May 17, 2003

At last, a nice quiet weekend! It's also a rainy weekend, which means I won't get much done in the back yard. However, I have plenty to do indoors as well.

Ian Drury - We All Make Mistakes

When I was on the cusp of adolescence, I picked up a double album called "The Concerts for the People of Kampuchea". The album was two lps from a series of concerts in 1979. Interestingly, it had a mix of old 70's rock (The Who, Queen, Paul McCartney) and New Wave (The Clash, The Specials, The Pretenders, Elvis Costello), covering my tastes at the time. It also had a cut from a three-hit wonder from England – Ian Drury and the Blockheads.

I heard Drury on the radio when my family lived in New Zealand, mostly on 3ZM in Christchurch. At the time, Drury was grouped in with his labelmates on Stiff as being punk. However, while his lyrics were often bizarre and a little crude, his music more a mixture of funk and British dance hall. At my school, a couple of other third formers loved him; I was just whetting my thirst for punk rock. At that time, 3ZM played mostly album rock, but would sneak in a little New Wave from England. I even remember seeing the Sex Pistols on a re-broadcast of Top of the Pops. However, I never bought an Ian Drury album while in New Zealand; in the states, his records were always expensive imports.

So, feeling nostalgic, I added Drury's Greatest Hits to my shopping cart a couple of weeks ago and bought it along with some other CDs. When the package arrived, I the Drury CD in the CD changer...and was appalled. The music was smarmy , sing-song, pseudo-pop with some cockney rhyming over the tune. I skipped to the hits, maybe they would be better. They weren't. But this had been cool when I was a pre-teen. What happened to it? When had it suddenly become lame pop with sophomoric lyrics? I put Ted Leo and the Pharmacists in the CD changer and listened to something more substantive instead.

I've seldom been very nostalgic for my teenage years, especially in terms of music. I never made serious mistakes – like Bob Seeger or Night Ranger. However, I have a box of albums at my parent's house that I will probably never listen to – Billy Joel, Men at Work, it's not a pretty list. I also watched MTV during its "golden age" featuring some truly inane New Wave like Joe King Carrasco and the Crowns, Fun Boy Three, and ABC. My real education in music didn't really begin until after high school graduation, when a friend lent me his REM albums and let me listen to the Stooges. In hindsight, the artists of my misspent musical youth nearly makes Blink 182 and Good Charlotte forgivable. I would emphasize "nearly".

Linkage

Don't Give Up On Us Baby

Another blessing of being overseas in the late seventies was missing one of that decades crowning police television dramas – Starsky and Hutch. Because it was such a fine television show, it's now being remade into a movie with Owen Wilson and Ben Stiller as the crime fighting duo. Will Owen Wilson follow in the footsteps of the original Hutch and start a musical career?

JavaScript Coolness

Building a website or remodeling a kitchen, try the color match. Well, I though this was pretty cool, but then it doesn't work in Opera 7 or Mozilla. Oh well, if you have IE, enjoy.

BBC Current Events Quiz

Want to make sure that you're up on what's really going on in the world? Take the BBC's weekly World News Quiz. [Found on megnut]

The Cost of War

They say that only a soldier knows the true cost of war. Few witness that cost the way that the "92 Mikes" at Camp Wolf in Kuwait do.