Hot Summer Car Jamz: Super Nostalgia Edition!

I think the beginning of summer makes me nostalgic; I totally had the urge to listen to Liz Phair today. I always get a little sad too, realizing that the days will get shorter for the next six months. Whip-Smart got thousands of plays in my car's tape deck, back in the day. Before the mp3 revolution, people had that connection to music; you'd buy something, and that would be it, you better like it, cause it's gonna be a week before you have disposable income again. You looked for reasons to like it. There were plenty of albums I didn't really dig, but I committed to giving them 3 or 4 listens, because dammit, I bought it! And you know what? Sometimes, you'd catch something on that third listen and the album would end up in permanent rotation. Nowadays, it's the opposite, you look for a reason to hit the skip button; to go ahead and find the next thing. It's hard, cause a lot of the music I love didn't instantly grab me. I really think that most people will like an album if A. they culturally identify with it, and B. they are familiar with it. These days, I need to actively decide to get into something and then see how it plays out. It works for me, but it's not the same.

One thing that kinda sucks about living in NYC is that you don't spend any time in people's cars. I know it sounds weird, but there's an intimacy factor; it's probably as close as you get to someone until you get into their bedroom, if you ever get that far. A lot of the music that really sticks with me, and would guess most of you too, has a strong person/place/time connection. In a car, you instantly had person/place association. Whenever I hear "Only in Dreams," I'm baked out of my mind in the back of Chet's police issued Crown Vic with four other kids, parked down by a lake where no one would bother us. Whenever I hear "Mayonnaise," I'm cruising around with Meg in the middle of the night, feeling lost and hopeless, but also feeling like we belonged; if not to the world as a whole, but at least to each other. Whenever I hear "Marquee Moon," I know it's exactly as long as it took me to drive from the giant Victorian house I split with six other people across from the JCA in Amherst, to Rachel's two bedroom apartment on Randolph Place in Northampton, provided it was late at night and there was no traffic on Route 9.

Brooklyn - New Jersey Mix Tape Swap

We exchanged mix tapes with CoolDad Music, a NJ based indie rock blog. I'll let Jim take it from here:

Dentist kicks off Jim's playlist.

It's been one of my goals since starting CoolDad Music to bridge some of the too-wide gaps that exist between the Jerseys North and South, between New Jersey and New York, between Asbury Park and Brooklyn. I love seeing and hearing new bands, and I love the idea of bands expanding their sphere of influence beyond their neighborhood and their circle of friends. That was all kind of my motivation for this little "mixtape swap" with Hearts Bleed Radio. I want my readers to hear some of the great bands that Stephen has been championing at his site, and I want to give some great New Jersey bands wider exposure. Even if it's just in a small way. 

This is a compilation that includes Asbury Park bands like surf poppy Dentist, hardcore Hot Blood, party rocking The Battery Electric, modern rocking Smalltalk, and the early aughts indie influenced Prehistoric Forest. It includes New Brunswick bands like poppy basement dwellers ROMP, prolific indie song machine Sink Tapes. Roy Orbitron bring their unconventional song structures from Trenton. Grand Mariner do the surf / garage / punk thing in Howell. The Off White are dirty and gritty all the way down in LBI. Paper Streets are half-Brooklyn / half-Jackson, NJ disciples of all things jangly and classically indie. Almost all of these bands are my friends, and they all deserve to be heard far and wide. 

I hope you like it. Lots of these bands make the occasional incursion into Brooklyn, so keep your eyes peeled. Hey. Come on over to CoolDad Music, and I'll be sure to keep you posted. Thanks for listening. 

-Jim
 CoolDad Music

Check out the mix below! (and check out my mix on CoolDad Music, here)

The guitar guy played real good feedback... The top 5 Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth songs.

  When I was a teenager I had the world subdivided into two sets of people, those who liked Sonic Youth, and those who did not. They were the most famous obscure band in the world. Obscure to the general population of course, not the arty-intellectual types like my friends. During a time when grunge and hip hop were breaking into the mainstream, most kids were exposed to at least some decent music, just by turning on the radio. If you were into Sonic Youth, it meant you dug a little bit deeper. SY fans weren't going to be jocks, call you a fag for having dyed hair, probably read books other than the ones required by school, and generally, were less likely to be total dicks.

  When Thurston and Kim split up, I gotta say, I didn't really care. Maybe I'm just jaded, old, cynical, but I'm an adult now, they are people, shit happens, whatever. I like the newer Sonic Youth albums, but I really haven't been deep into a SY release since A Thousand Leaves. It's not them, it's me. I don't think they ever put out a bad album maybe unless you count Cicconne Youth or whatever your least favorite SYR EP was, and that's really incredible. That's NINE albums that I love and another handful that are somewhere between good and very good.

Nothing will ever be as cool as this. Deal with it.

  I saw Lee Ranaldo play one of the last shows at Maxwell's (RIP). The timing of it all; the Kim and Thurston split, the SY breakup, and Lee releasing a strong album of very accessible rock songs, really put a spotlight (for me at least) on Ranaldo's work in SY. Part of me wanted to avoid gossiping or even realizing that the couple who defined the band that basically shaped my existence has broken up. Part of me was pumped from seeing a really good show, with a band member who had always been a supporting actor finally in the starring role. For the first time since hearing Washing Machine back in 1995, I really saw Sonic Youth with the indie-camelot folklore stripped away.