Lunch should be this...and 03 music thoughts

Lunch at the Hotel

Yum Cha (Chinese Dumplings)
Red Wine
Brie-ish or Camembert-ish cheese
Coffee with sugar and cream.
Chocolate

The effects of the drugs against each other is sublime.

Now why am I familiar with this meal for lunch today, a work day as you say? Well your friend Steven was very stupid yesterday and has 4 GIGANTIC blisters on his feet. They are of the scope that I cannot even hobble about well. It sucks. See, I had the bright idea of running from Bondi Junction to Bondi Beach. It’s not far, it was a great sunny day, I was feeling good.

So I ran down there to make my surf lesson, grabbed the board, and started heading out into the waves. The sun was out, the waves were breaking nicely and I was getting some great tips from my coach.

I stood up once in the sandbar and my feet felt bad - like they’d been scratched. Shortly after my feet felt real bad. It got worse with each passing moment and the sand and sea were not making the situation better.

I’ll spare the details, but the story ends with me leaving the lesson early with bandages around my feet (like Chaplin’s “The Little Tramp”) and me gently padding back to the hotel. At that point I looked down and found this disaster:

Fortunately, things this morning are better than yesterday – but still, it hurts to walk. In sum, i decided to bail on going into work and instead fired up the Ethernet connection and worked from the lovely Central Business District.

Salon.com on Coldplay

Salon.com reviewed the year in music and that spawned these next two bits.

I’d like to say something about Coldplay. I like that tune “Yellow”, but there is no way this band is half as good as everyone likes to say they are. On CNN they said that Coldplay were the new U2. Hell no! Heeeeeellll no! U2 has a little thing called passion - Coldplay is about as passionate as Mamie van Doren in a V2-Rocket bra in the back of a 57 Thunderbird with a fifth of whiskey … making out with a dead carp. No way. By the way, XXXtina Aguilera should start copping Mamie’s look for her next media blitz - I think that the whole Versace thing is a bit trite, going hot vintage might be the next mine-able meme.

Back to Coldplay: The lyrics - God, no, they’re nowhere near U2’s in their more crafty moments and there nowhere near as simple as U2 in their most naked moments. I’m not a huge fan of the whole ZooTV thing (Yes, I “get it”, I have a philosophy degree, I get it, but I just don’t like it). “Where the Street Have No Name” and “With or Without You” are two of the most powerful songs ever written. Sorry Coldplay, you’re not even in that league.

Salon cited as an example of their compositional capability:

God gave you style, God gave you grace God put a smile upon your face.

My suggested version:

God gave you style, God gave you grace He put pork chops on your plate.

(mmm. pork chops.)

It’s a simple rhyming couplet pairing a love-sentiment “face” with one of its nearest closest rhyming neighbors: base, case, face, grace…. This isn’t Wordsworth.

Salon.com on Jack White

Is Jack White (of the White Stripes) an obnoxious pig as salon.com suggested?

I’m pretty sure he is. But dammit he’s the best rock star - heck maybe even the only rock star out there right now (OK, maybe except the Yeah Yeah Yeahs). Look man, I stood on a corner of Bondi Junction when some guys in a Volvo pulled up blaring “7 nation army” and immediately I gave them the “in the know grin (™)” and they just stopped so I could check out that monster fat-ass building crushing riff. It’s the spontaneous bonhomie that we saw in Wayne’s MirthMobile. It’s something only music can summon out of nowhere.

And let me just say that that 7 nation army video is outstanding. It’s like Jack White’s Willy Wonka ride of horrors. The blue, the red, the marching vintage Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Skeleton Warriors army, Meg, and then AN ELEPHANT – it’s OUT-standing.

It’s a bit old and all, but since MTV doesn’t show videos anymore, you may not have caught it.

Video added 2022; YouTube didn’t exist at time of writing

Agreeing with Salon

Where I agree….

Cat Power’s Free was the best indie record of the year
Emmylou Harris is getting better (was it possible!?) with age.
Lucinda Williams’ World without Tears was great - but the best in recent memory? Sorry on that one, that would be Car Wheels… - still. Don’t get me wrong - I still bought it :)

Notable Exception

Yeah Yeah Yeahs - this band is huge, gigantic, and that fame hasn’t quite caught up is irrelevant. They are great, Important, and Big. If it turns out that they break up before fame comes along it will be Velvet Underground effect - they will affect every musician for 2 decades to come.
Evanescence - Well omitted. They are a flash in the pan and have nothing. Except their singer is nice-looking.

Salon and Hip-Hop

I most heartily agree with this year being the year that non-hip-hop fans really got into hip-hop. I had never bought a rap record that I recall (besides Black Sunday from Cypress Hill) but this year all that changed.

Why? Well Gangsta Rap reached its zenith (50 Cent) instead of it’s 1970’s glam like pinnacle (Puff Daddy - heck, Puff did a song with the titan of 70s excess — Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page!). 50 Cent is a lot like the punk revolt, he’s taking gangsta back to the actual gangstas. But let me say this, this is the end of the line. Everything after 50 Cent is decadent that is not in a new direction. It is impossible, narratively, to out gangstsa’ 50 Cent. Therefore:

Hip-hop has two choices: literate poetry or something else

Russell Simmons, cleverly, is doing the first one. You can tell with his Def Poetry Jam. This trend came up with Digggable Planets, A tribe Called Quest and was occulted by the Puff Daddy age - but it’s coming back. There is an underground group of rhymers and lyricists of Sting Calibre ("…Young Apprentice / Scylla and Charybdis") who are going to move things forward.

The second genre has to be coming from hip-hop saviour poster children OutKast. It’s exciting, it’s fabulous, it’s amazing. They’re pushing hip-hop forward – not the way Eminem did by being white – no they’re really really failing gloriously or succeeding terribly with what they’re doing. It’s like Prince and hip-hop and gangsta rap rolled into one and … it’s what we’ve been waiting for.

My mother said Prince was ahead of his time in 1985, she said this on Galveston beach under an iron sun shelter as my cousins and I ate sandwiches. It’s not surprising that 20 years later when that sound’s integration into hip-hop is exactly what it took to make a genre turn the corner.

I heard that Andre 3000 of OutKast has been cast to play Hendrix in a bio-pic. GREAT CASTING. Go Hughes brothers. I’m glad I wasn’t the only person to see a more than casual resemblance between Mr. 3000 and Mr. Hendrix. I sensitivity to actually playing music is not one of the least significant differentiators between OutKast and the rest of the hip-hop field they’re leaving behind.

So that’s my thoughts on music for the year…