Thread: Favorite Albums
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Old 2011.05.11, 06:04 PM   #40
Tokyo Jihad
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#17 and #11: Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain and Transmissions from the Satellite Heart


There’s always going to be somethings you are never going to quite understand. No matter how much research, you might not ever be able to relate. In early 1994, I was just seven years old. The world was big. On Saturday Night Live and what I’ve gleaned from the news was that a figure skater got clubbed in the knee and wouldn’t be able to ice skate. I thought it was pretty funny honestly, not that I had any stake in such topics. I remember being at my grandma’s house late one night. I changed the tv channel from the news to MTV. Maybe I’d see that new Nirvana video again! (Nirvana whom I was already a fan of by this point.) They may or may not have shown “Heart-shaped Box” that night, but the two videos I vividly remember seeing were “She Don’t Use Jelly” by The Flaming Lips and “No Rain” by Blind Melon. I was unaware of the song names, but the melodies stuck with me for years before I realized how relevant they were. The imagery stuck with me of course, a guy with bright orange hair (how cool!) singing about Vaseline and toast for some reason and another longer hair guy with no shirt singing about a girl in a bumblebee suit. What made this evening a real breakthrough for me, other than being mildly prophetic, was that this was the first time I made the connection that these songs, these images, were what a lot of people older than me liked and related to.

Around this time, Beavis and Butthead was the big thing and I’m sure I was watching around then. On Nickelodeon was another show I’d understand a lot better when I was older as well, The Adventures of Pete & Pete. Why I’m referencing these shows along with Pavement’s sophomore album, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain and The Flaming Lips’ mainstream breakthrough Transmissions from the Satellite Heart is that these shows served as my window in to the culture that fostered these albums: the early 90’s slacker culture. I was oblivious to what “mainstream” was as a concept then, I had a good grasp that there were people doing the opposite of what was normal and these shows and these bands were part of that.

Pavement is not a band I have mentioned much in this article yet, though it is supposed to be half about them! Maybe it’s understood. Pavement is the grand daddy of slacker rock. “Oh no, its another one of these...These guys need to try harder” is what Beavis & Butthead lobbed at the band, steeped in irony. In comparison with Pavement’s debut Slanted & Enchanted, the band DID try harder, at least when it comes to classic song structures. When it comes to comparing Slanted and Enchanted and Crooked Rain, it is a hair splitting affair that I’m not going to go into. Someone once said the only difference in which one you like better is which one you happened to hear first. I’ll leave it at that.

In a way, Pavement is also commenting on the music scene. They do it directly in “Cut your Hair” and “Range Life” but even in the production on the album. They didn’t retread the lo-fi sound from their debut. Kurt Cobain may have resisted (at least reportedly) sounding too accessible, but I’m sure Steven Malkmus saw it as an opporitunity to show Pavement wasn’t a one-trick pony. They could be a band that sounded as good as the bands they grew up listening to and still sound like the band that put out Slanted & Enchanted. In a way the album is a sign post of 90’s music itself. Noise rock in “Hit the Plane Down,” textural shoe gazing in “Newark Wilder,” sentimental pop rock with “Gold Soundz,” the angst in “Stop Breathing” and the alt-boom quickly approaching at the time of “Unfair.” I’ve tried hard to not seem too “Pitchfork” when talking about Pavement, but how do I hear the flannel and smell the early 90’s automobiles when I listen to Gold Soundz??

“I know a guy who sucks!” mocked Beavis about the Flaming Lips. Transmissions from the Satellite Heart is less of a newspaper of the day like Crooked Rain, but more of a diary -- a snapshot of those revelling in slacker-dom. No song sounds more so than the album’s closer, “Slow Nerve Action.” The songs evoke images of broke kids, out of school, working at the Quick Stop, doing the stupidest stuff on earth. Hell, it’s like they were singing about me 18 years in the future! Like Malkmus, Wayne Coyne always had his melodies. Maybe Coyne had to work more at it, but this is the first album where the song writing really shines. Or maybe because it’s the first time they had more than one real musician in the band. This is also where they drop their “You don’t have to be good, you just have to be loud” mantra. When they let up on their volume knobs, they allow the true charm of the album shine through. I like to think of this as their “Okie” album with songs like “Chewin the Apple of your Eye,” “Plastic Jesus,” “Superhumans” and “When yer Twenty Two.”

These albums both feature “songey” songs, but played through each band’s warped slacker, counter-culture temperament. One scoffs at conformity and the other...just likes things strange for the fun of it. I enjoy and admire the slacker era. Maybe it wasn’t even a very big movement! I was just a kid at the time and observed a few cool dudes who were into it and as I grew that mystique grew. I feel like these two albums were actually owned by my non-existant older brother and they somehow snuck in to my collection. I enjoy them simply as albums, but they also represent a mode, a fashion, I only ever viewed from the outside. Never totally understanding, but always admiring.
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Last edited by Tokyo Jihad : 2011.05.12 at 08:48 AM.
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