#a smattering of pop radio hits and country

[fromtenthousandfeet]

Smells Like Steady Vocals and Perfect Pitch

Part 1.

I wrote this on April 5th, 2024 in a fit of rage/inspiration. I wasn't going to post it but I've decided to anyway because I'd like to give a little perspective about why Jimin, out of all the members of BTS, is popular in the US, and why I think he has amazing potential as a solo artist if he's given the right team and tools.

*******

Today is the 30th anniversary of Kurt Cobain's death, so it feels like a sign from the heavens that it's time to write a post I've been composing in my head for months.

So often when I'm on Twitter/X looking for information about Jimin, I see one nasty comment after another downplaying his singing, his artistry, and his talent in general. The phrase repeated the absolute most by the fandom of a particular member is that the reason HYBE invests in one above all the others is because he has the most stable singing voice. And perfect pitch. And the perfect tone for pop music.

Frankly, I get so sick of reading those comments, but I also have to laugh, because it shows such a fundamental misunderstanding of what appeals to music fans in the US/Western countries.

If you open Spotify right now and search for Nirvana, you will see 31.1 million monthly listeners! As a reminder, their last album was released 30 years ago and they only put out 3 major label albums over a 3 year period. Meanwhile, BTS has 28.6 monthly listeners and has a discography a mile long and a career spanning more than 10 years.

Do you honestly think that Nirvana has enjoyed so much popularity over the years because Kurt Cobain had perfect pitch and could sing live? Yeah, no.

I remember where I was the first time I heard "Smells Like Teen Spirit." I couldn't decide if I loved it or hated it, but the song held a strange grip on me. It was sooo different than all the other popular music at the time, even in the alternative scene. It wasn't quite punk, wasn't quite heavy metal. The song was angry and raw, but also oddly charming. But mostly, it was refreshingly different from all the highly produced music that was on radio stations' rotations at the time. Don't believe me? Here's a link to the Billboard Top 100 on the week "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was initially released:

Check out the list and tell me how many of these songs you know. Probably a few, but not many have withstood the test of time (shout out to 3 a.m. Eternal by The KLF, though. That was a fun song).

This was the #1 song that week:

Didn't like it then. Don't like it now.

Now compare that to Smells Like Teen Spirit:

Look at the Billboard list again. Lots R&B (love), dance tracks, a smattering of college radio/alternative tunes, and a whole lot of what we would call easy listening/adult contemporary music. A snooze fest. Nirvana came along at the right time when the American music audience was in desperate need of something more authentic and not so over produced.

Sorry for this long-winded pop music history lesson. Believe it or not, I have a point to make. Americans like a huge range of music styles (as can be seen on the current Billboard charts). We get bored easily. We don't demand a steady voice or perfect pitch. What we want is something new. Something innovative. Something authentic. The biggest western pop stars who have enjoyed long careers in North America know that they must push boundaries and release new, unexpected material in order to stay relevant.

Be it BTS' English trilogy, songs that blatantly emulate American pop singers, or the conveyor belt of 2 minute TikTok-ready tunes sung by Korean girls, so far it doesn't seem like we should expect anything terribly innovative or cutting edge now that Big Hit has morphed into HYBE with its many labels/subsidiaries. Fickle American audiences will move on quickly, in my humble opinion.

One last thing. The US is a huge country with very diverse cultures based upon geographical location. Gender, age, ethnicity, urban vs. rural, and region of the US all influence what people are listening to. What's popular in Atlanta isn't necessarily popular in Salt Lake City, for example. Americans are not a homogenous group and neither is our taste in music.

[televinita]

The Music of 2019

As long as I'm bringing everything else over to a Tumblr audience these days...this is a tradition I've had running for over a decade, ever since I decided that tracking my books read and movies watched each year simply wasn't enough to cover my media consumption.

Behold: a list of (almost*) every new-to-me song I fell in love with this year, sorted by artist so you can get a snapshot idea of my general taste to complement the Spotify Wrapped version.

*Full albums I've fallen in love with can be found at the end, with my top 3-6 tracks included in the list as representatives to avoid totally unbalancing it, unless it is a multi-artist album and then all limits are off.

Abra Moore – Your Faithful Friend

Alanis Morissette – A Man

Alanis Morissette – Crazy (Seal cover)

Alanis Morissette -- Precious Illusions

Alanis Morissette – Princes Familiar

Alanis Morissette – Sister Blister

Alanis Morissette – So Unsexy

Alanis Morissette – You Owe Me Nothing in Return

Allison Pierce – Evidence

Aofie Scott -- Another Reason

Aofie Scott -- Building Up and Tearing England Down

Aofie Scott -- Fuel I Need

Aofie Scott -- Homebird

Aofie Scott -- Ireland's Hour of Need

Aofie Scott -- Irish Born

Aurora – Runaway

Avril Lavigne -- Head Above Water

Avril Lavigne -- Dumb Blonde (clean/solo version)

Avril Lavigne – Goddess

Avril Lavigne – Souvenir

Avril Lavigne – Warrior

Betty Who – The Reunion

Betty Who – The Valley

Children in Need Cast Recording – It Must Be Love (Madness cover)

Christy Altomare – I Let It Slip

Chxrlotte - Come With Me

Clairo  –  Alewife

Clairo  –  Bags

Clairo  –  North

Clairo  –  Sofia

Clairo  – White Flag

The Corrs – Hurt Before

Daddy Yankee ft. Snow -- Con Calma

Daddy Yankee ft. Katy Perry & Snow -- Con Calma remix

Dasko – New Day

David Tennant – Sunshine on Leith (Pretenders cover)

Destiny's Child – Independent Woman

The Dragonz – Dragonz Rap (a.k.a. We Are the Dragonz)

The Dragonz – On The Dance Floor

The Dragonz – Soul is Bare

Eisley – A Song For The Birds (acoustic)

Elbow – Red

Eleanor Tomlinson – Hushabye Mountain (cover)

Erutan – Jabberwocky

Erutan – The Willow Maid

Gareth Gates – Any One Of Us (Stupid Mistake)

Halsey/Khalid – Eastside [vocalists are the only artists to me unless there are no vocals]

Humbird – Kansas City, MO

Imogen Heap – Speeding Cars

Isabelle – Unlabeled

Jillian Jacqueline – Sad Girls

Jodie Whittaker – Yellow (Coldplay cover)

Josh Groban/Jennifer Nettles – 99 Years

Josh Groban/Sarah McLachlan – Run (Snow Patrol cover)

Josh Groban – Bigger Than Us

Josh Groban – Won't Look Back

Josh Radin – I'd Rather Be With You

Katherine Cordova -- Applause (Lady Gaga, piano solo arrangement)

Katherine Cordova -- Miracles (Coldplay, piano solo arrangement)

Katie Melua – Nine Million Bicycles

Katy Rose – Overdrive

Katy Rose – Snowflakes

Katy Rose – Teaching Myself to Dream

Katy Rose – Watching The Rain

Kimberly Locke – 8th World Wonder

Lana Del Rey – Doin' Time (Sublime cover)

Lana Del Rey – Young and Beautiful

Lauren Alaina – Doin' Fine

Lauren Aquilina – Talk to Me

Lil' Nas X ft. Billy Ray Cyrus -- Old Town Road

Lizzo – Juice

Lizzo – Truth Hurts

Lucy Spraggen ft. Scouting For Girls – Stick the Kettle On

Mackenzie Johnson – Fast Car (Tracy Chapman cover)

Maddie Zahm – Beautifully Human

Malinda – Music Box

Mandikat – Minnesota

Matt Wertz – Carolina

Matt Wertz – Everything's Right

Melanie C – I Turn To You

Michelle Branch – Texas in the Mirror

Michelle Branch – Through the Radio

Nicole Richie – Dandelion

Noah Cyrus – July

Noah Cyrus – Topanga

One Bit ft. Noah Cyrus – My Way (Acoustic)

Phoebe Bridgers -- Funeral

Phoebe Bridgers -- Georgia

Phoebe Bridgers – Motion Sickness

Phoebe Bridgers – Smoke Signals (and reprise)

Rae Morris – Dancing With Character

Rob Thomas – One Less Day

Roberto Cacciapaglia - Oceano (instrumental)

Sammy Ward – Two Sides

Sharon Van Etten – Seventeen

Stephanie Mabey – Glorious

Suranne Jones – Symphony (Clean Bandit cover)

Talis Kimberly – Goodnight, Sarah Jane

Taylor Swift – New Romantics

Taylor Swift – Wonderland

Taylor Swift – You Are In Love

Taylor Swift – You Need to Calm Down

ZOEGirl -- About You

ZOEGirl -- Dead Serious

ZOEGirl -- Good Girl

ZOEGirl -- Let It Out

ZOEGirl -- Reason to Live

ZOEGirl -- Scream

FULL ALBUM RECS: Aofie Scott, “Homebird” (2020 - available early on tour) Avril Lavigne, "Head Above Water" (2019) Clairo, "Immunity" (2019) Phoebe Bridgers, "Stranger in the Alps" (2017) Alanis Morissette: The Collection (2005) Alanis Morissette, "Jagged Little Pill (acoustic)" (2005) ZOEGirl, "Room to Breathe" (2005) Katy Rose, “Because I Can” (2004)

UPDATE: OTHER FUN FACTS

I analyzed where/how I first heard of each song/album (all songs from the same album count as 1, under whatever brought the first song to my ears), and Spotify has a comfortable lead as the top source, but that stake only accounts for 33% of the total. Second place is YouTube, 3rd is the radio, and 4th is ONTD on Livejournal.

But remaining sources (less than 5 apiece) include all of the following: secondhand CDs at garage sales/used bookstores, the library, Tumblr, Instagram, a DVD, Goodreads, a book, Soundcloud, my fiance, Wikipedia, and a concert tour.

[justthehiddleswrites]

Trivia Night | Stephen Strange x Reader

Pairing:  Stephen Strange x Reader

Summary:  Stephen can’t pass up music trivia night at a local dive bar. But what should have been a landslide win is a bitter battle. Has Stephen met his match in more ways than one?

Warnings: drinking (not underage)

-

Stephen stopped in front of the non-descript bar. A colorful banner hung against the faded brick facade. Music Trivia Night Every Thursday!

“Well, don’t mind if I do.” he commented to himself as he ducked in.

Bodies crowded the small bar. The smell of smoke still clung to the walls despite the smoking ban. He noticed the groups gathering around tables with buzzers. He approached the nearest group.

“Mind if I join you guys for trivia night?”

A somewhat rotund man who came up to only Stephen’s shoulder pushed up his wire-rimmed glasses.

“Are you any good?” he questioned.

“Try me.” Stephen smirked.

“What was the flip side of the last number one hit for the Beatles?”

“The last number one of the Beatles was The Long and Winding Road…” The man smirked as he turned. “…For You Blue is the flip side.”

The smirk disappeared and was soon replaced with a huge smile. The man extended his hand.

“Welcome to the team. Name’s Matt.”

Stephen shook his hand. “Stephen.”

The group did quick introductions as Stephen took a seat and one guy handed him a beer. Stephen sipped, grimaced at the bitter, watered down domestic beer. He pushed the glass and flagged down a server to order a more suitable craft ale.

“With you we might stand a chance.” Matt joked.

“Yeah, perhaps you are the one who can take down The Terminator.” another guy called Chris chimed in.

“The Terminator?” Stephen glanced around the bar to see if someone who was a worthy opponent to his own mind. “Can you see him?”

“She sets up by the moderator.” Matt gestured to one side of the tiny room.

Stephen’s eyebrows rose in interest. A woman? He chuckled to himself at his luck. He felt more confident than ever as the event started.

“Okay everyone, let’s get started!” The emcee’s voice reverberated against the brick walls. “Welcome to Music Mania, where the points and the answers matter.”

Stephen zoned out as the emcee read over the rules and prizes of the night. He had half a mind to use his powers to see the outcome, but what was the point, he always won when it came to music.

“Round 1!” the words punched through his thoughts and brought him back to reality.

Everyone playing hunched over their tables, ready at the buzzer.

“Question 1: The band Duran Duran is named after a character in what movie?”

As Stephen moved to slam the buzzer he overheard BZZZZ!

“Terminator?”

A soft voice lilted through the air. “Barbarella.”

Stephen banged the table with his fists. “I knew that one.”

“Sure you did.” Chris muttered off to the side, nursing his Miller Lite bottle.

“I can go to another table.” Stephen hooked his thumb over his shoulder.

“Not necessary, Stephen. Can I call you Steve?” Matt questioned.

“I prefer Stephen.” He took a long draw on his bottle. “What’s the matter with your friend?”

Chris shifted in his seat, glaring at Stephen. “I’d rather not say.”

