Tag Archives: 2000

How to Disappear Completely

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I’ve been thinking lately about how the eternal on-ness of global connection has given way to the loss of self to some degree. Now, I’m not necessarily saying that the incredible ease in which I can go online and find something I’m looking for is inherently bad — just that I often remember and kind of miss that it wasn’t always this easy to fall down a rabbit hole. And I’m not necessarily saying that this global connection is breeding some kind of conformity, because if anything, it’s done the exact opposite and opened several social avenues for people who might not have had this access in the past.

I’m just saying that if I’m passive about this global connection, that I just let it wash over me with minimal reaction or emotional resonance, then all it’s ever been is a white noise distraction and a folly.

Right now as I’m writing this on late Sunday afternoon, I’m listening to Radiohead’s Kid A, an album released twenty-six years ago this month, and I recall buying it on cassette at Newbury Comics in downtown Amherst, and listening to it on the way home. Driving through the back woods of central Massachusetts on a cold afternoon, the New England foliage just reaching its peak. I’m looking forward to getting home to work on A Division of Souls on my PC in my parents’ basement. We had the internet back then of course — it was dial-up and the local phone lines wouldn’t upgrade for another year or so — but I was more focused on writing my new novel instead of futzing around online. I saved that for the late nights on weekends when I had time to kill and nobody to accidentally disconnect me.

I say this because I find it morbidly fascinating that I can listen to Kid A and am immediately connecting with the music on a deeper and closer level, as I hadn’t had as much distraction, nor was I fully plugged in and mainlining sounds from hither and yon. I’d given myself more time and patience to resonate with the music I surrounded myself with. And then I’ll put on, say, A Moon Shaped Pool from 2016, and it’s much harder for me to connect. I know what it is, and it’s not that I’ve lost interest in the band. It’s because in those ensuing ten years, I’ve ingested so much music, most of it passively or merely in passing, that that resonance isn’t nearly as strong.

Is it because my memory is almost full? Or is it because I’ve rewired my brain so much over the years that the connections aren’t as easy to revisit? I’ve been going through my library and ‘retiring’ a good portion of it — saving the secondary backup but deleting it from the main source drive — in order to rectify this. I think of it as selling my old physical copies at record stores back in the day, getting rid of the excess to lighten the load a bit and maybe get something back from it.

Why do I want to reinvest in this ‘resonance’, as I keep calling it? Well, it’s because that’s the primal reason for me loving music in the first place. A song that sings to me. A style or a genre that inspires or influences me in one way or another. It’s still there, I know it is, it’s just become so much harder to reach because of this passive intake and its ensuing clutter.

Listen in Silence VIII…and a life change

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I remember making this one at the tail end of my years at HMV, and I’ve come back to it recently when I’ve been working through the Mendaihu Universe Legacy Soundtrack list. It was made in early August 2000 when it was clear that I wasn’t long for that store. My quality of work hadn’t changed, at least not in my view, but that was my then-boss’ issue: I apparently was too set in my ways and couldn’t (and wouldn’t) bend to his will. You’ve all heard the story of our frequent arguments leading up to a final “you need to quit or else I’ll fire you” confrontation.

Still, I’d hoped I’d last longer at the store because it was one of my favorite jobs I’d ever had. [To this day I still have the occasional dream about it, twenty-six years on.] Because of this, there seems to be a slight feeling of melancholy in this mix. Not one of spiraling gloom like the mixes I’d made back in my teen years, but one of things coming to an end. The energy here is muted for the most part, with only a few songs reaching any high octane.

I remember listening to this one a lot in my car during my weekend road trips, but also when I started heading down to the Pioneer Valley more often, considering I’d be starting a new job down there soon enough. After several years of heading east towards the metro Boston area, I’d be returning west to my old haunts of central Massachusetts; quieter, calmer, and definitely a shorter distance. I had to remind myself that this wasn’t going to be about attempting to relive my late 80s past but creating something new.

