Monday Music

Here's another installment of Monday Music for all of the cool cats out there who know you have to be viewing the web version of this blog to see embedded videos. Per usual it's just tunes I've been digging over the last few weeks or so. We'll start with some quintessential Generation X slacker vibes. I absolutely hated this tune when I first heard it. You'd think I would have been up for it since I had been reading about Beck's antics in Flipside magazine, but it took years for me to grasp it's meta mythic state. What kind I say, I was a loser.

I'm a loser baby so why don't you kill me.

I lived on the farm of country music star Jimmy C. Newman for most of my high school years and got to know him and the members of his band. Most of them were Cajuns and they never forget to tell you that often. They were so proud of their culture and I thought they were very cool and interesting. Eventually, by just being around them so much I found myself subconsciously imitating their accent when I spoke with them. I watched Jimmy C. Newman and his band Cajun Country perform many times and much of the appeal of the music was provided by his accordion player Bessyl Duhon who is a legendary musician. This music seeped me into me and I've found myself on a Cajun music kick just this past week. I wish I could find the entire documentary of this which aired on PBS way back in the 70's. This features Louisiana musical giant Nathan Abshire. 

Nathan Abshire

Thinking about Jimmy C. Newman naturally leads me to the tune "Alligator Man" which he co-wrote with Floyd Chance. He performed that song at every concert I saw. It's an ace tune and the man who is perhaps my favorite American musician loved to perform it too.

Alex Chilton "Alligator Man" 1998

And now for an upside down question mark with hair. This may have been released in 1990, but it's absolutely perfect music for a montage in an Eighties film. And this video..it's bonkers in the best way. 

Steve Vai - I Would Love To

I wish this video was for the full song, but it's the 45 version we get. That will have to do. I find myself singing this song often these days. Black Sabbath was a visionary band. Such a combination of light and heavy in "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath." 

They just tell you that you're on your own fill your head all full of lies.

I got The Who "Sell Out" box set and it's amazing. I had always rated the album highly, but immersing oneself in it like a bath of baked beans is truly the way to go. I am obsessing over it like a school kid really. This mono version of "Our Love Was" is just great. And then you've got to hear "I Can See For Miles" too. I hope everyone reading this has a great summer. 

Our love was shining like a summer morning.

The Who lip syncing is still great cause they look hip

Sell Out? Who Me including a list of my favorite bands (Subject to Change)

I couldn't resist any longer. I put my order in for this box set:

Then in July this baby will be coming out. I need to pre-order it soon:

The Who and The Beach Boys go together just fine. The Who are right up there with The Beach Boys on my favorite band of all time. Way ahead of the Beatles. The Beatles aren't even my favorite band from Liverpool. My current read is the Peter Stanfield book on The Who titled A Band with Built-In Hate: The Who from Pop Art to Punk. It's a really great book which is as much about pop culture as it is The Who. I highly recommend it. 

My ever changing list of favorite bands may change from time to time, but The Who are always there. They're mod, they're pop, they're rhythm & blues, they're heavy metal, they're conceptualists, they're just this great combination. I've seen many people opine they are a band with a lead singer, lead bassist, lead drummer, and lead guitarist (although Pete is more aptly titled a rhythm guitarist), and it's not that far wrong. One of the grandest things about the group is their constant evolution. Pete Townshend's inability to ever be content is to our lasting benefit. 

So about that list of favorites. I'm not numbering it since it's in no particular order, but I'll still keep it to 10. This is a list of bands as they pop into my head. Sorry solo artists. You can sit this one out. 

The Who

The Beach Boys 

Van Halen 

Ramones

The Muffs

Cheap Trick

Jimi Hendrix Experience (they were a band! albeit one with a major dude leading the way)

The Kinks

Echo and the Bunnymen

Kiss

Monday Music

I got a phone call this morning from a relative. I'm at the age when a phone call from a relative is a bad thing. My uncle had passed away. He was the last of the bunch on my mother's side of the family. 14 brothers and sisters in all with all but 1 of them reaching adulthood. My grandmother had her first child in the year 1922 when she was only 15. They were sharecroppers picking cotton in North Mississippi. My uncle was born in 1951. And now they are all gone. Enjoying the same status as kings and queens and other heads of state that have left this mortal coil. So, this morning is a bummer, innit. 

there's just a graveyard and it's coming fast

Facebook can shove it....

