In Defense of "Pirate's Life" and Other Stuff.

First, the track listing for "Current Resident," which was included originally but somehow did not post after I made some formatting changes. I'm struggling with the formatting on this sucka.

Side A
1. Harry Slash and the Slashtones – Extreme Theme
2. Heavenly – P.U.N.K. Girl
3. Superchunk – Down the Hall
4. Poole – Mary Shakes Her Hair
5. Quasi – The Skeleton
6. Mötörhead – Tear Ya’ Down
7. Handsome Boy Modeling School Feat. Brand Nubian – Once Again (Here To Kick One For You)
8. Echo and the Bunnymen – Do It Clean
9. The Promise Ring – B is For Bethlehem
10. Busy Toby – Me, My Drums, and You
11. Sebadoh – Weird
12. The Lilys – Who Is Moving
13. The Weirdos – Fallout
14. Belle and Sebastian – Dirty Dream Number Two
15. The Jesus and Mary Chain – My Little Underground
16. Idlewild – Everyone Says You’re Fragile

Side B
1. Small Factory – The Last Time That We Talkes
2. Unrest – Makeout Club
3. Green Day – Who Wrote Holden Caulfield?
4. The Karl Hendricks Trio – A Letter From the Coach
5. The Rolling Stones – Rocks Off
6. Talulah Gosh – The Girl With the Strawberry Hair
7. The Magnetic Fields – The Sun Goes Down and the World Goes Dancing
8. The Revelers – Detroit Bridge (Summertime)
9. The Rondelles – I Melt With You
10. The Lemonheads Feat. Belinda Carlisle – I’ll Do It Anyway
11. Holly and The Italians – Tell That Girl To Shut Up
12. The Gravediggaz – Pit Of Snakes
13. Sloan – All By Ourselves
14. Heavenly – Space Manatee
15. The Magnetic Fields – Punk Love

Second: Fuck twee.net and their retconning. We legitimately stole that election.

Third: I'm in total agreement on the issue with transitions, CD-Rs, and now MP3 CDs. The Gravediggaz-to-Sloan movement is mix tape genius; Maybe the best in Tom's history.

And in a final pre-defense note, between "Hope Is Important" (which I don't own) and "The Remote Part" (which I do) was "100 Broken Windows." "Remote" has the two best songs Idlewild ever did, but as a whole kinda sucks. "Windows" is much more consistent and I can actually listen to it front to back.

As for "Pirate's Life," I'm surprised Tom has such a good opinion of it. I don't want to judge my 18 year-old self too harshly since it was kind of an awkward era for me musically¹, but it looks like a few hits surrounded by too much filler. Outside of "In Pursuit," "Classics of Love," and "Next In Line," even the great bands on here aren't represented by what I would consider an essential track. "French Guy?" Really? That's what I felt was a good enough RFTC song that it NEEDED to be on here? I guess I would consider "These Two Boots of Mine" to be "essential" Bruisers, but that might imply that such a thing exists.²

I have a theory about The Parasites: there is no person on this planet who considers The Parasites their favorite band. No one. For years I've been trying to think of another band who had some level of national attention in a national scene that I can say the same thing about. I haven't been able to think of any. "Fool For You" is a very, very good pop song (maybe essential Parasites), but I don't believe it ever turned anyone into a Parasites fanatic. They were the ultimate pop-punk also-rans of the '90's scene. They even released one of those Ramones cover albums that were all the rage, but since more premiere bands³ got the chance first, they ended up doing "It's Alive." In other words, they got to do a live set of the Ramones' greatest hits. Here, Parasites, have your pop-punk consolation prize.⁴

This all ties in with Tom's Lillingtons comments. "Death By Television" is next to "Leave Home" and "My Brain Hurts" as the absolute of the genre. And it really is difficult to explain why any one of the songs on that album could turn me into a Lillingtons freak but the Parasites' best song will never convince me they're worth much of my time. It's that intangible urgency that's level beyond the 3 chords and snotty vocals.

