SSP Alert! or In Which the Authoress Sings Her Own Praises

I'm going to take just a few minutes here to throw in a plug for my band, Lauryl Sulfate & Her Ladies of Leisure, because we're going to be doing a song at the Riverwest Follies on Saturday, March 3rd*. Molly Snyder, who is a rad mama bandmistress in her own right (LINK!), has written a supersweet article about me and my musicalish exploits for OnMilwaukee, and I'm pretty siked to share it here. I also really liked this related blog post that Molly wrote, about giving yourself permission to be rad. ALSO! I haven't played out in a while, and I'm really excited about it. I am working with the très awesomesauce LOL to come up with a hella boss act for the Follies, and if you're in Milwaukee, you should come and watch us. I don't want to give too much away, but I will tell you this: There may be cardboard pizza! I will rap! Someone may do the Roger Rabbit! If we can figure out how the balls to do it! And other rad shit!

*You should go, duh. This is me inviting you. Yes, I mean you and not some other you who's reading this blog. It's at the Falcon Bowl, which, you know, is awesome. I am not sure yet what time it starts, but I am sure that info could be readily Googled.

If you're feeling supporty, you can throw some love at the LOL by liking us on Facebook, and that would make me and the Ladies feel really special and warm inside.

And. really... feeling warm and special? Is that not why we're all put on this Earth anyway? So, what are you waiting for? Like, like, like!

Lauryl the Brave, Protectress of Castle HuffPo, Why Russians Never Get the Blues, and Other Stories I Tell Myself About Myself

"'You're' is a contraction of 'you are', whereas 'your' indicates ownership! Furthermore, I find the conservative position on corporate deregulation to be dangerously simplistic, you blood-sucking freak!"

NOTE: This post was begun on the day of the official start of the Scott Walker recall petition period, which, as you know, is just closing today. I just finally went back and finished it today. Apologies about the quasi-outdatedness of it. I hope you enjoy it, regardless of its Total Lack of Timeliness. xoxo-Laur

I'll tell you what.

I was all psyched to come out to le local coffee shop and blog the shit out of this evening, because it has been simply forevs, and I've been a-hakerin' to write. But now that I'm here, on this fine November 14th, the day before my birthday, the anniversary of my nativity, I find I am almost TOO EXCITED to type a even a single obscure-yet-witty-pop-cultural-reference. Almost.

It's not because it is almost my birthday, although that's cool too.

Nope, I'm SUPER FUCKING EXCITED because tomorrow is the FIRST DAY OF THE SCOTT WALKER RECALL PROCESS! YESSSSSSSS!!!!! (Fist pump! Snoopy dance!)

I know, I know. You're all like, "Chill, Laur! We have 60 days of signature gathering ahead of us, and there is no guarantee that this shit'll actually work."

True enough, friends, especially with whack ass stunts like cyber-attacks on United Wisconsin's website and people claiming that they're going to "infiltrate" recall offices so that they can illegally destroy signatures. But I still can't help feeling that special holiday feeling. It's not unlike the way I get super jazzed for Halloween in about mid-July. I know it's a big job, but I think we can do this. I really do.

Unfortunately, this means that what EZ lovingly refers to as my "internet autism" could get even worse, at least for a while.
He is not wrong, btw.
I have come to realize that I'm am Internet Knowledge Addict.

I realize how incredibly pretentious that sounds, but I really don't mean it that way. I'm not, like, sitting around all day absorbing chess strategies, working up formulas for measuring black holes and studying the complete works of Dostoyevsky. Well, mostly not. Although, I did read a really great short story online last night; The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, by Ursula K. LeGuin. I'm going to link it, so you can read it. It's really short, so you should go read it as soon as you're done here, and then go argue about the meaning of it with some Ayn Rand fans on Goodreads or something. Go ahead, have a ball! Oh, but finish reading my blog, first, m'kay? (And then friend me on Goodreads, because I am a dork.)

Hello, my name is Lauryl, and I'm an internet compulsive.

If there's a song I like, I can't just like it. I have to look up the video on YouTube, google the lyrics, check WhoSampled to find out what all the samples are and then look up the album that the original, sampled song came from on Amazon to see how much it is selling for. If I'm in the mood for cake, I must google pictures of cake. If I'm feeling crafty, I'll go poke around on the Martha Stewart website and try to figure out how to punk up all of the projects. If I'm depressed, I go to Regretsy and laugh at all the shitty art. Then I eventually end up on regular Etsy, mooning over things I can't afford and don't have time to make myself...and then I start looking at my own poorly maintained and barely seen Etsy page and feeling inferior, and then I get thinking about pottery, and then I get distracted by the Wikipedia article on haniwa horses...

