Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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35-for-35: 1982 – “Maneater” by Hall & Oates

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[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]When I was slightly older than EV I still did not have my own record player (I know – the injustice), so my mother was in charge of pulling out my favorite songs on vinyl and then dropping the needle into the groove.

hall-and-oates-h2oOne of my earliest musical memories is of her playing “Maneater” on repeat for us as we sat in our rocking chair. I know this was an early memory because the turntable was on a set of ramshackle shelves built by my father before my parents separated, rather than its later home on the other side of our living room.

Here’s what I understood about “Maneater” at the time: it was about a creature, like “Thriller.” She ate people! It had a throbbing bass line that was good for bopping along to. Also, it was on an LP called H20, which meant water but also meant Hall & Oates. Basically, it was the most clever thing anyone had ever thought of.

As a toddler, I may have missed a few entendres.

As with a lot of my early-in-life vinyl favorites, I completely lost touch with Hall & Oates as I grew older and amassed my own record (and, later, CD) collection. In fact, unlike Madonna and MJ, who I began spinning again in college, Hall & Oates didn’t make their return to my collection until 2010 inspired by the requests of my communications-buddy and cube neighbor, MK.

I was even listening to The Bird and The Bee’s H&O cover LP before I was listening to H&O again!

Revisiting “Maneater” as an adult and a musician, a whole new set of elements stick out for me.

The intro is a familiar Hall & Oates gimmick – a long minor-key instrumental that gradually adds additional instruments (bass, keyboards, a trickling water effect, and smarmy saxophone) and then pops into the relative major key for the verse.

hall-and-oates-maneaterThe lyrics are as lurid as those of my other childhood favorite with an awesome bassline, “Billy Jean.” Here, H&O are unsubtly describing falling in love with a sex worker – or, at least a woman who is ready to devour any high-roller who enters her life.

What makes the song interesting to me today is this line: “If you’re in it for love you ain’t gonna get too far.” Who exactly is pursuing the Maneater, in the context of the song? Is it another rich boy, unware that he’s about to be drained dry? Or, is it someone who is genuinely falling for her.

If the latter, who are H&O to warn him off? Maybe he’s the true love that has been missing from all of Maneater’s conquests.

We’re not meant to know. Hall & Oates wrote fantastic songs, but they weren’t ever especially known for the complete narratives of their lyrics. If you don’t believe me, please share – what is the “That” for which “I Can’t Go For”?

Even without a coherent story, there’s no doubt that “Maneater” is one of Hall & Oates’ stone cold early-80s classics.

Crushing Krisis: Blog of Tomorrow (a Patreon launch event)

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Behind-the-Scenes at the Patreon Introduction Video

Behind-the-Scenes at the Patreon Introduction Video

patreon-squareWelcome to a very special month of Crushing Krisis, which I have dubbed “Blog of Tomorrow”!

Why is it so special? I’m glad you asked!

I am marking my ten-year anniversary of using WordPress with the launch of a Patreon campaign. Patreon allows readers to become Patrons who cover the costs of running CK.

Rather than tempt you to pledge your support with promises of future content you can only imagine (and that I might not be able to produce), I’m bringing you the real thing – along with the 16 years of blog posts and comprehensive Marvel Collecting Guides you already love.

For the next 30 days you’ll get a future vision of what I think CK could be a year from now with your regular support and interaction, and with my full non-parenting attention on blogging. It’s something I’ve never had the opportunity to do before. My hope is that if you love it, you’ll become a Patron to help me make this a reality for CK.

Here’s a glimpse of the content you’ll read on CK this month:

I want you to feel the need check Crushing Krisis every single day the way you would all your other favorite websites. The difference is that I’m doing this all on my own without other contributors, artists, editors, or advertising dollars. And, while posting won’t remain at this insane intensity come December, it will still feature regular content just like what I’m producing this month.

Here’s my pitch video from Patreon, where I’ll be making another series of almost-daily posts to explore behind-the-scenes details of running a 16-yr-old blog.

At the end of the month, commenters, mailing list subscribers, and Patrons will help me decide what future content to focus on first. We’ll unlock new and regular features as the pledge total rises.

Want Wonder Woman and Maurice Sendak readalongs instead of Image and Dr. Seuss? Want more original music and less music essays? Wish I’d talk more about movies? I’ll be asking you at the end of the month.

Read on for more of the backstory on this unprecedented month of content. [Read more…] about Crushing Krisis: Blog of Tomorrow (a Patreon launch event)

things blow up sometimes

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If you visited CK anytime between 5pm this afternoon and 10 minutes ago you witness a really confusing muddle of a half-installed WP theme and a cascade of PHP errors.

That’s all due to some sprucing up I did today to prepare for my big November plans for CK. November will mark my 10th anniversary on WordPress, and my ninth anniversary on this lovely, plain little WP theme, Very Plain Text.

