I was watching a lecture from iTunes U the other day, this one on the topic of the intellectual landscape during ancient “classical” times. One thing the lecturer talked about was how it’s kind of a myth that the great break in the storehouse of ancient knowledge was the burning of the library at Alexandria. In fact, it was the development of new technology that caused a lot of old information to be lost. The new technology was the development of the codex, which was a superior system for storing written documents in comparison to scrolls of papyri. As use of the codex format took off, people had to choose what was important enough to warrant the expense and hassle of transferring from papyri to codices. Many things were lost because people at the time made judgment calls about what was worthy of keeping and what didn’t need to be kept for future generations.

I first became familiar with this very concept as the music industry embraced compact discs over LPs and cassettes. CDs have a superior sound quality, but replacing an entire library of cassettes and LPs with CDs is a large expense, so the process takes time, consideration and prioritization. The essential music was replaced nearly immediately. Thereafter it was a matter of whether the music company put the item out on CD, and if they did, which ones should be purchased next. This process of replacing cassettes with CDs is still an ongoing one for me.

( A side issue for the musicians and manufacturers )

For many years, when I’ve perused the shelves where we store our CDs, I’ve had this feeling that there is an important CD missing. It was always like a hole in my heart that I couldn’t find. I also couldn’t figure out how, if it was so important that I knew it was missing by the feeling I had in my gut if not the knowledge in my mind, I couldn’t remember which one was missing. Last night I figured it out.

You see, the reason it took this many years is that it’s an album by INXS. It’s been over ten damned years since Michael Hutchence committed suicide and I’m still not over it. Listening to INXS now is always just about equal parts pain and joy: there’s that happiness and love of hearing a music that hits you just right mixed with overwhelming sadness. I loved that band like crazy from the very first night I heard them as the opening band for the Stray Cats. To my mind, INXS was far and away the better act that night; I went out and bought Shabooh Shoobah immediately thereafter (on cassette). Since 1997, every time I’ve wanted to hear their music, I’ve ventured over for a look at our music shelves and thought “there’s something missing”. But I shied away from thinking too much about it because I almost couldn’t stand to listen to their early albums – the ones I had listened to the most over the years, the ones that meant the most to me – and thus almost always picked out something from later in their career. It was like a protective instinct to immediately reach for the later ones which had little to do with what I think of those albums as artistic efforts.

But last night I had a craving to hear a particular song and I realized I don’t have the CD the song originally came on. Once I figured that out, I found myself somewhat amazed I hadn’t ever bought The Swing on CD before Michael Hutchence’s death, but not surprised at all that I hadn’t bought it since. The Swing came in between Shabooh Shoobah and Listen Like Thieves and back in the day, those three albums were like Boy, October and War to me. In fact, as much as I listened to those three U2 albums around the time of their releases, it is very possible I listened to Shabooh Shoobah, The Swing and Listen Like Thieves more. It was kind of weird, actually, how U2 hit the public consciousness with The Joshua Tree in nearly the same way and around the same time as INXS did with Kick. They both went from being these bands it seemed like only I and a few others knew about to being huge sensations. But for whatever reason, when U2 went on to “chop down the Joshua Tree” and create Achtung Baby (arguably going from a height to an even greater height), INXS didn’t hit the sweet spot with their next album (X) in quite the same way. Thereafter, public consciousness of the two bands went on different trajectories, and a few years later Michael was dead.

Given that it’s been ten years I obviously need to accept that thinking of INXS is always going to be like poking at a particularly tender bruise. I’m determined to get The Swing on CD, and I will listen to it even though I know the whole experience will have a shadow over it. Somehow I need to get to a place where it’s not so painful; I want more of the joy back. I’m not sure if the path to that place is via listening to more of their music more often, but I suppose it’s worth a try. It may be a path paved in tears, but I think it’ll be worthwhile to take it and see where it leads.

::Deep breath::

Wish me luck.