Knowledge, in general, is mostly a good thing, but I'm the first to admit that amongst all of the valuable and worthy things I've learned on The Internet, there are quite a few coprolites mixed in among the gems.* For instance, who really needs to know that one of the girls from MTV's Sixteen and Pregnant recently lost custody of her kid? Nobody but her mom, who is probably caring for said kid right now, poor woman. Or, did you know that Justin Bieber is being accused of fathering a child with one of his fans? Of course you didn't! Because who the fuck cares! And yet: I POSSESS THAT KNOWLEDGE. I am now a Level 5 Useless Celebrity Gossip Mage.

*A coprolite is a fossilized piece of dinosaur shit, by the way. That particular...uh, nugget of knowledge comes courtesy of my dinosaur obsessed 4-year-old. I am practically an amateur paleontologist now. Por exemplo: Tyrannosaurus Rex ("Tyrant King" in Latin. What a magnificent, beastly moniker!) is a member of the suborder theropoda, which is characterized by all of its members having three-toed feet. Other theropods include Allosaurus, Spinosaurus and the mighty Giganotosaurus, which was like a T. Rex except EVEN FUCKING HUGE-ERER! "Theropoda" is greek for "beast feet." BAM! I didn't even have to google that shit.

Some Useless Knowledge is, in reality, Useful Knowledge, because it helps me Totally Rock at crossword puzzles, or it helps me and my beau to Wipe The Floor with The Competition at Trivial Pursuit, or it helps me to, like, be a well-rounded person who has historical context for current world events and discuss them thoughtfully and thoroughly or some shit like that. And some useless knowledge is just plain delightful to have tingling around in your noodle like some kind of delicious chocolate brain phosphate. Like THIS.
Or THIS.
Or THIS!

Dammit, now I really want a chocolate phosphate.

But I will tell you, some knowledge I really just need to stop putting in there. Sometimes I cannot stop myself from reading articles about horrible, depressing, unspeakable tragedies, like Michele Bachmann.

And sometimes...okay, oftentimes...I cannot stop myself from clicking on the link to the comments section of these unspeakably tragic articles. With the notable exception of floods, famines, fires and genocides, is there anything more truly tragic and devoid of humanity than an internet comments section? Every time I read one, it takes a little piece of my soul and buries it in a landfill somewhere,where it will remain forever without properly biodegrading and becoming part of the cycle of life again. And every time I can't stop myself from replying to some jackass xenophobic paranoiac (who has apparently turned off the spellcheck on his keyboard AND forgotten that he can google things like, say, rape statistics pretty easily, instead of just making them up on the spot), it's like someone went out and murdered a sea turtle with a plastic six-pack ring, only that turtle is my heart.

Intellectually, I understand that a person who believes that all liberals eat children and piss on Bibles is not a person who is going to care about my [relatively] well-researched statistics. In my brain, I know that homophobic chach-meister dudes who think that Eli Roth is an unsung genius are simply not mentally prepared to understand any aspect of the term "rape culture". And I know that all the reason in the world will never dissuade the armchair corporatists and temporarily embarrassed millionaires and fundamentalist creationists and dubious, doubting climate skeptics from their mission to insult a random stranger online. BUTDAMMITSOMETIMESIJUSTCAN'THELPMYSELF!!!!!

Argh!

Today, I was listening to Wisconsin Public Radio, because National Public Radio is way too cool for this cat. Talk of the Nation was on, and this particular episode featured an interview with David Bellos, the director of the Translation and Intercultural Communication program at Princeton. Bellos was saying that what he finds most frustrating about working as a translator is that people mistakenly believe that language can be translated with perfect accuracy. He says that in fact, perfect accuracy is not possible, as languages cannot be translated on a 1:1 ratio.

For instance, in Russia, there are different words to describe every shade of the color blue. Sky blues and midnight blues and cadet blues, teals and ceruleans and indigos all get their own unique word, which is not unlike English. But in Russian, there is no blanket term, "blue". So, when a translator needs to translate "blue" from English into Russian, they must choose the best word to use for themselves. Which blue to use? It's up to the translator to figure out how best to preserve the original meaning, as they have interpreted it.* Bellos goes on to say that every use of language, even when we are speaking our own language to another native speaker, is an exercise in translation. You are translating your thoughts, choosing your words, and someone else is reading or listening to them, and interpreting what you say.

*Another good example of how the 1:1 ratio does not work is the Yahoo Babelfish translator. I find it delightful in its interpretive inaccuracy. Sometimes, I like to take a block of lyrics from a famous song, translate them into another language, and then translate them back into English again. Then I post them on friend's Facebook walls. Because I'm online way, way too much.**

**For instance, here are the lyrics to Closer, by Nine Inch Nails, translated from English to Dutch and back again: "I want to fuck you of an animal keep. My whole is existed has been marred. YOU become me dense to god!"

