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Moby

Photo: Scott Dudelson/Getty Images

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Moby On His New Memoir & 'Play' 20th Anniversary trouble-so-hard-moby-his-new-memoir-20th-anniversary-%E2%80%98play%E2%80%99

Trouble So Hard: Moby On His New Memoir & The 20th Anniversary Of ‘Play’

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"'Play' was supposed to fail and the fact it did exactly the opposite of that was very surprising and still to this day seems anomalous," says the electronic DJ/singer
Dan Weiss
GRAMMYs
May 20, 2019 - 12:17 pm

Moby is famous for two things: Making electronic music and not making electronic music. This contradiction has made for a strange career that opened electrifying raves with early floor anthems like “Go” as a DJ, before cycling through genres as disparate as ambient and punk rock not too many years later. It also serves as a fitting setup to his fifth album Play, which indeed famously turned non-electronic music—namely sampled field recordings of gospel hymns from Alan Lomax’s Sounds of the South collection—into electronic music. Several of those tracks (“Natural Blues,” “Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?”), along with a couple that Moby sang himself (“Porcelain,” “South Side”) became huge hits all over the world.

But every one of Play’s 18 tracks (even many quiet, obscure instrumentals) was licensed for commercial use, saturating the year 1999 so effectively that the album eventually climbed to 12 million copies sold. As a result, the album crowned Moby with the best-selling electronic album of all-time.

Reading Moby’s new memoir Then It Fell Apart will tell you what a shocking turn of events this was, rising from the commercial wreckage of his 1997 hard-rock experiment Animal Rights to a surreal level of fame that involved dating Natalie Portman and beefing with Eminem. And uh, brushing against Donald Trump at parties.

The Recording Academy spoke to the man himself about how Play’s very millennial fusion of house music and gospel roots could’ve ended up sounding like Pantera, how the landmark album fits into today’s discussions of cultural appropriation and more.

Play changed your life 20 years ago; it’s the all-time best-selling electronic album. What does that mean for you?  

The context was what made it so surprising. Before it was released, my career was in the toilet. The album that came out before Play, Animal Rights, had just been an across-the-board failure. Bad sales, bad reviews, no one came to the shows. My expectations, my manager’s expectations and the record label’s expectations were so low. Richard Sanders, who was running V2 [Records] at the time, said he thought that Play might sell 50,000 copies, and I scoffed at it. “Oh, it will never sell 50,000 copies.”

It’s not only the fact that it went on to sell absurdly well, but also that Play became this weird lifestyle record… the stories people told me about the ways in which they listened to it. I had people telling me that they had multiple copies of it, one for their car, one for their home, one for their parents’ home. Elton John told me he had a copy of it in every home and apartment that he had in the world.

I made it in my bedroom, it was mixed poorly. It was released at the time when Eminem and *NSync and Backstreet Boys were topping the charts. It was supposed to fail and the fact it did exactly the opposite of that was very surprising and still to this day seems anomalous. If you remove the albums Play, 18, and Hotel, my career and sales make a lot more sense. Those records really are the baffling exceptions to everything else.

You’ve said that you didn’t expect Play to do better than Animal Rights. But clearly you made a very different record from Animal Rights and making a punk album was kind of an obvious risk, no?

This might seem disingenuous or overly naïve, but I assumed all but the most conservative pop musicians made creative choices based on their enthusiasm for the music they’re making. When Joe Strummer decided to start playing reggae and hip-hop, to me, it made perfect sense. When David Bowie went from being a folk artist to a glam-rock artist to a disco artist and a new wave artist, it all seemed challenging and interesting because he was excited by these genres. Same thing when John Lennon started the Plastic Ono Band and started releasing crazy noise records, or when Lou Reed made Metal Machine Music. I thought this was part of the musician’s job description to be inspired by different genres and release records that might be challenging but were a product of that inspiration.

READ: Ruben Blades & Making Movies Team Up On "Delilah," Co-Written By Lou Reed

Yeah, but the sales figures for Metal Machine Music were very at odds with its eventual influence.

I didn’t expect Animal Rights to be successful, per se. But the fact that it was crucified and maligned was weirdly disappointing. That was sort of when the blinders came off; that even in the world of indie-rock and dance music, it was way more conservative than I thought it was. I thought that it was a critics’ job to support experimentation even if they didn’t like it, the Lester Bangs approach.

Were you specifically setting out to make a dance record again after that?

At the end of the Animal Rights tour, I was playing Glastonbury for the first time and it was grim. It was in the middle of the afternoon, I was playing in the pouring rain, there was a sea of mud in the front of the stage, the tent was maybe 20 percent full. On the tour bus, I was talking to my managers. I had just been listening to the most recent Pantera album and I told them, “So, for my next record, I want to take what I did on Animal Rights and go harder, I want to tune down the way Sepultura and Pantera are all tuning down really far and just make it as dark and hard and almost unlistenable as possible, doubling down on the aggression of Animal Rights.

