The title track misreads punk so badly that it offers some insight into just how Zappa got so far off course when it came to watching his contemporaries. What it doesn’t illuminate is where he got his painful aesthetic hypocrisy on the issue from: his line on punk is that it’s “dumb”. Whereas his own music is “stupid” — is there so much of a difference?

(These concert recordings also feature multiple examples of a weird Zappa-as-light-unto-the-masses performance tic he had: interjecting “that’s right!” after an unkind lyric, as though maybe audience members not otherwise convinced of his sincerity might come around.)

But OTHERWISE, the live Zappa release I’ve enjoyed most, if memory serves. “The Blue Light” has the feel of an old Mothers track, and isn’t afflicted with Zappa’s latter-day lyrical smugness (or at least not obviously). Now that I’ve had a few weeks to breathe I kind of want to go back to some records I know I gave short shrift to, like The Grand Wazoo.

Recommended to me by someone who thought they’d make a good next step from Zappa. I was intrigued, particularly since I wouldn’t have guessed it.

The liner notes repeat the Zappa thing, and I can kind of hear it, so there’s that. But I think, depressingly, that I just don’t like the basic funk beat, that slooooooow monster. I have a feeling the momentum which is supposed to shake my ass just feels plodding.

I wouldn’t even think twice about this if it weren’t music that discusses in great detail what’s wrong with people who don’t like it. Hate second-guessing myself; powerless to stop.

In the early 90s, a group of experts issued fascinating, detailed recommendations on how to mark a site containing radioactive waste so that it would go undisturbed for the 10,000 years the waste would take to become harmless. Read this. (That page is excerpted from Appendix F to the full report, available here.) When you get to the drawings of some of their ideas you’ll see that (though they didn’t actually have one on staff) one type of expert whose wisdom would be useful in a project like this is “video-game designer”.

Equally ambitious but less grave, and perhaps more optimistic, are the Long Now Foundation. LNF has much more going on than the last time I checked, including a beautiful chart showing the group’s expenditures and projects over time that (perhaps because of inflation) takes the shape of several slim cones of light beaming into the distance, and the information that only one in seven LNF web denizens believes students will learn how to defend themselves against robots in the year 2150.

(WIPP links via laboratorium.)

Miscalculation. I found this relatively cheap and figured it was about exactly as much solo Nicks as I needed: curiousity would drive me beyond the singles whether I liked them or not, but I definitely didn’t need to plan on buying all the individual albums.

And this is indeed the right amount of material to get comprehensiveness without completeness, but the poor sequencing makes it a swamp. As I kind of expected, several songs whose names I didn’t recognize turned out to be the subjects of inexplicably-suppressed childhood radio memories, but they were scattered over the first two discs, and I couldn’t tell whether the gunk between them was immature-bad or past-peak-bad.

But my experience with the Mac canon has been that Buckingham’s songs got to me faster, while a Nicks track I didn’t already know often needed an extra spin. So I’d be inclined to give this another chance were it not for the awful way it ends: a seven-minute solo-piano “Rhiannon” from 1998 with the rhythm perverted into squared-off lockstep. When Nicks calls Rhiannon’s name this time, she sounds like an assistant principal.

The Black Album vs. Pavement’s Slanted And Enchanted. Great idea! Wait, no, is it?

Several of these tracks use such tiny bits of the S&E tracks that the implied mashup-style equality between Pavement and Jay-Z is far gone and even knowing Pavement pretty well, I’m only taking DJ N-Wee’s word for it that he’s used the song he claims. I could take or leave those, though some are strong. (And I respect his choice to combine each record’s 14 tracks one-to-one, in order, Oulipo-style.)

I’m in this instead for the full-bore collisions, like “In The Mouth An Encore” and “Our First Singer”. N-Wee presumably couldn’t edit out Malkmus’s vocals while leaving the rest of the song intact but I love having him mumbling in the background. And Pavement’s music already supported lyrics with more portent than sense well; turns out it does the same for rhymes with more bluster than point.

I had to relearn just how BitTorrent works to get this (like, maybe I used it once before) and I’d call it worth the effort.

The record itself was new to me, but I waited to write about it until I knew it well enough to comment wisely on the bonus tracks. Not worth the wait, I think! The rough takes differ audibly from the album versions, um, sometimes. Not much. The rough “Dreams” sounds like Nicks is singing to herself, though, an interesting effect and a VERY interesting contrast with the savage “Silver Springs”, which I gather decribes, as “Dreams” does, the aftermath of her breakup with Lindsey Buckingham.

