When Elvis Died

The authenticity problem, Pitchforkmedia, and Leadbelly

2006-02-20T06:55:00.000-08:00

For some time now, I've been wanting to write a long essay (actually a book), about the problem of musical authenticity. Pitchfork has an interesting essay on the subject as of today. I have some problems with the conclusions, but it's well written and illustrates the problem of trying to find authenticity in a marketplace rut with capitalism. You can read the essay here.

The problem has a long history in anthropology--since anthropologists study culture, you need to find the most authentically "cultural" person to interview. But of course, what happens to creole people like the Metis in Canada (French and Indian ancestry)? I could spin off for paragraphs about this--how the approach of "true" authenticity is a bad one, mainly because it jettisons history and process (and usually power), but how many of the methods and theories developed under an "authenticity paradigm" of the 19th and early 20th century are still with us today. I won't make you suffer through that. However, what I will do is rattle off a few paragraphs about Leadbelly and Alan Lomax, which I think illustrate some of what I'm talking about. It's a condensed version of a paper I wrote when i first came to UMass, and it's also one of the few things I've written that I think still stands up.

For those of you who don't know, Leadbelly is one of the most famous "folk" musicians (what does that even mean?) of the 20th century. You can read a biography and discography of him here. His most famous song, "Goodnight Irene" has been on the pop charts many times, but never his version of it. The last song on the unbelievably good Nirvana Unplugged is a frightening cover of Leadbelly's "Where did you sleep last night?". Leadbelly spent most of his adult life in a harsh Louisiana prison (Angola, I believe) for killing a man (supposedly in self-defense, but in the racist 20th century south, that's life in prison either way).

In the 1930s, John Lomax, and later his son Alan were travelling the South on a Library of Congress grant to catalog the musical heritage of America. The Lomax's are as perhaps as important to the history of American folk music as any performer, because they served as documentarians and organizers. You can read a little about Alan here, while John's bio can be found here.

Anyway, Leadbelly is sitting in prison in the early 30s, and the warden calls all of the men into the yard. Standing with him are these two white guys, and they ask if any of the prisoners know any "old time" songs. Leadbelly had been an itinerant musician before getting arrested, and had even travelled with Blind Lemon Jefferson, so he raised his hand and got to talking with the Lomax's. He figured maybe it'd get him out of work detail for a couple days, and he hadn't played a guitar in a few years, so what the hell?

He recorded a bunch of songs for them. He had a good musical memory, and played anything he could think of. The longer he played, the longer he could hold out going back to the drudgery of prison They were very excited about his playing, but they kept asking him about "old time" songs. He knew pop songs, and blues, and jazz, and all kinds of stuff, but they really wanted this old-time music, so he did the best he could to figure out what they meant, and gave it to them.

Eventually, he got out of prison (there's some controversy as to whether he just served his time or the Lomax's actually convinced the governor to release him). The Lomax's picked him up at the door and took him to New York for a series of performances at Carnegie hall. When he got there, he saw that all of the posters for his performance showed him dressed as a convict, with taglines to the effect of "Come see the wild murderer Leadbelly, performing the lost music of America", and things like that. On top of it, the Lomax's wouldn't let him wear nice clothes to the performance, instead giving him his old prison clothes to wear onstage, much to the dapper man's chagrin. To make matters worse, they took a large cut of everything he made for "rent and expenses", and even (by some accounts) made him work as a chauffer and butler at their house while he was in New York. He didn't even mind that stuff so much (white folks want crazy things sometimes), but what really burned him was when he tried to get them to let him play Broadway tunes at the concerts (they were his favorite because of the interesting chord changes), but they insisted that they wanted the authentic old time music. Leadbelly died in 1949, and only a few years later, his most famous song "Goodnight Irene", a haunting, semi-supernatural ballad, jumped on the charts performed by a group called the Weavers (for which Pete Seeger played banjo), and kicked off the folk revolution of the 1960s.

I'm not trying to demonize the Lomax's. The service they did to American music is indescribable. But they were stuck in an idea of authenticity that made Leadbelly only legitimate if he was a "wild murderer", from the poorest and therefore most pure streams of American folklife. He could never have been a musician, only a violent conduit for the great tradition, and a symbol of some idea that was as much a part of the Lomax's vision of America as with the reality of America itself. Would Leadbelly have been any less of a musician if he had played broadway showtunes instead of blues tunes he learned from Blind Lemon Jefferson? Would his music have been any less authentic? Clearly the Lomax's thought so--for them, mass culture was phony while isolated groups (re: poor, black, etc...) were something pure, because they were outside of the phoniness.

While this is an interesting idea, especially as a reaction against the widespread penetration of consumer capitalism, and the ideologies associated with the differential priveleging of wealth, I have some problems with it. Namely, that authenticity becomes a tag placed by rich on poor people (or on black folks by white folks), and valorizes their poverty as something to be sought after because of its "connection to pure culture". The status quo of rich and poor becomes something that is naturalized--rich people may have power and wealth, but poor people have authenticity, so the system must be fair. Clearly, the Lomax's were not rich (there's a whole other essay on middle-class appropriation of dominant ideologies), but they were using concepts and ideas that fostered a maintenance of inequality. I can only guess, but I don't think Leadbelly found authenticity to be a laudable state of being. That's why I told the story from his perspective. The ludicrous nature of it all seems apparent, but despite this, the Lomax's are (still) heralded as "saving Leadbelly", when it seems to me that all they did was move him from one kind of servitude to another.

No desperation

2006-01-31T06:54:00.000-08:00

Sorry it's taken me so long to post, and sorry this post will be so short, but, hey, who really reads this anyway?! :)

I spent some time yesterday calling senators asking them to support the filibuster against Samuel Alito, which has apparently failed. Since it's almost impossible for the democrats to muster enough votes to actually overturn Alito's nomination, given a minority of members, and some of whom actually support Alito (Ben Nelson from Nebraska and Robert Byrd from West Virginia, to name two) this makes his appointment essentially certain.

