October 2007 Archives

A Paler Shade of White by Sasha Frere-Jones
in the New Yorker

The first and most obvious point is: here's an essay that's long overdue, of the stripe the New Yorker should have been running for at least the past twenty-thirty years, ever since Ellen Willis left. The color line is still the most dramatic, obvious, blatant, screaming-in-silence issue facing pop music today, as it ever was.

Second, Frere-Jones's point about indie rock forsaking African rhythms is quite well-supported, on through to his points about Eminem ("the exception that proves the rule"), but he leaves out Beck ENTIRELY, which is a major editorial oversight. Beck is perhaps indie-rock's Godfather, the patron saint of lo-fi sampling, an intriguing character who dominates the indie field with hit albums and a sizzling stage show (where he's James Brown trapped in the body of Bill Gates), and crosses over to persuasive, largely unsentimental folk (MUTATIONS and SEA CHANGE). Beck's commitment to rhythm is overt, and yet he's not only missing from this essay, so far he's also missing from all the feedback comments.

Then there's Dylan, whose early embrace of R&B caused a sensation, but he's largely dropped same over the past, oh, twenty years (exceptional rule-prover: LOVE AND THEFT), yet still charms critics who oughtta know better. How does he fit into this scheme? He's an indie God too, right?

"The only thing that I got's been botherin' me my whole life..." Is there a Springsteen line more suited to Win Butler? (via Zoilus)
Setlist via Backstreets
More at the Riley Rock Index.com page on YouTube

Sign of the Times: Scott Peley's 60 Minutes interview with Bruce Springsteen approaches his anti-war stance so gingerly: "You know some people are going to say Bruce Springsteen is no patriot..." How different is that from O'Reilly saying "Why do you hate America?" It may be a tad more polite, but it's basically the same lame-ass question. As if poll after poll hasn't revealed that anti-war sentiment is at an all-time high, that the public rates Congress even lower than the President for refusing to put a stop to it. As though this anti-war stuff, whew, that's taking a BIG CHANCE with your audience, right Bruce? This is plain silliness, and if half the Democrats responded with the confidence and aplomb that Bruce did we'd be in a lot better shape.

Magic has grown on me: I can't stop listening to "Girls In Their Summer Clothes," and the retro touches only make it more endearing -- those bells, those tom-toms. "Your Own Worst Enemy" starts to sound like the voice inside Bush's own head. Stephen Deusner maps most of the references, but I even like how the album starts by quoting Blue Oyster Cult's "Reaper" and then works in "Mystery Train," or how all that radio candy production is so ironic since it won't get played, and even if it does, it won't get heard.

Notes on opening night of Bruce Springsteen's MAGIC TOUR with the E Street Band Hartford Civic Center, Connecticut October 2, 2007

(Listen today, Thursday 10/4, for the WBUR story, podcast archived this afternoon.)

LEAD: Bruce Springsteen, a spry 58 years young, proved once again that rock'n'roll is not just for kids Tuesday night in launching his latest world tour at the Hartford Civic Center. His new album is called MAGIC, and there was plenty of that as a crowd of 10,000 roared BROOOOCE and sang along with every song, including some released just a few hours earlier.

For his first tour with the E Street Band since 2003's The Rising, Springsteen led his longtime crew of nine backup musicians through a set that mixed topical commentary with his older hits ("Promised Land" and "Born to Run") for a set that argued for his catalog's continuing relevance in the digital downloading era.

KEY THEMES:

Rock'n'roll is not just for and about teenagers anymore... Springsteen digs into his older material as though there's still a lot left to discover there, and he makes youghtful rebellion like "Badlands" and "She's the One" mean completely different things when sung by a greying married father of three...

Springsteen's bond with his audience is matched only by his bond with his muse: he keeps working on his songwriting so his material is both relevant and sturdier than his earlier, more earnest pieces. A lot of the songs on this new album are rousingly melancholic, he described this era as an "Orwellian moment" in political history, and yet he still turns in a show that is achingly jubiliant. "Last to Die" is built around John Kerry's famous anti-war congressional sound-bite that got inverted by the Swift Boat ads. Another song from MAGIC, "Long Walk Home," talks about the flag down at the courthouse that declares "some things are set in stone..." and yet the song is clearly about disillusionment with America's neo-imperialist adventures... how does Springsteen pull off such bitterness without turning sour? By skirting sentimentality, nostalgia and cant, and grinning down self-seriousness at every turn.

