south park last night had stan joining the goth kids following his break-up with wendy. ("dude, if you want to be a non-conformist you have to drink coffee like us...") today, in the midst of a long-overdue but typically ridiculous adventure involving my blogmate and i driving in circles in the north suburbs trying to find suitably low-brow lunch in an office park, we reviewed our own phases of music identity, and mostly why they'd failed. highlights?
1) consensus that we'd both tried to do the phish/widespread panic jam band scene, but while we liked the music on cd, didn't like the live scene enough, mostly because we weren't high enough, and that it takes too much pot for a newbie to be high enough to enjoy phish solos.
2) consensus that we'd both tried the raver look, but while we both enjoyed the baggy jeans and little dr. seuss t-shirts, that i was vaguely surprised to discover that the look seemed to come with bad techno music, and that my blogmate was unwilling to drop acid and lose hours of brain control just in order to wear cute t-shirts.
3) me reassuring my blogmate that i never really was a goth, but that i had lots of friends who were goths, and that my college roommate and i spent lots of saturdays making fun of them as sport.
4) both of us going through a surprisingly angst-less nine inch nails phase.
fast forward to current musical tastes:
5) my blogmate's desire to be a better music critic, but unwillingness to spend time learning about new bands, and resultant embarrassment when around our much more music-cool friends m and n.
6) my desire to like indie rock, but as i eloquently stated, "my problem with indie rock is that i don't like it..." and "i kind of just want to listen to happy music like jack johnson without the embarrassment of actually liking jack johnson."
so our tastes seem to be informed by our sloth.
enter butters, also from last night's episode: "i'd rather be a crying little pussy than a faggy goth kid."
but while we may be lazy on the discovery forefront, there's no end to how much energy we can spend hating mainstream trends. i was pleased to discover:
7) i don't love coldplay x&y. it sounds like old u2 but more boring. i do, however, love the vh1 i-love-the-whatever-decade episode where two guys hypothesize that everything looks more dramatic when you play coldplay in the background, and promptly re-enact a) touching each other, and b) touching each other to coldplay in a slow-mo gay-love-scene demonstration. as my blogmate said, "coldplay makes great homoerotic background music."
so. since i think our readership has more energy and taste than we do, we hereby invite suggestions for new phases of music and artists we should like. criteria? a) we are cynical but not angry. b) no broken-down-and-self-important (i.e. counting crows). c) we accept "barbecue" as a valid genre.
thank you for your support.
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12 comments:
Congradulations on not liking Coldplay! They're repetative and feature a member dim enought to we Gwenyth Paltrow.
My suggestion would be the Super Furry Animals. They:
1. Are melodic and often happy sounding.
2. Have credibility.
3. Sing some cynical lyrics.
4. Will tour the States come spring with an inevitable stop in Chicago.
There's other reasons, of course.
Pat
your reference to the greatest tv character ever, butters, has finally put me over the top...i need to link to your blog on my pals page, but i need a picture to do it. this obviously presents a problem, since there are 2 contributors. however, i think with some photo-editing software, you two could manage to create a hybrid photo, much like peter did with the photo of jesus covered with a half photo of the incredible hulk. it could work, i think. please email with an appropriate picture to use when you get some time.
if you do this, i will mail you a magnet of Professor Chaos that will make all your friends jealous.
i would suggest The Shins. classify them under "something miserable is done, i am happy."(smidiah?) it works for after-work, after-school, after-bar, etc.
some of The New Pornographers songs would work there too, and you could throw in Mates of State.
we have such wise readership!
- in high school i worked with a guy whose pants were so big they kept falling down while he was bussing tables. i counted pants-hitchings one shift: 115. hee hee, i forgot that look.
- is super furry animals touring this november in chicago, or was the website i saw outdated? i'll have to hurry and jump on the bandwagon!
-we not only have a new genre, it has its own acronym already! awesome!
i should clarify my indie rock issue as one of confusion. what kind of genre is "indie?" it's like "etc."
Hmmm.... must be an old site. The updated one has them in England and Japan. No American dates.
