Category Archives: Diatribes

Opinion pieces exploring the political, metaphysical, or hypocritical.

Kind of Blue

Diatribes

For months, I’ve wondered what music I’d want to listen to once the long election march toward the post-Bush era was finally over. The always-reliable Carrie Brownstein had some great pre-election suggestions in her Monitor Mix blog —the Chambers Brothers’ “Time Has Come Today,” Al Green’s version of Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready”—but like me, she found that on election night the only real answer was to make your own music. From NYC’s Union Square, she reported “magically becoming tolerant” of “the Bacchanalia I usually associate with drum circles, Hemp Fests and Renaissance Fairs.” Fresh off the plane from two days of voter protection work in Nevada, I had a similar moment, banging on an assortment of random percussion instruments with my three year-old son Matthew like a giddy hippie who’d staggered through one too many Dead tours asking for a miracle.

By the next morning, though, I knew exactly what I wanted to hear. On his unlikely path to the Presidency, Barack Obama kept his cool very much like vintage late fifties/ early sixties Miles Davis. Like Obama, the Miles who recorded Kind of Blue was hardly a radical; his subtle power was less iconoclastic than Ornette Coleman’s similarly timed Shape of Jazz to Come and less dramatic than the Giant Steps of his sideman John Coltrane. Yet Miles too was a forward thinker who nailed his moment in history. Sensing that hard bop’s routine of riffing had become a bridge to nowhere, he dispensed with straight chord progressions in favor of modes and shaped sounds that still seem almost as fresh as they did nearly half a century ago. After enduring a parade of hotheads, blowhards, dimwits, and trigger-happy supermodels, I’ll spend today celebrating the simple virtues of the “cool”—not in the snarky sense of “hipper than thou,” but as a credo standing for resilient grace and poise in the face of chaos.

As an occasional hothead, I can’t help wondering whether the cool President-Elect Obama who channels mid-period Miles also has a little Bitches’ Brew bubbling under the surface. Before I could even complete this thought, I discovered that someone has already done a mash-up of Obama’s speeches and electric Miles, notably “Feio” from the Bitches’ Brew sessions. There’s a new deal in town, and I can’t wait to listen.

Miles Davis, “So What” (featuring John Coltrane)

This Band Could Save Your Life

Diatribes, Heavy Rotation

Can you think of a band that could save your life? I didn’t ask which band could be your life, the subject of the Minutemen‘s classic “History Lesson, Part II” and Michael Azerrad‘s survey of the American rock underground circa 1981-1991. The question posed here is more literal. A Reuters article this week reported that the Bee Gees’ falsetto-fortified 1977 disco hit ‘Stayin’ Alive,” which clocks in at 103 beats per minute (bpm), almost perfectly matches the 100 per minute rate that the American Heart Association recommends for chest compressions during cardiopulmonary resuscitation. A recent study at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria found that listening to “Stayin’ Alive” helped 15 doctors and medical students perform chest compressions on dummies at the appropriate speed. By contrast, Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On,” despite its title, plods along at a potentially lethal 50 bpm.

No disrespect for the Bee Gees, who started out as a rather classy British Invasion band, but I suspect the disco-loving doctors stacked the deck on this one. Quick review of an online bpm directory reveals that the medical authorities strangely bypassed plenty of songs registering exactly 100 bpm, including such life-affirming ditties as “Straight Cadillac Pimpin‘” by 8-Ball and MJG and “No Shelter” by Rage Against the Machine. But I’m probably just getting defensive because I had to give a guy CPR once, and the song I recall hearing in my head was “Blitzkrieg Bop” by the Ramones, which races along at a frightful 175.8 bpm. Miraculously, he survived. For years, I’ve harbored the delusion that the Ramones helped save his life, when the life they helped save was mine.

One song I’d identify as a “lifesaver” without resorting to mathematical determinism is “(Reach Out) I’ll Be There” by the Four Tops, whose lead crooner Levi Stubbs passed away yesterday. It’s as thorny as a hook-laden love song can get, with “confusion” rhymed with “illusion” and an outstretched hand offering solace in a “world crumbling down.” Almost as good is the 1986 British hit that Stubbs inspired, “Levi Stubbs’ Tears,” which probably ranks as Billy Bragg‘s finest moment. The song is a bittersweet character study of an enduring woman that says more about living with dignity in hard times than a dozen of Bragg’s wordier political anthems. “When the world falls apart, some things stay in place/ Levi Stubbs’ tears run down his face.” When the nameless woman in the song quietly places the Four Tops tape back in its case, her world remains bleak, but she’s managed to survive to face another day, a little wearier and a little wiser. Call me corny, but at a time when the world sure seems like it’s falling apart, keeping the heart moving a little may be the most subversive impulse available. And it’s not just based on math.

