Bad Brains Live at CBGB's in 1982

Phenomenal performance by Bad Brains, it's hard to come across such energy. Apparently Ian MacKaye, of Minor Threat fame, is in the audience, but it's hard to make him out. Watch for the moves by H.R. and those on stage from around 1:10 to 1:20 - it looks almost choreographed, and it is in a sense a modern dance. (Pere Ubu reference, anybody?) I also like the women in the red shirt sitting on the stage to the left, who seems to somehow know all the words to all the songs. I'm not sure if she actually knows the words or she knows the sounds coming out of his mouth - I guess it depends on whether or not their eponymous debut, also released in 1982, had already come out before this concert, and whether it came with a lyrics sheet.

The Hollies' Greatest (1968)

The drums on this thing are mixed so low that if I stand more than 10 feet away from the speakers, it becomes A Capella. The Hollies were all about harmonies, as was the AM Pop of the time, and as more and more bands nowadays are starting to use harmonies again, perhaps for the first time in such widespread form in rock since either the glory days of Power Pop, it's easy to like the Hollies. For a long time, I swear I thought there actually was a brief A Capella interlude during "I Can't Let Go," but no, the drums are there all lone, quietly doing what I can only describe as "metronomic pattering," in the background, along with the guitars and bass. "I Can't Let Go" is arguably one of the finest pure vocal tracks of the 60s outside of the Beach Boys, but with other songs, you realize that this is that band on the radio that you're ashamed to admit that you like those two songs of theirs, but are genuinely annoyed when another comes on. Which is why it's a Best Of. Ah, sweet nostalgia for a time when not only were you not born, but your mother might not have even yet known exactly how people get pregnant... gotta love those harmonies!

ESG - Come Away with ESG (1983)

ESG apparently stands for "emerald, sapphire, and gold," but rocks are about the last things I would use to describe them. This music doesn't "rock," it does something more powerful, yet something slightly nameless. Perhaps the best way to describe it is... it makes you want to dance. This music created by four sisters from the Bronx in 1983 is slightly indescribable. I think the song title "Parking Lot Blues" kind of sums up how this album would be if I dreamt it; black asphalt, surrounded by apartment buildings, people standing, dancing, making music in the heat. For a superficial equation, it seems to combine the kind of acoustic atmosphere present on Suicide, the bass of Jah Wobble on Metal Box, the arrangement of, dare I say it, Steve Reich, in its slowly developing, simple layers and the repeated entering and exiting and entering again of its musicians, with the funkiness of the funk. The songs are individual, yet, with their similar bass lines and progression, and one repeating tom run that seems to gleefully pop up in every song, they almost resemble a song cycle. ESG is the kind of band that's meant to make only one record; the impact of 11 perfect songs is there, and with any more it would become repetitive. But as it is, the 11 song simply slowly reveal themselves even more every time and never lose their feel. They only need 11 songs because only 11 are needed for a singular impact, repeated over and over, party after party. 11 more songs - i.e., another album - would create a secondary "impact group" that would only seek to compare itself to the first group, and thus, lessen the impact of both groups. And the lyrics are so pure that you're almost unsure if they're subtly with a wink paying tribute to the sensibilities of girl groups past, or if they're just trying to make a damn good dance songs. And I couldn't care less which one it is, because either way, I'll be dancing.

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Erykah Badu's "Baduizm" (1997)

Neo-Soul is such a sad term - it implies that anything remotely influenced by the soul of the 60s and 70s is a conscious revitalization act, rather than a natural evolution from a prior genre. And it's not that - one listen to ?uestlove and The Roots' production will tell you that it belongs in nowhere else but the 90s. Everyone compares Badu to Billie Holliday, and I wouldn't have really thought of it if I had not been previously told so, but her voice is actually strikingly similar, but, of course, much funkier. The hit here is "On & On," but "Next Lifetime" is that one that really sold it for me.

Now what am I supposed to do
When I want you in my world
How can I want you for myself
When I'm already someone's girl?

I guess I'll see you next lifetime
No hard feelings
I guess I'll see you next lifetime
I'm gonna be there

No, I never really care about lyrics, but it doesn't hurt that these compliment the best groove on the album. It's high time pseudo-intellectual white people stop obsessing over the past and realize great music that charts still is a reality, and has been, always - particularly in 1997.

