Pop Culture Petri Dish

If you want to get technical, this is Day 35 of the 30-Day Song Challenge: I fudged and neglected posting on a couple of days. And no, I don't want to go out on Toto (see previous entry). Close to this time last year, I was first discovering the joys of Cobirds Unite , the most recent solo CD by Seattle's best singer/songwriter, Rusty Willoughby . The title track, my favorite song on the album, sounds (to me, at least) like the Beatles and Neko Case waltzing through a dense forest together, under a bright but foreboding full moon. Or something like that. Gorgeous, eerie stuff; sung sublimely by Willoughby and Visqueen's Rachel Flotard.

Some of my first favorite bands as a kid were incubated in the slick waters of AM radio. Before I discovered punk and new wave at age 15 I drank as deep from the well of arena-schlock as any child of the 1970's. One of those AM-ready bands was Toto, whose big hits of the 1970's and '80's made for some reasonably tasty empty calories. One of the first LP's (vinyl, kids) that I purchased was  Hydra , the band's sophomore release in 1979. The title track's combination of pompous prog rock keyboards, unicorn-piss fantasy lyrics, arena-metal guitars, and radio-ready gloss stroked my pre-adolescent pleasure nodes. I hadn't heard this song in ages, and it did take me straight back to being 11 years old. No, it's no damned good, but it entertained the hell outta me back in the day. Toto actually made a 'video album' for  Hydra , many excerpts of which can be found on YouTube. The 'Hydra' video is really damned entertaining...

Still behind. Sorry. Took a day off yesterday from everything, including participating in this Facebook-rooted time-suck. So what to make of today's Song Challenge? Are we back in Guilty Pleasure territory? Or are we talking about a song that triggers associations with acts of guilt and sin? Or are we talking about a song that really addresses issues of guilt in an eloquent fashion? This silly challenge yields as many nuances of interpretation as Shakespeare, I tell ya. Well, I've already covered the so-called Guilty Pleasure turf (viva, Spice Girls!); and as an ex-catholic whose every breath and move induced guilt in his halcyon years (and sometimes today, for that matter), every third song I hear could probably trigger some guilt-induced association. And that's not particularly fun (though it is sort of funny). So I go for Door #3: A great song that happens to address guilt. And as a bonus, I'll throw in two great ones. The Arctic Monkeys are probably my favor...

So I got a little behind. When you're up 'til 3 in the am writing trivia questions, this'll happen. Fortunately, both of these categories are easy for me. Like every third person in the Northwest, I play (a little; very little) guitar. For awhile in my halcyon days of youth, like every third person in the Northwest, I even kicked around the idea of, you know, doing it for reals. Played two live solo gigs at a Chinese restaurant in Ballard, even. During this period, I practiced guitar pretty diligently and got to the proficiency of a pretty skilled twelve-year old. One of the things you learn when you first pick up the guitar is that some of (OK, MOST of) the greatest rock and pop songs on the planet are pretty damned simple to play. So it's kind of a rush to discover a great song, a song that you love, that you can play. One of my first such discoveries was this one. There's a terrific guitar tab for it that's right in my vocal key, and with some practice......

There are a lot of songs that induce intentional laughter in this world. Hell, the entire catalog of Flight of the Conchords would fill the bill nicely. But picking between all of the Conchords songs would be like the Octomom picking her favorite octuplet, so I'll go with someone else entirely, namely garage rockers Electric Six. Don't know about you, but any band that mixes fuzztone guitar with handclaps, cowbells, and Abe Lincoln in tight leather shorts makes me mighty happy.

I hope that the necessity for this soundtrack doesn't come for a good many years, but when it does I'd rather have people having fun than moping about my recently-departed duff. Party up, all.

The initiator of this here list suggested a change to Day 23, and that suits me just fine, especially in light of the artist who comes immediately to mind. Serge Gainsbourg's probably best known today as the dad of chanteuse Charlotte Gainsbourg . But for over twenty years, he was an honest-to-God superstar in France, cutting records that combined his sense of lackadaisical Gallic cool with a wide variety of musical influences--jazz, afro-cuban, disco, and rock. My favorite Gainsbourg track is "Bonnie and Clyde," directly inspired by the 1967 Arthur Penn flick and sung in duet with the exotic Brigitte Bardot. Some of Gainsbourg's work took a left turn into kitsch (not a bad thing); "Bonnie and Clyde," with its surging acoustic guitar, strange looped (or at least they sound looped) cymbals, and insistent strings, just sounds gothic and haunting and wonderful. And really damned cool.

