A Year of Blind Spots: Merriweather Post Pavilion

Joe is working through a list of albums that he considers "blind spots," i.e. albums that he's never heard but feels like he should.

There are plenty of big-tent indie rock classic releases from my formative years that I'm not intimately familiar with. But at this point, around 20 years after the mid-point of that time period, any huge, critically acclaimed indie rock album that I'm unfamiliar with still is unfamiliar by choice. At some point, for many of those albums, I kind of gave up. I listened to Merriweather Post Pavilion a few times, shrugged, claimed I would never understand it, and tucked it away for a couple decades. This is a Blind Spot of my own making, based on assumptions I made at a younger age about whether I would be able to understand it or if the efforts weren't worth it.

But as the years fly by, that kind of decision holds less and less weight. We grow and change, we adjust our musical values, we discover that some things aren't as harsh or unpleasant as they might have seemed earlier in life. I couldn't handle spicy food when I was younger, but now I love hot buffalo wings. I'm not going nuclear with the spiciness, but there's a noticeable uptick in tolerance. That's how it goes with music too. I thought Merriweather Post Pavilion was fucking stupid when I was a 20-year-old, just an indecipherable psychedelic mess, a scam pulled on any susceptible indie rock critics worth their salt. The thought is that, at the age of 37, maybe I suddenly find that such an album is tolerable, or maybe even enjoyable. You never know! The quest for new (to me) music is infinite, and in its infinity, it occasionally circles back around.

Animal Collective has always been a weird-ass test case for this theory, because I actually really like their second-most acclaimed album, Strawberry Jam. (Is it their second-most acclaimed? Feels is up there too, quantitatively speaking, and so is Sung Tongs. I am not quite there yet.) This album snuck through somehow. Was it because Strawberry Jam was released the first week of my undergrad experience? That my mind was so totally blown open from so many new experiences that it left a wide gap for some weird-ass neo-psychedelia to sneak in? And that by 2009 my mind had closed and Merriweather Post Pavilion just didn't land the same? Or maybe Strawberry Jam provided everything I'd ever need in the right amount, and MPP was just a little too much?

It's not worth reiterating. It's honestly not that important, or that interesting either. This is how music works. Sometimes it lands and sometimes it doesn't. It's all so fucking arbitrary that it's not the type of thing you can build a blog post around.

The 2026 verdict on Merriweather Post Pavilion? Pretty good! Seems more accessible this time around, definitely more tolerable to my ears that have been conditioned over the years to handle harsher audio terrain. I am able to find the hooks buried amongst the psychedelia in ways that I couldn't contemporaneously. But at the same time, there are definitely more than a couple tracks that don't go anywhere, and don't amount to anything other than white noise (e.g. "Daily Routine").

Even after listening to this album a bunch more times after mild dalliances in the late aughts, and coming to a better understanding of how it ticks, I still think that everything hinges on the one big "hit" of the album, "My Girls." If you're looking at Top Tracks of '09 or whatever, that's the one you see around the top (like Pitchfork, for example). And it's a great song! I see that now. I understand it better in two ways. The first is the lyrical theme of the song is now applicable to my own life—I too don't care about material things but really want to provide a nice life for my wife and daughters. The second is in the repetition—in my older age I have come to the realization of how repetition in music can act as a balm, can bring peace, like, the act of repetition itself is the calming thing. I like how the song is unhinged rhythmically, but still manages to stick the landing of being heartfelt and powerful.

Otherwise, ya know, I'm not totally sold on the album as a whole, but I'm very far removed from the original assessment of "this is fucking ass." I like it, but I just can't find enough to latch onto, especially in its latter half. I think Animal Collective is generally lame, a little too try-hard for my tastes, a little too "out there" to the detriment of the quality of the songwriting. It would probably be more interesting to write about Strawberry Jam and try to explain why that one is the winner for me, as opposed to something like MPP. Because, really, are there are large differences between the two? Probably not. It's just more so timing. But time marches on, and we can adjust the clocks as we see fit.

Listen to the entire album here:

Sonic Youth, Nolan

When I was a freshman in, I thought I'd do a very cool thing and take my art elective right away in an effort to expand my horizons, so I signed myself up for the History of Electronic Music with the hopes and dreams of becoming well-versed in the humble beginnings of the EDM scene. 

Shortly after the opportunity to drop said class, my rose-colored headphones thrown aside, I realized that what I had assumed would be a re-telling of music history in the later twentieth century was rather earlier. The history of electronic music was more aptly the development of electronic music. In that semester, I spent week after week listening to constant noise. From headache-inducing theremin clips to creation of computer haptic sounds, I listened to noise. Distortions, Samples, Beeps, Looping, Scratching, Splicing, all of it. This class encompassed the creation of soundboards, MIDI controllers, the impact of the computer. Not once did we ever discuss artists, or hear music, even remotely recognizable.

Sonic Youth would have been the last lesson in that class, a final note that says, "and look what all of this technology could produce." Walls of noise trying to piece themselves together. And it would have been a blessing. Had the class started day one with Sonic Youth, I'm sure this would have been a welcome listen for me. But all the noise, noise, noise. Not quite so welcoming.

They were influential, and pushed boundaries, and inspired new types of sound and music, but it's just not easy listening. It sounds like Radiohead released studio sessions. Just a bit overwhelming.

In My Place 206

July 25, 2026. 40.0997, -75.02314. See the updated map here. See all the blog posts here.

My entire weekend has been in flux, plans coming together and falling apart due to external factors beyond my control. That's okay. It actually reminds me a little bit of college, when you'd be getting out of your last Friday class and start texting people and you wouldn't really know what the plan was until something sudden crashed onto your or your friend's phone and you or your friend's eyes would light up like, oh shit, here it is, the plan! And then you'd leave and it would be a legendary night. As of this writing, my night is still up in the air. The day was locked in pretty tightly, though. We're leaving for the shore in seven days and the next six days are all booked solid, no time to hit the wholesaler before then, gotta be today, gotta nab those pallets of seltzers and boxes of bags of Doritos. We did the only thing we had to do, and then I moved into the unknown.

The Stone Roses, Joe

I'll tell you this vision I have of listening to The Stone Roses. I can't speak to its veracity, as it's about sixteen years old, the memory, and you know how things like this get. But I was in my room, and I was about to turn 21 years old. The timing of it was coincidental. It's not like I planned to get deeply into this album in honor of finally turning the legal drinking age. But that's how it worked out.

I was spending a lot of time in my bedroom. I'm talking about my childhood bedroom, like at my parents' house. I was commuting to school that year, which really has a way of fucking with your social life. I was five months away from meeting my future wife so romance wasn't really happening in my day-to-day either. I was just hanging out in my bedroom, on the computer, and listening to The Stone Roses.

And I was drinking. Since that's what the occasion called for. Temporarily drinking alone, there in my room, listening to some good music, and getting excited for the days ahead. For whatever reason, the beer of choice that week was Coors Extra Gold. I remember the taste of that beer just like I remember every snare hit and guitar jangle of "She Bangs the Drums." There were three friends coming over in a little bit, maybe 10 PM. It was a Monday night, and Monday hangs don't really happen all that often. But anyone who was my friend and lived close by and had already turned 21 was invited to hang out in my parents' Florida room while we counted the minutes till midnight. Dave (23yo), Nick (22yo), and Andrew R. (21.05yo) were there. We drank the Coors Extra Gold that I had bought earlier that day (a fake ID being a pillar of my pre-21yo days). We listened to the Stone Roses.

We got a little tipsy, and then the four of us walked down to the Rockledge Pub (three blocks away) at around 11:50 PM. It turned midnight as I was sitting on a barstool. I requested to buy a round of beers basically in the same minute I said goodbye to underage drinking forever. The bartender did not card me. But I insisted on pulling out my ID anyway, and making her check the date.

Listened to the Stone Roses on the drive to school the next day. Slept through a few classes, including a religion class with the president of the school, who had a policy that you could be up to one week late on exactly one essay of your choosing each semester. He laughed when I told him why I was taking my extension today. He was a good dude, and plus my reputation as teen-turned-20-something alcoholic proceeded me.

