0.15.0 - And bad mistakes, I've made a few (Week 15 Wrapup)

This week:  Accelerationist anxiety, a silly amount of albums from the mid 1990s. 

It used to be for me that a deadline provided a very useful starting point for a simple calculation.  If the deadline for any given task is in, say 5 days time, and it's a task that should take me 4 hours to complete, I will schedule myself to begin that task in 4 days and 20 hours time, and until I reach that threshold I would act as if that task did not exist.  It's ironic, because I'm quite serious about punctuality when I make plans with people;  at some point in the past someone impressed on me the importance of being on time for things and now I get frustrated if I am late, and very frustrated if other people are making me late for plans with other people because their view of timekeeping is (lets say politely) more flexible than mine, but my desire not to do work often overcame my need to be on time.

Over the years, I've trained myself to see deadlines as more "the amount of free time you get once you've finished the task as long as you don't let anyone know you've done it so they can't give you another one"; a subtle shift, but one that has helped motivate me to clear my deadlines as quickly as possible, to allow myself to blank from my mind whatever work I was doing and go back to trying to find ways to entertain myself.  But where I struggle is when I have a task with no deadline.  Right now, I could be sat on my work laptop completing a presentation I am in the middle of trying to explain to the very senior people in my company why "lets leverage AI to make up your resource shortfall" doesn't make a lot of sense when every forecasting company in the world has a very expensive AI software solution to deal with the many many constantly changing factors in the supply chain world, and that you can't replicate those functions just by typing "make our forecasting better" into Copilot or ChatGPT.

But I'm not doing that, obviously, I am here, doing this instead.  This is in part because I read a terrifying piece in the Guardian this afternoon about the overwhelming agenda of End Times Fascism and it made me feel very powerless to do anything about it;  not a good place for someone who's primary learned response to control anxiety is to put together a plan to mitigate the things that are causing you anxiety to the best of your ability.  When the best of your ability is "I have literally no agency in this at all", that's less helpful as a response.  This wasn't helped by weird vivid dreams last night (no doubt not helped by some high strength beers at the St Mars of the Desert Brewery with my friends yesterday) where at 3.30am this morning I was awake wondering whether RFK Jr would be acting any different if he were literally Pestilence, the biblical Horseman of the Apocalypse.  Anyway, the intersection of my minor mental health wobble, the AI subject matter, and the fact that I've been at home all day working tirelessly to reorganise significant parts of the house while Catherine is away in the sun in Mallorca, made me decide that the AI presentation could wait, and that I could at least let all my brainworms out all over the digital page in the hopes it lessens their influence over me.  

And on the subject of procrastination, deadlines and mistakes - yes, I didn't put up a Friday blog this week;  primarily for reasons of work and because I spent the entire evening building IKEA furniture which arrived at 5pm that night, but that does mean I have an intolerable 19 albums to cover this week.  As I promised last week, my Garbage Week celebrations have involved me exclusively listening to albums released between 1993 and 1997 (with two exceptions) which in turn has made me question a lot of things about 90's music.  Growing up, the 1970's were always considered the whipping boy decade for producing a terrible cavalcade of catastrophically bad music.  I've listened to a significant portion of the 90's alternative music scene this week and let me tell you, while it has its highs, I think the 90's were secretly pretty bad.  Right?  Is it just me?  Assuming continue to be in a position where the possibility of popular music being freely released exists in a few years (my bet is on no), I'll be curious to see whether the current 80's revival rolls into a 90's revival and we can see what this current generation does with shouty angst and chugging guitars.  It  might fit right in, if I am honest.

So, god help us lets do this;  no massive paragraph long screed for all of these albums else I'll be here till midnight.

