In a radio interview I can’t find now, Ricky Gervais was talking about different types of art and called a song (any song) “The greatest piece of art someone can create.”

Since the album’s resurgence in the mid- to late-1990s, technology has — in my eyes — made it such that singles have become the preeminent want to digest music. iTunes and other such MP3 services make it so everyone can make their own playlist of songs they enjoy. Hit singles mean more and more songs become hits.

—

I mention Gervais for two reasons. The first is because his quote is odd for a person responsible for some very critically-acclaimed comedy, elevating music over his own art.

Secondarily, it brings me to a conversation I was having recently. I’ve been recently getting into Gervais and writing partner Stephen Merchant’s non-Extras/Office work; indeed, it’s mostly his work with Karl Pilkington. An Idiot Abroad truly is work of genius in its combination of a travel show and exploration of cultural exchange. The animated Ricky Gervais Show shows Pilkington at his Little Englander best, with odd flights of fancy toward the Elephant Man (Karl’s favorite freak), evolution and weird stories about Karl’s strange family.

This is to say this: I don’t want a ton of TV — comparatively, I’d say — but almost all of the TV I watch is scripted. When people complain about the popularity of reality TV, I can’t relate. I watch NBC’s Thursday lineup and a few cable dramas (I’m in Game of Thrones and Mad Men season now; in the summer/fall, I’ll get to Breaking Bad, Louie and Sons of Anarchy), but I’ve never seen Intervention, any of the Real Housewives franchise, any of those pawn/storage shows, etc.

I know about Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. I don’t know anything about this reality shows. This may be in my DNA, as my high school years had me actively ignoring Seinfeld, despite it since becoming a favorite show of mine. I didn’t see Titanic until nearly 10 years after it had been released. I kept up some with the mainstream music of the era, but that was largely because of my involvement in radio.

—

Miley Cyrus’ music isn’t geared toward me, so it’s hard to blame me for ignoring her records in the past however long she’s been singing. I’m not a teenage girl and have never been one. Moreover, I’m more than ten years her senior, so any interest I’d have in her is awfully close to creepy.

With that said, “Party in the U.S.A.” is a pretty great record. It’s the power that Gervais mentions, in that a great song never really gets out of your head. No real offense to Ms. Cyrus is intended, but her performance is close to forgettable; the hook is so cheesy, it’s absolutely brilliant, but otherwise, it’s pretty average.

But, like so many records, when a song hits a Lil Wayne mixtape — as this song did — it causes a listener to reexamine its merits. “Party in the U.S.A.” is a hook that is undeniable and having Lil Wayne rap over it makes it wonderful. It also gives — me, at least — a new appreciation for the simplicity of such a song.

I’ve said it before, but not everything is going to be the record that you play at a funeral, wedding or whatever. Some songs are just wonderful earworms. It is the greatest form of art, indeed.

In the sea of singer/songwriter music, it’s hard to make a serious impression. Because of the nature of the arrangements, singer/songwriters are seldom harsh. The troubadour styling speaks to a very easy shortcut toward “sensitive, gentle and wonderful.” And similarly, sculpting from the Nick Drake mode is a simple way to make things sound listenable and emotional; a whispery voice is a shortcut. It’s not necessary to be more lyrical, as the implication is inherent in the whisper.

Somewhere near that is the baritoned misanthrope. Again, the “man with a solely a guitar” is an easy shortcut to “this person has an understanding of the world,” the vocal style — working against the Drake/Elliott Smith whisper — can give a broader range. Bill Callahan’s deep vocals provide the backdrop for a wide range of emotions, Jason Molina’s are hurt, Jens Lekman’s are optimistic, Jim O’Rourke’s are, well, insane and so on.

David Thomas Broughton’s got a different bent, though I’d call it closest to Bill Callahan’s. Working with a deeper than deep vocal range, he also uses sampling to provide a wider arrangement. With flipping guitar lines starting the album — first backward, then forward) — Broughton intones the existential nature of life: “How much love can a boy contain in here? How many contradictions can a girl posses up there?”

And in the vein of Callahan’s best Smog work, Broughton moves into misanthropy that works as an juxtaposition to the work. It can be well-worn territory — the Isobel Campbell years of Belle & Sebastian were built on her sweet voice singing about dildos and death — but Broughton makes it work better than most. “Execution,” with a wood block-esque rhythm (seriously, it sounds like someone is hitting a wooden spoon on a table), is built on a possibly heartbroken lyric (“I wouldn’t take her to an execution”) repeated and layered with samples of Broughton’s vocals.

