Please summarize this video in one word. That is all. Thanks.
Jun 252021
Jun 222021
Jun 212021
Townspeople, it’s that time for cracking open summer music reading. My birthday just passed, which means I’ve got some new books piling up. I’ve been digging right into this oral history on David Bowie, listening to all the Bowie albums being covered as I read. So far, for all my complaints, I’m clearly enjoying it, but maybe in a bit of a “hate-read” way.
You may recall my longtime difficulties with Bowie. Despite the fact that I love 30 songs by him, he’s just…not my kind of guy. The focus of this oral history is on his devouring – aesthetically, sexually – side of him. It confirms so much of the foreign – to my sensibilities – vibe I’ve always gotten from him. He seemed like he was so ambitious, so eager to create a persona – two qualities I actually don’t have an issue with – but he wasn’t doing it for himself, the way my natural music hero John Lennon seemed to be doing. Instead, he seemed to do all this to insulate his inner void, or whatever. I’m thoroughly enjoying this book, I am ashamed to say, but the story so far, through Aladdin Sane and his dumping The Spiders, is making me a bit queasy.
I’m curious to see if this rock bio can end without chapters on our hero hanging out with Phil Collins and Sting at exclusive Caribbean resorts. I hate when that happens.
What music reading do you have underway or lined up for the summer?
Jun 172021
Does it get more gentle than this?
Jun 132021
Hey, gang — I need some help with some Stones lyrics. I cued up a bunch of trackssss from across their career — nothing too obscure — and wrote down what I heard, starting right at the top of each tune. But Mick was pretty much incomprehensible, so I stopped transcribing before I hit the choruses. Which was pretty stupid, because now I don’t remember which songs these are. Can you help ID the tunes? Once I get the song names, I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to figure out what the heck Mick is yelling about. Thanks.
1.
Yeah, once papa cold when I was crazy spade
Gear New York’s lanky legs
I saved my money, I took a plane
Ever I go seems the same
2.
I’m a little bit clean of mulcher
All my friends are cultures, snot feelers too
3.
When your walrus is rough
Satan’s glove
I been browned in your love
You got a front door blue, yeah
I’m from the same one that you, yeah
Oh, I mock the helm mop blues
4.
Break me five, big me down, me runny, know my way around (assy Choo cha!)
Pig me pile, ping me dan, beat me run-in, beat me on the ground
5.
No git, can’t sleep, wing up, no sleep, sky diver insider, slip brooch, sky dang
Moon bed lover, got no time on feen
One less sucker bare freak on the soul scene
Oh, for bid nay oh, git stand
6.
Made me think of Percy
All the kind of worsen
Make me fer the cattle on thang
Baby, Baby
Doe these the jews in a frown
7.
Reb troll up the cold town bully
Come on bend my hand
Riff so yo you braille buddy
Briss so muss so pram
Bray buss every lane granny you and stay
But I lost a lot of girl over you
Jun 112021
Not sure where or how to start this rant, but — well, let me just call all of RTH out (yes, including me) for being a bunch of bullshit rockist pansies. How is it possible that in the 15 years or so that we’ve been bloviating about music we’ve never stopped to acknowledge how truly amazing the Bee Gees were?
And look — before any of you start yammering about their output in the ’60s, or their silly-psych concept albums, or any other rockist justification for liking the band — let’s just call a spade a spade: during the second half of the 1970s, the Bee Gees’ batting average for crafting powerful, moving, era-defining, ethnic ghetto-busting pop music was literally close to 1.000.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lbFycezCo8
My wife and I had to spend a lot of time on the highway over the last few days for work reasons that are too boring to get into here. Because my shoulder is still pretty jacked up, my wife had to do all of the driving — and that meant she got to choose what we listened to as we trundled down the highway. For a while, I was able to sneak shit that I wanted to hear on the rental car stereo, but it didn’t take long for her to start making specific demands — and the last one, made in the interest of staying awake and alert, was “play something you can dance and sing along to.” Enter the Bee Gees. I found a pretty generic greatest hits package on Amazon Music, and pressed play. A full hour later, I was shocked by the fact that we hadn’t exited the 1970s yet, and each and every tune we’d heard was aces.
And let me be clear: sure, these tunes are danceable. Yes, they’re catchy. They do make you feel happy. But they’re stealth vehicles for some of the densest Kentonism in pop music. I’m not smart enough to describe the music theory going on behind “Nights On Broadway,” or “How Deep Is Your Love,” or about a dozen other songs that owned the charts 45 years ago, but their music was some seriously brainy shit.
So let’s give it up for the Bee Gees, shall we? And please do so without referencing their 1960s output. That stuff is occasionally excellent, but we need to face the truth here: the Bee Gees made pop music great in the late 1970s.
I look forward to your responses.
HVB
Jun 082021
Idle prestidigitation for the recent wailing installment of RTH brought to mind a most curious phenomenon, one which left me bamboozled for the last few years until I solved it a few weeks ago, came to mind.
I’d enter the kitchen without a thought of glam rock in my head and yet, by the time I’d tidied up, I’d be humming a specific T Rex song to myself and wondering where it came from. Again.
Finally, I realised it was the dishwasher.
One press of the button and the motor comes on for a long, grinding beat, then silence 2,3,4, another blast on the motor, another imaginary count of 2,3,4 and off it goes again. Then it whirrs into action, just like the guitar on the introduction to 20th Century Boy.
In the days when my work office was open, a run of any more than a dozen page on the photocopier set up to replicate the rhythm of Money by Pink Floyd set me off down that rabbit hole
Surely, in such august company, I cannot be the only one to have experienced this?
Which items of household or office machinery do you have which set off rhythmical earworms? And are they songs which, broadly speaking, you enjoy?
