CDs

I continue to rip my CDs into my computer. I haven't seen these in almost 6 years and they are bringing back lots of memories. I'm currently ripping "Calamus," a recording of Arab-Andulisian music. Really haunting, and very unusual. It used to be a favorite demo disk of mine when I was selling stereo equipment, always impressed people. I've also just stumbled across a disk my girlfriend in college gave me. 

Here's a good one, I just unearthed my box set of the Bulgarian State Television Female Vocal Choir. I know, I can hear you now, but really, this is some amazing stuff. Like Calamus, the Bulgarian choir sings in a style that has a zillion influences from both east and west. It really is mesmerizing. Well, maybe not three disks back to back to back mesmerizing, but really good.

I'm looking for my favorite Flamenco disk, my collection of different composers' "Stabat Mater," and all of my various live jazz and classic jazz recordings. Oddly enough, the big rock collection isn't exciting me overly much. I probably ripped most of that before I went to Yemen and have been listening to it ever since. I'm also probably still hearing it via the various streaming services I use. Hmm, and maybe most of the really good stuff is on vinyl. Probably all of the above. In any case, it'll be good to get through this project.

I'm seriously considering backing this up to another hard drive (aside from my usual back-up) and keeping it somewhere else for safe keeping. I plan on getting rid of all of these CDs once I'm done with them. I would then be in a situation where all of my music would be in two rather fragile drive enclosures. If something really bad happened here, I don't want to lose all of that stuff. Hmm. Will have to think about where I could put it.

More questionable music in commercials

I can tell i'm old because "edgy" music from my youth is now considered mainstream enough to sell things like computers and minivans. First up a commercial from Hp using a song about masturbation.

Yeah, it's a catch riff, but those lyrics are seared into my memory.

"Body and beats, I stain my sheets

I don't even know why.

My girlfriend, she's at the end, she is starting to cry.

Let me go on, like a blister in the sun,

let me go onnn, big hands I know you're the one."

 

The next one isn't so bad from a content standpoint, not really, but it is amazing how associations change over time. Here's an Ozzy Osbourne song selling a minivan.

 

 

WIth the exception of the little girl's part of "Mental wounds not healing, life's a shame." the lyrics are appropriate for most things. Not really sure why they let her sing that though, it is a rather dark aspect of the song… Anyway, the amazing thing is that this song was from a point in time when Ozzy was widely believed to be a devil worshiper. He didn't help anything by biting the heads off of doves either. In short, Ozzy was, at best, a degenerate and at worst a madman steering youth to a ruinous life. Now his song is selling minivans. The parents are about the right age and I guess it shows how mainstream outrageous things from the past have become. The song does have one of the more distinctive guitar riffs you'll ever hear, kudos for one of the girls playing their seat belt air-guitar style. Just for completeness sake, here's the original.

And here's one of the more memorable pictures of Ozzy.

 

 

 

 

I'd like Lady Gaga more if she played guitar

I came across the other day and found it remarkable. I have since been informed by some of my friends that it is old news, but still, I doubt everyone has seen this. It's a cover of Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance." If you've been wondering about the appeal of Gaga, this might at least give you a taste.

 

It's from an artist that goes by the name Lissie. I think she does a great job with the song, moves it towards a little more honest performance. Gaga's, in comparison, sounds a little… entitled? Not whiny, but… I dunno, not as honest. I also find Lissie's glancing down at the neck of the guitar for chord changes endearing.

 

I often play a game with more recent music where I try to imagine what some of the luminaries from the late 60's would think of the song. I wonder what would Pete Townsend or Janis Joplin think of this? When we compare this rendition to what was offered back then, you can see how far women have come. First there is the guitar playing. With the exception of "The Duchess" (Norma-Jean Wofford), I can't think of any prominent female rock guitarists until the Runaways came along. Then there is the content. Women back then just didn't sing songs like that. I very much doubt that any woman could bring herself to all herself a "freak bitch" back then. I mean, it just wasn't done. But that's the point, for a woman to come out and perform a song about lust back then would have been very difficult. Does anyone know of an example?

Some would say that Gaga represents the current state of feminist expression. Maybe, but I'm with Kathleen Hannah, I wish Gaga would would pants a little more often while being a strong woman. Lissie is more powerful I think because she isn't using any of her feminine wiles to get her point across, but she still gets it across. Anyway, enjoy!