Indie is the new alternative. Things that don't fit "Rock", "Folk", etc. are lumped in there. Alternative just isn't credible enough these days.
Well I'll be god damned! They are here this November. I found it on VH-1 of all places. Thanks for the heads up!
yeah, alternative never made sense either... but alternative was mostly grunge/seattle/doc martens scene, and even if it was a prime example of non-conformity-just-like-everyone-else, at least a genre like "alternative" was at least funny in that it only presented one alternative. now stuff that sounds like the-artists-formerly-known-as-alternative all gets lumped into rock, or gets played on best-of-the-80s-90s-and-more.
indie is kind of something else- stuff not covered on major recording labels? on my admittedly lazy tour thru indie rock, it seems like it covers that '50s throwback rock (which i like a lot), jangly discordant boy-music (which just makes me feel like i'm in my brother's car), quasi-folk... i think my indie complaint is the same as my music-in-general complaint. where's my pigeonhole so i can understand and mock all at once? i need subcategories. (except at starbucks, in which case i mock the subcategories during all seasons except october when the non-fat pumpkin-spice half-caf latte comes out.)
n, m- where are u? this one's practically made for you.
I'm sorry, but if the bestof2004 hasn't inspired any spirits within, I may not be of much help. First of all, though, you should put it out of your head right now that M has good taste in music. She likes about 4 bands, all of which sound the same.
You've gotten some good suggestions already, mates of state are one of my top tens, and i'm seeing them for the tenth time live on 10/6. Read various past blog posts for reviews. New pornographers are impossible to dislike, unless you are some sort of giant asshole who hates mindblowingly catchy fun music. SFAs are good as well.
CDs can be burned, bestof 2005 coming in a few months, but the trick here is understanding what you guys want to hear. At times i fear that you've, in your old age, jumped off the new music train and will be content listening to your current record collection and attending overpriced shows at the new school of folk music until your eardrums inevitably kill themselves.
I wouldn't say you necessarily have bad taste in music, but only that you are picky to the point of disliking everything. give me a genre and I will give you a top ten list, but don't ask me to perform miracles.
p.s. I'm kind of in a bad mood right now.
dear sweet angry n, i love bestof2004 and in fact commissioned a barbecue (partially) in its honor. i have been ever so remiss in my not mentioning its rulingness in this entire post. i made mb figure out for me today why no internet radio was working since his acquisition of an mp3 player for his birthday (i am a very good girlfriend) so we could listen to all of our new band suggestions, all of which i like so far. my real points are few and far between, and include the following:
1) indie is a weird pigeonhole
2) both my blogmate and i actually liked all of the music contained in all of the previously mentioned pigeonholes; we just thought the pigeonholes were decorated funny
3) you're giving us (me, at least) far too much credit to assume i was ever on the new music bandwagon, or that i pay money for shows at the school of folk music.
i, for one, am desperately trying to get back on the new music bandwagon. true, i'm just starting to buy new cd's again after a 5 year hiatus (only to discover that buying actual cd's- rather than virtual ones seems to be tragically passe)- but i blame the music industry a little bit. i'm sure that that there's been a constant stream of good stuff in the decade since the alterna-craze, but unless you really went looking it was all about the buena vista social club and norah jones (good but not edgy).
and while i'd like to think that my new cd-buying craze has something to do with my dusting off the cobwebs of my intrinsic hip-ness, i have to admit that 1) the only reason that my blogmate listened to the new coldplay cd long enough to have rant material is that i actually own it, and that 2) i have alterior motive. as i explained to the bride a few months ago, with my 30th birthday looming in the not-so-distant future i've decided to take one more stab at being edgy and sophisticated in the hope that it might deviate my fate away from a lonely life of cats and james taylor.
in otherwords, n, please make me cool again...
Hey, we're going to see Saturday looks good to me on thursday night, see here for more info:
http://darkroom.indietickets.com/tickets/customer/home.php
I'm afraid it will be too high class and arty for M and I to handle on our own (being sponsored by a website with naked girls on it and all) so the more the less awkward. Plus its only 7 dollars.
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