The Village Voice ended its 30-plus year employment of Bob Christgau. Thanks to John for first alerting me.
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
If this comes completely out of the blue, I apologize.
It is now official–Village Voice Media fired me today, “for taste,” which means (among other things) slightly sweeter severance. This despite the support of new music editor Rob Harvilla, who I like as a person and a writer. We both believed I had won myself some kind of niche as gray eminence. So I was surprised Tuesday when I was among the eight Voice employees (five editorial, three art) who were instructed to bring their union reps to a meeting with upper management today. But I certainly wasn’t shocked–my approach to music coverage has never been much like that of the New Times papers. Bless the union, my severance is substantial enough to give me time to figure out what I’m doing next. In fact, having finished all my freelance reviews yesterday, I don’t have a single assignment pending. So, since I have no intention of giving up rock criticism, all reasonable offers entertained; my phone number is in the book, as they used to say when there were books. What I don’t need is a vacation–the three of us just had a great two and a half weeks, and Nina matriculated at BMCC yesterday.
As I duly note the hosannas piled like fruit at Justin Timberlake’s feet, let me posit FutureSex/LoveSound as Timberlake’s Modern Times: an album that refines the achievements of its predecessor, made by a star whose anemic theosophy hardened not long after his thirteenth birthday, who prefers to beg/borrow idioms, sounds, tropes, production doohickeys, and melodies over crafting something world-historic – who may in fact be smarter than we critics because he realizes that begging and borrowing, when refracted through his starpower, becomes lustrous and thus stranger. Like Dylan, Justin knows just enough about how human beings interact to use their language but is incapable of transcending his/their limitations (lots of losing-my-ways, what-goes-around-comes-arounds, and until-the-end-of-times here), which is, I suppose all we want from a star.
Frankly I don’t get the complaints that Justin’s a cipher without Timbaland; since I figured that JT’s a zero anyway he had nothing to lose. But “Señorita” and “Rock Your Body” on 2002’s Justified didn’t sound like anything the Neptunes had done before, and I give Justin the credit; their toddler-funk and Justin’s pseudo-lubriciousness mated and produced a handful of delightful children (if you doubt me, relisten to the latest Nelly Furtado album and you’ll note the difference between a client and a collaborator). Divining ways of fucking with his producers’ sonic signatures by plagiarizing primary sources is his finest gift. He croons over a Linn drum programmed with Princely precision in “Until the End of Time,” forces Snoop to inject languid raps in the loping “Lady Cabdriver”-wannabe “Pose,” and overdubs himself singing in his lower register for the magnificent title track. Most happily for all concerned: not a single Brian McKnight horror.
Justin wants us all to love him (and according to this many of his skeptics already do), despite the disparity between his ambitions and the results. He’s got great ears and a big attention span though, both of which distinguish him from the other graduates of the Teen Pop Class of ‘99. The smugness which once made him distasteful has turned into a self-confidence winning enough to win the surly likes of Jim DeRogatis.
Neil Young once said about his catalogue: “It’s all the same song.” Surely this more accurately describes Bob Dylan’s. I haven’t yet formed a conclusive opinion about Modern Times, but the brazenness with which he quotes if not steals Slim Harpo, Muddy Waters, melodies and chord changes from his own “Love & Theft” radiates its own kind of benighted sincerity. My expectations — conditioned by years of buying this old coot’s drivel after impressive hot streaks — are so low that all I can be grateful for are good Dylan songs, and every one of these (with the exception of “Someday Baby”) is a Good Dylan Song. And this certainly can’t be said for the majority of the dull dull dull Time Out of Mind. The album’s expediency is itself beguiling. You can listen to “Workingman Blues #2″ and “Beyond the Horizon,” or not; you can play the album at the end or the middle or the beginning; it makes no difference. Modern Times doubles on itself, comments on itself, a pristine example of post-modernism, with a band schooled enough in blues verities to avoid the hotshot moments that Charlie Sexton and Larry Campbell’s guitars indulged in on the superior “Love & Theft“. Whether stopping to lament that “the buying power of the proletariat” has deteriorated, admitting nary a word of remorse for wanting to kill a man in the closer “Ain’t Talkin’” (it’s as heartstopping as Mountain Goat John Darnielle’s anomic 2004 murder reverie “Against Pollution”), Dylan can’t hide his glee in running through the repertoire of blues tropes; he sheds his humanity for the comfort of the tower of song. Allmusic’s Stephen Thomas Elrewine is correct: “Modern Times is the sound of an ambivalent Psalter coming in from the storm, dirty, bloodied, but laughing at himself — because he knows nobody will believe him anyway.”
