It’s a Wonderful Life of Albums: Oracular Spectacular
Everyone should have a psychedelic rock album from their youth, and in 2007 we got ours. Oracular Spectacular was the studio album debut for soon to be indie giants MGMT, and nothing sounds more like my sophomore year of college than this record. Formed by Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden at Wesleyan University in 2002 as freshman, MGMT would explode into the mainstream with a blend of psychedelia, electronica and indie rock that was as catchy as it was brilliant.
The trip starts with the single, “Time to Pretend” a wonderful synthesizer filled ode to dying young and all the fun you can have. There is a point in everyone’s partying youth that this ethos seems plausible, if only momentarily. The hook during the chorus is instantly recognizable, and the lyrics were canon among college students at the time. As they agree to live fast and die young, the future seems absurd, “Yeah it’s overwhelming, but what else can we do? Get jobs in offices and wake up for the morning commute?”
Further on the journey we run into a song about a special lady with the magic touch in, “Electric Feel.” The grooving bass drives a stomping beat that makes you want to move, as slowly as you like of course. This one will hook you with its’ ear worm quality and its hard not to bounce with the chorus, “I said, ‘Ooh girl, shock me like an electric eel, babygirl, turn me on with your electric feel.’” Infectious doesn’t even begin to describe this song at a house party, and this album should come with glow sticks.
The highest charting single on the album, “Kids” which peaked at number nine on the billboard alternative list is one of the best songs of my college years. The synth-heavy track oozes with pop sensibility, the melodic lead synth line that permeates is contagious and it’s really fantastic on large speakers. I have never understood what this song was about, and I have never cared, it’s pop perfection. I have to mention the acoustic cover of the song by The Kooks in 2008 is also worth looking up, in the realm of indie-sublime.
This record came out during the perfect time for me to hear it, and I am nostalgic about it. It’s not rosy retrospection however and I am not overapraising it. It appears on Rolling Stone’s, “Top 500 Albums of All Time” 2012 list at #494, as well as on every roommate’s iPod from the late oughts. It’s a very easy listen with some drinks and friends or your favorite psychedelic sweetener, and it’s catchy choruses just may expand your mind as well.
It’s a Wonderful Life of Albums: American Idiot
Why not Dookie? Because I wasn’t 17 when Dookie came out. The feeling of being neck deep in a Green Day wave was palpably similar to when they first exploded in 1994. Nothing was bigger in 2004 than Green Day’s punk rock opera American Idiot. The album has sold more than 23 million copies to date and there was a resurgence in Green Day’s popularity similar to the release of their major label debut with 1994’s Dookie. This was the Green Day album my generation grew up with.
Released in September 2004 with an election looming, lead singer Billy Joe Armstrong didn’t mince words with his thoughts on then President Bush. With the war on terror in full swing and Fox News, led by anchor Bill O’Riley in prime time, were incessantly selling the war. Fox would emerge as the propaganda arm of the Bush administration, and Billy attacked the zeitgeist: “Don’t wanna be an American idiot, one nation controlled by the media, information age of hysteria, it’s calling out to idiot America.” That lyric from the album opening title track sets the stage for what’s to come, it’s more than a rock opera about Jesus of Suburbia, they were making a statement.
Like many other Americans at the time who weren’t buying the bill of goods being sold about weapons of mass destruction, Billy continues with the chorus of, “Holiday.””I beg to dream and differ from the hollow lies, this is the dawning of the rest of our lives.” Later, before the track fades into billboard hit, “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” the bridge has Billy throw out, “Seig Heil to the president gasman!” As memory serves, this was not hyperbolic, and there were as many people calling Bush and Cheney fascists then as there are about Trump now.
Not everybody was caught up in the politics of the album however, a lot of people just really loved, “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” and what a tune it is. With that soaring chorus and the throng of people singing along, if you walked with Green Day you didn’t walk alone, “My shadow’s the only one that walks beside me, my shallow heart’s the only thing that’s beating.” It was a massive hit song with everybody from the Hot Topic people to the Hollister people, and that’s a rare event.
