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Sunday, August 16, 2009
RIGHT HERE NOW
James McMurtry
Where'd You Hide the Body
Sony : 1995
[Buy It]
Days of disconcertion, days of imbalance, days of rage. They happen less often than they once did, but they still happen. Once a wise old man told me that these days are a blessing, because they are a sign that vitality is still coursing through your veins. "Without these days, you have death in life," he said. I slammed the window on his beard. I stopped at a bar on the way back and stayed until last call. That old man's voice was echoing in my head and I needed the anger to drain.
Days of frustration, days of impatience, days of choler. This used to be the only reason to listen to music, and it was a substantial one. It's hard to overestimate the therapeutic efffect of that first Pretenders record, or Public Image Limited, or even AC/DC. I defy chiropractors to claim with a straight face that what they do straightens your spine and resets your alignment better than playing "Precious" at top volume.
Days of displeasure, days of judgment, days of narrowed eyes. As old or at least older age advances, it's easier to see those medicinal songs simply as vitamins. They give you energy but what else do they give you. And it's easy to resist the songs that other people insist are sources of comfort: "Thunder Road" or "Let It Grow" or even Tricky or Radiohead. To paraphrase David Bowie, if they don't do it, they don't do it: it's only false claims.
Days of suspicious, days of perceived injustice, days of moral exhaustion. In those times, it becomes a kind of quest, to find a song that works without exerting too much effort, or at least without appearing to. This week, there were a number of frustrating days. I don't mean to overstate the severity of what happened-it was nothing much, maybe nothing at all, but it was getting to me. I went searching for something calm. This is what I found. As a bonus, it even has football-related lyrics:I remember a ball game I watched as a kid
Neglecting my homework as I often did
Joe Namath scored on a seven-yard run
His knees barely held him, but they got the job done
And there'd be no last call if they elected me king
And if you were here with me, I'd tell you these things Which songs get the job done for you?Labels: ben, rock and roll
posted by Ben
LINK |
Wednesday, August 05, 2009
SILENCE
Lefty Frizzell
1958
Life's Like Poetry
Bear Family : 1992
[Buy It]
SILENCE IS A STRONG REPLY
Murray Head
Say It Ain't So
Island : 1976
[Buy It]
DAY OF SILENCE
Pete Townshend
Happy Birthday
Universal Spiritual League : 1970
[Buy It]
(SILENCE)
Ciccone Youth
The Whitey Album
Enigma : 1988
[Buy It]
Most days I speak to people, like most people. One day this week, I spoke to almost no one. It wasn't planned. I didn't do it to make a point. I got a new computer at the office, and it was a lemon, so I took the day off while they replaced it. I went out for a little while and left my cell phone at home. I had no way to communicate and so I was out of communication, if not exactly uncommunicative.
Usually I speak to one person, at least. I don't mean a generic person. I mean a specific person. There's one friend I check in with every day. I haven't always had a friend like this, but it's been the case more often than not. Every once in a while, this friend will go on vacation, or I will, and we won't speak, and it's disorienting. It's as if the days don't really exist. It's like time is executing a feint. This week, one day, I didn't speak to this person. To be fair, the silence and non-speaking didn't last all day, but they lasted for part of the day, intensely. If making no conversation and making no sound were experiments, my participation in them was at once semi-committed and ultra-compressed. I was out for a walk with no way to communicate with ohters. I listened to music instead.
The songs I heard were, in part, songs about silence. I let the iPod search for them. The first one was Lefty Frizzell's "Silence," from 1958, and it was a disconnect, for the most part, because Frizzell is singing about silence as loneliness, and I wasn't lonely at all, just out for a walk, listening to music, not talking to a friend of mine. Frizzell, too, isnt talking to a friend of his, but this is the cause of his silence rather than an effect of it:I will die in the silence
Where no one hears me when I cry
When the clock ticks
When the wind blow
When the rain falls
Or when it snows
I think of you
Oh yes I think of you
And your face I can see Again, silence here isn't the absence of sound or even of conversation. It's the absence of one specific person, without whom any sound or conversation is meaningless. It's hard to recover that idea in today's world, where there are a million options for connecting with others. I assumed--correctly, as it turned out, though I wouldn't know until later - - that my friend would try to make contact with me during the day, via phone or email. Was the silence my friend was experiencing, where attempted contact went out but nothing came back, different from what I was experiencing, when I felt the fact of attempted contact but could not add to it? I walked and listened.
After I heard some Simon and Garfunkel and some Paul Westerberg, I got to Murray Head, in whose hands silence is another kind of statement- - a proportional response to an injury. The sleeping dog in me won't lie
But when I'm woken you can't deny
When you fall in love right from the very start
You give your love and then they break your heart
When dreams are broken silence is a strong reply Again, here, silence is a romantic substance, and again, the absence he feels is in fact a sign of a more powerful presence. After that song, I wanted to call my friend, just to make it clear that the fact that I wasn't replying didn't mean I was Not Replying. It's easy to mistakenly feel this in today's world, where the million options for connecting with others makes silence echo even louder.
Murray Head's song sounds a little like something Pete Townshend would have written away from the Who, for himself, in the early seventies. Townshend did in fact write something similar, "Day of Silence," though it wasn't for himself--it was from an album called Happy Birthday, which he recorded with a group of friends in 1970 as a tribute to Meher Baba. From this communal environment, Townshend managed to extract a song about solitude and mindful silence:When you're feeling low
Try a day of silence
Take things very slow
Listen to the wireless
Never speak a sound
Sit up on the hedgerow
Watch the world go round
Peace will let your mind go I wasn't feeling particularly low, and I couldn't find a hedgerow, but otherwise, I followed Townshend's prescription to the letter. In his song, in my day, silence wasn't about intake but rather output. It was the decision to produce no noise. That was the song I decided to mention to my friend when I returned to the land of communication: in fact, the one I decided to mention to all the friends I gave the silent treatment to, accidentally or purposefully, mindfully or matter-of-factly.
My iPod moved on from the Townshend song to others: Van Morrison's "Hymns to the Silence," Pavement's "Silence Kit." All of them, no matter what their philosophy, contained a central irony, the one Townshend was talking about when he recommended listening to the wireless: they are noise about silence, as conflicted at their root as, say, an essay about noncommunication. For actual silence, marked and measured, I went and found a song that I was surprised my iPod couldn't find on its own, Sonic Youth at its most experimental, recording as Ciccone Youth. The Ciccone Youth album is a riot of experiments and shattered expectations--the fact that it was released on Enigma almost seems redundant--and so it only makes sense that one of those experiments finds the noisiest of noise-rock bands monumentalizing the non-noisiest state imaginable. "(Silence)" is shorter than John Cage's "4'33",", which renders it both less committed and more compressed. Below I have reprinted the lyrics in full.Labels: ben, rock and roll, silence
posted by Ben
LINK |
Monday, July 27, 2009
HEAT OF THE MOMENT
Asia
Asia
Geffen: 1982
[Buy It]
BURNING HELL
John Lee Hooker
Hooker 'N' Heat
Elektra : 1971
[Buy It]
AHMNOT MADATCHA
The Negro Problem
Joys & Concerns
Aerial Flipout : 1999
[Buy It]
I'M NOT ANGRY
Elvis Costello
My Aim Is True
Columbia : 1978
[Buy It]
Yesterday was the first day that was too hot. I didn't check the temperature, but I felt the temperature. A few people disagreed with me, insisting that it was summery but comfortable, so it is possible and maybe even likely that temperature is subjective.
Yesterday was the first day of the summer that I lost my cool. Three separate people in my house--all the people in my house who aren't me--told me that I was too hot-tempered. It started early in the morning, when my five-year-old decided that he was going to talk back, make faces, push things off shelves, lean his chair back on two legs, and generally be five years old. I snapped at him, snapped at him again, told him what he could do to avoid further snapping, but he would not rehabilitate no matter how many opportunities he was offered. My wife and the eight-year-old, more circumspect than I was, tried to rein him in, but they failed as I had failed before them, and as I would fail after them. The morning was bad enough. Then we went to lunch. He started in immediately. The table was shaped weird. The lemonade was too bitter. Give me my cookie. I glowered and scowled and did my best to lessen the swelling, but it got worse over the course of the afternoon. Dinner was a repeat engagement: he mocked my voice and my wife's, stuck his tongue out at his food, laughed inappropriately. Five. Finally I was finished with it. I took my plate to the kitchen, dropped it next to the sink, and left the room. He came to find me and apologize, but somehow managed to turn that into a demand for a trip to the park. "Park, park, park," he said, stamping his foot. "Now, now, now."
"Go away," I said. He didn't. I went for a bike ride by myself. A storm was coming in. The air was nearly liquid. When I came back, he was still defiant. He rolled his eyes and then narrowed them. I yelled a little, which may have seemed like more than a little to him. It was the heat of the moment. Incidents arose from circumstance. The five-year-old went to bed without any resolution, and before he went to sleep he told my wife that he didn't like me. "Dad's always mad," he said. Temperature is subjective.
I have several wise things to say about child-rearing, but none of them relate to the behavior I exhibited yesterday. When the kids were off to sleep, my wife told me that I had acted poorly and I reminded her that five-year-olds can be jerks. "I wonder where he gets it from," she said.
"Stop it," I said. I thought I was joking, but evidently my face wore an expression of rage. I gave in to it. "I'm boiling mad," I said, and as a result I was. She went to bed, tired of me, and I stayed up alone and listened to music. Mostly I listened to John Lee Hooker, who isn't my favorite blues guitarist or singer but usually trances me out a little bit. This time, the first song was "Burning Hell," not the original but the version he recorded with Canned Heat. It starts with a bit of studio chatter in which Hooker gives the producer instructions. "Nothing but the best and later for the garbage," he says. I went in to look at my kids as they slept. The eight-year-old was peaceful; there was a book open beside him. The five-year-old had his jaw set angrily, even in sleep. I lay down next to him for a minute, rubbed his head, and then wrote an apology on a Post-It Note. "Sorry I yelled at you at dinner," I said. "Love, Dad."
