Saint Julian

Three and a half years ago, I moved into a new apartment in Brooklyn. To christen our sweet new abode, my roommate Chelsea and I went halfsies on a fabulous special edition of Mojo magazine devoted entirely to Top Ten Lists.
And let me just say that the $14 we collectively forked over for this mag was probably some of the best $14 we ever spent. The magazine took up permanent shop in our bathroom and I can safely say I perused it upwards of a couple hundred times.
Now, I don't mean to diminish the importance of the top ten most phenomenal Stax releases, Madonna incarnations, or Stevie Nicks-donned shawls. But this blessed issue of Mojo contained one particular list that changed my life forever. It was the top ten record covers featuring animals (or parts of them).
This list was significant to my life for two reasons:

I bought Paul McCartney's RAM a couple of days after I first encountered the list. I fell deeply, madly in love with it. It is easily the best Beatles solo release. It is also my favorite album all time. If you haven't heard it, I feel sorry for you. But I have retailed the shit out of this album countless times to everyone and anyone I've ever met since the first time I heard it. In fact, my love for RAM is so very strong that once some dumb Williamsburg jerk was ribbing me for my Lennon and McCartney tattoos, jesting that I should have gotten Jagger and Richards inked on my inner elbows instead, and I said, "Have you ever heard RAM??" and bad-ass-ly threw a lit cigarette at his mid-section. This was one of the most proudest moments of my life. And no, he hadn't.

So that's RAM. But what about the other album? The one that this post's title quite clearly infers I'm trying to get at? Well, three and a half years ago, I thought, "Hmmm. Julian Cope, huh? That's a cool album cover. I wish I could wear a turtle's shell too". Then I put RAM on the hi-fi, dismissed the thought, and drifted off into the impenetrable beatitude that only ex-Beatles can bring about.

A few weeks ago, I was at my parents' house, stir-crazy and bored: typical Christmas with the Fam blahs. I was listening to the Children of Nuggets box set I'd recently received. I was in one hell of a black mood, and every song served only to remind me how inferior these children were to their artfully psychedelic parents. Then Julian Cope's Sunspots (click and go to the weird website to download) came on. It was one of those rare but exaltant moments in a lifetime of fevered pop music ingestion when you can tell from a song's very first few moments that this is one of your favorite songs of all time. And it was. And it is. The opening chords sound like the Rolling Stones' Citadel if it were about love and not sex (being a Beatles fan, I tend to find the subtleties of the former infinitely more satisfying, sonically at least), and the repeated "I'm in love with my very best friend" lyric makes me girlishly wish that I was Julian Cope's best friend. Who he was in love with. This desire was amplified tenfold when I realized that when he wrote this song, Julian looked like this:

How gloriously hot he is. But whatever. We all know it's the music that matters. And what matters even more than the music is whether or not the music makes you want to either
a) dance
or
b) drive around in a car listening to it at top volume.

This song does both and then some. It also makes me want to craft headdresses out of narwhal horns and romp around the beach with my fly turtle-shelled boyfriend, write twenty novels, drink lemonade, get stoned, eat Mexican food, sport batik-print, play tennis, ride on a ski lift, smash windows, and pet a puppy.

I've since downloaded Fried, and it is one of the best albums I've ever heard in my life. It may very well be my second-favorite album of all time, which cements a particular hypothesis I've been throwing around for the past three and a half years (that records featuring animals or animal-parts or drawings of animals are generally better than those that don't). Fried sounds like if you took all the most transcendent moments of every album ever recorded by Blur, Primal Scream, the Smiths, the Voidoids, Helium, the Inspiral Carpets and every other band you could think of who sounds remotely like the bands I just mentioned, then cut out all the crap and welded them together, amplified their brilliance by infinity to the power of infinity, cut it with a healthy dose of madcap Lennon-esque je ne sais quoi, and then sealed it all up together in an iridescent turtle shell crafted from gold, rubies and Ecstasy tablets.

I urge you to go out and buy Fried ASAP (or download it, if you're a cheapie like me). But if you need further convincing, even after that sick Ecstasy/turtle-shell metaphor I just dropped, please enjoy the nonsensical whimsy of Mik Mak Mok and the wistful introspection of Me Singing.

PS: Also buy RAM.

Posted by Laura in Music
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