Taylor Swift: Red

This week, dearest readers, I’m listening to Taylor Swift’s 2013 release Red.

I’m considerably bummed out about this.

I’m also considerably bummed out that I like the intro of the first song. Where the hell is my mug...

Oh fucking damn it, this opener is actually catchy. DAMN IT DAMN IT DAMN IT. My only solace is that “catchy” does not equate “good.” There’s maybe like seven layers of audio here. Nothing too complex. Definitely has sing-along quality to it. I can see why young girls like this shit so much.

I think the real disappointment is that so many people like these LYRICS. Literally any literate high schooler could write the text for Swift’s song. Why is Taylor Swift paid so much money for being vocal and cute and blonde?

Wow, this song is actually a million fucking years long. How many times can Swift sing, “I never saw you coming / I’ll never be the same / This is a state of grace.” Please shut up. “Love is a ruthless game unless you play it good and right.”

ALRIGHT, LADY. I don’t know who in the shit taught Taylor Swift what love was and how it is to be handled, but they did an absolutely terrible job.

My lava lamp is doing crazy things right now. It’s in the weird stage of heating up when it takes kind of gross shapes and just hangs around, waiting to get hotter. There’s a really large chunk with this weird stringy tail thing. It makes me uncomfortable to look at, so I guess I could get back to the music.

It’s just kind of really silly to make an album completely filled with love songs. It strikes me as vapid to only think of another person to the point that your feelings for them are the only thing you can write about. Do you entertain any other thoughts? Or do you only exist for the person that makes your stomach all flippy-floppy? Get reeeeal.

Oh goody--“Red.” Wow, how creative to compare feelings to colors, even more original to compare the feeling of love to red!

Ohhh, the opening of “I Knew You Were Trouble” strikes rage into my heart. That repetitive, uncoordinated guitar pluck over and over again. FURY. THIS SONG WAS SO POPULAR WHY? WHY?! Oh my God, “the drop.” I’m actually going to vomit. Who produced this? Who decided to boldly add mild dubstep to mild country with a lot of pop soft rock tossed in? Someone stop the madness. Jesus Christ. Have I ever listened to a song so completely uninteresting? I don’t think I have.

Oh goddammit, I just realized Spotify is going to recommend so much shit to me based on my listening to Red. Oh, I’m so sad.

“It feels like a perfect night / To dress up like hipsters / And make fun of our exes / Ah ah ah ah.” Allllrighty, if you wanted to just stop right there, that’d be great. Oh, you’re going to keep going? Oh. Okay.

It actually makes me really sad to think about all the synths wasted on this album. What a colossal waste of truly transformative technology.

It’s definitely just my opinion, but I would tell Taylor Swift to her face that she has not made a single noteworthy song in her entire career. The only reason her smash-hit “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” was popular was because people recognized that the intro was stolen from the melody of “Pinch Me” by Barenaked Ladies, and that’s a song many of Swift’s listeners have known their whole life. Subconsciously, they connected to Swift’s song immediately and were like, “Yeah, I dig it.”

Dear Lord. By the end of this album, I’ll know more about Swift’s romantic relationships than my own. She writes about literally nothing else. This album is so shallow I can’t even comprehend it.

OH MY GOD THEY INCLUDED A RECORDING OF SWIFT LAUGHING AT THE END OF “STAY STAY STAY” I AM INFURIATED.

But now that I have reached “The Last Time,” let us discuss the versatility of Swift’s music. Ahhh and the repetitive, four-chord guitar riff. And the barely noticeable bass. And the entirely unsatisfying, non-noteworthy percussion. I have no musical talents and I’m sure that I could recreate this entire album in a span of a month if I really worked at it.

It actually blows my mind that Taylor Swift and Daft Punk were both nominated for Best Album in 2013, and when the announcer started to pronounce the “R” in Random Access Memories, Swift was so fucking expectant to win. She heard that "R" sound and was like “Oh, it’s in the bag! It’s in the hole!”

