The Albums That Matter: Astral Weeks

Joe runs through every album on his iPod, mostly in alphabetical order, and offers some brief thoughts. Check out previous columns HERE.

Astral Weeks

Van Morrison

1968

In November of 2007, my dad found an iPod Classic (were they even referred to as "classics" back then?) along his mail route. He put up a sign on a tree near where he found it, asking that its owner contact him to retrieve it, but no one ever did. This was a few weeks before my eighteenth birthday, and so, when I became a legal adult, and inherited "Izzy the iPod," along with all the music already uploaded onto her by her previous owner.

Most of it was Greatest Hits compilations, which I've made clear before that I am no fan of. But for some artists, I felt that maybe it was worth keeping their Greatest Hits around, mostly because I knew they had a few good songs but I had no interest in delving any deeper. Simon & Garfunkel were an example of Best Ofs I kept (though drastically pared down, because "Song of Silence" fucking suuucks), and so were the Beach Boys (I eventually broke down and got Pet Sounds to supplement). Van Morrison's Greatest Hits were on there, and I kept that too.

And shit man, there are some rippers on there that I love, eleven years later. "Gloria," and "Baby Please Don't Go," that shit is fire. Imagine my surprise, then, when I was reading Van Morrison's Wikipedia page last week (in preparation for this piece), only to discover that those songs are not technically Van Morrison songs, but rather Them songs, Morrison's band that he started out in. I was deceived by my iPod.

But, at the same time, it kind of made sense to me, because the first proper Van Morrison solo album, Astral Weeks, never really made sense to me, and at least this explains the disconnect in how I can love "Gloria" but not "Madame George." (I also kind of love Morrison's post-religious-conversion craziness on the Greatest Hits like "Dwelling on the Threshold" and "Did Ye Get Healed?" but more on that some other time.)

So yeah, cat's out of the bag. Despite my love for a Rolling Stone list that claims this album is #19 all time, I just never fell in love with Astral Weeks.

It doesn't help that Van Morrison himself, despite the album's lavish critical praise, might just feel the same way. To quote: "Maybe I should have changed the arrangements because the arrangements are too samey... four or five other songs should have had a change of mood." The man is right on the money when he uses the word "samey." It's all slow and dreamy and really pretty, but there's just too much of all that. Give me a "Brown Eyed Girl" to break it up, ya know?

But at the risk of creating limp equivocation, I will now attempt to praise Astral Weeks in as many ways as I can. #19 all time! C'mon, there's gotta be more to it than what I've been able to decipher so far, right? (I'm also feeling a little burned by Stereogum's essay about American Water from the other day, where they claimed that the album's lyrics hold depths, a few months after I made the opposite claim, saying that the lyrics were worthless. I won't make that same mistake here, even if it kills me.)

My first praise is that Van Morrison's singing is nothing if not passionate and expressive. I'm of the opinion that this powerful voice works best over some pounding garage rock drums, but I'll admit that it is also dynamic when superjacent to a fucking piccolo. Check out "Sweet Thing" for what I'm talking about. The drums are limp as my dick after a Phillies extra-innings loss, but the vocals, goddamn, that fucking range! It's good stuff!

My second praise is the lyrics, which Morrison wields like a paintbrush, sketching pastoral scenes full of life. Drinking cherry wine past rumbling stations filled with pining lonesome engineers and throwing pennies from trains down to the Dublin bridges below, every flourish of words evokes vivid imagery in your mind. There may not be much more here than world-building and story-telling, but there isn't much more than that in American Gothic, and that's most certainly art all the same.

My third praise is "The Way Young Lovers Do," the song in which Morrison and his whimsical backing band finally (and sadly, only temporarily) awake from their slumber to play some fucking JAZZ. I hope the drummer wasn't paid by hour during the Astral Weeks sessions; if he was, he finally earns his fucking keep here. "The Way Young Lovers Do" was callously dismissed by critics as "A poor jazz-flavored cut that is uncomfortably out of place on this record." I mean, they weren't wrong, because "The Way Young Lovers Do" is not Astral Weeks. But they weren't right either, because I, contrarily, would appreciate Astral Weeks a lot more if it were more like this song and less like the flights of fancy indulged in otherwise. (Okay, this praise is admittedly backhanded, sorry.)

That's about it for my praises. I think the most important one is the second praise, that's the one to focus on. If you take away one thing from Astral Weeks, it's the movie Morrison plays in your head with his lyrics. His words are eloquent and meaningful and scintillating and bright and colorful and memorable, even if, ya know, the music itself is a little docile and repetitive.

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If this album sounds interesting, try this song: "Cypress Avenue"

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Stray Observations

• As much as I rebuff the idea of this being an "all-time classic" or whatever, I still appreciate that it is considered as such, because that means there was a LOT to read about online. The Wikipedia article for Astral Weeks is beastly, and probably more fun than the damn album itself.
• For a fun fact provided by wiki, does it surprise you that "eight or nine" prospective music producers declined to produce Astral Weeks because they all "thinking they were going to hear 'Brown Eyed Girl' only to find that 'it was another person with the same voice'"? Basically, in the preceding paragraphs, I have acted as indifferent to Astral Weeks as the villains of a Wikipedia article did.
• The sessions for Astral Weeks sound kind of crazy, too. Maybe not as bad as Captain Beefheart's, but you can see shades of that here. Van Morrison stayed in his booth, recording and listening, and didn't even interact with the band at all during the sessions (didn't even say Hi, apparently).
• Which may explain, I suppose, how all these years later, no one involved in those sessions remembers who the flute player was. Imagine being a flautist on one of the most critically acclaimed albums of all time, and Van Morrison didn't even fucking bother to remember your name.
• ALBUM COVER: Primarily it's a photo of Morrison, taking by the same photog who snapped those infamous pics of Jim Morrison shirtless and pouted. The outline surrounding the photo allegedly signifies "the mystic symbol of the union of opposites; the sacred marriage of heaven and earth," which, alright, cool? (If you are looking for hokey magic-believing like-minded folk you are reading the wrong blog.)
• Does the rollicking Van Morrison who's kicking ass and taking names in The Last Waltz even remember Astral Weeks? I hope not.

NEXT TIME: At Hope's Ravine by Holy Esque

White Dudes with Guitars

I'm quickly working my way through Twilight of the Gods, Steven Hyden's awesome book about the life and death of classic rock. One of the chapters is all about classic rock's relationship with politics. It touches upon something I've struggled with for a while.

Are my own listening habits diverse enough, and does that ultimately matter?

I've been sensitive (though perhaps not necessarily proactive) about this concern ever since the end of 2016, when I posted my Top Ten Albums list in a comment on Stereogum. I was immediately called out (in a gentle way, because the comment section at Stereogum is fucking awesome) that only the lead singer of one single band was a non-white-male (The Sun Days are fucking great, P.S.). Every single other musician involved in the top ten was a white dude.

It was a glass-shattering moment for me, because, in all honesty, it had never occurred to me how white and how male my listening habits were. On the other hand, it's not like I consciously chose to enjoy white dudes with guitars almost exclusively. Well, okay, I consciously chose to rank them in that order, but I only did so because those bands were legitimately my favorite of the year.