CDs

Dad and Butler brought up my CD collection when they moved me into Rick's place. I packed them up before I went to Yemen and haven't seen them since. It's amazing how much space 400+ CDs take up! I'm in the process of ripping them to my computer where they will take up considerably less space. Don't know what I'll do with them afterwards, do people still buy used CDs?

The box I'm working on now has part of my classical collection with some jazz thrown in. I'm struck at the number of discs I got through services like the BBC magazine and the Musical Heritage Society. Before them it was BMG and some other CD service. Before that I was a member of the RCA club for cassettes. You remember those clubs right? They send you 12 or 13 albums for a penny and you only have to agree to buy… what was it, 10? more CDs in the next year. Of course b y default they would send you one a month unless you sent in the paperwork on time. Each time you bought something at full price (17.99 if I remember correctly) they would give you a certificate to buy the next one at half price.

I tried to remember to send in the "do not send me the selection of the month" letter every time for the popular music clubs. I'd screw up from time to time of course and I'd get something or other that I didn't want. I think the only time that ever worked out was the time I got Pat Benetar's "Live From Earth" cassette. That was pretty good, at least 13 year old me thought so...

I went ahead and got the selections of the month with the classical clubs mostly because I wanted to hear a lot of different things. The BBC Music magazine was supposedly a cornucopia of classical music information, but I really only ever cared about the CDs that came with it every month. I got some stuff that I never would have thought of getting that way. I never would have dived into early music otherwise. Of course, I also wouldn't have gotten any of the early English operas either, anyone want a copy of "Alfred?"

We've come so far in such a short period of time. Convenience is king nowadays. It is trivially easy to find and download almost anything you want. The world of popular music is your oyster with new streaming services like Spotify MOG. Classical and jazz folks still have to buy their stuff mostly, but it is out there. The streaming and downloading options for popular music sound just fine with the compressed formats. The classical types have a variety of high res formats available to them too.

When the CD came out, we couldn't believe how nice it was. There was no surface noise, no pops, no cracks and most people mistook the absence of defects for sound quality. CDs and CD players eventually got really good and we figured, "This is it, this is the ultimate audio medium." Of course having no medium at all has proven to be far nicer, and at no penalty of sound quality. When I sold audio gear, I fantasized about having a 300 CD changer so I could have most of my music in my system at all times. These eventually came into being but they were always too clunky, slow, and prone to breaking down. Now I can stream 12 million songs whenever I want for 10 bucks a month, life is good!

 

ADDENDUM:

 

I just googled BMG Music Service, just for old times sake. It's hilarious. Towards the bottom, there is a pane that says BMG Music Service is what Columbia House Music was. Then the pane above that says that BMG Music Service is closed and is now Columbia House DVD service… Anyway, the deal isn't too bad really, you have to get 12 CDs for a little under 50 bucks. That's pretty cheap. I can't imagine having to deal with the clutter of all of those CDs mind you. The selection is straight out of the 80's. They boast of having over 14,000 albums to choose from! That was impressive back a ways, but nowadays with iTunes having 18 million songs, 14,000 is laughable. I can only imagine that it is filled with the blandest radio hits type of folks too. Good luck with that Columbia/BMG/Columbia!

mind/no mind

Have you ever heard a song that encapsulates basic tenets of Buddhist beliefs? No, neither have I, but I might have created one and I quite like it.

It all started when I stumbled across Ty Segall's Imaginary Person.

 

 

It's a lovely little bit of psychedelic/garage pop, you'd be forgiven if you thought it came out in 1968. I think it was actually made in 2002. I think it is about someone trying to convince themselves that they aren't crazy. The chorus could either be "You are an imaginary person, you're in my head but I am certain you aren't real," or "You are real…" Because of the charming low-fi quality, it's impossible to tell.

Well, I was humming it to myself the other day and I mistakenly sang the lyric, "I am an imaginary person…" I thought that was pretty funny, but the more I thought about it, the more it reminded me of zen. Zen practitioners have the unenviable task of looking past themselves, of realizing that what they think of as self is an illusion. The self can't be your thoughts and memories, otherwise where do you go when you sleep? Naturally, this leads to some real cognitive dissonance and confusion. Apparently that's par for the course and is the basis of serious zen. So with apologies to Ty Segall, here is the first zen psychedelic/garage pop song. I've modified the lyrics a bit, but imagine them in the regular music and see what you think...

