alt-literature
Just received an event announcement from the SUNYBuffalo-based "poetics list"; thought the description of one of the readers might tickle and intrigue P2ers (well, except perhaps the Objectivists)... * * * Beth Murray began writing poetry after receiving her MFA in photography. She has two letterpress chapbooks-Spell and Into the Salt-and has been published in Volt, Fence, Mirage #4/Period[ical], No Roses Review, Tinfish, and Proliferation.Her writing retrofits urban legend with the spooky rituals of Gnostic dualism, as with jangled moans and a steady hand she churns up the American lyric and the old oaken bucket.She's like a one-woman Anthology of American Folk Music. * * * carl w. Received: from hub.tg.globeandmail.ca [199.246.69.20] by ccmail.globeandmail.ca (ccMail Link to SMTP R8.30.00.7) ; Wed, 28 Apr 1999 10:47:45 -0400 Return-Path: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Received: from defer.acsu.buffalo.edu([128.205.7.58]) (2751 bytes) by hub.tg.globeandmail.ca via sendmail with P:smtp/D:aliases/R:inet_hosts/T:smtp (sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED]) id [EMAIL PROTECTED] for [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Wed, 28 Apr 1999 10:46:07 -0400 (EDT) (Smail-3.2.0.101 1997-Dec-17 #5 built 1998-March-10) Received: (qmail 22927 invoked from network); 28 Apr 1999 14:33:37 - Received: from listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu (128.205.7.35) by defer.acsu.buffalo.edu with SMTP; 28 Apr 1999 14:33:37 - Received: from LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU by LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8d) with spool id 4387947 for [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Wed, 28 Apr 1999 10:33:34 -0400 Approved-By: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Received: (qmail 15145 invoked from network); 27 Apr 1999 17:08:20 - Received: from mail5.sirius.com (205.134.253.72) by listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu with SMTP; 27 Apr 1999 17:08:20 - Received: from [205.134.242.42] (ppp-asfm09--042.sirius.net [205.134.242.42]) by mail5.sirius.com (8.9.2/8.9.1) with ESMTP id KAA98959 for [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Tue, 27 Apr 1999 10:08:18 -0700 (PDT) X-Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: l03130300b34b9f282484@[205.134.242.176] Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 10:08:16 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sender: UB Poetics discussion group [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Hillman and Murray at SPT To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Early Bird Calendar
couple of questions: RELS: The Ex and Tortoise,... You mean together? RELS: Hattifatteners (Syd Straw and Cat Power's Chan Marshall) I thought the Hattifatteners were a God Is My Co-Pilot sideproject? carl w.
Re: Beatniks?
hipsters slackers scenesters bohos playas post-grads middle-managers ... in the 90s there are no beatniks. ... in the 90s, everyone's a beatnik. carl w.
Re: Updates
Geez, why is this so difficult to get across? As Dave wrote: But given most people's busy schedules and abundant entertainment choices, there's a good chance a lousy band (and it's not solely a matter of chops or a lack thereof) *would* turn them off to roots music for good. How many of us have gone back to a restaurant we hated the first time around? To which Todd replied: But did that stop you from going to restaurants altogether? Of course not. Nobody's saying a lousy band will make people abandon *music*. But if someone goes to, say, their first Malaysian restaurant (to choose something fringey), and the food is overcooked and greasy and makes them practically retch, the next time someone suggests a Malaysian restaurant, they may well say, "No, I tried Malaysian food and I don't like it." This is, of course, ridiculous - they just don't like *bad* Malaysian food. But not having inside knowledge of the kitchen or any exposure to *good* Malaysian food, they may well steer clear of anyplace serving Nasi Goreng thence forwards. Carl W. PS. Translation guide: Food = music Malaysian = bluegrass or insurgent country or what-have-you for overcooked = clumsily played greasy = clubfootedly parodic Nasi Goreng = banjo, perhaps
Re: single most influential, cont.
As a footnote to our discussion, see the new issue of the Atlantic, including an article arguing that Dylan changed pop music more than any other single figure, "including Sinatra, Elvis or the Beatles." (No mention of Der Bingle.) Read and discuss (I haven't, yet). Carl W.
Re: Speaking of Noise
Tony - who once upon a time lived on a steady diet of the Germs, Void, Discharge, Venom, Throbbing Gristle, SPK, James Chance and the Contortions, Half Japanese, and a boatload of other noise. Hurrah! Oops, I meant to say: Tony, you male chauvinist pig you. carl w. (and his three best female friends, all huge Caspar Brotzmann fans)
re: artist of the decade etc.
A little take on Rolling Stone's parlour game, for the Globe and Mail in Toronto. * * * THE ESSENTIAL RECORDINGS OF THE '90s by Greil Marcus et al Rolling Stone, May 13 Reviewed by Carl Wilson ... In which Rolling Stone rushes to judgment in order to beat every other magazine to the end of the year. Hey, if you were about to release a brilliant disc in the later months of 1999, don't bother. The section is launched by Greil Marcus's brief essay on the magazine's Artist of the Decade, Kurt Cobain of Nirvana. This one's no scratch on his definitive RS piece after Cobain's suicide in 1994, merely re-running Marcus's patented line on negation in American music via the epochal Smells Like Teen Spirit. It covers the "artist" part well: "The song is . . . definitively unsettling and a definitive release." But what Marcus misses is the "decade" part: Yes, Cobain dominated a two-year time span, but how did he affect the next five years? In fact, especially in death, Cobain rendered the decades-long underground-vs.-mainstream debate obsolete, forcing us to hear everything from Garth Brooks to Pavement as doubled - inherently self-subverting. Rock's resulting aporia cleared the way for hip hop, as well as for teenyboppers untainted by that original sin. And that, in brief, plus Soundscan, gives us the chart Babel of 1999. Not to mention the Babel of RS's nineties-recordings list, a scattershot rundown on dozens and dozens of albums and afterthoughts on singles (including "Top 10 Songs About Your Butt"). The selections divide evenly between the obvious (PJ Harvey, Beastie Boys, Dr. Dre, Beck), nice surprises (Iris DeMent, Yo La Tengo, Belle Sebastian), and absurdities like Hootie and the Blowfish, Peter Wolf, Billy Joel and anything Touched by a Jagger - the latter few pulled straight from editor Jann Wenner's personal rolodex. Without the guts to confirm or deny any aesthetic agenda, lest someone feel left out, Rolling Stone's list suggests that Wenner's real artist of the decade is none other than Bill Clinton. And when Marcus quotes Cobain saying that he used to expect to be voted "Most Likely to Kill Everyone at a High School Dance," there's a haunting sense that the decade has come full circle - and that Cobain is the least of the betrayed.
Re: Artist of the Decade/singles/influence
The discussion here breaks down along the atomization of markets since the mid80s, so it makes sense to say that Gill, Dre, Malkmus (Pavement does make sense as the key 90s indie band, though only because they democratized Sonic Youth's late-80s innovations) and the Beasties (who, for various sentimental-social reasons, I actually would love to win the crown, but really can't) all rule different roosts. And the one figure I think transcends that is Cobain: Nirvana's breakthrough changed the music scene irrevocably by destroying the previous loyal opposition and thus altering the basic lines of battle that had stood since 1977, and pretty much everything that's happened on pop charts since has been a chain reaction from Smells Like... Cobain is also pretty much the sole zeitgeist-defining personality in 90s pop (I'm not sure there is a *single* such figure in hip-hop this decade, though there are some contenders, and in country, well, that's Garth - which is a whole other story). As well, Nirvana combined quality and commercial success at an incomparable level for the decade - if The Key had sold like a Garth Brooks album, Jon W's assertion would hold up better, methinks. (AOTD for the 80s by the way is, to my mind, unquestionably Prince.) A thread tie-in I meant to throw into the mix yesterday: Smells Like Teen Spirit is also, on a craft level, one of the few singles of the decade that seems to me to stand up on every level to anything in the afore-bandied-about Golden Age of Singles - throwing down a gauntlet that pretty much all of Nirvana's imitators were far too chickenshit to pick up. By the way, I assume the Cobain-jeerers are willing to discount every other overdose and/or suicide in rock history on the same knee-jerk moralism, right? Janis, Jimi, Ian Curtis, etc. etc., all useless whiners. Carl W. Terry Smith-esque P.S.: David C., altho you're basically right about Madonna, it seems to me the ground had already been created for her to stand on before she arrived - by Patti Smith, Chrissie Hynde and others. (If I had my druthers I'd give all credit to Patti but I don't think we can get away with that...) Yep, Madonna would rank pretty high on the influence scale, but she seems to me more a visionary opportunist than a revolutionary. HOWEVER: Your question about whether Aretha rather than Joni was the key gender-revolutionary in sixties pop was already creeping into my head as I wrote that last post. I'd certainly *prefer* to say it was Aretha - but I wonder if she had the same women-can-be-auteurs impact? Perhaps, but this requires further thinking and historicization; I've just realized that maybe before deciding exactly whose gender-bar-breaking was the most definitive (and I do think this is, as Music Trivia games go, an important one), I should read one of those late-90s books about women-in-music that I've been semi-avoiding. Any recommendations for the best one?
Re: Artist of the Decade? (Beasties rant)
Lance wrote: I guess one of the inherent problems with discussing the Beasties as rap artists is the amount of essentialism that must be chopped away before you can discuss the music they create. Indeed, which is why I wish they qualified as AOTDs to more than a small segment (multiracial but pretty much all college-qualified, I'd assert without backup) of the population... Though I'd enjoy the lesson even more if the previously mentioned criminally underappreciated Michael Franti (Spearhead, Disposable Heroes, Beatnigs) were its object. carl w
Re: aotd Jeff Tweedy?
er, no comment except to say that the phrase "with Beck, Joe Henry and Wilco doing what they're doing..." begs the Sesame Street response: which of these things is not like the others? I would actually choose Beck as one of the artists who's not been too "chickenshit" (to quote myself) to pick up the Make Singles challenge raised by Nirvana, as well as, at different times and places, the lines in the sand drawn by Prince and the various hip-hop contenders including Dre and the Beasties, not to mention by Uncle Tupelo, Steve Earle (whom I believe was an AOTD nomination in our previous go-round), Elliott Smith (an important up-from-underground phenom) and, in a roundabout way, Mr. Number-Two-But-Trying-Harder Brooks. I still think he's in Cobain's long shadow, by the by, and my personal feeling is that he's just not quite the burst of light he'd need to be to qualify, but Odelay, Transmutations - and I'd bet the upcoming "official" Odelay followup - make a good case. carl w
Re: Doo Rag
more recently, they've morphed into "Bob Log III", where bob does a one man show-playing slide guitar and kick drum with some drum loops here and there. still sounds like doo rag. the motorcycle helment with the built in telephone receiver/microphone has go to be seen to be believed. I had a soft-in-the-head spot for Doo Rag, I confess, but I recently saw Bob Log III and after two songs realized that this was going to go on and on in an undifferentiated oozy sloppy-blues mess and that I'd gotten all the novelty value from it I could. Luckily in the same venue a bhangra/drum'n'bass group was rocking the house downstairs so I went and shimmied among 21 year old beautiful Indian girls and boys and felt much better. For the not-my-idea-of-fun brigade, Carl W.
