#listen i do like sonic cd its just that also i hate it

[whiskydisky]

alright buddy you asked for those headcanons....

a lot of them are for rachel for some reason, or just me projecting, or really out of character, I thought of them in the shower, blah blah blah you don't wanna hear me yap.

some of them are also just "____ reminds me of _____", and they shift past and present tense cause I'm STUPIDD so sorry

ANYWAY

Andre

Andre doesn't really have a definite music taste, he just listens to whatever Cal likes and whatever's on the radio (OR SO HE SAYS)

He was pretty much a straight A student, he probably would've even gotten a scholarship.

His family has had Mel since she was a kitten.

His favorite arcade games are those hunting simulators with the guns.

REPRESSED HOMOSEXUAL (obviously), but he probably would've never figured it out anyways.

If he was alive today he would've been one of those shitty misogynistic fortnite players that watch andrew tate and you can't change my mind.

His bed is the best thing you will ever lay on, it's so ridiculously comfortable.

out of character, but it's funny, so who cares. andre secretly LOVES pop music, but he never really gets a chance to listen to it.

cannot draw anything to save his life.

HATES musicals. absolutely despises them.

still sleeps with this one stuffed animal he's had since he was a kid. its a lamb.

THE HEAVIEST SLEEPER YOU WILL EVER MEET. it is almost impossible to wake him up unless he does it on his own.

he's red to me.

autistic. how many more characters will I project onto? only god knows.

necklace guy.

one of those white guys that punch holes in walls when they get mad.

pops his fingers a lot.

paranoid about balding. (AND FOR GOOD REASON.)

Cal

knew absolutely nothing about guns before andre started talking to him about them.

him and rachel were childhood friends.

had a MASSIVE cd collection. just shelves and shelves of cds in his room that him and andre would listen to when they hung out.

doesn't really like going out.

sonic fan. im not explaining he just seems like one.

his entire wardrobe is just black band shirts and jeans because black shirts "go with anything" (he isn't wrong).

bracelet guy.

a little spoiled, ends up spending money like an idiot because of it. (example, his massive cd collection)

the way he was bullied was either physically or those kinds of "my friend has a crush on you" type deals

huge music geek, and gets angry when andre doesn't keep up with all of the stuff he tells him about bands.

REPRESSED BISEXUAL. he probably would've figured it out.

middle school was the absolute worst for him.

says the absolute meanest shit about people and then says "but who am I to judge?" and thinks that covers it

absolutely loved chuck e cheese animatronics as a kid.

he's blue to me.

draws on himself a lot, just draws in general, it's a way for him to fidget.

definitely neurodivergent.

chews off the paint on his nails, and his nails.

Rachel

hums a lot.

not exactly a "popular kid" but people do hang out with her.

air hockey god, nobody can challenge her, they will lose.

earing girl.

people sometimes look at her weird for hanging out with cal, but she defends him.

had a little crush on cal, but nothing would've really come out of it anyway.

her house is super nice, like those grandma homes with the glass figures and useless decor with lace everywhere and uncomfortable couches to sit on. I'll send a picture if u don't know what I mean.

really nice to hang out with.

fidgets with her hoodie strings a lot.

one of those people that can adjust their personality depending on who they're hanging out with.

doesn't like andre because of his reputation and how cal acts around him (like how he actually is), but she doesn't actively bully or talk about him. she isn't that kind of person.

absolutely loved prom but the ride home was so incredibly awkward that it almost ruined the night for her.

has naturally curly hair, but doesn't really treat it right so it's pretty frizzy.

HATES it when car windows are down, her hair gets in her face a bunch.

also doesn't like putting her hair up unless it's really hot out.

paints cals nails. she knows he's a little 💅💅💅 but doesn't say anything.

really liked cal.

i do think she moved on, but it definitely took her a long time.

I'm very sick and tired of the "lesbian best friend" trope in caldre fics, she just doesn't seem like it to me.

falls asleep unnaturally quick.

absolutely loves going out, especially to malls or the park where she can walk and talk with people.

really good in school.

freshman year was horrible for her.

really likes reading and writing, she has a journal that she keeps to herself, it's one of those that have keys to them and stuff.

absolutely obsessed with unicorns as a kid. wanted them to be real so badly.

worried about how she'd look on her college application.

hung out with cal AND andre one time. did NOT like it and absolutely still talks to cal about how bad it was.

AND THAT'S IT... SO... YEAH!

THABK YOU SO MUCH FOR FUELING MY BRAIN AHHH I LOVE THESE SO MUCH!!!!!!

[donnieluvsthings]

guyyyssss i didnt know amy shows up in palmtree panic this is gonna mess up my whole fic!!!

[themattress]

Lol. After @ultraericthered pointed out that their behavior is exactly why the Sonic fandom gets such a bad rep online, the SammyClassicSonicFan Gang apparently had themselves a group therapy session where they told themselves comforting lies rather than actually engage with arguments and facts. And I just need to show some of them; they’re too good to pass up.

No, that’s what I’m doing to you now. What I was doing before was giving reasonable arguments as to what about SatAM warrants legit criticism and what doesn’t, and how all of its flaws and inaccuracy to the game doesn’t make it an invalid take on Sonic particularly when you consider the context of the times and position the show’s developers were in with SEGA of America. Rather than respond to that, you went “La la la la, I’m not listening!” and regurgitated your old positions as if I hadn’t just given you new information to consider.

You’re allowed to do whatever you want. It makes you look like a jackass, but you’re allowed.

Also, way to miss ultraericthered’s point - he was being sarcastic about your “an adaptation must always adhere to game canon!” stance because Lost World is a canonical game, its events and characterizations are therefore canonical, so by your own logic Tails behaving like that is part of his canon characterization and should be adhered to in adaptations. As we will see later, these peoples’ definition of “dismissing the mainline game” is “pointing out issues with them”, and they’re accusing us of doing it out of bias toward SatAM...which I have also pointed out issues with, repeatedly. Nuance and an even-handed perspective, what is it?

........................And the world of SatAM didn’t?

How anyone can read what we posted and say we were “treating the side canon as the mainline canon” is beyond me. What we were saying is that the game canon is the mainline canon, the side canons are the side canons, the mainline canon is not obligated to feature anything from the side canons but the side canons are also not obligated to do everything like the mainline canon does it. If you’re really an Underground fan, you should agree with that.

So “shitting on” certain games or certain aspects of certain games = “dismissing the mainline games canon”. Right. I’m a big fan of the original Sonic game, Sonic CD, Sonic 2, Sonic 3 & Knuckles, the Adventure titles, Unleashed, Generations, the Storybook titles and Sonic Mania, see a lot of positives in games like Lost World and Sonic Forces even if I think they overall failed in execution, and even have a nostalgic fondness for that shitty 3D racing game with the Tails Doll.....but nah, I totally hate the games canon and am just a SatAM fanboy.

It boggles my mind that this is what people like this actually believe. The vast majority of people I’ve seen don’t ignore the games canon and love it on the whole, they merely have justified constructive criticism about many of its post-2000 entries. These people apparently think any criticism of the games canon is an attack on it and that everyone should just shut up and unconditionally love every game ever released because they’re part of the core canon.

Note that neither I nor ultraericthered have used the “SEGA stan” label. I agree it’s ridiculous.

.........I mean, what else can you even say to this but

This is literally insane. It’s an argument I never once made. I never said the games have to be non-canon. They are fucking obviously canon - the CORE canon, as has been said before. The argument is that not every sub-canon needs to ape the core canon in order to be a good and valid interpretation of Sonic. That’s it. Also, I’ll tell you how the core canon won’t improve: jumping down the throat of everyone who likes parts of the franchise that are different from it (while still enjoying the core canon too, mind you!) and dares to suggest they be allowed to consider them as Sonic and themselves as real Sonic fans, not “normies”.

More misrepresenting the argument to comical degrees. I never regarded the games as “secondary canon”. I literally called SatAM and the Archie comics “sub-canons”. These clowns think me talking shit about games mean I disregard the games as canon in favor of SatAM and the Archie comics, which ignores that I talk shit about SatAM and the Archie comics too. I’m a free-thinker, I’m not gonna blindly worship or blindly condemn anything.

1. I watched the cartoons, read the comics, AND played the games as a child. Many did.

2. Part of why I can’t take any of these guys’ arguments seriously is that they keep showing how ignorant they are about what they’re talking about. The Archie comics did NOT “continue SatAM’s storyline”. There are many crucial differences between the world and characters in the Archie comics and the world and characters in SatAM. They aren’t the same thing. Behaving as though the Archie comics ever picked up right where “The Doomsday Project” left off is the very definition of misinformed, because that’s not what fucking happened.

3. Bringing Doug Walker into this? Really?

Yes, and that mindset is stupid. Just like your mindset of expecting Sonic to always be exactly like the core canon. There should preferably be overlap, but differences should be allowed.

Have you ever met the Pokemon fandom? I think you’d be surprised.

Also - trying to ascertain one’s “faults as a human being” due to their behavior as a fan?

So yeah, it’s been fun, but also really sad. I’m a lover of Sonic as a whole franchise (games, shows, comics, movies, etc.) and I wanted to make the case “Hey, even if SatAM, an admittedly flawed show, isn’t your cup of tea, couldn’t you still acknowledge it as Sonic and its fans as Sonic fans whose views are just as valid as your own?” and the response I got is “WAAAAH, YOU’RE JUST A BLIND SATAM / ARCHIE FANBOY WORSHIPPER WHO HATES THE GAMES AND WANTS TO CONSIDER THEM NON-CANON! GTFO OF HERE, HERETIC! WHEN WILL YOU LEARN THAT YOUR ACTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES!?”

@ultraericthered​ was spot-on in his assessment, it seems.

[sege-h]

1, 10, 16 for Cyclone. 5, 13, 20 for Storm. 3, 14, 22 for Ry. 11, 23, 31 for Sharp. And 7+29 for all four.

tHESE ARE LONG SO

Cyclone

1. How does your character sleep? Peacefully, fitfully? What position do they sleep in? What is their typical bedding like?

Tbh I don’t know him well enough yet to know if he sleeps peacefully, or be a 100% certain on his position. But he strikes me as someone that sleeps either on his back, or on his side. Tho I do know for sure that his bed is a nice big one, and it’s a mess of pillows and blankets. Some of the covers are soft, akin to silk. It’s just him in his bed but that doesn’t stop him from surrounding himself with pillows, with at least 4 by his head.

 10. How is your oc about medical care? Do they avoid any form of healthcare that they can, do they seek it out over every little scrape? Do they treat their injuries/illness all by themselves?

He usually treats his injuries and illnesses by himself, unless it’s something pretty serious, then he seeks out a doctor.

 16. If your oc could only eat one thing for the rest of their life (while miraculously not suffering from malnutrition), what would it be? Does this match their favourite food?

Oof this is another one that Idk him well enough for. But I know he likes meat, so probably steak? Well seasoned, maybe with some sauce on it. I think he rarely eats things plain, like JUST a steak with nothing on it.

 7. How would you describe your oc’s voice? Do they have an accent? Do you have any voice claims for them?

He’s p new but also I suck at describing voices. I don’t THINK he has an accent? Definitely no voice claim. His voice is…idk. Gravely??? I feel like that’s not the right term. Like Idk gravely but more high pitched??? IDK

 29. If your oc was in a video game, what would their idle animation be? (When the player stays still for too long, the animation that plays.)

I feel like it’d be him tapping his foot and going from grinning to a lil frown.

 Storm:

5. Your oc has to make something for an art exhibition. What would they make? How terrible is it? Would they enjoy making it?

Tbh I feel like Storm’s the kind of person to just leave random garbage on the floor and watch people be like ‘hmm’ at it like it’s modern art. Or he’d put in a bit more effort and crush something metal or a soda can in some weird impossible-ish way and just leave it there.

 13. What is your oc’s immune system like? Are they invincible to illness, or are they compromised completely from the slightest of dirt?

He’s somewhere in the middle, honestly? He’s usually relatively okay, but is prone to falling ill when it’s cold/flu season around winter, though when he does get sick he rides it out pretty fast.

 20. Does your oc have any pleasure that embarrasses them so they keep it secret? Or are they open about all the things they enjoy?

He doesn’t have anything that embarrasses him as far as things he enjoys go. Though there are things that he’ll keep secret for the sake of the safety of his friends. He won’t reveal that he lives in a big mansion (the fact that it’s a mansion doesn’t matter to him, just that he has a roof over his head), or just how much he enjoys Zee’s company, unless he’s really close to someone.

 7. How would you describe your oc’s voice? Do they have an accent? Do you have any voice claims for them?

Storm’s actually one of my few OCs that has a voice claim! Kind of. The voice from Mugen from Samurai Champloo, but a tad more high pitched. He has a southern accent, though he fakes it. Whether it’s convincingly or not depends entirely on how funny it’d be for it to be obvious it’s fake in the moment HSGDHSGDSH

29. If your oc was in a video game, what would their idle animation be? (When the player stays still for too long, the animation that plays.)

He’d play around with his artificial arm by making crackles of electricity.

 Ry:

3. How easy to annoy is your oc? Do they have common pet-peeves or are they stoic in response to everything? What is their reaction if the source doesn’t stop?

I feel like it’s not easy to annoy him if you’re a stranger, at least as long as you’re trying to annoy him just by jabs at his own person. He’d get more annoyed if jabs aimed at his brother start happening. But otherwise he either brushes off annoyances, or fires back at the people trying to annoy him by trying to annoy them in turn.

 14. Does your oc do anything “just for the aesthetic”? Or are they completely practical in everything?

Tbh 90% of his look is ‘just for the aesthetic’. There are practical uses in the things he uses, such as things that conduct electricity and/or will amplify the power of his element based hits. But there’s also no practicality in the back of his shoes being able to draw from his power and light up and leave an electric trail behind him. It’s all just shiny zappy aesthetics SHDGSHGD

 22.How long can your oc stay focused on one task before they get bored? Do they constantly have to switch things up or do they hyperfocus? What sort of things is it the opposite for?

Unless he’s in some sort of danger where he definitely has to 100% focus on the task at hand and getting out of trouble, he can get pretty bored if what he’s doing isn’t interesting to him. Like he could mess around with the zircon for hours, trying to figure things out about it. But give him, idk, a rubiks cube, and he’ll mess around with it for like 5 minutes before going ‘uGH I cant do it this is boring’ and trying to find something else to do.

 7. How would you describe your oc’s voice? Do they have an accent? Do you have any voice claims for them?

Ngl I have 0 idea how to describe his voice and I definitely have no voice claims

29. If your oc was in a video game, what would their idle animation be? (When the player stays still for too long, the animation that plays.)

He’d pause and. Idk how to describe like. Take a stance with his arms on either side of him to make electricity surge over them a few times, kinda like mini lightning crackles.

 Sharp:

11. How competitive is your oc? Is every little task something that they can win, or are they just in competitions for the fun of it? Is there anyone they’re most competitive with?

GOD HE’S SO COMPETITIVE. If you give him ANYTHING and tell him it’s a competition, he HAS to come out on top. Doesn’t matter who he’s up against, especially if you introduce him to it like ‘this is a competition and this other person is SO good at this, I bet they’re better than you at it’ he’ll go fuckin. Feral. SHDGSHDG. He HAS to win and prove that he’s better or at the very least worthy

 23. What is the most annoying sound to your oc? What’s the most pleasant? Is there any reason?

Tones of voice that sound even the littlest bit condescending to him while someone is talking to him HSGDHS He hates being looked down upon, or made to feel like he hasn’t tried his best even though he knows he has. He really really hates the type of talk that makes him feel like the person talking is basically saying they know him better than he does himself.

He loves the sound of rain. He loves rain in general, and if it’s not an outright windy storm, he’ll go out in it. Being out in the rain is connected to him getting to relax and calm down at this point.

 31. What time of day is your oc most awake? What about most tired? Do they get up at the same time every morning without need of an alarm, or is their sleep schedule all over the place?

The morning is when he’s most tired, and the afternoon is when he’s most awake. His sleep schedule is all over the place when it comes to waking up. Sometimes he gets up in the morning without being prompted to, other times he sleeps in. Winter is when his schedule leans more towars “sleeps in” 90% of the time because he’d rather stay snuggled up in bed than get up.

 7. How would you describe your oc’s voice? Do they have an accent? Do you have any voice claims for them?

I ACTUALLY FIGURED THIS OUT RECENTLY AND I HATED HOW IT HAPPENED SHDGSHDGSH

Ok so I had like a clear type of voice for him in my head for months, but no examples of it or ways to describe it. And then a week or so ago there was a video on my dash. You know the purple scientist dude from OK KO? Well evidently he’s voiced by a VA that also voices a character in GTA.

So the video was voice clips from his character in GTA, synced to clips from the dude from OK KO. It had some types of profanities bc ofc it did its GTA, the types that’d normally cause me to stop a video and move along. But I didn’t because the goddamn voice was *perfect* for Sharp. ESPECIALLY how he sounds like when he yells. There’s this one bit where he yells “rrgghHHHH ASSHOLE!!!! EVERYBODY!!!! ASSHOLES!!!!” and it’s goddamn peak Sharp both in the line and in the voice and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. So I just sat there listening to this continuously like ‘wow! I hate when certain things are mentioned but this is Sharp’s voice!!’

 29. If your oc was in a video game, what would their idle animation be? (When the player stays still for too long, the animation that plays.)

God honestly this made me imagine like. You know how in Sonic CD if you leave it for too long, Sonic taps his foot a few times and then when too much time’s passed he just goes ‘I’m outta here!’ and jumps off the screen?

