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a pleasant work environment
Posted on April 19th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Musicians.
Working at home on weekends is difficult. I can't combat the frequent outbreaks of bass-heavy music and piercing television from apartments on both sides of us with loud music of my own, because Velma doesn't like the music that loud and it just makes the problem worse for her; but I can't concentrate on my work. When I must get paying work done, as I must this weekend, sometimes the solution is to go in to my office. I've done so today, and the office is blessedly empty but for me, which means I can crank my own music, not bother anyone and not be bothered. And being away from the distractions of home helps me focus. The only downside is not being able to share space with Velma, a constant low-level nice thing we both like.
I knew I might need to come in to the office, so I prepared. I have twenty-two beloved Mingus albums digitized to my mp3 player, and I'm playing them all on shuffle now. This makes me very very happy.
r. kelly: creepier than you think
Posted on April 18th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Musicians, Badness.
Bill Wyman -- the music journalist, not the musician -- has been doing a lot of good work at his weblog Hitsville. The most important and disturbing piece he's written, one that ought to be more widely disseminated, is his extraordinary compilation of facts and allegations concerning R. Kelly's sexual history with minors leading up to his trial on one of the allegations.
I knew that he was in trouble for taping himself having sex with a minor. I knew that he married Aaliyah when she was fifteen. But I hadn't any notion of the documented extent of Kelly's history with teenagers. Eleven separate allegations of sex with minors have been reported. Some of the details, as Wyman notes, are "a little bit barfy". For example, a year after he'd settled out of court for $250,000 with a fifteen year old girl, the first sex tape emerged:
...showing Kelly having sex with a young girl. The girl’s aunt identified her, and Kelly. In the tape, the singer called her by her first name; she called him “Daddy.” Besides a variety of sex acts, the girl urinates on the floor at “Daddy’s” direction. “Daddy” then urinates into her mouth.
The girl was fourteen at the time. In the reporting surrounding the case, it emerged that Kelly had settled out of court with two other teenage girls.
Th details surrounding the marriage to fifteen year old Aaliyah are creepy, too:
...she was a singer and a protege of Kelly’s with whom, associates have said, he was having an affair. Without telling her what was going on, Kelly arranged an impromptu wedding at a suburban Chicago hotel and then swept her toward a plane. Fortunately, the girl called her parents. They came and got her and, articles have said, the pair never saw each other again. As rumors surfaced about the union, Kelly lied about it. But then Vibe magazine found a marriage certificate, on which Haughton’s age was listed as 18. The union was annulled a short time later.
There are several more allegations. I'll just mention one more:
Many of Kelly’s associates have been quoted saying they thought he was sick, or had an uncontrollable compulsion to have sex with young girls. Perhaps the strongest evidence of this is that, while already under indictment for filming himself having sex with a child, he was found to have in one of his houses a digital camera with new photos of him having sex with an underaged girl. ... The search that produced the camera was later disallowed by a judge, so Kelly was never prosecuted for those photos.
R. Kelly has been subject to a certain amount of mockery for what has been generally seen, so far as I can tell, as celebrity peccadilloes, maybe a little further over the line than most. I think the record Wyman has compiled makes a compelling case that Kelly is a genuine sociopath. Why he has not been held more accountable by the media and the entertainment industry, I don't understand. Read the whole thing and see if you don't agree.
bob dylan awarded special music pulitzer
Posted on April 8th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Musicians.
My dislike of Dylan and annoyance at the perpetual exaggeration of his (admitted) virtues and ignoring of his (near-constant) flaws aside, I can't argue with the award, which is obviously deserved. My main reaction is to be grateful it isn't a special poetry Pulitzer, which would have ground my teeth to stubs.
i'll bet it was about making a statement. yeah.
Posted on January 24th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Musicians, Badness, Quotes.
Quoted from Idolator:
The Spice Girls are walking away with "£50 million between them" for their sold-out 17-night stand at London's 02 Arena. "The truth of the matter is, to put on this tour has cost £18.6 million," Ginger sez. "This is not a money-making expedition...Hopefully we will break even but it has never been about that."
