My Year in Lists: Week Twenty Four

By Jordan

My Year in Lists chronicles one blogger’s quest to understand why music matters to us and what makes it a lasting aspect of our existence. To facilitate this examination, three music fans have contributed a list of 52 essential albums. Each week this year, one album off of each list will be analyzed in an attempt to understand why some music sticks with us and what it means for our lives.

“If Never Mind the Bollocks and London Calling are held up as punk masterpieces, then there’s no question that Singles Going Steady belongs alongside them […] As for the music, anybody who ever combined full-blast rock, catchy melodies, and romantic and social anxieties owes something to what the classic quartet did here.”-Ned Ragget, Allmusic

“War seemed to be the motif for 1982.”-Bono

Every song (at least every good one) has a theme. Some albums manage to carry a singular theme throughout their runtimes. Some of these are concept albums, which attempt to create a narrative that drives the entire album. Some of them, however, are just albums that display a singular focus and an idea that was operating behind the scenes during the creation of these albums. This week, we will examine three such albums, three works that, while not constructed as concept albums or purposefully developed around a single theme still manage to display one message consistently throughout. Whether that message is one of love, peace, or sex (as they are in our three albums this week), we will look at how that message becomes an essential part of the album.

In early 1975, Howard Trafford placed a notice looking for other musicians who enjoyed The Velvet Underground's“Sister Ray” (it’s a marvel how many bands came together, not only in the days following the release of The Velvet Underground & Nico, when it is said that every person who bought the album formed a band, but in the ensuing years using the band as a touchstone to seek out other passionate and like-minded musicians). Peter McNeish, a fellow student at the Bolton Institute of Technology, responded to the notice, though he played mostly rock music and Trafford mostly electronic music. McNeish assumed the stage name Pete Shelley; Trafford became Howard Devoto, and along with Garth Davies on bass guitar and Mick Singleton on drums, they became the Buzzcocks, a name they selected after reading a review of the TV series Rock Follies in Time Out Magazine that said, “it’s the buzz, cocks!” (to be clear, at the time, “cocks” was slang for friend in Manchester).

By the end of 1976, the Buzzcocks had formed their own label, New Hormones and self-released their debut EP Spiral Scratch (they were one of the first punk bands to form their own label, a practice that would be essential to the alternative movement in the 1980’s when several underground bands were forced to form labels for themselves to get their music and that of other smaller bands released). The band’s trademark sound is a marriage of catchy pop melodies with punkish energy and guitar riffs, backed by a tight and skilled rhythm section that sets them apart from their traditionally under-trained and ill-talented (at least in the traditional musical practice of properly “playing an instrument”) brethren in the early punk movement. From the first, the Buzzcocks were a different kind of punk band: vocally and in their guitar patterns, they sounded punk, but compositionally, lyrically, and in presentation, they were a different beast entirely.

During their initial career (like many bands of the era, they have reunited for several more albums in the last two decades) the band released only three studio albums, and one compilation of their singles and B-sides. This compilation, released after their third album as they planned their (never to materialize in the original era) fourth, is Tab’s pick this week, the aptly titled Singles Going Steady. Rather than feeling like a piecemeal collection of releases, the album is a near constant parade of excellence, running an impressive gamut of emotions and dealing with subjects both political and romantic.

The album’s opening track “Orgasm Addict” is a tongue in cheek look at a sex crazed teenager that includes a fake orgasm vocal break, just in case the point would not have landed otherwise. “What Do I Get?” is a classic ode to teen angst, full of pained cries about lacking love, luck, and appreciation.

The most well known song on the album by far, and in fact the most famous song the band ever recorded is the justly touted and deservedly well known masterpiece “Ever Fallen in Love?” Written after the band watched Guys and Dolls, which includes the line “Have you ever fallen in love with someone you shouldn’t have?” Shelley wrote the lyrics the next day while sitting in a van outside the post office; the music was soon to follow. This song stands out amongst even the sea of successes that makes up Singles Going Steady, not only because it is the band’s best song (and I don’t think I’m alone in holding that opinion) but because it so well illustrates the way in which the Buzzcocks stood out in the early day of punk rock.

While bands like Sex Pistols, The Clash, and The Ramones were, at their essence, rebellions against popular music and musical conventions, the Buzzcocks had a clear respect for what had come before, and often integrated classic pop themes and melodies into their compositions. While played at punk speeds and sung in a punkish register (a sound that is hard to describe, but to my ear always sounds like a melodic howl of angst), “Ever Fallen in Love?” is basically a standard pop song, with a hooky melody and a focus on love that is more common in pop and rock than in punk. It isn’t too hard to imagine “Ever Fallen in Love?” having been recorded a decade and a half before its release by The Beatles during their early days (hell, I think it would have fit very well on Help!), and I’m not sure there’s a higher compliment I can pay to a song than saying The Beatles could have written it.

“Everybody’s Happy Nowadays” is a deeply cynical song, but that somehow doesn’t preclude it from being an insanely catchy one. “Harmony in my Head” is one of the few Buzzcocks songs written and performed by guitarist Steve Diggle, who reputedly smoked 20 consecutive cigarettes to achieve the gruff sound of the vocals. The album’s closing track “Something’s Gone Wrong Again” is a song about Murphy’s Law style worries (verging on full paranoia) that is so melodically complex it almost leaves behind the band’s punkish roots entirely.

The theme behind Singles Going Steady is one of love, an uncommon message for a punk album. Not every track is explicitly about love, but the band makes every effort to sing about love and romance regularly throughout. This theme ties in perfectly to the band’s tendencies to color outside the punk lines and to look back for influences both lyrically and musically.

The Buzzcocks are rarely heralded among the great punk bands of all time. To my mind this is because of their willingness to break the punk rules. It is conventional wisdom that punk began as a rebellion against what was seen as the strict and binding rules of popular music, but quickly devolved into sects as people tired of adhering to the quickly developed “rules of punk.” Bands had to play a certain way, dress a certain way, act a certain way and write about certain things, lest they be ostracized from the punk community. Of course, true punk bands that cropped up later in the life of the genre broke these rules as a way of displaying just how punk rock they were, but the Buzzcocks were breaking them long before people had even realized what they were. Some might argue this renders the band outside of the punk genre; I would disagree. To my mind, the Buzzcocks are unheralded punk pioneers, taking the sound of the genre and melding it with melodies and themes that were decidedly un-punk to create something unique in the punk pantheon.

U2 is the biggest rock band in the world. Whether or not that statement remains true today, that was certainly the case for a period in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s when the band went through a period of both critical and commercial success that ensures them a place in the rock canon (to my mind, this golden age stretches from The Joshua Tree, which we will discuss in a month, through Rattle and Hum and to Achtung Baby, though I know some who will argue that it continued all the way through 2000’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind). While, as I just mentioned, we will get to The Joshua Tree in time, Collin’s original pick for this week, New Order’s Power, Corruption, Lies was already dealt with in this space back in Week Eight and so I requested that he furnish a replacement. In reply, he suggested we look at the album when the band was first getting its legs, their third studio album, 1983’s War.

Widely regarded as the band’s first overtly political album (but, as anyone who has ever heard Bono speak well knows, not their last), War focuses on both the physical aspects of war, and on its emotional after effects and is the time when, as Simon Reynolds put it, the band, “turned pacifism itself into a crusade.”

The album’s opening track, “Sunday Bloody Sunday” is an ardent protest song detailing the Troubles in Northern Ireland and specifically focusing on Bloody Sunday, the incident in which British Troops shot and killed unarmed civil rights protesters and civilians. The song was an early classic for the band, and instrumental to their breakthrough into the mainstream in America. And while the mere mention of Bono tends to illicit eye rolls at this point, in no small part because of his outspoken activism and politicization of practically everything, “Sunday Bloody Sunday” is a solid song, making a political point but not forgetting to be a rock song at the same time. It’s never subtle by any stretch of the imagination, but it it’s catchy enough that it doesn’t leave a bad taste in my mouth like so much of the band’s later work (especially their last two albums) tends to.

