Those first ones to get it down on wax, what they produced is to popular music what Genesis is to the written word. They didn't have any antecedents, not any that we would ever be privy to, at least. Theirs is the original tale, and we can never do what they did. No pretense to authenticity on our part could ever suffice. All we can do is to riff on the lines they created, the handful of earthy metaphors. No one could ever create music now that is free of the influence of the commercial recording industry in the way that they did when they started it all, that influence for them being limited to the immediate phenomenon of the live bodies making the deals and cutting it all down to the wax.
There is no such thing as folk music now, in the true sense of the term.
Showing posts with label music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label music. Show all posts
Sunday, September 2, 2012
Sunday, July 3, 2011
"It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry" and the Death of the Train Song
No doubt anyone reading this can instantly conjure up the mental image--sound effects and all--of a steam train leaving the station: the heavy sideways barrel of the big iron engine, the thick black smoke coiling out of the stack, the churning of the wheels, the sound of the whole massive device as it picks up speed, slowly at first, then steady, even, steel grinding steel. Though the steam engine was common over most of the world, this is an archetypal American image, at least for those of us who grew up in the U.S. within proximity of a television set. The chugging of the train is the very soundtrack of Manifest Destiny, the rude chorus of American mythology. I'm racking my brain, trying to determine if I've ever actually seen a real live steam-powered train in action. I can't say for sure that I have, but the image is so natural to me that it seems as though I must have seen it a thousand times, not just on TV.
Before television--and even after it, for some time--we had the train song. In the popular tradition, folk songs about trains go back to long before the concept of authorship mattered in songwriting. Among scores of others, the list includes "The Wreck of the Old 97," "The FFV," "Rock Island Line," and even "In the Pines," with its image of "the longest train I ever saw" that carried away the only girl that the speaker ever loved. I think especially, though, of Johnny Cash's version of "Orange Blossom Special," not only because of its use of a chugging acoustic guitar and snare drum rhythm that approximates the sound of a train in motion but also because it features the harmonica instead of the fiddle, which dominates most other versions of the song. There is something about the sound of the harmonica that goes with train songs, that mimics the sound of the speeding object itself.
In 1965, Bob Dylan unofficially heralded what I like to call the Death of Folk Music. Symbolically, the moment of this announcement might be considered Dylan's performance at the Newpoert Folk Festival on July 25, when he appeared on stage with an electric guitar and an electrified backing band. Dylan himself may not have intended any grand pronouncement at the time on the viability of folk music; indeed, the following year, Dylan stated in an interview for Playboy that folk songs "are not going to die." The songs themselves may never die, but the people who sing them do, unfortunately, and the ranks of those who qualify as authentic folk musicians have grown thinner and thinner from one decade to the next.
In its purest form, folk music might be defined as music that emerges spontaneously from among the populace--generally from non-professionals--and is by and large free of the influences of the commercial recording media. It could be argued whether "folk" music that does not fit these criteria is even folk music at all. To be recorded, folk musicians generally have to be sought out by ethnomusicologists. If such a thing as pure folk music still exists in the U.S., it does so in miniscule pockets isolated throughout rural regions of the country. Of course, there are traditions in music--blues (especially Delta blues), country, and bluegrass--that have very strong, close ties to folk music, but the terms of these idioms are decidedly different because of the influence commercial interstests have had on them.
By 1960, the existence of pure folk had become quite perilous because of the pervasive influence of commercial recording and because of broad-scale changes in society that meant that few people lived outside of such influence. That year, Bob Dylan set out to New York (of all places) to become a folk singer. He failed to do so, in a way, because the very act of aspiring to become a professional folk singer is an impossibility, or at least a contradiction in terms (Dylan's idol, Woody Guthrie, notwithstanding), and I think that it was Dylan's increasing awareness of this situation--whether consciously or below the surface of his thought--that caused him in 1965 to radically alter his approach to writing and performing his music. The more blatant change in his music was in the transition to the electric guitar (which, it must be noted, did not entirely push out the acoustic guitar, especially on rhythm tracks). The other change--less noticeable at first, but ultimately perhaps more profound--was in the lyrics, which were more abstract and dreamlike on 1965's Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan's first album that featured the electric guitar (which was dominant on all but the last four tracks on the album), but pervaded increasingly by irony, even cynicism, on the follow-up album, Highway 61 Revisited, which also appeared in 1965. Dylan had begun increasingly to hide himself behind the veneer of irony in both his lyrics and in interviews--to the point that the irony that had at first seemed persona had become part of his identity, it seemed.
If Highway 61 Revisited is part of the Death of Folk Music, Dylan's version of the train song that appears on this album, "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry," is nothing less than the Death of the Train Song. It's a meta-train song that borrows some floaters from songs gone by, but it is also, to some extent, a song about the inability to write a true and authentic train song. The train song is a kind of song that's impossible to write now, at least not with the same genuine sense of earnestness that pervaded those earlier takes.
As I write this, I can hear the whistle of a freight train off in the distance. It's a diesel engine, of course, but the whistle, I think, must sound the same. I can't imagine it taking my baby away, it's not the soundtrack to my own sorrows, but it is, as Hank Williams and so many others had it, lonesome indeed.
Before television--and even after it, for some time--we had the train song. In the popular tradition, folk songs about trains go back to long before the concept of authorship mattered in songwriting. Among scores of others, the list includes "The Wreck of the Old 97," "The FFV," "Rock Island Line," and even "In the Pines," with its image of "the longest train I ever saw" that carried away the only girl that the speaker ever loved. I think especially, though, of Johnny Cash's version of "Orange Blossom Special," not only because of its use of a chugging acoustic guitar and snare drum rhythm that approximates the sound of a train in motion but also because it features the harmonica instead of the fiddle, which dominates most other versions of the song. There is something about the sound of the harmonica that goes with train songs, that mimics the sound of the speeding object itself.
In 1965, Bob Dylan unofficially heralded what I like to call the Death of Folk Music. Symbolically, the moment of this announcement might be considered Dylan's performance at the Newpoert Folk Festival on July 25, when he appeared on stage with an electric guitar and an electrified backing band. Dylan himself may not have intended any grand pronouncement at the time on the viability of folk music; indeed, the following year, Dylan stated in an interview for Playboy that folk songs "are not going to die." The songs themselves may never die, but the people who sing them do, unfortunately, and the ranks of those who qualify as authentic folk musicians have grown thinner and thinner from one decade to the next.
