The Rise and Fall of 311

Nick Hexum, Doug “SA” Martinez, Tim Mahoney, Chad Sexton, P-Nut. 311 was the first band I ever cared about enough that I knew all the members’ names. The alt-rockers from Omaha blasted into the ‘90s with an uncanny ability to cross and fuse musical styles that came to shape the next 10 years of alt-rock – but no one was ever as good at mixing reggae, rap, rock, funk, punk, jazz, and latin influences to create such a unique sound. The first time I heard their third major label album, the self-titled 311, was on my sister Summer’s stereo, and I was hooked.

The song "Six", from Grassroots.
I quickly acquired my own copy of the album, and over the next few years I purchased the rest of their then-released discography. By the end of 10th grade, I could sing along to every single track on their first four major label albums, Music, Grassroots, 311, and Transistor. I managed to get my hands on a pirated copy of one of their early independently released albums, Unity, and their collection of early material, Omaha Sessions. Then came Soundsystem and something had changed. Something about the music was unsettling and in some way didn’t feel like the 311 I’d come to love.

Over the course of the next 10 years more albums followed – From Chaos, Evolver, Don’t Tread on Me, and Uplifter, and I like each one less than the last. The music had become softer, less edgy. The band that had, for me at least, defined the high-energy alternative rock of the ‘90s was starting to sound tired.

311 had always used their lyrics to promote a message of peace, love, and unity; like modern hippies with electric guitars and distortion pedals. Their sounds was usually pressing and heavy, occasionally lighter, slower, or more jovial, but always unique in its pan-generic hodge-podge of greatness. One of the things that made those early albums so great was that they were aggressive – heavy guitars and sharp drums accompanied the fast rapping and oft-distorted, angsty vocals that defined 311’s early high-energy sound.

The lyrics covered various topics such as anger, peace, standing up to authority, living in harmony, drug use, sex, the importance of respecting others, and farting in your bandmate’s face. Part of what made the music so damned interesting was the dichotomy of the aggressive sound with the peace-promoting lyrics. But with each new album after Transistor, the guitars became lighter, the rapped vocals began to disappear, and the diversity of influences shrank. Their most recent outings, Don’t Tread on Me and Uplifter can accurately be described as reggae-rock. 311 became the kind of music that frat bros listen to at the beach; no more room for mosh pits or headbanging. Even their lyrics became uninteresting, focusing more on sappy love songs and harmless platitudes about the peaceful feeling of being drunk. Snooze.

"Golden Sunlight" from Uplifter. What is this crap?


What happened? I don’t know if they saw all the money Jack Johnson et al were making and sold out, they just got older, or all the years of pot use made them incapable of being aggressive. Whatever it was, I wish 311 would find something to get mad about.

Wild Strawberries

I’ve long believed that the best media – be it movies, music, plays, paintings, sculptures, etc. – are those pieces that force you to re-examine yourself and question whether there aren’t little facets of who you are that need some adjusting. Not that all great art should be life-changing, there’s clearly a lot of fantastic art being created by very talented people that is not. Rather, any piece that causes introspection and reevaluation, in my book, joins the larger canon of great art. Perhaps more than any other medium, film has the power to turn the camera inward and show us where we ourselves are lacking. A great example of this forced introspection is Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957).


This old black-and-white from Sweden’s best known (and perhaps one of film's most pessimistic) director tells the surprisingly optimistic story of Dr. Isak Borg, a physician and professor near the end of his life who is returning to his hometown to be honored in a ceremony there. Along the way, Dr. Borg meets a handful of other travelers who come to represent facets of Dr. Borg’s personality and past. Through his interactions with these various selves, and with the help of flashbacks, visions, and dreams, Dr. Borg comes to recognize that pain is no one’s fault, that he is not a victim. Furthermore, he learns to appreciate the value of forgiving others and himself.