The next year, 2017, my list was a little better. Three out of ten had female lead singers (plus, SUSTO has a female bassist). And #2 Gang of Youths is pretty diverse, with a Somoan frontman, among other minority band members. Still, that's over 50% of my Top Ten made up of white dudes. That's not even considering honorable mentions (only two female leads, and no minorities), and definitely not considering the entirety of what I listened to that year.

In fact, let's see if 2018 so far is any improvement on that count. I keep a record of every album I become familiar with over a year ("familiar" meaning I listen to it enough time to know what it's all about), and so I'm going to go through the list now and get some tallies for ya.

I've become acquainted with 218 albums so far this year. According to my count, 64 of them have been albums from female artists (or female-fronted bands). Even if we include Ezra Furman, who considers himself androgynous, then still only 30.2% of the music I've listened to this year is non-male. [Editor's note from the future: Furman has come out as trans in 2021, good for her.]

Minorities fare even worse. I finally came to love Prince (specifically Purple Rain) this year, and also listened to the new BROCKHAMPTON, and those are the ONLY black artists on this list. At the Drive In has frontmen of Mexican and Latin American descents. Superorganism has a female lead singer of Japanese descent (the only female minority listed here). A stunning 98.2% of the music I've listened to in 2018 has been from white people.

About two thirds of the music I listen to is from white guys playing music. This isn't ideal.

With few exceptions, I enjoy the genre known as "indie rock," and with few(er) exceptions, indie rock is dominated by white musicians, usually male. So, the question we need to answer is, do I like a music genre that by and large features white males, or do I enjoy a music genre BECAUSE it features mostly white males?

If you know me, you have to know that the latter is definitely not the truth. Despite the trappings of my privilege, I do my best to challenge racism and sexism whenever I encounter it in my life. It has to be that the music I happen to enjoy unfortunately is monochrome in gender and race, right?

Except, now I'm thinking about Disco Demolition Night, which you can read about on Wikipedia if you don't plan on reading about it in Twilight of the Gods. The antagonist, radio DJ Steve Dahl, was accused for years of being racist and homophobic, since the music he was heralding was mostly white rock, and the music he was literally destroying with explosives was one created more so by black or homosexual artists. Dahl denies that this was his intention, but still, it might have subconsciously been a part of it.

What I'm trying to say is, what if I am just like Dahl, and race and gender subconsciously have something to do with it? Is it possible?

Again, I don't think so. It's not like I purposefully listen to less TV on the Radio than I would if they were mostly white. I listen to a lot of that band. I was the only person on Earth to defend Bloc Party's last single, and it had nothing to do with race. I could go on and on, but do you really need another white dude trying to explain why he isn't racist?

At the same time, I'm daydreaming about getting a bunch of kids to bring their Soundcloud Rap albums onto a baseball field and blowing them to smithereens. I'm salivating at the thought of it because Soundcloud Rap fucking sucks ass and puts domestic abusers on pedestals, and most assuredly NOT because most Soundcloud rappers are black. But I could ultimately see how the act of doing so might be misconstrued as racist. Again, it's unfortunate and unfair and problematic but true: certain musical subgenres primarily feature artists of certain ethnicities, and to defend a mostly white subgenre (indie rock) over a mostly black subgenre (disco, rap) is technically racist, no matter the intention.

I think at the end of the day, I mostly listen to music I can relate to, and unfortunately that means I relate to mostly other straight white males. I think the best I can do to self-improve and to fix this underlying issue is to be open to new forms of music, regardless of genre. Female country singers, black soul crooners, Grammy-nominated funk pastiche creators, riot grrrl, jazz legends, black rappers of all sub-genres, I need to be open to finding more welcome exceptions in my music tastes. Because, yes, this shit matters.

What will 2018's Top Ten Albums PoYB List look like? Probably a bunch of white dudes, maybe some women, probably few minorities. But I'm trying. I'm sensitive to the issue. I want to be better.

The Night That We... (got engaged)

Part XXIII
The Proposal
May 5, 2013

Adapted from a 2013 Tumblr post entitled "tHe proposle."

To truly tell the story of Pam and Joe’s proposal, you’ll first have to consider an event that occurred a couple years earlier, back to when Joe was still living those halcyon college years.

It’s pretty well known at this juncture that Joe is currently hooking up with a chick four years his senior. They say that with age comes maturity, so yeah, it's allegedly true that Pam is a little more mature than Joe. I don't think it would be farfetched to say that it's always been the dynamic in their relationship. It's cool. But Joe is working on it. Sometimes maturity means staying in on a weeknight, so Joe is perfectly content with rampant immaturity at this stage in his life. It's a hoot.

Anyway, so we go back to the first weekend in May of 2011, and Joe and Pam are headed to a wedding. This being a wedding, like DUH, they got drunk. The next morning, scratchy throats and eyes crusted, they awoke and decided to make a quick two-block jaunt from Pam's apartment to Broad Street to witness the Independence Blue Cross Broad Street Run® and support the runners.

Being a weak lazy hungover college fuck, Joe stumbles and trips toward Broad Street Run, still in his scuffed dress shoes from the night before. He truly embodies the word "crapulous." He struggles to walk 500 feet, all to watch people in the middle of running ten miles. The runners will reach the finish line with breath to spare. Joe reaches Broad Street and pukes in a trash can.

(This being a story about Pam and Joe’s love for one another, naturally it involves a puking incident. Their story is one that floats along on top of two inches of dry-heaved stomach bile.)

Pam rolled her eyes, to say the least "My silly boyfriend is a load," is (probably a censored version of) what she thought. Joe, being sensitive to the optics of what it must look like to have a boyfriend who is proving his immaturity to every pedestrian who can smell his wedding cake refunds, took note. That was IT. He made a solemn oath with himself that very minute.

He would train for the Broad Street Run®. Swear to god. He would start right away. Or, ya know, after like, four hundred more days of drinking and being in general a slob? THEN he would DEFINITELY start training for the 2013 Broad Street Run®.

Better yet, here was the grand idea that he had been looking for. The Proposal. He would run with the ring in his pocket (and hopefully not lose it?). He would wear a homemade white shirt emblazoned with “PAM [MAIDEN NAME OMITTED], WILL YOU MARRY ME?” in bold letters and enjoy all the girls swooning over his pending proposal during his final hour of being single. The image of Pam saying Yes would be used as fuel to propel Joe to train hard, every day, and then eventually slack off for a few months, and then train EVER HARDER.

Over the next two years, Joe drank a lot of beers, and annoyingly shared his proposal plan with a lot of friends and family every time he reached a certain BAC level. By the time Joe got down one knee, it seemed like Pam was literally the only person in the world who was surprised.

Which, by the way, running down Broad Street and proposing is a totally unique idea, and let's just all pretend that there aren't like four or five guys who do this every fucking year. It's so unique that when the Philadelphia Inquirer quoted Joe in an article about the Broad Street Run®, the picture they used was of another couple doing the exact same goddamn thing.