Modern Times confirms what Time Out of Mind augured and “Love & Theft” refined: Dylan was never human, not really, not in the sense that you and I are (he makes David Bowie look like Ray Charles). He’s gone so far into his music that when it’s time for him to gaze at the world it’s refracted through the cracked looking-glass of an imagination wholly contingent upon its source material. When a real-life referent appears (the oft-cited Alica Keys line in “Thunder on the Mountain”) it feels at first like a sop: ok, the buzzard still glances at Billboard now and then. But it has the perverse effect of exacerbating Dylan’s formidable distance from love and pain; this isn’t Method acting, it’s closer to the English way of creating a character out of peripherals in the hope that the surface will suggest the tumult within. This is really awesome, as far as it goes, and Dylan’s grasp of the material means we’re less likely to get a Knocked Out Loaded anytime soon; yet, hmmm…maybe he should. At least Knocked Out Loaded intimated that he left his tour bus on occasion.
(Tropical Storm Ernesto, scraping the mountains of Cuba, is less than 12 hours from a South Florida landfall. I’ll see you on the other side.)
I’m not exactly sure what unlikely set of circumstances could have led me here, but I’m actually typing these words: “The new Christina Aguilera double album is fantastic, one of the great albums of 2006.” I’m as puzzled as you are. I have absolutely no idea why I walked into a record store and bought a Christina Aguilera album without having heard a single song from it, but I’m telling you, unless my ears are seriously deceiving me, this is as good as pop music gets, and I find myself wondering why this woman is not a feminist icon.
Hard-rock melodrama requires the ameliorating effect of synthesizers — that’s what I repeat when I’m unable to listen to Led Zep for more than a few songs at a time. My favorite Pat Benatar single, “Invincible,” deserves to be remembered as much if not more than “We Belong” and “Love is a Battlefield,” the two top fivers which first channelled new wave tropes into Benatar’s dildo-rock. Pat’s band thickens the lyrics’ appalling triumphalism (just about every mid eighties hit with a battle metaphor — whether by Madonna or Survivor — was an implied blood tribute to Ronald, Lord Reagan) with welcome sophistication. Is there anything in Pat’s catalogue like the bass and rhythm guitar solos (check out the slight skank) at the 2:15 mark? or the and ricocheting snares/synth stutter before the chorus? If you’re going to goose-step before the Supreme Leader I can’t think of a less onerous chant.
I like Brandon Flowers a lot. He wears bad makeup endearingly. He’s a Mormon. He likes the Pet Shop Boys and loves Duran Duran; he even wrote a couple of numbers on the last album which approached their splendor. But more often than not his personality, parched vocals, the nasty metallic glaze of David Keuning’s guitar, and a homoerotica he slathers like Dijon mustard on half-assed, unfinished songs (he’s a straight boy who wants to assure the gay guy who hit on him that he’s okay with it) reveal them to be the third-raters their critics are too quick to dismiss them as. The first single from the forthcoming Sam’s Town is, like “Somebody Told Me,” a good intention. It goes from verse to chorus too quickly or something; it’s missing a bridge; the harmonies and Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me-era synths are mixed too low. The part about drinking the devil’s water is cool. GRADE: B-
Kelis feat. Cee-lo, “Lil Star”
With a vocal lifted from the Roberta Flack school of black middle-class sophistication, Kelis aims for Mary J. Blige’s patented I-am-a-soul-in-need narcissism racket. She succeeds where Blige fails, and not because she’s a better singer, although God knows that Kelis’ comparative underplaying makes Mary sound like a Gatling gun. The title’s pun is less gruesome when you stop thinking about it (”There is nothing special about me/I am a just a little star” is the first line uttered by this would-be icon whose “Milkshake” was damn near inescapable in 2003). The state of R&B balladry is so dire that the tasteful production — muted wah-wah, intro trumpets — doesn’t scream archly retro. Cee-lo, competing for the obtrusive-weirdo status that Ol’ Dirty Bastard abdicated, handles chorus duties. Despite the Uncle Remus drawls he is, happily, more human than Kelis, mitigating the tune’s egotistic humility. Use your imagination and picture a George Clinton guest appearance on Whitney’s “The Greatest Love of All.” GRADE: B+
Those of us who miss Grant McLennan have this new article by his partner Robert Forster to console us. In uncluttered prose Forster recounts meeting McLennan, an artistic polymath who could have been, according to Forster, a film or book critic. How encouraging to read about a great songwriter for whom reading proved perhaps the only lasting pleasure. Such was his erudition. And melancholy:
He was moody and you always hoped you got him on a good day. Sometimes I’d visit and it would take me over an hour to pull him out. Twice in his life I was with him when he was totally shattered. And there were many years I missed when we weren’t in the same city.