I'm soliciting theories on what the Spice Girls reunions shows were really about, since they were never about making money (or breaking even), as pretty much everyone on the planet who isn't a Spice Girl might naturally assume.
you don't say
Posted on December 17th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Musicians, Quotes.
As unfathomable as it seems from the distance of over 30 years, for a few months, Gerry and the Pacemakers were the Beatles' nearest competitors in Britain. --Richie Unterberger, Allmusic
For a very brief time in 1964, it seemed that the biggest challenger to the Beatles' phenomenon was the Dave Clark Five. --Rick Clark and Richie Unterberger, Allmusic
cafe tacuba, the repost
Posted on November 26th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs, Musicians.
(This is a combined version of the two posts I made on Cafe Tacuba at the beginning of the holiday weekend, just in case anyone who normally reads this didn't see them. I apologize to those of you seeing this twice, especially Martin.)
After last night's show at Hammerstein, I am as confirmed in my opinion as I can be: Café Tacuba (aka Café Tacvba) are the greatest rock band in the world: the most exhilarating combination of energy, invention, and breadth of style currently going. I can't imagine that the language difference is that big a barrier to their being better known in the states, but apparently it is. That and the fact that, for all their variety of form, they aren't trying to break or deconstruct any forms, which makes them of less interest to the indie press than weirder foreign-language stuff.
If you remain interested in where rock and roll is going, not just the underground stuff but the bands that play arenas, I urge you to try Café Tacuba. Robert L, you especially. Try Re first if you can, but try anything. Maybe it won't move you, but you should find out.
A few songs, chosen to represent Cafe Tacuba's entire career, and some of their breadth of style. Not all my favorites -- I like some of their styles more than others -- but all songs I love.
from Cafe Tacuba (1992)
Las Persianas
Rarotonga
three consecutive songs from Re (1994)
El Ciclon
El Borrego
Esa Noche
from Avalancha de Exitos (1996)
No Controles
from Yo Soy (1999)
Guerra
from Reves (1999)
3
from Cuatro Caminos (2003)
Eo
from SiNo (2007)
Volver a Comenzar
tacuba! - some evidence
Posted on November 22nd, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs, Musicians.
A few songs, chosen to represent Cafe Tacuba's entire career, and some of their breadth of style. Not all my favorites -- I like some of their styles more than others -- but all songs I love.
from Cafe Tacuba (1992)
Las Persianas
Rarotonga
three consecutive songs from Re (1994)
El Ciclon
El Borrego
Esa Noche
from Avalancha de Exitos (1996)
No Controles
from Yo Soy (1999)
Guerra
from Reves (1999)
3
from Cuatro Caminos (2003)
Eo
from SiNo (2007)
Volver a Comenzar
tacuba!
Posted on November 21st, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Musicians.
After last night's show at Hammerstein, I am as confirmed in my opinion as I can be: Café Tacuba (aka Café Tacvba) are the greatest rock band in the world: the most exhilarating combination of energy, invention, and breadth of style currently going. I can't imagine that the language difference is that big a barrier to their being better known in the states, but apparently it is. That and the fact that, for all their variety of form, they aren't trying to break or deconstruct any forms, which makes them of less interest to the indie press than weirder foreign-language stuff.
If you remain interested in where rock and roll is going, not just the underground stuff but the bands that play arenas, I urge you to try Café Tacuba. Robert L, you especially. Try Re first if you can, but try anything. Maybe it won't move you, but you should find out.
musing between floods of work
Posted on October 23rd, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs, Musicians.
I wonder how Rufus Wainwright feels about being the baby-subject of his father's "Rufus Is a Tit Man".
library amusement
Posted on October 10th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Musicians, Untruths.
The New York Public Library has put a big "YA" sticker on Jens Lekman's album When I Said I Wanted To Be Your Dog.
By the way, I suppose it has been much mentioned how much he sometimes sounds like Stephin Merritt? e.g., on "Julie".
pop art
Posted on October 3rd, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Musicians, Stuff, Cartoons.