“New Year’s Day” is also an overtly political song, this time about the Polish Solidarity Movement, but again puts the music before the message, at least enough to make it as interesting as a piece of music as it is when viewed as a political message. “Two Hearts Beat As One” is a more traditional love song that indicates some of the potential that the band would fulfill in their golden age, but fails to compel in the way a song like “With or Without You” does; it makes fine listening, but it also tends to slip out of my mind as soon as it’s done. The album’s closing track ‘“40”’ is a modification of Psalm 40 from The Bible. The song was written, recorded and mixed in roughly half an hour, as the band was being kicked out of the studio and realized they needed a good closing song for the album. The song is fairly perfect as a coda to War, and has endured as a staple of the band’s live performances, yet again, it doesn’t hold the power of some of their later work.

The message that permeates War is one of peace. Throughout the album, even on the less political tracks, the band seems to be begging for the world to find peace and seeking it either within themselves or externally, in the love of another.

The U2 of War is a band just figuring out its own identity, a band that is learning it is going places, but is yet unsure what those places might be and how it might get there. The album has its starts and stops, but is ultimately a satisfying one. For my thoughts on U2 t its height, however, you gentle readers will have to hold your breath for Week Twenty Eight.

After toiling in relative obscurity (relative, in this case, to where the band was headed) for eight years, Red Hot Chili Peppers signed to Warner Bros. Records and released the album that would launch them to superstardom: their fifth studio album, and Ashley’s pick this week, 1991’s Blood Sugar Sex Magik.

In 1988, the band’s guitarist Hillel Slovak died of a heroin overdose and drummer Jack Irons quit, leaving vocalist Anthony Kiedis and bassist Flea to find a new guitarist and drummer. Fan of the band John Frusciante came on as guitarist and drummer Chad Smith rounded out the lineup. Blood Sugar Sex Magik integrates the band’s typical punk-funk blend with more melodically driven songs, creating the sound that has carried the band to superstardom.

“If You Have To Ask” mixes Kiedis’ standard rap-sing style with a funk beat and a taunting chorus. “Breaking The Girl,” a classic Chili Peppers song, is a ballad (a rarity in the band’s previous work) that refers to Kiedis turbulent relationship with Carmen Hawk, and more broadly, his fears that he was becoming a womanizer like his father before him. More traditionally melodic than any song the band had done before, the song is also, as most of the band’s best songs are, a fascinating look into the conflicted inner world of Anthony Kiedis. “Breaking The Girl” is maybe the first great song the Chili Peppers ever recorded (though in fairness I am only passingly familiar with their previous work, so feel free to correct me on this point) and one of my favorites on the album.

“Suck My Kiss” is an unabashedly sexual song, an ode to fellatio and written about a kid Kiedis knew who talked endlessly about the blow jobs he was getting. “Give It Away” is focused on the idea of altruism and selflessness, a concept taught to Kiedis by his former girlfriend, punk rocker Nina Hagen, who once gave him a jacket he said he liked because she believed that giving things away made the world a better place.

Easily the most well known song on the album, and one of my favorite songs by the band to this day, “Under the Bridge” threw the band into the mainstream, becoming a smash hit. The lyrics of the song are taken from a poem Kiedis had written while contemplating the effects of narcotics on his life. Kiedis was feeling isolated from the rest of the band, as he had been sober for three years at the time of the album’s recording, and Frusciante and Flea often smoked marijuana together. This lead to him contemplating said isolation and coming to the conclusion that Los Angeles was his only true and constant companion. The song gets its title, and its most notable verse, illustrates Kiedis attempt to enter a gang territory to score heroin. In order to get under the bridge where the drugs were being sold, Kiedis had to pretend his fiancé was the sister of a gang member. Though he successfully scored the drugs, he considers the moment to be one of the worst of his life, as it showed him how far he would sink to feed his addiction. The song is a masterpiece of contemplation, isolation, regret and finally hope, as Kiedis pleas to be taken to the place he loves, where he could be among his band mates, friends, and family.

“Sir Psycho Sexy” is an eight-minute epic about an over-zealous, exaggerated version of Keidis, a man who can get any woman he wants and commit any depraved act he can imagine with her. The song is expansive, detailed, and illustrative, another enthralling journey into Keidis’ headspace. The closing track is a cover of “They’re Red Hot,” by blue musician Robert Johnson. The band recorded the song on top of a hill outside the mansion where they recorded the rest of the album. The song is propulsive, a blues-infused rocket of sonic speed that closes the album off with a spurt of energy that could hardly be attained over any longer than the songs scant, one minute run time.

While John Frusciante left the band after the album’s success (he had hoped to remain an underground group, and would later return for Californication, the band’s next masterwork after the less successful One Hot Minute), the rest of the group acclimated well to their newfound success, and Red Hot Chili Peppers have continued to turn out great albums periodically since (their newest, I’m With You will drop this August).

Throughout Blood Sugar Sex Magik the band examines nothing short of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Looking into Kiedis’ internal struggles with addiction and with romance, the album I, at its rawest and at its best, a look at the various things we do to ourselves to get by and the vices we rely on to keep us satisfied. Whether they are drugs, love, sex, or simply companionship, Blood Sugar Sex Magik tells us, they are an essential part of our lives, for we will forever be engaged in a struggle to tame, or be tamed by, our baser instincts.

Some albums, intentionally or not, center on a theme, an idea that becomes unavoidable as we listen to and absorb them. On Singles Going Steady the Buzzcocks examined pop music through a punk lens, centering on love as their main area of exploration. For War, U2 was looking at the causes and effects of conflict and searching both externally and internally for the peace they would need to excel as a band. And Red Hot Chili Peppers used Blood Sugar Sex Magick to examine sex, sure, but more deeply to look at the nature of vice and its place in our lives. Purposefully or not, each of these albums returned again and again to the same particular themes, and they colored them immensely. Whether released as a compilation as a career came to an end, as a tentative step forward for a band finding its sea legs in the ocean of rock and roll, or as the first masterpiece from a band entering its prime, these albums took one central idea, and ran with it until musical excellence was achieved.

Read more My Year in Lists here

Next week on My Year in Lists:

The Slits Cut, Prince weathers some Purple Rain, and Superchunk warns that there’s No Pocky For Kitty.

Want to keep tabs on all of our updates? follow us on twitter @reviewtobenamed (follow us here).

My Year in Lists: Week Twenty One

By Jordan

My Year in Lists chronicles one blogger’s quest to understand why music matters to us and what makes it a lasting aspect of our existence. To facilitate this examination, three music fans have contributed a list of 52 essential albums. Each week this year, one album off of each list will be analyzed in an attempt to understand why some music sticks with us and what it means for our lives.

“The big watershed was The Clash album […] Although The Damned and the [Sex] Pistols were great, they were only exciting musically; lyrically, I couldn’t make a lot out of it […] to realize that [The Clash] were actually singing about their own lives in West London was like a bolt out of the blue.”-Jake Burns of Stiff Little Fingers

“See microscopic, see world view, see the future leaking through, see the person who once was you.”-Coil, “Windowpane”

Thousands of words have been spent in this space discussing punk rock, not to mention the millions that have been published elsewhere on the subject. We’ve talked about its genesis, from The Stooges to The Ramones. We’ve talked about its existence as a reaction to the mainstream bands of the time (especially Boston). Most of all, we’ve talked about the after-effects of punk, from the New Wave ushered in by Joy Division and New Order to the hardcore exemplified by bands like Husker Du and a few other we’ll get to in a couple of weeks, to the slow development from post-punk into modern conceptions of alternative rock, starting with bands like REM and The Smiths. But until this week, we haven’t touched on one of the most important punk bands (honestly, just bands would still be accurate) of all time. Until today, we haven’t talked about The Clash.

