My Favorite Concerts and Livestreams on YouTube

I really only like listening to certain live albums or performances. I often get annoyed at the loud crowd screaming over the songs and singing along badly, and the singer changing up the lyrics, encouraging the audience to sing along or showboating too much, and all too often the sound quality is awful like it was recorded on someone’s cheap smartphone, and makes your ears bleed. I typically prefer studio recordings above all else. But there are some live performances that sound as good as or even better than the studio versions. It can be nice to hear slightly different versions of the songs you love too, just to add some variety. So when I am in the mood to stream a live performance on YouTube, these are the videos I most often listen to. This list is destined to grow of course. Some are bands performing in front of a sold out arena, others are low budget affairs recorded in the artist’s home. It’s a long list, spanning many genres, so I’ll just say a few short things about each choice.  

Light Asylum - Live on KEXP

Light Asylum is a band I miss a lot. They burst onto the scene around 2013, put out one album and some singles, and nothing since. This was a performance they did for the radio station KEXP. It sounds just as good as the studio versions, but with the added character of being played live. “IPC” is still such a danceable tune that I’ve never tired of after all these years.

Kraftwerk - Minimum Maximum 

This one is a long one, a two-parter. Here Kraftwerk plays the biggest hits of their discography, accompanied by a lot of good production value. By the 21st century Kraftwerk finally had the technology to make fully realized versions of their songs they probably would have made if they could back in the 1970s. And rather than becoming quickly outdated updates like what George Lucas did to the original Star Wars trilogy, these versions improve on many elements, and exist alongside the originals rather than attempting to replace them. Also helping is that Kraftwerk concerts don’t really lend themselves to mosh pits and screaming crowds, so you can focus on the music like a studio version.

Omnia - Pagan Folklore 

This is a relaxing concert that’s nice to put on as you’re going to sleep. If I’m in the right mood for it I do like listening to new age pagan folk music like this. This is another one that has a high production value, like it was produced for a DVD. It’s inter-spliced with little introductions to each song by the singers, giving the whole thing a certain charm. 

System of a Down - Live in Yerevan

I was at this concert, and I’ll be telling my grandkids about it one day. In April 2015 System of a Down came to Armenia for the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide, and put on probably their best concert ever. It was a magical night. They set up right in Republic Square at the center of Yerevan, and as they played a powerful thunderstorm started and just added to the epicness. I just happened to be in Armenia doing my internships teaching English with Birthright Armenia at the time, and got to go to the concert. I was out at the edge of the crowd, so I’ve never been able to find myself in this video. But I was there, I promise. 

Ministry on Broadway, Chicago, Il. (1982) 

Synthpop Ministry is best Ministry. Here’s a pretty good quality recording of one of their earliest concerts in 1982. I find that not most live performances from before the internet age have the best sound quality unless they were being purposely recorded for an album or home video, but this one sounds good. And despite Al Jourgensen’s distaste for his own early work, he recently remastered the audio of this concert and put it up on Bandcamp. It’s a worthwhile purchase. 

Glaare - April 17, 2018

I really love the sound of this band. They only had one album at the time so this concert is short and sweet, but it sounds as good as if not sometimes better than the studio versions. The singer puts more passion into tracks like “My Love Grows in Darkness”, one of my favorite songs. It’s music you can escape with. 

Mortiis - Live at the Place, September 11, 2018

This concert was from shortly after Mortiis returned to playing dungeon synth. I went to one of his concerts in early 2020 and it was more or less exactly like this, so when I want to relive that night I listen to this. It’s darkly relaxing. Great background music at least. Especially if you’re playing Dungeons and Dragons or something like that. Or even if you just want to do a dark meditation. 

Hante - Live at St. Vitus August 7, 2018 

Hante is a French coldwave solo act by Helene de Thoury. In this performance she plays in front of a small audience, but it’s professionally shot. She plays all my favorite Hante songs in this performance. It’s impressive in this performance that she does everything herself, both sing and work the synthesizer. She makes it look so natural and easy. It’s a bit similar to the Mortiis concert above, since he did all the work himself in that video too, although he wasn’t also singing. My neurodivergent brain wouldn’t be able to multitask like that. 

Minuit Machine - Sainte Rave

On a related note, here’s a concert by Minuit Machine, another band featuring Helene de Thoury. This was a virtual concert that was live streamed in December 2020. The audio alone rivals that of the studio versions of the songs, but the dark, ominous setting of the concert just adds to the whole atmosphere, like they set up a rave in an abandoned cathedral. In fact it was so good that they’re selling a recording of the concert on Bandcamp too. It would definitely be cool to have this on vinyl. 

Theatre of Tragedy- Last Curtain Call (2010)

This was the final farewell of the legendary gothic metal band Theatre of Tragedy, the last concert they played before they split up. So you can imagine they were giving it their all for this one, and it was professionally recorded due to its importance. It’s very emotionally-charged. You even see some of the audience members tearing up at a few points, as they witness the band’s swan-song. But it was a high note to go out on. 

The Cure - Trilogy (2002)

You can’t go wrong with The Cure playing all of their best albums live in their entirety. They play Pornography, Disintegration, and Bloodflowers. I also have this one on DVD, a super lucky thrift store find. It’s over three hours, but well worth listening to, even if only in parts.

Alice in Chains - Live at the Moore, 1991

This is a great showcase of early Alice in Chains, from after the release of Facelift but before their most famous album Dirt. They were less dark at the time, and as you can probably guess I prefer their darker stuff on later albums, but there are some top notch renditions of  “Man in the Box” and “Love Hate Love” here, a couple of my favorites. It’s nice to hear Layne Staley be conversational with the audience, it feels like he’s talking to you. Sounds like someone who would be great to hang out with. 