“The Terminator shot him down. And now he is bitter.” The rest piped up.

Stephen resisted the urge to chuckle. “You’re mad at me because you got rejected? I like this girl more already.”

“Listen—” Chris started in.

“Question 2: What year was Frank Zappa admitted to the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame?”

Stephen slammed the buzzer with lightening speed to hit it first.

“At the back?” the emcee asked.

“1995.” Stephen smirked, confident in his answer.

“Correct! Looks like you have some competition out there, Terminator. What’s your name back there?” The emcee shaded his eyes.

“T-3000.”

A smattering of chuckles and gasps came across the room. You popped your head up to see who dare to challenge you. Your eyes met a tall, goateed man sitting at the back. He winked and smiled at you. Scowling, you sat back down.

“This means war.” you whispered to yourself.

The emcee shrugged. “Looks like we have ourselves an actual competition. Onward and upward!”

The two of you steel yourselves for the next question.

“Question 3: Which country singer adopted the alter ego Luke the Drifter?”

You hit the button so hard it jumped on the table.

“Terminator?”

“Hank Williams.”

“Can you be more specific?”

You rolled your eyes. “Hank Williams, Sr.”

“Correct!”

You turned to see Stephen grumbling and grousing to his tablemates. You smiled. It was rare you had competition in trivia; the adrenaline was pumping.

“Question 4: What was the second music video to air on MTV?”

Stephen buzzed in first. “Video Killed the Radio Star by the Buggles!”

“Oh, that is incorrect!” the emcee hissed.

You buzzed. “I believe that was the first video. The second was Run to You by Pat Benatar.”

“Correct!”

“Shit!” Stephen yelled, and you noticed the sound of beer mugs clattering as he hit the table.

“Next time, listen more!” you taunted.

“Eyes forward.” he retorted.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I believe there is a rivalry. Let’s play on! Question 5: Who was the oldest artist to top the UK charts?”

The two of you hesitated for a moment before Stephen buzzed in. “Louis Armstrong in 1968 for What a Wonderful World.”

“Show off!” you bellowed.

“I believe that answer earns a bonus point.” the emcee responded with a smile.

“You’ve never given me bonus points!” you stood in protest.

“You have never given an answer like that. Looks like you have met your match.”

“More like my next victim.”

“The way you go through men that is probably accurate.”

“Next question, please.”

Stephen couldn’t hear the animated conversation between you and the emcee, but he spied your growing frustration. It pleased him to no end. He found himself more and more enchanted with you.

“Question 6: Which 80s song was re-released in the UK in 1991 and went straight to number 1? Name the artist and the song.”

You got to the buzzer first.

“The Clash. Should I Stay or Should I Go.” You replied.

“Correct!”

The rounds continued to bounce back and forth like an excited ping pong match. The entire bar invested in the match with all the other teams dropping out to spectate. People took sides cheering and jeering. The room buzzed with electricity. By the time the regular round ended, you and Stephen were tied.

“For the first time, we have a tie!” Everyone cheered. “Can I have the two competitors come to the front?”

Stephen rose and made his way to the stage at the front. You settled onto an uncomfortable stool. Stephen meanwhile looked perfectly at home as he folded up his long limbs to take a seat. You ignored the growing tightness in your chest as you gazed upon him.

“Now for the tiebreaker question. Terminator, T-3000, grab your pen and paper. Question: Of the over 600 songs Elvis sang, how many did he write? You have 15 seconds. Closest to the answer wins.”

The entire bar erupted into the Jeopardy theme as the two of you wrote down your answers. You placed your paper in your lap confident. Stephen winked at you from the barstool on the other side of the makeshift stage.

“Okay, time’s up. Terminator your answer.”

You flipped your paper to reveal the number zero.

“And T-3000?”

Stephen revealed an answer of thirteen.

“And the winner is…” The emcee bounced his head between you and Stephen. “… Terminator! She guessed right with zero!”

You pumped your fists in the air and did a little victory dance. Your hips shimmied back and forth. The motion hypnotized Stephen. In that moment, he decided.

“Excuse me.” He tapped you on the shoulder.

You spun to come face to face with your closest competitor. “You’re taller than I expected.” You extended a hand. “No hard feelings?”

He shook your hand with a firm grip. “On the contrary, I am delighted to find someone who meets my own knowledge of music. Tell me how do know so much.”

Your gazed dropped as you shuffled your feet. “My dad was a bit of a savant for music. We would talk about it every Sunday over breakfast. I was a sponge.”

Stephen smiled softly. “That is a charming story. Perhaps I could hear another one sometime. Maybe over dinner this week?”

Your head snapped up to meet his gaze. You stared into his ice-blue eyes.

“That sounds nice, uhh…”

“Stephen Strange. Dr. Stephen Strange.”

You introduced yourself.

“Pleasure. So what do you say Tuesday at 7?”

“I think I can swing that.” you croaked back.

“Until then.”

“I look forward to hearing some stories from you too.”

Stephen chuckled. “Yeah about that…”

[tswiftdaily]

Rolling Stone: Taylor Swift Reaches For New Heights of Personal and Musical Liberation on ‘Lover’

Her epic seventh album is all about big moods, dreamy Eighties throwbacks and evolutionary freedom 

By the time “It’s Nice to Have a Friend” arrives on Lover, her seventh and most epic album, Taylor Swift has entered uncharted territory. For one thing, it’s the 17th song here, and none of her previous albums have run more than 16 tracks. (Lover actually contains 18.) More importantly, it’s not about being 16 or 22 or even her not-insignificant current age, 29. It’s about being six or seven, and walking home from school in the snow: “Lost my gloves / You give me one / Wanna hang out? / Sounds like fun.” There’s no beat, no banjo, no metaphors or coded messages. There is, instead, deconstructed steel drum, horn and cooing voices — Animal Collective as interpreted by hip-hop-savvy pop-producers-of-the-moment Louis Bell and Frank Dukes, the song’s co-writers. It’s like the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, where a long turbulent journey through outer (and, naturally, inner) space culminates in the sudden appearance of a planet-sized fetus. For two and a half minutes, Swift regresses past all the drama and heartache she’s cataloged since her teen years to curl up in a weird little pocket of beauty. Swift has always been vulnerable, of course. And just as obviously, that vulnerability has been her strength. Female pop stars since Madonna have been expected to constantly reinvent themselves, lest it seem like they’re aging — an impossible standard that vexed Swift contemporaries like Lady Gaga and Katy Perry. In sharing her actual feelings about relationships chronicled by the tabloids — and parrying the entire internet’s judgements of those feelings — Swift helped open up a space for Ariana Grande to directly address Sean, Pete, and Malcolm on “Thank U, Next” (to name one glorious example). When Swift went pop, that wasn’t so much a transformation as an annexation of new territory. Grande might’ve picked up something here, too, with her triumphant embrace of hip-hop-style surprise drops. If Ariana, Billie, Halsey and others seem so effortlessly themselves, it’s in part because Swift worked so hard at speaking her truth and smiting her enemies. Lover is, fittingly, evolutionary rather than revolutionary. But nevertheless it feels like an epiphany: free and unhurried, governed by no one concept or outlook, it represents Swift at her most liberated, enjoying a bit of the freedom she won for her cohort. Made mainly in collaboration with Jack Antonoff, female songwriting ally nonpareil, the album’s dominant sound is sleekly updated Eighties pop-rock. In a bonus making-of track destined for a Target edition of the album, Swift tells Antonoff she wants a “dreamy guitar-y throwback, but not camp throwback” sound for the title track, and that’s pretty much the vibe. (Think recent Carly Rae Jepsen, if she made actual hits.) Swift loads “Paper Rings” up with a “1-2-3-4,” a “hey! ho!” and a key change for a jittery bit of Cars-meets-Eddie Money-meets-Go-Go’s delight. On the terrific “Cruel Summer,” written with Antonoff and Annie Clark (a.k.a. St. Vincent), she tells a simple tale of tortured love in under three minutes of pure pleasure, with what sounds like a smattering of talk box. When she sings “Out the window / I’m always waiting for you to be waiting below,” there’s no question you’re supposed to picture John Cusack in Say Anything.

Swift adjusts her frame of reference as needed. She claims to be “In my feelings more than Drake” in “I Forgot That You Existed,” a pro forma, post-trop-house declaration of her “indifference” to the haters. Thankfully, that’s mainly it for the sassy, winking Swift. Instead, she mostly goes for the big moods. “False God” is as minor-key and seductive as anything by the Weeknd, with a chorus, well — I’ll just leave this here: “Religion’s on your lips / Even if it’s a false god / We’d still worship / We must just get away with it / The altar is my hips.” She zags into oblique political commentary with “Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince,” a high school parable where she sees “high fives between bad guys” and delivers “O! K!” interjections in her best cheerleader voice. Like Euphoria,the HBO teensploitation extravaganza, it’s dark, melodramatic and, against all odds, perfect.

There’s plenty more fodder for the Swifties, haters, and bloggers here. Leo takes a proverbial volleyball to the face on “The Man,” a usefully blunt indictment of double standards, and the dub-inflected “London Boy” counts all the ways she “fancies” her boyfriend Joe Alwyn. “Soon You’ll Get Better” was recorded with Dixie Chicks, but giving the country-radio exiles a feature isn’t the point — the song is note-perfect ballad for Swift’s mother, whose cancer returned earlier this year. Whatever there is to be read into these songs, they are for one person and one person alone: Taylor Swift. Finally.

(x)

[dustedmagazine]

Dust Volume Five, Number 11

Cold rain, dead leaves, political corruption, diplomatic betrayal…it’s been a bleak couple of weeks on the home front, but at least the music is good. This time out, we check in with the estimable Ezra Furman (pictured above) and his blistering punk rock album, as well as a smattering of shoegaze, a low frequency trio, a black metal endurance test, acoustic entropy and the sound of black holes colliding.  You know, same old, same old.  Our contributors include Andrew Forell, Bill Meyer, Jennifer Kelly, Jonathan Shaw and Ian Mathers.

Blushing — Blushing (Wallflower Records)

Blushing by Blushing

Blasting out of Austin, Texas come Blushing (married couples Michelle and Jacob Soto on guitar/vocals and drums, Christina and Noe Carmona on vocals/bass and guitar) with their self-titled debut album, an impressively sophisticated addition to the shoegaze landscape. Blushing displays finely tuned dynamics, a keen sense of melody and joyous rushes of controlled noise. The interplay of twin vocals adds an ethereal Cocteau Twins sheen to the songs but Blushing aren’t afraid to let rip with layers of guitar. Producer Elliott Frazier of Ringo Deathstarr achieves space and separation in the mix that elevates this album above the basic quiet-loud-quiet formula. Underpinning all this is simply terrific songwriting and musicianship. Opener “So Many” starts with whispered vocals over strums and washes of guitar before the rhythm section enters, there’s a slow build before the track blossoms into a widescreen squall of almost psychedelic guitars and pounding drums then wanes into a feedback outro. Highlights “Dream Merchants” and “The Truth” bring classic shoegaze tropes and add a dreamy panoramic depth. Blushing is a band to watch and this is a gem of a debut.

Andrew Forell

 CARL — Solid Bottom (Astral Spirits)

Solid Bottom by CARL

“Bass, how low can you go?” CARL’s flow differs drastically from Mike D’s, but the question is undeniably pertinent. The Houston-based trio comprises three low end instruments — Damon Smith (since departed) on double bass, Andrew Durham on electric bass and radio, and bandleader Danny Kamins on baritone saxophone — hitting sonorities that range from ankle high to sub-sub-basement. But bulbous pitches can still be nimble, and so it is here. The interaction pits genre against genre, bow thrust against amp buzz, melancholy phrase against floor-rattling rumble, resulting in music that never feels at ease. Hey, Texas needs some opposition, and these folks are ready to show the way.

Bill Meyer

 Ezra Furman—Twelve Nudes (Bella Union)

Twelve Nudes by Ezra Furman

It was about the time that Ezra Furman started expressing his distinct identity—queer, cross-dressed, devoutly Jewish—that he turned into one of rock’s great songwriters. Today, freed of the need for self-abnegation, his songs balance a razor-stropped wit with sharp, assaultive hooks; he is not afraid to tell you his story, though he’s too literate and clever to deliver it unadulterated. His songs have a shape and a sting at the end like a good short story, but a punch that is considerably more visceral. “The kids are just getting started/they’ve only just learned to howl, and most of them throw in the towel/by the time that they turn 23,” he shouts raspily in “Evening Prayer aka Justice” and it leads into the kind of stirring, anthemic chorus that Titus Andronicus used to be so good at. “What Can You Do But Rock and Roll” rampages in a short-circuiting stop-start attack, like Green Day before they got so serious about themselves. In short, it’s a rock and roll of the sort that the culture has mostly abandoned, the kind that large men push to the front of Hold Steady concerts for, that causes Japandroids fans to punch the air. And yet it is not wholly of this man-centric tradition, simply because of who Ezra Furman is – lipsticked, cocktail dressed, smarter than you and willing to talk Torah. In short, here is a songwriter who has been killing it since Day of the Dog and Twelve Nudes, his latest, punk-est album (inspired equally by Jay Reatard and the Canadian poet Anne Carson) may just be his best. He is of the zeitgeist and also not, and you kind of wish more people were paying attention.

