"Chills"
Acetone
from Cindy
1993
I've told you about Record Club. Est. in February 2019, this ongoing weekly feature rotates through a different album each week. An album is announced on Sunday, and anyone who wishes to listen together (separately) can do so throughout the week, a ritual that culminates in the publishing of individual reviews on Friday morning. It's a discussion, in pieces, fractures of a discussion that can be put together and look eventually like a mosaic of a conversation about one single piece of musical art, the album. And then the following week, we do it all over again, with a different album from a different artist, over and over and over until who knows when.
I haven't told you about the other Record Club though. Well, okay, it's not called "Record Club," it's called "Catalog Club." Basically the same thing though. Kind of. Not really. The focus is still on music, on an album, one album per week. Except this one is more of a monthly rotation. Meaning that each month, Catalog Club focuses on a different artist, and each week for that month, Catalog Club covers a different album from that artist's discography (or catalog, I guess).
I haven't told you about Catalog Club yet because it's not my club, I'm just one member of it. Catalog Club is run by Steven Hyden, who is a professional music critic. You may have seen his work around the internet. You may also recognize his name from Puke on Your Birthday. He is not aware that this blog exists, but this blog has written about Steven Hyden a few times. I jokingly refer to him as "the foil" or "the antagonist" of Puke on Your Birthday sometimes, and I think that's still true, even though, were I to ever meet Hyden in an elevator and express these thoughts to him, he'd absolutely be the Don Draper to my Michael Ginsberg.
More importantly, he's really good at what he does, and that is being an effective music critic. He's self-aware that being a music critic is like the dumbest job there is, but he's really good at it anyway, and it's fun thinking about the points that he makes, which is good for me, because I think music criticism is dumb and fun too. We're just fucking around here, in this game. Not to quote Michael Ginsberg directly right after sarcastically calling myself that, but I actually do feel bad for Steven Hyden sometimes. He's the one getting paid for his takes, which creates a lot of pressure. He had to create a Substack and charge people for it just to put food on the table for his kids. I'm just typing dumb rock 'n' roll takes on the internet for free, which means I'm free of stress too.
I finally paid for a subscription to his newsletter on Substack, Evil Speakers, just because, I dunno, I don't really spend any money on any other pleasures in my life, and so why not give this schlub sixty bucks for a year's worth of music criticism. And then there's the access to Catalog Club, which is inferior to Record Club I'd argue, and yet still, I figured it might be fun to give it a try.
I waited about four months to join Catalog Club, so I missed months for Lucinda Williams, Grizzly Bear, Ramones, and Al Green. I joined right around the announcement of the fifth artist covered in Catalog Club, with—and this is a coincidence—this artist being the first artist in Catalog Club that I had never heard of before the announcement. Have you ever heard of Acetone? I thought it was particularly interesting to go through the ritual of Catalog Club under these circumstances: a completely blank slate, no preconceived notions about the artist whatsoever. So for the past four weeks, I've downloaded a new (to me) Acetone album, and dutifully listened along with the rest of Catalog Club, and participated in the discussion. I wasn't the only one who had never heard of Acetone before this.
I'm not here on Puke on Your Birthday to rehash a discussion on another blog. If you want to chill with us over on Evil Speakers and talk shop, hit me up, I have free monthly trials to give out if you're interested. It's definitely a different experience than what you'll find on Puke. Mainly because you're chatting with people you don't know in real life. You're chatting too with Steve Hyden, who, despite what I might make it seem on here, I also do not know in real life, and never will. I think it's fun to go onto his blog and pretend like I do know him, however. This is what I did during Week 1 of Catalog Club Featuring Acetone.
If you'll note from the song embedded above, called "Chills," a standout from Acetone's first album Cindy, the song directly quotes Grease's "You're the One That I Want." This was particularly good timing for me, listening to this song after a couple weeks of rewatching Grease and then watching Travolta in Face/Off and Newton-John in Xanadu. I was primed to get the reference. Not only that, but Steve Hyden's internet avatar has been, for as long as I could remember, a picture of John Travolta (from Pulp Fiction, I think?). So I thought for sure that Hyden was going to give a shoutout to the Grease quote on this album. When he didn't, I popped into the comments, wondering what his thoughts were about it.
And he got all snarky with me! Which I understand. You go through all this trouble to put together a thorough essay (in audio form for Catalog Club—don't you dare call this a podcast though, for my own mental health), and some little random snot rag dude hops in and tries calling you out for not mentioning something extremely unimportant. That's annoying, to have to shift the discussion to something that you didn't feel could possibly be important enough to mention in the first place. He's like "what the fuck do you want me to say about it?" or something like that. Which is fair, and also not. That's not how we do things at Puke, you know? If someone told me that there was, I dunno, a Waking Life quote in the Slayyyter album that I thought was fun but not revelatory, then I would LOVE to chat with someone who thought it was the centerpiece of the album.
It did actually end up spawning a mini-discussion, mainly about how the quote can either be seen as sincere appreciation or ironic dismissiveness, and some people more familiar with what the term "L.A. music" might mean chimed in and claimed it was ironic, that Acetone were poking light fun at anyone who don't hold ironic detachment for entertainment that spawns from this ironically detached city. I think that this adds to the art, this discussion!
To Steve Hyden's credit—and this is why people pay him for this shit—he briefly shouted out Grease in the second Acetone installment of Catalog Club. This was absolutely designed to be a button on the conversation that was had during the first week, and also to show acknowledgement that he himself, Steve Hyden, is an active part of Catalog Club, that he hears what the people are saying in the comments, and that he appreciates the conversation and considers it important, despite his initial skepticism about this particular subject. To say it more succinctly: Puke on Your Birthday is shaping what Evil Speakers is talking about, and that feels good. Worth the paltry sum it takes to have access to this additional arm of a lifelong hobby.
The Grease nonsense aside, it's also nice to participate in something somewhat passively, to be a follower and not a leader. With PoYB, there's always this dark thought in the back of my mind that whispers at me something like "you're doing all this work, and no one cares." Which I know is not true, I have some friends who read and some friends who participate and some friends who care. But the voice gets to be pretty loud sometimes, and does a good job at discouraging me from being truly happy about these millions of words that I write. With Evil Speakers and Catalog Club, I don't hear the voice, because it's not my problem. If I want to listen for 35 minutes to Steve Hyden's droll voice drone on about how he is somehow connecting this very third-Velvet-Underground-album-sounding third Acetone album to the Rolling Stones' Tattoo You yet again, then I can just listen. I have no responsibility here. I can just listen and enjoy, and find enjoyment too in the idea that other people whom I'll never meet are listening to the same slightly obscure slowcore rock album that I am.
There's a difference, I think, between engaging with art and creating art yourself, and I've always been more comfortable with the latter than the former. Or, like, maybe more comfortable with adding the latter to the former (and of course, it's a stretch to begin with to consider what we do here on this blog "creating art," but stay with me). It's one thing to listen to an album (or watch a movie, or follow a TV show, or read a book), it's another thing to put yourself out there and tell someone what you think of it, and what it means to you, and what your value system looks like, and, like, expose something about yourself, be vulnerable. Yes, that's art. Yes, that takes a lot out of you. It's nice to just listen to Acetone and then see what Steve Hyden thinks about it.
Bottom line here is that we need Record Club to outlast Catalog Club. I am trying to stay healthy and outlive Steven Hyden to ensure that this happens.
Postscript: the next month of Catalog Club is four Rolling Stones albums in the 1980s, which means we are already looking at Catalog Club x Record Club crossover. I'll check back in to let you know how it goes.
No comments:
Post a Comment