Thinking back about this time in music, I am glad I was a part of it. Every time I see the album art for this leviathan, I remember it fondly. Calling it the Millennials’ rock opera is fine with me, and it did eventually become a Broadway musical. Is it better than Dookie? No. Is it also great? Yes. American Idiot was a cultural benchmark of the mid 2000s and holds up today, let yourself drown in the power chords.
It’s a Wonderful Life of Albums: Get Born
Some would call it selling out, but I think it’s a pretty good sign if Apple calls and says we want to use your song to promote the music device that defined a generation. Australian rock outfit Jet’s debut album Get Born features so many great songs that if you weren’t there for it you might ask which one they used. “Are You Gonna Be My Girl?” is so upbeat and energetic, it’s as if they intentionally made the song to accent the black outline of a person dancing with an iPod to it.
The tambourine and bass intro that set the stage for the delectable main riff on, “Are You Gonna Be My Girl?” set the oughts on fire. It doesn’t require any sort of preparation, or greater thought process, it’s binary: Are you a human being or not? If you are, this song causes involuntary body movement in people. “So one, two, three take my hand and come with me, because you look so fine that I really wanna make you mine.” What else do you need?
There simply wasn’t a more fun song in the summer of 2004 than, “Cold Hard Bitch.” Back in the waning days of call-in requests to radio stations, there was a litany of hilarious dedications to ex-girlfriends and ex-wives. Often the DJ would egg them on until they let out a deeply satisfied, “She was a cold hard bitch.” The guitar on this track hooks you from the jump, and leads you down a road of playful misogyny, “Gonna take her home cause she’s over romancin’, don’t wanna hold hands and talk about our little plans alright.”
If you need respite from the rock for a moment you’ll find it with the breather ballad, “Look What You’ve Done.” It opens to a sad piano lamenting, “Take my photo off the wall if it just don’t sing for you, ‘cause all that’s left has gone away and there’s nothing there for you to prove.” In this song we see the versatility of the band and it provides some soothing mellow tones to an otherwise energy filled romp.
The album spawned five singles and sold over four million copies, it has something for everyone. The band enjoys a break from chasing tail and takes aim at the disc jockey on, “Rollover D.J.” “I wanna move but it don’t feel right, ‘cause you been playing other people’s songs all night.” “Radio Song” also offers a nice relaxed album track for you to fall in love with, this album uses all 48 minutes to the fullest. To not love this album, you would have to be some kinda cold, hard…Well nevermind.
It’s a Wonderful Life of Albums: Continuum
John Mayer was a polarizing figure before he broke Taylor Swift’s heart, frankly for a period of time he was a ladykiller who also played guitar. Thankfully for me, the guitar part was doing all the heavy lifting. His first two albums Room for Squares and Heavier Things were wildly successful albums in their own right, but it was clear John wanted to step out of the shadow of being the guy who wrote, “Your Body is a Wonderland.”
Continuum was golden era John Mayer, coming off the heels of his John Mayer Trio project with legends Pino Palladino and Steve Jordan, he was in peak form. This is 2006, three years after Bush declared, “Mission Accomplished” and well after the honeymoon period of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. “Waiting On the World to Change” is about as close to a protest song as a pop artist will get, and it’s fantastic, “Now if we had the power, to bring our neighbors home from war, they would have never missed a Christmas, no more ribbons on the door.”
Elaborating upon this disgruntled feeling, “Belief” echos a similar sentiment, and who could forget the Islamophobia that ran through the country like vodka through an Alpha Kappa bro: “We’re never gonna win the world, we’re never gonna stop the war, we’re never gonna beat this if belief is what we’re fighting for.” It’s not all gloom from the oughts, there is also blues, “Gravity” and “Vultures” are fantastic songs written during his time with the Trio. In addition, there is a completely respectable cover of Jimi Hendrix’, “Bold as Love.”
