Breaking News from the Campaign

I'm probably the last person in the blogosphere to comment on the Presidential campaign, and the Iowa caucuses a mere thirty (approx) weeks away. Today presents the perfect opportunity. Check out this Sopranos tribute on the Hillary Clinton website--complete with an actual cast member, and mockery of Chelsea's parallel parking skills. And some surprisingly poor acting.

It's too bad this is all to announce the selection of Celine Dion's "You and I" as her official campaign song. Apparently Smashmouth's "I'm a Believer" was a strong contender; my bet is that it was scrapped to avoid the eruption of Monkeegate. It is admirable that the campaign chose a Canadian artist, throwing nationalism to the winds (currently much needed in the steamy lower 48). But the song may prove the equivalent of Dean's scream, or Muskie's tears, or being shot in a duel by Aaron Burr. Its lyrics are possibly more insipid than you'd expect, and you can listen to it three times and not recall a thing about it. Plus the right will eat the Canadian thing up like so much thin, nitrated meat product on an Egg McMuffin. I mean, if they were going foreign anyway, why not Charlotte Gainsborough, Feist, or Mika?

Mika

It's been out a few months, but I still want to say that Mika's "Grace Kelly" is the best single I've heard in a long while--definitely the best since Kelly Clarkson's "Since You've Been Gone," and probably better. I've got no quarrel with his devotion to Freddie Mercury. His voice just keeps going up, and when you think it's reached the top it goes up more. If you haven't heard it, you ought to. Try here.

Feisty

I'm not exactly sure why, but I really like this picture of Feist that appeared in the Times today. I think it's because she looks both glamorous and nerdy. Also like she's having a really good time. The article by Kelefa Sanneh is funny, too; it's all about how Feist kept trying to get the audience to sing along but they just wanted to listen to her.

I'm liking her new album more and more; when I first got it, it was somewhat eclipsed by Charlotte G.

roundtrip for the midnight train going anywhere, please

It already seems a bit late to chime in, but the last scene of the episode was brilliant. Part of it went straight for the gut, of course—flirting with the possibility of a whack, or a whack of A.J. or Meadow, or Meadow getting hit by a car, or the possibility that no one was showing because they’d all been whacked, and so on, all while being advised not to stop believing. On the other side, the scene was an exquisite exercise in high realism: diners, Journey, parallel parking—what else is there, really? In the end, the tension of finding the proper angle to parallel park was aligned with the tension of possibly being marked for murder, and that’s a pretty perfect condensation of the show’s affective tactics, and view of the psyche, as a whole.

David Chase is already denying a lot of the openings for interpretive creativity the episode seemed to leave—the main one being what I actually first thought—that Tony had been shot dead; if the show were from his p.o.v., one wouldn’t hear the gunshot, right? It’s too bad Chase is playing interpretive FBI man, but it shouldn’t stop us from getting hung up on such questions as why Meadow was so anxious about being late. . .

A good deal of the web discourse about the episode seems to be that it constituted a “giant ‘fuck you’ to the fans” because it didn’t deliver any of the endings people had been discussing and predicting for weeks. But at some point on Saturday, I realized that nothing was going to happen. I can’t believe it took me so long. Given the series’ longtime comfort with loose narrative ends, it would have been absolutely inconsistent with the tenor of the show to attempt to put forth a single event to function as closure. You didn’t like this ending? Well, in fact, any other ending would have seemed wildly anti-climactic.

As for the “fuck you,” it seems to me that the real target of that particular oath in this particular case is the drivelly local news culture that produces “stories” about TV episodes that air the evening of the newscast. The show didn’t deliver an event to serve as easy fodder for segments like this one, or for bar interviews in which people are asked if they were shocked to learn that the last five episodes were a peyote hallucination. Given the amount of news coverage the episode was getting before it aired, I’m wondering what happened afterward. . .

the sopranos' finale

was genius.

who are public intellectuals?

The other night, Jill and I were discussing the problem of public intellectuals in the US, and scrounging for names--she suggested Michael Ignatieff, I mentioned the old chestnut, Gore Vidal. Then today at the gym, it struck me: America's public intellectuals are Jeopardy contestants.

More Sexy Sounds

If you like the sweet, seductive whisper of a beautiful woman with a fetching, unique accent that originates somewhere in the Chunnel, between London and Paris, then there’s a strong chance you’ll like the new CD by the actress Charlotte Gainsbourg, 5:55. The music was composed by Air, the highly tasteful French lounge-groove band. It’s a fitting combination in more ways than one; for much of the album, the noise from the air being expelled from Charlotte’s lungs is as loud as the tones she’s making with her vocal cords. Part of what I’m charmed by is that this isn’t the sort of typical high-show-biz, look-I-can-sing-too (because-I-had-a-vocal-coach-too-when-my-stage-parents-were-molding-me) project that lots of Anglo-American actors seem to produce: Jennifer Love Hewitt and Jamie Lynn Sigler, I’m talking to you (among others)! The wide open spaces of Air are so very welcoming to Charlotte’s softness, a kind of charming, weary timidity, or perhaps timid weariness. There’s also a charm in the slight karaoke feel of the singing.