Velma just pointed me to an awesome page full of highly stylized drawings of musicians by this guy Craig Robinson that he calls Lollipops:
This style of character-drawing began when I was asked by the British advertising agency Mother to work on their campaign for the Observer Music Magazine. [. . .] When some of these drawings were exhibited at the Rock en Seine festival in Paris, I had a lot of fun secretly watching people try to guess who they are, so I've not labeled them here. If you do, however, need to know who each one is, just hover your mouse over the image for a couple of seconds and a label should appear.
The Lollipops are faceless yet cute, like dressed up Fisher-Price figures, defined by their accoutrements. I'm reproducing a few here just to give the flavor:
And lots more.
microtonal goofball
Posted on August 28th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Musicians, Comedy.
A music reference book credited Ezra Sims with a non-existent work, String Quartet #2, supposedly written in 1962. So he wrote a piece called "String Quartet #2 (1962)". It's for flute, clarinet, violin, viola, and cello. And was written in 1974.
max roach, r.i.p.
Posted on August 16th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Musicians.
The great, groundbreaking drummer and composer is dead at 83. 83 is a good age, and I knew he was old, but it's still a shock, and makes me terribly sad. Some old jazz musicians, like some old classical composers, never stop doing great work, and any time they die feels like it's too soon. Roach is one of those.
I have no idea how many albums I have that have Roach on them. Beyond the albums that he himself led, an astonishing percentage of the jazz I love from the 1950s and 1960s features Roach. He's everywhere.
I was extraordinarily lucky to get to see the second Cecil Taylor - Max Roach concert at Town Hall in New York, and it was one of the most intense musical experiences of my life.
I am not articulate about jazz, and other people will have a lot more to say about Roach and his importance. But I didn't want to let his death pass without note.
still sad
Posted on February 20th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Musicians.
Kurt Cobain would have been forty today. I still wish we'd had more music from him. If he's conscious out there somewhere, I hope he's resting easy and free from pain.
(n.b.: If your inclination is to react to this cynically or snarkily, there are lots of places elsewhere to express that. Thanks.)
beauty based on science - the microscopic septet
Posted on December 28th, 2006 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Musicians.
In 1989, I went to see Charles Mingus's monumental Epitaph performed at Lincoln Center. My memory says it was an outdoor concert, but the reviews say it was at Alice Tully Hall. Epitaph was sprawling and intermittently fascinating, but the revelation to me was the opening band, the Microscopic Septet.
They were melodic and intricate and goofy. They didn't sound like Mingus, but more than Epitaph did, they reminded me of the virtues of Mingus that had got me into jazz in the first place: their music sounded heavily composed; no instrument or player seemed to dominate, the music sounding like a conversation, an interaction of personalities; the voice of the music was distinctive, instantly recognizable. I have always preferred the composition-oriented tradition that runs from Ellington through Mingus and Henry Threadgill over the looser improv-over-changes style that dominates most jazz. The Microscopic Septet carried that tradition to the boundaries of jazz; their music often sounded like mutant movie music, or cartoon music. If they had a primary progenitor, it was probably Raymond Scott.
They never got much attention, and their recordings were obscure: four albums -- Take the Z Train, Let's Flip!, Off Beat Glory, and Beauty Based on Science -- of which I have only ever found two (the first and last), each of which was as thoroughly delightful as the show I'd seen. Unable to record for the last few years of their existence, they broke up, and the two songwriters, Phillip Johnston and Joel Forrester, have led bands since then and recorded many excellent albums in a similar style to the Septet. That they continue to languish in relative obscurity I attribute to the unfashionableness of their style; to me they are among the great living jazz musicians. That Velma and I can still see Joel play shows in small rooms with a couple dozen people is nice for us but a sign of something lacking in the breadth of taste of the serious jazz audience (by which I mean the jazz audience that knows jazz doesn't mean the Lite Jazz abomination that passes for jazz on American radio), who generally prize improvisation over composition and experimentation over synthesis.
