Slate eBook Club
September 2003
Slate Opens the Music Box
Eminem's Martyr
Complex Gerald Marzorati
A Long, Staid
Trip Marc Weingarten
Miles Davis'
Missing Years Fred Kaplan
Bird-Brained Mark Jenkins
White Lies Mark Jenkins
Steely Dan Is
Getting Old Fred Kaplan
The Beethoven
Mystery Jan Swafford
Speed Freaks Do
Bach Jan Swafford
Johnny Cash on
Demand Ben Yagoda
Oh, Brother William Hogeland
Eminem's Martyr Complex
The rapper is
a national nightmare in his own mind.
By Gerald Marzorati
Posted
Thursday, May 30, 2002, at 1:40 PM PT
Remember the culture wars? Those were the '90s conflicts, the ones in which the
guys with the beards were gay-rights activists, Hollywood producers, or Robert
Bork. Most Americans saw no action in those wars (though they followed them
from time to time on talk radio or their cable-news outlet), and so they hardly
noticed when the battles drew to a close rather abruptly on Sept. 11. But for a
number of cultural warriors, the end of all that back-and-forth about sex and
gender, race and teen deviancy, God and PG-13 would seem to have left a hole in
their world, a metaphysical Ground Zero. Thus Jerry Falwell's attempt to blame America's
alleged moral demise for the collapse of the Twin Towers: What
was he trying to do but yell that the culture wars, and Jerry Falwell, still
mattered? And thus the new CD from Eminem, in which he imagines, or anyway
wants you to
imagine, that America is so terrorized by his rap—post-9/11 and, for that
matter, after that schmaltzy Grammy duet with Elton John—that it's hunting him down. Welcome, dogs (and
Bill Bennett and Tipper, too), to The Eminem Show, an album in which what is longed for
most is not hot bitches and the violent deaths of Mom and Dad (though they do
get theirs) but an America in which a national threat is still somebody who
earns a "parental advisory" sticker.
Eminem did have his moment, and not just because he was some sort of outrageous
minstrel act—a white boy bursting with lewd boasts and menacing taunts in the
nastiest gangsta style. (White suburban kids had been buying lots of rap
records, especially gangsta-rap records, for years before Eminem showed up in
the late '90s.) He had real talent as a rapper, along with an unschooled
writer's gift for assonance and inner rhyme. He was capable of wit—he wasn't
just the rap equivalent of Little Johnny's hidden, dogeared porn magazine but
of his Mad
magazine, too. And he was capable of truth, as when, in the song "If I
Had" from his first major-label album, The Slim Shady LP, he poured out in the hypnotic, list-building cadences of Walt
Whitman and Allen Ginsberg the weights and diminishments that could tug down a
working-poor kid, even at the height of the so-called Long Boom. (Remember the
Long Boom? Educated, grown-up white guys have their own style of outrageous
boasting.)
With his new album, though, that mix of social realism and hyperbole—in his
hands, an original and combustible compound—has given way to the paranoid
delusional. The ranting and the essaying are no longer concerned only or even
mostly with the middle-school id of his alter ego, Slim Shady, or with the
troubled youth of Marshall Mathers and his issues with class, race, his ex, Kim,
his father, and his mother (although the album's only knockout song,
"Cleaning Out My Closet," is a howling lament about his mom). Now
it's largely about Eminem, the pop star, who seems to have confused celebrity
with political and social potency. He would have you believe—he himself wants
to believe—that he has such terrifying authority among the young and restless
that mainstream America has got to bring him down. Eminem's developed a
martyr complex.
In "White America," the album's first song, there is an underground army forming across the nation,
kids with bleached hair combed forward, and Eminem is leading them somehow,
somewhere, whatever, and Congress is really, really worked up about this. On
subsequent tracks, those attempting to shut him up—or worse—include the Bush
administration, Lynne Cheney, and the FCC, along with any number of judges,
prosecutors, and journalists. As Eminem understands it, he is the national nightmare,
the one "everybody just wants to talk about," as he puts it in
"Without Me," the first single from the album. That scene in the video for "Without Me"—the
one where he dresses up like Osama Bin Laden? It turns out it's wish fulfillment.
Actually, the war against al-Qaida does figure briefly in The Eminem Show. In a song
titled "Square Dance," he warns his troops out there that they soon
may be drafted by the Government Man and sent off to die in Afghanistan.
Maybe he's been listening to somebody's old Country Joe and the Fish LPs.
One thing he hasn't been listening to closely enough is recent hip-hop. The
album's tired beats reinforce the sense that he is stuck in a moment he can't
get out of. Dr. Dre, Eminem's producer from the beginning and the one who
forged the young rapper's sound, is only a sporadic presence on The Eminem Show, which Eminem
chose to produce himself. That could explain why the album fails to take
account of the surprisingly adventurous atmosphere of mainstream hip-hop, where
Timbaland's bhangra-inspired beats propelled last year's best single, Missy Elliot's "Get Ur Freak On,"
and where the songwriting and production team the Neptunes, when they were not
busy making hits for Mystikal, Ludacris, and others, cut a stirring
funk-suffused rap record of their own called In Search Of ... that is among this year's finest so
far (and still earned that "parental advisory" sticker). Eminem's
idea of new and different—or could it be a not quite clever enough allusion to
Run DMC's influential rap-rock hit "Walk This Way"?—is to rap about his power and subsequent persecution
over Aerosmith's "Dream On."
In the "Without Me" video, not only Bin Laden shows up but Elvis,
too, in a bit of nasty bathroom humor—a fat, enfeebled Elvis prepares to die on
a toilet at Graceland. Poor Elvis. He had come to believe too early in his
career that it wasn't about his songs but about himself—that becoming Elvis,
and all that meant, was the whole point, all that anybody cared about, his
greatest triumph and truest art. When he has a chance, Eminem might watch that Graceland bit
again, as a precaution.
A Long, Staid Trip
How Deadheads
ruined the Grateful Dead.
By Marc Weingarten
Posted
Friday, August 30, 2002, at 7:53 AM PT
"There is nothing like a Grateful Dead Concert," the old bumper
stickers read. After attending my first 10 Dead shows, I soon realized this
wasn't true: Every Dead concert is pretty much is like every other Dead
concert. Not in terms of the set lists, which famously varied, or the
particular architecture of band leader Jerry Garcia's frequently transcendent
guitar work. No, it was that ineffable Dead "vibe" that always struck
me as rote—it felt more habitual than blissful. What bugged me was the a priori
assumption among Deadheads that Dead shows were always magic and that the magic
could be routinely summoned on a nightly basis. It couldn't, not by a long
shot. And that's coming from a fan.
A Long Strange Trip—the
exhaustive authorized Dead bio written by Dennis McNally, a Ph.D. in American
history and the band's publicist for the past 18 years—debunks the few
remaining preconceived notions about the band's hippie benevolence that
Deadheads have carried around. Even if one assumes that McNally has airbrushed
some of the uglier episodes out of this official story (and other Dead bios
might lead us to believe he has), he couldn't leave it all out. Despite the book's
"Great Men" breathlessness, this is a sad, sorry tragedy—the chronicle
of a personality cult so toxic it destroyed the very thing it venerated. Blame
it on the Deadheads.
The band's idea in the beginning was to bridge the gap between performer and
audience. According to McNally, the Dead's career was forged in a mid-'60s San Francisco
culture where showbiz notions of hero worship were unwelcome. "The
Grateful Dead certainly sought to entertain and move its audience,"
McNally writes, "but the root basis of their relationship was that of a
partnership of equals, of companions in an odyssey."
From 1965 to roughly 1975, the Dead fed off of this symbiosis brilliantly,
moving through Live/Dead's
lysergic-stoked free rock to the space-cowboy country of Workingman's Dead and American Beauty on to the
baroque prog-jams of Wake of
the Flood. Their venturesome efforts were rewarded with a fan base
of Deadheads that had swelled to a mega-movement by the end of the '70s.
Intensely loyal to the band, Deadhead-dom became its own sideshow, a traveling
community of freaks and later, frat-boy geeks.
The Deadheads gave the Grateful Dead a steady revenue stream and a safe harbor.