Re: Single Most Influential
Not to displace anything in David's definitive Top 4 - (sideline: except that I'm not quite convinced we've covered soul properly in the person of James Brown, whose influence vocally and rhythmically is definitive for funk-disco-rap but not so much in the more slow-grooving melody-centred part of pop-soul-RB - I think maybe I'd tie Brown with Ray Charles for 4th). - but on Tera's behalf I'd reluctantly say that if we look at the current state of pop music, where female singer-songwriters are about the only growing concern in the rock column of the equation, it's not easy to avoid pegging Joni Mitchell fairly high up. You have to open up your idea of "influential" here: "Blue" would be acknowledged by astonishing numbers of performers as a seminal record (likely more than any single Beatles or Dylan album). If you're bristling, let me put it this way: Joni Mitchell was the pop-music equivalent of Jackie Robinson, breaking the bar as the first major female artist to visibly call the shots on her own career, on her own songs and in her own distinctly female (but not feminized) voice - Madonna's godmother, and also that of Sarah and Sheryl and Alanis and Lucinda and Rickie Lee Jones and Lauryn Hill. Janis Joplin and Laura Nyro were important in this sense, too, but Mitchell's influence was cemented by the fact that she survived it. (Yes, you might name Dolly or Loretta or Aretha or Billie Holiday or Ella or Tina Turner, but I don't think any of them visibly held control over their personae and music in the same way.) The irony is that Mitchell's historical significance far outstrips her musical quality - much of the latter is for the worse, in that she, er, overlegitimized confessional songwriting (she is to song what Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell were to poetry) - but if we assume that the revolution in gender roles will go down as one of the 20th century's most important developments, that historical place looms pretty large (if depressingly recent). carl w.
wilco and vic
A review of last night's show - with a tip o' the Hee-Haw straw hat to David Cantwell for the illumination of the ELO emulations on Summer Teeth. Carl W. * * * WILCO WITH VIC CHESNUTT at The Guvernment on Saturday by CARL WILSON The Globe and Mail, Toronto I n a certain light, Jeff Tweedy's career - ever since his teenage group the Primitives in Belleville, Ill., metamorphosed into the legendary late-eighties band Uncle Tupelo - has been a struggle to address the question of what to do if it's not possible to play punk rock anymore. Uncle Tupelo's answer, famously, was to mine the distant past: With partner Jay Farrar (now of Son Volt), Tweedy combed old-time country music for sounds that could resonate in the postindustrial Rust Belt. But when Tweedy formed Wilco, he changed tactics. Wilco's alternative to "alternative" is pop music, the 1970s top-40 sound of Tweedy's childhood, from Cheap Trick to - prominently on Wilco's just-released third album, Summer Teeth - the power-pop period of the Electric Light Orchestra. It's a nervy strategy, and its potential and its failings were evident in equal measure at Wilco's early-evening, sold-out show on Saturday at The Guvernment. In a long set that included double-keyboard sugar shocks, a veritable army of guitars, more than enough rock-outs and a passel of "ooh-aah" vocal fillips, waves of pure elation were followed by bland washouts. Tweedy, the man with the most earnest eyebrows in rock 'n' roll, was consistently watchable, remarkably engaged with every line of every song considering the group's punishing tour schedule. The best tunes from Summer Teeth, including Can't Stand It, Via Chicago and A Shot in the Arm, seemed so fresh that you could imagine a new generation of 11-year-olds pumping up the radio volume and posturing to them in front of their bedroom mirrors. Yet in a few songs from 1998's Mermaid Avenue - a collaboration with Billy Bragg in setting lyrics from Woody Guthrie's notebooks - Tweedy discovered much wider thematic territory than he manages to cover in his own writing. The results are musical pearls such as Hesitating Beauty and California Stars, which was received like the time-burnished classic it deserves to be during the otherwise-excessive double encore. Much of the time, however, the samey songs seemed undeserving of the band's prodigious energies, and the hard-core fans' hunger for more thick-necked rock-show gestures left one wondering whether Tweedy would ever fully liberate himself from one or another form of nostalgia. None of those 11-year-olds will ever find out how cool he is if he keeps pandering to the pushing-40 punters. By contrast, Vic Chesnutt, in his opening set - sitting alone in his wheelchair, wrist braces limiting his electric-guitar work, his poignant voice nearly lost in an inadequate sound mix in the cavernous club - served no earthly master, not even himself. The Virginia songwriter specializes in acidic wordplay (he writes like a maudlin-drunk Dr. Seuss), and the barely-there accompaniment let the few people who had the courtesy to listen luxuriate in such lyrical loopdiloops as, "We blew past the army motorcade/ And its abnormal load haulage/ The gravity of the situation/ Came on us like a bit of new knowledge." The shocker here was the reputed misanthrope's easygoing generosity: After a few pieces from his new album The Salesman and Bernadette, Chesnutt bantered with the crowd to determine what songs he'd play next. And frequently, almost casually, with his Valley-of-Demerol death-croak on Supernatural or his teetering, lonesome croon on Where Were You?, Chesnutt hit emotional depths that Tweedy, so far, is just a touch too calculating ever to find.
autoclip: Sparklehorse/Varnaline
this is appearing in greatly truncated form (cut in half, actually) in tomorrow's paper; the director's cut to follow is a P2 exclusive... By the way, Neal baby, none of the following is directed at you - your take has seemed much more on-target than many I've read. CW * * * SPARKLEHORSE with Varnaline The Horseshoe on Tuesday, April 13 By CARL WILSON The Globe and Mail, Toronto The critical reception of Richmond, Va. rock band Sparklehorse seems a sort of bellwether of the well-meaningly misguided End Times we're living in. The albums songwriter Mark Linkous has issued under this monicker (1996's Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot and last year's Good Morning Spider, both Capitol-EMI) deserve their applause, even their places on numerous Best-of-the-Year lists. But Linkous's Valium-and-antidepressants overdose in a London hotel room the year of his first album has made him press fodder for all the wrong reasons - though admittedly it's hard to resist bringing up that a performer was literally dead for a few minutes and had to spend many months in a wheelchair. (I didn't get two paragraphs without saying so myself, did I?) Thus, Sparklehorse is so far a band much more written-about than heard, and that breeds confusion. After Varnaline's pleasant Velvets-to-Huskers opening set in a hotly packed Horseshoe club in Toronto on Tuesday night, the buzz began: "So do you have any idea what they sound like" "Well, I read . . . " Often, the adjectives that followed were way off. Sparklehorse Misconception One is that the name refers to ranches and rodeos, when in fact the steeds in question are the carousel kind. True, Linkous comes from a coal-mining family that had Johnny Cash on their 8-Track, and professes his love for traditional and country musics. But even his acoustic numbers remain mopey rock, and his best tunes are true pop, albeit inflected with violin or steel guitar. Sparklehorse Misconception Two is that Sparklehorse is somehow experimental, avant-garde, "wild." Yes, Linkous is eccentric enough to stand out, but no more than college-radio favourites like Mercury Rev and the Flaming Lips, though without their psychedelic excesses. Lyrically, he's twisted and tender, but has none of the sting of his friend Vic Chesnutt, the permanently wheelchair-bound misanthrope who lends his whine to a track on Good Morning, Spider and whose own songs seem written by a maudlin-drunk Dr. Seuss. Linkous does follow his hero Tom Waits in varying his sonic palette. He had sideman Jonathan E. Segel (ex-Camper Van Beethoven) play glockenspiel instead of fiddle or guitar on several songs Tuesday night, and there were some found-sound tape loops and a second, filtered microphone to put some rusty edge on Linkous's overgrown-choirboy pipes. And bassist Bob Rupe (of Cracker) spent part of the time on electric and part on an upright, which cast a shapely silhouette against the cityscape film loops projected on the stage backdrop. But unlike Waits, Linkous isn't reinventing music from scratch, merely putting exiting tools to deft use. Still, Sparklehorse is one of the most personable, evocative rock projects going, with an emotional depth befitting someone who can manage nearly to blitz himself on anti-depressants and yet a surprisingly sun-kissed optimism of melody. Linkous seems to have made a slogan as well as a song out of Roberto Benigni's broken-English line from Down By Law: It's a Sad and Beautiful World. He seemed a bit tour-tuckered on Tuesday, thanking the crowd for "staying up so late to see us," asking for whiskey and smokes, and doing only a grudging encore. But what transpired between midnight and 1:30 a.m. was stimulating enough. In a cowboy hat too big for his none-too-small head, the lanky singer-guitarist steered his group - rounded out by drummer Scott Minor - through a set that mixed Spider's woozy lullabies with the debut's rock rousers, plus the odd mad moment. (A sound effect goes boing, boing, boing a few too many times, and Linkous grins, "Everybody! C'mon, dance!"; Linkous returns for the encore in a rabbit mask.) Though the arrangements fuzzed out into southern rock too often for my ears, that wounded voice rang through clearly and Segal's sinewy violin was on-call to redeem the blander moments. The spookiest bits were best, such as the Pixies-esque Sunshine: "There will come a time/ Gigantic waves will crush the junk that I have saved,/ When the moon explodes or floats away/ I'll lose the souvenirs I made/
Re: autoclip: Sparklehorse/Varnaline
Neal wrote re: his attempt to explain "the Sparkle Boys": The moral of this story: I forget that my circle of friends -- physical ones or those in e-mail form -- are a smidgen of a smidgen of the population. The real world doesn't think the way we do. Mm-hmm. This is my biggest misgiving about having anything to do with journalism, at least for the mass audience a daily newspaper (even one with intellectual pretensions, like the one I work at) implies. I love writing about music, but I don't want to have to start from scratch each time - and yet I do want to aid in popularizing things I love, at least some part of my little brain wants to. So what reference is too obscure? I wrote the Sparklehorse piece assuming, for instance, that nobody would get the Vic Chesnutt remarks without some explanation, that the Flaming Lips explanation would be caught by some but was ignorable by most, and that people would know who Tom Waits and Roberto Benigni were, and probably what Down By Law is. That last assumption seems seriously dubious, frankly - secretly, it communicated that "if you don't know who Tom Waits is, go find that out before you worry about Sparklehorse." Likewise the beggarly description of the Varnaline set as Velvets-to-Huskers, a dead giveaway of lack of space and one that, again, 10 percent of readers would grasp. On the other hand, it's nice to be able to provide some media material for that 10 percent to read, since mostly they're ignored by all but the hip-music press and forced to endure endless Celine Dion and Shania Twain tripe. (This spoken from a Canadian perspective.) Not that I'm so smart myself - I still have a hell of a lot to learn about mainstream music history, since I ignored it growing up. I often think of going and taking a year in popular-music studies at a university to really give myself the background in straight rock, jazz and country that I have in more off-beat stuff. Still, music is one area where I do actually have friends who don't know the same things I do. And find myself required to explain things, which (Neal's right) is a good and humbling exercise. More broadly, though, I look at surveys and see how the vast majority of North Americans believe they have a personal relationship with Jesus and still admire Ronald Reagan - and no offense to any P2er who does, at least not right now - but what shocks me is that I don't know anybody who answers to those descriptions. Like, not a single soul. In a sense I'm happy to live that way, since it means I'm surrounded by people with whom I have some common ground, even those who aren't my friends - but on the other hand, I fear that I'm not really participating in society as such. This wouldn't bother/frighten me if I could make a living writing the strange creative stuff I do, where being "outside" is expected - but I can't. Even putting pragmatics aside, I also do feel some pull of citizenship and compassion to make a better attempt to grasp where Other People are coming from. That's one of the reasons I'm feeling more attracted to both traditional country music and contemporary Pop Muzik these days, both things of The Real World, while simultaneously getting more and more fascinated by free-improv and other Outside stuff, methinks: A soundtrack for the schizo schematics of my mental landscape. Anyway, thanks for the story and the stuff-to-chew-on, Neal. Carl W.
