Five on Friday: Kronerson speaks

Merriam-Webster defines music as “vocal, instrumental, or mechanical sounds having rhythm, melody, or harmony.” More than most other words, this definition has been stretched and desecrated by its practitioners to the point where people get in screaming matches over what should or shouldn’t be considered “music.” Maybe you’re confused and looking for examples of this thing so that you can better understand when you hear it. I present to you five such examples, or as they are often called, “songs.” I will also explain some of my rationale for choosing these five from billions of options. If you are confused by any of the terminology (rap, album, etc), please research those terms on your own time. Though you may disagree on the quality of my selections, we can all agree that these five songs are, by definition, music.

'I Can't Live Without My Radio' by LL Cool J

I once went through a four-year phase of trying to rap. Despite lacking skills in that field, I still believed I had the goods. Blame this misguided confidence on my becoming immersed in early-to-mid 1980s hip-hop. Similar to punk rock from around the same time, that rap era’s stripped-down sound could be mistaken for simple and thus easily replicable. LL Cool J’s Radio is my favorite rap album that came out before Public Enemy, and the song “I Can’t Live Without My Radio” is one of my favorite opening tracks on any album. The minimalism and force of this Rick Rubin production tricked me into thinking I could do it too. As LL performs this song in the film Krush Groove, one of his cronies holds a silver boombox that blasts the backing beat. This scene inspired me so much that I used a (not nearly as cool) silver boombox for the first year of my rap performances.

'Victim of a Talk Radio Crisis' by Psychic Graveyard

I view Eric Paul’s four main music projects–Arab on Radar, The Chinese Stars, Doomsday Student, Psychic Graveyard–as one cohesive story. I discovered Arab on Radar in high school, and that band was like a human peer: a teen friend who acted out child abuse trauma in abrasive and misunderstood ways. The Chinese Stars was that same friend in the early stages of adulthood, a period in which he tried to counter his trauma with drugs and dance music. Doomsday Student was that person simultaneously returning to his roots and going forward on the path of being a grown-up. Then there’s Psychic Graveyard; at this point, my friend has a family, works a respectable job, and owns a suburban home. However, he is still the same person who is trying to work out some issues, and he is thankfully bringing us along for the cathartic ride. “Victim of a Talk Radio Crisis” describes an alternate timeline, a place where such alienated middle-aged people could end up if they fall in with the conspiracy crowd. I love songs with fictional narrators, which is one of the reasons why I think Randy Newman is the bees' knees. What makes this song particularly unsettling is that this fictional narrator is the kind of real person who now runs the world.

'Speed Limit' by The Dot Wiggin Band

In Season 2, Episode 15 of Gilmore Girls, the bad boy newcomer Jess hands the protagonist Rory a Shaggs CD and says, “Trust me.” Two things are happening here: Jess is flexing his musical intellect for a potential mate, and the Gilmore Girls creative team is flexing their musical intellect for the CW audience. It was smart to pick The Shaggs, whose Philosophy of the World is often rightly regarded as the best outsider album of all time. In 2013, singer Dot Wiggin and her group The Dot Wiggin Band released their only album, Ready! Get! Go! I’ve spent a lot of time with this album, not only because it rules, but also because it was the only CD in my wife’s car for years. While on road trips, we’d inevitably hit a spot with no service and no streaming, and I’d say, “Aw nuts! I really meant to bring my CDs this time!” and we’d just listen to Ready! Get! Go! again. The album’s third track, “Speed Limit,” is the perfect song if you want to feel like a badass while in a vehicle. The lyrics read as quintessential butt metal (“My blood is pumping, boiling like a kettle. But I’ll never stop, no, I’ll never settle.”), and the fast-paced music sounds like speeding. But even so, the whole song still somehow sounds like it was made by Muppets.

'Man Urinating, Laughter' by Men’s Recovery Project

In one of my creative writing classes, we analyzed the following six-word flash fiction story: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” It’s an example of that style of writing in which the author only shares bits and pieces of the full picture, leaving you flabbergasted with what it could all mean. The recorded equivalent of this story is Men’s Recovery Project’s “Man Urinating, Laughter,” a twenty-five-second track of someone urinating while a crowd laughs, and the possibilities herein are endless. Maybe this paints a picture of a bro trying to make his other bros laugh at a drunken frat party. Maybe it’s the stand-up material of one of those ironic anti-comedy comedians who would have a show on Adult Swim. Maybe a human space explorer is taking a leak on Mars, unaware that this is a prime example of hilarity to surrounding Martians. No matter what the scenario, I wonder where the urinater could possibly go from here.

'You Set the Scene' by Love

Speaking of urination, let me tell you about my UTI. When I was 21, I noticed drops of blood while taking a wizz. I spent the next few days taking antibiotics; during that period, my tinkling was frequent and very, very painful. It was around this same time that I began getting into Love; when I heard their Forever Changes album for the first time, the agony from my UTI was so intense that I was almost hallucinating. As a result, I was very susceptible to singer Arthur Lee’s soothing voice and profound lyrics. In that moment, listening to Forever Changes was as spiritual as anything I have ever experienced in music, or maybe anything ever. In the album’s finale, You Set the Scene, Arthur Lee sings the following: “This is the time and life that I am living, and I’ll face each day with a smile, for the time that I’ve been given’s such a little while, and the things that I must do consist of more than style. There are places that I am going.” When I heard this, I felt changed. Two decades have passed since then, and I have yet to pee blood once again.