Category: Music

On exhaustion and bad parenting

On By Luther M. SilerIn life, Music5 Comments

I have done some grading tonight, but not much, and I regret to inform you that you cannot make me do any more. Nor can you make me get any lesson planning done; this week is going to be by the seat of my pants, more or less, and it’s going to be fine anyway because this shit is muscle memory by now. This weekend was kind of nuts; my father-in-law’s memorial service was Saturday morning in Plainwell, Michigan, which means I got up earlier on Saturday than I typically get up during the week and spent the drive up hurriedly composing the eulogy I was supposed to deliver in my head, sans paper, because for some fucking stupid reason I hadn’t written it yet.

Don’t leave eulogies to the last minute, people. I pulled it off and everything went fine because I am exceptionally talented, but … don’t do that.

Oh, and the … hole? Is it still a grave if you’re just using a box with an urn and some Beefeater Gin in it and not a casket? Well, whatever it was, the Goddamned thing was too small, and everyone got to take turns digging the hole wider and deeper with what I think were technically stolen shovels before the service started. My wife briefly considered putting the box in sideways, an idea that was quickly vetoed out of existence, and we all just sucked it up and got to digging, my father-in-law’s amused laughter echoing from inside his box.

Afterwards the whole extended family went out for Mexican, because really, what else are you going to do? Sure.

And because emotional whiplash is how we do things nowadays, we had tickets to see Barenaked Ladies Saturday night. By “we” I mean all three of us; it was slated to be the boy’s first concert, and I think he was pretty excited about it. Which meant we were all a bit surprised to be leading a sobbing child out of the theater barely four songs into BNL’s set, meaning that we really only got to hear the (shitty) opening band’s set, and we didn’t get to hear the one BNL song that the boy has memorized and really wanted to hear, as I’m sure it was the last song of the night.

Parenting advice! Concerts are fucking loud. This particular concert was perhaps too loud. And, like, I mean that as a reasonably veteran concertgoer; it was too loud for me, and I’ve seen shows in that venue before. That said, though, like, BNL doesn’t need to be blowing my Goddamned eardrums out. This isn’t a hard rock band or some shit like that, and even the shitty opening band was too fucking loud, and they were going for some sort of pop/bluegrass nonsense or something like that, so they definitely didn’t need to be super loud.

Anyway, we were unprepared. We should have brought headphones and/or earplugs, or at least warned him thoroughly, and we did none of those things. I’m not mad at him and this is one hundred percent our fault as the adults in the scenario. He doesn’t necessarily Have Sensory Issues in the way people generally mean that, but we should have been able to see this coming and we didn’t. The worst thing is that he was clearly upset about ruining the concert for us, and it’s hard to convince an upset eleven-year-old that you’re not mad at him and you’re not disappointed in him when he’s absolutely certain that both of those things are true.

So … yeah. I’ve mostly laid around like a lump today. I have started the new Stephen King book; it is terrible, and I am currently deciding if I’m going to drop it or hate-read it. It is about a seventeen-year-old who is somehow actually however old Stephen King is, and said fake teenager uses slang that no teenager, including King when he was a teenager, has ever used, except it’s not about that somehow. We’re supposed to believe that this ancient old man who refers to earning money as “folding green” is just a regular teenager and pay attention to the rest of the story, where he’s inexplicably befriending an old man, except the old man is actually an old man and not an old man masquerading as a teenager.

Anyway, it’s bad and I’m tired and I’m a shitty dad and somehow I have to go to work again tomorrow and I kind of want a redo on the last couple of days.

It’s Wednesday and I’ve got nothing

On By Luther M. SilerIn MusicLeave a comment

I’ve been sitting here staring at the screen for twenty minutes and this is the first sentence I’ve managed to write, so clearly I don’t have a strong agenda for today’s post. In other news, I have watched this TikTok video four thousand times today and you need to know about it, so at least I’ve done a good deed today.

@sylar2.5

#parodysong

♬ original sound – Sylar

In which I discover music

On By Luther M. SilerIn MusicLeave a comment

Dax has been around for a minute, but I just found out he existed, like, yesterday, and hoooooooly shit y’all is this guy talented. Trust me, it’s worth watching.

