Day of Denise Richards

Nothing has recently made me feel that Nathaniel West's vision of our relationship to stars as laid out in The Day of the Locust like the comments to this Yahoo blog post by Billy Altman on Denise Richards' butchering of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame".

Who's Beautiful?

There are few surprises on the new Pet Shop Boys' Yes, but that's just as well. No one makes adult alienation and self-doubt more credible and touching, and no one does it with more immediate music. They know melancholy like it's their area code, but the songs are never simply sad or souring. For one thing, half of Yes could be pulled as singles, and on "Beautiful People" - first single I'd pull - Neil Tennant's acutely aware of the distance between himself and the beautiful people he wants to live like, and thinking about them is primarily a way of measuring what he isn't. But before the song's over you suspect he's telling the truth, and that he'd happily give up a life of grit for one more insulated from care. Then you think about how many hits the Pet Shop Boys have and you realize he's closer to the beautiful people than many of us are, which makes his alienation more complex.

Back to the Future

The Gang of Four's Dave Allen wrote an interesting take on the relationship between the Web and music, taking up the thought that "The browser is the new iPod." As a consequence of that, he foresees the death of the album as the organizing principle for salable music. In the comments section, he writes;

Music recorded on analog 16 track machine, and not dumbed down to 44.1khz to accommodate transfer to crappy CD, pressed direct to a metal mother from 1/2″ tape and then pressed to vinyl which comes with MP3 and Lossless files, is the future I look forward to..or rather a reversion to the past…

Whether he realizes it or not, the future he envisions is more retro than he writes. The album became the dominant musical mode in the 1960s; before that, the single was the dominant mode, and albums were often collections of singles padded with a few extra songs. The Beatles did a lot to advance the album as the mature expression of an artistic vision that couldn't be contained by a single or EP, and the industry became so invested in the concept that it phased out the single in the early 1990s, in effect forcing people who only liked a song or two to buy the album. That short-sightedness in effect forced the creation of a music underground so people could get what they actually wanted.

The return to singles and EPs as the dominant mode of music production makes a lot of sense, moving the artist from an industry-dictated production schedule to a creativity-oriented one - cut songs when you've got them - but it doesn't necessarily mean the album is dead. There were at least two different kinds of consumers in the '60s and '70s - those who wanted the songs they liked to sing and dance to, and those who thought of the album as art (to simplify the terms, perhaps unfairly) - and there's no reason to think the latter audience will disappear. Albums cost more than singles and required a greater investment of time to hear, so they were never the easiest, most efficient way to consume music. They provided a different experience than a single did, and that difference will continue to exist and be addressed. But artists who don't have album-length thoughts or album-oriented aspirations will no longer have to pollute the market to have a place in the market.

Slow and Steady ...

... struggles just as much as anybody.

I'm a fascinated and loyal reader of Michaelangelo Matos' Slow Listening Movement blog. Last Christmas Eve, he explained his plan:

I need to clean out my ears. So from January to November 2009, I'm embarking on a kind of purification rite. In that time, I'm only allowing myself to download one MP3 at a time; the next MP3 can only be downloaded once I listen to the first one. With CDs, if I buy one, I have to listen to it all before I buy another, and before I am allowed to rip any of it to iTunes. There will surely be exceptions--CDs that suck, that I can't deal with playing all the way through--but hearing a bad album end to end is, if nothing else, a learning experience, so I plan to stick by this rule as much as I can.

[...]

Like a lot of people who love music a lot, I am a pack rat and a glutton. The Slow Listening Movement is my way of trying to curb those tendencies. Partly this is out of necessity: I have back taxes to start paying off, I'm planning to move cross-country (hopefully speaking, soon; practically speaking, probably not any time soon), and I'm sick of feeling trapped by my own clutter, be it my overcrowded CD shelves or the ungodly amount of MP3s my 1TB hard drive contains. It's great to have an extensive reference library, and many of those MP3s are duplicates--organizing it will be a project in itself--but there's a limit to these things as necessities. I can stand to indulge myself with fewer mindless acquisition sprees. Of course, it's not really a movement if only one person does it, and I hope others try it as well.

Not surprisingly, the program hasn't quite worked out as planned:

I start each month hopeful. Finally, I think, I'll sit down and decimate the endless Word doc and the email Digital Promos folders both at once. I will fully catch up, at last. I hope that happens in June, because it sure as hell isn't happening in May. For one thing, I've gone to more shows lately than I have in quite a while--including a day-long noise festival featuring all women performers (much of it rather good) and, this Saturday through Monday, the Sasquatch! Festival, which I'm covering for RollingStone.com. So that's four entire days where I won't get to play whatever I want, however nominal that want is. And I've been roaming more--not just the purge relistens, but jumping on things when I feel the urge, such as this wonderful survey of "After You've Gone" covering nearly a century and 30 performances, which I went for last night.

