Wax Tracks: When Celebrities Sing
Wonka Vision Magazine has just published Webzine Vol. 8. Each month, the webzine features my column Wax Tracks, where I talk about and review various records. In this month’s issue of Wax Tracks, I look at albums recorded by celebrities from Bruce Willis to Alan Arkin. Some you’ll remember, others you’ve never heard of before.
Get links to previous Wax Tracks columns in the Content Writing part of my site here.
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New “Wax Tracks” Column Is Online
about 7 months ago - No comments
The latest edition of “Wax Tracks”, my monthly vinyl review column for Wonka Vision Magazine, is now online. This month’s column includes reviews of new releases by Fake Problems, Ninja Gun, The Zebras, Ampline, Atomic Garden, Arms Exploding and more. Check it out!
New Maps Of Hell
about 1 year ago - No comments
Veteran punk rockers Bad Religion returned with their fourteenth studio album, 2007′s New Maps of Hell. It’s been three years since their last effort, The Empire Strikes First, and the wait proved well worthwhile. After nearly thirty years together, Bad Religion shows no signs of slowing down. In fact, at 16 tracks, New Maps of Hell is their longest album since 1998′s No Substance.
The first track, “52 Seconds”, is exactly that long, and is probably the hardest track on the record. It’s a great way to open the album, and a great track for the insomniacs out there to set their alarms clocks to – this one will definitely wake you up in the morning. Best lyric: “I’m a monkey with a madding affliction / With fact checking for a mental condition”. “Heroes and Martyrs” is an anti-war song along the lines of Recipe For Hate’s “All Good Soldiers” and “Portrait of Authority”, although harder and faster than both. Pounding drums and guitar propel lyrics such as “An ultra-violent call / Summoning both poet and thrall / Sweet catalyst for the acolytes”, with Greg’s voice run through a level of distortion to feed additional energy into the song. Track three is “Germs of Perfection”, seemingly anti-industrialism with lyrics like “Clip the wings of progress turn the direction / Enrich the fallow soil with germs of perfection”.
“New Dark Ages” is one of the stronger tracks on the album. Bad Religion’s trademark “ooh’s-and-ahh’s” harmonies are in full effect on this one, which also features some of the best drumming on the album (cheers to Brooks Wackerman). “New Dark Ages” is an anti-organized-religion offering, similar to The Empire Strikes First’s “Atheist Peace” and Against The Grain’s “Faith Alone”. Track five is “Requiem for Dissent”, a political call-to-action song similar to “The New America”, from the 2000 album of the same name. The stand-out quality here is the repeating choral chant of the word “Requiem”. It’s catchy, and fits the band, but also seems to recall 80′s metal. The album continues with “Before You Die”. Every once in a while, I listen to Greg’s lyrics and think he’s suddenly channeling Jim Morrison. A perfect example of this is “As you ruminate the hopeless sands of time / did you wander out your days lost and resigned? / Or recreate the universals in your mind?”. Forty years ago, these might have been lyrics to an unreleased Doors song. But in the hands of the guys in Bad Religion, the song warps from hippie rhetoric to fierce punk rock.
“Honest Goodbye” is in perfect position on the album. Smack in the middle of the album the tempo changes, and Bad Religion gives us a sentimental anthem, and their most likely commercial radio hit since The New America’s “Whisper In Time”. In fact, commercial radio has already started spinning this one, and, according to Epitaph Records, it “is their best received radio track since 2002′s ‘Los Angeles Is Burning’ from The Empire Strikes First”. Best lyric: “Hands so clean / a sympathetic cold-blooded killing machine / How did you get so mean? / I want to know what it means”. Track eight gives us a second helping of anti-religion propaganda with “Dearly Beloved”, which seems to directly critique the priesthood with under-the-breath commentary wrapped between the priest’s line “Dearly Beloved” and the response dialogue “I can’t relate to you”. The sides are beautifully interwoven with the lush harmonies we’ve come to expect in a great Bad Religion song.