The Clash debuted alongside The Sex Pistols at the dawn of punk rock, but the reason they remain so relevant is not only that they came in on the ground floor, but that they quickly evolved, continuing punk traditions while also bringing in other outside influences to change up the expected punk sound. By doing so, The Clash didn’t leave punk rock behind; rather, they solidified the genre as one worthy of the same amount of respect doled out to other forms of music. While just a few years after the late-70’s heyday of punk rock many fans would be complaining about and rebelling against what they saw as the tightly drawn rules of the genre, The Clash showed years before other bands seemed to catch on that punk rock shouldn’t and needn’t be as caged in as many other punk bands seemed to imply; rather, just doing whatever you wanted and creating memorable music outside of the mainstream could be seen as “punk rock” too. I’ve talked before about bands being “punk rock” without sounding like what we usually call punk rock (especially in my discussion of The Jesus and Mary Chain), but it’s possible that The Clash invented the idea. No one was ever going to claim The Clash weren’t punk rock, which freed the band to be whatever they wanted. They may not always sound like punk rockers, but that may be the single most punk rock thing about the band.

The Clash’s third album, and Collin’s pick this week, is the undisputed masterpiece London Calling, released in December of 1979 in the UK and the next month, at the dawn of 1980 in the US. After recording their second album Give ‘Em Enough Rope, in the US, the band separated from their manager Bernard Rhodes. This meant that the band had to find a new recording space, and after serttling at Vanilla Studios (which was located at the back of a garage) for a practice space, they quickly wrote and recorded demos, with Mick Jones composing and arranging music and Joe Strummer providing the lyrics.

In August of 1979, the band entered Wessex Studios to begin official recording of London Calling. The band asked Guy Stevens to produce the album, much to the dismay of CBS Records. Stevens had drug and alcohol problems and was known for his “unconventional” techniques. During recording he would swing ladders and throw chairs around the band to keep the tension high. The entire album was recorded in a few weeks, with many of the songs recorded in one or two takes.

The title track was partially influenced by the March 1979 accident at Three Mile Island, as well as the problems of rising unemployment, racial conflict, and drug use in Britain. “Rudie Can’t Fail,” the album’s fifth track, features a horn section and mixes the band’s punk roots with elements of pop, soul, ska, and reggae and tells of a hard-partying young man who is criticized for not acting more responsibly.





"Spanish Bombs" is, unsurprisingly, a song about the Spanish Civil War. What stands out about it is the fact that the band was actually endeavoring to deal with some political ideas within their music, to communicate ideas to their fans. This was not uncommon for bands like Devo and Gang of Four, yet for a British punk band at the time, it was at least a little bit outside the norm. "Lost in the Supermarket" is a slower song, and one of my favorite tracks on the album. The lyrics focus on someones struggling with an increasingly commercialized world and consumerism gone mad.





"The Guns of Brixton" has a strong reggae influence and is one of only two tracks written solely by Paul Simonon to be released on a Clash album. Contrary to popular belief, the song pre-dates the race riots in Brixton (which took place throughout the early '80s) but the lyrics depict the feelings of discontent that were building up due to the recession. "Train in Vain" (which on US releases is usually known as "Train in Vain (Stand By Me)") got it's title to avoid confusion with Ben E. King's "Stand By Me." The song was written in one night and recorded the next day, near the end of the album's recording. The song is sometimes referred to as a hidden track, as it was not included on the original sleeve, yet this only happened because the sleeve was printed before the track was added to the master tape. "Train in Vain" is a love song with country influences, a departure from much of what the band had done to this point, even on this departure of an album.





The Clash was one of the foremost bands in the development of punk rock, but quickly evolved into something more complex, influencing the development of ska, the prevalence of reggae, and the increase of political lyrics and ideas in popular music. London Calling is nothing short of a masterpiece, an album of big ideas, consistent vision, and an eye towards the future. Bono has said of The Clash that they are, "the greatest rock band. They wrote the rule book for U2." [Author's Note: It should be said that while Bono may claim The Clash as an influence, they should not be blamed for Bono's being a giant tool. That one's on him.] Other bands, including LCD Soundsystem, The Wallflowers, The Hives, The White Stripes, The Strokes, The Arctic Monkeys, and even M.I.A. consider The Clash to be a huge influence on their work. A landmark punk band from day one, The Clash became something more as they showed what punk could be and paved the way for numerous musical innovations to come.

Following on the heels of Throbbing Gristle, the Godfathers of industrial music, Coil was an English industrial experimental group formed in 1982 by John Balance (occasionally credited as "Jhonn Balance") and his partner Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson. Balance chose the name Coil because he said the shape was omnipresent in nature. The band's first album, and one of Tab's picks this week, Scatology was released in 1984. The album opens with "Ubu Noir," a decidedly experimental track that plays around with a single musical beat on a loop, feeding in found and industrial sounds around that center. "Tenderness of Wolves" opens with the sound of a child crying and develops an ominous feeling around that background noise.





"The Sewage Worker's Birthday Party" continues this ominous feeling, this time backed by the sounds of running water (let's hope) and industrial noises. The album's closing track, "Cathedral in Flames" is more melodic, but no less dark, maintaining the omnipresent hammering drum and adding vocals into the mix.





The group's third album, Love's Secret Domain is a much more palatable record, at least to my mind, a departure from the brooding melodies and heavy synthesizers of the group's previous work and focusing more on "acid house sampling," a repetitive, trance-like style that uses spoken word more readily than lyrics. The album's opening track "Disco Hospital" provides a perfect example of the acid house style the band experimented with on this release. The album was also intended to be more melodic than its predecessors, with even darker songs like "Windowpane" picking up a stronger beat that creates a dance-y thorough-line for the experimental piece. The title of the song refers to sheets of LSD (which the album's title is also a reference to), and the lyrics describe an acid trip.





"The Snow" has an electronic dance beat opening that is soon backed by heavy breathing and chanting. "Chaostrophy" is a sample-heavy track that ends in a hauntingly beautiful outro that would feel at home in a Kurosawa movie. Coil is often credited as a template of sorts for the development of post-industrial music in the 1990's, with Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails calling the band one of his greatest influences and even starting a band (with Mariqueen Maandig and Atticus Ross) called How To Destroy Angels, the name taken from Coil's first single. Coil took what Throbbing Gristle had started and moved it forward for a whole new audience, giving industrial music a dance-y update for a new decade and influencing the movement of the genre into the new millennium.

While we're talking about the 1990's (another champion segue, I think), we can take a look at Depeche Mode, an electronic music outfit that formed in Basildon, Essex, England in 1980. In mid-1989, the band began recording in Milan with producer Francois Kevorkian, and in March of 1990, released their seventh studio album, and Ashley's pick this week, Violator. One of the most well known tracks off the album, "Personal Jesus" became a huge success for the band, spawning multiple covers (the most well known by Marilyn Manson and Johnny Cash). As songwriter Martin Gore describes it, "It's a song about being a Jesus for somebody else, someone to give you hope and care...and how often that happens in love relationships; how everybody's heart is like a God in some way, and that's not a very balanced view of someone is it?" The song is great by any measure; catchy, intelligent, insightful and memorable, it's no wonder "Personal Jesus" has endured.

http://youtu.be/u1xrNaTO1bI

"Waiting For The Night" begins with a slow, repetitive beat before the lyrics enter in, deepening the eerie feeling of the song. If any track on the album is more well known and lauded than "Personal Jesus," it's "Enjoy The Silence," which is often considered the band's signature song. Originally written as a slow tempo ballad, the song was eventually recorded over an upbeat tempo by Alan Wilder, who believed (correctly) that speeding the song up would make it a hit.





