rolling with the years

Pal Ken unearthed a pretty interesting musical meme, and because I have never been one to shy away from a quick and dirty source of content, I've decided to use it as the basis of today's post.

So here it is, an annotated list of the songs that topped the Billboard Hot 100 charts on every March 13 since I emerged from the womb on that date in 1972. It's a countdown to the End Times which offers clear proof that "popular" does not necessarily equal "good."

1972 - "Without You" by Nilsson - And thus I entered this world bloody, screaming, and to the tune of calcium-leeching soft rock.

1973 - "Killing Me Softly with His Song" by Roberta Flack - Even soul was affected by the power of the 1970's.

1974 - "Seasons in the Sun" by Terry Jacks - Is it any wonder I took to punk rock as strongly as I did?

1975 - "Have You Never Been Mellow" by Olivia Newton-John - The de facto anthem for the Me Decade.

1976 - "December 1963 (Oh, What a Night)" by The Four Seasons - Attempting to escape the malaise via fuzzy nostalgia.

1977 - "Evergreen (Love Theme from A Star Is Born)" by Barbra Streisand - Fuck you, record buying public of 1977.

1978 - "(Love Is) Thicker Than Water" by Andy Gibb - And the effects of cocaine abuse are stronger than cardiac muscle.

1979 - "I Will Survive" by Gloria Gaynor - Saturday Night Götterdämmerung!

1980 - "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" by Queen - I can handle a little Mercury every now and again.

1981 - "I Love a Rainy Night" by Eddie Rabbit - "When the stars were right, They could plunge from the C&W chart to the Hot 100; but when the stars were wrong, They would remain in their own genre subdomain. But although They were no longer on Top 40 radio, They would never really pass from public consciousness..." - The Call of Cnt'ry'mu'zk

1982 - "Centerfold" by the J. Geils Band - I've already discussed the personal significance of this song here.

1983 - "Billie Jean" by Michael Jackson - It was a given that this musical journey was going to pass through Neverland at some point.

1984 - "Jump" by Van Halen - What fuck is a "record machine," anyhow? Apart from being a way to dodge coming up with a rhyme for "jukebox," that is.

1985 - "Can't Fight This Feeling" by REO Speedwagon - Forget all the talk about Minor Threat and 7 Seconds, this here is the real font from which emo music sprung.

1986 - "Kyrie" by Mr. Mister - No, no.

1987 - "Livin' on a Prayer" by Bon Jovi - I preferred the Swinging Erudites' version, "Livin' on My Hair."

1988 - "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley - Happy Sweet 16, Andrew! We chipped in and got you a rickroll!

1989 - "Lost in Your Eyes" by Debbie Gibson - That's Deborah Gibson now, thank you very much.

1990 - "Escapade" by Janet Jackson - Six of one...

1991 - "Someday" by Mariah Carey - ...and a half dozen of the other.

1992 - "To Be with You" by Mr. Big - Music to peak in high school by.

1993 - "Informer" by Snow - Truly the Falco of his times.

1994 - "The Sign" by Ace of Base - ABBA 2.0

1995 - "Take a Bow" by Madonna - ...and exit the stage, please, before things get any more embarrassing.

1996 - "One Sweet Day" by Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men - Honoring the late Steve (Def Leppard) Clark and the late David (C+C Music Factory) Cole in the most insipid manner imaginable.

1997 - "Wannabe" by the Spice Girls - "What I really really want is to host bumpers for the Soap Opera Channel."

1998 - "My Heart Will Go On" by Céline Dion - Never underestimate the purchasing power of teenage girls.

1999 - "Believe" by Cher - The auto-tune effect that launched a thousand shitty Eurodance tracks.

2000 - "Amazed" by Lonestar - Country-fried cheese.

2001 - "Stutter" by Joe featuring Mystikal - If 6 was 9 was a forgettable R&B hit.

2002 - "Ain't It Funny" by Jennifer Lopez featuring Ja Rule - No, not particularly.

2003 - "In Da Club" by 50 Cent - Ugh.

2004 - "Yeah!" by Usher featuring Lil Jon and Ludacris - ...and Bella Abzug and Helmut Kohl and Madame Curie and Jim J. Bullock and that one dude at the gas station with the lazy eye.

2005 - "Candy Shop" by 50 Cent featuring Olivia - Ugh³.

2006 - "You're Beautiful" by James Blunt - Flattery will get you nowhere, James. My affections are not for sale to some next-gen James Taylor who yodels the word "beautiful" like he's just been kicked in the nads.

