I’m part Irish-American, but that doesn’t mean I want to spend Saint Patrick’s day in leprechaun-themed restaurants guzzling pints of Guinness until I smell like the Pogues’ Shane MacGowan. Beyond the cartoon version of Ireland, this day provides the opportunity to celebrate the culture and history of a charismatic and embattled island nation stepping out of the shadows of the British Empire. I also feel a sudden urge to pop open a Red Stripe (now owned by Guinness), trade corned beef for curried goat, and listen to some angry white guys covering a Bob Marley song.

This isn’t quite as crazy as it sounds. The Irish arrived in Jamaica more than 350 years ago, and the first Prime Minister of Jamaica, Sir Alexander Bustamante, was part Irish. Lloyd Bradley’s excellent book on the history of reggae, Bass Culture, describes music events in late-1950s West London in which only the Irish would join the Jamaicans. My own reason for linking Ireland and Jamaica is more personal: my first real exposure to the genius of Bob Marley came from hearing Belfast band Stiff Little Fingers kick the living daylights out of Marley’s “Johnny Was.”

Stiff Little Fingers, “Johnny Was”

Bob Marley, “Johnny Was”

From the tippy end of the Very Long Tail comes this morsel of immutable baritone joy, apparently culled from the set of an obscure entertainment programme aired only in Russia in the early 70s.

The full title is “Я очень рад, ведь я, наконец, возвращаюсь домой,” which I believe translates into something like “A Gleeful Prayer From The Soaring Alter-Ego of Lurch the Butler.”

Update: Apparently there is a domain dedicated to serving this single song: trololololololololololo.com

Since all post-1963 speculation about J.D. Salinger’s state of existence is more or less a blank slate, save for the occasional lurid detail you wish you didn’t know, I’ll share my pet theory that he spent the years since 1989 preoccupied with endless repetitions of the Biblically dense, ridiculous, outrageous and uplifting scavenger hunt that is the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique album. Teenage angst paid off well, but when Salinger got bored and old, I can imagine him on a Pilgrim’s quest through the far reaches of Paul’s Boutique, with “Shadrach” captivating his mind much as the Jesus Prayer did for Franny Glass. Well, do you have a better theory?

I got more stories than J.D’s got Salinger
I hold the title and you are the challenger.

Beastie Boys, “Shadrach”

Franny took in her breath slightly but continued to hold the phone to her ear. A dial tone, of course, followed the formal break in the connection. She appeared to find it extraordinarily beautiful to listen to, rather as if it were the best possible substitute for the primordial silence itself. But she seemed to know, too, when to stop listening to it, as if all of what little or much wisdom there is in the world were suddenly hers.

J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

Beastie Boys, “Shadrach”

Chris Weingarten (@1000timesyes) on music criticism in the age of Twitter. A 10-minute rant well-worth watching.

Via Very Short List

In the 30 years since the Stooges recorded “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” the song has been covered by a variety of other artists, including Uncle Tupelo, Joan Jet [sic.] and Sonic Youth (“Weird Al” Yankovic even paid tribute, with the parody “Let Me Be Your Hog”). But perhaps the most unexpected—and entertaining— version is this short film by Georgie Greville.

I Wanna Be Your Dog from LEGS MEDIA on Vimeo.

Would Iggy approve?

Those of us old enough to remember that being obsessed with music used to mean hefting stacks of LP-filled milk crates from high school bedrooms to college dorms also have strong memories of flipping through endless stacks of musty cardboard LP sleeves in record stores. We weren’t just looking for particular music, but discovering, constantly discovering, through accident and association, the ever-branching web of vectors between artists and genres. But more than that, we were having an aesthetic experience, happily drowning in the LP cover art that became indelibly associated with the sounds we were exploring.

Today’s online music stores do their best to reproduce that spirit of discovery. Databases and their associative algorithms are able to emulate some of the connective cartilage – and even to strengthen it – but they don’t come close to duplicating the visceral experience of suddenly finding yourself staring at the absolutely unexpected, the cover art that came out of nowhere and clobbered you upside the head with some kind of jaw-dropping amazingness – amazing beauty, amazing camp, sexy stuff your 13-year-old brain wasn’t quite ready for, graphical styles you had never seen the likes of, stuff that crossed the lines of social acceptability, etc. And then there was the stuff that was just so banal it was painful — in a good way.