Tom is also completely fucking wrong about Teenage Bottlerocket and later Lillingtons albums. "The Too Late Show" is only a half-step below "DBT" and light-years above any Bottlerocket stuff.⁵ I think I was smitten by Bottlerocket live the first time because it was probably the first punk show I had been to in a year or more. It also helped that it was a small but extremely excited crowd. When I saw them 6 months later, they had somehow taken the crown as the biggest pop-punk band in the world. The Copyrights were actually being booed (despite being wayyyy better) before Bottlerocket took the stage and proceeded to bore the shit out of me. Leaving before their set was done, I told my buddy Whoot that our experience that night had to be similar to those Weasel fans who were so pumped to see The Riverdales the first time and having to deal with the disappointment that ensued.

¹ I was still grasping for new punk, and bands like the Arrivals and Lillingtons showed up. But overall, I guess I was trying to "grow" and find something new. Based on the tracks here, this was dead-center between my Screeching Weasel-worship and my RFTC-worship. (I still worship both.) Oddly enough, the Lillingtons and Vindictives put out my two fave albums around this time.

² The Bruisers broke up when Dropkick stole Al Barr, their lead singer. Dropkick stopped being good at that time and managed to break up a band that I kinda liked a lot at the time. Side note: despite his Boston-tough-punk attitude, Al Barr is about 5' tall and I'm pretty sure our 12 year-old niece Claire could take him in a fight. And as long as we're talking punk and the surprising body-types of lead singers, Ben Weasel is fucking ripped. Or at least he was the last time I saw him live about 7 years ago.

³ Like Boris The Sprinkler.

⁴ Yes, I own this. I played it once after buying around '99-ish and have only bothered to go through it once more since.

⁵ Exception: "Stupid Games" off of "Total." Maybe Cody's finest song... Jesus Christ do I know a lot about pop-punk. Thanks, Tom.

In Defense of "Current Resident"

Insane Records lives! Sorta.  Less Quality and Cheaper forever. 

The Twee List pulled a retcon on y'all, too. Sorry, Dan - I see a lot of the people you were spamming and they never bring up Go Bananas!. (Maybe they don't know that I own the only copy of "I'll Jack You in the Back of the Head" in NYC. . .)

Dude, fix that misused "it's" in paragraph 3. The ultimate peeve.  

So. My tape. Just because I half-assed the j-card, you omit the tracklist? C'moonnnnn. In any case, this came during my Minneapolis stint though based on what Dan's commenting on, the shoegaze/nu-gaze period I went through while I was up north didn't reflect on what I was putting on Dan's mixes.

"Tell that Girl to Shut Up" actually came out in the late 70's and I stole this little stunner off of one of the legendary Rhino Records DIY comps.¹ That makes this power pop (not indie/twee pop) and I get the feeling that this song, like a lot of power pop tunes from that era, probably blew every motherfucker in the room through the back wall  when Holly et al played it live, but was recorded in the same sorta lukewarm way that ruined a lot of other great PP tunes. (Seriously, find a Shoes live recording and listen to those songs just fly out. . .)  Fuck it, I think this song has balls to spare, and it's gonna be stuck in my head the rest of the week.

And c'mon. . . hooks make it possible for total morons to write "Louie Louie" and change the world. They're totally the ends/means/alpha/omega amen. Our favorite guy ever Andrew WK writes the stupidest/hookiest songs ever, and the only reason they sound urgent is that they ARE catchy and loud and fast but the urgency is sorta. . . mystifying. Corollas write songs just as good as ambulances, man.

"A Letter to the Coach" is. . . Karl Hendricks Trio (on S'chunk's label). In retrospect not that great, but that's a killer riff. Their records tended to be pretty dull, though. And for fuck's sake, did I really put a Promise Ring song on yr mix? You better tell 2000 Tom I'm gonna beat him up. (See? Catchy!)  What the fuck was I thinking? Oh wait. That song's pretty tight.

Idlewild is kind of a frustrating case - great tunes, great live act, great taste (covered "Everything Flows" on an EP!), great B-sides - but the dude's (Roddy Woomble - best name ever) lyrics often fall over their clumsy pretension. This song is off their "Hope is Important" record - an early record with sorta goofy Dischord bits in it. Also, one of those bands who got hyped before they should have, got signed when the labels were falling apart, and then was stuck in that awkward corporate "middle" between being a real major label band and being a semi-popular indie rock band. Eh, I guess they did just fine in the UK. The follow-up to this record ("The Remote Part") is pretty great.