But. To my delight, Cuneiform Records -- a bastion of experimental music, and one of the great labels in the world -- have reissued the entire Septet released output, plus assorted unreleased material, on two CDs. My Microscopic collection is about to more then double, and I will be doing a certain amount of dancing around the room goofily for the next month. Hurrah!
The Microscopic Septet on Fresh Aire.
Joel Forrester's gig schedule.
the go-betweens, 1978-1988, 2000-2006, r.i.p.
Posted on December 10th, 2006 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Musicians.
Feel so sure of our love
I'll write a song about us breaking up
I wasn't sure whether to put the song links at the beginning or the end. I think I'll put them at the end. We Go-Betweens fans know how inexplicably their appeal seems to elude the very people who ought to embrace them; we are anxious to explain them to you. (My inner copy editor wants to correct "anxious" to "eager"; in this case, "anxious" serves better.) The urge to communicate that passion risks the appearance of making exaggerated claims, almost guaranteed to put off the potential fan. (Maybe I should put the links first.) But if I'm going to write this at all, I have to say what they mean to me. I can't undersell them.
Today I was listening to Tallulah, and when it reached "Bye Bye Pride" , I was hit by a wave of sadness, and I started to cry. At first I thought I was mourning McLennan, but I realized it was the band I mourned, the band that had resurrected itself and would never play again, the band I had never seen. Nine albums isn't too few, but I want more. This is all there will be.
We thought there would be more. We were lucky to get as many as we did. Seventeen years ago they called it quits, and now more than ever I'm grateful for the improbable last three: improbable that they existed at all, but even more improbable, given the poor record of great bands reuniting, that they were good. They'd never been less than good. Even on their early singles and their first album (1982's Send Me a Lullaby), still callow and fumbling for their form, they were distinctive: another angular post-punk band, but with a literary bent and a range of subject matter unlike anyone else's. By the second album (Before Hollywood, 1983), though there were traces of their brief musical adolescence, they had found the clean, restrained style that was their signature, a flexible sound that allowed them to move from warm to cool (though never hot, never cold): personal, reflective, always distinctively themselves. For the next four albums (Spring Hill Fair, 1984; Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express, 1986; Tallulah, 1987; 16 Lovers Lane, 1988) they developed and refined their style; there was enough range within their style that they stayed fresh without fundamentally changing. Their last album, this first time round, was arguably their best.
The Go-Betweens were, essentially, Robert Forster and Grant McLennan. Other members of the band, especially drummer Lindy Morrison, keyboardist Robert Vickers, and string/woodwind player Amanda Brown, made important contributions to the sound; but Forster and McLennan wrote the songs. They met as students in Brisbane, and were instant friends; McLennan wanted to make movies, and Forster convinced him to make music. Their partnership was founded on two principles that never changed as long as they were together: each of them would write half the songs on an album, and they would never do anything they didn't both agree to. They were well-matched: similar enough to forge a coherent sound between them, different enough -- McLennan the more personal songwriter, Forster the more worldly -- to tug and push at each other, to provoke each other's muse. Even when the band broke up, with some acrimony, McLennan and Forster were able to patch up their friendship, and did one-off shows together over the years. For a decade the two pursued solo careers. They made good albums, of which McLennan's country-tinged Horsebreaker Star (1995) is the best; but as is so often the case in great songwriting partnerships, something was lost -- some tension, some balance -- and it reduced them to good but ordinary.
But they kept in touch, and played together sometimes, and after ten years and another one-off show, when their fans (and Sleater-Kinney) pushed, they were ready. Somewhat controversially, they didn't recruit any of the old members (though Robert Vickers issued the new albums on his Jetset label), but when the first reunion album (The Friends of Rachel Worth, 2000) came out, there was no doubt that it was the Go-Betweens. Not at their top level, but (to our relief) a solid second-tier album, a valid addition to their legacy. The next album (Bright Yellow Bright Orange, 2003) was also pretty good. But 2005's Oceans Apart was a revelation, an album as good as their best; the first of the new albums to make me genuinely excited about how much more they could have in them. And then, on May 6, 2006, Grant McLennan died in his sleep of a heart attack. He was 48. Immediately and inevitably, Forster said the band was dead too. I haven't gone three days without listening to them since.
