Inarticulate speech of the heart

Robert Plant in an interview with Rob Trucks:

Once upon a time," sayas Plant, "all we knew about Elvis was that he sang like a motherfucker. And that was all that mattered. You know, when you gas up and you go to pay inside the gas station and you hear Elvis singing 'Surrender,' you know that the mystery of that guy, at that time, was everything. The voice and the mystery and the not knowing. And I think the great thing about anything that you hear over the waves is, you don't want to know too much, you know?"

In the same issue, Rob Harvilla's review of Weezer's The Red Album, specifically "Pork And Beans," Rivers Cuomo's attempt at "Silly Love Songs," an inarticulate defense of a lucrative ethos:

Is Cuomo that inarticulate, or is he amazingly good at articulating the feelings of inarticulate teenagers in their own words? Much of this record isn't so much good as it is entertainingly mystifying: a 16-car pileup that may or may not have been staged for your benefit.

If I may: a 16-car pileup looks the same to an adolescent as it does to geezers Plant's age. "Entertainingly mystifying" is a response to art with which most of us have some acquaintance, familiarly so, and hence not so mystifying in itself. Surfing YouTube and contemplating "Mystery Train" will stiffen the geezer and the adolescent's determination not to know too much.

Camille Paglia's always worth a chuckle. Her description of the end of the Bill and Hillary Show:

I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised at the ecstatic media lockstep praising Hillary's so-called concession speech last weekend. This is the same herd of sheep who bleated to Bush's beat and brought us the Iraq fiasco. I first heard the speech on the radio as I was driving back to Philadelphia from a family event in upstate New York. I was shocked and appalled at Hillary's inflammatory demagoguery, which was obviously intended to keep her candidacy alive through the August convention and beyond. The echo in the museum's marble entry hall gave the event an eerily retro quality, as if it were a 1930s fascist rally. Hillary's turgid, preachy rhythms were condescending and manipulative, and her climaxes were ear-splittingly strident. It was pure Evita, a cult of personality masquerading as populism. When I later saw the speech on TV, I was disgusted by how Hillary undercut her insultingly brief endorsement of Obama with a flat expression and cold, dead eyes. The only thing that got her blood racing was the blatantly stoked hysteria of her screeching worshipers.

So it overdoes the horror. Fine. But it reminded me of an exchange with a former HRC supporter at the bookstore yesterday. I'm skeptical of Obama, but for the Clintons and their claque, now roaming the desert eating locusts, skepticism is for wimps.

Oh for god's sake.

Youwannadekitsch? Here you go: Brokeback Mountain: The Opera.

Per Ned, I follow these instructions:

“List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7other people to see what they’re listening to.”

So. Seven songs selected randomly from my iPod:

Lil Wayne - "Shoot Me Down." This Kanye West production (or so the credits say) from Weezy's insanely anticipated Da Carter 3 churns like it's 1995 all over again -- in Bristol, that is. Wayne moves from chuckling at his absurd tuff talk to muttering gritted-teeth imprecations with the hairtrigger quickness of Maxinquaye-era Tricky (think "Pumpkin"). The guitar hook is so insinuating that you don't notice when it turns into a noose. Then Wayne's own solo breaks it.

Arthur Russell - "That's Us/Wild Combination." I finally warmed to this purported art-disco pioneer a couple of months ago. This sounds like no disco I know; with the warm, grateful, abashed vocals of Russell leading the way, this is seduce-a-rama heated by smothered blankets, sunlight through hastily closed blinds, and his breath on your shoulder.

The Hold Steady - "Sequestered in Memphis." Alternative title: Smothered in Miami.

The Raincoats - "Shouting Out Loud." The strongest tracks on Odyshape articulate a secular version of Al Green's "Jesus is Waiting" and "Simply Beautiful" -- the vocals and instruments, swirling and impatient, scratch at the ineffable because the singers' idea of the numinous can barely keep apace with their own humility in articulating it (I've been relistening to Al Green a lot).

Ashlee Simpson - "Outta My Head." Ay-ya-ya-ya-ya, they're talking way too much, and I'm referring to her friends, not enemies. But just when I think Frank and Chuck aren't doing her cause much too good, a track like this proves they're right.

