You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train

Howard Zinn, the radical (in several senses of the word) historian has died, at the age of 87. Details.

The Actual and The Performed

Clearly my specialty (and that of any humanities Ph.D. student, let's be honest) is reading too much into things. Still, I was a bit surprised to read this about Lady Gaga this morning in the New York Times:

"Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta (aka Lady Gaga) sings, writes, dresses, and apparently exists to toy with celebrity as performance art, seeing how freaky (in a fascinating way) she can be as she reaches a mass audience.

"While show people like David Bowie and Madonna established this career path, Lady Gaga is strutting along it with larger-than-life style and, behind it, actual musical gifts."

While the relativist in me is wondering exactly what "actual musical gifts" are, the pop music fan in me (as opposed to the scholar of popular music) is wondering if Jon Pareles is really elevating Lady Gaga's musical gifts above those of Madonna and David Bowie? I mean, he can't be doing that, right? That would just be crazy.

I don't really get Lady Gaga, I'll admit. I think "Poker Face" is just a funny song, with it's stuttering post-chorus "Pa-Pa-Pa poker face" reminding me of the screechy little riff from "Toxic" by Britney Spears: they're both sort of amusing little bits that I laughed at the first dozen or so times I heard them, but I can't imagine anyone taking them that seriously. Britney seems to have basically disappeared from the public sphere. I'm just waiting for her to return with an album of jazz standards.

Who knows what's going to happen with Lady Gaga in a few years, but as for now, she certainly seems to have some cultural cachet, at least in some quarters. She can sell out four shows at Radio City, which, you'll remember, is "Hannah Montana's place," according to Gregg Allman. But whereas Montana/Cyrus could probably sell out shows at Radio City and at similar theatres across the country, I'm not so sure about Gaga. Her co-headlining tour with Kanye West was cancelled this fall, basically because it was going to look bad if stars as famous as West and Gaga didn't sell out every show. But that goes into the differences between contemporary pop music and the ideology, based on rock music from the 1960s and 1970s, about the place of live performance. Which is to say basically that record sales, iTunes downloads, ringtone sales, youtube hits, unauthorized downloads do not necessarily correlate with concert ticket sales. This is a simple point, but one that I don't think too many people have picked up on. Who sells tickets does not necessarily equal who sells records, who gets listened to, who is "popular." This is for a lot of reasons, including the increasingly high cost of concert tickets, which put them only in easy purchasing reach of the oldest and most affluent music fans--who in turn usually patronize concerts by older artists such as Eric Clapton, Billy Joel and Elton John, Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones, etc. But also, live performance is just a lot less important for most contemporary pop musicians than it was 30 years ago.

Interestingly enough, I think Gaga is in some sense trying to go against these trends by making her shows such a huge spectacle, a spectacle which matches, incidentally enough, her own lavish (and, um, weird) music videos. Time will tell if she is going to be successful.

Fin de Semana de Paul Simon

I can't seem to lay off Vampire Weekend. I've now had a chance to listen to their second album, Contra. Listening to it, I'm reminded of a review that I read of Coldplay's second album, A Rush of Blood to the Head. I can't find the review right now, but the line that stuck with me all these years was something like: "With A Rush of Blood to the Head, Colplday did what every young, ambitious band needs to do with their second album: they got better." I think that's a pretty fair description of what Vampire Weekend did with Contra: they got better. There isn't much of a pronounced change in style with this album; I think they just wrote better songs and executed them better.

One thing, though. According to the article in The New Yorker about Vampire Weekend that I mentioned before, "The band does not like to talk about Paul Simon, having heard too much about its debt to Graceland." Fair enough. However, if they don't want to talk about Paul Simon and Graceland, they may want to work on having songs that don't sound exactly like Paul Simon. Specifically, the second song on Contra, "White Sky," is a dead ringer for "Crazy Love, Vol. II." (Sorry, there isn't a studio version of "White Sky" up yet on youtube, but you'll get the idea from this live version.) A rolling 12/8 groove, trebly guitar and keyboards, the same 80s era snare drum sounds, Koenig's voice during the verses even sounds like Simon's breathy, gentle, high register tenor. And the chorus features some wordless whoops, sounding exactly like what Simon does on another track from Graceland, "Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes."

And it's not just me who hears this, either. When I played "White Sky" for Catharine, she spontaneously starting singing, "Fat Charlie the Archangel," the first lyrics of "Crazy Love." And someone named Homer8j comments on youtube, "I think they drew a lot of influence from Paul Simon. This song is like The Boy in the Bubble [another 12/8 song from Graceland] combined with Crazy Love, Vol II."

So, here's another hint for you academics out there writing about Vampire Weekend: anxiety of influence.

Uptown/Downtown

Two things I don't quite get about this article in the New York Times about how the Allman Brothers have been forced to move their annual series of concerts at the Beacon Theater on the Upper West Side to the United Palace Theater in Washington Heights. (The Beacon had been booked by Cirque de Soleil.)

1. Discounting other possible venues, including Radio City Music Hall, Gregg Allman says, "Forget about it. That's Hannah Montana's place." Ummm, what? Anyway, I saw Wilco play there in the fall of 2004 and concluded that it was an amazing place for a rock show. Beautiful space, great acoustics, great location. I hope more bands get a chance to play there.

