only noise – Page 3

ONLY NOISE: Nevermind Nirvana

I’m getting a lot of funny looks on the train these days. It might be because protruding from the sleeves of my tiny motorcycle jacket are two hands, holding a book. A book with Céline Dion on the cover. Perhaps my fellow commuters are confused as to why a young, angry looking woman is reading an actual piece of literature about the Quebec chanteuse everybody loves to hate.

The paperback in question is Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste by critic extraordinaire Carl Wilson. It is part of the acclaimed 33 1/3 series, in which musicians, journalists and the like write a smallish book about one specific album, in whatever style they desire. While so many of these books have been penned about canonized works – Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures, The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, David Bowie’s Low, etc. – Carl Wilson chose to invert the model by writing about something he…hated. But here you won’t find reckless diatribe. Instead of mindlessly spouting insults, Wilson steps back and asks: ‘why do I hate Céline Dion?’ What evidence can support the squirming reaction upon hearing her voice when she is literally loved by millions?

For music makers, critics, and enthusiasts, there is often an invisible and ever-changing list of what is cool to love. But there is a sister list for the opposite – what’s cool to hate. It sounds juvenile but one of the things I’m learning from Wilson’s book is that much of what makes up taste politics is just as juvenile as a high school cafeteria.

The book goes into far denser socioeconomic arguments for the origins of taste – which I won’t attempt to replicate as it’d be a tall order to do Wilson’s writing justice. But one thing I will recycle is this question: why do I hate ____________? And furthermore, what’s it like to be allergic not to schmaltzy pop that all of your friends hate along with you, but something everyone you know adores?

Ok. Here goes. Get the wood for my crucifixion. Tell my family I love them. If Carl Wilson had an advice column tending to the ambivalence of blind dislike – dislike you can’t always explain, I would write to him:

Dear Carl,

Why do I hate Nirvana?

-The Guilty Washingtonian.

One thing Wilson and I have in common is not only that we strongly dislike a commercially successful, wildly popular artist, but also that we both hail from their place of origin: Wilson from Quebec, and I from Washington State. I don’t doubt that this affects the perception of said recording artists. When inundated with something for years on end, you have one of two options – embrace it or run for cover. There is rarely an in between, especially for the likes of Dion and Nirvana, both extremes on opposite sides of the musical spectrum. Does anyone ever say, “Oh, yeah, Céline Dion, she’s alright. I won’t put it on, but I won’t turn it off either?” No. Likely this could be said for Nirvana as well, a band whose zenith was a worldwide phenomenon, but also a local victory for the Pacific North West. And that last factor makes me feel like an enemy on home turf. The visiting team…but hey, I’m from here!

I’ve tried to like Nirvana, believe me. I assumed I would. I don’t even remember how I heard of them, and this is coming from someone whose weekly column is practically a temple to remembering the exact moment you first hear a band. I just remember…knowing. Like their names and story and that album cover had been taught to me in daycare before I could form cognitive boxes to put things in. Nirvana was in the water growing up. It still amazes me that Seattle hasn’t erected some statue of Kurt Cobain right next to the one of Jimi Hendrix on Capitol Hill.

When did my knowledge of Nirvana go from intrinsic local legend to awareness of their sound? Likely it was when a combination of curiosity, perceived coolness associated with the wearers of their t-shirts, and the CD subscription club collided. Remember that staple of music consumption in the 90s and 00s? Those chintzy catalogs filled with mostly awful but some classic albums. The promise of “10 CDs FOR 99 CENTS!!!” (And then canceling immediately upon receiving those 10 picks).

So it was through a CD club that I first acquired – of course – Nevermind. I could finally investigate what all the fuss was about. I slipped the disk in. I slipped into that cerulean pool with that money hungry baby. And I felt nothing. Not just nothing, but unmoved. Even agitated, which I guess is something. But it wasn’t an invigorating agitation that some music inspires, just a rash. I couldn’t stand it. You can imagine the kind of confusion this might stoke in a 12-year-old eager to embrace the musical heritage of her region.

Disliking a deeply loved and influential band can’t be so bad, right? These days it’s common parlance to not be that into The Beatles, citing more obscure products of the 1960s instead. But this is not the case with Nirvana, at least not in my experience. I wonder if it’s because the people that grew up with them, that remember and lived in their heyday are now the tastemakers. I’m not sure. What I do know is I’ve never been met with so much adversity when discussing musical taste as when I say that I don’t like this band. It cuts people directly to the quick.

The opinion is seemingly so offensive to Nirvana fans that they attempt to find a manifesto as to why I feel this way. They insist that that my taste is not genuine, and rather born of some pathetic desire to be “cool” or “different.” But I gave up those hopes and dreams when I started listening to The Smiths like everyone else after years of steady resistance. It’s also not the common accusation of regional rebellion, allegedly serving the same purpose of setting myself apart from the masses. The fact of the matter is, disliking Nirvana does absolutely nothing for – as Wilson and Pierre Bourdieu. would say – increasing my “cultural capital.” If anything, it is a detriment to my social interactions when it comes up. I would love nothing more than to stop constantly pissing people off by answering a question honestly. What is that like? Tell me, because I will never know.

One of the things I strive to do as a music writer is really analyze why I’m reacting a certain way to something. Is it because of a sound, or a symbol? Because I was told to, or a genuine sentiment? Often I will listen to bands I can’t stand repeatedly, just to make sure I know where I’m at. I once cycled through all of my mom’s Genesis records just to make sure I wasn’t missing something – that I was an educated Genesis hater at the very least. It reminds me of taste buds: how with age they gradually change (well, die) and often people’s food preferences become less rigid over time. For this reason, I make an annual effort to give my most loathed food, the banana, another try. And though it becomes a teensy bit easier year by year, it still makes me gag every time.

So here I sit, listening to all three Nirvana LPs as an attack on my own ego, hoping that I will eventually enjoy them. But they are still mushy bananas to me. My inability to convince people of my honest opinion has been met with such opposition that once an ex-boyfriend casually put on Bleach to see if I would joyfully ask, “ooh! Who is this?!” But it bristled against me like steel wool, and I of course, knew who it was.

To make matters worse for my Nirvana-obsessed friends: I love Hole. That’s like saying you can’t stand John Lennon but you really dig Yoko Ono records, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not something people like to hear…especially when there is a whole camp of conspiracy theorists who think Courtney Love killed Kurt. It’s like ripping open a scab and packing it with fine salt. But my love of Hole has taught me something about my aversion to Nirvana…that maybe my relationship with the band isn’t so complicated and mysterious after all. I’ve never said Nirvana were a bad band, or bad songwriters. I can appreciate and admit that quite the opposite is true. So if the songs are good, what is it?

It’s just that voice.

Kurt Cobain’s voice alone is what makes my skin crawl. I hate it. And it’s not like I listen exclusively to Chris Isaak and Cher. I completely dig on fucked up, pitchy, gravelly, “bad” singers. Just not this one. I’ll probably never be able to explain exactly why.

I find it hilarious that it has taken me so many years to arrive at such a simple, even boring resolution. No one can really debate vocal preference, right? Every once in a while, it’s kind of nice when a convoluted question can be reduced to a crude, shallow answer. I just don’t like the way it sounds. I just don’t like the way it tastes.

Void of philosophy or agenda I can say: I just don’t like bananas. For now.

(Maybe I kinda dig this, just a little:)

ONLY NOISE: Shiny Happy Pop Songs Holding Hands

One side effect of obsessing over music for a living is the ability to compartmentalize your own tastes into pre-measured doses of sonic mood modifiers. Saying “music is my drug” is irrevocably corny and should be left to the bumper sticker manufacturers of the world, but it’s not an erroneous statement. I’ve written about music and mood before, and it is a subject I find endlessly fascinating. There have been numerous studies analyzing music’s influence on brain chemistry – studies that will teach you far more than I can by relaying personal, uncontrolled experiences. I am no neuroscientist, but I’ll do my best to discuss the subject in my own, pop-culturally referential way.

But this is more a gander at the inverse; not how music dictates your mood, but how your mood dictates what you decide to listen to. Mood doesn’t always consciously affect my listening choices. Sometimes when I select a specific record to put on, it is purely because that’s the album I’ve been spinning relentlessly. Last Thursday I listened to Smog’s Red Apple Falls four times in a row, and that would have been five or six if I didn’t have to run errands.

Sometimes the decision to listen to Prefab Sprout is rooted in a logic no more complex than: I’m just in a Prefab Sprout phase right now. A phase can last weeks, sometimes months. I think I listened near exclusively to The Smiths for about a year. I binge eat artists, albums, and songs, but unlike food, the repetition of great pop music never makes me nauseous.

But there are of course moments when I Spotify playlist myself, trying like an algorithm to switch or indulge my mood. I typically indulge, which I do not suggest as a method of catharsis. Unless you like crying alone while watching Joanna Newsom artfully play harp.

If I am depressed, angry, despondent, vengeful…oh DO I have a playlist for those moments. I have entire records for those moments, box sets and anthologies. When it comes to finding the soundtrack to a bad day I’m practically Ariel from The Little fucking Mermaid showing off her endless archive of sad knickknacks. You want Joni Mitchell? I’ve got plenty. You want anguish in B Flat? I got whosits and whatists galore, ok?

So what does one listen to when suddenly inundated with…nice feelings? One might want perhaps, to not ruin it with the entirety of 69 Love Songs? What if your reference library is stocked with Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave, Roy Orbison, and artists of similar ilk? And furthermore, how do you write a column about it? I’ve run into countless occasions where I happen to be happy, and therefore want to maximize that feeling with some aural reinforcement – but I come up blank. Nick Drake, anyone?

“Happy songs, happy songs…” I mutter to myself, remembering only the bummed-out Aldous Harding track I’ve been listening to incessantly. A friend once asked me to make a playlist for her birthday party. I laughed and wondered how well this person knew me or my morose musical tastes. Everyone else in my circle has crowned me the worst party DJ ever, mocking my interest in listening to records in full and my affinity for seemingly anti-party music (what do you mean The Birthday Party isn’t a great thing to play at a birthday party?!). More than once have I spent hours carefully constructing playlists to my own birthday parties, only to have them intercepted by guests and supplanted with Top 40 jamz before the clock strikes 12. But I get where they’re coming from. No one shakes their ass to The Jesus and Mary Chain.

“Feel-good music” has never been a tag that excites me. Songs shaped into balloon animals to distract you from good-old-fashioned suffering. Pop trickery that manipulates your mind with chimes and pitch correction. But in the event of spontaneous elation, if you or anyone you know is at risk of having a good, even lovely day, I want you to know: it is going to be all right.

Whether we want anyone to know or not, joy does occasionally break through, and we just have to deal with it. I could far more easily fashion a playlist of breakup songs, funeral anthems, and frightening German noise bands. But setting aside my eternally teenage heart for the purposes of letting myself be happy (for now) is a tall but necessary order.

I’m getting better at admitting to shortcomings such as this. I’ve even found a way to label it (a writer’s favorite thing to do). Since the band’s inception, critics have often described The Smiths as “miserablists,” and while I won’t stand behind that point entirely – they were far too self-aware and satirical to be reduced to such a limiting word – I kind of love the term. “Miserablist.” It’s an absurd word, as if misery were a political party, its spokesperson being the lugubrious Moz, of course.

Involuntarily or not, I may be a card-carrying miserablist myself. To the extent that when a desire for more beatific, up-tempo, major scale pop music bubbles through all of my petty brooding, I have a slight identity crisis. But I am working on it.

In the same way it is ok to let yourself be happy (I hear), it is also ok to let yourself listen to happy music. Shiny happy music. But who am I really telling this to? You probably already know that.

I have appointed myself with the task of making a playlist of songs I enjoy for their sheer mood-erecting abilities, which was harder than you might think. They can’t just be any peppy pop songs. I have to love of course. I may be in a good mood, but I’m still a snob.

In situations like these, I first look to ABBA. They are perhaps the only group in my collection whose “sad,” or “grave” ballads hold no interest for me. I turn (or twirl) to them for disco bangers alone, songs written for the purposes of merriment and cutting fat checks, not enriching the poetic canon. I wouldn’t call theirs particularly substantive music – though it was made with a depth of technical talent – but it sure as shit makes you wanna dance.

“Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!” is perhaps one of the most asinine and catchy cuts out there. Even Madonna couldn’t resist that ridiculous synth…pan flute? riff when she sampled it in 2005’s “Hung Up.” And neither can I.

The rest of my playlist follows a similar rule. As I construct it I realize that every song is void of guilty associations – those autobiographical kernels of nostalgia embedded into every song an ex showed you, or your mother used to sing in the kitchen. These songs have somehow become mine, no matter how they came into my life.

From what I can see of the end result, what makes me happy musically is pretty in step with real life. Absurdity (“Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick”), idealism (“Tenderness”), love (“Funny Little Frog”), and funk.

I guess a little positivity won’t kill me. Yet.

ONLY NOISE: Dropping The Neutron Bomb

Did my dad know that he might ruin me with a book? Of course not. What could a book possibly do? It wasn’t Story of the Eye, or Tropic of Cancer or even The Outsiders. It was non-fiction. Educational. All he knew was that his 12-year-old daughter was beginning to dress funny and gravitate towards a kind of music he couldn’t relate to. So, he did what any supportive parent would do: he bought me a book on the subject. But this was no mere book.

We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A. Punk was an oral history of punk’s first wave in Southern California. Much like its New York predecessor Please Kill Me, Neutron Bomb compiles hundreds of interviews with musicians, tastemakers, groupies and promoters into a sensational narrative. Edited by acclaimed music journalist Marc Spitz and former Masque owner Brendan Mullen, this was the book that changed everything for me – my answer to The Catcher in the Rye. It was a bomb indeed; reconfiguring everything I had ever known about music, writing, and debauchery – which as it turns out, all go hand in hand.

Informative the book was; innocent it was not. What my dad had unknowingly placed in my crimeless little hands was an instruction manual on bad behavior. He might as well have handed me the keys to his liquor cabinet. The pages were ripe with forbidden fruit, including, but not limited to the offensive quotes of The Runaways’ manager Kim Fowley (the “C” word abounds), anecdotes about shooting up with gutter water, and spreads of full frontal nudity. Full frontal MALE nudity!

It was a great time to be in the sixth grade. While everyone was speeding through the second Harry Potter tome, I was reading about people on speed, cutting themselves with broken bottles, smearing their malnourished bodies with peanut butter, and having all the unprotected sex. And of course, there was the music, the wild disruptor that was the birth of L.A. punk.

I am reminded of these growing pains with the recent publishing of Slash: A Punk Magazine From Los Angeles: 1977-80. Slash, which first came to my attention while reading We Got the Neutron Bomb, seemed to be the West Coast comrade of Punk Magazine and Search and Destroy. It was a newsprint rag of epic proportions when it came to chronicling the dizzying L.A. garage scene from its inception to its demise. The editorial backbone of the zine was as colorful as the bands they immortalized. At the core of Slash were founders Steve Samiof and Melanie Nissen, who recognized the importance of documenting the careers of the commercially challenged. Where A&R reps may have heard mayhem, the crew at Slash magazine heard the last cries of revolution. Or perhaps screams.

Slash championed the “dangerous” sound; bands like The Screamers, The Germs, Catholic Discipline, The Bags, X, all of whom cropped up in Neutron Bomb alongside countless others. But the magazine wasn’t only throwing roses. If Samiof and Nissen were the core of the paper, then writer/editor Claude Bessy, a.k.a. “Kickboy Face” was its blackened little heart. I remember Kickboy’s quotes in Neutron Bomb being true gems, and his belligerent snarl wasn’t any softer in the pages of Slash. In an early editorial from ’77, Kickboy lays into the giants of status quo rock:

“May the punks set this rat-infested industry on fire. It sure could use a little brightness! So there will be no objective reviewing in these pages, and definitely no unnecessary dwelling upon the bastards who’ve been boring the living shit out of us for years with their concept albums, their cosmic discoveries and their pseudo-philosophical inanities.” “

…let them remember the old days when they’d rather die than be seen with socialite creeps and being heard talking trash and then let them shit in their pants with envy. As The Clash say, NO ELVIS, BEATLES OR ROLLING STONES IN 1977!”

Kickboy Face was to Slash what Lester Bangs was to Creem, but probably more hated. He liked it that way. On the anthology’s cover is a small beckon for letters to the editor: “Write Kickboy! He wants you to respond. (He thrives on abuse).”

Abuse was something so pervasive in the scene, particularly with one of its most disturbingly fascinating bands: The Germs. The Germs, along with their ill-fated lead “singer” Darby Crash, were the nucleus of both Neutron Bomb and a second oral history by Mullen entitled Lexicon Devil: The Fast Times and Short Life of Darby Crash and the Germs.

After plowing through the first volume, Lexicon Devil was wrapped and waiting under the Christmas tree, a setting so innocuous it made the book’s hedonistic contents all the more comical. This collection focused on the self-destructive tendencies of Darby Crash, nee Jan Paul Beahm, who died of an intentional overdose at twenty-two. While this fate was not rare in the punk scene East or West, The Germs left behind a concise body of work that was far from generic. They sounded only like themselves, and as with most explosive art, weren’t fully recognized until long after their disbandment.

The twisted history of The Germs became such a fixation that years later I would agree to getting a Germs Burn: an idiotic and unhygienic branding created when a burn-bearing pal sears an entire cigarette into your left wrist. Start to finish. It was one of the many grotesque rituals championed by Circle One, The Germs’ own little groupie cult. At the time it seemed like some honor had been bestowed upon me, but more than anything it hurt like hell. I hid it from my parents for years, and I’m lucky it didn’t become gangrenous. No one even notices it anyway. Zero punk points awarded.

Throughout Neutron Bomb, Lexicon Devil and Slash, there was continual mention of a film in which all of these characters came to life: The Decline of Western Civilization by Penelope Spheeris. At the time this film was referred to as a holy grail: out of print, impossible to find, etc. Whether or not that was true is now nebulous to me, but at the time I, of course, believed it. So imagine my thrill up on seeing a bootleg copy on the shelves at Singles Going Steady, a punk record store in Seattle. The DVD was certainly bootlegged and overpriced, but it was mine. I was about to watch the most seminal documentary in punk rock history…with my parents.

