The White Stripes - Elephant

The White Stripes - Elephant

Published in 2003

Wikipedia

I have some spectacular friends.  One of the few friends that I got out of high school, that wretched hive of scum and villainy, is a man named Brian.  If you have looked through the archives, you will see him threatening hungerstrikes for me not having done The Beatles yet, you will see him with some incredibly well written comments, and you will generally see him everywhere.  So, I present to you, the first guest album project, by Brian G.  Bow down before him, ye mighty, and despair.

Jack White is an unassuming man whose presence does not impose upon itself. It is not until the pick hits the steel that you feel the room flex and can feel the music in your chest in the reverse fashion of how the mute can talk with a microphone pressed to their throats. Meg White follows suit in the duo, being the milk to Jacks thrashing cheerios. No one enjoying cereal ever mentions the milk unless it is past its prime, and this milk may have a bit of a twang to it, but fuck it, it has 2 weeks left before it makes you pee out your backside. When you think White Stripes, I immediately think of a few things. The first is the unfortunate fact that they broke up in February; if that will stick or not we will see, but I don’t see them getting back together. Jack carries on with the Raconteurs and the Dead Weather - both of which rock in their own right.

Seven nation army comes on with the bass line that could have been written by a 6th grader. This song is always found in a lot of authors 'top 50 rock songs of all time' list; and I agree with that. If nothing else, this song got the Stripes a ton of play and expanded their base more than any other single. I was glad to hear the band known for their garage rock sound getting play on the radio - I sensed this as a small step in the improvement of a steadily declining radio scene. 

Black math is exactly how it sounds. If the kings of yesterday would have relied on composite boxes of wood topped with metal strings rather than the black magic of royal lore - this is the jam you would flex to slay the fucking dragon. This is another simple hard hitting song that I am sure was first played in a basement or garage somewhere.

Just when you are verging on the side of face melting status, they slow it down without being dreary. 'I just don’t know what to do with myself', 'in the cold cold night', 'I want to be the boy to warm your mothers heart' and 'You’ve got her in your pocket' show a departure from the beginning of the album by telling a bit more of a story and also giving Meg a chance to step up to the mic. It works to keep this album very sessionable in that you can listen to it start to finish over and over and not grow tired of it. With that being said, you wouldn’t find any of those 4 songs on my Stripes mix tape.

Please note that this may look like a separate paragraph, but that is only because I couldn’t find a button on my computer to make this block of text a completely different level of being. This artifact of text is not on the same three dimensions as the rest of this piece. This is where the album gets fucking gritty; it drinks tiger blood and pisses grungy bluesy excellence. If you were to play 'Ball and Biscuit' through a 50s tube amp you are hearing the air vibrate in the method in which God intended and that only Jack White could be the epi-center of. As good as the album cut is, I cannot urge you more to find a video of the live performance. The improvise riffs and the dirty grit of it come through in a way that the polished studio cut couldn’t show. Seven Nation Army is very similar in this regard - I urge you to find a set where they mashed together 'Death Letter' with 'Seven Nation Army' on youtube. The transition between the two is one of those moments where you see what a live show should be.

Winding down the album, we have some solid songs which are led by the popular single 'Hardest Button to Button'. Multiple singles off Elephant made for some serious air time on the better rock stations. IF you didn’t know the Stripes before Elephant, you knew them now. The only song that I can’t explain on this entire album is the final track. The skit with Holly Golightly makes no sense but it shows the range that the Stripes Have. Although this is never the end of the Stripes for me - whenever the hiss comes on that indicated the end of the record it always leads to one of two foregone conclusions - dropping that fat needle back on 'Ball and Biscuit' or cuing up White Blood Cells or Icky Thump.

"Right now you could care less about me, but soon enough you will care by the time I'm done"

Fucking sick, am I right?  I have the coolest friends.

As for my opinions on things, I am pretty sure that Brian completely nailed this album.  It's driving, well crafted, and just a beautiful album.  It's one of those albums that every person needs to experience, because it just is that cool.  The drums are pounding, and the guitar is solid as fuck.

Of course, as they have just broken up, we must expect that this is going to be one of those albums that just lives on as a ghost.  One of those band that everyone will say they saw in their prime, and one of those bands that those of us who didn't will wish we had.  They play some spectacular rock, and they are just great.

It's personal story time.  My dad was in a punk band in Detroit, Michigan (the setting for Robocop) in the late 70's.  They were called the Denizens, and I have to say, they actually rock.  If they had come out twenty years later, they would have been hailed as a great classic punk act, but because they were ahead of classic punk, they never quite got that far.  They were seriously good, and I remember singing their songs as a kid.

