"it took me about three or four weeks to toilet train my cat, nightlife. most of the time is spent moving the box very gradually to the bathroom." -charles mingus
"she had a chihuahua named carlos that had some kind of skin disease and was totally blind." -tom waits
"he had a huge room with nothing in it except this huge vast hammond organ, right next door to the police." -david bowie
"he's got a mind like a sewer, and a heart like a fridge" -elvis costello
"you can't hold the hand of a rock 'n' roll man." -joni mitchell
"lou's jukebox spun for love and many other things, too: beauty, pain, history, courage, mystery" -laurie anderson
"hey there, hey now, well, you can make a pacemaker blink, easy thing, make a man's heart go bibbity boom. -john cale
"i've still got things inside me, sad things, happy things, that people don't know about." -loretta lynn
"to try to maximize the relationship of listening to a record through promotion is like experiencing driving a car by reading about stimulus programs." -bonnie 'prince' billy
"too much cheesecake too soon! old money's better than new" -roxy music
"my mother used to tell me about vibrations. to think that invisible feelings, invisible vibrations existed scared me to death." -brian wilson
"i could even find it in my heart to love mike love." -belle & sebastian
"i'm going to boogie my scruples away." -lowell george
"i'm a lunatic, and you are so super cool." - george jones
"i'm good and i'm bad and i'm happy and i'm sad and i'm lazy" -willie nelson
"i drive a rolls-royce, cause it's good for my voice." -t.rex
"i mean every letter in the words in the sentences of my quotes." -lil' wayne
"lyrics choochoo from my mouth like locomotion." - pato banton
"i'm dealing in rock and roll. i'm not a bonafide human being." -phil spector
"phil approached me with a bottle of kosher red wine in one hand and a .45 in the other, put his arm around my shoulder and shoved the revolver into my neck and said, 'leonard, i love you.' i said, 'i hope you do, phil.'" -leonard cohen
"they'd whisper at each other and look at phil and whisper at each other. finally this lady, tanked, comes over to phil and says, 'alright, sonny, what's your problem?' and he said, 'premature ejaculation, what's yours?'" -tom wolfe
"i bite my nails and if that fails i go get myself stoned, but when i do i think of you and head myself back home." -gram parsons
"i would say groucho marx, to name one thing, and willie mays, and the second movement of the jupiter symphony, and louis armstrong's recording of potatohead blues, swedish movies, naturally. sentimental education by flaubert, marlon brando, frank sinatra, those incredible apples and pears by cezanne, the crabs at sam wo's, tracy's face." -woody allen
brian eno songs that will make good book titles for my 10-volume memoir, in order: here he comes, baby's on fire, golden hours, brutal ardour, taking tiger mountain, events in dense fog, through hollow lands, some of them are old, everything merges with the night, dead finks don't talk
ry cooder albums that every man should own: into the purple valley, boomer's story, paradise and lunch
"really, we don't want people twiddling their goatees over our stuff." -radiohead
"i love songs about horses, railroads, land, judgment day, family, hard times, whiskey, courtship, marriage, adultery, separation, murder, war, prison, rambling, damnation, home, salvation, death, pride, humor, piety, rebellion, patriotism, larceny, determination, tragedy, rowdiness, heartbreak and love. and mother. and god." -johnny cash
"the moon is clear, the sky is bright, i'm happy as the horse's shite." -the pogues
"i hope that you all out there, young, old, tall, short, fat or thin, quick or slow, no matter what kind or color or shape or person you are, if you like to make music, why, go ahead. -pete seeger
"chuck berry isn't merely the greatest of the rock and rollers, or rather, there's nothing mere about it. say rather that unless we can somehow recycle the concept of the great artist so that it supports chuck berry as well as it does marcel proust, we might as well trash it." -robert christgau
mashable says about us: "expect the unexpected with this awesome gem. groovy." and 33 1/3: "nice to have someone steer me in a worthwhile direction"
a very special sunday p.s.a from the super groovy spectacular and the davies family: after many renowned brooklyn cantors with names like moshe koussevitzky, but before radiohead's life in a glass house, the kinks brought along a clarinet and a little brass section to get across their message–a very important message about sin, gin, demons, floozies, indecision, lags, suckers, gutters and trouble. clarinets make everything realer, just like ray davies’ gap teeth.