I've tried to avert the climes of sadness a lot lately. The surging and chaotic tumult of life brings scary alien bouts of change; and those surges of unrest alternately hurt, terrify, and exhilarate. But plumbing deep into sadness--looking squarely into it--is a whole lot harder. That's why when you hear music that truly taps into it, it can almost be too much to listen to. For some reason, a cloak of sadness has been hanging over me pretty persistently today. Part of the credit's due to some exotic strain of something that's been hanging on far, far too long. And when your body doesn't feel well, the mind makes that same stretch easily. So when I got home from a co-worker's farewell party, I threw on Nick Drake's Pink Moon . Nick Drake , in case you didn't know, was an English folk singer whose haunting, airy voice and sophisticated acoustic guitar playing wrought a massive influence on a lot of musicians. If you're a fan of the emotionall...

If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands. And listen to James Brown's "Sex Machine."

So what do I listen to when I'm angry? Well, why am I angry? And what am I hoping to accomplish in listening to music? Well, I'll tackle a couple of these possibilities. What the hell, it's only sleep. Maybe I'm just flat-out pissed at someone or something and need something loud and cathartic. If that's the catalyst, then I pick "Jake Leg," a track by Baroness, an amazing metal band that flat out blew the top of my head off at Bumbershoot 2010 . It's loud enough to satisfy the head-banging, but brimming with hooks--like Zeppelin and Dick Dale in a caravan, on amphetamines, with a pack of marauding cossacks hot at their heels. Bonus points to the guy who put this video together with clips from War of the Gargantuas and Frankenstein meets the Space Monster . Am I looking at submerging into something immersive and escapist that's gonna whisk me away from anger-inducing/mundane reality? Then I'd program in the first three tracks from The D...

I already put my favorite song by Love on Day 1; and that band's Forever Changes is (pretty much) my favorite album ever. So I'm gonna fudge and put down a song from one of my (other) favorite albums ever. On certain days, it is my favorite album ever. The Zombies' Odessey and Oracle came out in 1968; and in one of those glorious ironies of fate, it became a sizeable hit over a year after the band broke up. It is, I think, a perfect album--full of faultlessly-realized songwriting, a production that's as layered as it is crystalline, and exquisite singing by Colin Blunstone, a man gifted with the most hauntingly-beautiful set of pipes ever granted to a pop singer. The big hit from the record was the dusky "Time of the Season." It's still one of the most headily sensual rock songs ever recorded, and it's lost none of its power despite over forty years and use in umpteen commercials. But the rest of the album glitters like a chest of jewels exposed to...

As was addressed before, I'm not much for traditional radio. But if I did listen to it, I'd love to hear this song by Texas psychedelic shamans The Black Angels on it. I'm pretty much in love with the Angel's third platter, Phosphene Dream. It's a sublime trip record, and this song, "Telephone", sounds like some great lost track by The Zombies. Enjoy.

A song I hear often on the radio. The radio? Does anyone listen to The Radio anymore? With the myriad listening options feeding the earbuds of the world nowadays, radio in its traditional form seems like a quaint, wheezing memory. That said, every now and then a modern song becomes such a part of the pop-culture firmament that you can't escape it. And I'd hazard a guess that that means it also got played a lot on the radio. So here goes. If Your Obscurity-Huffing Geezer Truly has heard it, then that means it's REALLY become pervasive. Hey, I kinda like it, too. That Euro-trash barebones synth is in the pocket, methinks. Put that in yer pipe and smoke it, hipsters.

Wow, this shoulda gone up last night; but a date with The Residents kept me up til the wee hours. And a guy's gotta sleep sometime, y'know. Music-wise, I'm not one to discard beloved songs like used Kleenex. But every now and then, a song can get overplayed to death (by you as well as the whole of the media universe). And it can wear out its welcome. I used to be a pretty big Police fan in my halcyon days of youth, but the massive oversaturation of their last proper album (Synchronicity) and its first hit single ("Every Breath You Take"), coupled with Sting's precipitous descent over the years into tiresome old-gasbagginess, eroded a lot of that fondness. For about six months after it first came out, I thought "Every Breath You Take" was the greatest pop song ever. 'Hate' would be too strong a word for how I feel about the tune today, but listening to it again left me pretty cold, and had me scratching my head as to why I adored it so,...

