Pearl Jam ~ Nothing As It Seems
(written: 27 August 2004)In these soured and glorified times, I often find that despite the fresh faces that cross my path, it’s the familiar ones who keep surprising me. Ones who… well, who I haven’t pushed away.
Ever get the feeling that without Jeff Ament, Seattle would only be well known for it’s dearth of athleticism? The man is the most under-rated everything in music: bass player, songwriter, hair club for men client…
Pearl Jam doesn’t often get very dark. I blame the wine. But it is still surprising I like them so… despite the wine. When I hear this, all I can see is nicotined-stained wood paneling, and broken furniture. I can see the simple things that make us sad, but make us comfortable.
A Saturday night downstairs, an errant staple imbeds itself into your forearm, but the soda-high is making your Playstation One out to be something more than it should. Nothing else matters, though, not the voices in your head, not the raised voices upstairs, and not the unspoken politics of the social scenes whose quotas you sometimes fill.
The 1990s now seem to be far away. Not mine, but most of my peers’ parents likely told them about the sixties, and how great it was and then explicitly forbade their children to do anything sixties-like.
Nine Inch Nails ~ Happiness In Slavery
I suppose I will tell my children (or my dogs) about the nineties and how we all wore combat boots, and wanted to smash each others heads in, but all in the name of angst & love. There is a reason, that in the year 2000 every single male freshman had a poster of Fight Club in his dorm room, and every soon to be date raped female freshman complimented him on it. That movie was the nineties.
I try hard and chart my evolution through this decade, and the music that scored it. Most of it I first heard, sitting in a fetal position, outside of a locked bathroom door. To me then, it was noise, cause it lacked hooks or Jon Bon Jovi. Not too long after, I moved my own radio into the bathroom, and realized that we as human beings, we don’t think in ‘hooks’, and we don’t dwell in ‘Jovi’.
Our minds may as well be made of figurative flubber, and our music should very well be made of the same. Should take us to World -1, or release a little ‘Zod’ from our phantom zones.
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It's all I've got. It's all you have and you may not realize it. The cream in the cookie, and the ampersand between drinking horns and grammophones. Why, uhh... why do we worry so much about where we should be... instead of where we are?