Something Old
It was the 25th anniversary of the release of Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane over the Sea last week, and I saw a Slate piece that was basically like "it's still good but maybe not as important as you remember it being." So I gave it a listen for the first time in a while.
While it's true that the myth of Jeff Mangum was completely overblown, I think it's important to remember who the mythmakers are here. At a certain point in my life, ItAotS was my favorite album of all time, because I bought into the myth. But that buy-in gave me, and the fans like me, the power to shift that myth as needed.
Jeff Mangum is just a regular guy who had a lot of help creating a really good album. (I've known this since I bought too many tickets to the comeback tour and failed to convert that myth into a scalping profit.) But so the new myth is a myth of a myth. It's not of the creator who didn't exist, but of the young dreamers who followed him anyway. I don't give a shit about the mysteriousness of NMH anymore, but I care deeply about that time in my life when the magic felt real. And through that lens, the magic remains, incredibly. It's real now. We made it real.
Something New
As we continue to dig deeper into some hip hop classics, I think it might be important to take a step back and then take stock of where we've already been. What I mean is that, by necessity sometimes, I'm going to present myself as rap-ignorant. That might be true to an extent, but also I need to remember that there is a lot of music that I already listened to that's hip-hop adjacent at least. I don't have to completely uproot my entire music-listening life to experience rapping.
Two new songs made me think about this last week, from two completely different artists trying to do very different things here in 2023.
The first is "Whammy-O" from the '00s leftover band the Go! Team. They're still out there, doing their peppy, hooky, cheerleaders-meet-sound-collage thing. It still hits as well as it did back in high school, to be honest, though the surprise of it all has definitely worn off considerably. But the song "Whammy-O" off the new album features Brooklyn MC Nitty Scott, who kind of kills it. I know Ninja is still in the mix, and she is still rapping and chanting, but Scott was what finally woke me up to the fact that the signature Go! Team really is perfect for rap features such as hers.
The second is "doom gospel" and progressive-politics punk band Algiers with their song "Irreversible Damage." There are a ton of features on their new album, but this song has probably the biggest marquee name in Zack de la Rocha. In purpose, you cannot find two bands more different in Go! Team amd Algiers. It's "I'm here to party in the high school football parking lot" vs. "I'm here to execute every single billionaire in the country." And yet, like the Go! Team, Algiers' shit is fucking perfect for rapping.
Kinda makes me think that we all know more than we think when it comes to this shit. Hip hop isn't it's own separate thing. It's ubiquitous. It slots in really nicely to even the dumb little indie rock bands you already listen to.
While it's true that the myth of Jeff Mangum was completely overblown, I think it's important to remember who the mythmakers are here. At a certain point in my life, ItAotS was my favorite album of all time, because I bought into the myth. But that buy-in gave me, and the fans like me, the power to shift that myth as needed.
Jeff Mangum is just a regular guy who had a lot of help creating a really good album. (I've known this since I bought too many tickets to the comeback tour and failed to convert that myth into a scalping profit.) But so the new myth is a myth of a myth. It's not of the creator who didn't exist, but of the young dreamers who followed him anyway. I don't give a shit about the mysteriousness of NMH anymore, but I care deeply about that time in my life when the magic felt real. And through that lens, the magic remains, incredibly. It's real now. We made it real.
Something New
Two new songs made me think about this last week, from two completely different artists trying to do very different things here in 2023.
The first is "Whammy-O" from the '00s leftover band the Go! Team. They're still out there, doing their peppy, hooky, cheerleaders-meet-sound-collage thing. It still hits as well as it did back in high school, to be honest, though the surprise of it all has definitely worn off considerably. But the song "Whammy-O" off the new album features Brooklyn MC Nitty Scott, who kind of kills it. I know Ninja is still in the mix, and she is still rapping and chanting, but Scott was what finally woke me up to the fact that the signature Go! Team really is perfect for rap features such as hers.
Kinda makes me think that we all know more than we think when it comes to this shit. Hip hop isn't it's own separate thing. It's ubiquitous. It slots in really nicely to even the dumb little indie rock bands you already listen to.
Something Borrowed
I could probably "borrow" any number of his articles (please for the love of god can we just call them blog posts) for today, but one a few weeks ago stood out to me. Titled "Shred Til You're Dead," it's about the potential comeback of Diarrhea Planet, a multi-guitar attack that hung it up in 2018, and what "coming back from the dead" means for you regarding bands that you used to love. Here's Menapace contemplating DP specifically:
If Diarrhea Planet mounts a real comeback, I'm very curious to see where it lands with the TikTok generation. I'm positive guys my age would go back to the shows (myself included), but what would the feeling be like? Would the vibes be, as the kids say, off?
It would be naive to think we just pick up right where we were in 2018. The world has still been spinning since Diarrhea Planet left. Boy has it ever been. And, to use a cliché and a pun: Not everything that turns to gold can stay gold.
Now they have to start from scratch explaining the name, who they are, what they do, to an entirely different audience who maybe weren’t even in high school by the time I'm Rich came out.
They might look at it like a kid looks at a dusty old video game console their dad is super jazzed about.
Read the whole thing HERE. I guess I've tended to take a laissez-faire attitude about the idea of bands I loved as a teenager sticking around or coming back. There are hundreds of bands making music that sounds different than what I loved from them twenty years ago, and that music sucks. There are thousands of bands making music that sounds kind of the same, and it's pretty okay at worst. But my overall outlook is, like, we still have those old albums. I guess this is me partially rehashing my point from this week's Something Old. I also think that my aversion to live music has something to do with it—I'm not worried about DP at Bonnaroo in 2023 because you couldn't pay me enough money to attend Bonnaroo 2023.
I'm also not saying that Menapace is wrong here. Worrying about the status and well-being of your favorite bands is one of the fun parts about being a music fan. If we can't wax poetic about how a band named after a poop joke is doing the same thing that pet owners did in a Stephen King novel, then why even bother?
Something Blue
Alright, I'm here. I am tired. That's my takeaway from this year's Oscars—it went late, and now I am very tired. Pretty decent ceremony overall. The films that should've won ended up winning (e.g. RRR for "Naatu Naatu"). Minor nitpicks being that the best film of the year, The Fablemans, got shut out, and Avatar: The Way of Water, which was a piece of shit, winning anything at all. But yeah, man, I'm a sleepy boy who doesn't like being up till 11:30 unnecessarily. And it doesn't fucking matter if Jimmy Kimmel lampshades the fact that it's going late by making a bunch of jokes about it. Just make it so he doesn't have to joke about it in the first place! Start the fucking thing earlier!
2 comments:
I like MPP and ItAotS, but I still always think of this comic whenever they are mentioned
I knew Billy was a little fucking bitch but I didn't know he was also a music snob!
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