dansolomon

[dansolomon]

twitter banned posting social links to a bunch of other sites (including linktree!) but not to tumblr, so this is just a post to put on twitter with where to find me on not-twitter, which is a site I don’t expect to use much anymore.

http://instagram.com/dansolomon

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This is an extremely dorky observation but the whole world right now definitely makes more sense if you assume we are in the Ultimate universe and not the Marvel universe

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I miss LiveJournal, we had it so good with LiveJournal. We just talked about ourselves and then read everyone else talking about themselves and posted mostly nice things about each other in the comments, and sometimes we were in groups where we argued over nonsense. MySpace was worse than LiveJournal and then Facebook was much worse than MySpace, you didn’t even get a top eight and nobody was friends with Tom. On MySpace everybody was friends with Tom, it was a rule. Tumblr was good till everyone I liked talking to left, and then Twitter was good until it started to get depressing, after which it was still sometimes good but also very depressing so I would occasionally make a rule that I didn’t use it after dark or I would feel too shitty to sleep. Anyway it seems like it’s pretty much over now, for real, which is so much faster than I thought it would be. But these sites die all at once when they become boring and the people you want to talk to are gone and that sure looks like the future of Twitter. So here I am posting on Tumblr again, wishing it were LiveJournal. Good luck, everybody, perhaps some day we will meet again.

[dansolomon]

Today’s Song, May 4, 2022 “Rise Above,” Ibeyi (feat. Berwyn)

We went to see Henry Rollins do a stand-up show a couple of nights ago. It started at 8pm on Monday, and ol’ Hank has always put the “punk” in “punctual,” so I didn’t see the news about Roe, which broke at like 8:04, until several hours later (it was a long show). It was definitely one of those Troy-from-Community-comes-back-with-the-pizzas-to-find-everything-on-fire.gif moments. 

Anyway, lots of feelings over the past few days, as someone who believes that access to legal abortion is a fundamental right. By an unlikely quirk of timing, that is weirdly tied up with Henry Rollins for me in this moment—which led me to “Rise Above,” since that is one of those songs I’ve listened to several thousand times in my life when I am feeling depressed about how people with power seem to feel about rights that I believe are fundamental. But also: it is a 40-year-old song, performed by a bunch of dudes who are now in their sixties, which doesn’t really make it much of an anthem for the people who are most at risk of suffering from the rights they are about to lose. 

Except this morning, I found this version from Ibeyi, an early single from the album they’ll be releasing on Friday, and it sure sounds like they found something anthemic in it for themselves. Their version is poppy, dancy, and a little ethereal, where Black Flag’s is all aggression. I reckon that certain elements of aggressive music probably sound different to a pair of young Afro-Cuban women than they do to me—they’ve grown up hearing that stuff in, like, military recruiting ads—but “we are tired of your abuse / try to stop us, it’s no use” is still a powerful as hell thing to sing. In the voices of the Diaz twins this morning, as the jealous cowards try to control, it sounds more urgent than it has in a long time. 

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rapt, watching the best show on tv (julia)

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saw some normal shit walking the dog this evening

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Today’s Song, April 26  “I Pray For You,” Pusha T (feat. Labrinth and Malice)

I drove to Houston on Friday and spent the entire two and a half hours listening to It’s Almost Dry, Pusha T’s new album, which dropped that morning. It’s great—thrilling and bouncy and funny and mean, all of the things Push does well—but the thing that really got me came at the very end, on “I Pray For You,” where he gives the mic to his brother for the final verse on the record. 

A decade ago, after Clipse broke up, Push’s brother found Jesus and changed his name to “No Malice” (which is a very funny thing to do, if you called yourself “Malice” before you got religion). He’s put out a couple solo albums since then, and done a few guest verses in the past couple years, mostly rapping with introspection and remorse about the same drug stuff that his brother raps about with glee. On “I Pray For You,” though, he’s in a mood. 

He’s credited on the track as Malice again, and he sounds like it. I dunno what he’s going through, but listen to that verse and you can tell it’s something! It’s still nominally from a spiritual place, I guess, but it’s all external, rather than internal: “I greet you with the love of God, that don't make us friends / I might whisper in his ear, ‘Bury all of them.’" 

