Thirteen Birds vs. The Record Desk

Peter Doherty, Grace/Wastelands

May 19th, 2009

I’ve always enjoyed the imaginary past. I get the sense that Pete Doherty does too. The imaginary past being not the no doubt constructed “objective” official-type history but the phony land of yesteryear made up of discarded advertisements, old song lyrics, half-remembered wisps of movie scenes, and invented folklore. Grace/Wastelands is an interesting album given its preoccupations (lyrical and sonic) with the imaginary past while being in large part comprised of pre-existing Doherty songs from the quickly receding (and increasingly romanticized) past of the Libertines’ golden era before the famous split and more famouser flirting with druggy oblivion.

Grace/Wastelands is dripping with signs pointing pastward. The title winks at Elvis while giving a nod to T. S. Eliot. On hand for the record are UK indie royalty Graham Coxon and Stephen Street pointing the way to the great legacy of smart, moody British guitar pop via their associations with Blur and the Smiths (and those bands’ own retro-minded tendencies). The album begins in the pastoral pastiche of “Arcady,” visits the (Jam-referencing?) “Last of the English Roses” before “1939 Returning,” a shuffling number drawing connections between the early days of WWII and the unpleasant present of an old folks home.

Kids knee deep in rubble,
London urchins grey with dust,
Back of fout west in evacuation,
the farmers wives greeting pleasant lies,
far from the doodblebugs.

Nana doll still remembers,
leaving town in worn-out shoes,
Now she’s back out west,
in sheltered accommodation,
Homes for the old,
where pills aren’t the only blues.

Tred carefully,
so carefully,
on the drifting ice
staring blankly into the tv guide,
In 2009,
oh how it hurts me,
I’ve only seen her twice
since she went west for the second time
since 1939.

The present reality of dimming memory and that neglected relatives who possess these members seems much less romantic than the detailed enshrinement of “London urchins grey with dust” and a grandmother’s “worn-out shoes” in childhood.

The past creeps up sound-wise in the jazz-lite cabaret horns-plus-shuffle of “Sweet By and By” and the slinky glam doom of “Broken Love Song” (which passes John, Paul, George, and Ringo headed the other way) and about anywhere where strings and Mellotron sounds swoop in melodramatically dabbing songs with a touch of how one might remember the Beatles sounding if they hadn’t listened to the Fabs in a while.

In a way, Grace/Wastelands is Doherty’s most successful record. With the Libertines his Clash-isms often overpowered the whimsical Albion he was wordily conjuring – not that this was a problem. The Libs’ beat and clang made up for any messiness. At the helm of Babyshambles, Doherty once again saw the mess swallowing his poetry, often enjoyably. At their weakest though, Babyshambles seemed to be tilting at the Doherty/Libertines legend in, I’m assuming, an attempt to score points against tabloid journalists and other haters. Grace/Wastelands is a more controlled affair, daresay professional. Fans of hype and swagger might be put off by how well read and sensible it seems. Despite his very public battle with chemicals, Doherty retained the good sense not to waste these delicate, nostalgic songs just anywhere. They get their due here on this subtle, impeccably recorded album.

Doherty perversely moved forward by looking backwards and backwards again. I wonder if the imaginary Victorian waif Doherty sometimes pretends to be appreciates this Alice in Wonderland logic?

Posted in Babyshambles, Peter Doherty, The Libertines | No Comments »

The Breeders, Fate to Fatal

April 28th, 2009

Kim: No, we were off 4AD after Title TK. And then we had Mountain Battles, and it’s like, well, we’ll do it on 4AD. But that was a one-off. [4AD has not yet confirmed that the Breeders are no longer signed to the label. -- Ed.] And for this one, it’s an EP. What am I going to do, take a meeting for an EP? Then we’re like, maybe we should just give it away anyway. It’s on sale on iTunes, but I don’t know if anybody buys digital music. Maybe they will, and maybe we’ll actually be able to sell something, but that’s not the point. Music is free.

I don’t know if anybody’s going to buy it. I assume one person will download it, and everybody else will steal it. I have no idea what people do nowadays. People might actually buy digital music. Do you know if they do?

Pitchfork: I buy off iTunes sometimes.

Kim: [To Kelley] He says he buys digital music off iTunes. [To Pitchfork] Kelley says you’re lying.

…

Kim: I don’t see the drawback yet. Like I said, music is free, so who cares? It’s not like we’re in a rap band and I really need someone to sponsor my hundred-thousand-dollar wardrobe and car. I don’t know. Maybe it’s a really stupid way. Maybe by doing this now we have just leveled ourselves, like [whispering] we’re a band who lost their label contract. Or maybe people actually think that if a band doesn’t want to use a label, they just don’t want to use a label anymore. Because labels don’t exist anymore. Do you think they do? I don’t.

– Kim Deal in a 2009 Pitchfork interview

I absolutely love the Breeders. They were the band that gave me that last final shove outta my identity as a mostly a classic and/or hard rock listening guy who dabbled in alternarock, into being a guy who was mostly interested in alternarock and later punk and glam and what many people would now call “elitist” smartipance music. Don’t get me wrong. I listened to R.E.M. and a little Pearl Jam or Smashing Pumpkins, but the summer of ’93 is when I fell hard for what then seemed like “weird” bands to a Midwestern kid who listened to Aerosmith, Van Halen, and the Beatles.

It’s easy now to think that a committed music fan would seek out the willful, the quirky, and the odd. But when you’re 15 years old and every single bit of music you hear must be filtered through commercial radio, MTV, or word-of-mouth recommendation, your tastes move slower. There were no college radio stations in the far southeastern suburbs of Chicago. Heck, my college didn’t really have a radio station that played what is generally thought of as college rock. This totally wired infotainment age of ours has certainly made the word smaller. Folks making their homes in pop cultural dead zones like the not-urban Midwest are no longer doomed to hearing about things way after the fact. Heck, if anything, the internet gives anyone anywhere the opportunity to be the first person to backlash and pooh-pooh a brand new song/meme/band/idea. Something better be polished or professional, or blindingly innovative if you expect the internet to get on board.

The inversion of standards brought on by internet culture (and a savvier pop fandom in general) doesn’t feel entirely comfortable to me. I suppose that the extreme-ing of everything in the 1990s helped create our appetite for endless edginess and pop culture products that “cross the line” more often than not. Perhaps this extreme-ing influence has split into several strains. One strain being the obvious crassness that fuels the popularity of shows like Family Guy and mainstream pornification and a lot of other cultural ephemera that I can’t help but associate with those serious-looking energy drinks at the convenience store. Another variant of extreme-ness is indie snobbery – the need to hear of and discard first minor cultural happenings that almost no one will ever like in the first place. A lot of the energy drink people would consider indie snobbery to be elitist, and the snobs would likely consider the energy-drinks-and-tribal-tattoos people militantly populist and vulgar (in several senses of the word). I reckon it’s kind of a counter/pop-culture “red state v. blue state” thing.

I certainly don’t exist outside of these debates. I once conducted an animated (and, no doubt, slurred) argument in defense of the Shangri-Las’ “Leader of the Pack” in the general direction of my aggro-metal loving brother-in-law. He totally didn’t get it. “Leader of the Pack” is old-fashioned sissy music. How could I like that? In his defense, I didn’t get it either. I was trying to argue taste. I was trying to “improve” his understanding of pop music. It was a dumb argument – and I’m guessing a pretty common one.

This argument happened about 10 years ago. However, it sticks with me because I learned an important lesson – nobody wants to have their taste “fixed” for them. I didn’t experience an immediate epiphany, but I learned to roll back on the intensity knob when it came to arguing about taste.