New Romantics?
Since we somehow have looped out into early80s land the past couple days, I have a terminology question for the P2 Braintrust, re: a story I'm editing: Who and what were the British "New Romantics" (which I've sometimes seen spelled "Neuromantics")? I'm sort of vague on whether that means, say, Siouxsie and the Banshees, or Spandau Ballet. And I'm specifically wondering whether Japan (aka David Sylvian and friends) woulda counted as New Romantics, and if not what they did count on? I was a bit too young at the time - or perhaps just too far from any hip geographic locations - to keep track. Carl W.
Re: New Romantics?
... um, I meant what did Japan count *as*, not on. I assume, like all of us, they counted on the kindness of strangers. Carl W.
Re: Asylum Street Spankers looking for musicians
Someone's gonna have to say it, and better not-Jon than Jon: JP, you completely misconstrued Weisberger's meaning here - it was an inside-joking reference to Jon's long, untiring **defence** of the importance of chops in country (and other) music. In other words, he agrees with you completely. He was kidding, and he wasn't taking a shot at you but at various of his P2 sparring partners (Roy Kasten, call home). Fair enough you didn't get the context (request the P2 archive containing the Freakwater Chronicles for clarification), and by the sounds of it you're under stress right now. But it's boorish, to say the least, to refer to "you and your ilk" when clearly you don't know the first thing about what Jon's ilk might be. I'm always amused when people declare themselves to be above basic social decency. The Superiority Fairy works in mysterious ways. carl w. Reidle: Interested musicians must be incredibly badass. In fact, unless you have chops to burn, don't bother. Weisberger: Gee, and here I thought that feeling would have to be the number one qualification Reidle: Would you please go find a life. I have a band in crisis here and I certainly don't need every middle-aged mediocrity's two cents. Unlike you and your ilk, these are world-class players and all the "feeling" in the world is not gonna allow a half-assed player to keep up with this band... (blah blah blah ad nauseum).
former future frimfram on the fritz
(fluff/nitpickery warning) Dave P: As a fan of Ms. Hockeysticks's coinage, Steve Earle is her "future former husband," not former future husband (which would signify a waning interest or a broken engagement...) btw, when I mentioned this to a friend, she misunderstood at first because she'd known somebody who constantly used the same phrase to refer to her *current* husband, as a sign of deep, enduring, fatalistic hostility. B. FFH should be used only for crushable strangers, IMNSFHO. Carl W. twang content: hey, I mentioned Steve Earle.
Re: suckage: Re: Waco Brothers
Jeff Wallbanger wrote: "If I am reviewing a disc, and I can find absolutely no redeeming value, and I say that it sucks, is that not just my humble, or in my case, not so fucking humble opinion?" -- which generates a whole new internet catchphrase: IMNSFHO. carl w.
Re: Tom Waits Meets Matt Cook at SXSW
wanted briefly to respond to a few of Barry's comments: I seemed to be the only one I could find anywhere who'd actually seen him perform before--on the Penn campus in Philadelphia some 25 years ago, Really? Nobody saw the Big Time tour? The Waits show was the first memorable event after I moved to Montreal 11 years ago, in my first year of university. And it was rather like an omen - seeing him at an old theatre house in Outremont, a gorgeous, transcendent, hilarious show that I can still vividly recall to this day (and there ain't that many of those, altho I suppose I drank slower in those days) - that I was in the right place. I woulda assumed a lot of people saw that tour (and the subsequent movie), since it was very large-scale by Waits standards. On a more contentious note: I think this show also proves that it's generated some myths--the biggest being that Waits' extraordinary music had some drastic sea change when he shifted labels, which puts him in a sort of gravelly post-modern and hiphop mode which makes him one OK "boomer' performer for the alt. generation. Note Barry's sarcasm here. But that aside: While I agree completely with Barry that the "Asylum Years" were full of fantastic music, much of it as interesting and creative etc. as anything he's done since, it's no myth at all that Swordfishtrombones (his first Island album) was a dramatic shift. It was presaged by some of the material on Heartattack Vine and even on Blue Valentines, where there was a harder-edged blues and rock influence than anything on his previous work. But the dramatic move away from the piano as anything but an occasional (and even incidental) part of his sound, the abandonment of orchestral arrangements, the shift from songs that had identifiable stories to ones that tended towards much more pure imagery (this was more a shift in emphasis than in style overall, I agree), and *especially* his use of non-Western rhythms and avant-garde sounds and homemade instruments and further-out singing styles - all did add up to something truly new, a genre unto itself, as if 70s Waits had gone through Cronenberg's transporter (a la The Fly) with Captain Beefheart (and of course Harry Partch). And while that may have endeared him to younger fans who wouldn't have cottoned to the jazz-ballad/bebop stylings, it also turned off a lot of older fans. I remember when I was about 14 and Swordfishtrombones came out, I dropped by my local bookstore, run by a 36-ish Waits fan. He had the album, I didn't yet. He said he thought it was "totally devoid of Waitsian emotion." Damn, I thought, that's awful. Went out, bought it anyway - the cover art made it impossible to resist. Dropped the needle (wow, needle) and "Underground" - whose main sound is brake drum and clanging pipes - started up, and my head exploded. And that was the first time I really believed in a generation gap. (Although of course later I met many older fans who loved the new work, too, so perhaps I unbelieved it eventually.) All that said: Damn, I'm jealous of you SXSW bastards. I hope to hell Mule Variations is followed by a tour. I attended a listening party for it held by Epitaph here last week, and it sounds absolutely superb. CarlW.
Re: Brave New Waves/Nightline/WhateverSonic Blah Blah Blah
Mitch, just to keep things straight: if that was tonight (Saturday), it was almost certainly RadioSonic, which (tho it can be ok) is a much inferior program to the mighty Waves, whose reservoir of mandatory cool is far too deep (nay, even obsessive) for parade-style hooplah, unless delivered sarcastically. Follow this geographic rule of thumb: east-coast/Montreal (Waves), storm-jaded hipster intellectuals; west-coast/Vancouver (RadioSonic), mild-climate/scenic-vista induced fuzzy thinking, verging on slack-jawed hippie. Carl W. __ Reply Separator _ So I'm driving home from the Songs:Ohia show and tunne in to the Canadian station, and guess where they are broadcasting from? Yep, SXSW. Well, they just went one step lower in my book. They were talking like they were hosting the Oscars or the Thanksgiving Day parade.
SXSW (was re: shaver etc.)
Slim wrote Wooohooo Ok, just for that, smart guy - please do post extensive descriptions. The Waits show the Flatlanders hook-up I'd really like to hear details on. merci, Carl, bereft in Toronto
Re: The X/Brave New Waves
PaulAmeritwang asks after Brent Bambury and Mitch remarks on "early-morning news coverage" -- well, I don't know what time you get up, Mitch, but I don't usually consider noon "early morning." Brent is the co-host of Midday, a mostly inane CBC-TV chat and news lunchtime show; he interviews people, banters with his female co-host, and tries to look heterosexual as frequently as possible. He's fine on TV but it's a waste of a real talent - CBC should at least assign him to host an arts show of some kind. (Altho, trivia note, Brent wasn't actually the first host of BNW, which has its 15th anniversary this year; that honour goes to Augusta Lapaix, who's still working various CBC hosting jobs and running a bed-and-breakfast in Quebec.) Mitch also says: "Nightlines" was cool because the host (name?), David Wisdom ... would also allow listeners a "free hour" of music, called an "hour of power" in which you could send in a format of one hour's music for him to play Yes, I loved listening to those. The show that's replaced Nightlines on the weekends, Radiosonic, has its own version, occasionally having guest musicians etc. act as DJs (the last time I heard it they had one of the members of Combustible Edison, who played a great array of soundtrack and electronic music) -- but that isn't nearly as populist and exciting. Carl W.
Re: Tweedy and the ghettoizing of alt-country
Evan's point is well-taken. Mind you, these days I don't spend much time listening to the local college stations, largely because too often I tune in to find people rambling incoherently about politics or -- much worse -- a dj "interviewing" a local musician which sounds like a 2 am bar discussion of "what were your teachers like in high school?" "oh man, i remember mrs. stipocolloki would come in drunk to english class" "yeah, yeah, man, that was like - it made me question authority. what high school did you go to?..." (this is an almost literal quote from a 15-minute conversation i heard on air today.) And this was on CKLN, one of the largest, best-transmitted college stations in Canada, with full-time paid staff... Is the program director on vacation? Didn't they know the mic was on? That rant aside - there's definitely a stigmatization of rootsy stuff as uncool among the alterna-indie cognoscenti, which is a big change since the 80s. Good friends of mine run the (*very* professional - much more so than commercial radio) all-night CBC Radio 2 new-music program Brave New Waves, and while they have very eclectic tastes, not much country-flavoured music is permitted into the mix. While the host and I have had long conversations about the shortage of great songwriting among new bands, when I mentioned a couple of examples from the twangy side of town she said, "Yeah, sure, but I don't want to have to go that route." As though it were something you'd only do in desperation in your old age. Besides the indie-experimental rock (her staple, but which is not in great supply) she'd rather play the most mediocre electronica than the best of independent twangy stuff - some of which I think much more innovative in its way, for instance the Bad Livers. Unfortunately I think the fences have been raised higher because the consensus "cool" independent bands now (in the year 5 A.G. (After Grunge)) are ones that are very far from rock - not a bad thing in itself, perhaps even necessary. But with the side-effect that f your standard-bearer is, say, Stereolab, then twangy music is going to be a lot less close to your golden mean than it was when the standard-bearer was the Replacements or the Meat Puppets. If they're going to listen to acoustic music it's either free improv or lo-fi, or it's international folk music of some kind. Mind you, in circles just slightly less hipper-than-thou you will find young Johnny Cash or Emmylou or Steve Earle fans who also listen to Massive Attack and Gastr del Sol. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to extend up to the gatekeepers and tastemakers, but perhaps in time (again, just get us through the year 2000 and who knows). Carl W.
Re: Tweedy and the ghettoizing of alt-country
I simply have to apologize for writing a post that contains two separate paragraphs beginning "Mind you..." Not enough coffee today, perhaps. I'm not even shure what "mind you" means, come to think of it... Mind me, Carl W.