I admit to being a Word Nerd, living in the warm bosom of a family of Word Nerds. We're a Word Nerd Herd. I love learning new words, and coining new words, and stealing beautiful words from other languages, and playing with words I already know until they're just perfect, or just perfectly something else. But it makes it difficult, sometimes, having all this language floating around in one's head, because to a lot of people, I am uninterpretable. And a lot of people on the internet, with their weird, garbled half-constructed commentary, are uninterpretable by me.

Language can be such a terribly imperfect tool. How can we ever hope to use it to change someone else's mind about anything, let alone something important, like love, sex, ecological awareness, human rights, compassion, when a lot of us who speak English are not even speaking the same language? Especially when there are so many people that are not even fluent in their own native tongue.

Online, one lacks the benefit of looking for nonverbal cues from other people. No sarcastic grins or silly eye rolls to indicate joking sarcasm. No softening of edges. Plus, when you're not face to face with another person, it is so easy to just unleash the full force of one's anger about a given issue, isn't it? There's little to no mitigating knowledge about the other aspects of a person's life. That's how it can happen that another mom and I can end up in the internet equivalent of a knock-down, drag-out because she can seriously get up the huevos to say to me (a friend of a friend, mind you, so that we might very well get along in real life, but we only know each other through Facebook posts) that my nursing in public is the equivalent of showing people my tits to get Mardi Gras beads. (Yes, that convo actually happened. And I will shamefacedly admit that, though I usually don't rise to such silliness, I kind of snapped; I packed that snowball right back up and verbally facewashed her with it. I do not say this with pride. I'm a little embarrassed that I let her get to me.)

The question is, would she have said that to me, in just that same way, if we'd been debating public nursing at a party? I doubt it. And would I have felt a need to respond in kind? Probably not. Normally, when we meet people in real life who are overly forceful about their opinions, we find it kind of off-putting. Online, though, everyone's an expert, and nobody has to empathize, because the other person is just a construct of letters and punctuation. It makes it a lot easier for us to march blindly forward without other people inconveniently interrupting our personal, internal bildungsroman.*

*Is this an ironic statement to make in a blog, which is typically all about "me, me, me"? I dunno. Maybe. For what it's worth, I make it a point in my life not to take my point of view for granted, though I am not always as successful at it as I hope to be.

In this light, the invention of emoticons and acronymics like "LOL" not only make perfect sense, they are an inevitable result of a life lived increasingly in text. They're an attempt to reach across the ether, the no-contact version of a human touch. :)

I really wish that I could have rewound that breastfeeding argument and found a way for me and the other woman in question to discuss things without all that heat. Ideally, I would have liked for us to be a little empathetic.

I've always been comfortable living in text. Prose is one of my preferred mediums of expression and it is often the filter through which I most comfortably and naturally enter the world. When I write, I feel clear-headed, sure of myself, safe, smart, and saved from the awkward pauses and verbal sprinting and cautious ums, dudes, and like, y'knows that pepper my verbal communications. Sometimes, when I am excited about something, I talk so fast, I actually run out of breath. Communicating via text is sometimes a great relief for me.

But I don't know if I am quite ready for the rest of the world and all of their maddening improperly placed apostrophes to join me here in Textville. (She said, revealing her snobbery. Mea culpa.) I don't know if everyone is quite ready to join. I'd like to daydream that all of this new text-based communication will eventually create a whole new society of better writers, and maybe it will, but maybe being brilliant with a bon mot isn't all that important of an achievement. Maybe the thing I'm really not ready for has less to do with my snooty attitude towards grammatical imperfections and impenetrable, poorly constructed sentences (although I do hate that, urgh! ), and more to do with the loss of empathy that comes with the lack of contact.

I mean, there are people out there, right now, just sitting around their computers, looking at YouTube videos and calling the thirteen year old girls in them "whores" for lip-synching to Beyonce. You know I'm right.

And I'm sure that a good deal of them are the exactly the mentally unbalanced trolls we imagine them to be, sitting in the dark in a pool of sweat, masturbating to a picture of JarJar Binks , their hands covered in Chee-to powder from the empty chip bags that litter their sad, cat-pee smelling apartments. But I'll bet a lot of them are fairly normal, somewhat clueless people who just think they're having a larf or two. ("Dude, it was a JOKE! Gah, you feminazis have no sensa humor!") Sometimes, I'll even see a friend who I know is a nice, good person post something online that makes me go, "Ummmm..."

I know none of this comes as a revelation to anyone, but for some reason, I have such a hard time ignoring it. I think I'm hard-wired to defend underdogs wherever I may find them. Blame my entire middle school experience, I seem to be constitutionally unable to let a person think they got away with bullying someone else. I'm like a really crappy, nerdy superhero that never physically rescues anyone. Buffy the Troll Slayer. It's bad.

So, what to do about it? I've decided that for now, the only thing to do is to go on a diet from internet comment sections. I'm adding it to my New Year's resolutions list, along with my vow to eat one raw vegetable every day (because I don't) and to say "Happy Birthday" to people on Facebook when I see that it's their birthday (because it is nice to wish people a happy birthday).

