Flaming Pablum

Christmas Music, You Say?

Let’s face some festive facts, shall we? Most contemporary Christmas music is tantamount to sonic root canal. Don’t even get me started. My feverish loathing for Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas is You” is well established, by this point, but it’s not just shrill Mimi. In Carey’s (anemic) defense, at least she had a hand in writing the fucking godawful thing – a stab at originality, when most artists seem hellbent on “re-booting” canonical favorites and holly-scented warhorses. I can’t even begin to pick my least-favorite of these, although I was in the Astor Place Kmart the other evening, dispatched on a mission to procure some thin-wire Christmas lights for our surprisingly diminutive tree (it looked bigger on the sidewalk, honest), and was subjected to a seemingly endless dance remix of Christina Aguilera’s nauseatingly melismatic rendition of “The Christmas Song” (“Chestnuts RooooOOOooOOOOAAsssting on an Oh-whoa-whoooooapen FiiIiIIIIIIIIRrrrree….” etc.) that almost made me sharpen up the nearest candy cane to bloodily plunge into my own eardrums. That shit sucks. You know it. I know it. Hell, Christina Aguilera knows it. Humbug.

My friend Alexandra posted the video for “Do They Know It’s Christmas” on YouTube – which I’ve discussed here now and again – and asked for everone’s submissions of favorite Christmas tunes. Without a second’s hesitation, the track below sprang to mind.

Sure, the Ramones’ “Merry Christmas (I Don’t Want to Fight Tonight)” and Siousxie & the Banshees’ elegiac “Il Est N’est Le Divine Enfant” are both truly great, but I will forever swear allegiance to Fishbone’s frenetic tribute to “It’s a Wonderful Life,” because it’s simply goddamn incredible.

White Light, White Christmas

Here's Hoping You're Having a Very Velvet Holiday Season....

My Top 10 Favorite Songs of 2019

It’s that time of year, once again, wherein certain scribbly rock-journo types of the variety I used to a be more a member of start frantically composing their end-of-year best-of lists. Long have I lamented my encroaching aversion to this practice, given that I was evicted from my once-cozy perch on the cutting edge a long, long damn time ago. Given my own predilections and – frankly – where I work, I am exposed to new music on a fairly regular basis. I am certainly not in want of hearing new sounds. That said, I don’t know if it’s my finicky standards or my narrow expanse of taste, but I am sadly no longer routinely hearing genuinely newer things that are firing my imagination. If anything, most contemporary pop music leaves me cold, clammy and pugnaciously contentious. I’m not categorically condemning it, but if the genre is best represented by _______ [names expurgated] I’m more than ready to assert that I want no fucking part of it.

But I was never really a pop guy to begin with. I come from a rock (pronounced: rawwwwwwk) background first and fucking foremost. That’s fine, of course (despite what various pop culture zeitgeist-watchers might tell you about declining returns in guitar-based music), but even in that realm, I am sad to say the pickings – from my perspective – seemed slim.

Oh sure, there were new releases from canonical favorites (anemic list to follow), but in terms of new bands I got excited about, I can’t really point to one. Well, I guess I could cite new band Human Impact, but they’re a supergroup comprised of dudes from Cop Shoot Cop, SWANS and the Unsane, so …. I’m not sure they really count (sorry, fellas).

Back to the pop tip, for a second, I will indeed cop to digging what little bits of Billie Eilish I heard. Her performance of “Tough Guy” on Saturday Night Live certainly caught my attention. She, of course, was all over social media last week for the much-ballyhooed admission on Jimmy Kimel’s show that she had never heard of Van Halen. It should be noted, of course, that Miss Eilish is only 17. Practically speaking, she was born about ten minutes ago – OF COURSE she doesn’t know who Van Halen is. Why should she? I had a lot to say about that last week, but it’s now this week and let’s just move on, shall we?

In any case, what little of Billie’s music I’ve heard, I’ve liked, while that’s not saying much. It’s certainly way more interesting than certain peers like … I dunno, Ke$ha, Lana Del Ray and the rest of them. If you regularly read this blog, you’re probably not a fan of that stuff to begin with, so I doubt I’m surprising anyone, going off on any limbs or ruffling any feathers.