But I feel like Slow Listening has been a success. Not because the Unheard folder has 28 albums in it I'll be lucky to hear half of over the next week, or because I've paid more attention to the music I do have (that's why I think this year sucks: very little has stuck), but because it's made me more systematic. I've never had a gift for physical organization (or, often, mental organization), but keeping close tabs on my acquisition habits has been really good for me.

[...]

Part of it too is wanting to simply focus on what matters. I'm 34 and this has been on my mind in every area. Part of it is recalling my early 20s, when my focus on music, always, always heavy, became something I could see as a life. (I mentioned working at Sebastian Joe's and First Avenue at the same time in an earlier post--1997-98.) The listening then was structured: album after album, CD after CD. That's something that's faded for me with iTunes: I can play singles and make mixes and flit about with impunity. "Making the time to sit and play one folder after the other so I can tick them off the damn list" is not a description filled with joy and longing, but doing it I feel like I'm getting something done, and that's a kind of satisfaction as well.

I love everything about this because it's all so foreign to me. The attempts to systematize listening is something I have little connection to and less desire for, but I get it. Matos is also a lister, and fellow lister Geoffrey Himes defended lists to me as a way of making sense of a year in music. I'm not sure that spreadsheeting the year would do that for me, but clearly it works for some people. Matos goes so far as to work out quarterly lists; I have to be coerced into developing year-end lists, and then I go with the CDs that I remembered fondly, which seems like as good a measure of the year's CDs as any - which ones wore well and stuck.

At the same time, I recognize that how we hear music affects our responses to it - particularly when we listen professionally. I'll often having listening sessions to go through discs in my "I think I want to review them" pile and figure out which of those I actually want to review, but I'll still get to a quarter of those at most. Right now I hope to say something about Justin Townes Earle, John Doe and the Sadies, Ian McLagan, Wayne Hancock, Jarvis Cocker, Sonic Youth, the Felice Brothers, Lady Sovereign, the Minus 5, Fischerspooner and the New York Dolls, just to mention non-New Orleans acts. When Arlen Roth, a Ray Charles reissue and Abstract Rude came in, I almost felt bad because more CDs were going into that pile, decreasing the odds that I'd get around to some the discs I'd hoped to review.

The impulse to try to normalize our essentially abnormal way of consuming music make sense to me. But as Matos' writing shows, he's not really closer to a "normal" listening experience, and his attempts to normalize his experience haven't aleviated his anxiety. Rather than fight his fight, I've given in, then created niches of normalcy. My iPod only has songs I like - no work allowed. When I put it on, I'm always pleased with the shuffle. When I'm in the kitchen, I only listen to CDs in the collection; that's not review listening time either. But in general, I've made peace with the ironies that separate my listening from my readers'. It's hard for me to listen to my favorite music - pop - because if it's any good, it catches my attention and stops me from writing. For professional reasons, I spend little time with the music I value most and instead listen to a lot of DJ mixes, remixes, electronic music, dub and sountrack music because they fit in my work life.

Matos' desire to focus on what matters also reflects a subtle anxiety, namely, does what we do matter? Since popular tastes and critical tastes have rarely walked hand-in-hand, in one sense what we've done has always seemed superfluous. Most of us have likely made some sort of peace with that, but living a life based on ideas at a time when the number of paying venues for writing is decreasing adds a note of gravity to everything.

Remix/Reviolate

One element left out of Brett Gaylor's Rip: a Remix Manifesto is that of the remixer/reuser's attitude toward the past. The implication is that it's benign, merely using what he/she finds to make new art. But it's rarely that simple. Led Zep didn't merely borrow from Willie Dixon and Robert Johnson; they made made them "now" because now is better than then. There's an implied condesention toward the past, one often epressed by remaking it in a contemporary image.

In Girl Talk, the past is updated by being laid over new beats, taken out of context, and often given a new vocalist. That'snot a neutral act, even if it's done affectionately. As he screws with classic rock, you know he's upsetting many bands and their rap-hating fans by laying emcees over their riffs. But Girl Talk's am equal opportunity irritant; I'm sure many hip-hop fans are just as horeified by some the lame aongs their favorites are paired with.

But if the past tries to control the future and fights the present, it's not simply out of greed or small-mindedness. It is under attack by the forces of now, just as it always has been.