I don't think any band has grown so slowly and relentlessly in my affections as the Go-Betweens have. I liked them offhandedly during their first incarnation; over time the beauty deepened, the moods -- always in different shades than any of their contemporaries -- grew more vivid, the pleasure more personal. Now they occupy a position in my pantheon of Greatest Bands; in the mid-eighties, between Talking Heads and the Pixies, only R.E.M. rivals them, and I listen to R.E.M. less than I used to -- I have wrung most of the pleasure out of those songs, and the pleasure I take in them now is largely nostalgia (which is not to say I now think they are less great than I did then) -- while there are Go-Betweens songs that are still opening up for me.
I paid insufficient attention to the lyrics. I do that a lot; for a verbal person, sometimes lyrics can be a very small part of my pleasure in popular music (and I can also tolerate terrible lyrics with relative ease if the music offers enough pleasure). I have low standards for song lyrics, and am content if songs offer some witty turn of phrase, some precise and new observation, some sincere feeling. The Go-Betweens offer all these in abundance, so it took me a long time to notice how often their songs were perfect (or near-perfect) self-contained expressions of things other songs didn't say, pieces of life, beautiful, meaningful, complete (forgive me) works of art. As passionate as I am about pop songs, this is a level of achievement, beyond passion and craft, that is rarely reached by pop songs. Fans trying to describe it grasp at descriptions that only partially get there: feeling that the moods, for example, are more subtle and complex than ordinary songs, we call them "wistful" or "plaintive" or "wry", and know that we haven't really described it at all. Christgau is close when he calls them short stories; he resists calling them poems, because the term is abused so often when writing about popular songwriters, but in fact I think they are the musical equivalent of poems: just that sort of vivid and precise observation, compacted and intensified so that it simultaneously is what it is and implies things higher, broader, deeper. Not just the lyrics; the entire shape of the song, the mood of the music almost always a complement to that of the words.
Before the words is the music. The songs have to insinuate themselves before they can grow inside you. Here, I think, is where the Go-Betweens failed to find their audience. Their songs are rarely arresting; they are persuasive. They are passionate, but they don't shout; heartfelt, but they don't sob; they are reflective, contemplative; they run deep and still and clear, but the surface is calm. They can pass right by. And they did; but they came back, and the world was ready to hear them. Then they left, too damned soon. I can't properly mourn Grant McLennan, not like someone who knew him can; but I knew the Go-Betweens, and this is my eulogy for the band I loved.
I couldn't choose one song, or even two or three. I've compiled here something like a Go-Betweens album. I think it covers their mature range of styles. Half the songs are by McLennan and half by Forster, though there are twelve instead of the usual ten. They are all from the original incarnation of the band, because those are still the songs I know and love best (and the most recent three albums are the easiest to find if you want to explore further). And I kept the opening four songs from 16 Lovers Lane in the same order, here opening side two.
side one
Bachelor Kisses (McLennan) from Spring Hill Fair
I Just Get Caught Out (Forster) from Tallulah
Draining the Pool for You (Forster) from Spring Hill Fair
Cattle and Cane (McLennan) from Before Hollywood
When People Are Dead (Forster) single b-side 1987
Bye Bye Pride (McLennan) from Tallulah
side two
Love Goes On! (McLennan) from 16 Lovers Lane
Quiet Heart (McLennan) from 16 Lovers Lane
Love Is a Sign (Forster) from 16 Lovers Lane
You Can't Say No Forever (Forster) from 16 Lovers Lane
The Clarke Sisters (Forster) from Tallulah
Apology Accepted (McLennan) from Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express
(Song links are provided in the hope that people will buy the albums if they like the songs. Please support good musicians by buying their music. Thanks!)
the tapes
Posted on December 10th, 2006 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Musicians.
