Lyrics Corner with Anthony Kiedis

Robert Johnson - They're Red Hot
lyrics by R. Johnson

 

Red Hot Chili Peppers - They're Red Hot 
lyrics by A. Kiedis

 

Lyrics:


Abadaba see reeeed hot
Oh it's gotta be said
Abadaba see reeeed hot
Oh it's gotta be said
I gotta girl who's long and tall
Sexy in the kitchen and a doobie in the walls, y'see
Abadaba see reeeed hot
Oh it's gotta be said
Oh it's gotta be said

Abadaba see reeeed hot
Oh it's gotta be said
Abadaba see reeeed hot
Oh it's gotta be said
Dude on a monkey's gotta baboon bed
A bump a scoop on a dip sompey overcast boom debebedebbe
Abadaba see reeeed hot
Oh it's gotta be said
Oh it's gotta be said

ABADABA SEE REEEED HOT
OH IT'S GOTTA BE SAID
Abadaba see reeeed hot
Oh it's gotta be said
She got two for a nickel, got four for a dime
Boys got moist for 400 miles
Abadaba see reeeed hot
Oh it's gotta be said
Oh it's gotta be said oh yeah

Abadaba see reeeed hot
Oh it's gotta be said
Abadaba see reeeed hot
Oh it's gotta be said
I'm gonna fuck this bad boy till he gets me silly wild
If you break 'em when they're little they drop a baby roun' the house
Abadaba see reeeed hot
Oh it's gotta be said, loud meat yeah
Oh it's gotta be said oh yeah

Lyrics Corner with Jeff

Rancid - "Warsaw"
Music and lyrics by Tim Anderson

Lyrics:

CHOOOWWASSSSSUH! NAAAAANEFFDEHH!
Peeeyesssugeneuuuu baseball bat
Issu cheewedeugh raugh shiieeeughs, Pantera baseball bat
Wookie class lectural, disilluzhuh yuhfuhshuh
Hoop dreams in warsaw -- with a baseball bat

American! Baseball bat!
Demoliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiish the discotheque!
And how many pushtuhhhhh faawuuuughbuck
Teyabainayeh stuhscooyagh Washington deck

SEPTA KEY! 1981!
Hummumumbughayayacugdh
Humbuya flush kabowIIIIIIGH uuuuugh mashalawugh
Heyo bweeshkaugh Louisville
Ayayahhhhh nowaiiiiiy
Laiyughlaiyugh economic hardship in Warsaw

American! Baseball bat!
Demoliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiish the discotheque!
And how many pushtuhhhhh faawuuuughbuck
Teyabainayehstuh scooyagh Washington deck

Hey! All alow, lisumuh deh!

Late 2011 Update: Things I Love Right Now

Hi! Here's five new things I like and five old ones:

Newish











Oldish

Making It Easy To Root For Evil

Yeah I know, this is what woke my year+ blogging slumber, but so be it.

Musical concerns aside, this is one of the worst album covers in history, right? The faux-metal thing is clearly a joke -- it has to be -- but it's a joke that's funny only to people who know that Deerhoof sound nothing like Megadeth. Which is obviously millions of people. And by "millions of people" I mean "hundreds of bloggers"

Today's Three Awesome Things, And My Super-Brief Top X List For 2009

I need to get that fuckhead from WAVVES off the top of my precious blog. How about we allow some awesomeness to ensue? Is that something you'd be interested in?

* Andrew W.K. was already a made man for "Party Hard," but this GIF (old, but I only discovered it now) ought to give him a get-out-of-jail-free card for one, if not two, felony charges:



Seriously. He can commit two murders, and he'd still be in the black, morality-wise. This is so enthralling. I can't stop watching it. It's like if the Zapruder film were fun!

* French juggernauts Phoenix have contributed three videos to the semi-improvised and semi-acoustic Les Concerts à Emporter series. "1901" is below, while equally awesome versions of "Lisztomania," "One Time Too Many" and "Long Distance Call" are elsewhere at La Blogothèque.

Phoenix - 1901 - A Take Away Show from La Blogothèque on Vimeo.

There will be at least one more mention of Phoenix before Christmas. Assuming I actually bother with a year-end list. As I said in the comments a couple posts back, I kinda feel like abandoning the listmaking process, washing my hands of it entirely, is the ultimate tribute to this particular year.

* To reiterate a comment on my recent Passion Pit post, Stereogum's list of upcoming 2010 releases. Just a cursory glance at this list is enough to place 2010 way, WAY above 2009 as far as quality goes. It's like night and day. And that list doesn't even include May's rumored Arcade Fire album!

My point: given those developments, and the objective impending awesomeness of at least 8-10 of those releases, why spend more time thinking about 2009 than absolutely necessary,? Am I right? I can check out We Were Promised Jetpacks and call it a year.