There were some gratuitous pop/R&B songs by names like Lucky Daye, Spencer Ludwig, Anderson .Paak and Lizzo that I didn’t mind, but not enough to get me to rush out to buy the albums in question. That’s notable solely in the fact that I normally loathe that type of stuff.

Conversely, many of my favorite albums this year, notably Ghosteen by Nick Cave, Leaving Meaning by SWANS and, Fear Inoculum by Tool (which, honestly, I’ve only recently gotten) seem all to be the type of music suited to ponderously dark nights of the soul. Is that a statement about my own mindset? The mood of the culture? The trajectory of the species? Who can say?

Anyway, here are my favorite new songs of 2019. Fetch hither your dancing pants. 

1. Amy Rigby – “The President Can’t Read”
2. ExCop – “Tina”
3. IDLES – “I Dream Guillotine”
4. Slaves (UK) – “Bugs”
5. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – “Waiting For You”
6. John – “Future Thinker”
7. Prong – “Age of Defiance”
8. SWANS – “My Phantom Limb”
9. Tool – “Fear Inoculum”
10. Human Impact – “November”

Sign of The Kross

I've spoken about my love of Redd Kross a few times here (most recently here). I stumbled upon this clip of the 1985 iteration of the band, during their endearingly messy transformation from proto-hardcore kids into a glam-damaged power-pop hit squad. 

This clip is also notable in that it features a fittingly shambolic cover of "Saturday Night" by the Bay City Rollers.

Enjoy your weekend. 

Remain in Laight

November....

December ...

Does the Laight Street Bridge (i.e. the pedestrian bridge that extends over the northwest-bound exit out of the Holland Tunnel Rotary) have a proper name?

 

Teenage Buzzcock With Camera in Fun City

Peruse through the fourteen years worth of posts here on Flaming Pablum, and you’re bound to find not-just-a-few allusions to, posts about and pictures & videos of the mighty Buzzcocks, inarguably one of England’s finest exports from the Punk years. I first heard them via the inclusion of “Orgasm Addict” on a mixtape a friend bequeathed me circa 1980, and life was never the same. Progenitors of tight, immaculately crafted tunes that seamlessly fused palpable pop hooks with punky pugnacity, the Buzzcocks were, simply put, a perfect band. Beg to differ and be laughably wrong.

I didn’t see the Buzzcocks in their prime, being that they officially broke up in 1981, only a year after I’d first heard them at the age of 13. But they reformed in 1989, featuring the classic line-up of Pete Shelley, Steve Diggle, Steve Garvey and John Maher. My friend Rob B. and I went to their reunion show at the New Ritz in November of that year, and it was one of those rare live-concernt experiences wherein the myth fully lives up to the hype – the band exploded onto that stage like a multi-dimensional Jackson Pollack painting of noise and color. Hands down, it was one of the greatest shows I’ve ever had the pleasure of attending.

In typical form, I’m letting my love of the Buzzcocks get the better of me, as this post wasn’t really supposed to be about them, or at least not directly.

This post is about original Buzzcocks drummer John Maher. I only saw him perform once – at that show at the New Ritz in `89. Stiff-backed and stoic behind a pair of black shades, Maher provided the tireless engine that fueled the band’s most propulsive songs. My favorite image of him is in the live video Auf Wiedersehen, which captured the band’s final, pre-breakup performance on German television in 1981. Maher wore a black ANARCHY shirt (which was sort of cheeky, being that the band’s songs were always more about romantic travails than revolution), black shades and a bowler hat.

After the 1989 reunion, Maher left the band again to focus more on his love of vintage cars – which was also somewhat ironic, given that one of the band’s early singles, “Fast Cars,” lamented the fetishistic materialism of car culture. In any case, the band carried on without him, initially recruiting fellow Mancunian and former Smiths’ drummer Mike Joyce to helm the drum kit. Maher would later join the band onstage a couple of times, but never fully returned.

Along the way, Maher also established himself as a photographer, gaining renown for his work. I stumbled upon his Instagram not too long back and it took me a minute to connect the dots and realize that this was the same John Maher that played on some of my favorite records of all time.

