Popular Songs and Breakfast Foods

Adventures in the Life of Lady Soul

2012-01-04T21:03:00.000-05:00

First of all, let me extend my congratulations to Ms. Aretha Franklin on her recent engagement to William Wilkerson. I understand the couple is planning a wedding this summer in Florida with a reception to be held on a private yacht. Catharine and I will be very pleased to attend.

But wait, there's more Aretha-related news! As you may have also heard, Franklin is starting a kind of singing contest in order to find an opera singer worthy of being signed to her record label (and, presumably, mentored by Franklin herself). In a bizarre justification given to NPR, Franklin says, "Some of the older classical singers like Jessye Norman, Leotyne Price, and Barbara Hendricks are retiring, they're not singing anymore, and I'd like to see some younger singers come along and take their place."

Indeed, Price has been retired since 1985. But even weirder is this idea that, unless Aretha finds some new singers, there won't be anyone around to sing opera. As imperfect as it is, Franklin is aware of the fact that there is an extensive vocal training infrastructure in this country, right? That the streets of New York are awash in trained young sopranos eager to sing the classical repertory instead of working as waitresses and nannies?

So maybe Aretha is unsatisfied with this system and is going to use her money and influence to give attention to young singers in ways that the more conventional structures haven't been able to do. But I actually like the idea better that she, in fact, lives in her kind of celebrity bubble and actually has no idea that thousands of students are enrolled in vocal performance degree programs. It's kind of like when Prince released a song a few years ago called "Cinnamon Girl."

Obviously, "Cinnamon Girl" is a bizarre and racially problematic title. It was also used as the title for a iconic rock song written by Neil Young, which features Young's droning one-note guitar solo (which I actually kind of love). Surely Prince was aware of this song, right?

The other explanation is that both Prince and Aretha are fully aware of the antecedents their work is engaging with, but they feel they don't even need to acknowledge these things whatsoever, that whatever they are doing is so obviously superior that whatever came before is just irrelevant. Certainly that's an attitude of arrogance, but why else do we have pop stars?

Happy Anniversary

2012-01-03T15:05:00.001-05:00

I promised a few dissertation excerpts, and this seemed like a particularly appropriate one today. Here's a passage from my chapter on historical consciousness, after I talked about attending a concert in 2008 which re-created The Beatles' White Album to celebrate the 40th anniversary of its release in 1968.

"In fact, the period of my fieldwork found me in the midst of quite a few 40th anniversaries for some of the iconic events of the 1960s and 1970s. In 2009, the 40th anniversary of the release of the album Abbey Road was marked by a similar concert at the festival. Several Beatles tribute bands around the world also took the opportunity to recreate the Beatles’ final concert on the occasion of its 40th anniversary, in January of 2009. And the 40th anniversary of the release of the rock opera Tommy by The Who was also marked by several tribute bands playing the album in its entirety. This historical consciousness that these anniversary concerts seem to be both partaking in and helping to construct is unlikely to go away once the current spate of anniversaries passes, however. It seems all but certain that the early years of the 2010s will feature many '45th anniversary' performances of events from the late 1960s before ramping up for '50th anniversary' celebrations at the end of the decade."

The festival in question here is Abbey Road on the River, a Beatles tribute band festival held every year over Memorial Day weekend in Louisville, KY--now with a sister festival held over Labor Day weekend in the Washington, D.C. area. AROTR has a strong presence on Facebook. Here was an announcement they posted on their status today about this year's festival:

Sometimes it's nice to know that I'm not making this stuff up. Anyway, Abbey Road Live! is a phenomenal band, and they're also very nice guys--I interviewed them for my fieldwork. Sounds like it should be a great show.

You Say You Want a Revolution

2012-01-02T19:25:00.002-05:00

I just finished reading Patti Smith's Just Kids, a book Robbie gave me last year for Christmas. (We returned the favor and gave him a copy of it this year for Christmas.) It took me a year to read it because I was, well, busy with other things. I also knew hardly anything about Patti Smith and my interest wasn't immediately piqued. But I'm glad that I took it with me over the holidays and that I finished reading it. It made me want to listen to some Patti Smith records and look at some Robert Mapplethorpe photos, which, I assume, was the book's goal. One thing near the end interested and amused me, though, especially because it connects with some of the concerns of my research.

Describing her newly-formed band, Smith writes:

"We imagined ourselves as the Sons of Liberty with a mission to preserve, protect, and project the revolutionary spirit of rock and roll. We feared that the music which had given us sustenance was in danger of spiritual starvation. We feared it losing its sense of purpose, we feared it falling into fattened hands, we feared it floundering in a mire of spectacle, finance, and vapid technical complexity. We would call forth in our minds the image of Paul Revere, riding through the American night, petitioning the people to wake up, to take up arms. We too would take up arms, the arms of our generation, the electric guitar and the microphone."

Pretty remarkable rhetoric. This is at the top of page 245. Near the bottom of that page, Jane Friedman introduces Smith and her band to Clive Davis. On page 247, Smith signs a record contract with Davis. Just saying.

Now That We Found Love

2011-12-31T12:13:00.000-05:00

I had a dream last night that I was on a bus. A black woman in her 30s was also on the bus, and she was railing against contemporary culture. Politics, art, fashion, film, and (most importantly) music were all criticized for their shallowness, their violence and misogyny, their lack of aesthetic couth. With a final rhetorical flourish, she addressed all of us riding on the bus, laying the blame on her fellow riders for all that was lacking in society: "I love this city, but I hate its people!" And with that, she got off the bus.

The ghost of Heavy D (yes, really) suddenly appeared sitting to me right. He tapped me on the shoulder, leaned over, and said: "I don't know, man. I love the music."

End of dream.

I have no idea what that means, but I think it's kind of telling that I remembered this dream, when I hardly ever remember any of my other dreams. I'm not sure this dream has much insight into either the past year or the year to come; I seem to be suffering from a general lack of insight all around. But I love the music, too. See you in 2012.

Album of the Year

2011-12-03T16:58:00.001-05:00

The Grammy nominations came out this week. As is customary, the nominations elicit an equal number of thumbs-ups and WTFs. One of the more bizarre items on the list is Bon Iver's nomination as Best New Artist (snubbing Pittsburgh native Wiz Khalifa). There's really no universe in which Bon Iver can be considered a new artist. The Grammy time lags lead to all sorts of weirdness, including the fact that Rihanna's Loud (released in November of 2010) is still eligible this year, when she has already released another album, Talk That Talk. Similarly, Kanye's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy has to compete against his duet album with Jay-Z, Watch the Throne--not sure where I stand on that battle.

Anyway, I just made a playlist of all of the albums nominated for Album of the Year. So, that's 21 by Adele, Born this Way by Lady Gaga, Doo Wops and Hooligans by Bruno Mars, Wasting Light by the Foo Fighters, and the aforementioned Loud by Rihanna. Wasting Light is the wild card on this list for me: I haven't heard a single thing from it. Everything else has been played pretty incessantly on pop radio that you would had to have made a special effort to avoid, for example, "Grenade" or "Edge of Glory," to say nothing of "Someone Like You." There may be a radio station somewhere that, in fact, only plays "Someone Like You." Lord knows that may be a more successful format than some of the stuff you hear while spinning your FM dial.

So this is going to be my gym mix this week. In particular, I'm going to try to give the Foo Fighters a serious listen: in homage to my 14-year-old self, if nothing else. Right now, however, I think the smart money is on Adele winning Album of the Year--along with every other award for which she is nominated. And, as I said to a few folks before the nominees were announced, I think Adele might win all of next year's Grammys, too--and then perhaps be awarded last year's Grammys retrospectively. I'm not sure that 21 is my favorite record of this year, but it's a pretty stunning blend of chops and pop appeal. Not many records get made like that.

On to the Next One

2011-11-11T10:16:00.001-05:00

Well, it's really done now.

On Wednesday, I drove 11 hours back and forth to Philadelphia to deposit my dissertation. So I think that means I'm officially done? I don't know. I think I don't technically get awarded my degree until December. And then it will take another 2 months for the degree to actually arrive. They only do one Commencement ceremony a year, and that isn't until May. (I haven't decided if I'm going to go to that. It depends on who they get as their Commencement speaker. To really celebrate Penn's Philly cred, I think they should get Ryan Howard or ?uestlove.)

But, of course, work never ceases. I need to turn my attention to the conference paper I'm giving at SEM in a week. SEM this year is back in Philadelphia, which is adding to my confusion about being done. I seem to always do this fade-out with cities--I never can leave them all in one go. I left New York and moved to Philadelphia to go to graduate school at Penn, but Catharine was still finishing up at Barnard, so I went back to visit about three times a month. Then when she moved to Philadelphia, it was rather anti-climactic. We left Philadelphia and moved to Guatemala/Buenos Aires. That was rather dramatic. Except then we moved back to Philadelphia for 4 months before coming to Pittsburgh. Then I spent last year living in Philadelphia again three days a week. So you'll excuse me if I have the sneaking suspicion that I might not quite be done with the City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Compassion quite yet.

Anyway, now that the dissertation is officially submitted (coming soon to a ProQuest near you!), I was thinking about posting some excerpts of it here. Not all of it, but a few things that might be of interest to a wider audience. If I'm smart about it, I'll even do some hyperlinking and stuff so that you can follow some of the threads that I followed in the writing of it. (I'll spare you some of the dead-ends that I took along the way.)

But for now, see you in Philadelphia? I've got to get to work on this conference paper.

The Fall

2011-10-17T10:20:00.002-04:00

I'm trying to enjoy this fall. Certainly, I try to enjoy every season (though I'm not always successful, ask my wife Catharine about the person known as "Summer John"), but I have a particular reason to try to enjoy my time right now. A certain monkey is mostly off my back. On October 6th, I defended my dissertation. The title I settled on is "'Rock and Roll Never Forgets': Memory, History, and Performance in the Tribute Band Scene." I'll have other occasions to talk about it here.

But happy as I am to be done with my dissertation, working on the final edits made me miss late summer. Literally, I have no idea what really happened in the world in months of August and September. There was my wedding anniversary on August 29th. And the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. I remember both of those. The rest of the time, I was secluded at the 61C coffee shop in Squirrel Hill, type, type, typing on my dissertation. The end result seemed to please my committee, and I'm actually fairly happy with the work, too. Now that I'm working on the last proofreading, I can turn a little bit of my attention to other concerns.

So. The fall. It's been a pretty beautiful one in Pittsburgh. The leaves are starting to turn, and there's a nice chill in the air. The seasons, when I'm not obsessed with my dissertation, exert a pretty strong pull on me. For starters, there are certain foods that I really start to crave. In the fall, those include:

Bacon
Maple Syrup
French Toast/Pancakes
Soups and Stews, with good bread
Pumpkin Pie
Whisk(e)y
Brown Ales (not pumpkin ales,which I actually think are disgusting)

We made a great bean stew last week, which we've been working our way through the help of bread from our excellent local bakery, Allegro Hearth. I made French toast on Sunday morning. I'm excited to make pumpkin pie, though I may have to eat it all myself, because Catharine doesn't like pumpkin pie (sacrilege, I know). Anyway, that shouldn't be a problem, since pumpkin is one of my hands-down favorite foods.

My musical tastes change a little bit in the fall, too. And I'm actually going to make an effort to listen to music for pleasure, as opposed to just for "work." I've got some catching up to do. There are new albums from Ryan Adams and Wilco that I haven't heard yet. And Bjork's record just came out, too, though it seems like I've been hearing about how awesome and wide-ranging the record is for about the last three years. Currently, I'm listening to Dierks Bentley's bluegrass album, Up on the Ridge.

A couple of short music thoughts to finish up. Adele's 21 is going to win about a million Grammys. Kind of amazing to see an artist with such a wide-ranging appeal. And if "Pumped-Up Kicks" wins any Grammys, I'm going to be very upset. The song is fine, but that's the point. It's just fine. It's a little stupid ditty (admittedly one about a school shooting). I have no idea how this tune became wildly popular. I think the more time I spend studying contemporary popular music, the less I understand. I guess that means I'm not done yet.

You Thought Lil Wayne Was Weezy, But Weezy is Wayne

2011-08-21T22:52:00.002-04:00

We can start off with a song. It's "DontGetIt," the last track from Lil Wayne's Tha Carter III. It starts off fairly normally, sampling Nina Simone's version of "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood." The track is about three minutes long, and then it goes into an extended rant from Lil Wayne.

He begins by talking about racial disparity in drug sentencing, noting that it would be less expensive to send drug offenders to college than to send them to jail. I'm with him on all of this. He takes a slight left turn when he begins to talk about how jails are too crowded with small-time drug offenders that they're letting out sex offenders and child molesters. Apparently, in Lil Wayne's view, "You move him out [i.e., the drug dealer], bring him to jail for life, and then you move in a sex offender."

But he's not done yet. He decides to take on Al Sharpton, for some perceived slight. I don't really care what their beef is, so I haven't looked it up. But he goes after Sharpton for being, "no MLK, you are no Jessie Jackson, you're nobody to me. You're just another Don King with a perm."

Wayne ends with a great couplet: "I love being misunderstood, why? 'Cause I live in the suburbs, but I come from the hood." What's most interesting is what happens next. He calls out, "bring the hook in," and Simone's voice comes back, singing, "I'm just a soul whose intentions are good. Oh Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood."

I'm sure people have written about this type of thing before, but I was incredibly struck, listening to this track today, how sampling allows artists to claim the authority of other figures. In this case, it's Nina Simone: respected figure of the black cultural pantheon who seems, by way of being sampled, to support Lil Wayne's arguments, whatever they happen to be. The beef with Sharpton is rather trivial, the thing about sex offenders seems like paranoid ravings, and the first bit about sentencing disparities is spot-on, but it doesn't really matter. By sampling Simone's voice so effectively here, Wayne appropriates some of her authority towards his own ends. And it's a great track, too.

Well, How Did I Get Here?

2011-04-12T14:15:00.003-04:00

Answer: If you're Charlie Crist, former governor of Florida and unsuccessful 2010 candidate for Senate, you got here by using the track "Running on Empty" for a campaign commercial without getting permission from David Byrne. Yikes! This is one of the saddest videos I've seen in a long time. It almost makes me feel sorry for the guy. Evidently, it's part of the settlement they reached.

Another example of good (academic) writing

2011-03-30T01:46:00.003-04:00

Carl Wilson's entry in the 33 1/3 series doesn't need me to do publicity for it, but reading it a few weeks ago (I'm doing work on taste and cultural capital for my dissertation), I was struck by one of his song readings. Wilson takes the Celine Dion album Let's Talk About Love as his subject, trying to figure out how he, a white, Canadian rock critic can make sense of the phenomenal popularity of Dion, someone who seems to break all of the rules for how one gains respect in the popular culture world. In the chapter where he (finally!) gets to looking at the music on the album itself, he pens a brilliant description of the George Martin-produced "middle eights" (Wilson's term, though they're actually 5 and 9 bars long, but who's counting?) of the track, "The Reason."

"The first break slips into a minor key and sets up a counter-rhythm in the cello section, ushering the song behind a curtain into the bed chamber: 'In the middle of the night,' Dion pants (echoed by a hoochie-mama chorus), 'I'm going down, 'cause I adore you!' That's right, going down. Lest you not believe your ears, there's a classic (stunned?) George Martin pause and drum fill before she lets out a stretching, postcoital sigh: 'I . . . want . . . to floor you.' And isn't 'floor' a fine euphemism there? The second time it all happens again but more so, adding whooping horns and spiraling into a shit-hot guitar solo by Robbie Macintosh of the Pretenders, and the cumulative effect is to invert the self-abasement that might irk you in the lyrics, ensuring that by what must be called the climax, the lady is firmly on top. A tune that starts with a girl kneeling supplicant before a man ends up as a rhapsody to womanly erotic power as the flux at the heart of the cosmos, and as long as you stop yourself from picturing Dion's real-life husband at any point, you have to admit she nails it in more senses than one. Finally, adult entertainment."

-Carl Wilson, Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, p. 145.

All in the Timing

2011-03-14T22:20:00.003-04:00

Hello, and welcome to 2011. Oh yes, it's been going on for several months already. I remember. I remember ringing it in with Catharine and Matt in downtown Pittsburgh, watching Tower of Power perform on an outdoor stage in unseasonably warm weather. I haven't blogged here since the new year, though, so I thought I'd just write a quick note.

I've been busy. Teaching again, writing my dissertation, traveling. The same old. As I mentioned in my last post, my article on Wynton Marsalis got published, although that seems like a lifetime ago (the fact that I first wrote it in 2007 may have something to do with that).

