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Friday, September 29, 2000

more cereal-related humor: see how many of these deceased brands of cereal you remember. boy, i could go for a bowl of oj's right now.
-fred solinger | steal this link!

hmmm:

separated at birth?

(this post inspired by this.)
-fred solinger | steal this link!

BACKSTREET BOYS - "SHAPE OF MY HEART"
into this post-nsync world, the backstreet boys return, ready to reclaim their throne as rulers of the teen-pop kingdom. not only has the competition gotten stiffer, it is also now more profound. 'nsync went from also-rans to the most popular band alive, and many attribute their success to the personal freedom they achieved when they broke away from their management. the struggle for artistic liberty is documented on no strings attached which is a concept album of sorts dealing with five young puppets yearning to be independent of their surly master. they wrote much of the album and even produced some of it, no small feat.

the backstreet boys aren't to be outdone. they've recently announced that their new album, black & blue, will tell the story of a battered heart -- from the heart's perspective -- and that the first single from the album would be, appropriately enough, a cover of sting's "shape of my heart" -- heady stuff, particularly for a boy band. so how do they do?

well, first off, an admission: none of the above is true. well, most of it isn't, at least. it's the backstreet boys and, by now, you should know what to expect. i'll say that they're continuing the winning streak they've been on since "i want it that way," when it officially became okay for cool people to say they liked pop. prior to that single, in my opinion, the backstreet boys had been making run-of-the-mill teen pop that was catchy but not to the point where i had interest in listening to it. they wisely gave up the faux-r&b leanings that 'nsync has now made their stock-in-trade and have since gone straight-up pop. my criteria in judging whether or not i think a pop song is good is firstly this: being an active radio listener, if i don't leap to turn the radio off once said song comes on, it's good.

"shape of my heart" is a mid-tempo ballad, and not a million miles away from that aforementioned hit. all of what you'd expect is there: infectious chorus, toytown production, and that all-important key change. to deride it as formulaic is lazy: every genre has a formula, and it all comes down to how you use that formula, and i'd rather listen to most formulaic bands than a great percentage of those groups out their "making their own rules." "shape of my heart" is the sound of a group -- and a production team -- hitting on all cylinders. the chord changes are fine; the singing is very professional and the vocal arrangements are multi-layered; and the bridge is top-notch. it's sure to sound great over the airwaves and i do believe it will launch them back on top. sorry 'nsync, bbmak, 98 degrees, 5ive, westlife, & c.: like the saying of another famous formulaic product goes, "you can't beat the real thing."
-fred solinger | steal this link!

Thursday, September 28, 2000

a thought: while listening to public enemy's "brothers gonna work it out" on my walkman during lunch today, i was once again reminded how chuck d. and flavor flav are a reverse james brown & bobby byrd. then, as my thoughts turn to the devil doll image i have on my desktop, i realize that, in their own way, radiskull and devil doll are like the chuck d. and flavor flav of shockwave, only with greater contrast since radiskull's voice is deeper than chuck's and devil doll's is higher than flav's.

all of this is a very oblique way of saying that there is a new episode of radiskull and devil out and you can view it by going here.
-fred solinger | steal this link!

are we compatible?: since this blog's inception months ago, i've been wondering if you, the readers, and i were compatible. maybe you shouldn't be reading this blog: maybe there are others out there who are more attuned to your needs.

well, now i've found a way to discover who should and shouldn't be reading this blog, and that way is thespark.com's personality test. click on the above link and then answer the questions. when you get to the end, you can enter in my e-mail address, fred91577@yahoo.com, and see if we're meant to be together.

highest matches so far: tom (of course), dan p.k.a deX!, michael, my girlfriend, sophie, nick, tom's boss, april, and john.

lowest compatibility goes to ryan schreiber at 61%. can you beat it? let me know. even if you don't, let me know how we match up!
-fred solinger | steal this link!

Wednesday, September 27, 2000

zepwar continues: ewing, you right bastard. you had me believing that there would be no reply, and yet, i return to your blog hours later and i find a savage attack. far be it from me to back away from a good fight. keep it up and you'll be the one going down like a lead zeppelin.

