Music & Me

It’s that time of the year again, the time for Best-Of year-end lists.  I’m already seeing a few Best Albums of 2010 lists, and I recognize maybe one or two artists, more if I’m lucky.  Back in my heyday when I obsessed over making my own Best-Of list, I’d recognize at least half of the artists on lists, usually more.  But now, I’m beginning to realize how much I don’t really care about music.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love music.  I still get goosebumps to certain songs and ride the high of my favorite albums, but…I just don’t care about music as much as I used to.  Back when I really got into music, everything was new and amazing.  Underworld and Orbital were my favorite artists, and I obsessed over them, staying up late just to listen and relisten to their best songs even when my eyes could barely stay open.  I found a bunch of great people online who loved them as much as me, and I discovered so many new artists from them.  It was a golden era for me and music.

But, it did not last.  Keeping up with new music each year to do a Best-Of list became a chore rather than a delight.  I’ve always been stingy about downloading music, particularly crappy music, so I never downloaded a bunch of music to sort through.  And when my interest waned from keeping up-to-date, I didn’t care about music quite as much.  I haven’t done a Best-Of list in years.  I’ve listened to maybe three albums all this year.

Seeing the Best-Of lists each year now just makes me sad and frustrated.  Sad, because I feel like I’m missing out, not just on the music but on the communal experience that goes with listening and following music with friends.  Frustrated, because there’s just too much out there to follow, that it’s too much work to follow music sometimes, that I’ve lost much of my interest in following new music.  Yes, I know the internet is a great resource (how else would I be able to follow Underworld and Orbital in America without it?), but damn it, the internet is too big.  There’s too much information for me to take in and process.

Also, other things have taken over my interests.  Comics, of course, are my main focus now.  Back when I was into music, I tried my hand at creating music on my computer, and I produced some decent songs.  I even flirted with the idea of becoming a DJ by purchasing a pair of turntables and a mixer, but now they sit in the basement gathering dust.  I thought I could be a musician, and maybe with enough determination that could’ve been a possibility, but my love for comics and my desire to make comics soon outweighed any musical ambitions I had.
So now I’m concentrating on my writing and comics.  If you’ve been following my Twitter account, then you’ve probably heard I had some computer troubles recently.  My biggest fear was that my computer would lose all my files, which I had stupidly not backed up.  I wasn’t concerned so much about my music being lost as I was about my writings.  I figured I could always replace my music collection, but my writings were impossible to replace.  Thankfully, I didn’t lose my files.  But you can rest assure, I will back up my writings on a more frequent basis.

My relationship to music has diminished that much in the past few years.  It’s to the point where I could probably go a week or two without listening to music, and some days I actually don’t listen to music at all.  A part of me wants to follow everything I can, to be up-to-date.  Then again, a part of me wants to read the classics like War and Peace and Moby Dick, but those books have been sitting on my bookshelf, unread, for years.  So I’m starting to come to grips with my fading interest in music, or rather my pursuit of music, because I still do love music.  I’ll read the Best-Of lists, get a little nostalgic, and who knows, maybe I’ll listen to them sometime.

Brian Wilson’s Hobo Beard Is Epic. FACT.

If you’re like most Americans, you’re probably not aware that the World Series is going on right now.  Heck, you may even be wondering what a World Series is (hint:  it’s baseball).  But baseball is indeed being played right now as the Texas Rangers are playing the San Francisco Giants to win baseball’s annual championship series (double hint:  they do this every year).  If you’re like most Americans, you also don’t care about it unless there’s a team in it that either you hate (i.e. the Yankees) or a team of lovable morons who have been terrible all your grandfather’s life (i.e. the Red Sox or Cubs).  But there is a reason to watch the World Series this year for you!

Brian Wilson and his epic hobo beard.

