May 2006 Archives

II.

I've been trying to figure out a way to engage with you on some of your arguments. I deliberately steered clear of the homosexual themes in part because they don't reflect my direct experience but also because I felt a firm groundwork needed to be laid first before somebody could come along and give that treatment... I think it would still be very useful, can imagine a VERY good book waiting to get written... but to me the LEAST interesting aspects of Bowie, Elton John, and Boy George are their sexualities... I wanted to mount a spirited DEFENSE of Mick Jagger because I sense he gets too easily written off as a woman-hater when to my ear he's FAR more complicated than that. 

Gender has become this buzzword, in academia it can mean almost anything, it gets tossed around too much, etc. I was trying to address the area that Robert Bly wrote so ignorantly of [in IRON JOHN] when he said "Young men today have no role models..." What do we mean when we talk about "feminism" anymore? How did men respond to it? Why has it gotten so demonized and twisted? And who will stand up for the figures that paraded through rock that set it all off? 

That's the area... Presley's view on women is all over the place: he's a Momma's boy who was quickly corrupted by his power and tended to treat women as second-class citizens... but in SONG, it was clear how devoted, how romantic and how obviously wowed he was womanhood, don't you think? Otherwise, why are we still listening? Why does he stick up so firmly for his girl in "Blue Seude Shoes"? Why does "Suspicious Lies" sound so vulnerable? What is he so AFRAID of in that song? 

yada yada yada, BUTCH

I.
Date: May 16, 2006 10:33 PM
Subject: finished your book
To: Tim Riley

and boy do I have comments. They are too lengthy to go into right now, but I hope to soon. In the meantime...

My main question is: What is this book about? What I expected was a book about Madonna, Bowie, Elton, Mick, k.d. lang, Boy George, 80s hair bands...and how they blurred gender. I also predicted comments on how shitty women in rock (not pop) are treated in the mainstream, or even in indie rock. Instead I read a book about how Elvis and Tina are the blueprint for male and female musical performers, and how Bruce Springsteen had trouble with his dad.

I guess gender may mean something different to me. I've got a lot of queer friends (and am a bit queer myself), and many of them have studied gender both in and out of academic realms. Gender is a totally made up thing to them. It's amazing that Elton, Bowie, and Boy George got away with acting like complete fags (pardon the slang but is there a better word for it?) before gay couples could even walk down the street holding hands without getting beat up. And nobody from Poison, Motley Crue, or Guns n' Roses were called fags or girlie for wearing loads of makeup and hairspray... they were MEN to the fullest, fillthiest degree. And the clincher is that women loved it. Why did they love it? It felt safe? It played out lesbian fantasies?

I suppose I'm interchanging sexual orientation with gender but to me they do go hand-in-hand to some degree.

You have convinced me that Elvis played a major role in shaping how the boys who listened to him acted, especially as compared to John Wayne. But what was Elvis's view on women? Was he really sensitive? Sure, he danced and felt comfortable with being sexy, but what good did it do? No, the first generation of men to really improve themselves in terms of how they treated women and their families was the generation listening to the Beatles and all the hippie post-1965 bands. Flower power, man. That's what really transformed gender in America.

I did really like the last chapter on rock super couples though. Very well done.

Anyway, now that you hate me...

-- SM of heresyourwater.com/blog

SPIN CYCLE

In ONE WEEK, the Bush Administration, mired in DEEP POISON-POLL DOO-DOO, still managed to turn the story from this (G.O.P. LAWMAKERS FAULT A TOP PICK TO LEAD THE C.I.A.) to this (Bush's Picks for C.I.A. and a Court Succeed). Imagine the kind of success they could enjoy elsewhere if they were as competent at spin as they were policy, deployment, international relations, emergency management, etc.

BANDS ARE BANKS

Investment banks have identifiable personalities, decided Mark Gilbert, a columnist for Bloomberg News. So do rock bands. So he matched the characteristics of the banks to those of the bands (Bloomberg.com).

