Moonshine
All that I have to say, is, to tell you that the
lanthorn is the moon; I, the man in the moon; this
thorn-bush, my thorn-bush; and this dog, my dog.
‘Ah, so it’s come to this, I see! Ms. Waring wishes to share with us her love of Geto Boys. This is a bridge too far. Really, though. These are the Let a Ho be a Ho people here. Is this some sort of feint after which other marginally less implausible opinions will seem more plausible?’ (hint: ish.) Oh look everyone! It’s Unsung, a Behind-The-Music style show about black musicians, with a whole episode about Geto Boys!
What’s that? You say that it is, possible worlds and all, conceivable that I might have found something you were less likely to watch/listen to, but I would have had need to strive hard? Look, you goobers listen to podcasts about Alan Greenspan’s tragic and shamefully-lauded legacy in US monetary policy. Multiple podcasts of such wise. You listen to podcasts with Dan Drezner in them! (Sorry Dan, but you’ve never laid down beats like this.) It would hurt you real bad to hear about a concrete way in which racism in American society is applied to obscenity and threats of violence, would it? And hear some killer tracks? Scroll on, then, one wouldn’t want you to dirty your hands. SIKE! No, motherf%*#kers! Just open a tab and listen; it ain’t like it’s going to kill you. Though you will be missing interesting and humorous visual effects. “But Belle, I hate all rap music!” OK, this is nonetheless rather historically interesting, you may find, about the spasm of violence in the late ’80s and mid ’90s in the US that seemed like it would never end, and the real fear that hip-hop induced in white listeners. This white dude who was covering the hip-hop beat at Source magazine at the time is probably the single whitest person who has ever lived, including Immanuel Kant. His last name is Soren! When he tells you, “people were scared of this music!” you think, “you wet your pants when Paul Anka came on the oldies station!” Nah, but, in fact he’s extraordinarily well-informed etc. “But Belle, I only care about the history of Neolithic Northern Africa!” Oh really! How fascinating! Well, you’re off the hook then, but you should be getting about your business, I must say. This is rather a lot of slacking already. Oh hey five minute version! [click to continue…]
The rest of this post is a complete ramble, full of enthusiasm and entirely lacking in insight and you’d be better off just listening to Johnny and Al. You’ll learn, what you probably already knew, that Al used to be in Tony Blackburn’s backing band!
Today is the fortieth anniversary of Gram Parsons’s death in Joshua Tree, CA, a death famously followed by two funerals, after the coffin containing his body was stolen from LAX by his road manager so that he could be cremated in the desert (as previously agreed, apparently). Relatives got the partially incinerated body back, and completed the job (as it were) in Florida. There’s even a rather uneven film about it: Grand Theft Parsons.
When Parsons died, he’d never had a hit record. He was a too-rich young man from the South, who loved country music, fancied being a rock star, and who threw much of his talent away with the drugs and booze he could readily afford. Not much to admire, you might think.
Parsons’s fame rests on five albums: the Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo, the Flying Burrito Brothers’ Gilded Palace of Sin and Burrito Deluxe, then the solo GP and Grievous Angel (the latter two cut with the top session musicians his money could afford). All of them contain a mix of his own songs and covers of classic country and sometimes soul. His own compositions, written in the country-rock idiom he helped invent, are suggestive, even enigmatic, vignettes of American life, love, faith, betrayal and death. “$1000 Dollar Wedding”, perhaps my personal favourite (though I change my mind all the time) tells a story of death and tragedy, a wedding transformed into a funeral, but what, exactly, has happened? We have to invent a lot of that for ourselves. “Sin City”, recorded with the Burritos, also tells a story of something. What? Evangelism? Conflict between money and faith? “The scientists say, it will all wash away, but we don’t believe any more ….” And other songs depict childhood, nostalgia and loss: “Hickory Wind” (recorded with the Byrds and re-recorded on Grievous Angel), “Brass Buttons”, in which he remembers his mother. None of them have dated. [click to continue…]
My daughter’s friend thinks I am incredibly cool. Part of the musical cognoscenti. I have to find a nice way of disabusing her.
