Joe Bonomo's Blog, page 11

Castaways, Part 2

In my last post, I chose the best Green Day tracks from Dookie (1994) through 21st Century Breakdown (2009) that weren’t selected as singles. Today, I work my way through the band’s remaining six albums, 2012’s ¡Uno!, ¡Dos!, and ¡Tré! through to this year’s Saviors.

¡Uno! (2012)
singles: “Oh Love,” “Kill The DJ,” “Let Yourself Go”

Album track: “Stay the Night.”

After the sprawl of American Idiot and 21st Century Breakdown and two worldwide tours, Green Day regrouped and scaled things back considerab...

Castaways, Part 1

Singles are funny, stubborn things. Introduced in 1949 by RCA Victor as a lighter and less-breakable substitute for the 78 rpm shellac disc, they soared in popularity in the 1960s and ‘70s, grew five inches wider in the ‘80s, were virtually extinct by the 2000’s (but for its eternally cool club-mix cousin, who’s always out late), suffered through poor pressings and the indignity of errors on labels, and have made an improbable comeback of sorts, riding the vinyl resurgence of the last decade or ...

Deep in my heart I know I've lied

Twenty years ago, Rick Moody wrote “The Creature Lurches from the Black Lagoon,” an account of the shifting moods he felt as he witnessed the making of the film adaptation of his novel The Ice Storm. Among his complaints, couched in genuine gratitude for the film and its makers, were the clumsy difficulties that movies have historically had in capturing a first person point-of-view, by nature a subjective, interior, inward gazing experience. He gives as an example the cheesy “point of view” shot...

The world's out there

Overheard:

“All youth culture is trying to say the same thing. It’s young people trying to make their voices heard. Searching for an identity. Trying to discover themselves as an individual. Every young person tries to do that. And this is a new way of doing it. It’s a fashion.”

“Of course, youth cults are at their healthiest when they are developing naturally. When the practitioners are looking back and trying to recapture a lost moment then they are inevitably more constrained and less creative...

Come on and slip away

“You’re never going to kill storytelling, because it’s built into the human plan. We come with it.” Margaret Atwood

“In the beginning was the word…closely followed by a drum and some early version of a guitar…. The heart of a lyric for me has always been anchored in an experienced reality…. So in answer to the question I am most often asked, ‘Are these incidents real?’ Yes, he said, Yes Yes Yes.” Lou Reed

In 1978 Lou Reed released Street Hassle, a blend of live and studio tracks. By then, Reed ha...

Groovus interruptus

In January 1973, Sweet—then The Sweet—released the single “Little Willy” in the United States. A short time afterward my family bought a copy. A short time after that my older brother sat on the 45 and broke it.

Whether he did this intentionally or not is up for continual debate in my mind’s court of law. I was a kid, he was a few years older. I think we were probably horsing around down in the rec room, and he inadvertently threw himself onto the couch where sat the prize record. (Why we’d toss...

It's all right every time

Music’s like the weather. Some days you don’t notice it. Overplayed songs feel like that. You don’t pay attention to them anymore, or the songs don’t seize you the way they once did.

“What exactly happens inside our brains that makes a song lose its magic?” So asks Kashmira Gander in The Independent. “Neuroscientists believe that our brains go through two stages when we listen to a piece of music that gives us the chills,” she writes. “The caudate nucleus in the brain anticipates the build-up of...

The song that's never over

Ty Segall has cast a spell on me.

Over the many years I’ve been listening to his albums and seeing him live, both solo and with his great bands, I’ve become more and more bewitched by his potent blend of thoughtful psychedelia and noisy glam-stomp. He’ll move between being quietly introspective and amped-up exclamatory, sometimes, often, in the same song. But his magic as I hear it occurs in the spaces between those two poles, where, tumbling in a minor key or moving breeze-like in the major his...

What it's like living in the '20s

Because I’m a writer who writes mostly about music, not a music journalist, I regularly need to guard against confusing fandom with critical thinking. Certainly, professional music critics wrestle with this problem too, but I imagine that the best ones, some of whom I know personally, can adopt an objective point-of-view with relative ease, akin to sliding into a work uniform and punching the clock.

Green Day’s fourteenth album Saviors came out last week. When a band’s as big as Green Day is, I c...

Everybody's moving, everybody's moving

Because they can’t get up

Sometimes a song detonates and it restores rather than destroys its environment. The smoke lifts to reveal a revived scene, not carnage, and the post-blast ear ringing feels more like an insight than bewilderment.

Fugazi’s “Waiting Room,” released on 13 Songs in 1988, has long been on my list of perfect rock and roll songs. An intense, frightening glimpse into the singer’s interior, a sonic EKG, it’s a tune about frustration and impatience that never resolves. As I’ve wri...