One of my last posts was about daylight saving's time. Since we have just "sprung forward," a few comments may be in order here, too. I am a huge fan of the fact that it is still light out when I get done teaching at 6:30. Class today was also particularly good--in addition to more "writerly" things, we talked about Adele, New Orleans hip-hop, and the current scandal about the German defense minister plagiarizing his thesis--so there were several reasons why I was actually energized leaving class today, instead of exhausted.

I didn't even mind "losing" an hour of sleep this Sunday. I just slept an extra hour.

The dissertation is coming along. It's a slog. But I've got three of the four chapters done, or at least, "done." The fourth involves me thinking in Spanish--perhaps I've had this all backwards, and I should have written three chapters on Latin American things and only one on Anglophone matters.

I saw Prince since the last time we spoke. He was incredible. I was a believer before, but now I think I'm a disciple. I also saw Maceo (again), who was a lot of fun, and the aforementioned Tower of Power.

I'm rooting for Pitt in the NCAA tournament, of course. I have about 15 projects that I would like to work on once I finish my dissertation, but I know that I have to buckle down and finish writing this little monster first. Then I get to write about Biggie, rock en espanol, the radio personality Delilah, jazz in Pittsburgh, etc. The goal is to get to all of those projects, sometime in the next 20 years or so.

Shameless Self-Promotion

2010-12-10T11:15:00.003-05:00

My article on the cultural politics of jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, "The World According to Marsalis: Difference and Sameness in Wynton Marsalis's From the Plantation to the Penitentiary" has just been published in the most recent issue of the Journal of Popular Music Studies. I'm posting here a few links that may be of interest to anyone reading the article.

This is the first (and title) track for the album, "From the Plantation to the Penitentiary." The image on the video is the album cover by artist Jessica Benjamin. It's titled Rapper (Tragedy).

I talk mostly about two other songs from the album in my article. Here's the first, "Supercapitalism."

Here's the second one, and the one that I focus the most on: "Where Y'All At?" (My apologies for the business card ad that forms the image for this--but it's the music that's important here, anyway.)

Most of the images that are used in the album liner notes can be found on Jessica Benjamin's website.

In Re: Daylight Savings Time

2010-11-07T19:47:00.004-05:00

I was certainly thankful for the extra hour of sleep this morning. It meant that sleeping late, taking a leisurely walk to Reading Terminal Market for a breakfast of crepes and pierogies (which, now that I write it, sounds weirder than it actually was), and getting the subway back to South Philly could all be accomplished before 12:30. However, I fear that this new-found light in the morning just means that the rest of the day will just be incredibly gloomy. Indeed, for those of us who don't get up early enough to appreciate the morning light (and I'm even up early by grad student standards), it means that we will live the rest of the year in darkness. That may be something of a metaphor for the way that my life will go over the next few weeks, as I struggle to complete another chapter, finish the last round of job and post-doc applications, and prepare for the end-of-the-semester grading crunch.

Oh, well. That's what I signed up for, I guess. I've decided that this year, I'm going to own it. Following the advice of Guthrie Ramsey, I've made a (frighteningly long) list of tasks that I need to accomplish over the next few days, and I'm resolved to complete them all and still have time to work on my dissertation chapter--the writing of which has actually gone rather smoothly over the last few days.

And besides, after Tuesday, I get a bit of a reprieve from the increasingly-gloomy mid-Atlantic. I'm flying to Los Angeles on Wednesday for the annual conference of the Society for Ethnomusicology. I've never been to LA, and I'm very much looking forward to seeing the city and to the conference. I've also just signed up for a Twitter account, @johnpaulmeyers, and I'm thinking of doing occasional tweets about the conference. I've got to put my money where my mouth is when I talk about the importance of new media, I guess.

Anyway, it's going to be 70 and sunny every day in Los Angeles, which sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

A-hoooooooo!

2010-10-22T22:24:00.008-04:00

The New York Times just had an article a few days ago about Colombian pop star Shakira's new album and her increasing visibility in international charity and political circles. Indeed, in some ways, she seems to be pulling a Bono, whose moments of greatest political influence also seem to come at times when his band is at its most relevant musically (the late 80s/early 90s and the first few years of this century, lining up with Joshua Tree/Rattle and Hum/Achtung Baby and All That You Can't Leave Behind--at least according to this observer). I wish Shakira nothing but the best in her charitable work, and I think she's kind of cool musically. "Hips Don't Lie" is undoubtedly a smash, a song we'll be dancing to at parties for the next twenty years. I'm also actually a huge fan of "She-Wolf," ("Loba," in Spanish). I think it's a great song, and I love the completely-out-of-left-field howls that she does. Great stuff. And everyone has had good things to say about her most recent tour.

It has to be said, though, that Shakira is just not a great singer. This becomes painfully clear on her ballads. All those little warbles and yodels she does can't quite make up for the fact that her voice isn't strong enough to sustain notes and have them sound decent. Which is too bad, because she's obviously an incredibly compelling performer and provides a much-needed Latin American presence in the mainstream pop world. But I can't help but thinking that it's not quite deserved.

You want proof? Listen to her version of The Pretenders' "I'll Stand By You" from the Hope for Haiti telethon last year.

Yikes! Her lack of vocal chops was made all the more glaring by the fact that she was preceded by my man, Stevie Wonder. Stevie does about a minute of his tune, "A Time to Love," which isn't a great song. But then he goes into "Bridge Over Troubled Water," and, frankly, just blows that song out of the water. Honestly, I brought this clip up on youtube, listened to it for about two minutes, then I was looking at something in another browser tab while the song kept playing. After another minute, I realized I was crying. It's really that good.

So I haven't had a chance to listen to Shakira's new album, Sale el Sol, yet. So we'll see. But as for now, if I'm looking for pop divas, I'll stick with Beyonce and Xtina--though she hasn't done anything very good recently, my friend Ave was right to point out that "Beautiful" is just a really stellar tune. But for everything else, Stevie.

Busy Being Born

2010-10-06T15:07:00.004-04:00

I'm not going to write one of those lame posts in which I apologize for my lack of posts and promise to do better next time. No. What I will say is that the lack of posts is due to the fact that I have been incredibly busy over the last few months. "Busy?" you ask. Yes, indeed.

In early August, Catharine and I packed up the car, wished our subletters a farewell, and headed off to Boston (first stopping at the wedding of some grad school friends in New Jersey). We spent the next few weeks planning, ahem, our wedding, which was absolutely lovely--we got married on August 29 in Catharine's old childhood home in Belmont, MA. My grandparents performed the ceremony. Our friends Mike and Ellie played jazz standards and bossa nova beforehand. Our friend Susan played Brahms during the ceremony. My sister decorated the wedding cake. Catharine's family friend Izzie did all of the cooking. And the evening ended with an absolute throw-down dance party, with jams curated by myself, my lovely wife, and my best man Matt. You really should have been there.

Since then, though, I would say that I've been running around like a chicken with its head cut off, but that would be disrespectful to chickens everywhere, who, generally speaking, are far less frantic than I have been. I'm teaching a writing course at Penn on Mondays and Wednesdays, I'm commuting back and forth between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh every week, I'm trying to keep working on my dissertation, and I'm applying for tenure-track jobs, post-docs, and evening and weekend shifts at Famous Footwear.

And I'm saving all of my best writing for my dissertation. I can't waste any of my bons mots on a non-paying audience these days, I just don't have enough to go around. So you may be stuck, for a while, with quotes from articles that I read and find interesting, along with the occasional dispatch from Dissertation Land. Oh, and when my Wynton article finally gets published (it's at the publisher now, I've even got the online tracking information and everything), there will probably be a link to that, too. That's all I can handle for the time being. Content yourselves with knowing that I'm working hard behind the scenes, trying to figure out tribute bands and explain them to everyone else. It will be worth it, I promise.

Talking 'Bout My Generation

2010-10-02T18:46:00.002-04:00

"A young person in 2002 did not, I suspect, have to attend a fancy East Coast college to come of age with a looming terror that the rites of high achievement were becoming far more sacramental than significant. Attending a school like [ ] did, however, make certain things stand in relief. One thing that stood out for me, that first fall of 2002, was that the song most often playing at the parties, the apparent soundtrack of our generation's independence, was a hit released 13 and a half years earlier, as a 7-inch single, by Madonna."

-Nathan Heller, Slate.com, "You Can't Handle the Veritas"

The Age of Miracles

2010-08-13T11:16:00.004-04:00

In case anyone was wondering what I write about, it's basically this attitude:

"Listening to Big 100.3 (WBIG-FM) Washington, like all of you should be and am always amazed that the classic rock of the late 60's, music made 40-45 years ago by 25 year olds is technically and artistically better than anything since. The guitars, drums, vocals, harmonies, and old analog production surpass anything made today digitally or computers. Truly the real golden age of music."

-Facebook status of Abbey Road on the River, the Facebook account of the Beatles tribute band festival from Louisville and Washington, D.C. As of this writing, 10 people have "liked" this status.

Even Better Than The Real Thing

2010-08-10T12:25:00.002-04:00

Another example of good academic writing:

"It is remarkable to hear CDs spoken of as original and authentic. Not long ago, they were derided as cold, inhuman, and unattractively small--the antithesis of the LP, with its comforting tactility and oft-cited warmth of sound. Yet LPs were flimsy compared to the thicker, more substantial 78s; and to extend this further, many listeners preferred the 'warm' sound of acoustic 78s to those made by the electrical process beginning in 1925. And of course, recording itself can be considered inauthentic compared to live music-making. Authenticity is clearly a moving target. Often something is authentic to the extent that it has been replaced by something newer, less familiar, and more convenient, which is why CDs can now be thought of as 'the real thing.'"

-Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music

Oh Yoshimi

2010-07-21T10:20:00.005-04:00

I saw the Flaming Lips last night at the Station Square Ampitheater in Pittsburgh. Overall, it was a pretty enjoyable show (and thank you very much to Catharine for buying me a ticket as our anniversary present). I hadn't seen the Flaming Lips before, and I'm glad I have. As the picture indicates, their shows are pretty big spectacles: lots of multi-colored balloons, tons of confetti, and singer Wayne Coyne in an inflatable plastic "space bubble" which he uses to walk across the stage and the first few rows of the audience.

There were a couple of problems with the show. First of all, the venue is absolutely terrible. Basically, it's just a parking lot by Station Square. No permanent stage or structures of any kind, no grass, just a big slab of concrete. It had nice views of downtown Pittsburgh, I'll grant it that, though. The band started shortly after 9 and played until about 10:45, ending with "Do You Realize??"--but no encores. That was sort of surprising. They also really didn't play that many songs, preferring to do looooooooong versions of the songs that they did play. There usual mode was to play a song, come to a false ending, and then play the chorus two or three more times in a big audience singalong. This works well if you do it once or twice, but any more than that and it wears a little thin. I mean, come on guys, let's hurry this thing up and play "Waitin' for a Superman," "What is the Light?," and "It's Summertime." But, perhaps because they spent so much time doing other stuff, they didn't get to any of those songs, which happen to probably be my three favorite tunes of theirs.

I shouldn't complain so much, because there were some definite highlights. I was surprised that they played "She Don't Use Jelly," but they managed to breathe some life into this song, even if it's about 17 years old by now. "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Pt. 1" sounded great in the acoustic version of it that they played, and it was nice that the entire crowd sang along to the whole song. "The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song" was somehow far less annoying live than it is on record--in fact I actually kind of liked it live. They ended with the obligatory "Do You Realize??"--which is apparently the official state rock song of Oklahoma. They took a bow, left the stage, "What a Wonderful World" by Louis Armstrong came on the PA, and people started to leave. But Wayne kept coming back onstage to wave to the crowd. He faked a good number of us out, who thought that they must be coming back to play an encore. But after about 4 or 5 curtain calls and waves, they turned on the audience lights and we all filed back to the parking lot.

Overall, I had a great time. But I've gotten to like The Flaming Lips quite a lot and I was expecting their live show to be pretty incredible. Visually, it was pretty great. But it wasn't quite up to snuff musically.

It Has Begun

2010-07-08T13:17:00.006-04:00

This year's academic job search, that is.

AMERICAN UNIVERSITY, COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
DEPARTMENT OF PERFORMING ARTS

Assistant Professor of Music (Ethnomusicology), tenure track

The Department of Performing Arts in the College of Arts and Sciences at American invites applications for a tenure track position in Ethnomusicology at the rank of assistant professor to begin in Fall 2011. Responsibilities include: continuing professional scholarly activities, teaching undergraduate courses for majors and non majors, new course and curriculum development, student advising, mentoring, and participating in departmental and university service. A strong commitment to research and demonstrated excellence in teaching are expected. Successful applicants should hold a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology; ABD with projected completion date within one year will be considered.

To apply, please submit a letter of application and curriculum vitae, along with three letters of recommendation. Please describe research interests and teaching experience as part of the letter of application. The committee will begin its initial review of applications on September 22, 2010. Send to: Ethnomusicology Search, Department of Performing Arts/Katzen Ctr, AmericanUniversity, 4400 Massachusetts Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20016-8053 or e-mail materials to: duncan at american.edu.

American University is an accredited institutional member of the National Association of Schools of Music. American University is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer committed to a diverse faculty, staff, and student body. Women and minorities are strongly encouraged to apply.

Yes, about a million people are going to be applying for this one, I'd imagine. Including me.

Obviously, Leaving Your Lover and Going to Graceland

2010-07-06T12:01:00.004-04:00

Allow to me briefly interrupt this summer heat wave for some music-related thoughts.

I think I've figured out something about Paul Simon. He certainly isn't always a great lyricist, but he has put out pretty consistently compelling records for about 45 years, no small feat. I've figured out his secret, though. He just works with really great musicians who supply him with absolute grooves of doom that would be impossible for any musician to mess up.

He talks about this in the excellent documentary about Graceland. I'll skip going into a full lecture/rehash of that album, but suffice it to say that much of that record consisted of Simon "jamming" with South African musicians, laying down backing tracks, and then writing his lyrics and vocal part later. (It seems likely that the South Africans were responsible for many of the most important musical elements of his songs, but didn't receive writing credits or royalties.) For the title track, he even says in the documentary something to the effect of, "I didn't even want to write a vocal part for it, the track was so good, I thought we should just put the track out--no way to improve on that." Nevertheless, he did write lyrics for the song, which are OK, at least. (I think the song is about driving to Tennessee, Catharine thinks it's about redemption. I'm sure one of us is right.) But, to me at least, the lyrics really still feel quite incidental. I think he was right, he could have just put the backing track out.

Same deal with a song from about a decade earlier. "50 Ways To Leave Your Lover" features a brilliant snare drum groove from master percussionist Steve Gadd. I mean, really, it's one of the great drum grooves in history.

In comparison, Simon's lyrics and his vocal performance seem rather, um, wimpy. And I'm always disappointed when the song goes to the chorus (the "Slip out the back, Jack" part) and the groove changes to kind of a lame attempt at funk. Thankfully, the main groove always comes back.

The other example of this is "The Obvious Child," Simon's collaboration with samba-reggae extraordinaires Olodum. The groove that they cook up is so compelling that Simon could have written nearly anything for the lyrics and chords and it would have been a hit.

Perhaps it's telling that these are my three favorite Paul Simon songs and the parts that I like the best seem not to have really been created by Paul Simon. I'm not sure that I would rank Simon among my favorite pop musicians of the last 45 years. In fact, I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't. Still, there's something to be said for getting musicians together, letting them fall into a nice groove, and staying (mostly) the hell out of the way. There's definitely a kind of genius in that.

Maybe Twice in a Lifetime

2010-05-24T19:21:00.003-04:00

I've blogged about this sort of thing before, but it looks like another politician is getting sued for using a song in a commercial without permission (I mean, do the people who are running to be legislators really have such a tenuous grasp of copyright law?). This time, it seems that Charlie Crist is being sued by David Byrne for using the Talking Heads song "Road to Nowhere" in a commercial. According to the Billboard article, none of the other members of Talking Heads are parties to the lawsuit; this seems strange because they're listed, at least on wikipedia, as being co-composers of the song with Byrne. But we'll see how this suit goes, especially since the other gossip about Crist is that the Democrats may try to push their candidate out of the Florida senate race so that Crist, a former Republican, would have a better shot at winning the general election against the ultra-conservative Marc Rubio.

Dancing Ourselves Clean

2010-05-20T09:21:00.003-04:00

There will probably be some more thoughts from me forthcoming on the new LCD Soundsystem record This is Happening. I listened to it on crappy laptop speakers on Tuesday while cleaning up my office (I know, not the best way to really listen to music). Maybe I'll like it listening to it on headphones, which is what I'm doing now. But for now, I definitely agree with the summing up paragraph of Ben Ratliff's review of the record in the Times:

"And 'Drunk Girls,' [the first single] the most rock ’n’ roll track on the record, grates in exactly the same way as “North American Scum” did on the last album: it’s empty provocation with a wink. It isn’t a song about drunk girls, really; it appears to be a song about a guy who’s had the great idea to write a song called “Drunk Girls” but can’t convince himself that they’re any better or worse than sober girls. There’s a laugh in there, but it's a very short one."

