Daily Dose: No Doubt, “Spiderwebs”

If you were a teenage girl in the 90s and lived in Southern California, chances are your hero was Gwen Stefani. Ska was having a moment and No Doubt was everywhere; Gwen was gorgeous and offered a uniquely strong, DIY role model for young girls who wanted to be independent but glamorous in a quirky way–a fantastic antidote to other independent female voices of the era that were more of the Janeane Garofalo, coffee house aesthetic.

Then she married Gavin Rossdale (whom you will see soon in Daily Dose garb), and started a fashion empire while raising some of the cutest children known to mankind. If we ignore the fact that she’s slated to be on The Voice this season, this means she continues to be an amazing role model fifteen years later.

I watched this video incessantly as a teeny-tweener, and we danced like fools to Spiderwebs at every middle school shindig (right before the chicken dance, directly following a thrilling round of YMCA). Good times.

Daily Dose: TLC, “No Scrubs”

I celebrated a seminal birthday this month, and, instead of going existential about life’s brevity, I decided to run through my 30-year-old music catalog. Belatedly beginning today, the Nostos Algos Daily Doses of September will present the songs and videos that defined certain epochs in my life (in no particular order) because, as I’ve said before, music marks moments.

So here it is, the first installment: “No Scrubs” off TLC’s second studio album CrazySexyCool, which was released in 1994 when I was a 4th-grader learning the complexities of the California Mission System.

Thick Red Wine :: Homesick Homecoming

Mike Wojciechwoski plays DNA Lounge this Friday, 8/29/14, under the moniker THICK RED WINE with Halcyonnaire, Mild Meddle, and Portland’s The Weather Machine.

It’s a long holiday weekend. Many people are heading out of town to camp, attend weddings, or maybe they’ve already been raptured to the Playa. For those of us happy to stay in The City, might I suggest kicking off the Labor Day weekend by listening to the labors of THICK RED WINE at DNA Lounge tomorrow night?

The brainchild of San Francisco’s Mike Wojciechowski, THICK RED WINE pairs the intensity of adolescence with the reflection of grown-ass adulthood.  Taken at face value, the music is utterly enjoyable with its simple, repetitious chords and middle school nostalgia pushed through gritty, rambling vocals. As with most things in life, however, you get what you put into it and investing in the THICK RED WINE catalog unearths a depth that can be glossed over if you’re impatient. Some of my favorite moments from Wojciechowski’s last album, Never Wanted To Be Cool, come back to back with “If I Had a Shotgun” and “Never Find the Time” which speak to our generation’s paralysis in the face of seemingly limitless options that are tempered by fewer opportunities. We are eager, we are earnest and we just can’t seem to get over.

I feel this intimately, and Thomas Wolfe’s words “you can’t go home again” often rattle around my brain. Thankfully, THICK RED WINE provides an antidote to the depression Wolfe can trigger. No, we can’t go home again…but we can sure as hell remember it fondly, and we’ll always have our friends. In the last song on Never Wanted To Be Cool, Wojciechowski drops an impressive Marquis de Sade reference (brilliant) and provides a fantastic summary of his music: “I guess the moral to the story is you can’t hope to explain just what it means to be human or grow up or be sane…So I steal pennies from the dirty fountains of my checkered youth, hopin’ someday all these words I write will mean something to you.”

If this last album is any indication, I expect his forthcoming EP–Homesick–will mean much to me (this is, after all, a blog based on nostalgia), and I’m excited to announce Wojciechowski has agreed to be part of the Nostos Algos oral history project, Soundbyte. Tomorrow’s official release of “Marathon”, his first Homesick song, is hosted by Mutiny Radio and is a Bourgeois Productions joint. I will be there, and I will be in it to win it.