And my manager Barry said something so simple: “That’s okay, but people really do like your electronic music.” If he had said “Your electronic music sells better,” the old punk rocker in me would’ve rejected it. But I suddenly realized in an almost existential way, if you’re going to release music and try to communicate with people… one, try not to waste their time and two, give them something that they can derive joy from. So in that moment, I thought, if I’m going to make super-dark death metal, I can do that on my own time. And that was what led to trying to make a more melodic electronic album.

But you also had low expectations for the sales of Play. How did you end up underestimating pop songs like “South Side”?

In some ways, that’s the weirdest song on the record because it’s not a weird song. Every other song on the record [has] something abnormal. The song “Run On” does have a verse/chorus structure, but it involves vocals that were recorded in the 1950s. “South Side” is the closest thing to a pop/rock song and as a result, I didn’t want to put it on the record. I thought that “Porcelain” and “Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?” and “South Side” should be left off because they just didn’t feel substantial enough to me. But there was no thought of making pop music or making commercially viable music. I thought I was a has-been, I didn’t think that was even an option. Never once in the making of Play did I think that anyone would hear it or buy it.

You’d sampled before, of course, but was it a challenge to put new arrangements on an already-existing traditional song like “Run On?”

The challenge was actually more technical. This was all done pre-Pro Tools, a lot of really getting into the nuts and bolts of the Akai samplers, a little bit of time-stretching. Now in Pro Tools it would’ve been the easiest thing in the world. But back then, you had to do all your editing on the tiny little screen of an Akai sampler. When you watch an old movie, you’re just amazed at what they were able to do when they were cutting film. Making music before Pro Tools it was the same thing; it took a lot longer to get something to the place where it sounded normal.

Specifically that song “Run On” because there’s so many vocals, and obviously they did not record it to a click track, there’s no solid tempo in that song. As an engineer, that was the hardest song to make on the entire record. “Honey” was actually pretty easy because they’re clapping, which made for an ad hoc click track. And luckily, they had really good timing.

Did you struggle with worrying that you might offend the source material?

No, because I didn’t expect anyone to listen to it.

Right.

If someone had said, “You’re making an album that’s going to sell 12 million copies,” I might have given it a second thought. From the time when electronic musicians started sampling, there was only two criteria for sample-based music: Is it good? And are you gonna get sued? I’m not saying the criteria of historical sensitivity was invalid, just that it was never part of the conversation.

Of course, the world is a very different place now and people have a lot more understanding of historical sensitivity. I asked Chris Rock, “As a black man, what do you think?” And he said, “It’s good music, that’s all that matters.” I don’t know if he would feel that way today, but in 1999, that’s what he said to me at the MTV Awards.

READ: Why The Millennium Tour Matters in 2019

There’s been a lot of debate about cultural appropriation in the 2010s. Has that affected your feelings about Play at all, or have you had any substantive conservations about it since then?

No. I have not. I’m not saying I shouldn’t have those conversations or that I won’t have them, but as far I know, you asking me is the closest I’ve come to a conversation about it.

In that case, any thoughts you want to share on the fly?

Culture is evolving and it’s fluid. I’m sure if I sat down with someone like Cornel West, I’m sure they’d have a different perspective on Play and I’m sure that I’d agree with their perspective.

I was in high school at the time and I remember reading press about Play summing up the century by tying those Lomax field recordings of hymns and gospel from the beginning of it, to the beats of the Y2K era. Did this future-meets-past thing ever cross your mind?

No, no. [Laughs.] There was no meta context or anything academic in the making of it. There was simply… the only way I can describe it is, like, emotional utility. Did it resonate with me emotionally? That was the sole criteria for evaluating the music when I was making the record. And we didn’t have a licensing plan. People still ask me about the licensing of Play, which seems almost like a cute nostalgic question. Now every musician in the world will bend over backwards to license their kidneys. But no, I just made a record I liked and my managers liked.

You’ve had a complicated relationship with Christianity, were the gospel samples on Play significant to you in a religious way at all?

Ahh… not in terms of any creed or dogma or denomination, just more so the human condition and emotional expression. Even “Natural Blues,” which is a lament to the divine, to me it was much more about the quality of the voice and the expression of longing and sadness in the vocals in the words, rather than trying to slot it into a Christian or secular tradition.

After reading Then It Fell Apart, the videos from this era felt a little darker to me. “South Side,” “Bodyrock” and eventually “We Are All Made of Stars” all express a kind of discomfort with the limelight.

I like being an agreeable interview subject, but the video directors made most of the creative decisions. I’d love to take credit for “South Side” and “We Are All Made of Stars,” but the director, Joseph Kahn, those are his videos.

It was just interesting that so many of them commented on fame to a degree. Even the “Natural Blues” video has this preemptive look back at your career.

