Gus's Top 100 Bootlickin' Nonce Anthems

[Clinamenic]

come on, you've got 73 left!

That’s a lot of boots left to lick.

 

[Clinamenic]

Some killer tags on this thread.

“Joanna Newsom come to Butthead”

🤣

 

[sus]

The muses departed

 

[sus]

It happens sometimes. Who are you talking to? What are you trying to say?? You have no idea, you can't answer.

 

[woops]

It happens sometimes. Who are you talking to? What are you trying to say?? You have no idea, you can't answer.

you wait, you brood, you know futility intimately

 

[yyaldrin]

what is song number 28 gus?

 

[sus]

I'm not sure, people were not liking the direction the tracks were taking, so I feel impelled to change it up if I go forward

I was considering talking about my Burger Records years when I got really into garage rock revival and roadtripped down to Fullerton and met King Tuff.

I was considering talking about the beginnings of my poptimism arc, from RiRi to Robyn.

I was considering talking about my freshman year Americana radio show where I played soundtracks to Westerns, and Fats Domino, and the like.

 

[sus]

I've approached this as a biographical genre, the 100 tracks over my life that have defined and scaffolded the evolution of my taste, rather than what I would choose to defend now, in my late 20s. What did 8 10 12 14 16 18 year old Sus think was absolutely essential.

 

[sus]

Not an official 100 but I think it's the logical next step after The Books track. I did little baby steps in the shallow end of electronica in high school. This was one of the baby steps

 

[sus]

And I loved Gold Panda's "You," me and my junior year girlfriend listened to it all the time in the car driving around together

 

[sus]

She really loved these two we listened to them all the time together, driving around in her Prius in sunny weather all spring, day trips to Santa Barbara

 

[mvuent]

In golden hills with hungry gulls, where stillness kills and weather lulls, and mission bells ring culture dull; on sunset’s coast a teacher’s son, our host my ghost your medium—Promethean, bohemian, chameleon (qué bien & some)—with happy heart, nor art, the eyes fixed singly on the mark, and swimming laps from dark to dark—suspended, sea-logged, racing barque—yet nagging deep was discontentment: all achievement that was lent him came at cost of such neglection: words forgotten, song unpracticed, “heart of mine so like a cactus.”

Til one morning in the mountains—clearings where a libr'y founded, He-Man Miller, generous fountain—were all his doubt and debt surmounted, romancing to find his Merlin, and thus announced his route would swerve then.

A violin, a pedal loop, a puff of pipe-weed, o'raggad group; his Lady came from Guadalupe, and waved her arms amnesiac fog so he forgot about the odds—forgot the math, the path, the bath, of standing up to west wind’s wrath; the cries of gulls too much to take; from ghouls of death, sought lemniscate. The motto that he drank like nectar, brandished though he were defector: “I am muscle, I am arrow, I am bone and I am vector.”

So if it pleases, you may hear—my song so human and so flawed—of Heman the Americanite, his journey prolonged, in a nutative rhythm with writing that nods, with bouquets of distinctions that add up to God. (A cooing, an evenness, assonance, warble. A raga of throat-sounds that cast away foibles—that open up portals, make singers immortal.)

But what use is a bower that has not its bird? Flowers sans pollen are wasteful, absurd. The power of beauty, our interest, for hours; the sweetness of nectar, abhorrence of sour, is nutriment promised for which we devour. So the function of flourish is moral inferred, the lessons embedded in words we have heard. The rhyme is the dangler attached to the angler, and if it betrays, then it earns reader rancor. But reader is gambler and writer is card; a critical ear is a ward against bards. So caveat emptor and hurry along.

 

[sus]

A little twee don't you think Mvuent?

