The World is Falling Apart, So Morrissey is Having a Bed-In

The world has always been a kind of fucked up place. Here in Canada, I live in my own little bubble of safety and normality - there is no imminent threat of war, I'm not afraid of our economy suddenly having a massive aneurysm and keeling over dead, and I am not (for the most part) discriminated or in danger for just being who I am, a woman. 

But if I look beyond my safe bubble and the more I expose myself to, the more I just want to crawl back into my bed, pull the sheets up over my head and stay there until the world gets back on track again.

Part of me is glad we are not recording new episodes of Maximum Rhythm and Booze right now. Every episode would be a rehash of all these terrible things going on all over the world - subway explosions, crazies running cars into crowds of people, racist and bigoted rallies ending in deaths.

Stop the world, man. I want to get OFF.

With things being so off centre these days,  the fact that Morrissey unleashed his first tweet on the world didn't come as much of a shock as I would have thought. I logged onto Twitter while having my morning coffee on Tuesday, September 20th to see that everyone I follow and their dog had re-tweeted Mozzer's first every 140-characters-or-less musing:

I never really thought it was cryptic. Morrissey, the king of depressing songs, spent the day in bed. Big fucking surprise there. I can't say I blame him, with the way the world is going these days. Fuck, move over Moz, is there room for one more? 

I only realized something big was going down with his next tweet:

First thing that ran through my mind was "Or what can... AZ? Oh! Oregon, Washington, California..." The second was "Shit, Moz. No WPG? For fuck sakes..." It was pretty obvious by now to me, and the other masses of Morrissey fans that something was up.

Soon after all that, my Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter feed (not to mention my inbox, text messages) were flooded with Morrissey's new single, Spent the Day in Bed.

Morrissey's last single, Kiss Me a Lot was last released in 2015. To be honest, it didn't make much of an impact on me - I actually had to google it to refresh myself with the song and, I hate to say it, I found myself shutting it off about halfway through.

There is something about the new single that made me sit up and take notice - the lyrics, the melody, and the overall vibe reminds me of something that The Smiths might have put out later in their career.  Replace the keyboard with that distinctive Johnny Marr guitar sound and boom, here is the Smiths of 2017. 

I'm not afraid to say, I like the single. A lot. It's the first thing Morrissey has put out in years that has really made me sit up and take notice. Since I'm being honest, You Are The Quarry was really the last Morrissey album that I listened to from start to finish. That was 2004.

Maybe it's because I can relate to the song. The world is a fucked up place at the best of times but as of late, it seems to have sunk to a whole new level. I was speaking with my Maximum Rhythm and Booze co-host Warren Peace about this just today, lamination that the political climate all over the world is in such a horrible and constant state of flux that spending the day in bed sounds like a pretty good and viable option. I guess Warren and I aren't the only ones feeling the weight of it. Morrissey is all in for each and everyone of us having our own Bed-In for Peace. 

It's getting cold here in Winnipeg and as everyone on Game of Thrones would say, 'winter is coming.' With the weather change, it won't take much to convince me to shut off the TV, turn off the radio, crawl into my bed and escape from the fucking nightmare that is the world around me.

The only thing that would make all this better is if WPG was on that list of cities. C'mon Moz...

Love,

Penny xxx

Why I Love Vinyl...

It's inevitable. As soon as I meet someone new and start slowly sharing my world with them, sooner or later they always ask the question....

'Why vinyl?"

Some understand it instantly better than most, but those people are usually the ones who also have IKEA shelves full of records themselves. Others who I don't meet via the usual music related channels marvel at the novelty and eventually, while sitting with me at my place, watching me get up for the tenth time to flip a record over end up asking "so, why vinyl?"

I was thinking about this today while I was flipping through bin after bin of musty, old records at the Central Canada Record Sale - a small group of vendors selling their wares for a few hours on a cold, wet and snowy Sunday in Winnipeg. What is it about vinyl?

It's easy to tell you why NOT vinyl. It's inconvenient. Have you ever had to carry a milk crate full of records to and from a gig, a sale, a party or even just to a different room in your house? Records are fucking heavy. There are many a time I have come home at two or three in the morning from a gig, grunting and cursing under my breath as I lug a nights worth of vinyl back to my apartment. I have, hand over heart, stayed longer in a shitty apartment because the thought of moving all those records to a new place seemed like the most daunting task ever.

