The Other Shlubs

I've been going through a DVD exploration of Joy Division, who never spoke to me. I'd have to be made of stone to miss "Love Will Tear Us Apart," but in the band's moment, its tormented nature simply sounded gloomy to me. Later attempts to connect to the band failed because Martin Hannett's pins the records to the late 1970s as permanently and fatally as a butterfly on a corkboard.

Anton Corbijn's Control (Weinstein) at least did the job of getting me interested in Ian Curtis. The scenes of Curtis as a young Bowie fan are beautifully awkward and reveal an influence I'd missed the first time around. Control also depicts the low rent nature of the music business - such as it was - in England at that point. After a no-fun-to-watch stretch setting up Curtis' relationships with his wife and girlfriend Annik, Sam Riley brings Curtis' anguish to life.

After that, Joy Division (Weinstein) balances Control as a look back at Joy Division because it focuses on the other three members - Peter Hook, Bernard Sumner and Stephen Morris. Besides reinforcing Corbijn's depiction of the early days and their relative lack of glamor, the DVD also echoes Corbijn's treatment of them as the other shlubs in the band, guys who wanted to play, but who'd probably have been just as happy playing their favorite covers for beer money if that's the direction the singer would have wanted to go. You get the same sense of the Sex Pistols' Paul Cook and Steve Jones reading histories of the band, and we'd probably find that of many members of famous bands. For many, the desire to play outweighed the importance of what they played.

They weren't just along for the ride; they were normal people who happened to connect with someone who had a distinctive musical voice. That normalcy is underscored by New Order's Live in Glascow (Warner/Rhino). Admittedly, it shows Hook, Sumner and Morris almost 30 years later, and 30 years will normalize anyone, but you know almost all you need to know when Sumner walks onstage wearing an untucked black polo shirt. With short, graying hair and a little middle-aged paunch, he really looks like someone's dad, and only Morris' T-shirt prevents him from looking like a middle manager. Hook's face shows some years of drinking and good living. Still, you can see some charisma. He's someone you might run into in a pub who'd have some good stories to tell and would tell them all night long.

Perhaps its no surprise that I got New Order; it was a pop band, even when "pop" meant long, dance songs. There was no central personality obviously reflected in the material - no solos, no persona, just catchy songs with a far more moderate sense of melancholy than mustered by Joy Division. For that reason, Live in Glasgow is reliably entertaining, but the only memorable moment was Sumner's "dancing" during "Bizarre Love Triangle," which only furthered the impression that he's your friend's uncool dad.

Through this period of contemplation, my disinterest in Joy Division has softened some. I'll chalk it up to familiarity and a handful of chances to find a connection to the material though, because when I listened to Closer recently, I still found my attention waned after three or four songs. The pre-Goth, dour austerity only reaches me in small doses, but I believe its me. I've never had much of a drama streak and I haven't been prone to depression, so the lyrical and musical stance simply isn't very resonant for me.

Bottom line: I've spent hours figuring out that Joy Division isn't for me, though I'm not as down on the band as I was, and the research was reasonably pleasurable.

Ring of Hell follow-up

On June 3, I posted the overheated press release for the book Ring of Hell, the pro wrestling expose focused on Chris Benoit. There was a time when I was more interested in wrestling than I am now, and I saw a great ladder match between Benoit and Chris Jericho in New Orleans, so I was interested in the book for more than just the lurid revelations.

It can't surprise anyone that the world of pro wrestling is cruel, violent, drug-enriched and ego-driven, but the details are still pretty raw, particularly the hazing-like pranks. Writer Matthew Randazzo V also ties the sport to gangsters worldwide, which I suppose you could see coming, though I didn't. You also knew steroids were a significant part of the wrestling story, but again, you probably don't expect the degree to which it plays a role. According to Randazzo, Benoit had a chance to go to the WWE earlier than he did, but because it had just been investigated for steroid abuse, it had a new testing policy, one that would have revealed Benoit's years of steroid use. The book is nearly sad because Benoit's death and final murder spree seem so unnecessary because he watched other friends have their lives shortened by steroid-related illness. Then again, it's hard to imagine a smaller, less built Benoit would have had a career in wrestling. Once he started down the wrestling road, the decisions were largely made.

Still, it was hard to get around the luridness of the writing. As written, everyone's an asshole, everyone's an egomaniac, everyone's a reprobate. Randazzo's flatly declarative writing style stresses everything cheap, foul and tainted about wrestling. Obviously, wrestling gave him a lot to work with, but the writing also feels like a nod to the true crime genre, which is more about revealing the depravity than solving the crime. The jacket notes emphasize Randazzo's birth to an old Sicilian family and expertise in organized crime as if the shadiness must also extend to the writer.

Reviewing Reviewing

Critic Michaelangelo Matos recently wrote about the odd breakthrough he experienced when he purchased a few recent CDs. His discussion of promo CDs and reviewing addressed one of the ironies of reviewing - that reviewers listen to music in very different ways than their readers, largely because they don't buy their CDs.

