August 2010
1986: One Boy's Quest to Avoid Bon Jovi and Find Cooler Bands
Rob Sheffield's new book, Talking To Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut must have been titled by the publisher rather than the author. There was no questing for true love. Yearning and pining, perhaps, but no discernable actions were taken by the author to actually acquire a girlfriend. Despite having the advantage of three outgoing sisters who gamely attempted to transform him into a babe magnet and generally school him on the subtleties of elusive, mysterious minds and hearts of teenage girls, Sheffield was too paralyzed by fear and anxiety to talk to most girls, let alone bust a move. This is understandable for an awkward, gawky 15-16 year-old. But his neurosis extended throughout the entire decade of the 80s, well into his early 20s. It certainly takes balls to admit that, and makes me feel a little better that I at least managed to conquer my own fears just shy of 19.
So it's not really about talking to girls, nor questing for love, and not even much about Duran Duran. Instead, it's an episodic series of 25 impressionist vignettes using pop songs to talk about his life, which mainly involved listening to music, driving ice cream trucks, staying with his grandfather, thinking about religion, hanging around some girls and thinking about talking to them, but mostly not. Those looking for a compelling, heartbreaking narrative arc like his first book, Love Is A Mix Tape, will be left wanting. This book will appeal more to music trainspotter types who love the 80s. Really, really love the 80s. One of the most admirable things about the book is that Sheffield manages to be funny without using the crutch of irony. There's very little irony, only sincere love letters to 80s pop as it coincides with his hapless adolescence and early adulthood. I enjoyed Sheffield's enthusiasm for long-forgotten artifacts like Haysi Fantayzee, despite the fact that I hated the 80s. At least that aspect of it. Continue...
The Best Heavy Rock Albums
Heavy Psychedelic/Blues Rock, Hard Rock, Proto-Metal, Stoner Rock
Vanilla Fudge (1967)
Blue Cheer - Vincebus Eruptum (1968)
Do you remember hearing your first heavy album? Mine was Black Sabbath's first, when I was eight years old. It scared the bejeezus out of me, and I carefully put it back where I found it at my neighbors' apt. For the next year, bits of AC/DC's Highway To Hell, Queen, Led Zeppelin and Van Halen worked their way into my brain. The first hard rock album I bought was The Game, which wasn't all that hard. Led Zeppelin IV was probably next. Heavy rock creeped into my listening habits gradually, like black mold. I always liked it, but because so many d-bags at my school claimed the music as their own, I defined myself more with punk, post-punk and indie rock for a long time.
The roots of heavy rock arguably start with Cream and Jimi Hendrix. However, the first two bands that I believe defined themselves around heaviness are Vanilla Fudge and Blue Cheer, which is why their 1967 and January 1968 debut albums are the earliest entries on this list. Heavy rock music was divisive from day one. It sort of drew a line in the sand between generations -- those who were horrified by the first sounds of feedback by The Who and The Kinks, and those who craved more. Thus began three decades of critical dismissal and outright beatings. Like their metal brethren, heavy rock bands were used to being pariahs, and embraced it. Interestingly, long lost albums are being rediscovered by a new generation. Every month there seems to be new demand for reissues from bands like Buffalo, Pentagram, Sir Lord Baltimore, Bloodrock, Stray Dog, Granicus, Leaf Hound and Jerusalem. Even formerly reviled bands like Grand Funk Railroad and Cactus are getting critically re-evaluated. A slew of new bands influenced by these bands have come up in the past 5-7 years, particularly in Sweden (see Stoner Rock Primer).
Many of the albums in this list were originally in my metal list. While watching an interview with Lemmy Kilmeister on That Metal Show, I was reminded that in pretty much every interview, he insists that he his music is not metal. It's "rock 'n' roll." So out of respect for Lemmy, I figured I'd better make a whole new list. Coincidentally at the same time I also had been compelled to come up with a ballot for the "ILM Alltime Metal/Heavy Rock Albums/Tracks Poll." It's also a good way to reflect my own more recent listening habits more accurately, since my all-time list heavily favored post-punk, soul, reggae, Kosmische, art rock, indie rock, etc. I started the daunting task of adjusting it while making this list. Choosing what goes into the list involved some tricky judgements. The first being my decision to move the first five Black Sabbath albums from the metal list to this. The band is in the unique position of being the first true pioneer of metal when metal simply did not exist. Deep Purple, Uriah Heep and Budgie were also considered metal pioneers, but really don't sound much like modern metal. Which is why "proto-metal" is a useful category for a bunch of albums released between 1970 and 1975 that served as the seeds of modern metal. The first five Sabbath albums have more in common with the lumbering, bluesy hard rock of the other proto-metal bands. Of course there's doom metal, which consists of a lot of Black Sabbath acolytes, so the matter remains complicated. Continue...
