Going Overground with Sheryl Crow's new video

If you feel you wanna fight me
There's a chain around your mind

--Sheryl Crow
the first line of "Out of Our Heads"


Here's the link to the video. Embedding has been disabled for the video in all formats, so feel free to open the video in another window for maximum reading pleasure.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=WMBnUuiLR7U

And minimal listening pleasure. A song so bad it can almost make you decide you're in favor of the war. It has to be heard to truly be believed. The music is harmless enough. The verse is four chords on acoustic guitar set to a beat that's vaguely funky in a mid-90's white person kind of way (think Eagle Eye Cherry or Dave Matthews). The chorus then shifts into a more straightforward singalong a la "Give Peace a Chance"--which this song clearly wants to be--only with a more insistent beat. And the production at every turn is as clean and polished as some asshole's SUV sitting in line at the Chick-Fil-A drive thru at Beechwood when Athens is still in a drought.

Lyrics? Fuck yeah there's lyrics. When you're writing a protest song, one might say that the most important part of the song is its lyrics. Given a myriad of choices, Sheryl Crow goes for the easiest and most time-tested way of getting her message across: Trouble in the verse. Hope in the chorus. So let's start with what's wrong in the world, according to Sheryl Crow.

Oh, and be sure to keep it vague as possible. So nobody gets hurt.




Losing babies to genocide / Oh where's the meaning in that plight / Can't you see that we've really bought into / Every word they proclaimed and every lie, oh

You know the problem in this world today? Too many people supporting genocide. And not just genocide of adults, but something even worse--baby genocide. I'll answer your question, Sheryl Crow. There is NO meaning in that plight.

Interseting to note that Sheryl uses more pronouns without telling us what they're substitutes for than a gay person at bible camp telling us about their 'partner'. And just who is the 'we' that bought into the words 'they' proclaimed? Sheryl and her band? Sheryl and all Americans? Or did she just decide that using 'you' was too preachy, too finger-pointy, and would make it seem like she was blaming people for buying into a war started under false pretenses? See, Sheryl, I can use rhetorical questions too!

Thing is, if you believe people really did buy into every word and every lie, then, um, they kind of are to blame. And I think including yourself in that group by saying 'we,' so you won't hurt their feelings, kind of sugarcoats it. Especially when you didn't buy into every word and every lie. That's called disingenuous. It's also called manipulative. It's also called thinking the people you're talking to aren't as smart as you are. Which is fine if you think that, but you might as well come out and say it.

I'm going to cherry-pick the lyrics, but only in the interests of time & space because believe me they are all bad in the same vague, pseudo-poetical, pseudo-loving way. Sheryl Crow has put out a song that makes "We Are the World" feel like Public Enemy. In fact, let's cleanse our palette with a little PE right fucking now.

Public Enemy - Son of a Bush


Man, that felt good. So good it can almost make me forgive "Flavor of Love". It certainly gets its point across more clearly than this next verse from "Out of our Heads".

Through the dawn of darkness blindly / You have blood upon your hands / All the world will treat you kindly / But only the heart can understand, oh understand

As they like to say on the internet, WTF? Okay, last verse.

Every man is his own prophet / Oh every prophet just a man / I say all the women stand up, say yes to themselves / Teach your children best you can / Let every man bow to the best in himself / We're not killing any more / We're the wisest ones, everybody listen / 'Cause you can't fight this feeling any more, oh anymore

The problem with a song this vague, aside from the fact that it can't make up its mind between advocating either: 1) self-reliance at the expense of group thought or 2) putting the needs of the world ahead of one's own desires, is that people believing they were the wisest and that every man is his own prophet is a huge part of what got us into this mess in the first place. And any sensible analysis of our current fuckups has to take into account that the people who got us there really thought they were doing something good. Even if their logic was faulty, they still had noble intentions. This idea is important, because the chorus to this song, the part that Ms. Crow wants to get stuck in our heads, the section that every other part of this song is preparing us for, her great message, goes like this.