Something like that except instead of occasional foot tapping Sharp’s muttering things like ‘c’mon play the game’. And he progressively gets shoutier like ‘play the game…just…just. PicK UP. THE CONTROLLER!! AND PLAY THE GAME!!!! PLAY THE GAME ALREADY!!!!’ until he finally has enough and lunges at the screen like “juST FUCKIN GO ALREADY GIVE ME THAT CONTROLLER!!!!” shdgHSGDHSGDHS

[sharpdressedbman]

A Tribute to Chester: Life, Death, Rebirth, and How He Lives on in Memory

How do you properly memorialize one of your childhood idols? Are you supposed to scream, cry, and gnash your teeth? Or do you put on noise-canceling headphones and block out the ambient noise of the outside world for a while? All of these are difficult questions to answer. I guess that’s why they’re rhetorical. It’s hard to believe that it’s been almost two years since Chester Bennington passed. So in a way, this simple little essay is how I can honor him. It feels nice to write something that isn’t fiction or related to a blog for a change[1]. Let’s see how it goes.

Part Zero: Notes from the Underground

I must confess that I was never a member of the official fan club, the LP Underground. I suppose in retrospect that’s how I could have proven I was a legit fan despite never seeing them live in concert except via live stream. But even then, that was a rare occasion. I do remember a t-shirt I got from Hot Topic when I was 12 or so – it had the faces of all of the guys gathered around the classic script font of the band’s logo.

I don’t remember what happened to it. The last time I remember wearing it was in August 2014. I supposed by then I had outgrown it. But still, buying whatever merch I could and getting all of the CDs and eagerly anticipating the next music video all had to count for something.  I knew the names of all the guys, even Mark Wakefield, who was never an official member, and Phoenix Orion (Dave Farrell?), who left before Hybrid Theory but was back in time for Reanimation – more on that later.  

But I digress. Let’s get on with the real meat of why we’re here. In terms of structure, I thought it would make the most sense to go album by album, discuss some memories I have associated with each, and attempt to unpack why they remain so important to me even as time has marched on since then. Growing up with the band, as I’m sure many of you did, you might feel a similar connection that you never fully grasped until the night of the tribute show in December 2017.

Part One: Hybrid Theory

#Forfeit the game/Before somebody else/takes you out of the frame and puts your name to shame/Cover up your face, you can’t run the race/the pace is too fast, you just won’t last. [HT Track 4: “Points of Authority”]

Although Hybrid Theory came out in October 2000, I think the first time I heard it was for another month or two after it came out. It’s still one of the most vivid memories I can still recall, the first time “Papercut” blared out of a cd player. I was sitting in the basement at my buddy Andre’s house and we were playing Perfect Dark with our mutual friend Alberto. It was honestly the perfect soundtrack for the game. Here’s what I said back then: “Dude, who is this? This is awesome!”

               “It’s Linkin Park.”

Even then I thought the name was cool, the way that they intentional misspelled Lincoln – the rule of cool and all that. Elementary school hadn’t even ended yet, but it was still part of my formative years, musically speaking. Before then, I had never discovered any music on my own – my friends had always shown me. My parents didn’t raise me to enjoy music – I hated classical and most of the “standards” went over my head. My parents were still throwing karaoke parties. My old neighbor John showed me James Brown. That’s how I latched onto my first favorite song of all time “I Feel Good”. Then came Third Eye Blind, another early love of mine. But that’s a story for another time, as is my recollections of Limp Bizkit. This tale is about LP.

I wouldn’t realize it at the time, but Hybrid Theory would continue to be one of the most important albums to be me as I left elementary school and hit middle school. The days of Perfect Dark and WCW/nWo Revenge began to fade[2] as Diablo II and Starcraft emerged. The sound of Chester’s howls and Mike’s swagger along with the rest of the bands driving instrumentals provided a backdrop like you wouldn’t believe.  “In the End” stood out in particular, although as middle school came to an end, it became clear that those reasons weren’t ones I wish to discuss here, now. Ask me again another time. It was at the end of middle school (hell, even before) that I confronted the notion of how deeply uncool I was, and probably tangled with imposter syndrome, anxiety, and depression long before I knew what any of those terms meant.

I already knew I was an introvert who was much more inclined to stay inside playing video games, reading, or writing instead of going outside to play street hockey or anything like that. That shouldn’t have meant that I was an easy target for bullying, but hey, it was the 90s and then the early 2000s, so what could you do? LP helped me cope, even if I couldn’t always express my anger in responsible ways.

I think here is a good place to stop and point something out: mental illness has been something that has been immensely important to me – it affects me and I know it damn sure affects my wife and mother in law. I went through a very dark time in my life roughly five years ago that LP also helped me pull out of – but I’ll get to explaining that more in-depth later on. Right now we’re still in the HT era; I just wanted to talk a little bit more about my motivations for writing this piece.[3]

Part Two: Reanimation

#Keep that in mind/ I designed this rhyme/ when I was obsessed with time. [RA Track 3: “Enth E Nd]

Full disclosure: when I first heard Reanimation, I thought it had its moments. But it wasn’t something I could listen to end-to-end and love every single song. Heck, even HT wasn’t like that, since some of the songs had to grow on me. The video with the robots and aliens having a war while the disembodied robot heads of the band sing the remixed version of “Points of Authority” by Jay Gordon of Orgy was definitely awesome, but I don’t know, I had mixed feelings about the album that took years for it to resolve into me think of it as one of the LP’s early era classics that would culminate with Meteora and Live in Texas.

I have a very distinct memory of popping this cd into the car’s stereo while we were out in…Houston? Taiwan? The details are blurry now because it’s been too long. Seventeen years was a long time ago, and 2002 me was simpler, less refined, and yes, much dumber and naïve. On an emotional level, “p5hng me Aw*y” stood out, and even though it wasn’t actually a true Linkin Park song, “It’s Goin’ Down” stood out from this time period too.

Part Three: Meteora

#I’ll never fight again, and this is how it ends…I don’t know what’s worth fighting, or why I have to scream, but now I have some clarity to show you what I mean… [MA Track 9: “Breaking the Habit”]

Meteora is one of those albums I more clearly associate with Diablo II and Starcraft more than any other games. Just something about the overall darkness and broodiness of the album really fit both of those games. Also, this essay project is making me want to go back in time. Not really from a nostalgia standpoint – okay yeah I guess from a nostalgia standpoint. But it was during this era that I really started to enjoy their music videos. Believe it or not, for the longest time, not all of the songs on the album were rated five stars. I used to be stingier with that rating that I am now. It took a while for some of the songs to grow on me, but “Somewhere I Belong”, “Faint”, “Easier to Run”, “Breaking the Habit”. “Nobody’s Listening”, and “Numb” were instant standouts. I’m still not sure what happened to my original copy of this album. The last I checked, I had a burned copy, but not the real deal.

Part Four: Live in Texas

#When I look into your eyes there’s nothing there to see/nothing but my own mistakes staring back at me# [LIT Track 8: P5hng Me A*wy – Live]

Man, I remember this too. It must have come out six months or so after Meteora did, and grabbing it from Kmart was one of my best days. I think it was also the first LP album to have the dreaded Parental Advisory sticker on it, and this is probably the album I blame most for me disliking the edited versions of songs. Sometimes edits can be clever, but when they’re just bleeps or certain naughty words are blanked out, then it gets annoying. Then again, I probably wasn’t a stranger to this concept thanks to early exposure to Third Eye Blind and Limp Bizkit, as I mentioned before. Was this the first time I heard “live” performances of LP? I think it was, and it probably stoked my eagerness to see them live in concert. Alas, it was never to be.

Part Five: Collision Course

#Yeah/Thank you, thank you, thank you, you’re far too kind#  [CC Track 4: “Numb / Encore”]

It’s fitting that as I pick this up on (7/21/19) it’s the day after the 2 year anniversary. I meant to have this finished by the 20th, but it just didn’t happen. Plus “Numb/Encore” was one of the first songs that started up on this go-through of the playlist. If you’re interested in listening to it, I can direct you to my Spotify profile! Numb is one of those songs that have taken on new meaning since his death, but out of all the collaborations on this mashup album, I think it’s the one that works the best sonically and thematically, especially with the juxtaposition between angst and bravado[4].

Part Six: Fort Minor & The Rising Tied

#So sick, if he’s gonna think/That the good lord would come take him/I’m shaking him, “Wake up, you son of a bitch!”#  [TRT Track 14: “Red to Black”]

It was four years between the era of Meteora and Minutes to Midnight. In between that time, there was a sea change. First there was the mashup with Jay-Z, and then this came along in November 2005. I remember being more stoked for it than probably any other music that I discovered that year – and this was when Fall Out Boy, 50 Cent, and Coheed and Cambria dawned on me, among others. For those who don’t know, Fort Minor is/was Mike’s side project. He’s since done other solo stuff under his own name but between then and now he would bust out verses from The Rising Tied and incorporate them into existing songs. I always thought that Red to Black was the most LP-sounding song on the entire album and that for the longest time I thought Chester used Jonah Matranga as an alias and it wasn’t a separate person.  

Part Seven: Minutes to Midnight

#In this farewell/There’s no blood, there’s no alibi/Cause I’ve drawn regret/From the truth of a thousand lies/So let mercy come and wash away# [M2M Track 6: “What I’ve Done”]

In the interest of time, these entries are probably going to get shorter and shorter. At this point, I just want to get the damn thing over with. “What I’ve Done”, the lead single was the one that struck me the most at first; I remember LP making a big deal about how they wanted to start a new sound after leaving their classic era behind. The music video was awesome, and I think LP was one of the best choices for the Transformers movies. I always thought that “What I’ve Done” would make a great wrestling song. Not necessarily as an entrance theme, but as a hype video for a PPV or a feud or something like that. EWR back in the day helped reinforce that belief though I can’t exactly remember what I associated it with – anyway, that’s neither here nor there. The day that I got this album was the same day the shooting at Virginia Tech happened. Finding out that the shooter was a mentally ill Asian dude spooked me. In today’s parlance, I was shook.[5] That’s something that has always stuck out even though it’s something I’ve not been fond of discussing, for obvious reasons. Still, for our purposes here, it is for once, actually relevant.

Part Eight: Dead by Sunrise and Out of Ashes

#Don’t want to lose my innocence/Don’t want the world second-guessing my heart/Won’t let your lies take a piece of my soul/Don’t want to take your medicine# [OOA Track 2: “Crawl Back In”]

The melodies that emerged on Minutes to Midnight, especially when it was Chester’s turn to take the mic, evolved. They turned into another platform for his music: the side-project Dead by Sunrise and their only album, so far as I know: Out of Ashes. I lump this album in with Welcome to the Masquerade by Thousand Foot Krutch and Dear Agony by Breaking Benjamin. All three emerged during my sophomore year of college[6], which was another difficult year for me. I think that is when I had the most trouble sleeping, either by choice or for other reasons.  Out of everything LP-related, I think I have given this the least amount of attention. It’s probably time for that to change, ten years later.

Part Nine: A Thousand Suns

#Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds/I suppose we all thought that, one another# [ATA Track 2: “The Radiance”]

If Minutes to Midnight was an attempt to step out of the shadow of Hybrid Theory, then A Thousand Suns represented an aural breakaway. It was vastly different, integrating more spoken word and turning up their signature sound to 12. I can’t remember exactly if it was in 2009 or 2010 that I was meant to go see LP as they rolled into DC. Ultimately, I couldn’t go because of a lack of transport. It all ended up moot anyway because that was the show that got canceled because of Chester being sick. Trying to dig up that post on Facebook is probably beyond me now because it’s a day late. Maybe someday I’ll be able to find it again because those days were golden (at least my pathetic little eulogy for him that I wrote two years ago.)

Part Ten: Living Things

#Fly me up on a silver wing/Past the black where the sirens sing/Warm me up in a nova’s glow/And drop me down to the dream below#  [LT Track 6: “Castle of Glass”]

So if LP had been striving to break away from the sound that made them famous, it was at this point where they were “Nah bro” and went full bore back around into an ouroboros[7] of awesome. While the vast majority of A Thousand Suns[8] had to grow on me over the intervening years, Living Things grabbed me by the throat and never let go. It followed the Hybrid Theory blueprint to a T. After all this time, “Castle of Glass” still stands out as my favorite from the album, but as is often the case, it’s hard to pick favorites.

Part Eleven: Recharged

#When I was young, they told me, they said/Make your bed, you lie in that bed/A king can only reign ‘til instead/There comes that day it’s off with his head# [RC Track 1: “A Light That Never Comes”]

The less said about this, the better. It had its moments, especially “A Light That Never Comes” which showed me the potential of Steve Aoki. But the memory that stands out most clearly about the day I got this album was getting a case of Hell or High Watermelon beer. I think since I got it from Record and Tape Traders, it was the day I found the TARDIS socks for Ally and sent them to her later that week. As you probably gathered from the cluster of footnotes, this was deemed my least favorite “official” LP album, and that ranking has held up in the last six years. It does to Living Things what Reanimation did to Hybrid Theory, but for whatever reason, I can’t bring myself to enjoy it more.  

Part Twelve: The Hunting Party

#Cause you don’t know what you’ve got/it’s your battle to be fought/until it’s gone# [THP Track 7: “Until It’s Gone]

Ah, here we go. LP seems to follow patterns in the creation of their albums. Cause roughly a year after Recharged, there came The Hunting Party. After A Thousand Suns came and went, it seemed like LP was on a creative lull. But then we got LT, Recharged, and THP in three straight years. This came out in 2014, and it’s hard to believe that five years have passed already. To this day, I still think that my favorite part was all of the guest appearances on their album, especially from collaborators they hadn’t featured before then, like Daron Malakian and Tom Morello.

Part Thirteen: Welcome

#First time I did it, yeah I’ll admit it/I kinda hit it and quit it and left y’all hanging# [“Welcome”]

In all honesty, this should be a footnote for The Rising Tied. It came out 10 years later, as a way for Mike to tip a wink and a nod at all his fans that were still waiting for a full-fledged sequel. Fate had other plans, though. I can still remember helping to clean Tidewater while this song blared through my headphones.  This probably became one of my most played songs of 2015.

Part Fourteen:  One More Light

#Who cares if one more light goes out? Well I do# [OML Track 9: “One More Light”]

We’re almost to the finish line. I was super excited for One More Light because it broke a drought of no new music until 2017[9]. The song One More Light became more poignant after his passing. I hope it still makes him proud.

Part Fifteen: Afterword

So where do we go from here?  Honestly, not even the remaining members of the band know. They’re not actively looking to replace Chester, and as a group, they’re still officially on hiatus. I didn’t even touch on any of the DVD or special edition releases that I’ve barely heard. I guess in a sense they’re honorable mentions, but without having listened to them, I can’t form any honest opinions or associations for them.[10]

[/mrhahn]

     [1] It seems fitting that I mention that shirt I got as a twelve-year-old because that’s when I started picking up on writing as a hobby. It was a way to release my imagination and translate what I had in mind into a story, even if those early stories were embarrassingly bad. These footnotes will serve to flesh out those asides since they’ll more than likely distract from the main narrative I’m trying to spin here.

         [2] Although Revenge remains iconic! Even to this day, I still long for an N64 and another copy.

[3] Chester struggled with MI too, even though hardly anyone knew it. It’s what ultimately got the best of him.

[4] My fascination with Genius Lyrics is really helping me to analyze and better understand the meanings of the words.

[5] It didn’t help that he bore an uncanny resemblance to me…

[6] 2009, how time flies!

[7] Not sure how to spell this dang word.

[8] I regarded it as my least favorite LP album until Recharged came out. More on that later.

[9] It wasn’t until that I built the playlist that inspired this essay that I learned that there were some other singles issued between The Hunting Party and One More Light. These tracks include “We Made It” with Busta Rhymes, which actually fell between Meteora and Minutes to Midnight; “Not Alone”, which was between A Thousand Suns and Living Things; and “Darker Than Blood” with Steve Aoki that was between The Hunting Party and One More Light.  

[10] One was called “Frat Party at the Pankake Festival” and the other one was “Road to Revolution”, I think?

[jefferyryanlong]

Fresh Listen - John Trudell, AKA Grafitti Man (Rykodisc, 1992)

(Some pieces of recorded music operate more like organisms than records. They live, they breathe, they reproduce. Fresh Listen is a periodic review of recently and not so recently released albums that crawl among us like radioactive spiders, gifting us with superpowers from their stingers.)

I approached John Trudellʻs 1986 cassette tape (re-released as a CD in 1992) AKA Grafitti Man with two significant biases. First, I have a strong distaste for the music recording technology of the period. Sonic engineers, with their updated machines, had the newfound ability to scrape the rust away from their records, smoothing and glossing the edges and sucking the space from an aural document so effectively that it came across as compressed and sterile as a snow globe. You listen to these mid/late-Eighties mainstream records and they extend through time and the imagination like brittle branches of plastic, all the living energy–the breath, the ring, the rattle, the bleeding, the overload–constricted out of the husk of a clearly articulated but dead idea. 

Second, aside from just a few exceptions, Iʻm skeptical of spoken word performances awkwardly conjoined with a musical context. Iʻve been disappointed too many times. Though a poetʻs words might resonate on a page, or upon the naked template of air, the same words sometimes fall dead against a drum or a guitar. Conversely, Bob Dylanʻs words may seem leaden and overblown in a book, but as a performer, he has the ability to empower the nasal delivery of his thought-dreams with a rhythmic electricity. Many people might tell you different, but songwriting  and poetry are not always complementary disciplines, and evoke different reactions within the gut and the soul. Experiments in marrying the two are sometimes excruciating as an experience.

On AKA Grafitti Man, John Trudell seems to have discovered a working formula for combining his poems with pop music. He builds his pieces around ear-clinging choruses, hooks that echo in the mind long after the more complicated parts are forgotten. Though less direct than what listeners are used to hearing on their pop music records, these are real songs, grown-up songs. Songs of regret and resentment, of protest and celebration. Trudell honors the traditions of rock, blues, country, and old-timey ballads and contours his poems around those forms, instead of the other way around. 

