June 10: #9 Listen to a full album by a band you've decided you don't like
Phil: I’m going to get some blowback on this one, if any of my friends actually read this. But I’ve been told by several people now that I should start listening to this band PUP. “You’d really like PUP.” I listened to PUP so many times in the past, often on other people's’ requests, and it never hooked me. But this morning I let their record from 2016 ride while I got ready. And I’m sorry, I just can’t get into it. I tried. There are too many things that swirl through my mind when I hear it, and none of those things are good. It doesn’t have whatever the secret ingredient that I look for whenever I’m trying to get into a band. I’ve been wrong before -- I used to hate a lot of the bands that I really love now. Iron Chic is one that comes to mind -- a band I couldn’t catch onto for years but eventually watched them become one of my favorite bands. Maybe PUP will be like that. But for now, I am removing them from my Spotify, because...I just can’t.
Bruce: If Phil is going to get blowback on his response then I’m going to get shot on sight. I miserably failed this challenge, only listening to a quarter of Sublime’s “40z to freedom”. After hearing the first five or six tracks though I hate to say but I feel like I get it. What I don’t get is everyone’s obsession with it. I’m sorry to everyone I know who is blown away by the idea of pot and Hackeysack but I don’t get the appeal of this band. Demo quality recordings, a weird mix of rap, rock and reggae which they’re not particularly good at any of those things. Also I will admit I have a complete allergy to reggae. There is something uniquely agitating to me about those repetitious guitar chirps. They present simultaneously more monotony and less charm than a turn signal to me. Lazily written lyrics reporting on stoner life is both completely unrelatable and entirely uninteresting to me. One of the reasons I didn’t get around to listen to this whole album was actually pretty great, I was in the studio making my own music for four hours with friends and that felt really special and then I listened to this album on my way home. I thought about some of the production which I thought was pretty OK as far as changing up some instruments at times, though usually it just felt like capturing insert-jam-band I’ve seen at more open mics than I care to remember. But mostly I was perversely inspired by how much you seemingly don’t have to try or care to make some cult-iconic music. Maybe you had to be there, I don’t know. To each their own, music is subjective of course! The best surprise to me about this album was that they covered a song by one of my favorite bands, Bad Religion’s “we’re only gonna die from our own arrogance” , I was totally shocked and pleased by that, Sublime did pretty well by them. No enlightenment here, but I tried.
Tomorrow's challenge: #16 Rearrange a room in your house