The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
My favorite moment at my kid’s Spring Concert tonight was realizing I recognized a piece of music they were playing, asking my watch to recognize it basically for no reason at all, and being greeted with an error screen I had never seen before– “No Music Detected.”
No Music Detected being tossed at me during a middle school band concert is a little on the nose for a smartwatch music app, don’t you think?
It hit us sometime this week that we hadn’t even considered the idea that our son might want to join us at the Pearl Jam Dark Matter Theatrical Experience. He didn’t, and he wouldn’t have enjoyed it, but it got me briefly looking at tickets again, which entertained me greatly. Our showing, the sole one available when the email went out from Ten Club in the first place, was nearly sold out, with only a few stray seats available. Ironically, one of them ended up being next to us, so the boy would have had a place to sit while he was simultaneously bored out of his mind and paralyzed by loud.
At some point they’d added a second screening and not told anyone. That one was happening at 8:45 PM, and it had sold about eight seats, which entertained me, as it suggested that a) everyone who wanted seats had bought them for the first show, and b) the vast majority of Pearl Jam fans are roughly my age, their late forties if not older, and had absolutely no interest in going to an 8:45 PM anything on a goddamned Tuesday.
I didn’t take the picture above– I snagged it from Reddit– but it gives you a pretty good idea of how the thing went. I am provisionally very happy with the album, more than I thought I’d be, and as a music lover the notion of sitting in the dark in a theater with a good sound system (critical, it turns out, and apparently some of the theaters weren’t well-chosen, but ours was fine) and listening to a new album by a band I love for the first time is pretty Goddamned appealing.
Unfortunately, the second listen, the one with the “mesmerizing visuals,” was a little half-assed. They put the lyrics on the screen, which was nice, as if you know PJ you’re already aware of how close to impossible Eddie can be to decipher on an early listen, but the visuals themselves basically amounted to a different high-res, movie-screen-sized screen saver for each song. They weren’t particularly thematically linked and they weren’t, like, in time with the music or reacting to it or anything. And for some reason the lyrics weren’t there for half of one of the later songs, for no clear reason. This appears to have been the print and not somehow the result of our theater, as there were other gripes about it on Reddit.
The point was the music, though, and again, I’m a big fan of the album. I’ll talk about it more once I’ve had a chance to listen to it at home– and, while I’m griping, it wouldn’t have killed them to put the name of the damn song up in the corner of the screen during the second listen, either– but it’s solid, and possibly their best work since Avocado. We’ll see.
There’s a new Pearl Jam album out this week, and unless something has gone very wrong, by the time you see this I should be sitting in the dark with a bunch of other flannel-clad nineties dorks listening to it. They’re doing this limited-engagement one-night-only movie theater thing, where they play the album, which is called Dark Matter, in complete darkness, and then play it again with what they’re calling “mesmerizing visuals.” So by the time I get home, I’ll have heard it twice, and hopefully I won’t stink of weed or have a headache. We’ll see.
Pearl Jam has been my favorite band for a very, very long time. During that time I have formed Opinions. And I saw a Reddit thread the other day that was asking if you could only keep two tracks from each Pearl Jam album, which ones would they be?
None of you care, I know, and this will absolutely take longer to write than will be worth it– I’m starting it on Monday night– but it’ll be fun, and oh also I have no intention of sticking to two songs, so here we go:
TEN (1991)
Best Song: Black, my favorite song, period.
Indispensable Songs: Black, Jeremy, Alive, Release
Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: This might be their only album I can name every song from.
Let’s be real: every song on Ten must be kept, but if you put a gun to my head, it’d have to be those four. I could maybe — maybe— do without Oceans. But I can’t.
Vs. (1993)
Best Song: Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town, my second-favorite song.
Indispensable Songs: EWBtCiaST, Animal, Daughter, WMA
Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: Go, because Pearl Jam also has Why Go and it messes with my head.
Vs. is another album that is burned into my head forever and I need damn near every song. I mean, maybe I could lose Glorified G in a pinch, or maybe Leash, but that’s about it.
