Another example of good (academic) writing

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

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

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

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!

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

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

"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"