Now That We Found Love

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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.