Secret Samadhi by Live: its bathetic and grotesque lyrics

ums I am absolutely laughing out loud right now b/c it is so true, there is no wrong answer

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I might have to get this album now

I’ve been writing songs on my guitar and have been absolutely stumped for lyrics but this thread is showing me I can literally say any old batshit thing I want, shame and lucidity are my enemies

keep it angry, keep it wispy is amazing

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/aja6kH4G1Us/maxresdefault.jpg

Loved him in Fight Club

I wonder if anyone can think of another occasion when the band fired the singer, then (insert years long legal wranglings) the singer fired the band

I’ve been writing songs on my guitar and have been absolutely stumped for lyrics but this thread is showing me I can literally say any old batshit thing I want, shame and lucidity are my enemies

anecdotally there is some percentage of folks including myself that really don't pay attention to the lyrics at all, long as it sounds cool it's all good

Looks like America's dropped a load, like she was ready to explode

Me after a spicy curry

I’ve been writing songs on my guitar and have been absolutely stumped for lyrics but this thread is showing me I can literally say any old batshit thing I want, shame and lucidity are my enemies

― the new drip king (DJP),

I mean, you've been listening to Bernard Sumner for thirty-five years.

shame and lucidity are my enemies

And there’s your album title.

would very much endorse DJP, or anyone, trying out the "Ed Method." you could break your writer's block, entertain us all, and maybe have a hit record on your hands! as a reminder, this one is certified 2x platinum in the US alone.

If your mother went to bed with you
And Pauly Shore was there
And someone was nearby grinding pepper
And Joe Dirt was on the telly
And your armpits had the scent of stale pancakes
And the Stefan Urquelle episode of Family Matters was on
And you wish your uncle was still alive
Even though he smelled

WOULD THEY CALL HER A FREAK

is that first line a proto-"grocery bag"

LOL

It's an evening I shared with the sun...HOT

Everybody's anxious, for the coming of the crisis / The collapse of the justice / I can smell your armpits

^ voted for this of course. poetic. iconic.

yeah wow I never liked their groove so I didn't dig deep but there's gold in these hills

how I break it down to an extent - The rack is full and so are we, of laughing gas... and ENNUI! comes out swinging, then Everybody's here / this puke stinks like beer asks whether simpler isn't better but A man behind the altar screams, "You stole my idea! You were my idea! This puke stinks like beer!" replies that no, it's all about the extras, but then the pair of "if the mother" lines prove that first instincts are often correct, what you want is something just fast and awful, and then, having waited for its moment to strike, Looks like America's dropped a load, like she was ready to explode arrives in all its fetid splendor, just deeply awful in several ways (that second "like"? QED Ed, the load has been dropped, there is no second "like" if this is really the stretcher you wanna go out on, friend!), indelible, eternal, secret

SAMADHI

If it slithers into the haze, it's true: a child gives you his shoes

I mean what is this

Ernest Hemingway's childhood

Starting to hear all of these in Jack Handy's voice

but with Ed Kowalczyk's penis.

Fore skin, cause I got to eat it!

TUSK!

I'm truly delighted at the reaction this is getting

also it is worth checking out "Century" just for a) how many times he brings up the stinking puke, and b) how he puts the emphasis on "collapse of the justice."

look where all this talkin got us baby

I'm torn between "slithers" and "bagels." While I'm deliberating, let's enjoy some Stadium Super Trucks, as always befits a discussion of the band Live.

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https://media.gettyimages.com/id/843029276/photo/watkins-glen-ny-paul-morris-waves-to-the-fans-following-the-speed-energy-stadium-super-trucks.jpg?s=612x612&w=gi&k=20&c=VpLXOznjWZJWZFq1xa2gfkfTUHl9yntdOk5CgKQoLAY=

In another place, in another time
I'd be driving Stadium Super Trucks, my dear

ha i listened to this album once purely because of the lyrics

same with to the faithful departed, one of its many 'diminishing sales for a big 1994 alt rock band's next record' siblings

"A man behind the altar screams, "You stole my idea! You were my idea! This puke stinks like beer!""

Love the Fall, rips MES

I’m listening to this album right now and “Freaks” is something else

lmao no kidding, this was a single?

perfect poll. never paid attention to lives lyrics outside of lakinis juice and the placenta falls to the floor line on the other album. this is amazing lol.

XP ^^Yup. I used to have the "Music Issue" of Details magazine from '97, which had a big article on KROQ which included an account of a programming meeting wherein they were fuming about "Turn My Head" being held up as a single in favor of "Freaks".

xp would also recommend checking out "Deep Enough," which is maybe less psychotic but is also Ed Kowalczyk half-rapping about fucking someone on a couch at the club, also includes the phrase "sweaty thongs."

see, for me, "Freaks" at least builds to some kind of catharsis for its chorus... together with "Lakini's Juice" it gives the clearest sense to me of what they might have been going for with this album. i mean yes the lyrics are alarming, as amply demonstrated here, but i can see a viable scenario for this earnestly dark, intense band interrogating life's grisly seedy aspects with heavy post-grunge riffing. i mean it beats listening to Razorblade Suitcase.

unfortunately, it's on all the dreary shapeless tracks in between, where minor-key noodling takes the place of hooks or momentum, that there's nothing left to focus on but the lyrical howlers. which are way up there with any other case of what-were-they-thinking rockers drunk on their own success. like very clearly they learned all the wrong lessons from selling nine million copies of the album with the hit "placenta" song.

meanwhile: i suspect "Rattlesnake" is their attempt at a New Adventures-era R.E.M. track, and if so, whoof.

