Smooth Jazz Superstars

Caroling Pub Crawl

2011-12-12T11:43:00.003-06:00

Tuesday night is the 3rd Caroling Pub Crawl. Once again, we're taking beer and Christmas to the people of Uptown whether they want us or not. Last year, we successfully wassailed and were fed & offered booze by one family, and while I can't promise we'll meet with similar results this year, it should be another spirited celebration of the season. As someone who sings in the key of L, I can testify that singing ability is not required. Christmas sweaters are a positive addition to the event but similarly not required.

We meet at 7 p.m. at the Kingpin and wander from there. The route and stops will be worked out on the fly, but last year we went to Magazine Street and trolled along there through bars and restaurants and that worked pretty well. Kat and I found a house with great Christmas lights that might need some singing.

If you need a little help getting in the mood, here's my Spotify Christmas mix and this year's downloadable Christmas mix. Here's the song list for the latter:
1. O Come All Ye Faithful - Julian Koster's Singin Saw
2. Hey Guys! It's Christmas Time - Sufjan Stevens
3. Happy Sound's Christmas - Happy Sound
4. This Christmas Day - Don Rich
5. I'm Your Christmas Friend - James Brown
6. Black Christmas - The Harlem Children's Chorus
7. It Came Upon a Midnight Clear - Lew Charles
8. Little Drummer Boy - Ellis Marsalis
9. Santa's North Pole Band - Line Material
10. Run Rudolph Run - Keith Richards
11. Welcome Christmas - from How the Grinch Stole Christmas
12. The Christmas Song - Sergio Mendes and Brasil '66
13. Deck the Halls - Mirror Image
14. Love for Christmas - the Ebbonaires
15. Funky Funky Christmas - New Kids on the Block
16. It's Christmas Every Day - Hank Thompson
17. Blue Christmas - Tommy Wills
18. Joy to the World - St. Amanita
19. I'll Be Home for Christmas - Wayne King and His Orchestra
20. You're All I Want for Christmas - Brook Benton
21. Good King Wenceslas - John Fahey
22. It Doesn't Often Snow on Christmas - Pet Shop Boys
23. Marshmallow World - Darlene Love
24. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer - Andre Kostelanetz
25. (It's a) Happy Holiday - The Shells
26. Be There for Christmas - Ledisi
27. Jingle Bells - Marcus Roberts
28. The Christmas Polka - Jim Reeves
29. Merry Christmas, Everybody - Stompin' Tom Connors
30. I'll Be Home for Christmas - Al Green
31. Santa Doesn't Cop Out on Dope - Sonic Youth

My Kind of Merry Christmas

2011-12-02T15:24:00.005-06:00

"Christmas songs have to be joyous, even if for all the wrong reasons," John Waters told me in 2004. "They have to be amazing.” I've let that be my guiding logic when I collect Christmas songs for CDs, playlists on Spotify, or this, this year's downloadable Christmas mixtape. Enjoy, and Merry Christmas.

1. O Come All Ye Faithful - Julian Koster's Singin Saw

2. Hey Guys! It's Christmas Time - Sufjan Stevens
3. Happy Sound's Christmas - Happy Sound
4. This Christmas Day - Don Rich
5. I'm Your Christmas Friend - James Brown
6. Black Christmas - The Harlem Children's Chorus
7. It Came Upon a Midnight Clear - Lew Charles
8. Little Drummer Boy - Ellis Marsalis
9. Santa's North Pole Band - Line Material
10. Run Rudolph Run - Keith Richards
11. Welcome Christmas - from How the Grinch Stole Christmas
12. The Christmas Song - Sergio Mendes and Brasil '66
13. Deck the Halls - Mirror Image
14. Love for Christmas - the Ebbonaires
15. Funky Funky Christmas - New Kids on the Block
16. It's Christmas Every Day - Hank Thompson
17. Blue Christmas - Tommy Wills
18. Joy to the World - St. Amanita
19. I'll Be Home for Christmas - Wayne King and His Orchestra
20. You're All I Want for Christmas - Brook Benton
21. Good King Wenceslas - John Fahey
22. It Doesn't Often Snow on Christmas - Pet Shop Boys
23. Marshmallow World - Darlene Love
24. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer - Andre Kostelanetz
25. (It's a) Happy Holiday - The Shells
26. Be There for Christmas - Ledisi
27. Jingle Bells - Marcus Roberts
28. The Christmas Polka - Jim Reeves
29. Merry Christmas, Everybody - Stompin' Tom Connors
30. I'll Be Home for Christmas - Al Green
31. Santa Doesn't Cop Out on Dope - Sonic Youth

For those who like a more active Christmas celebration, Kat and I will once again lead the third annual Caroling Pub Crawl at 7 p.m., December 13 leaving from The Kingpin (1307 Lyons St.). We hope you'll join us, and as is the case every year, talent is optional.

The Rich at Play

2011-09-23T12:50:00.002-05:00

What's wrong with Mick Jagger's Superheavy? I'll start and end by questioning the imagination that went into it. Over at Spotify, I posted a playlist of an alternative version of the album - songs by the same name but by other artists before Jagger, etc. The process took all of nine minutes.

Hold the Line(s)

2011-09-10T09:06:00.002-05:00

Today, Peter Finney wrings his hands in The Times-Picayune about the condition of the Saints' offensive and defensive lines. They weren't impressive, but they were my one source of concern going into Thursday's game simply because of the amount of change in both units during a very short pre-season. Our O line has two new bodies in Olin Kreutz and Zach Streif (as a starter), and our front seven on defensive is undergoing major transition, particularly in the first two weeks with Will Smith out. With all that change going on, it didn't surprise me that they didn't play as well as units as they needed to, and I suspect if that game took place a month from now, we'd see a stouter set of lines.

ESPN's Fickle and Had Bad Taste

2011-09-08T10:39:00.004-05:00

ESPN has a new boyfriend in the NFC. A few weeks ago, the sports networks was steady on the arm of Mike Vick and all his new hunky pals on the Philadelphia Eagles. Eagles were "The Dream(y) Team" and were obviously ready for the Super Bowl.

After the preseason suggested that the Eagles' offensive line may have trouble protecting Vick and opening holes for Ronnie Brown, ESPN's love has moved to the Atlanta Falcons. This morning, on "Mike and Mike," Mike Greenberg and Mike Golic picked Atlanta to win the NFC South (neither see the Saints even earning a wild card spot in the playoffs!), and Golic has the Falcons going to the Super Bowl.

Later in the morning, Colin Cowherd spoke out against the conventional wisdom that put the Green Bay Packers in the Super Bowl in favor of the Falcons because the Falcons have a very forgiving schedule. The only problem with that analysis is that the Saints have a very similar schedule with two breaks the Falcons don't get. Saints play the Bears in the Superdome while the Falcons have to go to Chicago. The Falcons face one more Pro Bowl-caliber quarterback (one of Cowherd's yardsticks) in Michael Vick when they play the Eagles in a game that's sure to have Twilight-like implications in the battle for ESPN's love, while the Saints play the wounded New York Giants and the boy-next-door Eli Manning.

I'm always surprised by how much statistical information ESPN collects before throwing it all out in favor of the results it wants or the intangibles its narratives.

When Class War Comes, First We Take Their Foam Fingers

2011-08-14T08:05:00.006-05:00

When the Saints' pre-season opened Friday, the news was as much the improvements to the Superdome as it was the game. From The Times-Picayune :

"Everything is great," said Jed Gaspard, a season-ticket holder from Eunice who sits in Section 143. "I'm really excited that they spent the money to upgrade it so we can really have a nice facility. It kind of makes you proud coming here. I'm spending about $100 more per game per seat, but it is worth it."

I sit in section 649, and I too was excited when I went to the men's room nearest to my seats in the terrace and saw that the same two-year-old ad for a fantasy football service is still on the wall above the urinals, complete with the swastika that someone drew on a player's arm shortly after it went up. While the dome was upgrading the lower levels to add 3,400 seats, it left upper level graffiti in place for two years running.

I didn't expect the renovations to reach the upper rack, and I'm not disappointed that they didn't. The changes that did affect me, I liked: the significantly widened ramp outside Gate C, what looks like improved lighting on the field. But it felt a bit zeitgeisty when The T-P and all the local news outlets reported on the upgrades as if they were good for whole Who Dat Nation and not simply the most affluent. They now have "bunker lounges" (I guess the dome ran out of money to come up with better names about the same time they ran out of money for steel wool to scrub the graffiti), wider corridors, more and better food and drink options, and more bathrooms. I'm sure the women in the terrace looking forward to a dome dog while standing in the corridors in the terrace while in line for the ladies room will be very happy for them.

Don't Say "Extreme" Unless You Mean It

2011-08-09T08:42:00.003-05:00

WWL-870 has dubbed its coverage of the Saints' preseason "X-Treme Camp Coverage." If nobody's on a skateboard or spinning a bike in the air, calling yourself "extreme" simply draws attention to how old and not-extreme you are.

For me, the only thing extreme about WWL's coverage of the Saints is the extreme rage I feel listening to Deke Bellavia ramble. As someone who conducts interviews, I'm irritated by TV and radio sports reporters' tendency to ask a question and feed the athlete the answer in the question. A typical question might be, "What's your approach to this lockout-shortened pre-season? Are trying to just take it one day at a time and give 110 percent?" The Deke version takes that to the "extreme": "What's your approach to this lockout-shortened pre-season? Are trying to just take it one day at a time and give 110 percent? Because I know you're sort of player who just tries to give it his all every day, every snap, and you know that you can't look down the line and overlook any opponent in the NFL. Are you just trying to work on your game and contributing to your unit and letting the chips fall where they may? Because one thing we know about the NFL is that nothing goes as planned, and as soon as you think you know what's going to happen, everything changes."

Needless to say, the cavalcade of inanity prompts cliche-prone interview subjects under the best of circumstances to pull the cliche shell up higher than ever as they address the general subject of training camp, the only thing they could hang on to out of all blather.

Imagination is Reality, Pt. 2

2011-08-05T16:19:00.003-05:00

Yesterday I wrote about the Tea Party tendency to assume questions and the absence of information as proof of something malevolent. Yesterday on President Obama's birthday, Rachel Maddow waded into that tendency taken to the extreme - the Birther Movement.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

In that case, the document that we can't each individually empirically verify is taken as something suspicious that can't be trusted. In the Maddow clip, there's footage of Michelle Bachmann touches on exactly that when she says that the one way to verify the birth certificate is to interview the clerk who certified it ... unless he or she was paid off! Okay, the last part's mine, but if you believe everything else birthers believe, why believe that this functionary wasn't paid off?

Of course, the birthers are opening a door no one can get through. If Obama's birth certificate isn't proof of his US birth, whose is? Why should we accept Romney or Bachmann's birth certificates as valid?

Imagination is Reality

2011-08-04T12:53:00.003-05:00

If you're a Tea Partier, what now? Enjoy that the sun's a little sunnier and the air's a little airier now that the government's been taught a lesson in fiscal responsibility? I don't think so. This came in the email yesterday in a Tea Party newsletter:

What was meant as a defensive tool to protect our beloved nation may, in the wrong hands become a weapon of manipulation and Constitutional destruction? In the wake of the September 11th 2001 attacks the Bush administration recoiled with an all-encompassing doctrine of legislative action, commonly known as Homeland Security Presidential Directive-20.

Believe it or not, this directive grants broad sweeping power to not only the President of the United States, but also to those appointed to deal with a "Catastrophic Emergency." However, the concept of "Catastrophic Emergency" "Continuity of Government," "Continuity of Operations," while well-conceived, lacks in safe guards.

Consider this: Who decides what a "Catastrophic Emergency" is? What are the parameters and when will a "Catastrophic Emergency" come to an end? The concept of "Enduring Constitutional Government" becomes a moot point when interpreted in the light of the Liberal concepts of the present administration for if the Constitution is a living breathing document it will need enduring care indefinitely.

Just in case all those question marks left you confused, Bush enacted Homeland Security Presidential Directive-20 and the Tea Partiers are concerned that Obama will arbitrarily declare a catastrophic emergency and remake America, presumably as a Socialist Hell. What evidence do we have that the president who starts every negotiation by taking any faintly radical idea of the board will suddenly declare martial law and come for the Tea Partiers, their guns and their tax dollars? The possibility that it might happen. The scenario is absurdly unlikely, but the fact that they can imagine it seems to give the idea the power of certainty.

The Tea Party Needs Your Help To Stop The Obama Regime

Aren't regimes things that we overthrow? I don't understand Obama's desire to work with people who consider Democratic presidents illegitimate and possibly criminal (remember Rush's daily countdown during Clinton's presidency, declaring the number of days America was held hostage?).

In short, will Conservative actions meet the threshold of an open and known danger to the Continuance of Government if the definition of those actions challenge defined the ideals of a small group of powerful men with a socialist agenda?

Impossible, how about this: Will refusing to curb spending be interpreted as just as much of a threat to America as a terrorist or nuclear attack? Will Homeland Security jump into action when they perceive our nation is in danger if we refuse to balance our budget or perhaps if America stops printing money?