Here's a rather poor quality of her reaction, which never fails to amuse me/piss me off an extensive amount:

...Did she ever even hear RAM? She must not have, to think she even had a chance of beating Daft Punk for best album. Or she’s entirely delusional. It actually makes me mad that she thinks so highly of her music to place it on the same level as RAM.

Oh frick, I just realized I’ve been tuning out a majority of this album. Which I guess is what most people have to do in order to listen it all the way through. Why in the name of Satan is this album 16 tracks long?! How many times can Taylor Swift express her feelings of regret for lost love, her excitement to be youthful and privileged and living a life of perfect ease?

Haha, the song just changed, and for a moment I was like, “Oh, this punky guitar, that’s interesting,” and then I was like, “Oh, this a commercial for The Black Lips.”

“We could get married / Have 10 kids and teach them how to dream.” For the love of all that is sacred, Taylor Swift, please do not put your genes back into this world 10 times. Please do not do that. No one is asking you to, no one wants you to. Even if it kills your music career I don’t care, do not reproduce.

“I think it’s strange that you think I’m funny ‘cause he never did.” Yes, please form all judgments about yourself based on what a previous boyfriend said. That is the best way for young girls to develop a sense of self. I am so super pumped that Taylor Swift sang these lyrics to the millions of teenage girls that bought her album.

There is not a single song on this album that has to deal with Swift as an individual human being. Not a single track explores how she views herself, or how she sees the world, or what she thinks about anything (not like I care about her opinion anyway, but still). This entire album is about obsessing over boys and making a relationship your entire life, your whole existence. That’s so maddening that I want to smash Taylor Swift’s tear-stained guitar and then her face.

Television: Marquee Moon

Good God. There are few records that hold such a dear spot in my heart. There’s The Suburbs. Californication. London Calling. Shadows Collide With People. In Rainbows. Welcome to the Black Parade (I am not ashamed!). Funkadelic. And then there is Marquee Moon, released in ’76 as the ass-kicking debut of Television. 

“I remember / Oooh how the darkness doubled / I recaaaall / Lightning struck itself / I was listenin’ / Listenin’ / To the rain / I was hearing / Hearing / Something else.”

(An unrelated side: Do not ever buy Smirnoff’s peach-flavored vodka. Do not do it. Unless you have some Snapple Raspberry Tea or Mountain Dew [who wants to endorse me?] on hand, stay far away from that flavor.)

John Frusciante (all hail) is the reason I became aware of Marquee Moon, him and the older brother of a dear friend. Frusciante, along with many other musical critics, cites Marquee Moon as one of those rock ‘n’ roll albums of the ‘70s that completely debunked the style of improvisational guitar solos. I think one of the reasons Marquee Moon is such a standout album to me is because I’ve never heard anything like it. There’s music that exists solely because Marquee Moon exists.

Brian Eno once said not a lot of people heard The Velvet Underground’s first album, but everyone who did hear it started a band. There is not a single part of me that doubts Marqueen Moon had a similar effect. I certainly feel the urge to create music whenever I hear it. The Pixies, Sonic Youth, R.E.M., Joy Division and Echo & the Bunnymen all credit the jazzy style of impromptu guitar on Marquee Moon as having a huge influence on their music.

“Marquee Moon” is a fucking unbelievably beautiful track with mesmerizing guitar solos and interplay, and the dang thing was recorded in one take. ONE TAKE. THAT’S UNBELIEVABLE. And Marquee Moon didn’t even sell well in America, so you know what that leads me to believe? That Americans are foolish goons who don’t recognize good things when they see them! New York’s post-punk scene definitely recognized the band and they had a large underground following, but pop culture couldn’t handle the genius.

Since 2003, the album’s been hanging out at spot number four on NME’s greatest albums of all time, and number 130 on Rolling Stone’s same list. The fact that I’ve only been aware of this album for a little over a year is evident to the fact that I was raised musically ignorant, a struggle I must overcome daily. (This is a joke. My parents are very wonderful, kind and loving people who have not inhibited my musical advancement in any way, shape or form. And if they tried, it didn’t work. Holla.)

