Shut Up & Play: "Blew" by Nirvana

So, you wanna play "Blew" by Nirvana? You've come to the right place. Why? Because you can go all over the internet finding tabs to play this song and almost every one of them is wrong.

Almost.

It's not my favorite song, but it's in the top ten. Also, having listened to this band for way too long (longer than they were even around), I have studied their music in my own special way, and I can say with 100 percent certainty that this tab you're about to learn is good shit.

But before we get to it, you need to drop that fuckin' D. That means lowering the top string, the low E, down one whole step to D. Now your guitar is in the Dropped D Tuning (D-A-D-G-B-E) instead of the Standard Tuning (E-A-D-G-B-E). Congratulations.

Also, you need to know the parts that the song is broken down into: Intro-Verse-Chorus-Verse-Chorus-Solo-Chorus-Closing.

Now you're ready. Here we go:

The Intro. (0:10 to 0:17) It gets you in the groove, and it's kind of the entire bass line.

Play this twice.

E------------------------------------------------------

B------------------------------------------------------

G------------------------------------------------------

D------------------------------------------------------

A----0-0-3-5-6-6-5---3-3-0-3-5-5-------------------------

D----0-0-3-5-6-6-5---3-3-0-3-5-5-------------------------

The Verse. (0:18 to 0:46)(1:01 to 1:30) It's the same each time, both music and lyrics, a Cobain staple. Keep in mind that, as the melody of the lyrics go back and forth with each line, so does the guitar part. Basically the guitar is supposed to sound the same as what's being sung.

1. "And if you wouldn't mind, I would like it, Blew ..."
3. "And if you wouldn't mind, I would like to leave ..."
E------------------------------------------------------
B------------------------------------------------------
G--------------)bend(------------)bend(-----------------
D--------3-5-6/--6--6--\---5-5-3-5/--5--5----3------------
A------5-----------------------------------------------
D------------------------------------------------------

Then:
E------------0-------------------0---------------------
B------------0-------------------0---------------------
G------------0-------------------0---------------------
D----5-3-5-5--------------5-3-5-5------------------------
A-----------------0-0-0--------------------------------
D-----------------0-0-0--------------------------------

2. "And if you wouldn't care, I would like to lose ..."
4. "And if you wouldn't care, I would like to breathe ..."
E------------------------------------------------------
B------------------------------------------------------
G--------------)bend(----------------------------------
D--------3-5-6/--6--6--\---5-5-3-5-5-5-3--0--------------
A------5-----------------------------------------------
D------------------------------------------------------

Then:
E------------0-------------------0---------------------
B------------0-------------------0---------------------
G------------0-------------------0---------------------
D----5-3-5-5--------------5-3-5-5------------------------
A-----------------0-0-0--------------------------------
D-----------------0-0-0--------------------------------

The Chorus. (0:47 to 1:00)(1:31 to 1:44)(2:14 to 2:28) Here's where most tabulators fuck things up, and you can't blame them because it takes a good ear to hear this correctly when it's played live. Play this along with the video. It should sound nothing less than a carbon copy.

"Is there ... 'nother ... reason ... for your stain? ...
Could you ... 'lieve who ... we knew? ... Stress and strain ..."
E------------------------------------------------------
B------------------------------------------------------
G------------------------------------------------------
D----3-5-0--5-5-3-0--3-3-5-0--5-5-3-6--------------------
A----3-5-0--5-5-3-0--3-3-5-0--5-5-3-6--------------------
D----3-5-0--5-5-3-0--3-3-5-0--5-5-3-6--------------------

Then:

"Here is ... 'nother ... word that ... rhymes with shame ... "
E------------------------------------------------------
B------------------------------------------------------
G------------------------------------------------------
D----3-5-0--5-5-3-0--3-3-5-0--5-5-3-0-7-7-7-7-7-7-7-7-7-7
A----3-5-0--5-5-3-0--3-3-5-0--5-5-3-0-7-7-7-7-7-7-7-7-7-7
D----3-5-0--5-5-3-0--3-3-5-0--5-5-3-0-7-7-7-7-7-7-7-7-7-7

The Solo. (1:45 to 2:13) This is the part of any Nirvana song that requires some explanation. Usually, Kurt's approach to a "solo" wasn't the same as Eddie Van Halen's or Kirk Hammett's. It's better referred to as the "anti-solo." Do this: take all the notes you have been using in the song so far and do two things. First, raise those notes an octave so people know you're "soloing." Second, scramble them together, not unlike how you would eggs in a frying pan, to make it sound like you're punishing the instrument you're playing, or punishing the audience who is listening to you play that instrument. Either way works, but make it sound cool.

