NEW MUSIC FOR OLDS #3
Do I love this song, or is it crippling abdominal pain?
Greetings! I’m writing this while getting over a brief but intense bout of food poisoning. I’d already written a good chunk of this week’s newsletter a few days ago, so see if you can figure out which sections are the work of a rational mind and which parts evoke the sweaty rantings of a man being dragged into Hell.
Maestro…?
GOOD STUFF
As always, a Glossary of Terms.
Wet Leg, “Angelica”
Listen on Apple Music // Listen on Amazon Music
Album: Wet Leg
Nutshell: Pop earworm that flirts with novelty, but never succumbs.
Voltage: 6
Thoughts: An absolute sugar cube of a tune. Not just for its cheerfulness, but for its streamlined simplicity. It’s like they boiled away every single moment that isn’t “catchy”—(almost) no drum fills, no improvisation, no loose ends. This is Wet Leg’s fourth single, and they all display that dry wit that makes you wonder “Is this band a joke?” I could see them wearing thin pretty quick, but for some fun-on-the-first-listen empty calories, you won’t go wrong with Wet Leg.
Pairing Suggestion: Strutting around while ever-so-slightly sucking in your cheeks.
Greet Death, “Panic Song”
Listen on Apple Music // Listen on Amazon Music
Album: Panic Song (E.P.)
Nutshell: 120 Minutes-style style shoegaze fuzz
Voltage: 7
Thoughts: Don’t let the name or title put you off. There’s a lot of noise here to be sure, but the song is is downright wholesome. The sloppy-sweet vibe brings to mind Dinosaur Jr’s cover of The Cure’s “Just Like Heaven”. I wish the vocals were 10% higher in the mix, but I accept that murky production is a deliberate aesthetic. Doesn’t stop it from being great.
Pairing Suggestion: Spinning in a circle with your eyes closed until you get dizzy and collapse.
Komorebi, “I’ll Be Your Someone”
Listen on Apple Music // Listen on Amazon Music
Album: Birds & Bees (E.P.)
Nutshell: Retro video game sounds used in an affecting way
Voltage: 4
Thoughts: This song answers the question, “What if Princess Peach was kinda…sad? Over the past decade or two, as kids who grew playing Nintendo and Sega Genesis came of age, a niche market has developed for “8-Bit Music”, also known as Chiptune or—in my mind, Mario Bros. music. Simply type “Chiptune” into YouTube and you’ll find a ton of cool stuff. But I’m not sure bleeps and bloops have ever made me feel so melancholy.
Pairing Suggestion: Discovering that your princess is in this castle, but she has her heart set on a different plumber.
FOR FANS OF…[Queen]
First off, a plea: I need suggestions for this segment! Out of the ether, I made a list of older, potentially “favorite” bands and their contemporary analogues, but I would much prefer to use you fine folks as a springboard. So if you want to update a longtime musical obsession, leave it in the comments.
When comparing a band to Queen, is it cheating to recommend an artist that literally recorded an album of Queen covers? I care not! I need to use the bathroom again for the fourth time in an hour, so I’m skipping steps.
I first saw The Protomen at Bonnaroo back in 2009—I was there to shout my material at sweaty festival kids using the “comedy tent” as a way to secure 90 minutes of air conditioning. I saw a ton of great shows that weekend (the lineup was staaaacked), but my fondest memory was nine weirdos playing the Troo-Music-Lounge-Sponsored-By-Budweiser. I’d never heard of the Protomen, but they were hard to ignore.
Look, I won’t to sugarcoat this: The Protomen specialize in concept albums based on the video game Mega Man. There’s more, but why explain when I can simply steer you to their Wikipedia page.
The important thing is, they rock. I know zilch about Mega Man and I doubt it matters. Their original music doesn’t really sound like Queen—it owes more to earnest 80’s radio rock like “Maniac” and the movie Streets of Fire. But they absolutely capture Queen’s cinematic grandiosity. How cinematic, you ask? How does a likely-unlicensed stage production of T2: Judgement Day strike you? Or a 100% sincere cover of “Mr. Roboto”?
I’m guessing Protomen, Inc. isn’t a moneymaking venture, so more than anything I’m happy a goofy band like this exists. They’re touring again, which makes me think we may be on the verge the long-awaited Act III.
Here are a few of my favorites:
The Protomen on Apple Music // The Protomen on Amazon Music
SOME BULLSHIT
In NMFO #1, I mentioned that this is the section where you can safely stop reading. That will never be more true than this week. But if you’re up for it, strap in for some real “OK Boomer” shit.
Wet Leg (mentioned above) is currently the subject of a lot of music geek handwringing. How did they get so popular, so fast? Industry plants? Rich parents? I’m making a concerted effort to not focus on that stuff—not in “Good Stuff,” at least. While I doubt many music writers consider themselves “gatekeepers,” that stuff does have a gatekeeping effect. It may even be why you stopped consuming new music in the first place.
