Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun

Just wanted to let you know, precious readers, that I’ll be in sunny Bayonne, New Jersey, for the next few days for my brother’s wedding festivities. Consequently, the blogging sched might be a little light until next week. (Can you tell I’m dragging this Shelved thing out as long as possible?) In the meantime, though, here’s some Zelda warriors to keep you warm until I return.

# The Morning News on geoengineering. The upshot? We’re doomed.

# Here’s another arbitrary list, this one of the 100 Best First Lines from Novels. Take it for what it is, understanding that “Call me Ishmael” benefits from the same self-fulfilling cycle that makes “Stairway to Heaven” the most requested song on the radio. Stairway is touted as the most requested, so people request it. “Call me Ismael” leads these lists, because that’s what’s done. My own myopic opinion: 1984, Tristram Shandy, and The Stranger have better first lines. But oh well.

# If you want to understand DD&U, you’ll watch Baffler Meal.

Thixotropic

9) The Low Life, Thixotropic (2003?)
I took a writing workshop about music in college, and apparently I learned nothing, because I’m having a hard time describing Thixotropic on the merits. (This will be a recurring theme in the days to come, precious reader. My apologies in advance.) The vibe I get from The Low Life is that sound like a homeless man’s Red Hot Chili Peppers. (Here, I’m not talking about the hits, but rather the deeper cuts from albums like Californication and By the Way. [Why, the astute reader might ask, did I choose "a homeless man's Red Hot Chili Peppers" when that band, in fact, put out a couple of pretty good albums in the 00s? Well, to paraphrase Robbie Hart, I have the blog, and you don't, so you will listen to every damn word that I have to say!])

What was I saying?

Yes. Thixotropic. Tremendous album. As you might recall from last post, I struggled to whittle down my list of favorite albums to a manageable 10. Consequently, any outside factors that could help sway my decision were welcomes. Hence The Low Life’s appearance. Allow me to explain.

It was a more innocent time, the summer of 2003. A pal and I were driving down the shore, and she threw in a CD, and the first track was wicked catchy. So was the second. Then the third. And so on. How often do you hear a random band that turns out to be awesome? I’d certainly never heard of The Low Life before. And to boot, my friend only knew about these guys because someone handed her a free CD outside a rock club. Or something like that. Anyway, that CD was Thixotropic. I’ve had it with me for a long time.

The band, native to the DC-Baltimore area, has since broke up, leaving behind this album and the follow-up Daisy Cutter. Their website used to say something along the lines of “The Low Life is a robot killing machine sent back in time to save the future by destroying the present.” I’d say that describes their sound pretty accurately! The aforementioned first track, “In My Bed,” sets the tone for the album, both musically and lyrically: breezy guitars, jazzy basslines, and just the right sprinkling of bongo drums, coupled with a fairly grim view of relations with the fairer sex. Female readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun might recoil at lyrics like “Zip off your boots, spit out your gum. / Get in my bed. / Just because you’re pretty doesn’t make you dumb,” but the song’s protagonist, and indeed most of the album’s protagonists, are boorish enough caricatures that their critiques must be taken with a few requisite grains of salt. Notable and telling exceptions, though, include the album’s closer, “Four Walls,” a tender and melodic little acoustic tune that frontman Evan Bliss seemed to like so much that he reprised it on his first solo album, Pour-Soi en Soi. Regular readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun understand that I wear my heart on my sleeve, so sweet lyrics like “This is where we’ll call home. / Got four walls and a burning stove. / I can’t buy you gold when push comes to shove. / All you’ll have around your neck is my love,” are right in my wheelhouse.