For What It's Worth

2010-05-04T18:10:00.001-04:00

You have to take the bad with the good, I guess. Today's another 40th anniversary.

He Hasn't Dropped Them, Forgot Them, Or Anything

2010-04-24T12:11:00.003-04:00

Pop songs for a Saturday, that I heard last night on WYEP.

I Believe You Mean "Freak Flag"

2010-04-22T14:26:00.005-04:00

Still, this is pretty good writing. Got to give credit where it's due.

"Through the Eighties and Nineties, as the rock business became more nimble at exploiting rough sounds and raw styles, the same basic formulas were applied to a variety of different rock bands playing in a variety of genres, from gangsta rap to grunge. A familiar scenario went like this: First came an outpouring of enthusiasm, as media mavens got excited about hearing kids push the limits of their all but nonexistent musical abilities. (The enthusiasm was more intense if the band first recorded for a small, independent record label.) Then came a solemn projection of the broader social implications, as a music usefully associated with yet another colorful tribute of rebellious young people was presented to the marketplace with subversive flags flying. (The press had a crucial role to play here, since rock journalists ever since the Sixties have wanted to see themselves as custodians of subversive social significance—this is about the only thing that keeps the job interesting.) Last but not least came the commercial apotheosis and simultaneous critical backlash, provoked when some specific band, perhaps one with uncommonly talented or especially good-looking young musicians, actually succeeded in the mass market—thus ‘selling out,’ and betraying the subversive flags that had been flying."

-James Miller, Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947-1977

At Least in the Top 20

2010-04-21T16:48:00.003-04:00

I haven't really followed Courtney Love's career very much. What I've got for on outline is basically this:

1. Was in the band Hole
2. Married Kurt Cobain
3. May or may not have killed/ordered the murder of Kurt Cobain, but probably not.
4. May or may not have had affairs with Billy Corgan.
5. Is addressed by former boyfriend Rozz Rezabek in the hilarious film Kurt and Courtney with the immortal words: "Don't fuck with me, Courtney. I don't care if you're Jesus and your lawyers are the 12 disciples."

So apparently the big news today is that Courtney is changing her name from "Courtney Love" to "Courtney Michelle." (She was born "Courtney Michelle Harrison.") It's not quite a Puff Daddy/P. Diddy or an Ol' Dirty Bastard/Big Baby Jesus switch, but, you know, not bad for a Wednesday. But in the Salon story about this name change, they refer to her as "one of the most recognizable women in music." Hmmm. I mean, maybe that was true in, say, 1994. But I forgot my time machine today. I mean, whatever. I understand that the "one of the most recognizable women in music" was just a throwaway line, not meant to mean very much. But for fun, I thought I would come up with a list of women in music more recognizable than Courtney. So, I've got:

Madonna
Beyonce
Lady Gaga
Ke$ha (yeah, with the dollar sign and everything)
Taylor Swift
Alicia Keys
Rihanna
M.I.A.
Fergie
Miley Cyrus
Britney Spears
Erykah Badu
Mary J. Blige
Norah Jones
Amy Winehouse
Neko Case

All of these women are way more relevant to the music scene in the last five years than Courtney, whatever her last name may be. And I don't if care if her lawyers are the 12 disciples.

It's Come Down to This

2010-04-07T14:29:00.006-04:00

The list-serve for the American Musicological Society just posted an announcement, under the heading "JOB: Summer internship in Musicology, Brandeis University":

Rebecca Cypess, Assistant Professor of Music History at the New England Conservatory of Music, will begin a critical assessment of the work of Devora Ascarelli, a 16th-century Roman Jewish writer. Little is known about Ascarelli other than the information from her book L’abitacolo degli oranti (Venice, 1601; 1609/R). The book--apparently the first published work by a Jewish woman--consists primarily of Italian translations of Hebrew texts (some in prose and some in verse) including piyyutim and other works apparently intended for liturgical use. Also included in Ascarelli’s book are two original poems in Italian, including one based on the Apocryphal story of Susanna.

Dr. Cypess’ project will consist of an edition of and commentary upon Ascarelli’s L’abitacolo degli oranti, and will consider the possibility that translation may shed light on the persona of the writer that Ascarelli’s works contain elements of the translator’s voice. It will also attempt to understand the performative aspects of Ascarelli’s works--especially those in verse--by assessing them in the context of musical-poetic practices of the Italian Renaissance and of the Jewish communities of Renaissance Italy.

The HBI research intern will work on transcription (and, if language skills allow, translation) of both the Hebrew and Italian texts of L’abitacolo degli oranti. The intern will also assist in the preparation and assembly of a bibliography on Jewish women in Renaissance Italy. In addition to transcription and work on the bibliography, some photocopying will be required. The project may take longer than just the summer, but it is expected to produce a publication, for which the intern will share credit.

PROFILE OF APPROPRIATE CANDIDATE
- Strong word-processing skills, including Hebrew fonts and formatting
- Hebrew essential; Italian helpful, but not required
- Library research skills, including familiarity with Rambi and other research databases
- Demonstrated initiative
- Strong organizational skills

The internship lasts for six weeks (June 8-July 15); the HBI provides housing at Brandeis and a small stipend of $250, as well as an academic advisor to assist the students with their own projects.

Additional details and application instructions:

http://www.brandeis.edu/hbi/internship/details.html

I have to admit that I've never heard of an internship in musicology before, and I like to think that I'm usually pretty well kept up with all the email list developments. I was also intrigued that this email showed up right after the New York Times published a story about internships, suggesting that many companies use unpaid internships as free labor, a system which keeps them from hiring a worker who would earn an actual wage. But unpaid internships do more than just boost the unemployment rate. They also undercut something many colleges and universities have taken on in recent years. The Times explains:

"While many colleges are accepting more moderate- and low-income students to increase economic mobility, many students and administrators complain that the growth in unpaid internships undercuts that effort by favoring well-to-do and well-connected students, speeding their climb up the career ladder."

Not to toot my own horn, but I've been talking about this for years. It was pretty obvious to me as a Columbia undergrad during the Hedge Fund Era (2001-2005) that certain people could afford to take an unpaid internship over the summer at a financial institution or a film company and support themselves in New York City and certain people couldn't. And while Columbia at least didn't give academic credit for unpaid internships (or any internship, for that matter), they also clearly had an idea of what their students (at least the poorer ones) were supposed to be doing over the summer: "Summer earnings" were factored in my financial aid package as part of my family contribution.

Now, I'm sure that Professor Cypess' project is going to be great and that working on it will be a great opportunity for whomever ends up being her intern. I'm also sure that the $250 stipend provided will more than cover a roundtrip cab ride from Logan Airport to the campus of Brandeis. And maybe a Red Sox cap, too.

I don't mean Professor Cypess any ill will. No doubt she's doing the best she can. This is the work she wants done, this is the money and the resources she's got to spend. That's the way the world works, I dig. Still, it seems like the successful candidate for this internship will be a pretty accomplished person, fluent in at least two (or possibly three) languages, an experienced researcher in the field of Jewish Studies (I had to look up the RAMBI database), and some decent paleographic chops. All I can say is that if I were hiring such a person, I would sure want to be able to give them more than 250 bucks and a room for six weeks in a college dorm. I'm sure Professor Cypess would too, but again, we play the hands we're dealt sometimes.

So good luck to whomever is applying for this, hopefully it will work out great for you. But I will say that in a year in which, by one estimate, job openings are already down 20-25% from last year (hardly a boom year), it kind of sucks that this is what we've got to be excited about.

Every Picture Tells a Story

2010-03-25T13:47:00.002-04:00

The brilliant rock photographer Jim Marshall has died at the age of 74. The Times has the details. Make sure you check out the slide show, too, and take a look at some of Marshall's photos. He was responsible for a good number of iconic images (probably foremost being Hendrix at Monterrey) over the years.

That Actually Turned Out Pretty Great

2010-03-18T21:58:00.005-04:00

I woke up this morning at 4:54 a.m., which is never good for me. I'm not a morning person. And on mornings when I do actually have to get up early (6:30 a.m. was what I was aiming for today), I have a terrible habit of waking up even earlier than I have to, because I'm nervous that I will oversleep my alarm. So I listened to a bit of my current obsession (Julieta Venegas, particularly the album Limon y Sal), got ready, and made my way to the Westin Hotel in downtown Ottawa, host to this year's conference of the Society for American Music.

My panel was during the second session. It turns out that I was the only person on my panel who was actually able to be there in person, the two other authors were sick and had sent electronic copies of their papers to be read. This actually worked out about as well as one could hope, but I wouldn't recommend this practice in the future for anyone. My paper on tribute band audiences seemed to be pretty well received. So that's always nice. It's also nice to be DONE with giving my paper. I was pretty zonked for the rest of the day, and by 3 o'clock, I was yawning about every 90 seconds--and it had nothing to do with the papers I was listening to, either! I had some coffee at the break and was able to rally and pay attention to the last panel of the day, which featured a paper on Norwegian jazz and exoticism in Icelandic music, particularly focusing on Sigur Ros. Both papers were great, actually. Really interesting stuff and well-presented.

I'm staying in Ottawa with Catharine's cousin, David Bignell. David is a great guy, a musician who plays in Ottawa's leading disco/funk band, The Hammerheads. I got home to his house, checked my email, and found that I had an email telling me that I received a writing fellowship next year from Penn. Which means that I can pay my bills next year without selling my body to science! And then David and I had burgers and beers for dinner while watching the Senators play.

And did I mention that they've been having record breaking heat in Ottawa? It's been like 15 degrees. Which sounds cold, until you realize that's Celsius.

So let's review: paper went well, great weather, heard some great papers, burgers and beers, and money for next year. I think that was a pretty successful day, even if it did start far too early.

Nothing But a Number

2010-02-28T12:24:00.004-05:00

I just finished reading Elijah Wald's How The Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music. Despite the provocative title, the book really isn't about The Beatles, nor does Wald really believe that they destroyed anything. The book is mostly focused on popular music in the U.S. before 1960, and his main argument is that we need to pay more attention to the "mainstream" of music that was actually popular with listeners and (especially) dancers, rather than focusing on the artists and recordings that became later critical favorites. So while a knowledge of Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings will undoubtedly improve your life, it won't really improve your understanding of the music that was popular during the 1920s--or even typical of Armstrong's output in the 1920s, since he spent most of his time playing in large dance orchestras. It's a book that spends more time discussing Perry Como, Bing Crosby, and Paul Whiteman than just about any other history of popular music.

Wald has a lot of interesting things to say about race, gender, technology, recording formats, and I have the feeling it's going to have a pretty large impact on thinking about popular music, even if it will probably be under-cited. (It's a history, after all, and when was the last time you saw the Grout or Porter and Ullman cited?)

It's certainly given me a lot to think about for my own work. I particularly appreciate an insight Wald has about age and ragtime, an insight that could basically be generalized to all the styles of popular music that followed it:

"The pop music world that began with ragtime is fiercely democratic. Whatever its underlying commercial foundations, it claims to be the music of all America, rich and poor, country and city, black and white (and yellow, red, and brown, when it bothers to acknowledge such subtleties). The only gap it does not strive to bridge is that of age: Each shift of genre blazons the arrival of a new generation and threatens all doubters with the ignominy of hunching over their canes and mumbling impotent imprecations as youth dances by." (p. 27)

Which brings me to Soulja Boy Tell 'Em. Really.

When I first saw the video for "Kiss Me Thru the Phone" (which I believe was his second single, after the ever-popular "Crank That"), I thought it was absolute crap. The premise seems to be, "Sorry, I can't be with you now, girl, but I'm hanging with my homies." At least in the video they're just playing cards, and not in a strip club. Still, doesn't seem like a very romantic sentiment.

However, I love the part that starts at about 2:20, when instead of being about Soulja Boy and his girlfriend, the video switches to showing a couple of older couples who are also using their cell phones to communicate how much they miss each other. It's a brilliant (and, in Wald's terms, a more democratic) move on the part of the director here.

The message seems to be, "Hey, Mr. White Businessman and his wife, this song is about you, too. Oh, and retired black couple, you guys could kiss each other through the phone, too." I don't know if anyone over 40 would ever actually buy a Soulja Boy record, but the portrayal of older people in a sympathetic light in this video is definitely interesting. How many other contemporary hip-hop or R&B tracks do that?

Music Where You Least Expect It

2010-02-24T21:47:00.005-05:00

The gym I go to, the Jewish Community Center here in my neighborhood of Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh, has prompted some surprising music-related thoughts. They play a very small and bizarre selection of music videos on the big television in the weight room, which is mounted right above one of the leg machines. One of the videos they play fairly often is "Soldier" by Destiny's Child (with T.I. and Lil Wayne), which prompted a 70-year old Jewish woman to remark to her trainer, a 30-year old African American guy, that she had seen Lil Wayne on the boardwalk in Florida and had gotten her picture taken with him, to send to her grandkids! How am I supposed to deal with that at 9:30 in the morning? The head spins.

(This is one of the more interesting dynamics at the gym, by the way. The clientele, at least when I show up on weekday mid-mornings, skews quite old and Jewish. But of the 6 trainers I've seen around, 4 of them are black guys around 30, who invariably end up training fairly old white men and women. Everyone seems to get along great, though, and for a bleeding heart liberal like myself, it's always nice to see a bit of interracial interacting and friendship.)

Anyway, back to music. Two other videos that they play fairly often are "That's Not My Name" by The Ting Tings and "Who's Got Your Money" by Tina Parol.

I've decided that these two songs sound a lot alike to my ears. (Also, "That's Not My Name" reminds me a hell of a lot of "Mickey" by Toni Basil--have others remarked on this? The faux marching band percussion, the layered vocals, it seems so obvious to me.)

Anyway, I've decided on an aesthetic judgement of "That's Not My Name" and "Who's Got Your Money." They're both absolute crap.

Puppets!

2010-02-21T20:40:00.000-05:00

Not a very good song, but a very cool video.

Put It In a Blog

2010-02-19T12:30:00.003-05:00

As I mentioned over on facebook, I'm a big fan of the new Alicia Keys record, The Element of Freedom. I think some of the critics are right that the first half is better than the second. But the first half just has a couple of really killer songs, particularly the one-two punch of "Doesn't Mean Anything" and "Try Sleeping With a Broken Heart." Those are just incredibly elegant, well-constructed tunes. And the second half has perhaps the most obvious hit single on the album, the collaboration with Beyonce, "Put It In a Love Song." Again, the critics are right that this is something of a re-write of "Single Ladies," but I think it's worth noting just how musically weird this song is. (And "Single Ladies" was pretty weird, too, now that I think about it.) Long stretches of this song have only minimal harmonic support from some pretty subdued piano chords--or none at all. The drums are pretty spare, too. No cymbals. The rhythm track sounds like it's basically just like a tenor drum, with occasional handclaps on all 4 beats. Beyonce beats the crap out of Alicia Keys, vocally speaking. Keys sounds out of breath by the time her verse ends, maybe she just needed to overdub it so that she could take a breath somewhere. Beyonce's second verse, in comparison, smokes. Either she's just a much better singer for this kind of music or she's more comfortable using the available studio gimmicks to craft the most convincing performance possible. And then the little piano montuno-like riff that shows up in the bridge (2:21) absolutely knocks me out. I don't know why this only gets 8 bars, it's by far the best part of the song. Evidently they just filmed a video for this song, in Rio, of all places. I really, really hope that there's a choreographed mime dance part to go along with lyrics "Text me on my cell phone."

You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train

2010-01-28T10:15:00.002-05:00

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

The Actual and The Performed

2010-01-21T14:07:00.005-05:00

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

2010-01-15T10:23:00.004-05:00

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

2010-01-07T15:04:00.004-05:00

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?

2010-01-05T18:35:00.009-05:00

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.

Merry Christmas/Happy New Year!

2009-12-24T14:38:00.002-05:00

I'm going to South Africa for the rest of 2009 and the beginning of 2010. No posts until I get back. A decade summing-up post may be forthcoming in the new year. I may actually start writing real posts again, in general. See you in 2010.

We Interrupt This Program for a Brief Personal Message

2009-12-14T15:46:00.011-05:00

We're engaged! And we couldn't be more excited.

Philadelphia. 2009.

Lago de Atitlan, Guatemala. 2008.

New York City. 2004.

