On Fri, 12 Mar 1999, BARNARD wrote:
> It's a taste thing: Alejandro just doesn't do it for me. I'm all for
> intelligent music, I'm all for all those good things, but this music
> strikes me as monotonous and boring and self-indulgent. I've seen a good
> number of his live shows over the past five or six years, put in good
> listening time, but for me it neither computes nor connects. He strikes
> me, in my own limited and idiosyncratic world of taste, as a sort of Bela
> Fleck of Austin singer-songwriters, if I can put it that way. Tremendously
> talented, virtuosic even, but on a wavelength that doesn't touch me. The
> aestheticism and artsiness of this music, as I understand it, are in
> keeping with the current aesthetic of the NEA, which as we know
> from innumerable incidents, doesn't exactly tend toward edgy, daring,
> particularly innovative or, god knows, provocative or "dangerous" art of
> any kind.
Well said, Junior. I feel the same way towards the likes of Stephen
Bruton and James McMurtry -- polite adult rock that fails to move me. I
just finished listening to Bruton's new one, and despite the accompanying
flack hype claiming it to be "daring" and "adventurous," I found it to be
anything but. It's roots music for folks without any. And while I prefer
Alejandro over those two, there's still zillions of others that move me
more. No doubt it's a matter of taste, and like Junior, I just don't
connect with the genteel fare offered up by those folks.--don
