Another political season, filled with the venality and viciousness of a middle-school cat fight, has come and gone. It is very difficult not to be cynical about the brokenness of our two-party system and its ever-expanding ties to special interest groups and big business. In the words of the immortal political pundit Pete Townshend, "Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss." I'm not sure any of it really matters.
But some things do matter. I'm not cynical about them. My former pastor Rich Nathan, whose scrunched up face appears in this week's Newsweek Magazine (why is it that magazines always find the most unflattering pictures of evangelicals?), had some interesting things to say last week in a talk/debate with Jim Wallis in Columbus.
Can I just say that I love this guy, and that his prophetic but measured words make more sense than about 99.99% of the people I encounter inside or outside church?
Take it away, Rich ...
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It is a real privilege and pleasure to share a platform with Jim Wallis. My wife and I subscribed to Sojourners magazine before it was titled Sojourners back in the early 1970s. I think it was called Post-American back then and it was being published from Chicago, Illinois. As the old Virginia Slims advertisement used to go, “You’ve come a long way, baby!” My wife and I actually considered after college moving to Washington and joining the Sojourner’s community. So, I have appreciated Jim through his writings for over three decades.
Many of you don’t know me, so I will give you the briefest of autobiographies. I am a native New Yorker. I was raised in Queens, New York, in a conservative Jewish family. Like most Jews from New York, my family voted Democrat going back to at least the days of FDR. As a teenager, I participated in Vietnam War protests at the U.N. and in front of various corporations that were military suppliers for the Pentagon.
I became a follower of Jesus as a freshman in college at Case Western Reserve. It was through the witness of the woman who was to become my wife and, in particular, through the goodness and decency of her life, that Christianity became a credible option for me. And it was at a Passover dinner in 1974 that I surrendered my life to Jesus as my Lord and my Messiah.
Following that decision, I joined an evangelical church in Cleveland. And then, when my wife and I moved down to Columbus for me to attend law school, we joined a tiny non-denominational Christian community that has since grown and has become known as the Vineyard Church of Columbus. In 1987, I left my job teaching business law at OSU to become our church’s first senior pastor. I’ve been serving in the role of senior pastor of the Vineyard for the last 19 years.
So, in sum, I’ve spent my entire adult life inside the evangelical world. For those of you who are not familiar with what an “evangelical” is, we are people who take seriously what can be called “classical Christianity.” We really believe the historic creeds of the church – the Apostles, Nicene, and Chalcedonian Creeds. Like all classical Christians, we believe that God is a Trinity – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We evangelicals believe that Jesus Christ is God come in the flesh; that he was literally born of a virgin; that he suffered under Pontius Pilate; that he was crucified, dead, and buried, and rose bodily from the dead. We evangelicals believe that Christ ascended into heaven and that he is one day going to come back to judge the living and the dead. So we believe what classical Christians have always believed and taught throughout the 2000 years of church history.
And as children of the Reformation, we also believe that the Bible is our final authority for faith and practice.
Now, up until 1980 you could find prominent evangelicals in both the Republican and Democratic parties. Billy Graham was a model of bi-partisan influence. But in 1980 there was a shift in the evangelical world, and with the election of Ronald Reagan you saw evangelicals essentially line up behind one party – the Republican Party. In the last Presidential election, 75% of white evangelicals voted Republican.
During the 1980s and 1990s the most prominent television and radio evangelicals – people like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Kennedy, and James Dobson – began to influentially redefine evangelical political involvement as exclusively confined to the Republican political agenda.
But as I travel around the country and interact with a wide variety of evangelical leaders, I have discovered a changing landscape. I believe we are going to see an entirely new trajectory for evangelical political involvement over the next decade. Let me tick off five developments among evangelical leaders and lay people that I am particularly grateful for.
First of all, I am grateful that there is a broadening of the list of people who are now considered spokespersons for the evangelical movement. There are lots of us evangelicals who have found ourselves increasingly uncomfortable with the media’s selection of a few people of decidedly conservative politics who are regularly called our spokespeople. Whenever I hear this handful of people talk, I think, "This person doesn’t speak for me." When did anti-gun control through an expansive read of the Second Amendment become a Christian issue?
Don’t you hate it when someone’s views are 180 degrees out of sync with yours and yet they are called your spokesperson? You say, “When did I vote for them?”
I’m grateful that there is a broadening of who are considered spokespersons for the evangelical movement. Not only is Jim Wallis being widely quoted, but so are folks like Rick Warren, and Tony Campolo, and Miroslav Volf from Yale University, and Richard Hays from Duke. These folks wonderfully broaden the spectrum of evangelical influencers.
Second, I’m grateful that there is a broadening of the evangelical agenda beyond the two hot-button issues of abortion and gay marriage. Evangelicals are saying, “How did we ever allow ourselves to become convinced that the entirety of the biblical agenda for our political involvement can be reduced to just two things – abortion and gay marriage?”
Now, like most evangelicals, I am convinced that abortion is a huge issue for which we must take a radical stand in opposition. I believe that the whole trajectory of gospel witness calls us to an inclusiveness towards those we call our neighbor. So in the parable of the Good Samaritan Jesus asks: Which of these was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers? Evangelicals believe that we are called to be the neighbor of the least powerful in the world – the unborn, the woman who finds herself with an unwanted pregnancy, the severely handicapped, and the elderly. That is why we evangelicals virtually unanimously oppose abortion on demand, partial birth abortions, and doctor-assisted suicides. That is also why we evangelicals have stood with women through their pregnancies via the many pregnancy distress centers set up throughout our nation by evangelicals.
It is also certainly the case that we, as a society, must provide necessary support for women and children not only during the 9 months of pregnancy, but also after. But, I have to be honest with you and tell you that I was quite disappointed with the statement on abortion that is in the “Voting God’s Politics” brochure. While the statement regarding capital punishment is absolute and unequivocal, stating “our nation’s use of the death penalty should end,” the statement on abortion waffles and calls for “common ground policies that dramatically reduce the abortion rate.” We lawyers would say that the abortion statement contains “weasel words.” I believe the statement on abortion needs to be more absolute.
Having said that, I am so grateful that there is a broadening of the evangelical agenda that expands beyond abortion and gay marriage. There are many evangelicals coming out in opposition to global warming. There are more evangelicals speaking out about global poverty and the relief of Third World debt and AIDS. And I’m proud of the fact that evangelicals are taking the lead on some of the world’s most pressing issues. Specifically, it is largely the evangelical public that keeps the crisis in the Darfur region from being buried by the headlines of rising gas prices and falling tax rates. It is evangelicals who refuse to allow the President or the Congress to forget the Darfur region. And it is largely evangelicals who have kept global sex trade on the front burner for this administration. In fact, an evangelical organization called the International Justice Mission has led the way in fighting global sex trafficking.
Third, I’m grateful that evangelicals are moving away from our prior unreserved, unquestioning support for American military action around the world. Many evangelicals are now saying, “How did it come to be that we who claim to follow the Prince of Peace are stauncher advocates of war than any other demographic group in America?” And even those of us who do not come from a pacifist tradition, but rather a just-war tradition, have begun to ask, “How can some of our most recent wars be considered just?”
You know, St. Augustine, the father of the just war tradition, said that Christians may, on occasion, legitimately go to war. But we always do so with great reluctance and with tears.
Many of us evangelicals have asked ourselves, "Shouldn’t we Christians be the most difficult to convince of any group of people regarding the legitimacy of war? Shouldn’t we have the strongest presumption against war and require the government to have the highest burden of proof before we reluctantly, and with tears, go along with war?"
I am grateful that I am seeing a shift away from unreserved, unquestioning support for American military action among evangelicals.
Fourth, I am grateful that I am witnessing a shift among evangelicals towards the view that with God’s help, it is possible to change this world. The traditional evangelical view of the world is that the world is hopelessly fallen. Or to use the great 19th century evangelist, D.L. Moody’s line, “The world has hit an iceberg and the ship is going down. The only thing we can do is pull as many people as possible into the life boats.” So, for a century, many evangelicals have believed that it is an absolute waste of time to try to improve this fallen world, since to do so would be like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
But without being naïve regarding the fallenness of this world, or the difficulty of change, there are many evangelicals who are saying, "world change is possible with God’s help." In just the past fifteen years, we have witnessed the Roman Catholic Church rise up under the leadership of Pope John Paul II and throw off the chains of communism. We witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall. We saw the church rise up under the leadership of Bishop Desmond Tutu in South Africa; and we saw the fall of the apartheid government. Christians largely led the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine. It was Christians under the leadership of William Wilberforce who led the anti-slavery movement in the British empire. The American civil rights movement at its inception was largely led by the church.
I am grateful to see a growing hope among us evangelicals, that with God’s help the world can change.
And fifth, I am grateful that many more evangelicals are saying, "We are not going to be in the pocket of any political party." We have woken up from our naiveté and we recognize that pre-election day promises have not translated into post-election day action. So the evangelical vote is more and more up for grabs. And that is a good thing!
Now, having stated what I’m grateful for, I need to briefly share with you three cautions regarding evangelical political involvement. I want you to notice, by the way, that my talk has more positives than negatives. The Puritans said that one of the measures of the truth of a sermon was that there would be more positives than negatives.
My first concern is to warn churches and pastors against partisan political involvements. It is impossible to be a biblical Christian without preaching on and working for justice, for the poor, or caring for the earth, or committing ourselves to peacemaking, or committing ourselves to racial reconciliation, or being commitedly and consistently pro-life. But once churches and pastors begin to translate these broad value statements into very particular policy choices, we can unnecessarily divide the body of Christ and obscure the gospel message.
I am concerned that in many congregations people feel like they have to go through two conversions in order to receive Christ. First, they have to be converted to the church’s partisan political views, and secondly, they have to be converted to Christ.
I believe that it is generally best for pastors and churches to serve as spiritual advisors for those whose calling it is to engage in the political arena. We have many people in our congregation who are involved in politics on both sides of the aisle – both Democrats and Republicans. I hold up as personal models for me John Wesley and Charles Simeon, who taught the scriptures faithfully, who advised and prayed for and promoted biblical thinking among those involved in the political arena. But then they left it to groupings of Christians outside of the church and new societies such as the abolitionist societies to fight these issues through in the legislature.
I recently had very painful conversation with a Christian pastor here in town. His congregation is quite partisan and definitely leans in one direction politically. I asked my Christian brother about this, saying, “If someone was in your church and they were a sincere follower of Christ, but they disagreed with you about your political stands, would they feel marginalized in your church?”
He said, “Yes, they would.”
I asked, “Why would you do that to a member of the body of Christ?”
I’m concerned when partisan positions unnecessarily divide the body and obscure the message of the gospel.
I’m also concerned when churches don’t realize that the church uses different language than the language of politics. Let me tell you a story.
There was a great hero of the civil rights movement that many of you may not have ever heard of. Her name was Fannie Lou Hamer. Fannie Lou Hamer was the founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. In the summer of 1964, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party challenged the credentials of the lily-white Mississippi slate of delegates to the Democratic National Convention. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party offered an integrated slate of delegates, many of whom, like Mrs. Hamer, tried to register to vote in Mississippi, but were punished for it. In fact, Fannie Lou Hamer was jailed on a number of occasions, and tortured in jail, for doing such outrageous things as trying to register to vote in the United States.
Well, this conflict between the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and the white slate of delegates selected by the Mississippi Democratic Party was threatening the peace of the 1964 Democratic National Convention. President Johnson didn’t want the controversy to upset his ride to the White House, so he sent his Vice President, Hubert Humphrey, to visit Mrs. Hamer and to try to get her to back off.
Humphrey, who was the ever-happy warrior, went believing that he was just going to be talking to a typical politically motivated human being. So he asked Fannie Lou Hamer what she wanted. Now Fannie Lou Hamer was a woman who had been taken hold of by Jesus Christ. And Fannie Lou Hamer responded to Vice President Humphrey by saying, “What I want is the beginning of a new kingdom right here on earth.” Humphrey didn’t know how to deal with that statement. So he tried to explain things in political terms. He wanted Fannie Lou Hamer to understand that if he and Johnson were nominated, that they would work hard for Civil Rights, so she should compromise now and not push her slate of delegates.
Here’s Fannie Lou Hamer’s response:
Senator Humphrey, I know lots of people in Mississippi who have lost their jobs for trying to register to vote. I had to leave the plantation where I worked in Sunflower County. Now, if you lose this job of Vice President because you do what is right, because you help MFDP, everything will be all right. God will take care of you. But if you take the nomination this way, why, you will never be able to do any good for civil rights, for poor people, for peace, or any of those things you talk all the time about. Senator Humphrey, I’m going to pray to Jesus for you.
Churches ought to speak prophetic language, not political language. It is not wrong to speak the language of politics, the language of compromise and “half a loaf is better than none,” when we are in the political arena. But church is not that arena. In church we speak prophetic language, the language of kingdom absolutes and moral imperatives – the language of Fannie Lou Hamer and the prophets Amos and Jeremiah, and our Lord Jesus Christ.
My third concern is that we Christians, whenever we engage in politics, remember the third and last clause of Micah 6:8. You remember Micah 6:8. “He has shown you, O people, what is good and what does the Lord require of you? To do justice, and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” Christians in politics often focus on the first two statements, doing justice and loving mercy. But there is an atmosphere in which our doing justice and our loving of mercy needs to be practiced. One of the great dangers of any human being wanting to do justice is having a self-righteous, ugly, divisive, mentality, this sense of moral superiority in which the zealot for justice approaches the world: "Only people like me care about the poor. Only people like me care about the environment. Only people like me care about the unborn. Only people like me are really in touch with the true issues of the world."
What saves us from the awful stench of self-righteous, moral indignation is a commitment to walk humbly with God. We followers of Jesus can never approach the rest of the church or the rest of the world with some kind of triumphalism – we can fix everything; we can solve every problem; if people would just get on board with our agenda, the world would be healed.
God continually reminds us that we are limited. Life continually teaches us that there are issues and problems that go far beyond our wisdom and our resources. Real change is always much more difficult than we ever predict. And no one ever likes someone standing over them judging them.
But if we Christians come towards this world as servants, bearing the basin and the towel; if we commit ourselves to doing what we believe to be the will of God with humility; if we approach each other with humility and a willingness to listen and be persuaded; to learn and to be reconcilers; if, in other words, we “walk humbly with God,” then we will be faithful witnesses to Christ and will be used by him to be healers of this world.
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
Monday, November 06, 2006
The Universal Language?
More fodder from the Arts and Faith forum …The subject here is “music as the universal language.”
I don't think there is something inherent in the music itself that speaks to its hearers in a consistent way. Music is not the universal language. Or, perhaps better, music is a universal language that speaks with six billion tongues. I cannot tell you how radically different the same piece of music will sound to two equally sensitive, intelligent, spiritually attuned human beings. I have a good friend who experiences something approaching a spiritual epiphany whenever he slaps on Metallica. I hear the same music and want to stick a fork in my eye. There are genres of music I simply don't like, even though I know that millions of people find tremendous value in them. Music helps me understand what the word "joy" even means, and sometimes makes me want to worship God, and I've played that same transcendent music for people I love and I've met with uncomprehending stares.
That's not in any way to detract from the notion that music reaches people in remarkably powerful ways. It does, and I firmly believe that God uses it in countless good ways in peoples' lives. But there's no formula, nor are there instruments, melodies, chords, rhythms or any other components of music that universally communicate a specific meaning. I listen to music for a lot of reasons, and sometimes I'm simply looking to be entertained and mildly engaged. But sometimes something amazing happens. I apologize for quoting a review, but I'm too lazy to formulate this again, and it really does express what I'm trying to communicate:
"Lead singer/cherub Jonsi played his electric guitar with a bow, like a mutant cello, and made unearthly sounds with his voice. “Eeeeeuuuuu Syyyyyy Ohhhhhh” he sang on at least six songs, his falsetto soaring impossibly upward. It’s Hopelandic, a made-up language based on nonsense syllables and his native Icelandic, but I’d prefer to think of it as the angelic dialect of the heart. That mysterious phrase, repeated many times, sounded at various times like longing, yearning, grief, sorrow, joy, the unanswerable questions you hurl at God when your best friend dies of cancer, the wordless cry of joy when you witness the birth of your child, a thousand other moments of spiritual combustibility and incandescence that cannot be contained by cognitive knowledge and understanding. If it sounds trippy, it is. The gauze curtain that the band sometimes played behind, accenting shimmering shadows and spectral shapes, and the late ‘60s Pink Floyd freakout lightshow, only added to that impression. But that’s the territory explored by this band. It has nothing to do with objective communication, and everything to do with hotwiring the soul to the ineffable and the sublime."
Sometimes that happens. Those experiences in and of themselves can become idols, and the danger is in enshrining them and seeking them out rather than recognizing that they point to the author of all beauty. But those are incredibly meaningful experiences when they happen. That makes music pretty important, in my view. But good luck in trying to find the common musical denominator in those experiences.
I've had people express to me, on hearing such a view, that they find that it's steeped in relativism. I don't think so. I think it's kind of cool to love and serve a God who has found at least six billion ways to reach people.
And now, yet another take on “how can bad people create good music?”
There is a conundrum for me here and I can’t fully resolve it. If what you write is true, then the entire Miles Davis package – music, image, persona, personal life, whatever it was that drove his personal life – ought to come out in his art. You see that package, as a whole, as one containing serious moral flaws. And I do too. He was not a good man. The image that he portrayed is not one that I would encourage others to emulate. He engaged in behaviors that were certainly sinful. And, according to what you’ve stated above, all that badness should leak out at various points in what he created.
But here’s the conundrum: For me, this same vile dude created music that leads to the kind of transcendent experiences that I described above. I listen to Kind of Blue, the same album that has served as the backdrop to countless makeout sessions, and hear the angels. There is a song on that album called “Blue in Green,” a song co-written by Davis and pianist Bill Evans, another vile dude who has been a part of the recent conversation. I’ve listened to it hundreds of times, and it never fails to move me and startle me. It’s ravishingly beautiful. I could throw a bunch of other superlatives around, but none of them would really get at what happens. It’s something that draws me closer to God, that makes me want to worship the Creator. And it was made by sexist, violent, addicted, self-absorbed people.
All I can tell you is that personal history and worldview and image are real, that they’re significant aspects of any artist, and that they may not matter a bit in terms of how one hears the music. At least that’s my take on it.