I don't remember every detail of that day. I probably had jazz band practice. I don't think there were Masque winter drama auditions, I'm pretty sure that had happened a couple days prior. But at the end of the day, I made it home, freshened up, and then we went back out to the bar. McNally's this time. Dave and Andrew R. were back too, but instead of Nick (I think he was a chef at the time, so the night before being a Monday was probably ideal for him), Andrew's sister Jen was there. She worked at the Laf with me and Dave. I had a crush on her for a long time, and for just as long, she made it incredibly clear that the feelings were not mutual. We got pretty drunk, or at least I did. I got cut off when I accidentally knocked over a barstool. Which is probably slightly ironic, knowing now all the shenanigans I'd get into at that bar over the ensuing years, and how rarely I was ever cut off.

I remember I got back to my bedroom in the AM hours, and did the thing where I would look at the computer drunk with one eye open, trying to focus on the screen. I know for a fact that the Stone Roses were playing here too. I was loaded, and I went to the Masque Facebook page to check the audition results for String Fever. I did not make the cut. It was the first time I had ever not been casted in a show I tried out for, and it hurt. Plus, I was fucking loaded, so I listened to "Waterfall" and cried a little bit. You take the good with the bad.

I listened to the Stone Roses a lot that year. It wasn't the only think I listened to. It was a rough year of college for me, and a lot of different albums cut grooves into my soul on those long drives to and from campus. But The Stone Roses was one of them, and they were there for me during a somewhat pivotal birthday in my life, the day that I stopped being an underage drinker and started to be a legal adult problem drinker.

I was still listening to them about eighteen months later, after I had met Pam and we fell in love and I graduated La Salle somehow and got my diploma (eventually—they even denied me that on graduation day, the fucking losers), and a few friends from the Honors Program and their significant others were all headed down to Sean E.'s parents' time share, in Virginia, which was pretty far. Probably a little too far for an overnight trip, but what are ya gonna do, we were young. I don't think we listened to the Stone Roses on the way down there, me and Pam. Though I'm sure she was familiar with "She Bangs the Drums" at that point, my starry-eyed romance with her spurring monthly and probably questionable mix CDs with little hearts drawn on the discs.

The "controversy" of that trip—though extremely mild, and not even that in retrospect, but you know how 22-year-olds are—was that my ex-girlfriend was going to be there with her British boyfriend, and that the boyfriend was "uncomfortable" with my presence. Which I thought was pretty rich for a few reasons, mainly that I was going to have my girlfriend there too, and me and my ex had already had the conversation like eight months prior where we buried all hatchets and expressed admiration and joy for each other for having found our respective The Ones, and, most pertinent in my mind, I wasn't even the guy staying at that vacation house that had had sex with my ex the most recently! That was the founder of the Virigina-timeshare feast, Sean E. (sorry buddy), and for some reason British boyfriend didn't seem to have a problem with Sean being there???

There was no drama when we were all actually there under one roof. We drank a bunch of beers and played some drinking games and quite honestly just did things that we probably didn't have to drive six hours each way to do. But we were crowded around the Kings circle at one point, and the music was playing, a shuffle from who knows who (not me, I don't think), and the Stone Roses come on. And I'm like, fuck yeah, I love this album. And British boyfriend's eyes light up and he jumps out of his chair and goes "Oi! Fookin' Stone Roses! Fook yeah brudda!!!" and we high five and giggle and listen to the rest of the song and get drunk.

Took me about six more years to see him again, at a wedding. There was no mention of the Stone Roses. Mostly just pleasantries. There was a moment early on that wedding day when me and Sean E. were walking down to the lobby to buy some beers from the lobby fridge and we ran into British Now-Husband, and said what's up and kept walking. And I remember asking Sean if he was wondering what I was wondering. Whether British Husband was still uncomfortable around us, and at what point ancient hookups expire and are buried in the sands of time. I don't know if there is necessarily one answer to that question. It's probably different for everyone. But it's been almost nine years since that hotel lobby run-in, and the fact that I'm writing about it now in public makes me pretty confident that British Husband doesn't even remember who I am anymore, let alone care anymore.

The funny thing is that these circumstances make it so that I can't listen to The Stone Roses and not think about all the tiny little memories that have attached to the album like barnacles over the years. The process never really ends. Even just a few months ago, we spoke about a movie that portrayed a slightly fictional account of the scene that the Stone Roses were involved in, and the presence of "Fools Gold" on my copy of The Stone Roses finally clicked for me, now understanding the sounds that were emanating from that scene at the time. I listened to this album a lot this week and I thought about that Zoom in the same way I thought about playing Kings in Virginia Beach and walking through the doors to the Rockledge Pub and driving to school all hungover the entire first week of my 21st year.

I have a friend who recently told me that she views music like a little time capsule, that she hears a song and is transported back to another time. I like that. I feel that way sometimes too. I feel it even when I know that the memories are small and unimportant and micro-personal. I don't think Jen remembers that night at McNally's, I don't think Brother Tom remembers that Religion 301 class, I don't think my ex remembers her husband and ex-boyfriend bonding in that briefest moment in time, and I don't even think some of our stoned blogging friends remember being at that 24 Hour Party People Zoom discussion. But I remember it all. I remember it when I listen to the music. And that brings me so much joy.

GRADE: 4.5 pukes out of 5

In My Place 021

January 21, 2026. 40.03959, -75.15477. See the updated map here.

I mean, my god, it's been litigated for fucking death on this fucking blog. The whole college thing. At a certain point it's like, get over it, man. And I have, for the most part. I have. I've written, and that excises so many fucking demons. The writing itself, I mean. But I've written so much. I have nothing else to write. Not about this. My alma mater.

The new arena is nice. The seats are new, and rearranged, like so many folding chairs arranged ever so nicely on the deck of the Titanic. The Explorers won in a nailbiter, as we knew they would when they were up by 30+ at the half. I was happy for my school. I was happy that they have a pep band again. I was happy that we are all working together to make this school's years in hospice as comfortable as possible, before its fed the gas and we say goodbye once and for all.

Thought it would be funny to get a picture of the library on a night that we saw a sports game at the sports arena.

(That's a lie, I just simply forgot to take a picture until we were driving away from the stadium, and it was too late.)

When I see the basketball games in my dreams tonight, I'll still be in the old Tom Gola arena, playing "The Stripper" at the top of the stands, covertly sipping a warm Hurricane 40.

Fragile as Humans, Joe

(the secret is that sometimes I want to write about something that has nothing to do w/ the subject at hand and so I write and hope and pray that somewhere during the writing I am struck with how I can connect the two disparate subjects thematically................ but, like, sorry in advance if it ends up being a stretch anyway)

Our story begins in media res, in a dumpster. Pam and I are walking to somewhere, or from somewhere—that part of the story is unimportant and thus has been lost in the sands of time. There was a dumpster. I want to say in Fairmount but it honestly could have been anywhere. We were walking at night. Hearing rustling coming from a dumpster on a dark quiet lonely night in Philadelphia is not the most absurd sound you could hear, but the normal became the absurd when the source of the rustling revealed itself. It was Professor Stephen Jamison. My college professor of three music electives that were all basically the same class, the perpetually stoned (we all assumed), here, post-graduation, somewhere in the dead of the night, in a dumpster, for reasons never explained. "Professor Jamison?" "Oh, hey Joe, good seeing you." That was the extent of the conversation. I don't think I ever saw him again.

(i guess i'm attempting to do this because emily barker's fragile as humans is a nice little album and i will be honest i have very few thoughts about it beyond that it was nice and that it was pleasant and i liked listening to it in the morning because it mirrored my emotions at that time of day, slow to start, pleasant, floating)

When I talk about my theory that Professor Jamison faked his own death, I often tell the dumpster story, but I don't discuss chronology. I just let people assume that the dumpster story happened after his *alleged* death. Whereas, yeah, of course it happened prior to the date that people started to claim that Professor Jamison had died. I would not be so casual if I actually discovered for real that a man who we all assumed was dead was spotted rooting around in a dumpster. I... don't actually know what I'd do, the situation seems so hypersurreal in my head as I think about it. At the very least, I'd place a very strongly worded phone call to the La Salle Collegian. 