Jennifer Kelly

 Great Grandpa—Four of Arrows (Double Double Whammy)

Four of Arrows by Great Grandpa

“That’s why I hate you-ou,” cries Alex Menne in “Digger,” their voice catching in a hiccupping way that invites intimacy even at high volume. Her confidences are couched in an explosive swirl of country rocking countercurrents, concocted by the band’s two main songwriters, bassist and singer Carrie Goodwin and guitarist Pat Goodwin and executed alongside Dylan Hanwright (also guitar) and Cam LaFlam (drummer). The Seattle band’s second full-length is less brash and rock-centric than the 2017 debut Plastic Cough, which, perhaps because of their northwestern roots, elicited the term “grunge” from critics. This one is fuller, more elaborate and entirely devoid of Soundgarden references. It is decorated with lush, multi-voiced singing and baroque instrumental counterparts, and critically, uses a warmer more organic palette of instruments. That’s a violin and a banjo building out “English Garden,” not the buzz saw guitars of “Teen Challenge.” This rich, tuneful, grounded experiment might remind you of Ohmme, Hop Along or the Moondoggies, sleek but vulnerable, blown out but in control.

Jennifer Kelly

  Hatchie — Keepsake (Double Double Whammy/Ivy League/Heavenly Recordings)

Could it somehow be the fact that Harriette Pilbeam (late of Aussie indie rock band Babaganouj and here aka Hatchie, a family nickname) plays bass instead of the more standard frontwoman guitar that makes the singer-songwriter’s debut LP of new wave dream pop confections so singularly striking? Probably not, but Keepsake is assured and ingratiating enough it does leave one looking for the secret ingredient. Whether it’s the swooning likes of “Without a Blush” or “Secret” or the rougher emotional and sonic texture of “Unwanted Guest,” whether it’s playing against a sampled loop of her own voice on the chorus of “Obsessed” or achieving a particular kind of downward gazing transcendence through drum machine and synthesizer on “Stay With Me,” all of the songs here manage to hit on just the right combination of genre-appropriate beauty in texture with genuinely impressive melodic songcraft that whether Pilbeam sticks with this sound or not, she’s one to watch.  

Ian Mathers  

 Imperial Cult — Spasm of Light (Amor Fati/Sentient Ruin Laboratories)

Spasm of Light by Imperial Cult

This record consists of a single, 34-minute, largely improvised track, captured live in the studio. It’s all about endurance: the band’s, who must gamely thrash and bash at their instruments, with all of black metal’s requisite speed and intensity; and the listener’s, who has to commit a fairly significant amount of attention to the thing. Hailing from Holland, Imperial Cult are a new band, subscribing to the minimal web-presence policy of some other hyper-obscure acts, so it’s tough to say if they are of the “Satanists-and-we-really-mean-it” variety of continental black metal. If they are, the record’s grandiose gesture makes a certain sense. “Spasm of Light” may thematize the notion of eternal hellfire and torment. That, in turn, would raise other theological questions (do these guys imagine that declaring themselves devil worshippers and making this sort of music is their ticket out of forever in Bedlam? or are they looking forward to it?) that this reviewer isn’t all that interested in. More immediately concerning is the music. It’s pretty good, though to these ears, it’s more evocative of the epically inclined USBM bands of the Cascadian school — especially the early records of Ash Borer — than purposefully underground European occult acts like Novae Militiae (yes please) or Deathspell Omega (no thanks). Musically, that’s a good thing. Ideologically, who knows? Do these dudes wear cowls and sacrifice small mammals? Do you really want to know? Jonathan Shaw

  Minor Pieces — The Heavy Steps of Dreaming (FatCat)

Just gorgeous. Tape hiss master Ian William Craig and a Vancouver-based songwriter named Missy Donaldson join forces in an album that hangs right in the spectral other-space between conventional song and ambient soundscape. Craig, who is a classically-trained singer, sings lead most of the time. His clear, vibrato-laced tones with clouds and miasmas of electronic wash, mass-y harmonies and fragmented bits of guitar and piano. The effect in opener “Rothko” is both luminously polished and dream-like. “Bravagallata” reaches further up the register, twining Craig’s androgynous, unearthly tenor with the warmth of nestling, caressing harmonies; it shimmers in the interstices between icy modernity and comforting folk song. “The Way We Are in Song,” arises out of glowing, shifting electronic tones, yet feels wholly natural and unaffected. The way we are in this song is beautiful, touchingly human, but more so.

Jennifer Kelly

 The Pheromoans — County Lines (ALTER)

County Lines by The Pheromoans

The Pheromoans look at the world sideways, buttressing a workman-like rock and roll sound with murky embellishments of violin and synths. With a wobbly, wavery flavor of post-punk that might remind you, a little, of Blue Orchids, they match up dense woozy riffs with literate mumbles. They are the sort of band to ask “Sharia or Sheeran” and leave you shrugging, what’s the difference? This is the Pheromoans’ fifth full-length; their diaspora previously landed them on Upset! The Rhythm; but here the edges aren’t sharp enough, the punches not hard enough to evoke that label’s other bands. Yet there’s a disconsolate appeal to these wandering tracks. “Troll Attack” eviscerates electronic interaction against a Casio beat; both the music and the lyrics poke at unsatisfactory surfaces to find darker, truer muck underneath.

Jennifer Kelly

 Matthew Revert — The Inpatient (Round Bale)

The Inpatient by Matthew Revert

Some people get ready for surgery by making a bowl of Jell-o and making sure that the Hulu bill is paid up. Not Matthew Revert. His preparation for a date with the surgeon involved pitching himself into a new creative endeavor. None of his recordings to date, which have mostly involved acoustic entropy and electro-acoustic construction, will prepare you for The Inpatient. The album comprises ten improvised but structurally sound songs, all sung in nakedly emotional Spanish. Imagine Alan Bishop adopting a persona that is not immune to shame, and you’ve got an idea where this stuff goes. Prepare to be bemused.

Bill Meyer                        

 Marcus Schmickler — Particle/Matter–Wave/Energy (Kompakt)

Space is a place that has been exercising the minds of composers of late with recent releases by William Basinski (On Time Out of Time) and The Kronos Quartet (Terry Riley: Sun Rings) being two examples that use recordings from the deep cosmos. German experimental producer Marcus Schmickler, best known for his work as Pluramon, imagines the sound of galaxies colliding on his new piece Particle/Matter-Wave/Energy, a 37-minute block of immersive ambience based on Schmickler’s use of an algorithm to model gravitational data as a tool for sonification, a process that translates information into sound. The result is huge waves of tones that rumble, whistle and bleep like a swarm fleeing a storm. Through headphones this is an almost vertigo inducing experience as Schmickler evokes the sense of plummeting through a vast endless expanse of darkness. A fascinating and often unsettling piece, Particle/Matter-Wave/Energy works as a soundscape experiment rather than a casual listen, perhaps more to admire than enjoy, but it has a fluid physicality that rescues it from mere abstraction.

Andrew Forell

 Stein Urheim — Simple Pieces & Paper Cut-outs (Hubro)

Simple Pieces & Paper Cut-Outs by Stein Urheim

John Fahey barely made it into the 21st century, but his influence looms as large as ever. Stein Urheim, a guitarist from Bergen, Norway, is merely the latest to commit his confrontation with Fahey’s legacy to wax. He tips his hat to The Yellow Princess and other recordings of that vintage in this album’s accompanying book of tablature, but even if he hadn’t put it down in writing, you could hear it in his playing. Urhein is no rooky. He’s been recording with various bands since around 2004, working with singers and playing jazz, but this is the first time he’s anything quite like this. Urheim seems to be drawn to Fahey’s most virtuosic and lyrical work, and he has the chops to back it up, but also the performative confidence to let the music develop in its own time rather than chase after it. One has to put a bit of yourself into the music if you want to transcend the “sounds like Fahey” blanket that covers so many American Primitive guitar LPs. Urheim gets this, and he doesn’t take the easy way out by, say, applying his bluesy, acoustic picking to rustic themes or folkloric sources. Nor does he go for Fahey-esque textual obfuscation or faux-mythologizing. Instead he incorporates some samba gestures into the tunes, keeps them pithy and presses them on vinyl (by no means an assured thing on Hubro, which usually markets music via CDs and the internet). The album title proclaims this music’s simplicity, but Urheim’s is not simplistic so much as clear.

Bill Meyer

[celticguy2012]

WEDNESDAY NIGHT, MISSION CHURCH!  SATURDAY NIGHT, HIBERNIAN HALL!

You know, growing up in Boston was a joy in many ways.  Especially when your Dad came from County Kerry and your Nana came from County Mayo.  They were Irish born and Irish bred.  And then my Dad married Nana’s daughter and our family came about. We are part of what was called the Boston Irish.  

The war cry of the Boston Irish was “Wednesday Night, Mission Church.  Saturday Night, Hibernian Hall.”  On Wednesday night, they’d go to Mission Church, formally known as the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, for the weekly Novena services and Masses conducted by Father Manton.  His services would be broadcast live every Wednesday night by WHDH-AM 850, unless there was a baseball game that night.  They would then broadcast the afternoon service.  People would turn out in droves for those services, then they'd go down to the local coffee shop to get a donut and a coffee.  They'd talk about the service, how work was going and the family life that they were having at the time. 

On Saturday night, they’d go back to Roxbury, this time to Hibernian Hall to go to an Irish dance.  They’d hear the Irish bands play dance music such as jigs and reels, not to mention the latest songs from the hit parade.  Even though they were far away from Ireland, they felt a little bit of home whenever they congregated there.

In what is now a largely black and Hispanic neighborhood now, there were at one time 5 Irish ballrooms with recreational facilities and offices in them.  People would congregate on weekends for dances and weddings and what have you.  People would take the subway to Roxbury from all over town to enjoy themselves.

These dances enjoyed great publicity, thanks to Irish radio shows like The Irish Hour with Tommy Shields on WUNR.  There were many fundraisers there for charitable causes as well as concerts.  They were great times for all.

During the years of the blue laws, it was illegal to have a dance on Sundays. But they still had them.  When the police came around to see what was going on, someone would get up on the stage and sing, so as to the throw them off.  And wouldn’t you know it?  Once the cops were gone, they’d be up for another Irish waltz.

Musicians like Joe Joyce had steady employment at that time.  People would come from miles to hear them.  On Saturdays, some of the musicians would  play 2 or 3 weddings before their regular Saturday night gig, and then do another wedding on Sunday.   

On Sunday mornings, still reeling from their Saturday night out, the people would go to Mass then out to breakfast at one of their nearby cafes.  There, they’d talk about the previous night’s performers and how they did.  After that, they’d go on joy rides to the beach or the mountains.  Some would go out to yard sales and flea markets, too.

I know that my Mom and Dad would go out on dates to those dances on Saturday nights.  It was better than hanging around the house and watching TV or listening to the radio.  Sometimes, they’d go out to the movies and see what was new there.  

As the 60s and the civil rights movement came along, there would be riots in Roxbury, ending the reign of the Irish ballrooms.  Dances would move to church halls and Irish pubs.  They were more intimate settings for Irish music and dance, but people would still come to these places.  It was about the change in demographics as the Irish moved out to the suburbs and started their own social clubs and festivals.  Irish music can still be found in these areas if you know where to look.

Here in Boston, we’ve been blessed to have Irish radio programs like The Irish Hour Radio Program on WUNR and the Irish Hit Parade on WROL every Saturday.  Some Irish programs can be found in New York City, as well as a smattering of hour-long radio programs in various cities of the East Coast and the Midwest.  Outside of these areas, there’s a dearth of Irish radio programming as most of the music is country or pop.

Of course, bluegrass and country music are bballrooms.  Dances would move to church halls and Irish pubs.  They were more intimate settings for Irish music and dance, but people would still come to these places.  It was about the change in demographics as the Irish moved out to the suburbs and started their own social clubs and festivals.  Irish music can still be found in these areas if you know where to look.