Over the last year or so, I’ve been contemplating entering graduate school. As part of this process, I’ve had to take stock of what it is that actually interests me, what topics I’m passionate enough about to invest time and money into studying seriously. As an added bonus, I’ve spent some of this time thinking about what really flips my switch – what the core things are that I really love and that really got me into music and history and culture and books.

The Breeders are one of those things.

I’ve been on a bit of a Breeders and Pixies binge lately. When I found out that the Breeders were releasing a new EP I was psyched. Few things are better than learning that a band that you’re reconnecting with is releasing a new record. Fate to Fatal is an unassuming, homemade kind of record. As on the underrated Title TK and the most recent long-player Mountain Battles, this EP finds the sisters Deal sounding mainly like you expect them to. Rhythms chug beneath cooed, slurred vocals. Guitars sputter and pop. Strummed electric guitars shift in and out of time, eking out a delicate melody. Even the Bob Marley cover “Chances Are” sounds unmistakably like the Breeders. The only potential surprise is “The Last Time.” Instrumentally, the hushed, chimey pulse occasionally interrupted by a sloppy, trebley sheet of guitar noise wouldn’t be out of place on any previous Breeders album. It’s Mark Lanegan’s diva turn that stands out. The Breeders sound is built upon the interweaving Kim and Kelley vocals, so the vocal switch is unexpected.

Fate to Fatal is a slight release. Yet its very inessentialness makes it appealing. The whole self-released, homemade (even down to the hand-screened record sleeves) approach to record making touches on what makes a band like the Breeders special – they’re unpolished, they’re not untouchable rock celebrities. If Kim and Kelley deal can forge an identity in sound, then why can’t any committed, inventive person?

I suppose it’s the implicit democracy of the form that lead me to believe deeply in “alternative” or punk or whatever it was that turned me on when I was 15. It certainly wasn’t an elitist thing, an “I know about XYZ and you don’t” thing. It was about connecting with sounds that reflected how I felt – weird, shambly, wimpy, awkward, clattery, sarcastic. Last Splash didn’t make cool into something that required macho, phony cool. Unkempt Midwesternism could be just as compelling – just as charming – as high kicks and leering rock guy posturing.

It’s tempting to dismiss Fate to Fatal as an unimportant vinyl trifle, to give it a numerical score and cast it aside as not hotshit enough for these picky times. But the Breeders aren’t built for that kind of listening. Even at their loudest, they’re a quiet sort of band. I think you’re supposed to listen to this record and let it seep in.

Not that I’m telling you how to listen.

Posted in Singles and EPs, The Breeders | 3 Comments »

Pete Townshend, Empty Glass

April 10th, 2009

“I hope I die before I become Pete Townshend,” wrote Kurt Cobain in his journal in the middle of one of his rants against the rock press establishment. Why? Because I had become a bore? Because I had failed to die young? Because I had become conventional? Or, simply because I had become old? In fact, in the early Nineties, when Kurt was struggling with himself over whether or not to do an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, I was not boring, neither old nor young, and I was not dead. I was, unlike Cobain, hardened. Tempered, beaten and subjugated by all that rock had delivered to me and via me over 30 years. Rock is, I think, particularly hard. And in this statement Cobain appears to be hard on me. But perhaps he is sad for me?

***

It is desperately sad for me to sit here, 57 years old, and contemplate how often wasteful are the deaths of those in the rock industry. We find it so hard to save our own, but must take responsibility for the fact that the message such deaths as Cobain’s sends to his fans is that it is in some way heroic to scream at the world, thrash a guitar, smash it up and then overdose.

– Pete Townshend’s reviewing Cobain’s Journals

I firmly believe that rock and roll can save your life – though if that’s the case, I’m not sure your life was worth saving.

– Me (during some snark spasm or another)

Conveniently for me, my birthday coincides with the annual soft-focus reminiscing on the passing of rock martyr Kurt Cobain. It’s a convenient hook upon which I can hang my reflections on mortality and my inability to remain squarely in the youth cult demographic which rock and roll (disingenuously) posits as its core audience. Of course rock and roll (especially the semi-popular smartipance stuff I like) has long been the weapon of choice for moody overthinkers way too old to qualify as a “kid” of any kind. As many smart folks have pointed out before me, rock and roll serves a vaguely pagan religious role for sensitive types who need meaning and ecstasy and whathaveyou. The analogies are pretty easy – the icons, the ritual of communal rock happenings, the frenzied adulation/dancing, the bedsit contemplation and adoration of pop stars, the call to authentic living, the empty going-through-motions faking it when ecstasy isn’t forthcoming.

Still, when you do see the real deal in person, the whole rock-as-religion thing makes a lot of sense. In honor of my birthday, I received a ticket to see Morrissey at the Midland Theater. I’m not going to bore you all with a show review wherein I splutter about Morrissey’s fabulousness as a performer and object of rock veneration. I just wanted to mention the frenzy that occurred when Morrissey discarded a sweaty shirt by pitching it into the crowd. Ripping. Rending. Snarling. Weeping. Mania. I was reminded of the anecdotes about newly dead saints torn to bits by relic seekers. I’ve been in hundreds of rock audiences, and rare are those audiences where actual group madness breaks out. Some performers have “it” and some don’t. Morrissey (as if anyone was still unaware) possess the ability to inspire this old time religion. Slate recently ran an interesting article about Morrissey in middle age examining the roots of his appeal. What I came away with is that the holy weirdness of Morrissey’s awkward youth.

“I’m sick of being the undiscovered genius,” scribbled the 18-year-old Steven Morrissey. “I want fame NOW not when I’m dead.” He’d have to linger in the bed-sit five more years. In the meantime, his life consisted of: the dole, writing letters to New Musical Express, reading manifestoes with titles like “Men’s Liberation” and The Female Eunuch, and taking up—and abandoning—the musical instruments traditionally associated with playing rock ‘n’ roll. At 19, he sang twice, poorly, in a band called the Nosebleeds and, refining his skills of lonely pop adulation, published two monographs—fanzine one-offs, really—one on James Dean, the other on his beloved New York Dolls. But New Year’s Eve, 1979, captures young Morrissey best: As the clock chimed midnight, alone in his bedroom, the 20-year-old Steven ushered in the 1980s by reading Pride and Prejudice.

Even more than the frenzied pagan mass of the rock show or the idol worship, the actual religious act of rock and roll practice is the time spent in the misfit wilderness of adolescence. Adolescents, historically, have not made much excellent rock music. And many of rock’s true geniuses have been the sorts of people who were weird enough that you could imagine them spending their teenhoods in pain and seclusion. Of course, the essentialness of an awkward adolescence for any true rock believer leads a lot of folks to manufacture phony bologna accounts of their troubled coming of age (See Stuff White People Like #83 and #17). Heck, I’ve got some self-mythology I can lay on you if you’ve got a few hours.

Because rock and roll – while self-involved – is not often a terribly reflective form, most of its saints are treated as savant-type shamans only barely aware of their powers. Of course this is a crock – one look a Cobain’s Journals will show that even the most authentic-seeming rock icon does a lot of intellectualizing and conceptualizing. Nevertheless, institutionalized rock and roll (the audience, press, etc.) is suspicious of thinking or trying too hard. To be seen working at it is to be, at best, inauthentic (e.g., Bowie, Beck) or, at worst, a hack or careerist.

Pete Townshend has always been an odd rock and roll star. In many ways, he helped create and promote the awkward adolescence model of rock initiation. The protagonists in Who singles like “Can’t Explain,” “I’m a Boy,” “The Kids are Alright,” “Pictures of Lily” and many, many others are screwed-up, awkward, sensitive types. Angry young men wrestling with their feelings. Townshend’s later long-form conceptual pieces Tommy and Quadrophenia are likewise about rock and roll and idolatry and alienation and junk culture. I’m sure there are plenty of second and third generation rock adherents who can’t honestly tell you where their actual teenhood ends and Townshend’s stylized myth of spiritually unmoored teen angst begins. I’m not sure if I know the difference anymore.