Anyway, quite recently, my favorite things in the world completely aligned, and John Maher commenced a new series (?) on his website wherein he shares images of New York City he took during the Buzzcocks’ earlier tours of the United States in 1979 through 1980.

Check them out here.

Where The Music Leaves

Some of you might remember a curious entry I posted here back in April of this year wherein I chronicled the long, undisturbed residency of a certain compact disc on the shelves of a Westhampton Beach pharmacy out on the East End of Long Island. By my fuzzy math, there had been a copy of Ministry’s 1995 opus, Filth Pig waiting to be discovered and purchased from that shelf on Main Street’s Rite Aid since about 1998.

As mentioned in that older post, the store in question went through several makeovers and corporate permutations, but that copy of Filth Pig kept sitting there. In October of 1998 — when I met the woman who would become my wife — that copy of Filth Pig was sitting on that shelf. Peggy and I, having married in 2001, celebrated our eighteenth wedding anniversary this past July. When we did so, that copy of Filth Pig was still sitting on that shelf. It has been sitting on that shelf for as long as we’ve been married. While it sat there, we’ve had two children that have grown into their teens. All this time — no one has thought to purchase it.

Since posting that entry back in April, I’ve continued to give that Rite Aid my reluctant patronage. For whatever reason, whenever we’re out there visiting my mother, we invariably have to repair to that Rite Aid to procure any number of sundry items — from band aids to deodorant, suntan lotion through shampoo. If we’re out that way, it’s a given that at some point or another, we’ll be visiting that Rite Aid.

And, as such, whenever we did, I would usually check in on Filth Pig.

Now, having spotted the disc still siting there several times over this past summer, I didn’t think to take a picture of it every time I was there, but I checked in on it in the beginning, the middle and the end of the summer. And every time I did that, it was still there.

We left my mother’s place in neighboring Quogue at the summer’s end on Labor Day 2019. We always plan on coming down in the Autumn, as it’s lovely out there, but life gets in the way. As it turned out, we did not make it back until this past Thanksgiving Weekend.

Sure enough, with my son nursing a small wound sustained at an “Escape The Room” attraction at a birthday party last week (a whole saga unto itself), I was dispatched to Westhampton’s Rite Aid on Thanksgiving morning to procure him a new finger splint.

When I got there, I was nonplussed to discover that the Rite Aid signage was down, replaced by some decidedly makeshifty Walgreens banners. I feared the worst.

While, yes, still a soullessly corporate and antiseptic pharmaceutical chain of no great distinction, this new iteration of the space came with re-imagined aisles of brand new stock. I found a finger splint for Oliver and proceeded down the aisle formerly reserved for greeting cards, device-chargers, batteries and laughably anachronistic media like DVDs and compact discs. This was the aisle wherein that lonely copy of Filth Pig was seemingly permanently sequestered. In this newly designed section, however, all I encountered was cloyingly zealous Christmas decorations.

I circumnavigated the store, thinking they may have just absorbed Rite Aid’s old stock and repositioned it somewhere else. But after three sorties around the place — much to the bemusement of the new store’s staff -- it was relatively clear that this venture no longer stocked such goods.

For whatever stupid reason, I was sort of counting on that copy of Filth Pig to always be there.

But, obviously, life had other plans.

Happy Thanksgiving from Flaming Pablum

You Are Not What You Own: Age, Music & Technology in the New Millennium

While a valid argument could be made that I spend my time actively looking for things to get pissed off about (hey, this blog ain’t gonna write itself), I did stumble upon two articles, recently that particularly got my oft-gotten goat.

This first was this report about a documentary in the works about vinyl-collecting music-heads who are opting to sell their records. Says director Danielle Beverly, “It’s not really about how cool records are or the resurgence of vinyl, it’s really about people who are letting go of the things that once defined them."

Now, personally speaking, while I am intrigued by the concept of the film, I feel like Beverly is making some sweeping generalizations about about record collectors. As far as I’m concerned, while I would concede that I am somewhat “defined” (although I do not like this word) by my devotion to my favorite music and slavishly sentimental about my LPs, compact discs and, yes, even cassettes, I do not feel they are an integral part of my identity. The notion of parting with them makes sense on a purely practical level — given the amount of premium real estate they occupy in my home, space that could be arguably better utilized — but the thought of getting rid of them, to me, seems tantamount to throwing away personal photographs. Practically each one is imbued with some particular association or significance beyond simply being an artifact that delivers specific music.

