Chart Championship Week 11 RESULTS now with REVEALS

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

epicharmus's marks are in - has he delivered a nail-biting finish?

01. Rufus Wainwright - "The Origin Of Love". The singer is Rufus Wainwright, the band I'm betting is the Wallflowers, the song I don't know, but it's a ponderous riff on Aristophanes' speech in Plato's Symposium. The song confronts my guff about music resolving the problems of man-man alienation head-on: once we were all physically joined to our soulmates, but when mankind got too powerful, Zeus split everyone right down the middle. Love happens when we rediscover our other half, and sex -- contra Public Enemy, pro Elton John -- is when the pieces finally fit. Problem is that the Gods are ready to alienate all from all *again* if we get too powerful: "they'll cut us down on one foot, looking through one eye." This is totally not my personal theology at all -- I believe in my heart of hearts that God *wants* us returned to the fold, God *wants* us as wholes and not parts. Anyway the reeeaaal problem is that I really can't cotton to Wainright as a singer; his singing aspires to a perpetual state of common cold, and adopts rockstar mannerisms better left undead, audibly puffing his cigarette at the very beginning, desperately wishing it meant something. 9th Place - LOSE - poptasticuk succumbs to defeat.

02. The Scorpions - "Robot Man": Here the contradictions of heavy metal and new wave are resolved via the mediating power of Queen/Sparks weirdness. It's a taut (which is a joke, see, because it's about a rubber man ha ha) and even admirable synthesis, but maybe if the lyrics weren't social realist cliches garbled by someone's limited command of English, or if they were even *more* garbled, then there'd be more to hook me. WAIT A MINUTE. This isn't the Scorpions, is it? The Scorpions? 8th Place - LOSE - workhorse foreign imports can't cut the mustard for byebyepride

03. Barbara Morgenstern - "Nichts Muss": Oh person who selected this track, while I'm not totally crazy about this one, you know me better than I know myself. You know what I should've said I loved? PIANOS. OMG. The more reverberant the better. A few simple chord changes and I start swooning. Oh faded grandiloquence! Oh slow decay of tones! In pianos, we hear the very evanescence of all experience! Solo piano (and small ensemble) pieces are generally the only classical music I don't have to study to respond to emotionally; much of the resentment I feel about the overuse of pianos in sensitive-person pop-blues (Five for Fighting's "Superman" is one particularly egregious example) comes from my gut feeling that someone's trivializing holy musical territory you just do not fuck with by adding asshole mewling. So this track doesn't need much to fix my attention, and I even stay with when it goes to darker, more urgent places, but it goes on too long. There's a few too many moments in the second half where I think "OK, you can change now. OK, go on. C'mon, you can do it, I'm ready. Hmph." 7th Place - LOSE - agonising defeat ends lockedintheatti's hopes this season.

04. Fox - "Only You Can": I WAS GONNA SAY SOMETHING ABOUT J-POP! J-pop is one of the mysterious exceptions to my "no squeaky girls" policy. I think, I dunno, I must chalk j-pop vocal girlishness up to mere genre convention, something so so so background it really ceases to have any real bearing to womankind's subordinate status in society or whatever and is just done because, well, that's what you do if you want to make a j-pop song. (Martin is likely to disagree, and be right, too.) The sproingy country-glam hearkens back to the bubblegum from the handful of years in the mid-seventies when I first became a conscious TV-watching individual, so it tickles the deepest recesses of my memory whether I like it or not. This is not necessarily a positive association: I remember being really grossed out by the weirdo rockarolla of Captain Kool and the Kongs, who probably churned out things exactly like this, far as I know or care. (I also remember being choked with awe and emotion when I was maybe 4 or 5 hearing the Brady Bunch's "Time to Change" -- which also sorta sounds like this -- on my mom's car radio as we were driving onto the Seaford-Oyster Bay Expressway.) Plus I get an inarticulate sense of disgust when encountering musicians (and other cultural producers) who *try* to trigger (negative or positive) associations of the childhood ephemera we share: it just seems...too easy, too lazy, too crass, maybe too irreverent. But why do I like *this*? I think it's the seething sounds the singer makes, a bit of sudden rhythmic emphasis in singing that just might otherwise roll by. 2nd Place - WIN - thumping win not enough for brave skillextric side.

05. Kenickie - "Come Out 2Nite (Peel Session Version)": The voice is errr. Huh, well, the music is. Erm. OK! So the lyrics, then! Yes, the lyrics! They ooze carpe diem but are undermined by the polite tentativeness of everything else. Or is what I'm hearing esp. in the woman's voice not hesitation but every moment, every word in her narrative? Whatever, it outstays its welcome very quickly. 10th Place - LOSE - blue_russian ends season on a bum note.

06. Aavikko – “P-Piste”: Judging by the sounds, I'd say this was recorded as the seventies were turning into the eighties, a moment when a heartfelt easy-listening homage still had the electrical charge of the unlikely. And while it is a tad noir compared to the likes of Martin Denny or Percy Faith, it is heartfelt, as a mockery of the genre would not be so delicate in its approach, nor have the smarts to reference the Moonlight Sonata, which I think shows an intuitive understanding of EL's demiclassical aspirations and inspirations. (Of course, it could be a cover of some sort.) Outside of "Firecracker," I have no first-hand experience with Yellow Magic Orchestra but based on what I know of their aesthetic, it seems like something they'd do. (And, I'd argue, it could've only been made by people who maybe grew up with rock but could maintain a certain sense of irony about it -- people for whom rock wasn't an indigenous music, or people who made a conscious effort to treat rock *as if* it was a non-indigenous music, post-punkers like Stewart Moxham for example.) I am beguiled by this track but I'd be more beguiled by it in long-form or part of an album. 4th Place - WIN - smooth performance keeps jeff_worrell in title hunt.