Because the teenhood myth is central to the religious experience of rock and roll, youth itself is often venerated in song, performance, etc. Some obvious examples are twee’s obsession with childhood or 28-year-old indie rockers referring to themselves and their peers as “kids.” There’s no good model or myth to support the adult practice of the religion of rock and roll. There’s craft – which is boring and requires chops and often leads to dull dabbling in “roots music” or jazz or Pet Sounds-style pop. Sometimes perversity or eccentricity or cult cachet can provide an escape hatch. Most often though, adulthood and rock and roll combine to form a smug, bloated arena spectacle reeking of nostalgia and reverence. Occasionally an artist (not usually an audience) will emerge from the other side of adulthood as a wild old coot still in command of his or her old spell book – Dylan is the most obvious example.

Empty Glass is (among other things) Townshend’s best effort at giving adulthood the kind of rock myth meaning that he helped create for adolescence. As with much of Townshend’s work, there’s a hefty bit of autobiography and spiritual seeking going on in Empty Glass. It’s an album about purging and transcending the pain and longing and pettiness that you accumulate once you quit being a holy dumbshit teenager. It’s a record about needing help. Empty Glass’ best-known single is a love song where God offers to fix all the crap you screwed up.

“Let My Love Open the Door” – Pearl Jam @ Soldier Field

In Townshend’s own words, the album is about hitting bottom and needing to be refilled.

And when I did my first solo album, I called it Empty Glass, ’cause of this idea that when you go to the tavern — which is to God, you know — and you ask for His love — He’s the bartender, you know — and He gives you a drink, and what you have to give Him is an empty glass. You know there’s no point giving Him your heart if it’s full already; there’s no point going to God if your heart’s full of Doris.

I suppose it is easy to imagine that we all had tortured teenhoods which we romantically endured. It’s much less heroic to admit that getting older hasn’t made things easier. Grown-ups are supposed to be on top of their personal shit. They’re not supposed to whine. They’re not supposed to be paralyzed by fear and fatigue. I think that’s why the rock and roll youth cult continues. It allows you to fantasize about a difficult trial already overcome while nostalgically ignoring today’s horrible bullshit. My mother is fond of dismissing injustice or pain in adult life with a glib “That’s just the way things are” – as if someone isn’t making it that way or as if you shouldn’t even try to change it. I think that attitude is comfortable, safe.

Seeking authenticity. Looking for answers. Breaking down. Transcending. These activities are unbecoming. They certainly don’t help you project authority and bootstrapping self-sufficiency. Angst is bad for business. Doubt seems a bit self indulgent when practiced by adults.

We live in interesting times. It can be tempting to retreat to our imaginary high school days and obsess over the now tidy concerns of bruised feelings and mussed pride and simple loneliness that seemed oppressive then. It makes the very real hurt of right now go away for a while. Still, nostalgia is a cop out. Perpetual adolescence is a cop out. I do think that rock and roll can point to some kind of personal transcendence. I think the best of it is spiritually nourishing. At the very least, it can encourage contemplation and sensitivity. Still, rock and roll does its best work in conjunction with immediacy. Yesterday’s rock and roll listening won’t do you any good today. There’s no point in coming to the bar if your glass is already full of yesterday’s fake memories.

Posted in Morrissey, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Pete Townshend | No Comments »

Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros, Global A Go-Go

April 2nd, 2009

Fears about artmaking fall into two families: fears about yourself, and fears about your reception by others. In a general way, fears about yourself prevent you from doing your best work, while fears about your reception by others prevent you from doing your own work.

David Bayles & Ted Orland in Art & Fear

This is my Indian summer…I learnt that fame is an illusion and everything about it is just a joke. I’m far more dangerous now, because I don’t care at all.

Joe Strummer to Chris Salewicz in 2000

A couple Saturdays ago, I read Art & Fear while lounging on the front porch. The weather was great and I was enjoying the opportunity to relax. However enjoyable this was, I don’t remember actually relaxing. I was mostly procrastinating. I really meant to do some writing and recording that weekend, but I didn’t. I found other things that I *had* to do. I was going to work on projects later. Of course I didn’t actually get any serious work in. I never feel good about not working. I feel like something is gnawing at me. I feel guilty for neglecting what I can best describe as this nagging, uncomfortable lump in an unreachable part of my personality somewhere. The act of writing or rehearsing or recording leaves me feeling lighter and much less prone to the heavy sulks that I indulge in after a few solid days of idleness. And if I can get started, I can usually build up some momentum and actually become increasingly productive as I keep at it. But getting started – cripes. Why do I not start? Fear mostly. Fear that something won’t work out the way I want. Fear that I’ll need to go back and edit and tweak. Fear that what I write or play or sing or record won’t live up to my own idea of how I’d like to present myself. Ego essentially – the satisfaction of perfect plans not yet tainted by poor execution. Typical creative process bullshit.

I recently read the New Yorker piece on David Foster Wallace’s depression, unfinished work, and eventual suicide that was paired with a short excerpt from his unfinished The Pale King. Wallace – according to this account – had the same doubts and frustrations about his work that I have about mine and that everyone has about their own stuff. The excerpt “Wiggle Room” seems quite well done to me, but Wallace struggled with the novel. It’s humbling to realize that even the folks you admire are unsure of themselves. It’s also tough to stomach when they can’t resolve their fears in either life or art and succumb to despair. It’s easy to brood over idols who took themselves out before they were through.

It’s easy in all this misty, mopey romanticism to overlook a guy like Joe Strummer. Here’s a guy who basically commercially shit the bed right when he should have been cashing his check for big-ticket fame and fortune. He was a washout for a decade or more. Or course he’s a legend and a punk saint now, but for a long time he was an old fart has-been.

His return to form with the Mescaleros is striking given how expansive his records were. Resurrecting that old Clash sound would’ve been an easy way to cash in on the pop punk boom of the ‘90s. But psychedelic, dance-inflected, world folk punk records hardly seem like the surefire way to recapture your audience. Of course that’s why they work so well, they’re actual art. They aren’t product. They aren’t marketing move. They’re fearless Joe Strummer records – not all that different in spirit from the Clash’s restless eclecticism.

One of the most striking of the Mescaleros-era Strummer tracks is Global A Go-Go’s leadoff track “Johnny Appleseed.” It’s a fairly straightforward number, at its heart a strummy skiffle ditty. But the arrangement, the recording is both seemingly effortless and otherworldly. The simple verse melody is bolstered by a perfect bed of ambient sounds that gives way to a joyous pan-global sonic riot at the chorus. Wordess voices wash across the track as Strummer declares that we not “…go killin’ all the bees.” It’s a phenomenally happy recording without being needlessly strident or anthemic or pushy. In short it’s not U2’s “Beautiful Day” or Springsteen’s “Working on a Dream” or countless other attempts at capital-b “Big” pop uplift. (If anything, “Johnny Appleseed” is as legitimately joyous as something like the Breeders’ “Cannonball.”) Maybe it’s because the lyric is somewhat oblique. There’s some nostalgia hinted at – Appleseed himself, MLK, a Buick ’49 – as well as a bittersweet warning that you should take care not to do in the source of your honey. It’s a human song, an honest song, a worldly and adult song. It doesn’t preach, but it doesn’t candy coat either.

