Barry Zito and the Velvet Underground

Yesterday, Barry Zito lost again. He is now oh and eight on the year, and the Giants have lost all nine games he has started. Now, to be fair, this game and (I believe) the last, he allowed only a couple runs, and the Giants scored only one in each. However, specifics such as those don't really matter when you're being paid $126 million over seven years to be this awfully awfully bad. And the bitch about baseball is, even if the Giants fired him, he works in one of the few professions in California where he is not an at-will employee. The Giants will have to pay him all that money.

And, as an A's fan, I'm absolutely delighted by that. Seeing the Giants be stuck with this monstrosity really does make me smile. As a friend put it, Zito's "a miserable player on a miserable team." Growing up actively rooting against the Giants, and seeing them build a stadium with a fucking 309 foot right field wall so Bonds could (literally) juice balls into the goddamn water, and then having Zito jump ship to the rival...to some of us, this was deserved punishment all around. Fuck the Giants.

I'm listening right now to the acetate versions of Velvet Underground's demos that became the Velvet Underground and Nico album. That album was originally released in 1967, and there are more than one song on that record specifically and obviously about heroin (you know, like the song "Heroin"). Listening to it now, I'm trying to imagine the jolt I'd get out of a band singing so bluntly about such a taboo subject. We're so inured to shit like that these days, we don't even get up in arms about a song where Eminem kills his ex-wife or whatever she is. I can only imagine the response a band would get in 1967 singing about putting a spike in. I mean, this is when Johnson was in the White House, we hadn't gone to the moon, we were still in Vietnam, so forth and so on.

I think what's so shocking about the music, however, is that it's not loud, it's not abrasive; it's simple music with a very candid Lou Reed describing drugs with a sort of monotony usually reserved for laundry lists. Sometimes we forgot that loud doesn't equal shocking. And maybe I'm listening to the wrong stuff - I haven't delved into G.G. Allen or anything - but I can't think of a way to be shocked by something a band actually sings about these days. Acts can be vile, but who since Velvet Underground has been so forthrightly jarring (Amy Winehouse doesn't count, because it's no different). I think it might be nice to be shocked now and again.