Eventually, I will listen to the Chemical Brother's album I really love, Dig Your Own Hole, but it's not going to be this week.  It's definitely true that at every alternative music night I went to through the 90s and into the 2000s at some point in the evening transitioned into the "electro" block of songs.  Gone were the guitars and drums and shouting, and in their place were skaters and goths and metalheads all thrashing around the dancefloor to the same electrodance songs that were filling the dancefloors in every nightclub in the country.  If it's got a good beat and you can dance to it, that grants you a free pass across genre boundaries it seems.  Leave Home from Exit Planet Dust was a guaranteed floor filler.  As soon as the speakers blared "ChemBrothers gonna work it out" for the first time, the entire club would rush to the dancefloor like they were going to watch Morpheus fight Neo.  I spent a long time conflating this album with the music of the Dust Brothers, who most famously did the Fight Club OST.  Put the words "dust" and "brothers" on the covers of two albums and expect me to tell them apart?  Be serious.

I included Beck in here because his music has far more in common with these other two bands than the guitar-led rock and pop of the mid 90's.  I remember vividly first hearing Loser when he performed it on UK music stalwart Top of the Pops with a band consisting of senior citizens (and my recollection was so precise I was able to find that exact performance on YouTube instantly).  I'm weirdly ambivalent about Beck as a performer.  I've only really listened to Mellow Gold and Oh De Lay and bits of Sea Change, and there are some songs I like (Where It's At, Devil's Haircut and Loser mainly) but I find him too consciously esoteric to be interesting.  I saw him live at the T In The Park festival I mentioned in my Placebo article, and he ended his set with a klaxon going for 15 minutes while he ran around the stage wrapping everything in yellow and black caution tape without reason or explanation, then just left the stage.  If you told me he made all his lyrical, instrumental, and stage performance choices by rolling a hundred sided dice and consulting a big list of options like some musical Dice Man, I would not be surprised.  

The Prodigy's Music For The Jilted Generation more or less convinced me single handedly that there was something in the electronic dance music genre that could speak to me.  I can't remember whether I heard Voodoo People or No Good (Start The Dance) first on nights out in darkened basements, or if it had already cross-pollinated into our friend group;  I definitely had a bootleg cassette copy of the album which I think I got from my friend Jamie.  They were cool and underground and I felt like I was in on a great musical secret.  Then Firestarter came out and suddenly they were number 1 in the UK.  It seemed unthinkable to me;  for context, the other songs in the top 3 around the 3 weeks it held the number one spot were:  How Deep Is Your Love by Take That; Mark Snow's Theme From The X-Files, Mark Morrison's Return of the Mack; and Children by Robert  Miles.  I felt weirdly betrayed, like the british public had conspired to take something away from me so they could have it for themselves.  Obviously, the song was a total killer and good for them but it still feels absurd.  Breathe was the second single from The Fat of the Land and also hit the number one spot.  While I still think Jilted Generation is their magnum opus, there's no denying that Fat of the Land made them huge, without them really having to change or compromise their sound - they were just an act who's time had come.  

I saw them live twice, across festivals in two consecutive years.  At the V97 festival in Leeds, they closed the final night on the main stage and it was one of the best performances I'd seen at that point; the crowd was totally into it and the band were right there with them.  A year later, at the T In The Park festival in Glasgow, I saw them headline again, and maybe I just had sky high expectations, but whether it was me expecting too much, or a tired band phoning a festival performance in a wet and cold Glasgow field late at night who's to say, but it left me feeling slightly disappointed, because I had expected so much more.  The language in the opening track title is a bit dated, but it's got a killer POV music video.  I never really listened to anything they did after this, but these two albums and Experience from 1992 make up an album trilogy which crosses genres, styles, and will always make me want to jump, shout, break stuff and drive fast.

Jesus, we're really doing this, huh?  It's 9.15 and I've written 2,000 words in 2 hours and I've covered 3 of the 19 albums I have to get through.  I think midnight might be an optimistic deadline if I don't start skipping more rapidly through these, which is great because here comes three albums where only one of them I have anything meaningful to say about.  

