Everyone Needs an Old Guitar

Goletaville: The Soundtrack Vol. 3

Sucked Out- Superdrag
Mockingbirds- Grant Lee Buffalo
Everybody Hurts- REM
Debonair- The Afghan Whigs
Queen- Melvins
Talk Show Host- Radiohead
Down to This- Soul Coughing but this is even better!
Bull in the Heather- Sonic Youth
Down by the Water- PJ Harvey
She Don't Use Jelly- The Flaming Lips
The Distance- Cake
Live Forever- Oasis
Loser- Beck
Human Behavior- Bjork
Piggy- Nine Inch Nails
Hurt- Nine Inch Nails
Bulls on Parade- Rage Against the Machine
In the Meantime- Spacehog
Possum Kingdom- Toadies

I should maybe call this the "120 Minutes Volume". Many of the songs here remind me of that show on MTV which I watched pretty much every Sunday night in high school. 120 Minutes would always play the best videos, or at least the ones I was most interested in seeing, but they could not get a good host for that show! It was just painful. Matt Pinfield and Lewis Largent were responsible for some of the most awkward interviews and video intros ever recorded! But, that too, was part of the "alternative" rock schtick that was so popular at the time. It's "umbra" if you will, to use a recent Word of the Day.

This volume could also be "The Volume of the Riff". Many great riffs here, "Queen"(from the Melvins, the masters of the riff!), "Talk Show Host" (and here Radiohead was entering entering another phase growing creatively by leaps and bounds),"Piggy", "Possum Kingdom", all great riffs that were quite potent to my blobby teenage brain.

One of the interesting things that starts to arise when listening to these songs again are similarities I didn't notice before. Such as the songs "Possum Kingdom" and "Down by the Water", both songs which on a surface level are seemingly about the same thing, murder down by the river. Both songs are part of a long tradition of rock songs about murder at the river, see Neil Young's "Down by the River". His 1969 version, appropriately, follows from a blues and folk tradition of songs which was reflective of that era of song writing . But these songs, some 25 years later, are great examples of the evolution of pop music and the culture as a whole to an acceptance of art (or "art") to go to a darker and more psychological place, and certainly that is in part due to previous artists such as Neil. "Possum Kingdom" now takes us inside the head of the killer, which appears to be some sort of serial killer a la Silence of the Lambs. However, PJ Harvey one ups them all. Her tale of murder, takes a more poetic, symbolic, and possibly darker (depending on your interpretation) tact. She takes that common theme and turns it a little bit. Is it filicide or is it metaphor for the loss of innocence, or something else? Anyways, it would seem that pop song lyrics and themes were evolving and exploring new aspects of common themes during this time.

And, yes, "Everybody Hurts" may be the most depressing song (and video) ever written!

Goletaville: The Soundtrack Vol. 2

Sex and Candy- Marcy Playground
Fade Into You- Mazzy Star
Brick- Ben Folds Five
Runaway Train- Soul Asylum
Wonderwall- Oasis
Fake Plastic Trees- Radiohead
Lump- Presidents of the United States of America
Been Caught- Stealing- Jane's Addiction
Self Esteem- The Offspring
Daughter- Pearl Jam
Bullet with Butterfly Wings- Smashing Pumpkins
Cannonball- The Breeders
Low- Cracker
Feel the Pain- Dinosaur jr.
Novocaine for the Soul- Eels
Sink to the Bottom- Fountains of Wayne
Bad as They Seem- Hayden
Supernova- Liz Phair
Sick of Myself- Matthew Sweet

I'll just start this off by apologizing for the advertisements at the start of some of the videos. I'm trying to find videos that aren't Vevo, but sometimes that's all youtube's got or it's the best quality video. However, I will say, I should be watching more of these videos for this project. Videos were so strange! At times I wonder just how much these images and lyrics influenced me. Sometimes I think they influenced me more than I realized. For instance, during this time in high school when I was taking pictures I felt I "saw" more (or pre-visualized more) in B&W, but now I am being more attracted to color for the first time. Seeing these videos and their usage of color I think maybe I was influenced by them. It only took another 16 years for it to surface. I'm thinking particularly of the Mazzy Star, "Fade Into you" video, "Sick of Myself," "Fake Plastic Trees," and there's a couple others. It's interesting to see how the '80's usage of gels and color effects started to become more sophisticated at this time.

Random memories here are: "Low"- Cracker, it seemed Mtv would play that video a lot of early mornings as I was getting ready for school, and now it's sort of surreal that the LA landscape depicted in the video isn't so foreign to me; "Daughter"- Pearl Jam, there was a guy on my bus, the "bus clown" if you will, who would sing that song but changed the chorus to "move over butter", it was pretty funny; when "Fake Plastic Trees" came out it was Radiohead's highly anticipated follow up to "Creep" and I remember it wasn't really received that well because it was so different from what they had done before, but I thought it was great, little did we know just how different and weird and great they would become; "Self-Esteem" was totally cashing in on the "low self esteem" vibe of the music at the time, it does capture it pretty well, but it's such a Nirvana rip-off even down to the "yeeeeaaaahhh" chorus; "Brick" (yes, some songs from 1997 snuck in, oops!) reminds me of my first stint in Lawrence when I first started college, some frat guy wearing khaki shorts, Birkenstock's and a backwards hat (one with the frayed bill) pulled up next to me in a jeep at a red light once blasting that song and it just kind of summed up the place for me at that time, in other words, kind of lame, but I kinda like that song...and I'm kinda lame. Or is that just the themes within the music influencing my self perception?! Such is life.