Why I Love Rhapsody

2009-11-16T23:13:00.004-05:00

It's because without Rhapsody, I never would have thought to seek out Cassandra Wilson's cover of "Harvest Moon" (originally by Mr. Neil Young), which appears on the My Blueberry Nights soundtrack (random) and, before that, on her 1996 album New Moon Daughter which had somehow slipped through my fingers. Young's original version of this song is one of my favorites, but I think I might even like Wilson's rendition better. I mean, I love the woozy pedal steel guitar that leads up to the end of each chorus in Young's version (and, oh, the chiming guitar harmonics that serve as a kind of hook). But it's amazing how much mileage Wilson's version gets out of just simple movements from scale degree 2 to scale degree 1 played by a bowed bass. Brilliant, I say.

Steven's Quit The Band (sung to the tune of "Janie's Got a Gun")

2009-11-09T14:39:00.003-05:00

Steven Tyler may or may not have just quit Aerosmith (getting back at guitarist Joe Perry, who quit the band during the 80s?), but one thing is for certain: the photo the New York Times chose to include with their story on this has-he-or-hasn't-he development makes Tyler look absolutely terrible. This leads several people in the comments section to speculate if Tyler is already dead or express surprise that Aerosmith is still together. But comments like that just betray ignorance. Aerosmith may not be a critical favorite these days (if they ever were), but they've certainly been very successful live performers over the last 10 years or so, drawing quite a wide range of fans of different ages and genders. And grossing a ton of money, too, I might add. If you didn't notice that, you haven't been paying attention.

Nectar of the Gods/A Record Review

2009-11-08T20:12:00.004-05:00

Here I am in Mexico City, doing some research for my dissertation (there are a ton of tribute bands in Mexico City) before the big SEM shindig that happens in about a week and a half. I'm staying at a perfectly nice hostel run by the Quakers in Mexico. It's dirt cheap and well-located close to the Revolucion stop on the metro and the Insurgentes metrobus. The only problem is that my room has no natural light, which is really throwing off my circadian rhythms. Well, that, and the fact that tribute band shows in Mexico (as in Pittsburgh, for some reason, but no where else I've been to) run quite late. Also, since my lovely girlfriend of 5 and half years had to stay in the U.S. (what's this thing called grad school everyone's talking about, eh?), I haven't been able to count on her to force me to go to sleep and wake up at regular human times.

So, like in most areas where I have I problems, I turned to music. Listening to music to go to sleep is one of the activities most reviled by music snobs--dissing Norah Jones's music as only suitable for a nap has become a common trope in CD reviews--but I love falling asleep to music. And it doesn't just have to be something "soothing" like Jones. I think I surprised one of my college roommates by being able to fall asleep to Nine Inch Nails's The Fragile, and just today I fell asleep to Terry Riley's In C. The other day I was ready to fall asleep and I cued up Gold by Ryan Adams on my iPod. I couldn't fall asleep for whatever reason, but I at least got the chance to think about this album again, which I remember quite liking and listening to quite a bit when it was released in 2001 and in the years following. I'm significantly less impressed by it now.

It's not that it's a bad album, per se. There are no obvious misfires. The production, arrangements, and playing are of a consistently high standard. Adams is a fine singer and writes nice songs, even if you can basically hear every chord change coming a mile away. I'm just left feeling that album doesn't have any real personality, that everything on it is so middle-of-the-road, and that his lyrics leave a lot to be desired. He tends to leave A LOT of space in his songs and to cycle through 4-bar phrase chord progressions for long periods of time. That would be fine if he gave you interesting lyrics to ponder while the guitar, bass, and drums chug away. But he doesn't.

The best songs on the album--"Firecracker," "When the Stars Go Blue," and "Wild Flowers,"--find pretty melodies and solid chord progressions to depend on. The worst songs--"Harder Now That It's Over," "Nobody Girl," and "The Rescue Blues"--don't make any sense or go on too long AND don't make any sense. Case in point: "Nobody Girl" plods along for nearly 10 minutes, taking 3:30 just to get to the chorus. And what is our payoff for waiting around that long? A chorus consisting of the words:

You're nobody girl
You're nobody girl
You're a nobody girl
You're nobody girl
You're nobody girl
You're a nobody girl

Genius.

I don't mean to hate on Ryan Adams. This album did accomplish a couple of things. For one, I think "New York, New York," though not one of the strongest songs on the album, is a tune that's going to endure. And it clearly did some unexpected cultural work in the fall of 2001, with its video famously shot the Friday before 9/11 on the Brooklyn waterfront with a prominent view of World Trade Center. And "When the Stars Go Blue" has become, and I think rightly so, something of a pop standard, having been covered by a lot of people over the last 8 years. (In fact, it's been something of a victim of its own success. When Blake Lewis performed it on American Idol, the song was credited to Tim McGraw--who released a cover of it that became a country hit, but had nothing to do with writing it.)

I'm not going to try to sum up Ryan Adams's career here, especially since he has released 8 bazillion albums over the past 7 years. (This is only a slight exaggeration.) I think he's got some talent, and I think a handful of his tunes have some real merit--like the very strange but beautiful "Strawberry Wine" and the well-constructed "Starlite Diner," both from 29, one of a trio (!) of albums he released in 2005. What I mean to say is that maybe it's time to listen to Gold one more time. And then not listen to it again for a while.

And if this long post put you to sleep, well, just consider it a favor.

A Baaaaaad Mother

2009-10-19T20:58:00.005-04:00

This is an example of something rare: good academic writing.

From Foundation: B-Boys, B-Girls, and Hip-Hop Culture in New York (Oxford, 2009), by Joseph G. Schloss

"B-boying began with the break, the part of a song where all instruments except the rhythm section fall silent and the groove is distilled to its most fundamental elements. In the 1970s, when kids began throwing rebel street parties in the Bronx, people from different neighborhoods came together for the first time since the gangs had taken over, and there was one thing they all agreed on: the break was an opportunity. It was a moment on a record that was so powerful that it could actually overpower day-to-day reality and become an environment unto itself. The power of the break was so evident that DJ Kool Herc even began to play two copies of the same record on separate turntables, repeating the break over and over again, giving the dancers more time to showcase their most devastating moves. Before long, Herc and other pioneering deejays like Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash were playing nothing but breaks. And the dancers responded by creating a new dance form that was nothing but devastating moves: b-boying. Some even began dropping to the ground and spinning around. Hip-hop music and b-boying were born as twins, and their mother was the break."

Dorf on Music

2009-10-14T22:35:00.002-04:00

It seems like we might be going into a rockism rant, doesn't it? That was my reaction, at least, to Jody Rosen's column on Slate discussing the fact that NPR seems to be incredibly attached to music by white artists, at least as evidenced by All Songs Considered's list of Best Music of 2009 (So Far). The exceptions to NPR's taste for music by white artists is music by black artists which fit the rubric of DORF, standing for:

Dead
Old
Retro
Foreign

Basically, what Rosen is pointing out is that you can't expect to hear much contemporary black popular music on NPR nor should you expect to see it on NPR-sponsored "best of" lists. The black music that NPR does tend to play will be by someone like Tracy Chapman, Solomon Burke, or Youssou N'Dour. This is certainly true, and Rosen picks out a good acronym that describes a phenomenon that, as he discusses, is prevalent not just at NPR but in music festival programs, your neighborhood Starbucks (what's the plural of Starbucks, by the way?), and the mainstream press in general. I'm not sure that this is something to be lamented or made fun of--as I think Rosen is at least hinting at doing. I think it's just something to be understood. NPR isn't going to be playing Lil Wayne. Hot 97 probably isn't going to be playing Grizzly Bear.*

Now that we've got that cleared up, we can watch "Dorf on Golf."

*There may be a future post on Grizzly Bear, too.

It's Bigger than Hip-Hop

2009-09-28T13:51:00.002-04:00

David Segal published an article in the New York Times this weekend comparing hip-hop to conservative talk radio pundits. I'm not particularly interested in commenting on his points--that rappers and pundits both have huge egos, verbal skillz/skills, and are often getting in feuds with other rappers and pundits, etc. I'm more interested in noting that this is the second prominent article in recent months comparing hip-hop to some larger trend in the cultural world. The first one was Marc Lynch's article in Foreign Policy, comparing beefs between rappers to beefs between nations. Lynch's article got a ton of attention when it came out in July. I wonder, what is the next political or social idea that can be explained with a convenient reference to hip-hop? I vote for health care reform! I'll even start you out: "The public option is just like MP3 downloading." Now, go!

I will say one thing about Segal's article in the Times. If you're going to compare hip hop and conservative punditry, it might make sense to mention the huge fight between Ludacris and Bill O'Reilly. And, if you're going to specifically compare Jay-Z to Rush Limbaugh, you may have wanted to listen to Jay-Z's most recent album, in which he specifically takes on both Bill O'Reilly and Limbaugh himself. This is from the track "Off That."

Please tell Bill O'Reilly to fall back
Tell Rush Limbaugh to get off my balls
This is 2010 not 1864.

I'll leave it at that.

Place Them In a Box Until a Quieter Time

2009-09-21T18:45:00.004-04:00

The John Edwards/Rielle Hunter affair took a musical twist this last weekend. Andrew Young, an Edwards staffer who had previously claimed to have fathered Hunter's baby, said in a book proposal that Edwards attempted to comfort Hunter by saying that after his wife Elizabeth died from cancer, Edwards would marry Hunter in a rooftop ceremony in New York, with the Dave Matthews Band providing the wedding music. Do you think they know Pachelbel's Canon in D?

Authenticity?

2009-09-09T21:13:00.003-04:00

Apparently, today I'm supposed to be listening to the remastered Beatles albums and playing the new Beatles Rock Band game. Instead, I'm listening to the Beatles on vinyl. My versions of A Hard Day's Night, Something New, and Beatles VI were bought for 99 cents each at a record store on Bleecker Street in the Village, in a section called "Wreckords"--they were so cheap because they couldn't vouch for the condition of these, as opposed to the quite high prices they were commanding in the rest of the store for (apparently) pristine copies of Curtis Mayfield albums. And it's true that these records have a few scratches and a skip or two. But to my ears, they still sound pretty brilliant.

(My copy of Abbey Road I bought back in Fargo, and I stole my mom's copy of Sergeant Pepper. As always, thanks mom!)

What's Life Without the Occasional Detour?

2009-09-07T14:16:00.008-04:00

After all of these years, Bob Dylan still keeps us guessing. Far from calming down in his old age, he's certainly done some things to surprise us in recent years. In 2003, he appeared in a Victoria's Secret ad, for which his song "Love Sick" served as the soundtrack. Controversy ensued.

A few years later, Dylan's appearance in a commercial for the Cadillac Escalade raised some more eyebrows among his fans who are less than enthused about gas-guzzling SUVs.

In recent weeks, I've learned of a couple of things relating Dylan that have made me scratch my head. Taken separately, each one isn't terribly eccentric. But taken together, I have to wonder if he's in a particularly mischievous mood right now.

First came the news that he was detained by cops in Long Branch, New Jersey--on the charge of being an "eccentric-looking old man" and wandering around looking at houses before his gig with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp. The cops didn't recognize him, apparently, but someone on his crew vouched for him and all was forgiven. Insert your own Henry Louis Gates reference here.

Then came word, from his excellent "Theme Time Radio Hour" that Dylan might be lending his dulcet tones to a car company to be the voice of their GPS navigation system. Well, I can certainly say that I, and many other Dylanaholics would certainly buy that. But it seems pretty likely that was a joke.

Now, I hear that Dylan, the former Jew, former evangelical Christian, and current . . . (well, like anything else in his life, who the hell knows what his current religious proclivities are?) is releasing a Christmas album this year. A strangely conventional gesture for a man who has never been very conventional. But he's donating all the profits from the album to charity, which is a nice touch. And I really hope this means that we'll get to hear him growling through "O Little Town of Bethlehem" in supermarkets, pharmacies, and department stores very soon.

Politricks, Part 2974

2009-07-22T11:05:00.007-04:00

A leftover from the fall election: The RNC and Jackson Browne have settled, after Browne sued the RNC for using his song "Running on Empty" for a commercial supporting John McCain and criticizing Obama's fuel policies. According to the New York Times: "In February a judge denied motions by Mr. McCain and the committee to have the case dismissed on the grounds that their use of the song was protected by the First Amendment and fair-use doctrine." I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure this was a stupid ploy on the part of McCain and the RNC. There's a reason why companies pay a lot of money to pop musicians to use their songs in television advertisements. (Probably the most famous case of this--and there are many--was when Microsoft paid a bunch of money to the Rolling Stones to use "Start Me Up" in a commercial for Windows 95.) Why would it be any different (i.e., a fair-use, First Amendment issue) if the company just happens to be a political campaign?

The more interesting case is when politicians use pop songs at rallies. Left-leaning musicians like Bruce Springsteen and John Mellencamp have complained when their songs ("Born in the U.S.A.," "Pink Houses," "Our Country") are played at campaign events by conservative politicians. In some cases, they've been able to convince Republicans to refrain from playing their songs at these events. But legally, my sense is that they probably can't be forced to stop. I'd also be interested to see if the fair-use, intellectual property, free culture people (who tend to be left-leaning) have a reaction to the settlement. It will be interesting to see what they have to say when the people being sued by copyright holders are conservative politicians and not college students. Until then, Salon has a pretty good summary of recent interactions between U.S. political campaigns and pop music.

Taking a Second Look

2009-06-30T13:06:00.012-04:00

Something else happened this weekend, as you may have heard. Michael Jackson’s death on Thursday afternoon certainly took me by surprise, as I switched frantically between NYT.com, cnn.com, msnbc.com, latimes.com, and (unfortunately) tmz.com for details. Hospitalized? Heart Attack? Coma? Dead? I certainly share the sentiment of Rob Corddry, who said that he wished that, instead of TMZ announcing the death of Michael Jackson, it was Michael Jackson who was announcing the death of TMZ.

Like many people, I’ve had a complicated relationship with Michael Jackson over the last 15 years or so. It’s worth saying once again that he was never convicted of child abuse. I have no idea whether he did the things he was accused of, though I recognize that there is a distinct possibility that he did, especially in light of the erratic behavior he has exhibited even in his very few interactions with the larger world in recent years.

So basically, what I’ve come up with is this. There are three emotions I’ve got in reaction to the news of Michael Jackson’s death. (1) Sympathy, certainly, for the boys he was accused of molesting, because I’m willing to admit that there’s a distinct possibility Michael Jackson actually molested them. (2) Sympathy for Michael Jackson who lived a rough life, who was himself abused and scarred by his father and the constant pressure of touring and performing during his childhood and who, it seems pretty clear, was mentally ill. Frankly, his case has made me more and more surprised when people who were child stars or had overbearing parents (like Stevie Wonder or Tiger Woods) AREN’T royally messed up adults. (3) Finally, I’ve joined a lot of people in spending the last few days re-listening to his music, watching his videos on youtube, and marveling at his incredible talent.

I was born 2 months after Thriller was released, and while I maybe have some subconscious flickers of seeing the videos for Bad on MTV (courtesy of my older sisters, who are also responsible for my passing acquaintance with New Kids on The Block videos from this era), I definitely remember Dangerous. I remember watching the face-morphing “Black or White” video on television, I remember hearing those songs on Y94, the pop music station of my hometown Fargo, ND. In high school and college, when my music collection expanded (and file sharing networks proliferated), I worked my way back through his catalog, grooving to tracks like “Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough,” “Working Day and Night,” “Rock With You,” “I’ll Be There,” “ABC,” “I Want You Back,” “Never Can Say Goodbye,”—not mention basically the entire Thriller record, with the exception of the unfortunate Paul McCartney duet, “The Girl is Mine." (I wonder, whose bad taste is responsible for this tune?)

Rather than gush on about how much I like the tunes I’ve just listed above (or about how AWESOME both the song and the video for “Remember the Time” are), I’ll finish with one insight that I have on Michael. The email listserv for the American Musicological Society is having something of a mini-debate about whether Michael Jackson is musically important, whether his music is any good or not--and hence worthy of discussion (or not). This seems like a silly debate. I don’t believe in the tyranny of sales or statistics, because these things are not necessarily the signs of an intense engagement. People buy things for all sorts of reasons. But if an artist is able to inspire as much interest, engagement, and devotion around the world as Michael Jackson has in the last few days and throughout his career, it seems pretty foolish for us as scholars to argue whether his music is important or not. Clearly the music is important to people. If we can't recognize even this, we are really lost as a discipline.

What I will say is that people seem to engage with Michael Jackson in a different way, a way in which videos aren’t the souvenir of the song on the radio or the CD (or cassette or record). The other way around, I think, at least starting with the “Thriller” video. And this is one of the things that may be troubling people who are looking at Jackson’s strictly musical legacy (as some musicologists seem to be). Jackson was such an impressive dancer, his performances at awards shows or television specials were so stunning, and his videos were so elaborate that I think many of his fans treat these performances as the primary text of his career. They may buy the recordings or listen to the songs on the radio, but I think that the videos are not a “supplement” to the “purer” experience of listening to the music in isolation. Personally, I am a lot less interested in studying Michael Jackson as a pure musical artist whose work must be studied sonically only and then compared with recognized geniuses to see if it measures up (even though my personal belief is that the music, at least a good portion of it, absolutely does). Let's try to get out of the business of deciding whether things are worthy of our scholarly efforts based on our personal aesthetic preferences. I think Michael Jackson's music was great, but what I’m far more interested in is Michael Jackson as an incredibly influential social phenomenon, a performer whose songs, videos, and live performances have a tremendous amount of meaning for people around the globe. That’s what I want to hear and read more of.

