A Grand Illusion

Or poring through more issues of Magnet. I have to admit I had a pretty hazy conception of what the dudes in The Rapture looked like before I saw ‘em in the flesh last night. Basically, I knew Luke Jenner had a curly-floppy ‘do and that’s about it.

Suffice to say, the group that ambled onstage at the Cat’s Cradle looked absolutely nothing like the image I held in my head of the band that wrought the dance-punk fuckery of Echoes and the slick cock-rock of Pieces of the People We Love. That incongruity may not have been the overriding problem with the show itself, but it was certainly a symptom.

Simply put, The Rapture just didn’t have the stage presence to pull off the music they make in the studio, at least on this night. On wax they come off all street-scuzzy and invitingly lecherous, Pistols fans who’ve just discovered Zeppelin or club kids who’ve just discovered both. In person the band is standard-issue indie, fronted by a shaggy-headed cutie-pie when only a leering bozo showing off his cock bulge will do.

See, it wasn’t just physical features either. Musically, the Rapture was suitably tight, but only in rare instances did anyone in the band exude even a rudimentary degree of showmanship (Jenner stage-diving at show’s end, mainly). If they sounded like The Shins or Pavement the band’s visual presentation would be perfectly peachy, but music that thrives on sex and ugliness demands complementary panache. Imagine if Roxy had performed wearing oversized football jerseys and sweatpants and you’ll get some idea of the touching awkwardness I felt when Jenner tamely unleashed his best Bob Plant impression on “The Devil.” Perhaps the lack of ocular stimulation on stage explains why a ridiculous little mosh pit repeatedly broke out amidst the first few rows of the crowd.

(penned by Josh Love, the victim of log-in problems and his crack addiction).

Any fan of Al Green’s big hits must needs explore the studio albums which, despite intelligent defenses, are still underrated. Livin’ For You’s great “Beware” is a song very much worthy of your attention.

BLACK PEOPLE CAN ROCK!

Yes. In its latest study of gobsmacked irrelevance, The New York Times has uncovered evidence that “people of color” actually listen to music played by white people on electric guitar. The article, an expertly paced piece of hysterics, makes errors early and glaringly with an enthusiasm that’s almost contagious. The histrionic opening:

WHEN Douglas Martin first saw the video for Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” as a teenager in High Point, N.C., “it blew my mind,” he said. Like many young people who soothe their angst with the balm of alternative rock, Mr. Martin was happy to discover music he enjoyed and a subculture where he belonged.

Except, as it turned out, he didn’t really belong, because he is black.

The generalizations:

But 40 years after black musicians laid down the foundations of rock, then largely left the genre to white artists and fans, some blacks are again looking to reconnect with the rock music scene.

The un-parseable:

The next few decades saw several successful and influential black musicians who crossed genres or were distinctly rock, such as Prince, Living Colour and Lenny Kravitz, and rock melodies and lyrics have been liberally sampled by hip-hop artists.

Restricting its evidence to the contemporaneous and obvious:

At the same time, the hip-hop industry’s demand for new samples has increased the number of rock songs appearing on hip-hop tracks: Jay-Z’s latest album features contributions from Chris Martin of Coldplay and R & B artist Rihanna’s current single samples the New Wave band Soft Cell.

Finally, the omissions. How the fuck can you write this kind of thing and not mention James Brown? Otis Redding? The Temptations? Bad Brains? What about ska and two-tone bands like The English Beat and Specials? If I linger too long over Jessica Pressler’s silence on Parliament-Funkadelic, I might get very upset (you’d think that the totemic Talking Heads’ use of Bernie Worrell would warrant a mention).

Besides, it’s obvious that it’s white audiences who’ve traditionally had a problem with blacks encroaching on their domain (of which this article is but the latest example). Recall the treatment Prince got when he opened for the Stones in 1981 (he was booed, spit on, and had to dodge bottles; you think Keith and Ronnie offered Kleenex?), or the colonialist subtext to the coverage of (the utterly dull) Living Colour; they were given a pass by the likes of Rolling Stone because they essayed “issues” like cults of personality and their leader Vernon Reid was an eloquent provocateur before he started a rock band. Speaking of critics, where are Armond White? Cary Darling?

At most times I scoff at the notion of a liberal media elite; but parochialism, as this article demonstrates, knows no political allegiance.