It quickly became apparent that I hadn’t been reading cute rock n’ roll stories for the past few years. If the music alone didn’t alienate my folks enough, Decline would make a point of doing so. This was 100 minutes of my idols crumbling before me. Darby Crash: too loaded to sing into the mic. Lee Ving: misogynistic and homophobic. Ron Reyes: terrible lyricist. At its best the film spends time with X, whose John Doe, Billy Zoom and Exene Cervenka are actually intelligent, coherent human beings. At its worst are suburban kids trying to justify their swastika armbands.

Not everyone was pleased with Penelope Spheeris for this representation. Others didn’t give a fuck. But as I sat in between my parents, recoiling at a scene in which Darby Crash and a woman named Michelle laugh about finding a dead man in her backyard (LOL!), I realized that maybe liking the music was enough. I didn’t need idols or ideals to know a good record. As Kickboy Face once wrote:

“But seriously now, stop fuckin’ worrying silly about lost ideals and forgotten causes. You’re still here, aren’t you?”

ONLY NOISE: Get Well Soon, CMJ

Around this time of year, I’m usually unearthing my leather jacket from the season-long crypt that is my closet. I’m forgetting to send my mom a birthday card and cursing the ubiquity of pumpkin spice. I start to crave horror movie marathons, and turtlenecks, and potpie. But more than anything, at this time of year I am usually preparing for the once annual CMJ Music Marathon.

This very moment, I should be stuck on some letter in the alphabet, two-thirds of the way through with my yearly, militant, and self-appointed task of listening to every band and artist on the lineup, usually numbered at around 1,500 or so. I took special pride in knowing exactly how ninety percent of the bands would sound just by looking at their photos and witnessed a foolproof pattern that any time my assumption was wrong, I ended up loving what I heard. The element of surprise goes a long way.

Around this time of year, I should be compiling an overwhelming, archaic, and impossible calendar for the week of CMJ. One that suggests I can somehow manage between four and five shows daily, even though my record high was three, and I came down with a cold immediately after. The calendar would be printed, with handwritten information. “Must-sees” would be striped with pink highlighter.

And yet in the spirit of a fall that won’t begin-highs in the mid-80s today – it looks like CMJ 2016 won’t either. According to articles published by Pitchfork, Stereogum, and Brooklyn Vegan, the event’s 2016 existence is largely in question. As far back as April, Brooklyn Vegan posed the question: “Is CMJ happening this year?” Stereogum’s late August headline probed even deeper when it asked: “CMJ Sure Seems To Be Over. So How Come Nobody Is Talking About It?”

Naturally, I have some questions of my own. Firstly, if CMJ is happening this year, then why does the official website still have “CMJ 2015” emblazoned all over it, along with no lineup in sight? And secondly, what the hell are we supposed to believe when Time Out New York publishes an article that reads “The CMJ Music Marathon is probably not happening this year” as well as a “CMJ 2016 Music Marathon Guide” on the same day?

As it turns out, trouble has been brewing for a few years now. According to a 2013 New York Times article published the first day of the mini festival that year (very sensitive of you, NY Times,) the organization behind CMJ was facing a $1 million dollar lawsuit due to a failed merger with Metropolitan Entertainment. And that is just what’s keeping four days of new music bliss at bay this year: business problems.

But despite the pessimism from various news outlets, CMJ CEO Adam Klein is asking that everyone try a little tenderness and hold their horses this year. He expressed in a press release that he is “totally committed to protecting CMJ’s unique and ‘live’ heritage while adapting to the ever-changing demands of artists, fans, and the music industry. A little patience and a whole lot less wild and unsubstantiated speculation is what we need right now.”

But what about what music journalists need? Don’t we need four nights of nearly 1,500 bands we’ve never heard to lose our minds over every fall? Of course we do! I must be in full-blown denial of the situation, as I check CMJ’s website near daily just in case this is all some sort of lofty prank.

Leafing through my 2014 festival guide, which I have kept for reasons even I cannot fathom, I take note of the venue listings. Cameo Gallery: gone. Glasslands: gone. Spike Hill: Equinox. Trash Bar: run out of the neighborhood. There seems to be a whole theme surrounding the independent music scene in New York sometimes, and it’s not a hopeful one. While venues and bars reincarnate in more remote hoods, it’s hard to imagine what could possibly replace an event as essential as CMJ.

Like a mom that loves scrapbooking, I have kept all of my press badge lanyards over the years, a fact so dorky that it can only be expressed through use of the word “lanyard.” Without these badges, I wouldn’t have been able to see most of the gigs at CMJ…except that ¾ of the ones I select always end up being free to the public. “Ma’am, this show is free,” many a door person has scolded as I earnestly held the laminated card to their face. So thrilled I was about this event, that I would proudly take on the douchey, self-ordained responsibility of wearing my press badge at all times, even when it made absolutely no sense, like at AudioFemme showcases.

One time, in my fifth attempt to finally see Perfect Pussy, I wore my badge all the way up to north Williamsburg to an outdoor matinee featuring Protomartyr. There was no question in my mind that this was a CMJ event, as it was listed with the others. I waited in line, and gave ‘em the badge. “That won’t do you any good here,” the dough handler said gruffly. I slinked away outwardly embarrassed, but unwilling to hand over ten dollars to an asshole in a bad hat. A similar dilemma had transpired at Silent Barn days prior at a Sean Nicholas Savage show, but the resident hand stamper was more kind. Slightly.

If it weren’t for CMJ, I wouldn’t have discovered artists such as Cosmo Sheldrake, Kamasi Washington, Hooton Tennis Club, Phony PPL, Landshapes, Outfit, Tom Vek, The Dig, Money, or countless others. I first saw London trio Happyness at the marathon, and they have since become a favorite emerging band, and fantastic interview subjects to boot.

CMJ has always felt like my New York Christmas; a time of year I anticipate months in advance, and yammer on about like a grade school kid all throughout. It created a collective excitement and feeling of goodwill around the city, and fostered an environment that made me feel welcome and comfortable. I will always remember the showcases as being some of the few gigs at which I actually met people. By talking to them.

I don’t want to stress out Adam Klein. I don’t want to make assumptions, or be impatient, or god forbid insensitive. But as Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits ironically sang, “I want my MTV,” I will go on record as un-ironically saying, “I want my CMJ.” We’ve lost too many musical events and venues over the years, but losing the marathon after three decades might be the worst of it.

CMJ Music Marathon, won’t you please come back to us? Until then, I will continue to shamelessly wear my CMJ tote bag from a couple years ago, which is so grimy and frayed that even I, a person of debatable sanitary practices, question its public acceptability. Soiled though it is, it at least reminds me of the days when I could put on my leather jacket, curse the ubiquity of pumpkin spice, and then go see ten bands I’d never heard before.

ONLY NOISE: Love From Afar

They say everyone is good at something. My mom can tie cherry stems into knots with her tongue. My tenth grade English teacher looked alarmingly natural in pirate shirts. I once saw a man scale a 30-foot coconut tree with his bare extremities. Personally, I have a long history of romancing incredible men…who live very far away from me. It is a history that dates back to the preteen era: my first kiss occurred at a punk show (Clit 45, inappropriately enough) in Costa Mesa, California, approximately 1,000 miles south of my hometown. His name was Kevin. It didn’t work out.

A couple of years later, I fell head over heels for a punk rock Adonis at a tiny gig in Seattle. I can’t remember my exact tactics, but I somehow acquired his email address, which was surely a Hotmail account. That was it. I would finally have my mohawked boyfriend I had so longed for throughout my rural Washington existence. I gathered the courage to e-ask him out. He e-laughed, and informed me that he lived in New Jersey.

I don’t want to sound like Ludacris by saying I have hoes in different area codes or anything, but I must admit, traveling romances and meeting men who are just passing through has turned into an unwanted skill. I think guys can just smell the unavailability when you step off the plane, ya know? Whether it’s Portland or Paris, I’ve found myself loving from afar more than a couple of times. It has turned into some cruel joke at this point, but fortunately, I have a wonderful sense of humor. Ha. Ha.

Typically, when someone sees a continual pattern in their life, they might try to thwart it, or at least analyze why it keeps happening. But I tend to just score the phenomena with appropriate songs. Which is kind of like giving someone who’s starving an issue of Food and Wine Magazine instead of making them a sandwich?

I guess my point is, this week I am saluting the long-distance love song. We’ve all missed someone, so naturally, there is an entire canon of music to nurse such a woe. One of my favorites is the unbearably obvious, but undeniably good “So Far Away” by Carole King from her groundbreaking LP Tapestry. “So Far Away” exists within a mini-theme of the album, which includes “Way Over Yonder” and “Where You Lead-” tracks that likewise express a longing for faraway things. “So Far” takes the trophy, however, as it is the only song with the required dose of hopelessness lyrically. What can I say? I don’t like half-assed sad. Might as well do it right. King laments her solitude by wryly asking: “Doesn’t anybody stay in one place anymore?” No, Carole. No.

The great thing about love songs is their ability to be universal, but also to be even more universal in their specificity. I am in utter admiration not only of the fact that humans went beyond inventing the wheel and created the love song, but also that there are so many iterations and sub-genres of such. I can’t think of a more absurdly specific faraway tune than “Come Back From San Francisco” by the morose Magnetic Fields, who excel at writing a particular brand of pathetic love song. It is probably one of the most alienating miss-you tunes, with its nods to bisexual, novelist city dwellers, but, being a pretentious music journalist living in New York City, I’d say it’s right on the money for me.

When we zoom in on music this much or any medium for that matter, there is always the risk of ruining things; it’s fair to ask if we are accidentally taking the soul out of it all. Getting too close can expose blemishes, imperfections, or worse, isolate the beautiful abstract from the mere molecules; like reminding someone that gravy is essentially boiled blood. I want to keep these songs categorized as gravy, but I like to dig a little deeper. I like to see how the gravy is made.

It is funny, and also frustrating that though all of humanity has felt the sensation of longing for another person, only a select few of us can distill that longing into an art form. Painters paint, sculptors sculpt, and of course, songwriters write songs. The rest of us make playlists, mixtapes, CDs. They are in a way collages or monuments of found objects…a kind of paint-by-numbers for those of us who know dick about color theory. It feels democratic, even like recycling to use someone else’s song to express your adoration for a far off lover. Because in the age of text and email, how do you expect to get your weightiest points across? Emoji?

There is, of course, snail mail, but what’s in a letter that hasn’t been bested by Tom Waits singing about slow-grown love in “Long Way Home” off of Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards? Chances are what you pen in that note won’t be sticking in anyone’s head the way a ballad can. To forge an association between yourself and a song in someone else’s mind is like snagging free ad space during the Super Bowl. That sounds creepy, but you know what I mean.

A classic phrase for the faraway is: “Wish You Were Here,” but I will spare you the Pink Floyd and Incubus references. Nick Lowe has his own version from 1983’s The Abominable Showman, which could sneak by as an upbeat number if it weren’t for the subject matter. Because despite all of the puns and harmonies, there is still a lack that can only be answered thus: “having said that my dear/how I wish that you were here.”

Of course, at the end of the day, someone has to offer a solution to all of this wanting. Who better to lay down a piece of his mind than Bob Dylan, who closes 1969’s Nashville Skyline with one of my favorite songs in this category, “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You.” It is the quintessential, end-of-the-romantic-comedy song, in which the protagonist disrupts some form of transportation to spend at least a little more time with the object of their affection. In movies, it’s usually a plane. With Dylan, it’s obviously a train.

“Throw my ticket out the window/Throw my suitcase out there too/Throw my troubles out the door/I don’t need them anymore/’Cause tonight I’ll be staying here with you.

I should have left this town this morning/But it was more than I could do/Oh, your love comes on so strong/And I’ve waited all day long/For tonight when I’ll be staying here with you.”

It’s the end we all hope for, but that few can afford. Finding a new suitcase and train ticket were obviously within Dylan’s realm of financial capabilities. But I’d like to end with this one, because despite the rest, it’s the one song within this hyper-specific class that at the very least offers a modicum of hope…that maybe throwing caution, and one’s worldly possessions to the literal wind and living off impulse is a very good idea. That remains to be seen, but at least we can commiserate with a few songs before taking that leap off the train, so to speak.

ONLY NOISE: An Anthem For The In-Between

Drift.

Verb:

To be carried slowly by a current of air or water.

Noun:

A continuous slow movement from one place to another.

These are dictionary definitions of the word-a couple, at least. Though if I were to define what it means to “drift” I might say to float, to dangle…to exist in the great in between. To be forever en route.

So much of contemporary music is labeled, stuffed into Sharpied Rubbermaid containers: the “love” song, the “break up” song, the “political” song, etc. And yet over the years I have noticed that some of my favorite cuts have a bizarre, genre-less similarity between them: they seem to be about being neither here nor there. These songs seem to recognize the swirling unknown surrounding them, and accept it as such, neither good nor bad. This lack of specificity has strangely anchored me at some of my most specifically difficult times. They have been the land I spot when out to sea, so to speak.

One of the first songs that made me realize I was headed for a hard drive full of existential playlists was Pavement’s “Range Life” from their 1994 masterpiece Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. Stephen Malkmus has always been the king of nonchalance and blasé, putting boredom on a stick and somehow making it seem appetizing. “Range Life” is nowhere short of delicious in its absolute lack of zeal. You can almost picture Malkmus coasting through a blurred-out suburb on his skateboard, never losing or gaining acceleration.

“After the glow, the scene, the stage/The sad talk becomes slow but there’s one thing I’ll never forget/Hey, you gotta pay your dues before you pay the rent/Over the turnstiles and out in the traffic/There’s ways of living, it’s the way I’m living, right or wrong/It’s all that I can do and I wouldn’t want to let you be”

“I want a range life if I could settle down/If I could settle down then I would settle down”

“Out on my skateboard the night is just humming/And the gum smacks are the pulse I’ll follow if my walkman fades/Well, I got absolutely no one, no one but myself to blame”

Perhaps it is merely my interpretation of these tracks that garners such a feeling of warm nowhere-ness. Maybe if Steve Malkmus read this he might say: “Actually, that song was about being on tour.” To which I would say, “being on tour is an in between place.” But Steve Malkmus probably isn’t going to read this, so I am free to project all the existential dilemmas on his music that I can muster.

A true anthem for the unmoored, Bill Callahan’s room temperature “Riding For The Feeling” from 2011’s Apocalypse is a favorite for listless days. It is, one of the most solitary songs I have ever heard, yet somehow manages to evoke both heartbreak and liberation. Again, it is neither here nor there, and reminds me of the pointless joy that can be found in driving for no particular reason or destination:

“It’s never easy to say goodbye/To the faces/So rarely do we see another one/So close and so long”

“All this leaving is never ending”

“In conclusion leaving is easy/When you’ve got some place you need to be”

“What if I had stood there at the end and said again and again/An answer to every question/Riding for the feeling/Would that have been a suitable goodbye?”

When Callahan sings, “all this leaving is never ending” I can’t help but picture a ceaseless swinging door, one that no longer knows the difference between coming and going. One that opens to concrete people and places, but exists in that in between space: in between jobs, and relationships, and albums. To ride “for the feeling” is to drift, to coast for the sake of it, to float on the unknown. I’m not sure what it says about me that is my favorite part of the entire song, and if I somehow miss it I must rewind to carefully consider those six words:

“All this leaving is never ending”

The music video for this track could be considered a meditation on that one line. It is Zen with its unrelenting sameness: six minutes and fourteen seconds of a continuous ski jump over paper mountains. “Riding” is one of the few videos I have seen that deals strictly with the in between. No beginning. No end. Just the little skier coasting infinitely.

“Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space” by Spiritualized is a far more literal hymn for feeling un-tethered. Most will know it from the 2004 dystopian-romance film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which alone could cradle the song in a whole different context. But for me, “Ladies and Gentlemen” is a song for the sensory deprivation tank. It is so buoyant, so expansive in its ambience that it creates the exact feeling its title suggests-floating in space. Lyrically the track is no more exacting:

“I will love you ’til I die/And I will love you all the time/So please put your sweet hand in mine/And float in space and drift in time/All the time until I die/We’ll float in space, just you and I”

“Baby I love you today/I guess that’s what you want/And I don’t know where we are all going/Life don’t get stranger than this/It is what it is/And I don’t know where we are all going”

This is the kind of song that was made for feeling small and powerless in the best way possible. I know that sounds depressing, but if you really think about it, its kind of nice…like staring at the ocean and forgetting about your overdue electric bill.

If there was one bard of the great abyss, I can’t imagine anyone could handle the job better than Bob Dylan, whose catalogue is almost as overwhelming as existential dread itself. “Going, Going, Gone” from 1974’s Planet Waves is a true ballad for not knowing where the fuck life is going to take you. Though the original cut featuring The Band is a prime piece of audio, I have to be honest and reveal that my introduction to it was via the 1982 Richard Hell and the Voidoids cover. It is in a way a perfect marriage. Hell sprung from the nihilist punk scene that didn’t consider its own past or future, that only existed in the moment, much like the voice in Dylan’s song:

“I’ve just reached a place /Where the willow don’t bend/ There’s not much more to be said/ It’s the top of the end /I am going /I am going /I am gone”

“I am closing the book/ On the pages and the text /And I don’t really care /Of what happens next /I am just going /I am going/ I am gone”

“I been hanging on threads /I been playing it straight /Now I’ve just got to cut loose/ Before it gets late /So I am going /I am going/ I am gone”

“I been walking the road/ I been living on the edge /Now I’ve just got to go /Before I get to the ledge/ So I am going/ I am just going /I am gone”

It is the ultimate track for drifting, for nuzzling into the unknown. Because sometimes all you can do is just be.

