I Love a Bunch of Genres

I Need Ya

The Crack

The Best of The Crack

This is was the second of two songs by The Crack on The Tape.

In my first post on I Love a Bunch of Genres I wrote that I would finish the story I started some day soon. Now, a few weeks later, I’ve forgotten what I wanted to say. The rest of the story isn’t very interesting: my sister took The Tape out of our shared car and I heard that “straight-edge” Will moved on from absorbing The Crack with his ears to absorbing crack with his nose, and I haven’t seen him since.

It was years before I heard The Crack again, but I eventually managed to find and purchase their greatest hits CD, and it’s phenomenal. You should buy it, too.

So there you have it. A not-very-exciting story, but it ended with good music.

And that concludes I Love Punk.

The Brickster

Decal

Lego Island

Well, well. Just one day left until “I Love Punk” month ends and “I Love [Question Mark]” month begins.

It’s not actually going to be a month of loving Question Mark, by the way. It’s going to be a musical genre, but I don’t want to tell you which, yet.

That said, let’s be clear about one thing - punctuation is wicked sweet.

Picking punk for this month’s theme was a mistake since I started the punk-lovin’ about half way through the month. I have so many punk songs I want to post, and there simply isn’t enough time. Here I am on the second-to-last day with a song I certainly didn’t plan to post when I started this, so maybe there’s never enough time to cover everything.

—-

This is the type of song I most like writing about because it’s probably not something you’ve heard before and it holds a special meaning to me. I think this was the very first punk song I ever got into.

It comes from an old computer game called Lego Island. Basically, the game was Grand Theft Auto III on an island made of Legos, and it came out five years before GTA3. The original Grand Theft Auto and Lego Island came out in the same month.

Maybe just a bit more description would be good. I mean, you can’t kill Lego prostitutes and steal their money, but otherwise, the comparison is surprisingly accurate. You can run around an island and go anywhere you want, either by foot or by grabbing a car, bike, skateboard, or helicopter. You can compete in races. You can drive an ambulance or deliver pizzas. You can even run over cops.

The real reason I want to talk about Lego Island, though, is to call out the blockheads at Lego Magazine. A few months before Lego Island came out, Lego Magazine ran a preview of the game that teased that you can do something awesome with a whale. Well, folks, I’m here to tell you that it’s not true. You could call me Ishmael after all the time I spent searching for a whale that was cut from the final game.

Thanks for ruining my life, Lego Magazine. Play well, jerks.

Straight Edge

Minor Threat

First Two 7”s on a 12”

You know what’s totally unfair? Drinking and smoking and doing other drugs might completely mess you up, but drinking and smoking and doing other drugs can still look funny and cool, and they serve as bragging points. I’m not into that scene, but when Snoop Dogg says that he rolls the best weed ‘cause he’s got it goin’ on, he elicits cheers. James Bond ordering a martini - shaken, not stirred - it’s so suave and hip! (Warning: When you do the same, it is not.)

Abstaining from all drug use, though? Laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaame. Try telling someone you don’t drink without sounding like a smug little dweeb. Impossible. The only way you can get away with it is if you’re a recovering alcoholic, and even that’s cheating. It just means you made a down-payment on being cool.

That’s why I have to thank Minor Threat for providing people like me with our one claim to glory.

Maybe that’s putting it too strongly. Let me try again.

Thank you, Minor Threat, for being less pathetic than D.A.R.E.

(Lord, It’s Hard To Be Happy When You’re Not) Using the Metric System

Atom and His Package

Making Love

This is Part Two of a two-part article. Part one can be found here.

—

Have you ever seen that Steve Martin movie, The Jerk? Ya know the scene where Navin discovers rhythm? That’s exactly what hearing Meatball for the first time was like.

We listened. When it was over, we listened again. Then again. It’s not often you can pinpoint a moment where everything changes, but that was one of them. Suddenly, music made a kind of sense it had never made before.

This song was so weird and sloppy and… different. It certainly wasn’t like anything on the radio. It was strange and funny, but it wasn’t anything like our beloved “Weird Al,” either. It was a new experience. And it was short, and it was catchy.

Listen to “Meatball” a few times. How many plays does it take before you know it word-for-word? Great, now imagine that you’re a slightly nerdy eleven-year-old who’s just discovered there’s more to music than Lou Bega and Billy Ray Cyrus.