Caught the still-limber Red Hot Chili Peppers in concert Monday night for purposes of review in my local daily (I’m not linking to the review cuz I wrote it too long and subsequently it got hacked up into barely-recognizable pieces). It was my first time seeing the Chili Peppers, and by far the biggest surprise was finding out just how fucking insane people are over John Frusciante. I guess if you read Guitar World or whatever you’re probably already aware of his exalted stature, but I’m like the majority of my fellow critics in being completely cut off from that demographic of “real rock” holdouts.

Standing in front of a dude who spent the entire show repeatedly screaming “fuck ‘em up Johnny!” I started thinking that it’s strangely dissociative how guitar-hero rock is virtually moribund as a commercially viable genre (hardly any emo bands flash technical prowess, and even butt-rock outliers like Nickelback aren’t known for their shredding) while at the same time there are clearly A LOT of people who are hungry for larger-than-life axe masters, to the point where people unabashedly worship a (now) unassuming dude like Frusciante, who’s plenty talented but never struck me as some kind of Claptonesque deity.

Looking at the way thousands of people utterly lost their shit over Frusicante, it’s hard to understand how guitar-driven rock isn’t still a commercial force. Over the long haul I’m sure MTV’s played a significant role in the phasing-out of the unkempt, self-indulgent shredder (who has the time for solos anymore?), and it’s equally clear that the mainstream rise of hip-hop and country means fewer kids are being weaned on hoary rock epics.

Still, if there are things left to be done with a guitar, it would seem like the time is ripe for another six-string icon. Guys my age are just now having kids they can brainwash into liking grunge, and judging from the number of 50-ish dudes at the Chili Peppers show I’d say even boomers are amenable to crossing the generation gap in fealty to the almighty axe.

James Wolcott’s recent review of Little Miss Sunshine (which should be retitled Little Miss Sundance in honor of the film labs in which this inexplicable mini-phenomenon was rehearsed and schooled as thoroughly as Abigail Breslin’s character) is close enough to mine to make me wonder if he gets his daily dose of AGI, but it’s worth posting because the film’s recent Oscar benediction reminds me that there are plenty of people who think it’s the shit. During a movie discussion in class last week one girl admitted that although she’d missed it in the theater she owned a DVD copy; she’s seen it three times. “The grandfather is so much like my abuelo!” she giggled. She was dressed conservatively.

I am relieved that the Oscars, for parity’s sake, honored three black stereotypes: the Savage (Forest Whitaker, The Last King of Scotland), the Noble Savage (Djimon Hounsou, Blood Diamond), the Minstrel (Eddie Murphy, Dreamgirls), and Mama (Jennifer Hudson, Dreamgirls). And Eddie Murphy played them all in The Nutty Professor.

“Bohemian Rhapsody”’s middle section, a tricky studio concoction, was not exactly a match for a rock show. On the other hand, a Queen concert that didn’t include it would have ended with Freddie’s lynching, so the band usually circumvented the problem by playing the record when the mock-opera started and abandoning the stage. The audience did the rest of the singing.

My Chemical Romance’s chemopera “The Black Parade” often feels just like that: the band walked out and left other people’s records playing. There’s “A Night at the Opera,” yes, and “The Wall”, but it doesn’t end there. “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness”? Yup. A little Ziggy Stardust? Check. The Doors’ cover of “Alabama Song”? Indeed. Could “Cancer” possibly be a nod to Rufus Wainwright? Is that Green Day I hear? Heck, is that Blink-182? Yes, “Teenagers” is a great song, but it was pretty great when it was called “Bang-a-Gong” too.

But in spite of the way they jam their influences down your ear canal, “The Black Parade” is the first great screamo record, the first you don’t have to be a part-time employee at Hot Topic to truly get into. It still has the bleak, black eye-shadow worldview of MCR’s previous two, but it has ambition, which is more than I could ever say for Thursday or Fall-Out Boy.

And the songs are there all the way through. “Welcome to the Black Parade” may be the one to haunt modern rock radio for the next few years, but “I Don’t Love You” and “Disenchanted” are wonderful ballads, “Dead!” “House of Wolves”, and “This is How I Disappear” are propulsive enough to make you forget how silly the lyrics can get in their attempt to be nasty, and a tossed line like “I’m just soggy from the chemo” from “Cancer” has just the right amount of creepiness in it. Only the unnecessary Liza Minelli cameo in “Mama” threw me a little off.

But for all their histrionic “it takes the young to TRULY understand death and the meaninglesness of existence,” it sometimes sounds like MCR has gotten their info on illness and death from ER reruns. Of course, if I was ten years younger I wouldn’t even have noticed: there’s so much here to lap up if you’re of a certain age, and something tells me a lot of kids are going to remember this one very fondly a decade from now.