Remix/Revisionism

I just left a screening of Rip: a Remix Manifesto and ultimately I liked it as an act of provication. Filmmaker Brett Gaylor's manifesto is:

1. Culture always builds on the past.
2. The past always tries to control the future.
3. Our Future is becoming less free.
4. To build free societies, you must limit control of the past.

Good stuff worth contemplating, but what was interesting (beside the complete omission of hip-hop and sampling from the discussion) was the way Gaylor's evidence seemed to undo his argument. He contends that the past exerts unprecedented control over today's art and culture, but the film is centered on Girl Talk, who has now put out two albums of music laden with uncleared samples. His career and other examples in the film show that bit business may be trying to control ideas, but it has generally been unsuccessful.

He also misses the image enhancement, cultural capital and motivational value that accompanies the transformation of the ideas from the past. Gaylor exploits the pirate image throughout the film, but he does so as if being one's a bad thing. It might be an illegal thing, but until recent events, Johnny Depp's pirate-as-rock 'n' roll-outlaw has been an attractive pose, and transforming old blues songs, old Mickey Mouse comics, old fairy tales and old top 40 hits into works of art that speak to their moment has always had an appealing, subversive dimension.

There's enough cool in Rip: a Remix Manifesto to make it worth seeing (or downloading here) (or remixing here), but he gets a number of things wrong (Is it really a crime to hear music that contains samples that haven't been cleared?). Ultimately, it's more of a love letter to Girl Talk than anything else, but there are a lot of less worthy subjects of love letters.

More Review Insanity

The latest: There's a new Van Hunt album. I've liked Hunt, but I understand why Blue Note didn't release his last album for them. The publicist for his new album sent out a download link complete with a password and login information. Go through that link and you get to a page with a Download button. Click it and it asks you for your email address. Instead of getting the album then, you have to go to your email to get what I assume is the real link to the album. I have no idea if that's the end of the line or not because I quit trying. If I have to work that hard to get an album for review, I'd sooner review something on my desk or already on my hard drive. If someone actually wants a review, I shouldn't have to work this hard. Since critics have liked Hunt more than buyers have, this scavenger hunt approach to servicing reviewers seems particularly odd.

You Make the Call

I'm listening to the Minus Five's new Killingsworth and face the same three questions I face when dealing with A.C. Newman, Robyn Hitchcock and Robert Pollard:
1. Are the lyrics evocative or a dodge or both?
2. Does it matter?
3. Why are people so good at every other phase of pop music-making forcing me to ask these questions?

Something from Nothing

I admire Rich Cohen for his Vanity Fair profile of Jessica Simpson, not because it's so great but because she's obviously as bad an interview as you'd expect. There are few quotes from her from the interview, and he works around Team Simpson's general vapidity, exposing it in the process.

The Art of Writing - D.O.A. Again

Can we all call a time out on the reflexive Twitter/Facebook bashing? I suppose it's the inevitable byproduct of the moment when the cable news networks discovered members of Congress and the Senate used Twitter, and suddenly the social networking tool was ubiquitous - each time said with the same sense of oh-so-delicious naughtiness that accompanies the knowledge that it's a W away from something randy. Still, the easy, fake opposition Larry Blumenfeld created in the lead for his coverage of Jazz Fest is typical:

New Orleans inspires even inveterate Twitterers and Facebook correspondents to release their thumbs and touch real life. Except the guy at the bar of a club called DBA one recent Monday, who just leaned harder into his BlackBerry, typing feverishly as Glen David Andrews—trombone in one hand, mic in the other—upped the tempo of "It's All Over Now." Some people just don't get it.

Evidently people who use Twitter and Facebook are so caught up with themselves and their artificial networks that life is passing them by. But similar concerns were expressed about email, message boards and the telephone - each signaled the death of civilized written communication as people chose some ephemeral form of communication over carefully drafted, hand-written letters. Such hand-wringing really does little more than make the writer seem like a scold as he/she harrumphs "Kids these days ...!" and in the process, removed from the culture he/she is speaking to.

Trading Up?

Has anybody else found Christgau's Consumer Guide hard to use in its current form? At a technical level, I haven't been able to get the "Next" link to work to take me from review to review, but worse - what was once an easily read page has turned into 10 or so visually appealing, hard-to-use pages. I assume this is the handiwork of the good people at MSN, and it seems to be based on the premise that we only want to read the reviews of CDs we know, which is partially true. But I'd scan the other reviews to see if there was anything in there that sounded interesting enough to pursue, and every few months I'd make another discovery that way. The current model requires readers to choose to click on to see what comes next whereas before they had to choose to stop. And cover art's good, but it's not that good.

