Rock 'N Roll the Metro Map

I love maps. I love rock music. I love history. Not surprisingly, I love someone's attempt to combine all three things into one, as artist theonlyone did with this subway map:

It's marvelously flawed, of course: Van Halen and Elvis aren't on there, for example, and Europe gets a mention, but the progenitors of black metal do not. Emo and Nu-Metal don't deserve their own lines, categorizing Faith No More as just grunge is criminal, and the whole thing is much more a snapshot of current perceptions than reality (although one might argue that a diagram mapping influence would only work as a snapshot). But layout: man, it's beautiful, because it really takes advantage of the subway portion of the concept. Interchanges between lines and the line curves themselves make for an excellent demonstration of genre crossover, and the stations are placed in a rough chronological order that demonstrates where things came from and where they've gone since.

Via MetalSucks

Hot for Warm Weather

It's the end of a beautiful and unseasonably warm day, I've just accidentally mixed a beer with a 7.2% alcohol content with a Sudafed, and I'm feeling the need to celebrate the impending arrival of Spring. Only one hope for it, of course: fire up some Van Halen. 1984, specifically, with "Jump," "Panama," "Drop Dead Legs," and, of course, "Hot for Teacher:"

NIN/JA at PNC Bank Arts Center

In cooking, it is the combination of the ingredients, the creation of a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, that the gourmet enjoys the most. A freshly-caught fish, for example, no matter how delicious on its own, can become a part of a far more sublime experience when combined with the right supplementary flavors. In the same way, while each portion of the NIN/JA experience was a good time by itself, it was the combination of the three bands, the surprisingly wide variety of styles of "rock," and the limitations on their set times that forced a focus on stronger material that made NIN/JA a much better show in sum than it might well have been in pieces - and I say that even after my sublime Nine Inch Nails experience in northern New Jersey last summer.

The Street Sweeper Social Club came out swinging: all five members in glasses and military-style jackets, laying down a funky rock track that supported Boots Riley as he bopped and spun around the stage. All three bands had all kinds of energy, but the Street Sweeper Social Club had the kind of energy you see in footage of classic punk rock shows, each member careening through their space like meteorites on a mission of collision. Their music was infectious, Boots looked he'd originated the concept of cool, and seeing Tom Morello live makes all of those great sounds he's put into recordings seem as pale as shadows in sunlight: when he gets going, the man absolutely smokes.

Nine Inch Nails opted for a set list that focused pretty heavily on the rage-filed portions on their catalog, with strong doses of Broken, The Downward Spiral, Year Zero, and the songs of alienation from The Slip (think "1,000,000" and "Echoplex"). The energy might have dragged a bit in the middle with a selection from The Fragile and one of the tracks from Ghosts - which is tougher to translate live without the heavy visuals from Lights in the Sky - but a strong finish with a string of the band's hits ("Survivalism," "The Hand That Feeds," "Head Like A Hole") roped in the crowd in time for a closing rendition of "Hurt" in the deepening twilight. My favorite moment from the whole set: watching Robin Finck stalk around the stage during "Reptile." Close second (and pictured to the left): the lights going absolutely apeshit during the end of "Mr. Self Destruct," pulsing so rapidly that Robin looked like a vision out of a drug trip.

And then there was Jane's Addiction, rocking their original line up and looking to bring a large group of people (most of whom appeared out of nowhere when the NIN fans disappeared during the break) on a trip back through their old school material. Just looking at the four of them, you can almost see why they broke up: if Farrell and Navarro are rock via Van Halen, Avery - and to a lesser extent, Perkins - are rock via Black Flag and seeing the two styles together on stage seems to define incongruity. And yet when they play, the differences disappear in the moment it takes for the first notes to peal through the amplifiers. Avery and Perkins provide the foundation, Navarro builds the sweeping structures and adds the lofty touches, and Farrell...well, as Seth put it at one point in the show: Perry Farrell in any other band is David Lee Roth, owning the stage, drinking from a bottle of wine between songs, slapping fives with the audience in the front row. I wouldn't call myself a big enough fan to go see the band headline a show on their own, but in this context it was a great setup and an excellent way to end the night.

Casual Fridays: Billy Idol covering Van Halen

Billy Idol from last week doing a cover of Ain't Talkin Bout Love with a bunch of Schnooks like Kerri Kelli. This is about as casual as Fridays get without me posting Black N Blue clips.

And speaking of Van Halen.......

Revel in this live performance of Girl Gone Bad from Montreal in 1984. When they start pulling out the 1984 or Fair Warning deep cuts I'll welcome them back as a touring band. This is amazing. The most underrated track on the 1984 album.



Or speaking of completely fucking awesome Van Halen deep cuts how about Sunday Afternoon in the Park people? They put it right towards the end so as the drugs kicked in you could feel it nice and slow.

Casual Fridays: David Lee Roth Edition

I have been listening pretty much exclusively to David Lee Roth solo material for the last couple of days, with the brief exception of some 1984 cuts. To share the good times, please watch the video for Just Like Paradise below.

Marvel at the majesty of Steve Vai's doubleneck heart shaped guitar. Be puzzled by the use of synth bass when you have Billy Sheehan in your band.



And although I wanted to show you Skyscraper and write about 5,000 words on Steve Vai's genius it is sadly not up on YouTube. So you will have to settle by keeping the party going with "Hot Dog and a Shake." I believe that is innuendo for "my penis and some sperm" but I may just not be smart or clever enough for this game......

On Tagging (Not the Spraypaint Kind)

When I'm not going to concerts (which, in the scheme of a year, isn't that often), I'm probably listening to music in some other form. I'm the anal retentive music geek who not only alphabetizes his CDs by artist and then organizes within the artist by release year (to the endless fascination of my wife, who can't figure out a.) why the CDs are that important to me and b.) why I need to keep them in such a and rather difficult detailed order), but also does his damnedest to keep his large mp3 collection organized; not just including title and artist information, but also release year, genre, album name and album art. Henry Rollins, with his rants about music organization, is my hero.

To be honest, I blame my current fixation on mp3 tagging on one thing: iTunes. Back in the day (by which I mean up until about 2 years ago), I was a Winamp user. I did some tag editing, but as Winamp didn't correct your song information when you added music to the player, I lived a fairly ignorant and blissful existence. And then I downloaded iTunes.

All of the sudden there were all kinds of new tags to fill and even worse, the program had filled most of them for me! Now aware to the vast possibilities of arranging all of this new information, I found myself editing tags like a fiend, mining the CDDB for missing release years (which are the devil in the details for iTunes to download, for some reason) and then trying to decide the proper genre. Was Van Halen rock or metal or both? Did it depend on the album or even the song? Was I going to get that granular? Would I buy into the hype of post-punk and label The Cure as "Alternative & Punk"? Would I invent new tags of my own?

I settled for a happy medium that allows me to organize without going crazy - my obsessive compulsive nature settles for strong organization without getting to Monk-like levels - and went for the default tags, making an overarching decision about a band's genre even if they've defied classification throughout their career. Van Halen became metal (yes, even the Van Hagar material), The Cure became Alternative & Punk and I was happy.

In the end, I found there was so much music and so little time to absorb it all that I needed a new listening system. Most people would have gone for shuffle, but thanks to the work I put into my tags, I had another, much geekier option: I started listening to things chronologically. I'll leave you to contemplate the full depths of that one.