The song that hit the hardest on this album with its’ weeping lead guitar is, “Slow Dancing in a Burning Room.” John really gets after the solo on this slowly ending tragedy of a relationship: “I’ll make the most of all the sadness, you’ll be a bitch because you can, you try to hit me just to hurt me, so you leave me feeling dirty, ‘cause you can’t understand.” This is John Mayer’s best work, on his best album. It shows how much he can squeeze out of a Fender Stratocaster, and really makes you forget the bubblegum pop stuff, as good as it is.
If you wrote off John Mayer twenty years ago as fluff for the tabloids, you would be wrong, but it was easy to get that impression. I could tell you it sold five million copies in a post Napster world, but that’s just a number. I could tell you there’s another side of John, and he explores it here, but that’s subjective. What I will tell you is that this album is his best work in the studio, and stop this train, I wanna get off and listen to this album again.
It’s a Wonderful Life of Albums: Parachutes
It wasn’t the easiest thing to like Coldplay after the movie, “40 year old Virgin” came out with the side-splitter, “You know how I know you’re gay? You listen to Coldplay.” If I were a more scrappy individual, I might have gone to blows about this album with a few idiots who echoed the sentiment of the joke. Neanderthals aside, this debut was so good that it beat out homophobia in a small religious town, truly a miracle back in the days when Coldplay was a rock band.
Selling 13 million copies since its’ release in 2000, the album achieved worldwide critical and commercial success. Coldplay would go on to become one of the biggest pop acts in the world with the Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends album being a line of demarcation away from their roots. Chris Martin puts on a hell of a live show, and usually only has positive things to say. The mainstream works that followed are good, but I will forever be thankful for those first three rock albums.
With just shy of three billion streams on Spotify, “Yellow” might be one of those fleeting examples of a band’s most popular song also being their best. Four sons of school teachers caught lightning in a bottle for this one, “Look at the stars, see how they shine for you, and all the things that you do.” Lyrics that paired with an intro that explodes like the big bang when the lead guitar comes in, they don’t play songs this good in church.
“Yellow” was accompanied by two other excellent singles in, “Shiver” and “Trouble” but for me it’s the album opener that shines brighter. “Don’t Panic”, with its’ nervous climbing guitar line and the ending suggestion that, “Oh all that I know, there’s nothing here to run from, cause yeah everybody here’s got somebody to lean on.” It’s a short song at just over two minutes, but it sets the tone for the album as a whole and as it leads into the next track, “Shiver” it really makes me miss when Coldplay featured guitars more.
The moral of the story is that anyone can turn Coldplay into a punchline, they became very popular, and if that’s how you choose to waste your energy, okay. I no longer get mad about it though, I just feel sympathy for people that can’t enjoy Parachutes, A Rush of Blood to the Head or X and Y. To end on a positive note, we have come a long way since that silly joke, and are better for it. You know how I know you like Coldplay? You listen to good music.
Isn’t that John Candy?
Maybe I take a little too much joy in it because is was at the expense of the Cincinnati Bengals, maybe it was because I grew up playing Tecmo Bowl on NES with Montana to Rice becoming my religion. However, there is no maybe in the huddle on the final drive of Super Bowl XXIII, where Joe Montana casually says to his men, “Isn’t that John Candy?” They laugh, and then complete a game winning drive with a touchdown, one of four for Montana and the Niners in the eighties.
It is truly a game of inches when you think about the end of the XXXIV Super Bowl and the great game that it was. The greatest show on turf St. Louis Rams were on the sideline for the defining play, as Kevin Dyson came up one yard short of the end zone. You wanted to see this win for Kurt Warner, but I don’t think anyone wished that kind of Bill Buckner-esque bad ending on Dyson.
My dad will hate me for this, but one of my favorite plays in Super Bowl history is the Elway dive. Super Bowl XXXII on a 3rd and 6 Elway gets 8 as he throws his body, and his whole career really, at the 3 defenders. When he left the ground he was a hero, when he came down with the first down he became a Super Bowl winner. Terrell Davis deserves a shout out for this Super Bowl as well, he was a workhorse.
