Paul Pearson

On “At Last”

2012-01-21T01:37:00.001-08:00

It’s the song that burdens you when you’re already down. It doesn’t make things any better, because it reminds you of the aspirations of love never manifest. You walk the streets of New York, or San Francisco, or London, or Seattle, wherever you are, and it’s rainy. A dark and stormy night and all that jazz. You hear Etta singing it, and you realize why you’ve failed in love. You could never meet the expectations laid out in her song. It compounds and redoubles and complicates that which was already needlessly complicated. But in the end, after you’ve stumbled out of too many doorways and spanned through your list of wishes, it’s the only song that really makes any sense to you. So you sit in your apartment in Olympia, or Los Angeles, or Chicago, or Dublin, wherever you are, and you just let it make things worse with how beautiful it is.

It’s the song that goes off when you see a glimmer of hope. The one that you might at first be inclined to mistrust. When you meet that person at first you gauge interest, you analyze the possibilities. During this phase any number of mindless, optimistic pop songs go through your head. Then at some point you get that sense in the pit of your stomach, and all those songs turn off. “At Last” turns on. You remember playing it when you were desperate. Now you’re hearing it in hope. It’s the same song. When Etta sang “my lonely days are over,” you used to focus on the phrase “lonely days.” Now you hear that they could possibly be “over.” You don’t know where it’s going, but for now you have “a thrill to rest (your) cheek to.” When Etta sings that line, she’s at the precipice. The next line will take her over, but for now, for you, you’re resting in the thrill against your cheek. You could fall any minute, but you savor what you have now.

It’s the song that lets you know you’ve accomplished love as fully as you can. It’s the final sweet answer, the assurance of success. When you know you’ve finished the puzzle, “At Last” finishes too. Part of it has to do with the strings – they’ve been walking this path with you the whole song, settling into a bed of comfort when they need to, rising up in bluesy joy at other times, and in the end coming to a gentle, major-chord completion. Etta goes through the same phases: She casts her lot in sad remembrance, breaks out in rapture when she recognizes her moment of transcendence, then adjourns with a gratified exhale as her heart is troubled no more. You might catch that moment as you’re – I’m just projecting here – restfully at home, maybe looking at your family, your two kids with another on the way, and the person who helped bring you to this point of contentment and surety. You hope your contentment is hers too. When Etta comes to her resolution “At Last,” so do you.

There aren’t a lot of songs that work in all phases of love – sadness, hope and accomplishment. Here’s one of the two or three that do.

Etta James–At Last

Sweet dreams, Etta.

UPDATED: Re: The unbelievably, unfathomably awesome lyrics to Van Halen’s new single “Tattoo”

2012-01-13T01:29:00.001-08:00

(Those of you who've read this already and wish to read the very important UPDATE, please scan to the bottom of this piece.)

Heard/seen it yet? Here:

Your lip synch may vary

We could discuss several subjects relative to this exhibition. We could talk about the topic du jour: that “Tattoo” is merely an old VH outtake from the ‘70s with new words. (I don’t care; it’s a good riff, and if you’re going to steal from someone, it might as well be yourself.) We could talk about how nice it is to see one of the greatest electric guitarists of all time back in the saddle. We could marvel at how cheap the video is and wonder if David Lee Roth’s lip-synch miscues are going to tarnish his legacy. (Ha, ha.) We could talk about how much Michael Anthony’s backing vocals are missed. We could watch David dance. We could do all of that, but we won’t, because there’s only one aspect of “Tattoo” that I’m interested in --

The life-altering, consciousness-raising, Shakespeare-rivaling, abbagolutely fricking fantastic lyrics, which may be the greatest lyrics for any pop song since Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Jesu, meine Freude,” or “Venus In Furs.”

Take my hand, we’re going on a lyrical journey.

To put things in perspective: Out of all the bands of their ilk and generation, meaning masculine-flavored party boys with lethal instrumental chops, Roth-era Van Halen were actually good lyricists. They did not throw their lyrics away, and were never as simple or dopey as the generic beer teenage boys used to drink while listening to ‘em.

I’m not joking about this. “Runnin’ With The Devil” made everyone pump their fists, but listen closely and you’ll hear melancholy, a genuine Betrübnis*, about the fast life on the margin the singer has chosen. That same wistfulness shows up again in “Jump” (“I ain’t the worst that you seen…” he says, or asks?). And for all the hoo-hah “Hot For Teacher” caused amongst parental-advisory proponents of the ‘80s, it was actually funny, and contained some non-sequiturs that, in and of themselves, made you question your placement in this great expanse. Why else in the middle of a sex metaphor would Roth surreptitiously ask “How did you know that golden rule?” I was all gettin’ ready to dance in my skivvies in front of the floor-length – now I gotta ponder theology? Mister D.L. Roth, I accuse you of blowin’ my mind!

Then Roth disappears, Hagar joins, then he disappears, then Cherrone stops by for a cup of Folgers and a weak one at that, and I don’t really pay any attention to VH again until earlier this week, when Van Halen with Roth rejoined releases their first new recording in 16 years, and their first meaningful recording in almost 28. So you have to ask: How will they reboot themselves?

When I heard that 2012’s Van Halen’s first song was “Tattoo,” I thought – wait, they’re covering the song by The Who? That wasn’t immediately surprising, seeing as how they’ve gone to the well of ‘60s rock before in their career with “You Really Got Me” and “Oh! Pretty Woman.” But then I learn that it’s an original. Ah, okay. Well, then, they’re going to do something slinky. I’ll bet it’s a metaphor for sex, or something. They’ll talk about, say, a woman with tattoos, like that Swedish chick from the movies. And during The Act, her tattoos will interact with The Singer in such a way that each of them reveal the sticky vagaries of lustful abandon. You know, the bird of paradise will start cursing, the skull and crossbones will say something in French, the snake will rattle in time to the thrusts and throes. Yeah, that’s it – “Tattoo” will be the latest in a line of devious, eye-winking metaphors VH are so known and (mis)understood for.

Turns out the song’s about tattoos.

I mean, that’s it. It’s not a metaphor. It’s not some clever double entendre. It is literally about the art of tattoos. The several options you have if you, as a consumer with some modest amount of disposable income, decide that you would, in fact, like to procure the services of a tattoo artist. It offers you several designs to choose from, and a palette of potential colors and shadings. If you’re stuck on exactly what type of tattoo you would like to purchase, it then encourages you to consider your motives for getting a tattoo, and suggests that perhaps some philosophical investigation might be in order before committing a parcel of your flesh to tell-tale permanence. But in the end, it comes out in favor of the tattoo. It is tattoo-positive.

Let’s take this line-by-line. The intro starts. Thudding, plodding guitar riff. Great anticipation, swagger. And then the words. After 16 years of silence, the first decipherable words that come from David Lee’s mouth, the words that break the dirty spell of VH’s familial strife and cold-shoulder treatments, that mark the new dawn of a new day of a new era of brand new Van Halen:

I got Elvis on my elbow
When I flex, Elvis talks

Well, all righty then.

Kind of an off way to start a song. Not really the invocation of Elvis; bringing up The King isn’t weird in and of itself. But he’s on your elbow. The King Of Rock And Roll is, alliteratively, draped across your ulna. I imagine he’s on your forearm and not on your humerus, your upper arm, because I’m guessing that his mouth is actually on your elbow joint, because that’s the only moving part on which his mouth could effectively “talk.” Given Elvis’ mouth at the fulcrum which operates it, the elbow, then the rest of his body must be on your forearm, because if he was on your upper arm, he’d have to be upside down. I am guessing you do not have an upside-down Elvis on your upper arm, because that would make him look like a sleeping bat.

What else you got?

I got hula girls on the back of my leg
And she hulas when I walk

“Hula girls.” Not just any hula girls, but multiple hula girls that mysteriously morph into one in the second line. And on a body part that, on most men, you really don’t want to conjure up pictures of in your mind: the back of his leg. I’m sorry, but that part of the male physique is reserved for one sacred act and one only: the neighbor’s overly affectionate dog humping you in the front yard on an aimless summer afternoon.

Furthermore, the singer’s revealed that he probably wears shorts a lot. Otherwise you wouldn’t see the hula girls doing anything. The effect would be lost. Tree falling in the forest with nobody around. In that case, you pray that the hula girls are in fact on the back of his calves and that his choice of shorts is cargo pants, or Bermudas. Because if they’re on the back of his thighs, then he’s gotta be wearing some Richard Simmons type trunks, or bikini briefs, as a default.

Roth portrays himself as the puppet-master, controlling the movement of Elvis’ (presumably) mute lips and traditional Hawai’ian dancers with his own physical whims. The ebb and flow of his musculature is the guiding life force of his painted subordinates. What does this represent? Power, silly. He may make awful choices about what tats he’s going to sport, but by God, he will make those suckers dance.

Then there’s this couplet of utmost, cosmic gorgeousness:

Speak in cherry red, screaming electric green
Purple mountains majesty really talk to me
Talk to me babe!

Ladies and gentlemen: CONSIDER BAR RAISED. Roth could have thrown away that last line and just come up with more color combinations, like “baby blue” or “lipstick pink” or “doctor’s waiting room beige.” But by quoting “America The Beautiful” with the purple mountains bit, he invokes nationalism. It’s not just a good idea to get a tattoo – it’s your patriotic duty. A brilliant, compelling sub-reference. Well played, Sir Rothschild. Well played.

The chorus is next – the song’s central theme, as all good choruses must be (“I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” “Tie A Yellow Ribbon ‘Round The Old Oak Tree,” “Autobahn”):

Swap-meet Sally, tramp-stamp cat
Mousewife to momshell in the time it took to get that new tattoo
Tattoo, Tattoo

I do not know what a swap-meet Sally is. My research indicates that the phrase’s origins date back to a song entitled “Tattoo” by Van Halen.**

A “tramp stamp” refers to a tattoo situated on a woman’s lower back. The term is sometimes used in a derogatory manner. A “cat” is a word describing a feline, most commonly the domesticated Felis silvestris catus. In this case it may refer to a more aggressive feline, say the cougar (Puma concolor) or the many wild animals classified under the genus Panthera.*** A “tramp stamp cat” therefore refers to a woman who pursues a lower-back tattoo the way a carnivorous feline would pursue its prey: either by stalking, attacking and devouring its object, or by waiting for the asshat of the house to just open a fuckin’ can already.

“Mousewife” is slang for a stay-at-home homemaker with a penchant for the Internet. A “momshell” is related to a colloquialism of recent vintage, “M.I.L.F.” “Momshell” cites the earlier, classier term “bombshell,” indicating the singer has more of a Jayne Mansfield or Jane Russell type in mind.

“Tattoo” is the name of the song. It was also the name of a beloved supporting character from the ABC television series Fantasy Island, played by the late Herve Villachaize. You may safely assume Van Halen is referring to the former.

Now, then, everything’s established. So far it sounds like we have a simple song, extolling the virtues of tattoos. Everything’s pretty straightforward, no real deviance from the realm of the material into the philosophical. But then two things happen which turn this song, and ergo the axis of the earth, on its ear. In a brief coda to the chorus, with backup vocals in parentheses, Roth drops this exhortation:

(Tattoo, tattoo)
Show me your dragon magic
(Tattoo, tattoo)
So autobiographic!

“Show me your dragon magic” – that’s nothing, anybody can do that. But “So autobiographic!”? In a voice that resembles a rallying cry? Now that’s another level. It’s sung in the same way someone would relate a feeling of a more guttural, base nature: “So sexy!” “So hot!” “So excited!” But Roth (or whoever wrote the lyrics, I don’t know) takes that mini-orgasmic phrasing structure and says – “So autobiographic!” Indicating that the pure thrill, the rush, the adrenalizing factor of this whole tat-getting routine is that you can write your own equivalent to The Autobiography Of Mark Twain without the hassle of writing.

Say it to yourself: “So autobiographic!” Rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it? But there’s no time to dwell, because next, Roth drops into a brief spoken-word couplet – in the video he gets down on a knee – and delivers, in a low, intense timbre, the hidden center of the song – the weltanschauung****, if you will – that informs the whole piece:

Best believe that needle will hurt you
Best deceive these true colors that follow one of your false virtues

What?

What does that second line even mean? Hey, man, I just wanted a battleship on my arm, this tattoo parlor don’t look like no confessional to me!

Ah, but discard it at your peril, son. ‘Cause now we’re playing hardball. This is not video poker. Whatever that second line is supposed to mean, I’m too afraid to touch it. It will take years for me to devour its connotations. It is the most cosmic thing that’s ever come out of David Lee Roth’s mouth, the most cranium-blowing knowledge that ever got pumped out of his stomach. I’ll type it again:

Best deceive these true colors that follow one of your false virtues

That phrase would look great as a tattoo, with a little picture of Yoda saying it. (Important: See UPDATE at bottom of this article in regards to this lyric.) (Well, "Important" is relative, I guess, isn't it?)

Geez, we’ve been through a whirlwind already. I know this has been a rollercoaster of emotion for you, so let’s just handle the problem of the last two verses. Here’s the first:

Here’s a secret to make you think
Why is the crazy stuff we never said poetry in ink?
Speak in day-glo red, Explodo paint
Purple mountains’ majesty -- show me you, I’ll show you me

Here Roth is tackling the issue of the strangulation of our language. Our limitations, our interrupted clarity. We cannot articulate the symbolism of our tattoos, because if we tried to put it into words, we’d sound pretty stupid. We’d sound like Rick Perry trying to sound out the letters in Hop On Pop. It would all be so much dreck; we’d be committed for sure.

You know who had it right? The Egyptians with their hieroglyphics. They told stories, and they didn’t have William Strunk Jr. hanging over them minding their apostrophes and over-usage of semicolons. They drew shit on a wall. They’d say stuff like, “This afternoon I went out into the desert for to increase our water supply, and on the way I ran into Osiris, who’s still miffed at me for that time he reconstituted his soul into material form and I accidentally tripped him. I told him to buzz off and find some other hapless twit who’s sucker enough to go down to the underworld with him thinking he’ll get time-sharing in some condo.”

That was pretty crazy, right? And it took me a lot of words to say it. Egyptians would just draw a drop of water, a scythe, a stone and an affordable split-level, and everyone would get it. None of this “language” crap. Same thing with tattoos. If you get a tattoo with words on it people are going to want to stop you and read the whole thing, and that would adversely impact your schedule. That’s why pictures typically make the best tattoos. Also, if your tattoo artist misspells a word, you’re a laughingstock for life.

The second two lines of that verse restate the whole deal with the colors. If you don’t get it by now you never will. But the third verse changes everything. So far you’ve been given a compelling list of selling points on getting a tattoo. They’re colorful, they’re evocative, lest we forget they’re so autobiographic, and if you get it done right you can make Mickey Rooney fold his hands to pray every time you crack open a PBR. All good. Then this:

Uncle Danny had a gold tattoo
He fought for the unions -- some of us still do
On my shoulder is a number of the chapter he was in
That number is forever, like the struggle here to win

Wait, wait, wait a sec – who’s this Uncle Danny guy? Where the hell did he come from?

And is that a political statement Roth’s making there? Whoa! Whooooa! When was the last time Roth sang a political statement? Never, that’s when! I suppose you could counter that “Panama” was about the fragile trade relations with Central America that Roth might have experienced, but I think you’d be wrong!

It’s at this point that I realize there is no possible way to determine what “Tattoo” is about. Because it’s gone all over the map. And it’s at that point I realize, okay, Van Halen was just dropping shit in. They were just jamming on the idea of tattoos, and any potential fleeting thought that came through their heads was fair game. And now I don’t know what to think. There is no central point to this song. You wander around it.

And what does wandering mean? It means you go hither and thither with no fixed destination. And if you wander around with no destination, that means you seek a reward you cannot name. And if you cannot name your reward, then your soul is permanently aligned with the infinite. And what else is infinite? That’s it, you guessed it: God.

“TATTOO” IS ABOUT GOD.

A God who tattoos.

And it’s pro-labor.

There, I said it. This isn’t rock and roll – it’s freakin’ gospel, Pasadena style, with some Guthrie thrown in for… it’s just thrown in.

You may not experience “Tattoo” the same way I do. You may just consider it another solid VH jam where the words don’t matter. That’s fine. I’m not going to stop you from experiencing this song at face value.

But we know. We who’ve been ordained. We who have been spiritually constructed to receive such cryptology and turn it into myth. If you’re one of these people, you know who you are. And I’ll see you at the potluck this weekend.

“Tattoo” also contains a guitar solo.

THE END.

UPDATE: In re: The spoken-word couplet that I couldn't begin to disseminate -- True Believer Ian Jensen directed me to Blabbermouth.net's posting of David Lee Roth's handwritten lyrics to "Tattoo."
Besides displaying Roth's curiously elegant but well-disciplined penmanship, it also shows that I got that spoken-word couplet wrong. According to this post, the proper lyrics are:

Best believe that needle hurts you
Best to see these true colors than follow some false virtue

...which makes a lot more sense than what we heard it as: "Best deceive these true colors that follow one of your false virtues."

Also, I notice on the original lyric sheet that the actual lyric is "tramp-stamp tat," rather than the assumed "tramp-stamp cat." This would negate and sap all the considerable literary power from the cat-focused passages above. I feel terrible about all this, really, I do.

* German for the word “sadness.” This piece required the usage of at least one German word.
** Actually, this painting probably has something to do with it.
*** Wikipedia, without you I’m nothing.
**** By this point the article had gotten so long a second German word was required.

Food Isn't Something To Be Conquered, Subdued, Tamed, or Otherwise Vanquished

2012-01-10T10:23:00.000-08:00

(Article first published as Food Isn't Something to be Conquered, Subdued, Tamed, or Otherwise Vanquished on Blogcritics.)