Digable Planets - "Pacifics." As far from the numinous as Brooklyn. Most of us would prefer "Hawaii Five-O" reruns to reading Jean-Paul Sartre novels too.

Lightning Seeds - "Sense." See Arthur Russell above. When you're here, it all makes sense. By "you" I mean house keyboards and call-and-response vocals. The slightly fusty arrangement reminds me what I love best about early nineties New Order-influenced English pop.

I tag:

http://m-matos.blogspot.com/

http://theysosensitive.blogspot.com/

http://www.passionweiss.com/

http://ohmanchester.blogspot.com/

http://anthonyisright.blogspot.com/

http://kissoutthejams.blogspot.com/

http://fourfour.typepad.com/

Whenever a Washington "insider" publishes a book, it flares up and vanishes. Grim economic news and Obama's virtual coronation dominated the news cycle this week, but Dennis Perrin's take on the juicy bits contained in Scott McLennan's "shocking" expose deserves a chuckle or two:

*Karl Rove's ghastly halitosis which, in McClellan's words, "inspired President Bush to reminisce about the Mexican prostitutes he frequented in his youth, speaking in a strained Spanish accent while dancing around Rove, snapping his fingers."

*Al Gore being bribed into conceding Florida in 2000, using secret funds channeled through the Saudi royal family and delivered personally to Gore by Merv Griffin.

*Ari Fleischer gargling with peroxide before each press briefing, having McClellan pinch his nipples for luck while clapping his hands and saying, "Groovemaster's comin' to get ya!"

*Dick Cheney's penchant for handing subordinates pornographic playing cards, then smirking, "That's me in the mask."

*Barbara Bush disrupting a cabinet meeting by letting loose her pet Gila Monsters, Candy and Spank, on the conference table, warning Colin Powell and Condi Rice that the lizards loved "dark meat" before serenading her "babies" with a strange lullaby about sun-baked rocks.

*President Bush's obsession with sodomizing Saddam Hussein. According to McClellan, "For weeks before the invasion, the president went into intimate detail about how he would, in his words, 'Fuck that sand merchant's shit pipe,' complete with humping gestures, graphic sex talk, and always ending with a very theatrical fake orgasm, his face twisted with pleasure, his tongue darting back and forth. Afterward, the president would mime zipping up his pants, then say to whoever was in the room, 'That's the plan, anyway.'"

I got two of the best birthday gifts imaginable a couple of years ago when my friend Mallory bought used copies of Kingsley Amis' Every Day Drinking and On Drink for me. The trouble is, gifts they've remained. After chuckling at Amis' offhand, rather surly advice ("Champagne is only half a drink"; "Dealing with wine in a restaurant used to be quite a nervous business, and the chief generator of nervousness was, of course, the wine waiter himself"), I put them away and ignored his sagacity regarding hangover, which, as any of my readers over thirty know, get more severe.

Now you can get Amis' slim, edifying texts in one collected edition called Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis, complete with introduction by fellow hard tippler Christopher Hitchens. For your father you can't purchase much better.

Although it's debuted in the Top Twenty and she performed its latest single "Stamp Your Feet" on "American Idol" a couple of weeks ago, Donna Summer's Crayons hasn't gotten quite the attention it deserves -- she hasn't released a new album since Amy Grant and Bryan Adams were scoring Top Ten singles. It's not great, but then again Summer's classic LP's weren't either, which is to say, they're better than hits-plus-filler, but not by much. In my review, I insist that Crayons' moments of weirdness -- mostly genre hopping and funny accents -- are of a piece with Summer's recorded work, and, coming from a woman pushing sixty, unexpected and inspiring. Summer's best songs set their own terms for judgment; she was never the Pete Bellotte-Giorgio Moroder puppet some of her fans' backhanded praise suggested. She wrote and recorded great songs after 1980's The Wanderer just as she wrote and recorded awful ones before it (speaking of which, if anyone's got a copy of the eponymous Quincy Jones-produced 1982 record I'll be much obliged). All I'm saying is, program"I'm a Fire" after Hercules & Love Affair's "Blind" and the B-52's "Eyes Wide Open" and you'll think it's 1979 again.

This says it all...

