mixed feelings but overall would still count myself as a fan based on what they meant to me at the time and because the first three albums are great.
i do kind of hate what they’ve become. have to get that out the way. i think the rot had set in around the time I was super into them and seeing them whenever they came to the UK, in about 2003 or something like that. I loved it at the time. But my impression now that I’m not 16 is that they’re a bunch of millionaire californians making that paper by trotting out songs from nearly 30 years ago. I’ve never thought duritz came across as a douche on record or live, but listening to an interview with him recently it just sounded so much like a rich LA person who really believes he deserves it. there were a couple of tunes on Hard Candy but basically they’re living off how great they were a long time ago. Hard Candy and onwards feel squarely aimed at making something that makes money. No hard feelings, that is what happens if you made it so big in alternative music in the US in the 90s, you became very rich, but there’s nothing to relate to anymore.
the first three are total class though and they really were geniuses back then, particularly Duritz. I went to the corner of Virginia and La Loma in Berkeley recently. It’s a nice bit of a ‘liberal’ university enclave, which is a thing that I don’t think we really have in the same way in England.
Interrupted mid-post (maybe for the best).