At first, it felt like a rear guard action—fighting for community in a socially
fragmented era. But it curdled into the last refuge for musical conservatism
and complacency, and it seemed to destroy the band's work ethic. McNally glancingly
makes reference to this dark side of the Deadhead phenomenon: "Like all
fans … they could become tediously obsessed with the object of their joy,"
he writes.
It wasn't just the fanatics; every fan (myself included) bought into the "satori
through space jam" myths, wore the same tie-dye, danced the same wiggle
dance. What had begun as an inclusive rallying point for outcasts became a
provincial closed society. Deadheads were supposed to represent enlightened
musical inquiry, but instead, as McNally points out, they ignored adventurous
opening acts and lifted lyrics out of context. In the early '90s, according to
McNally, Jerry Garcia became annoyed with the fact that the line "when it
seems like the night will last forever" from his bleak ballad "Black Muddy River"
invariably was greeted with lusty cheering.
Thematic content hardly mattered to the loyalists any more; the band's canon
instead became a series of dramatic gestures, well-timed downshifts, and dance
cues. Safe within the fuzzy bubble of Deadhead-land, the band coasted for years
on end, but no matter how negligent or desultory the performance, they always
had the Deadheads to fall back on. Of course the Dead loved the support—they
never had to work hard to earn it.
With nothing to strive for and no musical goals to attain, the band lapsed into
a creative torpor for the last 15 or so years of its career, even resurrecting
itself this summer for another go-round without Garcia. If McNally's book
teaches us anything, it's that, for a band with a prodigious drug and alcohol
habit, the Deadheads' unquestioning faith was perhaps its most dangerous
narcotic.
Miles Davis' Missing Years
Maybe his
final albums weren't such a bust after all.
By Fred Kaplan
Updated
Friday, October 11, 2002, at 8:07 AM PT
Within the culture of collectors, there dwells a subspecies known as "completists."
They must have the complete set of baseball cards from the '61 Yankees, the
complete Lanny Budd novels of Upton Sinclair, the complete back issues of the
original Vanity Fair,
or their grasp of reality will seem … incomplete. The innovation of the CD box
set—those lavish, multi-disc compilations containing the complete Beethoven
piano sonatas, the complete Bernstein conducting Mahler, the complete Verve
recordings of Stuff Smith—has been like manna to these wanderers through the
wilderness. Yet once in a while, a box set comes along that conveys broader
import as well, that topples the consensus about a musician or composer or
style of an era. That can certainly be said of a new, handsomely packaged box
set of 20 (yes, 20)
CDs—19 of which, amazingly, have never before been released—called The Complete Miles Davis at Montreux,
1973-1991.
The box consists of every concert that Miles Davis played at Switzerland's
Montreux Jazz Festival (one set in '73, the rest almost every year from '84
on)—the full sets, unedited and unaltered. These were the final years of the
protean jazz trumpeter's life, the "fusion" era, when he abandoned
his acoustic traditions, surrounded himself with synthesizers and electric
guitars, and played a mesh of jazz, hard rock, and pop tunes. The conventional
wisdom (expressed most harshly, but by no means solely, by Stanley Crouch) is
that Miles' music in those years veered from chaotic to banal, that Miles
himself could barely blow his horn, and that the whole business marked not
merely a severe step down—this was the man, after all, who had played with
Charlie Parker and had led bands with John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Wayne
Shorter, Herbie Hancock, and a dozen more masters—but a deliberate and cynical
sellout.
To judge solely from the studio sessions that Miles recorded during much of
this era, the detractors have a point. The albums of the '80s in particular—Star People, Decoy, You're Under Arrest, and Tutu—are soulless affairs.
The band would lay down its rhythm tracks, then Miles (often in less than
stellar health) would overdub his solos, in repeated takes, which the engineers
would later cut and paste into a simulacra of performances. "Jazz" is
hard to define, but at a minimum it involves improvisation and interplay, which
these recordings, by nature, lack.
The Montreux discs
are a completely different matter. The biggest difference is simply that they
are live performances—no multitracking, no splicing. Miles is onstage, up
front, inescapably mixing with the other musicians, laying down lines, shifting
cues, inviting improvisations, and responding to what his band-mates send back.
Another difference is the band. The studio LPs mentioned above were recorded
between 1982 and 1986. But Miles didn't hit this era's peak until 1987, when he
found a core of musicians who had the chops and sensibility to produce the mix
of sounds he'd been grasping for. Kenny Garrett, an inventive and muscular alto
saxophonist with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, kept Miles from coasting and
pushed him to the peak of his energy. Joe "Foley" McCreary, an
unknown bass guitarist from Cincinnati, played the high frets in the manner of Hendrix but
with a thicker tone, a funkier bottom. Ricky Wellman, the go-go drummer for
Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers, could stay aggressively on the beat while
also swirling in and around it, like a good R & B drummer combined with a
good swing drummer.
"The band I had in 1987 was a motherfucker, man," Miles wrote in his
autobiography, and he was right. I heard Miles play live with this band four
times in the late '80s, and they were always terrific. Those concerts changed
my thinking about the possibilities of jazz-rock fusion (I'd previously been a
rigid skeptic). But the band put out only one studio album (Amandla, by far the best of
his late-era works, but still plagued by the typical slick artifice) and made
no live albums—or so we thought. Now comes out of nowhere this mammoth box set.
The post-'87 band plays on just seven of the 20 CDs (Discs 13-18 and 20), and,
while the others have their moments, it's with these sets, beginning with July 7, 1988, that
the music turns magical. The tracks are inconsistent—how could they not be?
Miles was sick all through this period (lingering coke addiction, too much
booze, diabetes, to say nothing of lip problems), but he plays with ceaseless
flair, even majesty.
Among Miles' anthems of this era were rearrangements of Cyndi Lauper's
"Time After Time" and Michael Jackson's "Human Nature."
When he first called for "Human Nature" at a 1985 studio session, his
longtime drummer and close friend, Al Foster, was so repelled by the prospect
that he walked out and never came back. Listening to the way the tune came out
on You're Under Arrest,
you can't blame him. It's flat, schmaltzy elevator music. Compare it with the
rendition on July 7, 1988, at Montreux. It's an upbeat rouser, and
Miles prances through it. Even the darker "Tutu," as multitracked in the studio in 1986, sounds like a computer
program, with Miles punching in the keys. At Montreux, the band's like a boiling
kettle, and Miles sprinkles in the spices with a joyful shimmy. I defy anyone
to listen to his performance of "Mr. Pastorius" on July 21, 1989 and claim he could no longer
blow a heartbreak ballad. Or to hear any of the five versions of "New
Blues" in this box set and say his rock band couldn't swing.
For those who hesitate to commit the money ($250 retail) or shelf space to a
20-disc box, try the single-CD Live
Around the World (released in 1996, five years after his death), a
compilation of performances, at various clubs and arenas, from 1988 to 1991.
His take of "Time After Time" on June 6, 1989,
in Chicago is more exquisite than any of the nine versions at Montreux. Yet the Montreux
box supplies the you-are-there thrill of a complete live performance—and so many of them—by a
band whose music was believed to have been so scarcely preserved. (And, by the
way, the sound quality is superb.) "Time After Time" may not be
"My Funny Valentine," and The Complete Montreux isn't the Complete Plugged Nickel. But
this is legitimate jazz, exciting music, a fresh look at an unjustly dissed
chapter, a satisfying document from a hidden archive revealing that the great
Miles Davis did not fade out with a whimper.
Bird-Brained
Lou Reed and
Edgar Allan Poe don't mix.
By Mark Jenkins
Posted
Wednesday, March 5, 2003, at 9:42 AM PT
Lou Reed has survived art-, glitter-, and punk-rock; drugs, alcohol, and
electroshock; obscurity, invective, and a Top 20 hit. His greatest challenge,
though, may be conceptual theater.