(If youʻve read this far and are wondering who the hell John Trudell is, I encourage to look him up on whatever media you have at hand. His personal story is more compelling, and important, than AKA Grafitti Man, though the record itself is a refraction of Trudellʻs past as a veteran in the US Armed Forces, Native American activist and spokesperson, and rogue DJ who, with a group of like-minded free radicals, snuck into Alcatraz and set up a radio station. A big thanks to Rodney Morales for turning me on to Trudellʻs music.)

Fortunately for the listener, Trudell has kindred-spirit helpmates to assist him in crystallizing his vision on the album. Jackson Browne served as Executive Producer–I thought I could hear his vocals on one or two of the choruses. I noted the lead guitar early on, a wonderfully peculiar tone, whether played as slide, blues, or straight-up rock, a tone that consciously avoids cliche blues regurgitations. Turns out the axman is Jesse Ed Davis. When you hear AKA Grafitti Man, youʻre not only getting a great John Trudell record, youʻre also getting a pretty damn good Jesse Ed Davis record. 

AKA Grafitti Man begins, as several of the songs do, with a Native American vocal, this first appearance against silence; a brief, vaguely familiar string of notes abruptly overtaken by a drum fill and a mid tempo rock groove. Trudell, claiming the expression of his people, infuses this expression with his own aesthetics, heavily influenced by Elvis, Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry, all the while calling back to Native American music. “Rocking the Res” contrasts indigenous ways of relating to natural phenomena and natural people with false commitments perpetuated by a decadent, commercialized reality in which war and consumerism are enmeshed, each dependent on the other. “A weird kind of living,” Trudell calls it, finding comfort in the soft-spoken resistance with which his people have denied the dominant American consumer/political message.

The characterization of the shaman has long been over-generalized and dissipated by American popular culture. In AKA Grafitti Manʻs title track, Trudell repurposes the essential function of the shaman–to tell a truth that no one of the tribe has the courage or foresight to tell–and applies it to a street artist, who uses their medium to illuminate the order of the world to a benighted populace. The Grafitti Man of the song is not of the upper class but of the people, is not cut off from the viscous mess and fecundity of life by fancy clothes and money. The Grafitti Man is able to accurately portray the reality of class in the United States because they are most acutely a victim of it. “Down with bosses,” the Grafitti Man writes, identifying authority as a meaningless layer that separates us from the rough texture of real life.

In “Restless Situations,” Trudell moves into RʻnʻB territory (neatly offset by Native America percussion between the soul groove), female backup singers doing the emotional work of communicating Trudellʻs empathetic portrayal of a woman swimming against confusion and insecurity.  In “Wildfires,” the poetʻs normally cool delivery builds toward impassioned (though still controlled) intensity, his words landing like notes against Davisʻs steady guitar and the organ of some unidentified hero. Here, Trudell is less a poet with a backing band and more a part of the band itself. The technique with which he carefully drops each phrase just behind the beat displays the skill of a true musician. “The nature of fire is to burn, every spark gets its turn,” the vocalist (not Trudell) melodically yells between the verses, commenting on the whims and notions that make up an identity. Some of these sparks lead to conflagrations inside and out, while some fizzle and die, and all we have is this residual smoke that ambiguously defines ourselves and our actions. Trudellʻs “wildfire” is interior–the wildfire is whatʻs released upon our loved ones and our hated ones, that makes us who we are. 

Itʻs the keyboardist who elevates “Baby Boom Che” to something near a masterpiece, folding in tuneful references to Elvis hits (especially “Love Me Tender”) in between the turnarounds. For Trudell, Elvis Presley, whom Trudell claims not only for Native Americans, or White Americans, but for all Americans, was a liberating spirit that exploded the haunted, post-war piety of Fifties USA with sex and dancing a a new consciousness in which the drab alternatives proffered by mainstream USA were no longer sufficient. “I mean, you take ʻDonʻt Be Cruel,ʻ ʻI Want You, I Need You, I Love You,ʻ and ʻJailhouse Rockʻ or you take Pat (Boone) in his white bucks, singing ʻLove Letters in the Sand,ʻ I mean hell man, what’s real here?” Elvis is not simply an entertainer–he is a revolutionary in the most political sense (whether he had any awareness of this aspect of his popularity), laying the groundwork for a new way to understand bodies and minds that had been dulled for so long by the psychopathic pall laid upon young America by two world wars.

I should note here that Trudellʻs words, and the ideas he conveys through those words, are far more complex and concern so many more areas of thought than can be described here. A full examination of “Baby Boom Che” would require more than a blog post. It would require a thesis, if not a full dissertation. 

The two most musically ambitious songs on Trudellʻs album are the similarly themed “Bombs Over Baghdad,” a prescient outspeak of inevitable events that were to unfurl several years after this album was recorded,  and “Rich Manʻs War,” which condemns the tendency of nation-states to callously sacrifice human potential for material and commercial resources. Where “Bombs Over Baghdad” rocks with a chunky electric guitar and furious leads alongside a mournful war cry, “Rich Manʻs War” is a swampy, synth-driven groove imbued with a heartbeat by Native percussion and intermittent chanting.

“Never Never Blues,” bookended by outlaw country songs “Somebodyʻs Kid” and “What Heʻd Done,” is a straightforward throwaway intensified by a group of female singers, another lament on the failures in relations between man and woman. It sounds like Kris Kristofferson helping sing the chorus of “Somebodyʻs Kid” (a credit sheet for AKA Grafitti Man has been difficult tracking down over the Internet), and Iʻd say it could very well be Mavis Staples showing up for some emotive lines in “What Heʻd Done.”

Jesse Ed Davisʻs soulful slide guitar and a heartbreaking chant provide visceral support to“Beauty in a Fade,” where, in his deadpan rendering, Trudell deconstructs the temporal nature of romantic relationships, sifting through the sweet pain of love, which can only reveal meaning after love is gone or as its going away.

Itʻs fitting that AKA Grafitti Man was celebrated by a songwriter like Bob Dylan upon its release. Both artists skillfully (and crankily) impart their hard-won wisdom through weathered sensibilities, persons who have sorted through he fragments of their memories to create a narrative of growth through loss. AKA Grafitti Man accomplishes its truth-telling by providing an alternative to pop music tropes, while still doing justice to popular musicʻs road-tested forms.

[fearlesslyenchantedinwonderland]

Taylor Swift - Fearless Album Song Ranking

For this album ranking, I decided to split the album up into tiers based on which songs I would put near one another to help decide where they line up. I wrote about the songs in reverse order (from what you will read it) and I help explain why I rank each song the way I do. (I don’t make as much sense on the higher ranked songs)

Tier 1: 

I hate when people have singles as their fav song, and it hasn’t always been this way, but these songs have tested time, I love when she performs them, the music videos bring back so many memories, and even just my own discovery of the song they are amazing.

Love Story

Ok, maybe I'm biased atm bc I haven’t stopped listening to Love Story recently because of the video of Shawn at her show. But… it’s so good. The more I like a song the more difficult it becomes to explain why. I’ve always loved the story of Romeo and Juliet. The instrumentation is beautiful. The music video. Ugh I can’t, everything about this song is great. Never stop believing in love, it might not be like the storybooks but that doesn’t mean portions can’t be, or maybe, maybe, it can be even better than you imagined?

Fearless

Ugh. This song is everything. This song is what I want in a first love, there are so many small things that I love about this song, the rain on the pavement, have I ever mentioned how much I LOVE petrichor? This song makes me think of a running on a spiral staircase in a long dress. Capture it. Remember it. Fearless.  Fearless and Speak Now were really important albums to me, in part because they motivated me to live that way.

You Belong With Me

The thing that’s funny about this album is I think it has some of the most memorable music videos, and yet at the same time, I am able to remember my own visuals (or at least some) of the album before the video came out. That’s the one downside of music videos is sometimes I think our minds can be flooded by an artists visuals and forget our own. This is such a fun song, the music video is amazing. Now I’m thinking of Taylor walking back to the stage from the B-stage during Speak Now Tour.

White Horse

I received this album as a Christmas present, per typical, after everyone opened their presents my family goes its separate ways and mulls over their gifts. I put this album and listened to this song on the stereo. I remember acting out each of these songs, but I can vividly remember portions of this song, being on the stairs (I still sort of do this when I’m listening to music - like I’ll make up a music video in my mind, or a dance routine, pretend I’m on stage)

Tier 2:

Breathe

This song is difficult to listen to, at one point I made the connection to the lyrics it feels like I just lost a friend, and I’ve never been the same. I’ve been through many ups and downs with these friends, these friends I also went through loving Taylor together, that slowly faded and I guess so did our friendship. Sometimes it feels like it's in flames even though one of them I haven’t talked to in a year. The tricky thing is that we're still family friends so it’s likely I’ll see them again and that’s rough. (I can’t continue, but I have come to the realization that it wasn’t just their fault, and I probably hurt them along the way, and I think that was important).(ugh now I’m finishing the song because sometimes I just wish there were answers, but like the song says wishing there was a clean break)

You’re Not Sorry

This song is a song to have a break down to. I know I have before. wow. Lol lyrically I didn’t think tier two had any similarities but wow they do and I don’t want to go any more in depth than I did in my description for breathe.

Tier 3:

Fifteen

Ahhh fifteen. I love the storytelling in this song. This song has been through a lot. This song was one of the first songs I heard before it was on the internet, oh the days when she had unreleased songs that she would play. This song came out at a time where I got to live listening to this on my first day of high school, the day I turned fifteen, and to hear it in concert when I was fifteen. "Dancing around the room when the night ends” what a beautiful lyric. lol still waiting for that first kiss tho 7 years later.

Change

At one point I this was my favorite song off of the album. Oh, and did I love singing the hallelujahs at the end. I was so proud of Taylor for this being an Olympic song.

Forever & Always

I mean… if you aren’t thinking of Joe when you are listening to this song you are doing it wrong. It was iconic, at the same time I wonder if she regrets outing him. But I’m glad that out of all her exes it was him, he took it like a sport, I mean yes he has a song too, but I think they would both be over that at this point. Also, this song was clearly written out of rage and in her later albums we see how much she cared about him. I never thought about this before but I wonder if Joe was her first love, I know she was with people in high school, but (Lol when you contradict this with her feeling invisible in her first album I always find it funny, because in my last review I mentioned that I never really felt alone or like an outsider but I’ve never even been asked out). I love the visuals that come to mind when I think of this song. Additionally, I think of the red chairs and better than revenge.

Hey Stephen

Hey Stephen used to be one of my top songs off of this album. It makes me think of her jumping on the bed like in the booklet… It’s a really sweet song. But sonically, it doesn’t stand out like it use to. If I had a crush I would probably be eating up this song.

Tier 4:

 I feel like with every album there are similar sounding songs found in the meat of the album that tends to get forgotten over time…for fearless it’s these next two songs. I like both of these songs but sometimes I forget about them. One thing that I love about these songs is they are the ones that you could scream, yell and cry to. It brings an additional dimension besides a fairytale that may or may not come true and the ramifications of that.

The Way I Loved You

This song is ranked higher because socially it gives more of a punch. I like the dimension of who he appears to be versus what is actually happening behind the scenes when it’s just the two of them. But also her liking the turbulence of the relationship because there was intensity maybe there was fighting but there was also a passion. Now it clean cut and they’re going through the ropes but it’s not what she loves about him.

Tell Me Why

I received Fearless as a Christmas gift the year it came out and I always remember having this song stuck in my head during the car ride home from my grandmas, but because it was a cd (and if I had an iPod at that time I probs couldn’t transfer the songs till I got home) I couldn’t listen to it. I was stating some of the lyrics to my mom and I remember her being surprised by the intensity of the song. I also really like the visuals in the album booklet for this song. That was one thing I always loved about her albums.

The Best Day

This has always been my least favorite song on the album, you’ll find a theme of my lower ranked songs because I feel like they have this same style to them. This song is important though, it is very sweet, very personal. It gives us as fans an insight into Taylor’s life, but more importantly, it’s Taylor giving her heart and her thanks to her Mom.

————

I didn't include deluxe songs in this ranking because they came out months later and I view them as a separate entity. I don’t listen to them as often since they’re not connected with my original album but I think all of the songs would rank in the second tier.

Ranking 

1. Love Story

2. Fearless

3. You Belong With Me

4. White Horse

5. Breathe

6. You’re Not Sorry

7. Fifteen 

8. Change

9. Forever and Always

10. Hey Stephen

11.The Way I Loved You

12. Tell Me Why

13. The Best Day

Album Ranking Masterlist 

[gushingaboutgames]

Sega Dreamcast

I hated middle school. There’s a whole swath of memories I’d rather do without as far as the years 1999 through 2002 are concerned. There is, however, one memory I hold near and dear to my heart during this time frame. After reading about it in magazines and being really excited for it, my mother took me to Toys’R’Us one evening to get me a Sega Dreamcast. We brought that puppy home with a copy of Sonic Adventure, hooked it up, fired it up, and took it all in. As the opening cinematic played on my TV, Mum said “It’s like playing a movie!”

Boy, if we only knew what games would go on to look like now.

The Dreamcast was, and to this day remains, my all time favorite console. It’s the swan song of a company that was perhaps a bit too ambitious for its own good, a marvel of gaming technology many years ahead of its time, and home to some of the best and most unique games to ever come out.

At the time of its release, the Dreamcast was the most graphically powerful console on the market. Sony’s Playstation boasted 32-bit graphics, and the Nintendo 64 had double that, at -wait for it- 64 bits. Dreamcast had double of that: 128 bits of beautiful graphics, thanks to the GD-ROM, a proprietary disc format born from squeezing every bit of memory out of a regular old CD as was physically possible, before DVDs and Blu-Ray became as ubiquitous as they are today.

Even the method of memory storage was unlike its competitors; the standard memory card for the Dreamcast was the Visual Memory Unit (VMU), a cross between a memory card and a Gameboy that let you manage data and download minigames to extend the functionality of many games. The only other thing like it that I can think of being made is Sony’s Pocketstation, and that never saw the light of day outside of Japan. You would not believe the number of button-cell batteries I burned through caring for Chao on the go.

Of course, all of the fancy tech and cool gadgets wouldn’t amount to much if the games on offer weren’t fun at all. Tiger’s Game.Com bragged of being a versatily console and handheld device, but the games for it all stank like a fragrant dog poop laying on the sidewalk on a hot Floridian summer day. Thankfully, fun games were something the Dreamcast had no shortage of, even in the brief few years that it was on the market, a slew of which I’d like to bring attention to.

Sonic Adventure 1 & 2

Maybe they haven’t aged as well as I’d like to think, but DAYUM if these weren’t some fun games back in the day. Sonic has always struggled with 3D, but the first attempts at true 3D Sonic games remain quite novel. The first Sonic Adventure had different play styles for each character, some of which were great (Sonic and Gamma, for me at least), others...not so much (the less said about Big, the better), in addition to, for its time, an intricate plot with each character’s story intertwining and playing out differently depending on which character you’re playing as.

Sonic Adventure 2, meanwhile, streamlined the gameplay and improved upon some of the first game’s flaws, cutting out the non-platforming related stages (aside from the treasure hunting stages, which are a touch better than in the first game). It’s story was also very compelling, being one of the darkest storylines in the entire series; government conspiracies, weapons of mass destruction, fucking murder! Maybe that’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but I think we can all agree that SA2 handled “dark and gritty” a lot better than Shadow the Hedgehog’s stand-alone game.

Both games also featured a mini-game that could prove to be just as addicting, if not more so, than the games proper: Chao Gardens. Chao were little, adorable water monsters that players could raise like virtual pets, their popularity likely owed in part to the ubiquity of other virtual pets like Tamagotchi near the end of the millennium, as well as how easy-going and casual raising a Chao was compared to a Digi-Pet that would not wait for you to clean its shit up: you can enter and leave Chao Gardens freely, and you wouldn’t have to worry of your Chao dying of neglect in your absence. There’s also very deep mechanics at work for raising Chao, with their growth and evolution depending heavily on how well you raise them, what animals you give them, and what fruits you feed them, all so you can have them participate in races. The aforementioned VMU also expanded Chao functionality considerably, letting you raise them anywhere you wanted.

Shenmue

My relationship with Shenmue, these days, is very much that of a love-hate relationship. On the one hand, Shenmue popularized two aspects of gaming today that I loathe; Quick-Time Events, and over-blown game budgets (this game would’ve had to be bought by every DC owner TWICE before it could break even). On the other hand, there’s no denying that this game was a labor of love by Yu Suzuki. The attention to detail in Ryo Hazuki’s hometown of Yokosuka is staggering. Everything you can imagine can be interacted with, down to the last dresser drawer in Ryo’s house. Every resident of Yokosuka was unique from the others and had their own behaviors that they would go through, unlike every other NPC in the town, or other games for that matter. The story may be a tad formulaic, and most of the voice work left something to be desired, but the world of Shenmue was one that was very fun to explore.

Plus, this game introduced me to Space Harrier. If that’s not a good thing, you tell me what is.

Jet Set Radio

I had to convince my mother this game wouldn’t turn me into a graffiti-painting delinquent. It was a hard sell, but it paid off, and boy am I glad it did.

Jet Set Radio is very much unlike other games, then and today even. This was the game that helped to popularize cel-shaded graphics; the thick black outlines around the character models made this game look like an anime come to life, and eventually paved the way for the wicked-awesome graphics we see today from Arc System Works with Guilty Gear XRD and Dragonball FighterZ. The idea of playing a roller-blading hooligan throwing tags around the city and evading the police was also unique, and kept players on their toes as techno music accompanies their shenanigans. The game was a bit on the short side, but was challenging and fun enough that multiple playthroughs were warranted.

Making my own graffiti tags was also quite the timesink.

Phantasy Star Online

I may be a late bloomer to the Phantasy Star series, but it has become one very dear to me for helping me meet some of my closest friends (Hi, Tara!).