Re: Tweedy @ Salon
Bob re: V-Roys in Toronto: it has to meet the needs of a crowd that gets very little of that kind of music. Maybe they batted .500 because they had to bend a little to satisfy that crowd. And maybe the crowd wanted their roots loud, straight-up, and danceable because few bands like that come up that way... maybe that crowd went home and the next day listened to Pet Sounds and Thriller and Minnie the Moocher and The Planets and Viva Terlingua. Maybe they just don't have the screaming need we do to talk about our eclecticism. No, Bob, actually we get a fair (tho not huge) portion of twang here, tho not as much as most equiv. US cities and much less that's as hard-rock-twang as the V-Roys are. The main thing was that this audience seemed noticeably different than the one that shows up to see other alt-countryish stuff here. Your second point however is well-taken - in other words, how the hell did I know? You do get a sense in a room, but it coulda been a for-the-occasion thing. A lot of the crowd definitely knew the band's material. It was just that they felt like an unfamiliar crowd, with a stamp of its own, compared to many shows in Toronto and at the Horseshoe, and seemed to have more conservative tastes than one encounters on a typical day on P2. Half-guilty, half-proud, copping a plea as a Screaming Eclecticist... Carl W.
all things Iggy (and V-Roys)
Tom wrote:
this Iggy thing has me all worked up. I've been listening to "The
Idiot" and "Lust for Life" since Sunday night...
One highlight from last night's V-Roys entertainment (pardon me but
I'm not going to know titles) - one song launched with a rousing
version of the rhythm line from Lust for Life, continued until tabels
of people in the audience were singing it, and then hit the first
verse of what turned out to be a very upbeat twangy pop tune and not
Lust for Life at all, which then segued into a (unfortunately not very
good) post-grunge Modern Southern Rock tune sung by the goateed
guitarist... It was a confusing family-tree exercise linking Iggy,
Buddy Holly, Black Oak Arkansas and Soundgarden, very clever.
Otherwise - several nice ballads, lots of good rave-ups, some clever
lyrics and between-song bits. ("I was going to call this next song
Jesse's Girl, but it was taken, so I called it, Goodnight You Goddamn
Fuckin' Loser.") A good ability to find wide variation within a strict
genre, without sounding too samey through the whole set. A little odd
how many of their songs are about the dilemma posed when some woman is
a faithless liar, though. Are there really that many faithless lying
ladies in Tennessee?
Carl W.
Re: Tweedy @ Salon
I have a mixed reaction to this - clearly the current backlash (which I think has been accelerated by PazznJop and a couple of other instances of high-profile folk like Christgau calling alt-country "confining") is largely crap, and another case of Moronic Media Meme syndrome. And Tweedy has shown, for a long time, a puzzling inability to resist whining about how misunderstood he is. *But* - I don't think P2 - at least the most active participants on P2 - are representative of the alt-country fan base in general, and I don't think Tweedy is talking about P2. (He may see stuff from Postcard and from AOL, but who the hell would be trawling through this mountain of verbiage and pointing out to him things to be annoyed by?) Don't take it too personally, but I think there is some truth to the complaint that there is a reactionary twang audience out there. Case in point: Last night I went to see a free gig in town by the V-Roys, who I thought were a great bar band, though they were batting about .500 on decent songs. But the crowd was a really roadhouse-country-rock-lovin' bunch, who wanted their roots as loud and straight-up and danceable as possible. Nothing wrong with that, of course. Since we don't get much of the V-Roys brand of twang this far north, I haven't seen a gathering like that at most shows here, and it was fun. But I was very doubtful about how eclectic that audience's tastes probably were. And if Tweedy feels like there are people in such audiences who aren't open to different directions, he may be more right than the braintrust at P2 (The Official Home of The Alt-Whatchamacallit Intelligentsia, tm) would like to assume. Until there are better demographic surveys of the so-called No Depression market, all generalizations are suspect, and all suspicions are general. Carl W.
Re: Tweedy @ Salon
I said of the V-Roys audience the crowd was a really roadhouse-country-rock-lovin' bunch, who wanted their roots as loud and straight-up and danceable as possible. And Dave P retorted: Is that any different from people at a Metallica show not wanting to hear Lars co sound like Celine Dion? Or Ziggy Marley fans not wanting Ziggy to pull a glam-rock move? Nope, it ain't, and those are good comparisons (since like Tweedy, Metallica and Ziggy have both been held up as standard-bearers by fans for their respective genres). However, that doesn't mean I wouldn't like to hear Ziggy Marley do a Velvet Goldmine soundtrack number, or that he shouldn't do so if he wants. And yeah, it would be kinda silly for him to whine and complain if reggae fans didn't appreciate his sudden penchant for Roxy Music and crushed-fabric blue evening dress. (Still if I heard someone verbally bitchslapping him for it, I'd be inclined to say, well, hold on, that's some fine glamrock Mr. Ziggy's turned out there, open your ears. So I'm swinging both ways on this one.) But my point was that P2 in general has established itself as a place where eclecticism is not only tolerated, but in some ways demanded. Which distinguishes it from your standard roadhouse crowd or even the usual cliques of genre devotees. (I don't think the same applies to No Dep to the same degree, by the way - it is more devoted to promoting the genre qua genre, though it's not close-minded.) If they can sell to a roadhouse audience, great -- but they shouldn't be surprised if Mike Ireland goes over better than Wilco. Ditto with bands who play roots music with camp or irony. Good point. It's worth noting here that Wilco's own roots have nothing to do with roadhouses - UT was a post-punk indie band, not a rockin' bar band, and that's a vast cultural divide. The alt-country scene includes both, as Dave's examples indicate. The backlash in the Henry and Wilco articles represent alt-twang way too monolithically. On the other hand, I disagree with Jon W.'s claim that nobody in the ND/P2 world has ever cried sellout at groups like Wilco. When a band known as alt-country moves away from twangier sounds - the Old 97s, Wilco, whoever - there's usually a comment made to the effect that it seems like a combination of "artistic development" and label pressure and/or commercial ambition, because as we all know twang doesn't sell. Now, on P2, that's usually accompanied by a "not that there's anything wrong with that" (which I find just a touch more convincing than the same excuse for anti-gay jokes on Seinfeld). But even if those comments are made in a spirit of complete objectivity, I think in the 90s it's hard for a songwriter to hear claims that changes in their sound are commercially driven without interpreting it partly as a dig. I've looked at twang from both sides now... Carl W.
Re: Tweedy @ Salon
Jon sez: "even leaving aside the question of whether it's really a criticism to say that a stylistic change includes a commercial motivation (in my book, it ain't), from my perspective there's a healthy-sized difference between the two characterizations." I agree, Jon, but in the minds of someone like Tweedy and the rock critics who interview him too much - generally reared in varying countercultures with self-styled anticommercial posturings - the "accusation" of commercial motivation is going to be read as a sell-out slam, and nuances are likely to be ignored. In a way I brought this up to show the double-bind involved: It's plainly fact that it's hard to make a living doing twangy music that doesn't pander to commercial country radio (not that all radio country's bad, I hasten to say, but I think we can agree its demands are fairly rigid). Rock audiences, for their part, are wary of twangy sounds, the more fool them, and rock labels even more so. So the artist's under all this pressure from "above" to make other sorts of music, and if you're Jeff Tweedy, you might say, "Well, actually, that's what I'm interested in doing at this point anyway." Yet you feel the reverse pressure from "below" -- the weird segment of the rock audience/press that thrives on twangy sounds sneers at pop (as if country were in itself a non-pop form - note second internal paradox). Yet in cases where label-and-money concerns are a bigger factor than natural development, the artist might feel their own regrets about leaving country inflections behind (not in Tweedy's case, I think, but I wonder about the Old 97s) and be extra defensive - perhaps projecting their own ambivalence onto a somewhat mythically constituted "alt-country" audience (esp. when critics are suddenly happy to help you do so). It's all, as Chris Isaks (sp?) might say, a twisted game. Makes me envy the pro musicians out there a bit less. carl w
Re: the pop switch(was Tweedy @ Salon)
Slonedog: While a handful (and it is just a handful folks) of the songs on "Summerteeth" (which I think is brilliant) do owe a debt to "Pet Sounds", I don't think either "Sound of Lies" or Joe Henry's new one have much to do with Brian Wilson. Right on. The Jayhawks' pop turn was pretty Beatlesque, to these ears, while Henry's turn is ... well, follow the bouncing Daniel Lanois. I'm not real impressed with "Fuse," myself, mostly for the songwriting itself rather than the sound. But I do find it sort of an unfortunate marriage of, say, Springsteen and U2. (Altho at times it sounds weirdly like Joe Ely.) The critical/musicians' rediscovery of Brian Wilson in the mid-90s, while a wonderful thing, is leading to way too many lazy uses of the Beach Boys as a metonymy for all things that are pop yet not bubblegum. Weird, weird, weird. Another instance of the syndrome by the way is the Scud Mtn Boys --- Pernice Bros. transformation. Of the group, Joe Pernice is also the one, so far, who seems to me to have the most sophisticated-pop-music chops, with genuine Brian/vdParks attentions *plus* Beatles, 70s pop, Big Star and, for that matter, the likes of Burt Bacharach. Me, I think the pop turn is as much the result of a sudden but sincere, methinks, rediscovery that shiny happy music is not inherently evil, and is a way out of rock's dead ends in a similar way that the adoption of twang influence had been. On the down side, it seems like the late 90s in rock-related music are the equivalent of the early 60s, a transitional time where individual songs are mattering more than albums and tho pop is reborn there are few long-term prospects so far. Which makes me real curious what will happen once this millennial funnybusiness is over, say in 2002-03. Carl W.
Re: Clip: The state of country radio
Jr. goes: Popular taste is not formed before industry dreck gets heard, it's formed *in and by* industry dreck. And then Todd goes: When did T.W. Adorno sneak on to the list? And so I goes: Like, too long ago? Jr. is using a real overpure Frankfurt-school reading of popular culture? And if not superceded totally the likes of Adorno need to be modified (sez me) by more recent cultural thinking on response, interpretation and appropriation? Adorno was an utter snob? He would think every bit of the music we're talking about was dreck, including, say, George Jones? (Tho that seems fitting to Jr.'s mood today considering his later "romantic music isn't classical music" nitpickery? Like, take a chill pill?) Plus, y'know, I'd like to, kinda, stand up for myself as more pessimistic than Junior? Because while thinking that people are to some degree, like, sheep herded and counted in the pens of the purveyors of dreck, I also think people can wallow dreck all on their own? Which is why the purveyors got to be the big muscular purveyors in the first place? 'Cuz no one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the [fill in nation-state here] public? Along with the logic of late capitalism, I'll grant you? But, well, shit, remember even among the dreck there are pearls? Pearls of parody at least? Y'what I mean? like, Carl W?
Re: Clip: The state of country radio
No, no, I know that, Mr.Junior. (I mean, really, with a name like "Junior", you'd have been drummed out of the Teddy-and-Walt Noble Frankfurters Clubhouse at the first meeting...) But I was somewhat, somehow serious that the management-and-creation-of-taste line, while valid, can turn into monolithic cultural conspiracy theory (a la Adorno) if not used with caution and parental warning stickers. PLEASE STEP AWAY FROM THE YELLOW LINE. Etc. (The above in reference to the statement from the plaintiff-turned-defendant, Philip aka "Junior" Barnard, aka "the twangy professor": Like, dude g, I would never look at pop culture from Adorno's perspective, so I take this as facetiousness.) In other news, went to an Epitaph preview party for Tom Waits's new album The Mule Variations last night. Hard to hear over the beer-fuelled chatter (including mine) but sounded, in a word, extraordinary. Carl W.