ONLY NOISE: Coney Island, Baby

As the glad hand of summer tightens to a fist, I feel hungover. These three hot months we wait for all year melt us into believing that we can live this way forever; damp and in torn jeans, drinking beer at 2pm and eating hot dogs at 2am. Perhaps summer to others is less slovenly, but it’s hard to be fresh-faced in the New York sun, which radiates off black pavement and carries the scent of freshly baked garbage up your nostrils. Where else in the country does summer = hot garbage? Better yet: hot garbage juice, which I’m sure we have all stepped in, wearing sandals.

This of course, isn’t everyone’s summer in New York. Portions of the Upper East Side and Park Slope seem to be refuse-free. And while many would find the above description noxious, there is one place in New York that seems to spin all that trash into colored candyfloss every summer: Coney Island.

Coney Island was a place I loved long before I walked its busted boardwalk, jutting upwards like misaligned teeth. It was a place I knew from song, as it has been immortalized in many. It seemed to be a perpetual place of interest for Tom Waits, who recorded a salty version of “Coney Island Baby” for 2002’s Blood Money. The beachside town has achieved an honorable mention in Waits’ “Take It With Me” from the 1999 LP Mule Variations, and it seemed the rakish balladeer perhaps knew the place better than anyone else.

Yet the artistic fascination with Coney Island doesn’t start or stop with Waits. The Ramones bopped about it in “Oh, Oh, I Love Her So” from 1977, singing about going “on the coaster and around again” in the grade C theme park. The only coaster they could mean is the treacherous Cyclone, which has provided thrill-seekers with whiplash since 1927. In the same decade Coney was fetishized by the Ramones, films like Annie Hall and The Warriors tipped their hats as well. While its use in the former merely provides a comical backdrop (Woody Allen’s character grew up in a house beneath the Cyclone, hence his neuroses), the latter catapulted the area into cult status. Where Waits had provided a mood, The Warriors affronted with a forceful visual of dueling gangs in leather vests and headbands.

I knew far more about Coney Island than I should have prior to moving to New York. I knew about the Wonder Wheel, and the Freak Show, and Nathan’s Hot Dogs. I knew that it was most likely filled with large women, and men named Frank. But I didn’t fully understand the allure until I first went for myself in 2009. By then I had discovered another “Coney Island Baby,” the classic Lou Reed track off of his 1976 album of the same name.

Something churned within me as I got off the F train that summer…and I realize now that same feeling can be explained by Reed’s lyric:

“Ah, but remember that the city is a funny place/ Something like a circus or a sewer /And just remember, different people have peculiar tastes”

It was right then that I grasped the elusive beauty of Coney Island: it is an absolute shithole. It appeared that all of the collective enthrallment with the neighborhood was very aware of this fact. What’s more, the contradiction between the dirt and depravity of such a hood and it being a place of magical, family entertainment only seemed to increase the morbid fascination.

“The city is a funny place/Something like a circus or a sewer.” This rotated in my head as I walked past a portly, sun-baked woman, the length of her strangled in a fluorescent pink fishnet bodysuit. To my left, children were running through sprays of water generated by large blow-up palm trees punctuating the beach. Seagulls dove through the mist as old men wetted their balding heads, no one discriminating against the offerings of the plastic foliage. A boom box accompanied a saxophonist blowing away to Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely” and pieces of garbage floated past my feet, though none of the famed “Coney Island Whitefish” I’d heard so much about, a.k.a, used condoms.

While I can’t say the same of many places, Coney Island is exactly what I’ve always wanted it to be; and it maintains its appeal almost eight years later. When I went the other day it was waiting for me, running up to say hello with a hot dog in one hand and a beer in the other. I accepted and sat on the cement benches at Nathan’s, listening to “Year Of The Cat” by Al Stewart and innumerable Fleetwood Mac tracks. Neither of these made any sense, and I wish I could say something like Reed or Waits was playing, but I was happy to choke down shameful food to something familiar, something un-Carly Rae Jepsen. And that is what this place is all about: shame, pleasure, and familiarity.

Perhaps the kernel of Coney Island’s appeal possesses the same molecules as comfort food, guilty pleasures, and poorly produced music. It isn’t so much about the overt, qualitative aspects of a thing, but the gut reaction it elicits. Did that hot dog feel good in my gut? No. But did it feel good in my gut’s heart? You betcha.

After waddling out of Nathan’s, where I once watched the world famous Fourth of July hot dog eating contest (to the tune of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’”) in another bout of poor taste, I made my way to MCU Park to take in my very first Brooklyn Cyclones game. Blaring out of the shoddy sound system were soundtrack versions of Disney songs: “Bippity Boppity Boo” and “A Whole New World” and the like.

Because Coney Island can only get weirder every time I go, the game is themed: it is princess and pirate night at the stadium, and there are hoards of terrifying children literally screaming for ice cream in sparkly pink dresses, tiaras, and pastel eye shadow. Large men with robust Brooklyn accents address their families with jovial shouting, which is later directed at the baseball team, only less jovially. As it turns out, the Cyclones are a pretty terrible team. A man behind me begins heckles the athletes while wearing a Cyclones shirt: “Come ON! My daughter hits betta than you!” he blurts. A princess-disguised hellion stands behind me, prodding my neck with something. I turn and realize it’s a chicken finger.

If it weren’t for Princess Poultry I may have stayed for the last two innings, but my companion and I were growing heavy from the heat and hot dogs. We laughed at the absurdity of such a place, and that a baseball game could be so comically bad. “You know what though?” my friend asked. I completed the thought before he could, “we would have been disappointed if they were really good.”

When I am asked to defend my bad taste, in the same way I must when my dad inquires about my preference for crappy bars as opposed to slick ones, I never have a ready-made reason at hand. But I think that it is the unrefined things that possess the most endurance. It is the rationale that against all of the information I possess about the health detriments of hot dogs, I still adore them. I know that Bob Dylan does not technically have a beautiful singing voice, but I will continue to love it. So when asked why in the hell I love Coney Island so much, I can’t help but counter:

“Ah, but remember that the city is a funny place/ Something like a circus or a sewer /And just remember, different people have peculiar tastes”

ONLY NOISE: Poison Pen – The Discretely Vicious Songs of Elvis Costello

The best insults are those that fly over our heads. Those that for a minute maybe sound like praise. Those that strike with a delay…like a cut from a sharp blade that doesn’t begin to bleed until several moments after incision. An insult that can walk away from its victim, turn its back and laugh as the brunt of the joke stands, stammering for a comeback. There are, in my book, four contemporary masters of this caliber of lyrical affront: Bob Dylan, Morrissey, Leonard Cohen and Elvis Costello. It is the latter that I praise today, for turning the act of insolence into an art form. I originally thought this could be a great Valentine’s Day piece, being the grumpy bastard that I am, but instead I will salute Costello on his birthday, which is today.

There are a cargo truck’s worth of reasons why Costello is one of my favorite songwriters of all time; that unmistakable snarl of a voice that could make “Three Blind Mice” sound subversive, his unflinching command of pop music, and those glasses…I’m a sucker for anyone on the Buddy Holly spectrum of things. But one of the most compelling things about Costello is his wicked mastery of the English language. His lyrics are often love letters printed with poison, at first seeming sweet, and only after consideration revealing themselves to be cruel reprimands.

It is this very contrast that I find so intriguing, and it is an attraction that occurs outside of my musical fanaticism as well. There is nothing more entertaining and refreshing to me than those who break the behavioral pattern people expect of them. When old ladies curse, when my kindest friends reveal their deep hatred for someone, when parents admit that their child is an asshole…these all tickle my deeply-rooted, contrarian nature, and the same can be said for Costello’s work.

His songs work in a similar, sneak-attack fashion to hard liquor; it’s smooth going down, but catches up to you later. The insatiable pop licks Costello brandishes overwhelm, while a guerilla faction of snide remarks injure from the side. Songs like “I Hope You’re Happy Now” from 1986’s Blood And Chocolate is a prime example of this dichotomy, especially given the misleading title (he really doesn’t hope you are happy now).

“He’s a fine figure of a man and handsome too,” Costello sneers. “With his eyes upon the secret places he’d like to undo.”

He goes on to describe a comically abysmal bloke that his former flame is bedding, wishing them both well with a sturdy middle finger.

“He’s got all the things you need and some that you will never/but you make him sound like frozen food, his love will last forever. Still, he knows what she wants and what she don’t allow/and I hope that you’re happy now.”

“He’s acting innocent and proud still you know what he’s after/Like a matador with his pork sword, while we all die of laughter/In his turquoise pajamas and motorcycle hat/I hope you’re happy now because you’ll soon put pay to that.”

The fun continues with tracks like “Miracle Man” off of 1977’s debut My Aim Is True, in which Costello proves his aptitude for the backhanded compliment (those going through breakups, take note).

“Yet everybody loves you so much, girl /I just don’t know how you stand the strain/Oh I-I’m the one who’s here tonight/And I don’t want to do it all in vain.”

I used to wish that during every breakup, I could magically summon Costello, like some sort of mean genie to rattle off insults to romantic wrongdoers in my life. Perhaps he could hide in a tree and speak into a tiny mic hooked to my invisible earpiece, feeding me lines like “I knew then what I know now, I never loved you anyhow.” If only life worked like that.

It seems that even Costello’s “love songs” are not what they seem. One of his most iconic ballads, “Alison” has often been looked to as a slow dance, anniversary type of love song-something deeply romantic, when in fact it sprung from a far more depressing reality.

In Costello’s recent autobiography, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, he describes the impetus for writing the track: “I wrote the song “Alison” after seeing a beautiful checkout girl at the local supermarket. She had a face for which a ship might have once been named. Scoundrels might once have fought mist-swathed duels to defend her honour. Now she was punching in the prices on cans of beans at a cash register and looking as if all the hopes and dreams of her youth were draining away.”

I wonder if there were a few who read that book and wished they hadn’t; their wedding song ruined forever.

A friend of mine in high school who was also a massive Costello fan found solace in the song “Different Finger” from 1981’s Trust when she got mixed up in the age-old conundrum of infidelity. While most songwriters would exalt their new lover, or self-flagellate with guilt, Costello is cold and despondent atop a knee-weakening melody. All he asks is that the affair be carried out sans wedding bands, revealing little to no emotional investment.

“Please put your rings on a diff’rent finger if you meet me tonight/’Cause I can’t stand those suspicious glances/’Cause I know the things they’re saying are right.”

“I don’t want to hear your whole life story/Or about my strange resemblance to some old flame/All I want is one night of glory/I don’t even know your second name.”

“Different Finger” is an honest song and a song without honor all at once. We can learn from its vulnerability and imperfections-it so clearly exposes all of the possibilities inside of us, that really we are all capable of anything given the correct cocktail of circumstance.

Of all these venomous love songs, “Little Triggers” off of 1978’s This Year’s Model takes the proverbial cake. It is one of the most heartrending songs of all time, with nods to doo-wop vocal melodies and the haunting pulses of Steve Nieves B3 organ. But despite the songs potential for glorious love-balladry, it is an extreme close up of an imperfect relationship, and all of the sour miscommunications that come along with.

“Little triggers that you pull with your tongue/Little triggers I don’t wanna be hung up/Strung up when you don’t call up/Little sniggers on your lips/Little triggers in your grip/Little triggers, my hand on your hip

“Worryin’ about the common decency/When it is only a question of frequency/When you say okay but you’ve got cheek to be/Sayin’ you’re tired of me when you don’t even weaken these/Little triggers that you pull with your tongue/Little triggers, I don’t want to be hung up, strung up/When you don’t call up.”

“Little Triggers” makes me wonder if the trigger-happy lover isn’t in fact Costello himself. It’s hard to imagine that any partner of his could be more sharp tongued than the insult-wielding musician. Or perhaps, his songs are merely some attempt at wish fulfillment. Maybe in real life it was too painful to put up a fight, so he brought the fight to music instead. I wish we all could siphon our pain into chart-topping songs. In the meantime, we have Elvis Costello.

ONLY NOISE: A Love Letter To KEXP

In the 1973 film American Graffiti, restless high school students zip around in classic cars, aimlessly careening through the night for the sake of motion alone. Characters wind up in different scenarios; burglaries, burger joints, brawls…kid stuff. But the one consistent element between every car ride is the radio; specifically the station tuned to the legendary, real-life DJ Wolfman Jack. Despite the seemingly chaotic habits of the characters, their differing tolerances for mischief and crime, their ability to drag race-they all tune into Wolfman Jack regardless. His gospel is the only thing they can all agree on: the gospel of rock n’ roll from the lips of a once-revered Disc Jockey.

The kids in the ‘60s may have had Wolfman Jack. John Peel rescued youth culture in the decades after. But for those of us born into an era of pre-programmed radio stuffed to the seams with commercial content, it’s difficult to imagine a golden age of rogue radio DJs. If there was some magical frequency out there playing The Germs or Throbbing Gristle, it sure as shit wasn’t broadcasting in Arlington, Washington. It wasn’t until my dad moved almost an hour south from my small hometown for work that our antenna could pick up the station that would change the way I thought about music, and radio. That station was, of course, 90.3 KEXP.

I am thinking of KEXP now because, well, I am listening to it. Not streaming it online from afar in Brooklyn, but right here, in Seattle. Right now DJ Cheryl Waters is playing “Human Performance” by Parquet Courts. Earlier in her set, Waters spun tracks like Cat Power’s “Sun,” Beirut’s “Elephant Gun,” and the brand new Let’s Eat Grandma cut, “Eat Shiitake Mushrooms” among countless tracks I’d never heard before. Each is song different from the last, abiding by no confining genre guidelines-just exceptional music curated with a whole lotta love.

The publicly supported radio station was founded in Seattle in 1972, originally under the call letters KCMU. The switch to KEXP didn’t occur until 2001, right around the time Seattle billionaire Paul Allen commissioned that multi-colored metal tumor to strangle the base of the Space Needle: the Experience Music Project. EMP and Paul Allen partnered with the station, providing it with operating support for a handful of years. It put the EXP in KEXP, I guess you could say.

The station is now independent and operated by Friends of KEXP, and is largely funded through its audience, holding biannual pledge drives and promoting its donation-based membership program year-round. The weeklong pledge drives are a small price to pay for largely interruption free year of music. Upon first hearing commercial-free KEXP, I didn’t think it was legal to do that…broadcast sans advertising. I figured this must be some pirate radio, Pump Up The Volume starring Christian Slater shit. These guys must be in a bunker somewhere. Surely no one else had stumbled upon this gem. I may have been wrong, but it did feel like my own secret station-a safe and nurturing place I could curl up into.

For someone crawling out of a sleepy lumber town, the thought that any contemporary DJ could possibly spin a Wire song was unfathomable. Not only did KEXP play Wire, they would do so at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday. They didn’t have to hide their more obscure selections in the wee hours.

Each afternoon returning from high school, I would shut myself in my room, spread out the night’s homework, and turn on the radio to soak in the invaluable musical lessons KEXP had to offer. Sitting at my little desk it was often difficult to focus on the seemingly useless algebra and inaccurate history chapters. How could I when there were far more interesting things floating out of my speakers? Jesse Sykes and the Sweet Hereafter, Fela Kuti, The Cramps, Art Brut…I would jot down lists of the bands I liked, later making a trip to Tower Records (R.I.P.) in the University District or Silver Platters to scavenge for CDs.

The most critical turn in my relationship with KEXP came about in that familiar scenario: sitting at my desk doing homework some weeknight…I think I was preparing for a debate the next morning. I sat, reluctantly flipping through note cards, when a storm rolled over the speakers of my Sony boombox. It was a simple gospel melody, but the voice preaching was nowhere near saintly. It sounded like gravel in a blender, like a diesel truck with emphysema, like an ex-convict whose diet consists solely of petroleum and wing nuts. The song was “Lord I’ve Been Changed” by Tom Waits. Nothing was the same after that. Waits has since become my favorite artist of all time, completely altering my perception of what makes music great, and what makes art worthwhile. I think it’s safe to say that that night changed my life forever, and it was of course all because of the good people at 90.3 FM.

KEXP not only exposed me to music I’d never heard before and to the records I would grow to love, it also taught me how to re-contextualize my tastes and break free from the boundaries of genre. After trying on a new subculture every few years for the better part of a decade, strictly adhering to each one with sonic intake and dress code, it was a relief to let the edges blur a little. I was no longer militant about remaining within the confines of what was punk, or mod, or rockabilly, or ska, or glam-I could eat all of them in one meal and add other flavors should I so desire. KEXP taught me that listening to The Dead Boys one minute and Dolly Parton the next was not only ok, it was totally badass, and far more realistic for the diverse needs of the human mind.

The versatility KEXP champions is not new to the station. Back in the KCMU days amidst a heavy indie rock rotation, they were the first station to play artists like Grandmaster Flash, which is no small thing. Yet another milestone for KCMU, just on the heels of the name change, was that it was the first station in the world to stream high quality (128 kilobit per second) online audio 24/7. That may sound a bit jargony, but think of all the online radio platforms that have followed suit since, and it’s rather impressive.

When people learn that I am a native Washingtonian, they often want to talk about music. And why wouldn’t they? Our alumni include Quincy Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Neko Case, Bing Crosby, Rickie Lee Jones, Kurt Cobain, Mark Lanegan, Mia Zapata, Carrie Brownstein, and countless others. But despite Seattle’s rich musical history, it is maintaining a fruitful present as well. 90.3 provides a sort of congealing community approach to nourish that kind of progress. Music is a main artery here, and I like to think KEXP is the heart of it all, pumping blood for the love of it.

ONLY NOISE: A Man Called Priddy

I am a scavenger, perhaps an opportunist, although that doesn’t sound very rugged. Ever since moving to New York in 2008, I’ve developed a wild thirst for the “hunt” whenever I return to either of my parents’ homes. The “hunt” occurs when after only moments of being beyond the doormat, all I want to do is rip through bookshelves, closets, photo albums, the garage, etc. It is a side effect of my severe addiction to nostalgia; a dangling carrot suggesting that around every nook I might find something exquisite. And, I typically do.

