Sunday, April 21, 2013
NYT: Mike Mills: A Rock Star of Fantasy Sports
(www.nytimes.com)
I once named one of my jerkball teams “Monty Stratton Got A Raw Deal”. #stand
Read More...Mike Mills rose from a chair and strolled out to his car, but not to fetch a musical instrument to perform songs from the catalog of R.E.M., his seminal alternative-rock band. A fantasy draft of Masters golfers, involving Mills and a dozen others at a house not far from Augusta National Golf Club, had just concluded. And with baseball games in the East winding down, Mills was retrieving a laptop to take stock of his ...
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1 2 3 4 >Worse than Warrant? Or Poison, or Styx, or Journey, or Night Ranger?
Maybe, Yes, Most definitely yes, probably, and Yes.
Although I think Pearl Jam is perfectly cromulent band. I just think they are so blah that there is no reason for anyone to go either positive or negative to them. They basically produce one listenable song per album, kinda like Kiss in their prime.(now that is a band that Pearl Jam is probably better than, but of course that was one of Eddie Vedder's goals to produce albums every nine months like Kiss did---note I don't know if Kiss actually did that, but that is what Pearl Jam claimed as their inspiration at one point)
I mostly stopped listening after their debut album, but started again after seeing the Twenty documentary, and have been amazed by all the great material I missed.
I don't think I'd put Pearl Jam in my 100, but they were definitely in my top 10 or 20 for most of my teenage years. At this point, the majority of what I like by them is off the album Vitalogy. Choosing that album over Ten or Vs would surely make me a hipster, except hipsters are not allowed to like Pearl Jam.
I hope we can all agree that the Goo Goo Dolls are a national treasure. They broke up far too soon.
EDIT: Apparently the Goo Goo Dolls still exist. Why had no one informed me?
Mediocre bands never die, heck
I'm close to 100% sure that all of these bands still exist and tour to this day.
And without Styx, Reds fans wouldn't have ever come up with "Domo Arrigato, Mr. Joey Votto" and we would never have had the pleasure of hearing Cartman's lovely rendition of Come Sail Away.
That reminds me of this incident, when the Gin Blossoms were set to play a Delta employee party at which Jeff Francoeur was going to do his thing.
The hipster approach to Pearl Jam would be to choose a random mid-career record and decide that it is the greatest rock release of the last 40 years, and then establish an extremely extensive argument to prove your case. You'd need your listeners to be amused by the irony of the whole thing when you start in on the topic, but then grow increasingly concerned after you've been going on for 25 minutes and referenced things like the Lacanian concept of the mirror stage and Grant Hart's post-Hüsker Dü career.
"EDIT: I think Binaural is the greatest rock record since 23 Minutes over Brussels. That or Flowers in the Dirt."
a sample:
June 26, Styx, with REO Speedwagon(!) and Ted Nugent
July 2, Def Freakin' Leppard with Poison and Lita Ford
July 20, Nickelback with Bush(!).
It wouldn't surprise me if these are the 3 highest attended shows at Riverbend this summer. It appears that Jimmy Buffett won't be there (is he still alive) so, that's one less sell-out to contend with. Yes, Jimmy Buffett is usually the highlight of Cincinnati's summer music festivities. Sad, really.
Just checked and Warrant is still touring, even with Jani Lane having died last year. He's the only name I ever knew from that band! They're playing a festival in Portsmouth, Ohio this summer (population, like, 10000). Awesome!
From Bogart's schedule (smaller year round club, holds about 1500):
June 28, An Evening with Collective Soul! w00t!
I'm seeing nothing bad with that. Well the Ted Nugent I guess, but if he stays away from politics. I guess Nickleback is considered horrible, but they have about a half dozen enjoyable song. Def Leppard is one of the most commercially successful bands of all time, it's not like they are playing utter crap that nobody would go to see.
They have one song, with about 100 different titles. And that song is bland, yet still entirely unpleasant.
Are their non-single tracks very different from their singles? I'll admit that I've never listened to a Nickelback album, so I cannot categorically state that they are a horrible band, but of the songs I do know, which include:
- How You Remind Me
- Someday
- Figured You Out
- Photograph
- Rockstar
well, I don't really like any of those songs. They range from overly schlocky & sentimental (Photograph) to generic radio rock (How You Remind Me). Maybe I am missing some deep meaning but Figured You Out is basically about some guy raping a girl and that does not appeal to me.
I would like to hear Steve Albini produce one of Nickelback's albums because I think he can get some decent songs out of them. It worked for Bush*. I won't say Razorblade Suitcase is a good album by any means, but Greedy Fly, Swallowed, Cold Contagious, and Mouth are all very decent songs.
* Sixteen Stone was OK, so they did have some talent in them pre-Albini.
They are basic generic airtime filler. I tolerate pretty much all the songs you listed. Mind you I have the worse taste in music among all the primates so that could be evidence that they are truly terrible. Like Pearl Jam I just don't see anything to get worked up over, positive or negative. I can understand hating/loving U2(Jeter), Nirvana(Ryan Howard), Rolling Stones(Clemens) etc. But Pearl Jam and Nickleback are like the Skip Schumaker or Bud Norris of music.
