-John Fogerty
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Blog: I've Been Thinking About Phil Ochs →
Here’s a piece I wrote for my friends over at Full Stop. As the title would suggest, it’s about Phil Ochs. I’d just watched There But for Fortune, the documentary about him, and now I find myself in the throes of a Phil Ochs kick. Follow the attached link or go to the Full Stop Tumblr to read more.
It’s tough to say if a figure like Ochs could exist now. Stylistic irony (i.e. anachronism) has become a hallmark of the sound of the last decade; one aspect of this sound is a lyrical tendency to romanticize or even mythologize oneself. In his own way, Ochs is guilty of it too: in There But For Fortune, friends and family mention that Ochs wanted to be a cross between John Wayne and Elvis, both folk heroes of the entertainment industry. That fantasy imploded as Vietnam ended and “there were no more dragons left to kill”; Ochs took his own life in April of 1976, three weeks before the first anniversary of the official end of the conflict. Still, Ochs’ music is predicated on unselfishness: he often uses the first person, but only to explain his personal relationship to his own time, and by extension to his listeners. It might seem out of place in an idiom that’s become preoccupied with inter/intrapersonal relationships, and the abstract life of the mind. It might also seem refreshing. […]
Oral Tradition in the 2010s | Full Stop →
This is a link to a piece I wrote in December of 2011 for my friends at Full Stop, but it has at least some bearing on what I do here at BoTR. The piece, in a nutshell, is about the relationship between a receding culture of oral transmission and the dominance of recorded music and the ramifications of this state of things.
I know, that’s quite a nutshell. It’s quite a nut. Enjoy.
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Best of 2011
Now seems to be as good a time as any to look back on the year in music that was. Best-of lists can be divisive things — I never agree with anyone else’s, most likely no one will agree with mine. The hope here is that you’ll check out some of these records that you haven’t yet. So, here’s my two cents.
Less Talk, Less Rock
Today the AV club ran an astute – if overdue – article by Stephen Hyde about how Rock is no longer an appropriate catch-all term for popular music. The article itself is worth checking out, but the basic gist is that since Rock is an inadequate signifier since its place atop the charts has been taken over mostly by hip hop artists. The same can be said for pop: the radio station I used to help run, WOBC, lumps all tonal music into the pop category when it doesn’t fall into another genre. I actually like that, since its connotations are pretty nil. Rock is a different case, however, since the term itself implies a kind of benightedness when it’s bandied about as frequently as the AV Club thinks.
The Beach Boys - Smile
I wrote this article for Oberlin’s Wilder Voice’s May ‘08 issue. I’m reprinting it now, in honor of SMiLE’s release, which happened last week about forty years too late. The gist was to take a look at the allure of unreleased albums through the eyes of perhaps the most famous one, and the one that got me hunting for more jettisoned gems like the ones you find on this blog.
It isn’t hard to say why The Beach Boys’ music survived the 1960s. They were a band in exactly the right place at exactly the right time; they were making Rock n’ Roll records when the teenyboppers were screaming for Rock n’ Roll, and they made weirder shit when the same teenyboppers found drugs and stopped getting haircuts. As to why they survived the decades that followed, that’s a different story altogether. There’s a reason you’ll always hear about The Beach Boys before you hear about a band like The Zombies or The Turtles (other ‘60s pop bands). It’s that The Beach Boys embody something much darker than California Girls and muscle cars. And it’s got nothing to do with the music. The music is only a window into to the eye of the Beach Boys zeitgeist.
