Another month gone

Well, the first month of 2022 is behind us.  I have to say, so far I’m not impressed.  But it’s early days yet.  It might get better.

Maybe.

Next week, something more substantial, I hope.

Distaff Attitude I

"Warm Us Up and Watch Us Blow"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

I have a very clear memory from a few decades back: a friend, excitedly trying to describe a great new song he’d heard on the radio.  “It’s this woman, and she’s singing to her ex, and she’s ...” and here he faltered, unable to find the right words.  He finally came up with “she’s so mad.”

The year was 1995, and the song, of course, was “You Oughta Know,” by the then little known Alanis Morissette, and it ushered in a whole spate of pissed-off women singing about being pissed off ... so much so that the original title of this mix was “Angry White Female.” I’ve captured the greatest hits of that musical movement here: Tracy Bonham’s glorious screamfest “Mother Mother” and Patti Rothberg’s bluesy take “This One’s Mine” from the following year, all the way through Veruca Salt’s amazing punk-grunge-pop anthem “Volcano Girls” in ‘97.  Louise Post and Nina Gordon can do it all, but I’ve always felt their unique combination of harmonizing, screaming, and sick guitar licks really reached the perfect crescendo in “Volcano Girls”: when they sing “warm us up and watch us blow,” it’s kinda the perfect expression of this mix (and that’s why it’s the volume title, natch).

Of course, there were other women singing during this period, and they weren’t always pissed off.  For instance, I don’t think Gwen Stefani was actually angry when she sang “Just a Girl” (released just a few months after “You Oughta Know”) ... but then again she doesn’t seem very happy about it either.  “Oh, I’m just a girl, all pretty and petite, so don’t let me have any rights,” she sings, and the mockery is crystal clear.  At the other end of the spectrum, while No Doubt was making fun of people who dismissed women for being emtpy-headed in ‘95, Natalie Imbruglia was making fun of the women who were giving those people those impressions in ‘97; “Don’t You Think” contains lines like “there’s more important things than making sure your shoes walk just right” and “your second-hand opinions don’t make you look any smarter.” What all these women had in common was not necessarily being angry, but having a certain ... attitude.

Of course, women singing with attitude didn’t magically start in 1995, nor end in 1997.  Even just a few years before, there were a few pretty important precursors to Alanis Morissette, like Julianna Hatfield’s growling “Dame with a Rod,” which was always my favorite tune to crank up to the max from Become What You Are, which is turn was one of my favorite albums of the ‘90s: throughout the entire decade, if you took a road trip you took with me, you could pretty much count on hearing the entire album at least once.  Certainly I feel like you can draw a pretty straight line from Hatfield to Veruca Salt.  And, for an example of a woman who can scream with power and artistry and still make it sound beautiful, it’s tough to beat PJ Harvey; “50ft Queenie” is only one of many awesome candidates from Rid of Me; produced by Big Black’s Steve Albini, it’s raw and noisy and just amazing.¹  Among those that came after, I was actually somewhat surprised when I went back to dig out Michelle Branch’s “Are You Happy Now?” to find that it was from 2003—it mirrors the Morissette-Bonham-Rothberg period so perfectly that I was sure it had come from the same time period.  And, while I can’t recall how I first discovered Marina and the Diamonds, I do recall the first time I heard 2012’s “Bubble Gum Bitch”: I thought, damn this song rocks so hard.  And I remember thinking it had to go on this mix.

And then there are the “bad girls” of rock.  One couldn’t possibly do a mix like this without including Amy Winehouse, and “Rehab” is the obvious choice.  Luckily, it’s a top-notch song too, even though the lyrics are quite sad in retrospect.  Perhaps less known (outside her native New Zealand) is Gin Wigmore, who I first heard of when I just had to look up who was singing the awesome theme song for Crazyhead.²  Then I heard “Black Sheep” and I was blown away.  There’s a good reason she holds the #2 spot on this volume.

