Speaking of Thomas, a useful review of Debarge's 20th Century Masters/The Millenium Collection. I've never particularly warmed to Debarge, to whom so many of my favorite critics surrender without a fight, but "All This Love" and "Time Will Reveal" hold up as well as any early eighties R&B ("A Dream" was the wtf-revelatory cut for me, actually). "You Wear It Well" shakes like the kid brother of Kool & the Gang's "Misled."I like "Who's Holding Donna Now" and "Who's Johnny?" more than he does, though. Of course, there's "Rhythm of the Night," which, as Thomas points out, skips to a robo-calypso beat first heard on the Pointer Sister's "Automatic," but so what? I love "Automatic." If you can get your hands on the "dance remix" (found on the collection named above), do so; the producers scrub much of the original's tackiness from the mix (the excellent bridge now omits the terrible synthesizer blasts punctuating the verses) and give Eldra Debarge more room to shake his blues right away.

Speaking of the Short Circuit theme song: more R&B producers listened to Scritti Politti's Cupid & Psyche '85 than I'd expected. Eldra's light, frisky tenor cuts corners around the Fairlight fizz, synth-horn blasts, and ricocheting drum programs as deftly as Green Gartside's did on tracks like "Absolute" and "Perfect Way." If we remember that Gartside contributed "Love of a Lifetime" to Chaka Khan's Destiny in 1986 -- and that the late Arif Mardin's ear for R&B trends remained impeccable -- the cross-pollination isn't so far-fetched.

At the request of one of my more obnoxious friends, a few words on George Lamond's great single "Bad of the Heart." 1989 and 1990 were curious years for freestyle: Stevie B, Sweet Sensation, Sa-Fire, and Timmy T scored their first Top 40 hits, at least four years after the genre supposedly peaked artistically. This is harder, slower, and, yeah, faster than any freestyle, most notably in the first forty seconds, in which the earnest crooning of the title surrenders to deafening turntable scratching and a backbeat Hank Shocklee might have concocted. It's the most abrupt, thrilling moment in freestyle -- maybe the first hit since Shannon's "Let The Music Play" whose sonic innovations buttressed the longing of the vocalist. Because Lamond's high, wan, uncertain voice is so exposed, I'm tempted to cite "Bad of the Heart" as a terrific example of the tricks freestyle played on critics: the genre presented weaknesses in pitch and tone as signifiers of humanity. But the obsession, pain, and recrimination to which Lamond and other submitted found their match in the beats, like horrible, honest admissions in diaries photocopied and circulated to friends.

Growing up in Miami, I heard this and other retreads constantly on Power 96, so Top 40 validation seemed irrelevant (Gloria Estefan, then at the peak of her chart success, dulled the victory too). Anyway, the name of my favorite freestyle hit of all wasn't even spoken by Casey Kasem. Neither was the love that dare not speak its name: when Lamond and Noel conveyed sentiments more at home coming from young women, with the same emotional abandonment, I wonder if they're being as honest as their lyrics and vocals suggest -- which is why I'm grateful to the Pet Shop Boys, who scored their last significant American chart hit with a Lewis Martinee (Expose) production, for exposing the subtext.

Since Sony Records won't allow me to embed the YouTube clip of "Bad of the Heart," here's the link.

A couple of quick reviews:

Tonight: Franz Ferdinand - Franz Ferdinand. For three albums now, these Scottish nancy boys who put the sex in "metrosexual" have let their zippy songcraft run aground after the fifth or sixth song, only to (barely) recover in the final third. A cad who snaps guitar picks convincing women he's a sensitive guy, Alex Kapranos is the frontman, but not the star (despite the authorship of a gastronomic tour that, like Kingsley Amis' tomes on drinking, illuminate the writers' attitude towards pleasure rather than provide an education); on "Bite Hard" and "Twilight Omens," it's Nick McCarthy's buzzing synths and Paul Thomson's backbeat that provide the spritz without which ostensible concept albums about nights on the town would turn flat. They've never made a great album, and at this rate probably won't; but a string of decent to excellent ones in this shrinking global economy testifying to a belief in hedonism -- and that stop for mornings-after with your sweetie under the blanket-- is as compelling a myth as universal health care.

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart - The Pains of Being Pure at Heart. I gagged at the title: figured any band with a name like this has a hear too pure for me to endure. I don't care much for the legacies of Ride and My Bloody Valentine either. Emo verities like claiming your love is fucking right sound better through fuzz and tinky keyboards I haven't heard since The Cure's Wish, and attempts at lapidary songwriting like "The Tenure Itch" augur an abandonment of emography which will probably get them laid more than boo-hoo stuff like "Stay Alive."