Phantasy Star was a series of JRPGs by Sega meant to compete with other big franchises like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. The original PSO, on the other hand, is an online multiplayer dungeon crawler that would change the course of the series from that point forward. As interstellar colonists investigating mysterious phenomena on an alien planet, players would delve into unique locals with characters they would create themselves to slay monsters, collect valuable items, and unravel the mysteries of the planet Ragol.

The original PSO is also very notable for its attempt to break the language barrier with a unique conversation system. While good ol’ fashioned keyboards remained in vogue, players also had the option of constructing sentences to transmit to other players in the area or party in those players’ native languages. Using this system, you could send a message saying “Help! This dragon is too powerful!”, and your friend in Japan would read it as “助けて！この龍は強すぎる！” It may not have seen much use, since players are more likely to congregate and play with those that can speak a common language fluently, but it was very kind of Sega to provide the option.

One thing that gets me straight in the feels is something from the original beta trailer for this game: “The world of Phantasy Star Online lasts for an eternity!” It is not uncommon for trailers and developers to hype games up with hyperbole (just ask Peter Molyneaux), but this is a statement that has held true for PSO! Even after the last official server for the last iteration of PSO shut down in 2008, private servers continue to run the game to this day, ensuring that the world of PSO truly remains eternal. Even with a proper sequel Phantasy Star Online 2 proving to be a pop culture staple in Japan, the original PSO remains one of the most beloved and enduring MMOs in history.

Skies of Arcadia

I’ve got friends who would skin my hide and leave me to hang like the Predator if I didn’t mention this.

Just about every console since the NES has a JRPG, and the Dreamcast is no exception. While Phantasy Star shifted towards MMO territory, those hoping for a sweeping single-player adventure still had Skies of Arcadia. As the daring sky pirate Vyse and his motley crew of adventurers, players fought to stop an evil empire from awakening an ancient evil while flying across a world of floating continents in a kickass airship. This game is among the most challenging JRPGs in the genre; a clever mind and strategic acumen are needed to survive battles with other pirates, monsters, and rival airships. The world of the game is also incredibly beautiful; I personally think it has much in common with Castle in the Sky, my favorite Hayao Miyazaki film. The soundtrack compliments the game incredibly, and is a joy to listen to by itself.

---

There are plenty of other games that made the Dreamcast incredible, but this article is long enough as it is, so I’ll have to give those games their proper due later. Suffice to say, though, the Dreamcast is a historical console that remains one of the most beloved in the history of the medium, not only by myself, but by hundreds of thousands of gamers the world over. It may have only been on the market for a few years, but it is said that the brightest stars are the ones that burn out the quickest.

And make no mistake, the Dreamcast is one of the brightest stars there ever was.

[vroenis]

Notes On A Conditional Form

I need a break from games writing, and I guess playing video games I’m not entirely enjoying. To be fair to the Uncharted series, I was also briefly dipping in and out of Battlefield V and that’s just not been going well for a long time. I’ll just sit quietly and wait for the new maps.

Today’s title is the most obvious and terrible of puns, for which I should be fired. You’re fired from your own journal - pack your shit and get the fuck out, Vee. Fine, I never liked this job anyway. Who am I kidding, I love this job - I’ve been writing consistently again since the 16th of February this year and really enjoying it.

For once I’m going to use something topical as a springboard for today’s discussion, so as I say on Twitter - Saturday is writing day.

The 1975′s new album Notes On A Conditional Form is out now, available on all the usual distribution platforms except for the good one that counts (Bandcamp) so go get it.

I’m just finishing up my first full listen-thru in the studio where I do my writing as I begin typing out this piece - actually Guys has just started up so it’s the final song. It’s the second time I’ve heard this track, the first time was last night when my week ended and I finally got a chance to sit down on the couch in-front of YouTube and the promo was in my recommendations. What an adorable video.

For the duration of this writing session, I’ve queued-up Telefon Tel Aviv because it suits my mood better - NOACF will play after Dreams Are Not Enough and it’ll probably play if I write for long enough.

I joked around on Instagram yesterday that I bought NOACF Friday morning but wouldn’t get a chance to listen to it until today. I could have listened to it during my work day but there’s no way I’d have had my first listen on the shitty UE Booms that have transducers made of stale bread I have at my work-from-home desk, plus I don’t want to have distractions for my first listen - be talking over it while I work and have to stop-start music during teleconferences and video-meetings etc. Friday was a particularly hectic day for me, but even if it wasn’t, the speakers alone are enough of a reason for me to not want to engage in critical listening in my work-space. I can’t use the 535s or 555s even, because constantly swapping from music to teleconference headphones would be a nightmare.

It’s fine - I just have to be patient. At some point you just stop having to listen to everything the minute you get it. Years ago, I absolutely would be slamming tunes as soon as I would download them - or back when we bought CDs from stores, R and I would be in the car, peeling plastic wrap and jamming them into the slot and cruising around having a listen. Even then, tho, I made it a practice of setting aside time for dedicated listening. Music has always been important to me, I don’t know if it’s tied intrinsically to being a musician, I don’t think it is but it could be, hard to tell. For as long as I’ve been recording things onto cassette from the radio and then buying CDs with my own money, I’ve spent time just listening to music - not while reading, not while doing chores or homework or recreational things like building Gundam kits and Lego, play board games or entertaining guests with other people altho it has its place backing all of these things.

I’ve always wanted to spend time having music as the main focus - the specific activity I engaged in.

When I studied Audio Production and Engineering, it was taught as a subject called Active Listening, albeit as a pragmatic subject of analysis both sonically and musically and I still appreciate it being taught this way. It engages students to perceive musical listening as something you should do as a verb the same way that it’s taught in psychology and social studies. While there are some specifics you can probably educate yourself with regards to the physics of audio and music theory, at some point it begins to become about what’s subjectively pleasing to your ear - this much is absolutely also taught - that much about sound is about perception and is subjective, and the industry of music (the actual course is literally called Music Industry: Technical Production) is about honing technical skills and combining them with understanding your own subjective perception and successfully marketing them.

The real art of active listening is simply paying attention - it’s rudimentary - it’s just not being passive. Most folks aren’t participants in their appreciation of music and that’s not a facetious statement - there’s nothing wrong with people who don’t take a greater role in their digest of music in general, it’s perfectly OK because it’s probably not that important to them. The point at which they feel they want more from what they hear is when they need to do something about it, but they don’t owe it to anyone else to do anything before that. You’ll get no soapbox ranting about pop-music from me.

What’s perhaps less OK is if an individual regularly expresses discontent at a generalised lack of quality or availability of good art but does nothing to seek it out. Good art has never been more accessible. “Oh Vee,” I hear you cluck, “Are you here fixin’ to tell me The 1975 is good art? Cos we gonna throw down.” If you disagree then firstly that’s fantastic. I mean, you’re wrong, but I’m happy for you. But also you’re already in a good space to know what you do and don’t like and should already be good and finding good art.

I’m getting distracted again.

As meandering as my writing seems to get, hopefully some of it is still healthily circular in some ways - and coming back to the reasons I’ve stepped back from other platforms and am finding it comforting to write regularly here on tumblr is that observation of the longer form. Here I get to set aside more time and give myself more consideration to a topic. I sit in the studio and get my thoughts out over a few hours, then over the next few days, I revisit and re-read snippets or all of what I’ve read, in part to proof-read and correct it but also to go over the subjects I’ve written about in review. Sometimes reviewing inspires further notes in my phone that may or may not turn into journals in the future, but that doesn’t have to be a thing, I’ve not decided yet, but I’ve long ago abandoned the need for every action to bear fruit; it’s a very capitalist way of thinking, this framing of return on investment, that a thing is only worth doing if it’s profitable in the future. The action often has value then and there, it’s the act of doing it, but there has to be an action beyond just the thought, because if I don’t write it down, I know a day later when I want to summon the thought again because I liked it, it’ll be gone from my brain and I’ll hate myself for not noting it. This is how the brain works - it’s immensely capable and sometimes, when everything is important but there are a lot of things, it can’t keep track of them all so at some point it starts discarding them, especially in the short-term.

I watch a lot of YouTube. I really enjoy Rooster Teeth videos and I’ve had a First subscription for almost two years now. Oddly I still watch almost all their content on YouTube simply because it’s more convenient to do so across all devices,  but the point of having a premium subscription for me is to support them as content creators, not to access content earlier or really to access anything exclusive - I’ll be honest, I’m not watching any exclusives at all and couldn’t tell you what that content is. I’m also super glad that they opened up First access free during Covid, so right now you can sign up for First and watch everything thru their web portal and see all that exclusive stuff plus watch everything early and it won’t cost you anything. Yes - part of the point is the marketing benefit that after Covid, they hope you’ll see that First has economic value for you and that you’ll pay for it afterwards, but they transparently, plainly and frequently acknowledge this in their shows which I suspect is more than other companies are doing.

Outside of Rooster Teeth - which do create a lot of content at 30 minutes and above, often 1 hour shows but often 10 to 15 minute episodes, I still do watch a lot of typical 10 to 20 minute YouTube clips, especially after work. My reasons for watching these are probably similar to a lot of people - after an arduous day of office admin, often it’s easier to watch smaller, more easily digested pieces of media instead of material that takes potentially more psychological commitment. How that commitment takes shape is different for everyone - for some people, heavy narrative is more demanding. For me, if you’ve taken any cues about my tastes, you’ve probably figured it’s a little different.

Some of the short clips I watch are video gamers arsing about being funny; a lot of Funhaus (under Rooster Teeth) falls into this category, but a lot of my watching is comprised of Synth Tubers and musicians. There’s some stuff in the periphery - because of Gavin Free’s adjacency in Rooster Teeth, I might watch the occasional SloMo Guys clip that might appear in my recs, as well as the odd 1975 promo because I’m subbed so their single releases appear in my feed and Dirty Hit and adjacent artists will hit my recs too, so again once in a while I might try them to varying success - I bought half of Wolf Alice’s Visions Of A Life but couldn’t bring myself to pay for the full album. Maybe next time.

YouTube is a bit like the thumb, heart and like. It’s the short-term hit, the low-level engagement for my visual and auditory senses. I’m not knocking it, it’s fine. It’s good. It’s not entirely like but not entirely unlike sugar. Does the analogy carry all the way thru to if I consume too much of it, it’ll give my brain virtual brain diabetus? I’m not entirely sure but it could be worth being cautious of. I don’t think that’s a real thing but one thing I certainly have been missing is real cinema, and the other night I finally turned everything off and put on a bluray I’d bought of a film I’d as yet not seen, and was really glad I did;

I don’t often get to watch films that are for me, as egotistical a statement as that might sound. When J is home, I try not to subject her to my film taste, or at least some of the more rigorous sides of it. There’s a decent amount of crossover in our tastes which is plenty fine for us to share, but for some things I’d wait for her to go to bed or be out or away. I’m not sure how she’d take something like The Favourite, there’s a lot to like about the narrative as a whole, but I certainly can understand how people might not like it.

Nevertheless I adored the film, it’s almost perfect for me with the exception of some of the editing - Yorgos Lanthimos edited it himself, it would seem, so that’s ah... a thing. Anyway, alas were I here to discuss the film because it’s an absolute smashing delight.

I really do miss sitting down and just being able to be immersed in good cinema. It isn’t because I don’t want to, either - it really is because I find it so difficult to find film aligned with my tastes. If you want to know what those tastes are, there’s a page full of it, and yes, David Lynch and Terrence Malick are on it so I’m one of thooose people. Whatever, I so don’t fucken care. I’m not a snob, tho - I’ve talked about it before, can’t be arsed digging thru the journals but they only go as far back as Feb so have at it - but I dug the first John Wick, Michael Bay has his place, I mean, he’s a cock, but I respect and admire the cinemacraft - I totally talked about that (maybe I should go find it). I really *really* love action and stunt-craft a lot - there’s a lot of hard work that goes into that - not just sets and props but personnel, stage-craft, lighting, vis-fx and camera. It’s good industry, it looks great and it’s simply fun to watch.

Anyway.

I have action films on bluray, I just don’t talk about them. Instead I keep a list of my weird shit because they get less attention, less money and I feel like they speak more to my experience and there are fewer things in this life that speak to my experience. The list of video games in the journal before this one speak more to my experience, that’s why there’s a list of them. Uncharted speaks infinitely less to my experience, and that’s probably why I hit it with a stick so much, because dear lord jesus fuck look at how much money it gets, and yet look at how poorly the people who made it are being treated and how much fuck-all is being done about it, so fuck that shit, unite and unionise, and support your fucking indies. I’m getting distracted again... it’s not hard to do at the moment...

A dear friend had a birthday recently and they asked for some music - actually let’s roll back. Once our state went into lock-down and we couldn’t go visit one-another, one of my best friends K and I started talking over video-calls instead of our normal phone-calls. We’d normally speak over the phone because we’d see each other when she’d come over and have dinner with J and I, or we’d all have lunch etc. So me being me, there’s no way I’m going to be happy just using my phone - of-course I can run Zoom from my PC and use my webcam, but run all my audio gear thru my interface - meaning a nice condenser mic instead of a shitty phone or hands free, plus all my synths. This is how our video-calls go - I play music for her while we talk. It’s an absolute blast.

On one particular call, she told me the music I was playing at the time would be really great to help her with the work she was doing (also working from home). I was only just playing a Rhodes patch thru the reverb unit with a massive tail but she did have some decent bluetooth headphones on and it sounded great. That weekend, I spent a couple of hours recording a few pieces of simple music, just one instrument and fx direct - no sequencing, straight into audio - lightly normalised - topped and tailed, encoded to mp3 and sent them to her.

I haven’t had a lot of studio time at all over the last two years - J and I have had a really rough year - not with one another, but challenges that we’ve had to face. If you read back thru the journals, you’ll see another one of those which has further flow-on effects for us that we continue to deal with. That’s life. Both she and I have been dealing with these kinds of challenges for most of our lives from a very young age. Sometimes I spend a bit of time noodling, as J calls it, on a piece of gear here and there, and in the past I’ve taken a few bits of gear out of the studio down into the kitchen and recorded videos for Instagram that have been fun - usually for a weekend or week while she’s been out of state with family.

There’s that thing again with only doing things in short bursts and hopefully I’m able to illustrate this pattern of shortness, of us having to live our lives in short bursts. I’m not going to hook it into the evils of YouTube (I like YouTube and use it) or Spotify (I hate Spotify and don’t use it) - as always, these things seem to follow people’s patterns of behaviour rather than shape it - but there are probably some other evils that have shaped our patterns of behaviour and the consumer services have simply followed. Are we being over-worked and is the quality of our life out of balance? Probably. Are we losing touch with a better sense of engagement with one another, activity, focus and art? Very likely. Do we point a furiously waggling finger at Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and yell BAD and run to the hills to farm organic vegetables and hide from 5G (couldn’t help it) for the rest of our days? Not at all because that’s clearly stupid.

I like Twitter. I really like Twitter. I really like YouTube. I really like the Wire and the accessibility and ease it’s brought about. Just because we haven’t quite figured out how best to utilise it doesn’t mean we have to set it on fire and huddle in the dark. I don’t get that approach - we are astonishingly intelligent beings, yet our reaction to not being able to fully process complex things always seems to be SHUN AND RUN. Don’t credit me with that, I’m sure I read it somewhere - I wish Mamoru Oshii’s external memory (or wherever he shoplifted it from) was a real thing and I could check it (NB: I did exactly that, but couldn’t find anything culturally remarkable enough as a source).

Dedicating time to recording those pieces of music for K was really amazing. I just listened back to them and I’m really happy with how they came out. If you ask nicely I might post one of them up here but you’ll have to ask really nice and understand they’re super ambient so they might put you to sleep but that’s one of the desired effects, I guess. Watching The Favourite was amazing, and I have to try to dig out more cinema to dig into. I’m really hoping Ghost of Tsushima reviews well for PS4 because I’m pretty much sold on it - I’d like a game I can play for long periods rather than short bursts because I value enduring video game experiences that aren’t frustrating. And writing here every week has been the most positive step I’ve taken this year, super beneficial and I hope at some point I can get around to discussing some of the other artefacts of art I keep mentioning in greater detail, or at least more about my engagement with them. That list of films has a lot going on in it as far as how it’s influenced my life. I say that it’s listed in no particular order, but Ishikawa’s Tokyo.Sora remains to this day my most favourite film by a long way, no other film has come close, but there are a lot of films that are almost as special and that leave everything else a long way behind. Most of Lynch’s films are pretty special to me, so too most of Oshii’s, but I’d love to talk about why films like Polgar’s Exit and Fliefauf’s Womb are there for their tone and feel more than their content.

I think that’s coming. For the moment I’m still writing as a capture of my mental state in time. Barely anyone uses the term microblogging in reference to Twitter any more but that’s exactly what it is - it’s a granular timecode of people’s pragmatic and emotional reactions to their experience of life - usually too granular to be useful without strange barely accessible tools to process. For me a return to traditional writing has been both immensely useful and satisfying. I enjoy both cataloguing and documentation, but I also love the mechanical process of such. Sitting down and spending time writing has given me perspective on how and when to use a granular tool like Twitter - even for shitposting - and Instagram too, tho shuttering Instagram is still on the cards - and it’s amplifying every activity I dedicate time to.

More and more I’m getting down on the floor with our dogs and playing with them - I did this anyway but I do it more, to bond with them and enjoy a sense of play and place at their level in pack harmony. There’s nothing overly spiritual and wanky about that, they’re just our dogs and we love them, it’s just about understanding canine behaviour and enjoying it.