About a month ago I was trudging to the train across an empty, wide intersection on the business end of a late Saturday night's beers and some bike punk rode by singing Small Factory's "If You Hurt Me" and it was so perfect and beautiful that I shouted the next lyric down the street as he rode by. Phoebe fuckin' Summersquash. 

I'm not sure how Dan and I can talk about music so much and he's relatively unfamiliar with Sloan, a band I've been obsessed with since, yikes, probably just about the beginning. Well, the "Smeared" record. . . which means over half of my life. Eeep. Anyway, Dan, I highly recommend starting with "Navy Blues" as it's probably more your speed, and then work away from that to the two adjacent records ("One Chord to Another" and "Between the Bridges"), and so on, though their last two full-lengths have been spotty at best. "Twice Removed" is by FAR their best release, and apparently a lot of Canadians think so too. In general, it was sorta depressing to see the band get all up in their rock asses and stop writing songs that had more meaning and heart versus great pants and cool stage kicks, but all in all one of my favorite bands ever. 

C'mon, I like to pride myself on my transitions - or at the very least, trying not to put songs that sound like each other next to each other. One of the nicer things about CDRs is that this is a LOT easier. . . but yeah, where's the romance?

Speaking of things that I was obsessed with in 2000, check out Buffy and The Rock in Southland Tales. The best and worst movie I've seen in forever. Deserves a special award for making Jon Lovitz a crooked badass cop. Also I think I like a Killers song now.

Saxophones have a place in rock. This is the best song ever written. 

¹ Now out of print and EXPENSIVE on eBay, probably because they meant as many to others as they did to me, despite their prevalence in the average Wal-Mart's 1.99 bin). 

Yo-ho-ho, I Pirate's Life For Me (Dan, 1999)

Let's hear it for four-month hiatus-in'. Um, I’ll be better?

This gem comes to us via 1999, and I'm wondering if Dan possibly made this for me as a graduation present (as he and my family came to Tallahassee to see me walk) or if he made this after he'd started school in Champaign. Hm.

Anyway, this one's definitely more my jam that the last tape I reviewed, primarily because the fake ska is kept to a minimum, the pop-punk features high in the mix, and again, we're looking at some serious hits.  The cover art's pretty minimal in comparison, and I'm not sure if "I Pirate" (vs. "A Pirate") is a typo.

Seriously, though, this might be the Golden Tape of Dan's because before this there was a lot of skapunk bullshit and once Dan got to college, he grew into more hardcore and metal - which means that he went from liking a lot of people playing their instruments well, to worthwhile music, to more guys playing their instruments really well. Anyway, this tape has a lot of songs I wouldn't have heard from any of my other sources, is catchy as hell, and I get the sense that Dan kind of knew what I wanted at this point. Cheap heat! 

Dan loooovvveessss the Vindictives and the Nobodys and I've come around (a little, anyway) but at the time, I just couldn't stomach them - didn't see what made them decent, but that distaste might be an aftereffect of the balls-shriveling nightmare voices of JJ Nobody & Joey Vindictive. 

On that note, I was in a circle pit at a Tullycraft show a few months back (um, really!) and based on how fast and fun Tully's songs are (though I've never been a HUGE fan of theirs), I'm often curious how some bands/songs get to be "pop-punk" and some don't seemingly only because of the singer's voice: note that the bassline of the Swingin' Utters "Next in Line" (a sorta gritty sad song from this tape) seems really close to "Josie" by Tullycraft but because Sean Tully sings in a funny cute nasally voice and pop-punk voices are supposed to be a) loud b) gritty c) British d) annoying e) unintelligible or hell, I dunno, Tully’s for wimps. What the hell. Conversely, I bet most tweepop kids probably own at least one MTX single but nobody calls those twee-pop kids "jocks".  

Anyway. . . 

The good: 

• So many good pop punk songs. A song about Zero Bars (which was, for a time, my fave candy bar). (Now my favorite candy bar is cheese corn. Fuck candy bars.)  Teen Idols! Pretty much all good reasons to stay in yr car two 
  

• JUD JUD

• Two incredible Lillingtons songs! Easily my favorite pop-punk band of the 90's-00's, and of all the bands Dan scooped me on, they're the best.  I know it's formula and I think most of my friends might not understand what makes them better than other soundalike bands, but their early stuff has this real heart to it, this simple, wide-eyed wistfulness that permeates even through the silly/stupid lyrics. While 1999's "Death by Television" is pretty much considered a punk-pop classic, and I love it beyond death, ultimately songs about UFO's and monsters and Rambo are always going to be trumped by songs about being in love with a girl at your high school. (Which is why Teenage Bottlerocket's records are better than the last two Lillingtons records.) http://www.teenagebottlerocket.com  (Thanks to this post, I now know what I’m doing next Thursday…)

The Less Than Good:   

• LTJ are apparently still around. Really. What the fuck do those guys look like now?  

