{"id":3972,"date":"2011-03-28T06:56:36","date_gmt":"2011-03-28T14:56:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/?p=3972"},"modified":"2011-03-28T06:56:36","modified_gmt":"2011-03-28T14:56:36","slug":"how-to-cook-a-screaming-eagle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/2011\/03\/28\/how-to-cook-a-screaming-eagle\/","title":{"rendered":"How To Cook A Screaming Eagle"},"content":{"rendered":"
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How to Cook a Screaming Eagle<\/a><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This is the best thing I’ve read all day, and I’ve read a lot.<\/p>\n

Well, maybe if we’re including last night as part of today, after all, it was past midnight, I’ve got to give props to the book "Bad Things Happen", which was the unread remnant from a long ago trip that I found on my Kindle which riveted me, making me wonder why I purchased a genre novel yet enjoyed it so much.<\/p>\n

ANYWAY, today music is about money.\u00c2\u00a0 The spicy center, the nougat that makes life worth living, that’s been pushed aside.\u00c2\u00a0 Now it’s all about how many t-shirts you sold and lamenting that iTunes downloads do not equal CD sales.\u00c2\u00a0 But what actually gets people to listen to music, to enjoy it?\u00c2\u00a0 There’s very little discussion of that.\u00c2\u00a0 Unlike the seventies, when being a rock critic could ensure fame that transcends your corporeal body.\u00c2\u00a0 See Lester Bangs for instruction.\u00c2\u00a0 When he wrote about rock and roll you were inspired to hear it.\u00c2\u00a0 When you read the letter grades of records in "reviews" today the factoid escapes your cranium shortly thereafter.\u00c2\u00a0 What has a grade got to do with music?<\/p>\n

And what does writing have to do with eating?<\/p>\n

There’s all this hogwash that you can’t write about music, can’t capture its essence.\u00c2\u00a0 The key is not to try and analyze music, but capture its excitement, its mood, draw people in, make them want to hear it.\u00c2\u00a0 In other words, just don’t tweet that you love so-and-so, EXPLAIN YOURSELF!<\/p>\n

But explaining is for pussies.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s what English majors do.\u00c2\u00a0 And everybody knows you can’t make money pursuing the liberal arts.\u00c2\u00a0 You need to be a computer science major, or a business major, which is why our music today sounds so bad.\u00c2\u00a0 It evidences science instead of soul.\u00c2\u00a0 It bounces right off of you instead of penetrating.<\/p>\n

The picture of the Screaming Eagle in this story was enough to make my mouth water and get my taste buds salivating, but it was the discussion of those who partake that really got me going.\u00c2\u00a0 Remember college, when calories were something you burned off walking to class?\u00c2\u00a0 When the girls were fatter than their mothers?\u00c2\u00a0 Yup, you can be chubby in college, but it’s anathema once you’re in the workforce.\u00c2\u00a0 Who wants to be involved with a woman who doesn’t eat?<\/p>\n

Because eating is like music.\u00c2\u00a0 The essence of life.<\/p>\n

And I’m not talking McDonald’s and I’m not talking Britney Spears, even though Mickey D’s fries are fantastic and "…Baby One More Time" is life-affirming.<\/p>\n

But what we like most is not the mainstream music, what’s on Top Forty radio, but what we discover at a buddy’s house, uncover at a club, that which hits us unexpectedly, that makes us feel so good.<\/p>\n

One can categorize a Screaming Eagle as junk food, but that would be wrong.\u00c2\u00a0 A Screaming Eagle is "Satisfaction", "Hang On Sloopy", "Wild Thing", something so simple yet so right.\u00c2\u00a0 Something that shoots low and succeeds. Something we live for.<\/p>\n

In this article Sam Sifton captures college, drunkenness, late nights and chow and wraps them up in a concoction that makes you feel you can both taste and smell the food, even though all you’ve got is a picture.\u00c2\u00a0 The best rock writing did the same thing.\u00c2\u00a0 You had to run to the store to buy the album, just to be part of the writer’s elation, which is what I did with Lester Bangs’s review of Alice Cooper’s "Killer"<\/a>, and when I dropped the needle on "Under My Wheels", not only did I get it, my life was changed.<\/p>\n

This food renaissance is what music used to be.\u00c2\u00a0 People can’t stop talking about it, can’t stop reading about it, can’t stop spending their money trying to titillate their taste buds.\u00c2\u00a0 The food truck scene is like indie or punk, a reaction to the establishment that captures the heart of the adventurous.<\/p>\n

With bands making so much money during the MTV era, music became about money.\u00c2\u00a0 And now with money more prevalent in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, music no longer gets the best and the brightest, but Snookis, the marginally-talented having a go before they settle into a life of drudgery.<\/p>\n

But it doesn’t have to be this way.<\/p>\n

The Kogi truck doesn’t sell McDonald’s.\u00c2\u00a0 Why are we giving credit to Dr. Luke for churning out the same crap with different people?<\/p>\n

Why do we laud "American Idol" when we wouldn’t let an inexperienced chef prepare our meal?<\/p>\n

Why is it about everything but the art?<\/p>\n

<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How to Cook a Screaming Eagle This is the best thing I’ve read all day, and I’ve read a lot. Well, maybe if we’re including last night as part of today, after all, it was past midnight, I’ve got to give props to the book "Bad Things Happen", which was the unread remnant from a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3972","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-business"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-124","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3972","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3972"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3972\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3973,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3972\/revisions\/3973"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}