Reed's latest album is The
Raven, which is based on POE-try, a piece he created with director Robert
Wilson for Hamburg, Germany's Thalia Theater. In recent years, the Thalia has
served as a frequent base for the American-born Wilson, who invented a style of
postmodern pageant with such non-narrative spectacles as Einstein on the Beach and the CIVIL warS, both with
music by Philip Glass. Although it substitutes video projections for actors, a
recent Wilson-Glass opus, 1998's
Monsters of Grace, is characteristic: It combines cryptic images
with the verse of Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi and Eastern-tinged music in the
vain hope that they might add up to something.
Beginning in the '90s, Wilson turned to less-abstract scenarios and song-oriented
scores, working with veteran rockers like Tom Waits and Reed. While big-name
composers (John Adams, Steve Reich, Louis Andriessen) and directors (Peter Greenaway,
Peter Sellars) emulated Wilson's style of thematic rather than storytelling
theater, the director joined with Waits to create The Black Rider, based on the legend of William
Tell, and with Reed for Time
Rocker, derived from H.G. Wells' The Time Machine.
That pairing of an earnest Edwardian and a hard-boiled contemporary decadent
seemed incongruous, but Reed apparently thinks that he and Poe are a good
match. Co-produced by Hal Willner, The Raven is a hodgepodge of songs and spoken-word
pieces, with such well-known Poe poems and stories as "Annabel Lee"
and "The Tell-Tale Heart" read by Willem Dafoe, Elizabeth Ashley,
Steve Buscemi, and others. It also serves as a sort of career summation for the
recently elegiac Reed, reworking some of his previous music and featuring guest
appearances by such old collaborators and inspirations as David Bowie (who
co-produced that Top 20 hit, "Walk on the Wild Side") and Ornette
Coleman. The album is available and in one- and two-CD versions; the former
skips most of the spoken-word material, although it keeps Dafoe's reading of
the title poem.
The single-disc set is, of course, easier to take. Listening to music is a
different, and more repeatable, experience than listening to readings. Yet the
abridged version misses the connections Reed has forged between Poe's art and
his own. The poems and stories provide the basis for the songs, including a
six-part suite based on a lesser-known tale, "Hop Frog or the Eight
Chained Ourang-Outangs." Reed also credits Poe with the album's
overarching theme: "the impulse of destructive desire—the desire for
self-mortification." This actually suggests Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground more
than "Murders in the Rue Morgue," but Poe does have a pulp-fiction
side that parallels Reed's own.
As a member of the Velvet Underground in the 1960s, Reed wrote many elegant
lyrics, including deadpan narratives like "I'm Waiting for the Man"
and sophisticated love songs such as "Pale Blue Eyes." His current
specialty, however, is a plainspoken, seemingly offhand idiom that favors
street-level rancor over literary grace. It worked pretty well for New York, a 1989 album of rants about subjects derived from
CNN and the New York Daily News.
But the style clashes with Poe's florid language and sometimes just seems lazy.
(Few people who have written about The Raven have resisted quoting this clunky introductory couplet: "This is
the story of Edgar Allan Poe/ Not exactly the boy next door.") Just
because Poe drank a lot and married his 13-year-old cousin doesn't make him one
of the hustlers and rogues that Reed is so fond of examining.
Reed is a published poet, the winner of a Literary Council for Small Magazines
Award presented to him by a reputedly bemused Eugene McCarthy. One of his
college instructors was Delmore Schwartz, and he's written two songs that
invoke him. But Reed's principal literary models are Hubert Selby Jr., William
S. Burroughs, Lenny Bruce, and New Yawk trash-talk. When he refashions some of
Poe's lines, it's to insert contemporary taunts that don't exactly harmonize
with the words of a 19th-century romantic. Reed's update of
"The Raven" includes this jarring transition: "Tell this
soul with sorrow laden/ Willful and destructive intent/ How had lapsed the
pure-heart lady to the greediest of needs/ Sweaty arrogant dickless liar!"
And his version of "The Cask of Amontillado" has its narrator
brooding, "By neither word nor deed had I given cause to doubt my good
will/ I would punish with impunity/ I will fuck him up the ass and piss in his
face."
Curiously, Reed is willing to rewrite Poe but not himself. He juxtaposes
"The Bed" (from his generally unloved 1973 song cycle Berlin) with "The Fall
of the House of Usher" but without altering his song's account of a
suicidal woman to link it to Poe's tale of Roderick Usher, a man obsessed with
the corpse of his dead sister. 1972's "Perfect Day" gets an odd remake featuring high-pitched singer Antony, and
Reed's notorious Metal Machine
Music, a 1975 album of nothing but roiling feedback, makes a brief
comeback as "Fire Music," the climax of the "Hop Frog or the
Eight Chained Ourang-Outangs" cycle.
After a particularly ostentatious album, Reed's pattern is to give interviews
in which he protests that he's just a rock 'n' roller. Thus it was no surprise
when he turned up in Rolling
Stone recently, proclaiming his eternal fealty to Fats Domino's
"The Fat Man," Roy Orbison's "Ooby Dooby," and Billy
Riley's "Red Hot." Despite its doo-wop backing vocals and punky
guitar, however, The Raven
is an art project. Reed, whose voice is heard on only about a third of the
double album's 36 tracks, is featured primarily not as a performer but as a
conceptual impresario—Robert Wilson in a leather jacket and shades.
Wilson is probably not the only influence. Reed is the longtime companion of
Laurie Anderson, a performance artist who does her own brand of
free-associative art theater. Like Wilson's and Anderson's work, The Raven jumbles the strange
and the banal, and new, classic, and recycled material. (In addition to
"Perfect Day" and "The Bed," the album includes
"Vanishing Act," originally written for Time Rocker.) The result is a grab bag of old
musical and conceptual riffs, closer to a Wilson extravaganza—without the visuals—than to a well-made
rock album.
"Sometimes I wonder/ Who am I," Reed sings toward the end of the
album. In taking Poe as his mirror, however, he doesn't seem to have discovered
anything new. What The Raven
reflects is just the same Lou Reed, older and not particularly wiser. This
raven quoth not, "nevermore," but "more of the same."
White Lies
Are the White
Stripes a blues band or just a sham?
By Mark Jenkins
Posted
Thursday, April 24, 2003, at 1:17 PM PT
The centerpiece of the White Stripes' new album, Elephant, is the seven-minute "Ball and
Biscuit," a grinding, gleefully suggestive blues. The Detroit duo
has covered Robert Johnson, Blind Willie McTell, and other blues venerables and
presents its own music as if it comes from a newly discovered cache of vintage
78s. Each of the 14 songs on Elephant
has a catalog number, like recordings indexed by the Smithsonian Institution or
the Library of Congress. The new album was recorded at a London eight-track
studio with no equipment built after 1963, and in recent interviews, frontman
Jack White has dismissed the idea of musical progress altogether.
On the basis of these and other ploys, the White Stripes have been classified
as a blues, roots, or back-to-basics act—the latest spin in a cycle that began
around 1968, when Bob Dylan unplugged for John Wesley Harding and Paul McCartney decided the
Beatles needed to "Get Back" to their live-band roots. The Stripes
have been hailed as the earthy, direct, low-tech antidote to computer-generated
teen pop and dance music. Yet the guitar-and-drums twosome has also been called
"primitivist, not primitive" (the New York Times) and a band that "could have one
heck of a career in marketing" (Entertainment Weekly). After all, this is a
back-to-basics act that named its second album De Stijl, after a 1920s Dutch art movement whose
minimalist palette apparently influenced the band's barber-pole attire
(principally white and red, with black touches).
Clearly, the White Stripes aren't a strict blues-revival act. But there's a
realm between certifiable authenticity and actionable fraud, and that's where
the Stripes have planted their red-and-white flag. The twosome's exuberant
shtick sometimes overshadows its music, but such myth-making is entirely in the
tradition of the bluesmen who gave themselves epic aliases like Howlin' Wolf or
Muddy Waters. The Stripes' blues-based strut is wholehearted showmanship, not
petty sham. And singer-songwriter Jack White's simple but versatile guitar
playing is anything but a con.