(no thematic relevance has revealed itself so far, but boy oh boy, i'm liking this album a lot, for what it is; i think barker's voice sounds a lot like neko case's, which is a good thing, it gives me a pleasant feeling inside, being familiar enough with her vocal stylings, mostly through her supporting role in the new pornographers, and also from whatever mediocre solo stuff that xpn is foisting upon me that week)

That's how the human mind works. It wants to believe. It wants to take a completely detached anecdote about a dumpster and apply it to a crackpot theory that a man faked his death, because the mind wants to believe that life is fantastical like that, and not banal, banal like death. Even easier to believe if you knew Professor Jamison. The man operated on a completely different wavelength than any other teacher we'd ever met, in both good ways and bad. The man had a way of bending reality. I've never done LSD but I can take a good guess as to what it feels like, simply because I spent so much time in this man's classroom. I found myself copying homework off of the basketball players in one class. Another class 50 straight minutes of a dembow beat set to a laser light show in the dome-like classroom; I don't even think he said a word the whole time. I told him I had to skip class because I was attending a taping of Jerry Springer, and when the episode aired, the whole class received an email summary of the episode. Of all the people I ever knew, Professor Jamison was the most likely to fake his own death. I'm just saying.

(still nothing, but i'll say that this emily barker has a way with words, she has that ability to sing shit that doesn't make sense literally—oooh fuck maybe this is a lead in the hunt for thematic connection—but feels poetic and hits right emotionally, like take for example on the title track the lyrics that go something like 'his cps skin and his moonlight eyes' or something, sorry the lyrics are not actually online yet, but it leads me to first say hmmm what does this mean and then second say hmmm i don't know what it means but it seems right, it feels correct, i know what she means, like on a deeper level, though not surface level, and that's art, baby, that's art)

I presented this story a couple weeks ago at a rare friends gathering on a Monday night, the occasion being a college friend who moved away a while ago but still kept in touch was in town, and we were bullshitting at the bar, and she pokes me about my Professor Jamison theory, because, you should know, my pal spent more time with Professor Jamison than anyone else I know, like somehow he bent reality and made it so that my pal was going with him on field trips to unpaid gigs in which she would sit there for hours and play the djembe while Professor Jamison went h.a.m. on other neo-African instruments and spoke nonsense into the microphone, and so she, of all people I know, is the most willing to believe that Professor Jamison is still alive, she being exposed to the most nuclear radiation, and the half-life being pretty long in this case. After she unraveled the bullshit about the dumpster, the question presented became: Why? Why would Professor Jamison fake his own death? There has to be a reason.

(we're getting close now, i can feel it, but in the meantime, we can talk about how maybe i like this album as a feeling of calmness but that ya know bring out this old chesnut again how i don't necessarily love when albums operate at this speed, how it kinda reminds me of joni mitchell in that it's nice and i get why people love it but it very rarely hits me in the chest like the best music usually does, except, like, by accident, i guess, like the opening track 'with small we start' and how it mirrors a sufjan song that's on the tip of my tongue and would require some light digging that i don't have time for in this parenthetical, but how barker reaches it, she reaches that mystical property that makes it good music, but only for a moment, and by the time you get to the closing track 'acisoma' you're just fucking tired, man, the slowness being too much brah)

Occam's razor states that he was probably embezzling money. The djembe doesn't get played for free, and yet my expert-level djembe-playing pal never saw a fucking dime. So why not embezzling? Wouldn't teaching seven classes per semester and having every class be the same fucking class not be the perfect cover to some nefarious shit? Add this on top of the fact that my pal's friend who was also at the bar the other night had it on good authority that Professor Jamison was openly flouting the idea that he was attracted to teenage girls, not that there was every any proof of anything happening, reality-bending or not, but maybe my pal starts to question it, wonder if she was the Macaulay Culkin to her MJ (Mr. Jamison), denying that there was ever any abuse because she was one of the lucky few who escaped it................ I am NOT presenting any theories of abuse here, absolutely zero proof of anything like that beyond the heresay'd words of a man who was perpetually stoned, I'm more in this case speaking the phenomenon that we want to believe that there was a reason here, a reason for a man to fake his own death, because in this case it would actually make sense, that Professor Jamison would do such a thing, and so the brain questions: why?????

(and i'm listening and I'm wondering why anyone does anything, ya know, like, what is the motivation here with emily barker, why is she doing this????? i tried to read some interviews with her, and received no deep insight, mostly surface-level industry shit, like this is a job, like this is just something she clocks in and out of, résumé: folk singer, minimum wage, and i think this is why, or at least partially why i'm liking the music for the most part but having trouble connecting to it on a deeper level, because i don't know the WHY, 

WHY humans do anything.... it's important to know motivation, or else we're all just out here randomly bouncing off each other like atoms in an electron cloud, random not feeling very good, because our brains need order, need to know the why. It hurts to think that there's no meaning to anything. It hurts to know that we're listening to folk music by a talented but ultimately uninsightful artist. It hurts to know that a strange man passed through our lives and faked his own death and we'll never seen him again and we don't know why. And we can sit there at the bar and bullshit about it, talk about Neko Case and Joni Mitchell and Neo-African Drums 'n' Dance, construct elaborate theories about why it could make sense if you think about it a certain way, but ultimately, when the tab is closed and the lights go back up and we're ushered out the door and friends wander off into the night, we're no closer to the truth than we were before. That hurts, sometimes. But it's just something we're gonna have to accept. And maybe pretend, on our worst days, that the truth is out there, somewhere. Maybe believing it can act as a balm.

(grade 3 pukes out of 5)

Christmas, Joe

You tell the other person to pick the music. That's how it's supposed to go, when you're hooking up. You invite them into your dorm room and you tell them that the iPod is over there and to pick whatever they want, use that click wheel, scroll through the selections and pick something, and then come over here, yup, right over here on the trash-picked pullout couch.

This is the reason, the only reason, I remember the Futureheads. The all-year Christmas lights lit the room as she chose the Futureheads, and we did what millions of young college kids have done before and have since, but this time to the jagged, angular sounds of British mopes yelling in British accents over sharp guitar-led post-punk. There was nothing notable about the music, maybe besides the fact that it wouldn't be your typical hookup music. The juxtaposition is burned into my brain, like so many other tiny memories from that time in my life, many of them tied around the ritual of music (and very few of them, for better or worse, tied around the ritual of sexual intercourse).

Christmas by the Futureheads does nothing for me. They sand down that bracing post-punk edge in order to fall into the rank and file of Christmas music tradition set forth by our ancestors and passed down through generations of B101 FM. That's understandable. I would still say it's unique, certainly, to hear this particular band sing these particular songs. Like, say you are a big Futureheads fanatic, then I can absolutely see the appeal here. You get your favorite band doing some old favorites in a way that literally only the Futureheads can.

But if you're not a fan of the Futureheads, and, say, you randomly copied them from your future blogging friend's then-girlfriend's iTunes onto your iPod and then a hot upperclassman arrives at your dorm room at the end of the hall and chooses a particular band due to a preference based on a personal history you'll never know, never, because you had one night and then things went downhill and then life took a turn and everything worked out and now you wake up seventeen years later and everything is perfect, except for your relationship with that band that's still lingering on your iPod, for reasons that only become apparent when you hear their weird-ass brand of post-punk and think back to that one moment, when everything was bright and new under the all-year Christmas lights of a dorm room long since abandoned, well, then, maybe this isn't the right Christmas album for you.

GRADE: 2.5 pukes out of 5

Tis the Season, Joe

I reread the blog post in preparation for this short review. You know the one I'm talking about. "Jake Shimabukuro – King of the Ukulele" by the blog Chevron Says, and in fact the most recent blog post by Chevron Says, dated June 30, 2009. Chevron Says is a blog listed on the right sidebar of the desktop version of the blog, where it lists all the Friends of the Blog. The sidebar gives you the title of each blog's most recent post. That's why, if you Ctrl+F'd "Jake Shimabukuro" at any time in the past 6016 days, you would've gotten a hit. And so why not listen to the mope's goddamn ukulele Christmas album, is my thinkin'.