The album ends with the two longest songs. “Submission Complete” is the longest on the album, clocking in at 3:40 minutes. I’d think that the lyrics were a damnation of higher education, if it weren’t for the fact that vocalist Graffin worked his way through to a Ph.D. Or maybe that’s why he wrote lyrics like “Fuck the freshman lectures and brandishments / they just betray impoverished accomplishments”. “Fields of Mars” begins with a slow, delicate piano piece that lasts for a few seconds before the drums lead the rest of the band into a fast explosion of music. The piano returns about two minutes into the song, with Greg singing softly overtop, before returning to the heavier music. This gives it an atypical feeling for a Bad Religion song, but reminds me of Greg’s recent work on his solo album, “Cold As The Clay”. Best lyric here is the one Greg sings over the soft piano: “Who cannot fight anymore / will never love any less”.
With sixteen songs packed into a little over 38 minutes, New Maps of Hell is one of the best albums of Bad Religion’s career, and certainly one of the best albums of 2007.
Make Love To The Judges
about 1 year ago - No comments
The first full length album by the Canadian all-girl quartet Pony Up hit me immediately from the first song. Soft, somber, and hauntingly beautiful, “Dance For Me” is driven by keyboards, drums, and a really catchy bass line, and somehow incorporates dialogue from the trashy novel/film “Fanny Hill” as its chorus.
Lead vocals on the album are split between Sarah Moundroukas and Laura Wills. Laura’s songs, like “Dance For Me”, have an early Tori Amos / Juliana Hatfield quality to them, while Sarah’s singing seems more influenced by bands like Sleater-Kinney or Cub.
Overall, the album has a nice blend of mellow and modestly upbeat songs, nothing overly peppy, a great album for listening to while staring out the window and watching the rain or taking along on a roadtrip to nowhere in particular.
An Open Letter To Gil Gerard
about 1 year ago - No comments
I grew up on re-runs of “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century”. It was a silly show, but I loved it anyway (or maybe because of that silliness). Later on, I remember Buck himself, Gil Gerard, starring in a short-lived TV drama called “Sidekicks”, in which he played a detective paired with a young Asian boy with a mastery of martial arts.
After that, I sort of forgot about Gil Gerard for a while. I was busy with college, girls, and building my own career. It wasn’t until I saw his name appear on the guest list for a 2003 fan convention that I started reminiscing about the old Buck Rogers TV show, and how I had wanted to be like Buck when I was a kid. In my mind, Buck Rogers and Han Solo were characters cut from the same cloth, charismatic rogues you couldn’t help loving. Han Solo was portrayed by Harrison Ford, and I thought of the character every time the actor released a new movie. But I hadn’t seen Gil Gerard on screen since “Sidekicks” went off the air.
There were more than forty stars on the guest list for the Halloween Chiller Theatre Convention in 2003, but Gil Gerard was the one whom I most wanted to meet.
When I finally found his table, I recognized him immediately, though I couldn’t believe how much he’d changed. He was old, gray, and fat. I smiled and struck out a hand. He smiled back, and gripped me with a handshake that showed the action hero within him – strong and commanding. He wasn’t busy, the crowd of thousands preoccupied with other celebrities, and we got to chat for about ten minutes. To this day, he’s one of the nicest people I’ve ever met at a convention. But there was a sadness about him, and I couldn’t quite place the cause.
Now, nearly four years later, he’s back on television, on the Discovery Health Channel, undergoing a mini gastric bypass in a special entitled “Action Hero Makeover”. There was the Gil Gerard I remembered meeting, slightly melancholy, seriously overweight, about to go under the knife. He talked openly about his lifelong struggle with obesity, about how it has affected both his lifestyle and his career, and I suddenly understood his sadness.
In the second half-hour of the show, the cameras check in with him over a ten-month period, as he drops from a high of 350 lbs. back to his Buck Rogers weight of 175lbs. Upon seeing him, Buck Rogers co-star Erin Gray says excitedly, “You’re even skinnier than Buck!”
Ten months after mini gastric bypass surgery, my childhood idol looks great. He looks healthy, and the sadness seems gone from his eyes. Gil, thank you for sharing your experience with your fans, and we hope your renewed confidence gets you everything you desire in life.