Despite the virtue of minimalism, I’m grateful as hell that my parents, especially my mother and grandparents (who we called Papa Charlie and Yaya), have saved so much over the years. At times, their collections verge on the side of hoarding. I once opened a drawer in Yaya’s house to find, among other useless knickknacks, a mason jar filled with tiny rosettes she’d fashioned from gum wrappers. There was nothing utilitarian about her “collecting,” but how can you deny the artfulness of such a thing? I couldn’t throw them out.

I could write a book gushing over all of Yaya’s clothing and bizarre creations I’ve acquired over the years, and someday I just might, but as I sit in my grandparents’ living room in Huntington Beach, California, it is Papa Charlie’s record collection that is scoring the evening.

Traditionally, I think of the “musical side” of my family as stemming from my father’s half of the tree, with so many songwriters weighing that branch. But, it was Papa Charlie who upheld the musical fanaticism on my mother’s side. As I flip through the dusty stacks of Charlie’s vinyl collection, my mom stands in the kitchen reminiscing about her wily dad.

“Back in the day,” she says, “after my mom would go to bed, he would whisper, ‘Go get another bottle of wine,’ after already drinking two or three, and we would just sit in the living room listening to jazz and big band, getting smashed. He would say, ‘Oh! Oh! Listen to that! Isn’t that marvelous?! Do you hear that?!”

I’ve certainly inherited Charlie’s propensity to always have a favorite part of a song, and then subsequently shove it down peoples’ throats while listening to it. I also share his need for ritual while playing records-attentively putting them on and just sitting and listening.

Charles Priddy passed away in 2002 near the Texas County he was born in. At the time I was on the heels of 13 – in peak preteen misery. I had relinquished the clarinet for electric bass in the hopes of making it as a punk musician someday. Papa Charlie, who was a devout fan of big band clarinetist Benny Goodman, was noticeably disappointed when I abandoned the woodwind. I couldn’t understand why. I had never thought of Charlie as an interesting person when I was younger. I knew he was a geologist, and one of the few members of my family who went to college. I knew he was an immense connoisseur of wine and rich food. I knew that he used to bury fossils from all over the world in his Orange County yard to “confuse future scientists.”

It was only years after his passing that I came to realize we would have gotten on famously. Today, as I flipped through his vinyl, through Django Reinhardt’s Swing It Lightly, Tex Ritter’s Blood On The Saddle, and countless albums of jazz, big band, bossa nova and flamenco, I wished more than anything I could sit with him, a glass of Syrah in one hand, just listening. I wish I could relay to him that my musical tastes have broadened since we last saw each other, and that with all the “noise” I love, I also dig on Artie Shaw and Art Tatum and Sergio Mendes, just like, and probably because of him. We would have a whole hell of a lot to talk about; food, my Yaya’s native Spain, our collective disbelief in god, food, and of course, music.

One of my favorite finds of today has been The Language and Music of the Wolves, which boasts recordings of actual wolves, narrated by Robert Redford. It is the land-dwelling equivalent to one of my favorite records in my dad’s collection: a collection of whale songs narrated by Leonard Nimoy.

Charlie was someone who was absolutely full of surprises, darkly hilarious, and smart as a whip. I credit all of my sarcasm and black humor to him, for better or worse. After he passed my mother was attempting to clean out a closet filled with cases of wine in his California home. Tucked away in a dirty little corner was a stack of Charlie’s vintage Playboys. The scoundrel.

But his reading habits weren’t solely of the centerfold kind. He was a massive fan of Hemingway, and shared the author’s love of Spain. When he married Yaya in the ‘50s, he quickly learned her native Castilian tongue and would take my mother and his wife back to the homeland often, stopping at as many of Hemingway’s old haunts as he could locate. On more than one occasion in such an establishment, my mother would look around at the bar, quickly noticing the dress of the female waitresses.

“Dad, are we in a brothel?” She would probe. Charlie would glance side to side. “Shh. Don’t tell your mother.”

His love for Spanish culture is evident in his record collection as well, with piles of flamenco LPs and recordings by classical Spanish guitar players such as Andrés Segovia.

My grandfather was a scientist and a romantic all at once. He could easily break things down with materialist logic, but he chose to save that for the workplace. He was a sort of bacchant, relishing in life’s edible and artistic pleasures with a pagan fervor.

My discoveries of the day do not shock me for the most part…though there is one outlier I don’t understand. Throughout my sifting I found a fair amount of German folk music. I ask my mom about it and she confirms that he loved polka in addition to Dean Martin, Mel Tormé and Edith Piaf.

“We used to go to this place in Anaheim called the Phoenix club,” she says. “It was a German spot and they used to have live polka music. One night he and I were quite a few beers in and we were dancing all over the place-so hard, that grandpa fell right on top of me on the dance floor. Yaya had to drive us home, cursing at us is Spanish as we drunkenly sang polka songs in the back seat.”

I continue to dust off albums, and there before me is a record that explains it all: For Singing And Dancing: Beer Drinking-Songs by the Zillertal Band. A nice marriage of interests, at the very least.

I of course cannot turn back time, or resurrect the dead. But I can sit in Charlie’s armchair, and put on Taboo by Arthur Lyman with a glass of wine in one hand, shouting “Oh! Oh! Listen to that! Isn’t that marvelous?! Do you hear that?!” to no one in particular. And sometimes, that’s enough.

ONLY NOISE: For the Love of the Struggle

Friends of mine tend to think that my insistence upon doing things the “hard” or “old-fashioned” way is merely my last cry of pubescent rage sputtering out like a tapped keg. A “contrarian” they call me. A “grandpa.” And I don’t mind. I don’t expect to get away with printing maps of where I’m going for the evening or writing down people’s numbers in my notepad without some ball-busting. I get it. Your grandmother knows how to use an iPhone better than I do and so does your three-year old nephew. Fortunately, this is the one place I don’t have to painstakingly explain my love of vinyl, which to many people outside of our music-website bubble is absurd and archaic. But what about how we acquire vinyl? For some reason I can’t deal with going into a shop to visit the shiny “New Arrival” or “New Release” sections without feeling like I’m phoning it in. I want a struggle. I want to dig. Sifting through piles of Lionel Ritchie and warped Rick Astley singles is a long and grimy endeavor, but the jewel found amongst refuse is always more brilliant.

Of all the junk shops I patronize, I’ve yet to find one as enthralling as Greenpoint’s The Thing. Rarely is an establishment so true to its title; this place is a grotesque organism of its own. An entire eco system of other people’s stuff. With nary a millimeter of free space, the Thing is an institution of sensory overload. Miniature cityscapes are formed by cassette tape skyscrapers, framed by mountain ranges of books, DVDs, and polyester dresses. Getting to the back room is hazardous and requires deft leg weaving through precarious stacks of you-name-it. A magazine asteroid could launch toward your head at any moment. I’d personally recommend a hard-hat.

At first glance, it’s difficult to imagine there could be more shit in the Thing. In the far reaches of the first floor rest thousands of records, leaning like post-storm trees and abiding by no system of organization. There are always a few people scavenging through these heaps, typically men in their mid-thirties, all shading their find with a furrowed brow, like an archaeologist dusting off a shard of pottery. They inspect the spine, note the release date, slip out the onyx disk in the hopes of a scuff-free surface. I suspect to most people this ritual looks as ridiculous as polishing a VHS tape, but to me it’s like local slang.

Much to the hoarder’s delight, this first floor is only the foyer. Teeter down the cement staircase, watch out for the low ceiling, and tiptoe into the basement if you’re up for some extreme rummaging. Down here there are only records. LPs, EPs, singles, ‘45s, maxi-singles, extended re-mixes, etcetera. If the records upstairs were mountainous, the basement is home to Everest. In the past I’ve seen guys down here spelunking for records, fully equipped with respirators and latex gloves. Today I have the cave to myself, and I’m determined to find something great if not rare.

But here exists the dilemma with a junk shop record dive: it’s 99 percent grueling pursuit and one percent success. Couldn’t we just go to a proper record shop? Of course. Will we? Absolutely not. It’s just too easy to waltz into a store and pay $26.75 for a 1980 release of More Specials. From their shelf to yours, with little more than a debit transaction to narrate the experience, it’s just no fun.

Now I’m not delusional; I realize that despite its obscurity, affordability, and hearty population of asbestos, the Thing is a still a store. We may be participating in Capitalism on the slightest level, but we are still consuming. Sure we can slap tags like “up-cycling” and “collecting” on it, but at the end of the day: we are buying shit.

It is not my goal to reprimand those who buy new vinyl instead of used. Nor is it my aim to pat us collectors on the back. That isn’t the point. The point is relaying the experience produced by finding a great record amidst a surplus of awful ones. The thrill of consciously searching for something that is not a necessity, but a pleasure defined by quality and nostalgia, is intoxicating. I like to think of it as cultural vulture-ism: we pick clean the bones of a dead medium.

However it isn’t a venture void of frustration; realizing the appeal of an album’s cover far exceeds its sound is annoying, accepting that an artist’s third album is garbage compared with their first two is disheartening, and not being able to reach that stack of untouched records jammed in a far corner is downright infuriating. I always try balancing on a milk crate, reaching an index finger towards the filmy piles that surely no one has flipped through, only to slip and risk a landslide of vinyl.

Three hours is the average length of time I can spend in these situations. By then my fingernails are piped with grime, my back hurts, and I’m primed for a bout of hypoglycemic rage. I’ll usually have a handful of records that are nothing more than desperate attempts at filling the 12’’ hole in my heart-usually hip-hop maxi singles that will only be heard at a party. All of this, for ten minutes of background music? The head hangs low.

I trudge upstairs and glance at the French DJ guy who has a Whopper-sized stack of records he will be sampling by dinnertime. It’s not fair. If I was a DJ I would be plum-fucking-tickled with the hundreds of unknown disco singles lining the floors of the Thing. All I want is one, just one great record. And yet, as I take a step to exit, I feel the tug.

The tug is the scream of something sought after yet looked over: “Turn around! Look at me! I’m right here!” The tug generally occurs the moment you decide to abandon everything. So I listen, I look, and there peeking out from under a Madonna EP is Squeeze’s Singles: 45’s and Under.

Now, this isn’t a rare record. It’s not even an original LP. It is, as the title affirms, a collection of singles; but it’s been on my list for quite some time.

There are two types of audiences familiar with Squeeze: the one that is privy to their entire body of work, and the other that inquires: “Isn’t that the band who did ‘ Tempted (by the fruit of another ?’” I was, for a very long time, part of the latter group. Seven years ago, when my then-boyfriend suggested I listen to Squeeze, I recoiled in disgust:

“I fucking hate that song. It’s on the lowest rung of the Dad-rock ladder, right there next to annals of Huey Lewis and his News.” He retorted with that typical, yet generally accurate remark: “You just haven’t heard their early stuff.”

Well, I now say the same to you. Though the band’s first three albums Squeeze (1978), Cool For Cats (1979), and Argybargy (1980) should all be heard on their own, Singles is the perfect appetizer to peak interest in a larger meal.

Formed in Deptford on London’s South Bank in 1974, Squeeze was the brainchild of vocalist Glenn Tilbrook, guitarist Chris Difford, and the now-revered pianist Jools Holland. As contemporaries of Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe, the band occupied the space in English New Wave that exalted catchy, pure pop music salted with tongue-in-cheek lyrics. There is something doubly effective about Tilbrook’s honey-sweet voice recounting stories of accidental pregnancy and the ‘ol “Slap and Tickle.” These early years produced wry tracks that are tight yet raw, and a far cry from the overproduced “Tempted.”

The largest account for Squeeze’s shift in sound was the departure of Jools Holland in 1980. I liken his absence to a post-Mick Jones Clash, in which the songs lose a tremendous amount of integrity and quality. The lack of Holland spawned a breeding ground for songs like “Tempted” and “Annie Get Your Gun,” the only two tracks I’d skip on Singles.

The high-points of the album are truly in every other song, but if I had to narrow it down to three, I would recommend “Goodbye Girl,” “Pulling Mussels (From The Shell)” and the painfully infectious “ Up The Junction.”

Despite a slightly nibbled sleeve, the record itself is in wonderful condition. There are no scratches to speak of, and it spins without any signs of warping. These are the nerdy details, but they are important ones nonetheless. These are the details that make three hours of dusty lungs and a debit of $1.99 all the more worth it. As my mom always said: “no pain, no gain.”

ONLY NOISE: The Ethos of Ezra Furman

It takes a lot of balls to wear a dress. Shit, I have a hard time with it, and I lack the pesky external organ complicating the endeavor to begin with. However, Ezra Furman’s ballsiness goes far beyond his ability to look excellent in a miniskirt. And he does look excellent.

The Chicago native has been on the music circuit for over eight years now, but has just begun to make international waves since the release of his 2015 LP Perpetual Motion People last spring. PMP was Furman’s inaugural release on the acclaimed Bella Union label, and its positive reception has had him touring extensively, including a few dates we covered in New York and a set at Glastonbury earlier this summer.

Backed by his band, the Boy-Friends, Furman’s sound is unlike anything else on the current scene. It is rock n’ roll at the end of the day, but a translation incorporating a love of everything from doo-wop to Lou Reed to the Replacements. The strength of Furman’s frenetic, wavering rasp and saxophonist Tim Sandusky’s screeching melodies truly distinguish their sound from contemporaries.

Recently, Furman has released a lone single off of his upcoming EP Big Fugitive Life, which will be out August 19 on Bella Union. “Teddy I’m Ready,” the EP’s first track is an absolute anthem, pairing thundering drums with delicate guitar builds, cooing harmonies, and of course, the requisite sax licks. It is a ballad that suggests Furman has stadium potential.

The EP itself is actually a collection of “orphaned songs,” as Furman put it in a press release. He continues to explain the relevance of this particular selection of work:

“They are focused on the theme of the mind unmoored–those of us who have been left to drift unsupervised through the modern world. Four of these tracks were originally intended for inclusion on ‘Perpetual Motion People’. Two of them were for ‘The Year of No Returning’. But they weren’t ready until now.

The first three songs are our vision of rock and roll. A madness that overtakes your mind and body. It’s wanting to go somewhere you’ve never been, knowing you’re on your way. The second side is acoustic guitar as open wound, a troubled mind on display. Emotional in a different way, tender like a bruise. It includes “The Refugee,” my first song entirely concerned with my Jewish background and present, a song dedicated to my grandfather who fled the Nazis as well as to all of the refugees desperate for a home today.

We dedicate this record to refugees of all kinds, all over the world. May all the wanderers find the homes they seek, and and may those with power welcome them as fellow citizens of humanity.”

It may have been while reading these words, in simply reading a press release, that something finally clicked for me regarding Furman: this is an artist who actually gives a shit. Pop culturally speaking, we’ve long been on hiatus from making political statements. Irony has pervaded, the urge to be nonchalant and, god help me for saying it, chill has been rife, and it’s still pretty rare for an independent artist to speak in earnest about the sort of topics Furman tackles. A few of those being, but not limited to:

Gender Identity/Body Positive Issues

In a beautiful piece that Furman wrote for The Guardian last year, the artist explains the struggle he’s faced understanding his own sexual orientation and gender identity. He credits musicians like Bowie, Lou Reed, Antony Hegarty, and Grace Jones (to name a few) for helping him accept his own ambiguity. He elaborates on his current state of pleasant uncertainty:

“The full list of musicians who don’t conform to traditional gender roles, of course, would be nearly endless, and more and more appear every year, whether by debuting their work or coming out as trans or gender fluid.

Over the past few years, I’ve added myself to this list, performing more and more often in clothing, makeup and jewellery traditionally intended for women and girls. I’d like to set the record straight (so to speak): this behaviour is not just part of an onstage persona, nor is it a gimmick to get people’s attention. Gender fluidity is very much a part of my life offstage, though I am still exploring what it means. I’ve not quite decided on a gender identity, I may never decide, and that’s all right with me. I am proud to exist in an ambiguous, undecided state.”

Mental Health

Furman has been equally open about his struggles with mental health and depression since the inception of his career. Perpetual Motion People comes with a lengthy letter from Furman, admitting a very dire time he faced after graduating college. He goes into detail about a period of time when he wanted to kill himself, and then leads the reader out of that darkness into his recovery, sharing a long poem called “FOAM FACTORY” directly after. It seems as though whatever difficulty Furman has grappled with in the past, he wants to share it, and he wants to be a device in the healing of others afflicted with similar issues. And that’s no small thing.

Social Unrest

Before he signed with Bella Union, Furman was still churning out an admirable amount of material, some of it highlighting admirable topics. Shortly after the shooting of Michael Brown in 2014, Furman released the song “Ferguson’s Burning” to exhibit his solidarity with the Brown family, which goes thus:

When the fires burn out/And the tear gas disperses/When the work is all done/For the doctors and the nurses/The cops may stop shooting/And the street get less wild/But Michael Brown’s mother/Will never get back her child/And the hatred and fear/That America harbors/Will only grow bigger/Beneath big body armor/So keep a close eye on our laws and our leaders/No justice for Mike Brown/There’s none for you either

Ferguson’s burning/And the world’s turning away/Turning away

It isn’t too often that you come across an artist like Furman. He is swiftly becoming much more than a musician – he is becoming a movement – a fully rigged artistic piece complete with a mission statement. A truly unique songwriter, performer, and character, one of the best things Furman leaves one with is a sense of confusion.

When I think of Ezra Furman, my music critic reflexes always ask: “Who can I lump him in with? What trend did he sprout from?” But there is no answer. He is not the last cry of the folk-revival scene, or the latest electro-pop outfit, or another fucking “dream pop” act. He is, undeniably, Ezra Furman. And he’s not going anywhere.

ONLY NOISE: Memento Mori-Alan Vega

“I think all art comes out of conflict.” It was the American novelist Joyce Carol Oates who spoke these words, but it was Alan Vega who lived them.

Vega, who fronted the indescribable proto-punk duo Suicide from 1970 to Saturday, has unfortunately passed away over the weekend at 78. His death lengthens a devastating list of artists we’ve lost this year. Henry Rollins broke the news with a statement from Vega’s family.

