Jump to content

The Sordid History of Sousa's Horrible Musical Tastes


Sousa

Recommended Posts

Dylan is very hard to cover. About the only cover of a Bob Dylan song I really like is Jimi Hendrix's version of "All Along The Watchtower". And even Dylan himself agreed that Hendrix pretty much owned the song.

Michael Hedges (also deceased) did an amazing acoustic cover, and Richie Kotzen also has done a pretty good version, as well.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I remember hating the way Justice sounded (really tinny, not a lot of bass) and that ruined it for me. Shit, as a kid I liked ReLoad better than Justice.

Justice's production was really awful.

Justice is fucking awful. Why you'd want to all but mix out the bass on a heavy metal album is beyond me - other than if you're petty fratboy pricks belittling the "new guy". Oh wait.

I think Sousa hit the nail on the head with how heavy-handed Metallica are. Everything is so obvious, and increasingly, James Hetfield's OOOUUGGGHHH is the most ridiculous thing in the world.

Master Of Puppets is just as bad. It makes me laugh when people say it's an epic song - epic doesn't just mean long. The shifts in mood are just jarring - anyone can write three different songs, glue them together, and call it an epic. There's no progression. Just noodly guitar, MASTER! MASTER!, Kirk Hammett ripping off the same Diamondhead solo he's built his career around, repeat.

Haha, holy shit, Use Your Illusion. Teenage me fucking loved G'n'R for a couple of years, and some of their stuff I can still play, particularly when DJing, but holy fuck, those two albums. Only "You Could Be Mine" and the closing minute of "November Rain" are worth a shit.

There's really no more Axl Rose moment than "I DON'T NEED YEEEOUUR CIVIL WEEE-YYYY--ORRRR-WAAWWWW".

I actually don't mind "Don't Cry" - it's inane pop balladry, but it's okay. Mogwai do an awesome cover of it that makes it actually sound like a genuine tearjerker, rather than Axl Rose going "Crr-yyy-y--y---y--y--yyyy--yyyy" for a solid minute in the outro. Also, the video features Axl Rose looking like a smackhead Roddy Piper, and Slash driving his car off a cliff, the car exploding, and the camera panning up to show Slash playing a guitar solo on top of the cliff. That has to count for something.

Also, Dylan is easy as fuck to cover. Like, aside from Leonard Cohen, maybe the easiest artist to cover in the world. Guns & Roses just did a shit-awful job of it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Dylan is very hard to cover. About the only cover of a Bob Dylan song I really like is Jimi Hendrix's version of "All Along The Watchtower". And even Dylan himself agreed that Hendrix pretty much owned the song.

I know this was ages ago, but I just noticed it and found it a bit strange. There have been so many good Dylan covers. The I'm Not There soundtrack is a whole double album of them.

The Byrds did better versions of Tambourine Man, My Back Pages and You Ain't Goin Nowhere than Dylan did, as well as a lot of others.

Faces cover of Wicked Messenger is better than the original. Rodney's cover of Girl From The North Country was almost as good.

Jimi Hendrix didn't just do a good Watchtower. He totally ripped the arse out of Like A Rolling Stone live at Montreux.

Indeed, it seems the only person that can't do Bob Dylan is Dylan himself, if his dreadful live reinterpretations are anything to go by.

And this is to Bob Dylan's credit. It's actually quite amazing the breadth of styles his material can be sung in and how well other artists can appropriate it to their own styles. Like, I was gobsmacked when I found out Bob Dylan wrote "Wanted Man". It sounds like such a classic Johnny Cash song. Obviously, he did a splendid "It Ain't Me Babe" too.

The Byrds were probably best at it. I never really understood their obsession for covering Bob Dylan. I could assemble an album from their Dylan covers. And it would be bloody amazing.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

PearlJamVitalogy.jpg
Pearl Jam - Vitalogy (1994)


From one brand of po-faced heavy rock to another. How does my baby feel about this?



Swoon.