Depeche Mode has become one of the most prominent electronic bands of all time and continues to be successful today, three decades after their formation. Many bands, including Pet Shop Boys, The Killers, Deftones, Shakira, Coldplay, and (unfortunately), Linkin Park cite the band as a major influence. They helped to usher in the prominence of electronic music in the ensuing decades, and with Violator delivered several songs that have been burned into the public consciousness ever since.

Each of these three bands holds an important place in the development of their respective genre. The Clash was there at the birth of punk and helped it to move forward. Coil ushered industrial music out of its infancy and into the more commercially popular form that it became in the 1990's. And Depeche Mode made their mark on electronic music and helped to shape what came afterwards. Each formed an important part of the development of modern music, influencing all that came afterwards, and their effect on their genres, and on music in general, can still be felt today.

Read more My Year in Lists here

Next week on My Year in Lists:

Kraftwerk lives in a Computer World, Sham 69 wants them to Tell Us The Truth, and My Bloody Valentine remains Loveless.

Want to keep tabs on all of our updates? follow us on twitter @reviewtobenamed (follow us here).

My Year in Lists: Week Nineteen

By Jordan

My Year in Lists chronicles one blogger’s quest to understand why music matters to us and what makes it a lasting aspect of our existence. To facilitate this examination, three music fans have contributed a list of 52 essential albums. Each week this year, one album off of each list will be analyzed in an attempt to understand why some music sticks with us and what it means for our lives.

“It never matters what you like; what matters is why you like it.”-Chuck Klosterman

“Outside there’s a boxcar waiting…”-Pixies, “Here Comes Your Man”

My feelings on the term “guilty pleasure” are incredibly complicated, I’ve found. Ostensibly, I agree with Chuck Klosterman’s thoughts on the term. I don’t think that I should feel guilty for liking the things that I like. I also don’t ascribe to the idea that there is some sort of universal taste that tells me what is good and what is terrible, and forces me to feel shame for enjoying things that have been deemed terrible. In the essay, Klosterman discusses his love of the movie Road House for completely legitimate reasons, and ponders whether the term guilty pleasure implies that “if these same people were not somehow coerced into watching Road House every time it’s on TBS, they’d probably be reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.”

I’ve read James Joyce, and I’ve seen Road House, and I enjoyed both for very different reasons and at very different moments in my life. If I hadn’t watched the entire first season of True Blood in a giant block, I might have been able to finish Pynchon’s Against the Day earlier, but I’m pretty sure doing that instead wouldn’t make me a better person. So as a rule I hate the term “guilty pleasures,” but my problem is that I also think the term has its use. Some things that I enjoy are constantly at war in my pop culture heart. Some things I recognize are terrible, not for universal, provable reason but for personal reasons. Yet I still enjoy some of these things. The easy answer to this would be to claim I enjoy them ironically, but that isn’t always the case. Look, when I watch Batman and Robin, its because that movie is fucking terrible and I find the gross miscalculations that went into its creation fascinating and hilarious. I watch that movie ironically because it provides a great time but in none of the ways it was intended to.

Yet there are some things I enjoy unironically while also being shocked at how terrible they are. When I was trying to put my feelings about Fleetwood Mac, and specifically the song “Go Your Own Way” into some sort of context, I recalled the night last summer when I was returning from a celebratory dinner after taking the LSAT. The song “Total Eclipse of the Heart” by Bonnie Tyler came on the radio in the cab I was in, and my friend and I started belting it out. I went home and bought the song immediately. I hadn’t listened to it since, until this morning when I realized my feelings toward it are nearly identical to my feelings for the Fleetwood Mac song, which we will discuss in a moment. I think “Total Eclipse of the Heart” is pretty terrible: it’s over-the-top, hilariously melodramatic, epic in scope in an exaggerated way that only feels at home in bad ‘80s music videos, and its fucking seven minutes long to boot. But I also think it’s really, really, incredibly catchy, the kind of song I want to listen to, not because it’s really funny how bad it is, but because I find the activity enjoyable. So while I disagree with the term “guilty pleasure” as it is usually applied, I can’t help but feel it’s accurate for this sort of phenomenon where I can simultaneously loathe and love something in nearly equal measures. I don’t feel guilty for listening to “Total Eclipse of the Heart” four times while I wrote this column, nor do I feel guilty about the fact that I’ll probably listen to it again right now. But I wouldn’t hold it up as an example of great music, nor as one of my favorite songs. I would say, in fact, that it is a terrible song that for some reason appeals to me.

http://youtu.be/840B27zYfOk

Now to Fleetwood Mac, a pretty awful band that has turned out a few songs that fit comfortably into the above category. The band was initially formed as a blues outfit in London in 1967 by Peter Green, drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie. Green enticed McVie to join by naming the band Fleetwood Mac after the drummer and the bassist. During their early years the band was a straight blues outfit that achieved moderate success in England. Over the course of the band’s first three years, Green experimented with LSD, which contributed to the onset of schizophrenia. By early 1970, Green’s mental state had deteriorated and he recommended giving all of the band’s profits to charity. The rest of the band respectfully disagreed, and Green left in May of 1970.

After five years in which the band shuffled through several members, they met guitarist Lindsay Buckingham, who was currently heading American band Buckingham Nicks. The band asked him to join and he agreed, so long as his partner and girlfriend (and, if South Park is to be trusted, professional goat look-alike) Stevie Nicks could come along. This new line-up became the iconic incarnation of the band and released a self-titled album in 1975.

The next year, John and Christine McVie got divorced, Buckingham and Nicks ended their relationship and Fleetwood entered divorce proceedings as well (presumably because everyone in the band was a terrible human being and wanted to keep from being privately associated with one another before they released their next shitshow of an album). All of the emotional turmoil was laid bare (read: sung out over melodies so upbeat they begin to feel almost as soulless as Boston) on the group’s eleventh studio album, and Collin’s pick this week, Rumors. The album is by far the band’s most successful release, selling over 40 million copies and peaking at the top of the charts in the U.S. and the U.K.

“Dreams,” the second track on the album, was written by sentient goat Stevie Nicks as an optimistic look back at the dissolution of her relationship with Buckingham. Nicks bleats through an endless series of clichés (you see, “players only love you when they’re playing”) and less than subtle digs at Buckingham for an interminable four minutes of faux-folk-pop. “Women they will come and they will go,” to be sure, but at times during “Dreams” I wondered when, if ever, the song would follow suit and get the hell out of my ear canal. “Don’t Stop” is a slightly better song, reflecting Christine McVie’s feelings after her separation from John following eight years of marriage. The song is relentlessly optimistic, to the point where it feels more like McVie was putting on a happy face to get at her ex-husband, while secretly taking several trips a day to the ladies room to ball her eyes out. Her pain was probably very real, but none of that makes it into this song, a standard “tomorrow’s another day” ditty that rings completely hollow. At least to my ears. Bill Clinton really likes this song, at least if nearly all of his campaign appearances over the last two decades are to be believed. And we all know that Bill Clinton’s taste in music, like his taste in women, is unimpeachable (couldn’t be helped).

“Go Your Own Way” was written by Lindsay Buckingham and was the first single off the album. Just like every other song on Rumors, it is about a break up, with Buckingham seemingly more pessimistic than Nicks about the future of their relationship. “Go Your Own Way” is definitely the best song on the album by far, which is kind of like calling it the skinniest kid at fat camp. I can’t help but think of the song as a punchline, the “driving off into the sunset” song at the end of a terrible movie, but at the same time, I have to admit that my enjoyment of it isn’t ironic, at least not entirely. Like “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” it is a god damn catchy song, fun to belt out, especially while drinking heavily to mask the fact that the song isn’t particularly good. The less we say about “Songbird,” the better, which brings us to “The Chain,” the only song on the album written by all five members of the band at the time, a song with a basic rock structure and folk influences. In some ways it feels like the most meaningful song on the album, mostly because it is obviously pretty meaningless, a string of “let’s stay together” gobbledygook sung over strumming guitars. By writing a completely meaningless song, Fleetwood Mac was able to find a shred of meaning to throw into an album that, from the circumstances that created it should have been chock full of authentic pain.