I don’t tend to give a lot of thought to the interoperability of old things until they up and die. I was shocked, shocked I tell you, to learn that E’s iPad from 2010 is trapped on version 5.something of IOS and cannot load any apps from the App Store since the lowest IOS they’ve been developed for is v6. I was puzzled when my old PreSonus FirePod didn’t have drivers to work on the newest operating systems – sure, it’s a decade old, but I payed good money for that hardware only a decade ago!

The sad fact is, a decade is now forever when it comes to technology. Heck, four years is practically an eternity. It’s not so much planned obsolescence as forced obsolescence.

Which brings me to tonight. I did a bad developer thing and changed multiple variables of my WP install at once without backing up first, and as a result none of my plugins wanted to speak to each other on the Admin Panel anymore. To make things worse, when I turned on debugging in WP_Config, a massive litany of errors unfurled because apparently when your WP theme was last updated to work with WP2.6 and you’re on WB4.6 pretty much every function call it uses has been deprecated in some way. It was impossible to figure out what other things were broken through the waterfall of complaints about my theme.

Three frantic hours of pulling back-ups later and everything was back to normal (well, normal for my 9yr-old theme) except for my one most relied-upon plugin, WordPress Editorial Calendar. It was still borked.

I’ve written about my love for WordPress Editorial Calendar before, and that love has never ceased. Nothing ever gets done here without it; if you notice I’m making halfway decent posts at a rate of more than once per week, it’s because I am spending quality time with my EdCal. Yet, even after all of my rollbacks it was still throwing a “Unable to Parse” and “Unexpected token” error. I was tearing my newly re-purpled hair out. There was only one hit on Google and WordPress.org and it had no guidance for me. I had reversed everything to the state it was in when I woke up this morning!

Except… except when I rolled out of bed this morning and immediately started doing SQL in Sequel Pro (seriously: not working at an analytics company anymore, but that is still my life), I noticed a few recent post titles that had wrong punctuation and edited them directly in SQL. And some of that punctation could be escape characters in some contexts. Could it be that even thought the rest of my blog was fine, those unescaped title characters were killing my EdCal?

Yup.

So, if you’re ever getting those errors on EdCal, try going far into the future and then scrolling back week by week until you hit a week that throws the error, then review your post titles for that week.

And, I’m very grateful that everything is back to nine-year-old normalcy here on CK. You should take a moment right now to appreciate some of the older things in your life whose function you take for granted.

Track-by-Track: Lady Gaga’s Joanne – “Perfect Illusion” (Track 06)

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lady-gaga-perfect-illusion-1I’ll be dissecting Joanne song by song every day until November, when I debut a month of major daily content!

Considering I just wrote about this song six weeks ago and in doing so deconstructed it considerably, what else is there to say?

A lot.

The choice of “Perfect Illusion” as a lead single turned out to be less a canary in a coal mine and more a Trojan Horse. It is by far the most synthy, thrashing, disco-tinged tune on the entire record. Only yesterday’s “Dancin’ In Circles” comes anywhere near it in sound and the chorus of “Diamond Heart” in ferocity.

That begs the question for me – was this a obligation single? You know the kind that I mean. That one song the artist begrudgingly produces to sound a lot like their older work so that their record makes an initial impact on radio, but then quickly ditches and never references again.

We’ll never know Lady Gaga’s true intent. One signal that “Perfect Illusion” was a throwaway is that Gaga hasn’t been performing it visibly past a single pub warmup gig in the UK. It played but not published for her Bud Light sessions on YouTube, not on her release-day Facebook Live concert, and not on Saturday Night Live this weekend. The only full-quality performance we’ve seen is a stripped down version that would have fit in with the ballads on this disc.

Is that in response to tepid radio pickup of the tune, or was it always going to be this way?  I’m not sure, and we won’t have more of an indication until we see if it shows up in tour setlists.

What we do have is its context on the record. “Perfect Illusion” acts as a crescendo to the build of energy throughout the first half of this album. The back half is a much more subtle affair. When the vinyl of this record drops I would be surprised if it wasn’t the final song on Side A rather than the start of side B.

There’s also the thematic content of the album to consider. As a lead-off single, “Perfect Illusion” seemed like a standard kiss-off to a past lover – an easy inspiration to assess considering Gaga’s recently-ended engagement. Instead, try reading it as a song that’s about making Artpop.