In its purest form, folk music might be defined as music that emerges spontaneously from among the populace--generally from non-professionals--and is by and large free of the influences of the commercial recording media. It could be argued whether "folk" music that does not fit these criteria is even folk music at all. To be recorded, folk musicians generally have to be sought out by ethnomusicologists. If such a thing as pure folk music still exists in the U.S., it does so in miniscule pockets isolated throughout rural regions of the country. Of course, there are traditions in music--blues (especially Delta blues), country, and bluegrass--that have very strong, close ties to folk music, but the terms of these idioms are decidedly different because of the influence commercial interstests have had on them.
By 1960, the existence of pure folk had become quite perilous because of the pervasive influence of commercial recording and because of broad-scale changes in society that meant that few people lived outside of such influence. That year, Bob Dylan set out to New York (of all places) to become a folk singer. He failed to do so, in a way, because the very act of aspiring to become a professional folk singer is an impossibility, or at least a contradiction in terms (Dylan's idol, Woody Guthrie, notwithstanding), and I think that it was Dylan's increasing awareness of this situation--whether consciously or below the surface of his thought--that caused him in 1965 to radically alter his approach to writing and performing his music. The more blatant change in his music was in the transition to the electric guitar (which, it must be noted, did not entirely push out the acoustic guitar, especially on rhythm tracks). The other change--less noticeable at first, but ultimately perhaps more profound--was in the lyrics, which were more abstract and dreamlike on 1965's Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan's first album that featured the electric guitar (which was dominant on all but the last four tracks on the album), but pervaded increasingly by irony, even cynicism, on the follow-up album, Highway 61 Revisited, which also appeared in 1965. Dylan had begun increasingly to hide himself behind the veneer of irony in both his lyrics and in interviews--to the point that the irony that had at first seemed persona had become part of his identity, it seemed.
If Highway 61 Revisited is part of the Death of Folk Music, Dylan's version of the train song that appears on this album, "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry," is nothing less than the Death of the Train Song. It's a meta-train song that borrows some floaters from songs gone by, but it is also, to some extent, a song about the inability to write a true and authentic train song. The train song is a kind of song that's impossible to write now, at least not with the same genuine sense of earnestness that pervaded those earlier takes.
As I write this, I can hear the whistle of a freight train off in the distance. It's a diesel engine, of course, but the whistle, I think, must sound the same. I can't imagine it taking my baby away, it's not the soundtrack to my own sorrows, but it is, as Hank Williams and so many others had it, lonesome indeed.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Sucking in the 70s
Disco still sucks, but awful as it was it may also have been the best thing ever to happen to rock and roll. Two things happened. First, it gave further impetus to the emerging punk movement, which was powered by its blatant rejection not only of disco but also of the bloated, radio-ready behemoths of sound that would ultimately be boxed up and sold as "classic rock." The second thing that happened, though, was in a way a more curious triumph: rock music co-opted elements of disco and added these features to the existing mix. Rock was already a polyglot musical style, a mixed-up bastard of older, more traditional sound styles and new innovations such that the more obvious influences on the genre (country, blues) only served to obscure the less obvious ones (pop ballads and the range of genre-defying novelty songs that seemed to be ubiquitous in the middle decades of the twentieth century). Disco entered something new into the equation.
Sometimes these two phenomena overlapped: consider the end of The Clash's "Stay Free" (1978), when Mick Jones' slashing guitar lines build up an anthemic instrumental coda in the wake of Paul Simonon's bouncing disco bass line. But the second effect of disco on rock music is also clear in the best mainstream rock of the period: to wit, numerous tracks by The Rolling Stones and Blondie. In the case of Blondie, we have a band that married a disco beat to the attitude of punk rock, not just here and there but rather as a defining quality of their sound. The guitars don't rend and tear like they do in The Clash or The Buzzcocks, but the idea of punk is still there, and it was clearly with the band when it first formed. With the Stones, you hear disco in "Miss You" and other tracks from the Some Girls era. In this case, the disco synthesis helped to extend the relevance of a band that could by all means have descended into the formulaic shadow-of-their-former-selves that other 60s bands that were still around had relegated themselves to. The Rolling Stones were among the very few commercially successful rock artists of the 1960s who were really able to maintain their sense of vitality--and that was because they did not merely follow the changes going on around them but rather innovated as they went along; they absorbed what was going on around them, but ultimately they were their own catalysts.
All of which is to say that rock music is a strange beast, one that continually takes on new shapes, new dimensions. And, in the end, who would really have it any other way?
Sometimes these two phenomena overlapped: consider the end of The Clash's "Stay Free" (1978), when Mick Jones' slashing guitar lines build up an anthemic instrumental coda in the wake of Paul Simonon's bouncing disco bass line. But the second effect of disco on rock music is also clear in the best mainstream rock of the period: to wit, numerous tracks by The Rolling Stones and Blondie. In the case of Blondie, we have a band that married a disco beat to the attitude of punk rock, not just here and there but rather as a defining quality of their sound. The guitars don't rend and tear like they do in The Clash or The Buzzcocks, but the idea of punk is still there, and it was clearly with the band when it first formed. With the Stones, you hear disco in "Miss You" and other tracks from the Some Girls era. In this case, the disco synthesis helped to extend the relevance of a band that could by all means have descended into the formulaic shadow-of-their-former-selves that other 60s bands that were still around had relegated themselves to. The Rolling Stones were among the very few commercially successful rock artists of the 1960s who were really able to maintain their sense of vitality--and that was because they did not merely follow the changes going on around them but rather innovated as they went along; they absorbed what was going on around them, but ultimately they were their own catalysts.
All of which is to say that rock music is a strange beast, one that continually takes on new shapes, new dimensions. And, in the end, who would really have it any other way?
