127 Bands, 5 Stages, 3 Days and 1 Mean Sunburn.
"Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival - April 17-19th, 2009 or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Find 30 Reasons To Love a Weekend in the Desert."
- By Scott Butterworth
Day #6 - Artist #6 - Morrissey:
The man, the myth, the legend, the Morrissey.
Talking about Morrissey is like talking about the Pope. It doesn't matter if I say something good or bad, I'm still going to piss somebody off. Great..now there's a third group of people I'm going to potentially piss off for comparing Morrissey to the Pope. No, I'm not comparing the two men to each other. The only similarity is that when talking about the two, one considers them either a deity or a joke. There's not much middle ground. So I'm going to be Morrissey's Switzerland. I will provide watches, cheese, chocolate and bank accounts...but no opinions.
But what I do want to mention is an interesting phenomenon that first introduced me to Morrissey. When I was in high school, my friends and I were jamming out to Metallica, Black Sabbath, Pantera, and Tool albums, so throwing on a Morrissey record was not much of an option. If I was caught with a Morrissey record in my zippered CD wallet (remember those?), I would have been excommunicated (no pun intended) from the group that hung out in the "D-Wing" at Fred C. Beyer High School. Because of that, I didn't discover Morrissey or the Smiths until a little later in life.
"Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival - April 17-19th, 2009 or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Find 30 Reasons To Love a Weekend in the Desert."
- By Scott Butterworth
Day #6 - Artist #6 - Morrissey:
The man, the myth, the legend, the Morrissey.
Talking about Morrissey is like talking about the Pope. It doesn't matter if I say something good or bad, I'm still going to piss somebody off. Great..now there's a third group of people I'm going to potentially piss off for comparing Morrissey to the Pope. No, I'm not comparing the two men to each other. The only similarity is that when talking about the two, one considers them either a deity or a joke. There's not much middle ground. So I'm going to be Morrissey's Switzerland. I will provide watches, cheese, chocolate and bank accounts...but no opinions.
But what I do want to mention is an interesting phenomenon that first introduced me to Morrissey. When I was in high school, my friends and I were jamming out to Metallica, Black Sabbath, Pantera, and Tool albums, so throwing on a Morrissey record was not much of an option. If I was caught with a Morrissey record in my zippered CD wallet (remember those?), I would have been excommunicated (no pun intended) from the group that hung out in the "D-Wing" at Fred C. Beyer High School. Because of that, I didn't discover Morrissey or the Smiths until a little later in life.
sic and culture and a nice pop alternative. The new album is called It's Not Me It's You. She has a brilliant way of switching around some popular phrases, as she does with "Thank You Very Much," one of my favorite tracks on the album. I saw her show for the first album in San Francisco and can't wait to see her again down here. She will be playing at the Wiltern on April 2nd. The album is just as catchy as you want it to 
be. It does what it sets out to do. The album is pure pop entertainment with that signature Lilly Allen feel to it. I do have a habit of loving the artists that most people either love or hate. It is the better artists that I think have this effect on us. You should love her like I do, but I will not hate you if you don't. She is for sure not for everyone.
picked up most of the New Order albums and the two studio albums of Joy Division. I quickly fell in love with Joy Division as well, but for different reasons. I was also a Morrissey fan before being a Smiths fan. It was always exciting to go back and discover a band that was over before I was old enough to actually listen to them while they were happening. I fell in love with New Order-- there was just no avoiding it. They were everything I wanted in a band. They were also really unavoidable during the 80s and 90s. New Order were all over the radio and you would most likely hear them everywhere else you went. You would hear them in the mall or at your friends' house. DJs loved New Order. You would most likely hear them at any school dance, dance club, party, wedding, or bar mitzvah that you went to. They were a band that was easy to fall in love with. Joy Division captured that inner 
depression and angst that many of us felt, but New Order captured that more fun and optimistic side that many of us also identified with. Joy Division and New Order were sort of two sides of a coin. They have both remained with me ever since. I still never get tired of hearing "True Faith" or "Blue Monday."
Last week an ATM outside an English supermaket malfunctioned and mistakenly started spitting out twice the money requested. For example if you wanted to withdraw a hundred English pounds it would instead dispense 200 but it would show as only a 100 deducted from your account. As you can imagine word spread quickly and after a few busy hours of use the ATM ran dry. Since no crime was broken the police in the town of Hull could not arrest anyone but said that those who benefited could face charges, but only if the company administering the machine complained. Ah, let them keep the money. I say it's theirs to keep if the machine made the mistake.