Re: Alejandro (was: need info)
geez, Junior, don't go gettin' all apologetic on me, ya wuss. for the record, there are many Escovedo moments i find unconvincing too. much less so in a live setting, and i think the live record is a lot more listenable than his studio albums, but, yeah, a lot of the time there's a sort of monotony there. ... my point was that i don't think there's anything wrong with someone seeking support to do more ambitious work. "seeking institutional validation" seems to me a specious accusation considering the kind of music that Escovedo plays; frankly I think he'd be playing his songs with much more straightahead rock instrumentation and more self-consciously Hispanic signifiers if he wanted that - he could easily work in the Los Lobos vein, but instead he makes very individualistic choices in the way he works with different configuraions, strings, etc. the point that the monotony of some of his work might have been a plus to the NEA's way of thinking seems pretty valid, though. carl w.
pearls (was Kinky / Terry Allen)
Junior wrote: np: Lyle Lovett "Sold American" (from Pearls in the Snow) uh, what is Pearls in the Snow? (nice title when you stop to think about it). carl w.
Re: Rufus Wainwright
I've been following this thread and trying to keep a lid on my temper, since I know that Richard was addressing career strategy and didn't mean his comments to sound the way they did - personally, when I hear someone say "flaunting it" and "shoving it in people's faces," the subtext that comes across is that gays should be shamed, thus discreet. And of course rock stars flaunt their heterosexuality all the time, so the double standard is annoying. But I know Richard was talking about a homophobic social context and talking about what RW should do to "make it." Ok, let's look at it that way. First of all, as Richard said, it takes (at most) five minutes to know that Rufus is gay - both in person and on record. So people who aren't open to a gay artist aren't going to like him, no matter what he says or doesn't say. This is important: Rufus really is bringing gay culture to the straight music world in the most blatant way, with the most label support and acclaim, that one can imagine. So the outcome will be telling. (New Wave etc. was full of queer music and subtexts, but that was tied to its Underground status, whereas Rufus is positioned as a mainstream, though left-of-centre, artist. And people like the Pet Shop Boys are very Britishly ambiguous and coy in their way of presenting sexuality, anyway.) But, more relevantly, Rufus's music is very dense, complex, with many non-rock influences (cabaret, show tunes, opera -- all very gay-identified too). I gather that both he and the record company are happy with sales so far, and that sales have been gradually picking up speed. The optimistic thing about Rufus's position from an industry point of view is that Dreamworks consciously signed him as a "career artist," accepting that it might take a few albums before he builds up a solid audience, and that he might never be a real hit-parade quantity. And this is ok with them, apparently, entrusting to Rufus's charm, looks, etc. that he'll get and hold a strong cult following. This is where his sexuality comes back in - Rufus can't afford to be more discreet and shy. A lot of the reason that his inaccessible music can be embraced by a pop audience, potentially, is that he is a very distinctive and attractive personality and performer. To downplay that personality - which would certainly be necessary if he wanted to tone down his gayness - would be to toss one of his main assets away. And considering the screaming young girls I saw at his show Tues. night here, I don't see the evidence that he's alienating "straight audiences." Might I gently suggest that to a large proportion of the younger audience, straight and not-so-straight, his sexuality is simply not that big a deal (or even a bit titillating)? Consider that experimentation with bisexuality etc. is fairly accepted, even fashionable, in liberal-arts schools in the late 90s - there might be a slight generation gap showing in Richard's analysis. Ultimately, I think opera is much more alienating to a pop audience than homosexuality is to college students. But if Rufus keeps expanding his status as an idol of that younger crowd, then he can afford to wait out the word-of-mouth process and let the mainstream pop world catch up later. Without having to compromise or dissemble about who and what he is. Carl W.
Re: Covers/Rufus
Jake, as expected, has delivered yet another lengthy and worthwhile set of points here. Especially useful was the reference to the Althusser etc. idea about the different layers of culture/socioeconomy/demographics responding at different rates to different forces but coalescing (at least in retrospect) to form particular cultural styles. Think of the map Jake was drawing as a seismographic (tectonic-plates) survey and I think that makes sense of why Barry's issue about individual boomer differences and the like doesn't obviate the point. Generational bonds are one of the layers that scrape beneath our feet. (NB: I'd clarify that my question about the timing of the first punk-style ironic covers wasn't meant to be a criticism of Jake's use of the Mats, just a music-trivia sideline.) I also found the periodic questions about one-mass-culture vs. splintered-niche culture interesting, esp. re: speed and pervasiveness of media. My sense is that demographic pressure is helping push the parts of mass culture closer together again (unity in diversity as rock hip-hop fanciers start to hop borders via hybrid New Top 40 pop hits a la Puff Daddy). But each of the new mass phenomena is now famous for much less than 15 minutes, helping reinforce a cultural amnesia-anomie that's very far from the icon-saturation of the seventies. (And nervous making, imho.) My sense of the post-ironic moment all this is helping create was reinforced last night at an astoundingly packed and high-emotion concert by Rufus Wainwright. His archly sentimental songs were being treated as anthems by a crowd he suspected of being too young even to know who River Phoenix (subject of his song "Death of the Matinee Idol") was. Also significant, for instance, that this Gap-ad-doin', slacker-fop incarnatin' singer closed with a cover of a little folk song rather than of, say, a piano-retooled disco hit. Though of course his own background informs such choices (having folk-makin' folks). Watch those layers slide. Here's my review, appearing in tomorrow's Globe Mail in Toronto. (This is also part of my continuing consciousness-raising campaign on behalf of Martha Wainwright's upcoming album...) -- POP REVIEW Rufus Wainwright Trinity-St Paul's Centre, Toronto by Carl Wilson The Globe Mail Diva this, diva that. While pop pundits _ who resist catchphrases less hardily than medieval peasants did the bubonic plague _ affix the label to every Celine, Alanis and Shania who comes along, the only Canadian who earns it is a gay ex-Montrealer in his mid-20s. Rufus Wainwright, after all, croons about sex, death, Venetian columns and the love rituals of arcane gods, in his unique octave-skipping "popera" style. And if the fever of the standing-room-only crowd at Trinity St. Paul's in Toronto Tuesday night was any indication, he's tapping the latent romanticism of a generation that would normally scoff at the whole idea of latent romanticism. After a warmly received opening set by British singer Imogen Heap, whose piano ballads aligned comfortably with the Rufus vibe, a female chorus immediately began chanting "Rfuss!" in an oh-so-20-year-old singsong cadence. In fact, the starstruck Rufies (for want of a better word) defined the evening _ even as brash a performer as Wainwright seemed surprised to see how quickly a Gap-ad cameo, an alternative-album Juno (last weekend for his eponymous Dreamworks debut) and a year's worth of media fawning can make you a cult idol. The cheekbones and sideburns don't hurt either, of course. Wainwright, in his flower-embroidered short black jacket and blue crushed-velvet pants, embraced sex-symbol status with cheerful, if self-conscious, arrogance. After full-band treatments of bouncy album numbers Danny Boy and Matinee Idol, he introduced the tougher Damned Ladies from behind his piano: "This song is about opera and divas" _ screams from the fans. Pause. "Some of you girls better grow up to be opera singers, okay? ... For daddy?" The irony of being greeted as a sophisticated Backstreet Boys didn't escape Wainwright, perhaps the most unabashed gay man ever to grace a U.S. major label (and, with his blend of Sondheim, Schubert and Harry Nilsson, a songwriter who takes camp seriously indeed). Later, taking up his guitar, he coyly addressed the crowd: "Now, I'm sure you little girls all brought your gay friends along _ are you going to pimp them to me? Come on, line 'em up," he chuckled. "Oh, I keep forgetting we're in a
Re: instrumentally speaking
Calexico.
Re: RIP Stanley Kubrick
Stevie wrote: If you're wondering why all this is, it's worth bearing in mind that we had 19 years of an unbelievably repressive Tory government that even managed to outlaw the "promotion" of homosexuality as a legitimate lifestyle in education and cultural contexts. "This song promotes homosexuality/ It's in a pretended family relationship/ With the other ones on this record/ And on the radio/ And in the clubs and on the jukebox." - Mekons, "Empire of the Senseless" I believe Tinky Winky, carl w.
mathcountry
Carl Z.: Perhaps in two years, we'll see math-country (alt.country fused with the very Frippian loud indie rock known as math-rock). hoorah! ... actually, Carl, weren't those Terry-irking stop-start (Minutemen-influenced) Uncle Tupelo songs math country, basically? (I'm thinking for instance of most of Farrar's stuff on Still Feel Gone). if I were a good enough musician i'd run out and start a math-country band right now - i'd love to hear, er, Neko Case fronting a band like Don Caballero, which has lots of great moments but really isn't interesting enough to get by without vocals/songs. my other obsession is starting an alt-countryish group with a turntablist. Richard Buckner with the Invisibl Scratch Picklz, anyone? (fluffy today) carl w.