• Discount - This song rules (and I believe I gave this CD to Dan for a birthday present) and reminded me of something that angered me not long ago: I read an interview with Alison Discount (now "VV" of The Kills) and now she says she's from London, probably because she's embarrased to be from Florida. Which is bullshit - Florida is 100% the punkest state in the Union. 

• You know, I'm glad the Clash tried to be a dubby reggae band, but boy, did they suck at it. "Crooked Beat" is just such a bad idea - soulless and sort of lazy. It's not that I claim to be an expert on reggae or dub (or really anything else) and I know the Clash were hardcore fans of the stuff and really helped if find an audience, but why did they do this? Ugh. Recently saw a documentary about Lee "Scratch" Perry - there's a funny scene where he claims that he "fixed" the Clash. There’s also a pretty funny scene where you can’t tell what in Jah’s holy name he’s talking about. . . turns out that’s pretty much the whole movie. Anyway, pretty amazing doc.
  

All said and done, some quality mixin’ from a quality guy, who just got lazers shot right through his eye. (Yarrr.)

"Yo-ho-ho, I Pirate's Life For Me"

Side A. 

1. The Vindictives - In Pursuit
   
2. Common Rider - Classics of Love
   
3. The Orphans - The Government Stole my Germs CD
   
4. The Lillingtons - For the Fun of It
   
5. Bouncing Souls - Undeniable
   
6. Teen Idols - 20 Below
   
7. The Clash - Crooked Beat
   
8. Swingin' Utters - Net in Line
   
9. The Pietasters - Yesterday's Over
   
10. The Parasites - Fool for You
    
11. Jud Jud - Bass at the Beginning Song
    
12. Screeching Weasel - High Ambitions
    
13. Moral Crux - Breakdown
    
14. The Business - Get Out of My House
    
15. The Groovie Ghoulies - I Don't Like Mondays
    
16. Rocket from the Crypt - French Guy
    
17. Beatnik Termites - Undesirable
    
18. The Descendents - Pervert
    

Side B 

1. Less Than Jake - Anchor
   
2. Discount - Lights Out
   
3. The Bruisers - These Two Boots of Mine
   
4. The Go-Go's - Tonite
   
5. Swingin' Utters - London Drunk
   
6. The Stubborn All-Stars - Lose this Skin
   
7. Anal Cunt - Your Kid is Deformed
   
8. Rancid - Idle Hands
   
9. Screeching Weasel - You'll Be in My Dreams
   
10. The Belmont Playboys - Hang All Over You (live)
    
11. The Bouncing Souls - Argyle (live)
    
12. Weezer - Velouria
    
13. The Vindictives - I'm Sick
    
14. The UK Subs - NRA Jingle
    
15. The Lillingtons - Homecoming Queen
    
16. The Clash - Julie's in the Drug Squad
    
17. Sloppy Seconds - Gimme That Zero Bar
    
18. Rancid - Blacklisted
    
19. Nobodys - Joe's Sister
    
20. Mr. T Experience - Semi-OK
    
21. 21. The Vindictives - First One on the Block
    
22. 22. The Groovie Ghoulies - Doin' Fine
    

“Current Resident” – Tom, 2000

1










Sometime in 2000, Shawn Gallagher of Insane Records started stuffing ballots on twee.net’s “Best Record of All-Time” (or some other silly poll) for Insane releases. I responded by stuffing ballots for my shitty punk band’s home recorded demo. A months-long battle ensued, casualties fell, and when the smoke cleared, Insane had a solid presence in the Top 100. Go Bananas!’ “I’ll Jack You In the Back of the Head,” though, sat well above some Belle & Sebastian record as the raddest thing ever put on tape. Those twee fucks didn’t know what hit them.

