An Embearrassing Admission: "Royals" by Lordes

Soooooo.....there are many points in life where we stand humbled.  Humiliated.  These are not times to be reveled in.  We would like to ignore them.  Bury them away when they occur as we believe we have done with past humiliations.   I could give you a load of examples ranging from my discoveries that I had no athletic gifts, to my total and continuing lack of understanding of women and on to numerous mistakes academically and professionally.

But you always think when these untoward events and self realizations occur that it will be the last one. That you have suffered through the last embarrassing event or self realization. That certainly by now you are comfortable in your own skin.  Certainly at 51 you have a reasonable idea who you are, what your tastes are and personal limitations. I am self proud, obnoxious music snob. I am disdainful of the taste makers but even more disdainful of the unwashed masses. I have recently attempted to grab on to something in EDM (Eectronic Dance Music) but no matter what I listened to I found that I could simply not "get there from here". That is ok. I tried. I know EDM is cool and that is where most of the young geniuses are working but... I cannot do it. I had the same experience with Rap and Hip-Hop years ago. Shit happens and it allows me to be critical of what is current. What is hip. Tre music I listen to is not hip. It is just good.  Generally in the new music would this attitude has served me well. It has never been easier for talent to put to music out and make it available. The hard part is figuring out what is good.  

There are things we know are not good. Whatever is on the billboard top ten chart is not good. These  are farts in the musical windstorm. Pap for the masses. They are to be endured when one finds oneself for some sad reason in a mall, at a GAP or Old Navy Store.  They don't even play this crap in the Starbucks (leave your gun at home).  Right now perched on top in the one and two spots are Miley Cyrus and Katy Perry.  Nuffield said. I too proudly did not know what "twerking" is or was and now sadly I do. Madonna arguably mattered. These chicks don't. They are produced and managed to be famous, not to make lasting music. Watching a girl who can't dance dress in pedophile chic and engage in simulated sex (and someone needs to tell her she can dance) is not music and Katy Perry is not much more talented but at least understands her dance limitations. This is the natural extension of Brittany. Ex Disney kids, pretty and well managed stoking up the machine. Here today, rehab tomorrow, gone the next day. I hate this shit.

Put Katy and Miley at 1 and 2 are not the problem.  The problem is number 3.  I blame Bob Lefsetz...lefsetz.com for telling me about this track.  Lefsetz os one of those filters that allows me to find some good music.  He writes on the industry and has different tastes than me but is age appropriate and seems like a smart little guy.  So several weeks ago  he does a post comparing Katy Perry, Paul Mc Cartneys new single and…”Royals” by… Lorde.

http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2013/09/03/roar/

Which made me listen to it on you tube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFasFq4GJYM

I immediately dismissed it.  All loops.  No guitar.  All production.  Then he sent me again there last week and I listened again, and I couldn’t stop.  This  gal can really sing and she rights tight and hooky.  Any I have listened to it probably 100 times over the last three or four days and I am shamed and embarrassed but it is that good.  And it is number 3 on Billboard which is just… just the worst thing in the world.  Then through the miracle of Spottify I can listen to the rest of the limited catalogue on youtube and Spottify.  Check out the video for “Tennis”.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8Ymd-OCucs&list=RD02LFasFq4GJYM

There is something about the lyrics.  There is something about her.  I don’t picture her  getting naked and humping her ass on stage for a few more clicks.  I don’t sense the production machine.  Great lyrics, humable hooks and a totally embarrassed music snob but this great and you have probably heard it a 100 times.  I am slow to get to this prom.

But everybody's like:

Crystal

Maybach

Diamonds on your timepiece

Jet planes

Islands

Tigers on a gold leash

We don't care, we aren't caught up in your love affair

And we'll never be royals (royals)

It don't run in our blood

That kind of lux just ain't for us, we crave a different kind of buzz

Let me be your ruler (ruler)

You can call me queen bee

And baby I'll rule, I'll rule, I'll rule, I'll rule

Let me live that fantasy

Warren Zevon, Ten Years Gone

She's so many women

He can't find the one who was his friend

He's hanging on to half a heart

But he can't have the restless part

So he tells her to hasten down the wind

Sooooo…. Warren Zevon.  He has been dead 10 years as of September 7th.  That… is a day that will live in infamy. I never really knew what to do with him.  I knew he was west coast and was buddies with Jackson Brown and Waddy Wachtel and the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt and… everyone.

