What's Life Without the Occasional Detour?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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."