Worst song ever made . . . part 1

This may sound like a joke, but it's not.  

Chicago has released an album called Chicago XXXVI.  

That's 36 for the young crowd who never learned Roman numerals.

Not only that, this record includes the worst song ever made.  Don't believe me, go read the lyrics:

http://www.metrolyrics.com/america-lyrics-chicago.html

Better yet, you can listen to it and hear for yourself:

I guess it would be too much to expect them to re-imagine some of their earlier political fare like "Dialogue" or "Someday" (or "A song for Richard and his friends," calling on Nixon to quite in 1972), but these guys are rich and old and shouldn't be so afraid to "call a spade a spade" as they once reminded us Harry Truman would do . . .  but their political statement for 2014 is a bunch of empty, and often contradictory, platitudes that I won't even let my second grader get away with.

Instead of blindly slamming our "leaders" for treating us like "fools . . .  who don't have a clue what to do," acknowledge that at least one political party has a vested interest in Government doing as little as possible . . . except repealing Obamacare for the 87th time or threatening to shut down the government to de-fund Planned Parenthood. Hey Chicago: write a song about this.  Meanwhile . . .

Dial-a-song is back

Bob Mould at Fillmore September 26

You know, if he's going to come out there and kick everybody's ass for 75 minutes, Bob Mould should really provide us with a safe word.

He opened up with two Husker songs:  "Flip Your Wig" and "Hate Paper Doll."  That should have been fair warning to what he was up to.  Both songs are from the album Flip Your Wig, which was the Huskers conscious attempt to crank out a punk-rock version of a pop album, one that would emulate the melodic sensibilities of the 60s and 70s pop/rock that Mould (and Hart and Nortion presumably) grew up on, combined with the background of pure guitar noise that marks out so much of Mould's sound over the years.

This was a good preview of the rest of the show . . . whether Husker Du songs, Sugar songs, or Mould solo songs, Mould's trio crunched through with barely a break.

My favorite part of the show, though, was the closing. They finished the oncore with a version of the Husker Du song, "Chartered Trips."  As the song ended and Mould and the band ditched their instruments, the background noise remained--this feedback (such a cliche to call it a "wall of sound" at this point), that has been part of Mould's sound in one way or another for 30 years, droned on and on.  I looked around at my fellow concert-goers . . . throughout the whole show I was feeling a bit unspecial; this was a group of 30- and 40-something white guys who seemed to know the songs, seemed to "get it" as far as this whole noise pop thing goes.  But at this moment, when I looked around, I saw lots of shock and confusion.

I'm sure bands from Sonic Youth to the Doors have similarly surrendered their instruments to the feedback like this, so it was not an incredibly original moment.  But somehow, something was pulled off.  The pop ended and there was extra noise to go around, so that's what Mould ended with. And the trio filed offstage, leaving a bunch of staring eyes and ringing ears, waiting to hear if there was any pop left for another song, but settling for being bathed in Doxa.

Be Zorch, disco-haters!

I finally got the call for papers for the Experience Music Project pop conference before the deadline (somehow I never seem to see it or think of it until too late).  I'm going to submit a proposal, and my idea is down to two choices:

Nervous Norvus or Disco Demolition.

The conference theme is "Get Ur Freak on: Music, weirdness and transgression," and the very first bullet-point in the call is for "histories of strangeness" in popular music.  I don't know how they can get by without Nervous Norvus in that history . . . so far, all I've found on him are (slightly) contradictory biographies and an album collecting some of his demos and singles (including Ape Call and Transfusion, of course).  Be zorch, daddio: present on the Nervous one.

Aside from marking his place in musical history, this is kind of open slate . . .  not sure up-front what angle to take on this . .

The Both

This is just such a good idea.

Aimee Mann is one of my favorite song writers. Ted Leo has a catalog of great records.  But the both of them have been spinning the wheels a bit . . .  on their last few albums, the songs have started sounding like all their other music, and there hasn't been much to bring me back.

I never would have put these two artists together.  It's like suddenly finding out your favorite genius writer was an avid fan of the radio talk show from your hometown that you listen to on podcast all the time, long before you ever listened to it (true story).

Somehow, Ted Leo + Aimee Mann works pretty well.  Like peanut butter & bananas, avocado and havarti, or bacon and anything.

It's the nucleus burning inside of the cell.  It's a song about the fonzie statue in Milwaukee.

Hate Your Friends!

This whole digital music thing is not working out so well.  Using a work computer has meant keeping a digital library that is about 10 times smaller than my physical (CD and vinyl) library.  Using CDs less, I wound up packing many of them away.  Itunes match somehow misplaced hundreds of songs.  To combat this, I recently pulled out boxes of CDs and actually listened to them!

One of those I came across was the Lemonheads' first record, Hate Your Friends, on the TAANG! label.  I remember buying this one on vinyl, circa 1987, with no idea who they were or what they sounded like (Ok - I was guessing punk.  I told my roommate that I bought the record because the guys on the record sleeve looked like us).  Where I bought it is a funny cultural history, too:  this Boston-based band was in the "import" section of the record store at the Ford City Shopping Center (on the Southwest Side of Chicago, where you'd think somebody would know better, but you're wrong because on the South Side, everything's 20 years behind and they are still waiting for Nevermind to come out).

Intro

Some friends and I were just talking about how there are so few blogs out there, especially related to music. So I thought, I better step up and start blogging . . .

So here it is, another music blog.  Another music blog by a white guy who spent his 20s listening to college radio and is an academic.  

Seriously:  I am doing this for a few reasons:  I chair a composition program, but I rarely find myself writing (outside of emails and proposals for new hires or new classes, that is), I have thoughts on music that I need to get out of my head (even if most of them are twenty years old . . . especially because most of them are twenty years old), I have dabbled academically in music analysis and need to find some ways to engage with that discursive community despite the fact I have less and less interest in publishing in academic journals (and maybe writing this blog will change that), I have found myself becoming stuck in my musical listening ways and figure this is a way to prompt myself to change them.

And what in the world does "sound arguments" mean?  A couple things -- first, my goal is to write arguments about music--not only what's good or bad, but how to interpret  and make sense of it.  Second, it represents the way I tend to think about music, as being a kind of argument --  an argument about what sounds good, an argument about society, an argument about how to live and be in the world. In the academic writing I've done, I focus on how music works rhetorically (I'll explore and expand and play with this idea in the blog, so I won't say much more here) and that approach will be in play here.  

So what's to come?  some thoughts about the Lemonheads and their AllMusic reviews, some thoughts about Liz Phair (and maybe a review of the new 33 1/3 book on Exile in Guyville by my colleague, Gina Arnold), some thoughts about the return of a bunch of Minnesota bands from the 1980s and which ones don't suck.

For now, I think this blog will unapologetically reinscribe my own white and lower middle class and academic privilege, but I promise to interrogate it and expand as time goes on.  Something to come back for!

Meanwhile, enjoy this: