My Top Five Lists, by Joe the hoodlum
Top 5 “Watch me sell this” albums:
1. Kruder & Dorfmeister- K & D Sessions
2. New Pornographers- Twin Cinema
3. Sloan- Between the Bridges
4. Cathedral- The Carnival Bizarre
5. D’Gary- Akata Meso
Top 5 “you haven’t heard this?” albums
1. My Bloody Valentine- Loveless
2. Beach Boys- Pet Sounds
3. Charlie Parker- anything
4. Black Sabbath- Vol. 4
5. Kate Bush- Hounds of Love
Top 5 music myths that need to be corrected:
1. Classical music is only for old people
2. Nico was a valuable member of the Velvet Underground (John Cale dammit, it’s all about John Cale and Sterling Morrison)
3. Extreme metal is satanic puppykiller music. It’s just awesome kick-ass music. And only most of it is satanic.
4. Ambient music and New Age music are two different things. Good ambient and good new age are the same exact thing, ambient musicians are just better at marketing themselves to college students. James Johnson, Steve Roach, Michael Stearns, Robert Scott Thompson, all great musicians you will find in the New Age section. I skipped out on picking up a lot of CDs over the past few years because they looked too ‘new age” even though I’ve always been big into Eno and Kompakt records stuff. I could have gotten CDs by Tuu and O Yuki Conjugate at clearance for like 3 bucks, but I was spooked by cheesy cover art or song titles. Now I’m buying them new for 15 bucks if they are even available at all anymore. DOH!
5. Guitar Hero is fun. If the kids who spent hours on Guitar Hero used that time to learn the actual guitar, they would be able to play all those songs for real, on an actual musical instrument.
Top 5 bands everyone has heard and the people that influenced them that far less people have heard:
1. Bjork– Kate Bush
2. Sigur Ros– Cocteau Twins
3. Radiohead– Aphex Twin, SND, early Autechre
4. Coldplay– the song “Talk” from X&Y was an exact copy of “Computer Love” by Kraftwerk. The whole song. It angers me.
5. Kings of Leon- vocal style influence from the mushmouthed football coach played by Chris Kattan on SNL.
Top 5 metal guitar riffs:
1. Voivod- Brain Scan
2. Megadeth- Wake Up Dead (at 2:38)
3. Immortal- Tyrants
4. Enslaved- Convoys to Nothingness
5. Darkthrone- Transylvanian Hunger
Top 5 guitar players who few people have heard but more should:
1. Steve Tibbetts
2. Ben Monder
3. Davy Graham
4. Keith Fullerton Whitman
5. Steve Hillage
Top 5 great singers that nobody ever talks about when they talk about great singers:
1. Lena Willemark
2. David Sylvian
3. Cyndi Lauper
4. Daryl Hall
5. Pat Suzuki
Top 5 metal singers:
1. Ronnie James Dio
2. Tom G. Warrior
3. Abbath
4. Lee Dorrian
5. Wino
5 records that I surprisingly like considering that I’m such a grumpy bastard:
1. Jonathan Richman- Jonathan Goes Country
2. Survivor- Vital Signs
3. Kylie Minogue- Fever
4. Vashti Bunyan- Just Another Diamond Day
5. Expose- Exposure
5 artists that others would probably consider a guilty pleasure that I like unapologetically:
1. Christopher freaking Cross
2. Toto
3. Stephen Bishop (the guy who wrote the “It might be you” song from “Tootsie”)
4. America
5. Carpenters
5 records I heard for the first time in the past year that I enjoyed:
1. Orb- Orbus Terrarum
2. Robert Rich/Alo Die- Fissures
3. Huong Thanh/Nguyen Le- Fragile Beauty
4. Krallice- s/t
5. Virus- The Black Flux
5 movies/tv shows I saw in the past year that I enjoyed:
1. The Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner- A Herzog documentary from the 70s about a Swiss Ski Jumper
2. Sunshine- An awesome and mind bending movie about solar extinction
3. Primer- An awesome and mind bending movie about a couple of guys who accidentally invent a time machine and the worlds most confusing plot
4. The Mighty Boosh- A surreal British comedy about a couple of zoo workers who travel to limbo and the arctic tundra among other places- also an endless well of amusing catchphrases
5. The IT Crowd- a british comedy about “a computer genius, a young go-getter, and a man from Ireland”
5 reasons I like records and CDs better than MP3s and Ipods
1. compressed digital files sound lousy and music is meant to be heard through a stereo, not crappy computer (or Ipod) speakers
2. When everything is free and digital it’s just like flipping through cable, music becomes something that has no value unless it grabs you in the first 5 seconds, just like an advertisement.