Alice in Chains - MTV Unplugged

This was mainly going to be one entry per band, buuuut these two concerts are both so good, and different enough from one another. This legendary performance came right at the end of Layne Staley’s tenure with the band, giving them a larger discography to draw from than the other live performance I included, and in many ways represented the end of an era. Alice in Chains would go on to release two more songs before Staley’s death, but this concert really did seem like the last hurrah. Not long after this Layne Staley was in no condition to tour. You get a very different energy from the acoustic versions of many of these songs. Dark, relaxing, and beautiful. And when Staley flubs his lines during “Sludge Factory” and yells out “FUCK!”, only to be consoled by his bandmate and friend Jerry Cantrell, it actually kind of puts a human face on the band. I probably would be flubbing my lines left and right if it were me.

You have to find a playlist to watch the whole thing on YouTube, no one has it as just one video. 

Nirvana - MTV Unplugged

Can’t mention Alice in Chains Unplugged without mentioning Nirvana Unplugged too. Hits a lot of the same energetic notes that the Alice in Chains one does. Most people who listen to alternative rock will have at least heard Nirvana’s rendition of David Bowie’s “The Man who Sold the World” from this concert, which received a lot of radio play in the 1990s as I recall. It is interesting that Kurt Cobain chose to include a lot of covers, and throw some folk and blues songs in there, while “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is nowhere to be heard. My favorite performance here is “Something in the Way”, with that dreary cello in the background. Much as it would for Alice in Chains, this concert ended up being something of a final farewell for Nirvana too, recorded less than a year before Kurt Cobain’s death.

Type O Negative - Symphony for the Devil

I actually have this one on DVD too. It starts with a bunch of funny clips from Type O Negative fans, and also includes the humorous antics of the bandmates. Type O Negative has a certain brand of humor you’re either going to get or not get at all. If you just want to put a live show on and listen to music in the background of whatever you’re doing it might not be the best since the songs are inter-spliced with the band goofing off backstage, but it’s entertaining if you feel like watching the band. The music itself is great too, of course. It’s performed in front of a huge audience. A bit heavier sometimes than the studio versions. But Peter Steele’s soothing baritone voice is just as good live. 

Statiqbloom- Live for Strict Tempo, July 9, 2020

This was the livestream that got me into Statiqbloom. I had heard the track “Thin Hidden Hand” before this, but the livestream was what made me a fan. It is best listened to from beginning to end as one single work. The songs all blend into one another, maintaining a consistent dark energy throughout. I also like some of the extra voice samples that were added to the songs that weren’t on the studio versions. It has more of a raw feel than the studio versions too. 

Grey Gallows - Luna Negra/ Cold Transmission 

Grey Gallows is along my favorite Greek bands. This performance is just the duo performing in what looks to be their home, but that just leaves no interference from a pesky crowd. I like these simplistic performances. You still get a different feel for the songs. For example, the singer puts a little more passion into his singing at some points, such as in the song “Enemy”. At 20+ minutes it’s on the shorter side, but they manage to squeeze in their best hits. 

Skinny Puppy, Halloween 1986

It’s kind of hard to find live performances from this long ago that sound good, but it was produced for home video, so it passes the test. I was less than a year old when this concert happened. To think I could have been listening to Skinny Puppy all my life, but only discovered them a few years ago. Pity.

Carnal Machinery - Luna Negra Livestream

This livestream is short and sweet, with three songs packed into a little over thirteen minutes, but it’s the perfect sampler of Carnal Machinery, a dark and aggressive synth-punk act. I especially love this version of the song “Voices”, with those voice samples at the beginning adding a layer of schizophrenia to the track that is missing on the studio version.

Molchat Doma - Taksirat Festival 2020

This performance perfectly encapsulates the gloomy post-punk sound of Molchat Doma. Here they go through all their biggest hits, and since it was produced for TV and wasn’t in front of a big crowd it has optimal sound quality. As a result though it doesn’t really differ heavily from the studio versions, other than being a bit more echoing. Still a good mix to put on. 

My Cassette Album Collection

 

        I threatened to do this post earlier, and here it is, for all five of you who like looking at other people's collections of things! These are the "official" cassettes I own (plus one bootleg tape). Now I have literally hundreds of formerly blank mixtapes, but these are the comparatively few tapes that are actual albums. Some of them came from my parents, a couple actually came from my grandmother, the newest ones were purchased straight from the artist either at a concert or online, and the rest were lucky thrift store finds (and that's rarer than you think; almost every thrift shop I've been to either has country music, religious music, or Christmas music in their cassette section, hardly ever is there anything I would like). I mostly tried to group the tapes that were similar to one another, but I wasn't always able to do that for each picture.

Kraftwerk - Autobahn (bootleg)

        I'll get this one down first. This isn't an official cassette. Now a long time ago in my early teens, when I was in the Boy Scouts (which I largely loathed but that's another story), the father of one of the other kids in my troop found out I liked Kraftwerk after I wore my Kraftwerk t-shirt on one of our camping trips, so he actually made this for me. He somehow printed out a very convincing cover, but the cassette itself is one of those TDK D90 tapes that I have a bunch of. It was nice of him; I suppose it's thrilling when you're middle-aged and you find out a kid is into the music you liked when you were younger. I'm closer to being middle-aged myself now so I kind of get it. I'd heard the remixed version of "Autobahn" on Kraftwerk's The Mix album before, but the first time I heard the full version (over twenty minutes long) was from this tape. There was a lot of blank space on the tape since the actual album isn't that long, which I filled with more Kraftwerk songs.