From the opening track you can tell this album is going to be boss as hell. One guitar creates this unbelievably addictive riff while the other provides rhythm, and the bass and drums do their wacky, quirky thing in the backbone of the song. Vocalist Tom Verlaine (sweet God) seals the deal. His voice is a smidgen nasally, but it’s a post-punk band and his goal is not perfect pitch, it is emotion. He strains and emphasizes, rumbles and whines with his vocals and it’s fucking beautiful. Jesus CHRIST, “See No Evil” is one of my favorite tracks of all time. For the most part I interpret Verlaine’s lyrics as unintelligible but there are lines that stick out, and they’re golden.

“I understand all (I see no) destructive urges (I see no) / But it seems so perfect (I see no) / I see / I see no / Eviiiiil! / I get ideas / I get emotion / I want a nice big boat / Made out of ocean / I get your point / You’re so sharp / (incoherent mumbling, sounds good regardless).”

It’s such a fun song to sing along to (or make loosely-correct-sounding noises). The inflections in Verlaine’s voice are wild and carefree; the members of Television are literally playing with sound, and then there’s that dang guitar solo just so they can say, “We’re having fun but we’re fucking good at it.” It hurts so good, I guess because I can’t recreate it. Just punch me in the face and it’ll hurt less.

Marquee Moon is a rather romantic album--romantic in the sense that it focuses heavily on feeling things emotionally instead of...methodically. Emotion oozes out of this entire record. It’s nearly 40 years old, but it’s impossible for the music to ever lose its vibrancy. The rolling drums, the piercing guitar soloing over everything else--this is a transportative album. Transportative is not a word, but I’m using it. The title itself is representative of the romanticism, and the way current culture has destroyed that school of thought. Yes, it speaks of a moon, but of a moon created by man-made neon signs. Marquees have a gravitational effect on people; they incite and pull in, and maybe even blind. (Neon Bible, anyone?)

Everything comes to a head in the title track. You can just feel it right off the bat. There’s an element to the music that sounds more serious and thoughtful than the three previous songs, and then Verlaine starts dropping these amazing lyrics. Just the tone of his voice makes me feel like he’s telling a very important secret, but it’s in a code that I have to figure out on my own. I feel like the dude is talking right to me, and there’s not a lot of music that makes me feel that way.

I will never do anything in my entire life as well as Tom Verlaine plays the second guitar solo in “Marquee Moon,” which comprises roughly half the track. Done in one fucking take. God it makes me want to vomit a rainbow.

Now I’m not going to lie, it can be hard to pay attention to Marquee Moon once the title track finishes. The song is such a suckerpunch in the face and soul that the rest of the album sometimes floats over me in a pleasant haze of sound, which is really just dumb on my part because all of Marquee Moon is incredible. So lucky for you, this time I’m paying attention.

“Oh no / Can’t pull a trick / Never the rose without the prick / But tell me how do I say? / I woke up and it’s yesterday / Do I again face this night?” comes from “Elevation,” as does some seriously fantastic waning, other-worldly guitar.

And then there’s this shit from “Prove It”: “The birds / They’re giving you the words / The world is just a feeling you undertook.” LIKE DAMN. That’s kind of the whole album: The world is just a feeling you undertook. That’s kind of life, dude! Oh damn. That’s really hitting me right now. I need a minute.

All of reality is nothing but perception--the world exists only because you think it does. And it all manifests itself in this overwhelming cascade of emotions that change on a daily to monthly to yearly basis. The only reason we experience life is because we, as humans, feel it--in the sadness and embarrassment that accompanies being reprimanded at work, in the happiness that comes with having a new companion, in the jubilation that comes from passing an exam. It’s all only there because we feel it. If humans existed without emotion literally nothing would ever get done. We’d have gone extinct by now, just by lack of caring/trying. The world is just a feeling you undertook.