Sex, Language, and M.I.A.

I take a liberal approach to my vocation as a guardian of the English language. That’s one reason I love M.I.A., the British-Sri Lankan dancehall rapper who made a splash in 2005 with her album Arular. Her lyrics, cadences, and accents take Anglophonics all kinds of thrilling new places. Trying to “decipher” the lyrics on Arular, I had the pleasantly nerdy feeling that comes when you can acknowledge your oldness and still really enjoy a piece of “youth” culture. I still don’t know how someone would translate the phrase “bucky done gun” into so-called standard English, but it certainly signifies effectively in the context of the song of that name.

Also opaque, only liminally English at most, and yet wholly effective as a speech act, is this verse from “Hombre”:

Hoytu hoytu
Cept cept (cet cet)
Cinko, quadro
Tres doie
You can call me over

Ok, M.I.A., you’ve convinced me that that would be a good idea. Please come over.

Which brings me to the topic of M.I.A.’s new single, “Hit That,” which is a data file bursting with hot buttered sex talk. Beginning with the query, “Would you like to zoom, zoom, zoom and a-boom boom?” the song becomes a vehicle for the incantation of the phrase “Boys let me see you hit that,” delivered in the sassy sing-song voice that betrays identifiable signs of London, Colombo, Kingston, and Long Island. Added in for good measure is her occasional encouragement to “Tap tap that bed to the wall" (her pronunciation of the word "wall" is where she really seems possessed by Amy Fischer on quaaludes).

First observation: among other things, sex is really good for reminding us of the aliveness of language. Second observation: Even though M.I.A. generally gets a lot of attention from a “political” standpoint—her father was a revolutionary in Sri Lanka, and her lyric “Like PLO/I don’t surrend-o” got her banned from the BBC—she gives off a strong and articulate sense of being deeply pussy-driven, much like the brilliant Missy Elliott (whom M.I.A. namechecks on Arular). One thing about her style of sex discourse that I really like is how she’s simultaneously connotative and direct, like in this passage from “Hombre”:

Excuse me little Hombre
Take my number call me
I can get squeaky
So you can come and oil me

My finger tips and the lips
Do the work yeah
My hips do the flicks
As I walk yeah With a good head
I came to make it With a good head
I came to break it

What’s happening here? Maybe a blow job, maybe masturbation, maybe cunnilingus—all these interpretations and more seem possible, and that plurality is something we expect from good “figurative” language. However, “euphemism” and “suggestion” are certainly not terms that apply.

“Hit That” doesn’t really have anything to match this imagistic orgy, but it has plenty of words that mean sex, and it’s worth finding. The link I downloaded it from is now dead, unfortunately, and word is that it will not appear on her new album, slated for August release.

gus alive II

So, it's been a long spring, but it's also been a spring with a lot of new music, much of it good. I'll be sharing some thoughts about it, et cetera, in the next little while. To tide you over in the meanwhile: a reader from Portland sends this priceless youtube clip.

Oh, and the band for which I am the drummer, M. Fix,is playing on June 1st at the excellent Freddy's in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. Please come!

Finally, I was tickled to see that the blog had been visited by someone searching google for "wearing a condom in the bathtub." This was right next to "major and minor themes in Jane Eyre": sexy juxtaposition!

Last Night at the Waldorf

I feel a little guilty for not liveblogging the entire Rock n Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony last night. I'm really, really sorry, but I had, unbelievably, more interesting things to do. I was fortunate enough to catch the Patti Smith segment, though, and I want to make sure everyone knows if you're looking for a model of aging gracefully, you can't find a better one. Her presence is majestic, and it's hard to believe her voice ever sounded better than it does now. She did a smoking version of "Gimme Shelter," thanking Keith Richards, who was present, for "writing such a great anti-war song"; you could almost feel him squirm. She dedicated the song "Rock n Roll Nigger" to her mother, and in the part where she lists people, she sang, "Gandhi was a nigger, Jesus Christ and my mother too!" But why am I telling you this? You can see it, and any other segments you choose, here.

I thought it was very cool that VH1 Classic aired the event in its entirety live, so that you got to see all the dead time for set-ups and breakdowns between performances and inductions and speeches. Very Brechtian. But I also just love moments of breakage in television "flow."