You missed – which is not surprising because no one really saw it – what I think is the best of all the videos from Play, and the most entertaining look at the world of fame, “Find My Baby.” I came up with the plotline for it: “The world’s youngest boy band.” It’s a boy band throwing whiskey bottles and having debaucherous hotel times, but they’re one and a half years-old. It was released at the end of the Play album cycle so very few people saw it, but I think it’s really funny. I hadn’t really thought of it until you mentioned it, but there is a through line in those videos, criticism of the world of fame in both a lighthearted and cautionary way.

Which brings me to you and Eminem meeting at this very bizarre nexus of two different kinds of celebrity. I wanted to ask if you still have the drawing Eminem gave you of himself strangling you?

Oh yeah, of course. I framed it.

Take The 'On Location' Tour Of Los Angeles

READ: Go 'On Location' In Los Angeles With Moby, Jade Novah, Nick Hexum & More

You were maybe his most bizarre target during a time when anyone was in his crosshairs. Have you come around to what he was trying to do artistically?

Honestly, I don’t know his music that well. I know the hit singles, but I’ve never delved too deep into the album tracks. It was clear to me from day one that he was very smart, very talented, and very aware. In hindsight, it sort of frustrates and saddens me that we were pitted against each other because I think our upbringings were very similar: scared kids in dysfunctional, single-parent households. I think a lot of misogyny and homophobia in popular culture comes from dumb, unevolved bigots. I don’t think Eminem is any of those things, for him it was almost like performance art. He’s certainly not the best poster child for me criticizing those things. I don’t need any more feuds, but I can think of a few thousand other musicians who are probably now wearing MAGA hats and watching Fox News, who probably made a lot more egregious music.

It’s funny that Elton John’s got your record in every property he owns, and then he’s singing with Eminem onstage at the GRAMMYs. For him, both your messages worked.

Uh-huh.

Then the Trump family appears in your memoir in random ways, particularly that “knob-touch” story. How did you end up in so many situations with the Trumps?

I grew up very, very poor. I longed for legitimacy and acceptance and validation, so in the 2000s, as I started getting invited to fancy events and parties, I jumped at the chance to ingratiate myself with wealthy New Yorkers.

But I also sort of use the Trumps as a narrative device in the book because there’s something really wrong with them. No one in the Trump family is ever allowed to serve on the board of a charity again because of the way they ran their foundation was so dishonest and so corrupt. That’s disgusting. So in an emblematic way, they’re representative of the corruption I was experiencing. The moment you say you’re at a party with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, you’re establishing that things have gone terribly wrong.

You publicly stated/posted a couple years ago that you have sources who know things we don’t about Trump. Has the Mueller report illuminated any of that or is there still plenty to come?

The Mueller report isn’t even the tip of the iceberg, it’s like the picture of the hair above the tip of the iceberg. The depths of corruption regarding Trump and his businesses, his administration, his foundation, it’s so much darker. The Republicans are basically water-skiing behind the Titanic.

How did you come to receive this info?

I’m just going on what I’ve heard, that Trump was installed as a Russian asset. Among the intelligence community, that’s just a given, no one even questions that anymore.

Do you have personal ties to the intelligence community?

I don’t include this in the book, but after college I had a relationship with a woman whose father was one of the heads of the CIA and I’ve been friends with a lot of those people since then. And years of touring, you just end up meeting people on tour. I don’t know that many people in that world, but there does seem to be a complete consensus that Trump is completely corrupt and his only saving grace is that he’s dumb and incompetent and has no control over his emotions. We should all be grateful for the fact that he’s not Putin. If Trump were bright and could regulate his emotions, he would be truly terrifying.

You also find yourself talking to Putin’s daughter at one point in the memoir.

This was the mid-2000s so I had met plenty of heads of state, children of heads of state and I was also very drunk. I just thought she was very nice, this normal, soft-spoken person. Maybe in my drunken haze that wasn’t true.

Twenty years later, do you think of Play as your definitive work?

I think it’s a lovely little record. If I’m being honest, I like the second half so much more than the first. It has more depth, more nuance, more texture. When I hear songs from the first half, sure, I like some of them, but I don’t get terribly excited. “My Weakness” or some of the ones at the end, those are the ones that resonate with me a lot more on an emotional level.

Dumb question: Why did you name it Play?

It was a few things. There was a park on the corner of Spring and Mulberry that had a giant mural that read “play” and I saw it almost every day. At one point I was listening to the music in a friend’s car and I thought “Wouldn’t it be funny to name the record Play so it would be displayed on any system it was playing on.” And one of my favorite bands, Magazine, with Howard Devoto, one of the original Buzzcocks, released a live album in the ‘80s called Play, a slight homage to that title. And the fourth reason is, I have always worried and anxious and possibly taken myself too seriously and calling an album Play was a reminder to not be so dark and dour and self-involved.