Last weekend I watched an episode of Travel Channel’s list-making show Food Heavens. The topic was “The Best Places to Pig Out.” The culinary hotspots featured in this particular chapter offered at least one signature dish whose mammoth size or spiciness made consuming it something of a dare, and quite frequently the subject of in-house competition. There’s the 72-ounce steak in Texas, the quadrillion-egg scramble in Seattle, the habanero-drenched chicken wings in Delaware that you have to consume in five minutes or less. If you meet that challenge you get a T-shirt and a Polaroid of your champion self on the restaurant’s “Wall of Flame,” both of which should take your mind off the next morning’s dysentery.

It reminded me of my problem with two other television shows: Travel Channel’s Man Vs. Food, and Food Network’s Outrageous Foods. Both shows follow the same rough template. Man travels to various destinations, walks into restaurant whose menu has been taken over by a dish with proportions so large it has satellites. Man decides eating mega-food offers a rare chance to display his intestinal fortitude, and determines that it needs to be eliminated for the sakes of safety and space constraints. Man attacks food, initially in a sort of shock-and-awe, frantic manner of consumption, before the reality of his military limits sets in. Each bite thereafter becomes a slow, gritty effort to weather the gap between ambition and nausea as the host winds down his pace.

After this long journey, the host hopes to successfully finish the entire dish and declare triumph. This does not always happen. When it does, the Congressional Medal of Honor ceremony is usually edited out of the final program.

I have two issues with this kind of programming. The first is perhaps obvious: It celebrates gluttony. We often confuse gluttony with love of food. They aren't the same. Love of food is like any other love; it’s something you nurture over time, developing a taste for food’s richness, depth, and personality traits and quirks.

Gluttony, on the other hand, is more like a middle-age swingers’ retreat. You do it because you don’t have that much meaningful time left, you’ve already attained and probably misplaced any noble goals you might have aspired to as a youth, and you don’t really care what you partake in as long as there’s lots of it. Outsiders get kind of grossed out at the thought of what you’re doing, and it’s almost never something we want to actually watch, unless we're getting paid to film it. The inherent levels of sheer carnality in both middle class orgies and hot dog eating contests are, to my mind, roughly equal.

(Speaking of hot dog eating contests – this is something I’ve often wondered: Do the grand champions of these contests have a training regimen? What could that possibly consist of? More to the point, do they have trainers? Is there some Burgess Meredith figure hulking over their shoulders, croaking in a gravelly voice, “You can do it, Rocky! Suck down those sulfites! You’re a winner!”)

But maybe even more than the gluttony angle, what bothers me about these shows is the postulation of food as an adversary. Why in the world would I want to set up a confrontation with a deep dish pizza? I wouldn’t win in the first place. I admit, if it came down to me versus a deep dish pizza, I’m screwed. I would awaken with bloodied lips, blackened eyes, and the telling welt of a heavy-duty baking dish somewhere on my person.

Maybe that’s the allure of these shows. They commemorate the spirit of human doggedness and determination. But I can’t go there. I will never be able to picture a baked Alaska as my personal Col. Kurtz, the taste of which I haven’t truly appreciated until I’ve clubbed it over the skull with a waffle cone. I cannot repurpose 125 raw oysters as the only things standing between me and significance. If I found myself in that situation, my first inclination would be to seriously reprioritize my existential strategy. Clearly my motives went haywire somewhere near the salad bar.

Buffalo wing challenges, especially, creep me out to the extreme. The only thing proven in watching collegiate boys scowl and suffer through chicken laced with maddeningly hot capsicums, with deep red sauce dribbling out of the corners of their mouths and off their chins, is that these kids would make more convincing vampires than Robert Pattinson.

Both these aspects rob food of its enjoyment. Gluttony presents food as a quantifiable asset whose value depreciates with increased consumption. Seeing food as an enemy, a great gastronomic beast that needs to be tamed by human mandibles, doesn’t serve any point whatsoever. You don’t commune with the food, as you’re supposed to do – you imagine that it’s taunting you, mocking you, maybe making some uncalled-for jokes about your mom. That’s not what our relationships with food should be about.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go kick the crap out of some asparagus.

A quick note on Cee Lo Green changing a phrase in his NYE performance of John Lennon’s “Imagine”

2012-01-02T23:32:00.000-08:00

No doubt you’ve seen or heard about this little New Year’s Eve performance by Cee Lo Green. It’s around the 4:00 mark of this video:

Imagine no giant Nivea pylons

If you listen closely, you’ll note that Cee Lo altered Lennon’s original lyric “no religion too” to “all religions true.” This small revision has ticked off a whole lot of people. They are all Lennon purists, or more exactly “Imagine” purists, who feel that by changing the negation of the original phrase to an all-inclusive meaning, that Cee Lo has – I’m quoting one YouTube artiste here – “desecrated a masterpiece.”

Good Lord, people. I mean, Good Unspecified Deistic Construct, people. Is this where your first unholy outrage of the new year is going to go?

I didn’t care for Cee Lo’s version, so don’t confuse this for a defense of its merits. He kinda butchered the end of it by going all Maria Callas on us. It wasn’t very good. Secondly, I don’t think Cee Lo’s edit was well-executed or enlightening. “All religions true” in essence means the same as “no religions too,” or is at least a mirror image of the concept. If all religions were true there’d be no real point in the demarcation of religious thought, ergo there would be no point in religion. It’s the same statement, except it goes through a longer channel of explanation. Lennon’s original line is the stronger artistic message.

But from the whizzing sound of the internets the last couple of days, you’d think Green had injected some sort of fundamentalist undertone to the song. Like he’d figuratively donned the Papal Tiara, or brought back The PTL Club, or endorsed Rick Santorum. He didn’t.

Green was trying to express a standpoint of inclusion. That may have been foolish, in fact probably was. Lennon clearly had no interest in any kind of organized religion (“God is a concept by which we measure our pain”). But he lived alongside religion. All religions. I think he would have laughed at this whole tempest that’s going on.

You know those bumper stickers that have the word "Coexist," with the letters made from iconic symbols of all the world religions? Surely you "Imagine" fans dig that sticker, right? Well, that's what Cee Lo Green intended to say. It might've been clumsy, it might've been artless, certainly it might've been futile, but that's what he intended. I consider that a good intention. Y'all are forcing Cee Lo Green to the place where the road paved with good intentions traditionally leads, and I don't think that's fair.

As far as “desecration” of a “masterpiece” is concerned – well, clamp onto an arm cushion here if you love your heroes as icons more than you love them as people, but I’ll be honest: “Imagine” is no masterpiece.

It’s not! It’s essentially the same song as “Over The Rainbow.” Which also offered no real solutions and merely expressed hope. Which is fine. But Lennon wrote a bunch of “message” songs that I personally thought were thematically stronger, if not so ubiquitous and universal-looking as “Imagine.” “Revolution” was better. “Instant Karma” was better. “Working Class Hero” was way better. And as for flights of fantasy or dreaminess, I personally preferred “#9 Dream” and “Mind Games.”*

“Imagine” felt like a tract. I passed out way too many tracts as a kid for me to feel altogether comfortable with it. Given my predisposition for other Lennon songs, though, I concede "Imagine" is exactly the kind of song someone would mistake for a mystical scroll exhumed from the Lost Ark. It’s not. It’s a fleeting thought turned into a pop song.

Lennon knew that the answers to life weren’t as simplistic as he painted them in “Imagine.” “So flower power didn’t work,” he said not long after the song became a hit. “So what? We start again.” That doesn’t negate whatever power you take from “Imagine,” it’s just how his maturation progressed. You can take comfort in the soothing thoughts of the song, you can set course on the tailwinds of a bodacious and beautiful dream, but in the final analysis, that wasn’t good enough even for Lennon.

Idealism is easy. Faith is hard. Lennon was not an idealist.

But I think he would have been much, much more tolerant of Cee Lo Green’s ad lib, awkward as it was, than anybody else who’s appointed themselves Defenders Of Lennon’s Honor. From their rather petulant outrage, you’d think that they were planning a bonfire this weekend to burn all of Cee Lo’s records. Which, incidentally, is what people did to Beatles records after Lennon said his band was more popular (not “better”) than Christ. Imagine that.

*(Also, for a song that has the exact same plot as "Imagine" or "Over The Rainbow," but conveys a much more complex, questioning and deep message, check out "Visions" from Stevie Wonder's 1973 album Innervisions. That's one of my five favorite albums of all time, and "Visions" is its emotional core.)

The First 5 Random Songs Of 2012

2012-01-01T01:41:00.000-08:00

Every New Year I sit at my computer, play five songs on my media playback device, and note what songs came up. It’s easy to imagine that they serve as some sort of oracle for the year ahead, but more often than not, they portend nothing. This year (since it's the last New Year of all time and all) I thought we’d work a little harder on the psychic front and make some notes. Maybe that’ll put things more into perspective while I’m hitting the gym for the first two weeks of January. It’s an opportunity! These songs could be the key to untold riches, prosperity and general thriving! Let’s go! What’s first?

1. “Working Class Hero,” Terry Hall

Well, screw that prosperity BS, then.

For your reference: This is the John Lennon solo classic as performed, live, by Terry Hall, he of the Specials, Fun Boy Three and the Colour Field. This is a bonus track from his really good solo album Laugh, which came out in 1997, except in the United States, where it didn't come out at all.

I guess this puts my whole professional ascension deal into perspective, doesn’t it? By the end of the year I will forsake all notions of climbing the executive ladder and start being of the people. Eeech, the people. There goes my new year’s resolution to get the scent of melted cheese product off my fingers.

I’m just kidding. I love the people. Here, take my card.

2. “Weeping Willow Blues,” Pink Anderson

Acoustic delta blues. I get one of these every year. I don’t know why. They never come up on shuffle any other time of the year. I think it’s just a reminder that my gnat-swatting, straw-hat-wearing days on the Mississippi aren’t that far behind me.

3. “Hear My Brane,” The Soft Boys

Hi, Robyn. This one’s almost blues-ish, with a guitar riff that sounds like Dave Edmunds beating up a German. This might be the portent we’ve been looking for, lyrically speaking: “Rob me when I’m bad/Teach me foreign languages/But don’t give me any food.” So: I’ll be backpacking through Europe on $5 a day. Again.

4. “Geneva,” Morgan Fisher

Morgan Fisher was the piano player for Mott The Hoople. He went “ambient” in the ‘80s. This is an instrumental from one of my favorite box sets of all time, I’ll Give You My Heart, I’ll Give You My Heart: The Cherry Red Singles Collection. This song, however, is straight-up George Winston. Actually, Winston might be a little more musically complicated than this. Ghastly synths. This is straight out of European soft-core porn. What are you telling me? Is this the serenade for the onset of my autumn years? There’s a gift-wrapped Lexus right outside my house right now, isn’t there? Isn’t there?? And there are the keys to the executive washroom, right under the mat! And a catheter! Thank you, baby Jesus!

5. “My Love Is Growing,” Marvin Gaye

That’s more like it. This is from Let’s Get It On. For those of you too young to remember, Let’s Get It On was the soundtrack to a million seductions at the time of its release. Were you born in 1974? There’s a good chance you were conceived to this record. Or the first New York Dolls album. That’s right. While your dad was sailing his citrus dinghy across the gurgling channel of your mother’s luv, I’m betting the bar band was playing something from the Let’s Get It On album. Or “Personality Crisis.” Whatev. Happy 38th. Hope it was worth it.

Happy New Year!

Tori Amos -- The Interview

2011-12-22T17:47:00.000-08:00

Photo: Victor de Mello

Night Of Hunters is the most unique album in Tori Amos’ catalog, yet it feels like the project everything else in her career has been leading up to. It’s also not an easy one to explain, which is why Tori’s advice to just hear it without reference guides makes a lot of sense.

Released last September, Night Of Hunters is Tori’s first album for the classical-centric Deutsche Grammophon label. Recorded with classical musicians, NOH is a song cycle about a fractured relationship as seen through the myths of different epochs. The song cycle as a compositional construct has always fascinated and eluded me, and if there was ever a contemporary musician that could engineer and direct the song cycle, no question Tori would be at the top of the list.

This was my second conversation with Tori in the past few years. After hearing Night Of Hunters I came up with about three pages of questions about the album. Realistically I could have talked to Tori for two hours about this sole project. But we only had twenty minutes or so when we spoke on the phone late last summer.

PP: Can you talk about the inception of this album?

Tori Amos: At Deutsche Grammophon, there’s a doctor of musicology by the name of Dr. Alexander Buhr. He kind of tracked me down out in the world. I met up with him and he proposed this idea: Would I consider doing a 21^st century song cycle based on classical themes? I kind of looked at him, and said, “That’s a very, very tall order, and a very dangerous one.” If you get it wrong, you get it really, really wrong.

He said, “You’ve been doing this musical – you need a challenge.” And I said, “That’s the least of my problems – working with the masters is a whole other thing.” We made a deal that he would send me endless amounts of classical music so I could expose myself, not just to what I grew up listening to, but all kinds of things. That was one of the key beginning elements that brought it together.

What composers that he sent to you really stood out to you for the first time?

TA: Quite a lot of them are on the record. Erik Satie, (Enrique) Granados – I wasn’t really familiar with their work. Once I discovered it, it just demanded to be a part the project. Mussorgsky ended up in the duet of “The Chase.” There were certain pieces I didn’t grow up knowing, or that I didn’t grow up playing, that just commanded my attention.

All the ones that really stepped in and took over my life are on the record, except for Franz Liszt. His energy was very much there – his music was there, I was developing something. In the final hour, story-wise, it just went in another direction, and it went down the Scarlatti path instead. That was for the title track. It wasn’t as if Liszt’s presence wasn’t there or that I didn’t learn a lot from studying his structures. Part of this is really studying how song cycles work. Dr. Buhr gave me Schubert’s “Winterizer.” I just talked to Germans awhile ago, and they were saying, “It’s Vinterizer” (laughs). That was the song cycle from Schubert, and sort of a benchmark for me about how they operate.

How would you explain the concept of the song cycle for someone who’s coming to it through “Night Of Hunters”? How did it fit your story?

TA: (Long pause) Well, a song cycle works in a way that narrative has to be sort of the foundation. The story doesn’t have to be understood in a linear fashion, but more from an emotional place. It’s not a play that’s set to music. It’s abstract in some ways, because it’s not dialogue set to music. That can be done in a musical format.

Night Of Hunters isn’t really dialogue. It’s more about your protagonist and what they’re feeling within a set of circumstances. The set of circumstances isn’t necessarily what’s being sung about. Whereas in certain musicals you hear about certain circumstances. That’s where the forms are somewhat different.

With some song cycles you can get a back story that the composer gives that’ll be all over the map. People in the beginning that I was testing this out with said, “Don’t give me the back story. I don’t wanna know. Eventually I will look it up, but I wanted to experience the emotion on my own.” That was the reason we only sent the back story to journalists, and you can get it on the net. But that won’t be in the album package.

How did you convey the narrative to the musicians and the people you were working with? Did they get the back story?

TA: (Laughs) It’s funny – no, the musicians never asked. They just listened to the song and the lyrics and got it.

Ah, professionals!

TA: But it’s not that they’re smarter than anyone else. It’s because they understand the form. They’re listening to it from an emotional level, they’re not listening to it as playwrights saying, “Well, is this an active part of the story?” You’re not getting a dramatist talking to you, you’re getting musicians who are understanding the emotion from the rhythm, the chord progression, the melody. Music is the language to musicians and everybody working on it.

The fact that they went from new world to old world didn’t really affect what they were listening to. What they were listening to was what she was reacting to in “Shattering Sea” when she sings “That is not my blood on the bedroom floor.” That’s all they needed to know. And then they played the shit out of it. They don’t need to know, “Well, did she come from Florida or Nantucket?” They don’t fucking care. They don’t care what they ate. They know that something happened once they got to wherever they were. They didn’t even care that it was in Ireland. They said, “Whatever. Wherever they are, we understand the emotional explosion of this couple.”

So there are people who are just working on and off of the emotion this woman had towards this man, and what you began to get his energy from different songs, they began to hear it in the lyric and how she was approaching it from the music and the lyrics. That’s all they needed to know.

The album begins in Ireland with the Celtic tradition, and references the ogham tree language. “Cactus Practice” cites Aztecan mythology and shamanism. You could even say the sea passages refer to Norse mythology. Was it a conscious decision to draw from various mythologies, or was that a coincidence in service to the story?

TA: The work itself was driving certain things. Sometimes, as a writer, you cock your head at certain signals and signs saying, “Well, why are we dealing with the nine underworlds of the Maya?” Why are we doing this?

Little did I know at the time, but I discovered that Granados, the composer, had made a trip to the New World. He was from Spain, and this song was from Spanish dances. Originally I was trying to somehow pull Spain into this, because they have quite an influence on Ireland and landed there – there’s a whole history there from hundreds of years. The crazy thing is, they would stop there – they’ve been there a long, long time – but they went in and settled the New World.

Granados made his trip, and everything in that song was saying you have to take this to the New World. He played for the President, which made him change his passage back to the Old World. He had a great fear of boats – water, really – so that on the way back, they made it back to England, but on the way back to Spain their boat went down. He was rescued, but he saw his wife drowning in the distance. He dove off the boat to save her and they both died. So “Fearlessness” was being driven by the song itself, and I didn’t really know the circumstances until the song was done. Dr. Buhr said to me, “Do you know the story of Granados?” I had no idea. He picked up on all the references.

I was going to ask if you knew about the Granados story.

TA: This is where you get to this strange moment of who’s driving who. I think the songs drive me to find them. It’s a very fine line: Am I writing it, or am I just translating a consciousness that’s already there?

It was very clear, hand on my heart, that this wanted to be called “Fearlessness” with his melody, and it had to be about water. And them being out on the water, our couple, Tori and this guy – it tied in with somehow the soul and consciousness of Granados. That was sort of the prerequisite. If I was going to use his melody, somehow there had to be a link with his journey and his story.

