Muppetpastor 3.0

So, I’m still unemployed, applying for jobs, fighting with the old job to try and get it back, and I manage to be late in posting.

It’s not like I have a life, but yeah. Things have sucked lately. Even my whoring of the links has met with little success. And with that in mind I started thinking about hindsight being 20/20, and that brought me to the idea of songs that I have on my iPod but haven’t actually listened to in years.

It’s as good a theme as any.

This week’s first track comes from rapcore/punk rock/reggae group 311. Never mind the god awful butchery that was their version of The Cure’s “Lovesong” and that that cover literally made me pitch that CD against a wall after hearing it, at one time, I really liked this band. I’d call this my Linkin Park phase, since they had been popping up on my personal radar around the same time. (Sadly, so did Papa Roach).

In 1997, a rumor started that the band’s name, 311, stood for Ku Klux Klan because K is the 11th letter of the alphabet. The band has denied that the name has any link with the KKK; saying that the name was taken from the number of an Omaha police citation for indecent exposure. Examining the multitude of positive and unifying lyrics that serve as a foundation for their songs, and ideology, finds the KKK relation to be wholly untrue.

In response to the rumors, Nick Hexum began to write a song for the album Transistor titled F*** the KKK. He revised the song though, and it ended up as the sixth track on the album, Electricity which starts with the lyrics, ‘This song started as a rant against haters, but that would be giving in to the instigators.’

Their biggest selling CD was their self-titled release in 1995 (also known as The Blue Album) which went triple-platinum, is where this track originally appears. However, since I could not find my copy of that CD, here it is from the Greatest Hits album from last year.

311 - Down

Hey Trong, this one’s for you. Sort of, at any rate. I have not heard some of Madonna’s early work in ages, and while some might say it’s a good thing, I happen to think her best work was before “Like a Prayer”. You know, her 80’s slut image.

Moving on with the story, a friend of mine by the name of Trong sent me a CD a while back by a band named Pretty Suicide. I rather enjoyed it, and the CD spent quite a while in my random rotation in the pre-iPod days. I found out that the band changed their name to Future 86 recently, which confused me only slightly. I liked the Pretty Suicide name, and Future 86 sounds…erm…. no. At any rate, they had some free downloads of some covers on their website, http://www.future86music.com . One of those covers is the second track this week.

Future 86 - Material Girl (Madonna cover)

Third track, a song from Cynthia Ann Stephanie Lauper (born June 22, 1953), who is better known as Cyndi Lauper, a singer whose melodic voice and wild costumes have come to epitomize the 1980s, the decade in which she first came to fame and…well, last really had superstar fame in.

Born in Queens, New York to Swiss German-American Fred Lauper and Sicilian Italian-American Catrine Dominique, she began her career in a cover band, Blue Angel, in the late 1970s and early 1980s (she almost quit singing altogether due to a week with strained vocal chords in 1977), and in 1983 started dating her manager David Wolff with whom she released She’s So Unusual, a worldwide hit which made Lauper a household name. A mixture of teen-friendly pop-rock and edgier, almost punky sounds, the album’s biggest hit, “Girls Just Want To Have Fun”, quickly established itself as a female anthem. Lauper won a Grammy Award for Best New Artist at the Grammy Awards of 1984 for her work on the album. Cyndi Lauper was the first female artist to have four consecutive Hot 100 Top 5 hits from one album, She’s So Unusual.

The same album also gave us the instant classic “Time After Time”, which according to the Wikipedia, has been covered over 70 times. Frightening, that..

This track also appeared on that album, and was found on the most recent Greatest Hits album. The song was controversial thanks to lyrics that subtly address masturbation. An accompanying music video aired heavily on MTV and featured Lauper as a quirky sexual liberator leading the brainwashed masses to their own liberation. (This was done in metaphor showing teenagers as disgusting fast-food consuming zombies.) I was watching VH1 Classic and saw the video for the first time in years, hence the post here.

Cyndi Lauper - She Bop

The fourth track comes from the now defunct Soundgarden, a seminal Seattle rock band who helped to define the sound that came to be called grunge. It’s odd, really, in that I liked Soundgarden, liked Rage Against The Machine, but can’t bring myself to really give a shit about Audioslave.

Superunknown was released March 8, 1994 (see 1994 in music). It was the fifth album by the band Soundgarden, their third through A&M Records. It was the band’s breakout, driven by the singles “Black Hole Sun”, “Spoonman”, and “Fell on Black Days”.

The name “Spoonman” is credited to Jeff Ament of Pearl Jam. While on the set of the movie Singles, Jeff, who was part of the fictional band featured in the movie, came up with a list of possible titles. Chris Cornell took it as a challenge to write a list of songs using those titles, and “Spoonman” was one of them. The song, and its video, featured Artis the Spoonman, who is a street entertainer in Seattle, and a demo version of the song is used in the movie.

The album shows a Beatles influence, particularly on “Black Hole Sun” and “Head Down”. In a 1994 interview with Guitar World, Kim Thayil explains this: “We looked deep down inside the very core of our souls and there was a little Ringo sitting there. Oh sure, we like telling people it’s John Lennon or George Harrison; but when you really look deep inside of Soundgarden, there’s a little Ringo wanting to get out.” Again, frightening.

This song was also a single, but oddly, not many seem to remember it, even on those classic rock stations that play the album to death.

Soundgarden - The Day I Tried To Live

The final track this week hails from the great white north, eh? Our Lady Peace, colloquially OLP, is a Canadian alternative rock band consisting of Raine Maida (vocals), Duncan Coutts (bass), Jeremy Taggart (drums), and Steve Mazur (guitar) with backing from Joel Shearer (of the band Pedestrian).

Our Lady Peace was founded in 1992 when Mike Turner placed a “musicians wanted” ad in a Toronto newspaper. Responding first was Michael (Raine) Maida, a criminology student at the University of Toronto. Later, 17-year-old Jeremy Taggart and Chris Eacrett joined the band. Eacrett left in 1995, replaced by Duncan Coutts. Turner left in 2001, replaced by Steve Mazur. Jamie Edwards, a keyboardist, would join in 1996 and leave in 2002, shortly after Turner left.

Our Lady Peace first won recognition with their debut album Naveed, released in Canada in 1994 and the United States in 1995. “Naveed” became a hit in Canada and “Starseed” a hit in Canada and the United States. (”Starseed” would later appear on the Armageddon film soundtrack.) Their second album, Clumsy, released in 1997 and including the tracks “Clumsy,” an instant hit around the suburban landscape, “4 AM,” a more morose song about not appreciating the good things in life including family, “Superman’s Dead,” a song about being alone in a world without relying on a hero, “Carnival” and “Automatic Flowers”, established OLP as a leading band in 1990s rock music in Canada, and a notable group internationally. Their music explored often deep intellectual and emotional themes with powerful orchestration and the unique singing voice of lead vocalist Maida, called “strange” and “paranoid”.

It’s the final track for this week, and a song that’s playing even as I finish this entry.

Our Lady Peace - 4 AM

Hopefully, things will change for the better next week. Until then.