The album’s great triumph is the ender, “Ever Rotating Sky.” Nine minutes long, the song starts in a typical fashion, with two guitar lines and Broughton’s savory voice easing into a song that appears to be about cannibalism (as Pitchfork seems to think) or possibly some sort of metaphor about the fealty of death. Indeed, it reads just as lovely as it is sung:

To have felt the depths of life, and the drowning shallows of death, the storm of the half-sleep the half-sleeping storm, out of the blackness of incompletion into the politics of inconsequence.

The song’s final four minutes are almost Hebraic chanting — that’s the only way I can describe it, as it reminded me of the old men in the synagogue growing up davoning during the Amidah. In Broughton’s case, it’s more English-sounding chanting, but it had an oddly spiritual tinge to it.

A lot of Broughton’s stuff is mediocre, but “Ever Rotating Sky” is a masterpiece. Unlike so much singer/songwriter stuff, it’s drawn-out, emotive and lovely.

One of the wonderful things about music and our relationship to it is the function of it bringing back memories, snapshots in time. I, of course, write a lot about this and especially did an entire 30-piece project about it.

The making of playlists is a way to do this. On my first iPod, I had a playlist named after my ex-girlfriend — we were dating at the time, of course — that had songs that reminded me of her. On a lesser level, I did this last week, creating a “90s Junk” playlist on Spotify (the playlist is here). It was fun going through my memory, trying to think of the stuff I liked — on the fringes, mostly — during that time. 

Yes, I came of age, taste-wise, in the first decade of this century and I’ve made that absolutely clear. But, I was a teenager in the 1990s and the decade’s touchstones are partially my touchstones. I remember, albeit barely, a time in which my computer had to dial the phone to connect to the Internet. I remember a time when everyone made fun of you for having a cell phone.

It was a pretty cool time to be a teenager, though that could be said for every single time, no? The 1990s were dynamic, with the technological seeds of the space race finally bearing fruits — satellite TV, cell phones, the Internet, etc. — for the consumer. TV was changing, from the three-channel days of my parents’ age to the cable days of my youth to the nascent ideal of 100+ channels of the 1990s. And MTV still had a foothold on the culture.

–

Whatever their foibles, in one way my parents did not drop the ball in raising me was their open-door policy on most culture. No, they weren’t letting my sister and I watch porno on TV when we were tiny, but they didn’t censor TV or radio the way a lot of parents did. My parents, essentially, let the cultural ether do the choosing for us.

I grew up in a part of a suburb that was not, for the first eight years of my life, wired for cable. My experience with cable television — and this was a big deal in the 1980s — was minimal and I was often out of the cultural loop of wiener kids at Avoca West Elementary School. I had to work to watch MTV — cousins’ houses, etc. — and I didn’t get to watch Nickelodeon until I was close to being too old for it. Our part of the suburb got cable in the fall of 1989, so I was able to catch the “Dawn of the Decade” party on MTV — back when MTV showed MTV Grind, a show of scantily-clad women dancing — around New Year’s.

–

I know it sounds minor, but TV largely raised me. The flipside of my parents letting the culture do the choosing for my sister and I — moreso me, because my sister is older and a much more disciplined person than I — was that I was plopped in front of the TV a lot as a kid. I watched a lot of TV and it was important to me. The upside is that it really fomented a curiosity in the culture that is only starting to fade now, in my 31st year.

Like every decade, the 1990s weren’t a monolith. Most people think of the decade in regards to grunge, but the late part of the decade saw a resurgence of pop artists (Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears and the BackStreet Boys all broke in 98/99 and Will Smith’s career hit its zenith in the late 1990s) and the pre-Nirvana portion of the decade was full of the coda of pop-metal.

This made Cherry Pie a bit of a cultural touchstone for me. Mötley Crüe was my favorite band before I discovered classic rock, but the first album I remember buying with my own funds was Cherry Pie. My parents were hesitant, I imagine, because of the innuendo in the title track — they gave me far too much credit at age nine. But, they relented, drove me to the mall and let me use a birthday present gift certificate to buy the cassette of Cherry Pie.

