M. Doughty - Classic or Dud?

NYC novelty rock isn't bad if it's, say, Von Lmo. Imitating David Byrne (poorly) and trying to be all "ironical white guy rappin'" (poorly) are two major duds.

"True Dreams" might be a mouldy-oldy by now, and somewhat of a ballad to boot, but it also explodes the TMBG comparison and will always have a place in my heart.

Best rock-writing evah in NY Press, even if it was Grade-A BS occasionally. (Not necessarily meant to be faint praise.) I remember hearing a Soul Cough song over the speakers in a Starbucks the same day I read his "Corporate Bohemia" rant, circa New Years '00. Jokes on you, buddy.

oh damn, yeah, those "Dirty Sanchez" articles were hilarious.

it's a little sad to see my once-favorite band get such a beatdown here. honestly, if you can look past the goofier aspects of what they did, there was some seriously inventive stuff going in the lyrics and the music, way beyond "oh i'm white but i'm RAPPING"

http://www.pledgemusic.com/projects/mikedoughty

This dude, who will badmouth his old band and his old band's fans at every given opportunity, is now trying to make fresh money off those very songs and those very fans.

"Dud" as fuck.

Well he's been saying for years and years that Soul Coughing could have been so much better if only they'd listened to him, so I guess it's really time for him to put his (our) money where his mouth is. I know his solo stuff pretty well and I think it's pretty clear exactly what he contributed to that band. He's always wanted to have his cake and eat it too on this issue (the whole "I did everything!" vs "Those guys ruined the records!") but this is taking it to a freakish level. Especially putting "SUPER BON BON" right in front like that when that's the one SC tune that demonstrated first and foremost why Mike never would have made it without those guys. And certainly the one he had fuck all to do with outside of the vocal melody and lyrics, because if he had he would have rewritten it five times by now as he's done with "Circles" and "St. Louise is Listening".

And, y'know, I was kind of coming around on him too. "Sad Man Happy Man" is really a pretty great album because it found a way to showcase everything that the man does well, and it's his first since he got signed that sounds like he's not trying to prove that he can out-do Soul Coughing.

Dud: Dave Matthews' influence on Doughty. And this attempt to rewrite SC history is sad.

I mean, even if the other dudes DID completely fuck up his songs, that band was a confluence of weird ideas and experiments. The friction probably helped make it interesting

^^^^ bingo

I thought the part in his book where he talks about getting mad at Yuval Gabay for never playing the drumbeats he wanted was really telling - I've never heard anyone claim that Soul Coughing's drummer was anything less than excellent. A song like "Screenwriter's Blues" focuses on the lyrics and delivery, but if you take away the thick groove and the way everything is orchestrated (which was all Mark), then the song is only like 10% as interesting. I'm not against this project at all on a musical level - I *like* a lot of Doughty's solo stuff (especially when he drops the big Dave influence) - but after 12 years of telling people to forget his band and bitching out anyone who requests his old songs, it does feel really, really unsavory.

Yuval's amazing but i could totally see Doughty writing these songs as, like, Paul Westerberg songs and getting aggravated that YG would never play them like that no matter how many times he asked him to try.

That's probably exactly what happened

if Soul Coughing had sounded like Paul Westerberg, I never would have given them the time of day

A few good links:

http://www.pitch.com/kansascity/mike-doughty-soul-coughing-the-book-of-drugs/Content?oid=2831236
This is probably the best article that came out in the wake of the Book of Drugs, contains comments from the other band members and Doughty's comment that "songs are things that are sung" which explains a lot of his attitude as to why he deserves sole credit for everything

http://www.theunheardmusic.org/2012/01/03/soul-coughing-rarities-mega-post-originally-posted-may-21-2009/
A collection of rare Soul Coughing tracks, nearly 2 hours worth. Basically everything they did that never made an album, and maybe a better representation of who they were as a group than anything they released. Also a good demonstration of how great Doughty is as a lyricist, and how limited he was as a songwriter back then.

well... the thing is songs ARE things that are sung, that is the basic definition of a song

a great arrangement will elevate a song to new heights, though

yeah but c'mon 90% of the bands you like, the instrumentalists contribute to the overall sound and composition so much that calling it "arranging" and denying them songwriting credit would be insulting

my friend who used to do the Soul Coughing website has always shared lots of rarities with me, love those non-album songs like "Michael Jackson" and "16 Horses" and "Freelancer." shame there'll never be a good official collection of those for obvious reasons.

90% of the bands I like share songwriting credits throughout the entire band, partially because they all contribute to the process of writing the actual song in terms of structure and initial melody

for example, a third of the songs on Disintegration started with Roger O'Donnell; in fact, the way that album was created was everyone brought their demos into the studio and they were ranked for inclusion on the album and then expanded upon by the entire band (except Lol, who was a drunken mess)

everyone in the band I was in contributed to the songwriting process as well, whether it be in terms of restructuring the meter of the chorus to creating the foundational chord progression the melody was derived from

none of this has anything to do with the details of the Soul Coughing spat, which appears on first glance to be an egomaniac not recognizing how his bandmates made him better

well it has to do w/ the fact that the band only split songwriting credits after much arguing with the singer, who is still resentful that anyone else gets royalties for those songs

like, you wouldn't give Damo Suzuki sole credit for "Mushroom" because he came up with the vocal melody, would you?

