More Than The Sum of Their Songs

There are certain albums where the album itself, in its design or concept and composition, transcends being a mere collection of songs, and becomes a work of art in it's own right. The following is collection of some of my personal favorites in no particular order:

Vitalogy: Pearl Jam

From the album's title to the encyclopedia-like booklet to the strange tracks scattered through-out the album, the whole work conveys the feeling of some sort of bizarre 19th century text-book complete with instructional phonograph record.  The illustrations in the booklet take on an unsettling quality in the context they're placed in, and the raw cut & paste composition of the random scraps and pieces makes the whole thing seem like the manifesto of a deranged inmate of an unsanitary asylum where a bespectacled doctor is smoking his pipe and trying to decide whether shock-therapy or a frontal lobotomy would be a better course of treatment.  Tracks like "Aye Davanita" and "Bugs" help establish the atmosphere of cobweb-covered, grungy creepiness, and "foxymophandlemama" may be just about the most disturbing thing I've ever heard.  

Appetite for Destruction: Guns 'N Roses
Yep, this one was the real deal.  It was the product of a certain time and place.  It came out in the middle of the whole "glam" era when everything was all posing and choreography and hair spray.  This album was a kind of backlash against all that.  It was gritty, hard rock 'n roll.  It was like the rock-bottom dregs of a whiskey bottle that people had been throwing their cigarette butts in all night.  It made everything else look fake and ridiculous by comparison.  These guys were the real thing, and the album told the story of the raw side of the rock 'n roll lifestyle.  Not to mention it was really, really good.  Every track is excellent with Slash's unmistakable and inimitable guitar style and Axl's versatile vocals and scathing lyrics.  The final track "Rocket Queen" is the perfect example of the album's driving concept.  They didn't just dub in some orgasmic sound bites.  They brought an actual groupie into the studio and...well.  It's controversial, messed up, and a little too brutally honest, but that's Appetite for destruction.  And how many album's could be forced to discard their original, controversial cover-art and come up with something just as iconic to replace it?  

Dark Side of the Moon: Pink Floyd
It's hard to pick just one Pink Floyd Album for this list.  They were the veritable masters of the "concept album."  It's a close call between this and The Wall, but in the end I have to go with Dark Side of the Moon, even though The Wall probably has more of my favorite songs on it.  No, I have to go with Dark Side of the Moon because of its tight composition and unique sound.  Nothing else sounds like Dark Side of the Moon, not even another Pink Floyd album.  It has this soft, dream-like quality about it.  It's soothing and unnerving at the same time.   Roger Waters wrote each song about the different pressures in modern life that drive people insane, and you feel just a little bit like you're going to lose your mind listening to it.  Pink Floyd is great at making music that actually...sounds like things.  The intro to "Time" sounds unmistakeably like a giant, massive clock towering over you, oppressive in its stoic indifference to human mortality.  "Money" sounds like a hedonistic orgy of excess amid piles and piles of cash.  I won't get into the whole "Wizard of Oz" thing; it's probably nothing more than a coincidence or synchronicity.  But if someone were crazy enough to try and pull something like that off, it would be Pink Floyd.    

Home: The Dixie Chicks
This might seem like a strange entry on the list, but there are really very few good solid country albums.  Most of them are just a random collection of songs with no real theme or style holding it all together.  In the world of country music Home is almost a concept album.  It has a very stripped-down bare bones style to the sound that runs through the whole album.  It has the charm of sounding like a family gathered around a campfire singing songs; a really talented family.  It's just basic old school, down home, country music.  The songs are great from start to finish, from the catchy "Long Time Gone" to the haunting "Top of the World."  It's unfortunate that their country music careers got sidetracked over their comments concerning the Iraq war.  Their name is unmentionable in certain country music circles even today.  But people's opinion of their political views really should have no bearing on their evalution of their musical talent.   

Bat Out of Hell: Meat Loaf
If you haven't heard this album, you're really missing something.  The term "Rock Opera" gets thrown around, but nothing quite captures the essence of the idea like Bat Out of Hell.  The lyrics are almost deliberately cheesy, bordering on the ridiculous, and yet it's all so damn...uplifting.  You find yourself swept away by it all in spite of your better judgment,  and that's kind of the whole point and the real achievement of the album.  Even after listening to it like a million times, it's hard to say whether there's a single storyline here or just a bunch of separate love songs.  I like to think it's all one big story.  It's a kind of tongue-in-cheek treatment of the male fear of commitment and the restless yearning for conquest that finally gives way to tenderness and true love.  It's epic musically and in its concept.  There are only a few things, books, movies, ect. that I would describe as "the great things in life" with the hope that you would know what I'm talking about.  Bat Out of Hell is one of those things.

Melancholy & the Infinite Sadness: The Smashing Pumpkins
Much like Vitalogy, Melancholy & the Infinite Sadness is held together more by a style than a concept.  There's something about The Smashing Pumpkins' music that conjures up images and memories from early childhood.  It's that brief glimpse of the rocking horse in the sunbeam or those colored blocks you used to play with.  It's that time you chased fireflies with the neighbor girl or you cried because you were lost in the dark.  It's the illustration of the fairy god-mother in your book of bed time stories that lulled you to sleep when your hair was still wet from taking a bath.  Nowhere is this feeling more evident than Melancholy & the Infinite Sadness.  This is definitely the band's masterpiece; the full achievement of their signature sound.  As a double album, it's overflowing with creative energy.  Nearly every one of it's 28 tracks is indispensable.  As long as it is, I can listen to the whole thing through without growing restless or bored with it.  Time slips away as I'm lulled into it's unique dream.

