Being an internet refuge for Graeme McMillan
And while I’m talking about (a) nostalgia, (b) Matthew Sweet and (c) great opening tracks to albums, the quasi-glam stomp of “Dinosaur Act” was the song that almost made me learn to play the guitar, way back when, just because of all the feedback noodling in the background.
(And, again: Matthew Sweet loves his harmonies. Gotta appreciate that.)
Matthew Sweet’s Girlfriend was a massively important album for me in… 1993, I think? When I started art school, anyway. I was just discovering bands like Big Star and the like, and “power pop” as a genre, and “Divine Intervention” – despite its religious theme (Hardly subtle: “Does He love us/Does He love us/Does He love us/Does He love us?” it goes at one point, “I look around/And all I see is destruction/Guess we’re counting on His/Divine intervention”) – blew my mind with its arrangement, as much as anything. The harmonies! The guitars! And, more than anything, that opening, which remains one of my favorite album openings ever (especially if listening on headphones, to get the full effect of the switch from right to left channels). This is just a great pop song, and was enough to convince me to follow Sweet’s music for at least two albums longer than I should’ve.
The Bangles’ “Walk Like an Egyptian” is one of those songs you grow up with and never really think about; it’s catchy, it’s dumb and you sing along without giving it any real thought. But I’ll admit it: “All the school kids so sick of books/They like the punk and the metal bands” is oddly one of my favorite pop lyrics ever.
And another admission: I still have a massive crush on Susanna Hoffs in this video, especially between 2:45-2:55. Swoon.
Also, because it’s wonderful (and maybe my favorite version of the song), here’re the Puppini Sisters:
I am, again, horribly behind with keeping vaguely current with 366 Songs. So, again, here’s lots of music with even less writing than usual.
Billy Bragg is the sound of the 1980s for me; the late ’80s, admittedly, like, maybe 1988, ’89? But he was someone that my older sister was into for awhile, and so I heard a lot of his stuff and it sunk into me without my realizing it. I got into him for myself, years later, when he released his Don’t Try This At Home album, and worked backwards. When I heard this song again, back then, and actually listened to the lyrics for the first time, I realized that this was the kind of awkward, stumbling poetry that I wished I could write. “If your bed is wet/I will dry your tears,” indeed.
Classic X-Men feels like it was the first comic that I actually tried to collect, as opposed to just pick up and keep track of (The second was DC’s Justice League/Justice League International). I was there for the first issue! I could get in on the ground floor! I remember my excitement as I picked up the first issue – the first couple of issues, I think, I’m pretty sure the first two were out by the time I managed to get up to the city and buy them – and thought “Now I’ll be able to catch up on everything!” There’s something so amazingly nostalgic for me, looking at the above cover, now. I was 11 years old, and this was stupidly exciting for me.
No joke, it’s kind of a thrill to look at the sidebar on Time Magazine’s Entertainment blog and see your story at #6 of the top 10 stories, especially considering I’ve only been writing there for three weeks.
(The story is here, by the way.)
It’s been years since I’ve really listened to “Glory Box,” probably the biggest hit from Portishead’s first album Dummy; it was one of those songs that I was convinced I had over-heard, that I was too used to from listening to the album endlessly when it came out, and then the single came out and it was everywhere… But it’s playing in the cafe that I’m sitting in right now, and it sounds much sharper, much less bloated and self-obsessed than I remembered it. It’s as if I had replaced the original – with Beth Gibbons’ voice cracking with emotion and the retro guitar twanging shamelessly, not quite a cliche just yet, months and countless rip-offs yet to come – with some idea of what it sounded like.
There are some songs that I wish I could hear for the first time all the time; relive the thrill of that first listen, the zigging when I expected a zag, or whatever, and be surprised and impressed every single time. This is definitely one of them; it was worth ignoring the song for years to hear it again as if it was, if not the first, then surely not the one hundredth, time.