Now you’re probably wondering what is the visionary singer-songwriter of The Beach Boys doing playing baseball at, my god, 68 years-old with an epic hobo beard?  Well, that would be epic beyond dispute.  FACT.  But no no no, there is another, much younger crazy man who pitches for the Giants.  It is this man:

Yes, this is the closer for the Giants.  He’s a good closer, and I’ve sort of known of him the past year or two, but the past month or so, he’s really burst onto the scene.  Let’s just say he has a strong personality.  A strong, crazy personality to go with his strong, crazy hobo beard.  Here’s him after the Giants won the National League pennant:

Go to the link to watch the video because YouTube won't let me embed it. 

I just love that.  FACT has entered my lexicon this past week.  He’s so weird he’s fascinating.  I look at his hobo beard—which Scott Van Pelt on ESPN refers to with a cry of “Dr. Richard Kimble!!!”—and I’m just entranced.  You don’t really see it underneath his cap, but he’s sporting a Mohawk, brown, his natural hair color, and then his hobo beard is pitch black.  He claims it got dark because he plays a lot of day games, which suggests that his hair can get a tan.  Uh, sure.  Oh, and he also called it “focused.”  Yes, he was most likely referring to the hue of his hobo beard being refined by photons, but I like to believe that his hobo beard is a living entity that gives him the power to become a certified ninja in his sleep.

Yes, I just wrote that, and Brian Wilson did say that back in September (along with claiming he was fined for wearing bright orange cleats because they had “too much awesome” and carrying around a sweet cell phone).

As you can tell, Jim Rome was a little uncomfortable at the end there.  I don’t believe he knew who Wilson’s friend, The Machine, was when that happened.  Chris Rose on Fox Sports’ Cheap Seats certainly didn’t know when he got a very NSFW introduction. 

WARNING:  THIS IS VERY NSFW.  FACT.

So, yeah, that happened, and Brian Wilson has been playing that up every now and again.  This crazy man is playing in the World Series, and you have at least two more games to catch up on this crazy man with his epic hobo beard.

FACT.

Don’t Be This Guy: Rich Iott

First off, a little DBTG update (that’s an acronym for this column; rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?).  My last DBTG column centered around Todd Henderson, a rich guy complaining about not having more money.  I pointed him out as a Guy Not To Be (GNTB, for the acronym fans) because if you’re already rich, you should never complain about not being richer especially when the economy’s in the tank and most everyone else is struggling to, y’know, live on a daily basis.  Well, Mr. Henderson quickly apologized, deleted his post, and quit the blogosphere altogether.  You would think that the brouhaha he faced would dissuade anyone from committing the same blunder. 

You’re a silly person.  You see, now we have New York Times columnist, N. Gregory Mankiw, complaining about not having more money to give to his kids.  To be fair, he mostly said that rich people need incentives to work, and higher taxes would stifle that incentive.  Right, so if you’re highly talented and make a lot of money because of it, you’re not going to continue to do a good job when you’re taxed a little more out of nothing but pride?  And you’re not going to work more to make up that difference?  So, Mankiw is not quite as stupid as Henderson, but he’s still a rich person complaining about not having more money in this economy.

Now on to this column’s GNTB:  Rich Iott!

By now, I’m sure you’ve heard about him, and if you don’t remember his name, you’ll undoubtedly remember him as the guy who dressed up like a Nazi Waffen SS for fun.  Mr. Iott doesn’t dispute this since it’s impossible to when there’s a clear photo of him smiling with a bunch of other Nazi cosplayers.  But he says it’s all about historical reenactment and how this “small country from a strictly military point of view accomplished incredible things.”  They took over most of Europe and Russia, and that was “incredible.”  Historically, militarily speaking that is.

Now, if it was all just an reenactment of World War II battles for historical and educational purposes, then that’s one thing.  But as the Atlantic article points out, the Wiking group (the name of this reenactment crew) has really sanitized the Waffen SS that they don’t even look like the monsters they really were.  Basically, it’s like in a Civil War reenactment, the Confederate soldiers pretended to be super nice and respectful to blacks.

So, okay, maybe dressing up as a sanitized Nazi for reenactment purposes for fun still might not be enough to outright call Mr. Iott a Nazi sympathizer.  Except now we got some context of what re-enactors are like from someone named karoli at Crooks and Liars:

I'm going to share my own personal experience here. I was married to a Confederate Civil War Re-enactor for 10 years, and it is far more than an "interest in...history." They choose the side they're sympathetic with, for starters. They research the period, the uniforms, the attitude, and the social climate surrounding the period. They don't just re-enact it. They live, eat, breathe and admire it.