My German Polka Tapes

        Every now and then, I like to put one of these tapes on as background music. It's very happy and relaxing music. The top two tapes were both lucky thrift store finds, but the bottom two, titled Es Singt und Klingt im Ganzen Land ("it sings and clings in the whole land") were two of the only things I inherited when my grandma Olga died in 2003 (I also got my own copy of my grandfather's memoir). She grew up in Austria and lived there until after World War II, so this was her type of music. I don't have a whole lot to remember her by, but I do have these cassettes. So I have a lot of sentimentality wrapped up in these tapes. 

My Big Band Jazz and Swing Tapes

        These were all thrift store finds. The top two are part of a set of music from the 1930's and 40's called "This Was Our Music". It's the soundtrack of a generation that by and large is gone now. This was their music. Jukebox Requests of the 1940's is the same kind of music for the most part. And we have The Hits of Judy Garland. My favorite Judy Garland song, "Never Been Blue", isn't on it unfortunately. But I snatched it anyway for like 25 cents. 

 

Paula Abdul - Forever Your Girl

        Yes, one of my sort-of guilty pleasures. I was into Paula Abdul during my early childhood. This has all her best songs; "Opposites Attract", Cold-Hearted Snake", "Straight Up", and some other lesser-known good ones. 

Some Good 80's Bands from Thrift Stores

Here we have The B-52's with Cosmic Thing, an impulse buy at a thrift store for dirt cheap. It has "Love Shack", "Roam" and "Channel Z". some old favorites of mine from that band (which I was into when I was younger).  Please was the 1986 debut album from the Pet Shop Boys, with their hit "West End Girls". This tape is in great shape, sounds as clear as a CD too. Journey's Greatest Hits was something I grew up listening to on a CD my mom owned, so it was good to find that again. And Orchestral Manouevres in the Dark is another good New Wave band which I had to snatch up when I saw the tape among all the bland country music tapes. 

Lesser-Known Guns n'Roses and Pink Floyd Albums

The Guns n' Roses tapes belonged to my parents. I grew up listening to that band. These are the albums Use Your Illusion and Lies. The Pink Floyd tape is of their album Animals. It says it was copyrighted 1977, and if the tape is actually that old it's amazing it still works. I wish I had Dark Side of the Moon or The Wall. These three tapes are linked by the fact that they're not the more famous albums of either band.

Weird Al and MC Hammer

  These are both tapes I've had since childhood. Don't ask why I have an MC Hammer tape. It's been following me around for decades now and I can't seem to get rid of it. I'm really not a fan of hip hop, but if I'm going to listen to it, I like the stuff from the 80's better than anything later. That Weird Al Greatest Hits tape accompanied many a road trip when I was a kid, and I have fond memories of it. I need to get it a new plastic case, as you can tell. I could always switch the case with a crappy country music tape from the thrift stores.

Faith No More and Korn

The Faith No More tape was definitely my mom's, she loved that band. It's my only tape with a Parental Advisory label on it. I'm a parent now and I will always think those labels are stupid. The album is Angel Dust, it doesn't really have any of my favorite Faith No More songs on it like "Epic" or "Last Cup of Sorrow", but it is what it is. Korn's Follow the Leader was an interesting find at this record store in the San Francisco Bay Area I liked to frequent when I lived there, Rasputin Records. It seems rare to find rock music from the late 1990's on cassette, as that was solidly the CD era. 

Classic Rock. And The Church.

These were tapes I remembered at the last minute when I was digging through my collection. The Black Sabbath and AC/DC tapes were from my dad. They might just be the oldest tapes in my collection (along with the Pink Floyd one), actually from the late 1970's. I only rarely listen to them, but that keeps them in good shape I suppose. I'm really not that into classic rock. Black Sabbath and Ozzy Osbourne are some of the better ones that still hold up today, got to give them credit for their contribution to the metal genre. To me though almost all of AC/DC's songs sound the same. The Church is a misfit here, another New Wave band. Alas, it isn't the album with "Under the Milky Way" or "Reptile" on it, my favorite songs from them. 

Mortiis

I did a blog about the concert where I purchased these cassettes, two of Mortiis' dungeon synth albums. See I actually attended a concert in 2020! It was right before the coronavirus, of course.

Online and Concert Purchases

These are probably my favorites, along with maybe the Kraftwerk one. The top left one is The Midnight's album Nocturnal. The Midnight is one of the best synthwave bands out there, a revival of 80's music. To the top right is from the band Glaare, the album To Deaf and a Day. Glaare's music is amazing, I have to say. They are out of these tapes on Bandcamp page but you can still get the mp3's. I recently acquired Slow Danse With the Dead's debut album, as I mentioned in my Top 3 Songs of the Month for August. And finally I have Boy Harsher's album Careful, which I purchased at a concert last year in Tampa. 

Not Pictured

I wasn't able to dig them up, but somewhere I have the soundtrack to the 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie on cassette (missing the booklet sadly), as well as the soundtrack to Jurassic Park. I'm sure they're around somewhere, in a box in my closet. The Ninja Turtle soundtrack in particular has a couple good songs on it, and is a relic of my childhood.The Jurassic Park one is just instrumental, but there was a time I would buy anything with a Jurassic Park logo on it.

Anyway, that's the collection! Thanks for being bored enough to read about it. 

Thoughts on “The Dummy That Lived” by L. Frank Baum

            In my quest to further my knowledge of L. Frank Baum’s writing outside of the Oz series, I recently looked at American Fairy Tales, a short story collection from 1901. A story that immediately caught my eye was “The Dummy That Lived”. Like essentially all of his output, it's freely available and public domain.

