Thin Line Between Law and Rape

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Public Enemy, "Thin Line Between Law and Rape" (download until 2/2/09), from "Muse Sick-N-Hour Mess Age."

There are few heroes that mean as much to me as Chuck D. I don't have many heroes, really heroes as such. But Chuck always sets my heart aflitter. I was of precisely that age when Public Enemy hit where I was ready for it. 1988, Sophomore year of liberal arts college, ex-prep school malcontent, PE releases “It Takes a Nation...” and I'm done for. To make the point more clearly with another example, one of my high school buddies, then at Yale, described to me his experience in the summer of '89, back from Connecticut, “Fight the Power” just out as a single, driving in his dad's convertible around Mt. Soledad in La Jolla, blasting PE, thinking to himself, “this has all got to come DOWN!” True story, and one of Chuck's major achievements. Chuck never aimed his message at white people, but there are a lot of white people in this country who made choices in their lives for the better because his music radicalized them to a greater or lesser extent.

I think I may have made this point before, or maybe I'm recalling a conversation I've had in the recent past, but while I appreciate the mp3 file, and recognize some real benefits of this new mode of distribution, I'm not sure the way we access music in this age of the internet produces the kind of social convergence I remember from 1988 and 1989. My relic friends from the 60's endlessly discuss, wistfully but with some real enthusiasm, what it was like waiting for the next Beatles or Dylan record. What would they spring on us next? Rubber Soul came out, everybody talked about it with each other. Highway 61, everybody asked what the hell he meant, etc.

By the time I came of age this type of social convergence was lessened partially because of the efforts of the industry to produce it. No longer seeking producers of good music, the industry sought blockbusters which everyone would buy. The records which would seem to appeal to the widest audience got the biggest push, which meant that the industry pushed the familiar rather than the new. The Beatles I imagine would have been a cult act in the 1980's rather than the top sellers, and Dylan would never have gotten a hearing. So Madonna was a big deal, and while she was trumped up to be something new there was nothing new about her music, which wasn't even hers. She stunk then and stinks now, we all know it.

Prince was the one who snuck through when I was in Jr. High and High School. I remember being completely cynical about Prince when he first hit, because my cousin from the midwest thought he was all that, and while I liked my cousin I didn't take her or anyone else's musical opinions too seriously unless they were into Coltrane. But when the pianist in my school's jazz combo told me that Prince was fantastic, I opened up my 14 year-old ears and heard it. I'd been into Kraftwerk for a few years, and here he had all the electronic innovation they did—I feel I can say that—while adding so much more to it. First thing I bought was the single for “When Doves Cry,” which came out before the “Purple Rain” soundtrack. I then checked out “1999.” So if you think about the stretch I went through up until I graduated, it was the entire Golden Age of Prince: “1999,” “Purple Rain,” “Around the World in a Day,” “Parade,” and then capping it off my senior year with “Sign o' the Times.”

My little music buff crew would constantly go over the relative merits of each record as they came to us, and if you look at the list you can see why—each successive year—we had this intense sense of curiousity about what he would do next. The man always seemed to pull some amazing, unexpected ace from up his sleeve to set us talking, anticipating, praising—communicating. Then with “Sign o' the Times” he did everything, literally everything, and we were done for.

PE was the last artist who seemed to galvanize people—this is in my little world, I hasten to say—like Prince did, or Dylan, or the Beatles. Prince it should be said was never just someone who simply had mastered other people's forms and reproduced them. “1999” more than anything was the kind of sui generis creation that gave Prince license to genre hop. Prince was a hedgehog for one record, and then he became the world's greatest fox. PE, however, was the world's most radical hedgehog. I had not to that point and have not since to this day heard a record that was at once such a fully-conceived, integrated, cut-from-whole-cloth, break from the aesthetic past as “It Takes a Nation...” Maybe “Free Jazz,” but “It Takes a Nation...” sold a lot more. Chuck would quickly give credit and say he stood on the shoulders of giants, and he'd give credit to his collaborators, and sure, he should.

Now I start to get wistful, like my 60's relic friends who talk about how everyone was together and things were moving, and the world was changing. But, I swear it, that's how I felt with PE. And when “Fear of a Black Planet” was delayed, and there was the thing with Griff, you know, it produced fear that the whole thing was going to end, and that the machine would take away PE and we wouldn't have someone to look to. I know, I know, look in the mirror asshole, but I was just a kid, really.

“Fear of a Black Planet” came out and I think I was the only one in my group who didn't actually like it better than “It Takes a Nation,” but I respected it, and knew that it was a big deal. “Apocalypse '91” came out, and the sound had changed, it was more modest, but I was all in favor of that. Chuck had earned the right to just make a PE record without all the hype, and who could disagree with any record with “By the Time I Get to Arizona?”

Fast forward three years of gangster rap. I don't use the “a,” thank you. What follows is not my own point, not original, but it does bear repeating. The truth is, as any fool will tell you, that you can make more money if you have a bigger market. And in the US, the big market is white people. You'll make more money selling whatever to white people than any other single group, racially categorized.

This is the dialectic of Public Enemy. It was radical for Public Enemy not only to discuss things as they did and continue to do, but to do so so excellently that white people had to pay attention, and buy it. I've read in more than one place that PE sold more records to white people than black or any other color for that matter, in a dismissive way—white writers burnishing their hipster cred by questioning the authenticity of a black artist who went over with white people. What these idiots (and other words pop into mind) forget is that there are more white people in this country than any other racial group, so it's not surprising that more white people bought PE than black. It was the platter du jour: anyone with any sense had to have had “It Takes a Nation...” committed to memory. I did and do: ask my students. I can still bust out “Bring the Noise.”

Once—and this is the antithesis—you bring white people into the market, you bring white expectations. People buy most often to their expectations. So when N.W.A. hit, it's true, my friend from South Central that I went to see PE with when I was in college was into it, because it was his neighborhood. But to me the guys just sounded like, well...gangsters. Not the kind of people I'd want to associate with. Not really that pleasant. Rakim may have been a stickup kid, but he was no gangster. Gangsters aren't well, and we sensible people avoid them, with all due respect and courtesy. But who fit the expectations of white America in the first Bush era, Chuck D or Eazy E? The record companies knew that peddling the worst racist stereotypes of black people to white America was a much safer economic bet than betting on a black man speaking the truth. And so Chuck produced, like capitalism, his own gravediggers: white people buying rap trying to be hard. Chuck was hard, but gangsters were harder: they were stone killers. Gotta buy it from the safety of my suburb.

How did Chuck respond? He made his best record. Yes, I'll say it: “Muse Sick n Hour Mess Age” is the most well-conceived thing PE ever did, the broadest critique, with a different bag of musical tricks than any of the other records. Chuck had more tricks up his sleeve than Paul McCartney in 1967. Cue the ominous music and recall the Rolling Stone review: published before the record had come out, Rolling Stone gave the record one star out of five. Chuck was out of step with the times, Wenner's rotten rag claimed before anyone had a chance to hear it and decide for themselves. Rap had moved on, gotten harder, gotten gangster. The white kids, save a few die-hards like me, didn't buy the record. Sales were relatively sparse, and PE found itself soon without a label.