Lord, there goes a Buick forty-nine
Black sheep of the angels riding, riding down the line
We think there is a soul, we don’t know
That soul is hard to find

I find it fitting that “Johnny Appleseed” became the theme for David Milch’s lovely John from Cincinnati, which among other things is about getting over yourself, moving beyond your brokenness, and opening yourself to the possibility of the divine/transcendental/miraculous. When you go to the big board, that is after all what creating stuff is about – being human and sharing your little bit of the human experience with other people. The desire to be perfect, to be all things, to present yourself as shiny and perfect and special can be crippling. It also makes you a jerk sometimes. What is inspiring to me about a guy like Strummer or Dylan is how they managed to come out the other side of fame and failure with the ability to communicate that sweetly tart success of being able to get up and keep working on one’s own terms regardless of what previous, fleeting success they once had.

Suppose if you’re too concerned with weighing the issue of burning out/fading away question that you just stop, you’ll never really know what you had. It’s like killing the bees that make your honey.

Posted in Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros | No Comments »

Drive-by Truckers, The Dirty South

March 17th, 2009

“Puttin’ People on the Moon”

Mary Alice had a baby and he looked just like I did
We got married on a Monday and I been working ever since
Every week down at the Ford Plant but now they say they’re shutting down
Goddamned Reagan in the White House and no one there gives a damn

***

Another joker in the White House, said a change was comin’ round
But I’m still workin’ at The WalMart and Mary Alice, in the ground
And all them politicians, they all lyin’ sacks of shit
They say better days upon us, but I’m sucking left hind tit
And the preacher on the TV says it ain’t too late for me
But I bet he drives a Cadillac and I’m broke with some hungry mouths to feed

As anyone blessed with the internet, a television set, or even a crumpled months-old USA Today is aware, the entire mother-lovin’ USA is in the midst of a cruel poverty spasm that will likely end our very way of life and do mean things to a sack of puppies before leaving town. The end is not merely nigh – it’s drunk, in our very own homes, and likely making a nasty mess in the corner of the living room. Menacing acronyms abound. The rabble has been seen gathering pitchforks and torches. Fox News is wringing-hands over the possibility of a full-scale Helter Skelter outbreak. In short, bad juju.

Is this really anything new though? I’m not denying that the fear and the lingering specter of want might be new to some folks – professional folks in cities and upscale suburbs who lived, until recently, in a secure cocoon of never-ending good times. Nor am I making light. I know people who’ve wound up with the gilded boot of capitalism wedged squarely up their asses. But why are the tough times for real only after they set up shop in the land of “nice things?”

There’s been a whole lotta America been gettin’ the shaft for quite some time, with nary a news crew in sight. Sure, towns like Flint, MI are national tragedies. And the generations of squandered promise and dead ends in many inner city neighborhoods are massive institutional and social failures. But it’s not just these established blights. Middle America – that mythical “main street” – has been quietly rotting for years. Highway moves five feet to the right and the whole town dies. The one remaining plant burns down and no one bothers to rebuild it – the jobs just pack up and scurry across the border under the cover of night. Flood hits a town and people decide it’s best to simply pack up and leave because there ain’t nothing worth rebuilding save for the KFC. I know these examples read like hard luck bunk from the Grapes of Wrath discard pile, but they (some poetic license aside) are things that happened to a number of communities in southeast central Illinois. In fact, a number of them happened to Watseka, IL – the county seat of Iroquois county where my grandmother lives and where my wife Catherine and friend Matt spent sizable chunks of their childhoods.

The beige cloud of lowered expectations has been stretching itself across much of my native middle west since as long as I can remember. Of course, Chicago is a major exception and a success story – a city that actually works. However, what you don’t often read about is the blighted, failing suburbs around Chicago. When all us ex-suburbanites flocked to the North Side, we abandoned the family-friendly suburbs of our youths – leaving nothing but empty strip malls and heavily fortified gas stations in our wake. Still, at least the suburbs have density and proximity to jobs and attractions and transit in their favor. Many of the all-American small towns down state have little more than a defunct Dairy Queen and a sign that says “30 Miles to the Nearest WalMart Super Center.”

What’s frustrating about the current ever-present emergency is that this on-paper panic is mostly pretty well-off folks carping about the loss of imaginary wealth that came from over-valued, often un-tangible assets. It’s not like some dust bowl took a crap on the national food supply. Credit went bye-bye. The silo full of consumer confidence was eaten up by mice. Basically, the only thing lost was the idea that we were all rich and getting richer all the time. Of course folks are really losing their jobs now because the imaginary things that made their employment possible were discovered as the farts in a jar they always were. Pipers must be paid. And real people getting kicked around for imaginary problems tends to strike most people sideways. Hence all the ill-tempered “populism” making the news of late. The newly pissed feel that someone should pay for their discomfort, and the folks who’ve been getting the business for years agree that heads certainly should roll. The stage is set for some serious pay-per-view guillotine action. Predictably, the politicians and media folks – who were shooting bunny rabbits and rainbows out their behinds back when everything seemed peachy – are now hitching their wagons to the rage train. We’re all socialists now. Or populist insurgents. Or fucking pissed off. Or something.

Of course once we all wish hard enough that the magic markets can get back to making imaginary wealth and justifying imaginary jobs for those seeking employment in titanic corporate bureaucracies, all will be forgiven. Enough of the people will be fooled enough of the time that nothing much will change. The glittering sprawlopolis will once again have their needs met – flavored lattes and high-speed HD video on demand. The folks in the crumbling, fashion-crippled Meth Belt will be left to their own devices. And no one will give a shit anymore. Maybe we’ll think about rural rot a little after undergoing the routine colonoscopy necessary to score some OTC pseudoephedrine. But we sure as hell won’t think about how narcotrafficking links poor folks in Mexico with poor folks in Mattoon, IL. It’ll be back to soul-sucking employment for some, soul-sucking idleness for others. Crisis averted. Normalcy from sea to boring sea.

As we all run around like idiots worrying about what fell horrors await us as part of the Great Depression 2: Hardtack Boogaloo release party, we must remember that – not to make light of Americans’ troubles – everyone here has a relatively sweet deal. Not only do poor people in America have televisions, they have food. They aren’t eating dirt just to feel full. Americans don’t have a hard time getting at drinkable water. Our nation’s legacy of exceptionalist rah-rah bullshit makes us all sensitive (myself included) to any suggestion that we should be happy with “good enough.” Our inner Teddy Roosevelts would have us carrying big sticks and hitting the line hard and forever striving to be the corpse at every funeral and the bride at every nuptial. Still, people are actually and really hungry out there – not lacking organic pine nuts and access to affordable brie, but really hungry.

Peter Singer, “America’s Shame: When are we going to do something about global poverty?”

Despite the recent economic downturn, we are nevertheless living in a time that is particularly opportune for reducing extreme poverty worldwide. The first decade of the 21st century has seen the proportion of people unable to meet their basic physical needs shrink to less than it has been at any time in history, and perhaps at any time since human beings came into existence. At the same time, the proportion of people with far more than they need is also unprecedented. Those in affluent societies work an average of only six hours a week to earn enough to buy an adequate amount of food.

Most important, rich and poor are now linked in ways they never were before. Real-time moving images of people on the edge of survival are beamed into our living rooms. Not only do we know a lot about the desperately poor, but we also have much more than before to offer them in terms of better health care, improved seeds and agricultural techniques, and new technologies for generating electricity. More amazing, through instant communications and open access to a wealth of information that surpasses the greatest libraries of the pre-Internet age, we can enable them to join the worldwide community — if only we can help them to get far enough out of poverty to seize the opportunity.