Tags: inxs, music, u2

Way far back in time, when I was in grade school, I took classes at my local high school. I took two classes: computer science and algebra. (No snickers on the nerdiness of that, please.) The computer science class was taught by your prototypical aging hippy: Birkenstock-clad feet, long hair, yogurt-and-granola smell. You name it, he had it. The school year was spent with the class broken up into two groups (let's call those groups "boys" and "girls", shall we?) with the same goal shared by both groups: write a program for playing Craps. I was the youngest in the class and one of the boys was a Mormon - an 8th grader who really resented my presence and made it his goal in life to make me as miserable as possible - and the two of us represented the greatest storehouse of knowledge about the game. That is to say, we knew nothing. But the teacher taught us somehow, both how to play Craps and how to write a program using Basic. During our free time we were allowed to use this brand new thing called the Internet to play Oregon Trail (dial up the number with the rotary phone, get the squawky sound, put the receiver down on the machine connected to the dot matrix printer, hope it connected so we wouldn't have to start over). Our teacher espoused the wonders of what the Internet would one day be while we listened with that particular brand of eye-rolling skepticism that middle and high schoolers can do so well. He raved about the idea of the collected works of Shakespeare being housed at a remote location - or on a stack of floppy disks - that any one could access for free. No big, heavy books! Free information. It would be a marvel.

Fast forward and all those ideals our hippy teacher talked about have come to pass. But humans being humans, of course it's not *quite* the Utopia of high minded intellectualism he was so excited about. Still, there's lots to love. Tonight it all started over at Doug's blog on the subject of re-makes. Now, this is a touchy topic in my house. More often than not all we can do is lament with the tears and the woe when we hear a re-make of a beloved song because so often the re-makes are so terribly awful. All they do is ruin the song and make us wish for a time machine so we can go back to a moment *before* something so lovely became so ruined. Well, you can see a few examples of what I think are good and bad re-makes over at Doug's if you are so inclined. I'll be circling back round to this topic, you can rest assured on that.

But for now I have to take you down the bunny trail I went on tonight. Thinking about bands like Tears for Fears (boy did I love Mad World back in the day; hearing that song now brings back springtime memories in technicolor detail) had me searching for other songs I adored and didn't think I'd ever see in video form again. But thanks to the magic and wonder that is the Internet, they're on YouTube. It's like some kind of miracle. Seriously. Ages ago I looked up things like Two Hearts Beat as One, The Unforgettable Fire (love and adore that song like...well, there are no words), New Year's Day and of course I looked for that Conspiracy of Hope Tour moment when The Police handed off the Biggest Band in the World honors to U2 (didn't find that moment, but did find this rendition of Maggie's Farm, which is interesting from the perspective of realizing they were on a break from recording The Joshua Tree when they did this tour for Amnesty International. Well, ok, maybe it's only interesting to the U2 fan. Ahem. Moving on.)

No, all that U2 look up is old news. What I did tonight was look up things like The Motels Suddenly Last Summer, Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart, The Cure's A Forest, The Smiths How Soon is Now (one of the coolest guitar performances ever), Information Society's What's On Your Mind, Talking Heads Burning Down the House (houses courtesy of Portland, Oregon), 'Til Tuesday's Voices Carry & Coming Up Close, Soft Cell's Tainted Love (who can resist that song?), and INXS's The One Thing (it was love at first concert with that band - they were so very, very good) and Kiss the Dirt (because I have a particular college experience associated with this song that I love remembering; it's like the sound of freedom, in a nutshell).

Hours passed happily. Some might say too many hours.

Then I decided to go really out there and see if I could find two favorites of my friends and I. Obscure songs not heard since approximately 1988. Songs few outside of our little circle had heard of even at the time. And they were there! Unbelievable! So without further ado, I'll now bring you a little time capsule from the 1980s. Never heard of these songs? No worries, hardly anyone has!

First, a little English band called Vitamin Z:


And last but not least, a catchy little number by Bourgeois Tagg (who? yeah, that's right - Bourgeois Tagg):


Isn't the Internet amazing? Like, seriously amazing? Yeah, I think so, too.