There was also a weird moment at the end of the Ronettes performance, where Paul Shaffer came up to the mike and read a little note of congratulations from Phil Spector, whom Ronnie had consipicuously not thanked in her incredibly long and drunken acceptance speech. The response was tepid, and if I'm not mistaken, there were a few boos.

Second part of my post on Spector aesthetics still to come. . .

The Problem with Self Esteem

Last weekend I was talking to one of my bandmates during one of our infrequent opportunities to play together—this time, actually, to record a song for the soundtrack of an independent film. I really like the people in my band but we’re also so busy; we all have busy careers, and we live in two different cities, so not only do we hardly ever practice, but we hardly ever talk—we basically rush in, play for two hours, then rush out, and see each other two months later. (This is also my perspective—the other people in the band are all longtime friends and I just joined last year). Anyway, if you’ve ever recorded or been around a recording band, you know that the process involves a lot of waiting around, as do most professional or semi-professional activities in the music business. So even for this one-song session, we ended up waiting around for awhile as the engineer put together a rough mix on the spot.

It was a pretty funny scene if you’re into “white-people-are-so-lame” humor. There was a hip hop band recording next door, and there was a big entourage-ish presence in the hallways, and a guy had set up a mini-office in the studio’s front lounge from which he seemed to be operating a record company or at least the career of whoever was recording. And then there were we, between 35 and 40 years old (I’m pretty sure), sitting around in our studio talking about the Oscars and our jobs and whom we ought to hire in my department (one of my bandmates is a colleague), etc. Paula, the keyboard player, asked what I was doing for the rest of the weekend, and I said I was going to see Cracker in Philly the next night. And her face lit up, and soon we were sliding into “kids-today-are-so-lame” territory, or at least I was.

Paula was all like, “Man, that guy is so awesome (meaning Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven leader David Lowery, whose hand I actually shook at the gig because I was on a date with someone who used to date him—is blog writing all about the aside, or what?); you know, all these bands today like the Decemberists just owe so much to him.” I’d never really thought about that before, but it’s true; Camper Van Beethoven brought a kind of seriously quirky folkiness to indie rock that’s having a big renaissance right now, in the freak folk thing but also in poppier bands. And in what was perhaps a recording-induced bit of what seemed lucidity, a whole theory, that I’d been gestating for awhile, took shape.

I saw the Decemberists in the fall, and they were good, but. . . there’s something about them and a lot of other indie bands today (cf. Ben Kweller) that’s so alien to me—the vibe, for lack of a better word, is too sane, or comfortable, or something. What I want to chalk it up to is, of course, generational difference; specifically, I think these bands are made up of kids who were raised, unlike my generation, in the era of high-management, all affirming self-esteem all the time parenting. Their parents are baby boomers, yuppies. Their parents made sure they had lots of stimulating group activities in which to participate all the time, and that they were happy, and showing their creativity, and sharing their goodness with others. Unlike the parents of my generation, who if they weren’t dictatorial would leave you on your own for hours and hours (especially during the summer), and you would have to figure out how to pass the time. And you would spend a lot of time watching TV, but also coming up with some crazy shit that you never showed anybody or told anybody about except a couple of friends at best. And later, when you got old enough to be a musician or an artist, that crazy shit might end up in your work. And it didn’t have to do with pleasing your parents, or worse, affirming your own sense of how talented and creative you are, a sense initially generated by your parents and the adults running these organized activities. Am I ranting yet?

While I was talking to Paula and putting forth a more rudimentary version of these remarks, I had a revelation, which I’m nevertheless sheepish about stating openly. In the current New York Review of Books, Vaclav Havel writes something like, am I allowed to say I hated the World Trade Center yet? Well, I am writing, am I allowed to say I hate Sufjan Stevens yet? Because I think I do. I mean, in a vacuum, I like his stuff fine. But then, in the fall, I went to see him, with a friend who loves, loves, loves him. The band, all 600 or whatever of them, all came out wearing butterfly wings, to the delighted oohs and aahs of the audience. They stayed on, lightly flapping, throughout the show. And it was only after the show that I was able to put a label on my ambivalence: there is a slight but significant “Up With People” vibe to this music, and to its performance. That’s because they’re all so talented—the 75 violin players, the guitarist who looks like he just graduated from Berklee School of Music, the girl who sings on every song and plays three or four instruments—they’re all so nice, and creative, and talented, and Sufjan himself, of course, is the king of all this, because he is just so FUCKING TALENTED with his banjo and his weird time signatures and his slides and his sweet ideas about dressing his band, and so on. At least, that seems to be reason a lot of people have heart attacks or orgasms over him—he’s talented and we’re all so happy about how beautiful and nice that is. If it wasn’t Up With People, it was Fame. Talented kids—how we love them—watching them, having them, being them. I think Fame, Up With People, and perhaps Zoom have had a serious, serious influence on the norms of bourgeois parenting for the past 15 or so years.