This isn’t a puff piece about the perfect life, far from it. I’m not just trying to be positive either. There’s still an immense amount of shit happening around me, never you mind. It’s hard to contextualise everything all at the same time, so don’t be tempted to believe I’m here doing a HASHTAG BLESSED post because you can fuck right off. Go back and look at my taste in films damnit and tell me a positivity-only person digs those films get fucked. You wouldn’t know what we’ve been thru and I wouldn’t know what you’ve been thru either. Let us talk about shit sometimes and don’t do that whataboutism shit. You should be more mature than that. If there’s anything granular media has done it’s make you a lazy thinker so shake yourself out of it. You know better. You *know* you know better. Come on.

I might draw some art for you to steal, come back and insert it but I’m happy with ending here.

[twoinchreview]

1985 Albums

Friday 20th March 2020.

On the way home from work (for the last time in a while I think, thanks Covid-19) Radio 2 played The Whole of the Moon by The Waterboys. I loved and love that song from their album, This is the Sea. I knew the album was released in 1985. It’s a year I won’t forget in a hurry for lots of reasons; the main, unbearably sad one is losing my mum, but, also, for other reasons that were not at all sad. The aforementioned album being one, another being another album - Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love. (Another was Knebworth opening its gates to music for the first time in a few years….what a gig that was!) So, did I listen to any other albums that year? I seriously couldn’t tell you, for certain, the name of any other album released in that year….with aging memory it seems to me my turntable’s time was equally divided by Mike Scott and Kate - six months apiece. I decided to check it out. A quick search on Google and the first hit I clicked was this one from the NME that lists 50 albums.

I decided to listen to each in turn, from its count of 50 down to 1. I posted a one line review on each on FB. Here are those one-liners below, with supplementary comments as and when.

50.  ABC, How to be a Zillionaire. I didn't learn that actual trick but I did learn to love Martin Fry's delivery once again.

49.  Sade, Promise. Smoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooth.

48.  Sheila E – Romance 1600. One I missed posting about of FB, probably because it was that forgettable. I can’t remember one track from it and it was only a couple of weeks ago!

47.  Alex Chilton, Feudalist Tarts. Who knew? Seriously never heard of him before!

46.  George Clinton, Some of My Best Jokes Are Friends. Funky. Another new one on me.

45. The Replacements, Tim. Never heard or heard of them b4 today. Shan't bother again!

44.  Run DMC, King of Rock. Dunno why I like this album, just do. It's like that and that's the way it is.

43.  Cameo, Single Life. I've already forgotten about it.

42.  New Order, Low Life. The first album on NME's 1985 list that properly rocks all thru. 

It’s a proper ‘of its time’ album and yet timeless. This gets the bold review ‘cos I would definitely take time out to listen to this again. First one of the NME list!

41.  Robert Wyatt, Old Rottenhat. Out there. A defo doob album.

40.  The Style Council, Our Favourite Shop. I recall this album & it's better than it was.  Weller has a voice that sometimes sounds like it’s going to break at the sterner test but then he carries it off. It adds to the originality.

39.  Sonic Youth, Bad Moon Rising. Proper industrial punk. I like it.

38.  Dexys Midnight Runners, Don't Stand Me Down. Not one track had I heard before. Fab.

I really enjoyed this. I like the fact it’s a real deviation from what I remember Dexys for - all denim and oddly-antifashion fashionable. This album showed real confidence in their own ability, quite rightly.

37.  Husker Du, New Day Rising. 'Salright.

36.  Bobby Womack, So Many Rivers. “Let Me Kiss You Where It Hurts.” 😂😂😂 Yep - the only thing I wanted to post about this album, having listened to it (like so many others, for the first time) was the name of one track which still, as I type, makes be chuckle like a school boy. Sorry Bobby.

35.  The Fall, This Nation's Saving Grace. I never really got The Fall. This album doesn't help. This post on FB attracted some comment - Ralph White (fellow Posh and music fan) was, I sensed, a little perplexed at my opinion. But, I can’t lie, the band, and Mark E Smith, just didn’t, and still don’t, do it for me. I’m too old and long in the tooth to persist. Sorry Ralph.

34.  Propaganda, A secret Wish. If you had to guess the time of this album's release from its sound, it couldn't be anything other than slap bang middle of the 80s. I mean it is sooooo eighties. It’s the sort of record that will be used for educational purposes - in history lessons.

33. Scritti Politti, Cupid & Psyche 85. I feel I should be more impressed than I am.

32.  The Pogues, Rum, Sodomy and the Lash. What an album, what a fucking album.

I listened to this while out walking and it really took me by surprise just how much I enjoyed it. Of course, I’d heard a lot of the songs before but, as a collection, along with the tracks new to me, it really stands out.  

31.  The Cure, Head on the Door. The Cure does easy listening.

30.  The Cult, Love. What's there not to love? No sudden death, just love.

Contains one of my favourite all time tracks. Can you guess?

29.  Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, The Firstborn is Dead. Interesting. Definitely a band you have to be in the right mood before the needle hits the record.

28.  David Sylvian, Alchemy: An Index Of Possibilities. Music to have acupuncture to.

By that, I mean it was very, very, very Japanese-y.

27.  Suzanne Vega, Suzanne Vega. Singer song writing by numbers.

To be perfectly blunt, I found it boring.

26.  The Smiths, Meat is Murder. The Smiths are an enigma to me. Good music, good musicians but, that condescension. Morrissey, Geldof, Thunberg....peas in a high & mighty pod.

All that being said a few days ago now, I’m sure I’ll listen to this (and maybe other a records of theirs) again. I fucking hate that it was that good.

25.  Bryan Ferry, Boys and Girls. Slick as you like. Is he the coolest man in music? I think he is.

24.  10000 Maniacs, The Wishing Chair. I can take this or leave it. When I posted this on FB there were a couple of posters encouraging me to try In My Tribe - it’s on as I type and it’s a little better.

23.  Whitney Houston, Whitney Houston. I like this debut album. What a voice she had!

22.  A-Ha, Hunting High and Low. Not bad song writing in a second language.

Nice enough album...but this band will always just be ‘nice’ and, memorable for a video, not much else. 

21.  Grace Jones, Slave to the Rhythm. A mess of an album.

Worst one on the list so far even if it has got David Gilmour playing on it.

20.  Simple Minds, Once Upon a Time. I always felt, & feel, this band are wannabes to U2's crown. Nice enough album though.

19.  The Colourfield, Virgins and Philistines. A gem of an album. 

Terry Hall reminds me of Bowie. So talented, so prolific.

18.  Everything but the Girl, Love not Money. Pleasant enough but won't be on repeat. 

17. Loose Ends, So Where Are You? Hmmmm, not quite Color Me Badd. Very Delia Smith. The Delia Smith comment was because I found this album was an embarrassment much like Delia that fateful night at Carrow Road. If you don’t know to what I am referring, Google it.

16. Killing Joke, Night Time. Great album, cracking band.

15. Tears for Fears, Songs from the Big Chair. A big collection of comfortably accomplished songs. 

The first album on the list I had definitely played, in its entirety, before...just not in 1985. 

14. Dire Straits, Brothers in Arms. By no means their best. Tbf, you’d have to go some to best a debut or 3rd or 4th albums of the quality Dire Straits had under their belt. And, a side note, I think probably the best name for a band, ever. 

13. The Sisters of Mercy, First and Last and Always. A moody, gothic masterpiece. I reckon the growling vocals are the stuff of genius and nightmares.  12.  Prince, Around the World In A Day. Prince is brilliant, this album isn't. Like a few on this list, the decade’s half-way point didn’t see his finest hour.

11. Felt, Ignite the Seven Canons. I've never heard of this band before, nor heard a single track from this album, until now. I like them, I like it.

And I reached the Top Ten....I found myself really looking forward to the next 6-7 hours of the supposed mid-80s finest.... 

10. The Jesus and The Mary Chain, Psychocandy. Mentally sweet. 

It is a great album by a seminal band but I didn’t really get on the band wagon back then, and I don’t have the time nor the inclination to now. That’s gonna piss some people off, I’m sure! 9. Microdisney, The Clock Comes Down The Stairs. Never heard of them before, probably never listen to them again.

This album left me feeling nothing. It’s the most nondescript one of the list thus far and I doubt that will change.

8. REM, Fables of Reconstruction. This band were good before they got massive. 

Fucking brilliant. I had never listened to this album before and it’s such a precursor - we all know how massive they became and one or two of their later albums were residence, for a time, in my CD player. I reckon this one could become a real favourite of mine. Not just of REM stuff but in general.

7.  Lloyd Cole & The Commotions, Easy Pieces. Easy listening and first rate easy listening, at that. 

‘Brand New Friend’ is the stand out track.   

6.  Prefab Sprout, Steve McQueen. I don’t switch the radio off if this band are played, but I never play them. This album doesn’t alter that.

5. Madness, Mad not Mad. Who'd thought the stalwart rude boys would be so innovative? Another cracker from this list. It really stood out for me, they way the band changed things up a notch with this record. I can imagine some long-time fans would have baulked at this at the time of release but now, 35 years on, it smacks of progression. I’ve just asked Alexa to play it as I’m typing. 

4.  Talking Heads, Little Creatures. A wonderful, totally original band and album. This album reminded me that I do not spend enough time listening to Talking Heads. 

3. The Waterboys, This Is the Sea. Marvellous. This is an album I know and love. So, here it is, one of the aforementioned two. It’s is still one of my favourite albums, definitely, but, just a little bit, the metaphors grate - there’s enough of the fuckers on this album - the sea, the moon, the spirit. But I will always love this album and I will revisit many more times, I wager (and hope).

2. Tom Waits, Rain Dogs. Not really a musical masterpiece, more a lyrical one.

I found this a unusual choice for number 2. That’s subjectivity for you, I’d have picked many others before this one for the runner’s up slot.

1. Kate Bush, Hounds of Love. One of my favourite ever albums. The best of 1985, maybe of the 80s, very close to of all time. It’s number 1 for the NME and it most certainly is for me.

So, I listened to all of these NME listed albums in turn and it was, in the main, an enjoyable musical journey

And I reminded myself that, in 1985, I did indeed only put two albums, that first saw the light of day in that year, on my turntable (Kate Bush and The Waterboys). Any other releases didn't get a look in. 

[144-13]

4, 8, 13, and 20, please ;)

4. Worst game you've ever played?

Though I consider myself a gamer, I can’t say I’ve ever encountered a game so bad I had to quit due to its quality. I usually research games before I buy them and even if they’re free, games aren’t something I typically start if I know they’ll be bad.

That being said, I know a game I love that everyone else on planet Earth hates would be Mystic Quest. I can’t help but love it as it was my first RPG and practically my first video game ever played. It’s so very flawed and broken--far too linear and full of hand-holding when the other Final Fantasy games were far from that, attacks that are overpowered, attacks that are underpowered, attacks that are just straight broken and spells that have no effect--I don’t even know how it got licensed. But that childhood memory within me will never allow me to have a bad opinion of it.

8. Best soundtrack?

I’d have to say Professor Layton. Weird as it sounds, I actually like accordion-style music outside of PL, but the accordion, as well as all other instruments, for those games is especially beautiful. Phoenix Wright, Freedom Planet, Undertale, Cave Story, Sonic Mania, Sonic CD, Ib, the Trauma Team series, the Persona series, Maplestory and Darkest Dungeons are all definite contenders (especially the Town in Chaos theme from Darkest Dungeons). Some individual tracks I love from various others are the Agatio and Karst battle theme from Golden Sun, the town, battle and boss battle themes from Mystic Quest, the Team Plasma theme from Pokemon Black and White, Pepper Steak from Off, Emerald Shrine from Sonic Advance 2 as well as a lot of other themes from that game (another childhood fave) and, finally, Superstar Saga boss battle theme. (Sorry for such a long list. I was actually listening to some of these while answering which made me keep adding more. I guess I really do love video game music more than regular music =P)

If we’re talking about ambience more than music, I’d have to say Hollow Knight is incredibly immersive with music, sound and the effects on both as well as the Metroid series. Love them both to death.

13. A game you were the most excited for when it wasn't released yet?

A lot of games coming out this year. Metroid: Samus Returns was just released and I was really excited from that remake (re-remake if you got a chance to download the fan-made remake before Nintendo executed it). Mario and Luigi Superstar Saga is also getting a remake, which I’m pretty excited for. It’s another childhood fave. Sonic Mania for PC before it was released. And, of course, Layton’s Mystery Journey. Based on the sneakpeak I let myself have at someone’s part 1 playthrough, the graphics and music are amazing so I’m even more excited.

20. What was the first video game you ever played?

This is ancient history for me too, but I remember very vividly it was Super Mario World at a daycare that no longer exists. Lots of random, incredibly clear memories of those times, like how learnt once you had Yoshi you got a green mushroom from any future eggs.

And now that I think about it, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 might have also been alongside Mario World because I used to play it at a friend’s around the same time. Anyway, now you have one for Nintendo and one for Sega ;)

[pretentiousrecordstoreguy]

Andrew Wood - The Jesus Christ of Grunge

I worked at a record store for most of my college days. The pay was terrible, the customers had bad taste (for the most part), and the owner was always doing some untoward stuff that later resulted in his partner kicking him out of the business… but it may have been the best job I’ve ever had. Why was it the best job ever?  Because my income was supplemented by an unending supply of promo CDs, first crack at all CDs being traded in by customers, and my name always happened to make it onto the guest list of two of the three big music venues in town. Plus my co-workers were a diverse group of equally music-obsessed nerds, punk rockers, hip-hop enthusiasts and an Anglophile manager who became one of my best friends. It was pretty epic, and I wouldn’t change it for the world.


Working in a record store also gave me special insight into crazy rabbit hole of music theory conspiracies. My buddy Ryan Shaw had this theory about Andrew Wood, the lead singer of Mother Love Bone and the first major heroin casualty of the grunge era. His theory was that Andrew Wood was the prophet that rock and roll was promised, that he would be overlooked and ridiculed in his own time, and then sentenced to death for the sins of rock and roll, only to be resurrected and live eternally through his disciples and their testimony. 


In other words, Andrew Wood was the Jesus Christ of Grunge who had to die for the sins of Hair Metal so that Rock and Roll could live on. 


SIDE NOTE: My buddy Ryan was an ordained minister who later became a trial lawyer, so that gives credence to the underpinning philosophy of the theory.  

Much like B.C. and A.D., prior to Andrew Wood there was no “Alternative” but after his death we started living in the Alternative age. Grunge, Indie and Nu-Metal, Emo, and Alt-Country were all new gospels that were written in the aftermath of Andrew Wood’s passing... So if Andrew Wood was the Jesus Christ of Grunge, who were his apostles?

Stone Gossard as SIMON/PETER - The rock upon which the Temple of the Dog was built, literally. Stone Gossard is the through line for the Seattle sound and was ever present in its inception. From his time at Green River to Mother Love Bone to Temple of the Dog to Pearl Jam and then Brad, Gossard was the foundation stone. Without Stone Gossard, would there even be grunge? Stone is the rhythm (along with his brother Jeff Ament) from which the music is manifested. Gossard may never have been front and center in all of the bands he formed, but he spoke softly and carried a big axe.

Chris Cornell as JOHN - John was the disciple whom Jesus loved the most. 
Chris was Andrew’s roommate and best friend. When Andrew overdosed, Chris was on a European tour with Soundgarden striking his own Jesus Christ pose. Chris was so grief stricken with the loss that he immediately wrote two songs “Say Hello 2 Heaven” and “Reach Down” about Wood. Chris showed them to Stone and Jeff, and Temple of the Dog was formed to honor their late friend. Chris would later hit mainstream success with Soundgarden and with Audioslave (which was just okay but waaaayyy to mellow for a band composed of members of Rage Against the Machine and Soundgarden).


Jeff Ament as ANDREW (Simon/Peter’s brother) - Ament was right there with Stone in Green River, Mother Love Bone, Temple of the Dog and then Pearl Jam. He’s the bass that pulses the heartbeat of the music. Plus, his graphic design sense provided the classic look and feel of all the liner notes and album packaging for those bands (which along with flannel, long hair, and Doc Martens worn with shorts, were essential cornerstones of the era). Through Ames Bros. Design, Pearl Jam’s visual aesthetic was really set in stone and their tour posters became must-have’s for screen print enthusiasts everywhere. Music never looked so good. Eddie Vedder as JAMES, SON of ALPHAEUS - Some people say that James was literally Jesus’ little brother, while other’s interpret it metaphorically because upon dying Jesus said to James that Mary was now his mother, and James was now her son. Either way, Eddie Veddie was the younger brother of Andrew Wood who then took his mother’s hand and ushered in a new era of grunge. Eddie would tell you that he’s no fucking messiah, which is meant as a testament to the love he had for his brother.


SIDE NOTE: I almost had Eddie as Paul/Saul, not one of the original 12 apostles, but one of the most steadfast and true disciples of Jesus whose writings to the Romans and to the Corinthians would help shape Christian philosophy for many centuries to come. As the lead singer and songwriter of Pearl Jam, you could make a case that Eddie is Paul, but I don’t think he’s gentile enough for that. He’s Eddie Vedder, and that’s an entirely different essay.

Kurt Cobain as SIMON THE CANAANITE or SIMON THE ZEALOT - 
Simon the Zealot was known for strictly keeping the law of Moses (the Ten Commandments) and had great disregard for where he saw people headed. In Jesus, Simon found someone who was practicing what he preached. Simon would go on to evangelize the gospel in much of the west including throughout Egypt and into Africa. Kurt Cobain hated the mainstream and was a zealot when it came to grunge. He spread the word far and high and carried the tradition well. 
 Layne Staley as THADDEUS - Cool name. Cool band. When a jar of flies is kept for too long, the man in a box digs some dirt. Staley of Alice in Chains and Mad Season fame burned out too soon, but man was he cool.