It's a truism of mine that there is more good music coming out now than I can ever hear; that the condition of being an active enthusiast of more than a couple genres is the condition of falling further behind forever.
In the last couple years it's been worse because I haven't been able to afford to make even a token gesture at keeping up; I have kept up with the things I already know, and occasionally run into something new that excites me (Erase Errata, Arctic Monkeys). Mostly, though, I've been exploring the past, and since there are several genres I only began listening to in adulthood, the holes in my past knowledge are immense.
What the internet has taught me is that they are vaster holes than I had thought: that even in rock and pop of the late 1970s and early 1980s, which I know as well as I know anything, there are great things I never heard and never heard of. The condition of forever falling behind extends into the past, too.
(If I may polemically digress for a moment: This is one of the things that the internet has been great for, and downloading music in particular has been a cultural boon. We now have the ability to resurrect lost music and find it an audience through enthusiasm and word of mouth and downloading that simply did not exist before. Long-forgotten songwriters like Vashti Bunyan and Linda Perhacs have an audience now, through this network, that they never approached while they were recording; Bunyan has even come out of her nearly forty-year retirement to record again, and damned well. File sharing isn't killing music, it's saving it.)
I was uncomfortably aware, back when I wanted to know everything about the things that I liked, that I knew excellent bands in Seattle in the 1976-1984 period that never made an impact outside of Seattle (Red Dress, the U-Men, Three Swimmers, the Blackouts, the Little Bears from Bangkok, Student Nurse, others I can't remember), and this almost certainly meant there were similar scenes of excellent bands in other cities that I would never ever know about. Though I harbor no illusions of completeness anymore, the itch to find out about these bands when I could stuck with me, and when someone uploads to usenet bands from that period I have never heard of, I often check them out, and I've found some pleasant surprises that way (and a lot of stuff that deserved to disappear, of course).
So a couple days ago, someone uploaded three albums by some band called the Tapes. I looked them up on the net, and found no information except a discography which gave the dates of the albums: 1978, 1980, 1981. One of the albums was on Passport, a somewhat adventurous imprint of the period that had put out the Slow Children albums, a favorite obscurity of mine. This was promising. I downloaded a track, started it up, and within a few bars my attention was caught, and in thirty seconds I was excited. Could that excitement hold up over a whole album? It did; and even held up over all three. I had stumbled -- through the grace of some anonymous enthusiast -- upon a superb new wave band I had never heard of. Yet when I looked for more information, I found nothing -- this wasn't something I ought to have known about and overlooked, this was a band that appeared to have inspired no lasting comment at all. Eventually I was able to determine that they were Dutch (though singing in English), but even from Dutch sites I wasn't able to find out the names of the musicians.
I have neglected to describe the music. It is new wave of its period: herky-jerky rhythms, jaggedy guitars and melodic bubbly basslines and precise drumming, before new wave got dominated by synths. Somewhat yelpy vocals, not a lot of held notes in any of the instruments, empty space between notes, stops and starts, a lot of precise and oddball patterns, machine-like but goofy. It sounds to me clearly influenced by early Talking Heads, with a little Tin Huey thrown in. It's from the end of art-punk that doesn't take itself too seriously. It's ear-catching, and constantly surprising with the little turns it takes, the way it doesn't settle for the obvious changes and choices. Actually, I just realized it sounds an awful lot like the first two XTC albums.
Here are two songs by the Tapes:
from 1980's Party, "(I Fall) Head First"
from 1981's On a Clear Day, "Good Riddance"
Can anyone tell me anything more about these guys?
flatulent prose, philosophical division
Posted on October 28th, 2006 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Musicians, Badness.