So far, I've been doing waaaaay better on the vegetables and the birthday wishes than I have on not-reading comments sections, but I'd like to believe that there is hope for me yet.

If not, I'll just have to drive a stake through my computer.

Or, as they say in the Netherlands:
I will float a prop by my computer and killing only such as Buffy, the assassin of the vampire.

Where's My Goddamned "Blame it on the Rain" Cassingle?!

"Where's my BOY London jeans, dammit?! And somebody drench me with a blast of Sun Ripened Raspberry body splash, stat! I am a huge fucking star and I will never be forgotten!"

NOTE:
Dear bloglets, I realize that I have been disappointingly sparse in my blogly offerings as of late. Maybe it's only me who's disappointed in my lack of bloggishness, but maybe it's you, too. Maybe you think that I have not actually been writing at all, but in fact, I have. I'm actually pretty much always writing. According to my blog queue, I have something like 64 posts on this thing, but, you'll notice, I've published naught but half of them.
I dunno what to tell you. I sometimes go through long periods of intense pickiness wherein I never seem to resolve any writing to my own satisfaction. What ends up happening is that I'll get six or seven almost finished posts all in a row that never see the light of day. It's my own, verbally explosive version of writer's block, I guess.
My personal self-improvement project right now is trying to devise methods of pushing through this habit. So, while I work on that, I thought I'd offer a few imperfect, unfinished, older blogs. This one is from the summer, I think. It's just a trifle, really, but here it is. I hope that you like it like you'd like a little Andes mint that you stole off a co-worker's desk. Tiny, but sweet.
xo-The Laur

Today I went to a shopping mall with my offspring.

I somehow thought it would be a super awesome idea to walk to Bayshore with both of them in the behemoth double stroller that I second-handed from a friend specifically for long walks such as this. I say "somehow thought" because I also mistakenly believed that the weather would be as mild and lovely as it has been of late, and that therefore the hot, blinding sun would not be so hot and blinding, and that my oversized, charcoal grey slouch sweatshirt that makes me feel like I'm either Jennifer Beals in Flashdance or Heidi Klum on her day off would be appropriate for the mild, lovely weather that I mistakenly thought we were having. Needless to say, but I'll say it anyhow:

It was hot. I was sweaty. I looked nothing like Jennifer Beals or Heidi Klum, even if you imagine for a moment that they gained a whole lot of weight.

When my hot, sweaty self and my two offspring arrived at the mall, I did something else stupid. I went to Bath & Body Works.

I used to love Bath & Body Works when I was, like, fourteen. That is when they first came into being, I think, which should tell you something about my age. I ALSO used to love shopping at Contempo Casuals. How's that for dating myself? My favorite thing to do back then was to listen to my cassingle of the "Tom's Diner" remix by Suzanne Vega and DNA, go shopping at the mall, and buy clothes that made me feel like I was on Club MTV with Downtown Julie Brown. Wubba, wubba, wubba!

Anyhoo. I haven't set foot in B&BW since forever. But my dad's wife, T, loves to shop there. (I guess she never got burned out on it like I did when I was a tween who couldn't let $20 bucks from mom sit in my pocket for more than an hour without dashing out to buy some honeysuckle body splash. UGH! My stomach recoils at the thought.) I can pretty much count on getting a B&BW gift basket from her every x-mas. This year, she got me a basketful of a scent called "SLEEP", which is some sort of aromatherapeutic concoction involving lavender and chamomile. It reminds me powerfully of this set of scratch-n-sniff stickers I had in my sticker album as a kid. (Another relic of its era, the Sticker Album. I've tried and failed to find one for T-Boz. Do kids really not collect stickers anymore? I guess they're all too busy on their newfangled Sega Blaster Systems and their iPops and what-have-you).

The stickers had cute little cartoon lady piggies doing cute stuff, like eating a giant dish of mint chocolate chip ice cream, or taking a bath in flowers. That one with the flowers in the bathtub? It smelled really, really good. In fact, it smelled just exactly like SLEEP Aromatherapeutic Lavender Chamomile Bubble Bath from Bath & Body Works.

So there's an endorsement for you. Shop at Bath & Body Works! Smell like an adorable cartoon ladypig!

I have heard that scent is the sense most powerfully connected with memory, and it seems that this is true, because when I ran out of SLEEP bubble bath, I decided that I simply must get some more.

I took one step through the door of Bath & Body Works before I remembered why I do not shop there anymore. I really feel like I'm not crazy on this one. They used to have a lot of things that smelled nice, didn't they? (I especially seem to recall this lime-scented soap that was totally delightful; sharp and bitter and bright, just like a real lime.) But now...

Half of the shit in there smelled like the rotting corpse of Willy Wonka.

