Wednesday, August 13, 2003

Sam Cooke

A wonderful essay on Sam Cooke by Robert Christgau in the Voice. I really only started listening to Cooke in the last few months, but I've been reading a lot about him lately (in both Arthur Kempton's Boogaloo and Peter Guralnick's Sweet Soul Music), and I think Christgau's comparison of him to Elvis is apt. Not in his ultimate impact (at least on black teenagers--though he influenced a large number of musicians, not least Curtis Mayfield), but in his ambitions and his overall approach to music. My favorite phrase in the article is the description of Cooke's and Presley's "vocal transparency." It's the perfect description of a quality that is otherwise almost impossible to describe, that paradoxical sense of being not so much above the world, or above life, as wrapped around and through it, of permeating every possible event or emotion, both solid and airy, earthly and spiritual (and, of course, none of the above). It takes a remarkable simplicity, and a very canny and unselfconcious intelligence, to achieve (Aretha Franklin has something close to it, as did Kurt Cobain). The difference between Elvis and Cooke in this regard is that Elvis looked for that simplicity in the songs he chose to sing, whereas Cooke wrote most of his himself, and and formulated a set of rules for maintaining that quality that makes his songs look shallow and facile at first, and then reveal new and extraordinary depths every time you listen to them. Elvis's method was more hit or miss, less calculated, but he also aimed, and scored, higher than Cooke. Cooke, though, had he lived, would have had the longer lasting and more respectable career. Gurlanuick is working on a biography of Cooke, by the way, due out sometime next year.

RJM 2:32 PM PST [Link] [1 Comment]

Thursday, April 24, 2003

This is what I'm doing, Madonna

The new Madonna album is available for streaming, complete, on MTV's site. Nice, huh? Except Madonna, control freak that she is, isn't sure she likes the idea of you listening to her music (with shitty sound, at that) for free--you know, like you might do on the radio or at a freind's house. So, except for the title song, American Life, every cut is interrupted, sometimes more than once, by little vocal interjections, mixed way up high, so you can't miss them. "Hi, this is Madonna. I hope you like my new album." "Hi, this is Madonna. You're listening to my new album, American Life." And, most notoriously, "What the (bleep) do you think you're doing?" (the bleep is on the soundbite) This last, of course, is directed toward pirates, just like the fake samples her record company has put up on Kazaa and other file sharing systems.

Since she asked the question so politely, I think it's only right that I tell her what I'm doing.

1. I'm not buying your goddamned album. I don't care if it's good or not.
2. I'm considering the many ways in which you have just insulted your audience.
3. I'm wondering why you agreed to stream the album at all, if you're so freaked out about pirates, and whether the versions of the album that are played on the radio will have the same vocal interjections (people tape things off the radio, you know; been doing it for years).
4. I'm pondering how you can think people wanting to get a hold of your latest album, even with shitty MP3 sound, as quickly as they can, and in any way possible, is in some way an insult to you.
5. I'm relishing the thought of what you'll do when your own kids are old enough to download copyrighted music off the net.
6. I'm going to bed. The whole subject makes me tired.

RJM 9:19 PM PST [Link] [1 Comment]

Tuesday, April 22, 2003

'Bout time

Liz Phair has three songs from her upcoming album up on her web site. Very pop-rock, even slicker than whitechocolatespaceegg, which means she'll probably lose whatever she had left of her original alternative fan base. But what do alternative fans know? After only two listens, "Extraordinary" is continually buzzing through my head, and "Rock Me" is as straightforwardly lustful as she's ever been. And if you think the first single, "Why Can't I?" is too soft, try listening to the lyrics: "Here we go, we're at the beginning/We haven't fucked yet but my head is spinning." I'll withhold final judgment until I hear the album, but I think Phair has achieved something miraculous--she's become the pop-rock equivalent of Madonna: sexy, intelligent, free-wheeling, and artistically ambitious with the chops to back it up. And if she ever gets a hold of a mass audience, she could be even more important.

RJM 8:25 PM PST [Link] [1 Comment]

The Inessential Clash

After thinking it over a bit, I've decided that I can't recommend The Essential Clash after all (scroll down to the bottom to find the reference). It's not that it isn't a well put together set, but it really only scratches the surface. Which doesn't mean I prefer the box set, Clash on Broadway, or any of the previous Clash compilations. It means that for roughly four years, from 1977 to 1981, they really could do no wrong, and you should have it all, in the original configurations. If Sony really wanted to perform a public service, they'd delete the American version of the first album, Black Market Clash, Clash On Broadway, The Story of the Clash, and the current singles compilation, and release a complete singles set with all the A and B sides. Then they'd never release another Clash record again. Flooding the market with rehashed product is against everything the Clash stood for.

