A Little Bit Of This, A Little Bit Of That
I'm sitting here writing this from my back porch on a beautiful Saturday spring afternoon, temperature hovering at 65, slight breeze from the Northeast. (Actually, that's not entirely true. I thought about writing this while sitting on my back porch three minutes ago. But since I don't have a laptop, I had to go upstairs to the bedroom where my computer is located. Then I had to log on to write this blog, except I couldn't remember my password, or--more precisely--forgot that my username is NOT, in fact, filthyrich. Despite the fact that DJ Filthy Rich has been my fake DJ name ever since I've been a fake DJ, somewhere around 1997 or so. So the kind people at Blogger sent me an email containing my password. Except they didn't send it to me. They sent it to the REAL filthyrich, or at least the real person on Blogger.com who uses that handle. So, filthyrich, if you happen to read this, I'm sorry for clogging your Inbox with yet another useless email.)
On a side note, if the following rambling explanation doesn't give you insight into WHY it's taken me four months to write another blog, you probably shouldn't be reading this in the first place.
So anyway, I'm writing this in the nearby vicinity of my back porch, and I'm reading a remarkably great book given to me by a friend who obviously knows WAY more about my state of mind than he lets on. It's called Sex, Drugs And Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman, a former (current?) writer at SPIN, which makes sense because it's a collection of semi-coherent rambling essays on all facets of pop culture, similar to 95% of the articles in SPIN. (Or at least 95% of the articles that were in SPIN in the late '90s to early '00s, when I actually kept up with the magazine on a monthly basis.)
This blog is not necessarily a book endorsement, although it might serve that function as well. Rather, it's me rambling semi-coherently on all the reasons why my blogs tend to be quite similar to Klosterman's own ramblings, except his are published in book form and (presumably) make him a nice chunk of change, while I publish these blogs for free when I feel like it. (Approximately every four months or so.) But it's not like I'm building up four months of ideas here. This idea is, as of 4:55 PM, approximately 12 minutes old. And 3 of those minutes were spent inadvertently harassing filthyrich on Blogger.com.
So far, ol' Chuck has discussed the reasons why he will never fall in love with a woman and why women will never fall in love with him, and most of those reasons center around the concept of "fake love" as perpetrated by commercial artistry, such as the movie When Harry Met Sally (your best friend really IS your soulmate) and Coldplay (the stars really ARE yellow), for instance. It also hypothesizes that all women of my generation are really in love with John Cusack, or--more precisely--John Cusack as Lloyd Dobbler in Say Anything, creating an expectation for romance that can never really exist in the real world. And that's just the FIRST chapter. And who am I to argue with any of this? The boy is dead-on. No one I know has ever won a woman back by holding a boombox outside her window on a Sunday morning, yet we all think that, one day, the right woman will come into our lives, and we'll lose her for a moment but ultimately win her in the end through an amazing display of selflessness and compassion that somehow involves holding electronic equipment aloft while Peter Gabriel sings. (Note to DVD extras lovers: Check the bonus features on Say Anything for footage of Cusack holding the boombox with the original song playing. Something by Fishbone. Not the same effect, needless to say.)
Right now, Chuck just slew me by explaining the REAL reason why Kid Rock so vehemently hates Radiohead in every article/interview you read. (It actually involves a strange connection between Kid, Pam Anderson, and Tommy Lee. And here I thought he was just a tasteless redneck from Detroit.) But I'm finding it hard to focus because there's an outdoor "festival" of some sort going on in the Dilworth neighborhood of Charlotte right now. (They're probably calling it a "SouthEnd" something-or-other, and, if you're not a Charlotte resident, you have no idea what I'm talking about.) I'm assuming it's a festival, because there's a crappy cover band playing music. I can't actually VOUCH for the existence of said cover band, as I'm not in the immediate vicinity. I can, however, hear the lead vocals wafting across the springtime air as I read, and this explains my lack of concentration. See, the lead (female) vocalist was singing "The Game Of Love," by Santana featuring Michelle Branch, the #1 single from his less-successful follow-up to the multi-Grammy-winning Supernatural, and she was doing it with enough skill that I assumed--for a moment--someone in an adjoining apartment was washing his/her car while playing a Santana CD, before I realized that No one under the age of 45 would wash a car in public to a Santana CD. Or Michelle Branch, for that matter.
