Hey, groovy cats, we’re still in Keeping it Short Week, each post 250 words or your money back:
Everyone has bands they love, but what about the ones you kind of love and don’t love? The Doors and Jim Morrison hold a very singular place in my tastes.
I’ve owned their albums and CDs multiple times and then gone through a phase of being so over the Doors that they went… well, out the door. I felt sometimes like being a Doors fan over the age of 21 was embarrassing. The anguished “Mother/Father” oedipal stuff in “The End” is a prime example of how the Doors could swing from ominous to awful in the space of a few lines.
Morrison was, by all reports, a fairly reprehensible human being in a lot of ways, and his sexist stoned messiah complex wears thin fast. How we feel about an artist as a person can affect how you view their work, and that’s not cancel culture, it’s just being a human.
And yet, I still find myself humming along to the Doors. They were pompous, overwrought, exciting and ridiculous all at the same time. A broody epic like “Riders on the Storm” still gets me, while trippy psych-rock like “Light My Fire” and “People Are Strange” are both timeless and time capsules of what we think the ‘60s meant.
Maybe I overthink The Doors, and in the end they were just a solid rock band with a tendency towards bad poetry. But for a band I sometimes hate, I sure end up going back to them an awful lot.
Was 2003 the end of rock and roll? The genre has been killed and resurrected so many times it makes Dracula look like an amateur, but still, for me, somehow 2003 feels like the last year that I was personally invested in new rock and roll.
Part of that is simple age – entering my mid-30s, with a kid on the way, I was about to enter the demographic of Bob The Builder and Wallace and Gromit. I was following then-new music blogs and enjoying the dodgy thrills of downloading MP3s galore and burning them on oh-so-fancy mix CDs that are still in a closet somewhere, but soon I’d stop doing all that.
Rock began receding as a pop culture monolith as grunge died out, but it was in the early 2000s that it felt like it rallied for one last blast with a flurry of terrific albums from bands like The Strokes, White Stripes, TV On The Radio and more. Since then, to be honest, rock music feels like it’s less a part of the pop culture conversation.
Rock is still out there, but for me, 2003 is about when I started to sort of check out from obsessively following all the latest music. I do try to keep my hand in and listen to new stuff much as possible, but, I recognise that the best pop music now is mostly for the youth, not me, and if I happen to dig some of it, well, that’s just a bonus.
It’s hard to believe 20 years have passed since these albums came out, but I also tend to think of Taylor Swift as “new” music so I’m really well past it, I guess.
Nevertheless, two decades on, in no particular order here’s my 10 favourite albums of 2003, the year that rock died (OK, maybe just the year that rock got a nasty head cold that it’s still shaking off):
Blur, Think Tank – The Britpop stars delivered a woozy, tense album that feels like a loose response to the tension of the Iraq War (boy, we only thought we knew what global tension was in those halcyon pre-Trump, climate apocalypse and pandemic days, didn’t we?). The more optimistic groove of albums like Parklife is far behind but what emerges is a kind of gorgeous weary reverie hanging for dear life onto Damon Albarn’s achy croon in tunes like “Out Of Time” and “Battery In Your Leg.”
The Shins, Chutes Too Narrow – For about five minutes there, The Shins felt like the future of indie rock. Their second album is fragile and filled with grand harmonies, enigmatic lyrics and made for long lonesome road trips. It’s all very gentle and mannered and on the verge of being too twee for its own good, but there’s plenty here to remind you why Natalie Portman said “The Shins will change your life” the very next year in 2004’s hipster poster child of a movie Garden State.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Fever To Tell – A great blast of grrrl power as Karen O and company blew the roof off with this snappy debut album. Weirdly, the album’s most sedate tune, the ballad “Maps,” became its biggest hit, but the heart of this album is a boiling punk-rock hurricane led by howlingly good romps like “Black Tongue.” After this album the band’s output was middling, more “Maps” than punk, and they never quite recaptured the ferociousness Karen O blasts forth here.