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Super Black Market Clash!

OK, so it doesn't have an exclamation mark in the title. Without or without the exclamation, this is an album that all Clash fans should have but probably don't know about. This compilation combines a lot of B-sides and random songs that either were never released or singles and stuff that were just forgotten through the cracks of time. (Yes, I did just combine two metaphors there.) Either way, it's worth it. As for any albums of this sort, most of the songs were left off albums for a reason. Nevertheless, considering how prolific the Clash were, you would have to imagine that they wrote plenty of great songs that they just couldn't all fit on the damn record.

"City of the Dead" is a song with an unbelievably catchy sax riff, and one of the best on the album, and the more well-known "This is Radio Clash," another song with some nice saxes in there. It's got some interesting instrumental tracks, like "Listen" and "Time is Tight," and "Mustapha Dance," which for the first three minutes is kind of like an instrumental intro to "Rock the Casbah" - or, on second listen, perhaps it's part of the original song with the vocals and some instruments taken out. It's also got a sort of strange rendition of Toots and the Maytals' "Pressure Drop." It's a decent Clash song as long as you don't listen to the original, and unfortunately I heard the original first, so I'll forever be cringing slightly when I hear their take, which takes a lot of the groove out of the original. The highlights, though, are perhaps "Justice Tonight - Kick it Over" and "Robber Dub" (which cam from "Bank Robber"), in which the Clash try their hand at dub and do not do bad at all.

My only complaint: it doesn't include the fantastic "White Man (In Hammersmith Palais)," the best song the Clash never put on an album. In fact, it's probably better than every song on Give 'em Enough Rope, with perhaps the exception of "Tommy Gun."

John Cale on "I've Got a Secret," 1963

In 1963, a team of pianists, including John Cale and John Cage, participated in a marathon performance of Erik Satie's Vexations, from 6 p.m. to 12:40 p.m. the following day, playing the same phrase 840 successive times.

3 years later...

On Free Jazz

On the left, Donald Ayler, the brother of Albert Ayler, on the right.

Listen to Albert Ayler's "Ghosts - Second Variation" from his 1964 album, Spiritual Unity:

In 1965, Charles Mingus and drummer Roy Brooks assembled a new avant-garde free jazz ensemble to make its debut at the Village Vanguard in New York. Brooks and the rhythm section played conventionally in front of a curtain while a cacophony of brass sounds erupted out from behind the curtain. The audience sat and listened contently. After the concert, the curtain went up to reveal three children playing a trumpet and two clarinets for the first time. The audience had been witness to a hoax. Mingus had firmly put his stamp on an anti-free jazz stance. This was supposed to prove Mingus’s point: put anyone up there with an instrument, and it’ll sound no different than the most respected “free jazz” artists of the time – Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane. “My kid could play that.”

Only Mingus got it all wrong. If anything, he created the most perfect free jazz ensemble that could be assembled. Free jazz is about spontaneous emotion – emotion via sound. Disregarding general conventions about meter and pitch, free jazz is supposed to illustrate a player’s conscious and/or subconscious through something like wordless expression. I’ve done an acting exercise, to heighten actors’ senses to emotion, to become less self-conscious on stage, in which a scene is improvised without speech – just moans and mutterings and screams, primal expression, if you will. What better way to show a child’s personality than listen to what the child does on an instrument for the first time? Fiddling around with it, testing its limitations and its effects, its timbre, etc. This “technique” is not be foolproof, of course, it’s not guaranteed to illustrate a child’s entire personality and a typed lists of their hidden desires on the side, but it certainly has the potential to say something about a person - and to say that because it’s children and not adults playing, then it’s immediately not at the same quality as free jazz made by adults, is insane.