But I would say the undisputed bad girl of rock has to be P!nk, and I put my money where my mouth is by giving her 3 tracks on this volume, which I rarely do.  But she has plenty of songs to spare when it comes to attitude.  Possibly my all-time favorite P!nk song is “So What,” where she sings to an ex “I’m just fine, and you’re a tool.” Seriously, how can you not sing along to this song?  It was the perfect opener.  “Trouble” is also a lot of fun (“I’m trouble, y’all!”), but pride of place as the centerpiece of the mix goes to her best diss track, ”‘Cuz I Can.” While I’ll admit to being a bit disappointed that she appears to have actually written down “ruff, ruff, ruff, ruff, ruff, ruff, ruff, ruff” as an actual lyric, you can’t beat insults like “I could fit your whole house in my swimming pool,” and especially “my life’s a fantasy that you’re not smart enough to even dream.” Chef’s kiss.

But I knew I had to also pay some respect to the OG bad girls: Pat Benatar and Joan Jett.  Benatar was one of my first rock crushes: 1980’s Crimes of Passion was one of the first albums that I developed a fondness for when I began developing my own musical tastes.³  And it was also the first time I realized that an album could have more than one or two hits: featuring not only “Treat Me Right,” which I showcase here, but also “You Better Run,” “Hit Me with Your Best Shot,” and “Hell Is for Children,” Crimes of Passion is jam-packed with radio fodder, and the rest of the tracks—such as “Out-a-Touch,” the weirdly wandering “I’m Gonna Follow You,” and the amazing Kate Bush cover “Wuthering Heights”—are pretty dope too.  As for Jett, “Bad Reputation” was tailor-made for this mix, and it’s always been one of my favorites of hers.  Sure, “I Love Rock ‘n Roll” gets all the love, but I always thought “Reputation” was underrated, and I was pleased to hear it used as the theme for Freaks and Geeks nearly 20 years later.  And, while I’m not sure anyone ever accused Debbie Harry of being a “bad girl,” Blondie is certainly OG in at least my conception of rock, and I always felt “One Way or Another” had a certain amount of attitude.

Distaff Attitude I
[ Warm Us Up and Watch Us Blow ]

“So What” by P!nk, off Funhouse
“Black Sheep” by Gin Wigmore, off Gravel & Wine
“Uummannaq Song” by KT Tunstall, off Tiger Suit
“Just a Girl” by No Doubt, off Tragic Kingdom
“Rehab” by Amy Winehouse, off Back to Black
“Bubblegum Bitch” by Marina and the Diamonds, off Electra Heart
“Mother Mother” by Tracy Bonham, off The Burdens of Being Upright
“A Dame with a Rod” by the Juliana Hatfield Three, off Become What You Are
“Kiss with a Fist” by Florence + the Machine, off Lungs
“Are You Happy Now?” by Michelle Branch, off Hotel Paper
“Treat Me Right” by Pat Benatar, off Crimes of Passion
“'Cuz I Can” by P!nk, off I'm Not Dead
“Bad Reputation” by Joan Jett, off Bad Reputation
“50ft Queenie” by PJ Harvey, off Rid of Me
“Johnny Feelgood” by Liz Phair, off Whitechocolatespaceegg
“Don't You Think?” by Natalie Imbruglia, off Left of the Middle
“Volcano Girls” by Veruca Salt, off Eight Arms to Hold You
“You Oughta Know” by Alanis Morissette, off Jagged Little Pill
“Wild Woman” by Imelda May, off Tribal
“One Way or Another” by Blondie, off Parallel Lines
“This One's Mine” by Patti Rothberg, off Between the 1 and the 9
“Trouble” by P!nk, off Try This
“Tell That Girl to Shut Up” by Transvision Vamp, off Pop Art
“That's Not My Name” by the Ting Tings, off We Started Nothing

Total:  24 tracks,  78:55

Now, I’m not sure Liz Phair and her spiritual successor, KT Tunstall, ever really embody the anger of Morisette, the brattiness of P!nk, or the growling power of Harvey, but I love their music so much that it felt weird to exclude them altogether.  And one can define “attitude” however one wants, no?  “Johnny Feelgood” appears to be about an unhealthy relationship (“he knocks me down and he orders me around”) but it still portrays a strength in the singer.  Meanwhile, in “Uummannaq Song” (Uummannaq is a small town in Greenland), Tunstall sings lines like “did you see it, that I needed to prove that my stinger always stays ...” Just as I did on Sirenexiv Cola, I drew from the best albums from each: whitechocolatespaceegg and Tiger Suit.