Fountains of Wayne, Welcome Interstate Managers – Radio hit “Stacy’s Mom” alone is a gorgeous sexy/silly hunk of power pop, but the rest of the album by this late, lamented band is full of wry, jangly gems like “Hackensack” and “Hey Julie.” A good power pop album never gets old.
White Stripes, Elephant – And here we hit peak Jack White. I know he’s put out a lot of good stuff since then, but the raw, raggedy side of the Stripes sound collided with stadium rock here and face-melting anthems like “Seven Nation Army” to make it the best thing he (and the sorely missed Meg White) ever did. This one might just mark the end of rock ’n’ roll’s evolution, perhaps?
David Bowie, Reality– Reality is a fascinating time capsule – Bowie’s final release at age 56 before an unthinkably long 10-year hiatus, and his untimely death – and while it isn’t quite as original and path-breaking as his best work, it’s still a comfortable rock god doing what he did best in an album that feels playful and masterful. Highlights includes a bombastic cover of Jonathan Richman’s “Pablo Picasso” and the darkly gorgeous epic “Bring Me The Disco King”. Shame about that horrific cover art, though.
Outkast, Speakerboxx/The Love Below– Sweet and sour, sultry and silly, this double-album delight of André 3000 and Big Boi’s duelling soul, funk and rap is a treasure box that keeps giving. Yes, it was inescapable, but “Hey Ya” is one of those massive pop hit earworms that still delivers years on, and if you don’t like it I can’t help you, while the smooth groove of tunes like “The Way You Move” and askew hip-hop of “Roses” also are terrific.
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Nocturama– Not usually considered one of Cave’s top albums, but there’s something lovelorn and haunting to me about this set, which continued Cave’s move from rowdy rock demon to spooky apocalyptic preacher of songs. The brooding beauty of “Wonderful Life” or the wounded grace of “Bring It On” are near-top Cave, and I can’t get enough of the clattering 14-minute rambling album-closing jam of “Babe, I’m On Fire.”
Calexico, Feast of Wire– Calexico are the fuzzy warm blanket of Americana to me, fusing together elements of Tex-Mex, jazz, blues and country into music that all sounds like the soundtrack to some great lost spaghetti western. Feast of Wire is their finest, most expansive album, drifting along in a gorgeously restless haze. It’s an album I constantly return to for the journeys it takes your brain on.
Ryan Adams, Rock n Roll– Yeah, OK, I went through a big Ryan Adams phase in the mid-2000s, before his contrarian personality and troubling allegations kind of derailed his career and he put out a few too many meandering mediocre albums. Still, I’ll die on a hill for a couple of his albums of the early 2000s like Heartbreaker and Gold. Even though it got a middling reception, I still quite dig 2003’s Rock n Roll, where moody Ryan puts away the pedal steel and unleashes a pile of hooky, guitar-filled rock anthems with a heavy Replacements/U2 vibe. It’s just rock ’n’ roll, as it says on the tin, but I like it.
I don’t know no shame / I feel no pain / I can’t see the flame – “Mandinka,” Sinéad O’Connor
We spend most of our lives chasing the music we loved when we were 17.
Sinéad O’Connor came into my sheltered little musical world like a thunderbolt, and she blazed hard and bright through her trouble-plagued, too-short life before dying this week at only 56.
It’s an embarrassing kind of revelation to make, but I think she was the first female singer-songwriter I ever truly listened to and adored, as I emerged from my adolescent male-dominated world of Guns ’N Roses and Billy Joel music.
She was a pathway for me to discover her influences like Patti Smith and Joni Mitchell and her peers like PJ Harvey and Fiona Apple. I could not fully understand her life – how could I, a small-town California dude? – but I listened to her.
Her first two albums will always be part of the soundtrack of teenage love to me, of the jittery combination of urgency and anxiety your entire life seems made of at that age.
