Seen here, artfully posed with some of the crap lying around my hotel room:

This, my friends, is a Lanikai LU22CGC Concert Ukulele. As it happened, I had taken a drive over to Guitar Center this evening to amuse myself after work, and after playing a bunch of guitars and basses I had no intention of buying for an hour or so, I bought this, because it was neat and sounded pretty and wasn’t too expensive, and it’s small enough for me to haul around with me and plink on.

I’ve actually been itching to get a uke for a while now, mostly because I’ve been watching with great interest all the neat things Molly Lewis does with them, and from what I hear, it’s easy enough to play if you have a background in strings, as I do.

So, anyway, this is what I’ll be amusing myself with for a while. And, the nebulous “they” are right; it’s not that hard to play; after an hour or two of plinking around and looking up some chord charts, I can make some reasonably pretty sounds and chord progressions, and fumble my way through that twee little Jason Mraz song…you know the one.

So, yeah. << Insert your preferred Tiny Tim joke here >>

This is the tenth entry of this particular feature, which is longer than any sort of project I’ve tried to maintain save the random ten (which doesn’t really require all that much effort). With this piece, I’ve talked about 40 records, which barely cracks the contents of the box. If I want to keep going, I’ve got plenty of material to work with. It’s been kind of serendipitous how these records come up in contextual order, since I’m largely drawing handfuls out at random; I could probably write a few thousand words on the subject of indulgent solo project records, for example, and I’m pretty sure someone already has. If the av club hasn’t included it in their long-running Inventory series, they really ought to get around to it.

Without further adieu, here’s my latest stab at playing music critic/pop culture anthropologist:

♦“Weird” Al Yankovic – Off The Deep End: After listening to Alpocalypse over and over for the last week (quick review? generally awesome, but with a few caveats that I’ll attend to below), pulling this record out of the vaults was an interesting comparison. For the last three decades or so, Al’s records have always been a great marker of what’s big at the time of record release. Al’s transcended pop culture because he’s always been so great about identifying and making good-hearted fun of it; the guy’s got a tremendous sense for the zeitgeist (the regular Polka Medleys are consistently a crash-course in popular music of the era). It’s that, and along with one of the tightest, most versatile backing bands in music history, that have kept Al viable longer than pretty much every target he’s ever skewered. That said, Off The Deep End, circa 1992, shows a couple cracks beginning to show in the formula; not that these are Al’s fault. Starting about this time, pop music stopped giving Al as much to work with in terms of parody material. It always bugged me that Smells Like Nirvana was a comment on the subject as much as it was anything else (which is the same trap Perform This Way falls into), even if the craft was pretty great. The other parodies (New Kids on the Block, Gerardo, Milli Vanilli, and MC Hammer) are fine, but aren’t as good as the original Yankovic compositions. This has always been the case, but it started getting more apparent with this record because the pop music of the day just wasn’t as well crafted. I’m not going to complain, as long as we get more tunes like “Trigger Happy” and “You Don’t Love Me Anymore.” Which we do, since the best original tunes, like “Albequerque,” “Wanna B Ur Lovr,” and “Stop Forwarding That Crap To Me” came after this one.

