Top of the B-List
How could I NOT click on the ad for LDSAudio: “Download thousands of LDS songs by your favorite artists”
I had no idea there even was such a thing as Mormon music. My favourite? It has to be LDS Super Hits of the 80s. Hands down.
Though the concert happened more than a month ago, I just discovered this interesting commentary on Icelandic band Sigur Rós’ concert at my alma mater Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Calvin is a liberal arts college affiliated with the Christian Reformed Church and for me continues to exemplify the best example of what a thoughtful Christian education can be.
As part of a regular series, the school hosted a question and answer session with the band before the show, which you can listen to as an MP3 file. This unique approach allowed not only the audience to get to know the band, but the band to understand a little bit about the people for whom they were performing. What a great idea.
Also, it’s nice to see that I’m not the only person who raves about the feelings of transcendence that the band’s live performances inspire.
P.S. More love for Calvin: the Director of Student Activities, Kate Bowman Johnson, keeps a wonderully-titled blog called Evangelical Expatriate. And former student Ben Reed blogs thoughtfully and often hilariously about the evangelical subculture over at Christian Retail.
The Boomtown Rats – The Fine Art of Surfacing (1979)
There was once a time when “Sir” Bob Geldof was known for something other than organizing huge benefit concerts to feed the hungry. In fact, there was once a time when he was the hungry one. Hungry to find meaning in the world, and to find his place in it. In 1979, Geldof and his band The Boomtown Rats released one of my favourite albums, but the fact that it contained what amounted to a novelty hit (“I Don’t Like Mondays”) consigned The Boomtown Rats to “one-hit wonder” status and left the rest of this masterpiece of angry pop criminally undiscovered. In fact, the album was extremely difficult to find on CD in North America until a 2005 release that added some bonus tracks.
We might as well deal with “I Don’t Like Mondays” right away. Geldof was a former journalist, and you could see why he’d take inspiration from a newspaper account of a 13-year-old California teenager who shot 11 people with no remorse. When asked why she’d done it, she replied nonchalantly, “I don’t like Mondays.” Geldof’s outrage is somewhat obscured by his clever lyrics and sneering vocals, but it’s there. On “Diamond Smiles” he tells the sad story of a rich socialite who hangs herself at a grand party. “When the Night Comes” is about how the office drones try to escape their soulless jobs by fumbling for connection. Whether it’s the emptiness of riches, the incomprehensibility of random violence, or the alienation of our modern world, Geldof was a brilliant storyteller. Almost every song has a character at its centre, someone who is acting out their part in this confusing place. On “Someone’s Looking at You,” Geldof even eerily predicts our surveillance-mad post-9/11 culture of suspicion. This is a brilliant collection of pop songs with lyrics that are actually worth listening to.
Some people were surprised when the sneering Geldof became the ambassador for charity in the mid-80s, but not me. You can’t be born in Ireland and raised in a flawed but still vital Catholicism without emerging as an idealist. A frustrated and angry idealist, usually, but credit to Bob for not just giving up on this messy old world. When I first discovered this album, probably sometime in the 80s, I saw Bob as a great example of someone whose brain hadn’t completely crushed their soul. Even without the knighthood, I’d call him sir.
Track Listing
“Someone’s Looking at You” performance on Australian TV on YouTube
“I Don’t Like Mondays” video on YouTube
Great Albums is an occasional feature on Consolation Champs where I relate some personal stories about life-changing music in lieu of any proper music criticism. You’ll probably learn more about me than about music, so consider that fair warning. For more, click the Great Albums category tag.
Ooh, such a clever title! Thanks to Neil and indirectly to Frank, I got to see The National tonight for free. I’d only heard two songs before tonight, but am firmly in the fan camp now. If you get a chance to see them, you really ought to go, before singer Matt Berninger does permanent damage to his voice. Openers The Cloud Room were a pleasant surprise as well.
P.S. The TTC has gone haywire. From the beautiful young female streetcar driver I met at 12:30 this morning to the crazy subway drivers calling out the names of the stations, things were weird today. On my morning commute, the stations were being called out by a drunken halfwit, and on my way home from the concert tonight, by a chirpy and possibly medicated matron.
BONUS: Video of Gang of Four performing a surprise show at SXSW on a parking garage rooftop. Yet another amazing show I missed by coming home after Interactive.
In January 2001, I wrote an article for online magazine About This Particular Macintosh about the burgeoning popularity of “blogs” and now more than five years later, it’s sort of quaint to look at it again. I thought you might think so, too.
March 25: Seems like someone else is getting nostalgic as well. Michael Stillwell of beebo.org posts the list of the most-linked blogs from September 2000. Fascinating. And looking at the text file of the 446 blogs he was working with, probably a large percentage of the existing blogs at the time, brought back good memories of some people who’ve seemingly disappeared from the web.