Astonishing isn't it? Are there no limits to the power of Homeland Security Presidential Directive-20? Would President Obama brandish such power in the name of saving America and restore U.S. financial institutions in a manner the government becomes the manager of ALL financial transactions?

Why not? The power is before him, why would he NOT grab the power of ultimate control and pronounce salvation by the use of Homeland Security Presidential Directive-20?

Then again, one would have to believe our government and the people who run it are power hungry, agenda driven and of course are willing use existing law to further their plans.

Ridiculous isn't it! Need proof?

Yes! That passage asks nine questions. It doesn't state that anything's actually happening or offer up even a shred of evidence to lend credence to the possibility that Obama will invoke Homeland Security Presidential Directive-20, but the absence of answers is to be taken as confirmation that the takeover is nigh. This is written as if the absence of answers proves the existence of a conspiracy that doesn't want you to know their foul, socialist agenda.

In fact, what we see is the Conservative tendency to imagine a loophole, then assume someone's going to use it because they can't imagine someone not doing so. Anchor babies? Not a problem, but some Republicans want to fight them because they can't understand why countless undocumented immigrants aren't taking advantage of this possibility. Homeland Security Presidential Directive-20 offers the opportunity to enact such sweeping change that they assume Obama must be looking for the pretext to use it because they can't see why anyone would leave such a powerful instrument untouched on the shelf.

Still Together?

2010-05-25T16:46:00.004-05:00

I've written twice now about the New Pornographers' Together, once with a lot of love and once with a little skepticism. Since the latter post, I've found that when I put the album on, I tend to leave it on for another song and another song, and so on. I stay with it, and songs keep paying off with smart touches that continue to surprise such as the melody inserted almost gratuitously in the bridge to "Crash Years" that becomes the vocal melody for the outro. During the verse of "Sweet Talk, Sweet Talk," it's hard to imagine how the chorus will follow this, but the instrumental pre-chorus makes the connection seem inevitable. And though I admire the touches like these in almost every song, more often than not I'm simply singing along in the car, which is as good a barometer of pop as I can think of.

I Hate to Throw Stones, But ...

2010-02-08T13:55:00.003-06:00

... are there any standards in sports writing? I know music writers have little room to speak, but here's one of the dumbest things I've seen written after the Super Bowl, this by the Louisville Mojo's Billy Reed:

Bad Karma Beat the Colts

The New Orleans Saints didn't beat the Indianapolis Colts in the Super Bowl as much as bad karma did. You should not mess around with Mother Nature, or, apparently the gods of football. The Colts should never have blown off their opportunity to go unbeaten.

By winning their first 14 regular-season games, the Colts put themselves in position to join the 1972 Miami Dolphins as the only NFL team to ever reign as unbeaten Super Bowl champions. It's a hollowed goal worth achieving. Yet instead of pursuing it, the Colts blew it off.

They went in the tank in their last two regular-season games, gift-wrapping victories for the New York Jets and Buffalo Bills by putting their starters on the sidelines. The goal, said Colts' president Bill Polian and coach Jim Caldwell, was winning the Super Bowl, not going unbeaten.

They could have achieved both, Instead, the got neither. By blowing the Super Bowl to the underdog Saints, the Colts got what they deserved in the eyes of those who believe that every team has an obligation – to itself, its fans, and the integrity of the game – to try to win every time it puts on the uniform.

- Evidently players and talent have nothing to do with results; it's all about keeping the football gods happy. Of course, the other team that thwarted the game's integrity, sat its players down and didn't try in the final week was the New Orleans Saints. I guess the football gods were too busy stewing over the Colts' sins to properly smite the Saints.

I have yet to see the team good enough to orchestrate its place in history. The Colts tried it and got on the wrong side of karma. You tempt the gods at your own risk. When the Colts did their tank jobs against the Jets and Bills, you can bet that George Halas, Paul Brown and Vince Lombardi were frowning up in Hoghide Heaven.

- This is pretty Aristotelian now, with Jim Caldwell punished for his hubris. Do we blind him now or later?

Other than money, why play at all if you are not going to play for your place in history? Exactly 44 teams now have won the Super Bowl, but only one has been crowned as an unbeaten Super Bowl champion. The '72 Dolphins set the bar high and so far nobody has been able to vault it.

Those who have come closest – the New England Patriots of a couple of years ago, for example – have failed not from lack of effort, but because they weren't quite good enough. We'll never know if the Colts were good enough because Polian and Caldwell, playing God, took their fate into their own hands.

- Wait, so talent does matter? Now I'm confused. Or, did the football gods conspire to saddle the Pats with an inferior team? Those insidious gods!

Of course, there's also this: Maybe the Saints are just better. Maybe the Saints would have won even if the Colts had come into the Super Bowl unbeaten.

The Saints Sean Payton out-coached Caldwell, catching the Colts unprepared with some new offensive and defensive wrinkles. His decision to open the second half with an onside kick was one of the guttiest in Super Bowl history. And in the end, after an incredible duel of surpassing excellence, it was the Colts' MVP quarterback, Peyton Manning, who cracked instead of his New Orleans counterpart, Purdue product Drew Brees.

With the Colts down by only seven and driving, Manning threw an interception that Saints cornerback Tracy Porter, a native of Louisiana and a second-round draft pick from LSU, grabbed and returned 74 yards to blow the game open.

It was not a hard play. Porter simply moved around and in front of Manning's intended receiver, Reggie Wayne, and took Manning's pass right in the numbers. Yards from reaching the end zone, Porter began pointing at Saints fans in the stands, touching off a wild celebration both in Sun Life Stadium and on Bourbon Street in New Orleans.

- What's a discussion of football doing in this column?

It was a marvelous spiritual victory for a city still coming back from the ravages of Hurricane Katrina, the 2006 natural disaster that brought the Gulf Coast region to its knees. The Saints' home, the New Orleans Superdome, was seriously damaged, but still served as a shelter for refugees.

- What time is it? Cliche o'clock, time for stock piety!

As fate would have it, Peyton Manning also is a native of New Orleans. He was born there during the dark early years of the Saints franchise, when his father, Archie, was taking weekly beatings as the Saints' QB. The team was so bad that they became known as the Aints and fans took to wearing paper sacks over their heads.

- "Oh, cruel fate," Peyton says, "Why dost thou trifle with me so? Why must I play my father's keeper? And what's that tired reference to 1980 doing in this paragraph?"

The victory comes in the midst of Mardi Gras and is guaranteed to do what was previously thought to be impossible, which is send the festival to new levels of drunkenness and debauchery. But that's OK.

It's great to see New Orleans alive and well and strutting again.
Heck, I'll bet that if you look carefully during the Mardi Gras parade, you might just see the gods of football riding a float through the French Quarter. They still rule the game, you see, and woe be to the team that defies them.

- What time is it? Cliche o'five, time for a sidehanded slap at our partying and an anachronistic reference to floats in the French Quarter, something that hasn't happened in my 20-plus years in New Orleans.

To be fair to Billy Reed, he's hardly alone in his love of the intangibles. The Saints were supposedly doomed against the Cardinals because the Cards were "hot," having played a shootout against the Packers in the wild card game while the Saints rested players for two weeks. What's a team to do if it has no momentum, like the Cards and Cowboys? Evidently, sit home and watch the Super Bowl on TV. This week,the Saints were underdogs because they lacked experience in the Super Bowl. I gather inexperienced teams would lose all professionalism and roll up like pillbugs at the feet of Carrie Underwood when faced with the prospect of playing the nation's biggest game in front of its biggest audience. Ask the Colts how that experience worked out for them. Bottom line: Intangibles vs. actual football stuff - go with the stuff.

Schwag Check

2010-02-06T11:29:00.003-06:00

Packaged in press mailing of Americana artist Suzi Ragsdale's Wake Up, a packet of coffee grounds with the following label:

Just like her passionate lifestyle, Suzi Ragsdale's Americana music expresses a rich variety of experiences and interests. From relaxing with friends in her tipi back home to hiking the highest mountains of Peru, from creating new recipes to exploring new yoga poses, this ALTO WITH ATTITUDE brings sensual and joyful song to all she touches.

These exotic artisan beans reflect Suzi's multi-dimensional embrace, with a bold blend of Peruvian sweet-mellow sparkle and Mocha/Java choco-nutty richness.

Wake Up! ... and rise above the gravity.

I like choco-nutty music. It's my favorite.

Getting it "Right"

2010-02-06T09:57:00.003-06:00

Response to Kid Sister's Ultraviolet seems to have a lot to do with your investment in having the "right" artist fly the flag for indie/party rap. Those who think Kid Sister's a pretender & the beneficiary of star producers (one of which, A-Trak, is her boyfriend) don't feel her flow or the songs. Since I've not no dog in that hunt, I hear three or four pop songs with so much drive I've been spinning them regularly in the car - the electro-dance "Right Hand Hi" (which Mardi Gras dance teams should be parading to) through "Step" with a guest appearance by Estelle (which has a nice, clear-eyed analysis of the effects of buying women drinks). By now, "Pro Nails" is too well-known to move me like it once did, but it's a great pop track, too, and "Switchboard" (produced by Chicago's DJ Gant-Man) sounds fresh. I skip around the album, particularly in the second half when my attention seriously wanders, but Ultraviolet merits more credit than many critics have given it.

What a Couple of Decades that Was (Not Was)

2010-01-02T10:00:00.004-06:00

Seriously, did anyone realize that Was (Not Was) has been around for 20 years? I suppose the follow-up is, do people think much about Was (Not Was) at all? Some careers are like that, following alternate routes and only occasionally intersecting with the rest of the musical world. Now, there's a "greatest hits" of sorts, Pick of the Litter 1980-2010, and the news (I suppose) is how listenable it is.

For the most part, the funk/jazz/pop band hasn't sat well in my memory - erratic, sometimes unkind, often weird for weirdness' sake. Its debut 12-inch, "Wheel Me Out", holds up beautifully and promised something the band never delivered again, a merger of Detroit rock 'n' roll (with Wayne Kramer on guitar), funk (P-Funk's Larry Fratangelo on percussion) and jazz (trumpeter Marcus Belgrave), all on a great dance groove with the enigmatic title cut and the image of "a former scientist / now on wheels" to give the track mystery. After that, their need to say more kept tracks from inviting listeners to join in the same way.

My experience was also that the band followed a good album with a forgettable one - a few I only remembered when I looked at the liner notes for Pick of the Litter - but like Frank Zappa, an obvious influence, my biggest doubt was the band's attitude toward the people in the songs. Was the seeming detachment in "Out Come the Freaks" a way to goof on people? Was David Was' faux-hipster delivery on "I Feel Better Than James Brown" a way to signal that the speaker's nuts, or to rip the world around him? What Up Dog's "Anytime Lisa" (not included here) cruelly focuses on the easy girl who's too blind to see the guy who really loves her. Are the semi-spoken word tracks like "Dad I'm in Jail" and "The Sky's Ablaze" some sort joke on the straights? On the people who want to find meaning in the meaningless? Or easy bits of weirdness that don't really speak to anything or anyone?

Still, Pick of the Litter is a reminder of how strong their songcraft was, and how varied their influences could be. The chant evoking Afropop gives "I Feel Better Than James Brown" a kick I didn't remember, and the musical backing on "Dad I'm in Jail" engaged me. The one track from vocalist Sweet Pea Atkinson's Was-produced solo album Don't Walk Away (1982) shows its vintage, but it also reflected a thoughtful attempt to create a contemporary context for a classic soul singer. And in Atkinson and Harry Bowens, Was (Not Was) had singers who could invest a measure of compassion in even the strangest lyrics and give listeners a reason to care. And even when their sound had become predictable, they didn't fake the funk. They weren't always funky, but they never treated funk, R&B or jazz as a joke, and on Pick of the Litter, that affection for the music that spawned the Was Brothers is the album's unifying and most appealing characteristic.

Don't

2009-11-28T10:23:00.002-06:00

I just finished Alice Echols' Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture, and since it's not due out until March, I won't say much about it beyond a note on the ending. After Echols deals extensively with the '70s for most of the book, she rolls through the next 20-plus years in 20 or so pages, then concludes by seeing traces of disco acceptance in such band names as the Disco Biscuits and Panic! at the Disco. In short, a book that moves at a smart pace becomes cursory in the home stretch. The only thing I find less convincing is the attempt to link the past and present to show continued relevance. Joe Bonomo tries this in Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found, where his last chapter tells us that Dave Alvin and Rev. Horton Heat love classic Jerry Lee. Since they're in their 40s and 50s (I assume), those aren't the best examples. More to the point, though, are such gestures necessary? Does disco need to be accepted and enjoying some sort of normalized place in the culture for the book to matter? Do famous people now have to care about Jerry Lee for Jerry Lee's recordings to be relevant?