Following a discussion of Fleetwood Mac and “guilty pleasures” with a look at Throbbing Gristle and industrial music is like doing a double feature of Beverly Hills Chihuahua and Ichi the Killer, which is to say, the kids should leave at this point unless they want to see a man dangling on hooks. Throbbing Gristle evolved out of the performance art group COUM Transmissions and in fact, the last performance of COUM Transmissions was also the debut of Throbbing Gristle. The band is known for their confrontational live performances using disturbing images including pornography and pictures of concentration camps to rile up the crowd. The group maintained that their mission was to challenge audiences while exploring the darker, more obsessive side of human nature, rather than make attractive music. Basically, Throbbing Gristle is the anti-Fleetwood Mac. They pioneered the use of pre-recorded samples and made extensive use of special effects to produce a distinct, highly distorted background, which was generally accompanied by lyrics or spoken word pieces. Their first album, Second Annual Report, was released in an initial run of 786 copies. When that sold out and demand remained high, the group did a re-release, reversing the track order and playing each track backwards.

The band’s second album, and Tab’s pick this week, D.o.A: The Third and Final Report of Throbbing Gristle was released in 1978, just one year after Rumors and a sonic universe apart. “United,” the album’s third track, is a 16 second version of the song from an earlier EP (which we will look at next week). The original song runs five minutes, and is simply sped up to fit within the time allotted. “Weeping” uses four types of acoustic violin, is played through a space-echo and is a song about crushing defeat.

“Hamburger Lady” was inspired by a letter from Dr. Al Ackerman, the mail artist, and discusses a deeply scarred and mutilated woman. “AB7/A” is by far the most melodic song on the album, a reprieve from all of the darkness and depression that surrounds it. We will discuss several more Throbbing Gristle releases next week, but for now it must be said that the band’s sonic experiments on their second album are largely successful, and that the work exists as a fully realized journey into the dark side of man’s soul.

Jumping forward again, we turn now to the formation of Pixies in Boston, Massachusetts in 1986. The band consists of Black Francis on vocals and rhythm guitar, Joey Santiago on lead guitar, Kim Deal on bass and vocals and David Lovering on drums. Santiago and Francis first met at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Francis eventually dropped out and the two formed a band in January of 1986. Kim Deal joined the band two weeks later in answer to an ad seeking a female bassist who liked Peter, Paul, and Mary and Husker DU. Deal was the only person to respond, but arrived without a bass guitar, as she had never played the instrument before. The band’s name was chosen at random from a dictionary.

As this year winds down we will revisit Pixies and look at several of their other releases, but this week we will examine the band’s second full album, and Ashley’s pick, Doolittle. The album’s working title was Whore, though when the cover art was revealed to be a depiction of a monkey with a halo around it’s head, Francis decided he did not want to be pinned down as anti-Catholic and changed the name to Doolittle from a lyric in “Mr. Grieves.”

“Debaser,” the album’s opening track, is based around the Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali film Un Chien Andalou (known to those who have seen it as the “HOLY SHIT! That woman’s eye just got slit open by a razor!” movie). The song’s title is a reference to the film as a debasement of morality and artistic standards, but also to Amherst film studies professor Don Eric Levine, who screened the film for Black and was known as “the debaser” because he often spoiled the endings of films.

“Here Comes Your Man” is one of those songs that you know is great from the opening riff. By the first lyric, you’re completely in love and by the chorus on a different place of awesome. In other words, it’s a very good song. Originally written by Black Francis when he was a teenager but not included on earlier releases due to his reluctance and fears about its quality, Jon Dolan of Spin magazine called it, “the most accessible song ever by an underground-type band.” While I wouldn’t say I have the authority to make that assertion, “Here Comes Your Man” is an amazing song, catchy without lapsing into bubble gum pop, grungy without losing its upbeat whimsy and imminently listenable, the type of song I imagine will rack up hundreds of plays on my ipod without me ever getting tired of it.

“Monkey Gone to Heaven” references environmentalism and biblical numerology, a song Rolling Stone’s David Fricke called “a corrosive, compelling meditation on God and garbage.” The song simultaneously deals with man’s destruction of the environment and confusion about man’s place in the universe, two potentially heady ideas that should feel at odds packed into less than three minutes of music, and yet somehow work well together, even complementing each other. If you had told me prior to my first listen that a song on the album dealt with the environment, confusion about man’s purpose, and biblical numerology, I would have believed you (you are, after all, a trustworthy source), but I would have expected it to be a total mess. Instead, “Monkey Gone to Heaven” is sonically clean, with a clear message behind each of its several themes, never sacrificing clarity yet always remaining interesting and entertaining. In other words, it’s awesome. “Crackity Jones” describes a crazy roommate, and is a propulsive roller coaster ride of a song, clocking in at 1:24. The song is a rocket powered, punk-ish discourse wish a distinctly Spanish sound.

We will look more into the legacy of Pixies later this year, but the band, and this album in particular, were instrumental to the alt-explosion of the ‘90s and the beginning of the grunge movement. Kurt Cobain was a huge fan and feared that people would criticize “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (which we’ll talk about next month) as derivative of Pixies’ sound. Spoiler alert: they didn’t. The Smashing Pumpkins and PJ Harvey also cite Doolittle as a huge influence on the shape of music as the ‘90s prepared to dawn. The album is a near-perfect collection of songs, pulled together by recurring themes and a consistent sound, and hearkening toward what the alternative movement would become over the next several years, making it an absolutely essential listen for fans of the ‘90s, or of music in general.

Ultimately, Fleetwood Mac, like Boston before them, feels like a band that was more a part of tearing down the old musical system than a force for driving music forward. Where Throbbing Gristle and Pixies both experimented and helped to shape the musical landscape that would follow them, Fleetwood Mac seems mostly to be gnawing on the corpse of “classic rock,” hoping to get a few more bucks before their teeth hits bone. Still, though, there’s a pretty good chance I’ll listen to “Go Your Own Way” again before the day is out. That is, if I can stop listening to “Here Comes Your Man” for long enough to fit it in.

Read more My Year in Lists here

Next week on My Year in Lists:

Elvis Costello and the Attractions display This Year’s Model, we take a crash course in Throbbing Gristle with United/Zyklon B Zombie, We Hate You (Little Girls)/ Five Knuckle Shuffle, Journey Through a Body, Subhuman/Something Came Over Me, Adrenalin/Distant Dreams (Part Two) and 20 Jazz Funk Greats, and close out Ashley’s examination of the ‘80s with Fugazi’s 13 Songs.

Want to keep tabs on all of our updates? follow us on twitter @reviewtobenamed (follow us here).

My Year in Lists: Week Seventeen

By Jordan

My Year in Lists chronicles one blogger’s quest to understand why music matters to us and what makes it a lasting aspect of our existence. To facilitate this examination, three music fans have contributed a list of 52 essential albums. Each week this year, one album off of each list will be analyzed in an attempt to understand why some music sticks with us and what it means for our lives.