I don't think there is something inherent in the music itself that speaks to its hearers in a consistent way. Music is not the universal language. Or, perhaps better, music is a universal language that speaks with six billion tongues. I cannot tell you how radically different the same piece of music will sound to two equally sensitive, intelligent, spiritually attuned human beings. I have a good friend who experiences something approaching a spiritual epiphany whenever he slaps on Metallica. I hear the same music and want to stick a fork in my eye. There are genres of music I simply don't like, even though I know that millions of people find tremendous value in them. Music helps me understand what the word "joy" even means, and sometimes makes me want to worship God, and I've played that same transcendent music for people I love and I've met with uncomprehending stares.
That's not in any way to detract from the notion that music reaches people in remarkably powerful ways. It does, and I firmly believe that God uses it in countless good ways in peoples' lives. But there's no formula, nor are there instruments, melodies, chords, rhythms or any other components of music that universally communicate a specific meaning. I listen to music for a lot of reasons, and sometimes I'm simply looking to be entertained and mildly engaged. But sometimes something amazing happens. I apologize for quoting a review, but I'm too lazy to formulate this again, and it really does express what I'm trying to communicate:
"Lead singer/cherub Jonsi played his electric guitar with a bow, like a mutant cello, and made unearthly sounds with his voice. “Eeeeeuuuuu Syyyyyy Ohhhhhh” he sang on at least six songs, his falsetto soaring impossibly upward. It’s Hopelandic, a made-up language based on nonsense syllables and his native Icelandic, but I’d prefer to think of it as the angelic dialect of the heart. That mysterious phrase, repeated many times, sounded at various times like longing, yearning, grief, sorrow, joy, the unanswerable questions you hurl at God when your best friend dies of cancer, the wordless cry of joy when you witness the birth of your child, a thousand other moments of spiritual combustibility and incandescence that cannot be contained by cognitive knowledge and understanding. If it sounds trippy, it is. The gauze curtain that the band sometimes played behind, accenting shimmering shadows and spectral shapes, and the late ‘60s Pink Floyd freakout lightshow, only added to that impression. But that’s the territory explored by this band. It has nothing to do with objective communication, and everything to do with hotwiring the soul to the ineffable and the sublime."
Sometimes that happens. Those experiences in and of themselves can become idols, and the danger is in enshrining them and seeking them out rather than recognizing that they point to the author of all beauty. But those are incredibly meaningful experiences when they happen. That makes music pretty important, in my view. But good luck in trying to find the common musical denominator in those experiences.
I've had people express to me, on hearing such a view, that they find that it's steeped in relativism. I don't think so. I think it's kind of cool to love and serve a God who has found at least six billion ways to reach people.
And now, yet another take on “how can bad people create good music?”
There is a conundrum for me here and I can’t fully resolve it. If what you write is true, then the entire Miles Davis package – music, image, persona, personal life, whatever it was that drove his personal life – ought to come out in his art. You see that package, as a whole, as one containing serious moral flaws. And I do too. He was not a good man. The image that he portrayed is not one that I would encourage others to emulate. He engaged in behaviors that were certainly sinful. And, according to what you’ve stated above, all that badness should leak out at various points in what he created.
But here’s the conundrum: For me, this same vile dude created music that leads to the kind of transcendent experiences that I described above. I listen to Kind of Blue, the same album that has served as the backdrop to countless makeout sessions, and hear the angels. There is a song on that album called “Blue in Green,” a song co-written by Davis and pianist Bill Evans, another vile dude who has been a part of the recent conversation. I’ve listened to it hundreds of times, and it never fails to move me and startle me. It’s ravishingly beautiful. I could throw a bunch of other superlatives around, but none of them would really get at what happens. It’s something that draws me closer to God, that makes me want to worship the Creator. And it was made by sexist, violent, addicted, self-absorbed people.
All I can tell you is that personal history and worldview and image are real, that they’re significant aspects of any artist, and that they may not matter a bit in terms of how one hears the music. At least that’s my take on it.
Thursday, November 02, 2006
Favorite Songs of 2006 (So Far)
With the advent of the iPod and its insidious Shuffle Mode, I find myself more and more focused on individual songs and less and less focused on albums. This is not necessarily a good thing, but it has led to a renewed appreciation of the song as a viable unit of musical goodness.
These are some of the songs that have meant the most to me this year. Most of them come from albums I like a lot as well, but a few of them are gems surrounded by dross. In no particular order, other than alphabetical:
1. Apples in Stereo – Beautiful Machine, Parts 1 – 4 – An eight-minute psychedelic freakout that reminds me of all that was weird and great about the late ‘60s.
2. The BellRays – Third Time’s the Charm – This is Stax/Volt soul forty years after the fact. And it’s great, although very different from the rest of the album, which is Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath thirty-five years after the fact.
3. Birdmonster – ‘Cause You Can – The Strokes, sped up, with a lead singer who sounds unhinged instead of bored.
4. T-Bone Burnett – Every Time I Feel the Shift – The best political commentary I’ve heard this year, with ominous Orc drums for accompaniment.
5. Camera Obscura – Lloyd, I’m Ready to be Heartbroken – Sad, lovely, and sweet in a Phil Spector Girl Group kind of way.
6. Johnny Cash – Like the 309 – Johnny sounds broken, old, and barely hanging on. Which he was. And that lends a certain creepiness to this death-haunted song, but also a great sadness, and a great dignity.
7. Catfish Haven – I Don’t Worry – A white guy from Chicago tries to sing like Otis Redding, and mostly succeeds. For this song, at least.
8. The Decemberists – Yankee Bayonet – Your basic jangle pop song about a soldier dying at the battle of Manassas, and the pregnant girl he left behind.
9. Donald Fagen – Brite Nitegown – The Grim Reaper as Funkmaster. Three verses, three different ways to die, and you can shake your booty to it.
10. The Gibson Brothers – We Won’t Dance Again – I am a sucker for cornball country schmaltz. This is cornball country schmaltz of the highest order, involving mournful fiddle, a sobbing pedal steel, and a deathbed confession of love. But it’s so sweet, and so unaffected, that I can’t help but cry in my beer.
11. Gnarls Barkley – Crazy – Pure fun. Probably the best single this year.
12. Gomez – See the World – Do you recall the era when Michael Stipe could both enunciate and still write memorable songs? This will help you remember in case you forgot.
13. The Hold Steady – Stuck Between Stations – Great lyrics, power chords, references to Jack Kerouac and John Berryman, and an ode to disaffected youth. What more could you want?
14. The Kennedy’s – Gypsy Rose – Actually a song by Dave Carter, but it’s gorgeous, and it has the kind of timeless feel that folks like Gillian Welch are able to conjure. The lyrics could be from 2006, or 1806. It’s also wonderfully chiming folk-rock in the tradition of The Byrds and The Searchers.
15. Scott Miller – Freedom is a Stranger – In the absence of Steve Earle and John Prine this year, I dub this one as the gravel-voiced record of 2006.
16. Iarla O Lionaird – A Nest of Stars – Sigur Ros meets The Chieftains. Beautiful. This song has ended up on every mix CD I’ve made this year. I don’t care. If you requested Cajun, blues, jazz, whatever, you heard it.
17. The Raconteurs – Steady As She Goes – Really don’t like the album. Really like this song. It’s great power pop.
18. Silversun Pickups – Little Lover’s So Polite – Yeah, I guess it was time for a Pixies and Smashing Pumpkins revival. I love the fuzzed-out guitars.
19. Paul Simon – Wartime Prayers – The heavy-handed gospel choir at the end ruins it slightly for me, but it’s hard to improve on “I'm trying to tap into some wisdom,/Even a little drop will do/I want to rid my heart of envy/And cleanse my soul of rage/Before I'm through.” How ‘bout that? Me too.
20. K.T. Tunstall – Black Horse and the Cherry Tree – The rest of the album can’t sustain the wonder of this single, but this song’s a beauty. Hook-filled, effervescent, and a marvelous “wooo-oooo” chorus.
What are your favorites?
These are some of the songs that have meant the most to me this year. Most of them come from albums I like a lot as well, but a few of them are gems surrounded by dross. In no particular order, other than alphabetical:
1. Apples in Stereo – Beautiful Machine, Parts 1 – 4 – An eight-minute psychedelic freakout that reminds me of all that was weird and great about the late ‘60s.
2. The BellRays – Third Time’s the Charm – This is Stax/Volt soul forty years after the fact. And it’s great, although very different from the rest of the album, which is Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath thirty-five years after the fact.
3. Birdmonster – ‘Cause You Can – The Strokes, sped up, with a lead singer who sounds unhinged instead of bored.
4. T-Bone Burnett – Every Time I Feel the Shift – The best political commentary I’ve heard this year, with ominous Orc drums for accompaniment.
5. Camera Obscura – Lloyd, I’m Ready to be Heartbroken – Sad, lovely, and sweet in a Phil Spector Girl Group kind of way.
6. Johnny Cash – Like the 309 – Johnny sounds broken, old, and barely hanging on. Which he was. And that lends a certain creepiness to this death-haunted song, but also a great sadness, and a great dignity.
7. Catfish Haven – I Don’t Worry – A white guy from Chicago tries to sing like Otis Redding, and mostly succeeds. For this song, at least.
8. The Decemberists – Yankee Bayonet – Your basic jangle pop song about a soldier dying at the battle of Manassas, and the pregnant girl he left behind.
9. Donald Fagen – Brite Nitegown – The Grim Reaper as Funkmaster. Three verses, three different ways to die, and you can shake your booty to it.
10. The Gibson Brothers – We Won’t Dance Again – I am a sucker for cornball country schmaltz. This is cornball country schmaltz of the highest order, involving mournful fiddle, a sobbing pedal steel, and a deathbed confession of love. But it’s so sweet, and so unaffected, that I can’t help but cry in my beer.
11. Gnarls Barkley – Crazy – Pure fun. Probably the best single this year.
12. Gomez – See the World – Do you recall the era when Michael Stipe could both enunciate and still write memorable songs? This will help you remember in case you forgot.
13. The Hold Steady – Stuck Between Stations – Great lyrics, power chords, references to Jack Kerouac and John Berryman, and an ode to disaffected youth. What more could you want?
14. The Kennedy’s – Gypsy Rose – Actually a song by Dave Carter, but it’s gorgeous, and it has the kind of timeless feel that folks like Gillian Welch are able to conjure. The lyrics could be from 2006, or 1806. It’s also wonderfully chiming folk-rock in the tradition of The Byrds and The Searchers.
15. Scott Miller – Freedom is a Stranger – In the absence of Steve Earle and John Prine this year, I dub this one as the gravel-voiced record of 2006.
16. Iarla O Lionaird – A Nest of Stars – Sigur Ros meets The Chieftains. Beautiful. This song has ended up on every mix CD I’ve made this year. I don’t care. If you requested Cajun, blues, jazz, whatever, you heard it.
17. The Raconteurs – Steady As She Goes – Really don’t like the album. Really like this song. It’s great power pop.
18. Silversun Pickups – Little Lover’s So Polite – Yeah, I guess it was time for a Pixies and Smashing Pumpkins revival. I love the fuzzed-out guitars.
19. Paul Simon – Wartime Prayers – The heavy-handed gospel choir at the end ruins it slightly for me, but it’s hard to improve on “I'm trying to tap into some wisdom,/Even a little drop will do/I want to rid my heart of envy/And cleanse my soul of rage/Before I'm through.” How ‘bout that? Me too.
20. K.T. Tunstall – Black Horse and the Cherry Tree – The rest of the album can’t sustain the wonder of this single, but this song’s a beauty. Hook-filled, effervescent, and a marvelous “wooo-oooo” chorus.
What are your favorites?
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
Art and the Artist
Over on the Arts and Faith forum, I'm in the middle of an interesting discussion about artists and the art they create. At question is the degree to which the life of the artist and his or her personal convictions should influence our understanding/interpretation of the art he or she creates. It's an ancient question, but it's also fun to revisit it. And my take is that although we cannot totally separate the artist from art, we should make every effort to view the art on its own terms. Although the artist is reflected to some degree in what he or she creates, it is not nearly to the extent that a presuppositional approach to art would have us believe. Presuppositional approach to art, you say? Er, what's that? It's pretty simple.
Here's where I'm coming from: good people can create bad art, and bad people can create good art. It doesn't always work that way, but sometimes it does. And to the extent that we confuse the person with what he or she has created, or somehow try to project the person into what he or she has created, we misinterpret art.
I also find that most of the time it's a moot point. I write about popular music, and I deal in three-to-five minute bursts of noise where it's often difficult if not impossible to discern an overarching worldview. Most of the time I have no idea what a particular songwriter believes, at least in terms of the Big Questions. Nor do I know how that songwriter lives his or her life, or what deep, dark secrets and sins he or she may be harboring. I simply don't know. And when I do know, the scenario usually goes something like this: "Hey, man, I'm 22 years old, and we formed a band and now we're out on the road, livin' out of a van, and we sit around in a crappy hotel room and drink beer until it's time to play a show, and then we play a show, and we pack up our gear, and get in the van and drive off to do it again the next day." There's not a lot of deeply intellectual, philosophical material to work with.
So I'm probably approaching this from a different standpoint than someone would who is studying a well known, renowned artist such as Van Gogh or Gauguin. Obviously there's a great deal of historical/biographical material available about those artists, and I can see why knowing that information could add depth and insight to a critical understanding of their work.
But I still balk at the idea of making critical judgments about art based on one's moral take on the life of the artist. Whenever possible, I believe these two things should be held far apart. Why? Because good people can create bad art, and bad people can create good art.
I have a friend, a wonderful writer who knows a staggering amount about jazz, who can't write objectively about Miles Davis because she strongly dislikes his exploitation of women and his mack daddy pimp image. Okay, I understand that and respect that. But in this case she's made the right decision not to write about his music, because his music is still great. A bad person created great art. And if you can't get past the person and write about the art on its own terms, then you shouldn't write about it. We're talking about instrumental jazz, a genre that, by definition, could not possibly communicate a worldview which supports the exploitation and abuse of women. So yes, I do fully appreciate how one's distaste for an artist could influence how one interprets his or her art. But the solution, in that case, is to step aside as my friend has done, and let somebody else review the finished product, which has nothing to do with her moral objections.
The entire CCM industry is based on the notion that because people are good (i.e., Christian), then the music they create is worth buying. It's a false assumption. It's equally false to believe that because an artist is bad (immoral), his or her art is somehow negatively impacted. And that's what I'm reacting to in this discussion. It's not always possible to check our moral judgments at the door, but whenevever possible we should do so, unless the art itself reflects the moral/ethical/philosophical beliefs of the artist. Then those beliefs are fair game for the discussion. But in popular music, I believe this happens far less frequently than is commonly advertised. "I feel stupid and contagious/Here we are now entertain us/A mulatto an albino/A mosquito my libido Yea" tells me precious little about the most deeply held convictions of the artist. And that's far from atypical. But it's still great rock 'n roll.
Here's where I'm coming from: good people can create bad art, and bad people can create good art. It doesn't always work that way, but sometimes it does. And to the extent that we confuse the person with what he or she has created, or somehow try to project the person into what he or she has created, we misinterpret art.
I also find that most of the time it's a moot point. I write about popular music, and I deal in three-to-five minute bursts of noise where it's often difficult if not impossible to discern an overarching worldview. Most of the time I have no idea what a particular songwriter believes, at least in terms of the Big Questions. Nor do I know how that songwriter lives his or her life, or what deep, dark secrets and sins he or she may be harboring. I simply don't know. And when I do know, the scenario usually goes something like this: "Hey, man, I'm 22 years old, and we formed a band and now we're out on the road, livin' out of a van, and we sit around in a crappy hotel room and drink beer until it's time to play a show, and then we play a show, and we pack up our gear, and get in the van and drive off to do it again the next day." There's not a lot of deeply intellectual, philosophical material to work with.
So I'm probably approaching this from a different standpoint than someone would who is studying a well known, renowned artist such as Van Gogh or Gauguin. Obviously there's a great deal of historical/biographical material available about those artists, and I can see why knowing that information could add depth and insight to a critical understanding of their work.
But I still balk at the idea of making critical judgments about art based on one's moral take on the life of the artist. Whenever possible, I believe these two things should be held far apart. Why? Because good people can create bad art, and bad people can create good art.
I have a friend, a wonderful writer who knows a staggering amount about jazz, who can't write objectively about Miles Davis because she strongly dislikes his exploitation of women and his mack daddy pimp image. Okay, I understand that and respect that. But in this case she's made the right decision not to write about his music, because his music is still great. A bad person created great art. And if you can't get past the person and write about the art on its own terms, then you shouldn't write about it. We're talking about instrumental jazz, a genre that, by definition, could not possibly communicate a worldview which supports the exploitation and abuse of women. So yes, I do fully appreciate how one's distaste for an artist could influence how one interprets his or her art. But the solution, in that case, is to step aside as my friend has done, and let somebody else review the finished product, which has nothing to do with her moral objections.
The entire CCM industry is based on the notion that because people are good (i.e., Christian), then the music they create is worth buying. It's a false assumption. It's equally false to believe that because an artist is bad (immoral), his or her art is somehow negatively impacted. And that's what I'm reacting to in this discussion. It's not always possible to check our moral judgments at the door, but whenevever possible we should do so, unless the art itself reflects the moral/ethical/philosophical beliefs of the artist. Then those beliefs are fair game for the discussion. But in popular music, I believe this happens far less frequently than is commonly advertised. "I feel stupid and contagious/Here we are now entertain us/A mulatto an albino/A mosquito my libido Yea" tells me precious little about the most deeply held convictions of the artist. And that's far from atypical. But it's still great rock 'n roll.
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Beauty Through the Cracks
In a recent conversation a friend mentioned that she had difficulty listening to a particular musician (someone whose music she liked and admired) because of the violence and generally destructive behavior that characterized his life. And I thought about that. It's hardly a new phenomenon. And while I understand the reaction to some extent, I don't think I agree with it.
It's a bit of a cliche, but artists are known for being selfish, self-destructive (and other-destructive) assholes. I don't know if I would go quite so far, but I suspect that some would even argue that selfishness and a massive ego are necessary preconditions to producing great art. And although they exist, it's unusual to find great artists who are also models of Christian grace and charity. And so the bottom line for me is that I can appreciate the art made by the asshole geniuses while recognizing that I wouldn't necessarily want to spend a lot of time with the artist.
