As you may have guessed, I'm not one for big parties, let alone New Year's celebrations that involve riding home on the subway with hundreds of drunks. Call me a pansy, but I think I'm still emotionally scarred from the New Year's Eve during which the packed train crapped out underneath the East River about two hours after the ball had dropped. The lights went out momentarily, and in the cramped darkness, a number of people vomited from the combination of intoxication and anxiety. This caused other riders to begin screaming and pushing one another in a panic that seemed without end. Trust me, you don't know the first thing about having a really bad time until you've been locked in a pitch black underground vomitorium.
New Year's Eve is amateur hour anyway, especially in New York, where the city routinely floods with bridge and tunnelers who are hellbent on depositing their celebration on someone else's shoes. If that's what you're into, have at it and god bless you, but I'll be once again hangin' with my homeboys Ryan Seacrest and the sushi delivery guy, as well as my extremely tolerant and understanding wife.
In years gone by, when weekly radio duties were a regular feature of my life, I would always look forward to airing the (few) songs I liked that are applicable to this most maligned of holidays. Since I haven't got a sniff of a radio gig happening this year, I shall instead point you towards the best two in my iTunes shuffle. Like the Styrenes song I wrote about a few entries ago, these tracks are perhaps only marginally related to the holidays anyway, but in my mind, they easily trump all the sparkly eyeglasses, noisemakers, and related hooey that'll become the focus across town in a few short hours. Like every proper cynic, it's my place to note that for all its soaring highs and rock-bottom lows, 2008 was a year much like any other, and one that many of us would no doubt be pleased to drag down to the river with a burlap sack and a few heavy stones. But if our species insists on taking time out of one box and shoving it hastily into another, I say let's dim the lights in anticipation of Warner Wolf's year-end highlights reel, and get ready to grab 2009 by the shirt and push it up against the wall. Somebody pop open the bubbly -- goddamnit, we've got work to do.
To brighter days ahead.
The Dismemberment Plan - The Ice of Boston
Margo vs. Eiffel Tower - Tonight is my New Year
The Dismemberment Plan song is from their "...Is Terrified" CD on DeSoto Records. Buy it direct from the label here, or on iTunes here.
The Margo vs. Eiffel Tower song is from "The My Pal God Holiday Record Vol. 1" CD on My Pal God Records. It is no longer available in physical form, but can be had in digital magnificence on iTunes.
Update: I have just spent an unsuccessful 45 minutes trying to convert the brilliant Dismemberment Plan tour diary that vocalist Travis Morrison wrote for my old zine into a single, downloadable PDF. (Problem area: I don't have Adobe Acrobat. Does anyone have suggestions for another method by which to turn six individual jpegs into a continuous PDF?) Here are the links to view the tour diary one page at a time:
Dismemberment Plan tour diary from Green Means Go! Fanzine, circa 1996.
Without checking my library for something that trumps it, "11:59 Its January" by Scrawl is potentially my favorite New Year's Eve song. I think it fits nicely between the above selections.
Posted by: Jon Solomon | December 31, 2008 at 05:45 PM
Which record is that on?
Posted by: mike | January 01, 2009 at 09:34 AM
Nice article!
Why bother with PDFs when you have perfectly good JPEGs? I hate Adobe's dead-slow resource-hogging Acrobat and their stupid PDFs which crash everything.
Posted by: Ike | January 01, 2009 at 02:32 PM
I can't believe you didn't mention Starlite Desperation's "New Year's Bathroom Magic," if only in the context of an underground vomitorium.
(That Scrawl song was on the Working Holiday split with Versus - for January, of course.)
Did you take that Champagne photo?? Damn.
Posted by: jen | January 03, 2009 at 04:51 PM
I would have mentioned the Starlite Desperation, but I don't have an MP3 of that track. Agreed, it is pretty much the greatest NYE song of all! Now the real question is: did you already know which record the Scrawl song came from, or did you have to go dig out the singles and check? And good god, no, I didn't take the photo. My food/drink photography efforts tend to resemble roadkill/pee.
Posted by: mike | January 03, 2009 at 05:33 PM