"songs are things that are sung" - eh, no. not even close

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song

the state of music education in modern society is abysmal

btw this entire argument is based off of me being pedantic completely out of context with the details of this Soul Coughing dispute; M. Doughty being technically right about the definition of a song has little or nothing to do with whether or not his bandmates contributed to the songwriting process, which is the core of their disagreement and which I know nothing about, having not read any of the details about this. From my own band experiences, I would be shocked if they didn't contribute to the songwriting process and he's just trying to downplay what they did, but I have no idea how they actually worked. All I see is M. Doughty being self-aggrandizing.

yeah it seems like some of their songs, he did bring in the whole lyric/structure and they accompanied, other songs very much born of 'jamming' and him improvising vocals over the band and them hashing out the structure and finished song together, even if every word and vocal melody was his.

given the reality of how a really huge amount of modern music is made today, my philosophy is pretty much "if you were in the room creating the definitive recording of the song, and made choices that impacted what it sounds like, and weren't totally following someone else's instructions or playing super standard rhythm section accompaniment, you probably deserve a songwriting credit."

Yeah no offense to any singers here, but this "the lyrics + melody = the song" attitude is the kind of thing I hear from teenagers phoning the studio I work in, expecting there to be ready-made backing tracks for them to sing over. Then they think they "wrote the song". As far as I remember, the sampling was the best thing about Soul Coughing anyway.

yeah that's the thing, if they are changing the structure of the song or the harmonic foundation he's putting the melody over, they are contributing to the songwriting in my book

If he came in with the structure and chord progressions for every single song completely solid and the band was filling out their parts in that framework, that is what I would call arranging; I would also be surprised and amazed if that's how they did everything because not every band is Smashing Pumpkins

I can't imagine what this dude was like when in the same room as BT.

Sadly, this digression is reminding me of a spat that I had with Gondola Bob back in 1998 on a.m.a. about whether or not a concert encore featuring Stereolab and Mouse on Mars jamming on something with its basis in "Stomach Worm" would be called a song.

would any Stereolab-MOM jam be called a song?

This is precisely where the argument began.

oh man, where is Gondola Bob now

Either in a fetid basement or a shallow grave?

still waiting for some random ILXor to be all "surprise! I was Gondola Bob all along! also that poster is Persi"

If he came in with the structure and chord progressions for every single song completely solid and the band was filling out their parts in that framework, that is what I would call arranging; I would also be surprised and amazed if that's how they did everything because not every band is Smashing Pumpkins

There's no chance that this is true, judging by his solo work. He re-writes "Circles" on every album he does which is why I'm guessing that if he was capable of writing a groove like "Super Bon Bon", he would have done it several times by now. The very fact that he's making "Super Bon Bon" the marquee track here without acknowledging that his band had anything to do with it is what makes this so unsavory. If you compare De Gli Antoni's Horse Tricks album (which sounds a lot like Soul Coughing minus Doughty) with Doughty's own cut-n-scratch instrumental album the difference is night and day - Doughty just has no clue what he's doing. Haughty Melodic was by Doughty's own admission a demonstration of what he wanted Soul Coughing's sound to be like, and even though I do like that record, it's about as unoriginal as they come - it really sucks the personality out of every instrument. But the songs were good!

listening to him on Maron's podcast cemented everything I disliked about this guy, when he compared being a junkie rock star with difficult band mates to being a battered wife. I pretty much end up hating every musician Marc Maron talks to by the end though - he pulls out their worst.

...even aerosmith?

the U2-REM model looks sanest to me. Even if all Adam Clayton did was light Naomi Campbell's cig in the studio he got a songwriting credit.

I did find it obnoxious how in interviews he always insisted that he regrets ever putting the band together, not acknowledging at all how much his current success owes to Soul Coughing - it took him seven years to find a label willing to release Skittish (which is often considered his best solo album!), while this project got fully funded in less than 24 hours. This quote from Mark is really OTM:

I always say a band is only as good as its drummer and take our exceptionally genius drummer that we had. You know on the surface, somebody might say, "But the drummer wasn't writing any songs," but if it wasn't for the drummer nobody would have ever come to our live shows. People in our band stopped believing in our drummer. And to create the sound of Soul Coughing, it meant that all four of us had to sit down and work together.

ned - took me a minute to realize which aerosmith you meant - but no, I liked that one a lot.