What I’ve described is just so different from seeing a band like Camper Van Beethoven, who were of course incredibly talented and creative, but who were, well, if nothing else, stoned. And just not so totally transparent about why they were great. Paula was talking about having seen the documentary about Klaus Nomi the night before—obviously a very different kind of music—but there again is an example of someone doing really weird hybridizations of musical forms, but not in this manner that seems to all come back to the safe wonder inspired by talent.

For Lack of You Name It

Man, it is just so depressing to pass by my blog and see the same old post there, and wonder how many hundreds, if not thousands of readers have done the same, sighed, and consigned me to the huge dustpile of un-updated, not-worth-checking blogs. This must be an occupational hazard? No time yet to hone the next installment of my Spector stuff. Anyway, it's important to remind people that you're alive, so at the risk of turning this into a different type of blog entirely, work continues to kick my ass. I just made the best quesadilla. Have to remember to pay some bills tonight--I love paying bills while watching TV! If I type the phrase "Britney Spears's ass" will I get five thousand extra hits? It's snowing today. I'd say maybe we'll have a snow day and I'll spend all of tomorrow in some kind of blogging paradise. But there's a big sign hung on the gate of this place that says "We Never Close."

The Bad Art of Phil Spector, Part I

To the faithful: sorry for the meager level of posting, but my employer, a small liberal arts college, has rather, um, liberal notions of the amount of labor it feels entitled to squeeze from its faculty. Don't think I'm not thinking about you!

Anyway, I just saw today that Phil Spector’s murder trial (he is being tried for the murder of actress Lana Clarkson four years ago) is going to be televised; the judge’s reasoning is that it’s time to, as the AP puts it, “get beyond the O. J. Simpson trial.” And it’s true, I guess: if Americans have proven so capable of getting beyond Vietnam, they might well be able to get beyond O. J. as well.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Spector’s work for the past few months. He is certainly a lionized figure, if not the most lionized figure, in the history of rock and pop production. But like a lot of such lions, he’s generally understood through shorthand—largely the phrase “wall of sound” (which is certainly accurate) and a host of stories about his extraordinary misogyny (incidentally, Ronnie Spector’s autobiography, which documents much of this, is one of the better celebrity bios I’ve read), or his penchant for guns (which may have been part of his studio toolbox: he is said to have forced the Ramones to record parts of End of the Century at gunpoint).

The Spector sound is a really fascinating fine art of sounding, well, bad--at least bad in terms of the notion of (high) fidelity, which became predominant with the advent of stereo around the time Spector was making his classic recordings with The Crystals, The Ronettes, Bobb B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, etc. Indeed, Spector was famous for wearing a lapel pin reading “Back to Mono,” a replica of which is included in the box set of his work bearing that title (now available fairly cheaply from a lot of online sources). I’ve been thinking of ways of describing and understanding this aesthetic; it’s an ongoing project of mine, and at the risk of boring some of you, I thought I would share some of the basics of these thoughts.

They go back to the 19th century. At least that’s where I understand the history of modern listening to begin, and Spector’s work, in flouting the notion of “fidelity,” has to be understood in terms of listening, because it bucks the idea that everyone wants to listen to perfectly mimetic sound—the is it live or is it memorex ideal. My understanding of this history is not particularly deep by scholarly standards. It’s based, though, on a recent scholarly book by Jonathan Sterne, called The Audible Past. Sterne traces the development of what he calls “audile technique,” a mode of listening that involves separating out some sound from the larger environment, and fixing aural attention upon it. This is how we listen today. Since I can read the minds of cats, I’ll illustrate it this way. When I put Spoon’s Girls Can Tell (incidentally a title swiped from the Spector-produced Crystals) on a little while ago, my cat heard the music, but he didn’t see any particular reason to separate it from the sound of the cars going by outside, or of the heat blowing through the vents, or of my typing on this keyboard. He did not wiggle his butt, bob his head, or tap his paw--and not because he doesn't like Spoon (an essentially impossible state for all animate beings). Spoon was just another element in the ambient sound of the environment. But we humanimals, through a relatively brief history of cultural acclimation, immediately separate out the sound produced by sound reproduction technology and bring Spoon into the foreground, relegating the heat and cars to the background. The fascinating historical dimension of Sterne’s argument is that he traces this back to the development of the stethoscope and the sound telegraph in the early to mid 19th century. These technological developments suggested that sound was manipulable, and an object of isolable attention, in a way that we are all now used to.

Scenes from the next major to minor post:
Brian Eno!
Andy Warhol!