Not that horrid behavior is ever justified, but I also find that I have great sympathy for artists who were fairly miserable human beings. The jazz pianist Bill Evans was a heroin addict who lied and cheated to keep his habit alive. He used to inject his wife, for God's sake, and not surprisingly she developed her own habit, which led to her suicide at a young age. At one point in the late '50s Evans was strung out, broke, and his wife had left him. The electricity and heat had been turned off in his apartment because he was unable to pay his bills. He was at rock bottom. And he went into the studio with no greater motivation than to earn some cash to keep his habit alive, sat down at the piano, and improvised for seven minutes while the tape rolled and ended up with something called "Peace Piece," one of the most moving, hymnlike, and transparently beautiful pieces of music I've ever heard. And I love him for that.
Who can understand this? Where does that come from? The nice, neat theological explanation is that it's common grace, and that God bestows his gifts on the righteous and the unrighteous alike. But the explanation that I prefer is that it's a miracle, a little shard of God's goodness and beauty that shines forth all the more starkly when surrounded by the muck and the mire.
I don't think I would have liked Bill Evans. I surely wouldn't have liked Miles Davis. Or Mozart. Or Gauguin. I don't excuse their often horrendous behavior. But they created great art. And I've never reached the point where the weight of their personal sins offsets the glory of their art. I might have felt differently if I was married to one of them. But it's all a matter of degrees anyway. Some are more broken than others, but we're all broken. The miracle is that incredible beauty shines forth from the cracks.
It's a bit of a cliche, but artists are known for being selfish, self-destructive (and other-destructive) assholes. I don't know if I would go quite so far, but I suspect that some would even argue that selfishness and a massive ego are necessary preconditions to producing great art. And although they exist, it's unusual to find great artists who are also models of Christian grace and charity. And so the bottom line for me is that I can appreciate the art made by the asshole geniuses while recognizing that I wouldn't necessarily want to spend a lot of time with the artist.
Not that horrid behavior is ever justified, but I also find that I have great sympathy for artists who were fairly miserable human beings. The jazz pianist Bill Evans was a heroin addict who lied and cheated to keep his habit alive. He used to inject his wife, for God's sake, and not surprisingly she developed her own habit, which led to her suicide at a young age. At one point in the late '50s Evans was strung out, broke, and his wife had left him. The electricity and heat had been turned off in his apartment because he was unable to pay his bills. He was at rock bottom. And he went into the studio with no greater motivation than to earn some cash to keep his habit alive, sat down at the piano, and improvised for seven minutes while the tape rolled and ended up with something called "Peace Piece," one of the most moving, hymnlike, and transparently beautiful pieces of music I've ever heard. And I love him for that.
Who can understand this? Where does that come from? The nice, neat theological explanation is that it's common grace, and that God bestows his gifts on the righteous and the unrighteous alike. But the explanation that I prefer is that it's a miracle, a little shard of God's goodness and beauty that shines forth all the more starkly when surrounded by the muck and the mire.
I don't think I would have liked Bill Evans. I surely wouldn't have liked Miles Davis. Or Mozart. Or Gauguin. I don't excuse their often horrendous behavior. But they created great art. And I've never reached the point where the weight of their personal sins offsets the glory of their art. I might have felt differently if I was married to one of them. But it's all a matter of degrees anyway. Some are more broken than others, but we're all broken. The miracle is that incredible beauty shines forth from the cracks.
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
The Man
Forget Rod the Mod. Let’s talk about Van the Man. I don’t listen to him for months at a time. And then I remember. And I’m always glad I do. I remembered last night.
Here is the sort of magical alchemy that happens when I put on his records (and yes, these are records for me; you can’t beat vinyl). I come home from work, dog tired, brain dead, I mumble incoherently to Kate and Rachel for a few minutes, then I retire to the den. I put on, in quick succession, St. Dominic’s Preview, Hard Nose the Highway, and Tupelo Honey. I don’t play the entire records. I only play the title tracks from these three albums. At some point I start whooping, because this is what Van does for me. The music critic’s gotta scream and holler. It’s all good. And I emerge fifteen minutes later re-energized, invigorated, ready to face the whole suburban tableau, ‘cause I got soul.
I’d say that the first eight solo albums are essential. That would be Astral Weeks, Moondance, His Band and Street Choir, Tupelo Honey, St. Dominic’s Preview, Hard Nose the Highway, It’s Too Late to Stop Now, and Veedon Fleece. It’s an incredible run. Van is at the top of his vocal powers here, which means, in my opinion, that he’s simply the greatest, most soulful singer of the rock ‘n roll era. He makes masterful use of strings and horns. And he generates a few dozen masterpieces along the way. A Greatest Hits album really cannot do justice to the scope of the greatness here. You really do need them all. But if forced to choose, I’d probably go with St. Dominic’s Preview, which contains several straightforward R&B/Irish soul classics, and one very unstraightforward, weird-as-hell song called “Listen to the Lion” in which Van froths at the mouth for upwards of eleven minutes, repeating his lyrics like rosary beads until he enters what surely sounds like a trance-like state and simply starts, well, roaring like a lion. I love it. I know people who hate it. But I think it’s the strangest and greatest singing I’ve ever heard.
After the first eight, it’s spotty. The albums I’d outright avoid are as follows: A Period of Transition (1977), Too Long in Exile (1992), Days Like These (1993), A Night in San Francisco (1994). None of these are terrible, but they do sound like Van is going through the motions at times. The latter is a live album in which Van turns over the vocal duties to various backup singers. It sounds like a Las Vegas Revue. You’ve always wanted to hear some unknown backup singer sing “Moondance,” right?
At the peak of his commercial success, Van chucked it all away to follow his Muse. I respect him for that, but it hasn’t always led to the most approachable music. There are moments of greatness everywhere, but also moments of headstrong rants against the music industry (Van’s favorite target) and moments so mystically strange that they threaten to float away into the ether. For the past 25 years Van has been obsessed with childhood and childhood memory, revisiting the haunts of his youth in Belfast, pursuing communion with God in orthodox and unorthodox ways. Don’t come looking for creedal truths, but I respect his dogged pursuit of God even as I scratch my head at some of the directions he’s turned. Some of the highlights: Common One (1980), in which Van rants about T.S. Eliot and William Blake for fifteen minutes at a time, Inarticulate Speech of the Heart (1982), one of his most beautiful and mystical albums, Irish Heartbeat (1987), his wonderful collaboration with The Chieftains, and Avalon Sunset (1989), a collection of fine love songs. His last four albums – Down the Road, What’s Wrong With This Picture?, Magic Time, and Pay the Devil – represent a return to the more straightforward R&B/folk of his early albums, but with slightly diminished vocal powers. It’s not a big deal, because slightly diminished Van is still very, very good indeed.
I do love his music, and, along with Dylan and Al Green and Bruce Cockburn, Van probably comes as close to Musical Hero status as anyone in my life. I’ve never seen him live, and I want to very much. He doesn’t tour much anymore, rarely in the U.S. and never in Ohio, so Kate (another big Van fan) and I have tossed around the idea that for our upcoming 25th anniversary we’ll simply go wherever Van is. Hopefully he’ll sing his own songs and not turn them over to the backup singers. These are the things we do for love, love, love, crazy love.
Here is the sort of magical alchemy that happens when I put on his records (and yes, these are records for me; you can’t beat vinyl). I come home from work, dog tired, brain dead, I mumble incoherently to Kate and Rachel for a few minutes, then I retire to the den. I put on, in quick succession, St. Dominic’s Preview, Hard Nose the Highway, and Tupelo Honey. I don’t play the entire records. I only play the title tracks from these three albums. At some point I start whooping, because this is what Van does for me. The music critic’s gotta scream and holler. It’s all good. And I emerge fifteen minutes later re-energized, invigorated, ready to face the whole suburban tableau, ‘cause I got soul.
I’d say that the first eight solo albums are essential. That would be Astral Weeks, Moondance, His Band and Street Choir, Tupelo Honey, St. Dominic’s Preview, Hard Nose the Highway, It’s Too Late to Stop Now, and Veedon Fleece. It’s an incredible run. Van is at the top of his vocal powers here, which means, in my opinion, that he’s simply the greatest, most soulful singer of the rock ‘n roll era. He makes masterful use of strings and horns. And he generates a few dozen masterpieces along the way. A Greatest Hits album really cannot do justice to the scope of the greatness here. You really do need them all. But if forced to choose, I’d probably go with St. Dominic’s Preview, which contains several straightforward R&B/Irish soul classics, and one very unstraightforward, weird-as-hell song called “Listen to the Lion” in which Van froths at the mouth for upwards of eleven minutes, repeating his lyrics like rosary beads until he enters what surely sounds like a trance-like state and simply starts, well, roaring like a lion. I love it. I know people who hate it. But I think it’s the strangest and greatest singing I’ve ever heard.
After the first eight, it’s spotty. The albums I’d outright avoid are as follows: A Period of Transition (1977), Too Long in Exile (1992), Days Like These (1993), A Night in San Francisco (1994). None of these are terrible, but they do sound like Van is going through the motions at times. The latter is a live album in which Van turns over the vocal duties to various backup singers. It sounds like a Las Vegas Revue. You’ve always wanted to hear some unknown backup singer sing “Moondance,” right?
At the peak of his commercial success, Van chucked it all away to follow his Muse. I respect him for that, but it hasn’t always led to the most approachable music. There are moments of greatness everywhere, but also moments of headstrong rants against the music industry (Van’s favorite target) and moments so mystically strange that they threaten to float away into the ether. For the past 25 years Van has been obsessed with childhood and childhood memory, revisiting the haunts of his youth in Belfast, pursuing communion with God in orthodox and unorthodox ways. Don’t come looking for creedal truths, but I respect his dogged pursuit of God even as I scratch my head at some of the directions he’s turned. Some of the highlights: Common One (1980), in which Van rants about T.S. Eliot and William Blake for fifteen minutes at a time, Inarticulate Speech of the Heart (1982), one of his most beautiful and mystical albums, Irish Heartbeat (1987), his wonderful collaboration with The Chieftains, and Avalon Sunset (1989), a collection of fine love songs. His last four albums – Down the Road, What’s Wrong With This Picture?, Magic Time, and Pay the Devil – represent a return to the more straightforward R&B/folk of his early albums, but with slightly diminished vocal powers. It’s not a big deal, because slightly diminished Van is still very, very good indeed.
I do love his music, and, along with Dylan and Al Green and Bruce Cockburn, Van probably comes as close to Musical Hero status as anyone in my life. I’ve never seen him live, and I want to very much. He doesn’t tour much anymore, rarely in the U.S. and never in Ohio, so Kate (another big Van fan) and I have tossed around the idea that for our upcoming 25th anniversary we’ll simply go wherever Van is. Hopefully he’ll sing his own songs and not turn them over to the backup singers. These are the things we do for love, love, love, crazy love.
Monday, October 23, 2006
No Trespassing
My friend Erik, my favorite former college football player and pony-tailed doctoral student, is doggedly (woof) pursuing an esoteric career in the history and philosophy of science at the University of Notre Dame. But when he’s not buried under an avalanche of arcane academic reading or spending time with his wife and daughter, he writes about his life. You should read what he writes. It’s good, and frequently heartbreaking, stuff.
Recently he wrote this:
“What all the nice white churches I’ve been to do (including the one we’re at now) is just get really distant from problems. Pretend they don’t exist. Box them up. If that doesn’t work, talk about that person’s problems with other people, though not with the person who’s in the middle of the problem.”
Ouch. Although Erik’s observation is certainly accurate, I suspect that this is not just an evangelical phenomenon, but a human phenomenon. It’s easier to gloss over (or completely ignore) problems — your own, and those of your neighbors. It’s easier to gossip about (or, in alternative evangelicalspeak, “lift up a prayer request for”) those who are messy, broken, and hard to love, than it is to actively engage them as part of our lives.
But then I remember Jesus, who not only didn’t run from the lepers, and didn’t gossip about them with his cronies, but who sought them out. And still there are many days when I’d rather tune people out, and not engage in messy relationships at all. All I can do is confess it and repent of it and ask God to change me. It’s a slow turning, but I’m heartened by the small changes I see.
I sometimes despair of this happening in the increasingly individualistic, private world in which we live, a world where the garage doors open and close automatically, and where the neighbors are seen only in the ten-second interval between when the door goes up and when the door goes down. If community is still a viable concept, and I’d like to think that it is, it can only happen because people are intentional about it. In that light, I think the church model matters. Community — real, raw, will-you-still-love-me-when-I-show-you-my-big-black-heart community — doesn’t happen accidentally. People have to be purposeful about it, and work at it, hard, and commit themselves to people who are inconvenient and sometimes downright unloveable. It’s the un-American way, and I sometimes think it’s a miracle that it happens at all. But it can, and it does. I’m thankful — really incredibly thankful — to have found it. Not every day, but frequently enough to believe that it’s a vision worth pursuing.
And yet there are days — and yesterday was one of them — when I have to confess that I don’t want to be bothered. Just leave me alone. I’ve got my own problems. Leaving aside the trivial issues of nuclear conflagration and catastrophic terrorist attacks that sometimes keep me up at night, I sometimes feel overwhelmed by the litany of dysfunctional parents and dysfunctional children, untimely deaths, addictions, infidelities, twistedness, perversion, and brokenness everywhere I turn. I become numb. I’m sorry, but I don’t have any answers. Hang in there. Be warmed and be filled.
God forgive me.
I also remember this: I spent several nights at the same Harley Motel that Erik describes in his blog posting, under remarkably similar circumstances. The parental roles were reversed – my mom, and not my dad, was the crazy, violent alcoholic – but otherwise it’s like he was reading my most intimate mail. Those were nights when I needed somebody, anybody, to take even a remote interest in my life. And nobody did. It was the loneliest, darkest time of my life, and nobody shared it with me. I was new to Columbus, and I went to see a pastor I didn’t know at a church I’d never attended, and he prayed a perfunctory thirty-second prayer for me and sent me on my way. Be warmed and be filled. So I understand that disappointment as well, and I understand my own culpability. This is not who I want to be.
It’s a phenomenon that singer/songwriter Carolyn Arends understands well, too, and she’s written a wonderful song about it on her latest album Polyanna’s Attic:
They heard his cries in the night from across the lawn
They found him dead at the bottom of the lake at dawn
Nobody’d come running to the rescue and when they were asked
The passersby said that the signs that they read said “Keep Off the Grass”
‘Cause you can’t go near
Anybody else’s private ground
See folks ‘round here
Have got a democratic right to drown
And you’re just a fool
If you care about the faces in the crowd
We’ve got a new edition of the Golden Rule:
No trespassing allowed
Nobody asked her ‘bout the bruises on her face
I guess she was glad that they gave her her personal space
When the bones wouldn’t mend and it came to an end in the dead of the night
The neighbours were sad but at least they had respected her rights
‘Cause you can’t go near
Anybody else’s private ground
See folks ‘round here
Have got a democratic right to drown
And you’re just a fool
If you care about the faces in the crowd
We’ve got a new edition of the Golden Rule:
No trespassing allowed
Can’t you read the signs?
These are enlightened times
Got to be careful not to think too much
You can watch ‘em going under but you just can’t touch
‘Cause you can’t go near
Anybody else’s private ground
See folks ‘round here
Have got a democratic right to drown
And you’re just a fool
If you care about the faces in the crowd
We’ve got a new edition of the Golden Rule
Got a new edition of the Golden Rule:
No trespassing allowed
– Carolyn Arends, “No Trespassing”
Everybody’s hands were clean. No muss, no fuss. And how those clean hands stink to high heaven.
To quote Erik again:
“One of the things I’ve seen in Reformed theology is the notion that dirtiness is in everyone and that, ultimately, we can’t get rid of the dirt. It’s just part of who we are. So the line separating the clean and the dirty is never that distinct. When that’s thought through, it might mean that we can all get in there and bear one another’s burdens without fear of getting twisted up (”slimed” I’ve heard some charis-vangelicals say) with another’s mess. In Reformed theology, there aren’t many eternal reprecussions for trying to help and failing.
Idealistic, you say. Counter to the Gospel, you say. Which Gospel, I wonder? The charis-evang-amental gospel of politeness? I’m not sure I believe in that gospel anymore.”
In spite of my reluctance and numbness, I don’t believe in that gospel either. So I’m praying for Erik, for me, for all of us, and I’m asking God for the grace and the strength to enter fully into the messiness, and that we’ll blithely ignore the signs that our culture (and sadly, the Church) puts up that say “No Trespassing.” Let’s enter the private stomping grounds, where hearts and souls are trampled underfoot, even when we’ve been warned not to trespass.
Recently he wrote this:
“What all the nice white churches I’ve been to do (including the one we’re at now) is just get really distant from problems. Pretend they don’t exist. Box them up. If that doesn’t work, talk about that person’s problems with other people, though not with the person who’s in the middle of the problem.”
Ouch. Although Erik’s observation is certainly accurate, I suspect that this is not just an evangelical phenomenon, but a human phenomenon. It’s easier to gloss over (or completely ignore) problems — your own, and those of your neighbors. It’s easier to gossip about (or, in alternative evangelicalspeak, “lift up a prayer request for”) those who are messy, broken, and hard to love, than it is to actively engage them as part of our lives.
But then I remember Jesus, who not only didn’t run from the lepers, and didn’t gossip about them with his cronies, but who sought them out. And still there are many days when I’d rather tune people out, and not engage in messy relationships at all. All I can do is confess it and repent of it and ask God to change me. It’s a slow turning, but I’m heartened by the small changes I see.
I sometimes despair of this happening in the increasingly individualistic, private world in which we live, a world where the garage doors open and close automatically, and where the neighbors are seen only in the ten-second interval between when the door goes up and when the door goes down. If community is still a viable concept, and I’d like to think that it is, it can only happen because people are intentional about it. In that light, I think the church model matters. Community — real, raw, will-you-still-love-me-when-I-show-you-my-big-black-heart community — doesn’t happen accidentally. People have to be purposeful about it, and work at it, hard, and commit themselves to people who are inconvenient and sometimes downright unloveable. It’s the un-American way, and I sometimes think it’s a miracle that it happens at all. But it can, and it does. I’m thankful — really incredibly thankful — to have found it. Not every day, but frequently enough to believe that it’s a vision worth pursuing.
