Remember when music was made to enhance big public spaces that people wanted to exist in and not drown out the sound of all the other people crowded in the modernist polygon with shit acoustics? I can't help but think of the mall near me. It used to have multiple koi ponds. Now the only thing there still doing business is the pretzel stand because the profit margin on a soft pretzel is still next to infinite. Where am I supposed to meet my stacked goth if our natural habitats have all been wiped out? The Internet? Where everyone also exists in the six remaining places screaming over each other for attention as the meaning behind life becomes more and more austere.
This is such a beautiful album and I want to exist in the world that it was made for.
Okay, yes, AC/DC is a 2 as a reflection of what it actually represents in society. If it existed in a vacuume it'd be a 4, maybe 4.5 just because AC/DC easily has the Top 5 Double Entendre Songs this side of The Masochism Tango and it's actually impressive when you think about it. I'd split the difference but I was literally verklempt, wistfully hoping, while listening to "You Shook Me All Night Long".
FFFFFFFFFffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff................................ I've heard Mother's Little Helper so many times before, didn't even register the name of the song let alone register the content of the lyrics before just now. The rest of it just drags on after that. This is the band? This is iconic? This is in the cannon of our Collective Cultural Achievement? [Clay Davis says 'Sheeeeiiit' (10 hour edit)]
Is Led Zeppelin more high on their own bullshit than anything else? Yes.
Would understanding the meaning behind most of the songs annoy me? Yes.
Do I want to hear Kashmir with a full orchestra so loud that it melts my face off? Yes.
(Rounding up to 4 from ~3.5)
Break Glass if you Need to Rock
This is the ideal of a three-star. It's music that would be on if I was on at an independent hardware/parts store on a Saturday morning in early June. I don't care to intellectually investigate it. I don't want to think about Eric Clapton.
I know that it's a Duke Ellington arrangement. They way they did it was wrong but I can't explain why. It's good music... but the stuff that it's about is so alien to me. It's all bougie bohemian problems.
The other day I drove past a cigar bar on a country road that had a sign in the Godfather font.
I can't help but look back fondly at an era of pulp culture despite living in the downstream consequences of it. No other band has two Bubblegum Crisis: Tokyo 2040 episode name tributes, but there's a reason why this is not one of them.
I have the zeal of a convert.
Music made on a computer for playing too loud at bars where you don't talk to anyone you don't already know. A simulacrum of a life lived. hi-hat_4.wav the album.
My feelings about my father are complicated. It's hard for me to look past his immense failures as a father. There are so many memories though of the times that he clued me in to who he was as a person. Really early on, before my friends started playing Amish Paradise, I remember my dad having Weird-Al In 3-D on cassette. I don't remember him ever playing it but I remember inheriting it after. I also remembered that he used to joke that he wanted to name me Dweezil or something like it because of Frank Zappa. I've always kept Zappa at a distance because of my father. It was a step too far into his realm.
When I listened to this, I went into the basement and smoked half a joint and tried to build a coat rack out of spare lumber and screws only to give up after 15 minutes because it was too hard to do without a bench vice. In that moment, I had a perfect transcendental experience. I saw the beauty in the futility of our lives. I saw the depths of Zappa beyond the wonton crassness. I saw the depths of my father beyond all the pain he caused me into the pain that was caused to him. I saw who I was as a person and came to terms with it.
(Also, it just fucking whipped. I'm going to go listen to it again.)
I think I'm kinda over Fleetwood. Actually yeah. I would gladly never have a conversation about Fleetwood Mac ever again.
The kind of jazz they use on PBS, specifically Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, has always had a special place in my heart. It's what the world I'm from sounds like. It's what it sounds like when I think about the pizza place next to the old bank and the video store near the train tracks. It looks like a model train diorama.
I'm not sure how universal of an experience having Otto the Busdriver is for most people, but it's a pretty mundane fact of life here in Pittsburgh. I grew up on our Classic Rock station 102.5 WDVE. Bad Company is the kinda good songs that you can play on the radio because it would actually suck if they played Don't Stop Believin' every day on the bus. Bad Company is so there's a song that nobody cares if you talk over. Bad Company is so that Sadie Jeffers can tell you about how this band sucks and tell you that The Dead Kennedys are her favorite band and you can stare at her freckles and all the product she puts in her hair to get it to do that. It's disrespectful of Bad Company to put them on this list.
I listened to this album twice yesterday and remember nothing about it.
Hack! Makes KISS seem authentic.
This is someone that has committed themselves to a path in life. I sense their faith in their calling as a musician.