 

[kid charlemagne]

I think when my dad was a teen/young adult, he took the whole "Dylan goes Christian" phase pretty hard, it's all contaminated for him now.

father sus sees this newspaper in his nightmares

 

[dilbert1]

Time's ability to redeem the trash of yesteryear captures my imagination, yes. I've always wondered the extent to which future generations will look back nostalgically on the mediocre mainstream of our time, the way we look back at, say, 60s and 70s pop songs.

Adorno wrote about this kind of phenomena in 1960, with respect to a then emergent nostalgia for the 1920s:

“One has only to listen to the record albums that are now being revived as the hits, songs, and chansons from the twenties to be astonished at how little has changed in this whole sphere. As with fashion, the packaging changes; but the thing itself, a conventional language composed of signals to suit the conditioned reflexes of consumers, essentially remained the same… While it seems that such past fashions have a naive and awkward aspect in comparison with the current trend — that they are what the slang of American light music calls corny —this is due less to the substance of what is disseminated than to the time factor in abstracto, at most to the progressive perfecting of the machinery and of social-psychological control. The quality of being not yet quite so smart, which provokes smiles… is of the same nature as the idealizing nostalgia that clings to those same products today. The period’s comparative backwardness in the techniques of consumer culture is misinterpreted as though to mean it was closer to the origins, whereas in truth it was just as much organized to grab customers as it is in 1960. In fact, it is a paradox that anything at all changes within the sphere of a culture rationalized to suit industrial ideals; the principle of ratio itself, to the extent that it calculates cultural effects economically, remains the eternal invariant. That is why it is somewhat shocking whenever anything from the sector of the culture industry becomes old-fashioned.”

And about the ghost of a critical sting re: the exchange between @sus and @shakahislop about Arcade Fire (which stirred my own soul Gus) and also Corpsey on Green Day’s resignation:

“It is perfectly self-evident that after thirty or forty years, after the absolute break, one cannot simply pick up where things were left off. The significant works of that epoch owed much of their power to the productive tension with a heterogeneous element: the tradition against which they rebelled. This was still a force confronting them, and it was precisely the most productive artists who had a great deal of that tradition within them. Much of the constraint that inspired those works was lost when the friction with this tradition disappeared. Freedom is complete, but threatens to become free-wheeling without its dialectical counterpart, whereas that counterpart cannot be maintained simply by an act of the will. Contemporary art must become conscious not only of its technical problems, but also of the conditions of its own existence, so that it does not become a mere rehash of the twenties, does not degrade into precisely what it refused to be: cultural property. Art’s social arena is no longer an advanced or perhaps even decayed liberalism, but rather a fully manipulated, calculated, and integrated society, the “administered world.” Whatever protest is made
against this in terms of artistic form — and it is no longer possible to conceive of an artistic form that is not a protest — itself becomes integrated into the universal planning it is attacking and bears the marks of this contradiction. Since their material has been emancipated and processed in every dimension nowadays, artworks evolve purely from their own formal laws, without any heterogeneous element, and so they tend to become all too shiny, tidy, and innocuous. In this sense, wallpaper swatches are the writing on the wall. It is precisely the discomfort caused by this that draws attention back to the twenties but without this nostalgic yearning being satisfied. Anybody who is sensitive to such things need only examine the titles of the innumerable books, paintings, and compositions of the past few years to have the sobering feeling of the secondhand. It is so unbearable because every work created nowadays makes its entrance —whether intentionally or not — as though it owed its existence to itself alone. The desire that proved fatal, namely, the absence of a work’s necessity to exist, gives way to the abstract consciousness of up-to-dateness. This ultimately reflects the absence of any political relevance. When it is completely transposed into the aesthetic domain, the concept of radicalness becomes an ideological distraction, a consolation for the real powerlessness of political subjects. […]

This surely means nothing less than that the foundation of art itself has been shaken, that an unrefracted relation to the aesthetic realm is no longer possible… However, because the world has survived its own downfall, it nonetheless needs art to write its unconscious his- tory. The authentic artists of the present are those in whose works the uttermost horror still quivers.”