(And yeah, it was cool as shit being quoted in the Inquirer, but Joe drunkenly sat in his parents' backyard later that night and sent the journalist about 10,000 very disjointed booze-fueled words about his experience, and the guy used like twelve of those words and they were the most hackneyed ones Joe sent. What can ya do.)

Joe had told Pam that he would be wearing a "crazy costume" that day, that it would be a surprise to everyone what he'd be wearing, and if she could please meet him at the finish line and have a good laugh about was he was wearing. Pam, suddenly serious, asked, "What, are you going to propose to me? Don’t do that." This was probably not the greatest thing for Joe to hear fifteen hours before he proposed.

Pam was, in all honesty, expecting Joe to be running down Broad Street naked, which honestly isn't too bad of an idea, because Joe loves showing his dick in public (to consenting individuals, hopefully). Because she knew that if Joe WAS really naked, and the Philadelphia Police would more than likely take issue with this nudity, Pam was pretty nervous at the finish line there. She was worried for Joe's well-being, in general. You see, Pam was still thinking of her boyfriend as that Joe who had puked in a trash can on Broad Street a couple years ago.

What she found, however, at the corner of Broad and Pattison, to her utter shock and surprise, was a mature Joe, asking to officially make her the future Mrs. K***.

Joe had practically flown to the finish line. It was the fastest he'd ever run in his life (no exaggeration, there were witnesses). He wasn't even out of breath. He barely even fucking sweat, though to be honest, his stomach was indeed pretty sweaty, because despite all the training for the big run, he still had a hairy beer belly, and the sweat had collected in his belly button and spread onto the lower parts of white T-shirt he wore on that hot day. The point stands—way less sweat than usual. The Inquirer article was right: love had propelled him to the finish.

Pam cried, people clapped, an stranger took pictures, and Joe had a huge emotional boner.

They walked the final quarter-mile of the race together, hand-in-hand. Many spectators yelled "Congratulations!" and hollered and cooed. An even greater amount of spectators yelled, "Finish the race, you PUSSIES!!" because this is Philadelphia, and we can't have anything nice.

Pam happily shared the free Finish Line Soft Pretzel, which really makes you wonder why Pam scoffed when months later Joe suggested that they have a pretzel tray at the wedding.

Speaking of weddings, Joe was glad that Pam no longer was allowed to dance to "All the Single Ladies" at wedding receptions, because they may not be the most monogamous couple in the world, but yo, some things are fucking sacred.

Pam was glad that she received the ring on a holiday, so in case they ever divorced, she was allowed to keep the ring, as it technically could be considered a Cinco de Mayo gift, and women never stop finding divorce loopholes, AMIRITE fellas?!

Everyone was glad that these crazy kids finally got engaged. They were glad that Joe and Pam loved each other so much that they wanted to spend the rest of their lives together, regardless of whether they were running marathons or puking in trash cans.

Not glad, however, were Joe’s parents, who appreciated that their son had found the love of his life, but were particularly less appreciative of the fact that he had to consummate that love with drunk sex in the bedroom next door while they were trying to sleep that night.

Let's end on that high note. This blog post is over.

Top Five TV Shows All-Time (For Now)

I don't have as firm a grasp on TV history as I do music. It's one thing to try to understand the musical canon by listening to an old Rolling Stones album. It's a completely different task to try to understand the TV canon by watching 275 episodes of Cheers. It's a herculean task to watch TV enough to be a TV expert (but god bless Alan Sepinwall for trying).

So if you want to ask me what my favorite TV shows are of all time, well, of course I have an answer. What don't I have a list for? But if you want to know my opinion, please know my limitations. I don't know TV. I watch a little bit and I enjoy a little bit more, but I will make no bold claims that these select few are the BEST television shows of all time. They are simply my favorites.

If you disagree, you know where to find me. In fact, I don't really think I need to say "if" there. Of course you disagree. There's too wide of a scope for TV to be able to be critical about it with friends. Again, a comparison to music: people that are into music typically stick with certain genres, and if you are out at a dive bar talking about music, you're probably talking about it with friends whom you know listen to similar music. There's no categorization in TV; everybody watches everything. Discussions about TV always turn into a fucking circle jerk of "Did you watch this? Yeah, it's cool, but what about this? No I don't watch that. Do you watch this?" It's fucking annoying and I'm tired of it. But so anyways, here's the list.

Joe K***'s Top Five Favorite TV Shows of All Time.

Honorable Mentions: 10) Orange Is the New Black; 9) How I Met Your Mother; 8) The Office; 7) Breaking Bad; 6) Community

5) The Venture Bros

People may scoff, saying that it's "just a cartoon," but The Venture Bros. is anything but. What started off as a Johnny Quest parody turned into a long-running treatise on failure and death and growing up, complete with a mythology denser than any comic book, and more jokes and pop culture references than you can shake a shrink-ray at. This is not just a cartoon.

4) The Sopranos

I tried to resist for years, but it was no use. The Sopranos is the most critically acclaimed TV show of all time for good reason. The characters are as lovable as they are hateable. For a tense drama, I sure do laugh a lot. Probably my favorite part about The Sopranos is that it wasn't afraid to leave the mysteries hanging. In that way, it most mirrored real life. Not all your questions will be answered. It took me a few run-throughs of the series to understand the beauty of its unknown, but when I did, I was Tony, in the desert, yelling, "I GET IT!!!"

3) The Wire

I prefer when a TV show has overarching seasonal plots, but still takes time to craft each individual episode as its own thing. So it's a mark of the strength and audacity of The Wire that it's one of my favorite shows of all time, despite the fact that it is decidedly NOT like a collection of short movies. The Wire, from it's opening scene to the finale, is one large story. It moves from Point A to Point B to Point C, rarely leaving any loose threads. And guys, it's a fucking blast. It's heart-wrenching. It's warm, and it's fucking cold-blooded. It's the Great American Novel in the form of prestige television. Time to watch this if you haven't already.

2) Deadwood

I know, the Holy HBO Trilogy completely fills up the mid-section of my Top Five list, but I can't help it. Compared with the other two prestige dramas, Deadwood does a lot differently. There isn't too much of an overarching, series-long plot, and you can't really point to individual episodes as works of art. Deadwood takes a ramshackle approach, drunkenly lurching from plot line to plot line with seemingly little rhyme or reason. There's a wonder to seeing it all come together somehow. And yo, this show is fucking funny. Possibly the funniest show I've ever seen. And it's a drama! I am in need of a re-watch soon.

1) It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia 

The brilliance of It's Always Sunny—beyond the jokes that are equal parts ridiculous and crude and hilarious—is that the characters are such insane caricatures that they are able to use it as leverage to comment on society at large. It's not just "haha Dennis is a rapist," because that wouldn't be funny; it's more like, "Dennis is clearly a rapist, so what does his normalization in the context of the show say about our willingness as a society to tolerate similar behavior?" Thinking about TV shows in this way is usually a good way to ruin them, but not so here. They are holding up a mirror so we can see ourselves, but the faces behind the mirror are so goddamn funny that Always Sunny can have its cake and eat it too. "Seinfeld on Crack"? Absolutely not. It's the complete opposite of Seinfeld. Seinfeld made a point to be a hollow machine (and, fair, there was genius in that too), but It's Always Sunny wants you to feel everything (shock, horror, disdain, perplexity, pride, compassion, even *gulp* empathy?), and it escalates whatever you are feeling to an absurd degree, and somehow keeps all those plates spinning, even when you're crying from laughing too much. I dunno, it's not quite a prestige drama, but there's no other show like it.