I woke Sunday morning to word of his death, and instantly that phrase sprang to mind: “all art comes out of conflict.” Art is not only born of chaos, it is chaos. Art is conflict. And what artist exemplified this truth more than Alan Vega? His 46-year partnership with Martin Rev as Suicide (they never called it quits) produced a body of work that is sublimely discordant-like an Edgerton snapshot of fruit being eviscerated by a bullet. An explosion made delicate by means of destruction.

Vega’s music is a monument to the avant garde, the dark, and the soulful. And it is, for me, the embodiment of everything I look for in art. Something dangerous, yet repulsively gorgeous. Something that makes you fear for your own sanity. Suicide’s eponymous debut from 1977 is as awash with this kind of dissonance as it is sounds of the future. Its severity is matched only by its simplicity-Vega’s croons and shrieks loping over Rev’s unrelenting synths and drum machine. That record predicted post punk before punk had learned how to spell its own name. You can hear its influence in Throbbing Gristle’s work, and Sonic Youth’s and even Bruce Springsteen’s; the latter admittedly an enormous Suicide fan. The Boss has not only attributed “State Trooper” off of 1982’s Nebraska to Suicide’s influence-he also covered the duo’s song “Dream Baby Dream” throughout his career.

Springsteen recently paid homage to Vega with a eulogy he published on his website:

“Over here on E Street, we are saddened to hear of the passing of Alan Vega, one of the great revolutionary voices in rock and roll. The bravery and passion he showed throughout his career was deeply influential to me. I was lucky enough to get to know Alan slightly and he was always a generous and sweet spirit. The blunt force power of his greatest music both with Suicide and on his solo records can still shock and inspire today. There was simply no one else remotely like him.”

It might seem a stretch that one of America’s most successful musicians would have such obscure tastes, but if you listen to Suicide tracks like “Ghost Rider” and “Frankie Teardrop,” the influence might not be so shocking. Springsteen is known for his pointblank narratives of working class drudgery. That same desolation can be found in “Frankie Teardrop,” a disturbing tale of a disgruntled factory worker who massacres his family in a fit of insanity.

Suicide is an album that still sounds treacherous today. This cannot be said of much from its era. It is a difficult thing to admit, as it was an exceptional period in American music. However, I am aware of its historical relevance-that perhaps a Television gig in 2016 might not be as reckless as it was in ’77. Suicide on the other hand, has remained a lung-splintering scream frozen in time. A photograph taken with a rapatronic shutter. But don’t take my word for it. Go ahead. Cut the jams at your next party and put on “Frankie Teardrop” instead. See what happens.

It is important for music, or at least some music to incite panic. In their earlier years Vega and Rev did just that, and drank up the repercussions firsthand. Their shows bear the deviant legacy of hell raisers like Iggy Pop and GG Allin. In 2008, Vega recounted an especially perilous gig to The Guardian:

“That would be the show in Glasgow in 1978 when someone threw an axe at my head. We were supporting the Clash and I guess we were too punk even for the punk crowd. They hated us. I taunted them with, ‘You fuckers have to live through us to get to the main band.’ That’s when the axe came towards my head, missing me by a whisker. It was surreal, man. I felt like I was in a 3-D John Wayne movie. But that was nothing unusual. Every Suicide show felt like world war three in those days. Every night I thought I was going to get killed. The longer it went on, the more I’d be thinking, ‘Odds are it’s going to be tonight.'”

I sometimes feel that Suicide were the Dylan-going-electric of punk rock. And while I suspect that thought would cause Vega to roll in his grave, it’s a comparison I find comfort in. When the world cried “Judas!” at Dylan’s new noise, it wasn’t the sound they were screaming at-it was the icon he burned and the bird that rose from it. Punk was so busy edifying its defiant image that it was out-defied by Vega and Rev…the ultimate prank. It’s pretty funny, if you think about it.

But despite all the mayhem in Suicide’s history, all the near-death evenings and endless assaults, Vega remained a sincere artist, a loving family man, and a hilarious interviewee. In the same interview from ’08 he recalled the shift between being public enemy #1 and becoming an “entertainer”:

“People were looking to be entertained, but I hated the idea of going to a concert in search of fun. Our attitude was, ‘Fuck you buddy, you’re getting the street right back in your face. And some.’

The axe in Glasgow was just one of many weapons hurled at us. When we played in Metz, someone scored a direct hit on me with a monkey wrench. I’ve still got the scar on my head. Supporting Elvis Costello in Brussels, we provoked a full-scale riot and the venue was stormed by police letting off tear-gas canisters. Then something very strange happened. We headlined our own tour of Britain and ended up in Edinburgh. Two songs in and there was no riot, which was very, very unusual. Then we started to see people move around. I turned to Marty and said, ‘Here we go – watch out for flying objects.’ To my amazement, people started dancing. I turned back to Marty and said, ‘We’re finished, our career is over.’

We’ve turned into fucking entertainers. It was never meant to turn out that way. But what can you do? People are completely unshockable now. Even if you brought a fresh corpse out on stage and started eating it with a fork, no one would bat an eyelid. Still, one of the things about playing live these days is that at least we know we’re not going to die on stage. That’s kinda nice, man.”

Vega’s wry sense of humor always peeked through his work, even when veiled with the most hideous snarl. It surprisingly wasn’t always doom and gloom with Suicide; their fragility surfaced on cuts like “Girl,” “Dream Baby Dream,” and “Child, It’s a New World.” The former being my personal favorite-and not a bad tune for a romp might I add. In spite of the band’s propensity for violence and distortion, they were also vulnerable…far more than they’d have liked you to believe. This diversity was apparent to those who took time to listen between the crashing beer bottles. For them, Suicide were a beacon of possibility; a manifesto for undefined sound.

Alan Vega may have not wanted to be an entertainer; that’s just what happened over time. More accurately, Vega was an artist. A real conflicted motherfucker.

R.I.P Alan. Thank you for the noise.

ONLY NOISE: Love Songs (Without All That Baggage)

Love. Loss. Heartache. Pop music. These four things, among others like adultery, arson, and death, have all found homes in The Love Song. The tumultuous narrative has scored popular culture from the moment man could mouth words. Consider Helen of Troy, whose tale could be looked at as a large-scale “Jessie’s Girl” long before Rick Springfield ever sang to himself in a mirror. Kate Bush literally lifted her inspiration from the written word with her breakout hit “Wurthering Heights” in 1978. The song, like the novel, recounts the turbulent relationship of literary Sid and Nancy Heathcliff and Cathy. A personal favorite is Aaron Neville’s “Over You,” in which Neville threatens to kill his lover should she deny him, so that no other man may have her. Perhaps a bit of Henry VIII in there, no? All of this drama is unavoidable in storytelling because, well, drama is enticing. It keeps people on the edge of their seat; there’s a reason soap operas still exist after all.

But what about when you do the work, and grow up, and want to reserve the drama for your television set? What love songs can you turn to that aren’t jealous, or sexist, or murderous? Those are, after all, for the breakup. This week, while listening to Townes Van Zandt’s 1969 LP Our Mother The Mountain on repeat, a record packed with unruly love songs, a levelheaded track caught my ear. “Second Lovers Song” is, perhaps one of the sanest cuts I’ve ever heard, and a progressive one at that.

As the song commences, Van Zandt sings of waking next to a woman who whispers that he “ain’t the only one” softly in his ear. The male narrator responds by cooing: “Do you think I really care? Do you think it matters?” It might not sound so revolutionary, but if you consider the artistic canon-especially that of country music-it’s pretty damn forward-thinking. “Second Lovers” is a song about acceptance, realistic expectations, and removing the perceived ‘angel-woman’ from her heavenly pedestal. Van Zandt’s narrator is seeing his lover as a human being, not as an untouched virgin child who’d be a whore if she’d ever bedded another man. In the song’s last verse he croons: “My lady can’t you see I love not jealously? But for all you are to me and all you’ll be tomorrow.” If only there were more voices in contemporary pop music like Van Zandt’s, singing of a woman’s past without resorting to words like “bitch” or “ho.”

I was in the mood for more. More love songs that extol the virtuous aspects of relationships, even if that means knowing when they must end. Don’t get me wrong; I like to relish in gritty breakup numbers by the likes of Bob Dylan and Elvis Costello too, (especially if you can’t tell immediately just how mean they are) but every once and awhile it’s nice to hear some sense coming out of those speakers.

Below is my guide to a few love songs without all that baggage.

“Kentucky Avenue” by Tom Waits

Puppy love. Could another love be more pure? The final cut off of Tom Waits’ 1978 masterpiece Blue Valentine is a real showstopper. While the song is technically about Waits’ childhood friend Kipper (who was wheelchair ridden due to polio), and not a grade school crush, the same foundations of loyalty and unconditional love apply.

There is a strong sense of “us against them” in this track, as the narrator dotes upon his companion with gifts and acts of care-taking: “So let me tie you up with kite string and I’ll show you the scabs on my knee. Watch out for the broken glass, put your shoes and socks on and come away with me.” Waits goes on to promise that he’ll “get a dollar from my mama’s purse and buy that skull and crossbones ring, and you can wear it around your neck on an old piece of string.” “I’ll take the spokes from your wheelchair and a magpies wings. And I’ll tie ‘em to your shoulders and your feet. I’ll steal a hacksaw from my dad and cut the braces off your legs and we’ll bury them tonight in the cornfield.”

It is a song that revels in shameless adoration; the kind of worts-and-all romances that occur so rarely in adult life, and so often when we are naive enough to let them happen.

“Wannabe” by Spice Girls.

Though we may always be eluded by the etymology of “zigazig ah” the mission statement of 1996’s “Wannabe” is pretty straightforward and commendable. I speak from personal experience when I say that dating a socially inept log who, literally cannot “get with my friends,” is nothing short of excruciating. Some never talk. Others you just wish would never talk. Critics in the mid ’90s may have been skeptical of the miniskirt wearing Fab 5, but the Spice Girls’ message was always unabashed, unapologetic Girl Power. Their breakout hit is exemplary of that ethos; stating that they’d be fine to take a lover, but they’re not about to halt their lives for one.

“I won’t be hasty, I’ll give you a try. If you really bug me then I’ll say goodbye.”

And who could forget the simple power in the words:

“If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends. Make it last forever, friendship never ends. If you wanna be my lover, you have got to give. Taking is too easy, but that’s the way it is.”

It’s not exactly Chaucer, but I’m behind what they’re saying.

“Praise You” by Fatboy Slim

Another simple, cut-to-the-chase track. While lyrically the song owes nothing to Fatboy’s Quentin Leo Cook (the repetitive lyrics are taken from the introduction to Camille Yarbrough’s “Take Yo’ Praise”), the unrelenting loop of words grows with meaning each repetition: “We’ve come a long long way together, through the hard times and the good, I have to celebrate you baby, I have to praise you like I should.”

“Praise You” relays a dense message via omission. The repeated phrase is enough to build an empire of love and understanding upon, but what the song does not say is just as fortified. Lyrically it is void of so many codependent tropes that plague love songs.

Things you do not hear:

“I need you”

“I can’t live without you”

“I was nothing before you”

Whether or not it was intentional, Fatboy Slim’s lyrical restraint has left us with a simple, healthy, and drama-free mantra.

“Take Time To Know Her,” by Percy Sledge

The tragic tale of a man who commits a supreme mistake while conducting his romantic life: not listening to his mama. Percy Sledge’s “Take Time To Know Her” is a ballad exalting the value of taking things slow, not rushing it, and really getting to know the (wo)man you love. Contrary to his mama, and the preacher’s advice to “take time to know her,” the song’s narrator beelines into a marriage with a beautiful woman, only to find her cheating on him not long after their vows.

“And then I came home a little early one night and there she was kissing on another man. Now, I know what Mama meant when she took me by the hand and said, ‘Son, take time to know her. It’s not an overnight thing. Take time to know her. Please, don’t rush into this thing.'”

Even Elvis (and wise men) knew that “only fools rush in.” But so did mama. Please listen to mama.

“To The End,” by Blur

A big part of a healthy relationship is knowing when to call it quits. Maybe you bring out the bad in each other, or the sex has gone sour, or worse, there isn’t any sex to go sour anymore. No one knows that breaking up is hard to do more than songwriters, but some breakup tunes are less vicious than the rest.

A favorite is Blur’s “To The End” off of 1994’s Parklife. The song is a reprimand of both players in the relationship, citing the faults they’ve committed together:

“All those dirty words, they make us look so dumb. We’ve been drinking far too much, and neither of us mean what we say.”

The narrator goes on to honor the relationship’s good moments, while unfurling its inevitable demise.

“Well you and I collapsed in love. And it looks like we might have made it. Yes, it looks like we’ve made it to the end. What happened to us? Soon it will be gone forever. Infatuated only with ourselves, and neither of us can think straight anymore.”

There will never be a shortage tear jerking, wrathful and jealous love songs. Love is hard. Being a romantic is hard. But being a sensible romantic is the hardest.

ONLY NOISE: A Message To You, Moody

It is likely that whenever the Specials sang “pick it up, pick it up, pick it up!” they were not talking about your disposition. Maybe they meant the beat or your beer or the change on the ground…but why not your ‘tude while you’re at it?

It is a gross understatement to say that music makes you feel things. Composers know this well. Score writers know just when to cue in the strings to make a little tear fall, and massage therapists know which new age selection makes you relaaaaaaxxx.

But what about the other end of the emotional spectrum? What if the conductor of life’s cruel symphony is already making you cry, facilitating your craving for Duncan Hines easy-bake cake, and keeping you stuffed under innumerable layers of blankets with nothing but a bottle of Shiraz on your nightstand? How do you ‘pick it up’ then?

I’ve searched high and low for what some call a “good day record,” but often to no avail. Songs are too tied up in life events, too burdened by association to bleach away the sad or effectively spike endorphins. The C major scale can sound ecstatic on an on day, and cataclysmic on an off one. But wouldn’t a music writer have an entire fleet of mood-altering records at her disposal? 12-inch, black wax happy pills to make everything better?

No.

Both sad and true, there is only one album I’ve found in all my searching, that pinches me awake from the downward swirling hellhole of a bad mood. It’s the Specials’ 1979 self-titled debut that does it. It is my only hope, and I toss it back like a shot of bourbon after a long workday.

I’ve spoken at length about my parents’ respective record collections and the gratis therapy they have provided over the years. But of all the sleeves I’ve removed from those shelves The Specials is somehow the only album I’ve ever found that can snap me out of a bad day with Pavlovian accuracy…though I am currently taking submissions for more!

With its initial wheezes of harmonica and organ, it is a record that elicits instantaneous joy, a little cloud of dopamine in my limbic system. There are moments throughout its 14 songs that require tiny rituals of an obsessive quality. I will urgently drop a sandwich or press the phone between my ear and shoulder to catch that little snare fill in the beginning of “A Message To You Rudy.” Don’t try to stop me.

The effect this album has on me goes deeper than a “happy” sound or lyrical content. It isn’t as though the Specials only sang about the good life; there are tracks in their catalogue about everything from drunken bar brawls, to adulterous girlfriends, depressing clubs, a wasted London, and being an overall useless human being. Perhaps had I caught the 2 Tone bug later in life, that first record wouldn’t have the same beatific effect on me, but as it stands I pop it like a mood stabilizer.

I don’t focus so much on the lyrics, but rather the beat, the bounce, that crazy organ player Jerry Dammers who makes Shane Macgowan look like he has a nice set of teeth. I picture all seven members bobbing around like dancing ants in their little matching suits, black and white just like the musicians themselves. I think of horn sections, and shiny shoes, and the rhythmic absurdity that is skanking. I think of being in the kitchen as a 13-year-old, making failed attempts at baking and zine-making. Or of the time I gave my mother (partially at her request, and 100% to her boyfriend’s dismay) a Chelsea haircut. Bitch bangs and all. The Specials seemed to be a record to play amongst loved ones, or at a party, and it was never an album met with dissent.

The fact that this record came out almost 40 years ago is baffling to me. Of course it was born of a very specific, genre-heavy era in the British music scene, but it somehow remains fresh sounding-as crisp as the pleats in vocalist Terry Hall’s trousers. A lot of the credit for such timelessness can no doubt be paid to the record’s producer, the sire of cool Elvis Costello, who teamed up with the band to get everything tight in the studio.

For all of the depths I wade in the name of musical discovery, this is an album that persists with its importance. On the (very) rare occasion that I am asked what band I would be in if time wasn’t an object, I say the Specials. Are they my favorite band? No. But I can’t imagine a more fun group to be in. I turned to fellow music critics for answers; why won’t this record erode? Why, despite its birth in the nightmare of Thatcherite Britain, is it brimming with joy? Do others find it as timeless as I do?

Jo-Ann Greene of AllMusic made an interesting point: that the group’s debut LP was “a perfect moment in time captured on vinyl forever.” The website went on to say that it captured the spirit of “Britain in late 1979, an unhappy island about to explode,” and “managed to distill all the anger, disenchantment, and bitterness of the day straight into their music.”

That almost solves it for me, because what the Specials were doing on a grander, more socio-cultural level as the 1970s spilled into the ‘80s, I am attempting to do in my own mind; to take “all the anger, disenchantment, and bitterness of the day” and channel it into something more worthwhile. To “pick it up” and put it somewhere useful, like on the dance floor.

I’m not trying to write a self-help text here (though if I did it might be called Dance The Death Away). But I am trying to give credence to a phenomenon that endlessly fascinates me: that these little vibrations in our cochleae can so violently shift our emotional tide in ways that other stimuli cannot. The power of sound has been honed to such an extent that it has been weaponized for god sake, which admittedly is more to the credit of frequency than emotional response, but it certainly doesn’t undercut the impact of the aural.

A few years ago I reviewed a documentary for Film Forward called Alive Inside that discussed the effect of music on the memory of Alzheimer’s victims. The results, though perhaps not representative of a large enough study group, were pretty astonishing. It seemed that when the Alzheimer’s patients at a nursing home were played the music of their youth they were overcome with detailed memories and emotion.

Yet another study from 2011 dealt with the (proven) direct link between music and mood, citing that when subjects played their own selections of songs, they experienced “chills,” a scientific term summarizing the enormous amounts of dopamine the brain releases with such stimulation. The same reaction occurs during (good) sex, eating sweets, and injecting certain drugs.