2007 - "This Is Why I'm Hot" by Mims - "I can sell a mill sell you nothing on the track." How refreshingly honest.

2008 - "Low" by Flo Rida featuring T-Pain - Honestly, this stuff exists solely for the purpose of being licensed into tinny-sounding ringtones, right?

When I embarked on this project, I had hoped that there would be at least a couple tracks in the list that even I wouldn't feel embarrassed posting. As it turned out, there was "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" and not much else. (You may beg to differ, but mine is the hand that rests on the tiller.) So Queen it is then, along with an excellent acoustic cover of 1984's featured slice of pop rock bombast...

Queen - Crazy Little Thing Called Love (from The Game, 1980) - The greatest thing composed in a bathtub since Marat's Éloge de Montesquieu.

Aztec Camera - Jump (from a 1984 b-side; collected on The Best of Aztec Camera, 1999) - Maura once suggested that there was some kind of Dorian Gray relationship between Aztec Camera frontman Roddy Frame and Echo & The Bunnymen's Ian McCulloch, where McCulloch staved off the ravages of time by passing them on to Frame. If that was the case, the spell has apparently been reversed, as Roddy has been looking rather spry as of late, while poor Ian appears to be in the advanced stages of mummification.

Vacation 2008: Interlude - Don't need a weatherman

Don't mind me, I'm just taking a few minutes to calibrate this nifty piece of equipment (copped from Chris Sims) towards the prevailing local conditions:


Pylon - Cool (from Gyrate, 1980) - A bracing blast of postpunk relief. How is it that so many current bands have been slapped with the "postpunk" tag (or have self-applied the same), yet none of them even remotely capture those certain qualities that made old school postpunk so fascinating?

Vacation II: Day 1 – Lazy Saturday Afternoon

My second scheduled vacation for 2007 has begun with the roar of a cantankerous lawn mower and the rumbling of thunderstorms headed this way. As the morning’s yardwork has left me feeling completely thrashed and the potential for nasty motherboard-frying surges is limiting the time spent on the computer today, I figured I’d use this opportunity to give my answers to the “Name five to ten songs that have impacted your life” meme AC tagged me with.

This was harder to compile than expected, as “significant” is a much different creature than “favorite.” Most of my favorite songs have had little impact on my life outside the enjoyment they have brought to me, whereas the songs that I can recall making an impact aren’t what one would necessarily expect, given the impression of my tastes inferred from my various posts.

First up in this roughly chronological list is a tie:

Dexy’s Midnight Runners – Come on Eileen (from Too-Rye-Ay, 1982)

…and…

Styx – Mr. Roboto (from Kilroy Was Here, 1983)

The awakening of my individual tastes in pop music came occurred somewhere between my tenth and eleventh birthdays. It’s not that I was unaware of pop music or didn’t have favorite artists prior to that, but my preferences were shaped by received wisdom, handed down by or picked up from my parents, my teenage aunt, or the older kids in the neighborhood.

Then, in 1982-1983, I made the evolutionary leap to an independent consumer of pop, aided by the plethora of local music video programs put together to cash in on MTV’s success as well as the debut of WHTT, “Boston Hit Radio,” which played the “hottest Top 40 songs” every hour on the hour. The goofy concept rock of “Mr. Roboto” and the faux Celtic soul of “Come on Eileen” struck a chord with young Andrew, and I would camp out next to the boombox waiting for both songs to crop up on ‘HTT’s extremely tight rotation cycle.

(Thank Providence I came of age when I did, while new wave pop was still in full swing. If I was born a few years later, I might have been scarred for life.)

Jumping ahead a couple of years:

Sam & Dave – Soothe Me (from The Best of Sam & Dave, 1969) – The better part of my junior high and high school years were spent as a soul boy, with a look and musical tastes akin to an independently invented version of mod revivalism. It was this track, discovered through The Blues Brothers (where it plays on the Bluesmobile’s 8-track during the fateful traffic stop), that ignited my burning passion for sweet Memphis soul and opened my eyes to a musical world outside the classic rock and heavy metal ghetto of my immediate circle of friends.