Signature track: “Bag of Money”

True confession, guys: “Four Walls” is actually my choice for signature track, but unfortunately there aren’t any decent recordings of it out there on the Intertubes. No matter, though! This wouldn’t be a top 10 list if there weren’t an almost equally great song on deck. That song is “Bag of Money,” which tells the story of a bank-or-convenience-store-but-the-distinction-is-inconsequential robber who falls in love with one of his victims. (”Let’s leave our lives behind. / A bag of money and the car’s still running. / No time for acting shy, / Losing time with the cop cars coming.”) It’s all relatively straightforward, but you know I’m a sucker for a hooky song, and one that has a lot of different, catchy melodies. “Bag of Money” is where it’s at.

Since I sort of cheated you out of a signature track, let me make it up to. Click here to listen to a live performance by The Low Life from 2004, courtesy of the Internet Archive (which is a just dynamite resource for live music. Really amazing, actually.) I saw these guys one time at the legendary Crossroads in Garwood, New Jersey. I was the designated driver that night, and I remember being so antsy not being able to drink at a rock show at a club that I bought a pack of cigarettes. So yeah, you could smoke in a bar. That’s how long ago it was!

It’s almost the end of the year, and the end of the decade. (Which I won’t bother trying to name. Seek other commentators for that discussion.) I wouldn’t be a worthwhile blog-writing guy if I didn’t take a stab at an end-of-the-decade list, and since I write about (or at least pass along) music quite a bit, well, here we are. This wouldn’t be Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun, though, if there weren’t an introductory essay.

This is not a comprehensive list, which will become clear as the days go by. I’m sure Kid A and whatever drivel the Arcade Fire have put out in the past ten years are fine albums. I wouldn’t know; I never listened to them! So I’m not going to pull your leg and pretend that you’re about to read an authoritative list of the ten best albums of the decade. Rolling Stone or Pitchfork are doing that kind of thing. I’m only writing about what I’m qualified to write about.

As I was going through my music, though, I realized that I don’t actually own a ton of albums that I regularly listen to. Or, at least, listen to enough to say “this one is better than that one.” I pretty easily came up with around 25 albums to choose from. (There were still a lot that didn’t make even the first cut. I have like, every Modest Mouse album, and I’ve listened to exactly zero of those songs. Thanks, MyTunes!) This makes sense, though, right? I don’t steal a lot of music these days, so if I’m going to own an entire album, odds are it’s going to be by an artist that I know I already like. It’s a recession, after all. If I find an individual song I like, I’ll splurge, but for the most part, I’m not rolling the dice on unproven albums.

The big question is, is the record industry going to roll the dice on albums? I’m not going to make any dire predictions about the fate of the record industry: like I said, it’s a recession, and a lot of industries are in decline. However, the thrust of this Financial Times article looks not so good:

Only one album released after 2002 has made it in to the decade’s top 10 in the US, according to research that highlights the record industry’s decline since piracy and single-track digital downloads began to erode the once lucrative format.

Again, I’m not a business expert, or a record executive, or an artist, or anything like that, but it makes intuitive sense that in a world where you can easily buy any individual track you want, or steal it, or listen to it on-demand over the Internet, the market for full albums, collections of songs meant to convey a singular artistic message, would decline, on both the creative and the business side. All of this is to say, this could be the last Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun Decennial Album Retrospective you ever read!

A quick note on methodology: I limited myself to one album per band on this list. Otherwise, it would come to be dominated by what the Official Washington Correspondent of DD&U refers to as LIEWS. That is, Long Island Emo With Screaming. I’d like to appear a little more broad than that. In that spirit, here’s my tenth favorite album of the decade, a little New Jersey Emo With Screaming.

