Phthursday Musings: Rock Lobster Edition

The other night I got a notification from Facebook. My sister mentioned me in a comment. Uh oh, what is this about?

This is the comment, in its entirety, in response to a posted video:

“The entire look of this video just makes me think, Phil Huckelberry!! So there it is.. Phil is Rock Lobster, ‘78”

ROCK LOBSTER!?!

Oh my, is there a lot to unpack here.

First, let’s get it out of the way: this performance is brilliant, it’s one of the best things you could hope to find on the Internet. Make sure you turn the volume up.

Now, I don’t know how old I was, maybe 5, and I have no real recollection of this, but the story goes that I was with my dad and his friend at the Cherry Bowl, but apparently not to bowl, which sort of makes sense, because we used to go to the Cherry Bowl to get haircuts, because there was a small haircut place attached to the bowling alley, and my aunt worked there, but this is not about that, this is also not about the video games at the Cherry Bowl, one of which I distinctly remember to have been Qix, no, this is about the bar area in the Cherry Bowl, and for some reason we were there, and it is alleged that Rock Lobster came on, and look, I’m very particular about song titles in quotes and album titles in italics, but when we’re talking Rock Lobster, no quotes are needed, it’s Rock Lobster, ok?, and so somehow I as a young boy am out on the dance floor and I’m doing the Rock Lobster, not that there’s a particular way to do the Rock Lobster, and Chester is cheering me on, and in the telling it sounds like there was a crowd gathered, and so in my mind that must be the case, and maybe this makes no sense to you,

but,

my sister is right,

I am Rock Lobster ‘78.

There are times during this performance where it seems like there are no more than two people actually playing instruments and yet it sounds like a cacophony of a half dozen buzzsaws going. Cindy Wilson has a tambourine, but her primary instrument seems to be her wig. Ricky Wilson’s guitar is inexplicably missing the middle two strings. Fred Schneider is acting like he’s completely serious when he declares the presence of kelp and a narwhal. The mirror makes it seem like there’s twice as many people on stage, if, indeed, there even is a stage. The colors come off like film tricks. So does Fred Schneider’s moustache, which definitely earns that “o”.

I’d say that nothing else sounds like this, but that’s not exactly true. You know who sounds like this? Sonic Youth. It’s not a connection I’ve ever dreamt of before, but I swear, you take a little of the surf out, make it a little scuzzier, and this may as well be “Catholic Block”, or maybe something else from that vintage. It’s uncanny.

I’ve been undertaking this META-REVIEWS exercise - and hey! look for a new, outlandish installment in the next couple of days - and have veered toward the mega-big, as you shall see. But a voice is in my ear saying I should veer toward the things I’m more interested in sonically exploring rather than intellectually exploring. And I think what we’ll find is that the breaking point is somewhere in 1977. Maybe with the first Talking Heads album, hm? And 1978 might be the year it bursts open, when the Buzzcocks’ Love Bites comes out, and, well, this, this masterpiece, this outrageous, incredible single, this Rock Lobster, released in April 1978. Oh, the places we’ll go!

We’ve got an Alexa in the kitchen. At dinner one night last week, we had Alexa open Joke Responder, where you can tell a joke and Alexa will tell you how funny you are. (This, in essence, is how the country has been run for the last four years.)

Whilst Alexa praised by joke-telling chops, it, with no relevant context, urged us to go to Song Quiz. So we did.

Song Quiz is basically Name That Tune. Snippets of songs play, you guess the song title and artist. You can do this for the current year, for a special theme (right now that's Holidays), or for a specified decade.

We started with the 1980s, and we cleaned house.

Then we did the 2010s, and we could not identify a single artist.

We recognized some of the artist names, but I’m not sure we recognized a single song. Half of the snippets from the 2010s sincerely sounded essentially the same to us: strangely compressed, weirdly devoid of both rhythm and noise. Once I said out loud: I don't even think this is a song.

Michelle’s comment, summing it all up: “I feel so bad for kids.”

Over that night and the next we played Song Quiz for the other decades. Here's the thing. The songs from the ‘80s included a lot of rock songs, or at least artists sort of associated with rock music. Every other decade, rock music just wasn't there. The ‘60s was very heavily slanted toward pop music from the first half of the decade. The ‘90s involved a whole lot of mid-decade R&B. Even the ‘70s didn’t have much rock representation.

A lot of this no doubt has to do with how rock is more album oriented, less single oriented. But it also all served as a reminder about the nature of popular music generally. I couldn't remotely estimate how much music I listened to in the 90s, across all sorts of genres. But, um, no, I never sat down and listened to a Toni Braxton album. Well, I looked up the ‘90s, specifically, the 100 biggest selling albums of the ‘90s in the US. You can do the same.