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Bob Dylan, Diane Arbus, and Sword Swallowers (Albino and Otherwise)
Well, the sword swallower, he comes up to you
And then he kneels
He crosses himself
And then he clicks his high heels
And without further notice
He asks you how it feels
And he says, "Here is your throat back
Thanks for the loan"
--Bob Dylan, "Ballad of a Thin Man"
Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man" and Diane Arbus' photographs of carnival performers essentially do the same thing, make the same point, establish the same relationship between subject and object.
There is a curiously defined notion of otherness in both artistic visions represented here, and in Arbus' case (because she worked in the realm of the visual, presumably, and not the aural: because we can tell that a particular individual is represented in this piece of work) this has resulted in criticism of her photographic method. These critics accuse Arbus of exploiting outcasts and those on the fringe; they claim that she has depicted others as Others from her own privileged perspective on the inside. They claim that her photographs do not ennoble their subjects, that they posit freaks only as freaks. Without attempting to elaborate upon what Arbus might have intended with these photographs, I will still claim that these criticisms are misplaced. These photographs capture something that is and, without a narrative context, ask us to interpret its significance entirely on our own. This is, of course, what any photograph does, and in this respect photography is in a way perhaps the purest of media. Susan Sontag pointed out many years ago that photography bears great potential for corruption--"the worst form of mental pollution," she called it--neglecting, however, to point out that her own chosen medium, that of written text, has just as much capacity to pollute. We are reasonably intelligent people, are we not? We can determine the value and function of a photograph on our own, without text, without narrative. Those who are reasonably imbued with humanist sentiments will see the humanity of the photographic subject. Those who are not so reasonably imbued will likely go elsewhere to get their kicks. Moral function just might have to come from somewhere else, from some source entirely external to the photograph, to the song, to any work of art. Ultimately the artist doesn't get to choose how the work of art will be decoded.
Arbus' sword swallower one-ups Dylan's by being albino to boot, and it's worth noting that it is more the albino quallity that makes this performer a "freak" than it is sword swallowing, which, though unusual, is an acquired skill and not a natural aberration.
As for Dylan, his Highway 61 Revisited is an album full of freaks. They march in and out of the songs, especially "Ballad of a Thin Man" and "Desolation Row," the latter of which announces in its first stanza that "the circus is in town" -- as if it weren't apparent from the managerie of oddballs on display. Furthermore, the freaks seem primarily to serve the purpose of pointing out how weak in understanding--how morally thin--the rest of Dylan's characters are. The Thin Man of Dylan's ballad is, it would seem, the ignorant one, the one who doesn't understand: "And you know something is happening / But you don't know what it is," Dylan intones at the end of each stanza. The Thin Man bears witness not only to the sword swallower but also to a one-eyed midget and a host of others. It was 1965, and things were getting strange; it was time to freak out the squares. In the case of this Thin Man, his squareness takes on the quality of a moral fault, an inability to understand the other, and Dylan seems to harbor little sympathy for such a type. If the lyrics don't convince you of this, the tone of derision that unmistakeably inhabits Dylan's voice in this song should do so. Dylan has an advantage over Arbus here; while she works in one-dimension, his words function on the page and through the added dimension of sound.
Monday, July 7, 2008
Why You Should Listen to The Pernice Brothers
They don't have any new albums out, just some old ones that have kept growing on me over the years. For what my opinion is worth, I think they're one of the most underappreciated bands around.
All Music Guide, Pitchfork, and just about everyone else have all compared Joe Pernice's voice to that of Colin Blunstone of The Zombies. (Usually the word "smoky" is used.) The comparison is inevitable and apt. The similarity owes less to imitation, I would like to think, than to natural ability. Both singers possess voices that sound more fragile than they really are. Their vocals are whispery but not breathy: these guys are actually singing. It's the kind of sound that won't often work for the heavy stuff--It's worth noting that 2006's Live a Little includes a song about The Clash, but The Pernice Brothers seem unlikely to be able to actually pull off a Clash cover. There's a bit of that that Clash influence there, but for the most part The Pernice Brothers' specialty is intelligent pop music for a literate adult audience--music that is geared for the kind of listener who has been around the block a few times and is perhaps sadder but wiser for it.
Joe Pernice's lyrics prove that he possesses a great ear for the sound of words, and for the most part he avoids cliches and goes instead for more original figures of speech and, quite frequently, clever, sardonic wordplay. Pernice is also also a writer of short stories, and his gift for character sketch translates into his lyrics, as in this example from "Cruelty to Animals":
She won't mind if the place we stand is marked by ash. She believes what
doesn't kill her only takes more time to kill her. Then she smiles as she
paints her lips and does her lashes. Stunning as a taxidermy victim in a
silver cage.
The images and clever turns, startlingly good for pop music, continue: "Stuck in dumn amazement like a dog who's told to levitate." "... spinning glue back into horses."
It's true that musically there is nothing revolutionary or bold about his songs, and in fact some of them in tone and sentiment even border on what we might vilify as "light rock" or "adult contemporary." Don't let that easy tone fool you, though. There is admirable craftsmanship in every track the Pernice Brothers have released, and their work is all the more remarkable considering that it's all indie label material. Thirty years ago, one would think, these guys would have been all over the radio. Video really did kill these would-be radio stars.
So, what the Pernice Brothers offer is exquisitely crafted pop songs: shimmering, incandescent, approaching the sublime sometimes in the way that the best power-pop (The Beatles, Big Star, those Neko Case harmonies on certain New Pornographers tracks) can do. There's a bit of the Zombies, a bit of Elvis Costello, that distant hint of Joe Strummer, even some Squeeze and Joe Jackson, perhaps. The Elvis Costello similarity comes across not in the sound of the vocals but in the phrasing; listen to the way Pernice stretches out words sometimes at the ends of his verses, as in "Somerville," his ode to coming home with your tail tucked between your legs after not making a go of it in the city.