“Rattlesnake” is legit funny

Heropsychodreamer is hilarious because it just starts at 11 in terms of melodrama and then somehow keeps finding ways to get bigger

that my primary time spent listening to this album was backstage at rehearsals for The Music Man kind of endears it to me more, like I'd be watching Marian the librarian trying to evade Harold Hill while hearing "I KNOW YOU'RE SCARED, U SHUUUULD BE" in my ears

lol, that's great

Gary, Indiana, Gary, Indiana, Gary, Indiana
That's a crazy, mixed-up town!

My mouth was dry, my brain cold high, the groove was right, so i decided to
Ignite
Your eyes met mine, you skirt began to rise, and so did i
Now you know that i took that prize
In the middle of the club, in the middle of the club, in the middle of club
Now tell me!

...

this thread is a gift

alright that does it. ILX, we're covering this album.

I've taken care of Rattlesnake, whoever's next u got Lakini's juice

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A85Pm1l8S-M

let's go hang out in a church
we'll go find lurch
and we'll haul ass out through the abbey

We hit the room, me and my crew and it was cool, until we bumped into you now it's been years, but there you were like a mustang, redlinin' every single gear with a man that danced like he was born in '49, but lost his groove back when jesus died I want to know, are those replacement hips? is that a swatch watch? do you know what time it is?

i googled that and oh my god

It’s really sobering to realize Lakini’s Juic is practically a Leonard Cohen lyric compared to the rest of Ed’s work.

*Juice

we came to the earth to graze
if it slithers into the haze

xxxp from an album released one week after 9/11. Hadn’t the world suffered enough?

White, Revulsion

ed should collab with fellow pennsylvanian john fetterman

Look where all this strokin got us, baby

I'm not too proud to admit I fucked with these guys pretty hard in high school. they were my first concert, in fact, in 1995 I think. I met Ed several years later and he was drunk but very nice.

Prefecture, I don't have an answer for a hip-hop equivalent, but if it helps any edge cases sneak in: I think the "commercially disappointing... of 1996" frame, as classic as that thread is, probably could have always been framed more as 96-97 without losing anything. Basically you add this album, Secret Samadhi, Ixnay on the Hombre, Nimrod, and the Talk Show album. True, a lot of those are followups to the late joiners of '95 rather than the powerhouses of '91-93, but I think they speak to the same diminishment from the headiest days of the alternative explosion, even as other acts less beholden to the grunge core racked up huge success with poppier offerings (Third Eye Blind, Collective Soul, Everclear, etc.).

Nimrod really got saved in the 11th hour by "Good Riddance". Warning was closer to a flop, and following it up with a hits album was no preparation at all for American Idiot.

Some other '97 contender: Ultra by Depeche Mode.

...oh, and POP by U2--the Final Boss of these failures/disappointments.

POP obviously a huge step down, clearly no longer at unstoppable "biggest band in the world" status, but it had also been six years since their last "true" album, and they weren't really part of the same alt-rock explosion anyway. But I do wonder if it helped cement execs' understanding that no rock band was too big to fail and that maybe it was better to just keep placing smaller bets on carefully cultivated new acts that didn't come with gigantic arena-spectacle headaches. I mean, why bother when you could get platinum sales out of the Marcy Playground album? (Secret Samadhi went 2x platinum, for the record.)

Live - Overcome (with Ground Zero Footage)

listened to this yesterday in hopes of finding more lyrical nuggets

this is truly one of the worst albums ever made, just vile shit

like if you asked me what good music is, it would be whatever the opposite of Live's Secret Samadhi is

THIS PUKE STINKS LIKE BEER

Insomniac (which I think(?) marked the biggest sales drop of anything from around the period) fits much better than either Nimrod or Warning purely in RIAA figures - in my head the parameters begin in the last quarter of 95, cf One Hot Minute

man back then 4 years was an eternity between bloodsugarsexmagic and one hot minute. amazing to thonk that bssm was released in the “Poppy Bush Interzone”

yah y'all are right, Nimrod isn't really a good fit... Insomniac is the dropoff record for them. "Good Riddance" was like a fluke novelty hit in terms of not actually shifting their public status - the greatest hits (a bit like the Beasties and Pumpkins comps around the same time) arrived like a retirement present.

lol ums. imo no album containing Lakini's Juice can be all bad, but even the best hits here are an acquired taste, and require looking past everything i tried to capture in the poll options.

would love to read an oral history of this thing, talking to the engineers and the booklet designers and the marketing people... was any attempt made to steer them away from all the puke, sperm and toilet water, lyrically and sonically? or were they seen as wunderkinds beyond questioning after Throwing Copper?