A blog by Alesh Houdek
Stevie Wonder performed at the White House. Cool enough. I say let’s do a concert a week, and let’s move them outside. Here’s a few folks I’d like to see performing in the rose garden (in addition to the obvious choice of George Clinton):
More suggestions?
Wikipedia names your band, a clever band name/album title/cover art randomizer, with some gorgeous results. It’s worth sifting through all the submissions. (I have a few in there.)
A completely unexpected argument about Billy Joel. I’ve read the Chuck Klosterman article, and while it was fun to read, I don’t care about Billy Joel either way, and I don’t understand why these people are so worked up.
We all have our concerts we regret missing. That one amazing show we knew we should go to but ended up missing for whatever reason… for me it was Alice Cooper when I was in high school, but most especially Zoo TV. This is the story of three U2 albums: Achtung Baby, Zooropa, and Pop. If you knew me at the time, and you got me started about U2, you’d hear my analogy between the Beatles and U2. How each had their “black and white” phase, both sonically and visually, and how their overwhelming popularity pushed each group to really explore and experiment (unlike lesser acts, who’s success forces them to retreat and to try to repeat the formula that brought them the success).
Achtung was U2’s Sgt. Pepper (simultaneously a complete break from their past work and a complete masterpiece), Zooropa was their Yellow Submarine (even more experimental, but also more hit-and-miss), and … well, at some point U2 went “back to their roots” (ie stopped being interesting), but not before releasing Pop, an album which requires a whole shift in paradigm to understand. So now hear this:
“And remember, power moves aren’t about being cool, they’re about being awesome.” (That may be the worst possible episode of The Show to start with if you’ve never seen one before, btw.)
So, over the course of these three albums, U2 stopped trying to be cool, and started to concentrate on being Awesome. The awesomeness is pretty evident on Pop, with unabashed songs like Discothèque and The Playboy Mansion. The attempt to be cool (i.e. detached, in contrast to their earlier earnest work) is in effect from start to finish on Achtung Baby — in fact, it’s what distinguishes it from the ultra-sincere previous studio album, The Joshua Tree.
Musically, Zooropa is the least successful of the three albums. It finds the band in its most experimental and exploratory phase, and the duds come as fast as the successes. But none embodies everything that is right with this period of U2’s music better then “Daddy’s Gonna Pay For Your Crashed Car.” One of the things that’s cool about the song is that it doesn’t even have a proper video; it lives on only as an album version and several live permutations. The basic one is above. Check out how the staging had evolved in short order:
Now we’ve got Bono, in full-on lead singer parody, singing the first verse to himself in the mirror, in some sort of Satan’s dressing room. If anyone’s keeping archetype score, don’t forget Pink from The Wall here. OK, but let’s get to the heart of what’s great here. It’s how directly the faux-nihilism of the concept of the song leads to its greatness. The second person — the “you” of the song — is held in utter contempt by the song’s narrator. Yet the staging, and the setup of the song, makes clear that the “real” singer has at least as much contempt for the “narrator.” The whole thing twists back on itself, and nobody ends up guilty except maybe the un-self-conscious pop star that Bono mocks.
After all that, it’s almost unnecessary to examine the formal qualities of the song itself, but let’s run through them anyways. Refer again to the music-only version of Daddy’s Gonna Pay For Your Crashed Car. We open with a bit of obligatory static and some classical music (I don’t even have to refer to my CD sleeve to tell you that this sample was credited simply to something called “Lenin’s Favorite Songs,” in a transparent bit of liner-note showmanship). What follows sounds novel even today, despite being built out of fairly mundane sonic blocks.
The cry-cat effect, in evidence on various guitar parts from all over this era, finds its way to the snare in the main bit of the song. (In technical terms, the effect emphasizes frequencies that are higher the louder the input is. Compare the snare on the first part of this song to the guitar on Mysterious Ways to hear it.) After that, the song is largely built on the bass part. Sonically heavily compressed, the sound is nonetheless a tribute to Adam Clayton’s oft-overlooked creative force.
We get a few other keyboard/sampler sounds, but the only other distinguishing sonic feature is the lead vocal’s reverb advance/retreat. I’m not sure how conscious the untrained ear is to this, but this song is an early blatant example of a lead vocal that vacillates between dry and wet (echoy) sonics for emotional effect.
