zz top - degüello

Growing up, my parents maintained an impressive collection of adult-themed music that was almost always within my reach.  My mom's favorite artist was Prince, and my dad's favorite was Donna Summer.  I took me a decade to hear more than a handful of tracks on , and probably longer to realize "Bad Girls" was about prostitutes.  I had no idea what kind of music I was listening to at the time, with a few exceptions: "Let's Talk About Sex" by Salt 'n' Pepa, and "My Head's In Mississippi" by ZZ Top.

"Let's Talk About Sex" was the unfortunate case of my parents letting me listen to the song beyond the point of simple novelty of a child saying unchildish things, into the period where I retained memories, and eventually found out what the word "sex" was.  "My Head's In Mississippi" was more ZZ Top's fault than my parents'.

In hindsight, ZZ Top was always a hilariously sexual band.  Even before Eliminator and their string of terrible MTV releases, when they were a legitimate blues-rock band, their songs were laced with innuendo and crude metaphors.  But they always seemed to be just sly enough about it to evade my eight year-old consciousness.

For years, I thought a line in "Tush" went "Damn those taxes / Honey would," transforming the song into some kind of abstract political commentary that I just assumed was above my head.  I had no idea what "La Grange" was about, but it sure as hell wasn't a whorehouse.  And I was nowhere near comprehending the complex subtleties of "Pearl Necklace."  But even I understood what "Mississippi" was about: "Last night I saw a naked cowgirl / She was floating across the ceiling."

What I never realized was the same dark, confusing sexual energy that coursed through that song was in just about every other ZZ Top song I loved.

"I Thank You" is literally thanking a woman for sex.  "She Loves My Automobile" is nothing but clumsy comparisons between car parts and female anatomy.  "Hi Fi Mama" even turns playing a record into a phallic "needle in the groove" metaphor.  And so on, with damn near every song on Degüello.  And I had no idea.

The band maintains that this all comes from the lost art of rock 'n roll innuendo.  In reality, it's just a clumsy gimmick unnecessarily piled on top of some of the finest blatant blues worship this side of Led Zeppelin.

What impresses me is that even after revealing ZZ Top's cheap sexual act, the music really doesn't suffer at all.  Pretty much everything after Eliminator is still complete trash, but I don't think any less of Degüello or Tres Hombres.  On the contrary, I'm rather impressed that I'm still unpacking these lewd details so many years later.  It doesn't exactly make them sophisticated musicians, but it somehow makes them more ZZ Top than ever before.

dj 6666 - death breathing

I consider myself a pretty huge Alec Empire fan.  Destroyer was my introduction to breakcore, and also largely to electronic music in general.  From there I took in every album of his I could find, leaning more towards his Digital Hardcore period, which I absolutely devoured.  For years, I thought Live at CBGB's with Merzbow was by far the heaviest album he ever made.  But that was until I discovered Death Breathing.

Live at CBGB's is arguably the closest Alec ever came to recreating the sounds on this album, but even that doesn't come particularly close to matching it.  This is Destroyer played even faster, amplified well into the read, laced with feedback and screeching noise way more dynamic than what Merzbow was doing on CBGB's.

This is Alec at his most nihilistic, most extreme, and most disturbing.  Long gone are the childish calls for anarchy from Atari Teenage Riot--DJ 6666 exists in a world beyond hope, and the result is an endless stream of death and suffering that amounts to perhaps the heaviest album ever made.

rites of spring - end on end

Looking back on this post, I was somewhat considered with the flippant way I dismissed Rites of Spring's role in the history of emo.  They're considered the fathers of "emocore," but every time I listen to End on End, I'm struck by how similar they sound to every other decidedly non-emo mid-80's post-hardcore band I know.  Admittedly, however, it had been over a year since I last gave Rites of Spring a listen--certainly enough time for a change of heart--so I decided to revisit them and see if my opinion of these forefathers was still the same.

In short: it is.

Rites of Spring represented what amounts to a rather minor stylistic shift from hardcore punk, largely just melodic chords changes and personal lyrics.  A handful of distracters labeled their sound "emocore," and it was all downhill from there.

In hindsight, this makes absolutely no sense.  Guy Picciotto is no Dan Hoerner--his lyrics may pack an emotional punch, but his delivery here really isn't any different from his future Fugazi performances.  As for the musical changes, I can't help but personally find them a welcome, needed development of the mechanized nature of DC hardcore.  So too did Ian Mackaye himself, leading the vaunted Minor Threat frontman to from a band in the same vein, Embrace.

As dubious as its beginnings were, "emocore" eventually did succeed in becoming a true genre of its own--it simply happened eight years after Rites of Spring broke up.  These guys simply tweaked hardcore at a time when the DC scene was becoming increasingly stale and repetitive, and in response, the scene slandered them, tainting them perhaps forever as the founders of a weak, laughable derivative sound, instead of recognizing them as one of the better bands to ever come out of DC.

When we finally re-write the rock 'n roll history books, the emo chapter is gonna start with Sunny Day Real Estate.  Let Rites of Spring stay in the Dischord annals where they belong.

rubble 13: freak beat fantoms

I've never met a garage rock compilation I didn't like.  Which is pretty impressive, considering how many I've met at this point.

Nuggets, Back From the Grave, Pebbles, Where the Action Is!, Hallucinations, and now Rubble--hundreds of tracks, dozens of volumes, yet still barely scratching the surface of an almost comical amount of compilations in existence.  I keep waiting to be burnt out on them, waiting to reach that one volume too many that breaks my habit and forces me to acknowledge that most of these songs sound exactly the same.  I thought Rubble's twenty volumes would finally do me in, but here I am, thirteen volumes in, and still loving it.

So far, this compilation has been much less of a hit-or-miss than most others, especially Pebbles.  It undoubtedly helps that Rubble's volumes were released out of order, because whoa totally psychedelic or whatever.  Rubble 13 was released several years before Rubble 8, for example--a system that makes absolutely no sense, yet removes the bias that comes with listening to a volume deep in a series and assuming it's mainly leftovers.  There certainly has been a fair share of those leftovers, but nothing that tarnishes specific volumes by any means.

Unless the last few volumes take an unexpected dip in quality, this may go down as my favorite garage rock compilation of them all.  (So far.)  I'll go to war for Pebbles, and while it still may have better individual songs, Rubble is simply on another level as far as overall quality.  A fantastic comp that any garage/psychedelic fan needs to have in their collection.