M2M reviews the two free MP3s from the new Clap Your Hands Say Yeah album in real time.

CYHSY are a band that consitute a fair amount of the thread by which I’m tenuously holding onto some knowledge of the “scene,” as it were. They sound like early Talking Heads, they put out their first album entirely on their own, they have a not-too-slick 80s sound that really grows on you, they made the Times Arts and Leisure section around November 05 (which means they are no longer part of the scene, duh, I know that). If you knew me last year, then you know that my former band, Polar Bear Parade (got a problem with that name, buddy?), practiced across the hall from them in Red Hook, Brooklyn, because I relentlessly told people about this for about four months. Nevertheless we only saw them once and were duly sheepish; i.e. tried to act like we didn’t care (that’s what people in New York generally do around celebrities anyway). Anyway, they have a new album out, and as an overworked schnorer I thought I’d record my immediate impressions of the two songs they’ve posted for free on their website.

"Love Song No. 7":
Hmmm. Piano. Slow. They’re trying to sound weirder. There’s something Bowie-esque here, but not the usual Bowie people copy. More the Scary Monsters Bowie. Cool in concept, though I’m still—hey, they just switched to ¾ time! Oh, no, back to 4/4. Someone’s whistling, unless that’s my heat. Accordion—it’s getting slightly twisted, heading into Neutral Milk Hotel territory—and some serious rhythmic jumpiness despite the slowness. The main lyric seems to be “Safe and sound.” Was that someone opening my screen door? Not really coming together for me.

"Underwater (You and Me)":
Bowie again—but Heroes era, by way of Pianosaurus—remember them anyone? The vocal, though, got no Bowie going at all. Oooh. That little descending bit there sounds like “Do They Know its Christmas?” The production is muddy or else these are super crap quality mp3s. I like that tremolo guitar solo, all chords! Lyrics pretty indecipherable on first listen. Midtempo is a risky thing, my friend. My mind is wandering. . . oh, there’s that toy piano again, above the fade. This is the best part! The rest is kind of cluttered.

Later: I accidentally started the first song up on two different pages, with a delay of 20 or 30 seconds, and it sounded really cool.

Not So Much

Reader,

I didn’t marry him. That’s not the reason for my quietness of late. No, my numerous arch-foes have succeeded in silencing me for the past two weeks. But don’t worry, I’ve got a sucker punch or two in me. And that’s your last warning, arch-foes!

That said, I have little to declare, except Oscar Wilde’s genius, as well as some fragmentary documentation of my own muted thinking from this lost time. (Warning: Sacvan Bercovitch fans, you'll be disappointed.) Some shards that have crossed my mind:

-The Bob Spitz Beatles bio ended up spouting every tired, racist cliché about Yoko Ono you could ever imagine (at one point he even describes John as the innocent caught in a villainous tug-of-war between two manipulative Asians, Yoko and the Maharishi). It’s a shame that Spitz has the research skills, but then is in the end, at best, a lazy hack.

-The thirty or so seconds of John singing “Ah, Ah” in “A Day in the Life,” directly following the “woke up, got out of bed” interlude, constitute one of the top two or three most sublime moments in pop music history.

-Oh my god, Joe Harvard commented on my post about his Velvet Underground book for the 33 1/3 series! Ok, ok, I admit to tracking down his band’s myspace page and sending him a link, but he responded at length, with extreme grace, and without requiring any further harassment. He even spilled the beans about whether he went to Harvard, but you’ll have to read it yourself to find out.

-Ok, ok, Destroyer is really good.

-Should I try to write a post about the Sports Club Network? Do people know what this is? I’ve been considering it, but it might just turn into a rant about Creed (the band, not the fragrance—was there not a lawsuit? Could that have been a way of stopping them?). Nonetheless, there seems to be a genre of “Straight-to-Sports-Club-Network” videos that might merit comment. Or maybe that is the comment.

-One of the final memories of my marriage—perhaps the last not directly related to splitting up—is of waking up and hearing my ex-wife say, in an uncharacteristically deadpan voice, “I had an erotic dream about Jack White.” This memory actually makes me kind of happy; there’s something aesthetically pleasing about it.

-Whenever I hear some cable news pundit refer to “what they’re saying in the blogosphere” I fully intend to raise my glass to him or her (i.e. to the TV). Or if I’m not holding a glass, something else. My ass comes to mind, but probably not.

R. I. P. Barbaro

The 33 1/3 Series

You’ve probably seen these ever-so-cute little volumes in record stores and bookstores, or maybe in friends’ houses; each one is by a single author about a single album, and there are now, I believe, a few dozen of them out.

