The adventure continues with Yo La Tengo...

Many people know that I have a simple and complete disgust for the show "Sound Opinions." I hate Greg Kot, and am embarrassed by Jim Derogatis' dumbing down of his own opinion. Kot is absolute in his pandering to mediority and Dero lets him get away with it. It makes me sick. I think that Derogatis is a good writer, though, and Kot, well...let's just say I threw his Wilco book across the room when I finished it, and then I threw it away. I guess I pretty much hate Greg Kot, I think he's an idiot and a bad writer, and I think that people that listen to his radio show and think he's smart should be forced to listen to the "Dirty Dancing" soundtrack at full blast for eternity.

Of course it may come as surprise then that I first heard Yo La Tengo on "Sound Opnions" way back when. I'm pretty sure that it was a Sunday night, and definitely before Greg Kot started sucking the show up. Mostly it was before I knew any better. Anyways, Dero starts talking about how there's this band and they're from Hoboken and they used to be rock critics. They're called Yo La Tengo. I don't remember if he said bad things about their more recent albums at the time (which would have been Painful and Electr-o-Pura, both classics of a forgotten age) but I do remember him saying glowing things about the album he was gonna play. Fakebook is a collection of Ira Kaplan's favorite songs, songs he believes to be standard, to be worthy to play, a stunning, subdued take on beautiful, well crafted acoustic gems. The funny thing is, I don't remember what song they actually played!

For weeks I tried to get people to tell me about this band. Everybody I knew told me to shut up and just get into something that people actually liked. But I couldn't be detered. My search was mostly fruitless, as the pursuit of "rock music" was a bit of a sin around my house, but later in the summer of '95 I got my first taste of Yo La Tengo: Electr-O-Pura. Sitting in Miles Levy's house, I pulled the CD out and really dug in. Certainly different from the acoustic covers on Fakebook (containing an Kinks song, no less), this album tested my ability to listen to songs that weren't bombastic rock meltdowns. Cuts like Pablo and Andrea (their best, absolutely) and Blue Line Swinger (also their best) fucking kill me now, and certainly made me stop and listen then.