Posted in The Drive-by Truckers | No Comments »

Courtney Love, America’s Sweetheart

March 11th, 2009

You hiss and groan and you constantly moan
But you don’t ever go away
That’s because
All you need is me

You roll your eyes up to the skies
Mock horrified
But you’re still here
All you need is me

– Morrissey, “All You Need Is Me”

Morrissey quoting aside, hate is a strangely American virtue. Seems like if folks don’t hate us, we feel we’re only lukewarm. And if we can’t work up a moderate-sized hateball for someone, -thing, or idea — why that’s a failing of the motivating passions. A little yellow bile does a body good. I have some first-hand experience with Hate American Style. Since about 2001 or so I’ve made a public nuisance of myself on an internet message board.

It started out in good faith. I entered the fray mostly to stick up for bands and records I like that certain internet guitar weenies were abusing for various aesthetic and personal reasons. I wasn’t too far removed from my days as an undergraduate English major at the time — arguing about what you liked and why it was a worthy undertaking. I took as well as I gave. I turned a couple sharp phrases and, occasionally, made my points deftly and wittily. At the time I thought I was merely engaging in spirited debate. But slowly dissent and discussion gave way to rancor and petty point scoring. Teams were picked. Lines were drawn. Dodgeballs flew. People got beaned in the head. People enjoyed the smell of napalm in the morning. I think I’d been a member of the forum for about six months.

In the years since all out hate was declared, I’ve wished lethal cancer on people. I’ve mocked peoples’ families, pets, record collections, fashion sense, and pretentions. And I’ve had mine mocked in kind. I adopted and cast aside personae of varying sincerity. I’ve been banned for life more than once. I was a shithead amongst shitheads. I wound up sparking one feud that quit being funny games long ago and seems like it is actually “real world” mean-spirited on both our parts. Ill-tempered Christmastime missives were sent. I reveled in being a hateful fuckface. The pettiness felt good. All the shit I ate at my unfulfilling job could be transmogrified into 101 proof government-bonded spleen juice to be liberally dumped on the unsmart no-counts who couldn’t find it with both hands and a flashlight. I was towering smartipance stomping the duncefields. Those chumps could all go eat a bowl of fuck as far as I was concerned.

Being a self-aware little critter, I knew what I was doing. I even engaged in a good deal of fourth-wall-breaking meta-hate. The whole stupid thing became a joke amongst a group of ill-tempered hatey partisans I became actual “real world” friends with. Of course this winking and nodding didn’t diminish the fact that I spent the bulk of my online time being a bilious meany.

In my defense, my reprehensible online doings aren’t part of some unheard of perversion. America digs this kind of partisan poo slinging. (This is where you throw your hands up and gasp, “Not ME! I want balance and bi-partisanship and CHANGE, damnit! A new era of mother-loving good feelings!”) Rush Limbaugh and his chattering ilk are obviously practitioners of fine American hate, as are the shrieking radicalized hippies from Limbaugh’s hated Sixties. The “culture wars” are a great place to collect samples of genuine American bile — along with the occasional wink and nod. Celebrity gossip vendors also apply the hatesauce liberally. Just think of the scandals surrounding young, attractive people over-indulging. I mean, those people didn’t even EARN their right to behave badly through “talent.” Or so goes the usual complaint. And of course one could consider the regional prejudices (”Lousy white-trash Hoosiers copulating in the Dairy Queen parking lot…”) and nasty sports rivalries. Not to mention America’s proud traditions of racism, sexism, xenophobia, red-baiting, and whatnot. This is the land of freakin’ opportunity, after all. No matter who you are, you can find something that sticks in your craw. And by golly, if you happen to hate *me* — well, obviously you can’t deal with the extent to which I “keep it real” and “tell it like it is.”

There’s certainly a rush in knowing that you’ve gotten under someone’s skin, that you made them lose their shit and hate you. That hated need the haters and vicey versa. And sometimes out-and-out clobbering the object of your hate is cool and refreshing. (Go ahead, feign disbelief again.)

Much of my serious thinking on hate is prompted by reading Rick Perlstein’s excellent Nixonland. As any fan of Record Desk patron saint Hunter S. Thompson can tell you, Richard Nixon makes for some good hatin’. He is — short-sighted Bush-baiting aside — likely the most hated president of all time. Heck, the nastiest taunts hurled at W. usually include the words “worse than Nixon.” And Nixon just didn’t set the bar for being hated; he could dish it, too. Nixon was hated because Nixon could and did hate with both frequency and intensity. One of the main points of Nixonland is that Nixon helped us, as a nation, learn how to hate. He taught us to channel our resentments and our fears.

In many ways, Nixon gave us the culture wars. He gave us our convenient labels so that we could easily form raiding parties and rush off under cover of darkness to menace enemy trenches. He was also over-concerned with his public image. He wanted to be hated in the right way, so that he could be loved all the more by his side. As we all know, Nixon’s preoccupation with his enemies and his image ultimately caused everyone to lose sight of why he was president in the first place. In a hatespasm for the ages, he was run out of government. The bile in his wake was so great that even poor affable Gerry Ford got sunk by it.

Poor Courtney Love seems to have suffered a similar fate to that of poor dead “Tricky” Dick Nixon. In general, people have forgotten what Courtney Love was before she was someone you just hated reflexively. Her own hate/hate relationship with everyone/-thing defines her as a public creature. What started out as simple provocateering has swallowed her alive. Heck, she is so hated that the tinfoil hat sector has managed to convince some of the people some of the time that she was actively involved in the death of beloved lunchbox icon Kurt Cobain. Of course many of Love’s critics pile on unfairly. My gut feel is that sexism plays a big part in the whole “Let’s hate Courtney” impulse. Sure, she’s been a public drunkard/junkie who’s made questionable artistic and fashion choices, but those same “crimes” made folks like Keith Richards, Johnny Thunders, and Love’s late husband Kurt Cobain into culture heroes. The whole “rock star as positive role model” expectation is a crock anyway. Respectable rock stars make lousy records like All That You Can’t Leave Behind and front Coldplay. No thank you.

Still, the fact that Courtney Love has been treated harshly by a sexist, group-thinky rock media doesn’t erase the fact that she achieved fame in some measure by daring people to hate her. Her outspoken, consciously bratty behavior is part of her charm. Deep down she’s a rock critic herself, her critiques coming in the form of her own songs and her snarky interview soundbites. Her 2004 “comeback” record America’s Sweetheart is equal parts invitation to hate and rock criticism. When the record was released, much of it was swallowed up by soap opera summaries of Love’s supposed bad behavior.

If we’re to indulge Rolling Stone’s pretentions as the “paper of record” for matters of rock and roll, consider the tabloid concerns voiced by their review of America’s Sweetheart. (If you read the full review, you’ll also notice a certain stuffy disapproval regarding the sort of broke-down, outsized debauchery that used to be RS’s stock in trade.)

You’d have to go back to Sticky Fingers to find a major-label album so saturated in the slow-motion drug ambience of the sleazy rock underworld. It will surprise anybody who expected Love to clean up her act after so many years as a tabloid spectacle.

…

For people who enjoy watching celebrities fall apart, America’s Sweetheart should be more fun than an Osbournes marathon.

…

So she settles for the role of a hapless circus act staggering down the red carpet — and Paris Hilton does it better.

Such prudish tut-tutting is par for the course when discussing Courtney Love. Her legendary naughtiness seems overmuch in these times of nice guy “approachable” musicians. I’d wager that people hate the idea of Courtney Love more than they hate her records, because America’s Sweetheart ain’t a bad little rock and roll album. Sure, it’s a big time glossy affair. But there’s some real heart and pain there too. A few songs are prime examples of Love’s ability to smartly engage with the ideas and arguments that are so often ignored by rock and roll as the medium continues playing at its primal savant act.

Take for instance her swipe at “the future of rock and roll circa 2003″ Julian Casablancas, “But Julian, I’m A Little Bit Older Than You” —

The track begins with a sassy pop-punk chant in the best tradition of school yard mockery. The song is loosely structured, touching on several standard retro punk tropes, eventually making its diss explicit with the snarky “Hey gabba gabba, baby. I’m a little bit older than you.”