I was disappointed that only 25 senators voted against cloture, but as someone recently pointed out, 98 senators voted to confirm Scalia, and that was in a democrat controlled senate. The other thing that gives me heart, or rather, a sense of perspective, is this article by Howard Zinn. The summary of it is basically that, in the long term, its important to remember that our rights are not given to us by the supreme court, but are demanded from it, and from elected officials.

Brown vs. Board of education was the culmination of decades of civil rights work and grassroots organizing. The supreme court dealt the final blow (or lit off the fuse, depending on your point of view) to old-style segregation, but they did so because a whole lot of people got together, organized, and made it happen.

I'm certainly terrified of Samuel Alito, and the power he'll have over my life and the lives of the people I care about. But his confirmation is not the end of the world. It adds an extra step in the path toward true freedom, but no system of power is insurmountably vast, and any time we want, we can dictate the course of our own lives, and take what is ours from those systems..

"I ain't dead yet, muthafucka"

2005-12-11T09:39:00.000-08:00

Maybe I'll write something longer, maybe I won't, but I just wanted to put this out there, in case you haven't heard.

Richard Pryor has died

So many comedians of his generation skirted any kind of social responsibility, or any kind of controversy (Lenny Bruce excepted of course). Pryor reveled in controversy, swam in it, and spit it out at his audiences. And we loved it. I've laughed so hard listening to Richard Pryor that I sobbed. My dad and I would have to pull off the road if we put in one of his tapes while driving, to keep from crashing. When they started giving out Grammys for comedy/spoken word records in the 70s, Pryor's albums dominated that category for nearly a decade.

There have been many since who have taken up his yoke and tried to speak laughter to power (Bill Hicks being my favorite, but also David Cross, and Dave Chappelle, to name a few of the righteous), but Richard Pryor proved that you could interrogate inequality with laughter--a fairly revolutionary proposition, given the long history of sober scholarship on the ills of the world, and something all of us seeking to change the status quo should constantly keep in mind.

Scary music--about frigging time

2005-11-28T14:46:00.000-08:00

Everybody swings on Christmas, but not me. Halloween is, without a doubt, my favorite holiday. I've loved it ever since I was a little kid, and its been one of the few moments that I associate with innocence of youth that I've carried with me into this tenuous terror called adulthood.

It's atmosphere more than anything else. I guess it's the same with Christmas too, but around Halloween, there's definitely a feeling in the air, and all you have to do is prick up your ears and listen for it. It's especially palpable here in New England, where the golden leaves reflect the sunlight in colors you don't see any other time, and where the hills, forests, and rivers have given rise to so much great atmospheric literature (Hawthorne, Poe, and my man H.P. Lovecraft).

I play on that atmosphere every year. I readjust my world in small ways to better attune me to it. I watch certain movies, I read certain books, and more than anything else, I listen to music.

This list represents the contents of a mixtape that I made in 2000, right around Halloween. At the time it represented the spookiest songs in my record collection. I'd probably make changes now, but given that it represents a moment in time, designed to capture an atmosphere, it's kind of taken on a life of its own, and I don't know if I'd dare mess it up. I put this tape in a walkman and wandered around the North End of Boston on Halloween night, past Copp's hill cemetary, down the winding European streets and along the waterfront. Everytime I hear any of these songs, I go back there.

1.)"Good morning Captain"
by Slint

Maybe one of the most perfectly crafted pieces of art I've ever had the pleasure to experience. Someday I'll finish my essay on Slint's album Spiderland, and what they mean to me, but for right now, suffice it to say, this is a ghost story, to kick off my collection ghost stories (to greater or lesser extent), and it's the best. A sea captain crashes his ship, killing the crew. As he laments his fate, alone in the ocean, he begins to see things—a door rising from the sea, an empty house, a child who may be dead speaking to him. All the while, the music tense and tight, building and falling, building and falling until the ocean of the last few chords and the screams wash the whole scene out of existence. What a band. What a song.

2.)Big Empty
by Stone Temple Pilots

I can take or leave the chorus of this song, but the slide guitar reminds me of the beginning of Pirates of the Carribbean at Disneyland, where you're riding through the swamp, listening to the sounds of crickets and backwoods musicians who know that you're going somewhere dangerous. The other great moment is the breakdown after the second chorus, a whirlpool rising from the depths, engulfing you. Note in both cases, Scott Weilland is not singing. Sorry man, but sometimes songs are better when you sit them out.

3.)Riding
by The Palace Brothers

As a template for Will Oldham's later work in Bonnie Prince Billy, this song works. As a frightening morality play about incest and death and desire, it works beautifully. The guys from Slint are actually the backup band here (no surprise, given the ambience of the recording and the musicianship). When Oldham screams “I'm long since dead, and I live in hell”, you can here the soul he represents screeching and warning the living not to make the same mistake.

4.)As You Said
by Joy Division, performed by Tortoise

I'm cursed with a problem— I have a really hard time enjoying music unless the production blows me away. It has to sound full and filling, for me to get lost in it. It's for this reason that, try as I might, I've never been able to get into Joy Division. I think they would scoff at my desire, intent as they were on portraying the world as a fragile, crystaline thing. This song is instrumental, and doesn't have any of the manic nihilism that characterizes Ian Curtis's lyrics. Plus, it's performed by Tortoise, on a JD tribute I bought a few years ago. They turn the song into a bubbling, electronic, gradual decay, and the single note melody is like a pulse from a dead planet floating black and alone in space.