Re: Clip: Plastic People of the Universe
Wow, talk about a big tent - it was kind of hilarious to see this clip pop up in the middle of the oh-so-serious deliberations on No Depression vs. Alt-Country and the sources and tributaries of each. But since there seems to be some interest... FROM INSURRECTION TO RESURRECTION by Carl Wilson The Globe and Mail (Feb. 27/99) Czechoslovakian band The Plastic People of the Universe never said they wanted a revolution. From post-Soviet-invasion 1968 to their early-1980s breakup, they sang mordant poetry about mayflies, tavern beer and constipation. Yet unlike barnburning rock rhetoricians like John Lennon, the Clash or Rage Against the Machine, the Plastic People actually helped spark an insurrection. It was the 1976 trial of Prague's beloved psychedelic band (followed by the jailing of some members and expulsion of others) that prompted playwright Vaclav Havel and others to launch Charter 77, the dissident cluster that would birth Civic Forum and lead 1989's anti-Communist velvet revolution. Havel, in turn, as eventual president of the Czech Republic, was responsible for reuniting the Plastic People two years ago for a concert commemorating Charter 77's 20th anniversary. This led to the band's current North American tour, a once-impossible dream that brought them to Montreal on Wednesday and to a full house at the El Mocambo in Toronto on Thursday night. While it was repression that forced the Plastic People to political extremes, the radicalism in their sound is supplied by sax player Vratislav Brabenec, who joined in 1973 and convinced the group to switch from western rock covers to original songs (which Milan Hlavsa delivers in a talk-sing-shout recalling 1930s Central European cabaret). Brabenec also brought jazz _ the forbidden music of the previous generation _ to the Plastic People's stew of Frank Zappa and Velvet Underground influences. He blows Albert Ayler-style free screech over the ensemble's otherwise dated Smoke on the Water blues riffs (executed on violin, keyboards, bass, guitar and drums, often in unison). The saxophonist lived in exile as a gardener in Toronto and British Columbia for 14 years before the reunion. He said the tour is an opportunity to retire the old repertoire in a new environment before moving on _ perhaps _ to another phase. "Nothing musically has changed," he said from New York before the band hit the road, "but it is refreshed _ perhaps played with a new code." Indeed, the band is something of a museum piece. But unlike taxidermized rockers like the Rolling Stones _ who were playing the Air Canada Centre the same night the Czechs took the ElMo by storm _ the Plastic People's show carried a visceral charge. It was rather like a visit from Nelson Mandela. Recalling the authorities' disproportionate reaction to the group's frankly self-indulgent jams, Brabenec explained, "It wasn't necessary to be politically organized. The threat was the influence on young people. It was a circle of friends and fans, but it became a very large circle, thousands and thousands of people." The Plastic People mostly played private concerts at friends' homes, but when the gatherings got too large, police waded in, sometimes with savage beatings. It was as if the U.S. government had classified the Grateful Dead as Public Enemy Number One. Brabinek said the band was surprised to find how far their legend has travelled. The audience in Toronto greeted them with rapture, as pink-haired young cognoscenti jostled with grey-haired Czech parents (some with young-adult kids in tow) dancing in transports to the skronky sound. A highlight was a cameo appearance by Toronto's own Paul Wilson, who as a young visiting teacher in late-sixties Prague sang English lyrics for the early Plastic People. On his return to Canada _ where he became a distinguished translator and recently a contributing editor at Saturday Night _ Wilson smuggled the band's tapes to the West and distributed vinyl copies of their debut album, Egon Bundy's Happy Heart Clubs Banned (1974). Introducing the group, Wilson recalled how he'd helped sneak the Roland keyboard on stage into Czechoslovakia decades ago. "It's great to see it's still going," he laughed, and it was clear he meant the stooped and balding noncomformists on stage with him, too. Still, Wilson pointedly declined audience shouts for him to sing a number, perhaps Sweet Jane (the band's encore). Some parts of history, he averred, were better left unrevived. Indeed, the reconstituted group finds itself in a new world. Its tour
Re: Tweedy quote /generations
Tera wrote: - alt.country seems to be music for we aging baby boomers as opposed to alt.rock or new country which seems to target the teen to twenties crowd. Just a quick note as I gather breath to respond to Jake's epic call'n'response from yesterday - I think if you look at the P2 Survey you'll see the untruth of this. I'm convinced that alt-country is a (as Monsieur London puts it) "tailbust" and "gen-x" phenomenon. A glance around the audience at any alt-country show I've attended shows it skewing way to folks in their late-20s to mid-30s, with a smattering of younger and older. The punk connection of the "insurgent" side in particular makes the demographics fairly easy to track. Refer back to the Wilson-London chronicles for various bafflingly vague descriptions of the broader implications of this general pattern. I do think it's important that alt-country has a Gen-X connection (and as Jake noted, even a few years difference in age has some important implications for where in musical-cultural history you'll stand). And I'd also assert New Country is much more boomer-oriented than is alt-country - thus HNC takes its rock influences from Billy Joel, not from the Clash. Carl W.
Tweedy generations - cont'd
Tara, to clarify, it seems to me you're shouldering that "boomer" mantle/stigma in vain, if I'm reading you right. Amerians born after 1960 are not really baby-boom material, for myriad reasons social-and-economic chronology. For instance, if Watergate is one of the first news events you were able to follow (or even remember), that distinguishes you fairly obviously in cultural experience from anyone old enough to have had class interrupted by the announcement of Kennedy's assassination - we Watergate-era children never had quite the same cultural innocence to lose. Which has a lot to do, I'd reckon, with the eventual coming of punk, as well as with the interest in country as some sort of purer heritage from the antediluvian age - I don't think it's just coincidence that alt-country adores pre-seventies country (Hank, Buck, Cash, Jones, etc.) and is squeamish about almost everything thereafter. There's a generational sense that any mainstream culture made in our lifetimes must be by nature corrupt, stained by original sin. That a band as big as the Beatles could be seen as great artists and countercultural heroes by broad consensus is a basically alien concept to everyone too young to have participated, methinks. [With the possible counter-example of Star Wars, but that's total escapism. Nobody claims Star Wars galvanized the youth of America, tho in fact it did cause a huge shake-up in HOllywood and thus in the culture at large.] I'll shut up now ... carl w.
Re: Tweedy generations - cont'd
Noted I'd spelt Tera's name wrong. Mea culpa.
Re: A Question
Cheryl Cline wrote:
What DO we call this stuff?
I know you're being semi-sarcastic but: Having a country influence and
not being on country radio doesn't seem to me to make this stuff all
of a genre, even though the same people will often like most of it.
"Rootsy stuff" usually does in conversation. It'd behoove writers to
call things by more specific and evocative terms. The Old 97s should
be called "Dallas Calling pop-punk roots" while Dale Watson should be
called "stubbornly retrograde hard country," the Geraldine Fibbers
should be called "AIDS-era sonic twang," etc. etc. Delineating the
relationship to the alt-country media/marketing/social-scene should be
done in a separate sentence. ("Tweedy hates being called alt-country,
even though most everyone blames him for the movement;" "Hadacol is a
bit of an alt-country bandwagon band"; "Don Walser isn't quite sure
what the kids mean by alt-country.")
All in the spirit of your rules-for-critics.
Cheryl also wrote:
P.S.: Coming Soon: Boomers and Gen X, Tailbusters and Teenagers: Pfui.
Um, just to forestall being torn to well-chewed chunks by the sharp
incisors of the Cline wit - and knowing that I was waxing purple and
puffy in some of my previous contributions to this - I would like to
state for the record that generational distinctions only have very
very general application and that one's place in cultural chronology
is no more or less important than one's place in cultural geography,
gender, race, class and smarts, among other elements of life. *Of
course* age has no necessary relation to, for instance, being a
utopian hippie, or a cynical slacker, or whatever. These are all
contingent generalities.
I was addressing demographics in the frame of Jake's essay, but I too
hated the Gen-X shit when it was coming down the pipe fast and furious
in the early nineties. However: in retrospect, I have to say the best
of the commentary it generated was more accurate than I wanted to
admit. And I don't think it's foolish to say that the particular
cultural moment you grew up in, along with the economic conditions and
prevailing politics, is an important influence on who you become. We
don't question that when we talk about people who grew up in the
Depression and in the Jazz Age, so it seems fair to speculate about it
in terms of the eighties boom, the eighties-nineties recession, David
Letterman and grunge.
Any overblown claims of explanatory power are hereby dampened down.
But I'd still like to hear what Cheryl thinks.
Carl W.
Re: Generational irony and cover cheeze
Lance says: If there was one thing that I do see a bit differently is the idea of irony as a '90's development (of course, if you weren't suggesting that, Carl, please call me out). In point of fact, irony seemed to be a fundamental part of punk the moment rock came down with its case of arena-goggles. Oh, no, this is exactly what I was trying to address, Lance. My point was that irony worked as a counter-strategy in the late 70s and then became pervasive in the 80s. There are myriad examples but Letterman to me is the clearest marker of the shift - started off doing what seemed (when I was 12) almost like punk-rock television and then quickly became the most mainstream of forces. Spy magazine had a good piece about "The Irony Epidemic" in about 1989 that talked about the retro-kitsch and scare-quotes culture of urban hipsters of the era, and I think there was a confluence of the yuppie and the punk attitudes in all this. (Think of the emblematic young adult of the 80s as someone in a Hawaiian shirt, a house decorated with Flintstones memorabilia, working in advertising - and listening to the Cramps.) As David Thomas of Pere Ubu now argues, the weird thing about punk rock is that from a certain point of view, punk "won". (Only a certain element of punk but the dumb-is-smart part, for sure.) Thomas argues that Everything Is Punk now - politics included - and commercials being the best place to look. Nirvana's ascendance, though deeply well-deserved and also a complex cultural phenomenon, cemented the victory. My personal sum-up of Cobain's suicide is that the resulting paradox was unlivable for him, and I sympathize; one of the disturbing things about his death was that it seemed so logical, so much the inevitable outcome of the narrative. Which led precisely to this: sincerity had become the new alternative, and into that vacuum stepped alt.country. And that doesn't just apply to music. The younger folks I know have none of the same conflicts about all this that I do - the sorts of conflicts expressed in Jake's essay. They have so highly developed a sense of irony that it is useless to them - and as a result they have a lot more energy about just moving ahead and trying to find something meaningful to them despite how fucked-up they know the world is. There's an ingrown surrender to that attitude: mostly they don't see any point in opposing or rebelling against anything, and just want to pursue their own passions. "Selling out" is hardly an issue anymore. Which disturbs me, but since it's the same point I've come to after some 15 years of punk-rock-style anger, far-left politics and irony debilitation, I can hardly blame them. I almost envy them. And the drift of my musical tastes as I neared 30, toward "purer" forms - pop, country, experimental composition, jazz - and away from punk-based music was a fairly dramatic indicator of that sad, but necessary and liberating, attitude adjustment. carl w.
