John Cale

by teabog on March 29th, 2007

John Cale
“Antarctica Starts Here” (From the album Paris 1919)

Paris 1919 was recently re-released and I will be goddamned if every review that was less than a perfet 10 didn’t piss me off. Sure, all the 9.5s and 4 and ½ star reviews were great—and there were usually sure to how Cale’s early stuff beats the everloving shit out of Reed’s wonderful solo stuff—but they weren’t PERFECT dammit, and this album is PERFECT.

Buy this. Buy it now. I own two copies just in case one breaks.

As for this song, it’s one of the more underappreciated one the album. It closes things out on a rather soft, somnolent note, only it feels a lot more genuine than any other “lullaby” rock track I’ve ever come across.

Once I was driving along rural Illinois, high as a kite. I was 17 years old and had taken several different Very Dangerous drugs. I drove into a ditch, and rather than try and get myself out of it I just rolled up the windows, turned up the stereo as loud as it would go, and played this song over and over again for an hour or so. Then I gunned the motor, made it onto the road, and drove safely home.

Buy Paris 1919 off of the Amazon

Fox “S-s-single Bed”

by teabog on February 5th, 2007

Fox
S-s-single Bed

I downloaded this off of Fluxblog ages ago, and once I got past the fact that it was unapologetically a piece of sleazy 70’s dance music—free from any sign of kitsch or self-awareness—it became my campy anthem of the summer.

The key word is “camp,” not “kitsch.” I’ve read Susan Sontag’s half-coherent essay that tries to differentiate the two terms, and even though I found it very interesting I thought it was way too prolix and muddied the terms more than they needed to be. To little old simplistic me, the difference between the two terms is that “campy” things are good in spite of being campy, while kitschy things are only good within the context of being kitsch. Lime green stretch pants were never good, until they were worn by self-aware people who embraced and appropriated their badness to a new end. Campy things are good things that, for whatever reason, are grouped in with bad things. The films of John Waters and Douglas Sirk, for example, or the music of Girls Aloud or Annie.

Back to this song…this song is one that you probably shouldn’t play in front of new company for fear of getting dirty looks. When you first listen to it, it just feels wrong, like you’re listening to something you should hate. But then you start to realize how goddamn sexy it is, how it’s not the coked-out, superificial disco fantasies of some dumb cunt that you’re listening to, nor is it a run-of-the-mill 70’s psychedelic track. Instead, the blending of the two styles yields something that’s much filthier than you would expect, something that maintains its playfulness in spite of its sexiness. The end result is sounds like a blend of Cyndi Lauper, Goldfrapp, and Blondie, and I like it a whole bunch.

Buy Fox’s debut album at Amazon