Femi Kuti at World Cafe Live

2009-06-30T12:39:00.007-04:00

On Friday, Catharine, Matt, and I went to World Café Live and saw Femi Kuti and his band. (Femi’s father was Fela Kuti, the late, great star of Nigerian afrobeat.) Also happening in Philly on Friday, Beyonce played at the Wachovia Center. I wish that I could have seen Beyonce, too, because I imagine she puts on a great show, even if I’ve been less than impressed with anything on I Am . . . Sasha Fierce. WCL is a lot closer to my apartment (and within my price range), so we went there instead.

I was pleasantly surprised to find a fairly large and diverse crowd at Femi’s show. There were West Africans in their 20s and 30s, African Americans, middle aged white people, and the usual assortment of hipster white dudes in their 20s with cool sneakers.* Throw in some $3 bottles of Yuengling, and you’ve got a recipe for a party. And it was nice to see people actually filling up World Café Live, since the last time I was there for a Halloween night performance of DJ Spooky and King Britt, there were about 12 people there—not including the half dozen of us who had free tickets WCL had given the music department.

Anyway, Friday was a really fun show. They played mostly tunes from Femi’s most recent album, Day By Day. (The title track isn’t a Godspell cover.) I had heard this album on Rhapsody, but I’ll submit that music (particularly afrobeat) is always more fun to hear live. Femi’s band has 14 people in it: the usual keys, bass, guitar, drummer, and percussionist, plus 5 horns, Femi himself on organ/sax/trumpet, and 3 female back-up singers/dancers. A word about these women. Their occasional back-up choruses weren’t terribly audible or frequent. What was more frequent/visible was their nearly non-stop dancing for the entire two hour concert. And when I say dancing, what I really mean is ass-shaking, because that’s what these women did. Faces pointed 180 degrees from the audience, beads dangling from their short yellow skirts, shaking their asses—especially when the drummer played his snare or closed hi-hat, which seemed to be a cue. I’m saying. If hip-hop is criticized for sexualizing and demeaning women on the account of fleeting images in a video, don’t let Stanley Crouch come to a Femi Kuti concert.

On the walk back to Center City in search of sustenance, Catharine tried to do a feminist reading of the dancers, arguing that the dance was a kind of virtuosic display of female dancing prowess, power, and sexuality. And it is true that these women could shake it. Old man that I am, I get tired of standing for two hours and busting out a few modest dance moves. These women were working it for two hours straight. So, credit is definitely due for that. But I can’t really salvage anything progressive about their performance. It’s hard for me to see their performance as being anything other than for the benefit of the gaze of the male members of the audience.

Femi made a couple of strange choices as well, including ending his set (before the encore) with a song titled, I think, “Don’t Come Too Fast”—at least this was his repeated refrain. This was a song about sex, that had a long interlude in the middle where Femi proceeded to instruct the audience in the ways of love. At one point, he even said that when you’re a real good lover, you’ll be like his father, Fela, and start at 10 p.m. and not finish until 4 in the morning.

Now, let’s talk about this. First of all, and maybe I’m just showing some latent Puritanical roots here, but it is weird to talk about the sexual abilities of your parents. Who wants to think about that stuff, talk about it, or lecture an audience about it? Second. Earlier in the night, Femi performed a song with the lyrics, “Fight AIDS, Stop AIDS.” Perhaps not the most artful lyrics, but certainly a good message. You might think that a song about sex would also include something about the need to protect oneself and one’s partners. You might also think that bragging about your father’s abilities as a lover is kind of ironic given the fact that he died of AIDS. It’s a little bit like having a father who died of cirrhosis and bragging about how great a drinker he was. I mean, I’m sure it’s true and all, but it seems like it’s in bad taste to do such a thing.

Nevertheless, despite these two bizarre things, I had a great time at the show. I’m a sucker for big horn sections with loud bari sax lines, and really, who among us isn’t?

*There will be a future post discussing hipster white dudes in their 20s with cool sneakers.

Returning to Lake Minnetonka

2009-06-22T13:35:00.005-04:00

The July issue of Spin (curiously, available at newsstands but not up online yet) has a 25th anniversary retrospective on Prince's Purple Rain. The article is a kind of oral history of the album and the film, with contributions from a lot of the people around Prince at the time. ?uestlove is also interviewed to shed some light on the topic and says . . . well, I'll just quote him.

"Purple Rain really started hip-hop culture, whether the historians want to view it that way or not. You have Prince himself, a very unusual-looking figure, five feet tall--pretty much anybody considered a musical genius in hip-hop has some sort of odd physical feature, i.e., Biggie's lazy eye."

What?

Anyway, to go along with the magazine story, Spin commissioned a tribute album, in which 9 bands covered the 9 songs from Purple Rain. You can download it for free starting tomorrow. I guess they're trying to make it like a physical record and not releasing it until Tuesday (or Monday at midnight).

The man himself, not surprisingly, did not participate in the Spin article. As Spin editor Doug Brod said: "We did a full court press to get Prince himself involved. He's a pretty tough guy to get a hold of, and he doesn't dwell much on nostalgia." Only the rest of us do that.

A More Serious Obituary

2009-06-20T10:52:00.003-04:00

The great sarodist Ustad Ali Akbar Khan has died at the age of 87 of kidney failure. The Times has the details.

Auto-Tune, We Hardly Knew Thee

2009-06-19T12:22:00.002-04:00

Here lies Antares Auto-Tune
born 1998 ("Believe" by Cher)
died 2009 ("Death of Auto-Tune" by Jay-Z)

In case you haven't heard yet, Jay-Z has proclaimed the "Death of Auto-Tune." Just about a year ago, I talked about how Kanye was releasing a new single with no rapping on it, just him singing with the help of Auto-Tune. (That track was, of course, "Love Lockdown," the first single from his all-Auto-Tune album 808s & Heartbreak.) Evidently, however, this is a bandwagon that Jay-Z isn't interested in jumping on. The track isn't exactly classic Jay-Z, but I do particularly like the hilariously out-of-tune (and therefore obviously un-Auto-Tuned) "Na na na na, hey, hey, hey, good-bye!" that functions as the chorus. Also, this chorus is evidently sung by Kanye himself, which perhaps gives a hint as to what 808s & Heartbreak would have sounded like without Auto-Tune.

Now, so my question is: if this is really the death of Auto-Tune, when will it become ironically cool again (like, for example, the TR-808 drum machine)?

Anyway, SFJ has a good little article on Auto-Tune for those not familiar with it. I'll quote him to give at least one possible reason why Auto-Tune may be on the way out: "You can only feel so bad for a robot."

Suze Orman Goes Crazy

2009-05-15T14:40:00.003-04:00

Really, though? "Goes," is the verb in that title? (And not "is," for example?) The New York Times profile of the personal finance guru features Orman's insulting and offensive take on teachers:

"She [Orman] has been reluctant to work on school curricula on personal finance, because she says students can’t learn empowerment from people who aren’t empowered, and teachers, she says, are too underpaid ever to have any real self-worth. She told me: 'When you are somebody scared to death of your own life, how can you teach kids to be powerful? It’s not something in a book — it ain’t going to happen that way.' She once delivered pretty much the same message at an anniversary celebration of a private school — she seems to recall calling the school a 'travesty' — and was all but escorted to the door when she was done."

I'm with her that teachers are underpaid, but I don't see how it follows that they're "too underpaid ever to have any real self-worth." I mean, really? Self-worth is determined only by compensation? I'm not saying compensation can't be a part of it, but do you think that teachers (and people in general) may find self-worth in more than one place, and not completely in their bank balances? And teachers are "scared to death of life?" That's just ridiculous. Can I get a "Yikes!" over here?

Money (That's What I Want)

2009-04-30T10:36:00.005-04:00

On the competition for NIH challenge grant money that is available as part of the stimulus package, Amanda Schaffer writes:

"To a young applicant, these look a bit like de facto earmarks, drawn up with particular scientists in mind. (Many have combed the topic lists to see where their work might fit in. This has involved a lot of all-nighters and an 'almost comedic reshaping of what people do,' said the New Jersey biologist.) As a result, the competition has started to look something like America's Got Talent—if Bob Dylan, Beyoncé, and Bono were allowed to compete."

Bono, of course, is not actually American. Which I guess would make the possibility of him performing on America's Got Talent even more unfair.

By the way, where's the federal stimulus money for ethnomusicology? Someone has to keep pointing out slips like this one.

I'm Slipping Under

2009-04-29T16:07:00.006-04:00

Some preliminary google searching hasn't turned up too many promising hits. So I ask you, dear readers, is it true that there hasn't yet been a really good "toxic assets" joke that references Britney Spears's song "Toxic"? (Don't even pretend like you're not thinking the riff to that tune now.)

A Bad Day Fishing Beats a Good Day Working

2009-04-26T13:55:00.004-04:00

Stanley Fish gave a talk at Penn last week sponsored by the Philomathean Society. It was one of the few events I’ve attended at Penn that seemed to have a relatively even mix of undergrads, grad students, and faculty present. I’ve been reading Fish’s columns for the New York Times for a while now. Love him or hate him, he certainly is quite an interesting writer, and the talk showed him to be an engaging speaker as well.

He seems to have changed his ideas quite drastically over the course of the nearly 30 years since his book Is There a Text in This Class? I don’t know if he has formally renounced that work, but his concern in the title essay of that book with “the authority of interpretive communities” over and against authorial or textual authority (authorial authority—hilarious!) doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the kind of intense formalism (one could say nihilism) that he seems to practice and preach nowadays. The Penn talk was devoted to themes covered in his most recent book Save the World On Your Own Time, which argues that professors should teach their subject and not seek to indoctrinate their students in a particular political ideology. Sounds fine on the surface, right? Because who wants to hear some gasbag professor expounding on how wonderful Obama is or on how the Iraq war was necessary to keep the United States free from terror?

But at the basis of Fish’s arguments is a persistent belief that “academic” or “intellectual” work or thinking is somehow different (read: “above”—though he said that “academic exceptionalism was one of the worst sins committed by academics, it’s hard not to see him as also partaking in this vice) from other kinds of more pedestrian pursuits and shouldn’t be justified or judged based on these more earthly standards. While he acknowledges that the very act of creating a syllabus that includes or doesn’t include white/black/male/female/straight/gay writers (or musicians!) is in fact a political move, he doesn’t believe that this kind of political act is akin to the more banal acts of advocating for a particular candidate or policy.

In his vision of the ideal university, professors do not aim to make their students appreciative of diversity or more engaged citizens or to develop their students’ characters. According to Fish, these are not the things they are trained or paid to do. (Though, here was a logical inconsistency in his work, since he started his talk by—disapprovingly—reading mission statements from universities that in fact do state that they are trying to foster an appreciation of diversity, prepare students to function in democracies, etc. Whether Fish likes it or not, in fact universities do hire professors to do exactly these things, at least according to their mission statements.)

And when asked to justify the work that they do to their state legislatures or funding agencies, scholars (particularly those in the humanities) should not offer any justification for what they do, since none exists outside of the world of the “exhilarating pleasure” they get from the texts they are studying.

Perhaps it is clear by now that I disagree profoundly with Professor Fish. I don’t believe that the admission that “everything is political,” is, as Fish said, “trivial.” The kind of neutral, apolitical reading of a text that Fish argues for is, in fact, a political move itself. As the historian Howard Zinn put it best, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.” The world is moving: wars are started or ended, policies are enacted or rejected, people are cured of disease or they die. We can’t pretend that our actions or nonactions—academic or otherwise—have nothing to do with the events around us. If nothing else, our presumed neutrality at least perpetuates the status quo.

This talk was an interesting counterpoint to another earlier panel sponsored by the Philomathean Society on the future of the humanities within the academy. That panel was organized around the questions:

1. Does the academic analysis of works of literature, philosophy and history
have instrumental value?

2. Should they be funded?

Putting aside the fact that the referent of the second question is unclear (if the pronoun is meant to refer to the analysis, why is it “they” instead of “it?”), the answers given by 2 of the 3 Penn faculty members on the panel addressing this question were rather disappointing. Basically, the answers were “yes” and “yes.” Not terribly surprising stuff. Fish himself offers “no” and “yes” to these questions. This set of answers is perhaps more interesting, though Fish doesn’t offer any reason why a “yes” would follow from the first “no.” But I really wanted to see someone (preferably a well-funded member of the academy) make a strong argument for a “no” to the second question. The devil’s advocate in me says, “Hey, so why should we as a society spend so much money on Stanley Fish so that he can obsess over Milton for nearly 50 years?” I am not one of those people who believe that art and culture will save us. Or, if they will save us, I believe they will be far less effective at doing so than an HIV vaccine, a cure for cancer, or an end to poverty.

I will say, however, that the music department’s own Gary Tomlinson said some very on-point things about what sort of responsibilities the humanities can have. In particularly, he talked about how one of the deconstructive movement’s failures has been its inability to counter the popular portrayal of itself as a painted-in-a-corner fringe practice using an arcane jargon to pore over the minutiae of texts. Instead, Tomlinson argues for a deconstruction that has a sharp ethical edge to it, a deconstruction that is about denaturalizing accepted notions and providing alternative examples of human difference. This, for me, is really the only reason to teach: to be able to encourage critical questioning in one’s students so that, when they are the ones holding the levers of power, they will be able to make more informed decisions about what policies and practices should be followed or discarded. Otherwise, what are they doing in my class when they should be learning more about how to dress wounds or design more efficient transportation systems?

Fish, obviously, disagrees. And so I disagree with him. But he certainly presents his arguments in an interesting manner, and there’s no denying that he is an engaging speaker and writer. It is definitely quite the privilege to be able to think about and discuss such important topics. As someone once said, though, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” As for Fish, I’m not sure he believes there is a “point,” period. Or at least not one that we as academics can get to.

Shadows in the Field

2009-04-25T22:05:00.002-04:00

A letter to the folks over at amusicology.

Thanks for this post about a very important topic. You’ve managed to remain a lot more sanguine about this whole thing than I’ve generally been able to. So, if you’re not “lamenting anything particular about this state of affairs,” then I would be happy to!

What you’re talking about, generally speaking, is the “casualization” of academic labor, the fact that more and more teaching is being done not by TT faculty with benefits and job security but by grad students, recent Ph.D. graduates, and others, for very little money/benefits/job/security/university support, etc. As a grad student who has taught my own high enrollment classes over the last few years (and who will likely be trying to cobble together adjunct work in the future), I would say that there is, indeed, something lamentable about this. The problem isn’t that as grad students or non-TT faculty that we are better or worse teachers than TT faculty, but that we aren’t really treated like real employees by our university (and compensated and supported accordingly).

I think you’re absolutely right when you say that we need to manage expectations when we get to grad school and not think that we’re going to get TT jobs at research universities as soon as we graduate. I hope that things like the musicology jobs wiki (which you guys have been great about drawing attention to) lead to a more honest discussion among prospective grad students, current grad students, and current faculty about the state of the job market. I would love to see aggregated statistics about how many people are entering musicology/ethno/theory/comp Ph.D. programs every year, what percentage graduate with degrees, and what percentage land TT jobs within 1 year, 5 years, or 10 years. My sense is that there are just far more people graduating every year than the number of TT jobs available. At a recent SEM, Philip Bohlman talked in his presidential speech about how great it was that there were more student members at the conference than faculty. For him, this was a cause for celebration, evidence that ethnomusicology was growing and assured of a bright future with so many young scholars interested in the field. But looked at another way, it means that (at least for that one weekend in Columbus, but possibly generally as well) there are more people in the field who will want jobs in a few years (when they presumably graduate) than currently have jobs. So unless every faculty member retires or the number of faculty lines in ethno increases dramatically, there’s going to be some serious un(der)employment.

I generally agree with most of your suggestions for how to manage this “shadow residency” period that will no doubt result from this serious un(der)employment, except for “ABDs should have the opportunity to teach independently.” Teaching experience in grad school will certainly make teaching as an adjunct in the future easier. (It will probably also make one more marketable on the job market generally speaking, as well. At least, I hope so.) But I also think that the increasing number of grad student teachers is part of the very problem we’re addressing, and that we should advocate for fewer courses to be taught by non-TT faculty, so that universities will have to hire more TT faculty to teach classes.