I guess, seeing who their base demographic is, they've aimed more and more of their marketing at them. I guess 14-year-old girls just love smelling like Strawberry Shortcake just took a shit on their face.

I also guess that I'd forgotten the part where I developed a nasty sensitivity to perfumes at some point during my mid-20's, right around the time my migraines stopped just being bad headaches, and started moving into the trippy, "Hildegard of Bingen thinks she sees god" zone. I was only there for ten minutes, but by the time I left, my left temple was throbbing, and everything I said reverberated in my ears like I was talking into a tin can. UGH.

But I got the bubble bath, so that's good. Tonight I'm gonna ladypig it up!

Riverwest Co-op Mug Design

Lookie, a picture of my new Riverwest Co-op mug with my illustration on it! It's a wraparound image, so I included a picture of the original drawing as well.

Also, I got gift certificates for the co-op, just in time for me to be broke this week, YAY! Organic milk and eggs, paid for in pen and ink. This, in my opinion, is just as it should be. If anyone else wants to exchange material goods in exchange for art, you know who to call.

Rock It or Hock It: Action Figure Party

Singing is a trick to get people to listen to music for longer than they would ordinarily.
-the Talking Heads, Stop Making Sense

Oh, man. The ROCK IT/HOCK IT concept started off with such a nice, discussable, well known band. I really wish I didn't have to delve so deep into obscurity for what is only my second post in the series, but I also am kind of anxious to get this one out of the way so I can move on to more familiar material. Alas, this project requires that I discuss every CD in my collection. And so I must bring you the band you've never heard of, Action Figure Party.

This CD was given to me by my friend, the Duckman, who is a deep music listener of the kind that loves to bless his friends with burned discs of everything he's listening to right now in a sort of proselytizing gesture towards musical world togetherness. I love people like this. Everyone has to have at least one Music Disseminator in their lives. I have a few, all of whom I adore. (I think for some people, I am the MD, which I find funny, because my musical knowledge doesn't run nearly deep enough for my own satisfaction.)

Anyway, mostly, I have pretty good luck with discs from the Duck. I got Feist and Metric from him, both before they broke big, the French Kicks, Mike Doughty concert bootlegs, a mix CD full of righteous booty house anthems, Sneaker Pimps (Yes, me & the Duck go way back, in case you're wondering), and Kylie Minogue's Fever, which is one of the greatest dance pop albums ever, srsly. One thing I love about Duck's taste is that he loves a good pop song, and he appreciates good production, and he doesn't care what form it takes (unless it takes the form of any song from the 70's. It's his one musical blindspot, if you ask me, but at least he's in good company. Lester Bangs didn't think much of overwrought 70's stadium rock, either. Me? I love that shit.)

So, yeah. Action Figure Party. Honestly, it took me a long time to even listen to this for the first time. For some reason, maybe the name of the band or something, I really thought it was going to sound like Butter 08. So, you can imagine my disappointment when it didn't. It sounded more like the Beta Band, but maybe not quite as good. In my listening exercises for writing this post, I listened to this while doing the dishes a bunch of times. And it starts out swinging along pretty nicely, if not remarkably. But somewhere around track 9 or 10, it takes a weird detour into jazzy explorations that land just north of Brad Mehldau and just south of Vince Guaraldi. I like both of those jazzbos in their own ways, but I'm not so into them suddenly appearing in the middle of what I thought was a funk album.

Track two ("Action Figure Party") is obviously the single, and if all the tracks on the album were at least this good, it would probably be a great chill out record. It's got affinities with Cibo Matto, Beck, and Stereolab; clearly the hippest entry in an album full of hip references. It's one of the few tracks on the album with lyrics, which add dimension to the song. And, as long as I've already mentioned 70's bands, I have to note that many of the songs on this thing, upon re-listening, owe a clear debt to the work of both Steely Dan and the Average White Band. This reminds me exactly of something my mom might have played at a dinner party when I was 5. And then later in the night after everyone ate, and I was in bed, they'd break out the weed and switch from AWB to the Doobie Brothers, and it would be years until I figured out why I felt so nostalgic anytime someone in my general vicinity lit a joint.

About the lyrics thing: I'm not gonna go and be one of those people who claims not to like any music without words, because I think that's dumb. I think that's dumb in the same way that I think it's dumb when my mom refuses to watch any movie with subtitles because it's "too much work". I like music that works for me, whether or not it falls into any particular category. I like jazz. I like classical. I like house music and drum-n-bass, and trippy-dippy hippie jams and world music and experimental film soundtracks and all sorts of other shit that probably annoys my coworkers when I bring it in to work.

But sometimes, a song without lyrics is like a dress form with a half finished dress on it, y'know? And sometimes, a cool reference is just not enough, especially if the music isn't using that reference as a way to carve out new space for itself.