The soccer run was a major locus of conflict last year. The drive is far enough and frequent enough that the 12-year old girls want to listen to “their” music, and enough of a bore that I don’t want to be assaulted by rubbish. A modus vivendi was eventually established, in which their ipods were the inputs, but I got to veto anything I couldn’t stand hearing. (As soon as the truce was signed, their taste (magically!) improved, and we started hearing more Buble than Beiber, because basically they are nice kids and, having won their battle, were magnanimous). Taylor Swift is pretty easy on the ear, so I know a lot of the songs (and in fact took the 12 year old to see her for her 12th birthday. In Des Moines!). Sometime in early spring I heard a review of an album called Same Trailer Different Park by Kacey Musgraves which really appealed to me. Musgraves has a very similar voice to Swift’s, is more country, less pop — and the songs are, really, for grown ups rather than teens (or tweens). Very catchy melodies, they are about stagnation, fear of risk, and the risks of being paralysed by fear of risk. So I started playing it in the car, and, to get my way, just told them it was Taylor Swift’s earliest album, that had not had wide release. They believed me for about 2 weeks — until they decided that, really, this was too good to be Taylor Swift (it is, no disrespect to Taylor Swift, who is multi-talented, but Kacey Musgraves is really something). “The words are too clever for Taylor”. Now they’d much rather listen to Musgraves than Swift.
My older daughter is supposed to learn a new word a week. And tell the class. She has a good vocabulary, so I think some weeks she coasts on fancy words she already knew. But she likes new words! So I thought I would make a short list of cool words for 12-year olds, in case she ever needs a new one on short notice: asperity, vermiculation, sussurus. That sort of thing.
Then I thought of a good one: Custerdome! From the classic Steely Dan track, “Gaucho”. The Steely Dan lexicon defines it as “an archetype of a building that houses great corporations.” Alas, since this fictional synecdoche of a fictional archetype exists in the minds of Fagen and Becker, the term has languished on the badland borderlands of private language-hood. My daughter is not exactly a Dan fan, so probably that state of affairs will persist. “Try again tomorrow.” [click to continue…]
I really have no excuse for posting this. This year is the 25th anniversary of Kenneth Williams’s death, maybe? Its just that my 6 year-old-son came downstairs the other day talking about Chiswick flow, and moulies, and then, today, sang the whole song, pretty much word perfect, and I am very happy about it. So is my daughter. My wife? Maybe not.
In a study by Harvard graduate Chia-Jung Tsay … nearly all participants — including highly trained musicians — were better able to identify the winners of classical music competitions by watching silent video clips than by listening to audio recordings. “In this case,” says Tsay, “it suggests that the visual trumps the audio, even in a setting where audio information should matter much more.
I haven’t listened to this yet, but fans of Tom Stoppard, Pink Floyd, or of both [1], might be interested in listening to Stoppard’s latest play, Darkside, written in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the release of Dark Side of the Moon. Its here until Monday Sept 2nd.
[1] I’m neither really, but suspect that reveals a character flaw.
Wilco Johnson discusses the making of Down by the Jetty in the first of the new series of Mastertapes. I’m not a special fan of Johnson, or of Dr. Feelgood, but listened to it the other day while making a birthday cake for my wife, and really enjoyed it. Johnson is dying of cancer, and has chosen to let it run its course; listening to him talking about that, about life, and about music, is really, really, fun. Apparently there is more than a year left to listen — so you can wait till he dies to listen to it if you like! Series one, with Susanne Vega, Ray Davies, Paul Weller, the Zombies, and Brinsley Ford, is archived here — also with more than a year left to listen!
Quiet around here! How do you like the new Daft Punk album, “Random Access Memories”?
Speaking of which, I was suffering from horrific ‘file not found’ syndrome until I finally found it. “Instant Crush” is basically a discofied version of Midlake’s “Roscoe” – which has been discofied before, in a mellow sort of way.