I also think that if we as grad students need to do a better job managing expectations, our departments need to do a better job managing outcomes. This situation where there are far more students with degrees than TT jobs is a situation that our departments have, in some sense, created (or allowed administrations to create for them, depending on to whom you would like to ascribe agency). Are there fields other than the academy that allow so many people to go through their rigourous professional training programs when the prospects for stable employment are so bleak? Our departments need to advocate for more faculty lines to be created and, frankly, to limit the flow of new students entering the Ph.D. pipeline. And as students, we need to do a better job of advocating for ourselves and not simply accept the fact that many of us will, despite having credentials, be only marginally employed for years at a time. That could include many things, including supporting unionization efforts, advocating within our own institutions and administrative structures for more TT jobs, or encouraging undergraduates to attend only institutions where the teaching is done by trained professionals, who are compensated like trained professionals. Whichever path we want to take, though, I think we need to find some way to get the supply of scholars more in line with the demand, unless we all want to be living in a “shadow residency” for the rest of our professional lives.

Don't Tell Philip Bohlman

2009-04-16T13:58:00.003-04:00

There's a whole website devoted to the 54th Annual Eurovision song contest on the New York Times. Eurovision, for those of you who aren't familiar with it, is a huge celebration of national identity, nationalism, and pop music. It's like "American Idol" avant la lettre. A few of us here are pretty amused that a certain ethnomusicologist at the University of Chicago seems to be moderately obsessed with Eurovision, writing about it here, here, and in one of his columns in the SEM newsletter. At least, those are the places we've tracked down thus far. There could be more out there.

Stay Classy, San Diego

2009-04-15T09:51:00.003-04:00

I finally got the schedule for the conference that I'm giving a paper at in May. Nice to see that a couple of other Penn folks are on the program. And how awesome is it to go to a conference that pretty much exactly covers the types of things you are interested in studying? No offense to other conferences, but it's nice not to have to really strrrrrrrrrrrrrrretch to make a paper or a panel relevant to your own concerns. So it should be a fun couple of days. Anyone got good restaurant recommendations for San Diego?

Tidbits of the Day

2009-04-14T10:09:00.003-04:00

So I love this, I think this is great. Shawn Fanning, the former Northeastern University student who founded Napster, you know how his parents met? They met because his mother attended a concert of an Aerosmith cover band that his father was playing in! What a brilliant link between the old way of copying (with musicians) and the new way of copying (with ones and zeroes). That's so going in my dissertation. Right next to the anecdote about Vladimir Putin being rumoured to have attended a private performance by the ABBA tribute band Bjorn Again, which Putin himself denies.

Yarrrrr!

2009-04-13T15:28:00.003-04:00

Isn't it amazing how there has been all this talk in the media the last week or so about, you know, real pirates as opposed to, say, people who download music illegally? I swear, I think the primary referent for "piracy" now in journalistic discourse is no longer the swapping of digital media files. How long before it switches back? Certainly, there's enough time for a good (?) pirate joke . . .

What's a pirate's favorite baseball team?

The Carrrrrrrrrrdinals!

Alternate Answer: The Pirates!

Alternate Answer: The Twins!

Come to Philadelphia For The . . .

2009-04-08T18:51:00.002-04:00

Sorry, haven't had a lot of time to post. But I do have one exciting piece of news. Catharine and I are moving back to Philadelphia for a couple of months. Which means, among other things, that I can attend the 2nd annual Roots Picnic. The Roots, TV on the Radio, Antibalas, Public Enemy. I'm so there.

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

2009-03-29T20:50:00.006-04:00

Leave the gun.

Take the cannoli.

Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis

2009-03-28T17:16:00.003-04:00

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

2009-03-14T22:52:00.005-04:00

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)

2009-03-09T22:25:00.004-04:00

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

2009-03-03T18:09:00.004-05:00

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)

2009-03-02T18:41:00.002-05:00

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.

Ending Up Where We Started

2009-02-10T13:11:00.004-05:00

I may yet do a proper Grammy recap post (Raising Sand, really?), but probably not. I didn't even watch this year's ceremonies. I probably could have found them down here in Buenos Aires, but you know, life's too short sometimes. Especially when you can catch all the good bits later on youtube anyway. I am definitely amused by the fact that Gwyneth Paltrow introduced Radiohead (or, at least, Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood--didn't see Ed, Colin, or Phil) and the USC Marching Band. I especially liked it when Paltrow called Radiohead incredibly influential. Essentially the subtext of her statement was: "Radiohead is so cool that I married the singer of a band who desperately wants to be Radiohead (or U2)."

And why don't pop artists play with marching bands more often, anyway? Is it just me or is it way awesome everytime these collobarations happen (see also "Jesus Walks" from Dave Chappelle's Block Party).

There's some discussion over at Slate about M.I.A. and her fashion choices. The headline is "What Should a Hugely Pregnant Sexpot Pop Star Wear, Anyway?" And, I'm sorry. Maybe I was out of the room for this (or out of the country, one), but when did M.I.A. become a "sexpot"? Cath and I saw her this past (northern hemisphere) summer in Philly and had an interesting conversation about how she represents a very interesting kind of stage performance for a female performer in which sexuality (at least as conventionally thought of) is about the 7th or 8th most important element in her performance. If that. (In case this matters, by my calculation she was about a month pregnant at the time of the concert.) The people at Slate bat around the term jolie-laide, but I'm not even convinced that applies to M.I.A. I'd buy that for Missy Elliot, maybe. But M.I.A., no. Is it sexist to insist that sex is a big part of every female pop performer's image/persona/success. Or is just naive to assume that it isn't? And how do issues of South Asian orientalism work in here, too? They did get the "hugely pregnant" part of the headline right, though. That part is pretty inarguable.

I'm also not terribly convinced by people calling M.I.A. a rapper and leaving it at that. Clearly rap is one element in the bag for her. But so are about a million other things that I'm not even close to understanding (nor are most of the people who write popular press articles, it seems). I will repeat my call for someone smarter and with more time than I to write something about M.I.A. and break it down for the rest of us.

At Last?

2009-02-05T08:03:00.005-05:00

File this one under, "Snap."

Etta James is apparently going to whup Beyonce's ass. I haven't seen Beyonce's version of "At Last" from the Inaugural, nor have I watched really any of the events from the Inauguration. I guess maybe I should at some point, and I imagine they are all up on youtube for all to see.

Anyone see Cadillac Records, yet? What's next, anyway, in this line of movies, after Dream Girls and Cadillac Records? Is there gonna be a Stax movie? Or (closer to home) one about Philadelphia International Records? (It's pretty obvious what this movie should be called, right? It's gotta be Love Train.) Or one about Def Jam?

Anyway, Cadillac Records is on the list of movies I need to see when I get back to the states. Other movies on the list include:

Milk
Slumdog Millionaire
The Wrestler
Che
Gran Torino
Frost/Nixon
Tropic Thunder

Am I missing anything obvious?

And while we're on the topic of asses getting whupped, here's some classic Wesley Willis.

A Long, Long Time Ago

2009-02-03T18:41:00.003-05:00

Anniversaries, anniversaries. Just last week was the 40th anniversary of the Beatles's last live performance together, their rooftop lunchtime concert at the end of the "Get Back" sessions. And today is the 50th anniversary of the death of Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens. I have something of a slight connection to this event, as I'm originally from the town they were on their way to when their plane crashed: Fargo, ND. This article from my hometown paper does a good job explaining Fargo's place in rock 'n' roll history. It ain't quite "George Washington slept here," but one Elston Gunnn (really, with 3 n's) did live in Fargo during the summer of 1959. If you don't know who he was, you may want to look him up.

Straw Men and the Popular Press

2009-01-30T11:07:00.005-05:00

I was doing a bit of research this week about anti-consumerism, since part of my dissertation has to do with the consumption practices surrounding a culture (rock music) that has at times at least paid lip service to anti-consumerist sentiments. I stumbled across the wikipedia article for "anti-consumerism" and was amused to find that the section "Criticism of anti-consumerism" consisted of exactly two sentences. Those two sentences reference an article by James Twitchell (a great name) from a 2000 issue of Reason magazine. And, sorry to beat on something so old, but Twitchell's arguments were outdated even in the year 2000.

I think that much of our current refusal to consider the liberating role of consumption is the result of who has been doing the describing. Since the 1960s, the primary "readers" of the commercial "text" have been the well-tended and -tenured members of the academy. For any number of reasons--the most obvious being their low levels of disposable income, average age, and gender, and the fact that these critics are selling a competing product, high-cult (which is also coated with its own dream values)--the academy has casually passed off as "hegemonic brainwashing" what seems to me, at least, a self-evident truth about human nature: We like having stuff.

In place of the obvious, they have substituted an interpretation that they themselves often call vulgar Marxism. It is supposedly vulgar in the sense that it is not as sophisticated as the real stuff, but it has enough spin on it to be more appropriately called Marxism lite. Go into almost any cultural studies course in this country and you will hear the condemnation of consumerism expounded: What we see in the marketplace is the result of the manipulation of the many for the profit of the few. Consumers are led around by the nose. We live in a squirrel cage. Left alone we would read Wordsworth, eat lots of salad, and have meetings to discuss Really Important Subjects.

So, a couple of things. This isn't vulgar Marxism. And vulgar Marxism isn't vulgar in the sense that it's "unwashed" or "unsophisticated." I'm not anything close to being an expert on all the various strands of Marxism, but I can at least tell you what vulgar Marxism is: it's Marxism that assumes a 1:1 ratio between base economic conditions and superstructure (the shape of institutions, artistic forms, etc.) with no mediation involved.

And secondly, if you go into any cultural studies class, you will not "will hear the condemnation of consumerism expounded," as Twitchell suggests. In fact, if anything, you might hear the opposite. You'll hear about "remaking," "remixing," "appropriating," items from consumer culture to express personal and cultural meanings. I mean, even 9 years ago when this article was published, how many years after Dick Hebdige and Henry Jenkins was Twitchell writing? These have become accepted ideas. I think that just about every scholar of popular culture (professor or grad student) hangs onto this fundamental tension: that there is a "culture industry" that exercises enormous control over consumers but that the act of consumption can (at the very least, seem to) be an act of empowerment for consumers. In my teaching of themes of globalization, technology, and popular music to a classroom full of undergards, I always try to hang onto a bit of ambiguity in my lectures and our discussions. And I think this sort of humility and an unwillingness to preach to our students is pretty common in liberal arts classrooms, in general. (But maybe things are really THAT BAD and we should be preaching to our students, screaming at them to get out there and make a difference. I don't know. But I don't think I'd make a good preacher.) Twitchell's account of what is happening in the academic study of popular culture is unconvincing, to say the least.

So what's at fault here for such a shoddy argument? Is it Twitchell? Reason magazine? The inherent space and style limits of writing for the popular press? As a blogger, consumer of the popular press, and someone not entirely satisfied with the way the academic press works, I hope that there are alternative forums available for important and serious discussion. The internet, as they say, should hopefully be one of these places, since concerns over space and money should be drastically reduced here. I'll refrain here from philosophizing about the promises and challenges of the internet, because I think that most of that writing (probably any that I would attempt, as well) is so light that it will just float away in the breeze of our collected laptop fans. But what I mean to say is that if you're looking for an interesting negative look at anti-consumerism, it ain't in this article.

Money, Money, Money, Money . . . MONEY!

2009-01-28T10:09:00.004-05:00

Let's play devil's advocate here. Or just devil. Or just plain advocate.

The Times has an article about the controversy following Brandeis University's decision to sell off the collection from its Rose Art Museum to bolster its finances, which have taken an enormous hit in the wake of the recession (and, indirectly, the Madoff scandal). The reaction seems to be uniformly negative: how could Brandeis do such a thing, surely this portends terrible events to come when universities treat these priceless objects as vulgar commodities . . .

This reminds me of Lee Rosenbaum's talk at Penn's ethnohistory colloquium series last year. Much of her talk concerned the selling of artworks, archeological finds, and other assorted objects by institutions in search of funds. (And this was before the current recession!) There was a disapproving tone throughout her entire talk, along with more than a vague air of elitism. How could institutions in charge of protecting all that is good and holy fall victim to such crass concerns of money? The conversation of course also turned to the Gross Clinic debacle. For those of you not in Philly, Thomas Jefferson University sold a Thomas Eakins painting to one of the Wal-Mart heirs (which seemed to be the real offense) in order to finance building new dorms. A storm of protest ensued, appeals were sent out, and many otherwise-reasonable Philadelphians donated money so that the painting could be purchased by a consortium of Philadelphia-based museums, keeping it in the city (and not going to a new museum in Arkansas, perish the thought).

But let me ask a question, because the reactions to the Gross clinic fiasco, Rosenbaum's talk in general, and the current Brandeis controversy leave me wondering: is it ever OK for an institution to sell an object from its collection in order to finance other projects? I understand if there are legal issues about selling things that may have been bequeathed in wills, etc. But let's imagine all of those things are sorted out. Is it still "wrong" or "bad" for Thomas Jefferson or Brandeis to decide that it has other priorities for its assets? In a perfect world, everyone would have art museums, dorms, state-of-the-art facilities, and tenure-track jobs. (Actually, I'm not sure that a perfect world would have art museums, at least the way they are now, but that's another conversation.) So short of living in a perfect world, institutions make choices. And we should argue about those choices, advocate for the causes we believe are most improtant, absolutely. But I don't know why the selling of art works has to be immediately off the table and protected as something existing in a rarified realm, above petty concerns. Actually, I think that ideology of art is incredibly damaging both for art and society as a whole. In the current job market, if Brandeis can keep the lights on and maybe hire some more professors with the money to be gained from selling off its art collection, I don't know why I'm supposed reflexively be against that as a matter of principle. Maybe it's a good idea, maybe it isn't. But let's argue about it constructively rather than just dismissing it out of hand. Am I missing something here?

Hardly Blue Anymore

2009-01-27T16:51:00.007-05:00

File this one under "Surprised, Pleasantly."

I neglected to blog about the 50th anniversary edition of Kind of Blue by Miles Davis when it came out last year. Mostly, because I was kind of pissed at Columbia for releasing YET ANOTHER version of this album without much new content, but with a hefty price tag. (And because the 50th anniversary edition came out a year early. Come on, guys. If you're going to do this, do it right.) As I wrote earlier about Bob Dylan's Tell Tale Signs, these special editions are a great way of squeezing more money out of an artist's devoted fans, bundling limited new content with lots of older or otherwise available content, and charging a fortune for the whole thing. That seemed to be the case with the Kind of Blue 50th anniversary edition. The new content was limited to some relatively unenlightening studio outtakes (which are described in Ashley Kahn's book, anyway). And Columbia tried to pass off recordings of the same band from 1958 as "new" when in fact they had been available on '58 Sessions for quite a while. ('58 Sessions, by the way, is brilliant. Maybe even as good as Kind of Blue itself.)

So it was nice to see that Columbia wised up a little bit and released a 2-CD set with the studio outtakes, the '58 Sessions recordings, along with the original album for a far more reasonable price. And it was especially nice to hear something else they included with this 2-CD set: a 17-minute live version of "So What" from Miles's Spring 1960 European tour. This is definitely worth the price of admission (especially if somehow you don't already own Kind of Blue). And the good news is that even if you do, you can buy the live version of "So What" from the Amazon music store for 99 cents.

And seriously, you owe it to yourself to listen to this track any way you can. Coltrane plays his ass off on this version. Really, it's one of his best solos on record to my ears, on par with his solos on "Someday My Prince Will Come," "Stella by Starlight," and "India," to name just a few of my favorite solos of his off the top of my head. If you've listened to the Live at Birdland album or Impressions (or any one of many other Coltrane live recordings now available), you know that Coltrane live can be a revelation. His solo on this track definitely qualifies on that front.

Sing us a Song

2009-01-24T11:13:00.004-05:00

You're right, Ron, this is an odd moment to bring up Billy Joel.

Ron Rosenbaum has a take-down of Billy Joel in Slate. Rosenbaum seems to focus mostly on Billy Joel's ever-present contempt for "phoniness" and the fact that it can't obscure that he himself, Billy Joel, is a phony. Rosenbaum takes particular issue with Joel's apparently unconvincing defenses of the authenticity of the workingman's experience, though this is complicated by the fact that Rosenbaum also finds the time to praise Bruce Springsteen, for whom a similar criticism could be easily made.

Anyway, I don't really have a dog in this fight. But I do like these little polemics when they show up in the popular press. (Another classic example is this piece by Jon Pareles about Coldplay.) As Rosenbaum rightly points out, the opposite kind of article is far more common to encounter.