5.)Baby Did a bad bad thing
by Chris Isaak

I've been told that Chris Isaak is basically some great songs in a sea of filler. But what a song this is—if he had an album of stuff like this, I'd be all over it. As such, I got this song where a lot of people did—from Stanley Kubrick's final opus Eyes Wide Shut. The smokey rockabilly-delay intro is like a car driving off into the night, and then Chris tells us that “Baby did a bad bad thing/and I feel like crying”. He never says what she does, but it must've been something awful—certainly its a betrayal of his love, and it maybe something worse. In the movie, it functions to heighten the tension between Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, but it stands on its own as a creepy testament to what love can make us do, or even forgive.

6.)Glenn by Slint

Slint pops up way too much on this tape, but that's because they epitomize to me how great music can be, and what kinds of sensastions it can inspire. Plus, they make some sounds that most of us have never heard on a record album—whispers, screeches, and that strange vibration during the chorus of this song. The melody of the verse could almost be a voice, but whatever story it's telling is most surely a little mad. Something is rotten in the state of Spiderland.

7.)Curse of Milhaven
by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Nick Cave used to raise all kinds of real hell in his original band The Birthday Party, quite possibly the scariest coterie of freaks ever to make an album, with the possible exception of the Stooges. People say that he mellowed out (re: kicked heroin) when he started the Bad Seeds, but one listen to this song, or the entire Murder Ballads album and you know you're in something frightening. I like to think of this song as the polka that will be playing at the gates of hell. The best line: when the murdering child has finally been caught and begins her confession, she comes out with this frightening description of herself... “my eyes ain't green and my hair ain't yellow/ it's more like the other way around/ I've got a pretty little mouth underneath all the foaming”. The bad seed indeed.

8.)Salo
by The For Carnation

After Slint broke up, the guys all went their separate ways, but Brian McMahon took the torch (or maybe the ember) of Spiderland and formed The For Carnation, which makes even Slint's music sound pleasant and unmenacing by comparison. This song is on their album Marshmallows, and its essentially a series of frightening viniettes, culminating in what appears to be a rape. All through the song, a single musical note pulses like a submarine ping in the deepest ocean, or maybe a satelite, sending out its last information on a dying battery in the dead of empty space. It's a message of something, but like all great art, it demands our attention because of its ambiguity and because we have to meet it to interpret. The only problem is that we may be horrified by what we end up seeing.

9.)Red Right Hand
by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

The problem with making a scary music tape is that some bands have made their careers on scaring the crap out of us. Slint and its progeny did this well, and nobody has mastered the macabre (and also redemption) better than Nick Cave. A lot of people know this song from Scream, and it worked well for that movie, but this is a song that's really old testament, trials-of-Christ type stuff. It's like a legend that hoboes and broken junkies might tell each other over a barrel fire, or maybe two men in prison talking about their lives. Satan, with his red right hand (this is an image from John Milton, apparently), is behind it all, and is constantly teaching us that the worst aspects of humanity come not from the evils that men do, but the greed and desire that they feel.

10.)I put a spell on you
by Screamin' Jay Hawkins, performed by Marilyn Manson

Ok, ok, don't switch off your computer just yet. I know there are far better versions of this song (including the original by Screaming Jay Hawkins, who was probably the original Marilyn Manson of his day), but it's not so much the song that's great as the way the band took to it. When the drums come in, pounding out a sailing rhythm for the galley slaves, it almost sounds like the dead have come up and are marching toward the city. Say what you want about Manson's voice, but at least the guy is somewhat expressive, and when he screams, you can feel it in your bones. When he starts yelping out “you, you, you!!!” it sounds like he's got his love taped to a chair in front of him, and every syllable is the wave of a sharp kitchen knife. Also, Twiggy pulled a great solo out of his ass for this one. If the lyrics are a stalker's diary, the guitar is his car, pealing away into the night after the horror has been concluded. For all the stupid shit he's done, I'll never begrudge Manson for this song.

11.)For Dinner
by Slint

Though part of Slint's magic was the whispers of stories that Brian McMahon would tell, just barely audibly, my favorite Slint song has no words. Not that it really matters, because the energy of this song is so palpable that you could tell any story and the song will take it away from you and transform it. It's dark and rumbling, and walking through Boston on Halloween nights, I would find myself looking over my shoulder at every turn to make sure I wasn't being followed. By the time the single guitar line subsides at the end of the song, you feel like something has happened, but you don't know what. Resolution is the wrong word, but maybe acceptance? Damnit—now I'm trying to tell a story over what is essentially a tone poem. Slint does it again.

12.)Wandering Star
by Portishead

I once heard a Portishead track without Beth Gibbons voice, and it was all I could do to not turn it off after ten seconds. She belongs there, and she makes her presence known at every turn. I have no clue what this song is about, but the imagery—stars, darkness, empty husks—send it into the realm of the frightening. Maybe it's just lonliness—the feeling that you're like a star, casting about the blackness of space, and nothing is around you, nothing speaks to you. Of course, as soon as I start thinking about floating silently in space for all eternity, I turn on every light in the house and call everyone I know, just to have some human contact.

13.)Musica Ricercata No. 2
by Dominic Harlan

This is the first track from the Eyes Wide Shut soundtrack. Lots of people got annoyed with it, but I dare you, double dog dare you, to turn all the lights off and listen to it all the way through. I've never been able to do it. Every time that high piano note comes in after the long silence, I jump up and hit the stop button.

14.)Stuck in Here
by Filter

This is one of two acoustic numbers on Filter's first record Short Bus. I have no illusions about liking Filter anymore, but this first record (it also has “Hey man Nice Shot” on it) is really good. This song sounds like an old record player, and has a kind of surreal quality to it—the melody is just a little too off-kilter to be anything other than a dream, or a prelude to a nightmare.

15.)Don, A Man
by Slint

This is the last time, I promise! The only acoustic number on Spiderland, this was the first Slint song I sat down and learned how to play. It's essentially two songs held together by a bizarre narrative about partying, alienation, and driving way too fast. It's got some great lines too: “/like swimming underwater in the darkness/like walking through an empty house/speaking to an imaginary audience/he watched from outside”.
I won't say much about it, except that when the distortion comes in, you will jump out of your seat. If that doesn't convince all you bored music lovers to pick up Spiderland, you need some shock therapy.

