Ep. 205 - A Richness of Embarrassments, with Kelsey Lewin

pasquinelli

TracyDMcGrath yeah, that’s what i’m talking about. the baggage of a thing varies from thing to thing, a person’s reaction to a thing is also their reaction to its baggage, that reaction varies from person to person, and people’s reaction to a thing, in aggregate, becomes part of its baggage.

TracyDMcGrath

pasquinelli I’ve certainly been on the other side of the baggage issue. Whether it’s love of radio pop, horror movies, games with intricate systems you have to learn “before it really gets good”, or, or, or…. It’s rough when something you really appreciate has a barrier to entry where people who you think might really enjoy it can’t get past that.

Can’t count the number of times I hear someone talk about movies they like and think, Oh you’d love Lucio Fulci…..wait….nevermind.

yeso

There are way more psychically confusingly popular musicians than U2. Don’t want to mean spiritedly list them except for munford and sons

My observation is that lots of people just bump into music from time to time rather than seeking it out, which fits with U2 just always being around. Same with aerosmith who flamed out by like 1980 then got resurrected for the MTV era everywhere at once geffen treatment

antillese

In 1995 I borrowed my friend’s copy of Areosmith’s singles album “Big Ones” to listen to in the car on the trip from Portland to NorCal to see family. I genuinely thought I returned it. I recently found the empty jewel case while cleaning the CD archive in the garage.

My life has not measurably improved or been hurt by having not listened to Big Ones in 20 years. BRB, I’m going to see how much damage it does now.

Edit: OK, I’m not (intending) to live-post about this album, but my reaction to the first song was “Whoa! I had forgotten about this exclusive track that opens the album! This ‘Walk on Water’ song is cool!” Then the lyrics started and I laughed out loud at the words “moolah” and “boo-yah”. Now the bridge has arrived and I’m finding the entire song mega cheesy. “Boo-yah” is spoken like 3 times. And yeah, it’s hyphenated because that’s how Stephen Tyler is pronouncing it.

NoJoTo

You too? Well, not me

exodus

NoJoTo get ’em

though I would say there are bands with way more baggage. there’s racist bands! there’s bands fronted by murderers! etc. certainly more baggage, though their influence is smaller. But I certainly agree that any big popular band has the stink of popular culture on it, and there’s a certain baggage that comes with that. It’s similar baggage to the marvel movies I’d say, but nobody is really hoping the next U2 album is going to blow their minds the way people seem to hope for that with marvel movies.

I dunno, to me it’s so vanilla and whitebread that it doesn’t seem worth discussing at length (and yet here I am). It’s like when people are talking about which fast food chain is better. I try to be nice about it but deep inside I’m like… ranking two piles of salt and carbs against each other is just finding a reason to plant a flag in the ground, but about the most banal thing you can imagine.

goonbag

exodus though I would say there are bands with way more baggage. there’s racist bands! there’s bands fronted by murderers! etc. certainly more baggage, though their influence is smaller. But I certainly agree that any big popular band has the stink of popular culture on it, and there’s a certain baggage that comes with that.

The elephant in the room here is Bono. He might not be a known racist or murderer but he does have that celebrity-activist-whose-opinion-nobody-asked-for baggage, exacerbated by the common knowledge that U2 make enthusiastic use of tax havens.

Otherwise as far as I’m concerned they’re just like the Rolling Stones or Metallica or whatever, a rock band who got too big to fail and have cultivated a permanent audience for late-career dreck.

beets

pasquinelli but maybe my view on that particular album is colored by the fact that my dad played it on the drive camping everytime we went.

This is U2 for me, my dad’s music in the car when the radio stops working. I’m quite fond of it, I probably know quite a lot of songs but none of the tracknames. My parents are also the same reason I know a lot of Coldplay, The Killers, The Beegees, ABBA (commonwealth rise up), and a bunch of other Best of cds.
It’s kind of a shame that cds are almost obselete, it was nice as a kid to have music connected to something physical. On the other hand it’s now fun filling my car with a bunch of $2 cds from op shops.

DaveedNoo

If the radio was a little better we’d probably have a lot less to say about U2.

billy

I was 11 when Yoshi’s Island came out. Shows how much you know.

yeso

I wonder what rock type group was least diminished over the long haul. Maybe The Fall? Nothing else coming to mind …

goonbag

yeso If we’re talking vitality in particular I think that’s the only example, yeah. They broke the mould when they made MES

穴

yeso it may depend on who you ask but a band that comes to my mind is The Flaming Lips, they can be somewhat inconsistent sometimes but they’ve been like that for the entirety of their almost 40 years of existence. Some of their recent stuff is really good imo.

rainbowbattlekid

yeso LOW is on track for this, but obv hasn’t been quite as long.

The Fall I’d say had a couple valleys, and so did Bowie but he’s another one I’d say his later stuff imo is on par with the early stuff

rejj

yeso depends on how far one is willing to stretch “rock-type” to!
I’d put forward some stalwarts from the New Wave of British Heavy Metal: Judas Priest and Iron Maiden.

yeso

goonbag yeah I was thinking not that everything was consistently good without exception, just that into old age they were still actually interesting and good rather than just satisfactory

rainbowbattlekid true, but I’ve been listening to the late 90’s into mid 2000’s records and like them a lot more than I once did, maybe a result of getting old myself (62 years young)

TracyDMcGrath

Parliament/Funkadelic maybe?

rainbowbattlekid

Yeah I like U2! If you’re at all into more like, new wave/post-punk stuff, their stuff up through War is more in that vein than the big anthemic stuff, though I love Joshua Tree too. Them turning into Oprah is a good call, but yeah they have some good stuff before they because uhh very embarassing.

But like, I mean this is corny in its own way, but this is so not even the same band they are now really:

seasons

I think yo la tengo fits. Saw them a couple years ago and they’re still having a good time.

穴

If Yo La Tengo and Low (I can’t believe I forgot to mention both of those bands!) being great after almost 40 and 20 years respectively teaches us anything is that if you don’t want your band to start getting worse over time you should have a married couple in the band.

wickedcestus

穴 one is probably okay; two gets you into a fleetwood mac situation where you burn bright while exploding in supernova and then coast for like 30 years while hating each other

« Previous Page Next Page »