My favorite Pernice Brothers album is 2003's Yours, Mine, and Ours. At a first listen, this album seems a little too slick, perhaps. This is partly due to the opening track, "The Weakest Shade of Blue," which is so well put-together that it seems like something only a machine could produce. You learn to live with its over-perfection, though. For a Pernice Brothers song, "Weakest Shade" has moments that are brimming with optimism. You shouldn't get used to that, because the next track, "Water Ban," and most of the rest of the songs that follow strike more troubled notes. The melancholy tone persists to the end of the album and almost drags it down a little in the end; my only complaint about this set is that it needs another track (in addition to the exquisite "Sometimes I Remember") with a little more drive in it to hold up the last few songs. Nevertheless, the songs are in and of themselves pitch-perfect. This is an imminently listenable collection of songs. "One Foot in the Grave"--despite its ominous title--strikes the perfect balance between up and down; this is what power-pop is supposed to do. "Blinded by the Stars" and "Waiting for the Universe" are other stand-outs. Although this is the most heavily rotated album on my iPod, I am still waiting to get tired of listening to it.
My next favoriate Pernice Brothers album, 2006's Live a Little, does not quite, to my mind, achieve the same level of the sublime, but it's still a great album by any measure. Thematically, the songs focus mostly once again on mature perspectives on adult relationships. It does boast my favorite Pernice Brothers song, "Lightheaded," a song about celebrity, fame, and all that glitter and flash that have eluded Pernice. If this is the result of obscurity, though, he comes off all the better for it.
It's easy to consider Joe Pernice--voice, lyrics, melodies--as the sole architect of this band's sound, but that would be a mistake. As important as he is, all of this would fall a little flat if it weren't for the music that holds that wispy voice aloft. What really makes the Pernice Brothers such a spectacular band is the band. These aren't stripped down acoustic numbers that we're listening to, and as much as the craft of songwriting is in evidence here, I wouldn't want to listen to these songs presented in a bare-bones singer-songwriter fasion. That's not what they're designed for, though it's true that an acoustic guitar track is put to good use at the heart of most Pernice Brothers songs. The arrangements are pretty lush for indie music--especially given the strings on Live a Little--but they're never over-produced. The songs really achieve definition from Peyton Pinkerton's guitar lines, which never quite jangle, exactly, though they do parse out the contours of Pernice's melodies to great effect. On YM+O, the keyboards--at first almost unnoticeable, a mix of organ and spacey-sounding synthesizer--also add flourishes that would be sorely missed were they not present, and LAL features some steady piano work. I've started to appreciate the drums, too, lately--not just the precision of a well-kept beat but also the fills on "One Foot in the Grave," for instance, or at the end of "Automaton," which serve as a reminder that, despite the subtlety of the music, this is a rock band we're hearing.
What happens to a band like The Pernice Brothers? They have a sizeable following for a band that releases on its own label, but mainstream commercial success in today's music industry climate seems well-nigh impossible. At this point, I imagine, every record sale counts, so my recommendation is to get out there and buy a Pernice Brothers record first chance you get.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Cat Power's Jukebox
Chan Marshall is one of only a few recording artists these days who seems to understand that the art of interpreting someone else's songs can be an act of creation on par with the act of songwriting itself. Each song on Jukebox, Marshall's fifth full-length release as Cat Power and her second album of covers, participates in an act of transformation. The original song is lost, submerged in a new wash of sound, and comes out something different.
The experience of listening to Jukebox is, at first, a little disorienting. Listening to "New York" and "Ramblin' (Wo)man" the first couple of times around, you might try to match the melody that Marshall sings to that of the familiar originals. Eventually, though, you would have to give up on this, because the melodies as Marshall reworks them are not the same. She could have written new words to the arrangements on this album and never been accused of theft. But that, it seems, is not the point Marshall is trying to make.
The iconic "New York" (the title pared down from the more familiar "New York, New York") takes on new meanings with Marshall's breathy reading of it. Some of the Sinatra swagger is there, but there is a quality to Marshall's voice that makes her version less about the braggadocio of taking the big town by storm than about the vulnerability of wishing for some experience that is beyond the limits of your own life as you have known it so far. She takes Sinatra's swing and replaces it with soul. The song will always be about taking a chance on the big city. Marshall makes taking the chance seem like a more risky enterprise than Sinatra did, but the risk here pays off. "Ramblin' (Wo)man," aside from taking liberty with gender role reversal, takes one of Hank Williams' only minor-key songs and spooks it out almost beyond recognition. On the original recording, Williams' voice is plaintive and apologetic--the voice of a soul in turmoil. Marshall issues no apology and makes no excuses for her rambling ways; she offers an explanation instead, stripped down as it is: "When the Lord made me, he made a ramblin' woman." There's no other accounting for the mystery of her character. The echoing sound of electric piano is perfect for the mood Marshall evokes on these two songs: soul in the deepest sense, haunted, from the vaults.
As she did on The Covers Record, Marshall covers herself here, reworking "Metal Heart" from Moon Pix, filling out the song and giving her vocals a bigger sound, somewhere between the breathier hush of her earlier work and the classic soul-inflected tones she has pursued of late. Marshall will never be a belter like some of the singers from eras past that she seems to be drawing inspiration from, but her voice now is far from fragile.
Nowhere is Cat Power's new vocal confidence more evident than on her version of "Aretha, Sing One for Me," a somewhat obscure number by blues-soul songwriter George Jackson. The band is loose here in a good way, and the production is playful--listen for the whistling at the beginning of the track and Marshall's pronouncement to the studio engineers: "keep rolling." On other tracks, Marshall takes old songs and makes them new; here, the mood is retrospective, but it's an utterly winning track in all ways--impossible to dislike.
Really, there isn't a song on this album that doesn't profit somehow from its presence here, even if the result is not to overtake but to draw out new meanings from the originals. The Highwaymen's "Silver Stallion" (something of a Townes Van Zandt knock-off) takes on the opposite effect at work on "Ramblin' (Wo)man": these outlaw blues inherit a new sensitivity, and the cover, like "New York," exposes a kind of longing heretofore latent in the lyrics. James Brown's "Lost Someone" also holds up admirably. The sparse arrangement--unaccompanied electric guitar--on the traditional "Lord, Help the Poor and Needy" is pitched right for the song, which effectively gives the album grounding right at its center. (It also serves as a nice complement to "Moonshiner," another traditional song that Marshall covered on Moon Pix.) Dylan's "I Believe in You," from the odd and somewhat baffling Slow Train Coming (a fifty-cent bin favorite across the country), fits nicely with a chunky guitar riff powering it from start to finish. The tempos start to sag a little toward the end, but Joni Mitchell's "Blue," while doing nothing to inject energy into the album, is lovely nonetheless: thin and ghostly but aching with a soulful quality that again brings new dimension to a song that is now approaching a certain age.