The band's design consciousness isn't exactly typical of roots outfits, and one
aspect of the band's self-generated legend is unprecedented: The former Jack
Gillis initially passed as the little brother of drummer Meg White, who's
actually his ex-wife. (He took her surname, which is not exactly a typical
alpha-male move.) But while the Stripes don't look like earnest American blues
archivists, they are reminiscent of the mid-'60s blues-rock bands that flowered
in British art schools. It's fitting that the Stripes first made a big noise in
the U.K., where the marriage of rock and artifice isn't regarded with such
suspicion as on this side of the Atlantic.
Like the Yardbirds and the Pretty Things, the White Stripes are calculating popsters
with a genuine regard for the blues. On Elephant, they cover not Leadbelly but Burt Bacharach
and Hal David's "I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself." The Yardbirds
also balanced pop and hard blues, and mutated into Led Zeppelin, who were
British and psychedelic and still managed to convincingly channel the bluesman's
bravado. Jack White is no more the natural man than Jimmy Page, but both know
how to play a larger-than-life role—and play it like they believe it.
The bluesman has always been a cocky, commanding, but not altogether credible
figure. (Even Britain's New
Musical Express, the originator of Stripesmania, has dubbed Jack
"a difficult man to trust.") The blues may be steeped in
suffering—notably the poverty and racial oppression of the Depression-era South—but
the style's distinguishing attribute is swagger. This confidence is so potent
that it has sometimes been identified as supernatural. It was said that Robert
Johnson sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his suddenly acquired
mastery of the guitar.
Jack White plays the guitar well too, but he hasn't sold his soul to anyone. In
an age when the charts are topped by heavily marketed corporate products, his
White Stripes haven't even signed to a major label (although their current indie
outlet, V2, is owned by billionaire balloonist Richard Branson). The Stripes
have built a major-league presence from sass, skill, and an insistence on
self-determination. Jack produces all the band's recordings, and doesn't use
session musicians or anything but the most basic studio tricks to the augment
the band's two-person sound.
The mythic bluesman doesn't need anyone, just the guitar in his arms and the
hellhounds on his trail. (The ex-wife on drums is a new one.) And the
independence-minded indie-rocker keeps things simple as a way of maintaining
control. White stays true to both traditions, but it's not quite true that he
doesn't believe in progress. Elephant
is the band's most sonically diverse album: "Seven Nation Army" opens
with a bass line, and "There's No Home for You Here" features an angelic choir. Yet these additions are
all Jack White. The bass is really his guitar, treated with an octave pedal,
and the choir is a gang of multitracked Jacks. The only outsider heard on the
album—aside from a sample of Detroit-area radio commentator Mort Crim—is
British vocalist Holly Golightly. She joins Jack and Meg in singing "Well
It's True That We Love Each Other," a three-way tune that plays on the
Stripes' sibling fiction by having Golightly proclaim that she loves Jack
"like a little brother."
That Donny-and-Marie-and-Marie moment aside, most of the dialogue on Elephant is between Jack's
voice and his guitar. This call-and-response structure is traditional in
African-derived music, including the blues, but the Stripes' style also recalls
the simple fills of rockabilly and old-time country and the curt, urgent
squalls of punk. Juxtaposing guitar against his (and occasionally Meg's) voice,
he's Harrison to his own Lennon, Marr to his own Morrissey (as in
the Smiths, whose biggest American success, "How Soon Is Now," was a
blues). While White's playing is economical, his range is impressive, from the distorted Brit-blues of "Ball and
Biscuit" and the heavy-metal rockabilly of "Black
Math" to the peals of buzzing noise that punctuate "There's No Home
for You Here." Yet the guitarist never emulates those overreaching '70s
blues-rock virtuosos who came to think they were playing jazz.
Jack White is so self-assured that he—unlike most bluesmen, save Robert
Johnson—can spend much of his time detailing his romantic inadequacies.
"Hypnotize" borrows the melody of "Secret Agent
Man" to confess his inability to mesmerize a woman; "I Want To Be the
Boy To Warm Your Mother's Heart" despairs of winning mom's trust, lamenting
that "it feels like everything I say is a lie."
Jack's skeptics would probably agree. But the White Stripes know that a big
enough lie is indistinguishable from legend, and that a large enough boast is a
form of poetry. With just drums, voice, and stinging guitar, the band is
composing an elephant-sized saga.
Steely Dan Is Getting Old
And that's a
good thing.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted
Wednesday, June 18, 2003, at 9:31 AM PT
It's been 30 years since Steely Dan came out with the first of nine albums that
infused pop music with new layers of knotty harmonies, insouciant irony, and a
cryptic poetry that Dylan might have conjured had he pored over Burroughs
instead of Guthrie. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, the former school chums
from Bard who created Steely Dan (a name taken from the steam-powered dildos in
Burroughs' Naked Lunch),
are now 55 and 53, respectively; their output of late has been less than
prodigious (three records in the past two decades); their basic sound is as
distinctively slick—detractors would say soullessly repetitive—as that of any
act in rock history.
So, why, at least for their fans of long standing, do they still delight,
compel, sometimes—as on the best tracks of Everything Must Go, their new CD—even startle? It's not just the retro
doo-wop backup singers, the Blue Note horn charts, the slam-dunk backbeat, or
the skylark guitar riffs, though these things do help break down resistances.
Above all, it's the Fagen-Becker songs: literary sparklers with oddball
narratives, usually about loss, illusion, or unfulfilled dreams, sung by a
narrator who's either blithely clueless or self-loathingly aware of his slim
prospects.
Then there's the narrator, played by Fagen, who sings nearly all the Steely Dan
songs. Can Fagen properly be called a singer? He strikes attitudes more than
notes; his vocal cords strain when they exceed their half-octave range. Yet
without his harsh knife-edge cri
de coeur, the polished instrumental arrangements can slack
perilously close to smooth-jazz fusion. This is why letting Becker sing "Slang of Ages" was a bad move; the tune
comes off as a middling blues. When Fagen's at the mike, a tension brews
between the voice and the musical mix. (For a more elaborate theory of Fagen's
role, click here.) He's a troubadour for our times, just as
Dylan, that other great nasal whiner, was for his: Dylan's persona, the
rebel-protester who storms off Maggie's farm; Fagen's, the world-weary Sybarite
who sees "the blood orange sky" above the freeway but feels too beat
for rage, and so takes refuge in "the long sad Sunday of the early
resigned" (to quote from two of the new songs, "The Last Mall"
and "Blues Beach").
Everything Must Go
sports some of Steely Dan's catchiest hooks and grimmest lyrics. The disc's
first song is about the closing of a mall, the final song about the end of a
corporation. But the grand theme of the whole album is the merciless meltdown
of all sure bets. Truly everything
must go, including the ultimate man upstairs. "Godwhacker," the album's destined
classic, might have inspired mass disc-burnings had Fagen sung the words more
clearly. ("In the beginning/ We could hang with the dude/ But it's been
too much of nothing/ Of that stank attitude/ Now they curse your name/ And
there's a bounty on your face/ It's your own fault daddy/ Godwhacker's on the
case.") Some early reviewers have interpreted the song as a portrait of
terrorists or an attack on Bush. Nonsense. It's a pitch for Götterdämmerung, the cool
ravings of a modern Job turned nihilist, Nietzsche crossed with Shaft.
So, we've come full circle from The
Nightfly, Fagen's 1982 solo masterpiece, which wistfully evoked the
bright-eyed early '60s, the New Frontier of Cold War vigor and limitless
possibilities: when Fagen was a restless teen in the Jersey suburbs, dreaming
of the day that he and his girl, Maxine, could "move up to Manhattan/ and
fill the place with friends/ drive to the coast and drive right back again";
and when the future was imagined as a "streamlined world" run by
"a just machine that makes big decisions/ programmed by fellas with
compassion and vision."
Now the millennium has arrived, and not even the bomb shelter Dad built can
provide protection from the fallout. On "Blues Beach,"
the narrator talks to "my hypothetical friend." Real life and sexual
desire have merged with computer games, programmed by very different sorts of fellas,
as in "Green Book" ("The torso rocks and the
eyes are keepers/ Now where'd we sample those legs?/ I'm thinking Marilyn 4.0
in the Green Book"). The long-unnerving Steely Dan fetish for vapid
underage girls ("Hey, Nineteen" on Gaucho, "Janie Runaway" and "Cousin
Dupree" on Two Against
Nature) is supplanted by swoons for "Pixeleen," the teeny-bop heroine of an
anime spy-thriller ("Pixeleen/ Rave on, my sleek and soulful cyberqueen").