For a few months in 1990, the girl from Ireland was inescapable with the striking video for “Nothing Compares 2 U.” There were no women like her then at the top of the pop charts that year. She stared at you in that remarkable video with candour and a sincerity that was startling in a year when MC Hammer, Vanilla Ice and Paula Abdul ruled the airwaves. With that extraordinary voice, she could channel a world of emotions, from bliss to defiance. Unlike far too many pop singers, you never felt her showing off. She simply let out what was inside her.
I love I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, but it’s her debut The Lion And The Cobra I play the most, her rawest and most punk-rock moment. Barely out of her teens, Sinéad blew like a hurricane through an otherworldly mix of anthems, anguish and adoration. She would never sound so carefree as she did on “Mandinka,” or as ominious as she did on “Jackie,” but if I had to take one song by her with me, it would be the triumphant epic “Troy,” which howls and builds with energy. It’s a song that blows me away every time I listen to it, and while it was “Nothing Compares 2 U” used in all the headlines and tributes, it is “Troy” that sums up Sinéad O’Connor’sessence.
Number-one album I Do Not Want and that unstoppable hit Prince cover song were both her making and unmaking as a hit singer. She followed it up with a criminally underrated album of torch song covers, Am I Not Your Girl, and she bent those songs into her sphere marvellously.
I always considered myself a fan but realised I had only dipped a little bit into most of Sinéad’s music after 1994’s mellow and contemplative Universal Mother. I kept meaning to catch up because I always had a soft spot for her. I had drifted away from paying attention to her music, and I wish I hadn’t.
I wish I could say her death was surprising.
I knew she had a background of terrible abuse and repeated mental health issues, which were surely escalated by the suicide of her teenage son last year. I knew she sometimes said things that were off the wall or offensive and never quite seemed the same after being so rudely scorched by the public eye in the 1990s. She dared to speak out angrily about child abuse by priests and her mainstream career as a musician never really recovered, even though history has proven her defiantly right. She was a woman with opinions, and some people never forgave that. She was not your internet content.
It’s been bittersweet to see so many people talking about how much Sinéad’s music meant to them in the last day or so. This complicated woman, despite all the troubles and obstacles in her life, touched the lives of many.
I’ve seen some in the aftermath of her death saying the many controversies of her life never drowned out her music. I’m sorry, it’s a noble thought, but I think unfortunately, and terribly, for the vast majority of the mainstream world that just wasn’t true, and the tabloid clamour over her life swamped coverage of her musical career.
I wish it hadn’t. I wish she’d found a little more peace in this life. She changed me, just a little bit, by the very act of listening to her, and I wish somehow all of us who felt that way could have helped this beautiful woman make a different way in this hard old world.
I am not like I was before / I thought that nothing would change me / I was not listening anymore / Still you continued to affect me – “Feel So Different”, Sinéad O’Connor
I missed seeing the Ramones live. And the Clash, and the Sex Pistols. So I sure as heck wasn’t going to miss The Damned, one of punk’s pioneering acts and just about the last great band still going strong from their peers.
Many of my best friends were punks and goths when I was a young wide-eyed lad, but I always felt sort of punk-adjacent. Paradoxically, the older I’ve gotten the more appreciation I have for the unrestrained energy and fury of a good punk tune, and on a rainy Friday night at Auckland’s Powerstation there was nowhere better to be than hanging out with the Damned. Far from some vapid nostalgia effort, it turned out to be the best gig I’ve been to in quite a few years now.
The Damned sprouted from the UK in the class of 1976. They were the first British punk band to release a single, the unforgettable ‘New Rose,’ to release a studio album and to tour the US. But while their debut Damned Damned Damned was hardcore, over the years they branched out into goth rock and psychedelia, perhaps offending narrow-minded punk purists but impressing those of us who like a band that continues to evolve.
