They require a lot more thought before they’re ready. So I’m going to go in a totally different direction.
This post will be a discussion of slightly-to-very embarrassing bands I love. It’s come to my attention that I might have exceptional taste in popular media. If I don’t, well you can go get fucked. This is my blog &c.
Let’s talk music. I have some terribly embarrassing and terribly acceptable taste in music. Let’s start with the acceptable.
MC5, The Stooges, Velvets, Etc.
Okay, they’re great. It’s not all that much fun or all that revealing of me to say so. They stayed consistently hard as shit throughout their recording careers. My dad had a copy of “Kick Out the Jams” that was the 2nd most important record I got from him, immediately behind the second Led Zeppelin album. Well, third behind the copy of Foreigner’s “We Built This City (On Rock and Roll)”.
Flipper.
I would like to thank my college friend, Jacob, for introducing me to this band. I can’t begin to do justice to how amazing this band really is. Me, Kurt Cobain, and someone who actually liked UK Two-step Garage for awhile, agree on a “post-punk” band. Their only real album is also out-of-print, which is frequently (though not always) a very good clue that a band rocks really hard.
Bad Brains.
I seriously think Rock For Light is what you hear by default when you get your ass kicked. It’s like Michael the Archangel cues up the tape or something. Plus they’re black, which makes them cooler. Surprise surprise, they were cooler before they got old and moved to New York where they made some particularly-famous-now Jewish assholes want to make hardcore.
Black Flag.
They rock pretty fucking hard. Not as hard as Bad Brains, but that’s sort of like “This guy I know is a badass, but I bet he couldn’t kick Charles Bronson’s ass.” “Damaged” is the only album post Dez Cadena singing that’s worth owning. Like, ever. Greg Ginn wrote all the words worth hearing. Please remember that before you all rush out to pay Hank Rollins for his friendship with Ian MacKaye.
Minor Threat.
More embarrassing than Black Flag just because they are affiliated with Straight Edge Hardcore. By “affiliated,” I mean “some stupid kids decided to take something way too literally.” Ian MacKaye is probably not as interesting a songwriter as Greg Ginn.
All that said, I don’t want to discourage stupid kids. Most pretty awesome things are the result of stupid kids taking something way too far. But seriously. The vegan assholes who worship at this altar conveniently missed the videos upon videos of MacKaye and company slugging 2 liters of everyone’s favorite cocoa derivative to get ampd up for shows, and so on and so forth. This music also sounds like beating people up.
Jawbreaker.
As far as I can tell, this is where that awful “Screamo,” “Post-hardcore” or whatever they’re calling bad punk with expensive haircuts and poorly pitch-corrected vocals now. Which is not to saw Jawbreaker sucks. They rock really fucking hard. Imagine if those awful “Rain . . . / . . . Pain” rhymes really did make you ache deep down thinking about the girl you took to your Junior prom, or the girl you dropped out and lost through the warping butt-end of a 40, and so on. They toured a lot, and inspired a lot of really bad music. Please don’t judge them for it. While we’re talking about bands that don’t deserve your loathing despite influencing awful music . . .
Nirvana.
This band is scary because they totally were the kids up the street who always smelled like either really cheap pot or burning garbage. They showed me Rambo II once when I was like 10. At any rate, the Nirvana home videos show us a frighteningly normal set of three guys who just happened to be in a really good band with a fucking hot lead singer. This is, again, embarrassing because they are associated with a lot of bad music. Sonic Youth, for example, sucks in a big way. I always feel like I’m on the outside of an elaborate joke when people talk about liking them. They also paved the way for bands like Weezer and “The Grunge REO Speedwagon,” Smashing Pumpkins.
Led Zeppelin.
I would not listen to guitar-based rock without the second Led Zeppelin album, and I suspect many “grunge” kids/musicians feel the same. Before my father introduced me to them, I was listening to frighteningly embarrassing music. Really embarrassing. My dad listened to them a lot, but he always had awful taste in Zeppelin. I obviously didn’t have a name for it at the time, but I could hear what I now know was overproduction on what I now know is “Physical Graffiti” (“Kashmir,” in particular) when I was in sixth grade. I shit you not. There was something visceral in “Communications Breakdown” and “Whole Lotta Love” that just felt right, and faded as the tapes progressed chronologically. I know someone who paid a stripper with falsies to dance to “Whole Lotta Love,” mostly because he/his friends didn’t think she could.
