MISCmedia for 11/1/99
Pleasures, Not Necessarily Guilty

I WAS ASKED by the editors of Resonance to participate in their year-end issue's survey of various critics' musical "guilty pleasures" of the past decade.

Being the shameless guy I am, I replied that there was nothing I've liked over the past 10 years that I particularly felt guilty about.

Nevertheless, I was able to provide the magazine with a few choice discs that other critics might wish me to feel guilty about liking. The mag declined to include any of them on its final list, which turned out to specialize in discs that had received both commercial popularity and critical disdain.

(Some of these following discs I've mentioned in prior articles on this site.)

• SAM SPENCE The Power and the Glory: Original Music and Voices of NFL Films (Tommy Boy)
  American football is a patiently-paced game of pre-choreographed plays, executed by players whose faces you can't see. NFL Films turns this into narratives of personal heroism, and these stirringly-cliched themes are a big part of that transformative process.

• VARIOUS ARTISTS Music for TV Dinners, Vols. 1 and 2 (Scamp/Caroline)
  Fifties and Sixties leftovers from a stock-music library, which had lent them out for everything from commercials and educational films to 'Ren & Stimpy' and Russ Meyer movies.

• VARIOUS ARTISTS South End All Stars (Collective Fruit)
  One day, when the true obscurities of "Seattle Scene"-era music are fully appreciated by rarities collectors, this compilation will find its due. The band names alone will be worth the eBay auction price (Rhino Humpers, Tramps of Panic, Spontaneous Funk Whorehouse, Queer the Pitch, Stir the Possum)!

• CHURN Titus (Laundry Room)
  More relics from the early "We're Notgrunge, Dammit!" era of local indie bands (late '93). Still sounds grungier than most of the fake-grunge bands from L.A. and London the major labels were hyping at the time.

• EDWYN COLLINS I'm Not Following You (Setanta)
  Pleasant, insubstantial, Birthday Party-esque twee pop and pseudo-neo-disco.

• RICHARD PETERSON Love on the Golf Course (PopLlama)
  Easy-listening music with a true hard edge (not a posed "atittude"), by a lifetime street musician expressing his fantasies of a leisurely life he's thus far never gotten to live.

• BLACK VELVET FLAG Come Recline (Go Kart)
  Lounge arrangements of punk classics--a surefire formula for good times! I've done it myself. Try it in your own home.

• PSYCLONE RANGERS The Devil May Care (World Domination)
  Loud, stoopid, un-self-conscious, fun garage-punk from Pennsylvania. So the songs all sound the same; so what?

• VARIOUS ARTISTS Planet Squeezebox (Ellipsis Arts box set)
  The mighty accordion and its variants, as heard on three continents--proof that so-called "world music" need not be laid back or mellow.

• KALYANJI, ANANDJI Bombay the Hard Way (Motel)
  India movie music--proof that so-called "world music" need not be folksome or less than ruthlessly commercial. If there's a "guilty" part to this pleasure, it's in the unnecessarily campy new song titles and the dance-floor-friendly remixing added to the tracks in this collection.

IN OTHER NEWS: It's a sad day for fans of Happy Kyne and the Mirth Makers.

TOMORROW: An "off-off-year" election brings leftish "progressives" and rightish "populists" against a common foe, the corporate middle-of-the-road.

ELSEWHERE:

• Life's not a movie, so why so much background music? (Hey, if life were a movie, I'd demand a stunt double....)
• This site imitates chicken restaurants right....

RECENT HIGHLIGHTS:

• Could Blair Witch be considered a Dogme 95 film?
• The joys of oral surgery.
• Treat your tricksters to this year's coolest candy.
• The origins of manga/anime storytelling.
• Does it really matter when the 'real' new millennium is anyway?
• Cyber-libertarians vs. cyber-libertines.
• The music everyone but me likes.
• That great contemporary-art benefactor, Procter & Gamble; and a possible way to restore alterna-art's role in urban society.
• The end of Almost Live and TV's role in the decline and possible rebirth of regional culture and humor.
• Remembering the good old days of foreign film.
• Rumored changes to a once-great college radio station.
• There are many successful female public artists; does it mean something? Must it?
• Brief looks at a few more real-estate relics.
• Susan Faludi's Stiffed fails, so far, to attract the reverse-reverse-reverse-sexist backlash; while Douglas Davis seeks a future where men will be equal to women.
• Faster, James Gleick! Write, write!

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