Probably didn’t care, either. My little publicity stunt failed to drum up any interest in our partially defunct group. It was around that time that I got handed “Current Resident,” filled with indie-pop, neo-Nuggets, a little punk, and yeah, a little twee.

Listen, I love a good pop song. Prince’s “Kiss,” Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May,” any of Smashmouth’s singles… There’s a base quality in good pop. When you hear one, every part of your mind will question it, look for it’s faults, dissect it and pull it back together, and try to rationalize what you learned. You, appreciator of the deeper side of music, are above this crap! But that kind of rationale just doesn’t work. There’s nothing to think about and nothing that logic can explain: it just takes that good one hook and you find yourself caught on the wrong end of the reel. A great pop song is a smile from a cute girl and a sweet action movie sequence all in one. It’s a high. So I’m not above shutting off any sense of deeper music appreciation that I might have, turning on the reptilian portion of my brain, and become absorbed in pop music.² But after years of listening, I’ve noticed that too many indie-pop songs blur in my head. Twee, in all its cuteness, more often than not fails to capture my base instincts like it’s supposed to. Even most pop-punk, another sub-genre based on catchiness, comes off as bland.

Holly and the Italians’ “Tell That Girl To Shut Up” is a good example. It’s all solid indie-pop here: catchy and up-beat with a post-Ramones pop sensibility. The chorus is one, large melodic hook. Female vocals and lyrics indicating some cat fightin’ in the future? Hell yeah! Individual parts of the song work, but as a whole, it’s just bland. Even the chorus doesn’t make a lasting impression. Here one minute, gone the next. There’s something missing.

Urgency.

I’m not talking about the song’s tempo; I’m talking about its ability to convince the listener that right now, you need it. “Tell That Girl to Shut Up” isn’t urgent. For all of its hooks, the song never makes you think that you can’t go on with your day until it ends. The hook is the end, not the means. It’s a problem that affects a lot of the indie-pop that’s been thrown at us in the past couple decades and, unfortunately, is prevelent in this era of Tom’s musical interest.

Luckily, “Resident” was also made during Tom’s (and my own) peak interest in pro wrestling and that led to “Extreme Theme’s” inclusion.³ It’s absolutely silly and terrible and everything that made Paul Heyman’s little-fed-that-could so fun to watch.

As further luck would have it, there’re still plenty of killer tracks jammed in here between the mostly annoying Heavenly songs. “A Letter To the Coach” is an understated scorcher. Like a lot of Superchunk, it doesn’t come off as particularly pressing at first, but there’s something impetuous under its first layer. “Detroit Bridge” could have been a poster-song for the garage revival in the early 00’s (I mean that in the best way possible). “B Is For Bethlehem” is just pretty darn good. Idlewild’s “Everyone Says You’re Fragile” slays. And then, the highlights:

Small Factory’s “The Last Time We Talked” is the antithesis of my little rant above: an urgent song laden with hooks at the right spot, meeting my reptilian brain’s desire for pop and my heart’s desire to beat a little faster as the chorus builds. It’s a brilliantly crafted song. Everything fits together just right, with timely drum fills and soaring chord progressions that release in bursts. Absolutely awesome and heart-wrenching and rockin’.

“Me, My Drums, and You” does same thing for twee that “Last Time” does for indie-pop: justify the genre. No point in trying to explain. It’s just a good, catchy love song.

And then we get to “Pit Full Of Snakes”... In the past few years, I’ve grown a bigger hip-hop vocabulary. That’s bound to happen when you grow into a mild obsession with the Wu-Tang.⁴ But hearing this RZA-produced⁵ track for the first time in a while, I have to kick myself for not diving into this stuff faster. I’ve always liked this track; At times, it was probably my favorite hip hop song of all time. But I admit that I kind of forgot about it until recently, and that’s unfortunate. “Snakes” is as good as any other Wu-banger. It’s a fantastically EVIL classic of East Coast style that never let’s the listener feel comfortable. The production is appropriately haunting, but the beat keeps simplistic enough to allow that subconscious head nodding.