Basically, Love is well aware what game the hype of the moment is playing. She’s seen it (even been a part of it) before. Not that the song is mere celeb-on-celeb trash talking. It’s a knowing riff on the contradictions of life in the mainstream underground.

I’m overrated, desecrated
Still somehow illuminated
I know I’ve got a screw loose
Just meet me in the bedroom
I know you did this, what a punk
You would never sell out
Just like I did in Playboy
That was art, it didn’t count

Sex and drugs and integrity — none of them have any fixed value.

Love, like most alternative-era acts, made her name by turning the confessional into the political. Rock and roll was an article of faith and a means of transcending hurt and awkwardness. And when fame and reality and other grown-up concerns soured the whole thing, “alternative nation” collapsed upon itself — retreating to the fringes, succumbing to indulgence, or making peace with showbiz.

“Mono” is a little bit of Love struggling to recapture the spark. Note the confrontational “Did you miss me?” taunt.

HeY, yeah we had everything
Vinyl and mono
And we looked the other way
Man, we were so dumb
Is this the part in the book that you wrote
Where I’ve gotta come and save the day?
Did you miss me?
Did you miss me?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

…

Well they say that rock is dead
And they’re probably right.
99 girls in the pit
Did it have to come to this?

Oh God, you owe me one more song
So I can prove to you that I’m so much better than him
Oh God, please listen fast
Here comes the crash
We’re gonna rise above
We’ve gotta smash it up
You won’t abandon us again

…

Three chords in your pocket tonight
Are you, you the one
With the spark to bring my punk rock back?
I don’t think so.

I recognize that I’m focusing heavily on Love’s lyrics. However, they’re the one part of Love’s songs that are 95%-100% her own. She’s no tunesmith. She’s a writer. Her strength is her ability to make her own concerns and musings into something relatable. Her primary subjects are rock and roll and herself. One reason she’s such a hatable celebrity is that so much of herself is in what she does. You can’t approach her music without coming to terms with her persona. Of course many of her contemporaries (Eddie Vedder, Rivers Cuomo, Kurt Cobain) employed a similar approach and were likewise hated as a result. The difference seems to be that Love hasn’t atoned for her egotism by retreating into sensible do-goodery, charming eccentricity, or sainthood. People don’t like folks who overstay their welcome unrepentantly. The pitfall is that being hated at length can turn you into a caricature of yourself, a campy object of “their” ire.

I used to think that the big problem with the internet (and other forms of mass media, really) is that it fostered easy consensus and suppressed dissent. This self-serving analysis explained how I could become an object of public hate on an internet message board. I thought I’d also figured out why outsized artists like Courtney Love got a universally raw deal. Everyone could quickly come to the same snap judgment and mock away any disagreements. Then I realized that my beef with the internet was little different than Nixon’s spiteful war with/on the news media.

I suppose that the way in which the internet (or media in general) fosters hate is that it exposes you to ideas/images/people/etc. that you might not otherwise encounter and provides you with a set of ready-made labels that you’re invited to apply to yourself and others. The expansion of niche media outlets on the internet allows you to quickly find your “us” and set up shop against a million “thems.” Smart cookies like Nixon and Courtney love recognize that tribalism and snarkiness are fun. They use these impulses as a means of self-expression. Of course nothing but a steady diet of insular snarkiness will harden your heart and convince you of your own virtue over time. Oversized examples of “the other side” will seem particularly hatable (while these same big time hatable qualities make them heroes in their own camp). Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

I think the need to be liked, loved even, leads us to adopt hatedness as protective coating. Hatedness is an effective defensive position. “Let them hate me for my [whatever]. I’m simply too grand for them to stand.” Problem is that after years of defining yourself by what you hate and who hates you, you wind up incapable of setting your own course without other people’s hate as a guide — lost in your own museum.

That’s why I resolved to quit being a jerk on the internet. At first I thought I could just behave myself, but the hate habit was strong. I had to go cold turkey. I quit. I just stopped doing it. Baby and bathwater together. They won’t have me to kick around anymore.

I’m already seeing results. I’ve started to reconnect with my love of rock and roll. No longer is what I listen to part of some elaborate social duel. I like Courtney Love. It’s totally fine if other people don’t. My taste is no longer a cudgel for whacking my “enemies.” It’s like I was waging my own little version of the culture wars. I was ignoring my real needs and goals and values and desires to feel superior to others on petty matters of taste and style.

I ain’t totally reformed though. I hope they miss me now that I’m gone. I’m a native son of Nixonland, after all.

Posted in Courtney Love | 2 Comments »

Announcement: 03-10-2009

March 10th, 2009

Just a quick heads-up — I recognize that I have been remiss w/r/t regular posting. I have good reasons. (Really!) I recently spent a week in Tokyo and wasn’t blogging while on vacation. Also, I’ve been finishing up some pressing graduate school application matters. Regular activity will resume shortly. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Posted in Announcements + Blog Housekeeping | No Comments »

The Exploding Hearts, Guitar Romantic

February 7th, 2009

History Today Issues, Volume: 59 Issue: 2 — “To Buy or Not to Buy: The Origins of Good Taste” by Keith Thomas

In modern times, there is nothing which more exactly defines social differences than personal taste, whether in food or music or wallpaper or the choice of children’s names. The choices that people make in these areas of life may seem spontaneous and genuine, but, without any apparent pressure or coercion, they usually conform to class lines. The possessions which we place in our living spaces and the way we decorate those spaces instantly reveal our sensibilities, our preoccupations, and our social milieux. That is why they will evoke the admiration of some observers and the disdain of others.

…

Possessions were symbols of refinement and politeness. They helped to define individual identity. They even shaped their owners’ physical deportment and behaviour, for knives and forks, cups and teapots, fragile porcelain and increasingly delicate furniture imposed a distinctively mannered way of eating, drinking, moving and sitting. In this way the consumption of goods created social differences as well as expressing them.

The process was assisted by the rise of the idea of taste. ‘Taste’ is a term which first acquired prominence in England in the later 17th century. As goods multiplied, it became a central concept of aesthetic theory and an important form of cultural differentiation. As a contemporary noted in 1633, ‘great folks’ always had a tendency to ‘think nothing of that which is common and ordinary people may easily come by’. Taste involved transcending mere financial criteria when assessing the value of goods, introducing instead a subtler and more elusive yardstick.

…

Taste was notoriously a quality which the vulgar lacked, for they were without the necessary education and experience, whereas connoisseurs were cultivated, well travelled and ‘conversant with the better sort of people’. ‘Those who depend for food on bodily labour’, ruled the critic Lord Kames in 1762, ‘are totally devoid of taste’. The middle-class inhabitants of the London suburbs were scorned by their social superiors for their bad taste, manifested in the embarrassingly derivative style of their houses and gardens.

I’ve been thinking a bit about the manufacture of rock taste and about the internet as the place where rock tastemaking happens. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about the popular internet gem “There’s tons of great music out there. You just have to work/look for it.” I’m sure I’ve said this before. And even if I never did, I’ve certainly participated in the types of activities where that phrase could serve as an apt motto — community radio, start-up rock zines, webzines, local rock bands, this very blog. What “You just have to work/look for it” means is that you have to busy yourself cultivating sophisticated tastes. Once engaged in this pursuit, you can prove yourself by purchasing (or often “stealing”) the objects of your desire. You can also make others aware of the hard work you’ve put in by blogging, reviewing purchases on Amazon, or posting endless lists of all-time, all-time favs on Myspace, Facebook, online message boards, etc. Also implicit in this “looking/working hard” idea of taste is that the stuff produced for everyone to be consumed by everyone is less-than-good. Origins of hipster backlash for $400, Alex?