There's one more gem here worth drawing attention to: the album's only new original track, "Song for Bobby." This is a quiet, understated song that brings to mind Cat Power albums of the past but also shows how much her music has refused to stay still. It also gives us reason to look forward to more original songs from Marshall in the future.
The experience of listening to Jukebox is, at first, a little disorienting. Listening to "New York" and "Ramblin' (Wo)man" the first couple of times around, you might try to match the melody that Marshall sings to that of the familiar originals. Eventually, though, you would have to give up on this, because the melodies as Marshall reworks them are not the same. She could have written new words to the arrangements on this album and never been accused of theft. But that, it seems, is not the point Marshall is trying to make.
The iconic "New York" (the title pared down from the more familiar "New York, New York") takes on new meanings with Marshall's breathy reading of it. Some of the Sinatra swagger is there, but there is a quality to Marshall's voice that makes her version less about the braggadocio of taking the big town by storm than about the vulnerability of wishing for some experience that is beyond the limits of your own life as you have known it so far. She takes Sinatra's swing and replaces it with soul. The song will always be about taking a chance on the big city. Marshall makes taking the chance seem like a more risky enterprise than Sinatra did, but the risk here pays off. "Ramblin' (Wo)man," aside from taking liberty with gender role reversal, takes one of Hank Williams' only minor-key songs and spooks it out almost beyond recognition. On the original recording, Williams' voice is plaintive and apologetic--the voice of a soul in turmoil. Marshall issues no apology and makes no excuses for her rambling ways; she offers an explanation instead, stripped down as it is: "When the Lord made me, he made a ramblin' woman." There's no other accounting for the mystery of her character. The echoing sound of electric piano is perfect for the mood Marshall evokes on these two songs: soul in the deepest sense, haunted, from the vaults.
As she did on The Covers Record, Marshall covers herself here, reworking "Metal Heart" from Moon Pix, filling out the song and giving her vocals a bigger sound, somewhere between the breathier hush of her earlier work and the classic soul-inflected tones she has pursued of late. Marshall will never be a belter like some of the singers from eras past that she seems to be drawing inspiration from, but her voice now is far from fragile.
Nowhere is Cat Power's new vocal confidence more evident than on her version of "Aretha, Sing One for Me," a somewhat obscure number by blues-soul songwriter George Jackson. The band is loose here in a good way, and the production is playful--listen for the whistling at the beginning of the track and Marshall's pronouncement to the studio engineers: "keep rolling." On other tracks, Marshall takes old songs and makes them new; here, the mood is retrospective, but it's an utterly winning track in all ways--impossible to dislike.
Really, there isn't a song on this album that doesn't profit somehow from its presence here, even if the result is not to overtake but to draw out new meanings from the originals. The Highwaymen's "Silver Stallion" (something of a Townes Van Zandt knock-off) takes on the opposite effect at work on "Ramblin' (Wo)man": these outlaw blues inherit a new sensitivity, and the cover, like "New York," exposes a kind of longing heretofore latent in the lyrics. James Brown's "Lost Someone" also holds up admirably. The sparse arrangement--unaccompanied electric guitar--on the traditional "Lord, Help the Poor and Needy" is pitched right for the song, which effectively gives the album grounding right at its center. (It also serves as a nice complement to "Moonshiner," another traditional song that Marshall covered on Moon Pix.) Dylan's "I Believe in You," from the odd and somewhat baffling Slow Train Coming (a fifty-cent bin favorite across the country), fits nicely with a chunky guitar riff powering it from start to finish. The tempos start to sag a little toward the end, but Joni Mitchell's "Blue," while doing nothing to inject energy into the album, is lovely nonetheless: thin and ghostly but aching with a soulful quality that again brings new dimension to a song that is now approaching a certain age.
There's one more gem here worth drawing attention to: the album's only new original track, "Song for Bobby." This is a quiet, understated song that brings to mind Cat Power albums of the past but also shows how much her music has refused to stay still. It also gives us reason to look forward to more original songs from Marshall in the future.
Friday, February 1, 2008
Satan Is Real: Milton, Shelley, and the Louvin Brothers
The story behind the cover of the Louvin Brothers' 1960 Satan Is Real album is the stuff of country music/folk-art myth--it's like something out of a Flannery O'Connor story come to life. Ira Louvin soaked old tires in kerosene, buried them in rocks, set them on fire, propped up a hand-painted twelve-foot devil, and stood in pristine white with his brother Charlie while the photographer snapped pictures--and while the heat from the flames caused the rocks around the brothers to crack and split like real brimstone. The point: the devil is real, sin is real. Satan Is Real.When you hear the Louvin Brothers sing, you're tempted to believe in the reality of the devil, no matter your religious persuasion or lack thereof. But in fact, the Satan depicted here was only plywood, and despite Ira Louvin's bad behavior (he was the rounder, and brother Charlie the teetotaler; Ira knew all too well that sin was real) this fallen angel doesn't have much depth. Not so the Satan of John Milton's Paradise Lost.
In Paradise Lost, Milton strived to create something remarkable--something "unattempted yet in prose or rhyme." Not only was the fusion of classical epic and Christian tradition untried, no one had ever before endeavored to parse out the dimensions of Satan's character in the way Milton had. Marlowe's Mephistopheles, for instance, simply delights in evil, and that is that. He is a walking embodiment of the idea of evil, as all good devils had been up to that point. Milton's project, to "justify the ways of God to men," required that he indicate the devil as the source of the first fall from grace experienced by "our grand parents." That is, Satan, in the exercise of his own free will, had to corrupt Adam and Eve, who acted also on the premise of their own free will. Out of this situation will emerge God's greatest triumph: the redemption of downfallen humankind through His "Infinite goodness, grace, and mercy."