             

 I’ve long had a fascination with stories about mannequins which come to life. I first encountered the concept in The Twilight Zone, in the episode “The After Hours”, about a woman who is a living dummy but doesn’t know it, and has to be reminded by the other dummies in a department store. Another work I like that uses this concept is Kraftwerk’s song “Showroom Dummies” (embedded above). In this song, a group of mannequins in the window of a shop come to life, break the glass in the window, and walk to a dance club where they dance. It’s a suitable song to be sung by a group that often masqueraded as robots and put on concerts and interviews with robotic counterparts. I’ve seen several other media use this concept, such as an episode of Doctor Who and the music video for "Instant Crush" by Daft Punk. L. Frank Baum’s story, however, predates all of the examples I know by more than half a century. Did he come up with this concept? Was his story the first? I suppose it is predated by Pinocchio, but then again, that was a puppet coming to life, not a store mannequin. Baum was quite the innovator, and did provide early examples of robots, cell phones, and the concept of fantasy world building in his writing, so maybe he created this concept as well.

            The story is about a mischievous elf named Tanko-Mankie, who just for fun breathes life into a mannequin in a store window. This mannequin is at first baffled by her sudden consciousness. She eventually escapes the store and tries her best to blend in with society, walking through town and into a coffee shop (only to burn her lip and decide she doesn’t like coffee), ending up being hit by a car (to the horror of witnesses who see her caved-in skull; luckily she doesn’t feel pain) and thrown in a jail cell, before the elf takes her life from her again. Bringing inanimate objects to life is a theme that shows up often in the Oz books written after this story as well (the mannequin character brings to mind Jack Pumpkinhead and Scraps the Patchwork Girl, specifically), and it seems like something Baum thought about a lot. It’s a story that can force the reader to dwell on their own existence and question what it means to be alive.

I relate to this poor mannequin. I’ll often be walking around, baffled by my own existence, attempting to interact with other human beings but not really knowing how, just trying to copy what other people do and hope it goes over well. But the story really has universal appeal. Aren’t we all in the same sort of predicament; finding ourselves alive in a strange world that makes little logical sense, doing our best to fit in with it, not always doing a good job of it, only to one day be inevitably stripped of our brief consciousness? Is this curse of self-awareness and consciousness, which seems unique to our species, merely a trick that was pulled on us by a mischievous cosmic entity, like Tanko-Mankie? This story is really a metaphor for the human condition. When we look up at the night sky, at all of the stars and constellations, we really don’t know much more about our vast universe than the dummy knew looking out the shop window after just becoming conscious.

Mixtape Reflections: Work For Love

            So I’ve talked about the job I enjoyed having in my last post. Now I’m afraid it is time to discuss the worst job I’ve ever had; working at a call center for a furniture and bedding department, which I stayed doing for the health insurance for my pregnant wife. It was a little over a year ago that I was finally fired from this job for using too many sick days; not that they cared that my wife had just given birth and needed extra help, nor that what pushed me over the limit was actually coming down with the flu. I guess they wanted me to come to work and get everyone else sick! To them, I was a defective cog in their machine and had to be removed. But being fired was one of the best days of my life anyway. Fortunately, it’s all behind me now. I’ve talked about it on here before, in my post about how the Oz books became my main coping mechanism at a job where I was belittled, berated, dehumanized and yelled at 40 hours a week. Another thing I did between calls was keep a journal. This was allowed because we weren’t handling any confidential personal information. This journal chronicles my downward spiral into madness, but more importantly for this blog post, an entry in it chronicles my decision to make a mix tape out of the whole experience. Songs that popped in my head a lot on the job, songs that were relevant to my experiences. This is an example of how I use mixes and playlists as a form of memoir.

One of the saner couple of pages, trust me.

            Why make mixtapes about bad times in my life? Is it strictly healthy to go back to tapes like this and mope over things that happened years ago? It’s not as if I go back and listen to tapes like this that often, mind you. I guess I just don’t like forgetting eras of my life, bad or good. Like all human beings who don’t have unusually strong photographic memories, I have a mild case of amnesia. I have only the vaguest sense of what I was doing more than two days ago on any given day. Let alone five, ten, fifteen years ago. And I don’t know if my memory has been getting worse as the years go on. It’s a little scary. But I retain memories in songs. It’s important to remember the past so you can learn from it. Those who don’t are doomed to repeat it, as the cliché goes. I also think a part of me feels triumph in overcoming past hardships. I survived working this horrible job. Never again.

            Included on the tape are samples of songs from the hold music I was tormented with, day in day out. How I grew to despise these songs. They’re on here as a reminder, lest I ever forget. Of course, it’s not the full songs. I would be on hold often, either to speak to a team leader for help, escalate Karen the Furious Soccer Mom to a supervisor, call in for NPT (non-phone time, I think is what it stood for; basically permission to be off the phone so I could finish processing a refund or whatever else). The songs were “Stockholm Syndrome” by One Direction, “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac, “That’s the Way it Is” by Celine Dion, “Chariot” by Gavin DeGraw, and “Everlasting Love” by Howard Jones. These are my least favorite songs in the world, and to this day if I hear them somewhere, I get horrible flashbacks. The people who made these songs and sold them to a call center company to be used as hold music deserve to be strapped to a chair and forced to listen to the song they created on loop for 40 hours a week.  I remade this tape as a Spotify playlist, but did not include these songs, not only to spare the ears of whoever reads this blog and wants to listen to my mix, but because I heard the artists make a tiny bit of money when their song is played on Spotify, and I wouldn’t want that.