Being of that group that came of age during the ’90s alternaboom, I remember a time when “popular” didn’t always mean “dreck.” (Though there’s probably a future blog post in examining my first attempts at rock snobbery and my “horror” at people embracing bands I thought belonged to me.) Still, the motto of the college rock years (and realized in the alternarock era) could easily be “In a perfect world, THEY’D be as big as the Beatles.” Big Star comes to mind as *the* band whose pop appeal was unfairly thwarted, but there are plenty of other bands that SHOULD’VE been huge, if only…

Of course when the underground finally got its due on US radio/television, folks started grumbling about “sellouts” and the modern hipness became a going concern. Interestingly — though coincidentally — the internet also became a going concern for the masses at this point as well. And access to the internet did allow folks to point and click at articles, interviews, and later mp3s of bands about whom very little was available in the wilds of Midwestern suburbia. It became a lot easier to get to the source of what you soon learned was derivative, spiffed-up, saleable versions of bands who had toiled in obscurity for years. I’m sure I became pickier and snootier at this time. I bet I became more vocal about eschewing what could easily be got at by switching on Q101 or whatever. I was on my way to become a better, more proper sort of listener — so was everybody else.

I’m pretty sure that this refinement in taste is when everything went sideways.

Don’t get me wrong. Without the internet and its “sophisticated” hipster vision of pop, I might have missed out on personal favorite records by Modest Mouse and the Soft Boys, and even the Exploding Hearts’ Guitar Romantic. Still, the internet has given us a world where Pop is carved into smaller and smaller wedges of specific niche appeal. I’m certain I’ve griped about this before, but because people don’t have to wade through everything in the same way as everyone else, they can’t assume any sort of common ground. They can navigate directly to what they want without ever considering what other people are up to. Every person a snoot.

In thinking about this process, I started to consider how I spend my “interactive” online time. Mostly, I abandoned checking out new music recommendations years ago, save for the trusted opinions of a few friends/critics whose opinions I trusted. Basically, I replicated my off-line behavior online. Beyond that, I spend a lot of “other people” internet time arguing about why what THEY like is inferior to what I like. Basically, I invest a lot of time/energy in telling other people that they’re wrong because they’re using a different set of aesthetic rules than I am when they choose music, clothes, food, etc. for themselves. For the most part, I’m not even championing stuff I like. (I do that more here.) I’m just bickering with people I don’t know about things they or I aren’t really invested in. Even worse is that I — like most people on the internet — have fallen into presenting myself as smug, sophisticated, and 100% unflappable. You know, that “Heh. Look at how smartly I take this joke without any real self-reflection” pose that confuses a healthy appreciation of irony with smarmy disconnectedness. The internet is a place where no one ever cares about anything — people HYPE things, but they don’t care. At least the internet I visit is very interested in novelty (site/blog updates, hot new tracks/bands/albums, in-jokey videos, etc.) without being concerned with newness or freshness of insight, form, method, etc. Everyone seems very bored on the internet (”OMG! Someone already posted that yesterday, n00b!”). Maybe that’s because the internet is largely used as a boredom-fighting device for folks stuck at work, crippled by social anxiety, disconnected from their local communities, easily distracted by dancing hamsters, whathaveyou.

I think that the internet because people use it alone and because it is so good at giving people just what they want tends to make us each more insulated and convinced of the rightness our own individual taste. Stuff everyone likes or stuff that people like without a wink-and-a-nudge seems a bit vulgar. Outdated. unmodern. Because I’m a contrarian and a reactionary, I find this whole process bittersweet. Self-directed tastemaking could allow people to become more eccentric, more themselves. But yet, everyone seems content to become the same kind of “unique.”

I’m reminded of Andy Warhol’s famous claim about pop and democracy –

What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

Which brings us around to Guitar Romantic. It’s a great, hooky, energetic record. I put it on in the car the other day and beamed from ear to ear as I bopped about behind the steering wheel. It’s the kind of rock and roll that posits a funner, better, more excitinger version of the world. It’s simple, sleazy fun. It’s smart, but not over-sophisticated. It’s clever without being snooty. It’s a fun, funny record that is completely accessible. You don’t need a decoder ring to get at it. It’s the sort of record that can be easily overlooked because it’s not doing anything “special” or novel.

This is a fabulous record. I’ve been listening to it mostly non-stop since it came in the mail the other day. It makes me happy to be alive. I know it’s dumb to read something like that on the internet. Enjoying something wholeheartedly isn’t much of a meme. Rock and roll and the cheap thrills for which its built isn’t optimized for the internet age. Getting a quasi-religious zing of real live window-rolled-down rainbow sherbet glee isn’t an internet thing. Caring too much is not the internet thing to do. Whooping and hollering is retrograde vulgarity best left to the NASCAR set.

Fuck it. I love this record. Sure it’s the sort of out-dated “retro” thing that, at best, is just a bunch of folks recording themselves brushing the teeth of dead monsters. Still, you should buy a copy and turn it up loud. Or at least you should go outside and play. Go get a big chocolate malted from the Dairy Queen. Dress up like a vampire. Flip through old highschool yearbooks. You’re an American. You can do whatever you want.

N.B. — I had some of the ideas from these articles in mind when I wrote this, but couldn’t find a good excuse for quoting them.

Robert Christgau’s Rock&Roll& column “Bohemias Lost & Found”

Robert Christgau’s ARTicles column “Inbreeding”

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Bruce Springsteen, Working on a Dream

January 27th, 2009

I sometimes wonder if Bruce Springsteen ever tires of performing as the avatar of American sincerity. Several of the reviews I’ve read hint that Springsteen’s post-inaugural Working on a Dream seems to sonically and lyrically reflect the new era of positivity and good feelings ushered in by the Obama administration. At the very least, the title Working on a Dream seems a bit like a mothballed Obama campaign slogan. Even the album’s dreadful cover art seems a cousin to the ubiquitous “Obamafied” images that now roam the internet seemingly unchecked.

ARRRRG! My eyes!

Linebacker II or Pakastani Drone Strikes -- You Make the Call

It kind of makes sense to connect Springsteen with the election and the overall national mood. Springsteen campaigned for Obama and played one of the inaugural parties. And he campaigned for John Kerry before that. And he self-identified as the national shaman on the mostly not good post-9/11 kinda-concept-record the Rising. Even his lower key, solo outings like Devils and Dust and the Seeger Sessions could be read as political, or at least as attempts to put a face on the political or contextualize it. In short, part of what Springsteen obviously does as a pop artist is embody and speak to Americanness. For the most part, rock critics and Springsteen’s audience recognize what he does and respond to it accordingly.

However, I think it’s kind of a lazy approach to Springsteen to just accept his pronouncements on “America” at face value.

It’s not just Springsteen’s fans who accept his “important” pronouncements on Americanness. His critics fall into this trap, too. As a life-long Springsteen fan, I’ve had plenty of “Bruce ain’t the boss of me” arguments. And the one gripe that stands out is that Bruce is phony in his authenticity, that he’s corny because he “means it” in the wrong kind of way. Basically, the complaint is that Springsteen is full of shit about not being full of shit.

Stephen Metcalf’s piece on Springsteen for Slate.com makes some solid points about the whys and wherefores of Springsteen’s authenticity problem. As Metcalf notes and as many of the anti-Boss faction contend, Springsteen’s “believability” is hampered by his association with former Rolling Stone writer and legendary hyperbolizer Jon “I saw rock and roll’s future” Landau. Of course, Landau ultimately managed Springsteen to superstardom — some claim that he turned Springsteen into a working-class parody to do so. Basically, Landau helped craft (or completely crafted) the brokedown American everyman image that made Springsteen a household name. It wasn’t Landau’s first attempt at a makeover. He once managed the MC5 and tried to rebrand them as American teenage delinquents, accidentally inventing the tinny sound of punk rock production along the way.