Likewise, Florence + the Machine’s output primarily consists of soft, sparkling pop gems like “Dog Days Are Over,” the big hit off of Lungs.  But, somehow, right in the middle of that album that Wikipedia assures me is “art rock” or maybe even “baroque pop,” there is the stripped-down, almost punky, glory that is “Kiss with a Fist.” Another abusive relationship song, in this one the singer gives as good as she gets, and produces a song that is short and brutal, like the relationship of its subject.  Contrariwise, Irish-born Imelda May is known for a sort of rockabilly revival style.⁴  But with lyrics like:

I knew a feral girl, once upon a time.
She grew into a werewolf: that monster was all mine.
She was incarcerated, to the inside of my skin,
And then I sat and waited, for my nice life to begin ...

“Wild Woman” is quite perfect for this mix.  A wicked, wicked, wild woman, dying to be free ... that sort of says it all.

Finally, we close with a pair of pop-punk songs that I’ve always felt were spiritual sisters, despite being separated by 20 years and about 2½ hours on the M1.  London’s Transvision Vamp has strong opinions on your current girlfriend—“to be a musician, she goes to school”—and advises that you better “Tell That Girl to Shut Up.” Over in Manchester, the Ting Tings are not happy about how women are treated: “they call me ‘hell,’ they call me ‘Stacey,’ they call me ‘her,’ they call me Jane.” But of course “That’s Not My Name.” Her name, in fact, is Katie White, and while Wendy James was singing about how you better tell that girl she’s gonna beat her up, White was busy being 5 years old.  Still, I feel some sort of connection between the two Brits and their vocal styles.  Of course, it might just all be in my head.

Next time, let’s get dark.

Distaff Attitude II ⇒

__________

1 My second choice, for what it’s worth, was “Me-Jane.” Perhaps we’ll see that one show up on volume II.

2 Gin Wigmore’s music is also featured in Wynonna Earp, yet another show about badass females—or “hell bitches,” as Crazyhead’s Raquel refers to them—kicking demon ass.  Obviously there’s a trend here.

3 As distinct from just listening to the music of my parents.  I delve into this topic a bit more in my intro to 80s My Way.

4 We first head from May on Salsatic Vibrato III.

Day 3 of 4

This week I took Friday off in order to have a four-day weekend.  I’ve been taking advantage of those days to catch up on a lot of things I’ve been putting off lately, and I’ve been getting a lot of cool stuff done so far.  So I’ll continue the streak and not post anything here—other than this brief message, of course.  More exciting content next time, hopefully.

A Second Cento

Time ... Isn’t

I have lived to see strange days.  Which side are you on?
Have we reached the point where time becomes a loop?
Somebody must have said nobody.  When you’re laughing, nothing matters ...
but inspiration is hard to come by: time is a weird soup.
You see, time is an ocean, not a garden hose,
and when (or even if) it stops, no one really knows.

Now, some say time is a circus, always packing up and moving away,
or that there’s a time to every purpose, and that everything has a season.
But what if there’s no tomorrow? (there wasn’t one today ...)
Because time is a flat circle, the dreaming eyes of a demon.
Some say you can’t step into the same river twice, but those people are imposters:
time is not a river; time is a jungle, filled with monsters.

Time is a storm, liquid and simultaneous; time is a feathered thing, a jewel;
the whole design visible in every facet, yet all moments quickly run away.
Still, an unperceived dimness in thine eyes makes me believe in yesterday,
and that we are all lost—though it can be loved, the truth is cruel.
This is the school in which we learn; its sword will pierce our skins.
This is the fire in which we burn; it doesn’t hurt when it begins.