Circle Jerks – When the Shit Hits the Fan (from Golden Shower of Hits, 1983) – The first punk album I purchased was the Repo Man soundtrack, and so impressed was I by the Circle Jerks’ tracks on that LP, the second punk album I purchased was Golden Shower of Hits. My affection for California-brand hardcore (and hardcore in general) has waned over the years, but upon listening to this track again I found myself flashing back to junior year, staring into the bathroom mirror, preparing to make a personal paradigm shift by spiking my hair up with glob of petroleum jelly.

Crass – Sheep Farming in the Falklands (from a 1983 single, collected on Best Before...1984, 1986) – I came to the anarchopunk party late in my punk career. (Indeed, the music and message played a big part in my ditching the rigid fashion-punk template and making the Great Leap Forward.) More than anything else the band ever recorded, this blistering howl of righteous indignation and anger (for a war that had been over for nearly a decade at the time I first listened to the song) struck a chord with me, and echoes of the profanity-laced rant that closes out the piece can be observed in many of my political posts at Armagideon Time.

…and finally:

Rubber City Rebels – Brainwave (from a 1979 single) – In the spring of 2006, I was reading the copy of Simon Reynolds’s Rip It Up and Start Again that Maura had given me for my birthday. I got to the bit about Cleveland/Akron scenes of the late 1970’s, which provided a list of some of the lesser known participants. Most of the acts were known to me, if only through individual tracks on obscure punk and new wave compilations, but one act, the Rubber City Rebels, I’d never heard of before.

My curiosity led to a Google search, which in turn led me to this post at Something I Learned Today featuring a representative selection of the band’s material. Prior to my stumbling across the site, I was almost completely ignorant of the concept of mp3 blogs apart from Fluxblog and a couple others dedicated to more recent material (which really didn’t interest me that much). I spent the better part of a weekend exploring all Something I Learned Today had to offer, then embarking on a whirlwind linkjumping tour of similar sites.

At the time, I had been mulling over the idea of starting a blog, but my initial choice of focus -- comic books -- was already overserved with clever folks doing what I was thinking of doing, and better than I ever could. The discovery of the mp3 blog scene was a major revelation to me, and I discovered what my true calling was. Thus was Armagideon Time born.

I'm not big on tagging folks, so anyone who wants to take up the meme-baton and run with should feel free to do so.

she doesn’t wanna know me now

Because nothing on my "potential projects" plate is leaping out at me today, here’s some lazy content in the form of the “Eight Things People Don’t Know About Me” meme that’s been making the rounds as of late. This was a more difficult process than I anticipated, given the autobiographical/confessional nature of Armagideon Time.

1. Irises are my favorite type of flower. I like they way the look. I like they way the smell (sweet and vaguely lemony). There used to be random wild patches of them growing in the North Woburn woods when I was a kid.

2. I once shook hands with Larry Storch. I met him outside a theater where he was appearing in a play. My wife and her friend were huge fans of F-Troop, and were pen pals with the man otherwise known as Corporal Randolph Agarn. He seemed like a really nice guy.

3. In my senior year of high school, I won first place in the annual public speaking contest. I recited Colonel Kurtz’s “pile of little arms” speech from Apocalypse Now in a pseudo-Shatnerian manner. The prize for first place was forty dollars.

My grandmother refused to attend because I wouldn’t remove my earrings before going onstage. She insisted that “They’re all going to laugh at you.” Fortunately the night was free of pig’s blood and telekinetic mayhem.

4. I can play the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on both the flute and the piano. It is the only piece of music I know how to play, which suggests that there may be a genetic propensity toward enjoying Die Hard hardcoded into my being. Or that my grade school music teacher was a tyrant.

5. I have bits of gravel embedded in both kneecaps. The last day of my freshman year, I had a bad crackup on my brother’s scooter, and shredded my knees something fierce. I spent most of the following week alternating between long soaks in the tub and peroxide rinses. While most of the grit got cleaned out, some deeper fragments remained beneath my skin, and the dark splotches are still visible on my knees to this day.

6. If my family’s genealogical legends are to be believed, John and Priscilla Alden (of the Mayflower and the Plymouth Colony) and General Oliver Otis Howard (one of the founders of Howard University, Commissioner of the Freedman’s Bureau, and the man who fucked over Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce) are among my distant ancestors.

7. I nearly drowned when I was two years old. I got too close to the waves at Plum Island and was sucked in by the undertow. A fisherman heard my cries, and pulled me out of the ocean. As a consequence, I can’t abide submerging my face in water.

8. The first record I owned was a copy of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band I pulled out of a trash pile. The first record I ever purchased was AC/DC’s Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap.