16.)House full of Garbage
by Shellac

Shellac has dabbled with creepiness through the twisted metallic grind of their albums, but this song stands out in part because it never actually goes anywhere. There's no loud chorus, or a dramatic build up. The song actually ends with (I kid you not) about three minutes of Todd Trainer banging out single hits on drums. I threw this song on the tape because as a kid, I used to have nightmares about abandoned houses full of garbage. I still don't know why the image is so visceral to me, but every time I hear this song, I think of waking up screaming as a little kid, after dreaming about falling through the floor onto a dirty mattress piled high with garbage, and knowing that I was lost forever.

17.)Story
by Tool

I had to close with this. It's after the hidden track on Undertow, and it's also the last sounds that appear on that album, aside from some general cricket noise. Supposedly Maynard received this story/poem/suicide note on his answering machine, and felt it warranted inclusion on the album. I don't know what it's about, really, but the imagery gives me goosebumps, and if I'm listening to this at home, I lock all the doors when it ends. God help me if I'm outside.

What this story, and the rest of the songs make clear is that Lovecraft was right—the supernatural, the unknown, the ambiguous, and the undefinable are so frightening and horrifying to us in part because we have no way of categorizing what they tell us. It's cliché to say that the best scary movies don't show the monster, but it's not because the monster isn't there, it's because we have to engage our minds in what is going on. We are asked, on Halloween and anytime we get the shit scared of us, to entertain the possibilities of our own imaginations, and all great art succeeds, in one way or another, of engaging them to a greater or lesser degree. Hopefully these songs are no exception. If you want to recommend any other scary-assed music for my next year mix tape, I'd love to hear about it.

Scary music prelude

2005-10-31T13:10:00.000-08:00

I'm working on a post about a halloween mix tape I made a few years ago. Every year in mid-october I find myself searching for creepy music. I know it's out there, but no one ever gives me a guide, or a way to think about looking.

Pitchfork put this up a few years ago. I've still never picked up any of these records, mostly because (no surprise, given the arena) they're too obscure to be found in any of my record haunts. Still, if you run across any of these albums, drop me a line and let me know if they live up to the hype:

Pitchfork: Every Day is Halloween

Also see an offering of scary music from another on-line rag, Stylus Magazine

Greenspan: Electroclash Godfather?

2005-10-27T07:07:00.000-07:00

Since we've all heard that Alan Greenspan is retiring, to be replaced by Bush's chief economic advisor, I thought it'd be nice to reflect on some of his achievements: pragmatic economic policy (or dumb luck), closely guarded economic secrets, and...

electro-clash

The last piece by is by Ian Svenonius, formerly of the D.C. bands Nation of Ulysses and the Make Up, and currently in Weird War. I love music journalism like this. :)

"The problem of leisure"

2005-10-18T10:11:00.000-07:00

My wonderful girlfriend got me a fantastic (and wonderful) birthday present a couple of weeks ago. I had mentioned that Gang of Four were playing in Northampton that weekend, and that I might like to take her. When I asked her if she wanted to go, she turned the tables and offered to take me. I enthusiastically accepted. I'm sure I spoke of their importance in late 20th-century popular music, and I probably even admitted that I felt like a total geek-boy when faced with the possibility of seeing such a seminal band. What I didn't and couldn't really speak about was whether they were any good. I had Entertainment! on Vinyl, and had given it a few listens, but the somewhat flat quality of the recording kind of turned me off--a topic deserving a longer post at a later date.

However, what I, and most everyone else I know understood was that so many bands that we loved (and plenty that we didn't) would not exist without this band. Although it pains my "indie cred" to say it, my friends and I didn't go to hear music. We came to hear a legacy, a tradition--we were looking for the source.

(Just an aside--Somebody needs to write a book about indie rock and the importance of tradition. Endless referentiality in the form of influences and styles forms an entire discourse among a huge group of people in North America, and as far as I know, that seems like a relatively modern phenomena. I want to know the circumstances, history, and the power dynamics involved in this particular cultural form).

For better or worse, a legacy is what we got. Most of the set came from Entertainment! and Solid Gold, Gang of Four's first two records. A few new songs were sprinkled in, but this was a reunion show, first and foremost, and like all reunion shows, the hits had to be trotted out for the kiddies. How different was this than seeing Bachman-Turner Overdrive play "Taking Care of Business" at the Hawkeye Downs Speedway in Iowa?

Let me be very clear--I had a tremendous time at this show. The band were ferocious (but how much of a pose was that?), and all of us danced our hearts out, even break out into an exuberant mosh pit during "At home he's a tourist". Jon King danced around the stage, pounding the air with his fists in time with the beat, and Dave Alexander and Andy Gill thrashed their instruments across the stage, playing at times in barely tolerable registers of noise, and all through, the tribal pounding of Hugo Burnham's drums, locking all the chaos in place, tying the morass of the experience into something knowable--a pulse, jagged and disjointed though it often was, like the pulse of our collective heartbeats.

Dancing is certainly part of Gang of Four. Their post-punk jitters and funk paved the way for an incalculable amount of more recent music of numerous sub-genres (insert trendy name here). But from their name on down, their music was always incalculably political. In the late 1970s, especially at British universities (where Gang of Four first met) social theory was undergoing one of its many radical transformations. Simplistically, the "post-punk" in the cultural world was prefaced by a whole series of "post-"s in the academic and philosophical world. The structuralist approaches of the 1950s and 60s were giving way to new understandings of the way that power was mobilized in social relationships, and what is now known as "cultural studies" was burgeoning in academic departments everywhere.

