Aimee Mann

Bachelor No. 2

Way Too Much Zen

Review Score:

(8/10)
I have been trying to approach this kind of music with too much intellect, especially when I felt that intellect was mainly a lack of feeling. What I like best about this album now is that none of these songs appear on the more recent "Ultimate Collection," which has 20 songs that might be considered better, but which aren't much different. My favorite on this album is usually the last song, "You Do," which seems better to me than "That's Just the Way You Are," the first song on "Ultimate Collection." Songs like hers help me recover from seeing how real fans respond to my own assertiveness, like when I thought that someone had posted the response "Barten is a retard" (which was not at all what the next reviewer meant) to a review that I wrote on a book about two intellectual giants, Nietzsche and Emerson, who seemed to me to be competing for the title of most grandiose in their pretensions, as any book on those two might be as a matter of course. For those who feel secure in their knowledge of what genius is, bringing up this album, with its subtitle, "the last remains of the dodo," may just add to their opinion that my mind has been spoiled by the kind of modern pop psychology which has to join in the common charge of stupidity used to attack any serious assertion of individuality, a ridiculous character trait which might be considered a challenge to the norm in our comic society. But really, my own reaction to the statement, "Barten is a retard" seems like a call for help from the kind of stilted thinking which could gain a lot of insight from listening to a few of the songs which can be heard on this CD. In my own vain way, I'm too close to admitting the kind of truth suggested by "Deathly," a song that reminds me of a drug-addled character in the movie, "Magnolia," which might have been inspired by this song, but that isn't what the song is really about. Its theme is more argumentative, especially when Aimee Mann sings "don't pick on me / when one act of kindness could be / deathly." This might not sound good enough, when set to music, for everybody to like it, but the music pulls this kind of thought into its own reality without expressing the pain. The tremendous promise which intellect brings to this kind of nitpicking ends up being more like her lines in the song by Mann/Lockwood, "Driving Sideways": "And you're powered by the hopeful lie / that it's just around the bend." This may deflate the tires in the field of aesthetics, which tries to keep everyone on a road that only allows the communication of life's pleasures, but it doesn't seem dumb to me. "Driving Sideways" is better for me than the song "Driving with One Hand on the Wheel," which appeared on a benefit album in 1996 and was included in "Ultimate Collection" in the interest of having a few unfamiliar tunes show up with the really great stuff. I have enough different albums that I can get confused about which one I want to play. Even when the titles seem to say the same thing, "Just Like Anyone" on this album is not the same as "Could've been Anyone" on the "Whatever" album, and this album might not be as good as "Whatever."

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