My thinking extended beyond that at a certain point. My motivation to expand the blog community waxes and wanes depending on how rough of a week I'm having. I suppose during a time period in my life when the motivation was cresting, I had the idea that Record Club should cover Jake Shimabukuro at some point, and that I'd spend that week gathering as many Collegian alumni as I could to cover it. Guess I overshot the place where I needed to explain what the blog Chevron Says was. (This is assuming you missed the drama back in 2019, when I wrote new blog posts for all the Friends of the Blog sidebar blogs, and ruffled some feathers in the process.) As far as I've ever been able to tell, it's an overflow for stories that didn't fit into the Collegian, which was La Salle's newspaper.

So I would've basically tried to gather any of my old friends and acquaintances that were willing to write a few words about a ukulele album for one week only. I have a tough enough time convincing my closest friends to write album reviews, so I don't know if I would've actually been able to or even willing to make efforts to reach out to acquaintances that I haven't spoken to in fifteen years. Though I'd definitely be able to gather some of those friends closer in my social circles. Some are even on this very blog already (you know who you are, and if you don't, scroll through Chevron Says for some names). Liz wrote the Jake Shimabukuro article that is now preserved in amber, and she's on the email for the blog, though has not yet contributed (shoutout to Liz, who will make a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo in the Futureheads review that publishes one minute from now, that for whatever reason I wrote first... maybe she'll be like Beetlejuice and actually write for this blog if she gets one more mention, like in the Big Freedia review or something). We could pull something off.

But the fear is that I'd put in so much effort to gather long-lost pals for some hobby music club, and then they'd all commit to writing... for this? Some limp-ass corny-ass ukulele music? I don't know, man. I feel like I would be pretty embarrassed if a roughshod Collegian reunion was centered around this fucking shit. Definitely overshot the point where I should have mentioned that Tis the Season is a fucking ballsack. Sorry about that. This is literally my first time listening to this guy, after more than a decade of residence in a far corner of the blog homepage. Sounds like some fucking bullshit you'd hear on a Sandals commercial.

I know that's what some people look for during the holidays. They are comfortable with the commercialized plasticity of capitalist Santa making you gifts at your closest Macy's. And maybe someone with more guts could've pulled off something that went against that, using the ukulele as a weapon even. But Shimabukuro can't do it. You know when I knew? When he covered "Mele Kalikimaka." Did he have to do it? He didn't. He shouldn't have. Too easy. Fucking coward.

The only good thing about this album is how we arrived there, which is the reason I spent 70% of this short album review fleshing out the backstory. It's important to know where we are coming from. It's important that I reread the blog post that's been linked on our homepage for all this time. Like, did you know that Liz's Shimabukuro review compares him to Eric Hutchinson? That's some deep RC lore right there. So now I can hear this ukulele music and immediately know that at least two people are going to appreciate it on some level—Gary (who chose Hutchinson for RC) and Rachel C. (who wrote one of my favorite reviews for Hutchinson), two people who definitely didn't write for Chevron Says.

And so, the story continues unravel out, on and on. We are perpetuating it here, in this space on the internet, this blog, connecting other blogs and other friends and all kinds of music, both cool and lame. This is not me being a Scrooge and bah-humbugging Jake Shimabukuro. I'm just explaining the Why is great detail, because that shit is important. I don't like this music, but who the fuck am I? No, this is me in George Bailey mode. My friends are important to me, and I want them to find joy, and so why not gather them all around me as we all sing "Auld Lang Syne" (which is thankfully NOT covered by the ukulele man here).

GRADE: 1.5 pukes out of 5

RC@5: Plastic Hearts by Miley Cyrus

Record Club covered this album five years ago. Joe gave it another listen this week. Here are some thoughts.

Plastic Hearts

Miley Cyrus

Week 96: November 29-December 5, 2020

[Curtains. We find a disheveled older-30-something male on the floor of some abandoned flophouse. You can tell he's been here before. He looks around, slumps his shoulders as if resigned to his fate, and starts slowly climbing the rickety stairs. He arrives at a small door, opens it, enters a bathroom filled with cobwebs, and closes the door behind him.]

JOE: It's me again.

[We see yet again that on the back of the bathroom door hangs the same damn poster. Much time has passed, as it always does, and the edges of the poster are curling a worse than they were before.]

JOE: I just wanted to say goodbye, if that's okay with you.

[He hits the light switch, and a flickering light illuminates the room, finally showing the audience that it's the infamous poster of Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus, back-to-back, always the same, always the same.]

JOE: I think the RC@5 column has run its course.

MILEY: ...

JOE: I know. I have been saying all this time that I wanted to make it to Week 100 before wrapping it, but I'm trying to get in the habit of not forcing myself to do unnecessary tasks.

MILEY: ...

JOE: Well, it's that, but it's also more, like, a mental thing. There was a time when I said I was going to write a short blog post for five-year-anniversary RC albums, and because I told myself I was going to do it—

MILEY: ...

JOE: Exactly. But then it's like, for who? Who am I doing this for? At a certain point, it collapses and becomes for too few number of people, and the work doesn't balance with the reward.

MILEY: ...

JOE: I'll still mention them in the Sunday write-up, maybe even give a two-sentence blurb about it or something. But I have to shave time off somewhere in my life, and the act of creating a new blog post and supplemental Microsoft Paint fuckery is something that I'm deciding now is just not necessary.

MILEY: ...

JOE: Sure, I listened to it.

MILEY: ...

JOE: It was fine? As fine as I remembered it. But what I'm saying is that I think it's a matter of not saying as much as I've been saying. Very rarely do I have something specific to say about RC itself, and what I have to say about the album could be condensed to "did I overrate it or underrate it at the time?"

MILEY: ...

JOE: Your album was overrated, sorry to say.

MILEY: ...

JOE: Yeah, that was definitely the reason I overrated it. Sometimes I just get excited about the writing, and that excitement is confused for excitement about the music.

MILEY: ...

JOE: Well, there's been two, and I will say that I liked neither one as much as I liked Plastic Hearts. But even then, I think that I was a little too willing to believe that you were breaking the mold, when really you were just doing a really competent pastiche.

MILEY: ...

JOE: Sure, I'll grant you that. It's what the best pop stars are good at.

MILEY: ...

JOE: Okay, but I don't really remember. Let's see... it was the only time that Nolan chose an album, I suppose it would've been cool to reach back out and see if he's ever relistened to this album. Eight reviews total, which I gotta believe is the draw of a big name like this.

MILEY: ...

JOE: I think three others have been in this bathroom besides me, so I don't think there's a correlation, no.

MILEY: ...

JOE: You're right, they could visit, if they wanted to. Since I visit you so often myself, in my dreams and in my album reviews. But I don't think they want to. They aren't sick in the head.

MILEY: ...

JOE: True.

MILEY: ...

JOE: I don't know, but I don't think re-reviewing old albums is going to move the needle at all. It hasn't so far.

MILEY: ...

JOE: Yup, Nate added some thoughts every once in a while. Sunny was in here once or twice. I forget who else. I'm not gonna scroll through all 96 of 'em.

MILEY: ...

JOE: Because I don't have time! There's that "time" discussion again. Yes, yes, it's not a literal marker of time, but more an indication about mental energy. I don't have the mental energy to complete as many blog posts as I used to. So we're gonna end RC@5 here, unless I have something CRAZY to talk about, in which case I'll make an exception later on.

MILEY: ...

JOE: There are many paths toward redemption.

MILEY: ...

JOE: No, for the albums. I'm already redeemed, motherfucker.

MILEY: ...

JOE: I don't know. You'll probably still be around, haunting the outer frames of the blog. Just because this blog post ends doesn't mean you do. We've learned this before. Anything can return at any time. You are a comic book hero! You can never die! Even if your death is shown! You will rise as the story requires!