If we could only get out of our heads / Out of our heads /And into our hearts

So the problem is. . . we think too much? That we should just follow our hearts? Trust our gut instincts? This is the answer?

Aside from the cheap shot that I didn't realize being too much in our heads was the cause of baby genocide, isn't someone following their gut instincts in place of all tangible evidence, believing in their hearts instead of logic, kind of what got us into this problem in the first place?

The video is every bit as unfocused and clusterfucked as the song it represents. It features Sheryl and her band 'performing' the song on a stage. Set in black & white, there's no audience in the hall but plenty of smiles on the band's faces. Interspersed with the performance footage are clips of protests through the years, all of them protests in America of course, and people throughout history flashing the peace sign.

These peace flashers range from historical figures like Bobby Kennedy and Boris Yeltsin to Kobe Bryant and Fergie. Every Beatle is represented except George Harrison. The list features one war criminal--former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who in addition to unnecessarily prolonging the Vietnam War for an additional six years (and his own political gain), also illegally bombed Vietnam's neighbor Cambodia, creating two million refugees which in turn helped lead to the rise of the Khmer Rouge, who once in power genocided nearly three million people, including lots of (gulp) babies. And the list also features a president so crooked he was convicted of several felonies and would have gone to prison had he not been pardoned. No, not George W. Bush--though he's in the video flashing the peace sign as well. We're talking about Richard Nixon.

See! the video wants us to say, everyone believes in peace! Even the people who start the wars in the first place!

Let's end with the list of all the peace flashers I was able to recognize in the video. The punctuation's random because I had to type fast.


jimmy carter
bobby kennedy
fergie
Michael moore
Donald trump
slash
allen ginsberg
harry truman
jimi Hendrix
wyclef
cindy Sherman
paul McCartney
ringo starr
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of iran
yassir Arafat
george w. bush
patti smith
bono
jerry Garcia
al sharpton
martin sheen
jerry Garcia
john & yoko
carlos santna
boris yeltsin
elvis
stevie wonder
Richard Nixon
Winston Churchill
Henry Kissenger
Vladimir putin
kobe Bryant
jane fonda

And do you know what all these people have in common?

Not a single peace flasher had webbed fingers.

Let's hear it for evolution!

The 2008 Flagpole Music Awards

The classiest amateur show in town made its 10th appearance last Thursday at the Morton Theater (excuse me, Morton Theatre). As uplifting as a decent church service, and as dependable as the winner in the World Music category giving props to the upcoming solstice, even if it occasionally veers towards hokiness & self-indulgence, the Fpole Music Awards are still a good bang for your Athfest buck. And even if it lasted nearly four hours, or about as long as the televised portion of the Academy Awards, I didn't start to get bored until the third hour. And I sure can't say that about the Academy Awards.

While we're on the subject, the big winners--in a Hollywood sense--would have to be Dark Meat and Of Montreal. If you're the kind of person who's interested in winners (and if you're reading a low-profile blog, how could you not be), you can check them out, along with video of the show, at Fpole's website, http://flagpole.com/Awards/. They also have video of the UGA drumline kicking off the show, which was pretty awesome, even if one of the Fpole's managing editors climbed inside my head and stole the joke I was going to make about this being the closest anyone in the audience had ever been to a football game. Too bad, because it was a pretty good joke too.

The music performers represented as wide a cross-section of Athens Music as possible: Indie, Folk, Jazz, Hippie, Rock, and Hip-Hop. And though award shows are a time for celebration and love, I have to mention that my head is still pounding from Moyuba!'s bongo-fest. Not really a drum circle, with five members it was more of a drum parabola, but their relentless tribal drumming ricocheted off the natural reverb of the theatre until it sounded like an army about to go fight a war, or at the very least go roast a pig or something.