Even as they’re pushing their late sixties now, they still make a dynamic picture on stage. Lead singer Dave Vanian and guitar guru Captain Sensible are the only two of the original line-up left, but they’re more than enough to summon up the band’s spirit with a solid group beside them. Vanian was instantly the most stylish man in the room with a bespoke suit, fedora and sunglasses, strutting and crooning in his distinctive baritone, while the good Captain, mugging and smiling and wearing his trademark striped shirt, feels like a Beano comics character come to life.
Punk could be angry and violent, but there’s none of that bad energy in the Damned 2023. For nearly two hours, they pounded their way through classic punk and impressive new songs and reminded you why they’ve endured long after the Clash and Ramones are gone. Sure, there was a churning mosh pit (with a lot of bruised-looking guys my age who you know are hurting today) and even a stage-dive attempt, but it was a place of good vibes.
A big chunk of the set was devoted to the Damned’s brand new album Darkadelic, a rather bold move when you know that most of the crowd was really there for the older hits. But having listened to Darkadelic a lot the past week or two, it’s actually pretty terrific. It doesn’t try to be some hip rock release from 2023, but more of a summing up of all that the band has built. The Damned gather up their considerable powers honed over the decades into catchy numbers like ‘The Invisible Man,’ the grand harmonies of ‘Bad Weather Girl,’ the comic menace of ‘Beware of the Clown’ or the swoony dark ‘Wake The Dead.’ The new songs all navigate the tricky business of slotting right in among the Damned’s better known work, and they were terrific live.
Of course, though, the classic punk bashers are what the crowd is there for, and the final section of the show was an unrelenting blast from ‘Born To Kill’ to ‘Love Song’ straight through two encores and concluding with an utterly fiery stomp through ‘New Rose,’ the one that started it all. It’s still a lightning bolt of a song, and the crowd bobbed up and down like pogo sticks, old geezers like me and young girls born decades after the ‘New Rose’ single was released, and by gosh it was fun.
Punk is momentum, and catharsis, and lord knows we could always use a little more of that in these stressful times. Pound past the angst and the ugliness and uncertainty and just be there. Even if I can’t hear so good the next day, it’s worth it.
The Damned have followed their own quirky path for nearly five decades now, from rapid-fire punk to brooding goth to stadium rock anthems. They aren’t the young men in the ‘New Rose’ video almost 50 years ago, but somehow they’re still nothing but themselves.
What could be more punk rock than that?
(Here’s ‘New Rose’ performed more than 40 years apart, in Wellington and in the 1970s video. They still got it!)
From left, OMC’s Pauly Fuemana, Marlon Williams, Devilskin.
Once again, it’s nearly the end of another New Zealand Music Month, where all kiwis get up and dance to kiwi music all the month long.
People who were born here and those who came to live here from far away will all tell you that the music of New Zealand – from rough garage punk to delicate singer-songwriters to rich Māori waiata – feels special, somehow. We’re a small country, and yet, we make a mark on the global music scene. We’re the bottom of the world, so maybe we try harder.
Up in the hills of California, I didn’t grow up listening to a lot of the more obscure New Zealand music, and part of the fun of living here is constantly discovering fantastic songs that never made a splash in America, spanning gritty alternative rock to South Auckland soul.
Darcy Clay.
I dug making a playlist of 30 or so of my favourite New Zealand songs last year, and figured I’d give it another go this year picking out work by another bunch of great local musicians – celebrating everyone from Flying Nun legends like the Chills to rich young talents like Vera Ellen and Kane Strang or classic old-school psych-pop nuggets from The Fourmyula and Larry’s Rebels.
I love a song list that can encompass both the elegantly formal craft of Don McGlashan and the chaotic anarchy of the late Darcy Clay, so get ready for a wild ride through NZ sound. It really just scratches the surface of the talent, weirdness and beauty to be found in Aotearoa music. Here’s my playlist More Noisyland Music: NZ Music Month 2023 which you can hear over on Spotify:
They’ve been doing this since the 1970s, and they’re totally old dudes now, but there’s not a lot of music I’m more excited for in 2023 than a new album by Sparks.
