Monday, January 12, 2009
In My Dark Little Heart of Hearts ...
... I don't agree, but I'm going to agree with Simon anyway because I'll always come out vocal in support of The Sweet.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
A Trend?
A few months back, Down's publicist pitched review tickets to the writers and editors in the cities the band would be playing, only to withdraw the offer a day or so before the show. The same thing just happened yesterday; I was told by the publicist that Lil Wayne's management had pulled publicity tickets in New Orleans, and that the tickets I had been offered by the publicist weren't available anymore. In this case, the matter was made worse by the fact that they weren't all pulled; the writer for The Times-Picayune was hooked up by the publicist who told me i was shut out. On the other hand, photo pit passes were available. Draw your own conclusions.
Friday, January 9, 2009
Meet Ron Asheton
Ron Asheton's death this week is so sad, and I've been disappointed by the general lack of engagement with him as a musician. The Stooges weren't simply Iggy, and the band wasn't an autonomous entity divorced from its members. Asheton was central to one of the most influential and devastating rock sounds ever recorded. In his review of Fun House, Robert Christgau wrote, "Now I regret all the times I've used words like "power" and "energy" to describe rock and roll, because this is what such rhetoric should have been saved for. Shall I compare it to an atom bomb? a wrecker's ball? a hydroelectric plant? Language wasn't designed for the job."
RollingStone.com picked up some of the slack, but here's how you met Ron Asheton if the first Stooges album you heard was The Stooges:
"1969" starts at a leisurely pace with a wah-wah'ed guitar than pans between the speakers. It's not laid back, though. It's not trying to be cool. It's as insistent and regular as brother Scott's snare snaps. When the Bo Diddley beat kicks in and Iggy starts singing, the wah guitar is gone in favor of boxy, tightly controlled chord progression. Notes don't ring, chords aren't left to hang. The moment isn't about Asheton, except that it's all about him. The song's tension is all in his refusal do a show biz thing; his refusal to insert "notice me" licks, or even lead fills. At the end of the verse, he releases the tension with two heavily distorted power chords, but they're not Townshend-like power chords played for the cheap seats. They're heavily distorted depth charges that add texture without grandeur or heroics. This is anti-hero music. Another verse passes in the same way before a modulation up that brightens things a bit.
At the end of that verse, the final power chord is still crackling when Asheton enters with a guitar solo, and there's nothing polite or organic about it. His solo jumps in at maximum volume, layering distortion over distortion, working his whammy bar, paying more attention to the crisp attack of notes and the ebb and flow of melodic clusters than the melodic development itself. Iggy's repeating "It's 1969, baby" as Asheton bends the occasional held note, then breaks off another tight fistful of distorted sixteenth notes. Melodically, he's threatening to pursue an ascending line, but he keeps doubling back on himself, getting sidetracked in overtones, wah-wah, and murk. In the last minute, he's lost interest in the false optimism of that ascending melody. He could solo for 10 minutes and never get to the moment when it feels transcendent. Instead, he revels in the sound of electricity as channeled through strings and boxes. That last minute is the real tension breaker, the antithesis of his straightfaced chording through the verses. He borders on manic, as if he can't quite decide which noise he wants to play next, but he does. And he chooses the next noise and the next slur and the next jerk of the whammy bar with intuitive brilliance. Hendrix may have been the poet of the electricity, but Asheton was the Mickey Spillane, breaking off something that would never soar, but more dangerous and that would hit with a physical impact Hendrix couldn't imagine.
... and "Down on the Street," the opener on Fun House, is harder.