There’s something fascinating about the way It’s Almost Dry creates an atmosphere of menace, the kind of thing that good writers in any medium work hard to pull off, and don’t always succeed at. Earlier on the album, on a short song called “Call My Bluff,” Push raps over this eerie Pharrell beat, his voice in a higher register than usual, a little sing-song in his delivery, making his threats like he’s almost distracted—like all of this is so matter-of-fact to him that it doesn’t even deserve his full attention. But the context of “I Pray For You” hits me even harder, that these threats are coming from someone who had previously renounced trying to sound scary in his music, and who’s since managed to resolve whatever conflict he used to feel about it. “X told you ‘Hell is hot,’ / I told you repent,” Malice raps. That’s some Old Testament shit. 

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Twitter brain

Elon Musk bought Twitter today. There are all sorts of takes, most of them smart, about what that means for Twitter and the Internet and democracy and how it is proof that we are living in an oligarchy, when one man is able to marshal an unfathomable amount of resources ($44b, the purchase price of Twitter, is more than the GDP of 46 nations!) in order to make the most expensive purchase by an individual in human history. Go read those, if you’re trying to make sense of this! It’s got me thinking about something else, which is the way Twitter has affected my brain.

I don’t mean that in a bad way, like when people talk about how the hellsite has given them brainworms, etc (even though, I dunno, maybe that’s true for me too). But I’ve been on the site for thirteen years now and I think in tweets a lot of the time. If, as I expect, this man controlling Twitter changes my relationship to the site, that’ll change, too. Which is a lot to reckon with! I’ve written for the Internet basically my whole life. When I was younger, I thought in LiveJournal entries; big, meaty paragraphs about not very much except feelings and details, very much intended to be read by the couple hundred people who subscribed to my posts. My brain composed those entries throughout the day, as I rode the bus or waited between bands at shows. Before we had phones with us all the time, I sometimes wrote those thoughts on paper, so I could type them up when I got in front of a computer, so people could read them.

I don’t think in paragraphs in the same way I did when I was mostly expressing myself in personal blog posts. (If I did, I reckon I’d update this more often.) When I react to the world, I tend to do so at roughly tweet-length, since the first place I will go to express what I mean to say will be a place where you only get a couple of sentences and you want to be pithy so people connect with it. It’s not necessarily a bad thing—there’s something to be said for concisely distilling what you mean to say; in some ways, it reminds me of when I used to write poetry—but the fact that Twitter has been my first-impulse medium for saying whatever it is I am going to say has definitely shaped the way I think.

With that in mind, I’m going to choose to be agnostic about my future on Twitter, and whether my expectation that I’m going to use it less (maybe not at all, in time) is good or bad. That’s just speaking personally, of course—politically, one capricious dude who thinks he’s the smartest guy in the whole world controlling one of the world’s major communication platforms sucks ass, even if he just runs it into the ground, which seems plausible. For young people right now, they kind of come out of the box shaped like the Internet. Their contours, from birth, have gaps for TikTok and YouTube and whatever else kids are into. For those of us who are a little bit older—whose lives had some form and structure before the Internet, who were actively molded by it in real time—I think maybe we’re more like memory foam. The indentations are there, but it doesn’t sound so bad to have the chance to bounce back.

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okay, yes! hello again, Tumblr. 

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10 Albums That Mean Nothing To Me, Day 10 69 Love Songs, the Magnetic Fields

This one just always seemed overwhelming. 69 songs? Man that's a lot. I know that people really love this album, but I have a hard time believing that anybody has strong feelings in any direction about all 69 songs on it. Like maybe you really love 8 or 9 of them, and you skip past another 8 or 9, and then the other four dozen are just okay. I could be wrong, maybe all 69 of them are essential, but I never made it a point to find out because I didn't want to do all of that work. I’d probably have listened to an album called 8 or 9 Love Songs. 

The song titles aren't that encouraging, either. "Love Is Like Jazz." "Love Is Like A Bottle Of Gin." "A Pretty Girl Is Like..." "Long Forgotten Fairy Tale." I guess it's good that there are 69 songs on this album, because if there were ten songs and those were four of them, only the goofiest people would have ever bought this album. It's like he needed 69 songs to dilute the goofiness here, even though making an album with 69 songs on it is also goofy. What a paradox!

Anyway, I imagine that this album features a lot of ukuleles and musical saws and harmonicas and maybe a theremin. There's probably at least one xylophone solo since there are 69 songs here. Statistically speaking, there pretty much has to be.