Generational irony and cover cheeze
I thought it interesting that Jake preceded his piece by saying that he thought Fulks's "Jet" cover was what put the "alt" in his alt-country, as well as Dina's comment about how covers are received from alt-country artists as compared to those of New Country singers. It resonated, of course, but what struck me is that the cheeze-cover syndrome is actually not endemic to alt-country the way it was to post-punk and grunge. What's actually more representative is covering classic folk and country songs, a practice that begins with the 80s roots-punk groups (tho in cowpunk it tended much more to the sarcastic brand of irony rather than the with-a-twist irony of, say, The Pogues, and nineties alt-country) but certainly made its most influential emergence with Uncle Tupelo's version of No Depression and on the March 11-20 album. With the perhaps-exception of Warfare (more a wonky misstep than a deliberately sarcastic cover, in my opinion), the Tupelo covers are definitely tributes, and also attempts to reclaim the material of these old songs as relevant to the post-industrial scene the group grew up and lived in. Likewise with other cases - when Neko Case covers a Loretta Lynn song, or Freakwater does One Big Union, is there anyone who thinks there's any element of mockery there at all? There is irony, but it's irony in this sense: "Ironically, though I'm a young hipster in 1990s America, these defiantly unmodern old songs speak more to my heart and my experience than the glitzy music being produced for the radio in my own time." It's a bittersweet irony at most. Now, I'd say the reason for the contradiction (dare I say irony) that Dina pointed out is fairly simple: while Garth and Robbie Fulks might both love a Paul McCartney song equally well, the context is very different. For Fulks to assert that he's playing "Jet" for the love of it is to make an intervention in the whole alternaworld narrative of irony, not to destroy the irony but to put it behind him, to say, "yes, I know what the cultural war we've been through was, but now I'd like to reclaim something from it." It is, to use an unfortunate term, post-irony. It's to grasp that, as a character in Todd Solonz's Happiness says of New Jersey, we've grown up "living in a state of irony" -- for all the reasons Jake so smartly elucidated in his essay -- and we can only transcend it, not escape. On the other hand, the (very country-traditional) emotional positioning of Garth and most New Country artists doesn't acknowledge the ironic moment to begin with -- the act of covering a Billy Joel song has no relationship to the canonical contest that Jake described. I recently read art writer Arthur Danto saying that in the 1990s, "the art criticism is built into the art," since frequently the only way to affect a jaded viewer is to anticipate the series of historicized responses she'll have and then strategically counter or subvert them. Unlike Garth doing Billy Joel (or everyone and his mom doing the Beatles tribute album), Fulks's "Jet" cover (if it's as good as you folks say) is doing something similar, and that's what puts the alt in his country. Likewise, Tupelo was anticipating that country was not considered cool by their punk peers, and asserting back in their face that it was -- rather than cadging about behind an ironic shield and half-allowing people to think they were kidding. Again there is an irony here, a Mobius-strip half-twist, but it isn't sarcasm. It isn't like Sid Vicious singing My Way. (Incidentally I can't quite buy The Christian Life as having much to do with the kinds of covers Jake was addressing. When I asked what "the first" was, I really meant of the trend he was discussing - I thought it'd be significant to know if there were cheeze-covers that fell squarely into the same position - for instance did Iggy Pop ever sing a Carpenters song? Or what about that Banana Splits cover of the TV cartoon theme?) Now, the question in the context of Jake's essay is, why? Being a few years younger than Jake (or so I gather), my friends and I don't have the same relationship to 70s music that he describes. Yeah, it was the soundtrack to some of our teenage beer-drinking, but so was punk, ska and new wave. Our older siblings loved Emerson, Lake and Palmer; we listened to it for a couple of months, when we borrowed their years-old vinyl, then dropped it and moved on. I was not quite ten years old when punk first arrived in the nearest metropolitan centre; I could hear its faint signals by turning my transistor radio at just the right angle toward the window. Although I've experienced my fair share of feeling crowded out by baby boomers -- and still do -- the 70s were just as much a given part of the culture I came of age in as the 60s. They didn't belong to me, and I'm not especially nostalgic for them. I'm nostalgic for the Replacements. Or, to give an instance of a song a band I
Re: Robbie Fulks and covers
...covers of godawful cheesy rock songs? Why do people respond to these more than they do to the, OK, I'm going to say it, "real" songs? The obvious answer here is that people like to have fun (and unfortunately sometimes people like to have fun much more than they like to have anything else, which is why people talk during the ballads). ... But it was interesting the way this came round to various attempts to condemn particular pop songs, which others defended, and then to the whole alterna-cool of cheeze these days. I'm as bored by a lot of kitschomania as anyone (possibly more so), but I think there's more to this - that in a genuinely *un*ironic way the hip-music world has come round to an appreciation of pop as a Good Thing in itself in the past few years. you can hear it in people saying "we're not trying to be silly by playing these pop covers - we *like* these songs." you can hear it in many of the best indie bands, and I think (I know it is for me) a weariness with the pointless game of keeping up with hip trends and cooler-than-thouness that began especially with punk rock, and a new wariness against the kind of disdainful ironic stance that was ubiquitous in post-punk circles towards pop culture. The embrace of pop is also part of a new eclecticism, in which everything from 60s soundtrack music to disco to musique concrete to Tuvan throat-singing sits happily in the alterna-bricolage. (Oh, and country should be on that list, too.) I do however see a couple of problems with this: first, I think a lot of people in the alterna-world have never developed good ears to be able to tell a great pop song from a mediocre one, and tend just to respond to whatever reminds them of being 12; second, the just-wanna-have-fun impulse that's good for pop can lead to a shutout of more genuinely experimental and innovative efforts, an over-suspicion that anything not willfully bouncy is pretentious. Still, I think pop revivals are always a good thing for the music-creativity cycle in the long run. Music being music, you need to feel it all over. Carl W.
sucking in the 70s (was Fulks/very long piece)
I'm off to a company-awards dinner with an open bar, so I can't linger at the moment. But I'd like to urge everybody who might have balked at the length to read Jake's piece right now (tho he shouldn't have sent it as an attachment - you should repost it as mail for those who can't handle attachments, Jake). It's the most engaging and cogent piece of personal rock crit/history I've read in a long while - a lot like some of the considered essays people used to post to P2 more often in the distant past. (When there weren't seven-fucking-hundred of us.) I have some points to make about the demographic analysis he offers, how that's shifted since the essay was written, and how that relates to my argument that post-irony (not to be confused with boomer non-irony) is happily finally here (in my previous post). I also have some thread-sparking questions (what was the first known instance of the half-ironic cover - is he right in naming the 'Mats's Kiss cover as Patient Zero - and also how to relate this web of analysis to the various levels of irony in alt-country covers of both rock and country so-called cheeze). Briefly, the grunge-lounge period dynamic changed the landscape - which I think relates very much to why the post-Tupelo alt-country explosion (much to do with groping toward authenticity-sincerity) has happened. As I say, I've got some serious drinking to do, so that'll have to wait til morning. But y'all could start without me, I won't mind. Thanks a lot Jake. Don't wait 3 years next time! Carl W.
Re: Is It or Is It Not?
Re bluegrass 'n' the purists: I think it's right to be skeptical about the extent of genre-purity policing and how much it's directly kept away potential fans; *but* - consider the secondary possible effect, that purist attitudes are part of the reason that bluegrassers have perhaps hesitated to embark on projects like the Steve Earle album before now. (Aside from Grisman/Garcia, and perhaps a couple of more minor examples, that's somewhat true isn't it - contributing to coffee-house f*lk albums doesn't count, by the way - ?) As someone remarked, a lot of people have trouble with hardcore bluegrass (and old-time, and of course country for that matter) when they first hear it - find it piercing, grating, repetitive, etc. (a lot of this is class, anti-rural etc. but it's also lack of exposure and familiarity). A lot of people don't "get" jazz either. But crossover projects in the long run help bring people 'round to new appreciations of the source material, and rock-pop-jazz-soul-country crossovers of various sorts have been common for ages. If bluegrass musicians hesitate to do such projects because they'll get flack and "is it bluegrass" grillings for it, then that opportunity's lost. All that to say: it might not be purist attitudes driving away potential bluegrass fans, but obeisance to purists (real or apprehended ones) may make bluegrass musicians less effective popularizers. carl w.
Re[2]: The Eradication Game (Re: Grammyszzzzzzzzz....)
Me-toos: Celine (nationalism be damned), Alanis for confusing a generation about the meaning of the word irony (nationalism ditto), Phish (look, turning people onto bluegrass is still no excuse for turning much larger numbers of people on to hackysack) (no offense, Amy!), and add the goddamn Dave Matthews Band while you're at it (the Supertramp of our age). Plus: Stevie Ray Vaughn, who while inoffensive and sometimes soulful in himself has inspired the worst teenage guitar boy fantasies since Jim Morrison. In the same spirit, Yngwie Malmstein. Oh, and why not Jim Morrison? (And Neil, no pre-punk whining from you.) Alternate-universe fun: Imagine there's no Beatles. (Or can we at least imagine *less* Beatles? Puh-leez?) No way: Joni, who is pretty much responsible for the acceptance of serious female songwriters since the 1970s, despite her occasional excesses (and Mingus is a great album too). I also object to picking on Styx, whose camp excesses are the source of endless amusement (why next you'll be killing off Burton Cummings!) The Buckner and Ray Stevens battling blow-offs are beneath notice. Pet peeves: Eradicate the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. Eradicate Oh Susanna. Eradicate James Taylor (oh, he already has). Eradicate Paul Simon - even though I like his stuff at times, I think it would be healthy. (Well, maybe Graceland can stay - wouldn't be kind to wipe out all those great African bands along with the little whiner). Eradicate Will Smith. (Vanilla Ice being too easy). And, despite their groovetastic moments, eradicate the Wu-Tang Clan, who've dragged hip-hop kids way off in the comic-book direction. I was going to go on to Twangcentric eradications but not up for the fight. Next round. carl w.
Re[2]: Hyper produced Bobby Bare
Terry wrote: To me, production is like makeup on women; when it draws attention to itself, then it's not working. Nice phrasing, but I don't buy it: I know what makeup is, but what exactly is "production" in this sentence? Isn't it pretty much everything on the recording? Should nothing on the recording draw attention to itself? How is the prominence of one element (say, strings) inherently more of a problem than the prominence of another (say, the vocalist). I'd say on some of my favourite records the production precisely does call attention to itself - let's take Phil Spector (or Brian Wilson/ Van Dyke Parks's Beach Boys production) for an easy example and Tom Waits for a somewhat harder one. Spector's big smooth wall of sound - and Waits's herky-jerky textured carpet of sound - are both the outcome of production technique, of "playing the studio." It's the sound of the record, and if it didn't draw attention to itself then you wouldn't be listening. This isn't to say all production is good production, Terry. But it makes far more sense to me to say that you think a record was produced in bad taste rather than trying to say it was produced too much or too little, which is more a process question that would require some knowledge of the recording's history to decipher. Carl W.
Re: 50/90
Contributing just cuz - I'm not 100 p.cent sure that one "has to" pick a Tupelo on such a list - sure, there's a wide-ranging infl. on the subgenres we discuss here, but much of the rest of that list was justified by the waves sent out that reached a broader mass than that. And some of what gets called a Tupelo influence is equally an X-Gram Parsons-Replacements-etc list of common predecessors. Tho some of the list equally unjustified or unjustifiably missed. But then again the title (50 reasons it's been a great decade) suggests a personal-taste element - and as Ms. Cheryl says, the whole idea is somewhere in the crap zone in the end. Still I enjoyed the read (tho mind you I fall somewhere in the critic category, if not as far in as the weaselly Weiss among others - I no longer get many advancers - few of all the discs everybody's talking about this week for instance). But on UT - I would go along with David Carl Z. on Still Feel Gone, tho Anodyne's an undoubtedly more influential album. The dynamic range and lyrical unconventions, the sudden switches in texture make SFG Tupelo's art-rock album, to my ears, and I think in emotional range the most interesting thing Farrar was to do until Straightaways. (How's that for a contrarian position?) Carl W.
Re: Hyper produced Bobby Bare
David's point about context sounds fuckin' cool: I heard a panel discussion on record production on the radio this weekend that included Niles Rogers, the fuckin'-cool-sounding producer-guitar player from Chic and, of course, of David Bowie's least-twee, funniest album, Let's Dance. (The great final flameout of his artistic relevance.) One of the points made was that a producer is like a film director - not someone making a soundtrack but someone *making the film* by assembling the creative elements into a coherent package. And it seems to me that a lot of arrangement choices are the aural equivalent of montage. Great montage includes, for one thing, the awareness that cliches (eg., screaming to indicate fear, minor chords to indicate sadness, darkness to indicate menace, spare instrumentation to indicate grit) are a trap. You're unlikely to create something striking and original because you're telling people what they already know - whereas horror in full daylight might be more horrifying, whereas happy songs in minor keys (which is a tradition in many parts of the world) might be more evocative, whereas lush instrumentation may convey a sense of suffocating self-awareness... (Of course, the cliches used carefully might also be original and striking but that seems an even more daunting challenge doesn't it?) The other important element in montage of course, is montage itself. That is, as Eisenstein realized (based I recall on psychological studies), that people will read values into neutral images depending what precedes and follows. So you can cut from a crying baby to a woman seated at a table with a blank expression, and the audience will guess she's a mother at wit's end; or you can cut from Marcello Mastrianni opening a bottle of wine to a woman seated at a table and people will assume she's rapt with anticipation for her lover. This is just an analogy to support what David's saying about inherent meaning and artistic choice - that putting strings on something isn't always sweetening, that a slow slide down a steel guitar is a prism we see the song through, not a dictator of a particular emotive content. (I can accept that through tradition and perhaps even inherent musical wiring we're *likely* to hear these things one way or another, but like David I'm highly suspicious of literal equivalences.) Though that's not to say that some countrypolitan music didn't get the shit produced out of it, just like some spare music sounds wobbly and flat. In art how you use the tool matters at least as much as the tool itself, McLuhanism be ... well, not damned, but at least somewhat modified. Carl W.