The really strange thing about my flirtation with grunge is that it had a lot of overlap with my metal period; around the time I was air-guitaring to "November Rain," I was also spinning copies of Nirvana's Nevermind, Silverchair's Frogstomp (ugh), and Soundgarden's greatest hits compilation A-Sides. My favorite at the time, by far, was Pearl Jam, and likely for obvious reasons: they were super-serious with a "tortured" vocalist with whom I identified because, like I said earlier, Teenage Sousa was not the greatest.

As odd as it is to say, what really drove me to Pearl Jam was MTV.

I don't know if I'd ever have gotten into the band in the first place were it not for the video for
which was strangely not one of the better songs on Ten ("Black," "Alive," "Once," and "Deep" are almost certainly at the top of that list). But at this time, Pearl Jam had a more recent video. At the time, I was watching a lot of what was then still called Total Request Live (later shortened to just TRL). The boy band revolution was in full swing, but TRL drove me to music that I probably would've otherwise overlooked, from utter shite like Limp Bizkit to tracks like Aaliyah's "Are You That Somebody?" that I otherwise wouldn't have given two shits about. Also Pearl Jam had a music video, which was a big fucking deal. It was "Do the Evolution." And it was the shit, yo.



Regardless of how I might feel about Pearl Jam now (I have a hard time with how serious they take themselves, which I bet surprises you), "Do the Evolution" was a wicked bit of business. Listen to the way the guitar kicks in about 1:05 and tell me you don't feel anything. It doesn't get much better than that.

The problem was that the surrounding album, Yield, wasn't particularly interesting. The one that drew me in besides Ten (which I almost wrote about) was Vitalogy. The weird one.

Vitalogy came in a cardboard case and was obviously meant to be in vinyl, and it came with an entire book's worth of liner notes and lyrics. This is one of those things that I miss about buying physical CDs: all of the cool shit that came with them.

seeker_satansbed.jpg
IMG+(2).jpg
IMG_0011.jpg

It was pretty neat, drawing inspiration from an old medical journal also called Vitalogy. I really regret that I don't have it anymore, even if my weather-beaten copy of the CD is still in my collection (I still have a ton of CDs, including the Weird Al album mentioned earlier).

Vitalogy itself is sort of a mixed bag. It's the "experimental" album, which a lot of musicians interpret as "let's do a lot of weird unlistenable shit," so it's got dreck like "Bugs" (an accordion polka thing about an insect invasion that's all symbolism 'n shit) and "Pry, To" ("P-R-I-V-A-C-Y is priceless to me" repeated over and over because it totally is guys) and the fucking mop song (recorded spoken word stuff over "Revolution 9"-style noise).

If you can get past that, though, it's some of Pearl Jam's best music. "Better Man" and its quasi-companion track "Nothingman" are two of the band's prettiest songs and aren't dragged down by Vedder's vocals, which can sometimes get a little nuts. "Satan's Bed" and "Whipping" rock pretty hard, and "Not for You" is suitably groovy.

It won't make believers out of non-Pearl Jam fans, but it's a pretty interesting album nonetheless. I'd describe it as "tense." It came at a time when Pearl Jam had stopped running videos on MTV (which they'd later do again exactly once with "Do the Evolution"), had just bombed their first attempt to tour after boycotting Ticketmaster, and were on the verge of firing a drummer. Even the most spare and pretty tracks on the album--"Better Man," "Nothingman," and "Immortality"--feel ill at ease, while the looser songs--"Not for You" and "Corduroy" in particular--strain at the seams. I think this tension was part of what drove me to the album. While Ten was their attempt to shout from the rooftops and Vs. was a looser, more organic album, Vitalogy is about a band in transition. It was interesting to hear it again with the benefit of hindsight (and Wikipedia!).

Song Highlights:
"Nothingman" - This was my favorite track from the album when I was a teenager, and it still holds up; it's quiet and pretty even if it's pretty bleak.
"Better Man" - Probably the album's most famous track ("She lies and says she's in love with him--can't find a better man.") and with just cause--it's a great pop song with a good hook.
"Tremor Christ" - A nod to one of the more unusual tracks that I think works. It's set against a dissonant, staccato melody complemented by a thumping rhythm section. Vedder stays away from a lot of screaming and works well within his range. A real surprise here because I remember skipping this one as a kid.
"Not for You" - I remember seeing this one on an old rerun of Saturday Night Live on Comedy Central and only sort of liking it. It's not Vedder's best work vocally (especially in the end), but it's a groovy, head-bobbing tune that reflects a lot of the tension of the grunge scene around the time of Cobain's death.