What this field of knowledge argued (at least as I understand it), was that Western cultural forms, especially popular culture, needed to be interrogated and understood as part of interal power dynamics within societies. People wrote books on punk rock and mod subcultures, television, Disneyland, and romance novels, anything that had previously been considered worthless, ephemeral, and vulgar by the academic gaze.

Gang of Four were part of this world, and they consciously espoused its theories and politics consciously. Their songs touched on the vague relationships between appearances and essences, the mysterious nature of love in the traditional pop song, the stultifying air of suburbia, and numerous other topics within the purview of the (explicitly Marxist) field of cultural studies. What they, and the fields of knowledge they represent argue for was that the aesthetic experiences we associate with popular culture are molded and shaped by unequal power
relations inherent in society.

Which is why it's hard for me to write a glowing review of the Gang of Four show that I saw. The show was powerful, certainly one of the best live concerts I've ever been to, and the band was everything I'd hoped they'd be. But what does that mean? Would I have felt the same if I had never heard of Gang of Four? If I hadn't read about their influence on the Dismemberment Plan, the Liars, Rage against the Machine, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and hundreds of other bands who, at various times in my life, had meant so much to me? Would I have felt the same if they had only played songs no one knew?

How can I trust my own feelings in a world where, at every turn, I'm told how to feel by the pop-culture I love (what does that mean?). My personality is a process of cultural apparatuses acting upon my being, trying to get me to respect the authority of governments, treat myself as more valuable than others, and above all BUY!!!! BUY!!!! BUY!!!!! I certainly partake of all those things at various times during the day--where is the real "me" in all of that? Or to conclude by paraphrasing, if our essence is rare, as Gang of Four seem to argue, what room is there for appreciating something as simple as a great rock and roll show by a great rock and roll band?

Gang of Four

2005-10-06T19:15:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note...if the words Gang of Four pop up in your local paper under upcoming music listings, run, DO NOT WALK to go and get yourself some tickets. I checked them out at Pearl Street the other night and they blew my hair back. I'll write a little more about them later, as the show gave me some things to think about.

10 (mostly) white blues songs from my record collection

2005-10-06T18:37:00.001-07:00

The Blues is a craft or a practice, not a genre. It came from Black folks, who've had to endure enough pain and suffering for the history of the world in the last 400 odd years. But white folks have picked up on it too—the idea that you can practice the blues, and the pain you've got will be revealed for the diversion that it is. It's not unreal, just something you have to embrace, instead of rejecting. Here are the tunes that have made me embrace my pain.

''No Surprises'' by Radiohead
on the Album OK Computer

I only liked this song until I saw the video. It has a plaintive melody and some pretty lyrics, and it provided a nice quiet moment to the very dark second half of OK Computer. But when I saw the video with Thom Yorke's head slowly sinking, and heard him sing ''Such a pretty house and such a pretty garden'', I was moved to tears. One of the many sadnesses of modern life is that our only escape is to drown into the soft silence of suburbia.

''Nothing'' by Reel Big Fish
on the Album Turn the Radio Off

The summer that I heard this song, I was living in a basement in Des Moines, Iowa, where I didn't know anybody, working at a job I hated because it paid good money. My social contacts were almost zero, and my only solace was driving around Des Moines, blasting CDs in my worn out Ford escort. The first half of the song is straight-up punk lamentation, but then it slows down into a nice bigbeat riff and even though it all sucked, I knew, as the Aaron Barrett says, that ''it's gonna be alright'' because ''I don't fucking care anymore''. After that, the summer was over before I even noticed.

''Oh Sweet Nuthin'' by The Velvet Underground
on the Album Loaded

It sounds way older than it's thirty years. What a great piece of old-time lamentation, in the tradition of ''I can't be satisfied'' and ''Walking Blues''. This is one of the truest blues songs ever written by white folks. Who else but the Velvets?

''Whiskey Bottle'' by Uncle Tupelo
on the Album No Depression

The mournful country intro and verse belie the fiery-loud chorus. Just like drinking alone—you start out sipping and talking slowly, smiling, maybe even singing a little, and then your inhibitions go, and you scream at all the contradictions in your life, break and smash your things, cry and bleed and wonder how your going to get through. But ''somehow life goes on in a place so insane''.

''Have you ever been lonely?'' by R.L. Burnside
on the Album A Ass Pocket Full of Whiskey

I have no idea how the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion found R.L. Burnside. New York hipsters honking out blues tributes tossed into a room with a Mississippi Hill country moaner once convicted of murder—there's almost no way it could've worked, but on this song, they just play until they bleed. R.L. and Jon have this weird conversation about what it means to be lonely, and in between, they play their guitars like they're on fire; they scream and wail and revel in the pain of looking around the room and seeing not a soul. The answer to the question of the title is: ''Yeah, a lotta times, you know?''

''Respect is Due'' by the Dismemberment Plan
on the Album The Dismemberment Plan is Terrified

When I saw these guys live last years, they refused to play this song because it was ''a twelve minute dirge'', and they were out to have a good time on their last tour. I have to admit that the song gets a little long at times, and it's certainly not something I listen to very often anymore, since I've found myself in a fairly stable adult relationship. Still, I've had my heart broken enough for reasons I didn't understand to know what it means when Travis Morrison says ''If I ever let down the walls that protect me from you, I could say respect is due. But not in this lifetime.''

''Jesus doesn't want me for a sunbeam'' by The Vaselines, performed by Nirvana on the Album Nirvana Unplugged in New York

See my previous post about covers. Nirvana were great in part because they loved paying homage, and they had no pretensions about where their influences came from. When Cobain says that this was based on an old Christian song, he may have been right, but what matters is that the song sounds old—even eternal. There's always been that tension in the blues of fervent belief and feeling as though God has abandoned you. The Vaselines, and Nirvana, made it clear that even though they were beyond divine help, they didn't care. In an age when fundmantalist religions seem to be asking our lives of us every second of the day, this song brings home that our relationship with God or his son, or whoever is always way more than dogma.