Rumours proper, on the other hand… fantastic record. I find myself entertaining notions about it deserving its super-blockbuster status despite the long-standing principle (of mine) that fame has such a distortionary effect on public opinion as for NOBODY to meaningfully ‘deserve’ popularity of the gargantuan type that Fleetwood Mac achieved. And I’m falling prey to it myself: for whatever reason, about 1000 times more people have bought Rumours than most of the records I find totally indelible. As a result, for one thing I give Fleetwood Mac credit for emotional insight that maybe I shouldn’t, and for another thing I imagine my liking Rumours to be some kind of community experience that maybe it isn’t.

(Was the title “You Make Loving Fun” ever anything but an awkward euphemism? I mean, did people SAY that back then?)

Anyway, I understand how the blues lope of “Don’t Stop” came about but don’t care for it, and “Songbird” suffers being sandwiched between two monster songs; other than that, in damn-it-I’m-going-to-forget-context-and-just-decide-if-I’m-hitting-PLAY-again terms, I continue to goggle at how thrilled I am to have heard this.

No idea how the term “synth-pop” sounded to those who used it when it first arose. Now it’s a genre, a style with its own canon, but surely ONCE it had some flavor of “other styles of music played with synthetic instruments”? I don’t know. I didn’t get how that worked when I was 13 and so Erasure’s gospel touches confused me as much as they, perhaps subliminally, put me off.

With this record Erasure ‘did’ dance music in way that my casual exposure (a little radio, and a greatest-hits collection I found cheap) suggests they didn’t before or after. But they’ve put out a lot of records since I stopped paying attention, so I don’t know.

Actually, now that I think about it, Erasure may have been the first band I ever gave up on! The Innocents was the second record I ever bought with my own money; I liked it, but I had definitely discarded the idea of getting further Erasure albums before the next time I encountered anything even somewhat disillusioning (which would have been, I think, Adrian Belew’s Mr. Music Head).

If you don’t already know Dokaka, listen to this first.

I’ve been amazed by Dokaka for about a year but as it happens, he’s never recreated a song I was already familiar with before. I think I get it now: what takes him from ‘talented’ to ‘great’ is his single-minded refusal to change his source recording’s arrangement at all. He’s also a good interpreter, I suspect, but it’s hard to judge that on the same scale as, like, June Tabor dusting off an old trad.

Can Frank Zappa cause depression?

The last month or so of my life has been marked by near-groundless crippling misery, and listening to a lot of Frank Zappa. The Zappa came first by a little bit. Who knows? Normally I’d consider this too stupid to even speculate about but depression gives you really about all the time you need to consider lots of bad ideas. Well.

I’ve always found it strange that musicians who write songs about how being in a band really feels to them (Bright Eyes, Pavement, maybe They Might Be Giants, now Zappa) get dinged for self-indulgence on account of it more than musicians who write songs romanticizing their own lives. Criticizing apparent consensus is dicey — maybe people just have so many worse things to say about Bryan Adams than “self-indulgent” that they don’t get around to it.

Last time I wrote about Frank Zappa I was marvelling at how little he seems like a bastard in the characteristically vicious, uncharacteristically sincere “Packard Goose”. Similarly, these rambling, largely-instrumental soundtracks to movies and a stage show about the touring life, despite not calling out to me for repeated listens, have charm I wish the guy had had the will to preserve as he went on.

Also, despite my belief that instrumentals rarely make an impression on me even when I enjoy them, I distinctly recognized several tunes on Ahead Of Their Time; I just had to check the CD case to see what they WERE: “Oh No” and “The Orange County Lumber Truck”.

(Motels: Zappa’s 13th, my 14th. Meat: Zappa’s 6th, my 25th. Ahead: recorded in the 60s but released as Zappa’s 61st, shortly before his death; my 26th FZ record.)

Looking back, Angie Hart should have been the duchess of guilty pleasures (and since Frente were the THIRD band to cover “Bizarre Love Triangle” in more or less the same indiepop female-vocal style, they may not have been very original but nor could they have been blamed for some kind of new cultural contamination, as people seemed to think the cover constituted back then). But the same currents that brought this cute little band to temporary fame elevated a few too many other bands with similar surfaces, and so Frente! sounded worst, contextually speaking, right when they had their moment in the sun. Good EP. Very short songs. I just wish it was a little bit more succulent, because I have the energy to like them as a guilty pleasure, and not quite enough to like them as a lost cause.