The Closing. (2:29 to 3:12) It ends the song. Kurt wasn't much for gradual fade-outs, preferring instead to end things with a strong statement, both literally and figuratively.

Play this eight times.

"You could do anything ..."
E-----------------------------------------------------
B-----------------------------------------------------
G-----------------------------------------------------
D----0-3-5-6-6-6-0-------------------------------------
A----0-3-5-6-6-6-0-------------------------------------
D----0-3-5-6-6-6-0-------------------------------------

You're welcome.

Dog Days. Of Summer.

Jesus! It's been longer than five weeks since my last post? I must've lost track of time after getting back from my camping trip in Colorado. It's easy to lose yourself in the mysticism of nature, just you, your friends and a fire. By the second week, we all realized we had to get home before we lost our jobs, so we got outta there. I'll be damned if I haven't been feeling like I forgot to do something, though.

Just kidding! I didn't go to Colorado and I don't have any friends. The real reason I haven't done shit is because it's Summer. In Florida. It's so fucking hot, I can't even think, and when I can't think, I can't write. It drains all my energy. When I get home from work, all I can do is spend six hours reading seriously insightful list articles on Cracked.com until I fall asleep. Yeah, Cracked. As in the baby brother offshoot of Mad magazine. I have no idea what happened either.

So, without further ado,

7 Women With The Hottest Bitch Faces

7.  Michelle Obama

[Disclaimer: Before continuing, I want my readers to know that I am fully aware of how a woman might feel when the word "bitch" is used to describe how her face looks. I want to make it clear that I employ this word not as a denigration of the character of these women, but as a way to describe their unconventional, sinister-looking sexiness. Like the she-villains in Disney movies. What I'm arguing is that these women are hotter than someone who looks like Kate Upton, or any other conventional candidate for Sexiest Woman Alive. I can think of no greater crime against nature, from man or God, than changing, in any way, the appearance with which these women were born.]

The hottest First Lady since Jackie. There, I said it. Oh! You're pissed at the President, America? (I hadn't heard.) Someone oughta whip that Muslim, Kenyan Freedom-hater into shape, you say? I know someone. Someone who scares the shit outta me, who really gets the blood flowing to the right places. Like the brain of the Leader of the Free World, so it can do all it's important, uh, Leader Freedom Thinking. Also, I wasn't turning a phrase back there. I think she literally knows how to use a whip on the President.

Here she is looking all Mad Men.

6. Juliette Lewis

Juliette Lewis is a seasoned pro. Cape Fear, From Dusk Till Dawn, Natural Born Killers, Whip It. Her characters sure had to learn how to grow up fast. Just an average, all-American girl that life has kicked around too many times, and now she's ready to do some kicking of her own. Whether her assault is directed toward vampires, roller derby girls, a convicted rapist, or the person who wants to film a documentary of her and her husband's serial slaughter of innocent people, there's still something about her that makes me feel all warm inside.

 

That feeling could just be internal bleeding. I don't know. I smell toast.

5. Vampire Pam

 

Remember when you were still scared of the dark? When movies used to tell you the most terrible, evil things happened when the clock struck midnight? The very thought of something coming out of the dark to eat you alive through your jugular filled you with terror, and didn't help you fall asleep either.

Then you grow up and realize that those fears never go away, their terror just pales in comparison to real fears, like not being able to pay your rent. Vampires sucking your blood? Less likely than the bank you put your paycheck into every week.

Sometimes the things that terrify us as children are the same things that we become attracted to as adults. When it comes to fireworks and vampires, I can attest to this. My favorite explosives are Black Cat firecrackers and I want Kristin Bauer van Straten to suck me dry.

"Oh, dream weaver. I believe you can get me through the nighhht."

4. Anjelica Huston

In the beginning, Morticia Addams was the macabre matriarch of the Addams Family, the best cartoon in the New Yorker. Then she was dollface Carolyn Jones in the 60s sitcom. Even Brooke Shields took a crack at her on Broadway. But nobody embodied Morticia's glacial creepiness better than John Huston's first-born daughter.