♦Richie Sambora – Stranger In This Town: In the five-year void between New Jersey and Keep The Faith, there were a few blip of Bon Jovi activity to keep the devoted fans interested. The big hit was the Jon Bon Jovi solo record/”Young Guns II” soundtrack, which was pretty good, and keyboardist David Bryan put out a record I never managed to find, but this was the record I was looking forward to, the opportunity for Sambora to step into the spotlight and lead a band after wailing “Wanted!” every night and doing that harmonic blues box thing. As I said previously, I was really into what Sambora was selling, probably more for the cool sideman stage presence and songwriting than the guitar playing, although his style is distinctive, if not flashy, and works in the band setting; “workmanlike” is probably a good description. I once heard somebody describe him as “Neal Schon lite,” which, after listening to the record this week, is about right, since so much of this record has a real Journey vibe to it (it doesn’t hurt that Sambora’s singing voice sounds like a slightly more masculine Steve Perry). Like all “solo” projects, it’s awfully self-indulgent, especially in the early tracks – lots of lyrics about “gypsy”, “blues”, and “voodoo” with all the resonance of someone who’s only heard these things mentioned in songs by more iconic guitarists, and a lot more guitar noodling than on your average Bon Jovi record. Still, after he gets it out of his system, he breaks out tracks like “Rosie” which, while mining the tired “stripper with a heart of gold really loves me!” lyrical trope, is musically about as rocking and definitively Sambora as you can get, including all of the signature guitar licks (it’s not a coincidence that this one was co-written with JBJ, Desmond Child, and Diane Warren), and “River of Love,” which is an appropriately sleazy blues rock tune featuring barely veiled cunnilingus euphemisms and some clever guitar riffs. It was a great record for fans, reasonably accessable for newcomers, and a hell of alot better and less indulgent than “Undiscovered Soul” was (though I reserve the right to change that opinion if and when I pull it out of the box).

♦Nuno Bettencourt – Schizophonic: This one has a lot in common with the previous review, being a solo project from the guitar player of a successful rock band known for its vocal harmony that I was quite a big fan of. Nuno recorded this one during Extreme’s “Punchline” tour before the group disbanded. In a lot of ways, it’s way more ego-stroking than Sambora’s record, what with Nuno playing every instrument, the overblown soundscape, the “edgy” lyrics, and the artful, copyright-skirting mispelling of “Dizkneelande” on track six. That said, there’s surprisingly little guitar noodling from a guy who’s kind of known for it; it’s kind of a treat when the wheedling kicks in now and then. Although it’s got a lot of the same sort of funk influence Extreme was known for, it tries hard to catch the Alternative Rock wave, succeeding a bit, in the sense that much of it sounds a hell of a lot like modern Foo Fighters and Weezer (which, as I’m fond of saying, isn’t really a bad thing). The vocals are often intentionally buried in the mix and heavily processed, adding to the alternative feel, although there’s some (as you might expect) decent acoustic based Beatles-esque stuff there as well. I liked the whole project, though “Fine By Me” (a nice piece of power pop songwriting) and “Note on The Screen Door” stood out as the best of the bunch for me.

♦Joe Walsh –The Best of Joe Walsh: I’m most familiar with Joe Walsh, known to many as the outsized comic relief of 70s rock and roll, in the context of the later Eagles records, where he contributed some excellent slide guitar, and totally owned the show I saw on the “Hell Freezes Over” reunion tour, despite the huge duelling egos of Don Henley and Glenn Frey. However, I always enjoyed the “hits” out of context on the classic rock radio I heard constantly on my college summer jobs, so I eventually ended up with this record and But Seriously Folks to get the triumvirate of “Rocky Mountain Way,” “Funk #49” and “Life’s Been Good” into my collection,. It’s all good stuff, even if it never resonated with me the way some other stuff did, and thanks to this record, I discovered “Help Me Thru The Night,” which I would otherwise have never heard, because it’s only the three previous songs from the Walsh catalog that ever get played on the radio, and adds a bit of depth to the popular clownish image Mr. Walsh normally presents.

It’s nice to see another state, particularly one so populous, signing on to the idea that everybody deserves the same rights as everyone else.

Also, once New York is done celebrating and picking out china patterns, I wonder if it’s too much to ask her to have a chat with her fellow original British colony Virginia, who, as we all know, tends to stay way behind the pack on this sort of thing, and always ends up regretting being on the wrong side of history.

Maybe in this case, a little loving correction might help her break the cycle.

Lots of rumors this week regarding my getting shuffled around to fix somebody else’s problem…again. I’d use the pawn/chess metaphor, but the people making the decisions aren’t that strategic. At best, I’m a Sorry! token or one of the little kid pegs from The Game of Life.

I’m going to the water park now and not think about it.