* In fact, fuck it. We're going 2005-style on this list. Off the cuff, no thought, and very little explanation:

Best Album

1) Passion Pit - Manners (best front to back)
2) Phoenix - Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix (genius songs, but sags in places)
3) The Decemberists - The Hazards of Love (most underrated)
4) Franz Ferdinand - Tonight (totally awesome & unfairly underrated)
5) The Flaming Lips - Embryonic (their best in forever)
6) Metric - Fantasies (fun poppy throwback)
7) the xx - xx (nice new-wavey debut, potential one-offs)
8) Noisettes - Wild Young Hearts (made them super-famous in the UK this year)

I can't even think of ten albums that I'd want to list. Art Brut, A.C. Newman, Trail of Dead, and Royksopp get honorable/partial mention. Tegan and Sara get an incomplete for me not listening to it yet.

Best Songs

1) "Little Secrets" by Passion Pit
2) (tie) "Lisztomania"/"1901" by Phoenix
3) "Daylight" by Matt & Kim
4) "The Heartbreak Rides" by A.C. Newman
5) "Gold Guns Girls" by Metric
6) "Two Weeks" by Grizzly Bear
7) "Don't Upset The Rhythm" by Noisettes
8) "Crystalised" by the xx
9) "Watching The Planets" by The Flaming Lips
10) "Ulysses" by Franz Ferdinand

And my annual Most Awful award should be self-explanatory.

That's it. That is literally how much effort I want to put into 2009. And now I'm done with it. Off to the airport; time to fly into 2010!

Shitgaze: The Rare Indie Rock Subgenre That Actually Is What It Says It Is

This idiot is why cocaine is bad, kids.

The only thing about indie rock more disappointing than its music is its labels. Inventing some nonsense term like "blipcore" or "nu-jungle" or whatever to describe indescribably odd music is so facile that the labels aren't even relevant. I got to the point where I could speak these terms (sort of) by realizing that you basically just smush words together in some vivid-sounding manner depending on how you feel. It's basically a bunch of arrogant crap. It's a rare pleasure to encounter a classification that actually works, that isn't just the verbal equivalent of "you got chocolate in my peanut butter."

A few minutes ago, while reading an excellent write-up of highly recommended 1000 Times Yes reviewer Christopher R. Weingarten, I was introduced to a word so fantastic that I felt compelled to share. It even gets its own paragraph. Behold:

"Shitgaze."

Holy hell, is that a fantastic term. In a sea of names whose sounds are better than their meanings, I believe this is the most accurate that I've ever come across. Every single band that qualifies as shitgaze is, in fact, very shitty! No Age? Sucks! Vivian Girls? Unlistenable! WAVVES? Goes without saying! Combine "shit" with the evocatively deprecatory -gaze suffix, and you've got maybe the biggest face-forward diss possible. It would be like inventing a subgenre for Animal Collective and Neon Indian and stuff called "overratedgaze" or "waste of fucking timegaze," and then having the label stick. I can't imagine what I'd do if that happened. [Ed. note: not true; what would happen is I would get an erection.]

Anyway, shitgaze calls out the vast majority of the laziest, most unfairly overexposed indie acts on the planet, the bands that can't help but appear in my worst-of lists. It's a real thing, and it's awesome. Sure, many of these bands could adopt the term ironically, or as a compliment, but I prefer to pretend that it's nothing but an insult. I hate the music, but I love the word. My day is better thanks to shitgaze. So there.

My Blogging Habit Has Been Blown... To Kingdom Come

Holy jalapenos in a hot pocket... it's been almost six months since I said a damn thing. The last thing I said was "Grizzly Bear is awesome," and the only activity is a gaggle of Google-ogling haters reminding me that my Hate Binky post is the #1 search result on Google for "Animal Collective sucks." Not complaining about that per se... cause hey, fight the powers that be. But I have hit blog bottom, and it smells like moth balls down here. Time to bust out the biscuits and strike up the band.

So let's see what I've been up to, culture-wise:

DINING & TRAVEL

I ate cream cheese on a bagel. I ate smoked mackerel. I ate at one of Las Vegas's finest buffets, shortly after eating the best Egg McMuffin I have ever had. I drew a picture of myself with blood pouring out of my mouth in crayon at a $30-an-entree restaurant. I ordered filet mignon shortly after drawing said picture. It was delicious. The filet mignon, not the drawing. The drawing was underdone. Those things happened over the past six months.

FILM

My Netflix queue has become a cesspool. I still haven't finished my Best Movies of 2008 post, and it's almost 2010. Not that I'll be writing a 2009 post from the look of it... I have seen exactly one film in a theater since the last time I posted anything here: the sixth Harry Potter movie. It was great, until the end, when it absolutely blew. How do you make the most devastating moment in the series totally boring and matter-of-fact? Makes me want to puke in a sorting hat.