On a really, really, really good day, I do, in fact, move like a cat, talk like a rat, and sting like a bee, babe... Just saying.

Well, now that I've admitted my fondness for the Spice Girls, there really isn't much of anything that'll surprise folks who stray across this blog. Considering my propensity for music that's outside the mainstream much of the time, though, my fondness for this song might be a surprise. A lot of folks worship Tom Petty pretty slavishly, and I've never been one of them. He's written a few great songs, but those efforts have often (for me, at least) been superceded by that mewling Dylan whine and (I'm sorry, but it's true) those teeth that appear too massive for that horse-face of his. But, again, he's written some great songs, and this one--"Here Comes My Girl"--is probably my favorite. With all the tension in those coiled guitar chords and the spoken-word interludes, it sounds like Lou Reed with a libido. I'm still waiting for someone who can, you know, really sing, to cover this.

So any music geek willing to stick to his or her six-guns would preface this category with the exhortation that, "There should be no such things as guilty pleasures." I'd agree with that, pretty much. Unless you're a Celine Dion fan. Kidding. Sort of. So I guess my definition of this category would be music so utterly bereft of any traditional muso-snob 'redeeming values' as to raise eyebrows from most stuffy rock critics and indie snobs. If that's the litmus test, then I've got one that'll turn the PH strip into a frickin' kaleidoscope. I love--no, scratch that, ADORE--the first two Spice Girls CDs. They're perfect, sunny uber-pop albums that hit every fizzy note you could ask for, and then some. And I'd argue that--with their hopscotching of genres, insidiously catchy tunes, and larger-than-life personae--Ginger, Sporty, Posh, Baby, and Scary were the ABBA of the 1990's. They're one pleasure that I'll readily cop to ...

I've had a curve ball thrown at me by a fellow music nerd (OK, maybe the only person reading these posts besides me). Instead of just linking a song from a band I hate, how about also linking a song that I really like from a band I (normally) hate? Quick and easy, on both counts. Not even gonna waste too much copy yabbering about how much I detest Huey Lewis and the News. Sanitized, ultra-slick gruel that I've hated, literally since the day I first heard "Do You Believe in Love?" on the radio nearly thirty years ago. Ick, ick, ick, ick. Rather than dignify these blandoids with a link or an embed of a straight-up video, I'm attaching a link to a YouTube clip of a sequence in American Psycho , in which Christian Bale's Patrick Bateman character sings the praises of the band's most grating hit single, "Hip to be Square". And if you put a tableful of Huey Lewis CDs in front of me, you can bet I'd treat said tableaux in the same way that Bal...

Let's amend this to A Song from One of your Favorite Bands, why don't we? This selection comes from my personal short list of all-time faves. For my money, Cheap Trick were the greatest rock band of the 1970's. They crashed the pompous Rock Artiste Jackass Party of that decade with an almost punk-rock irreverance, and to this day their meld of bright pop hooks, snotty humor, and monster power chords holds up like Gibraltar in a hurricane. Somewhere nestled in the bowels of this blog is the beginning draft of a nerdily-exhaustive cap of their career, but for now, here's one of my favorite songs off of Cheap Trick's most recent album, The Latest . Listen--and rock--as four old guys blow out eardrums with more force than bands a third of their age.

Some of the categories on this Facebook Time Vacuum could be open to several interpretations. Take today's, for example. A song that makes you fall asleep: Do you go with a song so numbingly dull that it instantly induces somnabulism in the stoutest of night owls? Or do you go with a song that captures that wonderful twilight time, when you're relaxed and contemplative and ready to drift happily into the wonderful universe of Dreamtime? God knows there are more than enough songs out there that encourage the former torpor. Hell, the vast majority of the mellow ballads that somehow prospered in the 1970's could handily fill the bill; the collected works of Barry Manilow ("Copacabana" and "Could This Be the Magic" notwithstanding), Bread, Air Supply...Just writing their names is forcing me to stifle a major yawn as my fingers touch the keyboard. But the nocturnal romantic in me vastly prefers contemplating songs that capture the twilight and ease you in...