RJM 7:59 PM PST [Link] [1 Comment]

Monday, April 21, 2003

White Stripes

At last, a review.

The White Stripes
Elephant
V2

“This album is dedicated to, and is for, and about the death of the sweetheart,” Jack White declares in the liner notes to the White Stripes new album Elephant. Which is another way of saying that the record is about pain, regret, anger, and most of all, distance. It isn’t about love, per se, but love betrayed, or perhaps love thwarted, love that isn’t allowed to declare itself. [more]

RJM 08:37 PM PST [Link] [1 Comment]

Saturday, April 5, 2003

How outside can you get?

I've never been a big fan of the whole "outsider" music cult--it has far more to do with laughing at people than music or sociology--but this gallery of album covers, with occasional music samples, is pretty wonderful, and the curator shows more respect for the people involved than most. There are times, though, when he actually believes there's good music on these records. That may be going a little too far. Link via The Morning News.

RJM 5:56 PM PST [Link] [3 comments]

Thursday, April 3, 2003

Making my way back...(you can hum the rest)

I can offer no good excuse for not posting here more often. It’s not that I haven’t been listening to a lot of music. If anything, I’ve bought and listened to more new music in the last year or so than I did in the previous five (hereafter referred to as “the time of the great freeze”). And since I used to write about music for a living, or at least part of a living, I should have something to say, right?

I’m not going to try and put the blame for my lack of interest or productivity, as some have, on the “current state of pop music." That’s bullshit. Yes, things have been kind of down in general, and last year was pretty poor. But, too often, complaining about the deadness of the current scene is just a lame excuse critics use when they reach the point where they can’t dredge up the energy to care anymore. Whenever critics approach the limits of their own, generally narrow, interests, or when they suddenly find themselves no longer impressed by the brash, adolescent guitar buzz of earlier days, they blame the scene, as if they were embarrassed to admit that they may have grown up a little, or that their tastes had improved, or that they had only pretended to like that shit in order to get laid anyway.

I refuse to give myself that excuse. I lost interest in music for a while for a combination of reasons which had nothing to do with the industry, my own changing musical tastes (which haven’t changed much, because for the most part I was right the first time—fuck off), or the creeping suspicion that people my age (this was in my late thirties), don’t devote those levels of energy or time or rapidly diminishing finances to such an, ahem, immature pursuit.

To put it simply, I lost interest in music, and especially writing about it, because, in a variety of ways I will not detail here, my life fell apart. I spent long hours doing nothing but listening to the Pet Shop Boys and feeling depressed (there were other reasons for listening to PSB than being depressed, but they sure provided a great soundtrack), and generally found myself uninterested in anything new. I would make brief forays into other things, but besides being depressed I was broke, and out of touch with what was going on (was anything going on?). As for writing, I had become disgusted with the sound of my own voice, with the tone and tenor of my words, with my inability to come up with anything interesting, at least to me, to say.

Have you ever tried to write about music? Seriously, I mean. Not just gossip, or the latest trends, or the larger social implications of the rise and fall of Mariah Carey, or the true meaning of Madonna, but the music itself. I don’t mean music theory, either, all about how the final chorus modulates from C to B flat while shifting meter from 4/4 to 9/8 or something—it’s valuable work, but it’s schematics, it’s not the music itself. The music itself isn’t even the sound that comes out of the instrument or the sound that eventually sets the bones in your ears vibrating. The music is what happens inside your head, inside your brain. It doesn’t exist anywhere else and it can’t be replicated. Just like stepping in a river, you can never hear the same sound twice.

Try to write about that, and I can guarantee that 9,999 times out of 10,000 you’ll fail. You’ll make a fool of yourself or you’ll go mad trying--probably both. And to avoid those possibilities you’ll fall back on gossip, and social implications, and politics, and the biz, and music theory. But every time you do you’ll know that you’ve failed somehow, in some essential way, and you’ll become depressed and irritable, and you’ll find yourself listening to the same records over and over again looking for the truth, and you’ll become boring, and bored, and your tastes will narrow, and you’ll declare pop music a fraud, and the current scene dead (not like it was back in the day, I can tell you), and in the end you’ll change careers and either wax nostalgic about your wild rock and roll days, or you’ll put all your memorabilia and super-rare promo material up on Ebay and forget about it.