I’ve read three of them: The Abba: Gold one by Elizabeth Vincentelli, the Love: Forever Changes one by Andrew Hultkrans, and the Velvet Underground and Nico one by Joe Harvard. I came upon them completely arbitrarily. Well, actually, a combination of chance and fate: I read these three because I am what my grandfather would have called a schnorer, aka a cheapskate (approximately), and I encountered each of these in remainder sections of New York bookstores I frequent. I love all the records, though.

My conclusion, based on this schnorer’s sample: these books are wildly inconsistent in quality.

The Abba book starts strong, discussing the oddness of selecting a Greatest Hits’ compilation for this series, which is supposedly devoted to the great masterworks of the LP format—albums like Sgt. Pepper, Blue, Thriller, and any number of ELO records. The riches of some bands simply can’t be appreciated in that format, Vincentelli (who writes for multiple publications, like the Village Voice) points out; there are simply certain bands that most people encounter through the greatest hits’ format, and in such cases the usually maligned “Best Of” format takes on a life of its own. But after making this point early on, V slides into, basically, reportorial description of each song and its accompanying promotional video.

Unfortunately, Andrew Hultkrans, author of the Love: Forever Changes book, starts with a paean to one of his undergraduate teachers, Sacvan Bercovitch, a big muckity-muck in American Studies at Harvard. In numerous books, Bercovitch writes compellingly about how American political and cultural discourse quashes radicalism by favoring prophetic forms like the jeremiad, with its endless fixation on renewal and rebirth, over critiques that address current, historically conditioned social and political conflicts. That’s admittedly a very thumbnail, perhaps pinky-nail, account of his argument. It’s still better than Hultkrans’s misunderstanding, though, which is that Bercovitch’s point is that Americans “have a responsibility to think in prophetic terms.” Ouch! Then he goes on to celebrate how Arthur Lee, the brilliant leader of this intensely original and weird San Francisco band from the late sixties, fits into this vaunted American tradition. Ooof!

(Interjection: If you’ve never heard the album Forever Changes go out and purchase or steal it now!)

This objection may seem like my nitpicky defensiveness about my field of scholarly interest. But this misreading by Hultkrans, described as "former editor of Bookforum," underwrites and undermines the book as a whole. It sets the stage for a long series of esoteric platitudes about Lee’s lyrics: in other words, to do exactly the sort of thing acvan Bercovitch critiques. I’m not just making a kind of loose, reflexive Marxist point here; in so much journalistic and academic writing about rock, jazz, and hip hop, romanticizing the band as part of a prophetic tradition so often works to allow the critic to avoid the challenge of writing about the material of music, which is sound.

The pleasant surprise (as my father once diplomatically described learning of my mother’s pregnancy with me) here is Joe Harvard. As the most famous underground rock band of all time, the Velvets have a tendency to generate the same kind of romantic generalizations that dominate the Love book. Yet Harvard, who is not a professional writer (he owns Fort Apache studio in Cambridge), and who does not tell us whether or not he attended Harvard, is lucid, and funny, and clearly aware of the problem of writing about rock insightfully. He’s read his stuff, and issues correctives to a lot of misinformation in other books about the Velvets.

There’s a lot of attention to the studio, as you’d expect, and it’s pleasantly surprising that Harvard is able to do so much with an album recorded in a couple of days. I think the edge he has on many other writers is that he simply understands what it’s like to work as a member of a band. I think it’s a consequence of this, too, that he upends the notion that Lou Reed and John Cale were the only important forces in the band. “The Velvets were a band in the truest sense,” he writes, extending this sense out to Sterling Morrison, Mo Tucker, Nico, and others, including Andy Warhol. (I agree that a “band”’s borders often extend outward beyond the musicians who play onstage or in recording sessions).

I was especially impressed by his sustained attention to Warhol. Most rock writing on the Velvets tends to write him off as, basically, a financial sponsor. More generous critics say he had the insight to give the band space to do what it wanted. One sometimes gets the feeling that there’s simply too much weirdness, queerness, and effeteness surrounding Warhol and the Factory for these writers to deal with. But Harvard talks about Warhol’s careful role in surrounding the band with technical people who would maintain the grunginess and perversity that he loved in their sound, and that fit so well with his own work, especially in the mid-sixties when the Factory was in full swing and he had gone headlong into avant-garde film. As Harvard puts it:

"It was Warhol's comment that the band should just rehearse onstage [much in the same way he viewed filmmaking] that helped push them toward their flights of improvised daring. He suggested that Reed write or make changes to "Femme Fatale," "I'll Be Your Mirror," "All Tomorrow's Parties," and "Sunday Morning". . . Were it not for Warhol, of course, Nico would never have joined the band, and that in itself gives him a colossal role in the sound on the first album. "(51)

Or, more generally:

"Warhol did precisely what a great producer should: he achieved an effective translation of the sound the band heard in their heads on to tape, and then he got it out into the world in tact."

