4hero, “Sunspots” (from Parallel Universe, 1995)

As an aside, this is what I’m hoping things’ll be like by the end of the week.

Comets on Fire, “The Antlers of the Midnight Sun” (Live at the Echo, Los Angeles, 8/16/06)

This week begins in a way not unlike last one ended. (And aren’t these guys due for another album soon?)

Boris with Michio Kurihara, “Starship Narrator”

It’s gonna be one of those kinds of weekends.

The Smoke, “That’s What I Want” (1973)

Or: why more fuzzed-out mid ’60s mod-psych bands should’ve stuck it out ‘til at least the early ’70s. (Though apparently it isn’t even the original lineup that recorded “My Friend Jack”, so huh.)

Also! (via allmusic):

[The band] ended up in a bizarre management situation, when they were offered a seeming rescue by a pair of twin London-based entrepreneurs, Ron and Reg Kray. Renowned today the world over as notorious gangsters, the Kray brothers have been immortalized in books, including Profession of Violence and Reg’s own autobiography Born Fighter, and one feature film (The Krays), and were even memorably satirized in one Monty Python sketch (“The Piranha Brothers”). They were among the top crime kingpins in London at the time, and among their other enterprises, they had an interest in a few clubs, and thought at one point that a more direct participation in the entertainment business might prove lucrative. (And yes, it sounds funny to read it, or even to write it, but that is exactly how Morris Levy, an American gangster and club owner, came to go into the record and publishing business in New York, and ended up founding Roulette Records). Thus, they signed the group and became the Shots’ managers, but were never able to do anything with them in terms of bookings — strong-arming clubs for “protection” money was more their specialty than lining up engagements. The band decided to abandon the contract, and when they were served with an injunction, they were left unable to perform.

Minutemen, “Viet Nam” (live 6/15/84)

Calling my relationship with punk rock “love-hate” is an understatement — suffice it to say that I discovered the Ramones’ debut album and Maximumrockandroll at their most fundamentalist at roughly the same time (the mid ’90s), and trying to listen to music that I instantly loved at its core still while realizing that it was supposed to be diametrically opposed to a lot of stuff I still liked jostled my teenage brain until I was dizzy. (You were just not supposed to like Singles Going Steady and The Dark Side of the Moon, as 24 Hour Party People gleefully reminded me some eight years after this conundrum first presented itself to me.) Maybe the breaking point that lead to my view of the born-in-the-fifties/sixties punk generation as a bunch of joyless oldsters was the book Generation Ecch, which set about whining that us dumb kids made overnight megastars out of Nirvana while it took forever for Never Mind the Bollocks to go gold in the States. That ties into the general suspicion in the air during the peak of ’90s alt-culture that the the Xers were irreparably damaged by delusions of postmodernism and self-infatuated irony, the kind of charges typically leveled by people who canonized Black Flag and CBGB’s to the same extent that the boomers they despised did to Woodstock. Basically I read way too much shit that amounted to “how dare you buy into an aesthetic that’s just a lamer version of the real revolution we had,” your classic cultural poison that tends to make kids think, unhealthily, that they were born 20 years too late. (“No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones in 1977,” went the Clash song — no me, either, until September.) It got to the point where, when one of my friends described one of her friends with the phrase “you’d like him, he’s totally punk rock,” I felt obliged to retort “that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s cool.” (Turns out he was, but anyways.) So by and large I view punk — unfairly, I suppose — as a movement of (often) great music made by (sometimes) righteous people that has long since lost its monopoly on the aspects that made it necessary (DIY culture, independent publishing, agitprop, antifashion) and is mostly left with an aesthetic that, while still frequently exciting, lives and dies on the principles of some other era’s excitement.

I had to say all that mostly to prove how much it actually means when I say that the Minutemen never fail to inspire complete awe in me. That is all.

Johnson & Jonson (Blu & Mainframe), “Disco D.Y.N.A.M.I.T.E.”

This year’s “9x Outta 10”?

Gonjasufi, “Kobwebz”

OK, enough fuming. It’s chill the fuck out time for me now.

Freeway & Jake One, “One Foot In”

If “We Are the World 25” killed hip hop (cf. Rappers I Know / Ill Doctrine), it looks like we’ve got a couple necromancers on our hands.

Syl Johnson, “That’s Just My Luck”

Happy Valentine’s Day?