Storytime With Dr. Fester
Cathi Unsworth, The Singer (2007)
Punk rock fiction really should have become a popular sub-genre. It probably would have produced even more garbage than the current vampire fiction trend, but it's a guilty pleasure I could get onboard with. Fortunately Cathi Unsworth is a far superior writer to the likes of Charlaine Harris (True Blood). Let's not even bother comparing the others. Unsworth came from a British music journalism background, and dove into Derek Raymond-inspired crime noir with The Not Knowing, which I plan to read next. In The Singer, she tracks the story of a down-and-out music journalist who hopes to revive his career by writing a book about could-have-been post-punkers Blood Truth (a band seemingly modeled on The Birthday Party). This is the lightest part of the book, conveying the giddy excitement of forming a band after working class Hull boy Stevie Mullen is inspired by The Sex Pistols and recruits Lynton, the new tall skinny black kid in school, who grew up playing jazz, and learns bass in a couple days, and shy nerd Kevin on drums. Fittingly, they meet Vincent Smith at a Sex Pistols show after he gets whacked in the head for kissing Sid Vicious' bass. Unsworth pulls out her tricks in describing the eerie charisma of Smith as if he were a vampire for teenybopper tweenies to slaver over. Continue...
Favorite Albums Growin' Up
I spent some time recently listening to some AOR albums from 25-30 years ago (Poll: MOR/AOR/Arena Rock Albums 1983-85). Some I had never heard in their entirety, others I liked as a kid, which gave me flashbacks to the excitement I felt at buying my first records, and getting those first RCA/Columbia shipments with six or seven albums. There were a lot of favorites that I became embarrassed of when I was a teenager, but now I think they’re not so bad. Even the likes of Loverboy and the Fixx still have some decent jams. My top favorites from those years have mostly changed, especially when I became fascinated by the hidden world of post-punk that I had brushed up against but didn't really discover until I read the Trouser Press Record Guide years later. Continue...
2009 Year-End Summary
I always look forward to year-end (or decade-end) lists every December. It's a great way to catch up on some great albums I missed throughout the year. But inevitably I encounter the annoying tendency for many of the participants to whine about how they think lists are stupid but they're forced to feed their vampiric readers' list-lust. Or the self-deprecating, "shucks, I'm not qualified to tell you what the best albums are, I haven't heard enough, and it's all subjective anyway." Of course it's subjective, FFS. But the least you could do is do your job and listen to as large of a sampling as you can.
You're not going to get that crap here. I'm uniquely qualified to make lists. I started listing the best records that belong to my family as soon as I could learn to write, and haven't stopped since. I listen to more new music (usually over 500 albums a year) than all but a small handful of people on this planet. Most of them are disqualified because they are either not sane, or do not use their powers for lists. I am the king of lists. Pump me with enough whiskey and you might see me stand on the table and proclaim myself your patron saint of lists. Switch to tequlia and I'm your Fucking Bastard God Of Lists. You might not agree with all of my list, but I could make your own personal list better than you could, because you probably only listened to a half-assed baker's dozen of new albums this year. Didn't you. Shame on you. While you probably don't deserve it, I could do it for you. All I'd need is a glance at your music collection, or your pathetic iTunes catalog, and you'd have to voluntarily take a roofie to reveal your guilty pleasures. If that makes you nervous, you could opt for the alternate brain probe. I take cash, money order and PayPal. Continue...
Top 100 Albums of 2009 | 2009 Breakdown: Top 13 Genre Lists | Singles, Shows, Movies & Books
Best of the 00s
It's been a blur of stolen elections, downspiraling economies, mounting debt, and a paranoid entertainment industry relentlessly jerking their customers around, yadda yadda. I'll skip the futility of trying to encapsulate what it all meant. Despite everything, some great albums were written, recorded, released, sold, bought, consumed, ripped, and re-consumed. Despite alarmist reports to the contrary, the album is not dead. Nothing has effectively replaced it, and every album of this list can still be found on CD. There are certainly some people who stopped buying or even listening to whole albums, but they don't really like music all that much anyway and don't count. The era of blockbusters of course is over, because the industry no longer has a stranglehold on bottlenecking the variety of what we choose to listen to. As much as they'd like twenty million people to all buy the same ten albums at Walmart, we have a far wider variety of choices than ever before. The era of consensus is over, and canons are always questionable. That may sound strange coming from a compulsive listmaker, but I'm all for supporting a variety of opinions. Lists aren't very interesting if they're all alike. Just because lists can be challenged doesn't mean they aren't valuable. When I first started working on my decade list in 2007, I used critic's polls and books like the MOJO Collection and 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die to find albums I've overlooked, reconsidered ones I've dismissed, and get a different perspective on ones I'm familiar with. Whether I agree or not, I often hear things I didn't notice before. Continue...
Top 200 Albums of the 00s | Top 60 Artists | 00s Breakdown: Top 13 Genre Lists | Top 100 Movies | Top 60 Shows | Top 13 Books - Fiction; Music & Rock 'n' Roll Fiction; Graphic Novels & Comics
Magnet Magazine: Fast 'n' Bulbous was reviewed in the Nov/Dec 2003 issue of Magnet, the best music magazine in North America (I'm not just saying that cuz they reviewed me, really. I've been a subscriber since issue 3).
The Wire Magazine: Adventures In Modern Music. Fast 'n' Bulbous was reviewed in the February 2001 issue of The Wire, a British magazine that covers "electronica, avant rock, breakbeat, jazz, modern classical, global and sounds from the outer limits."