"Battle Of Trees" has an interesting precept. The battle itself takes place 3,000 years in the past, and you explain that poets actually fought alongside militants, and that the two factions were originally on equal footing as warriors. But then the poets had to insulate themselves with words, as you say. It's hard not to imagine that division happening today. Can the role of the poet ever be noble again, or will it take a total decimation of the earth for that to happen?

TA: I don’t know. (pause) I was reading Robert Graves’ The White Goddess, which was kind of a guiding light through this whole project. I’ve had it my life before but it’s such a hard read for me personally because it feels like a textbook. In some ways I guess it is, because it goes through mythology from ancient, ancient times, but it explains how it came to Ireland, and also the British Isles, and the inception of it all. I don’t know if he believed we would ever see poets acknowledged in that way again.

But also, as he said, to be considered a poet of great standing you had to have such an understanding of ancient myth. And it seems like our culture doesn’t encourage our writers to know mythology. Neil Gaiman, he’s my spiritual brother. He’s one of the few writers that I’ve known that 20 years ago was talking about how essential mythology was to his palette. I don’t really know what Neil would write without his mythological references. That’s been the thing for me – I wouldn’t have many ingredients in my garden coming from the piano if I didn’t have mythology at the core.

After hearing this album, I began to think about my own relationship with my wife, and what our mythology would be. As “Night Of Hunters” gets heard, is it something of a goal to have other couples think about the story of their relationships?

TA: Paul, if that actually made you do that, then I’ve accomplished what I wanted to do. Because we get so distracted by the traumas that are happening in the world. It’s not as if they shouldn’t command our attention. But our own relationships, our personal lives, have to command our attention as well. If there’s no healing within the sacred relationship of the home, then there’s no way we can have peace outside in the world. That’s never gonna happen.

So couples have to start valuing that they have something special to hold onto and not just throw away. It’s such a disposable society now. People throw things away, just toss them aside. If it’s not working, then forget it. I’ll do another job, I’ll do something else. That’s one thing when you’re talking about jobs, it’s another thing when you’re talking about people. And of course, some relationships have a natural end, as you and I both know. They’ve done what they need to do, you’ve gone to school together, and you go your separate ways. It doesn’t mean you hate each other, it just means you’re going separate ways. But if you have a wife or a husband, a lover or a partner that you care about – isn’t that gold? Isn’t that more precious than gold?

That’s why I thought the myth concept would be helpful – it’s a way to interpret our lives that might take work, but it would reveal whole new layers.

TA: What an adventure that would be for couples. I think couples get stuck in the grind and forget the magic that is happening – the alchemical magic between two people. Finding your myth that’s special just to you two? To me there’s nothing sexier than that.

Thank you so much, Tori, I appreciate your time.

TA: And say hi to your partner, yes?

My favorite album of 2011

2011-12-20T01:31:00.000-08:00

We’re not who we thought we were at the beginning of this millennium. I’m not sure we’re anybody anymore.

We were probably somebody in 2001. Then planes ran into the WTC. Then came a couple of wars, one of which ended –- checking my watch –- yeah, about six hours ago. We also had a recession that’s still sleeping on our couch and farting up a storm.

Also, the democracy of technology failed to equalize us, and it certainly didn’t unify us. Your opinion is shit, my opinion is correct, and I don’t have to get into a point-by-point explanation of how my opinion is correct and yours is shit. If you challenge my thinking, I merely have to CAPS LOCK words like “Obamacare” and “Islamofascist” and “Repuglican" so I’ll look authoritative. I will scream myself into intellectual impenetrability. You’ll never know me, but you’ll never forget my screen name.

We don’t even have that much fun anymore. We used to play with Frisbees and Slip ‘n’ Slides, or if we were into a little cash, hit up Disneyland or Plato’s Retreat. (They weren’t strictly the same despite what you’ve heard.) Now what do we do for fun? Set up websites for the express purpose of spreading a hoax that Bon Jovi is dead.

Speaking of: We love that death now. We’re really into that death. It’s like the least inspirational Boy Scout leader imaginable.

We also have Kardashians now, and as docile as they appear to be, I have a feeling they’ve inadvertently stolen from all of us. First I think they took our capacity to be shocked. Then they took our will, and after that the keys to our house were easy pickin's.

And at some point in the last few years we all got together and thought that yes, indeed, we can, but in fact, we didn’t. Whether we didn’t was because people in fake founding-father wigs were standing on our throats preventing us from doing it, or because we just decided we had too many other things going on at the time to do it, the fact is, we didn’t. The streamers and confetti are now writing paper in Kenosha, or landfill in Utah.

Well, if there’s no one else to speak for us, at least we still have Andy Rooney around to articulate our… what? Aw, shit!

There were protest songs written over the last decade about some or all of the above points. None but one lasted. That was Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy,” because it summed up where we all were at the time, which was 2006: losing our connections to our heroes, our cultivated realities, and eventually ourselves. It was the last cry of our identities, and the scariest thing about “Crazy” is that is doesn’t have any answers. We didn’t know where we’d wind up or what would happen to us.

But now we know, and it’s Tom Waits’ latest album, Bad As Me.

To be on the level: Bad As Me addresses none of the specific causations expressed so far, except one. Waits saw no need. It would have been wasted energy. He hadn’t made a completely new album in seven years before this one. That left enough time for conditions to conspire and for him to see what was left at the precise time a diagnosis was needed.

A lot of characters on Bad As Me want to be somewhere, someone, or sometime else. Two songs talk about escaping local troubles on the open road, one with a specific destination (“Chicago,” which for me personally was ironic), the other with none (“Get Lost”). Two other songs talk about turning a blind eye to desires, whether they’re someone else’s (“Face To The Highway”) or one’s own, unrequited ones (“Back In The Crowd”). There are two songs about wistful, nostalgic memories – one about lost, presumably stronger archetypes (“Raised Right Man”), and one about love that’s lost its mystery (“Kiss Me”). Nobody wants to be where or who they are. They feel that way because they remember who they could have been, or who they thought they should aspire to be.

Most musicians have songs about that kind of displacement. But not many in their 60s. Bad As Me derives its power from the scary proposition that even a person for whom “there’s nothing in the world that I ain’t seen” can still feel unsettled enough to want to bolt. The song that bit is from is called “Last Leaf,” and it’s an unbelievably heartbreaking number about the loneliness of the last standing survivor, the one fragment of spring that autumn couldn’t kill. Hilariously, Waits’ backup singer on “Last Leaf” is Keith Richards. Tell me that wasn’t planned.

But elsewhere, Bad As Me teems with embracing uncertainty. The train to “Chicago” barrels through the speakers on wheels of tenor sax and muted snares, and the since-corrected optimism “What we need the Lord will give us.” “Get Lost” is a lumpy ‘50s rocker that dreams of old cruises just a car length behind James Dean, with another hopeful proclamation: “Time it don’t mean nothing/Money means even less.”

There are two other moments of remote, maybe coerced jubilation on the record. The title track forges a love story between two people who’ve been drawn together through their defects: “You skid in the rain/You’re trying to shift/You’re grinding the gears/You’re trying to shift/You’re the same kind of bad as meee!” The word “me” is sung in the excited voice of a kid getting a bike for Christmas. You just have to hear it. On “Satisfied” Waits not only embraces his own impending death, he gleefully depicts his eventual molecular decomposition. But before that happens, he’s going to do everything right that “Mr. Jagger and Mr. Richards” got wrong the first time. (Yep, Richards is on this song too, playing guitar.)

In between those songs lies the more remorseful wishes of Waits’ character (I’m pretending it’s one guy – hmm, no idea why, just hide all the mirrors please). He’s been alienated by the cross-purposes of everyone else on the planet on “Talking At the Same Time,” which he sings in a fragile falsetto. When he can’t figure out what everyone else expects of him, he just turns to the promise of the open road on “Face To The Highway” – but now that road seems less like a path out and more a conveyor belt to something just as undesired.

“Back In The Crowd” is one of the most outstanding ballads Waits has ever written. Directly copping the structures of your favorite Roy Orbison tearjerker, Waits decides the only remedy for being unloved is anonymity: “If you don’t want these arms to hold you/If you don’t want these lips to kiss you/If you found someone new/Put me back in the crowd/Put the sun behind the clouds.” You can read that two ways: Either the singer’s too weakened to stand on his own, or he’s eager to rejoin the faceless millions in hopes of finding someone again. (The next song in sequence, interestingly, is the title track: see above.) Both answers suffice for me, since “Back In The Crowd” is exactly the way I felt after every breakup that wasn’t my choice. This was back in the day. I don’t have breakups anymore.

We’ve covered the first nine songs on the album. (Not all of them – I haven’t talked about the mysteriously mournful “Pay Me”, but I think Tom might want you to figure that one out yourself.) Already it’s set a narrative pace and depth that Waits has never quite reached before, even when he’s tried on things like Franks Wild Years and The Black Rider. Escape, remembrance, longing, jubilation, all of it earned, but somehow not explained.

Then all hell breaks loose. To say that the war in “Hell Broke Luce” [sic] is the literal root of all that comes before doesn’t feel accurate. But it’s the first of two songs, the album’s last, that describes where the person is right now, in real time, and it feels as shocking a revelation as the season finale of your favorite Showtime series. Musically “Hell Broke Luce” is a martial meltdown, supported by strict clopping rhythms, gunfire, and the only heavy metal guitar Waits has ever employed (it’ll be coming through your right speaker in just a minute). The soldier gets graphic and peculiar about his status: “That big fucking bomb made me deaf… Listen to the general every goddamn word/How many ways can you polish up a turd?/Left, right, left!”

“Hell Broke Luce” does two things Waits hasn’t really done before: It describes his wartorn plight the way a first-person correspondent would, and it points a finger (or the stump of one) at forces beyond the singer’s control: “How is it the only ones responsible for making this mess/Got their sorry asses stapled to a goddamn desk?” Those two moments break through what could be construed Waits’ last veneer of cool, from his lounge-lizard shtick to his hipster detachment. Emotionally, abstractly, they explain everything that’s preceded them on the album. Maybe all his albums. It also explains the coda that completes the album, “New Year’s Eve,” a story song in which the narrator’s life, and the lives of his compatriots, have lost all mechanical and emotional direction. There’s nothing left to do but sing “Auld Lang Syne.” So that’s exactly what Waits does, at the risk of being heavy-handed. He isn’t.

My favorite album of last year was Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. My accompanying article about that album was shoddy and inarticulate. I think the basic gist was that I felt like a hopeless, condemned piece of expired lunchmeat headed down the rabbit hole, and it seemed like the guy in Versace shades was coming down along with me. A lot of that still has to do with why I love Bad As Me, except I can explain this one better. It’s aware of the escape routes, memories, promise, heartbreak and hope of redemption through death. And although I’m not one to blame others for my own misfortunes (in public anyway – get me a few vodkas on credit and we could talk), I’m aware of outside forces that, let’s just say, haven’t helped.

It’s the world and all its problems, John Wesley Harding once sang. I think that’s too easy. On Bad As Me it’s the world and all its promise. It doesn’t look good. Nothing close to our childhood, that’s for sure. It looks worse than it once was. But now that finality feels almost comically approachable, we can look back on what our ideal was, and maybe believe that at some point, through some vaporous portal, possibly not on this earth, we might get the chance to shoot the whole damn thing over again from the top.

And at any rate, Keith Richards is still around, for Christ’s sake. He’s like a goddamn cockroach.

My top ten albums of 2011:

1. Bad As Me, Tom Waits

2. Circuital, My Morning Jacket

3. Everything’s Getting Older, Bill Wells & Aidan Moffat (a nice compare/contrast to Bad As Me if you’re interested)

4. Middle Brother, Middle Brother

5. El Camino, The Black Keys

6. James Blake, James Blake

7. Helplessness Blues, Fleet Foxes

8. Wounded Rhymes, Lykke Li

9. Watch The Throne, Jay Z & Kanye West

10. Nothing Is Wrong, Dawes

They Might Be Giants’ John Linnell -- The Interview

2011-12-18T23:50:00.000-08:00

John Linnell at the wheel, with fellow potential giant John Flansburgh riding shotgun

It's hard being anything for 30 years, but in the music business it's even harder. If your band is ever described as "quirky," that's the same thing as being given an expiration date. They Might Be Giants have been together almost 30 years, practically defining the meaning of "quirky" for those of us with impaired attention spans. I've always insisted there was a lot more to their music than its quirk quotient, and in fact John Linnell and John Flansburgh have proven there's a lot of ways you can go with an aesthetic if you know what you're doing. Or decided that you never will.

TBMG write songs about almost anything. They link to very specific, very thought-out narratives they allow to develop. That might be the secret to their longevity, as well as their willingness to branch out into other forms like children's music or TV theme songs. What limitations one might get from their aesthetics have turned out to be the source of their versatility.

They released their 15th album Join Us last July, along with an odds-and-sods compilation Album Raises New and Troubling Questions last November. I spoke with John Linnell over the phone last August (which explains our remarks about the weather) about what's serious with They Might Be Giants, how they've managed to keep creatively viable, and whether there are any hidden messages in their work that backward masking won't pick up.

The interview started at 7:30am my time, which is never a good time for me to be speaking in public. Linnell was gracious and accepting of the questioner's restricted capacity for connected thought.

PP: Sorry if I’m a little off – this is kinda early in the morning for me.

John Linnell: I’m on Eastern Time. I’ve been up for hours!

PP: Yeah, this is kind of an unusual time for me to be up, but it’s good for me.

JL: Sorry about that.

PP: Speak very slowly. For some reason you’re coming in very dimly – hold on, there’s a fan on in my room, maybe I can turn that off. (Turns off fan.) Sorry about that, we’re experiencing some very unseasonably warm weather.

JL: Really? The whole planet’s going to hell type thing? ‘Cause it’s been miserably hot in New York. In Chicago, yesterday, it was really hot there as well.

PP: I guess I’m kind of bellyaching, ‘cause we whine when it gets to be 70 at seven in the morning. Are you in Brooklyn?

JL: Yes. Let me just check the temperature here… according to my sources, it’s about 73. But it’s coming up to 79. Actually, that’s kind of civilized. I should stop complaining, that’s the coolest it’s been in a while.

PP: Yeah, it’s supposed to get up to 78 here. Weather’s fascinating! Could you tell me a little about Join Us?

JL: It came out in July. I just noticed that the songs are incredibly short. We always have very short songs on our records, but this is one – I haven’t heard anyone talk about this, but there’s only really one or two songs that cross the three-minute mark. Maybe people just expect that from us now.

PP: I think it’s only one song.

JL: Really? Only one song? That’s an even better story. [Ed. note: John was right, there are two.]

PP: The amount of work that They Might Be Giants has done over the last 30 years is pretty staggering. How would you describe your work ethic?

JL: For me – this sounds probably incorrect, but I’m pretty lazy. I am. I have a hard time getting going for a job. I’m sort of kicking and screaming the whole way, in terms of writing and recording and all that. It can be kind of unpleasant, because it’s the process of becoming less and less unsatisfied with whatever idea you’re working on. I find that challenging.

But there are little moments when you can step back and say, “This is working, this is great.” I’m feeling good about it. That makes it all worth it. John Flansburgh’s more of a workaholic than I am. He really hits the ground running and can work all day long. But I tend to drag my feet a lot.

PP: One thing that typifies your work, to me, is the breadth of subject matter you cover. It’s a very unique perspective. How do you catch a song idea – how do you know you’re actually going to write about something?

JL: The process doesn’t get easier over time, I’d say, because once you figure out a sort of rhetorical trick, or a musical trick that works, you don’t want to keep repeating that. In some ways that gets crossed off the list, I guess. You want to try something else. It gets harder and harder to find something original to say each time.

PP: Do you get a lot of cues from reading or research?

JL: Well, often it’s something where you hear an idea and you kind of perk up. Something occurs to you, and for whatever reason – you might be sort of misguided, this’ll be a great idea. And then you kind of have the clarity of mind to realize that it’s not a great idea. Often that can help you get all the way into something to where you actually are making it interesting, even though it might have had objectively less promise than you thought.

Often it’s a process of tricking yourself into thinking something would be a good idea. If you stepped back, you’d probably talk yourself out of it. “This is too cliché, this is too boring.” But when you’re in the heat of the moment of writing, you think, “Oh, this is cool, this is a good idea.” Then you get all this work done. And you basically reinforce that maybe not inherently great idea with authenticity, or authority rather, that puts it over the top. I kind of like that process. I think often the most misguided ideas are the ones that wind up being the best or most interesting.

PP: When I hear songs like “Ana Ng,” or “Birdhouse in Your Soul,” or “Protagonist” – I also felt this way for some reason about “Metal Detector” -- I sense a real poignancy in those songs, behind all the specific detail you use. Do people ever miss the emotional aspect of your work?

JL: I don’t know! I don’t know how people take it. I can sort of think of it one way or another. There’s an emotional resonance to everything that makes it interesting. But often there’s a kind of an autistic quality that I like, where it seems to be completely stripped of emotions. It almost has some numerical fascination, a way of ordering things that’s appealing that doesn’t seem emotional or personal. Perversely, I kind of like that type of writing.

But in any of that, people can project their own emotions onto almost anything. I often wonder listening to Bach if he was having the feelings he was evoking. There’s something deeply emotional about the music of Bach – yet it’s this highly systematic and ordered composition. It almost seems like a computer could write that music, yet it’s very beautiful. It makes you think of all these nameless emotions. It draws all this feeling out of you. It has a very strange quality in that way. Often I think the composer knows what he or she is doing, but doesn’t have to actually be having the feelings that are ultimately produced by the music in order to make it.

PP: Are you surprised how strongly your work has endured?

JL: I don’t know that it’s endured for me. It’s nice that people respond to it. I notice that someone who’s too young to have heard a song when it came out – the context for it had presumably changed quite a lot – they say, “I really like this song.” And I’m thinking, I remember how I felt about it when we wrote it, but I’m surprised that it means the same thing.