Vitalogy (1994)
Best Song: Better Man
Indispensable Songs: Better Man, Nothingman, Whipping, Corduroy, Bugs
Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: Stupid Mop, which I swear to God and sunny Jesus was called Hey foxymophandlemama, it’s me on the original album release.
Fun fact: Vitalogy is actually my favorite Pearl Jam album. I walked across Bloomington at midnight to buy a copy of this album on release date and then stayed up to listen to it, pissing my roommate off to no end. I am literally the world’s biggest fan of the song Bugs. I love this album.
No Code (1996)
Best Song: In My Tree
Indispensable Songs: In My Tree, Red Mosquito, Off He Goes
Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: Red Mosquito
I didn’t like No Code the first time I heard it. I’m not sure what the hell I was thinking. I have every word of Red Mosquito memorized and I have no idea why I can never remember the damn song’s name. It’s literally in the first line. I’m not very bright sometimes.
Yield (1998)
Best Song: Wishlist
Indispensable Songs: Wishlist, Given to Fly, Low Light, All Those Yesterdays, Faithful
Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: Brain of J.
I was in the middle of a heavy hip-hop phase when Yield came out, so it’s one of the very few Pearl Jam albums I didn’t pick up immediately upon release. And it took a while for it to click, as did a lot of the middle-career Pearl Jam albums. But it’s got some amazing stuff on it, especially when played live and Eddie can never get the words to Wishlist right.
Binaural (2000)
Best Song: Nothing As It Seems
Indispensable Songs: Nothing As It Seems, Insignificance, Of the Girl, Parting Ways
Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: n/a
Binaural is one of the few Pearl Jam albums where I’m known to skip tracks, mostly because most of my favorite songs on this one are better live so honestly I don’t listen to it very often. I think it might be my least favorite of their studio albums, which doesn’t mean I don’t like it (I listened to it today on the way home from work, in fact) but something has to be my least favorite album.
Riot Act (2002)
Best Song: Love Boat Captain
Indispensable Songs: Love Boat Captain, I am Mine, All or None, Cropduster
Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: Absolutely fucking Cropduster.
Love Boat Captain was our song at our wedding, and was quoted in the program: Hold me, and make it the truth/ That when all is lost, there will be you. This entire album is indispensable.
Fun fact: I’ve spelled indispensable wrong every single time I’ve typed it in this post, including that time, where I accidentally put an “e” after the “d.”
Lost Dogs (2003)
Best Song: Down
Indispensable Songs: Down, Yellow Ledbetter, Hard to Imagine, Dead Man Walking, Last Kiss
Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: Drifting, because they also have a song called Drifting Away
Technically a two-disc collection of rarities and b-sides and not a true studio album, Lost Dogs is still a fantastic collection even if the ludicrous Gremmie Out of Control and Dirty Frank are on it.
Pearl Jam (2006)
Best Song: Oh god this is hard World Wide Suicide
Indispensable Songs: World Wide Suicide, Life Wasted, Gone, Come Back, Inside Job
Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: None on this one
My god, I love this album. Affectionately known as the Avocado Album, I saw them at Lollapalooza while they were touring for this release, and I love it. I love it all. Absolutely the best of their post-nineties releases.
Backspacer (2009)
Best Song: Just Breathe
Indispensable Songs: Just Breathe, Unthought Known, Amongst the Waves
Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: Force of Nature
I also saw them on tour for this one, at Deer Creek. Backspacer has always felt like them stepping back and taking a breath after Avocado, but there’s definitely some good stuff on here. It’s super short at only 37 minutes, though, so there’s no way for it not to feel a little unimportant in comparison.
Lightning Bolt (2013)
Best Song: Sirens
Indispensable Songs: Sirens, Swallowed Whole, Sleeping By Myself, Yellow Moon, Future Days
Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: Swallowed Whole
I don’t give Lightning Bolt enough credit, I think, because it’s organized so oddly– all of the best songs are in the back half of the album, and other than Sirens I don’t really love any of the first six or seven tracks. That last third or so, though, is phenomenal.