No pictures of the actual award itself on-line, but it does feature a masterstroke of postsrutcturalist Saussere-ian wordplay by placing the word 'Flagpole' on a flag. Nice one. But an award show isn't about the award, or about winning, or which band is better, or even who plays, it's about memories, and this show was packed with them. We learned that with his deadpan wit, someone should immediately give Mercer West (spelled 'Mercre' while inside the Morton) his own late night talk show. On the other hand, we learned that Michelle Gilzenrat shouldn't be allowed within a hundred feet of a live broadcast until she gets her tourette's syndrome sorted out. And for anyone taking part in the downstairs betting pool, what were the final odds that Gilzenrat would be the potty-mouth instead of Mercer? Certainly higher than the odds that Dark Meat's Jim would be the only presenter who insisted on bringing his beer out to the podium with him when the Morton doesn't allow any food or drink into the actual theater because it's 100 years old and made out of wood. How oh so very rock'n'roll.

Actually, Michelle was a very charming, and occasionally funny, co-host. The other master of ceremonies, Clay Leverett, had his good moments--like using the sparkle mirrors on the award podium to reflect the spotlight back into the audience, along with his not-so-good moments--like always complaining about the sound guy turning down his mike, or feeling the constant need to sing along with Kenosha Kid's instrumentals. He also told us to "give it up" so many times that by the end of the show I started to think I was (pick your favorite):

a) a mormon cheerleader on prom nite
b) an altar boy right after sunday mass
c) a congressional page in an airport restroom
d) r.e.m.

Let's just go ahead and make this the negative section of our post. You know that show on local cable, "Classic City Dining"? Well they had the hosts of that show out to present some awards, and they were only slightly less brittle and smiling than they are on their show.

Oh, and when C-Fre$h said during his performance--which was great, by the way--that we've never seen anyone like him before. Um, I'm pretty sure I have. Just saying.

Alright, back to the positive.

Which just turned negative since I can't embed the awesome video from The BuddyRevelles that won one of the Sprockets music video awards, because the copy & paste capabilities of the internet/youtube are totally and utterly failing. And after ten minutes of trying, including my successful attempts at copy & pasting other videos, I refuse to take any responsibility whatsoever. Here's a link instead.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=ShvpcC9jmmQ

The song's neither here nor there, a finely assembled wall of shelving in a late 90's indie rock sense, if you're looking for that sort of thing. But the video is creative, watchable, and funny.

Other highlights included Tofu Baby trying to pronounce "Perpetual Groove" though her constant lisp as she announced the nominees for Best Jam Band, and the Of Montrealers doing their theatrical non-sequitir livening up the party thing. Have to figure Kevin was the guy dressed up in the deep-sea-diver outfit flopping around on the floor and cleaning up confetti with his legs.

The show ended with "Spring Tigers vs. Twin Tigers", a subject already covered on these pages. It was cool and different how they divided the stage in half and had each band alternate songs, but even if Spring did nothing to embarass themselves, I still gotta to with the Twins, who sounded even better live than they do on their recordings. They're just a few hooks away from doing something memorable and fantastic.

It would've been nice if the show ended there, but then they brought everyone out to sing Queen's "We Are the Champions". On a night that featured the very best of what the Athens Music Scene has to offer, I'm pretty sure that this moment--whether being sung in mocking insincerity or misguided earnestness--wasn't one of them.

Holy Fucking Athfest!

If it's the third week in June, it must be time to celebrate all things Athens music in one glorious weekend. Back in 1789, our town founders asked themselves two very important questions. What's better than Athens? and What's better than a festival? And they found two very important answers. A festival of music! and Having it in Athens! And with that Athfest was born.

A third question, why would I pay fifteen bucks to see the same bands that I can see play any other weekend for five?, thankfully went unasked.

(I know. It's not for the locals, it's for the out-of-towners. It's just a joke. It's cool).

