20 Essential Albums: Bleach

Bleach - Nirvana

Nirvana’s Nevermind came too late.  It’s big, Butch Vig production was good for radio play, but it was the simple raw sound of 1989’s Bleach that was Nirvana. I was just 21 when I was listening to Bleach constantly. It was loud and dirty. The guitars overly distorted, the drums slamming the cymbals with vigor, and there was Kurt Cobain screaming “give me back my alcohol.” How could I not like this record a lot?

This was grunge as I knew it. Along with albums like Soundgarden’s Ultramega OK and Screaming Trees’ Buzz Factory, the Seattle sound was high volume distorted guitars, with the occasional break to a clean guitar.  Then Pearl Jam came along and, though I liked Ten, they ruined everything.  Grunge was darker, angrier, and just more honest. It reflected the angst of the particular age and the depression that arises when it rains 300 days a year.

Like much of what I discovered, and loved, in the early 90s, Bleach represented an extreme.  It was the sound of something inside stretching out and trying to become real in the outside world. It was a good soundtrack for the reckless driving of the pizza driver I was at the time, and of the late, late nights of that time as well.

Book Review: Intruder in the Dust

Intruder in the Dust - William Faulkner

I have said before (and often) that I think an author's biography should stay separate from one's reading of a text. Yet, while reading Intruder in the Dust, I began to wonder how much William Faulkner was drinking at the time of its writing.

The novel is a story of racial injustice in the South that continues some eighty years after the Civil War. After being rescued as a boy by a black man, Lucas, from an icy stream, Chick, now 16, harbors a resentment over his indebtedness to Lucas. When Lucas is jailed and in danger of being lynched over the murder of a white man, Chick's debt is called. He must prove his innocence by digging up the body of the murdered man.

Unlike much of Faulkner's work, the story is told with a consistent timeline. It is still told in a loose, modernist style, reminding us how much Faulkner has in common with Virginia Woolf or Joyce's Ulysses. It can be difficult at times to discern the narrative from the stream of consciousness. Indeed, in the late sections of the novel, this style takes over for extended passages. What makes it worse, though, it the preachy-ness of these passages.

Faulkner carries a moral indignation about the continued maltreatment of blacks in the mid-century South, and the overcompensation of white guilt, and voices it loudly in passages like this:

to defend not Lucas nor even the union of the United States by the United States from the outlanders North East and West who with the highest of motives and intentions (let us say) are essaying to divide it at a time when no people dare risk division by using federal laws and federal police to abolish Lucas's shameful condition, there may not be in any random one thousand Southerners one who really grieves or even is really concerned over that condition nevertheless neither is there always one who would himself lynch Lucas no mater what the occasion yet not one of that nine hundred ninety-nine plus that other first one making the thousand whole again to repulse with force (and one would still be that lyncher) the outlander who came down here with force to intervene or punish him....

Passages like this led me to question Faulkner's drinking at the time he wrote this novel. What was one of the most coherent and simply enjoyable of Faulkner's novels is challenged by this preaching. And yet it will rank high on my list of the best of Faulkner's novels.

The Perpetual-Motion Family

I wonder if the hectic nature of my life is simply perspective. It "seems" busy when it really isn't. There always seem to be things to do. Things in the calendar everyday. And there is always a certain pace in the house, maintained by many voices and many footsteps. There perpetual-motion machine that is our house. The respites are few and limited in duration. The hours between their bed and mine. The fleeting, momentary escapes.

But if this is life, if this is the baseline, then "busy" would mean something more than it does now. Busy would have to refer to those bits when the activities do not cease, continuing and overlapping in succession.

Keeping busy with The Three

Does this perspective shift allow for some sort of relief? Would this stop me from answering, whenever the question of how things are going arises, that things are hectic? Would--should--this allow me to pick up the book I'm reading whenever the spare moment materializes? Or, will I continue to believe that I, too, must always be in motion? Using every moment.

Even now, stealing this time to write, my leg twitches as if I should be doing something.

20 Essential Albums: Bone Machine

Bone Machine - Tom Waits

There may be better albums by Tom Waits.  In fact, Swordfishtrombones and Raindogs are better albums.  Bone Machine, though, was Tom Waits to an extreme.  The traditional Tom Waits songs are here, perfect melodies, strong chorus, the sorts of songs that get covered by commercial crooners, but counteracted by the gravel in Waits’s voice. It is the boldness of the other songs that makes this album essential.

It is easy to imagine these songs banged out in some barn, with anything handy used for percussion, the guitar amp with a hole in it, and the vocals recorded through a vintage mic. There is something to be appreciated in the creation of really great songs that reject everything conventional. The songs represent a casualness, a relaxed freedom, even when done with passion in songs like “Such a Scream” or songs that come off like work songs, as “Jesus Gonna Be Here.”

For me, Tom Waits was what to listen to when all else seemed too typical, when nothing else fit.  It sounded like independence and individuality.

20 Essential Albums: Daydream Nation

Daydream Nation - Sonic Youth

I bought Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation from the Columbia Record Club, when they were running a special on double-record sets. I’d known Sonic Youth from songs of their earlier release Evol and decided to take a chance on this one (I had to fill my quota anyway).  The album is like a dream, guitars rattling or dying away into a tepid dream. The album’s opener “Teenage Riot”, the most popular song from this record, begins with the steady strumming, where you can actually hear the strings, before breaking open to the fast pace of most Sonic Youth material.

There is something in the atonality, just the wrong notes struck at the right time, that seems to characterize a particular way of life, a particular attitude.  “Candle” does this well, with verses that are calming and emotive, but with breaks where guitars screech and drums bang before the song turns around again.

Sonic Youth would go on to release Goo two years later in 1990, with songs more song-oriented and more popular. And Dirty a couple years after that is in the same vein.  These albums are great as well, but sometimes it is the initial entrée into an artist’s work that stays with you.

20 Essential Albums: In the Flat Field

In the Flat Field - Bauhaus

It doesn’t get darker than Bauhaus.  In the Flat Field, their first full-length, opens fast big and loud, with “Dark Entries” and lines like “Puckering up and down those avenues of sin.” The sound leaves little doubt that this is something different. Abrasive and disturbing. Expressing a life one can only hope to avoid. Yet, still, Bauhaus captures something dark inside, something that demands expression. And it comes with the benefit of shocking and offending others (especially parents).

And it gets darker with the second track “Double Dare”, with Peter Murphy entreating the listener, “I dare you / to be real.” I found this music frightening at first listen.  Wondering why someone would create something so dark, so sinister sounding.  But, in my sophomore year, I remember coming home from track practice to sit, exhausted, in my basement room, and listening to Bauhaus.  The music came over me like an hallucination, like a trance that lasted until the cassette player stopped.

Later, in my late teens and early twenties, this music began to reflect a darkness that I knew. And now, with the darkness replaced by light, the mood is occasionally just the right one for the music of Bauhaus.