Welcome To Culture Fridays post #1. For now on, I’m going to try to put up a cultural piece (article on music, movie review, etc.) every Friday.

First off: Joe Peicott’s Favorite 5 Albums of All Time!

Here’s how my Top 5 methodology works: These would be the only discs I’d be able to have with me on a desert island. No others. What 5 albums would I trust to keep me company forever?

These aren’t what I consider “the greatest” Albums of all time, these are the 5 albums I’d want to have with me for all time (i.e., I feel no need to prove my street cred by filling this list with Dylan, Zepplin, and Pink Floyd).

5. The Streets - Original Pirate Material

Whenever I hear people spoutin’ off about how Eminem is/was the new Dylan, I cringe. Dylan was the voice of a generation. He tapped into a youth undercurrent of rebelliousness and anger and spoke for those who weren’t articulate enough to speak for themselves (then again, is as articulate/clever as Dylan?). Who, tell me, did Eminem speak for? Wife killin’, drug ingesting, wrist slittin’ assholes? Eminem tells stories in a clever way; but that’s all. It was, in fact, another white boy rapper who quietly became the over-looked voice of a generation; a British generation, perhaps, but none the less…

I’m not fluent enough in Hip Hop to understand why the hardcore American Hip Hop fans seem to dismiss Mike Skinner. His abrasive Garage beats take some getting used to, I’ll admit, but they’re much more interesting than anything I’ve heard coming out of American Hip Hop recently. He brings to the Hip Hop table a whole new verbiage, cockney slang, that is immensely refreshing, if perhaps only for the fact that it’s new. Most importantly, his stories are overflowing with a tremendous sense of uncertainty. Uncertainty about his actions, about his place, about his friends, about his society. Mike Skinner asks QUESTIONS. Modern American Hip Hop long ago dropped any pretense of being a simple window into black urban life: it now overtly celebrates the ghetto fabulous lifestyle. I think an important thing to remember is that timing is everything in culture; a throwback album that might have been dismissed as more-of-the-same 15 years ago comes out tomorrow and is hailed as brilliant retro. The Streets came on the scene to tell a story and ponder that story’s repercussions, while the rest of the rap world celebrated grills and Cadillac’s

4. Rancid – And Out Came The Wolves

Speaking of Cadillac’s, one has only to watch a football game this weekend to view a Cadillac commercial in which Iggy Pop and the Teddybears sing, “Cause I’m a punk rocker, yes I am.” Wow, who knew Cadillac was punk? Well, I did, because these days, everyone wants to be punk. Punk was always cool, but now it’s acceptable. So acceptable that a company known for selling cars to rich old men is claiming to be punk. And it’s all Rancid’s fault.

The castration of punk rock took hold in the early 1990’s, when Green Day and their ilk broke through with their catchy pop-punk sing-a-longs. True punk fans didn’t worry, “Let the little kids have their punk-lite, we’ll keep screamin’ about anarchy and cultural destruction… And skippin’ our showers!” But oh, what a sad, sad day for real punk rockers when the reggae-tinged ska band Operation Ivy, one of the few bright spots in the 80’s American punk scene, disbanded, reformed as Rancid (well, Armstrong and Freeman formed did) , and started putting out, gulp… Alternative rock records. Was Rancid punk? Were they pop? It didn’t matter. They were real punk rockers sellin’ out and playing to the masses. Soon thereafter punk stopped being a movement and became a brand. And Out Came The Wolves isn’t a particularly important album in the history of music, but it is an important album for fans of punk rock. A blatant sellout album made all the more aggravating by the fact that, shit, it’s really, really good. It was the album no punk rocker would admit to listening to, but that they all had in their collection. The end or the turning point? Punk or pop? Who knows. But it’s good music.

3. The Beatles – The Beatles (aka The White Album)

Far, far, far from a “perfect album.” The White Album has 4 or 5 songs that I promise you would rather pull your ears off than listen to. “Wild Honey Pie?!” “Piggies?!” Or, God forbid, “Revolution 9?!!!” Horrible, horrible, horrible songs. I defy you to name anyone who’s listened to “Revolution 9” after the first time they gave it the obligatory, “What the fuck is going on with this” listen.

