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Tunes

Best tunes of 1992: #26 Dada “Dizz knee land”

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Dada was a nonsensical modernist artist movement that occurred early on in the 20th century. I remember learning about it during the art history segments of my visual art electives back in high school. To be honest, though, it wasn’t my thing. I always preferred the Impressionists, to which these Dada artists were partially reacting.

Dada is also the name of a three-piece alternative rock band from California. Unfortunately, I know less about the band than I do the art movement. In fact, this case is much like the last post in this series, where the tune about which I am writing is the only song I knew by the band for years, except here, I have yet to explore Dada’s catalogue of tunes any further.

“Dizz knee land” was the band’s first single and luckily/unluckily for them, it was huge, easily outselling and outshining anything else they would ever produce thereafter. It was on constant rotation on my local alternative radio station, which is where I first heard it, and I later put it on a mixed tape I was making at a friend’s house with her CD collection (same university friend from that previous post). “Dizz knee land” would go on to help Dada’s debut album, “Puzzle”, sell more than half a million copies and spend a few weeks loitering on the Billboard charts. The band released four more albums over the years, the most recent of which came out in 2004, and save for a hiatus between 1999 and 2003, is still officially kicking around.

Our song today is a fun one, as you can tell by its title (the misspelling likely being a way to avoid legal wranglings). It begins with a chiming guitar lick that carries on through the song, dragging with it the vocal melody, then, a drum fill, and we’re off on Michael Gurley’s litany play on the Super Bowl Disneyland commercials.

I just ran away from home
Now I’m going to Dizz Knee Land
I just crashed my car again
Now I’m going to Dizz Knee Land
I just robbed a grocery store
I’m going to Dizz Knee Land
And I just flipped off President George
I’m going to Dizz Knee Land

You get the idea. Funny thing is, and I learned this after years of listening to this tune, going to Disneyland is also used in some circles as a euphemism for going to prison. Changes the meaning, somewhat, doesn’t it?

For the rest of the Best tunes of 1992 list, click here.

Categories
Tunes

Best tunes of 2011: #8 Cults “Go outside”

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I have a very distinct memory of listening to this very song one early morning late in 2011, in that burred season between late fall and early winter. I was re-listening to a handful of albums released that year, trying to nail down my inaugural best albums list for my old blog, Music Insanity. Cults’ self-titled debut was one of two debut albums that caught me by surprise and snuck its way into the running for 2011.

As track one slid into track two, I was standing at Bayview station awaiting the arrival of my commuter train to take me into work. It was so early it was still dark so I could clearly see the lightly falling snow glinting from the glow of the fluorescent light posts. I was shuffling my doc martens in the thinnest of coatings on the asphalt waiting platform, causing rivulets of feathered snow to amass around my feet. But then “Go outside” burst through my iPod earbuds in earnest and it was like the sun came out, warming me from outside and in, and it was as if summer had made a glorious return.

Okay. Yes. I am exaggerating but I am sure you are getting the point here.

Cults are a two-piece indie band from New York, made up of Madeline Follin on vocals and Brian Oblivion (sounds like a stage name to me) on vocals and everything else. When I first listened to the album, I thought to myself: “These two make no attempt to hide their love for shimmering, sunny 60s pop”. Madeline’s vocals are so light, almost to the point of child-like, that it’s unbelievably shocking when she drops the F-bomb at the end of one of the album’s tracks. And that’s probably the point. The music that backs her is washed and filled with effects, so much so that it is sometimes difficult to tell the different instruments apart.

“Go outside” is still incidentally my favourite track on the album but it is by no means an aberration. It is a seemingly light and fluffy song about going outside to enjoy life outdoors but if you listen a bit closer, you can discern soundbite samples of cult leader Jim Jones. Adding another layer of sinister is the video’s use of archive news footage from Jonestown. Indeed, the song seems to be employing, much like throughout the rest of the album, a theatrical technique I learned in high school drama class when studying Bertolt Brecht: namely, disguising that dark subject matter behind the cheery veneer of the music. If you’ve ever listened to the lyrics of “Mack the Knife” (by Brecht, not Cults), you know what I mean.

But before I start getting highbrow or anything, I’m going to drop the mic right there and allow the song to speak for itself. Enjoy.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 2011 list, click here.

Categories
Vinyl

Vinyl love: Ride “Nowhere”

(Vinyl Love is a series of posts that quite simply lists, describes, and displays the pieces in my growing vinyl collection. You can bet that each record was given a spin during the drafting of each corresponding post.)

Artist: Ride
Album Title: Nowhere
Year released: 1990
Year reissued: 2010
Details: 180 gram

The skinny: A Facebook friend invited me to do one of those things where you post a picture a day for 10 days and then invite 10 of your own friends to do the same. Normally, I don’t go in for those things but in this case, I couldn’t resist choosing, revisiting, and sharing the pics of 10 albums in my vinyl collection that had a great impact on me and my musical tastes. So today was day ten and this album here is the final album cover I posted to my Facebook wall for this exercise: Ride’s “Nowhere”. It’s not very often that I agree with Pitchfork’s assessment of a song (see hype sticker above) and a band, but Ride”s debut and the single shared below are definitely amongst the greatest moments in the original shoegaze movement. This reissue was pressed by Rhino Records back on the album’s 20th anniversary and is of the original track list. Eight songs, all of them mighty.

Standout track: “Vapour trail”