An "Unplanned Take Dose"

2009-11-17T09:09:00.004-06:00

A friend forwarded me this - obviously an English story mechanically translated into a foreign language then mechanically translated back. The result is accidental dada poetry, made finer by the celebrity subject matter:

Lindsay Lohan‘’s incommunicative has revealed that her famous girl was dating Heath Ledger when he died.

Dina claimed that the ‘Mean Girls’ grapheme and the ‘Dark Knight’ grapheme were in a relation at the instance of his unplanned take dose in Jan 2008.

In a leaked sound call between Dina and her ex-husband, she has said that playwright never genuinely recovered after the Joker actor’s death.

“Lindsay was dating Heath when he died. I don”t undergo if you undergo that, but I undergo ”cause I would modify her soured and they were friends very, rattling close, ok?” The Sun quoted Dina as informing archangel in the sound tape.

In the conversation, which was transcribed in 2008, Dina attributes some of Lindsay’’s individualized problems to Heath’’s passing.

She also feared her girl haw modify up feat the aforementioned artefact cod to ingest and medication take addictions.

“When she’’s inebriate or takes an Adderall with it she module do something same Heath Ledger did in a ordinal without thinking. His modification f***ed her up,” the Sun quoted her as locution on the phone.

Blowing in the Wind

2009-11-10T08:41:00.003-06:00

After Katrina, New Orleanians were castigated as a bunch of slackjaws who didn't know enough to get out of the way of a hurricane coming straight at them. It was as if hurricanes are just like warm fronts and rain bands, and that once set in motion, they'll go in the predicted direction until they run out of United States and do whatever they do in the Atlantic. But hurricanes aren't that predictable, as Hurricane/Tropical Storm/Mild Breeze Ida illustrated yesterday. Despite predictions of 70 percent chance of rain all day, it barely sprinkled.

What critics also failed to account for is the cost of dealing with a storm. Hurricane Gustav was small "D" devastating to the region last year because the mass evacuation meant a whole city went on a forced vacation and people had to spend money earmarked for such frivolities as bills and groceries on evacuation. When they returned, they came back to businesses that had gone a week without cash flow and struggled to make payroll. Gustav sent a shiver through the South Louisiana economy that took a few months to work off last year, and even Ida's weak miss affected a lot of lives as many working parents suddenly had to figure out what to do with their children yesterday when many schools pre-emptively closed.

Bottom line: As always, what seems simple is rarely simple.

A Simple Question

2009-11-02T11:39:00.002-06:00

Friday night at the Voodoo Music Experience in New Orleans, hip-hop group the Knux played on one of the side stages. Unfortunately, the rains earlier in the day created a 10-foot-wide mud mote around the stage that fans had to brave to see the band. That and the rapidly cooling night kept the crowd down, but it didn't stop the hype man for the Knux from trying desperately to get a "KNUX! KNUX! KNUX!" chant going. When it didn't work, he badgered the crowd and tried again, then repeated the process until I walked away, tired of being yelled at. I feel for the group because Krispy and Al are from here, but because they got their act together out of town, they have little following here. Still, what's more likely to move a crowd - a hype man yelling at the audience, or playing something funky?

On Rob Walker's Territory

2009-10-21T16:17:00.003-05:00

Rob Walker's NO Notes chronicles all things "St. James Infirmary." I'm going to let Rob breakdown Clint Maedgen's re-write of the lyrics to SJI in the new version by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band in this version; I can wrangle the referential end of things. I've admired the Hall's efforts to remain true to traditional jazz without being bound to antiquity. The recent New Orleans Preseration, Vol. 1 sounds perfectly true to the Hall tradition, and it's not until you stop and think about it that you realize that the vocalists are 40-ish and under, and that this incarnation has expanded the repertoire to include R&B, Mardi Gras Indian music and more. With that in mind, it's no surprise that the Hall chose to do video for "St. James Infirmary" in imitation of the Fleischer brothers' cartoons from the 1920s and '30s.

In the spirit of conflating time frames, the cartoon includes members from at least three generations of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band (that I recognize) - Sweet Emma Barrett on piano, John Brunious on trumpet, and Ben Jaffe and Maedgen from the current band on tuba and vocals respectively. I don't recognize the drummer's caricature, and in a salute to the song's remixer, Philly DJ King Britt is included on the turntables. Though they provide the music, the video's narrative follows two characters from the New Orleans Bingo! Show, a theatrical concert/game founded by Maedgen that came into the Hall family when he started singing with the group. In the cartoon, Ronnie Numbers and Mr. the Turk are on the run from the cops - who isn't in cartoons? - in pursue of lost love, and visit the decrepit Pontchartrain Park amusement park - one that no longer exists in any form, much less the half-broken down one depicted. Cartoon logic explains a lot of what happens, but when the cartoon's finished, a lot of subtle transformations have happened. In the animated world, real people alive and dead met fictional characters to play a new version of a traditional jazz song that's heard not as it was played but as it was remixed to illustrate a version of the city that never was. Few things capture the spirit of play that is central to New Orleans better than that.

Trading Down

2009-10-14T09:37:00.002-05:00

I can understand how a band name like Starfucker happens (it seems so cool and underground when no one's paying attention), and I can understand how such a band finds a following (fans get to feel cool and subversive talking about one of their favorite bands), and I understand how such a band decides it needs a name change (they can't say it on the radio or in the paper). But how does someone go from that to Pyramid? Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune were taken?

No Escape

2009-10-02T10:39:00.003-05:00

There's nothing quite like the right wing vitriol that accompanies Christian, white middle-aged males discovering that other voices count too. Any diminution of the remarkably wide sphere of influence they're used to is greeted as if it were part of a plot to dig a big hole and bury them all alive. Unfortunately, there's also no escape from that hostility, most of it directed toward President Obama. Today in my Google alert for Christmas music - an obsession - I found that the War Cry of the Wounded Conservative naturally extends to discussions of Christmas music.

Press Release Gold

2009-09-30T10:54:00.001-05:00

This was accompanied by the message from the publicist: "Your audience might love this story" - "might" being the operative word.

Do Near-Death Experiences Alter the Brain?

Author Says It Definitely Changed Him Forever

Woodland Hills, CA, September 29, 2009 – After he drank a cobra venom cocktail to simulate death, Jamshid Hosseini knew his worldview was forever transformed, but he also believes his brain was physically altered – rewired into something different.

The experience led him to create a spiritual “roadmap to bliss” that he and co-author Dave Cunningham detail in their critically acclaimed self-help book, Travel Within: The 7 Steps to Wisdom and Inner Peace (O-Books, John Hunt Publishing, Ltd.).

“Why did my whole life and direction change after that? I know that my near-death experience gave me peek at the eternal Oneness,” Hosseini said, “but I also feel that my brain actually changed. I’ve been doing a lot of study on this.”

So has Dr. Willoughby Britton, Research Associate in Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Brown University Medical School. She studied the brainwaves of people who have had near-death experiences and found evidence their brainwave patterns differ from those who haven’t had a brush with death. The near-death patients showed a distinct spike in activity in the left temporal lobe.

The brain’s left temporal lobe has been linked to feelings of peace and tranquility. Dr. Britton said the temporal lobe is sometimes called the God module, the part of the brain that connects with the transcendent.

During a spiritual quest that included studies of Baha’i Faith, Hinduism and Zen Buddhism, Hosseini followed a monk in India who asked a select few disciples to drink a concoction of tea, honey and milk laced with cobra venom. The idea was that experiencing near-death would free one of our most primal fear.

For Hosseini, at least, it worked. His life, philosophy, and perhaps even his brain were changed forever. Cunningham, an award-winning journalist, novelist and screenwriter, spent over a year interviewing Hosseini and researching how his new look on life – born of a near-death epiphany – was supported by current thought in the fields of science, philosophy and religion.

Travel Within: The 7 Steps to Wisdom and Inner Peace is not aligned with any particular religion, and its precepts don’t clash with any of the world’s major faiths. The book includes a roundtable discussion between Hosseini, a scientist, a philosopher and a theologian.

During his worldwide journey, Jamshid “Jim” Hosseini lived on a hill overlooking a king’s palace in Iran, was beaten by Muslims for practicing the Baha’i Faith, begged for food in India, and labored for a monk in Katmandu. He took counsel from the famous Rajneesh in Pune and built his own successful business in California.

2 Cleva Bi 1/2

2009-09-16T09:21:00.003-05:00

Yesterday I had to put on my hip-hop rebus-solving hat when a CD arrived by S-PYanage. It took a minute to realize his name is pronounced "Espionage," though on the CD he seems to refer to himself as "Spy," so I guess the name works two ways. On the cover, he has been photoshopped to loom like Godzilla over the Saenger Theatre pointing menacingly as people photoshopped into the foreground point at his package. The album's title is on his T-shirt: "Str8 2 Da" and an "I'm with Stupid" hand - "Straight to Da Point".

It's better than the cover would suggest, and the one genuinely surprising moment is "Off n dat wata," where water inevitably brings floodwaters to mind after Katrina and becomes a metaphor for trouble. The moment that's sadly predictable is "Tea Baggin," which is the inevitable "I'm such a freak in bed" song. SPY gets credit for not trying to be coy about the phrase unlike cable news talking heads, but it's still gross posturing as he's caught up in the visual image to have anything more to say.

No Guilt

2009-09-09T18:59:00.002-05:00

I don't understand Sally Shapiro titling an album My Guilty Pleasure, but I don't understand feeling guilty about pleasures either. Her relatively anonymous performance - more a set of modest vocal inflections than something that reflects a person - may not be the thing we're supposed to want, but when pure pop is as gorgeous as this Italian disco, it's tough to feel bad. She returns to the sound, style and subject matter of Disco Romance, but "Looking at the Stars," "Love in July" and "Miracle" are as engaging a trio of songs as I've heard this year with hooks that pay off repeatedly, no matter how familiar they seem. Sally Shapiro's not her real name, so there's nothing personal about the album, but self-expression is really overrated.

A Criminal Matter

2009-09-05T06:46:00.004-05:00

During the Clinton presidency, Rush Pumpkinhead started each show with the day count for "America Held Hostage." The implication was that Bill Clinton seized an unwilling country, and now Republicans are similarly treating Obama's presidency as illegitimate. First, birthers claim he's truly illegitimate by challenging his birth certificate and his well-documented accounts of his own origins, while others have attacked him as a socialist and a Nazi out to undermine the American way of life. When he proposes to speak to schoolchildren to "challenge them to work hard, set educational goals, and take responsibility for their learning," many Republicans around the country see this as something suspicious - perhaps an occasion for indoctrination from the dark side.

The premise is absurd, but it's further evidence of Republicans' efforts to reduce American politics to a Holy War - a clash not of reasoned, evidence-based notions about what's best for the country but simple belief. Belief is the central tenet of Christianity - that you accept things you can't see, take them on faith, and act as if they're true. Over and over, Republicans retreat to this position, whether on large matters like the unquestionable rightness of the free market, or on specific issues like the non-existent "death panels" and the non-existent threats to seniors posed by health care reform. They choose to believe regardless of what evidence says to the contrary, and those who don't are heretics, spiritual outlaws whose ideas should be criminal because of the threat they pose to America as Republicans believe it to be.

Politics as Holy War can't be laid solely at the feet of Conservatives. Cable network news has long had an investment in a clash of the ideologues. After Michael Kinsley left CNN's Crossfire, Christopher Hitchens says he was asked to take his place on the left debating Pat Buchanan. He passed, he says, when he found out that his job wouldn't be to take the liberal position but to defend Clinton no matter what. And the Holy War fervor has prompted some Democrats to push back reflexively and others are equally automatic in the belief in their own rightness.

Still, it's instructive to remember that the one president whose claim to the White House was genuinely questionable was never treated by Democratic legislators as illegitimate or a criminal, and though his speech gave listeners reason to question his wisdom and his arguments for war in Iraq were as much propaganda as policy, he was never treated as an enemy of the state by the opposition. (The irony is that he was one. With the Patriot Act, he did more long-term damage to the American way of life than terrorists ever could. 9/11 was a remarkable success in that it scared the Bush White House and American government into changing itself in ways no outside force ever could.)

The Masters of Domesticity

2009-08-31T13:29:00.002-05:00

By now, no Yo La Tengo album sounds remarkable on first listen, or it sounds remarkable in that it sounds like other Yo La Tengo albums. In the car, though, when it's easier to separate songs from the general flow of the album, it's easier to hear and appreciate that it sounds like other Yo La Tengo albums because the songs are really good.

What I hear on the new Popular Songs more than anything else, though, is how they've mastered sounding like us if we were in bands. Put us behind a microphone and we'd half-whisper/half-mumble lyrics, uncertain of our ability to truly carry a tune. We'd hit the drums gently, disconcerted by how loud they are, but when we found a good riff that we were confident in, we'd play that guitar riff as loudly as we could. When we finally wrote a classic pop song with a strong melody, we'd sing it proudly. The first time we discovered that we could play soul music, we'd treat it as a goof in case others didn't think we could play it as well as we did. The next time we cut a soul track, we'd know we didn't have to treat it as a joke; that we could do this and would do it well.

