After
17 years of professional music-reviewing, Noel Murray is taking time off from
all new music, and is revisiting his record collection in alphabetical order,
to take stock of what he's amassed, and consider what he still needs.
Is it possible
to find terms like "chick flick," "chick lit" and "chick rock"—as well as
more kindly phrased equivalents like "femme-friendly" and
"gynocentric"—at once mildly offensive and somewhat useful? Yes,
everyone's an individual, irreducible to their gender, et cetera et cetera. But
it's hardly unenlightened to say that there are generalized differences between
the way women feel, perceive and behave, and the way men feel, perceive and
behave, even if only some of those differences are related to chemistry and
biology, while others are merely social (and therefore vary from culture to
culture). Whatever the reasons behind the gender gap, if an artist writes a
song or tells a story that speaks to that gap, or merely presents a perspective
from the distaff side, there shouldn't be anything wrong with slapping on a
label that identifies their work accurately.
That
said, the problem with the various "chick" classifications is that they're
usually used pejoratively—and when used by women, even apologetically.
Last week, when the Sex And The City movie was released, there were a number of male critics and
commentators groaning about how wives and girlfriends were going to be dragging
their guys to see this chick flick piece of crap, and most of then seemed more
concerned about the "chick flick" part than the "piece of crap" part. It's true
that movies like Sex And The City, 27 Dresses and P.S. I Love You can be annoying even to women for the way they pitch
a version of feminine life that's simplistic and somewhat vulgar. But the same
can be said about the version of manliness in action movies and gross-out
comedies, yet many movie buffs will excuse a dopey adventure if it has a few
good action sequences, or a slovenly comedy if it contains a few laugh-out-loud
jokes. An effective tearjerker, though? Not as easily forgiven.
This
elevation of the macho over the feminine extends to music fandom, where acts
that are harder-edged or patience-testing are often considered superior to acts
that are softer, more melodic, or more sentimental. And those acts don't have
to be female, either. There's sometimes a knee-jerk reaction by male music fans
against male musicians that women like. Those musicians may get their share of
critical praise in the early going, but as the backlash starts building among
fans, critics are all too eager to join the fray. Perhaps it's because so many
male critics are basically nerds: doughy, bespectacled, balding guys who spend
a lot of time indoors. If we can't prove ourselves in feats of physical
strength, we can least tap out a few words about why Sufjan Stevens is for
pussies.
I know a
lot of women—my wife, for one—have a love-hate relationship with
"chick" culture, and I feel the same about "guy" culture, frankly. I like
sports, poker, beer, explosions and crude jokes. But when I hang out
exclusively with my male friends I often find I say things I don't mean, or
give tacit approval to ideas I don't share, in an almost unconscious attempt to
fit in. I've never been big on cut-down wars, pranks, wrestling around, or any
of the other ways that guys jockey for position when we're left to our own
devices. Throughout most of my post-adolescent life, I've had as many close
female friends as close male friends, and even now I find I'm often more
comfortable talking with the women in my social circle than with the men.
(Being a stay-at-home dad may be part of the reason for that.) And yet, I seem
hard-wired to go along with the crowd when everyone in the room is a man.
One of my
all-time favorite songs is Joni Mitchell's "Free Man In Paris," reportedly
written about her friend David Geffen. It's mostly about getting away from the
pressures of show business, but the references to the protagonist finding "that
very good friend of mine" implies that part of the appeal of Paris to Geffen is
that he can be openly gay there, and won't have to worry about being perceived
as weak. I think that's a fantasy that appeals to a lot of us: this idea that
there may be a place where we can be wholly ourselves, unrestrained by concerns
that we'll be judged for our tastes, our preferences, our political views, or
even the way we look, talk and act.
I'd
imagine that idea also resonated with Mitchell, who spent much of her career in
the '60s and '70s fighting against the perceptions of who she was and who she should be. Was she too aloof, too
pretentious, too open, too careerist, too promiscuous? A lot of those
perceptions were tied to her gender, because while hippie dudes loved that
their old ladies felt free enough to get high and ball, a surprising number of
them still expected to retain the old hierarchies when it came to cooking,
cleaning, and taking care of the kids. Mitchell's label Reprise understood
this, and marketed her with teases about her simultaneous sexual dynamism and
wholesomeness. The rock press seized on this angle, and made casual mention of
her sexual affairs during write-ups of her records and concerts. Mitchell found
that kind of publicity distasteful and disheartening, but it didn't stop her
from writing songs about her own conflicted feelings of desire, or about the
men she'd argued with, laughed with, and bedded.
So, is
Mitchell "chick rock?" Part of me thinks it would be an insult to Mitchell to
tag her as such, and part of me thinks it would be an insult not to. (According to what I've read,
Mitchell's pretty touchy…there's really no way you can't insult her.) Certainly, she's an
inspiration to any woman who takes up an instrument and looks for a way to
express what she's seen and understood—and likely an inspiration to a lot
of men, too. But a song like Mitchell's "Song For Sharon," in which she tries
to explain her restless romantic life to a girlhood friend who's settled down
back in Canada, is so specific about wedding fantasies and feminine empathy
that to ignore the song's gender origins would be disingenuous.