Last night a storm dumped rain on the city. Rain is supposed to cool things off. This rain didn't. This morning my five-year-old woke up mad, mostly mad at me. While his brother read and got dressed, he stalled, challenged, got his back up. I went to force him into his shoes and socks, and saw the note I had written him, crumpled up in his trashcan: later for the garbage. A few minutes before we had to leave for camp, he asked me to play some music for him. He likes music with energy: the Hives, the Who, the Ramones. I tried playing him Public Image Ltd.'s "Rise," which explains that anger is an energy, but he wasn't interested in a lesson plan. He insisted on AC/DC's "Thunderstruck." "There was a storm last night," I said.
"So what?" he said. "Who cares?"
I walked him to camp. "I'm hot," he said. "And tired." I resisted saying "Who cares?" We talked about kids and parents and arguments and time. Talking about time was his idea; he wanted to know what it was and how we all got in it and if there was any such thing as being outside of it. I said there wasn't. To support my point, I told that when I was his age, I had a very similar personality to his. "I got in trouble because I argued and talked back," I said. "I didn't like listening to grownups."
"I know," he said. "Why would you?" I turned my head to look at him, assuming he was joking, but his face had an entirely different expression. I didn't ask him if he was still mad. It was obvious. When we got to camp, he asked me to carry him upstairs. "I like being here," he said, "with you." Then he said he had to tell me a secret. I leaned in. "I love you," he said. "Now go away." I did.Labels: ben, rock and roll
posted by Ben
LINK |
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
NEVER TELL YOUR MOTHER SHE'S OUT OF TUNE
Jack Bruce
Songs For a Tailor
Atco : 1969
[Buy It]
YOU SAY YOU TRUST YOUR MOTHER
Swamp Dogg
1972
Available on : Excellent Sides of Swamp Dogg, Vol. 2
S.D.E.G. : 2001
[Buy It]
MY MOTHER WAS A FRIEND OF THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE
Blurt
1980
Available on : The Best of Blurt Vol. 1: The Fish Needs a Bike
Salamander : 2004
[Buy It]
MAMA TOLD ME NOT TO COME
Randy Newman
12 Songs
Reprise : 1970
[Buy It]
MOTHER
John Lennon
John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band
Capitol : 1970
[Buy It]
I DON'T WANNA BE A SOLDIER
John Lennon
Imagine
Capitol : 1971
[Buy It]
WHO PUTS ME IN MY LITTLE BED
Ada Jones
1913
Edison Blue Amberol
YONDER COMES MY MOTHER
Son House
1965
Father of the Delta Blues
Sony : 1992
[Buy It]
In the last week three friends of mine have had what I'll call non-productive moments with their mothers. This isn't the appropriate place for details, so I'll make some up. One friend wanted to go on a camping trip in the wilds of Alaska, and her mother, who once lost a sibling to a vicious Kodiak, overreacted to the plan. "No," she screamed. "You will be torn to pieces by that bear, my darling." Another friend told her mother she was planning on taking crack. "Whatever," her mother said. "Save me some." The woman was then incensed that her mother didn't care more for her. The third friend had given notice at her job, which her mother had never much liked, on account of the fact that her boss was a hardened criminal who bootlegged DVDs and carried a gun in the waistband of his pants. But some important wires crossed in her mother's head, and she became furious with her daughter for once again becoming, at the age of 41, unemployed.
The other day I saw the Albert Brooks movie "Mother," which I have been bothering my wife to rent. She went to every video store within walking distance of our house, and no one has the movie. I despaired for it. Then it turned up on HBO, and we watched about two-thirds of it. I don't usually talk about pop culture other than pop music here, but I urge everyone to see it. It has too much dime-store psychology, and it knows that, but it has a fantastic performance by Debbie Reynolds as the perky, practical, judgmental, loving mother. Brooks is great, because he's always great: when he is forced to eat the permafrost sherbet in his mother's freezer, he screws up his face and says that it "tastes like an orange foot." There are plenty of moments of inspired discomfort -- at one point Brooks taunts his younger brother by pretending that he and his mother are having a sexual relationship -- but the climactic scene, where Brooks, who is playing a successful but blocked sci-fi writer, discovers that his mother also harbored dreams of literary fame, is legitimately moving. Consider this a Moistworks two thumbs up, though both thumbs are mine.
In the last hour I have been working on a technology to beam that movie into my friends' minds. I want them to understand that most of what their mothers do is done from love, and that the poor execution should be forgiven if possible. I would also beam the movie into the mothers' minds and tell them to ease off, that their kids are smart and confident so long as they are permitted to be that way, and that they need not worry so industriously about the worst-case scenarios. Of course everyone already know all of this, but I want to agree. And while I perfected the technology about five minutes ago, now I'm having second thoughts, mainly because the three situations I heard about this week concern mothers and daughters, and the Albert Brooks movie, along with everything I personally know, concerns mothers and sons. I think we can all agree that mother-daughter business is significantly different from mother-son business. It's knottier. It persists. There are mirrors hung next to windows, which can be confusing and exhilarating. I'm not even sure that mother-son solutions can address mother-daughter problems except in the most hapless, generic sense. Oh well.
In the last ten seconds, I put the blueprints for the movie-beaming device into the top drawer of my desk and took out a series of songs about mothers. There's Jack Bruce's "Never Tell Your Mother She's Out of Tune," which is interesting advice if you consider it more broadly - Bruce seems to be saying you should just take the lumps from maternal scrutiny/sanction and move on. Unfortunately, all the reasoned thinking takes place in the title; the song, despite some nice guitar by George Harrison, is a collection of disjointed blues-inflected lyrics. There's a similar problem at the heart of Blurt's spiky, excellent, somewhat nonsensical "My Mother Was a Friend Of the Enemy of the People." For actual answers, it's useful to go elsewhere. Swamp Dogg's "You Say You Trust Your Mother" investigates what can happen when children no longer believe that their mothers are acting in their best interest. As usual with Swamp Dogg, the song is far more complex than it first appears; it's not just about biological mothers, but about nations and patriots, the dangers of unconditional trust and the toxic sadness of suspicion. Randy Newman's "Mama Told Me Not to Come," on the other hand, illustrates what can happen when children fail to heed their mothers' advice - what can happen, it seems, is that those children can grow up fast: The radio is blasting, someone's beating on the door
Our hostess is not lasting, she's out on the floor
I seen so many things here I ain't never seen before
I don't know what it is but I don't wanna see no more
Mama told me not to come
Mama told me not to come
Mama said that ain't no way to have fun So what is the way to have fun? To listen to your mother? To ignore her? To ignore her knowing that what she's saying is half-panic and half-wisdom? In the Albert Brooks movie, he is drawn back to his mother when he starts to believe that he is dysfunctional in life because he has failed to understand what lies at the root of the mother-child dynamic. But he cannot accept anything his mother says at face value: she's always prodding him, always provoking, never saying exactly what she means. If she told him not to go to a party, he'd go, just like the young man in Randy Newman's song - and like that young man, he might spend much of the party thinking of his mother's sound advice, and even missing her a little. One of the most famous mothers in rock and roll belongs to John Lennon, who lost her when he was seventeen; she surfaces explicitly in the Beatles "Julia" and then "Mother," from Lennon's first solo album. She may also be present, though more obliquely, in "I Don't Want to Be a Soldier," the ragged, anguished political broadside that closes side one of "Imagine":Well, I don't wanna be a soldier mama, I don't wanna die
Well, I don't wanna be a sailor mama, I don't wanna fly
Well, I don't wanna be a failure mama, I don't wanna cry
Well, I don't wanna be a soldier mama, I don't wanna die
Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no Is Lennon appealing back to the mother he lost for sanity? For safety? Or is "mama" more generic here? Is it a girlfriend? Is it womanhood in general, understood as protection against the ravages of war and male insecurity? Again, these are all mother-son situations, and not particularly helpful for mother-daughter dust-ups. Again, oh well. I did find one explicit mother-daughter song, from Ada Jones, from 1913, though it's sung from the perspective of a child dreaming of adult romance and complexity and coming back, every time, to the reliability of a mother's affection--and then, as punchline, to the harsher reality of a father's responsibility:I've had the measles and the mumps
The stomach ache and stomach pumps
My ma says she's afraid a cough
Some day will surely take me off
I get five cents each time I take cod liver oil, you see
And when I've got a dollar saved my ma buys more for me
Who puts me in my little bed?
My mama dear
Who hugs me when my prayers are said?
My mama dear
Who buys me every kind of pill
With sugar on to cure my ills?
But who pays all the doctor bills?
My dear old dad In the ninety-six years since the song was first released, it hasn't gotten any less creepy.
Mothers, children, conflicts, bonds: it all comes together and all comes apart in Son House's "Yonder Comes My Mother," which is rich with unanswerable questions of separation, emptiness, fullness, exhilaration, and fear. While most songs about mothers get caught up in domestic particulars or psychodrama, this one sees only the big picture, and this may be because it's mistitled, somewhat: this is Son House's version of the spiritual "When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder," which makes a case for accepting even the flawed among us, and for looking past shortcomings to the common thread that binds together all humans, even those who are already bound together. Wait, maybe it is about mothers and children, after all.Labels: ben, blues, rock and roll, soul
posted by Ben
LINK |
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
COMMUNICATION BREAKDOWN
Led Zeppelin
Led Zeppelin I
Atlantic : 1969
[Buy It]
I FOLLOW YOU
Amadou et Mariam
Welcome to Mali
Nonesuch : 2008
[Buy It]
TOO MANY BIRDS
Bill Callahan
Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle
Drag City : 2009
[Buy It]
Lately, everyone's talking about Twitter. Or is that twittering about talking? Regardless, the 140-character-limit monologue (mono-blog?) has gotten us all a flutter. It's the future of communication! The future of the written word! The future of the future!