How often are we at fault for the pain that we experience? More importantly, how often do we ascribe those painful experiences to the failings of others? How willing are we to forgive ourselves and others, accepting that pain is simply a part of life and that blame is not an adequate salve? As Dr. Borg learns, we all have pain, disappointment, and regrets – it’s how we respond to them that makes us who we are.

Interactive sound generators

Lately, I've been really fascinated by these interactive sound generators you can find on the internet. Below are two of my favorites. I find the idea of making music from a visual source extremely cool.



Otomata
With this link, you can click on random squares within the grid, then assign them a behavior - meaning a direction they can move. They move as far as they can within the field, then when they hit a wall, they create a tone and bounce back in the opposite direction. The result is pretty cool.
 
Matrix
Here, you can click on cells within the matrix to produce a design, which then gets turned into musical tones - it's sort of like a graph where the x-axis represents time, and the y-axis represents a tone.
 
Alright, you probably think these are kind of lame, but I literally played with both of these for at least 30 minutes when I found them.

Resurrected!

I've decided to revive the old blog. Life lately has been one change after another, so in keeping with that theme, I've decided to change this blog to become a journal of the things - movies, music, websites, etc - that I like. No more incessant ramblings (I know, I know, I'm rambling incessantly right now...I swear, I'm getting to the point), just reviews of things that really blow my skirt up.




Without further ado...

In a scene near the end of 2010’s Catfish, a man explains:

"They used to tank cod from Alaska all the way to China. They'd keep them in vats in the ship. By the time the codfish reached China, the flesh was mush and tasteless. So this guy came up with the idea that if you put these cods in these big vats, put some catfish in with them and the catfish will keep the cod agile. And there are those people who are catfish in life. And they keep you on your toes. They keep you guessing, they keep you thinking, they keep you fresh. And I thank god for the catfish because we would be droll, boring and dull if we didn't have somebody nipping at our fin."

To say anything about the identity of the speaker would reveal too much about this mysterious documentary. As much an evaluation of the role (and the danger?) of social networking in modern society as it is a character study, the film is the story of a man, Nev, who meets a prodigious young painter and becomes involved with her family and their friends via Facebook. Nev falls for the young artist’s older sister (the "catfish"), but as they get closer, things begin to fall apart in cyberspace. What follows is a bizarre look at the duality of real life and virtual life in the age of social media.

A great deal of speculation, doubt, and debate surround just how much of the film is “real” and how much is made up. Doubters claim that it’s too bizarre, too storybook, to have not been staged. Whether the film is 100% real or somewhat staged is really irrelevant (though I happen to want to believe it is all true). As the filmmakers point out on a panel they do in the DVD’s Special Features, in the age of social media, real versus made-up is less important than the story we present. The persona we show the world via Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace (and our blogs) becomes reality to those who view it, and reality is rarely what it seems.

Thinking about going off the grid...

Lately I've been thinking a lot about trying to go off the grid. I don't really mean installing solar panels and fermenting my own waste to produce energy (though I'd like to do the solar panel bit some day), but rather, going off the social technology grid. I'm thinking about shutting down my facebook account, getting rid of this blog (like anyone reads my semi-annual posts anyway), and in general keeping as low of a public profile as possible. I know there's been a lot in the news about identity theft and whatnot, but my real reason for wanting to become a social-media-born-again is that I feel like people use social media to broadcast their lives too much. At first I found it interesting to know what people were up to, but then it got to be too much. Honestly, I don't care that some person I haven't talked to since high school is having a bad day because some friend of theirs who I don't even know was in a bike accident.

Don't get me wrong, it's not that I don't care about you, it's just that I don't want to hear every sad little detail of your life, especially if I barely know you. I feel like social media has brought us to this strange place where everyone feels the need to broadcast all the deepest darkest feelings they might be experiencing, and honestly, I feel like it sort of cheapens real relationships. Part of the fun of being a human being is trying to figure out what makes people tick - but you don't have to do that anymore, because everyone is publicly broadcasting every little secret about themselves.