For all of this to work, though, Satan must be a compelling and convincing tempter. He must possess depth of character. Satan must be real, or at least as real as Hamlet--which is pretty real. Like Hamlet, Satan is complex, convincing, and--if you can conceive of such a thing--morally ambiguous. That is why Milton's Satan, who through the poet's liberal imaginative faculties fills in the blanks left by the Bible, engages our imaginations and at times perhaps our sympathies.
As a thinker, Milton was something that is inconceivable to many of us today: he was both a religious extremist and a rationalist. Moses (invoked in Book I of Paradise Lost as the author of the Pentateuch) was obviously not a rationalist. Milton planned to remedy that situation by rationally explicating the problem of evil as part of his larger project. Paradise Lost is a logical argument for God's rightness, and only in an era of burgeoning rationality would a poet feel so compelled to explore Satan in the way Milton did. The Enlightenment, a later era that took the rationality of Milton's day several steps further, replaced religious extremism with judicious humanism. A yet later era, the Romantic era, replaced this judicious humanism with a belief in passion and the imagination; the Romantics by and large said to hell with rationality as well. What happens when you take away both the rationality behind Satan's characterization and the religious impulses that automatically make Satan the would-be ursurper and God the legitimate source of power? You get Percy Shelley, who claimed in A Defense of Poetry that "Nothing can exceed the energy and magnificence of the character of Satan as expressed in Paradise Lost." If you think that sounds like crazy talk, then you haven't read Book I of Paradise Lost very closely.
Milton was not quite "of the Devil's party," as Blake claimed, but he might as well have been. Of course, Milton could not have anticipated the attitudes of later eras and how they might transform the concept of his wicked Archangel. Skipping over the parts about Satan's devotion to the "study of revenge" and his "immortal hate" (and is it not sensible to hate a tyrant?--for Satan, that's all God was), we are left with a being whose appeal to the Romantic poets is all-too apparent: a powerful figure with an "unconquerable will" and "courage never to submit or yield." Satan embraces adversity and strives to find a way to overcome. Satan's grand statement to Beelzebub, when the chief of the fallen angels hails the abysmal landscape of Hell as his new home, is among the most powerful testaments to the power of mind and imagination in all of literature: "The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n." (And is there not an echo of Hamlet here, who could get stuck in a nutshell and count himself "a king of infinite space"? Satan's character in Paradise Lost is far more sensible and consistent.) Satan continues: "Here at least / We shall be free ... / Better to reign in Hell, than to serve in Heav'n." Satan is no rebel without a cause, especially given the fact that God in Paradise Lost is a real flat bore. Milton accepts it as a given that his audience would not conceive of the possibility of seeing God as anything but the good guy. He didn't count on the coming of a genuine anti-Christ like Shelley.
All of this raises a fundamental question about the value of literature: does the meaning of a text emerge from the author's intentions, or from the reader's interpretation? Jaded citizens of a postmodern landscape that we are, we are unlikely to believe anymore that it somehow springs magically from the text itself. Perhaps it's not magic, but just like the tree falling in the forest without anyone there to hear it fall, the book on the shelf doesn't own any meaning unless somebody reads it. Regardless, there's no doubt that Shelley's interpretation of Satan is itself a feat of great imagination, and not one without legitimate grounds. For Shelley, at least, Satan was truly real.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Darjeeling's Limitations
To what end did Wes Anderson put together The Darjeeling Limited? This is a question that demands to be asked when viewing this film. Needless to say, perhaps, most good films don't demand that we ask this question.
Darjeeling boasts some nice segments, some clever cuts, nods to cinema techniques that were abandoned several decades ago and that now look fresh again. And no one could doubt Anderson's skill at using music montage: here it is The Kinks that make the scene, popping up to good effect throughout the film, though nothing could quite top Anderson's masterful sequence from Rushmore involving "A Quick One" by The Who. Anderson knows how to make music work on film.
Anderson's strengths also reveal his weakness: he's too hip for his own good sometimes, and much of this film reduces down to indie-cool posturing. Anderson's relentless reconfiguring of family-structure breakdown and rebuilding gives him something to work with, but by now his characters seem to be plodding through the landscape without any direction--which is alright as long as someone in charge (the director) knows where they are going. This is a journey film in which nobody (audience included) seems to have anything genuine staked on whether we ever get there or not.
Worst of all is the prologue to the main story, a short entitled Hotel Chevalier, the purpose of which seems to be to showcase the contours of Natalie Portman's body without actually showing any direct frontal nudity. It's supposed to illustrate the wound that is central to the inner life of Jason Schwartzman's character, Jack. Unfortunately, it doesn't work. It's hard to buy into the fiction that such a relationship ever existed. The brazen go-to-it-iveness with which Portman's character borrows Jack's tootbrush is the only redeeming moment.
Excursions into the quirky and the unexpected gave Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums a noteworthy charm. At this point, though, we have come to expect the quirkiness, and for this reason it has lost its charm. The tailor-fit retro fashions displayed by Anderson's characters once made style seem like substance, but now they just seem like style, which on its own inevitably falls out of fashion. In all, Anderson needs to strive for something different--something more substantive--next time around.
Darjeeling boasts some nice segments, some clever cuts, nods to cinema techniques that were abandoned several decades ago and that now look fresh again. And no one could doubt Anderson's skill at using music montage: here it is The Kinks that make the scene, popping up to good effect throughout the film, though nothing could quite top Anderson's masterful sequence from Rushmore involving "A Quick One" by The Who. Anderson knows how to make music work on film.
Anderson's strengths also reveal his weakness: he's too hip for his own good sometimes, and much of this film reduces down to indie-cool posturing. Anderson's relentless reconfiguring of family-structure breakdown and rebuilding gives him something to work with, but by now his characters seem to be plodding through the landscape without any direction--which is alright as long as someone in charge (the director) knows where they are going. This is a journey film in which nobody (audience included) seems to have anything genuine staked on whether we ever get there or not.
Worst of all is the prologue to the main story, a short entitled Hotel Chevalier, the purpose of which seems to be to showcase the contours of Natalie Portman's body without actually showing any direct frontal nudity. It's supposed to illustrate the wound that is central to the inner life of Jason Schwartzman's character, Jack. Unfortunately, it doesn't work. It's hard to buy into the fiction that such a relationship ever existed. The brazen go-to-it-iveness with which Portman's character borrows Jack's tootbrush is the only redeeming moment.