Get this: Soundgarden isn’t on this list. Nirvana is only on this list once. Celine Dion is on this list four times. I swear, I have never seen a Celine Dion album anywhere besides a store.

It's a straaaaange list. We're a straaaaaaaaaaange country.

Two huge items of news out of baseball this week. One is that Major League Baseball will now consider the Negro Leagues to have been major leagues, meaning among other things that all of the statistics will now be considered equivalent to MLB statistics. At the time I write, this news has only just broke, and it's hard to understand exactly what this all means. Josh Gibson, perhaps the greatest slugger of all time in any league, is informally credited with hitting over 800 home runs. But a huge number of those were technically in exhibitions, so what does it mean to include his stats? It’s the right move by MLB, it's just hard to understand exactly what it means in practice.

The other big news was out of Cleveland, where, it seems, the Indians name will be retired after the 2021 season. Again, this is the right move overall, and the move will be all that much better if they can find very good ways to use 2021 as a way to educate about the history of the game and the name and bring dignity to it all and in the end come up with a very good replacement name. (Cleveland Spiders sounds good to me.)

Here’s how I’d really like to see it go. I’d like to see an extended dialogue. I’d like to see Native American groups around the stadium. I’d like to see a celebration of Native heritage, and leverage the name change as a way to bring attention to what’s happening in Native communities. And I’d like the whole thing to spur a major national discussion about all of the “Indians” and other mascots like that in every school around the country.

Our high school mascot was, and is, the Indian. The Winnebago Indians. Winnebago having been a Native tribe, I suppose it was a logical mascot... once upon a time. Now, I never personally saw anything which struck me at the time as especially offensive. But... I also don't think I went to school with any Native Americans. (Or anyone from South Asia...) Understandings of things change. That’s okay. It’s time to move on.

I'm not into finger wagging. Rather, I'm adopting this stance about mascots. Winnebago has a rich athletic tradition. Embrace it! Champion it! And come together as a community and pick a new fun name to use going forward. Emphasis on FUN. Be the Winnebago Homsars or something. FUN. Make it into an all-around positive thing. That’s the key.

I know such things tend to turn into anger. They shouldn’t. Treat it like an opportunity. Make it FUN. It doesn’t have to about anything that anyone did wrong! It’s about doing something right now. And make that right into FUN.

An aside on both of these stories. As it so happens, the sportswriter whose opinions seem the most relevant are Joe Posnanski’s. He wrote the book on Buck O’Neil, and therefore one of the most important books about the Negro Leagues. And as a kid who grew up in Cleveland in the 1970s, whose all-time favorite player is Duane Kuiper, his take on the Indians name... well, let's just say that it helps inspire mine.

Yes, the PosCult is coming. Hot cherries for us all.

I wish I could write something interesting here about art, but friends, I don’t know shit about art.

I think, though, that my favorite artist is Piet Mondrian.

A couple years ago as an extension of Journalism Wednesday I used to do what I’ll call article curation. I enjoyed it, I thought it was worthwhile, but it really did take time to seek things out. I'd rather put my limited time and energy into writing and hoping that, just maybe, it can spur some more indepth discussion about some things.

I’ve thought about using Phthursday Musings as a way to do some lighter curation. Should I? Shouldn’t I?

Well, I came across this delightful article in Wired, and just had to share it with you all. It’s about something called Busy Beavers, and it’s about Turing machines, and, well, just read it, and be delighted:

Super Slow Computer Programs Reveal Math’s Fundamental Limits

Final thought this week.

A friend of mine and I have decided to do something stupid. Well, I’m not sure if he actually decided to do this, or just thought it was funny. But now he’s stuck. We’re doing it. Also, I’m not sure it’s stupid. Except, I’m pretty sure.

We’re going to pick the non-English European football equivalent of the Detroit Lions and become fans.

Now, we don’t know how to measure this. It’s very hard for a team to be quite like the Lions in a sport where you can be relegated. But we imagine it to be very possible.

If we were doing this with England, we know what our choices would be, and we sort of already made them, except that I inexplicably made my choice, and then two seasons later, they won the Premier League. See, I’m good luck here. You want to be the next Leicester? You want me on board. (Alas, when the time came, he chose Newcastle. Don’t worry, I don’t think it’s his fault.)

So lay it on us! What’s the Bundesliga equivalent of the Lions? What’s the Scottish Premiership equivalent of the Lions? Is there anything remotely like the Lions anywhere? The important thing, I think, is that there can never truly be any serious expectations of major success, and yet there can still be the once-a-decade glimmers of misplaced hope. And then, maybe, just maybe... glory.

Glory like Rock Lobster.