Audio post reblogged from with 22 notes - Played 380 times
You wont remember … anything you felt … when he cuts you all alive with his bible belt.
What song is this? Never heard it…
It’s known as Bible Belt, it was performed only a few times during the Live Through This tour in 1994 but was never recorded (at least to my knowledge). Each version has slightly different lyrics so I’m not sure how much of it was a finished song vs. an improv though. Here’s a video that has 3 different versions of the song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwtWZEBuUWk
Source: andiwillawayyourhighness
Audio post reblogged from Crumbler with 7 notes - Played 100 times
“Baby Say Goodbye,” Wavves. King of the Beach has an appealingly bratty quality, with Nathan Williams’ plaintive pipsqueak regularly dropping acid on those sunbaked Beach Boys harmonies. Brian Wilson is about as lazy a reference point you can pick these days, but some things in pop never grow old, and Williams borrows the best of those Surf City harmonies and modernizes them with production tricks learned from Animal Collective and others. It all comes together exactly once, on the album-closing suite “Baby Say Goodbye.” As bouncy and bright as July itself, the song surprises you by turning suddenly into an anthem, as Williams sings the title over and over again the way his forebears used to lament that God only knows. A song for the season if there ever was one.
(track via hamtunes)
It’s interesting that you would pick this as the one time when everything comes together, because this is one of the more frustrating tracks on the album for me precisely because it just barely misses building to perfection. The track absolutely is striving for an anthemic moment at its close, but it doesn’t get there because of how bland and emotionless Williams’ vocal sounds as he repeats the title again and again, leaving the backing vocals to do all the work. Obviously it’d be ridiculous to expect great displays of vocal prowess here, but there’s not enough feeling in the delivery to justify the lyrical build-up throughout the song (not that Wavves is alone in that problem, it bothers me about a lot of indie rock), and what should be a big finish is undermined by the continual “oh yeah”s until the end when letting the instrumental fully take over would’ve been a wiser choice. It’s still an enjoyable track, but I always hate when a song comes close to greatness and falls a little short.
Source: hamtunes
Photo reblogged from it's still cold in alaska with 5 notes
(via coldinalaska)
coldinalaska’s Stevie Nicks “I Can’t Wait” GIFs are great, now all I need is one of Stevie dancing up and down the stairs in that ridiculous dress.
Video reblogged from Tyler Coates with 59 notes
Hole - “Olympia”
Whenever I hear someone talk about authenticity, I think about Hole.
I remember when Hole first came out. I was a teenager. Most of my friends were in thrall to Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. Although a “grunge” band fronted by a woman was appreciated on a theoretical level - we were all feminists because Kurt Cobain told us we should be feminists - Courtney Love was not the rock chick most of my dude friends wanted.
To them, she appeared to be flimsy and fake. Some guessed she was just using Kurt to become famous and that Kurt wrote all of her songs. Even worse, she seemed to be driving him to mental illness and drug abuse. While he was alive, some grudging respect was given to Courtney because our artistic god must have seen something in her. His death took away that prop: Courtney Love was a fake, no-talent whore.
Two decades on, I listen to “Olympia”, and all of that stuff seems immaterial. I remember one of my high school friends complaining that his little sister played this song on an endless loop every day after school. I can see why - I want to play this song on an endless loop!
The song is filled with hooks: the repetition of the lines “I went to school” and their attendant guitar chords; the “ay-ay-ay-ay” of “Olympia”; the “make me real/FUCK YOU/make me sick/FUCK YOU!” Listen to how Courtney’s voice cycles from humour (remember how rarely Kurt laughed?), to compassion, to ennui, to anger, to vulnerability, to sexual satisfaction (that background “yeah, yeah, yeah”). The song is incredibly simple, and yet no part repeats itself exactly. No wonder teens (particularly girl teens!), identifying with its feminine teenage frustration, could play it endlessly.
And the genius of the song is that, like Kanye, Courtney is already guessing your criticisms before you make them. The “when I went to school” line is repeated because Courtney presents them as false starts - as mistakes. And the end of the song ends to soon. Another mistake. Courtney knows you think she is a fuck-up, and she’s laughing because her “mistakes” make the song more interesting and varied than if she hadn’t made them.
They also foreground the performative aspect of the song. Courtney, being a smart feminist, knows that people - men - judge women on their ability to play the part. Kurt, whether he knew it or not, played the part of tortured genius. Courtney, as we all know, is constantly struggling to chew her way out of other people’s perceptions of herself. Lately, it’s become sad. But when it was incorporated into the structure and pleasure of “Olympia” - “You think I’m shit? I’ll show you how good shit can be!” - it becomes thrilling. And it makes many of those male contemporaries of Courtney’s that my teenage friends adored sound simple-minded in comparison. They didn’t have to fight their way through a whole load of pointless shit to create music. The shit was unfair to Courtney, but it gave her music a spine-tingling tension that still shines.
It also just boils down to this: authenticity is gossip. Courtney wasn’t authentic because she did this or slept with him. But gossip fades away. No one cares about old arguments. When they aren’t being nostalgic, what people care about in old songs is hooks and emotion. Listen to “Olympia” again, and that’s all you’ll hear: hooks and emotion.
THIS!
This analysis is spot-on, both in terms of the song and Courtney.
Source: teenageart
