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pseydtonneI've been thinking about doing the Decade In Review post meme. I probably will, but I need to sit down and write. Tonight and tomorrow night probably won't be those days, but Friday could be good.
For now I'd like to create a little meme of my own, and I shall include my own sample.
Is there a band you fell in love with but can't figure out why anymore? Perhaps that band was amazing live but could never put that energy onto a recording. Perhaps you found out about the band before they got big and changed. Perhaps you got into the band at its height and its subsequent releases could never come back to that feeling. Perhaps the music isn't bad, but you know too much about the musicians' lives and can't look at the songs without thinking about the context of the text. Did the facts weigh more than the emotions?
I want to give several examples, but I'll start with one: Midnight Oil. They cover more than one of the above.
I learned about Midnight Oil back when I was in junior high school and "Diesel and Dust" came out. That was one of the first five CDs I bought, back when they came in long boxes that took forever to open. This was also back when listening to a CD meant sitting at the stereo, when a discman could a couple hundred and took six AA batteries to play for four hours. I would listen to some tracks over and over, but wound up avoiding several tracks for years.
I didn't want every track from the album, so I'd put a few tracks on a mix tape and play that until it wore thin. Somehow "Dreamland", "Arctic World" and "Warukana" wound up embedded in my head but I was in shock a decade later when I listened to the track right before those three and realized it was the same album.
Midnight Oil was political, enough so to make me feel guilty. What was I doing, other than listening to my own guilt? How could I be making things better? As an adult, I wonder why I took this so seriously.
I found a copy of the first album, which shocked me by being nine years older than their MTV hit. It took that long? The album was clearly a first album, but it wasn't too bad. I noticed that their previous albums would have one or two good songs and then a lot of leftovers, as if the effort were about one hit and some filler -- a 1950s kind of effort in the 1980s.
There was one major exception to this: their 1983 album "10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1". This has a theme running through it and it executes it with highs and lows. Even the slowest song on the album, "Scream in Blue", serves a purpose and sets up the ramp-up on the flip side of the album.
When I went to Australia, I was hoping to find bootleg live shows or other Midnight Oil stuff that was not worth exporting. Instead I learned that Aussie albums are aud20, imports are aud30 and no one buys in-country because the tariffs are ridiculous. The Canadian habit of cross-border shopping exists in Australia, only they schlep to Vietnam or Bali. I wanted to hunt a lot more, but I was tired of getting stuck in torrential rain. I went north and wound up on the Lismore Road mentioned in "Outside World".
A lot of other lines from that song also suddenly made sense instead of seeming abstract. "It's the summer of another year, a little world-weary, a little more to fear." New Year's Day happens at the beginning of summer there, which is obvious. Nevertheless the sense of "oh it's summer, time for new year's resolutions and reflection" didn't hit me until I was stuck in their winter solstice in June.
Peter Garrett had spent decades being a dedicated leftie. He was fervent and everywhere about it. Then one day he left the Greens for Labour, started trash-talking anyone voting against his old party and got himself into a scandal. Suddenly his holier-than-thou stance on native rights in Australia fell into a paper mill and drowned in Port Philip (nowhere near his riding, which by the way is out by Sydney Airport).
I guess we all grow up. I used to pick on my mom for smoking: now she hasn't smoked in fifteen years and I wish I could take up smoking to keep from eating.
At some point I picked up a copy of Red Sails in the Sunset, their 1985 album. I think I bought it two years ago because it has a big red dot on the back, a pricing system used at the Electric Mindshaft in Scranton. I had never played the disc until today, when I grabbed it from the To Be Ripped shelf in my bedroom. (Yes, I have that many items to create queues. Even though the process only takes five minutes per disc, I hadn't ripped anything while my old MP3 player was full all the time.)
I am listening to this album for the first time and just not digging it. I can hear the band moving away from obvious synth fills and gimmicky stereo gating on the drums, toward the leaner approach to song composition that would make Diesel and Dust so MTV-ready. There are a couple good tracks, such as Kosciusko --
The intellectual part of me thinks, "That word should be pronounced 'kuh-SHEW-skoh', not 'KAzee-OSco'";
The rawkgod in me says "I never thought that would make a good rallying cry but it totally works";
The chord lover in me loves the changes during the chorus and the violins in the bridge;
The singalong part of me can't seem to memorize much of it: the words "Alice Springs" stick, as does the chorus, but the connective tissue isn't connecting.
Then I get a song like "Jimmy Sharman's Boxers". The song starts quietly and builds into its minor-chord scare. It gets louder and louder, asking a clear question: "what are we fighting for?" Then it changes to another song in the last third and never really resolves. I feel like I was primed and left alone. Was that the point -- they don't know why white folks fight so much, so we get no tonal resolution?
Why do I want so much from this album? Perhaps I've been listening to the same two tracks too long. Why do i want there to be more to this than "hey, I liked some tracks but not all of every album?"
I probably still know more about the band than really matters. I look up references in songs. I was far more familiar with Australian history than any other traveller I met while I was there, and I had only planned a trip five weeks before I left.
Midnight Oil seemed like a beacon of historical knowledge and political will when I was coming of age. Now I'm the age of a typical session musician. Australia is a country I want to visit again and I always recommend if you want to see life in Cinerama. Maybe I'm just older.
