Welcome, new friends and welcome back, old friends. Always very glad to have you here, reading these. For those of you keeping score at home, I think this has “officially” become a fortnightly newsletter, after a three week gap between the previous two editions. I’m not worried about it, and you probably aren’t, but Substack recommends keeping a steady schedule and informing your readers of it. So, there you have it.
This week I have a new format I’m calling The Boneyard. What’s that? Well, it’s ideas that I couldn't make work as posts in their original form but felt had some merit (or I spent some time on) so figured out how to still write about them anyway. You can decide if that means I'm very efficient or very lazy. I would hope we don’t see this format recur very often.
If you want an soundtrack for this week, I am very into the new Guardian Singles album. It ticks a lot of my boxes, so I hope you dig it.
Back in two weeks with either a #RumoursByDecade update or the latest of my bootleg greatest hits compilations. We’ll see which one flows out of this keyboard the easiest.
Dead Idea 1 - Distant Cousins: Wade Boggs and David Boon
Distant Cousins is a yet-to-be-debuted recurring bit I wanna do about baseball and cricket, the reigning co-champions of bat and ball sports (go home tennis, you’re drunk.) Given that both of these sports bask in a shared love of statistics, data analysis, terrible histories, confusing rules, weird arcana and questionable urban legends they have way more in common than either wants to admit.
High on that list of accidental coincidences is that both of these sports have an story about a famously mustachioed and macho player drinking 50+ beers during a single plane flight? Wade Boggs allegedly did this on a transcontinental US flight (less than 6 hours) and David Boon allegedly did this on a flight from Australia to the UK (more than 11 hours.)
Two main problems with this one:
It turns out to not be that interesting.
I call bullshit on both stories (and especially Boggs.)
I also found that someone wrote about this already, which was the final nail in the coffin for this idea.
I do wonder, given their careers overlapped each other, if one heard this story about the other somehow and then co-opted it? They already had exactly the same mustache as each other, so why not both have this dumb story as well?
Dead Idea 2 - Album Stories: Modern Life Is Rubbish
Album Stories is an ongoing series, in which I wax nostalgic about an album and how it fits into my life, ending with a letter grade for the album and that time of my life. Modern Life Is Rubbish is basically the only Blur album I like.
There turned out to be three problems with this one:
I was having a hard time properly remembering the how and when this album came into my life, the timelines seemed to be off. Which meant I only had the album to write about and, well…
In listening to this album a bunch of times to be ready to write about it, I started to like it less each time.
In reading/listening to interviews was reminded that Damon and Alex from Blur are insufferable people. (Graham Coxon seems great, though.)
#2 was the biggest problem here. It’s not that the album isn’t good - it is. I just learned that I only need to listen to it occasionally. So, I didn’t really want to write a long thing about this record only to give it an artificially-low letter grade at the end. That felt mean spirited.
So, while there isn’t a cohesive story to tell about this record, I do have some stray thoughts to share, seeing as I listened to it a bunch when I was trying to break this story:
My main thing about this album, which was released in 1993, is that I didn’t really listen to it until 1997 or so. The Peak-Britpop-era Blur albums (Parklife and The Great Escape) are not to my tastes and I was never interested in the band as a result. Plus, in the great Blur vs Oasis feud, I was/am solidly on Team Oasis. How could I not be? For his many, many faults, Noel Gallagher is a) of The North and b) a charismatic and funny man. But, discovering Modern Life is Rubbish allowed me to turn around my thinking on Blur, by finding out that they didn’t only make bad pop records.
There’s some tracks on this album that are (somewhat successful) attempts to write about the the shared-English-experience e.g. Sunday, Sunday, but Damon ends up repeating verses and I can’t help but feel that shows that he doesn’t have as much to say about, or observe of, the world as “truer” observational-men-of-the-people like Noel Gallagher or Jarvis Cocker. (Or even Alex Turner who was smart enough to know you shouldn’t want to be a man of the people anyway.)
This is a so-white-hot-it-is-molten take, but: For Tomorrow is probably the best Blur single. I was interested to learn that it was added to the record after the rest of it had been made, because the record label wanted a single. Pretty decent work, as far as on-demand single creation goes.
Colin Zeal might be the best song on this record. And, to give Damon some credit, the idea of Colin Zeal does speak well to his observational eye. England is filled with Colin Zeals. They run the place: an endless parade of high-ranking failsons, educated at all the right places and with all the right connections. I like to think the Charmless Man famously referenced on The Great Escape is, in fact, Colin Zeal.
Resigned is a sad song. I’m on record that I don’t care for sad songs. They get in the way of the fun I’m trying to have. And yet, Resigned is an excellent sad song. It could have been a great album closer (see my Exhausted post for more on that) but then they ruin that closer with the 30 seconds of no-good, mock “cockney knees up” instrumental nonsense that follows.
Finally, I’d like to paraphrase Damon in Star Shaped and say that I also believe “having a couple at the weekend keeps up camaraderie.” It seems like the pandemic is winding down (at least here in Los Angeles), so let’s go get a couple beers and enjoy this time while we can. Hit me up, locals/IRL readers.