The Albums That Matter: As You Were

Joe runs through every album on his iPod, mostly in alphabetical order, and offers some brief thoughts. Check out previous columns HERE.

As You Were

Liam Gallagher

2017

Look, there's not much to dive into here; the pool is too shallow. I don't necessarily mean that as an insult. Sometimes rock music is just there to listen to, not to explore like a map or digest like a novel or study like an ancient scroll. As You Were is just there. It's fun in its simplicity and sameness. It doesn't scintillate, but burns a steady glow. It is basically Oasis-lite from the Oasis frontman. Almost exactly a year since As You Were was released, I still enjoy listening to it from time to time when I need something that is straightforward and uncomplicated. But where does that leave the blogger in me?

Let's consult my notes here. There were four potential leads we could've followed for the hook to this short essay, all of them pretty weak:

1. Liam Gallagher was very recently caught on video choking his girlfriend at a restaurant, and was being questioned by the police. Does this alleged incident add anything to our understanding of the album?
2. The album is called As You Were, and Liam Gallagher typically ends each of his tweets with the phrase "as you were." Was the album named after his twitter signature, or does he tweet this because of the album title? Or do both uses of the phrase originate from some third source?
3. Liam's brother and former Oasis bandmate Noel Gallagher released a solo album around the same time last year. Which one was better? Should we even be comparing the two?
4. Having been part of Oasis and thus a leader in the mid-1990s Britpop movement, how does this album fit into the Britpop pantheon?

Yeah man, not much to go on here. Fuck it, let's just continue on and jump down each of these rabbit holes, we can see if any of them yield more than a paragraph or so. This is The Albums That Matter: Unimaginative Vamping, by Joe K***.

1. The disgraceful Kavanaugh debacle may have so successful gaslighted me, at least for the time being, that I can barely even bring myself to comment on another alleged abuse allegation. The dude was on tape as having choked his girlfriend. It's fucked up. But the whole point of the Me Too movement is to respect the victim and her voice in these matters. And according to the alleged victim, Debbie Gwyther, it is... "a pack of lies." Either she is being threatened to stay silent or there is more to this story. Let's Occam's razor this shit and move on for now.

2. The "As You Were" question is easy to answer with a little research. The title comes from the tweets, and the tweets come from... well, not even Liam Gallagher is sure. In a radio interview, he explains, "John Lennon used to wear these t-shirts with 'You are here,' and I always just liked that. It kind of reminds me of 'as you were.' I mean it doesn’t really mean anything, but you know, I think it looks good." So basically it's just a self-imposed catchphrase of sorts. Nothing to see here.

3. I can't answer this because I just wasn't interested in exploring the new Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds album at the time. It was late in the year, I was wrapping up the year's end reviews, and so I was choosing carefully the new stuff I still wanted to listen to. Who Built the Moon? was getting tepid-to-fine reviews, and the few singles I listened to didn't really do anything for me, so I forwent it. I have no stakes in the brotherly rivalry, and no interest in awarding either party as the so-called winner. For what it's worth, Noel's previous album, 2015's Chasing Yesterday, is pretty fucking great, and I would probably choose that album over As You Were. But who cares?

4. If there is a subject I'm less qualified to answer than the Gallagher rivalry, it's the history of the Britpop movement. All my knowledge of Britpop added up could probably fit into a single bottle of champagne supernova. Actually, me and Pam watched that CNN docuseries about the '90s the other night (the music episode, obviously), and they described Britpop as "the hangover after grunge," which to me sounds pretty reductive, but what the fuck do I know. If there's a time and place to do my own research, it'll be as soon as Be Here Now's PoYB essay, if I ever get around to listening to that. For now, let's assume that As You Were makes no great strides away from the classic Britpop sound.

Suffice it to say that this is a good album, but it's nothing to go crazy over. The album is certified Platinum in the UK though, so again, what the fuck do I know. As you were JK x.

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If this album sounds interesting, try this song: "Greedy Soul"

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Stray Observations

• Genius' annotations are absolutely filled to the brim with quotes from Gallagher regarding each song. Every quote pretty much amounts to the following: "Oh yeah, I love this song. It's a classic." I don't think it's a vanity thing, though...
• ...especially because Gallagher is pretty honest with his limited songwriting abilities, and his dependence on other songwriters (his brother prior to Oasis' break-up, producer Greg Kurstin and songwriter Andrew Wyatt on this album). So when I see him saying overly-nice things about his own songs, I see him complimenting his partners more so than patting himself on the back.
• Kurstin actually won a Grammy for his work on As You Were (among other albums), which probably gives you a hint as to how much help Liam Gallagher had here. Not that that's a bad thing, I'm just saying.
• Okay, so you know how I was saying that I didn't know jack shit about Britpop? Let the record show that I had no idea that Liam Gallagher was the frontman of Oasis until today. I thought it was Noel Gallagher. I don't know why I got their roles mixed up. I really need to do some more exploring into the mid-'90s rock scene.
• ALBUM COVER: It's a photo of Gallagher's face. He has a very punchable face. Maybe that was the point of putting it on the cover; Gallagher seems to do a lot of things that cause people to want to punch him in the face, and he seems to lean into that tendency by saying even more ridiculous nonsense.

NEXT TIME: Astral Weeks by Van Morrison

Facebook's Suggested Events: Absolutely Not

Thank you, Vox Media, for fucking FINALLY explaining to me in words what I've always felt—most "festivals" that sound enticing to the general populace are generally disappointing and sometimes even a scam. "There’s an entire economy within social media that trades off people’s FOMO," it notes, and goddamn, it is so true. Facebook absolutely perpetuates this shit.

Remember that Philadelphia Cheesesteak Festival? As soon as I saw that go viral on Facebook, I smelled bullshit. I could smell it from a mile away. Sure enough, all those people who hopped on it because they wanted to be trendy were sorely disappointed.

And yet, Facebook keeps suggesting stupid fucking events to me, as if after all this time I'm still gonna be persuaded to attend this nonsense. To be fair, some look way worse than others, but for the most part, I'd rather die then attend these dumb goddamn events.

So using a scale of 1-10, 1 being that I miiiiight attend as opposed to killing myself, and 10 being I will absolutely kill myself to avoid going, let's explore ten events that Facebook is suggesting to me right this second.

1) Pickledelphia Pickle Festival

October 14, 2018

Pickledelphia is exactly the kind of bullshit me and Vox are talking about. Take a trendy food that #millennials think is cool, promise lots of "fun times," charge money for the opportunity to spend more money, don't say a word about the long lines you'll experience. LAME.

How Likely Am I to Want to Die: 9/10

2) Blocktoberfest 2018

October 13, 2018

At least this one is free to attend, which makes it slightly less of a rip-off, but still. Packing hundreds of people and a dozen and a half large trucks on four city blocks does not necessarily create the type of atmosphere I appreciate, where we'd have to cloister into the one corner of the festival that isn't crowded as fuck to consume overpriced food and $5 pilsner beers.

