Vinyl In Alphabetical

Marquee Moon is a good bullshit detector record. Everyone who has ever bought it/downloaded it hasn’t heard a Television song, and all they know is that Television were, along with Talking Heads, Patti Smith and the Ramones, part of the first wave of NY Punk. And then you listen to the thing, and it turns out these guys are less the Ramones than they are the East Coast Grateful Dead, if the Dead’s music ever went anywhere and their guitar riffs locked into place like a subway on a track. Then you have to admit to yourself that this isn’t at all what you are looking for.

But then you realize that this is more tuneful than any Ramones album. And that what this lacks in the “authenticity” of someone like Richard Hell (who was in this band originally) it makes up for in actual musicianship. These guys could play the fuck out of guitars. Television are one of the best guitar bands of all time, and no one even realizes it. And sure, the Dictators had “fury” or whatever, but they never wrote one song that is as good as the title track off here.

So, for awhile, you live with the idea that this is an album that isn’t what you thought it’d be, then you realize that Television realized something before all the punks did. Anger and two-note riffs may get you the immediate respect of your peers, but 12 minute songs with 3 guitar solos live forever.  

I know it’s cliche now, because it’s been in every emotional movie trailer since 1993, and even people who generally don’t like the Talking Heads at least acknowledge its greatness, but it’s hard to not acknowledge “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)” as the best Talking Heads song. It’s the Talking Heads song I’d want playing at my funeral, it’s the Talking Heads song I hear when I see a pretty girl, it’s the Talking Heads song I’d play to someone to tell them how it is on earth. And I know that seems so corny now, but that’s only because everyone realizes it’s great, and now it’s not unique to think that that song is the best Talking Heads song. 

Well, I’m not unique. I’m just a sad, cliched dude who once teared up when listening to this. 

Back when the A.V. Club Madison was a running concern, and I could turn a quick buck writing concert reviews and play previews, I got asked to write a “Favorite Shows of 2010” thing, and back in 2010, there was one show in particular I remember fondly even now, in 2013: I saw Sleigh Bells open for Yeasayer like 4 days before Treats came out, and in terms of having my balls rocked off by a band, it’s that Sleigh Bells show and everything that came afterwards. It was a transcendent show. Here’s what I wrote at the time:

“My first full year of seeing shows in Madison got off to a slow start, but once it got going in April, it seemed like there was at least one can’t miss band to see each week. But no show was better than the 35 minutes I spent having my chest cavity imploded at the Majestic while watching Sleigh Bells open for Yeasayer. The show was in the few days before the duo’s excellent Treats came out, and while I had heard deliriously loud singles “Kids” and “Crown On The Ground,” I didn’t expect to be quite so sonically assaulted. I spent the band’s set alternately smiling my face off and stepping backwards to try to relieve some of the pressure on my torso. Granted, Yeasayer was terrible—the group confirmed every snarky Rusted Root comparison—but I would gladly pay double to see Sleigh Bells again.”

The thing I think about now, is how irrelevant Sleigh Bells made Yeasayer seem. I was so-so on Yeasayer before that show, and then seeing them after being carpet-bombed by Sleigh Bells just made them seem out of touch, and worst, impossibly lame. Like, how horrible of a opening band for them; they have to follow up “Crown on the Ground” with a bunch of boring ass shit from Odd Blood. They didn’t even try to top them; they just rolled over. I haven’t listened to them at all since. 

                                                 ***

The only problem with seeing a lot of the songs on Treats live before hearing them on wax is that they never, ever seem loud enough. I’ve listened to this album probably 100 times, and it never can pack enough oomph. I blew out a speaker in my old Saturn listening to this, and even then, rattling windows and blowing up stereo components, it didn’t feel like it did live. This record doesn’t come close. The only time their music felt like it did when I saw them live is when I saw them alive, again, in 2012. I guess that’s probably not good for Sleigh Bells’ record product, but I guess this is an endorsement: see these guys live. Your chest cavity will never be the same.  