 

 

say say, i can't say what I'm tryin' to do to me oh no oh no oh yea

cuz I'm in my head so i never go to bed oh no oh nooh no

talk talk, it's all I do so i never talk to you oh no oh nooh yea

cuz I'm in my head so i never go to bed oh no oh no

cuz I, I am an imaginary person

I'm in my head, but i am certain I'm not real

I am an imaginary person

I'm in my head, but i am certain I'm not real

yea, I'm not real

I'm not real I am real I'm not real

 

Another great music service

Spotify is the later music service to get my money. I already subscribe to LastFM and Slacker Radio. Slacker is a great way to hear new music and LastFM gives me a radio station based on my own curation. Spotify lets me listen to any song any time I want to.

Yeah, any song I want, any time I want. How amazing is that? If I hear a new song, I can look up the artist and listen to any of their albums. That's in addition to all of the older stuff too. For 10 bucks a month I get no ads and can stream the music through my iPhone and squeezebox. I thought I had a big collection before...

The last couple of nights I have been going through Aweditorium on my iPad, finding interesting artists, and then looking them up in Sporitfy. It's a great combo. It's true that Spotify doesn't have everything,. They don't have any Beatles or Led Zeppelin but that's hardly the end of the world. Plenty of people would tell you that's a blessing. And it's true my favorite Flamenco album and a live Cynics albums aren't in there either, but those are a little bit obscure. A little more worrying is the absence of A Joy Division album called Warsaw. I'll have to do some more digging to see how many albums aren't in there.

 

As it stands right now, I'm having a hard time figuring out what I'll be using iTunes for. Yes, I do have a few things on there that aren't in the streaming version of Spotify, but Spotify also allows me to use my iTunes library on my computer and I can sync music to my phone with it as well. I'm pretty sure Spotify has a higher quality bitrate as well… I don't think I'll actually erase my iTunes library, but I doubt I'll be playing it very often.

If you haven't yet, check out Spotify, it is amazing.

Lovely

I'm not familiar with the original, but this is wonderful. Reminds me of Astrud Gilberto a bit.

 

Amy Winehouse (drugs)

I was saddened when I head about her death. I had hoped that she was going to turn it around. I still hold out hope that she didn't fall off the wagon, maybe her body just gave out after years of abuse. I know, reason tells me that isn't the case...

 

It may seem strange to post a song from another group in an Amy WInehous post, but I think it fits. Drug use is always sad, this song captures that sadness and the video (scenes from The Panic in Needle Park) really sums up for me how life devolves when you're locked in that cycle. RIP Amy, hope you can have some peace from all your troubles now.

 

More iPad apps

A few more apps I've become smitten with... First up is something that sounds trivial, but it really works well. I'm using the FIOS remote app. It lets me view the program viewer, chose the channel, and gives me a duplicate remote control on the iPad. This is nice because I'm using a tiny 13" TV right now and it's awfully tough to read the stupid TV guide onscreen. In addition, the regular remote control seems to have an incredibly narrow angle of view. I have to aim carefully in order to change a channel. The iPad app uses wifi, so it works no matter where I am in the house. Plus, it's really quick.

OK, that one is handy, this next one is amazing. Its name is Awedetorium.

 

This is an app that really takes advantage of how you use the iPad and it fits in really well. It is a music discovery app, all of those tiles you see are different bands. When you tap on one, the image fills the screen and a song from them starts playing. While it plays, the app will pop up all sorts of factoids about the band.

 

 

Along the bottom, you'll see some controls that will allow you to buy the song, favorite it, and even show you a video (the main image is a still one). The main screen with all the times can be scrolled though, there are hundreds and hundreds of bands on there. I'll be browsing though this for a long time. I'm also under the impression that they keep adding new songs and bands to the the app. I've come across all sorts of music on there, country, folk, noise, hip hop, and lots and lots of rock. Best of all, it's a free app! I am constantly amazed at the quality of apps I can find, even for free.

 

Morning song

I had a dream that I was at work when "Blueside" from Rooney came on the store's music system. The rest of the dream became inconsequential as I locked onto the song. It's really catchy and I marveled because I had never heard it at work before. Come to think of it, it's quite a bit more appropriate than some of the other songs I hear at work like "Wicked Game" and "Fake Plastic Trees."

I woke up a lot later still humming it. If you haven't heard it, the song is a guitar driven power pop ditty. Imagine a mashup of Matthew Sweet, the Beach Boys, and maybe even the Partridge Family thrown in for good measure. The band also took on the old CCR look for the video, the hair, the denim, the earnestness... Check it out!

 

Music.... ahhhh...

