IF YOU'RE A FAN OF THE ALBUQUERQUE ALT-EMO-THRASH-METAL SCENE...
yeah, but brendan fraser, he covered a reagan youth song.
incidentally, jesse pinkman = david arquette (pictured above)?
5/22/09
THROW STEPHEN OFF THE BRIDGE
i have this foggy memory, from the early 90s, of sook-yin lee playing this pastels video on the wedge, which was at the time a nightly half hour block of "alternative" music videos. i think they it aired at 11:00 or 11:30. back then, i would watch it for the nirvana videos, maybe even if i'm really honest with myself the soundgarden and nine inch nails videos (but absolutely not the candlebox and stone temple pilot videos), but every now and then they would play some of this slacker rock stuff that blew my mind but was a bit beyond my understanding. i always thought to myself, "i'll like this when i'm older." when you're thirteen and weaned on the processed vocals and loud/soft/loud dynamic of nirvana and the smashing pumpkins, it's hard to really hear what's going on in the fuzzy mumbly eric's trip or early pavement songs that would sometimes air between "jeremy" and "creep," or even in that one liz phair video they used to play all the time.
but the one i really remember is this pastels video. i don't know why, but i always had this thought in the back of my mind that if i ever saw a pastels c.d. to buy it on sight. of course, i went the entire rest of the decade without ever seeing a pastels c.d. in any record store. i never did hear the song again until the spring of 2000, my freshman year of college, when i typed "pastels" in my napster search box and there was their singles collection, a truckload of troubles. i didn't even know which of the songs on the album i had heard all those year ago — in fact, i didn't until last week, when i typed "pastels" into the search box on youtube — but what a fantastic bunch of songs. "crawl babies" is my favourite song in the world right now.
5/18/09
SOMETHING'S GOTTA COME UP IN THIS WORLD, IN THIS WORLD YEAH
but how's this going to go down in the popular imagination? belgrade, 5. october, 2000 or rwanda, april - july, 1994?
5/05/09
FORGIVE ME FOR RUNNING OFF TO FIND THE ONE THING I HAD TO DO
while cleaning up after dinner, the weirdest thing popped into my head. it's been ten years since i outgrew that nonsense. that's significant because, this fall, it'll have been ten years since i was a college freshman, which, in turn, is significant because the university asked me this week to teach a course on punk rock in the fall. punk rock 101, as it were. wow, ten years. and yet, now and then, these emo-leaning middle-american singer-songwriters that i could never relate to in the first place still charm me in a strange way:
more later.
5/04/09
THE PAINS OF BEING SO FUCKING AFFECTED
last week, the pains of being pure at heart came to town. this morning, i was singing along to the album and i said to alex, "you know, it's kind of fun to sing in that fake english accent that kip affects." and she said, "you always sing with a fake english accent." i'm completely shocked and dumbfounded. is this like when green day first became popular and someone asked billie about his fake english accent and he was like, "what fake english accent?" anyone else want to weigh in on this?
anyway, here's an entire show's worth of video of kip's band. they were really good — and much tighter than i'd imagined.