"The real head of the family ... low-voiced, incisive and subtle, smiles are rare…ruined beauty ... contemptuous and original and with fierce family loyalty ... even in disposition, muted, witty, sometimes deadly ... given to low-keyed rhapsodies about her garden of deadly nightshade, henbane and dwarf’s hair ..."

– Charles Addams, 1963
 

Why didn't I just put the cartoon Morticia on this list? Oh, yeah. 'Cuz cartoons aren't real. I'm always forgetting that.

3. Sandra Bernhard

Listen, I grew up watching stand-up comedy, and I know that a lot of stand-up comedians are not supermodels. But nobody wants that, because supermodels are stupid, and not very often are they intentionally funny. But I have to be honest, at a certain time in the 90s, Sandra Bernhard was pretty damn close to the best of both those worlds. Her face was as brash as her humor. I knew she was hot when I was only eight fucking years old!

 

Don't believe me? Ask Madonna.

2. Jane Curtin

There used to be a time when the news wasn't a joke. I don't remember it either, because the first people to inject comedy into current events did it eleven years before I was born. The Show? Saturday Night Live. The sketch? Weekend Update. The first WU anchor was Chevy Chase, and sure it was funny, but it lacked a necessary level of cold, sexy deadpan.

Enter the Queen. I mean, then the Queen came. I mean, that's when Jane Curtin showed up.

Whenever I think of a decade in American history in which I would have liked to come of age, it's almost never the 1970s. Almost never. The 60s had better style. The 80s had better music (seriously, just not on the radio). But the last four years of the 70s had Jane Curtin, for one night a week, looking hot, satirizing the news, and occasionally tearing open her blouse and goading Connie Chung.

Tina Fey and Amy Poehler better rekkinize.

1. Maribeth Monroe

She's Alice Murphy on Workaholics. Currently, Workaholics is the voice of our generation. Also, it's comedy gold. These days, I guess you just need two things. Three morons with shitty jobs? Check. An irate hosebeast/the foxiest superior you can only dream of having for a boss? Check.

What I'm saying is, asleep, unconscious, eyes closed, with the firing of random synapses in your brain, is the only place where you can be on the business end of her bewitching, elegant wrath.

 

She is the reason for this entire post. A woman after my own heart.

They're pissed at me. I'm forgetting something.

Oh, yeah. In addition to your dreams, you can also watch her tear you a new asshole every Tuesday night at 10:30 on Comedy Central.

A Rant

When I read the title of this book today I had a thought, and because this month has been pretty lazy for blogging, I'm running with it.

The thought: the title implies a time that used to exist when grown adults needed to be told fairy tales in order to be dissuaded from doing things that could cause harm to themselves or society, like gambling, drinking or wearing a hat indoors.

That entire notion must've been all too much for the person who coined the phrase "the devil's tickets" when referring to playing cards. Too much to simply craft an argument about the perils of placing wagers with hard-earned money that one can't soon repay with tangible imagery from the world in which the gambler lived.

The conversation would, understandingly, lack a certain level of artistic license. "Hey, Wilfred, bro, come on, a pair of sevens, hold up. You put all that money in the pot, and you can't pay your rent for, like, a year. Your wife will leave you for another dude, and your kids will die of starvation. Fact!"

I mean, how's that gonna get the message across, right? It must have been a lot easier back in the roaring '20s to just say something like, "Dost not play this hand of poker, Wilfred. For when you do, thou art holding the Devil's Tickets! If you didn't already know, those are tickets that take you to Hell! And monsters eat you there!"

The Other Tongue

I'm not the type of person to talk about my lineage often. America is a nation of immigrants, and as such I think a discussion about any of our "homelands" is irrelevant by default. That being said, allow me to prattle on about my lineage and how it relates to my definition of American culture.

Quick rundown: I was born in West Palm Beach, Florida. My mother's family is Italian and she grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My father's family is English/Irish and he grew up in Tennessee, in a small town named Paris.

Being born to a Southern father and Northern mother was an interesting (and short-lived) experiment. It's shaped my entire perspective about the freakish North-meets-South setting where my story began.

Here, our lack of cultural cohesion is par for the course. When I got my first job bagging groceries, I didn't know that a shopping cart could have so many other names (carriage, buggy, trolley, wagon), but the customers did because they came from other parts of the country where these terms are used to refer to shopping carts.

Nothing is permanent or collective. There are only three cultural staples: Alligators, golf courses and the music of Jimmy Buffett. Are any of our residents fans of the Miami Dolphins? If so, I have no explanation as to why they would be.