That name, Pixeleen—could it be a VR recombinant of The Nightfly's Maxine ("pixel" +
"ine")? There's an intriguing reverie in the middle verse, lasting
just a couple of lines, where the melody segues into a Leiber and Stoller-style
lilt, similar to that long-ago song "Maxine," and Fagen reminisces,
"Flashback to cool summer nights … in the room above your
garage"—before the pixel-pixie lures him back to Matrix-land. It's the one
moment of unmasked elegy on Everything
Must Go, when the flippant irony dissolves and lays bare the
heartbreak of what's been lost.
Fagen said in a recent New York
Times interview that he regards all Steely Dan albums
as "comedy records to some degree," and of course he's right. Fagen
and Becker are not Lou Reed; they have no urge to wallow in the miasma. Take
the album's finale, the title song, which, after a long, wistful,
party's-over tenor-sax solo, begins: "It's high time for a walk on the
real side/ Let's admit the bastards beat us/ I move to dissolve the
corporation/ in a pool of margaritas/ So let's switch off all the lights/ and
light up the Luckies/ crankin' up the afterglow …"
This isn't mere whistling-in-the-dark denial. The Dan know, and well capture,
the subversive sexual thrill of letting it all go up in flames. But there is
also a deep, sweet sorrow in the final lines:
Talk about the famous road not taken
In the end we never took it
And if somewhere on the way
We got a few good licks in
No one's ever gonna know
'Cause we're goin' out of business
Everything must go.
And you can dance to it.
sidebar
Here's another way to read this contrast between Fagen's vocals and the music:
A Steely Dan album is a trip through the warped mind of our unreliable narrator
(as played by Fagen), and the ultra-polished instrumentals reflect the
idealized soundtrack that he hears in his head as the stories and fantasies unspool.
(Don't we all, at certain times, to some degree, amble through life with a
soundtrack playing in our heads, lending rhythmic drama to the random humdrum?)
As evidence for this interpretation, I direct you to The Nightfly, Fagen's 1982
solo album, not just one of the great pop albums but one of the great pop album
covers (which you can see here). The front cover
shows Fagen as a disc jockey at 4:09
a.m., chain-smoking Chesterfields,
a Sonny Rollins LP on the turntable. The back cover shows a suburban house, one
of a row of identical houses, except in this one, a light glistens through an
upstairs window. The sky shows the hint of dawn. By inference, it's 4:09 a.m., and the
kid upstairs—the only person awake in the neighborhood—is listening to the disc
jockey. Fagen's liner notes suggest that The Nightfly is autobiographical. It's about the
adolescent Fagen listening in the wee hours to cool jazz on the radio—while
also imagining that he's the DJ, "Lester the Nightfly" of
"WJAZ," as the album's title song calls him, spinning "sweet
music/ … till the sun comes through the skylight." Or maybe it's about
Lester, spinning records while reminiscing about the all-night listening
sessions of his youth. Either way, the covers (both in gleaming
black-and-white) present an image of music as the perpetual soundtrack and the
creative fount of an imaginative life.
I would also cite the technical credits (clearly written by Fagen, Becker, or
both) on Steely Dan's 1975 album, Katy Lied: "Steely Dan uses a specially
constructed 24-channel tape recorder, a 'State-of-the-Art' 36-input
computerized-mixdown console … some very expensive German microphones … a
Neumann VMS 70 computerized lathe equipped with a variable pitch, variable
depth helium cooled head." There's a deliberate stratagem to these gushings.
They convey the clear impression (even to a reader who doesn't know what
they're talking about) that the boys of Steely Dan get to play with
dream-fantasy gear in a dream-fantasy studio: the hi-fi geek's equivalent of
driving an Audi TT, lounging in a comfy Eames chair, or dating a girl like
Tuesday Weld—to name a few dream-fantasies mentioned by the narrator in some
Steely Dan songs. It all reinforces the sense, if only subconsciously, that
this record you're listening to is
a dream-fantasy, the inner soundtrack to an ordinary guy's secret story, for
else how could a voice like Donald Fagen's—in other words, like yours or
mine—get backup from a band that sounds so damned impeccable?
The
Beethoven Mystery
Why haven't we figured out his Ninth Symphony yet?
By Jan Swafford
Posted
Wednesday, June 30, 2003, at 9:31 AM PT
This summer, as every summer, the end of the Boston Symphony's Tanglewood
season will be marked by another round of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. The world
over, the Ninth has become an indispensable adornment for socio/musical
hooplas. Chances are, it will be played soon by an orchestra near you. If you
know Western classical music, you know this one. Probably half of humanity can
hum the little ditty that serves as the theme of the choral finale—a setting of
Schiller's revolutionary-era drinking song, "Ode to Joy."
Which is all to say, the Ninth has attained the kind of ubiquity that threatens
to gut any artwork. Think Mona
Lisa. Still, as with Lisa,
when that kind of success persists through the centuries, there are reasons.
One reason is its mystery. Figuratively speaking, everybody knows the Ninth.
But has anybody really understood it? The harder you look, the odder it gets.
In a singular way, the Ninth enfolds the apparently contradictory qualities of
the epic and the slippery.
First movement: loud, big, heroic, no? No. Big and loud all right, also wildly
unstable, searching, inconclusive—everything heroes aren't. The formal outline,
on the surface a conventional sonata form, is turned inside-out: The development section in the middle, usually a
point of maximum tension and drama, is the relatively most placid part of the
movement; the recap, the return of the opening theme and usually elaborately
prepared, erupts out of calm like a scream, with a
major chord that somehow sounds hair-raising. (Major keys and harmonies being
traditionally nice, hopeful, that sort of thing, minor ones darker, sadder,
etc.) At the end there's a funeral march over a slithering bass.
Beethoven wrote funeral marches earlier, one the second movement of the "Eroica"
Symphony. There we can imagine who died: the hero, or soldiers in battle. But
who died in the first movement of the Ninth?
Next comes the scherzo, Beethoven's trademark skittering, ebullient movement.
Here it's those things ratcheted up to a Dionysian whirlwind, manically
contrapuntal, punctuated with timpani crashes. Strange
choice, to follow a funeral march. Even stranger: For all the apparent
over-the-top gaiety, the movement is in D minor. Gaiety generally means major
keys, but not here.
Given its surroundings, the third movement is peculiar mainly in its cloudless
tranquility. It's one of those singing, time-stopping adagios that mark Beethoven's
last period. Two themes alternate, and nothing much happens but the themes
acquiring delicate filigree and little dance turns in a dreamlike atmosphere of
uncanny beauty.
The famous finale is weirdest of all. Scholars have never quite agreed on its
formal model, though it clearly involves a series of variations on the
"Joy" theme. But why does this celebration of joy open with a dissonant shriek that Richard Wagner
dubbed the "terror fanfare"? Then the basses start playing stuff that
is unmistakably a recitative, the familiar prose patter between arias in opera
and oratorio. Here, a recitative with no words. And for the supreme oddity: One
at a time, themes from the earlier movements are introduced only to be rebuffed
by the basses—opening of the first movement, nope, too grim; second movement,
too light; third movement … nice, the basses sigh nostalgically, but no, too
sweet.
This, then: The Joy theme is unveiled by the basses
unaccompanied, sounding for all the world like somebody (say, the composer)
quietly humming to himself. (In fact, Beethoven sketched the Joy theme early on
and aimed the whole symphony to be a revelation of it.) The theme begins to
vary, picking up lovely flowing accompaniments. Then, out of nowhere, back to the terror fanfare. And now up steps
a real singer, singing a real recitative: "Oh friends, not these tones!
Rather let's strike up something more agreeable and joyful."