I guess my grievance with Beverly’s point is that these peoples’ lives aren’t necessarily dominated by their physical collections. It’s not like their love of the music contained therein is going to go away when they part with the LPs. It’s just not that black and white, I don’t think. If I had to dispense of my physical collection of music (a scenario that would probably make my wife very happy), I don’t believe the opinions, likes, dislikes and sensibilities that actually define my identity would change. 

Now, again, I haven’t seen the film, so I’m obviously being prejudicial in my assessment. Watch this space.

This other story, however, just completely burnt my toast.

Titled “I use an iPod. Why Should I Be Ashamed?”, this piece — penned by one Robert Shrimsely — recounts the evidently traumatic travails of being “tech-shamed” by colleagues aghast by the author’s insistence on still using an iPod Classic, being that it so brazenly defies the current ubiquity of streaming and suggests some sort of bourgeois adherence to — god forbid — actually owning music, as opposed to merely renting it. To which I say — FUCK YOU!

I still use a goddamn 160 GB iPod Classic, and I have another on standby for when the long-cherished and well-loved one I’m currently enjoying inevitably dies. Do you *honestly* believe I give one single rolling rat fuck about what some dinky millennial or zoomer thinks about my anachronistic tech? Come try to take it from me, and you can expect profanity and pugilism. I'll stream when I'm in the cold, cold fucking ground.

To put it mildly, I vehemently resent the notion that I am to be expected to renounce a life spent lovingly curating my preferred music in long-vanished shrines to less-celebrated aesthetics that, in most instances, endearingly eschewed the tastes and validation of the mainstream (hand me a copy of a Thriller on CD, and you’ve given me a fucking coaster). While my collection does not “define me,” I harbor no regrets about amassing it, let alone supporting the independent shops, artists and record labels that put it out. Oh, it’s unseemly to still own music, is it? Go fuck yourself. As mentioned in my thoughts about the documentary, I can understand the impetus to part with one’s physical collection if it is impeding some other important part of one’s life or if by selling it off, one could facilitate some other necessary activity, but if the reason you choose to ditch or dump or pawn your music is simply to be in step with the times, you are a fucking lemming. “Resistance to new and life-changing devices is the path to atrophy,” Shrimsley asserts towards the end of the piece. Shut up, Robert, and think for yourself. 

You want me to abandon my iPod and join a service to re-enjoy some — but not all — of my music and be reliant on WiFi and a monthly charge? Fuck that and yourself, while you’re at it.

To borrow a line from The Wedding Present, if the world doesn’t understand, then the world has GOT TO LEARN.

I realize this is an unpopular and needlessly thorny opinion on the matter. What’s YOUR take? How do you listen to your music, and do you believe it defines you? 

Discuss. 

Pinheads in Plimsolls: Parsing the Footwear of the Ramones

I spotted the video below on Facebook this morning and was left on the fence

On the one hand, The Ramones never made a great deal of money when they were a going concern, so I get it, and this clip is certainly cute -- dutifully adhering to the band's familial, one-for-all/all-for-one, cartoony mystique (when, in truth, they were bitterly dysfunctional), but there is still a lingering aftertaste to this.

I am somewhat reminded of an abortive ad campaign for Doc Martens back in 2007 that featured the late Joey Ramone wearing a pair of Docs, when it's universally acknowledged the great man never wore anything but sneakers.

Also, not to totally become Johnny Pedantic, but I don't know that the Ramones actually wore Converse. I mean, yeah, they wore plimsolls (i.e. canvas sneakers), but were they Converse? Might they have actually been Pro-Keds?

I posed this question on Facebook, and my old MTV News colleague Brian Wallace weighed in with a truly exhaustive website devoted to the Ramones' preferred footwear (short answer: While they frequently sported Sperry "boating shoes," they were known to rock the odd pair of Converse). So, there you have it.

Gabba, Gabba...