Sparks have led a beautifully eclectic career for more than 50 years now, straddling the line between pop, rock and art and becoming popular, but never quite that popular.
Brothers Ron and Russell Mael (Russell sings with an operatic energy, Ron writes the music, mostly) are Californian natives who only really made it big when they went to Europe, and who somehow have kept a career rolling along as the entire music industry has changed several times over in their lifetimes.
I mean, who else makes a great music video I actually care about watching in 2023? There’s something joyfully enigmatic about their video for “The Girl Is Crying In Her Latte” starring Oscar-winner Cate Blanchett, the first single from the album of the same name coming out later in May. It’s an insinuating earworm, but it’s also weirdly sad and funny, making catchy music out of the modern world’s murky, jittery uncertainty. And Cate’s got moves:
In my journalism career, I’ve read a zillion bad press releases from bad bands that started off with some variation of saying “Our sound can’t really be described” or “Our music defies classification, man.” For Sparks, that description is actually true.
Their song titles alone are often perfectly formed little comic vignettes – “Nothing Is As Good As They Say It Is,” “Edith Piaf (Said It Better Than Me),” “What The Hell Is It This Time?”, “Lighten Up, Morrissey,” “Dancing Is Dangerous” or this gem — “I Can’t Believe That You Would Fall For All The Crap In This Song.” And don’t get me started on their album covers, which frequently are works of genius.
Their peculiar stage presence in the 1970s and ’80s was just oddball enough to seem rather subversive – Russell the long-haired, swinging frontman, Ron the leering, somewhat sinister keyboard presence, with that “Hitler mustache” that gave the whole band a macabre air. Who were they trying to be, anyway?
Their earliest work, 1971’s Sparks album, had a bit of a hippie-pop hangover going on with funkily falsetto singles like “Wonder Girl.” But they refined their sound fully with the dazzling Kimono My House in 1973 and bombastic single “This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both Of Us.” It’s almost like a Queen song reimagined by aliens who had never actually been to Earth:
Queen, of course, were bombastic too, but in a milder, more crowd-pleasing way. Sparks were defiantly weird, and put the onus on you to go along with them rather than just sit back and be entertained. An unexpected hit, “This Town” led to a series of goofily smart pop tunes all through the ‘70s and ‘80s. At one point, they wrote a song simply about the joys of eating pineapple.
With 1979’s synth-pop electronic collaboration with Giorgio Moroder, No. 1 In Heaven, it feels like they invented the new wave of the 1980s – turning repetitive beats and surging futuristic chords into something almost ecstatic, strange and wonderful.
Periodically, they’d go away and return as an entirely different band, but they never really left, even if their work was more of a cult pleasure than mega-seller. Circa 2000 their work took a more orchestral, elaborate turn on albums like Lil’ Beethoven and Hippopotamus, with a renewed focus on the power of repetition with such mantra-like tracks as “My Baby’s Taking Me Home.”
Yet while the later songs have an older, wiser perspective than some of their earlier work, they’re still shot through with that very Sparks sense of humour. They’ve even written one of the weirdest movie musicals in recent years, the incredibly bizarre story of a murdering comedian and his magical puppet baby (!!!), Annette. I loved it, but it’s about as far from the mainstream as you can get.
Sparks contain the qualities of most of the musicians I admire the most, from the Beatles to Bowie – a determination to always move forward and not keep repeating themselves. Their 26th studio album sounds almost nothing like their first more than 50 years ago, and yet at the same time it’s unmistakably the work of the same vision.
The excellent documentary by Edgar Wright, The Sparks Brothers, which I’ve written about before, has played a big part in the autumnal appreciation for Sparks and is a terrific tour through their idiosyncratic career for beginners.
Witty and weird, Sparks are a band that for 50 years has been boldly nothing but themselves, never chasing fads nor fashion, but sometimes creating it. In a world where everybody seems obsessed with fame and going viral, there’s something comforting in a cult hit favourite band that’s never been anything but themselves.
