monday mixtape garou
April 29th, 2013 by david brothers | Tags: mark millar, matthew vaughan, musicEight songs here, which should play in random order. The list:
-The Smiths – Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now
-The Verve – The Drugs Don’t Work
-The Verve – Bitter Sweet Symphony
-Joy Division – Love Will Tear Us Apart
-The Smith – There Is A Light That Never Goes Out
-The Stone Roses – Fools Gold
-Blur – Trimm Tabb
-Blur – Under the Westway
My friend Amy hooked me up with a playlist she called “Madchester and Manchester.” You can listen to it here if you have Spotify. I was going to embed it here, but it turns out you need Spotify to hear the songs, so… I did a lot of extra legwork and turned the tracks I like best (plus two more) into an 8tracks mix.
I say I like britpop, but what I really mean is “I like Damon Albarn-led or -related projects, like Blur, Gorillaz, and so on.” Albarn’s work has been the main way I’ve experienced britpop, even down to it being the lens through which I learn about britpop history. Oasis exists in relation to Blur. I was introduced to Justine Frischmann not through Elastica but via “Oh, she’s Damon Albarn’s girlfriend, some songs are probably about her, and the best Blur albums are post-breakup.” It’s not that I’m a superfan — I own a lot of his stuff and I figure his name is enough to get me onboard, but I wouldn’t say I’m obsessive about it — so much as I’m ignorant of the context. I wasn’t there, I was a kid when all of it was going on, and frankly, there ain’t a lot of young black kids in Small Towne, GA listening to The Smiths or whatever. I didn’t even hear an entire Beatles song, and recognize that it was The Beatles, until high school.
So I reached out to a few friends who’d know. Amy hooked me up weeks ago, and it took me forever to listen for stupid reasons. (I wanted time to be able to really listen to figure out what I liked, which is typical of me.) I got Ron Richards to kick me a lot of album recommendations in a few different genres, too, since we have so little overlap in taste.
I’m trying to broaden my horizons, and the best way I know how to do that is to do something new and then see how it makes me feel. In this case, I took Amy’s playlist and listened to it a few times on shuffle while walking around the city and commuting home. After an hour or so, I started starring whichever songs caught my ear for whatever reason. Maybe I liked the melody, maybe I liked a particular line, or maybe I liked something more ephemeral.
Whichever way it is, the star means I need to pay attention, and paying attention means either checking out more songs from the album the song originates from or asking friends what else sounds similar.
I don’t really have an endpoint for this. I just wanna know more, and spider-webbing my way to more seems good enough to me.
Thanks Amy. Sorry it took so long.
The two songs I added to round out the mix are a couple Blur joints I like a lot. The only Blur album I don’t own/haven’t heard is The Great Escape, I think. I passed it over when I was heavy into Blur, by accident maybe, and haven’t had a chance to go back yet. Which is weird of me, but hey.
–I wrote about Frank Quitely & Mark Millar’s Jupiter’s Legacy. It’s soft like baby butts, but also the best comic Millar’s written in recent memory.
–I wrote about Ananth Paragariya and Yuko Ota’s Johnny Wander. I like it a lot. Website.
ComicsAlliance is closed. To my knowledge, it wasn’t because of hits or performance or controversy. It didn’t fit, or something. Dunno. Either way, I spilled 477,770 words on 317 posts over about three and a half years.
-I watched Matthew Vaughan’s Kick-Ass finally, the adaptation of the odious Millar/JRjr comic. It was eleventy times better than the comic, but still pretty dumb. It’s like they intentionally shied away from making a good movie in favor of a weird quirky… thing. Hit-Girl was the most interesting part, and they botched every single action scene with her, including the big introduction where she rescues Kick-Ass.
It’s weird. It wanted to be an action movie, but the action was shot poorly almost as a general rule. The hallway run toward the end had so many good parts, like Hit-Girl dodging bullets, but it was delivered in the laziest, stupidest-looking way. Why cut every time someone moves an arm? I mean, maybe it was because they needed a stuntman (stunt-girl?) for Hit-Girl, but people have been using stuntmen for decades without it look like crap.
Anyway. The trailer for Kick-Ass 2 was funny, but ehhhh. Figure I’m good.
Open thread. What’re you reading/watching/hearing/enjoying?
Similar Posts:
- The Beatles: Eleanor Rigby & Cellar Door
- How Kick-Ass Ran Out of Gas
- Monday Mixtape 01: alpha
- “It’s a new way of thinkin’…” [On Vinyl]
- Blur’s 13: “I’m a country boy, I got no soul”
What’s ‘garou’?
I’m watching the trailer for Pacific Rim. Goddanm, I love mecha in film. I’m not that keen on them in anime, in actuality, but for some reason if it’s CGI well then. I AM ON IT.
Reading: I am just finishing Bossypants, the Tina Fey book. It’s a superfast read, and was a $2 Kindle special the other day. I love her delivery, it feels very natural.
Listening: Macklemore, Alt-J, and this 4-day long instrumental mix my friend has on Spotify, which is particularly good background tunes for getting work done.
Experiencing: total disappointment. the NBA just cockblocked Seattle getting the Kings. :negativeman:
Going to watch Re-Animator for a school project, and also ‘cuz it’s high time I mainlined some Jeffrey Combs into my eyeballs since my DS9 watch was put on hiatus.
Reading the third book of Phil Sandifer’s Tardis Eruditorum blog on the Jon Pertwee years; illuminating, thought-provoking, and fun as ever.
Listening: To early Madonna, Eric Serra’s Fifth Element soundtrack (man, this is SO GOOD, so how come his Goldeneye score was SO TERRIBLE?), and Bowie’s Station To Station, because it is my favorite, and also perfect. Literally perfect. As in every song on it is amazing.
I struggle a bit with Matthew Vaughn’s directing. I’m not sure how to complete describe it, but it feels like Top 40 music in film. Like a film student who has a ton of money so he covers up otherwise underwhelming moments with expensive licensed music.
What was up with that weird bar/comic book store/high school hangout spot?
Reading: The Forever War. Quick read, really thought out sci-fi. I like it when authors can world build without giving me mega sized sentences. So far, pretty good.
Watching: Saw Place Beyond the Pines, excellent. Will see Trance tomorrow, don’t know anything about it, like seeing movies that way. As for TV, I’m watching the Americans. It feels like a show that’s going to get suffocatingly high stakes (like the Shield as soon as the Season 2 heist) so I’m excited.
Listening: A$AP Rocky’s mixtape and album. Super chill listening, great beat selection with a chill flow. Lots of Danny Brown as well, saw him live and had a blast. The beats SKYWLKR and Brandun Deshay make for him are dope and he can spit on anything.
Playing: I can’t overstate how much fun I’m having with Sleeping Dogs right now. I’m alternating that with Fire Emblem: Sacred Stones which is pretty good as well unless a character gets a cheap death that make me start over an hour long chapter. There’s something super satisfying about the sprite animation as well.
Experiencing: Joy, the NBA just cockblocked Seattle getting the Kings. :c00lbert:
I finished reading Denis Mack Smith’s biography of Mussolini over the weekend. He would constantly issue contradictory statements, to people in his party, people in other parties, foreign diplomats, the public, and he made it work, for a while at least. But he also didn’t seem to have any real plan beyond “get power” No real goals that he wanted to accomplish. I have another biography to start this week, that’s going to incorporate the rise of neo-fascism in current Italy.
I watched Once Upon a Time in the West again over the weekend, because I was in a Sergio Leone mood. I’m going to start playing Left 4 Dead this week.
@Amy: http://www.etymonline.com/wolf.php David probably got it from Fatal Fury; it’s called Garou Densetsu in Japan, and the last game was called Garou: Mark of the Wolves wordwide.
Anyhow, I recently burned through most of Mercedes Lackey’s Bedlam’s Bard books. I really need to learn how to stop myself instead of staying up all night reading.
@Rbx5 : I am both jealous of and curious about any sort of project that involves Re-Animator.
Watched Pain & Gain over the weekend, and I am still getting over the fact that I not only liked but strongly enjoyed a new Michael Bay film. Right now I’m about to watch Marat/Sade before it goes off Netflix, then probably Cluny Brown because I have a reading for class tomorrow based around it, so I should probably have seen the film.
Why is no one else freaking out about ComicsAlliance?
I’m freaking out about ComicsAlliance. It seems like whenever I find a comics news/culture source, it dies. First Comics Foundry magazine, now ComicsAlliance.
Where am I supposed to turn now?
Comics Alliance closing? That was sudden. Damn. Hope you land a new gig soon.
I grew up in Manchester, England and was transitioning from teenager to adult during the Madchester period so I know the music pretty well. It was an interesting scene but a small one. Generally characterised as Ecstasy and the Hacienda nightclub, the White Man Dancing, the music is best summed up as indie colliding with dance, the miserablist jangly guitar gangs of the 80s suddenly realising nightclubs existed. But it was a small scene. I’d only classify two of the songs on that playlist as Madchester (though they’re all Manchester). Like Britpop, most of the defining songs were by bands who didn’t do a lot else of significance. I made a compilation a few years ago, a purist’s one, and it was quickly apparent that to fill a CD I’d be putting bands on there who even peers from the period struggle to remember.
(Not a bad compilation though, and I can post the tracklist if you care…)
Reading: Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton, which has reminded me of what a great writer he is sentence-to-sentence, and of how clear a precursor to the War on Terror the fatwa was. But because it was happening to an Indian-born writer who made a bunch of money, we decided his particular freedoms weren’t worth defending.
Sad news about Comics Alliance, which was definitely my favourite of the comics news sites out there. Commiserations.
Here’s hoping it gets turned into something else.
@Amy: Yeah, Gaijin Dan is right. Mark of the Wolves is one of my favorite games. Also me and you? We’re gonna have a Charlie Hardie book club. Or die trying.
@Rbx5: I like Station to Station a whole lot. I have trouble picking between that and Diamond Dogs as my favorite Bowie (at least from what I’ve heard).
@CalvinPitt: I own West, but I haven’t watched it yet. I think it’s part of a Leone collection I bought on DVD. They recently released it on Blu-ray, but without Once Upon A Time In The West, I think. I need to get on that.
That’s heavy reading. I’m knee deep in The Savage City: Race, Murder, and a Generation on the Edge
, which is both fantastic and infuriating. I’m actually about to take a brief break from it to read Duane Swierczynski’s Point and Shoot
, which is very fun a couple chapters in.
You know how a book can just describe actual things that happened in the past and the sheer injustice of it makes your blood boil? Savage City is like that. But it’s also extremely informative and good. But it’s a soul drainer.
I finished re-watching Outlaw Star. I think my favorite character is still Gene, but that Shimi/leilong episode is pretty great too, just for him. That and the Macdougall brothers were super weird, Harry especially
Currently listening to Kendrick Lamar M.a.a.d. World and Curren$y random mixtapes. Dude has the best mixtape covers IMO
Garou was a dope game, kind of like Street Fighter 3 though. Rock Howard is the future
I’m currently reading a lot of Michael DeForge stuff. I discovered Ant Comic recently which was amazing, then a few days ago I discovered that he has far more comics online than I realized, so I’m reading those. The best was Rescue Pet. Hilarious and creepy.
Also I’m reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s Birthday of the World, a collection of short stories set in Le Guin’s Hain universe. I love that series, she explores alternate types of human societies really well.
And I’m rereading the web comic Terror Island, which is really funny. I had read it a few years ago but forgot about it, but I plan to read the whole thing now that its finished. Requestcast by the same authors has also made me laugh a lot lately.
As far as Brit pop – Pulp – Common People is probably the best Brit Pop song of all time, and definetly has the best lyrics.
Also if you like Joy Division, check out New Order – after Ian Curtis hung himself the rest of the band started New Order, dropped some of the gloom, kept the great rythym section and started making incredible pop dance music.
Common People is an excellent song, but the clinical detatchment the singer from Pulp had when singing detracts. William Shatner of all people made the song achieve greatness when he covered it awhile back, because he took the simmering anger of the lyrics and let it boil over into screaming rage. I never thought I could say a Shatner song was truly good, let alone great, until I heard this one.