So I think it's decided...if anyone actually reads this and is interested in staying in contact with me, send me your email address or phone number, because this will most likely be my final blog. Oh, and Merry Christmakwanzukkah.

Best. Songs. Ever.

I decided to try something tonight, something I've been wanting to do for a long time. In fact, I've made weak attempts at the same in the past, but each has failed miserably. My goal was to create a playlist in iTunes of the best songs ever written. What a feat that would be! I think the mere power and glory of such a marvelous playlist would result in the skies opening and my laptop being carried up into Heaven amidst the singing of angels and shouts of "Hosanna!"

Obviously, there are limitations on such a project. Limitation #1 - the playlist has to come from my iTunes library, thus, must come from music I own. Limitation #2 - I chose not to include any music from the rap, heavy metal, classical, or country (see limitation #1) genres. Obviously, there are numerous songs from each of these genres that deserve consideration, I felt that moderation was the key, so I chose to pick from a library of music that I think most people could enjoy. My goal, after all, was to create a list with staying power.

The list was begun easily with the addition of The Band's "The Weight" and The Eagles' "Hotel California". As I moved on to more contemporary musicians, I added Mason Williams' "Distance Between the Fireflies", Jeff Buckley's "Mojo Pin" and "Grace", and a whopping 5 songs by Sufjan Stevens (the most heavily represented artist in my final selection, followed by Radiohead with 4 songs). At this point, I was feeling good, but I could already see the major problem with my endeavour - selectivity.

In my mind, the first two songs, "The Weight" and "Hotel California" are EASILY two of the best songs ever written. Could I possibly fill up a playlist with songs of this caliber? Not really. There are thousands of great songs out there - where do I draw the line between a great song and a song worthy of the "best songs ever written" moniker? To use a bit of rhetoric that I normally loathe, it's a long slippery slope if I've ever seen one. Once you relax the criteria a bit to allow yourself some wiggle room, you suddenly find yourself wanting to include the likes of The Raconteurs' "Rich Kid Blues", Modest Mouse's "Float On", and the Meat Puppets' "Plateau" - songs that are undoubtably great, but don't really belong with the best songs ever written.

So here I am, listening to a playlist of great songs calling themselves the "best songs ever written", wondering where it all went wrong. No skies opening up, no choirs of angels - but now I've got a 45 song playlist that's extremely easy on the ears and will make a great study companion. Maybe that's enough.

I think for my next post I'll try to discuss in my not so eloquent way what makes a song great. Feel free to give me suggestions for your "best songs ever written" playlist.

Contractions -- Don't Worry'bout't

So, in my last post I put to use one of the oldest conventions in the English language - the contraction. This is that beautiful little rule that allows us - and by "us" I mean mostly "me", because you can do what you want - to turn longer phrases and words into smaller language bits that are easier to say and type (you don't even have to use the 'Shift' key to hit the apostrophe!).

So "wen't" isn't a real contraction you say? I dare say it is. "Wen't", as almost all of us know, is a contraction of the phrase "were on our way to".

Yes, it is the second "e" in "were" that's included in the contraction. That's just the way it is.

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about contractions. "But Gable, don't you have more important things to be thinking about, like gastric lymphomas, arterial shunting, and how to differentiate appenditis from acute colitis?"

As we all know, marriage is a compromise...maybe naming conventions after a marriage should follow the law of the contraction. Rather than the wife taking the husbands last name, or sticking with her maiden name, or doing the ridiculous two-names-connected-by-a-hyphen thing (hyphens are just obnoxious - to say and to type), perhaps when two people get married they should form a new last name as a contraction of their own last names.

For example, my last name is Moffitt, and my wife's given last name is Bullock, so we've got two options. Since I don't want to have the negative, violent associations that go along with "Bullitt", I think we'll go with the much more innocuous "Moffock". Definitely much better.