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Thursday, December 5, 2002 -- 07:54 p.m.

New content! Sort of! I review MC Paul Barman for City Pages. That is all for now. I am currently working on TOP SECRET STUFF so things will be quiet here for a little while.

-Nate

Saturday, November 30, 2002 -- 09:52 a.m.

So last night I was listening to Crap From the Past, a local retro-pop show on KFAI, and...
I don't know how to continue this. All I can say is that Ron "Boogie Monster" Gerber was at the end of his show, decided to give the audience a fair warning of the awfulness of the record he was about to play, and then...
I have no idea how to proceed with this post. All I know is that I was hit in the skull with a sledgehammer of treacle called "Dear Mr. Jesus". This was an actual Top 40 hit in 1986. Sung by a four year-old. And it's about child abuse. And some ultra-histrionic metal-ballad reject jumps in at the end. The horrible thing about this is that it's about battered kids and it's so incompetently done that it makes me laugh. I am laughing at a song about child abuse. That is probably going to send me to some form of Hell.
So click on that link. Listen. Listen good. Because I am a sadist, and I want everyone to share my pain and/or mirth.

-Nate

Friday, November 29, 2002 -- 10:56 a.m.

DAMN. Get thee immediately to the website of Go Home Productions and download "Ain't No Sunshine In My Closet" IMMEDIATELY. It's one of the best bootlegs I've ever heard, giving one of Eminem's most heartwrenching yet oddly-backed singles an eerie Grover Washington jazz-soul backdrop that turns it into a Detroit white-kid "Trouble Man". Again, DAMN.

-Nate

Friday, November 29, 2002 -- 09:58 a.m.

I don't know if all of you frequent SSCB on a regular basis, but one of the most out-there things I wrote for it was a review of a horrendous bicycle safety film, "One Got Fat". Well, if it wasn't enough monkeytime goodness for y'all, Scott Munro did his own take on the film and, while short, does bring up a couple points I missed (all the kids appear completely apathetic to their friends' demise; the one kid who had no bike was a wimp for being unable to walk nine blocks).

-Nate

Friday, November 29, 2002 -- 12:04 a.m.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

-Nate

Saturday, November 23, 2002 -- 06:41 p.m.

ILM's influence has spread to the popblogosphere in the form of the "Load every single MP3 you have into WinAMP, hit 'shuffle' and list the first ten songs that come up" deal. I'm going to try my hand at this, though I should mention that I'm cheating and will completely omit all instances of spoken word or comedy interludes, Beck songs (which account for at least 25-33% of all my MP3s) and the stray TV show theme (unless it is THEME FROM SWAT). With those omissions, that gives me about 2,200 MP3s to work with. I might do this every night until the novelty dies off.