Tags: music, u2

It's been an interesting time lately. Carpal tunnel is still quite painful, so the long posts that are composed in my head (with quotes! and links! and pictures!) remain in my head. It'll hurt less eventually and I'll be back to my verbose self. For now I'll just say January hasn't been too kind to very many of the people I know and move on.

So what have we been up to? Well, one thing that won't surprise you in the least: My family went to see U23D earlier this week when it premiered here in Portland. I wholeheartedly agree with the NYT review that says it's "a work of art". As soon as I saw that Catherine Owens and Mark Pellington were directing it, I knew there would be some fantastic moments and images, and there are. (They've both worked with the band for years, Catherine Owen designing a lot of the set pieces/artwork for their tours and Mark Pellington you might know from directing the version of the One video with the buffaloes running off the cliff.) Our only complaint - which I've seen around blogland we're not alone in - is that the sound was not nearly loud enough. Now, I'm a person who uses earplugs at concerts and other events with loud sounds and am considered a touch on the sensitive side when it comes to hearing, so if I'm saying it wasn't loud enough, you must know it really wasn't loud enough!

It is the closest thing to being at a concert that I've ever seen. If the camera were about 6 inches lower I would've swore I was looking at the view I had for the concert here in Portland. They use the 3D technology in a way I haven't seen before: there's a real layering of imagery so there are things in the foreground, middle ground, background and at other points in between - and yet it's not confusing to follow or too much to take in. They also take advantage of the capabilities of digital shooting in a couple of places in a creative way, though I don't want to say just how because I think it would take away from the experience to go into it looking for those moments.

As respects the concert performance: It's fantastic. I kept thinking as it went along what a great flow they had with the song selection (though I sorely miss not seeing Until the End of the World). Plus there were those moments that were just like being at an actual show. For example, the operatic section in Miss Sarajevo where Bono hits those pure tenor notes - sent a shiver down my spine just like it did when I saw it live. My husband was saying when we saw it live he had a feeling we'd seen a one-of-a-kind moment that no one else would ever see that hadn't been there, but it's just as wonderful (maybe better?) than when we saw it live. It's an amazing moment of performance in a rock-n-roll show. There's also that pure joy that goes through the audience that you can't help but get caught up in. I mean, how many moments in life are that truly joyous? You can count on getting at least one moment at a U2 show where you feel part of something far bigger and far more profound and ineffable than you can ever be and it's recreated quite well with this film.

Because the technology is so new, they don't know when/if this can be released on DVD. Consequently, we're supremely tempted to go see it again. Hopefully they'll have the sound turned up if we do. If so, I couldn't ask for more in a concert film.

Tags: u2

I recently read an essay speaking to one of my favorite subjects: the duality of man. In this case, how we have contradictory needs for the spiritual and for the worldly. It seems that, for the most part, people don’t know how to find a balance between these two: if a person focuses too much on one, it creates a hole in his life that’s exactly the size of the other. For example, it’s always seemed to me that the more ascetic the man, the more what he really needs is some worldliness in order to become his ideal image of a worthy supplicant to God. And the more worldly the man, the more he needs a spiritual awakening in order to achieve any sense of peace. For in both cases it seems that without a proper balance between spirituality and worldliness, a person turns more and more towards despair. It’s impossible to be truly fulfilled as a human only through consumer goods and worldly experiences just as it’s impossible to feel completely human without these same things.

( As I was reading, I thought that it seems there is one place where man seems to co-exist in the spiritual and the worldly... )

Tags: philosophy, religion, u2

In honor of today being the 20th anniversary of the release of The Joshua Tree [Ho boy, how old does this make me? Never mind, don't answer that.], here's a slightly modified re-post of something I did nearly 2 years ago.

Some albums stand alone, out of time, perfect gems that you love heart and soul, flaws and all. The Joshua Tree, in my mind, stands alongside albums by The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, The Eagles, and Fleetwood Mac as classics that all fans of rock should own. (The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame agrees with me. There's a lot wrong on that list, but The Joshua Tree at #5 ain't one of those things.) I recall about 10 years ago I read a critique that said this album was "derivative rock" and, to this day, I don't know what the fuck that guy was talking about. What other album has, before or since, sounded like The Joshua Tree?