So this is happening

On By Luther M. SilerIn Music2 Comments

My son, who clearly does not realize what he has gotten himself into, has to do a report on a Famous Person from Indiana, and has somehow chosen Axl Rose, born in Lafayette in 1962. The ensuing discussion among my wife and I about what GnR song is their most iconic led to my brother suggesting that I get an immediate divorce. While I suspect I’m probably not going that route– I would be homeless in a month without my wife– her opinions on GnR are Wrong. My son, at one point during the conversation, looked at us and, I swear to you, quietly mumbled “What have I started?” to himself.

The correct answer is Sweet Child O’ Mine, by the way.

I think what’s probably going to happen is I’m going to write a 75-page pamphlet on GnR and give it to him, and he can edit it down to three pages or a hundred words or whatever passes for hard work in fourth grade nowadays.

I don’t have to go in to work tomorrow, as I have a training thing in the morning, which means that I’ll actually have my afternoon to myself. I’m going to take the rest of the night off after I finish this brief post and curl up with a book; I started John Scalzi’s The Kaiju Preservation Society last night and it’s going to demand my full attention until I finish it, I think.

Something I didn’t like and something I did

On By Luther M. SilerIn Music, Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

This is at least the second time that a Neal Stephenson book has started off really really cool and then flubbed the landing. I was all ready to write an effusively positive review of this book, which is a near-future novel about climate change and geoengineering, and then it just sort of … ends, with several storylines unresolved and the overall feeling that Stephenson had a page count he was expected to stick to and didn’t feel like going back and cutting anything out so he just ended the book. You may remember my review of Seveneves from several years ago, which is roughly five hundred pages of good, then a massive time skip and another three hundred pages of garbage. This does not do that; there is a brief time skip at one point but it keeps with the same characters afterwards and generally isn’t a huge misstep, even though it scared the hell out of me. But it does this thing where you’re following several characters whose stories knit together and one character whose story doesn’t until the end of the book, when they finally do come together, and they come together in such a ridiculous and unnecessary way that it made me feel like the extra character would probably have been best cut entirely from the book. Don’t get me wrong; it’s a Neal Stephenson book, so there’s a lot of interesting stuff here, but I’m starting to feel like this guy’s move is that he writes books that are chock full of cool stuff and interesting ideas and do not actually knit together into satisfying books. I gave it three stars on Goodreads; I could probably justify four or two depending on my mood.

Also, the novel is horrendously misnamed.

I went with the Termination Shock cover for my post image because the cover of Miley Cyrus’ new live album, Attention, is a close-up of her ass in a thong. Which, like, I don’t disapprove of, exactly, but neither do I need it spread all over my blog, and my normal way of listening to music on my computer involves the album art being visible and I had to turn that off too. I’m not even sure why I bought this, to be honest, it kind of happened without my conscious mind being involved, but I liked it a hell of a lot and I really want Miley to do an album of Janis Joplin covers. Her most recent incarnation seems to be leaning into the raspy, twangy nature of her voice and into rock much more than the pop music she used to do, and I like it a lot. The weirdest thing? The audience interaction is pretty good throughout the album, but the last song is Party in the USA, as you might expect, and the audience acts as if they’ve never heard the song before. It’s really weird.

Anyway, give it a look.

Get thee behind me, Satan

On By Luther M. SilerIn MusicLeave a comment

My brother inflicted this monstrosity on me, and now it’s your problem.

Music Monday

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Yes I know it’s Tuesday SHUT UP this is all I have right now

Every so often I like to talk about great covers. This one’s phenomenal:

2021 in music, sorta

On By Luther M. SilerIn Music3 Comments

I bought about an album a week this year, which is roughly on par with previous years, although this year my music purchases seem to have been focused on filling holes in my collection– I spent a lot of time listening to Outkast and REM and Black Crowes and Jane’s Addiction and Alice In Chains, and it turns out that I didn’t have everything they released. Prince had a new release and that got me to go back and pick up a few of his records that I didn’t have before. A lot of the new stuff (as in 2020-21 releases) was kind of experimental and a lot of it didn’t work out. But this article from Albumism, full of shiny new music mostly by artists I’ve never heard of, popped up on my radar today and that got me thinking about the new, or at least newer, music that I bought this year that made an impact, so I figured since I always write a ton of end-of-the-year pieces during the week between Christmas and New Year’s I may as well start with this. Other than one album I’m not going to be ranking anything, but here are six albums that I bought this year (mostly; we’ll get to the exception) and that I think are worth you checking out.