Work For Love - Spotify Playlist

Ministry – Work For Love

            The mix starts with some hold music before transitioning into “Work For Love” by Ministry, the tape’s namesake. Love was the only reason I kept working at this call center, so it is fitting in that sense. It makes me think back to my early days starting the job, before I became traumatized by it.

Type O Negative - I Don’t Wanna be Me

Next is a song that often pops into my head when I’m trapped in some horrible situation I don’t want to be in. This job really did make me not want to be me anymore.

Brotherhood - Damned

This a song that often came to my mind on the job. The chorus “I’m damned if I do, I’m damned if I don’t, there is no hope” spoke to me at the time. Being at the call center did make me feel like I was damned. Surrounded by broken souls, in Hell.

Weird Al Yankovic - “Callin’ in Sick”

This is a little break from the doom and gloom on the tape, a triumphant ode to faking sick to take the day off from work, sticking it to the man. There were days where I could call in sick in order to get a three-day weekend. Other times, I just mentally couldn’t handle being there that day. Yes, this probably contributed to my being fired for taking too many sick days, ultimately. I guess I’m just not as good of a worker as a soulless robot.

Depeche Mode - Enjoy the Silence

            The next song on the mix is “Enjoy the Silence”, which lyrically reminded me of the silence between phone calls. On Sundays I could go a good twenty minutes in between phone calls sometimes, so I would purposely try to work on Sundays. On holidays, there could be even longer between calls. But more normally the calls were back to back all day. Eventually, the silence would end with a horrible beep in my headset. ”Words like violence, break the silence”. You’d never know when that beep would come and words would break the silence. You never knew if you were about to get someone fairly nice, or someone who was about to scream at you. The anxiety builds and builds. It’s like Chinese water torture.

Mortiis - Marshland

            I’ve discussed in length Mortiis’ song “Marshland” before. It's kind of strange how often he comes up on this blog. I suppose he is one of my favorite musicians, as well as a bit of a role model for me. The next few songs follow the theme of “the machine”. That is what the corporation is like. Cold, unfeeling, only caring about profit, not people. “Nothing that I say or do, matters to the big machine. Nothing that I think or feel, matters to the big machine. And if I’m dead when tomorrow’s gone, the big machine will just move on.”

Kraftwerk – The Robots

The next song, Kraftwerk’s “The Robots”, continues the theme. The Russian lyric in the song translates to “I’m your slave, I’m your worker”. I think this song is about capitalism. When you work at a call center, you are just a number. A statistic. Completely replaceable. They're listening in on your calls, they can check what's going on your computer screen, your bathroom breaks are strictly timed, and you will be lectured and derided by your team leader in coaching when none of their statistics are satisfactory. They own you. No privacy, no freedom. Paid the barest minimum the company can get away with paying you. The only reason there’s health insurance is so that you’re so terrified of getting fired and losing that insurance you’ll be their completely loyal robot. Why do you think there’s no universal healthcare in the United States? Because then no one would be stuck doing these shitty jobs, that’s why.

The Cure – Cold

This song is here mainly because I listened to it a lot at the time I was working at the call center. It conveys the depression I felt. I felt dehumanized and hopeless. Its here more for the energy of the music than the lyrical content.

Pink Floyd – Welcome to the Machine

This song came to me again one day as I was writing in my journal and waiting for the next terrible call to come in. I was here because my wife was pregnant. Here in this Hell. Is this the world I was bringing my son into? Where people are raised from the cradle up to be brainwashed and exploited? Turned into obedient workers? That’s the whole point of school in this country after all. And am I supposed to lie to him for his whole childhood about how horrible the world really is? This song is about doing just that I think. It’s about giving your son a sheltered childhood, and then introducing him to the soulless real world when he reaches adulthood. I still struggle with these questions, even if I’m in a somewhat better place now.

Sadie Killer – The Working Dead

This is where Side B starts, Side A ending with a sample of crappy hold music. So yes, I’ve watched the cartoon Steven Universe, and that’s where this song is from. An anthem to those who hate their dead end jobs, it is all too appropriate for this mix, and a song I came to listen to a lot during my short breaks. Steven Universe is an unexpected source for music that speaks to me, but here we are I guess. And Spotify even had it. 

The Kovenant - Mannequin

This song reminded me of my poor, broken co-workers, drowning in a sea of cubicles, especially the ones who had been there for years, for whom any hope of a better life had dissolved, any dreams they once had, pulverized to dust. “You’re just another faceless mannequin, you’re just another fallen star.” You lose your identity, your very sense of being, working in a call center. You are merely the face of the company. Merely a recording. A robot. I could have become one of them. I almost did. The journal entry I posted up above shows you the moment I realized it should be on this mix.

Gwar – Sick of You

And the next few songs are dedicated to those horrible customers. Oh, how sick I was of them. Their entitlement. Their first world problems. The ones who just would not shut up. I would sing this song to myself sometimes after putting them on hold and transferring them somewhere.

Twiztid – Kill Somebody

I would get this mad sometimes. There’s only so much abuse I can take. Some people forget they’re talking to human beings. I’ve been yelled at, called a retard among other things, treated like shit. Working at a call center is like being a urinal. You’re just there to be pissed on by random people. You’re not a person, you’re an object, there to serve the purpose of being pissed on. Sometimes people will throw a wad of gum in there or something even worse. They’re not supposed to, but who’s really going to stop them? When I reached my limit, I would sometimes hit the phone or the computer screen. One time I tore my stress ball into tiny little pieces. And that’s what this song is there to illustrate.

The Sweeney Todd Soundtrack – Epiphany

“There’s a hole in the world like a great black pit and it’s filled with people who are filled with shit, and the vermin of the world inhabit it. But not for long. They all deserve to die…” This song illustrates well the darkest depths that this job pushed me to. This job made me hate humanity. It made me long for an asteroid to just smack into the Earth and wipe everyone out.