They will argue strategy, tactics, nitpick historical authenticity, and political implications for hours. It's costly, requires not only an investment in weapons but also in authentic costumes and other pieces. You can find them scouring antique shows looking for photos, letters, memorabilia, and other pieces of that time period.

Does this make Mr. Iott a Nazi?  Well, the jury’s still out on that.  But I’ve seen people at comic book conventions dress up in intricate costumes as their favorite characters.  They have to make their own costumes, and they invest a lot of time in these things, and they don’t just do it for the heck of it.  If you’re going to spend hours of your precious free time making a costume, or finding old authentic Waffen SS uniforms and equipment, you’re pretty damn well interested in the person or group your cosplaying as.

Yes, Mr. Iott does dress up as other non-Nazi people in other historical reenactments, and that’s fine, too.  But none of them have the stigma that a Nazi has.  I don’t think I have to explain this, but apparently, I do.  General life rule for living:  never dress up as a Nazi for fun!

Returning Favorites?

I don’t really want to watch House anymore.  Or South Park for that matter.  Really, they’re just shells of their former selves.

But yet, new seasons for each have started, and I watch them.  Why, why, why am I watching them?  Why do I still take time out of my week to see what’s going on?  Sure, I’ve invested years into the characters, but the shows are just not that good anymore.

House came off its worst season, one in which Cuddy comes out of nowhere to profess her love to House.  The season finale was actually one of the better ones in the series, where our favorite self-loathing doctor somehow became attached to a woman whose leg was pinned down in a collapsed building.  It was actually pretty riveting, enthralling, and everything worked until that last scene where Cuddy came in.  Maybe this would’ve made sense a few years ago, but now all of a sudden, after adopting a child and getting engaged with another guy, she realized how much she loved House.

And that doesn’t even get into the general awfulness of that season and the general decline of the series the past few years.  Seasons two and three were probably the best House we’ll ever see.  The team was set, House was a complete ass, Cuddy and Wilson played the adults, and we had reliably good patients-of-the-week.  There was a system to each episode.  Enter the patient, House finds something interesting and goes for the most common solution, a series of negative tests and false diagnoses follow, someone tells House he’s crazy, House does it anyway, and finally, someone says some non-sequitur that sparks a revelation in House that explains everything.  Maybe a little formulaic, but it worked, damn it.

Then the patients became an afterthought, like “Oh yeah, our characters are doctors, so they need to have patients.”  Rarely did they have families to check up on them, often did they suddenly know that House was an ass because of his leg pain (somehow), always did they’re situation reflect exactly what was going on with the characters.  Patients now can’t just have an illness because they have an illness.  That would be silly.  The main plots became House and his team, and while this was entertaining at times, it took us out of the formula.  And when they kept switching up the team, there was no cohesion, and things got messy.

South Park has been about the same.  There used to be a time when South Park was one of the best commentaries on television, even with all the crude jokes and wild situations.  It was at its best when they were saying something about what was going on in the world.  Unlike most animated shows, it was made with computers, and an episode could be made in a week instead of months.  South Park could be topical.

Episodes on Mel Gibson, gays, Scientology, immigration, and Paris Hilton were brilliant, weird, and hilarious.  Even when it wasn’t commenting on something, it was the funniest show around.  One of its best moments was the first episode a month after 9/11.  South Park made it okay to laugh again, and they were brilliant.  Whatever they wanted to do, they did it.

But now, it seems they don’t want to do topical humor anymore.  Sure, there’s been the occasional Glenn Beck and Tiger Woods episode, but they’ve been hit or miss.  This week’s season opener was about Cartman believing all NASCAR fans are poor and stupid, so he tries to be poor and stupid to drive NASCAR.  Kenny objected, and that was about it.  Meh.