But this is a Jackson Pollock painting of an album. Just throw songs against the wall and see what sticks. Some are good. Some are bad. Who says an album has to have a “sound?” This one’s got my favorite Beatles song ever, “Long, Long, Long,” and another George Harrison masterpiece, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” “Helter Skelter” is out of control, “Rocky Racoon” is fun… They take more chances on this album than you can shake a stick at, and most of them work. The Beatles at their most disjointed, jokey, and experimental.

2. Weezer – Weezer (aka The Blue Album)

My favorite album of all time, and by far the one I’ve listened through most. Flashback! Early 1990’s, circa 6th-grade. Lil’ Joey likes music and all… But, in the height of the grunge era, it’s all a bit, erm, depressing. Lil’ Joey figures that’s what music is all about: you listen to crunchy guitars, look at craggly old guys making faces and women pulling live fish out of their bellies in music videos, and you feel bad. Oh, the grunge era… But then, like a ray of sunshine bursting through a Seattle rain cloud, Weezer hits the scene with “The Sweater Song.” This wasn’t depressing. This wasn’t disgusting. This had… A melody?! Music was fun again, kids, and the 6th-grade Joey eats it up. Time moves slow in Middle School, and by 7th-grade it seemed I had forgotten all about Weezer, that band I liked from forever ago. It wasn’t until my freshman year of High School that I dug up the ol’ Blue Album again. Weezer had broken up, their second CD had disappointing sales. I popped the disc in and high school Peicott was blown the fuck away. This wasn’t just joke songs about sweaters and name checking dead rock stars. This was AMAZING ROCK AND ROLL MUSIC. Compared to the bullshit Korn, Limp Bizkit and Boy Bands crowding the marketplace at the time, Weezer’s Blue Album blew me away again, this time as a new kind of fresh air: really good music amongst piles of shit.

Like seemingly one out of every three guys of my generation, I rediscovered Weezer in High School and became obsessed. Rocked out drunk to the Blue Album, brooded over Pinkerton, downloaded the B-Sides (Suzannnnne) on the newly released Napster. I am always struck when I here a Blue Album song these days by how fucking good it is. There are many bands, more bands than I care to mention, who I rocked out to in High School, only to realize when giving them a listen a few years later that they were utter shit. Weezer is good music. The Blue Album is their most complete and kick ass work.

1. Beach Boys – Pet Sounds

The Blue Album is my favorite album, but if you told me I could only hear one album for the rest of my life, this would be it. How the hell this piece of pure beauty was created on a1960’s 4-track is beyond me, but, Jesus, it’s amazing.

You know, “Gone Only Knows” has been so overused in movies and TV that it’s nearly lost all meaning. I think it’s only when you listen to it in the context of Pet Sounds, let yourself get drawn into Wilson’s soundscape and forget the world around you, that you can be hit by this, as Paul McCartney calls it, greatest of all songs, and, to be a bit more vulgar than Sir Paul, just go “Holy Shit! That is a perfect song!”

Almost every song on Pet Sounds evokes a similar reaction from me. The song lyrics, co-written by Wilson and an advertising man, are disarmingly simple, all the more affecting for their child-like innocence.

This is a true album. The most beautiful CD on any rack, in any collection, ever made. Perfection.

That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it!

There’s a line in the excellent new Scorsese flick, The Departed, that has been playing through my head.  Near the beginning of the film, Irish Mob boss Frank Costello says, “Twenty years after an Irishman couldn’t get a job, we had the presidency, God rest him.”  The line plays on the same unique American aura  that The Godfather tapped into three-decades ago.  The American Dream.  The chance that a man, or a people, can go from nothing to the top in practically no time at all.  From the oppressed to cock-of-the-walk in a single generation.  I’ve come to accept that this is how evangelical, born-again Christians must have felt when George W. Bush was elected President. 

Highly religious American Christians had increasingly been the butt of the joke (pretty much any joke) for years.  They were hicks.  Under-educated.  Illogical. Intolerant.    Judgmental.  Self-righteous.  Ripe for mocking.  And mocked they were.  To see an Evangelical Christian on the news was to see someone, usually with a laughably sparse vocabulary complaining about some inconsequential matter most people would never think twice about, let alone take the time to protest.  The conservative Christian character on a TV show or movie was almost always playing the part of villain, standing in the way of the free-thinking, open-minded hero.  Burned and barbed by the media again and again, the Born Agains became wise to the fact that the best they could hope for when dealing with the media was to be laughed at.  And so they remained quiet.  They went to their mega-churches every Sunday, quietly.  They asked themselves which candidate Jesus would vote for, quietly.    Interpreting the bible literally, they believed the Earth was formed but 6,000-years-ago…  Quietly.  And their numbers grew.