Being nine, I absoutely did not understand the innuendo in the song; I just thought that “Cherry Pie” was something the boys liked about this girl. I was not aware, even after watching the video, that the girl’s pie was, indeed, her vagina. Which is kind of fun, now that I think back on it; there’s a Ginuwine-esque lack of innuendo that I begrudgingly respect about the songwriting of the song.

(According to our good friend Wikipedia, the song was written in 15 minutes because the label wanted an anthem on which to pin the record. I never thought I’d compare Warrant to Sabbath, but that’s a similar story to the title track on Paranoid. Only with less singing about a vagina.)

—

It made me a little sad last year when Jani Lane passed. Warrant was one of the final of the pop-metal bands to have broke before Nirvana hit and weren’t popular enough to have spawned terrible reality shows or unending reunion tours. Instead, Warrant toured a bit and probably fell into the trappings of being a has-been.

If nothing, there’s one person who heard “Cherry Pie” and became a more intense music listener. So, his memory exists there, I guess.

I like metal a fair amount, largely thanks to a friend I met out here who reignited my love for it. However, I’m also pretty tied into vocals; a bad voice ruins nearly any music for me (see: Neutral Milk Hotel) and a wonderful voice can make a record a million times better (see: anything with Isobel Campbell).

Sadly, these two concepts are pretty incongrous. Most harder metal isn’t really vocally intriguing, but rather involves death growls. This concept sounds, all too often, like Cookie Monster. Oddly, I do not hate this, as the music is served by such monstrous.

Which sort of brings us to High on Fire.

Somewhere between the Cookie Monster vocals and a simple scream, the band’s vocals are oddly palpatable, considering the band’s overall sound. Considering the band’s ionception — coming out of an influential doom metal band called Sleep — it is hard to think that such a vocal could work. However Matt Pike’s vocal delivery often mirrors the violent guitar sound and driving rhytymns.

Snakes for the Divine‘s title track is the epitomy of this. The song’s main riff is infectious, expedient and catchy. The record moves along from there into “Frost Hammer,” a slower burn of a record, then into another.

This is the natural procession of the record. Snakes for the Divine is one of the best sequenced records I’ve ever heard, oddly. The album has the pace of a Paranoid or Piece of Mind, with ease of movement. “Holy Flames of the Firespitter” easily ends the record, with a strong, quick punkish ender.

Like most metal, High on Fire’s art — see the ridiculous cover art — and lyrics are not there to really deconstruct as anything other masculine nonsense. No, I don’t find meaning in “Bastard Samurai.” Whatever the meaning Pike and Co. felt they had behind the snakey naked lady is not of interest to me; I could be alone in that. But, ultimately, the lyrics aren’t interesting enough and the guitar work is wonderfully constructed to more than make up for it.

I often use any of these records as a entrance into writing/thinking about something other than the music therein. I imagine I could write about the brilliance of the show Community here, but I don’t know that I could do that as easily as I’d like.

Indeed, Donald Glover does star on the NBC show, but his Childish Gambino moniker is a different animal than that of Troy Barnes. Where Troy is a bit of a manchild, Glover’s Childish Gambino persona is, well, a rap manchild with little to no personality.

It’s not to say that EP — a free, uh, EP — doesn’t have its charms. It certainly has one fine track (“Be Alone”) that shows a fair amount of self-reflection.

But, overall, EP is a very unimpressive group of four songs and one good song. Songs range from the failed attempt at real adult rap (“Lights Turned On”) to the patently awful (“Freaks and Geeks”). Indeed, “Freaks and Geeks” has the lyrical consistency of a Pavement record, only without the actual intellect or wordplay. “My Shine” tries to do what “Be Alone” does, only in a lesser way.

Lots of people do a lot of things and Glover is not a bad comedian (or writer, as his stint on 30 Rock shows). But, he’s not much of a rapper.

So much of this space is devoted to the conflict I have in aging, my self image and my cultural tastes, so it will come as very little surprise that I’m going down that road once again. For the most part, I stick toward (not to, but toward) the margins of mass appeal popular culture.

I say “toward” for many reasons — the lack of a shared pop culture, the blurring of the indie/mainstream lines, my own cowardice in truly trusting experimental stuff, etc. — but my general eschewing of the most mainstream of culture makes it so that I miss things. Most of the time, these things are generally shitty — Two and Half Men sucks, Transformers movies are terrible, that “Friday” song is useless, Twilight reads like it was written by a high school kid, etc. — and I don’t need to consume them. Sometimes, though, something insanely popular is really, truly good and I don’t care about it.