It would
also be stupid for men to presume that because "Song For Sharon" was written by
a woman and is about being a woman, that there's nothing they can glean from it. Yes, Mitchell's
take on relationships, politics and music is at once fully human, fully
feminine, and fully her own, and just because a man connects with Mitchell's
music, that doesn't necessarily make him any more "enlightened." But like the
man said about chicken soup and common cold, it sure couldn't hurt either.
*****************
Pieces
Of The Puzzle
Joni
Mitchell
Years
Of Operation
1967-present
Fits
Between Joan Baez
and Tim Buckley
Personal
Correspondence The
first time I heard Court & Spark, I had a new benchmark for a number of different genres:
singer-songwriter confessionals, jazz-informed pop, and '70s AM, among others.
Mitchell's earlier albums each have their considerable merits—especially Blue, which helped move folk music away
from the stridently political and trippy and towards the personal—but Court
& Spark is a
real level-jumper. Mitchell's lyrics are so pared-down and precise—and
Mitchell's growing interest in jazz and pop so well-integrated into the
mix—that the whole record feels preordained, like this set of songs and
this sound had been hanging in the air forever, waiting for someone to pluck
them down when they were ripe. In the years that followed, Mitchell headed
further into jazzy abstraction, and the stark character sketches—more
like slivers, really—gave way to songs packed tight with allusion. But
she made two more great records along the way: 1975's The Hissing Of Summer
Lawns, and the one
true rival to Court & Spark in her catalog, 1976's Hejira. I wrote up Hejira for The A.V. Club's now-defunct "Permanent Records
column, saying, "Opening with the sprightly, catchy 'Coyote'—with its
haunting lines about the 'prisoner of the white lines on the freeway'—Hejira announces itself as an album about
how being rootless can be its own kind of trap. Throughout the record, Jaco
Pastorius' fretless bass chases Mitchell's lilting voice around open
arrangements, as she sings rambling sketches of the tired old friends and dying
musicians that she sees in her own tour-bus mirror. 'I'm traveling in some
vehicle,' Mitchell sings in the moody title track, a paean to the pleasurable
anonymity of driving through the night and letting thoughts wander. At once
tuneless and arrestingly beautiful, 'Hejira' proves Mitchell's lyrical
contention that 'there's comfort in melancholy.'"
Enduring
presence? I'm so
enamored of Mitchell's run from 1974-76—and of scattered tracks from her
first five albums—that I've tried at times to make sense of her odd '80s
records. There's a lot to like about 1982's Wild Things Run Fast, but the rest, I hate to say, are a
mishmash of incompatible recording techniques and relatively graceless lyrics.
Still, while Mitchell has developed a reputation for being cranky and unwilling
to entertain, over the past decade she's been making a stealthy comeback. I
thought her 2002 collection Travelogue—orchestral covers of her old songs, sung in a
deeper, smokier voice—was astonishingly beautiful, and last year's Shine should've been a bigger event than
the media treated it as, given that it was Mitchell's first collection of new
songs in nine years, and her first top-to-bottom good record in over 30.
Mitchell's legacy is fully secure, since nearly every chanteuse who sits in
front of a piano is compared to her. But I hope people recognize that she's not
a museum piece. She's a going concern.
[pagebreak]
Josh
Rouse
Years
Of Operation
1998-present
Fits
Between Bread and
Ryan Adams
Personal
Correspondence My
friend Jim Ridley first met Josh Rouse when Rouse was still working at a Nashville
coffeehouse, and a few months after their encounter, Jim called me up to tell
me about it, because it was one of the few times that a person he'd encountered
out of the blue had handed him a homemade CD, and the CD turned out to be good. That disc was Dressed Up Like
Nebraska, a catchy,
unassuming collection of songs that mixed Neil Young-styled roots-rock with
heavy dollops of The Smiths and The Cure. I picked it up on Jim's
recommendation, and because it was exactly the kind of music I liked, I too became
one of Rouse's first and most devoted fans. I interviewed him a few times in
those early years, and found we had a lot in common: roughly the same age,
roughly the same taste, both latchkey kids who moved around a lot, both newly
married and starting our careers in earnest, both amateur cooks, and so on. As
Rouse's star rose, our occasional encounters became more businesslike, as was
appropriate. But he remained a favorite, and as he kept cranking out albums, I
kept covering them. About Rouse's masterpiece, Under Cold Blue Stars, I wrote: "He plays with his
heartland rasp in the manner of his idols, who write precise lyrics and then
sing them as though each syllable were only loosely related to the one before.
Though Rouse's lyrics mimic a to-the-point conversation, he obscures much of
what his characters are saying by breaking words in two or slurring them
together until they lose their directness. He crafts a tonal portrait of people
talking around each other. The highlights of Under Cold Blue Stars are the lyrical phrases that Rouse
chews up and blows out. The emotional apex of the record comes on the
penultimate track 'Women And Men,' which concludes a five-minute, despairing
sketch of loneliness and isolation with a man returning to his wife. 'Grass needs
cut, cuddle up,' Rouse suddenly enunciates, and the rationale behind the
persistence of troubled relationships becomes touchingly, devastatingly clear."