Mazbou Q, The Future Was. I actually encountered this guy through his TikTok feed, believe it or not, where he talks about the musical theory behind hiphop, and does so at great length and in incredible detail in a way that is incredibly interesting and illuminating, especially to someone like me who doesn’t have much technical knowledge about music and frequently struggles to talk about it in a way that is compelling. The guy’s smart as hell and his lyrics are complex and fascinating and I’m pretty sure I’m the only person I know who has heard of him, so let’s see if we can’t bring that number up a little bit.

Counting Crows, Butter Miracle Suite One. Technically an EP– this includes four new songs and four single edits of those four songs, but that didn’t stop me from keeping it on repeat for quite a while after it came on. Adam Duritz is one of my favorite singers, and while the Counting Crows aren’t nearly as big as they were in the nineties everything they release is directly up my alley.

Lil Nas X, Montero. A confession! I’m not actually that big of a fan of Old Town Road, the song that made sure that everybody on the Goddamned planet knew who Lil Nas X was, mostly because we all had our own guest spots on the remixes. That said, this album is fucking brilliant, and the fact that I still think it’s brilliant despite the fact that I can’t turn on the radio without hearing three songs from it is damned impressive. The guy’s got an incredible amount of talent, both as a musician and a visual artist (my jaw was hanging open for the entirety of my first couple of viewings of the music video for Call Me By My Name) and I hope he has a really, really long and prolific career.

Billie Eilish, Happier than Ever. This was probably my single most eagerly anticipated album of the year, as I was looking forward to Billie Eilish’s follow-up to When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? pretty much from the moment I first listened to it. I’m not sure this is quite the triumph that Asleep was (and I have utterly no idea at all what the relative sales were like) but it’s a damned impressive record. I also bought her brother Finneas’ debut, Optimist, and while I enjoyed it I think his skills are probably more on the production end of things. That sounds like an insult. It’s not. I had this whole metaphor here about playing tennis against LeBron James but I don’t think it quite makes sense so I’m just going to assume you know what I’m talking about and move on.

Taylor Fuckin’ Swift, Evermore. Yes okay technically this came out in December of 2020 but it’s close fucking enough, and I only bought this because I wanted to see if my enjoying Folklore was a fluke, and then I found out the reasons behind her re-releasing Fearless and Red and I ended up buying both of those on release date too, just out of, like, solidarity, and Jesus Christ have I turned into a fucking Swiftie?

Okay: Evermore and Folklore are both really good. I couldn’t tell you which one I like more because they tend to blur together in my head. And I found myself really enjoying Fearless’ re-release, but Red is kind of the perfect example of Why I’ve Never Really Liked Taylor Swift, because I wasn’t even remotely a fan of hers until this year and yet somehow I can tell you every dude she’s ever dated and that’s kinda fucked up. And I am absolutely on Team Conspiracy Theory about the ten-minute version of All Too Well, because no song written back when that was supposed to have been written would have had the words fuck the patriarchy in it. But fuck it; I’ve always been very clear that Taylor is phenomenally talented if for no other reason than that I have half of her catalog memorized without ever deliberately listening to the songs, and I like the idea that she’s re-releasing all of her old music so that she can screw over this asshole record executive dude, so I’m going to keep buying the re-releases even though I’m going to sigh a lot and roll my eyes while listening to some of the songs.

(I also, and this is related, bought Olivia Rodrigo’s debut Sour this year. I have nothing to say about it until Olivia Rodrigo is no longer a minor.)

(I have just discovered that Olivia Rodrigo is 18.)

(Someone needs to give this kid a hug and a therapist.)

Anyway.

Willow, lately I Feel EVERYTHING. I am not sure that Willow Smith really deserves to be a single-name person yet, but picking this album up was another one of those impulse, what-the-hell-it’s-$9 purchases this year, and I actually haven’t dug into her backlist but whatever the hell era of her music she’s in right now I want a lot more of it. lately I feel EVERYTHING is only 26 minutes long and all but one of the tracks don’t even make it to three minutes, which makes it even more ridiculous that I love it as much as I do. I said I wasn’t going to be doing any ranking, but this is still hands-down and far away the best new music I bought this year; the only thing close to it would have been Montero, which is also full of short-ass songs. If like me you’re an old person and you haven’t given Willow Smith a single thought since back in her Whip My Hair days, you owe it to yourself to check this out, especially if you’re an old 90s head like me. Her music weirdly blends together everything I love about rock and roll, alternative music and hiphop, and it’s just great.