MILEY: ...

JOE: I really do need to go now.

MILEY: ...

JOE: No, sorry.

[Curtains drop, and then rise again on another scene. This time, it's a happily married couple in bed. It's nighttime now, and all is still. These kids have clearly worked out some shit over the past five years, and don't squabble about petty shit anymore.]

PAM: We need to talk.

JOE: About the Woodstock house blogging bit? Yeah, I know, I used it again.

PAM: You weren't actually there, right?

JOE: Nah, you know the deal. Artistic license, and all that.

PAM: Do you wish you were back there?

JOE: On my worst days. But today wasn't my worst day. Not by a long shot.

PAM: That's good, babe. I get worried about you sometimes.

JOE: I appreciate it. But I'll be okay. Banging out a quick one-sided dialogue scene between fake me and a poster of Miley Cyrus during my lunch break actually brought a smile to my face. It helps.

PAM: Awesome! Well listen, you gotta do self-care, okay? Remember that.

JOE: Thanks babe. Love you.

PAM: I love you too! Get some sleep now. Try not to snore.

JOE: Yo!

[The snoring begins as the curtain drops again.]

[Miley Cyrus walks in front of the closed curtain and sits on a three-legged stool, facing the audience.]

MILEY: Thanks for joining us in the Dan Rodden Theater for this very special presentation of Joe's Worst Attempt to Put a Ribbon and Bow on the End of a Blog Column. The producer wanted me to stress that none of this happened, that it's all bullshit, all of it, just like most of what you read here on this blog. But I'm real. I'm Miley Cyrus. And my music is going to be here, whether anyone is writing about it or not. I'm okay with that. Dear audience, are you?

[Curtains close one final time.]

Man Alive, Joe

Okay, so the lyric is "who's gonna sit on my face when I'm gone," right? But nah, c'mon, that can't be it... can it? Everything Everything, after ten or fifteen listens through Man Alive, does not seem like the type of band that would be singing about a sex act like face-sitting. But you never know! So it was finally time to visit Genius.com. Except I had the thought at the moment when the 67 bus was passing under an awning at the exit of Frankford Terminal that for some reason always cuts the service to my work phone, and I had a few extra moments to reflect on the face-sitting of it all...

...and I wondered whether I was doing this right. Not just this review, I'm talking about all of it. Listening to music, processing it, categorizing it, filtering my emotions through it, "reviewing" it as a means of expressing my human experience. I listen to a lot of music, but, like, what does "listen" even mean?

I've trained my brain to process and capture a lot of different music over the course of the day and the week and the year, but no brain can actually retain the sheer amount of unique music that goes in my ears at any given point in time. I keep lists of music that I've "listened to" recently, but am I able to recall any of those tunes three months later? Do I know the titles of the songs three weeks later? Am I able to hum along in my head three days later? Do any of the lyrics actually mean anything to me three hours later? I get self-conscious when I talk about how much music I listen to, because you could very reasonably make the case that I don't actually listen to any of it. Case in point, I'm walking away from Man Alive assuming that these dudes are singing about eating ass, and that can't possibly be the truth.

I keep thinking about a quote from a rapper, I can't remember who said it (maybe Vince Staples?), and I can't find the quote now, but it was something along the lines of "Everybody's got a Top Five, but no one really listens to the music anymore." I don't completely agree with the statement but I agree with the sentiment. There are those who don't really care all the much about music, the majority, and they love keeping the vibes on in background and let it fade out of consciousness. And then there are those who care deeply about music, the minority, we the few, many of whom are on this music blog or other music blogs, and we're out here searching for that next hit of dopamine, moving through music at a voracious pace, and, yeah, sure, making some Top Fives, and maybe not letting all of it sink it, not really.

Back in the day, at the dawn of my new life with a love for music and all its many wonders, I didn't have any money, and I wasn't motivated to do a whole lot of in-person p2p sharing (a.k.a. burning CDs), so I'd get maybe a dozen albums a year into my possession. And that was enough! I pored over all of it. I let them sink into my bones, my fucking soul. There are albums from this time that I know front to back and then to the front again, every fucking inch. That doesn't really happen too often anymore. No time for it. (And, just as an aside, there are definitely some people out there who agree with me but for the opposite reasons. "I'm not connecting with any of the new music" they say, but only because they aren't exploring at all, they are content to lean on the music of their youth and delude themselves into thinking that nothing else in the present day is comparable and that that's somehow the music's fault. That's different, and yet, the horseshoe bends toward the middle anyway, reaching toward that same empty void.)

Unless I make space for it, of course. But that requires an initial intrigue, a quick spark at the beginning, and not every album has that. But some do. Some have those moments that make me want to keep coming back, over and over, the repetition allowing the essence of the music to sink in and make a permanent mark. Maybe you mishear a lyric about making someone sit on your face, and you're curious. And so for the first time in a really long time, you check out the lyrics, for the dual purposes of both finding out the truth and also making space for the occasional emotional impact of the words and the tunes and the art.

The lyrics for "Suffragette Suffragette," by the way, are: "Who's gonna sit on your fence when I'm gone?" So I'm wrong. But that's not the important thing. Reading the lyrics and the notations on Genius opens up a whole can, you know how it goes. Into the rabbit hole, etc. I'm told that I am not the only person to mishear these lyrics (maybe I won't even be the only person today on this blog). Not only that, but the lyric is purposefully ambiguous, and that it's a song about being too cowardly to stand up for feminism, the author having just broke up with someone and feeling like a coward because he had sat "on the fence" on certain issues pertaining to sex and gender and the patriarchy, when really he should've stood by his partner, backed her up, treated her better. The "sit your face" misinterpretation could be speaking to power dynamics, how certain types of men have emotional breakdowns when women express any sort of agency in their lives, their sex lives specifically. And, oh, wow, "Suffragette Suffragette," the single—Everything Everything's very first—came out on December 1, 2008, my 20th birthday, the morning I was waking up in the cold dark hungover realization that things were probably over with my ex, the first woman who ever sat on my face (taking artistic liberties here), because I had found out maybe one hour before midnight the night before that she had hooked up with my roommate, and I got all self-righteous and self-piteous instead of seeing this for what it really was, my being uncomfortable with my former female counterpart expressing sexual agency without me / opposed to me. There was no sudden realization the morning of my birthday, because I was still sitting on the fence. That realization would come piecemeal over the subsequent seventeen years, before and after the roommate ended up as the officiant in my wedding, the meaning coming sometimes in fits and sometimes in spurts, like now, like right fucking now, when I'm reading these lyrics of "Suffragette Suffragette" and seeing with wide eyes what date it dropped as a single and knowing exactly what happened on that day, coincidentally but not really, and finally, truly understanding what happened back then, on that day, in that point in my life, a song that I got confused about because I too love getting face-sat, but then that quirk leading to a true understanding of the song and also a true understanding about life, my past, the universe, and all the human experience contained within it.

I will admit now that this feeling didn't last. It's not spread out over the course of the album. Man Alive has some severe high points and a breadth of boring low points. I think that's okay, ultimately. The albums that mean something as an artistic whole are few and far between, and very rarely do they pass through the halls of this little music club we've had brewing since 3716 days after my 20th birthday. And it takes work to get there too, and we're busy, sometimes we have obligations and sometimes the great hammer of life takes out its frustration on us and sometimes we're simply passing through the phone service deadzone of the Frankford Terminal of life. But it's nice when you can connect in tiny little ways to the art that's presented to you, ain't it?

It doesn't even have to mean anything, it can just be catchy, and that catchiness can be meaningful like a disease is meaningful—senseless but impactful in tangible ways. The chorus on "Photoshop Handsome," for instance. Jonathan Higgs' falsetto goes nuts on this one, and I sincerely had no idea what in the world he was squealing about. Something about being called a commie??? I'm looking up the lyrics, and there's no sudden realization this time. Some thoughts about digital manipulation that are rote in 2025. But still, man, I crave that chorus. Musically speaking, it gets to me. It digs into me. It means something to me, on a much deeper level than the words on the page.