At my grand old age of 25, I can’t take the teenager anthems as seriously as I would like. As it turns out, parents DO understand: they’re just too busy working their asses off so you can get your damned Wii for Christmas.

David Bowie essaying a straightforward love song is usually cause to head for the hills (rather like learning that Paul McCartney will record one of those I’m-gonna-play-all-the-instruments-cuz-I’m-a-pop-genius albums he does from time to time). Generally the poseur is most moving when he reminds us that he is one, albeit one blessed with a preternatural gift for wicked guitarists, and versatile rhythm sections that can top or bottom as the occasion demands. Think of “Word on a Wing,” “Be My Wife,” or “Soul Love,” in which love and narcissism are inseparable. Or the obscure “Win” from Young Americans: he learns the Bryan Ferry trick of digging so deeply into parody that he achieves an addled kind of pathos (if background vocalist Luther Vandross had recorded it himself the lyric’s ironies would have exposed his questionable sexuality). Something similar occurs in 1995’s “Strangers When We Meet,” featuring one of Bowie’s very best vocal performances, imbuing lyrical decoupage with palpable lust.

“Absolute Beginners” has never held sway; in my Bowie canon it would probably rank in the upper thirties (somewhere between “African Nite Flight” on the high end and [yes] “Too Dizzy” on the low end). This big British hit from the film of the same name (it peaked in the high fifties here) has a predictable chord structure, a pinched Bowie vocal as an unwelcome reminder of his deficiencies, and lyrics whose rather hamhanded insertion of the film title (like “Against All Odds,” right?) adduced the song’s boilerplate nature. Take a look at the single sleeve. Note the wide grin. When Bowie attempts “normality” he’s truly frightening — even scarier than the emaciated splendor he displayed here.

So why is it a minor triumph? Producers Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley — responsible for nearly killing Elvis Costello’s career with Punch the Clock and Goodbye Cruel World — surround Bowie with a yearning string section (as expressive as Bowie is blank), a non-cliched saxophone solo that may or may not be played by Bowie himself, and a glorious percussion breakdown at the 6:30 mark in which congas, timbales, cowbells herald the recapitulation of the song’s vocal and musical hook. It’s the only post-Let’s Dance moment Bowie in which sympathetic production reminds the poseur of his limitations so that he can transcend them.

I’ve just emerged from under Thomas Pynchon’s “Against the Day”.

It feels like a library shelf crashed down on me and I’ve slowly eaten my way out to daylight through the musty pages of ancient boys adventures with titles like “The Troublesome Three and the Yellow Menace.” But what begins like a not-exactly-timely parody of Tom Swift adventures becomes truly Pynchonian (i.e: a novel about pretty much everything), and if the mere size seems intimidating, I can testify it’s worth it: 1000+ pages, and nary an indigestion. Pynchon has a reputation for difficulty, but that eludes me: behind the large casts and errant narrative he’s positively EASY to read, and he’s a prankster first and foremost. Often he’s even sophomoric: He may be discussing the fourth dimension, but he interrupts himself, entranced with a fart joke.

But it’s a funny one.

Another Thomas, Thomas Harris, has returned to the thing he does best. Or the thing he used to do very well. Or the only thing he can do, in fact: provide something for Anthony Hopkins to do when he’s not throwing his gravitas around the screen in increasingly samey characters.

“Hannibal Rising” charts Hannibal Lecter’s childhood youth in spastic, screenplay-ready episodes that made me forget that Harris was once a really gripping writer of thrillers. This time even the gorier moments are sort of bloddless. Worse of all, the book explains away Hannibal’s seductive brand of evil by using a comic book trope fans of the X-Men (and Magneto) will recognize.

Yes, you guessed it: The Nazis did it.

In case you doubt my meaning, the first Thomas’ book is the one to go with.

Curse of the Golden Flower: Miles removed from Hero and House of Flying Daggers, as the focus isn’t on the lives and loves of outsiders cruelly twisted by the hand of empire but rather the royal players themselves behaving badly, causing the deaths of faceless thousands in the process. So, really more histrionically tragic than nobly so. The first two-thirds is a slowly-revealing palace intrigue that manufactures plenty of compelling drama even without much hand-to-hand combat, but the run-up to the denouement is numbingly vast in a bloodletting that offers neither emotional sustenance or real visceral thrills. I’m guessing Gong Li won’t get any Oscar love, but it’s hard not to juxtapose her performance against Mirren’s in The Queen, one literally poisoned into hysterical madness, the other culturally poisoned into disconcerting calm.