Wayne Coyne Looks Back On 'The Soft Bulletin': "I Wouldn't Want to Be In That State of Mind Ever Again"

GRAMMYs

Dave Grohl in 1995

Photo by Niels van Iperen/Getty Images

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He Stuck Around: Foo Fighters' Debut Album At 25 he-stuck-around-foo-fighters-eponymous-debut-album-turns-25

He Stuck Around: Foo Fighters' Eponymous Debut Album Turns 25

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In his post-Nirvana 1995 debut, Dave Grohl launches his legacy as a creator of truly great, mood-stabilizing alternative rock
Dan Weiss
GRAMMYs
Jul 21, 2020 - 10:37 am

You could call Dave Grohl rock's greatest survivor, and have an uncomfortable laugh, but that doesn’t make the question go away. Robert Christgau once put it even more darkly by referring to him in passing as "Nirvana’s most successful member." You'd be hard-pressed to find happier post-tragedy endings in the genre, though, than two albums with significant anniversaries this month. One is AC/DC’s now-40 Back in Black, in which their new singer Brian Johnson sang "Forget the hearse, ‘cause I never die" on the title track, which is supposed to be a tribute to the late Bon Scott, and somehow winds up one of the most tasteful things on the record. The other is Grohl’s first time in the spotlight himself, 1995's Foo Fighters, which turns a more robust 25, and was keyed to the early hit "I'll Stick Around," a promise the drummer's made good on since his last singer killed himself and in some ways took a whole generation with him.

Dave Grohl's stuck around so long that the entire guitar-loving world has watched as he became the genre's new benchmark act, the very horizon itself. The Foo Fighters founder's hard and friendly guitar-bass-drum attack redefined radio's idea of rock especially, a hard rock dad's idea of punk and R.E.M. condensed into one easily swallowed pill. You could call them the most streamlined band ever, and you might not be wrong. Oftentimes, the grain of Grohl’s swollen, jangling guitar sound recalls the unstoppably melodic fuzz of Bob Mould, another major alt-rock figure with two careers, one being a similarly legendary band that was never revived. You could even say that Foo Fighters brought Mould's noise-tune synthesis full circle, playing out its every possible combination before letting emo take over as the new standard for commercial rock. Again, Foo Fighters rarely elicit strong opinions from tastemaker types; they're generally accepted as a part of the ecosystem. But their early records are truly great, if you can imagine the band being considered for the first time and not taken for granted as a reliable AOR staple.

Foo Fighters wasn't even a band's work; save for one guitar solo, Grohl sings and plays every instrument on the entire thing, and gets a surprising variety of colors out of it. "Weenie Beenie" and "Wattershed" honored Nirvana's desire to put a killer riff to bed by simply throwing garbled screaming over top. But "Big Me" is a pop jingle far more squeaky-clean and crowd-pleasing than any Nirvana song, more akin to Weezer's "Buddy Holly." And like Weezer, he couldn’t put forth such a sincere piece of craft with a straight face, so he made the video a Mentos commercial like Weezer simulated a "Happy Days" episode.

Grohl exploited the quiet/loud dynamic even more casually and shamelessly than Kurt Cobain, because Cobain's clean verses still utilized chord sequences as jagged and misshapen as the choruses they'd explode into. You could tell they were going somewhere dark and punk. Foo Fighters on the other hand, starts with the innocent strums of "This Is a Call" as a pump-fake before launching into its reaffirmation of grunge's loudness. Its follow-up, 1997’s The Colour and the Shape, was even more Jekyll-and-Hyde, treating "Hey, Johnny Park!" and "Up in Arms" like outright prom themes plunging into waterfalls of expensive distortion, and especially the 90-second "Doll" into the rip-roar of "Monkey Wrench." Even when Grohl is as abrasive as his hardcore inspirations (which is more often than "My Hero" or "Learn to Fly" haters think), he rarely sounds too disturbed or dangerous, which is probably his legacy: mood-stabilizing alternative rock. Foo Fighters sounds like the work of a middle-class, well-balanced individual; its most enraged moment, the famous "I don’t owe you anything" refrain from "I’ll Stick Around," falls well south of, say, Billy Corgan's contemporaneous "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" on the breakdown-o-meter.

More often, Grohl comes off like a soft-spoken riff-painter who digs shoegaze as much as Corgan did, with broad-brush tones on "X-Static" and "Exhausted," the dirge-y latter of which somehow becoming the very first Foos release. But he allows a little cocktail swing into the funny tantrum "For All the Cows," and hop-skip-waltzes through "Floaty," one of the debut’s most underrated tunes. The incinerating drive of "Good Grief" has improved with time; in fact, most of Foo Fighters is comprised of extraordinarily solid tunes. It wouldn't be a Nirvana album in any way, shape, or form if only, say, "Oh, George" or "Alone + Easy Target" asserted themselves. But post-grunge was rarely so graceful and consistent, so enamored with its own textures and dynamic shifts, so confident of its melodic worth while skirting punk's obnoxiousness. It’s rarely mentioned alongside the '90s' most auspicious debuts, and it’s not like Grohl doesn’t have enough to brag about. But in more than half its songs you can hear a second banana transforming into a headliner-god without making a big deal about it, and doing it all by himself in a realization of purpose that recalls Prince's Dirty Mind. That guy was a Foo Fighters fan, too.

