'Safe'
There's a lady plays her fav'rite records/On the jukebox ev'ry day/All day long she plays the same old songs/And she believes the things that they say/She sings along with all the saddest songs/And she believes the stories are real/She lets the music dictate the way that she feels.
Bye, Buck. Who's gonna mow your lawn? Who's gonna twang the Tele?
Another splendid exemplar of the Village Voice school of music criticism:
Karen's crypto-candid lyrics, inevitable but not therefore unmoving day-after assessments, pile on the contradictions:
Allow me to be crypto-candid for a moment when I say that I, like many Americans, sometimes find myself.
OMGoth! I just got back from the Sisters of Mercy show. Yes, all the reviews are true: the sound is crap, and the fog machines have been cranked into overdrive, so you can barely see the band. I don't care. I have finally seen SoM live.
Plus, thanks to a couple of happy coincidences, I was standing on the side of the stage when they started playing "Dominion/Mother Russia". No, I didn't get to meet them, but I was 10 feet away from them. Squeee!
Allow me to be crypto-candid for a moment when I say that I, like many Americans, sometimes find myself.
This cracks my shit up. Also, David, as someone who feels completely intimidated by VV crypto-candid patois, I appreciate your mockery.
Crypto-candid, it turns out, works in lots of sentences. Try it yourself!
Nikki Sudden has died.
Almost everytime I post here it seems I've got some depressing musician death news. I only hope I don't get banned from the thread.
Well, based on this blog entry Sudden's death probably wasn't much of a surprise.
This cracks my shit up. Also, David, as someone who feels completely intimidated by VV crypto-candid patois, I appreciate your mockery.
I grew up on the Voice's music writing (and considers it to be the Newsweekly of Record for the 70s and 80s when it had NY Punk and the birth of Rap to document). This is hard for me to stomach. I am sympathetic to the plight of the music writer. It's tough to find a decent angle on it, and match your prose accordingly. But this stretches Bob Christgau's quirks into something grotesque. It's like he's created a bad house-style.
Crypto-candid! Crypto-candid!
I'm going for transparently oblique, myself.
Shame about Nikki Sudden. Shame that both he and Epic Soundtracks died at relatively young ages, too.
Well, based on this blog entry Sudden's death probably wasn't much of a surprise.
The Replacements ode "Johnny's Gonna Die" was part of the long-term Johnny Thunders death-watch. Nikki was the same junkie flavor of self-destruction. I'll post "Jangle Town" tonight. He was still an interesting musician.
There's a whole class of musicians who took that Keith Richards idolatry to heart. It always seemed kind of funny to me. Not that Keith isn't worth adulation, but the Keith wannabees (Nikki, Peter Perrett, Miami Steve, Johnny Thunders, Steve Tyler and Joe Perry, all of Guns n' Roses...) just seemed to not get it, because they were trying so hard to be that thing. The point of Keith Richards is that he didn't try hard to be Keith Richards.
From the 33 1/3 site:
NMH chat on WNYC, Monday March 27th
Kim Cooper, author of our Neutral Milk Hotel book, will be discussing the book and the album on WNYC's Soundcheck radio show on Monday afternoon, 2-3pm Eastern Time. 93.9FM if you're local, online if you're not.
I only caught the last couple minutes. Should be archived within the next couple hours.