Song Lowlights:
The Weird Experimental Shit ("Bugs," "Pry, To," "Aye Davanita," "Stupid Mop") - Lumping them all together because it's all garbage for the same reason. Given everything that surrounds the album, I sort of understand why this is there? But this sort of meandering "experimenting" rarely works in album form. It's a first draft, and the first draft should largely be on the cutting room floor.
"Spin the Black Circle" - Every review I've read gave high marks to this song, but I didn't like it. It's another one of the album's singles and is best summed up as "Eddie Vedder really likes vinyl records and tells you about it on this driving rock song." It's okay, but I couldn't get too excited about it.

With the Benefit of Hindsight:
Just fine--not the sort of thing I'd put in now, but certainly not painful like the last one. It's a hard album to just chill out and listen to, and that's likely one of the reasons Pearl Jam was starting to shed fans at this point. I really do wish I still had the physical album case, though; cool liner notes seem largely to be a thing of the past as digital distribution continues to gnaw at the rotting corpse of CDs.

NEXT: Me oh my oh me and guy oh.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

That was a B-side for "Jeremy." It's a pretty good track, too.

I think my favorite Pearl Jam song (or at least one that still finds its way into my regular rotation) besides "Do the Evolution" is this one from their next album.

If you can't tell, I like "pretty, acoustic Pearl Jam" a whole lot more than "EEEEEEEEEEVAAAAAAHFLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, THAWSARRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIVE LIKE BUTTAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHFLIIIIIIIES, YUUUUUUUUUUUH" Pearl Jam.

EDIT: Oh shit I missed this one too, from Big Fish (a movie I really enjoyed). Yeah I like a lot more Pearl Jam than I thought. :shifty:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I will be one happy motherfucker if I never ever hear "Jeremy" again as long as I live.

JEHRAHMEE SPOOOOOOOO KANNNNNNNNNNNNNNN CLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASS T'DEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEH

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The weird thing about Pearl Jam's self-seriousness is that Eddie seems to be more mellowed about things in recent years. I still remember his bit from Portlandia which sort of played on the absurdity of his vocals in a loving manner and he also seems like a nice dude from what I see/hear of him in interviews and the like.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Vitalogy was fucking weird. "Bugs" is one of the shittest attempts at proving that you have more "depth" than "rock band with that guy" I've probably ever heard. It's shit.

I'm not a huge fan of Pearl Jam any more - loved "Ten" when I was a kid, but I just don't find them very interesting any more, and Eddie Vedder's voice just seems ridiculous to me a lot of the time. Doesn't help that his vocals have directly inspired some of the worst rock vocalists of the last ten years or so, either, which has retroactively put me off Pearl Jam for life.

That said, I will pretty much always DJ "Do The Evolution" or "Animal" - partly because they're bad-ass songs, but also so that if anyone ever asks me for Pearl Jam, I don't have to play something off "Ten".

Link to comment
Share on other sites

My (half-)brother is a musician, and one of the bigger formative influences on me in early life; in the village we grew up in he was the only person I knew who owned a guitar, and that seemed impossibly cool and exotic. He was a teenager in the mid-'90s, so grunge was his big thing, and pretty much the music I grew up with. Our pet cockatiel used to whistle Soundgarden songs.

For years he played in a succession of fairly bog-standard grunge bands, but he had a really strong voice, though always overdid the Eddie Vedder. And when he mellowed out years later and did an acoustic record, if anything the Vedder tendencies got stronger when the angrier edge was off his voice, as it went more to that horrible crooning thing Vedder tries to do on ballads.