During the chorus, in the live version, the monitors flash “A-HA” and “SHA-LA,” in bold all-caps, a tongue-in-cheek “This is a Pop Song” deceleration. This is not unimportant, because it marks the single most conceptualized point in U2’s career. It’s the most “meta” they ever got, and maybe the most “meta” any pop star can ever get. Nothing before or since had tried as strenuously to deconstruct (and perchance to mock) the relationship between the cult-of-personality of a music star and the idol-worshiping ID of the pop music fan.
And maybe it’s just as well. Pop is a better album overall, and mines a similar territory, but the emotional space of the narrators of Staring at the Sun and even Last Night on Earth is much more familiar then that of Daddy’s Gonna Pay For Your Crashed Car. Mostly forgotten, the song deserves its place as the marker of the most self-consciously and deliberately detached narrator in the pop canon.
At the end of the year, when most bloggers are kicking back and taking it easy (ahem), Rex Sorgats has been busting his butt, bringing the excellent 30 Most Notable Blogs of 2008, the Top 35 Albums of 2008, and the monster List of Lists. Crazy.
So, I thought that Rex Sorgatz was the only person in the world who cared about Chinese Democracy, but it turns out I was wrong. His college roommate, Chuck Klosterman, also cares a lot, and wrote a 1,900 word review for the Onion’s AV Club.
Now, the opening pages of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs is some of my favorite neither-fiction-nor-nonfiction writing ever, and I’m generally all too happy to follow Klosterman on whatever flights of rhetorical fancy he chooses to explore. (It’s also tough to escape the fact that my writing style largely consists of biting him to whatever limited extent I’m able.) But I’ve read the Guns N Roses review twice now, and I’m just not sure I’m buying it.
I understand Klosterman’s position — I’m just about the same age as Rex and he, and so I understand that he’s got a lot of yarn to spin around Guns N Roses (just by way of example, check out a fake review of Chinese Democracy he wrote for Spin in 2006). This being (please God) the last time anybody will have any interest in reading about what’s left of GNR, he’s got the one chance to let it loose.
Klosterman’s gift is the ability to momentarily make the trivial seem monumentally important, and he goes all in here:
Reviewing Chinese Democracy is not like reviewing music. It’s more like reviewing a unicorn. Should I primarily be blown away that it exists at all? Am I supposed to compare it to conventional horses? To a rhinoceros? . . . This is a little like when that grizzly bear finally ate Timothy Treadwell: Intellectually, he always knew it was coming. He had to. His very existence was built around that conclusion. But you still can’t psychologically prepare for the bear who eats you alive, particularly if the bear wears cornrows.
I’m with him there, but it goes off the rails right away in just the very next paragraph:
Three of the songs are astonishing. Four or five others are very good. The vocals are brilliantly recorded, and the guitar playing is (generally) more interesting than the guitar playing on the Use Your Illusion albums. Axl Rose made some curious (and absolutely unnecessary) decisions throughout the assembly of this project, but that works to his advantage as often as it detracts from the larger experience. So: Chinese Democracy is good. Under any halfway normal circumstance, I would give it an A.
Am I the only one who zipped happily through that paragraph and didn’t at all see where it was headed? An A?! Since when does a competent rock album with three great songs get a fucking A? Here mainstream rock has been dishing up stagnant pop-punk since Kurt Cobain’s suicide (i.e. just about 20 years), with interesting music coming mainly from eccentric Brooklynites who get minimal play outside of pitchfork, and we’re seriously handing out good reviews to 46-year-old has-beens who manage to come up with 3 good songs and a pop-metal album that isn’t completely embarrassing?
Next, we’re then treated to a boilerplate “last real album” argument in which we are to believe that rock fans around the world will take Chinese Democracy as seriously as Klosterman does, and that it’s good enough to be remembered as the end of the era before all music was downloaded track by track. Which is completely goofy, since even the albums alleged fans are streaming it on MySpace and downloading it off the Pirate Bay.
