Wanderin' Blues

My pal Pangborn just came back from St. Petersburg, Aaron is bursting with crazy tales of Morocco, cousin Conor is walkabout in the Land of Oz, and here I am, stuck at work, updating my livejournal. Feh. Oh well, at least I have a reasonable excuse to haul out my old photos of the Cliffs of Moher again.

I'm going to Boston in a week for my little sister's birthday, but I could use a real vacation.

Charlie Parker - A Night in Tunisia (take 5)

Dion - The Wanderer

Dean Martin - On a Slow Boat to China (live at the Sands, 1964)

Willie Nelson - The City of New Orleans

X - Los Angeles

Flatt & Scruggs - Little Girl in Tennessee

Noah Howard - New York Subway

That last post was just a test.

Inaugural post! I've already got a music blog on Livejournal, but since pretty much all of the good music blogs I read are on Blogspot and not Livejournal, I figured it was high time I moved over here myself. I'm going to maintain the old mp3 livejournal, and use this as a secondary platform. I'd move all my old posts over here, but I haven't figured out how to backdate stuff yet...or if it's even possible.

I guess I've got to get busy thinking of some new posts now.

1873

1873

Central Park in NYC completed.

Barbed wire invented.

Both Coors and Heinekin breweries founded.

Born: Ford Madox Ford, Willa Cather, W.C. Handy.

Died: Sheridan Le Fanu, John Stuart Mill.

Johannes Brahms - Variations on a Theme by Haydn

1867

1867

Nebraska!

Missionary Thomas Baker killed and eaten in Viti Levu, Fiji

Baudelaire drops dead in a maison de santé in Paris; he is not eaten.

Born: Frank Lloyd Wright, Marie Curie, Luigi Pirandello (I saw his house once; it was a dump).

Bedrich Smetana - Dalibor
I. Slyšels to, príteli, tam v nebes kuru? (Oh, Didst Thou Hear It, Friend, In Heaven's Regions?)
II. Tot tretí noc (It's The Third Night)

In the Mood for Hating: A Field Guide to Blogosphere Hype

Hey, are you totally fucking sick of hearing about Gnarls Barkley yet? I sure am.

If you read music blogs at all, you know it's been impossible to avoid hearing about this band (or 'band'), weeks and months before any actual record of theirs came out. Most of the initial hype centered around DJ Dangermouse doing a 'soul' record, which made me think, okay, hype aside that might be all right. His "Gray Album" was good, and "Dangerdoom" was okay. I never really had an opinion on Cee-lo, the singer, other than to think that his old band, Goodie Mob, always kinda blew--but I realize I'm prejudiced because I think that all rap from the South inherently sucks grits.

Then their big single, "Crazy", got major press in the UK for going #1 just on internet downloads, and apparently now there's some peculiarly English mass-hysteria for this band? (An alternate title for this post was: The UK Has Gone Fucking Insane.)

Unfortunately, now that I've actually heard the record, I can safely say it's as soulful as a ziplock baggie full of dog farts. Really the most startling thing about it is that it's so hideously bland, so preternaturally underwhelming. It's not even like I hate this record. How can you? There's nothing there to hate. But that doesn't stop eight million bloggers from posting about it like it's the second coming.

CubikMusik and Clever Titles Are So Last Summer are just two of the unnumbered legions of blogs (just this week alone!) who posted GB's Top-of-the-Pops smash "Crazy" (or here). CubikMusik describes this slab of punishing mediocrity as a "classic". CTASLS calls it the "craziest psychadelic soul jam that Prince couldn't even come up with". Both are smoking crack rock.

The Laws Have Changed posted GB's cover of that Violent Femmes song, "Gone Daddy Gone". And even if not too many other blogs have posted it, they all seem to agree it's doubleplus awesome that GB picked that song. Hello! It's a boring cover of a song that really isn't any good in the first place!

Silence is a Rhythm Too posted this track, "The Last Time", and at least admits that the hype on this group is totally absurd. In case you're wondering, this song blows too.

Bushwick is Beautiful (which has an interesting title, but that's about it) calls Gnarls Barkley "the Outkast of 2006", which pretty much sums up why I was sick of them before I ever heard a single song. He does, to be fair, post "Smiley Faces", the sole song on the album that is even remotely catchy.

1866

1866

First robbery by Jesse James.

Calaveras skull hoax!

Born: Wassily Kandinsky, H.G. Wells, Butch Cassidy.

Root beer invented.

Edvard Grieg - Intermezzo for cello & piano in A minor, EG 115

Songs occupying my mind like the Nazis occupied Poland

The Bermudas - Chu Sen Ling

This is an obscure girl-group gem I copped from the always interesting Crud Crud over at blogspot. On first spin, I thought this song was okay, a little annoying maybe, not to mention the fake-Asian cadences and Engrish grammar and the ahh-so, Number-One-Son-ness of it all (though I am inclined to wink indulgently at that sort of thing in pop music).

But the more I hear it, the sweeter it gets. Elemental stuff: girl loves boy, girl loses boy, girl cries. And it's catchy as fuck. Even if you don't dig it that much at first, I think it's the textbook definition of a song that will grow on you. As Crud Crud points out, the credit is mostly due the writer, Rickie Page, one of the secret movers and shakers of the 1960s music scene in Los Angeles. Download and enjoy.