Or I get to it about a year too late.

So it is with Adele, the British soul singer who has, essentially, taken the world by storm. It’s not to say that I completely missed her rise; I have a pair of ears and her music is played in ads and such. With that said, I never really cared about her records and had no real need to hear it. So, this past this week, I decided to pick her records up and listen to them a bit.

I’m, obviously, not going to break any new ground in saying that Adele has an amazingly strong voice. Her second record, 21 is far better than 19 as the songs are more strongly-written. Nevertheless, she’s less of a songwriter than she is a singer, which is what makes 21 so spotty.

Nevertheless, the notion of “Everyone with a heart and an iTunes account does it” about crying and listening to Adele is a truism. Indeed, “Someone Like You” is a wonderfully stark song, entirely based on Adele’s considerable pipes. The theme is the same as the rest of the record: a breakup has occurred and Adele is seeking revenge. “Rolling in the Deep” plows the same ground, as does “Rumor Has It,” “Set Fire to the Rain” and “He Won’t Go.” All of the songs are superlative in their rollicking ability to empower the protagonist of the song, making the listener empowered by inserting her/himself into the storyline.

It’s not a wide span, by any means. The furthest she moves outside is a cover (superior to the original, I’d say ) of the Cure’s “Lovesong.” A more straightforward — aka not a breakup song — love song, Adele’s tenderness actually comes through.

—

Adele is a wonderful singer and is a completely charming individual, as evidenced by her

I like that she really doesn’t care what other people think about her (but, isn’t, like, insane. Because the “I don’t care what other people think” thing can really be dangerous). She still fits within our idea of what’s interesting, while still being pretty mainstream.

This isn’t a criticism, as I really do like the way she presents herself. There aren’t enough female pop stars who actually are out there, powerfully. Too many are simply vessels for men to throw fantasies or are “quirky” solely for the purposes of annoying me (not really, but you get my point that Ms. Perry is very annoying).

—

I originally wrote something here about modern feminist/liberal thought about the notion of standards in what we consider acceptable/attractive/etc. and the movement of those standards as society progresses. But, ultimately, I am not smart enough to explain my feelings on this without sounding like a complete jackass other than to say this: Thankfully, we have the Internet.

Whatever attracts you, the Internet can give it to you. This, again, speaks to my confusion as to what is “mainstream” and what is not, as segmentation is exactly what the Internet gives you. If you attracted to overweight people, there is a wealth of sites for you to discuss/look at/etc. overweight people; but there are hardly any overweight people on network television.

Like I said, I can’t really discuss this with any insight that doesn’t make me sound like a jackass. I do know this: Adele is not a tiny, size 0 sexpot. And that’s great. She’s got fucking pipes and she’s got personality.

Because this site doesn’t get a wide amount of traffic — and I’m thankful for this, by the way — I imagine I should try and reconcile my issues with Twitter, the outside world and the notion of intellectually masturbating. This is to say that I’m trying to actually figure out my own place on the privacy spectrum.

I work in the media, but I try not to be too out there with it. Part of that is the notion of the old American media ideal of objectivity in all forms; I used to work at a joint where you couldn’t put a political bumper sticker on your spouse’s car, as someone could see you in said car. Even for those of us on the sports staff. It was a frustrating experience for someone like me, as I have a lot of opinions on just about everything including (maybe especially) politics.

I no longer work at said joint and my current employer does not forbid such things (though, without a car, I don’t know where I’d put said bumper sticker). But, of course, it doesn’t look great if someone working for a news organization is screaming — either online or via bumper stickers, lawn signs, volunteering for a candidate, etc. — about one issue or another.

—

Because of my political beliefs, I did spend a good amount of time RTing and tweeting about the recent battles over reproductive rights. I also spent a lot of time tweeting while watching hockey games, often doing my cheering online. This, of course, is completely worthless and no single person gives a single shit about my reaction to Patrick Kane being awesome. I’m not sure I care about it. So, I quit doing the latter because no one cares and I quit doing the former because of my job.

This is all to say that I’m not great at Twitter. I mostly tweet photos and videos of animals, with the occasional environmental thing in there. This makes me sad, on some level, because I do have a fuck ton of opinions on politics and the current climate is very very very strange and makes me feel like I’m living in some terrible alternative reality where the sane people are considered extremists and the crazies rule everything. A world where words have no meaning.

