The answer, of course, is no. But the music on the train this morning was very nice indeed.
At this point, I'm disappointed in myself for not catching the Radiohead wave earlier in my life. I can enjoy the music now, at the fine age of 27, but I'll never love it in the way that I loved music when I was 15. I'm certain now that I would have been one of the many Radiohead fans in the 90's if I had picked up the two CD's I bought all this time later.
At least Radiohead is still around and making music. I definitely missed my chance to see Nirvana in concert - even if I'd known that Kurt was going to blow his head off, I was thirteen at the time of his death, which is probably too young to go to a Nirvana show. I was the oldest child in my family, so I didn't have that cool older brother to take me to that kind of stuff. I also missed the boat with Soundgarden; by the time I was really into them, they had already broken up. There's rumors of a reunion, and I'd probably go see them, but with low expectations. Actually that's not quite true - I saw a video on You Tube of the three band members who are not named Chris Cornell jamming with Tad Doyle (from the band... Tad) and they sounded as good as ever. Matt Cameron is a very underrated drummer, and Soundgarden was a great opportunity to showcase his ability to rock in unusual time signatures. Kim Thayil's guitar playing sounded great too. Of course, the real question is Chris Cornell. By this point, the guy basically has no vocal cords left, so he'd probably be croaking instead of actually singing.
Then there's my other favorite 90's band, Smashing Pumpkins. I'm not even going to get into the massive disappointment that they turned out to be - I could write an entirely separate blog about what a joke Billy Corgan has become. The odd news from Planet Corgan keeps coming in, too - my friend Eric sent me an email at work today announcing that Smashing Pumpkins is now auditioning a new bass player and keyboardist via You Tube style video submissions. Um, yeah. Good luck with that, Billy.
The Pumpkins were coming to play the Electric Factory in Philadelphia in the fall of '99. Tickets were originally priced at $20, and I can't remember why I didn't go out of my way to buy one when they first went on sale. Of course, that would have been easier said than done - the show sold out in less than two minutes. I went to the office of a nearby ticket broker, and he wanted $100 for the ticket that he bought for $20. I passed.
I was a senior in high school at the time, and my after-school job was at a store that sold pool supplies in the summer and Christmas decorations in the winter. I remember that the concert was in November, so by then we must have had Christmas trees and Santa dolls everywhere, but the hot tubs were still set up in the back of the store, and one of them had a radio (even a CD player!) built into it. I had to work on the night of the show, so I took every opportunity I could to stop by the hot tub and listen to the concert which was being broadcast over the radio. I was disappointed that I wasn't there at the show, but I figured that I'd catch them next time for sure.
It wasn't long after the tour that the band broke up. Before long, he starting doing weird stuff like testifying before Congress on behalf of Ticketmaster.
Billy is currently attempting to re-boot the band, but Smashing Pumpkins have morphed into something that is completely unrecognizable. The final insult was the newly released "Song For A Son", a song so jaw-droppingly bad I'm convinced that it's some sort of joke, that we are all in the middle of an episode of Punk'd.
Is that show still on? I feel so old.
Anyway, I wanted to throw a post on the blog that returns us to the topic of commercialism in the music industry. I arrived home after work today, ate some food, and flipped open the laptop to check my email. Best Buy sent me an email, informing me that they were having a massive sale on CD's.
Awesome! I love CD's, and I love sales. Who doesn't like saving money?
So I clicked on the link and took a look at the discs that B.B. was peddling. The specifics of their sale is this: thousands of CD's priced at $7.99 or $9.99. You can sift through the CD's all at once (there are 1,666 discounted CD's for sale, which means that Best Buy is lying when they say they have 'thousands' of CD's at the discounted prices, since you would need more than 2,000 to qualify for that category, but I like that the number of CD's that actually are discounted = 1,000 + 666 (the number of the beast!), proving yet again that rock and roll is the devil's music), or you can sort them by genre. There are 47 Blues albums, 19 Comedy albums, 14 Folk albums, 274 Country albums (!), and 1,251 Rock albums.
I decided to focus on the Rock albums. I figured I would always backtrack to check out the 86 Electronic/Dance albums.
By this point, I was really looking forward to finding something to buy. I had forgotten that I already own some 500 CD's and 70 LP's, and even more music stored on my laptop. By this point, I probably don't need any more 'catalog' CD's, by that I mean CD's that are no longer considered 'recent' or 'new'. I don't own any AC/DC albums, and I enjoy listening to AC/DC, but who needs an AC/DC CD when they seem to be played constantly on the radio? At least, they were played a lot on the Philadelphia rock radio station 93.3 WMMR. If you left WMMR on for two or three hours, you were guaranteed at least one AC/DC song, one Ozzy song, one Van Halen song, etc.
All the CD's for sale on the Best Buy website were catalog CD's, or worse, Greatest Hits compilations. There's Guns N' Roses Greatest Hits (another WMMR staple), U2's Greatest Hits (they have a few Greatest Hits packages - this one is their '18 Singles' album), Blink 182's Greatest Hits (oh man I am really old)... stuff like that. I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't enough to make me want to get back on the subway and go to Best Buy.
I realized that I was craving a good deal more than craving a new CD. I guess I should have the U2 18 singles disc, but would I really listen to it that much? Haven't I heard Sunday, Bloody Sunday enough times already? Then again, St. Patrick's Day is coming up...
(On a serious note, I want you to know that I'm kidding about the St. Patrick's Day thing. I like the idea of St. Patrick's Day but I hate the execution of it - all of a sudden, there's green-tinted Miller Lite in all the bars and people are packed in all the bars at 9 AM... it has very little to do with being Irish - or perhaps rather I should say Irish-American - and more to do with boiling a culture down to its lowest stereotypes and using it as an excuse to call out of work to drink whiskey all day. But hey, don't let me ruin all the fun.)
Let's change the subject, shall we? I want to talk about cheesiness.
The word 'cheesy' is a great word indeed. I could do some quick research and learn the history of the word (the etymology?), but it doesn't really matter. The point is that I love that there is a word in the English language that can be used to describe both a Styx record and a plate of nachos. That makes me happy.
And a Styx record is exactly what is rotating on my turntable right now. I wanted some music on, and I thought I'd take a break from Radiohead. What is the opposite of Radiohead? At first I thought it would be Styx, hands down, but actually now I'm not so sure. I think both artists were going for the same thing - this specific Styx record, The Grand Illusion, is trying hard to be some sort of concept album. The album art is very self-important: ooh, look! An optical illusion!
Or, you might even say, a GRAND illusion!
This is the album with the song Come Sail Away on it. C.S.A. has to be one of the cheesiest songs of all time. Is it possible that Styx could have foreseen my generation's obsession with declaring things 'ironic' and embracing these ironic artifacts with all our our hearts?
The answer, of course, is no.
Styx is clearly a silly band, and Radiohead are definitely not silly in any way. But I do actually like this record. I like its bombast, it's over-produced and syrupy songs, and the incredible goofiness of the lyrics (the biggest offender is the song A Man In The Wilderness, which might just be the first emo song).
It's extremely difficult not to smile when you're listening to the most famous song from the album, Come Sail Away. It's as if the band got together and said, "okay, gang, how can we make this song even more hilarious?"
Okay, break time is over. Time to stop with the cheesy.
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