Thursday, March 17, 2005
word war cross post
The Minutemen: "Do You Want New Wave (Or Do You Want the Truth?)"
The Minutemen: "The Glory of Man"
Over at the mother ship I wrote a little bit about the movie Word Wars. There's not much music in the movie, and what there is is mostly forgettable. The pretty lousy score (written by some dude named Thor) has maybe three or four recurring pieces, and the director's brother's take on "Across the Universe" is a complete non-entity (although the wife thought it was Scott Weiland at first). G. I. Joel Sherman's piano-bar take on the same song is the only sense we get that his life is not exclusively based upon Scrabble, but as music it's just barely competent enough to escape notice from Irwin Chusid. That leaves the two songs from the Minutemen, whose appearances are surprising and inexplicable. Director Eric Chaikin's use of Do You Want New Wave (Or Do You Want the Truth?) serves to highlight the frenetic, big-city pace of a Washington Square Park game, and "The Glory of Man" could very well be where the movie's title came from. And although it was nice to hear these two grand old chestnuts, they sort of diverted my attention away from the film at hand and made me think about that Minutemen documentary.
One of the amazing things about this band is that the older I get the more I appreciate them. I actively disliked them when I first heard them in high school. I warmed to certain songs in college but their noodly, funk-inflected material still turned me off. It wasn't until '99, when I got a vinyl copy of Double Nickels on the Dime from my old pals at Music Boulevard, that I started to really get into them. It took me a while to warm up to that one (I was getting tons of records in that time), but ever since I did it's been in semi-regular rotation on my record player. And due to SST's exorbitant cd prices, I still have yet to hear a good half of their collected works. I'm sort of putting that off, I guess, trying to stave off the inevitable personal depletion of their catalogue, so that when I get the urge and wherewithal to buy a new (to me) record by one of my top faves there'll always be something waiting there for me.
The Minutemen: "Do You Want New Wave (Or Do You Want the Truth?)"
The Minutemen: "The Glory of Man"
Over at the mother ship I wrote a little bit about the movie Word Wars. There's not much music in the movie, and what there is is mostly forgettable. The pretty lousy score (written by some dude named Thor) has maybe three or four recurring pieces, and the director's brother's take on "Across the Universe" is a complete non-entity (although the wife thought it was Scott Weiland at first). G. I. Joel Sherman's piano-bar take on the same song is the only sense we get that his life is not exclusively based upon Scrabble, but as music it's just barely competent enough to escape notice from Irwin Chusid. That leaves the two songs from the Minutemen, whose appearances are surprising and inexplicable. Director Eric Chaikin's use of Do You Want New Wave (Or Do You Want the Truth?) serves to highlight the frenetic, big-city pace of a Washington Square Park game, and "The Glory of Man" could very well be where the movie's title came from. And although it was nice to hear these two grand old chestnuts, they sort of diverted my attention away from the film at hand and made me think about that Minutemen documentary.
One of the amazing things about this band is that the older I get the more I appreciate them. I actively disliked them when I first heard them in high school. I warmed to certain songs in college but their noodly, funk-inflected material still turned me off. It wasn't until '99, when I got a vinyl copy of Double Nickels on the Dime from my old pals at Music Boulevard, that I started to really get into them. It took me a while to warm up to that one (I was getting tons of records in that time), but ever since I did it's been in semi-regular rotation on my record player. And due to SST's exorbitant cd prices, I still have yet to hear a good half of their collected works. I'm sort of putting that off, I guess, trying to stave off the inevitable personal depletion of their catalogue, so that when I get the urge and wherewithal to buy a new (to me) record by one of my top faves there'll always be something waiting there for me.
