March 2005 Archives

THREE INSANELY GREAT MUSIC SITES:

Chromewaves , with weekly covers, copy, right?, a very savvy survey of ongoing mashups, covers and remix paraphanalia, and Brat Productions, "obligatory web clutter" (check out "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Baby You're A Rich Man").

We were imprressed with Garret Dillahunt when he played Jack MacCall, the dazed dumbfuck who up and shoots Wild Bill. Last week he showed up on ER as Sam's Ex Steve Curits (they pulled a Bewitched switcheroo), another dazed df. Suddenly he's back as dapper perv Francis Wolcott, and goner Crop Ear as well, although you wouldn't learn that from the official web site.

"GET'EM OFF ME!" (from "Get Your Rocks Off")
Robert Levinson's Discussing Dylan class at the New School (NYC)

HOW COME the NYTimes puts out such a good Circuits section but still runs vapid editorials like this...

ESPECIALLY WHEN there are ALREADY intriguing alternatives to sending lawyers' kids to college for all eternity like this...?

Nina Totenberg did a much better job explaining the opposing arguments facing the Supreme Court today, with a giant caveat: shouldn't a story like this include the fact that the parallel Napster case from several years ago resulted in BMG BUYING the Napster brand?

I'm behind on this, but it's worth noting: Springsteen inducts U2 into the Hall of Fame:

Oh, my God! They sold out!

Now...what I know about the iPod is this: It is a device that plays music. Of course their new song sounded great, my guys are doing great, but methinks I hear the footsteps of my old tape operator Jimmy Iovine somewhere. Wily. Smart. Now, personally, I live an insanely expensive lifestyle that my wife barely tolerates. I burn money, and that calls for huge amounts of cash flow. But I also have a ludicrous image of myself that keeps me from truly cashing in. (laughter) You can see my problem. Woe is me.

So the next morning, I call up Jon Landau -- or as I refer to him, "the American Paul McGuinness" -- and I say, "Did you see that iPod thing?" And he says, "Yes." And he says, "And I hear they didn't take any money." And I said, "They didn't take any money?!" And he says, "No." I said, "Smart, wily Irish guys." (laughter) Anybody...anybody...can do an ad and take the money. But to do the ad and not take the money...that's smart. That's wily. I say, "Jon, I want you to call up Bill Gates or whoever is behind this thing and float this: A red, white, and blue iPod signed by Bruce "the Boss" Springsteen. Now remember, no matter how much money he offers, don't take it!" (laughter)

Sweet, and you could tell he meant every word of his quotable musical descriptions of the band. But doesn't it say something odd that he's funnier in his induction speech than U2 has been in over 25 years of touring and recording...(Does the title Achtung Baby count? Or Rattle and Hum? Joshua Tree?)

CLASSICAL
Brahms Viola Sonatas, Kashkashian and Levin (ECM 1997)
Leon Fleisher, Two Hands (Vanguard 2004)
Rachmaninoff Third Piano Concerto, Lazar Berman, Abbado, LSO (Columbia, 1976)
Brahms Second Piano Concerto, Rudolf Serkin, Szell CSO (Sony)
Mahler Second Symphony, Claudio Abbado, Chicago (DG)
Mahler Ninth Symphony, Bruno Walter, Columbia Symphony (Sony)
Mahler First Symphony, Leonard Bernstein, NYPhil (Sony)
Mahler Fourth Symphony, Claudio Abbado, Chicago (DG)
Chopin Waltzes, Dinu Lipatti (Angel)
Chopin Mazurkas, Nocturnes, Artur Rubinstein (RCA)
Shostakovich Preludes and Fugues, Vladimir Ashkenazy (Decca) [Keith Jarrett's ECM set is not too shabby.]

TK: Schubert, Schumann, Prokofiev, etc.

I agree that there's a far "cooler" sensibility alive in today's pianists, but the "newness" is a stretch (Pollini epitomized cool a generation ago), and the influence of rock is a wayward swipe:

"But there is something more going on now. The new coolness seems generational: a contemporary, anti-Romantic, unsentimental stance. Having grown up in the age of rock, younger performers may place a high value on rhythmic crispness and clarity..."

This is like saying "the influence of television on novels," as though rock is a single, monolithic entity that can be reduced to "rhythmic crispness and clarity." Is there any doubt that Elvis influenced Glenn Gould's sound for same? It's one of those essays that should have more room to breath so Tommasini can track down more nuances, he's better than this. A lengthy comparison of Lang Lang vs. Andsnes might have been a better format, there's your Yin-Yang, and the reasons Andsnes finds much more critical favor is because his listeners probably listen to far more pianists than Lang Lang's core crowd do. An article like this that doesn't mention Pogorelich or Kissin has some gaping holes. IP was flavor of the month, and a weird, untamed sensibility who didn't really survive the hubbub... where is he now? He should be turning in fascinating recordings if his thoughts developed at all. And Kissin is an even stranger case: freakish virtuosity with an intelligence that sounds like it's always running to catch up, but never quite does. I keep thinking "He'll be fascinating in about ten years if he can start listening to himself better..." And I think that each time I hear him. The other name missing from this overview is Lars Vogt, who recorded Brahms Sonatas with Christian Tetzlaff last year, and straddles the line AT is talking about between passion and craft.