So with 15 local venues all featuring music at once, and with cloning still illegal--if not scientifically impossible--how can a music lover deicde which shows to check out? Well, you can check out this week's Flagpole (Chris Hassiotis is excited about seeing Kuroma, because they sound like "Paul McCartney inviting Yes to come jam with Wings" Yowsa! Count me in!), or you can decide for yourself. Or you can keep reading. If you stay with me I'll try to make it sound more exciting than Michael Andrews talking about Curley Maple, who he describes as "a comfortable, back-porch sound that gets warmer and more inviting with each listen." Well in that case, I hope they play at least three sets, so I can get myself good and warm & invited!

Honestly, there's only one band I'm dying to see this Athfest. And that's Creepy.

No, not creepy like this.



Creepy like this.



Taking the best parts of Hopeforagoldensummer, Still Small Voice & the Joyful Noise, and sounding nothing at all like either one, Creepy is offering the one thing that no other band in Athens can guarantee this Athfest: Something Different. Saturday night at Flicker will be their first show. Judging by the songs on their website (www.myspace.com/creepyashell), Creepy sounds like Alice in Wonderland singing with Public Image Ltd. Or to put it more abstractly, a good Creepy music video would feature penquins and sunsets, with a glass cathedral held together with duct tape. Too abstract? Fine, then. The guitar is brittle & coated in layers of delay, the bass is full & textured, the vocals are non-existent and echoing.

Eno would love this.

You can walk into this show and have no idea what to expect--of Creepy, of their future, of yourself. An Athfest miracle.

The rest of the festival?

--I'll try and be in the front row for Dark Meat. So I can turn around to watch the look on the audience's faces. Later, I'll try and get Jim to autograph my copy of Superfuzz/Bigmuff.

--And it's times like this I curse my parents for not having any other kids. Because if I had a little sister, I could take her to go see the Modern Skirts and she would love me forever. I mean, look at this picture.



Otherwise, nothing I'll be seeing that I wouldn't be able to see in the next month or so.

Oh, except for the movies at Cine. Check out The B-52's at the Downtown Club in 1978. Most of the show is on youtube. Click on the link and swoon with nostalgia.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=VN8hV4AyNss&feature=related

Without them there wouldn't even be an Athfest. There would barely even be an Athens.

Incidentally, I won two free wristbands off WUOG by answering a trivia question. How many layers does a Yoo-Hoo drink settle into? I guessed three. It turns out De La Soul (and Schoolhouse Rock) was right. Three really is the magic number.

Tiger vs. Tiger

There's two bands in town.

Spring Tigers (www.myspace.com/springtigers).
Twin Tigers (www.myspace.com/thetwintigers).

And if old west towns weren't big enough for two sheriffs, then is Athens big enough for two Tigers? Should one have to leave? And if so, which one?

Athens Music Express breaks it down by using arbitrarily chosen categories, because that's what boys do on the internet.

Name

The name Twin Tigers is a lie. Because there's four people in the band.

The name Spring Tigers is also a lie. Because it's currently summertime.

Spring Tigers named their band after a Guided by Voices song, so they gain two points. But they lose five points for self-consciously naming themselves after a song off one of GBV's obscure 1993 7-inches (and they lose ten points if they named themselves after the version on that 'Suitcase" boxset). What's the matter ST? Too cool to name yourselves 'Motor Away'?

Verdict: TT by a whisker. (get it? whisker).

Looks

First, ST.



Wow. I think I saw these guys on Ellen the other day. Her audience loved it. The question is, do they work at Hot Topic just so they can get the discount? Or do they do it because they love the music?

Let's not even talk about the leather jacket.

Alright. Now, TT.



They seem very nice. And I'm liking that sweater.

Verdict: TT by a landslide.

Localness

ST frontman Kris isn't even from America, let alone Athens.

TT frontman Matthew grew up here and went to ACC public schools. Can't get much more local than that. And before Twin Tigers he was the main guy for Psychic Hearts, who were awesome. Loses points for changing his last name to 'Rain' though. But he would've gained points if he'd spelled it 'Reign'.

Verdict: TT seem to be doing pretty well so themselves so far.