The album ends with “Torn Curtain,” which is easily the most depressing song on the record. It’s all about double-entendres and seeing the ugly side of something you thought wasn’t ugly. At one point all of Television wails in an echo, “Tears, tears / Years, years” while the guitar wails and cries, and damn, is it moving. It doesn’t necessarily change the whole mood of the album, but certainly leaves the listener with a new perspective. How nice, right? You get to the end of something only to be like, “Oh fuck, that’s what they meant?”

Going from “Torn Curtain” back to “See No Evil” is shocking. The distinction between moods is painfully apparent, and wow, it’s really not until now that I get the point. It goes from seeing no evil to peeking behind the torn curtain and realizing, "Wow, sometimes the world sucks. Sometimes you need to cry." 

Like right now. Right now I need to cry. 

Hole: Live Through This

Greetings, readers, and thank ya for tuning in!

Since I geeked out pretty hard about Kim Gordon in my last post, I figured I'd stay in the same vein, and this vein led me to Hole, one of the must popular grunge bands in the 1990s, most famous for their album Live Through This. Some people might try to tell you Hole only received attention because lead singer/guitarist Courtney Love was the kooky wife of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, but those people don't know what they're talking about.

I know I don’t stand alone when I say Hole was a badass and, more importantly, a monumental band. It was raw as fuck--the lyrics were piercing and thoughtful, calling our society out on its bullshit attitude toward women. The musicianship was just as good as Nirvana or Pearl Jam. When bassist Kristen Pfaff overdosed, the band put things on pause, but recruited Melissa Auf der Maur and then released some EPs, a compilation album and then their third studio album. They dealt with all the same bullshit as other bands—switching labels, finding producers and creating a solid fanbase that worshipped the shit out of them.

I would give/do quite a few things to be alive in 1994 and see Hole perform at Lollapalooza. For Love to scream, “FUCK YOU!” to the audience I stood in, to have her spit on me and cause a ruckus, to roll around on the stage in her babydoll dresses. All the while rocking the fuck out on guitar and screaming her piss-sour lyrics, her band playing just as hard, but allowing Love to soak up all the attention.

The childishly aggressive demands of “Pay attention to ME!” got a little old, but Hole was an almost all-female grunge rock band in an industry where dicks are literally everywhere. If Hole wanted to stick around, things were going to have to get real.

Not going to lie, I think a considerable amount of the dramatics was done for press coverage. The behavior perhaps wasn’t 100% genuine, but it got critics to pay attention. And now, 20 years after the release of Live Through This, the album is chilling at spot 460 on Rolling Stone’s list of the Top 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

Cobain killed himself right before it was released, which is pretty fuckin’ lame on his part. Like, you couldn’t even wait for your wife’s album to drop before checking out? Maybe he did that on purpose, because he knew the material on the album and knew that if he was dead when it was released, its meaning and lyrics would have much more impact. Perhaps he sacrificed his own life to see Love succeed, or hoped she would become successful enough to carry on and provide for Frances Bean without Cobain around? Too bad that didn’t fuckin’ pan out. I don’t know if you know this, but Frances Bean Cobain barely talks to her mother because Courtney Love went a little batshit crazy along her lifeline. Maybe it’s because of all the shit that happened with Cobain and “losing his estate” or whatever the fuck Love claims happened.

But I don’t want to make this whole thing about Cobain and Love. I’m weary of the whole “debate” about who shot who and who wrote what. Does anyone have anything interesting to say about the music itself? This past winter break someone tried to tell me Cobain was killed by the government, and (probably for the better) I was too baked to smack the shit out of him. But I wanted to. Enough with the gossip! Hole’s a cool band, dang it, and I want to have an intelligent conversation about Hole!

But that in no way means I have intelligent things to say about Hole. I mean, I’ll try, but that’s really all I can promise.

Live Through This is a very beautiful album. The music is just what you want from a grungy rock band. One thing I have to admit immediately, however, is the enormous similarity to how Nirvana created music. Love’s style of vocal delivery—her pacing, the changes in the timbre of her voice, the rough guitar riffs. Other things. Listen to any Nirvana song, then listen to “Plump” from Live Through This. “They say I’m plump / But I throw up all the time,” Love screams. Hole is not imitating Nirvana, but definitely vibing off them.

