“1 Samuel 15:23,” the first track on the Life of the World to Come, exemplifies what we stand to lose in the age of digital music.
Avoiding listening to anything else but this album has been one of the more fun/kinda silly conventions I’ve set up for this week.
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There’s a lot about home on The Life of the World to Come.
SOME BULLETS IN WHICH I FIRE OFF SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT THIS HERE THE LIFE OF THE WORLD TO COME BUSINESS
So it’s not every day that your favorite band puts out a new album, and the real truth is that I am typically pretty on top of these things in the manner of anybody who grew up claiming that music changed his life and is now thirty-one and would still probably hold on to this fact. So it was strange to the point of feeling disconcerting when I got the Insound newsletter today and it mentioned that yes, that crazy* bible-themed new Mountain Goats album, The Life of the World to Come, came out today.
Needless to say I have never been more on time as far as leaving for lunch break in my life.
banksy image via denial_land on flickr
Some things!
–In an attempt to have posts look uniform, I am going to try to have a photo and an eventual read more link in far more of my posts now. Whee!
(can you see how exciting this post’s gonna be?)(I bet you can’t wait for more!)
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Sometimes I want to just start a tumblr that consists of screenshots of the terse descriptions that Pandora assigns to favorite bands.
Other times I just want to be the Dismemberment Plan.
I really didn’t think I would end up posting anything about Michael Jackson, to be quite honest. I think as a midwestern boy growing up, he sort of represented in a human being all the cries of “Faggot!” that boys grow up with as well as scary city stuff, all wrapped up in a man who had two massive faces–the weirdo my mom would probably group in with David Bowie and a few others, and the genius that no one could escape.
He was one of those transcendent musicians who still trigger indiscriminate memories (seeing Alfonso pretend to be him on “Silver Spoons”) as well as memories that understandably seemed big enough at the time to still be rattling around in my 31-year-old brain (being envious yet fascinated when a classmate could dance like him; watching as my TV broke the scandal about “markings” a young boy could identify)(a story breaking, as I recall, at a time also scarred by the Magic Johnson announcement).
Is Michael Jackson what I hope to hear when I go to Soul Night? Of course. There’s no question that, now that the 80’s no longer seem so kitschy, his music still makes people put their drink down and get back to dancin’.
But really, I wanted to write a post simply because I read this over at Said the Gramophone, and it simultaneously showed the strength of that blog while also reminding me of the greatness of a man so wrapped up in so many things beyond “just” making shockingly good music. It’s a post worth sharing, and the demo of “Billie Jean” accompanying the piece will make you smile. I really hope you all will read it.
Today has been quiet.
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Last night.
