Lou Reed.

Lewis Allen "Lou" Reed : March 2, 1942 - October 27, 2013.

 

 

"Had he accomplished nothing else, his work with the Velvet Underground in the late Sixties would assure him a place in anyone's rock & roll pantheon; those remarkable songs still serve as an articulate aural nightmare of men and women caught in the beauty and terror of sexual, street and drug paranoia, unwilling or unable to move. The message is that urban life is tough stuff—it will kill you; Reed, the poet of destruction, knows it but never looks away and somehow finds holiness as well as perversity in both his sinners and his quest. . . . [H]e is still one of a handful of American artists capable of the spiritual home run." - Rolling Stone, 1975.

Always With Me (いつも何度でも) - Youmi Kimura (木村 弓).

 

 

The classic, evergreen closing theme song from Hayao Miyazaki's 2001, Spirited Away (千と千尋の神隠し), "Always With Me" (いつも何度でも,, literally, "Always, No Matter How Many Times") was written and performed by Youmi Kimura (木村 弓), a composer and lyre-player from Osaka. The lyrics were written by Kimura's friend Wakako Kaku. The song was intended to be used for Rin the Chimney Painter (煙突描きのリン,), a different Miyazaki film which was never released. The song is about finding inner peace, which Miyazaki finds fit perfectly with his coming of age of story of a girl who finds her inner strength.

The Olive Tree / 橄欖樹.

The Olive Tree (橄欖樹) is a classic Mandarin song that is sung by Taiwanese artist Chyi Yu (齊豫) from her 1979 debut album. It is used as the opening song of a film from the same year, "Your Smiling Face" (歡顏). The film launched Hu Hui Chong's movie career just as the song itself launched Chyi Yu's recording career.
The English version sung by Hong Kong artist, Sally Yeh (葉蒨文) is ironically also from her very first album in 1980, when she was just 18 years old.

The words of Olive Tree were written by the famous, late Sanmao (三毛), a well-travelled and greatly-admired Taiwanese author. She died tragically in 1991, via suicide, having just written the screenplay for "Red Dust" which won 8 Golden Melody Awards. Her popularity led to intense speculations during those period pertaining to the circumstances which made her took her own life.

The Smashing Pumpkins - Siamese Dreams, Pisces Iscariot, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (Deluxe Version).

More than twenty years have passed, and I still haven't gotten over these guys (and a gal) with their second album, The Siamese Dream (1993), the collected b-sides, Pisces Iscarus (1994) and double album, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (1995). Those were the times. College days. Long discarded, the cassettes format of these albums were played ceaselessly 'till the tapes themselves worn out. I never did replace them with any CDs version. The famous singles never need to be replaced. A box set got it covered. Its the un-discovered jewels packed amongst the song lists which I really miss. I never got their debut, Gish (1991) and probably won't. But the Lull LP (1991) from a second hand shop gave me taste, and that's fine enough. I am still personally divided over Corgan's whiny, high pitch voice. And I can't really place their songs in any specific category. Some are simply beautiful, lush and breezy. Others grabs me by the throat with its walls of feedback guitars, thumping bass and monstrous drumming. Re-listening to these three re-issued albums, memories from those years came back to me. The aeroplane flies high, turn left, looks right...

R.E.M. - It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine).

That's great, it starts with an earthquake, birds and
snakes, an aeroplane and Lenny Bruce is not afraid.
Eye of a hurricane, listen to yourself churn - world
serves its own needs, dummy serve your own needs. Feed
it off an aux speak, grunt, no, strength, the Ladder
start to clatter with fear fight down height. Wire
in a fire, representing seven games, and a government
for hire at a combat site. Left of west and coming in
a hurry with the furys breathing down your neck. Team
by team reporters baffled, trumped, tethered cropped.
Look at that low playing. Fine, then. Uh oh,
overflow, population, common food, but it'll do to Save
yourself, serve yourself. World serves its own needs,
listen to your heart bleed dummy with the rapture and
the revered and the right, right. You vitriolic,
patriotic, slam, fight, bright light, feeling pretty
psyched.