Somewhere in the recesses of my work-and-chaos-informed existance, I'd intended to post this on Valentine's Day, but that February pseudo-holiday came and went. Fortunately, this song fulfills the booty-shaking quotient required for Day 9 of the 30-Day Music Challenge, and then some, no matter what time of the year. Outkast's Speakerboxx/The Love Below was one of my favorite listens of the last decade (for reals-- see here ), in no small part because Andre 3000's portion of that big-selling hip-hop double-disc marked the best platter Prince never released. Sure, it was packed with sonic imagination and hooks to burn, but moreover, you could dance to the mutha. "Happy Valentine's Day" sports the kind of potent old-school groove that packs dance floors, and it's funny as hell (the venom at the tip of Cupid's arrow, it seems is as rife with giggle juice as it is with the poison of unplanned passion). When the horny imp intones, "Keep on runn...

INXS were my favorite band for a lotta years; and they possessed one of the greatest rock vocalists ever in Michael Hutchence. When I made attempts at singing myself, I'll admit openly that Hutchence's dusky, evocative pipes were a massive influence. The band's two best records were (I thought) 1982's Shabooh Shoobah and 1984's The Swing . They sounded more mature, more sensual, and richer than damn near anything else the era produced. I could blather on interminably about the many ways in which they rocked my world, but it's late, and I'm trying to stay on task. After a lot of years, I still know all the words to every single song on both of these records, but the one that resonates with me the most on this cool, rainless Seattle night is "Johnson's Aeroplane," from The Swing . It's incredibly atmospheric, melding a funk pulse with stately strings and lyrics that have their hands placed firmly and empathetically into the Australian so...

This'll be even quicker than last night. The night of my graduation, I partied as heartily as any energy-filled kid at that crossroads; and the album from which this song came provided the soundtrack, thundering over the speakers in Frank Takahashi's Dodge Ram Truck like a choir of horny troublemaking satyrs. Damn, but I loves me some Diamond-Dave-era Van Halen.

This will go fast. It's late, and I'm tired. But I love this song, and it's a location spike of total precision and clarity for me. I spent a couple of weeks in England four or five years ago, and found myself enchanted by the noir grayness that enveloped much of it. There was also the deep sense of history that rose from it and clung to you like so much humidity. Being a hard-core Anglophile I could summon up a lot of songs that make me think of certain aspects of Merry Olde. But sometimes one band captures the spirit of a place better than anyone or anything else can. Want to feel and taste what Compton's like? Throw on some NWA. Want to experience the almost freakishly sunny pocket universe of California's coast? The Beach Boys'll do the trick. For me, no band captures the forboding, swoonsome, and spectral atmosphere that imbues much of England better than The Clientele--a limey quartet whose gently-psychedelic music seems deliciously, inexorably a par...

Circa 1975, it was, I think. I was seven years old, on an Arkansas-bound Trailways bus with my mom and little brother. My mom sat next to John, and I sat across the aisle from the two of them, stretched out between two seats and looking out at the deep indigo sky as the silhouetted landscape zipped by. At some point the bus stopped to pick up more passengers at a brightly-lit terminal somewhere around what I think was Idaho, and my stretched-out reverie was broken when a woman stepped on to take the second seat on my side. I politely shifted to the window seat while she took the aisle. She made me nervous at first; just because I was a shy kid, too young to understand females in general. Strange, floral-scented aliens, they were, I thought. But after a few minutes of silence she noticed the book in my lap--Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea --and asked me how I liked it. I started talking to her about how full of strange and wonde...

If you're talking about songs that induce you to drink from the fount of romantic and spiritual melancholy like a bittersweet and toxic liquor, well, I got a million of 'em. But as far as songs that just flat-out make you sad, there's always been one that's done it for me sure as the sun sets at the end of every day. Like any thinking human who professes any sort of love for popular music in any form, I love the Beatles. And they could do romantic melancholy as well as anyone (cue "Julia" and "Yesterday"). But the band's last single, "The Long and Winding Road," pulls from a well of sadness so deep that I must confess that I have a hard time listening to it. It's the sound of the last fragments of the band crumbling away; and in that fragmentation you can hear a pretty rich metaphor for the dissolution and fragmentation of anything--a human life, a relationship, your childhood, whatever. The strings and the gospel chorus interject...