And yet there are days — and yesterday was one of them — when I have to confess that I don’t want to be bothered. Just leave me alone. I’ve got my own problems. Leaving aside the trivial issues of nuclear conflagration and catastrophic terrorist attacks that sometimes keep me up at night, I sometimes feel overwhelmed by the litany of dysfunctional parents and dysfunctional children, untimely deaths, addictions, infidelities, twistedness, perversion, and brokenness everywhere I turn. I become numb. I’m sorry, but I don’t have any answers. Hang in there. Be warmed and be filled.
God forgive me.
I also remember this: I spent several nights at the same Harley Motel that Erik describes in his blog posting, under remarkably similar circumstances. The parental roles were reversed – my mom, and not my dad, was the crazy, violent alcoholic – but otherwise it’s like he was reading my most intimate mail. Those were nights when I needed somebody, anybody, to take even a remote interest in my life. And nobody did. It was the loneliest, darkest time of my life, and nobody shared it with me. I was new to Columbus, and I went to see a pastor I didn’t know at a church I’d never attended, and he prayed a perfunctory thirty-second prayer for me and sent me on my way. Be warmed and be filled. So I understand that disappointment as well, and I understand my own culpability. This is not who I want to be.
It’s a phenomenon that singer/songwriter Carolyn Arends understands well, too, and she’s written a wonderful song about it on her latest album Polyanna’s Attic:
They heard his cries in the night from across the lawn
They found him dead at the bottom of the lake at dawn
Nobody’d come running to the rescue and when they were asked
The passersby said that the signs that they read said “Keep Off the Grass”
‘Cause you can’t go near
Anybody else’s private ground
See folks ‘round here
Have got a democratic right to drown
And you’re just a fool
If you care about the faces in the crowd
We’ve got a new edition of the Golden Rule:
No trespassing allowed
Nobody asked her ‘bout the bruises on her face
I guess she was glad that they gave her her personal space
When the bones wouldn’t mend and it came to an end in the dead of the night
The neighbours were sad but at least they had respected her rights
‘Cause you can’t go near
Anybody else’s private ground
See folks ‘round here
Have got a democratic right to drown
And you’re just a fool
If you care about the faces in the crowd
We’ve got a new edition of the Golden Rule:
No trespassing allowed
Can’t you read the signs?
These are enlightened times
Got to be careful not to think too much
You can watch ‘em going under but you just can’t touch
‘Cause you can’t go near
Anybody else’s private ground
See folks ‘round here
Have got a democratic right to drown
And you’re just a fool
If you care about the faces in the crowd
We’ve got a new edition of the Golden Rule
Got a new edition of the Golden Rule:
No trespassing allowed
– Carolyn Arends, “No Trespassing”
Everybody’s hands were clean. No muss, no fuss. And how those clean hands stink to high heaven.
To quote Erik again:
“One of the things I’ve seen in Reformed theology is the notion that dirtiness is in everyone and that, ultimately, we can’t get rid of the dirt. It’s just part of who we are. So the line separating the clean and the dirty is never that distinct. When that’s thought through, it might mean that we can all get in there and bear one another’s burdens without fear of getting twisted up (”slimed” I’ve heard some charis-vangelicals say) with another’s mess. In Reformed theology, there aren’t many eternal reprecussions for trying to help and failing.
Idealistic, you say. Counter to the Gospel, you say. Which Gospel, I wonder? The charis-evang-amental gospel of politeness? I’m not sure I believe in that gospel anymore.”
In spite of my reluctance and numbness, I don’t believe in that gospel either. So I’m praying for Erik, for me, for all of us, and I’m asking God for the grace and the strength to enter fully into the messiness, and that we’ll blithely ignore the signs that our culture (and sadly, the Church) puts up that say “No Trespassing.” Let’s enter the private stomping grounds, where hearts and souls are trampled underfoot, even when we’ve been warned not to trespass.
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
Score One for the Neocons
David Kuo, the former deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, has written a book entitled Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction. In the book, Kuo argues that the current Bush administration cynically used religion for political ends, and that White House aides ridiculed the very Christian leaders who helped bring Mr. Bush to office.
It sounds like a damning indictment, and as a Christian I ought to be outraged. And certainly there is much cause for chagrin, if not outrage, including the alarming statistic that only $60 million of the $8 billion earmarked for programs for the poor -- or less than one percent -- actually ended up in the programs for which the money had been destined. But then there is this:
"National Christian leaders received hugs and smiles in person and then were dismissed behind their backs and described as 'ridiculous', 'out of control,' and just plain 'goofy,' " Kuo writes.
"You name the important Christian leader, and I have heard them mocked by serious people in serious places," Kuo told "60 Minutes" Sunday night.
That mockery, he added, included the Rev. Pat Robertson being called "insane," the Rev. Jerry Falwell being called "ridiculous" and comments that Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family "had to be controlled." (from ABC News)
How 'bout that? For once the neocon cabal got it right, and they may not be as out of touch with reality as I had feared. It's time for people like Robertson, Falwell, and Dobson to step aside. Just go away. They don't represent me. They don't represent any kind of Christianity with which I am familiar, or with which I want to be associated. They give Christianity a bad name because they crawl into bed with politicians and claim to represent Christ. Here's a clue: they're wrong, and they're deluded. They may or may not be insane. But they're most certainly ridiculous.
I am still no fan of the neocon cabal. And I don't doubt that there is much in Kuo's book that is sobering and alarming. But give them credit. They recognize a nutcase when they see one.
It sounds like a damning indictment, and as a Christian I ought to be outraged. And certainly there is much cause for chagrin, if not outrage, including the alarming statistic that only $60 million of the $8 billion earmarked for programs for the poor -- or less than one percent -- actually ended up in the programs for which the money had been destined. But then there is this:
"National Christian leaders received hugs and smiles in person and then were dismissed behind their backs and described as 'ridiculous', 'out of control,' and just plain 'goofy,' " Kuo writes.
"You name the important Christian leader, and I have heard them mocked by serious people in serious places," Kuo told "60 Minutes" Sunday night.
That mockery, he added, included the Rev. Pat Robertson being called "insane," the Rev. Jerry Falwell being called "ridiculous" and comments that Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family "had to be controlled." (from ABC News)
How 'bout that? For once the neocon cabal got it right, and they may not be as out of touch with reality as I had feared. It's time for people like Robertson, Falwell, and Dobson to step aside. Just go away. They don't represent me. They don't represent any kind of Christianity with which I am familiar, or with which I want to be associated. They give Christianity a bad name because they crawl into bed with politicians and claim to represent Christ. Here's a clue: they're wrong, and they're deluded. They may or may not be insane. But they're most certainly ridiculous.
I am still no fan of the neocon cabal. And I don't doubt that there is much in Kuo's book that is sobering and alarming. But give them credit. They recognize a nutcase when they see one.
Monday, October 16, 2006
The Hold Steady - Boys and Girls in America
Let’s dispense with the preliminaries: The Hold Steady’s Boys and Girls in America is quite possibly the best album of 2006. It’s an impossibly outsized combination of beat poetry and power chords, raging, literate rock ‘n roll from yet another New Dylan (as if we really needed a new one) in a leather jacket. It is epic in every sense, loud and brash, celebratory and angry, and it contains a fully realized world of idiosyncratic characters thrown together willy-nilly and trying to make sense of their desperate couplings. It is the sound of loneliness in a crowd. And it is Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run thirty years down the two-lane highway, and not only because lead singer/songwriter Craig Finn’s voice bears an uncanny resemblance to the Springsteen of the mid-1970s. It’s about time somebody grabbed for the brass ring – great lyrics combined with white-hot rock ‘n roll – and Finn latches on with both hands.
So why can’t I love this album? I don’t know, but I can’t. For all their musical and lyrical similarities, Springsteen’s dead-end characters longed to bust out, get the hell out of Dodge, make a better (or at least different) life for themselves. Finn’s characters are content to sit stoned in front of the television set, or aimlessly wander the suburban shopping mall until the next party starts. And maybe that’s the difference.
But give credit where it’s due. It’s one hell of a shrug of resignation:
There are nights when I think that Sal Paradise was right
Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together
Sucking off each other at the demonstrations
Making sure their makeup’s straight
Crushing one another with colossal expectations
Dependent, undisciplined, sleeping late
That’s from a song called “Stuck Between Stations,” and it’s the best opening verse of an opening track I’ve heard since “Thunder Road.” It obliquely references Kerouac’s On the Road even as it sets the stage for songs about kids who can’t even bother to get out of their home towns. The irony is delicious. The guitars kick in at Line 3 and pin your ears back, more Pete Townshend or Angus Young than Broooooce, but if the power chords don’t immediately call to mind this album’s historical predecessors, then the perfect Roy Bittan piano interlude will. This is Born to Run but louder, more intense, more desperate. Except nobody’s running.
But they’re surely having a great time standing still. “Chips Ahoy” is the story of a young woman who bets $900 on a horse race, wins her bet, and spends her winnings getting high and engaging in round after round of compulsive sex:
She’s hard on the heart
She’s soft to the touch
She gets migraine headaches
When she does it too much
She always does it too much
Then there’s “First Night,” “Party Pit,” “Massive Nights,” “Citrus,” and “Chillout Tent,” two ballads and three raging rockers that are about, respectively, drugs, drugs, drugs, drinking, and drugs.
You may be picking up on a theme here.
So let me cut to the chase. Tipper Gore wouldn’t understand, but this is the kind of album you should buy for your teenaged kids. It makes a great Christmas present, moms and dads. The fun and games turn into something else entirely very quickly, and if you’re looking for proof, look no further than “Hot Soft Light,” certainly one of the best, most startling, and most rocking songs about addiction ever committed to recorded media. It is a first-rate cautionary tale of doing drugs until they start doing you:
It started recreational
It ended kinda medical
It came on hot and soft
And then it tightened up its tentacles
And therein lies the unresolvable conundrum of Boys and Girls in America, the tragedy of understanding the hollowness at the heart of the bright and shimmering dream, but not understanding that there is an alternative. This is a fantastic album with a huge sound. It’s brilliantly written. It rocks like crazy. But it skirts the big themes, and it settles for a kingdom the size of a pill, which turns out to be no answer at all. The town’s still full of losers, and it will still rip the bones from your back, but nobody’s pulling out of there to win. All the boys and girls in America are too wasted to drive.
So why can’t I love this album? I don’t know, but I can’t. For all their musical and lyrical similarities, Springsteen’s dead-end characters longed to bust out, get the hell out of Dodge, make a better (or at least different) life for themselves. Finn’s characters are content to sit stoned in front of the television set, or aimlessly wander the suburban shopping mall until the next party starts. And maybe that’s the difference.
But give credit where it’s due. It’s one hell of a shrug of resignation:
There are nights when I think that Sal Paradise was right
Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together
Sucking off each other at the demonstrations
Making sure their makeup’s straight
Crushing one another with colossal expectations
Dependent, undisciplined, sleeping late
That’s from a song called “Stuck Between Stations,” and it’s the best opening verse of an opening track I’ve heard since “Thunder Road.” It obliquely references Kerouac’s On the Road even as it sets the stage for songs about kids who can’t even bother to get out of their home towns. The irony is delicious. The guitars kick in at Line 3 and pin your ears back, more Pete Townshend or Angus Young than Broooooce, but if the power chords don’t immediately call to mind this album’s historical predecessors, then the perfect Roy Bittan piano interlude will. This is Born to Run but louder, more intense, more desperate. Except nobody’s running.
But they’re surely having a great time standing still. “Chips Ahoy” is the story of a young woman who bets $900 on a horse race, wins her bet, and spends her winnings getting high and engaging in round after round of compulsive sex:
She’s hard on the heart
She’s soft to the touch
She gets migraine headaches
When she does it too much
She always does it too much
Then there’s “First Night,” “Party Pit,” “Massive Nights,” “Citrus,” and “Chillout Tent,” two ballads and three raging rockers that are about, respectively, drugs, drugs, drugs, drinking, and drugs.
You may be picking up on a theme here.
So let me cut to the chase. Tipper Gore wouldn’t understand, but this is the kind of album you should buy for your teenaged kids. It makes a great Christmas present, moms and dads. The fun and games turn into something else entirely very quickly, and if you’re looking for proof, look no further than “Hot Soft Light,” certainly one of the best, most startling, and most rocking songs about addiction ever committed to recorded media. It is a first-rate cautionary tale of doing drugs until they start doing you:
It started recreational
It ended kinda medical
It came on hot and soft
And then it tightened up its tentacles
And therein lies the unresolvable conundrum of Boys and Girls in America, the tragedy of understanding the hollowness at the heart of the bright and shimmering dream, but not understanding that there is an alternative. This is a fantastic album with a huge sound. It’s brilliantly written. It rocks like crazy. But it skirts the big themes, and it settles for a kingdom the size of a pill, which turns out to be no answer at all. The town’s still full of losers, and it will still rip the bones from your back, but nobody’s pulling out of there to win. All the boys and girls in America are too wasted to drive.
Friday, October 13, 2006
New All Music Guide Reviews
For those who might be interested:
Steve Almaas and Ali Smith -- You Showed Me
Barzin -- My Life in Rooms
Steve Almaas and Ali Smith -- You Showed Me
Barzin -- My Life in Rooms
Thursday, October 12, 2006
Steve Almaas, Gomez, Catfish Haven, William Bell, British Sea Power
The problem with reviewing albums is that you actually have to listen to them. Or at least you should, and the guilt kicks in when you attempt to slide by with, oh, one listen, or listening to selected snippets of songs you know you didn’t really like very well in the first place. The discerning public demands more! And so you dutifully pay attention, again and again, instead of listening to the new Hold Steady, Beck, and Decemberists albums you’d really like to hear. A pox upon you, Barzin, Rod Stewart, and The Lemonheads!
It’s not that they’re bad (well, okay, Rod Stewart is bad). It’s just that they take up my time. But on the bright side, Rod Stewart is truly horrid, and I will admit that I take a perverse pleasure in slamming him in print. Do ya think he’s sexy? No. Do ya think he’s recorded a single note in the past thirty years in which he’s emotionally invested? No. Etc.
So in addition to Rod the Fraud, I’ve been listening to the following albums, some of which I’ll review, and some of which I won’t. But I’m really looking forward to that new batch of albums from The Hold Steady, The Decemberists, and Beck.
Steve Almaas and Ali Smith – You Showed Me
Almaas was the head wrangler for Beat Rodeo, an ‘80s cowpoke band (back when alt-country was still just country rock). I liked him then, and I like him now. He hooked up with girlfriend Ali Smith on a great duets album in 2002, and he reprises the formula here. And it’s a great formula, too – sweet Gram and Emmylou harmonies, chiming, Byrds-like guitars, and subject matter ranging from original protest anthems to settings of James Joyce poems. Smith’s quivering Girl Group vocals on “The Lonely Sea,” an early Brian Wilson song, and Almaas’ approximation of an entire Beach Boys chorale, is worth the price of admission itself, but there are many more highlights.
Gomez – How We Operate
Like Teenage Fanclub and Travis, Gomez arrived with plenty of buzz via the hype machine, rapidly faded into near obscurity, and are quietly putting out one wonderful album after another. There are three legitimate songwriters here, each with distinctive styles, but they all have an affinity for crafting three-minute guitar-driven pop gems. It’s nothing you haven’t heard a thousand times before. But the quality matters, and these guys deliver consistently high quality.
Catfish Haven – Tell Me
Three white boys from Chicago who want to be Otis Redding. It’s a noble goal, and on the uptempo numbers they nail it. Much R-E-S-P-E-C-T for the attempt. The slower songs are a mess, though. George Hunter, the lead singer, is a poor substitute for Otis as a pleading balladeer, and the hyperventilating act gets old very quickly. It would also help to tune the guitars.
William Bell – New Lease on Life
William Bell was one of the great Stax/Volt soul singers, and his song “You Don’t Miss Your Water” is justly regarded as one of the pinnacles of Memphis soul. He’s still plugging away, forty years down the line, and he’s still in fine voice. Sadly, the production here is dismal, and the songwriting itself is lame to the point of embarrassment. Titles like “Playaz Only Love You When They’re Playing” (hello, Stevie Nicks!) tell the story. It’s too bad, because the voice is intact. Where’s Joe Henry when you need him?
British Sea Power – The Decline of British Sea Power, Open Season
I’ve had these two albums for a while now, and haven’t paid that much attention. But I pulled them off the shelf recently, and I’ve enjoyed them immensely. Fans of the cracked eccentricity of The Arcade Fire or The Decemberists will appreciate these literate, quirky tales of Antarctic ice floes, Charles Lindbergh’s plane, and the martyrdom of 16th century nuns. Best recommendation I can offer: Lead singer Yan sings “The occultation of a summer sun/Was burning holes in everyone” and makes it rock. The music sounds familiar in a vague New Wave sense, but never oppressively so. I hear echoes of Interpol, The Cure, Talking Heads, even early, very psychedelic Pink Floyd on the pastoral, lovely “North Hanging Rock.” It’s different. It’s frequently pretty. And it rocks.
It’s not that they’re bad (well, okay, Rod Stewart is bad). It’s just that they take up my time. But on the bright side, Rod Stewart is truly horrid, and I will admit that I take a perverse pleasure in slamming him in print. Do ya think he’s sexy? No. Do ya think he’s recorded a single note in the past thirty years in which he’s emotionally invested? No. Etc.
So in addition to Rod the Fraud, I’ve been listening to the following albums, some of which I’ll review, and some of which I won’t. But I’m really looking forward to that new batch of albums from The Hold Steady, The Decemberists, and Beck.
Steve Almaas and Ali Smith – You Showed Me
Almaas was the head wrangler for Beat Rodeo, an ‘80s cowpoke band (back when alt-country was still just country rock). I liked him then, and I like him now. He hooked up with girlfriend Ali Smith on a great duets album in 2002, and he reprises the formula here. And it’s a great formula, too – sweet Gram and Emmylou harmonies, chiming, Byrds-like guitars, and subject matter ranging from original protest anthems to settings of James Joyce poems. Smith’s quivering Girl Group vocals on “The Lonely Sea,” an early Brian Wilson song, and Almaas’ approximation of an entire Beach Boys chorale, is worth the price of admission itself, but there are many more highlights.