Re: Gay Country (Was: Re: K.D. Lang)
Just a correction of the record here, Jon. I didn't argue that the views in the survey and intreviews were a step backward from anything. (And I also didn't say suburban/female - I said average middle-class - which was the focus of the survey and the related book (whose title I'll trawl up if anyone's interested)). My point was that on race, religion, culture, gender (i don't recall there was any class oriented content, unsurprisingly) the responses were much more tolerant and unprejudiced than you might expect - while the respondents may not live integrated lives racially, for instance, they recognized and earnestly expressed respect for those categories of difference. But when it came to homosexuality people were much less progressive, much readier to express discomfort, even hatred. The implication was that we haven't come as far in North Am. society on accepting diverse sexualities as we might like to think, compared to some other fronts. That's not nec. to say the survey was accurate, but insofar as it was an indicator, it reinforces the sense that the very idea of homosexuality is still fraught territory and risky for music that pitches itself more toward "average" folks. Thus it's probably a mistake underestimating the career problems it would raise for KD or any other out country musician (or light pop or rock artist, or fill-in-the-mainstream-category here) carl w.
Re: K.D. Lang
Jon J wrote about cueers in quountry music: A lot of the old taboos have fallen in the last ten years or so, but that's still the Big One. The eventual emergence of the first openly gay country music star is going to be one of the more fascinating milestones in country music when it finally happens. Not that I believe in polls exactly, but there was an interesting survey showing last year showing that homophobia truly is the last bastion of open intolerance in America. The authors did in-depth interviews with hundreds of very average middle-class people across the country, found them much more open-minded about race than anyone expected (tons of them brought up family members who were in interracial couples as a factor that made them reevaluate prejudice), but quite virulent in opposition to homosexuality. Though most of them stopped short of hate-mongering, or even saying it should be a crime etc, they did honestly think it a sin. And disgusting too of course. That'd pretty much be the soccer-mom demographic country radio aims for, and I'd be pretty surprised if a gay or lesbian country star can break through before this changes. (Which I foolishly imagine it will by the time today's late-adolescents are grown, because no reasonably educated kids I meet now seem to be shocked by homosexuality anymore. But y'never know.) Not that rock-based pop music or, for god's sakes, hip-hop are terrifically open-minded on the matter either, but it is pretty hard to imagine even a country equivalent of Marilyn Manson's level of androgyny (a good example since he makes a big deal of being straight), much less an out-and-proud pop twanger. carl w.
Re: Hard country (was Re: Heather Myles Injustice
Thanks don for recycling yer hard-country history lesson. Nice to precisisize one's terminology, and I must have been off-list when you first posted it a year ago... carl w.
Re: Wilco (ST)
Lance wrote: Well, I've heard the Kinks, the Beach Boys, and the ubiquitous Beatles referred to, but does anyone else think of the Flaming Lips when they listen to this new album? Or maybe Neutral Milk Hotel? I'm not necessarily suggesting an influence here, but in their space-age orchestration and dense layering of sounds... Sure, but 'soon as you start talking about orchedelia bands like the Lips and especially NMH you're talking about the sixties-production, and especially Beach Boys, -influenced stream of 90s indie. I haven't heard the new Wilco (though the things I've read and the hopes that JT has learned something from the Mermaid Ave. experience make me more interested in it than I was in Being There), but I think there's something Brian in the water the past couple of years. Pre-millennial van dyke sparks. And Tweedy is nothing if not a well-tuned antenna for available pop options. (poptions?) carl w.
Re: songs of love and hate
Evan mentioned his annual anti-valentine show, 'n (if this doesn't qualify as fluff) prompted me to tell him that the last anti-valentine broadcast he sent on tape has become my road-trip standby, so if the offer's good a second time around... and I dunno if Carl tapes his shows but since Fear Whiskey's playlists continually convince me it's the best radio show in the world... I will send money. Or tapes. Or music. Or pie. Woe, regret 'n' recrimination being my middle names, Carl (WRnR) W.
re: old 97s in Toronto
A few thoughts vaguely related to some current threads... So the great mystery of the O97s is now cleared up -- after hearing only a couple of tracks on comps here and there, I now actually know what they truly sound and look like and what the hype is about, after their show last night at The Horseshoe in Toronto (which I attended against my more responsible judgment). Damn if they aren't an impressively energizing live band, as most of y'all know. I won't detail the set, since I'm behind the curve here, but I'm surprised, with Rhett's cute-boy charisma (I assume the fact that the six or seven most attractive women in the room lined up directly in front of centre stage was not a one-time-only phenom?) and the ridiculous hookiness of the songs, that they haven't broken a little bigger. The non-twanginess of the upcoming album seems a little overhyped, judging by what they played from it last night, incidentally. But while I was thinking how country a couple of the songs were (the West Texas tributes had the most roots-soul, though as much Mexican as country) I thought back to the usual P2 debates, and wuz struck by how right Jon's been in the past to point out that the altcountry vs. HNC battles often aren't, emotionally, so much about which is "real" country so much as a difference in taste about the type of rock involved in each case. I know it's been said many times, many ways but: The punk/new-wave aspect of the Old97s is as vital to their sound as Journey and the Eagles are to Garth's - yet both obviously know their trad country too (the cover last night was "Mama Tried"). I'd defend my Nick Lowe/Replacements/Clash preferences over 70s MOR rock any day - and it's not just my particular brand of nostalgia, though it's *also* my particular brand of nostalgia - but I really do think it's ridiculous to do it in terms of relative country-ness. There's a relevant argument to be made about the importance of Glen Campbell 70s country vs. outlaw 70s country to each of the two streams, too, but again "realness" does in fact seem a foolish substitute for defining taste, yardsticks of quality - I was real fond of the Old97s lyrics, for the wordplay and humour, which in most of the HNC I've heard is overly reliant on one reiterated dumb pun, tho that in fact might be more country kidding, kidding - and so on. I am coming round to thinking that what we're seeing is the fact that rock in one form or another has overtaken country so much in the culture that it feels like "roots" music to a broad demographic that includes a lot of the former core country audience, so that stone-traditional country is very marginal to all the commercially partway viable versions. Or at least that's what I was thinkin' last night. I had had a couple of beers, mind you. Hm. I'm late for a dinner party. No time for second thoughts... Carl W.
Old 97s in Toronto
Swore to myself I'd do this properly this time - I don't know if this is supposed to be Tfest material, but frankly I suspect lots of the northerners don't bother with you southerners' social palaver. (I'm beginning to agree with Barry M that the division is slightly problematic, after all the recent music talk over there. List dominatrixes must maintain vigilance.) **Any P2ers and their associates in the Toronto region (you know, east of Winnipeg, west of Halifax) planning to attend this Old 97s show at the Horseshoe next week? If so shall we make plans to meet up?** And Richard Flohill, my apologies for missing you when you dropped by the office - was that this week? carl w.
Re: Americana guesswork
I'm counting on everyone to stop wishing alt-country will "blow open," since the continual frustration of that hope seems to me to be causing some of the genre's stalwarts to falter a bit. There'll be events like Lucinda's much-hyped (but not so much bought) 1998, but I think the key is the demographic point someone previously made - it is in fact a glass ceiling that's set at about knee level. Though this is a drag for working musicians, for fans it's not really so bad - the constant obsession with judging musical success by huge sales numbers seems parallel to me with the tendency to judge politics by polls, movies by box office, and justice by corporate dividends. Here's my 1999 slogan for alt-country/Americana - The Back To "No Future" Music - "The Past is Now." carl w.
Re[2]: cd reviewing ethics Danger: long and a bit preachy!
..Anyway, the idea is to grow a "scene" the way we grew up those many years ago. And if i have to put on my own barn dances and publish my own little fanzine or ezine or whatever to help it grow, I'll do it. I have to say I agree. We have a little bluegrass fanzine called The Burr here in the NYC area and we all write about each other in it. And it gets a bit of attention for all the people on the bluegrass scene here, and really encouraged a lot of growth in that little fledgling scene. It created a local forum. There's a professionalism vs. scene-support divide in the music-journalism biz that's hard to cope with. At the so-called alternative-weekly I wrote for in Montreal, friendships with musicians were considered qualifications for the job -- the one leverage we had against the grown-up media in getting stories, interviews etc first. There was an unspoken understanding you wouldn't stand to make $ off promoting anyone, but that was about the only limit. I don't think it was *entirely* healthy - I was less comfortable with folks around me who had the same kind of friendships with major-label record and radio hacks and who felt obliged to do favours for them re: shit music. But since I specialized in the weird stuff - experimental indie rock, avant-garde stuff, non-dance electronics and country/roots material - it was easy for me to feel that I was a part of what little scene existed in those areas, but as a writer rather than as a musician or promoter. It sorta made life worth living - and while I might have overstated things when I loved what a local musician was doing, along with the "inside" role it seemed to me I was constrained to offer constructive criticism or even a hard jab here and there, since a critical ear and incisive pen was what, according to my lights, I had to offer to help improve things. Working now at a major metropolitan daily (I just like the way the words go together) - and not being a full-time critic, but fighting for space to do some music writing here there - the divide is a little harder, 'cuz there's none of the idealized marriage between the paper and a scene that many alt-weeklies at least imagine themselves to have. Mind you, it is fun to try to sneak things in (like my Magnetic Fields Richard Buckner pieces this summer) that the paper just wouldn't normally print. And it's also fun to play the voice on the mountaintop judging big cultural trends. BUT - north american media's so hamstrung by the Voice of Objectivity, and a whole overwrought ethical system that goes along with it, that suddenly being friends with people you've praised (even because you've praised them) is an issue. Frankly I think culture, unlike straight politics, is so far from being a matter of objectivity that most of these systems of thought are insane. I heard Frank Rich, former theatre critic of the NY Times, say that during his long period as critic he avoided having any social contact with people in the theatre. Which means that as a reviewer you miss whole levels of insight you can provide to an audience, and set yourself up as some sort of vehicle of divine intervention. I'd rather read someone like Gary Indiana, whose allegiances and positions are clear and whose point-of-view is the spirit motor of his writing, anyday. A friend who read my Buckner piece thought it was well-written but criticized it for sounding "a bit too much like it was written by a fan." To me that was praise - the aesthetic of the old punk and other scene magazines that demanded and got great writing but great writing by people who were clearly passionate about the art form and the specific music they addressed. That's the kind of thing that raises criticism to an art. All else is foul wind. And if you can afford to take the time to write for the kind of small-scale, non-paying miracles like the bluegrass zine Elena's talking about, that's a sort of secular heaven. carl w.
Re: Americana guesswork
JP writes: 2) I'm not talking about Son Volt et al. I'm talking about converting teenagers already into country from crapola to good country etc Kind of like Dwight, Clint, Randy and Steve saved country from Kenny Rogers in 1986 (of course Garth ruined all that.) From tired, cliched country to another, richer style that will also bring new fans to the genre. Like Nirvana converted Motley Crue and Poison fans to punk ... ok, but how many teenagers are there who are into any kinda country? anyone know? does Garth have a teenaged audience? did Dwight Randy? i'm genuinely curious. verbose this aft, carl w.
