Via Andrew Sullivan (and Hit and Run) this fine, fine video. You have to watch the whole thing, because it really grows on you. I agree with scruffy hipster Julian Sanchez: “Anyone who can watch this and complain about the pernicious effects of cultural globalization has no soul.” Finally, a Numa Numa dance video for the generation that grew up 30 seconds ago.
From the category archives:
Music
I saw a great concert last night as part of the Third Coast International Audio Festival‘s events. The special guest for the evening was One Ring Zero playing music different from most of what’s usually on my playlist. As one of the members described it at some point: weird circus klezmer music. As silly or weird as that may sound, I think it was a reasonable description of at least some of their music. (If you don’t know what klezmer music is, you can check out the bit of discussion we had about the topic here on CT a while back or see what Wikipedia has to say about it.)
The group was performing pieces from their most recent album As Smart As We Are that has songs with lyrics from an impressive set of writers. See the Web site for some sample mp3s and the list of contributors to this album.
The concert also came with the special treat of watching Bob Ewards play the theremin. I had never seen a theremin played so this was interesting in general. In case you don’t know what a theremin looks like (or what someone looks like playing it), Theremin.info has a helpful animated image on its front page to give you an idea. (Needless to say blogs exist on the topic of theremins if you want a daily dose.:)
Thanks to my friend Ben – the trumpet player in last night’s performance – for alerting me to this event, it was definitely a treat. I’ve posted a couple of images on Flickr.
The last time Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam was discussed on this blog, he was being deported from the US as a threat to national security . Now, via Amanda , I see that he’s been busy recording with Dolly Parton. As Amanda puts it:
bq. call me profane, but the idea of a noted religious ascetic picking with the Texas Whorehouse lady herself really appeals to me.
This paragraph from Brian Hinton’s _South by South West: A Road Map to Alternative Country_ could perfectly well do service as a caption to a Far Side cartoon:
bq. Lazily labelled as “folk rock” during their ten-year career together, Richard and Linda were as attuned to Americana as anyone living in a Sufi commune in rural Norfolk could ever hope to be.
Probably the high-point of a book which mainly consists of a long list of obscure band names.
My interest in americana and similar was noted by a former student who runs the music pages of a local arts magazine, so I was drafted in to review a performance by Tom Russell in Bristol the other day. As you’ll see from the review in Decode magazine , I had a good time, and I’m hoping for similar commissions in the future!
Jim MacDonald (over at Making Light) offers us a compendium of vital life advice gleaned from folk songs. Number one is, if someone says to beware of Long Lankin, then totally beware of him, for real. More:
If you are an unmarried lady and have sex, you will get pregnant. No good will come of it.
If you are physically unable to get pregnant due to being male, the girl you had sex with will get pregnant. No good will come of it. You’ll either kill her, or she’ll kill herself, or her husband/brother/father/uncle/cousin will kill you both. In any case her Doleful Ghost will make sure everyone finds out. You will either get hanged, kill yourself, or be carried off bodily by Satan. Your last words will begin “Come all ye.”
Going to sea to avoid marrying your sweetie is an option, but if she hangs herself after your departure (and it’s even money that she’s going to) her Doleful Ghost will arrive on board your ship and the last three stanzas of your life will purely suck.
If you are a young gentleman who had sex it is possible the girl won’t get pregnant. In those rare instances you will either get Saint Cynthia’s Fire or the Great Pox instead. No good will have come of it….
Have nothing to do with former boyfriends who turn up and say it’s no big deal that you’re now married to someone else and have a child. If their intentions are legit, that’s got to be a problem. If it’s not a problem, their intentions are not legit.
You are justified in cherishing the direst suspicions of a suddenly and unexpectedly returned significant other who mentions a long journey, a far shore, or a narrow bed, or who’s oddly skittish about the imminent arrival of cockcrow.
If you are a young lady and you meet a young man who says his name is “Ramble Away,” don’t be surprised if, by the time you know you’re pregnant, it turns out he’s moved and left no forwarding address.
I’d just like to add a few words based on American folksongs (probably derivative of the English ones): if you do kill your pregnant lover by drowning her in the cold, cold sea, the odds are good that someone will find her body and make a fiddle bow of her long black hair, and pegs of her white finger bones, and then the only song that fiddle will play will cry your guilt out to the world. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Listening to Bob Harris Country last Thursday, I was really captivated by Tom Russell talking about Charles Bukowski. I didn’t know anything about Bukowski, except having a vague idea that he might be something to do with the beat poets. Anyway, I was intruiged enough to go out and buy Post Office , Bukowski’s grittily written account of working for the US post office as a relief postman and then as a clerk whilst being almost permanently drunk, gambling and womanizing.
bq. It began as a mistake.
A great opening line to hook you in, reminiscent of Hammett or Chandler, except this isn’t a crime story. Brilliant muscular writing about snagging with petty authority figures, trudging around delivering letters to lunatics in the pouring rain, mean and manipulative men and women, making money at the track, routine, boredom, cheating the system.