In the early 2000's my dad's band got back together.  In Detroit.  They were going to play one show, and so we took a vacation up to the brown/tannest place on Earth, and went to a place called the Bohemian house.  To say that this concert took place in a bad part of town was an understatement, and since it is in Detroit, that understatement is an understatement.  The house was really cool though, with a bunch of really nice people.

My dad was the closing band.  A group called the Fondas came out and rocked out a bit, played some quality music. The whole event was for this guy Jim (I think)'s birthday, and so he got dressed up in his rock star best.  He had on khakis and a pink button up shirt, no tie.  He got warmed up with the band a tiny bit, and then they started playing.

They killed.  It was a room full of the most incredibly diverse group of people I have ever seen,  My dad's generation on down to my sister, who is three years younger than me, and the place was fucking into it in a way that I have rarely seen at a concert.  The whole place was into the concert, they were doing some really cool stuff, and a huge group of Detroit musicians were in the room.

I couldn't take my eyes off this one person, who was standing next to a central pillar in the room with a large, dreaded black guy.  I knew that I knew her from somewhere, but I couldn't remember where, until I really thought about it, and I had seen her on TV.

Meg White was at my dad's concert.  That is some fucking insane shit that I couldn't make up.  Seriously.  It was just one of those things that I still to this day, kick myself for not going up to her and just saying something small, about how she was influential and how cool it was for her to be at my dad's concert.  Writing it out now, I'm glad that I just treated her like a person, and didn't bother her.  I really enjoyed the concert, I enjoyed the hell out of my dad going up and blowing people away, and I thought that he was a pretty cool dad for doing it.

So, that was my brush with an incredibly famous, interesting, and seemingly very nice person.  If I was wrong, and she wasn't there, I feel like an idiot, but I'm not wrong.

Anyway, thanks to Brian, I hope that you will write more projects, and whoever out there has an album that they want to knock out of the park like Brian did, I will always provide space for you to vent your feelings, heart and soul.

"Danger in Disneyland"
Matt

PS.  Five Phil Give!

PPS.  Want to read a little more about my dad's band?  Go here.

The Beatles - The Beatles (The White Album), Jay-Z - The Black Album, Dangermouse - The Grey Album

The Beatles - The Beatles

Produced in 1968

Wikipedia 

Jay-Z - The Black Album

Produced in 2003

 Wikipedia 

Danger Mouse - The Grey Album

    Produced in 2004

      Wikipedia 

So, before I get to first off, so zero off, you're right, I'm crazy.  If I were attempting to do this on Thursday night, I'd be a psychotic person, who wants to disappoint you.  However, I have discovered the secret to a blog updating on time is to create a great deal of backlog before you get to something that you actually want to go pretty deep into.  So every Friday or maybe every other Friday, I'm going to write a longer piece.  Sometimes it will be like this one, a breakdown of a couple of albums.  Sometimes it will be something weird like what I wrote about Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix.  Sometimes it'll just be a regular album project that's been extended because I decided to write a bunch of words about a particular album.  This is my own admission that I am a wildcard, and any regular production is as beyond me as making the music that I am writing all these words about.  Unless somebody needs someone to be in their band.  Then I'm going to be the next John Lennon and McCartney at the same time.  Also, if any of the artists listed here are googling themselves and come across my blog, I'm a huge fan, and hope that you enjoy everything I say.  And if you don't, I got you to read my blog, so please, please leave a comment or something, and call me an ass if you think I'm an ass.  I'll take it as the biggest compliment of my life.  Seriously.  

Okay, now that I've explained myself... (and apparently lost all 'journalistic integrity' that would have existed if I was a journalist and I hadn't written something like 400 variations on the word Fuck on this blog already).

First off, as usual, I have to thank someone for the suggestion.  Luckily, this time, I only have to give him one third of the credit, however, he gave me the seed of the idea back, some five months ago, and threatened to go on hunger strike if I didn't write it.  So he's a lot thinner now, is what I'm saying.  So, Brian, I must thank you for giving me this idea, and suggesting The Beatles - The Beatles to me.  You're right, it's awesome.

I'm not exactly sure how to structure this essay.  I want to look at each original album as it's own work, but I actually think that the order in which they influenced me might be a more interesting way to look at it.  Did you know, that for someone who loves music as much as I do, and may well be addicted to it, I had never heard the full The Beatles before I came to college?  Did you know that Jay-Z's Black Album was exactly the first Rap album that I ever bought and listened to?  I had it on CD in my car, and would listen to it a lot.  Did you know that The Grey Album was the first Danger Mouse production that I ever heard, like most people, but influenced me into buying Gnarls Barkley's first CD on the first day it came out?  Did you know that I expected the answer to all of these questions to be why are you asking these questions?