RollingStone.com picked up some of the slack, but here's how you met Ron Asheton if the first Stooges album you heard was The Stooges:
"1969" starts at a leisurely pace with a wah-wah'ed guitar than pans between the speakers. It's not laid back, though. It's not trying to be cool. It's as insistent and regular as brother Scott's snare snaps. When the Bo Diddley beat kicks in and Iggy starts singing, the wah guitar is gone in favor of boxy, tightly controlled chord progression. Notes don't ring, chords aren't left to hang. The moment isn't about Asheton, except that it's all about him. The song's tension is all in his refusal do a show biz thing; his refusal to insert "notice me" licks, or even lead fills. At the end of the verse, he releases the tension with two heavily distorted power chords, but they're not Townshend-like power chords played for the cheap seats. They're heavily distorted depth charges that add texture without grandeur or heroics. This is anti-hero music. Another verse passes in the same way before a modulation up that brightens things a bit.
At the end of that verse, the final power chord is still crackling when Asheton enters with a guitar solo, and there's nothing polite or organic about it. His solo jumps in at maximum volume, layering distortion over distortion, working his whammy bar, paying more attention to the crisp attack of notes and the ebb and flow of melodic clusters than the melodic development itself. Iggy's repeating "It's 1969, baby" as Asheton bends the occasional held note, then breaks off another tight fistful of distorted sixteenth notes. Melodically, he's threatening to pursue an ascending line, but he keeps doubling back on himself, getting sidetracked in overtones, wah-wah, and murk. In the last minute, he's lost interest in the false optimism of that ascending melody. He could solo for 10 minutes and never get to the moment when it feels transcendent. Instead, he revels in the sound of electricity as channeled through strings and boxes. That last minute is the real tension breaker, the antithesis of his straightfaced chording through the verses. He borders on manic, as if he can't quite decide which noise he wants to play next, but he does. And he chooses the next noise and the next slur and the next jerk of the whammy bar with intuitive brilliance. Hendrix may have been the poet of the electricity, but Asheton was the Mickey Spillane, breaking off something that would never soar, but more dangerous and that would hit with a physical impact Hendrix couldn't imagine.
... and "Down on the Street," the opener on Fun House, is harder.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Just Remember ...
... drugs fund terrorism. Repeat after me: drugs fund terrorism. This was the message of Homeland Security, U.S.A., which was as foul a piece of propaganda as I've seen in a while. I watched it with my immigration lawyer way who periodically exploded in outrage at the heavy-handed narration and its countless assumptions, including the reminder that drugs fund terrorism. Of course, the narrator forgot to intone solemnly that sometimes drugs fund huge houses, kickass cars, and a sweet lifestyle. What we see is someone arrested for drug smuggling; what we're told is that we just saw funding for terrorism interrupted. What we see is mule after mule going down; what we're told is that we're fighting the war on terrorism.
The only part that didn't outrage either my wife or I beyond the time wasted was the Swiss belly dancer who was coming to the States on a tourist visa, but she wanted to look for work as a belly dancer while here. Her detention and refusal of entry was all reasonable if a bit silly, and it was obviously in the show to lighten the mood between the strikes on Bin Laden's funding through border drug raids. But is this what the Department of Homeland Security is for? To protect us from the Swiss and their pernicious plot to take jobs away from hard working American belly dancers? Is that really a national priority?
The show's particularly galling in New Orleans because FEMA was put under the Department of Homeland Security when the department was created after 9/11. Protecting the borders and fighting terrorism one belly dancer at a time was made the priority as FEMA was financially and bureaucratically weakened. And we saw where that got us. The country was left unable to respond to disaster so that we could hire more border cops who perform routine police business and bust low-level drug traffickers.
Troy Patterson's review at Slate.com is a nice introduction to the writing that has circulated about the show, including a link to Jeffery Goldberg's story for The Atlantic on the ease with which he got forbidden items through airport security - a necessary counterbalance to the bathetic monologue from an airport security drone who won't let any illegal items get through on his watch because all these people, all these travelers - they're his responsibility. They're like his children.
... and drugs fund terrorism.
The only part that didn't outrage either my wife or I beyond the time wasted was the Swiss belly dancer who was coming to the States on a tourist visa, but she wanted to look for work as a belly dancer while here. Her detention and refusal of entry was all reasonable if a bit silly, and it was obviously in the show to lighten the mood between the strikes on Bin Laden's funding through border drug raids. But is this what the Department of Homeland Security is for? To protect us from the Swiss and their pernicious plot to take jobs away from hard working American belly dancers? Is that really a national priority?