Perhaps I should say that I accept Time absolutely.
that here or henceforward it is all the same to me and my designs,
or perhaps I should observe, even more astutely,
that I reject linear time and all the other lies of the beforetimes.
Is it merely a period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments?
Or is the future is never truly set: our fate defined by countless choices?

You run to catch up with the sun, but it’s sinking; the time is out of joint.
We are thrown down here at random, between the stars and matter’s profusion.
The day is done, and the darkness falls from the wings of ... look, that’s the point:
Night’s whatever you want it to be.  Time is an illusion.
It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.
Dear beautiful eternal night: no sun outlasts its sunset, but it will rise again.

But time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures.  Time ripens all things.
There is no difference between time and any of the three dimensions of space,
except that our consciousness moves along it, and you can hear the sound of her wings.
Time makes fools of us all.  Our only comfort is that greater shall come after us.
Day and the angel Life circle the worlds of air ...  Yes, life is fleeting,
but also eternal; it will always find a way to begin again.
Our sole purpose to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

The Story of a Cento

I’m hardly the first person to notice that, since the pandemic hit, time has gotten ... strange.  In fact, so many people were making note of it that it became hard not to think it significant when you come across some piece of culture referencing the weirdness of time, even though many of them predate the pandemic itself.  I’ve no doubt that the fungibility of time during the pandemic was top of mind for Ashley Johnson when she made the brilliant observation that “time is a weird soup” in episode 1 of Exandria Unlimited, but then surely it was a coincidence that shortly afterward I decided to rewatch John Dies at the End (a movie that plays with time quite a bit), or that I finally got around to season 3 of Legion (which features a time travelling mutant), or that our family rewatch of Steven Universe just then hit the episode where Sour Cream (voiced by the brilliant Brian Posehn) makes his own observation on time ... surely just coincidences, but they started to feel like more, and I started to jot them down in a file, along with other observations about time—Worf’s, from STNG; Rust Cohle’s, from True Detective—and I started to become intrigued at how they seemed to fit together, to form a narrative ...

The last time I did one of these, I talked about what a “cento” actually is.  Go read that again if you need a refresher; basically, centos are the found object art of poetry.  I took the pieces that matched up and put them together; took the pieces that didn’t match to anything and found things to match them to; I even filled in a line here or there to add ryhthm or rhyme.  But I kept it very loose: the meter is very irregular, and the rhyme scheme fluctuates from stanza to stanza.  (In the latter, I am quite inspired by J. Patrick Lewis, a much better poet than I; if you haven’t read The La-Di-Da Hare, I highly recommend it.  While it’s ostensibly a children’s book, the poetry is very sophisticated.)  In many cases, I used slant rhymes instead of perfect ones; sometimes this was necessary (because those were the quotes I had), but sometimes it was just fun.

I also did something quite different this time around (vs my last cento, I mean): I rearranged the quotes.  Not all of them, but I didn’t hesitate to twist things around to make them fit my form and flow.  For instance, the actual line from “The Raven” is:

And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,

which I rearranged to “the dreaming eyes of a demon” (because that way I could use it to rhyme—sort of—with “season”).  And French historian André Malraux actually wrote:

The great mystery is not that we should have been thrown down here at random between the profusion of matter and that of the stars; it is that from our very prison we should draw, from our own selves, images powerful enough to deny our own nothingness.

which I condensed and rearranged to:

We are thrown down here at random, between the stars and matter’s profusion.

because I needed something to rhyme with “illusion.” In this case, I actually started with the word “profusion” and searched out quotes containing it.  Why?  Hard to say, really ... I knew I needed something to fit that rhyme, and I wanted a word that might be somewhat unexpected (not “conclusion” or “delusion” or “confusion”), and I thought that surely somebody had once said something about “profusion” that would fit this theme, and I found it.  I had no clue who André Malraux even was before I started; but now I do, and that’s a good thing.