Then, about his mellow, soulful 1972: "The album isn't about throwback shtick or note-for-note
copying. Rouse is shadowing the sophistication and perfection of classic pop,
trying to replicate its power to make people feel more at peace with their
uniformly awkward relationships. He invests the reliability of waking up next
to the same person every day with a spiritual, ascendant hope." Shortly after 1972, Rouse apparently no longer felt
connected to that domestic reliability, so he got divorced and left Nashville
for Spain, and as the differences in our lives widened, I started to feel less
enthusiastic about the records he was putting out, apart from a song here or
there. Nashville
featured some strong material, but the two that followed—Subtitulo and Country Mouse City House—have been slim pickings.
Enduring
presence? So what
happened? Rouse was widely considered an up-and-comer—not just by
me—only six years ago, and while I'm not willing to say that he's tapped
out, his recent push toward online-marketed-and-sold fan-only EPs and live
sessions is the kind of move made by someone ready to rest on his laurels and
cultivate his cult, not an artist with something new and vital to say. And
truth be told, since the stylistic breakthrough of 1972—which finally transported
Rouse back to the musical space he'd been trying to reach from the
start—his CD player seems to have gotten stuck on "repeat." I'd hoped
that moving to Europe would inspire Rouse to try new things, but instead it
seems to have made him complacent, and more willing to put out half-finished
work. Still, I can't believe the man who wrote "Late Night Conversation,"
"Michigan," "Feeling No Pain," "Rise" and "Middle School Frown" is done with
arresting, keenly observed and realized songs for good. I hope that when
Rouse's next album comes out, I'll be as pleasantly surprised as my friend Jim
once was.
Journey
Years
Of Operation
1973-87 (essentially)
Fits
Between Foreigner
and Loverboy
Personal
Correspondence This
is going to make no damn sense I'm sure, but for a significant stretch of my
youth, I didn't feel worthy of Journey. I arrived in junior high a year younger then
most of my classmates, and while there wasn't much of a gap between 10 and 11
when I was in sixth grade, the gap between 12 and 13 in seventh grade was wide
and seemingly unbridgeable. I was physically smaller, weaker, more immature and
socially awkward, and not old enough to do a lot of the things my peers were
doing over the next three years—from shaving to going to rock concerts.
By eighth grade, the kids in my class started showing up wearing Van Halen and
Journey T-shirts that they'd picked up at the arena shows they were allowed to
attend, and just as I've always found some feats of physical skill an
impossibility—like doing cartwheels, or diving headfirst into a pool—it
seemed unlikely that I'd ever be cool enough to go to a Journey concert and buy
merch. Of course by then I was already getting into new wave and college rock,
and by the end of high school I'd embrace my musical likes and dislikes as a
sign of moral superiority. If I couldn't be popular, I could secretly scorn
what they valued. And yet, over the years I'd catch the occasional Journey song
on the radio and feel a little pang. Partly it's because songs like "Lights"
and "Any Way You Want It" and "Don't Stop Believin'" are well-constructed
corporate rock, with grabby melodies, simple sentiment and just a touch of the
gimmicky. And partly it's because I can't stop imagining Journey as the
soundtrack to a lifestyle I never got to enjoy: the R-rated movie version of my
family-hour sitcom youth. (If my classmates were Caddyshack and Fast Times At Ridgemont High, I was Family Ties.) I've argued before on this site
that Journey is unfairly maligned for a lot of reasons, many of them related to
the fact that they're essentially a singles act, pumping out cookie-cutter
albums with more filler than keepers. But the part of being a rock critic that
I've always found the hardest is trying to toe the line on the on the notion
that a song like Journey's "Only The Young" is dreck while, say, Joy Division's
"Digital" (to pick a song I'm going to get to in a minute) is brilliant. I know
that it makes my taste automatically suspect to admit I like both—because
if I like something you like, and something you don't like, for some reason
you're more likely to fixate on the latter—but in the end both songs are
about feeling pressured, stressed, and perpetually adolescent. Yes they sound different, but in the end, isn't
that just a matter of the audience they're pitching to? And if we're reduced to
reviewing the audience rather than the music, doesn't that make us snobs, not
critics?
Enduring
presence? Sopranos-approved or not, Journey isn't
likely ever to become acceptable to the rock cognoscenti. And they don't do
their legacy any favors with Steve Perry-less reunion tours, or that
contentious-yet-entertaining Behind The Music episode in which Neil Schon and his
cronies grumble about the power-ballad-heavy direction that Perry led them in.
(Not that any of them had any trouble banking the money he made them.) The
existing members of Journey seem to openly acknowledge that they're lame, as a
kind of defense mechanism. I'm sure they're comeuppance is satisfying to some,
but not to me.