The show's particularly galling in New Orleans because FEMA was put under the Department of Homeland Security when the department was created after 9/11. Protecting the borders and fighting terrorism one belly dancer at a time was made the priority as FEMA was financially and bureaucratically weakened. And we saw where that got us. The country was left unable to respond to disaster so that we could hire more border cops who perform routine police business and bust low-level drug traffickers.
Troy Patterson's review at Slate.com is a nice introduction to the writing that has circulated about the show, including a link to Jeffery Goldberg's story for The Atlantic on the ease with which he got forbidden items through airport security - a necessary counterbalance to the bathetic monologue from an airport security drone who won't let any illegal items get through on his watch because all these people, all these travelers - they're his responsibility. They're like his children.
... and drugs fund terrorism.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
What Should People Know?
It's more than three years after Katrina, and one of the underlying questions remains how we talk about the state of the city to the rest of the world. Are we half-empty or half-full? Me - I'm the half-empty type, because people can't and won't help if they think things are fine. Of course, civic leaders and tourist organizations want the world to think we're fine in most significant ways because they figure that will encourage people to come here, which has value as well. Tourist money is good for a city that has made tourism its economic engine.
When I take people to the Lower Ninth Ward these days, I point to the Upper Ninth Ward first so people can appreciate what they see when they get there. Immediately after the storm, the destruction was obvious - houses that had floated off their moorings and smashed into trees or came to rest on pickup trucks. Acres upon acres of houses contorted by the violently surging floodwaters. Now, much of it looks like a pasture because most of the irreparable houses have been demolished, leaving blocks of green space with weeds obscuring the foundations and pipes. Without a visual reference as to how dense the neighborhood once was, there's no way to gauge it anymore.
Tonight PBS' Frontline returns to the Lower Ninth Ward with 82-year-old Herbert Gettridge for a documentary on rebuilding titled The Old Man and the Storm. We didn't get a screener of it, but here are previews from Salon.com and The Times-Picayune.
... and if you see a rerun of Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations, we're not all as despondent and wounded as local columnist Chris Rose, who Bourdain talks to in Domilese's po-boy shop. I'm not convinced Rose is even as damaged as he seemed, and if so, he's the one who's out of step with the city right now.
When I take people to the Lower Ninth Ward these days, I point to the Upper Ninth Ward first so people can appreciate what they see when they get there. Immediately after the storm, the destruction was obvious - houses that had floated off their moorings and smashed into trees or came to rest on pickup trucks. Acres upon acres of houses contorted by the violently surging floodwaters. Now, much of it looks like a pasture because most of the irreparable houses have been demolished, leaving blocks of green space with weeds obscuring the foundations and pipes. Without a visual reference as to how dense the neighborhood once was, there's no way to gauge it anymore.
Tonight PBS' Frontline returns to the Lower Ninth Ward with 82-year-old Herbert Gettridge for a documentary on rebuilding titled The Old Man and the Storm. We didn't get a screener of it, but here are previews from Salon.com and The Times-Picayune.
... and if you see a rerun of Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations, we're not all as despondent and wounded as local columnist Chris Rose, who Bourdain talks to in Domilese's po-boy shop. I'm not convinced Rose is even as damaged as he seemed, and if so, he's the one who's out of step with the city right now.
Friday, January 2, 2009
Space is the Place
At my more New Orleans-centric blog, I've been writing a lot recently about the city getting involved in Mid-City's New Year's Eve tradition of a Christmas tree bonfire on the Orleans Avenue neutral grounds. (You can read previous posts here, here, here, here and here, and you can see a youtube video here.)