Nirvana Manager Danny Goldberg Talks 25 Years of 'MTV Unplugged In New York'

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Sheer Mag

Photo by Marie Lin

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Sheer Mag Have The Right Stuff sheer-mag-have-right-stuff

Sheer Mag Have The Right Stuff

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Lead singer Tina Halladay talks to the Recording Academy about the Philly four-piece's sophomore LP, 'A Distant Call,' the majesty of Lizzo and how to be the cool aunt to end all cool aunts
Dan Weiss
GRAMMYs
Sep 3, 2019 - 1:10 pm

Like Rhiannon Giddens or Jason Isbell, Sheer Mag are that rare thing: musical traditionalists with something new to say. They appropriate the onetime sleazy riffs of Kiss, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and singer Tina Halladay’s favorite band Thin Lizzy (she has a full-length tattoo of Phil Lynott on her thigh) for trenchant jams about slumlords ("Fan The Flames"), murdered maquiladora workers ("Can't Stop Fighting"), and fat-shaming concern trolls ("The Right Stuff"). Needless to say, this isn’t your dad's cock-rock. In fact, we should probably stop calling it "cock-rock."

After a string of increasingly awesome EPs and a well-received full-length, the Philly four-piece just released their second album A Distant Call, which expands their sound into both louder (the Judas Priest-like "Steel Sharpens Steel") and prettier (the '80s Fleetwood Mac turn "Silver Line") realms, and combines their personal and political songs like never before, in part because the frontwoman suffered the loss of a partner, a job and a family member since the last recording. Halladay spoke to the Recording Academy over the phone from Philly about the new album, the majesty of Lizzo and how to be the cool aunt to end all cool aunts.

What did you set out to do differently this time after Need to Feel Your Love?

It was a huge difference going to digital for recording the vocals from, like, a tape machine where I had to do everything in one take. That was the right move.

You stuck with lo-fi production for a long time. Did you all feel pressure to make the digital jump?

Not really, but people have always told me they can’t hear my vocals clearly. We take such a long time to do things that [digital] is cost-effective as well. [Laughs.] The instrumental parts sound so much better, and I wanted to try and do the vocals in a different way. Because it’s stressful and limiting to have to do it all on one track.

I can hear the need to make them more legible, especially when the lyrics are so specific and politically focused.

Definitely, that’s something that had been bothering me. I don’t think we realized how illegible they actually were to some people.

Sometimes the lyrics can be secondary when you instantly love the sound of a band, but after you have a feel for them you can focus on that other layer.

Maybe [a fan] doesn't agree with what we’re saying and it would influence them. [Laughs.] They could listen and it would change their mind. I’m excited for people actually hear what I’m saying.

Have any Sheer Mag fans ever thanked you for opening their eyes to world issues?

I’ve had friends with Mexican ancestry who live in Texas near the border thank us for "Can’t Stop Fighting." But mostly it’s women coming up to me and telling me "You’re the reason I started a band." When YouTube comments and idiots tell women what they can’t be in a band, unless they’re industry-standard hot or conventionally attractive to a bunch of sh*theads. More women have told me that than I can even count.

Has that been the most gratifying part of your success so far?

I think so! That and my friend who works in the Girls Rock Camp in Austin sent me a photo of a collage that a young girl had made of me; they all make different collages of different artists. I cried.

You very specifically of all bands seem like your stage presence conquers the room, so I can see why that would be very inspiring.

Thank you, yeah, it’s always a strange feeling inside me when we’re playing. If people are being assholes, I use whatever energy is being brought to me by the people in the room most of the time. That could be feeding off of everybody’s excitement or it could be anger from whatever person being rude. It’s something I talk to other people in bands about, being energy vampires.

Where have you experienced asshole crowds?

There was this funny time in Denver, the guy was in front of me, leaning on the PA speaker and texting the whole time, while everyone else around him was so amped. So I leaned over and he didn’t even notice me and I took his phone out of his hand with my two fingers and he was furious. I had it for maybe like, half of a song and then gave it back to him. Then he went back to doing it and a bunch of 15-year-olds start pushing him around. I thought he was going to murder me but it was so funny. He was a nerd, somewhere I have a picture someone took of him looking really serious.

A Distant Call seems to connect the personal to the political more in the lyrics.

Yeah, I think it’s melding the two aspects that we usually write about, bringing them together instead of in separate songs. Everything is political in our lives so it only makes sense.

You went through some significant tragedies between the last album and this one. How did those find their way into these songs?

The way that Matt [Palmer] and I write together is really personal and we have to be—I mean, we are close friends—but for him to help me express those ideas and feelings of despair and everything I felt when my father died, and the fear and frustration of the world treats fat women and most of the things that I deal with… we have to be pretty close.

Right.

"Cold Sword" deals with my feelings about my dad, who wasn’t very present in my life except as a force of terror. I hope other people who’ve had similar experiences will connect to that. "The Right Stuff" deals with unspoken things about looks and the conversation about how society treats fat women. But Lizzo is famous now… I’ve loved her for a long time, I saw her playing at [Philly venue] the TLA a few months ago and it was insanely packed.