But you don’t have to have bad sex, or spike your glycemic index, or shoot heroin. Music surely doesn’t solve all of the world’s problems, or even all of one’s own problems, but it’s a crutch I’m happy to lean on. As Morrissey once sang: “the world is full of crashing bores,” and that is true. Yet we bores are humans, and we humans have only so many things to count as true victories…is not one of them music?

We’ve figured out how to make instruments out of everything from gourds to pure vibrations in air. So in all this chaos, and mayhem, I will try to remember that in bleak Thatcher London in 1979, when people were rioting and on the dole, and race tensions were taut, this glimmering little record by The Specials burst through and made a handful of people dance. I hope we can pick it up from there.

ONLY NOISE: The Good, The Bad, and The Guilty

Freud called it ambivalence. I call it Cher. And not just “old stuff”, niche, “Half Breed” Cher. I’m talkin’ “Believe” Cher too. The good with the bad, which could be a crude definition of ambivalence itself. This week, I’m thinking a lot about ambivalence, and my favorite iteration of it: the Guilty Pleasure.

I recently came across a piece of clickbait that The Daily Mail ran last summer called “The Science of Guilty Pleasures: Study uncovers how feeling bad can boost your happiness.” Evidently, Professor Ravi Dahr of Yale University got the notion to conduct such a study as he sat next to a colleague one day, watching him munch on a chocolate bar as if it was some sort of dilemma. Dahr was taken aback by his coworker’s simultaneous display of enjoyment and self-loathing while eating the chocolate. Thus spawned the idea to research the merit of the Guilty Pleasure.

The article goes on to site stimuli such as “alcohol and shopping sprees” as arbiters of this shame/pleasure model, the driving point stating that “guilt and pleasure are often tightly coupled in people’s minds, so activating one of these concepts can draw out the other.” Hence: forbidden fruit, the five-finger-discount, ice cream, and Phil Collins. Dahr’s intended application of the study was market research (which is all a bit too Edward Bernays for me), but what happens when we apply this idea to the ultimate Guilty Pleasure: the Musical Guilty Pleasure (MGP)?

Is shame the true catalyst for the immense joy I feel while listening to “You Can Call Me Al” and picturing the entire city dancing in unison? Do I feel just the right amount of “naughty” when I, in all sincerity, have to fight back tears upon hearing “In The Air Tonight”? No. This isn’t a fucking Dove chocolate commercial. I may not be a professor at Yale, but I can’t help but wonder if the MGP functions on a different level than a sumptuous dinner for one at Dallas BBQ. Because unlike the handbag that cost more than your rent, or the 3am Seamless order, the MGP has no real repercussions. You aren’t poorer for listening to, say, every record the Wallflowers ever recorded, on repeat, for a year. Cranking Bette Midler’s The Divine Miss M to 11 when no one’s home doesn’t raise your cholesterol. So why feel guilty in the first place?

One consistent feeling I recognize when accessing my secret song library is discomfort. There is always that lingering question: is this good? Or bad? Or very bad? My favorite example of a band that elicits such confusion is Paul Weller’s schmaltz project The Style Council. Their music is…I don’t know. It could be compositionally brilliant, and merely stamped with that 1980s seal of production quality that seems to doom and date so much of the era’s oeuvre. Or, it could be horrendous. I will never know, because loving The Style Council is like having a stupefying crush: you’re so smitten you fail to notice how ugly his shoes are. Or his crippling video game habit.

For instance, The Style Council have a song called “You’re the Best Thing” off of their 1984 debut LP Café Bleu. It is kind of my MGP poster song, if you will. No song has ever toyed with my emotions so deeply, and I don’t expect another ever will. It makes me rage with cognitive dissonance. It is so gauchely over the top, so sappy, so wrong; and I love every minute of it. This is a track that legitimately makes me squirm with unease. While preparing for this week’s rant, I was going through all of the music that I classify as MGPs. Upon listening to “You’re the Best Thing” I jotted a sprawling note on my legal pad, which read: “isn’t good art supposed to make you feel uncomfortable?” I don’t know what Ravi Dahr would have to say about that.

I suppose that aside from causing discomfort, the MGP stokes the fear of being found out. That somehow your love of U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday” (just that ONE song, ok?) will potentially negate your enormous Tom Waits collection. Like U2 has the power to cause chemical equilibrium and suddenly disable all of your good taste. There is a wonderful scene in the recent movie Green Room in which an interviewer is asking members of a punk band what their desert island band would be. They respond with understated cool: “Poison Idea,” “Sabbath” and the like. Towards the end of the film, as the main characters are getting killed off one by one in the most gruesome ways, the band’s guitarist poses the same question as a sort of rallying distraction, but the answers have shifted rather drastically. “Prince.” “Madonna…and Slayer.” “Simon and Garfunkel.”

The funny thing about these two scenes is that while the characters weren’t discussing MGPs, the same principle of embarrassment applies: that fear of being revealed as a charlatan, of being, god forbid, not punk enough, or at all. Last year I was conducting an interview at the Four Knots festival here in New York, and brushed up against a similar phenomenon. The band was fairly new to the scene, so I asked them that old question I find so endlessly amusing: what were their MGPs? “The Strokes.” “Grizzly Bear.” “Guns n’ Roses.” It was the Green Room effect before I even knew what that was. I wanted real humiliation. I wanted Enya, or Yanni, or Godsmack. I pressed them to think harder, and finally got something deeper. “Alkaline Trio.” There it is.

I don’t believe people when they say: “none of my pleasures are guilty.” Or maybe I am simply jealous of their carefree life, in which they can host a dinner party and put their itunes library on shuffle, walking away free from the clutching fear that one of several Rancid songs could come on at ANY MOMENT. That must be a nice feeling. But until I can liberate myself from discomfort and shame, I will brandish my guilt in the most Catholic of ways, reserving it a seat next to me at the bar, doing its laundry; hell, my guilt and I could even open a joint checking account. Guilt is a lubricant for dry food; she is the one thing separating bad taste from eccentric taste.

ONLY NOISE: The Weird World Of Jerry Paper

You always notice growth in a plant or pet when you haven’t seen it for a while. The little evolutions we undergo are lost to the everyday eye, but reveal themselves as blazing metamorphoses to the intermittent onlooker. The latter is also true in the case of Jerry Paper, at least according to my eyes and ears. Jerry Paper is a music-making entity, who’s earthly birth name is Lucas Nathan. Like most of life’s best offerings, JP drifted into my frame of awareness with bizarre ease, at first entirely by accident.

Two summers ago I was just dipping my toes into the loungey sound-pool of Sean Nicholas Savage, who was headlining a gig at the late and great Death By Audio. Manning the slot just before Savage was an unlikely looking fellow with big, wire frame glasses and a purple lei ’round his neck, a storage unit’s worth of effects pedals and cables tangled at his feet. It’s hard to say if he looked at the crowd once, but I do remember his fanatical immersion in each song.

After a fair share of “live” gigs whereupon the stage is taken over by a man on a date with his laptop, you can become a bit underwhelmed by this sight. And yet Nathan’s music negates the stereotype married to such a setup. I didn’t realize at that point in time that Jerry Paper was more than a stage name reminiscent of 80s power pop. I wasn’t privy to the mythology of Jerry Paper-that Lucas Nathan was merely a host-body which Jerry possesses in order to generate tunes. Nor did I know that Nathan was originally a student of philosophy; though a brief leafing through his lyrics could have informed me so, as he discusses the likes of simulacra, fuzzy logic, and “the settings of the synthesized mind.”

That first set knocked me out completely. Despite the sterile stage layout Nathan was writhing with groove, seemingly possessed whenever a song commenced, and back to normal upon its completion. I remember thinking at the time that he reminded me of Elvis Costello, but it wasn’t just his glasses; something in the depth of his voice and the quiet arrogance of his stage presence. It was perhaps the impression that his performance was a 40-minute revenge act from a man who’s much smarter than everyone in the room. I rushed to the merch table immediately after and bought a copy of his 2014 LP Big Pop For Chameleon World, which I’ve been listening to ever since.

One of the things that make Jerry Paper so special is his potential capacity for cynicism and his subsequent denial of it. Though wearing the guise of empathetic AI and employing tools of the Muzak genre such as keyboard saxophone and elevator synths, he manages to make sincere, and more importantly good music that is relatable to humans and algorithms alike. Nathan is the first to admit in interviews that yes, he does find synth sax hilarious, but he also truly enjoys the sound of it, or else it wouldn’t get anywhere near the record to begin with.

Seeing Jerry Paper perform at Secret Project Robot this last weekend, it was evident that a lot of things have turned in his favor in only a couple of years. No longer an obscure opening act with only his machines for sonic scaffolding, he was playing a headlining gig backed by a full band. The lineup touted local “non-country” outsider Dougie Poole and the aforementioned bizarro crooner Sean Nicholas Savage, the latter of whom predominantly sang cover songs with a backing track (unfortunately). Dougie Poole was also accompanied by a backing track, but interspersed the noise with guitar phrases and pedal manipulation. Poole’s dopey pigtails only made the melancholy of his ass-dragging cowboy act all the more blue. He is seemingly in character, but it’s a heart-rending effect nonetheless. It was an evening of undeniably odd birds, but what a wonderful thing to see when so many modern bands are required to be ultra slick and fronted by supermodels. Poole resurfaced as a funkified bassist in Jerry Paper’s backing band, which indulged in great versatility via keyboards, guitar, pedal effects, and flute. But it was Nathan who truly rose to his headlining post for the evening. Sporting a fine and shiny spandex body suit he looked like a deep-sea diver-or a black seal maybe, as he was bobbing around the stage with similar grace and silliness.

It seems as though Nathan has undergone a fair amount of change since I first saw him at Death By Audio in 2014. Two full length albums (2014’s Big Pop For Chameleon World and 2015’s Carousel) and 3,000 miles (he recently relocated to his home state of California), the evening was a celebration of his latest record Toon Time Raw!. And it was the first celebration: the record release party, the first gig of the tour, and I believe the first time Nathan has ever been backed by a full band; this last little fact seeming odd as Jerry Paper was evidently born to front a band.

JP is a wildly charismatic entertainer, his interpretive dance gestures conveying equal sincerity and hilarity. His on-stage banter is wonderfully deadpan, an air that is contradicted by his nervous and polite off-stage presence. “It’s great to be alive,” he droned into his headset microphone. “But having a body is sooo annoying.” Jerry’s jab at his own host body earned a hearty laugh from the room. “But you are a body, so…fuck it,” he concluded.

Nathan’s lyrics and performances seem rife with these sorts of blasé aphorisms that wink at his education, but don’t force it down your throat. Conceptually the music of Jerry Paper could be coined as abstract or out-there, but the inherent groove is what makes it approachable. Much like Daft Punk are robots with beating, blood-pumping hearts, Jerry Paper is code with soul. This combination of the perceived coldness of technology with the foolproof warmth of human music is part of what makes Jerry Paper so compelling; he describes the phenomenon best in an interview with The Editorial Magazine:

“What the fuck is more human than a computer? That doesn’t happen outside of humans. Electronics are purely human tools. I think a lot about the separation of humans and nature and why we think like that instead of thinking of humans as part of nature. I hate to sound like a douchebag but it’s very Cartesian/mind-body dualism. We think of electronics as not natural, but if humans are natural then our tools are also natural.”

Agree or disagree, it is an irrefutably relevant perspective, especially considering that so much of our budding technology is used for social purposes, including the making and sharing of music.

Toon Time Raw!, as with last Saturday’s performance are markers in the upward motion that Jerry Paper is riding high. The LP, out on Bayonet Records, picks up where Carousel left off, but lets things get even warmer, even groovier, proving that Nathan is a legitimate pop songwriter with beauties such as “Ginger and Ruth,” “Zoom Out” and “Stargazers.”

It’s a rare thing to locate genre-less music. They majority of hype bands seem to fit into some sort of self-referential box labeled with a bygone genre. Just check “dream pop” or “psych rock” or “surf-girl-group-garage” and you’ll get someone’s attention. But Jerry Paper, be he your cup of tea or not, won’t be squeezing into a box any time soon. And for that, I tip my hat to him.

ONLY NOISE: Pop Of The Tops: Extended Remix

With Father’s Day around the corner, Madison Bloom revisits her dad’s record collection. A version of this article originally appeared on the site in 2013.

My dad has more records than your dad. Roughly 4,000 of them. And as the former owner of a record shop located in Eastern Washington, he used to have many more to his name. The Chelan-based shop was only his for a few years in the late 1970s, and it was aptly titled: The Music Store.” Among other fads, like men shopping in the women’s section to find the coolest threads, my dad also predicted titular minimalism before it hit the mainstream. Or perhaps the moniker was a nod to the simplicity found in his favorite band’s name: The Band.

Dad used to stock The Music Store with stacks of pop/rock, country, bluegrass, jazz, folk, blues, and countless sub-genres. A large portion of his inventory was accumulated secondhand, as he would peruse thrift stores for rare finds as well as record discount sections, then known as cutout bins due to the rectangular chunk punched out of the LP’s sleeve. He’d buy milk crates full of albums for a few bucks.

To this day the cutout bin records are my dad’s scapegoat of choice when defending ownership of such releases as A Flock Of Seagulls’ 1986 release Dream Come True, and a surprisingly large body of the Huey Lewis and the News discography. “Must have been a cutout bin!” he always says. Yet the crates and bins were also responsible for some of the most strange and obscure gems. Take for instance my dad’s album of whale songs, narrated by none other than the late and great Leonard Nimoy. Or perhaps Ambrosia’s 1982 release Road Island, which, although sonically terrible, boasts a Ralph Steadman illustration on the cover. He also has an original pressing of A Tribute To Uncle Ray, an album released by (Little) Stevie Wonder at age 11, in which Wonder performs the songs of Ray Charles in his signature, sugar-sweet voice.

Giving the milk crate hauls and cutout bins all the credit would be unfair. The truth is the majority of my dad’s collection, in all of its diverse excellence, is due to his shameless, unrelenting love of music. It’s the reason he has everything from Todd Rundgren’s Runt to Marlene Dietrich Returns to Germany, an album of the starlet singing in her native tongue over Burt Bacharach’s orchestra. It’s the reason he has Tom Waits’ first seven albums, and T-Bone Burnett’s first two. He owns every record Harry Nilsson released, and as much of The Kinks’ output he could locate. He has an unopened copy of an interview with The Beatles, which could probably pay a few bills here and there if he could part with it, as well as a sealed collection of speeches from the 1934 Olympics, featuring monologues by American gold medalist Jesse Owens, and Axis leader Adolf Hitler.

As lucky as I feel to have this massive archive essentially at my fingertips, I have earned the access. In the span of ten years my dad and I moved that hulking collection five times. With each move the records would be put in orderly boxes, keeping their alphabetical ranks and genre-specific confines. A box for Christmas LPs, a few for country, soundtracks, jazz, etc. The collection was always the first thing I wanted to unpack, as our new house never felt like a home without that tower of vinyl watching over.

I realize that these are niche bragging rights, especially for someone born after the invention of the CD, such as myself. It is true that I’ve been surrounded by more iPods than turntables throughout my life. But the objects of our childhood fascination rarely lose potency over time. Mine just happened to have an “adult” application as well as a visceral one. Records, you see, were as good as my baby blanket. More than that, they were road signs for me all the way through adolescence, and they’re still guiding my infatuation with music today. In the same way I fervently rummage through my mother’s closet each year and find something previously overlooked, I spend hours in front of my dad’s massive library of albums during the holidays, eyeing each spine for a hidden pearl. Unfortunately, our steady rotation of house cats over the years has left most of the spines illegible and shedding their own skin.

Shamed as I am to say it, I have spent the majority of my eight years in New York sans turntable, and therefore have not allowed myself the indulgence of purchasing any vinyl for over six and a half years. Then, one birthday I was gifted a flimsy little dollhouse of a record player; a 1980s suitcase model by Vestax that I refer to as “Fischer Price My First Turntable.” It’s no collector’s item, but it does the trick. Ever since then I’ve allowed myself the occasional purchase-an occasional purchase which has swiftly escalated to weekly purchases, a subscription to a monthly vinyl club, and the slow but steady transplantation of my original collection in Washington to my growing one in Brooklyn.

One time, while selecting some records to take back to New York from the small corner my collection occupies in my dad’s shelving unit, I noticed something amiss. Dad had filed a handful of-go figure-my favorite albums in with his behemoth pop/rock section. As I started plucking my copy of Wire’s And Here It Is Again…Wire from the W’s he caught me. This immediately spawned an argument about whether the album was in fact mine, gifted to me by my mother, or his from before they were married-a promo copy from the Music Store days. I was tempted to challenge pops to name five Wire songs as proof that he even liked them, but instead simply pleaded, saying it was one of my favorite records of all time. This ended up being far more effective.

When my parents separated 18 years ago the retrieval of records was a painful order of business. Was that copy of The Pretenders’ first LP mom’s or dad’s? What about The Specials, or Hunky Dory? These disputes still surface, but I like to look on the bright side, which bears a simple fact: my parents have amazing taste in music. What if they were bickering about who ended up with the Kenny G record? Things could be worse.

He may not own a record store, or play in a country rock band, or wear navy suede cowboy shirts anymore, but my father has reintegrated music into his life in a whole new way. He never stopped writing music, or listening to music, or loving music, but now he nurtures the music of others in the restaurant-cum-club he owns with his wife. It has become a welcoming home to many Northwestern artists in its two years as a Bloom establishment. The bistro is just one more facet, one more excuse to talk about music, which we do more than anything, sending each other songs via email and watching the ever-impressive musical career of my older sister.

Recently I asked him what some of his most prized records are.

“Wow, that’s kind of a tough one,” he texted, responding almost immediately after with “of course my Harry Nilsson collection would come to mind. I also think my Mills Brothers collection and my collection of Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli are treasures.” The former two were easy guesses, and yet I had no idea he even had Django Reinhardt or Grappelli on wax. I suppose that is the constant allure of his collection.