If it's the future, then it has to be distinct from the past, right? By that standard, Twitter earns its stripes. We've probably always had some interest in endlessly self-indulgent pitter-patter, but now we finally have the tools to give constant shout outs to people--of course, they are essentially constant shout outs to ourselves. And who doesn't like a shout out? During my long, often thankless days gazing at the feeble beacon of my laptop screen, I must admit to the simple pleasure of digital attention. Instant messages. Blog comments. Facebook posts. All these notifications have become a meaningfully meaningless part of daily monotony - a sugar rush, sweet and fleeting.
When I first joined Twitter, I had the odd realization that communication had evolved away from the need for an exchange of information. The back and forth of dialogue was, finally, obsolete. Twitter didn't even pretend to be about adding friends, or making connections - instead it encouraged the one-sided wonder of following people. And as I decided who I should follow, I started thinking about what music would follow me. There aren't any songs specifically about Twitter, of course. No band has gone down that questionable path yet - though no doubt we'll eventually hear ditties about twenty-word errors ups and falling in love one status update at a time.
But plenty of songs are still topical. Take the famed Led Zeppelin song "Communication Breakdown," which has a fairly straightforward message:Hey babe, I got something I think you oughta know
Hey babe, I wanna tell you that I love you so. Indeed, that could easily fit into the short sentences of our digital age. But even in its simplicity there's a breakdown going on. Someone isn't getting that message, even though he's sending it loud and clear. This makes sense: we may be tech-savvy, but we will always be life-sloppy. As an advertising copywriter, I can compress complicated client briefs into headlines, long-winded arguments into pithy emails, and life into blog posts. But when it comes to getting emotion across in real-time, I go strangely mute. And though I have at least ten different ways of getting in touch, I always remain just out of reach.
I suppose to combat my inherent aloofness, I could take a page from Amadou and Mariam's book. In "I Follow You," the pretense of casual contact is completely discarded in favor of vocalizing unabashed determination.When you go to school, baby I follow you
When you go to work, baby I follow you
When you go downtown, baby I follow you
I think of you every day, every night
I think of you everytime, everywhere The word "follow" is a bit uneasy; it suggests a shadowy presence lurking a few steps behind. And yet, somehow this song takes that notion, and injects it with such earnest sentimentality, that there isn't anything disturbing in the urgency of the lyrics. The same is true of Twitter, hopefully: "following" and even "stalking" are common Internet verbs, stripped of their threat because they're kept apart from reality.
Which suits me just fine. I would never really want to admit to my surreptitious interest in those I follow online. I mean, if I were to be more vocal in my longings, what of my pride and reputation? Turns out modern gratification still goes hand in hand with good old-fashioned fear of rejection. After all, what happens if no one responds? If you write something on the Internet, and no one acknowledges it, does it even make a sound? It seems safer not to try. In the end, it's almost a relief to sink back into the anonymity of an online world where no one pays enough attention to know how much attention you're paying. In "Too Many Birds," Bill Callahan nails the wistful comfort of this technological wasteland:Too many birds in one tree
With no place to land It's true. We are all too many lonely souls flapping about aimlessly together on one site or another. All just looking for a place to land, a stand to take, or maybe just a place to be noticed and go unnoticed at the same time. I'm not sure if I'll ever really take to Twitter. Its staccato impermanence doesn't do enough for me--even my short attention span longs for something a little longer. Plus, the hope it peddles is mostly false. Twitter might change the way we communicate slightly, but the glorious insecurities of life and love will always be more than 140 characters or less can possibly capture.
Note: This post represents approximately 35 Tweets.Labels: madeleine, rock and roll
posted by mad
LINK |
Thursday, February 12, 2009
THE GRIP OF LOVE
Tom Verlaine
Tom Verlaine
Elektra : 1979
[Buy It]
Why are people so quick to love movies, books, songs, paintings, restaurants, and sports teams but so slow to love other people? Sages have been debating this issue for centuries, and continue to the present day. Bill Sage, a kid I went to high school with, used to talk about the girl he was dating, how she was a hot girl who was smart or maybe a smart girl who was hot. "Maybe she's the overlap," he said. "I love the idea of the overlap." But he never loved her, and she found that out a few years later in college, and promptly slept with someone else. It wasn't me, but I knew the guy, and after she got rid of him, too, we became friends. Now she's living in a western state, where she works for a company that helps other companies manage inventory. I spoke to her not so long ago, and she said that her personal life was frustrating, not exactly loveless but not exactly love-filled. Work, on the other hand, was rewarding. "You wouldn't think it," she said, "but I like the purely logistical issues. For example, in most companies, sending things out of the warehouse is a relatively trivial matter compared to bringing things into the warehouse." She went on to explain that since no system is perfect, especially when so many moving parts are involved, a certain amount of management is management of inevitable errors in counting, logging, and ordering. "You have to be precise about imprecision," she said.
I digress. Or rather, she digresses. Or does she, and do I? Bob Sage, Bill's brother, used to say that it was easy to love people so long as you didn't have to look at them, and we would laugh at him, because he was always making these kinds of jokes, but it's entirely possible that he wasn't joking at all. People are quick to love movies, books, songs, paintings, restaurants, and sports because those things don't love back--or rather, can't love back. There is no expectation of reciprocation and consequently never any disappointment when reciprocation falls short. Each and every time you listen to "Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell," say, it produces the same experience for you. If the experience is different, you will quickly understand that the shift has occurred within you rather than within the work. And it's rare that love is withdrawn from a song or a book: you can come to see its flaws, or come to be embarrassed by your earlier ardor, but that might just make you drive your love deeper inside. It won't, for the most part, make you bring your love to a full stop.
Loving people, on the other hand, is a dangerous business, because love isn't just about what you feel. It's an economy in which what you feel must be matched with something of equivalent value, as well as one in which your expectations for ongoing supply can quickly reach self-annihilating levels. Not to mention the fact that you may feel you are not equipped to handle what you are receiving: expectations from another person that are as interdependent and volatile as yours. Love, or whatever you want to call it (pick a less romantic word if you'd prefer, like "relationship" or "commitment") is a frightening prospect. When you accept it, you are assuming risk at a level that often overloads the human organism. Two people acting with single purpose but retaining their separateness? That's an overlap, and nobody likes--let alone loves--the idea of the overlap. Giving love refines the spirit; worrying about getting it clouds and clots that same spirit. Or, to reinvest the digression, sending out of the warehouse is a relatively trivial matter compared to bringing things into the warehouse.
This may be obvious, but it's Valentine's Day, the commemoration of the obvious. The friend in the western state who manages warehouse inventory recently went through a breakup. I think maybe she was trying to hold on until Valentine's Day, but that became untenable for several reasons, some of which I have listed above. The person she was seeing was not a movie or a book or a painting, and so, in trying to love him, she quickly found herself concerned with trying to accept his love, which led to expectations he could not satisfy. These were not unreasonable expectations, not as far as I was concerned -- and, sometimes, not as far as she was concerned. They mostly involved him offering to drive her to work some mornings, or offering to pick her up some afternoons, or leaving little notes in her jacket pockets, or calling in the afternoon and assuming a funny accent to ask if she knew where he might find the "best little wharehouse in the state." Whatever. The specifics aren't important, not to me. The point is that all the things she admired about him statically, all the things that would have worked to his advantage if he was a TV show or a sculpture, dissipated when he couldn't -- or wouldn't -- understand the issues of inventory management. She was able to give him love, for a time, but witnessed repeatedly how pained he was to give in return, and that returned her to a point where giving seemed more like someone else's taking.
After the breakup, she said, she thought often about whether she had give him enough chances. "He made mistakes but so did I," she said. "Why should that be unacceptable?" This was a fair question with a fairly obvious answer. In love, or commitments, or relationships, you don't have to avoid error. In fact, you should embrace error. But you should embrace the proper type of error. This is another way in which static artworks are easier to love than people. As we have said, artworks don't change, really, so they can't disappoint you. But they also can't try to accommodate you and, in doing so, show you that they are utterly insensible about how to find your heart. My friend told me one story that stuck out like a stalactite. After their breakup, the guy came by her office. He took her to lunch. He ate a meal that he would never eat -- a big burger, she said, when he was mostly no-red-meat -- and asked questions he would never ask. "I know he was trying to be a different him so that I would feel differently," she said, "but it only made me feel more the same. The root him and the root me didn't intertwine." It is easy to believe unverifiable things about a song or a book, but harder to do so about a person. We left aside one broader issue, which is the question of why people date people they know are wrong for them -- I have a theory about Controlled Failure which dovetails nicely with the terrors of confronting someone you might actually love, and thus cannot control -- because it was a social call, not a session. We talked about music and politics.