Tryin’ to get control
Pressure’s takin’ its toll
Stuck in the middle zone
I just want you alone

My guessing game is strong
Way too real to be wrong
Caught up in your show
Yeah, at least now I know

Gaga fired her longtime manager Troy Carter simultaneous to Artpop‘s 2013 release, when media attention and fan expectations were at their peak. She had promised for months to deliver a stunning work of artistic perfect on par with her highly-regarded Fame Monster EP, but Artpop turned out to be a mirage of synthesizers and drum programming more about The Fame that Gaga had been chasing than about the woman herself. Most critics and fans brushed it off like a gossamer soap bubble. She was truly caught up in her own show on “Applause” and flop “Venus,” which was scrapped for middling performer “Do What U Want.”

Would it have been better off more undressed, with a plainer, Gaga at its center? Did she let producers, managers, and A&R reps second guess her own direction – or perhaps did she second guess herself? Maybe she wasn’t as obsessed or inspired by all of those layers of fabrication as she claimed she was. Maybe it wasn’t love – not for her, or for her fans. It’s evident that the world loves a less-guarded, still-unique Gaga based on the success of her intervening work like Cheek to Cheek, American Horror Story, and “Til It Happens To You.”

In that interpretation, maybe “Perfect Illusion” was the only possible lead single to Joanne – a callback to a less-fussy sound that lays bare all of Gaga’s pent up anxieties about exposing something a little more stripped down and true on this record.

Or maybe that’s all just useless speculation about an inscrutable pop star who is smart enough that she can make us assume anything she wants to about her true motivations.

Either way, the vital, live-rock sound of the song is already aging well even if the brevity of its actual content continues to dissuade repeat listens. It turns out that Joanne would have plenty of live-band sound to share with us, but just not in the same vein as this tune.

Track-by-Track: Lady Gaga’s Joanne – “John Wayne” (Track 04)

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Lady Gaga's title cards from this week's SNL.

Lady Gaga’s title cards from tonight’s episode of SNL, where she is the musical guest.

I’ll be dissecting Joanne song by song every day until November, when I debut a month of major daily content!

Hearing “John Wayne” tracked after “A-YO” and “Joanne” made me appreciate just how canny Lady Gaga is.

A song title like “John Wayne” seems to clearly confirm the country bent of this album. Doubtlessly, some pop fans will be in a panic after the acoustic “Joanne” and another country-tinged tune could cause them to tune out.

What does Gaga do after the shock to reel us back in? Delivers a track named “John Wayne” with a decidedly country-fried guitar lick that’s more in line with her typical minor-key dance-stomp, so much that it feels ripped right from the back half of Born This Way.

Yes, Born This Way. Listen to Gaga’s vocal tone and intonation here. There are still shades of her country drawl from “A-YO,” but it also has the cooed alto notes of Born. Add the bass groove with minor synth work exploding into a big hook feels like it could be tracked right next to “Highway Unicorn (Road To Love).”

The stomp of the drums during that big hook make even more sense when you know that “John Wayne” is one of two cowrites with Josh Homme, of Queens of the Stone Age and Eagles of Death Metal (the other is “Diamond Heart”). Homme’s guitar work – muscular and sour – is usually his sonic signature (heard clearly on the chorus hook and outro solo), but many listeners don’t know he also plays drums. He’s the one behind the sticks here for the massive wallop of chorus drums with emphasized upbeats, which is another QotSA trademark.

Josh Homme

Josh Homme

It’s hard to dissect Homme’s guitars from Gaga’s own wordless chants in the hook of this song, and I suspect they’re each doubling the other. Combined, they’re a sort of slow-mo version of a down-home fiddle riff, as you might be dancing along to in “Cotten-Eyed Joe” at half speed. Gaga can never attack a genre head on, so just as “A-YO” turned radio pop into a line-dance, here she perverts a line-dance into a modern rock song with Homme’s assistance.

On both “Diamond Heart” and “John Wayne” Gaga casts herself in the role of selling her body, there dancing for money and here proclaiming “Every John is just the same” (“John” is the noun that many sex workers use to describe a customer, basically a spin on “John Doe.”). While ArtPop was shameless sexual across its full length, for me the more specific callback is to Born This Way tracks like “Government Hooker,” “Judas,” and “Scheibe.” There, Gaga was toying specifically with the Mary Magdalene aspect of the “virgin/whore” dichotomy, versus the more generally sex positive ArtPop.

Yet, Gaga isn’t offering subservience here – she’s wishing for a better quality of man. “Every John is just the same,” she begins, “I’m sick of their city games. I crave a real wild man. I’m strung out on John Wayne!” Of course, Wayne is noted as a paragon of American masculinity. Yet, is Gaga talking about the literal, historical man here? Or, is John Wayne simply her nickname for any country man with rough hands who can take her on a “three-day bender”?

The answer doesn’t matter – it’s the question that defines this record. If ArtPop was a celebration of all things artificial that are crafted to be obsessed over, Joanne is about appreciating things that are authentic and tangible – anything that isn’t a “Perfect Illusion.”

More on that on Monday. Before then, we have another throwback track to discuss tomorrow.