[Listen] BLUE ÖYSTER CULT: Sampler

Remember “Don’t Fear the Reaper”? Well, forget it.

Image result for blue oyster cult

I mean, it’s a good song and everything, but falls far short Blue Öyster Cult’s best. I’m sincerely baffled that they’re not more well-known, considering how irrefutably awesome their music is. I don’t even mean that in some kind of abstract, holistic, or in any other way “niche” manner, I mean it’s just plain clever and catchy and GOOD.

Like, objectively.

I couldn’t limit myself to three songs for this sampler. I mean, I did for this particular one, but there’ll be more, believe you me.

[EDIT 3/1: So I can’t seem to leave this post alone, I had to change the second song from “Godzilla” to “Shooting Shark” it’s just it’s just it’s just BETTER.]

“Kick Out the Jams”, from Some Enchanted Evening (Live album, 1978)

“Shooting Shark”, from The Revölution by Night (1983)

“Astronomy”, from Secret Treaties (1974)

“Kick Out the Jams” is a cover of a song by MC5. It’s a very frequently covered song, whose original version is also very good (as is the cover by Rage Against the Machine), but this. THIS is “Kick Out the Jams” with Buck Dharma. The song is already fast paced, not allowing any of the members a break (even the poor keyboardist, whose name I can never remember), but still Buck outshines everyone, dominating your ear-space, thickening the texture with all these improvisatory flourishes in even the smallest gaps. There’s not one Buck-less second. Which means, of course, that there’s not one second not worth listening to.

Which, I hate to say, is not the case with every BÖC song. There are some painfully long ones. But that’s why you’re listening to a sampler, right? You want to be guaranteed goodness. You smart little cookie, you.

[EDIT 2/24: OK OK OK this is important apparently the original “Kick Out the Jams” first came out 50 years ago almost exactly and here’s a cool article I found about it that alerted me to this little tidbit

Brothers, Sisters and Motherf&#kers

But whoa isn’t that crazy??]

“Shooting Shark” is one of the best anti-love songs I’ve ever heard. Actually, anti-love doesn’t do it justice. It’s like a breakup song, I guess. Its lyrics are wonderfully poetic, but I can’t credit BÖC for that; not beyond having incredibly talented poet friends (in this case, Patti Smith). Anyway, it sounds what a pop song of its time should sound like, with piercing drum-beats and sweeping synth. And saxophone??? The whole song is kept from sounding too much like “Radio Gaga”, however, being unable to escape its persistent “dark” quality. It seems to be drowning in a quagmire of its bass line and synth flourishes, and the free-roaming sax and Buck’s momentarily optimistic vocals seem to be straining against their clutches.

ALSO Randy Jackson from American Idol is the one playing bass on this song WHAT

“Astronomy” was the first song of theirs I heard, and still it transports me now as it did when I first heard it. It epitomizes everything I love about BÖC. The sometimes-relaxed, sometimes-intense, dreaminess, the fairy-tale lyrics, and even its structure. It’s not terribly unique, being verse/verse/chorus/ or whatever, but it builds wonderfully, with well-placed instrumental breaks (not to mention a killer guitar solo) and nothing… overdone or overwhelming or overshadowing anything else. It’s just a great song.

Justice for the Cult of the Blue Öysters.

– Mans

[Listen] COWS: Sampler

No “The”.

I mentioned the Cows in my first post, because in their song, “The Man”, they have this line:

Then he called me a fucking punk, I said “Yeah, sure boss, you bet”

It was one of those lines that obsessed me for a while. Maybe it’s just the way he said it, but it certainly also fit the topic of whether our taste in music must define us. What made the Cows punks? It’s not a term frequently associated with them. Maybe they listened to punk. So they’re one degree removed from it. And what does that make me, a listener of the Cows? A tertiary punk?

Anyway, I’m mentioning the Cows again, because I love the Cows, and I don’t care what that makes me. I adore every single one of their albums, but I’ve chosen three songs to help orient a new listener to their catalog, and hopefully pique enough interest to inspire further exploration.

“Down Below” from Cunning Stunts, 1992

“Hitting the Wall” from Peacetika, 1991

“No, I’m Not Coming Out” from Sorry in Pig Minor, 1998

The most specific descriptor I feel comfortable applying to their decade-long discography is “noise”. It’s pretty apparent, upon a minute of listening, why that is. Cows was the first band I came across whose music wouldn’t just fill your ears to bursting, it would plant itself in there and shred them apart from the inside. Each song revolves mostly around whatever rhythm they’ve come up with, invariably played at breakneck speed, and a matching bass melody. The only other structural element is a hook, in whichever instrument, always very short, hardly greater than four bars in length and four notes in range. And the rest is madness.

“Down Below” is the first song I usually recommend, because it’s the most “palatable”. The guy isn’t screaming in your ear in this one, nor is the guitar, so that’s good. The song also opens straight away with the guitar hook, so you know what to expect. It’s by far one of their more melodious songs, too. “Noise” is the only appropriate descriptor that can be applied to a considerable portion of Cows’ music.

