Anecdotes! Anecdotes! Part 66

Fair warning, I'm am reaching deep into the well of drafts of this one, so I can't promise that the level of thought and cohesion we all know is IMU's calling card will be present this months after the fact. Funny the way that happens, I'll jot down a few ideas to make sure that I don't forget an idea I found interesting, but the longer I go before writing it out, the more the connective tissue between the ideas disintegrates. In life as in blog. 

A deeply embarrassing thing about me is that I was a "rap is crap" kid. I wasn't all the way there and had rap records that I liked as a teenager, an inevitability growing up in Scarborough, but I would say I was 60ish% of the way there. I feel like this part of my personality was especially turned up in early high school when I was starting to get into my local punk scene in Toronto and was digging my heels in to make "punk" my persona. It was also due to the commercial rap of the time being dominated by Eminem and G-Unit, which I still haven't come around to liking.

Still, most of my friends in my neighbourhood listened to that stuff and it was often a source of banter with us. I would tell them that 50 Cent sucked and had no talent and they would tell me that NOFX sounded like shit and nobody liked them.

During one of our debates, I was trying to make a point that punk bands were better musicians because they played their instruments live (in hindsight, full-body cringe) and they played the music on the albums (yet another FBC). Two of the guys I was with, Chris and Vito, said something along the lines of 

"Are you dumb??"

"What do you mean?"

"The DJ plays the music."

"Yeah, from a record"

"No, they use the turntable."

They thought that a turntable was a musical instrument! And not in a poetic, "the DJ uses it like an instrument" way. They thought that turntables and the mixer were and instrument that played the actual notes of the song. 

It was one of those crazy moments where a short statement succinctly communicates how dumb the other person is. A beautiful moment of catching the other person and them just having to sit with it. The extremely powerful feeling of "I know more than you." 

In hindsight, is Get Rich or Die Trying or The Documentary better than Punk in Drublic or The Decline? Probably? A thought for a future draft?

It Had to Be You Who Broke My Heart

 Welcome to 2022 in I, Musical Genius. We are pivoting HARD this year and TRYING NEW THINGS. I, Musical Genius is going to INNOVATE and PUSH FORWARD. No more emo write-ups of albums. No more trying to sound intelligent when talking about movies or observations. We are putting our FINGER ON THE PULSE of culture. We will start with a discussion of a record.*

*I was reminded of the early viral video "Power Thirst" by Pinic Face today that my friends and I were all obsessed with in our university residence dorm. It's between that and "My New Haircut" for the things that best exemplify the early days of YouTube for me, though I wish people other than Pat and myself were familiar with the guy who did voice-overs of John Petrucci guitar instructional videos.** Maybe "Power Thirst" made me write out this dumb intro. Despite that, I still had to italicize I, Musical Genius, even though an moron probably wouldn't.

**My friend Katie married a great guy named Tom last year. I consider Tom a friend, but we were always kind of ships passing in the night. I feel like we have a lot in common and are two different versions of the same sort of Ontario punk guy. He's the only person I ever met who also knew these videos.

I found Esther Rose's album How Many Times last year, but didn't spend enough time with it for it to make it onto my year-end music list. Still, there are tracks on it and I've been enjoying it as some mopey winter music while the days are short and my mental capacity shrinks. I guess that giving a record its own proper write-up is actually more attention than something would get in a short list, but the prestige is reversed, I promise you.

Country is a bit of a weird thing for me and I don't think I've found my "guy" yet in the genre. I didn't listen to it much at all until Daniel Romano pastiched it on his first solo records, which is what opened my eyes to the good parts of the genre. I'm long past my days of believing that any particular genre is good or bad or more worthy or important than any other, but country is still a path that I haven't walked too far down. I'm sure there is a canonical great whose vibe clicks with me and who will kick off a gigantic country period for me, but that's in the future.*

*Apparently we're doing a lot of notes today. I bought the album Hard to be Humble by Mac Davis in 2019 and wondered if that would be something I would get into by virtue of owning. Didn't happen, but it's still a funny record. Also of note, I found this guy only just died and wrote songs for Elvis in the 60s (cool I guess? I don't know) and Weezer in the 10s (funny).

Sometimes though, the mopey forelorn vibe of a good country song does hit the spot and I find that Esther Rose's album is doing that for me at the moment. While Romano committing completely to the gimmick is fun, especially when the songs are that good, I also like Rose's personal lyrics on the record. "My Bad Mood" and "Coyote Creek" back to back is my favourite part. 

Becks and I are almost done Game of Thrones and the end of the show is pretty dumb. I was saying that it was still extremely watchable, especially as a binge, but that was before every episode was 80 minutes. Why not make ten 50-minute episodes instead of six 80-minute ones? High on twists and CGI, but low on good conversations. While the early part of the show showed people traveling everywhere for episodes at a time, everyone now just zips around to all corners of the map, which cuts out all the great character building that happened along those trips. I would also say that I thought Daenerys was dumb from the first episode, but that would require to wade into dumb fandom conversations that the show was surrounded by and that ain't me babe.4

I will also say that I'm at the end of season five of The Sopranos and it is the complete inverse, with the writing being just as if not more sharp than any other point in the series and characters growing now more than ever. Shout out to my twin Buscemi.*

*Real ones know