Amusing Ourselves To Death
about 1 year ago - No comments
Originally published in 1985, Neil Postman’s book Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, is a scathing critique of the popular culture surrounding twentieth century television, with Postman defending his hypothesis that Aldus Huxley has accurately predicted a future society, now here, where “what we love will ruin us”.
Postman addresses the transformation of our society from one that gets its information from print media to one that is all-consumed by television. He asserts that, with television, the people seem to fixate more upon the images than the content. He talks about this with regard to the television news, and I see exactly what he means. The talking heads who deliver the headlines from the TV set become actual celebrities, even if they are only local celebrities.
I remember taking a field trip to the local news station when I was in junior high school, and the talking heads were signing autographs. These are people whose only job in life is to look pretty and read from a teleprompter. Think about that. All they do is read to us, read for us, and we think of them as extraordinary people. Television news is a benchmark of our image-obsessed culture. How many old, fat, or ugly people are newscasters? No women, certainly. And while there may be some old men, or some fat men, there are none who are both. And there are no ugly men. And television news, given its regimented time slot structure, requires news to fill the time. On page 65, Postman, describing the invention of the telegraph, notes that it would “not only permit but insist on a conversation”.
What this means is that the invention of a daily news show of a certain length requires that a certain amount of news be presented, whether such an amount of news actually exists. And the nature of the medium dictates an additional rule, that such news be entertaining. This is why local news shows are constantly doing a “revealing expose”. I saw an ad for one a few months ago, where the journalist revealed the shocking news that a city worker didn’t actually live in the city. How is this vital news to the community-at-large? It seems like simply an attempt to fill the time slot.
In this argument, Postman has his finger on the pulse of his era. But the age of the worldwide web has transformed many Americans back into print consumers. I get all my news online, and none from the talking heads. Unlike TV or even newspapers, online news has no pre-defined page or time boundaries, and can handle as much or as little news as currently exists. Unfortunately, like both TV and newspapers, online news depends upon an audience that visits regularly and often, because of the same demon that befell the others: advertising revenue. And so many online news sources are just as likely to include non-news as their print or video counterparts, because such pieces provide greater content for their demanding audiences.
Postman considers this trivializing of information, that too many choices make for a diluted experience, and he’s right. I recently saw an online news article about a “most beautiful bulldog” contest, and wondered why this was headline news in a country currently fighting two overseas wars and plagued by rising inflation.
Postman’s book was published before the reality-television craze began, but foretells its coming nicely. On page 112, he says “television shows, such as ‘Entertainment Tonight’, turn information about entertainers and celebrities into ‘serious’ cultural content”. When I read this, I immediately thought of how often I’d overheard people arguing about the outcome of the recent episode of “American Idol” or “Survivor” or “Who Wants To Eat A Pygmy”, or whatever other non-event television spectacle was popular that week. It is difficult to remain culturally relevant in today’s society without soaking your brain for hours a day in the iridescence of the TV.
No doubt that earlier cultures suffered this as well, but certainly not to the same degree. I can imagine that, in high society of the 19th century, everyone had read the same book or seen the same play, and one was expected to be able to discuss this shared experience in social settings. But today, with hundreds of channels, thousands of programs, TV requires dedicated patronage to establish a cultural acceptance in conversation; that is, in modern society the standards seem higher for the amount of knowledge of television a person has to possess to remain culturally relevant.
I picked this book up on eBay. My copy is a 1986 reprint. There is a more current edition, but I’m not sure if it deals with the expanded world of the internet. He addresses the computer near the end of the book, but of course this edition predates the popular usage of the internet, and the worldwide web, by more than a decade. I wonder what he would have to say about new experiences like Yahoo! News?
On page 137, Postman discusses the idea that “instantaneous news” fails to provide a framework for actual learning, and leaves a public who “seem to know everything about the last twenty-four hours but very little of the last sixty centuries or sixty years”, as he quotes Bill Moyers. The internet comes closer to “instantaneous news” than even television, in that a story can be uploaded to the internet and circulating around the world before a television station can get the proper make-up applied to its talking head, get the lighting just right on the wooden desk, and load the script into the teleprompter, so that they can interrupt a rerun of “Happy Days” and tell us all about what we’ve already emailed to twenty friends.