Dave Grohl as MATTHEW/LEVI - Matthew/Levi was the tax collector who gave up his job and life to follow Jesus. He was the author of one of the gospels (Gospel of Matthew). Grohl was a drummer who later gave up that life to lead his own band, the Foo Fighters, who went on to become one of the biggest alternative bands (and David Letterman’s favorite band). 
 Kim Thyll as JAMES (brother of John) - James was John’s brother who followed him along and became an apostle. He had a moment of doubt when Jesus came back to life and doubted that it was really Jesus. Kim followed Chris Cornell into Soundgarden and preached the gospel upon a black hole sun. He later had many doubts when Chris left the band and stored to become a pop singer and then started Audioslave, which was terrible. Eventually, Soundgarden reformed and the word could go on being spread, one music hall, arena or outdoor festival at a time.

Jerry Cantrell as BARTHOLOMEW - Cool name. Cool band. Do the Bart, man! Mark Arm as PHILIP - Philip was an apostle, but he didn’t really matter. He was there at the start and probably did some stuff but you can’t really remember it. That’s kind of like Mark Arm and Mudhoney. He started Green River and recruited Stone Gossard to the band because he only wanted to sing instead of sing and play guitar. Then He formed Mudhoney. They had a moment for a slight minute but most people couldn’t tell them apart from Tad. How’s that for a Judgement Night?


Courtney Love as MARY MAGDALENE - Go listen to Hole’s second record, Live Through This, and you’ll be asking Courtney if you could wash HER feet. From start to finish, that album is all killer and no filler, regardless of wether Kurt Cobain wrote it (allegedly) or not. 


Thurston Moore as JUDAS - Sonic Youth were grunge before grunge was a thing. They ushered in the alt-rock movement and were preaching the gospel way before it was cool. In another world, Thurston Moore would have been John the Baptist, but he blew up the band by betraying Kim Gordon, which caused the inevitable break up of one of the best bands ever. So, yeah. Thurston Moore is Judas.         

Paul Westerberg as JOHN THE BAPTIST - He came first and helped lay the groundwork for the alternative movement. This could have easily gone to Michael Stipe of R.E.M., but The Replacements were much better and spawned a legion of followers. The Mats work in the 80s at Twin Tone and in Minneapolis would help to set up the dynamic that would take place in Seattle with Sub Pop. Westerberg couldn’t hardly wait…

With Pearl Jam having recently been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, now more than ever, we should give thanks and praise to the great Andrew Wood, the Captain Hi-Top, Love Commander (it is right to give him thanks and praise). For he so loved rock and roll and that he was forced to suffer, die and was buried for its sins so that rock could be reborn again. May he rest in peace today, knowing that his words still resonate with the masses.

So come bite the apple, my fellow star dog champions.      

Hide your mom. Control your sister.  Yeah.

Can I get a Hallelujah?

A reading from the Book of Stone

EDITOR’S NOTE: This post has been updated to correct two errors found within the text.

[acehotel]

INTERVIEW: JUSTIN STRAUSS WITH MICHEL GAUBERT

Paris, France

Michel Gaubert, legendary French sound illustrator, is the go-to sonic maven for fashion designers from Raf Simons to Karl Lagerfeld, Loewe to Rodarte. Music obsessed his whole life, Gaubert’s record collection is a behemoth, physical history of his tastes, as is his Instagram account, widely noted for its originality and idiosyncratic visual vocabulary. For this episode of Just/Talk, Ace friend, DJ and music producer Justin Strauss caught up with Gaubert at his home in Paris to talk about the downfall of Champs Discques, if Paris or New York has better nightclubs and what it’s like to soundtrack a Chanel show. 

Justin Strauss: For me, fashion and music have always gone hand in hand. When I was a kid, I saw The Beatles and that changed my life musically. Seeing the way they looked, how they dressed played a huge part. What was your inspiration? When did your love affair with music and fashion start?

Michel Gaubert: It started at a very early age because my mother was very much into fashion. She had a bookstore, and we would get all the magazines at home, and I was watching those TV programs, and I liked the whole thing — just like you.

I thought there was more to music, more to music than just the actual music. There was also the lifestyle — I mean I don’t like that word, “lifestyle,” but they dressed to represent themselves because I think representation is also a part of it, part of the music, like the artwork on records. I was conscious of that. I think the biggest revelation for me was David Bowie and Roxy Music because they were performers. And then Patti Smith came along with a whole different thing where style meant something. 

JS: So was it David Bowie for you, your inspiration?

MG: Yeah, there was so much about him. I listened to the record Hunky Dory, the back cover with him wearing the large pants and the whole thing… Oh my God it was interesting. Ziggy Stardust came up and I was like “wow.” I loved everything about it, the melody, the lyrics, the aesthetic; it was good.

JS: I was lucky enough to see that show.

MG: Oh you were?

JS: Yeah, like you seeing David Bowie, I had already been into The Beatles and the whole British thing from a very young age, and then as a teenager, I was in this band Milk n’ Cookies — and you know, we just loved everything English; and then David Bowie and the whole glam scene came along and it was everything.

MG: And for me, Roxy Music is the same thing. The first three or four years of Roxy Music was absolutely unbelievable. I saw David Bowie when Station to Station came out and for Let’s Dance. With Roxy Music, I saw them quite early on 1976 in Paris when Bryan Ferry was dressed in military, a black tie tucked in and the whole thing. I liked him when he was with Jerry Hall…

JS: The bass player of Milk n’ Cookies played with Roxy Music on tour before he joined the band. David Bowie, Roxy Music and Sparks for me were the biggest. And our band was discovered by Sparks’ managers so we kind of got to be really involved with that.

MG: I loved the guy who did the Sparks album covers Kimono My House and Propaganda.

JS: That guy, Nick Deville, also art directed all the great Roxy Music album covers and did the Milk n’ Cookies album cover as well. They used a few different photographers but he was the art director.

MG: For Roxy Music it was Karl Stoecker.

And it’s funny because at Raf Simons’ show last February, we started the show with that song from Roxy Music, “In Every Dream Home a Heartache.” Because the collection was very black satin, jewelry, colors, all that kind of stuff.

JS: Well, the cover “For Your Pleasure” with Amanda Lear and walking the black cheetah was so striking, and such an important part of the album experience — how sad that is so missing from today’s music scene, the artwork.

MG: It is. I mean I hate cds.

JS: It’s beyond cds now, it’s just something in the air.

MG: I do like to use them, of course, and also digital files. But I still like vinyl, cause when you get a vinyl it’s the whole thing. It’s fantastic to look at. And cds, they never come close with artwork.

JS: So you’re into David Bowie, you’re into Roxy Music, and how did you start working in music as a living?

MG: Well, after spending time in London, I then went for one year to America as an exchange student.

JS: Where? New York?

MG: No, no, no. I went to California. I was sent to California but I was still in school. When I came back to Paris, I didn’t do much for a couple of years and then I started to work in a record store, Champs Discques. And from then I made quite a few friends and people liked what I had to offer. In those days, the record store was much more than it is now, the ones that are left.

JS: You were a curator to your customers. They trusted you and your taste. And the records you would recommend to them.

MG: Yes, exactly.

JS: It was a great record store.

MG: It was fun, I mean I got to know all the DJs in Paris, lots of people came to that store. It was more than a record store, it was an “in” place to go. From working there I got asked to work at Le Palace.

JS: Had you DJ’d before that?

MG: No, no. I did it because they had the main room and then downstairs a roller disco, and I was convinced it was the right thing to do. So they asked me for a different style of music and I just did it. So, of course, there was lots of fashion there at Le Palace.

JS: Le Palace I always related to Studio 54 in New York.

MG: I think it was better. It was that kind of a place where I think it was more cultural than Studio 54. I think it was more refined. Studio 54 was this amazing place when you walked in but then… I thought the balance was bad.

JS: And musically, what were you playing?

MG: Everything. I was playing Rick James, X-Ray Spex, Devo, Talking Heads.

JS: So it was very much like the Mudd Club in New York.

MG: Yes, it was more like that.

JS: But in a fancier place.

MG: Yes, see that’s what I liked about Le Palace. Okay, you’ve got a mixture of the Mudd Club and then Studio 54. Studio 54 is all about the glossy and Le Palace had the mixture of both — it could be dirty also, which I liked — and why I think it’s better.

JS: I never DJ’d before the Mudd Club either and I just played what I liked. I didn’t know how to mix records.

MG: Boom, boom, boom, like that. It was just to make sure you caught the end of the record before the next one. They would  play weird stuff like Eddie Harris. It was super.

JS: Anything goes.

MG: Everything goes, it was diverse, but I was not playing the Bee Gees. I was not playing that kind of stuff.

JS: Did they play that in the main room?

MG: Upstairs, yes, yes. I mean there was some cool disco stuff but I was more of the alternative thing. And I liked all the new wave, all that kind of stuff, new wave. Gary Numan, B52s…

JS: I guess it’s very similar to what was going on in New York at the Mudd Club, Danceteria, and the Ritz. The Ritz kind of reminded me of Le Palace because the Ritz was an old, beautiful place, kind of like Le Palace, and everyone played there from Human League to Kraftwerk. Back then, I was DJing there at least three times a week. It was crazy, when you think about all the music that came from around that period from so many different places. From punk to funk, to early hip hop, to disco. It was insane.

MG: Yeah, it was a truly crazy era. I don’t want to sound like an old person but it was truly like a beginning of things. I saw a Kraftwerk show in Paris, and they had all those robots on stage and things like that.

JS: Do you mean when Computer World came out?

MG: Probably, yeah.

JS: Because that’s when they played in New York, at The Ritz.

MG: And then I went to New York to the Paradise Garage and they were playing Numbers and all those kids were dancing to Numbers. I said, what?! I like the cross-cultural thing.

JS: I mean that’s funny how our stories are very similar because Afrika Bambaataa used to hang out at the Mudd Club. We became friends and then when I started to work at the Ritz, Kraftwerk were playing and I invited him to the show and that just blew his mind. It was just such a great thing how all the kids who loved hip hop really embraced Kraftwerk.

MG: Of course. A couple of years ago they were sampling New Wave records a lot, all those kids.

JS: Then there was a scene in Paris, I think around the same time, like Z records.

MG: Celluloid Records too.

JS: Yeah, Celluloid Records were filtering into New York and we played all those records at the Mudd Club and Danceteria, they were huge.

MG: Yes, Fab Five Freddy “Change The Beat.” There was good stuff at the time. The thing is, the music in France is different from America. It was more open. I mean America had amazing music, but in Europe there are smaller countries so we were more aware of what was going on around us like what was happening in Germany, Italy and Holland. Plus, in France we were a bit like, deprived musically since we had limited radio and television stations. 

JS: You had access to a lot of music, we didn’t have that.

MG: And in America music was either American or British. The rest was more —

JS: We would have to look harder to get it as a DJ. There were little stores like 99 Records or whatever that would bring in the crazy stuff so yeah, we would find it, but it was harder. So how long did you DJ for at Le Palace?

MG: I DJ’d for Le Palace for about 3 years and then I couldn’t deal with it anymore. I was, at the same time, still working at Champs Discques and I was working at Le Palace twice a week. But then that would fuck me over for the week. At the same time I had some friends who were asking me to do music for a fashion show, and I said, “Okay, sure I’ll do it.”

JS: What was the first one you did?

MG: It was a friend of mine, the brand was called Vestiaire. It means “wardrobe,” basically. It was a men’s show in a restaurant. And then some people asked me to do another one, and another one, and then I started to do a bit more and then I got fired from the record store.

JS: Why?

MG: Well the record store was not doing so good anymore because Virgin came next to it and the owner, unlike us, rather than highlighting all the strong points of Champs Discques, he went to compete with them. Like slashing prices, all that kind of stuff. It was the wrong move, it was more an ego trip, but you know.

So I wasn’t there enough probably so he fired me. So I was like “Oh my God!” That’s okay, maybe it’s the kick in the ass I need.

JS: Sometimes those things are the best things that could happen to you.

MG: Yeah, and after I was fired I was like “Shit, I wish he would have fired me earlier.”

JS: I did the same thing, I got asked by Stephen Sprouse to do the music for his first big show which was at the Ritz, and we opened with “Search and Destroy” by Iggy and the Stooges and it was just like the most amazing thing. I’ve done a bunch, but I got into the remixing thing and that took up all my time so I couldn’t really do it so much.

MG: It’s fun, plus it’s good when you find an alter ego to work with. You know when there is a feeling of trust between the designer and you, both ways, when they trust you because they know when you say something, when you propose it, it means something, and also when you trust them. Then you know you can play for them whatever you think is right, and you feel comfortable in that.

JS: Was there one show that kind of set your career off that was like magic?

MG: Yeah, I think it was the show for Karl Lagerfeld. That one was planned before I left the record store — I knew him from the record store, he was a steady customer. He said “Would you like to do music for my show.” I said “Sure, why not, of course.”

JS: It was huge show obviously.

MG: Yeah, it was a big one and the music was inspired by Malcolm Mclaren’s “House of Blue Danube” and all that kind of stuff. It made my career. I mixed Soul II Soul with Strauss and De La Soul, with opera dialogues, that kind of stuff. It was great.

JS: And were you mixing it live with records back then?

MG: No, no —

JS: You recorded it?

MG: I worked with Dimitri from Paris for the first three years. It was all done reel to reel.

JS: Tape edits?

MG: Yes. It was done like that. I was not able to do it, but he had wonderful fingers and ears.

JS: So now these days when you hear about music and fashion, if there’s some amazing fashion show, it’s probably you doing the music.

MG: There are other people…

JS: Yeah, but you have been super successful at it. Is this still exciting for you?

MG: Yeah, of course. Like I said, when there is this idea of collaborating with someone, it’s exciting. When you know it can push things, like the Chanel show for example, they are big productions. For me, it’s cool, it’s the spectacle. It’s like soundtracking a movie or something that makes it feel different. And then there are people who I like to work with because you know that they have a sense of fashion which is unique and I learn things from them and they learn things from me. So that’s the best part.

JS: Yeah, when those worlds collide and inspire each other. That’s one thing which I always miss about New York and the 80s, when you had Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, all these artists coming to the clubs, being part of the whole scene. Everyone was intermixing and everybody was inspiring everyone else and that’s a great thing.

MG: It’s more complicated now. They have still this kind of thing. I don’t know if it was in New York, but in Paris we had places you could go to every night and see the same crowd. Now there’s not a club like that. There’s places people will migrate from one place to the other depending on what goes on, so it’s a bit different. I like the idea of having one place to go every night, the same place. You know you don’t have to worry about anybody. And you can say "Hi, how are you? See you tomorrow.” Cause then you would dress up, dress up for the other kids and for yourself.

JS: It was like the first time I went to the Backroom at Max’s Kansas City. Everybody knew each other, everyone was like “Oh who’s this new kid?” Any of those clubs like Area, Mudd Club, everyone knew each other.

MG: That’s cool, that’s cool. Everyone knows each other when I go to a fashion party or something, so it’s part work and part fun.

JS: So when you work with a designer now, do they come to you for ideas and inspiration as well? Is it mutual?

MG: Both, both. There are several ways to look at it. Either I come up with stuff or an idea and some say, “Listen, hey there is this track I like. What do you think?” I say what I think.

JS: You do multiple shows every season. Is that something that’s difficult?

MG: Yes and no. I mean, the shows are now ten minutes long. When I started they were like 35 or 40 minutes, which was super hard to do to keep people’s attention span for 45 minutes. But then, the usual was 45 minutes. Now it’s ten minutes and everyone has a very specific image.

JS: Do you ever find they musically crossover?

MG: Not, not really. 

JS: That’s good. Because sometimes there is a theme running through the season and a lot of the designers kind of —

MG: Of course sometimes there is a new big album they all are tempted to use, but I think it’s because of that and also because music is easy to get and not so easy to get. When you are not into music it’s pretty difficult to know what’s going on. People want to make it more individual. If you have a good new record at the right time, then it works. Let’s say I got a record and I know I have a show in three days, then it’s perfectly fine. But if it’s been around for a month, you don’t need it. It’s all a question of timing.

JS:  How do you feel about the way music is heard now and how many people don’t buy music? I mean it’s never going back to what it was.

MG: No, I don’t know if it’s good culturally but that’s one thing. Because, at least, like a lot of music I know from the past I grew up with or listened to when it came out. You relate to what’s around you and what it means at the time. There was always a significant connection to be made somewhere with the music. These days, people listen to music all across the board regardless if it’s new, old, whatever. Sometimes a lot of people don’t know how to focus.

JS: There’s no connection like there used to be. It’s very disposable, I find, and people’s attention spans are shorter because of the internet and everything is quick, quick, quick, they don’t take the time to let it really sink in.

MG: But I do the same thing too, sometimes, because there is stuff I want to listen to. I just do something else and put the record on and listen to it at the same time.

JS: Where do you find your music these days?

MG: Everywhere. Everywhere.

JS: Do you still go record shopping?

MG: Not really. Do you?

JS: I mean I try to. But there’s so much new music that doesn’t get released on vinyl so it’s nice to get the record if you love it.

MG: When I like a record and it’s worth it, I get it. The last one I went to was in January and I went to work in London. I bought some stuff because it’s there in front of you. You know, “I don’t have this” or “I don’t have that” and you just get it. As a matter of fact, I think it’s harder to buy them like that because you don’t see as much.

JS: When I DJ, I bring a small bag of vinyl. It’s still great to play, but a USB stick is life-changing. So many great things have come along with the technology and so many not so great things too.

MG: I think it’s great and I think there are bad things too. I think society is too dependent on the machines and a lot of the things that go wrong are also because of the machines. People don’t know what to do if they don’t have their machine. So basically, and me included, it can’t be just that and no USB stick.

JS: That’s pretty standard. It’s become the standard and not the turntable. When it was changing over and you saw these DJs come in and set up their laptop, wires, pulling out everything and then two minutes later the computer would crash, and there would be nothing. Then they would be like “Can you put on a record?” Because the record always works. People have become too  dependent on the internet.

MG: Everything, people’s minds, fake news. It’s crazy, it’s very, very crazy.