Goldman Sachs is like the Rolling Stones: "Unrivaled profit-generating abilities arouse jealousy and admiration in equal measure."

Deutsche Bank is like Fleetwood Mac: "Immensely profitable? Check. Years of infighting and not communicating with one another? Check. Badly in need of a style makeover? Check."

And, "both Merrill Lynch & Company and Madonna peaked in the 1980's and have been irrelevant since the 1990's..."

--DAN MITCHELL (NYT) [to be continued...]

COUNTRY ALWAYS GOT THERE FIRST

Latest NPR podcast (RA): Country music politics, pegged to those Dixie Fried Chicks.

LINE OF THE MONTH

"Crime watch on the braid..." Marjene reluctantly agrees with her neighbor to keep an eye on her own polygamist wife.

SONG TITLES TO LIVE BY

from Willie Nelson on Imus in the Morning: "I Hate Every Bone In Your Body Except Mine."

CAN YOU UNDERSTAND MY PAIN?"*

Despite some SHAMELESS name-dropping (never a good sign), Goldstein's "Satellite Dylan" piece in The Nation (nice cover!) steers things back to the bard's misogyny, which he usually skates on:

I don't claim that Dylan is determined by machismo -- there's much more to him than that. But I will say that he reaches many men of a certain age and status on precisely these grounds. He digs beneath their ambivalent embrace of sexual equality, the insistence that they acknowledge their interests as a sex, and he proposes that these demands insult the fundamentals. Liberals won't accept that regressive message when it's wrapped in conservative politics, as it often is in country music. But because Dylan is as critical of injustice as he is of liberation, he overrides such reservations. And if you take a purely textual approach, it's possible to forget that his mystique rests substantially on his sexual politics. Dylan is a liberal man's man.

Richard Goldstein
Goldstein in LookSmart
Out of Ear's Reach, Riley on Ricks in Slate (June 2004)
Wiki Dylan links

[*Actual lyric from "Is Your Love In Vain" off of 1978's STREET LEGAL, notoriously omitted among Ph.Dylanologists.]

Time was when a set of Chopin Nocturnes didn't really make waves... everybody does'em, and recently the fad has centered more around the Preludes. Both can be mistaken for student pieces, but like everything else by our beloved Freddie, they're all student pieces and every pianist is gonna play them to death so get used to it.



Still, this DG set from Pollini stands out more for the pianist than for the material; it's the kind of recording that could be defining for him, after eons of ravishing perfection, the great Italian takes his biggest risk and turns inward.



Another disc, from Japan's Yundi Li, set him tackling the great warhorses with Schumann's Carnaval, the gimmick is the Musikhuas in Wien. The clue to greatness lies in the opening Scarlattis. A couple weeks back

THE BOB DYLAN ENCYCLOPEDIA by Michael Gray (832 pp, Continuum)

While not the David Thomson of rock, Gray aims pretty high, and hits enough marks to keep you going back for more (see Marcus, Greil, and Lee, CP). Without ever describing his tone or solo style, his incisive entry on Robbie Robertson spins your head around several lampposts:

...In 2005 he saw the rease of another of his rewriting of history, a 5-CD plus one DVD set titled THE BAND: A MUSICAL HISTORY, in which he re-mastered his own choices of material from Ronnie Hawkins & the Hawks' 1963 single 'Who Do You Love' through to the combined Band and Staple Singers performing Robertson's 'The Weight' in a studio in 1977 for inclusion in the LAST WALTZ movie--THE NOTES TO WHICH FUDGE OVER THE DATE AND PLACE OF RECORDING FOR QUITE A NUMBER OF THOSE ITEMS ONCE CLAIMED AS COMING FROM THE BASEMENT TAPES SESSIONS... the re-masters include 'Can YOU Please Crawl Out Your Window?' single from 1965, 'Tell Me Mama' and 'Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues' live from Liverpool May 1966, 'Odds and Ends' from the Basement Tapes 1967, 'I Ain't Got No Home' from the Guthrie Memorial Concert in 1968, 'Forever Young' from PLANET WAVES recordedin 1973, and 'Rainy Day Women #12 & 35' and 'Highway 61 Revisited' from the 1974 come-back tour... [emphasis added]