The point is that even though he didn't know the first thing about twiddling the buttons on the console, Warhol skillfully produced the conditions that gave rise to the album--and its sound.

I Wanna Destroy You

One record about which I blanked while straining to come up with my “Top” list for 2006 is Destroyer, Destroyer’s Rubies. This is a record by Dan Bejar, who essentially comprises the entire band, and moonlights with the New Pornographers. I don’t think I’ve ever loved and hated a record so much, and I mean in a more real sense than what saying I have a “love-hate relationship” with it would suggest. I love it and hate it at exactly the same time. The lyrics, dense with references, are so damned cloying; he definitely has claimed a place in the “I’m So Clever” school of lyricists. Consider:

Those who love Zeppelin will eventually betray Floyd,
I cast off those couplets in honor of the void.

So of course, you find yourself trying to catch all of the references; indeed a lot of the problem here is that what’s bad about it is also what’s good about it. Actually, as I listen now, it kind of reminds me of the once revolutionary rapping style of Rakim. And as I listen now, a half second later, it reminds me of Robin Hitchcock, and I can’t really stand any Robin Hitchcock besides a couple of Soft Boys songs, esp. “I Wanna Destroy You.” I do love the crisp, dry production; the guitar sound is so clean and immediate. But. . . well, you get the picture.

Bejar reminds me of this certain type of friend who’s so f-ing brilliant and voluble and unable to control it that s/he's great to be around but if you ever have to, say, spend two hours in a car with him (or her), you want to kill her (or him).

Now I need to go watch some TV before I die of TV deprivation.

video part 2

If you liked the video link from yesterday (now available, thanks to alchemisty, in your regular everyday pushbutton link mode), you should look at this one too. It picks up from where the other one leaves off, literally, with them eating fish and chips on the set and going through the song again, with their mouths full.

This was posted on Youtube by someone with a very cool blog about sixties pop, with a lot of content on Asian singers and groups.

Oh, and. . .

I found this adorable, surprisingly ironic pre-Sgt. Pepper video that I'd never seen before.

We Love You Beatles (Oh, Yes, We Do)

Personally, I have to rate the blog a success thus far; because of it, I’ve already gotten back in touch with a couple of friends, been virtually leered at, sparked some interest in Alice Coltrane, and provoked the claim that the Beatles stole everything from the Monkees. (Incidentally, I am a big Monkees fan). So I’m glad to have gotten in on this whole internet thing while it’s still on the ground floor. (Here I allude to the late-90s Simpsons episode in which Homer decides he needs to start a dotcom, and at one point looks up from one of many books on the topic piled before him to exclaim, “Wow, they have the internet on _computers_ now!!”)

A recurring theme in responses to yesterday’s first post is the role the Beatles played in people’s childhood imaginaries, and the people bringing this up cross boundaries of gender, straight/queer, generation, and probably numerous other, less articulated lines of difference. What’s interesting about this to me is not any homiletic suggestion that the Beatles bring us all together, above our differences; it’s how different each of these relationships no doubt were, and all the different things they might have done for those involved. I would hazard to guess that sexuality and, less abstractly, sexual feelings played a role in the vast majority of these childhood experiences; also that these feelings involved some highly complicated and titillatingly tangled web of desires and identifications illegible to standard categories of sexuality, and different in each case. I remember reading one of the Hernandez brothers (of Love and Rockets fame—the comic book, not the 80s band) say in an interview a long time ago that when someone would put on a Beatles record when he was a little kid, he would feel that he had to leave the house, because the sheer amount of feeling it generated in his small body, however pleasurable, was simply unbearable. That struck a loud chord with me. As an expert in repression, I don’t have many memories of childhood sexuality or autoeroticism. But I do remember that when the Beatles were playing, I would feel my body in a way that I never had before. It was like the inside of my body suddenly became real, all at once took on depth. And I’m talking about being five or six here (among the many great advantages of having much older sisters is being initiated into good music at a young age). I also remember that the most intense moments of this feeling came in response to the vocal harmonies. Hmmmm. . .

A Top Something List for 2006

Goodbye, 2006. No really, it's really time for you to leave now. A couple of days was fine, a week I could even understand, but three? We both need to get back to our lives. And don't call me for awhile either.