2. The writer, David Itzkoff, continues: "The band is also looking into other ways that it could make the Washington Heights neighborhood more familiar to its itinerant followers, who might not have spent much time there. Mr. Allman said he and his colleagues might rent a bar there during the residency that would offer 'a safe, safe place to get loaded or talk to the pretty women — do the things that us guys do.'" I'm not sure why this hypothetical rented bar needed to be described as "safe" twice. I mean, if you're looking to get loaded and talk to a pretty woman or two, I'm pretty sure any of the bars in that neighborhood will suffice. I hope the subtext of this isn't that the (white) Allman Brothers and their (largely white) fans wouldn't feel comfortable getting loaded and talking to pretty women in a Dominican neighborhood without the protection of this "safe, safe place." But maybe I'm reading too much into this.

Why Blog When You Can Just Read The New Yorker?

The current issue (thanks to Hannah and Neil for extending my subscription) had two articles of interest to me. One is about the band Vampire Weekend, reporting on their stay in California and previewing their upcoming second album, Contra. I must say that as an ethnomusicologist and teacher of world music classes, I’m pretty fascinated by Vampire Weekend. Though the comparisons between them and David Byrne/Paul Simon 1980s era world music are inexact, it’s nice to have a case study that’s slightly more recent. Plus, I went to college with these guys, and I sort of vaguely knew them. It’s hard not to be interested when people you consider your peers become successful in the field of endeavour nearest and dearest to your own heart. I don’t think that Vampire Weekend’s music always pans out, but they’ve got their moments. Their new single, “Horchata,” is certainly a dud, but “M79,” from their first album, is a small piece of brilliance. It’s also the best song ever about a bus route.

The article, by Lizzie Widdicombe (and if that’s actually her real name, wow!), doesn’t shed too much new light on the band. I mean, what can you do in 5 pages, really, especially when a sizable chunk of the article chronicles their meeting with Tom DeLonge from Blink-182? I’ll repeat the plea that I’ve made for M.I.A.: can someone out there smarter than me and with more time than I’ve got write something really intelligent about this band? I mean, maybe actually talking about musical style in a real way? And actually probing further into the question of imperialist nostalgia? If someone writes something like that, I’d read it. And I’d assign it to my students.

There's at least one quite smart thing in this article, though, and I think it deserves much more than the small mention Widdicombe gives it. She writes: "Many of the personas of rock music--punk rebel, sexual deviant--have lost their power to shock. But the effete, collegiate image projected by Vampire Weekend proved capable of offending in a fresh way." I think that's absolutely on point, that's exactly what happened with this band. Now, will someone out there spin out some elaborate theorizations on this?

Also in The New Yorker this week, Rebecca Mead takes on the thorny issue of what to call the decade we just finished. Her argument seems to be that our lack of consensus on what to call these past 10 years (the naughties? the aughts?) points to a general distancing from our recent past:

“Given all that has emerged in the past ten years, the failure to invent a satisfactory name for the period seems overdetermined—a reflection of our sense that the so-called aughts were not all they ought to have been, and were so much less than they promised to be. With its intractable conflicts and its irresolvable crises, its astonishing accomplishments and its devastating failures, the decade just gone by remains unnamed and unclaimed, an orphaned era that no one quite wants to own, or own up to--or, truth be told, to have aught else to do with at all.”

Indeed, certainly the tone I’ve perceived in the end-of-the-decade pieces that I’ve read has been a rather negative one. And perhaps with good reason. From an American perspective, at least, one can trace the outline of the previous decade in a series of tragedies, fiascos, and failures: the disputed election of 2000, the attacks of 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, torture at Abu Ghraib, the re-election of George W. Bush, the near-total collapse of the economy.

In fact, looking back at all that has happened in the larger world, I feel kind of guilty admitting that the 2000s were actually pretty good for me. I graduated high school, left my comfortable Midwestern hometown and moved to New York City, made some great friends, listened to some great music, learned a lot, met the woman I’m going to spend the rest of my life with, graduated from Columbia, got into graduate school, lived in several foreign countries, and nearly completed my Ph.D.

The 2010s look to be going equally as well. We didn’t see any lions on the outing to Pilanesburg National Park in South Africa that I took with several friends from college at 5:30 in morning on January 1^st. But we did see some rhinos, zebras, giraffes, and elephants. And a few days later, I got to see my freshman and junior year roommate get married. And in August, I’ll be getting married as well.

So as I say, the last 10 years or so have been pretty good for me. I certainly hope that trend continues. And I hope that when I write my decade-summing-up post 10 years hence, that events in the larger world will have been as favorable as those in my own personal life.

And, one more story about Vampire Weekend, or at least vaguely about Vampire Weekend. When I was in Argentina, I used to read the Argentine edition of Rolling Stone, which was made up of articles about Argentine music in Spanish and articles translated into Spanish from the American edition. They had a review for the movie Twilight that was, I think, by Peter Travers or something. It was one of the articles originally written in English and then translated. The title, in Spanish, was "Fin de Semana del Vampiro." This is clever in English, since it makes reference to the vampires in the movie by also name-checking a popular and trendy band. The Spanish version of the review must have just been a literal translation, but, as literal translations often are, it is somewhat lacking. Namely in that Vampire Weekend wasn't popular enough in Argentina at the time to have really rung any bells. Plus, I only got the original reference anyway because I was an English-speaker. To get the joke, an Argentine would have had to both be proficient enough at English to translate "Fin de Semana del Vampiro" to English (perhaps relatively easy) and recognize that translation as the name of an American indie rock band (relatively more difficult at that time in Buenos Aires, I think).

Anyway, I realize in just writing this little anecdote that it doesn't seem nearly as funny as I remember it being. I guess this just proves once again that when you are learning a language, any jokes or bits of verbal flair that you recognize and understand are absolutely hilarious.