TV

Lost. That's about it. Almost done with season two, and so far it's everything I'd hoped for. Mad Men's been awesome, but that ain't news.

MUSIC

Kind of a blah year for Teh Rock. To invert a Louis CK truism, nothing is awesome, and everyone's happy. Really? We're happy that Animal Collective and Dirty Projectors are the only things we can really hang our hats on this year? We're fine with that being the direction of music?

The only real victory of the year, musically speaking, the only true, top-to-bottom legitimate contender for Best Album of 2009, is Manners, from Cambridge's own Passion Pit. Continuing the burgeoning trend of New Order/Devo fixation, as epitomized by the likes of Cut Copy and Holy Fuck and Hot Chip, Passion Pit have brought the synth-heavy sound to bright, fun, bouncy new places. There's nothing complicated or challenging about them... I don't see PP changing the game or blazing new trails in music or anything. But I don't care. Manners is flat-out incredible from start to finish. All the words being used to describe Merriweather Post Pavilion that I hated so much? "Danceable," "universal," "accessible," and so forth? Those words describe Passion Pit.

Behold:

"To Kingdom Come"



"Little Secrets"



"The Reeling"



See? Isn't that some fun-ass fun? You know it is.

(Also of interest is Andrew Kuo's thoughts, visualized, on a show of theirs last year as well as their debut EP, Chunk of Change.)

Basically, this is the one breakout masterpiece of the year. Manners is the only front-to-back excellent album of the year; even Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix has its uncompelling moments. It'd be great to hear another breakout pop album before Christmas but I'm not holding my breath. It's not that kind of year. (Embryonic doesn't count, cause Embryonic is fucked up.)

It's bad enough that my primary musical fascination since the beginning of the summer has been late 70's/early 80's punk (Buzzcocks, Wire, Minutemen) and post-punk (Gang of Four, Mission of Burma, Pere Ubu) and neither (Elvis Costello). I've gone 30 years back in time to find something that moves me. I don't think I'll be able to do this again next year.

But until then... Double Nickels On The Dime, you are fabulous.

Cats And Dogs, Living Together

I never thought I'd say these words, but here goes:

I like Grizzly Bear's new song, "Two Weeks." I like it a LOT.



I'm as shocked by this as anyone. I'm supposed to hate that song with the flame of a thousand cases of gonorrhea. And yet I don't. What's wrong with me???

I hate Grizzly Bear as much as anyone else. They're a quartet of effete, self-serious twats who make Vampire Weekend look like the fucking Dropkick Murphys. I could rant for hours about their meritless rise to stardom, fueled by a legion of headphone-riddled professional-ish bloggers. They are exactly what's wrong with indie "rock" at the present moment, forcing me to put rock in double quotes.

Here's what I wrote about their breakthrough LP in late 2006:

Worst Album Of The Year
Grizzly Bear - Yellow House

No contest. After several tries, I remain entirely confused by Yellow House's critical success. It's a boring, meandering, unremarkable turd. Even their idea (beautiful lo-fi pop) is a piece of shit, never mind the fact that they failed to execute it. Since when did Beach Boys harmonies become the indie scene's top priority? This band sucks.

Put it this way. Car trouble caused them to miss a gig here in DC. opening for TVOTR, back in October. Their absence on that night ranks as one of the luckiest things that happened to me all year.

Ouch. Gotta love the Beach Boys slam, which seems particularly prescient prior to the preponderance of Pet Sounds preoccupation amongst pundits pertaining to Panda Bear's putrid, pallid personal project, Person Pitch. But yeah, Yellow House sucks harder than a thousand pounds of barnacles. It's as unlistenable as my alliteration is unreadable.

The impending release of Veckatimest set all my early alarms off. The reception of Merriweather Post Pavilion gave me an idea of what was to come from the blogosphere and criterati; already primed to hate Veckatimest and anyone who didn't, I planned to skip the album and the entire conversation.

Then something unexpected happened: they wrote a Wolf Parade song. That buzzing keyboard, jutting out into the main hook, would fit in nicely on Apologies To The Queen Mary. It brings a rough edge to a band that is typically soft to the point of detriment. Good thing too, because unlike every lifeless, flaccid millisecond of Yellow House, "Two Weeks" actually has some verve to it. Congratulations boys, you realized what effect music is supposed to have on people.

But even though it's fucking "Hey Jude" compared to their earlier output, it isn't nearly as effective as it could have been. It's an old chestnut of mine: when the song's natural momentum gets throttled by design, in order to draw attention to the painstaking musical design, you fucked up. Sure enough, the drum work, which is otherwise far improved, drives the energy backwards, not forwards. I feel the music being pulled back when I listen. I guess it's interesting that I can feel that so vividly, but I dunno.