So while I was sad that I was leaving HMV, I was looking forward to starting a new chapter. One that meant a new day job, but also meant a much-needed revitalization of this science fiction trilogy that I’d been hammering away at for a few years already.

SIDE A:
1. Richard Ashcroft, “A Song for the Lovers”
2. Doves, “Sea Song”
3. The Dandy Warhols, “Godless”
4. BT, “Satellite”
5. Stone Temple Pilots, “Sour Girl”
6. Porcupine Tree, “Last Chance to Evacuate Planet Earth Before It Is Recycled”
7. Belle and Sebastian, “Don’t Leave the Light On Baby”
8. Moby, “Porcelain”
9. Black Box Recorder, “The Facts of Life”
SIDE B
1. The (International) Noise Conspiracy, “Smash It Up”
2. Longpigs, “Blue Skies” (not available on Spotify)
3. Lit, “Over My Head”
4. BT, “Never Gonna Come Back Down”
5. Eve 6, “Promise”
6. Everclear, “Wonderful”
7. The Dandy Warhols, “Nietzsche”
8. Catherine Wheel, “Sparks Are Gonna Fly”
9. Badly Drawn Boy, “Another Pearl”
10. The Urge, “It’s My Turn to Fly”
11. Cypress Hill, “(Rock) Superstar”

Music Is My Radar

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I’ve been listening to a lot of music from 2000-2001 lately, and this song popped up on my playlist. Blur can be kind of odd at times, but this one’s strange even by their standards. It was a new track to sell up their Best of album that dropped on 30 October 2000, but it pretty much sounds like an extended jam session set in a single key, feedback and all. It might be filler, but it’s also infectious and demands to be cranked up.

Still, one of my favorite songs of theirs, and I absolutely love the oddball video they made for it.

Dividing Lines: When the Trilogy Soundtrack Really Started

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I’ve been going through my music library for the year 2000 to revisit what I would be listening to in the Belfry, and I think I’ve figured out the point where I knew the HMV days were truly over and when the Belfry days kicked into high gear. It’s actually a surprisingly stark line that jives with when I was given the quit-or-be-fired ultimatum from my terrible boss. It’s August of 2000, and by the end of the month I’d be gone.

The Dandy Warhols, Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia, 1 August 2000. Although I’m almost certain I bought this in my final days at HMV and listened to it around that time, I want to say this was an album I spent more time listening to in the Belfry. I wasn’t even the biggest DW fan; by this point I’d heard their earlier hit “Not if You Were the Last Junkie On Earth” for the zillionth time on WFNX and did not like it to begin with, hearing “Godless” turned the tables for me. I remember listening to this one a lot during the summer evenings and weekends while figuring out what I wanted to do with The Phoenix Effect.

Between then and the end of the month, I did pick up a handful of CDs both from the record store and from Newbury Comics — by then my weekly comic book run had started to include a quick stop there to look for things my own store might not carry (or sell cheaper).

Goldfrapp, Felt Mountain, 11 September 2000. I’d left the record store by this point and was just starting at Yankee Candle — a westerly commute instead of an easterly one, and twenty miles shorter at that — but I really didn’t want to disconnect from my weekly accumulation of music. I could just as easily buy copies of my favorite music magazines, CMJ (College Music Journal) and ICE (an industry magazine featuring news on new releases) at Newbury Comics. I think this was one of the first that I bought there after starting the new job.

VAST, Music for People, 12 September 2000. I know I bought this one the same day as the Goldfrapp album (and the Barenaked Ladies album Maroon as well). I’d been a big fan of Jon Crosby’s first album under the VAST moniker and while this one felt slightly more upbeat and less steeped in Nine Inch Nails-esque gloom, it featured some amazing tracks that got a lot of play in the Belfry.

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I actually wouldn’t start writing A Division of Souls for another year and a half, maybe early 2002 after the frustrations brought about by The Phoenix Effect and its sequel The Mihari, which I was writing at the time. The two books do have a lot of similarities to A Division of Souls, however, and it was simply a decision to stop work on both TPE and TM and completely start over from scratch. [Very similar to what I’d done recently with Theadia, actually.]