Whenever I travel to the desert (Oregon has what we call a "high desert"), The Joshua Tree is an obvious and necessary cd to take in the car. I can't go to the desert without this album; it always seems to make the most sense when heard there. On a trip, while listening in the car, my mind drifted as the scrub brush and pine trees and horses came and went, and I had the sensation that I was back in time and in the present all at once.

This was the result of my day-dreaming:


It's March 1987 and I'm attending college in a small town surrounded by farming country. I don't watch television and I don't listen to the radio (no college radio and the local stations are country and light rock), but I know The Joshua Tree is out and I'm desperate to find it. I only have a cassette player in my dorm room, so the album form won't do me any good - though I intend to buy it anyway. I walk and ride my bike daily to the likeliest places around town where I think I can find a copy on cassette, but no luck. I have to wait for Spring Break when I go home to "the city". That's nearly a full month of anticipatory agony.

I don't have a chance on the Friday I return home, so Saturday - as a group of friends and siblings and I pile into cars to head to the beach - I force a stop so I can buy it. At last it is mine.

We drive to the beach and I have to wait some more. No one I'm with cares about this band, and besides, even if it was possible to put it in the car's deck, there's too much talking and laughing going on to hear it anyway.

We get to the beach and it's pouring rain. Not a little wet drizzle, but an absolute deluge. Obviously, walking and playing on the sand is out, so the group decides to find an arcade or a movie or something until the rain lets up. I can't stand the wait any longer: I'm going to stay behind in the car and listen. I'll find them when I'm done if they haven't come back to the car. Are you sure? they ask again and again. I'm quite sure, I say, and wait impatiently for the group to take off.

The rain is coming down so intensely that as soon as the group is gone I am completely alone - I can barely see a foot or two beyond the car. The world is reduced to me in the car, nervous and excited to find out if my band has created magic. I unwrap the plastic for the first time and put the cassette in. As it starts, I remove the liner notes from the case so I can look at the pictures and read the lyrics while I listen. U2 had moved their sound in a completely new direction with The Unforgettable Fire. I had seen that moment during the Amnesty International tour when the members of The Police handed their instruments over to the members of U2. The message had been clear: U2 was to carry the torch forward. This was their first release after that tour and I had wondered and wondered if this album would live up to the implicit promise they made when they accepted those instruments from The Police.


( Where the Streets Have No Name )


( I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For )

( With or Without You )

( Bullet the Blue Sky )

( Running to Stand Still )

( Red Hill Mining Town )

( In God's Country )

( Trip Through Your Wires )

( One Tree Hill )

( Exit )

( Mothers of the Disappeared )

For the first couple of weeks I lived with this album in my own little bubble of pleasure. I hadn't met anyone else that had it, and it wasn't on the radio in force like it would be later. Then it was as though it hit the public consciousness and exploded. As it took off I remember my mingled pride (my boys, my boys, finally people are recognizing how fantastic they are!) and dismay (oh god, these people don't get it and concerts are going to be a mob scene now!) at its success. I said at the time that if the number of times I had listened to it could be measured in distance, I had easily gone to the moon and back with The Joshua Tree. Now I'd have to say perhaps I've been as far as Venus.

I don't think it's too strongly stated if I say this album has become a part of my very soul. I wonder who I would be if it didn't exist. I know a part of the reason, beyond its own greatness, that it has played such an important and positive part in my life is that it came out at a stage when I was gaining independence, feeling like I could "be myself" and discovering just what that meant. I'm sure any person or work of art you come to know at this stage of personal development gains importance due to that association, but I know that's really only a small part of how and why this album means so very much to me. It means more than ever be expressed, really - like how a person who has had a large impact on your life means more than words can say.

So I'll close by repeating that sentiment. The Joshua Tree is intertwined with my life inextricably and eternally. Imagine what you think that means, then add infinity to it and you'll just about have it.