For you idiots thinking something is fixed, let me take you back to the face of the league Peyton Manning getting out coached and outplayed by New Orleans, who successfully recovered the second half opening onside kick of the century. I am a Manning apologist, but Drew Brees winning this one for New Orleans was the way it was supposed to be.
So when you are on your Super Bowl journey tonight, get the best food, this is the cheat day of all cheat days. Enjoy your friends if you go to a party and resist the narrative that the game is fixed in any way. Regardless of the number of times they put Taylor Swift on TV, it has no impact on the ten 300lb offensive and defensive lineman that decide the game in the trenches, it has no impact on Mahomes being the best quarterback in the game. I’m gonna try to enjoy Kendrick Lamar at halftime, I know he’s a legend, and you should all treat yourselves too, Chiefs cover (-1.5).
College Football Idiot Savant Season Review
Hello friends, we hope you have gotten some enjoyment out of the weekly picks, and some laughs from the terrible jokes. We ended up 2-1 for the national title game, because Notre Dame let us down and allowed the Buckeyes over 400 yards of offense, I shed a tear. We finish 30-22 for the year, but nobody cares today, we got the last one right. Class was missed this morning in Columbus, Emily’s co-worker already had a national championship t-shirt on, and the rest of the college football world is going to love to hate us again.
I’ve never been happier to win $3 in my life, three separate $1 bets on Ohio State to cover (-9.5 and -8.5) respectively. That game should, in the end, leave no doubt in a rational persons’ mind that The Ohio State Buckeyes are the best team in the nation this season. It has been enjoyable to write for those who read and I will consider doing it next season, while flawed, the playoff delivered and that was the reason I started this weekly piece. This has been a fantastic Buckeye team to watch this season, and they deserve all the praise for living up to the expectations here, national champions.
How’s it feel to be in Ann Arbor now?
South Bend?
All of the South?
I leave the Notre Dame fans with a reading from the book of Lebowski: “I guess that’s the way the whole durned human comedy keeps perpetuatin’ itself down through the generations. Westward the wagons, across the sands of time until we – ah, look at me. I’m ramblin’ again.” See you in August again Texas, O-H!
College Football Idiot Savant National Championship
(In an effort to remain as objective as possible with the picks this week, I have chosen to write from the Notre Dame perspective. This should prevent me from conscious or unconscious bias. I respect my right to do this on behalf of a roommate I had in college who did a stint at Notre Dame. I am not going to pretend our catholic upbringing doesn’t come into this as well, it does.)
It’s been such a blessed season friends! Liveforthepage is at 28-21 for the season’s predictions and we now stare down one final athletic competition between wonderful college athletes fighting for school pride. There will be a national championship to decide the best college football team in the nation for this season, and in a new playoff format, kinda like coming home to fresh apple pie from your loving wife.
Prediction 1: There are total gentleman on both sides of this intercollegiate competition, but I think the ones wearing the golden helmets of the lord just have something here. They will hold the secular and superior Ohio State offense to under 400 total yards during the game. Notre Dame is going to need a Tebow-like performance out of Riley Leonard on the other side of the ball, luckily he puts God first at all times and will be efficient on 3rd down.
Prediction 2: Let’s be honest, we are all here to spread Jesus’ message to the world, and what better way to do that than to have our team in a championship! I am willing to bet any amount of money in the world, which means nothing because Jesus is my savior and I would live in a box on Skid Row with him. Even so, our faithful brothers at Notre Dame would never join a conference. Do you know how much NBC money would be taken out of the coffers at church if Notre Dame joined a conference and became legitimate?! (Both Notre Dame and Ohio State players will wear bible verses on their eye-black.)
Prediction 3: I will tell you what brothers and sisters, this is a tall task. But I am again conflicted, there seems to be illicit commerce taking place in the house of the lord. Jesus would turn over the tables of these gamblers trying to say that Notre Dame is eight and a half points less likely to win than the Ohio State! Clearly we need to put the entire collection basket on Ohio State covering (-8.5).