It's not cheap, either. The further you go down the vinyl rabbit hole, the more money you are willing to and find yourself spending on things. When your collection starts to expand and you can no longer find the records you are looking for in the one, two, or three dollar bins, the shit gets real. Soon you justify spending five dollars on a record. Next, ten dollar seems completely reasonable for that one record you've been itching to get. Before you know it, shelling out over $100 for an original Blue Note actually starts to sound like a logical thing to do (note: I to date have not done this yet, but I am starting to come around to that way of thinking, and it scares me).

Vinyl can be annoying. How frustrating is it to be sitting on your sofa with someone, sharing a glass of wine and have a great conversation, only to have to put that conversation on pause to get up and turn over the record when side A is over? Or worse yet, you have that person you have been lusting over a bit in your house, all night moving closer and closer to each other on the sofa when suddenly you are touching, smiling and you finally build up to courage to kiss them....and the record ends and all you can hear is the SCRATCH SCRATCH SCRATCH of the needle caught in the never ending out-groove loop? 

Maintenance? I'm sorry, but my ideal way to spend a Sunday afternoon is listening to records, not carefully cleaning and drying them. I hate the upkeep. You have to be careful how your store your records, and don't get me started on equipment. Buying turntables and cartridges can quickly snowball to the point where you are scraping and saving to get that new Techniques turntable and the best possible needles for it.

So, really, what is it about vinyl? 

I think I find this such a hard question as I really can't put it into words. Right now I'm sitting at my desk with warm tea, and I've got Let's Stay Together by Al Green on the turntable and it's just bloody brilliant. The sound isn't perfect - there is a grit and a depth to the grooves on this record that is so drenched in history. This isn't a new record. Someone bought this album back in 1972, took it home and put it on their turntable and listened to it from beginning to end. They played it multiple times after that. Then it got passed on to someone else, sold to another person, stolen by another, gifted to someone else, until I found it for $15 dollars in that bin, mixed between records by Aretha Franklin and Toto. Then I, like all those before me, took it home, put it on my turntable and got lost in the music.

I love how every time I put on this record, every time I play it, that it will sound different. The pops and hisses will morph. In that regard, vinyl can be this living and breathing thing that grows and ages as we do. This record by Al Green, while still at its core is the same record that was first played in 1972 sounds so different today then it back then. 

I don't care how hip it now is to collect vinyl. I don't give two shits that Urban Outfitters have made buying turntables and records the cool thing. What you can't commercialize is this moment I'm having right now with Al Green. I hear years of love in those grooves. I don't want perfect, crystal clear sound. I am in love with the history, the tangibility of it all. I do Punks in Parkas because I love to share the music - I want people to be exposed to all these wonderful sounds. I collect vinyl because I, quite simply, love it. I love how I buy a record for one song and suddenly, I discover three other tracks that I never knew existed that have quickly become my favorites. I love the community and the fact that there is a group of people who share this passion for music - of all kinds. I love the shared knowledge, the discovery and the fact that, as silly as it may sound, the guys in this community have never ever once made me feel less than them because I a female and, by nature, a minority in this crazy, underground world. 

Somethings we just are drawn to and love for reasons we can't completely explain to those who don't share the same passion. We can try as hard as we can to put it into words, but just fall short. I'll laugh through the pain of carting records around, of spending afternoons over my kitchen sink cleaning dust out of grooves and I'll smile inwardly as I get up again to flip the record over, because now I have another 20 or so minutes to build up the courage to kiss that person on my sofa again...

Viva la Vinyl...

Love,

Penny xx

Has the Random Button Killed the Album?

The world was a very different place in 1979...Sony had just released The Walkman, Michael Jackson released his amazing Off The Wall album, Voyage I photos revealed Jupiter's rings for the first time, the Snowboard was invented, I was born and The Buggles released the now classic track, Video Killed The Radio Star.

We all know the song. Not only was it popular (the track topped sixteen international music charts, including the official singles chart of the groups home country of the UK, and also peaked into the top 10 in Canada and the Top 40 in the United States), but the songs video has the dubious honor of being the very first music video ever played on MTV, airing the moment the station went live at 12:01 am on August 1, 1981.