The decision to keep that stuff away from my Twitter feed is partially one in the vein of maturity, but also because — like I said — I suck at Twitter. I don’t bring a ton to the table and my measly 150ish followers don’t give a shit. I tend to keep that stuff to Facebook, wherein my account is protected from the outside world.

It’s not hard to figure out who I am or for what I stand or what I believe. This blog, obviously, is a place wherein I spout off a bit about politics (notice the links above), but mostly about my own philosophy. I keep my Twitter feed to mostly irreverent stuff or environmental stuff, though the latter makes me sad because it means we’ve completely politicized the environment. Everyone should care about the Earth, no matter your political stripe.

—

Apropos of nothing else written here, The Rachel’s are an amazing collective of wonderful musicians. Like a lot of bands, I found them through the mail order catalog of the Touch and Go distributed records.

Because I knew of Rodan and James Noble who had been the driving force behind the band. On a lark, I bought The Sea and the Bells, a strikingly lovely record that ebbs and flows as well as any chamber music does. As the band changed — James Noble left a while before — Rachel’s got to be more of a post-rock outfit, as evidenced by the project-y Systems/Layers. The album is more experimental, coupled with the SITI Company for a dance project. “Moscow Is in the Telephone” is an excellent opener and “Where_Have_All_My_Files_Gone?” is a topical record. “NY Snow Globe” closes out the record on a softer note and the title track is surprisingly accessible.

—

Ultimately, though, here’s what’s important: Whatever I think/believe, I do not let it influence the decisions I make at work, editorially. First of all, I don’t have much sway in editorial decisions at my job. Second, I am a professional with a Master’s in my field; I didn’t get here by pissing off people with whom I am diametrically opposed. Third, I am a relativist in most things, so I try to be empathetic to other people’s worldviews as much as possible.

I’ll continue to Tweet things like this, mostly, though. It’s mostly because my own identity is wrapped up in my love for cute animals and my meager — by which I mean donating money to wildlife charities, leaving a small carbon footprint and sorta using social media — attempts at spreading the conservation word. But, also, it’s because I’m starting to mature a little and need to act like I’m more of a professional at my job, not just some angry atheist progressive.

In college, I went through a progressive rock period. It was largely due to my love of post-rock and the influences progressive rock and jazz had on the genre. I was also not immune to the fact that the differences between progressive and psychedelic rock are not vast and the greatest band of those two genres just happened to Pink Floyd (a band I’d already loved).

This period came around in some odd ways; progressive rock is not an unpopulated genre of music. I got mostly into the top-level bands which most people know — Rush, King Crimson, Genesis, Pink Floyd and Yes were the ones to which I first attached myself. I later got into some of the more disparate and lesser-known bands — Orange Alabaster Mushroom, ELP, Dream Theater, Gentle Giant, Jethro Tull’s folk-prog, etc. — but I mostly stuck with the famous ones.

For a few reasons, I fell in particular love with Genesis. Part of it, I’m sure, is simply my having a contrarian streak; I loved the idea of identifying with a band that featured Phil Collins as frontman in the 1980s (though, I would always correct people, saying “I like Gabriel-era Genesis.”). King Crimson’s albums were uneven, too many Yes records were more about the album covers than the music, Gentle Giant went too far into the English countryside and, ultimately, Rush’s libertarian nonsense is just that.

Mostly, though, Genesis had the wonderful combination of very weird, musically talented, complex and catchy. All too many prog bands forego any possible hook for technical proficiency (hello, Dream Theater!). The Gabriel-era Genesis records have excellent melodies — “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway” is a wonderfully catchy record — but also tackle complex fantastical storylines and incorporate wildly strange lyrics. I have to think the band took a lot of drugs. This, in progressive rock, is a plus for me.

—

Part of it, too, is the very ethos of underground/indie rock, as I see it. The underground exists largely to push against the status quo; it is, by nature, contrarian. In order to progress, theoretically, the current status quo must be challenged, the theory goes. This is a theory to which I subscribe. I tend to be believe that change is absolutely necessary in all things and boundaries must be pushed.

(The other side, of course, is the fact that all too many indie rock/underground folks are, generally, trying to one-up one another and trying to be different. So, anything that the whole of the community enjoys will receive a backlash, even before it hits mainstream.)