I got shut out of that show!

Our touring guitarist Kora Puckett's brother Aaron co-wrote Lizzo's song "Boys" so he was able to get me a VIP pass. I was crying the entire time. She’s so powerful.

I did catch her opening for Sleater-Kinney a few years ago, so it doesn’t seem crazy that she’d share a bill with Sheer Mag someday.

She's really, really famous now, though.

You mention SNAP benefits on "Blood From A Stone" and I don’t think I know many rock songs that name-check food stamps.

That time of my life was really… I was a manager at one of the locations for a service that picks up and drops off your laundry on bikes.  I had just broken my thumb on the way to work and they basically forced me to sign papers that say I quit, because I didn't know what was going on and I wasn't really educated in what I should’ve done. I was living paycheck to paycheck at that point so I had no way to make money because I was injured. Luckily, I had health insurance because if I didn't, it would’ve been really, really bad.

Do you ever get recognized around Philly?

Yeah. [Laughs.] I did once in Wal-Mart. Actually, I was in Long Island with my mother a few weeks ago walking with my niece, she’s like, 11, and has no idea. Someone drove by and yelled "Sheeeer Magggg!" I was like “What up, bitch!” and played it all cool for my niece.

Sleater-Kinney Are Embracing Whatever Comes Next

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Len's “Steal My Sunshine" 20 Years L-A-T-E-R million-miles-fun-listening-lens-steal-my-sunshine-20-years-l-t-e-r

A Million Miles of Fun: Listening To Len's "Steal My Sunshine" 20 Years L-A-T-E-R

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There were plenty of weird hits in the '90s, but there is absolutely nothing normal about “Steal My Sunshine," from Len’s genre to its famous sampled riff. And don’t even start us on the lyrics
Dan Weiss
GRAMMYs
Jul 23, 2019 - 10:28 am

The 1990s, particularly the musical culture that defined the decade, was marked by a lot of things: irony, disaffectedness, angst. But "randomness" might be the most crucial component. '90s radio was a Wild West of jock jams, Pearl Jam and Nirvana imitators, ska, big band swing, the tail end of New Jack swing, the front end of Timbaland and people of all walks of life who rapped with varying degrees of success, sometimes over loud guitars. And Cake. At least the 2010s developed social media as a support network to espouse complicated feelings over something like Rebecca Black (or "OId Town Road," for that matter). The '90s did not provide memes to bring people together and help make sense of "Tubthumping." We were all alone. But we made it.

Len's "Steal My Sunshine" was one of the decade's last true non-sequiturs. It doesn't matter that the mysterious Canadian outfit put out two albums before "Sunshine" home You Can't Stop the Bum Rush or has since apparently released two others. Len, definitively, in the public eye, came from nowhere, to whence they returned, but not before offering history some butter tarts. (If you've been wondering for 20 years, the Canadian treat resembles mini pecan pies sans pecans. They're better than you think.)

No one knows who "Len" is supposed to be, least of all Marc and Sharon Costanzo, the brother and sister who became one-hit wonders under that moniker. That's asking dangerous questions, like who Harvey Danger is or what the "182" in Blink-182 stands for. Let the chaos be and it will reward you with pop bliss. So we are avowedly not going to steal everybody’s collective sunshine and run "Now the funny glare to pay a gleaming tare in a staring under heat / Involved an under usual feat / And I'm not only among but I invite who I want to come" through Google Translate.

We are going to celebrate the Costanzo siblings’ giggly homemade boredom, though, because it gives that of Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas a run for their (piles of) money. You Can't Stop the Bum Rush is a pinnacle of randomness, the cherry (or smoked salmon) on the Dadaist sundae that is the 1990s. Musicians on this thing include hip-hop pioneers Kurtis Blow and Biz Markie, Poison guitarist C.C. Deville, Broken Social Scene plug Brendan Canning and future croaky alt-rap cult hero Buck 65, who also appears in cartoon form on the cover, second from left. The only thing more unlikely than this combination of people is the album bearing a hit single, which of course sounds like none of the above-named artists. (In this ridiculously entertaining interview with Marc Costanzo, he says Sum 41's Deryck Whibley was present when he recorded vocals. Was every Canadian musician involved with Len? Did 13-year-old Drake deliver pizza to the studio?)

Because this was the '90s, Len weren’t even the only Canadians working the Completely Irreplicable and Somewhat Frighteningly Eclectic circuit; sh*t would’ve hit the fan if Bran Van 3000 started a turf war (those kids had a girl-group cover of "Cum on Feel the Noize" that starts acoustic and ends techno). But Len were The Killers to BV3’s The Bravery, so to speak, and their reward was a song that your regular, non-weird-music friends remember in 2019.