One of the criticisms of free jazz by Mingus was that the musicians didn’t know what they were playing – they just randomly moved their fingers around, blew hard into the mouthpiece, and hoped something cool and hip would come out. This is a perfectly valid criticism, which is why there are better free jazz musicians than others, and why the “children” performance works so well. Anyone who tries to express themselves, forcing their emotion out into an instrument, is immediately in another realm than fiddling that might “unconsciously” reveal emotion or personality. The great free jazz players are not just marked by the innovations they made, but how they successfully transferred their emotional energy into an actual coherent structure of a sound, something that could be understood immediately, leaving little room for varying interpretations. Take an 80 year old man who’s never played an instrument in his life and ask him to try to express himself on a tuba with no regard to melody or structure could easily outplay someone who was amazingly technically proficient at a tuba but didn’t know how to transfer their message and emotion into the sound coming out of the tuba. Technical proficiency and virtuosity simply can – but not always – heighten expression, which is why even I’ll admit I’ll defenitely take Ayler over a child. That's mainly because Ayler is one of the most revolutionary, creative, and expressive jazz musicians of all time - if not the most expressive. Simply put, free jazz harder than you think. Though I encourage you to try.

The Greatest Punk Singles

OK, that's a bit of a bold statement, but if I were to list some of my top singles from the "punk" era - I'm saying that's 1976-1980 - these would be on the top. Punk brought the definition of a "one-hit wonder" to the table every week, mainly because so many of these bands did something unique for a single, or an EP, or, rarely, an entire album, before burning out creatively, or just breaking up - so that means there are a lot of great singles. Record labels scrambling to get some of this new sound combined with the first "indie" labels to make an impact sped this all up - or, at the least, added to the field.

To streamline this a bit - no, make that a lot - I've excluded post-punk, art punk, electronic punk, new wave, and all other child genres of punk from this list. I'm just focusing on the loud and fast ones. However, since American punk, with the exception of the Ramones, Dead Boys, and, to an extent, Richard Hell and a few others, didn't really get into the loud and fast act until hardcore emerged in the 80s. So, this list is largely British, with a few Americans and Australians thrown in. Also, I should note that none of these "rankings" are set in stone, it's all very approximate, and I'll probably want to change the order of one ten minutes after I decide on an order. And, if anyone so requests, I might try my hand at a post-punk list of this very nature. I've provided YouTube links for all the A sides, except for #5, for which I could only find "Armalite Rifle," for some reason.

1. (I'm) Stranded / No Time - The Saints
2. Teenage Kicks / True Confession - The Undertones
3. I Wanna Be Sedated / The Return of Jackie and Judy- The Ramones
4. (White Man) In Hammersmith Palais / The Prisoner - The Clash
5. Damaged Goods / Love Like Anthrax / Armalite Rifle -  Gang Of Four (Very close to the post-punk line, but none of these songs aren't loud and fast.)
   
6. Blank Generation / Love Comes in Spurts - Richard Hell and the Voidoids ("Spurts" gets my vote for the best B side on here)
   
7. Aloha Steve and Danno / Anglo Girl Desire - Radio Birdman
8. Neat Neat Neat / Stab Your Back / Singalonga Scabies - The Damned ("Stab You Back" is 59 second long, and probably the... third best B side on here!)
   
9. Babylon's Burning / Society - The Ruts
10. Suspect Device / Wasted Life - Stiff Little Fingers

So, what do you think? What are some of your favorite punk songs? (And should I do a post-punk version of this?)

What Makes Up Television, Continued

A reader kindly notified me of two things regarded my previous post on Television, so I'll take a time to address both of them.

First of all, I should clarify about Verlaine's solo work and Television's eponymous third album, released in 1992 after a sort of reunion. I said that, "even Verlaine’s solo work lost a lot of its Television edge." In other words, Verlaine's subsequent solo work, and even their third album, lost that kind of layered complex guitar interplay that you find on Adventure and Marquee Moon. Verlaine's work is wonderful, particularly his first two solo albums, but it has a different texture and a different sound - Verlaine, without Richard Lloyd, is a different musician, though hardly a much more inferior one. 1992's Television almost sounds like a Verlaine solo album, since it doesn't have that same texture, to an extent, as well.

Also, the word "lush." By "lush," I don't mean a Phil Spector lush, but as a sort of a weak adjective to describe that texture which I've been blabbering on about. Indeed, there's an intense sense of silence in Television's work, as our kind reader notified. However, it's almost alternating between "silence" and "lushness" in a way, since sometimes the guitars create a dense texture, and sometimes they create a more simplistic alternating layering. Take Guiding Light, for example:

The simplicity of the verse versus the more layered, arpeggiated chorus, which is only heightened with a piano and then an additional guitar during the solo. Its a minimalistic kind of lush.