yeah that's the thing, if they are changing the structure of the song or the harmonic foundation he's putting the melody over, they are contributing to the songwriting in my book

see even this feels very conservative and unrealistic about contemporary music composition to me -- there are a LOT of grey areas in which massive amounts of change can be made to a song that are not harmonic/melodic or structural or lyrical but are also not the window dressing implied by 'arranging' or 'production'

well who would'a thought

http://i.imgur.com/QHQyZJa.png

Anyway as much as I've shit on the guy lately, I will say his covers album is holding up well. "Sunshine" is probably his most clever arrangement since the SC days (its hard not to hear how a young Doughty would've gone apeshit on it though) and if nothing else he's at least working with much better material than the songs he wrote himself on his last album (and it's like 100x better than his supposed "electronica" album).

when you actually have to list the names of songs you're gonna play on the poster

"don't worry..."

its everything he railed against in his book, even down to billing himself as "M Doughty" again.

Dunno what I was expecting from this, but on first two listens this remake album is kinda dire

First thing you notice is the AMPED UP BEATS, not like the kind of complex stuff you'd hear in electronica, but rather the sort of preset sounds you'd get on some free beatmaker program, turned up really loud (the handclaps in "Mr. Bitterness" before made me want to shut it off all together), this is like replacing Stewart Copeland with a drum machine

The standup bass is still there about half of the time, but it's way in the background. Samples are limited to chopped up vocal stuff and more keyboard presets ("Monster Man" has the tuned dog barks that you get on any cheap Casio)

Doughty's vocals are okay, no intensity or ad-libbing or anything, doesn't seem like these lyrics mean a thing to him anymore, worse yet it sounds like he's going off a click track

Feels like this is Yet Another Attempt to show that he can reproduce the things people liked about SC by himself, but right now it actually has the opposite effect - it makes the other dudes look like geniuses, to craft such great recordings out of songs that are either hardly fleshed out or are mostly based on the same patterns. Like before hearing this I didn't know that "Idiot Kings" and "True Dreams of Wichita" were basically the same song at different tempos (throw "St. Louise" in there too). You can definitely see why the other dudes didn't think much of his songwriting..

I do give him some credit for putting his money where his mouth is with this, but when he rants nonstop "I'M NOT THAT GUY ANYMORE", boy howdy is he right

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=803smSs_4LY

christ

total trainwreck. i love how he tries but can't even get the "Super Bon Bon" bassline right.

I watched a couple of the "making of" videos a few months ago, and I do remember him telling the bassist to NOT sound like the original.

yeah I think he pretty clearly wanted to remove everything his bandmates did

This guy is a chump. I would happily listen to those three SC if he was missing and they were instrumental.

there's an unreleased 2nd Mark De Gli Antoni album that basically is that, my friend has the label rights to it and still hasn't put it out for some reason.

Now would be a great time for that to surface.

I'm surprised how silent they've all remained through all this. There's definitely something to be said for not lowering yourself to that level but it's gotten ridiculous. I hope that 2nd Mark De Gli Antoni album does come out, "Horse Tricks" was weird and excellent in its own right but it doesn't seem like he's been up to much since then.

huh. apparently he's giving out free tickets for creative iTunes/Amazon reviews. I wondered why the Amazon average rating shot up so fast.

Had we talked about this yet

http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/opinionator/2013/10/04/redemption-songs/

If it's really true that his band mates own the rights, there's some major justice in this world.

I'm pretty sure he doesn't mean the other 3 guys own all the rights but rather that he only has 25% (or whatever the percentage is when one person gets credit for lyrics and the credit for the music is split four ways) because they bullied him out of taking full rightful credit for HIS songs wahh wahh wahh etc.

The most challenging Borgesian map-versus-territory aspect in playing these songs isn’t technical, but — if you’ll allow me to be a hippie here — spiritual. A live performance’s intensity of focus — both mine and the audience’s — can’t be replicated in rehearsal. There’s a communal mind to be navigated. What’s gratifying to me about playing to an audience isn’t the applause; it’s the oceanic feeling of fused consciousness. You can’t rehearse that — it’d be like rehearsing the Himalayas.

*pukes*

There would often be significant chordal differences, or complexities I had to accommodate.

The guitar parts from the pre-translated-to-band versions have never been exposed to sunlight — they’re straight from a bedroom in 1996.

“Super Bon Bon”, which was a big radio hit for us, consists of sections that were were entirely discrete when they were written — in fact, they were composed years apart — and, though the Soul Coughing version fused them together, when I go back to the process that began it all, they’re somehow disconnected again.

Isn't this a roundabout way of saying that the other guys in the band took what you brought them, changed the chords around, connect the dots, added a bunch of stuff, and in essence .. rewrote them? Thus earning composition credit?

Yeah, this went really quickly from "oh, this sounds kinda neat, alternate take on the song" to just sounding bad and very forced. Agreed that it only serves to make him look smaller and less mature. It's like, even Paul McCartney more or less figured out that diminishing George's contributions to the Beatles (while Paul raked in the millions) was NAGL.