Music

A local DJ played ‘The Year of the Cat’ a few weeks ago and said that it was about ‘some British comedian called Tony Hancock‘ (yeah, like, the greatest single-handed comedian of the 20th Century, but I’ll let that pass). So, I listened to the song over and over again. And then again. I know the story of Hancock’s life better than anyone my age should, and though the song does sound a little sad, I simply can’t get the reference. (Is ‘a country where they turned back time’ Australia? If so why?) Google doesn’t help much: I got this German site, and an error message. Now I hear Steve Harley’s show and he (who ought to know) associates the song with Yussuf Islam which makes much more sense. Does anyone know the story about this?

* Listening to “Appetite for Destruction“. I wasn’t much of a metalhead, but it’s still a terrific album. It’s noteworthy that in a genre known for showboating drummers and extended drum solos, their drummer is the very opposite of a showboat. (A “tugboat”, maybe?)

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I’m sure all the Cool Kids have heard this already, but I only just found out about Skeewiff's remix of the Soggy Bottom Boys’ Man of Constant Sorrow. That’s a 7.3MB download, but it’s well worth it. It is, at the very least, the best freely available song I’ve heard in a long time. And electronic remixes of bluegrass songs seems like such an obvious idea, I’m surprised it hasn’t been done before. (Or, perhaps more to the point, I’m surprised it hasn’t been brought to _my_ attention before.)

Norm has published the results of his Dylan songs poll . A very good list it is too. I’m struck by the fact that the majority of the top 21 come from just three (consecutive) albums: Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 and Blonde on Blonde. There’s also only one post-1976 song on the list. This is as it should be IMHO.

News today that a musical version of _The Lord of the Rings_ is in the works. Suggest songs and plot-points here. Potential titles include: 'I'm gonna wash that orc right out of my hair' (Legolas), 'You're the One Ring that I want' (Sauron in Act I, then Gollum in Act II, and Frodo, Gollum and Sauron in Act III), 'People will say we're in love' (Frodo/Sam duet, Act II, theme echoed by Gimli and Legolas during Battle of Pelennor Fields), 'City with the Tree on Top' (Gandalf’s arrival at Minas Tirith), 'How do I solve this problem, my dear Grima?' (Theoden introduction), and Gollum’s Act III showstopper, 'Memorieses'.

Update: I’m way behind. John Holbo has had the libretto up for ages — including not only “Moria” but also “These are a few of my favorite Rings.”

Nihon Break Kogyo Co’s company song smashed into the Oricon, one of (Japan’s) most influential music charts, on Dec 29. It is the first time that a “shaka,” or corporate anthem, has made the charts, according to Oricon Inc, a major Tokyo music information provider…

Unlike the stiff, propaganda-like nature of regular Japanese corporate anthems, the up-tempo rock tune, written and performed by a Nihon Break Kogyo demolition worker, sounds like themes from old Japanese animated films featuring superheroes.

But the humorous lyrics reflect the pure corporate anthem spirit of promoting the company — “We will destroy houses! We will destroy bridges! We will destroy buildings! To the east, to the west — Run, Run, Nihon Break Kogyo!”

I believe that I am the first person in history to point out that Japanese culture can appear somewhat baffling.

Chris’s post about the ENO production of Rheingold reminded me of why I don’t know anything about Wagner’s music. When I was a graduate student, I invested a substantial chunk of my income in a pair of season tickets to the Met, with half-decent seating. You got a set program of opera over the course of the year. We had a great time. Then came the Wagner week. I forget which opera it was. Die Walküre I think — anyway, the one where the guy stumbles into the forest hut, falls in love with the girl, and upon discovering she’s his sister sings, delightedly, “Such wonderful news! Our children will therefore be of the purest blood!” or words to that effect.

As soon as we got to our seats we knew something was wrong.

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Juan Non-Volokh opens an interesting line of inquiry: which political ideology has the best music? I’m torn on this. Juan leads with his chin, describing Rush as “arguably the most prominent libertarian band of all time.” _Arguably?_ Who else is in the running here? Clint Eastwood singing “I Talk to the Trees” in Paint Your Wagon? Was Ayn Rand, like L. Ron Hubbard, a great composer on the side? The irresistible image is of a phalanx of airborne Libertarians screaming up the Potomac in surplus Hueys fitted with tactical nuclear weapons sourced on Ebay, while Rush’s 'Freewill' blares from speakers bolted to one of the choppers.

But the question seems a bit underspecified. For instance, conservatives in general might claim the whole tradition of western classical music for themselves, while quietly ignoring the fact that, throughout history, your common or garden conservative can reliably be found bemoaning the appalling quality of serious music since the year _n_ — 75, for all values of _n_. Those on the left, meanwhile, will have to work hard to distance themselves from the output of the troops of the Folk Song Army. Perhaps we should be asking which are the best _explicitly political_ songs. A related question is which country has the best National Anthem. France edges it, I think, over South Africa (too long) and the United States (too hard to sing). _God Save the Queen_ is clearly the worst, a judgment made compelling both by the anthem’s non-existent musical merits and the fact that English fans would rather sing a spiritual written about an exhausted, enslaved people longing for the sweet release of death.

I’m back from seeing the ENO production of The Rhinegold (sung in English). I should say, before uttering a word of criticism, that I enjoyed myself and wouldn’t disrecommend the experience at all. But, that said, this was a pretty weird staging. The opening scene takes place in a pole-dancing club, with dodgy businessman Alberich being teased by dancers in turquoise pvc mini-dresses. Alberich is sung by an Alexi Sayle lookalike (Andrew Shore) who does an excellent job of portraying the sexually-frustrated dwarf. The scene opens, though, with Alberich being encouraged to enter the club by property-developer Wotan and his PR-man and Mr Fixit, Loge. This addition, needless to say, has no textual warrant and, if taken seriously, would amount to a major distortion of the plot.

