Girl Trouble

I loved M.I.A. appearing very pregnant in a notice-my-pregnancy outfit, and was grossed out by the Grammy producers' obvious discomfort with her pregnancy as the camera got away from her as quickly as possible.

And Katy Perry's performance settled the question of "I Kissed a Girl"'s nature (if a question still existed). As she and hot girls danced around each other, she presented the notion of women kissing as a Howard Stern fantasy.

... and he's not a woman, so technically, he doesn't belong in this post, but what was up with McCartney's hair color? When you're in your 60s and your hair is suddenly darker than the Jonas Brothers', you've chosen a shade too dark.

Song du Jour

The Bran Flakes' "Stumble Out of Bed": After the Avalanches and Girl Talk, most sample-oriented music seems to lack ambition, but this manipulation of Dolly Parton's "9 to 5" replicates the plight of the working man as it struggles to get words out and move the song forward while the DJ keeps backing him up. The forward/backward movement becomes an agreeable groove before there's a genuine interruption - the Osmonds' meditation on freedom in "Think" - and "you speak of freedom / as if it's just a word" seems to give the song the impetus to make it to the chorus. Who expected saving wisdom from the Osmonds?

C'est Rock et Roll

A Cross the Universe, the Justice DVD of its North American tour, shows the band applying the same arena rock aesthetics to touring that they apply to their music. Guns, girls, boffing on the bus and drinking in the chapel - it's all here, along with a bus driver with a voice like Clu Gallagher and audiences that react like Justice is Led Zeppelin.

Faubourg Treme

Tonight at 7 CST, PBS airs Faubourg Treme: the Untold Story of Black New Orleans. Whether you're interested in New Orleans or not, the documentary by Lolis Eric Elie and Dawn Logsdon is worth watching because it fills out the outline version of the story of blacks in America - slavery, Reconstruction, Civil Rights movement. Parts of the New Orleans experience took place in many American cities, and even if it didn't, Faubourg Treme suggests that what actually happened to African Americans was more complex than such a simple narrative would suggest.

The one curious factor today is the roll of Hurricane Katrina in the documentary's narrative. Katrina frames the story of Elie moving into the Treme and "investing in his history," he says. The efforts to renovate his house are analogous to the documentary's efforts to reconstruct a meaningful history for a neighborhood that had come to be associated with drugs. Katrina literally interrupted all the processes, and some of the documentary's footage was lost in the post-flood heat and funk.

Katrina as a framing device now serves as a giant neon date stamp on Faubourg Treme. Documentaries on the city shot in 2006 all employed it to some extent, and long, lingering shots of devastation that once seemed so important now feel a part of another consciousness. The flood doesn't stop seeming incomprehensible, and dead bodies left unattended remain brutal reminders of what happened, but such shots now are reminders of the emotionally naked city we were at that time. I think my anxiety about the city being abandoned by the country is written into most of my writing from 2006, and what makes Chris Rose's One Dead in the Attic is that you can tell he's writing out of desperation and grief that he's struggling to get a grip on. Gestures that would seem artlessly big and broad under other circumstances seemed perfectly appropriate, and they were. But those gestures also pin the writing, music and filmmaking to their moment.

Now I see the flood sequences and the hurricane as frame and I don't experience Katrina Exhaustion, but a response to Katrina that wouldn't be made today. Katrina remains an event that divides all of our lives into pre- and post-, and one of the interesting facets of the post-K story is how it settles into our consciousness, and how we incorporate it into our lives. I wonder what people from outside New Orleans will see, and to what extent the pre- and post-Katrina experience is shared by the rest of the country.

Favorite Song of the Day

Today I'm nutty about the Junior Boys' stripped-down take on '80s pop-funk on "Hazel" from its new album, Begone Dull Care. They test their funk to see how few notes it needs to groove and find that a few properly timed hold-and-release chords do most of the work.

A Time When Things Worked

The Cramps were playing Larry's Hideaway in Toronto in the mid-1980s, and it was so crowded that anybody who wasn't immediately in front of the stage had to stand on their cocktail tables to see, reaching up to the low ceiling to steady themselves. While Ivy retuned after breaking a string, people shouted requests. Lux responded, "Maybe" to each request until I barked out "Drug Train." He said, "Okay" and they rolled straight into it.

I never saw a bad Cramps show, and any event touched by the Cramps turned entertainingly strange. When I tried to photograph them at the Concert Hall in Toronto, a phalanx of people 5 and a half feet tall and shorter formed around me to keep me from being jostled. After a friend's girlfriend paied our bar tab at one club, she took us to Nuts and Bolts, a new wave dance club that was three-quarters empty. When "Garbageman" played, our drunken dance took up most of the dance floor. With Bryan Gregory, they played a place in Hamilton, Ontario that I always assumed was a money laundering joint because whoever booked it seemingly had no idea what he was doing, booking cover bands three nights a week and the Cramps in their most disturbing incarnation on the Friday. And I can't remember how many nights of drinking on the roof started with Songs the Lord Taught Us. Lux will be missed.

... and here's "Garbageman," from the days when videos weren't boring.

Bonnaroo Lineup

Here. After looking at this and the lineup for this year's Jazz Fest, can we officially call the jam band dead? Or at least in remission?

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band
Phish (2 Shows)
Beastie Boys
Nine Inch Nails
David Byrne
Wilco
Al Green
Snoop Dogg
Elvis Costello Solo
Erykah Badu
Paul Oakenfold
Ben Harper and Relentless7
The Mars Volta
TV on the Radio
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Gov't Mule
Andrew Bird
Band of Horses
Merle Haggard
MGMT
moe.
The Decemberists
Girl Talk
Bon Iver
Béla Fleck & Toumani Diabate
Rodrigo y Gabriela
Galactic
The Del McCoury Band
of Montreal
Allen Toussaint
Coheed and Cambria
Booker T & the DBTs
David Grisman Quintet
Lucinda Williams
Animal Collective
Gomez
Neko Case
Down
Jenny Lewis
Santogold
Robert Earl Keen
Citizen Cope
Femi Kuti and the Positive Force
The Ting Tings
Robyn Hitchcock & The Venus 3
Grace Potter and the Nocturnals
Kaki King
Grizzly Bear
King Sunny Adé
Okkervil River
St. Vincent
Zac Brown Band
Raphael Saadiq
Ted Leo and the Pharmacists
Crystal Castles
Tift Merritt
Brett Dennen
Mike Farris and the Roseland Rhythm Revue
Toubab Krewe
People Under the Stairs
Alejandro Escovedo
Vieux Farka Touré
Elvis Perkins In Dearland
Cherryholmes
Yeasayer
Todd Snider
Chairlift
Portugal. The Man.
The SteelDrivers
Midnite
The Knux
The Low Anthem
Delta Spirit
A.A. Bondy
The Lovell Sisters
Alberta Cross