Final note: I think I love Sloan. “All By Ourselves” follows the Gravediggaz track and, oddly enough, fits perfectly. The “horrorcore” rap and its East Coast tempo flows wonderfully into Canadian power-pop in terms of tempo and beat, if not in mood, style, or purpose.⁶ But, frankly, I think I’m late to the party. Emusic lists 9 LPs and manages to recommend 5 of them. Simply: I’m too far from this band to dive head-first into 9+ LPs of music. They’re littered over every tape Tom gave me for almost a decade and I can’t say a single bad thing about them, but I also have no point of reference as to where I should start. And even if I start now, with much available to me, I feel that it will all feel hollow. They seem like a band that you need to discover and obsess over at a certain time in one’s life, and I have a feeling that time has passed…

¹ This was the first tape where Tom put no effort into the J-card. He simply cut up junk-mail from his cable company in Minneapolis.

² First of all, everyone should have a subscription to Seed magazine. There’re lots of reasons, but one is an article in the 08/08 issue called “The Shape of Music.” In it, Dmitri Tymoczko discusses his study on western music, its melodic structures, mathematics, and the brain’s response to it all. It’s a brief overview of the deeper concept of WHY pop music, in all its forms, has been so prevalent in western music: it might just be the brain telling you how much it loves the mathematic universe we live in. That’s the kind of shit that blows my mind.

³ This tape came paired with a dubbed copy of of the WWF’s “Wrestling Album” from ’85, featuring then wrestling stars “singing” “rock and roll,” including “covers.” Hilarious. The tape also featured a short filler-mix on the b-side, with some ‘Chunk, REM, Ramones, and highlighted by Harry Slash and the Slashtone’s “Huka Blues,” which is the best originally composed entrance theme in wrestling history. I’m usually very, very against using the saxophone in a song. Ever. But “Huka” is seriously rad.

⁴ Reminder: Method Man once shook my hand and called me “fella.”

⁵ …And the second Prince Paul-related track on the tape, with the Handsome Boy Modeling School track, which is also particularly great. I need to hit that stuff.

⁶ On mixes, I describe this as “transitioning” and, intentional or not, Tom hits it out of the park here.

While I'm writing the next one. . .

Cover art for "Nazis"

Sorry, I really should have scanned this in last time. Oh, and nice guesswork, Sherlock - the tape fucking says "1998" on it.

In Defense of "Pubes. . . "

Dan has really gone apeshit with this, as I'd hoped he would. Footnotes? Wha? ¹

I suppose I should feel honor-bound to defend the mix he tore a few new ones in, but he pretty much summarized my defense in one line: I was indeed in college, and newly in college at that. Looking at this mix, though, I'm proud to say that with the exception of They Might Be Giants, most of my iffy high school tastes had passed and I can stand by most of those songs as being pretty awesome or occassionally tolerable. But, I'll get to TMBG in a second.

This is as good a time as any for me to explain my attitude towards making mixes for Dan, and for the most part making mixes for anybody, which has pretty much remained intact lo these years. My primary goal has been to find things in my collection that I think the person I'm giving the mix would like but probably doesn't have in his/her collection yet. I worry sometimes (especially in the ensuing years where my collection expanded both in size and in diversity) that Dan thinks I'm trying to drop a Snob Bomb on him but I could have put some seriously wimpy shit on this if I'd liked. And there are truly, truly some hits on this (as he's detailed). As he's correctly surmised, when in doubt, I included the fastest, loudest song I had from the band.

But, it's not only a college mix, but a pretty irritatingly cliche (in retrospect) college mix. It's funny how I thought I was hot shit for loving all these bands but man, it's pretty obvious I mostly read SPIN in high school and didn't got to a lot of shows until college. I'm glad Dan liked this one but I'm hoping my subsequent mixes showed a little more personality.

Looking that holy quintuplet of Indies involved, only really Sebadoh and Superchunk are bands I still really have a deep feeling for and it's because they actually wrote songs about people and life, and that means they'll resonate more than the rockin' (Archers), catchy (GbV), and, um, "smart" (Pavement). I made this mix at a time before I'd ever had a girlfriend or a relationship (nice one, Superstud) but lemme tell ya, when there were suddenly ladies and emotions and arguments and make-ups, Sebadoh became a necessity. Not that I put one of THOSE 'doh songs on this mix; as Dan pointed out, I put on the "rockin'" one. Same thing with Superchunk - those songs still yank out the occasional tear. Of all the huge hits that maybe would have stuck with Dan a little longer, I wimped out and put on "punk" songs. Such a waste - now look at Dan. I take responsibility.