“I saw the rock and roll future, and its name is Bruce Springsteen. And on a night when I needed to feel young, he made me feel like I was hearing music for the very first time.”-Jon Landau

“Over their brilliant first three albums, Wire expanded the sonic boundaries of not just punk, but rock music in general.”-Stewart Mason

I’ve always thought Frank Sinatra got kind of screwed in the nickname department. The man was a musical God and an American legend for the majority of the 20th century, and he gets to be called Ol’ Blue Eyes. At his luckiest, he is known as The Chairman of the Board, a position which, in my opinion is extremely vague and at best not all that prestigious. Regardless of what Board he is chairing, it can’t be an impressive enough position for a man of his stature and acclaim. He ran with the Rat Pack and the Kennedys, played Vegas when it was a mob town and Vegas when it was just a modern den of inequity. He recorded Only the Lonely and Come Fly With Me. He sang “Strangers in the Night,” “My Way,” and everyone’s favorite version of “(Theme From) New York, New York” (with apologies to Liza Minelli). But somehow, in the nickname lexicon at the disposal of the American public, he never rose above an appointed position on some hazy organization, a fringe nickname for a man who spent his life center stage.

He couldn’t be The King, I guess. By the time his career got its second wind when he won Best Supporting Actor for From Here to Eternity (yeah, the talented bastard could act too), a young guy named Elvis Presley was already on his way to nailing that nickname down. Johnny Cash got to be the badass sounding The Man in Black, not that Sinatra could really have laid claim to that. And though Sinatra really should have had a nickname by the 1970’s that was something more prestigious (or at least more awesome) than The Chairman of the Board, it was at that time that Bruce Springsteen showed up and laid claim to the name The Boss.

I do think Sinatra got screwed out of a great nickname, but at the same time, I really do think Bruce Springsteen deserves to be The Boss. Somehow, it just feels right. His first two albums, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. and The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle were both released to huge critical acclaim but pretty much no commercial success. Springsteen was hailed as the new Bob Dylan and the future of rock and roll, a mantle that would eventually start to get to him but at the time just seemed sort of inaccurate. The man might be great (spoiler alert: he was), but if no one was listening to him, it was fairly unlikely that he would become the future of rock and roll.

When he began preparing his third album, he was handed a large budget and a subtle intimation by his label: make this one a hit or you’re finished. That third album, and Collin’s pick this week, Born to Run was the first commercial success of his career, becoming a smash hit while retaining the high critical praise of his previous albums, and eventually eclipsing those two entirely and gaining a reputation as the magnum opus of the man we now know as simply The Boss.

Born to Run is a wall to wall masterpiece of an album, with eight perfect songs pinging off each other and building in cumulative power like only the greatest of musical achievements can manage. The album took 14 months to record, with six months alone spent perfecting the title track, and it was worth every minute. Springsteen arranged the album with a “four corners” approach, beginning each side with uplifting odes to escape and ending each side with epics of loss, betrayal, and failure. The album opens with perhaps my favorite Springsteen song, “Thunder Road.” The song opens with a piano and harmonica interlude meant to serve as an introduction to the album as a whole and give off the feeling that something very special is following. It tells of a young woman named Mary and her boyfriend, who have “one last chance to make it real” by escaping the small town that has imprisoned them. Over his next several albums, Springsteen would become known for capturing the spirit of the common man, and that reputation begins right here with “Thunder Road,” which feels like someone snatching the opportunity that you might have let slip through your fingers and running with it to make their every dream come true.



“Tenth Avenue Freeze Out” tells the legend of the formation of the E Street Band. The song was one of only two singles released off the album, and never attained great success. It remains the most upbeat song on the album, however, and an important part of the myth behind Springsteen and the E Street Band. “Night” is about a blue collar worker who escapes dissatisfaction with his life by drag racing after dark. Side one closes with the phenomenal “Backstreets,” a tour de force about the disintegration of a relationship and the death of a love.







Side two opens with the title track, which was written by Springsteen as his last ditch effort to land a big hit. His record company had given him that big budget and one last chance for a breakthrough, and Springsteen put most of his energy into making “Born to Run” that breakthrough. The song is ostensibly romantic, but at its core is to my mind less about the love between the protagonist and Wendy and more about his burning desire to get out of his hometown. That song is followed by “She’s the One” about a woman who the narrator wants to be perfect, in spite of her obvious flaws.





“Meeting Across the River” is a pitch black character sketch with heavy jazz influences. The song forms a sonic bridge between “She’s the One” and the album’s closer, “Jungleland” and the river of the title is presumably the Hudson, signifying the album’s journey from New Jersey to New York, the setting the closing track. “Jungleland” is an almost ten minute long epic telling of love amidst gang violence and despair. The song’s protagonist Rat loses both his dreams and his Barefoot Girl because of the gang he is involved in, and finally loses his life to gang violence. The album closes on this down note, with dreams dashed and hopes lost, but fortunately for music fans everywhere, Springsteen’s career did not have the bleak coda he might have imagined.





Born to Run became a smash success and cemented Springsteen’s reputation as “the future of rock and roll,” creating hype he would fight against for years after the album’s success. Bruce feared that such high praise would inevitably create a backlash, and maybe it did. But he actually was the future of rock and roll, and while I guess it may be possible not to love Bruce Springsteen, it’s pretty hard to deny that he’s The Boss.

Just a few years after the release of Born to Run, a punk outfit formed in London of 1976, consisting of Colin Newman on vocals and guitar, Graham Lewis on vocals and bass, Bruce Gilbert on guitar and Robert Gotobed on drums. They called themselves Wire, and they too were about to change the face of music. They began as a punk rock band inspired by The Ramones, but would soon become instrumental to the development of post-punk.

Their debut album, and one of Tab’s two picks this week, Pink Flag is a fairly straightforward punk album, but even from the start the band played punk music with a rock and roll irony that would be instrumental to their later push into post-punk. Over 21 songs and 35 minutes the band used their punk sound to comment on and twist rock music standards. Never going as far into experimentation as, say The Residents on The Third Reich N’ Roll, Wire still managed to make punk rock that was simultaneously a commentary on the state of rock and roll and a statement of purpose from a new band with a bold sound.

The opening track “Reuters” sounds like a standard rock opening before the band’s punk-y vocals come in. “Field Say for the Sundays” is a 28 second song that sounds simultaneously complete and like 30 seconds pulled from a pretty god damn great punk rock song. The band’s shorter tracks, like the 41 second “Brazil,” tend to sound more like straight punk rock, while their longer songs, like the title track, sound more like rock and roll with a decidedly punk bent.









“Strange” especially sounds like a song that could have been recorded just as easily by The Rolling Stones if not for the distinctive punk touches sprinkled throughout. “Feeling Called Love” has an almost surf rock feeling to it, showing Wire’s diverse influences and ability to change up the routine. The song allows the melody to carry the song (which is fairly unique in early punk rock) more than the lyrics, which are done in a more speak-sing style.





The band’s second album, and Tab’s second pick this week, Chairs Missing has a much more developed song structure than its predecessor, taking some cues from prog-rock, psychedelia, and art rock. As fits with the band’s general style, Chairs Missing’s more developed sound leads to longer songs, with this album including 15 songs in 42 minutes. The opening track “Practice Makes Perfect” is heavily melodic, with a prog feel that almost overtakes the punk roots. “French Film Blurred” has a more experimental vibe than most of the tracks on their debut, but also a very melodic chorus.





“Heartbeat” is the band’s self proclaimed first love song, with a building tempo that comes to its peak as Newman repeats the title at the song’s conclusion. “Outdoor Miner,” though only 1:44 was so loved by EMI, the band’s label that they were asked to expand the song to turn it into a single. So melodic and even proto-New Wave it barely sounds like the band’s previous work at all, the song is amazingly catchy and fun without sacrificing any of the band’s complexity. “I am the Fly” is a perfect example of the band’s evolving style, with a complex arrangement and a catchy melody to go along with the punk philosophy the band still focused on.







The album’s closing track “Too Late” is nearly a straight rock song, with punk verses and a rock and roll chorus. We’ll follow the band’s continued development into post-punk next week, but for now, Wire developed in its first two albums from a heavily Ramones influenced punk band into something far more unique and original, while still managing to be just as fucking awesome (which is, I believe, a critical term).