Our "culture" is purely transitory, brought over by whoever moves here, and disappearing when they leave. To a region that only became habitable after central air-conditioning was invented not even a century ago, a word like "tradition" means almost nothing.

Almost.

In the last year I've decided to continue my study of Spanish, from the point where I left it in high school, where it was required of my study for all four years. Was I able to speak it fluently back then? No. Has my continued study required me to start all over again, relearning all of what little I retained? Absolutely.

But I'm diligent, and that's important because the number of people speaking it is only going to increase. It's influence will only become more saturating. I understand this and have no problem with it whatsoever.

Questions you might be asking: Why would you welcome the phasing-out of your native tongue? How would life possibly be made better because of this? Does it not make you feel like your country, the only one you've ever lived in, your entire world from the moment of your birth, is disappearing? Do you hate America?

To all ideas posited by the rhetoric of these questions, I say:

No, English will never be eradicated in my lifetime. It's too nuanced, potent, deft, and efficient. It steals from the languages around it. It takes new forms with each new generation of speakers. Ideas and emotions can be expressed beautifully or hideously. It's vocabulary encompasses the complete spectrum of sound.

No, learning Spanish, or any other language, will not make my life harder. It will be made better by expanding my perceivable world, not erasing it. Everything I said in that previous paragraph? How am I supposed to confirm it if I don't have another language to compare it to? (Fact!)

No, it doesn't feel like my entire world is disappearing. Why? Because my surroundings do nothing but disappear. What's stayed the same? Nobody can even claim that Palm Beach County, let alone the entire country, hasn't completely changed from what it was twenty-five years ago. When you live in a place that never stays the same for more than a year, your idea of community becomes more dynamic, not more static.

And finally, no, I don't hate America, because America is about moving forward, not recycling the same words, the same concepts, the same ideas for centuries so that we can "purify" all of our "traditions" and "values." Our "virtues" and "principles."

That equates to cultural incest, and progress doesn't come from fucking your idea siblings. That's some Dark Ages shit.

I wonder, too, why my maternal family doesn't speak Italian. Not a word, except when my grandfather watches The Godfather on TV. It all comes back to him, or something. I've always thought it was a cool language, even if it does have a penchant for the dramatic.

I was told when my grandfather was born that his father, typically, wanted the children to speak only English. I find this a disagreeable parental impulse, but I can understand it. I don't think America is a very forward thinking, culturally tolerant nation in 2012. I can't imagine what it was like in the 1930s.

I've already made my sociopolitical case for wanting to speak Spanish, but the motive that courses through my veins is that learning Spanish would bring me that much closer to learning Italian. Little by little, I want to reconnect with what was severed from me even before the woman I came from was born. (See, this thick sappiness could've really been driven home with just a little Italian.)

I think everyone should feel this way, even if they don't. My girlfriend constantly waxes lyrical about Tradition and has no interest in learning German, her paternal family's mother tongue and one her father still fluently speaks.

She might change her mind one day, but I don't know what it will take. Either the realization that life is precious and we only have a finite amount of time to learn and appreciate everything we are, were and can become, or a Gossip Girl plot twist that involves Blair Waldorf falling in love with a fictional German chancellor.

Either way is fine.

We all just end up where we came from in the first place.

The Part of the Itch

Commercials suck. Honestly. Who needs them? Who even likes them? The best ones are rare, and soon become so forcefully repetitive that a viewer can discover and be sickened from overuse by the same advertisement inside the window of an hour-long show.

Television would have never been created without this disgusting drivel, and if television had never been created we would never know the superb genius of Mad Men.

After an excruciating 17 months, the greatest show on television finally returned to fill that burning emptiness we've all been numbing with cheap booze and meaningless sex.

The fact that Matthew Weiner had the ability to write an enthralling series around characters who supply, by a wide margin, the most unwanted and annoying product in the history of mankind is nothing short of brilliance.

It's not just how cool Draper is, how pithy Roger's one-liners are, how bodacious everything about Joan always is, how big a tool Pete can be, how determined Peggy is to show them all, how Selectric typewriters are employed in a delicious '60s office setting or the drama created by all these factors. What fascinates me most about this show is the idea that a time used to exist when advertising was an art form.

Ask yourself if today's commercials are works of art. How much "creative" has gone into these things?

I had an epiphany yesterday. It makes me feel stupid because I should've had this epiphany years ago, but here it is: commercials on mute.