Excursions into the quirky and the unexpected gave Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums a noteworthy charm. At this point, though, we have come to expect the quirkiness, and for this reason it has lost its charm. The tailor-fit retro fashions displayed by Anderson's characters once made style seem like substance, but now they just seem like style, which on its own inevitably falls out of fashion. In all, Anderson needs to strive for something different--something more substantive--next time around.
Monday, January 14, 2008
I'm Not There
Throughout I'm Not There, I was distracted by the music. If for nothing else, the film ought to be commended for making viewers want to listen to Dylan.
Otherwise, the film was hit and miss, nothing too profound in terms of insights into Dylan's character. For that, Martin Scorcese's documentary No Direction Home does a fine job. In No Direction Home, Dylan himself seems mystified at how he could have embodied so many different selves, and in this respect Dylan is just like the rest of us, negotiating through different personas at different moments of our lives, only Dylan's grappling with different versions of himself is (literally and figuratively) amplified--and Dylan just happens to be the genius who reinvented American popular music for his time. My own favorite Dylan is the cynical, disillusioned folkie (or perhaps ex-folkie) of Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde--Dylan as the master ironist whose cutting remarks spare no one, not even himself. In I'm Not There, it is Cate Blanchett who somewhat improbably--but to great effect--takes on this role.
I can never tell if Cate Blanchett is one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen or one of the plainest. Regardless, she excels at playing a self-absorbed 1960s Dylan-esque asshole. Some of the other performances were intriguing or endearing, but Heath Ledger's 70s asshole Dylan ("Robbie Clark") made me want to run from the theater. There wasn't anything compelling about his louche debauchery or his casual affairs or about the Hollywood schlock that, supposedly, had torn him away from music and propelled him into a life of hollowness and vacancy devoid of any redeeming artistic quality sufficient to save him from himself. The gradual dissolution of his marriage to Claire (Charlotte Gainsborough) was too gradual for me: I couldn't wait for them to split and get it over with. I didn't sympathize. It seemed like we had seen this sort of thing done so many times already in other films, sometimes to much better effect, and the fact that its purpose in this film was to say something about Dylan wasn't enough.
Marcus Carl Franklin's turn as a black kid self-identified as "Woody Guthrie" ticks off some interesting interpretations of what Sasha Frere-Jones termed "musical miscegenation" in a recent New Yorker article (http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2007/10/22/071022crmu_music_frerejones), and it's hard not to like Franklin when he's up there on screen. Richard Gere's "Billy the Kid"/Dylan doesn't do much except to add some interesting imagery, though Jim James' performance of "Goin' to Acupulco" during this segment is powerful, probably the best of all the Dylan covers to grace the movie soundtrack.
We admire the noble failure, and for me at least I'm Not There qualifies as such, though in the future I would appreciate more of the nobility and less of the failure.
Otherwise, the film was hit and miss, nothing too profound in terms of insights into Dylan's character. For that, Martin Scorcese's documentary No Direction Home does a fine job. In No Direction Home, Dylan himself seems mystified at how he could have embodied so many different selves, and in this respect Dylan is just like the rest of us, negotiating through different personas at different moments of our lives, only Dylan's grappling with different versions of himself is (literally and figuratively) amplified--and Dylan just happens to be the genius who reinvented American popular music for his time. My own favorite Dylan is the cynical, disillusioned folkie (or perhaps ex-folkie) of Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde--Dylan as the master ironist whose cutting remarks spare no one, not even himself. In I'm Not There, it is Cate Blanchett who somewhat improbably--but to great effect--takes on this role.
I can never tell if Cate Blanchett is one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen or one of the plainest. Regardless, she excels at playing a self-absorbed 1960s Dylan-esque asshole. Some of the other performances were intriguing or endearing, but Heath Ledger's 70s asshole Dylan ("Robbie Clark") made me want to run from the theater. There wasn't anything compelling about his louche debauchery or his casual affairs or about the Hollywood schlock that, supposedly, had torn him away from music and propelled him into a life of hollowness and vacancy devoid of any redeeming artistic quality sufficient to save him from himself. The gradual dissolution of his marriage to Claire (Charlotte Gainsborough) was too gradual for me: I couldn't wait for them to split and get it over with. I didn't sympathize. It seemed like we had seen this sort of thing done so many times already in other films, sometimes to much better effect, and the fact that its purpose in this film was to say something about Dylan wasn't enough.
Marcus Carl Franklin's turn as a black kid self-identified as "Woody Guthrie" ticks off some interesting interpretations of what Sasha Frere-Jones termed "musical miscegenation" in a recent New Yorker article (http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2007/10/22/071022crmu_music_frerejones), and it's hard not to like Franklin when he's up there on screen. Richard Gere's "Billy the Kid"/Dylan doesn't do much except to add some interesting imagery, though Jim James' performance of "Goin' to Acupulco" during this segment is powerful, probably the best of all the Dylan covers to grace the movie soundtrack.
We admire the noble failure, and for me at least I'm Not There qualifies as such, though in the future I would appreciate more of the nobility and less of the failure.
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Modern Music: Panda Bear, Battles, Marnie Stern
Those were different times.
All the poets, they studied rules of verse,
And those ladies, they rolled their eyes.
--Lou Reed, "Sweet Jane"
Panda Bear makes music that often resembles the music Brian Wilson made over forty years ago. Many of the tracks on Person Pitch resemble tracks from the Pet Sounds box set that came out a while back: like most of the music has been stripped away, leaving only the vocals. Onto this, Panda Bear has added slight instrumentation and a lot of background noise, so that it sometimes sounds like you are listening to a Beach Boys song coming out of someone else's window. You strain closer to hear some more.
The similarities to Brian Wilson are more than surface-level: both Pet Sounds and Person Pitch are products of individuals who are clearly obsessed with sound. How many hours did Wilson spend layering track upon track in the studio? Probably more hours, overall, than Panda Bear spent at his laptop, but the obsession is the same. The inspired concept behind the bicycle horn on "You Still Believe in Me" takes on a much larger role for Panda Bear; Wilson's sonic epiphany--that any sound can make music--is a pervasive principle in much modern music. Panda Bear exercises that principle with a good ear, but he has traded in Wilson's fondness for layering instruments with one for layering found and created sound, only some of which you can place. On Person Pitch, you won't find a song with frailing banjo and baritone sax paired together for the instrumental break, but there is still a great sound to admire here.
