It’s a busy news week aside from that, too. It’s not every week you get someone with a name like Bombshell McGee enter the cultural sphere, and so colorful, too! She may even last until she can get on next season’s Celebrity Apprentice!

And John Boehner lost his shit on the floor of the house, which was awesome (more on that later in the week), and in other news, I hear there’s a basketball tournament going on.

Seriously, though. The Bracket concept is awesome. So adaptible, and it hides its meaninglessness in wave after wave of gravitas as half the field gets culled every round. What’s not to like?

RSS Feed - iTunes

I mentioned a few non-basketball bracketeering style promotions in the podcast this week, and here are the links to same. I know I’m missing a few; I did omit a few morning-zoo looking things that didn’t have any point except to longtime listeners of those shows. If there are any inventive or left-field ones I’ve missed, I’d love to follow them. Let me know via twitter or by email.

Thanks to the friends who helped me compile this list:

• Go Fug Yourself’s Fug Madness - the year’s worst dresser.
• Jezebel - Cake vs. Pie - best baked dessert wins it all!
• The Morning News - Tournament O’Books - the best books of the year, as chosen by TMN.
• The Big Lead - Culture Bracket a full 64-candidate bracket, broken down into smaller categories. It seems a little chaotic, but it does look like someone really tried to plan this one out.
• Boston Globe - Much Madness - Boston’s best restaurant.
• Name Of The Year - these are real names, found by real people, and they are all awesome and truly, truly unique. Worth checking out.
• I Am The Trend - Tee Madness - to find the best t-shirt manufacturer in North America. Honestly, there’s a lot to love t-shirt wise here.

If you have others, let me know. And thanks for listening. Pass this on. Tell somebody.

I got to the Kimmel Center at NYU three hours before the box office opened, just to get the same-day-only tickets to see Jandek, our favorite outsider artist still in the game. Wild Man Fischer’s on his meds, and Wesley Willis is dead. Jandek is all we have left. Jandek lives. Viva Jandek.

So I managed to finagle four tickets even though the limit was two per person, because I am a master of disguise and — look, don’t question me. Which would not matter, except that I managed to forget said tickets as I was on my way to the venue, and it was only through the good fortune of Jandek’s relative obscurity (and the fact that he’s been through town three times in the last two years, which even for the Jandek fans in town is largely enough to more or less scratch the itch) that there were enough free tickets left at the theater that I didn’t have to cab all the way back to Astoria for us to see only the second half of the show. If this was, oh, a Taylor Swift show we were getting into, we’d have been at the Stoned Crow or Vol De Nuit instead, watching the hockey game, with me buying round after round after round for the four of us in penance for my own absent-mindedness.

So.

(more…)

Those books are the template for this one. Mitch Myers didn’t roll with the punk crowd so much, and it doesn’t sound like he really got the edgier stuff that lit the creative fire under Bangs & Meltzer. Sure, he covered them — he may not have understood Lou Reed’s “Metal Machine Music” the way Bangs (thought he) did, though clearly it wasn’t for lack of trying — but his best writing comes when he waxes elegiac for the John Faheys and Doug Sahms of this world, more laid back types who swim in a different musical end of the pool than the gritty fuckyou types over whom Creem and Rolling Stone went skeetcrazy every week.

I want to fault this book for being boring. I suspect it’s largely that he seems to like music that I’m not crazy about, but you know, one of the jobs of a critic is to make the reader interested in what they themselves are interested in. I don’t think Myers is all that great a writer, especially compared to the Christgaus, Guralnicks, Marshes & Toscheseses of the world. And the “Adam Coil” fable-between-pieces conceit gets old real quick. (He mentions his music-executive father and his uncle Shel Silverstein many times in the book, and it makes me wonder how he got some of these writing gigs.)

Look, if you want a book about the about the music of the last 40 years that crackles with the force of literature, don’t start here. If, on the other hand, you’re really down with people like Leo Kottke and think he’s been woefully underappreciated in modern music, then maybe this book will signify with you, the way I wish it did with me.
[**1/2]

See you later tonight, sexy people.

In that light, I could not possibly give less of a shit about the release of Guns & Roses’ Chinese Democracy this week.

