Entries Tagged 'music' ↓

Here’s a straw in the wind that I’ve been waiting for, and a possible indication that our pop culture may soon begin to catch up with 21st-century reality.

The Independent reports that the Brits’ love affair with memoirs about misery and wretchedness is over.

Depravity, drink, drug addiction and abuse are hardly the most uplifting subjects for a leisurely read. But for years, misery memoirs have been the toast of the book world, with stories of human suffering generating huge sales. But new figures suggest readers have reached their pain threshold and the mis lit boom may be over.

At its height, profits topped £24m a year and authors could be sure that the more they plumbed the depths of despair and depravity, the deeper publishers would reach into their pockets. But industry research firm Nielsen now estimates that sales for the top 10 best-selling misery memoirs will be down from £3.87m last year to £2.59m this year.

Regular readers know that I’ve been appalled at the poverty of imagination that’s been on display in the pop culture for a long time. The wretched-family-and-dysfunctional-child memoir has been one of the most prominent features of this trend. There is no more grappling with big ideas in the culture; instead there’s the obsessive focus on the minutiae of miserable everyday life and on the unique ways in which individuals suffer their particular wretchedness.

It’s a fucking bore! Leon Wieseltier agrees with me (sorta)!

The decline of The New York Times remains worthy of comment, as does the poverty of imagination in American theater and film.

I’m no expert, and there are plenty of people discussing the culture, in depth, all over the interwebs. What I am, though, is a very disappointed reader and movie-goer, because I’m not being presented with any big stories and big themes—books or music or movies or plays that address things that are way larger than individuals and larger even than the sum of individuals—that get my juices flowing.

Two decades ago Tom Wolfe called for more novelists to stalk what he called the “Billion-Footed Beast“ (subscription to Harper’s required). You can read all about it here, at the NYT blog Paper Cuts.

Wolfe has for decades complained that in about 1960 American novelists made the decision to turn inward, to take their work in abstruse directions and to reject realism. All this was a disaster, Wolfe has maintained, especially because the social changes in America during this period offered such rich material. With “Bonfire,” he set out to reclaim the ground once occupied by Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, James T. Farrell and the other Americans of the first half of the 20th century who wrote in the tradition of Balzac, Dickens and Zola.

About two years after “Bonfire” came out, Wolfe published a famous essay in Harper’s, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” (subscription required) laying out his theory in detail, and what really struck me while reading it again was that he could have written it yesterday and hardly changed a thing. He has gained no followers.  [e.a.]

More’s the pity. There is one exception: Jonathan Franzen, whose novel The Corrections was in fact a correction to the obsessive inward-looking trend in writers—a sprawling social novel in the tradition that Tom Wolfe had talked about (albeit, one with postmodern touches as well)—as James Collins notes in Paper Cuts:

The only book I can think of that has reached for something like the same realistic density, sweep and accessibility is “The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen. But the core of that book is a bourgeois family drama, and so it is really more like a gargantuan short story than a novel of the type that Dickens or Balzac would recognize.

Franzen himself addressed the discouraging landscape of contemporary fiction in a 2002 essay titled “Mr. Difficult,” in the New Yorker. It’s not available online. It provoked a dispute between him and Ben Marcus a few years later; discussion here.

Though Marcus’ essay extends over 13 pages of small text, at its core is a very simple premise: Contemporary American fiction has lost its innovative edge and its interest in language as art, and Jonathan Franzen is largely, if not exclusively, to blame. In particular, Marcus focuses on Franzen’s 2002 essay “Mr. Difficult,” in which Franzen chronicles his growing disenchantment with the novels of William Gaddis, and more generally with the modernist-inspired ideal of “difficult” literature—the belief that “the greatest novels were tricky in their methods, resisted casual reading, and merited sustained study.” Writers like Gaddis, Franzen argues, are “Status” authors, who see themselves (again, in the modernist mold) as obligated only to their art, and who for the most part ignore the interests and desires of the reader. With some reluctance, Franzen places himself in an opposing camp: “Contract” authors, who place a high value on the relationship between narrator and reader, who primarily see the novel as a device for social and cultural communication, and who take human life (rather than, say, language or ideas per se) as the ultimate subject of their fiction.

While I’m waiting for all these novelists to sort themselves out and to start to grapple with 21st-century realities—and there’s a new generation of writers who seem eager to engage—I enjoy dipping into old pop culture favorites.

Like this 1961 movie (based on—gasp!—a trilogy of books! in French! which inspired a Broadway musical!), which was featured on TCM last night:

Watching the Oscars paid off!

I loved the movie Once!