Continuing as though he were working off an Important Album Review Template, Klosterman next gives us the lyrical analysis paragraph, which is actually the highlight of the review. “The weirdest (yet more predictable) aspect of Chinese Democracy is the way 60 percent of the lyrics seem to actively comment on the process of making the album itself.” Do tell. But we run into trouble again when the discussion turns to “the music.” If the warning bells haven’t begun ringing yet, what about when the praise for an album begins with “It doesn’t sound dated or faux-industrial.” And if you cherish, even in a small way, the Guns and Roses of yore, you’ll cringe at where this is going: “But it’s actually better that Slash is not on this album. What’s cool about Chinese Democracy is that it truly does sound like a new enterprise, and I can’t imagine that being the case if Slash were dictating the sonic feel of every riff.”
I don’t know who that works for, but as I vaguely recall it, GnR gradually tanked artistically as Rose’s influence over the group’s direction grew and Slash’s waned. Buckethead may be an interesting guitarist, but I suspect he’s playing Philip Seymour Hoffman to to Axl’s Robin Williams in Patch Adams here.
But don’t get me wrong — reading this review is still way more fun then entertaining the prospect of listening to the actual album. Towards the end, Klosterman goes off on one of his two-tangents-a-minute romps, speculating at great length about why Axl Rose chose to sing one particular line in one particular song in the particular way he did, along the way winding his way through an Extreme comparison, a James Bond reference, and the entirely probably speculation that there are 400 hours of vocal takes of this one particular song on tape somewhere. “Throughout Chinese Democracy, the most compelling question is never, ‘What was Axl doing here?’ but ‘What did Axl think he was doing here?’” Maybe so, but how compelling is either question, really? And is it going to make this album worth listening to?
Klosterman concludes with a sincere and heartfelt deceleration that this is, in his honest opinion, a Good Album. He sounds like he means it, but I actually sort of hope he doesn’t. I hope he just figures that making a big deal out of Chinese Democracy makes sense for him, and making a big deal out of it being good is more plausible then making a big deal out of it being predictably lame. He seems oblivious to the fact that much of the anticipation that existed at one point for Chinese Democracy has fizzled out years ago, and that CD is little more then the present day Two Against Nature — very few people care today, and nobody will care or remember 6 months from today.
In the end, Spin Magazine’s actual review of CD, brief and mildly dismissive, seems like a much more measured response. And if you want some primo Klosterman, go read his piece on R Kelley’s Trapped in the Closet, or better yet Sex Drugs and Coco Puffs.
David Byrne on tour. Miami date: December 13, Jackie Gleason.
I know what you’ve been thinking. “Sure, it’s all well to have this blog and everything, but why doesn’t it have a soundtrack? Wouldn’t the things typed in here make a lot more sense if there was music to like, you know, complement it?” Well, the answer is most definitely yes, and so I present you here with my very own B&F radio station.
Ok, it’s a link to a Pandora quick mix. Nothing special, actually. Unless you like things that are AWESOME. Actually, I’m not really sure how well this is going to work. My friends have been using my Pandora account almost exclusively to listen to music at their house, and they’ve added a bunch of things to it. (Double scoop of “avant garde jazz.”) And I suspect that anyone who clicks through can change the mix for everyone else, which should make this interesting. Think of it as an experiment.
Also, you have to sort of give it a chance — there’s so many different things programmed into it that it’ll take awhile to get a flavor for what you’re going to get. Eclecticism. This also seems like a good time to point out that I have another blog, a Tumblr that has lots of music on it. (Mostly, stuff goes here if it involves a significant amount of typing. The stuff on the tumblr is mostly stuff grabbed from other places. Like a scrapbook. But online, the way the kids do these days.)
I came across this old nugget while doing research for my forthcoming comprehensive appreciation of Missy Elliot’s work. This track, credited to Notorious B.I.G. (his second posthumous #1 hit single, an all-time record), is really a Puffy vehicle, and one of the strangest bits of art to make it onto MTV in the 90s. We open with a parody of a climactic moment of a golf tournament, Puffy playing a Tiger Woods character, cut to a “conventional” rap video, back to a bit of golf footage, back to rap video, then to some home-video of Biggy rambling, then cut to more rap video footage, now with a primo verse of posthumous Biggy spliced in from some abandoned track* (this is far and away the highlight of the whole thing), and then back to the previously scheduled song. The hook is lifted from a Diana Ross track (re-recorded), but what holds the track together is the line “more money, more problems,” repeated in the golf skit and in Biggy’s candid monologue.
