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So I totally forgot to put this up yesterday, but here's my artist for this past week...

I've always been wary of bands/artists containing already-made celebrities. Now while both Johnny Depp and Keanu Reeves are members of decent bands for the occasional get together, we all know how spectacularly female tabloid fodder Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan's pop-albums bombed. Sort of like a car stuck in the middle of a train track while a train roars dangerously nearby, you can kind of tell how well a celeb known for something else other than music is going to fare. It's bad, and you want to go get help, yet at the same time, it's just so flamboyantly disastrous that you can't look away.

I'd like to thank my good friend Lucas for suggesting this act to me, and it totally changed my view on all bands containing an A-lister (or any "lister" for that matter).

Jason Schwartzman's--the lovable antagonist pariah in "I Heart Huckabees"--solo project, Coconut Records, comes packaged as a mellow West Coast breeze, sounding like a mix between the Shins, the Beach Boys, and Rooney. Schwartzman incorporates acoustic guitars, easy on the ears drumming, and even some fast-paced guitar solos to make that trip down the Pacific Coast Highway all the more tangible for people this side of Los Angeles. 

"West Coast" off of Coconut Records' debut, Nighttiming, fuses a bouncy, pop sounding keyboard and synth with a deaf, pitsicatto piano to build a likable, if not anthemic chorus to end the song. Featured on the season four soundtrack to the hit show The O.C., Schwartzman longs for his crush in lyrics like, "and I miss you/I'm goin' back home to the West Coast/I wish you would've put yourself in my suitcase/I love you."

"Nighttiming" starts with a funky bass intro, reminiscent of fellow Californian musical legend Flea of Red Hot Chili Peppers, and then bursts into an early 80s techno, synth freak fest. Sounding like a Hello Goodbye dance-punk jam, Schwartzman flows seemlessly using the chorus, "yeah you've been nighttiming, baby, uh-huh" to get the listener up and moving. Like the subtle, escalating caffeine high that you get by drinking a Pepsi, "Nighttiming" concocts as potent--and addicting--of an effect.

Schwartzman has created a flowing, Californian pop-music bear with his debut album, one that's just as catchy the first time as it is the fiftieth time--and I think I'm approaching that listening milestone quickly. 

This weekend's been great with the exception of OSU's latest cop-out in a big game. I'll leave my loathing there concerning my state's beloved--although I don't know how appropriate that title is now--Buckeyes. I think I'll just forget about it, because stewing over it will just cause my already tattered expectations to be trampled more. Thanks for the douse of piss you coated my heart with, Buckeyes!

Anyways, I got into a very in depth conversation today with a few of my other peers during a very windy hookah session outside of a friend's dorm over musical preferences and the state of mainstream music as we know it today. For followers of my columns the past few years at Dublin Jerome, I would frequently touch on the apparent lack of--for lack of better words--heart that many musicians put into their music nowadays. And that might be a pretty quick conclusion to jump to. But after talking it over with my fellow hookah-mates, my opinion seems to be one that's commonly shared--at least to six other 18 year old O.U. freshmen.

While that might not be the best sample size to take when deciding whether music still has the same heart that it used to--I know McCarthy, my sample size "n" should be much larger--I think it would be safe to conclude that many others share the same sentiments. And it's not to say that music now isn't catchy or appealing, at least to some. There's just that "umph" factor missing, the place where the music should leave an aftertaste as potent as getting too much coal on a hit of hookah should be.  

What happened to the days when one could tell you the entire track listing off of the Weezer Blue album? The exact lyrics to a Fall Out Boy song from Take This to Your Grave? The exact point in a Lil' Wayne song when you can clearly hear Weezy make his trademark snicker? Well maybe that last example is still possible, but the last time I checked, I can't even tell you the name of a song off of Weezer's latest CD (better known as the "Red Album" to keep with the title ingenuity), or, for that matter, Infinity On High.

And once again, I could simply be jumping to conclusions. I'm sure that there's plenty of die-hard Weezer and Fall Out Boy fans out there just wanting to prove me wrong. And I don't blame them. Both are pretty great bands, no matter your musical preferences. But to the casual fan, that guy you know down the hall in your dorm in college, your class' professor, or your parents, do you really think that they could tell you even one member in either band? And "that guy that's banging Jessica Simpson's sister" doesn't count.