1. “Until You Dare” – Hooters
2. “Nine While Nine” – Sisters of Mercy
3. “Misunderstanding” – Genesis
4. “True Fine Love” – Steve Miller Band
5. “Cadence to Arms (live)” – Dropkick Murphys
6. “Attention Earth People” – Dimensional Holophonic Sound
7. “Highwire” – The Clarks
8. “Monkey on a Wire” – Kasey Chambers and Shane Nicholson
9. “Back Broke” – The Swell Season
10. “Late Bloom” – Amy Ray
11. “Free To Decide” – The Cranberries

It also seems that I can’t count. Oh well.

I’m pretty sure with this entry, I’m caught up with my listening, and it’s probably time to swap out for a new box of CDs. That is, if I can resist just listening to Alpocalypse over and over for a while. What can I say, a boy never outgrows his “Weird” Al. In any case, in this installment, I lament a pop trend that never came to be, and finally get around to the group I spent more time listening to in my teens than any other:

♦Jewel – Spirit: The apparent similarities between this record and Sheryl Crow, which I talked about a few posts ago, are easy to see. Both records are sophomore efforts produced after both performers hit the big time with relatively small, stripped-down debuts that blew up huge. They’ve even got similar black and white portrait covers. Like Sheryl Crow, Spirit builds on some of the things that made the preceding project successful; in Jewel’s case, that means folky vocals and instrumentation, personal lyrical content on an intimate scale, and a little bit of yodelling. However, unlike the Crow record, Jewel eschews much of the raw, stripped-down production favor of a slicker, cleaner sound. It’s not that this doesn’t work, because the record is quite well produced, and still maintains the singer-songwriter vibe she’d cultivated an maintained (at least until she released the ladies razor commercial dance-pop single “Intuition” a few years later), leading to great success on the radio with singles like “Down So Long” and “Hands” (which, to this day, I can’t hear without replacing the lyrics with those of modernhumorist.com’s excellent parody“A Little Prayer (Wolverine’s Theme)”).

♦Michelle Branch – The Spirit Room: Once upon a time, around the turn of the century, I had a hope. A hope that the era of disposable blonde pop tarts in mainstream music like Britney and Xtina would be supplanted by a new movement of youthful, attractive, and (mostly) brunette female singer-songwriters. Enter acts like Vanessa Carlton, Norah Jones, and Michelle Branch (heralded, of course, by the likes of Jewel, whose blondeness we’ll forgive in this instance). Sadly, that movement was not to be, but the sparks thereof left us with a few nuggets of refreshing, confessional, and infectious pop music that isn’t all about going to da club and exploiting the virgin/whore paradox, and on the whole, more lyrically complex and compelling than Taylor Swift. The Spirit Room is a perfectly wonderful pop record, and emininetly listenable, particularly the ubiquitous single “Everywhere,” as well as “Goodbye to You”, which, while sadly not a Scandal cover, was a pretty great coming to terms with a breakup song that I kind of fell in love with when Branch played the Bronze right before Buffy and Spike hooked up in season six. As listenable as it is, though, I never particularly found myself driven to track down the rest of her output, which is probably a failing of mine than anything else.♦Darcie Miner – Down To Earth: This record continues the tradition of the last two, another teenage singer-songwriter (who’s mostly blond on the album cover), only on a more local/regional scale. Darcie opened a couple of Central PA gigs with the Badlees, and became kind of a protegé or mascot (depending on who you’re talking to). This record was produced by Badlees guitarist/vocalist/songwriter Bret Alexander back in 2000, and sounds like it, down to the mandolins and Jeff Feltenberger background vocals. This isn’t a bad thing at all; the production meshes well with the songwriting, which is very definitely Darcie, hewing closer to the life experience of a teenage girl (and all that implies) rather than Alexander’s trademark road-weary blue-collar poet with a larger than average vocabulary. Shortly after this record came out, Darcie got a sorta-major label deal, which, as they often do, fell apart, ultimately leading her toward more interesting musical directions. Her current web site doesn’t acknowledge this record, other than to say that ” it may not exactly have been the record SHE wanted to make, it still made a very strong impression.” Be that as it may, “My Angel” is a wonderfully crafted pop tune with great dynamic sense, and “No. 17” is probably something I wish I’d have been capable of writing at that age (heck, I’d like to be able to write it now). Also of note is that although I was gone from Central PA by the time this released, I still had electronic fingers in the scene, and Darcie pretty much sold this record to me personally via email correspondence, and I’m glad she did.