Gomez – How We Operate
Like Teenage Fanclub and Travis, Gomez arrived with plenty of buzz via the hype machine, rapidly faded into near obscurity, and are quietly putting out one wonderful album after another. There are three legitimate songwriters here, each with distinctive styles, but they all have an affinity for crafting three-minute guitar-driven pop gems. It’s nothing you haven’t heard a thousand times before. But the quality matters, and these guys deliver consistently high quality.
Catfish Haven – Tell Me
Three white boys from Chicago who want to be Otis Redding. It’s a noble goal, and on the uptempo numbers they nail it. Much R-E-S-P-E-C-T for the attempt. The slower songs are a mess, though. George Hunter, the lead singer, is a poor substitute for Otis as a pleading balladeer, and the hyperventilating act gets old very quickly. It would also help to tune the guitars.
William Bell – New Lease on Life
William Bell was one of the great Stax/Volt soul singers, and his song “You Don’t Miss Your Water” is justly regarded as one of the pinnacles of Memphis soul. He’s still plugging away, forty years down the line, and he’s still in fine voice. Sadly, the production here is dismal, and the songwriting itself is lame to the point of embarrassment. Titles like “Playaz Only Love You When They’re Playing” (hello, Stevie Nicks!) tell the story. It’s too bad, because the voice is intact. Where’s Joe Henry when you need him?
British Sea Power – The Decline of British Sea Power, Open Season
I’ve had these two albums for a while now, and haven’t paid that much attention. But I pulled them off the shelf recently, and I’ve enjoyed them immensely. Fans of the cracked eccentricity of The Arcade Fire or The Decemberists will appreciate these literate, quirky tales of Antarctic ice floes, Charles Lindbergh’s plane, and the martyrdom of 16th century nuns. Best recommendation I can offer: Lead singer Yan sings “The occultation of a summer sun/Was burning holes in everyone” and makes it rock. The music sounds familiar in a vague New Wave sense, but never oppressively so. I hear echoes of Interpol, The Cure, Talking Heads, even early, very psychedelic Pink Floyd on the pastoral, lovely “North Hanging Rock.” It’s different. It’s frequently pretty. And it rocks.
Thursday, October 05, 2006
Metal of Honor: Mastodon and Saosin
It's the last frontier. I can find many things to love about punk, rockabilly, psychobilly, indie rock, emo, screamo, hardcore, shoegazer, blues-based boogie, lo-fi, power pop, and just plain rock 'n roll. Electric guitars and I are old buddies, and we go way back. But I've never been a fan of metal. I would rather undergo a root canal than listen to Metallica. I think Ozzie Osbourne is a totally engaging reality TV star, but that's about it.
So, for reasons unknown, two new metal albums have shown up in my mailbox recently -- the eponymous big-label debut from Californians Saosin, and something called Blood Mountain from the atrociously named Athens, Georgia-based Mastodon.
I know what you're thinking. I was thinking it, too. Good God, Mastodon. Blood Mountain. The image wasn't helped when I saw song titles like "Crystal Skull" and "Circle of Cysquatch." I conjured visions of the Stonehenge scene from Spinal Tap, gap-toothed guys whipping their greasy hair around in some sort of heavy metal ecstasy, paeans of praise to drinking goblets of fresh Type O Negative.
But you know what? Blood Mountain is really great. It's loud, it's angry, it thrashes like crazy. No big surprise there. But it's also articulate and witty and wise. That's a bit of a surprise. And every couple of minutes it evolves into something that can only be described as prog rock thrash. And that's a big surprise. The Mars Volta aims for this territory, too, but I'm always derailed about six minutes into their fifteen-minute opuses, put off by the seemingly endless wankery and nonsensical lyrics. Not this time. These songs are tight and concise, but endlessly surprising. Just when you expect them to descend into the usual metal cliches, they veer off into completely unexpected and delightful directions. And these guys are seriously great musicians. I'm very impressed.
Saosin take the same hardcore elements and weld them to populist early Def Leppard anthems. They're far more of a serious metal band than Def Leppard ever was, but the same multi-tracked harmonies and soaring, anthemic choruses should win them a big and devoted fanbase. This band will probably be huge if they get the right promotion from EMI, and I suspect they will. And for once they will improve the neighborhood.
I'm still not a big fan of metal as a genre. But these two albums are going a long way to change my mind.
So, for reasons unknown, two new metal albums have shown up in my mailbox recently -- the eponymous big-label debut from Californians Saosin, and something called Blood Mountain from the atrociously named Athens, Georgia-based Mastodon.
I know what you're thinking. I was thinking it, too. Good God, Mastodon. Blood Mountain. The image wasn't helped when I saw song titles like "Crystal Skull" and "Circle of Cysquatch." I conjured visions of the Stonehenge scene from Spinal Tap, gap-toothed guys whipping their greasy hair around in some sort of heavy metal ecstasy, paeans of praise to drinking goblets of fresh Type O Negative.
But you know what? Blood Mountain is really great. It's loud, it's angry, it thrashes like crazy. No big surprise there. But it's also articulate and witty and wise. That's a bit of a surprise. And every couple of minutes it evolves into something that can only be described as prog rock thrash. And that's a big surprise. The Mars Volta aims for this territory, too, but I'm always derailed about six minutes into their fifteen-minute opuses, put off by the seemingly endless wankery and nonsensical lyrics. Not this time. These songs are tight and concise, but endlessly surprising. Just when you expect them to descend into the usual metal cliches, they veer off into completely unexpected and delightful directions. And these guys are seriously great musicians. I'm very impressed.
Saosin take the same hardcore elements and weld them to populist early Def Leppard anthems. They're far more of a serious metal band than Def Leppard ever was, but the same multi-tracked harmonies and soaring, anthemic choruses should win them a big and devoted fanbase. This band will probably be huge if they get the right promotion from EMI, and I suspect they will. And for once they will improve the neighborhood.
I'm still not a big fan of metal as a genre. But these two albums are going a long way to change my mind.
Perchance to Dream
I can't sleep. This has been a chronic problem in my life, but it's getting worse. For those of you who are praying types, I'd appreciate your prayers.
I sleep, on average, 3 - 4 hours per night. It's not uncommon to fall asleep at 4:00 a.m. and for the alarm clock to go off at 6:30 a.m. A "good" night of sleep for me is 5 hours.
Here's what I do. I go to bed at a reasonable hour. I exercise like a madman (yes, it's hard to tell, but I hit the treadmill for 4 miles per day at what may look like a leisurely stroll, but which is a pretty brisk clip for someone with 16-inch legs). And I've cut way, way back on caffeine, limiting myself to 2 cups of coffee per day, and nothing after noon. And I still can't sleep. I simply can't turn off my brain.
So I'm chronically exhausted. There are times when I'm trying to have a conversation with someone and I'm literally so tired that I can't form words. And I'm a words kind of guy. In other words, this is interfering with life. I'm able to focus at work, except during the several passing phases every day where I just want to lay my head down on my keyboard. But this is frowned upon, so I don't. I do my best to have normal social interactions with my family and friends, but there are many times when I know I'm on autopilot, not able to fully engage with people I'd honestly like to engage with fully.
Life is stressful, but it's always stressful. This is what comes of working a fulltime gig and a couple of part-time writing gigs. And I'm not willing to give up the part-time gigs. But I'd surely like to sleep. Anybody have any suggestions? Prayers are welcome.
I sleep, on average, 3 - 4 hours per night. It's not uncommon to fall asleep at 4:00 a.m. and for the alarm clock to go off at 6:30 a.m. A "good" night of sleep for me is 5 hours.
Here's what I do. I go to bed at a reasonable hour. I exercise like a madman (yes, it's hard to tell, but I hit the treadmill for 4 miles per day at what may look like a leisurely stroll, but which is a pretty brisk clip for someone with 16-inch legs). And I've cut way, way back on caffeine, limiting myself to 2 cups of coffee per day, and nothing after noon. And I still can't sleep. I simply can't turn off my brain.
So I'm chronically exhausted. There are times when I'm trying to have a conversation with someone and I'm literally so tired that I can't form words. And I'm a words kind of guy. In other words, this is interfering with life. I'm able to focus at work, except during the several passing phases every day where I just want to lay my head down on my keyboard. But this is frowned upon, so I don't. I do my best to have normal social interactions with my family and friends, but there are many times when I know I'm on autopilot, not able to fully engage with people I'd honestly like to engage with fully.
Life is stressful, but it's always stressful. This is what comes of working a fulltime gig and a couple of part-time writing gigs. And I'm not willing to give up the part-time gigs. But I'd surely like to sleep. Anybody have any suggestions? Prayers are welcome.
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
The Milkman Cometh
It doesn't sound like the name of a horror movie. But it is. Drop off the daily delivery, then line up some sweet little Amish girls in front of the blackboard and shoot them in the head. It's Nightmare on Bonnet Street.
It's nothing new, of course. Ever since some Goth outsider kids in Colorado decided to massacre their classmates and teachers seven years ago, violence in schools has become fairly routine news. We've become desensitized to it. There have been three such occurrences in the past week. But the thought of those bloodsoaked bonnets has awakened me again. And I feel sick.
Why the Amish, of all people? Why terrorize people who simply want to be left alone, who preach nonviolence and non-resistance, who want to live peaceably with their crops and their livestock and their community of faith? And who will, God bless them, find some way in their hearts not to harbor bitterness and unforgiveness? Why them?
Strolling into a school building should not be a life-threatening event. But it is. It is, and I hover between wanting to pull my daughter out of school and providing her with a bullet-proof vest. I understand the Second Amendment. I understand how fervently some people cherish their right to own firearms. But look at us. Look at what we have become. To put it mildly, it doesn't seem like it's working.
It's nothing new, of course. Ever since some Goth outsider kids in Colorado decided to massacre their classmates and teachers seven years ago, violence in schools has become fairly routine news. We've become desensitized to it. There have been three such occurrences in the past week. But the thought of those bloodsoaked bonnets has awakened me again. And I feel sick.
Why the Amish, of all people? Why terrorize people who simply want to be left alone, who preach nonviolence and non-resistance, who want to live peaceably with their crops and their livestock and their community of faith? And who will, God bless them, find some way in their hearts not to harbor bitterness and unforgiveness? Why them?
Strolling into a school building should not be a life-threatening event. But it is. It is, and I hover between wanting to pull my daughter out of school and providing her with a bullet-proof vest. I understand the Second Amendment. I understand how fervently some people cherish their right to own firearms. But look at us. Look at what we have become. To put it mildly, it doesn't seem like it's working.
Friday, September 29, 2006
Next Blog
Blogger has a "Next Blog" button, which I've never noticed before, that appears in the upper right corner of the blog window. So, while checking my blog, I clicked it. And this is what I found:
"Life........ its a very strange thg... neither u can live with it nor u can live without it....sometimes life gives u everythg.... i mean everythg u need. U dont even have to ask for it... its thr decorated in plate and handed over to u... just like tht... In such moments i think how strange? I didnt ask for it!! why? wht for??"
I don't know how this person arrived next to me in the blog world. I don't know how these things work. But I am so glad to hang out next to someone who realizes that life is something you can neither live with nor without. Particularly without, I would guess. Welcome, virtual neighbor! May u ponder life fr mny yrs 2 come.
"Life........ its a very strange thg... neither u can live with it nor u can live without it....sometimes life gives u everythg.... i mean everythg u need. U dont even have to ask for it... its thr decorated in plate and handed over to u... just like tht... In such moments i think how strange? I didnt ask for it!! why? wht for??"
I don't know how this person arrived next to me in the blog world. I don't know how these things work. But I am so glad to hang out next to someone who realizes that life is something you can neither live with nor without. Particularly without, I would guess. Welcome, virtual neighbor! May u ponder life fr mny yrs 2 come.
Thursday, September 28, 2006
Utopia v5.0
One of the seductions that bedevils Christian formation is the construction of utopias, ideal places where we can live totally and without inhibition or interference the good and blessed and righteous life. The imagining and then attempted construction of such utopias is an old habit of our kind. Sometimes we attempt it politically in communities, sometimes socially in communes, sometimes religiously in churches. It never comes to anything but grief. Utopia is, literally, “no-place.” But we can live our lives only in actual place, not in an imagined or fantasized or artificially fashioned place.
-- Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, p. 73.
I am no stranger to utopias. Version 1.0 crumbled when I was an adolescent, when my happy, secure home morphed into Hell’s Half Acre, thanks to marital infidelity and alcoholism and mental illness. I didn’t realize I was living in utopia at the time. I just took it for granted that it was home. Then the butcher knives came out and the suicide attempts started and the ambulances started pulling in the driveway at 3:00 a.m. Joni Mitchell once sang, “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone?” And she was right. But I was determined to find utopia again.
I found Version 2.0 a few years later in an unlikely place – what passes for a ghetto in Columbus, Ohio. I was a new Christian, I was deeply (for better and worse) influenced by the counterculture, and I wanted nothing to do with stained glass windows and hardwood pews. But a Jesus Freak commune/community in the middle of the city sounded just fine. It was home for eight years. I met my wife there. Before that I lived with a married couple with kids, and watched them work through their conflicts, and learned something about what it was like to live in the midst of a normal, healthy marriage. I lived with single guys. I lived with dogs and cats. I lived with goats. I lived with homeless people who got picked up off the street, brought home, given a place to sleep and a warm meal the next morning. I lived with a church full of people who were committed to trying to live like Jesus in what sometimes passed for a war zone. Women got raped. Houses got robbed. And in the midst of that incredible turmoil, I found a group of people I grew to deeply love.
And then it fell apart. The Jesus Freaks got married, started having kids, and figured that they didn’t want little Joshua and Sarah to be exposed to the crack dealer on the corner. And unlike their poor, downtrodden, and frequently violent, crazy neighbors, they moved because they could. I understood it. I didn’t blame them. But utopia started looking like suburbia in less than a decade. And part of me – the cynical, resigned part of me – smirked at the injustice of it all. It was either that or cry. So much for the lofty vision of ministering to the least of these. Now people were ministering to their lawns.
But idealism is a tenacious little virus in me, and a few years later it came back with a vengeance. Version 3.0 involved a move to Norman Rockwell’s America – specifically, Mount Vernon, Ohio. Mount Vernon was a picturesque little burg with coblestoned streets and lovely Victorian homes and a real downtown shopping district and churches within easy walking distance and a quaint little park with a Civil War statue smack dab in the middle of everything. And I convinced myself that that’s what was missing from my life. You couldn’t manufacture community, the way we had tried in the ghetto. You had to move to a real community. So we packed up the kids and headed to Smalltown, USA, where all the men would doff their caps and say “Mornin’, Andy” as I strolled the cobblestoned streets, and where all the apple-cheeked children would smile and wave.
Somebody should have warned me that Norman Rockwell was a sentimental schmuck. Or somebody should have at least warned me that I was a sentimental schmuck. In any case, it didn’t work. Nobody told us about the insular world of small town America, where four generations of a family all live within a couple blocks of each other, and where, if you’re lucky, you might lose the “outsider” tag if you stick it out for twenty years. We stuck it out for seven. And then we headed to the wilds of suburbia, where everybody’s an outsider, and where, if you’re lucky, you might be able to have a conversation with your neighbor before he pulls into his garage and presses the button on the automatic garage door contraption that shuts him in for the night.
Version 4.0 has been progressing nicely for a little more than seven years now. It’s a smaller, more circumscribed world where I don’t expect too much. Maybe Mount Vernon cured me of that. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a pleasant life. I love being able to walk outside my door and see sailboats on a lake. Bruce Cockburn once sang “All the diamonds in this world that mean anything to me/Are conjured up by wind and sunlight sparkling on the sea.” That sounds about right. But for the rest of my days, I’m going to stop counting utopias. I have a wonderful wife, and great kids, and a bunch of friends, a church full of courageous and generous human beings whom I love and admire and am challenged by and amazed by. I would be a fool not to be thankful for these things, and at least in this area I am not a fool.
But I walk around with a hole in my soul, just as everybody does, just as it must be for all those who stumble around on a planet that is not utopia. There are places that even those closest to me cannot touch. There are aches I cannot even articulate. There are losses I cannot name. What is the word for the disconnect that makes me indifferent to the sufferings of others, that makes others indifferent to my deepest longings, that imprisons us all in our garages of insecurity and anger and unforgiveness? I long to go someplace else. I long for a country I’ve never visited.
And so I limit myself to a dream, a hope, a prayer. I can’t wait for version 5.0.
-- Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, p. 73.
I am no stranger to utopias. Version 1.0 crumbled when I was an adolescent, when my happy, secure home morphed into Hell’s Half Acre, thanks to marital infidelity and alcoholism and mental illness. I didn’t realize I was living in utopia at the time. I just took it for granted that it was home. Then the butcher knives came out and the suicide attempts started and the ambulances started pulling in the driveway at 3:00 a.m. Joni Mitchell once sang, “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone?” And she was right. But I was determined to find utopia again.
I found Version 2.0 a few years later in an unlikely place – what passes for a ghetto in Columbus, Ohio. I was a new Christian, I was deeply (for better and worse) influenced by the counterculture, and I wanted nothing to do with stained glass windows and hardwood pews. But a Jesus Freak commune/community in the middle of the city sounded just fine. It was home for eight years. I met my wife there. Before that I lived with a married couple with kids, and watched them work through their conflicts, and learned something about what it was like to live in the midst of a normal, healthy marriage. I lived with single guys. I lived with dogs and cats. I lived with goats. I lived with homeless people who got picked up off the street, brought home, given a place to sleep and a warm meal the next morning. I lived with a church full of people who were committed to trying to live like Jesus in what sometimes passed for a war zone. Women got raped. Houses got robbed. And in the midst of that incredible turmoil, I found a group of people I grew to deeply love.
And then it fell apart. The Jesus Freaks got married, started having kids, and figured that they didn’t want little Joshua and Sarah to be exposed to the crack dealer on the corner. And unlike their poor, downtrodden, and frequently violent, crazy neighbors, they moved because they could. I understood it. I didn’t blame them. But utopia started looking like suburbia in less than a decade. And part of me – the cynical, resigned part of me – smirked at the injustice of it all. It was either that or cry. So much for the lofty vision of ministering to the least of these. Now people were ministering to their lawns.