Faderhead – This is Your World

The second song that bashes the world which led me to be trapped in this job, at least until I was finally fired. “This is your world, I don’t wanna live here.” And I really didn’t, when I worked here. I wanted to go live in Oz. Or at least Armenia.

White Ring – IXC99

This song is kind of a calm down song after the previous two. A song I liked while I was working at the call center. It’s still dark, but a little calmer. Save for the shotgun blast in the background.

Audiotherapie – Devil’s Mind

“Consumption, is that enough to satisfy your needs? All the things you learned, he is going to earn. Money is your religion, money rules your world.” This is a song about the kind of world we live in, where corporations and the rich rule, all that matters is money, and we’ve all been brainwashed into consumerism. The kind of world where, even though I wanted to be an author and artist and got a Master’s degree in Creative Writing, I was still trapped in a job I hated, stripped of my dignity and pride, berated, and nearly destroyed. The artist has no place in this world, where everything has to be quantified, and if it is not useful to the billionaire class it is discarded and treated as if it has no worth. Money is a religion, especially in the United States. Money is God. Money is how the powerful stay powerful. I hate money. I hate, to my very core, whoever it was in history that came up with the idea of money. Hate them. Let's go back to bartering. 

This one isn’t on Spotify or YouTube as far as I can tell. I first heard it on the Communion After Dark podcast. So, I’ll just link to their Bandcamp page.

https://audiotherapie.bandcamp.com/track/devils-mind

Switchblade Symphony – Sweet

This, like “Cold” by The Cure, is kind of only here for the energy of it. But lyrics like “Broken people, hollow and feeble” describe the people who worked at this call center. So it fits. The song reminds me of when I would just give in to the despair. I would lose the energy and will to be angry or sad. I would stop feeling anything, and just accept my fate. Become the robot. A faceless mask. A bard no more.

Voltaire – Underground

“Six walls of wood, to keep them out. The smart remarks, the screams the shouts. They scream, they shout. There’s only one way to drown them out.” Yes. There were days, when the job pushed me to these depths of sorrow. Days where sleep was my only escape from the nightmare that my waking hours had become. Days where…I wished I could have stayed asleep. Just to drown out the smart remarks, screams and shouts.

David Bowie – I Know It’s Gonna Happen Someday

This song to me represents the dreams that I had and still have, which kept me alive for those months I worked at this call center. I wasn’t going to be one of those people stuck working there for ten years. I couldn’t give up. I didn’t know when I was going to get out of there, but I knew it would happen eventually. Just like I don’t know when I’ll be a successful author and cartoonist, but I know it’ll happen one day.

So there’s a takeaway from this mixtape, even though it chronicles a very bleak, hopeless time in my life. Nothing bad lasts forever. Every storm runs out of rain. Your present situation isn’t your final destination. All those feel-good slogans you can think of that mean that the torture will eventually end.

Now the day I got fired, I knew I’d used up my attendance credits. I wasn’t going to say anything; I was going to make as much money as I could before I was canned. My team leader wasn’t there for a couple days, so I actually worked a couple more days before she arrived; forty-five minutes into my shift, she called me up, let me know I’d overused my credits, and told me to clean out my desk. I grabbed my stuff, and left. It took a while to sink in that I was finally free. I went home, laid in bed, and just tried to come to grips with it. I checked my subscriptions on YouTube, and the synthwave channel New Retro Wave had just uploaded the song “Let Go” by Kalax. It seemed to fit the moment. This tape had already been made and is only 90 minutes long, but if it were possible to add to it without recording over another song, I’d have had this as a bonus track. The song signaling the final end of my time at this awful call center. It was time to let go of all of that negativity and move on with my life. I worked in two other call centers after this unfortunately, but neither of them were as bad. I’m still haunted by the experience but I am in a much better place now.

The Years in Music – The 1970’s

                A few years ago, I got the idea to make a CD mix for every year starting with 1981 and going up to the current year, with my favorite songs that were released each year. These are mixes that look beyond the top 40 hits you hear everywhere, to the more obscure, underground music. I’ve discovered a lot of new music doing these mixes (new to me anyway), and I just enjoy them so much I have to blog about it and share them with whoever might care to read about it. I’m currently up to 2008. Most of the fun comes from putting these together, really.

I put together a single mix for the decade of the 1970’s to start off my Years in Music series. To be honest, I’ve never been that fond of music from the decade. I’m usually just not into the vibe of it. I don’t know if it’s like that for other people born after the 1970’s. If you actually lived through the 1970’s you’d probably like the music a lot better, but if you weren’t there for it, it’s hard to get into. I can’t appreciate it in the proper context. My favorite music genres were either in the early stages of being invented (like post-punk, New Wave and Goth music), or nonexistent. It was a challenge to fill the entire 80-minute CD without repeating any bands. You’ll notice a good many of the songs are from bands that were big in the 1980’s but happened to be starting out in the 1970’s, such as The Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees.

For the record, I really wouldn’t be able to even fill an entire CD mix with songs from the 1960’s I like. It’s just not my style of music. Fine, The Beatles were important, but I feel mediocre about their music, I don’t love it or hate it, they’re just okay. I appreciate jazz music from the 1920’s through the 1940’s, and will occasionally listen to music even older out of curiosity, but the 1950’s through the 1970’s are hard decades for me to wrap my head around. That’s even true of movies and TV shows from that era, and culture in general (the exceptions being The Twilight Zone, The Honeymooners, and Mad Magazine). It’s the culture of the baby boomer generation. It’s just not my thing. Afros on white people, bell bottoms, yellow smiley faces, I don’t get any of it.