And the song “Falling Slowly”

And I love Glen Hansard for saying: “Make art! Make art!”

And I love Jon Stewart for bringing Marketa Irglova back out onstage to get her moment to encourage artists everywhere!

Wooohooo!

But, sadly, Neil Young has

lost all hope that music can change the world …

He made the remarks while presenting a documentary about a 2006 antiwar tour that he took with Crosby and Stills and Nash, reports the New York Times.

Wait. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young had a reunion tour in 2006? Oops! Missed it!

Anway,

“I know that the time when music could change the world is past,” Mr. Young said. “I really doubt that a single song can make a difference. It is a reality.”

Indeed it is. Sad, that.

Mr. Young made no distinction between the Vietnam War, during which Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young earned a reputation for political activism, and the war in Iraq, which their tour condemned with songs like “Let’s Impeach the President.”

Hmmm, was it music that ended the Vietnam War? No difference between Vietnam and Iraqa? Eh, never mind. I still love ya, Neil.

Keep on rockin’ in the free world.

Whoever thought up and produced this Obama video is a PRopaganda^TMgenius. Not that the under-30 set isn’t entirely in Obama’s corner anyway, but this pretty much seals the deal in terms of putting Obama in the territory of “hip.”***

Though the effectiveness of the message-delivery system can’t be disputed, there is an obvious weakness in this kind of campaigning—and this kind of candidate—as Jeff Jarvis points out: It’s all rhetoric.

To me, this only underscores the notion that Obama’s campaign is the most rhetorical of the bunch: speeches and slogans so neat they can fit in 4/4 time.

I agree. The Obama campaign more and more begins to resemble a celebrity marketing campaign, as I mentioned here:

The way Barack Obama is being covered by the media and the blogosphere, he’s not a political candidate anymore—he’s a celebrity. He doesn’t have political followers—he’s got fans. He doesn’t have a political platform—he’s got a one-word slogan—”change” [which works, ’cause “change is good,” just like Nissan says, right?]. He makes narcissists feel so good about themselves.

So: the slogan has changed—now it’s “Yes, we can”—but the marketing pitch is the same: Obama’s the one.

Howard Kurtz tried to burst this bubble on Reliable Sources this morning [e.a.]:

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
HOWARD KURTZ, HOST (voice over): Conjuring Camelot. The media gets swept away over Ted Kennedy’s endorsement of Barack Obama. Are journalists promoting the rookie senator as the next JFK? …

KURTZ: The presidential campaign is a blur now, all sound bites and snippets, a 22-state dash to Super Tuesday just two days from now. John McCain has been boosted by winning Florida, by the backing of his formal rival, Rudy Giuliani, and by favorable coverage from the reporters he talked to for hours every day.

Hillary Clinton claimed victory in Florida, a beauty contest where no Democrats campaigned because of the a dispute within the party, but the press wasn’t buying her spin.

And Barack Obama, well, the pundits have been comparing him to JFK since he first started flirting with running. And when Ted Kennedy and Carolina Kennedy endorsed him this week, the media somehow magically transported us to this moment in 1961. …

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOHN F. KENNEDY, FMR. PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Let the word go forth from this time and place — to friend and foe alike — that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans. (END VIDEO CLIP)

KURTZ: Every anchor and correspondent, it seemed, picked up that metaphor and ran with it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BRIAN WILLIAMS, NBC NEWS: On the broadcast tonight from Washington, passing the torch.

KATIE COURIC, CBS NEWS: Tonight, passing the torch.

CHRIS MATTHEWS, MSNBC: The torch gets passed, the Clintons get passed by.

WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: Barack Obama touched by the legacy of Camelot.

HARRY SMITH, CBS NEWS: Ted and Caroline set to hit the campaign trail after they announced the heir to Camelot.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KURTZ: Why have the media gone haywire over this Kennedy endorsement?

The consensus of Kurtz’s panel? Because it makes for a great story. (regardless of what it means, if anything).

The media is all about storytelling. It is not about “the news.” Infotainment rules.

Beyond that: you can’t burst a successful PRopaganda^TM gambit with a lot of words. The only way to beat it is to create an even bigger, better, and eye-catching one.

The campaign ‘08 Battle of Iconography goes on.

————-

*** “He’s got soul,” said one of my son’s friends. Being New Yorkers, with everything that’s entailed (that is: living in a bubble of harmony and tolerance … especially now that Giuliani is no longer our mayor), my (young adult) kids and their friends don’t form a representative sample of youth, of course. But they serve as a bellwether of the attitude of their generation.

They feel betrayed. They feel that they were lied to. They want a reason to believe.