But when has one of these "big" bands really made something so outlandishly big, fantastic, and catchy that your grandmother will ask you if you're into that band with the nerdy looking lead singer or the guitarist with the girl pants on? It just seems like that heart has fallen out of the music, that one defining aspect that made your favorite band exactly what it was--your favorite band.

It seems that whenever a band gets too big for its own britches that they lose their soul, their identity that makes them so appealing in the first place. Granted they have to assimilate to time constraints, non-stop touring, and other promotional farce, but that shouldn't constitute a band to start throwing down more forgettable shit than a fat guy at a eating contest.

The only bands that seem to still be putting out material with any longevity seem to be the bands that never crack the top-forty, the ones that will be floating their music on Myspace until civilization--and the internet for that matter--cease to exist. Using my own anecdotal evidence, my iTunes kingpins like The Kooks, John Butler Trio, and Jurassic 5 seem to still be orbiting that galaxy of good music albeit the fact that any of those three could easily have one track blow their decently large underground fan base out of the fucking water.

So should I pray to any God that I can that all of my quasi-unknown acts never get airtime? And should I completely disown the mainstream bands that could quite possibly have turned me onto music? No. Of course not. But it makes you wonder what sometimes happens when our favorite bands turn sour at the first appearance on TRL. Maybe it's that emphasis on the individual or the appearance of the band in general. Or, more to the point, the fact that we now see our bands as a commodity, the product being used to push merchandise and hackneyed albums by our materialist, capitalistic music industry.

It's a blessing and a curse that this phenomena could all very well just be the plight of corporate greed, or just the simple fact that our society revolves around money and in order to keep our "favorite" music playing, we need to make sure that the buck does not stop before it gets to the record company. Because it costs money to produce the music in the first place.

It's a complicated issue. Or maybe there is no complicated issue at all. Maybe some of these bands really only had one or two good albums in them in the first place, and pulling their strings for more material was just too much to ask for. Whatever the case is, listen to what you want to listen to. Becoming a famous band doesn't have to be a death sentence. But everyone can tell the difference between what has soul and what does not. And that's something--no matter the "n" sample size--that we can all agree on.

First Post: An Introduction to Ryan's Rockin' Athens

To All Whom Read,

   For the sake of this first entry, I decided to take a formal approach and address all my future readers/subscribers in a letter format. For me, a letter symbolizes a kind of formal casualness--if there's even such a possible paradox. This format addresses--but does not shove down the throat--my message and my intentions in creating this blog. If anything, I hope that whomever reads my daily to quasi-daily panderings will find my opinions and views on music as a relaxing, if not introspective, look into not only the music scene that shapes Athens, Ohio, but also popular, established bands/artists that already shape our musical lexicon.

   For the past four years (prior to my freshman year in college at Ohio University), I have been an Arts & Entertainment correspondent and editor for The Verve, my high school's publication (much love to Jerome nation). I decided to continue my journalistic journey to one of the best journalism programs in nation at the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism here at O.U.  My monthly column of music reviews became a staple those first four years of our high school's publication, and, according to most, my monthly column, Ryan's Rockin' Records, was the one article that they looked forward to most. Since I am in between non-paying writing jobs right now, I decided to act upon the advice of my journalism professor and start up R.R.R. again, this time in a more regular fashion. We'll see if I can keep up the daily updates past tomorrow, but I can't make any promises on my college schedule. However, don't feel that I'm just going to treat this blog as the red-headed step child whom I only call upon when I feel the need to. Oh no, even if I can't go day to day writing in this labor of musical love, I'll be thinking about it, only to come back with an even stronger post that's been stewing in my brain from the time that I posted last.

   For those who have read my columns from high school, I focused--primarily--on older albums by lesser known bands, but I eventually came to realize that my snobby taste in music ended up being everyone else's snobby taste in music. However, with the college edition of my column, I hope to review not only new releases and old classics, but also give the thriving Athens music scene the spotlight, with reviews of shows and--hopefully--band interviews and profiles. I want to spread the wealth here and warm-up to all potential audiences of this precocious music column. 

   Agree to disagree with me or become a believer of the Joseph Gospel, read at your own risk. So tune in, turn on, and drop out.

Yours In Life,

Ryan M. Joseph