It’s funny how all of these “best music of all time” list shows on VH1, AXS TV or other cable channels often proclaim music from the 60’s and 70’s to be the best music ever written, in all the hundreds of thousands of years of human history, and never talk about music from before or after these two decades. They never mention Mozart or Beethoven, who apparently don't hold a candle to Jimi Hendrix or Fleetwood Mac. Shows like these are generally written and watched mainly by baby boomers, not so coincidentally. Curious, isn’t it? That their generation just so happened to be coming of age during that special time in human history when the music was the best it has ever been. And now music sucks. It’s all nostalgia goggles. Will music of the 1980’s and 1990’s be the best music ever written in another couple decades according to cable TV music networks? Of course, by then their target audience will have died off and the Millennials won’t be watching cable. Cable probably won’t exist anymore by the time I get old enough to think I grew up with the best music in human history. Maybe the lists will be made by some over-the-hill vloggers. Who knows if my son, born last year, will one day feel the same way about the 1990’s and 2000’s that I do about the 60’s and 70’s. It’s possible. But I won’t force him to listen to Nirvana and tell him it’s the greatest music of all time. If I don’t force it on him, maybe he won’t grow to resent it.

My favorite bands of the 1970’s are Kraftwerk and Pink Floyd. I’ll like pretty much any song by those two bands. I’ve been listening to Kraftwerk since I was 12 years old. Both bands are timeless. Black Sabbath is pretty good, not that I listen to it a whole lot, and AC/DC are okay, but the rest of it? There are a couple corny disco songs I like ironically, but beyond that, it’s only certain songs here and there. As with the 1980’s, I think there’s probably a lot more to the music of the 1970’s than you might think when you look at the more underground bands, and away from the classic rock hits you’ve heard a million times on radio stations. I just haven’t done enough digging yet. Anyway, here’s the mix I came up with.

Dschinghis Khan – Moskau

            One of the aforementioned corny disco songs I ironically like. It’s everything you think of when you think of a corny disco song. And it’s in German. This song came back as kind of an internet meme in the late 2000’s, which was when my best friend Kris introduced it to me. Of course, whenever I hear it, I’ll always think of the misheard lyrics version by the YouTube user Buffalax. The video was viral back in 2008 or so. “Moskau, Moskau, come and dance and love the fish, Mr. Disco summoned it, hahahaha.” I know that version practically by heart. I couldn’t tell you what the singer’s actually saying. This to me is the perfect opening track to a 1970’s mix. It’s my first impression of the 1970’s. People dressing weird, doing silly dances and having a good time. 

Earth, Wind & Fire – September

            This was partially included because it’s one of my wife Deborah’s favorite songs. But it does seem emblematic of the 1970’s as well, to me. It seems like such a happy song. Another reason it’s a good song to represent the 1970’s is that falsetto singing. Nobody sings like that anymore. It was a uniquely 1970’s phenomenon. Perhaps the anti-disco backlash of the early 1980’s killed that type of singing and it never recovered, even if disco itself was somewhat rehabilitated by the 1990’s.  Anyway, it’s a nice song. Nothing wrong with it. It’s just not coldwave or industrial or the other genres I like.

Michael Jackson - Don’t Stop ‘Til You get Enough

            Who honestly doesn’t like the music of Michael Jackson? Even if you have misgivings about the man himself, you have to admit his music is catchy. It’s interesting to observe how his music evolved, from this very disco-influenced track, through his pop music of the 1980’s and his under-rated, somewhat darker and angrier music of the 1990’s. It’s kind of a barometer for how popular music itself evolved and changed over that time period. Not to mention how he changed, both physically and mentally. I guess he’s one of the few singers that continued to sing falsetto after the early 1980’s and get away with it. There was a while there where he could make any music he wanted and people would love it.

David Bowie – Sound and Vision

            As I share these Years in Music mixes, you’ll find David Bowie is constantly there in the background, all throughout the 1980’s, 1990’s and 2000’s. He was a fixture in music for such a long time. I’ve mainly liked his 1980’s music best for most of my life, especially the soundtrack to the movie Labyrinth, and paid little attention to his music from before or after the 1980’s until somewhat recently. When he released Blackstar in 2016 and died a couple days later, I bought it, and it gave me a new appreciation for his music, so I’ve listened to more of his music since then. As far as this track in particular goes, I just picked it out of the tracks on his album Low as my favorite of them. It’s all very ahead of its time, almost proto-goth. If you look at the album cover of Low, Bowie could walk into a goth nightclub today looking exactly like that and fit right in. Since I much prefer the music of the 1980’s, you’re going to see quite a few bands on this mix that were ahead of their time.

See? He looks like the lead singer of an industrial band. Or rather, they look like him.

Siouxsie and the Banshees – Playground Twist

            I always thought of this as a 1980’s band, but their first three albums were released in the 1970’s. Siouxsie and the Banshees is required listening for anyone who wants to be called a goth, so of course I’ve listened to them. I can’t really say I like them as much as I feel I should like them, given that they’re one of the founding goth bands, but there are songs here and there I like, such as “Night Shift” and “Spellbound”. This song is a good one too. You have to imagine how completely different this song must have sounded to people of the late-1970’s when disco was what was popular. This must have blown people’s minds in 1977. There’s plenty of music coming out today that sounds like this.

The B-52s - Planet Claire

            Here’s yet another band I often forget is this old. I’ve been listening to this song since I was a kid. My mom was the one who introduced it to me, from a Best of compilation CD we had. The electronic, sci-fi tinged intro that takes up about half the song reminds me of something Kraftwerk would have made. It’s fun trying to imagine what Planet Claire looks like; it apparently has pink air, red trees, and no one dies or has a head. That the air has a color to it is weird enough.