Better than that, there's "Schoolin'." I'm not even worried about the lyrics on this one. The Genius hyperlink remains blue. The words don't matter. It's the whistling. Those five notes, the first three the same and the fourth one lower and the fifth at a slightly higher pitch than the first three. Those notes, repeated over and over this week. I found myself whistling the pattern at dull moments throughout the day. Doing the dishes, plates on the rack, towel-drying pots, whistling the hook to "Schoolin'."

I'm thinking beyond the lows at this point. At least four songs are boring dreck, including the last two, which is a severe sequencing problem. "NASA Is on Your Side" sounds like Coldplay, which is a felony around these parts. Without any hooks worthy of remembering forever, a song can easily fall into the trap of sounding like lukewarm In Rainbows (talking about "Qwerty Fingers" here). The best moments on Man Alive make the rest of the moments fade away and cease to matter. Who gives a fuck that "Leave the Engine Room" doesn't go anywhere? We just heard the whistling! Life is good!

The hook on "Schoolin'," the chorus on "Photoshop Handsome," the wrong-by-design lyrics and overall gestalt of "Suffragette Suffragette"—these are the moments that I will take with me into the next life (i.e. the next week of Record Club, and the next week of listening to new-to-me albums). These are the moments that mean something to me now. These are the only moments that earn Everything Everything that lofty name of theirs. These are the moments that make me appreciate the best that music has to offer, and remind me of the time in my life when I could sit here and soak in these moments for a lot longer.

I like where I'm at right now, and I like my habits when it comes to music. I experience highs in new, fresh ways constantly. This is the way I want to live my life. I just feel guilty for all the detritus I leave behind. Sometimes. Not always. Other times, I grab a few lifelong treasures, and hold on tight, and gleefully forget about the rest of the junk in the dust kicked up from the back wheel of my motorcycle, riding off into the distance, whistling the same five notes, over and over. Fuck, dude, I love this shit.

GRADE: 3.5 pukes out of 5

Never Seen It #243: The Doors

You're all a bunch of fuckin' slaves! How long you think it's gonna last? How long are you gonna let them push you around? How long you gonna let 'em watch 400 movies they've never seen before? I'll tell you this: I'm gonna get my kicks before the whole shit blog goes up in flames!

The Doors

1991

Oliver Stone

I'm writing this before all the reviews for The Doors come in, but I'm going out on a limb (a tree limb, because "I don't like doors" ha ha ha) to say that Jim Morrison is going to be the main focus of many of the reviews. And why not? He was (and still is, from the afterlife) a larger-than-life figure, more myth than man. He's not the reason the Doors were good—that can be attributed to the actual musicians in the band—but he was the reason they were important. So it certainly makes sense that a movie called The Doors, about the band the Doors, would mostly be about Jim Morrison as well.

It's pretty well-known, mostly due to the post-movie reactions from the living members of the Doors at the time, that The Doors is inaccurate. We pretty clearly have a case here in which a real-life figure (Jim Morrison) portrayed himself as fascinating enough to base a movie on, but whose real life wasn't quite interesting enough to make a good movie out of. And so the filmmakers fib. Which is fine, I don't mind that. I'm not looking for historical accuracy in a music biopic. I'm not claiming that I know more about the Doors than I did prior to watching this movie. It's just entertainment, man. I'm not holding the bag for the Morrison estate, I honestly couldn't give less of a fuck about Morrison's legacy.

That's what's interesting though about this movie, though. Not whether it was accurate or not accurate, but more so that the film clearly had an immense power in shaping what we see as Morrison's legacy today. It's shaping truth, which is kinda fucked up, but only a little bit (since, ya know, who fucking cares). The film portrays Jim Morrison as a insane drunken asshole. Ray Manzarek stated that, while Morrison certainly had issues with alcoholism, he was also a sensitive and funny guy. But the film portrays him as a guy with a bottle all the time, a fucking prick and a louse. Now you tell me what the majority of people on this planet earth picture when they think about Jim Morrison in 2025. Whose portrayal are they going off of, testimony from band members, or Val Kilmer's performance in a major motion picture?

I'm not saying that this is the responsibility of the film, to portray anything or anybody "accurately." Its only responsibility is to provide entertainment (with bonus points if it manages to say something important). If The Doors was entertaining while it fabricated entire scenes out of thin air, then so be it. I'll watch it. I just think it's a little frustrating that this movie was well-known enough that it managed to skew an entire generation's perspective of a guy who's been dead for over fifty years now, and it thus becomes something that the listener has to grapple with as they attempt to listen to any Doors album, featuring the voice of Jim Morrison (as opposed to the voice of Val Kilmer).

Putting all that to the side, there were some flaws here that occasionally made The Doors tough to watch. The first and most glaring was that it indulged in all your classic movie biopic clichés. Were they clichés in 1991? I don't know. But they sure as shit are now. The tortured artist, everyone around him saying "you're going too far!" The part where someone in the band says "I've been working on something" and everyone else's eyes get wide because they know it's a hit and then they smash-cut to the band performing it on stage. It's all here! And I still hate it (especially since I'm watching it after I watched Walk Hard)!

There was something going on with the camera that I also didn't like. This is something that I wouldn't have noticed that some directors do if I had forced myself to watch 500 movies in the past five years, but I'm at the point where I'm like "I don't like that camera movement," which feels pretentious but hopefully well-earned! Here it is. Whenever Morrison was drunk or high, and the movie wanted to underline his inebriation, the camera would slowly rotate a little bit, moving toward a canted angle, back and forth, like a ship rocking on a stormy sea. And, like a ship, the movement made me seasick whenever it happened. I understand why it happened, but I also think it underlined the point a little too much. Like, we get it, the dude is fucking tripping or hammered, let Kilmer's performance carry that shit.

Another thing that rankled me, but just a little bit, was that there were a couple scenes in which they had Morrison speak about Respecting the Music and Being a True Artiste. I forget the exact words, but I noticed them because they were ideas that I usually find myself espousing. Yes, it's true! Music really is the most important thing! But my issue was that, in Morrison's words during these scenes, they felt empty. Nothing else about the rest of the movie indicated that Jim Morrison cared all that much about anything besides drinking and fucking. And yet, we've already said that this wasn't accurate, that Morrison the poet who cared deeply about his work was probably a truer picture of the man than a dipshit with a whisky bottle glued to his hand. What I'm saying is that you can't portray him like that and then also have him talk about the importance of art. It doesn't ring true.

Oh well. It was still entertaining. I enjoyed watching it, despite these flaws, and despite the fact that the "historical inaccuracies" tab on Wikipedia is over 1200 words long. The irony is, I think I actually would've liked an accurate depiction of Jim Morrison as his friends and family knew him. I was thinking about this regarding the Ed Sullivan incident. In the movie, some producer tells the band not to say the lyric "girl we couldn't get much higher" on the telecast, and in response, Jim Morrison screams the line while looking directly into the camera, in an act of defiance. But that didn't actually happen. He did sing the banned lyric, but he sang it normally, and claimed later that he was so nervous to be on Ed Sullivan that he forgot about the lyric on accident. 

If they had shown it that way, then I would've found room to relate to him. In my junior year of college, I was in a play that had my character saying "fuck" a bunch of times, but La Salle made us take the words out. During the final performance, I put them back in (after Hannah put her one censored word back in too). There was a disciplinary meeting in which we had to explain that it was just the pressure of putting on a show that made us forget about the censorship. I believe Hannah when she says that's the case for her; I don't know if you should give me the same benefit of the doubt. Still, it was shockingly easy to convince a group of college administrators that I was a terrible actor. Was it just as easy for Jim Morrison to claim the same? I want to know.

But I probably will never see that question answered in a major motion picture about the Doors, because that's not what this movie is about. It's not about the nuance of the Jim Morrison character. It's loud and sloppy and inaccurate and entertaining as hell, but I can't relate to any of it. Maybe that's the point. We can't relate to legends, that's what makes them legends in the first place. Just be weary when you learn about that legend from a movie!

GRADE: 3 pukes out of 5

NEXT TIME: Group F finally gets a crack at it, and they've chosen Nashville.