Most delicious irony – given the film’s subject matter, that the only genuine bond of self-sacrificing love occurs between a mother and her son.

Threading at the farther edge of Illusionate concerns, but since we do take on random pop culture bits… I have a tiff with slang. Has anyone seen that after-Christmas cellphone commercial? The one where the father (a Carl Winslow-type) meets his offspring at the breakfast table, recaps on their gifts,(AWESOME cellphones, we are to believe), and then asks the kids: “What did Daddy get.” “Aftershave?” says the daughter, (with a guilty lilt that conveys: “We didn’t put you in a home, so be grateful”). Then Daddy provides the punchline. At first I was completely shocked by what I took to be the father’s response. I thought, almost simultaneously: a) WHAT?! b) Why has this affable pater familias resorted to prostitution? c) Why is he telling the kids? d) Is he complaining? e) Bragging?

I’m relating this because I just saw the ad again, and I heard better. Daddy’s reply is actually:

“No, Daddy got hosed,”

Instead of: “No, Daddy got hoes!” (Which was my first assumption.)

This commercial is badly phrased. It puritanically skews what we all know Daddy was trying to say: “No, Daddy got SHAFTED.” But in the bowdlerizing process, something got lost and confusion emerged. I get that getting hosed is the same as getting shafted, being buggered, or generally being forced to copulate, (all sorts of feminist and gay diatribes could be hung on exactly why we assume that getting the shaft is supposed to be a less than pleasant experience on the subservient end) but I guess hosed has a milder connotation- you might be accidentally garden-hosed by your suburban neighbor as he/she tends to the lawn. Still phallic.
Still the punchline does not work.

I’m not quite sure why this ad’s phrasing just bothers me. I think Flaubert might have understood.

Like Children of Men, Pan’s Labyrinth re-imagines war as absurd and wanton. “Sides” are irrelevant: the winner is the one who has a temporary monopoly on violence. Pauline Kael’s description of Vivian Leigh’s performance in A Streetcar Named Desire – it evokes “pity and terror” — comes closest to capturing what Guillermo del Toro has accomplished in Pan’s Labyrinth. A few dissenters have chastised the film for failing to give the Spanish Civil War its proper dramatic heft, but in the performances of Sergi Lopez and Maribel Verdu, the almost bovine servility of the women, and the numbed infliction of cruelty, I was reminded of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, Picasso’s Guernica and some of Hemingway’s fiction from the period. The matter-of-fact manner in which Del Toro stages the sadism of Lopez’s Capitan Vidal is matched by Ofelia’s confrontations with assorted monsters (the one in the picture above may be the scariest goblin I’ve ever seen filmed).

*************

Here are my favorite films of 2006:

Pan’s Labyrinth
Children of Men
Marie Antoinette
Clean
The Death of Mister Lazarescu
Inside Man
L’Enfant
Volver
Neil Young: Heart of Gold
Changing Times

Take this quiz and chart your results. According to the chart, I’m a social libertarian with rather centrist economic principles (no surprises there).

And, according to this chart by speakout.com, I’m a “moderate liberal.”

Maybe I decided to write about Michael Penn’s “No Myth” because March was the first album I ever bought on CD (the first CD single I bought: The Cure’s “Lovesong”). Listening to it years later, it’s an uneven, frustrating collection; Penn’s smart, as you’d expect, but not smart enough to hire a rhythm section when he thinks drum programs will do. He’s enamoured with leaden extended metaphors that crumble upon scrutiny (”Cupid’s Got a Brand New Gun,” “Battle Room”). “Subterranean Homesick Blues” is a personal touchstone (”Brave New World”). But “Invisble,” the dusky “Innocent One,” and “No Myth” are original takes on sexual politics undergirded by a delectable surliness. Surely Aimee Mann is capable of less.

Here’s my essay on “No Myth.”

As I feared, Bryan Ferry is recording an album of predictable Dylan covers. We remarked here that Ferry may pull off a miracle as wondrous as his 2002 cover of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue; and I’m not unopposed to Ferry contributing piano, harmonica, and those wizened pipes to the loosey-goosey arrangements of his longtime backing band. Still…

The track listing:

Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues
Simple Twist Of Fate
Make You Feel My Love
The Times They Are A-Changin’
All I Really Want To Do
Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door
Positively 4th Street
If Not For You
Baby, Let me Follow You Down
Gates Of Eden
All Along The Watchtower