“Thin Line Between Law and Rape” is the case in point when I make the claim that “Muse Sick...” is Chuck's meisterwerk. This is not just a rap—just a rap...tell that to Rakim—but a weltanschauung. Legally deprived of the right to make the kind of sample collages he'd raised to high art with the Bomb Squad, we have this beautiful, simple, straight organ on top of the beat. The broader diaspora is present in its Jamaican form. And while, yes, Chuck did use the “B” word previously, and while his first apologies were, like all apologies, of limited value, he does right here. An apology is so many words, but calling white patriarchy by its true name is all right indeed.

Edith and the Kingpin

Cover of The Hissing of Summer Lawns

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Joni Mitchell, "Edith and the Kingpin" (download until 2/1/09), from "The Hissing of Summer Lawns."

Joni was one of those players--and we can refer to her as a player, because nobody plays guitar like she does, and people like Wayne Shorter wouldn't play with her if all he liked was her songwriting--who I came to late, not as late as Love, but late nonetheless, in my Junior year of college. I'd gotten into the Band and watched "The Last Waltz." There she was, playing "Coyote," the least Band-like tune of the lot, and very beautiful. I bought "Hejira" soon after and loved it. It's still my favorite Joni record.

It's interesting to me and probably very universal that one's approach to a musician is almost totally conditioned by when one encounters the music. I'm overstating it for sure, but, looking backwards, Elvis is a great example. I can read a text that explains why Elvis was a big deal to people, but it's totally separate from the music, which I really find boring, excepting "Heartbreak Hotel." Even that's merely good to me, not great. You want great Rock 'n' Roll, go for Chuck Berry--on every count he owns everything. To prove that it's not about race...though, I guess it is about race...but to make the point, take Carl Perkins. Completely his own man, not stealing black music in the least, just being true to his broader context, exceptional writer and the only guitarist of the genre to rival Chuck Berry. Etc., etc. You get the point. Elvis means nothing to me, but I wasn't around then. A corollary point is that my students will often listen to both punk and metal bands, and ask me if I know them. Yes, I say, but I never listened to Iron Maiden. They were metal, I did punk. You didn't mix medicines back then, though if you were into punk you listened to AC/DC without telling your friends.

So it was with some shock that, once I got into Joni, I read that this record was almost totally rejected by the hip rock 'n' roll cognoscenti of 1975, Rolling "Good-for-Kindling" Stone above all. "Court and Spark" was cool, I guess, but putting vocals on top of a field recording of Burundi drummers wasn't. "Court and Spark" was cool, is cool, I thought then and obviously now, but not as good as this, for the very simple reason that the tunes are better on "The Hissing of Summer Lawns," though I really have a soft spot for "People's Parties."

So why reject this record when it's so obviously good? I imagine that to the Jann Wenners of the world, it wasn't good because Joni wasn't Joni. Joni was this fragile little thing, like the twig-limbed little sister of Crosby, Stills, and Nash, and Young too. "Blue," that was Joni. Good record, for sure, but not the Joni I love.

What I think threw Rolling Stone was that Joni had stopped doing what a girl ought to do. "Blue is, in fact, a great record, but the narratives are entirely subjective--it's a record about subjectivity. Girls are subjective, the boys say, and this is just how they are. "The Hissing of Summer Lawns" is a feminist record, in the truest and best sense, and I'd point out the most analytical and objective. Joni doesn't pine for a lost lover, she describes patriarchy and its effects on people--its effects not only on women but on the men as well. "Harry's House," "Edith and the Kingpin," "The Hissing of Summer Lawns."

The boys could have dealt with a feminist record, if it was shrill. There are shrill feminists just like there are shrill Marxists or shrill conservatives. The shrillness often gets mistaken for content. It's not. But to the boys at Rolling Stone, a Joni who expressed her feelings, that we can take, but analyzing social situations is muscling in on our turf as men. Get back. You can make a feminist record, but you can't speak: you have to shout.

Joni, however, speaks, because it's not up to the boys to set the terms of what is and what is not feminist. The boys get to listen for a change, and the smart boys recognize this as an opportunity. I said above that my favorite Joni Mitchell record remains "Hejira," and it's true, primarily because of the musicianship, though also because of the raw skill with which she writes the tunes on that record. The political content of her work, which has since this record been present on everything she's done since, has never been clearer or more analytically solid than on this, even as she's broadened her view past this single subject, as of course is entirely appropriate.

I saw this blog post, "Sunday Joni Mitchell Blogging," in which the author posited Joni as a "great songwriter." It's almost so obvious a point that I can't imagine it worth making, but sure enough in the comments some people disagree. What do you want, people? Listen to this, ponder its meaning, and try to come to any other conclusion.

Ambiance Kalle Catho

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Grand Kalle, "Ambiance Kalle Catho" (download until 1/31/09), from "African Pearls 1: Congo - Rumba on the River."

I have very little to offer in terms of information about the performers or even the context of the production. I don't know precisely when it was recorded. This was given to me by a friend, and I've never read the liner notes. Just a record (even in mp3 form, it's still a record) I listen to constantly.

One of the huge flaws in the way people in the United States tend to view and discuss "World Music" is that in this country we tend to think of the term in a continental sense, with the sole exception of music from "the Pacific." It might be correct in some circumstances to do this, but unfortunately what tends to happen is that people talk about African music as a thing, but wouldn't dream of lumping Polish music in with French. The categories mirror the 19th century imperialist view of the world which still, as Marx put it, "weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living."

It's not odd for African people to talk about Africa as a generality and have some sense of continental unity, and indeed this sort of suprised me when I stayed in Senegal for eight months. I sort of assumed it would be rude to talk about Africa, and made a point to say to myself, "I'm in Senegal. It's specific. It's not just 'Africa.'" But while people were certainly aware of the specificity of Senegal I was struck by how much talk there was of "Africa."

That said, the category, "Africa," doesn't always make musical sense when you're listening to the music of the Diaspora. One should, depending on the music, categorize it as "Atlantic" music, because that's precisely what it is. Orchestra Baobab and other African salsa groups--though there's a lot more to Baobab than just "salsa"--get portrayed often as somehow taking something of the Americas--something Cuban, in this case--and then working it into, depending on how one discusses it, something unique or something merely derivative.

This misses the fact that Cuba is part of Africa in every sense except the geological. No other way to conceive of it. Salsa is as foreign to Africa as country music was to Bakersfield in the 1950's and 1960's. Different regions of the Diaspora have different accents--like Senegalese salsa is different that Congolese or Cuban--but they speak as it were the same language, if possible in different, though mutually intelligible, dialects.

Of note in this recording is the guitar work. It's absolutely elegant, and the grace with which it builds from backing up the singing to taking a solo is breathtakingly subtle. So, so easy to say, so difficult to actually do.

Live and Let Live

Cover of Forever Changes

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Love, "Live and Let Live," (download until 1/30/09) from "Forever Changes."