Tags: u2

Back when I was in middle school, reading Harlequins instead of doing my homework (shuddup), I wondered at and was a bit annoyed by the fact that whenever an author mentioned the hero or heroine listening to music, it had to be classical music. I suppose there's an argument that classical music can be more elevating (intellectually speaking) than other kinds, but even so it still speaks to the same thing inside of people that any other kind of music speaks to. That's a leveler to my mind since music is music. It comes in infinite varieties, yet it's the same.

Anyway, I eventually understood that one thing authors were doing was trying not to date the story since musical genres and fads come and go, but classical is apparently forever. I thought if ever I found a book that actually mentioned you-know-who by name it'd be a keeper that I'd be practically required to love forever. After all these years and after all the books I've read since middle school, I found it: a book that mentioned U2 and actually made one of their songs a minor plot point.

Now on to the geekery. So the plot point revolves around something happening in the past. Which of course means I immediately flipped to the front to see when the book was published, subtracted a year, then subtracted the appropriate number of years the story was traveling back in time. A-ha! Early 1991. The year of Actung Baby...but that album didn't come out until winter and the scene was set earlier that year in the spring and so of course, my logic told me, it had to be a Joshua Tree song. Not only due to the timing but also due to the kinds of U2 songs that were played on the radio pre-JT in comparison with those post-JT. And then I had it: With or Without You. The book had to be talking about With or Without You even though the song is never referred to by name.

Would anyone except a U2 geek go through such mental perambulations? I think not.

My trip down geekery lane brought two things to mind: the first, obviously, is the reminder that U2's music has been the soundtrack to my life. It's like how my husband and I date things around our daughter - when she was born, the time she did this or that; in a similar way I also date some things around what I was listening to at the time. The other is that I realized I've been seeing this kind of thing - that is, specifically naming musicians and songs in books - lately and I don't recall this happening much before. Of course, this could also be a function of how my reading ebbs and flows through genres and it's perfectly possible that in there somewhere this trend had been going for awhile and I never noticed it. But it is a little interesting to me since it does really nail a story to a specific time - which perhaps authors don't mind since most all stories are nailed to a specific time anyway. It just seems this does it in such a particular way that my instinct would be to avoid it. It will be interesting to me to see if this little trend continues. I think it's kind of fascinating to see the kinds of choices other people take with their work that I would never think to take if I were in those shoes.

Tags: books, u2

Quick one while I wait for the e-mail to boot. There’s not much that’s more boring than hearing the laundry list of why a person is sooooo busy (perhaps hearing about what a person did or didn’t eat that day qualifies), so I’ll spare you the details on how I’ll be happy to make it through the next couple of weeks with any brain cells left intact.

Since yesterday’s craving for Zoo Station turned today into a craving to hear all of Achtung Baby, I couldn’t resist the temptation to do what I spoke of yesterday and post some lyrics. (I’m only human, people, and I’m sure by now you had to know this day was coming.) Ahem, where was I? Oh, right…

First, the famous:

( One )
For fans of U2, the genesis of this song and how the lyrics had a certain meaning that was applicable to the band as a group is well known. But since this song was released, it’s taken on a completely different life and several different meanings have been ascribed to it. Larry has said that he thinks it’s a mistake sometimes that Bono will tell people what the songs are “about” since they can speak of a situation in broad enough terms that the words can have a variety of meanings. The same can be said for some of my favorite poems (if not the ones that have best stood the test of time, perhaps due to their air of mystery): the authors may have had one or two things in mind when they wrote down those words, but thanks to an infinite variety of life experiences, people can get that original meaning and/or they can get a completely different one that is arguably legitimate based on the text. If I had “world enough and time” I could go on a lot more on that subject plus some of the ways in which One is so touching, but I don’t so I won’t.