Kraftwerk - The Robots

            Finally, here’s Kraftwerk. The majority of their discography came out in the 1970’s, and I really could have chosen any of their songs, but I decided to go with their most emblematic song. The one which really illustrates what the band was about. Most of their albums are going to turn 50 in the 2020’s, and they still sound ahead of their time. Once their music caught on, it changed the entire music scene. They don’t get the credit they deserve. I should have put the German version on the mix, which I think is just a little bit better than the English one. But, I heard this version first.

Pink Floyd – Welcome to the Machine

            There’s never going to be another Pink Floyd. I chose this song mainly because it sounds nice right after the previous one, but I could have chosen a lot of their songs to be on this mix. To me this song is about a father who has to reveal to their son what a harsh and terrible world this is when they grew up sheltered from it. “Welcome my son, to the machine.” It’s best enjoyed along with the trippy animations of the music video. Listening to music of the 1970’s makes me wonder if every musician back then was on a drug of some sort. Pink Floyd definitely was, but I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if all of these songs were written while intoxicated.

Bauhaus - Bela Lugosi’s Dead

            This is often stated to be the first goth song, laying the prototype for what would become death rock, later known as goth rock. I don’t really have much to say about it that hasn’t already been said in the last 40+ years, but it was essential to include this song on the mix, even if it is more than nine minutes long. Is Bela Lugosi really dead, or will he be back, just like the vampire he played?

The Cure - A Forest

            A slight cheat, as this was released in 1980, but 1980 was pretty much still the 1970’s, culturally and musically. And anyway, The Cure had performed this live before 1980, according to videos I’ve seen. You can’t go wrong with The Cure. This is one of my favorite songs by The Cure too, just for the atmosphere it creates.

Joy Division – She’s Lost Control

            Ah yes, this is from that album with the squiggly lines that everyone has on their t-shirt. You can even get a t-shirt of a t-shirt with this album cover on it. We’re continuing the early goth theme of the mix with this song, which is another example of a song that doesn’t sound like it was made in the 1970’s, which honestly may be why I like it. Joy Division would later become New Order, among my favorite bands of the 1980’s, after the singer of Joy Division sadly committed suicide. It would have been interesting to see if they would have developed differently had they remained Joy Division.   

Gary Numan – Cars

            For the longest time I could have sworn this song came out in the 1980’s, but nope, it’s from the 1970’s. So it gets to be on this mix. I have to admit I first heard the cover by Fear Factory back in the late 1990’s on alternative rock radio stations before hearing the original. The cover mainly just sounds like a slightly updated version of the same song. But I’ve always liked both versions. Interestingly Gary Numan is still around making music today despite this song being his one hit wonder, which is more than could be said for most of these bands.

Blue Öyster Cult - Don’t Fear the Reaper

            There, I found an O with an umlaut over it and copied and pasted it for the sake of accuracy. I wonder how you’re supposed to pronounce that with the umlaut. “Oeyster”? Extra emphasis on the O? Anyway, from here we’re getting back to more mainstream music of the 70’s. This is a song most people have heard by now. To me this song means coming to terms with death; putting aside your fears and facing death together with your loved one. It strikes me as a good song for the Egyptian God Anubis, a reaper of souls who was only there to help you into the afterlife, not to be feared.

Journey – Lights

            I think Journey hit their stride in the 1980’s really. But I like their earlier stuff well enough. And they have plenty of other good songs besides “Don’t Stop Believing”. I wish more people acknowledged that. I think this is a song for anyone who’s longed to be somewhere else, like a city they grew up in, and these are feelings I have quite often, ever since I moved to Florida. Feelings of homesickness. The song is actually about San Francisco. I don’t really miss San Francisco per se, but I miss nearby Contra Costa County at times. Every time I see San Francisco when I come back to visit, it looks bigger and more expensive. Like they’ll start charging you to breathe the air there soon.

Black Sabbath – Paranoid

            This was a song I first came across while listening to my dad’s old Black Sabbath cassettes, and it is my favorite song from the band. I love the guitar riffs in the intro. I do like to listen to Ozzy Osbourne on occasion. Metal bands owe a debt of gratitude to Black Sabbath. It’s weird to think that this song is from 1970, just a couple short years after the heyday of The Beatles.

Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody

            Yes, yes, everyone has heard this song before. Everyone knows all the words to this song. It’s really an unusual song if you place it in the context of when it was made. A rock opera song about a poor man who committed murder and now has to face the consequences of said act. I think the fact that it’s become so mainstream is remarkable. Songs this bizarre aren’t normally seen as marketable by the big record companies; and they had a lot more control over what people listened to back then than they do today. Today someone could make a song in this style and put it up on YouTube somewhere. It probably wouldn’t become popular, but people could find it. Back then it all depended on getting an agent and a contract with a record company and getting your record sold in stores. Perhaps it only became mainstream because the band that made it was already popular. If some unknown band had made this song it would have faded into obscurity. Luckily it did not.

            Anyway, that’s the mix. And will you look at that, I was able to find every single song on Spotify and remake the whole playlist. A sure sign that I wasn’t looking for music that was obscure enough. I’m in a strange way disappointed that all the songs were on Spotify. I’ll have to do better some other time.

Spotify Playlist – The 1970’s Mix

I hope maybe any of the points in my little rant rang true for someone, and maybe this list turns someone on to music they hadn't heard before. I’ve got a few more blog entries planned this month before I move onto 1981 in Music, but that will be the next to come in this series. Stay tuned for that.