Soon the chorus is crying, "Joy! Joy!" and the piece is off, praising
joy as the universal solvent, under whose influence love will flourish,
humanity unite. Schiller's ode is a stylized drinking song, meant literally or
figuratively to be declaimed by comrades with glasses raised. And what a tipsy
course Beethoven's setting follows: At one point a mystical evocation of the
godhead is followed by a grunting military march in a style the
Viennese called "Turkish," which resolves into a learned and majestic
fugue.
Nobody has figured out what Beethoven meant by all this. The result has been
that every age and ideology has simply claimed the music for its own.
Communists, Catholics, lefties, and reactionaries have joined in the chorus. A 1999 book by Esteban Buch, recently available in
English, traces the course of the Ninth through history. It's been attached to
European disunity in the form of nationalism, it got sucked into the Nazi cult
of blood and race, and finally it became, with the Joy theme's adoption as the
anthem of the European Union, a symbol of togetherness. Others have seen the
Ninth as a universal human anthem. Leonard Bernstein conducted it at the
international celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and what else would
do the job?
For the composer's part, it's a good bet that Beethoven didn't intend for the
Ninth to be precisely figured out. As with the Mona Lisa, maybe its very ambiguity is part of
its success. Paint it any color you like, and it remains its exalted and
inexplicable self. If you want universality in a work of art, here you are. One
could argue that the best way of keeping the Ninth alive and fresh is not to
pin it down but to embrace its mystery.
What can be said about the Ninth with reasonable certainty? One is that its
position in the world is probably about what Beethoven wanted it to be. In an
unprecedented way for a composer, he deliberately stepped into history with a
great ceremonial work that doesn't just preach freedom and the unity of peoples
but attempts however strangely to foster them. Another thing to note is that
most late Beethoven pieces take surprising courses. His earlier works tend to
have a tone (which sometimes he names for us, as in the "Pathetique"
and "Eroica") that propels a dramatic unfolding: We hear what happens
to the pathos and the heroism. In his late works Beethoven turned away from
such clear dramatic curves to more elusive and evocative trains of ideas whose
effect he and his time called poetic.
And in keeping with the turn from drama to poetry, he left the heroics behind.
I'll add one more surmise. Famously, the Ninth first emerges from a whispering
mist to towering, fateful proclamations. The finale's Joy theme is almost
constructed before our ears, hummed through, then composed and recomposed and
decomposed. The Ninth is music about music, about its own emerging, about its
composer composing. And for what? "This kiss for all the world!" runs
the telling line in the finale, in which Beethoven erected a movement of epic
scope on a humble little tune that anybody can sing.
The Ninth, forming and dissolving before our ears in its beauty and terror and
simplicity and complexity, ending with a cry of jubilation, is itself his kiss
for all the world, from east to west, high to low, naive to sophisticated. When
the bass speaks the first words in the finale, an invitation to sing for joy,
the words come from Beethoven, not Schiller. It's the composer talking to
everybody, to history. That's what's so moving about those words. There
Beethoven greets us person to person, with glass raised, and hails us as
friends.
Speed Freaks Do Bach
Please, stop
turning sublime classical works into dance music.
By Jan Swafford
Posted
Friday, September 5, 2003, at 10:37 AM PT
I'm pleased to possess, in a dusty sleeve from the cheapo-but-interesting days
of Vox records, what appears to be the world's first recording of a major
Baroque work on original instruments. It's Handel's "Royal Fireworks
Music," recorded in 1961 with masses of keyless oboes and bassoons,
serpent horns, valveless trumpets, hunting horns. I put it on for musician
friends and watch them slide off the sofa laughing. It's a howling mob of splattering horns and blatting oboes,
everything gloriously out of tune. Oh, the pleasures of the really, really bad.
Nearly as great is the scholarly lecture on the flip side, in which we are
informed that, believe it or not, this is exactly how Handel sounded in his
time. Since brass instruments could not be played in tune, they simply carried
on out of tune while everybody else was in.
Of course, our lecturer got it wrong. The game but incompetent pioneers on that
recording simply didn't know how to play their horns. Listen to any decent
original-instrument group of the last 30-odd years and you'll hear lucid,
in-tune, elegant playing—as in this version of the Royal Fireworks by Trevor Pinnock
and the English Concert. And the original-instrument folks have been creeping
forward in history. We've seen more releases of Mozart, Beethoven, and beyond
with original instruments.
In the process we hear scholarship go right and we hear it go wrong. Sometimes,
we hear it go nuts. After all, research can take us only so far. We can't
really know what music sounded like before recordings arrived, and the
historical data is vague and contradictory. The older the music, the more
uncertainty. As the early-music movement matured from its first burgeoning in
the '70s, the exponents 'fessed up: Their original claims of "authentic
performance" gave way to the more modest "historically informed
performance" (aka HIP). Musicians make guesses informed by the evidence,
further informed by their sense of musicality. It's musicality that makes the thing work or not. Our
Handel performers guessed wrong, and they lacked the chops to do even the wrong
thing right.
The first really good original-instrument orchestra I heard was the Academy of Ancient Music,
in the late '70s. The recording was Mozart's "G Minor Symphony," and
my jaw dropped in the first bars. The familiar opening theme sounded nervous
and muscular rather than logy and saxophonish, as it does with big modern
orchestras. Wow! I
thought as the piece went on, You
can actually hear every note in the score. It was as if that
long-familiar piece had been restored and renewed. I was instantly an
enthusiast.
After conceding much of the Bach-and-backward repertoire to original
instruments, mainstream orchestras began to get hip to HIP. In the '80s at
symphony performances in Boston and elsewhere, you started to see much of the string
section disappear for Mozart and Beethoven. As Glenn Gould played Bach aspiring
to make his piano sound like a harpsichord, modern orchestras began to aim for
a leaner and cleaner sound in the Classical-period repertoire.
Ah, the '70s and early '80s. That was the good time, when performers often
beautifully balanced the scholarly and the expressive. This is the period of
some treasured HIP recordings, like Nicholas Harnoncourt's Monteverdi
"Vespers." Then, in the '90s, in the midst of its triumph, for a lot
of us early music and its influences went sour. Lean and clean turned mean.
Sometimes textures got so slimmed down they became anorexic, as with the
conductors who started doing big Bach choral works with one singer on each
part. The more obvious extremes, though, have to do with tempo. Clock the last
40 years and you'll find the beat getting relentlessly faster. The scholarly
rationalizations are more sophisticated now, but somehow what they invariably
add up to is: You can't be skinny enough or fast enough.
There's a speed sweepstakes going on. Six years ago in Boston I
heard a Bach "B Minor Mass" from which slow tempos had been
essentially banished. No more grandeur, no more sublimity, no more sweetness,
no more tragedy—all qualities in which the "B Minor" is incomparably
rich. Or used to be. In this performance the speeds were brisk, brisker, breakneck.
In the "Crucifixus" movement, Christ trotted all the way to Golgotha,
pumping his cross.
I thought that was the last freaking straw, everything fast as possible, until
two years ago I heard a conductor take movements of the "B Minor" faster than possible, chorus
and orchestra scrambling desperately to catch up. In the crowd after the
performance I heard one guy exclaim, "I didn't know Bach was so bouncy!";
another, an organist no less, wondered, "I don't get it. What's the big
deal about that piece?" The most trenchant comment was from an older
composer, who sighed as I passed, "Too bad. It really is the greatest
music in the world."
There's incompetent bad, which as in my old Handel recording can be highly
entertaining. And there's sophisticated bad, which is just depressing. There's
no way to say to what degree those Bach tempos were "authentic." The
main basis for those tempos is fashion, not hard evidence. What can be confidently said is
that a two-hour religious work of often tragic import containing little or no
slow music is inexpressive, unmusical, and silly.
We're seeing the Vivaldi-ization of Bach: gloom banished, minimal variety,
implacably crisp, bouncy.
And the slim 'n' speedy virus has infected good conductors. When the
well-reviewed 1989 John Eliot Gardiner recording of Bach's "St. Matthew
Passion" appeared, as a Gardiner fan I ran to get it. This time the great
chorus of lamentation that begins the "Passion" was indeed an
occasion of mourning: I'd blown 20 bucks. Gardiner takes the chorus of
lamentation at near-gigue tempo. Jesus
is crucified, his performance cries. Let's dance!