“Asking For It” has convinced me that Hole is Nirvana in female form. I have absolutely zero problems with this. “And if you live with me through this / I swear that I will die for you.” Big, elaborate pause... “Was she asking for it? / Was she asking nice? / She was asking for it / Did she ask you twice?”

The songs are rough and in-your-face, but every track (omit the last two) are packed into three tight minutes. This is orderly angst--it’s as if there’s a formula that made Nirvana what it was, and Hole has put its own spin on the recipe. I clap. I’m clapping.

“She Walks On Me” is raising the hair on my arms. It’s pretty savage. Hole is a bit of a savage band. The lyrics are fierce and violent, as well as extremely feminist.

Album opener "Violet" is a fantastic preview for the band. “They get what they want / And they never want it again / Go on, take everything / Take everything / I want you to.” In order to really stand out in a world full of men, Courtney Love dressed herself up to be ultra feminine, with makeup smeared all over her face. But her attitude, behavior and demeanor were the perfect foil for her appearance. The lyrics in the song change just slightly, but it’s a huge impact.

“I told you from the start just how this would end / When I get what I want / Well, I never want it again.” Love takes the power in this situation, asserting herself over everyone else.

Many of lyrics stress the socially condoned passivity of women. Love’s stinging, biting satire and sarcasm sung in her sickly-sweet croon adds a very specific element to the music. She is furious and impatient. 

I did some researching on the Interwebs and have discovered that this fury and impatience that possessed the members of Hole is detailed very clearly in the band’s name. I once saw this VH1 special on Love where she made fun of Nine Inch Nails and the band name, saying something like, “Fuck off, Trent Reznor, bragging about your nine inches. You don’t hear me saying ‘Big hole, little hole, tight hole, whatever.’” Many people assume the name is a reference to the female anatomy, but that’s not true.

It’s something Love’s mother once said to her. Love told her mom she had a terrible childhood (what a surprise, seems to be a trend that continued for her whole life) and her mom said, “You can’t have a hole running through you all the time.” So it is about emptiness, about missing something and knowing that something is absent, but not being able to get that back.

The name is also a reference to the play Medea (a witchy woman’s husband cheats on her, so to get revenge Medea kills her own children and her husband’s new wife. If you wondered when the phrase ‘Hell hath no fury’ is appropriate, Medea would be that situation). Medea states, “There’s a hole that pierces my soul,” and it does not surprise me that Love (who was a generally angry person when Hole was intact) could relate to Medea.

Live Through This was an album that proved a mostly female band could be just as successful as male bands doing the same thing. The musicians in the band performed just as fiercely as any other musician in the '90s. Hole just had a bit more spunk and therefore gained more controversy. I don't know why some people had such a strongly negative reaction to Hole and Live Through This--maybe because they were forced to face the idea that women had voices just as loud as men, and they were going to make them heard. But I can hardly imagine a world where men get angry at women for speaking their minds.

Anyone who doubts Hole’s legitimacy as a creative unit needs to direct their attention to “Doll Parts,” one of the most moving tracks on the album. Really listen to it, and then try to stay Hole didn’t know what was up.

Sonic Youth: Daydream Nation

First and foremost, welcome readers (if you’re out there, and many thanks if you are!). This marks the first review of my brand-spanking new blog, Daydrunk Nation, in which I will review famous albums while under the influence. Should be fun for all of us, I think. I may shed a few tears and hiccup a couple times in the writing process, but this should be smooth sailing for you. At least I hope it is.

Let me start by saying I am terribly humbled to be reviewing the namesake of this blog, Sonic Youth’s fifth album Daydream Nation. This is an album ranked number one (ONE!) on Pitchfork’s “100 Greatest Albums of the 1980s” list, as well as number 13 on Spin’s list of “100 Greatest Albums from 1985-2010.” This album is a huge fucking deal, as is Sonic Youth, and I feel incredibly unworthy. But I am a child of the MTV Generation, a generation that really doesn’t give much of a shit about anything (man can I relate to “Teenage Riot”), so full steam ahead I go.

