Saturday, June 28, 2003
A friend and I were talking about the Stones--she's a big fan, and I told her that I was recently really getting into them. She emailed me some very helpful buying advice:
1. Out of our Heads (1965)
Many good tunes,including the hits "Satisfaction" and "The Last Time" But also excellent are "Play With Fire" "The Spider and the Fly" and the remake "Mercy, Mercy"
2. The Rolling Stones, Now! (1965)
Hardly, but that's why ya buy it! Excellent Berry, Muddy Waters covers plus more misogynistic fun with "Off the Hook" and "Surprise Surprise"
"Little Red Rooster" was banned by the BBC, which is why I, at age 16, bought this LP
3. Aftermath (1966)
In my opinion, the most misogynistic of the Stones' work, with the well known "Under My Thumb" and lesser known "Stupid Girl" and "Doncha Bother Me" (possibly written for Brian Jones??" "High and Dry" is hilarious. Another high school acquistion for me.
4. England's Newest Hit Makers (1964)
Their first album??? Excellent cover of "Route 66" "Walking the Dog" is a howl.
If you want to fill in gaps, you can buy 12 X 5 (1964) and December's Children (1966) but see if you like the above four first. You also have to make sure that the songs I refer to are on the CD you are buying (U.S. vs. U.K.) releases.
I also have Flowers, which I bought in high school.
I also bought the quartet of Let it Bleed, Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main Street, and Beggers Banquet. This is late 60s/early 70s and are considered the best of the Stone's *original* work (as opposed to covers)
Thursday, June 26, 2003
A Chicago Tribune article today points out the obvious--file-swapping hurts indie music at least as much as big corporate music. Support your favorite artists by buying their music, in some form.
Wednesday, June 25, 2003
Yesterday I referred to Liz Phair embarassing herself, which was someone else' opinion (I haven't heard her album--but hiring the Matrix is a tipoff). Today I want to write about Madonna's album--which I have a heard a few times--and how she embrasses herself with the new material.
It's frustrating because I actually think the songwriting, musically, is not bad, and the production by Mirwais quite good. I was actually a big fan of the "Die Another Day" song--I thought it was both a good Bond song and a witty take on Madonna's career. (Though many thought she embarassed herself on this song, as well.) The production was a thrilling blend of mainstream pop and avant electronica. I'm both appalled and fascinated by the endless tweaking of the vocals. It's got to be one of the most complex digital re-workings of a voice I've ever heard. It reminds me a bit of someone who discovers they can change fonts in a word processor and then tries to use as many as possible--and yet it also calls such attention to itself and its engineering that it's as postmodern as the Pompidou Centre. I think most chanteuses who use digital effects are using pitch-correction to disguise their vocal flaws. Here the effects are part of a musical pallette. I wouldn't want everyone to do this--my listening is rooted in an indierock of quirky and average vocals, extremely honest--but it's very interesting to me.
Unfortunately, no one seems to be talking about the production because everytime the music starts to pull you in as a listener, Madonna will do something to ruin the mood, something that makes you cringe. Something that makes you feel embarassed for her. Examples:
- the rap at the end of American Life ("I'm drinkin' a soy latte..." etc.)
- the artsy spoken-word refrain at the end of Hollywood ("Push the button..." etc.)
- the chorus of "X-Static Pricess" ("I forgot / that I was special too"--is she 12 years old?)
The sad thing is, I Iike all of these songs musically, but these lyrical gaffes are SO cringe-inducing that they ruin the songs. Mirwais, please, work your digital cut and paste magic!
Tuesday, June 24, 2003
The NYT has a review by Meghan O'Rourke of Liz Phair's new album. No suprise given the advance press, it's really negative. But it also expresses profound appreciation of Liz Phair's talents and previous work. I knew, of course, that Exile in Guyville was a response to the Stones album. But I didn't realize it was a song-for-song response!
Before I include my favorite quotes from the article, a thought: Liz Phair obliviously embrassing herself on her latest album reminds me of Madonna doing the same. I think I'll post tomorrow on that. Article quotes:
"In place of a sometime feminist icon, we have a woman approaching 40 getting dolled up in market-approved teen gear (the bad schoolgirl look, recently embraced by Britney Spears). She's junked her oddball, sui generis eccentricity for songs about thirtysomething traumas wrapped up in bubble-gum pop that plays off a cheap dissonance: underneath this sunny soundscape lies the darkness of life's hard-won lessons. This is a superficial way of jolting us, and the result is that Ms. Phair often sounds desperate or clueless; the album has some of the same weird self-oblivion of a middle-aged man in a mid-life crisis and a new Corvette."