Anything cultural has a sort of shelf life, and when the world changes around the idea, it doesn’t mean the same thing anymore. It’s more true in comedy, for example. Old comedy is rarely funny – it has to be something profoundly, deeply resonant for it to last more than ten or twenty years.

PP: In comedy a lot of that depends on topicality.

JL: Yeah, that’s true. But also these cultural cues that get worn out over time. People hear Henny Youngman now and they don’t really laugh the way they did fifty years ago. You might get it, but you’re not on the floor rolling around. Similarly with music, it’s harder to get to music from a long time ago.

PP: How has your perspective changed over the last thirty years?

JL: That’s a great question. I don’t know the answer. I know that it has. John and I are much more familiar with the musical world we inhabit, in a way. That’s sort of a dangerous situation, because we run the risk of relying on old formulas. We have to make an effort to keep it fresh for ourselves. I feel in some ways we’re exactly the same as we were thirty years ago in terms of what we want out of songwriting and singing and recording. It’s essentially the same.

PP: Regarding your children’s albums – when I first played No! for my daughter, it just struck me as a They Might Be Giants album. It didn’t feel like it was much different in tone and sound. Is there a markedly different process you use for children’s albums?

JL: It’s very similar, you’re right. Especially No!, where I think we didn’t even quite know where that project was going to wind up. We were doing something we thought was fun and interesting, and we weren’t trying to speak down to the audience. We thought we’d just make it as interesting as possible for us. We didn’t realize or have any idea what age group it was for.

It was a really lucky thing that we weren’t taking it all that seriously, because we probably would have been more conservative in the way we approached it, had we realized how popular kid’s music was going to wind up being. We weren’t really clear on whether any child was actually going to hear it though. Or whether it was just a weird folly. It wasn’t our idea – I think someone at Rounder Records had suggested it. We were doing a bunch of other work at the time. We thought in between these paying gigs, we’d do some kid’s music as another record, put it out and see what happens. I think that spirit was what made people like it.

PP: It didn’t sound like you were forcing anything.

JL: Not at all. It wasn’t even clear that we knew what we were doing.

PP: You may have been the first band to embrace and exploit the internet. I think you were using the internet before a lot of people knew what it was. Did you have any idea how big it would become?

JL: Bear in mind, at that time, the ‘90s, it wasn’t like there wasn’t a lot of hype around the internet. Everyone was saying it would change everything, the internet’s going take over. You get weary of those kinds of pronouncements. We were not thinking this was how we were going to orient ourselves. We got an offer from eMusic to put out an internet-only release. According to them we were the first band to do it. But it wasn’t defining us at all – it wasn’t what we were about. It was more, like with Dial-A-Song or the other projects we’ve done, it was another way to produce music that wasn’t the normal way to do it. It seemed promising.

And you know, It wasn’t our idea. We had other people who worked in our office that were way more interested in the dynamics and the ins-and-outs of the internet. John and I never bought issues of Wired magazine or anything like that. It was just another way of producing stuff. I don’t think we thought it was a glamorous idea, the way a lot of other people did. “Oh yeah, you could be a cyber-virtual band!” We were,“What?”

The other thing I think we were put off by was the idea of interactivity. That was a real big buzz word in the ‘90s. We were very allergic to that early on. It seemed like a way to take control away from the artist. That’s how we perceived it. “Oh, I see – you send your tracks out and someone audience member mixes it.” I don’t know – why is that a good idea? (Laughs) It’s just like you’re not finishing your work, so you have someone else do it.

We were very skeptical about the whole thing, to tell you the truth.

PP: How do you approach your stage shows now?

JL: We have our regular five-piece. We often change up the shows where we add a horn player or something. We figure out how to approach a lot of this material, which was written and recorded in a very studio-specific way. There were sounds that were created in the studio and weren’t created to be performed. We have to figure out how to translate that to a live thing. The key for us is not to try and be too literal about how it becomes a live version – not trying to reproduce it exactly. Try to turn it into something that is about a live performance. That’s kind of a fun challenge.

The Black Keys: El Camino

2011-12-16T00:30:00.000-08:00

(Article first published as Music Review: The Black Keys - El Camino on Blogcritics.)

Do you remember the Chevy El Camino? It was what they called a “coupe utility vehicle.” The two-passenger cabin felt like a luxury ride, but the back was an exposed flatbed, like the mullet hairstyle reversed, but not as repellent. The first generation of El Caminos, unveiled in the late ‘50s, fit the suburban flash of the times: long, gliding design, not without elegance, but not flaunting too much.

The late ‘70s iteration of the El Camino was kind of comic. The slightly descending angle of the back of the cab was still there, but the tail fins were gone. It was frequently produced with a two-tone color scheme, sometimes even wood paneling. The ‘70s El Camino couldn’t decide whether it was a sports car or a pickup; it may have even had station-wagon tendencies. It was the first American automobile in which a personality crisis came standard. The most awkward car not made by American Motors (they of Gremlin fame), the El Camino was nonetheless one of the coolest cars one could drive.

The Black Keys titled their new album, El Camino, after the Chevy El Camino, only because they thought the name sounded cool. That’s not even an El Camino on the cover. But it channels the vibe of the ‘70s generation of El Caminos all the way. Building off the naturalism of their last, breakthrough album, Brothers, guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney called upon revisionist producer Danger Mouse to reinterpret ‘70s rock, without compromising their blues and R&B core. That compromise was typical of late ‘70s classic rock, as guitarists weaned on blues, R&B and early rock and roll had to amend themselves to keep in line with slicker production values. Think of the Stones’ “Miss You” or The J. Geils Band’s “Flamethrower.” Both are good songs, but are not representative of where the bands came from.

On El Camino, Auerbach and Carney absorb those moments, extract the strut and melodies, and throw it right back. It’s a trick that lazier talents would have accomplished with heavy doses of irony, but the Keys are way too affectionate for that. El Camino has Auerbach slamming robust riffs in a confident, personal way, trying to fit a stadium rock sound into a walk-in refrigerator. It’s an easily adaptable sound, cutting across all rhythms from the scoot-shuffling “Lonely Boy” to the glam-rock throwback “Gold On The Ceiling.” The wild abandon also makes the very predictable trick in “Little Black Submarines” — part one acoustic Zeppelin folk, part two thunderous electric restatement — giddy and irresistible.

The Keys’ nod to mutant, late '70s album-oriented rock is especially subtle and gratifying. “Run Right Back” owes a melodic debt to, of all things, Foreigner’s “Cold As Ice,” but makes it rawer. When they flirt with rhythms just an open high-hat short of disco on “Sister” and “Nova Baby,” the Keys always bring the music back to the grit of Auerbach’s sharp guitars and Carney’s insistent drumming. There are sly keyboard quotations on “Hell Of A Season” and "Stop Stop" — Danger Mouse’s contribution, I'm guessing — but they're a shading device. The technology doesn’t hold any song hostage, which is what ruined, say, (Jefferson) Starship. Hindsight has its advantages.

El Camino has the ambling swagger of a 19-year-old kid who’s only just realized he has the capacity to be cool. Entirely upbeat except for half of one song, it’s the Black Keys’ most logical next step on their passage from American roots to rock splendor. Now that a popular audience has finally caught up to the Black Keys, they’re hitting the gas.

Check-In & Playlist: November 27, 2011

2011-11-27T22:06:00.000-08:00

We had a freak-tastic Thanksgiving, how about you? All sorts of crap to be thankful for. For one thing: St. John's Wort. I've been taking this herbal supplement for about three months now. The label says, "If you don't notice changes in your overall demeanor within two months, it's time to look into something like Prozac, a used sensory deprivation tank, or self-flagellation." Happily, I've noticed a big change: None of you appear to me as a flesh-eating zombie wielding a scythe. That's a big improvement over August. I'm also a little chipper.

Also: As you can see on this very page I've started writing for Blogcritics, and published my very first Q-and-A-formatted interview, with Professor Elemental. There are two other interviews in the can that I'm hoping to have up here soon, but it was personally important to me that Prof was our debut. Say, if you happen to know a music-type person that wants to be interviewed, I have lots of questions. They're not all from Trivial Pursuit either.

Also: November 2011 was this blog's most-viewed month by about 30% over the next-biggest month (which was October). We're one step closer to accusations of selling out - thanks!

Also: If you haven't noticed, I've curtailed my writing for The Seattle Times. We were just two different people thrown together in turbulent times while bombs were flying overhead as an indifferent aristocracy willed us to the slaughterhouse. It just didn't work out. But we're on good terms. Ironically, though, the online version of the Times' one-time competitor, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, syndicates Blogcritics content for its website. You can search for the Nickelback and Miranda Lambert reviews on http://www.seattlepi.com/. So it looks to casual observers, if they don't look closely enough, that I now write for the P-I. I discovered that this weekend. It was pretty amusing. In the end, though, I'm really jonesin' for a spot at http://www.cracked.com/.

Also: The Nickelback review elicited my first-ever reader comment on Blogcritics, from someone named Gina: "Nickleback is fucking amazing and no matter what all those fuckers say, i will ALWAYS love them & have them be my favorite band!" Absolutely, Gina! More power to you!

Also: I saw The Muppets and Melancholia. They were kind of the same. Jason Segel was only in one of them, but I think Animal was in both.

Also: The guy behind the honey badger viral video now follows my tweets. I didn't really do anything to merit or influence his decision but I still rank it as a major accomplishment.

Also: Truly unforeseen, bizarre, wonderful opportunities appear to be manifesting themselves for 2012. I may be on the cusp of thinking about planning for the possible execution of a major achievement. You'll be the first to know. Probably before me.

Playlist:
Critical Beatdown, Ultramagnetic MC's
Take Care, Drake
Rebel Without Applause, Professor Elemental & Tom Caruana
Les 50 Plus Belles Chansons, Nino Ferrer
Solitaire, Neil Sedaka
Quadrophenia, The Who

Nickelback: Here And Now

2011-11-22T20:12:00.000-08:00

(Article first published as Music Review: Nickelback - Here And Now on Blogcritics.)

(Also, check the comments below for the edited-out introduction about Hooters' Buffalo chicken.)

Nobody says they like Nickelback; they do not have devotees. There aren’t any “Nickelheads” running around. As I write this, people in Detroit are petitioning to not have them play at the Lions’ Thanksgiving game halftime show. Yet somehow, the Canadians have sold 50 million records. So the blue-collar rockers apparently are “of the people,” but none of those people want us to know who they are--sort of like Opus Dei.

Does Nickelback deserve our wrath? Probably not, but that says more about where we should be directing our wrath these days. On their new album, Here And Now, the hard rockers’ preferred milieu is a dive bar, and their protagonist is an agitated, maybe bipolar drinker who doesn’t follow the news. He also likes oral sex, almost as much as he likes coming up with metaphors for oral sex. Maybe you urban folk don’t run into this guy much, but travel about twenty miles outside city limits--you’ll find him in a heartbeat.

Lead singer Chad Kroeger delivers every emotion, whether it’s semi-political rage, horniness, or yearbook sentiment, with the same brash, Tourette-y tenor Bobcat Goldthwaite used. This works best when Kroeger’s promoting social change or getting everyone drunk. When he tries to be romantic, it’s a little distracting. The band hasn't changed their approach much from previous albums: sludgy tablets of compressed metal guitar riffs over thunderous drumming. Even the ballads eventually get to that point of rage and release.

What’s most hilarious about Nickelback is how drastically they swing between a plane that approximates social consciousness and a perplexing effort to be hedonistic. “This Means War” kicks off the record with imprecise anti-nationalism sentiments; the very next song is “Bottoms Up”, with lyrics like “Let’s drink that shit till it’s dry/ So grab a Jim Beam, J.D., whatever you need.”

It ain’t a Nickelback record without man-tastic sexual exploits, and we have three here. Kroeger does try to find nice things to say about his targets. In “Midnight Queen” he admits his bartender has “a hold of my heart,” and he can’t wait until she “licks my pistol clean.” In “Gotta Get Me Some” he says his girlfriend’s friend is so hot, “she’s a scene from a Baywatch rerun.” I liked that line. That shows you what cultural reference points we’re dealing with here--wonderful. Finally in “Everything I Wanna Do,” Kroeger at last humanizes his female by marveling about how their kinky sex is, gasp, consensual.

Honestly, it’s hard to be mad at a band whose self-expectations are about as high as an anthill, especially when their music and mentality are so blatantly out of touch with contemporary society. Nickelback knows their audience. They make big, blocky sounds for people with big, blocky feelings. If they’ve filled that niche, what does it matter?

Give Nickelback this much: Plenty of bands can be mediocre, but very few embrace their own mediocrity. Like Salieri at the end of Amadeus, or the Tea Party, Nickelback practically celebrates it. They call upon other mediocrities to aggressively ignore prevailing wisdom. Perhaps they’re who are buying Nickelback albums. If you see yourself happily wobbling amongst that contingent, by all means feel free to obtain and enjoy Here And Now, with crazy bread and ranch dressing on the side.

Professor Elemental -- The Interview

2011-11-17T22:12:00.001-08:00

I don’t yet know what 2011 is going to be remembered for, musically speaking – I suppose it’ll be Adele, Nicki Minaj, various underage gentlemen with waterproof hairstyles, and Tyler, The Creator. I’ve listened to most of it. Some of it’s pretty good. The hairstyles in particular are very, very well-maintained.

For me, though, I was only too thrilled to volunteer perhaps one-third of my total music-listening time in 2011 to a British emcee who dresses as a rogue character from an H. Rider Haggard novel, lives in a castle surrounded by a tea-filled moat, conducts troubling experiments in animal fusion, searches the jungle for artifacts that may in fact be located between his sofa cushions, and calls his most-loathed rival in the hip hop arena “rap’s Piers Morgan.” Then, there’s more tea.

So crown who you want, but for me, 2011 will go down as the year of Professor Elemental.

I cannot begin to tell you how often Elemental, the Steampunk inventor of chap-hop, has been the go-to guy in my speakers this year. I first heard him on Irwin Chusid’s show on WFMU. One second I was doing something with a spreadsheet, the next minute I was furiously looking up the name of the person who’d just shouted “It’s splendid!” over my computer speakers. Ten minutes later I owned a copy of Elemental’s debut album, The Indifference Engine, and about 45 minutes later I was racing around the office demanding that my co-workers obtain it post-haste. Discovering Elemental was one of my most giddy moments of the last twelve months. Take that as you will.

Elemental’s YouTube debut, “Cup Of Brown Joy” (sorry, sickos: it’s about tea), obtained well over a million hits in the U.K., which means it’s the isle’s equivalent of the honey badger clip.

Playing a character in hip hop can be risky, but the reason Elemental’s comic turns are so addictive is that behind the outfit is someone who truly loves and understands hip hop. He’s a fantastic, very precise rhymer (his lines about his disdain for coffee at the three-quarter mark of “Brown Joy” are just jaw-dropping). Producer partner Tom Caruana – so vital to the Professor that he’s given equal billing on the remix album More Tea? – makes amazing sonic flourishes, combining legit big beats with a bag of samples ranging from big band swing, early ‘90s hip hop, Wagnerian dread and ‘60s soul-jazz.

It reminds me of a line about the great 20th century musical parodist Spike Jones: You can’t make comedy music this good unless you’re wholly in love with the music you’re sourcing. It’s not parody (like Elemental’s nemesis, the “George Formby clone” Mr. B The Gentleman Rhymer, with his Shakey’s Pizza hat and his sub-John Oates ‘stache) – it’s stretching the ways hip hop can be used to tell a story.

I got in touch with the Professor in early November, showering him with plaudits like a fan-girl, insisting that I was in fact something of a journalist, and asking if he’d consent to a chat. After he kindly agreed to an interview, I sent my questions to his attention via a unicycle-powered postal-reflexive catapult*. His remarks are presented untouched, except for grammatical items I’m famously sticky about.

As a bonus, I also talked to Brighton hip hop advocate, seminarian and expert Paul Alborough, who… well, let’s just say he knows the Professor better than just about anyone. Except maybe the monkey butler.

Interview after the jump. It is, as they say, splendid:

(*Or it may have been via email. I can’t recall.)

PP: How are you, Professor! Where are you at the moment?

Professor Elemental: I am sat in my rather dusty, but still resplendent dining room. Waiting on that damned monkey butler to bring me my afternoon scones.

PP: First off: Whenever people have asked me who I’ve been listening to this year, I’ve said “Professor Elemental.” With one exception, everyone I’ve gotten to check your music out has loved it. That doesn’t happen a lot. And the one exception was more on the fence than disapproving. Are you aware of the potential of something happening for you here in America? Have you been here before?

PE: On the fence eh? Well, that’s not good enough. I won’t rest until I am beloved by all who hear me. Well, beloved or feared.

Yes. The Americas. Land of theme parks and Fruit Loops. I have been lucky enough to visit for a couple of Steampunk conventions and they have been some of the best gigs of my life. I am definitely feeling the full potential over there… I should be back and forth quite a bit next year. Hopefully for Dragon Con, Octopodicon, Wicked Faire and a few others.

PP: Most Americans are probably not familiar with your ~~character~~ profession. In a nutshell, can you describe what it is you do besides rapping?

PE: My act is a winning combination of mad science, stand up comedy, casual conversation and erotic dance….With a creamy hip hop filling.

PP: How did you meet Tom Caruana? How would you describe your working process?

PE: I met Tom at the Glastonbury Festival. He was lost and fell over me at a campfire. I had just started rapping but didn’t know any producers, he had just started properly producing and didn’t know many emcees. Plus we both liked cake.

As for the process... well, he sends me a pile of beats, I roll around in them and choose favourites, write them in a furious scribble and then we come together to bash them into shape. It's my favourite thing ever.