How long have you been 100 percent deaf? Twenty years, I'm betting.
BEGONE, HERETIC!
Pearl Jam sucks. Even their band name sucks. Vedder's a major, sourpuss ########. Who sucks.
This is, verbatim, how I've always felt about the Doors and Jim Morrison.
My sarcasm meter is having trouble with this one.
Same here. Still, I sold their first LP for $99.99 on eBay a few years after picking it up as a cutout in the early '90s for maybe $4 in a now-defunct North Little Rock record store, so my hat is off to their crazed, taste-challenged devotees.
I took multiple cracks at Animal Collective a few years back because they were getting a lot of talk and critical love. And...I just can't get there, it's not my thing. I'm sure when I was a teen or young adult I would have been loudly declaring that "they suck."
To be fair, Bronson Pinchot was fine in True Romance, and very funny in Beverly Hills Cop.
Not many people could steal a scene from prime Eddie Murphy.
I was thinking grunge-y-er, though just as precise and clipped.
Try it in the voice of Jeff Spicoli.
Hmm, I guess I can't rebut.
And I wanted to invite to take you to a ST game, but my cars iPod is now all PJ all the time so I'm sad...
Yellow Ledbetter and Jeremy aren't bad, though.
Pearl Jam has been classic rock radioized. They have half a dozen songs that have been played, ad nauseum, for 20 years. If you don't like the band, you're stuck with occasionally hearing these same damn songs again and again, and you grow to resent the band because of it, even if you were initially neutral or even mildly supportive.
From what I can tell, the most interesting thing about Pearl Jam is the energy and creativity they put into their live performances. But it you're not a fan of the band, you don't care about this. They certainly are not still releasing relevant new music.
I don't believe this applies here. There are plenty of earnest indie darlings out there. Neutral Milk Hotel still casts a long shadow, Joanna Newsom, The National, Girls...
Yeah, I got a whole different, scary vibe from him there. Was he ever used like that again?
In a universe where they broke up after releasing JED and HOLD ME UP, when they were a Replacements-ish band with good reviews and no record sales, it actually would have been kind of true.
Define relevant, in a way that doesn't mean "that I care about."
That's not how I would ever use the term "relevant."
There is no national expectation for, or conversation about, a new Pearl Jam record. Radio stations aren't excited to pump their new singles. Critics aren't anxious to put in their say. Perhaps most importantly, young people do not listen. They aren't winning over new fans.
You can make terrific music and not be relevant anymore. Some of my favorite bands from the 90s (Yo La Tengo, Sonic Youth, Stereolab) are still chugging along, making high quality records, but I wouldn't call them relevant.
You mean to me?
There is no national expectation for, or conversation about, a new Pearl Jam record. Radio stations aren't excited to pump their new singles. Critics aren't anxious to put in their say. Perhaps most importantly, young people do not listen. They aren't winning over new fans.
How many rock bands are there for whom these statements aren't true? Four? The Black Keys .. Kings of Leon ... Cage the Elephant? Are Mumford and Sons a rock band?
If you look at the Mainstream Rock radio charts it's almost entirely bands that critics despise and/or bands that have been around for over 15 years. Critics are a lot more enthusiastic about Pearl Jam than Seether or Puddle of Mudd or Chevelle. And mainstream rock is almost never found on the real Top 40 radio anyway, that being the province of dance music for 15-year-olds.
Give me another word.
Fair enough, but there are many bands that don't fail at all of them. Animal Collective (mentioned by someone else above) isn't played on the radio, but their releases are hotly anticipated by critics, they are growing, they are listened to people under the age of 25. I'd call them "relevant."
Is Bush considered a historically awful band? I sortof enjoy some of their stuff, in a nostalgic-for-the-90's sort of way. I think I still have Greedy Fly on my iPod...I like listening to it even if the lyrics are rubbish.
You use this in response to someone extolling Pearl Jam rather than someone calling Nickelback listenable?
I pretty much consider Nickleback and Pearl Jam to be the same thing. Listenable music. Neither are good.
While the statement was kind of...harsh...IMO it's more defensible calling Nickelback listenable (a very low bar, and a pretty large number of folks agree) than calling Pearl Jam the best group in the last 20 years (an extremely high bar, and almost nobody will agree).
All those albums are fantastic albums as stand alone music but don't necessarilly say anything about the Band's achievements or accomplishments. Pearl Jam had one GREAT album--and that is about it. Really. They are certainly not "one of the best bands of the last 20 years" as was mentioned earlier IMHO. Not even close. They had one fleeting moment in the sun and it was brilliant while it lasted.
Please let's not give them more credit than they deserve.
That comment is going to be archived on Google for posterity's sake, and you will never be able to deny making it.
I wouldn't call it fantastic, but that album is pretty solid. It has one track ("Rise") which I think is a really beautiful song, probably better than anything Pearl Jam ever released. It also has a few more good songs and a bunch of perfectly cromulent background noise. I'm a sucker for anything with a ukulele though, so I'm not the most unbiased opinion when it comes to a collection of ukulele songs.
Also, "Jeremy" sucks.
My sarcasm meter is having trouble with this one.
I seem to be good at having that effect.
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