English as a Second Language

Rhino recently re-released Sammy Davis, Jr.'s All Star Spectacular as a download-only album, and in ways, the album's riveting. The album has the fingerprints of 1962 all over it to such a degree that it might as well have been recorded in a foreign language. Davis explains on the first track that on the album, he's doing impressions while singing the hits of the day, and he does so talking about his "swinging" association with Reprise Records, and how the project is "kind of a gas." His sincere bourgeois hipster tone is almost incomprehensibly unironic, giving the track a strangely mysterious quality even though I know all the words.

The project itself is strange, but its re-release is stranger because many of the songs have since joined history's parade of also-rans, and the people he's impersonating have no presence in the culture in 2009 - Frankie Laine, Vaughn Monroe, Al Hibbler and Mario Lanza to name a few. Songs you don't know as sing by Davis impersonating people you don't recall are fascinating and strange, but whatever frisson he thought he was creating at the time is utterly lost today. I'm entertained by it as an artifact of a show biz that was crushed by a meteor years ago, but I know that's not the album Davis made.

That, though, is what was once side one of the album. Side two is Davis without concept, simply singing cool, swinging songs with a band neither as to the point as any Sinatra would use nor as florid as any that appealed to Dean Martin and the results suggest that while accounts of Davis' impersonation skills may have been overrated, his talent as a singer weren't.

Such an odd project makes me wish Rhino would re-release more of Davis' albums because greatest hits collections and box sets show off his talent, but if the other albums have the eccentricity of All Star Spectacular, then it may be that his year-in, year-our recorded output is in its way as much a diary of his own issues and insecurities as any confessional indie rocker or singer-songwriter.

Everybody Out of My Box

Has anybody had a more uneasy slumber than Nat King Cole? First his daughter's regularly climbing into the coffin to sing a post-passing duet with him, and with Capitol Records' recent Re:Generations, another 20 or so artists join him in the box. Naturally, Natalie's there with the banal Will.i.am to produce a banal version of "Straighten Up and Fly Right," but the news is that much of this is entertaining and riffs on his image. Cee-Lo Green's remix of "Lush Life" affectionately situates Cole's urbanity in a contemporary context, while Salaam Remi's remix of "The Game of Love" suggests his notion of suave style is a bit corny. In the Just Blaze remix of "Pick-Up," now vs. then is the explicit theme as girls who would have loved Cole in his day find him and his pick-up lines laughable today (and in the song's only false note, they go with him anyway). When that theme is less prominent, Re:Generations presents compensatory charms such as a duet with Bebel Gilberto or a version of "Nature Boy" remade in TV on the Radio's own image. If we're going to make the dead croak out one more song, doing so this smartly makes it more palatable.

Sorting Things Out

I've been blogging at my more Louisiana-centric site recently since so much of what I've been writing about recently pertained to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. And I've still got a few thoughts on it that somehow seem more appropriate here than there, but I'll get to them soon enough.

While I've been working on our Jazz Fest issue, I've sorted CDs more than I've reviewed them, listening long enough to decide that something belongs in the "I hope to review it" pile but not actually doing any writing. Here's an attempt to deal with a fraction of that stack:

Black Moth Super Rainbow: Eating Us (Graveface): This is so up my alley - Moog synthesizers, trip-hop drums, melancholy robovocals singing surprisingly solid melodies. I'm not sure how this one's different from Dandelion Gum except that it doesn't smell like the packaging was fabricated by Topps, but I'm glad I have both.

Southside Johnny with LaBamba's Big Band: Grapefruit Moon - The Songs of Tom Waits (Leroy): I haven't thought about Southside Johnny in over 20 years, so I put this on more out of curiosity and have been pleasantly surprised. Waits' compositions are remade as swing tunes with his blessing (he sings on "Walk Away"), and the results are very agreeable if not compelling. Maybe it's because Southside Johnny's just not that compelling a singer, or maybe its because these versions of largely pre-Swordfishtrombones songs suggest that Waits' persona did the heavy lifting in those days.

Ha Ha Tonka: Novel Sounds of the Nouveau South (Bloodshot): I put this on and only moments ago noticed it - five songs later. I'd hoped it would catch for me the way Kings of Leon records eventually do, but they never disappeared entirely.

MSTRKRFT: Fist of God (Dim Mak/Downtown): Arena techno catches me because of its simplicity - throbbing, fuzzed-out riffs and little else. It's economical and made to be physically intense in a club, sports venue or aircraft hangar. I could use stronger hooks since I'll probably never hear MSTRKRFT in any of those venues, but I supsect what's here would be more than enough if I were dancing.