We're music fans first, so we'd likely make music that would reflect the breadth of our tastes - or at least to the degree that we could figure out how to play them. We'd play music that was fun - garage band particularly - and if we were guitar players, we'd occasionally the physical pleasure of trying to shape feedback and distortion, trying to control something that's largely uncontrollable (and something that sounds really cool).

We're not conceptualists, so instead of working up a master plan, we'd play the songs we had and go from there. We'd figure the album's like a meal or a home movie or a summer picnic - there will be another one, and it will be fun too.

A Cycle Skipped?

2009-08-31T13:10:00.002-05:00

There are certain books and writers that should be read while you're young - Hunter Thompson, Jack Kerouac, Bukowski, to name a few. After reading all the canonical stuff high school asks you to read, some outlaw lit's a pretty valuable thing. Unfortunately, once you pass your undergrad years, the outlaw stance seems a little wobbly. I eventually developed a new appreciation for Thompson and Lester Bangs, but I now find the Beats and Buk hard to stomach. Still, someone had to tell readers that you don't always have to mind your manners, and that there's a bigger, grittier literary world than you found in Henry James.

Another artist I thought you had to deal with while you're young is Lou Reed, but unlike the literary rebels, I can't think of anyone who's picked up his subject matter. Is anyone writing songs about the romance of our darker impulses? Is it possible that you still can't sing about your mixed feeling about addiction, self-destructive love and the wild side? And if someone is doing it, is that person doing it in undeniable pop forms like Reed?

(Thoughts after listening to the epic, weirdly Vegas version of "Heroin" on Rock & Roll Animal yesterday.)

Hands Off the Wheel

2009-08-26T15:46:00.004-05:00

By now, it can't be a surprise that the Drive-By Truckers' odds & ends album is better than most. The Fine Print - due out next week - is their sayonara to New West Records, who evidently were displeased with the decidedly un-big rock Brighter Than Creation's Dark. Fortunately, their sweepings and leftovers still have a lot of meat on them, but the greatest pleasure of the album might be that they've never seemed more relaxed or had more faith in the car to find its own way home.

The opener, "George Jones Talkin' Cell Phone Blues," presents them in their country rock mode addressing their cultural heritage, but they do so with a lighter touch, unable to escape the comic image of No-Show Jones on the riding lawnmower his struggles with modern technology. "Mrs. Klaus Kimono" almost mocks the band itself, bringing its love of foreboding to a horny elf that has the hots for Santa's wife. Even Hood's veteran-coming-home-legless song "Mama Bake a Pie" eases up. He sings the sardonic comeback, "Since I won't be walking / guess I'll save some money buying shoes" over an atypically bouncy, almost pop melody that prevents his saga of a life falling apart from becoming unbearable to listen to.

There are some unnecessary tracks. I don't think anybody needs to cut the covers they do live - they're better as surprises - but the versions of Tom Petty's "Rebels" and Warren Zevon's "Play It All Night Long" are good fun. Hood, Shonna Tucker and Jason Isbell each take a verse, but Dylan's words and sentiment suit Hood's vocal talents particularly well. The moralist, good ol' boy, punk, student, historian and smartass in him all come out in a perfectly unified vocal, much the same way that Dylan's one voice slyly incorporated many points of view. The other verses are good, but none are as revelatory as his.

Similarly, alternative versions are rarely special, and the world will keep spinning just fine whether anyone hears alternate versions of "Uncle Frank" and "Goode's Field Road," the latter of which churns along in the Truckers' default mode. Still, a slightly undersold vocal with less drama in the arrangement makes the song more chilling.

After "George Jones Talkin' Cell Phone Blues," the highlight is "The Great Car Dealer War," which sounds like it came from The Dirty South era. Like so much of that album - and the best DBT songs - it takes us into a mundane life that would be comic if not for the desperate choices their characters have to make to live in America these days. But the converse is also true; their grim moments have touches - like the song's title - that never let you forget that there's a joke in there somewhere. On The Fine Line, that nugget of humor, dark as it is, isn't buried as deeply as it is on other albums, and a lack of dread is welcome once in a while.

When I Form My Band ...

2009-08-20T11:18:00.003-05:00

... I'm destroying every recorded moment I don't use. I'm burning the tapes from my analog period, I'm bulk-erasing all hard drives, then just to be sure, I'm taking those drives and any other miscellaneous file-carrying devices to the outskirts of Vegas, where I'll get hammered and shoot them with semi-automatic weapons that otherwise scare the shit out of me. I'm not leaving anything laying around to be rescued, remastered and released as a bonus disc or as bonus tracks to reissues of my music. Rhino is releasing a new version of Chris Bell's I Am the Cosmos, itself an album that was posthumously assembled from tracks in varying states of completion. Now it's paired with even more tracks in various states of completion. Me - I'd rather have my band remembered by the tracks that represent us the way we wanted to be represented.

Careful with that Tweet, Eugene

2009-08-13T15:53:00.004-05:00

I often feel cast as an evangelist for Twitter for the simple act of defending it to people are so remarkably hostile to it. Inevitably, its critics say that they don't care what someone had for breakfast, dismissing its triviality. Evidently, the worst use of the tool invalidates it entirely, which doesn't make any sense. We don't assume cars are bad because drunks hit people with them, or that computers are bad because people do all sorts of creepy and disturbing things with them. If the poor use of an object or technology marks it as worthless and dismissable, there's little that we've developed that can stand the test. Fire? Bad.

How Things Go Wrong

2009-08-10T16:12:00.006-05:00

Adam brought in his CD by hand. The CD's in a white sleeve with simply "Adam" and "In the Beginning" written in Sharpie on it. The CD is theoretically for sale through his Web site, but with a stage name like Adam, Google can only do so much.

In the Beginning is, as you might expect, Christian music - Christian hip-hop to be exact, but without drum machines or any programming. As such, it often sounds like little more than a collection of demos. The one winner is "Sweet Sixteen." Bad title that promises cliches a-plenty, but the Spanish guitar figure and a backing singer cooing "Take your time" gives the song a fleshed out quality that little before it has had. Adam's flow's pretty good, and for a moment, you can imagine this as a possible slow jam hit.

Then the words start to add up and the cliche I feared turned up. Sweet Sixteen skips school to see a 22-year-old guy who knocks her up, then in cad fashion straight out of a Jack Chick comic, suggests that she sees "the special man." In New Orleans, that's a hard line to hear with a straight face because for years, it was the slogan for a commercial for a discount furniture store. People with no credit or bad credit would go see the special man, and he'd say, "Let 'em have it." It would be great to think that Adam was making a connection between abortion and discount furniture, but more likely it was just slack writing. "The special man" phrase is the only live one in the song; everything else is commonplace and forced to fit to make sure the point isn't lost.

UPDATE: After writing this, I decided to try to find Adam and found Google more powerful than I thought it might be. Here's a link to "Sweet Sixteen" on YouTube.

Too True an Echo

2009-08-04T15:30:00.003-05:00

Smithereens' drummer Dennis Diken just released Late Music, and like the Smithereens' albums, it reveals its roots a little too clearly. In the case of Diken (with Bell Sound), the album often refers to Pet Sounds as closely as the Rutles did the Beatles, minus the jokes. I enjoyed the album as it played, and periodically he veers toward other vocal-oriented, lightly psychedelic bands, but it's often hard to hear his songs because of the songs they evoke.

Mocking the Lame

2009-08-01T21:28:00.002-05:00

It seems unkind to expose well-meant, hapless demos, but someone's got to do their part to disabuse some people of the notion that music's for them. Mind-Melting Demo Disasters does exactly that, though if my experience is representative, almost anyone who'll commit music to tape/disc won't be dissuaded by abuse, rational feedback or a lack of attention from anyone. Here, few are truly catastrophic, but you can hear derivative track after derivative track, each dotted with some unique bad idea or misestimation of talent. My favorite - the July 16 track, with a vocalist singing"la la la" instead of the lyrics he has yet to write.

Idol Chatter

2009-07-30T09:45:00.002-05:00

Today, one of Yahoo's blogs reports that one of last season's American Idol contestants, Ju'Not Joyner, came out and detailed how the show was fixed, including vote counts. While I hadn't heard about voting being rigged, I'd heard second-hand reports of other more subtle forms of rigging - favored contestants get flattering makeovers and wardrobe while others don't, favored contestants get clearance to sing the songs they want, others have to make do with choices that don't put them in the best light.

I wrote some about AI mechanisms here, and here are some of Joyner's revelations about what goes on backstage at Idol:

"They pay for our lawyers to negotiate against their lawyer (which is BS)," he said. "They make us COLLECTIVELY choose the lawyer, then they act like it's in our best interest. Craziest stuff I've ever seen. I have a son to feed. I HAD to ask questions and know what I was signing. Plus I write my own songs and I needed to know details...Some folks were like, 'Just shut up and sign on the dotted line.' I know better than that...I wasn't complaining...I was asking basic legal questions. There's a huge difference between the two.".

He continued: "I definitely believed that affected my time on the show. They didn't like the fact that I wouldn't sign 'just anything' and that other contestants were coming asking me questions. So I think they ousted me the first chance they could get...Even if I didn't get in on votes...how did I not get picked for the Wild Card show when I received comments from the 'judges' that were better than most of the contestants who were picked for the Wild Card show?".

Ju'Not also theorized that he was not selected for the top 13 because he refused to let the show's producers exploit his sympathetic "back story" of being from "the hood." Said Ju'Not: "They wanted me to put that out to the world and expose my personal business for ratings. I wouldn't do it."

When in Doubt, Do Wrong

2009-07-28T08:51:00.004-05:00

The "news" that Senate Republicans on the Judiciary Committee plan to oppose Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation depresses me more than I expected. Essentially, her hearings and their outcome present us one of a couple of equally sad possibilities. Either the confirmation process - and many other governmental activities - are simply ritual and theater, or the Republicans, when given the choice, choose ignorance. How else do you explain days of Sotomayor explaining her words, their contexts, her rulings and her record - the latter two of which Republicans on the committee observed was largely consistent with what they perceived as mainstream legal thinking - and Jeff Session and Charles Grassley coming out now to say they're not sure where she stands. If they're not, it's because they don't want to be.

I'd like to think our government has become an incredibly elaborate dance, but considering the dishonest way that Republicans fighting health care have cited studies by the supposedly non-partisan Lewin Group to show the possible dangers of a public option in health care reform, I have to believe that they value deception and ignorance. The Lewin Group is owned by health insurance company United Healthcare.

... and then there are the birthers. And Sarah Palin.

Star-struck

2009-07-20T15:19:00.003-05:00

After reading Bruce Eaton's 33 1/3 book on Big Star's Radio City this weekend, I wondered if a Big Star-like cult band could ever happen again. Eaton couldn't write the book without mentioning his connection to the Big Star story - playing with Chilton years later - and the personal connection to Big Star seems like an essential part of their story. The liner notes for the upcoming Rhino box, Keep an Eye on the Sky, include a section on the touchstone the band became partially due to the scarcity of their albums, which meant finding one used was always a jackpot moment. When you finally got your own copy and heard it, you were already inclined to listen generously because you'd worked so hard. Third became an even greater source of fascination for me once I discovered that it was unstable. When I found a cassette copy of the album, it had a different song sequence than the vinyl, and Rykodisc's reissue of it as Sister Lovers resequenced it radically.

Because the band itself had a shimmering blink-and-you-missed-it quality - did it ever actually exist? - it's readymade for a cult, but could a Big Star exist today? Is it possible for anything semi-pop to be truly rare? I think of the role Piracy Funds Terrorism played in establishing M.I.A.'s name and suppose it must be possible on some level, but I find it hard to imagine.

Reach of the Day

2009-07-16T09:44:00.002-05:00

I received this press release this morning:

You may recall the late Michael Jackson sang, “If they say why, why, tell ‘em that it’s human nature.” With the same sense of wonder, author Kentetsu Takamori tells 65 stories about human nature that help us deal with loss and change and teach us to live more fully. He’s great for Japanese interviews, and for English, we have Takamori’s reps from the publisher, available to speak at length about his book and philosophy. Please see the press release below, and let me know if you would be interested in receiving an advanced copy of the book and to provide us with a written review that we can have printed in the book or on the back cover.

R.I.F.

2009-07-15T09:08:00.003-05:00

Reading is Fun-damental, as a Saturday morning literacy slogan stated in the '70s, but only if you read all the words. As Republicans on the Senate Judicial Committee chew furiously on Sotomayor's "Wise Latina" quote - referring to it in similar shorthand - they reveal either their intellectual dishonesty or their inability to recognize the meanings of words. She said:

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion [as a judge] than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

"I would hope" doesn't mean "I believe," and to assert that it does radically reconstructs what she said. I would hope that eating as I eat and exercising as little as I exercise will lead to weight loss, but I don't expect that to happen. I would hope that my experience as a writer makes me a good editor of others' writing, and that might or might not be true. But these statements reflect my desires - in the latter case, related what I hope is true but can't be sure. It's reasonable and just as self-flattering as those senators who'd like to believe that their white male-ness gives them a special awareness of America's social mainstream, even though whites and males no longer dominate either numerically.