But idealism is a tenacious little virus in me, and a few years later it came back with a vengeance. Version 3.0 involved a move to Norman Rockwell’s America – specifically, Mount Vernon, Ohio. Mount Vernon was a picturesque little burg with coblestoned streets and lovely Victorian homes and a real downtown shopping district and churches within easy walking distance and a quaint little park with a Civil War statue smack dab in the middle of everything. And I convinced myself that that’s what was missing from my life. You couldn’t manufacture community, the way we had tried in the ghetto. You had to move to a real community. So we packed up the kids and headed to Smalltown, USA, where all the men would doff their caps and say “Mornin’, Andy” as I strolled the cobblestoned streets, and where all the apple-cheeked children would smile and wave.
Somebody should have warned me that Norman Rockwell was a sentimental schmuck. Or somebody should have at least warned me that I was a sentimental schmuck. In any case, it didn’t work. Nobody told us about the insular world of small town America, where four generations of a family all live within a couple blocks of each other, and where, if you’re lucky, you might lose the “outsider” tag if you stick it out for twenty years. We stuck it out for seven. And then we headed to the wilds of suburbia, where everybody’s an outsider, and where, if you’re lucky, you might be able to have a conversation with your neighbor before he pulls into his garage and presses the button on the automatic garage door contraption that shuts him in for the night.
Version 4.0 has been progressing nicely for a little more than seven years now. It’s a smaller, more circumscribed world where I don’t expect too much. Maybe Mount Vernon cured me of that. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a pleasant life. I love being able to walk outside my door and see sailboats on a lake. Bruce Cockburn once sang “All the diamonds in this world that mean anything to me/Are conjured up by wind and sunlight sparkling on the sea.” That sounds about right. But for the rest of my days, I’m going to stop counting utopias. I have a wonderful wife, and great kids, and a bunch of friends, a church full of courageous and generous human beings whom I love and admire and am challenged by and amazed by. I would be a fool not to be thankful for these things, and at least in this area I am not a fool.
But I walk around with a hole in my soul, just as everybody does, just as it must be for all those who stumble around on a planet that is not utopia. There are places that even those closest to me cannot touch. There are aches I cannot even articulate. There are losses I cannot name. What is the word for the disconnect that makes me indifferent to the sufferings of others, that makes others indifferent to my deepest longings, that imprisons us all in our garages of insecurity and anger and unforgiveness? I long to go someplace else. I long for a country I’ve never visited.
And so I limit myself to a dream, a hope, a prayer. I can’t wait for version 5.0.
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
Oh Boy! New Dan Reeder and Steve Goodman
John Prine's record label Oh Boy! can usually be counted on for quality music, and he hasn't disappointed in the month of September. The label's two new releases, Dan Reeder's sophomore album Sweetheart and Steve Goodman's Live at the Earl of Old Town, are both superb.
Reeder has the kind of world-weary rasp that makes it easy to understand why Prine would be drawn to him. He has Prine's wit and fine eye for detail, too. He's a crass son-of-a-gun (three of the song titles are "I Drink Beer," "Pussy Titty," and "Pussy Heaven"), but I can't fault him too much. The middle song is a wry commentary on men's room graffiti, while "I Drink Beer" solemnly declares, ""I drink beer to improve my mind/End all war, and help mankind/Through these dark and trying times.'' Yeah, me too. He takes Procol Harum's prog-rock classic "Whiter Shade of Pale" and turns it into a Neil Young country-folk ditty, and on "Bach is Dead and Gone" he offers a line that has to be in the running for lyric of the year: "I said, 'Let's write some motets.' He was already done." Cynicism and a heart that cares in spite of itself haven't sounded this good since Prine's early albums.
I love Steve Goodman, and have almost everything he's ever recorded, so I may not be the most objective source here. But somebody unearthed a long buried concert tape from 1978, and for me this is the equivalent of a life-changing archaeological discovery. The sound is miraculously good, Goodman is at the height of his powers, which means that he's funny, sad, profound, and a hell of an acoustic guitar picker, and he concludes his hour-long set with an ode to the Chicago Cubs, who were only four games out of first place when the concert was recorded.
They finished 11 games out of first. They will break your heart every time. Those of you who care about Chicago know that the Cubs can do that. So can Steve Goodman, who was thirty years old when this concert was recorded, and who died a mere six years later of leukemia, just a few days before the Cubs clinched their first playoff appearance in what would have been his lifetime. I love his songs and I love the way he plays them here; full tilt, no-holds-barred, heart-on-the-sleeve folk music that somehow manages to rock. He was a great talent, and I still miss him, and I'm glad to have another artifact of his too short life.
Reeder has the kind of world-weary rasp that makes it easy to understand why Prine would be drawn to him. He has Prine's wit and fine eye for detail, too. He's a crass son-of-a-gun (three of the song titles are "I Drink Beer," "Pussy Titty," and "Pussy Heaven"), but I can't fault him too much. The middle song is a wry commentary on men's room graffiti, while "I Drink Beer" solemnly declares, ""I drink beer to improve my mind/End all war, and help mankind/Through these dark and trying times.'' Yeah, me too. He takes Procol Harum's prog-rock classic "Whiter Shade of Pale" and turns it into a Neil Young country-folk ditty, and on "Bach is Dead and Gone" he offers a line that has to be in the running for lyric of the year: "I said, 'Let's write some motets.' He was already done." Cynicism and a heart that cares in spite of itself haven't sounded this good since Prine's early albums.
I love Steve Goodman, and have almost everything he's ever recorded, so I may not be the most objective source here. But somebody unearthed a long buried concert tape from 1978, and for me this is the equivalent of a life-changing archaeological discovery. The sound is miraculously good, Goodman is at the height of his powers, which means that he's funny, sad, profound, and a hell of an acoustic guitar picker, and he concludes his hour-long set with an ode to the Chicago Cubs, who were only four games out of first place when the concert was recorded.
They finished 11 games out of first. They will break your heart every time. Those of you who care about Chicago know that the Cubs can do that. So can Steve Goodman, who was thirty years old when this concert was recorded, and who died a mere six years later of leukemia, just a few days before the Cubs clinched their first playoff appearance in what would have been his lifetime. I love his songs and I love the way he plays them here; full tilt, no-holds-barred, heart-on-the-sleeve folk music that somehow manages to rock. He was a great talent, and I still miss him, and I'm glad to have another artifact of his too short life.
Willie Nelson, Silversun Pickups, Peter Walker, Unwed Sailor
Willie Nelson – Songbird
These days Willie is hit-or-miss for me. He followed up his horrendous reggae album Countryman with the surprisingly lovely You Don’t Know Me: The Songs of Cindy Walker. Now he’s back with Songbird, aided and abetted by fellow renegade Ryan Adams and his backing band The Cardinals. Willie’s voice, always a somewhat dubious instrument, is thinner than it used to be. But he makes up for it in engaging in some rowdy good times. As smooth and countrypolitan as the Cindy Walker album was, Songbird is all jagged edges and bar band raunch. There are some mediocre covers (please, not Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” again, and Gram Parsons’ “$1000 Wedding” is surprisingly lackluster), but Willie’s take on The Grateful Dead’s “Stella Blue” is an unexpected highlight, and the title track (yes, Willie does Fleetwood Mac) is pure gold. Adams and the Cardinals kick up a fuss behind him, and Willie sounds more energized than he has in years.
Silversun Pickups – Carnavas
It was about time for an early nineties revival. L.A.’s Silversun Pickups clearly listened to a lot of My Bloody Valentine, Smashing Pumpkins, and Pixies during their misspent youth. So if their debut album is derivative, and it is, then at least they they picked some great influences. Singer/songwriter Brian Aubert takes Kevin Shields’ hazy wall of guitar noise and marries it to some infectious hooks. Bassist Nikki Monninger has her Kim Deal moves down, and sings/shouts the harmonies. And overall, Aubert writes better songs than Billy Corgan has written in fifteen years. If it’s not original, it’s at least good. That’s better than anything I can say about the reconstituted Pixies, the increasingly bland Corgan, or the long gone Valentine.
Peter Walker/Various Artists – A Raga for Peter Walker
First Vashti Bunyan. Now Peter Walker. The old hippies have decided to become productive again in their dotage. The legendary/infamous guitarist Peter Walker was the musical director for Timothy Leary’s LSD experiments at Harvard, recorded two folk albums for the venerable Vanguard Records in the late 1960s, and then took a 37-year break. Hey, everybody needs to stop and smell the roses. And have you ever tasted red, man? I mean, like, really let red permeate your whole being? So, after a colorful few decades, Peter’s back with a new album, A Raga for Peter Walker, which features Walker on four new tracks, and musical friends such as Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore on seven more. It's lovely music, too, combining some intricate acoustic fingerpicking with the drone that you would expect given the album title. If Leo Kottke and Ravi Shankar joined forces, this is what they might sound like. Far out, old man.
Unwed Sailor – The White Ox
Unwed Sailor’s previous album, 2004’s The Marionette and the Music Box, was a 17-song concept album about a lost marionette trying to find the music box he/she/it called home, and featured a track called “Distraction. A Conflict of Interest. Enchanted by the Unicorn.” It gave credence to the notion that drugs can do serious damage to human beings. Astoundingly, given the premise, it was pretty good in spite of its pretentious/twee aspirations, and managed to present a series of coherent all-instrumental songs whose meaning/content was conveyed by the illustrations in the CD booklet. This time out Unwed Sailor mastermind Johnathon Ford is joined by Early Day Miner’s Dan Burton, who actually sings words on a couple tracks. But musically, it’s the same winning formula – ambient, brooding, mostly instrumental songs that are as dark and foreboding as they are lovely. There’s not much here that you can hum along with, but it’s perfectly wonderful mood music.
These days Willie is hit-or-miss for me. He followed up his horrendous reggae album Countryman with the surprisingly lovely You Don’t Know Me: The Songs of Cindy Walker. Now he’s back with Songbird, aided and abetted by fellow renegade Ryan Adams and his backing band The Cardinals. Willie’s voice, always a somewhat dubious instrument, is thinner than it used to be. But he makes up for it in engaging in some rowdy good times. As smooth and countrypolitan as the Cindy Walker album was, Songbird is all jagged edges and bar band raunch. There are some mediocre covers (please, not Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” again, and Gram Parsons’ “$1000 Wedding” is surprisingly lackluster), but Willie’s take on The Grateful Dead’s “Stella Blue” is an unexpected highlight, and the title track (yes, Willie does Fleetwood Mac) is pure gold. Adams and the Cardinals kick up a fuss behind him, and Willie sounds more energized than he has in years.
Silversun Pickups – Carnavas
It was about time for an early nineties revival. L.A.’s Silversun Pickups clearly listened to a lot of My Bloody Valentine, Smashing Pumpkins, and Pixies during their misspent youth. So if their debut album is derivative, and it is, then at least they they picked some great influences. Singer/songwriter Brian Aubert takes Kevin Shields’ hazy wall of guitar noise and marries it to some infectious hooks. Bassist Nikki Monninger has her Kim Deal moves down, and sings/shouts the harmonies. And overall, Aubert writes better songs than Billy Corgan has written in fifteen years. If it’s not original, it’s at least good. That’s better than anything I can say about the reconstituted Pixies, the increasingly bland Corgan, or the long gone Valentine.
Peter Walker/Various Artists – A Raga for Peter Walker
First Vashti Bunyan. Now Peter Walker. The old hippies have decided to become productive again in their dotage. The legendary/infamous guitarist Peter Walker was the musical director for Timothy Leary’s LSD experiments at Harvard, recorded two folk albums for the venerable Vanguard Records in the late 1960s, and then took a 37-year break. Hey, everybody needs to stop and smell the roses. And have you ever tasted red, man? I mean, like, really let red permeate your whole being? So, after a colorful few decades, Peter’s back with a new album, A Raga for Peter Walker, which features Walker on four new tracks, and musical friends such as Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore on seven more. It's lovely music, too, combining some intricate acoustic fingerpicking with the drone that you would expect given the album title. If Leo Kottke and Ravi Shankar joined forces, this is what they might sound like. Far out, old man.
Unwed Sailor – The White Ox
Unwed Sailor’s previous album, 2004’s The Marionette and the Music Box, was a 17-song concept album about a lost marionette trying to find the music box he/she/it called home, and featured a track called “Distraction. A Conflict of Interest. Enchanted by the Unicorn.” It gave credence to the notion that drugs can do serious damage to human beings. Astoundingly, given the premise, it was pretty good in spite of its pretentious/twee aspirations, and managed to present a series of coherent all-instrumental songs whose meaning/content was conveyed by the illustrations in the CD booklet. This time out Unwed Sailor mastermind Johnathon Ford is joined by Early Day Miner’s Dan Burton, who actually sings words on a couple tracks. But musically, it’s the same winning formula – ambient, brooding, mostly instrumental songs that are as dark and foreboding as they are lovely. There’s not much here that you can hum along with, but it’s perfectly wonderful mood music.
Thursday, September 21, 2006
The Last Day of Summer
It's the last day of summer, and what better way to celebrate it than for middle-aged fat guys to revel in the wonder that is surf music? So I sit in my cubicle, eat my leftover meat loaf sandwich, and contemplate carving a line atop a 50-foot wave at Malibu. Don't dwell too long on the image. It can make you crazy.
Still, I'm a sucker for surf music in general, and surf instrumentals in particular. Even if I can't surf, I can still vicariously participate in the culture. To that end, Rhino's Surfin' Hits compilation is still the best place to start, and features the expected Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, and Dick Dale tunes, along with marvellous one-hit (or sometimes two-hit) wonders The Marketts, The Chantays, The Rumblers and The Trashmen.
Another big favorite is San Francisco's Mermen (one of whom is a woman, but why quibble about beings with fins?). All of their albums are good, but 1995's A Glorious, Lethal Euphoria has to be heard to be believed. There are definite Dick Dale influences, as well as some hints of Sonic Youth and John Coltrane, all speeded up to ridiculous tempos and put in a sonic blender. Plus a song called "The Drowning Man Knows His God" and a surf take on Brahms' 3rd Symphony.
I also have to put in a plug for French, Frith, Kaiser and Thompson's (as in Richard Thompson) album Live, Love, Larf, and Loaf, which features a goosestepping version of "Surfin' USA" as it might have been performed by Heinrich Himmler.
Surfers have their own version of human depravity and the fallen world that we live in. It doesn't really account all that well for the Heinrich Himmler's of the world, but I've always loved it just the same:
There's a moon in the sky somewhere I know
Waiting for all the love to burn below
If you fall and it happens all to soon
Blame it all on the surfer moon
But not today. It's the last day of summer. The sun is shining gloriously. It's as beautiful as California, only with corn. I'm going to take the iPod outside after I finish my sandwich, stroll sedately to some old surfin' tunes, and imagine that I'm on Zuma beach.
Still, I'm a sucker for surf music in general, and surf instrumentals in particular. Even if I can't surf, I can still vicariously participate in the culture. To that end, Rhino's Surfin' Hits compilation is still the best place to start, and features the expected Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, and Dick Dale tunes, along with marvellous one-hit (or sometimes two-hit) wonders The Marketts, The Chantays, The Rumblers and The Trashmen.
Another big favorite is San Francisco's Mermen (one of whom is a woman, but why quibble about beings with fins?). All of their albums are good, but 1995's A Glorious, Lethal Euphoria has to be heard to be believed. There are definite Dick Dale influences, as well as some hints of Sonic Youth and John Coltrane, all speeded up to ridiculous tempos and put in a sonic blender. Plus a song called "The Drowning Man Knows His God" and a surf take on Brahms' 3rd Symphony.
I also have to put in a plug for French, Frith, Kaiser and Thompson's (as in Richard Thompson) album Live, Love, Larf, and Loaf, which features a goosestepping version of "Surfin' USA" as it might have been performed by Heinrich Himmler.
Surfers have their own version of human depravity and the fallen world that we live in. It doesn't really account all that well for the Heinrich Himmler's of the world, but I've always loved it just the same:
There's a moon in the sky somewhere I know
Waiting for all the love to burn below
If you fall and it happens all to soon
Blame it all on the surfer moon
But not today. It's the last day of summer. The sun is shining gloriously. It's as beautiful as California, only with corn. I'm going to take the iPod outside after I finish my sandwich, stroll sedately to some old surfin' tunes, and imagine that I'm on Zuma beach.
Monday, September 18, 2006
New All Music Guide Reviews -- Birdmonster, Bernard Fanning, Ollabelle
Some new reviews at All Music Guide (allmusic.com):
Birdmonster -- No Midnight
Bernard Fanning -- Tea and Sympathy
Ollabelle -- Riverside Battle Songs
Birdmonster -- No Midnight
Bernard Fanning -- Tea and Sympathy
Ollabelle -- Riverside Battle Songs
Paste #25
Paste #25 is now out, with moviemaker/movie star/TV star/Shins fan Zach Braff on the cover.
Those who care about virtual Andy Whitman sightings will find my lead review of Mindy Smith's latest album (Long Island Shores), a short review of the new Bruce Hornsby box set, and my back-page article on cosmic cowboy Gram Parsons. Those who care about physical Andy Whitman sightings can catch me at home most evenings this week, writing feverishly, mowing the lawn, helping my daughter with occasional homework requests, cooking dinner, washing the dishes, and, time permitting, trudging faithfully on the treadmill. Yes, Kate is working evenings most of this week.
For the virtual sightings, visit your friendly neighborhood Borders or Barnes and Noble Bookstore. For the physical sightings, call me at home, but give me advance warning so I can bathe first.
Those who care about virtual Andy Whitman sightings will find my lead review of Mindy Smith's latest album (Long Island Shores), a short review of the new Bruce Hornsby box set, and my back-page article on cosmic cowboy Gram Parsons. Those who care about physical Andy Whitman sightings can catch me at home most evenings this week, writing feverishly, mowing the lawn, helping my daughter with occasional homework requests, cooking dinner, washing the dishes, and, time permitting, trudging faithfully on the treadmill. Yes, Kate is working evenings most of this week.
For the virtual sightings, visit your friendly neighborhood Borders or Barnes and Noble Bookstore. For the physical sightings, call me at home, but give me advance warning so I can bathe first.
Wednesday, September 13, 2006
Sin City
This is a cautionary gospel tune written by two hippies who may or may not have known Jesus. It just might be my favorite gospel song. Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman left The Byrds in 1969, determined to play old-time country music. They formed a band called The Flying Burrito Brothers and wrote songs like this. Influenced by authentic Appalachian music from the likes of the Louvin Brothers and the Stanley Brothers, they engaged in some fabulous picking and high harmony singing and raised an impossibly glorious hymn to paranoia and impending Armageddon. Somehow it seems more timely than ever.