#871: antony and the johnsons - thank you for your love (2010)
for reasons that are currently too complex to discuss i didn’t listen to all of antony and the johnson’s the crying light and swanlights, and for that matter somehow didn’t open my copy of robert penn warren’s all the king’s men, until this past week. the albums are like the kid a and amnesiac of decaying forests and fluttered eyelashes and empty bedsheets and throbbing clarinets. and so far all the king’s men is better than both randy newman’s good old boys and a.j. leibling’s the earl of louisiana, which is unlikely and immense. i am grateful for them.
radiohead songs, in chronological order, that would make for good celebratory headlines in tomorrow’s papers for radiohead’s rumored #occupywallstreet concert: million dollar question, the trickster, karma police, lucky, how i made my millions, the national anthem, optimistic, knives out, dollars and cents, hail to the thief (an album title, but it counts), we suck young blood, a wolf at the door, house of cards and little by little.
radiohead songs that would make for good condescending headlines: you never wash up after yourself, (nice dream), sulk, street spirit (fade out) and paranoid android.
this may not be the official best video of the 90s, but, gosh, it’s my best video of my 1990s. i was a wee sleepaway camper at laurel south when i walked into a room of counselors watching a vhs of 7 television commercials, radiohead’s compilation of videos from the bends and ok computer, and even though i’d grown up in love with mtv, especially daisy fuentes, i’d never seen something so perfect. a head, singing about a heart filling up like a landfill, in a fishbowl filling up with water! slowly drowning? holding his breath for the final silence? opening his misshapen eyes for his final bellyache? and saved at the last moment by his chorus! i’ll take no surprises, please.
#642: gram parsons and emmylou harris - streets of baltimore (live, 1973)
first came a bookstore-bathroom run in with ultra rare hipster runoff graffiti. and this afternoon, in the middle of a very stressful observer deadline, i got to have an actual back and forth with pitchfork founder ryan schreiber, who, let’s face it, is a true indie-and-internet god. if you’re interested, and who could blame you if you’re not, it was a gentlemanly twitter disagreement over his site’s top-videos-of-the-90s list, which ends with aphex twin’s dementedly dark come to daddy.
the finale came with his excellent point that anthony kiedis’ ocean rap should have been number one. and just like that our conversation had ended! the irony is that i started the day by spending 90 minutes compiling my list of the top 10 videos of grainy live versions of beautiful country rock songs about major maryland metropolitan areas. this one ended up on top, and it goes out to you-know-who.
#568: radiohead - motion picture soundtrack (2001, live at canal+)
the radiohead lyric that goes “the whole building is about to collapse anytime now” isn’t actually a radiohead lyric, it’s a line from an email that a goldman sachs banker named fabrice tourre sent as he was putting together a purposefully rotten multibillion-dollar investment for goldman’s own clients. “only potential survivor,” he continues, “the fabulous fab, standing in the middle of all these complex, highly leveraged, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all of the implications of those monstruosities!!!”
one nice thing about today’s two extraordinary chunks of goldman sachs news–the more important one is about the s.e.c.’s astounding allegations of fraud, the more charming is about its bankers’ dissatisfaction with goldman’s $2.1 billion new tower–is that it proves that the world is exactly how radiohead has always said it was. back in high school, when i listened to amnesiac more than any other album on earth except for kid a, but adored ok computer more than both combined, radiohead’s lesson was that the world is filled with ugly fraud, vulgar ambition and manipulative ruthlessness. which more or less turns out to be true.
referring to a new yorker article about the beautiful mural in the new goldman tower, a letter to the magazine quoted meridel le sueur’s thoughts on corporate-sponsored art: “they just want you to perfume the sewers. they need artists to bring perfume to the terrible stench of their death.” ms. le sueur died the year before ok computer came out.