The Who – The Real Me (from Quadrophenia, 1973) - Really rockin'.

Curtis Mayfield and The Impressions – See the Real Me (from People Get Ready, 1965) - Really soulful.

Guntherfest '07

Special bonus content, no commentary given or needed:

because I hate focus groups

It’s been a while since I engaged some memery, so here’s one copped from Kevin. Set your playlist to shuffle and fill in the categories.

Opening Credits:
“Hebrides Overture” by Felix Mendelssohn. Classy, sweeping, and stark. Not bad.

Waking Up:
“Fireworks” by Siouxsie & the Banshees. Wow, this is shaping up to be a gloomy film. At least I’ll have the moody student demographic sown up.

First Day at School:
“Too Much, Too Young” by Dave Smalley. Filling the “quirky indie pop cover of a new wave classic” quota.

Falling in Love:
“The Man With the Dogs” by The Dead Kennedys. Maybe. I can see the protagonist fleeing from his enemies and dodging environmental obstacles on a suburban sidewalk. He makes it to the corner, where he makes eye contact with the new girl in the neighborhood, an introspective barette-wearing beauty. He is so overcome with yearning that he forgets what he’s doing and trips over a fire hydrant.

Fight Song:
“He Was a Friend of Mine” by The Byrds. Now we must battle, for the whole world is at stake!

Breaking Up:
“The First Noel” by The Moog Machine. Seasonal holiday depression is the best kind of depression.

Prom:
“String Bean Jean” by Belle and Sebastian. Appropriately soft and intimate, but not slow dance material. I like it.

Life:
“The Night” by Lene Lovich. So I guess the film is kind of a hipster reiteration of Mahogany….

Mental Breakdown:
“Don’t Leave Me This Way” by Otis Redding. Perfect.

Driving:
“Mary’s Room” by The Vyllies. The bleak minimalist synth and haunting female vocals would work for a gloomy midnight ride, but it lacks the classic rock je ne se quois needed for a proper driving song.

Flashback:
“Diamond and Loving Arms” by Boytronic. Perfectly fine, if the film in question was shot in 1985.

Getting Back Together:
“Antmusic” by Adam and The Ants. Celebrating a new romantic era, perhaps?

Wedding:
“Missing Missiles” by Slow Children. Oddball new wave as wedding music? Hey, it worked for my wife and me.

Birth of a Child:
“Never Stop” by Echo and The Bunnymen. Not what I would have picked, though the more I think about it, the better I like the idea.

Final Battle:
“Rush” by Big Audio Dynamite. High stakes yet whimsical. Have to be careful not to overdo the CGI goofiness, though.

Death Scene:
“That Neutron Taste” by The Bleach Boys. Claustrophobic, apocalyptic garage punk/punkabilly with lyrics that beg for radioactive annihilation. Way to exit in style!

Funeral Song:
“Thru the Flowers (New Version)” by The Primitives. A little too upbeat for my tastes, but it does fit the theme well enough.

End Credits:
“Outrage” by Booker T and the MG’s. Ah, yes. A playful organ-driven R&B instrumental track to close things out on the right note of absurdity.

I should be jumpin' shoutin' that I made it all this way

Guess which reclusive music and pop culture blogger turned 35 today?

Funny, I don’t feel older. A few of my peers have a pathological fear of aging and fight tooth and nail with the process, leading to a series of increasingly ludicrous gestures calculated to fend off the encroachment of the long, gray twilight minute by precious minute. It seems kind of futile to me, this massive expenditure of energy in order to delay the inevitable. My mother spent her thirties engaged in such a struggle, and it killed her in the end. She was 37 when she passed away, two years older than I am now.

It’s a cliché, but true nonetheless: You are only as old as you feel. (High cheekbones do help, though.) Andrew at 35 isn’t much different than Andrew at 25, or even Andrew at 19. I’m a bit wiser…I think. My responsibilities have increased, but they are less a burden than a price willingly paid for achieving certain aspirations. I don’t begrudge the growing cluster of gray hairs in my buzzcut’s little forelock; I’m too busy enjoying what I have while I have it.

The Clash – Gates of the West (from a 1979 single, collected on Super Black Market Clash, 1994) – Equivocation in the face of success, something I’m well acquainted with. “But just like them we walk on and we can't escape our fate.” Perfect.