♦Bon Jovi – Keep The Faith: I eventually knew this little series would come around to a Bon Jovi record. Apologies in advance if this one becomes a little longer than usual. I came of Age in the 80s in the Rust Belt northeast, and for quite a large chunk of it, Bon Jovi was my soundtrack. Sure, I dabbled more than a little bit in glam and thrash (and less openly, mainstream pop music) but I kept coming back to the hard rock populism of Bon Jovi, even when it wasn’t the cool thing (except it gave me something to talk about with girls who still weren’t interested in me). The first four records, particularly Slippery When Wet and New Jersey were about as good as rock records got for me at the time, given my limited experience. They were hard and aggressive enough to address my pubescent masculinity issues, but touched on deep(er, anyway) lyrical themes, borrowing liberally from Springsteen’s slice o’ Jersey life songs, and also cranked out enough of that type of romantic ballad my sheltered little self figured girls liked and if I had them playing in the background at the right moment, well…let’s just say I was disabused of that notion pretty quickly. I idolized Sambora, who was more than just a side-man, contributing to the songwriting and filling out the sound with his background vocals on top of carrying the guitar duties with all those fancy pinched harmonics. Given that background, when this record came out when I was in college, I was excited, begging car-posessing dorm mates to drive me to the local mall to pick it up, then dropping everything for a private listening party. At the time, I enjoyed it, although it was different enough from the earlier records to alienate me a little bit, but not enough to give up my allegiance. I finally saw the band live on the tour supporting this one, and all was, at least temporarily forgiven, until a couple of years later, they forgot how to rock (seriously, someone explain to me how This Left Feels Right was ever a good idea?) and spent most of their musical energy flirting with country audiences, made up largely of the same girls who were dedicated fans in their teens, but mellowed out into rural soccer moms with little stick figure decals on the back of the SUV.

~Look, and unprecedented Second Paragraph!~

This record was heralded as a turning point toward more maturity for the band, largely because JBJ cut his hair. Some of the tunes play this out, but not to the extent one would have expected. It’s still largely the same stuff: hard rock with soaring vocals and a bit of honky-tonk piano backing it up, with experimental forays into acoustic blues (“Little Bit ‘o Soul”), the Springsteen-esque (“Dry County,” which comes to the Boss via “November Rain”-style overindulgence…great guitar solos, though) and the oddly creepy (“If I Was Your Mother”), and a few romantic ballads like “I Want You” rounding it out. If anything pre-sages the changes to come (not necessarily for the better) for the band, it’s the Tom-Waits-y “Bed of Roses,” despite the kick-ass guitar solo; it’s a decent song, and was a pretty big radio hit, though it dialed down the “rock” to such an extent that the band never quite recovered. Notably, coming back to this on CD with much better sound reproduction equipment than I had as a teenager, I noticed how narrow-band and muddy it all sounds. I wonder now if all the early stuff sounds that way and I just never noticed because I was listening to hissing cassettes on crappy speakers for all those years?

I’ve been following with interest the discussion at pandagon and elsewhere regarding the social implications of vegetarianism and veganism, particularly the apparent difficulty experienced by people in relationships where one partner is vegan and the other is not.

It’s an interesting topic that one might not immediately think about; the importance of food in our culture is a lot bigger than people realize. We’re attuned to the tensions differences over politics, religion, or even music can cause in relationships, but food is just kind of always there in the background, not getting noticed until differences get in the way. People are surprisingly defensive about eating choices. It’s honestly shocking how the simple presence of a vegetarian can cause some omnivores (who might not even be aggressive carnivorous troglodytes) to launch into impassioned violations of Wheaton’s law because they perceive another’s choice of diet as an attack on them*. Whether we realize it or not, food and food choice is completely entwined with identity, at least in western culture. That Brillat-Savarin quote at the beginning of every episode of Iron Chef is right:

Tell me what you eat, and I’ll tell you what you are.