One of the best things I’ve read in a while, I don’t mind saying. Completely non-boring. I’ve now gone out and bought Ham on Rye , which I’m really looking forward to, as well as a book of poems: You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense . Comments to further remedy my Bukowski-related ignorance (or my Tom Russell-related ignorance for that matter) would be most welcome.
Bribery is a good thing because it helps the bribed to learn what is best! So argues law & economics professor Thomas W. Hazlett in today's Financial Times :
bq. Payola was made famous by scandals in the 1950s, when “cash, drugs and women” were traded to rock and roll disc jockeys in exchange for airtime, but the practice has a richer history. In both Britain and the US, 19th- and early 20th-century performers collected side-payments from music publishing houses for singing their songs.
bq. Ronald Coase, the Nobel Prizewinning economist, explained the practice in 1979. Radio stations own something valuable: songs played more tend to sell more. Competition for airtime develops, but how one conducts the best auction – given that station revenues come primarily from selling audiences to advertisers – is complicated.
bq. One view is that radio stations should be faithful to listeners and make choices based only on their DJs’ honest musical appreciation. But how do they know what gangsta rap track is top quality? Payola helps them learn, because record companies will tend to value airtime the most for releases for which they have the highest expectations of future sales.
I’d love to read commentary on this over at Marginal Revolution . Tyler?
The Flop Eared Mule (who is becoming a daily stop for me) has a fine post on Townes Van Zandt , Philip Larkin, and how life-embracing depressing lyrics can be (complete with link to an interview with the maker of the forthcoming Townes movie).
Here’s a site I think is fun: Cheezeball . Dedicated to alt.country (whatever that is) and keeping it free of schmaltz and schlock: ‘ “It is “cheeze” with a “z,” as in “Muzak.”‘. The reviews are often savage (including of a least one album I think is pretty good) and funny and the manifesto is worth a read (and connects with Kieran's recent post on Christian rock).
The Rousseau Association/Association Rousseau , which is a very fine bunch of scholars and a nice crowd of human beings, has a new website thanks to Zev Trachtenberg at the University of Oklahoma. It is still in development but when finished it should be an important resource and marks a distinct improvement on the last version. Visitors can dowload works by Rousseau, follow links to other sites of interest, browse a selection of images and even listen to some of the music Jean-Jacques composed. (Full disclosure, I’m currently VP of the Association.)
I’m gradually making my way back to Tucson from Australia. Free advice: if you can avoid taking a flight across the Pacific oecean with a small child suffering from a cold and teething pain, go right ahead and avoid it. I am presently at an undisclosed location in the Pacific Northwest. Outside the hotel is a little plaza. A band has been playing Christian rock music to a small crowd. Lots of terrible, low-quality, saccharine power ballad stuff, complete with sexualized double-talk. (“There was a man in my room last night … ” Guess who it was.) Like Creed on valium. Hard to imagine, I know. They just closed out the show with a version of “I’m a Believer.” By far the liveliest song they’ve played, but with the lyrics changed. (“Then I saw _his_ face,” etc.) I suppose _something_ has to counterbalance the fact that a large chunk of the best music ever written is Christian music.
“The world needs laughter.”
The Something Awful column “Your Band Sucks” is an unrelenting, over-the-top assault on every musician, genre and album that it touches. A recent column, “The Greatest Albums Ever Suck”, is just what it sounds like. For example:
On U2’s The Joshua Tree: This managed to weasel its way to number four on the Rolling Stone list, inexplicably. I wish I could write this review like The Edge plays the guitar. I’d just tap a few words into my delay pedal and let them echo and repeat for five minutes so I could leave and read Mad Magazine on the toilet.
A lot of people look at a few critically revered albums with incomprehension, don’t they? I know I do. My big one is Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted. I’ve given this rock milestone a lot of chances, and I just can’t pay attention for more than a few minutes. Fans listen to this album and hear “cryptic”, “primitive”, “disjointed”, “groundbreaking”. I hear a bunch of guys who forgot to write any songs. I’m not saying that my taste is any better than theirs; I just don’t get it.
Anyone else?
On Tuesday night I went to see the Bottle Rockets , supported by Romney Leigh Getty , play at the social club attached to my local RC church. Very good they were too (review here ). But I write not to praise the Bottle Rockets but to wonder how the whole thing makes economic sense. Here are four guys, who have travelled to Europe from St. Louis, Missouri (plus the two Canadians in the support act). They have to meet their expenses, pay their entourage, agent, manager etc. They have to pay the cost of travel. The people who run the club have to break even, etc etc., the bar has to sell enough beer. My guess is that there were 50 people in the audience who all paid 10 pounds (and some of them bought CDs for another tenner). Maximum income for the night is therefore 700 pounds. Sure, touring sells CDs and builds name recognition, but how much difference does it make? Enough? This is the sort of thing which Tyler Cowen has probably got an opinion on.
Surfing around, I found this oldish report of some classes that Steve Earle taught at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago . The class is about the links between traditional music — as found in Harry Smith’s American Anthology of Folk Music — and contemporary songwriting. There are classes on Woody Guthrie, Dylan, Springsteen, Townes Van Zandt, and on Earle’s own songs. There’s also much gossip and general chit-chat. Interesting stuff.