Things I Have Noticed

• If you sit in one place for long enough, you will eventually start playing a Ramones album.
  
• Black Sabbath wrote a lot of songs about individuality, but then again, most bands did. It would be difficult to find a group that really supports group consciousness.
  
• The female member of The Knife seems like she should be really attractive. She is not.
• Chuck D doesn't have much in the way of flow.
  
• If you're feeling heartbroken and desperate, listening to Nick Drake won't make you feel better, but it will fill you with a sense of accomplishment that you thought to put on a Nick Drake album.
  
• Pink Floyd wouldn't be remembered at all if it wasn't for Roger Waters' songwriting.
• At first it seems surprising that nobody could figure out that Rob Halford was gay, but you've got to remember that the late '70s and most of the '80s were an incredibly faggy period of United States history. He basically just seemed like an average man.
  
• Parliament/Funkadelic wouldn't be able to rise above the status of "cult act" if they founded any later than they did.
  
• James Brown was actually an incredibly handsome man. It seems like an obvious statement, but it's something a lot of people seem to forget.
  
• The Smiths would improve exponentially if they thought to include a decent bassline in any of their songs.
  
• A smiling white man on the cover of a blues album is something that should stay in a courtroom.
• There is no correct food to eat while listening to Bob Dylan.
• The level of unfounded rage at Bruce Springsteen probably mostly comes from people who didn't love their grandparents.
  
• There's not really a decent reason to listen to Built To Spill in this day and age.
• There's a time and a place for black metal drumming, and it could work in more songs than you might think. Insert some blast beats into "Gimme Shelter" and marvel at the results!
  
• "We Will Fall" by The Stooges is probably the worst song ever recorded.
• Pay attention while you're listening to a Slayer album. You'll notice that nothing really impressive is happening.
• It seems unlikely that math rock will ever get it's day in the sun.
• Jeff Magnum has one of the worst singing voices in rock history and that's what makes most of his songs work.
• Everyone seems to like the Melvins, but nobody seems to have anything by them.
• Many Japanophiles, if not most, have never heard of Boris.
• All of the Beatles' later work is constructed on the pop foundations that they laid down early in their career, so if you're one of those people who hates the "pop shit" that the Beatles did early on, you are, at best, a slut.
• There are few metal songs about relationships, but there's a surprising amount of relationship songs about metal.
• Hospice by The Antlers doesn't get completely incredible until the last third of the album, and it makes the previous two thirds seem sort of shitty by comparison.
  
• The Specials are almost too jazzed about their own music to come off as being angry about much of anything.
  
• It's pretty hard to make friends when you're the kind of person who spends Superbowl Sunday making a list of pithy music observations.

-CJ