How Likely Am I to Want to Die: 7/10

3) Philadelphia Cheesesteak & Food Fest

October 13, 2018

Oh shit, when I used Cheesesteak Fest as an example in the intro, I had no idea it was still going on. Fuck this! How many different bites of cheesesteaks does one really need to consume in one day? And why would you spend money to get mass-produced cheesesteak samples when you can go anywhere and get the real thing? And who would spend $10 just for the CHANCE to stand in multiple lines to spend MORE money on those shitty cheesesteak samples? Why?!

How Likely Am I to Want to Die: 10/10

4) Glenside Knight Food Truck Festival

October 11, 2018

Yes, the suburbs get this kind of shit too! Good stuff! On the other hand, I guess you could call me a hypocrite, since this at least gets people out of the house, as opposed to sitting at home on their phones. Still, let's do some things that are actually fun, as opposed to, like, going to Beaver College and sucking down $12 artisanal hot dogs along with the exhaust from the trucks that made them.

How Likely Am I to Want to Die: 6/10

5) Fleetmac Wood Presents Rumours Rave

October 19, 2018

Okay, so let me get this straight. We spend $13.50 to get into a club. We spend obscene amounts of money on booze inside the venue. We listen to a DJ take a great album and make it shittier. In a sweaty, crowded, dank room, we... have fun? This is almost as big a rip-off as buying a $450 ticket to see the actual Fleetwood Mac.

How Likely Am I to Want to Die: 8/10

6) Chestnut Hill Witches & Wizards Weekend

October 19, 2018

I'm actually a little more sympathetic to this event than I am the others on this list, because its theme is based on a book (which is better than a theme of trendy food, etc.), and the event had to change its name because of our corporate overlords invoking copyright law. So look, again, all of this is great in theory, but when put into practice, all you have is packed sidewalks of sweaty berobed tweens walking past crowded-to-the-rafters renamed taverns selling beer and sugar. Ain't gonna catch me dead pushing a stroller past that absurdity.

How Likely Am I to Want to Die: 7.5/10

7) La Salle Homecoming and Family Weekend

November 9, 2018

As much as it makes my physically cringe at the idea of giving La Salle more of my money, I can't help but think there's a chance I'll end up at this thing again, and it'll be okay. The key difference between this event and the others is this: Open Bar. Yeah, paying $25 per person is a fucking pain in the ass no matter how you look at it, but if the food and alcohol are free, then a cover charge can be earned, ya feel me? We're past the point in our lives when we can wear "LaSallcoholics" T-shirts and actually live up to that claim, but with a few beers in hand, this might actually be semi-bearable.

How Likely Am I to Want to Die: 3/10

***UPDATE, TWO WEEKS LATER: I just found out that Homecoming is no longer an open-bar event. You pay $20, and you get one complimentary beer. FUCK LA SALLE!!!

UPDATED How Likely I Am to Want to Die: 11/10

8) Philadelphia Oddities Expo

November 3, 2018

The description of this event is just vague enough to make me think that it would be a huge disappointment. "A charity event like no other," and of course, "a caravan of food trucks." Christ. It's billed as a kids event (because mommy and daddy will pay that sweet sweet cover charge even if kids don't have to), but a portion of it features tattoo displays? At this point, we all have to acknowledge that these types of events are bullshit, right?! Aren't they all starting to sound the same to you???

How Likely Am I to Want to Die: 9/10

9) Mumford & Sons

December 7, 2018

This event, to be fair, is not comparable to the others. It's a concert. Still, Mumford & Sons blows dick, I pity all those who would pay over $100 for this tripe, especially here in 2018. Kill me.

How Likely Am I to Want to Die: 10/10

10) Philadelphia Wing Festival

November 10, 2018

I like wings as much as the next guy. In fact, recently I've been eating a lot of wings (they are keto-friendly), and I never get tired of them. But this is fucking lame. Everything is packed into a sweaty small-time arena where they usually have local wrestling matches. You pay $25, which includes one drink and six wings. SIX! $25! Everything else you're paying out of pocket. Please someone explain to me why this could possibly appeal to anyone. I know I sound like a broken record here, but c'mon! If you like wings, go to your favorite bar and order some wings, or buy a whole bunch and bring them to a friend's house. If all this really necessary? Are we so broken as a society that we need to gather for arbitrary reasons that financially benefit, um, who exactly? Burn this shit to the ground. (Oh boy, wait, there's a ranch-chugging contest, nevermind, take my money...?)

How Likely Am I to Want to Die: 10/10, fuck this shit with a bucket of Wings To Go wings covered in their patented Homicide Sauce™.

The Albums That Matter: Art Angels

Joe runs through every album on his iPod, mostly in alphabetical order, and offers some brief thoughts. Check out previous columns HERE.

Art Angels

Grimes

2015

"She also became tired of how the music industry ignored her technical abilities, who would focus on her being a 'female musician' and having a 'girly voice'; she responded to these generalizations with 'yeah, but I'm a producer and I spend all day looking at fucking graphs and EQs and doing really technical work.'"

In these trying times, it's pretty nice to settle in and listen to an abrasive and masterful girl-power pop album. Grimes does it all, both musically (she learned to play violin and ukulele and all kinds of other crazy shit when making this album), and lyrically, in which she makes her best attempt to tear down the patriarchy.

Is it fair to Grimes that this is a potential hook I'm trying out for a column about Art Angels? That it's a feminist album? I've been particularly sensitive to how I reflect on certain albums ever since Jason Isbell called out music critics for failing to write a review of his wife Amanda Shires' (fucking great) album without mentioning his name. Is it fair to always have to evaluate female musicians in contrasting them with their male counterparts? Am I off the hook for lampshading this issue in this paragraph?

It's almost impossible, though, not to talk about Grimes in her position in the feminist populace, since she as a person is almost always so upfront with it. It's great! We need strong female musicians who aren't afraid to speak their minds. We're going to especially need Grimes' strength these days, as we live in a time when alt-right sexists have been enabled by our sexist-in-chief (and these same scumbags feel the need to, for example, blame Grimes for the slow collapse of a technology corporation?!).

I don't know if I am qualified to make the point any clearer than that, so, as always, we return to what I am slightly more qualified to talk about: the music.

Grimes is making pop music. This is normally not something that I get excited about, because the vast majority of pop music (in this music fan's opinion) is made to be easily digestible, and that's a turn off. Artists like Ariana Grande, the Chainsmokers, Drake, Maroon 5, they all make music that has mass appeal, and a lot of the time the songs are catchy (if trite). But none of their music really challenges the listener. That's okay! Maroon 5 doesn't give a fuck about challenging you, they just want you to sit back and relax and ingest their shiny, plain product.

Art Angels sticks to the definition of pop music; per Wikipedia, to be "pop music," a song should have "repeated choruses, melodic tunes, and hooks." But Grimes takes this basic format and twists and distorts and layers and surprises far more than any pop musician in America. She is taking pop music to hitherto unknown destinations. And that's fucking exciting.

