Resonance

Wall-Eyed

2009-05-21T10:19:00.002-04:00

When I was a kid in Baltimore, one of my favorite TV shows was a local offering called The Bob McAllister Show (yes, the same Bob McAllister who later became the host of Wonderama). In addition to the usual helping of cartoons, McAllister also featured live action sequences in which the star dressed up as a superhero and did various ridiculous superhero things. It was funny, in the broad, slapstick way of children's entertainment, but what I remember most the amount of time I spent trying to figure out how they did the special effects. Some were fairly easy — for the “flying” sequences, McAllister was simply strapped to a board on a truck and driven around, an gimmick any seven-year old could figure out — and some weren’t (who knew from blue screen at that age?), but overall it made for a significant formative experience. My curiosity about special effects had made me aware that storytelling was a process, and it could be just as interesting, and far more instructive, to focus on how a tale was being told than merely to follow the plot.

Whether this was the first step toward a career in criticism or simply reflected a natural predisposition to analysis is a chicken/egg question I’ll leave to others, but for whatever reason I can’t help but think about the things I listen to, look at, or read. And while that sometimes leads to understanding larger truths about a work, it can just as easily leave me irritated by questions about plausibility, logical consistency and the like. Instead of being intrigued by the mechanisms that facilitate the narrative, I’m distracted by the clanking of their machinery.

Which brings me to Wall-E, a Pixar feature many critics felt was one of last year’s best films. It’s not hard to see why; the film is visually sumptuous, consistently amusing, beautifully paced, and blessed with an appealing cast of characters. It even has a nice moral about the evils of materialism and mindless, endless consumption.

It just doesn’t make sense, is all.

Even if you ignore the way the story scales the whole of human existence down to one city and one spaceship, and accept the notion that robots not only have emotions but fall in love in accordance with heterosexual human norms, the film still asks its viewers to swallow a lot of absurdity. Some of that is simply the price of making the characters more appealing (read: human-like). For instance, there’s no reason a robot would flinch or shudder the way Wall-E does, but because those gestures telegraph emotion, they’re a useful tool for the writers to express Wall-E’s feelings. So we overlook them. There are also some elements that exists as exaggerations in the service of a larger point. Take the opening sequence, in which the camera pans across a city in which half the towering buildings turn out to be, upon closer examinations, huge piles of stacked, compressed garbage. As cartoons go, it makes a powerful image, but think about it for more than a second and it seems utterly implausible. If there really were that much garbage lying around this city, wouldn’t the streets have been several stories deep with trash? And if so, how could anyone living there have possibly made it to Buy N Large, much less to one of the massive space ships that shuttled humankind off the planet?

Still, there are other plot points that simply disregard logic. Start with the Axiom. We’re to imagine this spaceship as the ultimate luxury cruiser, offering robot-assisted entertainment and relaxation to all aboard. At a casual glance, it seems a reasonable product for Buy N Large to offer, but ask yourself: What’s the economic model here? If no one on the ship is creating income, who’s paying for everything? (And how, after seven centuries in space, could the ship still be producing tons of garbage every day? Is there some sort of matter-generating machine on board?) Even the basic social interaction seems implausible. For instance, there’s a touching sub-plot that arises after Wall-E inadvertently tears two passengers away from the all-encompassing video screens that have defined their soft, fat existence. Finally seeing the world around them, they meet and fall in love, which is apparently a novelty on the Axiom. Cute, sure, but if everyone is leading an isolated, electronically-assisted existence, where did the babies in that nursery come from? How could the ship’s population have continued for all those centuries? And, creepier still, why are there no old people or children, just infants and generic adults?

And so on. Of course, it’s not hard to find similar flaws in any other work of fantasy or speculative fiction; the variations on “there’s no sound in space” may be as infinite as space itself. In that sense, the real irony of Wall-E is that if the animation had been a more cartoon-y, I doubt I would have been bothered by half those things. Render a story in ink, with all the natural exaggerations and simplifications that come with the creations of pen and brush, and it’s amazing how easy it becomes to swallow all sorts of silliness, from interstellar railroads to galaxy-traversing battleships. Make it look real, however, and people will expect it to conform to the rules of reality.

Idol Evenings

2009-05-07T00:03:00.002-04:00

As a critic, I try to make a point of not allowing suppositions or presumptions colour my opinion. If I’m to review something, I make a point of not arriving with my mind made up ahead of time. It’s only fair.

In my personal life, I’m not always so diligent — especially when it comes to choosing how I spend my leisure time. As a result, I’ve spent the last eight years happily avoiding the phenomenon that is American Idol. Oh, sure, I’ve been aware of the show; I was familiar with the judges and the winners and the basic format, so I knew all about William Hung and Sanjaya Malakar and votefortheworst.com. But I never had to watch the show, so I didn’t.

In fairness, I should mention that I don’t watch much TV, period, and seem incapable of the sort of every-episode viewership shows like Idol demand. (It’s even worse with serials; despite valiant efforts and a lot of VCR programming, my wife and I have failed to ever see a full season of the Sopranos, MI5, or 24.) I should also add that, apart from a few performances by Jennifer Hudson and Kelly Clarkson, I’ve not been particularly impressed by the post-Idol work of any of the finalists.

After watching both of this week’s episodes, I have to say I feel utterly vindicated in my presumptions. It may have been “rock and roll week” on Idol, but the performances didn’t rock my world. If anything, they left me in despair, wondering in what world the evening’s performances would have been considered rock.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start by looking at the positives.

There’s no disputing the level of musicianship on the show. The performances may not have been to my taste, but there was no shortage of ability on stage. In fact, it would not be exaggerating to suggest that each of the contestants had, overall, better chops than the singers whose work they were covering. The one exception here would be Danny Gokey, who clearly cannot scream as well as Steven Tyler. Or James Brown, Paul McCartney, or several dozen others I could name. But the ability to scream does not seem to be something they look for in Idol contestants (as opposed, say, to in audience members), so we’ll let that pass.

So why didn’t that surfeit of technique strike me as being a virtue? Yes, Adam Lambert showed plenty of power and conviction when he sang “Whole Lotta Love,” and his high notes were rock solid. They were also carefully massaged with vibrato, something that made Lambert’s performance seem smoother and more like “great singing” than what Robert Plant did on Led Zeppelin II.

But “Whole Lotta Love” isn’t supposed to be “great singing.” It’s supposed to be raw, nakedly powerful, bluesy and elemental. Frankly, it sounds better without the vibrato, which is one reason Plant always seemed more of a great rock singer than the more polished Freddie Mercury.

And the sad thing was, Lambert’s performance was by far the best part of the show.

Allison Iraheta’s version of “Cry Baby” was an admirably athletic rendition of the Joplin oldie, and managed to convey a hint of emotion despite Iraheta’s apparent belief that feeling the blues means singing as hard as you possibly can. (Although I blame Joplin as much for this.) She was similarly full-on in her duet performance with Lambert, but at least the material — Foghat’s hard-grinding “Slow Ride” — supported her exertion. She shouldn’t have been cut, but was.

Kris Allen, who looks like a K-Mart knock off of the young Michael J. Fox, sang “Come Together” as if he’d never heard the Beatles’ version. That’s some sort of accomplishment, surely, but not one I’d care to applaud. The original was preternaturally cool, twisting a Chuck Berry car race lyric into a series of stoned non sequiturs, but Allen felt more comfortable playing it hot and funky, and ended up making the classic cover band mistake of ruining a tune by trying to improve on it. He also joined Gokey for a trainwreck rendition of the Styx tune “Renegade,” and let’s be honest here — if “Renegade” is what this show considers “classic rock,” no wonder I didn’t like it. Still, Allen made it through both looking cute and Fox-y, and that was enough to ensure his return.

As for Gokey, well … words fail me. I understand that he’s a big audience favourite, but I don’t get it, at least not on a musical level. The rasp in his voice, which presumably passes for character in Idol-land, actually worked against the melody in “Dream On,” and there was a strange tenseness to the performance, as if Gokey saw the song as some sort of terrifying personal challenge — which, given how he handled the final note, was very likely the case. Factor in his less-than-awesome share of the Styx tune, and I came away from Tuesday’s show wondering how this guy ever made it to the finals.

Then, on Wednesday, Ryan Seacrest showed one of the Ford “music videos” (read: commercials) the finalists had made, and suddenly all became clear. Gokey has a perfect jingle-singer voice, gritty enough to vaguely recall Michael McDonald, but otherwise utterly lacking in character. And sure enough, each of the others sounded equally at home in the ad, hitting their mark every time and singing with the perfect degree of bland professionalism. It was as if they’d each found their calling. As Seacrest might have put it, they were home.

Live or Memorex

2009-05-05T11:16:00.002-04:00

There's a fair amount of footage online from Britney Spears' concert at Mohegan Sun, where a fan got onstage during "Womanizer." The great thing about this clip (the kid turns up at 2:20) is that Spears is clearly screaming at the intruder, yet no scream is audible.

Oh, for the good old days, when singers at least sang along to their pre-recorded tracks...

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Tomorrow's fish and chips paper

2009-03-28T16:28:00.001-04:00

Blender was shuttered this week. The news wasn’t a huge surprise, given that Folio had reported in January that ad pages there were down 30.6 percent. Not a promising indicator, that. The issue currently on newsstands weighs in 72 pages, which is pretty close to a “mayday!” signal. So it was hardly surprising to hear that Blender’s new owners, Alpha Media Group, were pulling the plug.

What may come as a surprise to some is that Blender was a failure despite having a paid circulation of roughly 780,000. It wasn’t that the magazine couldn’t find readers; the problem was that it couldn’t find advertisers who wanted to reach those readers. One of the ironies of magazine publishing is that the larger your circulation, the more dependent you are on advertising, as printing and distribution costs become too high to be covered by the cover price. That’s why niche magazines with small circulation often survive while larger, mass-market titles fail.

I worked at Blender for about seven months, until I quit to move to Canada. I edited the reviews section, which was one of the magazine’s strongest features. Unlike most American pop magazines, which seem to treat the reviews section as an afterthought, Blender recognized reviews as a major selling point. Not everyone agreed with their approach, of course, and even writers who contributed to the section complained about the enforced brevity of the reviews (110 words while I was there, although they later ballooned up to 135). But there’s something about the discipline of short reviews that really focuses criticism, requiring the writer to make a point clearly and succinctly.

Thinking about the demise of Blender left me wondering just how many now-defunct publications I’ve written for over the years, so I decided to assemble a list. It’s roughly chronological and as complete as I could manage, although I’m sure I’m forgetting something:

New York Rocker
The Baltimore News-American
Musician
Record
BuZZ
Standing Ovation
Request
Model
Guitar for the Practicing Musician
Fi
Guitar World Acoustic
Tracks
Bang
Bass Guitar
Blender

A little knowledge...

2008-08-06T14:16:00.003-04:00

A little while ago, I came across an entry posted by Scott Woods at Rockcritics.com called Meme of the Day: It’s All About the Music, Man… It was essentially a selection of contrasting quotes, taken from the website’s archive of rock critic interviews, on whether or not it’s important for rock critics to know something about music. Naturally, there were quotes both pro and con, and probably the smartest comment was Jon Pareles’ commonsensical observation that, “A critic should learn as much about music as possible, from any angle that seems interesting music theory, history, psychology, literature, theater, acoustics, religion, dance, anthropology, film theory, pharmacology, economics, fashion, linguistics, electronics, sports, and all the other things that touch on music.” (And yes, for what it’s worth, I’m among the critics quoted.)

Anyway, I happened to be reading this while listening to listening to James Brown, and as such flashed on a comment that has bothered me for years. The piece was an essay Lester Bangs wrote decades ago for Musician magazine, called Free Jazz/Punk Rock. At one point, he’s discussing alto saxophonist James Chance, of the Contortions. Here’s the quote:

“And come to think of it, his sax work has a precursor in James Brown, too: that guy who stood up in the middle of the title cut on Brown's Super Bad album and took that horrible raggedy solo which probably got him fired.”

If you have only a passing familiarity with Brown’s “Super Bad,” it’s easy to see what Bangs is driving at. The solo, by Robert McCullough, is overblown and frenetic, eschewing the usual blues licks for something approximating John Coltrane’s “sheets of sound” approach. Granted, McCullough played tenor, not alto, and his solo lacked the honking cacophony of Chance’s playing, but the point is clear enough.

Still, the last four words bugged me. Sure, I recognized that Bangs was riffing off Brown’s reputation as a disciplinarian who fined players for bad notes, but come on — what sort of control freak would fire a guy for “a horrible raggedy solo” and then release the track anyway? Logic should tell us that had that solo been a firing offence, we never would have heard it; the take would have been junked, and someone else’s solo would have been on the single.

Especially since the producer of “Super Bad” was James Brown himself.

For the record, McCullough — who joined Brown’s band at roughly the same time as the Collins brothers, Bootsy and Phelps — appeared on at least three more sessions with Brown after cutting “Super Bad.” He was ultimately replaced, in 1971, by St. Clair Pinckney. So no, he didn’t get fired for the solo.

But the most pointed refutation of Bangs’ point is on the record itself. Roughly four minutes into the original single, as McCullough starts in on a second solo, we hear Brown urging him on: “Come on! Come on, Robert! Come on, brother! Blow it, Robert! Blow me some Trane, brother!” How Bangs could have missed that is hard to imagine — perhaps he only half-remembered the track, and didn’t have time to re-listen before filing his piece? — but Brown’s exhortation to “blow me some Trane” suggests that he not only approved of what McCullough was playing, but was encouraging him to push the envelope.

Which brings me back to Pareles’ point. A writer who tries to “learn as much about music as possible” will be less inclined to let hyperbole lead to nonsensical statements, and that can only strengthen his or her writing. Had Bangs grasped that James Brown actually intended to merge avant-garde jazz and funk on “Super Bad,” he might have made connections that would have lead to a deeper understanding of the music, and a better essay overall. Instead, by assuming it to be an aberration, he squandered any potential insight on a joke. And not a particularly funny one, at that.

The curse of celebrity?

2008-07-31T16:18:00.003-04:00

"WASHINGTON (AdAge.com) -- Sen. John McCain's campaign today wasn't content with simply launching a new attack on Democratic rival Sen. Barack Obama. The McCain team held a conference to further accuse Mr. Obama of being 'the world's biggest celebrity.'"

Aha -- that's the problem with Obama. People like him. And if the last eight years have taught us anything, being liked is not part of the job of being president.

Coming soon, the new campaign slogan:

Vote for someone nobody likes. McCain '08.

Better Late Than...

2006-09-22T16:41:00.000-04:00

This is a review from the Guelph Jazz Festival which was to have run in the Globe and Mail on September 11, but got bumped due to coverage of the Toronto International Film Festival. Not that I'm complaining Â— the review of the Virgin Music Festival was bumped back, and coverage of the Canadian Opera Company's Ring Cycle and new opera house opening was also curtailed. There's only so much space, after all.

Still, it seems a shame to let the thing disappear into the ether. So here's what it would have said had the festival run some other week:

Steve Coleman and Five Elements/Gyorgy Szabados & Vladimir Tarsov
At the Riverrun Centre in Guelph Saturday

Reviewed by J.D. Considine

In the ’60s, after Ornette Coleman freed jazz from the shackles of chord changes, the avant garde embraced the notion of "free improvisation,"in which musicians spontaneously created music without any preset plans or material. Although occasionally transcendent, the results were more often chaotic, coasting on energy while studiously ignoring recognizable melody.

Perhaps that's why a growing trend in today's avant garde integrates pre-prepared themes and structures into what is otherwise an improvised performance. Steve Coleman, whose group Five Elements headlined a double bill at the Guelph Jazz Festival on Saturday, calls this collaborative approach "spontaneous composition," and it has huge advantages over the free-flowing cacophony of old.

But simply having a handful of themes and an organizing structure is not enough. It'’s also important to have a sense of balance and dynamics, and in that sense Coleman and crew would have done well to study their opening act, Hungarian pianist Gyorgy Szabados and Russian drummer Vladimir Tarasov.

Szabados and Tarasov (who were making their North American debut as a duo) are an unlikely pair of jazz dynamos. Largely unknown outside of Europe, the two look more like aging academics than cutting-edge improvisers, and are as grounded in the European classical tradition as they are in jazz. Indeed, elements of what they played — particularly the eloquent silences and melodic use of percussion — owed more to composer Pierre Boulez than to bebop.

Even so, the two made it clear that improvised composition doesn'’t have to sound random to maintain a sense of frisson. Although their hour-long first selection had its moments of roiling rhythms and untrammeled dissonance, there were also regularly recurring themes, ranging from a surprisingly tuneful triplet figure on Tarasov’s tom-toms to a vigorous, two-handed march from Szabados.

Not only did those elements anchor the performance in recognizable melody, their use subtly altered the way Szabados and Tarasov listened and responded to one another. There was a genuine sense of play to their interaction, a joyful intertwining of wit and discovery that drew the audience in and brought them to their feet, demanding an encore.