So for this unholy coming holiday, and for my friend, and for the guy, even -- who I never met and probably wouldn't have liked, at least from the description, but who has the right to be happy elsewhere, eventually -- here's Tom Verlaine's "The Grip of Love," which not only contains some of the finest electric rock guitar of the last century (try it, you'll love it), but has a comprehensively elliptical lyric that says most of what I've been trying to say: You do the moon
You do the snake
Everywhere you go
You make the right mistake
You take a picture
And lay it on my tray
Some kind of window
Just like the Milky Way The song doesn't end well -- the girl tells him to get lost, and he says, desperately but slyly, "well, don't that buckle my belt?" -- but it starts beautifully, and that's something. Inventory is managed, at least for a little while, and it's managed exactly as he says it is, exactly as my friend said it is: "everywhere you go you make the right mistake." So find that person, get in the grip, do the moon, do the snake. Happy Valentine's Day.Labels: ben, rock and roll
posted by Ben
LINK |
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
DON'T FORGET ME
Harry Nilsson
Pussy Cats
Buddha : 1974
[Buy It]
FORGET ALL ABOUT IT
The Nazz
Nazz Nazz
SGC : 1969
[Buy It]
DON'T FORGET WHAT I TOLD YOU
John Simon
John Simon's Album
Water : 1971
[Buy It]
The other day I was cleaning out an early-model desktop computer and I found a folder labeled "Old Old Old." Inside it were pictures of old, old, old people. No, no. That's not true. That would be impolite and uncomfortable. Inside it were a number of text files, all date-stamped April 2000. That wasn't the composition date, as it turned out, but the date of transfer from some other storage device (a floppy disk?) to the internal hard drive of the computer. The files seemed to be from the early nineties. Most were short notes. In many cases, I could retrieve the original context. This one was a note to my roommate regarding a feud about a lamp ("I'm sorry that it broke but I think we both know how that happened"). That one was a note to my brother with what I think was relationship advice ("You might never be sure but if you're sure that you'll never be sure that's something to go on"). One of the files completely perplexed me. It seemed to be a note to a friend in which Terms Of Friendship were being managed and reset.Yes I'd like to keep it up. I know that you say you don't, or that you can't. You say different things at different times. I don't know why I didn't think to say that same thing sooner. Wishful thinking, maybe? Hey, yesterday I was out at the store and I thought of you. It was because the woman in front of me in the check-out line was hideous and annoying. Ha ha. Just kidding. It was because in one aisle there was a sign that said "Party Supplies" and I remembered how you like using that word: supply. "What if this isn't supplying me with the things I need," you said. You were standing by your refrigerator, so I made a joke: "What, you want one that crushes ice?" You laughed, which was nice of you. Friendly. I am curious if you really felt like laughing. Why would you laugh when you're so convinced that I'm making unreasonable demands? Anyway, I'm sure we'll talk about this more tomorrow and the week after that and probably next year and it won't get any clearer. Unpolished mirrors, like you said. The next to last sentence was wishful thinking, as far as I know. There are no notes that seem to be sequels to this one. Moreover, I don't remember what the note was about, or who this friend was, or if I sent it, or if I received a reply, or anything else. Maybe it wasn't even a friend. Maybe it was someone I was dating. I figured that it probably wasn't written to a serious girlfriend, because I tended to live with my serious girlfriends and wouldn't have said "your refrigerator." But this was just detective work and I didn't even remember the victim.
I sent the note to a friend who has known me for a long time. She said she recognized my writing, but that she had no idea who I might have been writing to. The note reminded her of something, though: she had recently had a similar experience. She was clearing out a desk drawer and found a legal pad with scribbled notes that she assumed were fragments of a draft for a longer letter. "I think it was to that guy," she said, naming a name that I was supposed to remember but didn't. "It's funny how faint he is now to me. In the notes, I was telling him about how there had been a shift, how one minute I had felt one way and the next I had felt another way. It's like the past never happened."
"That's what you said to him, or that's what you're saying to me now?"
"What?"
"Was that what you were telling him, that it was like the past never happened because you felt one way one second and another way the next second? Or are you saying that to me now because you remember him so faintly?"
"I'm not sure what you're saying," she said. "All I know is that it's very comforting. I love the idea that we have pasts that are unavailable to us. If I had to remember everything about that guy, how would I ever have gotten over the pain?"
"Get over pain?" I said. "Get past it, maybe. If you really forgot everything about him, then what would have stopped you from dating him again?"
"I'd never forget everything," she said.
"Exactly," I said. "But I did. I forgot everything about this letter, this person, this time. I don't know what the inside jokes are about. I don't remember seeing the Party Supplies aisle in the store. Maybe it was a piece of fiction. And, even if it's real, doesn't that mean that the same friend could resurface and the same problem reappear? I could put my hand, or hers, on the hot stove again."
There was then a long pause in which she either considered what I had said with great concentration or ignored me completely and paid attention instead to someone in her office. "I have to go to a fantastically interesting grant meeting," she said.
"Okay," I said. "Later." She went off to her meeting. I went back to the note about supplies and demands, tried again to remember who I had written it to, failed. Part of the problem was in the reciprocity: I didn't like forgetting, but being forgotten was worse. Change was acceptable, even necessary, but the prospect of disappearance triggered an existential shock, and here was solid proof that things did not always persist. In thinking about the note, I found myself thinking about the phone call. Had she forgotten it already? Were a broader set of memories endangered? How could I be sure that the present would not become the future's forgotten past? I wrote that question down and emailed it to my friend: "How can I be sure that the present will not become the future's forgotten past?" Then I went off to a meeting of my own. It was fantastically interesting too. What a coincidence.
Later, as I rode the subway home, I tried to think of songs about forgetting. Or rather, I tried to remember songs about forgetting. I didn't have a pen or paper with me, so I couldn't write them down, and as a result any that I remembered on the subway would have to be re-remembered when I got home.
Most songs about forgetting are really songs about fear of being forgotten, which in turn are really songs about fear of being unloved or unwanted. I remembered Bill Lloyd's "Forget About Us" ("I cannot forget about us"), James Carr's "Forgetting You" ("Don't make me live the rest of my life forgetting you"), Simple Minds' "Don't You (Forget About Me)" ("Don't you forget about me"). Harry Nilsson's "Don't Forget Me" is a pledge of undying loyalty even in times of dying, with a melody too beautiful for the bleak lyrics:When we're older
And full of cancer
It doesn't matter now,
Come on, get happy,
'Cause nothing lasts forever Well, okay, but if nothing lasts forever, then what about forgetting? Eventually that's going to fade, too, and when it does, what replaces it? Utter indifference? Fantasy? Or was it memory? Would there come a time when I would remember exactly who I was writing that note to, and why, and what it meant, and what I meant it to mean? The Nazz's "Forget All About It" is a noisy Who-lite song that makes this suggestion (the chorus, "Forget all about it a while," is either a paradox or a substantial psychological insight), along with another helpful one:If you haven't got time to rest
Then take the record off now There was one song whose title I almost exactly recalled, and that I looked up when I got home. It was John Simon's "Don't Forget What I Told You," from his 1971 solo album. The song--which Simon sings poorly but sweetly, like a tone-deaf Richard Manuel--somewhat resembles a love song but opens up much wider to accommodate fairly apocalyptic notions of disconnection and discontent:This world's a joke they tell me
It'll go up in smoke some day And then later:How would you feel if your world wasn't real? This was the question I had sent in email to my friend, more or less. It was the question that hung over the note I had found. It was the question that I wanted to remember.
There were other songs, too, I think, but they're fuzzy and getting fuzzier by the minute. Unpolished mirrors, like she said.Labels: ben, rock and roll
posted by Ben
LINK |
Thursday, December 04, 2008
KEEP A KNOCKIN'Little Richard 1957 Available on : The Specialty SessionsSpecialty : 1990 [Buy It]IF YOU PICK HER TOO HARD (SHE COMES OUT OF TUNE)Little Richard 1972 Available on : King of Rock and Roll: The Complete Reprise SessionsRhino Handmade : 2005 [Buy It]SLIPPIN' AND SLIDIN' (TAKE 2)Little Richard 1956 Available on : The Specialty SessionsSpecialty : 1990 [Buy It]LUCILLE (FALSE START)Little Richard 1957 Available on : The Specialty SessionsSpecialty : 1990 [Buy It]OOH! MY SOUL (TAKE 9)Little Richard 1958 Available on : The Specialty SessionsSpecialty : 1990 [Buy It]RIP IT UP (TAKE 14)Little Richard 1956 Available on : The Specialty SessionsSpecialty : 1990 [Buy It]FREEDOM BLUESLittle Richard 1970 Available on : King of Rock and Roll: The Complete Reprise SessionsRhino Handmade : 2005 [Buy It]DIRECTLY FROM MY HEARTLittle Richard 1956 Available on : The Specialty SessionsSpecialty : 1990 [Buy It]Little Richard turns seventy-six tomorrow. Most of what needs to be said about him has been said, some of it here, on this site, by me. Last September, on my birthday, I wrote about the epochal fifties hit "Keep A Knockin'." I will now idiotically quote myself at length: "Keep A Knockin'" wasn't original, of course. It was an old Louis Jordan number from 1939 that goes back even further, to Lil Johnson's "Keep On Knocking" in the early thirties. At that time, the (double) meaning was clear: it's a woman singing and a man knocking, and what he's knocking on is her front door (you know--the kind of door you can slide a key into and out of until that key ejaculates), and she's not letting him in no matter how much he knocks, so he might as well not even bother. When the gender switches, and it's a man singing, the knocking is a little stranger. Is it a woman knocking? How persistent is she? And why does the man have to bar the door, anyway? And when the gender switches again, and it's Little Richard singing, the strangeness turns into something tremendous--something threatening and seductive and terrified and terrifying, all at the same time. The same theme recurs in other Little Richard songs, like "Heeby-Jeebies" from the previous year, where he says, somewhat sadistically, that he's going to "ring your door til I break your bell." These songs rarely raise the issue of Little Richard's sexual orientation, even obliquely, but they frequently raise the issue of his sexual aggressiveness. If Louis Jordan swings, Little Richard swings a hammer. About a month later, I posted "If You Pick Her Too Hard (She Comes Out of Tune)," a bit of country soul from a shelved early seventies record on Reprise. Richard's Reprise period yielded four records: The King of Rock and Roll (1970), Second Coming (1971), The Rill Thing (1972), and Southern Child. They were roots records, reaching back into country and jazz as well as taking a stab at the rock-and-roll of the time. The vocals weren't as volcanic as the Specialty sides, but they were more than just respectable, and the songwriting was sometimes fascinatingly personal.
