Welcome to the third installment of Aux.Out. Book Club, where a group of us tackle a new or renowned book of the music canon and lay down some of our thoughts. Last time we slogged through the 2012 R. Kelly diary/autobiography/memoir/Yearbook Soulacoaster: The Diary of Me. Today, a “biopic” by the author Touré on the music industry’s most enigmatic, paradoxical, and funkiest people: I Would Die 4 U: Why Prince Became an Icon. Please read along with us in the future (our next book is at the bottom).
Full disclosure: I have a ska-inspired tattoo. There are checkers. There are flames. Some dude named Lucky seared the crude design into my flesh when I was 18. He did an awful job, I might add, especially for two-hundred bucks. I mean, it kinda looks like dog shit. The lines aren’t straight. The flames suck. The color quickly bled out.
How have Bob Dylan and John Darnielle, a.k.a. The Mountain Goats, traveled world?
Darnielle often sings in the present tense, moving with caution from place to place, detailing the ghosts that live in unexplored pockets of the world. He zooms in on Portmore in Jamaica, or Galesburg in Illinois to set a new backdrop for trials domestic and romantic, personal and imagined. His geography is only surreal in the sense that it is unfamiliar, whether he’s Going to Georgia or Going to Ghana. He is always there, living in that moment, experiencing the jungle or the desert with his heart in his hands.
It’s strange that in just 10 short years, an ostensibly modern era can feel so seperate. There’s a generation of people who can now say they’ve grown up with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the anointed New York early-2000s indie-rock scene had a defiant, exciting sense of nowness…
Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories is so indebted to the past that you don’t even have to listen to the album to listen to the album. It’s fun to play music taxonomy with bands, but so rarely has a record come along and culled from everything from ’80s yacht rock to musical theatre…
Ian Gilliam of Deep Purple once wrote a little note that explains why Y.N.RichKids are so remarkable right now. The note is printed on the back cover of an album by an obscure ’70s Brit-metal band called Jerusalem, a record produced by Gilliam. It reads:
This message from Cold Cave’s singer and creative force, Wesley Eisold, intrigued me in part because of its content, but also its candor that appeared to be the result of his sobriety. I wasn’t aware of Eisold speaking in such confessional terms to the general public without being provoked. His interviews were always honest but usually characterized by his answers dealing directly with the questions and offering little more. However, with a message about change and personal growth, atypical behavior seems precisely the point.
I find it hard to listen to the Exploding Hearts without hearing some haunting melody from the past. It’s a fleeting, ghostly hum that must have crystallized during the Portland power-pop band’s final moments. At least that’s how I imagine it. I imagine the sound of eternal youth and wasted promise embodied by the Hearts’ lovelorn songs from a decade ago suddenly spilled across an innocuous stretch of Oregon’s Interstate 5 on a Sunday morning. Or perhaps what I’m hearing is just an echo from the long, sickening silence that trembles in oblivion’s wake.
The black and white parental advisory sticker that Tipper Gore worked so hard to place on jewel cases in the mid ’80s is becoming another cultural artifact fit for a listicle about the way we used to do stuff. If you want to download Tyler, the Creator’s new album Wolf from iTunes, you just do it, and there it hides in your cloud or MP3 player, the young rapper and his suspect morals. Parents are none the wiser. Kill people, burn shit, fuck school in total secrecy.
Welcome to another installment of Stress Position, where we test a writer’s patience and insanity by forcing them to listen to an album they hate for 12 hours straight.
Let the carnage begin.
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