The Burholme Tapes: "Beverly Hills"

"Beverly Hills"

originally by Weezer

When it comes to "Beverly Hills," I feel like a Republican getting an abortion. In the same way a conservative is prone to say that "the only moral abortion is my abortion," I hypocritically say all the time that "the only good Weezer song from the '00s is my Weezer song from the '00s."

I've seen discussions online that "Beverly Hills" is the worst Weezer song of all time. If I remove myself and my own life experience from that discussion, then I'd be hard-pressed to come up with a counterargument. I am of the general and not necessarily unique opinion that Weezer mostly sucks, and has mostly always sucked (and that there are exceptions, but one of those exceptions is NOT Pinkerton, which I guess constitutes my only "hot-button opinion" on Weezer). I am fully able to admit that, were it not for Burholme, I would probably be a hater of "Beverly Hills" as well.

It's lame, is the thing. Not that that made a single fucking difference to Burholme—we played what we wanted to play, and made cool what had been previously uncool—but it's fucking lame. Just truly one of the worst songs, lyrically, to have ever been conceived. "Beverly Hills / That's where I want to be / Livin' in Beverly Hills." Wow, you've outdone yourself this time, Rivers. Fucking dork. I mean, it makes sense that an overly simple song like "Beverly Hills" would be the type of song that an incredibly amateurish teen garage band would be able to play. A few chords, a nauseatingly plodding drum rhythm, lyrics designed to be shouted from the rooftop of your nearest preschool, there wasn't much that could be construed as "too complicated" by even your worst teenage musicians (and we were relatively far from that, all things considered).

Something I noticed about both of these videos while watching today is that Mike's vocals are pretty bored and monotone, almost purposefully so. At least in the verses (since the chorus is one that's difficult to keep from shouting along to). I'm speculating now why that was. My theory that I'm coming up with literally as I type this sentence is that Mike knew in the deepest corners of his heart that what he was singing was really goddamn stupid and lame, and so the flatness of the vocals acts as a sort of defense mechanism, an implicit acknowledgment that he knows what he's doing, and to even attempt to bring some of the try-hard loser-ass verve that Rivers Cuomo brings to his hokey bullshit would be to buy into it, and thus be branded as a loser-ass too. Mike might be an ass sometimes, but he is not a loser. He is a winner. He was the frontman of the best high school garage band in a two-block Rockledge radius from 2005 to 2007!!!!

I don't know what's going on in that second video. Not the first time videos from that concert (circa 2006) have showed up in this column, and it won't be the last, so we'll just have to live with the fact that we can't see anything that's happening with Burholme that night.

But we have clear (mostly) visuals for 2007, and something that is new and exciting for "Beverly Hills" is that Burholme invites their first of a few guest singers to the stage. If I recall correctly, there were discussions leading up to that final concert of being inspired by The Last Waltz (the final concert of a band known as the Band—look it up, it's one of the most famous concert films of all time), especially how the Band invites up to the stage a lot of their famous friends to help them sing some of the songs. These are our famous friends.

Well, kind of. Dan B. comes on stage to sing co-lead with Mike on "Beverly Hills." Unlike many of the other cameos that you'll see in the next few weeks, Dan has never made an appearance on Puke on Your Birthday before. He went to school with me at La Salle College High School, but the fact that Kev announces his name and brings him to the stage makes me think that Dan had a Cheltenham High School connection as well. Maybe he went to grade school with a bunch of Kev's friends or something? I would have considered myself maybe a really good acquaintance to Dan, maybe a tepid friend at best, and he is the type of friend I saw a decent amount of in high school and literally haven't spoken to once since we graduated.

When feasible, I want to (briefly) interview those non-Burholme folks who end up on Burholme's stage through the life of this column. It is not feasible today. I don't know where to even begin looking for Dan. Used to be that I could just look people up on Facebook. That's not really the case anymore. Even if I had Facebook, I feel like a lot of people my age either don't have one or don't check it or update it all that often. That's the one thing I miss about Facebook, honestly. We called it "stalking" but it wasn't really that. Stalking would be to make your shadowy presence known in order to enforce your desires upon your victim against their will. "Facebook stalking" was just keeping tabs on someone in case you ever needed to reach out. I haven't stalked in ages.

I tried googling Dan, with no luck. I included his last name, obviously. I won't type it out here, even though it's yelled in the video. There are rules on the blog. But so I googled his full name in a few different ways, and nothing showed up. Didn't help that he shared the same name as that dude whose wife murdered him and then wrote a bunch of books titled something like How to Kill Your Husband. The Dan I knew wasn't a chef born in the 1950s, so it's not the same guy. No, the Dan I knew apparently joined the army after graduation. I think? Don't quote me on that. Kinda hard to rectify the image of this long-haired goofy pot-smoking suburban burnout teen with the idea of a straight-laced killing machine. There's a good chance "Beverly Hills" drove Danny B. to madness.

In retrospect, I defend the idea of bringing friends to the stage to close us out as a band. Yes, to a certain degree, some songs start to sound like glorified karaoke. Compare the two versions of the song here, and the final one somehow manages to sound even more sloppy than the earlier version. It's not like Dan was coming over the Rockledge garage too often (or at all) to practice "Beverly Hills" with us. On the other hand, it's not like "Beverly Hills" is the type of song that you could possibly fuck up even if you wanted to. 

I think it was a worthy idea because it gives credence to the idea that Burholme was about more than just Mike and Kev and Joe. It was about more than whatever shitty Weezer song we decided to sing. Burholme was about community. There is a reason why we named out band after a geographical location. Burholme, in both its iterations, is a place that like-minded people can gather, share some music and some laughs and maybe some beers, and express the joy they feel in that comradery. For this particular moment, that comradery is expressed by yelling an absolutely awful song into a microphone as loud as you can. But in the act of yelling, magic is made: the imperfect becomes perfect, a terrible song becomes a golden memory, and a room full of friends become a family. Here at the Burholme concert.

Dan, hit me up if you are reading this, I'd love to chat.

RC f/u #25: Danny Brown, Empty Country, PinkPantheress

Record Club alumni brought the fucking heat in November. Usually it's tough for November releases to crack the Top Ten on any end-of-the-year best-of lists, just due to the nature of timing. Even if these three albums continue to reveal themselves as excellent, it'll probably be too late. So I'm thankful for this space here, where I get to tell you to listen to new albums from artists previously highlighted by RC. No negative reviews today! All positive! Ending 2023 strong!

Quaranta by Danny Brown

Released: November 17, 2023

Follow-up to: Atrocity Exhibition, Week 40

Much has been made about this newest Danny Brown album being a bit of a downer. True—not much of the skronking falsetto that marks the "fun" Danny Brown. A bunch of busy beats in the production but gloomy nonetheless. But not much has been made about the fact that this album was made a while ago. Crucially, this album was made before (possibly way before) Danny Brown got sober. For the record, we got there within two weeks of each other, and I'm really happy for him (note that my RC review was basically like "Hey, should we be worried about this guy?"). But this means that Quaranta becomes a rich portrait of a dude who's struggling, and we can appreciate the struggle because we know that he eventually gets out of it.

Not that all of it has to do with substance abuse, but all of it is pretty dark (e.g. "Y.B.P." and the bit about his aunt with a black eye, a song that makes even Bruiser Wolf's ad salesman voice feel sinister). And there's a lot of room for great wordplay still, but it's employed in a way less lighthearted way than it has been in the past (e.g. the rhyming of "sell a bit" and "celibate" and "cell a bit"). It makes sense that there wouldn't be much about substance abuse though, right? Admitting you have a problem is the first step, and this album is, by Brown's own account, from before when that first step was taken.

