You know the dilemma, which we may call the Polanski Problem — what do you do when you find out that a gifted artist who has done a lot of a great work you admire is a terrible person? My answer, in general, is to not deny oneself the art while also not exonerating the artist personally.
Anyway, with Chris Brown there’s no talented asshole problem, since he’s just an asshole.
Read about the new crime wave sweeping America’s tubas:
BELL, Calif. — When thieves broke into the high school music room here this week, they cut through the bolts on all the storage lockers and ripped two doors off their frames. But they didn’t touch the computer or the projector or even the trumpets.
“It was strictly a tuba raid,” said Rolph Janssen, an assistant principal.
Bell High School is only the most recent victim in a string of tuba thefts from music departments. In the last few months, dozens of brass sousaphones — tubas often used in marching bands — were taken from schools in Southern California.
Though the police have not made any arrests, music teachers say the thefts are motivated by the growing popularity of banda, a traditional Mexican music form in which tubas play a dominant role.
I don’t want to make light of crime, particularly the theft of valuable instruments from schools that cannot afford replacements.
On the other hand, there is something refreshing about an instrument like the tuba becoming so valued to perform music in this nation that people will resort to crime to acquire one. Could a wave of oboe-based crime be next?
…I suggest we add “conservatives rapping“:
After all, there’s nothing wrong with a “knicker” joke among a room of wealthy white Republicans and that one black guy.
UPDATE: Also.
UPDATE II: For the sake of comparison, here’s your modern conservative movement in two images. First, immediately before (1:49) the “knicker” joke:
Second, here’s immediately after (1:57) the “knicker” joke:
That’s where this “rapper” is asking that one black guy “What? I can’t say ‘knickers’?” I’d be indignant too, I suppose, if I wasn’t allowed to proudly be the provocative asshole I am.
I had an interesting twitter exchange (@ErikLoomis) today with Andy Bowen (@andymbowen) about John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman. I was listening to Ornette’s “The Shape of Jazz to Come” this morning and we started chatting and a really good question came up. Why exactly is John Coltrane so much more listened to today than Ornette Coleman? The young jazz listener probably enters the genre primarily through Miles Davis and John Coltrane, then maybe into Bill Evans or Duke Ellington or Herbie Hancock, and then may or may not explore in various ways from there. That’s a generalization, but one that seems not too far off based on the many jazz fans I know who are my age, former students, etc. My own experience listening to jazz, beginning when I was maybe 18 or 19, was with Coltrane, then into Miles, and then I found myself more attracted to the wilder stuff, so I began listening to Sun Ra, Pharoah Sanders, Sonny Sharrock and more modern people like Bill Frisell, William Parker, etc. Then later I moved back into the 50s and early 60s. Yet even my knowledge of Ornette’s deeper catalog isn’t all that great.
Anyway, why Coltrane? That’s not to say John Coltrane isn’t amazing. I do think that Coltrane has one huge weakness that Miles didn’t–he’s the jazz version of a ball hog, dominating the music in a way that Miles never did. That’s his strength as well and possibly his ultimate appeal. But rather, why Coltrane and not Coleman? Was Coltrane the clearly more popular bandleader in 1967, when he died? “The Shape of Jazz to Come” is as iconic an album as “Giant Steps” but Ornette seems a clearly secondary figure in the popular history of jazz (as opposed to the real jazz listener’s understanding of the genre).
So to repeat simply–why Coltrane and not Coleman?
All of this is really an attempt to get our valued commenter Howard to answer the question for me, as well as to start whatever kind of jazz conversation people want to have, which we don’t do enough of around here.
There are two types of criticism I find particularly irritating. On the one hand — this was particularly prevalent in Seattle alt-weeklies when I was a grad student — you have criticism that isn’t really about the music/movie purportedly being discussed but about what the critic thinks liking or disliking the art in question will say about your social status. On the other hand, there’s the faux-populist criticism that assumes that if you like any art less popular or more complex than Transformers 2 then you must be some kind of poseur arguing in bad faith. What makes Chuck Kolsterman’s TuneYards piece so special is that it manages to combine both of these angles (with a little Abe Simpson for seasoning.)