Here in Boston, we’ve been blessed to have Irish radio programs like The Irish Hour Radio Program on WUNR and the Irish Hit Parade on WROL every Saturday.  Some Irish programs can be found in New York City, as well as a smattering of hour-long radio programs in various cities of the East Coast and the Midwest.  Outside of these areas, there’s a dearth of Irish radio programming ased on Irish folk music and is very popular in the South and other parts of the country.  Some say that country music is more popular in Ireland than it is here in America, since the two genres are related to each other.  Country music shows on RTE and local radio stations in Ireland are very popular and feature local country artists as well as worldwide talent. And on Irish radio shows here in the USA, a lot of Irish country artists are featured in the programs’ playlists.

     Yes, life has changed for the Irish since their days of "Wednesday Night, Mission Church, Saturday Night, Hibernian Hall."  However, the Irish experience is still alive in Boston in many ways.

[clickyourradio]

One of the UK’s most hotly anticipated bands, Gathering of Strangers are back with their latest single ‘Red and Gold’. Combining pop pomp and swaggering indie rock sensibility, the five piece have been turning heads since their inception, selling out shows up and down the country, and appearing at such prestigious venues as Manchester’s O2 Ritz and London’s Shepherds Bush Empire.

With a smattering of post-pandemic singles under their belt in the forms of ‘Cherry Red’, ‘Naked and Blind’ and ‘Antidote’, the latter of which receiving air-play on BBC Radio 6 Music,

Kerrang Radio and XS Manchester. the band’s new single ‘Red and Gold’ looks set to do much the same.

Three minutes of hugely anthemic indie rock, it’s a rousing return for the five-piece. Described by the band as being about “having the time of your life with your lover or your family. Simply dancing from sunset to sunrise all night long”, that sense of sheer elation is palpable across the track’s runtime.

"My absolute favourite time of the day is just after sunset, and you have about five minutes when the sun has disappeared, but it has turned the whole sky a golden red. I wanted to capture my feelings during those 5 minutes and put it in a song" explains frontman Conor Rabone.

“Having come out of the pandemic and not being allowed to go anywhere. We felt this was absolutely necessary to write an upbeat, feel-good track to go hand in hand with this beautiful summer of freedom.”

And therein lies both the crux and the appeal of ‘Red and Gold’ a three-minute feel good anthem that’s made for summer festival stages and radio airwaves alike.

[randomvarious]

Today’s compilation:

The Great Millions 1966 Traditional Pop / Pop / Pop-Rock / Rock & Roll / Easy Listening / Orchestral Pop

Dot Records was a real force to be reckoned with in its day. It was formed originally in Gallatin, Tennessee as an R&B and gospel label in 1950, but by the middle of the decade it started releasing pop covers of R&B tunes to appeal to a broader, whiter audience. This compilation, which was released in 1966, but is actually just a stereo version of a 1959 release that was originally issued in mono, gathers some of the label's biggest hits from its first decade. All of these singles managed to sell a million-plus records, hence the album's title, The Great Millions.

Before I get into this album itself though, allow me to briefly bring up one of those million-selling pop covers: "I Hear You Knockin'" by actress Gale Storm. This is a prime example of one of those gross instances where a black artist (Smiley Lewis) released a song and then a white artist (Storm) released a cover immediately after, and the white artist's version ended up selling like hotcakes because their label provided the backing and infrastructure it needed to succeed, and white people, as a whole, were more receptive to music made by other white people rather than black people at the time 🙄.

All of that said, Storm's rendition is a decent-sounding cover, and it's also pretty interesting to hear when juxtaposed with the much more now well-known 1970 version by Dave Edmunds.

All in all though, this compilation is just too traditional and strait-laced to be interesting. There's a reason why oldies stations don't play these oldies: most of the people who bought them are gone. All of these songs came out in the 50s. and the 50s are often remembered as the decade that birthed the rock & roll revolution, but that was music for rebellious kids at the time. Those 50s oldies that were made for the youths of the decade still get some burn today, but these 50s oldies were made for their parents. And those parents are almost all gone now. And we have little to no connection to that music, because outside of a smattering of jazz, blues, R&B, and country tunes, the timeline for the collective American pop music consciousness pretty much starts with rock & roll and then branches out infinitely from there. And most of these 50s tunes simply aren't rock & roll. They're largely traditional pop tunes sung by people like Pat Boone; boredom for most these days, including yours truly.

But hang on! Is it all bad? No. The Fontane Sisters put forth those traditional made-for-AM-radio vocal harmonies, but the stuff had a sweet jauntiness to it. "Hearts of Stone" was their biggest seller and it comes with a pair of nice sax solos. Those ladies are, like, a really forgotten relic of the 50s too, because even though they managed to chart well over 30 singles, their Wikipedia article is barely more than a stub 😔. Would be nice to get a PBS documentary on them or something.

Also, film and TV music supervisors might still find some utility in a few of these songs. Like, "Glow Worm" by The Mills Brothers is not a song that you'd probably ever catch me playing again, but it would probably pair well with a scene that involved something like fishing by making it more memorable.

But for the most part, this just was not a very interesting listen. I happen to think that the 50s are an all too underappreciated decade of music, but when I say that, this isn't the type of stuff that I'm referring to 😅.

Highlights:

The Fontane Sisters - "Hearts of Stone"

[delicatelythoughtfulpatrol]

How Pop Music’s Teenage Dream Ended

A decade ago, Katy Perry’s sound was ubiquitous. Today, it’s niche. How did a genre defined by popularity become unpopular?

Story by Spencer Kornhaber

“I am a walking cartoon most days,” Katy Perry told Billboard in 2010, and anyone who lived through the reign of Teenage Dream—Perry’s smash album that turned 10 years old on August 24—knows what she meant. Everywhere you looked or clicked back then, there was Perry, wrapped in candy-cane stripes, firing whipped cream from her breasts, wearing a toothpaste-blue wig, and grinning like an emoji. She titled one world tour “Hello Katy,” a nod to the Japanese cat character on gel pens worldwide. She made her voice-acting debut, in 2011, by playing Smurfette.

Perry’s music was cartoonish too: simple, silly, with lyrics stringing together caricature-like images of high-school parties, seductive aliens, and girls in Daisy Dukes with bikinis on top. Kids loved the stuff, and adults, bopping along at karaoke or Starbucks, enjoyed it too. (Maybe that’s because, like with so much classic Disney and Looney Tunes animation, the cuteness barely disguised a ton of raunch.) Teenage Dream generated five No. 1 singles in the United States—a feat previously accomplished only by Michael Jackson’s Bad—and it went platinum eight times.

Perry wasn’t alone in achieving domination through colorful looks and stomping songs. Teenage Dream arrived amid a wave of female pop singers selling their own costumed fictions: Lady Gaga, a walking Gaudí cathedral, roared EDM operas. Beyoncé shimmied in the guise of her alter ego, Sasha Fierce. Nicki Minaj flipped through personalities while wearing anime silhouettes and fuchsia patterns. Kesha, glitter-strewn and studded, babbled her battle cries. Taylor Swift trundled around in horse-drawn carriages. Each singer achieved impressive things, though arguably none of their albums so purely epitomized pop—in commercial, aesthetic, or sociological terms—like Perry’s Teenage Dream did.

A decade later, that early-2010s fantasy has ended, and Perry and her peers have seemed to switch gears. Rihanna has put her music career on pause while building a fashion and makeup empire. Beyoncé has turned her focus to richly textured visual albums that don’t necessarily spawn monster singles. Gaga, after a long detour away from dance floors, has returned to sounds and looks comparable to those of her early days, but she cannot bank on mass listenership for doing so. Swift keeps reinventing herself with greater seriousness, and little about her latest best seller, Folklore, scans as pop. Perry’s latest album, Smile, came out Friday. Regarding her new music’s likelihood of world domination, Perry told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, “My expectations are very managed right now.”

For the younger class of today’s stars, Teenage Dream seems like a faint influence. The Billboard Hot 100 is largely the terrain of raunchy rap, political rap, and emo rap, with a smattering of country drinking songs thrown in. Ultra-hummable singers such as Halsey and Billie Eilish are still on the radio, but they cut their catchiness with a sad, sleepy edge. A light disco resurgence may be brewing—BTS just strutted to No. 1 on the American charts while capitalizing on it—but that doesn’t change the overall mood of the moment. Almost nothing creates the sucrose high of Teenage Dream; almost nothing sounds as if Smurfette might sing it.

The recent state of commercial music has led to much commentary arguing that pop is dying, dead, or dormant. That’s a funny concept to consider—isn’t popular music, definitionally, whatever’s popular? In one sense, yes. But pop also refers to a compositional tradition, one with go-to chords, structures, and tropes. This type of pop prizes easily enjoyed melodies and sentiments; it moves but does not challenge the hips and the feet. It is omnivorous, and will spangle itself with elements of rock, rap, country, or whatever else it wants without losing its essential pop-ness. 

The early-2010s strain of it seemed like the height of irresistibility, and yet it’s mostly faded away. There are many reasons for that, but they can all be reduced to what Perry’s journey over the past decade has shown: Life and listening have become too complex for 2-D.

Pop has seemed to die and be reborn many times. When the 21st century arrived, the music industry was near the historical peak of its profitability—in part because of slick sing-alongs catering to teenagers and written by grown-up Swedes.

 But over the first few years of the 2000s, CD sales crashed thanks to the internet, boy bands such as ’NSync began to splinter, and Britney Spears’s long-running confrontation with the paparazzi reached an ugly culmination. 

Around the same time, women such as Pink, Kelly Clarkson, Ashlee Simpson, and Avril Lavigne began scoring hits inspired by mosh pits but more appropriate for malls. Gwen Stefani moved from rock-band frontwoman to dance-floor diva during this period as well. Such performers, though often assisted by the same producers and songwriters who helped mold Spears, flaunted unruly personalities to a reality-TV-guzzling public hungry for a kind of curated grit.

Katy Perry capped off this rock-pop boomlet. The California-born Katheryn Hudson had kicked around the music industry for years, first as a Christian singer—her parents were traveling evangelists—and then as an Alanis Morissette–worshipping songwriter.

She finally hit on a winning combo of sounds for One of the Boys, her delicious 2008 major-label debut, whose spiky rhythms, crunching guitars, sneering vocals, and juvenile gender politics earned her a spot on the Warped Tour, a punk institution. But the gooey, sassy hooks of “I Kissed a Girl,” “Waking Up in Vegas,” and “Hot n Cold” really made her a household name. 

Some of those songs benefited from the touch of Max Martin and Dr. Luke, songwriters-slash-producers of 2000s pop legend. (In 2014, Kesha filed a lawsuit accusing Dr. Luke, her producer and manager, of rape and abuse; he denied her claims and eventually prevailed in a years-long, very-public court battle over Kesha’s record contract.)

By late 2009, when Perry set out to record her follow-up to One of the Boys, the musical landscape had shifted again thanks to the arrival of Lady Gaga, a former cabaret singer with mystique-infused visuals and an electro-dance sound. What made Gaga different was not only her thundering Euro-club beats, but also her persona, or lack thereof. 

Gaga’s work overflowed with camp fun while keeping the singer’s true nature hidden under outrageous headpieces. By forgoing any attempts at banal relatability, Gaga seemed deep. In this way, she updated the glam antics of Prince, Madonna, and David Bowie for the YouTube era. Many of her peers took note, including Perry. 

Teenage Dream was lighter and happier than anything Gaga did, but it was electronic and fanciful in a manner that Perry’s previous work had not been. The cartoon Perry was born.

The conceit of Teenage Dream’s title track—“you make me feel like I’m living a teenage dream”—really boils down pop’s appeal to its essence: indulging a preposterous rush while also reveling in its preposterousness. “It is Perry’s self-consciousness—her awareness of herself as a complete package—that makes her interesting,” went one line in an NPR rave about the album. Even skeptical reviewers gave credit to standout singles such as “California Gurls” and “Firework” for being effective earworms. Perry had laid out her intended sound by sending a mixtape of the Cardigans and ABBA to Dr. Luke, who was part of a production team that pushed for perfection. 

“People on the management side and label side were pretty much telling me that we were done, before we had ‘Teenage Dream’ or ‘California Gurls,’” Luke told Billboard in 2010. “And I said, ‘No, we’re not done.’”

Such efforts ensured Teenage Dream’s incredible staying power on the charts through early 2012. The album’s deluxe reissue that year then generated a sixth No. 1 single, “Part of Me,” which also provided the title of a self-produced documentary that Perry released around the same time. Much of the footage showcases the stagecraft behind her 2011–12 world tour, a pageant of dancing gingerbread men and poofy pink clouds that would presage her hallucinatory 2015 Super Bowl halftime show. Perry comes off as charming and willful, and the film currently sits as the 11th-highest-grossing documentary in U.S. box-office history.