''Divorce Song'' by Liz Phair
on the Album Exile in Guyville

I lived part of this song, from the other end. An ex-girlfriend of mine, who I loved more than my own life at the time, broke up with me the day before we were going on a weekend vacation to Maine. I had rented a bed and breakfast for us to stay in, and shelled out a bunch of money for gas and food and whatnot. Needless to say, I was a pathetic wreck the whole weekend, pestering and bothering (and far worse) this girl who wanted nothing more than to enjoy the outside in peace, and not be bothered by my constant questions about why she didn't want me anymore. It's not harder to be friends than lovers, it's almost impossible, and the worst thing for someone to figure out is that I was as much responsible for my own pain that weekend as she was. Now that's the blues.

''Good Feeling'' by Violent Femmes
on the Album Violent Femmes

The viola solo on this record is one of the most beautiful sections of music ever committed to tape. It says more than the words ever could. As the Buddhists say, existence is suffering; the constant wheel of desire and fulfilment make always wish that the good feeling would stay ''just a little longer'', but it never does. That's why this is great blues—the blues at its best is a constant reminder that we create the world around us. Our own suffering is caused by our own desire, and the pain the blues roots us in is always tempered by the knowledge that we have at least some power to see the world as something that we can change, and that we don't have to take part in.

Weezer's Blue album in ONE DAY

2005-10-06T18:37:00.000-07:00

The art of the arrangement is being lost. In times gone by , musicians were considered skilled if they arranged, in interesting ways, other peoples music. Songwriting was a separate art altogether. No one would argue that Cole Porter was somehow a ''better'' musician than Ella Fitgerald, just because he wrote songs and she interpreted the songs of others.

Within the last fifty or so years, that seems to have changed. I'm not sure where are it started, although I have some ideas (Beatles, I'm looking in your directions), but nowadays you're only a good musician if you can write a good song, and arrangement and performance have been relagated to that sticky catchall term of ''cover''.

I do think it's no accident that musical copywright has intensified along with this trend. The record industry is only too happy to cordon-off more and more spheres in which to accumulate capital. It may be that people have been disenchanted with ''covering'' songs because of a sea change in popular music and the industry has gone along with that, or it could be that because of stricter copywrights, people are less capable of arranging songs legally. Either way, interpretation of great music has taken a nosedive.

I find this to be really sad, as I became a musician not because I had delusions of grandeur about my own talent and ability to be famous, but because I love music—I'm a fan before I'm anything else. Music is such an integral part of my life that I can imagine being a musician without it. Every time I play a D major chord on the guitar I think of ''Crazy little thing called love'' by Queen; C major reminds me of ''Patience'' by Guns'n'Roses; B minor starts ''Exit music for a film'' by Radiohead playing in my little inner radio. I'd like to think that I'm not the only picker who has that kind of musical memory. There have been so many great songs that have touched my life in some way, and playing them by myself, with friends, or on the stereo drives every feeling home to me.

My friend Juan and I were getting drunk one night while watching ''1 Million Years B.C.'' and talking about music. He's quite a good songwriter and musician himself, and while Rachel Welch's breasts made their way across the fictional prehistoric landscape of clay dinorsaurs, Juan and I tossed back and forth the idea of making an album in one day. We have enough equiptment between the two of us, but we thought to do it right, we'd need the songs already written. We would take an album that we both knew and loved, churn it around in our heads, and rerecord the whole thing. To figure out which one to do, we put a bunch of albums on pieces of paper, dropped them into his Detriot Tigers cap, and drew one out. We had a lot of ideas: ''The joshua Tree'', the first Violent Femmes record, ''Wish'' by the Cure, the third Velvet Underground record, and a bunch more. But when we open the piece of paper that we drew, it said ''The first Weezer record''.

I've been listening to that album since I was fifteen. A girl that I was in the process of breaking up with played it for me on one of our last car trips together. My friends and I would listen to it when we camped out back of Dan's house, shooting the shit, playing DnD, and enjoying our youth. It's an album I've got a lot of love for, and when I thought of the possibilities of rearranging it, I was really stoked.

Somewhere along the way, our friend Chris got involved, and two weeks ago, we ended up over at his house at ten in the morning, ready to rock it out.

And we did. Although it was slow going (the first two songs took us four hours), we finished at 11:30 at night, and I went home with my 8 track filled with bizarre covers of Weezer songs. I'd love to post them here and get everyone's opinion on the slash-job we did, but I imagine that the folks at DGC and whoever owns the song credits would be none too happy that I've so flagrantly violated their copywrights. Still, I thought I'd post brief descriptions of how we changed the songs and what other crazy crap we did.

MY NAME IS JONAS—I've always liked the ''workers are going home'' part of this song, so we started with that—just bass and vocals, with guitars building and building until we spill over at the verse. Chris programmed a beat on his drum machine that gives the song a bit of a tribal feel.

NO ONE ELSE—Chris sang this one, but he didn't know the words. I played his wurlitzer organ and sang a guide track. With the thumping beat, and Chris's off-kilter ethereal vocals, the song sounds like the grisly conclusion to a stalking.

THE WORLD HAS TURNED AND LEFT ME HERE—Juan sang this, and he loves Belle and Sebastien, so it kind of sounds like them. I played a little violion part underneath one acoustic guitar

BUDDY HOLLY—Chris later described this as sounding like ''sweaty robots having sex''. We slowed it way down, put some funky guitar and bass on it, and turned it into a distorted doo-wop number. During the “bang, bang, knock on the door” part, Chris read a poem in German called ''The panther'', then laughed manaically when he finished.

THE SWEATER SONG—Everybody knows this song. The acoustic guitar riff is instantly recognizable—almost to the point of being hideously annoying. We played it on three different instruments and just looped it for like five minutes. The sketch in the beginning has changed form a little, but still gets the same points across: lonliness, alienation, and the haughtiness that comes from being an outsider. We put in a strange inside joke as the "sketch section" involving Ron Perlman, the character actor.