Now on to my favorite song from the album, which also includes words that can be interpreted in a couple of different ways:

( Until the End of the World )

The reason this song originally became my favorite has more to do with the music. Around the time that Achtung Baby was released, I read that Bono and Jim Kerr (of Simple Minds fame) had a talk about how Simple Minds were struggling to make their songs achieve some kind of lift, and they were especially struggling with having that lift translate from the studio to a live (arena) setting. So I had the word “lift” hovering in the back of my mind when I got to know this record. As best as my non-technical mind can decipher, this song has that elusive lift thanks to (mostly) Edge’s mini guitar solo after the line “you were acting like it was the end of the world” as well as a change in key*. Bono sings in a low key throughout, with the exception of the “love section”; that combination of the change in key plus the music at that section of the song really open it up and send it flying. (I won’t go into raptures as I could do about how hearing this song live is amazing since Edge is flexible enough now to interpret the solo section in seemingly innumerable ways, all of them fantastic.) Ahem, where was I? Oh yes…after falling in love with all of that, I started paying attention to the lyrics and – thanks to one of the over-arcing themes of the album being relationships that are tested to the outer limits of their endurance – I assumed it was simply about a male/female relationship. Though of course, that didn’t take into account Bono’s deep familiarity with the Bible. I really don’t know how long it was before I figured out what he was really talking about, and it was a good few years after that before I ever saw him interviewed on the topic. (Here’s a hint on its inspiration.). But whatever relationship it’s speaking to, the image inspired by the words “waves of regret and waves of joy/I reached out for the one I tried to destroy” is a powerful one. And I don’t think it’s an accident that the song leaves off at the point where one person has, metaphorically speaking, fallen to his knees in supplication so that we don’t know for certain what the other person has decided as respects forgiveness.

OK, even with cutting and pasting and fast typing, this took about 5 minutes more than I wanted to spend, so now I’m off to the races.

*If I knew how to do that yousendit thingy, I’d load this up so those of you unfamiliar with this song (presumably, this is most of you fair readers) could hear what I’m talking about. But you know how it goes with old dogs and new tricks.

Tags: poetry, u2

Every Friday morning my local radio station plays a little set of songs from the 1980s. It occurred to me today that music gets segregated to different memory banks so that when I hear a song I haven't heard in awhile, different memory responses are evoked.

( Sorting memories like laundry... )

This whole thing is another one of those forehead slappers for me because it's so obvious that I've always done this, and yet I never noticed it until this morning when I found myself running the gamut of emotions described above as 6 or 7 songs were played on the radio. Well, there was all that plus the realization that U2 really did have a sound akin to punk back then, which again, I never noticed before now -- at the time I didn't think of them as part of that genre due to the lyrics and the fact that you could understand them, but the prominent guitar and drums and up tempo rhythm and straight-ahead cleanliness of the tunes: punk all the way.

Tags: music, u2

Some albums stand alone, out of time, perfect gems that you love heart and soul, flaws and all.  The Joshua Tree, in my mind, stands alongside albums by The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, The Eagles, and Fleetwood Mac as classics that all fans of rock should own.  I recall about 10 years ago I read a critique that said this album was "derivative rock" and, to this day, I don't know what the fuck that guy was talking about.  What other album has, before or since, sounded like The Joshua Tree?

Over last week-end we went to the high desert and The Joshua Tree was an obvious and necessary cd to take in the car.  I can't go to the desert without this album as it always seems to make the most sense when heard there.  Listening in the car, my mind drifted as the scrub brush and pine trees and horses came and went, and I had the sensation that I was back in time and in the present all at once.

( Trip through time's wires... )
I don't think it's too strongly stated if I say this album has become a part of my very soul.  I wonder who I would be if it didn't exist.  I know a part of the reason, beyond its own greatness, that it has played such an important and positive part in my life is that it came out at a stage when I was gaining independence, feeling like I could "be myself" and discovering just what that meant.  I'm sure any person or work of art you come to know at this stage of personal development gains importance due to that association, but I know that's really only a small part of how and why this album means so very much to me.  It means more than ever be expressed, really - like how a person who has had a large impact on your life means more than words can say.

So I'll close by repeating that sentiment.  The Joshua Tree is intertwined with my life inextricably and eternally.  Imagine what you think that means, then add infinity to it and you'll just about have it.

 

 

Tags: u2