But this comes as no surprise. Too often, Conservatives seem to overlook the basic notion that reading is the act of interpretation, asserting that their understanding of law and the Constitution is right and the Liberal understanding is a matter of interpretation. Their inability to account for all the words in one 31-word sentence suggests only the most superficial problem with that belief.

Band Hell

2009-07-13T09:24:00.003-05:00

This paragraph by Zack Smith, drummer for local band Rotary Downs, captures perfectly the hell of being a local band. I don't know what the show was, but I gather it was a Rotary Downs gig:

I made $5 last night. I got to the Pearl ready for rehearsing a few tunes for the gig at the Saturn, but there was no rehearsal to be had, and we wouldn't be gigging for another 6 hours. By 2:30 we were on stage, i was tired as fuck, playing to 5 people who were still there. But, the crowd still did outnumber the band, even though they were at the bar..so we played. Loud blues, loud funk, space rock. im pretty sure J was singing, and some keys were played, but all i had was bass in my right ear and snare in my left - yeah. Reeger even made it to see the last few tunes, sorry you had to hear that. At 3:15 we ended, collected $5 for the gig (there were 6 bands) - to have some $ for food on Sunday (im broke, again) and went home.

A Theory of Lists

2009-07-09T08:45:00.004-05:00

On the Anti- Blog, Beck Hansen interviews Tom Waits. As part of the conversation, they talk about lists. Since the pressure to list comes from all sides and in various forms, I found this interesting:

BH: I get asked to write "Best of" lists occasionally. An emphasis on ranking things. Having a hierarchy and having it be written in granite, written in stone.

TW: It's economic. So you can charge more.

BH: Yeah, it must be. But maybe it's just a need to have some order that's been established, and that everybody has been notified. I don't know.

TW: There's too much of everything.

BH: Maybe it's a millennial thing. It started around the millennium. "What are the best movies? What are the best songs?"

TW: Well, then there's the pressure of feeling that you need to have what has been already rated the best. A lot of people are afraid to explore their own peculiar taste for fear - that it would be uncool. Just like when you're a teenager you don't want to be caught with the wrong sports shirt, the wrong socks.

BH: I think there's a bit of that. Certain things haven't made it to the "List," so then they go into the category of guilty pleasure or something.

TW: My theory is that the innovators are the ones that open the door to things, and then behind them there's a huge crowd and they are trampled by the crowd behind them. And then you have to peel the innovators off the ground like in the movie, The Mask. Like a Colorform.

They Don't Have Cooties

2009-07-09T08:38:00.002-05:00

I'm relistening to Stuart Murdoch's God Help the Little Girl, his project written for a female singer. Belle and Sebastian albums gave me hope for this, but the album gives me reason to wonder if he's ever actually talked to a woman.

Helpless

2009-07-08T08:49:00.003-05:00

I love Carrie Brownstein's "Monitor Mix" blog for NPR.org, not because of what she writes but because I'm fascinated by the respondents. They invariably agree with her, no matter what position she takes. When she wrote that she didn't like her iPod's shuffle feature because it so rarely captured her mood, nobody asked why she's asking her iPod to randomly match her mood. Instead, they rallied around her and hated their shufflers too. Stupid shufflers never seem to know what their owners really want to hear.

They also suggest there are limits to perception of NPR as the place for eggheads. In today's post, Brownstein challenges a writer's assumption that the music you listen to is a reflection of your intelligence, associating Lynyrd Skynyrd with low intelligence and Bjork with high intelligence. Brownstein doesn't agree, and neither do her readers. One wrote:

This is a topic that I spent a great deal of time thinking about until, like Robin Williams' character in Good Will Hunting, I had one thought and it calmed the entire storm. Here it is: if you like it, it's good. It becomes good when you like it. Whether you dig DeBarge or one of the Popol Vuh's, your feelings about a song validate that song/ artist/ painting/ book's quality.

Like = good? Really? Isn't it more accurate to say like = like, and that we flatter ourselves to think that the things we like are all good? Or are we really going to say that Dane Cook, supermarket tabloids and The Biggest Loser are good?

Another responent wrote:

You can't help who you love...when you truly love them--music/bands are not exempt.

That sentence construction invites doubt because it posits us as helpless victims jerked around by our passions, but there's something in there that the writer Brownstein refers to - Geoffrey Miller in Spent - missed. He suggests our tastes are uniform and intelligence-driven. The reader counters that we're helpless where our loves are concerned. It's far more likely that different things appeal to us at different levels, and that we respond to different kinds of music - some smart, some boneheaded - because they speak to different things in us. When we talk about "guilty pleasures," we're tacitly acknowledging things we like that don't coincide with our notions of "good." They appeal to something in us other than our intelligence. Rather than throw up our hands and act as though our musical passions are unpredictable, a more productive response would be to contemplate what we're responding to when we like the bands and songs we like.

Notice Me

2009-07-02T12:57:00.002-05:00

New Orleans "bounce" artist Kynt released this sad remix of "Off the Wall" as a "tribute" to Michael Jackson. I'd like to think that this is genuine but misguided tribute rather than an attempt to capitalize on the attention Jackson's music has received since his death. Whatever, listen for the point roughly two-and-a-half minutes in when you can hear Kynt run out of ideas with almost half the song left to go. Jackson deserves better, something more like "Michael Jackson Wit' It" by Monsta wit Da Fade. This is so exuberant and audacious as it takes "Don't Stop 'til You Get Enough" and interpolates it into a storm of hyperactive triggerman beats, quick edits and the dance floor command, "Michael Jackson wit' it." The possibilities for what that could mean are endless - to do the Thriller zombie dance? The toe stand? The crotch grab? An en masse moonwalk?

Thanks to Alison Fensterstock for referring me to this.

Really?

2009-06-28T21:36:00.004-05:00

Today I saw this Top 25 Downloads list at Amazon.com:

1. Man In The Mirror by Michael Jackson
2. Boom Boom Pow by Black Eyed Peas
3. Thriller by Michael Jackson
4. The Way You Make Me Feel by Michael Jackson
5. Billie Jean (Single Version) by Michael Jackson
6. Beat It (Single Version) by Michael Jackson
7. P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing) by Michael Jackson
8. Poker Face by Lady GaGa
9. Smooth Criminal (Radio Edit) by Michael Jackson
10. Black Or White by Michael Jackson
11. Rock With You (Single Version) by Michael Jackson
12. I Gotta Feeling by Black Eyed Peas
13. Don't Stop 'Til You Get Eno… by Michael Jackson
14. New Divide by Linkin Park
15. Bad by Michael Jackson
16. We Are The World by U.S.A. For Africa
17. Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' by Michael Jackson
18. Remember The Time by Michael Jackson
19. Dirty Diana by Michael Jackson
20. Human Nature by Michael Jackson
21. Second Chance by Shinedown
22. The Climb by Miley Cyrus
23. Just Dance by Lady GaGa
24. LoveGame by Lady GaGa
25. Off The Wall by Michael Jackson

That 17 of that 25 songs are Michael Jackson songs is no surprise. That "Man in the Mirror" is the most downloaded is. Is it the Jackson song that people liked but never bought? Or is that the song with the most conventionally growthful message, so that buying it was a way of imposing a simple meaning on Jackson's life and art? Or do people simply like that song better I ever imagined?

The Right End

2009-06-26T12:30:00.004-05:00

This is the end of my Michael Jackson writing for a while, but I enjoyed the essays on Jackson at Salon.com, particularly this one:

Alex Koppelman, Salon staff writer

"Thriller" was the first album I ever owned. It came out a week before I was born; a friend of my mother's gave it to me when I was still an infant -- she was worried all the classical music my parents were playing would turn me into a nerd. I doubt she ever had any idea what she was really doing for me: For the first 10 years of my life, that album meant the world to me. It still does.

It's awful to say so soon after, but what happened Thursday might have been the best thing for his legacy. Yes, he was about to go back on stage, and his shows had sold out. But so much of the excitement, now, was the perverse pleasure we all take in watching a tightrope walker work without a net. Had he lived, continuing down his downward spiral, the turmoil and scandal might have obscured his music for good. Now that he's gone, we can allow ourselves to think of him the way we've always wanted to. After he was pronounced dead, the obsessive fandom that had become taboo, left to the kooks who were still true-believers, was suddenly alive again. Everyone was listening to Thriller, crowds flocked back to Indiana to say goodbye and people were dancing and singing in front of the Apollo for him.

This morning an intern and I talked about the shows he was scheduled to do, and how unlikely it was that he would have been up for a run of 50 shows, and how neither of us ever imagined that Jackson would live long enough to grow old and withered.

First, We Kill Cable News

2009-06-26T09:40:00.002-05:00

Anyone from New Orleans has the sins of CNN's coverage of Hurricane Katrina indelibly seared in their brains, but last night's coverage of Michael Jackson's death on cable news once again underscored what a mediocre idea a 24-hour news channel is (or perhaps what a mediocre thing the 24-hour news channel has become). For over an hour, I watched Keith Olbermann try to fill as a helicopter airlifted Jackson's body to a coroner's van, and as hour rolled into the next hour, he had to stretch a decent observation - the irony of someone who once needed bodyguards now accompanied by three paramedics - until it was as stale as Michael Jackson jokes. He reached for resonances and echoes, but they didn't illuminate Jackson or the process we were watching. The reporter covering the moving of Jackson's body (Really? We needed a reporter on the body transportation beat?) tried to delicately refer to the last decade of Jackson's life, but the awkward combination of his efforts at solemnity and his discomfort with the accusations made toward Jackson made all the guarded language sound even more judgmental and sordid than if he'd have come out and talked about the charges, the documentary, the dangling of the baby, and so on.

I'm surprised that they didn't go for critics to help fill time; after all, they were easily found on facebook shedding more light on Jackson's significance than shots of a helicopter (shot from a helicopter!) buzzing over Los Angeles. But really, the story quickly hit a point where no more live coverage was needed, and critics wouldn't have helped. Sometimes, it's actually valuable to let the story be and return to it when events dictate.

... but my post's title is technically wrong. First we kill E! News. I didn't have the stomach last night to watch it to hear Juliana Rancic talk about "The King of Pop" in faux-somber tones, or Debbie Matenopoulos talk only semi-breezily about "MJ". If anyone saw E!'s coverage and it was less than loathesome, let me know, but the generally chummy, faux-hip, nickname-oriented, tabloid tone of the channel's - ahem - news department has rarely let me down.

More Word Soup, Please

2009-06-25T08:31:00.002-05:00

When I was a teacher, I was once asked to chair a panel at a teacher's conference, and one woman's paper promised to reveal a new way to use music to teach poetry. I introduced her and remembered the lame high school teachers we had who tried to tell us that if we liked rock 'n' roll, we really liked poetry. They then dissected songs the way they took Blake and Tennyson apart, leaving us with the bones of "Richard Cory" and "She's Leaving Home" - two songs that didn't say much to my friends and I, who had tickets to see Rush in our pockets. Of course, the woman's "new" approach was exactly that, only she substituted Creed for Paul Simon and McCartney.

In her semi-academic take on the poetry/lyrics debate, she threw out lines that were repeated, ignored all "yeah"s and "baby"s as simple metric placeholders, and overlooked refrains, which might explain why students today are lousier readers of poetry than we were - they've been taught that some of the words and lines matter and others don't. That teaching led to students who could claim a poem was about one thing by seizing on a few lines, nevermind that other lines confront that interpretation. My students would defend their partial readings with an indignant, "Well, that's what I got out of it."

These recollections were prompted by NPR's interview with Regina Spektor during "Morning Edition" during my drive to work. During it, she said:

"If I could explain every word of this song, then I wouldn't have been very inspired when I wrote it. I would have been more crafty and intellectual," she says. "I would really hate it if I could call up Kafka or Hemingway or Salinger and any question I could throw at them they would have an answer. That's the magic when you read or hear something wonderful — there's no one that has all the answers."

However, that's not to say she doesn't want people to look for deeper meaning behind her songs.

"It's not like I have all the answers," she says.

Where to begin? The premise that if you know what you're talking about, you're being crafty and intellectual? The idea that her songs have meaning, but that some of the words are just stuff? Or, worse, that the words that don't directly address the central thought represent the "art"? Or that it would somehow ruin Kafka, Hemingway and Salinger if she found out that their work was deliberate and thought-through?

Her attitude also seems to reflect a shallow notion of artistic mystery and questions. I don't know if Roberto Bolano had Kerouac in mind when he wrote The Savage Detectives, but I couldn't get the Beats out of my head as he seemed to present a vision of the Beats as they seemed to those around them, something very different from the self-conscious, self-mythologizing perspective of Kerouac. Bolano may not have written that subtext in intentionally, but that doesn't mean those resonances aren't there.