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Today also happens to be Mike “Mikester” Sterling’s birthday as well. Progressive Ruin has long been one of my favorite comics blogs, an always interesting glimpse into the world of funnybooks from the perspective of a fan and retailer blessed a great sense of humor and ample common sense. Poor Mike has been buffeted about lately by the comics internet peanut gallery over his assertions that basing orders on intangibles like Marvel’s capricious marketing methods and unforeseeable media factors is very a risky business. Seeing as Mike has some affection for Swamp Thing, and Chris Sims has seen fit to resurrect this old meme, I put together this little birthday .jpg for the poor guy:

The Chameleons UK – Swamp Thing (from Strange Times, 1986) – Is it just me, or does that guitar lick at the opening sound like it was cribbed from Jerry Reed’s “Amos Moses’? Next up, Hoyt Axton’s “Jealous Man” and its influence on Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart.”

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I saw that comics legend Arnold Drake has passed away at age 83. He was most famous for his work on the original Doom Patrol, the ending of which became the source code for subsequent superheroic Götterdämmerungs. It’s a shame that the gravitas of tragic heroism Drake bought to the team’s demise seems to have eluded the current generation of imitators, who focus more on shock value than substance. (Grant Morrison being the exception, as Seven Soldiers #0 has shown.)

Drake was also the writer behind one of my all-time favorite series, Stanley and His Monster, a deceptively sophisticated “kiddie” humor strip published by DC in the mid-to-late 60’s, begun as a back-up feature in The Fox & The Crow before taking over the title with issue #109. The series is in dire need of the Showcase black and white “phonebook” reprint treatment.

Here’s Drake’s “ought-to biography” from the letters page of Stanley and His Monster #109, in which reveals he was a man after my own heart, and here’s one of my favorite comics panels of all time, showing that good food and friendship can overcome the differences between a boy, a giant purple monster, and Napoleon’s ghost (not a giant spectral penis, as a certain woman I live with seems to think he resembles) :

Life should be like that panel, don’t you think?

Queen – You’re My Best Friend (from A Night at the Opera, 1975)

those songs are second-hand, but something’s missing

I like memes, especially music-related ones. They are a great way to generate plug-and-play posts when I’m too lazy to do my own thinking. This meme comes courtesy of Bully, by way of Kevin Church.

Total amount of music files on your computer:
Currently 46 gigabytes, but the totals are always in a state of flux as I’m constantly shifting things in and out of my archives.

The last CD you bought was:
A used copy of Metro Stylee’s self-titled album from 1998, purchased from a seller on Amazon. It’s enjoyably quirky fem-vox ska from NYC. I made the effort to track the disc down after hearing “Destroy”, the band’s contribution to the Girls Gone Ska compilation album.

What is the song you last listened to before reading this message?
“The Test” by the Chemical Brothers (with Richard Ashcroft), from Singles 93-03 (2003). This track regularly makes it onto my driving music mix CDs, although I’m not sure if my wife is cool with that. (As official co-pilot, my wife has limited veto power over my song selections, and I make sure to always include a minimum allotment of tracks by “her” bands.) I can usually tell if she likes a song by whether or not I overhear her singing along to it under her breath. I’ve yet to hear her sing along to this song.

Write down five songs that you often listen to or mean a lot to you:
As of this moment?

Black Box Recorder – Child Psychology (from England Made Me, 1998) – Luke Haines is a genius. Here’s a song that possesses all the ingredients (including spoken word segments) needed for an overly precious Prozac Nation pity party, and yet he makes it work beautifully. Sarah Nixey’s vocals are ethereal and sweet, but with an undercurrent of weary detachment to keep things plausible.

Teenage Head – Bonerack (from Teenage Head, 1979) – The best punk rock band you’ve never heard of.

Electric Light Orchestra – Hold On Tight (from Time, 1981) – Jeff Lynne doing his best Roy Orbison impersonation. It must be the always-wearing-sunglasses thing. Lest anyone fear that the band has turned its back on their prog rock roots, there’s a verse sung in French, thus meeting the required pretentiousness quota.

Ladytron – International Dateline (from Witching Hour, 2005) – My favorite track from my pick for the Best Album of 2005. Gorgeous and haunting.

White Heat – Nervous Breakdown (from a 1980 single, collected on Shake Some Action, Vol. 5) – Featured in a KBD Records post a few months back, this song is damn near perfect, at least by my esoteric standards. The killer hooks, angry/angsty lyrics, the shouted choruses…it’s power pop’s Platonic ideal, of which all other power pop songs are mere shadows.