Forster correctly notes that the darkness was there, always, shadowing “Cattle & Cane,” “Dusty in Here,” “Somebody Else’s Wife,” even “Streets of Your Town,” the only nostalgia piece to begin in tranquility and conclude with a regret shaped by an unvarnished acceptance of reality (the “battered wives” with sharpened butcher knives form as much a part of the singer’s experience as taking his boat under the bridge). Tracks like 2005’s “Finding You” and “The Statue” prove that this fusion was an ideal more tenable than the escape for which so many romantics yearn.
Beyond their penchant for horrorshow tabloid headlines, the Libertines move me because they find a lyrical and vocal correlative for the motormouthed preemptory insistence of their guitars. The dialogue — between singers Carl Barat and the hapless, hopeless Pete Doherty — is jagged and demotic, exactly what one would expect from old friends/combatants. Or lovers. The ease with which Barat and Doherty allow for this possibility opens their music; it positions them fully in the canon. Consider Mick Jagger and Keith Richards’ yelped harmonies in “Dead Flowers,” animated by a mutual delight in tweaking the song’s country-blues tropes yet buoyed by the tacit admission that, snarky or not, having a laugh at these tropes’ expense keeps the needle and the spoon at arms’ length for another four minutes.
The Libertines’ 2004 single “Can’t Stand Me Now” is a soiled transcript of what happens when two men realize that their jokes no longer amuse, that irony isn’t enough anymore, that there yet remains an appetite neither music, friendship, nor even the needle and the spoon can sate. The song itself teeters over chaos: in its opening salvo one guitar keeps a nervous rhythm while another picks high, yearning notes, before trading places — all this before Barat and Doherty dramatize their revolting melodrama. Barat is matter-of-fact and inexorable: “An ending fitting for the start/you twist and tore our love apart”; Doherty, at first a live embodiment of why the bromides of Narcotis Anonymous are as injurious as the drugs (”you shut me out and blamed it on the brown”), kicks back with a chorus admission so strangled and free of irony that it can make you gasp. By shouting “You can’t stand me NOW!” he’s inverting a myriad love songs in which the lover can’t grasp why the beloved finds him undesirable; and when Barat confirms his partner’s conclusion with an improvised “No,” it’s as chilling a moment as any I’ve heard in recent years. Where else can Doherty go beyond self-abasement? He’ll take his partner anywhere he wants to go, he’ll try because there’s no worse they can do — he’ll burgle his own room if necessary. It’s not a stretch to imagine that the love-which-dare-not-speak-its-name nibbles at the frayed edges of Doherty’s heart; it’s not hard to postulate that Doherty found the Fisher-Price homoerotica of the Who, the Stones, the Kinks, the Buzzcocks, the Smiths, and Suede a disgusting sham unequal to the dilemma of what to do when the person you want most in the world is your male best friend. There he is sharing your microphone: the only awareness that your improvised lyrics might have parallels beyond the fictive is in the frightened wet in his eyes.