Plus, there's always the chance we'll see another of those "career re-evaluation" essays that places like the New York Times Sunday "Arts & Leisure" section are fond of running about the Barry Manilows of the world. The kind of piece in which we'd discover that Billy's actually "gritty," "unfairly marginalized" by hipsters; that his work is profoundly expressive of late-20^th-century alienation ("Captain Jack"); that his hackneyed, misogynist hymns to love are actually filled with sophisticated erotic angst; that his "distillations of disillusion," to use the patois of such pieces, over the artist's role ("Piano Man," "The Entertainer," "Say Goodbye to Hollywood," etc.) are in fact "preternaturally self-conscious," not just shallow, Holden Caulfield-esque denunciations of "phonies," but mentionable in the same breath as works by great artists.

(Indeed Chuck Klosterman has a piece exactly like this about Billy Joel, which I'm sort of surprised Rosenbaum didn't mention.)

Also interesting for me is that there is NO MENTION AT ALL of musical setting (arrangement, solos, melodies, rhythms, tunes) in this article. Rosenbaum only finds the time to criticize Joel for his lyrics. You could have almost forgot that Joel is a musician and that his music might be a worthwhile thing to look at when making a broadsided rant against his artistic worth. But then again, that's just me speaking as a musician and ethnomusicologist. What's the chorus of his most popular song, anyway? Is it "Tell us a story, you're the poet"?

Territorial Pissings

2009-01-18T11:32:00.003-05:00

One of the perils of being in a foreign country is, despite the advances of the internet, you miss out on certain news items that, while perhaps not having large popular appeal, are certainly worth your attention. So apologies for being two months late on this, but here goes. Evidently a Jersey City city councilman peed from the balcony of the 9:30 Club in D.C. onto the audience below at (wait for it) a Dark Star Orchestra concert. Dark Star Orchestra is a Grateful Dead tribute band, and one of the most commercially successful tribute bands in the United States. I don't even really like the Grateful Dead that much, but I have to admit to quite enjoying the Dark Star Orchestra concert that I saw this past summer at Penn's Peak (outside of Philly). One of my theories about the popularity of tribute band concerts is that, for an audience mostly made up of aging baby-boomers, they are far more comfortable experiences than conventional rock shows: the acoustics are better, people aren't smoking pot around them, the seats are more comfortable, they often take place in the suburbs, 25 year-old kids aren't spilling beer on them. However, that theory bites the dust if public urination from elected officials is going to become a part of the tribute band experience. Let's hope, for all of us not seated in the balcony, that it doesn't.

Penalty and Repentance

2009-01-10T12:50:00.002-05:00

William Zantziger, a.k.a. William Zanziger, a.k.a. the subject of one of Bob Dylan's best early songs, "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," died a week ago at the age of 69 in a nursing home in Maryland.

Resisting an Obvious Pun or Reference (an example)

2009-01-07T15:31:00.002-05:00

Here's a thought, kids. Let's have a column discussing Caroline Kennedy's Senate candidacy that DOESN'T make reference to a certain song by Neil Diamond. I know it's hard out there, editors of the world, but let's try to do better than Maureen Dowd and Cal Thomas.

Don't Believe The Hype

2009-01-07T12:09:00.002-05:00

Or, actually, do believe the hype. Because it's true. Dear Science by TV on the Radio is a brilliant record, one of the best things to come out in 2008. Too bad I first heard it in 2009. Well, I'm usually a little late on these things.

Freddie Hubbard

2008-12-29T17:49:00.004-05:00

Somehow I thought that he must be older than that, but jazz trumpeter Freddie Hubbard died today at the age of 70. I have to admit to not really knowing much of his music beyond a handful of Blue Note albums from the 1960s that he was a sideman on. These include Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch, Wayne Shorter's Speak No Evil, and Herbie Hancock's Maiden Voyage. Classics, all of them, and Hubbard plays beautifully on just about every track, sometimes outshining his more-famous bandmates. His solo on the title track to Maiden Voyage is particularly brilliant. His work is definitely worth a second listen. Or a first.

On the Curious Similarities Between Britney Spears and James Brown

2008-12-26T15:10:00.009-05:00

I may be mishearing this, but then there's a long and noble history of misheard lyrics in popular music. I'm finally listening closely to "Womanizer" by Britney Spears. I don't know whether I should be embarrassed by that or not. I suppose as a popular music scholar, I should be embarrassed that I hadn't really heard this song until today. But the small part of me that's still a jazz-and-classic-rock snob is shocked to even be admitting to listening to this song ever. But I'm trying to catch up on all of those end-of-year lists and so forth, so I figured I should give this track a serious listen.

Anyway, the song is fine. And I'm so out of the loop on the Britney comeback/crash stories that I'm not sure which part of the cycle we're in right now. So I'll limit my comments to one of the lyrics on "Womanizer." Britney is taunting this guy, saying she won't get with him because she knows that he's a womanizer. And then she says, "You say I'm crazy/ I got your crazy." Which is really cool, at least in the way that I'm reading it. It's like, "Oh yeah? I don't care what the tabloids say. You think I'm crazy? I got your crazy right here, mister. Come a little bit closer." And then POW!!! She smacks that no-good womanizer.

However, I may be wrong on my interpretation of the lyric. In fact, I may be repeating a similar mistake. One of my favorite songs by James Brown (who went to the great big funk show in the sky almost exactly three years ago) is "The Big Payback." And my favorite line in that song is "I don't know karate/but I know ca-razy!" It's actually the same kind of sentiment that Britney's song is putting out there. It's like, "I might not know karate, I might not make it neat and clean, but if you cross me, I will mess you up big time, I will go crazy on your ass." Except I've also heard this transcribed as "karazor" or something instead of "ca-razy." And karazor, according to various interpretations I've seen on that most prestigious of sources (the internet), is either some sexual technique (really--I researched the controversy surrounding this misheard lyric a few years ago) or just JB's way of saying "razor." Meaning he's going to cut you with a razor. A similar sentiment to my interpretation, I guess, though certainly more explicit about the kind of violence intended.

But there's a similar sort of ambiguity happening with "Womanizer," too. Indeed, some of the lyrics websites have a slightly different hearing of Britney's lyrics, putting it as "I got you, crazy" instead of "I got your crazy." Which changes the meaning completely. But I think my interpretation is right, because Britney's vocal accent is clearly on "got" which only really makes sense if the lyric is "I got your crazy." If it was "you" and not "your," the vocal accent would be on the "you," since that's the most important element in the phrase. "I've got you, crazy." Just like that other song by James Brown: "So good, so good, I got you."

So you've got to hand it to Britney. If she can make me think of James Brown twice in one discussion of a rather unremarkable pop song, she's got something going for her.

Three times, actually. For, as somebody once said, "Hit me, baby, one more time." And as somebody else once said, "Hit it and quit it!"

Respect

2008-12-18T11:09:00.002-05:00

It's great and all that Aretha Franklin is performing at Obama's inauguration. I sort of wish that someone other than John Williams was being commissioned to write the piece that is going to be played, evidently, right before Obama is sworn in. But my big question is: where's Stevie? I trust that he's being saved for the 3-hour long concert and dance party that's happening immediately after the ceremony, right? I've heard people say that they expect Inauguration Day to be a cross between the 1963 march on Washington and Woodstock. I wonder if anyone who played at the original Woodstock is going to play during Inauguration Day? I'd vote for Richie Havens.

"And you see it there . . . one right after the other"

2008-12-17T12:50:00.005-05:00

Honestly.

http://www.slate.com/id/2206749/

Did Someboday Say . . .

2008-12-16T15:16:00.004-05:00

I don't particularly care who gets appointed to be the next senator from New York state,* but it does seem to me that a good portion of the discourse surrounding the possible appointment of one Caroline Kennedy to this seat involves something that I do spend quite a bit of time thinking about, namely the mythology of the baby boomer generation. Exhibit A is Ruth Marcus's Washington Post article. Marcus has gotten beat up all over the internet for her musings on Caroline Kennedy as a senator. Again, I don't really care who gets appointed. But here are a few of the paragraphs that seem to have drawn some reaction, and that also seem to be dealing with boomer nostalgia:

What really draws me to the notion of Caroline as senator, though, is the modern-fairy-tale quality of it all. Like many women my age -- I'm a few months younger than she -- Caroline has always been part of my consciousness: The lucky little girl with a pony and an impossibly handsome father. The stoic little girl holding her mother's hand at her father's funeral. The sheltered girl, whisked away from a still-grieving country by a mother trying to shield her from prying eyes.

In this fairy tale, Caroline is our tragic national princess. She is not locked away in a tower but chooses, for the most part, to closet herself there. Her mother dies, too young. Her impossibly handsome brother crashes his plane, killing himself, his wife and his sister-in-law. She is the last survivor of her immediate family; she reveals herself only in the measured doses of a person who has always been, will always be, in the public eye.

Then, deciding that Obama is the first candidate with the inspirational appeal of her father, she chooses to abandon her previous, above-it-all detachment from the hurly-burly of politics.

I know it's an emotional -- dare I say "girly"? -- reaction. But what a fitting coda to this modern fairy tale to have the little princess grow up to be a senator.

The baby boomer generation likes stories--"fairy tales," in Marcus's words. Hey man, don't we all? The only difference is that the baby boomer generation, far more than other groups in the U.S. now, seems to have the power to turn theirs into reality. I think that's what Marcus is saying would happen if Governor Paterson** appointed Caroline Kennedy to this senate seat. And I certainly think that's a big part of what's happening in the tribute band scene.

*OK, that's a lie, I do care. I'm holding out hope that it will be someone cool like, I don't know, David Bowie (probably not a U.S. citizen, though he does live in Tribeca, doesn't he?) or Bernie Williams. And I realize that those choices are as irrational as Marcus's critics would say her choice of Caroline Kennedy is. But come one. Bowie and Bernie are WAY cooler than Caroline Kennedy. This isn't even a contest.

**Shout out to Governor Paterson, by the way. He's awesome! I hope he has a future in government. He's already the coolest black, blind governor New York state has ever had.

John's Grammy Ballot (Pt. 2)

2008-12-11T19:45:00.004-05:00

So, album of the year.

The nominees are:

Coldplay, Viva La Vida
Lil Wayne, Tha Carter III
Ne-Yo, Year of the Gentlemen
Robert Plant and Alison Kraus, Raising Sand
Radiohead, In Rainbows

So most of these albums I had already listened to when they came out. And a track from Year of the Gentlemen was a topic of a previous post. So I decided to dive into the one record that I had only listened to very vaguely, Lil Wayne's Tha Carter III.

Lil Wayne got a lot of Grammy nominations, but he seems to be a pretty polarizing figure. I read one review of this album (in Guatemala, no less) that said that it was basically unlistenable, and that every beat and every rhyme was crap.

I wouldn't quite go that far. But I do have to admit to being a being surprised that people seem to like this record quite a bit. The singles aren't exactly bad. "Mr. Carter" is at least salvaged by the fact that Jay-Z shows up on it. I'd like "A Milli" if the bass and snare didn't come in every time that I sort of get into the strange groove conjured up by sampling someone saying "A Milli" continuously (that's a 3+3+3+3+2+2 pattern for those of you keeping score at home). "Got Money" with the ever-Auto-Tuned T-Pain guesting on it reminds me a little bit of "Yeah" by Usher. I do like the line where he tells people to clap their hands if they've got a bankroll. But I think this album actually should have been disqualified from the first song ("3 Peat") which is TERRIBLE. Lil Wayne's raspy, whiny voice is particularly irritating on this track, and he doesn't have any guest artists around to save him. And I'm sorry. But any song that name-checks Stuart Scott is grasping at straws, don't you think?

Anyway, there's already been a little bit of discussion of Ne-Yo on this blog and in the comments section of another blog. I do think Ne-Yo is pretty much a genius. He reminds me a bit of Michael Jackson in the early 1980s. I hope that things turn out better for Ne-Yo, though.

So yes, the synth on "Miss Independent" is pretty cool. And Ne-Yo in general seems to be able to sing without too much studio trickery (though, these days, who knows?). There are lots of nice grooves and timbres on this record. It's definitely state-of-the-art pop music, everything is in its right place, if you know what I mean. But there's nothing that's really grabbing my ear, no irresistible hooks, no tracks that are begging to be replayed. It's very solid, but just not too exceptional. I could listen to this all night, but I don't think I'd remember much of it afterwards.

Raising Sand is pretty obvious Grammy bait. All of these collaborations with older respected artists we haven't heard from in a while and newer, critical-darling artists are. (See, for example, Van Lear Rose.) Sometimes the hype is worth it, sometimes it isn't. But, as I said on the "Record of the Year" post, I'm less than impressed by this album. Fine music for playing at a Starbucks (is that going to become the dis of the 21st century?). But can't really hold a candle to some of the other nominees (not to mention all the albums that came out that weren't nominated).

Coldplay shouldn't be overlooked as easily as they sometimes are. There's always going to be a place for big, loud, chiming guitar-based rock. And if you want to ever discover how good Coldplay is at doing what they do, go see a mediocre Coldplay tribute band (I'm convinced that all tribute bands to Coldplay are probably mediocre). Because, at least in the studio, Chris Martin is really a very impressive singer, far better than he gets credit for. I used to think that his voice was some sort of unholy, faceless amalgam of every successful tenor in 1990s rock (a little bit of Jeff Buckley, Bono, Dave Matthews, and Thom Yorke). But I've changed my mind. Maybe it's just that those four have faded a bit into the background, but Martin's voice seems to have taken on a bit of personality, at least to my ears. There's some interesting stuff on Viva La Vida (particularly, I dig "Lovers in Japan"), but it's actually not as good as A Rush of Blood to the Head. Snicker all you want, but that album was great. Even if you're a Coldplay-hater (which I sometimes am), there are some inarguably great tunes on that record.

It's unfair for me to name Radiohead's In Rainbows as record of the year, but I'm going to anyway. It's unfair because Radiohead is unequivocally my favorite band of the last 15 years and I'm moderately obsessed with them. I of course actually paid to download In Rainbows, and then I bought it legitimately on vinyl (cause I'm cool like that) when it came out on January 1st of 2008. And I downloaded the free videos that they put up on iTunes. And I paid to download the "From the Basement" videos from iTunes, as well. (And they're GREAT, by the way! Highly worth downloading.) And I saw Radiohead in Camden this last summer, basically my last night of carousing and listening to music before I left the U.S. this fall.

The first four tracks on the album are great, man. I hate to be so positive, but can you really find anything at all that isn't AWESOME in "15 Step," "Bodysnatchers," "Nude" [finally we get to hear an official version of this track which had been kicking around for like 10 years, check the Meeting People is Easy documentary], or "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi"? No, you can't.

I'm less impressed with the rest of the album. "Reckoner"--another old bootleg finally released officially--has lost my favorite part somewhere in the wash (the part at thend where Thom used to say, "Reckoner, Ba ba ba. Reckoner . . . whoo."). Check out the original here. But it's still pretty good, just not approaching the brilliance of the first few tracks. "House of Cards" keeps showing up places (for example, Grammy nominations and an episode of the ludicrous television show Brothers and Sisters that also had "Nettie Moore" by Bob Dylan in it), and I'm not sure entirely why. I'm not as impressed by the album-ending "Videotape" as some other people seem to be. I've never quite understood this thing where people go crazy over the last songs of Radiohead albums. I never really liked "Street Spirit (Fade Out)" or "Motion Picture Soundtrack," either. ("The Tourist," though, the last track from OK Computer is wonderful.) "Jigsaw Falling Into Place" salvages the second half of this album, though. That, coupled with the sheer brilliance of the first four songs makes this my favorite album of the last year.

But I should say that there's NO WAY it will win the Grammy. Unless you weren't paying attention last year, you know that Radiohead first released this as a pay-as-you-wish (including nothing) download on its website, only releasing it in conventional physical formats several months later. The record industry is deathly afraid of this type of stuff, and there's no way they're going to reward Radiohead with a Grammy for pulling the kind of stunt that they hate. Not that Radiohead have really been darlings of the Grammy voters, anyway. I'd sort of like to see Thom give a Grammy acceptance speech, though. But I don't see it happening this year.

Loose Canons Sink Ships

2008-12-08T18:19:00.005-05:00

Two articles--one pessimistic, one optimistic--both advancing a notion of the unchallenged supremacy of the canon. Yikes!

Some representative quotes at random:

Victor Davis Hanson, writing in City Journal, "Any common, shared notion of what it means to be either a Westerner or an American is increasingly rare." Umm, and this is a bad thing why? Since when is being an American or a Westerner a singular kind of identity?

John Parker, writing in something unfortunately titled Intelligent Life about (among other things) Classic FM, a less-stuffy classical music radio station in the U.K.: "It is certainly true that a good deal of Classic FM’s output is undemanding; the most ferocious and rebarbative contemporary music is banned. But it plays the world’s greatest music in proper recordings. It takes the classical canon beyond the traditional audience of connoisseurs and, with its magazines and books, tries to engage new audiences more deeply with the music it plays." All well and good. I should hope that any radio station would try to "engage new audiences more deeply with the music it plays." But unquestioningly describing the Western Classical Tradition (minus Schoenberg, Stockhausen, and Boulez--apparently) as "the world's greatest music" is a bit much in this day and age, don't you think? And saying that listening to this music shows that you are objectively smarter reeks of a kind of lazy "Mozart for Babies" type of attitude. Come on. Where's Bourdieu when you need him?

