Tag Archives: music

Lighten Up

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steve-martin_banjoSome people have taken umbrage at my musings about Bluegrass Music. Apparently these folks take life so seriously that they think my opinion 1) matters to anyone, 2) is to be taken as 100% at face value. Now seriously folks, the operative term here should be sarcasm. Bluegrass musicians are some of the most accomplished folk musicians in the world. I can appreciate their talent while at the same time I cannot bear to listen to them. It just isn’t my gig. I hate it. My apparently feeble attempt at humor in the piece was so lame that it was misconstrued as the ravings of a hydrophobic dog on Bluegrass music. Either I didn’t write things very well or you are not the sharpest tool in the shed. I know which one I’m going to bet on.

atmosphere_testing_nuclear_weapons.jpeNow seriously, how can anyone take life so damn, well, seriously? Daily life is usually the most humorous thing imaginable.  I mean unless the current situation in front of you involves death or you losing everything then it’s not fodder for tears. Make a joke. Have a laugh. Lighten up. People are always running up to me saying: “It’s a nightmare.” “We’re doomed.” “We’re porked.” I always ask: did anyone die? Did anyone go out of business. Did the ground just open up and swallow someone?  No.  I say: “Well this is just the first sign that the apocalypse is imminent.” The conference room goes quiet. Everyone in the immediate group is dead serious. About what?  The world’s going to end!  Again, I don’t think so.  Lighten up.

tsunami2There is enough grim news in the real world so your sorry insignificant little problems are a source of laughter for me and they should be for you.  See the humor in the everyday occurrences.  See the humor in your useless job.  See the humor in your whacked out family, see the humor in the fact that you have no idea why you do 95% of the things you do, see the humor in that driver texting and fixing her hair at the same time.  Bill Monroe (rest his soul) will still be there when you get back.  In all seriousness folks, lighten up!

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Faster and Louder

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It’s a well known fact that all music is better when played faster and louder, just like all music is better if it includes robot voices. From punk rock to opera to new age I listen to all my music at an ear shattering volume, always have. My kids tell me I’m going to lose my hearing to which I always reply: “What?” I figure at my age if I haven’t lost all my hearing by now it doesn’t really matter if I go partially deaf later. When I die I will either not care or get to listen to all the music I want to at an ear shattering volume.

My family hates my music. My wife used to share some of my interests but gradually has spurned almost everything I like. She moved on to the one music that almost nobody actually likes: Bluegrass. I hate banjos. I hate them in any kind of music not just Bluegrass but this probably is at least partially the reason I hate Bluegrass so much. For instance, I hate Bela Fleck. I wouldn’t care what he played, I’d hate it because it has banjos in it. I have extrapolated this to the generalization that nobody really likes Bluegrass music even though for some reason nobody will say so. I think it’s one of those things like asking a group of people where they want to go eat and nobody says anything even though they each have a place they really want to go. Somebody ends up picking somewhere that everyone else hates but nobody will say they don’t want to eat there because they think everyone else does. Does that make any sense? So people are afraid to say they hate Bluegrass because they don’t want to offend anyone even though they all really hate it.

I tried to give my children a good musical education with healthy doses of bands like The Ramones, The Sex Pistols, Sigue Sigue Sputnik, Depeche Mode, The Toy Dolls as well as a side dose of classical music. It stuck for awhile. My oldest daughter still has tastes that are the closest to mine but I also find some of her music just noise and too avant-garde for my childish tastes. My middle daughter pretty much only listens to Asian pop music, K-Pop, J-Pop, etc. She’s in Japan now for study abroad so you can imagine she is in seventh heaven. My youngest daughter listens to Broadway musicals, Barbara Streisand, Judy Garland, you get the picture. I can stand these in small doses only. So you can see my comprehensive musical education had little to no effect on them, although my middle daughter once told me, “Nobody likes Bluegrass,” so some things were not completely ignored.

Faster and louder is the same way. Everyone really likes their music played faster and louder and with robot voices in it too, but are afraid to say it because they think everyone else will think they are stupid. If everybody would just ‘fess up, somebody take the first courageous step, then the music that gets played on the radio for instance would get a lot better when they started playing the music people really want to hear instead of say, singer-songwriter stuff.