Tapes, Part 2

Jimmy Iovine and Bob Clearmountain on the credits should tell you what you need to know about Get Close, The Pretenders' one bald attempt at chart success, 1986 style: swollen drums, keyboards filling every corner where "Higher Love" backup vocals don't go, and guitar parts punched on a Casio's "shred" program, of course, but also the blurred generalizations of stadium rock. Coincidence doesn't explain why "My Baby" ends with recorded audience fanfare – that's the crowd to whom Hynde's band directs its songs. Still, from the album title on down Hynde always means what she says, and if stadium-rock was how pop stars in 1986 understood outreach she did her damnedest to signify as a person. To this day, she's never sung so beguilingly; this album epitomizes the concept of vocalist transcending material. "Message of Love" doesn't trip over its "Within You Without You" bullshit because Hynde extends an Indian melody way beyond the point at which George Harrison would have sprayed his larynx over the neck of his sitar. Ditto "Don't Get Me Wrong," in which Hynde signals her submission to True Love with vocal pixie embellishments. To say it's cute would risk Hynde kicking me in the shins. Detractors who wish she'd stuck with tattooed love boys will find plenty to gripe with here: "How Much Did You Get For Your Soul?" attacks Michael Jackson for his naked consumerism while the backing track wheezes like 1985-era Starship. She saves her aces for the conclusion. "Hymn To Her" eroticizes sisterly companionship, and "Chill Factor,"over rolling soul organ, blasts Jim Kerr for turning their kids against her; the longest held note of her career mitigates the self-pity.

I didn't hear Pretenders until the summer of 1994, and it startled me. Depending on my mood, I might admit that it's my favorite album. The hairpin chord changes and thundering rhythm don't disguise how filthy it sounds; this album doesn't just stink of sex, it wallows in it (I learned more from Pretenders than I did in school). Just as I became aware of realpolitik in relationships, Hynde and her cohorts wrote about how lust turns to anger and how "you" shoot your mouth off while showing her what that hole is for. When she asks, "Where's my sandy beach?" in "Mystery Achievement," she's not clinging to a fantasy, she's wondering why, after all the tattooed love boys she's fucked, she ever believed the fantasy in the first place. So Get Close is a redress of sorts: the "maturity" Hynde copped to in 1986 demanded self-flagellation on drum risers.

Bo Diddley - RIP

This is the best time to thoroughly acquaint myself with the man's music, of which I know little except the epochal A-sides. I didn't know much about him either, so this much-cited Neil Strauss profile from 2005 does a splendid job of rounding out a life that, blessedly, didn't need rock and roll as much it needed him -- and, indeed, why should he need rock when rock did shit for him financially?

Anyway, the interview's got sensational bits:

"I got some shocking things I want to do before I decide to say, 'Hey, I'm giving up,' " he says as we climb into his Ford minivan, which is equipped with a Diddley-built wooden console full of drink and map holders. "But I'm not doing anything at the moment because I have a very undecided problem. They call it a matrimony problem. I'm going through a separation, a divorce, whatever you want to call it." In his deep, rich voice, Diddley explains that he has decided to lay low creatively, in case the courts decide that his fourth wife should have a piece of any new project.

We pull into the driveway of an old white house. Lola, a white pit bull missing an eye, greets us.

There is only one item in his hallway: an overturned washtub with a three-foot board screwed into the side. Running between the center of the washtub and the top of the board is a nylon string. Diddley steps up to the washtub bass and begins picking at the string, adjusting the pitch by tilting the plank backward and forward. Whenever he gets a particularly resonant sound, he chuckles happily. We are in Bo Diddley's playpen now.

In the first room off the hallway is a giant amplifier, at least six feet long, that Diddley made. It sits next to another one of his inventions. "It's a board game," Diddley says, gesturing to a giant wooden tabletop covered with squares of writing. "The Bo Diddley Horse Racing Game."

"If I put the guitar down today or tomorrow, I would not starve," Diddley continues as he leads me to the next room, his studio. "I know too many damn things. I can decorate. I can cook. I can do electronics and wire any kind of electric shit. I can figure anything out."