JS: What did you do when you came to New York? What was happening and did you go to the clubs?

MG: Of course. I have a good friend who we stayed with for three weeks. Florent from the restaurant, Florent. And he lived on Lafayette and Spring. So we got there, and there were like three bullet holes in the glass and maybe 25 more on the sidewalk, and we were just like “oh my God.” We went through the East Village and were like, “Where am I?” So the first night we decided to go out because a friend of his was like “Oh my God there is a Dolly Parton birthday party at Studio 54, you want to come?” And of course, I wanted to come. So we go and we took a taxi and the taxi cab driver was like “Are you going to 54? What do you want, quaaludes?” And we went to Studio 54.

JS: When did you go to the Paradise Garage?

MG: That was later. I went in 81. So I went to Studio 54, the Mudd Club was also 81.

JS: When you walked into Paradise Garage was it like anything you had ever experienced?

MG: I remember going up a ramp with candles or lights on the ground, going up that way and then turning a right like this, and then I remember hearing Numbers by Kraftwerk and that completely blew my mind.

I went to the Mudd Club when it was New Romantics time period. They were playing Soft Cell "Tainted Love” like ten times in a row.

JS: I worked there then. Started there in late 79 and played there until the late 1980. I went to the Blitz Club once which was pretty crazy.

MG: In England?

JS: Yes with Steve Strange.

MG: I didn’t go there. I never went clubbing in London really. But in New York, yes, and I went to Pyramid. I went to all the gay clubs. I went to the 12 West.

JS: Yeah the gay clubs were the most forward thinking. Back then The Garage, 12 West, Infinity, all those clubs were known for breaking new music and that’s where you heard all the best new records. Then that sort of went away.

MG: I see it the way it was at Champs Discques. I mean the store was super successful because in France we didn’t have many radio stations that would play that kind of stuff, and there was no way to get music. So we were playing really loud, all day long, the things we liked about every 10 to 15 minutes and people were grateful. They’re like “Oh my God, that’s so cool.”

JS: It was the only way to hear new music. Especially club music.

MG: Exactly, and even in the clubs there was a bit more freedom. Not freedom, but I could play a lot of things whenever I wanted because people were interested in discovering stuff, you know what I mean? Now people want to hear what they know or relate to. People don’t understand. They think a DJ should play whatever.

JS: “What do you mean you don’t have it?” And they hand you their phone. For me and for you I’m sure was the same. A great DJ was someone who would turn you on to new music. I didn’t want to hear only things I knew.

MG: Exactly, me too. I like to discover new stuff and older music I don’t know. There’s so much music. There’s new music, in-between music you forgot about in the past, you know or you forgot about, it’s like a full time job.

JS: Do you ever get involved in actually creating music for shows?

MG: Yeah. But I don’t create it myself. I work with people. I had a good experience with the Chromatics. That was really good and Johnny was super involved in it, that was really good.

JS: Have you ever been involved in mixing records or re-mixing?

MG: No, never.

JS: Produced your own tracks?

MG: No, I really don’t have the time. Plus, I think I would be too demanding, you know what I mean? Never happy with the result or whatever. I can be very demanding.

JS: You basically go from one season and start working on the next… How many shows do you do a year?

MG: Probably 100.

JS: Do you work with New York designers?

MG: Yes, of course. New York, also French designers, we work with Calvin Klein, Proenza Schouler, Rodarte, Michael Kors.

JS: What do you think about brands like, say Kenzo, or so many brands where the original designer is not involved anymore and they bring in new people to re-brand it? You’ve been around to know the original designers.

MG: Yeah, well I think some people do a good job. I mean I like what they do at Kenzo. I like their point of view, I like what they do with music.

JS: They use a lot of original music as well.

MG: Yeah, yeah which I think “why not?” They can use the music on the videos… I like the movies they make for perfume. They have a good thing going on.

JS: You’re very active on Instagram. Was Facebook ever a thing for you?

MG: Yeah. I started doing it on Facebook, but then I find the process on Instagram to be more direct, quicker, easier, and has a wider reach. I think it’s more fun.

JS: It’s one of the best things about what’s going on with the Internet. Communicating with people through images.

MG: Yeah. It’s fun because it’s like a jigsaw puzzle and then sometimes I’m like, “My God this picture, I’m sure I’m going to get this many likes” and it’s like a game. Like, okay I won again.

JS: Do you get disappointed when you get something that you think people are really going to get and then they don’t?

MG: No I don’t. I don’t know when the best time is to post. I don’t know any of that kind of stuff, I’m a very instinctive person.

JS: I see you posting stuff in the middle of the night and then early in the morning.

MG: Yeah, sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night for like half an hour and post.

JS: And do you just have a collection of images?

MG: Yeah, I collect them. I do collect and then there are some I research. Music, fashion, architecture, and all of the stuff I like. And of course the way it is when you find something, it leads you to something else, and something else, and something else, and that’s the way it works.

JS: And do you do your own images as well?

MG: Not really. Yeah sometimes I take pictures, otherwise, I don’t create anything especially for that. It’s found. It’s pictures I take, or it’s clippings from magazines, or it’s pictures from a book. This week I’m going to scan a few pictures from books I have, because I know you won’t be able to get them anywhere. So I like to share that too.

JS: You’ve got a nice following. People seem to love what you do and really react to it.

MG: I guess now I have quite a few, and with it comes the other side, I have a few haters.

JS: If you don’t have some haters, you’re not doing something right.

MG: That’s right! That’s what I thought as well.

[dustedmagazine]

Listed: Axis:Sova

Photo by Grant Engstrom

Axis: Sova has grown from a one-person operation to full-fledged heavy psych juggernaut with last year’s Motor Earth. In 2015, Ben Donnelly observed that, with Early Surf, “Axis: Sova make heavy psych that bears the traces of bedroom multi-tracking, epic and casual at the same time. Some more fidelity wouldn't hurt their fuzz forms, but the chunks of treble and simple beatbox steps give it an appealing down-to-earth quality.”  Founder Brett Sova contributes a list this week.   

ZZ TOP — “Under Pressure,” “Gimmie All Your Lovin’" and “Sharp Dressed Man” Live On The Tube 1983   

When it comes to the Little Ol’ Band from Texas, the first few records are undeniably hot and where it’s at. But Eliminator is mostly Billy Gibbons working with a drum machine if legend has it right, and top to bottom it delivers with extremely high impact. It’s a big commercial sound, for sure, but that type of ambition following a successful formula is a credit to Gibbons’ vision and willingness to morph and change creatively. BFG’s guitar tone here in particular is one I was after a little bit on Motor Earth — distorted amp saturation that feeds back whenever you’re not playing, bleeding. Something I always listen for with ZZ is the number of guitar tracks on each song — while they’re an exemplary power trio live, Billy tends to at least double track his guitar on a lot of recordings, and sometimes he’ll have two rhythm tracks panned to either side along with another track for the solo (check Tres Hombres, for example). Always pretty tasteful and subtle. (Axis: bandmate) Tim Kaiser and I set out to make our version of a boogie rock record with Motor Earth, and along with Beefheart’s Clear Spot, some Crazy Horse, and some requisite Stonesian scuzz, ZZ provide much blueprint for something of that nature for me, personally. All that aside, this footage of the band doing “Under Pressure” on 1980s British TV show The Tube is simply badass and I'd question the health of anyone who doesn't enjoy it.   

Les Rallizes Denudes  "Night of the Assassins" 3rd Sunset Festival Live 1976  

Been on a mild Japanese psych kick, and this is the original artifact: Les Rallizes Denudes playing one of their iconic songs live (of course) at a festival at dusk against a glorious, mountainous backdrop. Their noise comes atop something simple and repetitive to latch onto, which allows their feeding lead guitar squalor to fully envelop and carry me around as if strapped to a horse on a patient gallop. It's yearning for something, like anything FSA, if FSA was ever accompanied by Link Wray-ish, rhythmic progressions. Melody and groove on the foundation, a screech of feedback over the top: "I Will Follow Him," but decapitated. 

Electric Eels — “Splittery Splat”  

One of the interesting things about growing up in Ohio and then leaving at the age of 18, when your brain is still mushy, is slowly realizing, especially once outside of it, just how much great, fucked up music has come from the state. There are the obvious and hugely successful ones, like, say, Devo, and there are some like Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments, a band I saw numerous times in high school and sorta just took for granted as simply being ‘the guy from Used Kids Records’ band.’ I just saw TJSA in September at Cropped Out Festival (a.k.a. the most important festival on the planet), in Louisville, KY, for the first time in 15+ years and they were phenomenal — they represent to me a lineage of Ohio punk/weirdo music that is entirely genius yet also entirely too out for a broader audience (major label support or no), much like V3 or Tommy Jay, or Electric Eels. This Electric Eels song was on a Scat Records cassette compilation that my friend discovered when we were teenagers in the late 1990s. Apparently I borrowed it and never gave it back, because I recently rediscovered it when going through a box of tapes not too long ago. It’s a perfectly fucked punk song, from composition to delivery to recording and mix. Seems like they’ve gotten a lot of reissue treatment, but I’ll always remember this song from the Scat tape.  

Fumio Miyashta (Far East Family Band) Live On Boffomundo 

Embedding is disabled but you can go here and watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHNLtEMl2dg

Killer live performance of mellow headtrips via one of Japan’s psych-rock purveyors in the proggiest sense, Fumio Miyashta (of Far East Family Band). These dudes he’s playing with really lock into it, with tasty, mellow guitar leads and a pulsing bass mingling with the space-synth sounds Miyashta is laying out there. A relaxing and deep listen, but also buoyant and light, at times reminiscent of Blackouts by Ashra, which came out three years prior to this performance on The Boffomundo show, an early cable TV show dedicated to progressive music.  

The Stooges — “My Girl Hates My Heroin” from My Girl Hates My Heroin 

Unmatched depravity — like The Stones recording at Nellcote to get that dusty, humid summer basement vibe for Exile, this jam/gem from a rehearsal around the Raw Power era comes from a neighborly basement with similarly thick air. I make no bones about worshiping at the house of Ron Asheton (Fun House forever), and therefore must point out his nimble and fluid bass playing on My Girl Hates My Heroin, pushing this grimy riff forward, but Williamson really had a gnarled, unhinged nastiness to his playing that’s immediately enjoyable, as well. Iggy sounds like hell, like he should. Bought this on CD at a record store in Paris when I was in high school, and listening to it made me feel like a tough dude for the rest of that year.

Alice Coltrane — Huntington Ashram Monastery  

Lacking depravity — empowering! Impossible to do a list without including Alice Coltrane. Journey to Satchidinanda is one of the few records I’ve ever bought new that I’ve truly worn out from excessive plays. Huntington Ashram Monastery might be more consistently played currently. It’s a power trio album, the Rashied Ali and Ron Carter rhythm section out to quake. Relatedly, last time I was in San Francisco I visited the Saint John Coltrane Church, where we listened to and meditated on A Love Supreme in its entirety. As a congregation — which didn’t consist of more than a handful of people — we collectively chanted/sang along when it was time, and otherwise actively listened free of distraction. The experience felt like an open window into the spirituality so prevalent in his and Alice’s music.

Royal Trux — Untitled (3rd album) 

“Your beautiful skin, your beautiful spine / You’re beautiful all the time.” Chunky acoustics, insulation, isolation and utter abandon in the form of serrated guitar squeals from the edges of Neil Hagerty’s torn up plectrum straight to your ears. The album begins as something earnest, almost pensive, a light haze akin to just waking up, and proceeds to slowly rise out of bed and begin to walk around, shaking out the legs and cracking the joints til the moss rolls off and the stimulant (or analgesic) hits the vein. From there, its loose openness stretches into a broad expanse, allowing for glorious feedback-laden solos to cover the sonic horizon, barely-there rhythm action holding it together by sheer will. Not much percussion, no bass? More room for what matters! Herrera’s voice right in the sweet spot with bad intent, “on top.”  The things I want and need from rock n' roll.  

Randy Holden — “Blue My Mind” from Population II

Randy Holden, the badass who spent a year and half an album in Blue Cheer, realized his vision with the unmatched velocity of his solo album, Population II. I was just hipped to one of his earliest bands, The Other Half, for whom Randy Holden played guitar prior to his stint in Blue Cheer, and the power and brilliance of his song construction is evident and completely identifiable even there— but Population II is the full realization of Holden’s six-string swagger damage, and “Blue My Mind” is the highlight for me. There’s barely a drop of effects (ok there are overdubs), it’s just the sound of one man blasting through a literal wall of 200 watt Sunn Amps (16 of ‘em?) with minimal bass and drum accompaniment. Sunn amps have a distinctive sound: their reverb isn’t close to sounding “sparkly” the way someone might describe a vintage Fender with admiration. Instead, when cranked, they sound kinda like a guitar being played through an overheated A/C window unit or maybe a tube-powered hairdryer in a tile bathroom that’s meticulously mic’d through a high powered PA System. It’s not for everybody, but that gnarled and blunt quality cannot be matched, requiring zero fuzz or distortion pedal whatsoever to achieve a gloriously saturated molten tone that somehow retains bell-like clarity. Early days for Axis: Sova was playing through a ’67 Sunn Sceptre exclusively. While that’s not the case anymore, it’s very present on songs from our previous album, Early Surf, especially the title track’s main riff. Guitars in front!  

Velvet Underground — “What Goes On”  Live at the Hilltop Festival 2nd August 1969  

Featuring Mo Tucker, the human metronome. I wish I could get a snare sound out of my drum machine like this. Its rhythmic simplicity set against skittering guitars produces counter beats and accents that start to feel like Terry Riley’s sat in — especially once the organ begins to fry. 

Sonny Sharrock — “Once Upon a Time” from Ask the Ages   

Stately and serene, a song beholden of wisdom and truth. You know, hopeful. The melody has a patient emotion that doesn’t force itself on the listener, but rather amplifies whatever feeling the listener has at that moment — be it upbeat, uplifting, or melancholy.  Especially gritty tone and saturation. Sonny Sharrock’s last album is amazing, with a killer band including Pharaoh Sanders and Elvin Jones.  

Steve Hillage — “Salmon Song” live in 1977   

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Hypnosis via riff-phrase, let it slip, put a driving, unwavering bass line underneath it, and soar towards a gassy nebula… its space-prog breakdowns and solos cascade and shimmer, and then the riff rises again. The whole album, Fish Rising, is cool, but not as tough to beat as this live performance of its best jam, "Salmon Song."

Rafael Toral — Wave Field   

Wave Field - Remastered by Rafael Toral =

Aside from Flying Saucer Attack, who regularly achieve something similar, there are few pieces of guitar music that convey as much emotional expression through feedback and drone as well as Wave Field by Portugal’s Rafael Toral.  It’s deep, theta brainwave meditation is enveloping and surreal — it drips and distorts reality like the best painters of the genre — to a liquid degree, akin to floating in a sensory deprivation tank. Having gone looking for it online, I just discovered that Rafael has remastered it to create what he feels is a more spacious sounding recording, more in line with his original vision. I’m not entirely sure which sounds better to me: both versions fit like a snug wetsuit in bath water. 

[birdboyofbabylon]

TAGGED BY: @blue-pincushion TAGGING: @cloud-the-bluebird ((Gonna keep it short here since I don’t know most people enough to know if they’d be okay with me tagging them in this kinda stuff yet))

—    BASICS.

▸     IS    YOUR    MUSE    TALL    /    SHORT    /    AVERAGE ? Short. Even by Mobian/Babylonian terms he’s on the short side and relies on his hair/feathers to get the last few inches to be considered on par with the rest of the cast.

▸      ARE    THEY    OKAY    WITH    THEIR    HEIGHT ? For the most part, yes. Jet enjoys taking advantage of his small size for both stealth and agility. He loves outmaneuvering and outwitting larger targets and sees it only as a bonus for riding where his smaller size simply means less weight and less wind resistance.

That being said. There are times he feels intimidated being the shortest member of his team. 

▸      WHAT’S    THEIR    HAIR    LIKE ? A slicked back and spiked mohawk formed of thick clumps of green feathers

▸     DO    THEY    SPEND    A    LOT    OF    TIME    ON    THEIR    HAIR     /    GROOMING ? Absolutely. Jet adores the style, both aesthetically and functionally. He’d first tried the style out when he was still a kid and managed to discover upon a few heavy metal CDs in a fellow Rogue’s quarters. He’d been listening for a while, enamored with how fast and angry and exciting it sounded as he was looking through all the CD manuals and saw a drummer packing a more traditional spiked mohawk with the spikes sticking straight up. So of course he tried the style for himself. Of course, after one ride like this, his feathers were soon slicked back and when he saw it in the mirror, all he could think was “WOOOOW, COOL! THAT LOOKS RAD!” and needless to say, the style stuck. The way it’s spiked back, rebellious and out-of-control, he feels expresses him to a tee, and the fin-like nature of it is aerodynamic enough while providing a fair bit of stability at speeds. 

▸      DOES   YOUR   MUSE   CARE   ABOUT   THEIR   APPEARANCE   /   WHAT    OTHERS    THINK ? AB-SO-LUTE-LY. Sometimes Jet will spend hours in front of a mirror, fine tuning everything about his appearance before any even where he expects cameras to be involved. Most of the effort goes to his hair and the tuft of white feathers on his chest, but he’ll still spend a sizable amount of time making sure every last part of his appearance looks impeccable.

As for what others think? To a degree. Though the hawk lives for praise, he won’t pay too much mind to the jeers and boos of others. Jet can focus on the positive responses he gets far better than most, but if it’s nothing but hate and criticism, then it’ll start to take its toll on his mood...and fairly heavily, for that matter.

That being said, he’s far more sensitive when it comes to those he respects. He sets a high bar for that respect and feels it should be valued greatly, so if someone who falls into that category belittles him, then he’ll take it to heart and have it on mind for days, possibly even weeks at a time.