I found it interesting that the premise of the video, i.e. the lugubrious facial tics, the digitally-enhanced slo-mo drag of eye blinks etc., is a digital representation of what I hear the drums doing. You are waiting impatiently for the eye to come all the way up, just like you're waiting impatiently for the song to catch up with what your brain expects.

It's just more evidence that the band's conceit, to drag music downtempo, to suck the urgency out and proceed as carefully and deliberately as possible, is what's holding "Two Weeks" back. With a more talented ear at the helm, "Two Weeks" would be a legitimate sensation, but instead it's just a likable curiosity. One need look no further than Girl Talk's amazing remix of "Knife" from a couple years back to hear how brilliant GB's songs can be when taken out of their boring-ass hands. In someone else's hands, you could be looking at seriously classic shit.

Instead, as fits GB's raison d'etre, the song has been soaked in milk. That slower pace to the vocals; their trademark, gimmicky church harmonies; the almost clunky interplay between drums (livelier than anywhere else in GB's recent work) and piano/keyboard... it's all part of the playbook. "Knife" is their mission statement; the suffocation of "Two Weeks" is just a reminder.

This is why I have the degree of bile I have for this band: it's frustrating enough for their addictive hooks to be straight-up bungled, but they are actually given MORE credit for doing it wrong than anyone else gets for doing it right! It's just amazing.

Odd that after 700 words I've spent this much time bitching about a song I ultimately like. Reminds me of my take on "My Girls," which I also enjoy freely. I think so little of AC that I've graded "My Girls" on a curve, thus crediting them for making a half-decent song more than they deserve, all while hating their guts. Likewise, the fact that "Two Weeks" is merely listenable had me sprinting to my Blogger dashboard to spill out all this internal conflict. I can't just like/dislike their music at face value, because in the end I want much more from them than this. Whatever that all means.

But ultimately, I have to hand it to them. It's a goddamn ear worm. I can't stop thinking about it, or humming along to it. They did exactly what they needed to do to win me over: something different from that thing that made me wish sterility and cancer upon them. Something that actually speaks to what I like about music. It's a legitimate pop tune. Well done.

As for the other tracks on Veckatimest... I haven't made up my mind on the entirety of it, but it's not as unpleasant an experience as Yellow House. Not by a longshot. Not only am I not bored out of my gourd, I'm actually leaning positive on it. I know one thing for certain: I won't be putting them in the "Worst Of The Year" category this year. Upset of the new century, by a country mile.

Now, of course, I have a new problem: who is left for me to bestow that dishonor upon? To destroy Freddie Mercury's sentiment... can anybody find me somebody to loathe? I never thought I'd say THESE words, either, but I sure hope Deerhoof or Clap Your Hands Say Yeah puts out new music soon...

Stuff I'm Loving Right Now

Accentuate the positive, that's what I always say...

Phoenix - "1901"



New song from a band I completely missed the boat on last time around. 2006's It's Never Been Like That is a great album. How I screwed up so royally, I don't know. In sports terms, me letting Phoenix past me in 2006 is like Carlos Beltran letting strike three go past him against the Cardinals in the NLCS. Inexcusable.

Anyway, what I've heard of Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix has sounded just as good. It's exactly what MGMT does, but they've been doing it longer and they have all the kinks worked out.

As a remedial Phoenix-is-awesome lesson, here's the audio to "Napoleon Says":





Metric - "Gimme Sympathy"



Seems like Canada hasn't been mined for all its sunny pop yet. This is the catchiest song I've heard in ages. I seriously can't stop hearing it. I'm hearing Cylon activation messages. IT'S IN THE FRAKKIN SHIP!!!!! It's incredible how jacked up I get about one teeny, tiny alteration in the synth riff, where it goes way up high towards the end of the chorus. Totally eating that one part up.

I feel like I say this a lot about a lot of bands... but why aren't chick-driven bands like Stars and Metric HUGE bands? Why isn't Gimme Sympathy all over the radio and prime-time chick shows?

Here's why: their kickass alt-rock sound is very late-90s. It only furthers my theory that Canada is just like America, but 12 years ago. Metric should be the Letters to Cleo of this era; Emily Haines should be its Kay Hanley.



Röyksopp - "Happy Up Here"



The song is pretty simple and fun. The video is fucking awesome. That's all I got to say on that.

CAWK KACAWK KACAWWWWW!

Tweet of the week goes to famous blogger Jason Kottke, who taught his infant son to perform the inimitable apparently imitable after all Gob Bluth chicken dance.

Kottke provides linkage but just in case you forgot a single occurrence of the chicken dance: