SOUNDTRACK: THE REPLACEMENTS-Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash (1981).
Since I’ve been talking about The Replacements so much, it made me want to go back and listen to their stuff. The Replacements are the quintessential band that “grew up” or “matured” and for better or worse sounds utterly different from their first album to their last (a span of only nine years!). In fact, I don’t imagine that there are too many people who would enjoy all seven of their discs. One suspects that if the band themselves were given a copy of their All Shook Down disc in 1981, they would have smashed it.
So this was their first release. It has 18 songs in about 30 minutes. That’s pure hardcore, right? Well, not exactly. Even though the songs are short and fast and quite sloppy, there’s something about Paul Westerberg’s voice and delivery that makes these songs seem not quite hardcore. He enunciates! And you can understand him most of the time. And, maybe this is a better indicator: there’s parts to these songs, it’s not just breakneck pacing. They also have song titles that belied how good their song writing would become. Like: “Shiftless When Idle.”
In fact, “Johnny’s Gonna Die” isn’t fast at all. It shows what the kind of songs that they would eventually write: literate and moving indie rock.
There must have been something in the water in 1981 in Minnesota. Hüsker Dü, the other amazing punk outfit out of Minnesota (referenced in the ‘Mats song “Something to Du”) also put out a blistering live hardcore record in 1981 called Land Speed Record (17 songs in 26 minutes, listed as 2 tracks on CDs because they don’t pause in between songs). Like the ‘Mats, Hüsker Dü wouldn’t recognize their later incarnations in 1981 either. And why are The Replacements abbreviated as The ‘Mats? I don’t know.
But this ‘Mats record is the kind of sneaky record that can get you to enjoy punk even if you don’t think you like it. There’s something so fun about Sorry Ma, that you don’t really notice that it’s all done so fast.
[READ: May 22, 2009] “My Great Depression”
This essay collection is tough to catalog. Do I include all of the authors in the title of the post, do I pick selected ones, or just go with none. Yes, go with none.
Harper’s asked ten authors/artists to send stories from the near future, after the economic collapse of the country. All of the pieces are three columns or less, and some are more enjoyable than others.
KEVIN BAKER-“Change Without Movement”
The premise of this piece is that it is an excerpt from a book called The Chinese Century. It is an academic look at Obama’s four years as President: how his plans and laws were shot down by Congress, how nothing was achieved, and after admitting exhaustion, how Obama just gave up on us. Bush-like Republicans returned to prominence, and their economic policies sealed the deal for the end of American dominance, giving rise to the Chinese century.
THOMAS DE ZENGOTITA-“Reframing Your World”
Now that the entire world is recessed, it’s time to take a page from television: Make life a game, a challenge, an opportunity, a reality show. If you can’t reframe yourself into a reality star, then why not treat everything like a challenge on a game show: putting food on the table when you have lost your job, for instance. This was pretty funny.
JAMAICA KINKAID-“Lack, Part Two”
I feel like I’ve known of Jamaica Kinkaid for years, and yet I don’t think I’ve ever read her before. This is an interesting look at how a poor young girl, who has virtually nothing, moves to the United States and begins to acclimate to the the new world. It is only after the economic collapse that she realizes how much her life is reverting back to those days…and how she is unprepared to deal with it. This was the most “short-story” like piece in the collection.
RUBEN BOLLING-“Our Coming Depression Funnies”
Bolling is the artist behind the Tom the Dancing Bug comic strip. This little cartoon shows what the funnies will look like in a few years. It includes parodies of The Family Circus (The Family Oval–with an amusing play on the Not Me Ghost); The Lockhorns (The Bickers); Dilbert (Doible–deadpan and on target); I don’t know this one (Forrest Greene); Garfield (Wilson–an amusing play on the ubiquitous Monday joke); and another one I didn’t recognize (Al ‘n’ Harriet). I always enjoy parodies of bad cartoons.
COLSON WHITEHEAD-“The Great Reboot”
This was an amusing look at how 2009 is shaping up to be like 1977 (April 1977 to be exact). And how that year was pretty bad for most Americans, but–hey we produced Star Wars in that year too. It is quite funny and strangely uplifting. My only beef with it is that he sets the beginning of “the end” at November 26, 2009, and then notes that most of the cable companies had gone bankrupt so that only the three major network channels, TBS and HBO were still on the air (a distant possibility) but also that FOX has long been extinguished. I feel you can’t set a story six months in the future and then say something is long extinguished is it is still around at the time of writing. This is somewhat absolved by having the entire internet collapse from everyone watching “Gonad Monkey” at the same time on YouTube was damn near genius.
SIMON CRITCHLEY AND TOM McCARTHY-“Interim Report on Recessional Aesthetics”
Simon Critchley and Tom McCarthy founded the International Necronautical Society (INS) in 1999. It is a reality based/reality mocking avant garde art project. Critchley himself is a philosopher at the New School for Social Research. With that in mind, this “official Document” was commissioned by the Obama administration. It uses historical literature to forecast what should be done in the future. Fist: The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare) predicted the current crisis. Second: Finnegans Wake (Joyce) shows the value of using counterfeit money–something Obama should strongly consider; finally, As I Lay Dying (Faulkner) shows that recessions are at the heart of all of life. Clearly this was a highly theoretical piece; I didn’t enjoy it as much as I should have.
DAVID REES-“One Year Since the Collapse”
David Rees wrote the hilarious Get Your War On cartoon. He officially ceased publication when Obama was elected, even if the war is still going on. This piece uses the same techniques of that cartoon (clip art style people saying completely unlikely things) to show what we have come to. I didn’t enjoy it as much as GYWO.
SHERMAN ALEXIE-“Green World”
This piece is also a short story, and I enjoyed it very much. In it, the narrator has gotten a job cleaning dead birds from underneath all of the wind turbines outside of an Indian Reservation. He meets one of the Indians who is remorseful that his tribe allowed the turbines and the death that they cause. It is quite a moving piece.
BEN MARCUS-“My Views on the Darkness Are Well Known”
An interview with a man who has moved into a cave, and encourages everyone else to do so. I would have liked this to be funnier, or something.
BEN KATCHOR-“A Child Ponders the Ruins of the 21st Century”
A full-page, color cartoon about a child dreaming about how giant stores like “Mite Aid” with 7,500 square feet of space could possibly have sold the same number of things as their local, cramped variety stores now do. Weird and sad.
I guess you have to go into this section of the magazine expecting to be depressed, given the topic at all. It was nice that there was a little uplift in some of them.
For easier searching I’m also adding this spelling: Husker Du.
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