PP: My kids want to know about your orangutan butler, Geoffrey. I mentioned it might be a thorny subject because I gather it hasn’t always been an easy arrangement to maintain. It sounds like he might have occasional trouble understanding the whole point of a master-to-subordinate relationship.

PE: Ah. Yes. Well, when I first found Geoffery – he was quite wild, in fact he was furious. But over the years I have tried to train him to wear clothing and give the very basic level of care to which I have become accustomed. Certainly, he still has a tendency take out his temper on the good crockery or I find him ‘marking his territory’ in the Duchess of Kent’s hat during a garden party… but generally he is a fine companion.

PP: You’re known for time-traveling, which is how I expect you discovered hip hop. I’m wondering if you had the chance to introduce past civilizations to hip hop. I’m guessing if you did, quite a few didn’t get it. But were they any that really took to it?

PE: Not really. Well, I did go back to the mid-'70s and teach this one chap named DJ Kool Herc about the finer points of hip hop, but that’s about it.

PP: Your song with Helen Arney, “Animals,” is without question the slow jam of the year. You and Helen discussing wanting to "get it on," as they say, in the same, sometimes unsavory ways that other members of the animal kingdom would, like salmon and hedgehogs. Were there any animal mating rituals that didn’t make the cut for this song because they were even more disturbing than, say, the praying mantis or the gentleman bee?

PE: Yes. There were plenty. Giraffes were particularly surprising, filthy beasts. Fortunately, my colleague Baba Brinkman has done a much dirtier remix of the song and was not shy about mentioning each and every one of them. But then he is a Canadian.

PP: I really hate to stoop to TMZ-gossip column type questions, but I’m afraid there will be trouble if I don’t ask about your beef with Mr. B the Gentleman Rhymer. Sorry to dredge up old news if that’s the case. The battle took place, is that right? What’s the status of the feud?

PE: Well, the battle did take place, but the audience wrongly declared it as a draw, despite me having beaten B to a mushy pulp with my mighty word stick. We are having a rematch in Paris in February and by God, I will show him no mercy -- I may rip the tache right off of his chops.

PP: Speaking of beefs, I sense a hint of disdain from some of your contemporaries in the social and scientific circles in Britain. It just sounds to me like they’re afraid to try new things. Where do you think this springs from? Is there anybody in that circle you feel you can confide in?

PE: I’m genuinely not sure what you mean… so that must mean they are either talking behind my back or I have been too dense to notice. Bah! Who needs them anyway? I am going to go and live in America and eat Twinkies for breakfast every day.

PP: The video for “Cup Of Brown Joy,” probably the greatest song ever written about tea, was a big YouTube hit in your native country, and also a great example of your skills at exotic dancing. How did that come about? I was also wondering where the exteriors were shot.

PE: That video (and pretty much 90% of the reason anyone knows who I am) comes from the director, Moog. He is amazing and the finest director I have had the privilege to work with and he has a lovely line in facial hair. It was shot in Lewes and Stanmer Park in Brighton, Sussex on a fine February morning.

PP: I come from Seattle, which is all about the coffee. What blend of tea would be most effective in converting coffee drinkers to tea drinkers? 'Cause I don’t think this chai business is working out.

PE: Chai? That’s not tea -- that’s a nutmeg-flavoured abomination, sir! Hmm... I always favour Yorkshire Tea, Barry’s Tea (from Ireland) or if you are getting fancy, I get my posh tea from the Wan Ling Tea House.

I should add that (sadly) I am not sponsored by any of them. Which is a shame. I would happily sell my soul for a box of free tea.

PP:“Splendid” got me first, but the song and video that really put me in your corner was “Fighting Trousers,” which is your Mr. B diss. I especially liked the Raging Bull homage in the opening credits.

PE: Again, that’s all Moog. He had the Raging Bull idea and it worked out just lovely. “Splendid,” I should say, was put together by the good folks at www.rathergood.com: The home of kittens, cake and wrongness.

PP: One very tangible obsession that’s come out of my listening to your tracks is the Battenburg. I don’t eat a lot of cake, but I searched for some photos of Battenburgs online. They looked amazing. Now I’m trying to convince my wife to give me kitchen time this holiday so I can try making a Battenburg. Given that she relents -- and it will take a very persuasive argument from me to make that happen -- is it possible for an American to make a Battenburg without screwing it up?

PE: I have no idea. I once tried to impress my girlfriend by pretending I could bake and then got in such a tiz ruining a roulade that she had to come and comfort me. It was probably about then that I knew I would never be a gangsta rapper.

Good luck with your Battenburg. I think you should try and make it before you put this interivew online and make sure that there is a photo for your effort for the readers. (Here's a picture. It's not my Battenburg. -- Ed.)

PP: Can you clue us in on your plans for the future? What kind of things will you be exploring? What era will you be time-traveling to? If you happen to plan on going to the French Revolution, can you tell Marie Antionette “Thanks for the lovely evening” for me?

PE: I have enormous and extensive plans for the future… and the past come to think of it. I’ll be spending 2012 on tour and plan to visit everywhere at least twice. I also have a show featuring my future self, holograms and flying robots scheduled for early in the year. (I really do, and am not making this up!) Details will be announced via my website. It is the most excited I have ever been about a show, and can’t wait to do things that have never been done on stage before, let alone with hip hop.

No plans to head to the French Revolution -- it’s not the most fun period to return to. Although, I do agree that Mary Antionette is a saucy minx who’ll do anything for a bunch of grapes and a fresh camembert.

PP: I looked at your tour schedule for next year, and I noticed you’ve scheduled an appearance at a Steampunk convention in Oklahoma. Out of respect and concern for the Steampunk contingent, I have to ask: Are you at all worried about having to spend time in Oklahoma?

PE: I have no worries at all about the Oklahomosapiens. From what I hear they are a lovely folk with nice manners and a splendid line in bison. Mmmm, tasty bison. Hooray for Oklahoma! Hooray for Steampunk for getting me to Oklahoma! Hooray!

------

(We then turned our attention to Prof. Elemental's "associate," British emcee Paul Alborough:)

PP: Seriously, though, how did you discover hip hop?

Paul Alborough: We have lots of relatives in America, and when I was about 12 I was left with an uncle’s hip hop collection. I had never heard anything like it. It blew me away. It wasn’t widely known about in the rural parts of the UK either, so I loved that I was the only one I knew who was into it. The fact that it used so many words and could communicate everything from surreal stories (The Fresh Prince) to incredible feats of braggadocious wordplay (Big Daddy Kane) made me fall in love with it from the beginning.

PP: The story of the origin of Professor Elemental’s character is great -- a hip hop anthology that places the form in other eras and characterizations. The album didn’t happen, but what was it about Elemental that stuck with you enough to pursue it?

PA: It was the vehicle that I’d been looking for really. I’d already tried fancy dress while rapping, but it just came across as a bit weird.. and not in a good way. The professor is a natural extension of myself, so he’s easy to maintain as a character. Plus the potential for his adventures is limitless.

PP: As I’m writing this, we’ve just recently heard about the sad, way-too-early passing of Heavy D, whose lyrics you referenced in “Livin’ In the '90s."You have a very strong affection for the hip hop of that period. What was it about that particular era of rap that makes it close to your heart?

PA: Well, it’s a combination of things. For me, it's when the music was at its most vital and most varied. You had rap that was funny, smooth, gangsta, conscious and everything in between. People were trying new things and labels were signing some very unusual acts that wouldn’t get a chance these days. Plus the producers were all knocking out such incredible beats -- DJ Premier, Pete Rock, K-Def, Buckwild -- everyone sounded fresh and new.

That said, to be more objective, I think it’s really because that’s when I was a teenager. We all think that the music that came out when we were a teen is the best, because that’s when we first get into music. My Dad will always swear by Motown and Stax soul, and older friends of mine will say that the '80s is the golden age of hip hop. It’s just down to when you were born I think.

PP: What kind of contemporary hip hop do you feel is making the grade? Are there any new artists or strains of hip hop that resonate in you, that you think are moving the genre forward?

PA: Tons and tons of artists are doing brilliant music, both here and overseas. Much as I love the music of the '90s, the last ten years have brought out so much incredible music -- plus the fact that you no longer need be signed to get your music heard by millions.

Dizrali And The Small Gods, Haji P, Kyle Rapps, Dr. Syntax, Foreign Beggars, Stig Of The Dump, Jay Electronica, Baba Brinkman, Rizzle Kicks and tons of others all move hip hop to new places in completely different ways.

PP: I was curious about the workshops for kids that you do. It sounds a lot like a group we have up here called 826 Seattle, which just won an award for inspiring kids to take creative writing to the next level. What are your workshops like? What are some of the biggest rewards you’ve experienced from them?

PA: I’ve been lucky enough to work with some amazing people doing workshops. It’s the most constantly surprising experience, and every workshop has at least one young person who astounds you with their skills or potential. Probably the most satisfying one was a beatbox and rapping workshop with young people who had severe learning difficulties -- we created a song from scratch in an hour, and we were all so happy with it.

Plus, I taught (the now very famous) Rizzle Kicks in a series of workshops a few years back… at the risk of sounding like a weather-beaten old trainer in a boxing film, I knew the kid had something special about him -- so amazing that he has now hit it big. What better outcome is there than that?

One thing I have learnt from endless workshops with teenagers is that teens get a bad reputation, particularly in the UK. We need to treat our young people with more respect.

PP: My son Hank is three years old, and his speech is still in that sort of indecipherable age between baby-talk and understandable language. So I occasionally engage in some call-and-response things with him, ostensibly to improve his communication, but also, I admit, so I can hear how he sounds when he repeats things in his own funny way. One of the songs I’ve played a lot for him and my daughter Lucie is “Cup Of Brown Joy,” and sometimes around the house I’d just break out the chorus on that. “When I say Earl Grey, you say ‘yes please’! Earl Grey!” And they all respond appropriately.

One afternoon I was kind of absent-mindedly goofing off with the kids at home. So I started riffing on “Cup of Brown Joy.” I did the line about Oolong – “Now when I say oo, you say long! Oo!” “Long!” “Oo!” “Long!”And I stopped there – something else caught my attention and I didn’t go any further. But Hank kept talking, and I didn’t really notice what he was saying until he got insistent:“When I thay ‘herbah,’ you thay ‘No fanks! Herbah!” Met with silence from the rest of us.

So then he said, “When I thay ‘herbah,’ you thay ‘No fanks’!.... Herbah… Herbah… Herbah… SAY IT!” At that point we pretty much figured we had no choice but to say it.

PA: Ha! That’s brilliant, wish I could say the same for my kids. When I start rapping, my three-year-old just gives me a withering look and says, “Stop being silly daddy.”

Miranda Lambert: Four The Record

2011-11-05T19:21:00.000-07:00

(Article first published as Music Review: Miranda Lambert - Four The Record on Blogcritics.)

Popular music has a crick about image establishment. Once an artist sets down a well-loved persona, an audience might get testy when the artist tries to deepen or shatter that image. Many haven't forgiven Metallica for cutting their hair, for instance; they're still so mad they refuse to use scissors.

Miranda Lambert threw down a fiery image on her first two albums. Her debut hit, “Kerosene,” was a startling prologue. The singer deals with devastation by devastating back, setting fire to anything that even reminds her of her faithless lover – cars, neighborhoods, whole personality classes. Lambert was clever, focused, on casual terms with sanity, and aware that the abyss has a parking space with her name on it. It made The Dixie Chicks’ “Goodbye Earl” sound uncertain.

A more timid artist would have rewritten the same tome of fury ad nauseum. But Lambert took a mainstream leap with her third LP, Revolution, fusing anger with resignation. It was no concession: Lambert’s reflections, wit and fight-or-flee instincts cut deeper in “Dead Flowers,” “Only Prettier” and “White Liar.” She may still come home from the bar feeling ticked off, but on Revolution she peeked in the mirror on her way to the night’s final cigarette. The album was her biggest yet, but also her riskiest: Can an artist still develop and revolt at the same time?

You don’t know the half of it. On her new album, Four The Record, Lambert comes full-circle, staring down every woman-scorned cliché imaginable with brilliant, atypical attention to musical detail. Lambert’s latest songs capture duality from end to end.

The songs playing to her type are deeper. The “Fastest Girl In Town” makes you think you can hang with her on a whiskey joyride, but she’s got a surprise before it ends. The airport metaphor of “Baggage Claim” sounds straightforward enough – she’s not here to pick up your crap – but you don’t get the point in one sitting. Even simple love songs like “Safe” and “Better In The Long Run” (a duet with husband Blake Shelton) aren’t proclamations, they’re dialogues: You have to return to pick up on the details.

It’s a joy to return, too, because Four The Record is a musical coup. Few country artists attempt such diversity. “Fine Tune” is one of her strangest, most electrifying songs: Singing through distortion, Lambert turns what should be a heavy-handed auto-care metaphor and into a horny boiler. “Easy Living” fronts as a simple paean to kicking back, but features the odd detail of indecipherable TV chatter in the background. Where the tricks stop, Lambert’s band delivers grandly – they stick with every turn, slowdown and spray of gravel these songs demand.

More than half of the album's songs were written by others, a first for a Lambert album. So it could partly play as the “Miranda” character reinterpreted by outsiders (though most have written for her before). But Lambert inhabits each song so thoroughly, it feels like knowledge that she would have come up with sooner or later regardless. Whether accidentally or not, Lambert’s four-album story is a progression of character and pacing. Nobody in popular music is more in command of their talent or career, and that trumps image every time.

Now That's What I Call Music!

2011-10-25T20:18:00.000-07:00

In Re: Potential Marketing Strategies For Lou Reed & Metallica’s New Album Lulu.

If you’re a hardcore fan of Metallica at any stage of their career, especially if you’re adamant about the superiority of the first four albums of their catalog and equally as adamant that since then they’ve gone to shit, you will hate this album. This review means nothing to you. Take my advice and move along. [But if you love razor-sharp wit, read on! -- Ed.]

If you’re a hardcore Lou Reed fan, you questioned the logic of this pairing but were open to it, albeit reluctantly so, if for no other purpose than perverse fascination with how it would sound. You’re not open, trust me. You’ll have no pleasant experiences with this album; you won’t grow into it the way you grew into the Banana Album or even Berlin. I don’t know how much illumination this review will provide you either.

In addition, this album is not going to play very well to certain isolated demographic groups, including but not limited to: the elderly, vegetarians, children between the ages of 3 and 12, those who hydrate themselves, the employed, and those with opposable thumbs.

I also think this album will not be popular with fans of music.

That leaves only two pertinent, obviously marketable targets for the new album, Lulu, by Lou Reed & Metallica. These subsets are:

Dead people.
Insomniacs, possibly but not necessarily medicated, for whom the combination of exhaustion and stimulation has produced an inverted excretory urge, resulting in the sudden, unquantifiable and assuredly temporary predilection for hearing an over-the-hill street preacher drifting into the latter stages of Tourette’s, verbally harassing a bemused metal band who have just come back from a killing spree in which seven people and hundreds of metronomes were hurtled to their deaths from a Goodyear blimp.

I can confirm that for at least part of Saturday evening, October 22, I was in one of those two subsets. I don’t think it was the dead people, although a few more listens to Lulu and I might have died or at least gotten syphilis.

For this write-up, I am tempted to emulate my biggest journalistic hero, Roger Ebert; specifically his review for the 2009 cult horror film The Human Centipede. Ebert gave the film “no star rating.” Not zero stars, which would indicate the lowest grade – he didn’t assign it any star rating at all. “I refuse to do it,” he wrote. “The star rating system is unsuited to this film. Is the movie good? Is it bad? Does it matter? It is what it is and occupies a world where the stars don't shine.”

I agree with Ebert (although if forced I would give The Human Centipede two and a half stars for execution) (or is that excretion?). The entirety of the appeal, the justification of the existence of The Human Centipede, was its premise. The Human Centipede wasn’t a story, it was a motive. Plot did not matter, although it had one. Theme didn’t matter, unless you count meta-commentary a theme. I suppose the acting was good, but in conversing about The Human Centipede, did you ever say, “Yeah, but the performances were superlative”?

I almost feel the same way about Lulu. It is this year's Sex And The City 2. It sounds like a poetry slam in which all participants are stricken with food poisoning. It has all the attention to detail as does Bob Dylan's Self-Portrait. It has a thematic device, based on a pair of plays by German playwright Frank Wedekind, who specialized in critiquing the sexual hang-ups and preventive attitudes of Victorian-era capitalist Europe. (Just like Master Of Puppets!) That doesn’t matter. Ignore it. I just put it there because you deserve full information if you need it, like on nutritional labels and insurance policies.

What matters about Lulu is that it happened and we were powerless to stop it. When first we heard about it, our jaws dropped. We then moved our eyes away from Pitchfork’s news section, gulped, and cast our gazes outside the window. In our mind’s eye, the view outside that window shifted to a bleak, sandy landscape, where half-decomposed cow skulls and gangs of flies told all the story that was there. On the far-off horizon we saw a hideous, gargantuan being: one-third animal, one-third machine and one-third rust. It was lumbering towards us, and we knew trying to run away was pointless because our backs were up against an impenetrable force field and we couldn’t go in reverse. Like the trapped, newly blobby protagonist in Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream,” we motionlessly watched as it inched closer, knowing that it might not arrive for months, but it would indeed arrive and would chew us into stringy, lumpy bite-sized pieces while muttering in a robotic, vaguely Bavarian accent.

Not the smoothest way to shill for pre-orders, but that’s what waiting for Lulu felt like. And now it’s here. And I’ve heard it. I’ve met fate and fate’s met me. So, you ask, how’d it go?

Well, to be honest, I first heard it late at night through a couple really small stereo computer speakers. As Lou himself has mentioned, you have to listen to Lulu on a big speaker set to get the full effect. If you first hear Lulu on what Lou calls “Radio Shack speakers,” it won’t sound the same. To me, at least during that first hearing, I thought Lulu was, if not exactly what you’d call “good,” then at least “amusing.” But I was shortchanging it. I had to listen to it in higher fidelity.