For now I'd like to create a little meme of my own, and I shall include my own sample.
Is there a band you fell in love with but can't figure out why anymore? Perhaps that band was amazing live but could never put that energy onto a recording. Perhaps you found out about the band before they got big and changed. Perhaps you got into the band at its height and its subsequent releases could never come back to that feeling. Perhaps the music isn't bad, but you know too much about the musicians' lives and can't look at the songs without thinking about the context of the text. Did the facts weigh more than the emotions?
I want to give several examples, but I'll start with one: Midnight Oil. They cover more than one of the above.
I learned about Midnight Oil back when I was in junior high school and "Diesel and Dust" came out. That was one of the first five CDs I bought, back when they came in long boxes that took forever to open. This was also back when listening to a CD meant sitting at the stereo, when a discman could a couple hundred and took six AA batteries to play for four hours. I would listen to some tracks over and over, but wound up avoiding several tracks for years.
I didn't want every track from the album, so I'd put a few tracks on a mix tape and play that until it wore thin. Somehow "Dreamland", "Arctic World" and "Warukana" wound up embedded in my head but I was in shock a decade later when I listened to the track right before those three and realized it was the same album.
Midnight Oil was political, enough so to make me feel guilty. What was I doing, other than listening to my own guilt? How could I be making things better? As an adult, I wonder why I took this so seriously.
I found a copy of the first album, which shocked me by being nine years older than their MTV hit. It took that long? The album was clearly a first album, but it wasn't too bad. I noticed that their previous albums would have one or two good songs and then a lot of leftovers, as if the effort were about one hit and some filler -- a 1950s kind of effort in the 1980s.
There was one major exception to this: their 1983 album "10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1". This has a theme running through it and it executes it with highs and lows. Even the slowest song on the album, "Scream in Blue", serves a purpose and sets up the ramp-up on the flip side of the album.
When I went to Australia, I was hoping to find bootleg live shows or other Midnight Oil stuff that was not worth exporting. Instead I learned that Aussie albums are aud20, imports are aud30 and no one buys in-country because the tariffs are ridiculous. The Canadian habit of cross-border shopping exists in Australia, only they schlep to Vietnam or Bali. I wanted to hunt a lot more, but I was tired of getting stuck in torrential rain. I went north and wound up on the Lismore Road mentioned in "Outside World".
A lot of other lines from that song also suddenly made sense instead of seeming abstract. "It's the summer of another year, a little world-weary, a little more to fear." New Year's Day happens at the beginning of summer there, which is obvious. Nevertheless the sense of "oh it's summer, time for new year's resolutions and reflection" didn't hit me until I was stuck in their winter solstice in June.
Peter Garrett had spent decades being a dedicated leftie. He was fervent and everywhere about it. Then one day he left the Greens for Labour, started trash-talking anyone voting against his old party and got himself into a scandal. Suddenly his holier-than-thou stance on native rights in Australia fell into a paper mill and drowned in Port Philip (nowhere near his riding, which by the way is out by Sydney Airport).
I guess we all grow up. I used to pick on my mom for smoking: now she hasn't smoked in fifteen years and I wish I could take up smoking to keep from eating.
At some point I picked up a copy of Red Sails in the Sunset, their 1985 album. I think I bought it two years ago because it has a big red dot on the back, a pricing system used at the Electric Mindshaft in Scranton. I had never played the disc until today, when I grabbed it from the To Be Ripped shelf in my bedroom. (Yes, I have that many items to create queues. Even though the process only takes five minutes per disc, I hadn't ripped anything while my old MP3 player was full all the time.)
I am listening to this album for the first time and just not digging it. I can hear the band moving away from obvious synth fills and gimmicky stereo gating on the drums, toward the leaner approach to song composition that would make Diesel and Dust so MTV-ready. There are a couple good tracks, such as Kosciusko --
The intellectual part of me thinks, "That word should be pronounced 'kuh-SHEW-skoh', not 'KAzee-OSco'";
The rawkgod in me says "I never thought that would make a good rallying cry but it totally works";
The chord lover in me loves the changes during the chorus and the violins in the bridge;
The singalong part of me can't seem to memorize much of it: the words "Alice Springs" stick, as does the chorus, but the connective tissue isn't connecting.
Then I get a song like "Jimmy Sharman's Boxers". The song starts quietly and builds into its minor-chord scare. It gets louder and louder, asking a clear question: "what are we fighting for?" Then it changes to another song in the last third and never really resolves. I feel like I was primed and left alone. Was that the point -- they don't know why white folks fight so much, so we get no tonal resolution?
Why do I want so much from this album? Perhaps I've been listening to the same two tracks too long. Why do i want there to be more to this than "hey, I liked some tracks but not all of every album?"
I probably still know more about the band than really matters. I look up references in songs. I was far more familiar with Australian history than any other traveller I met while I was there, and I had only planned a trip five weeks before I left.
Midnight Oil seemed like a beacon of historical knowledge and political will when I was coming of age. Now I'm the age of a typical session musician. Australia is a country I want to visit again and I always recommend if you want to see life in Cinerama. Maybe I'm just older.