Any night at our local alternative night would feature what I called in my head "The Girl Block";  we'd have our System of a Down and Rage Against The Machine fade away, only to be replaced by Girl From Mars by Ash, or Female Of The Species by Space;  the young, angry men would vacate the dancefloor to be replaced by the britpop loving women of our small town, who also couldn't get their music of choice played in mainstream bars.  I, like a rational person, resented this intrusion into the music I liked and too great umbrage at having to listen to 45 minutes of guitar pop with relentlessly upbeat sentiments.  Wake Up Boo! by the Boo Radleys from this era represented for me the complete nadir of all musical sentiment, something akin to the theme from a BBC children's TV program being played alongside Metallica.   There were lots of bands in this block who I refused to listen to their album to this day (Supergrass, The Boo Radleys, Dodgy, Cast), but Spiders was no more palatable.  The whole album has a weird affect, like someone thought The Kinks' The Village Green Preservation Society concept needed updating to the 1990s, and it's knowingly kooky in a way I have no patience for.  1977 was fine;  I think Goldfinger is a decent song, I think Girl From Mars is a song straight out of the Busted discography and still makes me cringe, the rest was OK.

I think Ocean Colour Scene managed to both be popular and successful but also musically interesting, and they were just far enough away from the dayglo Britpop sentiment for me not to reject them out of hand.  I think Moseley Shoals is a pretty good album, and I don't just say that because I spent a year or so learning the drum part to Riverboat Song and getting bamboozled by it being in 6/4.  This one gets a pass from me, its pretty just timelessly good rock and roll.

Well, that was faster (3 albums in 20 minutes by my clock), but we're about to lose all that momentum because I have stories about all three of these albums.  

I've never been a big fan of football (the soccer kind, international readers), either as a player or supporter, but when you've blagged your way back stage at a music festival, and Leeds based band Terrorvision invite you to have a kick about next to their tour bus you say yes, just so you can tell that story in the future.  They were a band who had a much bigger, more successful album How To Make Friends And Influence People out at the time, but my friend Dave knew them from this album first and so it seemed appropriate to listen back to.  In hindsight, that wasn't a good decision because the Formaldehyde is pretty rough around the edges for a debut, more so than my nostalgia-tinted recollections suggested, and How To Make Friends... is just a better album which I might not get round to again this year.  What am I supposed to do, tell the football story again?

The reason I was at that festival in the first place was to see Veruca Salt.  It wasn't a headliner, not a mainstream act that got me out of my comfort zone, made me buy a tent, go camping for the first time since I was a boy scout.  It was a 40 minute set by a relatively unknown band on a side stage in the middle of the first day.  But they never toured; at least, not in the UK, or if they did, maybe just in London which seemed so expensive and distant.  My schoolfriend Colin loved Veruca Salt, and it was with him that I went to go and see them, having spent months beforehand listening to this album over and over.  There was a gap in the market, a subgenre if you will of bands who kinda sounded like The Pixies/The Breeders, and Nina Gordon and Louise Posts' alternative rock band did just that, with some great close harmonies and interesting abstract lyrics.  So fervent was our desire to see Veruca Salt that we made our way to the front of the NME stage at 1.30pm, saw the end of some band called Feeder who would put out a career defining single in a few years time, watched American trio The Driven who were very cool, had a guy playing upright double-bass, and we decided to enthusiastically dance like loons because it seemed like no-one else was there to see them, which at the time we thought the band appreciated.  They have a song called Secret Police which brings back fond memories of that afternoon.  Stereophonics, another band two years too early for their breakthrough had just released 1000 Trees but I didn't care for it, and having exhausted ourselves before, took a break on the front rail and waiting for them to be done.  I have no memory at all of seeing Hurricane 1 nor can I name any of their songs and I have a pretty good recollection usually.

Veruca Salt were everything I had hoped for.  We lost our minds and screamed along with every lyric,  Louise Post came down from the stage and gave me a lollipop.  Col shouted a wedding proposal at Nina Gordon, but she was very far away otherwise I am sure she would have considered it.  I was worried going back to this album, because I had not listened to it in a VERY long time, and I didn't know how I would react if the shine had come off this most treasured and nostalgic of apples.  I needn't have worried - this album is still great.  I said out loud to the absolutely no-one else in my house while listening to it "God, I forgot how great this album is".  If I were to pick an album for you to listen to out of everything from this week, it would be this one.  