All this serves as a preface to the Dirty Pretty Things’ Waterloo to Anywhere. I’ve only heard it once; it sounds a lot like the Libertines, without Doherty’s guitar, harmonies, and subtext. Perhaps Doherty hopes that Barat’s perfectly honorable impulse to carry on will suceed — surely one of the many reasons why he continues to destroy himself is his inability to cope with the news anyway.
Three readable stories in the New York Times: two critical profiles — one on Matt Dillon, the other on Outkast — and an exegesis on the question of faith as manifested in Bob Dylan’s forthcoming Modern Times. Jon Pareles suggests that the vaporous apostasy of Time Out Of Mind and Love & Theft has finally started to crimp Dylan’s songwriting (”lackadaisical” and “tentative” are just two of Pareles’ adjectives).
I haven’t yet met anyone who’s too excited about Justin’s “Sexyback” — “bringing sexy back from where?” is one typical complaint. At present it’s next to impossible for Justin to be the beneficiary of the critical redress which turned “Like I Love You” and “Rock Your Body” into pop masterpieces. To his credit he seems aware of his position and, employing the canny instinct for marketplace vibrations he acquired as a former Mouseketeer scion, is dropping all the right references (”The best way I can describe that song is say David Bowie and David Byrne decided to do a cover of James Brown’s `Sex Machine,” Justin helpfully explained). However he is, bless him, bringing nasty back — by insulting Taylor Hicks (and recanting, or so his publicist claims).
On to the song. Since Timbo can assemble an arresting backbeat from an air conditioner compressor and a jar of Peter Pan peanut butter, the question is whether the blond moppet can work it. In this summer dominated by “Promiscuous,” in which the formally coy Ms. Furtado gets hopped up after a couple of sour-apple martinis, Justin’s got his work cut out for him. As Andre 3000 discovered on The Love Below’s “Dracula’s Castle,” burying a wan falsetto in distortion will fool your fans into thinking you’ve been listening to Bone Machine-era Tom Waits; and, indeed, “Sexyback”’s quasi-demo spareness could have supported Gary Lucas or Latin Playboys-inspired guitar blurts. Could have. Justin’s gotta know this won’t stay in the Top Ten very long — if it makes it. If he’s got a Low or Fear of Music in him, now’s the time to unleash it, cuz Thriller simply ain’t enough anymore.
Lindsey Buckingham’s album has an official release date. An acoustic album. He’s been threatening this since Fleetwood Mac released The Dance in 1997 (the underrated Say You Will, following a tradition dating as far back as 1987’s Tango in the Night, included several tracks that were originally solo Lindsey). If his acoustic tracks on The Dance are an indicator, more “Go Insane” (asshole-ism as resignation), less “Big Love” (middle-aged morning wood).
Thoughts on Andy Garcia’s The Lost City, posted elsewhere but recorded here:
(1) Andy Garcia is his usual stiff and uncharismatic self (Soderbergh exploited this for comic effect in the Oceans 11 movies). If he flirted this openly and clumsily with my sister-in-law, I’d have stuck a trumpet up his ass.
(2) The film is a honeyed reverie: gorgeous nonsense, like Sastre’s mooing after Garcia. Reminded me at its best of Hou Shiao-Shien’s talent for presenting moments of chronological incongruity so as to stress the tension between memory and nostalgia.
(3) In the film Batista is much more than a preening met (and much less: he’s like John Gielgud in Caligula). He runs a secret police! His goons shoot suspects in the head after an unsuccessful interrogation! He’s got man-tits!
(4) Garcia the director is rather good when instructing the actors to tease and ricochet the good Cuban novelist Gabriel Cabrera Infante’s purple dialogue — initially (a tense scene between Dustin Hoffman’s Meyer Lansky and Garcia). In the last third it gets ridiculous. Sample: “Havana is like a rose. It’s got petals and thorns, but you still want to hold her close.”
(5) Bill Murray?!? WTF?
(6) Jonathan Rosenbaum: “Cabrera Infante had a nuanced sense of how the Cuban revolution soured, not a simplistic set of cold war reflexes—his criticism of the idealized radical icon Che Guevara is a lot more complicated than this film’s.”