As for me being unable to appreciate Led Zep because I'm a wimpy Brit....what nationality were that band again?

what nationality does a particular nationality say can't comprehend irony?* anyhow, despite the fact that led zep were in fact british, where did they pick up their influences from? skiffle? NAY! zep were part of that now-deceased breed of brit who really wished they were african-americans. tommo, however, is more like your hugh grant-ish british stereotype. he enjoys the speed-rock of motorhead because it's extreme: that is to say he likes rock but not rock. and by rock, i mean bands like the stones and the who and zep and the yardbirds and hendrix, etc. (though for some strange reason he likes...credence?!)

You can't think about Zep, he bleats, you need to feel them. That's a cop-out argument at the best of times, the direct equivalent of fans of Zappa or Mr.Bungle upbraiding people for not being clever enough to 'get' the music: you can think music and feel it, right at the same time.

yes, you can...and then you end up listening to things like smog. whether ewing agrees with it or not, there is some good music that will fall apart under close scrutiny, music that should bypass the mind and head straight for your soul. tom not being possessed of such a thing, i can once again understand why he doesn't "get" led zeppelin.

*call it my version of a red rag.
-fred solinger | steal this link!

tom and zeppelin: a love story: so tom ewing has finally bought a led zeppelin album (a best of, wouldn't you know) and he now believes he's entitled to dismiss them as a band. certainly, now having heard their stuff, his opinions have more credence than when he'd dis the band's oeuvre based on "stairway to heaven." it's really no fun dissecting his post when i know he's gone over-the-top with it but, at the roots, his complaints, like the song, remain the same.

They are, in the end, a foolish band: Plant's reedy yelp is easy to recognise, but also very easy to mock, and though millions of fans would disagree it doesn't convince me for a second.

i will admit that i was initially put off of the zep by mr. plant's vocals. i expressed these concerns to a friend and he informed that it wasn't even about plant, instead it was about how all of the parts coalesced into this perfect rock machine. it took some getting used to at first, but now i'm at the point where i see plant and his ridiculous voice -- a male janis joplin, if you will -- as another component of the band's desire to be louder, higher, harder, and faster than any rock band previous. is he a good singer? God no, he's atrocious. but, is that important? not at all. plant's vocals are a form of release -- as i strain to stifle sexual metaphors. the band -- page's virtuoso axe-work, jones's melodic and facile bass-playing, and bonham's immense drumming* -- would bring songs to their fever-pitch and it was up to plant to cap it off with his impossible voice. does it sound nice? no, but, if that enters your thinking at moments like these, zep isn't the band for you.

It's not that I'm over-analysing them or that I can't 'get' them: I'm suspicious of intelligent people trying to wriggle out of analysis, it usually means that what they're urging you to take on trust doesn't stand up well.

tom, i hate to say it, but you think too much. you're on all of the time, which is why, i think, that you don't like much classic rock. the impulses that zeppelin create have nothing to do with the mind. it's all feeling, and it should be an involuntary one. it's the same kind of feeling that brings out the air-guitar: if you're unable to play an air-guitar or say things like "axe" without a trace of irony, then zep just isn't the band for you. it's all about rocking HARD and if that notion doesn't appeal to you, go listen to your belle & sebastian records.

let me be unfair for just a brief moment. maybe rocking HARD is just an american thing. maybe you sensitive brit-types with your anxiety and heartbreak and frail constitutions and sighing aren't meant for rock. perhaps that's why you continue to export bands like the aforementioned belle & sebastian and, how can we forget, the smiths, while we pump out at the drive-ins. perhaps you're just genetically predisposed to hate zeppelin. it's best evinced by lines like this:

And I 'get' Zeppelin perfectly: they made loud rock music, but so does anyone if you turn the volume up.

this is, of course, your clever-boy way of trying to invalidate the last paragraph. i'm sorry my friend, but it doesn't work. the thing about zeppelin was that you don't need to turn it up. it rocks hard at '1' -- on a hypothetical system that goes up to '10' -- and maybe that's just what you're afraid of.

*even though i know being good at playing instruments means nothing to you, tom, and that's likely part of the problem
-fred solinger | steal this link!

