Consolation Prize From a Night Spent Trying to Get into a Concert That Was Sold Out

Leave the gun.




Take the cannoli.

Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis

Well, not really. More like, song from a formerly-Minneapolis-based musician. On Jay Leno. Name-checking A.I.G. And freely quoting the introduction to one of his earlier songs.


But do listen to the Tom Waits song whose title I stole for the title of this blog post, too.

Ella Cumbio

Dude, I so knew abut this before the New York Times did. This ain't exactly the hardest-hitting article I've ever read, but you know, baby steps. Not sure I'm content with the description of cumbia as a "fusion of Latin pop, salsa and dance that is popular among Argentina's lower classes." But again, baby steps. Or, I guess, pasitos.

The Country Music Station Plays Soft (Part Two)

There's something to be said for broadcast. I've just returned from a very long trip across many of the United States, which involved a few bouts of extended driving for the first time in nearly 10 years. The interesting thing about that wasn't the driving itself, but the fact that when you drive long distances and don't really plan ahead to bring CDs or an iPod (and the requisite cords), all you have to listen to is the radio. So this was the first time in quite a while that I got to listen to mainstream radio, particularly country music radio. Back when I was about 17 (and a cool jazz musician), you showed how hip you were by saying you liked every kind of music except country. When I was about 20, it became OK to like certain country artists, mainly just Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash. But man, I've reached a point (as an old man of all of 26 years) where I really like mainstream, poppy, overproduced country music, not just the "authentic" stuff grudgingly accepted by northeastern hipsters. (By the way, who's working on researching the uneasy relationship between white northeastern hipsters and bluegrass? That topic seems like a goldmine.)

As Cath and I have often discussed, country singers are pretty much always "better" singers than rock and pop singers. A big part of this has to do with different conventions among genres. In country music (obvious exceptions notwithstanding), a division of labor between writer and singer is pretty accepted as a way of life. And this doesn't hurt at all the process of attaching authenticity in a performance. Read my old professor Aaron Fox's book Real Country: Music and Language in Working Class Culture about how the concept of "voice" is prized in country music--not necessarily linked with notions of authorship the way it is in rock. A big part of, for example, Bob Dylan's authenticity is the fact that we know he wrote all of his songs and therefore "feels" them in a certain true way that, for example, Britney Spears does not. (I don't necessarily subscribe to these positions, by the way, I'm just repeating received wisdom. Plus, Dylan only wrote all of the songs that he didn't crib from 19th century American poets or Japanese writers. But that's another story altogether.)

So anyway. What does this mean for listening to country music? Well, it's very hard to be a good singer. And it's very hard to be a good songwriter. And it's even harder to be both of those things. (In the pop music traditions I usually deal with, who are the examples of really great songwriters who at the same time are great singers? I can think of Lennon and McCartney, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Sting, Prince, Thom Yorke. Who else am I forgetting?) So in country music, you can outsource the writing to someone who's a great writer, outsource the singing to someone who's a great singer--which you can't do in rock because of the genre's notions of authenticity. So the end result is that the songs in general are a lot more pleasant to the ear, being both interestingly written and expertly sung.

So it's nice to listen to country music sometimes. It's easy to forget that country music is one of the most popular kinds of musics not only in the U.S. but in the world. (I don't know the statistics these days, but they used to say that the two most popular musics in the world were Indian film music and American country. Hip-hop may have moved up a bit, but rock is WAY in the back.) The country music station plays soft in the northeast, perhaps. But it's out there just about everywhere else.

For Reasons I Cannot Explain

I think fair use applies to this marker, since it's probably US government property. Otherwise, you can take all the pictures you want in Graceland (where I went today), but can't use any of them for commercial or public use (I forget the exact wording) without checking with Elvis Presley Enterprises first. So I am probably going to want to include images of Graceland in my dissertation (and I took a LOT of them today), but I guess I'm going to have to consult with some lawyers sometime in the next few years.

Graceland sure was expensive, but I actually thought it was quite nice. The included audio guide was very well done, with a good basic tour and then a bunch of optional things you could cue up to listen to explanations of a lot of the exhibits. Definitely worth checking out if you're into this sort of thing (or into studying this sort of thing).

The Country Music Station Plays Soft (Part 1)

Haven't blogged in a while as I've been traveling (travelling?) all across the country in planes, trains, and automobiles (and buses). Cath and I are here in Memphis, where we were greeted unexpectedly by 9 inches of snow on the ground. What's the deal with that? I thought this was, you know, the south.
But anyway, there was something funny about all of this. Today I saw a guy spreading some salt on the sidewalk to melt the ice. However, down here they clearly don't have the big bags of salt specifically for this purpose that we have back in the north. So the guy had a standard 1-lb salt container with the little metal spout that he was shaking on the sidewalk. And for some reason, this just cracked me up. And, reminded me of a song from a friend's band.