Of course, identity isn’t just about food, though food can be a big part of identity. America’s big on the idea of identity politics, but then so, I would posit, is any human culture that isn’t totally occupied with subsistence efforts (though those groups would probably apply identity as a unifying force to encourage effort to feed and defend the group – we can’t escape it – as a species, we’re all about posturing and conveying an image). So many of us define ourselves by the groups and causes we associate ourselves with. Ideology. Party. Church (or not). Sports Franchise. Car Manufacturer. Team Edward vs. Team Jacob (or Team neither)….

On this topic in relation to food, Amanda points out one trend that seems uniquely American and current:

The “must have meat at every meal, cannot even CONSIDER a SINGLE vegan meal” mentality is a new twist on ye ‘ol ew-gross pickiness. There’s a specific kind of American pickiness—one that’s often tied right up with male privilege—that is not only picky but also petulant, as if being unadventurous and small-minded makes you morally superior.

See where I’m going here?

Sure you do. I suppose here is where this post stops being an anthropological discussion and starts becoming a bit of an editorial. I’ll continue to go on record saying that life-long learning and the trying of new things is inherently good, and that remaining intentionally cloistered in self-imposed ignorance generally isn’t, even if it makes you feel superior to all we simultaneously elite and unworthy types who aren’t afraid of things like quinoa or raw kale.

I just want to say, dear friends in the latter category, that you’re missing out on a lot of neat stuff, particularly some delicious food, by clinging to the whole anti-intellecutal moral superiority thing. My vegetarian friends have some amazing and totally delicious recipies that I think you’ll really enjoy.

It’s okay. Try the Taboule.

_________________

* – Also, I’m not going to rule out obnoxious vegs who are quick to judge and chastise meat eaters about their food choices. However, I will say that no matter how many stories I hear about these sorts of people and their militancy to the point of feeding their evolved-to-be-carnivorous cats and dogs vegan pet food and insist you should too, I’ve never personally met one in (forgive me) meatspace (though I have seen some arguments online approaching the line). I have, however, seen many a meat-loving person not think twice about rudely belittling vegs who dare to have a salad for dinner rather than huge slabs of roast beast.

Have you ever had to take in so much information in so little time that your brain hurts from having to expand to be able to take it all in, let alone process it all?

That was between two and three pm for me today.

Ow.

Once again, I dig into the big box (and elsewhere) to find old records to listen to and blather on about. This volume branches out a little bit past the usual piles of hair metal and mid-nineties pop rock into one of the more embarassing musical phases of my life, which is something, coming from someone who usually has no shame regarding his musical tastes:

♦Little Texas – Kick A Little: This one’s left over from my mostly ill-advised mainstream country phase, circa 1994-96. Not entirely sure where the phase came from (beyond an unhealthy fascination with Tricia Yearwood); I chalk it up to the unrefined taste of youth. Still, as they say, I got better, and balance a small stack of semi-embarassing CDs with the experience of seeing some surprisingly good live acts during the period, marked by the fact that I was the only one in the crowd dressed in flannel and combat boots, looking like I got lost on the way to the Pearl Jam show. This record is actually one of the less embarassing artifacts of that age, because after the novelty-ish opening title track, you get the surprisingly excellent “I’d Hold on To Her” and the even better “Amy’s Back In Austin” before falling into full-on pandering to the country lifestyle demographic from “Southern Grace” through the closer “Redneck Like Me.” It’s really an exercise in what might have been (see what I did there?), simply because despite making it obvious that they’re clued in to the pattern by taking the piss out of the whole “hot country” genre with “Hit Country Song” (which does nothing but list all the easy-out go-to references one puts into stereotypical country songs for three or four minutes over mournful steel guitars), but then they spend four-fifths of this record offering up hopelessly cliché country lyrics without any sort of irony. I’d love to see what these guys could do if they really tried digging a little deeper lyrically more often, because they’re all great players and the live show was energetic, charismatic, and novel (if you ignore the Steinberger bass on the little spinny belt buckle thing).