Graceland is, without question, Paul Simon’s best solo album. But a series of things have happened since that make it seem less great.:

1. Vampire Weekend stole the sound and taught a new generation about Gap-friendly African music (I don’t mean this as a pejorative, I love Vampire Weekend)

2. We’ve become uneasy with the fact that a little, white nerdy guy co-opted African music for an album that was sort of like a mid-life crisis. 

3. Seriously, however much Ladysmith Black Mambazo made, it wasn’t enough.

4. The video from “You Can Call Me Al” stars Chevy Chase, and we all know Chevrolet Chase is an asshole.*

5. This is an album that is so totally uncool by modern standards—and not ironically uncool like Hall & Oates—that people underrate it in retrospect. It came out in the era when ’80s indie was blowing up. It doesn’t have the cache of the later Talking Heads albums. It’s corny. It’s not worthy of magazine cover retrospectives. 

All of this is a shame, because this might be the album I’d pull out if I wanted to explain what music was like in the ’80s. Or at least what dorks listened to in the ’80s

*—This one is mostly because I wanted to make that Chevrolet Chase joke. 

I’ve seen Shabazz Palaces live twice since Black Up came out, and both times, it was an intriguing, bewitching experience. The first time, I saw them in Milwaukee, and their bass was so intense that I felt like I had vertigo. I turned to walk, and I almost fell down. 

The last time was a week ago, and I got paid to see it. This is what it was like. This album is a live session the group did on Seattle radio, and it’s pretty close to capturing the live sound of the group; the bass is heavy, the sound is sprawling and everything is percussive and awesome.

1. If you were to try to soundtrack a movie about America in the 1970’s, you would use a song by Thin Lizzy, probably from Jailbreak. But if you were going to try to make a movie about America in the ’70s, and you wanted to use music from the American band that most sounded like the 1970s, you’d pick something from Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band’s Night Moves. Seriously; this thing actually comes with a feathered haircut, a pair of bell bottoms, and a 12-pack of Budweiser. It’s flawless. It’s an album as a history lesson about the mood of a country. It’s an album that makes the Eagles entirely unnecessary.

2. The year after I graduated college, I lived in St. Cloud, Minn., and spent a bunch of weekends down in Minneapolis hanging out with my friend who lived there and his roommate. These weekends always ended with us going out and drinking ourselves into oblivion. Part of this routine was listening to the song “Night Moves” as the last song we’d listen to before we went out the door. It was a ritual my friend’s roommate had, and it never made much sense. I mean, it’s a song about making out with a childhood girlfriend.

But now I hear that song and I remember the time I got woken up at 5 am by this roommate, who got home an hour after us and was throwing a fit because he blew it with a woman he was trying to lay some night moves on. I think about the time we ate McDonalds at 3 AM, and I threw a street cone like 50 yards into an alley. I remember sitting in a shitty Dinkytown apartment, trying to extend my childhood for a little bit longer. 

I could probably count on one hand the poets I’ve actually read. I’m aware of a bunch of poets, but I’ve pretty much only read Ginsberg, Shakespeare, and this girl who wrote me love poems when we were in the 5th grade. So, I guess I can’t say for sure that Gil Scott-Heron is the “best” modern poet or whatever, but when you listen to this album, he’s got a way of making poetry seem like it could actually CHANGE things, that it could be used to indict people, that it could shatter your beliefs, and it could say things as powerful as “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” Gil never completely captured this mood again—how could you?—but his relevant poetry career all the way till he died in 2011 is pretty hard to ignore. 

Something I don’t think the Roots get enough credit for—apart from how they are easily the most enjoyable band to see live in all of music—is how they are one of those bands that get you interested to read books that are mentioned by their titles or their songs. I read Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart because of the Roots. I read Rising Up and Rising Down because of the Roots. I read The Tipping Point because of the Roots. I can’t think of many modern groups—rap or otherwise—who make me want to read the things they’re reading. The Roots might be it. 