Honestly, this album (like Brown's team-up with JPEGMAFIA from earlier in the year) is a lot easier to swallow due to the fact that we know that it was a darkest-before-the-dawn situation. I'm very curious to hear what a sober Danny Brown album sounds like. I wonder if we'll ever get one. As good as Quaranta is, you'd have to be a fucking monster to wish that he could remake it.

GRADE: 4 pukes out of 5 (no change from previous review)

Empty Country II by Empty Country

Released: November 3, 2023

Follow-up to: Empty Country, Week 73

Joseph D'Agostino, creative force behind and frontman of Empty Country, has the unique ability to spin what might otherwise be very good indie rock tunes into fucking epic gold. Every song sounds like it's being sung from a mountaintop in a thunderstorm. I don't know if I necessarily understand the science, but I'm sticking around for the magic.

I was curious to see if Empty Country II hit the same notes as Empty Country, since the first album hit during COVID, when every piece of art seemed heightened and twisted and anxious and desperate. I likened that first album to a sort of life raft or escape vehicle, and I still think that way when I hear those songs. There was the possibility that ECII was going to falter due to the fact that we are, however briefly, not living in a global pandemic situation that forces us indoors to hide from an unseen but very much real danger.

It's a possibility that thankfully did not come to fruition. This proves the opposite true—it doesn't matter how crazy or how mundane you life might be at the current moment, Empty Country can make it seem like you're living in the climax of an Oscar-nominated coming-of-age film. I don't understand it, but this isn't the type of thing you need to understand to appreciate. 

GRADE: 4 pukes out of 5 (+0.5 from previous review)

Heaven knows by PinkPantheress

Released: November 10, 2023

Follow-up to: to hell with it, Week 147

This is technically the artist's "debut album," even though we reviewed her last album, which I guess was more of a mixtape? Semantics aside, there is a sizeable leveling-up with this latest/first studio album, and I'm not gonna lie... I'm really fucking into it. Any concerns I had last time about this feeling too slight or tossed-off are completely gone. Yes, the songs are somewhat "bite-sized," but they are no longer cut off or faded away. This is fucking art, fully-fledged and complete, and in a way that I just don't hear at all these days otherwise.

I probably should hold some of my more effusive praises for next week, when—despite what I said above—I will probably include this album in my Top Ten of the year. But since we're in the business of comparing albums in this adjacent supplementary RC column, I'll compare it to Empty Country II, and say that they are mostly opposites. Empty Country makes small emotions feel huge, while PinkPantheress makes huge emotions feel compact and digestible. If you're as young as PinkPantheress (22 years old!!), then you're going through some shit, but the way she sings about it, it comes across as more of a shrug, which is impossibly cool. 

GRADE: 4 pukes out of 5 (+1.0 from previous review)

There are still two RC alumni albums left for the year, but I'm in a time crunch for making the Best Of lists before next week, and I don't need to waste any time with a novelty sequel holiday album from a football team or a novelty "rock and roll" album by an old woman who loves rapists and violent bigoted transphobes and fake corporate-interest snake oil salesmen who force their employees to stick bananas up strippers' assholes and puts them on her album because she thinks they are all going to heaven together. We can deal with those in a couple weeks.

Shelter from the Storm: Home and School

May 3, 2005, 5:43 PM

 

Time is moving so goddamn slowly these days. It feels like it's been forever since I wrote on Xanga, and it's only been like a day and a half. Last time I wrote about how I had high hopes for the week at school, and now it's Tuesday and it feels like Thursday and the fact that time is moving so slow on that end too doesn't bode well for this week in general.

I can't name any specific incidents that shout "BAD!" or anything. Just a general malaise. It's tough to see the forest around this particular tree—is the mental fog something that teenagers go through in the normal course of adolescence, or is there something wrong with me? Maybe it's a little bit of this and a little bit of that. A little bit of "yes, shit sucks when you're this age" and a little bit of "I could use a slight perspective shift."

Like, okay, take the incident in Monday's Honors Chemistry lab period. Nothing was necessarily my fault, but it still somehow feels that way. Basically what happened was that there was a slight aberration in the chemicals we were mixing in the test tube, it wasn't heating up properly or something, and so Dottie Po (the silly moniker of our very unsilly chem teacher) decides to just move the whole beaker, and because there must have been a slight crack in the glass, exacerbated by the boiling water, the bottom of the beaker gave out, splashing scalding water all over the desk and all over the equipment and all over Dottie's arm. She gave out a mighty yelp when she got burned, which was disquieting in a way that I don't know if I can even explain. It's like, you see your teachers as invincible sometimes, and so when you hear an exclamation of pain, it shatters an illusion that you didn't even realize you had.

So that's been my week so far. Ah well. As the new-ish (three years old at this point) series of Degrassi says in their theme song: if I hold out, I know I can make it through.

Here's a bit of fucking optimism for ya: the weekend absolutely shimmers with potential. Options lined up for Friday night are limited to various kegs around discreet corners of the neighborhood. There's one allegedly happening in Burholme, and I thought maybe me and Mike and the gang might want to check it out, and possibly see if we can find the mythical firepit as a sort of side quest. There's also one behind St. Basil's Academy, which is unknown territory for me, and might be a bit farther of a trek, but we'll see. And then on Saturday, there's word that a band called Pepper's Ghost is going to be playing a set at the FYE in King of Prussia Mall. The LSCHS newspaper, The Wisterian, had a really positive write-up about the band from our very own Matthew S., so I've been meaning to check them out. That'll depend on who's going and whether we can find a ride or not.

Speaking of high school publications, our school also has a quarterly poetry magazine called The Gazebo. Not that I consider myself a poet by any means, but I've submitted something that I called "The Conspiracy at the Vatican and Its Impact on the Modern World." It's a surrealist, sort of stream-of-consciousness thing (as you may have been able to guess, it has nothing to do with the Vatican). I appreciated the opportunity to try it out, but I have no idea whether it's something that Ms. Anderson (moderator of The Gazebo) would find worthy of publication. It might be that stream-of-consciousness is viewed as cheap and insulting next to the works of my sincerely talented classmates.

Oh yeah! Speaking of cheap and insulting writings from Joe K***. I keep forgetting to tell you guys this. Apparently one of the topics at the most recent Presentation B.V.M. Home and School meeting (basically like a parent/teacher association) was the issue of Xangas, or like, blogging in general I guess. My mother alleged that my Xanga in particular was mentioned. I don't know if the unnamed person was speaking about my old Xanga or this new one that I'm am currently writing on, and I was too pale-faced to ask her.

Apparently, parents don't like Xangas, et al., because they "give too much personal information away." I mean, I guess I can't argue with that logic. I did just get done putting in writing how I plan on breaking the law on Friday night, and named the specific locations where I would be breaking the law specifically. Whoops.

All of this makes me extremely uneasy. Of course I don't want parents reading these words, but at the same time, I haven't taken any steps whatsoever to even address the possibility that they could, and I can't seem to do it no matter how many times I tell myself that I must. I keep getting drawn back to the Xanga, to the idea of putting my thoughts and feelings into words for my closest friends to see. There's an appeal to that. Sure, yes, I need to stop being a fucking moron about what I write, but I'd hate to go way to the other side of the spectrum, where the Pres teachers and parents stand, and bomb all Xangas everywhere out of existence forever. I like writing and I'm going to stay here for as long as I can, no matter what fucking school meetings mention all this.

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

Comments

Anonymous: That's hilarious–your xanga being the topic at a Home and School Meeting. That's classic.
I love the background song. The Band...awesome.

vllyb128: joe! haha you should have looked closer... oh well...