We freaked right the heck out. We danced through my friends house, shouting the song as loudly as we could. We called all the local radio stations and requested that they play Atom and His Package. We marched through the streets, belting out our new anthem.

I am not, by the way, exaggerating any of this. The singing, the marching, the calls to the radio stations - all true. We acted like total dorks, and we were aware of it. Proud, even. We’d found something, something special. We’d discovered a way out of the everyday mundane. We’d broken out of everyone else’s culture. We’d escaped, and we were giddy.

We tried to spread our joy to a third friend, dragging him out of his house and to the computer to listen to this stupid little song that meant everything to us, but of course he didn’t get it. You can never really express that sort of thing to someone else. Looking back, it’s incredible that even two of us shared the same appreciation for Meatball.

Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve)

Buzzcocks

Love Bites

Apologies to anyone waiting for page two of my super-sized Atom and His Package blowout. Today was the day of a thousand meltdowns, and I’d rather take the easy way out and talk about something that holds a little less meaning for me right now. The thrilling conclusion to yesterday’s article will be the first thing I write tomorrow morning.

Don’t take that as any kind of enmity toward this song. I adore this song. This is the song I’m most likely to play too loudly on my guitar too late at night. Sorry, everyone in my apartment building.

Fun fact: So many bands have covered this song. Like, so many. A search for “every fallen in love” on YouTube returns the Nouvelle Vague version as the first result, and you know what? It’s positively delightful. I’m not sure I can say exactly the same about the Fine Young Cannibals cover, but I like it even so, if for very different reasons.

Meatball

Atom and His Package

A Society of People Named Elihu

Believe it or not, this was probably the single most important song in the development of my musical taste. Seriously.

See, I went through this “Weird Al” phase where I listened exclusively to “Weird Al.” That’s it. Nothing else. For about five years.

Flashback to 1999/2000: Mock me if you will for my obsessions, but at this time I was eleven or twelve. Backstreet Boys. Britney Spears. Christina Aguilera. Ricky Martin. Jennifer Lopez, before she reduced her name to a letter and a syllable.

Also take into account that I was living in Texas, and the worst sort of country was reigning supreme. Kenny Chesney, Alan Jackson, Tim McGraw, George Strait.

I’ve since come to appreciate much of the trash-pop of the late-ninties (that style of country is still pure ear-poison), but at the time, “MMMBop” just wasn’t doing it for me, and so I turned to the funny guy who stole his tunes from several decades of popular music’s best.

This isn’t about Al, though (I’ll be writing plenty about him in time), or about the music of those days. This is about my rejection of mainstream music. For half my life, I assumed the alternatives started and ended with “Weird Al.” And then Napster entered my life.

I had spent the night at my friend’s house the previous night, and we were spending our morning exploring Napster. By this point, we’d spent a fair amount of time in the world of file-sharing. We’d been downloading music for a few months, but there was still a thrill to it all. It seemed there were no limits to the wonders being offered to us, and we had no idea what to do with that freedom. Any song could be ours. The only obstacle was our limited knowledge of music.

Why my friend searched for “Meatball,” I’ll never know. I thought he was crazy! We were kids in the age when Internet Paranoia was at its height. Who knew what could happen if you searched for “meatball” online? Something sick and depraved awaited us, no doubt! I tried to convince him to stop the download, but he wouldn’t.

Download Complete. He hit play.

Come back tomorrow for Part 2…

‘Bout the City

The Reps

Jet Set Radio Soundtrack

I don’t have time to write anything significant today, so I picked this song because

A. I like it very much, and

B. It is inevitable that I will say more ‘bout Jet Set Radio (Jet Grind Radio in North America) when I get around to an I Love Video Game Music month.

Enjoy.

(The more I listen to this song, the more I question if I should be posting it as punk. What is this? Ska? I’m gonna say it’s close enough.)

Nihilism

Rancid

Let’s Go

Last night’s Ted Leo concert was loud and wonderful and loud. I’m assuming that today’s song is good because I can’t hear.

Rancid is nice that way. I can pretty much pick any of their songs and feel confident that it will be fine. I don’t exactly love any of their music, but sometimes you just want some standard punk noise, and they suffice.