Yet the movie is best remembered today not for the way it shored up Perry’s shiny image, but for the way it complicated it. Over the course of the tour, Perry’s marriage to the comedian Russell Brand dissolved, and the cameras captured her sobbing just before getting on stage in São Paulo. It’s a wrenching, now-legendary scene. But elsewhere in the film, the viewer can’t help but experience cognitive dissonance as the singer’s personal dramas are synced up to concert footage of grin-inducing costumes and schoolyard sing-alongs. By hitching Teenage Dream’s whimsy to real-life struggle, the movie seemed to subvert exactly what had made the album successful: the feeling that Perry’s music was made to escape, not amplify, one’s problems.

Perry released her next album in 2013, a year that now seems pivotal in mainstream music’s trajectory. That’s the year Gaga pushed her meta-superficial shtick until it broke on the bombastic Artpop, which earned mixed reviews and soft sales.

 It’s also the year Lorde, a New Zealand teenager whose confessional lyrics and glum sonic sensibility would be copied for the rest of the decade, released her debut. Then in December, Beyoncé surprise-dropped a self-titled album whose opening track, “Pretty Hurts,” convincingly critiqued the way society asks women to construct beauty-pageant versions of themselves.

Later on the album, Beyoncé sang in shockingly explicit detail about her marriage to Jay-Z. Tropes of drunken hookups, simmering jealousy, and near-breakups were reinvigorated as specific and biographical, thanks in part to Beyoncé’s fluency with rap’s and R&B’s storytelling methods. She ended up seeming more glamorous than ever for the appearance of honesty.

The title of Perry’s album, Prism, not-so-subtly advertised her trying, too, to show more dimension. But the songs’ greeting-card empowerment messages, hokey spirituality, and awkward genre hopping made it seem as if Perry had simply changed costumes rather than had a true breakthrough. 

Still, both the cliché-parade of “Roar” and the trap-appropriating “Dark Horse” hit No. 1., and Prism’s track list includes a few examples of expert, big-budget songcraft. 

The album would turn out to be Perry’s last outing with a key collaborator, Dr. Luke. While she has maintained that she’s had only positive experiences with the producer, Perry hasn’t recorded a song with him since Kesha filed her 2014 lawsuit.

The Kesha-versus-Luke chapter added to a brewing sense that the carefree pop of the early 2010s was built on dark realities: Perry and Gaga have both described their most profitable years as personally torturous. Broader social and political developments—Black Lives Matter, the #MeToo movement, and the election of Donald Trump—also proved impossible to ignore for even the most frivolous-seeming entertainers. 

“When I first came out, we were living in a different mindset in the world,” Perry said in a recent Rolling Stone interview. “We were flying high off of, like, life. We weren’t struggling like we are. 

There wasn’t so much of a divide. All of the inequality was kind of underneath the mat. It was unspoken. It wasn’t facing us. And now it’s really facing us. I just feel like I can’t just put an escapist record out: Like, let’s go to Disneyland in our mind for 45 minutes.”

If that point of view sounds blinkered by privilege—who wasn’t struggling before, Katy?—Perry probably wouldn’t disagree. Her 2017 album, Witness, arrived with a blitz of publicity about how the star had become politically awakened and had decided to strip back her Katy Perry character to show more of the real Katheryn Hudson. A multiday live-stream in which fans watched her sleep, wake up, have fun, and go to therapy certainly conveyed that she didn’t want to seem like a posterized picture anymore. 

Yet neither Witness’s attempts at light sloganeering (the anti-apathy “Chained to the Rhythm”) nor its sillier side (the charmingly odd “Swish Swish”) 

connected with the public. It’s hard to say whether the problem was more temperamental or technological: By 2017, streaming had fully upended the radio-centric monoculture that stars like Perry once thrived in.

Her new album, Smile, is an explicit reaction to the commercial and critical disappointment of the Witness phase. Over jaunty arrangements, song after song talks about perking up after, per Smile’s title track, an “ego check.” There are also clear nods to her personal life. “Never Really Over” ruminates on a dead-then-revived relationship much like the one she has had with Orlando Bloom. “What Makes a Woman,” Perry has said, is a letter to her daughter, who was born on Wednesday. But she’s still mostly communicating in generic terms—lyrics depict flowers growing through pavement and frowns turned around—and with interchangeable songs. The explosive optimism of Teenage Dream has been replaced by ambivalence and resolve, yet the musical mode hasn’t really changed to match.

This leaves Perry tending to longtime fans but unlikely to mint many new ones. That’s because pure pop, the kind that thrives on doing simplicity really well, is largely a niche art form now. The delightful Carly Rae Jepsen will still sell out venues despite not having had a true hit in years. Today’s most acclaimed indie acts include the likes of 100 Gecs and Sophie, who create parodic, deadpan pastiches of pop clichés. Fixtures such as Lady Gaga do still have enough heft to ripple the charts (and thank God—her sense of spectacle saved the VMAs on Sunday). But her recent No. 1 single, “Rain on Me,” benefited from Ariana Grande, whose ongoing success comes from smartly channeling R&B. 

The current status of Dr. Luke, who has retreated from the public eye but still works with lesser-known talents and while using pseudonyms, seems telling too. He can’t land a hit with Kim Petras, a dance diva in the Katy Perry lineage. But he can land a hit with a rapper: He’s behind Doja Cat’s recent smash “Say So.”

Streaming, now the dominant form of music consumption, does not reward bright and insistent sing-alongs that demand attention but offer little depth. It instead works well for vibey background music, like the kind made by Post Malone, who’s maybe the most cartoonish figure of the present zeitgeist. It also works well for hip-hop with an obsession-worthy interplay of slangy lyrics, syncopated rhythms, and complex personas, all of which are presented in a context that feels like it has something to do with real life. 

Last week’s No. 1 song in the country, “WAP,” by Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion, radiates some of the fantastical thrill of the 2010 charts. But it delivers that thrill as part of a lewd verbal onslaught by women whom the public has come to know on an alarmingly personal level. The video for “WAP” is bright and pink, yes, but also immersive. 

It’s not a cartoon—it’s virtual reality.

[northcountryprimitive]

From Celestial Explosion to Hallowed Ground: Don Bikoff in His Own Words

This originally appeared at North Country Primitive on 23rd April 2016

I like these American Primitive guitarists who have been around the block a few times. They plough their own furrow, and long may they continue to do so. Case in point: I sent Don Bikoff a bunch of interview questions. He decided to ignore them completely and instead sent me back an essay - a mini-biography, as it were. I mulled it over for a while, wondering whether to edit the hell out of it and squeeze it kicking and screaming into some sort of Q&A format. No, I concluded. This is how it should be read - and it’s far more entertaining a prospect for it. You may know Don for his Celestial Explosion, that great lost fingerstyle album from 1968, reissued a couple of years back by the ever-dependable Tompkins Square Records. That’s far from the whole story, though - he has been a busy man these last few years. There’s the session he did for WFMU Radio back 2012, now available via the Free Music Archive. There’s a further session for Folkadelphia that you can download via their Bandcamp page. Then, in 2014, he released his first new album in over 45 years, Hallowed Ground. It’s an album you should hear. Even after this, Don isn’t standing still - he’s currently recording duo material with Mark Fosson, and rumour has it that these two venerable elder statesmen of fingerstyle are sparking off each other in a most edifying manner. The working title of the forthcoming album is Old Man Noises, and on the basis of the yet-to-be-mixed bits and pieces I’ve had the pleasure of hearing, it’s one to look out for. Over to you, Don…

I began playing guitar around 1959 or 1960, motivated by listening to Allen Freed under the bed covers ever since I was six years old. I had a great collection of various pomades that froze my hair better than Gorilla Glue to simulate that Elvis look. Early AM radio rock came in, with a good smattering of southern blues - on a good night the stations  be heard from quite a long way away. Nonetheless, I coerced my father into buying me a guitar at age twelve: I still remember that Harmony F-hole red and black sunburst six-string. He insisted, however, that I take lessons. Let’s just say that Mel Bay and I did not see eye-to-eye and the lessons were short-lived, to say the least. To backtrack a bit, my first public performance consisted of an accordion tune for my second grade class, followed by some trumpeting through to the sixth grade. Grade eight led to the formation of Donny and the Tornadoes, my early cover band, playing Beach Boys and other top of the pops tunes. At around fifteen years of age, I came to the conclusion that some guitarists were actually using their fingers rather than a plectrum. Perhaps it was Pete Seeger and my Weavers albums that led to this revelation. Now it gets a bit more interesting, as I was old enough to pick myself up and travel the Long Island Railroad to NYC and Greenwich Village. This was truly the very beginning of the folk scene and I was privy to performances by such luminaries as Bob Dylan, Dave Van Ronk, Buffy St. Marie and Jose Feliciano - the list goes on and on. One evening, Dave Van Ronk spotted a kid at the front table in the Gaslight Café and castigated him for writing furiously throughout his performance every night. After much embarrassment, he took me aside and allowed me to sit in at the backroom area, where I was treated to all the artists, whom I pestered unmercifully. The die had been cast. As I grew as a young guitarist, I sought out who I considered to be the true masters. I found the recordings of Alan Lomax to be a great help. The folk boom was coming of age and the Newport Folk Festival was in its infancy. I spent afternoons there, often under a tree with Mississippi John Hurt and maybe five or ten people looking on. Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Son House… guitarists playing slide with tableware and steak bones. I was in blues heaven. My own style was beginning to coalesce as a result of my encounters with these great artists. I never heard of John Fahey until a friend from California introduced me to his music and commented that we were somewhat alike. Truly a case of independent discovery on my part… I thought there must be a parallel universe somewhere out there for fingerstyle pickers. As the sixties came and went, I did get to meet Fahey; I still have one of the letters he wrote me. I found Robbie Basho intriguing, along with Peter Walker, Sandy Bull and a host of others. Timothy Leary’s League for Spiritual Discovery on the lower east side of Manhattan had both Peter Walker and I playing for the faithful. So along came an introduction to a record company owner who was looking for new artists for his label, Keyboard Records. I recall going to his office for an unofficial audition of sorts. He chronicled his own success at producing the Firestone Tyre Xmas Album and the Dorman’s Endico Cheese jingle (The first cheese individually wrapped in plastic!). Ed was very enthusiastic about my unique approach to the guitar and said he had an opening for a single album. The previous artist he interviewed simply didn’t excite him. His name was Neil Diamond. Within the next few months in 1968, Celestial Explosion was released and, much to my surprise, garnered great reviews from Record World and other critics. An underground favorite was the phrase often used to describe my music. My brief encounter with a press agent led me to a nationwide TV live performance on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour, where I lost to a Russian gymnastic team and a singing shoemaker. Just search for me on Youtube and you can see it for yourself. Ted said, ‘That’s unusual, to say the least.’ Subsequent years led to performances in Europe and small clubs throughout the U.S. and then reality hit. Family and day jobs happened. But then, 40 years later, Josh Rosenthal of Tomkins Square fame heard me on a local radio show and contacted me. One thing led to another and before I knew it Celestial Explosion was re-released to a new wave of listeners. I released  another album just last year, Hallowed Ground, my second in 40 years. I actually have been quite active again by my modest standards. I’m doing a number of folk festivals this Spring: The Montauk Music Festival, Music on the Great South Bay, Hopscotch in Raleigh, NC, The Bing Arts Center in Springfield, Ma, the Glen Cove Folk Festival and who knows what else. I also continue to play at small venues in Brooklyn and Manhattan and on Long Island… Union Pool, Elvis Guesthouse and the Living Room, to name but a few. One of the best things to happen has been my association with Mark Fosson. Mark is both a remarkable player, musician and composer and he and I share a vision of sorts, that enables us to play so well together. We are hoping to release a joint project in the near future.

[irish-nlessing]

Ooh alright! How about 3 or 21? (prompts)

21. Hey, have you seen the…..oh

A/N: For my dear dear friend Christina who attacked me with this image while I was trying to do a five hour drive home in a rain storm.  @dibsonthat1d

The past two weeks had been out of control.  Ever since Niall had released “Slow Hands” your life had been turned upside down.  From the moment you first heard it you knew it would be a hit for him - a departure from “This Town”, but still distinctly “Niall”.  After the initial furor had died down Niall jumped immediately into promo.  Suitcases were packed.  Guitars were in their cases.  Itineraries were printed out.  You’d known this was going to happen, Niall’s team had his schedule planned months ago.  But knowing something is coming doesn’t necessarily take the sting out the actual event when it finally happens.