And it worked: Until you listen to Lulu through a speaker the size of a Subaru Legacy, you won’t be able to comprehend how awesomely, epically, painstakingly terrible it is.

At least on small speakers it still had hope. Maybe not that it would be good, but that we could enjoy some element of it, could restock our bellybags with that old-fashioned irony that was popular before the recession. Instead, the most we can do with Lulu is learn from it. It has gone from head-scratching collaboration, to an awful pre-release PR experience, to an after-school special on the dangers of cough syrup.

There’s this great old record biz story about Warner executives who gathered in 1979 to hear Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk for the first time. It was their first album since the mega-smash Rumours. It was a double-album featuring a stripped-down, nervy, decidedly tense sound that contained none of Rumours’ comforting slickness. The great line is, upon hearing Tusk, those Warner employees “saw their Christmas bonus checks going out the window.”*

Imagine if those same execs heard Lulu. They would have jumped out that window to chase down their bonus checks.

Look, it’s an adage as old as the hills: “Thrash bands often have a difficult time replicating the urbanized tenets of early 20th century modernist playwrights.” Ozzy used to chant that before every Sabbath show in the ‘70s. Metallica should have known better.

Judging from the lyrical content of Lulu – hey guys, news flash, Reed fancies the same imagery as the Marquis De Sade! – I’m guessing the elevator pitch of this album to their respective management teams was, “Picture the uncompromising, unsparing, free-wheeling lyrical assault of Lou Reed at his crankiest with the full-on, metallically apocalyptic sound flood of Metallica!” On paper it – well, I was gonna say it works, but I really mean it conjures interest.

But for all the insistent spillage of id, which I guess in a sense is admirable, Lulu also shows how the greatness of Reed’s and Metallica’s past work depended on at least some tacit restraint. Reed's best songs had powerful melodic elements, and Metallica used mathematics to better effect than they used anarchy. They confuse “refusal to compromise” with “good art,” or even just plain “art.” We’re back to Ebert’s view of The Human Centipede here.

There are aspects of Lulu that I find comically endearing. Lars Ulrich’s drumming on “Pumping Blood” is one – he’s trying to channel his inner Keith Moon while Lou is speed-spewing things like “Waggle my ass like a dark prostitute/Coagulating heart!” That's just adorable. And anytime James Hetfield opens his mouth on this album is comedy gold. He’s like a wandering, bungling Pip to Reed’s drooling, short-breathed Gladys Knight. He does not sing his lines so much as he allows them to barge in.

The rest of it? You’re just going to have to wait with all the other bobbysoxers and teenyboppers lining up at midnight to get their hands on this album. But we have to get back to the marketing plan. We’ve determined that it’s not an artistic success. We’ve agreed that it’s bad enough to not just endanger Reed’s and Metallica’s future careers, but to tarnish their legacies as well. I know Reed has been drolly saying in interviews that Lulu is “the best thing I’ve ever done.” You should know he told Lester Bangs the exact same thing in 1975 about Metal Machine Music. And that he eventually retracted that statement, in his typically caustic, inexact manner that makes the questioner feel stupid.

My associates will tell you that Lulu is an album with not one shred of redeeming quality. I disagree. There are three pillars of Lulu that certain people – certain very, very bored people with loads of disposable income or file-sharing savvy – will find of value, and this is where all our marketing plans should be focused:

(A) It will cure artists’ historic struggles with self-worth. Hearing something like Lulu will reassure artists that no matter how mediocre or pedestrian they, or others, perceive their work to be, that two artists of great stature combined to make a gigantic mistake like this. This plank will especially ring true for artists who have been under constant media assault as to their talents. Rebecca Black should get this album immediately.

(B) Connected to that, this album will be of interest to professors of collaborative theology or cultural anthropology who wish to instruct their classes on the enormous range of human potential. Human know-how can result in beautiful masterworks like Street Hassle or Ride The Lightning. Yet the same people who made those milestones can make something like Lulu. We should be in awe of the fact that we, mere mortals, are able to achieve both ends of that spectrum in one lifetime. Astonishing. Affirming.

(C) Finally, I believe this album will have true appeal to people who root for the underdog. You won’t find a bigger underdog, or a bigger dog period, than Lulu. People are taking turns beating this album up in the playground, and it won’t even be out officially for another week. Perhaps you’re the type who tends to his rats, like Willard, because you don’t believe the social strata has a space for you. Perhaps you need a truly hopeless cause to champion. Well, then, maybe Lulu’s something you should embrace! Take it into your home, wrap it up in a blanket, maybe put it in a basket with some chew toys. Keep it warm. Beef up your hero complex, and maybe at the end of the day, feel that you’ve done something charitable for society, that you’ve made a little rainbow dent in the blackened skies of a cold, crusty world.

Just don’t actually play the album or you’ll want to carpet-bomb an orphanage.

*(P.S. Tusk is Fleetwood Mac's best album, one of my 30 or so favorites of all time.)

Check-In & Playlist: October 14, 2011

2011-10-14T22:07:00.000-07:00

Last week Hank, my three-year-old son, decided that the baby on the cover of Nirvana's Nevermind album was, in fact, him. We have the 20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition of Nevermind lying around the house, and upon seeing it, apparently, it brought back memories of that time we submerged him in a pool and dangled a dollar bill in his face. That in itself was adorable, but now he's actually listening to the album. At some point yesterday he took the CD, put it in his "record player" (I have no idea how he knows of record players), cranked it up and starting singing at the top of his lungs. This is a significant leap, because the last album we got him was the soundtrack to Jake and the Neverland Pirates. (I suppose there's a physical similarilty between the words "Neverland" and "Nevermind," neither of which are, of course, actual words. Also, the Jake soundtrack sounds a lot like Flogging Molly, who do not sound like Nirvana, but are definitely closer to Nirvana than, say, The Wiggles.) The sucker's already outstrode the cultural advances I made at his age. Jeez -- he's already ahead of where I was when I was seven. And we have not one ounce of Ritalin in our house. Parenting's great!

I don't know what Hank's favorite Nevermind song is yet, but judging by the progress of his toilet training, I like to think it's "Territorial Pissings."

Playlist:
Hurry Up, We're Dreaming, M83
Heat Treatment, Graham Parker & The Rumour
One Kiss Leads To Another, Hackamore Brick
The Whole Love, Wilco
Eraser, The Knux
The Less You Know, The Better, DJ Shadow
Servant, Kuedo
Ashes & Fire, Ryan Adams
The Sound Of His Own Voice, John Wesley Harding

We Got Your Disease

2011-10-02T22:52:00.000-07:00

Forgive me for going off-topic -- I know, I know, what topics have I offered lately that would indicate that I'm going off-topic now? -- but I think it's probably important for my recuperation to write this all out and express myself.

Yes, I said "recuperation." If you haven't heard yet, my condition just got a diagnosis. That came a few seconds after I found out I had a condition. News flies fast and furious here. We have cable.

How about I quit talking in riddles? That sounds good. Here we go: Hey, everybody, there's at least a sporting chance that I'm mentally diseased! But not according to a doctor, or a psychologist, or any number of former associates (though I imagine some of them might concur with the diagnosis).

No, my status as a mentally diseased person was inferred by the religion I grew up in - the Jehovah's Witnesses, based in Brooklyn, although they're selling off a lot of their properties at the moment and moving, as so many New Yorkers do, upstate a ways.

I of course have a link, as my condition was rather insensitively made public. But in the U.K. I got some friends, or as they call them "blokes," who are even more ticked off than I am. Here's the gist:

Detectives are investigating whether (an) article, published in July’s edition of The Watchtower, is in breach of Britain’s religious hatred laws...

"Suppose that a doctor told you to avoid contact with someone who is infected with a contagious, deadly disease," part of the article stated.

"You would know what the doctor means, and you would strictly heed his warning. Well, apostates are 'mentally diseased', and they seek to infect others with their disloyal teachings."

A group of former Witnesses, based in Portsmouth, have made an official complaint to Hampshire Police about the article. Police have launched an investigation.

I wrangle with my newfound condition in true movie-of-the-week fashion after the jump.

A little context for the newsy bit: The reason British police are investigating this publication is speculation that The Watchtower may have run afoul of legislation, enacted in 2006, that addresses the use of religious "hate speech." This legislation sprung as a reaction against anti-Muslim hate speech. I don't know if it's ever been applied to speech against ex-members of a Christian-derived religion or non-believers, but it wouldn't surprise me if this is the first time.

Former Witnesses are all up in a dander about this. I can see why. "Mentally diseased" is the most pointed, emotionally loaded phrase The Watchtower has ever used to describe us. This isn't some mild epithet like "disfellowshipped persons," or a vague value judgment like "bad association." This is some House M.D. stuff. "Mentally diseased" connotes degradation, a worsening condition, a cerebral virus. I can picture Hugh Laurie belittling me right now before curing me with strategically-placed balloons and spilled cognac just before time fatally runs out. And then American Idol comes on.

(Wait, AmIdol doesn't follow House anymore, does it? It's local news or Cleveland Show reruns or something. Or did AmIdol ever follow House to begin with? See? I'm so mentally diseased, I can't even follow the lineup of a network that only broadcasts two hours a night.)

The point being, the strong language of the term "mentally diseased" opens up a new frontier for The Watchtower: It comes right out and says what they've been imploring their rank-and-file to believe for years without really saying specifically. If you didn't believe in "the truth" after being exposed to it so religiously (excuse me) and relentlessly for years, then something must have grabbed a hold of you and sickened your mind.

Before now this wasn't in any of their publications -- but it was all over, in implication, their shunning and disfellowshipment policies. A person who's changed their beliefs was kind of viewed as a leper: You feel bad for his condition and hope he eventually improves, but you better not bring him a covered dish.

While the use of such a potent phrase as "mentally diseased" is a little surprising, the fact that The Watchtower has to employ it now isn't surprising at all. That's because there was never an organized, accessible opposition to The Watchtower before the Internet went and screwed everything up.

In 1985, when you left JW's, information backing up your decision was extraordinarily difficult to come by. There were some ex-JW support groups, but finding them was not easy. I quit in 1983 when I was a teenager, and did not know about any such group until seven years later. That's when someone I knew who worked in the religion industry pointed me to a cult awareness network, who eventually led me to Witness Inc. I had to read a lot of books that were printed on paper back then. I saw documents, but couldn't take them from the premises. Additionally, the guy I talked to was, although not outright antagonistic, at least formidably pissed off. I entered his sanctum and immediately ingested a bunch of fear. It could have been the trepidation that comes when you are about to discover something that will alter the course of your life, but at the time it felt like he was just as liable to claw my eyes out. It made for an unsettling experience, but it was all we had at the time. The Watchtower could handle and contain that kind of movement back then.

It cannot now. Just as the Internet has fostered communities of people around the notions of self-help, political diatribe, Kardashians and a nearly Abyssinian worship of cute kittens, they have also banded together former Jehovah's Witnesses. And it's not good for The Watchtower's business. Now when one of them comes to your door and offers you a tract, you can thank them, wish them a good day, close the door, and head to your computer to look up "Jehovah's Witnesses" in your favorite search engine.

Spoiler alert: Not all results will paint them in a positive light. You'll encounter some rebuttals, some of them quite spirited, complete with sarcastic JPGs (most of them featuring cats, of course).

So the best The Watchtower could do was control what they already had. Well, that's not true - the best they could do is embrace or at least allow some sort of reformation. But they have this problem with admitting they were wrong. It's very similar to George W. Bush's and the Tea Party's problem with the same thing. If you admit you're wrong, you imply some sort of weakness, and once you've done that there's no telling how much milk you'll spoil. In lieu of that, then, The Watchtower Society started imposing more limits and restrictions, which to be fair is the thing they're best at.

I've noticed some JW friends' (yes, I have some) Facebook profiles have completely vanished in the last six months. This has to come from some admonishment about the dangers of social media. They have already (in the same article quoted above) told members not to comment on the blogs of apostates. Since social media is quite popular these days, The Watchtower had to come up with a designation that states, once and for all, that any apostates JW's might come across on the World Wide Web must be avoided - not just for convenience's sake, but for the survival and extended health of all its members in the near and distant future. (Which is kind of strange, since they preach that Armageddeon is only a few heartbeats away. Nothing messes up a health kick like the threat of an apocalypse.)

Ergo - "mentally diseased." In quotation marks, so they can always fall back on the idea that they never came right out and were literal about the mental disease. They were air-quoting "mentally diseased," which effectively reduces the phrase from a diagnosis to a metaphor.

Which is how I think they're going to skirt the British investigation. And to be honest, I'm not sure I think they ran afoul of hate-speech laws myself. I mean, personally, in my perfect world, every time some crazy person says things like "homosexuality is a disease" or "KISS stands for 'Kids In Satan's Service," that person would be rigorously humiliated. But they aren't, and there's always some twist of vernacular that proves their speech is not hateful, and we have this little freedom-of-speech thing that occasionally irks us, but that we must always defend. Like that cousin of ours who doesn't bathe enough, collects too many figurines and still thinks Obama was born in Kenya -- but who really hasn't done anything terribly illegal. Yet.

About the most we Americans can do is say this kind of speech is really, really, really stupid. Then we have to leave it. I'm not from England, so I don't know what the culture over there thinks about this kind of speech. But since we're somewhat close kin to the English culture and world view, I'm going to guess that the investigation will amount to nothing, and The Watchtower will be cleared of all charges, as they usually, frustratingly are, without having to go through the mortification of a public apology.

Would I like to see that? Would I procure some enjoyment out of seeing officials from The Watchtower Society being forced to squirm and take something back? Would I laugh? Would I snicker? Would I express some jubilation? Would I cackle and point my fingers at the sky and say "Yes! Yes! Whoooo-hoo!"

Of course I would. But with dignity. Always dignity.

As for my condition, though? Well, looking back over the description, I'm not what you'd call a real hardcore apostate. In fact, technically speaking, I was never a Jehovah's Witness since I was not baptized. I was just raised around it day after day for the first 15 years of my life. Members of my family are still Jehovah's Witnesses. They do not shun me. Quite the opposite. We all get along great. They love the fact that I have a beautiful family, seemed to be somewhat gainfully employed and didn't sell all my teeth for crack. They treat me well.

I also don't like bashing Jehovah's Witnesses. I love bashing the organization that rules over them, but not the everyday JW who's been told not to question the organization. I don't even care about their doctrine, just their management. I have no particular response to their belief system. Most of it seems based on faulty arithmetic and failed predictions, but I do both of those all the time. They believe what they want and that's everybody's right. I'm no longer interested in debating the particulars of the theology. I'm kind of exhausted with all theologies, to be frank.

Realizing that right to your own belief was the first thing that led me out of Jehovah's Witnesses, actually. What made them so different? What's so great about their exclusivity? Isn't the arrogance of certainty, at compassion's expense, exactly what all those New Testament writers were aligned against? Would you mind checking with those writers before you lay down your edicts? Their being dead for 2,000 years is no excuse. It's just a logistical challenge.

I don't care what you believe as long as you don't call for the destruction or degradation of someone who's not you. "Mentally diseased" is the closest The Watchtower has ever come to that kind of statement, and it's revealing. It indicates things are not going well internally. They're playing with house money. Skepticism is up. You can now Google things. Armageddeon's not a marketable product anymore -- at least not the Judeo-Christian kind, we outsourced it to the Mayans. And, well, there's this other scandal that sort of came up a few years ago, which couldn't have helped.

But am I shocked? Not really. The Watchtower Society's been heading toward this sweeping, disparaging, even more dictatorial way for awhile. It certainly doesn't mean ex-JW's like myself are mentally diseased whatsoever. Which is a shame, 'cause I was looking forward to the disability checks from the state.

Check-In & Playlist: September 24, 2011

2011-09-24T21:27:00.000-07:00

The playlist covers more than a month so there's lots of stuff on there, but there are some stray tracks and contained moments of spastic album listening that I feel compelled to bring attention to here:

Nirvana. It's the 20th anniversary of Nevermind's release. The commemoration has taken over Seattle so completely that I thought I saw a giant baby flying on top of the Space Needle earlier. There was also the 20th anniversary tribute concert which was expertly covered by one of the Seattle Times' most sensational breakout new writers who deserves his own publication, my God, he's that good! Anyway, I went through most of the week deliberately not listening to Nevermind, until last night, when I figured I should listen to find out what all the fuss was about.

Nice record. But I listened to In Utero right afterwards, and I think I decided that if I was still in my early mid-20's, I'd probably have listened to In Utero more.

Bill Wells Trio: "D.A.D.E.". Heard this on Wednesday's Irwin Chusid show on WFMU and immediately went on a crazy goose chase trying to find a copy of it. I did but I can't say where. If I were producing the series finale of the show about my life, this song would be the one I played over the sentimental, looking-back montage capturing the emotional high points and moments of discovery from my time on earth. Then I'd get hit by the bus.

A bunch of newly released Queen remasters. Everything from News Of The World to Hot Space. Including the Flash Gordon soundtrack. I decided to give Hot Space another try, having once been turned off so overwhelmingly by the presence of "Body Language" and encouraged by the song "Calling All Girls." I was pretty much right the first time.

The rest are below. I've been trying to get into a writing frame of mind. Haven't gotten there yet. The keyhole's too small. But I've got a line on a pickaxe. Or maybe it's a fishing rod. I have no idea. I don't do enough drugs.

Playlist:
Pull Up Some Dust And Sit Down, Ry Cooder
How Do You Do, Mayer Hawthorne
Obscurities, Stephin Merritt
Thursday, The Weeknd
Neighborhoods, blink-182
Seeds We Sow, Lindsey Buckingham
Cults, Cults
Black Up, Shabazz Palaces

I haven't even opened this album yet, but I already know by its cover that it is the greatest metal album of all time

2011-08-16T17:40:00.000-07:00

Rhapsody Of Fire's From Chaos To Eternity:

"After 15 years of fantasy oriented lyrics, this is the last time you'll hear Sir Christopher Lee's narrations."