Jfingers88: Alcohol = bad thus Keggers = bad and Drinking = bad

Anonymous: Your xanga was the topic of a home and school meeting LOL, man thats fucking hilarious. At a home and school meeting at my friends's was on myspaces, becuase a kid had threaten to rape a teacher.

Never Seen It, #126 of 200: The Philadelphia Story

Oh, and the night that you got drunk on champagne and climbed out on the roof and stood there, naked, with your arms out to the moon, wailing like a banshee, watching 200 movies you'd never seen before... you drew a blank.

The Philadelphia Story

1940

George Cukor

As we saw last time, when the word "Philadelphia" is in the title of the movie, that might be a hint that it's gonna hit a little close to home. The Philadelphia Story, though more related to a Philadelphia that I'm only nominally familiar with (Main Line high society, technically not even Philadelphia), actually ends up closer to my heart for a coincidental reason. Or maybe it's not coincidental; maybe this is the reason The Philadelphia Story ended up on this list in the first place. In any case, it was tough to concentrate on the task at hand, for a reason I'll reveal in a moment.

First—hey, great movie here. I'm definitely at the point where I can mostly trust an "old" movie to be worthy of my time if it's lasted this long and made its way across this many decades to reach me. I'm not watching any shitty 83-year-old movies; all those were forgotten before I was born. There's star power here that keeps the memory alive. This is the fourth movie I've seen with Jimmy Stewart, and that's about two more than I needed to know that this dude is one of the best actors of all time. Katharine Hepburn proved why she holds the record for most acting Oscars won by any one person. I knew Cary Grant's name but didn't know what he looked like, and The Philadelphia Story proves I won't forget him any time soon.

While it was fun watching some of the best that ever was snipe and crack wit across a two-hour comedy, I couldn't help but be distracted. You see, La Salle University performed the stage version of The Philadelphia Story the semester before I arrived on campus, and joining the Masque that fall, I heard a lot about the last play that these jabronis did. I've never seen their version, and I don't plan on seeing it, but I know every person who acted in it, and I was giggling the whole time I was watching the 1940 film version, imagining my friends as these characters on the stage. My original plan was to look up the cast list after the movie was over, but I couldn't wait. It probably would've been better if I had waited, because now the story here—my Philadelphia Story story, as presented by PoYB—necessarily becomes something totally different. It becomes how art and life intersect, and inform each other in weird ways.

The Spring 2007 cast is a great mix of graduating classes—some people whom I had one year with in '07-'08, when they were seniors, and some people who were freshman while in Philadelphia Story and thus were stuck with me for three years. There were two seniors whose collegiate years never intersected with mine—one writes for PoYB regularly, and one I can see on the Megan's Law website whenever I want. A few regular blog writers on the cast, and another few who have their old blogs on the blogroll still. Some I talk to every week it seems like, some I haven't seen in years. I probably won't drop any names in this blog post, even though many of you know the people I'm writing about anyway. It lends an air of mystique to the affair.

As soon as the credits rolled, I text my pal who played Hepburn's part, Tracy Lord. I hit her with a bad joke: "Marry / Fuck / Kill: [friend who played George Kittredge], [friend who played C.K. Dexter Haven], [friend who played Macaulay "Mike" Connor]." The joke is double-sided, since 1) I'm referencing a play that she acted in in 2007 in a text sent randomly to her on a Saturday afternoon in 2023 and expecting that she's going to get the reference without being told, and 2) she literally ended up marrying the guy who played Mike Connor, which means that she was legally obligated by Improv 101 law to not choose him for the "Marry" in the MFK equation.

This also means that my two friends who ended up getting married had a stage kiss, lending credence to my ancient theory that "a stage kiss means something." Per my friend, the director claimed that their kiss was "not believable." Prior to having seen The Philadelphia Story, I would have taken the director's claim as dramatic irony—an allegedly non-believable kiss is literally impossible to disbelieve now that they have kissed on the altar to become husband and wife. After having seen The Philadelphia Story, I view it a different way—that the director was a fucking moron, since it doesn't seem like the kiss between Tracy Lord and Mike Connor was supposed to be believable, since they were both extremely drunk and making a huge mistake, and so shouldn't Celeste Walker (okay, I have to say at least one name here) have encouraged the stage kiss to look "non-believable," since that was truer to character? Doesn't this just mean my friends are good actors? And then does this also mean that the friend whom I often get lunch with in the city can do a serviceable Jimmy Stewart impression that he's never deigned to show me?

But see, this is what I'm talking about regarding the intersection of art and life. Where do we draw the line between acting as a way of channeling truth and acting as a way of becoming someone new? My friend who played Dinah Lord, the little sister and shit-stirrer of the Lord clan, was probably perfect in her role. I laugh when I think about it because she is short and must have definitely embodied an eleven-year-old character, but also because my friend is not by any means a shit-stirrer, and so it must have been funny to see her act like one. Same thing with my old pal who played Uncle Willie. The man was the true archetype of the Lasallian Gentlemen in real life, and I have no doubt that he was a delight as a creepy old man who pinched women's butts (especially since he was acting next to, I'll mention again, a dude who literally ended up on Megan's Law—talk about dramatic irony). Not to mention my friend who played Tracy was a real-life rival to my friend who played Liz Imbrie, and how the characters are more or less rivals in the story as well, and how I wasn't aware of this real-life story until I entered school in media res a year later, and how I'm now sitting here wondering whether that rivalry existed in the spring of 2007, or if it sprung from this play, or if it predates it, and if the rivalry informed the performances, or if it's fucked up that I'm even writing about this obliquely on the blog. I don't know.

I'm thinking too about how The Philadelphia Story (1940) came to be—Katharine Hepburn being gifted the film rights to the play adaptation by Howard Hughes, and Hepburn using it as a sort of "comeback" after a few flops, and shoring up those prospects by enlisting the other A-listers (Grant and Stewart), and the three of them using their talents and chemistry to create what is generally considered one of the funniest movies of all time. You think about The Philadelphia Story, and you think about the people who made it. Screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart, when he won his Oscar for adapting the play into this script, infamously proclaimed in his speech, "I have no one to thank but myself!" It's only a notable speech because of how untrue it is.

And it makes me think about La Salle's Philadelphia Story, and how it is only remembered now by people like me because of the people who made it. As far as I'm aware, there was no one involved in that play that was saying such bullshit like "I have no one to thank but myself." Reading through the "Meet the Cast" blurbs in the program (which exists online, but you'll have to find it yourself), I'm struck by how loving and thankful each cast member's words are. More dramatic irony abound, too. My pal who played a couple of characters who might not have even survived into the film adaptation (named Elsie and May in the play) thanks her future husband and says to him that she's "smiling," around six months before they officially started dating (and a decade or so before they both started writing for Puke on Your Birthday). My pal who plays Tracy's mother thanks a girl named Pam for being a "true friend," a friendship that would last until (and beyond) the night that she (and Tracy) introduced me to Pam, four years before I married that Pam. All the cast thank yous ring so sincere to me, and really give me a sense that this was a tight-knit cast, as the best plays inevitably end up being.

That love and grace ripples over to the film adaptation that I just watched. You get a sense of joy when you watch movies like this. That joy and satisfaction that you're feeling is the outcome of a group of people committing to a labor of love. The witticisms and the charm and the goofiness on the screen makes me smile, but the real happiness is knowing what it took to bring it to my eyes in the first place. This is the real way that art imitates life and life imitates art—there's so much joy in what goes on here, and I want to be here for it for as long as I can.

GRADE: 4 pukes out of 5

NEXT TIME: We're watching The Pink Panther, which I can promise you La Salle University's The Masque did not perform at any point, as far as I'm aware.