War All the Time

10) Thursday, War All the Time (2003)
Ok, so “emo with screaming” isn’t the most apt description. Thursday counts as a post-hardcore band, if that sort of label means anything to you. (It doesn’t mean much to me.) War All the Time is Thursday’s second full-length studio album, and it’s a doozy: loud, intense, and grim. You know I’m a stickler for starting a record out right, and the first track, “For the Workforce, Drowning,” does the trick: I’d argue it’s the most potent commentary on the existential terror of the rat race in the last 25 years. (Now we lie wide awake in our parents beds / tossing and turning. / Tomorrow we’ll get up, / drive to work, / single file. / With everyday, /it’s like the last. / Waiting for the life to start, / is it always just always ahead of the curve?) Right on those heels, we’re confronted with what passes for a ballad on a Thursday album, “Between Rupture and Rapture,” dread-inspiring imagery and all. (Without a second opinion / The chemicals saturate to counteract the code. / Through the double helix we are twisting / Too scared to let this go. / Someone call the head nurse. / She’s coming to the capitol / To wrap us up and throw us in the dirt / With a dream that’s turning off.) It’s a ferocious-sounding album from front to back, but the endearing quality of Thursday is the heart and feeling that goes into their lyrics. I don’t want to blow all my material before I get into the signature track, though.

Signature track: “War All the Time”

Thursday frontman Geoff Rickly is on record as saying that the album’s title and theme were inspired by a Charles Bukowski poem called “Pace Is the Essence,” which I’ll go ahead and reproduce here in full, probably in violation of all manner of copyright laws. Sorry. It’s a good poem!

as the mailman walked up the hill
he laughed
when he saw me.
I laughed too.
“yeah, Harry, I know:
just an old man with a hose
watering the parkway.
you got me…”

those guys think it’s got to be
war
all the time.
I’m just taking a
rest.
when I finally press that red
button
they’ll wish I was
back watering the
gladiolas.

“It’s about love, this record is really about love,” Rickly said about War All the Time. “I’ve never written a song about love before, the whole record is about love lost and faith lost.” Which, you know, we have to take the man at his word, to an extent. Regular readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun will recognize, however, comma, that I’m a pretty enthusiastic proponent of the reader-response school of criticism. The band has said, in a number of venues, that the title track of their album isn’t actually about September 11th. But it’s very hard not to complete the meaning of the text through interpretation, so to speak. And when I hear lyrics like “War all of the time / In the shadow of the New York skyline. / We grew up too fast, / Falling apart / Like the ashes of American flags” and “We don’t know where to land / So we kiss like little kids. / We used to be very tall buildings. / We’ve been falling for so long,” it’s hard not to imagine an allegory for what happened that day. I won’t bullshit you, dear reader: six years later, I listen to this song, and I get a couple pieces of dust in my eye.

Rickly and his bandmates have an interest in removing their tune from the collection of songs that can be categorized as “About 9/11,” since so many of them, especially those written in the most immediate aftermath, come from a place of fear, hatred, and irrational groupthink. They have an even greater interest if, in fact, they didn’t mean for the song to be even remotely considered for that category in the first place. What I’m trying to say is that even if you inadvertently create a piece of art that can, in a meaningful and artful way, take people back to a place that they would rather forget, but are better off not forgetting, and think critically about it, that’s probably something to be proud of.

I guess it’s becoming painfully apparent that architecture gets me riled up. Who knows why. I guess it’s because unlike other forms of art, architecture is something that we all have to engage and be exposed to every day. You can manage to go through your whole life and do a good job avoiding, say, Jo Baer’s Primary Light Group (please, for the love of God, if you don’t have a sense of humor and perspective, don’t click on this link. It will make you want to smash things!) But the building you work in? You come into contact with that architecture every day.

So, courtesy of Ezra Klein, we’ve got Travel+Leisure magazine’s list of the world’s ugliest buildings. I’m not going to repeat what EK said, suffice it to say that I agree with him. I will mention two things, though:

1) The Port Authority Bus Terminal is not on the list. Here’s a picture of its pretty side. That’s the right cross against this list’s credibility…

2) …and here’s the crippling uppercut: Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim is on T+L’s list of the world’s coolest buildings. Regular readers of DD&U know how I feel about Frank Gehry’s work. It’s lame. And ugly.

Ugh. Why can’t people just appreciate things that look cool?