"Steal My Sunshine" is one of those tunes that was everywhere in part because the seeds for it had been planted in part by the Andrea True Connection’s "More, More, More" saturating discos in 1976 (True herself had a bonkers story, acting in more than 50 porn films before reaching Number Four on the Hot 100). "Sunshine," which sampled True’s bridge for that iconic opening hook, was merely its final form. Stylistically, "Steal My Sunshine" is inarguably pop, though the tone of it is gloriously incongruent even with itself. Marc and Sharon’s voices border on twee, with a breezy delivery that speaks to directly to the song’s famous soft-serve vibe.

But the words, whatever you make of them, speak to fighting off something dark. Taking a cue from the canned candid dialogue of Weezer’s “Undone (The Sweater Song),” the Costanzos’ verses each begin with concerned friends discussing them: “Man, I’ve never seen Sharon look so bad before.” But this alarm is confusingly offset by the cheery narrators themselves. Are we supposed to believe Sharon’s hit rock bottom because she’s made [checks notes] an “eight-foot heap” of Slurpee straws? (Holy hell that’s a specific and esoteric image.) Is this a weird Canadian in-joke? Depression in 1999 sounds significantly preferable to depression in 2019.

The chorus, which everybody kind of knows (did you know you were going to be singing “keeping dumb and built to beat” before it appeared on the karaoke screen? You did not), has a loving sound to it, of the two reassuring each other of things that may keep their heads up. But that’s under the strange stipulation of promising to steal each other’s sunshine, not to prevent the thievery of said Vitamin D. This threatens to blow “Steal My Sunshine” wide open as potentially the most mysterious are-they-vampires song since Toadies’ “Possum Kingdom.”

You Can’t Stop the Bum Rush, on its face, looks like the weirdest part of the Len saga. Once it gets the hit out of the way, the rapping begins (“Cryptik Souls Crew,” “Beautiful Day”), in comes with the squeal of rock guitar (“Feelin’ Alright,” “Cheekybugger”), and occasionally some atmospheric lounge funk (“Junebug”) or krautrock (“The Hard Disk Approach”) takes up residence like they’re the friggin’ Avalanches. But plenty of ‘90s radio anomalies made albums that sounded nothing like their reason for being (wait ‘til you hear the rest of the Sugar Ray album “Fly” is on) and the biggest shock is how little “Steal My Sunshine” — which is very possibly an anti-sunshine song — makes sense when held up to the, um, light.

Ultimately, the underlying bizarreness, enigmatic characters (in that aforementioned Stereogum interview, Marc Costanzo mentions in passing that he and his sister “really haven’t talked in a while” as of 2016), and uncanny industry connections only serve to further cement “Steal My Sunshine” as a legendary pop blip. If you have more questions than answers now about a sweet tune that you assumed had less to ponder than, say, “Closing Time,” well, you’re welcome. Bring on the memes. Your move, Lil Nas X.

Blink-182's 'Enema Of The State' Will Never Actually Turn 20

John Lennon in 1970

John Lennon in 1970

 

Photo: Chris Walter/WireImage

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'John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band' At 50 john-lennon-plastic-ono-band-50-year-anniversary

Now That I Showed You What I Been Through: 50 Years Of 'John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band'

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After The Beatles' split and before 'Imagine,' Lennon recorded a jarring audio confessional that remains indelible in 2020
Ana Leorne
GRAMMYs
Dec 29, 2020 - 4:25 pm

John Lennon asked The Beatles for a "divorce," and he got his wish. After the group's breakup in 1970, quarreling and competition were the norm between himself, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. In Lennon's case, this tension added to a slightly tainted reputation derived from the public's disappointment upon The Beatles' end, his unpopular marriage to Yoko Ono and an artistic dispersion. The latter resulted from an ongoing quest to find his spot in a world he'd grown frustrated with yet to which he desperately wanted to belong. As evidenced by his songs and remarks, Lennon's efforts to find himself often left him feeling empty, and he regularly lacked unconditional trust or engagement.

Standing in the way of this self-discovery process was an inability to resolve past traumas, which was one of the main reasons why Lennon decided to undergo Arthur Janov's primal scream program. He had the apparent goal of finally dealing with childhood wounds related to his mother's death and feelings of rejection linked to his father's absence. But the treatment also addressed the recent pain of losing his other family—the one Lennon had shared a life with for the past decade. In short, how could he go forward when he didn't know which way he was facing?

Lennon channeled all this into his debut solo album, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, which turns 50 this month. (December 2020 also marks the 40th anniversary of his murder.) Released as a companion to Ono's concurrent solo debut, Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band, Lennon's album was therapy in its purest form: raw and self-referential. This intimacy was also apparent in the recording process: Apart from Lennon and Ono, the latter of whom is credited on the album sleeve for contributing "wind," the only other musicians were Starr and bassist Klaus Voormann, along with former Beatles roadie Mal Evans (for "tea and sympathy"), pianist Billy Preston and Phil Spector, who played piano on "Love" and "God," respectively.