Coltrane Plays Naima in 1965

Before you read all this, make sure you watch the video and listen. Don't read until you've listened.

Now that you've listened: I'm a fan of jazz, a huge fan, in fact. I'm the kind of person - or rather, the kind of listener - who always pays more attention to the music of a song than the lyrics. Always. I even usually listen to Bob Dylan for the music more than the lyrics, and jazz is to me seems to be the most perfectly realized purely instrumental art form there is, so there's no reason I'm so in love with it. (No disrespect, I should add, to "classical" music - in quotation marks because I hate that term.) I listen to anything from Coltrane to Bud Powell to Sam Rivers to Pharoah Sanders. I guess what I'm trying to get across is, I listen to a lot, and pretty broadly. And yet, this single video, which I happened on by chance one day on Youtube is one of my favorite jazz recordings I've heard, ever (perhaps after Thelonious Monk's "Pannonica" or Trane's own Love Supreme). I haven't been able to find an audio recording of it, I don't even know where it was recorded (my guess is somewhere in Europe), or when it was recorded in 1965. When exactly in 1965 it was recorded is crucial, because it's either before or after Coltrane's free jazz magnum opus, Ascension, recorded on June 28 of that year, which gives some light on Coltrane's thoughts while playing this, and how much of a drastic change it is from his other material at the time.

In this performance, Trane takes an old tune for his former wife that he recorded for Giant Steps - which was beautiful when it was recorded then - and reworks it, but only slightly. It's not drastic at all, really. The melody is the same, at the same basic tempo. Only instead of the soft ballad on Giant Steps, everybody's intensity is increased one thousand percent: Elvin Jones at times crashes those cymbals like Keith Moon jumping into a hotel pool of polyrhythm, McCoy Tyner exerts a subtle sense of rashness, flying all over the keys, at some times pounding them, and Jimmy Garrison seems to be plucking the strings like he's afraid that at any moment, if he stops, a ship somewhere will sink. And then of course there's Coltrane, who, beginning at his solo, plays a solo of unmatchable near anguish. He uses his beautiful screeching that he used in reservation on A Love Supreme and later brings out full force on Ascension. (Pharoah Sanders later perfected it.) He shows a little bit of his early "sheets of sound" style, a constant onslaught of sixteenth-note arpeggios. He also goes low on the sax, creating a contrast between the high squealing and his best attempt to be a baritone. The greatest quartet of all time simply is at their peak here. I've already watched it five times today. I suggest you do the same.

On Music in Film

In the late sixties and early seventies, a young Martin Scorsese began using pop singles to score his films. It seems odd to even mention this today as a revolutionary idea, because the technique is now so common in mainstream American blockbusters. And yet, that idea can be seen as the threshold that truly brought Hollywood into the era of the modern film.

During the 1910s and ‘20s, a orchestral score was the only real choice. Some theaters would hire a lone pianist to provide music during a film, others a full band. When sound was introduced, scores still took their cues from the Birth of a Nations (Births of a Nation?) and the Metropolises: Big films with big budgets and big music. There were deviations, of course. Fritz Lang's M features little music, other than the whistling of "In the Hall of the Mountain King", perhaps film's first leitmotif.

Even when taking movies like M into consideration, that rule held true for quite some time. The big budget, blockbuster score, as we think of it today, however, only really found its place in the '50s, '60s and '70s. There are two major schools for such scores: First, the Max Steiner/John Williams score. I combine the names not because the music is similar, but because of the common intent. Simply put (and this is an over-generalization, but bear with me) the music reprents the crucial moments of the film. Steiner, in Gone With the Wind and Casablanca (nobody mention "As Time Goes By") used music to convey the emotion of the characters and the audience. Williams used the same idea in films like Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark, more obviously and more iconically. In fact, in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the same triumph motif repeats at virtually every moment of Indy's success.

The second school, the Bernard Herrmann/Ennio Morricone score, is more abstract. The sludgy jazz of Taxi Driver seems to reflect Travis Bickle's growing discontent, and bubbling anger. The unyielding spiraling nature of Vertigo's score ties back to obsession. These scores can be just as iconic as the previous school's (try The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) but they're both more interesting and more important. Instead of reflecting isolated moments, they reflect the film as a whole.