The day had finally arrived.  Niall had finished his California shows and was headed out for another round of radio shows across the country.  Even though the weeks would go by quickly, you’d gotten used to having him home.  Even if he was doing ten or twelve hour days in the studio he was still waking up next to you and that made all the difference. Instead of dwelling on the empty feeling in the pit of your stomach as the front door clicked behind him, you decided to treat yourself to a hot bath and maybe a mani-pedi.  Anything to take your mind off how quiet the huge house had suddenly become.

You padded across the sprawling kitchen and up the steps to the master suite.  Ditching your jean shorts and tank in the hamper, you spied one of Niall’s shirts slung over the door handle to the closet.  It was the white linen button down you’d gotten him for Christmas.  You’d bought it on a whim for him from an eclectic little shop down in the valley.  It was perfect for LA, soft and light, making the blue in his eyes burn bright.  Clad in only your panties you swiped it off the handle and slipped your arms through the sleeves.  It still smelled like his cologne.  You pushed one of the buttons through the buttonhole to keep it closed and tucked your chin into the collar to nuzzle the fabric.  It was the closest thing you had at the moment to being in his arms again.  

Swinging your hips a bit, you hummed to yourself as you sorted some laundry on the bed and looked for a clean towel.  Without even realizing it, you started belting out the words to Slow Hands.  Dragging your fingers down the front of your shirt, your nipples pebbled under the thin fabric of Niall’s shirt.  You even added in the “Woo!” along with a shake of your ass.  Just as you started to hit the bridge and start singing about your fingertips and the show they were going to put on, a very familiar voice sounded from behind you.

“Hey, have you seen the….oh!”

You screamed and spun around, shocked to see Niall with his long arms spread across the door frame, eyes wide, and mouth parted.  You clutched at your chest and tried to slow your heart rate.  The surge of adrenaline started to subside and you dropped your arms to your sides.  “You scared the shit outta me!  What’re you doing back?”

You watched as his gaze trailed up your bare legs, his throat bobbing as his eyes scanned up your torso and across your chest.  “Forgot the box with my guitar pedals in it.”  Taking a step into the room he tossed the grey paddy cap onto the side table and pulled his white henley over his head.  You were still frozen in place, standing next to the bed with your arms hanging limply at your sides.  Niall stepped in front of you and let the backs of his enormous hands just barely skim the front of your body.  “Don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so sexy in my life.  Shaking your cute little arse to one of my songs.  So fuckin’ hot.”  You let out a shaky breath and gripped onto his bare shoulders, molding your lips onto his.  His tongue swept against your lips, hot and sweet, begging to tangle with your own.  You moaned into the kiss as he turned and pulled you against his chest.  When his legs hit the mattress he sat in a heap and you wavered in between his legs and tried to steady yourself. His fingers trailed across the hem of your panties that were peeking out from under the open buttons of your shirt.  “Always gets me goin’ when you wear my clothes ya know.”

You smiled and tucked your lip in your mouth.  Pushing him back slightly so he was resting on his elbows you tugged at the button of his dark jeans.  They popped open easily and you shimmied them off his thin legs leaving him in only a dark pair of boxers.  You could see the outline of his cock, already hard and leaking, leaving a wet spot on the front of his shorts.  Seeing how turned on his was for you only made the heat pool in your center more intensely.  You kneeled on the bed and straddled his waist, rocking in slow circles over his length.  

“You’re not weirded out - hearing me sing your own lyrics?”

Niall’s head lolled against his shoulder with the tip of his tongue trapped in his teeth as you rocked back and forth over his bulge.  He sat up so you were pressed together and gripped the flesh of your hips, pulling you harshly against his hips you keened at the friction against your throbbing clit.  Prickles of sweat cropped up across your flesh as your skin began to burn with want.

“Course not.  Who do ya think I wrote them about?”

You smiled against his lips and pressed small kisses across his lips while you slipped the button open on your shirt.  The soft material slipped over your shoulders exposing your chest.  The coarse hair scattered across Niall’s chest prickled against the sensitive skin of your breasts.  Your panties were wrecked by this point - soaked through with your arousal and clinging to your skin.  You leaned back and rolled your hips forward.  Your back arched and opened up the plane of your chest making the soft light from the bedside table flash across your skin.

“I hate it when you leave, Ni.  Just skip the shows, stay home with me.”  Your voice was pleading, asking for things you knew he couldn’t give.  He pressed his palm over your heart, his long fingers grazing across the base of your throat.

“Don’t wanna ever leave, babe.  But it’s my job - you know that.  Besides, you’d skin me alive if I stayed home too long.  Be bouncin’ off the walls and driving ya mad.”

You breathed out a laugh and tipped your forehead down meeting his gaze.  

His lips spread in a wide smile.  “There she is, there’s my sunshine.  Always want ya to be happy, love.”

Niall covered your mouth with his own, deepening the kiss right away.  He lifted his hips up and managed to shuffle his boxers off.  You could feel the hot, hard length of his cock pressing up into your thigh with the dribbles of precum smearing against your skin.  Niall cupped your sex and pulled your panties to the side.  You lifted your hips slightly and felt the tip of his length start to sheath itself inside you.  You let out a whine as you stretched around him and sank down until he was buried deep inside you.  Instead of thrusting up into you Niall was sat completely still, dragging in lungfuls of air.

“Fuck.  Fuck, feels so good inside ya.  Gimme a second, want t’last for ya.”

You let your hands roam his shoulders while you traced the smattering of freckles littered across his neck with your tongue.  When he finally started to move it wasn’t the harsh thrusts you expected with how worked up he was.  Instead he held you close and rocked his hips into you.  You could feel the tip of him deep inside your core massaging your g-spot.  You gripped your nails into his broad shoulders and started to bounce up and down on his cock in a desperate attempt to feel his length drag along your walls.  The coil in your belly was starting to unravel faster than it ever had before.  You slid your hand down your belly to where your bodies were joined and started rubbing fast circles against your aching clit.  Niall let out a strangled cry and maneuvered you onto your back against the duvet.  He pulled out and slipped down between your legs before you even had the chance to cry out about the empty feeling between your legs.

He hooked his fingers in your panties and pulled them frantically off your legs. “Wasn’t gonna last if I had to watch you touch yourself like that. Lemme taste you.” He dipped his head down and nudged at your clit with his nose while he dragged his tongue through your folds. All you could do was whimper and grip the duvet tighter and tighter. He licked and sucked and flicked all over every centimeter of your soaking heat. When he finally latched into your clit and slid three of his fingers inside you, you completely fell to pieces. He worked you through your release as your body clenched and relaxed under him.

You could only babble and whimper as he pulled off of you, wiping away the leaking mess on his chin. He wrapped his hand around his cock, the purple tip shining and nearly ready to burst. He lined himself up and thrust back inside your swollen center, both of you crying out. You wrapped your legs around his hips trying to draw him into you as close as possible. He gripped onto your hand and laced his fingers with yours, trapping your arm above your head.  Burying his face into the crook of your neck he lost himself in you, whispering over and over with each thrust, “Sunshine, love you, love you so much.”

When you felt the muscles in his back go taut as a bow string you knew he was close.  With another thrust he cried out your name and sunk his teeth into your shoulder.  You cried out at the sharp sting of his teeth and the soothing pulse of him emptying inside of you.  

He stilled and rolled away, pulling you on top of his chest.  Your hair splayed across his body, damp and tangled from being pressed into the pillows.  The only sounds in the room were your heaving breaths and the soft hum of the fan blades whirring above you.  

You were the first to break the silence.  Your voice rough and low from how dry your throat had gotten.  

“Niall?”

“Yeah sunshine?”

“You wrote a really fucking good song.”

He belted out a laugh and pulled you closer.

“You gave me a really fucking good reason to.”

[stevecanmakeanythingnerdy]

RANDOM RECORD WORKOUT SEASON 4 Battle 23 Altered Images : Pinky-Blue (side 1) Vs. The Lords of the New Church: The Method to our Madness (Side 1) Altered Images : Pinky-Blue (side 1) Altered Images were an early 1980s Scottish new wave/post-punk band. Fronted by singer Clare Grogan, the band branched into mainstream pop music, having six UK Top 40 hit singles and three Top 30 albums between 1981 and 1983. Their hits included "Happy Birthday", "I Could Be Happy", "See Those Eyes" and "Don't Talk To Me About Love". Only one of those appears on the first side of this record. It should be noted that this is not your typical band. Clare has a very unique singing style and voice. It is literally like nothing I have ever heard before. I am being completely serious when I describe it as a poorly stereotyped but dreamy and blissful Japanese "eng-grish" style. In fact, it almost appears that this band is just weird for the sake of being weird. I kind of like it. They remind me of The Records a little. In the same wheelhouse as Psychedelic Furs, but female fronted. Maybe even The Go-Go's if they just didn't give a $#!t about guitars. It is a good formula, but it does tend to wear a little thin by the final song. "Pinky Blue" is the title track and is very dreamy, 80's pop sounding with child like fascination. Complete Echo and the Bunnymen + Siouxsie and the Banshees jangle bop. "See Those Eyes" as previously mentioned experienced some chart success. It is a nice, driving, soothing, sugar tooth and fairy dust smattering of a tune. The problem is that it is very similar to Pinky Blue...so similar that for a moment I was convinced it is just an alternate vocal take and nothing more. "Forgotten" is a bit more radio friendly and straight forward. Ala Split Enz. You even get some percussion driven tunes with "Little Brown Head" and "See You Later"...bongos I believe. It is clearly unique and different, but again, just suffers from sounding like photocopies of itself. The Lords of the New Church: The Method to our Madness (Side 1) Formed in 1982, the band comprised the punk pioneers Stiv Bators (The Dead Boys), Brian James (The Damned), Dave Tregunna (Sham 69) and Nick Turner (The Barracudas). The band recorded three studio albums and one live album before Bators ended the band onstage after a concert on 2 May 1989, at the London Astoria. Bators is probably the most notable member, often the cause of on stage antics (even reportedly clinically dying on stage for a few minutes). This is their 3rd studio effort, and is admittedly much more produced than I would have ever imagined. It starts out with some nasty riffage on guitar and then, right into Bators' snotty vocals. In my opinion, his vocal takes suffer from too much reverb. "Never Believed" is an almost surfy, rock-a-billy tune. It is a strange and unexpected twist. Acoustic in nature but still good! "Pretty Baby Scream" caught my attention the most, with those china cymbals!! Catchy and bouncy, it is almost a Social Distortion outtake. Even a little (pre) alt+country. "S.F. And T." (Just take a wild guess what those initials could stand for) is probably the most rock 'n roll tune here. Pretty straight forward and in yer face, punker. "When Blood Runs Cold" contains one of the biggest shocks of the whole album: piano! November Reign, anyone? Seriously, I can see this as being an influence on Axl and GnR for sure. Errily charming collection of tunes. And it certainly shows the growth and songwriting of Bators, and all of these punks, really. Not the expected result. It is Dead Boys enough, especially with Bators singing his trademark "yeea-aawws", but not nearly as punk as I was hoping or expecting. I think they were out to prove something with the songs. Actually, if you want to know the truth, it is darkly gothic and reminds me of more modern stuff like The Bravery, so in addition to all of the above, they were ahead of their time! I am slightly let down by the slick production ( vocals are too low and buried, and the bass is too high, with guitars being fuzzed out). Minor inconvenience though for the interesting interpretations. I would recommend checking this band out. Especially if you are a fan of any of their counterpart punk bands. Images were altered and Churches were newly lorded in this, the 23rd battle of the 4th season of RRW. But who won? Well Altered Images took 22 minutes to burn 165 calories over 6 songs. They burned 27.5 calories per song and 7.5 calories per minute. The Lords of the New Church took their 19 minutes to run through 5 tunes and burn 158 calories in the process. That is 31.6 calories per song and 8.32 calories per minute. It seems the method to their madness is WINNING, as the LotNC take the ring! Altered Images : "Forgotten" https://youtu.be/7rfi9iJyymE The Lords of the New Church: "Pretty Baby Scream" https://youtu.be/WFMnyWh1o2w #randomrecordworkout #randomrecordworkoutseason4

[lifeonashelf]

CAVE IN

Confession: I don’t have any especially deep insights about Cave In. Honestly, I essentially forgot Cave In even existed until I trotted to my shelf to pull the next band in my queue and found out that band is Cave In. Though as I sit here listening to them for the first time in over a decade, their credentials are gradually coming back to me: they earned a solid reputation on the indie-label circuit, which led to them being scooped up by RCA and receiving a heavy promotional push for their first major-label offering—2003’s Antenna, the disc I am playing right now to make things about Cave In gradually come back to me.