Pontifications: nWo

Walter shares his weekly thoughts, fears, and philosophies (or some bullshit like that).

You know what the New World Order is going to be? Fucking AI. Before, it was just Machine Learning algorithms forecasting that you're running out of toilet paper—want to buy more? "No," Sam replied, "I bought a bunch of toilet paper behind your back because I'm afraid of a nuclear holocaust that the news has been forecasting would drive ad sales. Some humans will survive, and they're going to need toilet paper!"

Now we're in the phase of Generative AI, where all the machine learning algorithms seem combined into an abstract service layer, distilling any prompt into a forecasted answer. "Write a python script that translates a given CSV file into an XML format based on the following specifications."

Sam Altman, Illya, and "the Boys"—because the female board members of OpenAI actually seemed to be ousted after all the drama—are working to figure out how to get us into the Artificial Generative Intelligence period, where the machines are just as smart as us Humans are in logic and reasoning.

Artificial Super intelligence (ASI) is next, and will come when it comes. With that, a New World Order. My mind hasn't been able to fully distill what this will look like, but I imagine an inundation of propaganda from various class levels, based on one's geographic area. Doesn't that seem similar to our current state? What those class levels will look like may be completely different from what we see today—is this what Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice novel is alluding to?

What that New World Order will look like doesn't really matter, because I'm still addicting myself to the generative AI offering of today. My addiction became apparent when last week's OpenAI drama coincided with some ChatGPT technical disruptions; throttling; and a temporary suspension of new user sign-ups for version 4. During this time, I realized how many hours I have been spending on generating all sorts of GPT content: for work, fun, personal debates and conversations (some with myself). Like the AOL chat rooms and Google searches before, generative AI has reinvigorated my mind to seek out my current curiosities. Any disruptions of this addiction to consume the AI tokens make me feel and wonder a few things:

• I feel like my capacity to learn to code is impossible without AI; at the same time, I am apparently not interested enough to want to learn to code by reading books, because I'm using AI to find the solutions for me. I just want to leverage code to create scripts to do things I don't want to do, or to discover information more quickly from data that I wouldn't have analyzed because I can't efficiently (or proficiently) design and implement a script. I want to use AI to exploit something, but what that something is seems to constantly change.
• I wonder if I will become dependent on AI like I've become dependent on search engines to find answers. Or on books and other knowledge tools of the past to satiate whatever is curious. Isn't it all the same?
• Without AI, internet, books, or people, what would exploring curiosity look like? I'm addicted to knowing, aren't I?

With all that said, how would one even define the phases or stages of AI and the current period by which it is defined? If I'm already leveraging the current phase of AI, and feel handicapped when it's suddenly not available, can't the AI already be considered somewhat Super Intelligent due to my dependence on it? Or am I limiting myself to the whims of technology? I come full circle, without any real coherence, to the position that AI will be the New World Order. Technology rules me.

I think I need to cry because that's something AI cannot currently do, so it cannot be considered ASI. Until Altman unlocks that capability, I am my own New World Order.

Explorers Are Frequently Lost: Fran Dunphy Appreciation Thread

  written by Sam

The patron saint of lost causes, St. Francis of Olney (left, arms crossed), looks on as La Salle shoots the J against Coppin State.

 

PHILADELPHIA —  As an eager freshman at La Salle, I ingratiated myself with the upperclass women and men Collegian editors by doing a bunch of work. I easily cranked out three-to-five articles for the weekly student rag and attended monotonous, late-night copy-editing sessions in the dingy basement of the Student Union. I wouldn't change any of it for the world.

The editors at the time embodied cool to me. They cultivated opinions on the arts and sports that far outstripped my rube-like South Jersey upbringing. I blissfully acted as the fly on the wall while folks debated the merits of Pavement music videos, Neil Young's one-note guitar solos, or how douchey the sports guys at the radio station were. In hindsight, these dudes were probably as in-step with the times as my friends were when I got older, but I'll always hold an intellectual inferiority to the hipster elite of 2005.

Current La Salle basketball coach Fran Dunphy played a memorable part in my snobbish indoctrination to low-level arts criticism. Dunphy is an alum of La Salle, and even played under the legendary Tom Gola during the team's 1968 NCAA run. In 2005, he was coming off an impressive career as Penn's coach, and was in the mix to take over La Salle after the unspeakable "Summer Incident." In fact, the deal was allegedly done—so much so that La Salle printed up a bunch of promotional headshots of Fran's famous receding hairline. But Dunphy turned heel, stayed at Penn a bit longer, and he eventually took over at Temple for the legendary John Chaney. 

Dunphy's back-stab left the Collegian office (and I think a few installments of CAKE) covered in these Dunphy headshots. I remember his sourpuss glancing back at me when I weighed the proper AP Style for Second Street (2nd Street? Two Street?) while copy-editing Philly File.

Fran's face also was affixed to the ceiling of the cool editors' off-campus house on Uber Street. I was welcomed into the world of off-campus living via a weekly poker game held there. If you recall, Texas hold 'em was all the rage in the early 2000s, and quarter games for PBR touched even the hipsters. 

And Dunphy was the patron saint. If you were pushing your opponent to the limit, one knew what the coach's advice would be. Scrawled in Sharpie was the following maxim: "Fran Dunphy says, 'GO ALL IN!!!!'" This phrase was shouted with the same enthusiasm as was yelling "NEW BRAIN!"—a story for another day.

Many, many years later, after Dunphy retired from Temple, La Salle lured him back. His patented rolled-up white dress shirt adorns the sidelines of the Gola, as he barks out plays to his roster of comprised of young men fifty years his junior. And Sunday was a big day for ol' Frannie.

In La Salle's 81-62 thwacking of the hated Coppin State Eagles (0-7), Dunphy accomplished what apparently only 42 other NCAA men's coaches have achieved—to win 600 games. Although the Explorers (5-1) couldn't get the W in front of Coach K and Duke (the less said about that game the better), Dunphy quietly accomplished this seminal victory on a rainy Sunday afternoon in Olney.

What impressed me about the feat is that he never would have reached the mark without "going all in" on La Salle. Though only 20 of the 600 wins came as the Explos' skipper, the 75-year-old likely would have finished his career being slightly short of the mark. 

Dunphy certainly didn't need to get over that arbitrary numeric hump. He's already the winningest coach in Big 5 history (take that Jay Wright), and made several March Madness runs with Temple and Penn. His current job is essentially doing La Salle a favor. He has ably separated affluent alums from their wallets to secure financing on a basketball arena renovation. After three directionless years under a failed prior regime, Dunphy has somehow breathed life into what may be a dying program.

I've been mulling this mortality/purpose concept recently following our Infinite Jest read. We all have a finite time here, so what do you devote yourself to? Isn't it kind of pointless to follow sports, blog into the ether, or exercise when you're going to die eventually? But what's the point of anything then? You might as well GO ALL IN while playing the game, and enjoy the thrills along the way.

This concept was similarly explored (for real relevant this time) in the 2022 film, Living. That movie mostly involves a dying bureaucrat trying to get a playground built before he shuffles off. He is very aware of the fleeting impact that action will have, but he nonetheless concludes its worth the effort and time (when he is short on it).

Coach Dunphy has reached a similar conclusion. Will he win a national championship or even a conference title while leading this club? Certainly not. But he's determined that salvaging these players, this team, this university is worth his energy at a moment in life when I'm sure it could be spent elsewhere.

Basketball is not more important than education. But the folding of this club would be more than a canary in a cold mine to the future of Christian Brothers' education in Philadelphia. Dunphy coaching to the team demonstrates that La Salle means something to him. My gambling-induced nostalgia for the man will never wane, and I am following his example, likely to both of our detriments, by writing about the team.