Song of the Day: "Lazy Bones"

A column about music, and about how the music informs our lives. Today's author is Joe. See the previous songs HERE.

"Lazy Bones"

WITCH

from Lazy Bones!!

1975

The vast majority of what I contributed to the college school newspaper consisted of hackneyed inside jokes in the form of horoscopes and pathetically sparse crossword puzzles. But I also wrote some other bullshit on occasion. Most of it has already been reprinted on the pages of this blog. I was surprised that that summer list hadn't made the leap yet, so I'm glad I got that on here a couple weeks ago. After I wrote that blog post, I was scrolling through my own personal Collegian archives, just to see if there was anything left in the tank besides long-forgotten sudokus. Not really, no. Though I did find this little piece in the Commentary Magazine section of a March 2010 issue, in which me and two other writers contributed pieces "wax nostalgic about the pop culture of [our] childhoods." I wrote about Crazy Bones.

In preparation for writing this article, I had to do something I had been planning on doing for quite some time now. So, up to the dusty attic I went. I waded my way through the Christmas decorations, pushed aside old school projects, and tried to avoid the boxes of old musty clothing. Finally, I found it, buried under spider webs three inches thick. A bright pink box covered with stickers.

Before me lies my Crazy Bones collection.

Oh, how the memories came flooding back. Those countless summer afternoons spent playing Crazy Bone games. Those many recesses, much to my fourth-grade teacher's dismay, trading Bones with classmates. Those trips to Zany Brainy, pretty much the only place to sell Crazy Bones, and the feeling of excitement after finally getting a rare Crazy Bone that seemed so elusive.

Ah! But I'm getting ahead of myself, because I feel like some of the readers out there may not have a clue what I'm talking about. And I regret having to explain it here, in a college newspaper, because now it seems so damn silly, all the weeks and months spent obsessing over such a weird little toy.

Crazy Bones were little plastic figurines about one inch tall. There were hundreds of different shapes and models, each with a cute little name. Their appeal lay in playing fun games with them (the myriad of shapes lent to making each game interesting), but also in collecting all the different Bones out there (this preceded the "Gotta Catch 'Em All" Pokémon phrase). So there was a certain thrill in getting a rare Crazy Bone.

Since I'm no longer an innocent fourth-grader, but a bitter wrinkled old man, I can see now how much of a rip-off the Crazy Bones were. A pack of four Bones cost $2. They probably cost about five cents to make. Add in the cost of all the accessories you could buy (Crazy Bone Coffin to store your Bones, for example), and I probably spent hundreds of dollars on the plastic toys. What a way to spend my paper route money, right?

And yet, I hold no regrets, no grudges. It may not have been money well-spent, but it wasn't all for naught. I sincerely enjoyed the times I spent playing with and collecting my Crazy Bones. It brought me and my friends together for a common interest, it fueled my desire to "fight the man" when our teacher banned them from the classroom, and it gave me a way to occupy time during those years before puberty made me care about girls more than toys.

Man, those were some good times. I wish I could go back, just for one day. I wish I didn't have to worry about deadlines and assignments and all this nonsense that I deal with in college. I wish I could just go back to fourth grade, sit around all day, and play with my Crazy Bones.

It's funny that I ran across this (rather pointless) piece, because in my blog ideas memo pad on my phone, I have the following note: "collections as a kid, why it resonated w/me." I don't remember writing this. My theory is that I wrote it on the way from my own bed that I was kicked out of to my daughter's bed that was recently vacated when she got up in the middle of the night to sleep in my spot and kick me out, and I probably was having a dream about one of my collections that I had as a kid, and in my 90%-asleep stupor, I wrote down a note because it seemed like a good idea for a blog post at the time. I don't know if it is, even with the last-minute Collegian archive partially rescuing the otherwise pointless blog post idea. Here we are. Collections—they resonated with me as a kid, apparently!

I did have a handful of collections back then, I guess pre-high school. There was Crazy Bones, as you already read. And, by the way, I think the whole "we played games with Crazy Bones" idea is farfetched. I guess we occasionally did, but really, they were just trinkets to collect and show off. Which is stupid and definitely a waste of money, and indicative of the '90s consumerism hellscape that I grew up in, and so I think I subconsciously trumped up the idea of playing games with these things, just to cut the cringe a little bit.

I also collected keychains. That was pretty cool and harmless. It gave me a good excuse to buy something small in gift shops wherever we were traveling. It also made other people feel good that they could go into gift shops on their own vacations and buy something for Joey back home. I remember having a long chain of like 200 different keychains, and each of them had a story. They, like the Crazy Bones, went dormant for a couple decades in the parents' attic, and I think it was around 2018 or so that they took them out and asked me to decide what to do with them (I was then and still am a minimalist, and had no problem throwing that shit out). Imagine my surprise to see a keychain from the trump plaza in Atlantic City, chilling there this whole time. Yikes. Pretty gross to collect a keychain from a guy who rapes children, but I didn't know this when I was a kid myself!

I collected Pez for a little bit. Not much to say about that one. I collected Pogs, but that was back in kindergarten, so I didn't really have much agency with the collection at that point, it was mostly just my parents buying me Pogs. My pappy tried to get me into coin collecting at one point, but it didn't stick; a box containing some of his own coin collection has been sitting in my basement since he died, and I don't know why I keep putting off cashing that shit in. There was also a rather embarrassing spell when I obsessively attempting to complete the collection of Star Wars: Episode I Pepsi cans, 24 in all, an obsession that included using binoculars to scope out trash on the beaches of North Wildwood. (That last one has been on my mind recently, after seeing ads for Coke cans featuring Star Wars characters from whatever dumb TV show is out now.)

Would I say that I "collect" anything now? Not technically, but only if we're assuming that the "anything" is referring to physical objects. I cringe at the idea of buying bullshit just to "add it to the collection." This probably has a lot to do with my psychological issues revolving around finances during these middle years of my life, something I'd rather not go into during this particular blog post, lest it goes way off the rails. 

But I do still collect, and I'm talking about music. At a certain point in high school, music became my only collection. At that time, it was physical CDs that I was collecting. I spent three years attached to my Discman. Then I got an iPod, and there were a few more years of in-between time when I was collecting CDs but ripping them onto the computer and uploading the music onto my iPod. And then, about twelve years ago, I learned out to download music without any pesky corporate middlemen, and it was off to the races.

If it's a collection still, then it's a useful collection. I'm not just downloading albums to put them on a shelf. I'm collecting art. I'm appreciating the art in real time. I lovingly keep my collection organized, and I revisit each piece of the collection often. I write about my collection all the time, and show pieces of my collection off to others, recommending that they too collect this or that piece. There are no physical objects anymore, unless you consider the sound to be a physical object, just one you cannot hold and can only interpret in the ear canals. 

I really do get a sense of satisfaction from the "collection" aspect of it, though. That's true. It's always been true, clearly. But why? That's the question that my dream self tasked me with answering in a blog post at one point, and I'm not really sure I have an answer yet. Something about ownership, I think. Comfort of knowing that something you love is always with you in some way. Also a nifty way to keep memories organized, assuming that you are attaching memories to each object and then organizing said objects. A collection as a way of being sentimental, something like that.

I keep telling my parents to throw the Crazy Bones out, though, whenever they ask me what I want to do with them. I'm not that sentimental.

Song of the Day: "Final Summer"

A column about music, and about how the music informs our lives. Today's author is Joe. See the previous songs HERE.

"Final Summer"

Cloud Nothings

from Final Summer

2024

The process of selecting songs for playlists has been on my mind a lot this year, mostly due to Monday Morning Mixtape. I have so many songs in my head, but none of them are organized up there. I can't just open up a manila folder in my brain and pull out the perfect music for any occasion. My mind just doesn't worth that way. This is probably the most unrealistic part of High Fidelity. If Jack Black asked me what my top five favorite songs about death (a Laura's dad tribute) were, I would have no fucking clue. I couldn't name even one. It's not that I've never heard a song about death, or that I've never loved a song about death. Of course I have. It's just that I would have to think it over, away from icy expectant stare of Todd Louiso.

