Hey.


How you doin'?


Been pretty busy, me. No posting, and all kinds of crazy stuff to talk about too. Dang.




Random Ten, and I'm feeling Self-Audit-y today:

58 gigs of music, 40 days of songs.



1. The Rat's Prayer from the album “The Soft Boys 1976-81” by The Soft Boys. Robyn Hitchcock's first band, but it's still Robyn. Death and fish, sex and psychedelia. 7/10, obscure and an IMS favorite, but not one of the best songs.

2. Oh, Me from the album “MTV Unplugged in New York” by Nirvana. Nirvana covering a Meat Puppets song. Say what you will, Karl, but Kurt and the boys loved the Pups and did what they could to get the Arizona desert punks a higher profile. And it seemed to be working until heroin got Cris Kirkwood kicked out of the band. 8/10.

3. Diamond Smiles from the album “The Fine Art of Surfacing” by The Boomtown Rats . One of the first punk bands I really liked. Never really clicked in America; but then, America is pretty clueless, on the whole. 9/10

4. Stalag 123 from the album “Megatop Phoenix” by Big Audio Dynamite. Mick Jones post- Clash. 7/10

5. Baby Genius from the album “Electro-Shock Blues” by Eels. Pretty much a one or two man band, a Man Named E does this stuff. It's pretty good all considered, Alhtough too short. From a concept album about death. Happy songs! 8/10

6. Kenneth -- What's The Frequency? from the album “Lolita Nation” by Game Theory. Scott Miller's first major band. Reviews of this album are required, by international law, to contain the adjective 'sprawling'. Genius nonetheless. 9/10.

7. Making A Noise from the album “Contact From The Underworld Of Redboy” by Robbie Robertson. Member of the Band. Backed up Bob Dylan when he went electric. Canadian. Didja know he's also a Native American? Here, he adds some noise and electronica to an album about being a Native American in America (including a song about Leonard Peltier) A guilty liberal's dream. Redboy is what he was called in school. 10/10.

8. How Beautiful You Are from the album “Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me” by The Cure. Robert Smith and his crew at their height. I'm sure they're inspiring a whole new generation of sullen teens to wear black clothes and lots of eyeliner. 7/10.

9. Rude Girl from the album “SKA The Third Wave-Volume 2” by Undercover S.K.A. what to say? It's ska. Perennially underground, perennially popular. 8/10.

10. What More Can I Do? from the album “The Brooklyn Side” by The Bottle Rockets. Ah. Former Bloodshot recording artists, these guys can kick pretty well live. I once saw them play a set list completely chronologically, froom their first single to a new unreleased song. Their hats might get them mistaken for a modern country artist, but any one of them could kick Lee Greenwood's ass while outdrinking Kenny Chesney and Charlie Daniels combined. 7/10


A couple of bonus tunes, cuz some of those up there were pretty short.


11. Great King Rat (Live) from the album “At the BBC (Live)” by Queen. Old fashioned hard rock glam. Nobody will ever replace Freddie Mercury. Paul Rodgers? Please, don't make me retch. 8/10

12. Joan Crawford from the album “Fire Of Unknown Origin” by Blue Öyster Cult. Probably receive a verbal assault from the Music Snob. I know, I know, no matter how much I like 'em, it's still not cool. In the immortal words of Tom Servo, Bite Me. It's not Dokken. 4/10.

13. Liar, Liar from the album “Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From The First Psychedelic Era” by The Castaways. Late 60's garage rock. The stuff on this album provided a blueprint for punk and post-punk bands, and some of it still sounds contemporary. Debbie Harry did a cover of this song once. Never touched the original. 7/10.




Average: 7.6, but a 1 point penalty for no Mekons connection: 6.6.
no mulligans



I've got a theory about the Self Audit.

Because each person's music library is, to a certain extent, self selected, most of that music will, in that person's opinion, be above average. even the guilty pleasures will fall into one of two categories: either really embarrassing (which doesn't seem to happen that often) or embarrassing but the person will defend it, giving themselves a 4 or 5.

But It also seems that Self Auditers are hesitant to rate many of their songs in the 9 or 10 range, not wanting to appear too much the Insufferable Music Snob.

Hence, if you look at the range of Self Audit scores around, the score is nearly always between 6.2 and 6.9. There are some outliers, like Norbizness while he was between music services, or the odd self auditer who will rate Journey above a 2, but these can to be considered statistical noise.

Of course, Norbizness and Lauren are excluded from this rule, because the former is from Austin and knows from music, and the latter because she IS the IMS.

I call this the Milwaukee Effect of Random Ten Normalization. MERT-N.