This old town is filled with sin
It'll swallow you in
If you've got some money to burn
Take it home right away
You've got three years to pay
But Satan is waiting his turn
This old earthquake's gonna leave me in the poor house
It seems like this whole town's insane
On the thirty-first floor a gold plated door
Won't keep out the Lord's burning rain
The scientists say
It'll all wash away
But we don't believe any more
Cause we've got our recruits
And our green mohair suits
So please show your ID at the door
This old earthquake's gonna leave me in the poor house
It seems like this whole town's insane
On the thirty-first floor a gold plated door
Won't keep out the Lord's burning rain
A friend came around
Tried to clean up this town
His ideas made some people mad
But he trusted his crowd
So he spoke right out loud
And they lost the best friend they had
This old earthquake's gonna leave me in the poor house
It seems like this whole town's insane
On the thirty-first floor a gold plated door
Won't keep out the Lord's burning rain
On the thirty-first floor a gold plated door
Won't keep out the Lord's burning rain
-- Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman, "Sin City" -- 1970
This old town is filled with sin
It'll swallow you in
If you've got some money to burn
Take it home right away
You've got three years to pay
But Satan is waiting his turn
This old earthquake's gonna leave me in the poor house
It seems like this whole town's insane
On the thirty-first floor a gold plated door
Won't keep out the Lord's burning rain
The scientists say
It'll all wash away
But we don't believe any more
Cause we've got our recruits
And our green mohair suits
So please show your ID at the door
This old earthquake's gonna leave me in the poor house
It seems like this whole town's insane
On the thirty-first floor a gold plated door
Won't keep out the Lord's burning rain
A friend came around
Tried to clean up this town
His ideas made some people mad
But he trusted his crowd
So he spoke right out loud
And they lost the best friend they had
This old earthquake's gonna leave me in the poor house
It seems like this whole town's insane
On the thirty-first floor a gold plated door
Won't keep out the Lord's burning rain
On the thirty-first floor a gold plated door
Won't keep out the Lord's burning rain
-- Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman, "Sin City" -- 1970
Blues for Jesus
The Christian music press is making a big noise over one Jonny Lang. Jonny is a hotshot blues guitarist. He made his first album (Lie to Me) when he was fifteen years old. And it’s a good album, too, featuring blistering guitar runs and Jonnny’s voice, which sounds like he’s fifteen going on fifty, and which has that whiskey-and-cigarettes quality that one hopes is merely a good imitation, at least at that age. So Jonny, now at the ripe old age of 24, has made a new album (Turn Around), where he sings about his love for Jesus. And various Christian magazines are falling all over themselves about what a wondrous and new thing this is – Christian blues. And they are proclaiming this as Jonny’s greatest triumph.
It’s a tendency I’ve seen far too frequently. I remember similarly ecstatic responses for the debut “Christian” albums of Richie Furay (Poco, Souther, Hillman, Furay Band), B. J. Thomas, and, of course, Bob Dylan. The quality of the music is almost an afterthought, and the primary message that is communicated is "Hey look, we got ourselves a legitimate musician from the big, bad, pagan world, and now he gets to engage in 'loss' and 'cross' and 'grace' and 'face' rhymes.” Whoopee.
It's truly unfortunate when the Christian music press takes this approach. For the, umm, record, I think it's great that Jonny Lang knows Jesus. I really do. But his music still needs to be evaluated on its own merits. Just as a footnote, Jonny was singing about Jesus on his previous album, too (Long Time Coming). And you know what? It was a lousy album, and that had nothing to do with the subject matter. It had to do with the cheesy '80s arena rock production, an over-reliance on Pro Tools, and banal lyrics. When will the Christian music press start to understand this?
And just as another footnote, the Christian music press has got it all wrong if they thing Jonny is breaking new ground with this Blues for Jesus thing. Ed Raetzloff did it back in the seventies. So did Resurrection Band/Rez Band/Rez, and "Broken Promises" is still the best "Christian" blues I've ever heard. And moving outside the CCM world, I'll take Blind Willie Johnson over any of them, and he was recording his great gospel blues songs back in 1927.
To quote Larry Norman, "There ain't nothin' wrong with playin' blues licks." He wrote that in 1972, forty-five years after Blind Willie. And it's still true. So God bless Jonny Lang. But please, I think I may have a coronary if I read too many hyperbolic comments about Jonny's breathtakingly innovative approach.
It’s a tendency I’ve seen far too frequently. I remember similarly ecstatic responses for the debut “Christian” albums of Richie Furay (Poco, Souther, Hillman, Furay Band), B. J. Thomas, and, of course, Bob Dylan. The quality of the music is almost an afterthought, and the primary message that is communicated is "Hey look, we got ourselves a legitimate musician from the big, bad, pagan world, and now he gets to engage in 'loss' and 'cross' and 'grace' and 'face' rhymes.” Whoopee.
It's truly unfortunate when the Christian music press takes this approach. For the, umm, record, I think it's great that Jonny Lang knows Jesus. I really do. But his music still needs to be evaluated on its own merits. Just as a footnote, Jonny was singing about Jesus on his previous album, too (Long Time Coming). And you know what? It was a lousy album, and that had nothing to do with the subject matter. It had to do with the cheesy '80s arena rock production, an over-reliance on Pro Tools, and banal lyrics. When will the Christian music press start to understand this?
And just as another footnote, the Christian music press has got it all wrong if they thing Jonny is breaking new ground with this Blues for Jesus thing. Ed Raetzloff did it back in the seventies. So did Resurrection Band/Rez Band/Rez, and "Broken Promises" is still the best "Christian" blues I've ever heard. And moving outside the CCM world, I'll take Blind Willie Johnson over any of them, and he was recording his great gospel blues songs back in 1927.
To quote Larry Norman, "There ain't nothin' wrong with playin' blues licks." He wrote that in 1972, forty-five years after Blind Willie. And it's still true. So God bless Jonny Lang. But please, I think I may have a coronary if I read too many hyperbolic comments about Jonny's breathtakingly innovative approach.
Monday, September 11, 2006
New All Music Guide Reviews -- Elanors, Bobby Bare Jr., Mark Hummel, Horse Feathers
Some of my new reviews have shown up on All Music Guide:
Elanors -- Movements
Bobby Bare Jr. -- The Longest Meow
Mark Hummel -- Ain't Easy No More
Horse Feathers -- Words Are Dead
Elanors -- Movements
Bobby Bare Jr. -- The Longest Meow
Mark Hummel -- Ain't Easy No More
Horse Feathers -- Words Are Dead
Forgetting and Remembering
At 10:30 a.m. on 9/11 I walked in to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles in Westerville, Ohio to get my driver’s license renewed. I strolled in, knowing nothing of what was happening, watched the second World Trade Center tower tumble to the ground, and then about a minute later had to sit in front of a camera and have my picture taken for my driver’s license. The world is about to end; smile at the count of three. I carried that photo around with me for four years. I look like I’m in shock, possibly because I was. I’m smiling, right on cue, and tears are rolling down my face. Amazingly, within a couple weeks I, along with most Americans, was back doing the things I always did, pretending like none of it had happened.
But it did. I have a friend who wrote about an extraordinary lunchtime conversation he overheard on 9/11. Less than three hours after Armageddon, a group of women sat around in a restaurant and talked about their weekend sexual conquests and discussed plans to go shopping. My finely tuned sense of moral outrage kicked in when I read his story. How can people be so shallow? How can they be so self-centered?
Me? I went home and alternated between being drawn to the television and being repelled by the television, wanting to watch and wanting to turn it off and make it all go away. I cried easily. I prayed easily. I wanted to pound my head into the wall. But the next week I started a new job. I had a lot of new information to assimilate. I had to be “on.” And, as rumors of another impending attack filled the airwaves, as stories of ricin and anthrax in the water supply made the rounds, I did my best to concentrate on electronic data interchange and X12 standards and other esoterica that had little or nothing to do with the state of the world, but everything to do with the state of my ability to put food on the table. In short, I went back to normal life.
We cannot sustain the kind of hyper-charged reality that 9/11 temporarily thrust upon us. Some people get past it remarkably quickly, and end up making very, very small talk at lunchtime on the day of a catastrophe. For others it takes a few days, a few weeks. But we all get past it. We go back to doing what we do – going to work, spending time with our families and friends, listening to music, watching TV, puttering around in the woodshop or the garden. It is mundane life, and it is better, or at least easier to bear, than abject fear and terror.
Last night CBS showed a remarkable documentary. Two French filmmakers were making a documentary about the life of a young fireman, tracking his progress from the training academy to life on the job. He was stationed in Engine House #7 in lower Manhattan, seven blocks from the World Trade Center. In the middle of their documentary a catastrophe of unimagined horror happened. Quite by accident, they ended up filming a remarkably stark, graphic portrayal of 9/11, embedded with the first firefighters who arrived on the scene, milling about in the lobby of Tower #1. There is chaos all around the firefighters. People are running. Every minute or so a frighteningly loud thud is heard. That is the sound of bodies who have jumped from eighty floors above them. Their bodies literally explode on impact. A young fireman looks shocked, the fear radiating from his eyes. “What the fuck must it be like up there,” he muses aloud, not even knowing that a camera is trained on him, “if people think that jumping from the eightieth floor is their best alternative?” Fifteen minutes after the firefighters arrive the first tower collapses, and that is caught on film from inside the lobby of the tower. The roar of collapsing floors above the firefighters is, I think, the saddest sound I’ve ever heard in my life. I couldn’t stand it. I hated it. But I couldn’t turn it off.
We will never forget. It’s a marketing slogan these days, a handy catchphrase that encapsulates and trivializes an event so massive that it cannot be contained. But we do forget. We have to in order to go on living. We file it away like we would the snapshots from our family vacations. We pull them out occasionally, acknowledge that they happened, and then go back to the mundane. And perhaps that is all we can do. But today, at least for today, it is worth remembering, really remembering. Don’t trivialize it. Go back to 9/11 and relive it, just for a little while.
The events of the past five years have deeply divided America. We are at war. We have sacrificed valuable freedoms. And we could be attacked again, at any moment. There are no easy answers. But regardless of your political persuasions, think about these statements. They are true. You can read them defiantly if it makes you feel better. That’s the way I prefer to read them. Take that, you purveyors of doom and despair. Or you can read them through tears, read them in memory of the 3,000 people who died on 9/11. I do that, too. Either way, read them, and believe them, and remember what has been lost, and remember what cannot be lost.
Do you not know?
Have you not heard?
Has it not been told you from the beginning?
Have you not understood since the earth was founded?
He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth,
and its people are like grasshoppers.
He stretches out the heavens like a canopy,
and spreads them out like a tent to live in.
He brings princes to naught
and reduces the rulers of this world to nothing.
No sooner are they planted,
no sooner are they sown,
no sooner do they take root in the ground,
than he blows on them and they wither,
and a whirlwind sweeps them away like chaff.
"To whom will you compare me?
Or who is my equal?" says the Holy One.
Lift your eyes and look to the heavens:
Who created all these?
He who brings out the starry host one by one,
and calls them each by name.
Because of his great power and mighty strength,
not one of them is missing.
Why do you say, O Jacob,
and complain, O Israel,
"My way is hidden from the LORD;
my cause is disregarded by my God"?
Do you not know?
Have you not heard?
The LORD is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He will not grow tired or weary,
and his understanding no one can fathom.
He gives strength to the weary
and increases the power of the weak.
Even youths grow tired and weary,
and young men stumble and fall;
but those who hope in the LORD
will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles;
they will run and not grow weary,
they will walk and not be faint.
-- Isaiah 40:21-31
But it did. I have a friend who wrote about an extraordinary lunchtime conversation he overheard on 9/11. Less than three hours after Armageddon, a group of women sat around in a restaurant and talked about their weekend sexual conquests and discussed plans to go shopping. My finely tuned sense of moral outrage kicked in when I read his story. How can people be so shallow? How can they be so self-centered?
Me? I went home and alternated between being drawn to the television and being repelled by the television, wanting to watch and wanting to turn it off and make it all go away. I cried easily. I prayed easily. I wanted to pound my head into the wall. But the next week I started a new job. I had a lot of new information to assimilate. I had to be “on.” And, as rumors of another impending attack filled the airwaves, as stories of ricin and anthrax in the water supply made the rounds, I did my best to concentrate on electronic data interchange and X12 standards and other esoterica that had little or nothing to do with the state of the world, but everything to do with the state of my ability to put food on the table. In short, I went back to normal life.
We cannot sustain the kind of hyper-charged reality that 9/11 temporarily thrust upon us. Some people get past it remarkably quickly, and end up making very, very small talk at lunchtime on the day of a catastrophe. For others it takes a few days, a few weeks. But we all get past it. We go back to doing what we do – going to work, spending time with our families and friends, listening to music, watching TV, puttering around in the woodshop or the garden. It is mundane life, and it is better, or at least easier to bear, than abject fear and terror.
Last night CBS showed a remarkable documentary. Two French filmmakers were making a documentary about the life of a young fireman, tracking his progress from the training academy to life on the job. He was stationed in Engine House #7 in lower Manhattan, seven blocks from the World Trade Center. In the middle of their documentary a catastrophe of unimagined horror happened. Quite by accident, they ended up filming a remarkably stark, graphic portrayal of 9/11, embedded with the first firefighters who arrived on the scene, milling about in the lobby of Tower #1. There is chaos all around the firefighters. People are running. Every minute or so a frighteningly loud thud is heard. That is the sound of bodies who have jumped from eighty floors above them. Their bodies literally explode on impact. A young fireman looks shocked, the fear radiating from his eyes. “What the fuck must it be like up there,” he muses aloud, not even knowing that a camera is trained on him, “if people think that jumping from the eightieth floor is their best alternative?” Fifteen minutes after the firefighters arrive the first tower collapses, and that is caught on film from inside the lobby of the tower. The roar of collapsing floors above the firefighters is, I think, the saddest sound I’ve ever heard in my life. I couldn’t stand it. I hated it. But I couldn’t turn it off.
We will never forget. It’s a marketing slogan these days, a handy catchphrase that encapsulates and trivializes an event so massive that it cannot be contained. But we do forget. We have to in order to go on living. We file it away like we would the snapshots from our family vacations. We pull them out occasionally, acknowledge that they happened, and then go back to the mundane. And perhaps that is all we can do. But today, at least for today, it is worth remembering, really remembering. Don’t trivialize it. Go back to 9/11 and relive it, just for a little while.
The events of the past five years have deeply divided America. We are at war. We have sacrificed valuable freedoms. And we could be attacked again, at any moment. There are no easy answers. But regardless of your political persuasions, think about these statements. They are true. You can read them defiantly if it makes you feel better. That’s the way I prefer to read them. Take that, you purveyors of doom and despair. Or you can read them through tears, read them in memory of the 3,000 people who died on 9/11. I do that, too. Either way, read them, and believe them, and remember what has been lost, and remember what cannot be lost.
Do you not know?
Have you not heard?
Has it not been told you from the beginning?
Have you not understood since the earth was founded?
He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth,
and its people are like grasshoppers.
He stretches out the heavens like a canopy,
and spreads them out like a tent to live in.
He brings princes to naught
and reduces the rulers of this world to nothing.
No sooner are they planted,
no sooner are they sown,
no sooner do they take root in the ground,
than he blows on them and they wither,
and a whirlwind sweeps them away like chaff.
"To whom will you compare me?
Or who is my equal?" says the Holy One.
Lift your eyes and look to the heavens:
Who created all these?
He who brings out the starry host one by one,
and calls them each by name.
Because of his great power and mighty strength,
not one of them is missing.
Why do you say, O Jacob,
and complain, O Israel,
"My way is hidden from the LORD;
my cause is disregarded by my God"?
Do you not know?
Have you not heard?
The LORD is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He will not grow tired or weary,
and his understanding no one can fathom.
He gives strength to the weary
and increases the power of the weak.
Even youths grow tired and weary,
and young men stumble and fall;
but those who hope in the LORD
will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles;
they will run and not grow weary,
they will walk and not be faint.
-- Isaiah 40:21-31
Friday, September 08, 2006
Sweet Revenge
I am not a fan of indie music site Pitchfork. Sometimes they get it right, and sometimes they get it spectacularly wrong. And, most damningly from my point of view, even when they get it right they still have an uncanny knack for writing smarmy, condescending prose full of ad hominen attacks, the point of which seems to be to inflate their hipness factor. And here's a clue: hipness is way, way overrated in the music world, not to mention a fairly shallow way to view human beings. If I was ever hip, it was perhaps back in the Carter administration, and it's been downhill ever since. And you know what? It doesn't matter, because music is still worthwhile, and still worth writing about, even when it's made by people with bad haircuts and not enough tattoos. I wish Pitchfork would learn that lesson, but I'm not holding my breath.
But I have now figured out a way to take out my frustrations against P'fork's editor. Take that, poser.
But I have now figured out a way to take out my frustrations against P'fork's editor. Take that, poser.
Tall Stacks Music Festival
I'm thinking about venturing down to the musical Mecca of Cincinnati at the beginning of October. Why? The five-day (Weds. Oct 4th - Sun. Oct. 8th) Tall Stacks Music Festival. Who's playing?, you might well ask. And that would be:
Abigail Washburn
Al Green
Asleep at the Wheel
BeauSoleil avec Michael Doucet
Bettye LaVette
Big Sandy & His Fly-Rite Boys
The Blind Boys of Alabama
Buckwheat Zydeco
Buddy Guy
Charlie Musselwhite
Chatham County Line
Cherryholmes
Chris Hillman & Herb Pedersen
Chris Smither
The Del McCoury Band
Delbert McClinton
Dr. John
Hot Rize
Jerry Douglas
John Hammond
John Hiatt
Junior Brown
Loudon Wainwright III
Marcia Ball
Medeski, Martin & Wood
Nathan & the Zydeco Cha Chas
Old Crow Medicine Show
Ollabelle
Over the Rhine
Peter Rowan
Ralph Stanley & The Clinch Mountain Boys
Rhett Miller & The Believers
Ricky Skaggs & Kentucky Thunder
Rodney Crowell
Rosanne Cash
Sarah Borges and the Broken Singles
Sean Costello
Sonny Landreth
Sonya Kitchell
Tea Leaf Green
Teresa James & The Rhythm Tramps
Tift Merritt
Tim O'Brien
Tony Rice
Wilco
Yerba Buen
Here's the best part of the deal. I just received my invitation to SXSW in Austin next March. For a mere $700 I can get a week-long pass. The Tall Stacks Festival? $22 for five days of music. No, that is not a typo. If you like folk/roots/soul/blues/bluegrass/alt-country music, this is about as great as it gets.