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10 Albums That Mean Nothing To Me, Day 9 Master of Puppets, Metallica

This is apparently Metallica's best album, but I don't think I've ever listened to a full Metallica album on purpose. I don't know any of the songs on this except I think maybe "Sanitarium." I feel like when people talk about Metallica, though, this is like the platonic ideal of Metallica, and it's the one on all of the best-of lists and in the Library of Congress.

I'm guessing that the song "Battery" is about the crime and not energy storage, but it's pretty much a toss-up. There's an instrumental called "Orion" that is 8:27 seconds, which means it's probably a slog to get through unless you're really high, which most people who are really into this album were when they first heard it, so I guess it works out great. A lot of these song titles sound like they could be 1950's horror movies ("The Thing That Should Not Be," "Mater of Puppets"), which is cool, I guess. The cover looks like the band's bassist, who I've just learned was named Cliff Burton, drew it on his folder in math class, and then took it home and painted it over. There are hands in the corners and then the crosses are on strings, so I guess the puppets in question are tombstones? That seems like it's probably not very scary. It'd be scarier of they were zombies. At least that would make sense.

Anyway, I never cared about Metallica even a little, so I definitely never cared about this album. I've heard the Black Album a few times, and I know that the real Metallica fans think that album sucks and this album rules, but I'm pretty sure if you played me songs from each of them and made me guess which were which, I would only identify "Master of Puppets" as being on Master of Puppets, and maybe if there's a song on the other one whose chorus is "the black album / whoa-oh, the black album" I'd guess that one came from that. 

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10 Albums That Mean Nothing To Me, Day 7 Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Pink Floyd

Unless some roommate put this on and didn’t tell me what it was, I’ve never heard a single song off of this record. I know that people who are embarrassed by 70’s-era Pink Floyd like to talk about this album as part of their more authentic period, but I’ve always assumed that it just meant these songs were boring instead of corny.

Maybe in 1960-whatever, the kaleidoscope effect on the cover was mind-blowing and trippy, but it looks ridiculous now. It’s weird that rock bands almost never put their faces on records anymore, but these guys made up for it by putting dozens of copies of their faces on one album. I do like that guy’s orange coat. He seems like he ties a nice cravat.

The track listing makes the songs sound silly. “Pow R. Toch.” “Chapter 24.” I assume that at least half of them are about The Hobbit. I imagine they mix electric guitars with lutes and oboes, maybe someone plays a bassoon. The lyrics probably don’t make any sense, but that’s like the point, man. I’m sure Syd Barrett was a genius but this all seems very silly.

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10 Albums That Mean Nothing To Me, Day 6 In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, Neutral Milk Hotel

If I had to guess, I'd say that I've heard this entire album at least once or twice in my life. I definitely know a few of the songs. There's the one that starts "when you were young you were the king of carrot flowers," which is either "The King Of Carrot Flowers Part 1" or "The King Of Carrot Flowers Parts 2 and 3." There's the one that starts "Two-Headed Booooooy...", which is called "Two-Headed Boy" according to Wikipedia. There's the one where the singer goes "what a beautiful day / [something something ] / in the aeroplane over the sea" in the chorus, which is called "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea." This is easy!

That's it, though. I know this album means a lot to a lot of people (Wikipedia says it's "regarded as one of the greatest albums of all time," with two citations!), but somehow despite having literally unlimited opportunities to hear this album in full and form an opinion about it over the past 20 years, I just never felt the need to do that.

Anyway, on the songs from this album that I know, I don't really remember any of the words except the words that are in the title. I'm pretty sure there are, like, banjos and ukuleles on it. I don't know why the lady with the moon for her head is sitting there, or what it has to do with areoplanes, or why she and the little boy are sieg-heiling, but I think that this album has something to do with WWII and Nazi Germany (I assume it's about how it's bad since it was 1998 and not 2018) so I'm guessing that they are the bad guys and that this is a concept album.

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10 Albums That Mean Nothing To Me, Day 5 Parklife, Blur

I learned when I lived in London that this is apparently a very famous album that every British boy and girl received in 1994 on their way to school and was forced to listen to at least once a week for the duration of the '90s. Harrowing stuff.

Anyway, my American friends are reading this like, "Oh, that's the 'Whoo-hoo' band, right?" and my British friends are like, "This is absurd, literally everyone has heard Parklife, you had to hear it once a week or you'd die." We're such similar cultures, yet so different!

