Fighting. I don’t have a lot of fighting stories, because I don’t fight much. The reason I don’t fight much is, well, now it’s because I’m an adult (for the most part) and I just don’t conduct myself that way. However, when I wore a younger man’s shoes I could often walk around in a pretty angry state of mind, and, well, you know, shit happens. Altercations. Bad Blood. For me, my attitude toward fighting was pretty “I will if I have to” with chances of “oh hell yes I’m gonna” until my senior year in high school, when something happened that taught me to avoid physical confrontation whenever possible. I’ll get around to that story next time the slots come up “fighting” on this machine. In the interim, this week I’d like to play you a song about fighting. It’s by High On Fire and it’s pretty awesome. The opening line is, “Drive the fist into your face and blacken your eyes.”
Drinking, Fighting, F*&king, and Crying
Endless Loop: A Warm Place
Have you ever had one of those songs that gets stuck in your head for days…weeks…years? Sure you have. These are the songs that always make the cut. The songs on repeat. We all have them. I have a ton. Welcome back to Endless Loop.
“A Warm Place” by Nine Inch Nails
We’re almost two weeks removed from the school shootings in Parkland, Florida at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that left 17 dead and many more injured. And while the wound is still new, still fresh, and still deep, something feels different this time around.
The Joup Friday Album: Jean-Claude Vannier – L’Enfant Assassin Des Mouches
Hey guys, it’s scary out there. And it’s only getting scarier. So, why not get lost in an oddball record of orchestral pop?
After providing the arrangements on Serge Gainsbourg’s legendary 1971 album Histoire de Melody Nelson, French composer Jean-Claude Vannier followed up that landmark with a record of psych-tinged soundscapes that were like nothing else out there. Ignored and lost to time upon its initial release, years later the record became rumor to salivating collectors in the know, a legend, a ghost, something entirely too amazing to actually exist.
Drinking, Fighting, F*&king, and Crying
Statement: You can drink to most any music, but not all music was crafted to drink to.
Furthermore, there is some music specifically made to accompany the act of drinking and, perhaps more specifically, intoxication.
Elaboration: If I’m having a couple of beers I can toss anything on. When I’m with my friends in Chicago, the ones I grew up with, the ones I socked it out in the Schlitz Family Robinson with, then it’s a different thing, and it’s going to require a different soundtrack.
Endless Loop: Take On Me
Have you ever had one of those songs that gets stuck in your head for days…weeks…years? Sure you have. These are the songs that always make the cut. The songs on repeat. We all have them. I have a ton. Welcome back to Endless Loop.
“Take On Me” by a-ha
A plague of pestilence has fallen over my house. Well, not to be so hyperbolic, the little one got the flu, and then I caught some kind of bug too. Not that I’ve been laid out or anything, but there are some symptoms I just can’t seem to shake. Back at work, but snotty…coughing…light-headed…and a general feeling of malaise, like I’m just waiting to faint at work. But fever free!
The Joup Friday Album: Broken Social Scene – ‘You Forgot it in People’
Broken Social Scene’s You Forgot it in People
Nature is reclaiming my elderly neighbour’s house. Really rubbing his nose in it. Recently I’ve been walking around all my former haunts, and this album has been accompanying me. Of course, there’s nothing like the olfactory and auditory to fast-track you to your memory banks, but this is nostalgia illegitimately invoked since this is an album as new to me as the year. Ordinarily I try to unearth an album to share with you that I’ve lived with for a long time, but strangely, this is an album that takes me to the era it was made without me having heard it before.
Drinking, Fighting, F*&king, and Crying
And we’ve come to crying. Anyone here unable to admit to crying from time to time? More than time to time? In some reverse macho way I love crying – it’s one of the reasons I always keep a handful of albums by The Cure on hand. Crying is such a visceral, cathartic experience, it’s like nothing else, except maybe sneezing (which I used to overlook until I read Anton Lavey’s article about sneezing where he refers to it as ‘little death’).
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