Joy
Division
Years
Of Operation
1976-80
Fits
Between David Bowie
and The Birthday Party
Personal
Correspondence I've
been thinking and writing so much about Joy Division over the past
year—including a review of the new Joy Division documentary DVD, running on this
site next week—that in a way I feel I've exhausted the subject. But I
can't just ignore them either. Even after all the recent attempts to humanize
Ian Curtis and document his every dalliance, doubt and epileptic fit, I still
find Joy Division beguilingly elusive. The band had such a small output—by
fate, not design—and yet their percentage of timeless songs is remarkably
high, which is even more impressive considering that they were essentially just
four average lads who came together in the aftermath of the punk revolution.
Some credit is clearly due to producer Martin Hannett, who molded Joy
Division's sound by prolonging the arid, empty spaces they liked to explore and
then filling them with industrial clank and menace. But then Joy Division's
songs were good—and every bit as moody—when the band was just
another set of DIY bashers, rattling the walls of Manchester's clubs. Where did
this gift come from? What allowed these four men to connect so cleanly as
collaborators? What would they have accomplished had Curtis not taken his own
life? These are the questions that make being a fan so confounding.
Enduring
presence? All of
that said, my Joy Division fandom tends to come in waves. I've never stopped
loving them, but they're not one of those bands I can listen to just anytime. I
sometimes go years without listening to anything by Joy Division, and then go
through a week or two where I don't want to hear anything but. And every time I
revisit the catalog—and it's always a thorough revisitation, not just a
few songs or a single album—I'm knocked out all over again at its wealth,
and near-miraculous existence.
June
Carter Cash
Years
Of Operation
1939-2003
Fits
Between Minnie
Pearl and Mother Maybelle Carter
Personal
Correspondence One
of my happier discoveries in recent years has been the music of June Carter
Cash, a country music legend whom I'd always thought of as an adjunct to Johnny
Cash rather than a creative force in her own rite. Then June's posthumous album Wildwood Flower
was released, and I was intrigued by the depth of feeling and homey-ness about
it. Reviewing it, I wrote: "The late June Carter Cash's career shadowed 20th
Century pop music, beginning in the '30s when she toured with her famous
folksinging family, continuing through the '50s when she married country singer
Carl Smith and became an Opry fixture, and culminating with her 1968 marriage
to Johnny Cash, who frequently included his wife in his intuitive fusion of
folk, country, rock and gospel. June Carter Cash's final album Wildwood
Flower is more a
scrapbook of her final days than a proper collection of recorded music, but
it's poignant and crafty in its casual portrait of a matriarch in repose. Most
of the songs come from the Carter Family songbook, and are strung together by
outtakes from old radio broadcasts and spoken word introductions that sometimes
ramble into impromptu reminiscences (like the one about the Cashes hanging out
with Jack Palance and Lee Marvin). Cash's voice is thin and frail, as is her
husband's when he sings backup, but they take clear pleasure in singing old
favorites with warm, spare, mostly acoustic backing. A lot of the tracks on Wildwood
Flower have the
quality of stories told in the parlor at a family reunion, with the guitars,
fiddles and loose percussion nodding along like cousins. June hums her way
through standards like 'Church In The Wildwood' and 'Cannonball Blues, letting
the visions of vanishing pasts and uncertain futures hover pointedly. And the
quaver in her voice as she sings 'Will You Miss Me?' is moving, not just
because Cash is dead now, but because she sounds a little scorned, as though
she's unsure whether she's ever been properly appreciated."
A year
later, the double-disc June Carter Cash anthology Keep On The Sunny Side was released, containing almost the
entirety of her 1975 debut solo album Appalachian Pride and a fairly full accounting of her
scattered novelty singles of the '50s and '60s, many of which were either
country music spoofs like "No Swallerin' Place" or lovers' spat songs like "He
Went Slippin' Around" and "Well I Guess I Told You Off." Pairing that
collection with Wildwood Flower, I realized what I'd missed about her along: raised an
entertainer, June never lost her instincts for putting on a show, and yet she
found ways to invest shtick with her own down-home, matriarchal personality.
Enduring
presence? I imagine
a lot of people have gleaned their June Carter Cash knowledge from the movie Walk
The Line, a flawed
film with a terrific performance by Reese Witherspoon as June. When the movie
came out, I wrote: "Maybe the best way to understand June Carter Cash is to
catch Reese Witherspoon's impersonation of her in James Mangold's Johnny Cash
biopic Walk The Line. Her performance ends during the fledgling stages of June The Nurturer,
but it starts with June The Cornpone Clown, cutting up onstage while winking at
the silliness of it all offstage (and living pragmatically with persistent
heartbreak). Witherspoon captures June in all her clear-headed, bright-eyed
glory, without losing the Witherspoon within. When she grabs her autoharp and
starts whooping it up, it's like witnessing a spiritual visitation. Early in
the film, the young Cash is shown listening to The Carter Family on the radio,
and even after he grows up and joins the military, he keeps pictures of the
teenage June Carter in his footlocker. The arc of their romance shadows Cash's
career path, as he falls in love with the idea of celebrity, then has to learn
how to live with its reality. In that, Witherspoon-as-June makes an ideal
instructor: simultaneously charming, deep, and broken inside." It's easy to
catch up to June Carter Cash. Buy Keep On The Sunny Side and Wildwood Flower and you're done. Quite happily done.