That was part of the block I had come up against. There are only so many times you can describe guitars as screaming, voices as world-weary, and bass grooves as deep (as if a bass groove would be anything else), before the desire to kill yourself, or somebody else, takes over what’s left of your brain. Not that I ever used those terms, mind you—well, maybe once or twice—but they were always floating around as an easy out, and as a reminder of the pitfalls that opened up in every direction.

What most critics search for--the good ones, at least—is a descriptive phrase along the lines of the instructions I once heard David Thomas issue to a guitar player before a solo: “Make me regret every decision I’ve ever made.” Inspiration like that, alas, doesn’t come very often in the regular grind of record reviewing. Even if Thomas’s guitarist had gotten exactly the sound he wanted, the best description most reviewers could probably come up with is “blistering.” That might, in a sense, be true (wouldn’t you feel blistered if someone made you regret every decision you’d ever made?), but would be nowhere near as descriptive or poetic.

The real job of a critic, as opposed to a reviewer, is that of interpreter and annotator. After taking in the performance or the artistic object--and, one hopes, understanding it--in the artist’s language, the critic must then translate that experience into a totally different language and annotate it in such a way that the reader obtains not only a broader intellectual understanding of the work at hand, but also some idea of the sensation of coming face to face with that work.

In this, critics are not much different from artists themselves. The main distinction is that artists seek to translate the raw material of life itself, whereas critics translate life through the already semi-processed work of artists. The advantage for artists is they don’t have to annotate (not in public, anyway, though if they haven’t done the annotative work, at least in their own head, there’s a good chance that their art will be shit). The disadvantage for critics is that they need to know life, and the artist, and their own heads, probably the hardest part of all, well enough to make distinctions between the three and get it all down in a form that, because it needs to be readily understood by as wide an audience as possible, doesn’t admit of much formal experimentation. As Pauline Kael suggested, that’s why there are so few critics and so many poets.

I’m not trying to suggest that I copped out by setting myself too high of standards so that failing to meet them could be easily excused. I’m trying to say that I was just too wiped out, for a long time, to even make the attempt, and that I’m only now, in dribs and drabs, recovering the strength to make another attempt. I’m also only now understanding what actually is involved. The advantage of youth is that you’re willing to stumble on without knowing exactly where you’re going, because you figure you’re bound to make it eventually. The advantage of age is that you know you probably won’t get there, but you at least know where you’re heading, so you don’t stumble as much.

Now we can see what happens. And, in the meantime, a few records I can recommend:

Amy Rigby: 18 Again
A compilation from her three albums on Koch, now out of print. The brave saga of late thirties marrieds, singles, and looking. The style is somewhere between alt and mainstream country with a little blues and pop mixed in, with a vulnerability rare in any of those styles. Her voice is so open you expect her to either start laughing hysterically or break down crying any second, but she’s too tough to do either. And when she urges her current boyfriend to off her ex, you realize what a trap that apparent vulnerability can be--for her as well as for him.

I’ve only listened to the new White Stripes album, Elephant, once, [more]

RJM 09:46 PM PST [Link] [22 comments]

Monday, February 17, 2003

Oh, No!
I'm as aware of her faults and her pretensions and her missteps as anyone, but can't Yoko Ono ever catch a break? Now that her little feud with McCartney over the writing credits to the Beatles's catalog is pretty much over, Reuters runs a story on the upcoming Pet Shop Boys remix of "Walking On Thin Ice" with the headline "Yoko Ono to Release Dance Version of Lennon Song." The story goes on to describe the song as the last that Lennon recorded, and refers to it, consistantly, as his. Since when? It's true that it was the last thing the two of them were working on together, but Yoko wrote the song, she sings it, she co-produced it, and it was released under her name. It has never been included on any albums but hers, and as far as I know, no one has ever before referred to it as Lennon's song. Nothing in the Reuters story suggests that they have any particular reason for calling it Lennon's, other than the fact, I suppose, that they don't think it could possibly be Yoko's. Which means that "Fame" isn't really a David Bowie song, and Pussycats isn't really a Harry Nilsson album, and that McCartney should just throw in the towel--no part of of any of the Beatles's records can be considered his (except maybe "Yesterday"), because John Lennon was involved. Now I'm beginning to understand why Paulie made such a fuss. You can't fight the dead.

RJM 9:02 PM PST [Link] [15 comments]