With all this Wavves, Best Coast, chillwave talk going around it’s making it really fucking hard to live in California and be happy about the music coming out of here. It’s certainly all got a pretty lazy beachy quality to it, but it’s also not any good at all. So here are five albums that more honestly resemble California than god damn King of the Beach. I’m going to go ahead and leave out anything involving drug usage, as the desire to get fucked up is a basic human drive which is not uniquely Californian.
-Pet Sounds, by the Beach Boys
Well come on, now. Of course this is on here. It’s not on because it resembles California at current date. This album is best thought of as the symbol of California’s image of peace, good times, and pretty girls. It’s also a pretty good collection of songs. I don’t know if you know this, but that Brian Wilson guy’s got a good ear.
-Self-titled album by HEALTH
I prefer to use this album to illustrate learning about California first hand through the people. Starts nice, suddenly unsettling, violent and off-putting while simultaneously pleading for sorely needed attention, lashing out, warped by the leftovers of overdevelopment, unbalanced, and just growing more and more and more, leaving only the dread of finding the tipping point. In other words: noise rock.
-Straight Outta Compton by NWA
An honest confession: I’ve only made it through this album once, and I don’t have plans to do it again. The reason it’s on here, though, is that it only felt right to use the album that is the birth of gangsta rap to use to represent the gang riddled image of Southern California. It’s a vicious, biting thing that happens here, serving as the most recognizable symbol of a culture I’ll never know first hand.
-Evil Empire by Rage Against The Machine
The college student culture is vital to Californian identity in 2010, what with vague outrage and general inaction. Rage Against The Machine is probably one of the better ways to channel that young outrage since they’ve chosen their specific targets, and have their own exposure and mystique. That way, people don’t have to go out and find things that really bother them when they can listen to Zach De La Rocha scream at them over admittedly great music.
-Ice Cream For Crow by Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band
Not the Beefheart album everyone’s heard of, but the most useful for expressing the most natural influence on Californian behavior: the desert. Nothing quite fucks up a mind like persistent heat, and born of people who live their life in that heat is a biologically made dialectical tension, of human needs of belonging with the solitude of the desert. Sooner than later, the heat becomes welcoming, and the mind starts warping bit by bit that oft results in a collection of totems in tribute of the heat. What I’m saying is, the desert does bad things to people, but it’s the kind of beautiful warp of human nature that most great art comes from. It permeates this record start to finish, in it’s tightly composed bizarre nature and rambling storytelling.
Fermata over Whole Rest 