Because of the cycles of culture, that makes the underground culture turn on itself very quickly once something becomes popular. Which is to say that punk rock’s pure anti-authority received a fair amount of backlash upon its popularity in the later 1990s/early 2000s. It’s hard to consider Green Day anything but mainstream when the band is putting on broadway shows or to when these bands are on the Rock Band series of video games or when football players are sporting mohawks.

Long considered the domain of weirdoes, nerds and people who play D&D (possibly redundant), progressive rock still isn’t mainstream. There is a loyal following — Rush still sells out arenas, certainly — but it’s hardly something that one could make into a Broadway show. It’s just too weird.

—

The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway is weird. There’s little question about that. The main character in the piece is Rael — coincidentally (or maybe not) also the name of a cult leader — a man working through his own identity issues. Not unlike the seminal Fight Club, there is a question of his split personality. This is all fine and well, except the concept album’s concept, basically, is that Rael needs to find himself among weird creatures, all of which are veiled allusions to aspects of the culture of the time. Some kind of amphibians (“The Colony of Slippermen”), Carpet Crawlers (live favorite “The Carpet Crawlers”), caged animals (“In the Cage”) all dot the subterranean New York that Rael has to traverse. he eventually finds peace in “it.,” the album ender, but, it is certainly a weird journey. As our friend Wikipedia describes, the live show was… something:

For the first half of the show, Gabriel dressed as Rael in leather jacket, T-shirt and jeans, while relying on lighting and dramatic expression without the use of props or costumes. In the second half, the costumes and other visuals became much more elaborate. During “The Lamia”, for instance, Gabriel was surrounded by a spinning cone-like structure decorated with images of snakes. For the last verse of the song, the cone would collapse to reveal Gabriel wearing a body suit that glowed under the stage’s black lights. However, the most notorious of Gabriel’s costumes was the Slipperman, a naked monster with inflatable genitalia and covered in lumps, who emerged onto the stage by crawling out of a phallus-shaped tube. At the intro to the final song “It,” a huge explosion set off twin strobes, and the audience was faced with both Gabriel and a dummy dressed identically, clueless as to which was real. “It” also featured an alternate ending with Gabriel vanishing from the stage in a flash of light and a puff of smoke.

There are weird records that have no value outside of weirdness; they are weird for the simple sake of being weird. I don’t know that The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway isn’t that. But, it nevertheless takes you on a journey that’s untouched by most other progressive rock records. Gabriel’s voice has a tremendous combination of passion and tension, echoing Rael’s journey.

—

Like everyone else, I only have a certain amount of space in my life for music. Sadly, my progressive rock period has been over for a bit. But, I still pick up The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway and the other Gabriel-era Genesis records and love them. Outside of Pink Floyd, Genesis was the best progressive rock band.

It’s hard not to think about one’s origins when thinking about music and its place in our lives. My music fandom and the places to which I go in said fandom, as mentioned here and here, come from a direct line to one evening and my taping songs off the local college music station.

Indeed, that fateful evening is the reason that Tortoise is my favorite indie rock band. If there’s a better place to meet post-rock than “Gamera,” I don’t know it. As a song, “Gamera” has everything. It’s a meandering, repetitive, building song. With a strong bass and drum background, a slowly picked guitar lays out the melody, over and over until it crescendos into electronic noodling and atmospheric keyboards.

However, as a concept, it’s even better.

“Gamera” means as much to me as anything in music. It’s the ideal nature of the early stages of the Internet, when the web was used mostly for scouring and finding those who identified with you. It was the late 1990s/early 2000s Internet, before Spotify, Last.fm or Pandora. It was the time when you weren’t recommended everything, but you liked what you liked and you had to know how to find things.

This is how I came upon Gamera. I knew the song and, of course, I knew the band. But, the EP from which the song came was simply impossible to find. It was a limited edition EP; fewer than 10,000 copies had been pressed and only on vinyl.

You have to understand, my exuberance for music when I was 18 was enormous. It was doubly important for me to own every possible limited EP and 45 my favorite bands had released. Just having “Gamera” on a tape was not enough; I needed to find it (and “Yaus” and “Why We Fight” and “Lonesome Sound” and other early singles) to add to my collection. Again, this was in the infancy of Napster, though these songs weren’t even online anyway.

