Hey Friends! It is that time again, time for another MixTape. I have managed to do this three weeks in a row which is pretty great for me. I have this bad habit of starting a series and then just wandering away like a bored toddler. For anyone who might be tuning in for the first time to this spectacle, I missed the era of building custom mixtapes for friends. Since you are all my friends I am now building custom mixtapes for you my audience. The idea is to put a number of songs together in a way that the combination is more than any of the constituent parts. The challenge however is how to make this actually work for the digital age.
The answer to that is that I am doing this largely on Spotify and also including a YouTube Playlist as a backup. I greatly favor Spotify however because it allows me to make some nonsense custom artwork, but I guess you are going to see that anyway if you are reading this blog post. I also try and come up with a good name for the mix to sort of set the tone. Occasionally these are pretentious nonsense and others like this morning are just pretty straight forward.
Push Me Punch You
One of the things that I love is a music that has a cohesive nature but no real cohesive name. This music is referred to as punk, post-hardcore, indie rock, garage rock, alternative or just the very boring and generic “rock”. Whatever the case it is music with a slight edge but that isn’t super hard about it. This is probably the mixtape of the series that I probably listen to the most because it most represents the general state of what I want to hear in a song. I attempt to parade some b side cuts and maybe some bands doing things that you might not expect from them. This is technically the second mixtape that I created in this sequence but I wanted to try and space things out a bit since the first one also had a little bit of an edge to it.
- Bull In The Heather – Sonic Youth
- Mistaken for Strangers – The National
- Bulldog Front – Fugazi
- Somebody to Shove – Soul Asylum
- Head Injury – Soundgarden
- Been Caught Stealing – Jane’s Addiction
- Backwoods – Red Hot Chili Peppers
- Relatin’ Dudes To Jazz – fIREHOSE
- Out There – Dinosaur Jr.
- Cut – The Cure
- Jessie – Paw
- Nearly Lost You – Screaming Trees
- Ana Ng – They Might Be Giants
- Hey Now – The Regrettes
- Sunday Morning Coming Down – Me First and the Gimme Gimmes
Spotify
YouTube
Tidal
I hope you enjoy it and drop me a line below with your thoughts. Also what the hell do YOU call this brand of music? I mostly just call it Punk even though it isn’t the sort of Johnny Rotten/Exploited/Safety pin as a nose ring era that the term generally evokes.
Took a while to take the time to listen to it, nice set.
There were quite a few I didn’t know (or not too well), I think most of them are just a few years before time (I’m pretty good with 95 and later, but not ~92).
Hmm. Musical nomenclature is a minefield. I’d say just about everything on that list is “Rock” but that tells you absolutely nothing. I guess everyone on there could also just about be called “alt-rock” but really that’s not much more help than “Rock” these days.
Soundgarden and Dinosaur Jr. were core grunge bands. Fugazi were… I want to say hardcore but maybe they were post-punk? (Hah! I just checked wikipedia and it has them as “post-hardcore”!). The Chilli Peppers are about as rock as you can get, I’d say. Classic rock, pretty much, by now, although they did used to be thought of as funk-rock at one point. Or possibly punk-funk. The Cure started as punk but very much at the art end of the movement. Then they became probably the world’s most famous goth band for a while but they’ve shifted so many times (they were a top 40 pop singles band for a couple of years) I think they’re generally thought of as indie now (sonically, not commercially, obviously). Sonic Youth, very similar trajectory to the Cure, except without the pop singles.
The National I don’t know very well. Always thought they were college rock like REM? Jane’s Addiction I thought were rock edging towards goth but again I don’t really know much about them. The track you picked is kind of funky rock, a bit stonesy. Funk bassline, and drums, rock singing. Never really know what to call that although there’s a lot of it about. fIREHOSE ditto. Never heard them before although I know the name. Screaming Trees I also only know by name. That track sounds grungy.
Paw I never heard of before but that track is some form of hardcore. They Might Be Giants are college rock/math rock. That track’s very mathy. The Regrettes… I love The Regrettes. They kinda stand out on this mix, don’t they? My favorite track here by an order of magnitude. I love that video, too. They’re pure indie. Almost indie-pop rather than indie rock, too. Have you seen their cover of Sweet’s Fox on the Run? And finally, Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, who I’ve also never heard of, your guess is as good as mine! There used to be a genre called cowpunk – maybe they’re that?
Anyway, I could do this all day. Thanks for another great mixtape.
So… I typed up a whole response and apparently never actually hit the reply button so I refreshed the screen and it all went goodbye. The Me First and the Gimme Gimmes track is interesting because it is from an album they did of covers of country songs. Their thing is that they released a bunch of albums of “punk” renditions of other songs. Sunday Morning Coming down is originally a Johnny Cash song and I really like this particular rendition. Paw is a grunge era band from Lawrence Kansas which is a college town nearby so I am wondering if it got national play at all, or if it was just something that played around here a lot. I had not heard the Fox on the Run version but looking it up now. I mostly included Regrettes to include something newer into the blend for maybe someone who was familiar with some of the standards but maybe not the logical decedents. fIREHOSE is a favorite of mine, and I only know they exist because they had several tracks on a skate video. Back in the day various companies would release these videos that were essentially segments of skateboarding, and over time they started trying to weave a narrative around them. Santa Cruz Streets on Fire had a phenomenal soundtrack. If you have not heard it I highly suggest looking up the song Brave Captain.