I just need help. That's why the easiest mixtapes to compile are the ones where I can do a simple keyword search in iTunes. But that only works if that's what the theme of the mixtape calls for. There's a difference between "songs about dogs" and "songs with the word 'dog' in the title." The former is gonna be a better mixtape, but tougher to think off the top of your head about songs that fit. The latter just involves sticking the word "dog" in the search bar.

I made a Top Ten list for the Collegian back in April 2009, and its title was the misnomer of "Summer Songs." There are plenty of songs about summer, and that's what the Top Ten list called for. I, being the lazy sophomore that I was, clearly just typed the word "summer" into the iTunes search, and took the songs that popped up. No apologies needed for misleading our large readership, since the intro indicates that these are indeed songs with "summer" in the title. But still, I could've done better than this. If only I had a more functional brain. Check it out.

Top 10 list

Summer Songs

by Joe K***

Collegian Editor
April 30, 2009

When preparing for this list about songs with "summer" in their names, I noticed a common theme running throughout each song. Songs about summer are all ideological. They are about the freedom and the good times and the infinite fun that will no doubt occur during those sweltering months (and no, Kid Rock's "All Summer Long" is not included).

It brought me a certain joy to listen to these songs today, as I sit here imprisoned by deadlines and essays. In one week, I'll be free. It will be summer.

10. "Girls in Their Summer Clothes" by Bruce Springsteen

What list of summer songs would be complete without the Boss? Many of his songs perfectly capture the spirit of the season, like "Born to Run" or "Thunder Road." This track is one of his newer songs, in which he pines for those women on the beach. Any guy my age can relate.

9. "Summer" by Sum 41

Remember those awkward adolescent punk anthems? This is the summer version of that. Sum 41 tells us that summer is "far beyond your reach," but we can make it!

8. "Summer Babe (Winter Version)" by Pavement

The song follows the common summer theme, but tells it in a different way. Written about a girl who is the singer's "summer babe," [sic] but she's just not the same in the winter. Nothing is, friend.

7. "Summer Teeth" by Wilco

Those boys in Wilco sure know how to craft a good pop song. This is no different. Summer is "just a dream he keeps having, but it doesn't seem to mean anything." Sure feels that way sometimes.

6. "Summer" by Modest Mouse

Though the song is dated (1996! Wow!), Modest Mouse still sums up my summer mantra after all these years: "Go to a party! Dance! Dance and go crazy!"

5. "Summer in the City" by the Lovin' Spoonful

Ok, someone had to point out the bad side of summer. It's so darn hot! Especially during the day on those city sidewalks. Here's the solution: "At night it's a different world, despite the heat it'll be all right." There you have it. Those amazing summer nights will get you through those brutally warm days.

4. "Summertime" by Will Smith

Will Smith is cool, right? He's a great rapper, right? Yeah, okay, not so much. But to hell with it, this song is great for those lazy summer days. "Time to sit back and unwind."

3. "Boys of Summer" by Don Henly [sic]

Cheesy '80s synthesizers can't keep me from loving this song and all the nostalgia it creates. It's melancholy the way it looks back and misses those summers of old. When I'm old and gray like Don Henly [sic], I hope I can look back at the summers of my youth and feel the same way.

2. "Summer Nights" by the cast of Grease

I'm not sure there's much that can be said about this classic song about summer lovin'. I can only appreciate this song because we all want to meet that special someone on the beach and enjoy those great summer nights.

1. "Constructive Summer" by the Hold Steady

This is my number one summer song for many reasons. First, it's a powerful rock anthem that only the Hold Steady could pull off. Secondly, these guys don't sing about sitting back and relaxing. They want to make big plans this summer. That's exactly what I do. I spend all spring talking and planning my summer. Thirdly, it's realistic. Yes, you ahve all these big plans, but how many are actually going to happen? Who knows? All I know is that no matter how constructive we are, we will all just hopefully end up relaxing.

Not a terrible list, per se, but definitely one constricted by the limitations of a very light iPod. The addition of a deep cut Sum 41 song at #9 gives away the game—my iPod probably only had six songs with "summer" in the titles at the time, and I stretched it to ten with a newer Bruce song and three well-known hit songs ("Summer in the City" and "Boys of Summer" and "Summertime") that any old schmo could pull out of thin air like I did.

Unsurprisingly, there have been a few more songs released in the intermittent sixteen years since this Top Ten list was published. My iPod now counts over 100 songs with the winning keyword in the title. Here is a new list of ten "Summer Songs," one that purposefully excludes all those in the original 2009 list. (An honorable mention was used as today's Song of the Day.) Plus a YouTube playlist with all 21 songs from today. Enjoy!



10. "Summer of '69" by Bryan Adams — LOL at the last list skipping this one.

9. "Cold in the Summer" by Young Gov — Scrape that demo-sounding bullshit from the bottom of side eight of a quadruple Young Guv release and you're getting music better than most shit pumped through pop radio these days.

8. "Summer and the Magic Trick" by the Sidekicks — It's been long enough that they don't sound like Band of Horses to me anymore.

7. "Summer Days" by Langhorne Slim — Trying to sell more music to Coca-Cola commercials, I see.

6. "Jogging Gorgeous Summer" by Islands — I can count on one hand the number of songs that I legitimately love that feature steel drums. I might even be able to count on one finger???

5. "End of the Summer" by Joyce Manor — With an album cover that says: "summers are for partying with Frances Quinlan."

4. "That Summer, at Home I Had Become the Invisible Boy" by the Twilight Sad — That's me, this summer. The kids ignore me 99% of the time. I am the invisible boy!

3. "Summer Girl" by HAIM — In the winter, they are three sisters, making music. In the summer, they are Lou Reed.

2. "You're So Last Summer" by Taking Back Sunday — Maybe the true nostalgia is for the emo we lost along the way.

1. "Summer in the City" by Regina Spektor — The lyrics "summer in the city / cleavage, cleavage, cleavage" run through my head at least once per day for three months straight, every single year for the rest of my life.

Freewave Lucifer f<ck f^ck f>ck, Sam

Sometimes, the thing is not the thing. As a couple, you may have a heated exchange about a minor disagreement right in front of you—the best way to drain pasta; did someone remember to pack X snack in Little Y's lunch; taking out the trash. The blip takes on unexpected and heightened charges if a more major problem is simmering in the background—money, family, work, etc. It's easy to lash out when you are confident in your answer ("You said you were going to do Z but didn't") as opposed to an unsolvable quandary (you don't have the money; you dislike someone in your partner's family; one person's job is taking priority over the other). 

My past experience with Of Montreal possesses the context of the above paragraph, but fortunately not with a partner. 

Without going into all the gory details (as many on here already know them), but a good friend of mine in college entered a lying spiral he struggled to pull himself out of. We were very close friends, roommates, newspaper and theater buddies, and spent much time together. As the lying grew out of control, our relationship strained. His problems (and the perceived impact on me) felt existential.

What didn't feel existential was his insistence that I would like Of Montreal. He and Nate (if I recall) got at me one night in the spirit of sharing an artist they thought I would enjoy. I had listened to them before, and was lukewarm-to-fine with them. But my friend (and, to a lesser extent, the Nate Dogg) pushed me to justify my reasons. And I really couldn't articulate my musical critique. What I could put words around was my annoyance at my friend for pushing me on this matter when he was skipping his classes and lying about some bogus internship. I don't remember the extent of my snapping, but I reacted much larger than the situation warranted.

Bringing me to today's album, while I don't have a seething rage boiling below the surface that would explain negativity, I still don't really like this band. Seems like unconnected art pop that's less coherent than bad David Bowie. My favorite song on my three listens through the album is the eighth song. On this seven-song record, number eight would be whatever algorithm jam Spotify lined up next for me after this album continued. Twice I thought it was an Of Montreal song that finally could sink my teeth into. Instead, it was just Hop Along.

Anyway, I'm not pushing myself to articulate why. I just don't like it. Fucking go to class already.