Ramones, “Blitzkrieg Bop”

Four Tops, “(Reach Out) I’ll Be There”

Billy Bragg, “Levi Stubbs’ Tears”

Strange Fruit

Diatribes, Rants and Raves

Do you remember the first time you heard a song that gave you the chills? For me, that moment happened the same month Richard Nixon resigned. Too young to fully grasp current events, I still knew that a disturbing otherness was intruding into daily routines, something unsettling enough to make grownups forget their keys at the supermarket or lose their train of thought in mid-sentence. People seemed strange, and I didn’t know why. During these culminating moments of Watergate, a Billie Holiday anthology from the library gave me my first taste of “Strange Fruit.” For reasons I couldn’t explain, the way she sang her way through her numbness captured the unsettling strangeness around me. I had no idea that the song was about lynching; for years, I still thought it was about fruit. Decades later, when I saw photographer Amy Kubes’ “Little Worries” collection, which features images of a bandaged pear and a cantaloupe wearing underpants, I couldn’t stop hearing “Strange Fruit” in my head.

For the past few weeks, “Strange Fruit” has followed me everywhere. Partly that’s because recent events made me recall a picture of two studious-looking little boys who reminded me a bit of myself—little Robert, dressed in a Brooklyn Dodgers t-shirt, looking over the shoulder of his big brother Michael, with his face buried in a newspaper. But these boys were the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and the newspaper in Michael’s hand bore details of their parents’ impending execution. Robert and Michael became the adoptive sons of Abel Meeropol, a Bronx-based schoolteacher, union activist, and occasional poet/ songwriter who wrote under the pseudonym Lewis Allan. After seeing Lawrence Beitler’s gruesome image of a lynching in Marion, Indiana, Meeropol wrote a haunting poem that he later turned into “Strange Fruit.” One wonders whether he saw the Rosenbergs’ execution, which Jean-Paul Sartre once termed a “legal lynching,” as strange fruit of a different sort.

The iconic picture of Robert and Michael reading the newspaper reappeared in the news this month along with new evidence confirming Julius Rosenberg’s involvement as a Soviet spy, while adding to doubts that Ethel was guilty of more than being a loyal wife. That news prompted the Meeropol brothers, who spent decades attempting to prove both parents’ innocence, to confront the strange reality that things were not quite what they seemed. Ironically, the revelations about the Rosenbergs coincided with the near-collapse of the banking system and plans for the most sweeping state takeover of private enterprise in American history—not because of a Russian invasion, but because under-regulated and over-leveraged financiers ran out of ways to creatively repackage crushing debt. Time will tell whether the reaction to this crisis will, 78 years after the lynching that inspired “Strange Fruit,” lead to the election of our first African-American president. I’m trying to be hopeful, but much of the time, I’m singing my way through my numbness and feeling a little strange.

Billie Holiday, “Strange Fruit”

Change of the Century: A Campaign Playlist

Diatribes, Playlists

Last Thursday in Denver, at the rousing convention finale held on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, the most gifted orator of his generation finished the most important speech of his life before a crowd of more than 80,000 and an international audience of millions. And what music did Barack Obama choose to accompany his exit? “Only in America” by Brooks and Dunn, a song recycled from the Republican convention four years ago. If there’s one act that deserves to be put in the slammer with the Oak Ridge Boys, it is Brooks and Dunn.

This can’t be the musical change America needs. I love my country too, but “Only in America” reminds me of the speech a generation ago in which the elder mayor Daley of Chicago pontificated that “together we will rise to ever higher and higher platitudes.” The song choice was especially puzzling because Obama, with the possible exception of Ralph Nader’s 2008 running mate Matt Gonzalez, has the most interesting musical taste of any candidate for the Oval Office in recent memory. Stevie Wonder was in the house, and stadium-worthy Obama fans ranging from Wilco and Kanye to Springsteen and U2 couldn’t have been more than a phone call away. If they were all unavailable, couldn’t Obama simply have put his iPod on shuffle?

I suppose you could view the commandeering of “Only in America” as a defiant gesture aiming straight for the hearts and ears of red state line-dancers and wearers of enormous hats. But I still think the song is too weak to work, especially now that John McCain has thrown down the gauntlet by selecting Alaskan yodeler Jewel Kilcher as his running mate (or was it Lisa Loeb?). Can we attempt to lay out a campaign playlist suitable for a year of change? As Bob the Builder would say, “yes we can.”

Lee Dorsey, “Yes We Can”

The Pointer Sisters added an extra “can” to the title for their hit version of the Allen Toussaint-penned New Orleans funk classic, but I prefer Lee Dorsey’s earthier 1970 version. As storm waters head toward the Crescent City yet again, it’s a good time to emphasize the need to back up the song’s optimism with real resources and hard work.

Merle Haggard, “If We Make it Through December”

Where some see struggles between red and blue to control the United States map, I simply see a struggle for the soul of Merle Haggard. Most famous for decades-old hippie-tweaking fare, Haggard is also an underdog troubadour whose ear for the poetry of the working man sometimes rivals Guthrie and Springsteen. I was surprised to discover buried alongside the ABBA ditties on John McCain’s all-time Top Ten was Hag’s bleak seventies weeper “December.” The laid-off father in the song has a bank account in the red and a serious case of the blues.