This is Warren Ellis, talking about comments sections on websites:
Which brings up another thing, and I’m not going to ascribe it to Charlie, who is a nice man, but it’s real – sometimes, your commenters, by which you often mean your audience and your readership, are really fucking annoying, and sometimes you don’t like them. Which you can’t say. Who’s going to pick up another book by a writer who says “My readers are awful pieces of shit and I can think of twenty of them, right off the bat, who should be drowned in hot pig blubber”? Nobody. “My audience are all complete pissflaps. Have you read my website comments threads? Utter inane gibberish. I would like to train a giant horse to fuck out all their eyes.” Who’s going to say that?
I guarantee you that even the sweetest and kindest writer has thought that exact thought more than once in their lives. And its corollary: “Oh god, my readers are such horrible demented shitbags, what am I doing so wrong that I attract them all to me?”
I have grown to hate comments sections on blogs.
I didn’t used to be like that; I used to love them, love seeing the conversations and different opinions and alternative viewpoints to the ones in the main piece, and so on. But somewhere along the way – and my experience at io9 definitely feeds into this, hugely – I realized that comments sections (and message boards in general, for that point) have become just suckholes of in-jokes, arguments and, most depressingly, people spoiling for fights. Social media has opened up space for conversation elsewhere that’s more democratic and also less likely to end up with people feeling as if they have something to prove, and I think that has weirdly killed off the viability of the comments section as was.
But maybe I’m insane.
I have one of the new iPads. For both my email and Twitter, I’m able to talk into it and get speech to text (with Dragonfly voice-recognition software). It’s become more and more efficacious, which is great and convenient. If you start to think — one of the only barriers of people publishing is people have to type. What if that goes away? Just a huge explosion. Instead of going on the phone and talking about prom night, we’re either at or near a place where they can speak it in their phone and it’ll appear in text. What if people don’t have to type to get it into there? Does that make what we do more or less valuable? There’s more for us to sift through. But we’re the signal in the noise, and it’ll make us more valuable. I’m fairly democratic in my impulses. I don’t want more crap out there, but I think the fact that I need to type my thoughts means I share less of them.
– New York Times journalist, David Carr.
(I have to admit, I have thought about speech recognition software as a way to speed up my writing process many times. I am terrible at typing, somewhat ironically for a professional writer; what keeps me away from using any kind of speech recognition is the fact that I’m convinced my accent will prove so confusing to it that I’ll likely spend more time correcting transcription errors.)
The most amazing and telltale thing about the conversation is not Jason Frazer’s nerve in initiating it, but his blase assumption that it would be alright. It’s another sign of how deeply he, and huge parts of the modern entertainment world, have internalized a set of values in which all parts of the business – and in particular the artists, the tabloids and the paparazzi – have more in common with each other than anyone else outside their world, and in which, despite occasional tensions, they recognize their common interests. It’s a world of we’re all in this together and a world of it’s all just a game, isn’t it? A world of gloss and desperation where fame and money are the only lubricants, and the only goals. In this new pop world, the tabloids and the paparazzi are no longer an ancillary nuisance that comes with success, they are your co-workers in the celebrity corporation, and you are expected to recognize and acknowledge them as such.
– Chris Heath, from Feel: Robbie Williams.
There’s a comic book editor who shall remain unnamed to avoid his seemingly unstoppable Google search who, on social media and message boards and comment threads and now, it seems, in print, can’t stop himself from baiting comic journalists and critics who’ve said anything other than blanket plaudits; he’ll jump in, perceiving personal slights where there aren’t any and throwing out award-winning examples of passive aggression in response, instead of actually addressing what’s being said (I’ve been the… target, which isn’t really the right word, of his ire more than once, but I generally fail to get mad enough, which I think ruins it slightly for him).
The oddest thing about him, though, is his insistence when challenged on his behavior that he’s just having fun and people should stop taking him so seriously. Every time I see that, I think that he’s misjudged the room, so to speak; that what he thinks is happening and what is actually happening are so amazingly different that there’s something wrong, somewhere. Then, this weekend, I read the above passage and thought, Ohhhhh. That’s what he’s thinking.