And it was at that second when I realized how the vocals were slightly "off" from the original recording. And that there was really no other music to speak of behind these vocals. Due to the nature of sound traveling through air (or something with the Doppler Effect), all I could hear was the female singer. Nothing else. She could be fronting an aging hair metal band, or a country group, or a vaguely R&B/dance/funk/disco ensemble that seems to play every twentysomething wine-drinking social function within the city limits of Charlotte, NC. (Another good one for the residents.) I didn't know, and it didn't matter. Here I was, reading essays on pop culture that jump from one topic to the next with random brilliance, and meanwhile this girl and her unknown band were providing the perfect soundtrack.
Her next selection was "Panama," by Van Halen, off their #1 album 1984. I can't imagine a song more quintessentially male, yet this vocalist handled herself well, singing lines about "keeping the moving parts clean" with the timbre of early '80s Pat Benatar. And I remembered how, when I was a kid, every girl wanted to sing like Pat--that combination of street sass, attitude, and pitch-perfect high notes--and now that type of vocalist doesn't exist, outside of free outdoor SouthEnd festivals. Every girl under the age of 25 now wants to sing like Mariah Carey channeling Whitney Houston, and the "best" ones wind up on American Idol doing just that, which is one more good reason NOT to watch American Idol. The ones who can't quite pull that off--and believe me, there are a LOT--wind up sounding more like Britney Spears, which isn't a bad commercial skill to have, judging by the success of Hilary Duff, JoJo, and my AutoTuned gal herself, Lindsey Lohan. Whereas, if you aim for Pat Benatar and fail, you sound a lot like Ashlee Simpson (sans backing tapes). And no one wants THAT.
Now the vocalist is tackling Teena Marie's "Lovergirl." (It was the only Top 10 hit for white R&B sensation Marie, and it wound up in the Casey Kasem year-end countdown of 1984 directly behind Billy Ocean's "Loverboy," a neat bit of pop serendipity too perfect to be planned. See, I can't remember anything from the three Physics courses I took during my first two years of college, but I can remember THIS. Sad. And a little pathetic too.) And I realize that there is, currently, no station on the FM dial anywhere in America where I could possibly tune in and here "The Game Of Love," "Panama," and "Lovergirl" back to back. (And I seriously doubt XM has one either. But maybe they're working on it.) And yet, that's exactly what has just happened. Unannounced. To me. As I sit here on my porch reading a book about pop culture.
To Unknown Vocalist Fronting Unknown Cover Band, I salute you. For your Pat Benatar vocals, for your random song selections, and for all the memories you inadvertently stirred up. You see, I can still clearly recall the first time I knew I was going to be in a rock band. I'm not talking about watching Def Leppard or Eddie Van Halen on the fledgling MTV network and going, "I want to be a rock star." I'm talking about the more concrete, humdrum act of watching an average, everyday, run-of-the-mill high school cover band ply their wares in public and realizing, I could do this. It was Snellville Days Weekend in Snellville, GA, in May of my 7th grade year, and some nameless band was playing "Jungle Love" by The Time on a makeshift stage overlooking a manmade lake. I don't think the singer even knew all the words. He sure didn't sing them all correctly. But they hit that groove, they worked that one chord sequence over and over for five minutes, and some little random kid in the audience had an epiphany. Or, more precisely, decided to start taking guitar lessons that summer.