Essentially, South Park and House have turned into The Simpsons, though somehow House got there a lot faster.  They’ve all been around so long that they’ve run out of ideas.  Now, they’re just relying on hey-have-we-done-this-yet stories.  They’re watered down, so then why am I still watching?  Do I really care about these characters that much to keep watching, even if I kinda dread it?  Am I holding onto hope that they’ll somehow right the ship and become great again?  I don’t know.

And damn it, I still watch The Simpsons, too.

AL Cy Young

Now, I’m going to talk baseball.

Wait!  Come back, please!  I know you’re the artsy type, here for comics talk, and you likely don’t know your Wee Willie Keeler from your Willie Mays Hayes, but I’ll try to keep it fun for you nonetheless. Artists and athletes aren’t that different from each other, after all.  You hone your skills with a specific set of instruments over several years, and sports are essentially entertainment anyway, so we’re all basically in the same profession.  Just that in comics we don’t get big paychecks and our testicles are normal sized, so that’s an even tradeoff, right?  (Except if you’re a woman, then I guess you just don’t get the big paychecks.  So…moving on.)

Baseball, our national pastime, the sport of sticks and balls and going all the way with that special someone.  Yes, baseball.  Besides being a euphemism for sex, it is also an entertaining game to watch, especially as 30-second highlights on ESPN.  It’s been around since at least the Polk administration, which is a really long time if you don’t know who Polk is or when he was President or that a guy named Polk was President.  It’s so engrained within our society that it is naturally behind football in popularity.  By a lot.

Still, it is a popular sport in America, Latin America, and Japan.  It is one of the few ways Latino immigrants can come to this country and get heckled, not for the color of their skin or their ethnicity, but for leaving a hanging slider in the strike zone and losing the game for us in the ninth inning.  Truly, this is what Martin Luther King, Jr. wanted.  While I do enjoy watching Japanese players like Ichiro Suzuki and Hideki Matsui come across the Pacific to play, I wish they’d bring their giant robots along with them.  I’m sure that would help baseball’s popularity.

Now I hope I have entertained you long enough because I’m going to get into some deep baseball-speak.  Hopefully, you won’t get too lost or bored, but if you’re the nerdy type who loves crunching numbers, then good news!  Baseball loves crunching numbers.  People are downright obsessed with them here.  There’s this whole thing called sabremetrics that pumps out new stats every year, throwing different things into a beaker to find what meaningless number comes out.  DIPS, PECOTA, VORP, Pythagorean Expectation.  These are real things that people came up with.  If you like to invent stats with names like VORP, then baseball is just waiting for you to come up with something named DETHRAGE.  (If that stat hasn’t been invented yet, I want some credit for when it does get invented.)

Personally, I stick with more traditional stats like ERA, Ks, and WHIP.  These are pitching stats, and in the American League, the pitcher with the best stats is Felix Hernandez of the Seattle Mariners.  Baseball traditionalists, a.k.a. old fogies, guffaw mightily when you suggest Hernandez is the best pitcher of the year, that the Cy Young award should go to someone like C.C. Sabathia of the New York Yankees or David Price of the Tampa Bay Rays.  Why do they guffaw mightily?  Largely, that’s their thing as fogies, but also because Hernandez’s record is a measly 13-12 while the other guys have 21 and 19 wins respectively.

Wins, you say?  Yes, that’s another old stat that’s been around forever.  Back in the no-black-people days, it was common for a pitcher to get 30 wins in a year.  Now due to increased specialization, five-man rotations, and probably more blacks, a pitcher is lucky to get 15 wins in a year.  So how does a pitcher get a win?  By preventing the opposing team from scoring more runs that his teammates can score, of course.  As one of nine men on the field, the starting pitcher has sole dominion over every aspect of the game from what pitch the catcher wants him to throw, to how the manager wants the defense behind him play, to the easy ground ball the first baseman flubs, to the left fielder grounding into a double play for the third time today with the bases loaded, to the middle reliever who somehow can’t keep a five-run lead.  Yes, the starting pitcher has control over all of this somehow, and his worth should justifiably be determined in such a manner.  Things like ERA are secondary to wins because it’s the starting pitcher’s job to win, which I’m sure is good news for the first baseman, right fielder, and middle reliever.  Boy, are they off the hook.

