Tom's Year-End Music Talk Starts Now!

Well, it's that time of year again. No, not Christmas. Well, it's that too. But I'm referring to the end of December, when all the people who have nothing better to think and talk about twiddle their thumbs and compile pointless year-end reviews of what they thought the best of the year was in art, music, whatever.

And as I have done for the people couple years, I will be doing my own thing, music related, of course.

I considered not doing this at all, or in doing it in some other form than a Top-Whatever list, because I am more and more turned off by the idea of ranking art and and designating some things that I like as "better" than others. In any given year, there are usually only two or three albums that absolutely blow me away anyway, and beyond that, I have trouble designating one thing as 6th best and another as 7th best, especially since, like so many other people in the internet-driven world (there's a music writing cliche for you), I now take in such a wide variety of music that it's almost pointless to even try to do this. When the Pipettes ended up next to Scott Walker on a first draft of my list, I couldn't help but question the purpose of even trying to compare those two. It felt like looking at Tiger Woods and the 1927 Yankees and trying to decide who was better, in general, at sports.

But that's what's fun about music, isn't it? And I decided that an individual's list is probably more interesting than those compiled by websites or magazines, since any given person is more prone to weird oddities than a collective will, which tends to accentuate that which is more widely appealing, even if it's not #1 on anybody's individual list. (I'm using TV on the Radio and The Hold Steady as examples of this, even though I think they are both good.) On top of all that, people seem to enjoy when I do this sort of thing. My readership probably jumps from 5 people to 10 people. Wow!

So I'll be doing what I've done before: first some individual songs I liked (I'm trying to focus on songs from albums that didn't make my top 10 this year), then my "runners up," then my top 10, which, as always, is purely a reflection of my opinion, and not an attempt to "canonize" anything, nor an attempt to force anybody to like anything or admit something HAS to be good. If you're annoyed that I'm doing this, you're taking it way more seriously than I am (despite my own lengthy explanations of this whole thing).

Debate is encouraged. Some of my picks will certainly be easier for dissenters to tear down than others (in Joanna Newsom's case, I am disregarding any argument against her that involves her use of the word "thee"), but whatever. Let's all have fun. Feel free to leave your own top-whatever picks in the comments (anybody can post).

Philly sports are in a slightly less dire situation

Let's start with the Eagles, who beat the Panthers Monday night in what was apparently a very exciting win (I didn't see the second half because of work). Sure, it's just one win, but still... it's one win! That's exciting these days!

Jeff Garcia: 300+ yards, 3 TD passes, no interceptions. Any of you guys still want A.J. Feeley in there? And let's not forget that he basically outperformed Peyton "God's gift to quarterbacking" Manning last week (not that Manning had to actually do anything to lead the Colts to their blowout win).

Then I read this: "The Eagles took the lead when their offense was set up by a Brian Dawkins interception of a bad passed caused by pressure from the defensive line." Hell yeah! About damn time those guys showed up. The defense didn't seem to play all that great, and Jake Delhomme had way better stats than he should ever be allowed to get, considering that he's Jake Delhomme, but the important thing is that they didn't give up more than they gained, and they made some big plays to seal the win.

A few more games like that and the Eagles might just earn the right to get blown out by New Orleans in the first round of the playoffs (the implicit prediction there is that Chicago and Seattle are getting the byes).

Moving on, the Phillies may have lost out on the big power hitters, but who wants to be stuck paying $136 million to Alfonso Soriano until he's an old man, anyway? Chicago is going to be dying to get rid of that contract in a couple years, like Texas was with Alex Rodriguez and Boston is every offseason with Manny Ramirez (and you can see Soriano becoming a huge pain in the ass and demanding a trade like those two guys too, if the Cubs don't start winning right quick). And like the Astros will be with Carlos Lee soon enough. Soriano might come back full circle to the only team that could afford him, the team that traded him to get A-Rod in the first place. You heard it here first, folks: Fonzi a Yankee again by 2010.