Respectable and fascinating sold poorly. Sales were so sluggish that the fourth album of the series, Southern Child, wasn't even released at the time, and only saw the light of day thanks to bootleggers and, eventually, a Rhino anthology of the Reprise years. Southern Child is of a piece with the others, with some key differences: more original songs, subtler vocals, and a more mellow feel. It also contains Little Richard's mid-career masterpiece, a country-folk composition called "If You Pick Her Too Hard (She Comes Out of Tune)." The song has many assets (arresting title, peaceful acoustic guitars, unorthodox structure) but its real strength is in its wordless opening, which consists of some two dozen sweet exhales and then a rousing cry that communicates some kind (and maybe all kinds) of freedom:Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Whoa whoa whoa yeah yeah yeah Those are just two of the songs. I wish I could post all of them. There's the second take of "Slippin' and Slidin'," which has a fairly mannered performance, and the significantly accelerated master take. There's the brilliant false start of "Lucille." There's the ninth take of "Ooh! My Soul," when he is asked by Art Rupe if he wants to rest. He doesn't need to. At the end he asks to move on to another piece. "We've got to leave here in about five minutes," Rupe says. "We'd never get it done in time." Ye of little faith. There's the fourteenth take of "Rip It Up." Fourteenth! Beyond the songs, and within them, there is the man. He appeared onstage at the Grammys last year with Jerry Lee Lewis and John Fogerty, looking frail but sounding fine. He's been in league with Geico. All of this has turned him into something cuddly and accessible, something beloved, which he deserves. But what about that earlier incarnation that you wanted to love but couldn't get near without burning up entirely? Eddie Murphy has a routine in which he talks about being asked by Little Richard himself to star in a official biopic based on Richard's memoir. Eddie asked for the book. Richard sent it. Eddie dove in. Everything was going well until he ran into this sentence: "In 1950 I sucked my first dick." The crowd laughs, but the tone isn't malicious, and certainly not to the degree of...well, almost every other Eddie Murphy routine about gay men. In the bit, Eddie calls Little Richard back and they have a conversation about honest self-presentation, and how Richard's irrepressible gayness is part of the package, and how Eddie feels wrong for it. He's trying to say that he's too manly to play gay, but he comes off as sounding inadequate. "You can't even put me on the piano and then cut to my face and then bring in a stunt ass." The punch line comes when Little Richard says, "Well, never mind. I'll get Prince to do it." But what's vivid about the man and the music has already taken hold, even in the bit. And Eddie Murphy's right, you know. You can't bring in a stunt ass. Though it was easy to see Little Richard as a cartoon--easy because he helped--there was always more to the man, always surprises and hidden shadings. "Freedom Blues," from the seventies country period, is a civil-rights minded piece that opens with an incredible bit of vocalizing. When he was little, his siblings called him War Hawk because of how he shouted; in every recording session, he seems to be going to war with (and for) his songs. When my son was little, I taught him to say this sentence, which he did: "Little Richard is a big deal." For reasons I may never fully understand, Little Richard means more to me than nearly every other rock singer. The fact that he's the best doesn't hurt. Every time I think that connection may be ebbing, I put on "Poor Boy Paul" or "I'm A Lonely Guy" and hear it all come through again. So, for voice and ass both, for body and soul and then some more soul, for slippin' and slidin' and knockin' and rippin', I'd like to wish Little Richard a happy birthday. Directly from my heart to him. Labels: ben, rock and roll
posted by Ben
LINK |
Thursday, October 30, 2008
REPETITIONThe Fall 1978 Available on : 50,000 Fall Fans Can't Be Wrong: 39 Golden GreatsBeggars UK : 2004 [Buy It]JOY IN REPETITIONPrince Graffiti BridgeWarner Bros. : 1990 [Buy It]You know when you tell someone the same thing over and over again? You know when you tell someone the same thing over and over again? I mean, really: You know when you tell someone the same thing over and over again? Does it help? Does it? Does it help matters? Does it help matters when you tell someone the same thing over and over again? Recently I had to repeat myself. Recently I had to repeat myself. Recently I had to repeat myself. I was speaking to someone with whom I have at least the illusion of common cause. I believe that we are on the same wavelength, in some important ways, as humans. As a result we are friends. That is rare, and so it makes me happy. I repeat: That is rare, and so it makes me happy. People are a mix of learned wisdom and spontaneous immaturity, and to find a friend who either parallels or complements you in that regard, well, it's rare. It ignites the best things in everyone. Usually I have nothing to complain about with this friend. Once, a few months ago, I complained about something. It was a behavior of hers that I found slightly troubling and that I worried might develop into something more troubling. I mentioned it once and let it go. I didn't want to repeat myself. Recently, though, I did. Recently, though, I did. Recently, though, I did. Circumstances hadn't changed, and so I once again said the thing I said once before. I restated it, not in the sense that I revised it, but in the sense that I repeated it. Here we have two kinds of repetition, related but not identical. I repeated myself because the thing I was concerned about has not changed. Does that truly count as repetition, something that has not changed? I read something once by someone who said that all artwork is about finding a balance between repetition and variation. This is true, this is true. But it is truer than true, true not just for artwork, but for everything that artwork imitates and informs: Nature, time, the human mind, sex, breath. Everything is about finding a balance between repetition and variation, and by and large they have equal weights, if not equal shapes. Repetition is a form of variation. Variation is a form of repetition. Take pop music, which depends both on rhythm and melody. One is repetition and the other is, within reason, variation. But songs catch your attention by varying that which is repeated and by repeating that which is varied. The Fall is perfect for this kind of thing. This kind of thing is perfectly illustrated by the Fall. For a perfect illustration of this kind of thing, consider The Fall. Mark E Smith formed a band that depends upon repetition (song after song on album after album, year after year) and depends also upon variation (new band members, new sounds, new topics for lyrics). The Fall's song "Repetition" summarizes this tension concisely: Repetition in the music
And we're never going to lose it Smith is also very funny, and in that sense he also participates in repetition. The French philosopher Henri Bergson names repetition as one of the three foundational rhetorical devices central to laughter, and he traces it back to the childhood game of Jack-In-The-Box. The handle goes around and around and around, the repetition lulling the viewer into submission and creating one kind of pleasure, and then, with a kind of violent suddenness, the Jack jumps out of the box. Laughter is produced when surprise is produced and repetition is shattered. But then that process is good for another go-round, at least: the process by which variation is introduced can itself be repeated. It is a mainspring of the human experience: people say that we learn from repetition, and they are right. Mark E Smith is also very funny: We dig repetition
Repetition in the drums
And we're never going to lose it
This is the three R's
The three R's:
Repetition, Repetition, Repetition When I had to repeat myself recently it was because I felt that the circumstances that produced my original statement had not changed. But because the circumstances could only change as the result of action--by myself, by my friend--my repetition carried an implication of failure on both of our parts. Had there been effort, the circumstances might have changed, and so the repetition would not have been necessary. Because circumstances were the same, because the second identical statement applied months after the first, I felt that I needed to explain that I was not joking. "I am serious," I wrote, and considered writing it a second time for emphasis. Repetition without comedy is a specific form of emphasis, and it is a different proposition entirely from the one sketched above. When repetition is serious, it travels to the extremes of freedom. On the one hand, it can become suffocating and unforgivable. This was my fear repeating myself to my friend, that she would feel suffocated. On the other hand, serious repetition can be ecstatic. Spiritual satisfaction depends on repetition, as does sexual satisfaction. Prince's "Joy In Repetition" is ecstatic in both regards, and it may even suggest that one is a restatement of the other. In the song, a man goes to a nightclub and sees a woman at the microphone, repeating the words "love me" over and over again. He follows her into the alley, hoping for a conversation, but she keeps repeating herself: In the alley over by the curb he said tell me what's your name
She only said the words again and it started to rain
Two words falling between the drops and the moans of his condition
Holding someone is truly believing there's joy in repetition
There's joy in repetition
There's joy in repetition
There's joy in repetition
There's joy in repetition There is repetition in "Joy in Repetition." There is joy in "Joy in Repetition." The woman is repeating her request to eliminate any chance of misunderstanding. Prince is repeating his chorus in the same spirit. Repetition here isn't boring. It's joyful, as I have said--like the repetition of a friendship day after day after day--and as a result, the song makes me feel better about repeating myself, when I have to, which isn't all the time. Recently, I had to repeat myself. I had to tell a friend something that I also told her months ago. I had to tell a friend something I also told her months ago because things haven't changed since then, and so my words, too, haven't changed. My friend replied to my second statement much as she replied to the first, with a promise of improvement. She replied to my repetition with a repetition of her own. Repetition is a source of frustration, because it suggests a lack of progress (why aren't the bad things changing?), and it is also a source of comfort, because it reiterates a central premise (the good things remain intact). I should be able to see the benefits of repetition. I have learned and relearned that there are benefits to repetition. I have learned it repeatedly. I don't want to feel bad about repeating myself. I repeat: I don't want to feel bad. I repeat: I repeat. * HELLO PEOPLE OF NEW YORK CITY AND ENVIRONS: We have a special Moistworks announcement. Regular contributor Ben Greenman, who wrote the post above, will be celebrating the release of his fancy new limited-edition, handcrafted, letter-press book Correspondences at the Tenement Museum (108 Orchard Street) at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, November 6. Ben will read, along with Arthur Nersesian and Todd Zuniga. Come one, come all. Labels: ben, rock and roll, soul
posted by Ben
LINK |
Thursday, August 14, 2008
THE DARK PAGES OF SEPTEMBER LEAD TO THE NEW LEAVES OF SPRING
Paul Weller
22 Dreams
Yep Roc : 2008
[Buy It]
MY PHILOSOPHY
Boogie Down Productions
By All Means Necessary
Jive : 1988
[Buy It]
OKWUKWE NA NCHEKWUBE
Celestine Ukwu and his Philosophers National
1974
Available on : Nigeria Special: Modern Highlife, Afro-Sounds and Nigerian Blues
Soundway : 2007
[Buy It]
PHILOSOPHY
Them
1965
Available on : The Story of Them Featuring Van Morrison
Polydor : 1998
[Buy It]
SHIT FROM AN OLD NOTEBOOK
Minutemen
Double Nickels on the Dime
SST : 1984
[Buy It]
As ususally happens in late summer, I'm in a phase where my reading is split almost exactly between crime fiction and philosophy. Not crime philosophy. Let me rearrange that so that the adjective doesn't look distributive. I'm in a phrase where my reading is split almost exactly between philosophy and crime fiction. Not philosophy fiction! Damn it! I mean actual philosophy: Kierkegaard, Hegel, Wittgenstein, Plato. The crime fiction is easy to explain. It's summer. There's time on the beach. Procedurals and thrillers are printed in mass-market sizes. They fit easily in pockets. Plus, you can read them fast.
