I tend to post about relatively frivolous stuff. But today is shaping up pretty serious. Global warming report. North Korea and Trump rattling sabers. I’m a pessimist at heart, which makes these headlines so alarming I have trouble thinking clearly. What do I think the really important, consequential issues are for humanity for the next hundred years? Climate change and environmental destruction generally; the threat of some catastrophic, global war and/or the use, somewhere, of weapons of mass destruction. I guess number three would be: inequality and the threat it poses for the stability of societies and political orders, long-term. Everything else bad looks a lot smaller – more super-structural – than these three. I don’t have a lot of bright thoughts about any of the three. My poor brain likes to think about smaller, nicer things.
So what do you think? Am I right those are the big three? Are we screwed, long-term, because of them? Are you a pessimist or an optimist about the survival of humanity, the continuation of civilization in something like the form we know, past the next 100 years?
Death Cab For Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard released a kind of weird yet good? new album. “Oho so what!” you say. “I’ve always been meh on Death Cab For Cutie, Belle Waring, I’ll have you know.” I wish you would let me finish what I’m saying, ever! I agree. Anyway, it’s a song for song cover of Teenage Fanclub’s 1991 Bandwagonesque. This is cool as a concept album theme, and I have a soft spot for concept albums. Also, Bandwagonesque is a sublime album whose Big Star greatness was lost in the decade’s welter of grunge, so, why not cover it in its entirety? Gibbard put it this way to NPR:
“Bandwagonesque is my favorite record by my favorite band of all time,” Gibbard writes via email. “It came along at a pivotal time in my musical life, and I’ve loved it for over 25 years. It’s been such a blast taking these songs apart to see how they work and then putting them back together again.”
This is worthy-sounding but the weird thing is that he put them back together just the way they were put together in the first place. I mean, maybe there should have been new dovetail joints, or different instruments, or that part at the end of “What You Do To Me” where it fades out seconds before the end and then comes back could have been altered fractionally? The song which is changed the most is the opener “The Concept”, which he extended and made more shimmery and it is indeed a legit good cover.
However I am in a strange state of aesthetic suspension about the rest of the cover album. Is it good? I have listened to it more than once, which is a positive sign, but its main virtue was in making me listen to the actual album more? I haven’t really listened to it in ages BUT WHY NOT?!?? Now, it could be that I have deep-seated psychological problems and that’s why. Or that I have deep-seated psychological problems unrelated to my failure to listen to an album I really love for ages. That’s more likely actually. My psychiatrist would probably agree with that latter thing. ANYHOO. In short, the cover album is way too by-the-numbers, but the songs are so amazing, and his voice so well-suited to the harmonies that by some conservation of good music principle it is also good, I guess? (John likes it more than I, I think.) Additionally the production quality is a bit higher, so perhaps what I really want is a beautiful re-master.
I tried to explain/debate this problem with my brother in law but he has always been meh on Death Cab For Cutie and actually had never heard of Teenage Fanclub. So I asked him if he loved Big Star and he was fractionally slow in responding with some word that by the high questioning pitch audible just as he began aspirating was clearly going to be “well” or something like that so I said “nonononononononono. Nononononono.” You know, like a normal person would. He doesn’t love Big Star. That’s OK! Some people have a tiny chunk missing from their soul that–no, not that either; I guess some noble lovable folk just don’t love Big Star and I have to laboriously reconstruct my worldview now to accommodate this ill-shaped fact.
He actually attributed it to a well-known problem of not having listened to them as a young enough person to become truly obsessed ever. It’s not that he doesn’t ever like new music, he just doesn’t then sit there and listen to it endlessly on repeat, memorizing the lyrics, and crying slightly to himself. But nothing prevents you from doing this so I recommend it highly! Well, you don’t need to cry quietly to yourself–what if you aren’t emo like me the album is a real barn-burner after all? It’s true that there will probably never be music as emotionally important to you as music you listened to when you were 16 or 20 or whatever…but only probably. It varies from person to person. I recommend having various shattering emotional crises at different ages so the music you listened to obsessively then can pierce your heart with simultaneous love of music and hangover sadness at the same time! Wait, I’m not sure I do so unreservedly, but it does work. The real moral of the story here is that you should listen to Tennage Fanclub’s Bandwagonesque; Jesus it’s so good. And hey, the other is good too?
What about you guys? Do you have music you first heard when you were 35 that you love deeply? 55? Do you love Big Star as is right and proper? Should I go back and listen to Death Cab For Cutie; it’s not like I didn’t have some songs I liked when they first came out? Did my new favorite album come out ten minutes ago and you have to tell me about it now? What’s the score?