Lucky Millinder & His Orchestra - Silent George (vocal by Myra Johnson)

No real story behind this one. I've just got Lucius Venable (aka "Lucky") Millinder on the brain since posted a song (not this one) this morning. This one's from a comp of 'raunchy' R&B, and I guess this is reasonably raunchy, okay. I assign this song a raunch level of...six!


Wanda Jackson - Funnel of Love

You want raunch? Listen to this motherfucking song. It's not the words; there's nothing raunchy about the lyrics at all. It's in Jackson's delivery, a raw rockabilly snarl of undiluted sex and, as she pulls back, romantic sweetness and confusion. I've been obsessing over this one for near two weeks now, and I still can't stop listening to it.


Dizzee Rascal - Give U More

Now that Americans have gotten the heads-up about Lady Sovereign in a big way, I am no longer cool for knowing about her before 99% of the universe did. So I need to get my grime fix from somewhere else, and this is it. Dizzee Rascal singles started hitting the U.S. a couple years ago, but they were ignored by, well, everyone (too bad you weren't tiny and cute and white, Diz!)

For a minute, people thought he would be big over here. And then he wasn't. And then people gave up and kinda forgot about him. So I guess that means he's ripe for hip re-discovery, right? Geez, electronic media really accelerates the life cycle of pop music by a factor of 100, doesn't it? From hype to has-been to superhip post-failure discovery in like 24 months? That's crazy.

1865

1865
Lincoln inaugurated for second term. Then assassinated. (In that order.)

American Civil War ends. William Faulkner begins work on first novel, although he will not be born for 32 years.

Slavery abolished by the 13th Amendment. American racists bitch about it for six days, then form the Ku Klux Klan. (On Christmas Eve. Merry Christmas!)

First train robbery in the United States.

William Butler Years born June 13. Rudyard Kipling born December 30.

Grieg - Piano Sonata in E minor, Op. 7

1860

Whaaat? I know you must be thinking. What happened to 1855 through 1859? Nothing happened to them, I just thought I had some files from those years on my PC at home, and I don't. I knew the year-by-year might be a little spotty until 1920 or so. (If anyone has any files from the missing years, I'd love to have them!)

1860
Johannes Brahms - String Sextet #1 in B flat Major, op. 18

In other news, the venerable and awesome Jazz Pour Tous over at blogspot seems to have been taken down, which is a shame since it was the best jazz blog in the world. But since they were posting full downloads of very expensive box sets almost every other day, you knew the record industry was going to catch up with them one day or another.

The majority of the Rapidshare URLs that the Jazz Pour Tous users had uploaded albums to also seem to have been terminated by Rapidshare because "complaints were received." Luckily because I'm anal retentive about stuff like this, I kept a log of all the URLs posted on Jazz Pour Tous, and I'm going through them now to see what's still live. I'll put up a (probably very short) list in a friends-only post later today, in case anyone's interested.

1854

Not much goin' on in 1854 either. Crimean war, the beginning of the ascendancy of Tammany Hall in NYC, Dickens starts writing my favorite Dickens novel, Hard Times. Also, Uncle Sam dies. Oh well, better luck next year.



1854
Franz Liszt - Faust Symphonie

1853

If I can remember to do this often enough, this will hopefully be the first in a (more or less) daily review of music, year by year, up to the present. It ought to allow me to update more often, since I won't really have the pesky requirement of trying to think of some vaguely interesting text for each post. The year-by-year thing is its own justification; I just need to wiki each year to come up with some interesting minutiae about each 365-day period, and the posts should make themselves, right? But I looked up 1853, the year I am arbitrarily starting with, and nothing really interesting happened that year, except potato chips were invented.

Johannes Brahms - Piano Sonata #3 in F minor, op. 5

Spring is in the Air

[note: I wrote this yesterday, when it was actually fucking NICE out, but lj was actin' a damn fool and wouldn't let me post it]

It's finally gotten warm enough for me to stop using the bus, so I've been walking to work all week. I love that switchover, from the gray wretchedness of public transit in winter to the glory of the first sunny days of spring. Granted, three and a half miles along Flatbush Avenue during rush hour is not the most picturesque stroll, but the spring air and blue skies make up for every time you get blasted by diesel exhaust or have to wipe off the Pavlovian drooling brought on from being downwind of eight hundred chicken shacks.

Spring also, of course, tends to inspire in me a woozy romantic beatitude that makes me want to sit on a porch swing somewhere with a bottle of beer and a girl with glasses. The door is hereby opened to summer, and to the Botanic Garden and Bronx Zoo and Flushing Meadow and Coney Island! I want to eat something out of Tupperware in Prospect Park.



The other thing that walking two hours a day will do for you is allow you to really plow through all the warm and springtimey songs on your iPod, which is what I've been doing.

Big Bill Broonzy - The Glory of Love

Bobby "Blue" Bland - That's the Way Love Is

Grant Green - I Want to Hold Your Hand

The David Murray Octet - Sweet Lovely

Duke Ellington - The Girl in My Dreams Tries to Look Like You

The Blenders - Don't Fuck Around With Love

I'd also wanted to upload Dollar Brand's "Soweto", because it's always seemed a wonderfully sunny, springy song, but it's a huge file so I ran out of time. Maybe tomorrow. Instead, I figured this would be a good capstone for today's post:

Joan Jett - Crimson and Clover