When a cycle doesn't end fast enough, there's often a tendency to accelerate it, and Lennon was a man on a mission. The previous year, Lennon had been creatively disengaged from the Let It Be sessions and generally disapproving of the approach McCartney and producer George Martin wanted for Abbey Road, as he attempted to destroy the entity he helped create. This self-sabotaging process, which coincided with his dangerous affair with heroin, often translated into a deafening silence that Beatles scholar Stephanie Piotrowski describes in her Ph.D. dissertation as "part of Lennon's agenda to break The Beatles' myth."

But silence wasn't his sole strategy. It progressively became apparent throughout his solo career—culminating with his GRAMMY-winning final album with Ono, Double Fantasy (1980)—that Ono was his new partner-in-crime in McCartney's stead. For anyone unable to take a hint, in September 1969, he privately told the other three Beatles he was leaving the group. Their financial manager, Allen Klein, asked them to keep this development a secret for as long as possible, fearing the news would undermine sales of the forthcoming album, Let It Be (1970), which was taking forever to mix and master. 

Read: History Of: Walk To London's Famed Abbey Road Studios With The Beatles

Lennon's apparent hurry to break free makes it odd that Plastic Ono Band only came out in December 1970, rendering him the last Beatle to release a proper debut album. (This, of course, if we don't count three previous experimental albums with Ono: Two Virgins, in 1968, and Life With The Lions and Wedding Album, both in 1969. And don't forget the hastily put-together Live Peace In Toronto 1969, which partly consisted of early rock covers and featured Ono, guitarist Eric Clapton, bassist Voormann and drummer Alan White.)

Spector was supposed to be producing, but he was missing in action when the sessions began, leading Lennon to publish a full-page ad in Billboard saying, "Phil! John is ready this weekend." His relative absence ended up being a blessing in disguise: Spector's trademark "Wall of Sound" style probably wouldn't have suited the album's ethos. Lennon and Ono's minimalist approach matched the content better, allowing the emotional outpouring to sound adequately barer. 

Revolving around themes of healing, surrender and replacement, Plastic Ono Band is a prime example of Lennon's songwriting particularities. These include his remarkable ability to craft instant hooks, focus on the lyrical element and rely on subjectivity in storytelling, which contrasted with McCartney's general preference for third-person points of view. 

Always with a way with words, Lennon refrained from complicating his message, choosing direct statements ("Hold On," "Look At Me") over the elusive metaphors and cryptic references he often returned to during The Beatles' later years. This aspect made the album vaguely echo his mid-'60s confessional period that produced "Help!" and "In My Life," transpiring as a matured reflection of what it felt like to feel lost in the eye of the hurricane.

For all its sincerity and the psychological commitment that it symbolized to Lennon,

the album encountered a mixed reception at best; it was also quickly eclipsed by the release of Imagine nine months later, in 1971. Similar to what had happened with McCartney's self-titled debut, some critics accused John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band of being a product of self-preoccupation and void egotism. This harsh perception mostly came from the absurdly high expectations following The Beatles' breakup. 

"This is the album of a man of black bile," Geoffrey Cannon declared in a 1970 review for The Guardian. "Lennon's album makes a deep impression, if more on him than us … This is declamation, not music. It's not about freedom and love, but madness and pain."

Read: The Beatles Take Aim With 1966's 'Revolver': For The Record 

Even though Imagine eventually became Lennon's indisputable legacy—the title track was inducted into the GRAMMY Hall Of Fame in 1999, seven years after Lennon's posthumous Lifetime Achievement Award—Plastic Ono Band was still properly cherished. Fans embraced its relatability. It's easier to identify with one's idol opening up about their problems of love and loss than hearing them discuss overly abstract concepts, the renunciatory "God" and tender "Love" being exceptions.

But it also helped that the album didn't become as heavy an institution as Imagine did. Less over(ab)used by pop culture and more grounded in both content and form, Plastic Ono Band felt more human and accessible, despite coming from the myth-ridden colossus called John Lennon.

In September 1980, three months before his death, Lennon gave an extensive interview to David Sheff for Playboy magazine. Sheff asked what Ono had done for him. "She showed me the possibility of the alternative," Lennon replied. "'You don't have to do this.' 'I don't? Really? But-but-but-but-but...'" Although he was referring to his temporary retirement from music to dedicate himself to being a house husband fully, one could see Plastic Ono Band as the dénouement of a similar epiphany 10 years prior. It kick-started a new life Lennon knew would be radically different from everything he had previously experienced.

In addition to representing a threshold moment for Lennon, the album underwent a mutation with regard to its critical reception. Over the decades, Plastic Ono Band received praise that was anything but a given at its release. In 2020, the album ranked at No. 85 in Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time list. "Lennon's [...] pure, raw core of confession [...] is years ahead of punk," the list's album entry reads. 

However, perhaps Lennon acerbically summed it up best in his Rolling Stone interview with four words that remain jarring to read: "The Beatles was nothing."

It's Not Always Going To Be This Grey: George Harrison's 'All Things Must Pass' At 50

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