[pagebreak]
Kanye
West
Years
Of Operation
2000-present
Fits
Between Jay-Z and
Nas
Personal
Correspondence As I
wrote about Jay-Z a few weeks ago, a lot of the appeal of Kanye West to me is
his presence as the most written-about and in some ways most dominant rap
artist of recent years. We need idols in pop like we need hot-shot athletes in
sports. We need those aces who get all the favorable calls whether they
actually hit the strike zone or not, because they give us someone to root for
and to root against—something to react to, in other words. And when an artist
looms as large as West, that reaction happens on a larger scale than just a
small handful of music critics and fans. It's impressive that West, given that
kind of attention, has been willing to record songs like "Diamonds From Sierra
Leone," or to speak out against homophobia in the black community, or
institutional racism in the media. The first time I heard The College
Dropout, the song
that won me over was "Spaceship," which reminded me of the kind of catchy,
personal, socially conscious hip-hop I responded to in the early '90s. I know
West isn't alone in writing and recording songs like "Spaceship," but hearing
it on that year's must-own hip-hop album was heartening, to say the least.
Enduring
presence? One of
the other things I like about West is how he tempers his "I'm the most
important person in the industry" arrogance with a genuine appreciation for
other musicians and styles. He may think he's better than every other artist
out there, but that doesn't stop him from getting enthusiastic about a Peter,
Bjorn & John song, or collaborating with other hip-hop and pop artists he
likes. He's got a mighty big tent, given that he's one of the few artists left
who can go from zero to platinum in under two weeks.
Kate
Bush
Years
Of Operation
1975-present
Fits
Between Genesis and
Tori Amos
Personal
Correspondence
There was a time when I thought Kate Bush had the best voice in popular music,
and I liked her almost as much for her guest appearances on Peter Gabriel's
"Don't Give Up" and Big Country's "The Seer" as I did for her own music,
which—to be honest—took me a little time to warm up to. Bush was
sort of the Björk of her day, experimenting madly with rhythmic texture in a
pop context, and floating off to fairyland without stressing overmuch about how
silly she might look or sound. I dabbled in Bush at first, sticking with the
well-chosen compilation The Whole Story, but I eventually found all the albums The Whole
Story draws from on
vinyl, and got into each of them one at a time, enjoying her evolution from
trilling art-pop towards willful obscurity, then back out the other side with
the sublime Hounds Of Love. The albums that have followed The Whole Story have been decidedly spotty, but
each still offers a chance to slip behind the eyes of Kate Bush, and see how
every raindrop can contain universes within universes.
Enduring
presence? Bush has
followed her own quirky muse since her 1978 debut, and aside from cosmetic and
thematic differences, each of her records has offered a similar blend of prog,
folk, and new wave. By the time Bush released 1993's unfocused The Red Shoes, her routine had grown stale, yet
while her 2005 comeback record Aerial didn't change that routine significantly, the record was
still a welcome return, if only because she'd been incommunicado for so long.
Now I don't know whether to root for another Kate Bush album to come around
soon, or to hope she waits 12 more years, so that she'll sound fresh again.
*****************
Stray
Tracks
From
the fringes of the collection, a few songs to share….
Jorge
Ben, "Ponta De Lança Africana (Umbabarauma)"
This song
was my first real exposure to Brazilian pop, and not just because it's the
first song on David Byrne's influential Beleza Tropical compilation. I heard "Umbabarauma"
for the first time in the context of an animation festival, where the song
accompanied a stunning short that set paintings in motion. It was a snug fit,
since the song is about an athlete in full stride, getting into position to
score, and the music replicates that sense of kinetic purpose. When I bought Beleza
Tropical and heard
"Umbabarauma"—a song I recognized, and already loved—I knew I'd
come to the right place.
José
Feliciano, "Golden Lady"
Here I'm
trying to backdoor some Stevie Wonder, by sneaking in one of my favorite songs
from my favorite Wonder album, as interpreted by somebody else. I'll write more
about Wonder and Innervisions when their appointed time comes around, and will attempt to
explain why songs like this one get at the essence of pop, and all its
potential for transcendence and beauty. Wonder's best songs work even when
someone else is singing them. And, y'know, José Feliciano, you got no
complaints.
José
González, "Crosses"
González's
music keeps popping up on TV shows and in movies, so I guess he's becoming
something of a cult figure, which is probably the ideal fate for an Argentinean
Swede who plucks out pretty folk songs indebted to The Beatles, Nick Drake and
Joao Gilberto. I liked his first album Veneer the instant I heard it, and wrote
about it that, "It's an intimate expression of all that's beautiful and
terrifying in the world, recorded by one man in the dark of night in a quiet
room." After initially finding the follow up In Our Nature to be a bit of a retread, I
eventually recognized it as a stronger album than Veneer, writing, "González seems
preoccupied with human impulses—particularly violent ones—and
nearly all of the songs on the record have an urgent, in medias res feel, as though someone switched on
the tape after González had been playing for a while, and worked himself up to
a high level of intensity." But nothing he's yet written and recorded tops Veneer's "Crosses," two-and-half-minutes
of crystalline acoustic guitar, evocative imagery, and overpowering want.