I always considered myself somewhat in the know about cool, hip, underground things, but in hindsight I know I'm really more of an eclectic dabbler rather than a real authority on anything. Love is the perfect example. Were I really cool, I'd have gotten into Love at the same time I got into Coltrane, in the 8th grade (if I remember correctly). At the very least when I got into Ornette Coleman, freshman year of college. Instead I got into Love at the ripe old age of 36, despite having read for years that “Forever Changes” was the real masterpiece of 1967 rather than “Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

This isn't to bash “Sgt. Pepper's,” which is something of a favorite pastime among people who are somewhat in the know about cool, hip, underground things. I went through all those phases before coming back to that record and hearing it as indeed my second favorite Beatles record, behind the White Album. That said, “Forever Changes” really does get my vote for the masterpiece of 1967 award even if it didn't get whatever notice it deserved. This isn't my favorite tune off the record—that would be “The Daily Planet.” Dammit it's close, though.

Arthur Lee is one of those few people who make (no past tense with this man) being excellent seem like a simple matter of course. I am not sure if I even buy into the concept of mastery, but only the Beatles, in his era, and in a different way Brian Wilson—but with Brian in a completely different way—mastered the form like Arthur Lee did, and they of course made a lot more money. These people take things to a level where it's not just about exceeding expectations but creating a situation where a listener has no expectations at all.

I can't remember if it was in the liner notes to “Forever Changes” or in some article where a critic went on and on about the opening couplet:

The snot has caked against my pants
It has turned into crystal

As good an example as any of Arthur Lee's ability to throw what seems to be almost any lyric on a page and have it really stick, and a vivid image to boot. But what follows is to me what nails it, particular the second line of this second couplet:

There's a bluebird sitting on a branch
I think I'll take my pistol

I have in my head an image of Arthur Lee hurling words at the page like a baseball pitcher with things like these. Not often are words so impenetrable on the surface, so affecting—meaning in this sense rendering an impression on a listener—an impression, while for me completely palpable and just as completely difficult to express in words. This is entirely characteristic of Lee's method, across with ouvre.

Lee's music, and again, “Live and Let Live” is but one typical example among many, always fits where it doesn't follow and follows where it doesn't fit. Transitions are never obvious but, like Wilson and like the Beatles, they're always right in the pocket. Ellington of course had mastered that same game, quite likely to an even greater extent were one able to measure these things, as Andre Previn famously noted in his comparion of Ellington and Stan Kenton. This music doesn't sound difficult, and if there's a mark of a master this is it: simple or complex, it's never difficult. The Coltrane of “Meditations” is not difficult in the least when one is in the right place for it. One may not be in that place often, but when one is, it's easy listening.

Hounds of Love

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Kate Bush, "Hounds of Love," (download until 1/25/09), from "Hounds of Love."

It sometimes surprises me which musicians do and don't remain somewhat in popular consciousness and which do not. The persistence of the Ramones, for example, surprises me, until I remember that Johnny Ramone was a right-winger and I become certain--someone ought to do the research on this--that some of those psy-ops funds the Defense Department has went to funding those Ramones t-shirts the kids get at Wal-Mart these days. The Pentagon pays for movies, you know, so don't tell me this is far-fetched.

So why not Kate Bush? Maybe because musicians who were English English, who have some sense that English and United States American are not interchangeable and that a special relationship is more a marriage of convenience. Ray Davies doesn't get a whole lot of attention at this point either--when did you last see a Kinks shirt at Target? No place for them in Bush's--ah, Blair's--ah, Bush's England.

If you were to describe Kate Bush's music to me now--not to me in 9th grade, when I first got into her--I'd either start laughing or give a nasty grimace depending on my mood. Nothing on the surface would appeal to my sense of self. Dramatic singing, and not the cool, on-the-edge-of-your-seat, Jimmy Scott kind, but the she-needs-to-settle-down kind. Lyrical references to dreams and memories of childhood. Celtic flourishes reminding us all of the dancing Druids at Stonehenge. Painstakingly "layered" recordings in which overdub after overdub is piled onto tape so the fact that none of the individual parts needs to actually be good goes unnoticed. None of this actually makes me want to listen to Kate Bush.

But listen I do, because Kate Bush has two things in her favor. The first is that she's really good. The second is more important in a way, because there are lots of really good musicians I really don't want to listen to: she's completely honest. Honesty can't be faked, we understand--if you believed Bush at any point, then you're a sucker who needs to own up to it--and it's especially so in music. Ages ago I read a review of Jonathan Richman which said that he was one of the two great adult children of Rock, capital "R," alongside Kate Bush. Probably not fair to either one of them, but it should be stressed that while the near constant references to childhood one gets on "Hounds of Love," song and record, would be unbearable if they weren't completely honest.

The tune itself, again, doesn't sound appealing to me were I to describe it to myself. "Overdubbed cellos hitting the root and the fifth over and over again to give it a kind of refined sound that appeals to people who are uncomfortable with saxophones." Not my cup of tea, especially because people do this kind of thing all the time to get a kind of Eleanor Rigby sophistication without the actual musical sophistication that George Martin brought to that string arrangement. "Just hit the root and the fifth on a couple cellos over and over, man, nobody will tell the difference." And the truth of it is that almost nobody does, and it gets over. So it is with some astonishment that I say that the strings are absolutely perfect on this tune. "Hounds of Love" has got to be the one case where the "root and fifth over and over on a pair of overdubbed cellos" trick actually was called for and worked to great effect.

It should also be mentioned, remembered, then probably quickly forgotten, that when digital sampling as a musical technology first came out it was embraced pretty quickly by two camps: hip-hoppers and English progressive rock types. We all understand that it was the hip-hoppers who really worked wonders with the technology and the progressive rock types really just found a new technique to distract from the fact that they really didn't have anything to say about anything and give their waning, 1978-9 careers second wind or shot in the arm depending on their habits to get them to 1982-3 before calling it a day and waiting for the reunion tour. A pox on the Fairlight CMI and the awful musical distractions it encouraged, but dammit if Kate Bush didn't use it the most unobtrusively and tastefully among the English folk.

And the Celtic thing--not as prominent here as in a lot of other stuff on the record--it's hard for a recovering Irish-American, meaning someone who went through, through a "discover your ethnicity, white man" phase long enough ago that he can consider himself respectable again, to take Northumbrian pipes on a pop record. But when it's honest, it's honest, and it's very different to do the Celtic thing when you were born on Celtic land and your mom was Irish and actually did traditional dance. It's legit.

Who Do You Love?

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Bo Diddley, "Who Do You Love?" (download until 1/23/09), from "The Definitive Collection."

It's all about networking of course—building rather than burning bridges. Other concerns, however, often intervene. Today, the desire, or possibly rather the need, to aim for the head while shooting from the hip will trump any effort to ingratiate this writer to the graying dinosaurs of Rock Journalism.

So Bo Diddley is not primitive, and any “hip” magazine that speaks of him that way should have its pages burned and the steel girders that make up the high-rise office building that houses its offices melted down and returned to the earth from whence they came. The people who work for the magazine will have a chance to publicly renounce their error and name names before entering the re-education camp, but should they choose not to exercise that opportunity all bets are off. Rolling Stone, this is shot from the hip at the head number one.

To see the “primitive” claim clearly, “primitive” meaning among other things “first, we need, for a moment, to consider top 100 lists. Please note that the race of list item number one will always equal the race of the largest target demographic defined racially. And the royal we means “racially,” not “ethnically.” Sit down, sit down. My fellow white people can sit down. The rest of you know what I mean.

