Category: Music

You know, I’m already starting to confuse Destiny’s Child with En Vogue.

Somewhere, Beyonce Knowles feels that trembling in her celebrity.

The backlist sales of music from the 1980s and 1990s trend towards hard rock:

AC/DC’s “Back in Black” (1980) last year sold 440,000 copies and has thus far sold 156,000 this year, according to the Nielsen SoundScan catalog charts, which measure how well physical albums older than two years old are selling. (All figures for this article were provided by Nielsen SoundScan.)

Those “Back in Black” numbers would make most contemporary CDs a success. Metallica’s self-titled 1991 album is altogether the second-biggest selling album of the Nielsen SoundScan era, which began in 1991. “Metallica” sold 275,000 copies last year.

Bon Jovi’s greatest-hits collection “Cross Road” last year sold 324,000 copies, while Guns N’ Roses “Appetite for Destruction” (1987) sold 113,000.

Well, yeah.

That’s the sound of me finally giving into myself. I saw this video on Ace of Spades and have watched it over and over:

It’s a nice tribute to Bob Ross of The Joy of Painting. I recollect catching Bob in his early years (ca. 1986-1988) and watching him on the local PBS station, broadcast over the air if you damn kids can believe it. I was twisting the knob, which was how we changed stations between the three to seven stations we could get with antennae, and I found his show early in my late middle school to early high school period, watching the grainy television from the top bunk in a bedroom in a mobile home sized to fit only a television, a bunk bed, and a dresser.

I liked how easy he made painting landscapes look, and I watched it a couple weeks running. He tempted me to try some painting on my own, using stray watercolor paint set gift packs and the only canvases I had handy–the glazed tops of doughnut boxes my mother brought as our special Sunday treats from the local U-Gas. The doughnuts were the treat, not the boxes, you dang literalists. Man, I can picture one of my self-portraits in my head even now, wherein a rudely-depicted blond young man reclines under a tree. Fortunately, that picture reclines in a landfill somewhere now. Even if I could post it, I probably wouldn’t; let’s leave it at that.

The year after I graduated, I was shipping/receiving clerk for an art supply store, and the shop carried a small set of the Bob Ross line of products. I remembered him fondly and probably caught an episode or two of his show for the then-kitsch value. He died while I was working there, a stunning blow that no doubt the sales staff, local students in art programs, brought to the back room with a combination of sadness and smugness. Based on the quality of my art work, I didn’t have youthful superiority to spare, so I was only sad.

The aforelinked video touches me with nostalgia and a hint of that sadness, but also pleasantly amuses me with the music and with the sense that maybe, yes, Bob Ross would have felt that way about the message his laid-back style conveyed.

Sometimes, when I’m singing along with my favorite songs on the radio in front of friends—good friends, mind you, the sort who don’t mind that I miss one note out of every three or two—I will further embarrass myself by not only missing the interval, or octave, but by missing a line or a lyric. Sometimes, a bridge or solo is shortened and the renewed vocalization catches me by surprise. After the song is over, I try to justify that portion of my pathological performance by saying that I am “singing the skip.”

Back in my formative middle 1980s, the cassette single was a novelty even as the era of the 45 record was fading. My mother owned a large number from her youth some twenty years previously, so my brother and I had plenty of oldies to load onto the console stereo in the living room. We cut our teeth on those, and when I went onto college, my endearment with the cheapening media form grew.

I found a music store in Milwaukee that offered juke box packs of records, a ten platter grab bag, for $1.99. I bought as many as I could, uncovering a large number of singles of dubious merit, but some I recognized. I also bought singles of contemporary or past hits for $2.49 each, and a number of used LPs to play on my shelf turntable.

There shall come a time when we’ll have to explain the oddities of records to children and young folk. You see, it was a disc like a compact disc, but it had these long grooves on each side. A needle rode in these grooves and the minute variation in the groove depth provided the sound. However, sometimes the records became scratched or damaged, and the needle would jump the edge of the groove. This skipping would advance the song a couple seconds, sort of like touching fast forward for a nanosecond.

Some of the inexpensive or used records I bought were imperfect, and even with the penny taped to the record needle, the songs sometimes skipped. Due to the nature of the imperfections, the songs skipped consistently; that is, the same line morphed into the second following line every time I played a particular song. So as I sang along in the darkness of my apartment, I began to skip, too.

The years of conditioning has paid off; I could sing to those songs and correctly account for the errata. Unfortunately, that special talent only works when I listen and sing along to the records I owned as a teenager and twentyager. When I’m confronted with the songs on the radio, on cassette, on CD, or in any of the current digital flavors of the month, I find myself a couple measures ahead at least once in the song.