We’re going to do things a little backwards here, kids, and I hope you don’t mind. We’ll be digging into The Cure’s formulation and early years with Boys Don’t Cry in just a few weeks, but due to timing and my desire to leave each contributor’s list intact as much as possible (my only alteration so far coming in Week Five’s Talking Heads marathon), we’re going to start in the middle with this band, looking at Ashley’s pick this week, Disintegration, and later retreating back to Boys Don’t Cry. Hope you don’t mind, but as always, feel free to bitch at me on twitter, in the comments, or at reviewtobenamed@gmail.com about how I’m destroying the sanctity of music itself if you’d like.

The eighth studio album by The Cure, Disintegration was released on May 1, 1989 and aimed to be a return to the gloomy and introspective gothic rock that the band had established earlier in their careers. Lead vocalist Robert Smith hoped to follow up on the group’s pop successes with more lasting musical contributions, and found himself dissatisfied with the group’s popularity, which caused him to lapse into the use of hallucinogenic drugs. Following the group’s growing success, keyboardist Lol Tolhurst was drinking heavily and Smith was taking large amounts of LSD. Smith decided something needed to change.

Smith wrote many of the songs himself before showing any of them to the band. He admitted that if the band didn’t like them, he was willing to record them as a solo album. The band enjoyed them and began to record (though Tolhurst’s drinking lead to him leaving the band before he contributed anything lasting to the album). The second track, “Pictures of You” is a nostalgic love song with a two minute long introduction before the song explodes into a wave of passion and sound. “Lovesong” is exactly what its title implies, a darker sounding love song that is still as full of emotion as any of the band’s upbeat songs.





The album’s longest song, the 9:19 “The Same Deep Water as You” is a dark examination that reflects Smith’s current mental state at the time he recorded it. The title track is another very long journey deep into the mental state of Smith during the writing of the album, as he worried about the “Disintegration” of both the band and his own life.





The Cure was one of the first alternative bands to be widely commercially successful. They have heavily influenced modern goth-influenced bands, including Interpol and My Chemical Romance, in addition to lighting a path for alternative rock bands to follow into commercial success.

Each of the musicians we looked at today was part of the inception of a new musical direction. Springsteen was the beginning of a new era of rock and roll. Wire helped usher punk into post-punk. And The Cure showed bands that there was a path to success outside of the mainstream. A person’s (or a band’s) musical legacy is to a large extent completely outside of their control. All they can do is make great music and hope for the best. If they are completely understood, they may come to be known as The Boss, but even if they don’t manage to land themselves a badass nickname, the important music will always be remembered, even if only through those it inspires to create.

Read more My Year in Lists here

Next week on My Year in Lists:
We continue to look at Wire with 154 and The Ideal Copy, and take a look at self titled albums from Boston and The Stone Roses.

Want to keep tabs on all of our updates? follow us on twitter @reviewtobenamed (follow us here).

My Year in Lists: Week Sixteen

By Jordan

My Year in Lists chronicles one blogger’s quest to understand why music matters to us and what makes it a lasting aspect of our existence. To facilitate this examination, three music fans have contributed a list of 52 essential albums. Each week this year, one album off of each list will be analyzed in an attempt to understand why some music sticks with us and what it means for our lives.

“With its members bizarre, Kabuki-like makeup, studded black leather costumes and arsenal of onstage firepower—both musical and literal—Kiss represents the most extreme form of hard rock in 1974.”-Bennington Banner, Rock Music

“They were all wearing these black leather jackets. And they counted off this song…and it was just a wall of noise…They looked so striking. These guys were not hippies. This was something completely new.”-Legs McNeil, who founded Punk magazine in 1975, on The Ramones CBGB debut on August 16, 1974.

That music is an art form we can all agree on. This is something I have covered in this space constantly for the last sixteen weeks, so let’s hope if you’re still reading this you can go at least that far with me. Yet I have only briefly touched on an art form that is completely integral to the way we think of music now: performance. Music is written, sure, but it is not meant to remain on a page. To achieve the full splendor of its artistic intent, music must be performed, and with that performance comes all of the posturing and artificiality that comes along with any performance. Performing written musical compositions turns everyone into a little bit of an actor, and some far more than others.

People who are shocked when they see David Bowie in a movie should keep in mind he played Ziggy Stardust for over a year on tour and then became The Thin White Duke for years after that. When Bob Dylan comes out on stage, or gives an interview to reporters, he knows what audiences expect, and is therefore playing to those expectations, whether he chooses to meet or subvert them. In this week’s My Year in Lists: Interlude I discussed the weight that I think the ability to engage the audience carries in terms of whether a band is an effective live outfit, and if you don’t think what Kanye West does on stage is a performance, I don’t know what to tell you.

So when four guys took to the stage in New York City in the mid-70’s breathing fire and wearing full face makeup, it may have seemed completely shocking to the music scene at the time, but really, nobody should have been surprised. Singers have been wearing masks for as long as there have been songs to sing—the guys in Kiss just made those masks slightly more literal.

In 1972, Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley, co-founders of the band Wicked Lester, abandoned that group due to lack of success, moving on to form what they conceived of as a new version of that group. Later that year they found an ad in Rolling Stone for drummer Peter Criss, who auditioned and joined this new lineup. Inspired by Alice Cooper and The New York Dolls, they began experimenting with their image, wearing face makeup and various costumes.

In early 1973, after failing to secure a record deal with Epic Records, the group added Ace Frehley on lead guitar. As Frehley joined, the group decided on the new name for the band: Kiss. The name was chosen after Criss mentioned his tenure in a band called Lips and Stanley responded, “what about Kiss?”

At their first show on January 30, 1973, the band wore no makeup—their now iconic appearance debuted at a March 9 show at The Daisy in Amityville, New York. With their makeup in place, they took on altered personas: Paul Stanley became Starchild due to his tendency to be a hopeless romantic and “starry-eyed lover,” Gene Simmons became The Demon because of his cynicism and dark sense of humor, Ace Frehley became Spaceman due to his fondness for science fiction, and Peter Criss became Catman as a response to the joke that he had nine lives after his rough childhood growing up in Brooklyn.

In October of 1973, former TV director Bill Aucoin offered to become the band’s manager. The group accepted, provided Aucoin get them a recording contract within two weeks. On November 1, 1973 the group became the first act signed to Emerald City Records, which was soon to become Casablanca Records. The band’s first tour began on February 5, 1974 and their self-titled debut, and Collin’s pick this week, was released on February 18.

The opening track “Strutter” is one of the few songs written by Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley. “Nothing to Lose,” the band’s first single, was written by Gene Simmons and chronicles a man coercing his girlfriend into trying anal sex, which she discovers she enjoys. The song “Firehouse” has become famous due to the fact that Gene Simmons breathes fire on stage whenever the band sings it.







“Cold Gin” is Ace Frehley’s first composition for Kiss, and is about the rumored stimulating effects of the beverage on the male sex drive. The album closes with “Black Diamond,” which begins acoustically before exploding into a full on rock song, finally slowing down and fading out.






Kiss took the artificiality of performance to a completely new level, creating characters and an entire mythology around themselves, a legend that sustains to this day. They also formed a fan base devoted to the outsider mentality the band forwarded with its theatrical posturing; Kiss showed that hard rock and heavy metal were a different beast from old school rock and roll entirely. The band became eligible for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999, and were finally nominated for a slot in 2009, though they were not voted in. This has been incredibly controversial among their fan base, though Kiss super fan (and one of our Top Ten Pop Culture Commentators You Should Be Reading) Chuck Klosterman believes their exclusion is for the best. As he put it at the time, “Kiss not getting into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is kind of like Pete Rose not getting into the Baseball Hall of Fame: it’s the best possible scenario for everyone involved. Every year they get shut out, they’re back in the news for not making it—people will actually notice far less if they ever get inducted. Plus, being denied entry into the Hall of Fame advances the idea that Kiss exists outside the canon of critically sanctioned rock, and it perpetuates the idea that Kiss fans are unjustly persecuted for loving Kiss, which is essential to the Kiss-fan identity. I hope they never get in.”