Did you know, and there's no earthly reason why you would, that before Sugar Ray and Mark McGrath were the very incarnation of mid tempo inoffensive radio garbage, they were the prototype for Limp Bizkit a year before Fred Durst would record his first song?  And that their opening single was a rap/rock protest song about why convicted rapist Mike Tyson should be released because he's good at boxing?  While we're covering absurdities, did you know that I've hugged Mark McGrath, and that Sugar Ray of all people are one of only two bands I've every stagedived at one of their performances?  I saw them, during this phase of their career, play a students union in nearby Bradford, and I had a ton of fun.  This album and its attitudes have aged like sour milk and I spent the whole process of revisiting this album wondering what on earth was wrong with me.  The idea of nu metal, which would sweep me up in it's feverish grip, wasn't a thing yet, but this album sure sounds a lot like it, and the complementary contrasts of that genre worked just as well on 20 year old me as they would in the years to come.  After Lemonade and Brownies, they released Floored, which had a surprise hit with a mid tempo ballad while the rest of the album stayed at least rock-adjacent.  When 14;59 rolled around, it opens with a 45 second song called New Direction where they basically parody their old metal(ish) sound, before pivoting entirely to an album which all sounds like Fly, and the rest is history.

At some point during this process I realised I was about to hit album 420 for the year.  I considered what would be era-appropriate, and fortunately Doggystyle landed just inside the 1993-1996 sweet spot.  I don't have much to say about this album, I have mixed feelings about 90's rap (and rap in general) because I love the music but I'm not wild about the homophobia or misogyny.  Look, sometimes you just have to do something for the bit.

Back on track, and now were into records that have stayed with me long after the 90's faded into the rearview.  I love Soundgarden, and this three-album sequence (human brains love trilogies, for some reason it just provides a sense of completeness) of Badmotorfinger, Superunknown, and  Down On The Upside exist in the pantheon of 3-album runs for me.  Chris Cornell has the singing voice I'd most like to have;  on like my third date with Catherine we ended up at a Karaoke bar and I sang the Audioslave song Like A Stone (different band, same lead singer);  she later told me she was convinced I was going to be terrible and was impressed when I wasn't - if that's as close to being compared to the sadly departed Chris Cornell as I get, I will take it.  Down On The Upside had a difficult task of following huge crossover album Superunknown and their approach seems to have been doubling down on conceptually weird prog rock and telling people to fuck themselves if they thought it wasn't as accessible as the other album.  I really like it for that reason.  I find myself singing the lyrics to the bridge for Blow Up The Outside World out of nowhere on occasion, but that's probably more to do with how I feel about everything than any particular musical merit.

By all accounts, Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins is annoying and arrogant and hard to work with and a bit of a dick.  He was famously so controlling and overbearing to his bandmates that they would finish a recording session then Billy would go back into the studio after they left and overdub their parts with him playing them instead to make sure they were how he wanted them.  Also, this is one of the greatest rock records of all time, so maybe he was right?  I mean, I can't endorse that kind of behaviour, but when I hear the opening finger-picking riff to Today, or the opening snare roll for Cherub Rock I get psyched out of my mind.  If someone from space arrived and I had to perfectly illustrate for them they way all rock music is meant to make you feel, I'd put this album on for them.  Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness followed this in epic, sprawling double-album pretention, but all it did was dilute and diminish the purity of what they'd achieve with Siamese Dream.