In the Rolling Stone universe—like the Marvel Universe, only for evil purposes—of top 100 lists Bo Diddley is Black Music, while Chuck Berry is the proof we're not racist, really. Rock 'n' Roll had its base in R'n'B and white country—leave off the African elements in white country—but, yes, that's the conjunction, “but”—was made more sophisticated by the dynamic geniuses of Rock, the Beatles, the Stones, and Dylan, all three of whose music I rush it, comforting, soothing, to say that I love in the first and third cases dearly and in the second well enough.

In the Rolling Stone universe, neither Bo Diddley nor the relative sophisticate Chuck Berry are dynamic. Each presents his form which is almost Platonic in its constancy but which, once presented simply exists, leaving the musician himself to play to small audiences in small clubs or, at best, theaters while others, will work the raw—how often has Bo Diddley's music been called “raw” by the rock music cognoscenti?—material of the African progenitor into a constantly changing, always new and therefore worthy of a constant re-investment of consumer money into new commodity, cultural product.

We have a teleology of African origins, transmission to the White Man, and then the fulfillment of the original promise of Black music by White people. I'm using capital letters now, that's right. Humanity began in Africa, and developed civilization in Egypt. But Egyptian society was static for 3000 or 3500 years, depending on whom you read. The story of Egypt after the Old Kingdom is the story of outsiders—the Hyksos, and later the Ptolemies. Akhnaten is of course inserted, but as an anomaly, a freak, really. We stress his odd cranium and proclivity for incest. More centrally, we stress not his dynamism but his failure. That the dynamic Pharoah failed is proof of the ultimately static character of Egypt and by extension Africa. It came to the Greeks, to the White Man, to take civilization and make it dynamic.

The static African, Bo Diddley's one chord. European settlers came to North America and saw an empty continent, land unused, despite the fact that the continent was not empty and the land was indeed used.

The problem here is that certain brains can't handle more than one variable at a time. This applies to history, to culture, to beauty, to anything, and it's a characteristic function, to use the hip lingo of the day, of whiteness. If your idea of beautiful hair is how it lays on a woman's shoulder, you will not see the difference between well-kept and poorly-kept locks. You will only see locks, and they won't be as beautiful as that flowing straight hair on the other lady.

If you started a magazine and put a Beatle on the cover, and that was what was hip and good and genius, and you knew with certainty that songs with middle eights and little introductions and tags were good because Lenny Bernstein was saying that there were great things happening with the kids' music, and people were calling Dylan a poet, you probably would focus on that one chord Bo Diddley was playing and think the music simple. Because if you think that musical quality varies in direct proportion to melodic variation, then Bo Diddley would at best be simple music.

But Bo Diddley did not make simple music. He called up a lot of stuff in his song and put it into play. His references to rattlesnake this and cobra were simultaneously satirical and completely serious. He knew he stretched things. It wasn't just his beat—and there's a lot more to Bo Diddley than just “the Bo Diddle Beat” for sure—but the beat, nothing at all like the sterile impersonations people my age learned as the “Bo Diddley Beat,” was very, very old, and when he played it the age in it added the type of complexity that I would think a truly great, properly aged and cellared wine had had I the palate to distinguish these things. Only more deep, and more complex, and at a fundamental level more social. The Bo Diddley Beat—not in its stereotypical form on this track, of course, but rather on “Bo Diddley”a—is in its true form a social phenomenon rather than just a series of taps on a tom-tom. It takes nothing away from the individual Bo Diddley to note that his music is the product of a social, historical development. That development brings the kind of nuance that the musical notation that would impress the Lenny Bernsteins of the world (or the type of obvious complexity that a Jann Wenner could detect) misses.

So too in the lyrics. If your idea of great lyric writing is the Dylan of, take your pick, “Blowin' in the Wind,” “My Back Pages,” or “Tombstone Blues” (my favorite of the three) you wouldn't be bowled over by “Who Do You Love?” That's because you expect the meaning of the words to be contained entirely in the words themselves rather than in the relationship between him singing and them listening. Bo Diddley's words are exceptionally specific in the social response they elicit. They refer to reference upon reference. If you haven't experienced the referential context, you can understand the tune but you miss its impact. It would seem lesser when placed next to “Tombstone Blues.” Lesser, however, it's not.

Boat Train

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The Pogues, "Boat Train," (download until 1/22/09), from "Peace and Love."

Joe Strummer generously called Shane MacGowan the best songwriter of his generation, meaning Joe Strummer's generation. Labeling anyone the best of anything is not really a useful exercise, and while I have no doubt that Strummer's sentiments were genuine—because as we all know this was a man who seemingly could never be anything but—I also have a feeling that he knew that saying so publicly would help Shane's reputation and therefore assist his, and the Pogues', career. It would assure Shane at least a minor spot in the pantheon.

This is by no means Shane's pre-eminent achievement, but it is one of the three or four tunes of his that archetypify his approach. Shane is a social songwriter, one might say, and in this he more than nearly anyone I know of from his place, time, and tradition, can rightly be called a real part of traditional music. He sustains and departs from his musical inheritance, which is what tradition is. If it's static, it's not tradition. It's ancient history. This is much more true with Shane than with a guy like Bob Dylan, who of course is the one people talk about, and whose self-conception seems to be (insofar as anyone, anyone at all including Bob Dylan has any sense of what he actually thinks) that he's the bigshot heir of traditional music extending it into the present. Bob keeps the musical, formal aspects of traditional song but drops almost entirely the social aspects of traditional song. Not that this is a bad thing, it just is.

This is to be sure a generalization, and by no means is what I'll next describe uniquely Irish, but there's a lot of Irish traditional song, my favorite among them “The Galway Races,” which takes as its subject a social situation rather than an individual protagonist. Of course many Irish songs have individual protagonists and are written from a single perspective. That kind of subjectivity—while in no way standing in the way of the making of great song—is the fundamental trait of the modern pop song. There's an individual looking out at the world in most song today. So it's not particular interesting to find that kind of subjectivity, individual subjectivity, in a song in 2009, or in 1989, when Shane's “Boat Train” was released.

Quickly recall the aforementioned “Galway Races.” The song reads basically as a long list of all the parties present at the races on a particular day. None of us modern types, myself included, read lists for fun, and despite having insisted that he'd be glad to hear Joao Gilberto sing the telephone book I'm quite sure that Miles would only do so out of stubbornness, gritting his teeth, pretending he was digging it only to prove wrong the naysayers who called him on his nonsense. Yet here at the Galway races we are presented with the most compelling list I know of in traditional song, acknowledging my admittedly thin knowledge of traditional song. I'm no Lomax, or Dylan—because though Bob discarded tradition more than extending it he certainly knew it.

The list of attendance is one of the most important literary forms there is, but in the sickness of capitalism we've completely denigrated it. Why? Because under capitalism things are more important than people, except for the individual consuming and occasionally producing subject. But I can't overstate how often, when reading this or that book about some sort of ancient history, I come across some reference to an inscription that lists who was present at the inscribing. We modern folk think of this as graffiti, but in fact it's an act in the formation of people as a people. We are essentially a social organism, and all of our social neuroses arise in the United States because we've forgotten this. Cheikh Anta Diop made this comment in Civilization and Barbarism somewhere, that all the West's social neuroses derive from an excess of privacy, where all of Africa's social neuroses derive from a lack of it. Not an exact quote, but that's the sense of it.