He stopped playing for a long time after he had kids, and actually played his first gig in eleven years last week. His wife uploaded a clip of it to Facebook, of him covering "Wishing Well" by Free, and my Mum made us all listen to it.

Within seconds, my response was just "thank fuck he doesn't sing like Eddie Vedder any more".

Link to comment
Share on other sites

RedHotChiliPeppersCalifornication.jpg
Red Hot Chili Peppers - Californication (1999)


I sort of feel like I'm getting these out of order; as I recall, I was invested in the next two bands before Red Hot Chili Peppers. But going by album release dates, this one was first, and there was some overlap anyway, and nobody's actually going to fact-check this via time travel, so here's this one.

For the three of you left who have never heard of Red Hot Chili Peppers, they are Living Colour for lame white people, fully 75% of their musical output is about their lead singer's penis, and your man Sousa was very much obsessed with one of their albums. Californication got a ton and a half of press upon release; Chillywilly had parted ways with guitarist John Frusciante after he made the important creative decision to do ALL THE DRUGS. Their replacement was http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpfDARU75FI, the least interesting member of Jane's Addiction, who then proceeded to help the band create
whose name I also won't mention. Look at that guitarist. Look at him. He is Chris Cornell without the essential Chris Cornellness.

So it was with no small amount of pyro and ballyhoo that the band got back together for Californication, led off by the mellow, incredibly chill, and not at all fucking "Aeroplane" single "Scar Tissue." My tastes had mellowed out quite a bit; I came down hard from my metal phase and liked my music like I liked my coffee: fucking introspective, man. So coming out of my sophomore year of high school, Chillywilly's most reflective album to date--helmed by the guitarist that actually helped make the band a monster--was a perfect fit.

(For the record, I bought this album on the same day I bought Limp Bizkit's Significant Other, which very nearly made this list until I looked at the track list and realized I only listened to about five tracks on it regularly. Fuck you, Fred Durst, you weren't much of a phase after all!)

Here's some Californication trivia. In 1999, I attended my very first concert ever with a few of my fellow Dairy Queen employees, co-headlined by the Foo Fighters (who rocked) and Chillywilly (who were actually really really bad). The opening act for the two was a wall of sound alt-rock band from England. They called themselves Muse. I was convinced that I would never hear about them again.

It was the heavier, funkier songs that drove me to RHCP at first; they could still shred like an alternative band, but I was into their funk influences as well. This of course led me back to Blood Sugar Sex Magik and Mother's Milk as well as a brief flirtation with that other fucking album with that fucking guy. They seemed effortlessly cool to 16-year-old me, even if 30-year-old me now finds songs that reek of trying too hard ("Sir Psycho Sexy" anyone?).

The one I loved best was Flea, though. As I'm older, I find his insufferable slap-bass more than a little wanky, but as a kid with very little knowledge of its funk origins? Holy shit. Metallica would absolute bury their bass sound much of the time, but Flea was right front and center, highlighting what was a highlight to me as a kid: RHCP's powerful rhythm section. As a trombone player in band, I was right there with them. Flea made it cool to play bass, and I wanted to play too.

I failed--pretty miserably, and largely because the first thing I tried to do was play Flea-style slap bass without lessons--but this experience did lead me to "accidentally" join a heavy metal band years later. It did not end well.

Californication represented a shift for RHCP--mostly away from the funkier influences of their early work and toward the pop music sensibilities that fueled "Under the Bridge." It was a rebirth album, and it did very well, both critically and commercially. I don't think it'd be unreasonable to call it their best album, but if nothing else, it was the most successful. It defined the path the band took going forward as well, with a marked shift toward alternative rock at a time when, ironically, alternative rock was beginning to change into something else.

I sort of liked it. It wasn't a total downer like Vitalogy was, and hearing some of the band's big hits--"Scar Tissue," "Otherside," and "Californication"--again was a nice trip down memory lane. "Otherside" in particular reminded me of its really nice music video. It's directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, who were also responsible for
Enjoy!



Excellent. Fight that paper dragon thing, Lip-Flying Guy!

