Schwag Check

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"

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)

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

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"

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

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

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?