Friends are essays. Enthusiastic creatures in their worlds, laid out to read like chapters over spirits in a corner tavern. I am entertained by the way our lives juxtapose, leaping day in and day out threading through multifarious plots and portrayals of love, hate, happiness and sadness. We decorate ourselves with a pretense of courage, showering in inner apprehension. Can we really be hopeful and trust that our dearest friends will pacify our sorrows? The appeal is steady. The reality may be merely an apparition. A haze which envelopes our hope. One must learn to appreciate the benefits of solitariness. Sequestered away to ponder. To meditate and evolve so the boundaries of suffering narrow. To be able to invert the heady demon and endure, is to become as saintly as one could hope for in this mortal coil. Constant dependence is the most deadly expenditure. The key to reason is executive thought. The achieving road lies just ahead.--Michael A. Mazzarella, leader of the band the Rooks, from the tray notes to their eponymous cd. These words are given a page of their own.
(Yes, the spelling of "envelopes" is per the original text, as is the word "solitariness".)
My first reaction to prose like this is that the writer is beyond help. His tone is pompous but earless, ponderous but pratfalling with nearly every lurch from phrase to phrase, a hippotamus wallowing in whoopee cushions. He is equally enamored of the stock phrase and the big vague abstraction, because he imagines that the stock phrase elevates his tone ("in this mortal coil") and that speaking of abstractions means he is talking deep. His metaphors are empty when they aren't outright hilarious ("showering in inner apprehension"). His verbs are imprecise ("invert the heady demon", "pacify our sorrows") or meaninglessly colorful ("leaping day in and day out threading through multifarious plots"). His observations are imbecilic ("The reality may be merely an apparition", "Constant dependence is the most deadly expenditure") and trite ("the benefits of solitariness"). He switches from "we" to "one" without appearing to notice. It's all gas; even by the standards of gas, he can't keep his balloon inflated, letting it all out with a braaaaaaap ("I am entertained by the way our lives juxtapose", "The key to reason is executive thought"). I've left some phrases alone, but the whole thing is bad; the only sentence that can be defended in isolation is the first one, and it has nothing to do with the conclusion. For that matter, you can take any sentence in this mess, compare it to one three sentences away, and only know they came from the same piece by the smell.
I don't think this writer can be saved; his self-delight is too evident, his tone immaculately awful. I wonder, though, whether writing like this can be used to teach students about errors of tone. I sometimes think that tone is so much a matter of ear and of taste -- of being able to hear the bad note, or smell the unintentional vulgarity -- that it can't be taught; you have to be born with at least a measure of it, and develop it. But I'm not a teacher, so I am curious about the experience of teachers in trying to teach it -- or in, god help them, teaching students who write like the above.
modesty
Posted on October 28th, 2006 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Musicians.
Richard Thompson plays on Christine Collister's cover of Bruce Cockburn's "The Whole Night Sky". Thompson has one of the most distinctive, recognizable electric guitar styles in music; the timbre of his playing has scarcely changed since he was young. He is justly famous, and he could be forgiven for taking that style with him wherever he goes.
But when he plays on other people's songs, or in ensembles, he almost always tones it down; if you know he's there, he is certainly recognizable, but if you don't, his playing is unlikely to make you look up and exclaim "Richard Thompson!" Even though there's no doubt that having Richard Thompson playing on someone else's song is a matter of interest, strong enough even to persuade some Thompson fans to listen who otherwise would not, Thompson understands that he's there for the song; he is there to lend his skills to someone else's style.
To me that shows an ego under control, a secure man who can command primary attention whenever he cares to and knows when not to.
joseph hill, r.i.p.
Posted on August 22nd, 2006 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Musicians.
Joseph Hill, the singer, songwriter, and moving force behind the great reggae band Culture, has died at 57. This is sudden and very shocking (to me, at least); he was still touring and performing very recently.
Other people can talk more intelligently than I can about Hill's place in reggae history. He was my favorite reggae singer and songwriter, and even though I'm not a big fan of his work after the 1980s, I can't believe he's gone so young.
Culture's Two Sevens Clash is in my (admittedly undereducated) opinion the best reggae album ever, and it's always the one I recommend to people who want to begin exploring reggae beyond Bob Marley. It's apocalyptic, brooding, lyrical, and melodic, and it is hypnotic from start to finish.
Rest in peace.