What is it? What a time to be alive. The country was riveted by the presidential campaign of Walter Mondale. The plucky cassette Walkman was in everyone’s home. We all woke up each day asking, “Where’s the beef?” And looming above it all, breakdancing fever burned through America like a raging inferno in those halcyon days of 1984, 39 years ago now. Not one, not two, but three movies dedicated to the dance sensation hit the big screens. First came Breakin’ in May, followed by competitor Beat Street in June, culminating in the December 1984 release of the Avengers: Endgame of poppin’ and lockin’, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo.
Breakin’ and its sequels joined a long line of teen-oriented dance movies from Beach Blanket Bingo to Bring It On to Step Up, all frothy pop culture trend-chasing at its height. The first Breakin’ wraps up all its dance numbers around the story of rich white girl dancer Kelly (Lucinda Dickey) who becomes friends with a couple of streetwise breakdancers, Ozone (“Shabba-Doo” Quinones) and Turbo (“Boogaloo Shrimp” Chambers). For the sequel, the producers at Cannon Films turned to the time-worn concept of “puttin’ on a show,” as a beloved youth centre is being threatened by a cartoonish evil yuppie developer and the only way to save it is… with dance! The awkward yet oddly unforgettable title of Breakin’ 2 ensured it would endure in film history. But as a movie… well…
Why I never saw it: Weirdly, I saw Breakin’ on the preferred medium, VHS tape, sometime during its original 1980s heyday, but about 30 seconds after it was released, Breakin’ 2 and its insane subtitle became a punchline. To see it would have been complicit in its very lameness. It got referred to in the title of a terrific documentary about the ‘80s delights of the parent film company, Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films. More disturbing, because we can’t have nice things in this life, somehow the word ‘boogaloo’ got hijacked by a bunch of racist idiots, too.
Does it measure up to its rep? Look – this is a ridiculous movie. With a title like that, how could it not be? But it’s kind of charming, too in a completely inane way. A gaudy, Hollywood snapshot of early hip-hop culture, it’s not quite as grounded in reality as the first Breakin’ (which was hardly a Bergman film by any means). Like most sequels it’s bigger, brasher and louder, immediately kicking off with a giant dance number where an entire multi-racial neighbourhood gyrates and dances down the streets, from construction workers to old ladies to traffic officers. Truly, Breakin’ 2 kind of defies words. It’s a movie one has to describe in YouTube clips:
It also features an utterly non-violent “breakdance battle” which might just be the greatest thing you’ll ever see:
And that’s not even getting into the stunning ’80s fashions, the compelling bro-mance between its two leading men, the scene where young Boogaloo Shrimp is healed by the very power of dance, the entirely random puppet scene. I can’t pretend it’s a good movie by any means. The actors are all stiff and weirdly aware of the camera. The late “Shabba Doo” is a strangely charismatic awkward presence, eyeballing the camera with Brando-esque intensity, while Lucinda Dickey – who starred in both Breakin’ and the utterly magical Ninja III: The Domination and then vanished from screens – has a perky charm of her own, even if you don’t buy the reality of her “character” for a second. But you watch a movie like Breakin’ 2 for the dance numbers, and they’re elaborate, campy and colourful nonsense, and yet somehow, I smiled at every one of them.
Worth seeing? Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo is cheese through and through, of course. How could it not be? And yet, while it may seem like damning with faint praise, it’s got a good heart. Far more diverse than many movies of the time, it gently teases its very chaste interracial romance and fundamentally has a message of inclusiveness and acceptance, which I dig. There’s a place for this kind of airy escapism in cinema. Sure, you can pop it on the screen of your choice and laugh at it the entire time, at the fashions, the dance moves, the glorious camp of it all, but you know – for all its corporate synergy fad-hopping origins and essentially clumsy filmmaking, it’s weirdly sincere.