So, I took to message boards, online commerce and the like. I, luckily, found the EP on eBay after a tip from the www.post-rock.com boards (I am not kidding). The EP cost me $90, including shipping, to get the thing from England to my dorm room in Columbia, Mo.

Totally worth it.

—

It’s hard not to look back and not see the foolish nature of spending so much money on a piece of vinyl that I’ve used, possibly, fewer than 25 times (if that). It was money wasted, especially considering the song’s placement on the Tortoise box set I’d pre ordered the first instant I could.

But, the story isn’t just mine. Technology made it easier for me than it had for those before me; the people who’d attended screenings of Monty Python and the Holy Grail in colleges in the early 70s, before the movie came to the states. Or the ones who wrote letters to England to get the TV show on in the States during the same time. It was easier than the Grateful Dead (guh) bootleg guys, meeting in stadium parking lots to exchange tapes. It was easier than the D&D heads who would meet to exchange whatever it is they exchange.

This kind of extreme fandom is hard to explain, but it speaks to a quality I can respect: curiosity. I wanted ownership of my curiosity about Tortoise, a band I adore. I wanted to go through the trials and tribulations of gathering all the band’s material, through whichever method I could.

—

The Internet makes this a different animal, of course. Between peer-to-peer networks, pirate sites, Pandora and the like, it’s easy to learn about any media around. It take the effort out of so many things, certainly; I can access so many things at my fingertips.

It’s stupid, but, as I get older, I get that thing that old people get. I bitch about how hard it was back in my day. We had to go to the store to buy our records. We had to ask clerks about which other bands we’d like if we like Rainier Maria. We had to tape songs off the radio. We had to watch movies in the theater.

I hate this about myself, but I cherish what I had to go through for Gamera. It’s not a great album cover, but the record is framed in my apartment because it means so much. Nostalgia is powerful.

Progressive rock, like stadium rock, is often decried by the punk folks all too often as self-indulgent, obnoxious and overwrought. I’m not going to disagree, but self-indulgent is not exactly the worst thing in the world to me (example: this site). Punk rock — and by extension, the very essence of rock and roll — is a populist art form, born out of the notion that somewhat simple music is the people’s form.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t stop there in punk. All too often, punk rock’s lyricism is idiotic and childish; the Ramones created an entire career out of this. Music, in and of itself, is a hard place to convey complex emotions, but the actual arrangements can bely a complex message.

—

Kurt Cobain’s 45th birthday would’ve been this week. I bring this up because he’s the antidote to too much punk rock’s facile messaging. Possibly because of its time coinciding with my early adolescence, I find Nirvana’s music to be wonderfully interesting with enough lyrical complexity to rival, yes, Bob Dylan.

—

Ultimately, the more proggy metal and progressive rock is often the result of lots of drugs, lots of self indulgence and way more drugs. Mastodon, a band I adore, is a lyrically ridiculous outfit. The entire conceit of Crack the Skye is way too complex, bouncing around Russian mysticism, suicide and monarchies or something. Really, I don’t know. Rush’s ridiculous libertarian beliefs soak the band’s lyrics, with bizarre-ass metaphors, too.

In the Court of the Crimson King is nearly as insane, without necessarily having a plot or theme. The lyrics are a step away from the hippie-ish 60s metaphors (see “I Talk to the Wind” for an example), but somewhere weird. “Moonchild” is similarly written, but sifted into two movements (“The Dream” and “The Illusion”).

With that said, the record is somewhere between the idealistic 60s and the cocaine-fueled early 70s. “Epitaph” has some complexity — “confusion will be my epitaph” is a key lyric — and the title track is obnoxiously well-crafted. Of course, the album’s key is “21st Century Schizoid Man,” a sorta apocalyptic, scatterbrained progressive anthem. Sampled (Kanye West, etc.) and covered (Unrest, Crippled Bastards, etc.), “21st Century Schizoid Man” uses saxophones in a way previously unknown and unmatched. Greg Lake’s vocal is desperate, speaking of war, with a lyrical structure that matches a poem or whatever (from our good friend Wikipedia):

All three verses follow a set pattern in presenting these images. The first line of each verse presents two relatively vague images (e.g.”iron claw”, “death seed”). The second line is a single image, often more specific than the first two, and the third line approaches an actual sentence. The fourth and final line of every verse is “21st century schizoid man”.

—

King Crimson is the ultimate progressive rock band, largely because of this album. The record is a touchtone that has peppered every prog rock record ever since.