The First Word that They Learned was Please

Now with an update on this week's Giant Brain Album Exchange Album of the Week, Mean Gene Okerlund!

This choice by Duff was unique because Sinéad O'Connor's I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got is actually a record that I've tried to get into in the past, but ultimately gave up on. Even though I have a history with the record, it had been almost a decade since I had given it a listen, so our exchange was a good excuse for me to revisit it.

Deep down, I want to like Sinéad O'Connor because I think she's extremely cool. Like most, my knowledge of her came from the two most obvious places: Her cover of "Nothing Compares 2 U" on I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got and her ripping a picture of Pope John Paul II (JP2, for all of my Catholics in the know) on Saturday Night Live. I always thought the former was so badass and it's something that I've grown to respect even more with time. The Catholic Church's history of child abuse is firmly planted in mainstream discussions of the religion now, but not so much in 1992 (or 3, I didn't fact check #jschool).



I feel like so much of my relationship to older pop music was shaped by watching MuchMoreMusic while I was in elementary and high school. In addition to videoflows of music from the 80s and 90s, they would show tonnes of VH1 music documentaries, which would contextualize the bands I saw. Watching those shows was absolutely how I learned about Sinéad O'Connor and is also why I tend to only think of her in terms of her biggest crossover hit and her most infamous moment in the public eye. Not enough time in a superficial music documentary to really dig in, you know?

I deeply loved "Nothing Compares 2U" after going through my first breakup in university. In fact, me listening to the song on repeat in my tiny basement room in my shitty student house is probably the most melodramatic cliche thing I've ever done. Even so, every time I hear the song it takes me back to that time and I remember deeply the song resonated with me. For the entire duration of it, I felt present and it felt like I was being heard. That seems silly to say, considering I was 19 and didn't know anything about life or love yet, but I'm a silly person.

Of course, since I was 19 years old and still invested in skate punk, this version also got a lot of play:


At this point in my life, I'm willing to hear out claims on Me First and the Gimme Gimmes being much better than NoFX.

After revisiting the album, my opinion was more or less the same as the first time. I think that I appreciated it more this time, but it ends up being a little too all over the map for me. I wish the percussion on "I Am Stretched on Your Grave" was on every song. It feels like it's getting close to an interesting mix of Britpop, 80s dance, and folk singing sometimes, but then just when I get comfortable it veers into something else. Really, I want to like the album more than I actually do. I wish it was a cohesive thing that ties together all my expectations, but that's just not the case.

Maybe she has other ones that will do that? Probably not. Is it bad to limit my appreciation of Sinéad to her canonical moments? As much as I do want to steer out of the dumb a limited Western canon of rock and pop music, in this instance I tried and came back with the same answer. This reminds me of this scene from Lady Bird, which has stuck with me since I saw the movie and I think of all the time.

I Want to Taste the Salt of Your Skin

I'm wearing a vintage Kenny Rogers t-shirt today that my brother got me for Christmas in 2018 and it got me thinking about wearing the shirts of bands that you don't listen to, which has persisted as a hot-button issue in rock subcultures since merch really started to take off.

Not actually my shirt, but that is the one I currently have on.

Seeing somebody who more than likely doesn't listen to a band wearing a band's shirt and trying to needle them about their choice of shirt is something that the most basic rock bro loves to do. Case in point:



I guess that because you have devoted so much of your life to learning minutiae about a specific type of music, it feels good to identify and out somebody who is, in your estimation, a poseur. That will certainly make you feel big, but it also reflects more deeply ingrained gender dynamics in music, as especially rock music. How many of the people that he does it to in the above video are women? Does he gravitate to women rather than men because he assumes that most men will know? How many of those women were just panicking because they were put on the spot?

Being asked about the t-shirt that you're wearing is something that Rebecca has always worried about and that I had a hard time relating to. Becks hated talking about music and movies and their feelings about those things because there was such a history of men not believing their feelings were genuine. I couldn't believe that "Oh you like this band, name 5 songs" was a real thing, but obviously it happens all the time.

Who fucking cares what someone is wearing? Most male rock music fans are the type of losers who put any woman that listens to the same music as them on a unattainable pedestal anyways, so why are you purposefully trying to drive them away from that?

How that relates to my current shirt though is that the current fad of wearing vintage shirts is basically entirely built on wearing the shirts of bands you don't like.

Sidenote: Today, we were listening to Third Eye Blind's Self-Titled while driving. I wondered what type of merch 3EB has right now (it's all bad) and that led to me looking for their shirts on Etsy, where their 90s merch was going for hundreds of dollars.

A prime example of this is me right now. I don't really care about Kenny Rogers at all. "The Gambler" is a great classic rock staple and the MadTV skit was pretty funny, but other than that I have no tie to his music whatever. I like wearing the shirt because of commodity fetishism and because I love the aesthetic of old rock shirts. I can put on this t-shirt and because it's Kenny Rogers and it has the sewn-on stripes on the sleeves, it makes me look like Kelso.

Though at one time a celebrity wearing the logos of bands they clearly didn't listen to was grounds to roast them online, somewhere in the last 15 years the rock side of that argument lost so soundly that no one even noticed at all. Anyone bringing up that sort of argumentation now sounds like Abe Simpson in a bad way,* and we can see that reflected in current style.

*I find that "Ok boomer" got so tired after like a day. I get extreme chills of embarrassment every time someone uses it now.