Gigaton (2020)
Best Song: Dance of the Clairvoyants
Indispensable Songs: Dance of the Clairvoyants, Seven O’Clock, Comes Then Goes, River Cross
Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: Seven O’Clock
I really love Gigaton, although I admit I don’t know it nearly as well as many of their other albums– probably because I’m not buying the concert bootlegs as fanatically as I used to and so I don’t have live recordings of any of the songs on it. Every time I listen to it I’m surprised at how good it is, which you’d think I’d have gotten over after four years. It’s not as lopsided as Lightning Bolt, either, so I really don’t have an excuse.
And there you have it. I’ll have heard Dark Matter by now, or at least be listening to it, and I am a big fan of the first two tracks, but we’ll see. The environment might have me come out raving about it or if it’s not as positive as I want it to be, it might hurt my opinion of the album. I can also imagine a world where I’m tired from work (ILEARN started today) and don’t really want to be out in public. I’m sure there will be a review of it soon one way or another.
My usual line on Beyoncé is that I’m a big fan of Beyoncé as an entertainer and maybe not such a big fan of her music. I buy everything pretty religiously as it comes out but what usually happens is that there are a few tracks from any given album that I like a lot and I can take or leave the rest of it. Her collaboration with her husband was an exception, and I liked her live album a lot, but Cowboy Carter is the first studio release from her where I genuinely feel like every single track is a banger. It is emphatically not a country album, despite the existence of maybe three country-ish songs (Protector, Jolene, and Texas Hold ‘Em) and Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton both doing short spoken cameos. I don’t know what the hell it is. She calls it “a Beyoncé album,” and that’s just gonna have to be good enough for us mere fucking mortals. There’s opera on this damn thing. She’s doing whatever the hell she wants, and it’s amazing, and sooner or later I’m going to have to reconsider that disclaimer because she’s starting to stack up exceptions.
Oh, and speaking of the Jolene cover: it slaps. It’s a great update to the song and I love it. I love the original too. I love other updated versions of it. Music is good.
Shōgun getting a new Hulu miniseries somehow led, not to me not actually watching the miniseries, which for the record I’ve not heard a single bad thing about, but ordering the books, which are currently only being printed in two volumes because the motherfucking thing is 1500 pages long. I’m not even sure why I did it, to be honest, because I broke my current “don’t buy new shit” reading rule to do it, and even once they got here I was convinced that I was going to read a hundred pages and quietly put them away because they were going to turn out to be super fucking racist.
So naturally I blew through the first (700-page) volume in about a day and a half. I have not picked up the second yet, but I’ll have it read by the end of Spring Break. And it’s interesting– I kind of want to compare it to Gone with the Wind, except Gone with the Wind is a really amazing story that was written by a racist who wanted to promote racist ideas and is chock-full of racist characters, but Shōgun is a really amazing story chock-full of racist characters (basically every person in the book thinks everyone of a different ethnicity or religion from them is a subhuman, and some of them don’t even extend humanity to all of “their” people depending on their economic status) but I don’t think the book itself is racist, nor does reading the book make me want to look askance at James Clavell. If anything, I think Clavell would land on the side of the Japanese if he had to, and while I’m only halfway through the book it’s not remotely as white-savior as I was expecting it to be. Like, this would be a fascinating book even if Blackthorne wasn’t in it at all; the book doesn’t really revolve around him at all.
There’s an interesting article on Vox about how historically accurate the show is; the condensed version is “good enough,” and while I’m hardly an expert I certainly haven’t hit anything that had me looking twice. One way or another, I think I can probably recommend this pretty whole-heartedly, with a caveat that, again, I’m only halfway through right now and who knows what the next 800 pages will bring.
Fuck this game.
I finally deleted it today, after giving it way too many chances over the last, what, ten days? two weeks? since it was released; I was ready to fight Sony for a refund after twenty minutes, and while with a couple more hours of gameplay I’m willing to admit that the game does get better after a completely fucking inexcusably bad first half hour, the bug I ran into today where every NPC everywhere was constantly hostile for no reason at all and nothing I could do would fix it was the last straw. The game is just deeply fucking mediocre, riddled with bugs and a ton of absolutely bewildering gameplay decisions that I refuse to defend, and it’s not getting any more of my time, I give up. I’m not going to fight with anyone who enjoys it because there’s a kernel in there that could be fun under the right circumstances, and I think I was starting to get into it before the bug, but after a couple of hours of experimenting and looking at message boards and trying workarounds, I am not about to start over and I’m done.
