LAY OFF NATALIE MERCHANT

I quote one review that mentions lyrics, triggering a back-and-forth about the merit of those particular lyrics, and now ILM gives a shit about lyrical content as a whole? Wow!

I am so so so proud of Dan's new handle it isn't even funny.

This statement makes no sense. People on ILM who don't care about lyrical content have always been in the minorty and even among that group, it has never been the case that egregiously bad, intellectually offensive lyrics have been given a free pass, particularly when the accompanying music isn't stellar (for varying values of the word "stellar" obv).

blount your otm point about the reparations remark is kinda undone by sexist crap like this

On my morning bike ride, I go past the Vietnam memorial. And I couldn't help thinking of the "Slowest Parade" song.

*Double checks ot see if he wrote brian instead of brain there. No. Good.*

lol!!!!!

i'm gonna go out on a limb and say it's commentary about they're *ahem* glands...

maybe not. maybe my brains in the gutter.

she seems to be onto you all...

***OMFG IT'S THE TOTALLY TUBULAR ILX 1980s NOMINATIONS SUGGESTION THREAD***

"Planned Obsolescence" sounds very Joy Division-influenced.

BEFORE they remixed it!!! The bastards...

Dan, I assume you mean stuff like this? (TWR = Thin White Rope, I guess.)

TELL ME WHY DO YOU HATE THE JEW?? DO YOU HATE THE JEW BECAUSE HE IS YOU??

>Frankly, I'd much rather have a beer with
>the Sugar Ray dude than, say, Tori Amos (unless I had any chance of
>putting masking tape over her mouth and fucking her).

look who posted the sixth reply.

In '91, my band was recording an album at Bearsville
studios, and we came into town just as R.E.M. was wrapping
up 'Monster' - and 10,000 Maniacs was working in the
rehearsal barn. We had just started cutting basic tracks,
and I was sitting in the kitchen/game room smoking a
cigarette when Natalie walked in and started berating me for
smoking in the studio. I reminded her (probably a whole lot
more politley than she deserved) that my band was paying for
the studio and hers wasn't, and finished my cigarette.

If we dropped leaflets with the lyrics to "Pieces Of You" on them over Beirut, what do you think would happen?

revive

Dude, the whole thing that's so great about her lyrics -- especially the early ones -- is that they're so collegiate creative-writing assignments; if I remember correctly, "Tension" was the first song she and Lombardo wrote, and they lyrics were in actual fact from an intro creative-writing class Natalie was taking. Memories spawned by looking through your grandparents' old things: is there anything more college-sophomore lit? Hence my comment about current-day "women's lit" up above, and same goes for the Catholic working-class thing that runs through so much of her stuff, this constant excavation of what the mid-century experience of that might have been like, as with the (fucking AWESOME, seriously) "Maddox Table," which is all about Union immigrant furniture-workers (the video was all cut-together colorized tourism and factory footage of Jamestown), or "My Mother the War." (Suddenly I'd be curious to hear what ILX Mary, who I think has some upstate-NY working-class Catholic roots, would think of some of this stuff.) Anyway: I still find that lyric approach pretty charming through most of the early stuff, and I think she's actually quite good at it; I can't imagine many college girls writing better songs about multiple personality disorder than "Katrina's Fair," I like her enunciation (which is at least interesting and a decent signature and AS IF BELOVED MARK E. SMITH ENUNCIATES LIKE A HUMAN), and "Death of Manolete" makes perfect sense and has loads of great details in it, enough that I can remember plenty of them even apart from my teenage Maniacs fandom -- "there were women holding rosaries ... teenage girls in soft white dresses, standing silent, peace-respecting." (Yeah, there's something way too on-the-nose about "bred for one purpose only / to die in man's sport," but it's totally outweighed by her chirping cadence on the "neck neck, hook, poles of wood / the picadors stood eyes ablaze" part, and still, I mean, c'mon, why do you people want to STOP people from writing cool songs about the deaths of toreadors? Seriously. If she'd written lots of boring songs about dating people -- which NB I find it hard to imagine she was doing a lot of back then, unless they were like 35-year-old creepy academics -- then you'd have nothing more to make fun of than the enunciation, so CREDIT FOR TRYING. How cutely and beautifully and period-piece early-80s collegiate is it that not one but TWO songs on Hope Chest had lyrics adapted from Wilfred Owen WWI poems?) Anyway again: the lyrics on The Wishing Chair are like massively not issue-type things, which may have been kind of a "first real album" backoff and may have been because of the weird upstate history-rock the band suddenly got into, and maybe that's a better place to see how Natalie's lit approach to writing lyrics could create some plain just good lines, e.g. just spend some time unpacking the twists on "the man who's left to divvy up time is a miser / he's got a silver coin, only let's it shine / for hours, while you're sleeping away," from "Back o' the Moon," which in terms of character-creation and period-history-creation is just plain the most nicely sophisticated moon-reference I can think of in a pop song. It's on In My Tribe where the issue-per-song thing starts to become a bit much, but it's still interesting there, if you ask kinda-biased me (and c'mon, don't get all snobby toward trad writing, there's some great stuff in "Verdi Cries," if not in, say, "Gun Shy," and the whole Verdi-through-the-wall thing is so nice that I decided at some point it must be lifted from a short story, maybe A.S. Byatt, but so far as I can tell it's not). And then basically with Blind Man's Zoo it's like GEEZ, okay, one-issue-per-song, yes, these songs are actually alright but take a step back, you've done alcoholism and illiteracy and now teen pregnancy and colonialism and Vietnam vets, lay back a little. I mean, like, "Hateful Hate" -- the best way to reconcile this kind of thing is to think of someone like Morrissey, where his moments of total self-parody ridiculousness are maybe kind of the charm, where laughing at his idiosyncrasies is like part and parcel of loving and enjoying them.

Re: Rob Buck's guitar playing, I dunno about bum notes on Unplugged, which I've never heard, but his squealy sustain tone on the early stuff is just terrific, I think, and his superfast scale-playing solos on a lot of songs ("Death of Manolete," even) is pretty terrific. Basically it occurs to me that he was always kind of ahead of the curve on guitar sounds and tended to always sound great doing it, from those new-wave-isms to something like "Don't Talk," with those big sweeps of guitar -- I said earlier that "Maddox Table" puts Marr to shame, which would make "Don't Talk" something like their "How Soon is Now." (And again, the fucking guitar playing on "Maddox Table" -- COME ON, that spindly shit is TIGHT, let's not even get into it.) Beyond which I guess he kinda blanded out into blah, which is fine, though it was funny to hear little touches of his old high-up on the Gibson neck new-wave stuff come through later, like at the end of the solo on "What's the Matter Here."

GIANT post is mostly just cause it's late at night and I'm typing rapidly as a break from deep-cleaning my apartment, but mostly because yes, it's true, this was maybe the first band I was seriously obsessed with, so even with the stuff I don't think is so great anymore I can still very vividly remember how one might have appreciated it at the time.

-- nabiscothingy, Sunday, August 7, 2005 10:00 PM (2 years ago) Bookmark Link
Also

is great

I read this as "terminate Natalie Merchant's employment".

Things I would do to get to write something really long about Hope Chest: pretty much anything short of actually pitching or mentioning it to anyone