To see what I mean with the piece's mournful opening movement, compare the early '70s recording by the distinguished Bachian
Helmuth Rilling with Gardiner's. Gardiner's is nearly 20 percent
faster—and Rilling's was faster than Herbert von Karajan's and Otto Klemperer's
recordings of a few years earlier.
What it amounts to is that the influence of the early-music movement is turning
everything into dance music. And the virus is spreading in the repertoire.
Compare the tempos of Beethoven symphonies in the classic '60s Karajan set with
a recent "authentic" set by David Zinman: Nearly every movement of
every symphony is several notches faster in the newer one. In addition, the
musical phrasings, the commas and colons and semicolons, are glossed over in
favor of momentum.
Let's compare beginnings of Beethoven's "Sixth Symphony," the
"Pastoral," whose first movement is titled "Awakening of happy
feelings on arriving in the country." Here's Karajan and the Berlin
Philharmonic in the 1960s. Now here's the beginning from a late-'80s original-instrument set by
Christopher Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient
Music. I admire that band, that
conductor, and much of this set, but I don't know what planet Hogwood's
"Pastoral" is on. Our traveler is jogging too fast for happy
feelings—he's anaerobic. Hogwood's tempo is nearly three metronome clicks
faster than Karajan's, whose tempo is on the brisk side for his time. But
Karajan wouldn't even rate on today's dog track.
There's something more troubling going on here, beyond tempos in classical
music. I think people don't want any music to be serious anymore. It's all rock
'n' roll now. Many people know mainly dance music, and that's all they want to
know—even in classical pieces. There's an increasing disconnect between music
and meaning. I saw that in the big New
York rock concert in memorial of 9/11.
In a way I understand it: When tragedies happen, creative people respond by
doing what they do. But in a larger sense that concert disturbed me. What it
said was, Three thousand people
have died. Therefore, let us shake our booties.
The old saw comes to mind that for everything there is a season. There's a time
to shake that thing and a time to refrain from shaking it. Maybe one of the
times to refrain is right after a catastrophe. Rocking in response to disaster
mixes up the purposes of mourning and getting down, which belong to different seasons.
Some kinds of music are there for serious moments, others to party with, and to
erase the difference is to erase the purpose and integrity of any music.
The moral here is that in the absence of solid evidence, and sometimes in the
presence of it, scholars are apt to believe what they want to believe, as
whispered to them by fashion. The lecturer on my old Handel recording probably
believed in progress, so it suited him that old instruments sounded lousy. When
Wanda Landowska started playing harpsichord many years ago, some believers in
progress were outraged that she'd resurrected an "obsolete,"
"inferior" instrument. These days, literally and figuratively,
scholars like to dance; fast and lean is the answer to everything. Perhaps some
performers are just bored with the repertoire, so they inject it with speed.
Maybe those performers should give the music a rest, because a lot of listeners
aren't bored with the music. We'd like strong, engaged, passionate performances
rather than the Bach and Beethoven Lite we're getting.
I hope someday our greyhoundish conductors will stop and smell the flowers:
rediscover that tempo has something to do with meaning and expression and that
a scrawny sound isn't always the right sound. I hope they'll let music be
tragic and intense and sumptuous again, when it needs to be. For myself, I'm
swearing off live performances of Bach for a while, until conductors have worn
themselves out chasing that rabbit.
Johnny Cash on Demand
Get ready for
tribute songs to the Man in Black. Lots of them.
By Ben Yagoda
Posted
Wednesday, September 17, 2003, at 10:18 AM PT
Because Johnny Cash was a remarkable popular artist who inspired many listeners
with his voice, his compositions, and his character, his death last week will
inspire tributes. Because he was a country music icon, his death will inspire
tribute songs.
To be sure, country has no monopoly on this sometimes moving, sometimes
schmaltzy, sometimes crass genre. Ronnie McDowell recorded "The King Is
Gone" the day after Elvis Presley's death, and it's been followed by 202
more Elvis tributes, according to New York DJ Peter Bochan, who lists them on
his Web site. (He unaccountably leaves out George
Jones' "The King Is Gone [and So Are You].") If there's a "Rock
and Roll Heaven," the Righteous Brothers memorably noted, "you know
they've got a hell of a band." George Harrison sang about John Lennon in
"All Those Years Ago," and Ringo Starr in turn recorded "Never Without
You" about George. The Commodores' "Night Shift" honors the
estimable lineup of fallen soul singers, and Tupac Shakur has been mourned in
Master P's "Is There a Heaven 4 a Gangsta?," Richie Rich's "Do
G's Go to Heaven?," and Naughty By Nature's "Mourn Till I Join Ya,"
which observes, "Nigga I miss ya this thug gonna miss ya till I'm witcha."
But the tribute song plays a crucial role in country, which is the most
self-conscious genre of American pop music. In second place is the style with
which you'd think it would have zero in common: hip-hop. Both forms are far
more than the sum of their lyrical and instrumental conventions; they are, in
fact, a big part of performers' and listeners' self-definition. Explicitly
autobiographical references, references to other performers or other songs, and
statements about the genre itself are badges of authenticity.
Country—feeling itself to be under attack from crossover artists, New York
lawyers, and developers who want to pave over Grandpa's back 40—can seem almost
obsessive in defining what it is and what it is not, as in "I Was Country
When Country Wasn't Cool," "When You're Looking at Me, You're Looking
at Country," "Country Till I Die," "Kindly Keep It
Country," "If That Ain't Country," " Now That's Country,"
"If There Was No Country Music," "Don't Think You're Too Good
For Country Music," etc. The biggest theme in recent years is, in the
words of a Travis Tritt song, "Country Ain't Country"—that is, that
the purity of the music has been corrupted and the survivors of a more
authentic Golden Age, such as Johnny Cash, have been banished from the airwaves
in favor of the likes of Shania Twain. The Dixie Chicks' recent hit "Long
Time Gone" complains of the current Nashville sound, "the music ain't
got no soul./ Now they sound tired but they don't sound Haggard,/ They've got
money but they don't have Cash."
Country singers are always defining, narrating, defending, or mythologizing
their own lives; again, the only competition is hip-hop. A 1950s Kitty Wells hit
was "The Life They Live in Songs," and in both country and hip-hop,
performers generously present themselves to fans in personas that are bigger
than life, but still truthfully reflect their inner and outer selves. Johnny
Cash explained his wardrobe (and gave himself an indelible nickname) in the
1971 song "The Man in Black": among other reasons, "I wear it
for the thousands who have died,/ Believin' that the Lord was on their
side." The cheerier "Luther Played the Boogie" tells the story
of his first days as a touring musician, with Luther Perkins on guitar:
"Well, we did our best to entertain everywhere we'd go./ We'd nearly wear
our fingers off to give the folks a show." "Songs That Make a
Difference," recorded with the Highwaymen, remembers jam sessions,
"back in 1969," with "Shel [Silverstein] and Kris
[Kristofferson] and Dylan, and a couple off the street."
Waylon Jennings, who wrote "Don't You Think This Outlaw Bit's Done Got Out
of Hand?," went in for this kind of thing a lot, as does Willie Nelson.
Every couple of years George Jones puts out a song that has some fun with his
own image, including "I Don't Need Your Rocking Chair" and
"(They Call Me) No-Show Jones." In the late '70s and early '80s, Hank
Williams Jr. issued a brilliant series of songs—including "Family
Tradition," "Living Proof," and "Whisky Bent and Hellbound"—about
his burden of "Standing in the Shadows" (as the title of another song
put it) of his father, the tragic hero of country music.
The tradition of the country tribute song started in 1933, with the death of
the Singing Brakeman, Jimmie Rodgers, at the youthful age of 35. Just days
later, "When Jimmie Rodgers Said Goodbye" was issued, followed by
"The Train Carrying Jimmie Rodgers Home," "The Life of Jimmie
Rodgers," "The Passing of Jimmie Rodgers," and many others.