I only got a Facebook account way back when for no real reason. My account just sat there for the longest with just one friend from my high school days. Then he got me into playing a game. Soon the only reason I added friends was to help play Mafia Wars. That particular game was fun for a few months, but it didn't take too long to see there would never be an end result. It was your typical donkey chasing a carrot on a stick game. So I quit playing it. Facebook, itself, blew up during this time circa 2009/10 and soon I was reconnecting with old friends which was fun. It was like Myspace, but where Myspace was an atom bomb, Facebook was a hydrogen bomb. I enjoyed it. I liked seeing photos of my peers and their lives. I liked people sharing their top ten musical lists or funny videos. But then 2016 came and went like a hurricane. Suddenly people started becoming political. You were soon either/or. 

And this dismayed me. I remember talking with some friends...and I mean really talking with them face to face and they said they agreed with me that they didn't want to log into Facebook to see people spout off their opinions. Sure, you're welcome to do it, but I am free to either delete you or, more benignly perhaps, just hide your timeline. The friends I was talking to began sharing their political thoughts on Facebook shortly after our conversation. Guess what? I hid those people. It didn't matter if they were left wing, right wing, or just plain nuts. I hid them. I am an equal opportunity avoider of political nonsense on Facebook. 

So, what are my political views then? Do you want to dox me perhaps? Facebook actually calculates your political views. I have forgotten how to find this data, but I know when I looked it up they thought I was a Democrat. Nope. So I must be a Republican then? Nope. I'm an actual independent thinker and voter which is perhaps a rare thing these days. But, I'm not really here today to talk about the legalized crime of politics. That is just one of many irritants to infect social media. I will add something here that everybody must know deep down in their hearts to be true: no matter how many political views you post, no matter how many memes you share; it's not going to change even one person's mind. If that method works, then the country as a whole is in far worse shape than any of us can imagine. 

So politics as a whole came along and made Facebook a worse place. It wasn't as much fun to hangout there. Next you can add Facebook's constant tweaking of, admittedly their environment, which gets annoying. Once you've gotten rid of the political garbage and joined some cool groups devoted to your interests the garden gets tilled and you find debris and weeds abound. I belong to lots of groups on Facebook. Some of them are devoted to the era I spent my formative years, I belong to some movie groups, and some television show groups. These groups have this in common: unless they are policed by hardcore administrators they get overrun by spammers. Even worse than that though is people who can't be bothered to look things up so people just post the same damn stuff over and over and over and over again. It's tedious. 

I was accused of being a spammer recently when I linked to my Electric Cowboy festival piece posted here. I protested this since: 1. it was a reply to a comment about the festival 2. this blog isn't for profit so what good does it do me to gain traffic here? There was a convoluted response about people spamming posts just for likes. I don't need the dopamine rush of likes at Facebook. Because here's my last bit about the social media giant and then I'll get back to my regularly scheduled lack of posting here in 2021 (although there is some Martin Theatre movie listings coming in the next few months).

Facebook can shove it because nobody really cares that much anymore anyways (never mind this screed which proves I might care just a little I suppose). Nobody under the age of 21 or so maintains anything much there. I know my own children rarely do anything there. Heck, my youngest doesn't have an account and I doubt he ever will get one. Nobody really cares that much about your vacation photos or about the fact that you have coffee every morning. That funny meme you just shared has been shared by 10 or more people today and it wasn't even all that funny when it first appeared 5 years ago. Another thing; have you ever noticed how much snark is on there? So many people try to be funny in their comments and it all gets so tiresome. Or even worse, they try to be the smartest person. I've had enough of smartest people. I've had enough of dumb people. I've even had enough of myself some days. I'm going to go back to the way it was before I joined that data collecting wretched hive of scum and villainy.