Here's what I think this music would be best suited for: the world's sweetest iPhone game soundtrack. I can just imagine this as the background music to some weird, cutesy Japanese video game involving adorable laser penguins and flying pizza slices. And you'd buy the soundtrack partially because it's kind of a quirky thing to have, and you'd play it at your house party, and people would say, "DUDE! Is this the soundtrack to Nemesis Kittens?!" And you'd be like, "Yup, dude. Japanese import only. Check it." And there would be high fives all around for your acquisitive awesomeness.

But this isn't a soundtrack to a video game, and there are no flying pizza slices that give you extra points, either for your laser penguin or for owning this album. This is the thing...the band is called Action Figure Party. That suggests that the music it contains might indeed be party music. And I suppose it is, if you are the type of person who likes to throw fancy cocktail parties at your hip urban loft. Ultimately, I think that Action Figure Party, while technically sound and somewhat cool, is just too ambient for me.

So. I don't think I'll hock it, exactly. I think I'll probably just give it to my mom. Your thoughts?

VOTE:

☐ I'm sorry, now that you mentioned flying pizzas, I can only think of flying pizzas, which are awesome. Therefore, I now associate this album with Awesomeness, and I must insist that you continue to ROCK THAT SHIT.

☐ The only thing I like that's fancy is Heinz ketchup. GIVE THAT SHIT TO YR MOMZ, YO!

NOTE: This post is a part of a series called ROCK IT/ HOCK IT, in which I listen all the way through my vast CD collection and give you, the reader, a chance to vote on which music to keep, and which to ditch. For more ROCK IT/ HOCK IT posts, please visit the ROCK IT/ HOCK IT Archive, conveniently linked here for your reading pleasure. xoxo-Laur

Abba: Greatest Hits

We're all just one big, awkward, hairy baked potato of musical togetherness.

Oh, Abba.
I know that as a semi-professional fag hag and a self-styled aficionado of queer culture, I should love you. I know that they made a musical out of your collected works, but I've never seen it. That is probably for the best, because I'm really picky about musicals. I've seen Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, though, and danced/lip synched melodramatically to Dancing Queen enough to last me a lifetime of bar times.

But really, Abba, if I'm being honest with myself? I think you're just okay.

There is a tight, professional structure to the songwriting here that I admire. Nearly all Abba songs start with a very distinctive hook followed by a minor key verse, followed by a major key chorus. The juxtaposition of darkness and light in a song that's structured this way can be really satisfying. (The most obvious example of this is, natch, the Turtles' "Happy Together". Totes beautiful, right?) And I'll give it to Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Anderssen, they really know how to write a catchy hook. Is there anything finer than that "Gimme, Gimme, Gimme" hook that Madonna copped for "Hung Up"? No, there is not. It makes me wish that I enjoyed the rest of the song half as much as I enjoy that hook. (Well sampled, Madonna's producers! Now just get her to let you write lyrics for her again, and we're square.) Plus, the choruses of Abba songs are always so dynamic, aren't they? That's what makes them really fun. But sometimes slogging through the verses is just a total drag: "Half past twelve and I'm... blah, blah, blah... GIMME GIMME GIMME A MAAAN AFTER MIDNIGHT!" You see what I mean?

For some reason, Abba is thought of as a disco group, which would indicate danceability, but I mostly don't find that to be true. I think they're one of those bands that reside in the gray area between dance and simple radio pop, like Blondie. First of all, they do a lot of ballads, of which I'm not such a fan. And all the uptempo songs are all just slightly too slow. You could really only dance to this if you were on quaaludes. Although I guess a lot of people at Studio 54 probably were. So maybe that's part of my problem. Maybe I like my dance music more coked up. Also, they have almost no basslines, which I find odd. Maybe that's why a lot of these songs seem like they're lacking fullness to me.

There's a sort of distance created by the overly glossy production style that seems to be putting you at arm's length, instead of giving you the kind of immediacy you'd need for a truly great dance experience. The vocals are so layered and canned-sounding.

The only song where that seems to work really well is on "Take A Chance on Me.", where the layering is over the top and really intentional, like an olde English round, but in four-inch-spikes and a belted sweater. That is a great fucking song. It's also on of the few that doesn't have the hook-minor verse-major chorus structure. Maybe that's why it works so well. They dispense with the narrative lead up and just drop right in where the story gets good. It just has this loud, bursty, hooky chorus that blasts your face off right outta the gate: IF YOU CHANGE YOUR MIIIIND, I'LL BE FIRST IN LINE! HONEY, I'M STILL FREE! TAKE A CHANCE ON MEEEE! And it stays that way through the whole song! This is a total yelling-along-in-your-car-song, also appropriate as a slightly tongue-in-cheek entry on a mixtape you plan on using to get into someone's pants.

God, so good! Now I feel like listening to it. You, too? Okay, here.