Josef
K, "Radio Drill Time"
This song
is from the waning days of the original post-punk era, and sports edgy Joy
Division/Echo & The Bunnymen-style moroseness alongside the kind of bright
jangle common to Josef K's fellow Scots Orange Juice and Aztec Camera. It's no
accident that this sound was so immediately popular among young bands in the
various UK scenes: there's a kind of unearned gravity about it, making
relatively trouble-free post-adolescents sound more mature and significant than
they actually were. It's instant stature.
Josh
Ritter, "Lillian Egypt"
I'm still
waiting to be wowed by Ritter, an obviously accomplished singer-songwriter that
many people—including many of my friends—think is possibly the best
of the neo-folk-rockers. At the moment, I'm still in the "song here, song
there" stage with Ritter, although I liked pretty much all of The Animal
Years (an album I
described as "a record so rich, rootsy, and timeless that it's like it's been
buried underground for 30 years"), and a good portion of last year's The
Historical Conquests Of. If I hesitate to go completely ga-ga for Ritter, it's because I'm not
hearing a lot of songs in his catalog as immediately likable as this one off The
Animal Years. I
think his music sounds better the more he fleshes it out in the studio—so
long as he doesn't go overboard with it, making the orchestration more
important the composition. Then again, The Animal Years gets the balance right remarkably
often, so I'm sure Ritter's got a Court & Spark waiting for him, just around the
corner.
Josie
& The Pussycats, "Every Beat Of My Heart"
I spent a
fair chunk of this past Saturday morning at a family-friendly community event
which featured an appearance by the Radio Disney van, and a set of games,
dances and songs organized by a team of well-rehearsed, wholesome teenage
girls, likely drafted out of high school theater classes and cheerleading
squads. My kids found the Radio Disney girls transfixing, for different
reasons: my son because they behaved like game show hosts, which may be his
favorite occupation outside of meteorologist; and my daughter because I think
they reminded her of a combination of preschool teachers and TV kids' show entertainers.
My daughter's only three (about to be four), so she's not at the Disney
Channel/Hannah Montana stage yet, and I don't know how I'll feel about it when she gets there.
I've joked since she was born that I'd like her to be a dumpy, bookish child
who blossoms when she goes to college, so I won't have to worry about her
fighting off the advances of teenage boys. But at the same time, since neither
my wife and I were ever fashionable or cool in our adolescence, it might be an
appealing novelty to raise a girly-girl social butterfly, obsessed with
whatever version of High School Musical or Josie & The Pussycats is fighting for the
tween dollar in the late 2010s. Though given her genetic makeup, it's more
likely that she'll be listening to the next generation Josie with her best
friend—someone equally gawky and nerdy—and it'll be the one time of
day where they feel in communion to the popular crowd.
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Judy
Collins, "I'll Keep It With Mine"
Judy
Henske, "High Flyin' Bird"
One
surprising thing about the box set Forever Changing: Golden Age Of Elektra is how Judy Collins-heavy it is.
Today, Collins is more of a footnote to the '60s and '70s folk-pop era,
remembered as much for her TV appearances and her hit covers of Joni Mitchell
and Stephen Sondheim songs than for her longevity, or the fact that she was one
of Elektra's flagship artists. Collins is more of an interpreter than an
originator, though she has an amazing voice, and can make even a song as tricky
as this Dylan classic sound mainstream. By contrast, fellow Elektra signee Judy
Henske took an approach to traditional folk that had her submerging into a song
and roughing it up, striving to create a one-of-a-kind moment that requires the
listener to reach out some. If you had to assign gender stereotypes to each of
these songs, you could say that Collins is more giving and therefore more
feminine, while Henske leans masculine. But both recordings are amazing.
Judy
Garland, "If Love Were All"
As a
singer, Garland's always been a little too broad and theatrical for my taste,
but she's made such an impression as an actor and performer that if I just hear
her voice, I can picture her face and her gestures. The appealing thing about
Garland on film is that in a studio system era that prized bland beauty,
Garland often looked ragged and disheveled, even as she was hitting her marks
like a pro. When I talk about Liza Minnelli in a couple of weeks, I'll get into
the idea that some singers can be fake and sincere at the same time, but with
Garland, the fakeness was never as transparent as it is with her daughter.
Garland gave her all, even when she didn't feel like it, and that's what wrung
her out. Well, that and lots and lots of pills.