The thing has, at least, occasioned plenty of excellent writing that also actually tells you something about the band. Scott Creney, among many excellent points, notes Klosterman’s sexism (“At the top of Chuck’s list of relevant facts: Is she hot or not? One can assume this was not one of Chuck’s primary concerns when he started listening to LCD Soundsystem.” See also Jen Girdish.) Maura Johnston is excellent on Klosterman’s critical incompetence. And by critical incompetence, I don’t mean that his evaluation is wrong (he claims unconvincingly to like the album and it would be perfectly reasonable not to in any case) but that there’s no evidence he’s listened to it carefully even once. (The lyrics aren’t “indecipherable” and they really aren’t “asexual”; you’d think “my man likes me from behind” wouldn’t be too subtle even for a Brett Michaels fan.) Anyway, while Creney is also good on this point, my minor contribution is to point out that the entire premise of the article — to summarize it is to make it seem more coherent than it is, but roughly that people will be embarrassed to have liked whokill if Garbus doesn’t make a lot of better records that are also popular — is built on a foundation of 100% pure bullshit:
This happens all the time. It now seems super-funny that so many people once believed Arrested Development was among the most important bands of the early 1990s. The idea of anyone advocating the merits of Fischerspooner now seems totally ridiculous. It somehow seems crazy that Cornershop was previously viewed as luminous, even though their songs still sound good to me. It’s just an impossible problem: We always want to reward art for being innovative, but most artistic innovations are not designed to hold up over time. They exist as temporary reactions to other things happening within the culture. And that means they will seem goofy and dated when the culture changes again.
Let’s take these one at a time. I suppose very few people would strongly defend the merits of Fischerspooner now, but then very few people did at the time if their grand total of zero top 40 (let alone top 10) Pazz&Jop finishes is any indication. With respect to Cornershop, what happened seems clear — it took Singh five years to come up with a follow-up to When I Was Born for the Seventh Time, and while Handcream for a Generation was also a very good record it lacked another “Brimful of Asha” that could grab public or extensive critical attention. But, anyway, since Klosterman doesn’t cite anyone (including himself) who’s embarrassed for having liked Cornershop, and since if you liked When I Was Born at the time I’ll bet you still will even if you haven’t thought about the band lately, I have no idea what this this has to do with anything. The band is “somewhat unfairly ignored,” not “routinely mocked.”
Then there’s Arrested Development. Here, at least we have a band that most would consider retrospectively overrated; I’m certainly pretty confident that if critics were polled about 1992 again their debut wouldn’t be the winner and I doubt it would be in the Top 10 of what was actually a pretty good year. (I’ll even throw a bone to Klosterman by speculating that some indie purists irrationally upset about Mould’s pop move and/or SY’s major label move may have underrated what strike me as two of the year’s great records, Copper Blue and Dirty.) But, again, what happened here seems pretty straightforward — sometimes a killer single puts an uneven record over (and not just in the pre-iTunes era: cf. Oracular Spectacular), and I’m sure some critics also overrated AD because most of the other critical and commercial hip-hop successes of the year were the work of misogynist assholes. So it’s not surprising that their reputation faded over time, especially since they disbanded after one real follow-up. But leaving aside that AD are more ignored than a punchline, there’s the issue that 3 Years, 5 Months and 2 Days in the Life of . . . was utterly mainstream music, expensively promoted by a major label, that went quadruple platinum. So what does this tell us about the “perils of indie stardom” that await Garbus after her weak-selling succès d’estime? Beats the hell out of me, and presumably Klosterman is hoping that an audience that hasn’t heard of most or any of these bands won’t notice.
I had been waiting for the Voice‘s annual Pazz&Jop poll to come out so I could complain about the fact that in a year when I’m having trouble winnowing down to just a top 20 a sonically undistinguished singer-songwriter album with atrocious lyrics had won it. But funny thing — not only did the inexplicable (or, perhaps, all-too-explicable) Pitchfork winner drop all the way to a distant ninth, I love 4 of top 5 and like the other. (And Watch the Throne left me a little cold only because these vastly-more-accomplished-than-Justin-Vernon artists have each made several solo albums I’d rather hear.) I must be getting less contrarian in my old age.
Will Layman offers a lovely remembrance of the late, great Paul Motian, whose passing we have talked about here a couple of times.
A couple of months ago, I found the New Left dystopian film “Punishment Park.” In it, Motian provides one of the great soundtracks of all time. Worth a viewing for the soundtrack alone.