I really feel like I ought to throw a movie review in here too, but I haven’t seen anything new in forever. Oh well. Let’s pretend Shōgun counts for both.
One week until Spring Break. And really the last day before the break doesn’t count, so only four teaching days until Spring Break. I can do this. And apparently ILEARN starts a week after we get back? I had no idea. I thought we had at least a couple of weeks, or maybe the last week of April. One way or another, I don’t even look at the results any longer.
We’re taking a road trip tomorrow for an academic competition for the boy, and we have to be up at like 5:30 in the fucking morning for it. I am complaining here because the boy does not read the blog– I’m pretty sure as of right now he is still unaware that it exists– and I will not complain about it around him, because I’m not going to be that kind of dad. It can be taken as read that the entire thing makes me want to die, though.
Pearl Jam has a new album coming out on April 19th. If you’ve been around a while you probably already know they’ve been my favorite band for basically my entire adult life. They just released a new single off of the album today, and along the way announced that they’re doing what they’re calling a “Dark Matter Global Experience” on the 16th at 500 theaters around the world. One of the 500 happens to be nearby, so I snagged tickets for my wife and I since they were basically the cost of a movie. They’re going to play the new album twice, once in darkness and once with “mesmerizing visuals.” I gotta be honest: even as a huge fan, huge enough that I just bought tickets to this thing, I have no idea if I think this is a good idea or not, but I’m willing to burn $24 on it, and I can’t wait to get home and wash the weed stink out of my clothes so that I can go to work tomorrow without raising eyebrows. If nothing else, this will be a unique experience, I imagine.
Speaking of new music, Fletcher, the other woman in the Miley Cyrus video that turned every woman on TikTok into a lesbian for a few days,(*) released her sophomore album this week. I’m four songs and– sigh– ten minutes into it and so far I’m liking it quite a bit except for the way streaming has fucking ruined music, because I should never be four songs into an album if only ten minutes have gone by. There is one song at 4:09, one at 3:05 and one at 3:02, and every other Goddamn song on the album is less than three minutes long.
I need the whole world to get off my damn lawn.
Every morning, I wake up, roll over, pick up my phone, and say a little prayer that I’m about to discover the shitgibbon died while I was asleep. I am going to add more Republican resignations to the prayer, because that shit is getting more hilarious by the Goddamn day and it’s not like God is listening anyway so I can ask for whatever I want.
I note that Jimmy Carter is still hanging on, though, despite all odds. He’ll outlive that fat bastard yet.
(*) It’s me, I’m women
Much more manageable day today, in accordance with the law of averages. That said, this is gonna be another short post, on account of I need to finish the new Sarah J. Maas book before bed or I’ll die.
Quick random thought, though: on a scale of 1-10, how ironic and/or pathetic is it for a middle-aged middle-school math teacher to listen to Killing in the Name on his way home from work at a volume understandable from inside nearby restaurants and retail establishments? While headbanging and screaming along?
Asking for a friend.
This will be relatively brief, as I apparently didn’t get enough sleep last night and at 7:05 I am entirely willing to go directly to bed the minute I finish this, but after seeing a TikTok video of T-Pain performing Ozzy Osbourne’s War Pigs live, the second I found out that there was a recording available of the entire concert I jumped at it. There is apparently also a cover album with a similar playlist that is studio versions, and I wasn’t aware it existed until searching for a .jpg of the album cover just now. I don’t really know a lot about T-Pain; I thought autotune was mostly his thing and while I’m sure I’ve heard him do a ton of guest appearances in other people’s songs I don’t think I could name anything by him if you paid me. But this album is bananas good; it’s eclectic as hell, running the gamut from Journey to the Guess Who to Marvin Gaye to Chris Stapleton to, again, Ozzy, and while I’ll admit that some of the bits where he’s just chatting with the audience are kind of annoying, this motherfucker can sing, and I listened to the album like three times straight yesterday.