Anyway, the Phillies signed Not-Randy-Wolf to a three year deal, completing a rotation that looks like it could easily be one of the best in the NL. And Adam Eaton finally gets to play for the team that drafted him. It's not quite Peter Forsberg's 13-year Philly homecoming, but it's nice anyway. (And that Forsberg trade was still a great deal in hindsight; wouldn't you much rather have our amazing memories of the Eric Lindros era than wonder what could have been if the Flyers had just kept the 50 guys and $80 billion or so that became the foundation of Colorado's Stanley Cup-winning teams? Sure, we might have had a couple parades down Broad Street, but what's that compared to, say, Lindros getting hammered by Scott Stevens? Or Lindros' dad's pissing contest with Bob Clarke?)

Speaking of Forsberg, the Flyers are starting to play like professional athletes, slowly climbing their way up out of the cellar. Or they'll be out of the cellar soon. The point is, they're getting a lot better.

Plus, John LeClair was recently waived by the Penguins, and rumor has it the Flyers are interested. I think that's a good idea. Philadelphia has a long-standing tradition of bringing back our aging former stars for one last futile gasp at glory. Everybody from Hugh Douglas to Ron Hextall all the way back to Jimmie Foxx has done it. Hell, even Rocky Balboa's making another go of it. Let's add ol' Johnny LeC to the list! I can just see Allen Iverson returning to the 76ers in six or seven years after being traded at the end of this year, playing second fiddle to some guy who's a freshman in high school right now, and finally admitting that maybe, just maybe, even he needs to practice now and then.

And the 76ers, they're looking up too! They've got... uhh.... hmm..... Oh, I got one! Remember when Mo Cheeks helped that girl sing the national anthem when he was with Portland? What a great guy! (Wait, actually that was a really heart-warming moment.)

One final note: did anybody see Sylvester Stallone at the Eagles game last night? He was never exactly the most handsome guy in the world, even if he's always been ridiculously ripped, but his face has definitely suffered from significant droopage and a little bloat over the past few years. Combine that with his weird, outdated haircut, and you know what? The New Yorker who's been posing as a Philadelphian all these years is actually starting to look like one of those weird, wrinkled Italian guys you see in South Philly. You know, the guy who's had season tickets to the Eagles since they opened up the Vet, who's capable of drinking an entire case of Budweiser before 1 pm on a Sunday, and who still goes to games at the Linc wearing his Kelly green Seth Joyner jersey that he bought in 1991 (or he would if it still fit him). That's what Stallone looks like now. Except he's still from New York, he's still a phony, and he still only ever comes here when he wants people to go to another Rocky movie or buy his book. See you when you need press for Rocky VII, Sly.

Music in (not so) Brief

The Beatles - Love - This is kind of an officially-sanctioned remix/mashup thing, in case you somehow were not aware of that. I remember watching a TV special a couple months ago about the making of Love, which had at least as much to do with Cirque du Soleil as it did with George and Giles Martin (what kind of a first name is Giles, anyway?). It was kind of annoying to watch George Martin and Paul McCartney pat each other on the back, congratulating themselves for having the brilliant range of vision to put the rhythm track from "Tomorrow Never Knows" underneath the vocal from "Within You Without You." ("Hey, you know those two really trippy songs we did? Let's make them into one really trippy song!") And you can just imagine Paul McCartney's joy at the thought of removing George Harrison's guitar solo from "Drive My Car" and replacing it with Paul's own solo from "Taxman." ("If I can overdub the background vocal, we can take George out completely!")

So Love is basically an exercise in pointlessness. There are probably five minutes of things worth hearing over the 26 tracks. My favorite moment by far was mixing the end of "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite" with the end of "I Want You (She's So Heavy)." Adding some of Paul's vocal histrionics from "Helter Skelter" was the icing on the cake. Aside from that, there's nothing much worth mentioning. The songs are still the Beatles', and thus they are still brilliant, but that's not really the purported point of this release. There's the exact same a cappella version of "Because" that's on the 3rd Anthology release, a version of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" that's also on the 3rd Anthology, except with a pointless string arrangement. Other "brilliant" ideas: using the live Ed Sullivan intro to go into the studio version of "I Want to Hold Your Hand," reducing "Glass Onion" to 1:20 (actually, that does kind of help that song), flipping the tape of "Sun King" backwards and calling it "Gnik Nus," and awkwardly cramming the vocal from "Octopus' Garden" on top of the string arrangement from "Good Night." "I Am the Walrus" appears virtually untouched; I guess there's no point in trying to make that song any weirder.