"Flesh Without Blood" is a good example. Do you know of another pop song that features such dark industrial vibes backing up its bright hooks, or one that possible samples the soundtrack to the Donkey Kong Country cave levels? Do you know of another pop song that would have the audacity to be called something like "Flesh Without Blood"?!

No one could make this album besides Grimes. Her handiwork is splashed all over this ostensible pop album. "Kill V. Maim" was apparently created to be the music for the trailer for a make-believe movie about a Godfather / Twilight crossover, and dude, it fucking sounds exactly like that. "World Princess Pt. II" sounds like a Sonic game in the best ways. "Venus Fly" features a dark and disturbed take at the verses by Janelle Monae, and it's a treat. "SCREAM" is very catchy, even though it's all in Japanese, and is apparently about a rape. This album is fucking wild!

I don't know if Grimes will ever see light on the Billboard 100. I don't think I particularly want her to, no offense to her wallet. If Grimes ever has a hit song, that means that she finally bowed to the lowest common denominator. Luckily, I don't see her doing this anytime soon. She is a brand of pop music all her own, and I hope she stays that way. GREAT fucking album.

~~~~~~~~~~~

If this album sounds interesting, try this song: "Belly of the Beat"

~~~~~~~~~~~

Stray Observations

• "REALiTi" may not be my favorite song on here, but it's still really good, and it is definitely the song that worked best as the lead single (it did not chart on the Billboard 100, but it did reach #30 on the "US Hot Dance/Electronic Songs" because apparently that's a thing). This song was actually released nine months before the album, but it's included on the album in a different form. The "demo version" is still out there, and according to what I remember from the 2015 Year in Music discussions, the demo version is actually preferred by a lot of people. I've never heard it.
• I want to stress again that Grimes did almost EVERYTHING on this album. She wrote the lyrics, played the instruments, sang the songs. Besides guest spots for Monae and Japanese rapper Aristophanes, Grimes IS Art Angels. This is another way that we contrast her with typical pop music, in which each song usually has a laundry list of collaborators.
• Shout out to possibly the catchiest song on the album, "California," which is an exercise in Happy Music vs. Angry Lyrics. Grimes described the tune as a "hate track" against Pitchfork, which is a sentiment that, after our last entry in The Albums That Matter, we can all empathize with.
• There are a few throwaway tracks, for sure ("laughing and not being normal" and "Life in the Vivid Dream" for the most part), but albums that strive to be high art are typically afforded these somewhat unexciting digressions.
• ALBUM COVER: Though her music stylings remain firmly in the Occident, there are occasional flourishes of the Orient. Besides the aforementioned Japanese rap in "SCREAM," there's also the front cover, designed to emulate an anime comic book. It's a little creepy, but then, so too is most anime (in this westerner's ignorant opinion). 
• I don't really know anything about Elon Musk so I am doubly uninterested and unqualified in making any comment about his relationship with Grimes, on top of the fact that artists' love lives shouldn't retroactively have any effect on how we view their albums.

NEXT TIME: As You Were by Liam Gallagher

Don't Tell Me What I Can't Do, Part III: The Magazine

Welcome to "Don't Tell Me What I Can't Do," a new series here on PoYB. Please first read this blog post I wrote in 2009. There, I listed 22 subjects that I would NEVER write about on this website. Here in 2018, I say: don't fucking tell me what I can't do. For a total of twenty-two posts, I will be blogging about these subjects, in striking defiance of my 20-year-old naiveté.

TODAY'S "FORBIDDEN" SUBJECT: "Why Rolling Stone is still legitimate after publishing that terrible Lady Gaga cover"

WHY IT WAS FORBIDDEN: If I was saying that I will never write about how RS is a good magazine, then my point was that RS is NOT a good magazine, you see? Hahah?

HOW I WILL WRITE ABOUT IT: Reflecting on the debt that I owe Rolling Stone. This is technically also a "The Night That We" essay.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Night That We... (discovered music)

Part XXII
Magazine Mentor
November 2003

I sometimes pretend otherwise, but there was a time in my life when I didn't really give a shit about music. If we're being honest, that time wasn't too long ago. Every intense music fan has that awakening at some point in their lives, at various ages. Mine came relatively late. But like all music fans, I can pinpoint exactly the moment when that awakening came. And it's a fucking lame one.

Prior to this moment, I didn't have much in terms of appreciation for music. Some highlights from my life listening to music in grade school, perhaps: I owned a copy of The Best of Nickelodeon Nicktoons; I would take band names that I heard from Y100 and write them on my pencil case like a fucking poseur; I owned a copy of Banjo-Kazooie: The Soundtrack; I would get pumped up for a basketball game by listening to "Aaron's Party (Come Get It)"; I made a mix cassette featuring prominently the R&B stylings of TLC; I owned and listened to many times a recording of the Philadelphia Honors 2002 Band featuring a spirited rendition of "Thus Spake Zarathustra."

Again, I was coming up on my fifteenth birthday, and I didn't know shit about music. But I did know one thing: I was a big fan of lists. This is the reason I walked out of Blockbuster with a shiny copy of Rolling Stone magazine, still with the extra-large pages, its cover a bold red with gold trim and a stark white mega-headline: 500 GREATEST ALBUMS OF ALL TIME.

I had never really heard of ANY of this shit! It was wild! Like, okay, I had heard of the Beatles, duh. I had been beaten over the head with commercials for the compilation album 1 like the rest of America. But I had no fucking clue what Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was, and the album cover was so colorful, and it was ranked #1! I had to explore it. I had to know everything about this list.

And the really enticing part was that all the writers who collaborated on the list made each individual album seem so damn important in the blurbs. It was like there was this whole other world that I didn't have a clue about, and Rolling Stone was grabbing me by the shoulders and shaking me and yelling at me to come be a part of this.

The coup de grâce was that the issue (the one that I bought, anyway) also came with a free sample CD of selected songs from the albums on the list. There were only nine songs, but dude, I listened to that CD probably three times every day for a month. This was the definite confirmation that I wanted in on the whole "music" thing. The tracklist is here on Discogs. I no longer own the CD, but just looking at the tracklist brings me back to those days in my parents' basement family room with their "state of the art" five-piece sound system, wondering what the fuck was the deal with this Dylan guy and this Floyd guy, and how the fuck soon can I get in on this action.

For a while, the Rolling Stone 500 was my scripture, my guidebook into the wild world of the musical canon. Since I purchased the issue in late November, Christmas was right around the corner, and I asked Santa for Sgt. Pepper's and Dark Side of the Moon and Physical Graffiti and Tommy. I fell in love. I brought a Christmas gift card to Best Buy and went right to their CD section (hahaha, I know, right? 2002!) and bought Highway 61 Revisited. My dad was pressuring me into buying Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits instead, but I scoffed. The Rolling Stone 500 had to taught me to revere the album as a work of art. I didn't want just a collection of songs. I wanted an album that fucking meant something to enough people that it landed on #2, all-time!