This is hardly a comprehensive list, and I could probably go on.  But I think that's enough for now.  I might do another one of these lists some time.  I'll see what the response is to this one.  It might read as a collection of over-enthusiastic plugs to some people, but whatever.  This is my blog, and if I can't occasionally use it as a platform to ramble on about the things I love, then really...what's the point?                         

When Did Thomas Edison Become the Bad Guy?

Sometimes I feel like there's a meeting I missed, like there's some committee that gets together in the middle of the night and makes changes to the culture.  Everyone else seems to be instantly on board with these changes.  No one else seems thrown or confused by them.  In fact, sometimes I wonder if anyone else even notices that a change has happened.  I never hear anyone ever mention it.  There just seems to be this unspoken understanding that the thing is different now.  If I were living in the world of 1984, I'd be the bewildered guy wandering through the crowd asking, "But weren't we just at war with Eurasia?", that is until the Thought Police hauled me away and put a rat cage on my head and showed me the error of my ways.

For instance, I can't remember the first time I went into a restaurant and  a "server" took my order, but I definitely remember that they used to be called "waiters" and "waitresses."  I understand the reason for the change in terminology, obviously, the whole politically correct agenda behind it all.  I just don't know when this was decided or by whom.  There was never any big announcement on TV or in the town square where someone got up on stage and declared, "Henceforth, they shall be called 'servers.'  Woe be unto them who use the gender specific job title....Oh yeah, and by the way, we're getting rid of 'actress' altogether."  No, it all just seemed to happen overnight, and everyone fell right in step with it as though the job had never been called anything other than 'server'.

Another odd example I've noticed is "they" changed the "B.C/A.D." dating standard to "B.C.E/C.E.", which means "Before the Common Era" and "The Common Era" respectively.  What the heck is the "Common Era"?  Common to what?  The years haven't changed.  We're still dating everything from the same moment in history.  Isn't it disingenuous to discard the religious references in name but to keep them in number? At least when the French Revolution threw God out the window they started over with year one.  So far, I've only heard this one on TV and it seems confined to academic circles, but what do I know?  When the date comes up in casual conversation, people rarely feel the need to specify, "that's 2010 Anno Domini...in the year of our blessed Lord.  Amen."  So for all I know, the change might already be widespread in the public consciousness.  But I doubt it.  Even the world of historical TV documentaries seems to be struggling with this one.  I think I caught one of them using good old "B.C." the other day.  Maybe the secret midnight committee got together and decided, "This one just isn't catching on." 

Even the news often makes me feel like I've been left in the dust.  It used to be that the anchorman would come on at six, tell you what was happening in the world, and leave it to you and your friends to scratch your head over the human condition.  Now, with the proliferation of the 24 hour news channels, I constantly feel like I've walked into a room in the middle of a conversation.  They've already moved on to speculating about the meaning and the impact of such & such, and I still have no idea what they're talking about.  A few years back, I heard people gossiping and grumbling about Rev. Jeremiah Wright for a month before I even had the slightest idea who the man was and what he had said to get people so worked up.

The process sometimes even extends to history itself, and there they even have a name for it.  They call it "Revisionist History."  The problem with this term is that it's used indiscriminately.  On the one hand, it's used as a pejorative term, meaning someone who distorts or misrepresents the facts of history in order to promote a specific agenda.  On the other hand, it's used again as a pejorative term, but this time meaning someone who has brought new facts to light that challenge a common, established, and traditional view of a historical subject.  People are rarely willingly to admit that they're using the term in this second sense, but I have actually seen a few cases.  Mostly the term just gets thrown around as a vague accusation in cases of historical disagreement.  The problem is, watching these arguments from the sidelines, the double meaning makes it easy to get confused and awfully hard to keep score.

I remember Christopher Columbus was an early target.  Some time in the early 1990's some nebulous powers-that-be seemed dead set on burying this man's reputation.  Some people objected to this, calling it "revisionist history."  But the nature of the objection wasn't always clear.  Some people meant, "They're making stuff up to make Columbus sound bad."  Then there were other people who meant, "Columbus is a revered American icon and you're ruining his image by bringing up facts that make him look bad.  I'm going to stick my fingers in my ears so that I don't have to hear about it...la-la-la-la."  Then, of course, there was a lot of grey area between these two viewpoints, where people we're just pissed off about the whole thing, but they really hadn't thought out why.

But somewhere in all this crossfire, I get to feeling like I can't keep track of what the truth is.  You grow up hearing one thing about history and then the secret midnight committee has another one of their damn meetings, and the next day everyone's saying, "Nope, it actually happened like this."  What are you supposed to believe?  Is this new information any more reliable than the old information?  You certainly can't dig up Christopher Columbus and ask him if he really chopped off an Indian's hand. 

For instance, not to sound like some lunatic fringe, holocaust denier, but until about 8 years ago I had never heard about these Japanese Internment Camps that they had in America during World War II.  I never learned about it in school.  I never heard anyone talk about it.  This information just seemed like it popped up out of nowhere, and everyone acted like it had been common knowledge forever.  I'm not saying it didn't happen; I'm just wondering why I never heard of it.  Then, of course, there's Thomas Edison.  When I grew up, he was the symbol of the American dream, a genius and a great man.  Now, it appears he stole all of his ideas, destroyed brilliant careers, engaged in all kinds of illegal acts, and probably strangled puppies because he didn't like the way they wagged their tails.  

There are two possibilities, and sometimes it's hard to tell which side of the line Occam's Razor falls on.  One, people of the past were ignorant, unenlightened, bigoted, and apparently willing to credit Paul Revere with feats of daring and bravery solely because of the rhyming potential of his name.  Or two, someone is fabricating a bunch of elaborate smear campaigns to push an agenda or cause trouble or just to let people know they're too original and clever to be impressed by the conventional image of Thomas Edison.  I guess it all comes down to the real question:  Who are these people, and where are they holding their damn meetings?