Without further comment, the great Carl Wilson on Pitchfork’s Album of the Year (and Richard Bruckner):
Which brings me round, if only because you asked, to Bon Iver. I see the appeal of Justin Vernon’s traffic-stopping falsetto and deft arrangements, but I can’t handle the overbearing self-seriousness, which seems to obviate the need for the music to have any kind of forward momentum, melodically or rhythmically—his songs not only don’t go anywhere, they don’t seem to start out anywhere. The only tune on Bon Iver’s self-titled second album I can even listen all the way through is “Beth/Rest,” on which, like Jonah, I appreciate the nakedly cheesy, John-Hughes-credit-sequence vibe.
Vernon generally sings as if he’s afraid he might bruise a word by articulating it, so many listeners might miss how strained and awkward his poetry-class-stoner lyrics are. In interviews he has credited the influence of one of my favorite and most overlooked living songwriters, Richard Buckner. Unfortunately he mimics only the mannerisms—the elusiveness, not the resonance, of the wordplay. Between his mushmouthedness and his thesaurusisms, the songs end up, paradoxically, oozing excruciating sincerity but evading almost any discernible content. Buckner, by contrast, never shrinks from casting aspersions on all culprits in his songs’ emotional bloodbaths. I wish I could sit every Bon Iver fan down to listen to Buckner’s first album in five years, Our Blood—songs like “Escape” or “Confession,” for instance—so they could hear the difference.
Hopefully everybody in the LGM community had/is having a good holiday. Since I have only thanked him in comments, I owe all-star commenter Howard front-page thanks for sending me a copy of Live in Europe 1967, which of course is incredible. (Profound and Original Music Criticism: Wayne Shorter is a player of substantial quality.) And in addition, thanks to his (and Erik’s) tips about the late Paul Motian other friends and family generously gifted me On Broadway and Windmills of Your Mind (the latter with Frisell and Petra Haden, and not surprisingly particularly good.)
While I have to single out Howard, though, thanks to everyone who helps to make LGM what it is.
As the pundit and blogging worlds mourn the loss of a blowhard amoral drunk and reaffirms how much the media loves to talk about itself, the world should really be mourning Vaclav Havel and Cesaria Evora. I’ll leave it to others to eulogize Havel, only saying that for whatever disappointments in his late-life beliefs and actions, on the whole he was a massive force for good.
Less famous is Cesaria Evora, the great Cape Verdean singer. Cape Verde is one of the great musical treasures of the world, an island where many cross-cultural influences have come together to shape amazing art. Evora was probably the most famous Verdean musician and her voice is one of the all time greats. Her loss is far greater than Hitchens; I for one am very sad that she has passed. The impending demise of Etta James makes me even sadder, possibly in a compound way since although James and Evora are from different countries and sing in different languages, they share much in style, talent, and impact.
The great James McMurtry offers his song “We Can’t Make It Here” as a free download in support of the Occupy movement. Says McMurtry:
We quit playing “We Can’t Make It Here” for a year or two. We’re playing it again because it seems to still be relevant, and that pretty much sucks for everybody but us. I know the song is still relevant because people are camped out along Wall Street and in front of City Halls around the country and around the globe, demanding a solution to the problems I tried to give light to when I put my song out seven years ago. They are mixed in age and economic status. Some are young and idealistic. Some are old enough to have had their ideals trampled upon a time or two. My son goes to school in the New York area and some of his friends have been involved in the protests. One was detained for nine hours without charge. This is not supposed to happen in our supposedly civilized nation. These people are getting roughed up, but the press only seems to notice when a victim of police brutality happens to be an Iraq war veteran. I’m guessing there are a good many vets in the crowd and the poor fellow in Oakland won’t be the only one hurt. I suppose the cops think the protesters are breaking the law. Seems to me, the Bill of Rights guarantees the right to peaceful assembly. Meanwhile, the one percent, safely ensconced in the tall glass towers, does not have to break the law, because they get to write the law. I thought it was supposed to be the other way around, in a democracy. I think maybe my fourth grade teacher lied to me.
It’s a great song (and on a great album which you should buy) on its own merits, but it also could serve as the theme song for the 99%.
Paul Campos, Above the Law 2011 Lawyer of the Year
Erik Loomis, HNN Cliopatria 2011 Best Series of Posts
