a song in a shaky voice, it's not really by choice. But there hasn't been a decent new batch of songs in some time?has anybody actually made it the whole way through Silver and Gold? It's time for him to shake things up again. We need Neil the oddball making records that piss off both the suits and the backpack crowd. We need him talking once more about Hawks & Doves and everything in between. And right now, more than ever, we need him to elaborate on how it's "hard to face that open space."
Justin Hartung