Somehow, watching one of these goofy teen movies where all the world’s problems can just be solved with silly dancing is a bit life-affirming. To quote the deeply profound lyrics of the soundtrack song, “When I’m dancin’ / It seems like everything’s all right / Everything’s all right / I believe in the beat.” There are worse things to believe in.
Look, we’re all a bit nostalgic for the 1990s these days, right? It’s a cliche, but it’s almost relaxing to recall an era where pop culture’s greatest fear was “selling out” rather than worrying about climate apocalypse, social media overload, misinformation and creeping fascism. It was hardly perfect but we like to imagine it was.
Not every ’90s band is the same. I can’t remember the last time I listened to Pearl Jam, but I put on a Pavement song every week or two at the very least. For a band whose full albums precisely spanned the 1990s, from 1992’s Slanted And Enchanted to 1999’s Terror Twilight, they feel far less bound to their era than others. Pavement returned to New Zealand for a fantastic show at the Civic Theatre last night and reminded us all why they still matter, decades after their final album.
I saw Pavement play their first reunion tour in 2010 (reviewed on Version 1.0 of my website) and it was marvellous fun, but 13 years on, even though they’ve never put out any new music, they felt even more contemporary somehow – all the angst and weirdness of the last few years just seem to make them more relevant than ever.
The band were a bit looser and more playful than in 2010, stretching out nicely in extended spacey jams on songs like “Type Slowly” that built on the hazy vibe, with frontman Stephen Malkmus’ spiky guitar solos evoking the late great Tom Verlaine of Television and his own relaxed and sprawling solo albums.
Pavement have often been misleadingly described as “slacker rock,” including probably by myself at some point, but it occurred to me that lazy label obscures the amiable craftwork behind their songs – earworm nuggets like “Gold Soundz,” “Summer Babe” or the surprising viral hit B-side “Harness Your Hopes” have a tight power pop catchiness at their core.
Malkmus’ lyrics have always had a charmingly casual quality to them, sounding like a super-relaxed rapper. But no matter how surreal the songs may get with their asides about Geddy Lee’s voice or how sexy Stone Temple Pilots are, Malkmus always managed to sound disarmingly sincere. “I’m an island of such great complexity,” he sings in one of my top 10 Pavement songs, “Shady Lane,” and the key is he never makes that seem like hard work.
They had the blissful upbeat tunes like “Cut Your Hair” and “Stereo,” but there’s always been a gently melancholy core to the band, too, a quality which helps their music endure in numbers like “Here” or “Stop Breathing.” I’ve listened to my favourite of their albums, 1997’s Brighten The Corners, about a zillion times and still manage to come away with new things from each song.
Last week I had the pleasure of “writing up” – as they say in the biz – an interview Pavement’s Bob Nastanovichgave to Radio New Zealand’s Music 101 before their show, talking about how NZ’s classic Flying Nun bands like The Clean and Chris Knox influenced their sound. Maybe that’s why they sounded faintly alien in the flannel 1990s. They hailed from Stockton, California, and were an ordinary-looking group of dudes, but at their core Pavement were inspired more by bands like Can and The Fall than KISS and Led Zeppelin. They have always been a rather unique brew of American casual and avant-garde surrealism.
Everyone seemed to have a different favourite song last night, as Pavement dipped between their “hits” and more obscure numbers. That’s kind of the beauty of their work – it’s whatever you want it to be.
I’m sorry if I ever called them slacker rock – they’re their own beast, really. Maybe it’s the dream of the 1990s, hazy and irresistible like that summer babe in the distance, unforgettable and you’ve always just missed her.
I always wanted to be a real music critic. A hardboiled, unshaven take-no-prisoners wordsmith like Lester Bangs, Robert Christgau or Jim DeRogatis. I wanted to be William Miller in Almost Famous.