OK, so I finally got my stereo hooked up. I had been listening to it for quite a while up in my tiny room, but I now have more room to spread out. Setting up was delayed for a week because I needed some more speaker cable. Plus, I wanted proper connections on the ends of the wires. The binding posts on my current amp are a bit of a pain to use with bare cables.

Anyway, got it set up and I'm really enjoying it. I now have a decent set up for the first time in... 5 years? My God, it's been a long time. Things are a little different with this system though. I am streaming my music either from the internet or my computer through my squeezebox player. I switch tracks with my iPod touch, it's the ultimate remote really. I have full access to every song in my library, plus all of my internet radio stations, and I can also control the volume. Here's the kicker, the only way I could set it up involves the listening position to be in my bed... I don't think I could imagine a better set up:-)

 

The speakers are about 9 feet apart, giving me a pretty big sound stage. I still need to fiddle with the distance from the wall a little to tame the bass. Listening again is just sumptuous. No, this isn't perfect, but it is a hell of a lot better than I've had in a long time. All of my music is pretty compressed, it was all ripped into the computer for portable listening. I need to go dig up my CDs, rip them in some sort of lossless format, and then get rid of them. Do people still buy used CDs in bulk anymore?

I'm also starting to fantasize about getting tubes back into my system. I own a really nice set of amps, but they are a bit large. Last year, out of the blue, a friend gave me a 300b based amp. I got a chance to listen to it a couple of times and I'm totally in love with it. Plus, it's a lot more compact than my current amps. Of course, my regular amps use $10-15 dollar tubes, this one uses 150-900 dollar tubes...

With a new computer in my future, I think I will try running the server software I need for the squeezebox off of it. If that doesn't work, I might invest in a dedicated music server. Once I have the tube amp and some decent source material, I think things will be as good as they are going to get for the foreseeable future. I plan on spending lots of time relaxing, listening to music into the wee hours of the night:-)

LastFM

LastFM is an internet service that tracks what you listen to and creates a "station" based on it. It's great, I love it. My personal station is amazing of course but just as valuable is the station from LastFM that recommends things for me based on my personal station. I've heard some interesting stuff that way. I can also tune into my friends' stations too, and that's a blast. LastFM is one of my most frequently listened to stations on my Squeezebox, and I "Scrobble" (send lists of music I listen to to LastFM so they can adjust my stations) from my iTunes library on my computer and from my iPod.

They have just gone to a subscription plan for folks using streaming devices (like a Squeeebox) and mobile devices. It's all of 3 bucks a month. So did I pay up? Damn right I did, $36 a year is well worth it to me. Honestly, between LastFM and Slacker, I really wouldn't be broken hearted if my music collection disappeared. I might have to add a classical service too, that's about all that's missing now. I hope that my subscriptions will really pay off once I get my iPhone, streaming that in the car will be a major coup...

 

If nothing else, the internet has been an incredible boon to my music enjoyment. It keeps getting better and better and I constantly get exposed to new stuff along the way. LastFM is still free if you want to listen on your computer, check it out!

More odd music stuff

I had a dream last night and in it I was trying to figure out what band Don Van Viiet was in. Just like in real life, when something like this eludes me, it drives me crazy. So, in my dream, I googled it and came up with the answer. Captain Beefheart of course! After I woke up I wondered why I had to google it in my dream. Clearly, it was in my head so why did I have to go through the process of finding a computer typing it in, etc. I wonder if this tells me something about how my brain is organized...

 

Woke up this morning with "See America Right" going through my head. It's a charming tale of co-dependancy ("Your love is like a cyclone in a swamp" "My love is like a dark cloud of rain right there above you"), drunk driving, DTs, and general consternation. It's rather well done, although I can think of better songs to wake up to.

 

I have an enormous amount of music in my iTune library. Between eMusic, free Amazon tracks, stuff I buy, and stuff people give me, I keep adding more and there is a lot I haven't heard yet. These days, I mostly use genius to pick the music to put on my iPod, so I don't know what's on there until I hear it. The other day, I heard not one, but two bizarre covers of songs. The first one was Melanie singing "Ruby Tuesday." You remember her, right? Her biggest hit was the irritating "Brand New key" and her best song was "Lay Down (Candles in the Wind)" and even that can be hard to take at times. Her version of "Ruby Tuesday" was... odd. Couldn't listen to the whole thing. Where the hell did I pick that up?