Scene two takes place in Wotan’s apartment and opens with Wotan in the bath. The dynamic between Wotan and Fricka may not have been modelled on Tony and Carmela Soprano (or JR and Sue Ellen), but it is hard to think that such comparisons weren’t somewhere in producer Phyllida Lloyd’s mind. The giants are played as construction engineers who brandish their plastic-bound copies of the contract as they demand payment for their work on Valhalla. Donner wears trainers and wields a baseball bat, Loge prefers subtler methods: you get the picture. One of the problems of staging such a modernized production is that it interferes with the suspension of disbelief. If everyone is dressed up in fantasy costumes then it is easier to take seriously the idea of Freia as an object of lust even if she is somewhat hefty. But if everything else looks like Dallas or the Sopranos then a Freia who doesn’t fit with the conventions of those dramas is incongruous.

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I’m off to see Das Rheingold on Saturday (or, rather, since the production is by English National Opera , The Rhinegold ). The anticipation of this set me off googling for a hilarious passage from a Jerry Fodor review of Steven Pinker. I’d have liked to have found the whole thing, but the money quote is there in this review of a Fodor’s In Critical Condition :

bq. The literature of psychological Darwinism is full of what appear to be fallacies of rationalization: arguments where the evidence offered that an interest in Y is the motive for a creature’s behavior is primarily that an interest in Y would rationalize the behavior if it were the creature’s motive. Pinker’s book provides so many examples that one hardly knows where to start.… [H]ere’s Pinker on why we like fiction: “Fictional narratives supply us with a mental catalogue of the fatal conundrums we might face someday and the outcomes of strategies we could deploy in them. What are the options if I were to suspect that my uncle killed my father, took his position, and married my mother?” Good question. Or what if it turns out that, having just used the ring that I got by kidnapping a dwarf to pay off the giants who built me my new castle, I should discover that it is the very ring that I need in order to continue to be immortal and rule the world? It’s important to think out the options betimes, because a thing like that could happen to anyone and you can never have too much insurance. (p. 212)

UPDATE: Thanks to commenter C.P. Shaw. The whole Fodor article, which I’d failed to find using Google is available on the LRB website .

Head over to Normblog for another of Norm's polls , this time on Bob Dylan’s best songs. You have up to five, but no more than five votes. My own entry?

bq. Visions of Johanna
Stuck inside of Mobile
Desolation Row
It’s All Right Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)
Gates of Eden

All from just three (consecutive) albums. In my view, despite a brief return to form with _Blood on the Tracks_ , Dylan’s subsequent output has been pretty mediocre and doesn’t compare to those wonderful albums just after he discovered the ‘lectricity whose ghost howls in the bones of her face. But I know others disagree (strongly).

The late great Jake Thackray has a song, Old Molly Metcalf, in which he describes a local quirky way of counting sheep in Swaledale (Yorkshire). The shepherds apparently count(ed) as follows:

bq. Yan, Chan, Tether, Mether, Pip, Azar, Sazar, Akka, Cotta, Dik
Yanadik, Channadik, Thetheradik, Metheradik, Bumfit, Yanabum, Chanabum, Thetherabum, Metherabum, Jiggit.

I first heard the song long ago, and at that time still remembered a colloquial counting system from my Welsh childhood, but I have now completely forgotten it (it wasn’t Welsh — it wasn’t one of those parts of Wales). There must be others. Does anyone know what I’m thinking of? And can anyone give the origins of the Yan, Chan, Tether, Mether, Pip system? (Google gives me one hit — the page with the lyrics of Old Molly Metcalf).

I went to a great klezmer concert yesterday in Princeton. It started off with the Princeton University student klezmer group: the Klezmocrats. They are a talented young group. The main attraction was the Klez Dispensers. They, too, started out as a Princeton student group some years ago but by now work independently. It’s been wonderful to watch them grow over the years. They’re amazing. But don’t take my word for it (admittedly somewhat biased given my friendships with about half of them:), according to Pete Sokolow they are “the finest young group playing classic American Klezmer style today”. I recommend their new CD, the New Jersey Freylekhs. (I realize blogging about this before the concert would have been more helpful than doing so after.. I’ll try to be better about that next time.)

Tyler Cowen writes

bq. Read Michael’s recent treatment of The Economics of Mozart. The bottom line? Mozart was a successful commercial entrepreneur. His economic problems stemmed from a war with Turkey, not the failures of the marketplace.

He should definitely have known better than to start a war with Turkey. That whole abduction from the seraglio business was a complete farce. Meanwhile — sorry, I’m not even going to pretend to link these comments — Matt Yglesias makes the following observation about Greg Easterbrook’s _The Progress Paradox_:

bq. The real progress paradox isn’t “why doesn’t all our stuff make us happy” but rather, given that all our stuff pretty clearly doesn’t make us happy, how do we come to have all this stuff.

Which seems about right. An unwillingness to distinguish these two questions — or rather, the decision, for technical purposes, to treat them as if they were the _same_ question — is a hallmark of modern economics. Robert E. Lane has a book that argues this point. Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer have a solid rejoinder from the economist’s point of view, arguing that money can indeed go a long way towards making you happy — but not as far, surprisingly, as democratic institutions and local political autonomy can.