Benjamin Schwarz salutes Ol’ Blue Eyes:

With this new sensibility, which Pete Hamill has aptly termed the “Tender Tough Guy,” Sinatra created—as several of the pieces in this collection illuminate—the most important model of masculinity for a generation of Americans. He had transformed his persona from that of a skinny, boyish, even androgynous heartthrob with Brylcreemed curls, too-big jackets, sailor suits (!), and floppy bow ties into that of a suave man of authority and sensitivity in crisp, slim-line suits. He appealed not to teenage girls but to their mothers and fathers. The jazz critic Gary Giddins, one of the most astute writers on the singer, summed up the transformed Sinatra: “Above all, he was adult. He sang to adults.”

Yep.

on the stereo:

I’m in Havana, courtesy of Rubén González:

Me and Neil growing old together—what a treat.

Global politics enters the entertainment arena in Europe. The organizers of the cheesy Eurovision Song Contest, “notorious for the banality of its entries,” as The Times (London) puts it, are confronted with the problem of an Israeli band that sings about not wanting to be annihilated by A’jad (who was last seen yesterday making love to Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, who showed his appreciation by claiming that A’jad endorsed the Saudis’ 2002 peace plan for Israel and the Palestinians. Ha!).

Will Israeli peaceniks be allowed to participate in the world of global pop culture? With lyrics like this? [see this post for a discussion about how pop culture can work to dissipate conflict]

The world is full of terror

If someone makes an error

He’s gonna blow us up to biddy biddy kingdom come

There are some crazy rulers they hide and try to fool us

With demonic, technologic willingness to harm

They’re gonna push the button

Push the button push the bu push the bu push the button

And I don’t want to die; I want to see the flowers bloom

Don’t want a go capoot ka boom, and I don’t want to cry

I wanna have a lot of fun, just sitting in the sun

But nevertheless - he’s gonna push the button

Push the button push the bu push the bu push the button

The New York Times and the London Times quoted one of the contest organizers as saying: “It’s absolutely clear that this kind of message is not appropriate for the competition.” Why not? I wonder. Last year, as I recall (and wrote about here), a Finnish heavy-metal band with a rather unappealing Satan-worshipping “message” won the competition.

And an anti-war message is inappropriate in 2007? I’m not sure I get that.

Kobi Oz, the lead singer of the Israeli band whose song was voted into the competition by popular vote in Israel (those are the rules of entry), says:

“I’m not worked up over the issue, because I know our song is not political. …the song is about the state of humanity in general, whereby a minority has access to excessive power. The song could be about the terror in Russia or Spain, or the violence on the streets of England or France.

“Our way of dealing with terror it to laugh in its face. I think the Europeans should adopt this method as well.” [e.a.]

Good luck with that! I’ll be following along.

Here’s the divine Emmylou Harris singing “Love and Happiness“*** from

All the Roadrunning, by Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris, an inspired—and inspiring—collaboration.

——-
*** The You Tube clip is a bootleg—amateurish video layered over Emmylou singing this song live in November 2006. I think it’s the only live performance of this song available online. You Tube doesn’t permit embedding. View at your own risk. Yadda yadda yadda.

The clip sucks. Listen to the MP3 instead (click on the link above and scroll halfway down the page of the blog post that shows up, and thanks to the blog owner for the MP3).

Better yet: buy the disk. You will want to own it. I promise.

Listening to my iPod this morning, I got an adrenaline rush from some of the lyrics to ”No Retreat, No Surrender.”

‘Cause we made a promise we swore we’d always remember
No retreat, baby, no surrender
Blood brothers in the stormy night
With a vow to defend
No retreat, baby, no surrender

Now on the street tonight the lights grow dim
The walls of my room are closing in
There’s a war outside still raging
You say it ain’t ours anymore to win
I want to sleep beneath
Peaceful skies in my lover’s bed
With a wide open country in my eyes
And these romantic dreams in my head

Once we made a promise we swore we’d always remember
No retreat, baby, no surrender
Blood brothers in a stormy night
With a vow to defend
No retreat, baby, no surrender

Googling the lyrics, I came upon a little speech Bruce made as he campaigned for John Kerry in October 2004:

 I think the human principles of economic justice — just healing the sick, health care, feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, a living wage so folks don’t have to break their backs and still not make ends meet, the protection of our environment, a sane and responsible foreign policy, civil rights and the protection and safeguarding of our precious democracy here at home — I believe that Senator Kerry honors these ideals.