All this and NO entry for Peter Stone Brown, tsk tsk.

pub date: June 15, 2006

Continuum
Michael Gray's Blog

BLOG OF THE WEEK

Coolfer, it's daily music industry news links are... CONDI-licious.

THE MOST RADICAL WRITER IN AMERICA

If I were lucky enough to be teaching a Freshman expos-lit course, I'd bring this in (from 5/02/06):

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, released a video in which he showed his face and claimed that the Bush Administration had lied about its military victories. "America," said Zarqawi, "will go out of Iraq, humiliated, defeated." The United States announced that it would free 141 of the 490 "enemy combatants" at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba because they do not threaten U.S. security after all. In Dahab, Egypt, three bombings killed 30 people, and in Baquba, Iraq, about the same number of people died in fighting. President George W. Bush pointed out that not drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was depriving the United States of one million barrels of oil per day, and it was reported that Iraq's oil production had dropped by one million barrels per day since the U.S. invasion. In New York City tens of thousands of people marched against the war in Iraq, and in Washington, D.C., five members of Congress, all Democrats, were arrested outside the Sudanese embassy for protesting the genocide in Darfur. It was revealed that in 2005 the FBI had, without court approval, obtained from bank and credit card companies and telephone and Internet companies information on 3,501 U.S. citizens and legal residents. Iran, under criticism for its nuclear program, accused the United States of using "illegitimate and open threats to use force against the Islamic Republic of Iran." Scientists in Florida were working to improve a "brain port" device that will allow soldiers to perceive things through their tongues. New construction began at Ground Zero.

A Quebec family was offering a reward for their mother's head, which had been hacked from her corpse a year ago. "Each morning," said one family member, "when we get up, we ask ourselves: 'Where is the head? Will it show up on our lawn one morning?'" Chinese bra producers were offering larger sizes to meet increased demand, China announced that it would ban heavy snorers from its army, and a Chinese man used eBay to buy an old MiG fighter jet to decorate his office. It was reported that lobbyists had once provided former (now imprisoned) Representative Randy "Duke" Cunningham with free limousine service, free access to hotel suites, and the services of prostitutes; it was also reported that the limousine service that was used to ferry the prostitutes had received a contract worth $21 million from the Department of Homeland Security. The Louisiana state senate approved a bill that bans abortion except when the procedure can save a woman's life; an amendment to allow exceptions in the cases of women who have been raped or are victims of incest was defeated. It was reported that the Vatican might permit people with AIDS to use condoms, if they are married, although abstinence would still be preferred. A Vatican official also called on Catholics to boycott the "Da Vinci Code" movie. In Singapore an 18-year-old man, ashamed of his small penis, committed suicide by jumping from a building, and President Bush named Tony Snow, a Fox News host, as the new White House press secretary. The U.S. military, short of buglers who can play taps at military funerals, was waiting for an order of 700 automated $500 digital bugles. After 15,000 tries a California scientist was able to teach starlings some grammar.