Juicy
Bananas, "Bad Man"
I've
written before about "acquiring" the Repo Man soundtrack, but I didn't say much
about what that record meant to me. Aside from being an early sampler of the
early '80s LA punk scene, the Repo Man OST was also a souvenir of a movie and sensibility
that only a handful of people in my high school were aware of, which meant a
song like "Bad Man"—with its dialogue recitations and offbeat badass
posturing—was something we could share, like a secret language. Thanks to
video stores, the '80s were a great time for cult films, and at times it seemed
like my friends and I were carrying on whole conversations that were little
more than quotes from Repo Man, Raising Arizona, Blue Velvet, John Hughes movies, and whatever we'd rented on our last
movie night. And when I was stuck at home—carless and friendless—I
could always break out the soundtracks, and still feel connected.
The
Juliana Hatfield Trio, "My Sister"
Having
failed to write about The Blake Babies back in the "B"s, I couldn't skip
Hatfield, even though her solo career is pretty much nonexistent to me after
1993's Become What You Are. I'm not sure how Hatfield went from being one of the most
promising artists of her generation to being something of a joke and a hack.
Maybe it was her association with unreliable druggie Evan Dando, or maybe her
unfortunate comments about still being a virgin in her mid-20s. (The rock press
will always seize on anything sex-related that a female artist says, and make
that part of the lead in every profile for years to come.) Or maybe it's just
that she never developed her musical chops beyond the simplistic grunge-pop
that sounded so appealing when she started out. It's too bad really, because
when speaking about the history of rock written from a distinctly feminine
experience, Hatfield's songs about alt-rock crushes, feeling ugly, and the
slippery nature of sorority have to be part of the curriculum.
June
Christy with The Stan Kenton Orchestra, ""Are You Livin' Old Man?"
I watch a
lot of old movies on TCM, and one of my favorite recurring moments in films of
the '40s are the scenes where the hero goes to a nightclub—or a varsity
review, or a swank soiree—and some elegantly dressed lady steps up to a
microphone and sings a song laced with jive-speak. I dig the "slumming" aspect
of these scenes, as a room full of swells plays at being Harlem hepcats, secure
in the knowledge that they can leave the lingo behind when it's time to retire
to the library for brandy and cigars and murder plots.
Junior
Boys, "Like A Child"
Junior
Senior, "Rhythm Bandits"
One of
the reasons why I liked Junior Boys' debut LP Last Exit so much was that it reminded me of
the homemade electronic music that one of my high school friends used to make:
simple, minimalist stuff that operated in that shadowy area between avant-garde
and commercial. Junior Boys' follow-up So This Is Goodbye is more polished, but retains an
interest in accessibility and exploration. There's a sweetness to the
conciliatory "Like A Child," and a precision that reflects human
aspiration—a striving to be better. As I once wrote about So This Is
Goodbye, "It isn't
really built for hot clubs, flashing lights and moments of uncontrollable
passion; It's designed be heard on the way home at 2 AM, when the hard beats
have faded to a dull echo in the ears, and the sweat begins to cool." Junior
Senior, meanwhile, is all about getting people off their ass and on the floor,
which they achieve by slamming together samples over jumpy rhythms, then adding
cheerleader-ready chants. It's motivational music.
Junior
Walker & The All-Stars, "Shake And Fingerpop"
My wife put
this song on one of the first mixtapes she ever made for me, and it was one of
the first indications that musically, our romance might not be one-sided.
Generally speaking, I came into this relationship with a wider base of musical
knowledge than Donna, but she has her fields of expertise, including early
blues and R&B.; I knew "Shotgun" by Walker and company, but I hadn't
previously heard this similar track, which is awesome in any number of ways,
from its opening line "Put on your wig, woman!" to the way the guitar goes into
double-time every time the title is sung. As soon as I heard "Shake And
Fingerpop," I knew I had to stick close to any woman who had access to such
wonders.
Jurassic 5, "Monkey Bars"
Easily
one of the best hip-hop acts of the '00s, Jurassic 5 is also that rare group of
musicians that seems to undermine themselves every time they strive for chart
success. Generally speaking, there's nothing wrong with selling out—the
world needs good radio-ready pop songs every bit as much as it needs
self-indulgent experimentation—but J5's commercial instincts have been
kind of crummy. The band's 1997 EP and the 2000 LP Quality Control had them rewinding hip-hop about 15
years and starting on a new path that resembled the old school but was more
forward-thinking. On Power In Numbers and Feedback—two mostly good but fairly scattered
records—they tried to forge that path back towards the middle of the
road, and lost some of the assuredness that made those early records so
exciting. (Losing Cut Chemist before Feedback didn't help either.) Thus far,
hip-hop hasn't been a genre ripe with comebacks by acts who've declined, but
I'm still hopeful that Jurassic 5 will be an exception, especially since they
have yet to suck outright. Maybe now they'll take what they've learned about
the mainstream and set off on their own, yet again.
K.
