Rattle and hum

The boss-man has me Photoshopping a scan of what looks like a 19th cent. decaying script fragment to try to make the text readable. He thinks it says "Indian pipe of peace" but I'm seeing "Indiana police want power." Or maybe, "In dissing polio, get pewter."

I've been listening to The Woods but am haunted and angered by the suggestion I read the other day in an interview that this record is somehow more "masculine" and therefore more accessible to men than previous S-K fare. The interviewer knows her shit so she killed this idea. But it started me down the slippery slope of thinking, wellity, maybe that's why it's not getting into my bloodstream right away, why I haven't been able to climb into these songs and walk around in them the way I can w/ the old ones. I'm a girl.

This, loves, is seriously wonked out and effed up to an unverbalizable extreme. As if all male music fans secretly want for breakfast is 70s Sugar Sludge O's, and they might even have to pass on the Led Zep sometimes, b/c, y'know, Robert Plant's voice gets kinda high. As if no male music critic ever went cross-eyed praising Call the Doctor and Dig Me Out, and I'd never been to an S-K show where the front row was almost exclusively populated by worshipful guitar dork lads memorizing every barre chord and hammer-on.

As for the idea that I like treble and clarity and melody and Carrie's downstroke eighth notes b/c it's hardwired into my girlie, doll-collecting DNA, listen: I was raised on guitar sludge. I cut my musical teeth on fuzz et squeal, albeit of the kind born in 1991. I love Les Zeps, just as I do Bleach and Gish and Loveless and Rid of Me (if P.J. even counts, b/c she's, like, a lady). And it's not as if the first six S-K recs are flute concertos or something. If people stopped invoking a gendered monopoly on certain sounds, maybe that monopoly would get a little bit less tenacious, and then a little bit less tenacious still, until the time would come when a record could appeal or not appeal to someone based on her musical taste, not her XX.

Anyways, it's probably just b/c my brain is so indexical, but looky:

The Fox; Jumpers; Lonely as a Cloud; Entertain (yeah, smells like you-know-what, but also)/ Entertainment