8+

"November Rain" by Guns N' Roses which clocks in at 8:59

On the road for a month. Constantly documenting the adventures of a rock band as they tour the country, it's not quite the fertile ground for writing that I'd imagined it would be. Not yet at least. Though the seeds of a hundred posts are germinating, currently, in the down time, I've found that I prefer to unwind. To sleep. Not prefer, but that I need to rather. So, as a very special treat for readers of EAR FARM I've asked a good friend to contribute a series of entries (the following was most probably not originally intended to be split into four separate parts yet that is precisely what has happened) in the 8+ feature that will run each of the next four weeks while I am away. What follows is part 1 of 4, written by Ryan Vanderboosh.

“Real People”
(or: i get up around 7, get outta bed around 7:00:05)

“One thing that’s nice about dating a real person is that they buy, like, groceries & shit.”
-D.J. Moser

Reaching that point when we define those who are fundamentally dissimilar from ourselves as “real people” was meant to be a bedrock of identity. Us fake people, we are not real people. Tautology, folks. And sure we might date these real people; we might mooch their groceries; we might endure their civilized invitations to pan-Asian restaurants; and perhaps we might cladestinely slip 100mg of chlamydia-eradicating dioxycyline into their miso soup while they’re in the bathroom. But we will never become them. For the dirtbags, real people –& their creeping proximity in our lives-- only serve as handy foils & procurers of highspeed internet.

But oh, W. Axl, how i’ve betrayed you. As the forty-seventh electric kazoo track off any Chinese Democracy song surely demonstrates, you have no idea what a compromise is. But let me tell you: compromises abound in this shitty world. If only i had your fortitude to gracefully become a chunky, dreadlocked laughing-stock instead of the marginally functional human being i aspire to someday resemble. It was in fact to that eventual end that i recently noticed myself in my jammies at no later than 11pm with my alarm set for 7 the next morning, necktie ready for action. A disturbing predicament indeed.

Well, time passed, and with each utterance of the words “leveraged buyout” or “synergistic” my foolhearty quest for self-esteem coughed & wheezed. Eventually it died altogether, but not before i had splashed out a bunch of tainted scrilla on some trappings, thus becoming the final non-Amish on earth to purchase an iPod. yeah & a whole computer to plug it into. Sure i could now listen to music on the subway and enjoy Earfarm from the comfort of my own self-loathing, but i was mildly aghast at such a display of material attachment. This was not helping in my desire to stay Rumsfeldian –which is to say, pursuant to our dearly departed Defense Secretary’s paradigm of tactical flexibility, operational swiftness, & easily recalibrated standards of success. Was i detecting a quagmire?

Until recently it had been years since i had given any G’N’R a proper listen. But with my cd-drive whizzing through untold copyright infringements, it was high time to put my new technology to good use…

November Rain

The summer this song was a hit, i was riding shotgun in the family car, and when it came on the radio, i reached over to turn the volume up. A few stanzas in my mother asked me if we were listening to Weird Al. Ahh, what a stupid lady.

It would appear that Mr. Rose, ever the romantic, has fallen spandex-over-aviators for a bit of a tramp. Now, we’ve all known crisply agonizing days of crisis & uncertainty… days when we find ourselves wikipedia’ing “spastic colon” out of more than mere idle curiosity. It is the pits. But when all the aching muscles of your heart are trained on a piece of ass more tapped that Seymour Hersh’s phone, you clearly have little recourse but to hire the Boston Philharmonic for some absurd intro. It turns out that our first song in the quadfecta, the best known & most lucrative, is also the lamest.

None the less, the indulgent arc does payoff in a great G’s-up-ho’s-down guitar shredding, as if to say, “Though you will never rehabilitate your slatternly ways, my dear inveterate slut, my own regret is still dwarfed by what a miserable, snivelling pussy my friends now see me as. If my tearful, franitc masturbation to the postcard you sent me from Amsterdam simply reading IT’S OVER were channeled through a guitar, it would sound like this.”

(to be continued...)

Buy Use Your Illusion I HERE on Amazon.

EAR FARM's 8+ is a weekly feature that showcases songs longer than 8 minutes. In the recent past these songs were featured on EF's 8+:
Sleep - "Jerusalem (Pt. 4)"
The Velvet Underground - "The Gift"
Elton John - "Funeral for a Friend / Love Lies Bleeding"
Jenő Jandó - "Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2"
The Temptations - "Take a Stroll Thru Your Mind"
Deerhoof - "Look Away"
Tan Dun - "Symphony 1997: II. Earth (Yi3)"
Jane's Addiction - "Three Days"

To see a full list of every song featured in EAR FARM's 8+ click HERE.