Between the '70s and the 21st century, Steiner/Williams scores went out of fashion. I don't mean to suggest that music of that sort is gone today; I just mean that it more often serves as incidental music than anything else. There are exceptions, like the enormously mainstream Harry Potter series, but those scores are largely gone from Hollywood. Herrmann/Morricone scores are more present today, especially in artier big budget releases. Even this may be beginning to change, though; 2007's No Country for Old Men was widely praised for its very limited use of music.

But of course, there's still the pop song. "The Eye of the Tiger" in Rocky III springs immediately to mind. Anything by Quentin Tarantino is loaded with examples. To circle back to my first paragraph, the transition from Steiner/Williams scores to pop music is a fairly sharp representation of the change between the '60s and the modern age. Pop music is both more immediately relateable, and more ironic than bloated scores. Consider the fight scene set to "Please Mr. Postman" in Mean Streets, and A Clockwork Orange's scene of rape and attack with Alex singing "Singing in the Rain". Both are intensely (and immediately) striking, because of the sharp contrast between the audio and the visual. Both of those films are somewhat iconic of the '70s. Perhaps that's because both would be so out-of-place in the '60s or before. Of course, scenes like those are risky. When done without style, such scenes comes off as lazy and derivative.

So, whether done with or without any sort of ironic detachment or camp value, pop music in film is intrinsically modern. And it's a tool that modern filmmakers would be wise not to abuse.

What makes up Television?

L to R: Billy Ficca, Richard Lloyd, Tom Verlaine, Fred Smith.

What is in Television? It’s not necessarily a plethora of layers, no shoegazing electric wall of sound. It’s not minimalism either, not Steve Reichian or Philip Glassesque or Terry Rileyical. In comparison to some other bands obviously directly influenced by the repeating and alternating single note patterns of minimalism, it’s not quite that approach. At the most, there is occasionally overdubbing for three guitars throughout Television’s two albums, but never more and usually only two and a bass, and the third guitar is either playing a double lead or straight chords every first beat of a measure. More to the point, the structure is often like a pop song, save for a long solo in there; there is none of the pulsing of Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, no slow, subtle expanding on a theme like Philip Glass does. What Television creates, for lack of a better word, is a tapestry – a rarely achieved ability to create an ocean of sound with few instruments. Well, “ocean” makes it sound elegant and lush, which often times it is, yet it’s also very garagey – Tom Verlaine sights the Ventures, an instrumental surf guitar band of the early 60s, as one of the primary influences on his guitar style. And, indeed, one of the things that mark Verlaine particularly, and what set him apart from his peers at the time, is that he is almost completely free of the blues, hardly ever touches the minor pentatonic scale. It’s like what rock’n’roll jams would sound like if B.B. King or Robert Johnson had never been born. And even when Television is “lush,” it’s an almost metallic kind of lush, a guitar lush, straight out of an American garage.

Marquee Moon (and it’s very underrated sibling, Adventure) are incomparable – and I’m not just saying that because it’s my favorite album, like, ever ever ever, and probably always will be. I’m saying it’s incomparable because there’s nothing like it. There are bands that use intricate riffs, non-blues solos, subtle layering, etc., etc., etc. But nothing at all sounds like Television, which can not be said for even some of the greatest bands of all time. Perhaps what’s more impressive is that nothing after it has sounded close to it, either. Even Verlaine’s solo work lost a lot of its Television edge. Nothing sounded like the Velvet Underground or the Ramones or My Bloody Valentine when they started their respective revolutions - but now, 20, 30, 40 after the fact, imitation bands are a dime a dozen. But nobody seems to be even really trying to replicate Television, let alone trying to and failing. Is it that hard to emulate, or is their influence not actually as large as their acclaim? Probably both. And I couldn’t care less, because I have the real thing, and I could listen to that every day until I die.

Funk = Rock?

“Who says a funk band can’t play rock?” Who says a funk band isn’t playing rock?

Let’s name all the major food groups of music… rock’n’roll, classical, hip-hop, R&B, jazz, electronic, folk, country, and, what the hell, polka.

Now how many of those genres have lineups that typically consist of at least drums, electric guitar, and electric bass, with possible variations on the rule? Only one, rock. In fact, drums, electric guitar, and electric bass are so much the foundation of rock that “post-rock,” which bears little resemblance to traditional rock in terms of structure, melody, or dynamics, is called post-rock simply because it often uses traditional rock instrumentation – guitar, bass, drums – to create sounds so untraditional that it’s supposedly already writing “traditional” rock’s eulogy.