A farmer in Brazil pleaded guilty to killing a 73-year-old nun; the farmer had been paid by two ranchers to shoot the nun after she attempted to stop the ranchers from clearing a section of rainforest. The Mexican senate passed a bill legalizing the possession of small amounts of marijuana, opium, cocaine, and heroin; President Vicente Fox was expected to approve the bill. In Loreto, Mexico, a 17-year-old boy was killed at a horse race when he attempted to stop a horse from reaching the finish line by jumping in front of it, and in Denver, Colorado, a 17-year-old boy on his first bucking bronco ride was killed when the horse rolled on top of him. "It was," said his mother, "his first and last ride." A couple in Milford Township, Pennsylvania, were suing a veterinarian for faking the death of their dog and then giving the dog to someone else. A wheelchair-bound woman in Florida, who refused to put down a knife and a hammer, died after being tasered by policemen, and a Liverpool, England, man was sentenced to 100 hours of community service for getting drunk and singing "YMCA" on a flight from Florida to Manchester while his wife wept and comforted their three children. "He makes no excuses," said the man's lawyer, "for his loutish, idiotic behavior." Jane Jacobs and John Kenneth Galbraith died. Twenty percent of U.S. teenagers admitted to huffing household products in order to get high, and Keith Richards fell out of a coconut tree.

-- Paul Ford

On May 4, 2006, at 2:07 PM, JB wrote:

Dear fellow music lovers:  As you know, I collect lists.  Over the years, I have assembled a list of the top records of all time, as identified by various critics and publications.  These lists usually focus on rock, pop and r&b, with very little attention to blues, jazz or country and no classical at all.  I am looking to fill in some of the gaps in my collection, but the gift certificate I have will only allow me to buy 2 or 3 CDs, so I need your help.

  The list below contains the highest ranking albums from my list compilation that I don’t own already.  In many cases I own other recordings by the same artists; in some cases these are greatest hits compilations.  Where I own none of the artist’s recordings, I have put an asterisk next to the artist’s name.  If you need more information about what albums I already own, I’d be glad to let you know, but I wanted to keep this short. We are relieved to hear you own records by stones, Zep, Gaye, Young and the rest, but there are MANY TITLES HERE that are simply too esteemed to be without... And not just the "highly rated" kind of esteemed that you own but never listen to... I must say I can't get through the month without putting on BEGGAR'S BANQUET, and I'm sure that makes me an old FUDDY DUDDY, and I DON'T GIVE A HANG.

If you could only pick three off this list, which would you pick? 

              Led Zeppelin                           IV
            The Rolling Stones                  Let It Bleed
            David Bowie                           Ziggy Stardust & the Spiders from Mars
            Marvin Gaye                           What’s Going On
            The Clash                                The Clash
            *Michael Jackson                   Thriller
            The Rolling Stones                  Sticky Fingers
            *AC/DC                                  Back in Black
            The Band                                The Band
            *Joy Division                          Closer
            Prince                                      Sign o’ the Times
            The Rolling Stones                  Beggar’s Banquet
            Neil Young                              After the Goldrush
            Led Zeppelin                           II
            *Massive Attack                     Blue Lines
            *Metallica                               Metallica
            Nirvana                                   In Utero
            Oasis                                       What’s the Story, Morning Glory?
            *Primal Scream                       Screamadelica
            Simon & Garfunkel                 Bridge over Troubled Water
            Bruce Springsteen                   Darkness on the edge of town
            *The Stone Roses                   The Stone Roses
            Stevie Wonder                        Songs in the Key of Life
            The Band                                Music from Big Pink
            *Michael Jackson                   Off the Wall
            *Joy Division                          Unknown Pleasures
            *N.W.A.                                  Straight Outta Compton
            Pink Floyd                               The Wall
            *Portishead                             Dummy
            Public Enemy                          Fear of a Black Planet
            Otis Redding                           Otis Blue/Otis Redding Sings Soul
            *The Verve                             Urban Hymns

    JB
Poncy Law Firm
State Street, Suite xxx
Boston, MA 02109
617-523-25xx

    CONFIDENTIALITY AND INADVERTENT DISCLOSURE NOTICE: This e-mail transmission may contain confidential information belonging to the sender which is legally privileged and which is only intended for the use of the intended recipient.  If you have received this e-mail in error, such transmission is an inadvertent disclosure, and any copying, disclosure, distribution or dissemination of this information or the taking of any action based on the contents of this communication is strictly prohibited. Please notify me immediately of any inadvertent disclosure by e-mail, delete the original transmission and destroy any printouts you may have made.