07. Staple Singers - "Born In Bethlehem": Martin Skidmore's, I'm betting. OK, it's 11:30 at night in New York City and I have to write about this and Track 9 and I want to go to bed. So I'll say this: a haunted murk illuminated only by the singers' faith. Sounds quite a *lot* like the Stones' "I Just Want to See His Face" (or the other way around, obviously). 5th Place - WIN - last minute strike keeps koganbot in pole position.

08. Adult vs Solvent – “Flexidisc (Remix)”: "You know what you need: the flexi-disc review." I so should remix this so it says something to me about my life: "You know what you need: four gin and tonics." And then add some weedy strings and piano. Something, anything to liven up the abject sterility here. 11th Place - LOSE - fans in despair as piratemoggy stays rooted to foot of table.

09. Cheb Khaled - "Hada Raykoum": Is this rai? I am shamefully ignorant about rai. The synth+accordian drones on and on in a thrilling way that instantly reminds me of Harold Budd's fucking unbelievable *Oak of the Golden Dreams*, the closest music has ever come to putting me in a trance state, but...I find myself resisting this. Maybe the vocals and the skinny beats break any spell the drone might weave. 6th Place - DRAW - solid end-of-term draw for martinskidmore's cosmopolitan team.

10. My Chemical Romance - "Teenagers": A readymade teenpop snarl anthem as catchy as "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini" with a singer as cute as Aaron Carter (and cuter than Rob Thomas) and an us vs. them scenario that a good half-century of culture have prepared us to thoroughly understand after exposure to only a handful of cues. And thoroughly misunderstand, maybe. The chorus goes "They say 'All teenagers scare the living shit of me.'" Who's "they"? Well, the non-teenage, right? Meaning adults, specifically adults in positions of authority (parents, teachers, cops, doctors, etc.) as established in the first verse: "they" are gonna watch your every move, force you into the role of "citizen" and "cog in the murder machine," ply you with pyschopharmaceuticals, etc. BUT. In the second verse, the "they" are "the boys and the girls in the clique" who'll ensure "you're never gonna fit in much, kid" -- that is to say, the "they" sound like other teenagers. The next round of the chorus is the same as before, though, which implies that the clique-teens also hate and fear all teenagers, too, including themselves. So the whole first verse could be read as being about the clique-monsters, who enforce cultural mores with fear, who are so afraid of other teens they sleep with guns, who ply recreational drugs on other kids to screw them up. OK, another weird ambiguity: the second half of the chorus can equally mean (where x=a darkening of your clothes and y=a violent pose): "Do x or y, and maybe they'll leave *you* alone, but they won't leave *me* alone" or "Do x or y, and maybe they'll leave you alone, but I *won't* do x or y" or "Do x or y, and maybe *they* will leave you alone, but *I* won't." The first reading says the singer is a victim, too; the second, a rebel; the third, a bully, just like the adults and the clique-monsters. Another hole: what's the thing under your shirt that'll make them pay? A gun? Or your heart? And there other things I could point to. Are these ambiguities deliberate or sloppy? Hard to say. But every way you cut into this song, there are many thin and flaky layers of extraordinary paranoia and cynicism about what it means to be a teen, both in the eyes of adults and the eyes of teens, and it's quite possible the song lets no one of the hook, not even the singer. Gross, compelling. 3rd Place - WIN - infov0re guarantees survival in fine style.

11. Bobbie Gentry - "Fancy": Is this the track Jeff Worrell worried I might've heard before? If so, lucky him. I can easily identify this song -- Bobbie Gentry's "Fancy" -- but I've never actually heard it before. I think. I passively absorbed a *lot* of hit country music from about the wimp/outlaw era to some point past the urban cowboy era (OK, let's say '75 to '82), and while I don't remember WHN ever playing many older songs (this would've been six years out of my listening window) they could've played this, so maybe I heard it then, I don't know, though I certainly do remember hearing Gentry's great "Ode to Billie Joe" any number of times. "Fancy" takes the "Billie Joe" form but adds just a wee little bit of decoration to make those bare bones into Dusty soul. Except it's actually a *lot* of different kinds of decoration (background singers, horns, organ, one fucking awesome drummer, plus Gentry lets loose a little more vocally here) applied economically. It has beauty in it, but I can't completely divorce myself from the fucked-up-ed-ness of the story: the narrator's *mom* whores her *daughter* (yeah, an of-age one, as Gentry casually mentions, but still) not just to feed the family (which Fancy loses soon enough anyway) but to help the kid "move uptown" and yet Gentry presents the latter as something of an anti-hero rather than...well, "starved to death with dignity" isn't necessarily fucking great, either, I know. 1st Place - WIN - lovely play by lisa_go_blind keeps title race open as final week looms.

Thanks to Mike for some epic reviews! Reveals at a more civilized hour today, and standings too!

For week 12, I am still waiting for a bunch of tracks - four in the Pop Prem and six in the Chart Champ, I think. Get them in! (Even if you've nothing to play for.)

Comments

Re: WTF with the Rubber man!!

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

Well, I liked it. These guys are immediatlely recognizable, and somehow have turned into one of those groups that sound like putting on an favorite old sweater.