In a way, listening to Abba is like listening to the BeeGees, but not quite as supreme. (Yes, I did call the BeeGees supreme, and I will stand by that.) They have a lot of the same strong structure holding their songs together. But the BeeGees' work is more dynamic, and their production choices were always more tasteful, with basslines! I would love to hear what these songs would sound like without out all of the glossy cheeseball 70's production values. Maybe a subdued cover by some twee indie tastemaker band, like Pomplamoose or something.

My other favorite Abba song is "S.O.S.", which is also in this collection. It makes the best use of the minor/major structure out of all of their songs, and is a little bit more rock-y and less produced sounding. This would be for the sad mixtape you give to an ex which you later regret giving them because it was a little too emotionally raw and makes you look desperate. (To hear it, and watch another incredibly awkward 70's music video featuring people in ugly clothes, click here.) It reminds me a little bit of E.L.O. But just a little bit.

Okay, so, wrapping up, I think I know what I'm going to do with this one, but since this my first official post in this series, let's vote on it. What do you all think of Abba?

VOTE!

☐ Mamma mia! Those Swedes know how to swish it up! You ROCK that shit!

☐ Pfft! Don't take a chance on those mushroom hairdos! HOCK that shit.



*For more ROCK IT/HOCK IT entries, go to the ROCK IT/HOCK IT Archive. And have a lovely day, m'kay?

Birthday Party, Cheesecake, Jellybean, Boom! (Rock It or Hock It)

"They're events you remember all your life, like your first real orgasm. And the whole purpose of the absurd, mechanically persistent involvement with recorded music is the pursuit of that priceless moment. So it's not exactly that records might unhinge the mind, but rather that if anything is going to drive you up the wall it might as well be a record."

-Lester Bangs

I recently watched part of an episode of Hoarders, and that is probably all I ever need to see of it.

It strike me as rather sad and not just a little exploitative, though I suppose you could argue that the show is at least paying for their exploitation, in the form of financial remuneration and procuring ongoing therapy for the subjects of their show.

That said, it certainly does inspire one to clean their house, though, doesn't it?

I've been trying for a while now to rid the Sulfate-Z compound of at least a third of the mountain of stuff we have accumulated here at our casa. Not an easy task when you have a family full of people with various and sundry Interests that need attending to. My music equipment, EZ's collection of board games, my huge cache of vintage clothing, relics from EZ's love affair with Palm Pilots (He only recently finally broke of with Palm by purchasing an iPod, which he now practically sleeps with.), the kiddos many, mostly grandparent-purchased toys, my art and sewing supplies, our collective avalanche of books, and last but not least, my big, fat CD collection.

To enlighten the youth: In The Olden Days, before iTunes, if there was a song you liked, you had two options. Either wait around your radio and desperately hope they play it, or buy a whole album's worth of songs to get it, and maybe the other songs on the album would turn out to be awesome, or maybe you'd find yourself the semi-queasy owner of an almost entirely useless Duncan Sheik album.*

*I kindasortalmost met him once, btw.
He came into the restaurant I was working in, on the last day that I worked there. I had no fucking clue who he was at all, but I could tell that he was in a band, because he was young and hip-looking, and young, hip-looking people simply did not eat at that restaurant unless they were staying at the Pfister, with whom we had a relationship. They were always sending fancy people our way...lots of NBA players.
Anyway, they weren't my table. The girl who was their waitress was this awesome chick named Liz.
"LIZ!" I said. "I think those dudes are in a band. Look at them! They must be in a band! Find out what band they're in!"
"NO WAY!" said Liz, "I can't just ask them that!"
I said, "Just be casual about it! Like, 'Hey, nice weather we're having today! I bet it would be great weather for sailing. Or drumming. So, is one of you a drummer, perchance?"
She rolled her eyes and walked away, and I kept hounding her about it, until they finally put out their card to pay the bill. Just as Liz was about to swipe it, I snatched it out of her hand and looked at the name on it: DUNCAN SHEIK.
"DUNCAN SHEEEEEEIIIIK!" I howled, holding the card aloft like I was the Highlander. "I KNEW IT!"
"Oh." , said Liz... "Um. Who's Duncan Sheik?"
This guy.
Yes, I bought that album. What, as if you never bought a shitty record.

Thanks to the miracle of modern electronics, we no longer have to endure an entire Lisa Loeb album just to hear "Stay". Nor does the world have to suffer through another mediocre Britney Spears b-side if we don't want to. Technology has made album filler a thing of the past.