The music that inspired the project, however, started around this time when I switched day jobs. It wasn’t a clean switch of course, as I actually worked second shift for my first couple of months (3 – 11pm or thereabouts) and wouldn’t move to first shift until sometime in November. It would be around that time when my writing sessions would truly become more stable and frequent, as would my weekly trips to Newbury to pick up new music.

Revisiting music from the trilogy

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I said I was going to do it and I’m doing it now: I’m currently going through the albums and singles from 2000 onwards as a soundtrack to the Bridgetown Trilogy Remaster Project. I started the revisit on Monday afternoon on my day off with William Orbit’s remixed take on Barber’s Adagio for Strings, one of my all-time favorite classical pieces.

I know, this is sort of an arbitrary place to start and doesn’t really line up with the writing chronology. I’d started and finished The Phoenix Effect (the early ‘demo’ version, if you want to continue the music analogy) but hadn’t yet started writing its aborted sequel The Mihari (that would take place that summer if I’m not mistaken), but the actual day-one of A Division of Souls wouldn’t take place until late 2001 or early 2002.

So why start the relistening at January 2000? Partly because I knew my days were numbered at the record store by then. I still loved the job and wished I could stay there forever, but a) I could definitely see the downturn of the music industry happening in real time, and b) I wasn’t sure how much longer I could handle the store manager without eventually ragequitting. It was also a bit of a weird time musically; grunge had long given way to adult alternative which had given way to meathead alt-metal, and pop was having a huge resurgence with its sugary overproduced electronica.

A lot of music I listened to at the time felt a bit out of place. I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to listen to, because very little of it was resonating with me at a deep level, as it once had just a few years previous. That could very well be due to personal issues and changes, and at the time I was feeling unmoored.

Still, I was willing to see where it all took me. Life changes and all.

Listening to 2000’s era Cure, Pt 1: Bloodflowers

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I stopped listening to The Cure so much probably about the time 1996’s Wild Mood Swings came out, and for a few reasons: one, I’d long grown out of my penchant for sinking into a depressive spiral with Pornography and Disintegration as its soundtrack, and two, WMS was just not a Cure album I could sink my teeth into no matter how much I tried. [In hindsight, I think it was a mix of it being too long and it feeling a bit too overproduced.]

So when 2000’s Bloodflowers was announced — and billed as a spiritual link to those two classic dark and gloomy albums I just mentioned — I looked forward to hearing it. It was released in my final year working at HMV, so as you can well imagine, it got a lot of play in the back office where I worked, as well as in the Belfry where I was just about to embark on writing the Bridgetown Trilogy. To me, Bloodflowers was a long-awaited return to form that I’d missed.

It’s an album that was purposely written to be listened to as a full album, and there were no official singles released from it, although the meandering “Out of This World” and the catchy “Maybe Someday” were both provided with promotional edits for radio play. The latter got significant play on WFNX at the time.

And thankfully, the rest of the album features some absolutely lovely deep cuts that became favorites, like the song “There Is No If…” which Robert Smith had written during his late teens but never tried recording, fearing that it was too cheesy, until he delivered a devastatingly desperate version here.

There’s also the other rarity here: Smith singing about getting older. “39” was written about him slowly approaching his forties. Would he continue down this road of writing his patented doom and gloom, or write something uplifting and trite? There’s also a little bit of concern here: he’s honestly surprised he’s lasted this long, given his drug and alcohol infused past.

I remember the critical response to this album being mixed: some were absolutely thrilled that they’d returned somewhat to form, while some felt a bit like they’d heard this many times before. I can definitely feel its similarity to Disintegration — minus the reverb-drenched echoes on everything — in that it felt like something coming to a close. Whether it was youth, bacchanalia, or goth gloom, it definitely felt like closure.

It would be another four years before their next album, although they would spend most of that time going on extended tours and releasing a greatest hits album with two new songs and a box set of b-sides and rarities.

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Coming up next: The Cure and the Curiosa Tour