Bereft of any nostalgic association with the band, I suppose I should craft some sort of proper critical analysis of Antenna to justify this piece’s existence. I can’t readily compare this disc to the band’s previous releases since I’ve never heard any of them, but Antenna certainly boasts some sturdy material: nuanced, slightly-proggy dropped-D rock with nice thick riffs and enough big-chorus melody to allow the songs a soaring, anthemic quality that makes each one memorable. There’s enough nifty shit going on here to make it difficult for me to comprehend how I completely disremembered that Cave In was a thing.

As I soak the music in, I’m realizing that Cave In most readily reminds me of Failure (the band, not the antonym of “success”). This is mostly because all of the tunes and tones on Antenna strongly resemble the tunes and tones on Failure’s sophomore release, Magnified, a sludgy gem of the highest order which features some of the tastiest guitar playing ever committed to disc. The similarities aren’t even subtle: I’ve heard plenty of music that sounds like Failure mixed with some other bands, but Antenna-era Cave In mostly sounds like Failure mixed with more Failure. I don’t intend that as an insult at all—Failure is fucking awesome; as far as I’m concerned, mirroring their approach is an artistically judicious course of action. Really, the only injudicious thing about Antenna is RCA’s ostensible prediction that Cave In would reach next-level success by mirroring the approach of Failure.

That reads like an insult too, so allow me to clarify. I’m sure you don’t need me to explain to you that ginormous record conglomerates don’t ultimately give a shit what the records they put out actually sound like, just as long as lots of people spend money on them. The music industry has always placed its focus squarely on the “industry” end of things; it’s mainly just a happy accident when the “music” component is supplied by talented, interesting, or even listenable, artists. So it would be fair to suppose that the primary reason RCA decided to sign Cave In is because they believed the band might prove to be a profitable acquisition. Yet in this instance, their dice-roll involved signing an outfit that sounds uncannily like Failure, a group which disbanded and subsequently withdrew into a 15-year hiatus shortly after putting out their magnum opus, 1996’s Fantastic Planet—a record that didn’t even crack the Billboard Top 200 album charts despite being an unequivocal masterpiece. Now, Failure was-and-is an amazing band, and if you’ve never heard Fantastic Planet you should absolutely stop reading this bullshit and go listen to it immediately (and then you should check out Magnified, because that one rules too… hell, their 2014 reunion disc The Heart is a Monster is also killer, and so is their first album, Comfort—truthfully, everything they ever recorded is better than anything you’ll find in these pages, so I can’t fathom why you’re wasting time with my nonsense when you could be listening to Failure instead). The thing Failure was NOT was commercially successful, which seems to indicate that RCA was grossly misguided in expecting Cave In to ignite the charts by mining strikingly comparable musical territory seven years after their muse’s own major label debut went criminally ignored by the masses.

Since Cave In didn’t get huge either, I’m assuming the RCA money-men deemed this particular procurement a failure (this time I am referring to the antonym of “success,” not the band). However, the more I listen to Antenna, the more I’m concluding it’s a pretty excellent disc that reasonably should have been heard by far more people than it evidently was. A quick read-up on the band’s history has informed me that this effort is an anomaly in their discography, which was previously characterized by far more ferocious fare, and that many of their fans received the outfit’s RCA-branded stylistic shift with cries of “sell out” (which becomes somewhat ironic when you consider that the album didn’t sell a gaggle of copies and the band quickly went back to playing shows at small gen-ad clubs for the same people who called them sell-outs). I’m certainly game to hear Cave In’s screamier stuff, but even if Antenna is the most placid entry in their canon, there’s plenty of evidence here that these dudes rock plenty hard. Though I could do without the obligatory lighter-waver “Beautiful Son” and the meekly-poppy “Penny Racer”, the opening cut “Stained Silver” is a bombastic minor-chord maelstrom, “Joy Opposites” seethes with somber beauty and lush guitar flourishes, and the absorbing “Woodwork” closes out the disc in satisfying and stridently epic fashion. There are some real choice tracks here that would have likely grabbed a lot of ears back in 2003 if those ears had been given due exposure, so it seems rather shitty that the mainstream mostly left Cave In out in the cold while that insipid “wake me up inside” song by Evanescence was being spewed from half of the goddamn radio stations on the goddamn dial every four goddamn minutes. When all was said and done, Cave In was summarily dropped by RCA when the label’s spit-polish netted the band little more than a cameo on the Billboard register at #167, while the members of Evanescence banked enough cash to fuel a lifetime of Hot Topic shopping sprees.

Of course, this begs the question: if people weren’t buying Antenna when it came out, what records were they buying (besides the Evanescence disc with that fucking “wake me up inside” song on it)?

I did a little investigative journalism (actually, I just did a Google search—I’m a terrible journalist) to get an overview of some of the hit releases from 2003 and ascertain what the multitudes were passing over Antenna for. What I learned both surprised me a lot and didn’t surprise me one bit. The part which did the first thing was discovering that the records which Soundscanned their way to #1 on the Billboard list that year suggest a fairly favorable marketplace for Cave In’s wheelhouse: of the 34 albums that topped the charts in 2003, 6 of them were by rock bands. The part that didn’t arrive as a bombshell was finding out that most of the rock albums which sold a shit-ton of units in 2003 were absolute garbage (the antonym of “quality,” not the band).

Droves of folks eschewed the more thoughtful approach of Antenna to instead listen to Aaron Lewis whimper about how his daddy didn’t hug him enough on Staind’s 14 Shades of Grey and root on Godsmack as they plodded through a dozen retreads of the same dimwitted WWE pay-per-view theme song on their appropriately-titled Faceless. Rock fans also purchased a lot of copies of the dullest entry in Marilyn Manson’s catalog, The Golden Age of Grotesque, and of Metallica’s 80% unlistenable St. Anger—an interminable series of throwaway riffs without songs whose shoddy patchwork assemblage suggested that ProTools had as much to do with the album’s construction as Metallica did. Granted, Antenna isn’t necessarily mandatory listening, but it’s undoubtedly a far more appealing record than any of those offerings, and has aged far better (an aside: I recently spun St. Anger in its entirety for the first time in over a decade to reassess it; I discovered that even with the benefit of fresh ears the record still sounds just as abysmal as it did then, and this encounter merely served to remind me that Metallica was a really awful band for a few years).

The rest of the releases that reached the top slot during Antenna’s annum were about what you’d expect: a few hip-hop sets (by 50 Cent, DMX, Outkast, and Eminem), factory-constructs from a host of mostly-disposable female pop stars (Monica, Ashanti, Hilary Duff, Britney Spears), CD-shaped product-placement trinkets from American Idol alumni (Clay Aiken, Ruben Studdard, and Kelly Clarkson), and a smattering of appearances from the requisite country icons of the era (Shania Twain, the admittedly-diggable Dixie Chicks, and Alan Jackson with his eloquently-dubbed compilation Greatest Hits Volume II and Some Other Stuff). Additional dubious notables from that year were issued by Madonna (whose American Life shot to #1 the week it came out, then subsequently plummeted progressively down the charts once people started actually listening to it), Toby Keith (whose Shock’n Y’all plagued mankind by being christened with the lamest pun of all time and by being a Toby Keith album), and R&B’s most talented lunatic, R. Kelly (whose Chocolate Factory was rendered icky in retrospect as gradually-revealed details of his personal life suggested the record’s title was probably a reference to defecating on adolescent girls—an association which could only possibly be more insalubrious if Chocolate Factory had hit the charts at number two).

Sure, there were some bonafide standouts on that year’s roster—Jay-Z got a lot of mileage out of his superb Black Album, while Alicia Keys reached the apex slot with her dynamite LP The Diary of Alicia Keys—but I can honestly say I would much rather listen to Antenna than roughly 30 of the discs which shifted enough units to reach #1 in 2003. I’m not sincerely suggesting Cave In’s tunes boast the extensive cross-demographic appeal of something like Come Away With Me by Norah Jones (released the previous year, but still going strong and occasionally wandering to the top of the charts throughout 2003) or John Mayer’s Heavier Things (a compendium of sultry bedroom-eyed blues that mesmerized legions of sorority girls, their desperate-to-be-hip cougar mothers, and men with vaginas). Nonetheless, I’ve heard Antenna a half-dozen times now and I’m not sick of it yet, which indicates to me that it’s a thoroughly respectable outing. And when compared to the material it was most directly competing with, Cave In’s neglected opus certainly stacks up well against most of the dreck that was dominating the alternative charts during a year when trifling acts like Chevelle, Dashboard Confessional, and Three Days Grace inexplicably had hit records.

I know I didn’t help matters by forgetting Cave In existed. However, I’ve resolved to at least partially make up for that now by adding them to my mental list of bands I need to seek out more work from very soon. By the time you read this, I predict that I will have augmented my Cave In library with several more of their albums, and I further predict that I will enjoy them.

And I also predict that my library will still be blessedly devoid of the Evanescence disc which features that idiotic “wake me up inside” song with the sulky Vogue-Goth piano intro and the melodramatic dear-diary lyrics about being nothing inside and the lame-ass two-note quasi-industrial juh-jun juh-jun juh-jun guitar riff that runs through the whole fucking track and the dipshit in the background who keeps fruitlessly trying to sound like a badass when he snivels his “can’t wake up” part on the chorus and then raps out a pathetic bridge where he sounds just like that other dipshit from Papa Roach.

Seriously, fuck that song.

February 4, 2016

[mythandritual]

From Celestial Explosion to Hallowed Ground: Don Bikoff in His Own Words

This originally appeared at North Country Primitive on 23rd April 2016

I like these American Primitive guitarists who have been around the block a few times. They plough their own furrow, and long may they continue to do so. Case in point: I sent Don Bikoff a bunch of interview questions. He decided to ignore them completely and instead sent me back an essay - a mini-biography, as it were. I mulled it over for a while, wondering whether to edit the hell out of it and squeeze it kicking and screaming into some sort of Q&A format. No, I concluded. This is how it should be read - and it's far more entertaining a prospect for it. You may know Don for his Celestial Explosion, that great lost fingerstyle album from 1968, reissued a couple of years back by the ever-dependable Tompkins Square Records. That's far from the whole story, though - he has been a busy man these last few years. There's the session he did for WFMU Radio back 2012, now available via the Free Music Archive. There's a further session for Folkadelphia that you can download via their Bandcamp page. Then, in 2014, he released his first new album in over 45 years, Hallowed Ground. It's an album you should hear. Even after this, Don isn't standing still - he's currently recording duo material with Mark Fosson, and rumour has it that these two venerable elder statesmen of fingerstyle are sparking off each other in a most edifying manner. The working title of the forthcoming album is Old Man Noises, and on the basis of the yet-to-be-mixed bits and pieces I've had the pleasure of hearing, it's one to look out for. Over to you, Don...

I began playing guitar around 1959 or 1960, motivated by listening to Allen Freed under the bed covers ever since I was six years old. I had a great collection of various pomades that froze my hair better than Gorilla Glue to simulate that Elvis look. Early AM radio rock came in, with a good smattering of southern blues - on a good night the stations  be heard from quite a long way away. Nonetheless, I coerced my father into buying me a guitar at age twelve: I still remember that Harmony F-hole red and black sunburst six-string. He insisted, however, that I take lessons. Let’s just say that Mel Bay and I did not see eye-to-eye and the lessons were short-lived, to say the least. To backtrack a bit, my first public performance consisted of an accordion tune for my second grade class, followed by some trumpeting through to the sixth grade. Grade eight led to the formation of Donny and the Tornadoes, my early cover band, playing Beach Boys and other top of the pops tunes. At around fifteen years of age, I came to the conclusion that some guitarists were actually using their fingers rather than a plectrum. Perhaps it was Pete Seeger and my Weavers albums that led to this revelation. Now it gets a bit more interesting, as I was old enough to pick myself up and travel the Long Island Railroad to NYC and Greenwich Village. This was truly the very beginning of the folk scene and I was privy to performances by such luminaries as Bob Dylan, Dave Van Ronk, Buffy St. Marie and Jose Feliciano - the list goes on and on. One evening, Dave Van Ronk spotted a kid at the front table in the Gaslight Café and castigated him for writing furiously throughout his performance every night. After much embarrassment, he took me aside and allowed me to sit in at the backroom area, where I was treated to all the artists, whom I pestered unmercifully. The die had been cast. As I grew as a young guitarist, I sought out who I considered to be the true masters. I found the recordings of Alan Lomax to be a great help. The folk boom was coming of age and the Newport Folk Festival was in its infancy. I spent afternoons there, often under a tree with Mississippi John Hurt and maybe five or ten people looking on. Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Son House… guitarists playing slide with tableware and steak bones. I was in blues heaven. My own style was beginning to coalesce as a result of my encounters with these great artists. I never heard of John Fahey until a friend from California introduced me to his music and commented that we were somewhat alike. Truly a case of independent discovery on my part… I thought there must be a parallel universe somewhere out there for fingerstyle pickers. As the sixties came and went, I did get to meet Fahey; I still have one of the letters he wrote me. I found Robbie Basho intriguing, along with Peter Walker, Sandy Bull and a host of others. Timothy Leary’s League for Spiritual Discovery on the lower east side of Manhattan had both Peter Walker and I playing for the faithful. So along came an introduction to a record company owner who was looking for new artists for his label, Keyboard Records. I recall going to his office for an unofficial audition of sorts. He chronicled his own success at producing the Firestone Tyre Xmas Album and the Dorman’s Endico Cheese jingle (The first cheese individually wrapped in plastic!). Ed was very enthusiastic about my unique approach to the guitar and said he had an opening for a single album. The previous artist he interviewed simply didn’t excite him. His name was Neil Diamond. Within the next few months in 1968, Celestial Explosion was released and, much to my surprise, garnered great reviews from Record World and other critics. An underground favorite was the phrase often used to describe my music. My brief encounter with a press agent led me to a nationwide TV live performance on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour, where I lost to a Russian gymnastic team and a singing shoemaker. Just search for me on Youtube and you can see it for yourself. Ted said, 'That’s unusual, to say the least.' Subsequent years led to performances in Europe and small clubs throughout the U.S. and then reality hit. Family and day jobs happened. But then, 40 years later, Josh Rosenthal of Tomkins Square fame heard me on a local radio show and contacted me. One thing led to another and before I knew it Celestial Explosion was re-released to a new wave of listeners. I released  another album just last year, Hallowed Ground, my second in 40 years. I actually have been quite active again by my modest standards. I’m doing a number of folk festivals this Spring: The Montauk Music Festival, Music on the Great South Bay, Hopscotch in Raleigh, NC, The Bing Arts Center in Springfield, Ma, the Glen Cove Folk Festival and who knows what else. I also continue to play at small venues in Brooklyn and Manhattan and on Long Island… Union Pool, Elvis Guesthouse and the Living Room, to name but a few. One of the best things to happen has been my association with Mark Fosson. Mark is both a remarkable player, musician and composer and he and I share a vision of sorts, that enables us to play so well together. We are hoping to release a joint project in the near future. 