I know, I know. Duh. But if watching commercials without sound doesn't immediately make your viewing experience more pleasant (OK, tolerable), I formally and officially invite you to freely punch me in the face the next time you see me.

Miserable jingles? Gone. Stupid pitches? Gone. Moronic ad copy that pretty faces are paid to recite (... guaranteed! ... call now! ... or your money back! ... lost thirty pounds! ... no contracts! ... try it risk free! ... been injured in a ... just ninety-nine cents! ...)? Gone. Moving mouths are all that's left, and sometimes streaming text that provides concisely all pertinent consumer information. After this revelation, it feels as though my mind is finally at peace.

Now it's a moving magazine ad. This novel silence allows me to interact and play games with the pitch, like filling those moving mouths with my own ad copy. If you can appreciate Mad Libs, you can appreciate this. Usually my copy is pretty liberal towards blatant vulgarity.

Regardless of my penchant for potty-word hilarity, I'm of the opinion that television as a medium is better at killing thoughts than creating them (this can also apply to drinking Scotch). That being said, I'm genuinely ashamed of how much television I watch and how much of my life I've spent doing it. Because of this, I can't wait for the day when television can be viewed by paying for individual shows. When that day comes, these are the ten shows (and only ten!) that would be on my TV. My desert island list, in order of importance:

Mad Men

Workaholics

South Park

Ugly Americans

True Blood

Mythbusters

The Daily Show

The Colbert Report (package deal)

Chopped

& Jersey Shore

But who am I kidding? I've listed these (great) shows for no reason. As far as I know, advertisers love the ridiculous amount of bullshit on TV. As I write this they're probably screaming for more out the windows of their billionth-floor offices on Madison Avenue. More shows! More channels! More air time! More money!

I realize now that I'm wasting my time.

But wasting time is where ideas come from, according to the people who are paid to create things, and the fact is creative people wouldn't get paid if it wasn't for advertisers and their annoying, unwanted product. Both parties know that.

I think Matthew Weiner should really be rewarded for giving us a world where advertising is interesting, where the people who do it are cool, intelligent, and have shitloads of artistic vision spewing from their fingertips. A fictional world of advertisers making good advertisements might have the power to seep into reality, providing a more enriching experience for everyone involved, viewer and producer alike.

Would the real world not be a better place if commercials sucked significantly less? I think it would, because it would influence for the better the art of the pitch, not just for advertisers and car salesman, but for everyone. The pitch is everything to/for/about everyone. It's persuasion. It's how you sell yourself, your abilities, your beliefs, your ideas, your value to everyone with whom you ever come in contact. Everyone wants to do this better.

You can call it growing bullshit, but that would only be true if the product reeks.

Poem I

On the share, feel total exploding
what I'm shooting & what he will lead
rather than effective first years.

The good news,
which discusses time,
has an upgrading focus
that was once the most of the change.

Contending will receive
characterization, technologically,
until ownership of the good day.

Strong, that premier news
learned will not be
even considered enlisting.

Likes his career best,
talked about going,
would have been sitting.

Of trying to break in, than history in his of.

The Lorax

Dr. Seuss is the greatest author of children's picture books. I say this because Dr. Seuss was responsible for some of the earliest childhood memories I still have. The Lorax (I have to admit) I only read a year ago, and that's because I work at a bookstore and can't resist an unread Seuss. My upbringing consisted more of Green Eggs and Ham, There's a Wocket in My Pocket, and Oh, The Thinks You Can Think! Even Seuss protégé P.D. Eastman had a few in there.

Only the blandest five-year-old couldn't love & appreciate the silliness of Seuss's dialogue, the wackiness of his characters and the shagginess of the plantlife in his rhyming, technicolor world. I loved his books when I was a child because I wanted to visit that world. Now that I'm an adult, I'm certain I want to live there permanently.

That's why, after seeing the new 3D adaptation of the Lorax by Chris Renaud & Kyle Balda, I was bothered to read Peter Travers' review in Rolling Stone, giving it only one star but still feeling that the underage idiot-fest Project X merited two and a half.

"Why does Hollywood keep screwing up the iconic work of Dr. Seuss?," Travers laments in the first sentence of his review, before bemoaning all the preceding Seuss films: How the Grinch Stole Christmas (correct), The Cat in the Hat (correct), and Horton Hears a Who (incorrect).