While Kiss was stepping outside the mainstream of rock and roll and forming a path for hard rock into the future, elsewhere in New York City an entire genre was about to be formed. Douglas Glenn Colvin, Jeffrey Ross Hyman, and John Cummings met in the middle-class neighborhood of Forest Hills in Queens, New York. Cummings and Thomas Erdelyi had been in a high school garage band in 1966-1967 known as the Tangerine Puppets. They became friends with Colvin and Hyman, and began to take shape as a band, in early 1974, just as Kiss was being released.

The initial lineup consisted of Colvin on lead vocals and rhythm guitar, Cummings on lead guitar, and Hyman on drums, with Erdelyi as the group’s biggest supporter. Colvin, who soon switched to bass, was the first to adopt a pseudonym, calling himself Dee Dee Ramone, which he got from Paul McCartney’s pseudonym during his Silver Beatles days, Paul Ramon. Dee Dee convinced the others to adopt the name, and the band was thus named The Ramones. Hyman and Cummings became Joey Ramone and Johnny Ramone, respectively. Dee Dee soon realized he could not sing and play bass and Joey became the band’s singer (though Dee Dee continued to shout his signature rapid-fire “1-2-3-4!” before every song). Joey subsequently made the similar discovery that he could not sing and play drums (The Ramones didn’t have any musical training, and I’m willing to guess all had a bit of trouble walking and chewing gum at the same time as well) and after auditioning many drummers who were not as good, Erdelyi became the drummer, calling himself Tommy Ramone.

The Ramones played their first gig on March 30, 1974. The songs they played were very fast and exceedingly short, most clocking in at less than two minutes. They played their first show at the legendary CBGB on August 16, 1974. By year’s end the band had played the club seventy-four times, with their average set running about 17 minutes long. By the time The Ramones released their self-titled debut in 1975 they were the leaders of an entirely new genre of music: punk rock.

The band’s first live album, and Tab’s pick this week, It’s Alive, was recorded at the Rainbow Theatre in London on New Year’s Eve 1977 and released in April of 1979. Titled after the horror movie of the same name, the album draws from material off the band’s first three releases. Among the songs included in the stellar set is perhaps the band’s most famous song, “Blitzkrieg Bop.” Other songs include “Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment,” “Sheena Is A Punk Rocker,” “Surfin’ Bird,” the band’s covers of “California Sun,” “Do You Wanna Dance?” and “Let’s Dance,” and the set closes out with “We’re a Happy Family.”







Listening to live music is a completely different experience than listening to a record. Some bands aren’t as good live; others have trouble capturing lightning in a bottle and never make a record as electric as their live performances. As is often the case with punk rock, there’s a vitality to The Ramones live set that is absent from many of their records. As far as live albums go, It’s Alive doesn’t really do all that much experimenting. There aren’t any long solos added in (economy was part of the band’s ethos, just as it would become part of the punk movement in general) and there’s very little banter between Joey Ramone and the audience. The band just gets up there on New Year’s Eve, plays the hell out of their songs for 53 minutes, and gets out.





The Ramones performed 2,263 concerts, touring virtually nonstop for 22 years. In 1996, after the failure of their fourteenth album, Adios Amigos, the band played a farewell show and disbanded. Within eight years of their break up, the three founding members were all dead (Joey died of lymphoma in 2001, Dee Dee died of a heroin overdose in 2002, and Johnny died of prostate cancer in 2004). The band almost single handedly created punk rock and influenced the development of popular music over the last 35 years as much as, if not more than, any other band. If you think I am exaggerating their influence, just think about how we have traced the development of “alternative” music so far in this column. The Ramones created punk. Punk branched out into new wave and hardcore in the ‘80’s, both of which were instrumental in the foundations of modern alternative rock.

On that note (I remain king of the segue) it’s time to continue tracing the development of alternative music and look at Jane’s Addiction. The band formed out of the disintegration of front man Perry Farrell’s previous band Psi Com. In mid-1985, Farrell was looking for a new bass player when he was introduced to Eric Avery. The two bonded over a mutual appreciation of Joy Division and The Velvet Underground and began practicing together while Psi Com was falling apart. They dubbed their new band Jane’s Addiction in honor of Farrell’s housemate Jane Bainter, who was unsurprisingly a drug addict. Eric Avery’s little sister Rebecca suggested Stephen Perkins as drummer, and though Avery was reluctant due to their different taste in music, Perkins was hired. Finally, Perkins and Rebecca Avery got their friend Dave Navarro into the group as guitarist.

The band’s second album (and first studio album, as their eponymous debut was recorded live), and Ashley’s pick this week, Nothing’s Shocking, was released in 1988. During the recording of the album, Farrell stated that he wanted fifty percent of the band’s publishing royalties for writing lyrics and a portion of the remaining half for writing music. Avery, Navarro, and Perkins were (rightfully) stunned by Farrell’s demands, but he refused to compromise, so the band decided to break up (for the first of probably a thousand times). Warner Bros., the band’s label, called an emergency meeting to resolve the situation and somehow Farrell ended up with the percentages he wanted (getting 62.5% of the publishing royalties) while the rest of the band was left with 12.5% each.

This understandably caused a rift between Farrell and the rest of the band, which manifests itself in some of the anger that permeates the album. The album’s longest song, the 7:23 “Ted, Just Admit It…” is a rage filled tirade mostly aimed at sex, repeatedly suggesting that, “sex is violence” before concluding with the album’s title repeated. “Summertime Rolls” is a slightly less angry and more melodic song, more about a successful relationship than the negative side of romance. “Mountain Song” became famous due to its music video being banned by MTV due to nudity and scenes of teenage girls dancing in diapers (apparently MTV didn’t agree with the album’s titular ethos). “Jane Says” is without a doubt the most traditionally catchy and melodic song on the album, sounding more like other “alternative” bands of the era, though that doesn’t hurt the quality of the song.









The band recorded one more album, Ritual de lo Habitual before breaking up (for the first, but not the last time) because, as Farrell puts it, “…I am an intolerable narcissist who can’t get along with anyone.” From all I have read about the man, that assessment seems entirely accurate. Farrell and Perkins went on to form the band Porno for Pyros, while Navarro joined Red Hot Chili Peppers and formed the band Deconstruction with Avery. The band reformed to release an album without Avery, 2003’s Strays, and toured briefly with the original lineup from 2008 through 2010. They are releasing another album (again without Avery) called The Great Escape Artist later this year. Then, if I was a betting man, I would guess they’ll break up again, reform in a few years, break up, get Avery back for a song or two, break up, and then release another album just around the time people stop giving a shit about them. But I’m no expert.

Performance is a key aspect of music, whether that ends up being a negative or a positive. For Kiss, that artifice became central to the ideas the band was pursuing. For The Ramones, a live performance was often the height of their musical accomplishment and the band was at their best when in front of an excited crowd. And for Jane’s Addiction, who seems locked into a never ending drama between their narcissistic frontman and the (clearly) masochistic rest of the band, their entire existence often comes down to how well they can pull off the performance, either of being able to pretend not to hate each other, or of being able to summon enough vitriol towards one another to generate news stories. Like it or not, performance permeates musical culture, and the medium, like most artistic media, relies on it for its very existence. Shakespeare once said that all the world’s a stage, and as we all know, the show must go on.

Read more My Year in Lists here

Next week on My Year in Lists:

Bruce Springsteen was Born to Run, Wire has a Pink Flag but some Chairs Missing, and The Cure experiences some Disintegration.

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