Leaning against the studio wall is a gorgeous square guitar made of blond wood and covered with eagle stickers. His picks, which he rarely uses, are coated with Velcro and attached to a Velcro patch on the side of the instrument. Next to it is a guitar with a misshapen head that's at least two feet long. Inset into this surreal instrument is a CD player, which has been rigged to play backing tracks while the guitar is played.

"I built that motherfucker, but I built that motherfucker too big," Diddley says, sighing.

He sits behind a desk strewn with recording equipment: a Mackie mixing board, a sixteen-track reel-to-reel recorder, a cassette deck, keyboards and half a dozen effects. On a nearby shelf there are dozens of boxes of Ampex tapes stacked in unwieldy piles, dated from 1958 to the present. "See all that over there," Diddley says, gesturing lazily at the shelf. "That's stuff people ain't heard before."

Diddley turns on a drum machine and picks up a microphone. What follows is a rare insight into the musical mind that helped invent rock & roll. His performance lasts nearly two hours.

Besides the "color" every reporter lives for, Strauss gets Bo to 'fess up to a reality which five score indie artists know: no one wants my shit, so I'm going to record it myself. But not one has his rhythmic smarts. Almost as touching: the suggestion that art is only worthwhile when you're sure you can surrender the urge to create it when the mood strikes. Maybe art isn't worthwhile at all.

A strange kind of feelin'

Sifting through a box of cassettes this weekend, I was struck by how many of the goddamn things I still own. Belinda Carlisle and Thompson Twins you'd expect, but also albums as recent as Massive Attack's Mezzanine and PJ Harvey's To Bring You My Love. So I've decided, inspired in part by Thomas' now-defunct tape blog, to review a couple of these a week. I don't have a name for this feature yet. I have no interest in reviewing the justly famous ones either -- I'm interested in explaining why I got albums by artists who must have done something to capture my interest besides an asymmetrical haircut and involvement with the Traveling Wilburys. I might even share an anecdote or two (heavens). Anyway, I'd an album like this one in mind....


Peter Murphy - Deep

In 1990 I was fifteen. I used to bike to a local record store beside a bowling alley called Jukebox Records, which has long since closed shop. I would read SPIN and race over to buy the Stone Roses, Michael Penn, Lenny Kravitz, Public Enemy, and the Blue Aeroplanes. On a whim, I'd bought the cassingle to "Cuts You Up." That synthesized violin hook combined with Murphy's portentous basso and inscrutable lyrics defined the ineffability of art on adolescent terms; it sounded, er, deep (Murphy never defined what exactly "it" was that cut you up and spit you out -- love? sharks?) . The album doesn't disappoint either. If you like this sort of thing, it's the best of its kind: sharply arranged, hooky, Goth-inflected alterna-rock cresting just as Disintegration and Pretty Hate Machine were making KROQs of every college radio station. "Crystal Wrists" and "Deep Ocean Vast Sea" jangle and churn, respectively, all praise due to walloping production and how proficiently Murphy's band the Hundred Men negotiate the tricky chord changes, especially when he decides to ascend an octave without seemingly telling them; and "A Strange Kind of Love" lives up to its title, a mostly acoustic hymn whose open door to a wide vast dominion exposes an emotional range of which Murphy's hollow cheeks seem scarely aware. He would spend the next few years trying to conjure its houdou again, to diminishing results ("Hit Song," "Let Me Love You").

Replaying it in the car a few days ago, I was impressed by how well it held up, despite my long-since-filed reservations about Murphy's Bowie/Iggy affectations (the less Bowie you own, the more original Murphy sounds) and how little love I've got for the two records bookending Deep. Eighteen (!) years later, Deep serves as one of those chart anomalies that signaled the end of the era rather than the culmination of one: despite the album and single's Top Fifty placing ("Cuts You Up" was also Billboard's number one "modern rock single" that year, back when this meant something), it did little for Murphy's commercial standing besides getting him on Dennis Miller's show in 1992 to perform "The Sweetest Drop," and was the last and greatest hit by this brand of eighties pretension before the charts stank of teen spirit. Shows how much we knew: teen spirit comprises much of Murphy's striking of received poses.

No Second Troy

Ah, Democrats. You're so much fun to watch.

Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great.
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?

--W.B. Yeats

Welcome June.