Yes, there's an “I” in “Boat Train.” Make of this what you will. The I, however, is a very dissociated subject, drunk as hell, one imagines slightly drunk at the start (not completely clear) but increasingly and intensely so as the song progresses. The first word is I, and then progressively the subject re-enters the social environment and though the I remains it becomes increasingly peripheral. The bulk of the happenings in the songs are simultaneously events and sensations. “Some bastard started slagging off the Pakis and the Jews.” “Some bastard started singing 'The Little Cottage by the Lee.'”

This is typical Shane—a brief beginning in which we are introduced to the “I,” who then enters some social occasion, the various and intersecting happenings of which are listed, with the impression that the list is incomplete, after which the song ends. “A Pair of Brown Eyes,” “The Body of an American,” “Fairytale of New York.” It's a brilliant technique. I wouldn't want to overstate it, to be sure—it's not that in any of these songs the narrative subject completely dissipates. Nor is the the only technique he uses, because he structures “Fairytale of New York” and to a lesser extent “A Pair of Brown Eyes” like a film as much as a song. Actually, the narrative subject is a stronger and more linear presence in “Boat Train” than in any of the other songs I've mentioned, which makes me wonder why I picked it as a starting point for this digression. Probably just because it's the funniest thing Shane's yet written. Funny goes a long way with me.

The only other writer that comes to mind immediately that puts forth song as social situation rather than—a pox on Lou Reed—character study, and does it so naturally, unpretentiously, and masterfully, is Chuck Berry. “Ring, ring goes the bell!”

Five (2nd version)

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John Cage, "Five (2nd version)" (download until 1/20/09), from "Cage: Music for Eight."

I have seen a very good documentary about John Cage and know about him as well from tangential references in texts about other subjects, but as I don't really follow the European tradition of composed music and I don't really go in for the biographical approach to music as a means to understand it—any biographical references in this or any other post reflect information I've stumbled across rather than sought out—not knowing too much, as I don't, about John Cage, I can't go into too much detail about his process in this piece or generally. Nor can I say I have a real understanding of his intent, because of course he had intent, we as humans function through intentionality, through any of Cage's actual words.

Increasingly over the course of his long career Cage came, it is axiomatic, to rely on chance operations in composition. That is to say, as a composer he delineated a set of variables rather than a series of notes. The precise notes musicians played, when, for how long, and in what order, varied according to chance. This piece is as good a brief example of the results as I've heard.

I am not sure that this is music that's meant to be described, and I'm really fairly sure it is mean to not be described. But I can describe my response. I've had this recording for years, and nearly every time I listen to it I feel sensations of real cold, though a cold that's not uncomfortable. Again, nearly always, I remember a lake my family used to go to in winter, in Montana, surrounded by trees and frozen solid, and white. It's very comforting to me. I've lived basically all my life in California with a couple of extra-continental interludes varying from six weeks to eight months, and not in the cold parts of California. Crocker-Amazon is as cold as it's been in any of my homes. But this image of that frozen lake, brought on by this piece, is more present to me when I hear this than my immediate surroundings.

I've read more than one biographical sketch or article about Brian Eno which made the claim that his accomplishment was to more or less bring Cage's ideas to a wider audience. This is unfair to both, though probably more unfair to Cage. In no way did Eno popularize Cage's ideas, because Cage's ideas were not fundamentally musical, but rather social. I am very sure that Cage inspired Eno, because Eno has said as much more than once and in particular in an interview I read in which Eno himself interviewed Cage. This was more than 20 years ago now and I have no recollection of the magazine. But one can be inspired by someone without actually understanding them.

Cage wanted to produce a social situation in which participants needed to set aside intentionality and simply experience the presence of sound. This is why we get Buddhism mentioned in the context of discussing Cage. Cage became furious with musicians who would improvise with his scores. Yes, it was not planned, but it was intended. Reliance on chance operations put musicians in positions of simply have to accept outcomes just as much as an audience, and was a form of letting go. This is good for people.


Above is a Youtube clip of a performance of the same piece. The actual music is not to my ear as lovely, and indeed on the album this is on there's a "(1st version)" which I find less beautiful than this. But this is the point of the piece. It exists in these different forms, it's none of the particular forms, it's neither in the form nor not in the form. Cage's music produces this existentially, and in that it isn't so much influenced by Buddhism but it's a Buddhist practice itself.

This is why Eno really didn't popularize Cage's ideas. Eno used machines where Cage used chance. The results of both are beautiful, but socially they're very different. Cage revises or more properly demolishes the identities of composer, musician, and audience, except, it has to be said, to the extent that he made money off composition. Eno makes (or made--haven't been as impressed lately, as I've noted) unique and spectacularly beautiful records, but ultimately conforms to the social roles of music he inherited. There's an artist that records a commodity, and a record-buying public.

Synchro Feelings

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King Sunny Ade, "Synchro Feelings-Ilako," (download until 1/18/09), from "Synchro System."

Very rarely do I prefer versions of music from traditions that don't adhere to a 3-5 minute song format that have been edited, reduced, transformed, commercialized, or what have you, to the original versions. This is an exception.

I've owned--the best one unfortunately got stolen from my office in the radio station I worked in during college--a few of Sunny Ade's original African releases, LP's, and they were uniformly fantastic. A lot of his stuff has now been reissued in the "West," and it's worth the money for sure. Sunny Ade cannot make a bad record.

Different West African musics obviously, because West Africa is a big place, take different contours, and some forms fit more nicely into the expectations of the marketplace in North America. The reduction of music to the commodity form, originally shellac and then vinyl but by technical as opposed to musical necessity limited to two to three minutes for a long enough time (roughly the first half of the twentieth century) that musical forms themselves adapted to the technology and song itself shrunk to fit the size of the medium. Lots of great stuff came about because of this: you wouldn't have Duke Ellington's great 78's or the type of concision you get with a Cole Porter tune without at some level the time pressure of the technical medium of the 78 rpm single. Later, with the development of magnetic tape and the LP record, musicians seemingly "pushed the boundaries" of the medium and apparently began to harbor larger ambitions. Jazz musicians were first, with increasingly long performances on record in the 1950's and 1960's, the first "concept albums," like "Kind of Blue," and then album-length pieces like "Free Jazz." Rock musicians were slow to get the idea but came around with "Pet Sounds" and "Sgt. Pepper's." You know the story.

Really what was happening is that people made what seemed to be discoveries, but like Columbus in the Caribbean, in fact people were already there. Any society in that period--the heyday of imperialism in its classic form--where people in general were prevented access to modern technologies by the imperialists as a means of subordination and control, any society like that would, particularly in the British colonies, where the plan was to simply steal the stuff that was there rather than, on the French model, spread culture, retain indigenous musical form. The British weren't going to bother, in general, in trying to get Africans to stop playing their own music. If they paid up in kind or in labor, that was plenty. There are exceptions to this of course.

So you have in Nigeria in the late twentieth century, after independence, you have musicians, most importantly you'd have to say Fela Kuti, but also the whole crew of juju musicians, Sunny Ade but also Ebenezer Obey, whose sense of form was not culturally conditioned most importantly by the three-minute pop song but rather indigenous form, but who, in the context of independence, now had access to all kinds of culture--music from the United States, for example--that under the imperialists was denied.