"Thy shall defend the empire against the scourge of False Metal."

Check-In & Playlist: August 10, 2011

2011-08-10T23:13:00.000-07:00

By now the news has gotten out all over, so let's go ahead and confirm it before the implants TMZ stuck in my head start peaking out and flashing that National Enquirer font in front of my eyes: Yes, we're having a third child. Expected date is February 2012. We've had both our other children in leap years and this one (whom I've nicknamed TBD) will follow suit. They've also been election years, which means if political candidates come around town and want to pursue the whole baby-kissing cliché, we'd have a pretty good shot at providing them with a photo op. That is, if we chose to attend a political rally, which, at this point in time, runs against every single one of my inclinations. Also, to those who worry that we are having too many children and over-populating the earth: Rest assured, TBD will be our last project in these efforts. We're done breeding. We've made our point.

Playlist:
24 Hour Karate School Part II, Ski Beatz
Success Is Certain, Royce da 5'9"
Ximena Sariñana (self-titled)
Ghost On The Canvas, Glen Campbell
Chief, Eric Church
Credo, The Human League
Doctor Bird: The Soca Anthology, The Mighty Sparrow

Check-In & Playlist: July 16, 2011

2011-07-16T00:42:00.000-07:00

Hey, Los Angeles, where I spent five not-bad years of my life! So you can't go anywhere on the 405 for a couple days, eh? So there'll be 30-mile backups that will choke the industry of the weekend, huh? You know what the media's calling it? They're calling it "Carmageddeon!" Either that or "Carpocalypse!" You may be hamstrung and stir-crazy, but you've got your own vehicular catchphrase -- two, even! -- that both describes your hell and mocks it! I feel for ya. Terrible times in the Southland. I mean, getting swept out of the NBA playoffs, and now this?

Here's the thing: Yeah, God's mocking you right now, I know you're in deep. But you know what? God's mocking Seattle, too. Because it's the middle of July, the rest of the nation is jitterbugging al fresco under the sun, and up here in our NBA-less Emerald City we're getting the kind of weather you guys occasionally, and I mean very occasionally, get in the middle of freaking winter. Plus the Mariners are choking, but that's actually right on schedule.

What I'm saying is this: Maybe this would be a great weekend for you all to make a very quick trip to the supermarket (hopefully you're near one), get materials that burn, invite some of those neighbors you don't really know over, and have a barbecue that lasts all weekend. Stay close. Get to know each other. The tar pits will be there for you when the weekend's over. Loosen up, L.A.! You have sun! You can grill things under said sun! We just want a 48-hour window where our climate doesn't resemble middle earth's!

I'm just messin' with ya, L.A., you know I love ya.

Playlist:
Nothing Is Wrong, Dawes
Where Country Grows, Ashton Shepherd
Join Us, They Might Be Giants
The Old Magic, Nick Lowe
Skying, The Horrors

Check-In & Playlist: July 13, 2011

2011-07-13T13:55:00.000-07:00

I came up with some "gotcha" questions for Sarah Palin this afternoon, for the next barrage of media assaults she'll have to face. These are the types of questions that seem to set her off and get her sympathy on Fox News. If you really wanna tick her off:

"How are you?"
"Excuse me, do you have the time?"
"Nice weather we're having, isn't it?"
"Could you sign this?"
"Knock-knock."
"Wouldn't Mitt Romney look great on Mount Rushmore? His face already looks like it's been chiseled in stone."
"Do you know who's buried in Grant's Tomb?"
"Do you like me? Check: __Yes __No."
"Would you like your dressing on the side?"
"Have you heard the good news of the kingdom?"
"Does this shirt make me look, you know, like a poseur?"
"Et tu, Frankie?"

Playlist:
More Tea?, Professor Elemental/Tom Caruana
Tell My Sister, Kate & Anna McGarrigle
Ritual Union, Little Dragon
We Must Become The Pitiless Censors Of Ourselves, John Maus
Within & Without, Washed Out

Life gives you Clemons

2011-06-19T00:49:00.000-07:00

"This is the important part!" Bruce Springsteen yells to the crowd in the concert version of "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out," which you can find on his Live 1975-85 box set.

The song's a loose retelling - more like a fictionalized, alternate version - of the formation of Springsteen's E Street Band, maybe the most famous backing band in rock history. Literally, it's about a musician finding his niche after not being able to define himself by himself. The first two verses are a little mysterious. All we can decipher is Scooter, the musician, meaning Bruce, fighting against unknown forces, disappearing in the urban fog while more stabilized success stories take his place. Springsteen himself has laughingly said he doesn't really know what a "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out" is. But it's chilly.

The third verse comes, and "this is the important part!" Scooter stumbles upon his muse. He had all these big ideas, and he can almost get them down on paper, can almost align them with the rest of the world, but couldn't do it without an accomplice. But finally he does: "The change was made uptown and the Big Man joined the band."

Clarence Clemons then rips into a brief saxophone fill. On the Live 1975-85 performance, at this point in the song, the stadium audience starts screaming. It's their loudest exhortation of the entire song, and probably rivaled the top moments of the entire night.

They're cheering wildly for a sideman, a musician defined almost strictly as such. You know how long and hard sidemen have toiled just east of the stage light without so much as a compliment from the audience? Ask the Funk Brothers, or Booker T. & the MG's. Ask Crazy Horse for that matter.

Clemons, who died Saturday, was not your ordinary sideman. It's conceivable that Springsteen could have been a superstar without him. But he might have not become the myth.

The tenor saxophone is the A-type of the saxophone family. Depending on your point of view, it's either the most brassily expressive of the sax family (Coltrane's "Giant Steps") or the sleaziest (Bill Justis' "Raunchy"). In rock and roll it's the only saxophone that really works, because it's the only reed instrument that can hold its aggression when competing against guitars and drums.

The first two Springsteen albums are, notably, much more intimate than the work he became most famous for. Clarence Clemons was on both of them, but except for the jazz-driven "Spirit In The Night" and Springsteen's first big epic "Rosalita," he melds into the rest of the wind and horn sections. It's a minor supporting role. Even on "Rosalita" he doesn't rip into an unscripted solo - he's part of a faction. He's in the hit squad, he's not the hitman.

That changed with Born To Run. Whether Springsteen calculated the myth or not (more likely producer Jon Landau did), it was that 1975 album that gave Springsteen the identity he'd have for the next decade-plus. He knew he'd have to take a chance. Back then reflective singing-songwriting was a big commercial boon, and the first two albums showed Bruce could have settled into that wordy, restrained prose if he chose to. He was a "new Dylan," after all, of which there were approximately 4,000 at the time.

He chose otherwise. Although intimacy was nice, Springsteen was too restless to remain still. American rock and roll - I mean mainline, blue-collar rock and roll, not heavy metal or glam - had lost its sense of mobility. There was an epic story to be told about rock and roll, in which passion overtakes and almost gets out of hand, in which youth struggles to realize its big dreams, in which you need to get into a convertible and drive down the highway, fast. This would require reverb.

It would also require Clarence Clemons. The moment Clemons erupts in the title track of Born To Run, Springsteen's whole M.O. changes. The song hits the accelerator. Clemons' tenor, full of aggression and sleaze, takes the kid's loose dreams and frustrations and gives them an engine. The metal hits the floor. Scooter rolls the top down, his traveling companion Wendy straps in, and the Big Man is the most practical, dominating hood ornament in the history of songs about automobiles.

("Hood ornament" in this case does not refer to the often meaningless purpose of hood ornaments. It refers to something you put on your car meant to show the rest of the world that you intend to kick ass. Like those guys in Texas who put bullhorns on their grills. I don't know what the Jersey equivalent of the bullhorn hood ornament would be. A tenor sax would be a good one.)

When compiling a list of Clemons' career highlights like I had to do earlier this evening, it was almost impossible to not include all six songs on Born To Run where he figures prominently. The original version of "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out," appropriately, is on it. There's a deep track called "Night" where his riff pushes Springsteen almost as hard as "Born To Run." There's a song called "She's The One," using the Bo Diddley rhythm, that Springsteen claims he wrote for the sole purpose of hearing Clemons' solo.

And then there's "Jungleland," closing in on ten minutes, that features Clemons' greatest solo ever. It's over a slow beat. But Clemons gives it urgency.

I guess that would be the hashtag for Clemons' work with Bruce: #urgency. With Clemons, Springsteen had a direct link to the early strategies of rock and roll. Clemons brought the carnal simplicity of Gary U.S. Bonds' "Quarter To Three" (a Springsteen concert favorite) into the complex psychology of "Born To Run." It made Springsteen's music sound familiar, even though it was, when you look more closely at the components, a pretty new approach.

Clemons' other great moment was Springsteen's 1980 album The River. You thought growing up was hard on Born To Run and Darkness On The Edge Of Town? It's even more catastrophic on The River. It's actually more schizophrenic and chaotic, too. It's a mixed-up circus where a young adult has to face unhappy compromises, unpleasant realizations, frantic parties and a remote, somewhat threatening future at least partially depicted an a car graveyard. (You guessed it: The River is my favorite Bruce album.)

And Clemons' performance on The River is heroic. He screams with joy as the narrator finds R&R in "Out In The Street." He mocks a troublesome in-law on "Sherry Darling," one of Bruce's funniest songs. He sadly comments on the charmless, robotic sex of "Ramrod." He spits at death right in the face on "Cadillac Ranch." And he provides the singer of "Drive All Night" with his lone comfort - perfectly timed, insistent at first, establishing his subject's passions, echoing the singer's devotion to his lover in powerful terms, then fading out, drifting, creating a segue to leave the lover to his intimacy.

That's another thing Clemons gave to Springsteen: surety. The affirmation that whatever the character felt was legit. It could be an exclamation point or a bunch of repeated commas, but it was rarely a question mark. I can't think of a corollary from the world of drama - "Greek chorus" came to mind, but a Greek chorus is frequently mocking. Clemons never mocked his boss's characters. (Just their in-laws.) He caught their joy, release, anger and fear, all those vulnerabilities Springsteen showed in his writing. He was never a distraction.

Lots can be said about Clemons' massive importance in Bruce's live show, which for a long time was the greatest live show on the planet. He was a man whose good cheer and humble happiness shot through the screen. His sax playing was so unique that you couldn't really mistake it for anyone else. (Randy Newman poked fun at it in a song once.)

All that's important, especially if you knew and loved the man as much as Bruce did. But for me, it overshadows the role he played in making Bruce who he is. Whether the myth of Springsteen annoys you or not (and really, it shouldn't in the least - we should be happy when good things like fame happen to good guys like Springsteen), Clemons had more than a passing hand in making Springsteen's vision clear. Maybe even to Springsteen himself.

And if you doubt that, just go back into the convertible that you've never owned but you've always had in your mind. Drive extremely fast. Don't worry - you have a great compass blowin' a mean sax.

Could Lars have scored with Nico? Wait, that's not a fair question - everybody scored with Nico

2011-06-16T23:53:00.000-07:00

From Pitchfork:

Here's one nobody was expecting: Metallica and Lou Reed have gotten together and recorded an entire collaborative full-length album, Metallica announced on their website yesterday. The LP doesn't have a title or a release date yet, but they finished recording it last week, and it's 10 songs long.

Here's my problem with this whole enterprise. It is not the likelihood of this project's failure or success. It is not the age difference between Metallica and Lou Reed, whose window for being in a thrash band closed sometime around the Eisenhower administration.

No, what I'm struggling with is that Metallica and Lou Reed could not have come from more opposite points of origin. Reed and the Velvet Underground cut their teeth in Andy Warhol's Factory collective, which to my understanding had lots of artists, models, filmmakers and junkies that set the bar for cool in the New York of the 1960's. I don't really know, because unless my mother really got lost while on a sightseeing trip to New York in the '60s after I was born, I never went to the Factory. Suffice to say, my general impression is that it was driven by equal parts art, fashion, contemporaneousness, average-to-excellent quality junk, and a relentless quest for apathy.

Metallica came from a garage in L.A. They drank beer in those dayz. Dave Mustaine drank lots of beer. Someone probably had acne.

And the vision I'm contending with is very simple: Can you picture James Hetfield waltzing around Warhol's Factory in the '60s? If by chance you can, here is the unanswerable question I just raised on my Facebook page: If Hetfield had wandered around the Factory and encoutered its denizens -- who would beat up who?

You can't answer that question. It cancels out. You can't say whether Hetfield would kick Paul Morrissey's ass, or whether Edie Sedgwick would kick Hetfield's ass. It is an infinitely repeating question that has no answer and only manufactures hypothetical agony. You will go crazy and will not be in any shape to ride lightning.

Maybe - just maybe - this is the kind of question the Metallica-Reed album will answer. Maybe that's the point. Or maybe Cliff Burton just had celestial milk come out of his nose, and he and Ronnie James Dio are having the laugh of their lives right now.

Lester Bangs, in the meantime, is probably shaking his head so hard his halo is dislodged.

Rock of ageists

2011-05-05T00:57:00.000-07:00

Fleet Foxes live, Seattle - 5/3/2011

There was this panel at South By Southwest in Austin last March that I considered going to. It was moderated by Jim Caligiuri of The Austin Chronicle, and featured some not-unknown names from the world of rock criticism and journalism. Thrust up your devil signs for Geoffrey Himes of The Baltimore City Paper, Chris Morris of Daily Variety, and freelancer Ed Ward, who is the "rock and roll historian" for NPR's Fresh Air With Terry Gross. Sure, we're not talking titans like Greil Marcus or Dave Marsh, or (hushed reverence) Lester Bangs. We're not even talking Michael Azerrad. But they've all spent their lives more or less carving a career in rock theory where absolutely nothing like it existed before, and they knew their stuff. I had to give them respect.

I'm looking at this listing in my handy SXSW Windows Phone app. I notice the panel is entitled, "I'm Not Old, Your Music Does Suck."

Yeah, I think to myself -- that'll help.

The description: "A great deal has been made about the decline of the music business. But few talk about the decline of the music. What if part of the reason the business is in trouble is that the music doesn't touch people that way it once did? How much is the lack or loss of gatekeepers responsible for the state of today's music? From American Idol to pitchfork.com, what are the reasons for the state of today's music?"

The most fascinating word in that description is "gatekeepers." As if they're sentries. Palace guards. Maybe your basic minimum-wage rent-a-cops. I wonder if they're armed. You can infer from the word "gatekeepers" that their function is to prevent things from entering whatever hallowed sector lies beyond the gate. Not necessarily people, but surely certain elements, you can further infer, are harmful to this storied area. Gatekeepers have seen the party-crashers before and they have detailed, fully ingested instructions on how to crush them. There is not a laminate or wristband they will not destroy. They may even consume a few just to prove a point. They're the gatekeepers. That's what they do.

And judging from the title of the panel, we're to believe that at least somebody thinks these gatekeepers are, or should be, "old."

I ended up not going to the panel, mainly because it was impossible for me to get into most of the panels at SXSW last March, and my feet were famously killing me. But the name of the panel, while catchy, immediately put me off. Because as much as they assumed you were generalizing that they were "old," they were generalizing you as someone who makes music that "sucks."

Sure, the sassiest of those whose music reportedly sucks could have lobbed back some zingers if they knew their history. "Yeah? Well, your generation gave us 'In The Year 2525.' I believe your hands are dirty with the blood of 'In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.' Explain that one away, Mr. Brimley." But that would have been stooping to flip off. And playing right into the arrogance of that description.

Talkin' 'bout your g-g-g-g-g....

There is nothing so annoying to me, nothing so reflexively chafing, as the tendency of every generation to lionize their own age's aesthetics. It's not honoring the art of their time or their chronological peers. It's hoarding. The one thing that comes close to annoying me as much is the corollary that those of younger generations are somehow less worthy, too smitten by novelty, or too out-of-the-know to produce art that will last as long as they think theirs will.

That second thing doesn't annoy me quite as much as the first thing because, well, that's human nature, and nobody's figured out how to defeat that. Aesthetics informs every generation's identity, and you have to expect that they will defend that identity. Even I do. It disturbs me that both those things are being legitimized under the cloak of the musical literati.

I have a midlife crisis every other month. This has been going on for about two years. I had a huge one last weekend. I fear the onset of irrelevancy being concurrent with my advancement of age. And how do I usually retreat from it? With the music of my youth, my comfort food. Soul music from the '60s and '70s. Punk from the '70s and '80s. Power pop. Familiarity's a tonic, and I accept that.

But as the man said (actually I think it was a woman), "Nostalgia's not what it used to be."

You can't designate your age as a totem. Romanticism's great, but when tied to an era and not a truth, it spoils quickly. It does not age well. The fact is, time's going to move on long after we've died, when we can no longer program digital timing devices without calling our grandchildren. And just because we don't feel resonance within ourselves upon hearing something new, different and younger, doesn't mean we are free to universally declaim it.

FEAR.

Young people still make rock-based music. And speaking to them these days, I hear a tremendous amount of respect for artists decades older than they. They like you pretty much. None of this was more obvious than earlier this year, when Mumford & Sons and the Avett Brothers teamed up with Bob Dylan for the greatest Grammy performance I've seen in years, and the first thing in music history to make Dylan almost dance. It was obvious last night when I saw Fleet Foxes play a show that was as musically fluent and disciplined as I'd seen from kids who are still pretty young. These guys work. Surely your lectures about the value of hard work must've landed somewhere with them.

Sure, sure -- you agree those guys are okay, because they're working in folk-based genres. Of course you can appreciate them. But what do you do about James Blake, who's making arch electronic music that is so electronically affected that its humanity has to be compromised? (Hint: Blake is actually working in reverse.) What do you do about the pop diva craze, and its spiraling outrageousness? How are you expected to approve of any part of that? (Hint: That's trickier, but -- well, LaBelle. Grace Jones. Cher.)