McCarty, "Walking The Cow"
McCarty
was one of Daniel Johnston's friends in his Austin days, and one of the first
to realize the potential of his rough-hewn, idiosyncratic songs. "Walking The
Cow" has been recorded multiple times—including a jangly take by fellow
Austinites The Reivers—but McCarty's version is my favorite, mainly
because of the way the strings and guitars mirror each other, giving a buzzsaw
edge to something beautiful. That's Johnston's music in a nutshell.
k.d.
lang, "Miss Chatelaine"
One of
the most amazing things about lang's career is how she's made the transgressive
wholly normal. It's my understanding—though I could be wrong—that
this is a song about a transvestite cabaret performer, and just as lang made
the idea of a butch-looking lesbian belting honky tonk tearjerkers seem as
natural as tumbleweeds, here she reclaims sexiness and glamour for same-sex
couples and the unrepentantly fabulous.
Kaiser
Chiefs, "Everything Is Average Nowadays"
I was
impressed with Kaiser Chiefs' debut album Employment, which seemed like a
mini-compendium of Britpop through the ages, as the band followed secret
passages between the old and the new. I wasn't as impressed by the follow-up LP Yours Truly, Angry Mob, which seemed like an attempt to compete directly with the likes of
Arctic Monkeys, The Kooks and Razorlight by serving up lazily hooky songs with
overcranked arrangements.† In the
context of an exceedingly slack record, "Everything Is Average Nowadays" sounds
like self-condemnation, and as such may be the most charged, personal song
Kaiser Chiefs have yet recorded.
Kajagoogoo,
"Too Shy"
Only in
the Culture Club/Duran Duran era could a song this slinky become a hit.
Produced by Nick Rhodes, "Too Shy" casts the Duran Duran keyboardist's Chic
fetish in a new light, by riding a disco groove that's been slowed down and
pulled apart, so that the bass no longer pops but just punches, softly.
Kaki
King, "Jessica"
As I
wrote about …Until We Felt Red two years ago,†
"Kaki King is a virtuoso guitarist by trade, though her particular gifts
are more suited to textured indie-rock songs than New Age, and the songs on her
new record—produced by alt-rock legend John McEntire—could pass for
some of the softer passages of Lush or My Bloody Valentine, or any other of
those early '90s dreampop bands that prized environment over melody. Even when
King adds her voice to the mix, as she does on the album-opening 'Yellowcake'
and the airily plodding 'Jessica,' her breathy tone works with the skittering
acoustic guitar and distant slide to create an atmosphere not unlike a
sun-dappled clearing in the woods. She evokes the feeling of sudden storms and
their immediate wake."
Kaleidoscope,
"Love Games"
The big
gimmick for the late-'60s American psychedelic act—as opposed to the
late-'60s British psychedelic act of the same name—was the addition of
exotic folk instruments and sounds to the usual garage-rock fuzz and happy love
vibes. Here, they come off like the unacknowledged forefathers of Camper Van
Beethoven, dressing up a catchy pop song with a trippy vibe borrowed from the
Far East.
Karen
Dalton, "Something Is On Your Mind"
A staple
of the '60s Greenwich Village folk scene, Dalton sang in a mewling voice that
recalled Billie Holiday and Nina Simone, with a thick streak of Mother Maybelle
Carter. Her recently reissued album In My Own Time puts that voice in the context of
hippie Americana, in songs that follow loping rhythms and rely on loose fiddles
and brassy horns. This song is like a miniature battle between Dalton's voice,
the funereal rhythms, and the free-ranging violin. Dalton, as always, wins the
day. Even as she trails off to a mutter at the end, we still strain to hear
what she's going to say next.
Kasey
Chambers, "The Captain"
Unlike a
couple of other Australian country artists, Chambers hasn't really had major
success in the states, though she did receive a boost when this title track
from her debut album popped up in the closing credits of an episode of The
Sopranos. It's
well-used on the show, too, making reference to the ill-fated ascendancy of
Ralph Cifaretto, as well as to the me-first impulses of Tony Soprano as he
begins his affair with Gloria Trillo. Of course Chambers had none of that in
mind when she wrote and recorded "The Captain," but once a song is out there in
the world, it finds its own way, making associations that its creators couldn't
have imagined.
Regrettably
unremarked upon:
Joseph Arthur, Joshua Redman, Judy Collins, Julie London, June & The Exit
Wounds, Junior Kimbrough, Kansas, Kansas City Five/Six, Karl Hendricks Trio and
Kate & Anna McGarrigle
Also
listened to: Joolz,
Jordan Zevon, Joseph Spence, Josephine Taylor, Josh Joplin, Josh,
TurnerJoshua Rifkin, Joss Stone, Joy,
ElectricJoy Zipper, Joyce Green, JR Ewing, Jude, Judy Clay, Julie Doiron & The Wooden Stars, Julie
Miller, Julius Airwave, Jumbo, The June Brides, June
Christy, The June Spirit, Junius, Jupiter Coyote, Justin Bond & The Hungry
March Band, Justine Electra, k-Os, K-Taro, K.C.& The Sunshine Band, Kaada, Kacey Jones, Kaddisfly, Kahimi Karie, Kaito, The
Kaldirons, Kamikaze Hearts, Karen O, Karl Blau, The Karminsky Experiment,
Karrin Allyson and Katamine
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Program
note: I'll be out
of town next week, and won't be able to write or post, so the next column will
be in two weeks, and will be labeled "Weeks 24 & 25."
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