Anyway, to finish my thought about the TV special: McCartney, Martin, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono, and a woman that I'm assuming was George Harrison's wife or girlfriend or something all showed up in Las Vegas for the premiere of the Cirque du Soleil show based on all this music. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but it looked to me like Paul and Yoko still hate each other. That's what I call carrying a grudge.

Oasis - Stop the Clocks - This is a "best of Oasis" release. I'm not reviewing this. I'm not even going to listen to it. I just wanted to take the opportunity to talk about how annoying I find Oasis. These guys could have been legends if one of the Gallaghers had OD'd or something in about 1997. People might have even hailed Be Here Now as an ambitious masterpiece if that had happened. But instead we're stuck with the same old crap a decade on, where the brothers Gallagher start saying whatever comes out of their head to any tabloid reporter with a notepad any time there's a new Oasis release, and we all get stuck reading headlines like "Noel Gallagher: Radiohead are 'rubbish.'"

Also, Stop the Clocks is on two CDs. Guys, come on. If the Rolling Stones want two discs for their greatest hits, they can have it. Same with, say, David Bowie. Hell, the Beatles basically took four discs for their best of. You guys? I don't think so. You don't need two discs to contain your five good songs from your two listenable albums.

Squarepusher - Hello Everything - Oasis could use lessons in late-career management from electronic maestro Tom Jenkinson. Hello Everything is basically one of those albums that spans everything he's done over the past decade (not unlike Yo La Tengo's new album), and it works pretty well, even if it's not particularly cohesive in a way that earlier albums like Hard Normal Daddy and Music is Rotted One Note were. He still plays bass at about a million miles per hour, he still likes a lot of noise, and you'd still give yourself a heart attack if you actually tried to dance to this "dance" music. If you've never heard Squarepusher, I'll put it this way: Aphex Twin made ambient music before he heard Squarepusher. (Like anybody reading this has heard Aphex Twin but not Squarepusher. Whatever.)

The Trans-Siberian Orchestra has at least one suburban compatriot

Ah, Christmas. Nothing quite brings out the bad taste in people like the Yuletide.

There are two manifestations of this type of bad taste: music and lights. Christmas music is almost uniformly bad. With the exception of maybe Vince Guaraldi's Charlie Brown soundtrack, most Christmas music is about either sap or pomp. Most of it is sickeningly sweet ("Chestnuts Roasting O'er an Open Fire," "I'll Be Home for Christmas," "White Christmas," etc., "White Christmas" made even worse by the fact it was written by Irving Berlin, probably the most famous Jewish songwriter of all time), and the rest of it is absurdly bombastic ("God Rest ye Merry Gentlemen," "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel," and most of the more Christian songs).

The lighting is a spectacle of itself these days, an hilarious trademark of suburban culture, and as with the music, the more money one has to spend on lighting one's home, the further it drifts from the boundaries of good taste.

Which brings me to this:



You may have seen this before, because it's a couple years old. If you haven't, trust me, it's real. Here's the full story.

Here's the thing with bad taste: if your bad taste is strong enough, if you execute it with enough steadfast conviction, your bad taste ceases to be a negative factor. It becomes something akin to the music of, say, Queen: it is completely ridiculous, it is completely over the top, but that's exactly the point, and it is awesome.

And, in short, that's what we're witnessing with this video. After all, there's nothing more ridiculous than the music of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, which takes everything ridiculous about Christmas and Queen and adds a dash of unselfconscious pretension to top it off. Combining it with a bombastic light show that's coordinated with the music is the type of absurd and brilliant touch that can push something over the edge that separates "stupid" and "amazing."