So let’s roll up our sleeves. That’s why I’m here today, to stand alongside Senator Kerry and to tell you that the country we carry in our hearts is waiting. And together we can move America towards her deepest ideals. And besides, we had a sax player in the [White] House — we need a guitar player in the White House.

Alright — this is for John. This is for you, John.

[Bruce launches into No Retreat, No Surrender]

Funny thing about those lyrics, though: Bruce sanitized them and made them safe for anti-war Democrats.

There’s a ”war outside still raging”? What war? There’s no war here.

We made a promise we swore we’d always remember
No retreat, believe me, no surrender
Blood brothers in the stormy night with a vow to defend
No retreat, believe me, no surrender

Now on the street tonight the lights grow dim
The walls of my room are closing in
But it’s good to see your smiling face and to hear your voice again
We could sleep in the twilight by the river side
With a wide open country in our hearts
And these romantic dreams in our heads

We made a promise…  

Fuck you, Bruce.

They say there’s a war outside still ragin’ and they say it ain’t ours anymore to win.

No retreat, baby. And no fucking surrender.

Sometimes they get it right: Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Then he went on to kick ass:

Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature this week, went on television Friday to criticize the French parliamentary vote that would make it a crime to deny that the Ottoman Turks’ mass killing of Armenians constituted genocide.

In a telephone interview broadcast live on the private television network NTV, Mr. Pamuk, who faced criminal charges for his statements acknowledging the massacre, said France had acted against its own fundamental principles of freedom of expression.

“The French tradition of critical thinking influenced and taught me a lot,” he said. “This decision, however, is a prohibition and didn’t suit the libertarian nature of the French tradition.” The legislation was approved by the lower house of Parliament, but it is uncertain whether the upper house will concur.

Bravo. Hate-speech laws suck. They’re illiberal.

————

The Journalist and the Jihadi aired on HBO. Among other things, this documentary it is a portrait of the grace and courage of Daniel Pearl’s loved ones: parents, sisters, wife, and friends.

Judea Pearl: ‘We have to defeat the hatred that took Danny’s life’

Visit the Daniel Pearl Foundation site and get inspired.

———————-

Also, I’ve been listening to this:

It’s awesome. Here’s what Rolling Stone has to say:

Jerry Lee Lewis is older and tougher than you. At seventy, he could eat your liver for breakfast, sleep with your kid sister and then burn down your house after a light lunch. So rounding up twenty-one heavy hitters (Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, Neil Young, etc.) for a Jerry Lee Lewis duets album either means that they’re paying their respects to one of the inventors of rock & roll, the wild man of the piano who came up with the sonic explosion that is “Great Balls of Fire”- or that they’re just afraid of what Jerry Lee would do to them if they said no.

I’ve been enjoying this:

and reading about the exhibit at the Morgan Library, Bob Dylan’s American Journey, 1956-1966

The exhibition examines the critical ten-year period that coincides with Dylan’s transformation from folk troubadour to rock innovator during a momentous, turbulent period of American history. …

The exhibition includes original typed and handwritten lyrics, rarely seen photographs, concert and television footage, posters and handbills of Dylan’s early performances in New York, and other artifacts. …

The exhibition follows Dylan to his debut on the national stage of the Greenwich Village folk scene—one of history’s most fascinating intersections of art, politics, and lifestyle—through to his massive fame as one of the first true rock stars and the man who “electrified” contemporary songwriting. This ten-year span encompasses the release of some of Dylan’s seminal albums, including The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde.

Morgan Library, New York City, till January 7, 2007

So says Louis Menand in his New Yorker Dylan retrospective about the years 1965-66:

At the same time that Dylan was putting out his first three electric albums … [“Bringing It All Back Home” (March, 1965), “Highway 61 Revisited” (August), and the double album “Blonde on Blonde” (May, 1966)], the Beatles released “Help” (August, 1965), “Rubber Soul” (December, 1965), and “Revolver” (August, 1966). It was a good time to be alive.

Yes, but we didn’t appreciate it, because we thought it was normal to live among an embarrassment of riches.

Whereas today, it’s normal to live among the richly embarrassing.

What a great piece from Menand (one of my favorite contemporary writers). Read the whole thing, and then read it again.

It is almost impossible to write a short Dylan piece and get at the essence of the mystery, but Menand does it—he separates the man from the myth and focuses on the music…which is what the man has always wanted us to do anyway. And oh does it make the music shine!

This gem was written by somebody protesting the “Support Israel” rally in Chicago.

(via Power Line)

On behalf of my people, I apologize for taking “their” falafel.

I gave some of it back tonight—I stopped off at Mamoun’s after seeing my main man in I’m Your Man.