Felix Hernandez only has 13 wins, which is pitiful.  I guess having a Major League best 2.27 ERA and Major League best 232 Ks while only trailing Roy Halladay in Innings Pitched in all of the Majors isn’t enough for Felix to be King Felix (as his nickname would have him call us).  According to the fogies, he really should’ve willed his teammates to score more than nine runs in his 12 losses.  What a layabout.

Don’t Be This Guy: Todd Henderson

There are certain things you just don’t do.  You don’t yell fire in a crowded theater, you don’t take candy from a baby, and you certainly don’t complain about not having enough money when you’re super rich, the economy is in the tank, and poverty levels are the highest they’ve been in fifty years.  Todd Henderson did the last thing, and I have no confirmation on whether he did the first two.

Who is Todd Henderson?  He’s a University of Chicago law professor who blogged about his plight a couple weeks ago.  In summary, he complained that making more the $250,000 made it really hard on him and his family.  If the Bush tax cuts were allowed to expire and he were forced to pay an extra 3% in taxes, then he would find it really hard to keep his kids in private school, live in (what I would assume is) his nice house in a pricey neighborhood, and keep his Mexican groundskeeper and Polish housecleaner employed.

Then someone with half a shred of decency and perspective sat him down and gave him a good talking-to, and Mr. Henderson took down the blog post, apologized for his stupidity, and quit blogging altogether (as if that were the problem).  Despite that, his post was saved on the Internet anyway for all the world to see.  Thank you, series of tubes.

Surely, as the great sage The Notorious B.I.G. once said, with greater amounts of money in one’s bank account, the greater the perils will follow.  But as the great comedian Lewis Black said, when you're rich and pay big taxes, you’re still fucking rich.  So it was no surprise Mr. Henderson was on the receiving end of a deluge of negative reaction for whining about not having more money when he was already making six figures.  He even got a whole Wall Street Journal article devoted to him because, honestly, if you can’t find a way to live off of $250,000 a year, then you’re doing it wrong.

As someone who hasn’t even sniffed $30,000 in my best year, who was laid off due to my lack of seniority within my department in 2008, who has been working temp jobs ever since because I can’t find a decent job that doesn’t involve being a Mexican groundskeeper or Polish housecleaner, there are many, many things I’d like to say to Mr. Henderson.  Many, many things that would make even Lewis Black blush.  But Mr. Henderson has received plenty of flame emails to cover that ground, and his apology did seem to indicate that he understands how incredibly awful he was.

So no, I have nothing much to say to Mr. Henderson that hasn’t already been said already.  Instead, this is to anyone else who may be reading this.  If you’re in the upper tax bracket, do not complain about not having more money.  If, in the future, you somehow find yourself in the upper tax bracket by random luck or by marrying a Montgomery Burns, do not complain about not having more money.  And, please please please, if I ever find myself in the upper tax bracket, please please please slap me alongside the head if I complain about not having more money.  I will have deserved it.

Underworld - Barking

Without question my favorite musical act of all time is Underworld.  They would have to commit genocide or cover a Britney Spears song for me to stop liking them (well, I’d probably find some way to rationalize one of those—I’m not going to say which).  Dubnobasswithmyheadman and Second Toughest in the Infants are always good for a couple dozen plays on my iPod every year, and despite being over 15 years old, they still sound fresh.  I found the Dirty Forums sometime in the early ‘00s when I started to dig deep into their work, and I became friends with hundreds of fans across the world, even developing some actual friendships.  The first time I saw them perform live in Denver ’07 was like a religious experience for this very non-religious person.  My many late nights of staying up listening, adoring, reveling in their music had honed my ears to recognize each song from that concert within a few notes.  When I was able to, I’d catch their online radio broadcasts that catered to us hardcore fans, and I turned into a giddy schoolgirl when Karl Hyde read my questions in that amazing speaking voice of his.  And I even isolated those questions of mine he spoke into individual mp3 files that I still have.