A few months ago, my dad and I were on the phone, and I expressed to him a conundrum I often find myself in while record shopping. “It’s like, I want to own Astral Weeks on vinyl, but I’d feel stupid buying it,” I said. “Because you already have it, and then someday I will inherit all of your records, and then I will have two copies of Astral Weeks.”

“They will all be yours soon enough,” he replied, sounding oddly resolved.

“Hey!” I barked. “Don’t talk like that! Jesus. I’ll just buy a copy!”

“Oh, no I don’t mean that,” he laughed. “I mean when Sharon and I pick up and move to France one day. I don’t want to move all that shit again.”

ONLY NOISE: The BBC and Me

Three years ago, on a dim June morning at 6 AM, I sat next to some toast at a shoddy Formica table. The table was in a damp, smelly kitchen exploding with mounds of used tea bags, soiled dishes, and sagging cilantro. Only, the latter wasn’t called cilantro, it was called “coriander,” because this kitchen was in Hackney, East London. Clapton Pond to be exact. And you couldn’t find “cilantro” in all of England, let alone in Clapton Pond. These early hours were perfectly serene for me. The moments before my two hour bus commute to the Southwestern tip of the city were quiet and sad, but most importantly calm. Sometimes I would see a little fox in the garden, foxing around. Other times I would sit with a journal and stare at its blank pages as if my retinas could burn words into them. Whatever occurred on a given morning, silence was crucial for peace. So there was a real hiccup in this pre-work routine when my affable flatmate Tom would bounce into the kitchen, pour himself a stout cup of coffee, and flip on the radio to BBC 6 Music

There couldn’t have been a more disruptive gesture with which to stab my lame little ritual. It made me uneasy, serrated with nerves – until I took a moment to actually listen. When I did, it struck me that what was playing was good. Really good. It wasn’t an online podcast, or a publicly funded radio station with biannual pledge drives. This was the BBC, once the home of John Peel. A government subsidized program, playing the likes of Wire, Kiran Leonard, and Stump at six in the morning. Was it for real?

Before long I was the one turning the dial to 6 Music at the crack of dawn, beating Tom to the punch. On weekends, all of my desire to get out of the neighborhood was extinguished by that four hour round trip commute Mon-Fri, and I would often sit in the kitchen for half of the day with a notebook and the radio. I pretended it wasn’t 2013, pretended that the DJs were my only source of know-how, like when Peel ruled the airways.

It is rare that we ingest contemporary culture alongside a hearty helping of surprise. We know the T.V. schedule, we oversee our own Netflix and HBO viewings, we cherry pick song by song on Spotify. Independent radio stations-not Top 40, but rather the few programs that exist outside of the mainstream-are true arbiters of surprise. You never know what will come next, and that is a scarce thing to come across today. The anticipation that perhaps the following track will be by your new favorite band…there is some dose of fate in that, even for someone who doesn’t really believe in fate.

I eventually became obsessed with the station, rolling into work a little later because I simply had to hear the end of that song, and find out who sang it. I began making unwieldy lists of everything I heard, a habit I maintain to this day. The dawn’s greatest priority was still coffee, but the radio was a close second. I was transfixed…how could something so perfect, so seemingly tailored to my tastes exist?

Founded in 2002, BBC 6’s slogan claims that it is “The place for the best alternative music. From indie pop and iconic rock to trip hop, electronica and dance with great archive music sessions, live music concerts and documentaries.” Somehow that statement still seems to be putting it lightly.

Their roster of DJs boasts names like Iggy Pop, Jarvis Cocker, The Fall’s original bassist Marc Riley (my personal favorite) and John Peel’s own flesh and blood: his youngest son Tom Ravenscroft, who turned me on to the likes of Girl Band and Maribou State. This is of course, the tip of the proverbial iceberg, as every host I’ve come across is either a renowned musician, journalist, or producer of some merit. Brush gently at the surface of any 6 Music presenter and you will uncover a rich history in popular culture. These aren’t merely critics, but fans; giddy enthusiasts with the entire BBC archives, Peel sessions, and exclusive interviews at their fingertips.

Their 24/7 programming spans every genre imaginable, sometimes encapsulated in more flavor-specific shows like Stuart Maconie’s Freak Zone and Nemone’s Electric Ladyland. Other times musical styles seem to be picked at random, the only consistent link being the superior quality of each track. One time I heard The Fall in the same set as Tribe Called Quest, which was only to be followed by Kate Tempest. It’s this kind of unfaithfulness that I can appreciate when it comes to record collecting.

If you and I have had a chat about music since June of 2013, chances are you’ve endured me waxing fanatical about this radio station. Not everyone dove right into it, but those who did always mention it when we cross paths. And often, they’ve found their own pocket of programming that I myself have yet to explore. One such convert informed me that he is hooked on Jarvis Cocker’s Sunday Service, a real Christmas dinner of a show featuring not only oddball tunes, but short stories, bits of radio plays, off-kilter sound effects, and of course, Jarvis’s velveteen voice to guide you through it all.

It seems safe to say that if it weren’t for 6 Music, it may have never occurred to me to have a crack at music journalism. Beyond that, I wouldn’t know or enjoy as much, and this goes for contemporary as well as veteran bands. My world would very likely exclude newcomers such as Happyness, Ezra Furman, and Meilyr Jones, all of whom have cropped up on my “Favorite New Artists” list. Some I’ve seen live, others I’ve interviewed; all have moved me to write about them in the hopes that some searching eye will come across my enthusiasm the same way my ears heard the excitement of the 6 Music DJs.

Although the more obvious takeaway has been finding more music to cram in my brain, there has been a much greater reward from listening to this station, and that is the optimism it’s restored in me as a music lover. A good decade of my pre-college life was dedicated to the discovery and devouring of music, and yet when I moved to New York something snapped. I assumed everything was over. There would never be another Smiths, blah blah blah. It was a juvenile stance to take, and one I hope I’ve completely scrubbed myself of. Because if there is anything that BBC 6 has taught me, it’s that people will never stop making music, and through the science of probability, there will always be at least some good music, some great music even. There never was a “day the music died,” just a constant costume change in a perpetual sonic play. There will never be nothing to listen to. You’ve just got to look harder.

ONLY NOISE: French Touch Me – A Love Letter To Daft Punk

There is a fetish for everything. Balloons. Urine. My Little Pony. Robots. Uncertain of the latter’s existence, I confirmed my suspicion via google. Sure enough, sexbots, cyborg fantasies, AI cosplay…all real things. And why wouldn’t they be? Films like Simone, Her, and Ex Machina, to name a few, have all addressed bot-positive love; the bond between man and machine. It’s only natural. At the end of the day it’s no shocker that a niche of the fetish community is reserved for Bicentennial Man’s nuts and bolts, but I was dismayed by two things during my research: 1) That the robot erotica community somehow missed the opportunity to coin the phrase “Robotica,” (which turns out to be a journal of the International Federation of Robotics) and 2) that there was no specific group dedicated to the ultimate robots, the droids that stole my heart: Daft Punk.

Are they not the sexiest bots to grace this planet? Their helmets, so shiny, their Frenchiness, their little matching outfits often made of leather-it’s all quite similar to certain costumes of the BDSM world. And yet, the closest thing I could find on the web alluding to the link between the French house duo and kink was an inflatable jacket with their name dubiously smacked on the title. Is it just me? Am I the only person who has a hard on for the helmet twins? It cannot be!

My introduction to Daft Punk, as with all good love stories, was at first pained. Their name was deceiving. “Punk, you say?” Popping in a friend’s copy of Discovery did not yield the expected results. It was plain false advertising.

House music? Techno? This was the noise I heard bleating up from my sister’s bedroom at 2 am. This was the soundtrack to her flirtation with “candy” bracelets and insufferably baggy jeans. This was not punk. Little did I know that within a decade the duo of faceless Frenchmen would steer me through my college thesis, teach me the subtle elegance of chair dancing, and open my eyes to a whole new kind of sexy: Robotica.

It was actually Stardust’s “Music Sounds Better With You” that first flipped my French Touch switch. The song was a one-off collaboration between Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter, the legendary bassist Alan Braxe, and Benjamin Diamond. It was, for me alone, the unofficial anthem of a half-assed relationship I was in while studying overseas in 2012/13. But it became the spark that set off a whole new set of synapses in my brain, the thing that allowed me to enjoy an entire genre I’d brushed off for ten years.

The mystifying thing about French house music is its ability to sound both undeniably cheesy-dated, even, and unassailably cool at the same time. It is nothing short of irresistible. Given the genre’s component parts-Giorgio Moroder-era disco glitter and more aggressive synth technology, it can be intoxicating if you just give in and let the boundaries of what “music” means melt away. There is a brilliant monologue by Mr. Moroder in 2013’s Random Access Memories that speaks to this perfectly: “Once you free your mind about a concept of harmony, and of music being correct, you can do whatever you want…” It is a succinct ideology, but when applied can truly boost the enjoyability index of any given song.

Random Access Memories hadn’t quite hit the shelves when I was tripping over “Music Sounds Better With You,” but I was intrinsically learning Moroder’s philosophy. Though the sparseness and repetition of the lyrics in “Music” could easily be mistaken for lazy writing, I found it more akin to poetic device; beats building, cresting like waves and crashing again, all while anchored with a simple phrase: “I feel right. The music sounds better with you.” A romantic but familiar notion, I related to the image of everyday experiences being elevated at the side of a loved one. Then again, they could have been singing about drugs.

Stardust’s hit sufficed for a while, but eventually I needed to dig deeper. I spent the better part of a year at school by day, and by night at a little glass table facing the wall of my fun-sized kitchen in Milan. The sewing rooms close early in Italy, as does everything else, and I had to make do with this makeshift studio. Sitting in a wooden chair hand sewing buttons or basting seams into the wee hours, I needed a specific sound to keep me going. My initial regimen of 69 Love Songs by The Magnetic Fields and Vietnam War documentaries were somehow not doing the trick-but maybe electronica would.

Compartmentalizing music into task-oriented playlists is not my ideal listening experience, but sometimes it happens without thought. You don’t tend to put on speed metal if you want to relax, or Yoko Ono if you want to make sweet love. Seeing as my driving mission at the time was to stay awake, keep moving and remain somehow upbeat, Daft Punk inadvertently scored my final year of college. Posted at my little table I would sew until three am nightly, dancing vehemently from the waist up in my chair.

I began with 1997’s Homework, in part for chronology’s sake, but also because I couldn’t resist listening to something called Homework while doing homework. It’s an album that continues to impress me every time I hear it, including right now as it accompanies the formless staccatos of my keyboard. At the center of the record is the duo’s breakout club hit “Around The World.” It is the cleanest moment on the LP, foreshadowing Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Chritso’s prowess at the soundboard. If you were being reductive, you could again call the song repetitive, but a closer listen reveals the early inner-workings of two helmets who know how to make you dance. The steady funk bass line, the flitting synths, the unrelenting beat…it’s one of many masterpieces on the album.

Homework is a landmark record not only for its evident genius, it is also the only time we get to hear Daft Punk this raw. Most of the record is unpolished, combative even. The p-word in their moniker seems to fit here, as the songs threaten a new era of relentless partying, and an unforeseen way of writing music. Tracks like “Da Funk,” “Rock’n Roll,” and “Rollin’ and Scratchin,’”-with its hostile beat and shrieking synthesizers, are nothing if not punk as fuck.

I kept going. Discovery, TRON: Legacy (the soundtrack), Human After All. I loved each for their own qualities, and appreciated that not one was like the next. Up to Random Access Memories, which cleaned up at the Grammy’s in 2013, Discovery had been Daft Punk’s pièce de résistance to many. And it’s easy to understand why. Where Homework is full of blood and gristle, Discovery is glittering and out of this world. Made by robots yes, but robots with crushes, robots programmed to party. It has admittedly become my go-to workout record, and though it’s a rare occasion that I do workout, I never tire of hearing it. Instead of remembering how boring and ultimately pointless one hour on the elliptical can be, I can instead focus on the intricacies of each song, the little riffs that slip away when you hear it at a bar, the madcap attention to detail that is palpable throughout. The way it makes your body move…I catch something new with each listen.

As someone who used to vilify the “non-traditional” instruments of electronic music, learning to love them has been an uncanny experience. I never have any idea what’s going on. What just made that sound? I don’t know. It is an endless source of surprise and wonderment for me to hear an aural universe unencumbered by the traditional triad of bass, drums, and guitar. The element of surprise is always rife with Daft Punk; it’s a consistent aspect of their compositions, their helmeted appearance, and their ability to pop out of nowhere with new music and annihilate the charts.

May 2013 was the month I graduated, but it was also the month the robots unleashed Random Access Memories, their first non-soundtrack, studio album in eight years. The music world was abuzz. Leading up to the record’s release the duo dropped a 15-second sample of “Get Lucky” as a sort of mini-commercial during an SNL broadcast. The blip oddly enough is still my favorite part of the song-that tasty Nile Rogers guitar riff in the bridge. And thanks to the wiz who looped it on repeat for 10 hours, I can still enjoy it in a vacuum. “Get Lucky” became the song of the summer, and though it’s by far not the best track on Random Access, it was infinitely superior to the summer jam of 2012: “Call Me Maybe.”

“Get Lucky” followed me to a fashion internship in London, where it became the only song on the top-40 radio station the seamstresses listened to that didn’t make me want to put my face under the industrial iron press. Needless to say it holds a special place in my heart, as does the entire record. The platinum hands that were lent to its creation-Rogers, Moroder, Pharrell, and Panda Bear to name but a few, are met with the gilded genius of Bangalter and Homem-Christo, creating a record that truly sounds like nothing else.

Returning to the States, I was shameful and amused that I’d spent a year in Europe and suddenly discovered electronic music. How lame. On the flight from Heathrow to Detroit a woman sat next to me flipping through the September issue of Vogue. There on the page were two dashing robots in gleaming helmets and YSL suits, sandwiching a supermodel. I got excited. Too excited. “Had I known Daft Punk would be in the new issue,” I thought “I would have bought it!” I glanced over the woman’s shoulder until she retired the magazine, hoping she hadn’t noticed. She probably had.

I was changed. My friends were concerned. One time, in the late night last sips of a friend’s house party, five of us were dancing to Paul Simon. “Wait!” I urged. “Lemme put something on!” Going from “You Can Call Me Al” to Daft Punk’s “Face To Face” was not the wisest DJ move. Everyone looked puzzled, but I persisted: “Hold on guys! It gets really good! Just wait for the BASS to drop!”

They still haven’t forgiven me.

Another time, while in a record store in Seattle, I stood in front of a Daft Punk cardboard cutout for twenty minutes, devising a way I could get it back to New York without feeling like a complete psycho, or worse, a 43 year old man who lives in his parent’s basement.

Certain idiosyncrasies don’t develop until adulthood. Certain affinities are never explained, but they can be admitted:

Daft Punk, I love you. You can leave your helmets on.

ONLY NOISE: Pop Anonymous

Someone I used to date always said that I only hated everything that existed. I fucking hated that guy, but he may have been on to something. I’ve long been called many things; a contrarian, a hater, overly opinionated, and my personal favorite, too intense. But while those assessments can ring true, they don’t take into account my aptitude for eating crow, a skill best exemplified in my musical flip-flopping over the years. Lengthy is the list of bands I used to “hate” and now adore. Changing your mind is a simultaneously painful and elating metamorphosis to endure. Especially when it requires letting go of a pre-teen ethos deeply rooted in punk rock; a genre that is constantly evaluating it’s own badassness. My leading question as a 14-year-old closet pop-addict being: does liking ABBA make me less punk rock?

Before my musical diet broadened exponentially, before I caught myself enjoying a Taylor Swift song here and there, or found out that I did in fact like hip hop, The Cardigans, and Kate Bush, I pretty much only listened to punk. I wanted music with anger issues. I was allergic to melody…or so I thought. There was a specific regimen of sloppy, fast, and distorted a song had to abide by to catch my attention. It was a closed mindedness I’m shocked anyone was able to put up with. My mom would softly chide me as I furiously jabbed the radio tuner in search of something to appease my limited tastes, “variety is the spice of life, you know.”

And she was right! But I couldn’t even see the variety so intrinsic to punk rock at first: jazz, ska, rockabilly, country…they all found homes in the tedious sub-genres of punk at some stage or another. But at the time it had a narrow definition, and more importantly, existed in a vacuum. Whenever my dad would try to relate to me by voicing observations such as: “hey, this is really just sped-up pop music!” I would defend its “hardcore” integrity with a spiny vengeance.

Pop was also burdened with a slim definition. Pop meant flaccid and saccharine. Pop was the noise that bubblegum made. Pop was the opposite of punk, unless it was pop punk, a genre I absolutely indulged in but would go to painstaking lengths to rename as “skater punk” or “neo-punk” because semantics and titles meant that much to me. I wonder why.

There were countless bands that I tossed aside in my one-woman-war against melody. The Smiths were top of the heap. Did I really hate The Smiths because I’d patiently, painfully sat through full albums and just couldn’t stand the irresistible brightness of Johnny Marr’s guitar, or Morrissey’s delicious voice? Or did I stop my investigation short of listening, scoff at the flowers in Moz’s pocket, and turn away the moment I realized that everyone else loved them? As we know, pop is short for popular, and with discriminating ears I’d decided that “popular” was synonymous with “crap.”

It took me a long time to realize that hating something because of its popularity is just as lame as liking it for that reason. Concept, I’ve learned, can be the enemy. Those little placards next to the paintings at museums can never communicate what it is that the canvas does to you. It may seem funny that a music critic is telling you to not listen to the ideas surrounding music, but before a critic I’m a listener, and one thing I know is that diving in on your own, swimming around, feeling the temperature and the texture of a song…that’s all that really matters. Gleaning significance from a concept-a synopsis really, no longer interests me…I want the meat of the thing. And it was with this abandonment that I was finally able to enjoy a whole slew of music I would have shrugged off in my younger years.