Dunphy assembling his thoughts. 

A Brief Departure for Actual Basketball

Quickly, I'll recognize that La Salle lost to Duke last week by only 29 points (suck on that Nate). The X (the service formerly called Twitter) account The Gola Standard pointed out that Duke improperly displayed the La Salle College High School football team's logo rather than the Division I basketball team's graphic. Lol.

Without getting my hopes up, I'll say the biggest game of the season is slated for Wednesday night at Temple as part of the Big 5 [sic] tournament. Both the Explorers and Owls already beat Drexel. That means Wednesday's winner will play in the Big 5 final Saturday at the Wells Fargo Center. Wednesday's a pretty fun night of basketball, as Villanova and St. Joe's will also play a death-match for the same stakes. 

My optimism last week aside, winning the Big 5 is likely the biggest obtainable goal for this season. If La Salle punches a ticket to the final (and not the respectable but unflashy third-place game), I'll pop in with another column this week. Let's all hope Dunphy clinches victory 601 against his former club and puts the Explorers on the doorstep of some hardware. 

"Explorers Are Frequently Lost" strives to be a weekly column about the La Salle's Men's Basketball Team, but I hope is about other stuff, too.

A Year of Blind Spots: Hard Core

Hard Core

Lil' Kim

1996

If I say that "Hard Core hasn't aged well," then I want to be very specific what I mean by that. This isn't some New Puritan bullshit, in which certain corners of the internet say that it's "inappropriate" to be rapping about sucking dick. My argument is actually way on the other end of the spectrum. Lil' Kim's Hard Core hasn't aged well because the lyrics are so clearly designed to "shock," and here in 2023, they aren't very shocking anymore. Good rapping, and we can talk about that too, but the general concern here is that the obvious shtick that Kim is employing is nowhere near as effective today as it must have been in the mid-'90s.

Here's how Wikipedia describes the calling card of Hard Core: "the album featured edgy hardcore rap and explicit sexuality, as the title suggested, which at the time were two territories that had long been the province of male rappers." I am not attempting to discredit Lil' Kim here (the only thing I'd fault her for, if we're being honest, is that superfluous apostrophe in her name). I value what she brought to the table 30 years ago. I think it was an important step in the right direction, to command a strong female presence in an overwhelmingly male field (and, if you look it around, if feels like hip hop has only taken incremental steps since, with the genre still being overwhelmingly male, and your Megans Thee Stallion and Cardis B feeling like exceptions instead of rules). And I think it was an important proclamation in the age of parental advisory stickers: Yes, females are allowed to rap about this, and fuck you for saying otherwise.

And of course, if something like this came out and was popular today ("WAP," for instance), then of course you're going to still have your right-wing blowhards who clutch their pearls over it. But the Overton window has shifted, and I'm finding that reasonably minded people on this side of the divide are more willing to accept and even celebrate such discussion. Yes, women should own their sexuality. It's healthy to talk about it, and it's healthy to live your truth, instead of having to hide behind the veil of propriety. There shouldn't be any ancient sense of embarrassment over one's desires. A chorus of women chanting "if you ain't licking no butts, we don't want it!" ends up being really valuable today, in the grand scheme of things.

So when I say that it "hasn't aged well," I guess I'm referring to the fact that this album was a rudimentary part of the process, not the solution, and we're so far past it now that it looks a little iffy in some respects, just due to the passage of time. For instance, while an underlying current is "women's empowerment," a lot of that weight is carried by the metatext, and the actual text has a lot to do with men—whether you should or should not make your man cum, how your man views you, where women stand in relation to the powerful men in their lives. The Notorious B.I.G. was Kim's mentor and probably her boyfriend—and if he was her boyfriend, then it's also probable that they started dating when Kim was underage. The album is produced by Biggie, as well as Puff Daddy, who was recently in the news for some really heinous abusive shit. I'm not bringing it up because I'm a woke SJW, I'm bringing it up to attempt to paint a picture here of patriarchal limitations under the guise of women's freedom of sexuality. It's not a coincidence that the last thing you hear on the album is a man rapping for Lil' Kim, and the first thing you hear is a man masturbating to Lil' Kim's Hard Core.

Hard Core is good despite this. It's even better when it finds those rare moments of separation from the forced female braggadocio. I marvel at the song "M.A.F.I.A. Land" every time I hear, with its chorus of: "There ain't a day in my life that rolls by / That I don't get high, sit back, and won't cry." This is femininity utilized in service of the otherwise spoken truth: being a gangsta is incredibly sad. Of course losing your friends is going to make you want to cry, that's true for all genders. But Lil' Kim, being a female rapper, found herself in a position that she could actually articulate it, without being called the f-word (that is used really excessively on this album).

So I think about the unique position that Kim found herself in, being a woman in hip hop, how she could (and did) use that to her advantage in a few different ways. I think Hard Core is an incredibly flawed album (thematically more so than aesthetically), but it nevertheless stands as an important one. It serves the important role of torchbearer, and as is often the case, the torchbearer doesn't quite make it to the Promised Land. Lil' Kim is hip hop's Moses, wandering through the desert for 30 years, ultimately denied entry to the Kingdom for making one too many references to the penis. We remember the sacrifice, though.

Never Seen It, #125 of 200: Philadelphia

I'm watching 200 movies I've never seen before, and now you're going to explain them to me like I'm a six-year-old.

Philadelphia

1993

Jonathan Demme

I think that even if the movie wasn't called Philadelphia (some of the other possibilities originally: At Risk, People like Us, Probable Cause), we'd still be asking the question: Why Philadelphia? We kind of already went over this a few movies ago, after Mystic River—it's more than just the fucking location. Yes, technically Philadelphia was shot in Philadelphia because this is the city whose film office had the most realistic courtroom available to shoot in over a long period of time, and yes, because it is shot on-location, there are plenty of scenes with recognizable settings to those who reside here. But still. If this movie ended up in New York, they wouldn't have fucking named it New York City. There's a deeper meaning here.

But you're gonna have to take this Philadelphian's word with a grain of salt, I guess. I view my hometown favorably. I sincerely believe that Philadelphians are every bit as passionate and as loyal and as intensely devoted to our principles and values as the boilerplate Philadelphia reputation suggests. Screenwriter had this to say: "The City of Brotherly Love, the Declaration of Independence... I mean, perfect, right?" That's true, but it's also more than that. Historical items like the Declaration of Independence are the ideals of the past, but they ripple into the present. Whether your typical Philadelphian would frame it this was or not, it doesn't matter—even unconsciously, we strive to put into practice the idea that all men are created equal, and the thing that levels that playing field and makes us equal in the way the Founding Fathers promised is the fact that we share the bond of this city we call home.

 

You can name a thousand local and even recent examples of why this isn't true, of course. I'm in love with Philadelphia and no one has ever said love made sense. There is so much about this city that is unjust, unfair, and cruel, but the reason I get so angry about that shit is because I think that cruelty is below the standards that we've set for ourselves as a city. If you were to make Philadelphia today, it would be about an opioid-addicted trans youth of color living under the El at K&A. When I say that the open-market heroin camps in Kensington are shameful, I am not making the McGruffian/Republican argument that those who are addicted are weak and deserve to disappear. On the contrary, I'm saying that the human beings in that situation are my Philadelphian brothers and sisters, and the shame falls squarely on those of us who have the power to address this issue but choose not to.

When we says "what would this movie look like today" and then give a present-day twist on the concept, what we're really saying is that pain and conflict and despair and cruelty are cyclical. No one ever asks that hypothetical about a film and finds that the answer is "this movie couldn't be made today because all our problems have been solved." The sickness of today is the sickness of yesterday, repackaged.