So the album is a lot more reflective than its predecessors, coming off of Frusciante's departure and the band's battles with heroin addiction. In that respect, it tends to be a much easier listen, though it's not really world-shattering or anything. I was surprised to find myself bobbing my head along with it, and very rarely did I find myself wanting to fast-forward.

A few things drag it down, and they're both related.

1. The lyrics. Holy shit the lyrics. "GORILLA CUNTILLA SAMMY D AND A SALMONELLA COME WITH ME CUZ I'M AN ASS KILLAH." Jesus fucking christ. Even the non-funk songs like "Californication" are plagued with shit like "Firstborn unicorn, hardcore soft porn." Some of it's okay but most of it is just really, really, really bad.
2. Anthony Kiedis. Eddie Vedder's voice has its irritating bits, but he has got fucking nothing on this guy. As if his rapping wasn't awkward enough, he's got an incredibly moany voice and hardly enunciates, and it's not even gravelly like Vedder's. It's just. Ugh. It's sort of an intangible, but combined with his typically incredibly awkward lyrics, good god. He's fine when he's sort of chill on songs like "Scar Tissue," but other times he's going "LON. DON. IN. THE. SUMMERRRRRRTIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIME." or "INGANGONGONGINGANGONGONG, INGANG" and it's just. Sheesh.

Song Highlights:
"Scar Tissue" - Of course it is. "Scar Tissue" is a wonderfully chill, inoffensive piece of alt-rock magic. I do a lot of driving with my window down, and this song will always be great for that.
"Easily" - This feels like the sort of song that develops organically as Chillywilly moved from funk rock to alt rock, highlighted by John Frusciante being back and great on guitar. It's got some lameness ("I don't want to be your little research monkey boy!"), but musically it works really well.
"Otherside" - See above.
"Right on Time" (the disco bit) - It's got a nice chorus.
"This Velvet Glove" - You can probably tell which flavor of Chillywilly I like best, and it's not SIR PSYCHO SIR PSYCHO YEEEEEEEEAH. On an album where like every song is "maybe we shouldn't be doing all these drugs" this is a really nice "we shouldn't be doing all these drugs" song.
"Road Trippin'" - A nice, very pretty end to an album that admittedly wears out its welcome. A pretty string section on top of some good guitar work from Frusciante and Kiedis chilling the fuck out for a minute. It reflects the "weary band on the road" attitude a lot better than, oh I don't know...

Song Lowlights:
"Around the World" - BONA FIDE RIDE STEP ASIDE MY JOHNSON YES I COULD IN THE WOODS OF WISCONSIN. Go away, this shit.
"Get on Top" - I'MA LINGER ON YOUR BLOCK AND GIVE A FINGER TO A COP AND. Go away, this shit.
"I Like Dirt" - I LIKE DIRT I LIKE DIRT. I LIKE DIRT I LIKE DIRT. Go away, this shit.
"Purple Stain" - TO FINGERPAINT IS NOT A SIN I PUT MY MIDDLE FINGER IN. GO AWAY, THIS SHIT.
"Californication" - Okay thank you. This track. I'm sorry, but it's a snoozer, and once again it's brought down by the most inane, shallow lyrics anywhere. I understand that's part of the point--it's about LA, and LA is shallow and moronic--but that doesn't mean I have to like it. It's the exact turn that made me dislike late-career Rilo Kiley (more on them later!).

With the Benefit of Hindsight:
Okay guys so we all agree: Anthony Kiedis is not allowed to rap or sing a song about fucking ever, ever again. If the dude would just... I don't know, chill out... he'd be perfectly fine and would elevate the rest of the act. I'm led to believe that he's pushing fifty and still doing that sort of shit, though, so maybe there's no hope for him at all. On the whole, some stuff I was very happy to revisit, but a whole lot of nonsense that I liked as a kid and would be happy to just keep it that way. I think I'm going to appreciate how light much of this album was, though, because we are about to take a turn for the super cereal.

NEXT:

Doesn't help that his vocals have directly inspired some of the worst rock vocalists of the last ten years or so


Oh. Oh we're getting to that as well. :shifty:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue. To learn more, see our Privacy Policy