There's no question that it was the most Apocalypse Now event I've ever been to, with fireworks going off on all sides of you, a dense smoke illuminated by fireworks even before the bonfire was lit, and the fire itself was usually a pretty fine inferno. I understand any mom or dad who was afraid of it, and I understand any city employee or public official who thought it was too extreme to go on as it did for decades (monitored by a fire truck for the decade-plus that I've been attending). But it's worth noting that nothing did happen, and that the changes have everything to do with legal liability and the general impulse of authority to extend itself into as many elements of our lives as possible.
The saddest feature of the new, idiotproofed, uber-secured version of the bonfire is that many are happy if not happier with it this way - not because of the improved safety but because it has been recast in a form they understand. A decentralized, democratic, participatory event was unsettling for many; now it's passive (viewers wait for the fire department to bring them the gift of fire), centralized (there's nothing going on at the neutral grounds site except the bonfire), and the dominant values are those of property - who's got it, who doesn't, and whose is valuable, whose isn't. The neighborhood homeowners don't feel ambivalent about a party/event that could set their houses on fire; now they have prime real estate for a safe, city-sanctioned tradition. Now their property values could go up because the homes are near the bonfire and the start of the Endymion parade route. And at the bonfire site itself, people started staking out their land by the bonfire's barricade as early as 5 p.m. The same neighborhood is notorious for starting to stake out curbside space for Endymion days in advance of the parade. In short, a perfectly democratic, egalitarian event has been transformed into yet another place to enact a haves/havenots drama, which is a sadder fate that death for the bonfire.
There's no question that it was the most Apocalypse Now event I've ever been to, with fireworks going off on all sides of you, a dense smoke illuminated by fireworks even before the bonfire was lit, and the fire itself was usually a pretty fine inferno. I understand any mom or dad who was afraid of it, and I understand any city employee or public official who thought it was too extreme to go on as it did for decades (monitored by a fire truck for the decade-plus that I've been attending). But it's worth noting that nothing did happen, and that the changes have everything to do with legal liability and the general impulse of authority to extend itself into as many elements of our lives as possible.
The saddest feature of the new, idiotproofed, uber-secured version of the bonfire is that many are happy if not happier with it this way - not because of the improved safety but because it has been recast in a form they understand. A decentralized, democratic, participatory event was unsettling for many; now it's passive (viewers wait for the fire department to bring them the gift of fire), centralized (there's nothing going on at the neutral grounds site except the bonfire), and the dominant values are those of property - who's got it, who doesn't, and whose is valuable, whose isn't. The neighborhood homeowners don't feel ambivalent about a party/event that could set their houses on fire; now they have prime real estate for a safe, city-sanctioned tradition. Now their property values could go up because the homes are near the bonfire and the start of the Endymion parade route. And at the bonfire site itself, people started staking out their land by the bonfire's barricade as early as 5 p.m. The same neighborhood is notorious for starting to stake out curbside space for Endymion days in advance of the parade. In short, a perfectly democratic, egalitarian event has been transformed into yet another place to enact a haves/havenots drama, which is a sadder fate that death for the bonfire.
No Surprises
Ben Sisario closed out 2008 at The New York Times with one last hand-wringing article about the sad state of the music industry:
Total album sales in the United States, including CDs and full-album downloads, were 428 million, a 14 percent drop from 2007, according to data from Nielsen SoundScan. Since the industry’s peak in 2000, album sales have declined 45 percent, although digital music purchases continue to grow at a rapid rate.
What's interesting in that is its emphasis on albums. Until the Beatles, single tracks (in the form of singles) were the primary form of artistic expression, and even after the growth of the album as artistic unit, there was still a substantial market that only wanted the individual songs they knew they liked. The increase in downloading and the decrease in album sales - whether for physical or mp3 albums - doesn't mark anything more or less dramatic than buyers resisting the industry's efforts to force them to purchase the more expensive item and buying the music they actually want.