But I never really quite managed to make that a full-time gig among the many hats I’ve worn in my journalism career, really. I’ve been editor of alternative weekly newspapers back when they still existed, written lots and lots of music reviews and talked about music on the radio and covered concerts, I’ve interviewed Alice Cooper and once had someone from the band Phish call me and yell at my answering machine over a snarky dumb article I wrote about them, and I started this whole crazy writing career off with an internship at music mag Billboard way back in the day, but still… I’m no Lester Bangs. I just sometimes write about music I like.
And now that I’m a gentleman of a certain age, I accept that I’ve lost touch with what the kids are into with their TikToks and suchlike. Although I do try to still discover new stuff now and again, in my heart of hearts, my musical lodestone still remains roughly 1972-1988, I guess. Accept who you are, at a certain point, I reckon.
That doesn’t stop me from having the opinions on music, but I also recognise that at a certain point, yet another middle-aged white guy rambling on about nerdy obsessions about albums that came out decades ago is a bit well, cliche. But sometimes, you gotta let your opinions out or they fester in your brain and cause an aneurysm. None of them are quite worth a post on their own, but the frustrated music writer in me insists on laying them down like it was 1987 and this was a bad column in Spin magazine.
Thus, here’s 10 Hot Takes About Rock Music I Will Not Be Explaining Any Further. Please feel free to discuss and debunk.
2. I will always choose to listen to The Sex Pistols over The Clash.
3. Almost every Guns N’ Roses song would be better with the final 60-90 seconds cut off. (Seriously, listen to “November Rain” sometime.)
4. The Rolling Stones should have broken up when Charlie Watts died.
5. I prefer Phil Collins as lead singer of Genesis.
6. I think David Bowie’s techno-jungle 1997 midlife crisis album Earthling is one of his five best albums.
7. I have switched back and forth between loving and hating the Doors at least five times in my music listening lifetime. I still can’t figure out which side I land on.
8. Frank Zappa was the better musician technically, but Captain Beefheart’s croaky stomps were more sincere and hold up better.
9. I’ve listened to Prince’s delightfully silly Batman album more times than any of his records other than Purple Rain.
Are we here again, at the end of another year? I’m not quite sure how this happened. The number “2023” sounds, to me, like some far futuristic utopia or dystopia, rather than the time I’m actually living in. I think I really stopped counting around 2012, anyway.
As I’ve previous said in these last twochaos-filled years, music helps keep me same. Whether it’s 6k walks around the neighbourhood or while I’m beavering away making journalism, there’s often a song nearby.
I have to say, 2022 has been, well, pretty shit in a lot of ways, on a personal level. Too much bad news in my life and the world seems to be getting stupider every day. It’s hard, sometimes, not to become the bitter sort of person you swore you wouldn’t become in your 20s.
So, music. And new music! I’m trying a little harder, like my mate Bob, not to become one of those old guys who always complains that music was better in the 1990s or whenever. I actively sought out some of the young folk making music this year, as well as my favourite old folks still making music, rather than just listening to the same Ramones and Prince albums over and over.
The Songs That Helped Me Survive 2022 Playlist is almost entirely music that came out this year (there’s a couple of perennial songs I listened to a lot that are a bit older). I listened to groovy young (or younger) folks like Wet Leg (who made the most joyously fun album of the year) and Orville Peck and Tove Lo, to awesome kiwi musicians like Marlon Williams and Troy Kingi and Aldous Harding, to old faves like Freedy Johnston and Midnight Oil and Don McGlashan who put out great new stuff this year.
And here’s my playlist. So here’s two hours of eclectic alt-rock, jazz, kiwi pop, afro-noise, songwriting genius, angry rants and wistful laments! Once upon a time it might’ve been a mixtape I mailed a dear friend or two from across the country or across the world. These days, it’s a collection of bits and bytes and well, anyone can listen. That’s music for you. It’s what keeps us going, when the going gets tough. Listen up, I made you a mixtape:
Nik Dirga 
#/media/File:David_Bowie_-_Reality.jpg){kind=link}