If I could find the members of that random band right now, I would shake their hands and individually thank them. Despite their baffled looks, I suspect they would appreciate it somehow. 'Til then, I'll collectively toast Chuck Klosterman and the Unknown Female Vocalist for hoisting the flag of unpredictability aloft in a safe-and-predictable Clear Channel World (TM).
I'm back downstairs to resume my reading now and seriously consider buying a laptop. I'm hoping for a rocked-out version of the Breeders' "Cannonball" next. But I'd settle for "Hit Me With Your Best Shot."
Your pal,
Rich
On a side note, if the following rambling explanation doesn't give you insight into WHY it's taken me four months to write another blog, you probably shouldn't be reading this in the first place.
So anyway, I'm writing this in the nearby vicinity of my back porch, and I'm reading a remarkably great book given to me by a friend who obviously knows WAY more about my state of mind than he lets on. It's called Sex, Drugs And Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman, a former (current?) writer at SPIN, which makes sense because it's a collection of semi-coherent rambling essays on all facets of pop culture, similar to 95% of the articles in SPIN. (Or at least 95% of the articles that were in SPIN in the late '90s to early '00s, when I actually kept up with the magazine on a monthly basis.)
This blog is not necessarily a book endorsement, although it might serve that function as well. Rather, it's me rambling semi-coherently on all the reasons why my blogs tend to be quite similar to Klosterman's own ramblings, except his are published in book form and (presumably) make him a nice chunk of change, while I publish these blogs for free when I feel like it. (Approximately every four months or so.) But it's not like I'm building up four months of ideas here. This idea is, as of 4:55 PM, approximately 12 minutes old. And 3 of those minutes were spent inadvertently harassing filthyrich on Blogger.com.
So far, ol' Chuck has discussed the reasons why he will never fall in love with a woman and why women will never fall in love with him, and most of those reasons center around the concept of "fake love" as perpetrated by commercial artistry, such as the movie When Harry Met Sally (your best friend really IS your soulmate) and Coldplay (the stars really ARE yellow), for instance. It also hypothesizes that all women of my generation are really in love with John Cusack, or--more precisely--John Cusack as Lloyd Dobbler in Say Anything, creating an expectation for romance that can never really exist in the real world. And that's just the FIRST chapter. And who am I to argue with any of this? The boy is dead-on. No one I know has ever won a woman back by holding a boombox outside her window on a Sunday morning, yet we all think that, one day, the right woman will come into our lives, and we'll lose her for a moment but ultimately win her in the end through an amazing display of selflessness and compassion that somehow involves holding electronic equipment aloft while Peter Gabriel sings. (Note to DVD extras lovers: Check the bonus features on Say Anything for footage of Cusack holding the boombox with the original song playing. Something by Fishbone. Not the same effect, needless to say.)
Right now, Chuck just slew me by explaining the REAL reason why Kid Rock so vehemently hates Radiohead in every article/interview you read. (It actually involves a strange connection between Kid, Pam Anderson, and Tommy Lee. And here I thought he was just a tasteless redneck from Detroit.) But I'm finding it hard to focus because there's an outdoor "festival" of some sort going on in the Dilworth neighborhood of Charlotte right now. (They're probably calling it a "SouthEnd" something-or-other, and, if you're not a Charlotte resident, you have no idea what I'm talking about.) I'm assuming it's a festival, because there's a crappy cover band playing music. I can't actually VOUCH for the existence of said cover band, as I'm not in the immediate vicinity. I can, however, hear the lead vocals wafting across the springtime air as I read, and this explains my lack of concentration. See, the lead (female) vocalist was singing "The Game Of Love," by Santana featuring Michelle Branch, the #1 single from his less-successful follow-up to the multi-Grammy-winning Supernatural, and she was doing it with enough skill that I assumed--for a moment--someone in an adjoining apartment was washing his/her car while playing a Santana CD, before I realized that No one under the age of 45 would wash a car in public to a Santana CD. Or Michelle Branch, for that matter.