Complete Nonsense

2009-06-23T09:41:00.003-05:00

On the drive in, I caught part of ESPN Radio's "Mike and Mike in the Morning," which I tend to dislike because Greenberg and Golic pose as wild, nutty guys while holding the most moderate, conventional opinions. This morning they said that history won't look kindly at the career of baseball players' union head Donald Fehr - which may be true - and that the next union head will have to look to be more of a partner with the league and owners. To that I say bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Can anyone recall a change in any union leadership when someone didn't say that? In Fehr's case, Bud Selig and the owners sure weren't worried about steroids when Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire were refilling stadiums that had been empty since the baseball strike, and they liked the way crowds showed up to boo or cheer Barry Bonds as he chased Hank Aaron's record. Selig and the owners don't seem to feel a need to be more player-friendly or better partners with the players, so whoever takes Fehr's position needs to remember to take care of the players first. That is, after all, the role of the players' union head - no matter what Greenberg, Golic and all the talking heads say.

Complications

2009-06-18T21:18:00.002-05:00

The pairing of Steve Albini with Jarvis Cocker is a curious one, and it sort of works to the detriment of Cocker's Further Complications. The album rocks like a very good garage band, but Albini's indifferent attitude toward vocals forces Cocker away from the sly, under-his-breath asides and mannerisms that make him a three-dimensional misanthrope in the house of love. And the big rock context lacks the elegance and grace that makes his thorny wit all the more acute for how easily it nearly fits.

The Road Well Taken

2009-06-18T20:56:00.004-05:00

Poor Stuart Murdoch. He set out to write his sort of album for female voices on God Help the Girl, only to discover that Camera Obscura's My Maudlin Career did twee, '60s-oriented Britfolkpop better a month or two sooner.

What's Berlin Up To?

2009-06-18T14:35:00.003-05:00

I'm trying to connect to Fisherspooner's Entertainment, but at its best, it's good second generation electropop ("The Best Revenge," "In a Modern World." The robo-beats amuse me, but not enough to put up with the forced or wince-worthy words ("We Are Electric," "Infidels of the World Unite"). When it's satisfied with its pop-ness, I'm with it. When titles such as "Supply & Demand" and overly urgent vocals dominate, the possibility that this might be intended to be meaningful at some level is offputting.

Criticism in Twitterville

2009-06-18T08:45:00.003-05:00

Michaelangelo Matos linked to this interesting conversation on music criticism in Twittering times. The piece begins:

One of the unfortunate side effects of the lack of critic culture: people are getting more stratified and separated in their listening habits. If you—if you read Spin or Rolling Stone in ‘96, you’d get an article on Nine Inch Nails, an article on Chemical Brothers, an article on Snoop Dogg—and, you know, the internet doesn’t work that way. If you’re into rap, you go to rap twitters. If you go into metal, you go to metal twitters. You know, bands build audiences for themselves! You just follow the bands you like. You don’t have to—you don’t stumble across this stuff, and that’s a problem! It’s harder to get exposed to things that aren’t in your comfort zone. I have friends that are so deep into indie rock that they don’t know what the fuck Katy Perry is, or Lady Gaga, and these are, like, the most ubiquitous songs in the country!

An interesting, logical observation that a check of anyone's iPod says isn't true. Listeners may read more or follow one genre more than others, but festivals and iTunes libraries say listeners aren't that stratified, and neither are critics. The second half of that, though - critics vs. the mainstream, if I read it correctly - there's something in that, but that's a tension that has likely existed since the dawn of modern music criticism.

... and there's a lot to think about in this post, more than I've excerpted.

Good Company

2009-06-16T13:19:00.003-05:00

The news that Rhino will release Bad Company's Swan Song albums digitally makes me happier than I expected. Paul Rodgers has done what could to debase the band's reasonably good name. I remain attached to them for Mick Ralphs' drama-free, perfectly measured power chords. They're not windmilled out, nor contorted or physically blasted out - they simply, suddenly exist full of weight and impact. It's not something that his time in Mott the Hoople revealed, so I take it to be the effect of band chemistry. Whatever - it's a beautiful thing.

One Big Festival

2009-06-12T09:38:00.004-05:00

I'm being a little alarmist worrying that the major New Orleans festivals will eventually become one big festival, but it's worth noticing that Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings played Voodoo, Jazz Fest and are scheduled to play Essence Music Festival on the July 4 weekend. Overlap between any two of the festivals is very common, but the announcement today that Widespread Panic will be one of Voodoo's headliners adds a serious Jazz Fest-y jam band vibe to a festival that has rarely had that, even with a Jazz Fest-y stage.

The announced headliners so far - Kiss and Widespread Panic - only further underline the challenge of booking headliners for festivals. Last year's headliners - Stone Temple Pilots, Nine Inch Nails and R.E.M. - dated back to the '80s and '90s, and now Kiss takes us back to the '70s and Panic, aesthetically, further than that. The consensus among promoters is evidently that there are few artists from the 2000s who can draw festival-sized crowds, which is sad and interesting. There's so much interesting music being made today, but the implication is that it's being made for increasingly subdivided genres, so much so that few recent bands have the necessary mass appeal. It's possible that future nostalgia will change that - was STP really that big that they cut across genres/audiences in their heyday? Really? - but if not, there's something sad in the notion that there are fewer and fewer experiences in our culture that are shared. I'm not quite ready to yearn for the monoculture, but I understand the impulse.

Proximity is Overrated

2009-06-10T09:03:00.002-05:00

Stardeath and White Dwarfs - The Birth (WB): The road crews for the Beatles and Stones haven't made any memorable music that I'm aware of. Here, the Flaming Lips' crew keeps the string alive. Pleasant, inconsequential psychedelia.

Convincing Enough

2009-06-09T12:14:00.003-05:00

As much as I like many artists who have been put under the "Americana" umbrella, I've never been entirely convinced that Americana is a distinct genre. Whenever I've asked who/what is Americana, people point to Steve Earle, as if one genre-crosser does the job. Dave Alvin - that's two, but Allison Fensterstock seemed to get it more or less right when she decided it was roots music that shared its fans' progressive politics. At the last Americana Music Conference, I saw honky-tonk holdout Dale Watson, blues man Tony Joe White, retro string band Chatham County Line and nouveau Bakersfield country band the Hacienda Brothers. For No Depression, the one-time Bible of Americana, I wrote about Cajun band the Pine Leaf Boys, Amanda Shaw, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band and reviewed Irma Thomas. All merit attention and love, but a genre that incorporates all that has some pretty broad defining characteristics.

But I guess they're defining enough. I received this press release just moments ago:

NASHVILLE, June 9, 2009 – The Recording Academy will officially recognize the Americana genre next year when it awards the inaugural Grammy for Best Americana Album. NARAS recently announced the restructuring of several Grammy Award categories, establishing a Best Americana Album award and a corresponding American Roots Music field. Both the new award and category will debut at the 2010 Grammy Awards.

The move further underscores the increasing significance of the Americana music format and brand, accelerating the Americana Music Association’s already substantial momentum as it approaches its 10th Annual Americana Festival and Conference.

“Americana music resonates with a growing legion of listeners,” said Jessie Scott, President of the Americana Music Association Board of Directors. “These are the country’s preeminent artists, who not only pay homage to roots, but truly shape modern music. The Americana community couldn’t be prouder of NARAS’s decision.”

For more information including details on this year's Americana Music Conference and Awards, which take place in Nashville September 16-19, go to AmericanaMusic.org.

Fear and Self-Loathing in Las Vegas

2009-06-07T19:52:00.003-05:00

I knew that at some point, my trip to Las Vegas would end up curmudgeonly, but I didn't see the doubt and unhappiness coming. My wife was attending a conference at the Palazzo in the middle of the Las Vegas Strip, and things got weird when I had to eat at the casino. When I was off the strip, I did well, had some great Thai and was entertained by Pan-Asianville. But at one point, I had to fend for myself for dinner in the casino and had the choice of two Mario Batali restaurants, two Emeril restuarants and a number of other restaurants branded by top chefs, all of which required diners to peel off $75 of so before a glass of wine. It felt depressing and somehow defeating when I realized I just couldn't comfortably spend that jack by myself and went to the Palazzo's equivalent of a Shoney's. It was good, but I flashed on tourists who used to come to the Quarter and with good food everywhere, opted for Shoney's. I realize that there is a significant financial difference, but I was aware that there was better food all around me, and I was settling for less. And the cafeteria-like room only made the dining experience worse.

That was the start of a downward spiral as I wondered if I was simply cheap, or if everybody around me really made so much more money than we do that they could live the casino life, buying $7-10 drinks (okay, that I did, but not a lot of them), gambling all night and acting as if the money stash was infinite. It got to a point where I wondered if I was just alienated by subliminal choice, and that the idea that there were ways I'd rather spend my money wasn't simply an excuse to make me feel aesthetically superior yet martyred at the same time.

Fortunately, I snapped out of it. Not to the extent that I ate at one of the branded restaurants, but I recalled the Gang of Four's underappreciated Mall album when I walked the casino floor and saw people dressed up to play penny slots. Obviously, there were also people playing $25-a-hand blackjack, but many brought the look of wealth to hide cheap games they were playing. The possibility that this was the vacation people saved for, and that penny slots were someone's idea of a get-moderately-wealthy-very-very-slowly scheme, or that killing an evening watching slots and video poker while they burned $30 was someone's idea of a good time didn't make me feel better about the world. Watching young people buy into the Vegas marketing also seemed grim and sad, but that might have just been the byproduct of watching the young and good looking living down to their stereotypes.

To be fair, though, I did get one "What happens in Vegas" moment, though, when I got on the elevator with two guys and a woman. She checked out one guy, asked him where he was from, then if he'd be coming back in January. "I'm up for an AVN for Female Performer of the Year," she announced, then got off the elevator at her floor. I shared an elevator with a porn star, and there are shots for that!

Sideshow, Pt. 2

2009-06-04T11:24:00.004-05:00

Yesterday I said it was unlikely Mario Batali had been in the kitchen of the restaurant in his name at the Palazzo since it opened. Just to make me look bad, he showed up yesterday for a sustainable food and wine talk in the concourse between the Palazzo and the Venetian, and he hosted a dinner in Carnevino.

A little more on value - what's a better value than free? Not surprisingly, the sidewalks are jammed at sundown for the free shows on the strip - the dancing waters outside the Belaggio (which are synchronized to Lee Greenwood's "Proud to be an American"!), the volcano show (I overheard) at the Mirage and the "Sirens of TI" pirate ship show at the Treasure Chest. The latter attracts a sidewalk-blocking crowd, one that went away disappointed because the show was cancelled due to high winds.

... and it didn't surprise me a bit that Sam Butera's death was on no one's lips last night on the strip, and when I mentioned it to my wife, nobody who overheard my voice responded.

The Sideshow Lives

2009-06-03T10:15:00.004-05:00

I'm on vacation and drove from Los Angeles to Las Vegas two days ago - cacti, mountains and meth labs for as far as the eye could see - and I find Vegas reassuring in a way. I feared that any trace of Old Vegas was dead, and there are certainly signs of its demise. When my wife and I emerged from the underground parking garage at the Palazzo, we were poured out suitcases and all on casino floor. After checking in, we had to roll our bags back across the floor to the elevators - so much for any hint of the casino as even a semi-classy place.

But the same logic that drove sideshows and exploitation movies still drives Vegas - sell the sizzle, not the steak. There's still the promise of a sexy time ("100's of beautiful, naked women," says one sign painted on a cinder-block bunker just off the Strip) even if what you get are aerobic instructors with boob jobs, and there's the promise of the celebrity meal, though Wolfgang Puck and Mario Batali have not likely been in their restaurants' kitchens in the last two years. And gambling is nothing if not the promise that the next card or spin could make you a winner.

The interesting twist is the way modern Las Vegas exploits the modern American obsession - value. Rooms are littered with two for one coupons, and everything is overpriced so that if a show or meal is comped, it seems like a bigger deal than it is. The cheapest Blue Man Group ticket is $71, so a comped pair is worth at least $140 - never mind that a guy is selling tickets for 40 percent off the day of the show, suggesting something closer to their true worth. Signs offer penny slots and $3 craps, so you could get rich without risking much at all. And if you lose, you got hours of excitement without spending much. That's good value!

So far, I'm not raging nearly as much as I expected to here. Then again, I've spent little time in the casino and hotel, so I haven't had the sort of prolonged exposure that will bring out my inner curmudgeon.

Day of Denise Richards

2009-05-25T08:09:00.002-05:00

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?

2009-05-24T13:14:00.004-05:00

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

2009-05-24T08:50:00.002-05:00

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 ...

2009-05-22T12:01:00.003-05:00

... 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

2009-05-21T08:14:00.002-05:00

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

2009-05-19T22:50:00.004-05:00

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

2009-05-17T12:58:00.002-05:00

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

2009-05-16T10:26:00.002-05:00

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

2009-05-14T07:39:00.002-05:00

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

2009-05-13T09:19:00.002-05:00

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?

2009-05-12T08:36:00.006-05:00

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

2009-05-09T08:49:00.004-05:00

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

2009-05-07T09:02:00.003-05:00

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

2009-05-05T11:50:00.002-05:00

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.