When I was a senior in college, my mom got a job working at the university where I was a journalism major. Since I lived at home, my mom and I ended up carpooling everyday, with me driving her to and from work. I technically had an 830 class on Monday, Wednesday and Friday my last semester in college, but it was an elective, and I was the only upperclassman in it, so I went roughly 30% of the time. Usually when I went, I just wrote record reviews in the back aisle of this big classroom by hand. It was weird, because I had to lie to my mom about going to this class; I got up and drove her everyday, but I’d end up being on campus when I didn’t want to be. Since I didn’t just want to go home—and on Fridays, often had nothing better to do and no other classes—I ended up hanging out most of the day in the office of the college newspaper where I was an editor. Since we didn’t have production meetings on Fridays, I often spent that time—as much as like six hours—just hanging out, surfing the Internet, and playing NBA Jam on the Super Nintendo that was in the office. I’d order pizza from a pizza place, sometimes bring beer, and basically treat the place like my clubhouse. When I think back on college, I remember doing goofy shit in that office.

Which brings me to the story that actually directly involves this Roots album: One Friday, I was in the office, playing Game Theory mega loud on a computer, sitting in a chair, eating pizza, and playing NBA Jam, having a fucking great time, when this 50-year-old woman yelled “EXCUSE ME” from the other end of the office—it was built where the bowling alley used to be in the union, so it was basically just three bowling lanes walled off—and scared the living shit out of me. I scrambled to turn the computer off. It’s worth noting I didn’t have shoes on at the time, and I also had hair down past my shoulders. 

“Yeah, how can I help you?”

“I’m looking to speak to an editor of the newspaper. I want to write here,” she said.

“Yeah, that’s me. I’m the managing editor.” 

And she said the funniest shit ever:

“Really? I assumed it would be somebody more responsible.” 

This lady thought I was irresponsible because I was eating pizza, playing videogames and listening to Game Theory. AND SHE WASN’T EVEN WRONG, BECAUSE I WAS SKIPPING CLASS. It’s maybe the only time I was stereotyped, and it was hilarious.

She ended up kind of running out after handing me her clip book. And I laughed my ass off for like 45 minutes. 

POSTSCRIPT: This woman was eventually hired, and she worked for one of my predecessors at the paper. After the new editor-in-chief—who was 30 years old at the time—wrote a humor column about how he ate wings and it destroyed his digestive system like he was an old man, she quit citing discrimination against elderly people. I laughed for 45 minutes when my friend told me this story.

1. No matter how you get into the Roots—whether it was through them being on Fallon, or through Game Theory or through How I Got Over—everything leads back to Things Fall Apart. For some people, the group never got better than this; they were a live version of all the conscious, backpacker rappers circa 1999, they were Blackstar with a band, they were Dilla live, they were the sound of a new era. This is accurate. 

2. I remember seeing the music video for “You Got Me” circa 1999, when I was 13, and MTV was technically “off limits” in my house, which basically meant I watched it constantly when my parents were at work and I was latchkeying, but then turned it off as soon as I could hear the garage door. One day, my dad kept talking about hearing about Erykah Badu on NPR, and thinking she was “great,” and being 13 and eager to show my pop culture knowledge, I started telling my dad about how she had this great song out with the Roots—this rap group—and I saw the video and it was awesome and I want to buy the album it was from, and I just needed to see the video again in order to see the title. 

It was at this point he realized I was watching MTV all the time, and I was told to never watch it again. I said OK. And then I watched MTV that night in my parents’ bedroom when they were watching sitcoms downstairs. And I was watching MTV when I was 16, in 2002, when I heard “The Seed 2.0” for the first time via its video, and then my friend Matt and I spent like an hour downloading the song off an early version of Kazaa. It was worth it. I didn’t get a full version of Things Fall Apart until I was 20, and could download music via my parents’ high speed internet—I had an incomplete version made up mostly of the best songs from Kazaa.

3. I’ve been listening to the Roots for half my life, and I didn’t even realize it until just now. 

4. Is there a cover that conveys more about the group, the album, the sense of history, or the greatness of an album more than this one?

5. I just got this record on Record Store Day, and really, it was the only thing I felt I “needed” to get. My local spot has a reservation system where you can claim Record Store Day releases ahead of time and they’ll hold them for you for the whole day. I had this record on hold, and I still went early to make sure I got it, because I somehow convinced myself that it wouldn’t be there. But it was, and I drove home fast to play this first. This is one of those record purchases that you are so sure of in your bones, it feels good to buy it. This is probably how people with shopping addictions feel all the time too.