When I was 19, like a lot of young men with overactive imaginations and negative self esteem, I spent a lot of time wondering why women didn't profess their undying love for me after I glanced sheepishly in their direction twice then got embarrassed*.  In those dark times when those questions would haunt me, Therapy? were there to cheer me up with lyrics like "With a face like that / I won't break any hearts".  I've said before that music exists as a way for me to be sure that what I'm feeling isn't unique, that other people have experienced it the same way I am experiencing it, and for teenage rejection, Therapy? (and also many years, actual therapy) had me covered.  Troublegum is an album for a particular mood, for a time and place.  Someone on Twitter once posted "Do boys have someone like Taylor Swift they listen too when they are heartbroken".  Therapy? were the answer for me, but as to how healthy a choice that is, I will let others be the judge.

OK, its 10.55pm and I've made an executive decision.  I listened to a couple of R.E.M. albums this week but it's getting increasingly depressing to me dashing through albums from one of my favourite bands of all time, so I am going to carry those album forward to next week and do the whole rest of the discography I am missing for an article.  The good news is that means I just have these four albums left to cover tonight before I can drink a sleepytime tea and try to get a few hours rest before work tomorrow.  

I'm sure there are hardcore Presidents of the USA fans out there, and I'm sure they have a rich and interesting discography that I could explore, but I feel like I got everything I needed out of them on this album.  This is another band which somehow lands on the favourable side of the Weezer deliberate-irony test;  I think there's something earnest about them singing silly songs about cats and bugs and peaches with a kind of infectious enthusiasm that makes it OK.  It doesn't feel arch, or knowing in any way.  This is just a band that when they get together to write music, they are less interested in talking about feelings and stuff, and more interested in Dune Buggies.  That's OK by me.

There isn't a band which encapsulates the insanity of the Britpop era like Menswear do.  I don't like recycling other people's stories, but I read an excellent book on Britpop linked here, which tells how Menswear, despite having a setlist which was only 5 songs long and having played a handful of gigs in London, had record labels desperate to sign them as they were going to be the next Blur.  The book tells the story of them negotiating their record deal, finding out Madonna was signed to the same label, and asking for £1 more than Madonna's contract as a joke, then being told they had a deal.  Menswear put out two very mediocre albums and promptly disappeared from public life, no doubt considerably better off.  Nuisance is interesting only as a window into a different, weird time, and to listen to Daydreamer and wonder how anyone thought they would be the next Blur.

The perfect companion piece, the American equivalent to the Irish Therapy?, Smash appears to specifically encapsulate the unspoken frustrations of white male adolescent male youth, to whit:  Gangs are scary but cool;  I wish I could shoot people who cut me up in traffic; I'll demean myself in any way imaginable if a woman indicates she might be willing to sleep with me.  Time, age, and distance recontextualised my feelings about this album a little, but I'll have a nostaligia-tinted soft spot for it always, if only because I love to play the drums for Keep 'Em Separated.  

Ever since The Good Place asked the question "Have you ever paid money to hear music performed by California Funk Rock band 'The Red Hot Chili Peppers'?" as a measure of whether you should go to hell or not, I think twice about including them.  In truth, I should have listened to something off Bloodsugarsexmagic, which produced massive hits, but I never owned that album;  this one I did, in part because I already had a bootleg copy of BSSM, in part because I liked My Friends (which I think is the best Chili Peppers song and I don't think it's close), in part because it was on sale.  I'm also pretty sure that Aeroplane was the Chili's song that was in most frequent rotation around the time period I am evoking, so while Under The Bridge and Suck My Kiss might have been the hits, it's not what I was listening to.  I have indeed paid money to hear music performed by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, though my prevailing memory of the gig was being constantly struck in the back of the head by people being crowdsurfed towards the front of the stage (the danger of being 6ft 1" in a crowd averaging 5' 10").  I'd worry that means I'm destined for the Bad Place, but it's possible I am already there.

Alright gang, we did it with 35 minutes to spare.  I guess we are doing R.E.M. next week, and with most of my house chores mostly done, hopefully I get get a couple of articles written next week so I don't end up doing this till nearly midnight again over Easter weekend.  

Peace.

* It took years for me to realise that talking to them confidently and trying to relate to them as human beings was the real trick.  That, and asking them to paint your nails for you.