SURF WAX AMERICA—A few years ago, I played in a Hawaiian band in Boston. Hawaii has a music scene that is absolutely huge, wonderful, and that no one on the continent ever hears. It's basically folk music with ukelele's. I didn't have a uke, so I just played acoustic guitar. Chris provided a little slack-key solo and Juan played a nice bouncing bass.

SAY IT AIN'T SO—This is probably my favorite Weezer song. For a band that thrives on power rock, this mournfull little ditty is like looking over a cliff at the waves of distorted guitar. We slowed it way down and played a really minimal guitar riff with lots of reverb, along with a bass and Chris's digitech effects pedal for some flava-country. Then at the ''Dear Daddy'' part, all hell breaks loose. This song turned out scarily good.

IN THE GARAGE—By this point in our recording, it was about 9 at night and we were getting tired. Chris put on a fast techno beat, I played a distorted part and just kind of shouted out the words. It made me think of my first recordings with a casio keyboard in my room when I was 14. I guess we kind of captured the spirit of the song, even if it's not terribly interesting.

HOLIDAY—We had literally no idea what to do with this song. None of us really liked it, and we all wanted to get to ''Only in dreams'' anyway. After just kind of farting around for a while, Chris found this shimmering guitar sound on his digitech and started playing two chords in the song while I was doing a vocal check with various lines. We looked at each other and realized that it would sound pretty good as a spacey, dream-like holiday, instead of the raging cruise-ship of a pop-song that is the original.

ONLY IN DREAMS—Each of us took turns singing verses. We moved the two choruses together, and sang one quiet, and then one with all the energy we had left in us. We didn't do the extended jam at the end, which I always thought was kind of pretentious anyway. We just left it with a strummed acoustic guitar and a fadeout. Not a bad way to end the thing, if you ask me.

Despite the hard work, we had a great old time. While I may not listen to the album very much after the initial excitement wears off, I'm gonna remember that day until I die. It proved to me that the joy of music isn't in writing some deep meaninful song, or even in playing something technically complicated. It come from moment and presence and feeling, like most joy in life. Play music, anyone's music for yourself, and revel in it's power to evoke the greatness of experience.

Ted Leo's vision of things to come

2005-10-06T18:36:00.000-07:00

Ted Leo and the Pharmacists tore up the Pearl street Club in Northampton. I mean they took the place apart; Ted Leo cut his forehead open, and threw sweat and blood into the audience, and played like a hellion--and we all helped, in our own way, singing and dancing (waltzing in one case) and even moshing, and screaming out requests and questions and nonsensical cries. I took a friend of mine who I turned onto Ted Leo's music a few years before, but who had never seen him live. I was worried for a while that he would put on a mediocre show, and she'd come away feeling let down; but no way—his destroyed. Or no, he created. His music isn't nihilistic destruction. It's soaked, steeped, painted with the kind of idealism that seemed to attract the crowd that he had.

After we left the show, my girlfriend commented that we were probably some of the oldest people in that club. Ted Leo had been giving a button by an audience member sometime during the show, and she told him that it was her birthday. When he asked her how old she was, she told him she was sixteen, and he blanched a little at the difference in their age. She was not alone either, as maybe 75 percent of that audience was under 20. I think there's something to that, because being a teenager, as much as it sucks a whole lot of ass, is one of the few times in your life when you feel urgency about almost everything. Once you hit college, it's all job training and (for the most part) you don't have parents peering over your shoulder, and you fall in love in a real way, but you also track and process yourself into being an adult. When your sixteen, as that girl demonstrated, you feel oppressed by everything, and everything seems to be a way out—everything is urgent. And everything is about getting somewhere better than where you are. It's that kind of idealism that makes adolescence both inspiring and ultimately tragic.

Of course, idealism isn't enough. Everyone's idealistic to a certain extent, I think. We all see the shit piling up around us, and we all complain about the smell, but then what? And this is where the Bolshevik communists and the enlightenment rationalists had it wrong—they thought, all you have to do is reveal the contradictions of society, make them clear, teach and educate “the people” (they never define that term very well) of their own ignorance, and they'll come flocking to your banner, overthrowing the powers that be and bringing us all into a new horizon. I think a lot of so-called ''liberals'' today think the same thing—all you have to do is say ''Bush lied, kids died'', and that will somehow be self-evident reason for his tar-and-feathering. What is often forgotten is that life, from wandering in animal skins to wearing them on your Ipod, asks a whole hell of a lot of us—it's huge and fast and powerful, and disorienting, and more than a little depressing a lot of the time. We've gotten really good at living with contradictions, because life has gotten really good at breaking us, and the natural response to that kind of pain is to turn inward, put your nose to the grindstone, let things that aren't in your immediate radar pass by you without notice.

Ted Leo goes further than that, at least in whatever small way a rocknroller can. His relations with his fans are some of the best I've ever seen, and his constant conversation with the crowd is almost as entertaining and fulfilling as his music. His albums (The Tyrrany of Distance, Hearts of Oak, and Shake the Sheets, plus some great E.P.'s) are all fantastic, loaded with killer rockandroll of most energetic stripe. Plus, unlike most modern rockers who put three 10 words over a drop-d guitar riff and call it a song, Ted Leo fills his songs with huge soliquays, and long spiraling verses. When sung above his quicksilver downstroke picking, he sounds desperate to get so many words out, and the energy with which he does makes him all the more enjoyable and worthwhile.