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When it comes to the world of sports, everyone is looking to gain a competitive advantage. Usually, it’s just a little thing here and there, like when Jason Kidd “accidentally” spilled water on the basketball court because he didn’t have any timeouts left, or a pitcher putting a little pine tar on the ball to ‘grip” it better. Of course, some people take these lies and cheats to the extreme, and at the end of the day we’re left with the realization that a lot of our heroes are really kind of jerks. Here are ten hilarious and ridiculous sports cheats that went way over the top.

#1 Boris Onischenko You may not have heard of Boris Onischenko, but as you can probably guess from his name he was a Soviet athlete competing in the Olympics in 1976 in the sport of fencing. And just like the clichéd Russian villain who shares his first name, he was a nefarious schemer, though in this case he wasn’t trying to keel moose and squirrel, but instead win himself a gold medal. He had won the silver at the 1972 Olympics, but that clearly wasn’t good enough, leading to him launching a plan worthy of the most over-the-top cartoon villains. His fellow fencers couldn’t help but notice that whenever they faced Boris, he would be credited with points despite seemingly never actually making contact. Was he just that quick with his foil? Of course not. Instead, he had rigged the scoring machine with a sort of electronic trigger. Whenever he decided he wanted to score a point, he’d simply hit the trigger and be credited with a point despite coming nowhere near actually touching his opponent. Eventually people caught on and he was disqualified, and people could get back to trusting the USSR like they always had before this embarrassing incident.

#2 David Robertson The game of golf, above just about every other sport in the world, has a certain sense of honor and a gentleman’s code of ethics. You keep your own score, you penalize yourself, and you do so while willingly wearing just the ugliest pants imaginable. So what David Robertson did during the Open Championship was obviously frowned upon. What did he do? Well, basically the same thing any of us duffers do when we’re on the link: he continued to give himself favorable lies when no one was looking. During the qualifying round of the 1985 Open, the Scottish golfer employed what amounts to little more than the old “foot wedge” to give himself a better chance. What would happen is that he would hit an approach shot onto the green, and then just about sprint up there before his playing partner or anyone else had a chance to arrive on the scene and see where his shot had settled. He would pretend to mark his ball so that he could clean it, but he never actually marked it at all. Instead, he simply picked up the ball, acted like he was cleaning it, and then place it closer to the pin before anyone realized what was happening. He tried this move five times before someone finally discovered the blatant cheating (on the 14th hole) and disqualified him.

#3 Danny Almonte Back in 2001, America got swept up by a youth baseball sensation named Danny Almonte. He was a pitcher for a team from New York, and was virtually unhittable. In fact, he actually threw a perfect game during the Little League World Series. He became the talk of every sports page and highlight show across the country, a bona fide superstar for that magical summer. And then, it was discovered that maybe he and his family hadn’t been entirely truthful about a thing or two — specifically, his age. See, there’s a reason Almonte was able to so thoroughly dominate his competition: he was actually 14 years old, a full two years older than any other player competing at the Little League World Series. Suddenly people looked at him from an entirely new perspective. This was no longer a promising young talent with Major League Baseball stardom written all over him. His fastball wasn’t quite as impressive with the revelation that he was more physically mature than the average 12-year-old, and he was followed by a cloud of shame for the next decade. The closest he’s ever come to pitching professionally was a brief stint in an Independent League in the Midwest, where his numbers proved that he was never really as good as his little scam made it seem. Oh, and just because it’s always fun to add a little more weird to things like this, when he was a senior in high school he got married to a 30-year-old woman. If it ever comes out that she was actually 20, then the two are officially made for each other.

#4 Diego Maradona Diego Maradona is one of the most famous soccer players in the history of the game, and he enjoyed a tremendous playing career as arguably the best player to ever come out of Argentina. Later, he saw some success as a coach, including guiding the Argentinian national club in the World Cup. However, what he is almost certainly the most famous for is an act that he claims was divine intervention and has become simply known as “The Hand of God.” The incident took place in the 1986 World Cup, when Maradona helped Argentina defeat England 2-1. The victory both eliminated England from the World Cup and kept Argentina alive, and they would eventually go on to capture the crown. The only problem was how Maradona blatantly used his fist to knock the ball out of the air just as it looked like the England goalkeeper was about to come away with it. Maradona would score on the play after what should have gotten him carded and probably sent off. After the game, Maradona denied touching the ball with his hand – which, if you’re keeping score at home, is a major no-no for soccer players – instead claiming that it had been the “hand of God” that led to the goal.

#5 Sylvester Carmouche It seems like it would be awfully difficult to cheat in a horse race, considering the horsies don’t actually know what “cheating” means. But Sylvester Carmouche pulled it off, at least until people realized how odd it was for a horse to make up so much ground without anyone, including the other jockeys, even noticing him. It’s amazing what a bit of fog can do, however, to enable a horse to go from first to last and suddenly win by 24 lengths. This hilariously short-sided solution by Carmouche happened a little over 20 years ago at a track in Louisiana, in front of only a smattering of fans and amidst a thick fog that covered most of the track and the infield. Riding a 23-to-1 longshot, suspicion was immediately aroused when it was pointed out that his horse had no mud spatters and was breathing easily, rather than the usual panting of a horse that, you know, just ran an entire freaking race. What is believed to have happened is that after the start of the race, Carmouche took his horse through the middle of the infield, waited for a few moments, and then popped out on the other side, racing to victory. Carmouche continued to deny cheating despite all evidence to the contrary, and earned the nickname “Phantom Rider”. Which, let’s be honest, makes the whole thing totally worth it because that’s one hell of a sweet nickname.

#6 Fred Lorz While it’s probably farfetched, it would be nice to imagine that Sylvester Carmouche was just a really big fan of Fred Lorz, because Lorz is perhaps the most classic example of just cutting out the middle of a race and popping up at the end to claim victory. The Olympic marathon runner, in a move straight out of a slapstick comedy, nearly pulled off a fraud that kind of makes us applaud him for his sheer audacity. The race in question was the marathon at the 1904 Olympic Games in St. Louis. Lorz was a bricklayer by day and not a particularly experienced long-distance runner, having earned a spot in the Olympics in a five-mile race. Yeah, Olympic qualifying standards were a little more loose back then. Lorz decided to more easily bring home the gold when he hopped in a car at the nine-mile mark and just rode for the next 11 miles. He didn’t even attempt to be discreet, instead waving to his fellow runners as he passed. Despite finishing first, Lorz didn’t actually get the gold once it was pointed out that he had hitched a ride. It didn’t seem to faze him, though, as he shrugged it off and said that he only did the whole thing as a joke.

#7 Donald Crowhurst You know what one of the easiest ways to accomplish something is? Just lie about it and hope no one ever finds out. At least that’s what Donald Crowhurst was hoping would happen when he attempted to compete in an around-the-world yacht race in a subpar boat. Upon realizing that continuing in the race would lead to almost certain drowning, he set up shop in South America and started radioing in updated positions that put him in the lead, despite not only being far behind the rest of the pack, but also, you know, not actually racing. Ultimately, Crowhurst found himself faced with a no-win situation: either own up to being a big fat liar with a crappy boat, or disappear for as long as possible and hope people would forget about him. He chose the latter. After three months had passed, he radioed in that he was too far behind another sailor named Nigel Tetley, and was about to just give up and go home when he learned that Tetley’s boat had sunk, meaning that Crowhurst was about to be the victor. Horrified by the fact that his competitor’s boat had sunk and the realization that his fraudulence would soon be discovered, Crowhurst put a final cap in the tragic story when he threw himself overboard, his boat found 12 days after he had killed himself.

#8 Ali Dia Imagine being plucked off of the street to become an overnight sporting hero. Ali Dia made this fantasy a reality, when the amateur soccer player conned his way onto a professional English soccer club, sight unseen. By the way, when we call him an amateur, it’s pretty much an insult to amateur soccer players everywhere. When he took the field for the first and only time, what resulted was comically poor play that made the folks in charge of his Southampton side rethink their decision to take him on literally out of the blue. So how does some average guy who has as about as much business on the pitch as just about any of us wind up with a professional contract? Easy: he lied about who he was. He and a friend concocted a scheme in which his buddy would phone up the folks at Southampton claiming to be famed soccer star George Weah, saying that he had a cousin named Ali Dia who was on the cusp of becoming a star in his own right. And the brilliant folks in the front office at Southampton bought the lie and offered Dia a contract solely on the word of some random guy they talked to on the phone. Dia was released shortly after his one 20-minute appearance, in which it became abundantly apparent that not only was he not the dynamic player he claimed to be, but a six-year-old probably could have played circles around him.

#9 Dora Ratjen And speaking of athletes who aren’t exactly who they claim to be, here’s an Olympian named Dora Ratjen. Dora was a high jumper who competed for Team Germany in the 1936 Olympic games — despite only finishing fourth, two years later she set a new women’s world record in the high jump. As it turns out, that record would not stand for some pretty dramatic reasons. Was this woman, Dora Ratjen, juicing before anyone really knew what that was? Did she wear spring loaded shoes out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon that vaulted her higher than normal? Nope. As it turns out, Dora Ratjen was hiding something else. Literally, as it turns out, since “she” competed with “her” distinctively male genitals strapped back like Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs. Dora Ratjen, as it happens, was really Horst Ratjen, meaning this was a real-life Juwanna Mann situation. Though maybe if the screenwriter had based his story on Dora’s and not whatever he actually concocted, he wouldn’t have crapped out one the worst movies ever made. So why did Horst compete as Dora? It had nothing to do with his gender identity. Rather, according to the man himself, he was forced into it by the Nazis, who weren’t confident in their female athletes’ abilities. Ratjen claims that they did not want embarrassment, so they recruited a guy and had him compete as a woman. Just another stupid Nazi idea, among many others.

#10 The Spanish “Paralympic” Team To top it all off, here’s the very definition of “low”. During the 2000 Paralympic Games, Spain took a page from The Ringer and sent entire teams of people who were not actually handicapped to compete. Most notable was the “intellectual disabled” men’s basketball team that won the gold with a team full of people who had absolutely zero disabilities, and instead thought it would be a good idea to pick on the mentally handicapped. One member of the team came forward later and said that he and his teammates had no disabilities, and the same was true for numerous members of the Spanish Paralympic team. It’s not a coincidence that, after the fallout of this scandal, intellectual disabled basketball was eliminated from the Paralympics. Years later, South Park filmed an episode where Cartman acted like a Special Olympian so he could win $1,000. When you inspire the actions of one of the biggest assholes in all of cartoon-dom, you know you failed at basic humanity.

Source: TopTenz