Sebadoh.
It’s neutered early Sub Pop. I’ll be presumptuous and assume you’ve heard Mudhoney’s “Superfuzz Big Muff.” If you haven’t, go do that now. Again, out-of-print last I heard. Sorry.
Sebadoh is like that, except it’s crying because all the requests/demands to have sex with you because you’re in a rock band from the aforementioned Mudhoney album didn’t work. This band makes you grow a vulva.
Beat Happening.
More Sub Pop-type stuff, although technically affiliated with the infinitely-cooler K Records. It’s all semi-incompetent crap that periodically turns out a gem, largely as a result of keeping a Tascam Portastudio running while a bunch of burnouts smoke pot and play guitar/bang on things. Somehow, this turns out a fair bit of listenable, and even good, music. I can’t figure it out, either.
Every Band Steve Albini Has Ever Been in.
Steve Albini, by definition, plays and records the kind of music my mom wouldn’t let me listen to. It’s everything gorgeous about punk rock combined with everything awesome about metal. I’ll confess to borderline fanboy status, although I’m trying to develop digital snobbery in response to his, among others’, analog snobbery.
Casiotone For The Painfully Alone.
It’s pussy-ass music over slow, slow breaks. Frequently, the said breaks are the preset beats from old Casio keyboards. It is occasionally gorgeous, but frequently mediocre.
The Mountain Goats.
It’s a guy with a guitar who used to record into the mic in on a boombox, and shouldn’t have stopped doing that. Now, he makes quirky, comfortable pop music with real production values, sort of like what happened when Pavement stopped making “indie” albums. He started really recording and working with other musicians, and the immediacy, or perhaps the lack of pretension, or something, vanished. It feels premeditated, belabored, and nowhere near as ephemeral. I’m probably talking about overproduction again. But when I hear “overproduced,” I hear Jimmy Page ca. The Song Remains The Same or Axl Rose ca. Chinese Democracy’s excesses. By contrast, The Mountain Goats aren’t so bad, or are even tasteful. Then I remember that George Jones doesn’t make your grandfather less a drunk.
Italo-Disco, as a genre.
There was no “disco sucks” backlash in Western Europe, and the US dollar was trading particularly well against several Western European currencies in the early eighties. So, what is the correct response to a surge in interest (and price) in Disco in Western Europe? You make your own, of course. Italo-Disco is the result. How does it sound? While it’s terribly predictable, that’s exactly the point. It sounds like something a gay Italian man would want to get all coked up and dance with another all coked up gay Italian man while listening to. It is also entirely synthesized, which is probably what it will be remembered for. No bass guitars, no pianos, all synthesizers, cheesy drum machines, and Gay As All Hell. This is the direct precursor to what people call House Music nowadays.
To paraphrase The KLF’s Manual, there are no emotions you can’t experience on a dancefloor. The words are complete gibberish, but it doesn’t matter. What does matter is the dull “thud” of the analog drum and the “snap” of the synthesized handclap with the squishy, squirmy sounds that were just a few years from being called “acid house” and providing a soundtrack to, uh, gay black men getting all coked up and dancing together in Chicago.
I know this stuff is cool to like now what with “electroclash” going out and people desperately needing a new ‘retro’ fad to latch onto, but this stuff seriously makes me want to dance and drink 6 dollar cocktails.
Joy Division.
Yeah, I said it. “Unknown Pleasures” is all that’s worth your time. They suck, and this album was made by the production, which makes it even further hilarious than it already is. New Order is in here, too.
Honorable Mentions.
Defiance, Ohio, The Ghost Mice, This Bike is a Pipe Bomb, etc. The anarchist-leftist vagaries of this crap hit too close to home for me to completely ignore it, so I need to listen to it from time to time. Then, I listen a little closer, realize it sucks, then realize I sort of like it.
I would like to remind you; This is a list of embarrassing music I LIKE. Bad music, or music other people like en masse that I hate, would take a really long time to list.