For example, I'm a Beach Boys fan and bought the Beach Boys reissues in the 1990s. When Dennis Wilson's Pacific Ocean Blue (which I reviewed here) arrived on my desk, I was excited, put it on for a few minutes to check it out, then put it aside for almost a week. Similarly, I was in no hurry to check out the Numero Group's recent entry in the Eccentric Soul series and Sloan's new album, even though I tend to like Sloan and the soul series. Had I bought any of the three, I'm fairly sure I'd have listened to them once I got home if not on the drive. And those who buy or download their music likely don't accumulate 20 to 30 albums at a time, which affects the time spent on an album and the timeliness of attention.

I wonder if the financial investment in a CD makes you inclined to listen to a CD more sympathetically. After all, buying a CD involves seeking it out and often making the effort to go somewhere to purchase it. That effort is motivated by some level of commitment or at least prior interest in the music, which you'd think would translate to the listening experience. We've all bought albums that sucked, but I wonder how many average albums we overrated at the time because we didn't want to admit we'd wasted our money.

Discipline Kicked In

Not surprisingly, Ted Nugent wrote an editorial response to the Supreme Court's support for the Second Amendment, but it's so self-righteous and aggressively dumb that discipline kicked in and I opted not to post it here. I'm sure you can find it online if you care.

The Structures

I took a few pages of notes at the PotLuck Audio Conference at the beginning of the month, but I didn't feel like I had the time or energy for a notebook dump at the time and now am not sure how far I feel like going through these pages. Here's a semi-random thought and a semi-meditation:

During the Urban Edge producers panel, I wondered if Dr. Dre killed hip-hop as we're used to thinking of it, and if he ushered in the era of hip-hop as pop.

In panel after panel, producers, engineers and artists talked about taking care of your own business, but the language was never sexy. One used a 'selling shoes' metaphor, and Larry Crane referred to the indie revolution as knocking down the mansion to reveal the subdivision behind it. Perhaps because there was nothing sexy in their imagery for the musical future, the audience seemed to miss the message. After the Urban Edge panel, one audience member got up to ask how he could get his demo in the hands of the people at the dais. Someone said, "Thee's nothing we can do for you that you can't do for yourself." The next day at Crane's Future of Music panel, the same thing happened - a guy complained about the lousy A&R he dealt with and wanted to know if they could help.

In the mid-1990s, T-P writer Doug MacCash and I made a documentary, Artists Make Big Money, about the financial realities of making contemporary art. In one of the interviews, Thomas Mann said that most people get into art to avoid the things they have to do in business, when they actually have to do those things and do them better than businesspeople because they have a more idiosyncratic product to sell. No one knows that they need your art. As the questions at PotLuck suggested, we can substitute "music" for "art" and the thought remains on point.

Clearly, people are going to have to adjust how they think about a career in music. Again, the questioners had an investment in a notion of success that involved a sexier life - a big house, a fast car, a hot girl (the conference was a dudefest) - and discussions that treated making music as a job, or one that ends up with a sensible house obviously became white noise for some. That sounds like the questioners want fame more than to make music, but a prolonged existence in music today is going some new metaphors that address the reality that there is a lot of good music being made, but the market and publicity mechanisms are so decentralized that they can't be counted on to work as they once did. What's the new metaphor? The new mechanism? Whoever answers those questions gets a mansion, not a house in the subdivision.

V's Closing Moments

I just caught the end of V for Vendetta again on HBO and was struck by how, seconds after reminding us that terrorism is a tactic not an ideology, the Wachowski Brothers back the credits with "Street Fighting Man." The juxtaposition is as chilling now as it was the first time I saw it in the theater, with the Stones' classic used to not only speak to revolution - it's done that before - but, by virtue of the Stones' revered place in rock 'n' roll history, to underscore the movie's rationalization of terrorism. That segues into Ethan Stoller's "BKAB," a world electronica track that asks the harder question: Who are you fighting? We are the world, remember?

Toronto Reggae: the Cougars' "I Wish It Would Rain"

This morning I found a copy of Jamaica to Toronto: Soul Funk & Reggae 1967-1974 that its compiler Sipreano gave me during the EMP Conference in Seattle. He and Light in the Attic Records have done a good job documenting the unlikely reggae scene that started in Toronto's suburbs in the late 1960s. At the EMP Conference, Sipreano's talk included a track that blew me away, and I ran across it this morning on my way to work. When he played the Cougars' cover of "I Wish it Would Rain" at EMP, I caught moderator Garnette Cadogan's eye and started tapping a heartbeat on my chest. The track sounds like a southern soul singer accompanied by a heart monitor, with a hospital-like beep following each thum-thump. The heartbeat is a bassline so low that it's distorting brutally, so much so that it's literally the sound of pounding, not of a melody or harmony instrument. As a result, the song feels almost a cappella until the instrumental passage between the chorus and verse, when a Stax-like horn section treats the phrase as a fanfare. It seems grand after the spare verse and chorus, and makes every return to the voice and heart monitor sound spare and desperate.