Rebuttal: I don't understand why he hated the additional characters (Zac Efron, Taylor Swift, Rob Riggle & Betty White) that, in my opinion, gave the movie some much-needed freshness, something more than a three-dimensional, frame-for-frame remake of the 1972 television special that I'm guessing Travers would have preferred.

Complaint: "This 3D, animated, idiotically musicalized version of The Lorax thoroughly debases the genius of the good doctor's book, adding characters, twisting plot points, and replacing Seuss subtlety with Hollywood frenzy."

Rebuttal: The movie had the same amount of heart as the book, if not more. For all it's (appropriate) silliness, it still accurately illustrated the insidious & well-intentioned nature of corporate thinking ("growing the economy") and the merciless & unforgiving consequences it can have not just on the environment but on social conscience. As for "Hollywood frenzy," I have no idea what he's talking about. And what is "Seuss subtlety," anyway? Is it the kind of nuance found only in his books, crafted so artfully at a five-year-old's level of comprehension?

Complaint: "Chris Renaud and Kyle Balda direct strictly for short-attention spans on a fruit-loopy palette that made me want to puke."

Rebuttal: It's a movie for children with the added bonus of placating their hipster parents. You know what made me want to puke? Seeing Babel after he gave it four stars in 2006. Much deserved congratulations to a film with armed middle eastern children, a border patrol snafu and a naked Asian that wasn't half as socially conscious as a cartoon with singing fish. How's that for subtlety?

Travers can't see the forest for the trees (zing!), and he should stop letting some inflated opinion of Dr. Seuss's "art" cloud his judgment about a movie that (for me) was enjoyable, emotional & gave me more than I expected. I think he's forgetting that, when you're a child, you only love Dr. Seuss for the pictures and the rhymes. It's only when you become an adult that you can appreciate the message.

Happy Birthday, Kurt Cobain!

The esteemed Pisces would've been 45 years old today. For your enjoyment, I've arranged some of my favorite Nirvana videos.

"About a Girl"
Sony Music Studios
New York City, New York
November 18, 1993

"Drain You"
Paradiso
Amsterdam, Holland
November 25, 1991

"Junkyard"(or "Token Eastern Song")
The Garage
Denver, Colorado
October 11, 1989

"Spank Thru"
Castello Vi de Porta
Rome, Italy
November 19, 1991

"Scentless Apprentice"
 Pier 48
Seattle, Washington
December 13, 1993

A Thank You to Sleigh Bells

Every once in a while, a musical group comes along that's deserving of our gratitude. One of those groups is Sleigh Bells, the Brooklyn noise-pop duo who made their network television debut last night on Saturday Night Live. I would like to use the following paragraphs to express to them my appreciation.

Thank you for bringing back the Jackson Soloist guitars I remember so fondly from my childhood, watching videos by bands like Def Leppard, Ratt & Living Colour. Culturally, I thought those instruments died after Seattle and could only be seen at Slayer shows and, subsequently, shows put on by bands of kids who went to Slayer shows. Like typewriters, you've shown me everything old can become new again.

Thank you, Derek E. Miller, formerly of Poison The Well, for (probably) going to all those Slayer shows, and for wearing a Nirvana t-shirt in the "Comeback Kid" video with In Utero's winged invisible woman on it (even though I've had that shirt since high school and you're copping my style. Admit it.).

Thank you for giving us Alexis Krauss. Her voice is so tranquilizing, her hair is so shiny & her legs just don't fuckin' quit. After the break-up of Be Your Own Pet, I never thought I'd see a frontwoman who could hold a candle to Jemina Pearl Abegg. I've never been so happy to be wrong.

Thank you both for being from Florida. Anybody who's lived here long enough knows it produces few significant artists. It doesn't really get any more uninspiring than Jupiter & Thonotosassa.

Thank you for a break-out that (with any luck) can take some much-undeserved attention away from less-interesting fellow-New Yorker Lana Del Ray. You have the noise & the power. She has the lips & the sadness.

Thank you for marrying drum machines to Marshall stacks. Somebody had to do it eventually.

But most of all, thank you for being cool and not making music that sucks. Before you, there seemed to be a Deficit of Cool and a Surplus of Suck from the music that's found on television.

Godspeed.

The Best Nirvana Song Ever

Yesterday was my Dad's birthday, so I'm writing about "Aneurysm," my favorite Nirvana song. Most people would never equate their father's birthday with a fairly obscure song by a now-fairly obscure, once-monumental, without-equal punk/rock three-piece. But I do.