So that’s my excuse, gentle reader and tolerant listener, for those odd moments where I run ahead of whatever I’m listening to and interpreting through my own rendition. It’s not a sign of my senility, but it is a sign of how we did things back in the old days when we flipped the discs or stacked them to play single-sides of albums in succession. We had to walk 2 mi—record store in the—we liked it!

I fly a starship
Across the universe divide

Come on, you cannot believe it either, even when you hear it in his own voice.

It’s been ten years since Meredith Brooks charted her only hit song, "Bitch". The song itself was one of those songs celebrating the essence of womanhood, or at least the essence of using being a woman as an excuse for mercurial mood swings and taunting a male if he couldn’t handle idiocy from his lover. You know, a retread of Sheryl Crow’s "Strong Enough To Be My Man", but without the remorse and with a dirty word as its name. Brooks charted with that song, but that’s it for her. Even Alanis Morissette got more than one single from the scthick.

So I was wondering today: Ten years later, who does Meredith Brooks hate to get mixed up with most?

• Meredith Baxter-Birney?
• Merril Bainbridge, whose 1994 song "Mouth" also was one word long but was upbeat and fun, something a even a guy could sing without feeling dirty:

• Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of the book Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women:

• Burgess Meredith
• That one waitress at Applebee’s.

It is a celebration of my people.

For not particular reason, I started thinking of songs that mention dimes. Including:

• “My Hometown” by Bruce Springsteen
  I was eight years old, running with a dime in my hand….
• “Downtown Train” by Rod Stewart
  I’m shining like a new dime….
• “Operator” by Jim Croce
  You can keep the dime.
• “Raspberry Beret” by Prince
  I was working part time at the five and dime…

Okay, that’s not a dozen, but I do have comments enabled here. You help me round out the list, okay?

The number one grossing Australian entertainment act from last year? It wasn’t Beccy Cole. It wasn’t Nicole Kidman. It wasn’t even AC/DC. Not even close:

The Wiggles were Australia’s top-earning entertainers last year, ahead of No. 2 AC/DC and No. 3 Nicole Kidman. The four men in brightly colored T-shirts, accompanied by a cast of characters including Dorothy the Dinosaur and Wags the Dog, grossed $39 million last year.

I am in the wrong business.

Johnny Cash singing “Hurt”:

Remembering that all of your efforts, your failures, and your successes matter the same in the end really puts your simple little “I Squandered A Four Day Weekend and Am Back At Work” churlishness into perspective, ainna?

KISSing UP:
Small in stature, tribute band lives large in honor of Gene Simmons and company:

Almost exactly a decade ago, Joey Fatale had the idea for MiniKISS, the “littlest KISS tribute band in the world.”

He was moving and, in the process, going through his vinyl records when he came upon his copy of “Alive!” the 1975 live album that helped make KISS a legend.

“I thought it would be great to have a band of little people dressed up as KISS,” Fatale said. “I threw it together as a fluke.”

The only thing that could make it better is realizing it’s not the only one:

MiniKISS clicked with Comedy Central’s mock-news program “The Daily Show,” which recently did a broad parody involving the “rivalry” between MiniKISS and Tiny Kiss, another KISS tribute band with a little-people lineup. On the MiniKISS Web site, Fatale has more or less foreclosed on commenting on Tiny Kiss, but he’s taken marketing precautions.

Isn’t this country great?

Epic by Faith No More.

Because let’s face it, it’s been 17 years, and I’m still saying, “What is it?”

But perhaps it’s not an effective song; perhaps it’s merely a poor metaphor, or I am not that bright.

Apparently, the producers of Channel4.com have blotted the movie Dirty Dancing from their minds; otherwise, how could they call Eric Carmen a one-hit wonder for his song “All By Myself”?

Oh, they’re British.

As if that’s some excuse they didn’t spend much of the late 1980s suffering through “Make Me Lose Control” on the radio.

My psychiatrist appreciates the difference and is glad I was not born in Leeds.

Groovin’, as in “When the Sun Goes Down“:

’cause when the sun goes down
we’ll be groovin’
when the sun goes down
we’ll be feelin’ alright

Kenny Chesney, you used to be a cowboy. Why, you once stole a horse from the Law. But the beachfront property addled your brain, and suddenly you’re sounding like something out of a 50s sock hop….granted, one where you’ve snuck in some booze, but come on, groovin’?

Exception to the Rule: I guess you can talk about groovin’ if and only if you’re singing about a plunge router, perhaps in a song entitled "If I Could, I Wood" about being briefly lonely when your woman tells you to choose between her and your sweet basement workshop.