And here’s another funny musical experience you can have: you are listening to a band that is known for a certain sound, and you realize that one of their songs – which isn’t really a paradigm of their sound – is sort of a paradigm of a different sound paradigm that came later … if you get me. For example, the Police’s 1978 tune “The Truth Hits Everybody”, which was not a hit, doesn’t sound like their signature rock reggae post-prog-compacted-into-punk power trio sound. It does sound the Foo Fighters – it’s that chorus. And I can’t really think of anything else from 1978 that sounds like the Foo Fighters. (Here you can hear the Police trying to turn “Truth” into a Police song, but it doesn’t quite work. It just sounds like Sting trying to cover a Foo Fighters song.) [click to continue…]
No, I’m talking about the film, not Daniel’s post (his thread, rather). Following up my bad experience with Sixteen Candles, I rewatched Say Anything and it really holds up. It’s a delight. It’s funny and sweet and sentimental, but in a good way. John Cusack is great. Cameron Crowe is the real deal. [click to continue…]
Like some other CT bloggers, I’m long past the age where I could plausibly claim to be in touch with modern popular music, and rapidly approaching the ‘there’s nothing new that sounds at all interesting’ stage of advanced cultural decrepitude. I mostly listen to the stuff that I was listening to in my late teens and early 20’s. But not all of it. Some music that I thought was wonderful then, I still think is wonderful. Some … not so much. Some music that I didn’t listen to then that I ought to have. Some music that I liked and still like has gone on to be pretty influential, while other music seems to be completely forgotten. So – consider this an open thread on music (for those of us who have reached early middle age or later) from your generation that survives for you, or that ought to be revived, or (alternatively, for less senescent readers) on music from earlier decades that you like, or music from this decade that you think/hope will survive. To start things off:
Music that has (at least sort of) survived, and that deserved to: My Bloody Valentine (obviously), The Smiths (I used not like them, preferring the Cure, whose music I now find insufferable), Pulp, Primal Scream. Music that hasn’t survived, and that ought to have – The Boo Radleys (Giant Steps), The Blue Aeroplanes (Swagger, Beatsongs), the House of Love (Babe Rainbow, their masterpiece, received startlingly bad reviews at the time). Dance music I have less to say about, because the genre I liked the most – drum’n’bass – appears to have disappeared almost in its entirety, while the other people I liked (Amon Tobin; the various incarnations of Kieran Hebden; Bonobo) are still around more or less doing what they always did.
Disagreements? Alternative suggestions? Comments are open …
Oh, I know what y’all are going to say. You’re going to say it’s wrong to like R. Kelly because his music is bad. No. Unnnh huuh. “But it’s got T-Pain in it!” You like “I’m on a Boat,” don’t you Sherlock? Further, “I’m a Flirt” is insanely catchy. Now you object that the Venn diagram of insanely catchy and bad has a large overlapping area, because you wrongly hate hillbilly-from-the-future Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe,” but nonetheless, “I’m a Flirt” is just a good song. No. You know why else? Because I told you so. Also, everything silly you wanted in a video. Expensive cars? Stupid big jewelry? Honeys up in the VIP room? So many honeys. I’m gay for this video.
But it might seem as if it’s wrong to like R. Kelly’s music because he’s committed statutory rape on multiple occasions. [click to continue…]
Today (the 28th, which it now is in Geneva) is the 300th birthday of Jean-Jacques Rousseau! It is fair to say that Jean-Jacques has divided people pretty sharply ever since he first came to public notice in 1749. There are those who love him, despite his madness, his misogyny and his occasional penchant for alarming political formulations, and there are those who loathe him as the progenitor of totalitarianism. For what it’s worth, I’m in the first camp.
Rousseau’s genius is to have perceived that the gains of modernity were accompanied by significant loss. He was obsessed with the idea that as civilization has developed, we have acquired new needs, needs which exceed our capacity to satisfy them alone. From that dependence on others arises a threat to our freedom; from our living together with others springs a new self-consciousness and a sense of how we appear in the eyes of others. Dependence on others provides each of us with powerful incentives to get others to do what we want; our consciousness of how we appear to them leads us to yearn for their recognition, for their love and respect. But knowing that they too have an incentive to represent themselves to us in ways that get us to fulfil their material and recognitional needs, we are forever gripped by anxiety, jealousy and resentment. We, and others, are dancers in a terrible masked ball of inauthenticity, from which we cannot escape.
Or maybe we can. Maybe we can be educated so that our sense of self-esteem is less dependent on the opinion of others. Maybe we can bring into being a social form in which each of us is secure in the recognition of our fellow citizens and in which we cease to be dependent on the whims of our fellows, but are subject instead to impartial laws that we ourselves have chosen.
That was Rousseau’s project, and it has not been without consequence: without Rousseau, no Kant, no Hegel, perhaps no Marx or Nietzsche; without Rousseau perhaps also no Robespierre (though he would have rejected as laughable the Jacobin claim to incarnate the general will). But we also should not forget, on his birthday, his contributions to music and literature, the beauty and pain of his autobiographical writings, and his sensibility to nature and contribution to the science of botany.
by Kacey Musgraves which really appealed to me. Musgraves has a very similar voice to Swift’s, is more country, less pop — and the songs are, really, for grown ups rather than teens (or tweens). Very catchy melodies, they are about stagnation, fear of risk, and the risks of being paralysed by fear of risk. So I started playing it in the car, and, to get my way, just told them it was Taylor Swift’s earliest album, that had not had wide release. They believed me for about 2 weeks — until they decided that, really, this was too good to be Taylor Swift (it is, no disrespect to Taylor Swift, who is multi-talented, but Kacey Musgraves is really something). “The words are too clever for Taylor”. Now they’d much rather listen to Musgraves than Swift.