(7) Once you accept the Garcia character’s passivity as an unintentionally ironic portrait of what my grandparents’ generation was like — apolitical bourgeosie who rather disliked Batista but lacking the imagination to realize that their comfort couldn’t stand a chance against Cuba’s unstable history — this synthesis of Casablanca, The Godfather, Part II, and Reds is okay to pretty good. There’s rather too much music (it’s excellent though). Questioning its verisimilitude is as fruitful as questioning the more repulsive The Motorcycle Diaries‘ depiction of Che Guevara-as-Henry-Fonda (this is a good demurral).
Does anyone listen to Remain in Light past “Once in a Lifetime”? I’ve heard “Houses in Motion” get some love, but no one (including me) has claimed much for the three dirges with which the album concludes. The liquid-terror plot foiled a few days ago brought to mind “Listening Wind,” which might be the most unsettling track on an album whose grooves throb and rumble with enough existential portent as it is.
The track may chronicle the dawning political consciousness of a nascent terrorist, but David Byrne’s he-sees-he-thinks verses (it’s like he’s keeping a safari journal) complement his demotic melodies. Imagine the narrator of “The Big Country” landing his plane by the banks of the Congo and proceeding upriver; confronting the Heart of Darkness vaporizes his Western condescension (that Byrne regressed to confused up-with-people sincerity makes True Stories doubly offensive). Mojique’s evolution is dreadful in its banality; he knows not what he does, but since he’s following the wind’s instructions it’s a reflex as involuntary as sleeping. For a song in which terrible violence is intimated Mojique doesn’t seem very angry, or determined; the colonialist tropes (the would-be saboteur’s “friend the wind” orders him to construct bombs to destroy foreigners) define instead of cheapen his quest. Like Remain in Light’s other slippery people — troubled men of intelligence who are nonetheless dividing and dissolving or changing their shapes — Mojique prefers to be acted upon by his environment, which is enough. The minimalist percussion, synth colors, and oddly timed guitar squeals (they flitter like birds) by the Expanded Heads evoke a wind heavy with unspoken threats. The beautiful chorus melody, sung by a doubletracked Byrne in the voice of Mojique, cushions the only sentence fragments Byrne writes, yet they don’t seem so because he phrases them with full-throated force.
“The Overload” records the aftermath: no second coming, no center, just evisceration (”the removal of the insides”), a surfeit of feeling, and a benumbed admission that perhaps actions do have consequences. It could be a missive from beyond the grave: terrorists rarely survive their deeds. Makes you wonder whether “Same as it ever was” is a conclusion or another question.
The voice of one of my favorite singers (top five, at the very least) suits Mantovani melodrama, not Mozartian delicacy. This is why Roy Orbison needed to write or co-write most of his material. The only composer approximating “Crying,” “In Dreams,” “Only the Lonely,” and “It’s Over” was Phil Spector and, frankly, it’s a proposed marriage whose compability works only on paper – like pairing two pieces of aged pork like Richard Burton and Liz Taylor, say.
Buying candles and Quaker Oats at my neighborhood supermarket yesterday afternoon I was surprised enough to hear Orbison’s “I Drove All Night” to thrust my crotch at a pyramid of Hunt’s Tomato Paste. His cover of Cyndi Lauper’s Top 10 hit from 1989 – neo-rockibilly Wilburyed by Jeff Lynne – is the sunlit equivalent to the nocturnal masturbatory tango “In Dreams,” with Orbison’s running-scared tremulousness echoed by overzealous snare work (the song was recorded in the early ’90s) and yummy guitar twang. Celine Dion’s aerobic cover is no pox.
Even the video is a yumfest: Their creepy good looks suiting the song’s overripe escapism, Jason Priestley and Jennifer Connelly, at the peak of their youthful magnetism, are illumined like a Calvin Klein. Keep tasting those sweet kisses: one or both of them seem aware that they’re isn’t much time. Jason is needed at a Barenaked Ladies shoot in a few years.
PS: I should really rank the best Steinberg-Kelly songs. How would you? Place these in order of greatness: “Like a Virgin,” “Alone,” “Sex as a Weapon,” “True Colors,” “In Your Room,” “Eternal Flame,” and “I Touch Myself” (their long collaboration with Chrissie Hynde is another issue; I agree with Christgau that, despite the credits, she’s the auteur).