The philosophy is trickier. I still have my old books, some from college, some from grad school. But when I read philosophy I rarely crack them open. That's because there's a deeper, shallower reason for needing philosophy at this time of year. I spend most of my time dealing with books: books as products, books as organs, books as bribes and tail feathers and millstones. I write books myself and publish them, as do a(n) (alarmingly) large percentage of my friends. Philosophy can take place in a book, but just as often it takes place in a text, by which I mean that I can locate the innards of the book (online or elsewhere: this is a good place to start), extract them, and carry them around with me. Free philosophy printouts, these brilliant non-books, have summer portability, but that's the least of their powers. They open up a magical door through which I can escape this world, the book world, for a moment, while still getting from it what I need. I can't tell you the number of times that I have been standing in bookstores, looking at this shelf or that table, and that I have started to feel queasy, unable to abide the thought of the latest novel by Writer I Know or the latest memoir by Writer Someone Else I Know Knows. Another book by another person in the neighborhood or someone in an identical neighborhood elsewhere: ecch. This is an uncharitable thought, or at least an uncomfortable one. It doesn't settle easily. But it's true, and that's what blogs, not to mention philosophy texts, are for, right? I (try to) read philosophy because I need to step in many directions at once: to step back into what I perceive as an unreachable past, to step upward into what I perceive as a zone of broader truth, and most of all to step sideways out of the line of fire.
Normally, this would be the point where I would outline some of what I have learned from philosophy and some of what I hope to learn. I might mention Lyotard or Aristotle or the Symparanekromenoi, as unpretentiously as possible, which isn't really unpretentious at all. But I'm not going to do that. I'm not a philosopher, by training or by temperament. I have friends who are. They are programmatic for long stretches. They work through the texts at hand. While they are mastering them methodically, they are storing up energy. Then, all at once, they make an intuitive or a moral or an analytical leap. That's how new philosophy is made and how the case is advanced. I don't work that way, which is to say that I don't work at all, not as a philosopher. I skip around. I master single sentences or paragraphs but leave the rest to chance. It's hard not to think of that line from "A Fish Called Wanda," when Kevin Kline, as the crazy Otto, responds to being called an ape by saying "apes don't read philosophy" and receives the all-time greatest rejoinder. "Yes they do," Jamie Lee Curtis says. "They just don't understand it." Since I am, ape-like, crippled by poor training and poor temperament, I'm just going to say that reading philosophy comforts me via worthy removal from the moment. I'm not reading these philosophy texts to understand books better, but because I understand them as something different (better) than books. It's only one way of dealing with the material, but it's my way. As KRS-One says:This is just one style, out of many
Like a piggy bank, this is one penny One of the problems, I think, is that it's too easy to come to see books as products, partly because they are products. Authors love/hate to talk about sales because they love/hate what sales represent: acceptance of their ideas, of their core. But the truth is that sales mean nothing in a historical sense. Some of the books we read now as classics of the canon were busts during their authors' lifetimes. Some of the books that were huge hits have vanished from sight. You can make (and I have made) the argument that there is in fact an inverse relationship between time-local sales and time-global relevance, that anything that seems to matter so much at the moment is not built to last, and while this is reassuring, it is also sophistic (see: I have been reading philosophy). But the other thing is undeniably true. You just don't know which books will matter later, and how much they'll matter. This is why making books is an exciting and sickening process. Your vogue could peak during your lifetime. It could be sparked again by a critic making a discovery in 2011, or 2019, or never. Still, it is important to remember that there is no real correlation between numbers and value: never has been, never will be. Books may be products with covers and endcaps and tie-ins, but what is inside of them is not. For me, philosophy books are an especially true case of this: while philosophers, when alive, are certainly just as subject to these endcap and tie-in anxieties as any author, their books seem to lend themselves better to de-booking. Innards can be brought out and allowed to speak for themselves. Product can give way to productivity. This is a borderline preachy point, which is why I'll let the Minutemen make it for me:Let the products sell themselves
Fuck advertising and commercial psychology
Psychological methods to sell should be destroyed
Because of their own blind involvement
In their own conditioned minds
The unit bonded together
Morals
Ideals
Awareness
Progress
Let yourself be heard Now it's time to go read some printed-out philosophy.Labels: ben, rock and roll
posted by Ben
LINK |
Friday, July 18, 2008
SOME PEOPLE ARE CRAZY
John Martyn
Grace & Danger
Polygram : 1980
[Buy It]
BABY'S CRAZY
Larry Williams
1958
Available on : At His Finest
Ace : 2004
[Buy It]
CRAZY WOMAN
Bill Wyman
Monkey Grip
One Way : 1974
[Buy It]
DON'T BE CRAZY
John Lennon
c. 1975
8 TON CRAZY
Andy Fairweather Low
La Booga Rooga
Universal : 1975
[Buy It]
RETURN OF THE CRAZY ONE
Digital Underground
Body-Hat Syndrome
Warner : 1993
[Buy It]
I called someone crazy this week. She deserved it. Objectively speaking, for a little while at least, she was every kind of loon. I wouldn't say flibbertigibbet, because that's sexist. I wouldn't say murderer, because that's inaccurate. I'd say crazy. When I told her about it, she balked. She should have thanked me. A crazy person has hundreds of songs at her disposal to clarify and celebrate her condition. In fact, you can argue that it's one of the five or six most decorated words in the history of pop music. Sounds crazy, I know.
The most common use of crazy is romantic: Patsy Cline's "Crazy," Billie Holiday's "I've Got a Man, He's Crazy For Me," Chet Baker's "You're Driving Me Crazy (What Did I Do?)," and Fine Young Cannibals' "She Drives Me Crazy," to name just a few. In others, it's just a way of expressing energy: Prince's "Let's Go Crazy," or for that matter the Clash's. But then there are the songs that investigate a darker, richer seam of meaning, where crazy means what crazy means: a temporary loss of reason due to a combination of emotional and psychological factors.
That's the case in "Some People Are Crazy," one of the signature songs of the British singer/songwriter John Martyn. I missed Martyn the first time he passed through my life, in college, when a slightly older guy I knew insisted that he was like Eric Clapton but with brains. "But that's not like Eric Clapton at all!" I said, and we both had a hearty laugh, and I went on my way. In the last year or two, I have found my way back to Martyn, or he has found his way back to me, thanks largely to his 1980 album Grace and Danger. The record can sound smooth and jazzy if you don't pay close attention, but beneath the surface it's as raw a dissection of a failing relationship as, say, Shoot Out the Lights. "Some People Are Crazy," the opener, isn't among the most bruising songs; it's cryptic, but still dark and disturbing: Some people are crazy about him
Some people can't stand his face
Some people they smile when they know he's coming
Some people chase him out of the place At first blush, it seems like another "crazy for" song, but as it goes on, it becomes clear that there's a broader brief: Some people are crazy
Some people are just plain good
Some people talk wouldness and couldness
Some people don't do as they should, One of the people who didn't do as he should was Larry Williams. Williams started out as a songwriter and performer at Specialty Records in the mid-fifties, and he was designated as the label's star when Little Richard left rock and roll for the ministry in 1957. Williams had the songs, like "Bonie Moronie" and "Dizzy Miss Lizzie." He had the style. He had the platform. In "Baby's Crazy," though, he may be grasping at straws -- his main piece of evidence against the woman in the song, Marie, is that she doesn't love him like she used to do. Maybe she just came to her senses, or moved on. In real life, Williams' problems were more severe than just missing out on the record hop, thanks largely to his involvement with pimping and dealing. His life in the sixties and seventies was marked by drug and gun trouble, and in 1980 he was found dead of a gunshot wound outside of his Laurel Canyon home in a highly suspicious suicide.
Guns also figure in Bill Wyman's solo work, though they seem the stuff of blues legend rather than of reality. Monkey Grip, the bassist's 1974 album, was the first solo product from a Rolling Stone, and it opens with "I Wanna Get Me a Gun," which featured an excellent piano solo by Dr. John. "Crazy Woman" is the second song, and it builds its case slowly: Crazy woman
She caught me with somebody
Crazy woman
She caught me with somebody else
Crazy woman
She flew into a fury
Crazy woman
She said she's gonna get me some
Crazy woman
She said I'm gonna get what's coming
Crazy woman
Gonna get me with a gun Wyman's song highlights the ways in which "crazy" can be used as dismissal, even if it's tinged with admiration. After all, who is more qualified to offer his opinion on a woman's mental fitness than Wyman, who began a relationship with Mandy Smith when he was 47 and she was 13 and who drove her to a nervous breakdown and anorexia?
It has suddenly occurred to me that the woman I called crazy might be coming for me with a gun. Is that sexist? Is it dismissive? Can she even shoot a gun?
