from major to minor

Remaking Rumours

2009-05-03T12:43:00.000-07:00

About a month ago, the artist Jennifer Delos Reyes put together a piece at Haverford (where I teach) in which she arranged for members of the community to remake the Fleetwood Mac album Rumours in its entirety. The album is legendary because, among other reasons, four of the band's members were involved in break-ups with each other while the recording was taking place. So it stands as a kind of monument to the difficulties and possibilities of collaboration.

Participants were all assigned a song to work on, mine was "I Don't Want to Know," on which I was paired with a Haverford junior named Jacob Waters, whom I'd never met before. We were the first people to record (lo and behold, my college has a recording studio in the basement of the dining hall--first I'd heard of this). The day of our assigned session, Jacob and I met in my office from 3:15 to 4 to talk about an idea I had for an arrangement of the song, then I ran off to faculty meeting, then to the studio for our session scheduled from 6 to 9. And despite all the difficulties we faced--the uncertainty of not knowing each other or each other's musical taste/approach, the age and student/prof differences, the general harried quality of the day, and so on--it came out pretty well as a Pavement-like slack sound. I'm playing drums and bass; Jacob sang and played guitars, and Julia Ryan, the Bryn Mawr student who was assisting Jen Delos Reyes, got thrown into the mix after she was caught singing harmony in the control room.

Jacob, Julia, and Me, "I Don't Want to Know"

Eight Minutes of Sun Ra Bliss

2009-05-03T12:26:00.000-07:00

This is a beautiful song recorded in 1960 by Sun Ra and His Arkestra. It goes well with the weather we're having in the Northeast: days and days of non-committal rainstorms. It's the title track of his album Interstellar Low Ways, which I believe is still in print on CD along with the album Sun Ra Visits Planet Earth. If you were to own just one Sun Ra CD. . .

Sun Ra, "Interstellar Low Ways"

Always on the Sunny Side

2009-04-10T13:50:00.000-07:00

This is a mini playlist, perhaps to be expanded, of songs that are so happy that they are actually sad. This could mean that they are masking some kind of desperation. It could also mean that they are rally songs sung from a place of pain or trial.

June Carter Cash, "Keep on the Sunny Side"

I’ve been obsessed with this song since it came out last year, on June’s final album. I love how it sounds like an old person, unabashedly. You can hear her struggling with the unavoidable limitations of her voice, missing notes. But, of course, she persists. Her voice has a quality I don’t recall hearing anywhere, except maybe on some old folk records—but this is crystal clear. I just love that it doesn’t mask the reality of being really old. I also love when Johnny comes in for the harmonies on the choruses; they seem like two elderly soldiers to me.

Darlene Love, "Chapel of Love"

“And we’ll never be lonely anymore.” Good luck with that.

This version has a slower tempo than the more famous one by the Dixie Cups, which enriches the sad undertone. I like this one better.

Barbara Harris, "It Don't Worry Me"

The climactic song in one of my favorite films, Robert Altman’s Nashville, and it was written by actor Keith Carradine. It’s a song that comes from a place of political trauma, very much of the Watergate era. But it could have applied equally well or better in the GWB era. “You may say that I ain’t free, but it don't worry me. . . "

Here are the songs.

Singing lesson from Bob Dylan

2009-04-09T19:40:00.000-07:00

I'm fascinated by the art of vocal intepretation. I love imagining what a singer is hearing as s/he re-casts a melody familiar to her audience. It's often said of Bob Dylan that what makes his singing interesting, in lieu of a voice that is innately pleasing tonally, is his phrasing, his interpretation of his own lyrics. I've seen Dylan live twice, both in the last three years. I've liked both shows, mostly because he seems so into it, and is aging gracefully. But interpretation for him now means the rhythm at which he spits out the lyrics, pretty much.

This version of I Want You is from a rather reknown bootleg, from a show in New Orleans in October, 1980. He was just coming out of his Christian period, just starting to sing his old songs again. And in this version, he is intepreting by really singing. He has an alternate melody in his head, one that nonetheless fits the song perfectly, and it undergirds a beautiful, rather desperate sounding performance. I think desperation is a good affective tone for this song.

There are some other gems from this show--particularly an awesome version of "Simple Twist of Fate"--that I may post at a later date.

Oh!

2009-04-08T19:42:00.000-07:00

I realized right after the posting the last post that the best song to re-start with would be the song that inspired the name of this blog. It's "Major to Minor" by the Settlers, a mid-sixties English pop band. The song is from the volume two of the excellent "Ripples" series of obscure Brit sixties pop singles, I think drawn from the Pye Records catalog. This is the best volume of seven--they're out of print but worth seeking out.

But also, from Cole Porter:

There's no love song finer;
but how strange the change
from major to minor

Back

2009-04-08T18:37:00.000-07:00

I'm back. In a stripped down, very minimal form. I'm actually just planning on posting individual songs every day or two or seven, with a little blurb about the song. I guess I've entered the Twitter age. And I'm not even on Twitter!

So my first post is "Things You'll Keep" by the Apartments. They are an Australian band from the 80s. I had never heard of them until I read an interview with Dan Bejar, in which he referred to them as an influence. I really like the atmosphere of this song, especially the way it "kicks in" by going from melancholia to a slightly less lethargic melancholia. I also like the lyrical hook of "Some things you were never meant to lose."

Test

2009-04-08T18:30:00.000-07:00

passover

I'm Coming Back

2009-04-08T11:57:00.001-07:00

Soon.

Breaking News from the Campaign

2007-06-19T11:36:00.001-07:00

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

2007-06-18T21:51:00.000-07:00

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

2007-06-13T17:22:00.000-07:00

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

2007-06-12T08:34:00.000-07:00

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

2007-06-10T19:28:00.000-07:00

was genius.

who are public intellectuals?

2007-06-06T18:04:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-30T13:34:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-05-27T10:53:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-25T15:39:00.000-07:00

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

2007-03-13T19:31:00.000-07:00

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

2007-03-09T15:16:00.000-08:00

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

2007-02-25T13:24:00.001-08:00

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

2007-02-17T09:46:00.000-08:00

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.

2007-02-08T18:10:00.000-08:00

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

2007-02-07T17:33:00.000-08:00

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

2007-01-29T13:18:00.001-08:00

The 33 1/3 Series

2007-01-27T19:17:00.000-08:00

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.