Now, when someone wears a vintage t-shirt, like let's say an Instagram influencer wearing a Judas Priest shirt or something, it's about them acknowledging the spot that Judas Priest once occupied in music and pop culture discourse, rather than voicing your opinion of their music. What you're really saying by wearing your vintage shirt is "I know that heavy metal used to be dangerous and edgy and I like the aesthetic of the band". It's a post-modern way of interacting with popular culture, because we are now bringing the discourse and culture surrounding an idea or a band into our fashion choices, adding an extra, critical step in the choice beyond "I like the band, so I'm wearing the t-shirt", which I also still do.

I guess it's similar to other fashion trends coming back around again, like acid-washed jeans and hippie skirts, where a young person wearing them is doing so because the idea that it used to be cool is now cool enough to display that you know that.

More like Closed-Eye

One of the most fruitful friendships that I've formed in my life has been with Duff, who I'm certain I've mentioned on here before. Duff and I met through going to punk shows in Ontario with mutual friends. We weren't nearly as close as we eventually became then, mostly because I was deep into my party phase and Duff was nailed to the X.

Note: Duff is my only friend who remained edge. Kudos to him.

We became much closer after I joined Beat Noir and we realized that we had much more in common than we initially thought. We both loved reading, both loved keeping up with #peakTV, had similar politics, and actually both loved a lot of the same music (neither of us would have guessed the last bit). We talk pretty much every day and have had a running conversation for I don't know how many years.

A quick aside: Duff used to work in Guelph and would give me a lift home from campus on Fridays. We would have really funny conversations on the ride home and I joked about starting a podcast that was just a recording of us talking shit during this drive. We obviously never did, but this is the only good podcast idea I have ever had and it is the only one I will ever consider actually doing.

At the start of quarantine, Duff came up with the idea that we would give the other an album they hadn't heard to listen to during that week and we then established these rules.

The listener must:

1) listen to the album from start to finish in one sitting
2) consult all notes given by the recommender while listening
3) read the relevant Wikipedia pages for the album

After that we reconvene and talk about what we thought. It's been a nice thing to do each week and has made me revisit my own collection of music more critically, rather than just living on my Spotify homepage and the playlist of things that came out this year. Both of us have had hits (Duff showing me a late-60s Kinks record and me showing him Thin Lizzy's Fighting) and both of us have tortured the other person a little bit too (Duff listening to the Raspberries and me listening to Faust).

Today I was worn out from a bike ride downtown to get a COVID test. Turns out that going right from learning to riding into the city is stressful. When I got home, I was in a bad mood, but something that helped mitigate that was checking out Duff's recommendation for the week, the Cocteau Twins' Heaven or Las Vegas.

Duff described them as UK post-punk's most ethereal band and that tracks. I had actually checked out an earlier release of theirs a couple of weeks ago, but for whatever reason that album didn't stick with me at all. This one was instead a dreamy, immersive way to escape the frustrated feelings that I was stewing in. For a moment, I thought it might be too adult contemporary for me, but that was only a passing feeling. This is what bad adult contemporary thinks it sounds like. Layers upon layers of vocals and effects that can take you away to another place for a little bit.

Before you thinking that I'm getting all highbrow pop critic on you though, I then turned to a Japanese ska-punk release I recently discovered and learned a bass tapping pattern.

And Consequently He Also Saved the Piña Colada Industry

I've never been a "bike guy" let alone a bike punk. This subculture has really flourished over the last decade or so and was something that I totally wiffed on because I didn't even learn how to ride a bike until last month. Once I learned, a friend graciously gave a bike to me, I rode it a bunch, went and got it all set up at a shop and now I guess I am a bike punk. I even have the rolled-up khaki shorts to go with it!

I must admit that a small part of me feels guilty that the bike will now take the place of my skateboard as my primary way of getting around. The divide between skaters and bikers isn't as strong as the former and rollerbladers, but I feel like it's still there to some degree. Is it possible to exist in both camps? I feel like yes, but this will be a new thing for me to navigate in the future.

While riding my bike to the bike this morning, the experience made me think of an anecdote that Dan Campbell told about the experience of writing The Upsides in which a formative moment for him happened while he was riding his bike through the city. Those sorts of bits of information always stick to me like Krazy Glue.

It made me reflect on that album and how singular my relationship is to it. I had such an obsessive draw to it after it came out and built it all into my personality so heavily. I had an "I'm not sad anymore" sign in my bedroom, had "I'm not sad anymore" written on my backpack, and had (still have) the "I'm not sad anymore" hoodie.

Note: I wonder constantly if this is the most valuable piece of merch I own. I was shocked when I looked at my discogs and discovered that my 1st pressing of The Upsides was my most valuable record by a landslide.

After that I never really got into the band's later stuff as much, though Surburbia did get some plays, and I quickly moved on from my interest in that sort of pop-punk. When I look back at the record now, I find the music, lyrics, and general message insanely corny, but I also have a deeply embedded nostalgic relationship with it that I can still fuck with it on some level. I think about how much I would make fun of a nasally pop-punk that centered a message of positivity above all else if they came out now. I think about how some of the jokey pop-culture reference aged like milk. I think about how truly embarrassed I am of some of the other stuff I liked at that time (I will never live down Four Year Strong).

It all makes for a strange relationship to the band in which I recognize that they are critically not very good and unbelievably corny in terms of punk and that I have to own that, but also that I have a real, emotional connection to the music and it did do very real, tangible things for me. Just look at this blog in 2010 for fuck sakes.

Maybe going through your posi phase is a necessary thing to do as a young person. I like to think that it taught me important lessons about keeping a level head and always looking for more perspective on things. I think it was also a way for me to ignore the world for a little bit in self-interest and only think about my own minuscule problems, which sucks.

All that said, this song is my favourite on the album and still bangs, so we can end on that.