Juke Box

Went and saw Iron Maiden at Madison Square Garden, with Dio and Motorhead opening up. The last time I saw Dio was also at the Garden, but he was headlining, with Accept opening. That was in 1986. Times have changed; he doesn’t have a robot dragon shooting lasers from its eyes anymore.

Motorhead were great, though slightly sloppy and almost painfully loud. When they began playing, the house was only half-full, so their sound was roaring and bouncing off the concrete. They played nine songs in 40 minutes—”We Are Motorhead,” “No Class,” “Metropolis,” “Doctor Rock,” “RAMONES,” “Killed By Death,” “Sacrifice” (with drum solo), “Ace Of Spades” and “Overkill” (the long version). A fast, tight, punishing set. Shame they didn’t play anything from Hammered; it’s a great album. Go buy it, you fuckers.

I’m bored today. I’m in a slump. I’ve got lots of work that needs doing, but somehow can’t quite muster up the energy to actually do any of it. I’m sitting around my office, opening boxes of porn videos and just not feeling even slightly intrigued by any of them. The flesh holds no more mysteries, not for me anyway.

There is one movie I got the other day that I’d kind of like to watch, but I think somebody already stole it out of my office. It’s called Pull My Hair And Call Me Stupid. Young-looking girls (none older than, at most, 22) being ass-fucked and verbally abused by guys in their late 30s or early 40s. Real charming stuff. Like I said, I think it’s already been stolen out of my office. Material of that nature tends to disappear quickly.

Read a quote earlier that “Black parents say a white guy shouldn’t teach black history”.

From the article:

>Phyllis Yarber Hogan, a member of the Oberlin Black Alliance for Progress, said a white teacher wouldn’t be well-suited to teaching students about subjects like slavery. “When you talk about slavery, students need to understand it is not our fault,” she said. “Our ancestors did nothing wrong to be enslaved. How do you work through that when the person teaching it is the same type of person who did the enslaving?”

Yeah, she sounds real committed to progress. What a bunch of morons these people must be.

John McWhorter wrote a piece in the City Paper http://www.city-journal.org/html/13_3_how_hip_hop.html a few years back about hip-hop, and that’s what I want to talk about today.

Most of it is poorly aimed, ill-considered boilerplate. McWhorter criticizes Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message” for its bleak lyrical tone, but cuts off the verse he quotes before getting to the “punch line,” in which Melle Mel warns the listener not to turn to crime, that it’s not glamorous, and that it brings nothing but destruction. “The Message” is actually one of the best examples of rap’s potential for imparting lessons, but McWhorter (possibly on purpose) misses that.

However, he does make one reasonable point:

16, Zoloft Smile
Cryptic Slaughter, Convicted
Cryptic Slaughter, Money Talks
Deftones, s/t
The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Are You Experienced?
Hank Mobley, No Room For Squares
Lee Morgan, The Rumproller
Hilton Ruiz, Enchantment
Sonny & Linda Sharrock, Paradise
DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid, Optometry
Vader, Revelations
David S. Ware, Third Ear Recitation

A really funny old interview with some douchebag writer whose book I’m probably never going to read.

In other news a ridiculous survey published in Germany says 1/3 of Germans under 30 believe the U.S. had something to do with 9/11.

Heh.

His take? “No more do I want to hear that Europeans are more sophisticated than Americans…the lunatic fringe is going mainstream.”

The phrase “more sophisticated than Americans” is the crucial hedge. Because, as we all remember, something like 40% of Americans surveyed by CNN thought the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqis.

Even if this survey did prove that Germans were as dumb as Americans, that wouldn’t be news. But since it does nothing of the kind, there’s even less of a point to this whole thing.

I was listening to the Miles set (Disc 1) on the train this morning, and early in the ride I shut it off and put my walkman in my bag and sat there reading, enfolded in the actual sounds of the world around me. There was just too much noise to tolerate in the subway, so I plugged in Kousokuya (Japanese heavy psych-guitar-assault w/female vocals), but when I got to the office I realized I didn’t want to listen to anything that demanded concentration. Instead, I wanted sonic comfort, a buffer to fill the room, and very little else. So I’m listening to all six Van Halen albums, in order, on MP3.

Today’s stack of CDs:

Acid Mothers Temple and the Melting Paraiso U.F.O., Electric Heavyland
Antipop Consortium, Antipop vs. Matthew Shipp
Art Ensemble of Chicago, Americans Swinging in Paris
John Coltrane, In Europe, Disc One
Dimmu Borgir, Puritanical Euphoric Misanthropia
Farmersmanual, Explorers We
Opeth, Deliverance
Cecil Taylor, Conquistador!
Yes, Yessongs

I bought the two-disc version of Jimi Hendrix’s Blue Wild Angel: Jimi Hendrix Live at the Isle of Wight on Tuesday, as my final CD purchase of 2005. I haven’t finished listening to it yet, but so far it’s…well, it’s pretty ordinary. In a way, it’s kind of cool to know that The Greatest Human To Ever Finger A Fretboard had off nights just like any other musician. To take but one example, did “Machine Gun” really need to be 22 minutes long? And did it need a drum solo? No, and no. There’s some typically fine music on the double-disc, but overall it really doesn’t show Hendrix in the best possible light. Some of his run-throughs of “classic” tunes like “Purple Haze” are perfunctory, a fact which shouldn’t surprise anybody; he’d been playing the song for four years at that point—anyone would have gotten bored with it. I’m not sure this is a concert that should have been edited down to a single “highlights” disc the way it has been, though—it seems to me that Hendrix’s divine status virtually demands that his stuff be heard in full, fuck-ups, toss-offs and all. But I know most people only want the good stuff. So maybe they should stay away from Blue Wild Angel entirely.

It’s important to start a new year off right. So I’m spending today listening to the first six Black Sabbath albums, in order.

Black Sabbath Lyrics

Released: February 13, 1970 – A Friday, no less!

1. Black Sabbath (6:16)
2. The Wizard (4:18)
3. Wasp, Behind the Wall of Sleep, Basically, N.I.B. (10:40)
4. Wicked World (4:42) / Evil Woman (3:22)
5. A Bit of Finger, Sleeping Village, Warning (14:20)