First Stomp

2009-04-28T10:30:00.004-05:00

Tonight's the first night of the Ponderosa Stomp at the House of Blues. Here's the lineup:

The Big Room Stage
6:00 PM - 6:30 PM
Little Willie Littlefield

6:45 PM - 7:15 PM
Classie Ballou

7:30 PM - 8:40 PM
Otis Clay and the Hi Rhythm Section

8:55 PM - 9:45 PM
James Blood Ulmer

10:00 PM - 10:45 PM
Dale Hawkins and James Burton with Deke Dickerson and the Eccofonics

11:00 PM - 12:00 AM
The Remains

12:15 AM - 1:00 AM
Howard Tate

1:15 AM - 2:00 AM
Ray Sharpe with the A-Bones

2:15 AM - 3:15 AM
Lady Bo

Parish Stage
6:00 PM - 6:30 PM
Alton Lott backed by Deke Dickerson and the Eccofonics

6:30 PM - 7:00 PM
Johnny Powers backed by Deke Dickerson and the Eccofonics

7:00 PM - 7:30 PM
Carl Mann backed by Deke Dickerson and the Eccofonics

7:30 PM - 8:00 PM
Cowboy Jack Clement backed by Deke Dickerson and the Eccofonics

8:15 PM - 8:45 PM
Little Joe Washington

9:00 PM - 9:30 PM
Lil Greenwood backed by the Bo-Keys

9:30 PM - 10:15 PM
Texas Johnny Brown backed by the Bo-Keys

10:30 PM - 11:00 PM
Little Willie Littlefield

11:15 PM - 12:15 AM
The Bo-Keys with special guest Dennis Coffey

12:30 AM - 1:15 AM
Legendary Stardust Cowboy

1:30 AM - 2:45 AM
Kenny and the Kasuals

I don't even try to see it all, particularly with another night of Stomp ahead of me and last night's Condo Fucks' show behind me. Rob Cambre says Little Joe Washington is the night's must-see, so I'll try to catch him, James Blood Ulmer, and hang around to see if the Remains hold my attention. Typically, garage bands disappoint at the Stomp because their great records were often heavily shaped by the circumstances of their recordings, and left to their own devices, they're often pretty ordinary. IF they stay interesting, then I'll hang for Legendary Stardust Cowboy, but I suspect the same caveats apply. If I'm still in the bar after that, something went horribly wrong or wonderfully right.

Record/Not Record

2009-04-27T16:52:00.004-05:00

I recently got the following press release from the organizers of French Quarter Festival, which took place the weekend before Jazz Fest this year:

NEW ORLEANS – April 17, 18 and 19, 2009, marked the 26th anniversary and a record year for French Quarter Festival. This year’s attendance figures indicate that more than 441,000* festival-goers enjoyed the music, food, special events and of course, the historic French Quarter. Visitors and locals alike enjoyed a unique weekend that only New Orleans can deliver.

The asterisk after its record attendance figure refers to an explanatory note at the bottom of the release:

*Attendance numbers are calculated based on actual counts (that are adjusted down by percentage to account for repeat entrances and exits). Fess Security counts at entry and exit points of major stages. This number does not include attendance at the festival’s Royal, Bourbon, Chartres and French Market stages, Battle of the Bands, Dancing at Dusk, Courtyard Tours, Cathedral Concert, Opera at the Cabildo, and other special events. The organization is pleased to report record sales of food, beverages and merchandise.

Because attendance is free and there are no gates to measure points of entry, this record number - the second in a row - is an estimate. Obviously, much of that paragraph is there to suggest that perhaps the numbers might be underreported because of all the things that didn't figure in the count. Or, the count is high and who would know?

There's no question that the French Quarter Festival has had two good years in a row, regardless of whether or not they have numbers to back up their belief that attendance has grown. The question is why a narrative of record-breaking growth is offered. Are we that married to the abstract importance of growth? Obviously, growth at any cost wasn't good for our economy, and after Saturday and Sunday at Jazz Fest, there's a point at which growth isn't good for Jazz Fest as an experience. I'm sure it makes it more profitable, but for us sheep, more sheep equals less fun. Perhaps a little rethinking is in order.

Good Grief

2009-04-27T07:09:00.002-05:00

Here's a review I found online that fascinates me a) because I love the title of the album, and b) because for all the description, I don't have any sense of the music at all. I'm not even sure it's a Christmas album.

A Charlie Brown Death Metal Christmas...
I am unsure how to rate this album. I really am. I know for sure that I absolutely love it. Is it progressive? Oh yes. Is it experimental? Oh yes. Is it original? ...

It is so many things. This is one of the most disjointed and unnerving albums full of so many flowing styles and mixes. Styles touched go anywhere form progressive rock and death metal, to indie rock and jazz. So many brilliant musical ideas are given to you, and with such conviction. Folk passages with clean vocals, death metal stomping in the midst of pretty sounds. The lyrics are something to ponder. This entire record strikes me as a virulent enigma, yet it captivates me with so vitriol.

The songs flow into each other in a way, and the entire album has an atmosphere (one that changes rather often.) The acoustic passages are beautiful, the heavy sections are well played and sound strong. One song in particular "Sleep is a Curse" is one of the prettiest pieces of music I have ever heard. How could they have come up with such a style? I do not know, and it makes this hard to rate.

The music is most certainly not easily accessible. It will alienate death metal and heavy fans, and it will alienate fans of soft acoustic/folk music. But, whatever they choose to do, they do so vibrantly, so skillfully, and with so many evocative melodies that entrance me completely.

There are interludes interspersed through the main songs, and are quite enticing. The entire album never stops being highly intriguing. So much material here to delve int0o and get lost in the lilting sounds. I will give this 5 stars. It is highly experimental and progressive, the songs go from powerfully brutal and dark, to emotionally moving and majestically pretty. By no means essential to everyone, but essential to me.

Anniversary Coverage

2009-04-23T12:34:00.002-05:00

I don't get anniversaries as hooks for stories, and nothing illustrates why like Keith Spera's coverage of the 40th anniversary of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival at Nola.com. It's a cyclical exercise in nostalgia for a non-story:

From James Booker and Bongo Joe to Billy Joel and Bon Jovi.

From $3 at the gate to $50.

From hundreds of attendees to hundreds of thousands.

From a budget in the tens of thousands to a budget in the millions.

From sponsorship by Schlitz to sponsorship by Shell.

Much about the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival has changed

Ten years from now, the second half of those statements might change, but they'll reflect the same thought - "look at how things have changed" - but they could also be made four years from now or eight years ago or 17 years ago or 12 years in the future. The number's a marketing device; the press doesn't have to bite on it.

By the way, I generally like Keith's writing a lot, but he goes a little soft when he starts explaining away criticisms of Jazz Fest today:

Some longtime festival fans bemoan its lost innocence. They miss the days when ice chests and tent canopies were allowed and nighttime Jazz Fest concerts rocked the riverboat President. Some find corporate sponsorships and premium VIP ticket packages distasteful.

Ultimately, such contemporary festival realities do not distract from the average festival-goer's experience -- except, perhaps, when the grandstand's upper floors are reserved for VIP ticketholders and everybody else is huddled outside in the rain.

I'm not sure how he knows people aren't annoyed as they work negotiate their way through the Shell hospitality tents, and how people feel about there being a Miller hospitality suite with a view of the Acura Stage, and how he knows that most people who worked to get to the front of the stage don't care that the wealthy can buy their way in front of them with their VIP packages.

And while I agree that Jazz Fest ticket prices aren't out of line, that's probably the sort of argument that should come out of Quint Davis' mouth, not his.

Why Do We Do This Again?

2009-04-20T14:07:00.002-05:00

Recently, I was called out (albeit in a friendly way) by someone who made meaningful contributions because I didn't comment on them in a review. I had to point out that the CD I was working from was an advance that came without artwork or a booklet, so I didn't know about said meaningful contributions. The last time this happened, I vowed we wouldn't review unfinished CDs (which includes the art and packaging), but that's often not realistic. As I write, I'm listening to the new Ha Ha Tonka to decide if I want to review it, and I'm doing so from an advance that came with a one sheet instead of liner notes. And a half-hour ago, I received the URL to download Jarvis Cocker's new album with the liner notes pasted into the email message. All of these situations conspire against liner notes that travel easily with the music it references. Information? What is it good for? (absolutely nothing!)

The Modern World

2009-04-16T10:39:00.002-05:00

I can tell you everything wrong with the Sweet's Action: the Sweet Anthology (Shout! Factory) - much of it is simply bubblegum and/or journeyman efforts - but the stretch of the band at its best is irresistible for me. From 1972's "Little Willy" through the tracks from 1975's Desolation Boulevard, the Sweet performed a pretty smart trick, connecting Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman's schoolyard melodies with Brian Connolly's hard rock voice and Phil Wainman's sound-of-modernity production. The result sounded like a sexy, hard rock now that was available to anybody who wanted to be a part of it.

Start Saving Up

2009-04-14T16:20:00.002-05:00

This almost makes me regret my affection for Christmas music:

YMC Records and Ali Lohan are kicking off the Christmas season with the release of her debut album, Lohan Holiday, which will be available in stores on November 21st. Following in the footsteps of older sister Lindsay, Lohan is taking the teen pop music scene by storm with a holiday-themed record that celebrates her love of the Christmas season. Lohan Holiday is an infectious and up-beat album that features the hit single "I Like Christmas" and classic songs such as “Deck The Halls,” “Jingle Bells” and
“Silent Night.” In addition to original tracks such as “Christmas Magic” and “Christmas Day,” Ali’s vocals were digitally added to the critically acclaimed singer Amy Grant’s song,
“Santa's Reindeer Ride," originally recorded by Grant as a teenager at the start of her career. The song captures the holiday spirit as reflected by two generations of up-and-coming pop sensations.

Lohan Holiday is not only the perfect stocking stuffer, but great for the family sing-a-longs during this year’s celebrations. For more information check out www.AliLohanMusic.com.

Track Listing:

1. “Christmas Day”
2. “I Like Christmas”
3. “Winter Wonderland”
4. “Christmas Magic”
5. “Jingle Bells”
6. “Groove of Christmas”
7. “Lohan Holiday”
8. “Deck The Halls”
9. “Silent Night”
10. “Santa’s Reindeer Ride” featuring Amy Grant
11. “We Wish You A Merry Christmas”
12. “I Like Christmas” (Remix)

Almost. There's a lot to love in all of that - songs called "Lohan Holiday" and the uberbanal "I Like Christmas", the requisite Lindsay reference, hype for a Christmas album a mere 7 or 8 shopping months' early, and Ali's voice added to an Amy Grant track. Y'know, it was creepy enough when Natalie Cole first did that with a Nat King Cole song, but at least that had some father/daughter drama to make it interesting. This is just Ali stapling her voice to a successful track by someone else, a naked attempt to be successful in some vague, purposeless, honorless, talent-neutral way.

Not by the Hair

2009-04-14T11:42:00.002-05:00

On The Flashing, the Fancing, I'm with Chin Chin's retro disco/NYC dance rock, but it's soul jazz moments leave me in the same place so much soul jazz does - waiting for more soul or more jazz.

Growing Hole

2009-04-12T10:13:00.004-05:00

At first I thought Booker T.'s collaboration with the Drive-By Truckers and Neil Young, Potato Hole, lumbered a bit too much for its own good. Now I love its weight as the electric guitars crunch with with as much distortion as they can carry, making Booker's organ sound even more glide-ready. Making organ-driven rock 'n' roll didn't seem like a good idea at first, but "Stomp it Out" finds his organ pulsing as authoritatively as the Truckers' power chords, and "Native New Yorker" spawns the sort of Neil Young solo we live for, and Booker follows his lead beautifully. The stunt song selections - "Hey Ya" and Tom Waits' "Get Behind the Mule" - seem gimmicky and unnecessary by comparison, and I'd say the same for the Truckers' "Space City" if Mike Cooley's vocal melody didn't mesh with Booker's sense of melody so seamlessly.

An Interesting Miss

2009-04-11T09:30:00.002-05:00

Cher's 3614 Jackson Highway is now available via download from Rhino, and it's such an intriguing misfire. She recorded it with the Muscle Shoals rhythm section in 1969, covering Dylan, Buffalo Springfield, and Dr. John's "Walk on Gilded Splinters" - the latter a rock/soul version that is one of its stronger tracks. Ultimately, the album didn't work because she's not a blues or soul singer, and no amount of soulful support could change that. It could mitigate her shortcomings, but she was a rock star even then, and the subtext of all her performances was her persona. Where the subject matter was too weird to fully move into - "Gilded Splinters" - or the song so malleable that anyone could find a place in it - "Tonight I'll Be Staying Here with You" - she shines, and she was enough of an actress to make "(Just Enough To Keep Me) Hanging On" credible.

It's Not Real if You Don't Feel It

2009-04-09T08:51:00.002-05:00

I just walked past a car with a mother and her teenage son smiling and listening to a radio preacher at the same volume that guys with bazooka tubes blast hip-hop as they drive down my block. A half-block down the street, I could still hear him.