But there’s another sound out there, largely extinct as a genre unto itself, yet can be found in traces across the spectrum of popular music. And, at least in its beginnings, in its true great moments of early fruition, its sound revolved around guitar, bass, and drums. You’ve read the title, so you know, of course, that I’m talking about the funk. A passing listen of that great funk masterpiece “Maggot Brain,” with guitar work by the legendary Eddie Hazel should seal the argument alone: that much of the funk of the early 1970s – Funkadelic and Sly & The Family Stone being the height of its achievements – is heavily rooted in that loud, white R&B ripoff, rock’n’roll. As great and innovative as Eddie Hazel is, much of his licks are borrowed from Hendrix, not from any of the Kings (B.B., Freddy, and Albert – for the record, Albert is my favorite). In a rare moment of truth, Hazel’s often considered to have invented “funk-metal.” True, much of funk is just as much rooted in horns as guitars, but funk revolutionized how horns were combined with guitars – or rather how guitars were combined with horns. Funk was the first – and, come to think of it, last – predominantly African-American music to put the guitar on display. Ultimately, funk shares just as much in common with rock as it does with R&B and soul.

 

So why so little recognition from the rock community? Unfortunately, the answer’s pretty obvious; I am convinced that if Funk originated as white guys being heavily influenced by the R&B of the time and put out nearly identical albums as those early 70s, rock-based funk (with slight vocal changes, of course), it would be called something like funk-rock. There would be no doubt that it would be heavily influenced by R&B, probably so much that people would debate if it belonged in rock or R&B. However, the rock side of the equation would be instantly heard and recognized. This is how genre categorization works – and ultimately the concept of a genre itself. As somebody (I forget who) said, this is why sometimes you often find Stevie Ray Vaughan in the blues section, but Eric Clapton in rock. (And I should note that this is all despite Sly & the Family Stone’s integration, heavily noted at the time.)

The thing about funk is that it’s rooted in rock – rooted, like rock is rooted in blues and country and, yes, plenty of R&B too. Funk uses rock as its foundation (which doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the most obvious material in the building, and yes I’m aware this metaphor has gone on long enough), then builds around it with R&B to create the ultimate product. For the first time, could it be that it wasn’t the white guy who borrowed another ethnicity’s music, then kneaded it to his liking? What only would have made this turn of musical events complete is if Funkadelic started covering songs by Cream or Blue Cheer – just like the Beatles and every other British invasion acted started covering Motown tunes. The fact that the Funk bands didn’t isn’t only because perhaps that isn’t a perfect comparison. The main reason is that a whole lot changed racially between 1963 – the year of “Please Please Me” - and 1970 – the year of Funkadelic’s eponymous debut album. One wonders if musical integration would have sped up or slowed, had Britain not invaded with their Motown covers – and how the resulting music would sound. My guess? A lot like funk. Not funk, but something more like it than Blue Cheer. The main reason I’d argue this is in part because of the British skiffle craze of the 50s. Blue became a focal point of rock – and, thus, the focal point of a predominantly white genre – because of British influences - the blues bands like the Yardbirds and the like who evolved from (and because of) skiffle to their interpretation of B.B. King. The blues became such a pillar of rock that, after the mid-60s and the beginnings of psychedelia, almost no one didn’t solo on a variation of the minor pentatonic until, arguably, Tom Verlaine and Television came around, and the subsequent punk movement. The natural musical spring to drink from, then, if not from the blues, would be R&B. Take Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels, as close to white R&B as comes to mind, psychedelicize it a bit, add distortion and solos and vamps, and there you have it – something that might sound suspiciously like funk’s right hand man.

Funk is just rock ‘n’ roll from a parallel universe.

About

Here we talk music. We are all teenagers.

The audible axiom is the musical postulate that we all take for granted. It is self-evident; in a word, it is unexplainable - and that is why we take it taken for granted. It is the sound you love, it is the sound you hate; it is the sound that makes us all tap our feet and squint our eyes and shake our heads and dance - and it is audible. Here, we're going to attempt to explain the unexplainable, and fail epically in the process. Hope you'll join us.