But as someone who reads music blogs but rolls his eyes at most music bloggers, it’s occasionally fascinating to peer down from the cultural bleachers and watch The Narrative be constructed. I’m always surprised by how rarely “music writing” makes me want to listen to the band being written about. It’s a constantly shifting Taxonomy of Importance, where overeducated/underskilled Wesleyan grads use music as a glorified easel upon which to display their own genius.
It’s especially strange when The Narrative works retroactively to fuck with your own personal timeline. Bands that seemed super important when you were a kid are utterly dismissed. I’ll put J. Geils Band in this category, not because they were great but because I grew up in Massachusetts, where radio presented them as sharing Mount Rushmore with The Beatles, Stones and Led Zeppelin.
Other times, inoffensive Lite FM bands you grew up hearing at TJ Maxx are transformed into paradigm-shifting All Time Greats (*cough* Fleetwood Mac). The benefits of age have shown to me that, yes, Fleetwood Mac did leave a larger mark on the culture than J. Geils. But it is disorienting, like someone rearranging the furniture in your childhood home.
For the past decade Duran Duran has been steadily climbing up the Critical Esteem ladder. This may come as a surprise for those of us who lived through about ten years of Duran Duran unfairly being used as shorthand for “empty Eighties excess”, but among tastemaking revisionaries, Duran Duran is now considered, not just good and fun, but…important.
It bums me out a bit.
Let me be clear: I dig me some Duran Duran. For a time they were my favorite band in the world. It may have only been six months, but when you’re nine years old, six months is an eternity. And I’m thrilled that their reputation has been redeemed to the point where pre-teens are tearing through “Rio”.
But maybe we’ve gone too far in exalting our once-guilty pleasures. The Narrative has gone from mocking Duran Duran to deeming them worthy of scholarly dissertation. Is there no middle ground? Because if you put Duran Duran under the same microscope as Little Richard and Joni Mitchell and (sure) Radiohead, they lose a lot of their appeal.
To be fair, some of it is kneejerk hyperbole. As a reaction to Gen X faux-ambivalence, the Millennial social media ruling class has wildly overcorrected. (“Wait wait wait, you only liked [insert perfectly adequate TV show]? Well I LOVED it. I was literally sobbing the whole time!!!)
To me, Duran Duran is like ice cream. Everybody loves ice cream. But we can acknowledge that ice cream, no matter how high the quality, is not, say, a salad. They are different things and we shouldn’t want or expect one to be the other. I say this as someone with a major pro-ice cream bias. I respect salad—blah blah, loyal opposition and whatnot. But when it comes to my dietary choices, ice cream vs salad is not a fair fight.
That said, there’s a difference between preferring ice cream over salad and equating the two. It would be weird if, in the middle of me plowing through a pint of Caramel Cone, I stopped to declare, “Actually, this is a salad. Arugula, Radicchio, gooey caramel—it’s all the same!” Beyond knowing I was deluded, you’d probably think, “I bet that ice cream stinks.”
I refuse to do that to my beloved Duran Duran. Being delicious is its own justification. Let ice cream be ice cream, I say!
Boomer rant concluded. Tell me how much you hated this!
Better yet, encourage other people to hate this as well.
In two weeks I’ll be enjoying a Euro-peen vacation. There will be a newsletter, but it may be truncated, compared to this unwieldy tome. You’re welcome.
Tail-end Gen-X here, and I absolutely co-sign your not-so-boomer thoughts on good music vs. fun. It's the difference between loving music for its technical prowess (Steely Dan) vs. loving it because, as the prophetess Daria stated, "it has a beat and you can dance to it, if you have no shame." It's understanding that Jon Batiste was really onto something in his Grammy speech when he talked about music finding you at the right time and the right place and connecting. Time changes how people are appreciated, as does age. It's really funny watching my cohort of Gen-X wake up and realize that we're in the vaunted 35-54 demographic, when we suddenly become the sweethearts of marketing and our cultural markers are everywhere. That changes this calculus too.
Tl;dr: you're 100% right on.
There's an old quote which may or many not be attributed to the late Paul Williams when the concept of hype infiltrating "our" music was fairly new. It was about the Monkees and it went something like they could outsell anyone in the history of music and remain irrelevant. Although I'd make a case for the Monkees actually having relevance and impact, we've seen that same argument brought up for decades now. Honoring the big-selling, arena -filling occupants of the AOR playlist that many of us had rammed down our eardrums has become a kind of sacrament. Where does the line between what is good and what is popular get drawn? Grand Funk Railroad in 1970 were militantly championed by a lot of teens but they were top 40 fodder by 1973 and totally forgotten by 1976. It's become an annual tradition now for Jann Wenner's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to stir contention for honoring that same old AOR playlist and ignoring artists who have arguably had more influence. Maybe the problem is that the criteria for what constitutes good rock has been a really evasive issue. Rebellion has arguably carried as much weight as the blues. Attacking plasticity and being plastic yourself has been a tactic for Elton John and Billy Joel. Today's trash might be tomorrow's treasure and maybe both at the same time.