My most ambitious rearrangements were in the third stanza, where the first line is actually 5 small pieces pieces of four different quotes, strung together to seem like they are all cut from the same cloth.  The bulk of those four quotes—the meaty bits, if you will—are then shuffled back in: the first half of line two matches the 3rd and 5th parts of line one; the second half of line two matches the 2nd part; the first halves of lines three and four match the 4th and 1st parts, respectively.  Then lines five and six are just two rhyming couplets (practically doggerel) spliced together.

I think my favorite rhymes in the whole piece are in the fourth stanza, where I rhyme Walt Whitman with B. Dave Walters, two sages separated by nearly a century, and yet their words contrast so beautifully.  (Note that this is a favorite phrase of B. Dave’s since the pandemic started; my link below is to but one example.)  I had to tack on a new ending to Whitman’s quote and write a whole additional line for this one, but I’m happy enough with it: I think it works well, in context.

About the only thing I’m not happy with here, other than maybe wishing I could tighten up some of the places where I just threw the meter completely out the window, is that I’m not sure I’ve got the order of the stanzas right.  I think each one is good on its own, and I think there’s a narrative that they form, but I’m not sure I’ve nailed the progression of that narrative.  Then again, given the nature of the subject matter, maybe telling the story slightly out of order is just par for the course.

Anyway, it’s not a first draft, but it may not yet quite be finished, so I once again ask that you be a bit gentle with it.  Still, if you have thoughts or comments, I’d love to hear them.

Credits:

First Stanza:

• Line 1.1: The Lord of the Rings.
• Line 1.2: I’ve Got A Nietzsche Trigger Finger!
• Line 2: Star Trek: The Next Generation.
• Line 3.1: Winnie-the-Pooh.
• Line 3.2: Julian Barratt.
• Line 4.1: Bob Dylan.
• Line 4.2: Exandria Unlimited.
• Line 5: John Dies at the End.
• Line 6: traditional.

Second Stanza:

• Line 1: “Elegy for Wonderland.”
• Line 2: Ecclesiastes.
• Line 3: Groundhog Day.
• Line 4.1: True Detective.
• Line 4.2: Edgar Allen Poe.
• Line 5.1: Heraclitus.
• Line 5.2: original.
• Line 6: Legion.

Third Stanza:

• Line 1.1, 4.1: William Carlos Williams.
• Line 1.2, 2.2: Kurt Vonnegut.
• Line 1.3, 1.5, 2.1: Watchmen.
• Line 1.4, 3.1: Jasper Mayne.
• Line 4.2: George Santayana.
• Line 3.2: the Beatles.
• Line 5.1, 6.1: “Calmly We Walk Through This April’s Day.”
• Line 5.2, 6.2: M*A*S*H.

Fourth Stanza:

• Line 1 – 2.1: Walt Whitman.
• Line 2.2 – 3: original.
• Line 4: B. Dave Walters
• Line 5: The Devil’s Dictionary.
• Line 6: X-Men: Days of Future Past.

Fifth Stanza:

• Line 1.1: Pink Floyd.
• Line 1.2: Hamlet.
• Line 2: André Malraux.
• Line 3.1: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
• Line 3.2: original.
• Line 4: Steven Universe.
• Line 5: Alice in Wonderland.
• Line 6.1: e. e. cummings.
• Line 6.2: Maya Angelou.

Sixth Stanza:

• Line 1.1: “The Garden of Forking Paths.”
• Line 1.2: Don Quixote.
• Line 2, 3.1: The Time Machine.
• Line 3.2: The Sandman.
• Line 4: Eric Temple Bell.
• Line 5.1: Richard Henry Stoddard.
• Line 5.2, 6: Circle & Cross.
• Line 7: Carl Jung.

Anticipation of a More Exciting Installment

Originally, I had planned to just skip this week, due to the holiday.  But then I had a sudden inspiration for something I had started on a while back, so I’ve spent the last few days trying to put it together.  But it’s not quite done, and I don’t want to rush it.  So I think I’ll let it marinate one more week and ask you for your patience.  Can’t guarantee it’ll be worth the wait, but I can assure you it will at least be better than what I could give you this week.

Till then.