Our new video series “Pitchfork Classic” kicks off with a 45-minute documentary on the Flaming Lips’ The Soft Bulletin featuring brand new interviews with the band.
I did the Oklahoma City interviews w/ the Flaming Lips for this documentary, very proud of how it turned out, RJ Bentler and the rest of Pitchfork.tv did a terrific job.
A live version of Flock of Seagulls’ “Space Age Love Song” from the Flaming Lips, recorded in 1994 at Lollapalooza.
The original is one of my top five or so songs from the early days of MTV; I was always happy when this one came on. In addition to the exceedingly simple melody, the guitar tone is what really drew me to it. With the reverb and delay and repetition it sounds a bit like the Edge or Big Country, but it’s also really airy and effortless. Thinking now, it’s one of the first times I really zoomed in on a texture and felt a heavy emotional response to music based only on the specific quality of a sound.
I like the Flaming Lips’ take on it, off-key vocals and all, because I get the sense that Ronald Jones, their guitarist at the time, had a similar reaction to the song on a sonic level. He takes that guitar sound and blows it up into a much larger and more psychedelic thing but he still, somehow, keeps the emotional essence of the tone, and it has a similar effect on me even though it of course sounds completely different. This was in their setlist because he loved it apparently.
Well, we are different writers with different ideas. Bear in mind that Zaireeka was reviewed on Pitchfork in 1998, during the very early days of the site. Jason Josephs basically felt that the record didn’t work because he couldn’t listen to it and he wasn’t interested enough in the 4-CD idea to figure out how to make it happen. Back then, when the site was much more loose, that was an acceptable response. It was (and is) also a fairly common one.
So even though I found that 0.0 upsetting at the time because I was instantly fascinated by the record, I came to understand it. If one of the requirements of successful albums is that they are playable on standard equipment, then Zaireeka clearly fails.
Jason was also often a very funny writer on Pitchfork, and when you are funny, you can get away with a lot.
The Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka and the listening party as a social experiment
This sounds fun—also sharing this b/c it mentions my book a couple times and also talks about the upcoming iPhone version of Zaireeka.
I was hoping the author for Scott’s book would be listed as Mark Plagenhoef, but no luck.
In case anyone reading this lives in the vicinity of Tulsa, Oklahoma, I am going to be reading from my Zaireeka book as part of an amazing Flaming Lips extravaganza being put on by Book Smart Tulsa. This is an all-day deal where I’ll talk about Zaireeka and then we’ll listen to the album the proper way, with four PAs, in what I’m told is a beautiful old theater. There will also be a Very Special Guest, which should be exciting. And then afterwards, there will be a screening of Bradley Beesley’s film The Fearless Freaks. I’m honored to take part in this and looking forward to Sunday. Details here.
What it is: “Around the Dial”, the opening track from the Kinks’ 1981 album Give the People What They Want.
Why it interests me:
1) My brother must have bought this one around the time it was released, which would have made me about 12 when I was listening to it. We probably had 20 or 30 LPs in the house total at that time, including the few records my brother had and the small handful of things my dad had picked up over the years (Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, Elton John’s Greatest Hits, The Best of Loud Reed, amazingly, NO idea why he had that). Because we had just these few albums, I started with the assumption that there was something special about all of them. I heard many of them over and over, and without thinking about it too much, I figured that they were all the best of their kind. Why else would someone have bought them? So I grew to love this album, and then I didn’t listen to it for probably 20 years, and then I bought it for a buck or so a few years ago. Did it hold up? Not really. Not in terms of sounding like what I would now consider “good music.” But it doesn’t matter. It’s like looking through a scrapbook—fun to do once in a while, regardless.
This song, which kicks off the album, seemed to me in 1981 to be this huge, heavy thing with a crushing riff, but now I mostly notice how lame the drumming sounds. But there’s still a reptilian brain thing happening when I hear it, where I can be swept away by my memory of the song’s force.
2) I’ve always wondered if the Flaming Lips’ “Turn It On” is a reference to this song. Certainly the radio static bits sound very similar. They both start their respective albums. They both have great riffs. They both talk about the weird connections that happen with new technology. I can’t hear one without thinking of the other.
3) The most significant development in radio in the last 15 years or so has nothing to do with music—it’s the rise of talk radio as a political force. What I read suggests that people have a strong connection to the format because radio fosters an intimacy other media can’t touch; this song is about the airwaves connection taken to an extreme. The narrator of the song had a particular DJ change his life and now he can’t find him anywhere: “FM, AM where are you? You’ve gotta be out there somewhere on the dial.” Maybe the DJ was fired because he wouldn’t sell out and play trendy music; maybe he was depressed. The important thing is that he’s gone, and the dude in the song doesn’t know what he’s going to do. He’s frantic. I listen to this song and wonder what the DJ might have played.
Always been a big fan of The Stranger. I lived in Seattle in the mid-90s, pre-Internet days, and used to look forward to it every week. In those days it sort of split the difference between a proper weekly and The Onion, throwing in surreal jokes in unexpected places.
Anyway, very nice mention of Zaireeka by Paul Constant that also brings up my favorite book in the 33 1/3 series, Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love.
Fluxblog » Blog Archive » Fluxblog Interview With Mark Richardson!
A little late posting this, but Matthew Perpetua at Fluxblog interviewed me about Zaireeka last week, it’s up over there now. It was a lot of fun and I think it turned out pretty well.
From talking to him elsewhere (he writes for Pitchfork, and other places), I get the sense that Matthew has a pretty good radar for when people get sentimental about changes in how we experience music (i.e. “You had to work harder to find out about music before, man, kids now have it easy,” etc.) And in my Zaireeka book, I talk a lot about how part of what makes the record so interesting is how difficult it is to experience. The hoops you have to jump through creates scarcity, not to mention, you need to experience it with other people who are also interested in jumping through the hoops. So there is automatically a social element to it too. And I touch on headphones a bit, and how (most of my evidence here is anecdotal) the percentage of our music-listening time spent alone, with our ears covered, where the music is the only source of sound, has gone up a lot in the last 30 years. Researching that part of Zaireeka, I wanted to write an entire book just on the nuts and bolts of how music is experienced and how it’s changed over the years. It’s an endlessly fascinating subject for me.
Anyway, I was glad that Matthew connected to what I was talking about in that part of the book, and recognized that my interest in how the unique context of Zaireeka informs the experience isn’t an indictment of current modes of music consumption. It’s a great time to be following music. And when you want to take a break from downloading mp3s and listening with your headphones on while surfing the web, Zaireeka is there waiting for you. Just gotta round up some friends and do some planning.
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