If the brand of rock and roll favored by those of us who came of age in the latter decades of the 20th century is to have a future, that future is Battles. The thing about Battles is the groove, which finds expression in a curious but exciting dynamic between the organic (real drums, expertly managed by John Stanier, formerly of the metrically diverse metal band Helmet) and the digital (keyboards, looping stations, pedals of various sorts). For Battles, the human voice is truly just another instrument: most of the vocals are so processed that even when there are words (as opposed to ohs and ahs) only snatches of a phrase here and there can be deciphered. Mainstream popular music uses vocal technology as a substitution for the real thing--as a corrective for poor singing--whereas technology is, for Battles, the real thing. The music they play is active and intricate, functioning on several levels at once. The video for "Atlas" shows the members of the band grooving together inside a revolving, futuristic glass box. If Battles is visiting us from the future, let's hope that they decide to stay a while.
The fact that Marnie Stern seems such an improbable choice for indie-rock guitar hero exposes a latent sexism that persists in rock music. Despite the fact that the role of guitar hero (of the non-video-game variety) stills seems to be reserved primarily for men, Stern's finger-tapping guitar style can only be described as shredding in classic Eddie Van Halen fashion, but with a contemporary twist: like Battles and Panda Bear, Stern relies heavily on looping, and the pounding fury of drums (supplied by Hella's Zach Hill) that serves as her primary accompaniment places her more in the punk tradition than in the hard-rock tradition associated with Van Halen. Stern's songs are loud and stoner-clever. "Plato's F****d Up Cave" and "Patterns of a Diamond Ceiling" are worth more than a chuckle, though; they display genuine creativity, and the guitar playing is exciting. But it's the opening track, "Vibrational Match," that defines Stern's sound. Amid the sonic fury, her voice fits nicely, soothing and sometimes a little comic.
What's exciting about all three of these acts is that they prove the vibrancy of rock and roll as a musical idiom. All along--acoustic sidetracks by Neil Young and so many others aside--rock music is an embracement of technology, and the music has to change as the technology does. Rock was created by act and compulsion of history--though Link Wray's discovery that he could poke a hole in the speaker cone of his amplifier and get distortion was a key innovation. It's in the amplifiers, the cables, the magnets. The racket they make is so glorious sometimes that it's all anyone can do to get up and shout along with it.
All the poets, they studied rules of verse,
And those ladies, they rolled their eyes.
--Lou Reed, "Sweet Jane"
Panda Bear makes music that often resembles the music Brian Wilson made over forty years ago. Many of the tracks on Person Pitch resemble tracks from the Pet Sounds box set that came out a while back: like most of the music has been stripped away, leaving only the vocals. Onto this, Panda Bear has added slight instrumentation and a lot of background noise, so that it sometimes sounds like you are listening to a Beach Boys song coming out of someone else's window. You strain closer to hear some more.
The similarities to Brian Wilson are more than surface-level: both Pet Sounds and Person Pitch are products of individuals who are clearly obsessed with sound. How many hours did Wilson spend layering track upon track in the studio? Probably more hours, overall, than Panda Bear spent at his laptop, but the obsession is the same. The inspired concept behind the bicycle horn on "You Still Believe in Me" takes on a much larger role for Panda Bear; Wilson's sonic epiphany--that any sound can make music--is a pervasive principle in much modern music. Panda Bear exercises that principle with a good ear, but he has traded in Wilson's fondness for layering instruments with one for layering found and created sound, only some of which you can place. On Person Pitch, you won't find a song with frailing banjo and baritone sax paired together for the instrumental break, but there is still a great sound to admire here.
If the brand of rock and roll favored by those of us who came of age in the latter decades of the 20th century is to have a future, that future is Battles. The thing about Battles is the groove, which finds expression in a curious but exciting dynamic between the organic (real drums, expertly managed by John Stanier, formerly of the metrically diverse metal band Helmet) and the digital (keyboards, looping stations, pedals of various sorts). For Battles, the human voice is truly just another instrument: most of the vocals are so processed that even when there are words (as opposed to ohs and ahs) only snatches of a phrase here and there can be deciphered. Mainstream popular music uses vocal technology as a substitution for the real thing--as a corrective for poor singing--whereas technology is, for Battles, the real thing. The music they play is active and intricate, functioning on several levels at once. The video for "Atlas" shows the members of the band grooving together inside a revolving, futuristic glass box. If Battles is visiting us from the future, let's hope that they decide to stay a while.
The fact that Marnie Stern seems such an improbable choice for indie-rock guitar hero exposes a latent sexism that persists in rock music. Despite the fact that the role of guitar hero (of the non-video-game variety) stills seems to be reserved primarily for men, Stern's finger-tapping guitar style can only be described as shredding in classic Eddie Van Halen fashion, but with a contemporary twist: like Battles and Panda Bear, Stern relies heavily on looping, and the pounding fury of drums (supplied by Hella's Zach Hill) that serves as her primary accompaniment places her more in the punk tradition than in the hard-rock tradition associated with Van Halen. Stern's songs are loud and stoner-clever. "Plato's F****d Up Cave" and "Patterns of a Diamond Ceiling" are worth more than a chuckle, though; they display genuine creativity, and the guitar playing is exciting. But it's the opening track, "Vibrational Match," that defines Stern's sound. Amid the sonic fury, her voice fits nicely, soothing and sometimes a little comic.
What's exciting about all three of these acts is that they prove the vibrancy of rock and roll as a musical idiom. All along--acoustic sidetracks by Neil Young and so many others aside--rock music is an embracement of technology, and the music has to change as the technology does. Rock was created by act and compulsion of history--though Link Wray's discovery that he could poke a hole in the speaker cone of his amplifier and get distortion was a key innovation. It's in the amplifiers, the cables, the magnets. The racket they make is so glorious sometimes that it's all anyone can do to get up and shout along with it.
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