Coleman’s set, by contrast, seemed more like homework than recess. With the six members of Five Elements arranged in a semi-circle across the stage, each reading from a thick sheaf of sheet music, they looked ready for serious business, and after an opening salvo from Coleman'’s alto, serious business was what we got.

At first, the group — which, in addition to Coleman’s alto, included trumpet, trombone, bass, drums and voice —— focused on pulsing, rhythmically intricate drones (imagine Philip Glass as interpreted by a college lab band). Various solos emerged, and then a new sequence announced by a sort of disjointed bebop melody. Many minutes later, a new pulse pattern was introduced. And so on, for 90 straight minutes, with only occasional changes in tempo, dynamics or mood.

There were some standout performances. Singer Jen Shyu did an exceptional job of making the voice seem as much a jazz instrument as any horn, and her wordless improvisations were beautifully phrased. Trombonist Tim Albright was a revelation, delivering slyly virtuosic lines while maintaining gutbucket immediacy, while trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson occasionally evoked the ghost of Booker Little. And Coleman himself remains a strikingly original voice on alto, being both less harmonically oblique than Anthony Braxton and more obviously bebop influenced than Ornette Coleman.

But those bright moments accounted for maybe 40 minutes of the two hours Coleman and Five Elements played. The rest was cluttered and monotonous, offering little textural or harmonic variety (would it have killed them to change key occasionally?). It was, in short, a performance by the group and for the group, and the steady exodus during the second number spoke to just how much that self-indulgence tried the audience’s patience.

Swell Maps

2006-08-22T11:08:00.000-04:00

Has anyone else noticed that Google Maps is something less than totally reliable?

A couple weeks ago, we were going from Ajaccio (on Corsica) to Nice. We were supposed to depart from Ajaccio at in the early evening, but because of rough seas the ferry company loaded us onto a bus and drove us halfway across Corsica to I’lle Rousse, where we were put on different ferry (and still had rough seas). Thanks to the unscheduled detour, our arrival in Nice was pushed back several hours, and it was nearly 3:00 a.m. when we staggered off the ferry and began to make our way to the hotel we’d booked. My wife had got directions off Google Maps, so when we got to the ferry terminal’s exit, she consulted her printout and announced we were to turn right.

Long story short, we should have gone left. Google showed our hotel as being well along the Blvd. Carnot, and so we set off to lug our bags and baby up the distressingly steep Avenue de Saint-Aignan (imagine the author as a rather cranky pack mule, pushing a stroller). But when we got to the point indicated by Google, we found their map was about 40 addresses off — in fact, the hotel was at the bottom of the hill we’d just climbed, a short walk in the opposite direction from where we turned right.

It was 3:30 a.m. when we finally staggered to our room. Admittedly, the Google-derived wrong turn probably only cost us 20 minutes, but with a baby to put to bed and a 9:30 a.m. train to catch, that 20 minutes amounted to eight percent of our night’s rest. Grrr.

Now, I’m not going to be an idiot and insist that Google owes us 20 minutes’ sleep, but I am curious if others have had similar experiences. How far off was the map? Did you complain to Google? Is there a corrections mechanism?

In the Air Tonight

2006-08-15T22:28:00.000-04:00

Having just flown back to Canada from Paris during the latest air terrorist panic, I have to ask: If the airlines are so keen to keep bombs off jetliners, why did my flight show the Steve Martin movie R.V.?

Murder By Numbers

2006-06-13T16:03:00.000-04:00

One of the bigger hits at the recent EMP Pop Conference was a paper by Randall Roberts called Dave Marsh-ing My Mellow: The Rolling Stone Record Guide and the Creation of the Canon. The talk, which was accompanied by a very ambitious PowerPoint presentation, attempted to use statistics to expose the biases that underlay the first two Rolling Stone guides (and by extension, the whole Rolling Stone rock aesthetic).

Roberts’ talk was hot for three reasons. First, it addressed rockism — which by the last day had become the unofficial theme of the conference — without resorting to any of the usual popist rhetoric or counter-arguments. Second, it was quite funny, and not just because of the PowerPoint. And third, it involved multi-colored graphs derived from spreadsheets — a labor-intensive, number-heavy approach that was well beyond the lyric parsing that makes up most rock writing.

But that’s the problem. Having been on the same panel as Roberts (delivering a talk called My JPOP Problem — and Yours), I greatly enjoyed his delivery. But re-reading the paper, which he has posted here, I found myself thinking that, amusing though it is, his argument ultimately doesn’t add up, despite having been so warmly received. If the stereotype of rock critics as former English majors is even partly true, then it shouldn’t be a surprise that innumeracy runs rampant in the field, and that my colleagues would accept Roberts’ analysis so uncritically. To quote a recent Dilbert strip, “And you know it’s accurate because I used math.”

So let’s look at the way Roberts used math, and discuss what he could have done but didn’t.

Before proceeding, I should mention that I’m not exactly neutral on the topic of the Rolling Stone guides. I wrote for three of the four volumes (only David McGhee has contributed to all four), and The New Rolling Stone Record Guide, which provided the grist for Roberts’ mill, was the first time anything I wrote ever wound up in a book. Roberts quotes me twice in his paper, but in neither instance were my words mocked or misrepresented. So this isn’t personal.

What bothers me about the essay is that Roberts promises a lot — for instance, that “[b]y understanding the unconscious biases of the editors, we can more fully understand what exactly we were taught, and how some of our pleasures came with the added baggage of shame”— and delivers little. His graphics may be colorful and his observations droll, but the points he makes are too often irrelevant or misleading, Worse, there are many larger points he could have made, but didn’t.

Fortunately, he describes this paper as “something I’m expanding/revising,” so perhaps a later version will address these issues.

Let’s start with the fact that the statistical analysis tells us nothing about “the unconscious biases” Roberts seeks to reveal. There is, for example, a bright, colorful pie chart breaking down the artists included in the second record guide by race. Because this follows by several paragraphs a sentence in which Roberts writes, “It didn’t cross my mind that of the 52 reviewers who appraised the records, only three were women, nor did I question how many black critics chimed in,” it’s easy to assume that the race chart reflects the bias of the mostly male, universally white reviewers.

But does it? One of the things the editors — Dave Marsh, who Roberts routinely castigates, and John Swenson, who Roberts largely ignores — make clear is that there wasn’t much filtering going on in choosing who got covered in the book. Unlike the Trouser Press or Spin record guides, which assiduously excluded albums that didn’t match their aesthetic criteria, the first two Rolling Stone record guides took the attitude that if it was in print and wasn’t jazz or classical, it got reviewed. (Later Rolling Stone guides were much more discriminating.) As such, Roberts’ pie chart is less a reflection of bias in the media than of bias in the recording industry — a different issue altogether.

Then there’s the notion of artistic bias. Roberts’ stats are derived from the star ratings. But because he sticks to the blunt tool of averaging (adding stars together, then dividing by the number of albums), the conclusions he derives are limited. Even so, he presents them as a sort of scientific insight — the Beatles, he reports. “were .8 of a star better than the Stones.” In other words, “You know it’s accurate because I used math.”

If, on the other hand, Roberts calculated the standard deviation of the ratings in a particular genre, as well as the averages, he would have a much stronger tool for deducing evidence of bias. Standard deviation reflects the amount of variance within a collection of ratings. If the ratings are all close together, the deviation is small; if the ratings vary greatly, then the deviation is large. If, say, there were a large number of blues artists whose albums averaged 3.5 stars with little deviation, and a large number of MOR artists whose albums averaged 0.25 stars with little deviation, one might deduce that The New Rolling Stone Record Guide values blues more than MOR.

Or not. My wife, who is a mathematician, points out that “using means and standard deviations to look at these things depends on two things: 1) the album guide reviewers were randomly chosen from the population of pop reviewers; 2) when the editors assigned the review jobs, they did so randomly; and 3) there is a large set of data. On this third point, whether or not there are small-sample issues would be up to Roberts to determine; he has the data and he'd have to look in a stats book to learn how to test whether or not his data set is a small one.” Of course, the reviewers were not chosen at random, and while there was some element of chance in doling out the assignments — reviewers had some choice in their assignments, but that choice whttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifas limited by what had already been claimed by others — it hardly fits the classic statistics model.

She suggests using histograms to graph the ratings. (You can read about them here and here.) When a histogram graphs a genuinely random or unbiased collection of data, it produces something that looks like a bell curve. When the data points are loaded with extremes — for instance, a ranking of NBA salaries or of biased reviews — the result looks quite unlike a bell curve.

Another approach Roberts might have taken would have been to look at the extreme ends of the ratings system -- the five star and no star reviews. He does make a stab at this, writing that, “Seventeen women released 5-star records — five percent of the 378 total masterpieces in the canon.” He also reports that the Rolling Stones’ “5-star ratio was a mere 19 percent.” But that doesn’t really tell us much.

But if one were to sort the artists who got five-star ratings by how many they got — one, two, three or more —then track that data by genre, the resulting map of “indispensable” albums would provide a fair representation of the Rolling Stone canon. Seeing how they’re distributed across genres would say a lot about what kind of music the reviewers valued most.

It would also be interesting to repeat the exercise with those albums deemed “worthless” — the no-star recordings. This would provide insights simple averaging can’t. After all, an artist whose sole release gets a bullet and one whose five album catalog all get bullets would each end up with the same average (0 stars). But writing off five albums conveys a level of contempt well beyond what Roberts describes as acts being “swatted away like flies and flicked out the window.” Again, analyzing that data by genre would say a lot about the kinds of music the reviewers were incapable of respecting.

There are problems with Roberts’ paper beyond the math. His prose manages to be both purple and clunky (“The opus that is The Rolling Stone Record Guide begins on page one…”), and he has the unfortunate habit of making his points through misleadingly selective quotes. For instance, he writes, “How did English-speaking bands line up against one other? Rolling Stone has an answer: ‘At their best, Chilliwack was the finest Canadian rock band, outrocking BTO and outwriting Burton Cummings.’” When he read that line at EMP, it got a big laugh, in part because people found it amusing to think anyone would rank the near-forgotten (in the US) Chilliwack above BTO. What the review (by long-time Globe and Mail reviewer Alan Neister, who really does know Canadian rock) went on to say was this: “But a lack of consistency kept it from international success, and only these albums remain in print,” A bit less risible when you get the whole thought, eh?

Roberts also tends to personify the views advanced by the book as reflecting the taste and will of Marsh, as if Swenson and the other 52 reviewers were merely standing on the sidelines. While talking about the reviewers’ distaste for metal, he writes, “Marsh’s Hammer of Justice came down hard on Motorhead.” Unfortunately, the review he quotes is credited to Malu Halasa, not Dave Marsh.

Such sloppiness is repeated when Roberts turns his attention to the guide’s coverage of hip-hop. He writes, “By 1982, the Sugarhill Gang, Grandmaster Flash, the Tom Tom Club, Fab Five Freddy, Kurtis Blow and Trouble Funk had released 12-inches, but the Guide ignored them.” Well, no. First off, the book states in the introduction that it chose not to review singles (which is what 12-inches were). Secondly, although Kurtis Blow’s singles may have been ignored, his two albums weren’t. They are reviewed by Dave Marsh, on page 47.

The last point I’d like to make has to do with the notion that the Rolling Stone record and album guides were intended to reflect and propagate the official party line of what Roberts calls “the Empire of Rolling Stone.” Many of the contributors to the guides were not regular reviewers for the magazine, and I’m unaware of any effort during the compilation of those books to ensure that the guide rating matched the magazine rating. Hell, many of the rankings changed from volume to volume, sometimes drastically. There may have been biases at work in the reviews, but it’s probably overstating the case to ascribe them specifically to Dave Marsh or Rolling Stone.

Better Late Than...

2006-05-07T09:53:00.000-04:00

One of the vagaries of print journalism is that sometimes there simply isn't enough room to get everything into print in a timely matter. What follows is a review I wrote for the Globe and Mail of Gary Morgan and PanAmerica! that met just such a fate.

Gary Morgan and PanAmericana!
At the Montreal Bistro in Toronto on Monday, April 24

Reviewed by J.D. Considine

If there’s any truth to the saying “talent will out,” then there will undoubtedly come a day when Gary Morgan is widely recognized as one of the brightest big band composer/arrangers in the business.

For now, however, the former Torontonian is merely one of the better-kept secrets in jazz. Based in Manhattan, he has been directing and composing for a Latin big band he calls PanAmericana! (yes, the exclamation mark is part of the name). On Monday, he brought his book and a select group of Toronto musicians to the Montreal Bistro, where they blew the roof off the joint for two sets. It was the sort of performance that makes you understand why Morgan feels entitled to that exclamation mark.

There’s no denying the guy’s mastery of his trade. Where many big band arrangements seldom move beyond the primary colours of saxophones, trombones and trumpets, Morgan’s charts work from a surprisingly varied and subtle palette, both by adding less common voices (two French horns as well as having the saxophonists double on flute, piccolo and bass clarinet) to the mix, and by taking a more orchestral approach to the ensemble, so that the instrumental voices are woven together in a rich tapestry of sound.

Moreover, because his PanAmericana! project draws from a variety of Latin musical traditions, Morgan has also mastered the art of writing rhythm — samba, bembe, beguine, you name it. As such, his charts are not only written around very explicit beats, they use changes in the rhythmic pulse as part of the compositional development, as well as additional fuel for improvisation.

Although Morgan’s crew had only a few hours of rehearsal, they performed with such authority you’d have thought this was their regular Monday night gig. It helped that Morgan had assembled an ace rhythm section, with Hilario Duran on piano, Roberto Occhipinti on electric bass, and powerhouse drummer Mark Kelso augmented by two percussionists. But it wasn’t just the rhythm section; the whole band seemed not only to get what Morgan was aiming for, but responded enthusiastically to his direction.

This wasn’t easy music, either. Morgan’s arrangement of Deanna Witkowski’s Happening At Once, for instance, was built over two distinct rhythmic ideas, one a loping, West African-derived 6/8, the other a more conventional Cuban pulse. On top of all that, there was some delightfully kaleidoscopic interplay between the brass and reeds, which sketched a harmonic structure every bit as intricate as the rhythm. Not only was it played beautifully, but there was an illuminating contrast in Morgan’s soloists, with tenor saxophonist Quinsin Nachoff varying his phrasing in response to the rippling shifts within the percussion, while Kevin Turcotte’s trumpet opted for a straight, boppish line over the roiling rhythm.

There was also a wonderfully inventive treatment of the Cole Porter chestnut I Concentrate on You, which opened with gorgeous pedal-point harmonies before slipping into a sly, sophisticated beguine. Mark Promane offered a wonderfully tart solo on alto saxophone, but the highlight of the performance was probably the arrangement itself, which loaded increasingly dense harmonies into each verse so that Porter’s habit of ending a minor-chord line with a sunny major-chord resolution took on additional impact with each iteration. Brilliant stuff.

By the time they got to the hymn-like opening of Milton Nascimento’s Vera Cruz at the end of the first set, Morgan had made it clear that he deserves to be thought of in the same terms as classic big band composers as Chico O’Farrill and Neil Hefti. Here’s hoping that doesn’t stay a secret.

Klactoveesedstene

2006-04-01T14:41:00.000-05:00

A joke:

The drugs having finally worked their way through his system, Charlie Parker returns from the grave and announces he’s going to start playing again — once he gets his alto out of hock. The news sets off a media sensation, and soon offers are pouring in from various firms wanting to “present” Parker’s return. Ultimately, Pepsi (hoping to boost sales by luring Boomers away from Starbucks) makes the highest offer, and Bird is set to make his comeback in a Pepsi ad.

Soon, it’s the big day. An all-star rhythm section has been assembled, a string section has been hired, arrangements have been written, and a very select group of guests have assembled to hear the first Charlie Parker solo in over 50 years. Finally, the cameras are in place, the microphones are ready, and Parker enters the studio to tumultuous applause.

He puts horn to mouth, nods to the conductor, and the music begins. The audience is transported, as half a century of bottled-up improvisation flows into the room. When the music ends, there’s profound silence, then riotous applause. Some of the guests and most of the musicians are in tears. Parker beams.

Then, from the PA, comes the voice of Pepsi’s creative director. “That’s great man, great. Just incredible,” he says. “Now for the second take, could you make it sound more like David Sanborn?”

V too, Schneider

2006-03-28T20:04:00.000-05:00

I reread Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta for the dozenth time last week, and was as before both dazzled and disappointed. Dazzled by the richness of the world evoked, and the way Moore plays against (stereo)type in casting his hero; disappointed by the slack predictability of the ending, and the fact that V’s world ends not with a bang, but a whimper (No. 10 Downing St. notwithstanding). I shouldn't be surprised, of course, as superhero fiction seems to be, almost by definition, more about premise than conclusion. But still — if V exists as a practical criticism of English nationalism and the fascistic undercurrents it harbors, its “rip it up and start again” solution seems, well, depressingly glib.

But hey, it’s just a comic, right?

Besides, whatever problems I have with the comic are nothing compared to the problems I expect from the film. Not to pre-judge the thing, but the ads alone remind me of what it is I find so tedious about film versions of comics: The fight scenes.

In David Lloyd’s rendering, the fights are brief and decisive. When V goes to Westminster Abbey to attack Bishop Lilliman, his battle with the guards takes only a single page, and half is mere set-up. In the first frame, we see the startled face of a guard. In the next, we see V, running low, headed for the gate. The third frame echoes the first, giving us V’s implacable mask. Then, a picture from near ground level, with V’s running legs in the foreground while, not far in the background, the guards reach for their sidearms. Then a frame showing an automatic pistol being drawn, followed by an image of V, knives out and running. Next, one hand dropping a pistol. A different hand thrown up, its pistol flying free. Then, finally, the bodies of the guards on the pavement, as V’s cape trails out of sight.

If you ignore the text – which is Lilliman praying, the words placed for ironic affect — the page takes mere seconds to convey its information. It’s fast and brutal and conveys the ferocity of the attack, but because operates mainly through speed and suggestion, it neither lingers on nor wallows in the violence of V’s foray.

Judging from the ads, the cinematic V for Vengeance not only plays out the fights in real time, but fetishizes the inhuman speed and agility with which V dispatches his foes. Of course, that’s to be expected from the guys who gave us The Matrix, but the film not only glorifies the violence (by turning it into a sort of hyper-athletic spectator sport) but encourages the viewers to root for V.

Thing is, I’m not sure that rooting for V is what the story demands. Ultimately, V himself is a cipher – that’s part of the reason the ending works the way it does, with Evie imagining various faces underneath the mask — and one whose moral stature is, high-flown talk aside, deliberately ambiguous. Like Delia Surrage, the former Larkhill Prison doctor, we’re caught by his charisma and fascinated by what he can do, but those who end up admiring him probably aren’t getting the point of Moore’s story.

All of which makes it easy for me to understand why Moore would have insisted his name not be associated with the movie. There are some stories that remain best told in non-moving pictures, and V For Vendetta is one.

Girls On Film

2006-03-18T09:28:00.001-05:00

From a recent New York Times article about David Joseph and his porn company Red Light District, which brought us the Paris Hilton sex tape (and is trying to bring us the Kid Rock/Scott Stapp groupie tape):

Even if he never gets a chance to sell the video. Mr. Joseph is already chasing another celebrity tape. He would not name names, but did drop hints. "It's a girl," he said, smiling mischievously, "and she's in the music business."

And who might this girl be? Britney Spears? Christina Aguilera? Lil’ Kim? A Simpson? Let the guessing begin.

ZZZZZZZZZZZ...

2006-01-19T19:30:00.000-05:00

What, is it January already? How did that happen?

Sorry for the long snooze. Look for (actual) new content soon — presumably when I don't have a squirming five-month old on my lap.

Madonna's Confessions on a Dance Floor...

2005-11-21T16:59:00.000-05:00

... is the best Kylie Minogue album ever.

Cat Heroin

2005-11-13T13:49:00.000-05:00

A couple weeks ago, the local grocer had a special on what looked like a new kind of cat treat. Because my cat Miles will occasionally turn up his nose at kibble (imagine!), treats are a handy tool for keeping the little fella fed. So I figured I would try the new stuff.

Turns out I should have read the label more carefully. What I bought wasn’t cat treats but very fancy moist food called Iams Select Bites. (The fact that the labels mention “gravy” and “sauce” should have tipped me off, I know.) Worse, Miles decided within his first nibble that this was The Best Cat Food Ever, and could he please have some more. NOW, dammit! And it isn’t even the meat he wants — mainly, he just licks off the gravy and leaves the rest.

In the past, when he’s become obsessed to some new food, it proves a short cycle and he grows bored of it after a week or so. Not this time. All I have to do is merely move in the general direction of the kitchen, and he’s at my feet, looking up at me with a plaintive expression and meowing piteously. If that doesn’t work, he tries tripping me.

I could just stop buying the stuff, but Miles has been my cat for 18 years now, and has earned a few indulgences. So for now, I’m stuck buying Iams. Still, let this serve as a warning to the cat owners among you: Shop carefully, or your kitty may end up with a two-dollar a day habit!

Everything You Know Is Wrong

2005-10-15T16:06:00.000-04:00

One thing that really frustrates me about many reference works on rock history is how frequently they offer misinformation. Not on the big stuff, of course, but too often the tiny details that flesh the story out are, frankly, wrong.

Worse, once in print bad info has a tendency to get repeated. Robbie Robertson was in Toronto recently, promoting the Band retrospective A Musical History, and complained that the liner notes to the previous Band box, Across the Great Divide, was “just all wrong. I couldn’t relate to it, because that’s not right, that’s not true, that’s not it… Over the years, there has been a lot of things written and stuff that’s just not factual. And I thought, God, there are people out there who read these things, because that’s what’s out there, so that’s what they believe. Let’s straighten that out. Let’s make it so that’s not a problem anymore.”

A day later, as I was turning that interview into a piece for the Globe and Mail, I re-read Greil Marcus’ essay on the Band from Mystery Train, where I came upon the following footnote on the group’s pre-history: “The names of those bands are too good to leave out: The Robots, the Consuls, Thumper and the Trombones…” Now, here’s version from the Musical History liner notes: “…Robbie and the Robots, Thumper and the Trambones, Little Caesar and the Consuls…” Minor differences all, and yet they make a world of difference. (Little Caesar and the Consuls is much wittier than the Consuls.)

That’s not to harsh on Marcus, but it does speak to the primary weakness of much rock history: It’s based on interviews with the music press, interviews that by and large simply take the musician at his word (or, at least, as much of his word as the reporter can make out). Trouble is, musicians aren’t always the most reliable sources. Sometimes they forget details, or exaggerate to make a better story, or make stuff up to reinforce a myth. Hell, sometimes they lie simply because it’s more fun. Stan Ridgway once told me that he loved speaking with the English press, because you could tell them anything and they’d print it. So he’d make up ridiculous stories involving movie stars and other celebrities, and sure enough, they’d turn up in print a few days or weeks later.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with daily paper reporters on short deadline filing stories that essentially amount to This Is What the Person Said. The news is frequently like that. Unfortunately, where news reporters sometimes follow up their quote-driven stories with investigative pieces that confirm or contradict what was said, pop music writers almost never do. Worse, other writers then reiterate those quotes without bothering to check their veracity, and before you know it, conversational bullshit has been enshrined as historical fact.

Fortunately, that is beginning to change. Writers as far afield as Charles Cross (in his Kurt Cobain biography Heavier Than Heaven), Ned Sublette (in his towering study Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo) and Jeff Chang (in his award-winning Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation) have significantly raised the bar for pop music books by doing the sort of research traditional historians and biographers have always done. Of course, correcting all the misinformation floating through the pop world would be a task on par with cleaning the Stables of Augeas, especially given the ease with which bad “facts” proliferate on the internet. But it’s worth trying to maintain standards, and double-checking to be sure the story you’re reading is the right one.

Sheer Heart Attack

2005-09-30T12:22:00.000-04:00

Rock fans have laughed at the weird stuff rock stars demand backstage — what’s known in the trade as “contract riders” — ever since David Lee Roth revealed that Van Halen requested a bowl of M&Ms every night with all the brown ones removed. As you’d expect, demands since then have gotten both sillier and more extravagant, as a quick survey of the riders posted by The Smoking Gun indicate.

Still, nothing on that list prepared me for this little bombshell, dropped by Our Lady Peace frontman Raine Maida. His band opened for the Stones at Toronto’s Air Canada Centre, and as he told the student paper at Villanova, “They had a defibrillator backstage for Keith Richards — or just for whoever was feeling it at the time. I'm serious.”

It sounds like a joke, I know. In fact, there was a Rolling Stones defibrillator joke on the internet weeks before the Maida quote turned up, one of many “gosh, they’re old gags” that trailed in the wake of the current Stones tour. Fortunately, we’ll likely be spared the “Start Me Up” association in real life, if only because they’ve already licensed that one to Microsoft.

Shame, Shame, Shame

2005-09-27T12:43:00.000-04:00

Remember all those horror stories that floated out of post-Katrina New Orleans? The murder and child rapes that turned the Superdome into a terrordome? The rampaging gangs and piles of corpses that made the convention center seem like a rain-soaked corner of hell?

Well, guess what — they didn’t happen. According to the New Orleans Times Picayune (with more from the Los Angeles Times), workers cleaning up both sites found no evidence of widespread murder. In fact, they only found evidence of one possible murder, which will require further forensic investigation to confirm. Obviously, evidence of rape is much harder to come by, but even that seems to have been considerably less common than originally reported.

Good news, then, for those worried that those cracks in the foundation of the American Dream might bring the whole edifice down. Still, a question remains: Why was everyone so ready to believe the horror stories? Is it because raping, murdering and pillaging are the kind of behaviors most people expect of poor blacks in America?

And do I even need to point out how unspeakably racist such an assumption is?

Fake Book

2005-09-08T13:43:00.000-04:00

On August 30, while much of New Orleans was underwater, George W. Bush was photographed playing a guitar given to him by country singer Mark Wills. Numerous pundits with a firm grasp of the obvious, seized upon this to draw comparisons with the Emperor Nero, who allegedly played fiddle while Rome burned. (Never mind that fiddles didn’t actually exist back then; “fiddled” sounds better than “played the lyre.”)

What bugs me about the photo, however, is that it gets described as showing the president “playing guitar,” when at best he’s only posing, trying to look like he’s a-pickin’. How do I know? Just look at his left hand. Like many a duff guitarist, he’s formed the hand shape for an open-G chord — except that instead of having his fingers in place to play G (third fret on the lower E string) and B (second fret on the A string), he’s a fret off, at G-sharp and C. His little finger may be adding an A (fifth fret on the upper E string), but it’s hard to be certain. In any case, were he actually to strum that guitar, the result would be utter dischord, revealing him as someone who doesn’t know diddley about guitar. Instead, he poses quietly, and only instrument geeks like me notice.

I don’t mean to single out the president on this, because instrumental fakery is disturbingly widespread. One of my favorite moments in Oliver Stone’s The Doors is a rehearsal session in which the band is ostensibly learning “Light My Fire.” One of the band calls out the changes, and as he does we watch John Densmore (Kevin Dillon) fingering the chords on guitar. And getting most of them wrong.

Even when the actors know what they’re doing, mistakes can happen. Taylor Hackford was justifiably proud of the fact that Jamie Foxx, who plays Ray Charles in the bioflick Ray, is a trained pianist who didn’t have to fake the keyboard parts. Indeed, the credits feature an overhead shot of Foxx’s hands accurately miming to the classic recording of “What’d I Say” on a Fender Rhodes. But as all vintage keyboard buffs know, “What’d I Say” doesn’t use a Rhodes — it’s a Wurlitzer electric on the track.

I know, I know — this is precisely the sort nerdery that gets lampooned in The Rock Snob’s Dictionary (although why actually knowing something about the craft of music-making counts as snobbery is itself rant material). But every time I see a model mishandle a prop trombone, or watch an actor flailing his or her fingers ineffectually along a saxophone, I’m reminded of how distanced the average person is from the art of music. It’s depressing to think that for many educated people, being able to play an instrument is as much a lost craft as spinning wool or carpentry.

In that sense, having Dubya pose as a guitarist is just one more example of how people get the government they deserve. As if another such example were needed.

All Wet

2005-09-02T18:07:00.000-04:00

It would be hard to imagine anyone following the story out of New Orleans without feeling some measure of shock, pity or dismay. Even with headlines screaming “Anarchy!” (to cite today’s Toronto Star), newspapers can hardly be accused of exaggerating the horror of the situation. Indeed, one of the scariest things about reports from the Crescent City is how essentially anecdotal the news has been. There have been unconfirmed talk of rapes and murders, of bodies in the streets, of thousands of casualties, but so far the authorities have been mum when it comes to concrete details. In this case, no news is definitely not good news; if anything, it suggests we’ve barely glimpsed the tip of this iceberg.

Much has been made about the fact that, to a very real degree, this was an avoidable disaster. As this story in Editor & Publisher summarizes, the Times Picayune has been reporting for several years now on how government funding to maintain the levees protecting New Orleans had been decimated under the current Bush administration — mostly to pay for the war in Iraq. And speaking of the war, that was also why there was no National Guard presence helping out in New Orleans, for they, too, had been sent to Iraq, along with much of the equipment needed to get supplies through flood waters.

That’s not just appalling, it should be embarrassing. By any accounting, the U.S. is the world’s richest and most powerful nation, and yet not only did it leave a major city — a world-renowned cultural center and tourist destination — completely vulnerable to an expected natural disaster, it sat on its thumbs for days as people fought, starved, suffered and likely died. A charitable reading of the U.S. response would be that the disaster was so overwhelming that even the mightiest of the mighty were unable to cope.

A less charitable (and likely more accurate) view would suggest that the Feds did nothing to aid New Orleans because, frankly, they couldn’t be bothered. It may be “the home of the blues,” but it’s also a city whose population is over 60% African-American, which boasts high crime and poverty rates, and hasn’t exactly been a Republican stronghold. Nor is it likely that the bluenoses on the right are especially enamored of the party-hearty atmosphere that inspired the nickname “Big Easy.” Congressman Dennis Hastert (R-Ill) may have made headlines by saying in an interview that New Orleans shouldn’t be rebuilt, but you can bet he’s not the only person in power with that thought.

Some see echoes of 9/11 in the Federal Government’s ability to act swiftly, decisively and humanely to the Katrina tragedy. Paul Krugman, writing in The New York Times, suggests that Dubya’s inaction is somewhere between a character flaw and a philosophical stance. As he puts it:

At a fundamental level, I'd argue, our current leaders just aren't serious about some of the essential functions of government. They like waging war, but they don't like providing security, rescuing those in need or spending on preventive measures. And they never, ever ask for shared sacrifice.

Well, that’s one way of looking at it. But I’d like to suggest a different reading: Dubya’s posse doesn’t like spending money. Period. Whether that reflects a belief in making government smaller or is simply the sort of selfish parsimony common to the exceedingly wealthy is anyone’s guess. But their record is too consistent to ignore. They’ve cheaped their way through the war in Iraq, refusing to commit sufficient troops or supplies to get the job done, and they continue to cut corners in the war on terrorism. They want to privatize Social Security and other aspects of the social safety net, and have slashed countless government programs. At bottom, all that their talk about making government smaller or more efficient boils down to is Spending Less Money. And that’s essential, because it’s harder to justify cutting taxes unless you’ve done something to cut spending. Like neglecting to shore up a few levees in Louisiana…

Short-sighted? Only if you assume the Feds will eventually bail out New Orleans, and despite the backlash against Hassert, that remains an open question. Once most of the survivors have been relocated — that is, made permanently homeless in some other city — suddenly, the government will begin to stress the importance of restoring the gulf’s oil infrastructure. And most Americans, pissed off by the price at the pumps, will heartily agree. So that relief money Congress is pushing through will mostly go to pipelines, not people. New Orleans, meanwhile, will sit wet and neglected, like some decrepit Atlantis. Just you watch.

What Would Jesus Do?

2005-08-23T17:37:00.000-04:00

Hire a hit man, apparently.

Canadian Living Quiz

2005-08-18T00:57:00.000-04:00

Calling someone a “Newfie” means that they are:

A) New to Canada
B) From Newfoundland
C) A female newt

Instead of states, Canada is made up of:

A) Parishes
B) Provinces
C) Leftovers

The Canadian dollar is known as “the Loonie” in honor of:

A) Canada’s first prime minister, Sylvester Loonie
B) The bird featured on one side of the dollar coin
C) Those who accept it as money

Which of the following Las Vegas entertainment staples did not originate in Canada:

A) Cirque du Soleil
B) Celine Dion
C) Elvis wedding chapels

Indigenous residents of Canada’s northernmost provinces are called:

A) Sammi
B) Inuit
C) Elves

Prime Minister Paul Martin was given a nickname by the opposition based on what popular comic strip character:

A) Mr. Boffo
B) Mr. Dithers
C) Luanne

When a customer at a coffee shop says “double double,” he or she is telling the clerk:

A) That they want two coffees and two donuts
B) That they want double cream and double sugar
C) How to figure out the sales tax

The term “milk bags” refers to:

A) What cars in Saskatchewan have instead of air bags
B) A common and economical way of packaging milk
C) Pamela Anderson’s least favourite nickname

There are more NHL franchises in the U.S. than in Canada because:

A) Hockey is just that popular
B) Small town American mayors will pony up more dough for a sports franchise than small town Canadian mayors
C) Southern parents need a way to show their children that ice comes in a form other than cubes

"Cottage Country" describes:

A) Those parts of Canada where residents can't afford full-size houses
B) Semi-rustic vacation areas in Northern Ontario
C) Canada's national mosquito-feeding program

Wrong Key Donkey

2005-08-11T13:22:00.000-04:00

The Globe and Mail, Canada’s largest daily (and my principal Canadian outlet), has a regular feature called “Your Morning Smile,” a reader-generated parade of jokes apparently meant to ensure Canadians get their daily dose of corn. Today’s, courtesy Lloyd Candow of Pasadena, Nfld, reads: “A C, E-Flat, and G go into a bar. The bartender says, ‘Sorry, but we don't serve minors.’”

The joke, of course, is that the musical notes C, E-flat and G comprise a C-minor triad. Hence, “We don’t serve minors.” Ha-ha, right? But being an early-morning literalist, I looked at the joke and thought, “Wait a sec — A, C, E-flat and G is a diminished seventh, not a minor.”

Maybe that's why there aren't more music theory jokes...

Toronto Story

2005-08-10T14:21:00.000-04:00

Last week, my wife and I went to a screening of Yasujiro Ozu’s 1953 family drama Tokyo Story (東京物語). That this is a touchstone of Japanese cinema goes almost without saying; its standing, both in terms of influence and audience affection, is comparable to that of Casablanca or Citizen Kane. One could go on at book length trying to plumb its depths or savor its subtleties, looking at everything from the low-key way Ozu frames his narrative to how its depiction of the city life/country life dichotomy reflects the division between “old” and “new” Japan.

What struck me, however, was the universal family dynamic underlying Ozu’s story. At root, Tokyo Story is about expectations — what parents hope for in their children, and how distant that can be from what those children hope for themselves. Some of that is standard enough to be the stuff of cliché, as when elderly Shukishi Hirayama (Chishu Ryu), in from the country with his wife to visit their grown-up children in Tokyo, sits with old friends over sake and discusses his disappointment with his children. But the sly, heartbreaking conclusion shows that parents aren’t the only ones who are disappointed with the way life turns out.

That resonated in unexpected ways the following evening, when I spent my first night as a parent. Exhilarated and exhausted, I found myself thinking of all the possibilities that stretched before my newborn son, and — like most parents, I suppose — began to think of things from my own life that Hugh (with the benefit of my guidance) could do better or more successfully.

And then I flashed on the final image of Noriko (Setsuko Hara), Hirayama’s daughter-in-law, from the film. Noriko is in many ways the film’s most admirable character — sweet-tempered, generous, considerate, forgiving and wise. And yet she, too, is weighed down by expectations, feeling like a fraud and failure because she can’t quite reach the bar she has set for herself. Seeing the tears on her sweetly smiling face in that scene is quite literally heartbreaking, and in remembering it, I suddenly became acutely aware of the burdens a parent can unwittingly inflict on their spawn. I was left chastened, and slightly ashamed.

I don’t imagine any parent can completely banish selfishness in trying to guide their offspring into adulthood; parenthood itself, after all, is deeply connected to the selfish desire to keep one’s genes replicating. But I hope that, as the years pass, I can keep Noriko’s tears in mind, and make whatever burden I impart as light
as possible.

Idle Questions

2005-08-01T18:55:00.000-04:00

• Aren’t Jessica Simpson, Lindsay Lohan and Hillary Duff just the Bobby Rydells of contemporary pop?

• What is the logic behind movie remakes of TV shows that went off the air decades before the movies’ target audience was even born? Seriously, what?

• Isn’t it a bit racist for white writers to refer to 50 Cent as “Fiddy”? Or is the literary equivalent to blackface somehow excusable in hip-hop?

• Have you ever met anyone who thought “Marmaduke” was funny?

• Am I the only person who thinks of Mohawk-wearing teen punks as rock’s answer to Civil War re-enactors?

• Considering that any kid smart enough to have run the Hot Coffee mod on GTA San Andreas would likely have also been able to download several gigs of internet porn, isn't it a bit silly to worry about the adverse affects of a few badly animated sex scenes?

• Why hasn’t there been movie of The Simpsons?

• Now that Nirvana, the Pixies and Smashing Pumpkins have attained nostalgia status, isn’t it time we gave up the fiction that their music is in any way alternative?

• What does it say about the current state of literacy that Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, a children’s book, is a more demanding read than The DaVinci Code?

• How could Lemmy from Mötorhead have any hearing left?

• Who will be the first idiot politician to propose a bill banning the sale of acetone?

• At the moment, the members of Mötley Crüe range in age from 42 to 49. How many years must we wait before their “babe magnet” act becomes officially embarrassing?

Hot Hot Heat

2005-07-16T12:09:00.000-04:00

Having spent the bulk of my life below the Mason/Dixon line, I ought to be used to steamy, sultry summer weather. My last summer in Baltimore, for instance, was marked by a four-week stretch during which the mercury never dipped below 90. At the time, I thought nothing of it.

But my Yankee roots must be showing, as the heat wave currently beating down on Toronto has me in sweaty, sticky misery. Although the temperatures are mild by Baltimore standards — especially since it does, in fact, cool down in the evening here — and the humidity no worse, Toronto is far less comfortable at 30° C than at -30° C. (That’s 86° and -22° for you Fahrenheiters.)

Some of that may be my cold-weather prejudice coming out, but it’s mostly a reflection of the fact that Toronto has not succumbed to the sort of hot-weather crutches that make life in the American South livable. Air-conditioning is not ubiquitous here, particularly in houses and lo-rise apartments, and that seems to reflect the Canadian fondness for fresh air as much as the relative rarity of scorchers. Consequently, Torontonians are less likely to spend their summer going from artificially cooled space to artificially cooled space, venturing outdoors only for recreation or lawn cutting. People continue to walk or to cycle, to enjoy the coolness of an evening from a front porch or rooftop deck, and to assume that the outside is not their enemy.

Given the smog levels currently besetting the city, that may not be the wisest assumption, health-wise. Still, it beats the insularity of A/C land, and while I can’t say I enjoy spending my days feeling like a damp dishrag, it is nice to spend the summer in a house that smells like fresh air.

Except when the neighbours’ dog tries to play with one of the neighbourhood skunks. But that’s another story.

Voices Inside My Head

2005-07-13T13:46:00.000-04:00

We all know that personal experience is, by nature, utterly subjective, and most of us assume that our little window on the world is reasonably close to everyone else’s. Occasionally, though, doubts creep in. A recent article in The New York Times described a man in Wales who began hearing pop tunes in his head, and was told by a Dr. Victor Aziz that he suffered from musical hallucinations, an apparently rare (or, perhaps, underreported) phenomenon.

Reports the Times’ Carl Zimmer, “Musical hallucinations were invading people’s minds long before they were recognized as a medical condition. ‘Plenty of musical composers have had musical hallucinations,’ Dr. Aziz said.”

This stopped me dead. I wasn’t shocked that people heard music in their head — what stunned me was that it would be considered unusual, because I’ve had an internal soundtrack my entire life. Moreover, I thought everyone did. Certainly, the phenomenon is common enough that seemingly everyone goes through the annoying “song stuck in my mind” situation at least once. And surely musicians and DJs regularly imagine or recall music mentally as part of their creative process. Why else would they talk so much about “getting the sounds inside my head” onto to tape? (Or hard disc).

Further research into this seems to suggest that what differentiates the sounds in my head from musical hallucinations is that I can distinguish between internal and external sound — not unlike the distinction between maintaining an internal monologue and actually talking to yourself. Except that, just as not everyone plays music, I suppose that not everyone keeps an internal soundtrack going full-time — much less conjures entirely new songs or sounds in their mind’s ear.

Still, it’s a bit distressing to read about a researcher describing a composer’s imagining music as a form of hallucination. But, as Greg Sandow points out, cluelessness about classical music is disturbingly common these days, even among the ostensibly intellectual. There was a time when every well-educated person could be presumed able to read music, and would likely sing or play on a regular basis. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising, then, that the only sound in some heads these days is the seashell hiss of white noise.

Who Likes Short Shorts?

2005-07-12T19:12:00.000-04:00

In the Washington City Paper, Jason Cherkis has an essay about celebrity rock critics and the damage they have done to the noble and exulted trade of record reviewing. It’s a provocative swipe at those littérateurs — Nick Hornby, Dave Eggers, Rick Moody, Jonathan Franzen, and so on — who’ve gone slumming in the album reviews section, and has drawn considerable notice in the blogosphere and on the I Love Music board.

Although some of the comment elsewhere has touched on the whiff of resentment beneath the prose — How dare these poseurs take bread from the mouths of actual music critics! — the snark and nitpicking has largely glossed over the real point behind Cherkis’ rant, which has to do with the low regard with which editors view music writing. Gripes Cherkis, awkwardly, “criticism has become cameo—stunt casting.”

It certainly is true that editors outside the music ghetto seem distressingly ready to believe that pretty much anyone with an interest and enthusiasm can write about popular music. Unlike classical, which seemingly requires if not musical literacy then an awareness of the musical canon, pop is presumed accessible to anyone with ears, and thus fair game. And, of course, the fact that newspapers and magazines invariably have on staff one or more obsessive fans with a lot of knowledge about a select few acts only reinforces that idea.

But criticism isn’t about knowledge — it’s about insight. And while it’s unlikely that someone with limited knowledge may have great insight, it’s just as true that having knowledge is no guarantee of having insight. Critical thinking involves making connections between various bits of info, seeing a bigger picture or greater context, and being able to explain it all in cogent, straightforward prose. It’s not something writers are normally encouraged to do (especially in journalism, where outside of the arts the practice is damned as “editorializing”), nor is it something that comes easily to most people.

Cherkis suggests, wrongly, “The problem with author-critics is that they’re critics who refuse to be critical; purple prose is their abiding principle.” No, the problem is that they’re approaching reviewing at the “how do you feel?” level so beloved of TV journalists. They natter on about memories and emotional response and social significance, things that go a long way toward explaining why they’ve devoted several thousand words to the subject, but which tells us precious little about the music itself.

Then again, so what? Rock criticism has been doing that for decades, since the early days of Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy. In the mid-’60s, those who tried to analyze the Beatles musically were derided as over-intellectualizing fuddy-duddies, and it was the practitioner of the trade who could balance vernacular enthusiasm with technical expertise (Jon Landau and the late Robert Palmer chief among them). Far more common in the reviews section were slices of autobiography, bad fiction and attempts at psychoanalysis.

That hasn’t changed much, either. True, there are many more journals covering popular music than there were 40 years ago, and many, many more writers eager to be published therein. But the main difference Cherkis sees is in the length of reviews:

“All you have to do is flip through any music magazine—Rolling Stone, Spin, Blender—to see the editors’ patience for real criticism. The majority of Entertainment Weekly reviews are only 75 words. In Spin, many reviews are whittled down to a couple of sentences before being anonymously dispatched with a grade. That means fewer words to suspect, doubt, tear at, take a record apart to see how it works (or doesn’t). Fewer words to change the way someone thinks about how and why art is made and experienced—which is, after all, the real purpose of criticism.”

This is where I’m obliged to play the heretic, because while there are many things wrong with music criticism today, short reviews is not one of them. Much as I would like to believe that great insights are being choked off as the average review’s word count declines, my experience is that the opposite is true. Less really is more.

As a guy who owes at least part of his reputation to reviews of a sentence or less, my preference for short and sweet may not come as a surprise. But sad truth is this: It’s a rare critic who actually has a raft of genuine insight into an album. More often than not, what gets set down are observation, description and rhetoric (not necessarily in that order), which is usually centered on a single idea about the album or band, then whipped into some semblance of essay form. Most could easily be condensed to 20 or 30 words of actual argument — and, frankly, should be. And once that couple dozen words are fleshed out with a bit of background and a supporting example or two, you’ve got a very nice 100- or 120-word review.

Writing short is also harder than writing long. It requires more thought, more discipline, more re-writing, more focus. There’s less room for self-indulgent wordplay, and less opportunity to show off. And perversely, writing short is harder when you have less to say, because there’s no space to pad out a paucity of ideas with clever prose. (Perhaps that’s why the celebreviewers are allowed to wax on at length…)

Cherkis is spot on in singling out Sasha Frere-Jones’ work in The New Yorker as worthy of both space and praise. SFJ’s recent take-down of the White Stripes was one of the best pieces of rock criticism I’ve read in a while, and not just because I agreed with his opinion. In addition to placing them in the cultural landscape, Frere-Jones addresses both the mechanics and the aesthetics of the Stripes’ sound, and manages to point up the band’s failings in a way that seems like genuinely constructive criticism. Still, Frere-Jones’ advantage isn’t that he has space, but that he packs it with meat, not filler.

The Emancipation of Meme

2005-07-12T00:46:00.000-04:00

Over on his blog, the delightful Douglas Wolk recently complained about the flood of “how-many-books-have-you-owned-type memes,” saying that he liked them in theory but found the questions “unthrilling.” Personally, I’d go a step further, and admit to being slightly creeped out at the notion of defining a person through their possessions (which is all some of these memes boil down to). Yes, it could be interesting to know what Writer X’s favorite novels are and why, but what does it matter how many DVDs he or she owns?

Anyway, Wolk posted a challenge, asking his readers to “make up ONE original question you think would be part of a really satisfying meme.” Those who did were obliged to answer the whole set of questions on their own blogs. So:

What is the oldest article of clothing still in active use in your wardrobe?

It’s tempting to get all rock critic-y and claim my 1979 Clash “Give ’Em Enough Rope” US Tour T-shirt — so old that it refers to “Epic records, cassettes and 8-track tapes” — but truth is, that shirt mainly sits in a drawer, keeping my Clash at Bond’s Casino shirt company. So it would have to be a camelhair cardigan vest I bought in 1981 and now wear without buttoning.

If you were to pass along to a child (offspring, godchild, favorite young person you hope to influence for the better) a lifelong passion for one thing, what would it be?

Practice. Spending hours on scales and arpeggios and etudes is nobody’s idea of fun, but it remains the best way to build technique — and with technique comes confidence and the ability to express what’s in your head. Of course, good technique will never outweigh good ideas, but what’s the use of ideas you can’t express? (The virtues of practice also apply to non-musical pursuits, from athletics to language skills to scholarship.)

What's the one website or periodical that you read which nobody would expect you to?

I subscribed to Car & Driver in the early ’80s, but lost interest ages ago. I loved Loaded back in the mid-’90s when it was laying the foundation for lads mags, but stopped looking at it before the decade was over. I’ve had spurts of reading Elle, Vogue and W over the years, but don’t currently. I have become appallingly predictable, I’m afraid — Cook’s Illustrated is the best I can do, and I doubt that would surprise anyone who knows me socially.

Does there ever come a point when [insert interviewee's occupation] becomes kind of arbitrary to you?

No. Interviewing is serious work, and while it’s always nice to turn a press session into something resembling a casual chat, the truth is you’re there to find out as much as you can about the person or their field. If that information begins to seem arbitrary, it’s time to look for another job.

What is one album/book/movie you have not heard/read/seen but which you really should to be doing what you do, and how do you work around that?

You mean apart from the books in my To Read pile? Obviously, it’s impossible to hear/read/see everything, but I can’t imagine a critic who would come across a gap in his or her knowledge, and not rush to fill that gap. (Well, OK, I can imagine some critics not caring enough to learn more, but they’re idiots.)

What superstitions do you follow or have you made up for yourself?

I prefer to eat Real Fruit Gummies in threes, but that’s more odd habit than superstition. Generally, I try to avoid magical thinking.

What happened the first time you danced?

Nothing. Well, the mother of the guys with whom I rode to the dance referred to my partner as “a long drink of water,” which changed my perception of her somewhat. But that was about it.

What was the first piece of art (book, song, film, painting, building, etc.) that changed your life? What happened? How do you regard that work now?

This is a tough one. I wish I had a pop music story here, such as describing how the first Sex Pistols singles changed my life, but that was hardly a first, as I had nearly finished university by that point. Likewise, I vividly remember hearing Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” on the radio for the first time. I was riding in a car with my father, and we were taking a short cut through the campus of Goucher college on bright fall afternoon. The song came on the radio, and it seemed to me as if time itself changed as I got lost in the interlocking rhythm of the overdubbed clavinet lines. But I was 16 then, so again, it’s no first.

That honor likely lies with a two-disc set of Wilhelm Furtwangler’s recordings of Wagner orchestral favorites I got for Christmas when I was in junior high. Some I already knew, but there was a drama and sense of narrative to his reading of “Siegfried’s Rhine Journey” that completely entranced my 13-year old self. Listening to music was never the same after that, and looking back, my only regret is that I’ve been spoiled for other Wagner recordings ever since. (But I’m hardly alone in that.)

If you could choose to understand one thing in much greater depth than the other, what would it be -- your roots or your current surroundings, and why?

My current surroundings, definitely. I’ve been in Toronto barely four years, and still have much to learn about it and Canada. And frankly, I feel in some ways more at home here than I do in Maryland, where I grew up — and that makes me even more curious about this city and country.

How do you like your eggs?

Poached, atop corned beef hash. Oddly, I have Richard Nixon to thank for that, in a round-about way. Many years ago, when I was in Los Angeles to interview the members of Van Halen, I was looking at a hotel breakfast menu and suddenly recalled that I’d read somewhere that corned beef hash with poached eggs was Nixon’s favorite breakfast. So I tried it, and well — the guy may have been wrong about Viet Nam and many other things, but he knew a good breakfast. Curiously, the best poached eggs I ever had (sans hash) were in Tokyo. Perfectly shaped and lusciously soft, they had gorgeous orange-yellow yolks and wonderfully vivid flavor.

The egg question was my contribution to Wolk’s list, and the thinking behind it was that there are many ways to have eggs, and as such a well-defined preference would likely say something about a person’s attitude and aesthetics.

I’ve since come up with some additional atypical questions. Feel free to give answers of your own, or to email them to your favorite blogger.

If you could have sex with the celebrity of your choice, would you tell your friends?

Which had more impact on modern America: The War Between the States, or the English Civil War?

When was the last time Berke Breathed was funny?

Should toilet paper rolls hang with the loose sheet over the front, or over the back? Have you ever changed the orientation of the paper in someone else’s washroom?

Do you like the taste of store-bought tomatoes?

Of the books in your house, how many have you never read? Of those, how many have you owned since college?

Beer or wine?

Intermezzo

2005-07-10T16:42:00.000-04:00

Oh, right — the blog. The blog I haven’t written anything for in a dog’s age. (Ahem.) This one.

Regular visitors (assuming such exist) may have wondered if I’d gone on vacation or perhaps forgotten about this thing. Neither, I'm afraid; I’ve just been directing my energies toward such dreary pursuits as maintaining an income and keeping the house in working order.

Things will pick up here, I promise. There should be a post along shortly, reflecting on what is and is not wrong about rock criticism these days. And I'll likely think of other stuff.

In the meantime, if there’s anything you’d care to see addressed in this space, feel free to ask. We do take requests -- and if we don’t know the tune, hum a few bars and we’ll fake it.

HiStory

2005-06-13T17:39:00.000-04:00

Michael Jackson, as you likely know, has been acquitted on all counts. He's now free to resume his career as a creepily eccentric has-been.

Ten Years After?

2005-05-22T14:01:00.000-04:00

Daniel Okrent, in his farewell column as The New York Times’ “Public Editor” offers a list of “13 Things I Meant to Write About but Never Did.” At No. 6 on the list is the problem of “blind spots” in critics. As he puts it, “If a critic just doesn't like the work of a particular playwright (or painter or singer or novelist), both the playwright and the readers lose out. He never gets a fair chance; we never get a fresh take.”

This is a bit unfair, really. It ignores the possibility that what Mr. Okrent sees as a blind spot is actually the ability to recognize and dismiss no-talents and hacks. Secondly, it suggests that not liking an artist’s work makes it impossible for a critic to offer a “fresh take,” a notion that comes dangerously close to dismissing someone’s opinion before they’ve even articulated it. Negative reviews can be more perceptive than raves, and it’s not uncommon for a reviewer to dislike different works by an artist for completely different reasons, but Mr. Okrent seems inclined to lump it all under “just doesn’t like the guy” and write off what’s being said.

Still, I suspect all that justifying is merely a smokescreen, set up to provide a context for what he really wants to say: That critics should have limited tenure, and be booted out after X number of years. (He suggests 10.)

Were the issue as simple as wanting adjust for bias in dealing with certain artists, the obvious solution would be to rotate assignments through the multiple critics. If Jon Pareles covers the current U2 album, then Kelefa Sanneh is given the next one. Simple.

But Mr. Okrent, like a lot of newspaper vets — and a lot of bloggers, and a lot of politicians, and a lot of readers — doesn’t seem especially comfortable with the idea of opinion in the daily paper. It’s a deeply ingrained prejudice in journalism, the notion that what critics do is less deserving of respect than what reporters do. After all, reporters work to uncover facts, whereas those who trade in opinion just make stuff up. And as we all know, opinions are worthless, as everyone’s got one. Even as august and erudite a writer as Virgil Thompson recalled that, during his days as music critic for the New York Herald Tribune, his position in the newsroom pecking order was only marginally above the copy boys (and then only because he got by-line).

Mr. Okrent isn’t just uneasy about reviewers; he also blasts several of the Times’ Op-Ed giants — Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd and the now-departed William Safire — and clearly would rather writers marshal “facts” than infer conclusions. But that’s only part of it. One of the other things critics have, along with the option of opining, is the power that comes with offering opinion from a pulpit as lofty as The Times. And, of course, the longer one holds that pulpit, the more authority one’s sermons garner. I suspect that’s a dynamic that makes Mr. Okrent deeply uneasy.

Of course, one might expect a critic like myself to chafe at the notion of “term limits for critics.” However much I might argue that it’s foolish to toss away the knowledge that comes from experience, some readers will presume that I just don’t like the idea of being eventually forced out of a job. To which I can only say, Well, who would?

But the truth is that term limits are, for the most part, not needed in pop music criticism, as few in the field last a decade even now. A while back, I looked up the first review I wrote for Rolling Stone, in 1979. But rather than re-read what I had to say about now-forgotten rockers Trillion, I checked the by-lines on the other reviews in that issue — and was shocked to realize that only two other were still writing. One was David Fricke, who remains at Rolling Stone; the other was Ken Tucker, who still reviews but has long since made music just a sideline. The rest were gone, and in some cases completely forgotten.

Many music reviewers, particularly in the dailies, eventually migrate to other beats, such TV writing; that’s the move Tucker made before leaving the Philadelphia Inquirer (Eric Deggans and Roger Catlin also spring to mind). And there also seem to be editors who believe that pop music is meant for young people and should be reviewed by young people, a view which occasionally results in forcibly removing older critics from their beat. (Age discrimination law doubtless keeps that from happening as often as it might.)

Those who do stick it out — who not only manage to keep pumping copy but actually continue to offer insight and a thoughtful, informed point of view — ought to be applauded, not punished for their persistence. But I suspect I’ll be waiting a long time before someone declares Music Critic Appreciation Day a holiday.

Anniversary Waltz

2005-05-17T23:02:00.001-04:00

We now pause for a brief acknowledgement of time passed: On this day, 28 years ago, my first professional review appeared in the Baltimore Sun.

It was, to be honest, a bit of a fluke. I was 20 years old, had just finished my junior year at Johns Hopkins University, and was convinced that I could do a better job writing about jazz than the stringer the Sun had been using. So I took a bus down to the Sun’s offices, found the features editor and made my pitch — which, if memory serves, wasn’t much more sophisticated than, “That guy you have reviewing jazz? I can do better than him.”

I had a sheaf of clips from the Hopkins student paper, but I doubt the editor had any intention of reading them. Instead, he asked when I was next going to see a jazz concert, and I replied that I had arranged to see Milt Jackson that very evening. Fine, he said; if I wrote it up, they’d take a look at it. He wanted 450 words the next morning, and 450 words by 10:00 a.m. they got.

It ran as filed the following day.

From what I can tell, this may as well be a Cinderella story by today’s standards. For one thing, at most major dailies you couldn’t simply walk in off the street and collar an editor; there are security guards at the door, and people who expect you to have an appointment outside the editor’s door. And forget about hearing, “Sure, kid, we’ll give you a try” — unless you have references and clips attesting to others who’ve already tried and tested your work, you won’t get the time of day.

Internships, which seem a prerequisite these days, barely existed back then, and surely didn’t apply where music criticism was concerned. The expectation was that aspiring journos would learn by doing — and getting paid to master my trade was a lot more appealing than forking over tuition to some J-School.

Not that the pay was all that good (and no, the irony of celebrating 28 years of professional journalism on a blog has not escaped me). But even at its worst, it’s still the best job I could imagine having. So here’s to the late Charlie Flowers, who gave me that first break, and to all the editors who followed. Thanks, and cheers!

Consider the source

2005-04-26T14:00:00.000-04:00

In case you haven’t read about this elsewhere, there’s a huge storm brewing at The Source, and for once it doesn’t involve Eminem or the editors of XXL.

On April 11, Kim Osorio, formerly editor-in-chief at the pioneering hip-hop magazine, and Michelle Joyce, formerly a vice president at the company, filed a sexual harassment suit, alleging a pattern of institutional discrimination and abuse. David Mays, who co-founded the monthly, and Ray “Benzino” Scott, chief brand executive at The Source, have since filed a counter-suit against the two women. But, apparently fearing a court fight wouldn’t be nasty enough, the two decided to impugn the women’s character as well, with Mays and Scott telling anyone who’d listen that Osorio had “sexual relations” with numerous hip-hop stars. It’s better than calling her a “lying slut,” but not by much.

If you’re as disgusted by such behaviour as I am, make your voice heard. Joan Morgan, Elizabeth Mendez Berry and Jeff Chang have put together a petition that objects to these sexist smears, as well as the casual objectification of women that has become all-too-common in The Source and other hip-hop magazines. Read the petition here, and sign if you agree.

As anyone who has worked in the field knows, music magazines by nature tend to be boys clubs, but that’s no excuse for making women feel unwelcome — or worse. Unfortunately, the suit against The Source, like previous sexual harassment suits against Billboard and Spin, will neither be the solution nor the last word on the subject, and it’s a sad reflection on music journalism.

New York’s Alright If You Like Saxophones

2005-04-18T16:36:00.000-04:00

I was in New York City recently, for the first time in several years, and it was odd to be in the position of having been away for so long. Even before I lived there, I generally got to the city at least once every month or two, and during my brief time on TV — anyone remember VH1’s 4 On the Floor? — was in Manhattan pretty much every other week.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss it, but I’d also be lying if I claimed to be eager to move back. I’d forgotten how loud and filthy the city is — I’m not sure which was more depressing, watching people throw their trash onto the subway tracks, or realizing that I was the only person in the station bothered by the sight — and was reminded that, in many ways, what tourists love best about New York is the endless ways to spend money it offers. So long as Americans equate strolling by the overpriced boutiques along Fifth Avenue with sight-seeing, socialism never has a chance there.

A lot had changed in the few years since I moved away. The mammoth Time Warner complex was a construction site then, not a skyscraper hunched over a shopping mall, and subway trains had not yet been plastered with American flags (a move no doubt meant to reassure tourists that despite the state of the MTA, they have not been unexpectedly transported to a third-world country). And it may just have been a function of where and when I traveled, but it seemed like there were fewer musicians playing in the subways. Particularly on the platforms, which back in the day was a forum for quite a few gifted Chinese classical musicians; this trip, the only platform performer I caught was a dazed gospel singer who seemed unable to remember more than half a verse of the spiritual she was singing.

Still, while jazz may be dying in the clubs, it continues to have a place in mass transit. In addition to a fine young tenor player whose subway-entrance soliloquies added some old-school 42nd St. feel to the Disney-fied Times Square, I caught a ragged-but-enthusiastic combo wailing loud and free (or at least only loosely following changes) at the Grand Central stop. Even better, they actually had an audience. Now, that’s the New York I truly miss.

The Big Payback

2005-04-08T11:26:00.000-04:00

Change is in the wind here in Canada, now that a publication ban has been lifted and the press is full of stories about kickbacks in Québec to the members of the ruling Liberal party. Getting almost as much ink are stories about how voters want to punish the liberals, and how the Tories, eager to exploit that anger, are gearing up for an election that could come as early as May.

Stay tuned — it’s not often you see an entire country cut off its nose to spite its face.

Vatican Blues

2005-04-02T17:05:00.000-05:00

Although much will likely be said about the late Pope John Paul II (who died Saturday at 84 after a long illness), it’s unlikely any of it will have to do with popular music.

OK, there was the infamous Sinead O’Connor incident, in which the shaven-headed singer capped a Saturday Night Live performance of “Success Has Made a Failure of Our Home” with an a cappella performance of Bob Marley’s “War,” followed by her shouting “Fight the real enemy!” and tearing up a picture of the Pope. It was a bit of a shock, and led to O’Connor getting booed off the stage at a Bob Dylan tribute not long thereafter. But strictly speaking, that had more to do with O’Connor than with John Paul II, and it’s worth noting that O’Connor did eventually apologize for the stunt.

But John Paul I, his predecessor, was the subject of a song by Patti Smith. Seriously. “Wave,” the title tune from her third album, was a one-way conversation with the late pontiff, to whom the singer once waved while visiting the Vatican. Offhand, I can’t think of any mainstream pop songs about John Paul II; there’s nothing in Jeff Green’s wonderful The Green Book of Songs by Subject, nor does a cursory Google search turn up much beyond devotional music.

Still, John Paul II was not only a big music fan — “I have a sweet tooth for song and music,” he once said; “This is my Polish sin” — but a recording artist in his own right. Amazon carries eight of his albums, while the All Music Guide includes him among their gospel artists. (John Paul II, Shirley Ceasar and Al Green — now, that would have been a show to see!) I actually reviewed one of his albums, in the January, 1995 edition of Musician:

John Paul II
The Rosary with the Pope (Cesar ISR)
Possibly the lamest rapping I’ve ever heard....

OK, so I’m a smart-ass. But even though I didn’t always applaud with his dicta (like a number Catholics, I would prefer to see women accorded a broader role in the Church), I found John Paul II to be a real inspiration in my life. A number of examples spring to mind, among them his Letter to the Jews, and his efforts to bring lapsed Catholics back into the fold with the new millennium. But the most emotional came two days after the 9/11 attacks. I was working at Blender then, and the office had been suddenly shut down due to bomb threats nearby. Wandering down to Union Square, I looked at some of the messages posted there, and was unexpectedly saddened to see calls for violence and vengeance among the impromptu memorials. For some reason, I suddenly flashed on the Pope, remembering how after having been shot by Mehmet Ali Agca he had gone to visit his would-be assassin in prison, where he forgave the gunman. It gave me solace and hope, reminding me of the healing power forgiveness bestows.

It’s a tough lesson, forgiveness, and more easily praised than practiced. It probably won’t be listed among his achievements in the obits, but for me it will be the highlight of John Paul II’s legacy. And that’s better than a pop song, any day.

Go For Your Guns

2005-03-08T20:35:00.000-05:00

Much for the same reason that I don’t follow professional sports, I don’t keep particularly close track of the various beefs rappers have with one another. While it’s easy enough to remember big scraps with famous opponents — Canibus vs. LL Cool J, Nas vs. Jay-Z, Eminem vs. everybody — keeping track of every and all feuds would likely be a full-time job.

So when the news broke about a shoot-out between the entourages of Game and 50 Cent outside the Manhattan studios of Hot 97-FM, I was surprised. Not by the fact that there was shooting outside of Hot 97 — the current perjury trial of L’il Kim, concerning her testimony in a court case involving some 2001 gunplay outside the station, is reminder enough that Hot 97 is perhaps not the best neighbour one could have — but that 50 Cent and Game, once pals in the G-Unit crew, were no longer bosom buddies.

Apparently, this was not a secret to New York radio listeners. As Jarrett Murphy reports in the Village Voice, 50 Cent had gone on about rap grudges to Power 105’s Ed Lover mere days before Game and 50 Cent whinged about each other to Funkmaster Flex on Hot 97. Clearly, hip-hop beef is meat-and-potatoes to rap radio, and no surprise — where else would you find a more compelling blend of gossip and team partisanship? While it’s probably overstating things to suggest that radio intentionally fans the flames, asking that they not mention who-hates-who is a bit like asking Bonnie Fuller to ignore Paris Hilton. Business, after all, is business.

Nor is hating other players unique to hip-hop. There’s an amusing piece in the current Blender collecting “The Greatest Rock & Roll Insults of All Time,” and it barely scratches the surface, ignoring as it does some of the most acid-tongued performers as Pete Townshend, Boy George and Johnny Rotten. Yet I can’t recall any rockers who depended on entourages to brawl with their rivals, much less have gunfights. Back then, being Number One with a Bullet was still just a figure of speech.

Fortunately, not all rap stars or their crews are trigger-happy thugs. Ja Rule, who was charged with assault in Toronto while filming Assault on Precinct 13 last year, was back in T.O. for trial and not only admitted he was wrong, but apologized for his actions. “[A]s the judge said, I stepped up to the plate today,” he told reporters afterward. A pity that Ja Rule’s decision to take responsibility will likely remain a lesser story than Game and 50 Cent’s shootout on Hudson St.

Coda
A few days after the shooting, 50 Cent and Game kissed and made up. Isn't that sweet?

Dreams Come True

2005-03-03T18:53:00.000-05:00

As promised, here’s more on music in the novels of Haruki Murakami, this time focusing on his latest English release, Kafka on the Shore.

Although music plays an enormous role in Kafka on the Shore, it’s not something that figures largely in the reviews (at least the ones I’ve seen), no doubt because simply explaining the plot is challenge enough. Not that Kafka is impenetrably complicated or maddeningly slow; if anything, it’s a real page-turner. Basically, there are two intertwining plots (delivered in alternating chapters), which Murakami has infused with such dramatic momentum that it’s hard not to be obsessed with learning what happens next. In that sense, the book is rather like a traditional cliff-hanger, except that with the denouement Murakami takes us over the cliff — leaving some reviewers feeling like Wile E. Coyote, nervously poking a toe into the nothingness before plummeting.

So let’s just stick with the basics. The central protagonist is an unusually resolute young man named Kafka Tamura. A loner and bookworm, he has decided to run away from home on his 15th birthday. One reason he has decided to leave is the utter lack of connection he feels for his father, the only relative he has known since his mother and adopted sister left when he was four. The other reason he flees (we learn later) is that his father placed a sort of super-Oedipal curse on him, one that adds sex with the step-sister to the usual kill dad/fuck mom scenario. So he heads to Takamatsu, on the northern coast of Shikoku, in hopes of putting enough distance between himself and his father to keep the curse from coming true.

Curses being what they are, though, running away only hastens Kafka’s fate. He meets what he believes is his sister, a girl now called Sakura, on the bus from Tokyo. The day he arrives in Takamatsu, he visits a private library in suburbs where he comes acrosss Miss Saeki, the library director, and eventually becomes convinced she is his mother. He also befriends the androgynous librarian Oshima, who tells him that Miss Saeki had, years before, recorded a dreamy, strangely compelling hit song called “Kafka on the Shore.” Kafka listens to “Kafka” repeatedly, and is slowly drawn into an odd, dreamlike shadow reality. Meanwhile, the novel’s parallel plot, involving a strangely brain-damaged old man named Nakata, slowly becomes entangled in Kafka’s story. Nakata fell into an inexplicable coma while on a wartime school outing on a mountain in Shikoku, and when he regained consciousness he had lost his memory, his ability to read, and half his shadow. Nakata also travels from Tokyo to Takamatsu, and is somehow part of the execution and resolution of Kafka’s curse. Among other things.

Complicated, as I said. But the great thing about the novel is that no matter how strange the action gets — and it gets pretty strange at points — the characters are so vividly drawn that it’s easy to suspend disbelief and read on. And for me, a large part of what makes the characters believable is their distinctive tastes in music. Kafka, for example, doesn’t pack much when leaving home, but makes sure to include a walkman and 10 discs (“got to have my music”), and like most teens regularly turns to them for solace. Murakami doesn’t catalog the discs, but over time we get a good sense of what they include. Some are actual albums, others are compilations he’s burned himself. There’s a Prince hits album he listens to when working out, and Radiohead for when he’s alone at night. He also has some Ellington, some Cream, some Coltrane. For a 15-year old, his tastes are impressive but hardly implausible — there were no albums by Prince or Radiohead when I was 15, but otherwise I listened to a lot of the same stuff when I was that age. But what really struck me about Kafka’s relationship with music was that it felt exactly right. Granted, it’s hardly genius-level insight to show a teenager taking refuge in his favorite albums, but Murakami also shows how Kafka uses his sense of music to sort out other difficulties in life. There’s a wonderful sequence in Chapter 41 where Kafka — angry, afraid, confused — hikes deep into a forest in hopes of confronting the mystery deep within himself. Working from memory, he starts to whistle the sax solo from Coltrane’s recording of “My Favorite Things” as he hikes:

“Somewhere along the line Coltrane’s soprano sax runs out of steam. Now it’s McCoy Tyner’s piano solo I hear, the left hand carving out a repetitious rhythm and the right layering on thick, forbidding chords. Like some mythic scene, the music portrays somebody’s — a nameless, faceless somebody’s — dim past, all the details being laid out as clearly as entrails being dragged out of the darkness. Or at least that’s how it sounds to me. The patient, repeating music ever so slowly breaks apart the real, rearranging the pieces. It has a hypnotic, menacing smell, just like the forest.”

Genius, that. Kafka may not know where he’s going, but by following the music, somehow we do.

Elsewhere in the novel, Murakami uses musical taste to define various characters. Take, for instance, Hoshino, the young truck driver who winds up accompanying Nakata to Takamatsu. Hoshino’s taste is fairly banal when we meet him — at one point, Murakami has him improvising lyrics to a song by Yosui Inoue, a Japanese pop singer perhaps best-known outside Japan for having written the lyrics for the Puffy Ami-Yumi hit “Ajia no Junshin” (アジアの純真) — but while in a coffee shop in Takamatsu, he becomes an unlikely convert to classical music. Specifically, he’s won over by a performance of Beethoven’s piano trio in B-flat (the “Archduke Trio”), recorded by the “Million Dollar Trio” of Artur Rubinstein, Jascha Heifetz and Emmanuel Feuermann. The owner of the café, a retired Education Ministry official, is quite the classical music buff, and waxes ecstatic over some of his favorites to Hoshino. The trucker later echoes the café owner’s enthusiasm to Oshima at the library:

“‘I prefer the Czech group, the Suk Trio, myself,’ Oshima said. ‘They have a beautiful balance. You feel like you can smell the wind wafting over a green meadow.’”

It’s a beautiful image Oshima conjures, and it nicely summarizes the languid virtuosity of the Suk recording. More to the point, the difference in taste helps define the two characters, particularly Oshima. While the café owner (a minor character) seems to exemplify the innate conservatism of connoisseurship, Oshima’s informed, discerning taste suggests someone unwilling to settle for the received wisdom of “established” taste, preferring instead to be guided by his own understanding and experience. Oshima also likes to listen to Schubert piano music while driving, particularly the D Major Sonata. Why? Because it’s a flawed composition, and so “all performances are imperfect. A dense, artistic kind of imperfection stimulates your consciousness, keeps you alert.” Well, it does if you’re an engaged listener, and that’s Oshima in a nutshell.

Why is music such a major part of Kafka on the Shore? Personally, I think it has to do with the relationship between dreamworlds and reality in the story. Music is an ideal representation of that duality, being at once absolutely real and utterly ephemeral. Moreover, like dreams music can seem incomprehensible and unreal to some, yet possesses deep logic and narrative for those able to understand its language. And as with both, its experience is always internal, always individual, and ever so difficult to put into words.

Character reference

2005-02-28T22:18:00.000-05:00

A short programming notice: In the post below, there ought to be two kanji showing what the words "boku" and "watashi" look like in Japanese. If your screen shows only a question mark, blame your browser, not me.

Wind-Up Bird Songs

2005-02-27T15:02:00.000-05:00

Unlike movies, novels tend not to have soundtracks. Not only does background music not play as we read, but there’s often little or no mention of music in the prose. The characters may not lead lives of quiet desperation, exactly, but more often than not the only thing “heard” in fiction is dialogue.

That’s not the case with the work of Haruki Murakami, however. Not only do his characters listen to music, they’re more often than not knowledgeable fans who seem more than happy to discuss their favourite recordings at length. This isn’t entirely co-incidental, of course; Murakami himself is quite the music fan, and has written various pieces of music criticism over the years (none of which, to my knowledge, has been translated into English). Moreover, two of his novels owe their titles to pop songs — South of the Border, West of the Sun was in part inspired by a Nat “King” Cole recording of “South of the Border,” while Norwegian Wood name-checks the Beatle song.

Murakami’s keen ear demands a certain attentiveness from readers, some of whom — no doubt people who never really listen to the music in movie soundtracks — gloss over the accumulated details of taste. Laura Miller, writing recently in The New York Times Book Review, described Murakami’s heroes as “men in their 30’s, easy-going solitary types with a taste for jazz, whiskey and American films” — which feels right at first glance, but doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. The protagonist in Dance Dance Dance — the critic jay Rubin refers to him as “Boku,” from the casual first-person pronoun (僕) Murakami uses in Japanese — is certainly in his 30’s and a fan of American movies, but his musical interest would probably best be described as classic rock: Ray Charles, The Beach Boys, the Doors, Sam Cooke, Pink Floyd, Three Dog Night, Solomon Burke, Sly & the Family Stone, Eric Clapton, Elvis, Ben E. King. He even sings the Styx hit “Mr. Roboto” while vacuuming. And his interactions with Yuki, an enigmatic girl he meets in Hokkaido, often include discussions of pop music (Boy George is mentioned more than once).

Talking about music is important in Murakami’s novels, because it’s often a way for the characters to connect. For the Boku of Dance Dance Dance, is a handy means to bridge the gap age has placed between him and Yuki; for the Boku of South of the Border, West of the Sun, music is a means of articulating emotion, of making and explaining connections. The owner of a jazz club in Tokyo, he would seem to fit Miller’s description to a T, except he also has a history with classical music, one which is inextricably intertwined with his feelings for a childhood female friend named Shinamoto. At one point, the two as adults attend a performance of the Liszt piano concerto, their youthful favourite. “The soloist was a famous South American pianist,” Boku tells us; I imagined Claudio Arrau but Boku, who apparently cares less about such things, doesn’t confirm my suspicion. In any event, he comes away from the concert disappointed. Shinamoto, who felt the performance was wonderful, asks why Boku didn’t like it. “’Don’t you remember?’ I said. ‘The record we used to listen to, at the end of the second movement there was this tiny scratch you could hear. Putchi! Putchi! Somehow, without that scratch, I can’t get into the music.’” It’s a nice gag, but it also speaks volumes about Boku’s relationship with Shinamoto, in which the past (for all its imperfections) seems more vivid than the present.

But Boku is no mere prisoner of nostalgia; his adult life has plenty of depth, but it’s expressed in his understanding of jazz. Later in the book, he and Shinamoto are at his club, and the piano trio plays the Ellington/Strayhorn composition, “Star Crossed Lovers.” A lesser novelist would have let the resonance of the title define the relationship between Boku and Shinamoto, but Murakami takes us deeper, as Boku explains why he’s so fond of the tune. Boku says that the piece was composed as an analog to Romeo and Juliet. "‘Ellington and Strayhorn wrote it for a performance at the Ontario Shakespeare Festival. In the original recording, Johnny Hodges’ alto sax was Juliet, and Paul Gonsalves played the Romeo part on tenor sax.’” Shinamoto, like the reader, leaps on the metaphor, and asks Boku if the two of them are star-crossed lovers. Boku says no, tries to talk through how he sees things. But his dance around their relationship seems awkward compared to the way he originally summed up the jazz song: “‘It took me a long time to figure out how complex it is, how there’s so much more to it than a pretty melody. It takes a special kind of musician to play it right.’” Carry that observation over to his personal life, and it makes an apt description of his dealings with Shinamoto. Unfortunately, neither ultimately is able to “play it right.”

Perhaps the best description of the importance of music in Murakami’s universe comes in the novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. As with a number of Murkami’s novels, this one features a sort of parallel narrative, following the paths of narrators Watashi (私, a more formal Japanese first-person pronoun) and Boku. Boku is something of a lost soul, imprisoned in a town of darkness and fear, whose denizens are ultimately fated to lose their shadows. Music is also taken from them, but one day Boku manages, while rummaging through a junk heap of abandoned instruments, to remember the tune “Danny Boy.” It’s as if the spark of life were rekindled inside him: “When have I last heard a song? My body has craved music. I have been so long without music, I have not even known my own hunger. The resonance permeates; the strain eases within me. Music brings a warm glow to my vision, thawing mind and muscle from their endless winter.”

Music also plays a huge role in Murakami’s latest novel, Kafka on the Shore. I’ll discuss than in my next entry.

Pipsqueak

2005-02-09T11:44:00.000-05:00

In the current New Yorker, there’s a Talk of the Town item by Adam Gopnik about how the old city street signs on corners in Manhattan are being overshadowed by big green signs. The piece itself is apparently meant to be whimsical, and the prose almost herniates as Gopnik pushes his wan observations toward humor. One sentence particularly caught my eye, however: “The two smaller signs are still there, but they are now drowned out by the highway signage, two jazz piccolos trying to be heard above an electrified kazoo.”

Two jazz piccolos? It’s not a common instrument in jazz, and off the top of my head I can only recall one jazz piccolo performance, by Joe Farrell with the Elvin Jones Trio on “Keiko’s Birthday March” from Puttin’ It Together (the credits only list flute, but it's definitely a piccolo). As for the electrified kazoo, there are actually a number of such things. Most are homemade, such as the “giant electric kazoo” invented by Ontario’s own Nihilist Spasm Band. Those disinclined to build their own may opt for mass produced “instruments” like the Saxxy, a hi-tech toy that bills itself as a synthesizer kazoo. Naturally, there are plenty of kazoo recordings to be found, perhaps the most famous being the Temple City Kazoo Orchestra, whose novelty recordings helped launch the mighty Rhino Records. But the kazoo doesn’t just exist as morning zoo joke fodder, and those interested in hearing how the instrument can be applied seriously should check out the Flat Earth Society album ISMS.

Gopnik, of course, is not being literal here, and I rather doubt the fabled fact-checkers at the New Yorker pestered him for actual musical examples. The older signs are cast as piccolos probably because they’re small (that’s what “piccolo” means in Italian), and dubbed jazzy in deference to their jazz-era typography. As for the electrified kazoo, well that’s just meant to make the new signs seem garish and ridiculous.

But what bugged me about the analogy is that in my experience piccolos never have any trouble being heard. Above anything. They may be tiny, but their tone is piercing in the extreme, and it rarely takes more than one to cut through the largest ensemble — think of the famous counter-melody in Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever” march. I’m tempted to call the whole thing overblown, but I suspect only flute and piccolo players would appreciate the pun.

Do the math

2005-01-23T12:06:00.000-05:00

This just in from CNN: Americans don’t understand fractions.

Actually, that’s not really what this story says. Instead, it reports the results of a CNN/USA Today poll on whether or not Americans see George W. Bush as a “divider” or a “uniter.” Not surprisingly, given the recent election, opinion was split pretty much down the middle, with 49% of those polled believing that Dubya has divided the country, while another 49% are apparently of the opinion that he is a force for unity.

To their credit, the folks at CNN don’t point out that those who believe Bush is a “uniter” are patently wrong, as you can’t get much more divided than those results. Even more astonishing is that the results almost exactly mirror a similar poll taken in October. So for at least three months, there have been consistent messages in the media that Americans are, erm, divided in their opinion of the president, and yet a whopping one out of two citizens somehow have convinced themselves that a half equals a whole.

In a way, this explains a lot about the Bush presidency — how, for example, his administration has managed to convince voters that it’s not insane to increase spending while cutting taxes, or that it takes only 153,000 troops to control a country of 25 million people (and 432,000 square miles). Dubya and his supporters don't do the math. They don’t have to — they have faith. They believe in his vision of the future, while all those numbers add up to little more than pesky details.

That’s why no amount of schooling will convince them that Bush’s proposal for privatizing Social Security won’t work. If you believe that two-percent compounded interest will, over time, eventually become six percent, that’s good enough. Those who would argue otherwise are merely partisan nay-sayers, after all. Believe.

Not coincidentally, “believe” was the message not-so-subtly built into one the Christmas holidays’ big hits, The Polar Express. Nevermind that the actual plot consists of grabbing a non-believer by the scruff of the neck and rubbing his face in reality long enough for “belief” to take root. (This, apparently, is what passes for salvation in contemporary American popular culture.) No, the message viewers are expected to take away as they exit the googleplex is, If you truly believe, magical things will happen.

And so two-percent interest gets compounded into six-percent; spending more than you take in leads to prosperity; a half equals the whole. It only takes a little belief, America.

Five Finger Exercise

2005-01-13T23:04:00.000-05:00

For the past couple months, we’ve had a guest in the house — a piano, on loan from one of my wife’s colleagues. Not a real, hammers-and-soundboard-and-strings piano, but one of the nicer electronic models, with realistic action and only one voice (as opposed to those pianos that double as harpsichords or organs or whatnot). Never having counted myself a pianist — although I had lessons (from my grandmother) as a child, piano always ranked behind various band instruments when it came to getting practice time from me — having a piano in the house hadn’t been a priority, and I’d spent most of the last couple decades letting my trusty DX-7 take care of any keyboard needs.

Now that it’s there, of course, it seems inconceivable that we didn’t have a piano before. It’s been humbling, of course, to note how badly my meager skills had deteriorated over the years; not only does my left hand stumble and miss when trying to keep up with the right, but my fingers inexplicably keep ending up on notes other than those I’ve intended, which is not a problem I have on other instruments. Still, I’ve dug out various music books and have been happy pounding away at the lower numbers in Bartok’s Mikrokosmos and plodding through the easier bits of the Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin and Debussy on hand.

At this point, I should launch into some minor hair-pulling over not having spent more time practicing the piano in my youth, but to be honest I don’t particularly regret not being a better pianist — no more than the pianists I know regret not being able to play bass. Part of that stems from the satisfaction of knowing that I’m more at home with string and wind instruments (and while I do regret having lost my embouchure over the years, I’m sure my neighbours are quite glad I’m retired from lower brass). Mainly, though, I don’t miss being a better pianist because I know how much work it would have taken. It takes a lot of effort and thousands of hours of practice to become even adequate by professional standards of piano playing; even more daunting is the fact that one could devote a lifetime to practice and still never been any better than “good.” It’s a very hard road to travel, and some of the best pianists I’ve interviewed speak of never feeling as if they’ve mastered the instrument.

That’s one of the reasons I try to discourage friends, when they mention that they’d like to start their children on music lessons, from thrusting piano on their offspring. Don’t get me wrong — I think everyone should learn some piano, just as drawing and swimming should be universal skills. But it’s better for children to start with an instrument that seems to get easier as it goes along, as opposed to piano, which gets harder. Turning the squawk of a clarinet or the screech of a violin into a melody can be a source of tremendous satisfaction for a child, and the discipline gained through practice can be applied to more arduous tasks (such as learning piano) later on.

Of course, all that is based on the (possibly quaint) notion that instrumental proficiency is a talent worth having, and won’t be outmoded by sampling, sequencing and other digital manipulation skills. We all have our illusions.

It's a Man's, Man's, Man's World?

2005-01-09T14:40:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago, some of you (well, at least two, anyway) expressed concern about misogyny in rap — or, more to the point, concern that critics such as myself aren’t more exercised about it. Certainly, nobody I’ve read seems to have given a second thought to the casual use of the b-word in Jay-Z’s “99 Problems,” nor have questions about his attitude toward women kept the song out of numerous Top-10 lists. Maybe having such a nice girlfriend makes our Mr. Carter above suspicion.

Still, I suppose the fact that there are concerns at all is progress. After all, just a decade ago most of the music press was so blinkered in its view of gender roles in music that the fact that women could make worthwhile recordings was considered headline news. Back in the dark ages before hip-hop was even heard of, the Rolling Stones managed to demean women in all sorts of ways (think “Under My Thumb,” “Brown Sugar,” the notorious Black and Blue ad, “Miss You”) and only endured tepidly doctrinaire attacks from the feminist left. Obviously, we’ve come a long way. Baby.

On the other hand, there are also those who believe that dead horses must continuously be beaten, and to that end we can’t repeat too often that Misogyny Is Bad. Mm’kay? It’s a stupid, hateful prejudice, and deserves to be stamped out along with other forms of sexual, racial, cultural and religious intolerance.

If only the question of misogyny in rap were similarly so black-and-white. Sure, someone who believes that any use of the terms “bitch” or “ho” is by definition misogynist (unless applied to female dogs and streetwalkers) will easily find rap guilty on all charges. But such an absolutist view is more than a little foolish, as it leaves no room for satire or sarcasm, among other things.

Focus on at the way specific rap songs address women instead of merely obsessing on foul language, and it begins to become possible to draw useful distinctions. Start with the distinction between seeing a woman as sexually desirable, and seeing women only as sexual appurtenances; the latter is by definition misogynist, whereas the former is, at worst, merely rude. But what about a rap like Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back,” which can be taken as a statement of black pride (in his rejection of “white” notions of physical beauty), or an utter objectification of womanhood (notice he doesn’t say anything about the women’s personalities)? It could even be both, although the notion that a work of art can embody contradictory ideas is one that gives a lot of people headaches.

Or take raps that refer to women as bitches and ho’s, and look at how the the men are being portrayed. Often, they’re thugs and players, killers, dealers and thieves. Not exactly positive role models, are they? At the same time, a song populated only by hustlers and hos isn’t exactly an accurate portrait of life in the big city (unless you actually think Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is a real place). Nor is it intended to be. It’s a fiction, a fantasy, a figment of somebody’s (possibly warped) imagination, and while the picture it paints may be nasty, it doesn’t necessarily mean the artist believes all people are like this.

Of course, after years of palaver about “keepin’ it real” and how rappers are really “musical documentarians,” it’s no surprise that some listeners — particularly those too young, suburban and un-read to remember the lessons implicit in such arguments as Norman Mailer’s The White Negro — can’t discern the difference between actual attitudes and a professional bad-boy stance. Whatever its status as street culture might have been, hip-hop these days is as much a business as movies or video games.

“Misogynist,” like “racist” and “fascist,” is too serious a label to be applied lightly; indeed, the ease with which they’ve been tossed around threatens to make them as meaningless as “liberal” has become in American political discourse. Questioning what’s being said and why is important, as is looking at how the underlying social content is received by its audience.

But if all you want is a simple litmus test to determine whether something is bad and should be shouted down, well, fuck off. One Tipper Gore is more than enough for this world.

That Was the Year That Was

2005-01-06T19:00:00.000-05:00

Like most folks, I tend to put off unpleasant tasks, which is why the promised list of what I liked in 2004 — along with general comments about the year in music — has been so slow coming.

Simply put, while I found much that was admirable in last year’s cavalcade of pop, it was admiration in a detached, cerebral sense. To grab a critical fave at random, I found it really hard to get chuffed about Brian Wilson’s long-lost Smile album. Some of that is, of course, taste; unlike Wilson, I never dug the Hi-Los or Four Freshmen, preferring the more boppish Lambert, Hendricks & Ross, and so those vaunted close harmonies Wilson dotes on have always struck me as being a tad soulless. And, to be honest, it’s not like I’ve spent the last 38 years wishing the original Smile had been released as intended. Still, listening to Wilson’s loving exhumation of that lost moment moved me not at all, and reading those it did move seemed a bit like listening to people enthuse over high school reunions — however much you might appreciate their feelings, it’s hard to share a sense of connection.

As such, I found myself at year’s end with a distressingly large stack of CDs I wanted to love but couldn’t. Among them: Bjork’s Medulla (smart and inventive, but not enough to overcome its chilly solipsism); Stars’ Set Yourself on Fire (title to the contrary, it seemed oddly lacking in heat, however beautiful the sound was); U2’s How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (is the world really so desperate for Big Rock that even mediocrity gets raves?); and Usher’s Confessions (a couple good singles, sure, but is being shallow and horny really the stuff of autobiography?).

Having said that, the obvious question that follows is: Well, what makes your favourites so great? Basically, what earned these discs their place had mostly to do with time spent in CD players. These are the albums I turned to for fun, for solace, for a burst of joy and for the simple pleasures of sound. There are 20 here, mostly because 10 wasn’t quite enough (and 20 seemed a good place to stop), and the rankings are less a value judgment than a vague reckoning of the intensity of my affection for this music. At this point in time, anyway — my sense of 2004 could be quite different in six months, but who’ll care then?

1. Youssou N’Dour Egypt (Nonesuch)
Perhaps the greatest singer on the planet, and certainly the best in pop. But the pleasures here have less to do with the lustre of his voice than with the ease with which he makes the pan-Arabic vocal tradition his own. Lush, heartbreaking, panoramic, gorgeous.

2. k.d. lang Hymns of the 49th Parallel (Nonesuch)
A covers album of songs most singers wouldn’t think to cover, this is a wonderful piece of chamber pop, deftly straddling both the rock tradition lang started in, and the croonerish sophistipop she aspires to. She sounds great, naturally, but her real victory is in making the songs sound like they’re hers — no easy feat.

3. Utada Exodus (Def Jam)
Having suggested in print four years ago that this J-POP wunderkind could really make a mark in the North American market, I must admit to having been pre-disposed to liking this. But not even the ambition of her last Japanese studio album, Deep River, prepared me for the ambitious reach exhibited in the dance pop on offer here. Great beats, a distinctive vocal approach and a surprisingly vivid narrative — who would have thought club music would have room for troubadours?

4. Eddi Reader Sings the Songs of Robert Burns (Compass)
An album almost no one heard, and more’s the pity. Reader, who some may recall from her days with Fairground Attraction, cut several delightful-but-overlooked solo albums in the ’90s, and is by no means a folkie purist. But that’s precisely why these old Scots classics work — she makes the wit, the melancholy and the sass within seem as contemporary as an iPod. And her band ain’t bad, either.

5. K-OS Joyful Rebellion (Astralwerks)
Much as I admire the lyrical perspective — thoughtful, honest, courageous, it’s closer to the hip-hop core than any contemporary b-boy stance — what slays me is the way K-OS’ music recaptures the scavenger glee of the great rap DJs. Doesn’t hurt that he can sing, either.

6. Puffy Ami Yumi Hi Hi Puffy Amy Yumi (Epic)
A better best-of than Illustrated History, and proof that they rock bi-linguallly. Now if only Canadian TV would pick up the cartoon show that inspired this collection!

7. Scissor Sisters Scissor Sisters (Universal)
Campy, sure, and very much second-hand (although how much rock these days isn’t?), but delivered with enough glee to make those points moot. And who would have thought intentionally cheesy synths could ever sound cool again?

8. Kanyé West The College Dropout (Roc-a-Fella)
It shouldn’t be a shock that hip-hop is so multi-dimensional, but apparently it is. (And those who were amazed that somebody who could be down with Jay-Z would also be down with Jesus really need to pay more attention to the world around them.) Still, it’s nice to find a producer whose solo project is not only as good as his for-hire work, but frequently better. Neptunes, take note.

9. Keren Ann Not Going Anywhere (Manhattan)
Hardly an album I expected to adore, given its murmuring vocals and Nick Drake moodiness, yet within three plays I was smitten. Quietly smitten, but still. Great songs, but it’s the secondary hooks that keep reeling me back.

10. Colonel Claypool’s Bucket of Bernie Brains The Big Eye in the Sky (Prawn Song)
Despite its jam band bona fides, what makes this Les Claypool project shine is how well the playing fits the writing (which relies more on hook than gimmick), and how well the disparate parts fit together. Special kudos to synth wiz Bernie Worrell.

11. Isis Panopticon (Ipecac)
Slow, dark and epic. But where most SD&E metal tends to evoke Black Sabbath and John Williams, Isis is redolent of the Cure and Olivier Messaien. A welcome change.

12. Chris Potter Lift (Sunnyside)
I’ve enjoyed saxophonist Potter previously in a variety of settings, from Dave Holland albums to live with Steely Dan. But the lean, swinging hard bop of this live session eclipses all that — and I love when Kevin Hays weighs in on “7.5” with a ring-modulated Rhodes solo that sounds like the world’s loudest cell phone.

13. Junior Boys Last Exit (Domino)
Using club consciousness to winnow out all that was great about ’80s synth pop — and managing not to sound retro, to boot! What’s not to like?

14. Branford Marsalis Eternal (Marsalis Music)
Given the brilliance of his cameos with Sting and other pop stars, it shouldn’t be a surprise that Marsalis knows his way around a melody. But what makes this ballad collection so compelling is the way he evokes the passion of Coltrane’s ballad work without playing off the well-worn bits of Coltrane’s vocabulary.

15. Lamb of God Ashes of the Wake (Epic)
It’s like System of a Down without the art rock excess, or Korn without the funk fixation. And smarter than 99% of all the guitar albums I heard last year.

16. Simon Rattle, Berlin Philharmonic Messaien: Éclairs sur l’au-delà… (EMI Classics)
If it were only a matter of getting to bask in a previously unheard Messaien masterwork, I’d be happy as a pig in muck. But hearing the wonders Rattles pulls from the Berliners — the transparency of the woodwinds, the bell-like purity of the brass — makes this treat feel like real revelation. Please, sir … more?

17. Keith Jarrett The Out of Towners (ECM)
Jarrett, Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette have been making exquisite albums for so long superlatives barely apply anymore. But DeJohnette, in particular, shines so brightly on this set that it was hard to pry it from the CD player. Besides, I’m a sucker for songs like “You’ve Changed,” which positively glows here.

18. Slipknot Volume 3: The Subliminal Verses (Roadrunner)
With Rick Rubin behind the boards, they finally achieve a studio sound as scary as their onstage look. More to the point, they finally justify all that extra percussion, making me wish more heavy bands made the beat as important as the crunch.

19. Auf der Maur Auf der Maur (Capitol)
Why this wasn’t a bigger hit (critical or popular) I’ll never know — the writing and play beat the pants off Queens of the Stone Age or Probot. Great live show, too.

20. Evgeny Kissin Schubert: Piano Sonata in B-flat, Four Songs; Lizt: Mephisto Waltz No. 1 (RCA Red Seal)
I’d listened to the B-flat sonata many times, but never really heard it before — the rich landscape, the almost picaresque narrative. Kissin evokes the drama and passion of romantic era virtuosity without resorting to flash or corn, delivering both depth and dazzle. If chamber music had rock stars, he’d definitely be one.

Eminem Never to Tour France?

2004-12-24T19:32:00.000-05:00

In France, Parliament recently passed legislation that would levy stiff fines and jail terms of up to a year for anyone found guilty of insulting women or homosexuals. According to the Guardian, the new law would put sex-based slander on par with racist and anti-semitic remarks, and would apply to any form of public speech, including print, video or music. And the criteria are fairly broad, including both specific gay-bashing insults as well as remarks “of a more general nature tending to denigrate homosexuals as a whole.”

Oh, dear.

Although the Guardian report linked above focuses mainly on possible complications for religious groups, who may find themselves facing charges for arguing against same-sex marriage, the question which sprang immediately to my mind was: Is this the end of American hip-hop in France? Seriously, if the purpose of the act is to stamp out what one French feminist group described as “verbal violence,” how long could it be before Mr. Mathers — or DMX, or Too $hort, or even the estate of 2Pac — gets served with a complaint over the nature of their rap lyrics?

Over at Sasha Frere-Jones’ blog, Joshua Clover (under the moniker Felizitas) makes a series of propositions about the nature of rap, particularly the genre’s more transgressive traits. A lot of it has to do with parsing the relationship between social content and sonic form, and frankly, Clover/Felizitas is better at asking questions than providing answers (particularly when it comes to just what, exactly, is meant by “sonic form”). But one of the best questions has to do with the nature of hip-hop sexism/misogyny: “Is the use of terms like ‘bitch’ and ‘ho,’ and even dalliances with woman-beating, part of rap 2005's social content, or sonic form? Or sometimes one, sometimes the other?”

In other words, should such wordplay be taken at face-value, and thus reasonably be deemed insulting (and thus, presumably, actionable under the new French law)? Or should it be taken as part and parcel of sounding hard — that is, as the rhetorical equivalent of the beats and samples that also contribute to the music’s aggressive edge?

On one level, this leads fairly obviously to a chicken/egg question of words versus music, and while my understanding is that the backing track usually precedes the rhyme, the rapper isn’t simply reacting to the music — often, some of what gets rapped was written or thought about in advance. Not to mention the notion of personal style, and an overriding aesthetic that can influence both beats and rhymes. But this detour into hip-hop epistemology is mostly a dodge, as it dances around the deeper issue of how power manifests in music, and what we should make of it taking this particular form of sexual discourse.

Make no mistake — the central issue here is power, and how to wield it. Aggressive music is inherently assaultive, forcing itself on the listener through blunt assertion. That was true when Wagner doubled or tripled his brass sections in order to bend the ears of his audience back, and it’s still true today, regardless of whether we’re talking about the gut-rumbling bass of crunk, the eardrum-crushing roar of hardcore, or the speaker-shredding physicality of industrial. But simply seizing the listener’s attention by being too loud to ignore is an act of will without consequence; to make that racket matter it has to stand for something. Which is where the whole notion of social context comes in.

Carl Wilson, in the course of his own discussion of Clover’s propositions, wonders “why Public Enemy was once at the forefront of both sonics and politics, and in the past decade those two haven't coincided.” One answer (not the one he considers) is that he’s limiting his notion of politics, and thus misses the radical social critiques implicit in the thug capitalism of Suge Knight and P-Diddy, or the wealth of racial and class dialectic implicit in Eminem’s identity games. (It’s also possible to conclude that P.E.’s Farrakhan-inflected black nationalism was just as much a fad as the brief boom in Five Percent Nation rap acts such as Poor Righteous Teachers and Brand Nubian, and thus more anomaly than launch pad. But we try not to be quite that cynical.)

But — and this is where we cycle back to the French law — the real issue in this display of power is intent. Does the artist actually mean to lord it over others, to use language as a means to denigrate and demean? Personally, I’d say the answer most of the time would be a resounding “no.” When Led Zeppelin appropriated from the blues, they didn’t just borrow, they amplified and transformed, turning blues guitar licks into mighty mega-riffs and stroking aged double-entendres into pointedly tumescent choruses. (Squeeze my lemon, indeed.) And celebrating the glory of volume and the power of the penis is definitely not the same thing as attacking quiet or subjugating women — even if both are open to misinterpretation and abuse.

Hip-hop’s use of “bitch” is much trickier to parse, because while it sometimes is clearly intended as a less-than-complimentary synonym for “woman,” it also frequently carries the jail-yard meaning of “male inferior.” Now, Kate Millett would probably argue that two are part and parcel of the overall repression of women, and fair enough. But if the default position for any rapper is to assume alpha male status, it’s only natural that his rhetoric would seem demean and diminish all others. As Robert Plant taught us, you can’t have a big dick unless there are smaller dicks to compare against. Likewise, you can’t be the ultimate stud unless your mere existence reduces all women to quivering prisoners of desire. Et cetera, et cetera.

Point is, it’s all about posturing. Which, in turn, is about exaggeration. Which, in turn, is about wanting stand out, to make an impression, to be heard and not denied. To force a reaction, even if it’s just an angry shout of “shut up!” It’s a basic need in most, if not all, forms of art, and I don’t imagine even the French could figure out a way to legislate against it.

Listomania

2004-12-22T16:46:00.000-05:00

Christmas is closing in, and Santa isn’t the only one making a list and checking it twice. Thanks to the magic of the interweb, not only are the magazine stands choked with Best of 2004 lists, but anybody with an ISP account and the ability to count to ten has also typed in their two cents’ worth.

Me, I got nothing against lists. (That they’re are beginning to surpass profiles as the leading form of music journalism is another issue, but we’ll deal with that some other time.) It’s the concept of “the Best of the Year” that bugs me, because I’m never sure how seriously any of the list-makers take the claim. After all, there’s a world of difference between recognizing the merit — indeed, the greatness — of a work and actually liking it.

Surely we all spent at least some time in University reading or otherwise appreciating masterworks that left us dazzled, enlightened, impressed or inspired, but which afforded no pleasure whatsoever. For some, that experience lasted whole semesters. Now, I’m not going to argue that because few people read Paradise Lost for pleasure, it is therefore not great literature. Don’t be daft. But it does suggest a need to consider the difference between Great Art and Greatly Enjoyed Art.

Consider the film Sideways. It is in many ways great cinema — sharply written, beautifully shot, wonderfully acted, vividly imagined. Using the usual criteria of artistic merit, I would have no problem calling it one of the Best Films I saw in 2004. At the same time, I would feel obliged to add that I didn’t much enjoy it. Well made as it was, I found the characters fundamentally unlikable, and as such got relatively little pleasure from watching the film. So even though it would easily make my Best Films list, it wouldn’t even place among my favourites of 2004.

Within the construct of “high art,” likability wouldn’t be an issue, because personal pleasure has never been very high on the list of cultural priorities. Pop culture, on the other hand, is all about pleasure — indeed, its eagerness to scratch that itch is one of the reasons high culture critics (particularly post-Adorno) so utterly disdain it. Obviously, there are many places where the criteria intersect, and we could all list works that mix the sensual and the sublime in ways that are illuminating and exhilarating, deeply resonant and utterly visceral. But just as we accept that there can be greatness without pleasure, we should also be willing to maintain a place for those things we enjoy that have no claim whatsoever to the status of Great Art.

To that end, I propose an end to best-of lists, and their immediate replacement with lists of the writer (or journal’s) favourites for the year. Not guilty pleasures — no cause for shame here — but a proud accounting of what gave the greatest and most consistent pleasure during the year in question. And if a given critic wants to augment their list of pleasures with a donnish nod to the year’s Great Works, fair enough. At least we’ll know that we’re not necessarily expected to enjoy ’em.

(And, yeah, I know: What about my faves for 2004? Patience, gentle reader. The year isn’t over yet.)

Back in the U.S.A.

2004-12-19T14:39:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the lack of content lately, but I was off on a short, pre-holiday visit to the States. Even though it’s only a two-hour drive from to the border, I don’t visit the homeland much (not owning a car may be a factor), and this recent trip was my first since April, when I drove to Baltimore to play a reunion show with my old new wave band.

This visit was also by rental car, and we spent most of the nine-hour drive in Red Voter chunks of New York and Pennsylvania. Not that it was obvious from the road, as the election seems sufficiently long ago that there was little Bush/Cheney signage left. Instead, we saw a diner in New York that advertised both hot dogs and tripe (the latter illustrated by a large, red steaming bowl), and were amused to note a Pennsylvania road sign warning against aggressive drivers that was immediately followed by another sign bearing the silhouette of a horse and buggy.

The most obvious reminder that we were back in the U.S.A. came at the supermarket. Now that I’m used to grocery shopping in Canada, the variety of goods in American supermarkets seems both dazzling and numbing. At the SuperFresh my mother shops, there were at least 60 varieties of canned soup, almost triple what can be found at my neighbourhood Loblaw’s. Such abundance is something I took for granted when living in the States, and while there are some products I can’t get here and miss — navy bean soup, for instance, does not seem to be a Canadian taste — I don’t particularly feel that my life is harder for not having so many items to not buy.

Having the LCBO become more like American liquor stores, on the other hand, would definitely be an improvement.

What most puzzled us, though, were all the yellow ribbon magnets we kept seeing. When did this phenomenon take root? And is Tony Orlando getting a cut?

Seriously, while publicly avowing “We Support Our Troops” is certainly more civil than jeering “Baby Killer!” at returning G.I.s, it’s more than a little disturbing, nonetheless. Proclaiming “I Support the War in Iraq” may be more controversial, but at least it’s honest. The yellow ribbon, on the other hand, seems disingenuous, even if taken as a sort of “love the soldier, hate the war” reaction. For one thing, the Iraq occupation is far from the clean, white-hat operation Donald Rumsfeld would have us imagine. Not only has Abu Ghraib sullied the U.S. forces’ good-guy image, but testimony at Jeremy Hinzman’s asylum hearing in Canada suggests that further atrocities — such as the killing of unarmed civilians — remains unreported and uninvestigated. Do the ribbon-bearers support those troops as well?

Feel-good patriotism is enough of an American tradition that I probably shouldn’t cavil at its current manifestations. Still, it bothers me to see so many Americans respond to the war so insipidly. If you really support U.S. troops, how about asking harder questions about American foreign policy? Or about staffing levels in Iraq? Or about the Pentagon’s refusal to honor contracts with reservists? Or about Bush administration cuts in military pay and benefits?

That’s real support. The rest is just the political equivalent of a Hallmark card.

The Good, the Bad and the Grammys

2004-12-08T23:20:00.000-05:00

Because the Academy Awards broadcast was moved up a month, the Grammy show was also given an earlier-than-normal airdate for 2005. That’s why, instead getting our list of hopefuls in the dead of early January, the nominees for the 47th Annual Grammy Awards were announced on Tuesday.

According to the L.A. Times, retailers are pissed because the change of date deprives them of the usual post-New Year’s sales bump — as if the teens hoping to exchange Christmas cash for new CDs have somehow seen the Grammy voters as arbiters of hip. But the Grammy establishment is probably pretty pleased with the change, as for once their short-list arrives at the same time as the usual avalanche of Top 10 lists. No more Johnny Catch-Up for them, nossir.

Most of the news stories followed the numbers, and made much of Kanye West’s 10 nominations, Alicia Keys’ eight, and Loretta Lynn’s five. What almost no one pointed out was that none of the three can possibly that many Grammys. West is competing against himself in both Album of the Year (both as a producer on Keys’ album, and as artist on his own) and Best Rap/Sung Collaboration. Keys’ nods include two each in Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals and Best R&B Song, while Lynn wrestles against herself for Best Country Song (“Miss Being Mrs.” versus “Portland Oregon”).

But the biggest con is that despite a ballot littered with unexpectedly hip names — Cradle of Filth! Modest Mouse! Scissor Sisters! Franz Ferdinand! — the bulk is utterly predictable, tilted as ever to warhorses (Elvis Costello, Prince, U2, Eric Clapton, Sheryl Crow, Dolly Parton, Al Green), recent big winners (Keys, Nora Jones, Alison Kraus) and the deceased (Brother Ray). It doesn’t take a genius to figure out which group will end up as wheat, and which as chaff.

As always, it’s tempting to snipe at some of the more ludicrous choices (Queen Latifah is a jazz singer? Not on the album I got), but as it’s always better to be constructive than destructive, I’d prefer to suggest that the Grammy folk merely change the wording in their awards a bit. Instead of Record of the Year, why not Record of a Year? No need to specify which one, either. That way, the next time a recording that’s five or 10 years behind the curve is awarded one of those statuettes, viewers at home can entertain themselves by guessing what year, exactly, it represents. (“Anita Baker?? That’s so 1987!”)

Weak Ends

2004-12-05T23:24:00.000-05:00

The curse of domesticity is spending an entire weekend doing seemingly nothing and having it suddenly become Sunday night without your having accomplished anything. Well, hardly anything. There was rather a lovely meatloaf Saturday...

So in lieu of the deeper thoughts I'd intended to plumb, the gap is being plugged with a few odds and ends. First, in the post about Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs, I mentioned having voted but not being able to find my ballot. Well, I have, and find that I can plead only partially guilty to forming its consensus. Distressingly, neither of my top two songs -- "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," written by Ashford & Simpson but most notably recorded by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, and Leonard Cohen's sublime "Hallelujah" -- placed, but the next seven did make the list (though none at higher than 80). And the tenth tune, Anna McGarrigle's "Heart Like a Wheel," also got ignored. In case anyone wanted to know.

Also, I was chagrined to notice that my link to Jeff Chang's blog, Can't Stop Won't Stop, inexcusably added an "e" to his surname. It's been fixed. Apologies for the name change!

Instruments of Mass Destruction

2004-11-30T17:27:00.000-05:00

One of my wife's colleagues was passing through Toronto over the weekend, and had his bassoon with him. Apparently, traveling with a bassoon is not terribly common, as he reported later that the customs inspector at Pearson Airport was initially unconvinced that this odd collection of carved wood and tubing actually constituted a musical instrument. Eventually the bassoon was assembled and played, and the inspector was mollified -- although he inexplicably found the bassoon's sound to be "like a trumpet."

Now me, I found that story hysterical, but I wonder to what extent I'm in the minority on that. Music education being what it is these days, I don't doubt that someone would be mystified at the sight of a bassoon -- assembled or not. Nor does it help the ubiquity of recorded music means that for most of us, the musical experience is nearly invisible, as we usually see neither musicians nor instruments. Half the time we're lucky if we even see loudspeakers.

It wasn't always this way. Before mechanical reproduction took over, all music was live, and being able to play a musical instrument was fairly commonplace. Maybe the average concertgoer wouldn't be able to point out the bassoons in a band or orchestra, but they wouldn't be surprised to see one, either.

Were we better off then? On a global level, I think not. Technology -- whether in the realm of the recording studio or the possibilities posed by digital sampling and manipulation -- has made it much easier to get the sounds in one's head out into the world, and while there's much to recommend the technical skills required to master harmony, counterpoint and orchestration, there are also advantages to being able to conjure almost any sound or rhythmic fillip -- and not having to worry whether the bassoon can actually play that passage you've imagined.

And yet it pains me to see interest in musical instruments become a form of arcana, like knowing the difference between igneous and sedimentary rocks. If only there were a place instruments could be borrowed, like books from a library! The closest I ever came to such a magical place was the band room when I was in school -- I still remember the excitement I felt when fooling around on a school-owned tuba or baritone sax. But that was before budget concerns deemed musical education unnecessary. After all, what's the point of exposing kids to bassoons or flugelhorns if they're going to grow up to become customs agents?

The 500

2004-11-29T17:54:00.000-05:00

What I've found most disappointing in the commentary so far on Rolling Stone's latest list issue, The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, is how predictable it has all been. One line of complaint runs, roughly, "How could this song be rated higher than that song, which any sane person knows is infinitely better?" Another moans that the list is too canonical, enshrining the greats of the '60s while ignoring the greats of today. Still another objects that the list is all too typical of Rolling Stone, and thus boring, pompous and out of it. A few writers even managed to stuff all three arguments into a single, eye-glazing rant.

Yawn.

It's as if they were concocted from formula, using a template that has been in place since Rolling Stone started publishing list issues over a decade ago. Moreover, the writers appear blissfully unaware that these list features are meant not as the final word on popular culture but as a means of selling magazines, and writing about the list -- even dismissively -- is effectively carrying the magazine's water. Yeah, give 'em free publicity. That'll show 'em.

Now, I probably should admit that I was one of the 172 voters whose input somehow generated the 500 (you'll find me right between Gail Colson and Elvis Costello). Unfortunately, I've since lost my list of what I voted for, so it would be difficult to compute my personal culpability, but suffice it to say that a number of my favorites -- "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," "Without You," "Heart Like a Wheel" among them -- are not counted among the 500. And so what?

That said, the 500 Greatest Songs list does suggest an obvious question, and seeing as no one else is asking it, allow me: Why do they bill it as the 500 greatest songs when in fact what they're celebrating are great singles?

It's not as if the editors aren't aware of the issue; indeed, the introduction tries to finesse the point by explaining that "the word song refers to both a composition and its definitive recorded performance." Which, as I understand English, pretty much means they're talking about singles. Hence "Respect," which a songwriting list would credit to Otis Redding, is celebrated as one of Aretha Franklin's best, while "Walk On By," which ought to stand as a monument to the genius of Bacharach and David, becomes a paean to Dionne Warwick.

This is shortsighted on two fronts. First, it ignores the fact that part of what makes a song great is its almost infinite immutability. Whether "I Got Rhythm" or "Norwegian Wood" or "Bizarre Love Triangle," a great song shines regardless of who interprets it or how -- and, in return, provides giant-sized shoulders for the interpreter to stand on. Unfortunately for magazine editors, honoring the song means paying homage to the songwriter, and most readers really would prefer pictures of Elvis Presley to shots of Lieber and Stoller ("Hound Dog," "Jailhouse Rock") or Mark James ("Suspicious Minds").

Secondly, the RS500 approach ignores the distinction between songwriting and arrangement, and as such muddies the whole notion of authorship. If, for you, the list-topping "Like a Rolling Stone" is defined by the whistling, five-note organ hook that punctuates the chorus, then fuck Bob Dylan -- the guy you want to thank is Al Kooper, who came up with the part. And who, for what it's worth, doesn't get a songwriting credit. I wouldn't go so far as to argue that "Like a Rolling Stone" wouldn't work without that hook, but neither would I suggest it's entirely incidental. Which is why, for me, "Masters of War" is a much stronger Dylan song.

Arrangements often make the difference between a hit and a miss, and are every bit as important as the performance itself. When Badfinger recorded "Without You," it was a terrific song about heartbreak, but it lacked the air of majestic tragedy Harry Nilsson's version delivered. Some of that is vocal -- Nilsson pushes his tenor almost to the breaking point, which registers in our ear as tragedy (a trick opera composers have exploited for centuries) -- but most of it derives from the swelling intensity of Richard Perry's arrangement and production, which exploits everything from the echo of a piano in a big room (conveying loneliness) to the surging power of cellos and horns (representing the melancholy power of love). And it's worth noting that those qualities aren't necessarily transferable. That's why Mariah Carey's rendition, which draws heavily on Nilsson, fails; her voice, at its upper limits, sounds chirpy, not heartworn.

Perhaps the ultimate irony in Rolling Stone's myopia on this point is that, for once, the Grammys get it right. Record of the Year and Song of the Year are not the same thing, and for good reason. Now if only the Grammy voters had better taste...

Y Canada

2004-11-26T17:37:00.000-05:00

In response to my first post, one of you wrote, "please explain to a fellow Torontonian what brought you to our city, fer chrissakes." And I have to admit, the whiff of incredulity curling around the question does seem quintessentially Canadian, partly in its modesty but mostly in its polite implication of "What are you, nuts?"

A reasonable question. Before moving here, I was in New York, living in Brooklyn and editing the CD review section at Blender; now I'm a freelancer in Toronto. Logically, most people in the rockcrit trade would want to move in the opposite direction. Nevermind that Toronto is a nicer place to live, with a saner government (both locally and federally), or that my overpriced current neighborhood (the Annex) is cheaper and safer than my overpriced former neighborhood (Park Slope). Business is business, and it's rare to find someone walking away from a good job at a good magazine. Lord knows, it wasn't easy.

I did it for two reasons. One was love. My wife Mary, a mathematician who had been teaching at Penn, was offered a job with tenure at the University of Toronto. Tenure isn't an option in the music press unless you're Jann Wenner, and the volatility of the business had driven home to me after my experience at Revolver. Besides, if you're going to freelance, may as well do it in a country with national health care.

The other was that I really wanted to live in Toronto. Not because being in New York when the World Trade Center came down traumatized me (it didn't), or because I can't bear the thought of being in One Nation Under Dubya (though it does give me the creeps). Basically, I've liked Toronto since I first visited in the late '80s -- the people, the weather, the topography, the Beguiling, the bacon ... just the overall feel of the place. And, yes, Canadian music, too. But I think I'll save that for a later post.

Oh Boy, Another Music Critic Blog

2004-11-25T15:05:00.000-05:00

It's not as if the world has been crying out for more music blogs, after all. That's part of the reason I'd put off adding to the clutter. (OK, that and laziness.) If the masses have been clamoring for a Considine blog, it's news to me.

However, it'd be nice to have a venue for ideas which don't merit full stories (in the trad-journo sense) or are a bit too arcane for mass (read "paying") media. I miss having the sort of immediate access to expression I enjoyed when I was on staff at a daily paper. And blogging seems to be a great way to start fights with people, which Lord knows we critics surely love.

Hence Resonance. The name derives from what I consider a key aspect of sound -- the ability of objects to vibrate in sympathy. It's what makes musical instruments musical, what makes a good performance space, what defines our perception of sound as being lively or dead. It's also a great metaphor for the sort of emotional experience great art engender, the magical ability to feel another's emotions and take them as your own. If not for resonance, I certainly wouldn't have invested as much of my life in music, and if you're reading this, likely the same is true for you.

That's not to say Resonance will be 100% music-focused, as I'll probably blather on from time to time about other interests -- media, food, anime, life in Toronto, etc. Those will be digressions only, however; for the most part, I'll be writing about I or other people think about music. I seem to have a bit to say in that area.

Like any blogger, I'll promise to update regularly; like any blog-reader, you know that it likely won't be as regular as all that. None of us wants to look like we have *that* much time on our hands, right? With luck, sympathetic vibrations will outweigh the dissonance and noise, but no guarantees. After all, if we all agreed all the time, how would guys like me get any work?