Among the new titles in Continuum's 33 1/3 series, Erik Davis's treatment of Led Zep's ZOSO walks the line Xgau called "genius dumb":

Of all the guitar heroes from the 1960s, Jimi Hendrix took this transformative potential the furthest, both onsteage and in his obsessive and almost extraterrestrial studio work. Still, it seems important to note that Page had Roger Mayer build him a fuzz box in 1964, years before Hendrix pushed Mayer's gear into the purple haze. Mayer's excellent machines also give us a different perspective on page's "guitar army," because when mayer started building his fuzz boxes for guitarists like Jeff Beck and Page, he worked for the British Admiralty researching acoustics. IN other words, his intimacy with sonic circuitry ran parallel to his work on underwater warfare...

The other standouts in this series are James Brown's Live at the Apollo, by Douglas Wolk, and Dusty Springfield's Dusty in Memphis, by Warren Zanes.

I Can See For Miles and Miles [RA]

Pete Townshend on Petra Haden in today's Boston Globe: "I was a little embarrassed to realize I was enjoying my own music so much, for in a way it was like hearing it for the first time," Townshend said in a lengthy e-mail interview. ''What Petra does with her voice, which is not so easy to do, is challenge the entire rock framework: the traditions, the processes, the decor, the accessories, the entirety of the established dynamics of traditional pop-rock. 'I Can See For Miles' is powerful not for the restrained electric guitars and suppressed and distant thundering drums of Keith Moon but for the torturously sustained vocal harmonies that John Entwistle added over my fairly conventional four-part. Petra is the first analyst who heard the vocal harmonies as they were written and reproduced them properly. When she does depart from the original music she does it purely to bring a little piece of herself -- and when she appears she is so very welcome. I felt like I'd received something better than a Grammy."

from Billboard's new blog, PostPlay:

The RIAA's False Mathematics

Here's another great post by Barry Rotholtz on The Big Picture. He takes a look at the paid subscription models like Rhapsody and Napster-To-Go and shows that the actual P2P losses to the industry are much much smaller than the RIAA trumpets...If you rationally analyze the 'unlimited downloads for a fixed monthly fee' business model, you get pretty convincing evidence that the maximum damages are only around $10 a month per person. "Here's a little secret the RIAA would rather not have you know: Musicians make most of their money performing and touring -- not selling CDs or downloads....The industry can scapegoat P2P for all their woes, but a closer analysis of the math demonstrates the claim is illusory. (Mis)management is the primary sources of the industry problems." (via PaidContent.org)

Also, a new favorite: Lost Remote.

from Artifice Eternity:

You know your surround sound system is good when the semi-psychotic, spouse-abusing British actor/writer who lives upstairs confronts you in the hallway and screams that you are "A PATHETIC LITTLE MAN!" with "ABOMINABLE TASTE IN MUSIC!"

And I didn't even have it turned up loud. Man, that subwoofer rocks.

Fortune salutes Women Don't Ask in its 75 Most Smartest Books list:

Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide by Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever (2003). The first book to adequately explain the dramatic differences in how men and women negotiate and why women so often fail to ask for what they want at work (starting with equal pay). Every male manager in America should read it.

Stephen J. Ducat on W.'s Texan manhood in Buzzflash: "I think a complex combination of factors determines this. Not all cultures and all historical periods evidence this kind of femiphobia. But we’re seeing a number of factors, not the least of which is a kind of backlash against feminism and the ability of the Republicans to really define the words we use. There is no greater power than the power to define. If you can determine how people use language, you really are able to determine how they think. If you can fill the word liberal with the meaning that you want it to have, which nowadays is weak, feminine, cowardly, so much so that even liberals want to run away from it, then you’ve won an enormous battle for control. That sort of framing, as George Lakoff calls it, the kind of linguistic hegemony on the right, has accomplished a lot. Fears have always been there, but certain historical events have brought them into the foreground. I think the defeat of the United States in Vietnam played a major factor. I’m sure you’re familiar with the term “Vietnam syndrome.” I think one way of reading the Vietnam syndrome is as a condition of wounded masculinity..."

and

ROSENBAUM OVERRATES CROWELL, if cleverly: "Yes! Graham Greene is the country-and-western songwriter of sentimental Anglo-Catholicism..."

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: from SKL, on Mel Harris's WEST WING appearance: "Nobody in the U.S. Senate has hair like that..."

DEPT. OF EX-SQUEEZE ME?
I don't know when defending Albert Goldman became critical "chic," but it doesn't wash. His pop journalism is not "criminally underrated," it's idiotic on any level you care to go at it. While this quote about talent-free celebs sounds prescient in regards to figures like Paris Hilton, Goldman also felt Lennon, Presley, and many other rock stars were also talent free because they were untrained. It's the worst sort of class discrimination, of the very type rock so successfully upended. Just because it was TOO successful, and is now WIDELY misunderstood, doesn't mean it was wrong to begin with.

SPONGEBOB's BIG MOMENT, Part XII
Listened to Smile again this morning. There's this song from thhe Spongebob soundtrack, "Best Day Ever," hilarious tribute to the master, that nobody's written about yet. Walks the tricky line between comic salute and effervescent original. "Spent the last two hours just tying my shoe." The boys have taken to singing the second, better half of "Bohemian Rhapsody" since they saw it in Wayne's World. Also, "YMCA," which beats all for cultural conundrums.