Anyway, there are families in the UK who stopped speaking to each other because some of them liked Oasis and some of them liked Blur, and one time at a party in Austin I met a British guy who felt *very* strongly that Oasis was great and Blur were rubbish and he did not care A) who knew it and B) that no one else had any opinion. I'd have picked Oasis for this, but as far as I'm aware, they only have that one album with "Champagne Supernova" on it and I have heard that one so it doesn't qualify. But for Blur, I'm pretty sure I've only heard "Whoo-Hoo," which must not actually be the name of that song, because it's not on the tracklist to this, and if this is their most famous album, that song is definitely on it. I'm going to guess that song is called "Parklife," because its name is in blue on Wikipedia, but it might be "To The End" or "End of a Century." Post your guess in the comments.

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10 Albums That Mean Nothing To Me: Day 4 Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, The Sex Pistols

I like punk rock, but the only kid at school who did his hair in the big spiky mohawk was a bully, so I wasn't going to listen to his music. Then I got older and just sort of skipped over the Sex Pistols because everybody talked about how they were more seminal than good, and that seemed like a waste of time since you can't listen to everything. I think I've probably heard a few of these songs. Isn't there one that starts "I am an anti-christ?" I remember that whichever one of the Spice Girls was Sporty Spice covered that song once after the Spice Girls broke up and she tried to have an alt-rock career in the early '00s, and she started it with "My name is Sporty Spice, I am an anti-christ," which is funny.

Anyway, I think you probably had to hear this record for the first time when you were 14 for it to matter to you, and I didn't do that. It's probably about as good as most of the other 70's British punk rock I didn't listen to, and worse than The Clash, so I don't feel like I'm missing much.

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Writing about music and pop culture means either being conversant in every big cultural touchstone, or pretending that you are. Since the former is impossible if you took any time to develop taste of your own, there are always going to be things that you missed out on because you were busy listening to, watching, and reading other things, instead. Rather than feel ashamed of my ignorance, I’ve decided to own it.

10 Albums That Mean Nothing To Me: Day 3 Stop Making Sense, Talking Heads

I didn't know until I looked at the track listing that this was a live album, but every song has the word "(live)" in parentheses after it, so I'm assuming it's either a live album or that these guys just think that's a fun thing to include in the name of every one of their songs. I've heard a few of these, obviously—I know "Psycho Killer" and "Burning Down The House" and "Once In A Lifetime" and they're all okay songs, I don't rush to change the station when they come on the radio or anything. I have no idea if I've ever heard the versions from this album or not, though.

The album art is part of an album cover and then a record coming out of it, which I guess was clever in 1977, when I'm guessing this came out because I'm not going to bother looking it up. The photo is of somebody in a terrible suit with no head, which I've decided is a pun on the fact that the band is called Talking Heads—how can the head talk if it's not there? It's a mystery for the ages, and part of why David Byrne is a genius. Also, whenever I try to think of what David Byrne looks like, I picture David Lynch. I know they're different dudes, though, and I'm 95% sure that David Lynch looks more like a rock star and David Byrne looks more like a guy who makes weird-ass movies. Thus concludes my review of Stop Making Sense, the seminal live(?) album of 1977.

[dansolomon]

Writing about music and pop culture means either being conversant in every big cultural touchstone, or pretending that you are. Since the former is impossible if you took any time to develop taste of your own, there are always going to be things that you missed out on because you were busy listening to, watching, and reading other things, instead. Rather than feel ashamed of my ignorance, I’ve decided to own it.

10 Albums That Mean Nothing To Me: Day 2 Funeral, Arcade Fire

I looked at Pitchfork's list of the best albums of its first 15 years and this was #3. I know the two Radiohead albums above it on the list, but I don't know anything about this album. I'm pretty sure it's uncool to be into Arcade Fire now, because they're like Casablanca or something where all of the things that made it interesting have been aped to the point that it all feels like cliche, but apparently this album was very influential when it came out! Pitchfork's review excerpted on that website says that this album is "the fierce declaration that love can and will conquer the finality of death," which seems like a big accomplishment for an indie rock record.

Anyway, I'm sure there are a bunch of bands I like that are trying to be Arcade Fire, or sound like a worse version of Funeral, or something, but I never noticed. Is the hand on the cover holding a really ornate feather pen? What is she writing? Is that question answered on the record or is it too busy overcoming the the finality of death? Please advise.