I knew “Werewolves of London” in all of its ubiquitousness.  It was...everywhere and it was funny… and annpying… and brilliant… and everywhere.  I was aware that he had a lof interesting songs.  In college I would blast “Lawyers, Guns and Money” and “I’ll Sleep When I am Dead”.  He was biting and ironic and could really pound a phrase and he made me smile but other than “Excitable Boy” I did not feel the need tp buy a lot of his music.

My eyes are stapled open wide,

As I lay down on my side.

I am bouncing off these walls.

As I focus on the clock,

Time stands still, but I cannot.

I should strap myself in bed.

I guess I'll sleep when I am dead.

But over the years he crept into my consciousness.

I found out he wrote “Hasten Down The Wind”.  I truly became obsessed with the song “French Inhaler”

How're you going to make your way in the world

When you weren't cut out for working?

When your fingers are slender and frail

How're you going to get around in this sleazy bedroom town

If you don't put yourself up for sale?

but “Bad Luck Streak In Dancing School” though a clever title with some awesome people on it (Springsteen and T-Bone Burnett)  it did not impress.. other than the haunting “Play It All Night Long”,

I'm going down to the Dew Drop Inn

See if I can drink enough

There ain't much to country living

Sweat, piss, jizz and blood

"Sweet home Alabama"

Play that dead band's song

Turn those speakers up full blast

Play it all night long

“The Envoy” released in 1982… lost me completely.  It was only later I found he was losing himself as well. In 1987 he comes back and with some help from REM releases “Sentimental Hygene” for my law school graduation containing the unstoppable…”Boom Boom Mancini”. one of the best boxing songs….ever.

Hurry home early hurry on home

Boom Boom Mancini's fighting Bobby Chacon

Hurry home early hurry on home

Boom Boom Mancini's fighting Bobby Chacon

Lyrics from eLyrics.net

“Transverse City” in 89 woul have allowed him to be forgotten by me again, but for the song “Splendid Isolation”.  “Mr. Bad Example” in in 1991 allowed me to forget him...again.  In 2009 he came back with “Mutineer” and it was all good, rollicking and smart but crowned by “The Indifference of Heaven”.

Time marches on

Time stands still

Time on my hands, time to kill

Blood on my hands

And my hands in the till

Down at the 7-11

Gentle rain falls on me

And all life folds back into the sea

We contemplate eternity

Beneath the vast indifference of Heaven

The frightiningly named “Life Will Kill You” gave us nothing but “My Shits Fucked Up”.  He finished his studio albums with “The WInd” which was uneven and brilliant and heartbeaking as he was dying.

But when you go back and read the lyrics.  The lyrics were always tight and brilliant.  Perfect and brilliant.  Brilliant and brilliant. Everyone admired the guys brilliance.  So I read the lyrics.  His son came out with a book of them shortly after his death and I was wowed all over again, and again.  So I went out and bought his first wife’s biography of him, “I’ll Sleep When I Am Dead (The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon).  And it was great and depressing.  If you love the west coast music scene of the last 30 years it is classic.  His ex wife Crystal did not write the book so much as just put together paragraphs by other people ranging from… everyone who ever knew him.  Relatives, girlfriends, musicians, singers, songwriters, agents, producers… all vaguley chronological.  And it is worth reading.

It is amazing as you read this… what a scared, arrogant, unhappy, brilliant, admired, insecure bastard he was.  When concerned about music he abused his women, serially.  He was a hopeless alcoholic, until he straightened himself out and had several years of revered sobriety before diving back in. Devestating to read.  Painful but true and realistically he could not live through it.  Happy for his friends success.  Bitter that he never got rich from his talent and always suspicious that he was a fake.  More than anything else reading the book as he struggled with people and music and alcohol and drugs to find pleasure that his life was the portrait of a godless life and the emptiness he found in that life ate him up, and those around him.  But God he could write.

Now, at this point in my life, his albums are a soundtrack for my life and perhaps all of ours.  Not always a happy sound track but a portrait of searching and sadness which resonates with anyone who  is lucky enough to remain living.  He was a beautiful, unhappy, sad mess.  I hope that he sleep peacefully now that his dead, but I suspect whether in heaven or hell he is making some righteous noise.  

I miss him or even more I miss the idea of him.  Sometimes the world needs reckless, self destructive beauty.  

But don't it make you want to rock and roll

All night long

Mohammed's Radio

I heard somebody singing sweet and soulful

On the radio, Mohammed's Radio

Shadows are fallin' and I'm runnin' out of breath

Keep me in your heart for a while

If I leave you it doesn't mean I love you any less

Keep me in your heart for a while