Among the varied ways rock stars have answered the challenge of getting older with the style without turning into self-parodies, Springsteen's is among the more persuasive. He's still got the most energy in the room, pushes his hard rock songs without thinning them out, and has a hard time leaving the stage -- he pushes on, encore after encore, after everybody else is drenched with excitement. Compared to the Rolling Stones (in denial about aging) or Dylan (mordantly embracing death), Springsteen comes across as perfectly comfortable approaching his seventh decade of life and rocking just as hard as you please. He's not embarrassed in the slightest by some of his goofier lyrics and dresses up familiar songs in new arrangements to startling effect...

It's not a comeback because he's always been so productive, but this tour presents Springsteen at his finest, with musicians who inhabit the songs with ambition and intimacy, and a legacy that keeps on rewarding repeated listenings.

Ho-hum, another knockout grand-slam expectation-bursting night from Bruce Springsteen....

COMPLETE SET LIST: Radio Nowhere/The Ties That Bind/Lonesome Day/Gypsy Biker/Magic/Reason to Believe/Night/She's the One/Livin' in the Future/The Promised Land/Town Called Heartbreak/Darkness on the Edge of Town/Darlington County/Devil's Arcade/The Rising/Last to Die/Long Walk Home/Badlands

Encores: Girls in Their Summer Clothes/Thundercrack/Born to Run/Waitin' on a Sunny Day/American Land (via Backstreets)

Last season was marked by two high-profile flameouts, one network, the other cable. Aaron Sorkin dumped West Wing, which although self-important (especially that 9/11 episode) and pompous and winded and haughty sported cracking dialogue, snappy performances, plot out the wazoo and a President on the couch about his abusive father. Sorkin's follow-up? Studio 60 On the Sunset Strip, which wallowed in self-pity and dramedy cliches, even as Amanda Peet transcended its hoariest damsel-in-distress cliches. This was a show about comedy that asked its audience to bring the laughs without serving up the funny. And Sorkin wailed on network mentalities far better at the end of Sports Night, now a classic. Unexpected turnaround: Matthew Perry was hard not to like.

David Milch dumped Deadwood, about the organic swelling up of law and civilization from the slimy, expletive-ridden dirt of the genre's wild wild west to make most other westerns look meek, and turned Timothy Olyphant into a "star." You had to admire Milch: if David Chase's Sopranos was supposed to extend Coppola's Godfather, Deadwood made mincemeat of Milch's parallel genre -- America's defining metaphors as a hollowed out drunk tank/gambler's den. Milch's follow-up? John from Cincinnati, which wallowed in self-pity and hoary cliches and worst of all... CHRIST metaphors until the best thing about it was its dreamy opening surf sequence (surfers are the new cowboys). There's supposed to be a Deadwood feature film, which could redeem all this but only just. Hurray for the return of Rebecca DeMornay, a respectable comeback Luke Perry (the new Matthew Perry), and an impossibly weird and broad wink of a turn from Austin Nichols in the title role.

But even all this quickly PALED when compared to MAD MEN, finishing up its first season on AMC... this time the title sequence ("falling man") blows while the scripts and performances have all been first-rate. Already this show sports two indelible images: January Jones as suburban housewife Betty Draper, the unknowing subject of Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique, pumping shells from her shotgun at her neighbor's pigeons while sucking hard on her cigarette; and Maggie Siff as Rachel, the heiress to her father's department store empire, explaining Zionism to Don Draper (and star, Jon Hamm) as he tries to pick her up over lunch. Tobacco, misogyny, ad culture as frat culture, the pre-Kennedy era as mutable force, anti-semites dreaming up Israeli tourism campaigns... Yeah, HBO's Tell Me You Love Me gives you naked testes but its characters are weepy clichés (except for Ally Walker, who could make you cry reading the phone book. Character as a self-destructive suburban housewife under the spell of her street pimp on last season's The Shield sent her into aesthetic hyperspace.) Mad Men stokes red-hot material before whacking it with a stick. Can't wait until that elevator operator gets his own episode and Nixon's defeat leads straight to Freedom Rides down South...