Still, it’s the on-the-record image-making that is supposedly evidence that Springsteen is inauthentic. I suppose therein lies the rub. Springsteen’s basic image is that he’s a guile-free 100% American genuine article. People expect authenticity from their “Authentic Voices.” Folks like Bowie and Dylan can get away with changing masks because that’s part of their act. And cranky old Neil Young can put “mercurial” on his resume with hardly a peep because it’s part of what Young’s fans expect. Springsteen’s projected seriousness and sincerity is one of the reasons he can seem a bit inauthentic.

In his review of Working on a Dream for Salon, “Springsteen Can’t Save Us,” Louis P. Masur describes the record as Springsteen returning “to an original faith in rock ‘n’ roll as the music of liberation. [Springsteen] once observed that Elvis freed our bodies and Dylan freed our minds. Springsteen is working on our souls.” That’s some heavy lifting. And I think it’s a bit much to expect of any rock and roller. Of course, that “saving” is part of the Landau-Springsteen myth. The “Gospel According to Landau” maintains that Springsteen “saved” mainstream rock and roll from hippie bloat and returned it to its proper blue jeans and bee hives glory. This isn’t too different than what McLaren claimed for his Sex Pistols.
Still, the wires holding up the Pistols’ act were visible. They weren’t marketed as the “real deal” and therefore could sneer at the swindle as the whole thing imploded. Springsteen on the other hand was a gifted songwriter whose authority was wedded to his image. He couldn’t necessarily get out from under his conceptualized image without alienating his audience. It’s little wonder that he went on to become the “voice of the people” or whatever.

So there we have it. Springsteen is an “important songwriter” who makes “important statements” about the state of the nation. Except that’s not really completely true. Superficially Magic was the Bush record and Working on a Dream the Obama record, but only superficially.

I think there’s a case to be made that the increasing (Catholic?) spirituality of Springsteen’s songs as well as the increasing directness of his language (”fuck” even makes an appearance in “Queen of the Supermarket”) could hint that Springsteen’s tiring of worldly trouble and vanity. I mean, “dreams” and “magic” aren’t always positives over the course of Springsteen’s catalogue. If anything “dream” usually turn out to be rotten disappointments in the cold light of Springsteen’s reality. As Masur points out, there’s a bleakness in Springsteen’s vision. This doomy-ness gets overlooked. After all, both Magic and Working… found Springsteen coming to terms with the deaths of two close friends (personal assistant Terry Magovern and E-Street keyboardist Danny Federici). Nevermind that Springsteen himself is getting older and maybe crankier. Cast aside the yammering class’ need to link Springsteen’s mood with the election cycle, and these could be two albums about keeping the faith in the face of death and other diminishing returns. It’s hard to read them this way because Springsteen’s public stance as the important American songwriter does point you towards the easy reading.

And what to make of Springsteen’s ’60s pop fixation on Working…? Or kicking off the album with a long-winded fib about the American outlaw myth? To my ear, Springsteen is reclaiming a bit of the sprawl of his early records and some of the pop zeal of the River. In many ways the slightness of Working… the lack of any real cohesive lyrical themes reminds me of the River. It adds up to one sound. It’s a bunch of songs written by a guy who writes songs and fronts a much-lauded bar band. I haven’t heard any of these songs for decades upon decades, so I can’t yet tell if any of Working… grabs me like “Badlands” does. It seems that Springsteen is working loosely without that push for “importance.”

Of course people are hearing even this lightness as somehow part of some secret code. I think that Working on a Dream is just another Springsteen record. I think he’s enjoying the studio and trying out a new batch of songs. I mean, check the Working-era Halloween goof “A Night with the Jersey Devil.” It seems he’s dropping the pose a bit and having fun. Or maybe I’ve been had again.

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Glasvegas, Glasvegas

January 19th, 2009

I was listening to my recently-purchased copy of Glasvegas on the way into work this morning and I had an itty-bitty epiphany. This part isn’t the epiphany — the conventional wisdom on Glasgow’s Glasvegas is that their sound is rooted in early rock sounds like girl groups and rockabilly as filtered through Euro sound junkies like the Jesus and Mary Chain and U2. It was in considering Glasvegas’ retro concerns that it dawned on me that they were taking up the middle ground between Bruce Springsteen and Morrissey. And that’s the tiny epiphany, that the Boss and the Mozz are essentially two sides of the same coin.

Don’t go nuts yet. I’m well aware that the Springsteen camp and the Morrissey folks rarely are seen together in public. One guy is the poster boy for “authentic rocking” while the other is the patron saint of lovelorn smartipances. Still, both performers are icons who’ve made careers mining rock and pop styles from that period between Elvis and the Beatles and using those retro moves as the backdrop for their own stylized yearning, dreaming, and score settling. The Morrissey who evokes that grey seaside mope in “Everyday is Like Sunday” is singing about a slightly imaginary version of English life in the same way that Springsteen’s auto-powered desert defiance in “The Promised Land” is speaking to a not-quite-real experience of American working-class frustration. Obviously the two artists focus on different flavors of classic pop and rock. However, both of them are nostalgic, even sentimental, writers and performers. One plays the role of the British eccentric, the other the role of American blue-collar everyman.

Enter Glasvegas. Their songs (like Morrissey’s and Springsteen’s) are crammed with words. They’re also unabashedly emotional. You can’t get away with a twist like “My name is Geraldine/I’m your social worker” without meaning it. And wink-wink, nudge-nudge stuff would make you cringe like the end of an M. Night Shyamalan movie. And just so you know that Glasvegas aren’t fooling, they’ve built their sound partly using the direct, plaintive blueprint of the Ronnettes and Shangri-Las and partly using U2’s plans for echoey, arena-as-cathedral guitars. It’s a big sound for songs with big hearts. I’ve read of Glasvegas being compared to the Jesus and Mary Chain, and while both bands are playing the sweetness vs. noise game, Glasvegas lacks the emotional distance (i.e, reverb-drenched or distorted deadpan vocals) and the abusive feedback of the JAMC’s early Beach-Boys-meets-Velvet-Underground stuff.

I think the neat trick that Glasvegas pulls is taking the romantic girl group song form and using it to write something other than boy/girl love songs. I mean, “Daddy’s Gone” takes the typical “my baby’s gone away” track and repurposes it as a vehicle for musing about one’s lousy father.

“Daddy’s Gone”

All I wanted was a kick-a-bout in the park
For you to race me home when it was nearly getting dark
How I could’ve been yours, and you’d be mine
It could’ve been me and you until the end of time
Do what you want, when you want
Be as fucking insincere as you can
What kind of way is that to treat your wife
To see your son on Saturdays
What way is that to live your life?

At this point in semi-popular rock history, when masks and ironic stances or complete escapism seem to be requirements for serious consideration, it takes a certain amount of guts to write and record songs about streetfights, bullying, and broken homes with a straight face. A song like “Go Square Go” could easily fit into an arch little betsit record by Belle and Sebastian.

“Go Square Go”

If he wants to fight you
at the school gates
Half past four grab your bag
Don’t you be late
If he wants to hit you
Hit you in the face
If he wants to hurt you
in front of your mates
If he wants you to run away
Run away run away
Don’t you fucking run away

It’s striking to hear a sad, almost tender song like this given the big rock treatment with the resigned/charged “Here we fuckin’ go” refrain juiced up into an anthemic rallying cry. Its the sort of clever, exhilarating move that would make Uncles Morrissey and Springsteen proud. Heck, even St. Bono would likely approve.

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