I'll end with a plea for sanity from John Lennon -- "Don't Be Crazy," from the Dakota Demos, is Lennon's workup for "(Just Like) Starting Over" -- and a pair of songs that handle craziness from the inside rather than the outside. Andy Fairweather Low is, like John Martyn, a respected and well-connected British guitarist and singer- - he has had professional relationships with Wyman, Clapton, and Roger Waters, among others - - who is more distinctive, if not more well-known, as a solo artist. The loping, beguiling "8 Ton Crazy" may be a love song, but it works more generically as a defense for temporary loss of reason: Hey mama morning, papa night and day
Don't treat me like I've got nothing to say
Please don't tell me that you think it's a shame
When things go wrong and there's no one to blame
'Cause I get 8 ton crazy
I get 8 ton mad
It's the strangest feeling
That I ever had
When you start tap-dancing
It makes me feel bad Finally, of course, there's Digital Underground's "Return of the Crazy One," which makes an strong case that a person's crazy parts are the most attractive, not to mention the most fun to handle. At times, Digital Underground sacrificed its comic genius for standard-issue P-Funk-derived hip-hop, but not as long as Humpty Hump was nearby. Here, Humpty presides over a celebration of alternative and maybe even revolutionary thinking. It seems like a good idea to quote it extensively, because what else can you do with joyful things? Lick lick let me lick
Smell let me smell the flavor
And taste the behavior
The way you
Been kicking it while the Humpster was lamping
Fishing and camping
Out renting boats in the Hamptons
Eating good, working out, and giving charity
Working on my vocal cord clarity
Hell no, I can't front, I been at the crib G-ing
Slapping poontang trying to be the mack pappy
40-dog and pina colada peeing
Making my rounds to keep the Humpty girls happy
If you missed me I was laying in the cut
Wrecking big butts
Scratching my knees
Cause my homegirl's cat got fleas
That's how it goes
The beat flow-flows
Yo peep the new color of my nose
Representing how we been living
That's how it is
I'm not the Biz
But if I was to pick a booger
It'd be a big fat gooey gold plated loogie
But I was born a yankee so I use my hanky
The way I wear my clothes freaks the hos 'cause I'm lanky
Speaking of hankies, I like hanky panky
Especially when the hanky panky's stanky
Of course ain't gonna be too much stanking
Cause then my duty would be to give the booty a spanking
I like biscuits and grits on the sausage
And so you know it's me, I wrote some nonsense
Hova glova nivlan blizman glaze niull And so, by way of apology to the crazy ones -- no, not exactly apology, but more a equal mix of admiration, impatience, fellowship, and challenge, all of which are tuned to a pleasant humming at the base of the brain because, well, there's nothing better than liking a person right on through the craziness -- I say, hova glova nivlan blizman glaze niull. And don't forget it.Labels: ben, hip-hop, rock and roll
posted by Ben
LINK |
Friday, July 04, 2008
BO DIDDLEY
Bo Diddley
Checker : 1955
Available on: The Chess Box
Chess : 1990
[Buy It]
HEY BO DIDDLEY!
Bo Diddley
Checker : 1957
Available on: The Chess Box
Chess : 1990
[Buy It]
THE STORY OF BO DIDDLEY
Bo Diddley
Checker : 1959
Available on: The Chess Box
Chess : 1990
[Buy It]
BO DIDDLEY 1969
Bo Diddley
Checker : 1969
Available on: The Chess Box
Chess : 1990
[Buy It]
BO DIDDLEY-ITIS
Bo Diddley
Chess : 1972
Available on: The Chess Box
Chess : 1990
[Buy It]
BO DIDDLEY
Roy Orbison & The Teen Kings
KSOA TV : 1956
Available on : Orbison
Bear Family : 2001
[Buy It]
BO DIDDLEY
Ronnie Hawkins
Roulette : 1963
Available on : The Golden Age of American Rock and Roll: Special Bubbling Under Edition
Ace : 2006
[Buy It]
BO DIDDLEY
Buddy Holly
Released : 1963
Available on: The Very Best of Buddy Holly & The Picks
Prism : 2007
[Buy It]
BO DIDDLEY
Art Neville
Sansu : 1968
Available on: New Orleans Funk vol. 2
Soul Jazz : 2008
[Buy It]
BO DIDDLEY
Drunk Man #2
Stax Reheasal/Audition Tape
196?
[Unreleased]
BO DIDDLEY
Sonny Boy Williamson & The Animals
c. 1964
Available on: The Animals w/Sonny Boy Williamson, Live!
Griffin : 1988
[Buy It]
BO DIDDLEY
U.S. Army Infantry
Run To Cadence w/the U.S Army Infantry
Documentary Recordings : 1996
[Buy It]
BO DIDDLEY (LIVE)
Janis Joplin
1968
Available on: Box of Pearls
Sony : 1999
[Buy It]
BO DIDDLEY
New York City Band w/Luther Vandross
Sunnyside OST
Unreleased : 1979
Available on: New York City Band
Alan Douglas : 2007
[Buy It]
BO DIDDLEY'S A HEADHUNTER
Roky Erikson
Live in Dallas 1979 w/the Nervebreakers
[Out of Print]
BO DIDDLEY 1969
68 Comeback
Mr. Downchild
Sympathy for the Record Industry : 1994
[Buy It]
I was the first son-of-a-gun out there. Me and Chuck Berry. And I'm very sick of the lie. You know, we're over that black-and-white crap, and that was all the reason Elvis got the appreciation that he did. I'm the dude that he copied, and I'm not even mentioned.
- Bo Diddley, 2005
If he copied me, more power to him. I'm not starving.
- Bo Diddley, c. 1956
The colored folks been singing it and playing it just like I'm doing now, man, for more years than I know. They played it like that in the shanties in and in their juke joints and nobody paid it no mind 'til I goose it up. I got it from them.
-Elvis Presley, 1956
I hold no grudges. Elvis didn't steal any music from anyone. He just had his own interpretation of the music he'd grown up on. Same was true for me; the same's true of everyone. I think Elvis had integrity. I've heard blacks ask, "Why couldn't the first big rock star be black, since rock comes from black music?" The commonsense reason is the numbers. Blacks are a small minority. The white majority, whether in movies or music, want their heroes and heroines to look like them. That's understandable. Sure, there are exceptions, but few. We blacks want our own heroes and heroines too. Back then, we had Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte. Now we have Whitney Houston and Denzel Washington. Blacks might invent a new style, but chances are, only the white artist's adadptation of that style will result in mass-market success.
-B.B. King, 1996
Nas: You got people running TV and movies who think they know black people better than black people know black people. And that's cool. But it has nothing to do with what's black and what's real. Nobody's giving us a shot, so why sit there and beg for a shot? We're smarter than that. There are so many things we can do. Hollywood is never going to understand a black man's story. They don't want to. So why beg them? Just create it. Write it. Produce it. Direct it yourself. Like Spike Lee did with Malcolm X
Interviewer: Why don't they want to understand a black person's story?
Nas: They're just not interested. It's not white people's fault, it's just that people are arrogant, they have egos - and people in those positions don't think much of other ethnicities. They're in power. And their movies are great. They're not even wrong. They just don't know us.
"Elvis Presley ain't got no soul/Bo Diddley is rock and roll"
-Mos DefLabels: alex, rock and roll
posted by Alex
LINK |
Friday, March 28, 2008
MEAN WOMAN BLUES
Jerry Lee Lewis
1964
Available on : Live at the Star Club, Hamburg
Bear Family : 1989
[Buy It]
MEAT MAN
Jerry Lee Lewis
Southern Roots
Mercury : 1974
[Buy It]
ROCK AND ROLL (WITH JIMMY PAGE)
Jerry Lee Lewis
Last Man Standing
Artist First : 2006
[Buy It]
Last night, I saw Jerry Lee Lewis play at Town Hall in New York. Lewis is seventy-two, but he has seemed at least that old for decades -- I remember watching him on Michael Nesmith's "Elephant Parts" in 1981, and he looked ancient even then, stiff behind the piano and vaguely sepulchral until he opened his mouth. At Town Hall, he was in decent spirits and in decent voice, and his piano playing was entertaining, but to use words like "decent" and "entertaining" to describe Jerry Lee Lewis is like saying that Jesse Owens moved okay in old age: depressing. I'm not sure he was depressed, and I'm sure most of the crowd wasn't depressed, but the universe might have been. For starters, there's the obvious problem of playing songs about teenage rebellion and lickerishness when you're within sight of death. People were screaming for "High School Confidential." Why? The songs that as a younger man drew on a not-yet-earned world-weariness, which include many of his country hits, worked better, and the earliest case of this, "End of the Road," which also happens to be his first record ever, worked best of all. His singing took control of the melody rather than the other way around, and the crowd withdrew slightly from appreciating him as a nostalgia act. Which was, of course, most of the trouble. The man a few rows ahead of me who waved his arm above his head for an hour solid knew all the songs, but to him they were all the same: they were Jerry Lee live, and that was enough. And the girl a few rows behind me who came with her parents kept running to the front of the house to try to take a picture of the Killer with her cell phone. She was eleven or twelve; forty years ago, you wouldn't have sent a girl that age toward Jerry Lee without great reservations.