Tuesday, September 26, 2000

where my head is at: an update: for those of you who wonder what ever happened to the post-happy proprietor of this here site, do not fear, i'm here and okay, it's just that i've become a lot less post-happy. a desire to cut down on the crap and to deliver straight content, as well as an increase in workload, has resulted in this page being sparsely updated.

most of my free time is being devoted to david foster wallace's infinite jest. how amusingly ironic that a book about addictions of every imaginable kind has itself become an addiction -- an end result that i'm sure the author was aiming for. infinite jest is nearly 1100 pages long (including 100 pages or so of footnotes) and, thus far -- thus far meaning 1/3 through it, it's turning out to justifying its length, a couple of superfluous passages notwithstanding.

what is the book about? well, i'm afraid i don't have the time to say; when i complete it, i hope to write something about it. roughly, it uses a tennis academy and a rehab facility in the boston area and the arizonan desert as locations. the story involves enough interweaving all of the people in these locales for three robert altman films or, more up-to-date, three p.t. anderson films. i'm nit sure when it takes place, but it all happens sometime in the near future where a device called the teleputer has replaced the television, where the continent of north america has been reconfigured to the displeasure of canadians and, especially, quebecois separatists, and where "sponsorship" of years is sold to the highest bidder, e.g. the year of the whopper. as involved as it all sounds, it's actually a lot (lot) more complex than that.

at the center of the story is the incandenza family: deceased patriarch james was a jr. tennis star and founder of the enfield tennis academy before becoming an apres-garde filmmaker; mother avril is the de facto head of the academy since her husband's death; eldest son orin is a punter-extraordinaire (yes, such a thing does exist) for the arizona cardinals and was also a jr. tennis star; middle son mario is, for all intents and purposes a creature as a result of numerous birth defects, but is beloved by all; and youngest son hal is very likely a genius and is currently an up-and-coming star in the junior tennis world. as a family, they often remind of a modern-day version of salinger's glass family, though the incandenza parents wield far more influence. and, basically, this is just the very beginning of all of the characters involved in this epic.

as you turn ine page, you have an incredibly strong desire to get through to the next one, and the next one, & c. through his dense and incredibly literate prose, wallace gives you the sense that all of this is leading to somewhere big and, very likely, tragic as each new page reveals a connection between two parties that you were unaware existed or discloses new information about a character that totally changes your view of them. as i said, it's very addicting as you highly anticipate, with each page finished, how it'll all end -- though it becomes frustrating when you see that you still have 600 pages or so to go still. so if you have a lot of time to devote to a book and enjoy challenging fiction, infinite jest comes highly recommended.
-fred solinger | steal this link!

hmm: if anyone knows of a malady which makes its victim feel frequently compelled to sneeze but not allowing, just flat-out refusing to let him/her to do so, please let me know so that i can treat it in the appropriate fashion. thank you.
-fred solinger | steal this link!

RICKY MARTIN - "SHE BANGS"
ricky martin: in this latin-pop world of enrique iglesiases, marc antonys, son by fours, and, now, christina aguilera, did you forget about "the latin elvis?" did you think that the singles he released after "livin' la vida loca" achieved a modicum of chart success more on the strength of that single than on the strength of those singles? and could that duet he did with madonna be any worse of a single than, say, "private emotion"? if you answered yes to any of those questions, well, ricky martin's returned to smack your fat ass with a phat new single.

"she bangs" has already kicked up a bit of controversy with its "racy" line about a girl who "blew [him] off" getting the thumbs down from british censors. based on that, one would wonder what american censors would make of the that possibly "risque" title -- until one realizes that, in this country, we understand that ricky martin is sexless enough so as to not mean anything more by the phrase "she bangs" than an action along the lines of "she moves."

so, i'm happy to say that in this land of the free, i've heard "she bangs" in all of its unexpurgated glory and i can report that it's, well, good! its rollicking beat serving as the perfect antidote to the studied "cool" of "la vida loca": in fact, the first ten seconds or so lead you to believe that he's going to break into "shake your groove thing." "she bangs," with its carefree piano licks and percussion redolent of earth, wind & fire's "serpentine fire," also has the distinction of being the first english-language song of his that i've heard that actually contains latin elements! take that jennifer lopez!

this being ricky, though, the tune, despite an 'a' for effort, lacks charisma and is not nearly as catchy as "la vida loca." its arguable that what success the single meets with will be attributable to the fact that he's the "la vida loca" guy or to the "steamy" new video which features a half-naked ricky being manhandled (hmmm...) by a bunch of scantily-clad young women. the video seems to scream, "am i straight or what?" and is a big-time riposte to his detractors. if he does turn out to be gay, this video is right up there with george michael's "i want your sex video" and elton john getting married to a woman in terms of gay male repression, but that's neither here nor there. what i'm saying is that "she bangs" is a marked improvement for martin and a fun little single to let into your heart.
-fred solinger | steal this link!