What's interesting and sad is the lengths people will go to force people to buy albums. Kid Rock found an audience with "Bawitdaba" and "Cowboy," but he's decided that Rock N Roll Jesus must be purchased as a whole and not through iTunes. AC/DC made the same decision with Black Ice, selling it exclusively through Walmart. Both have sold well - Black Ice was the fourth best selling album of the year last year - but if sales of single tracks were bundled and considered albums, a number of downloaded artists sold as well. According to RedOrbit.com's "Digital Downloads Death Knell to Artists?":
However, Kid Rock and AC/DC alone do not tell the entire story. For example, this year's best-selling album is Lil Wayne's "Tha Carter III," which sold 2.7 million copies. Digital music sales played a significant part in the success, with Lil Wayne’s “Lollipop” single selling more than 3 million copies. Cold play’s "Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends," the year’s second-best-selling album, sold more than half its 1.9 million units via digital services.
Digital stores also helped Leona Lewis single "Bleeding Love” become the best-selling digital single of the year, having sold 3.3 million tracks according to Nielsen SoundScan. The single is part of the album "Spirit“, the eighth-best-selling album this year with 1.2 million copies sold. Of those, 140,000 were digital sales. Counting every 10 tracks as an album, Lewis' sales rise to 1.5 million without considering sales of any other singles from "Spirit" – a number on par with AC/CD and Kid Rock.
Atlantic Records' attempt to force downloads to Estelle's "American Boy" to translate into stronger album sales failed miserably. It was a top ten download at iTunes, but sales of the song and album declined when the song was pulled from iTunes by the label.
The question the industry should be trying to solve is how to construct business models that value singles sales again. The question they've been trying to solve instead is how to get a piece of every end of an artists' income including live show and merchandise money. It's no wonder the industry's in such bad shape.
Total album sales in the United States, including CDs and full-album downloads, were 428 million, a 14 percent drop from 2007, according to data from Nielsen SoundScan. Since the industry’s peak in 2000, album sales have declined 45 percent, although digital music purchases continue to grow at a rapid rate.
What's interesting in that is its emphasis on albums. Until the Beatles, single tracks (in the form of singles) were the primary form of artistic expression, and even after the growth of the album as artistic unit, there was still a substantial market that only wanted the individual songs they knew they liked. The increase in downloading and the decrease in album sales - whether for physical or mp3 albums - doesn't mark anything more or less dramatic than buyers resisting the industry's efforts to force them to purchase the more expensive item and buying the music they actually want.
What's interesting and sad is the lengths people will go to force people to buy albums. Kid Rock found an audience with "Bawitdaba" and "Cowboy," but he's decided that Rock N Roll Jesus must be purchased as a whole and not through iTunes. AC/DC made the same decision with Black Ice, selling it exclusively through Walmart. Both have sold well - Black Ice was the fourth best selling album of the year last year - but if sales of single tracks were bundled and considered albums, a number of downloaded artists sold as well. According to RedOrbit.com's "Digital Downloads Death Knell to Artists?":
However, Kid Rock and AC/DC alone do not tell the entire story. For example, this year's best-selling album is Lil Wayne's "Tha Carter III," which sold 2.7 million copies. Digital music sales played a significant part in the success, with Lil Wayne’s “Lollipop” single selling more than 3 million copies. Cold play’s "Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends," the year’s second-best-selling album, sold more than half its 1.9 million units via digital services.
Digital stores also helped Leona Lewis single "Bleeding Love” become the best-selling digital single of the year, having sold 3.3 million tracks according to Nielsen SoundScan. The single is part of the album "Spirit“, the eighth-best-selling album this year with 1.2 million copies sold. Of those, 140,000 were digital sales. Counting every 10 tracks as an album, Lewis' sales rise to 1.5 million without considering sales of any other singles from "Spirit" – a number on par with AC/CD and Kid Rock.
Atlantic Records' attempt to force downloads to Estelle's "American Boy" to translate into stronger album sales failed miserably. It was a top ten download at iTunes, but sales of the song and album declined when the song was pulled from iTunes by the label.
The question the industry should be trying to solve is how to construct business models that value singles sales again. The question they've been trying to solve instead is how to get a piece of every end of an artists' income including live show and merchandise money. It's no wonder the industry's in such bad shape.
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