It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.

Six o'clock - TV hour. Don't get caught in foreign
towers. Slash and burn, return, listen to yourself
churn. Lock it in, uniforming, book burning, blood
letting. Every motive escalate. Automotive incinerate.
Light a candle, light a motive. Step down, step down.
Watch your heel crush, crushed, uh-oh, this means no
fear cavalier. Renegade steer clear! A tournament,
tournament, a tournament of lies. Offer me solutions,
offer me alternatives and I decline.

It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.

The other night I dreamt of knives, continental
drift divide. Mountains sit in a line, Leonard
Bernstein. Leonid Brezhnev, Lenny Bruce and Lester
Bangs. Birthday party, cheesecake, jelly bean, boom! You
symbiotic, patriotic, slam bug net, right? Right.

It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel
fine...fine...

 

Today is supposedly Doomsday/Armageddon etc. based on the Mayan calendar. Like Y2K during the turn of the Millenium, it receives major coverage from everyone to everything. And managed to caught this prog on Discovery (or was that Nat Geo) 'bout people goin all ways to prepare 'emselves for such events i.e. "Preppers". This brought me back to this R.E.M. catchy single, from their 1987 album, Document. As for today, life goes on as usual for me...I guess. 

The Velvet Underground & Nico 45th Anniversary (Super Deluxe Version).

In the history of rock & roll, the only artists to rival the influence of the Velvet Underground are the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan. On The Velvet Underground and Nico, the group - Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker, with German model Nico singing on three tracks - essentially invented underground rock. Establishing himself as one of rock's greatest songwriters, Reed portrays the lives of junkies ("Heroin" and "I'm Waiting for the Man"), masochists ("Venus in Furs") and desperately lonely scene makers ("All Tomorrow's Parties") in songs that seethe with subversive energy. The Velvets' revolutionary sound - now so routinely imitated that its originality is nearly impossible to convey - emerges from the war between Reed's knowledge of pop song craft and Cale's avant-garde training.

- The Rolling Stones magazine 200 definitive list of the essential rock CDs.

 

This is the 45th anniversary super deluxe edition of the 1967 debut album by the New York City's highly influential, ground-breaking band. It consists of six CDs - the original in stereo remastered with alternate takes, the original in mono remastered with alternate takes, Nico's Chelsea Girl, the Scepter Studio sessions and few rehearsal outtakes from The Factory and finally, two very early live recordings from Valleydale Ballroom, Columbus, Ohio in 1966. Packaged as a coffee table book, it contains an insightful accounts of how this debut album (and the band) came to be, intertwined with burgeoning Pop Art movement, multimedia experiments and the sub-culture of NYC sleazy, drug-fuelled underbelly, all held together by a manager who is more popular than the band, Andy Warhol who designed the by-now instantly recognisable "peel slowly and see" banana album cover, how and why it was doomed to fail from the very beginning, leading to the band perpetual lack of recognition, which would eventually, four albums down the road, if we were to take out the last controversial one, lead to the band's collapse, unaware of the redemption that history would provide, as Brian Eno in a 1982 interview once put it "everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band". My personal take is this - either you love it or hate it. Look wise, the Velvet Underground is the ancestor of those skinny jeans, shade covered eyes, floppy haired, dressed in black/vintage clothing "Oh, I don't care" hipsters. Honestly, when I first saw The Strokes, the first thing which came to my mind was, "Hhmm, looks like Lou and the Gang". The droning, off-kilter sounds, violent clashes of the violin with jangling guitar, unconventional drumming and bass, and more importantly, perhaps the first band whose lyrics, ironically drawn/inspired by the happenings around The Factory written by their gifted singer/guitarist, Lou Reed, dealt with such frankness on decadent subjects of sexuality, drugs etc. which are considered taboo for its time. I remembered a line from Q Magazine list of albums which change the world, in their humorous way, saying something along the line, "Gears are something which the band lugs around. After the Velvet Underground debut, gears are something which you inject into your arms."