The
above image of a post-it note album review attached to a Graham Parker The Real Macaw LP was shared, unleashed
really, from the Dusty Groove
Facebook page today, and it’s been sticking like a splinter in my frontal
lobe ever since.
Doug
at Dusty Groove, which is a great record store and general knowledge repository
resource for music along the soul/funk/jazz/hip hop/sample hunting spectrum,
theorizes that this may have been an old radio station copy and the note
functioned as banter fodder and guidance for DJs from a friendly and engaged
program director. Using my eyeballs and my brain and scanning for context
clues, his story checks out.
The
idea of a “radio” station with a physical library of physical LP’s and a physical
human program director providing physical human DJ’s with actual information via
physically written notes is hopelessly quaint. I imagine visiting a radio
station now is like walking inside a giant iPod. You’re greeted warmly by a
hologram of Steve Jobs, and just after his friendly message of welcome creepily
glitches into repetition, heretofore unseen robotic clamp arms surge through
the hologram’s forehead and rip your guts out to see what genre you are and how
many beats per minute you provide. Is what I imagine happens. That’s just the
feeling I get from occasionally listening to commercial radio.
Anyhow,
as nice and as sweet and as old-fashioned and cutely ineffectual as it is to
imagine a radio station programming director once upon a time warning his or
her employees about the inherent unevenness of post-Squeezing Out Sparks Graham Parker (with the exception of “Anniversary”—how frightfully
early-80’s AOR), it’s better to imagine the above capsule review as having been
written by an aspiring critic for unintentionally personal use. Some grump in a basement who is tired of shelling out dough for Graham Parker's latest LP and wants the world to know it, except he also hates the world and doesn't want to interact with it ever. So he just writes reviews on his own LP's so people will know how he felt on the subject after he dies and Dusty Groove is bidding on his old collection. That's my preferred fantasy about this Graham Parker The Real Macaw LP.
My
first reaction to seeing it was, “Hey! That’s what I do sometimes.”
And
it’s true. I do that. I write down my thoughts about an album because I like
having them. They’re my little thought-babies and I just love them oh so much.
Sure, I don’t write my thoughts on post-it notes and then scotch tape them to a
Graham Parker The Real Macaw LP, but
hey. Different stokes for different obsessive weirdos. I have the internet now.
I’m writing this instead, and I get to pretend there’s such a thing as a “you”
at the end of it, and hopefully “you” are not Doug at Dusty Groove in 30 years
saying, “That’s hilarious, let’s put it on Facebook.”
I’m
paraphrasing Doug. That’s what I would have said if I was Doug.
Man.
Graham Parker The Real Macaw.
Nobody
ever respects the power pop guys. If you’re an ambitious songwriter who wants
to be taken seriously as a craftsman and an artist, do yourself a favor and
never ever do a power pop single. Graham Parker. Joe Jackson. Warren Zevon.
Man, those guys. They drove themselves half crazy in a bid for legitimacy that
nobody except for a certain hardcore base of people with songwriting chops hangups ever wanted to give them. Making a name for yourself with a big fun power pop single and then
trying to switch gears to goopy sentimental ballads for the grown-up set is like Steve Urkel
trying to be a serious actor. Maybe you could do Summer Stock, but forget about
going bigtime with it. Only Elvis Costello made it out alive, and only because he
distanced himself from his early material as if it was some horrific collision of accidental timeliness rather than the best thing he’s ever done.
This
is as it should be, by the way. Power pop and “I am an artist” do not and
should not mix. You can’t blend the two concepts into one career without being
disingenuous about one of them. Is what I think. Often. Sometimes.
See?
I
had that thought.
Maybe
you’ll find it later in the internet-content bargain bin. Not some of my best work, but the Steve Jobs hologram was pretty funny.
Recommended: “Inconsistencies in the ALF Mythology”