Sounds

TT's touchstones revolve around the hazy psychedelia of My Bloody Valentine, Animal Collective, etc. Vocals are a little glammy, a little on the fey side (Bowie, not Tina). They're not reinventing the wheel, but at the same time their sound isn't overtly commercial. Still, it gets kind of hard to tell sometimes exactly which band has the english guy singing for them. And there's a huge cloud hanging over their head with the word DEERHUNTER written all over it in big pink letters.

ST's music would fit nicely into the soundtrack of whatever the big overprivileged white teen tv drama is these days. I'm getting the feeling these guys had to call a band meeting on the day The O.C. got cancelled. The singer uses the same snotty intonation as grade-schoolers do on a playground. But I'll bet you money his dad cannot beat up my dad. Also, negative 1000 points for claiming to be influenced by Syd Barrett and Wire when you really sound like Phantom Planet, or a more sober and high-pitched Strokes, or one more Plain White T's.

Overall, there's a cetain plastic feeling that hangs over their music. Which would be interesting if ST loved plastic, or if they hated plastic, or if they spent their whole lives trying to escape the plastic all around them only to end up with assholes like me calling them plastic. Unfortunately, they're content to just be plastic. Which isn't very interesting at all.

Verdict: TT for honesty, and for choosing the (slightly) harder path to stardom.

Final Judgement

Hey, wait a second. Athens isn't that small, and if we can have a Dark Meat and a Christopher's Liver, then why can't we have two tigers? They can both stay! And maybe they can even play a show together at halftime when UGA plays the Clemson Tigers! And eat Frosted Flakes together with Tony the Tiger while they read Tiger Beat! And cover 'Eye of the Tiger'!

That would be gr-r-r-eat!

Besides, I'll eat my own shit if Spring Tigers is still living and playing here 4 years from now.

Sphinxie @ Rye Bar - June 7th

15 thoughts about Sphinxie

1) Sphinxie has a myspace page. You can go there if you want to.

www.myspace.com/youaresphinxie.

2) It doesn't really work as an advertisement. It's more like grafitti. Or an inscrutable billboard.

3) Sphinxie is building a career the way insurgents build their bombs.

4) They don't really belong on Mtv. More like the Discovery Channel, or National Geographic.

5) Here is a picture. It is a picture of a cellphone.



6) Did Patti Smith ever sing with Beat Happening?

7) There are three members of Sphinxie; a person who sings, a person who plays bass, and a person who drums.

8) Maybe the way to make music that is different & unique is to actually be different & unique. I mean as a person, living your day-to-day life in a constant mix of wonder & irritation.

9) Because when their microphone kept crapping out, when the staff at the Rye Bar was hopeless & elsewhere, and the man in the Hawaiian shirt was starting to heckle, they just decided to play louder and sing as a group.

10) Because most bands in this town are no different than the bum on the street begging for some of your change, begging for more of your time, certain in the knowledge that you couldn't have anything more important to do in your life than to listen to them. The only difference is the bands want your attention & money so they can quit their jobs and live in a mansion. The bum just wants some booze, or maybe some crack. Which makes the bum smarter than the bands. Shit, at least he's going to have a good time.

11) Wasn't early Pavement fronted by the Carter Family?

12) Because their set is so short and mysterious that as soon as it's over you want to hear it again, to make sure you really heard what you think you did.

13) Here's another picture. I don't know what it means.



14) Because this show was so transcendent that the next time I see Sphinxie play I wouldn't be shocked in the least if all three members fucking levitated.

15) It's going to take a long time to get bored with Sphinxie.

Songs Dark Meat Should Consider Covering - Vol. 1 of a series

Fleetwood Mac's 'Tusk'




Granted, it would be hard to convince the band members to gradually come in one at a time (The Meat loves the all-at-once skronk. Dynamics are for pussies!). But the tribal drums, the marching band horns, the mix of male & female vocals. It's all there. Just waiting. Can't you hear it? And if you look close enough, Mick Fleetwood even looks a little bit like Jim!