♦Steve Earle – Trancendental Blues: One good thing about my country phase was that I dug deeper and found some great under-the-radar country and folk stuff that succeeds in ways that Little Texas mostly doesn’t. Alt-Country. Celtic Folk. 70s Outlaw. Steve Earle. Despite having success as a songwriter, and a troubled personal history to rival Hank Williams, Earle never fit in with his Nashville peers, in part because his leftist political views are at odds with the mainstream. His style is more experimental, gravitating toward rock and folk styles as well as country, all of which are represented here. The opening tracks, “Trancendental Blues” and “Everyone’s In Love With You” are strong, heavy and energetic (and make for an excellent six to eight minutes of driving) before the record settles into a nice mix of traditional sounding country (“Another Town”) and folk (“The Boy Who Never Cried”, “The Galway Girl”), all of which is honest, raw, and engaging. This record, as well as pretty much Earle’s whole catalog, is highly recommended, especially if you’re a fan of modern folk, alt country, or basically just good American roots music.

♦Melissa Etheridge: Like most people, I’d barely heard of Etheridge before Yes I Am was released to great acclaim and many radio singles. I’d seen her on the Grammys back in ’89 and was intrigued, though it took me until years later to reach back and snag the whole early catalog, all of which serves as evidence of her talent as a great emotional songwriter and one of the most affecting acoustic guitar players to ever pick up an Ovation Adamas 12-string. This first album a great rootsy rock record, recorded on the cheap and in less than a week, and the rawness and lack of polish here is definitely a feature rather than a bug; it works; Her voice is best when it’s mostly unadorned and on the edge of breaking. “Water” got nominated for the Grammy, but when I re-listened to this (at probably 1:00am while driving down the interstate), “Similar Features” and “Occasionally” stood out prominently, but the best track on the record is, hands down, “Like The Way I Do,” which does agressive, slinky, and sexy better than anything else I can think of right now. It’s kind of a shame that Etheridge ended up being more famous for being a lesbian than anything else, and that her later stuff (at least the radio stuff) lost a lot of the edge her early stuff has. But that doesn’t make make those first three records (this, Brave and Crazy and Never Enough) any less awesome.

♦ Lady GaGa – Born This Way: Given all the attention paid to indie rock, roots/country and the sheer volume of hair metal I’ve worked through in this little experiment where I write about music so far, a reader might find it odd that I picked this record up a couple of weeks ago. Sure, those of you who follow my random ten posts have probably noticed my dips into modern pop music through the regular appearances of Katy Perry and Avril Lavigne, but would expect that I’m largely a rock sort of guy, and you’d mostly be right. However, I am unashamedly a fan of Lady GaGa, because, above all, she’s interesting in a way that few other artists are these days. I’m not sure if I’ve said it in this space before, but GaGa is what I imagine you’d get if David Bowie, Madonna, and Freddie Mercury somehow managed to have a baby where they all contributed equal amounts of genetic material. Sure, there’s a lot of glitz and glam and showmanship (and impressively, the GaGa image manages to be sexy without ever explicitly selling the artist as a sex object), but behind that important packaging is some scarily competent pop composition skills, as evidenced by how “Poker Face” has been so seamlessly ported over to other genre styles without losing it’s inherent value. Anyway, Born This Way is, not surprisingly, a very good record, and a record that sounds distinctly modern, but with a definite retro 80s feel. As many have pointed out, “Born This Way” does almost serve as a melodic counterpoint harmony to Madonna’s “Express Yourself,” but that doesn’t make it any less effective as pop song – it’s still instantly recognizable (my 3 year old immediately recognizes it whenever it comes on the radio – that’s distinction right there). Much of the rest of the record reaches back to 80s and 90s pop music; there’s quite a bit of Jim Steinman/Bonnie Tyler in the melodies on this record in songs like “Marry the Night” and “Hair,” as well as the newest single, “The Edge of Glory,” which captures the best kind of Celine Dion/Cher arena vibe without any of the drawbacks of actually sounding like either of them. However, most surprisingly, with “Yoü and I”, GaGa’s probably written the best country song I’ve heard in several years, and managed to get Brian May to play guitar on it. Yes, I think the record’s pretty great.