This is one of the best kind of live albums, too– the crowd is tiny; he refers to “a hundred and some” people at one point, and I wouldn’t even necessarily have guessed that many, but you can hear every reaction from someone in the crowd and the recording itself is really clean. It’s occasionally a little too medley-style; I’d have appreciated more than a minute and eight seconds of Luther Vandross’ Never Too Much, for example, and that’s in the middle of about five or six great songs in a row, none of which get more than about a minute and a half. But he makes up for it with sheer charisma and energy, and there are worse complaints I could have had than I want more of this.
Don’t worry about whether you are a fan of T-Pain or not. Check out the set list (scroll down), and if you think you’ll enjoy the show, you’re probably right.
I purchased– and yes, “purchased” is the right word– 72 albums in 2023. I am an Old, and I have never taken to streaming, and so I’m still paying for all this stuff, and the fact that I got handed $200 in Apple gift cards partway through the year definitely didn’t hurt. Obviously not all of that is 2023 music, and as usual, I’m going to talk about stuff that was new to me this year.
The usual caveat whenever I’m talking about music: I have no idea how to write coherently about music, and never have, and furthermore I still cannot understand other people when they write about music. I have seen a ton of “Best New Releases of 2023” types of lists in the last few weeks, and purchased some music based on them, and … I just don’t get it. I’m pretty convinced that you could take the actual review parts of this article, randomly swap the artist and albums’ names, and republish it, and no one would notice. So this isn’t a list of reviews, it’s not a Best Of, and it’s sure as hell not in any kind of order other than maybe reverse chronological order of when I bought them. These are just albums that I enjoyed in 2023. Maybe you’ll like them too.
And I can hear you already, going “Wait, Luther, there’s no way you didn’t have Diamonds and Pearls already!” And you’re correct! I bought it on release day when I was in high school. What came out this year is the Super Deluxe Edition of Diamonds and Pearls, by Prince and the New Power Generation, which, for all my love of Prince’s entire career, will always be my favorite iteration of him.
The physical version of this motherfucker is seven disks long. There are live versions and alternate takes and an entire concert and demos and remasters and I’m going to stop typing now because you’ve already clicked away to go spend money.
I discovered Ren in 2023; Freckled Angels is a 2016 release but Sick Boi came out this year. Sick Boi is absolutely a rap album; Freckled Angels is something else and I’m not even going to try to describe it. Ren is Irish and monumentally talented and even if you’re not generally into hiphop you might want to look into him. Good shit.
I think it might actually be illegal to write anything about music in 2023 without mentioning Guts, by Olivia Rodrigo, and, well … yeah, it deserves it. I am really proud of myself for never unleashing my feelings about Sour in this space; Rodrigo has been underage for most of her career and picking on an actual child for musical choices that most likely were made mostly by other people who didn’t have her best interests in mind (no goddammit I’m not gonna do it) is not a move I want to make. But Guts is a more mature and multidimensional piece of work in every imaginable way, and bad idea right? is a fucking banger and I no longer feel like she should be taken away from her parents. All good. We’re fine.
2023 is also the year Paramore finally clicked for me, and after spending weeks mainlining This is Why every time I got into my car I went back and picked up most of the rest of their backlist. I mean, Christ, the name of their album is half of the line this is why I don’t leave the house; it’s like it was written for me.
You may have seen Queen Omega freestyling her ass off over a Dr. Dre beat on TikTok; I did, over and over and over again, until I cracked and spent money. I don’t listen to a ton of reggae nowadays, and I listen to even less reggae that doesn’t have anyone named Marley involved with it, but Freedom Legacy was a great dip back into the genre, and I feel like I might explore what modern, hip-hop influenced reggae is doing more next year. This is a hell of a collection, though, and I’m glad I grabbed it up.
Six? Six sounds good. Here’s the rest of the list:
