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Thursday, January 17, 2008
SUCCESS
Graham Parker
The Mona Lisa's Sister
RCA : 1988
[Buy It]
One day this week I woke up too early, stubbed my toe, cut myself shaving. Every clumsy bad-day cliche applied precisely. Other factors were present, too: I had gotten a note from a colleague who disliked something I had written, not because I had made a powerful argument that offended her sensibilities, but because she thought it just wasn't very good. Another older colleague whom I respect greatly suggested that the writing game has its limits, and that they are narrower than I might, even after doing it for fifteen years, suspect. Sales figures for another book weren't what I wanted them to be; when are they ever? I read some authors that I love, which usually cheers me up, but it had the opposite effect, inspiring terror (and its crippled cousin, insecurity) that I might never get there myself. What resulted was displeasure with the wife, with the kids, with friends, with myself: a bad mood. I thought I'd get better soon enough. I didn't. Time passed, but not the mood. Nothing was working, so I turned to music. That's not surprising. But it was how I turned.
It is now well known that technology has changed the way we listen to music. The change has been reported, analyzed, and accepted for some time now, as we have passed from pure push technology like radio (where you listen to what you're given) to technologies of increasing pull (LPs, where you have to lift a needle or flip a disc; CDs, where you can scan from track to track or, if you are crazy, program the playing order) to the pure pull world of the iPod and the playlist.
One of the most obvious effects has been to eliminate the physical cost of carrying large amounts of music. In the old days, back when I couldn't wait for winter so that I could justify wearing a coat with pockets big enough to hold a Discman and a few CDs, I packed up with an eye toward variety. If I took a rock record out with me, I tried to take a soul record, on the theory that moods are unpredictable, and that I might get tired of one and need the other. If I took a record with an aggressive vocalist, I tried to take along something instrumental or soothing. If I took male singers, I took female singers. When I traded the Discman for the iPod, the first and most obvious effect was to atomize the album as the unit of music and replace it with the song. Instead of listening to a James Brown album--never his strong suit--I could listen to eight or ten or twenty James Brown songs. Custom albums were instantly available. What I found, though, was that some artists, like Randy Newman or ESG or Al Green, worked best in short bursts, a few songs at most, after which I had an itch to play something else. The iPod encouraged extreme impatience--if a song wasn't aiding a good mood or counterweighting a bad one, it was simple to switch off--but that wasn't really the issue. Some artists were just better at the sprint than at distance running. Maybe it was the richness of the aftertaste: it was difficult to hear Al Green sing "Jesus is Waiting," the final song on Call Me, and not feel like everything else in his catalog was anticlimactic. Maybe it was the way that certain artists suggested other artists: Stevie Wonder always made me want to hear Smokey Robinson. I loved visiting with these artists, but I found I couldn't stay.
A recent Rolling Stone report on the death of high fidelity wondered if extreme audio compression has encouraged a culture of skipping around--songs in MP3 format, it suggested, might not grab listeners in the way that vinyl recordings once did. Perhaps, but there are still certain artists who resist the process and reward residency. When I listen to them, I want to listen to more of them, sometimes for days on end. Pace Yeats, the center holds. Van Morrison has that effect. Sly Stone has that effect. The Ramones have that effect. Mary Margaret O'Hara, despite having a tiny body of work, has that effect. I want to draw a distinction, very important and possibly spurious, between the idea of an artist's quality and his ability to retain my attention for an extended period of time. I'm not arguing that Van Morrison is superior to Randy Newman or that I like him more, only that he (Van) has a certain stickiness that keeps me in place while he (Randy) has a certain re- or propulsive quality that sends me on to other artists. Whenever I come to an artist with stickiness or he or she comes to me, it has the feel of a weather event. It is a front that moves in from the West and hangs around for a while.
I raise the idea of weather events because I am currently in the middle of one. Last week, before the bad mood, everything seemed normal. The iPod skipped blithely from Panda Bear to Peaches to DMX to the Contours. Then, during my bad mood day, I started playing Graham Parker. It wasn't completely accidental. I had included "Crying For Attention" in last week's Moistworks post, and then a friend wrote to say that he loved the song, and then another friend wrote to say he approved of the choice, and then another friend said, "Who is Graham Parker?" I was predisposed. Plus, somehow I had set my iPod strangely, on shuffle by song, and so after the first Graham Parker song I got a second, then a third, then a fourth. I have about two hundred Graham Parker songs total, more than twelve hours' worth, and so there was no reason to reprogram. I went out for walks, went to the gym, sat around the house with the iPod randomly picking Graham Parker songs for me. Some songs weren't as good as I had remembered, particularly the ones from the seventies. Some of the vocal performances, particularly those from the nineties, were better than I had remembered. Some songs were too wordy. Some production choices were curious. But it was a relationship rather than a fling, and so his worldview began to both amplify and clarify mine, and I fell into the sound of his voice.
Somewhere along the way, I got "Success." It's from The Mona Lisa's Sister, an album that is often dismissed as uneven or underwritten when in fact it's neither. It's a strong set of songs, sometimes superb, that are produced down close to the bone and share at least one unifying theme: the world will let you down if you let it. This isn't a new theme in Parker's work, but it came at a time when he had left Atlantic Records under a cloud (after leaving Mercury under a cloud), and many of the lyrics are about an artist trying to find his place in a world populated by hostile (or, worse, indifferent) figures. The opening song, "Don't Let it Break You Down," and the single, "Get Started, Start a Fire," are both self-help texts, though particularly pricky and equivocal ones. But the most striking song is "Success," which doesn't end the record but might as well, since it's followed by a bouncy minor number called "I Don't Know" and a beautifully sung if inessential cover of Sam Cooke's "Cupid." "Success" opens with a strummed chord, some soothing harmonies, and a little lead guitar figure, all very nice and all utterly misleading given what Parker's singing about. He looks at the biggest version of the big picture, especially with regard to his own creative work, and he comes away stung:The dreams and hopes of men are powered by addiction
And who am I to say that this is an affliction
When everybody gets suckered in and lives their lives like fiction
Writing their own stories of success
They say they want you for your colorful evocation
The way you turn a cliche into a sensation
But all they ever wanted was that same vibration
The one that shimmers round success
Success success success success
Success success success success
All you ever need -- success
You can't be happy while someone else has a fistful
They glow from TV screens: healthy, strong and fiscal
And everybody slaps their back while you're alone with a wristful
Jerking to the rhythm of success When I first heard the record, I was eighteen, and I was a little shocked by the last verse. The daring, even foolhardy rhymes (fistful/fiscal?) led directly to the final image, of Parker at home jerking off into the futility of his TV set, which carries a picture of somebody who's more famous. And then there's the way he pronounces the title: "suck-cess." It was brutal and remains so, although now the first and second verses, which are all about writing, cut just as deep. When I heard the song this week, in the middle of my bad mood, it reminded me that the bleakness of life comes in all forms, and that none of those forms obscure the central mission, which is to record it honestly, powerfully, and continuously.
Anyway, the Graham Parker weather event continues. Today I had a good time with the jouncy "Nobody Hurts You," from Squeezing Out Sparks ("Grandfather's money only in the finest stuff / That's enough, that's enough, that's enough") and the angelic, melancholy "Disney's America," from 12 Haunted Episodes ("And we drifted apart like runoff into the Chesapeake Bay"). The poor mood isn't exactly lifting, but I'm getting used to it, and when it finally dissolves and I spin the wheel back to Talking Heads or Chic or Prince or Morrissey, I'll be on the lookout for more weather.Labels: ben, rock and roll
posted by Ben
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