So that’s why I’m here, to tell the truth in this blog. I have now taken that first courageous step. All you sheep can now feel safe jumping on my bandwagon and admitting what you really like.

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I gotta go now and listen to some Teenage Bottlerocket.

Nostalgia

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SSSBand

In my first post I finished off with a picture of my favorite popular music, rock ‘n’ roll band of all time:  Sigue Sigue Sputnik  (Boom Boom Satellite, translated from the Russian). No, for you youngsters or the unenlightened that don’t know what I’m talking about, they are not Russian, we have a British pop group here with a name supposedly cadged from a Moscow youth gang. The band, briefly popular in 1986, wanted to be the future of rock ‘n’ roll; the look, the feel, the sound. Needless to say we all know now that they never became the future. Why? Probably over-hype that couldn’t be lived up to plus a complete immunity to the hype in the US from the very start. But this isn’t my point.

Over the years there have been several reunion attempts, one actually partly successful from 2000 to 2004. They sounded good again live. Real good. Made some mostly good if uneven albums. The problem is, and this is a big problem with a band like this, they were old. Remember, in the original incarnation image was possibly more important than the sound. This is always gone by the reunion. Plastic surgery and pink fright wigs on men well beyond 40 are just sad not cool. No way cool. Ask anyone 16 to 28 years old, what do you think they will say? Cool? Nope, unless you stick your tongue firmly in your cheek and embrace the fact that you ARE really self-parody. Self-parody can succeed on another level when it is self conscious. Self-parody otherwise is sad when you are actually trying to be serious and capture and relive the past, ergo ’70s Elvis.

In the past few years there has been a clamor among SSS fans, yes we will use the acronym here, for a reunion of the original band. Remember in 2004 they were old by “cool” pop music standards, now in the ripe old year of 2013 they are inching towards walker and wheelchair material. Can you imagine trying to recapture “the magic” of my 29th year in existence when I am now well into my fifties and the band I am going to see is in their sixties, a very special image driven band? Its just sad. The Sex Pistols had a reunion of sorts 20 years on in 1996 and it was okay, but only if you kept your eyes closed. However, nothing new was achieved. The band didn’t make some new important mark on culture or even their own legacy. It was about a bit of fun and making money. Rotten, who always claimed it was all a cheat in the first place, kept his sense of humor throughout the “tour” and refused to have anything to do with it after that. But some took the whole thing so seriously…

Here is a link to the SSS YouTube video of “21st Century Boy” from TOTP in 1986. Go look at it. Really. This will still be here. Can you imagine fat bald old farts doing “classic” Sputnik like this now without embracing the comedy aspects of it? I say again: Sad.

Not only are the old farts trying to pull this thing off a sorry lot, but probably even more so, the fans that cling to it and clamor for it. Just shoot me if I’m still alive in 20 years and they put a SSS reunion special on PBS during “begging for bucks” and I still wanna watch it. Clinging to a fossilized aged 18 youth isn’t healthy. People should live in the now and just think about the past. Of course I still look the same as I did in 1986. Except for the er weight, um wrinkles, and, oh, hair.

The original founders of SSS are putting out some old cast-off recordings and demos for the fans, and this is okay, but it has fueled speculation that the band is going to go back in the studio (maybe alright) and tour again (I’m not so sure about). Martin Degville retains a presence as a solo act trumped up as Sigue Sigue Sputnik Electronic, and it looks like fun and all, but people actually whine that it isn’t up to the old “classic” Sputnik and is ruining the bands image (?). At least he re-recorded everything in a more current techno style and released some new stuff so he wasn’t too hampered by 1986. It seems to be all in good fun though, not TOO serious. I hope Martin, at least, knows not to take it all too seriously.

So, no I don’t want to see a Sigue Sigue Sputnik reunion that goes beyond the studio. It also has to be the original band, not some Sammy Hagar-style replacement singer. Because if I’m going to have to close my eyes anyway and pretend it is 1986, it ought to be in the comfort of my own little home, not some stinking dive pub in Manchester.

A couple of other things. The good old days were only one thing: old, they weren’t all that good you just only remember that part. Remember the REAL future is right around the corner if we can just wait long enough for it. Oh, and excuse my still rudimentary HTML skills, I’m still learning. It looks like the YouTube link at least works. I’ll figure out how to embed next time, maybe, no promises