I understand it’s been 14 years in the making, and represents the culmination of everything the greatest of the great late-era hair-farmer bands had in them (or at least what Axl Rose had in mind), and the parallels to Smile, the lost Brian Wilson/Beach Boys decades-in-coming apotheosis, are easy and an adequate form of explanation as to what the hell happened.

And okay, let’s start there. The Beach Boys were the greatest chart-topping capital-A American Band of the pre-Woodstock 60’s. (Sure, Buffalo Springfield’s stuff was great, but they weren’t topping the charts with every song they released. Hell, not even Dylan had the Beach Boys’ track record, and the Velvets famously only sold records to other bands. If there’s someone I’m missing, let me know.) You could maybe make the case that Guns & Roses were the best band in their scene, but they didn’t have the consistent chart success of an REM or even Motley Crue, and just because Axl was an erratic space cadet who fought with his bandmates doesn’t make him Brian Wilson.* And I don’t know if anyone really noticed, but when Smile finally came out, it wasn’t exactly the second coming of Pet Sounds. The music was lush and pretty as you’d expect from a master arranger like Wilson, but as a lyricist, Van Dyke Parks was little more than a kiddie version of Bernie Taupin.

I heard a couple of the leaked tracks of Chinese Democracy through the usual nefarious means, and it sounds like the muddled mess I kind of expected. But honestly, if he’d managed to finish it in 1987, I don’t suspect it would have been a whole lot better. And while the world could always — always use more Beach Boys music, now that we have Soundgarden and all their descendants, and Queens Of The Stone Age and all of theirs, there are a hundred bands out there right now who can do what Axl did, and better.

Besides, we need to save Tommy Stinson. I know Tommy needs to get paid, and even a full-blown Replacements reunion wouldn’t make anyone rich, but goddamn, he’d have more integrity playing on a cruise ship.

So in the interest of the glorious future, I move we just let Guns and Fucking Roses** fade into history, like Oliver North, painter’s pants and the AMC Gremlin, quaint totems of an earlier era that frankly are better off staying there.

*And Brian wasn’t a danger to anyone other than himself. What Axl did (allegedly; thank you, out-of-court settlements and sealed court records!) to the women in his life was really fucked up. To paraphrase Robert Christgau, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll doesn’t mean fucking her in the ass after she passes out from the drugs you put in her drink.

** “G’n'F’n'R”? Really? Oh, Axl, how rebellious you are! At least spell your shit out, fergodsake.

It may be true that there are more artists on the progressive side of the fence under the least of times, and this is pretty damned far from that. But getting people of reasonable renown to openly cop to it, and then actually be able to articulate why, is no less worthwhile an exercise. They’re not long on the vagaries of policy: the current piece, by Greg Saunier of Deerhoof, talks about the politics of inclusiveness and his hope that intelligence may become a central American virtue again someday, and doesn’t delve into FISA or his economic plan. But if actors and socialites can weigh in on the Presidential race, then why not people who actually have somewhat coherent thoughts about the process and can articulate them too?

Update: In a related entry, Radar lists ten instances where music and politics collided, from Al Jolson to Mudhoney.

Oh, and congratulations to the Cream Masters, Rimshot Korsakoff, and Tired of Being Grouchy Marxists, who edged out That Family Plan With Rollover Minutes Sure Paid Off For The Packers for third place.

They’ve opened a couple of channels on YouTube and posted some (largely musical) videos under a few usernames:

• deumnborkborkbork

• patrioticeagle

• weirdowhatever

• meepmeepmeepow

• and, kindasorta tying them together: heckleu247

They seem to have constructed each video as a response to another already-popular Youtube video. You know, like they were paying attention to the internet before they started this ad-campaign-slash-whatever-the-hell-it-is.

I suspect this is going to turn into something else, and while the Jim Henson voices aren’t quite exact, they’re close enough. And it’s the Muppets. They were a significant part of my childhood. I’ll hear them out at least. If they’re selling Wheat Thins or Pontiacs or Lipitor or something, I’ll pass, but until then, let’s see where this is going.

I think I have a decent setup for it now. Every week (Thursdays, hopefully), I’ll upload that Wednesday’s 10-clip audio round, plus an 11th song that I could never use in an actual audio round, but which I either thin is cool or feel is otherwise worth the trouble.

I’ll post the answers in the comments on Tuesday. You’ll have until then to listen and work it out.