It's cyclical, but it's still interesting—and a little heartbreaking—to view previous iterations of the cycle through a film like this. I was alive for the AIDS epidemic but clearly wasn't old enough to understand it or be aware of it at all. When I speak highly of Philadelphia, I'm using my modern, rose-colored lens. The Philadelphia presented in this 1993 movie is not very kind, nor should it be presented as such. This is ignorance on my part, but the homophobia was extremely shocking to witness. Ignorance of the past, and also privilege as a white male cishet, yes. But in the circles I frequent as a 34-year-old residing in Philadelphia, homophobia is not the norm. It exists, and it'll take longer than one single generation to root it out completely, but what I'm saying is that in this previous spin through the cycle of pain, in Philadelphia's Philadelphia (and in any other major metropolitan area in the country, of course), circa 1993, homophobia was normal and accepted, so much so that pretty much an entire generation of men were killed by a virus and the general populace didn't seem all that concerned about it one way or the other. When Denzel Washington's Joe Miller says at the beginning of the film that he thinks that all f-words should die, and then lovingly kisses his only mildly annoyed wife, I'm taking that at face value. This is how it was, and I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't taken aback by the ideas that were presented as a truth of yesteryear.

Coming at this film from the perspective of "your typical 2023 Philadelphian" almost does the film's significance a disservice, because it was so much more than just a simple representative of the spirit of one city. Philadelphia is credited as the film successful motion picture film to capture the AIDS epidemic as it really was, and is further credited with helping shift the cultural perception of the epidemic and on the LGBTQ community in general. Wikipedia says that it was one of the first mainstream films to "portray gay people in a positive light." I don't doubt the veracity of that claim, but I am shocked nonetheless. 1993 seems like just yesterday. (A sidenote here might be that it's weird to me to hear people always saying shit like "it feels like things are getting worse every day in America," when there are plenty of metrics that might say things were much, much worse 30 years ago.)

It's never ham-fisted in its positive portrayal, by the way. Tom Hanks is beautifully understated in his role as Andrew Beckett. He never paints himself as some sort of LGBTQ icon or activist. He's in court fighting his former employer because he believes he was treated unfairly, that's all. He would have had every right to view his courtroom battle as symbolic of gay men everywhere fighting for equal rights, but the film succeeds in part because it allows the audience to see it that way without the characters needing to say it. I won't spoil the ending of the film here (just in case you're reading before you've seen the film, you fool!!!), but the final three minutes are stunningly beautiful, as it poignantly celebrates the life of Andrew Beckett, and thus makes the final argument that this was a life worth celebrating.

Maybe the true beauty of this film is that there are multiple lenses that you can view it through—the past and the present and the future, the hyperlocal and the generally local and the global, the character study and the parable and the historical fiction, the perspective of things being better and the perspective of things are still bad just in a different way. In every iteration, though, the message is nearly underlined: life is only worth living if we are kind, even in the face of injustice. It might seem ironic to some that a movie named after the city of Philadelphia would ultimately be about kindness, but those who see irony can fuck right off. Philadelphia is perfectly named.

GRADE: 4.5 pukes out of 5

NEXT TIME: Another story about our city, I guess, who know: The Philadelphia Story.

Album of the Week: Loaded

As always, an open invitation for anyone reading this to send in the End of Year Best Of lists. Puke on Your Birthday will publish it. Doesn't even have to have anything to do with Record Club or music. You have thoughts about 2023? A list or a ranking? Send 'em over. (Though I will be satisfied if you just fill out the end-of-year survey too, if you'd be so kind.)

Record Club:

archives | supplemental

spotify playlist | youtube playlist

choose | writing | map

WEEK 252 — November 26-December 2, 2023

Loaded

by the Velvet Underground

LISTEN:

Spotify | YouTube | Bandcamp | Apple

~~~~~~~~~~

PICKED BY GARY

GARY'S COMMENTS: "This album will either cure what's ailing you or make it a whole lot worse.

I had never heard of the Velvet Underground until Melissa and I watched an episode of Loki. Loki, by the way, is the absolute best Marvel show/movie there is, and you're doing yourself a disservice by not checking it out.

I won't spoil anything about the show, but the song 'Oh! Sweet Nuthin'' is played during the peak of the series. And when I tell you it was the most beautiful mix of cinematography and music that I've ever experienced. This was the band that's been missing from my life for the past 35 years."

~~~~~~~~~~

ALBUM DETAILS

GENRE: Pop rock, psychedelic pop

RELEASED: November 15, 1970

LENGTH: 40:35

TRACKLIST:

1. Who Loves the Sun
   
2. Sweet Jane
3. Rock & Roll
4. Cool It Down
5. New Age
6. Head Held High
7. Lonesome Cowboy Bill
8. I Found a Reason
9. Train Round the Bend
10. Oh! Sweet Nuthin'
    

BONUS TRACKS: The usual caveats when it comes to those Spotify and Apple links—they include extra songs (demos, bonus tracks), and there's nothing I can do about it, apparently. There is also some discrepancy regarding which "version" of "Sweet Jane" and "Rock & Roll" is the "correct" one. You have no choice but to listen to the "full"/"long" versions on streaming services. I encourage you to find the original ones if you want, though.

LYRICS: Genius.com

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ARTIST DETAILS

PRONOUNS: Reed, Yule, and Morrison all he/him/his pronouns. Tucker is she/her/hers, but she only appears here in credit only (she was on maternity leave).

ABOUT: The Velvet Underground. Jeez. I will not be able to tidily sum up this band in this blurb. Formed in 1964 New York, the band consisted originally of Lou Reed (guitar, vocals), Sterling Morrison (guitar, backing vocals), John Cale (bass, viola), and Maureen "Moe" Tucker (drums, and technically didn't join till 1965). They were originally known for integrating rock 'n' roll and avant-garde, though that balance shifted back and forth throughout the band's lifespan, and "known" was basically never "commercially known," at least not until after Velvet Underground disbanded. Andy Warhol was their original manager, taking them on the Exploding Plastic Inevitable tour. Their first album, The Velvet Underground & Nico (with German vocalist Nico), is their most famous (with the pop-art cover with the banana on it), though all of their albums are in present day considered influential. The last two of their four albums features Doug Yule (multi-instrumentalist), who replaced John Cale. Morrison passed away in 1995, and Reed passed away in 2013 (ten years and one month ago). Per Wikipedia: "Their provocative subject matter, musical experiments, and nihilistic attitude was also instrumental in the development of punk rock, new wave and several other genres."

DISCOGRAPHY: Four albums with the lineup that was known as "the Velvet Underground" (most critics ignore 1973's Squeeze, which only featured Doug Yule—PoYB is not "most critics"). The aforementioned The Velvet Underground & Nico was released in 1967. White Light/White Heat in 1968. The self-titled in 1969. Loaded is the fourth and final with the classic lineup, released in 1970. There's also a compilation album called VU from 1985 that featured most of the songs from the vaults.

~~~~~~~~~~

ADDITIONAL INFO

READING SOME SHIT: A reprinting of a 1973 interaction between Lou Reed and Lester Bangs

WATCHING SOME SHIT: a 1993 concert with a few Loaded songs

PREVIOUSLY ON RECORD CLUB: If this was "previously on Puke on Your Birthday" we'd have a lot to talk about. This is RC-exclusive though. I could, however, mention that The Velvet Underground & Nico tribute album that I wrote about a couple years ago, since there are four RC alumni on that tracklist—Fontaines D.C., Andrew Bird, Kurt Vile, and Matt Berninger of the National.

Otherwise, it's a little tough to "make connections" from the Velvet Underground to other artists, since VU's influence is so wide and so prevalent in so many rock 'n' roll bands. You can get specific, if you want. Were the Killers influenced by Velvet Underground? Probably, and you can hear it in the Killers song that features Lou Reed. But in many ways, connections aren't going to be as explicit as that.

So enjoy one of the only truly original rock bands in music history.