  JB,

 My man you frighten me to the quick. TO NOT OWN some of these puts you in great peril, weak from cultural deprivation and vulnerable to attack. 

TO ADMIT not owning them amounts to HIGH AESTHETIC TREASON. I hear the ghost of G.B. Shaw wailing "If you do not know DIE ZAUBERFLOTE, you are an ignoramus..."

You are brave, however, and worthy. And so to the matter at hand, in order of personal preference: 

           *Portishead                             Dummy
            *Joy Division                          Closer
            *Massive Attack                     Blue Lines

This was easy: I just chose three asterisked titles since you need all three AND stop ANNOUNCING to people that you DON'T OWN ANYTHING BY THESE BANDS. 

You don't need anything by Michael Jackson, the world keeps turning. Perhaps a Motown compilation, but don't even make it a twofer. That's the stuff you can deal with by downloading since WHO WANTS TO PAY HIS LEGAL BILLS? That should keep you away from ALL Sony product from here on in. 

But knowing you, and knowing your disposition, I should think you could cadge some bills out of mary's purse when she's not looking and snatch GOLD RUSH, STICKY FINGERS, LET IT BLEED, BIG PINK, and OTIS BLUE, that should get you through the summer. Next time you see one in a used shop, just plunk down for that ZEP box, it's the doorstop that keeps on giving. And also, go get those STONE ROSES, world's unlikeliest durability... on a COMPLETELY different order than Verve, and I LIKE Verve, honest. Indulge me by seeking out Ride's NOWHERE, same ilk, bigger mess. And My Bloody Valentine. 

Somehow I know you would treat me gently if I came to you with my legal theories, so I'm trying to be nice... BUT DO TAKE A TIP AND PRETEND TO BE A BIT MORE LEARNED IN THESE MATTERS, BUBBA. People will talk. 

CLEM

PS: Now I want to be in the loop for exactly WHAT titles you choose, HOW you choose, and WHAT your response is... will you make an average of all our recommentations, or pick the most eccentric tips? Or spite us all and pick all the ones we leave out, taunting us with your "insider" knowledge the next time we bump into you with your clothes on. Or is this whole thing a RUSE to foil us into admitting that none of can hear past the list? (For the Band, MAKE SURE YOU HAVE MOONDOG MATINEE...)

blog of the week

What Would Jesus Blog?

LOVE LIKE A TRUCK

On two new releases, the Bottle Rockets make like special prosecutor's on the country's warrantless wire-tapping WMD-lying ass:
Zoysia and
Live in Heilbronn Germanny July 17, 2005 on which they make Neil Young's "Cortez" lie down and beg for it.

PS: Does anybody else remember El Chicano? Pueblo, Colorado, 1971?


METANEWS

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FINISH THAT THOUGHT [DEPT OF FISH IN A BARREL]

"I think people who want to be a citizen of this country ought to learn English and they ought to learn to sing the national anthem in English..." and all those Texas towns should all be English and the Latin on our judicial buildings should be in English and the Bible should be read in Aramaic...

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY, JANN -- love Neil... or

THAT'S SGT PEPPER TO YOU, POTHEAD

Original RS Interview

BLOGROLL 3.5.0.a, Supplemental Patch for version Q3F-B (unlicenseed users must use the previous patch UPDGRADE)
For folding, spindling, mutilating... abbreviated to suit strict column width... full titles embedded in links...

ABOVE THE FOLD

AL Daily
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TEAR OFF YOUR OWN HEAD

Ron Rosenbaum on FLIGHT 93

COMING SOON

METANEWS links, Classical roundup, Annette Bening as MRS HARRIS, and JUICY QUOTES FROM OBVIOUS SOURCES...

Just do it.