In November of the year 2000, the first Born Again Christian was elected President of the United States of America, again, quietly.    It was a much tamer affair than when the Catholic JFK was elected.  People were not overly alarmed.  For, over the course of 30-years leading up to the 2000 election of George W. Bush, Americans felt that most issues of Religion and State had been more or less debated and solved already.  The State would take no position on issues of faith.  Religion would stay in the church.

That’s what most Americans figured.  There was one group, of course, that did not consider the Church/State fight settled at all.  And, after decades of being increasingly marginalized, finally, one of them had come to power.  And then, all of a sudden, the quirky, formerly quiet and respectful Jesus-folk went on the rampage.  As their Savior George W. Bush led these peaceful people into War, War(!), of all un-Christian things, they focused on “correcting” every gripe they had been surpressing for the past three-decades.  Gay marriage.  Evolution.  Prayer in school.  (Notice I left out abortion, which I wouldn’t classify as a “gripe,” as it is a quite serious issue, no matter the side you fall on)  And, so long as the Christian masses gave him free reign to do pretty much whatever the hell he wanted, Bush was happy to sustain their Theocratic fantasies, and (why not), even turn back the clock a bit on a secular progression or two.

Yes, the hardcore Christian did become emboldened, and their demands did rise.  And this is a problem because, as most people already recognize, most hardcore Christians are a mess of misplaced anger and hypocrisies.

Example: Born Again Christians imagine themselves to be a fiercely Patriotic folk.  You know them, the ones with the American flag bumper stickers on their cars, the ones overtly proclaiming their love of America to no particular ends.  And yet, I have more than a hankering that if there were a vote tomorrow to abandon the Constitution of the United States (you know, that document that makes America the country they so love) in favor of a new document stating that the country shall be run by laws in accordance with the rules written in the Bible, the Born Agains would vote to ditch that dodgy ol’ Constitution en masse. Ah, yes, how patriotic.
 
I don’t think it enhances ones argument to call the opposing side idiotic (though, truth be told, if you got a couple of beers in this space man you could probably coax it out of me).  But the conservative, born-again Christians certainly ACT idotically.  Judging their various conflicting stances, I can only conclude they do not have any idea what it means to be a patriotic American, or what this country really stands for.  As with their leader, it’s tough to figure out if they are actually ignorant or willfully blind.  Whatever the case, it is important to realize that Bush emboldened an Idiot Culture in America, and that is a very serious thing.

It’s the culture that demands criticizes evolution, without ever taking the time to learn the intricacies of the theory they decry.  The culture that, again hypocritically, creates false idol after false idol (Bush. Falwell. Etc.) and unquestionably accept the opinions of their demi-God as their own.  It’s a culture that has a curious disdain for science.  I suppose their anti-scientific attitude stems from the evolution “debate,” but, much like Scientologists’ not entirely clear hatred of psychiatrists, it’s strange conservative Christians, say, take a stance against believing in Global Warming, for no obvious reason other than the fact it was those dastardly “scientists” who “came up with it.”

 In some ways, I welcome their resistance to scientific proclamations.  After all, am I not just as blindly believing the things the Scientists say as they are the things their Super Reverends say?  Do I ever delve into the actual studies and verify the facts I’m told by scientists?  No, not often.   But I have, in my day (college days, mostly) gone in depth into several experiments, examined how their facts are arrived at, how the publish/peer review system works, and, like Socrates, who remembers that a triangles’ angles equal 180-degrees, even if he doesn’t remember exactly how the mathematical proof showed it, I am confident that the system is delivering me accurate facts and proclamations.  The conservative Christians question what scientists say, but I don’t think any meaningful percentage of them ever go back to the original experiments.  I don’t think they have any interest in PROVING the scientists wrong.  They’re lazy; it’s a lot easier to just point to The Book and say, “Nuh-uh.”

The emboldening of the willfully ignorant.  That’s to be the lasting legacy of the Bush Presidency.  Ouch.