Lost's Season Finale

The big twist.  I so called it.  Just saying. 

Don't Quote Me Boy, Cause I Ain't Said Shit

Sorry about the lack of activity lately. My computer has been acting up, and apparently needs a new hard drive to be content.

What I've been up to:
Reading- books about Shakespeare, specifically Stephen Greenblat's "Will In The World" and Peter Ackroyd's "Shakespeare: The Biography". I need to finish the book "Mansion on the Hill", which is about the corporate incursion into rock music. I got distracted by the Shakespeare books and need to pick this one back up.
Watching- The Wire on DVD, the season finales of 3o Rock, Lost (My bold prediction is that Locke is in the coffin. I'd almost be willing to bet on it) and The Office (fantastic season finale- so much to love about it, but I'd single out another sighting of the great Mose Schrute and Dwight convincing the new HR woman that Kevin is retarded), the movies "Iron Man" (good not great) and "Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian" (way too long, and there was no need to invent scenes that aren't in the books to pad out the running time past the 2 hour mark) and "Clueless" in chunks on TBS. That movie is so much better than it should be.
Listening- A lot of The Pogues and Shane McGowan, the Mobb Deep song "Shook Ones Part II", which is an old song that I've been captivated by lately, the new Gnarls Barkley and Atmosphere albums, Cool Calm Pete's album "Lost", and while I was doing some editing work I couldn't stop listening to Oasis collections (specifically the greatest hits compilation "Stop the Clocks" and the B-Sides collection "The Masterplan". I really can't explain why the brothers Gallagher seemed so conducive to fixing typos.
Playing- The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Bully, No More Heroes, which I picked up when I saw a used copy on sale for about 25 bucks and my curiosity about what a punk video game would really be like got the best of me, WWE: Smackdown vs. Raw 2006 (although I'm still waiting for a pro wrestling video game as good as the ones for the N64 were), the download game Lostwinds on the Wii, which is really fantastic, albeit way too short.

Hopefully my computer will be fine on Tuesday, so I can resume semi-regular entries.

Shoestore Friendly Unit Shifter

It's funny how the little things can set you off. For example, I was reading the sports blog Deadspin today, and there was a link to this story about new Kurt Cobain Converses. Now, the fact that Courtney Love would license her dead husband's name and writing for a pair of shoes doesn't surprise me at all. I'm more or less prepared for the day when Nirvana songs are used to sell everything from cars to life insurance. In fact, about the only thing that Courtney could do now to surprise me would be to put out a new, good Hole album. And while I'm bothered by the existence of these shoes, given how much Kurt would have hated it as well as my own knee-jerk reaction to the use of art to sell shit, that's not what I really began thinking about. Instead, I began thinking about how genuinely strange it all is- the mere fact that a rock star who has been dead for fourteen years is being used to market shoes, of all things, and how interesting the cult of Kurt really is.

Since his death, Kurt Cobain has become something of a profane saint, a symbol of all that was good about the music scene of the late 80s and early 90s and a symbol of how the music industry and marketing eat their young. He has become a martyr, a pure artist who had stardom pushed upon him, James Dean and Rimbaud and Elvis and Holden Caufield all rolled up into one person. And most of this is as full of shit as the endless conspiracy theorists who refuse to believe that a depressed heroin addict would ever kill himself. I don't find Kurt's life and death to be full of any particular meaning, nor do I see it as some sort of post-modern grunge Passion Play. Chris Bell and D. Boon both died at the age of 27, in a pair of car crashes, and I don't see Kurt's death as being especially different from either of those, except for the fact that Kurt's death wasn't an accident. Okay, so Kurt didn't like the nature of stardom or the way that music industry works. I can name a dozen other people this is true of, and none of them killed themselves. In fact, I don't believe that Kurt's distrust of fame and his suicide are connected. I think that Kurt shot himself for essentially the same reasons that Richard Manuel hung himself in a hotel bathroom- a cocktail of personal demons and addiction and depression. I could probably construct some elaborate theories about Manuel's death- Robbie Robertson killed him because Robbie can be as unlikable as Love, or he was upset about the way that Woodstock generation that Manuel was associated with had turned from peace and love to greed and materialism, and it would be just as hollow as the idea that Cobain's suicide is deeply significant on any level other than the literal level- a great musician killing himself.