The most conspicuous absence of the night wasn't youth or vigor or even libido--Jerry Lee seemed to get it up fine for "Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On." What was missing, above all, was competition. On "Live at the Star Club, Hamburg," from 1964, Jerry Lee made a point of systematically destroying each of his rivals for rock and roll primacy: leading (and often humiliating) the Nashville Teens, the Killer declared lightning war on Elvis ("Hound Dog"), Ray Charles ("What'd I Say"), Carl Perkins ("Matchbox"), Little Richard ("Good Golly Miss Molly"), and others. The album's opener, "Mean Woman Blues," took the Roy Orbison hit and beat what can only be described as the living shit out of it. That fire burned inside Jerry Lee from the beginning of his career, and never went out. Jealousy drove him to such a great degree that he was the only real choice to play Iago in Jack Good's visionary, if unhinged, rock production of Othello, Catch My Soul. Alex has posted about the show before; all I'll add is that Jerry Lee hardly heeded these lines, either straightforwardly or ironically:
O, beware, my lord, of jealousy; It is the green-ey'd monster, which doth mock The meat it feeds on Catch My Soul wouldn't be the last time that meat was served. "Meat Man," from 1974, has been read as a dirty song about oral sex, and it most likely is:
I got jaws like a bear trap
Teeth like a razor
Got a Maytag tongue
With a sensitive taste But it's also a song about oral sex in some very specific places:
I been down to Macon, Georgia
I ate the fur off a Georgia peach
Plucked me a chicken in Memphis
Mama, I still got feathers in my teeth Mack Vickery wrote the song, and maybe in his version, the visits to Macon and Memphis are ways of tracing the paths of unattainable idols--and, while he's there, notching some conquests. But Jerry Lee's version has to be read, in part, as an explicit domination of Little Richard and Elvis. Two years after that, in fact, Jerry Lee showed up at Graceland, drunk and packing, demanding to see the King. The Jerry Lee that came to Town Hall last night was still pumping the piano, but the context has changed greatly. Most of those contemporaries who stoked his fire are dead, and the ones who aren't dead aren't stoking his fire anymore. If there was a competition, he has won simply by surviving. His most recent studio album was a festschrift of sorts on which he collaborated, without animus, with several other aging rockers. It was called Last Man Standing, and even though he was seated for the entirety of last night's performance, the point is taken.Labels: ben, rock and roll
posted by Ben
LINK |
Thursday, February 21, 2008
NO COMPUTE
Funkadelic
Cosmic Slop
Westbound : 1973
[Buy It]
COMPUTER COWBOY (AKA SYSCRUSHER)
Neil Young
Trans
Geffen : 1983
[Buy It]
WE HAVE A TECHNICAL
Gary Numan
Replicas
Beggars UK : 1979
[Buy It]
MISS CLARKE AND THE COMPUTER
Roy Wood
Boulders
EMI : 1973
[Buy It]
I have a friend who divorced her computer. She went off email, off the Web, offline entirely. The computer became a typewriter. She did it for a book project. "Internot," coming next fall to brick-and-mortar stores near you. No, no. Just kidding. She didn't give up the computer just to write a book about giving up the computer. That would be self-indulgent. I mean, she's not a blogger! She gave up the computer so she wouldn't have to give up on herself.
When she divorced her computer, she called me on the phone. She was in withdrawal. Divorce is hard. "What did I do before the computer?" she said. The question was, sadly, not rhetorical. There are countless essays--some profound, some superficial, some insightful, some moronic, some alarmist, some complacent--about the ways in which recent communications technology has changed our minds and the world in which those minds circulate. Andy Warhol said, famously, "When I got my first television set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships," but post-television technologies have cut back in the other direction and tried to remedy that problem, often with disastrous results. These days, technology does not simply alienate. It connects, and by connecting alienates in much more complex and deceptive ways. Technology has allowed correspondence to proliferate while simultaneously destroying the letter. Technology has brought people together more efficiently than ever while at the same time obliterating the idea of togetherness. I have a young acquaintance, a college student, who will sometimes write to ask my advice about women. That sentence was hilarious. The thought of it! At any rate, when he tells me that he has spoken to a woman, I know to ask him what he means by that. Usually, he means Facebook or MySpace or email. Sometimes he means that he put a comment on a blog. Only once or twice has he walked up to the woman in question and opened his mouth. I have counseled against this, or at the very least counseled against calling this "speaking to."
That friend, the young man, will not divorce his computer. He's not even married to it yet. He's still hot and heavy. My friend who divorced her computer did so because she was becoming, by her own account, an addict of new communications technologies. By nine in the morning, she will already have read most of the newspapers, clicked on links where links appear, sent out emails, worried that they haven't been answered, sent out more emails to treat the anxiety produced by the first wave, and then surfed around to numb the anxiety produced by the second wave. "What did I do before the computer?" she said, not rhetorically. I didn't answer her question. I didn't know the answer. Instead I told her what I did, back in the old days, when Reagan was President and the Challenger hadn't yet blown up and computers were only beginning to find their way into the home. I killed time the way time should be killed: kaleidoscopically. Instruments of its demise included snacking, showering, walking in circles, going outside, playing basketball, whacking off, doodling, echolalia. "Yeah," she said, "I remember that. Snacking and whacking off." Her tone was mock-wistful, which is a valuable strategy for concealing actual wistfulness. "Now I'm more likely to go online and try to find a video of someone else walking in circles around an apartment." There was a pause. "Found one," she said.
"I'm going," I said, not unkindly. I meant to stand up from the computer and take a walk. But the computer has music on it.
Funkadelic's "No Compute" was released in 1973. It starts out deceptively, as if it might be an exercise in warm, psychedelic soul, and the spoken George Clinton vocals might blossom into full-throated singing. They don't. Garry Shider plays lots of guitar, and Clinton goes right on telling his story, which is about a man who wakes up, feels bored and lickerish ("the hornies occupied my being"), and goes out in search of a remedy:I spotted a lady who was also on the prowl
I could tell by her makeup, plus the scent was there
So I sashayed over to her, and, ah, spoke of my plan
She screamed and said, "Are you asking to make love to me?"
I said, "Is pig what's in pork?
Or you gonna play hard
After all the trouble you went through to get chosen?"
She resists. He keeps on point. Soon she comes around. "There was fun to be had, love to be made." Afterwards, the hornies have been satisfied, and the bloom is off the rose:Well, suddenly as she laid there, mouth wide open, wig half off, snoring
Breath smelling like a 1948 Buick
I was sick with the filthies, and she smiled in her sleep
As if to say, "All looks are not alike, all holes are not a crack." Some have suggested that the "wig half off" marks the conquest as a transvestite. That seems fair enough, and if so, it inserts "No Compute" into a long line of flipping-your-id songs that include The Kinks' "Lola" and Schoolly D's "Saturday Night." The title of the song is about the woman's (understandable) confusion when confronted with Clinton's come-ons. That's what she says when she doesn't get what he says: no compute. But it's probably also about the fact that sex isn't equational, or even rational. She doesn't want to go with him, but there she goes. I will also declare, with three decades of warping hindsight, that the song is about the difference between sedentary calculation and a more active extension into the world. As soon as you're alone again with your thoughts, you get sick with the filthies.
Sex isn't the only kind of human connection that's ruined by technology. Neil Young's Trans has been assessed and reassessed several times, generally in an upward direction, as critics and fans come to terms with the fact that Young employed the stiff, vocoder-heavy sound in part because it permitted him to communicate better with his son, who was born with severe cerebral palsy. If the music uses technology, the lyrics bemoan its abuse. For starters, there's "Computer Age," a wonderful and wonderfully vague condemnation of the digital age that has been covered by Sonic Youth, among others. And if there's any question that Young is taking aim at technology for its alienating effects, well, just go outside the song and look at his comments on everything from CDs (they destroy music) to high-tech war (it destroys our souls), or for that matter go three tracks deeper into Trans, to "Computer Cowboy (aka Syscrusher)." It's one of the least-known songs from the album, in part because it seems batshit crazy, but it's also one of the most interesting, playing like a foretoken of Laurie Anderson's entire career. The cowboy lives in a world where everything is programmed, or mediated by programming: Well, his cattle each have numbers
And they all eat in a line
When he turns the floodlights on each night
Of course the herd looks perfect!
Computer Cowboy. So, "No Compute" and the songs that flow down from it investigate the ways that technology thwarts sex. Trans leans toward love. But there's agreement that human touch is compromised.
Gary Numan's Replicas was an offshoot of a book project in which society is controlled by beings called Machmen, androids wrapped up in skin to look human. As a kid, I resisted Numan and his Machmen; he was too straightforward in his sci-fi ambitions. Later, when I hated sci-fi less, I came around. "Me! I Disconnect From You" is a brilliant title, not to mention a brilliant song (I always think it's Robyn Hitchcock for a good solid five seconds). "Down in the Park" is beautifully desolate. "Are 'Friends' Electric?" is known to all, or should be. But my favorite song from Replicas wasn't even on the record. "We Have a Technical," a stepchild from the original sessions, was included on expanded editions; it has a buzzing central riff that sounds like "My Sharona," and the lyrics illuminate what happens when the machines shut down:I suppose it's very shady
At least until the lights go out
Advertising posters on the wall
And the young boys singing softly
Do they ever come back
Or is it always at the wrong time
I could crawl around the floor
Just like I'm real
And move a hand in front of my eyes Reality and romance get even stranger treatment in the hands of Roy Wood, the mad genius behind the Move and Wizzard and the earliest version of ELO. "Miss Clarke and the Computer," a madrigal from his first and finest solo album, Boulders, straightforwardly relates a love affair between, well, Miss Clarke and a computer. Plenty of women love their computers--my friend, for example--but in this case Wood relates the affair from the computer's point of view, complete with highly processed vocals. At the end, the computer's heart is removed, and his voice slows down, and only the delicate strumming of a guitar remains. Is that the sound of romance dying or a sound that permits romance to be reborn? This question is not rhetorical either.
The day my friend divorced her computer, she ventured out into the real world. She thought she might pick someone up, or at least talk to someone. She saw people on laptops, people on cell phones, people on Blackberries. Finally she saw a couple in a doorway. The man's hand was on the small of the woman's back. My friend passed close by. "I'm so glad we met," she overheard the man say. "Yeah," the woman said. "I never thought I'd find someone online." The man laughed. "I have to get home," he said, "but I'll text you soon." Are you going to play into technology's hands after all the trouble you went through to get free?Labels: ben, rock and roll
posted by Ben
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