~~~~~~~~~~

Happy listening, RC family!
Have a great week!

Exit Survey: Joe on Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band

See the rest of the exit surveys HERE.

 

1. Were you happy with the reviews that were published? How do you feel about your week as Record Club captain?

 

Quantity check: if we're comparing to all Thanksgiving weeks past, then we tied last year's high-water mark of five reviews. 2021: four; 2020: two; 2019: four. This week's expectations were like the complete fucking opposite of last week's. Five reviews is more than I think your typical blogger might expect during a week featuring a major holiday. Four people managed to write a review in the shortened week; Sunny pulled a classic Friday early AM hours review out of his hat, even after a large Thanksgiving meal.

Quality check: no need for one. If you're writing for fun, you're doing more than 99.9% of your American peers are doing. I appreciate the writing. I think the people who write on this blog do an amazing job every time they sit in front of the keyboard. Good work, friends.
 

2. How was the variety of opinions? A wide range, kinda samey, or somewhere in the middle?

Same. There was a tolerance for this music, and a willingness to meet the artist on their own terms instead of imposing your own modern-day musical expectations on a 1970s avant-garde expression of weirdness. Opinions varied, but only starting from that bedrock of understanding. Nate always does a good job of holding something at a remove and appreciating its value from that vantage point ("it's unlistenable...yet" is a good way to find the distance needed). Walter always does a good job of picking out one detail to focus on, and use that as a way to open the third eye (orgasmic indeed). Sunny always wields the question "Why?" like a blade, and doesn't even need the artist to ask the question for him first. And Gary, not gonna lie, I was expecting Gary to go hard on this, but I laughed a lot at the circumstances of his week (not a mean-spirited laughter though, I promise—painful backs are a bitch). It fit so well under the circumstances! Light psychedelics for the hip Beatles-adjacent crowd!

3. Were there any differing opinions that made you view the album in a different light?

Nah, not really. I was more appreciative of the very specific ways that everyone reached pretty much the same conclusion. Not every week of Record Club is going to offer a plethora of opinions. Sometimes an album like this comes along and it ends up that one unifying response is absolutely warranted. But that doesn't make it a boring experience. The beauty is in the margins. I always say that a good blog post features three sections: 1) do you like this, 2) why do you like this, 3) what does liking this say about you. If everyone likes (or dislikes) a thing, then that doesn't ruin the experience, because #3 makes every response unique regardless.

4. Was there anything about this album or this artist that you wished that people would've written about more?

Kinda shocked that there weren't more words spilled about the Beatles in the reviews. Maybe it had something to do with the AotW write-up purposefully not mentioning them, but I'd like to have more faith in the PoYB community than that. I think that it was instead the fact that our writers are well-informed and reasonable and intelligent and knew that Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band had very little to do with the Beatles as an institution. Don't let my hollering against the strawman in my review fool you—I knew that the RC writers are not the type of people who are going to be participating in such moronic bullshittery as "hur dur Yoko broke up the Beatles."

5. How do you feel about your album choice now that the week is over? A success? Any regrets?

It was fine. Who cares? It's the week of Thanksgiving. The best album pick of all time is gonna be met with five reviews this week. I am sincerely glad that I understand Yoko Ono a little bit better now.

6. Any other takeaways from the reviews? Or from this experience in general?

I sincerely hate the fact that there are no spaces around the forward slash in the album's title. I usually forgo the spaces only if the slash is separating two interchangeable words, as opposed to phrases. But I also respect the artist's choices, typically, so if Yoko Ono wants to screw up punctuation, that's her prerogative. I'll abide by it.

7. What is an improvement that Record Club can make that would enhance everyone's experience, either as a captain or as a listener/writer?

 

One of my ideas for the new year is to turn the Sunday Record Club email into a Puke on Your Birthday email. That way I can just include all the other crap that we have going on around here (especially with all the new weekly columns coming up). Still in the planning stages.

Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band, Sunny

The 5 Whys: One of many Toyota Lean Six Sigma tools for diagnosing root cause of problems

Try using the 5 Whys when stuck on addressing the underlying cause of drivers of a situation!

Why do I find YO/POB somewhat off-putting? Maybe because of the odd mishmash of catchy/jazzy rock and experimental vocalization tracks laid over, or entirely, even coming from me, someone who seems to have no issue trying out experimental-type music

Why do I enjoy the backing, POB portion without music issue? The "who" of the POB probably helps, and melody/bass tracks for "Why," western bluesy "Why Not," catchy "Open Your Box" (REDACTED—bonus track, minus one pukes), are pretty good. Dance-along type fun. And then there's the YO portion

Why am I nonplussed by the lead vocals? Wailing is in the house! Crying is in the house! The comparison of screeching to a string instrument, or blaring horn, or whatever is here! Moaning, scratching, reverbing, and straight-up screaming are here! YO/POB are really doing what we love here at PoYB in blurring the noise/music threshold

Why am I seeing the gradient of blur as noise rather music? Because even though the tracks split 50/50 , Sweet Yeshua Ha-Nozri, "AOS" is over seven minutes long. At least "Paper Shoes" has a rhythm thing going on. Surely, SURELY the band, and YO in particular, must be having a real good time just making the music. Even if in my head, cause of pop culture, I imagine YO&Co to be dour pastiches of people, like the Simpsons episode, maybe really they're just having a good time. Maybe I need to think that because

Why else would they produce and release the album? Is it groundbreaking art? Poke-you-in-the-eye dummy pop? Or is it just, Why not?

Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band, Walter

First off, happy Turkey Day RCers! May you enjoy this day however you see fit!

I never listened to a Yoko Ono album before, and never thought I'd wonder what a Yoko Ono orgasm would sound like. And I've been wondering this before the album got to "AOS," which now I know what various Yoko Ono orgasms sound like, thanks! And I don't mean that in a purely sexual way... Yoko's voice is like an instrument that is articulating the orgasm of whatever emotion Yoko wants to emit. While "AOS" traps us, initially, into thinking it's a status quo sexual orgasm, Yoko quickly switches emissions to a psychotic yack that surely freaked me out... Not to mention the return to a more subtle orgasm with some retention of psychosis; exacerbated with the off-tone strings. By the way, could you all hear the coughing in the background of "AOS"? I thought that ruined this song a bit—I was totally tuned into the orgasms.

This review will be short but sweet. I give Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band 11/5 Pukes. That's right, an extra blast of Pukes on Thanksgiving, because I want more Yoko like I want more stuffing, but probably can't hold those volumes down for long!

Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band, Nate

It's unlistenable... yet it's in conversation with some of the more provocative avant-garde pop music that would be released in its wake. It's terrible... yet within it are the bones and ashes that modern pioneers could apply to their own fractured perspectives of what guitars, drums, and voices could produce and be called "pop music." It's miserable... except here's the bulldozer that allowed the highway that connected towns and cities formerly isolated from each other so that ideas and impressions might mix. It sucks... yet here's the bridge to the future whether the future knows it or not. It's become cliché to say that so-and-so taught one to be weird, but it feels right here. Never need to hear this again, need to appreciate it daily.

Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band, Gary

The week started off like any other. I drive Vincent to school in the morning, and the three of us listen to the RC album of the week. Only this time I realized what an acid trip of an album it was going to be, so I decided to finish it later that day. Why? Why? Why?