In his excellent book Love Is A Mixtape, Rob Sheffield (who used to write for Spin, but I think I read he gave up and took a gig with Blender) writes about the now legendary Nirvana unplugged show, which has retrospectively become Kurt's real suicide note, superseding the Neil Young quoting doggerel that Courtney Love famously read aloud to that huge crowd of mourners (and people who just saw the gathering as the place to be) after Kurt's death. Sheffield doesn't buy this interpretation, and neither do I. (On a purely literal level, if the show was a suicide note, why didn't the band play some bizarre acoustic version of "I Hate Myself and I Want To Die"?) Sheffield writes:
"The Unplugged music bothered me a lot. Contrary to what people said at the time, he didn't sound dead, or about to die, or anything like that. As far as I could tell, his voice was not just alive but raging to stay that way. And he sounded married. Married and buried, just like he says. People liked to claim his songs were all about the pressures of fame, but I guess they just weren't used to hearing rock stars sing love songs anymore, not even love songs as blatant as "All Apologies" or "Heart-Shaped Box." And he sings, all through Unplugged, about the kind of love you can't leave until you die."

When I listen to the album, I'm more interested in the little moments where Cobain seems to be having fun. "This is off our first record, most people don't know it" is a great way for a suddenly famous band to introduce their act. Or the story Kurt tells about trying to get David Geffen to buy Leadbelly's guitar for him. Or the way, before "Pennyroyal Tea" when Kurt asks "Am I going to do this by myself?" I'm not trying to say that the album isn't moving, or that it doesn't churn your emotions, especially looking back at what happened after the album was recorded. I'm just saying that I don't see the album as being any more packed with meaning than the Who Are You album cover, which features Keith Moon sitting in a chair with "Not To Be Taken Away" clearly written on it, and this being the last Who album before Moon died.

I worry about things that are somewhat silly. It's kind of my deal. But I do worry that the gospel according to Kurt has completely overshadowed just how great the albums, especially Nevermind and In Utero, really are. I feel like when people hear "Come As You Are" now, the only line that really connects is the weak irony of "I swear I don't have a gun". While Jim Morrison's death has somehow conferred a level of seriousness onto the essentially silly lyrics of Door's albums (which is not to say that silly songs like "The End" or "Riders on the Storm" or "Break On Through" are wholly without merit), Kurt's suicide bestowed a level of meaning onto the Nirvana albums that obscures just how legitimately good they really are. Most people can listen to the Sex Pistols rail about nihilism and "No Future" without connecting it to Sid Vicious murdering Nancy and then killing himself with a needle, but can't hear "All Apologies" as anything other than a parting epistle from the only pure soul in all of the music industry. People claim that Cobain never wanted to be famous. I call bullshit. Of course he wanted to be a rock star. He might have discovered, upon achieving stardom, that it wasn't what he wanted, but that makes him just like every other rock star who took their music seriously (except for, maybe, Paul McCartney. Just a feeling I have). I feel like the worst of the Cobain mythology has passed us by- the last time I saw a huge display of posters for sale in the Brickyard, Tony Montana outnumbered Kurt by at least four-to-one, which is a rant for another day- but every time something like this Converse deal comes to pass, there will be a little flare-up. Yes, you should be irritated about this. But you should be irritated in the same way that you're irritated when Jaguar uses "London Calling" to sell cars, or when "Fortunate Son" shows up in a commercial for jeans, or when, inevitably, the Velvet Underground is used to sell Roth IRAs. I'm saying that Kurt Cobain was a fantastic artist, and might even have been something of an unofficial spokesman for a generation, but he wasn't a saint to be canonized or the last angry man standing up against the corporate takeover of rock and roll.

Besides, everyone knows that's Neil Young's job.

The picture is a Kurt Cobain action figure. When I did a Google Image search, it came up, and it was too ridiculous not to include.