Okay, it's time to get a bit serious.  I need to switch away from Wolfgang Amadeus Pheonix on my itunes.  By the way, I need to mention that that album is not optional.  If you aren't listening to it or one of the three albums I am talking about today, you should be.

I mean, lets go down the list.  We have a classic band, at or near the top of their game, putting out a double record that has been highly influential and is still interesting to this day.  We have the self proclaimed king of rap, with what was going to be his retirement album, trying to go out on top, also at the top of his game.  And we have an upstart young producer, who, due solely to his skill as a producer, used the previous two to make a form of art that may actually define our modern culture. More on that soon.

The Beatles - The Beatles is a classic record, but one that presents very different sides of a band.  It's an incredibly wide array of strange and psychedelic songs intermixed with straight up rock songs with dashes of country, and Revolution 9, which is a punctuation mark on how weird it is.  I can't really think of another band that has done such a strange mix and spread in one album.  Over his whole career, maybe, and I sincerely doubt it, Elvis Costello might be coming close to maybe getting near the spread of this album.  That is how big and all encompassing the album is.  

It's a strange album to listen to, because it is one that shows exactly who is writing which songs, and the strange result of the mixing of the two leads ends up creating some great stuff.  However, it is obviously the record that shows the seams that were developing in the Beatles at the time, and it's actually pretty strange to hear.  If you can't find a song that you love on this album, you aren't a human being with ears.  If you want high quality pop, Back in the USSR is for you.  If you love psychedelic rock, I give you Glass Onion.  If you just love good songs, While My Guitar Gently Weeps is for you.  It covers such a range, it is difficult to even classify it in any certain genera or even if there is cohesion in the album.  It's a difficult record, interestingly, for me to listen to all the way through.  I keep wanting to go to certain tracks, and listen to the ones that I love as opposed to the ones that I just like.  This might be the Album that I like least as a whole album, and more as a collection of songs.

However, the songs are so good, that maybe having the ones that I just like in there helps me.  I just don't really know what to do with some of them.  Revolution 9 is a perpetual problem for me.  It's eight minutes, thirteen seconds long, according to my Ipod.  And it is an interesting experiment. But for some reason, I just have problems with it.  I want to get into it, and come to see it as an interesting and valuable addition to the record, but it's just impenetrable.  I can't seem to find the edge to get into it.  

I guess what I am trying to say is that the White Album is a great album, but somewhat inconsistent as a flowing record or as a whole.  It has peaks and valleys, which is normal on a record, but the experimentation sometimes goes to far for me.  I love the core of this album, and it is of course a genuine classic, but I still have problems with parts of it.  Actually a pretty apt description of my feelings for it, is the same as my feelings about Dream Theater.  This is one of those central puzzles to the Beatles, and as a person who likes to figure out puzzles, I need to be better versed in the base of the Beatles before I can get to wrapping my brain around it.

Moving on to the second album of the day, Jay-Z's Black Album is an incredibly introspective rap record.  Weirdly introspective for a genera that is exemplified by his earlier works, which are about money, guns and women.  Jay-Z is a rapper who is either the smartest guy in the business, or he is the one who is best at faking it.  The man knows how to talk about himself in a way that makes you feel for him, and he can actually do some incredible word smithing.  If you have never seen him lay down a track on video, it's a surprisingly simple progression.  He goes in, he lays down the track, then he's done.  I don't think I've ever seen him with a pen and a pad, he just speaks in these incredibly long, memorized passages, that just come out of his mouth.  It's a gift, as far as I can tell.  

This was a CD that I kept in my car for a very long time.  I don't know why I liked it so much, but looking back, I was in an introspective time in my life.  It was the middle years of high school, I was sort of feeling out the kind of person that I wanted to be, which if it isn't obvious, or you don't know me that well, I'm still in that phase.  It was a time when I really wanted to listen to new things, and try things that I hadn't done before, and I heard about this incredible rap album that came out.  I bought it soon after, and my complicated relationship with rap began.

