Tuesday, February 5, 2013

The Annotated Boris by Rev Norb

(www.bulge.biz) For more years than his youthful demeanor would suggest, Rev. Norb has been cranking out pop punk records while alternately finding time to write absurdly detailed, rambling-yet-focussed, multiple parenthesis-within-parenthesis, punk/pop/football/baseball meta-referencing, post-pre-postmodern screeds in various zines (from his own Midwestern gem Sic-Teen to the Punk Bible, Maxuimumrocknroll, to his current home in Razorcake), and all the while we were all not so much thinking, or dreading, but let's go with 'subconsciously expecting' that one day he would release an album that was somehow just a 100,000 word single sentence effusively describing the music rather than actually recording it, and while that is not exactly what this book is, what it is is basically a complete discography box set of his longest-lasting band Boris the Sprinkler, but in non musical form, or to be more precise, in the musical form of melodious written word, with the right Reverend describing every track he ever released with the band in a way that gives personal, professional, artistic, cultural, lyrical, odorous, its-place-in-musical-historical, ridiculous details about it, including plenty of footnotes, and to preemptively answer your question (be the question a straw man construct or a real one, as my head does contain a number of unidentifiable voices, or maybe I left the radio on, but that sounds like Paul Harvey, and he's dead, or maybe that's his new Super Bowl ad, which I would like to point out that, although I agree with praising Super Bowl commercial post-game critics [which seems to be an actual job now] that Harvey's words were some of his best and that the visual ode to the farming industry was moving and remarkable, the idea expressed in the tagline, that the Ram truck, or whatever the product was, would "bring out the farmer" in the purchaser, undermines the entire point of the fucking poem/video, which is that ACTUAL FARMERS ARE IMPORTANT, not that you can play farmer like you play cowboy and Indian and that somehow honors the lifestyle and labor and pain of this dying industry...but that has little to do with Norb, other than his Packers losing to a team that made it to the Big Game) you do not need this book, but it sure is enjoyable, and truth be told, likely more enjoyable than hearing all 972 Boris tracks. And the book is more than one sentence.

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