Cut to 8:00. I've been actually waiting all day for the Eagles to come on. I've been taking CBD gummies for my back for about a week. They have some THC in them, the highest amount they can sell without a card. Tonight I decided to take an entire gummy, and it was a HUGE MISTAKE. By halftime, I was high AF. I couldn't even finish the game. I had to go to bed.

Of course, this is when the rest of Yoko Ono's album just came from within. Why not? Why not? Why not?

Why not? Because you're a 35-year-old man who hasn't smoked pot for fifteen years. And before you knew it I was hearing the lyrics clearer than ever before. Sure, I was watching the Eagles in bed, and there wasn't any music actually playing, but Yoko still had the last laugh.

I'm safely out of my "trip" now, and now I know better to trust some California company. But I have an appreciation for Yoko just flying high 24/7.

Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band, Joe

There's a video that occasionally makes the rounds online that never fails to piss me off whenever I see it pop up. It's a video of "Memphis, Tennessee" performed by Chuck Berry, John Lennon, and Yoko Ono, on The Mike Douglas Show in 1972. The video deviously presents the situation as such: John Lennon is performing a classic Chuck Berry song with Berry himself, one of Lennon's heroes, and during their duet, Yoko Ono "ruins" the song with her screaming, causing Chuck Berry to look "bewildered" at the screaming, and allegedly causing the sound engineer to "cut the mic." The implication is that Yoko Ono is an interloper, unwelcome among these great MEN of ROCK 'N' ROLL.

The video is bullshit, and it's easy to know that it's bullshit if you take off the fucking Beatles rose-colored glasses for a goddamn second and think about it. John Lennon and Yoko Ono were guest-hosting The Mike Douglas Show that entire week, and Chuck Berry knew this when he signed up for the musical guest gig. He would have to have been a fucking moron to not understand what type of music Yoko Ono and John Lennon were making during that time. Two of the most famous people on earth. Any still-shot of Berry looking "shocked" is just clever editing, clearly designed to paint Yoko Ono in a negative light. Fuck out of here with that "Yoko is ruining John's time with his idol" patriarchal bullshit. That's just an extension of the foul racist, sexist shit that rained upon Yoko in the aftermath of the Beatles' demise. As if John Lennon was tricked by his wife. Get fucking real.

As if Chuck Berry's "Memphis, Tennessee" was some fucking paragon of creativity, either. Maybe it was in 1959. But this video (which I won't be linking to, by the way) takes place in 1972. Only thirteen years, sure, but those thirteen years featured a seismic shift in popular music, due to... well, due to John Lennon and the other Beatles. In 1972, "Memphis" was old news, a throwback. The idea of John Lennon singing "Memphis" with Chuck Berry (nine years after the Beatles covered it for the BBC) bores the hell out of me. The idea of Yoko Ono screaming bloody murder into a microphone while John Lennon and Chuck Berry rehash some fucking old chestnut of a boilerplate rock 'n' roll tune? Honestly, that excites me.

Whether you consider it "art" or not isn't really the concern here, at least not for me on the day after Thanksgiving, here in the trenches of the incredibly artless music month known as "the Christmas season." Or maybe it is. I don't know. I do know that the definition of "art" is so subjective that it might as well not even fucking exist. If art is "the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination," then Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band is art—in my opinion. Whether you like it or not is a completely different story. Pam asked me the other day if I could consider something like "AOS" of "Paper Shoes" to be something I would sincerely listen to of my own free will (i.e. outside of the confines of Record Club), and I don't really know. I'm glad I'm listening to it now. I'm interested in this album and why it exists (or why not), and I think it's reasonable to say that that interest lies beyond such base questions as "do you like it?"

I read a AITA post the other day that went something like: "Am I the asshole for throwing this birthday party? I wanted to try 'molecular food pairings' and so that's what I served at my party, and then my friend accidentally texted me instead of my other friend saying 'she's so fucking weird, why would she throw that type of party' and I want to know if I'm the asshole for doing so." C'mon, girl, have some self-respect. Throw the birthday party you want—it's your birthday. And if your friends don't like who you are, then it doesn't make sense that they are your friends, ya know? Doesn't sound like what a "friend" would do.

Okay, sure, 40 minutes of Yoko Ono yelping over some badass Klaus Voormann basslines and proto-punk Ringo tom-pounding is not necessarily everyone's cup of tea. Fine. But if it isn't, and your entire takeaway is "this is WEIRD," then it's like, why the fuck are you even here? The comparison to the AITA thing isn't 1:1 because you don't owe Yoko Ono anything, but not putting knee-jerk reactions aside, and not attempting to see the why here (after the first song literally asks you to do as much), and not at least attempting to find beauty in the bizarre and the weird, but instead just dismissing it outright because of its avant-garde nature, that just seems like a fucking waste of time to me. Make the effort or don't, but there's no reason to take a half-measure and then talk shit. I don't get why that's even a thing.

If I was taking my job as listener seriously—okay, fine, I don't always do that, and I don't mean to come off as pretentious in this "album review," so pretend all the ire is self-directed so you don't get offended—then maybe I'd try to construct a narrative around some of these songs. Understand the why. "Greenfield Morning I Pushed an Empty Baby Carriage All over the City" starts with a George Harrison sitar loop (that alone adds significance to the narrative, since this means that McCartney was the only Beatle not involved in the making of this album), and evolves into a sad downer shuffle beat (heavy on the low notes, that Ringo, really well done here), with some incredibly haunting wailing from our frontwoman. Consider the title, and what that might mean. Consider the fact that Yoko Ono had a history of miscarriages. Consider the fact that Ono was an artist, and had thus had (and has) the unique ability to translate immense pain into art. Now consider why Yoko might be wailing here.

There's screaming all over the album, but it's not just screaming for screaming's sake. That would be artless. There is a purpose to the screaming. There is meaning if you are looking for it.

Not saying you have to, though. Who gives a shit. If you're just looking for catchy tunes to add to the Spotify playlist, then move along. If you're looking for something a little complex and a little obtuse and a little mysterious and a little abrasive but in a good way like pulling out a long crooked beard hair that you missed during yesterday's trim, a pain that feels good in a purposeful way, then maybe here it is. But maybe not. I think you're wrong if you can hear the alien vocal sounds of "Why Not" layered on top of a looped and rock-solid rhythm section and, like, not be stopped in your tracks and be sucked in, but it is what it is.

What I don't like is some fucking asshole Redditor sneakily editing some old video to make it look like art is artless, a sniveling fucking coward hiding behind editing software, pushing an agenda that he has no right to push. I'm not saying you have to like Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band. There are plenty of moments on this album when I am pretty sure that I don't even like it. But it's worth considering. That's all I'm saying. I can totally understand why you'd listen to "Touch Me" and think "WOW that is a little too much for me, I don't know if I like it." But I can never fucking understand, not in a million fucking years, why you would ever listen to a song like "Touch Me" and think such churlish, vulgar thoughts like "this is nothing like the Chuck Berry songs that I love." Of course it isn't, you jag.

It's Thanksgiving. Time to take account of all the things in your life that you're thankful for. There's a lot in my life that I appreciate and am infinitely thankful of, and I don't need to list them all here. The most important thing I'm thankful of, though, at least in this context, is the fact that there is art like Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band out there to make life more interesting. No breadth, no wide appeal, nothing to take home to mother, sure, sure, fine, okay, but there's infinite depth here. No limit to how deep you can go with this fucking thing. That's art, baby. Don't just move along. Stop and stare for a bit. Take it in. What does it mean? And why do you think it means that?

Why? Why not?

GRADE: 3 pukes out of 5