And I really do mean began.  I had never really listened to a ton of rap, other than, to my eternal shame, on Limp Bizkit albums, but since I'm not 12 and pissed off anymore, most of the time, I moved on from those guys.  I knew that there was a big genera out there that I was missing, except for certian acts that got played on the rock stations, Beastie Boys, I'm looking at you.  And while I love me some Beasties, whenever I heard rap, it was this immature, weirdly lifeless music.  Not to say that it wasn't good in a certain light, I mean, you could dance to it, and you could get some really incredible music out of it, but to do that you had to ignore the inane crazy shit over top of it.  And I think that this feeling is one that is perpetrated by the radio/single way of releasing albums.  Even the singles off the Black Album are pretty club banger tracks, pre-made to fit into a rap block in a club.  They're well produced, broad tracks.

Speaking of which, let's talk about 99 Problems.  1. It was a crossover success.  I heard about the record because of this song.  Once again, it's actually a deep song, that is all about the choices that someone can make in certain situations.  It's surprising because the idea is that it was intelligence that got him out of the situations.  I also think that I am contractually obligated to mention that Rick Ruben is awesome, just for mentioning this song, so Rick Ruben is awesome.  Can I move on?

The Black Album seems to be an attempt to wrap up a career in one album.  It is a consistently good, interesting album, punctuated with some great songs.  It's an album that really allows a great talent to breathe and make something that is both deeply personal and commercially viable.

The last album is the one that I think I'm going to talk about the most, and the reason for grouping these three albums together.  I think that the Grey Album's impact is still being felt out, and that it is going to be seen as one of those albums that punctuated a changing shift in the production of a certain kind of music.

The Grey Album is a concept album.  Jay-Z, in an incredibly interesting move, that had been done before, but not with such a huge album, released a vocal version of his album, and said, do with it what you will.  This was at the same time that a strange new thing became popular, called the mash up.  The Mash up is a mixing of two independent songs to make a new song that reflects the best parts of each of the original songs.  So Jay-Z just gave his album and his implicit blessing to the world to make something new.

This is where Danger Mouse comes in.  I've already told about how I really respect him, and am always impressed by his style and work.  I actually have never heard a song of his that I didn't find intriguing, and there is only one that I've heard that I actually don't like that much.  I think that Lucifer on this album was just too much of the auteur and not enough of the conductor.  It just seemed too easy.  I'm going to keep my commentary short on this album because I want to talk more about the state of music and it's influence on culture with regard to this album.  I will say right now, that I think this is a great album, worth listening to, and other than my one track that I don't like that much, it's really an incredibly cool way of using both of the source materials.  You will listen to both of the original albums differently after this album, because some of the hooks get incorporated so well that you cannot seperate them out.  When a beat comes out of one of the songs on the white album, you hear it, you hear the phrase, and Jay's voice sometimes.  It's a pretty incredible feat.

There is a great deal of analysis about what songs were used to create the beats, and there has been a ton of press about how it is a new experiment.  What I really want to to talk about is the way that this album reflects the culture that we have at the moment.  Our generation, whatever the hell that means, is being referred to as the 'look at me' generation by the news media more and more, and while I don't agree that we are in any way more attention seeking than any other generation, I think that the ability to produce things that everyone can look at in many ways has changed the way that we think about property and ownership.

The system used to be something like this.  You are a musical artist.  You play small shows, get your name out there, then are approached by a manager, who books shows for you.  Then you get an album contract, and a big advance from the record label, for that record.  Then you become an indentured servant to the record company, working off the debt of the advance for the rest of your natural born life, unless you get lucky, in which case you can do whatever you like.  The pyramid is that there are a lot of bands just playing gigs, less who are label artists, and then less who are successful, non indentured servants.

But now, the system is shaking.  It's becoming easier and easier to get a quality recording in your own studio, make your album available digitally, build a fan base through that, release the album without a label, or do some other version.  There hasn't been a purely successful digital artist without any sort of label support, as far as I can tell, but there are hints of these projects that are privately funded without the intervention of a label.  The business model that was once so strong is starting to fail, because of the shift of power to a lower level.

I'm not sure how it is all going to shake out, but the Grey Album is the first album that came out digitally that was almost just a resume.  Danger Mouse is an artist more than he is a producer, and he has always stated that what he wants to do is create art more than creating a product.  He continues to be at the forefront of musical experimenting, whether he is playing the Odd Couple completely backwards, or replacing Paris Hilton's albums with a mix of her saying inane shit to a beat.  He is now in the business, and is much more of an insider than he was, but I still watch his moves because you never know what is going to come out of it.

Culturally, we're in an interesting place where everyone has publishing rights, as long as you have access to a computer and some money.  In the First World, that means that fame is one viral video away, and that you can become famous for doing nearly everything.  Whether this opens up new opportunity for talented people or makes the whole idea of being famous a larger and less interesting group, is sort of up to you.  I'm interested to see if the freedom of information is actually good for us or bad for us, because I have a feeling that is going to be the big question for the next decade or so.

Anyway, I want to thank Brian again.  I hope that I did the albums justice, even though I know that I didn't.  If you want to discuss it more with me, talk to me in the comments, and if you think I am totally wrong about all none or any of this, I really want to hear it.  I'm not sure if I've reached a conclusion on this, but I'm very interested in others opinions.

If you can read this, you don't need glasses,

Matt

Dream Theater - Train of Thought

Dream Theater - Train of Thought
Published in 2003
Wikipedia

Three posts in one day? Say it ain't so! I'd of course like to thank Zach for the suggestion, and for putting the word out to other people, Thanks!

Let me talk a little about my relationship with Dream Theater before I get to this album in particular. I've been trying to get into them for years, but have always had trouble just penetrating the surface. I find them to be a band that seems just out of reach of my tastes. When they go metal, they just go a little too far for me. Two of my good friends swear by them, so I keep trying. I've actually been more of a fan of Systematic Chaos (After Train of Thought), because that was the only album that really kept me listening. I enjoy it, and I find times to listen to it, but it's never gotten a hold on me the way some other music has. With that in mind, lets move on to Train of Thought.

First, and allow me to make this abundantly clear, this is a dark album. There is a lot of abyss in this motherfucker. Go too far in, and you'd be liable to find some old fucking gods. In the first couple of seconds, a triumphant sounding beginning is crushed by a pulsating baseline. The lyrics, which are hard to make out sometimes for me, but become more and more clear as you listen more and more, are deep and dark, just like the music. You want some fucking awesome 'getting pumped up to fucking rip shit apart' music, this is the kind of stuff that I'd suggest.

When Dream Theater is on top of it's game, they play some fucking great music. It's exactly what I'd have liked to hear from Metallica in their prime, but harder and more epic. I have a feeling that these guys heard guys like Metallica and said 'Why are you backing off, you fucking pussies?'

What they do very well is motifs and themes. Now copy and paste that about a hundred times. If you are not a student of music, this is what I think makes them a bit hard to pin down. These guys love repeating, morphing phrases. They want you to hear the same riffs over and over again in every possible permutation, drilling them into your head and then switching them up. When you notice the changes, it's kind of cool. Unfortunately, it is also where I sometimes get lost in their songs. They repeat so much it is sometimes hard to hear the subtle things that they are doing to change the music. I'm happy to report however, after really paying attention to the music, I've grown to appreciate them at the top of their game.

The reason that I am not in love with this album is because in some of what I thought were their best songs, there were parts that I found, to paraphrase Christian Bale, fucking distracting. Why do we need to have all of the whispering repeated lines over Honor Thy Father, when the music is plenty oppressive enough? What the fuck is with the loony tunes fucking interlude in Endless Sacrifice at 6:30? These kinds of things break my concentration and appreciation, but maybe that is just one of the things that they do, I don't know.

Don't let that last paragraph give you the wrong impression, I like the album, and I think it is a good one, I just can't find myself desperately wanting to listen to it more. Actually the song that I think is best on it is the shortest one on it. Vacant is what some would call a fucking tight song. It's brief, yes, but what it makes them do is incorporate what is good in a long song into a great short song. It's beginning is one of the perfect sinking chord progressions that you can really hear in their songs. It's slow, but it milks you for the emotion that it wants. It has a fucking Cello in it for fucks sake!

Maybe I've been trained to listen to short music by pop music, but I really do feel that they are at their best when they aren't wandering all over the place. When they are forced into a tight rhythm they can kick ass, and that doesn't mean that they can't get the permutations in. But I will say, I respect the hell out of these guys for not giving in to fucking assholes like me telling them to shorten it and tighten it up. These guys are obviously incredibly talented artists, and they can seriously fucking shred, to use the parlance of our times. This just might not be the album that gets me to jump down the rabbit hole, which in retrospect I should have known. A real fan of these guys suggested this album to me, which probably means that having spent a lot of time with the core course work of Dream Theater, this is one of the last bastions that he hasn't finished. If you love metal, you've already heard it, but if you haven't, it's an interesting experiment. This is an album I'd love to have a long conversation about.

Once again, thanks a lot Zach, it was a wild experience. I think I'm actually liking it more the second time around, so I promise to keep listening to it.

Up Next: Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots by The Flaming Lips

In the not too distant future,
Matt