Still, I cling to my CDs (not to mention my LPs, and my EPs, and my 45s, and my cassette tapes...) because I love them. I love reading their booklets, and unwrapping their cases, and stashing them in my backpack. I love their objectness. I love possessing them physically and not just as bodiless bits of memory on my hard drive. Or worse, out on the cloud somewhere, just being all conceptual and shit. It makes me nervous, like someone could just decide they don't exist one day and there'd be nothing I could do about it. If music were money, I'd be Mean Mister Mustard keeping my five pound notes up my nose. Except my five pound note is Xanadu on vinyl. Or my well-loved cassette of Like A Prayer, which still smells of fake patchouli. Or Björk's Family Tree on disc, which is a perfect example of how a CD as an object can be transcendent and beautiful.

There's a scene in the movie Almost Famous where the main character, as an 11-year-old-kid, discovers his teenaged sister's record collection hidden under his bed. (CLIP!) He plays them all, sitting on the floor, lovingly tracing his fingers across the artwork on the sleeves, just like I used to do with my mom's huge collection of rock and R&B records when I was a kid. I spent many, many happy hours laying on the floor in front of our big stereo cabinet with the contents of its shelves spread out around me... Abraxas with its psychedelic doodling, Revolver with its cool black outlines, Hotel California with all the crazy people in costumes, Rumours with the skinny dude and the beautiful, elegant lady, Houses of the Holy with its strange alien landscape, and The Doors because I thought Jim Morrison was handsome, even though he had long hippie hair.

My sister's records got the same treatment whenever she let me hang out in her room with her, (which was the coolest thing ever). I thought that the Sex Pistols and the Violent Femmes and the Psychedelic Furs were the most awesome, dangerous, transgressive sounding names I'd ever heard. I felt so special when my sister let me listen to "Add It Up" with her. It had all that swearing!

As CDs overshadowed LPs in the 90's, my mom finally decided to get rid of her album collection because "nobody listens to records anymore." Ha. Who knew that there would be such a dedicated collector's market of rockists and deejays and scenesters to fill the void? Well, okay I had an inkling, but just an inkling. I was 15, I think. I mostly knew that I loved my mom's records and I didn't want to see them go. I made her let me keep a bunch of them, and the record player, too, which I still have. She wouldn't let me keep them all, because the whole point was to get rid of things, and the record collection stretched halfway across the living room. (She wasn't Lester Bangs or anything, but my mom had a bomb-ass constant jukebox going on nonetheless.) The only thing she saved for herself were the Beatles albums, which she later threw out in a fit of pique. Which is a shame. My mom cleans when she's angry. (Or sad. Or disappointed. Or confused. Or happy...)

So, I saved about a crateful. Just one little milk crate filled with special records, and man, was it hard to choose. Although it did make me appreciate one drawback of records: They're heavy as shit to cart around, e'nt they?

I have, of course, the same problem now with my CD collection that my mom had with her record collection. I've got something like 400 CDs, give or take, and I'm quite sure that I don't listen to all of them. Furthermore, it takes eight or ten smallish, heavy-ass boxes to cart them around every time we move. I've thought about putting them in books, the way people do, but I am too loving and persnickety about them. I can't bear to separate them from their cases and/or booklets, because you never know when I'm going to need to look and see whether Ric Ocasek produced Weezer's green album (He did.), or who the session drummer was on Kind of Blue (Jimmy Cobb). And the cases keep them from getting all banged up. Have you seen what happens to CDs in a book after a while? Scratch city. They're literally the only thing in my house that is meticulously clean and organized; alphabetized by artist, and then within each artist, chronological from earliest to most recent.

This all probably makes me sound like some kind of a rock snob, but I'm not. I'm just a big old fucking dork for pop music.

Which leads me to my mission, and to the point of this blog, other than to wax nostalgic about record albums I have known and lurved.

I am going to begin the slow, painful process of culling my CD collection. Not just throwing it out wholesale and burning everything to my iTunes, (because, as we've already established, I'm a big fucking dork), but carefully, thoughtfully deciding what must stay and what must go. And there is only one way to do this.

I must listen to every CD in my CD collection. And I must blog about it.

I tried to do this once before, but now I have the confidence and the readership to do it, and dammit, I intend to follow through.

It is the only way. It is the Anal Retentive Way. It's my way. I'm going to attempt to listen closely to every CD in my perfectly alphabetized, chronologically correct collection from Abba to Zevon, and talk about it with you a bit. And then, I'm going to ask you, my readers, my lovely bloggingtons, to vote on it. And if I were really brave, I would take your suggestions and follow them perfectly, but who'm I kidding, I won't do that. I'm just going to consider them in my ruminations, because I have to live with my CD collection and you don't. I mean, unless you come over to my house and I force you to listen to Counting Crows' August and Everything After in order to prove to you that it really actually is a good album. Then I guess you'd have to live with it, too, but just for a little while until you get home and unfriend me on Facebook.

In the interest of full disclosure, I probably will blast through some CDs out of order, too. I get obsessed with listening to things and there will probably be excursions into the obsessed upon.

I'm going to call the project Rock It or Hock It.

And you know I mean business, because I made a header for it on photoshop. Rock ON, me!