What Ted Leo does, with his music, with his relations with his fans, is to construct a vision of the future that might be less horrible than what we currently have. He does reveal contradictions, but he also offers solutions—he makes a path to a better world, and he struggles with us to walk down it. It is only through being together that we arrive out of darkness—education and revelation are a beginning, not an ending, and after a certain point, we have to move from complaining to envisioning, and then from there, to creating. Ted Leo does all three of these, and he wants you to do the same and make a better world. His music is righeous and idealistic in the best way possible—it asks for more than world as it is, it envisions an idealistic world that could be, that should be, if the stars were right, and the Gods were smiling, and all of us weren't so hung up on guns and fear and buying things. Let's hope some of that righteousness is contagious like the plague, and we all of us rats spread it the far corners of the globe, and turn this ball of mud and rock and a few twitching carbon-based things into a great and beautiful place to be.

Marilyn Manson, we hardly knew ye

2005-10-06T18:35:00.000-07:00

What the hell happened to this guy?!?!?!? The God of Fuck has a greatest hits record out!?!?!? Even better, it's called Lest we Forget, which on one level is an ironic title for a retrospective and a not-so subtle bit of self-aggrandizement, and another level is a depressingly sad plea for attention from a washed-up hack who may have never been that talented in the first place.

But of course, that's entirely worth debating. The nay-sayers (among which I once counted myself), saw his whole persona as a giant sham and bamboozlement. With every album, he was a new character (the Antichrist Superstar, the asexual Bowie-like worm, the bogeyman pederast, etc...); he had no soul of his own, and it was all just the light-fantastic theater with an eye for making a few bucks.

His own self-righteousness about religion, sex, drugs, rockandroll, satanism—all carefully marketed to disaffected youth with enough extra income to shell out for his latest dark foray into the American pop-landscape--seemed to be just the icing on the cake of this assholes fakery. And all of us who despised him did so because the music we listened to was pure—the artists we loved were not shills trying to make a buck, or putting on campy shock-theater for a quick diversion in our lives. No, they were making real music, with real emotions, and they were the people we should be supporting. Manson was a travesty against all that.

What the nay-sayers didn't realize, and what I eventually came to see, was that that was the whole fucking point. Manson's whole credo, borrowed from LeVay Satanism and Nietzsche's amorality, but extending back to the 18th and 19th century Hegelians, was that all Gods that humans worship are false. We give them powers, we elevate them beyond ourselves, we anthropormorphize them with human characteristics. In some cases, we even make one of us into one of them, and the new gods are celebrities, politicians, the Smiley faces on TV, and definitely our rock stars. How much time does Dave Matthews, or Jet, or whoever else, spend choosing what ragged T-shirts they wear before a gig every night? How is that any different than Manson's preening around onstage in bondage gear? At least that's entertaining! And he was just being honest—he was out to make money, but at least he told us so. He was so over-the-top that everyone else's shilling was revealed along with him. And we bought his records even though we new it was phony—we revelled in finally being able to laugh at the phoniness of being a false god.

So part of Manson's genius was marketing, but the other part was his clear vision of the hypocrisy of dualistic morality. America has always seen itself as the greatest nation in the world. We were a ''City on the Hille'' for the Puritans, and have been so ever since—a shining example of the glory of Heaven manifested on Earth, the place that all other nations would look to for guidance, the great redeemer of the folly of Monarchy. America is a land predicated on fundamental (fundamentalist?) ideas about good and evil, right and wrong, yes and no. As late as the 1980s, Reagan called the Soviet Union, the seemingly only other alternative to the United States in the world, the ''Evil Empire.'' This language is all around us, and it’s one of the structuring principles of our countries sense of itself. The United States and its leaders are “good”, and somebody or something else is Evil. Communism was evil, terrorism is evil, evolution is evil, Marilyn Manson is evil.

Who sets the terms? Who decides what is evil and what is good? Manson recognized that that power has been commandeered by the false gods of the world: politicians, celebrities, pop stars, whoever else is in the news this week. He japed at it, danced around the stage in smoke and fire, laughing at the audicity of people who think they have a right to decide what side of the line we should all stand on. He used the symbols and trappings that had been defined as evil: fascism, hedonism, vulgar sexuality, and used them as a platform to defend the right of people to decide on their own, or together, what right and wrong should be, and not have it dictated to them by some false god.

But he never went the step beyond. This was a man who, in the 1990s, was paid by state legislatures not to play his music within their borders. As Jello Biafra said ''Nice work if you can get it.'' He was a ''poster child of fear'': the favorite target of the Christian right, who accused him of all manner of deviant acts, supposedly ''responsible'' for the Columbine massacre, subject of congressional hearings on music and violence the likes of which we haven't seen since the halycon days of the PMRC. He was the scariest man in America, everything “evil”, as defined by the false gods.

But what if he had showed up at a Christian anti-abortion rally? What if he had given money to GWBush's presidential campaign (''I'd like to thank Karl Rove, Kenny-boy Lay, and Marilyn Manson for making this all possible'')? What if he had run for congress as a republican on a family values platform (he's apparently a registered republican, so he'd at least know how send out the right leaflets)? If he really believed, as he often professed, in the falsehood of dualistic values, why didn't he cast himself further into splitting that falsehood wide open for all to see, when he was at the height of his powers? The tight dualism of “us and them” that pervades our language, politics, and policy today might be a little less destructive if we could all laugh at it.

Well, he's just a pop-star after all, maybe I expected too much. In the prosperous Clinton 90s, he was the scariest enemy the false gods could concoct. But of course, simmering under that shining happiness was all of the rage and strife that we had inflicted on the world to get at that prosperity, that bubbled up and scalded us on September 11th and since then in Iraq. Of course Manson's irrelevant now—he's scary in a cartoonish kind of way, but Al Qaeda, and their Western counterparts, the lumbering juggernaut called the neoconservatives, are way scarier, and unlike Manson, they're fully interested in martialling dualistic morality for the purposes of achieving power.

Where to start?

2005-10-06T18:31:00.000-07:00

Many of these posts were intially published on The Diamond Mine, but for many reasons, they will now be posted here. Thus, the above posts that all appear at the same time were actually written over a period of weeks, months, years even. Enjoy!