Marco Zaffarano, "MZ 5": As I've mentioned a couple times, Harthouse's Point of No Return was my first real exposure to techno-styled music, though this sort of stuff leans more towards the hard-edged, nearly industrial end of the spectrum. "MZ 5" was one of the tracks on this album that I wore the grooves out of; it's all kinds of sinister, dropping the hyper-tempo "boom-tssh" bassline and the fork-in-a-light-socket synth buzz that dominate this song in and out at nearly random intervals. I can't imagine this playing in Ibiza or happy-vibe warehouse raves or trendy small-club DJ sets. I can imagine this soundtracking Quake 4, though. Violent. And, at six and a half minutes, a little taxing.
Mirageman, "Thunder": Oh yeah, crazy Nixon-era Italo-funk spy flick bombast rears its immaculately-coiffed head once again and brings the hammer down! This falls at about the time when psychedelic pseudo-hippie electric guitars were a few short steps from being phased out and replaced by the almighty whockachicka, and this song makes the best of it by having the fuzz riffs walk hand in hand with more deranged horn solos than you can shake a Maynard Ferguson at. I have no idea if this scored a film or not but if it did the movie has to be at least twice as ridiculously comic-book loony as "Diabolik". Nirvana, "You Know You're Right": Oh, great. I thought I deleted this. Cobain's alive today, this is a non-album b-side. Grohl proves his weight as a hell of a drummer and Kur(d)t has a couple decent riffs in him before he spills out that characteristic Nirvana guitar hell death scream but it doesn't rise much above the until the two-minute point. And at the two-minute point, it goes into the most ridiculously overlong aimless coda ever. It's a minute and a half of "you know you're right" over and over and over and a variation of that riff repeatedly, endless nameless. It sounds like the kind of thing you'd imagine him churning out in the studio shortly before he decided he was in too much pain to do anything else but send buckshot through his skull.
Alex Gopher, "Consolidated": I was a lot more impressed with this guy before I heard Discovery, but this is still pretty high in the echelon of French funk-house (better than Rinocerose, for the most part). This isn't one of the better tracks on You, My Baby and I, mostly just a transition between "Party People" and "Quiet Storm" (it even incorporates a more intensely-backed version of the non-verbal vocal melodies that drive the latter song), but it's a nice distraction and the bass is as good a booty stimulant as any I've heard.
Negativland, "The Perfect Cut (Rooty Poops)": Oy. I had this on my hard drive back when I thought it would wind up in a QCPM installation, but I've since jettisoned it from that bit of mix-CD business and now it sits there, alone and unloved, sulking to itself and asking "why does he not love my edgy culture-jamming?!?!?" I think this song implies that King Floyd's "Groove Me" deserves to be mocked, and to that I say "FAH".

Okay, I said ten, but I'm going to go watch TV. I'm guessing that my MP3 collection isn't as cool as I think it is.

-Nate

Friday, November 22, 2002 -- 07:40 p.m.

"So, for all the gripers and complainers out there, I want to pose a question. Was the indie scene of 1997-2001 really better than it is right now? If so, why? Because all I heard during those years was a bunch of twee, poetic fluf bands and the "make you wanna stick an icepick in yr ear" strains of emo-influenced rock."
The Rub is now a permalink for that alone.

-Nate

Thursday, November 21, 2002 -- 09:05 p.m.

Ahhh, Pitchfork, you walking contradiction! Sure, you talk shit about MC Paul Barman and release a list of the Top 100 Albums of the 1980s with nary a nod to EPMD's Strictly Business, Eric B. and Rakim's Follow the Leader or anything by the Specials, Agent Orange, the Jam, the Dead Kennedys, Ultramagnetic MCs, Mudhoney or the Clash ferchrissakes I mean Sandinista! has a couple dozen* very good songs damn it. But for cluing me into the news that not only will Massive Attack release a new album early next year, they'll also release a follow-up shortly thereafter with guest vocals by TOM WAITS!!!, I forgive you completely.

*Give or take a few. Yeah, I like those weird dub remixes, sue me.

-Nate

Thursday, November 21, 2002 -- 06:30 p.m.

Pick one:

1) I was kidnapped and held for ransom by angry Fugazi fans who wanted to cure me of my MacKaye-Picciotto-loathing ways by subjecting me to a version of the Ludovico treatment. Unfortunately, they sort of forgot about the whole 'mind-altering chemical' segment of the procedure and therefore I just sat there and watched "Instrument" with my eyes clamped open.
2) I went on a week-long meth-and-Vanilla Coke bender, which culminated in my stealing a motorcycle and riding it through the Mall of America, swinging a chain around wildly and breaking every storefront window I could get close to. (Important note: the motorcycle had a boombox strapped to the back with Billy Idol's "White Wedding" playing on an infinite loop.)
3) My computer was stolen by Gargamel.
4) I got another full-time job.

Anyhow, expect me to start writing a ton of stuff soon now that the end of the year's coming up and I am therefore obligated to actually say something about those little thumbnailed records off to the right-hand side of yr screen. Oh, and I'll talk about singles too, since I am not completely rockist, really.

(I apologize profusely for the lameness of this post but I am tired.)

-Nate