Free Music For You Cheap Bastards

Hey, Josh Love found the blog. Cool.

I've been a little busy over the last few days with some editing stuff, but I thought I'd mention that Trent Reznor has decided to give away the new Nine Inch Nails album for free here.  Last year's album," Year Zero", was the first NIN album I picked up since I was in high school, and it was pretty good.  If Radiohead set the course for the future of distribution with "In Rainbows", then I'm cool with that.

In other music news, Atmosphere's new album "When Live Gives You Lemons, Paint That Shit Gold" debuted in the Billboard charts at number 5.  I still haven't really wrapped my head around that.  I've listened to the album about one and a half times (I also recently picked up the new albums from The Roots and Gnarls Barkley, so I've had a fair amount of new stuff to listen to) and while I don't like it nearly as much as the last Atmosphere album ("You Can't Imagine How Much Fun We're Having", which is one of my favorite hip hop albums this decade), it is pretty good.  Tom Waits appears on the album beat-boxing.  Make of that whatever you will. The album cracking the top 5 says a lot about how committed the Atmosphere fan base is, and a lot about how fragmented the music industry is at this point, given Slug and Ant's relative anonymity and lack of main stream exposure (well, one And1 commercial used an Atmosphere song, but that was a couple of years ago).  

Right now, I'm planning on writing more tomorrow, but that could change if the lines to vote in the primary are too long (most years that would be an absurd statement.  This year, I think there's an outside chance that the primary will be slightly crowded) or if something comes up, or if I get caught up playing "Ico" on the PS2.  

Oh, the picture.  I've been re-watching Arrested Development.  Again.  I might write Gob's name in on the ballot tomorrow every time I haven't heard of either candidate.  

Odds and Ends

-I just got the new issue of EGM (yes, I'm a nerd) and on the back cover is one of those "got Milk" ads with Avery Johnson and Josh Howard. Between the time that the issue went to press and when it arrived at my door Avery Johnson was fired when the Dallas Mavericks lost in the first round of the playoffs again and Josh Howard gave an interview where he talked about how much pot he smokes during the offseason. So, I'm guessing the ad is something of a collector's item now.

-Roger Clemens apperntly slept with either a fifteen year old country singer or Pearl Jam's lead guitarist. I don't know which thought is more troubling, especially since Pearl Jam hung out with a different pitcher who won a Cy Young in the 1990s (Black Jack McDowell, who got into a fight in a New Orleans bar in 1993 while hanging out with Eddie Vedder.) I'm ambivalent about watching Clemens self-destruct. It's apparent that the guy is a genius when it comes to pitching, and something of an idiot when it comes to everything else, so I kind of feel sorry for him, but he also seemed to do everything he could to bring this on himself, and he's always come across as something of a jerk.

-Tonight is the one night of the week when I watch a lot of television, because the bastards who program these things put "The Office", "Thirty Rock" and "Lost" on the air on the same night. Bastards.

-On Saturday night I went to some bar in downtown Raleigh with an old friend of mine. I got pleasantly buzzed, mostly because it seemed rude to tell the waitress that I didn't want another Sierra Nevada. Then I went home and drove around in GTA: Vice City until I heard Toto's "Africa" and Corey Hart's "Sunglasses At Night" on the game's radio stations. I also learned that driving under the influence in a video game is not easy. It was fun until I accidentally held up a pharmacy and the cops came and killed me. All in all, it was a good night.

-Have you seen these Denny's ads with Paulie Walnuts in them? If you haven't, I kind of envy you. There's something about them that distubrs me way more than the HD DVD ads that had Christopher Moltisante in them. I'm not sure if I spelled Christopher's last name right, but I don't care enough to check. I also don't care enough to look up his real name, especially since the only other role of his I can think of is the kid who got shot in Goodfellas.

-I thought I was going to vote for Obama in the primary next week. But then he went to Chapel Hill and played basketball with the UNC team. So now I don't know what to do. I found this indiscretion way more troubling than any of the stuff with Jermiah Wright, who is just an idiot with a soapbox to stand on.