Don't Compare Me

But comparing is what I do.

So anyway, yesterday I picked up an album that listal doesn't list-- "No me compares" (Don't compare me) by Frankie Negrón; it's a good show. (And the sharp black & white photo on the album cover somehow manages to obscure his complexion.) And so now I can listen to the Monkees, who are only the most best and lo mas anglo Brit-Yank rock band of the age of enlightenment.

The Monkees are a good group; 'your mother should know' about them. Like the Byrds, whose "Turn! Turn! Turn!" song is one of those 60s things that everyone must have heard somewhere, they've seeped into the culture of the land of "Pleasant Valley Sunday" and helped make it a little bit less bizarrely anti-romantic.

Like the Byrds, they were one with nature and not one with their producers, and I suspect that both groups traveled a path of growing artistic elbow-room later on, but with the early stuff being sometimes the better remembered. Though the Byrds were probably the masters of mellow (and Bob Dylan covers) the Monkees especially were groovy goofy. Although not usually offered the same space in the heart as the Beatles or even the Beach Boys, they did bring more heart to the world, and they managed to smile alot in a grey world that would have been easy to give up in, and instead of falling to failure they put out alot of art and music and without any major personal meltdowns or disintegrations, which is itself an achievement.

But anyway, the Monkees are certainly alot more than water under the bridge.

And sometimes, you can still hear "I'm a Believer" by the ocean on summer nights (BB) and pick up a hits album wherever oldies are sold (OG).

(8/10)