Yes, I am a total geek or nerd or whatever-you-want-to-call-me when it comes to Underworld.  I can’t help it, really.  I remember first hearing “Cowgirl” over (…holy crap…) ten years ago and being blown away by it.  Up until that point, I had never heard a song like this, the typical four-minute pop song format blown apart for something completely different and original.  There wasn’t a structure, at least not one I recognized, but my patience in listening to the eight minute song paid off, and I was hooked.  I am always excited to hear new Underworld music, seeking it out from whatever obscure British radio program had played those glorious new sounds.

Until now.  After a few listens through Underworld’s new album Barking, I am simply lost for words.  The conceit was that each track would be a collaboration with another artist, that Karl and Rick Smith would work on a song and have another artist tweak it in some way.  And I don’t know quite what to make of this.  Some tracks like “Bird 1” and “Always Loved A Film” work pretty well, but the rest just lose me.  There doesn’t seem to be any structural framework to this album.  Unlike Second Toughest in the Infants, there’s no cohesion.  I could listen to one track at a time and feel satisfied (to an extent, assuming the song is any good), but going from start to finish feels disjointed.

But the biggest problem here is nowadays I don’t know what Underworld sounds like.  Yes, I know collaborating with nine different artists is going to produce nine different sounds, but each song has a common denominator:  Rick and Karl.  Especially on Barking, they sound like they’re trying to imitate other artists.  I feel like I’m listening to other artists albums where Karl is singing as a guest.  I felt the same way with their previous album Oblivion With Bells but to a lesser extent (as they didn’t collaborate with someone on every song).  That album still sounded like Underworld at times (i.e. “Beautiful Burnout” and “Best Mamgu Ever”), but the rest felt like their half-baked attempts at experimentation.

This is not to say Underworld can’t experiment with new sounds and try something else—far from it.  That’s one of the reasons I gravitated towards them.  They weren’t like anyone else I had ever heard before, and to this day, Pandora has a tough time finding songs that sound like them.  Their early work is still some of the most inspired, layered, and amazing music I have ever heard or will ever hear.  Karl’s stream of consciousness lyrics turned his voice into another instrument, and despite their seeming randomness, those words evoked strong emotions that require deeper exploration into their meaning.  From 1992 to 1996, they weren’t just on top of their game, they were ahead of everyone else’s game by at least ten light-years.

So what has changed since then?  Well, they’ve obviously gotten older.  They’re in their 50s and have turned into elder statesmen of electronic music.  Karl overcame his battle with alcoholism, which may or may not have something to do with it.  I don’t want to ascribe too much to this point since I think it’s a cliché, and I don’t buy into the drugs-produce-great-art theory.  But the elephant in the room is that Darren Emerson left after Beaucoup Fish.  Unfortunately, I’m beginning to come around to this theory.

But there’s a few things that I still don’t know about this last one.  First off, Beaucoup Fish was a pretty good album, but a steep drop off from Second Toughest in the Infants.  Sure, it produced gems like “Cups,” “Push Upstairs,” and “Jumbo,” but the middle of the album isn’t as prolific or put together as the bookends.  And as such I don’t find myself listening to Beaucoup Fish all that often.  Second, A Hundred Days Off, the first album post-Emerson, was not a big of a thud as everyone thinks.  It follows pretty much the same pattern as its predecessor; “Mo Move” and “Two Months Off” are amazing, and “Luetin” is phenomenal.  Sure, it was more subdued, but it still sounded like Underworld.

Even if you disagree with that entire paragraph, there’s still the matter of “Pizza For Eggs.”  This “single” (I don’t know what to call it) was 25 minutes of pure genius, on par with their early 90s work.  It was everything Underworld was back then but new and amazing.  For a brief time, it felt like they had returned to what made them great.  Until Oblivion With Bells that is.

So where does this leave me?  They are still my favorite musical artist.  They’ve moved me and inspired me too much to remove themselves from that spot.  Simply, I have too many good memories to outweigh these past few years.  It’s like how I feel watching new episodes of The Simpsons; the show was so phenomenal for so many years, I can’t help but think good thoughts about it despite what it’s turned into now.  And honestly, that’s not a bad position for them to be in.