The other song that caught my attention was Nena's nuclear armageddon song 99 Red Balloons sung by Goldfinger. The original is a favorite among 80's pop lovers, but I've never liked it much. Goldfinger is (was?) a rock/ska group. And while their version had a faster tempo, it didn't change my view of the song. Still, it was another oddity I hadn't expected. At least my drives to work aren't dull...

Morning song...

Woke up the other day to the White Stripes' "Death Letter." This wasn't all that surprising actually, I had watched a documentary involving jack White before I went to bed. It's a cover of an old Son House song, old school blues. Like most White Stripes songs, the best thing about it is the hook that jack is able to create with his guitar. It wasn't so much the song that was running through my head as the guitar lick. Check it out...

 

 

Say what you want about jack White, but he can certainly play a mean slide guitar...

A morning song two-fer

I awoke from a rather bizarre cleaning at work dream to Janet Jackson's "What Have You Done for Me Lately?" It had nothing at all to do with the dream. I fell back asleep and woke up to the Star Wars main theme running through my head.

The Janet Jackson song is a classic example of a song that I don't really know getting stuck. I had the chorus looping through again and again. On the flip side, it's kind of cool to have a stirring John Williams number as a theme for waking up...

Songs in my head

Every morning, I wake up with a song in my head. Sometimes it's a carryover from a dream, other times, it's totally random with no apparent reason. Think I'm going to keep track of these as I remember them.

 

Keep in mind that these aren't favorite songs. They are usually catchy, but how much I like them has little to do with what sticks. This morning is a good example. I had a dream I was at a White Stripes concert. Did I have any of their songs stuck in my head when I woke up? Of course not. I had "Let's Twist Again" by Chubby Checker.

The story behind that is that I started the audience singing that song when I saw Jack White twisting for some reason as he was heading off the stage. I shouted out "Let's twist again Jack!" and some people picked up on it and joined it "Like we did last summer..." A woman near me ended up leading the audience. One of the crew actually gave her a mic towards the end.

Sigh. Chubby Checker to start my day. I wonder why my brain does this to me....

What's your favorite punk song?

My friend John at work told me that his favorite punk song is "We are the One" by The Avengers. I have just recently heard that, and I gotta say, it's a good one.

 

 

Incidentally, John is in a pretty good band himself called protagonist. Check them out on youtube. Why is it that everyone I know in a band is inevitably named John?

 

What's my favorite punk song? Hmmm, that's pretty tough to narrow down, there's a lot of good ones out there. A little while ago I posted a great one called "Television Addict," and that's a contender. If I had to name one song, I think I'd have to go with a classic from the Buzzcocks, once again an addiction is involved, but this time "...it's a habit that sticks."

 

 

"Orgasm Addict"  has all of the attributes of a great punk song, pace, snarl, it's a bit offensive, and it's short. Yes, the Sex Pistols had some iconic songs, and there's always The Ramones, but if I had to pick one song, this would be it.

 

Of course that opens up the question of what makes a punk song? When someone says "punk" as a genre, I inevitably think of mid to late 70's British punk and the Ramones. Yes, there were predecessors, and there were American West Coast bands too, but I always come back to the Brits. They re-invented rock and roll, reminded us what it was supposed to be about. I tend to think of bands that came after them with a similar style as just rock groups. But if you want to call all groups with a "punk" style punk, then I have another contender.

The 90's saw a handful of so-called riot girrrrl bands. They had a real edge to them, and usually had a combination of anger/feminism that fit into rock and roll perfectly. To me, the band that epitomized the sound of that movement was Bikini Kill. Here's the best version of "Rebel Girl" that they made. Kathleen Hanna knocks the vocals out of the park and Joan Jett provides her signature guitar sound to make one ass kicking single.

 

 

I think you'll agree that it shares some of the same attributes as my first pick. So what's your favorite punk song?

The Decline of Western Civilization

That's the name of a documentary made in 79-80 about the LA punk scene. It is mostly concert footage of various bands like X, The Germs, Black Flag, The Circle Jerks, etc. but also includes a fair number of interviews of fans, promoters, and musicians too. I'll admit to always thinking of the UK first when I thought about punk. A lot of that probably has to do with bands like the Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Buzzcocks, etc. getting a lot of press and footage. There were also celebrities like John Lydon, Sid Vicious, and Joe Strummer that are well known to me. I had seen the occasional Black Flag or Dead Kennedys album in high school, but I never heard any of that stuff until I went to college. Even then, I was in a school full of New Yorkers, so people looked to east coast bands like Ramones, Talking Heads, Bad Brains, and later bands like the Pixies and Mission of Burma for most of their musical influences.

