Mogwai. "Dracula Family." Pics of Argentina.

Utterly beautiful song from one of the finest bands around. Check them out April 27-29 at the Music Hall of Williamsburg. Or wherever you are.

Make Me A Mix Tape

I love a mix tape. Giving them, receiving them, making them.

A mix of inoffensive yet catchy pop music can be the perfect way to introduce oneself to a new person in the office. A well thought out mix can also be the perfect third date gift while a collection of Jeff Buckley, Tom Waits and Elliot Smith can provide the salve to (what you think is) a premature goodbye.

But things just ain’t the way they used to be when it comes to making a mix . . .

Whereas the creation of a mix tape used to require listening to each of the fifteen or so songs on a given mix in their entirety, making sure that you hit pause after a each track was over but before the start of the next (inferior) song, sorting through other tapes or cd’s and queuing them to the proper song, now you just make a playlist from the 5,000 or so songs in your iTunes library, click on “burn to disc” and sit back.

It used to be when somebody handed you that little rectangle cassette case with a cheeky title meticulously penned on the cover along with the tile of each track, you knew that there was not only a lot of thought put into its creation, but a minimum of 90 minutes as well (nobody ever makes 60 minute mixes). You took pride in playing the tape—loud in your Dodge Dart—and read into each song, knowing that this person was thinking especially of you when they chose it.

This is not to say that burning somebody a CD today is meaningless. Far from it. But I just don’t know if they really speak for themselves like they did way back in the day. . .

And with that, I leave you with some lyrics from Milwaukee pre-emo kids The Promise Ring

You remind me that I'm never going to be twenty-two
listening to the alarm, waking up south of north avenue
my skin is going to wonder what I'm doing now.
So write me a letter, tell me where you are how to get there and how long that it takes to tape me some songs.
Make me a mixtape something old and something new
something I said or that we did that reminds me of you
make me a mixtape that makes me yours.
Don't leave out Husker Du.
Put something on that The Cars did in 1982.
It makes me yours.

Come On Feel . . .

The etymology for the word nostalgia combines the Greek roots nostos, “returning home," with algos, “pain.” From the early 15th century until as recently as the 19th, nostalgia was treated as a medical condition, a form of melancholy, with entire medical texts devoted to it. And in the modern novel The Immoralist, Andre Gide writes that “happiness is never so easily destroyed than by thoughts of past happiness” lending credence to the idea that nostalgia is something to be avoided.

Yet when on the F train last night, reveling in the slight distortion of reality created by a touch of after-work tequila, I dialed up the Lemonheads 1993 album “Come on Feel The Lemonheads” on my iPod and was happily under the spell of dear old nostalgia . . .

The Lemonheads burst onto the scene in 1992 with their major label debut “It’s a Shame About Ray,”and as well received as this album was, critics were equally as blasé about “Come On Feel . . .” (Rolling Stone was in the vast minority giving the album four stars). But from the moment that the dulcet tones of Evan Dando’s voice in “The Great Big No” hits my ears to the last note of the hidden track “The Jello Fund” there is no doubt that this is my favorite album from the grungerific 90’s.

My love for this album is borne from the fact that Dando’s voice was not only the honey that soothed my soul during the breakups and disappointments of my late teens and early twenties but also from the memories of freedom and youth that it recalls. Coupled with the knowledge that “Come On Feel . . .” was created from beneath Dando’s burgeoning drug habit that would soon spiral out of control (which he confesses to in “Rick James Style” when he frantically sings “Don’t want to get high/but I don’t wanna not get high . . . Just give me a killer line/ and I’ll figure it out myself”) makes it an even more impressive feat. Yet even with this touch of darkness lurking beneath the surface, Dando’s effervescent pop sensibilities that offer tales of the mundane some pep (“Paid to Smile”), honesty when addressing the legions of gay men under the spell of his pin-up looks (“Big Gay Heart”) and desire for sanctuary (“Into Your Arms”) make this album too much fun to dig very deeply.

Are The Lemonheads as ambitious or complex as, say, Radiohead or Nirvana? Of course not. But ambition is overrated and complexity works best in puzzles, not pop albums.

Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before

Tonight I am going to the church of Morrissey at Webster Hall. I cannot deny that this particular venue is a terrible place to see a show, but when it comes to The Moz I would pay $75 to see him in a Bikram Yoga studio—which says a lot as I hate feet and yoga gives me the creeps. Often, my friends and co-workers will wonder aloud why I—a sports addled guy from the Rust Belt—would be so enamored with an asexual guy from Manchester who preens himself with gloom. How can somebody who screams at the television during Browns games harbor such an affinity for a guy who sings “I wear black on the outside/ ‘cuz black is how I feel on the inside”?

Why not address that here?

It all started when I was in high school outside of Akron, Ohio in the early 90’s. I discovered rap in the late 80’s and even though I lived in a white washed city of 40,000 I decided to emulate Flavor Flav, going so far as to wear a clock around my neck and speak in mode of affectation borne on the waves of urban radio. Feel my pain here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ltgXtrR_A4

This was before hip hop crossed over and was deemed cool by suburban white kids . . .Prior the moment in time (that continues today) when ebonics became the lingua fraca in towns like mine and guys named “Blaine” used words like “fo’ shizzle.” The result was daily verbal, and occasionally physical, evisceration from my classmates. Yet somehow, I found solace in the fact that I was not simply following the pack like a drunken lemming, wearing acid wash jeans and White Snake T-Shirts and looking at my reflection in the windshield of my red Camaro. I was special because I could withstand it and recall all of the lyrics to Big Daddy Kane’s “Raw.”

How does this relate to Morrissey? In about my sophomore year, just as rap was being accepted by the mainstream and kids at my high school were asking me if the could borrow the latest Eric B & Rakim or Jungle Brothers tape, I started to get bored with the whole gangster mentality that overtook the scene. NWA, with their gratuitous violent imagery and disdain for white folk like me, killed rap for me. Of course I know that Chuck D. also was not very fond of ol’ whitey but Public Enemy had an intellectual agenda that sent impressionable kids like me to the library asking for books about Malcolm X, Joanne Chesimard (Assata Shakur, if you like) and Marcus Garvey. NWA just had kids racing to their local black market in search of an AK-47 . . .

This was about the time that I first heard The Smiths “How Soon is Now?”. I was (am) a goofy, pasty red haired kid and was invisible to girls (at least the ones that I dreamt about) and when Morrissey sang about loneliness and despair I was there to empathize with him. It was like black laced manna from heaven as I knew what it was like to go to a dance in the high school gymnasium and watch my friends make out with girls while I stood in the corner. Let’s face it, red headed men are the antithesis of the “dark handsome stranger” that women long for and nowhere is that more certain that in the cruel minds of high school girls.

While I didn’t instantly go out and buy the entire Smiths catalogue (they had broken up by 1987 and my family was less than affluent) I started to chat with the kid in the Depeche Mode t-shirt in study hall and ask him about this Morrissey guy. I heard the witty, side of The Pope of Mope in tracks like “Girlfriend in a Coma,” “Hairdresser on Fire” and “Some Girls are Bigger Than Others.”

And because of songs like “Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before,” where he croons:

“And the pain was enough to make/ a short bald Buddhist reflect/ a plan a mass murder/ who said I lied to her?”

Or, in “This World is Full of Crashing Bores”:

“It's just more lock jawed pop stars/ Thicker than pig shit/ Nothing to convey/ They're so scared to show intelligence /It might smear their lovely career”

I slowly became yet another acolyte, unable to dismiss Morrissey as just a pop star.

Now, as I am much more secure in who I am (not really), I can say that Morrissey’s appeal to me is derived from his dark gravitas as much as his poetry. He represents the amalgamation of Dylan Thomas, Oscar Wilde, Elvis Presley and David Johansen of the New York Dolls and carries himself as such. As evidenced by his latest album “Years of Refusal” his skill as a song writer has remained strong and I am eagerly anticipating this evening’s show as a chance to see eye to eye with the my musical hero . . .

I just hope that he does not rip his shirt off at any point during the performance.