Anyway, I'm going to spend some time discussing TMBG, who are sort of weird animal; they figured prominently in my high school musical (uh?) tastes because I was a dorky smart kid who liked thinking he was "different" (ugh) but wasn't punk or goth or metal or anything else that might have made girls like me. When I got more into the real and true indie and punk, I'd already overplayed every song TMBG'd ever put out and the cute/clever aspect of their songs started losing the joke a bit.

However, having lived in New York for over 7 years now, and having taken every opportunity to talk to people who really lived in the city and see it morph into this oversold, brunch-and-pugs wonderland for graphic designers, it's really interesting to read the liner notes from "Then..." (from which these two songs are taken, though they're originally from TMBG's s/t debut) and think of two nerds living in parts of Brooklyn that are far cries from the yuppified current versions and playing music in the East Village when it was a semi-scary place filled with desperately weird and interesting people scraping together creative lives because there was nowhere else in this country that could support such goofiness. Oh, and crackheads. Now, the East Village is an irritating, incredibly overpriced neighborhood that I generally avoid. Probably because crack's easier to come by here in Crown Heights. Anyway.

Those first couple of records (s/t and "Lincoln"²) really don't sound like anything else going on in NYC at the time (ESG - Sonic Youth - hardcore punk - Mars - Glenn Branca - James Chance - beginnings of crossover hip-hop) and the songs remain catchy as hell and really cool and DIY, self-recorded collages that seemingly wasn't meant for an audience of real people.

And, TMBG was a "gateway" band for me (and I doubt I'm alone here) - the story is thus. When our family first moved to Cloquet, MN (up near Duluth), I would fall asleep with my headphones on, listening to the radio. At the time Nirvana was getting their big break ("Teen Spirit" had recently hit) and I was of course excited by this new, strange, loud thing that wasn't at all like the metal that was on the radio, but I didn't know what "punk" really was except that I'd heard the Ramones on beer commercials.

One night, trolling the dial, I stopped on what I thought was the rock station because I heard a Nirvana song³, but when I heard a They Might Be Giants song (who I know from Tiny Tune Adventures) (God, am I a tool), I kept listening - turns out it was KUMD, Duluth Public Radio, playing "alt" rock, which they did every weekday night for two hours. Radio tapes of this show became my staple listening for the first half of high school. (Turns out I wasn't that cool - the really indie station was across the river at KUWS, which played legitimately cool and weird stuff during the same night hours but was harder to pick up on my little radio).The rest is, well, mixtapes.

Anyway, I don't listen to They Might Be Giants anymore hardly ever, but I'm glad they were around. And, I guess I'm glad people are still excited about them now, though they seem more for kids of cool parents. I hate cool parents.

Roundup: I guess if I was going to pick ONE SMITHS SONG EVER for Dan to try to like, Bigmouth's the one. "Out There" still remains one of Juliana Hatfield's few truly lasting moments - check out that fucking exploding teenage chorus! If I never heard another Pixies song the rest of my life, I'd be fine; who still gets excited about Pixies songs?. Sugar, like all Mould material, gets harsher grades the older I get in part because I was so in love with the guy (and, y'know, still am) that I didn't recognize how much filler he writes; "Mind" is a good example of that. I bought that Dino Jr. tape at the WalMart in Orange Park Florida; good idea. "Kill the Musicians" was my first full-price record purchase in Tallahassee, at the OLD Vinyl Fever across the street from what used to be the Publix I was employed at on Pensacola Street.

This mix wasn't that bad, I suppose - just not all that imaginitive or interesting. Here's hoping they get better from here on out. . .

¹ Yes indeed, this was a reference to Dan's inability to keep a bathroom floor clean. At the time, though, I was being confronted with Communal Living in an All-Male Florida Dorm That Didn't Have Air-Conditioning. Dan, I'll admit that you were a better roommate than 75 other guys in a building that was scheduled for remodeling the next year so when something broke they just told you to stop using it, which is why my floor only had one working shower.

² Our sister Debbie actually gave me her cassette of "Lincoln" back when I was a freshman in high school - she was over being cool at that point. The other tape that I scored in that giveaway was the Dead Milkmen's "Beelzbubba." Thanks, Deb!

³ Soon, I would learn that this song was "Breed."