Abigail Washburn
Al Green
Asleep at the Wheel
BeauSoleil avec Michael Doucet
Bettye LaVette
Big Sandy & His Fly-Rite Boys
The Blind Boys of Alabama
Buckwheat Zydeco
Buddy Guy
Charlie Musselwhite
Chatham County Line
Cherryholmes
Chris Hillman & Herb Pedersen
Chris Smither
The Del McCoury Band
Delbert McClinton
Dr. John
Hot Rize
Jerry Douglas
John Hammond
John Hiatt
Junior Brown
Loudon Wainwright III
Marcia Ball
Medeski, Martin & Wood
Nathan & the Zydeco Cha Chas
Old Crow Medicine Show
Ollabelle
Over the Rhine
Peter Rowan
Ralph Stanley & The Clinch Mountain Boys
Rhett Miller & The Believers
Ricky Skaggs & Kentucky Thunder
Rodney Crowell
Rosanne Cash
Sarah Borges and the Broken Singles
Sean Costello
Sonny Landreth
Sonya Kitchell
Tea Leaf Green
Teresa James & The Rhythm Tramps
Tift Merritt
Tim O'Brien
Tony Rice
Wilco
Yerba Buen
Here's the best part of the deal. I just received my invitation to SXSW in Austin next March. For a mere $700 I can get a week-long pass. The Tall Stacks Festival? $22 for five days of music. No, that is not a typo. If you like folk/roots/soul/blues/bluegrass/alt-country music, this is about as great as it gets.
Thursday, September 07, 2006
Neutral Milk Hotel
So I've been listening to Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. In the last few weeks I've had four people, including my pastor and my daughter's cute little Italian gay friend, tell me in totally unrelated conversations that this album is the Greatest Album Ever Made, that it has Changed Their Life, and other hyperventilating things that music fanatics tend to say several times per week. I understand. I pat them on their cute little hipster heads and encourage them to simmer down. Pitchfork, that bastion of arch musical cluelessness and snarkiness, rated it a 10.0 out of 10.0, to my knowledge the only "perfect" album they've ever reviewed.
I will admit that I did not listen to this album for years because of that Pitchfork review. I want to shove banana cream pies in the faces of Pitchfork reviewers. Out of general principle, I tend to disdain whatever they praise. It just makes it easier to maintain my sanity. Plus I'm wary of the mythologies that surround Insane Songwriters Who Record Their Magnum Opus Then Are Locked Away In A Padded Room stories, a la Syd Barrett. But look, when your pastor tells you that something is really great, you start thinking that maybe there is some higher spiritual principle at work, and that your future sanctification may be at stake. So I listened to the album. And I've kept listening to the album.
And you know what? It's pretty great. It's not The Greatest Album Ever Made, but it's really, really good. I'm feeling holier already. Plus, it's hugely entertaining in a crazed, unhinged way.
Jeff Mangum, the aforementioned insane singer/songwriter here, made this, his second album, in 1997. Then he disappeared. Now he's a demented hermit somewhere, perhaps in a cave, where his fingernails are six inches long. And people eat this stuff up. It's National Enquirer for Hipsters fodder. So I was prepared to be cynical. But the songs won me over, primarily because they're utterly unpredictable and yet still rooted in an easily understood pop framework; catchy, hook-filled guitar rock until, say, a Turkish marching band crashes the proceedings, as happens in several songs. And the lyrics are absolutely harrowing. There's a song about Anne Frank called "Holland, 1945" that will break your heart. There's a song about young, passionate love that degenerates into a remembrance of dear old mum plunging a fork into daddy's shoulder. And yes, Mangum does sound crazed, spitting out the lyrics, veering off key so frequently that it gets alarming, but sounding like he's so intensely locked in that he has no choice but to careen out of control. It's spooky -- and surpringly moving -- stuff.
So I'll ignore the fact that the guitar chords are right out of the Mel Bay Beginning Guitar book, and that anybody with two weeks practice can play these songs. And I'll ignore the fact that one of these songs is a nine-minute folk tune with two chords. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is a fascinating, grim, and occasionally exhilarating ride.
I will admit that I did not listen to this album for years because of that Pitchfork review. I want to shove banana cream pies in the faces of Pitchfork reviewers. Out of general principle, I tend to disdain whatever they praise. It just makes it easier to maintain my sanity. Plus I'm wary of the mythologies that surround Insane Songwriters Who Record Their Magnum Opus Then Are Locked Away In A Padded Room stories, a la Syd Barrett. But look, when your pastor tells you that something is really great, you start thinking that maybe there is some higher spiritual principle at work, and that your future sanctification may be at stake. So I listened to the album. And I've kept listening to the album.
And you know what? It's pretty great. It's not The Greatest Album Ever Made, but it's really, really good. I'm feeling holier already. Plus, it's hugely entertaining in a crazed, unhinged way.
Jeff Mangum, the aforementioned insane singer/songwriter here, made this, his second album, in 1997. Then he disappeared. Now he's a demented hermit somewhere, perhaps in a cave, where his fingernails are six inches long. And people eat this stuff up. It's National Enquirer for Hipsters fodder. So I was prepared to be cynical. But the songs won me over, primarily because they're utterly unpredictable and yet still rooted in an easily understood pop framework; catchy, hook-filled guitar rock until, say, a Turkish marching band crashes the proceedings, as happens in several songs. And the lyrics are absolutely harrowing. There's a song about Anne Frank called "Holland, 1945" that will break your heart. There's a song about young, passionate love that degenerates into a remembrance of dear old mum plunging a fork into daddy's shoulder. And yes, Mangum does sound crazed, spitting out the lyrics, veering off key so frequently that it gets alarming, but sounding like he's so intensely locked in that he has no choice but to careen out of control. It's spooky -- and surpringly moving -- stuff.
So I'll ignore the fact that the guitar chords are right out of the Mel Bay Beginning Guitar book, and that anybody with two weeks practice can play these songs. And I'll ignore the fact that one of these songs is a nine-minute folk tune with two chords. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is a fascinating, grim, and occasionally exhilarating ride.
Hootenanny Special
I’ve been in a mellow, folky mood of late.
Horse Feathers – Words Are Dead
The debut album from Portland, Oregon folk duo Horse Feathers, Words Are Dead, is rapidly becoming one of my favorite releases of the year. Singer/songwriter Justin Ringle has a high, reedy voice that favorably recalls (and God forgive me for making this comparison) Nick Drake. He writes poetic, enigmatic lyrics about something or other (the album may be called Words Are Dead for a reason). Multi-instrumentalist Peter Broderick (violin, banjo, mandolin, cello, viola, piano, saw, percussion) fleshes out Ringle's skeletal melodies with some baroque filigree. He may use traditional bluegrass instrumentation, but this is more chamber folk than hoedown. And it's lovely. There is a haunting, timeless quality in this music. These are songs that could come from 2006, or 1906, or 1806. It's front porch music, except when Broderick leans hard on his classical influences, and then it becomes front parlor music. The album is out September 19th. You might look for it if you're a fan of the new folk music of M. Ward, Jose Gonzalez, Iron and Wine, etc.
Various Artists – Old Town School of Folk Music Songbook, Vol. 1
The Old Town School of Folk Music is a Chicago institution, and they’ve been schooling kids on the folk music tradition for fifty years now. This compilation collects 23 classic American folk tunes that you know even if you don’t recognize the titles, and gives them a new spin courtesy of a batch of contemporary folk and alt-country artists – Jon Langford of the Mekons, John Stirrat of Wilco, Danny Barnes of the Bad Livers, Janet Bean of Freakwater, Robbie Fulks, Dan Zanes, and a whole bunch more. If the performances are uneven, the songs are uniformly great. They’re part of our collective national identity, and the themes – unrequited love, losing your job, the need to fill that hole in your soul – sound as relevant today as ever.
Maia Sharp – Fine, Upstanding Citizen
Our friend Emily heads up the Upper Arlington Arts Council, and this past Monday she was responsible for managing the Upper Arlington Arts Festival. Upper Arlington is a tony Columbus suburb where everyone plays golf and where 2% of the high school kids commit suicide when they don’t make it into the Ivy League school of their choice. The Chamber of Commerce does not advertise this fact. And because it is a functional, utilitarian, Midwestern kind of suburb, Art is typically thought of in terms of what would work well over the sofa. So I was curious to see what kind of magic Emily would unveil.
And she did wonderfully. There were many talented visual artists there, and the musical entertainment was provided by one Maia Sharp. I know Maia Sharp’s music. I have a couple of her albums. And I know her primarily as a songwriter’s songwriter, someone who contributes material to albums from Bonnie Raitt, The Dixie Chicks, Kim Richey, and the venerable, indestructible Cher.
So I listened. And she was superb – passionate, articulate, soulful. I was amazed. And then I went home, put on her latest album Fine, Upstanding Citizen, and was disappointed all over again. This album is Exhibit A on how bland, safe-as-milk production can ruin perfectly great songs. I read the lyric sheet, and recognized many of the songs I had just heard and loved in a live setting. But there was no passion, no energy. It was music designed to provide that perfectly innocuous accompaniment to paintings that go well over the sofa. I hate laid-back, soulless El Lay. Come to think of it, I hate Upper Arlington, too. No offense, Emily.
Nick Drake – Five Leaves Left, Bryter Layter, Pink Moon
It used to be that Nick Drake was the closely guarded secret of a few thousand rabid music fans. Then that damned Volkswagen commercial came along and ruined it, and hundreds of thousands of vacuous indie scene kids discovered his music Thirty years after his death. He’s, like, so sad, man.
Better late than never, I suppose. He is sad. Clinically depressed even, which is what eventually did him in. He only left three albums. Two of them are baroque folk classics, full of intricate acoustic guitar fingerpicking interlaced with a lovely string quartet, and more full of hope and cautious optimism than his PR would have you believe. The third one is a stark, minimalist masterpiece, the sound of a man cracking up. It is the slightly altered, utterly fragile haiku of despair:
Know that I love you
Know I don’t care
Know that I see you
Know I’m not there
And then he wasn’t. He hasn’t been there since 1974. What’s left are a few dozen impossibly lovely songs. He was the Keats and Byron of the hippie generation. He’s been romanticized, mythologized, written about ad nauseum. If you want to be hip, you have to like him. In my unhip, balding, middle-aged book, it’s okay to like him simply because he made beautiful music.
Horse Feathers – Words Are Dead
The debut album from Portland, Oregon folk duo Horse Feathers, Words Are Dead, is rapidly becoming one of my favorite releases of the year. Singer/songwriter Justin Ringle has a high, reedy voice that favorably recalls (and God forgive me for making this comparison) Nick Drake. He writes poetic, enigmatic lyrics about something or other (the album may be called Words Are Dead for a reason). Multi-instrumentalist Peter Broderick (violin, banjo, mandolin, cello, viola, piano, saw, percussion) fleshes out Ringle's skeletal melodies with some baroque filigree. He may use traditional bluegrass instrumentation, but this is more chamber folk than hoedown. And it's lovely. There is a haunting, timeless quality in this music. These are songs that could come from 2006, or 1906, or 1806. It's front porch music, except when Broderick leans hard on his classical influences, and then it becomes front parlor music. The album is out September 19th. You might look for it if you're a fan of the new folk music of M. Ward, Jose Gonzalez, Iron and Wine, etc.
Various Artists – Old Town School of Folk Music Songbook, Vol. 1
The Old Town School of Folk Music is a Chicago institution, and they’ve been schooling kids on the folk music tradition for fifty years now. This compilation collects 23 classic American folk tunes that you know even if you don’t recognize the titles, and gives them a new spin courtesy of a batch of contemporary folk and alt-country artists – Jon Langford of the Mekons, John Stirrat of Wilco, Danny Barnes of the Bad Livers, Janet Bean of Freakwater, Robbie Fulks, Dan Zanes, and a whole bunch more. If the performances are uneven, the songs are uniformly great. They’re part of our collective national identity, and the themes – unrequited love, losing your job, the need to fill that hole in your soul – sound as relevant today as ever.
Maia Sharp – Fine, Upstanding Citizen
Our friend Emily heads up the Upper Arlington Arts Council, and this past Monday she was responsible for managing the Upper Arlington Arts Festival. Upper Arlington is a tony Columbus suburb where everyone plays golf and where 2% of the high school kids commit suicide when they don’t make it into the Ivy League school of their choice. The Chamber of Commerce does not advertise this fact. And because it is a functional, utilitarian, Midwestern kind of suburb, Art is typically thought of in terms of what would work well over the sofa. So I was curious to see what kind of magic Emily would unveil.
And she did wonderfully. There were many talented visual artists there, and the musical entertainment was provided by one Maia Sharp. I know Maia Sharp’s music. I have a couple of her albums. And I know her primarily as a songwriter’s songwriter, someone who contributes material to albums from Bonnie Raitt, The Dixie Chicks, Kim Richey, and the venerable, indestructible Cher.
So I listened. And she was superb – passionate, articulate, soulful. I was amazed. And then I went home, put on her latest album Fine, Upstanding Citizen, and was disappointed all over again. This album is Exhibit A on how bland, safe-as-milk production can ruin perfectly great songs. I read the lyric sheet, and recognized many of the songs I had just heard and loved in a live setting. But there was no passion, no energy. It was music designed to provide that perfectly innocuous accompaniment to paintings that go well over the sofa. I hate laid-back, soulless El Lay. Come to think of it, I hate Upper Arlington, too. No offense, Emily.
Nick Drake – Five Leaves Left, Bryter Layter, Pink Moon
It used to be that Nick Drake was the closely guarded secret of a few thousand rabid music fans. Then that damned Volkswagen commercial came along and ruined it, and hundreds of thousands of vacuous indie scene kids discovered his music Thirty years after his death. He’s, like, so sad, man.
Better late than never, I suppose. He is sad. Clinically depressed even, which is what eventually did him in. He only left three albums. Two of them are baroque folk classics, full of intricate acoustic guitar fingerpicking interlaced with a lovely string quartet, and more full of hope and cautious optimism than his PR would have you believe. The third one is a stark, minimalist masterpiece, the sound of a man cracking up. It is the slightly altered, utterly fragile haiku of despair:
Know that I love you
Know I don’t care
Know that I see you
Know I’m not there
And then he wasn’t. He hasn’t been there since 1974. What’s left are a few dozen impossibly lovely songs. He was the Keats and Byron of the hippie generation. He’s been romanticized, mythologized, written about ad nauseum. If you want to be hip, you have to like him. In my unhip, balding, middle-aged book, it’s okay to like him simply because he made beautiful music.
Thursday, August 31, 2006
Richard Pryor Addresses a Tearful Nation
The second best songwriter in the world, right behind an old curmudgeon from Hibbing, Minnesota, is a guy named Joe Henry. He's married to Madonna's sister, but I won't hold that against him. He needs a less nondescript name, because his songs are anything but nondescript. He's been making albums for twenty years now, and almost nobody buys them. If you like Tom Waits, you might like him. His songs are jazz and folk and blues, all rolled into one, and given an off-kilter spin to make you think that maybe he's the piano player for the house band at some roadside dive on Pluto. Jazzbos like Ornette Coleman and Brad Mehldau and Don Byron like to record with him. So do alt-country bands like The Jayhawks. So does guitarist Marc Ribot, but he plays with everybody. So does Victoria Williams, whose vocals are even stranger than Joe's. He has an opera singer on his song "Flower Girl." Good luck trying to find a label for that kind of music. I'm content to just call it great. His lyrics are also jaw-droppingly wonderful, and work more often as standalone poetry than The Poet of a Generation's do.
At any rate, I'm writing an article about him for Paste Magazine, and I'm marveling at his music all over again.
Here is his song about Richard Pryor, which manages in four short verses to perfectly encapsulate the man, and make me really, really sad, and still marvel at the beauty of the language. Ornette Coleman plays some wild blues on his saxophone on this song, and it's one of the strangest, most harrowing things you'll ever hear:
Sometimes I think I've almost fooled myself
Sometimes I think I've almost fooled myself
Spreading out my wings
Above us like a tree,
Laughing now, out loud
Almost like I was free
I look at you as the thing I wanted most
You look at me and it's like you've seen a ghost
I wear the face
Of all this has cost:
Everything you tried to keep away from me,
Everything I took from you and lost
Lights shine above me, they're like your eyes above the street
Lights shine below me, they're like stars beneath my feet
I stood on your shoulders
And I walked on my hands,
You watched me while I tried to fall
You can't bear to watch me land
Take me away, carry me like a dove
Take me away, carry me like a dove
Love me like you're lying
Let me feel you near,
Remember me for trying
And excuse me while I disappear
-- Joe Henry, "Richard Pryor Address a Tearful Nation" (from Scar, 2000)
At any rate, I'm writing an article about him for Paste Magazine, and I'm marveling at his music all over again.
Here is his song about Richard Pryor, which manages in four short verses to perfectly encapsulate the man, and make me really, really sad, and still marvel at the beauty of the language. Ornette Coleman plays some wild blues on his saxophone on this song, and it's one of the strangest, most harrowing things you'll ever hear:
Sometimes I think I've almost fooled myself
Sometimes I think I've almost fooled myself
Spreading out my wings
Above us like a tree,
Laughing now, out loud
Almost like I was free
I look at you as the thing I wanted most
You look at me and it's like you've seen a ghost
I wear the face
Of all this has cost:
Everything you tried to keep away from me,
Everything I took from you and lost
Lights shine above me, they're like your eyes above the street
Lights shine below me, they're like stars beneath my feet
I stood on your shoulders
And I walked on my hands,
You watched me while I tried to fall
You can't bear to watch me land
Take me away, carry me like a dove
Take me away, carry me like a dove
Love me like you're lying
Let me feel you near,
Remember me for trying
And excuse me while I disappear
-- Joe Henry, "Richard Pryor Address a Tearful Nation" (from Scar, 2000)
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