You learn to ignore anything that takes some time to develop, and everything becomes 15-second sound bite music. Imagine if that happened with movies or books. “I didn’t like ‘the Godfather”. I watched it for 2 minutes and nothing happened so I turned it off and watched ‘Baby Geniuses 2′ instead.” Do YOU want to be the person who likes ‘Baby Geniuses 2′ more than ‘Godfather’? Didn’t think so.
3. You miss out on any album art and design. Part of the music listening experience is sitting and reading the liner notes and looking at the art while listening to a CD for the first time.
That little square in the corner of your Itunes doesn’t count.
4. Listening to a record, you have to actively put it on, pay attention to it, and flip it when the side is over. Babysitting the record makes you pay attention to it.
It’s a more rewarding music listening experience, you end up noticing details and depth that makes it much more enjoyable and interesting.
On your computer or Ipod you just hit a file on Itunes and let it burble on for hours as wallpaper for your internet surfing or whatever. With records and CD’s you have invested money in a physical piece of music and you learn to invest time in listening to it accordingly, and reap the rewards. With free digital you have invested nothing in it, and you will probably get little out of it. Records teach you to pay attention to music; MP3s teach you to ignore music.
5. Having an awesome MP3 folder never got anyone laid.
November 18th, 2008 at 1:58 pm
[...] Joe’s Top 5 Lists [...]
December 4th, 2008 at 7:30 pm
I think Daryl Hall is pretty awesome. I will admit it.
December 8th, 2008 at 4:10 pm
I whole-heartedly agree with your comments about Guitar Hero. Kids would be much better off buying a real guitar than investing a bunch of time to learn how master pretend guitar. You wouldn’t catch Jimmy Page playing a crappy plastic video game guitar so why should some kid?
And a cheesy little amp
With a sign on the front said
“Fender Champ”
And a second-hand guitar
It was a Stratocaster with a whammy bar
So in sympathy with your just criticism of Guitar Hero, I offer up my Top 5 Unknown Guitar Heroes that have great bodies of recorded work but few readers will have ever heard of before…
Robben Ford - A super tasty, jazzy blues guitarist with incredible note selection. His music is very accessible for a blue fan. Either a Handful of Blues or Mystic Mile would be a good place to start.
Danny Gatton - The king of the unknowns. Redneck jazz meets Sun Records played with impossible chops. The Hot Rod Guitar: Anthology is the most sensible place to start even though it is a double set.
Mike Keneally - He cut his teeth with Zappa and took it from there. Scary ridiculous chops. His music is diverse and challenging so you need to work with it but there are unparalleled rewards for those who make the investment. Guitar Therapy Live, Dog, Dancing or Hat makes for a good introduction.
Sonny Landreth - A slide wizard that conjures up amazing music with his approach to the guitar. His Cajun-fried blues is very accessible. Grant Street, Levee Town or South of I-10 are good albums for getting acquainted.
John Scofield – Actually any jazz enthusiast would have heard of him but to the uninitiated masses he is pretty obscure. He is a terrific player with a wonderful imagination that managed to cut an album every year for about three decades without repeating himself. Cool albums to check out include A Go Go, Groove Elation, Works for Me and Blue Matter.
December 14th, 2008 at 12:19 am
I agree and disagree on the mp3 thing. The quality is crap, yes, and it’s taken me a long time to break the habit of just listening to songs and not albums. I’ll always keep the classics on CD, and if there’s something I hear in MP3 that is amazing, I’ll buy it. Plus, a lot of music isn’t really available in a digital format yet, like Blue Note’s more avant-garde albums, or John Adams.
The upside, though, is access. There’s really no possible way any of us can buy, or even listen to, all of the great music out there in the world. The internet and MP3s have given us access to local music from all over the world. Just the other day I came across a german producer named Torky Tork, who was giving a way a free album of what sounded like Madlib bumping qwawali samples. Living here in uptown Phoenix, how else would I have heard that?
Plus there’s the mixtapes and remixes. Lil Wayne’s Da Drought 3 is ten times better than anything of his you can find in a store and the Esau Mwamwaya & Radioclit are the Very Best mixtape could be one of the best albums of the year. Right now I’m listening to a superb Flying Lotus BBC mix full of stuff like Alice Coltrane and Manhattan Transfer.
Sure, none of this is probably as good as Young Liars, or Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, or any other of the discs I’ve picked up at Hoodlums over the years, and any album that sounds good on my computer sounds frickin amazing on vinyl, I know, but I wouldn’t trade our newer digital connections for anything. Sure, my attention span is shorter now than it used to be, so I have to force myself to slow down and listen to the great albums over and over again, which is a pretty amazing problem to have, don’t you think?