Or perhaps it doesn't separate the two as much as join them.

band name bonanza

For whatever reason, I probably put more thought into band names than most people. I think this makes sense on some level. First impressions last, and often say a lot, right? First off, I'm going to get a little mileage from the archives. This was written on January 12, 2005:

How to Make a Band Name that Doesn't Suck

by Tom

1. Pick something that's memorable, or at the very least not completely mundane and generic. Go ahead, try to find ANYTHING on Google about The Music or The The.
2. Avoid pop culture references. These are bad because audience reactions will be along these lines:
50% - Don't get the reference
25% - Get the reference and think it's stupid
25% - Get the reference but don't really care about it.
They're also short-sighted. Pray for Mojo might seem cute now, but can you imagine if there was a band around today called "Archie Bunker's Chair" or something like that? The only band that I can think of that gets away with this one is Mogwai. Franz Ferdinand do too, but they're beyond "pop culture reference" and into "historical reference."
3. To paraphrase Sub-Pop's Pitchfork Media parody, if you name your band something that nobody can pronounce, don't be surprised when nobody can pronounce it. Examples: !!!, and with all due respect to two of my roommates, Kilion and Mahlon.
4. If your band is anything that could remotely be considered to be (the dreaded word...) "emo," for the love of God, don't use an "-ing" verb or a name of a month or day of the week. If you have both (God forbid)... then your band is probably Taking Back Sunday and your name fits perfectly because you're a band of walking cliches anyway.
5. Shock value = not really shocking anymore. If your band name is Rotting Christ or I Raped Mother Teresa, we're not recoiling in horror. We're laughing at you.

Hmmm...

Well, I suppose there are a couple of things I would add, and some things I would say differently now (and some things I would be more diplomatic about). First off, I would definitely stress Google-ability. In this day in age, it's all about the internet, and if nobody can remember how to spell or pronounce your name, they're not going to find your myspace page, and they're not going to go to your shows. And if you just read that and said, "If people can't spell or pronounce my band's name, that's their problem, not mind," then you may be a pompous ass. Maybe. And nobody is coming to your shows.

Here are a couple more rules I'd abide by:

6. Don't name your band after a pre-existing song by a band you like, unless you want to be associated as a mere ripoff of them forever. I like Brian Wilson as much as anybody, but you'll never see me in a band called "Heroes and Villains." And twenty years from now, when the surviving members of Godsmack go on a reunion tour of Boston-area bars and pubs, people are still going to be saying, "I bet those guys like Alice in Chains, heh heh."

If you have to name your band after something already existing, make it from a relatively obscure poem, play, or novel, or an even more obscure arthouse film. That way, you get the added benefit of appearing literate, and nobody will ever say things like, "Man, Modest Mouse totally ripped off Virginia Woolf." (Nor did they rip off Modest Moussorgsky.)

7. Remember that Simpsons quote about a band name that is funny the first time you hear it, and gets more and more annoying each time after that ("The Be Sharps")? Avoid that kind of thing. The Dandy Warhols, The Boy Least Likely To, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, etc.

So there you go. Once again I've spent far too much time on that. What is a good band name, you ask? That I'm not so sure of. My only answer is anything that's not a bad one.

Revenge of the hippies!

Another link (how blogger-ish of me):

Hippies still trying to ruin the country.

I had to read it almost three times before I was convinced that it wasn't actually an Onion-esque satire piece, and even now I have my doubts. The overall effect, however, is the same: I link to it as a comedy piece, because Lord knows it doesn't warrant any serious discussion. It's hilarious that there are people in the world with such an absurdly skewed view of their political opposites. I'm not saying that people like this don't exist on the left (the "Bush is the next Hitler" people are similarly deluded; I will say again, as I have before, that I think Bush is well-meaning but catastrophically misguided), but I haven't seen anything this ridiculous in a while.

Here's the icing on the cake: "For aging hippies, it's easier to keep blaming old enemies than to confront new ones..."

Because blaming, of all people, aging hippies for all of the problems in this country is not at all beating a dead horse.

Jimmy Stewart's got nothin' on Dubya

This amuses me.