"Her voice always held a back-story of suppressed emotions, the kind it's hard to get into a pop song; when she said "That's just fine with me" in response to a sexual proposition, you heard everything that wasn't fine, and also all the reasons she didn't want to get into it."
"So she teamed up with the Matrix--the songwriter/producer masterminds behind the teenybopper Avril Lavigne.... The Matrix are now writing songs for everyone from Britney to Ricky Martin, and they're not exactly in the business of making a singer sound more like herself."
"Yet Ms. Phair's appeal has always lain in her idiosyncrasies. When it comes to rock, we're used to wincing at stars dressed up in packaging that masks a lack of talent. Here, the wince comes instead from watching a genuine talent dressed in bland packaging."
Found out about a new magazine. A recent issue has Rick Moody (!) writing an essay of appreciation on Magnetic Fields' colossal 69 Love Songs.
Thursday, June 19, 2003
As I mentioned in the last post, I've started taping performances of musicians I like on the late shows, esp. Letterman and Conan O'Brien. It suddenly dawned on me a couple months ago that I would never be able to see all these bands and that here they were, with cameras close-up, capturing some of their most prominent material often at the launch of careers--free and waiting to be taped. So I've started collecting. Both shows make it easy by saving the performances for the last 10 minutes of their broadcasts. Listings are easy to find. It's been really fun.
Haven't posted in a while. Been listening to music.
But I have to sing the praises of a May 18, 2003 New York Times article called "The State of American Singing as Heard on I-I-I-I-I-I-Idol" by Jody Rosen.
The article is a thoughtful look at the show and what it reveals about pop music today. She notes that it is "an art which has in the last decade been dominated not just by a single style -- a kind of watered-down gospel-soul -- but by a particular vocal mannerism: melisma." Now, I've been observing this for years--it's what I hate most in pop music. It's artificial, it's glossy, it's show-offy, it's about athletics over musicality. Rosen gives some interesting historical notes, and connects the digital effects of Cher's "Believe" and some of Madonna's recent work as examples of computer-generated melisma, seeing it basically as a way for less capable singers to get in on the game. She also concludes that "the enduring music of the 1960s is not post-Beatles guitar rock but post-gospel soul." That might be an overstatement, but she may be right in terms of what dominates. She rushes to point out that gospel soul is being "reduced to a signature trick," that "singers are sapping melisma of its expressive power" through overuse, she compares Ray Charles' "Come Back Baby" and Aretha Franklin's "Amazing Grace" to Mariah Carey's "Hero" and Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You." She then talks about how "good popular singing is less about technical polish than personality amplification," and lists several stars who probably could not win on American Idol, including Mary J. Blige.
It's an excellent piece, one of the best of the year--it starts out with a point many of us are making, but it gives more depth to the critique and expands on it intellectually.
Maybe it was the influence of this piece that had me noting an irony this week. I watched part of the new show Fame last night. Then I watched an appearance by The New Pornographers on Letterman last night. And, as often is the case with indie bands or good mainstream bands, I found the live performance on Letterman to be a little rough. I assume the performing conditions in these situations is really stacked against performers--the potential audience is huge (and the pressure equally so), the preparation time is minimal (no chance to really warm up in that space--when I attended Letterman, we were treated to an extra number after the taping for the air, but the band had little time to prepare), and there's probably minimal control over the space. Plus, live music is at a disadvantage against the luxuries of the studio, which I think is where many bands understandably put their emphasis for radio and sales.
Still, I find the juxtaposition of polished performers and less polished musicians (who write as well as perform their material) interesting. And I agree with Rosen that as fans of pop music, the polish of the performance is secondary. What makes a star is charisma and personality as expressed in the work, written in the lyrics, etc. Given the polish everything in life has these days, part of the reason I am drawn to the musicians I'm drawn to is that they seem "real," not polished. So it's ironic that the so called "reality" shows are giving us polish, as if its audience aspires to the same kind of glossy class mobility they see in the magazines and on tv.
One last dig, because I feel like it: these new shows aren't new. In the 80s they called it Star Search, and it was cheesy as hell, embarassing and tacky, the last thing I would watch. Then for years there were those shows where people would do star imitations. That was in some ways worse, but if it wasn't giving us personality, it was paying tribute to well-know personalities.