All my spare money went toward CDs around this time in my life (which wasn't a whole lot, mind you). The obsession started with the cataloguing my music, ripping all the music onto my parents' old Dell desktop computer, burning CDs for friends (mix CDs whose tracklists would probably be so very cringe-inducing if I saw them today). There was stumbles along the way, for sure. E.g. that same first Christmas, I also received Metallica's Black Album, and it was... not for me. Rolling Stones' unquestioning praise for these 500 albums was not without flaws, after all.

But it laid an important foundation for my listening experience. It was a great way to begin my journey, to have a mentor in magazine form, teaching me what the cherished albums in music history were. I put on emphasis on the "begin" part of my musical experience, though, because at the end of the day, listening to classic rock forever is no way to go through life, is it?

In 2005, I received a couple of mix CDs from my then-girlfriend, and for the second time (musically, at least), my mind was blown. I knew originally from Rolling Stone that there was a whole world of music that I had to burrow into, but with this mix CD filled with indie rock classics, I realized that there was this whole OTHER world that Rolling Stone didn't even touch, didn't even fucking scratch the surface. This new CD showed me that all the great music wasn't released decades ago, before I was born ("I was born in le wrong generation," or any of that bullshit), but that great music was being released RIGHT NOW. And I've been swimming through new music ever since.

But it all started with that fucking issue of Rolling Stone. That is so goddamn lame to say, mainly because Rolling Stone is, in general, a fucking lame ass rag. It's a magazine that is stuck in the past (they considered a fucking U2 album to be the best song of the year... in 2014). It's a magazine for has-been hippies and technology-deficient dads.

For a kid who didn't know jack shit about music, though, looking into the past was the perfect way to start, and I owe a great deal of my love of music to its guidance. That's why I'll never completely dismiss the magazine, no matter how pathetic it is in its failed quest to stay relevant (even if that involves putting a deeply uncomfortable picture of Lady Gaga on the cover). There's always old music to dive into. Music's history is deep and rich, and I don't mind having Rolling Stone to keep guiding me back to the past, always there help me discover what once was.

What Your Favorite "What Your Favorite Book Says About You" Says About You

Insert funny gif of a Real Housewife here. OMG, you like books! But somehow, despite this, you feel the need to let a fucking hack listicle website define you as a person based on what books you like! You would think that reading would help you think for yourself, but instead you rely on some $9/hr sorority-graduate freelance shitbag to do it for you! Find your favorite "What Does Your Favorite Book Say About You" article below and see what it says about you!

1. "What Your Favorite Book Says About Your Personality" by Bustle

You love lists that talk more about your personality than what you are reading. Books are used not as sources of knowledge, but simply as mirrors, showing you what you want to see. You think highly of yourself and you want your quizzes to reflect that. You need to get off the internet.

2. "What Your Favorite Book Says About You" by HerCampus.com

You are an apprentice at a Chinese Fortune Cookie company right before they go bankrupt. You think clever quips and cheap gifs are a good representation of your gender's ability to create internet content. You legitimately think that The Maze Runner could be someone's favorite book. You need to get off the internet.

3. "What Does Your Favorite Book Say About You?" by BookBub

You think that people have one defining trait. You don't believe that anyone could possibly love more than two books at once. You think that people should be defined by a personality quirk or flaw. You need to get off the internet.

4. "What Does Your Favorite Book Say About You?" by Huffington Post

You worry about what your favorite book could possibly say about you. You are embarrassed to read certain books because you have a low self-esteem. You think that a well-stocked bookshelf will win you friends and influence people. You need to get off the internet.

5. "What the Books You Read Say About Your Personality" also by Huffington Post

You think that you can know a person just by looking at the book they are reading. In fact, you'd RATHER look at the cover of the book than look them in the goddamn face and have a human conversation for once in your goddamn pathetic life. You are a robot inside, hollow and metallic and going through the motions until you die. You need to get off the internet.

6. "What Does Your Favorite Book Say About You?" by Book Riot

You read books. You know other people read books. You go online to try to figure out how to relate to other people using these two known facts. You spend your days on the internet. You remain alone. Forever. You need to get off the internet.

7. "What Your Favorite Book Says About You" by Under the Fridge

You read what Oprah tells you to read. You have the sudden realization that your middle-aged female coworker was probably using 50 Shades as spank bank material. You use a brand-new Kindle, and have never set foot in a library. You need to get off the internet.

8. "What Your Favorite Book Says About You" by Thought Catalogue

You don't know anyone cooler than yourself, and it's all because of the books. You'd rather sit in a lush garden on a warm spring day and devour the newest crime novel than have sex with your wife. You for some reason went to page TWO of the google results to find a new quiz about what your favorite book says about you. You are a blank slate, and you let brain-dead 20-somethings spew hot wet metaphorical paint on that blank slate from the comfort of their parents' basement, rent-free. You need to get off the internet.

9. "28 Favorite Books That Are Huge Red Flags" by Buzzfeed

You are an insufferable and unlikable know-it-all. You read a book for the sole purpose of taking its content and making a meme out of it. You like shitting on other people for their tastes, because it makes you feel powerful. You crave that power, because in reality you are weak, you are old gum on the forgotten sneakers of the world, you have nothing except hate and disdain churning inside your gut. When you find a quiz about your favorite book on the internet, you tend to cackle like an Anchorman fan who is hearing "Brick loves lamp" for the 800th time. You are a loser for reading. You like Buzzfeed, for christ's fucking sake. Now tell me what the fuck that says about you. You need to get off the internet.

Hogwarts Kids Can't Read: Scrutinizing the Magical Curriculum

How the fuck is this a seven-year course subject?!

In rereading the Harry Potter series to my daughter, I've found infinite joy in the wonderful, magical writings of J.K. Rowling. I've also, truth be told, found some very minor annoyances. The biggest one, which I'm going to write about today, involves how Hogwarts School is structured. Read on to find out how I'd run shit if I were Hogwarts' first muggle provost.

If you are a kid with magical abilities (or potential magical abilities), then on your eleventh birthday you'll most likely receive a letter from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, announcing your enrollment and asking you to join them in September. Stop and think about it though. Most or all of these children won't be beginning their education at Hogwarts. I started attending school at the age of five, and learned a lot in the subsequent six years. I would assume that children set to attend Hogwarts are in similar situations.

But so it was always curious to me that "normal" subjects didn't exist at magical schools. Children don't learn everything they need to know about Writing and Math in the first decade of their lives. It's a lifelong learning process. Harry, Ron, and Hermione are seen multiple times writing essays on scrolls of parchment, and yet they are never seen being taught how to write an essay.

I didn't get hardcore essay-writing instruction until I was fourteen. Are wizard children teaching themselves? Or does Professor McGonagall just look the other way when Neville Longbottom forgets to include a thesis statement in the introductory paragraph?

And how about math? I know that Arithmancy is taught at Hogwarts, which, sure, has to do with numbers. But that's more to do with how numbers and words interact to explain our world. Basic mathematics are completely ignored in Magical Britain. I know a typical eleven-year-old knows 2+2=4, but what about long form division? How do wizards manage their finances without that basic training? More so than English, I can see Math being solved sufficiently with magic in many occasions, but still, humans need that bedrock of basic understanding of numbers, and cutting that off at the fifth grade level is incredibly irresponsible.