I've spent the last five hours traversing downtown Seattle and Capitol Hill, aglow in that rarest of Emerald City joys--a sunny, mild(-ish), beautiful March day. And as clouds drag across the clarion blue sky, I've been listening to one song on repeat all afternoon. Seattle band Curtains for You are making a bit of a splash lately, most recently in a City Arts magazine poll that picked them as one of the region's Best New Bands (plug alert: Yours Truly was asked to contribute a sentence or two extolling the band's considerable virtues). Curtains craft un-jaded, unapologetically heart-on-sleeve pop blessedly free of indie-poseur airs; packed with gorgeous harmonies and songwriting that carries on the tradition of pop classicists like Harry Nilsson and Village Green -era Kinks. It's music tailor-made for a day like today. "Licorice Skies" closes out the band's (great) 2009 CD What a Lovely Surprise to Wake Up Here . It's a l...

If you've ever been to a wedding or a family reunion, you've likely endured the nightmarish Lovecraftian Vortex of Treacly Hell that is Kool and the Gang's "Celebration". Kool and the Gang earned their funk cred points in the 1970's with a lot of great throw-down tracks like the classic, "Jungle Boogie".  But their biggest hit has been beaten to death as THE soundtrack for any gathering populated by rhythm-(and taste-) impaired white people. It's R & B flavored with Nutri-Sweet. No wonder your grandpa can dance to it. I hate the song so much that I won't even dignify it with a link to a video or MP3 of the actual original song. So I thought I'd link the most memorable version of (a portion of) the song I know. SCTV was the Canadian equivalent of Saturday Night Live in the late '70's/early '80's. The sketch show spawned some of the previous generation's greatest comic sensibilities, some of whom created this ...

I pride myself in averting most Facebook Time Vacuums like the plague. Farmville? Bah! Mafia Wars? Meh. But send me somethin' music-related and I'm like a horse addict given the opportunity to rave on about his favorite grades of China White. My friend and Musical Yoda Dean Saling sent me the following challenge, and I'm in thrall to its siren song. I was looking for an excuse/vehicle to force myself into keyboard diarhhea, just for the love of it, on an extended basis, anyway. So here goes. The challenge is thus: Every day for 30 days, post a song title, mp3, video or link to your Facebook profile, in this order: day 01 - your favorite song day 02 - your least favorite song day 03 - a song that makes you happy day 04 - a song that makes you sad day 05 - a song that reminds you of someone day 06 - a song that reminds you of somewhere day 07 - a song that reminds you of a certain event day 08 - a song that you know all the words to day 09 - a song that you can...

The Conqueror , a gloriously bad 1956 sword-and-sandal flick featuring John Wayne as Genghis Khan (no, I'm not smoking crack...), brims with ridiculous dialogue, but one line in particular has always stuck with me. It's uttered by Khan/Wayne in classic western-drawl style, and he uses it to describe the object of his desire, the fiery Tartar princess Bourtai (played by the not-very-Tartar-but-admittedly-very-hot Susan Hayward): "She is woman...MUCH woman." Tura Satana was one of maybe six women who walked the earth worthy of that bit of minimalist adulation. Satana, who passed away yesterday at the age of 72 , was a Japanese-internment-camp survivor, an exotic dancer, paramour to Elvis Presley, and--most importantly--an energizing and world-changing (no lie) presence in some of the most entertaining cult movies of the 1960's and '70's. And she was much woman. I put Tura under the Petri Dish microscope a couple of years ago, ironically enthusing how ...

Man, but it's been a long time since I've visited this corner of the Blogosphere. My apologies. Truth be told, I've been far from idle. Between massive changes and upheavals, and a heap of outside projects, the ol' Petri Dish has been laying cold and neglected. More on all of that later...Maybe. Meantime, I've given myself an hour (gotta sleep, y'know) to wax cinematic in these electronic pages for the first time in too damned long. And where better to start than in a movie theater? I went into  True Grit -- the Coen Brothers' remake/reimagining of the 1969 John Wayne western --over Christmas, readily equipped with high hopes. Like most movie nerds worth the butter on their popcorn, I've been a pretty huge fan of Joel and Ethan Coen's brand of rejiggered genre cinema for a long time, and figured that this latest effort would maintain those lofty standards. Bottom line: True Grit does, and it doesn't. For those unfamiliar with the origin...