Thankfully, some of that cover art is being diligently digitized and archived for generations of kids that may never have the experience we did. Utne Reader:

Matthew Glass has been collecting records for the better part of four decades. In a his Manhattan living space he has a “record room” where 10,000 records live. Framed records are his wall art. For years he sold records at the flea market on 24th Street. There are times in his life when he was frequently bringing records home by the box. None of this would surprise you if you were to spend a single short second on LP Cover Lover, the website where he posts strange record covers in daily batches. He’s got a camera on a tripod in his record room and he is forever pulling records, photographing them, and posting them to his site, which boasts a comprehensive collection of “the world’s greatest LP album covers.”

Everyone was in on the action – even pharmaceutical companies:

There was no shortage of cover art on the sexy side, playing with what was at some point in history considered “edgy” but now just appears dumb/sexist (but sometimes endearing anyway):

I have a soft spot in my heart for records specifically designed to show off your new stereo hi-fi system. Dad had records like “Sounds of Sebring” (30 minutes of race cars going around a track, bouncing back and forth between your headphone-clad ears) and “Ping Pong Percussion,” which was basically the same concept, applied to timpani.

Also: Feast your eyes on a spectacular pair, experience music for chubby lovers browse an entire category devoted to big heads. Much much more at LP CoverLover.

Zealously pining for the status symbol of the decade, the iPhone Ocarina? With a little practice, you know you’d become more studly than Ian Anderson, more virtuosic than Zamfir himself. And you wouldn’t be satisfied with breathy renditions of “Row Row Row Your Boat” or “Lemon Tree,” either – you’d go straight for the classics, like Stairway to Heaven:

(or was that Hairway to Steven?) But the sad truth is that your luxury spending coffers have been vacuumed dry after years of gambling in credit default swaps, and an iPhone probably isn’t in your future. Bad investor! No ocarina! But wait… even in these lean times, hope remains. You don’t need an iPhone to play the ocarina! Just grab a healthy stalk of organic broccoli, carve out a few holes, tune it up and let ‘er rip.

“Ah!” you say, “It’s true I took out a badly structured sub-prime mortgage, and yes, it’s true that my collateralized debt obligations have sucker-punched my liquidity risk… but it’s not true that I want to play the ocarina.” Fair enough. Sounds like the cucumber trumpet might be more up your alley:

Pinched capital flow? Try the radish slide whistle. Negative equity? The Welsh onion flute might be the instrument for you.

Underwritten securitization? Go blow an ostrich egg. Submarined by the shadow banking system? Try your hand at the cabbage slide flute.

Despite a dearth of regulatory responses or substantial loss mitigation guidance, you can have your ocarina and eat it too. iPhone be damned.

What would you say to the crazy guy in the park muttering about alien spaceship landings on the day the mothership finally beams down to bring him home? The makers of Dr. Pepper must be wondering the same thing. Earlier this year, Dr. Pepper notoriously promised that if professional head case Axl Rose finally released Guns n’ Roses’ perpetually unavailable Chinese Democracy album to the public after 17 years –and thereby deprived the music world of one of its best synonyms for incompleteness–it would give a free Dr. Pepper away to every American (except for departed guitarists Buckethead and Slash). That day has finally arrived. Any time today, and today only, you can visit the Dr. Pepper website and claim your free soda.

As I’ve never really been a fan of the band, I could ignore the media hype over Chinese Democracy if it weren’t for a few things:
• It’s messing with my sense of integrity. Back in the day, I considered the head cases in the Replacements to be the anti-Guns n’ Roses, delivering mostly heart and soul where Axl and his gang delivered mostly hype and bluster. But hell must be freezing over, because Tommy Stinson of the Replacements is now Guns n’ Roses’ bassist.
• It’s reminding me that Axl Rose is an idiot savant, not just an idiot. It wasn’t just a lucky fluke that “Welcome to the Jungle” and “Sweet Child o’ Mine” have become air guitar/ karaoke classics. As late finishers go, he’s certainly no Brian Wilson, but file the band under guilty semi-pleasure–and skip the icky power ballads.
• Since Axl Rose has been known to pen lyrics that make him come off like Ann Coulter with better hair, it’s interesting that the “new” album features a sample of Martin Luther King.
• Despite Axl’s best efforts, I still think he’s only the second-best rock degenerate to use China as a metaphor (see Johnny Thunders, below).

Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, “Chinese Rocks”

Guns n’ Roses, “Chinese Democracy”