So most of this music was new to me. A few observations:

1) The west coast seemed to be very much like the British punkers as far as what low lifes they were.

2) There wasn't much talent involved in the scene. With the possible exceptions of Greg Ginn and Billy "zoom" there wasn't a lick of talent in the entire film. To be fair, the film was really documenting the emergence of the hardcore scene which put more of a premium on raw emotion, energy, and violence.

3) Speaking of violence, there was plenty of it. Yes, the music was high energy, but there really wasn't any reason why it had to generate violence. The hardcore music tended to attract the violent element. There were plenty of news stories back then of riots and Nazi gang activity. There are videos on youtube of Henry Rollins (a later singer for Black Flag) getting into fist fights with audience members. In this film, Fear mocked their San Francisco audience until a woman got up on stage and tried to accost the lead singer. She ended up being tossed around, and at one point being kicked back into the audience by the lead singer, only to get up time and again to get at him. A general melee ensued. There was another notable moment when Alice Bag stared down a guy in the audience that was trying to start something with her on stage. A rough scene to be sure...

4) At the end of the day, I wasn't so sure what it was all about. People seemed to be angry, but it wasn't clear what they were mad about. Some of the interviews of the fans managed to cement my overall view of the LA area. Violent, white, racist, and with an anger that they seemed to see as a right. This is probably what disturbed me the most in the film. Some of the lyrics show legitimate political or personal grudges, but a lot of it seemed like anger management issues, and the crowd ate it up.

 

Over all, I'd say that the LA hardcore scene was an interesting time in music history, but I don't really feel any desire to seek out any albums from those groups with the possible exception of X. It seems as though after hearing a few songs I can say, "Yeah, I get it..." I think I might look up some more of the San Francisco groups from that era like the Dead Kennedys, The Avengers, The Mutants, and various "queercore" groups have piqued my interest. They seemed to have a good combination of politics and musicianship. Enough to make the music interesting in its own right, nit just as part of a scene.

The Beatles

As you may have heard, the Beatles are now available in the iTunes store. It's a pretty big deal from a business perspective, I've heard that last year the Beatles were the second highest selling artist. That's pretty amazing considering how long ago they broke up...

They've been playing the Beatles non-stop in the store for the past couple of days. I'm actually enjoying it quite a bit, though ask me next week and see if I say the same thing... It's amazing, I know the words to all of the songs, I find myself mouthing the words even when I'm not really listening to the music. They are deep, deep inside my head. Listening to "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" made me recall my very first experience with audio equipment, and I guess the first time I played music on my own. It was with my father's reel to reel tape machine. He had Sgt. Pepper's on tape. I think the first real song I ever knew all the words to was "Maxwell's Silver Hammer." I think the only Beatles albums I haven't listened to a zillion times are Please Please Me, With the Beatles, A Hard Days Night, and Beatles for Sale. Rest assured, I know all of the radio hits by heart...

 

It is amazing to see how long their music has kept going. I don't think it's all boomers that are responsible for that either. Their hits are the very definition of iconic. I do notice they aren't playing songs like "Happiness is a Warm Gun," "Revolution No.9," or even "Run for Your Life," but we are getting some decent variety in the store and people seem to be enjoying it for the most part. They've had a great run, let's see if they can go another 40 years!

Punk Rock and Dinah Shore

Here's one that folks don't hear a lot. It's from an Austrailian punk band called the Victims. The song is "Television Addict" and it was released back in '77. There was a slightly more famous version (at least here in the states)done by the Helicopters, but this is the original.




I love the "snarl" of the guitar. Just goes to show that you don't have to play super fast to be intense. It surprised me that they were Aussies, I had assumed that they were British. I guess that's because I'm so used to hearing British punks. There's a certain sneering and snarling (there's that word again) that's only possible with a British accent. Or maybe and Aussie one too...

I'm also blown away by one line in there. Up until this line, I enjoy it as just another great song, but then it gets put into a very specific time frame...

"Just because I watch DINAH SHORE doesn't mean I need a facelift!"

Good grief, Dinah Shore? That's... old. That's stuff my grandmother watched, that's a TV show that was on before I really paid attention to TV. With that one line I am hit over the head with the fact that this song is 33 years old. That kills me. This music will always be about youth and it's hard to think that these guys are now in their 50's and maybe 60's. I guess my father has the same reaction when he hears the Rolling Stones and even Chuck Berry.

Anyway, enjoy a little obscure punk rock, I'll post more if I run something worthwhile.