Where Fela took this independence and went for James Brown, Sunny Ade incorporated electronics. It's not my original observation, but it should be stated clearly that the most important developments in electronic music in the late 20th century--insofar as they actually mean something to people in their lives around the world--came not from the "technologically advanced nations of the world" but from Jamaica. Lee Perry, rather than Kraftwerk (whose music I love, and who themselves always have taken the correct attitude toward their place in the musical world), is the father of techno.

Sunny Ade surely was not and is not the technical innovator Lee Perry is, or Kraftwerk, or Fela was in his different way. Sunny Ade offered and offers one thing above all, and that's raw quality. He is so exceptionally good as a musician, bandleader, melodist, recording artist, and performing artist, that he blows all competition away. I've seen Sunny Ade perform three times, all in the 1980's, and saw him on the "Synchro System" tour. Never seen a better show.

So the story behind this record, really more behind his previous, first US release, "Juju Music," is well-known but bears repeating. Bob Marley, third-world superstar #1, died, and Island Records lost a big money-maker. Looking for another to shake, they looked toward Africa. I don't know if Fela was approached but I can imagine he'd have nothing but disdain for the suggestion that he would follow Bob Marley or anyone else for that matter. Sunny Ade, then, was the choice.

He was not a good choice from a commercial perspective. Island put out three records. The first two, "Juju Music," and "Synchro System," took Ade's LP-side-long songs and cut the length to 4-5 minutes each, creating albums more or less in the form expected by the huge US market. "Juju Music" even included a song in English. But there is the obvious error in Island's thinking. Marley sang in English, and Sunny Ade sung in Yoruba. The big, white American audience can't deal with anything not in English. After a third record, Ade was cut loose.

The shocker, though, with his first two records in particular, was that though the songs were severely edited in terms of length to fit the target market's expectations, they were edited extremely well. That's the thing, I suppose. Another good example is Arthur Waley's translation and abridgement of "The Journey to the West," published as "Monkey." 2000 pages in an unabridged translation I read some years ago, 350 or so in Waley's version. But Waley's version works, absolutely. So too with "Juju Music" and "Synchro System," and to my ear a much lesser extent with "Aura." A piece well-abridged is legitimate. Very rarely does this kind of thing actually happen, but it happened with Sunny Ade. One has to think that it's Ade who deserves the credit and his producer Martin Meissonnier for knowing to stay out of the way.

Musically, I don't think I've heard a piece that makes me smile the way this does. There are about 20 musicians playing on this recording at the same time. Not a one steps on another's toes, and nobody is holding back. Try getting Americans to be as aware of each other.

Making Flippy Floppy

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Talking Heads, "Making Flippy Floppy," (download until 1/17/09), from "Speaking in Tongues."

For some reason, I'm finding myself coming back to tunes which I think are objectively mediocre but come together in a way that makes them great. This is one of them. Every single variable in the tune, from the melody, to the arrangement, to the words, is, by classic Talking Heads standards, fair to middling. Admittedly, the Heads made truly great music with alarming frequency between 1979 and 1983, and that raises both the ceiling and the floor. Most people would give their eyeteeth to write a tune like this one.

The Talking Heads are open at some level to all the same critiques I leveled at Tom Waits and Beck, tangentially. At the same time, though David Byrne has had a very chequered career since this record--in hindsight, "Little Creatures" is both derivative and weak, and seemingly a very forced change of pace, and then it's downhill from there--somehow the band, and it was a band, was able to draw on a variety of sources and make them their own.

David Byrne does not get let off the hook, and particularly the racial hook--which I didn't even wield with Tom Waits, I'm aware, could've, should've--but there's also the fact that one can make really good music while maintaining awful racial politics. David Byrne and Brian Eno both deserve any crap they get for their criminal exoticization of black people, and black music. It's worst on "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts," which is at the same time the best record they made together, truly, though I'd add it's the best record only in its originally released form, not with the added tracks of the reissue, with "Qu'ran" and not with "Very, Very Hungry."

I would think that at least Brian Eno (am I being unfair?) and possibly David Byrne had read the Amos Tutuola novel of the same name--at least I hope they did. How many of the white, college-boy hipsters who read the book, let alone bought it, remains in my mind in little doubt: about a tenth of a percent. I actually did--brilliant novel, included in my edition with Tutuola's first, "The Palm-Wine Drinkard," which I preferred. Tutuola was sort of disowned for admittedly good reasons by a lot of educated Africans because of his imperfect grasp of formal English (as opposed to Chinua Achebe, who for my money is the model of English prose from the mid-twentieth century), and his editors reviled for more or less marketing him as an exotic, essentially savage African, untouched by civilizing influence and thus "authentic." Accepting all this, Tutuola's imagery is about as astonishing as any I've read, and he's very clearly conscious of his place in the linguistic world.

There certainly is a problem with this music, with this project. I'll cite a line--and in defense of the artists, this is not a quote from them, but from the critic--from the allmusic.com review of "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts":

The songs on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts present myriad elements from around the world in the same jumbled stew, without regard for race, creed, or color.

There you go. Colorblindness, the surest sign of a white liberal. The Talking Heads are very liberal in this sense. Now some people are getting tense. Don't worry, my great, human, white friends, you're ok. But next time you're hanging out with one of your friends of color, just ask them if they can afford to be colorblind in America. Then, if you are really a friend, you won't be hurt. In fact, you should be proud that you're a white person that, if you can listen, is moving toward a solution.

This is the thing, though: the music is good. This tune would be great, too, if it weren't on the same record with other things that are better, as unsound as that logic might be. And it doesn't hold a candle to "Once in a Lifetime," for sure. We must be suspect of any band that hires P-Funksters for an album and tour, forms a sound that not only uses those players but requires them, and then proceeds to move on. This doesn't reduce, however, that a record with Bernie Worrell on it is always worthwhile. Everything he touches turns to gold.

Jockey Full of Bourbon

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Tom Waits, "Jockey Full of Bourbon," (download until 1/19/09) from "Rain Dogs."

Tom Waits is many things, but one thing he's not is authentic. I know, I know, all you crit theory hipsters—the jargon of authenticity and all that. Shoot me. But let's call a spade a spade. Tom Waits, quite talented, with a good ear, an ability to turn someone else's phase, is the least original “original” I've ever come across.

I'll point out that he makes good music. This particular tune was the first of his I'd ever heard, when I was a kid and saw the trailer for “Down By Law” at the Ken theater in San Diego. Remember the Ken? Still there. The video store next door, the single best video rental store I've ever even heard of, is still there, too. I remember seeing that trailer, and being much more interested in the song than the movie—though at this point I without question think that Jim Jarmusch is an original original, a real one.

Tom Waits is the Beck of ten years earlier, or vice versa. Both reference others' originality, and both make very, very good records. Both incorporate the trappings of popular music—in the record store they call it “folk,” but we'll say “popular,” “of people” as opposed to “of the culture industry,” of which both Beck and Waits are, without a doubt, and good for them—as a means to hipness and legitimacy. There the similarity more or less ends. Beck programs his music or has someone program it for him, and Tom Waits plays his or has others play it for him.