“Hitting the Wall” is a full 180 from “Down Below”. This is the deep end, opening with jarring, frantic, atonal electric jangling in both ears, a barely discernible melody played way down in the lower register, and the singer’s vocals way up the other way (yes, screaming), that lasts almost uncomfortably long, before switching back to the main melody. Then he screams again.

“No, I’m Not Coming Out” is a good change of pace. The quality’s been cleaned up a bunch so it no longer sounds like it was recorded on a 90’s cellphone and then played to be recorded by another 90’s cellphone and then put on an album. And, the guy is whisper-singing most of the time, so there’s no hidden jumpscares. Even the instrumentals aren’t super in-your-face, which was generally the case with this last album of theirs. Sorry in Pig Minor, their last album, is a significant departure from the eight that precede it, but the songs’ structure and what can be inferred of their composing process seem very much preserved. In “No I’m Not Coming Out”, there’s still one repeated hook, in the form of a looped and layered sample of the singer groaning, and of course the guitar still sounds kinda out of tune. Wouldn’t be Cows if it didn’t.

Moo.

-Mans

[Think] MUSIC AND THE LISTENER: He called me a fucking punk, I said “Yeah, sure boss, you bet”

So this has been bothering me. I’ve brought it up in nearly every conversation I’ve had for the past week.

https://ricochet.com/186533/archives/what-are-the-six-songs-that-define-you/

That links to a music “questionnaire” that’s supposed to help you define yourself with six songs. My guitar teacher showed it to me last week. None of the questions were particularly stimulating, in my opinion. I mean, can you get more basic than “What song always gets you dancing?”

Yes, you can, as it turns out. Question 6: “A song that makes you, you.”

Bullshit. How can a song make me? How can I make a song? That I didn’t literally make, of course. The song and I would both have existed on our own independent paths until we happen to cross once. And of course we don’t remain intertwined, forever. I listen to a ton of songs in a day. And songs tend to be rather promiscuous themselves, being publicly available for anyone else to share in. How, then, can I call one mine? And in doing so, am I trying to impose my own experience/interpretation on a song made by some people some time who never knew me, or am I pigeon-holing myself to whatever the fancy of those people was at the time? And given the music I listen to, whoever wrote the song was probably high when they wrote it. They could be alcoholics. That’s not me. They could be assholes. They might hate me, if they knew me. There’s a 90% chance they’re white men, too. All of which is fine. But’s not me.

I’m not saying I’ve never felt defined by a song. And I mean, defined perfectly. Where it’s in my ears and the whole rest of the world seems to fall away, and I’m simply lost in whatever melody (or anti-melody) is tickling my eardrums.

It’s just that it’s never a full song, and it’s never fully me. It’s a song fragment, a hook, a particular nuance that happened to catch my attention this one time and momentarily obsesses me. I listen to it over and over, the same song, waiting for the one motif.

It’s never lasted more than a day. I’m a different person the next day. Or the next hour. How can a song make me, me?

Punk. 60’s garage rock. Noise rock. Anarcho-punk. Hardcore. Feminist punk. Alternative rock. Alternative metal. 80’s/90’s Indie rock. Grunge. Industrial rock.

All words I’ve heard used to define whatever I’m into right now. Does that mean they define me, too?

I’m even more hesitant to plaster myself in these labels (or is it on these labels?) knowing that I only discovered this little sub-culture/genre a mere few months ago. Before that, I was all metal. Now I don’t know the difference. Does that make my love, my feeling defined by this music, any less real?

It started with a Minneapolis band called (the) Cows, for me. Last September. I quoted them in the title. I’ll write more about them later.

A lot of the 80’s punk culture was sustained and propagated by underground, independently published “zines”. I don’t know when “zine” culture died out, but it certainly happened before I was born. My source for this information is Michael Azerrad’s “Our Band Could Be Your Life”, from 2001, wholly centered around documenting these mechanics by which punk lived and died under the noses of well, the rest of America, I guess.

All this to say that zines sometimes gave rise to music labels, and that for this reason fanbases were centered not only around bands, but around these labels and zines too.

All that to say that Amphetamine Reptile, or AmRep, responsible for “launching” the careers of many bands that I feel currently constitute my persona, is run by a super cool guy named Tom Hazelmeyer that to this day occasionally puts out little compilation albums featuring some of the artists he produced, affectionately titled Dope-Guns-‘N-Fucking in the Streets. There’s a compilation of these compilations, DGFITS 1-11, that I think summarizes pretty well the kind of stuff I intend to talk about, at least presently.

Because who knows what I’ll wanna talk about tomorrow.

So try the album if you want. Oh and the questionnaire, too. Maybe I’ll post my answers sometime (SPOILER: they’re not real answers, just rants).

-Mans

P. S. Say it like Hans, with an M. Or don’t. Fuck you.

P. P. S. The Cows song I quoted is called “The Man”, and is off their 1991 album Peacetika.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2dstRya21w