Interestingly enough, the two articles are kind of talking to each other, albeit in a weird way. Hanson argues that one of the reason there's a boom for general education liberal arts online courses, CDs, DVDs (look for advertisements in the New Yorker) is that universities are no longer providing access to this knowledge, but people are still hungry for it.
Parker says that more and more people are listening to opera on their iPods and reading the classics in Oprah's book club; both of these are signs that people are getting more intelligent. Though Parker also says that one sign that people are more intelligent is that a greater percentage of people have degrees. As someone currently in a Ph.D. program, I can tell you that more degrees definitely does not necessarily equal more intelligence.

John's Grammy Ballot (Pt. 1)

2008-12-07T19:05:00.004-05:00

Once again this year, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences declined to nominate me for a Grammy. When will they ever recognize my talents?

(I tell this joke every year. It reminds me of an introduction that David Bowie gave at a concert at Jones Beach in 2005. "I'm going to play 'Under Pressure' right now. I wrote this song with Freddie Mercury. And once again, tonight, Freddie failed to show up to sing his part.")

Anyway, since I'm not nominated, I can be completely objective. I'm going to listen to as many of the nominees as I can stand and let you know my thoughts. Today we'll just look at the nominees for "Record of the Year." And if anyone can explain the difference between "Record of the Year" and "Song of the Year," well, I'd be grateful. (By the way, you can see the full list of nominees--not including me--here.)

And the nominees are . . .

Coldplay, "Viva La Vida"
M.I.A., "Paper Planes"
Robert Plant and Alison Kraus, "Please Read the Letter"
Adele, "Chasing Pavements"
Leona Lewis, "Keep Bleeding"

Well, we can get rid of "Chasing Pavements" right away. Come on. This song is terrible. Really. It's not even a good example of this style of pop music (that I don't particularly like, but can at least appreciate when it's done well). It's a kind of faux-Dusty Springfield that seems to be all the rage these days (see Winehouse, Amy--who, by the way, is a million times better than Adele). I have no idea how they come up with nominees, but this one seems like it was put on the list as a dare.

Leona Lewis and "Keep Bleeding" aren't going to get much more support from me. I can at least recognize that this song is put together a lit bit better than "Chasing Pavements," but there's nothing in this tune to grab my interest.

In theory, I like the idea of Robert Plant and Alison Kraus, but I'm not terribly impressed by "Please Read the Letter." It's fine, but sonically not terribly interesting. This album is general seems to be filled with reverbed guitars and mezzo-piano vocals. And the last minute of this track is a half-hearted attempt to rock that actually just sort of depresses me.

"Viva La Vida" is now the subject of a lawsuit (see my previous post). Rhapsody (always good for provocative and hilarious album reviews and descriptions) describes this track as "Phil Collins swagger." Really? Phil Collins? Since when has Phil Collins been associated with swagger? He's actually, I think, the last person I associate swagger with. I do like the syncopated strings, though. But I just can't stomach the chorus of this song anymore. Hell, Bono would be embarrassed to sing something like, "For some reason I can't explain/I know Saint Peter will call my name."

The obvious choice is "Paper Planes" by M.I.A., clearly the best song of the last year. Maybe one of the best songs of the last 5 years or so. Though it's hard to call this the "record of the year." What record? There are like a million different versions of this song. A remix E.P. and then a ton of un-official versions of various genres. (Dig, if you can find it, the bossa nova cover.) This song is actually a lot less rhythmically interesting than something like "Bird Flu," but I can understand how the juxtaposition of the sing-songy verses and the gun shot/cash register chorus with what sounds like a small children's choir singing about how they want to take your money would tickle the mind grapes (so to speak) of the listening public. I've raved about M.I.A. before, so I'll limit my remarks to quoting one of the greatest boasts I've heard in a long time in a record: "Yeah, M.I.A. Third world democracy. I've got more records than the KGB. So, uh, no funny business."

If I Could Sue

2008-12-06T13:06:00.005-05:00

Coldplay, which just got nominated for a bunch of Grammys (what is the proper plural of "Grammy," by the way?) also just got sued. Joe Satriani, he of guitar-shredding fame, alleges that Coldplay ripped off his song "If I Could Fly" on the title track of their latest album, Viva La Vida. Evidently this possible plagiarism/influence has been kicking around the web for a couple of months now. And of course, like anything, there's a youtube video illustrating the matter under discussion. You be the judge.

(I really like the stretched picture of Chris Martin in a turtleneck. That should be their next album cover.) And is if that isn't enough, a Brooklyn-based band called Creaky Boards also alleges that Coldplay ripped off the track "Viva La Vida" from them! I just hope that they don't end up getting sued by Satriani, too. Check out their video here.

I wrote a review of this Coldplay album when it came out, maybe I'll recycle it from my facebook profile if this case actually goes anywhere. I haven't had much of a chance to look at the Grammy nominations yet, but there may be a post or two on that soon, as well.

Following up on "The Minneapolis Vulgarian"

2008-11-28T13:09:00.003-05:00

In the interest of presenting some more complications (actually, some more he said/she said), I wanted to include a bit of the reaction from Prince's apparent denunciation of homosexuality. This caused quite a bit of consternation across the internet (not the least, from me). Enough consternation that one of Prince's people started putting out the word that Prince was misquoted. Claire Hoffman, the writer of the piece, claims otherwise (hardly surprising) and also says that she wasn't allowed to bring a taperecorder to the interview. So for a summary of some of the developments from Prince's camp, click here. For some further information from The New Yorker's Claire Hoffman on the experience of interviewing Prince, go here.

PS: "The Minneapolis Vulgarian" is Stanley Crouch's description of Prince from his classic polemical take-down of Miles Davis, "On the Corner: The Sellout of Miles Davis." You can find it here. I don't really agree with anything that Crouch has to say about music, but I do have to admit that he pushes a mean pen, as the kids say. On the same page that features that pithy description of Prince, he also has a pretty wild description of Miles Davis's late-career fusion, describing it as a "sound so decadent it can no longer disguise the shriveling of its maker's soul." I hope one day that I do something so objectionable to a man like Crouch that it warrants that kind of phrase.

All We Are Saying

2008-11-20T11:37:00.005-05:00

There's a lot to write about the last month I've spent here in Argentina. Overall, Catharine and I have been very happy here: good food, nice weather, the people are friendly (though they generally speak in a variety of Spanish that is still fairly incomprehensible to us), and there are a ton of concerts. In fact, somewhat to my surprise, there are a TON of tribute bands in Argentina. No doubt you'll all hear me spin out some eleaborate pontifications about tribute bands in Argentina for my dissertation (especially since I've been able to do interviews with three tribute band musicians over the last week), but I just wanted to mention a couple of things now.

Last week, I saw The Beats at the Teatro Gran Rex. Lots of interesting things happened at the concert (again, which you'll get to read about in my dissertation), but one particularly interesting thing happened during the performance of "Imagine" at the concert. First of all, this is not technically a Beatles song, but it is performed fairly often at Beatles tribute band shows, so I wasn't too surprised to hear it. More interesting was the manner of its performance. The "John" in the band was onstage alone, not playing any instruments, and accompanied essentially by a karoake tape background. I don't quite know why he just didn't have his bandmates accompany him, but the background sounded pretty good, in fact, it could have just been Lennon's recording with the vocal stripped from it. While he was singing, they showed video images on a huge screen above the stage and had Spanish subtitles for the lyrics. This was interesting, because while the audiences here are really into tribute bands and usually sing along quite strongly, I have suspected for a while that most of the audience doesn't actually understand the English lyrics in these songs (and Alex, the bassist I interviewed yesterday from the Pink Floyd tribute band Umma Gumma, seconds this view). (We'll also pass over here what "understand" means--clearly different things to different people.) But, evidently, The Beats decided that the lyrics were too important just to wash over the crowd, so they provided a translation for the non-English speakers in the audience. And they showed video images of--to put it plainly--deprivation, hardship, and misery: refugee camps, starving children, war footage, and a video of one of the planes hitting the World Trade Center. Mostly, the crowd was silent or singing along softly. For myself, I still don't really know what to do when I see video from 9/11. Usually, I just sort of stare at it unblinkingly with my mouth half open. 9/11 is probably the most talked-about event of the last 50 years, but what can you say about it? I think Vonnegut had it about right when he says in the introduction to Slaughterhouse-Five that in fact there isn't anything to say about a moment like that. All that's left is for the birds to sing, "Poo-tweet-tweet."

But anyway, they also showed some video of, if I remember correctly, the IRA, Israeli settlers, prison camps, people throwing rocks at tanks: relatively standard stuff. They also briefly showed someone holding a sign that read: "Las Malvinas son Argentinas." (The Falkland/Malvinas Islands are Argentinian.) And inxeplicably, the crowd, which had been silently contemplating or singing along, gave out a hearty cheer for that. Now, I assume that the image was chosen to go along with the line in the song, "Imagine there's no countries . . . nothing to kill or die for," and that the picture was supposed to represent the sort of doomed, futile, and destructive nationalism that caused two countries to go to war and lose many lives over a few sparsely populated islands. "Las Malvinas son Argentinas" is something of a rallying cry here, but Lennon's song, and the performance of it in this context by a tribute band with all of these other images, seems to be directly against the usual sentiment that "Las Malvinas son Argentinas" carries. I don't quite get how people could be so receptive to the song and its performance here (which, let me assure you, they were) and yet applaud a symbol of jingoistic nationalism. "Strange days, indeed."

My Name is Prince and I am . . . a Homophobe?

2008-11-17T12:24:00.007-05:00

I'm not necessarily saying that Prince has a coherent set of political and social views (that any of us mere mortals can understand), but this tiny article in the "Talk of the Town" section of the New Yorker doesn't do him any favors. After a brief discussion of Prince's new house in California, we get what the article's author, Claire Hoffman, must think is the money quote. Quoth Prince:

"So here’s how it is: you’ve got the Republicans, and basically they want to live according to this.” He pointed to a Bible. “But there’s the problem of interpretation, and you’ve got some churches, some people, basically doing things and saying it comes from here, but it doesn’t. And then on the opposite end of the spectrum you’ve got blue, you’ve got the Democrats, and they’re, like, ‘You can do whatever you want.’ Gay marriage, whatever. But neither of them is right.”

When asked about his perspective on social issues—gay marriage, abortion—Prince tapped his Bible and said, “God came to earth and saw people sticking it wherever and doing it with whatever, and he just cleared it all out. He was, like, ‘Enough.’ ”

The article then concludes with a short anecdote about a visitor to Prince's former residence in Paisley Park. And that's it. Now, I know that Prince can be elliptical and mysterious and all, but come on. If you're going to have an article about Prince in which he says something fairly controversial, you have to at least follow-up with it. Does this mean he is against gay marriage? Against homosexuality in general? Come on, Claire. One of the most sexually-provocative performers in popular music just said some pretty damning things about the sexual activities of 10% of the population (and likely a sizeable percentage of his own audience). You're the one with the New Yorker byline, Claire. I would ask him myself what exactly he means by that, but he's unlikely to answer my phone calls. You're taking a page out of Prince's own book by putting something suggestive out there and not fleshing it out completely. It works for him. Not for you.

And yes. As a Prince fan, I am slightly disturbed to hear him express what (possibly could be . . . again, I don't know because Hoffman doesn't do any real investigating for me) pretty intolerant views about homosexuality. But. Oof. Can I just reference all the hand-wringing that happens around modern-day Wagner reception and be done with it? My own cultural studies/audience studies/ethnomusicological stance is that Wagner, Prince, or whomever (lots of musicians throughout history and the world have held views that I virulently disagree with) may have some manner of control over their own beliefs and political stances, but that certainly doesn't limit what meaning their music has for me or what use I can make of it.

Books

2008-11-15T14:26:00.003-05:00

Eileen Southern has made it to Buenos Aires. I haven't seen any other musicological books here, yet. I'll keep you posted.

Papa's Got a Brand New Bag

2008-11-13T14:30:00.001-05:00

These cell phones are rocking out, man. Also, you maybe can't tell in the photo, but this band evidently has two bassists, a drummer, and a singer. Those cell phones like it HEAVY, I guess.

What Do I Know?

2008-11-12T10:04:00.005-05:00

There's a discussion happening over at Wayne and Wax about Ne-Yo's song "Miss Independent." I didn't know the song before Wayne originally posted the video and his thoughts about it, so my contribution was limited to one dazzling, highly original thought: that the synth in "Miss Independent" reminded me quite a bit of the synth in Kanye West's "Flashing Lights." Sure, the timbre (the original topic of discussion) was very similar, but something else made the linkage in my enfeebled brain. They also use a very similar rhythm. Please allow me my first foray into index card analysis.

Above shows the basic rhythm of the synth in the two songs. The rythm in "Miss Independent" is just a kind of compression of the rhythm in "Flashing Lights." "Miss Independent" is only a 2-beat long pattern, while "Flashing Lights" is 4 beats long. So, "Miss Independent" just takes the first and last beats of "Flashing Lights." They're also very similar tempos--"Flashing Lights" is a couple of clicks faster, but they're both around 90 beats per minute, which means that they're essentially the same tempo in my head, when I'm not comparing them directly side by side with a metronome.

So anyway, that's my thought about that.

SPF 2008

2008-11-08T09:00:00.003-05:00

Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister of Italy, just referred to Barack Obama as "young, handsome, and suntanned." Frankly, I'm glad he said it. At least, I'm glad he said it now. I think everyone needs to get all of this stuff out of our system now, before Obama actually takes office. The interesting thing for me, though, was the prior history of the word "suntanned" to refer to people of color. In fact, Duke Ellington's musical "Jump for Joy" prominently uses the word "suntanned" to refer to African-Americans, but with positive connotations. "Jump for Joy" Ellington's short-lived "social significance" musical from 1941 features, among other things, a stricken "Uncle Tom," surrounding by black performers singing about letting him die, he had lived a long life, while Broadway and Hollywood producers try desperately to keep him alive. The show opens with a number called "Suntanned Tenth of the Nation," which at leasts suggests that earlier in our history, "suntanned" was used comfortably by African-Americans. Then again, that was nearly 70 years ago. And we don't quite use the term "high yaller" anymore, either.

M.I.A. (a few ways)

2008-11-07T14:01:00.007-05:00

Slate takes the occasion of the upcoming release of Queen Latifah's latest album to speculate on the current paucity of female rappers. While it may be true that are aren't any prominent female rappers per se out there right now, there is certainly no shortage of interesting female artists in contemporary popular music today, many of whom are strongly influenced by hip hop, if they are not exactly card-carrying "rappers." (Where does one get such a card, by the way?)

Chief among these, as the article mentions, would be the fabulous M.I.A. I saw her this past summer at something called the 33rd Street Armory in Philly, which was a giant open building resembling an airplane hanger. The sound was deafening and the crowd was full of Drexel undergrads (if they weren't, in fact, actually high school students), but I dug it anyway. I hope that someone smarter than me is busy writing about her, figuring out the taxonomy of her influences and sources, and putting her in the context of the new world music movement, a movement very different from the tired Peter Gabriel/Paul Simon/LBM/Youssou N'Dour one of the 1980s. (At least, I'm tired of talking and teaching about that movement--interesting as it is. I can't imagine my students, most of whom were born 1989 or later, are interested in hearing much more about it, either.)

I wanted to teach M.I.A. in my world music survey class this past semester, but I realized I wouldn't have anything interesting to say other than, "Wow, isn't this song cool?" There's a time and a place for such unnuanced enthusiasm, but it probably ain't the classroom. However, I do think it's important that academics get hip to people like M.I.A., if for no other reason than, particularly at the universities I've been at, a sizable percentage of the student body is of South Asian descent. I was definitely conscious of the fact that the world music class that I taught focused very heavily on Africa and the African diaspora. Which is great. But it seems like we're missing out on teaching a huge part of the world (umm, the entire continent of Asia that isn't Tuvan throat-singing or karaoke)--and a huge percentage of our students. Of course, it's easier this way. There's material for teaching Umm Kulthum. There's material for teaching Graceland. There's material for teaching Youssou N'Dour. There's material for teaching the Pygmies. But too many of us who teach "world music," myself very much included, do not know enough about the contemporary music from around the world that our increasingly worldly students are grooving on. No more excuses. It's time we did something about that. But in the meantime, check out M.I.A.'s track, "Sunshowers."

M.I.A. - New Music - More Music Videos