For the record, my Oscar picks:

Best Picture: Slumdog Millionaire
Best Director: Danny Boyle, Slumdog Millionaire
Best Actor: Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler
Best Actress: Kate Winslet, The Reader
Best Supporting Actor: Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight
Best Supporting Actress: Penelope Cruz, Vicky Cristina Barcelona

RIP Rickey Wright

Sad, sad news. I knew him as an enthusiastic contributer to many an I Love Music thread; his resume is a lot vaster than I thought (Amazon!). I have a vague memory of meeting him at a Experience Music Project Pop Conference in Seattle. Ned and Matos enforce my chilling sense that you never have enough time to befriend all the people you want.

How I know the right, or maybe just Kathryn-Jean Lopez, has gone unhinged.

Day Two of Nathaniel's Oscar symposium, much more rewarding than Day One, in which I learned that participants liked Vicky Cristina Barcelona and In Bruges enough to place them in their top fives of the year.

I listen to conservative talk radio about once a week: not only is it healthy to get one's blood in a boil, but I'm attracted to dogmatism even when it hides behind jargon like "worldview" and "agenda" -- especially so. It's one thing to be self-confident; it's another to act as if your philosophical convictions trump everyone else's. To quote Bill Murray in Tootsie, that's weird.

Anyway, Dan Shelley's account of his experiences working with Charlie Sykes confirm your worst fears. But it's nothing to get smug about; talk show listeners, as Shelley remarks, aren't stupid. Mom, a college-educated woman, listens to Rush Limbaugh, the best and brightest of them. Among the non-surprises confirmed: hosts receive talking points from the White House and Republican Party, and will on occasion challenge prevailing wisdom:

A smart talk show host will, from time to time, disagree publicly with a Republican president, the Republican Party, or some conservative doctrine. (President Bush’s disastrous choice of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court was one such example.) But these disagreements are strategically chosen to prove the host is an independent thinker, without appreciably harming the president or party. This is not to suggest that hosts don’t genuinely disagree with the conservative line at times. They do, more often than you might think. But they usually keep it to themselves.

Here's an explanation for the lukewarm defense of John McCain in the last presidential election cycle:

Except in presidential elections, when they will always carry water for the Republican nominee, conservative hosts won’t hurt their credibility by backing candidates they think can’t win. So if they’re uncharacteristically tepid, or even silent, about a particular race, that means the Democrat has a good chance of winning.

This is the cutest collaboration I've heard in months: Peter Gabriel and Hot Chip remake Vampire Weekend's "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa." For Gabriel it's a particular triumph: the author of some of the quietest ponderosities recorded in the last twenty years gets to poke fun of himself, coaxed by the gentle bleeps and whistles of Hot Chip's beats, which move like feathers tickling his neck. Imagine the bald sexagenarian meditating without rancor on why Graceland has become a touchstone and So hasn't.

Disdainful as I am about biographical criticism, I'm tempted to sift the ore in this New York Magazine profile of iconoclastic film critic New York Press film critic Armond White (I'm equally tempted to ignore the nepotistic inclinations of a piece written by and to other New York critics, and maybe I should when confronted by ad-man patter like this: "[White] doesn’t mind playing the heel, the bringer of illusion-dissolving cold water, the man the peanut gallery loves to hate" -- White as, what, Al Gore?*). White, he admits, was raised as a Pentecostal, a way of looking at the other world that tends to the Manichean:

I’m a believer. I think God is the force for ultimate good in the universe. He made the movies, didn’t he? If you cut me open, that’s what you’d find: the movies, Bible verses, and Motown lyrics.”

On Close Encounters of the Third Kind, his partisanship of which stands as the best example of his famous admiration for Steven Spielberg:

“There I was, having seen that film, a truly great film, and I was walking through this blanket of pristine snow in the suburbs. I was the only one around. I’d never experienced a moment of such purity; perhaps I never will again.”

If anyone has got links to White's eighties rock criticism published in The Village Voice (I've read bits on the Pet Shop Boys and Morrissey), send it over.

*Author Mark Jacobson constructs his own escape hatch by quoting "one well-known film critic": “Armond’s smart and all, I get a kick out of him, but do I really have to see him looking out of the magazine like he’s the last angry, honest man in the film culture?” Go ahead -- answer the question.

Caramanica's been doing good work at The New York Times. This sharp, unexpectedly sweet review of the Heads of State (three-fifths of New Edition) is proof.

She's rather forgotten, isn't she?