And it was at that second when I realized how the vocals were slightly "off" from the original recording. And that there was really no other music to speak of behind these vocals. Due to the nature of sound traveling through air (or something with the Doppler Effect), all I could hear was the female singer. Nothing else. She could be fronting an aging hair metal band, or a country group, or a vaguely R&B/dance/funk/disco ensemble that seems to play every twentysomething wine-drinking social function within the city limits of Charlotte, NC. (Another good one for the residents.) I didn't know, and it didn't matter. Here I was, reading essays on pop culture that jump from one topic to the next with random brilliance, and meanwhile this girl and her unknown band were providing the perfect soundtrack.
Her next selection was "Panama," by Van Halen, off their #1 album 1984. I can't imagine a song more quintessentially male, yet this vocalist handled herself well, singing lines about "keeping the moving parts clean" with the timbre of early '80s Pat Benatar. And I remembered how, when I was a kid, every girl wanted to sing like Pat--that combination of street sass, attitude, and pitch-perfect high notes--and now that type of vocalist doesn't exist, outside of free outdoor SouthEnd festivals. Every girl under the age of 25 now wants to sing like Mariah Carey channeling Whitney Houston, and the "best" ones wind up on American Idol doing just that, which is one more good reason NOT to watch American Idol. The ones who can't quite pull that off--and believe me, there are a LOT--wind up sounding more like Britney Spears, which isn't a bad commercial skill to have, judging by the success of Hilary Duff, JoJo, and my AutoTuned gal herself, Lindsey Lohan. Whereas, if you aim for Pat Benatar and fail, you sound a lot like Ashlee Simpson (sans backing tapes). And no one wants THAT.
Now the vocalist is tackling Teena Marie's "Lovergirl." (It was the only Top 10 hit for white R&B sensation Marie, and it wound up in the Casey Kasem year-end countdown of 1984 directly behind Billy Ocean's "Loverboy," a neat bit of pop serendipity too perfect to be planned. See, I can't remember anything from the three Physics courses I took during my first two years of college, but I can remember THIS. Sad. And a little pathetic too.) And I realize that there is, currently, no station on the FM dial anywhere in America where I could possibly tune in and here "The Game Of Love," "Panama," and "Lovergirl" back to back. (And I seriously doubt XM has one either. But maybe they're working on it.) And yet, that's exactly what has just happened. Unannounced. To me. As I sit here on my porch reading a book about pop culture.
To Unknown Vocalist Fronting Unknown Cover Band, I salute you. For your Pat Benatar vocals, for your random song selections, and for all the memories you inadvertently stirred up. You see, I can still clearly recall the first time I knew I was going to be in a rock band. I'm not talking about watching Def Leppard or Eddie Van Halen on the fledgling MTV network and going, "I want to be a rock star." I'm talking about the more concrete, humdrum act of watching an average, everyday, run-of-the-mill high school cover band ply their wares in public and realizing, I could do this. It was Snellville Days Weekend in Snellville, GA, in May of my 7th grade year, and some nameless band was playing "Jungle Love" by The Time on a makeshift stage overlooking a manmade lake. I don't think the singer even knew all the words. He sure didn't sing them all correctly. But they hit that groove, they worked that one chord sequence over and over for five minutes, and some little random kid in the audience had an epiphany. Or, more precisely, decided to start taking guitar lessons that summer.
If I could find the members of that random band right now, I would shake their hands and individually thank them. Despite their baffled looks, I suspect they would appreciate it somehow. 'Til then, I'll collectively toast Chuck Klosterman and the Unknown Female Vocalist for hoisting the flag of unpredictability aloft in a safe-and-predictable Clear Channel World (TM).
I'm back downstairs to resume my reading now and seriously consider buying a laptop. I'm hoping for a rocked-out version of the Breeders' "Cannonball" next. But I'd settle for "Hit Me With Your Best Shot."
Your pal,
Rich
posted by Rich at 1:48 PM
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