Marilyn Monroe, The Rolling Stones & Muse So I'm sat outisde in my yard flickin' thru this real trashy Marilyn Monroe biog called 'Goddess' (I really only dig real sleazy, dirt raking biogs, like f'instance check out the hatchet job Albert Goldman did on Lennon, it's a blast, quite frankly I couldn't care less how accurate a portrait a biographer paints of their subject, jus' as long as they're imaginative and immoral enough to creates as many myths as they debunk) and I'm eyeballin' this story 'bought how she took LSD with Tim Leary in '62, and I'm sipping my cheap red, it's 6 in the pm & all's well in the world, & two doors down some cat sticks on 'Wild Horses' by der Stones real loud. Now it ain't my fave Stones track by any stretch, (for what it's worth, that dubious honour goes to the slide guitar white-boy funk of 'Ventilator Blues' from yer Exile on Main Street) but any vintage Stones on a sunny July evenin' is A-OK by me, especially as it's a nice enuff loping country ballad and the saintly Gram Parsons gave it 'em & it's just about right for my state of mind at that precise moment. So I'm a happy buckeroo. Then 'Wild Horses' trots to it's conclusion, an' I'm casually ponderin' wether this two-doors-down cat is gonna treat me to a whole evening of pleasent country rock, maybe some Flying Burritos, some CSN&Y, maybe if I'm real lucky he'll even spin some Sweetheart Of The Rodeo-era Byrds.

So it goes without sayin' that when my neighbourly DJ 'drops' some Muse LP I bum hard. Now, I ain't familar enough with contemporary indie rock to recognise der Muse instantly, but I figure pretty quickly it ain't David Crosby churnin' out the sub-Queen robo-metal dirge I'm being assaulted by, and even more depressin' still is that once I do recognise 'em I realise it ain't even their new LP, which at least woulda won my neighbour points for contemporaneousness (?) and woulda meant that if I were stopped in the street by the Indie Marketing Board and quizzed on my reactions to Supermassive Black Hole et al I coulda held forth with an INFORMED OPINION, insteada which I'm just gonna have to rely on my firmly held partially informed estimation that Muse suck, and their new LP probably sucks just as much as their last one and all the ones they did before that, and all this boohockey 'bout how the new single is some sorta big 'departure' for 'em, 'cos it's, like inspired by listenin' to cutting edge dance music in New York clubs, is just a PR exercise to disguise the fact that it actually just sounds like a Marilyn Manson b-side, and that if I were a cutting edge New York DJ I'd wanna tell Muse to shut the hell up and stop draggin' my good cutting edge name thru the mud, jeez, cutting edge New York DJs don't sit around mapping out the future of electronic drug music just so a buncha Jeff Buckley ripping off muvvafuggers can get their kicks in their club for a couple of hours and go home to tell the NME 'bout how the've had their horizens widened by hanging with drag queens an' listenin' to 'banging' Franz Ferdiand remixes in der Upper East Side.

Anyway, if you wanna hear something really good, check out 'Chicago: Live At Carnegie Hall'. It's a quadruple LP brass blues funk rock monster. That's quadruple LP. 4 LPs. 8 sides of vinyl. Two posters. A colour booklet. A nice cream box. That's called value for money, brother.  ¶ 10:44 AM