#503: orchestral manoeuvres in the dark - genetic engineering (1983)
surely if radiohead made the best album of the 1990s and the best album of the 2000s (ok computer and kid a) then radiohead’s probably going to make the best album of the 2010s. and i predict, based on a close study of the victorian fin de siecle, brian eno’s oblique strategies, rhett davies’ discography, the genealogical history of the greenwood brothers, and phrenological curvature of phil selway’s skull, that it will sound like the more danceable songs on orchestral manoeuvres in the dark’s underrated album dazzle ships. it’s available here–see for yourself.
with today’s conclusion of pitchfork’s top 200 albums of the 2000s countdown, the most haunting of all radiohead issues–kid a versus amnesiac–was finally put to rest. everything is in its right place: amnesiac (which has its intelligent supporters, but does not reach the same mind-tickling, soul-floating heights) clocked in at no. 34, while its sister album was named the decade’s no. 1 album. which it is!
remember when you were in third grade and were delighted by the trick ending of aerosmith’s amazing video, which revealed that alicia silverstone had been in charge of the virtual reality machine the whole time? that’s what it’s like, every single time, to listen to kid a in its entirety. it’s gigglingly good. it’s cold music that makes your head go warm. music with gravity to make you float! and the singing’s pretty, too.
but then here’s the thing: if radiohead’s ok computer was the best album of the 1990s, and radiohead’s kid a was the best album of the 2000s, then what happens when our children’s children start arguing over which was greater?
the new york observer’svery own leon neyfahk, who might be one of the smartest people i’ve ever met, and certainly one of the lankiest, once mentioned to me that he thought antony and the johnson’s painfully beautiful cover of beyoncé’s crazy in love was lousy. he was wrong! sure, antony’s cover doesn’t have the original’s sizzle or swagger or sweatiness or sexiness, but it’s full of ecstacy and torment, and what else can you ask for from a pop song?
leon became even more wrong today, cosmically wrong, when he wrote on twitter that it is “the most tedious thing,” and “more boring” than a bad song on pink floyd’s ummagumma. then he had to go and say it is “more boring than treefingers,” which is an easy target–that’s the murky, dreamy, eno-esque song on radiohead’s kid a. speaking of which, only last week leon casually said that he not only prefers radiohead’s amnesiac to kid a (which, hello, is insane), but then went ahead and gave the national anthem as an example of kid a’s weaknesses.
that is where he crossed the line.
not liking the national anthem is not liking waterfalls, heavyweight boxing, trampolines, the smell of blood and getting to second base for the first time. it is a song that pounds and throbs and thuds and wallops, and it’s pretty. (and this video, made for an mtv contest, is a classic too.)
so leon, if you’re reading this, please open your ears and heart to antony’s beyoncé song and the national anthem. treefingers isn’t bad either.
too much radiohead is like too much beatles or hershey’s chocolate or lobster or simpsons, so every year i go on a months-long radiohead diet. this may, june and july there was no thom yorke, no ok computer, not even johnny greenwood’s there will be blood soundtrack.
but now it’s august, which means i get to hum merrily along to chipper little lyrics like: “once again packed like frozen food and battery hens/think of all the starving millions.” fun times are here again!
#21: neil young - don’t let it bring you down (1971)
it’s primary day, so i’ve been trying to find a super appropriate get-out-the-vote, times-they-are-a-changin’ song. radiohead’s electioneering has the right idea, but it isn’t exactly the best track on “ok computer.” besides, it’s tuesday, which means i need something from the 70s–too early for public enemy, too late for pete seeger.
but high-voiced, long-haired neil young makes good songs for election day. and even though he has more activist-y songs then don’t let it bring you down, somehow this tune’s picture of burning castles, dead men, sinking moons, red sirens, scraped skies, cold winds and morning papers feels more political than whining about impeachment.
his after the goldrush-era performance here on the bbc is enough to make you want to change the world. and another thing! he likes obama.