When I was still too young to appreciate an unknown song by a band I didn't know I would soon worship before obtaining my driver's license, I was just another ten-year-old that only liked whatever his Dad liked, which was Van Halen. Back then, it seemed like my father had a lot of free time, at least as much as I did, and he would spend most of this time watching footage of (almost) every Van Halen concert ever performed.

My father loved Van Halen so fervently (and still does) that I can say with 99.9 percent certainty that theirs was the first piece of music I had ever heard in my life. I can't imagine my father not playing "Unchained" for me, his first-born son, within the first twenty-four hours of my existence. These things are just what fathers do when their children are born.

By now you're probably asking yourself what this has to do with Nirvana, and it is this: my father loved rock music, and he instilled this Love of Rock in me, almost immediately upon my birth. Most of my early childhood memories involved consuming rock music with my father either (a) in front of a television, or (b) in the passenger seat of his car. It was in the (b) setting that I first heard Nirvana's "Aneurysm." I wouldn't love the song for at least another five years. At the time, its lyrics were my only memory.

I remember the lyrics because they were so cliché. "Come on over & do the twist," opens the first verse after my favorite "gas-then-brake" song-openers of all time, a term I use to describe parts in a song that start small & quiet at first, then launch you into its maximum level of Rock, then simmer you down again like a sonic roller-coaster.

The empty meaning of the first line, and that it sounded like something the Chubby Checker would come up with, is what made it so memorable. Line Two, "Overdo it & have a fit," was interpreted childishly to be a reference to what happened in the song before the verse. Line Three, "I love you so much, it makes me sick," is still clever, regardless of how literally it described Kurt Cobain's love for Tobi Vail of Bikini Kill. Line Four just repeats Line One.

The second verse is same as the first, with the minor adjustment in Line Four, when Kurt sings, "Come on over & shoot the shit." For whatever reason, this got my Dad every time. He found this lyric patently hilarious. It might've had something to do with his upbringing in a small Tennessee town, but he's still entertained by it to this day. When I was ten and singing this lyric in the car with him as the song played, it was the only time I could say the word "shit" without any negative consequences, and being able to do that is memorable for all children.

I was fifteen and already an established fan when I realized how exemplary "Aneurysm" was to Nirvana's catalog. It is the best of everything they were, and probably the best of everything that was Rock & Roll in the 20th Century.

The melody and structure are impeccable. Bass, drums & guitar freak-noise count off the opening measure, then the most perfect arrangement of four chords ever conceived, with Dave Grohl hitting the cymbal one, two, three times at every other fill. It's what heroin must feel like (also referenced lyrically). Its verses are quiet, then loud, quintessentially derivative (and expertly reductive) of anything done by the Pixies, and the chorus (on the Incesticide studio version) employs a '60s-era echo ("Beat it, beat it") reminiscent of a time when women with shimmering bouffants did that sort of thing.

To top it off, the song's lyrical content combines into one idea the only two subjects rock music always glorifies: being in love & doing drugs.

I don't think I would have ever loved this song, or even this band, if it wasn't for that one afternoon in 1996, riding shotgun in my father's Honda Civic hatchback. For all of these reasons, "Aneurysm" will always be my favorite Nirvana song, and my father is the only person I have to thank for that.

The Case for Books

I should start by saying this debate has lost its freshness, that this post is overdue and that it will be long, but I believe that both sides should argue their points ferociously until a consensus is reached. Once this is finally achieved, we can all go back to living our lives.

Here's my position: Books are books. I don't want them to go away, and I don't think they should.

Here's why I bring it up: On Monday, Torie Bosch posted on Slate's Future Tense blog a criticism of comments made by author Jonathan Franzen about e-readers. In case you don't know, e-readers are electronic substitutes for books. Franzen's point was that e-readers are lame because they reduce literature (words in ink on paper) to a few bits of information on a plastic screen. In his opinion, words on paper feel "permanent," unlike words on a screen that could imply the potential for third-party tampering.

Seeming a little burned, Bosch responds that some serious readers prefer a device like the Kindle because of it's convenience when traveling. Franzen: 1, Bosch: 1.

Here's what I think: When I'm on a plane, carrying three books with me if I'm engrossed in three simultaneous plots doesn't seem like such a hassle. What seems like a hassle? Staring at a frozen, E-ink rendering of Joseph Conrad's face when my library of 100 e-books refuses to open for some inexplicable reason.