When I saw this video in 1997 I loved it immediately, and for two reasons. One was the (* not so conventional, really) completely new vision of a bright shiny approach to hip-hop. Credit for this of course goes to Hype Williams, who directed the video, and who’d certainly directed equally eye-popping videos before. This one, though, sunk into my consciousness as much as (and just before) Missy’s I can’t Stand the Rain. The 90’s were a desolate time for rap, where the gangsta (sp?) ruled, and it was all about pictures of yourself and your crew in baggy denim and Timberlands in a bleak urban landscape, and all about your flow. It seems quaint now, but the idea that rap could be Glam again (like it had been in in the mid 80s) struck like a hammer. So did Mase’s lackadaisical flow, which seemed like a challenge to the silver-tongued MC’s of the day (e.g. DMX, who you may not remember being that fierce, but really, he kind of was) that ruled in those days, and of course Puff Daddy’s rapping was that much closer to a joke from a conventional perspective — dude got over purely on personality, and plus being the dude who’s business acumen built the building in which the party was taking place.
But much more then that, what hit home was the song’s frank discourse with reality. The toss-off line “more money more problems,” which the posthumous Biggie attributes to Puffy (who’s really creating the song, follow?), seems to accuse the whole post-barter system of human trade of being a way of keeping the little guy (ie the black man) down. Success = problems, or so it sounded to me at the time. I don’t think anyone cared at the time whether this very real critique held any merit — what was so powerful was that it sounded true, and that it helped break the mold of a pop-song, propelled it into something that looked like a particularly biting form of social commentary.
This really strikes home in the middle of Biggy’s verse, when we’re treated to a brief shot of a party with several dozen women dancing, while the song tries to to sell the idea that its grandiose concept is based on a seed in B.I.G.‘s words. Of course, this leads us to an inevitable conclusion: that Biggie’s death was somehow the result of his success. More money leads to more problems, most money leads to getting gunned down by a never-to-be-identified assailant. That is some strong medicine, and in terms of the alleged exploitation of the Notorious B.I.G.‘s death for commercial gain, challenges even the sappy ballad I’ll be Missing You.
So there it is: a weird/powerful truism about social politics delivered in a catchy, post-modern package that uses parody, found video, and cutting-edge video techniques (and let’s not sell Hype Williams short for a second — check out the shots of Puffy and Mase in the yellow suits — I mean, what the hell is that?!), all montaged together with an off-handed mastery (check out how some of the transitions are deliberately not on-beat) to create something that felt so like the future that it could never really be the future. Just like all videos for pop singles, it was dug, and it was forgotten. And so it goes. Somewhere out there there is a list of videos that really truly did something new, and this one belongs on that list.
Correction: While the single and the album it appears on were released after Biggie’s death, the song was almost certainly created while he was still alive, with everything as it appears except the 2-part golf skit.
It is very stressful, in these troubled times, to try to summon emotions specific to Rick Wright. Waters and Gilmour would be no problem, even Nick Mason I have lots of specific affection for. As the keyboard player, Wright was obviously central to PF’s sound. But I think that he was most interesting in his minimalist approach to the keyboard. I guess it’s hard to appreciate what he was doing because, rare and innovative as they were at the time, his gauzy synth washes sort of became the default mode for keyboards in pop in the 80s and obscured his contribution. Maybe. I believe he composed that song on Dark Side that has a female singer doing a long wordless improv(?), but insofar as that sort of thing represents PF’s most indulgent side, well, I dunno.
I’m young enough that my introduction to PF came through Momentary Lapse of Reason, by which point Mason and Gilmour were listed as the only two official members of the band (although, oddly, Wright plays on the album), which I guess speaks to his friendship with DG and says something about loyalty and his generally being a perfectly lovely British chap.
If the four members of the Beatles were about as close to all being equal as you can imagine, and REM represents some sort of opposite extreme, with one extremely gifted member and three perfectly good but ultimately replaceable musicians, I guess PF fits somewhere in the middle. Two (three if you count Barrett) creative fountainhead dudes with two talented and valuable supporting musicians, of which Rick Wright was one. Not, I suspect, a bad life.