That's worth pointing out. Tom Waits is no virtuoso, but he is a player. The records sound it, above all “Rain Dogs” which to this day is the best-engineered thing he's done. The tonal quality of the recording, above all the sound of the room itself, is just beautiful. The musicians—and this really was the peak of his groups, better than either of the other two really good Tom Waits records, “Swordfishtrombones” or “Frank's Wild Years”—are not simply stellar but clearly have a feel for each other.

The melody and structure of the song are flawless, absolutely flawless. At some level, that's really all there is to the appeal—that's and a fantastic performance, well-recorded. It's as great as ELO was, and for the same reasons. Perhaps I'm not fair. ELO was good, and Tom Waits is really good. But to what are we listening? Some cool Cuban drumming. Dylan lyrics off “Highway 61 Revisited” either more focused or less free depending on your mood. Giving the man some credit, he's not doing the Harry Partch thing on this track, but it's all over the rest of his career from “Swordfishtrombones” forward. Straight outta Harry Partch.

He's good with words, but not so much to produce meaning as atmosphere. There's not a clunker of a line on “Rain Dogs” though to my ear—and it's in the sound of it that you can tell a good lyric—none of his other records are as consistently good with the words. I feel often as if in a fog of some sort listening to this or any of his best pieces, like I can't see to the end of my fingertips which flail in front of me, trying to find something to grasp. I say his best, because in the tunes where he is a bit more concrete about things he becomes a lot less interesting on any number of levels. The words of this tune make me feel like what I imagine I'd feel if I'd read a Charles Bukowski book, which I've never read and am never going to you. That, with the pirate references thrown in.

Above all, it's kind of lonely. It must be lonely to make empty references, and lonelier to listen to them. A person needs to communicate to not be alone, no matter how smart one is.

Bird Watching at Inner Forest

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Cornelius, "Bird Watching at Inner Forest" (download until 1/13/09), from "Point."

I don't know sometimes whether I should be pleased that I still make a new musical discovery (for myself) once or twice a year as I near 40, or whether I should be depressed that I only make one or two new musical discoveries a year these days when I made at least a dozen a year when I was in eighth and ninth grade. Regardless, I'll take what I can get.

So here's how I came across Cornelius. My wife had agreed to chaperone a dance at her school this past autumn and I agreed to clean myself up, put on my good suit, and show those people how to dress, as her date for the affair. The students wore all kinds of dress save the genuinely formal. One kid was wearing a sweatshirt with “BAPE” on it, and as he walked in and we greeted him and of course asked what his shirt meant. We're the older generation, so we don't know. “Bathing Ape,” he replied, and we as you would think assumed he was joking. I did the google on my phone to look it up, and sure enough, the kid wasn't pulling our leg. It's a Japanese clothing line.

My wife and I chuckled about how English words are sometimes used abroad without any regard—at least any obvious regard—for the words' meaning in English. We saw the same thing when we lived in Senegal. I read a bit on Wikipedia about the brand, and then read a line about how Cornelius had written a tune for a BAPE ad campaign or something like that.

I couldn't get over the name, Cornelius. No worse choice could be made in a name, I thought. I don't want to offend anyone actually named Cornelius—it must be hard. I had honestly thought that the last person to give that name to another was James Joyce to Corny Kelleher. Then the article I linked to about Cornelius noted that he took the name from “Planet of the Apes” which might explain the relationship to BAPE. In any event I'd forgotten about that film, because it was, was it not, a fundamentally forgettable film. But remembering the film just made the choice of the name all the worse.

I linked to a review this album, however, and I was intrigued by the mention of sampled field recordings of natural sounds. I found a video for the title track of the record on Youtube, and was done. My wife dug it too, and I bought the record. The whole thing's quite good and sui generis. The marketing campaign seems to have tried to link Cornelius to Beck, and some reviewers have followed suit. The comparison is ludicrous, however, because Beck works essentially through referencing various musical types whereas Cornelius really is a musical type unto himself.

For some reason, I keep thinking to myself that this music is melodic without a melody, somehow. I then rethink it, and note that that's obviously impossible. Last, I rehear the song and arrive back at the first, logically impossible position.

Leola

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Scott Joplin, "Leola," (download until 1/12/09) from "Entertainer: Classic Ragtime from Rare Piano Rolls."

Joplin published this piece in 1905, and it is worth noting that 104 years later the three-minute pop song as a form is more or less intact. I don't want to diminish Joplin's status as a composer in the least, because he obviously was one, for my money the first great composer whose output fit the description in a way comprehensible to Europeans this country produced. There's a problem, though, wherein legitimacy is conferred on people whose ancestors weren't or aren't European by noting their conformity to European forms, be they social, political, or musical. Legitimacy comes from being good, tout simple. And good Joplin was, without question.

I've seen it noted, however, in more than one place that—I don't remember the exact piece he noted this in and I'm writing this from a train without internet service to check the reference—the performer shouldn't take the piece too fast, because that wasn't, he wrote in more formal words, what rag was about. I have to imagine given that note that (and I should get a copy of a biography from the library, though a quick glance the other night on the web gave me the impression that Joplin's biography was not wholly clear from documentary evidence) there's a lot more to Joplin's concept that the printed page can hold.

We know that the great European composers were themselves improvisers as well, and not only Chopin. I remember when I first read in if I remember a biography of Bach something to that effect and I was almost overwhelmed with a sense of loss. One could easily imagine that Bach might well have never put pen to paper if he had had magnetic tape instead. Me, I'd rather listen to jazz than through-composed music of any sort, and the thought of finding an acetate of J.S. Bach at the Five Spot is at the same time enticing and depressing, because of course no such thing exists. I have to wonder what Joplin's improvisations must have been like. Often, when I hear Jelly Roll Morton's solo recordings (I'm hardly making an original reference here) I imagine Joplin playing them. But this is of course fantasy. I'm sure that Joplin went all over all kinds of unpredictable maps.

This recording is from a piano roll, cut by Joplin. One can say that there's a certain mechanical feeling to it that one wouldn't get with a living performer, but I still am surprised by how well it swings. That's worth pointing out. Joplin swung. Stephen Foster didn't—and that's not in the least to intimate that swing is and exclusively black phenomenon. But it is fundamentally black, and originally black. You can hear it in kora playing. This is not to essentialize swing by any stretch, it's on the contrary to historicize it. There's a development to swing. It came physically from somewhere, Mali, one imagines, surely somewhere along the Niger. In my imagination I can picture some Dogon folk taking swing from the stars, as a gift to people.

All this is to simply give credit where credit is due. The fundamental character of the music of the United States is swing, swing to a lesser or greater extent. The only music that is indigenous to this land that doesn't swing is Native music, which must have made swing welcome because it so often shuffles. Any music lacking swing that isn't Native, played by North Americans, just won't work. There's no life to it, no history. And swing is African. Bearing this in mind, we must conclude that Johnny Cash played African music, with some addenda. A kora if you listen to it goes “boom-chicka-boom.” I am sure Johnny would have been behind this idea.

On the Air

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Peter Gabriel, "On the Air" (download until 1/10/09), from "Peter Gabriel" (second album)

What are we to do with Peter Gabriel? It's odd, hindsight. I look back to my eighth grade and think, yeah, that's when I discovered the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, or, yeah, bought "A Love Supreme!" But in fact, I was overwhelmed more than anything by Peter Gabriel's "Security." I'd gotten into Genesis the year before--this is when they were cool...well...popular--and when Pete (I'd call him Pete in those days) came out with "Shock the Monkey" and it was on the radio, that was it.