Franzen's isn't the most radical opinion I've heard. Tom Chivers of the Telegraph scoffs when he posits that Franzen fears "surreptitious" editing by e-publishers, and a few people scoffed a decade ago at the thought of reading a book on a computer.

Does Chivers forget that today burning books is still a common practice among certain people? In the near future they might find it more effective and covert to just gradually "edit" such troublesome texts over an inconspicuous length of time. Perhaps after the author dies and his copyright expires? If the current decline of the publishing industry is any indication, it's that anything is possible if there's a market.

Listen, I don't hate new technology. One top of doing for my book collection (a "library") what my iPod did for my music collection, I think e-readers are cool because they enable me to adjust their text to both my size and font preferences (something I also enjoy with a blog), and a good font totally has the power to improve my day, let alone my reading experience.

I don't hate new technology because I love my MacBook. If it didn't provide me reliable access to the internet, I wouldn't be able to watch shows that aren't provided by my television, get maps and up-to-date pictures of places I've never been to, or purchase four manual typewriters on eBay at below-market prices, laughing in the short-sighted faces of all those owners of mega-chain, brick-and-mortar typewriter retailers. Your days of riding the gravy train are over, assholes! Ha ha ha!

I don't hate new technology because my touchscreen Samsung phone is fucking awesome. I don't have to be near a computer to Tweet anymore, and that's fucking awesome. It has completely revolutionized the way I read news, and that's fucking awesome. It even has a "Books" application that allows me to read Alice in Wonderland and The Picture of Dorian Grey for free. Without it, I would have never known that reading books on my phone totally gives me a migraine.

Although I agree with Franzen's opinion about e-readers, I will admit that I don't agree that people who think differently should be disparaged with pompous lecturing. That being said, I have no patience for anyone of the opinion that books were a primitive shelf decoration from an unenlightened time when peoples' phones didn't cause car accidents or allow eighth-graders to send pictures of their genitals to each other.

Besides, both products have their own niches. E-readers are great for guilty-pleasure trash that no respectable person would ever want on their shelves or be seen enjoying in public: diet books, Letters to Penthouse, anything by Chelsea Handler or Bill O'Reilly. On the flip side, I can't think of anything more ridiculous than reading a book like Atlas Shrugged or Joyce's Ulysses on an electronic device. It's not like a 21st-Century gadget like the e-reader was invented because consumer attention spans have gotten longer.

But our economy doesn't really welcome the idealistic, "share-the-wealth" attitude that I do, so a company like Amazon will do everything in their power to destroy anyone who would even think of taking eyes (and business) away from them, no matter how negligible a fraction. It sucks and it's not fair. Blog about it.

This debate has probably been raging for an entire decade, but what's really frustrating is that it seems like we have the same number of answers & solutions to the myriad of questions & problems we had at the start, which is still "none." With the exception of now having to watch commercials on the Internet, the intersection of media and commerce still has a broken traffic light and everyone's movin' & shakin' when it seems the safest and most appropriate.

If I could make a prediction of what the future would look like based on the looks of the present it would be this: the book will never die. Ink & paper bound tightly inside a virtually indestructible cover is a commodity that is as elegant as it is undecorated; also, a book smells better than anything with a battery. 

For readers to cast aside books, and the love of their contents, for the disposable, inconsequential convenience of another God-forsaken machine seems to me both absurd and disloyal, but these times we're living in are pretty absurd and the cost of loyalty is only getting higher.

For me, this is how it works: when I read a book that I love, I want it on my shelf. I want enough of them on enough shelves to fill an entire room (called a "library"). In that place, whenever I want, I can reach up and pull one down. Feel it, see it, hold it, keep it forever. This copy. These words. I own them. They're mine.

That's my position. Happy Groundhog Day.

Sonnet III

The Wednesday portrait to my left-hand side,
Thin, humming lines whatever divining,
Spilling, combining, designing, signing;
Always returning; a comforting ride.

The scoring pearl-insignia section,
Gauche aroma, raw technological
Resin, down-born for pretty tragical.
Here's for having a decent selection.

Charge percent, all you "scalp'em, Brother" saints.
Clean stacking up like some Kentucky split;
Embarking without the factory hit.
Now you're here, always changing out the paints.

I think he says, "Her legs up in your eight,"
Before she comes, distort at any rate.