I’m not even going to pretend I know what this whole album is about, just that Sonic Youth hates corporations and capitalism and materialism and Californication. And Ronald Reagan.

Take “Teenage Riot” for example. It’s pretty much an invitation for kids to stop being so apathetic, to stop seeing themselves as just kids without opinions or actions that can make an impact, and Sonic Youth is telling them to riot! Hot damn! This shit still applies today!

I really wish I’d found this album when I was an angsty teenager, because songs like “Silver Rocket and “The Sprawl” would have been scrawled ALL OVER my notebook margins. “I want to know the exact dimensions of hell / Does this sound simple? / Fuck you! / Are you for sale? / Does ‘fuck you’ sound simple enough?”

Kim Gordon’s lyrics are easily the scariest, most in-your-face, which is probably my favorite aspect of Sonic Youth: their scary-as-fuck female bassist. Yeah, all of Sonic Youth is pissed about the current state of things, but especially Kim. Her words being delivered in the harsh voice of an attractive woman is a giant slap in the face, a middle finger to the “kissability” that determined whether or not a female musician could be successful. Kim says “Fuck you” to kissability, and I scream, “THANK YOU!” to Kim.

“You’re so soft you make me hard” is my favorite line from “Kissability.” Essentially, the song is all about how selling out equates success--if you look good, you can make it. It’s not difficult to be a pretty face, and it’s not difficult to succeed if you have a pretty face. It’s PROSTITUTION OF THE SOUL!

This whole album makes me horny, and it also makes me angry and stressed out and makes me want to pick up an instrument and make some goddamn noise.

“Eliminator, Jr.” sounds like something they play on repeat in hell. Which makes sense, really, because it’s all about the Preppie Murder (Google that shit; I had to). The stabbing drums and shrieks from the guitar/bass amps are terrifying. There’s a lot of harsh tones, a lot of disorganization and dissonance. They are trying to make listeners uncomfortable, and it works. This is an album that both jells and grates—album opener “Teenage Riot” has an obvious semblance of order and was placed at the beginning of the album to keep people from turning off the record. Some songs are consonant and soothing/satisfying, while album closer “Eliminator, Jr.” actually sounds like something recorded for the sole event of ripping out one’s toenails.

Kim attacks the listener on “‘Cross the Breeze,” and holy faacck, would I do anything to hang out with that woman. Pour her a shot, pack her a bowl, punch Thurston and his new lady in the face/genitals, whatever, I’ll fuckin’ do it. I’m not a huge fan of her latest project, Body/Head, but I respect the absolute hell out of that woman and the things she accomplished, both as a part of Sonic Youth and independently.

Did you know that Lee Renaldo sings the lyrics on “Eric’s Trip?” Apparently he does, though his vocals sound quite a bit like Thurston Moore’s. He sings “Hey Joni” too, and by my third listen of the album I can hear the difference in the tone of their voices. He also sings “Rain King,” which I don’t care about too much. His voice is just a little boring. I’d rather hear Kim.

Man, the guitar riffs in “Daydream Nation” are actually perfect. I think this is an almost perfect song. It grows long and slightly repetitive by the end of its seven minutes, but it’s a really fucking good song. Thurston’s vocals and lyrics are perfect. Creatively written, require several listens/reads to fully understand them. This is a thoughtful album, and listening to it requires thought. It doesn’t make for great background noise (my boyfriend was too stressed out by the noise and had to go into a different room to write a paper). Daydream Nation grabs your attention in a threatening grip; it’s hardly friendly--in fact, it’s a little hostile. But it’s beautiful and a musical masterpiece.

This album was like a stepping stone for underground rock, for alternative music. They played by no previous rules—they fucked with their guitar tunings, they played out of time, and made their instruments make noises they weren’t supposed to make. Sonic Youth fucking experimented with this album. They made a statement and inspired countless other alternative artists.