Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Kevin had a jambox

Monday:
New Order, Power, Corruption & Lies
The Mountain Goats, Transcendental Youth (via Rolling Stone)

Tuesday:
David Bowie, 'Heroes'
Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Concert Program
Nick Drake, Five Leaves Left
John Hiatt, Mystic Pinball
Bobby Bland, Dreamer
Joe Simon, Drowning in a Sea of Love
Syl Johnson, Diamond in the Rough
Howard Tate, Howard Tate

I am so close to 200,000 blog-life pages views I can taste it, and I want to put up some really monster content to push me over the edge (for some abstract, inconsequential reason) but I can't think of any and don't have time to focus on making some and really, what could I come up with that is better than that Joe Simon album cover?

The album is good. I find soul music to be generally good; good in a way that has a thick baseline, plush as a '70s rug. I even like soul music when it isn't so good. I think most people feel that way about it, which explains the copious phoned-in soul albums put out by good performers. I find it hard to write about it comparatively, quantitatively - and maybe that is the point. Most of the art that resonates with me is giving something else a sharp elbow or a clammy embrace. Soul music is just up in your business, deep where you don't know where you business ends and it starts. It is intrinsically given to intercourse metaphor.

That cover, though.

I'm in the death throes of writing a big piece about a particular show and album and band (not Joe Simon or even remotely soul music) and wondering how much of what I feel and think about them is anchored to something  elsewhere, or even to a horizon point that actually doesn't exist. Are they a shell around and empty core? Then I hear the riff for one of their songs and I'm awww yeah. and I'm in the parking lot of my high school feeling momentarily in-the-music as shit. No matter that I really liked the Oingo Boingo album on side A of that particular C-90. It was the fact that The Album by This Band was on side B and that Kevin had a jambox and the gravel kicked up the right amount of dust from our thrashing around. Monster. Created by monsters. Against monsters. Listened to by, and so on. None of which may have existed, since monsters don't really exist. I'm drowning in a sea of love for that riff. Somebody hold my face while I look at my blog stats.




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