This next game will truly be a test of faith—light a candle, unless you’re in Los Angeles, then definitely pray. Love the sinner, hate the sin, Ohio State has just been too good this year, probably savoring all of the seven deadly sins. They will get their gratification here on earth on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in Atlanta, but Notre Dame will have their victory in paradise.
College Football Idiot Savant Playoff Semifinal.
With the clutter is mostly eliminated from the playoff we see the cream rise to the top with the final four teams. Liveforthepage comes off a 2-1 quarterfinal stage to bring us to 26-20 for the year, and we aim to continue the winning record in the final two weeks. As always, liveforthepage is not responsible for gambling losses associated with these predictions, please be a degenerate responsibly.
Prediction 1: However, I just got a tip last week from real wiseguy who has Notre Dame in the final. I haven’t really been impressed with Penn State (+1.5) and there isn’t really an incentive to take the points here. They may not be playing in the shadow of touchdown Jesus, but I think this is where Penn State’s story ends. While the thought of an all Big Ten final is appealing, the Buckeyes beating the golden domers in the final is too damn good. Notre Dame covers.
Prediction 2: Don’t mess with Texas…Seriously don’t mess with Texas if you want them to cover a game for you. Don’t mess with Texas…Unless you’re an Arizona State running back. Don’t mess with Texas…Well, let’s just say they have an inflated opinion of themselves even though they haven’t done anything since Vince Young played quarterback there. I’m not going to predict a thrashing as compete as what happened against Oregon, but this game is ripe for a cover at Ohio State (-6).
Prediction 3: I don’t live in their skin, but I have to imagine this Ohio State team is pretty fresh after barely having to do anything in the second half against Oregon. They should be rested and they are the best team left, which is why I am going with offensive yards, over 400. This Texas secondary just let a running back throw a touchdown on them last week, our #1 wide receiver room in the nation should split them up like a filet knife.
Jesus Quintana once said, “I see you rolled your way into the semis. Dios Mio, man. Liam and me, we’re gonna fuck you up.” Like that character from The Big Lebowski, Jesus will be present in the semis with Notre Dame, but that will be their last great line in this movie. The Dude and Walter are Ohio State in this scenario, and you can bet they will be abiding on January 20th.
College Football Idiot Savant Playoff Week 2
Happy New Year Internet! It was an exciting first round of the new playoff format that saw liveforthepage improve to 24-19 for the year after a sweep of last week’s predictions. It’s time for more holiday college football and we’ve got some great picks that you can take to the bank. Of course if you don’t have money in the bank already, don’t bet on anything.
Prediction 1: New Years Eve kicks off with a pairing that I would have never predicted at the beginning of the season. I grew up watching Boise State’s rise to prominence, and who could forget the trick play game against Oklahoma? However, I just don’t think a Mountain West conference team deserves a bye, and the spread line of (-11) Penn State would indicate that. Happy valley will be happier by midnight, but only straight up, this one could be as Lee Corso used to say: “closer than the experts predict.”
Prediction 2: You can make a lot of hay betting against Texas to cover, but as we look to the new year I will try to embrace SEC arrogance and pick Texas (-12.5) to turn over a new leaf. It’s not out of a preponderance of evidence that I think Texas can run away with this wildly, but a reflection on how little I think of the Big 12. How Arizona State is a four seed will be looked at with questions about the playoff format, as the second team with a bye goes bye-bye. Texas covered in peaches instead of sour grapes.
Prediction 3: Old guard college football fans should see a lot of tradition in a matchup between Ohio State and Oregon at the Rose Bowl. After the first game earlier in the season at Oregon, many thought we might see this pairing again, and it’s suitable that the Rose Bowl is the venue for what could be the ‘real national title game.’ I trust that Will Howard has trained his knee to get down to the ground in a timely fashion since the first game, and the Buckeyes win straight up.
I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday, enjoy the games and eat as much bad food as you want. For the fourth playoff game, I don’t feel strongly about one side or the other, but Notre Dame is 0-3 all time against Georgia and I don’t think that record will improve for them. Notre Dame has been a playoff pretender since there has been a playoff. Enjoy the games and don’t forget about your family members, they need bad food too.
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