Look, I don't think it's too much to ask for an album called “Dog Tracks: Songs By Dogs” to feature, I dunno—songs by dogs?
I was incredibly excited when the album came in the mail today. Who could blame me? Dogs are cool, I like music. It seems like a winning proposition. So imagine my horror when I popped the CD in and realized that is, in fact, a wholesale farce. The songs are actually by humans. Yeah, WTF, right? There are already plenty of albums by humans, a.k.a every other album in the entirety of existence. Shamelessly, the accompanying press release clearly admits the grotesque deception.
“While the songs were inspired by dogs, they are performed by top professional musicians in American Roots style using country, blues, light jazz and other popular genres.”
I'm sorry, but isn't the idea of humans writing songs from a dog perspective, aside from being awful presumptuous, a bit, well, weird? When Iggy Pop said “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” he didn't mean it literally. Sure, there's some charm to be derived from lyrics, like “Purebreds you think you're special, your noises in the air” (social commentary? probably not), but mainly the whole thing just gives me the wiggins.
And it's not like the concept of actual canines performing music is a foreign one. Brooklyn extreme metal band Caninus is fronted by not one but two dogs, pit bull terriers Budgie and Basil. They've also worked with Richard Christy, formerly a drummer for Iced Earth and Death and currently a staff member of “The Howard Stern Show.” Christy once licked his co-worker's balls, and that's kind of like something a dog would do.
