Bad Boy Bill has been a DJ for what seems like forever, starting in the late ’80s and churning out amazing mix after mix ever since. His Bangin’ the Box series and House Connection albums (with Richard ‘Humpty’ Vission) are legendary collections of Hi-NRG house that never let up, sometimes mixing over 40 tracks in the course of an hour. It’s amazing that it has taken him this long to create an artist album comprised entirely of original material. It’s even more amazing that it’s not all together that good. Instead of focusing on the frantic house that made Bill a standard in dance clubs worldwide, Bill’s decided to embrace standard dance-pop for The Album. Some of it is great, like the throbbing “Headlock” or the single “Fast Life,” but the rest of the songs are too derivative, annoying or just plain boring. Even worse is his pointless cover of Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit,” which takes the song’s classic hook and buries it with annoying fader effects, giving you a maddening taste of it before cutting it away. The best tracks on The Album will probably show up in a Bad Boy Bill mix eventually, and will probably sound even better, so there’ s no point in picking up this very unfortunate misfire. (Nettwerk Records 2009)
My first exposure to the Flaming Lips was seeing the video for “She Don’t Use Jelly” on MTV’s “Beavis and Butthead” show, which immediately pegged the Lips as a novelty in my mind (and not one that I even enjoyed all that much). How could one not see novelty in a song with a character who spreads Vaseline on her toast? This was kid stuff, and yes, I could be a silly kid, but where I drew my lines of tolerance for silliness were admittedly very arbitrary (example: I unironically enjoyed Mister Ed). As such, I completely shut out the Lips.
The buzz was loud and clear on Bee Thousand, the lo-fi masterpiece by Dayton alt-rockers Guided by Voices. This was the record that everyone positively had to own, so I borrowed it from a friend of mine…and totally didn’t get it. The songs aren’t finished! Are these demos? When lead singer Robert Pollard – whose last name should be a synonym for ‘prolific’ – saw a song to its completion, as he did on “Tractor Rape Chain,” I was definitely into it, but too many of the songs felt like piss takes to me, so I politely stayed off the bandwagon. Five years later, he made “Teenage FBI” with Ric Ocasek, which I loved, but still didn’t buy any of their records. Then they dropped Human Amusements at Hourly Rates, a compilation of Pollard’s more, ahem, finished songs, and I finally bit, and the disc scarcely left my CD player for months afterward. And then, of course, the band broke up just when I was beginning to appreciate them. Luckily, they recorded 16 albums in 17 years before calling it quits. The only question now is: which one do I start with? – David Medsker