-Silver Jews, “O Captain! My Captain!” live at Webster Hall, March; “Sometimes a Pony Gets Depressed” (The opening lines of this song: “Where does an animal sleep when the ground is wet?/Cows in the barnyard, chickens in the farmer’s Corvette/Sometimes a pony, sometimes a pony, sometimes a pony gets depressed.” I finally do think Dave Berman is brilliant).
-The Raconteurs, “My Baby’s on the Level”
-Tanztheater Wuppetal Pina Bausch at BAM, December
-Bob Dylan, Modern Times
-Robert Pollard, I Can’t Believe Gus Still Loves Everything I Do
-Belle and Sebastian, Us Neither
-Stephen Malkmus, vocals on live cuts, bonus disc, reissue of Pavement's Wowee Zowee: “Come on, Jonathan Yardley?????”
-M. Fix, “Song of the Chicken Fair” and “Weighted Air”
-Polar Bear Parade, “Baby Bohemian” and “Might Be Right”
-Bruce Springsteen, “Telling Off Soledad O’Brien”
-Jimmy Carter, “Telling Off Pro-Occupation Hacks”

BTW, I reset the comments thingy so everyone can do it now.

Read The Beatles

So, I’ve been reading Bob Spitz’s Beatles biography, The Beatles, which just came out in paper. I’ve basically been continuously reading books about the Beatles since I was about eleven years old; I well remember being not far from that age and waiting for months and months for my turn with the local branch library’s copy of Hunter Davies’s authorized biography. Nerddom is hot these days, as you’ll notice if you ever check out a “hip” internet dating site like nerve.com, but all you hipster nerds are poseurs as far as I’m concerned: how many of you have your first experience of *recalling a library book* etched permanently into your brain? I didn't think so. At the same time, there are plenty of Beatles books I haven’t read, especially more “serious” ones like Mark Hertsgaard’s, which from the reviews and publicity (I should try to be fair to the author when I’ve not read the book) sound like tired and facile accounts of sixties cultural history, and “America’s loss of innocence” for which the Beatles compensated, two months after JFK’s assassination, etc, blah, blah, we can all write this book in our sleep, and now it’s time to say good night.

Spitz’s biography came out last year with a lot of hoopla, and I can say it is good. Its goodness stems directly from its heft—almost 1000 pages. To produce such a tome Spitz emphasizes detail over either half-assed cultural critique or fan-oriented mythologization. As I was sitting in the bathtub this morning, when, incidentally, I conceived this blog (wasn't wearing a condom--let that be a lesson), I was thinking, the reason this book is good is because it’s more like a literary biography. After that moment of delusional thinking passed I realized that in fact it’s better, i.e. less single-mindedly hagiographical, than 95% of literary biographies. For even many of those literary biographies that deal with the nitty-gritty of their subject’s life do so in a way that treats his or her faults and pecadillos as important on an epic scale—which to me is not only dully repetitive, but signals the biographer’s anxiety about convincing us his or her book was worth writing. But Spitz, buried in detail, makes, for instance, John Lennon’s hideous treatment of his first wife Cynthia seem just as banal and routine as it no doubt was—not the “dark side” of his burning fires of genius, for instance. My only major complaint about the book is that it doesn’t seem to treat the recording process with any particular care or focus; for instance, it mentions when they first started overdubbing vocal tracks (recording the songs for With the Beatles) and leaves it there. But for that topic I’m looking forward to one day having the time to read Geoff Emerick’s Here, There, and Everywhere, which also came out last year.

I also went to Itunes a couple of days ago to listen to samples of the Smithereens new full-length cover of Meet the Beatles, which was written up in the Sunday Times last weekend. I always seem to be a sucker for those Arts and Leisure features—another recent one was responsible for my purchase of the Cirque de Soleil Beatles show CD, which is another topic altogether. Anyway, listening to the samples was enough to counter the effect of the paper of record. For as much as I’m interested in copies, revisions, and reconceptualizations of the idea of originality (as well as karaoke and cover versions more specifically), it was just not pleasing to hear what’s really a pretty run-of-the-mill male rock vocalist singing in the “place” where the voice of the best white male pop-rock singer ever—John Lennon—had once been. All I could hear was the absent grain of John’s voice.

Other:
-The new Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin is gorgeous; I just saw it in “the flesh” for the first time yesterday. Funnily, they made it look like a McSweeney's book! Then I realized, oh yeah, this (i.e. mid-late 19th-century publishing aesthetics) is where McSweeney’s got all its tricks.

-The semester starts on Monday. I’m resisting the temptation to analyze my decision to start a blog three days before the semester starts.

-I have not sufficiently marked the death of Alice Coltrane (to myself, or to others). But in the past ten years I’ve listened to her records more than John’s, largely because of the title cut on Journey to Satchidananda, with that superbly groovy bass riff, and the beautiful textures of the middle eastern instruments, etc. I haven't read any obituaries, so I can't comment on how she's being memorialized, and to what degree it's simply as "John Coltrane's wife." But there's a way that her work speaks more directly to the present--to styles like electronica's repetitious grooves and various forms of ambient music.