The answer is: You're not supposed to do anything, because that's what you expected of your parents. To butt out. But for me, that's not acceptable. I'd rather take the chance that someone 20 years my junior is going to do something that's going to amaze me, than risk looking mean-spirited by beating him up with my cane. After which I'd probably get tazed anyway.

To blame pop cultural phenomenons like American Idol for the depreciation that isn't actually happening is foolish, too. You know they're going to go away someday. They're not Meet The Press. They're probably not even Gunsmoke. Every single rock generation had its unseemly outlets driven by commercialism. Donny & Marie. The hippie episode of Dragnet. Solid Gold. Jefferson Airplane shilling Levi's. Being a preservationist of your ideals means knowing when to stop giving transient forces too much power. They don't affect truth, and therefore shouldn't affect you, but you're spending so much time fearing a cultural boogeyman's effect on your ego that you're afraid it's going to destroy all you believe in. The fortitude of your artistic beliefs stands tall and strong, but you can be felled by a wayward hula hoop. Bullshit.

Yes, you did.

The same goes for Pitchfork. Whether or not you think they're elitist, annoying, horn-rimmed or whatever -- you think they're actually making music worse? I don't read their site out of habit. (I don't really read that much to begin with.) I get why people my age and younger might think they're, I don't know, snotty. I have them in as high a regard as I for with other scions of the online music press, which is, you guessed it, somewhere between "at least someone's trying" and "what's the point of trying?"

But the old gatekeepers have Pitchfork Media on their shitlist for deprecating music? How, exactly? Do they have some sort of militia? Are there codes they enforce? Who's building the robot army? Does an artist make records for Pitchfork these days? If you insist they do, then did rockers of your time make music for Creem? If your answer's "no," then when did you decide that it was acceptable to stem information? Or opinions? If we stemmed your opinions, you'd whack us with your protest signs and tells us Wavy Gravy would never have acted this way.

(That's another one. I'm holding Wavy Gravy over your heads until St. Peter himself tells me to cut it out. I'll have none of your questions about what kind of lady wears a meat dress until you explain to me what that man did and why he was allowed access to amplification systems.)

You're going to run into this no matter what age you are. I'm convinced of that. It would not surprise me at all to learn that Scott Joplin had to sell shaving utensils or was concerned about the reviews he'd get in The Saturday Evening Post. (If they had a music section.) The only thing that changes is the technology. The devil's salesman routine and the crabby press have always been here, and always will. Yours wasn't any better than anyone else's. Neither was mine. It was just how we accessed the information, or the shaving utensils.

Funny story: My dad stopped listening to new music precisely at the time Elvis Presley came to the forefront. That was his dividing line, that was where he got off the train. My dad was 21 years old at the time. Elvis was just one year younger.

When Dad semi-retired -- I confess I have no clue if he's really retired as much as he should be -- he started playing music again. Picked up the trombone for the first time in 40 years, I'm guessing, and redeveloped his skills very, very quickly. He played in New Orleans last summer. But the funny thing happened about five years ago, when he told me he was going back and discovering, for the first time, the music that came immediately after he stopped listening to new music. He was amazed at how much progress was in that music that came so soon after he swore allegiance to big band and Dixieland for his young adulthood and middle age.

I asked him who he was getting into, and he said, "The Beatles. And Cher."

Okay, okay, I figure he'll get around to the Ramones in about ten years, but still, that was encouraging. It kind of validated what I'd decided to do with my life. That you can't realistically keep a closed door on culture for that long.

That's the problem with aging gatekeepers: they're not letting certain people in, but they also can't appreciate how much other people appreciate the stuff they're letting out. The eternal qualities. They are tied to the impermanent, as much as they think any of their descendents are. They hang onto nothing more than a curio of their time. The essence of art-making has never changed. The impulses and inspirations of art have never, ever altered. I'm positive Shakespeare wrote what he wrote to plumb the depths of humanism and to reflect a new layer of dramatic complexity, but he might've also just been trying to pick up girls.

The impulse of your generation's art has not changed at any point in human history. Other people are just using different means to redisplay it. If we're going to divide art into generations and assign merit curves strictly according to the chronological divide, and smite all younger generations with our pride of ownership -- well, we weren't really artists to begin with, were we? We kicked the eternal spirit of art in the balls, and then stole its pants.

You don't have to like new music. I don't like all of it myself. You don't have to appreciate it. You don't even have to listen to it, though it would be nice if you did every once in awhile. You just have to let it exist on its own terms. It might help if you compared it to something you understand, but I don't want to micromanage your tolerance engine. But blanket-judging by virtue of amount of time spent breathing is in direct opposition to the very core of the ideals you proclaim to know so much about.

In short, it's getting old.

The revenge of the song poem

2011-04-11T00:00:00.000-07:00

Rebecca Black's derided semi-hit song "Friday" has altered our perception of - well, not what's good, but what we're going to allow in our headspace. It's a singularly weird pop moment in which a song has - well, not been embraced, but turned a profit because of its awesome incompetence. That's something new in terms of musical economics (or what's left of it).

But artistically, "Friday" is actually reanimating and, in a way, legitimizing a form of perversely fascinating pop music that's been lingering in the cultural dustbin for a long time. And now, finally, it's having its revenge.
-----------

I think we can relax about the ungodly possibility that "Friday," the freakishly bad single from 13-year-old Rebecca Black, will become a touchstone of pop music. It's already down to #66 on the charts. The money's come in, there's not going to be any more, and "Friday" will retire as the Keyboard Cat of "incorrect music," which we'll loosely describe here as "music made by people who probably shouldn't be making music." Irwin Chusid would probably refine that definition. But let's leave it at that for our purposes. The "Friday" video got over 95,000,000 views on YouTube, with (at this writing) 1,927,208 "dislikes" versus 250,294 "likes." People were watching this video to see just how bad it was, not to gaze upon its resplendence.

I feel bad for the girl. Not because I like the song. I don't really see how it's materially possible to like the song. But I feel bad for her, for two reasons. The first is that that no innocent 13-year-old deserves to be dragged through the mud for this. It's not like she's Damien from The Omen. He sounds more like Tom Waits.

The second is that "Friday" being so bad isn't really Rebecca Black's fault. You could blame the producers for the grating Auto-Tune. But the bulk of the blame lies on the shoulders of the songwriters. When the dangling question of whether your protagonist should get in the front or the back seat serves as the climax to, not one, but two verses in your song, then you're something much, much worse than a dumb pop music songwriter: You've exposed yourself as being utterly incompetent. Not just at songwriting, but quite possibly at life itself.

I'm serious. If all you have experienced in this beingness has inspired within you an internal conflict about car seating arrangements, and the need to remind audiences about the positioning of Thursday as "yesterday," Friday being "today," Saturday strategically being "tomorrow," and then, as an unwarranted bonus, Sunday as a day that "comes afterwards" of said Saturday, as if any 13-year-olds might be in need of such a refresher course - geez, never mind creative tension, I'm shocked you've even mastered the art of walking. If you indeed have, 'cause right now it seems like you're having a moral quandary about whether to get in the frickin' front or back seat.

"Friday" the song is historically bad. That's where it gets its mojo: from its titanic, monolithic, curdled badness. Its popularity is based on its extreme unpopularity, its brazen ineptitude.

But believe it or not, it's not that unprecedented. Because I realized sometime last week that all "Friday" is, or will ever manage to be, is the most commercially successful product of a long-standing subset of music - one that's existed as a strict commercial property for almost half a century, has always been a source of disparagement, but remains a fascinating topic for fans of musical irony and outsider culture.

That is to say: "Friday" is the most popular song poem of all time. Its iTunes success could even be interpreted as the revenge of the song poem.

What's a song poem, and what does it sound like? Thrilled to death that you asked:

Image hijacked from http://www.songpoemmusic.com

In the '50s, '60s and '70s - and possibly later for all I know - some magazines had ads like the above in their classified sections. You, sitting at home in at your kitchenette table, might've been a hit songwriter and not even known it. Companies like Songcrafters offered you the chance to have your poem evaluated as to whether it might be good enough to be an actual record. You just had to send your poem in for a "free appraisal" to gauge if your writings were worthy of a real, professionally recorded song.

Your poem was reviewed by these recording houses and, almost always, judged as being more than good enough to be a song. You're a winner! So then the company would ask you to send some money their way to cover expenses, and in return you would receive a real recording of your song, set to music by in-house composers, and recorded by studio professionals.

In that regard, at least, companies like Songcrafters were not strictly scams. You did get a copy of your song, recorded by professionals, in contemporary pop styles. Whether they'd try to market or promote your song, though - well, that was up to you. Their job was done. And you, probably not having the acquaintance of independent record promoters or radio deejays, didn't really have the opportunity to market your song. So it died there, or shortly after you tried to give your local radio station a copy of your new record and were politely escorted away.

These recordings lingered somewhere in a vault, I suppose. Then someone with a sense of humor found a bunch of them, and released several collections legitimately in the early 2000's.

Let's just say the lyrics of these songs were not always replete with Coward-like wit or Porter-esque wordplay. They were the product of people who really didn't know how to be poets. But not all of them were entirely unsuccessful as final products. Rodd Keith - kind of considered the grandaddy of song poem magnates - had a fairly high return rate of enjoyability, given the materials he had to work with. And it wasn't all strictly ironic enjoyment, either. Keith was actually considered a legitimate musical genius by many. By and large, his songs on these post-mortem collections always stand the best chance of being something good.

Gene Marshall, on the other hand, often got the thankless task of recording the most structurally bothersome song poems. Marshall was the go-to guy for awkward statements of philosophy, moral didacticism, and social issues. But you got to hand it to him: He pushed through some stupefyingly bad lyrics - allegedly over 10,000 of them - with disarmingly good nature. His most astounding song was something called "All You Need Is A Fertile Mind," a truly weird lyric that, from what I can surmise, suggests that the listener avoid pornography in favor of masturbation. Marshall recorded song poems in support of both Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter.

Song poems tended to reflect suburban concerns of a very specific time period. They took a stab at eternal questions, of course, but most song poem writers were using the most current events and social phenomena to convey those questions. Meaning you got songs about Santa Claus arriving on a nuclear missle, or about flip-flops.

Other questions were related through metaphors and personal stories only the original songwriter could understand, and couldn't fit into any reasonable meter. Such as:

And, of course, some song poems were submitted as total practical jokes that nobody's really sure the recording studio professionals got - like the recording that was the most famous song poem of all time before "Friday" came along:

This is the tradition that "Friday" belongs to, of which it is the rightful heir. The difference is that the composers of "Friday" are not suburban housewives or klutzy small-town poets - they're considered professionals. That might be because our standard of professionalism is at an all-time low, or because the music industry is so desperate. Whatever dreams of immortality the original song poem lyricists might have had were quickly laughed off, hopefully by themselves. The writers of "Friday" are actually in position to thrive as businesspeople, though their swivel chairs might be a short a wheel.

Something as bad as "Friday" getting revenue because it's bad is a new economic turning point, that's for sure. But artistically, the mindset required to create a song like "Friday" has been there for years. And now song poem publishers, if they're still around, are watching this song take hold of the public imagination in bizarre manner - and they're laughing with it, not at it. It's their revenge. I would guess that it's just as sweet as all other revenge is said to be. But I ain't gonna lick the spoon to find out.

Besides, at least there's one good version of "Friday" floating around out there.

The aromatherapist wore jackboots

2011-04-05T23:11:00.000-07:00

Don’t ask why, but last week I found myself in a position of having to construct a 3-hour playlist of new age music.

I have issues with new age music. It’s one of two genres of music I had decided it was fair to universally declaim. Hearing one example of new age music was the same as hearing all of it, and I never enjoyed hearing any of it. The other genre used to be jazz fusion, but upon hearing Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew and re-evaluating Weather Report more favorably, I’ve been forced to take that genre off the list. So now, new age music is pretty much the only genre I’m game to say has never produced a single unit of worthwhile product.

It’s exclusively functional. It’s not an expression of the soul, unless the souls in question spend their entire lives avoiding sriracha sauce and conflict. It programs entire environments. You could say the same about ambient music, but I like certain ambient music. Ambient is not aggressively trying to program you, or forcing its aesthetics on you, it’s just trying to get you through this red-eye flight when alcohol might not be the best option.

New age music is up to something. There’s an insidious plot. The first part is luring you into relaxation. They establish a range of frequencies permissible to dwell, and thereby create a point of frequency transgression, where certain sounds become bad. Ambient music has an effect. New age music, I believe, has the goal of a non-effect. Rather aggressively so. It’s meant to neutralize your entire being by creating a fairyland. Then you’re in that fairyland, and you see all sorts of mythical creatures, the unicorn of which is (rather predictably) king. And when that happens, as you’ve been lured into creamy fantasy, who knows what kind of deviousness they can force upon you? They could figure out a way to make you compliant to your ponytail-havin’ project manager, or make you weave hemp into socks, or make you order something off eBay.

You don’t do anything to new age music. You can’t perform any real activity to it. Carpentry with balsa wood or clipping bonsai trees maybe, but that’s about it. You can’t dance. You shouldn’t drive. You can’t aerobicize. It just reminds you that there’s something else in the room. It’s not a motivator, it’s a bookmark.

Oh, sure, you can have sex to it. And I bet there are some shamans out there who have figured out how to have semi-realistic sex to new age music. But I bet it’s the kind of sex you have to be a quasi-religious figure to have. Tantra looks fun and all, but I’m not the person to engage in it. I can’t be like Sting and stay that focused for six days. I’d need a bagel at some point. I bet having sex to new age music helps it feel more instinctual, less animalistic. You could focus on the erogenous force fields and gyrate in degrees of millimeters. You could, but would not be required to, see God. And you would end the act bathing in a warm glow of amber light, both of you sharing the ecstasy in equally rationed amounts between the two of you, and you would be able to qualify and alphabetize the tingles you experience. That’s great. But I can get the same experience screwing to Devo.

What’s also annoying about new age music is that it’s so easy that almost anyone can make it. It’s like punk in that respect, except desensitized, and unlike the best punk, sucky. But just follow the strict sonic rules of new age music, put some D-batteries in your Casio, and guess what? You could very easily be a new age musician, and ergo a cub scout social engineer. It scares me that all of us are just a set of wind chimes and a spacebag of chardonnay away from healing leprosy through song.

When I lived in San Francisco I came up with a very cynical, comic plan to record a new age album for money with my girlfriend at the time. We jokingly called it Crystal Reflections In The Light. I’m not sure I’m not sorry we didn’t see that project through. We could’ve made it in a day. We could’ve made it in half a day. We’d have paid for our children’s college, or ashrams. Then we could laugh heartily and order the General Tso chicken we’d been craving all day.

So, to sum up, new age music has been pretty worthless to me. I’m not a fan. I don’t know anybody who is. I figure if I did meet someone who described himself or herself as a “fan of new age music,” then we probably wouldn’t be hanging out together. We’re probably going to go to different places to get our transcendentalism fix. Mine happens to have pinball machines. His probably prohibits any kind of centrifugal force whatsoever.

Nevertheless, there I was last week, having to program three hours of new age to a captive audience who will supposedly make a conscious decision to listen to the “new age channel” I was working on. I had to put myself in the position of a “new age fan.” I had to think how “new age fans” thought. I had to seek out what I thought was the best compliment to the “new age lifestyle.”

It was a bit terrifying. ‘Cause I figured, if I got it wrong, if I transgressed the boundaries of new age music, then I would’ve caught some serious Birkenstock hell. I would’ve been drawn and quartered, with utmost politeness, by the New Age Army. I needed to get this one right, because if I disrupted the psychic flow of a new age fan mid-flight, it would be like ripping a hole in the ceiling of their headspace, which if you’re flying Southwest is kind of redundant.

New age fans do not seem like people who appreciate challenge. So my challenge was to come up with as unchallenging a lineup of songs as possible. But first I had to find out who pimps this stuff, so I found a list of “notable new age artists” on the web. Strictly speaking, it was the Yahoo! new age artist search directory, because each list item had these numbers in parentheses that told you how many fan pages each artist has. So, big number, massive new age artist, right? Enya’s kind of like the Elvis of new age music. Yanni is closer to Frankie Avalon.

Then I had to sample each song I programmed. That was where the hell of the act set in. I found a song by Kitaro and skipped around – nope. There was an electric guitar in the middle of it that hadn’t been undistorted. That could cause leakage. Had to skip it. Went for some Mannheim Steamroller – no, no, those drums were too prominent. Went for someone on the Windham Hill label – not bad, but the upper frequencies on that guitar line tweaked ever so intrusively that I was afraid I might jostle someone’s cranium just a little too much. Every time I found a song that seemed to fit, something would happen that I perceived to be a potential slight against the new age code. High frequencies, low frequencies that are too loud, an out-of-phase ocean wave, a detuned synthetic bell sound, Linda Blair throwing up, birds that were supposed to be mating but clearly sounded like they were arguing, a percussion instrument that sounded too ethnic for new age, a bad rainstorm, goats. Every time I ran into an offending sound wave, I got furious with it. I swore. I got impatient. I got disoriented and frazzled. I felt the deadline on my back and I felt myself getting more and more nervous, biting my nails, clenching my teeth.

And I thought this crap music was supposed to be relaxing.

But I finished it. And the good news is that it didn’t take that much longer than other genres would, because new age songs go on for nine minutes, and it takes less of them to fill a three-hour time span. And that’s great, because I think if there’s one thing we need less of, it’s new age music. I think even that hippie dentist with the hemp lollipops would agree. Or he better, or else I’ll clock ‘im.

To be refreshed with the breath of life soon.

2011-03-22T22:30:00.000-07:00

Watch this space, especially if you like stagnation. Hello Tweeters!