Of course it was the obvious choice. The song was a anthem for the ever changing landscape of how people accessed music. Gone were the day of hearing your favorite bands on a radio, being blissfully unaware at times of what they looked like. The transistor radio of the late 1950s made it possible to be mobile with your music and now, with the release of the Walkman, not only could you take your music with you but you had the CHOICE in what you wanted to hear.

Perhaps Diane said it best in Trainspotting: "Your not getting any younger, Mark. The world is changing, music is changing, even drugs are changing."

Nothing is stagnant, especially the music industry. In the eleven years I've been involved in radio, I have seen the way we access and listen to music morph and change in ways I never dreamed. The medium sure is the fucking is the message, Mr. McLuhan. From the age of 16 to now I went from buying tapes and vinyl, to switching to CD, then biting my nails in fear that the FBI would come knocking on my door and arrest me for downloading hundreds upon hundreds of MP3s via Limewire and Napster, to using iTunes to purchase said MP3s (and lose some of the guilt) and finally, as of late, streaming all the music I want via Spotify. The medium has shifted and morphed so much in the past twenty years that we would be completely oblivious to think that it did not affect how we experience music, or even to go a step further, how it is created.

Music, despite what people will tell you, always was and always will be a business and any business has the main goal of making money - full stop. And it would be naive to think that with all these changes in how the consumer interacts with the product, that the way artist make music wouldn't have changed too. It has, climaxing hard with the creation of one simple, little concept...

Random.

Love it or curse it, the random button which first came into play with the rise of digital music forever changed the interaction people have with music. Musicians created singles as something that could stand alone - it could be shuffled into a jutebox or easily picked up and spun on the radio. The single was a huge promotional item that many artist lived or died by. It was often on the strength of these singles that fans would decided if they would or would not spend their money on a full length album.

A full length album was something special. It was a carefully crafted piece of art, designed from start to finish with the sole purpose to take the listener along on some incredible musical journey. Everything from flow and tempo and feel was given every consideration when laying out album tracks. Listen to Abbey Road, Days of Future Past, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Pet Sounds if you think I'm wrong. Albums became complete slices of time that only broke for a slight, well thought out pause before you got up and flipped over the record to continue on the second half of the journey.


The mass digitalization of music forever changed that art form. Now, not only could you just select your favorite tracks from an album, but you could pair them up with whatever you wanted, create your own set list. Worst of all, you could now put on Abbey Road and hit that tiny little 'random' button and listen to that album in a way it was never intended. It now gave the consumer the ability to be the creator.

But just because you have a general idea of how a human heart works, doesn't mean you should preform open heart surgery any time soon.

The random button took away what was so amazing about those classic albums - what gave them the moniker 'classic' to begin with. It took songs out of context, it interrupted flow and the build up to your favorite song was forever scratched away due to impatience and the 'I want it now' mentality that is ingrained in so many of us these days.

Soon artists had to work with this simple fact in mind - that their songs needed to be stand alone, individual pieces of art that would survive within and without the context of a complete album. The single, which was the calling card of so many artist in the 1950s and 1960s soon because the be all end all. If you wanted to succeed, you needed to be able to produce a single. Fuck if the album on a whole was good or not..

Maybe that's why I'm so happy about the resurgence of vinyl again. There simply is no random button. It's a rainy August morning here in Winnipeg and I'm typing this at my desk while John Coltrane's Stardust plays against the pattering of the rain on my windows and the flow is...well, it's nothing short of magnificent. I couldn't have picked the wax and wane of the sounds any better, and the reason behind that is simple.

This is not my art. This is Coltrane's art, listened to as Coltrane intended. I am letting John take me on the journey of his choosing. He is painting pictures, he is in control of his own palette and I am along for the ride.

Side one has finished, and it's stopped the music at the point John intended, not me. Now I will get up, flip over the record, and think while the first crackles of needle to vinyl start, about how he knows his art so much better than me, otherwise I would have created it and not him. I respect his musical choices and I do so by letting the album as a whole move me - not by making piecemeal decisions that not only break the integrity of the art, but remove all meaning from it.

Viva la Vinyl...

Penny xx