But this was a mere trickle compared to the outpouring of songs that followed
the death, 20 years later, of Hank Williams, who went to his reward six years
younger than Rodgers, had a more troubled life, and was (arguably) even more of
a genius. According to critic Christopher Metress, 16 songs honoring Williams
were released in 1953 alone, and there has been no sign of a letup. On this Web site, a German
devotee of American country music named Hauke Streubing lists 96 Williams
tribute songs, including "Hank Williams Sings the Blues No More,"
Jennings' "Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way?," "Please Don't
Let the Name 'Hank' Die," and Cash's "The Night Hank Williams Came to
Town." He somehow missed Leonard Cohen's "Tower of Song," in
which the singer reports, "I said to Hank Williams, 'How lonely does it
get?'/ Hank Williams hasn't answered yet," and the Boys from Indiana's
"(Those Modern Songs Are Dandy, but) Play Hank's Songs Once Again."
In contrast to rappers, who cite their (living) peers mainly to diss them,
country songwriters love tribute songs so much that they even write them to
singers who are still alive, as in David Allan Coe's "Willie, Waylon and
Me" and "Hank Williams Jr.," Toby Keith's "I'll Never Smoke
Weed with Willie Again," Tim McGraw's "Give It to Me Strait,"
and Daryle Singletary's "That's Why I Sing This Way" (the reason, he
explains, is "Mama used to whip me with a George Jones album"). Cash
himself was the subject of "(In the Mood for) Johnny Cash,"
"Hooked on Johnny Cash," "Walking Talking Johnny Cash
Blues," "That's Why the Man in Black Sings the Blues,"
and his daughter Roseanne's lovely "My Old Man." He was also the
namesake of the alt-country band the Bastard Sons of Johnny Cash.
Now the Man in Black is gone. He was a prodigious artist and a man of
integrity, generosity, complexity, faith, doubt, pain, and joy. Gentlemen and
ladies, uncap your pens.
Oh,
Brother
The bluegrass purists don't understand country music. Here's what they're
missing.
By William Hogeland
Posted
Wednesday, July 3, 2002, at 12:28 PM PT
There's a strange problem plaguing country music these days, and it's not the
perpetual lameness of country radio. The country purists—those twang nostalgists
who are fueling the O, Brother phenomenon and packing hipster bars for
bluegrass jams—are contributing to an irony that poses some troubling questions
about the music's health. Claiming some kind of transcendent authenticity for
bluegrass, or finding it bitterly telling that the Jayhawks, say, never get
mainstream airplay, actually violates the spirit in which seminal country music
was made. In this oversophisticated climate, it's easy to forget that slick
pop—even the kind that has Nashville acts like Tim McGraw and the Dixie Chicks
selling out stadiums—once helped make country music great.
For more than 10 years, the singer-songwriter Jim Lauderdale has been walking
the line between country pop and country grit in some provocative ways.
Lauderdale is an alt-country pioneer who has worked with Lucinda Williams, but
his songs have been covered by mainstream country stars like George Strait,
Vince Gill, and those Chicks. Having spent his childhood in North Carolina,
when Motown, funk, and psychedelia were on the pop charts (he's in his
mid-40s), he began exploring country and bluegrass in his early teens; he worked
in New York, Los Angeles, and Austin, Texas, before starting to release albums
in the early '90s. He has a real and generous commitment to vintage forms of
country. Last year he renovated early '60s "hard country" in the
witty, moving The Other Sessions. He's appeared on an album by Charlie Louvin
(of the brilliant '50s-'60s duet the Louvin Brothers) and on a collection of
trucker songs, for which he was paired with the '60s-'70s country crooner Del Reeves.
Most notably, perhaps, Lauderdale has collaborated on two ramrod-straight
bluegrass albums (full of his superb original songs) with that ubiquitous icon
of authenticity Ralph Stanley. Lost in the Lonesome Pines, their second
album, was released in May, simultaneously with his 10th solo work, The
Hummingbirds.
Given Lauderdale's attachment to older and grittier styles, it may seem strange
that his solo albums buck the preconceptions of those connoisseurs who buy
music that's supposed to be too good for country radio. The Hummingbirds
offers some very pleasant listening that will disappoint anyone looking for
mountain plangency, beery twang, or moody collage. There's nothing vintage or
edgy about this carefully balanced postmodern confection, which piles up drums,
pedal steel, "new-acoustic" strumming and picking, skirling fiddles,
fat electric guitars, backup vocals, even keyboards. The production values,
devised by Lauderdale and Tim Coats, would pose no problems for country radio
if Nashville still understood slickness the way Chet Atkins did
in producing Don Gibson, or Billy Sherrill in producing Tammy Wynette. The
Hummingbirds makes the most tasteful possible use of all the latest
developments, and it wants nothing if not to be extremely pretty. It's another
of Lauderdale's mildly advanced forays into country-pop.
The pervasive mood of Hummingbirds
is one of having come through rough emotional seas with optimism intact; it's a
Lauderdale trademark. Amid wavering guitar tones on "I'm Happiest When I'm
Moving" (the only breakup song on Hummingbirds), which build to an intense shimmer, sorrow mixes with self-assurance; poignancy
is kept at bay, perhaps deliberately. "Midnight Will Become Day,"
a waltzing country-rock anthem to gratitude, slips around images of solar
eclipse, gardens, stars. There's a gliding, cheek-to-cheek two-step, "I
Know Better Now," about coming to terms with self-deception; the goofball hot-country line dance "There and Back
Again" tells of a relationship's unexpected survival. The Rheinhardt-Grapelli
jazz in "It's a Trap" may recall Sinatra's renditions of "The
Tender Trap"—but what trap is Lauderdale warning us against?
Just being self-indulgently neurotic, it seems.
That a genuinely contemplative mood bars many of these songs from ever becoming
radio fare is perhaps less interesting than Lauderdale's overall project, on Hummingbirds and his earlier
solo albums: He's giving new intelligence to the happy-go-lucky messages and
undemanding sounds that have defined decades of carefully wrought country
fluff. Maybe Hummingbirds,
better than what's on the radio, represents the kind of more-or-less disposable
country music that we need in a strange new century.
It isn't a damning suggestion. Lauderdale seems to be among the few roots
artists who understand early hillbilly as an idiosyncratic form of slick pop. Go back to the O, Brother era, whose music
has been so widely praised for being "honest," "true,"
"back to basics." The Carter Family may sound eternal and primitive
now, but much of their repertoire came from 19th-century pop; much
of the rest came from blues and ragtime, relatively new and often quite urbane
forms in the 1920s. The Carters' singing and playing aren't really so stark.
Listening to field recordings of nonprofessional rural musicians can make the
Carters sound rich, warm, delicately textured—like the high-tech recording
artists they actually were.
Nobody was supposed to bow down and worship the Carters' "Wildwood
Flower" as something deeply and permanently authentic. You were supposed
to just lean back, close your eyes, and say "nice." Hummingbirds' final track,
"New Cascade," neatly dramatizes this
unbroken connection between old-time and next-generation country. The
piece is highly streamlined "newgrass," yet it features older,
decidedly pre-bluegrass styles of fiddle and banjo playing from Tara Nevins and
Richie Stearns, skilled exponents of Appalachian dance music. The song is
advanced, the playing as archaic as it gets; such is the strength of the
album's vision that potentially jarring extremes make for the easiest of
listening.
Jim Lauderdale's admirable and perhaps somewhat tense position in today's
country-music scene is made dramatically evident by his singing. He sounds
great on the bluegrass albums, as well as in the semi-mimicry of post-war
country that marks The Other
Sessions; vocally he really is a roots and alt artist, naturally better suited to
such projects than to The
Hummingbirds, whose full-on gorgeousness can at times make his lead
singing sound thin and strained. Yet on album after album he's tried to sing in
ways reminiscent not only of the Über-stylist
George Jones but also of country-soul crooners like Ronnie Millsap and Charlie
Rich. His albums aren't demo records from a songwriter; they're complete
personal expressions, and Lauderdale seems to want to show us everything he
likes. That a guy who makes lush country-pop albums also plays bluegrass isn't
the important thing to admire. The lucky thing about Jim Lauderdale—a thing
worth banking some of country's troubled future on—is that a guy with the
commitment to play bluegrass also loves what's truly country about pop.