If concept is the enemy, context is a friend. After all, it was context that first tricked me into liking The Smiths. I was on an ugly grey balcony in Seattle, the balcony belonging to a friend’s hip older brother. It was the summer before I moved to New York and I found myself dating hip big brother’s college friend, a coy Brit who played with his bangs too much.

The brother, being a musician, had a hoard of instruments strewn about his apartment, along with plenty of friends who could play them. What college apartment would be complete without the requisite acoustic guitar, after all?

Though I grew up in the midst of musicians and have been witness to my fair share of casual-setting sing-alongs, I’ve never taken a shine to them. Too intimate. Too showy. Mostly too intimate. This occasion was no different.

Some guy with a fashion mullet and a purple zip up hoodie started strumming away on a six-string, and though I already wanted to run far away, I remained board-stiff in my deck chair. The song was requested by the Englishman, who shortly began to sing:

“stop me, uh-uh-oh stop me, stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before…”

My ears perked up-I hadn’t heard this one before. I loved it. I wanted to know who wrote it so I could hear the original version as soon as humanly possible and wash the sonic imprint of this “stripped-down” cover from my skull.

“Whose song is that?!” I demanded.

The two men looked at each other with mild disgust that I didn’t already know.

“The Smiths,” replied a thin British accent.

Fuck.

It was the beginning of an ongoing love affair that peaked mid-college, at which point I effectively ruined The Smiths for my first New York boyfriend after playing their catalog too much. I probably have friends who think I still hate The Smiths. Don’t tell them.

My newfound love of the Salford four might suggest a wellspring of new interests on less aggressive terrain…say Belle and Sebastian, for instance. Not so. I found Stuart Murdoch’s voice too whispering, the music too soft, too…wussy. For years I scoffed at the mention of them, never realizing that Murdoch’s lyrics were just as divisive as Morrissey’s, Elvis Costello’s, and Paddy McAloon’s.

But the battle against Belle and Sebastian would be lost to one song: “The Blues Are Still Blue” off of 2006’s The Life Pursuit. I was studying in Milan and sharing a mini apartment with a friend from school. The two of us were practically married, sharing a bedroom, class schedule, and groceries. We would cook for each other and spend hours at our tiny kitchen table smoking poorly rolled cigarettes and finishing off bottles of three euros red. Wine-stained and enthused, we would exit our circular debates about religion and politics, opting instead to play music we suspected the other hadn’t heard. This was much easier for her, as she was Brazilian, and could pretty much stump me with anything other than Sergio Mendes or Os Mutantes.

And yet her greatest victory in this game was Belle and Sebastian, which took her months to secure. “No. I don’t like Belle and Sebastian. I can’t stand Stuart Murdoch’s voice.” I insisted. “Ah, but you have to hear this song” she would counter. It hit me like a kiss. There was no denying it was a fantastic song; dripping in hooks, with a chorus you couldn’t stand not to sing. I admitted after a few listens that it was pretty catchy, but just because I liked one song didn’t mean I liked the band as a whole.

Within weeks I was secretly listening to other songs off The Life Pursuit, then the entire album, and eventually, older Belle and Sebastian records. Right before we graduated I conceded to my persuader. “You did it,” I reluctantly grunted. “You made me like Belle and Sebastian. Are you happy now?” She smiled with purple lips. I still can’t get her into Nick Cave. She doesn’t like music that is too angry.

ONLY NOISE: Falling in Love With Punk Rock Through Secondhand Smoke

You probably remember the years leading up to the nationwide smoking ban. It was oddly enough Ireland-home of the dingy pub, that first did away with smoking sections in bars and restaurants. Today it seems unspeakable that non-smokers and babies alike were once held captive in the local diner, forced to ingest a carcinogenic smog alongside their meal. It is easy to look back on those days as less healthy time, an indulgent, old fashioned era, but I think of them only in a positive light. Those were the years I discovered punk rock, live punk rock-surrounded by clouds of billowing nicotine no less.

In the early 2000’s, I didn’t smoke, but years before the ban took effect I’d manage to concoct a very romantic idea of cigarettes, one that I may shamefully still possess today. I could perhaps attribute it to the particular sect of middle schoolers that piled in cars after class, filled up the largest booth Arlington’s Denny’s had to offer, and chain smoked while downing bottomless coffee. They sat for hours, never ordered anything requiring a plate, and would most often leave without tipping, sometimes without paying at all. They left ashtrays exploding with crinkled butts in their wake, and though I didn’t agree with their table manners I was transfixed by their tight black clothing, their angular haircuts, and the identical white skull they all seemed to sport on t-shirts and book bags.

These kids, punks though they were, remained oddly exclusive. They held court at Denny’s, and were selective with their invitations. Perhaps I was too young, or didn’t have the right outfit, or any cigarettes to spare. But they had something I wanted, yet would never acquire from them-nor from Denny’s for that matter. They had subculture, a community, a tribe.

The clan I lacked seemed as though it would never be found, at least not in Snohomish County. But it was waiting for me at Graceland, now El Corazon, a smokey club just off of I-5 in downtown Seattle. It had gone through many iterations as a nightspot in prior years-The Off Ramp, Sub-Zero and Au Go Go to name a few. Those who saw the venue in its pre-Graceland days were witness to Pearl Jam’s earliest gigs, Nirvana’s first Seattle show, and numerous sets from the likes of Mudhoney and Soundgarden.

Though my time at Graceland didn’t boast the same historical gravitas, on a personal level it is a fixed point in memory; the nucleus of an entire period of musical education. Mine wasn’t a lesson in grunge, but punk rock, and it began on Valentine’s Day in sixth grade.

Up to this point, my introduction to punk rock had been piecemeal and happenstance. The older sibling model for cultural osmosis did not apply, because my only live-in sister was entrenched in the rave scene, which at 12 perplexed me. I wouldn’t understand music sans guitars for years to come.

I’m not certain what it was that drew me to punk initially – maybe it was that naive idea kids have that we can actually achieve individuality by adhering to a subculture, by wearing the uniform and honoring the customs. Or was it the rebellious allure of the Denny’s set? Perhaps I just wanted to believe there was more to talk about than Pokemon and Beanie Babies.

More than anything I suspect it was the clutch of a gnawing preteen anger that made punk so attractive to me. I felt at odds with my peers, simultaneously despising them and wanting their affection. I therefore needed a mode of aggression, a manifesto to legitimize my ambivalent rage. Punk seemed to be the only club accepting of such antisocial sentiments, a therapy that didn’t ask why you were furious, but simply handed you the boxing gloves.

Despite the driving emotions, my entree into punk music wasn’t as badass as I’d like you to believe. There was Sum 41, and Greenday, and Blink 182, and Rancid. The latter was casually recommended to me by Amy, the teenage shopgirl at my dad’s mercantile. My long term love affair with Social Distortion also came about by chance. My cousin’s then-boyfriend was getting rid of CDs by the boxful, and among those disks was the band’s 1998 release Live At The Roxy.

It was an album I played on repeat for months. To this day I can’t put my finger on what it stoked in me. By later comparison it is nothing revolutionary-a pretty mild, straightforward rock n’ roll record with a few f-bombs and a guitar solo backing every bridge. Maybe your first favorite band is more about timing and convenience than it is choice-like your first crush at school.

Before Graceland I had been dipping my toes into punk; after I was fully submerged. According to an archive page from punknews.org, 2.14.2002 was in fact the date of my first punk show, which was a compilation gig embarrassingly titled: Punks vs. Psychos. The original bill was Tiger Army, Lars Frederiksen & The Bastards, Nekromantix, and the Distillers. The idea being that half of the bill were punk bands, and half psychobilly, a sped-up version of rockabilly with horror film lyrics.

Having caught wind of my burgeoning musical interests, family friends Shannon and Steve rode in to the rescue: the Punks vs. Psychos gig was entirely their idea It’s funny how the adults who have known you since infancy suddenly become shepherds of cool. These guys had seen The Clash, been to England, and had a seemingly limitless supply of secondhand Doc Martens to gift me. They even had a nephew, Keenan, who quickly became my accomplice in the search for anything punk as fuck in our sleepy cow town. They were like punk rock fairy godparents.

It took over an hour to drive into Seattle. The evening was particularly thrilling not only for the culture shock, but for the taboo: it was a school night. Before door time, Shannon, Steve, Keenan and I made a pit stop at Dick’s Drive-In, an institution well known by Washingtonians. Dick’s is a golden-era burger joint that’s been around since 1954-which is truly arcane for the West Coast. They serve greasy fare impervious to requests of customization. No add this, no hold that. It’s the opposite of Burger King. Want it your way? Fuck off. Come to think of it, Dick’s is more punk rock than I ever realized.

Being a drive-in Dick’s had no place to sit, so we took our feast to the car, American Graffiti style. We each devoured the divine trio of cheeseburger, french fries and milkshake. Despite the sating meal I was wracked with nerves, expecting the kind of rejection I’d found at Denny’s-or worse. As we pulled past Graceland to park the car I saw a slew of punks lined up alongside the venue’s exterior, which was painted a menacing combination of red and black. All against the wall were ornate biker jackets overpopulated with shining silver spikes crowding the shoulders like barnacles on the hull of a ship. Mohawks, Docs, torn jeans; the whole stereotypical bit. Then of course there were the psychobilly kids: men with slicked-back ducktails and cuffed jeans, and chicks touting Rita Hayworth hair and red lipstick. The aesthetic dissonance between the two clans made me feel like I was witnessing The Outsiders or West Side Story.

As we hitched ourselves to the end of the line I could feel curious stares from all around. It was an all ages show, but it still must have been odd to see two 12-year-olds in attendance, and goofy looking ones at that. My jeans were too baggy. My leather jacket was all wrong, more bomber than biker. And, in a sad attempt to get a pixie cut, I’d been left with a dense pompadour dyed “chocolate cherry” via Feria boxed color. I’d heard it was dark inside, and I was looking forward to it.

Even better, the audience was shrouded in smoke, a welcomed invisibility cloak for me. It was difficult to see anything in fact, given the atmospheric fog, but also because everyone was much older, much taller, and their hairdos added a decent four to six inches on top of that. I’d never seen anything like it. I thought punks-actual punks-had died out in the 80s, when they became two-dimensional villains in b-movies.

It wasn’t long before word got around the venue that half of the bands for the evening had cancelled. The bill turned out to be near punk-less as both The Distillers and Lars Frederiksen & The Bastards had cancelled. Local punk-ish band Mea Culpa had been tacked on last minute, but what was supposed to be my first punk show ended up being my first psychobilly show, which I was excited about because I knew no one at school would know what the fuck that was.

A large portion of the set is blurry to me, perhaps because the air itself was blurred by all that smoke. Or it could have been the impromptu bloody nose that was summoned by the dryness in the room (this was a great thing because all of the girls in the bathroom assumed I’d been punched). But I sharply remember the moment Nekromantix took stage, all armed with instruments like I’d never seen. Frontman Kim Nekroman’s upright bass was an enormous coffin crowned with a cross headstock. I remember how menacing they seemed to me at the time, singing freely of murdering cheerleaders, necrophilia, and the underground muse to many artists, Bela Lugosi.

The very chord of their first song hurled the crowd into a fit. The room began to churn in a circle pit, fists flailing in every direction and girls and boys alike tumbling to the floor repeatedly. In hindsight it’s all camp, but at the time it was equally thrilling and terrifying. The seemingly pointless aggression intrigued me, and I knew in that moment there was no going back.

ONLY NOISE: Car Songs

Welcome to the second installment of “Only Noise,” in which Madison Bloom writes a memoir with music.

A mixtape is something Generation Y shouldn’t grasp the importance of. Despite the small number of people who claim to prefer the sound of tape, mixtapes today are largely leveraged as devices of kitsch and nostalgia. There is of course the tape renaissance in the cottage punk industry. Once declining tape-manufacturing plants such as National Audio Company are finding newfound profits in reel-to-reel, and brands like Urban Outfitters are eager to get in on the “vintage” trend. The clothing retailer made a gesture towards analog at last year’s Northside Festival, stuffing press goody bags with a neon green compilation tape featuring artists such as Blanck Mass and Juan Wauters.

But truth be told, most people born post compact disc proliferation have never had a pressing need for a mixed tape.

Unless…

There was a patch of time in the late nineties when the good people at Subaru neglected to outfit their Foresters with the leading method of musical consumption: a CD player. My mother owned such a Forester, and though in hindsight I realize the simple solution would have been to purchase a CD player, the decision was well out of my 12-year-old hands.

At the pinnacle of my musical discovery, as well as the inception of my aural snobbery, this absence was an abomination. Living as we did in bumfuck Washington, we were out of range for all of the cool radio stations like KEXP and 89.9. All we had was classic rock, Top 40 (not so great in 2000), and 107.7 The End, which boasted that ambiguous, doomed banner “alternative.” The End was given to playing Papa Roach, Disturbed, and the state-ordained daily quota of Nirvana.

It was ok, but when something truly abysmal came on, there was nowhere to run. The car at that time, just on the cusp of mp3 players, kept you captive with your music more than most situations, which was the beauty and the burden of being on the road.

I began to do what any other pre-teen would have done in the decades prior: I made mixed tapes. I didn’t need an authentic childhood void of the internet, compact disks, or Napster to understand how these things worked. I’d seen High Fidelity.

I was in a unique position as a kid in the 90s who actually knew what a vinyl record was. I was, as all kids are, egocentric, and having admired my Dad’s 4,000 plus record collection for as long as I can remember, I would go to sleepovers and birthday parties wondering: where are your Dad’s 4,000 records?

And yes, I too fetishized the faux nostalgic from a young age. I blame the amazing stories my parents told me about growing up in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. They had “used up all the fun,” as my mom puts it. I wanted to pay a nickel for a candy bar, and have a paper route, and take acid with my high school teachers. I wanted boys to make tapes for me! Fantastic tapes filled with songs I’d never heard, the J-cards meticulously filled in with ball-point pen renderings of hearts and music notes alongside the painstakingly written song titles, artists, and run times. The cassettes would have themes, and clever titles winking at some hilarious inside joke.

But there were no boys. There were no tapes. So, like an independent 12-year-old woman, I made my own goddamn tapes.

The first was simple in its purpose: songs for the road. Or, as my strained, blue Bic handwriting declares: “Songs For The Ramblin’ Traveler.”

This isn’t going to get less embarrassing.

So deprived I was of decent music in the car, that I overcompensated with flamboyant, and horrible titles. The music however, wasn’t so terrible. Side One included Bob Dylan’s “Peggy Day” off of Nashville Skyline as well as “Radio Radio” by Elvis Costello. Neither was directly related to driving lyrically, but sonically they possessed a forward-motion needed for a good car song. Just uplifting enough to keep your eyes ahead.

Side Two, was far less forgiving. I can’t say the exact year this tape was made, but it would have come to life amidst my obsession with two bands: Social Distortion and The Wallflowers.

The former was certainly the catalyst for including Mike Ness’s cover of “Six More Miles,” originally by Hank Williams, which, unbeknownst to my young ears, was not about driving, but dying.

More true-to-form road trip lyrics could be found in the Wallflowers selections, namely “Back To California” and “Shy Of The Moon.” Yes. There were two.

But the tape to end all tapes was the love dedication tape that I, in all my teen melodrama, made for myself. Having just seen Brokeback Mountain, I was inspired. So much so, that I entitled my mixtape-to-me: “I Wish I Knew How To Quit You.” It is perhaps the cringiest thing I have ever done in my entire life. But I would like to clear up one thing: it wasn’t about self-love; it was about a puppy-love deficiency…I was essentially pretending that there did exist a boy who had made me such a tape. Like when Cher in Clueless sends herself flowers. Sort of.

There was no shortage of Social Distortion tracks on this tape either. Side A touted their more critically acceptable era with “Another State Of Mind” off 1982’s Mommy’s Little Monster. The song itself was about being on the road, on tour specifically, and missing someone back home. Side B found them a decade later with “When She Begins” from Somewhere Between Heaven And Hell.

The Dead Milkmen’s “Punk Rock Girl” would have also been on there, since at the time I truly thought that it was a sincere love song. The irony of my choices continued with “Mama You Been On My Mind” by Dylan and Costello’s “Allison.” It took me years to realize that both were snide reprimands of former lovers. One could posit that this tape full of “love songs” might serve as a breakup tape in later years.

Despite our necessity for them, we didn’t have many cassettes in the Subaru, and at some point I must have become bored of making my own. Maybe I simply ran out of subject matter. Besides love songs and car songs, what else did you have to work with in life? This was clearly before the explosion of hyper specific playlists via Spotify, which delve into such heady themes as “Hipster House Party” and “Chillimatic.”

Aside from my mixes, the car’s center console held but a Queensrÿche tape (very rarely played) and a copy of Queen’s greatest hits. The latter was bootlegged and wore a clean J-card sans songs titles and start times. As kids, Queen meant only one thing to my sister and I: “Bohemian Rhapsody.” In fact, Queen didn’t even mean that. Queen meant Wayne’s World.

Sometimes on the 20-minute ride to school, all we wanted was to bang our heads to the bridge like Garth and Wayne. We knew that part of the movie by heart, the little air-drum fill right after Freddie Mercury belted: “so you think you can stop me and spit in my eye?!” We couldn’t ask for a better start to the school day. But instead, the entire ride would be spent rewinding, fast-forwarding, ejecting, flipping, reinserting, fast-forwarding, that tape, usually to no avail. We could never find the goddamn song, but on the extremely rare occasion that we did, riotous cheers were unleashed from the backseat, and oh the headbanging.

As much as I prattle on about the relationship between music and memory, I similarly cannot pry the thought of cars from songs. Driving, riding, cruising – it’s the ultimate American experience. Still, but in motion. Speeding ahead, but inert in your seat. Always moving forward, and yet forever framed between the past and future. I’m not someone who speaks of “being present” all that much, but that really is where the present lies in its most distilled form: en route. It’s no wonder the road, the car, and the open highway, have long been recurring themes in not only American music, but film and literature for decades. And if we are so bewitched by the journey, how could we possibly resist a soundtrack?

Tag: only noise