Music can be dangerous for an overly-idealistic, bookwormy teenager. There's something about the adolescent swirl of hormones that makes one painfully (or is it wonderfully) susceptible that all the answers to life can be found in a truly great song.
Before I ever touched a beer or knew what weed smelled like, I would spend many a long high school evening getting absolutely blitzed on music.
Punk was the most effective delivery vehicle for the combination of righteously angry idea and amphetaminic effective music that would flood my body with the rage, indignation and misguided zeal of a teenage radical.
So I'll just say it - the Pixies are the indie rock version of the Beatles. I know there are some many aspects of this statement that can be quibbled with but here we have a four-person band that came out of nowhere to shoot to the top, had a brief but incredibly intense and fruitful run, only to retire, leaving a legacy that loomed incredibly large for all the bands to follow them. Without the Pixies, massive bands like Weezer, Nirvana and Radiohead would have all sounded drastically different.
My own personal Pixies experiences cut deep as well. They were the first real "indie" band that I got into, mostly because all my friends at school liked them and I was tired of not understanding their conversations (and God bless them for that). After a childhood spent listening to classic rock and pop, the Pixies gave me just enough melody to go with their yelping, pounding drums, screeching guitars and surrealistic imagery to teach me how to find beauty in dissonance and open my mind to more challenging music (and God bless THEM for that). In this installment of Covering Our Bases we look at the best of the released Pixes covers as a way to remember the musical capital-G "greatness" of the band as well as their absolute love of fun a music. Enjoy!
**On Warmer Music Exclusive Premiere**
This weekend was a bizarre time to be in Chicago. Ours was a schizophrenic city with its attention divided between baseball, beer and batons (in fact, perhaps the only thing we in the city didn't obsess over was the actual substance of the NATO summit). Twitter feeds and news cameras may have runneth over with downtown protestations but in most neighborhoods people were more concerned with finding a cool place to lounge about in the luxuriant mid-90s swelter. It was a sentiment that, after a few hours of watching NATO coverage I myself shared - the need to step back, exhale and live in the moment with what's in front of me, unconcerned with external events. As you might expect, I achieved this most easily with aid of music.
Soundtracks are a wonderful thing. There's a bootleg of John Darnielle from the Mountain Goats covering Neutral Milk Hotel's "Two-Headed Boy" where he says "I'm sorry if I screw this up, because I know there's a lot of you out there who are living and dying with this song" and that perfectly sums up what great music has the potential to be. If you truly love certain songs they become the soundtrack to your life - you live and die with them.
The only problem with that is that your life is under-rehearsed, way over budget and full of people who are far less interesting and attractive than those you see on the big screen. Movies are less messy and more satisfying. Good directors know that music is an emotional short-cut, able to short-circuit logic and quickly hack directly into our emotional-response centers. That means that a well-chosen soundtrack can not only open minds to new music but turn a good movie into a great one.
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Music can be dangerous for an overly-idealistic, bookwormy teenager. There's something about the adolescent swirl of hormones that makes one painfully (or is it wonderfully) susceptible that all the answers to life can be found in a truly great song.