More Petulance on My Part

2009-03-29T14:14:00.002-05:00

I'd like to review A-Trak's new mix, Infinity + 1, but I'm distracted by a voice that announces over the music, "You are listening to an advance of A-Trak's Infinity + 1." I'm not sure how regularly obscuring the sounds I'm supposed to be reviewing is supposed to help me review them, and there comes a point where I wait for the intruding voice and stop noticing the music. Of course, the announcement isn't there to help make sure I know what I'm listening to, but to keep me from bootlegging the album or sharing it without permission. But as a matter of principle, I won't review albums and artists that treat me as suspicious when I haven't given them any reason to do so. If I'm treated pre-emptively as the enemy, then I'll pass on that artist and review artists that wait until I do something wrong to treat me like a scumbag.

Beam Me Up?

2009-03-29T14:06:00.001-05:00

Does every instrument Prince touches have to look like it first appeared in a Star Trek episode or movie?

A Public Service

2009-03-28T07:35:00.003-05:00

The list of the final 27 contestants in the most recent 33 1/3 book proposal derby was announced yesterday, and thank God someone's finally writing about the Beatles, Stones and Dylan. It's about time someone shone a light on these underanalyzed phenomena.

To be fair, mine was one of the proposals that didn't make the final cut, and the procedure was completely civilized so I'm not grousing beyond the observation that it sure looks like music stopped with the '70s according to this list.

Do the Professor

2009-03-27T11:38:00.002-05:00

After seeing Alejandro Escovedo play "Real as an Animal" with a horn section last Friday night in Austin, I've had the Saints' "Know Your Product" on my mind.

How Businesses Die

2009-03-23T10:45:00.003-05:00

I have on my desk the book Battle of the Band Names by Burt Bull, and it is literally a book that lists band names. It's subtitle is "The Best and Worst Band Names Ever (and all the briliant, colorful, stupid ones in between." It's a list of band names with an art director who's gone wild. Someone published a list of band names. The Alarm Clocks - how wacky! Junior Murvin - those reggae guys must be high! Mojave 3 - is this some kind of joke?!

A Good Question

2009-03-23T09:36:00.001-05:00

See here. And a similar question - why was Barack Obama referred to as Obama during the Democratic primary season but Hillary Clinton was referred to as Hillary?

... on the other hand

2009-03-23T06:43:00.003-05:00

Todd Martens at the Los Angeles Times started his final take on SXSW this way:

As much as reporters sought to apply a theme to this year's South by Southwest, the musicians and industry reps in Austin, Texas, for the four-day music extravaganza just weren't making it easy. The economic realities of 2009 were a relatively obvious topic, but life for the many of the artists in Texas this week -- a record-setting 1,900 of them this year -- has never exactly been easy.

"During hard times, I didn't have much education or stuff like that to rely on," said the New York Dolls' Sylvain Sylvain, reminding attendees that artists are comfortable with recession-time living even in flush decades. "I wanted to take a job where I could still do my performances, or if I got drunk the night before, I wouldn't get fired."

Me, I want to follow up on yesterday's thoughts on Jazz Fest and SXSW and the relationship between the events and their towns. Yesterday my flight home was overbooked and the airline was looking for volunteers to stay until Tuesday - the soonest they could get the volunteers out - with a hotel paid for and a per diem. I considered it, thinking about friends from L.A. and New York that were still in town and what I could do if I stayed. What that reminded me was that SXSW is its own city, and Austin's simply the space it occupies. That might seem obvious, but graffiti on the bathroom wall in the Continental Club says, "Don't move to Austin," and I'm certain that many enjoy the town's vibe during SXSW and want to move there the same way people want to move to New Orleans after Mardi Gras or Jazz Fest. The difference is that the SXSW is as much shaped by the people visiting as the people who live there, and the glut of music will largely go away this week. In New Orleans, the big event may end but the same bands will play the next week as played during those events, and the vibe that surrounds them is entirely New Orleanian.

Getting Religious

2009-03-22T10:58:00.003-05:00

In New Orleans, it's impossible to hear about/think about Austin and SXSW without contrasting SXSW and Jazz Fest. The fact is that they share a few very significant characteristics. Both events represent the one occasion people from around the world have to see certain artists. Many regional artists don't tour, and both events collect most of the heavy hitters.

The more significant similarity is the sense of community that underlies both events. Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and a host of networking events make it possible to build a virtual community, but at SXSW and Jazz Fest, you get the visceral reality of looking around a room at a band that draws 50 or so people in your town and find the space you're in at the festival packed. You can see the numbers of people who share values with you; they don't have to be imagined or assumed. It's very clear that you're not alone.

I've half-joked that Jazz Fest is the high holy holiday for the Church of New Orleans, those whose connection to the city and its culture has taken on the character of belief - something beyond the city and bands' actual ability to deliver. The ideas that are encoded in the city and its music speak to them even when the reality is less convincing. Simply because of its size, SXSW is more than that. It's the gathering for those who believe in rock 'n' roll, its inheritors and fellow travelers. There may be more reflexive irony and cool self-protection in SXSW's adherents, but there's no less of a sense of the meeting of the true believers at it than there is at Jazz Fest.

What the size of both events tells us is that the significance of music in our lives isn't on the wane, just anyone's ability to get paid making it. (Or writing about it, I might add.)

Louisiana at SXSW: Friday

2009-03-20T10:12:00.002-05:00

Today from 3 to 5 p.m., there's a Louisiana party at the Continental Club featuring the Peekers, an indie rock band from Shreveport; the Iguanas, Tex-Mex veterans from New Orleans; and CC Adcock, Lil' Buck Sinegal and Kenny Bill Stinson's Louisiana All-State Louisiana Revue (yes, so Louisiana the state's in the name twice!). The latter should be a pretty fine introduction to swamp pop, and it's open to the public.

There will be a Southwest Louisiana party starting at 2 at Roadhouse Rags in South Austin. It will have boiled crawfish and music by Justin Primeaux, Drew Landry, all-woman string band the Figs, Dickie Landry and Grammy-nominated Cajun band the Pine Leaf Boys.

Tonight, Theresa Andersson brings her one-woman show to Antone's at 10 p.m. Between a series of looping pedals and the instruments around her, she's turned her music into true performance art, as much dance as song, and it's pretty enthralling and sweet. At 1 a.m., Big Sam's Funky Nation plays Opal Divine's Free House for a set that has roots in brass bands, but it's really all about the funk.

Louisiana at SXSW Today

2009-03-19T10:30:00.004-05:00

Today there's a day party at the Historic Victory Grill hosted by NOLASoul starting at 11 a.m. with the Prince-meets-space rock-meets-indie rock of the White Bitch. Also in the day, power pop with MyNameIsJonMichael (who just finished a year of recording a song a week) and Rotary Downs (they play at 5:45). Rotary Downs (who are finally outgrowing Pavement comparisons that have hung around too long) also play at 3:30 at Habana Calle on 6th Street.

In official showcases, the street band from days of yore Hurray for the Riff Raff play the Central Presbyterian Church at 10. At the same time, BeauSoleil avec Michael Doucet makes its SXSW debut 30+ years into their career at 10 tonight at the Continental Club, followed at 11 by the Iguanas.

Hissy Fit

2009-03-18T05:58:00.003-05:00

Jeez, do I hate the airport experience. I resent having to take off my shoes just because one chud tried unsuccessfully to make his blow up, and every effort to simplify (read: reduce manpower) the check-in process makes the process more inhuman. And now we get to pay extra for being treated this shittily. 'Cows - moo to the left and have your cuds out with a picture ID.'

Test the Market

2009-03-15T09:01:00.002-05:00

According to today's New York Times, A.I.G. chairman Edward Liddy defended bonuses the play to pay out thusly:

“We cannot attract and retain the best and the brightest talent to lead and staff the A.I.G. businesses — which are now being operated principally on behalf of American taxpayers — if employees believe their compensation is subject to continued and arbitrary adjustment by the U.S. Treasury,” he wrote Mr. Geithner on Saturday.

The story also reports:

The bonuses will be paid to executives at A.I.G.’s financial products division, the unit that wrote trillions of dollars’ worth of credit-default swaps that protected investors from defaults on bonds backed in many cases by subprime mortgages.

The bonus plan covers 400 employees, and the bonuses range from as little as $1,000 to as much as $6.5 million. Seven executives at the financial products unit were entitled to receive more than $3 million in bonuses.

Two thoughts:
1) That's the best and the brightest talent? That's the irreplaceable talent A.I.G. has to protect?
2) Let those executives test the job market. People have the jobs they have for a host of reasons, money being just one of them. If the lack of bonuses at A.I.G. causes some to look for new work, they'll do so with their role in the economic collapse on their resume. But that's arguing a non-point - Liddy's defense is a mere pretext for maintaining a compensation structure he and everyone at A.I.G. want.

Bring Me More Everything

2009-03-13T08:36:00.003-05:00

Isaac Hayes' 1976 album Juicy Fruit (Disco Freak) fascinates me in a way that Black Moses - re-released at the same time - doesn't. Black Moses is the more significant album and presents Hayes at the peak of his artistic powers, while Juicy Fruit (Disco Freak) features him one step over the line. The title hints that the world is starting to drift by him, and the slight songs stretched to indulgent lengths says the good times are catching up. Still, the fact that it's still entertaining says that even distracted, Isaac Hayes was a bad man with crazy compositional and arranging talents. And it's no surprise that Isaac Hayes' disco album isn't disco at all; it's pure Isaac Hayes.

So Cynical

2009-03-12T14:39:00.002-05:00

The tradition of Jazz Fest posters being anti-artist and anti-art is a proud one. Artists have been asked over and over again to mimic photos as realistically as possible where the figures are concerned, often at the expense of their style. That's the case in the Congo Square poster this year, which is in substance a reproduction of a Trombone Shorty publicity shot.

Worse is yet another James Michalopoulos poster, this one remarkably like the one he did of Fats Domino. This time, it's Allen Toussaint who's playing in the street with Michalopoulos' trademark curving buildings looming overhead. Besides the piece's lack of basic logic - why is he playing piano in the street? - it's also Michalopoulos' weakest effort. The piano is poorly drafted, resembling a key-tar more than a piano in the way it angles away from Toussaint's body. Since Michalopoulos' work usually shows better architectural consciousness than that, it's sad and inexplicable.

Still, his artistic sins are less glaring than Jazz Fest's. The choice of Michalopoulos for his third or fourth poster is simply cynical, as if people buying it will validate everything. Collectors collect, and those who have bought posters each year will buy them again this year, so the decision is whether or not to give them something as excellent as Doug Bourgeois's Irma Thomas poster last year, or pass off the same ol' same ol'. We know the answer.

Because He Asked Nicely ...

2009-03-11T16:58:00.003-05:00

Rotary Downs was confirmed for SXSW too late to make OffBeat's March issue rundown of who-plays-where. Drummer Zack Smith recently sent over the details, which include two day parties for the indie rock band. Here's the rundown:

Wednesday, March 18th
PASTE SXSW Showcase
Ace's Lounge - 222 E. 6th St., Austin, TX
Rotary Downs @ 9pm (21+)
wristband access

Thursday, March 19th -

Electronic Musician/reapandsow music SXSW Day party
Calle Habana 6 - 709 E. 6th St., Austin, TX
Rotary Downs @ 3pm - INSIDE STAGE

AND

NOLA Soul Presents
Historic Victory Grill - 1104 E. 11th St, Austin, TX
Rotary Downs @ 5:45

See them at least once.

Telefon Talking

2009-03-10T11:08:00.002-05:00

Leo McGovern interviewed Josh Eustis of Telefon Tel Aviv about Charlie Cooper's death for Antigravity. It's a pretty frank interview, and Eustis doesn't pull punches discussing the possibility that Cooper's death was a suicide:

Are you mad at Charlie at all?

Sure. I like to tell myself, to give myself comfort in a very selfish way, that it’s a natural response to something like this. But I can’t really be mad at him because the Medical Examiner, for instance—I’ll tell you this, since everybody is wondering—ruled inconclusively. They couldn’t rule that it was a suicide, because there wasn’t enough evidence to indicate that it actually was. It very well could’ve been an accident and that’s what the Medical Examiner thinks at this time. We get the toxicology report in a week and it’s going to stay between me and his family. If it wasn’t intentional, then I’m a lot sadder, but I’ll take comfort in knowing he wasn’t trying to take an easy way out of life’s problems. But, if it was intentional (which I don’t think it was), then yeah I’m pissed off because it’s a bullshit way of dealing with life’s problems—problems that everybody has: girl problems, money problems. Fuck, everybody has those problems. To despair when you have problems is the height of folly, because despair is only for people who know the end beyond any doubt. If you know for a fact that it’s going to end badly, then you can despair, but nobody ever knows that everything is going to completely fall apart and your life is going to end. For that reason I would be pissed off if the Medical Examiner comes back and rules it a suicide.