I stopped listening to Peter Gabriel in grad school, actually. I'd more or less let him drop off my radar in college, after "So" came out my senior year of high school and while we were all excited that Pete had a real hit on his hands, the more I listened to the record the more--it's not that I thought myself too cool for it, or that I was bummed that Pete had sold out or anything--the less interesting I found it. "Big Time" was cool enough at first, but I was way, way into Prince by this point in my life, still am, and Peter Gabriel getting groovy just isn't that impressive to a Prince fan. I want to question myself what precisely it meant to be someone's sledgehammer. You can chalk this up to my monastic existence at the time but in reality I actually did have the sense that it was a failed attempt at the kind of ribaldry one got from genuine, classic R & B. The image, the metaphor, it didn't go past the first layer. And "Mercy Street"--honestly, I felt betrayed when I found out that it wasn't just "for Anne Sexton" but was a mere reference to her work rather than a substantive piece of its own. What a waste of a good enough tune.

I did not question myself when I started to drop Peter Gabriel's music. I just let it go and listened to other things. It was only in the last couple years that I nostalgically--whenever I get tired of my job, of any job, I go through a nostalgic phase--picked up some of the really cool first four Peter Gabriel records, and found that my opinions of them had changed. All of them were still good, and the first, the one with "Solsbury Hill" is still the weakest by a long shot. His best is still his third, the one with the melting-face cover. But where before I'd thought that the second best was "Security," I now think it's his second record, the "scratch" one.

Pete's second record came out just after Punk broke and I think it became somewhat obligatory for musicians who wanted to continue their careers and maintain some self-respect needed to make some public show aligning themselves with Punk--witness "Some Girls," which was good, or Neil Young's shamefully shallow, yes, you read me right, Neil gets no sympathy from me after "Let's Roll, "Hey, Hey, My, My." I recall it widely reported that "On the Air" was Pete's, "hey kids, I'm on your side" piece.

Again, hindsight is weird, or misleading. Pete can't have been serious if he really thought he was hooking up with the kids with this or any other of his tracks. It's not that a public school--"private school," Americans--kid can't get into the trenches (look at Lenin, look at Che)--but rather that once a member of Genesis, never an ally of Punk. That's all. This tune is way, way too arty, and not in a Talking Heads kind of way, but more in a, a, a hmm, you've got some real pretensions there kind of way, to be put next to "God Save the Queen."

But here's the thing, and I want no mistakes made. I can take pretension if it's backed with talent. Peter Gabriel is nothing if not really, really talented. The tune itself here is fantastic, truth be told. To beat a dead horse, there's nothing Punky about it in a meaningful sense, but Pete can rock--not Punk but Rock. He can't not put in a half-tempo bridge--a tenure in Genesis saps the ability to avoid that kind of thing--but it's an impeccably executed bridge. At some level, and maybe at some point a discussion of Rakim is in order, technique, when approached properly, is its own elevating experience.

That, the song is. It elevates. I always am pleased to hear this and I always feel better when it's done.

James Alley Blues

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Richard "Rabbit" Brown, "James Alley Blues" (download until 1/10/09), from the Anthology Of American Folk Music (Edited By Harry Smith).

Now, this is as good a reason I can find to explain why Wilco has never done it for me. There was a podcast a while ago, put out as promotion for this collection when it was re-released, in which Jeff Tweedy performed this tune. What can I say? We want to like Wilco and we appreciate Jeff's good taste, but even if one were to pass over some lyrical mistakes one just has to think that people simply can't play it like this anymore. It's a retrograde, defeatist position, but I come by it honestly.

And don't think I'm being too harsh on Wilco. Wait until I lay into Neil Young. And why? Because listen to Richard "Rabbit" Brown. This is what is so absent from most of the Americana crowd's stuff. They get the melancholy, but they lose the lightness. Everyone has their blues to sing but it's a different blues one sings when one is poor and when one's earning prospects are merely less than one's parents' generation. The first time as tragedy, the second as farce. The second is best suited to satire, and the Americana crowd basically misses that. All the great stuff we could have, all the stuff added to the tradition, if only that basic point were understood...

The good, old folk singers had burdens to carry but they carried them with a lightness--lightness is becoming something of a theme with me, I'm afraid--that is what gave their music force. And it's not something like, ah, the dark person puts on a happy face to shuffle off through life like Chaplin. With the really serious people, like "Rabbit" Brown here, it's neither an avoidance trick nor a coping mechanism. It simply is an awareness that things are light, and that's all there is. You don't get that realization too often in popular music these days, and as I try to find an example of someone today who pulls it off and I fail I return to my earlier, bleaker assertion that they just don't cut records like this anymore and I add "because they haven't got the players who can cut them."

Livin' Thing

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Electric Light Orchestra, "Livin' Thing" (download until 1/8/09), from "A New World Record."

ELO would be a guilty pleasure if they weren't actually really good. I should qualify this: ELO put out a number of really fantastic tracks when I was a little kid, and as I aged and in particular once one could purchase individual tracks via internet (yes, I do purchase things) I went back to listen to "Turn to Stone" and found that indeed it was great.

I suppose this is one of the marks of someone my age and background. We had good music to listen to when we were kids but the music industry had already turned to crap. The crap that we got, though, was made by musicians, thoroughly derivative, who had enough sense and talent to rip off the seriously great musicians of the decade before. I have a really clear memory of REO Speedwagon on some talk show from when they had their hit going on--the guy with the black, curly mullet--about how important Lennon and McCartney were to them as a band and as people. You can hear it in everything except the actual musical quality of REO Speedwagon. But it does mean that--and I actually didn't care for REO Speedwagon when I was a kid, like I did ELO--we as kids had a certain type of melodicism ground into our skulls by the machine.

The skull-grinding wasn't a good thing, but the melodicism was, and to a great extent I think young people today who rely on only what the industry feeds them miss that. ELO gets no respect, in hindsight, largely because they don't deserve it. Jeff Lynne gets respect for facitilating the Traveling Wilburys, George Harrison's 9th-inning renaissance, and seeming to be a decent-enough guy (and his stuff with Tom Petty was really good, too). But, honestly, if ELO never existed, what would it change? Not much, honestly. None of the tricks they played, musically, were their own. A bunch of Beatles references, which more than one critic--critics justify their jobs by stating the obvious--cracked semi-wise about the fact that Lynne hooked up with Harrison.

However: the tune's great. I don't think that having the Beatles, who really did make great music, in my life when I was a kid was in the least sufficient to impart in me a real sense of melody or anything else. What worked was that putting stuff like the Beatles on top of a hill of stuff that was a high grade of mediocre--things like ELO, later XTC, and probably all kinds of other acronyms, even things like the Bee Gees who if nothing else created undeniably hummable stuff--put me as a kid in a really good musical position. The floor, so to speak, of musical quality was lower than the ceiling, but it wasn't bottom-basement.

This should be drawn out into a larger principle that governs all social and cultural developments--possibly even economic and political ones: the key average is not the mean, but the mode. How low is the mode, and how much is beneath it? Is a person surrounded by mediocrity or complete crap? The one surrounded by mediocrity is in a vastly, vastly superior position.