It would be one thing if English and Math were being replaced with more worthwhile subjects, but a lot of the subjects taught at Hogwarts seem way more prominent than they logically should be in the curriculum. A lot of them could probably be combined, or at the very least scaled down dramatically into a two-year requirement or one-semester elective, etc. Certainly not fourteen semesters for a lot of these! Let's go through them.

There's no way that the art of Potions should necessitate seven straight years of practice. Potion-making seems really important in the magical world, I'm not denying that. But from everything we've seen, making potions basically amounts to following instructions out of a book. In fact, in Half Blood Prince, Harry starts succeeding in Potions class because he's following the correct instructions in the margins of his textbook. No extra skill required. I get it—young wizards need to PRACTICE MAKING POTIONS. But they need seven years of practice?! To me, the subject of Potions would make more sense as a two-year requirement in the students' third and fourth years (having been given two years to become confident young wizards first, before fucking around with bottling glory and stoppering death). Advanced Potions could be electives in the final three years.

In my opinion, Charms and Transfiguration and at least 50% of Defense Against the Dark Arts could be combined into one class, at least at the beginning of a witch's training. All three basically amount to point your wand at someone or something and making magic happen. Yes, all three are slightly different—Charms changes how something acts, Transfiguration changes what something is, DADA disarms other magic—but at the end of the day, they all require the same method in magic-making: 1) point, 2) speak, 3) MAGIC.

What I envision for Hogwarts is a double class for the first two or three years called "Spell-Casting." Young magical students start learning about their wands (What is a wand? How is it used? What are the basic rules in using it?). This takes place during the lecture portion of Spell-Casting. The other portion of the double-sized course is a practical portion, or a lab. This is when the students actually practice what they learn about, whether that's causing items to float or changing items into other items or whatever the fuck.

The other half of DADA has to deal with magical creatures, or rather, defending yourself against the so-called "evil" beings that exist in the magical world. Let's combine that with Care of Magical Creatures, because they are on opposites sides of the same coin. Also, fuck it, let's combine it with Herbology as well, because, let's face it, the line between what is a magical plant and a magical animal is often razor thin (since we are in a world where plants act like animals and even humans sometimes). Again, double-sized class, with five lectures a week, and maybe two or three "lab" sessions where you actually deal with these magical creatures head-on.

I just combined five classes into two, but that doesn't mean that those subjects disappear completely. By the time you are fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, you might find that you have a certain knack for transfiguration, and by that point in your education, there could be electives specifically pertaining to Transfiguration. If you find that you are able to deal with plants way more easily than animals, take up Advanced Herbology as an elective.

Which makes me start to realize that Hogwarts does a piss-poor job preparing students for graduation and entering into the workforce. Maybe there was a lot that happens in Seventh Year that we didn't get to see because Harry was too busy saving the world, but I don't recall any mention of internships or anything like that. I could imagine seventh-year students having afternoons free on MWF so that they can work as apprentices at the Ministry of Magic or something like that.

Better that then waste five years with the other Hogwarts so-called "electives." Divination is an absurd class to offer to students. Professor Trelawney was right, some students just don't have a "The Eye" for seeing the future. She was wrong, though, in quantifying it as "some." It seems like MOST (or ALMOST ALL) students cannot see the future. I could see Divination maaaaybe as a one-semester elective for students who might want to explore whether they are capable of this rare art, but for someone like Ron Weasley, who CLEARLY is not a seer (probably), to spend TEN SEMESTERS pretending just seems like a fucking waste of time.

The Study of Ancient Runes sounds interesting, but again, I don't see how that's five years' worth of material. Maybe you spend a a semester learning how to read the runes, and another semester practicing the reading of them. Any more than that seems impractical to me (again, unless you wanna take advanced electives later on).

Muggle Studies sounds interesting too, though from what little we know about the current syllabus (Hermione has to write an article about electricity, for instance), it sounds like a class that no Muggle-born student should be allowed to take. If it were up to me, the subject material would be changed a little bit, to focus more on broad strokes of the Muggle World, understanding their limitations without magic, and really making an effort to teach about the relationship between Muggles and Wizards, and how Wizards are responsible in maintaining balance in the lopsided global arrangement. I think of Muggle Studies as more of a Diplomacy class or Political Science class than as a class where you learn how to ride a bike or make macaroni and cheese in a microwave.

The only class I have no issues with, ironically, is boring ol' Professor Binns' History of Magic Class. It's important to know where you come from! Maybe just get a better teacher?

I've touched on all the classes that currently exist at Hogwarts (except Astronomy, which, c'mon, total elective), but there are plenty of other subjects besides English and Math that should probably be offered at Hogwarts.

How about a class called Wandless Magic? A two-year requirement that could cover such miscellaneous subjects as Occlumency, Apparating, Magical Objects, etc.

How about a class called Wizardry Around the World? A one-year requirement where students learn about how other sects of witches and wizards in far-off countries operate, compared to Wizarding Britain. For that matter, how about a foreign language requirement? Choose between Spanish, French, Russian, Goblin, and Troll.

How about, I dunno, other similar classes to Muggle schools? Where's the gym requirement? We see students learn how to fly a broom once, and that's it. And yeah, maybe it's possible to improve your health with the help of magic, but wizards or no, it's important for kids to be physically active, isn't it? Riding on a broom, even if it was like a weekly thing, doesn't even seem to fill that need. You sit on your broom, and the broom moves. That can't possibly get your heart rate up! Why doesn't Hogwarts have a track and field program? How about swimming lessons? Surely the wizarding world has sports and games you can play on foot?

(Totally off-topic, but only 28 students out of hundreds are allowed to play the only sport that Hogwarts offers? And those 28 students only play three games a year? Games which could amount to minutes of playing time, depending on the skill level of your Seeker? I want to see more games of Quidditch played. Gryffindor should have to face off against the other three teams four times each per year, with occasional matches against other schools. And the other students should be able to form intramural Quidditch teams for fun weekend tournaments. AND those teams could mix and mingle between houses. Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc. Christ there's so much about Quidditch that's stupid.)

How about Home Ec classes? Baking with magic seems like it could be interesting. And they could be taught by the house elves! How about music classes? There are numerous examples of musicianship in the books (Celestina Warbeck, the Weird Sisters, the choir of musical saws at the Deathday Party), but nothing to indicate that playing a musical instrument is taught. (There's a choir in the movies, sure, but fuck the movies, they are not canon.) What about art classes? Theater? Any fine arts whatsoever?!

Look, clearly J.K. Rowling created this school and its specific curriculum because it all sounds really cool and fanciful, and a lot of the subjects are vehicles to advance the plot. There's nothing wrong with either of those reasons. Obviously, it's my own fault for thinking about this shit waaaaay too much.

Still, though, if you think about it logically for even a minute, you realize that the young witches and wizards at Hogwarts are being terribly underserved in their educations.

EXAMPLES OF COURSE SCHEDULES:

FIRST YEAR STUDENT

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THIRD YEAR STUDENT

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FIFTH YEAR STUDENT

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SEVENTH YEAR STUDENT

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Read more Harry Potter shit here and here and here.