mien_mo_man

try listening to his obscene "just a million dreams," with chris and john lord-alge and then tell me if you still like the "coherence" of good old alan.. by the way: have you ever listened to the spleen-spoken word album by ocasek, vega and a new york poetess whose name I don’t know? it’s called getchertiktz (get your tickets) and you can't even find it on p2p. holy cow, I wonder what I would do to have it!

I really fucking like it!!!!!!

I usually detest Scandinavian music: it manages to take what is vibrantly English and dilute it to the point of death. The grass at Wimbledon is green, the grass in the park from Antonioni's film Blow Up is green; that of the meadows in Bergen and Stockholm is... bluish (everything feels more melancholic in Scandinavia). In England in the eighties, there were Duran Duran; in Norway, three popsicles called a-ha (an onomatopoeia for someone who, braving the cold, breathes out to show their friend how much smoke comes from their mouth). When success was waning for both, the former became a bit Americanized, while the latter's most unruly move was to try to resemble the breezy early U2 (a failure). And what about Kent? Can you compare them to the Swedish Manic Street Preachers? And the Madrugada with Nick Cave? And Millencollin? A Californian punk band with a name that mocks the Smashing Pumpkins? And Robert Post and Sondre Lerche (good, clean, talented, but do you like them more than Badly Drawn Boy?)? Yet, in their own way, these blondes from every generation have made their mark, as have the Cardigans (who now make a kind of American country-folk, imitating something and someone else), without infamy (except for coming from an area of the world that musically has produced nothing but Grieg and has limited itself to offering a melancholy blue version of everything the world has produced throughout its history, including the grass for tennis courts). Without infamy, and with the praise for always having beautiful girls (Nina is a fairy tale, perhaps by Andersen), a superb piece of Scandinavian-Brit-nostalgic-mod-pop like "Carnival," and a certain taste for melody.

Yes... it's just that the songs by the Cars are powerful, catchy, the lyrics are not ungrammatical but rather minimalist (on purpose, always for the principle of making everything easier to remember for generations to come) and precise, there's not a word out of place, not a smudge.
And in general, the Cars don't copy anyone.
In short, the songs by the Cars are beautiful.

how beautiful this record is, that screams up to the sky, what pain comes out, what a drag these three are, what a comfort it is to know there’s someone who can put on paper the blood of three hearts that beat and pump, and that, success or no success, do what they "have to" do

Guys, back in '97, you couldn't let slip the new-acoustic-movement (or just pop-folk?) album by Mr. James Iha, of all people the stylish pumpkin-smasher squire of don Quixote Billy Corgan in the Smashing Pumpkins. With his single and music video "Be Strong Now," which was constantly played on TV, it was almost a given that he would become the first heartthrob for pimple-faced teenagers of Italic suburbs of East Asian ethnicity. Moreover, he was always about to be the first truly hardcore musician with a stamped timecard to confirm (at the time actively involved in the SP, then also in A Perfect Circle) earning himself a cover on Cioè!! Does anyone remember him, or is it just me?

From what I gather, the essence of the Cars' existence in the "landscape" of pop-rock was precisely decay... how can I explain? Beautiful girls and flashy cars, pin-ups and Cadillacs, 50s iconographies and catchy tunes, Ric Ocasek, the scientist who hired 4 researchers (the other Cars) to achieve the simplest, most ear-catching, immediate sound (and therefore deliberately re-listenable yet quite forgettable) possible. The theory of the hyperthyroid Czech-American was that since nothing more can be expected from rock, it was time to return to what was there before... that is, little art and a lot of fun. A bit like what Jonathan Richman and his Modern Lovers did (the Cars' drummer David Robinson was from the Modern Lovers), in a certain sense... or in the opposite sense, so to speak, of Suicide (Ocasek is a great friend of Alan Vega)... that is, bands that deliberately chose what to offer to people, and then started making music. Bands that didn’t start in college just to make noise, but embraced an "editorial line" (as if it were a newspaper!), a basic philosophy... and that indeed became prisoners, so to speak, of their own song structure, with a second life for the Cars given by electronics, along with Ocasek's experimental spoken word variations, etc. Watch out: Ocasek is a great intellectual, a New York-dependent hyuppie, and an experimenter: his experiences as a producer are a prime example.

silent talking, always dreaming, bring me to this, beautiful world....
the rest is crap

I DON'T KNOW WHAT LOVE IS
I DON'T KNOW WHAT LOVE IS
I DON'T KNOW WHAT LOVE IS
BUT I THINK I HAD IT....

For echoes of Cars/Queen, the first LPs of both bands were co-produced by Ray Thomas Baker. Perhaps this gentleman, when he heard that material, with those harmonies, felt compelled to produce them? Anyway, the harmonies of the Cars are magnificent, even though Ocasek is an unusual singer, almost by chance.