((PUTTING THE REST BEHIND A READ MORE))

                          \/  \/  \/  \/  \/

—    PREFERENCES.

▸     INDOORS    OR    OUTDOORS ? Outdoors, for sure. Specifically open areas with lots of wind. Being a bird, he needs the feeling of wind flowing through his feathers. Even when he is indoors, he prefers to not be on solid land, opting for the shelter of his airship. If he spends too much time without a nice long ride on his Type-J or returning to his zeppelin, Jet will start to grow antsy, anxious, and jumpy. This usually takes about three or four days to come into effect.

Needless to say, that makes any extended prison stays or other incarceration VERY tough on the hawk. Cramped indoors, no wind and stuffy air, and without the gentle sway of his zeppelin or some other airborne vessel to keep him company? That can be a nasty time.

▸     RAIN    OR    SUNSHINE ? Sunshine. Not to say he doesn’t enjoy the rain from time to time, but only when he doesn’t actually have to be in it. Most of the time it’s a burden. It gets in his feathers and leaves him soaking. It disrupts his flight plans and sometimes he’ll have to ground the airship completely when the weather’s bad enough.

That being said, it does make a good veil to escape in, both on foot and for his zeppelin. And he’s found out that a real torrential thunderstorm can make for a very exciting backdrop to ride full speed through. ▸     FOREST    OR    BEACH ?   The beach by far. Just give him a surfboard and he’ll spend all day on the waves. (No not that one get your mind out of the gutter maybe in five years when he’s older JEEZ) Not to mention the sun and coastal winds go hand-in-hand with the hawk. 

Not to mention Jet can fit a Hawaiian shirt pretty nicely, as you can see from the Sonic Channel artwork.

▸     PRECIOUS    METALS    OR    GEMS ?   Precious metals, simply because they’re more practical. Jet often finds him and his Rogues scavenging around for good scrap to bring in and salvage for supplies. After all, keeping an big, metal airship running can be a tall order sometimes. ▸     FLOWERS    OR    PERFUMES ? Neither? If he had to pick one, however, I suppose he’d go with perfume. Mostly because they don’t require any care and won’t just wither up and die. ▸     PERSONALITY    OR    APPEARANCE ?   For now, Jet’s pretty vain and goes mostly for appearance. He’d still need a personality that he could live with, but seeing as he’s of the age where he’d only just recently started to go “Oooooh, girls” he’s still indulging in the appearance more than anything.

He also finds himself accidentally starting to stare at Wave sometimes...just sometimes. ▸     BEING    ALONE    OR    BEING    IN    A    CROWD ?   In a crowd, specifically with all eyes on him. Jet loves being the center of attention, both good and bad. He craves recognition and will hog the spotlight at any chance he can get. ▸     ORDER    OR    ANARCHY ?   Anarchy, hands down. Chaos is Jet’s element. He thrives in the unpredictable. The more maddening he can make any situation, the more he gels with it and can turn the tables on anyone who opposes him. Even in heists, he often finds himself taking the fast and noisy approach, stirring up enough chaos in the process to leave everyone guessing what even happened as he rushes in, takes the goods, and bails. ▸     PAINFUL    TRUTHS    OR    WHITE    LIES ? Painful truths. Jet will tell you to your face exactly what he thinks without a moment’s hesitation. No matter how crude, how mean, and how hurtful it is, he’ll say it and he’ll say it with a smile on his face.

In fact, he’s more likely to lie to hurt someone than lie to make them feel better.

▸     SCIENCE    OR    MAGIC ?   There’s a lean towards “science” here, but overall just magic enhanced by science. Jet uses both on a regular basis. By nature, as his title of “Legendary Wind Master” would imply, Jet is aerokinetic. However his powers are still young and budding, and to do anything noteworthy, he needs his Bashosen or Bashyo Fans to amplify the work for him.

Another good example is the Ark of the Cosmos. This is, in a whole, ancient advanced science, but there were some very, very occult arts required to create them.

But that’s something Jet and his team will discover sometime later. (°<°)

However he still has a heavy tech reliance. His Type-J is an example of that, as well as his goggles which contain a comms device, a HUD (wirelessly connected to his Type-J at all times), and the computing power of a decent smartphone. ▸     PEACE    OR    CONFLICT ?   Conflict. Though neither Jet nor his team want to see the world fall apart, they all find a little shake-ups every now and then to really stimulate their profits.

Of course, they merely aim to profit off the strife that already exists, believing that “Well, it’s happening either way. Might as well make a little cash off of it” and would never even think of artificially inciting a war or something similar on their own just to profit off of it.

▸     NIGHT    OR    DAY ?   Night, by far. Jet feels more at home with the sin and vice that a big city’s nightlife can bring and being a thief by nature, just feels more comfortable under the cover of nightfall. Overall, it’s just more chaotic, the people are more lively, more real.

▸     DUSK    OR    DAWN ? Dusk. This one’s pretty simple as Jet tends to stay up late and sleep in well past noon. He rarely even sees the dawn, but the dusk is like a sign that his day’s about to hit the exciting part.

▸     WARMTH    OR    COLD  ? Warmth. Not that he minds the cold too much, especially when he’s got a snow-topped mountain to play around on, but too much and the sting of the cold gets to his muscles and holds him back.

▸     MANY   ACQUAINTANCES    OR    A    FEW    CLOSE    FRIENDS ?  A few close friends. Jet rarely feels comfortable opening up to anyone, always expecting the worst of them, and that if he ever shared anything personal, they’d merely use it against him. However, those he does trust, he trusts with anything and values them greatly, easily willing to put his life on the line at their defense.

▸     READING    OR    PLAYING    A    GAME ?   Playing a game, certainly. Preferably something with a lot of action, violence, and a need for quick reaction times.

—    QUESTIONNAIRE.

▸      WHAT    ARE    SOME    OF    YOUR    MUSE’S    BAD    HABITS ? He’s rude, he’s vulgar, he’s loud, he’s obnoxious, he doesn’t care about most people’s feelings or emotions.

He’s a bit on the specist side and thinks Babylonians and birds in general are simply better than humans or mobians.

▸      HAS    YOUR    MUSE    LOST    ANYONE    CLOSE    TO    THEM ?      HOW    HAS    IT    AFFECTED    THEM ? OH BOY HOWDY HE HAS. When Jet was younger, the Babylon Rogues had a member count somewhere in the 20s. They were more or less a large family of loud, disruptive, vulgar sky pirates, led by his father, Ace. They were a carefree bunch, roaming around and taking whatever they could get their hands on. Occasionally, sometimes, one of them just...wouldn’t come back. It was a rare occurrence and at the time, Jet didn’t really understand what had happened, just that he always missed them.

However, one day...none of them came back. It was just Jet, Wave, and Storm on their own. They’d soon found out that the rest of them, Jet’s father included, were set up and slaughtered, no explanation why, and no idea who’d done it.

▸      WHAT    ARE    SOME    FOND    MEMORIES    YOUR    MUSE    HAS ?   His first time ever riding an EX gear. He was barely old enough to talk and his father was holding the board steady while he rode along at a snail’s pace. It was all he could do not to crash even then, but that didn’t matter. It was exciting and new and cool! He just wanted to ride again and again and again after that.

▸     IS    IT    EASY    FOR    YOUR    MUSE    TO    KILL ? Not at all. The very thought of it sickens the Rogues. As Jet often describes it, “There’s no point in taking a life. Treasure, gold, money, and everything else we take from people, it’s all worth something. But what’s there to get from snatching away a life? Just gets their friends to come after you with revenge on their mind. It’s not worth it”

Of course, as tough as he tries to act about it, Jet knows he couldn’t stand to put anyone through what he’s experienced.

▸      WHAT’S    IT    LIKE    WHEN    YOUR    MUSE    BREAKS    DOWN ?  One word. Explosive. With how much pressure he has to lead the Babylon Rogues, Jet always feels as if he has to be the strong one, the figurehead that the others can look up to, no matter what the cost to him. Of course, this leads to feelings, emotions, worries all being bottled up. He’ll often have his breakdowns behind closed doors, being reduced to a stuttering, stammering fool, incoherently blaming himself for everything that’s ever went wrong, breaking whatever he can get his hands on, clawing madly at himself.

But if he can’t get that out of his system, or something shakes him severely enough, that’s when he gets violent. If there’s anyone in the area he’d consider a target, the hawk goes out of his way to make an example of them. Concussions, broken bones, and other injuries are common when Jet enters this state of mind.

▸      IS    YOUR    MUSE    CAPABLE    OF    TRUSTING    SOMEONE    WITH    THEIR    LIFE ? Rarely, but yes. It’s borderline impossible to earn that kind of trust from him, but if someone has, they’ve likely earned it for life.

▸      WHAT’S    YOUR    MUSE    LIKE    WHEN    THEY’RE    IN    LOVE ? Very, very defensive. He’ll always be denying it, sheepishly shying away from the topic and trying to claim that he’s “too tough for that kinda thing” with his face flushing red the entire time. As of right now, he’s not too comfortable with the idea of it. All that kissing and gushy stuff just doesn’t have much interest to him yet.

...Yet.

[themusicjerk]

A Tribe Called Quest - People’s Instinctive Travels And The Paths Of Rhythm

On my way back to Travis’s house to return his copy of Never Mind The Bollocks, I ran into my friend Dom. We started talking and I told him about my new blog. I showed him the CD Travis had lent me, told him how awful it was, and asked him how anyone could possibly think music was a worthwhile endeavor. He just laughed, went inside, and handed me another CD. A Tribe Called Quest, as I understand it, is a hip-hop group, and my brief exposure to hip-hop through the aural onslaught which is Drake’s “Best I Ever Had,” leaves me with no high hopes for this record. Dom insists that this album is nothing like Drake. I can only hope that’s true.

A Tribe Called Quest is composed of Q-Tip, Phife Dawg, Ali Shaheed Muhammed, and Jarobi White, so they were following in the Sex Pistols’ footsteps of having two people with gross names and two people with normal names. Perhaps when one’s parents are so self-centered as to name their child after a cottonswab, that child has no choice but to devote him or herself to the sordid and good for nothing trade of music. But I digress.

The album begins with the whooshing of wind chimes and echoes of gongs. Apparently, they recorded this on a very blustery day. A baby cries. I agree, baby. I agree. I will agree that this is unlike Drake - Drake at least made some effort to introduce a melody into his songs.

Once the baby finally shuts up, we are treated to a two bar drum loop with a piano line of ugly chords and a guitar riff repeated over and over again. Q-Tip starts monologuing about something or other - someone forgot to tell him that music is not theatre, music involves melody. At various points in the first song, “Push It Along,” the guitar, piano, and drums just stop playing entirely, as if to say, “If Q-Tip doesn’t want to try music, we shouldn’t either.” But then, like some sort of twisted Chinese water torture, the instruments come back in. 

Four minutes in, they bring out a saxophone, the worst of all instruments. Saxophones are reedy, and listening to them sounds for all the world like someone wiggling a piece of wood in my ear. I’m almost happy to hear Q-Tip’s monologue return after the saxophone goes away - but perhaps that’s Stockholm Syndrome.

Remember my analogy to Chinese water torture? Five minutes into the song, you can hear the dripping. They did this on purpose. Over a one-bar bass and clapping loop, Q-Tip recites the title of the album and introduces the group, while they all hoot and holler behind him. “Music” is far too positive a word for this, and this from someone who hates music. I’d be happy to meet these people individually, but their insistence to “keep [the one-bar loop] rolling” suggests that knowing them would be to endure their brand of Chinese water torture.

 “Luck Of Lucien” is the same thing - two-bar drum loop, guitar and bass lines in conflicting keys, stranger, monologuing on top. And what is he saying?

“But listen brother man, I really think you can Succeed with the breed of the brothers on your back It’s the creme de la creme, and you can vouch for that It’ll take a minute, rice, so take my advice Trust in us, and thus you trust in your life Lucien, Lucien, Lucien, Lucien - you should know” I don’t want to trust anyone who shoehorns lyrics about creamy minute rice into his soliloquys. Shakespeare must be rolling over in his grave.

The sound of a broken record player or possibly a man wiping a tablecloth with a sponge introduces the third song, “After Hours.” Unlike The Sex Pistols, who had to rely on vulgar noises from their own bodies and voices, A Tribe Called Quest is willing to bring in whatever vulgar noises from outside they might want, including chirping frogs.

I must say, though, Dom was absolutely right about this not sounding like Drake. In fact, of the three songs I knew before I started this project, this is most similar to Charles Mingus’ “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” in that notes are thrown together haphazardly as if the composers had never heard what the major scale is actually supposed to sound like. At least the Sex Pistols used scales, and even they had more melody than this.

The torturous stop-and-start of the instrumentals makes me wonder if the band gets tired of playing their boring music. It doesn’t sound particularly difficult to play. Hold on, let me do some more research. Nobody? Nobody in this band played in an instrument? No wonder they’re stuck playing the same two bars over and over again. If none of them can play an instrument, and none of them can sing, where did they get the idea to be musicians? At least Steve Jones pretended to know how to play the guitar. To think Dom had the audacity to tell me this was BETTER than the Sex Pistols. Somehow, this has managed to be worse.

It would also explain why the out-of-tune trumpet blasts on “Footprints” seemed like a good idea to anyone. I hate music, and I know more about music than these guys. And just like the Sex Pistols, they appear to have invited marching Christmas carolers into the studio.

“I left my wallet in El Segundo?” Q-Tip isn’t even trying anymore. This isn’t a song. This is a complaint. This is a thing you mutter on the subway to your decreasingly enthused travel companions. Someone vaguely banging on things in the background that might as well just be the sound of a subway train going over train tracks and in and out of tunnels. I can get this experience just by riding my local bullet train.

“Pubic Enemy?” Did they even proofread this? There’s an ‘L’ in “public.” Also, anyone who writes a song about being a sexual skeeve should rethink their “pubic” [sic] image. Is the appeal of all music that we have "pubic” [sic] confessions from wanted criminals? Yesterday we humored anarchists and here perverts. 

“There’s four friends of mine that thought they were bad And laid up this girl, so now, they’re sad.” That’s what guilt can lead to. So sorry you compromised your virtues and now have to suffer the consequences. Not.

“Bonita Applebum” features some strange kazoo-like instrument that is simultaneously sharp and flat that only plays when the other instruments get tired. This is clever because they’ve changed the game on us - no longer is the drum loop the anxiety-causing torturous drip, because now the silence is filled by something much worse. 

Yes, you may “kick it,” if by “kick it,” you refer to leaving. At this point the drum beats don’t even sound like real drums, but distorted and warped like they were soaked in water beforehand, or perhaps replaced with a cow slowly being pressed through a loom against her will. I’m even starting to miss Johnny Rotten’s ear for cacophony, as it made me want to tear my own hair out considerably less.

In addition to the two-bar drum-and-bass loop and the bizarre recitation on “Youthful Expression,” the group has decided to artificially raise and lower the pitches of their voice for squeaky grievances reminiscent of a puppet show.

“No banana, I ain’t no primate,” Q-Tip repeats his preference for creamy minute rice. To each their own, I guess. Toward the end of the song, we get what might actually be enjoyable piano phrases - but again, repeated so endlessly that we’re sick of them before the already-played-out drum-and-bass loop comes back in full swing.

Sonically, nothing is happening on this record. Just like the Sex Pistols, the band has written the same song 12 times - except that there are 14 songs on this album. “Rhythm (Devoted To The Art Of Moving Butts),” for its vulgar name, seems to have based itself around the noise of an angry puma, or perhaps a dying macaw, which I can only imagine is complaining about the drum loop they’ve been forced to listen to on and off for the last forty minutes.

Dom did mention that the importance of hip-hop was in the lyrics, but lyrics like:

“You’re a disc jock, then jock this Rhythms can’t lose, rhythms can’t miss If you feel uptight and need to freak It’ll be all right once we drop this beat” Seem as vapid and puerile as you could expect any lyric to be.

“Mr. Muhammed” leads with a man singing the same three-note non-melody over and over again over a bass that sounds like a wet fart or a mud drill. This is punctuated by what is either a crowd cheering (for some unknown reason) or the sound of an ocean wave because a tsunami is approaching the studio. In Phife Dawg’s verse, he rhymes such exciting words as dish with dish, tense with tense, groove with groove, and it with no.

To further extol the virtues of minute rice, the group denounces ham and eggs. This is the closest thing to a melody I’ve heard since I started this project, but someone should tell the group that the emphasis in “cholesterol” is not on the last syllable. At least they tried. Phife also lets us in on a secret: his favorite foods are lemons and limes. What important lyrics these are.

“Go Ahead In The Rain,” distinguishes its two-bar loop with the sound of a lost and confused man saying, “huh?” as if he’s trying to figure out why this band is even allowed in the studio. Q-Tip even repeats “devoted to the art of moving butts,” indicating that he himself can’t tell the difference between any of these songs. Two-bar drum loop, rambling about minute rice on top, and occasionally dropping the beat because the non-existent band gets tired.

The last song on the album is called “Description of a Fool.” Let me see - wears glasses, hates music, and has best friends named Travis and Dom. That’s me. I’m a fool for having agreed to listen to this trash or to have started this project. I have a feeling that my friends are giving me the worst of the worst on purpose. I knew music was bad, but I didn’t know it could be this bad. I’m a fool for sitting here for the last hour hoping I would hear something good in this, only to be teased by maybe two seconds of enjoyable piano on a CD lasting over an hour. Q-Tip doesn’t even talk for the last two minutes of the album, he just leaves us with the same two-bar drum loop and a couple different repetitive guitar riffs. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that this album was made entirely from that GarageBand software that came with my MacBook. 

GarageBand? More like GarbageBand. That’s my whole review of A Tribe Called Quest. Anyway, I have to go return Travis’s CD.

If you think music is good, send me music, and I will tell you why you are wrong!