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Bo Knows Qaddafi

Diatribes

Bo Diddley’s tombstone head finally joined his graveyard mind last week, and if there’s one thing Bo knew, it was how to distill the sound of danger. Warren Zevon was understating the case when he called him a gunslinger; as the featured clip below from the Ed Sullivan show attests, one-chord cavalry was more like it. The year was 1955. Bo, who claimed he had promised to perform a Tennessee Ernie Ford number, launched into “Bo Diddley” instead, galloping through his mutant variation on the son clave and hambone rhythms like a field general with a war to win and no time to waste. It’s a germinal beat that makes you want candy on a magic bus in 1969 while teetering between faith and desire that will not fade away. It makes you want to smash a rectangular guitar in a state of panic, wondering whether she’s the one, or asking how soon is now. Bo was human and needed to be loved, but he also wanted to be feared. It’s equally fitting that Bo entered his golden years opening for the Clash, and that back in the day, the Rolling Stones opened for him.

But none of the Bo Diddley retrospectives I’ve read have uncovered the secret of something Bo definitely did not know diddley about: foreign policy. I can attest that the author of the worst topical song in all music history was…Bo Diddley. (The close second runner-up: “I Hate the Capitalist System” by Barbara Dane). The year was 1986. While the United States’ past and future headliners in the Axis of Evil, Iran and Iraq, were busy fighting each other, Libya’s Muammar al-Qaddafi enjoyed fifteen-plus minutes of fame as the most hated man in America. During his celebrity run, nothing seemed to vanquish the madman of the moment; not the Reagan Administration bombing raid that took out a hundred civilians, and not even the New York Post article that ran a picture of what Qaddafi would look like if he dressed in drag.

There was clearly only one gunslinger whose rattlesnake hide was tough enough to take on the President-for-life who inexplicably remained a colonel: Bo Diddley. And so it was that during Summer 1986, when I watched Bo Diddley open for the Blasters in Washington D.C., Bo announced that the next song would be a little ditty called “Hey, Qaddafi!” I’m roughly paraphrasing, but the lyrics went something like:

Ooh Qaddafi, we’re gonna put a flag in your ear
Ooh Qaddafi, we’re gonna put a flag in your ass.

It never got any better than that. It seemed to go on forever. It was a slow-motion train wreck that made me feel crassly voyeuristic because I couldn’t bring myself to turn away. It reminded me that virtually all my favorite performers have at least one song that flat-out makes me cringe. If you’ve experienced one of your favorites having a “Hey Qaddafi” moment, we’d like to hear about it.

Bo Diddley, “Bo Diddley”

Can Obama Overcome his Big Pink Problem?

Diatribes

Barack Obama can’t even do an interview anymore without having to address one of his least-favorite subjects: the suspicion that beneath his calm demeanor and business-suited exterior, he is a fanatical Pink Floyd fan. The long-simmering suspicions boiled over last week at California’s Coachella Music Festival. Former Floyd leader Roger Waters arranged an unauthorized airdrop of Obama leaflets that missed its target, creating an unwelcome source of precipitation for golfing retirees. Then, during a performance of “Sheep,” from Pink Floyd’s Orwellian-themed Animals, Waters’ inflatable pig prop flew away, festooned with left-wing slogans (“Don’t be led to the slaughter”; “Impeach Bush”) and OBAMA written on the underside. The rabble-rousing Obama pig sailed over the Coachella Valley and crashed, winding up in a condition that its finder described as resembling “pulled pork.”

Hillary Clinton noted that “there is no clear evidence that Barack Obama is an America-hating Pink Floyd fanatic. As far as I know.” “But let me tell you,” she continued, “during my administration, we’ll have no time for laser light shows, ponderous guitar solos, vague anti-capitalist lyrics, and 23-minute songs about albatrosses. From day one, we’ll be rolling up our sleeves for the working people of America, pausing only for some Carly Simon, James Taylor and maybe a few aromatherapy candles.” Blushing as she adjusted her gun holster, she quickly added, “excuse me, I meant Toby Keith, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and a few rounds of target practice.”

While Obama’s suspected Pink Floyd past has dogged him for months, many supporters hoped he had put the subject to rest two months ago with a rousing speech in Philadelphia that some historians hailed as one of the most important speeches ever on the role of psychedelic rock in Anglo-American life. Obama’s speech criticized Waters’ occasional “Us and Them” mentality, as well as his apparent belief that “we don’t need no education” because it might lead to some sort of “thought control.” Yet Obama refused to entirely disavow Waters, saying nothing to quell the rumors that Pink Floyd songs were played at Obama’s wedding, or that at least one of his children was conceived while “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” played on his stereo. “I could no more ‘disown’ Roger Waters,” he said in Philadelphia, “than I could disown my stoner aunt in Hawaii who liked to have a little herb with her Bob Marley albums.”

Roger Waters’ “Obama pig” takes flight

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Jon Langford: South By East By Midwest

Diatribes, Slow Jams

A short trip to Austin earlier this month felt like a homecoming, even though I’ve never been there before. I’ve rarely been bombarded with so much music, with so little planning or effort, for so long into the night, since I left Chicago for California more than two decades ago. Austin is the sort of place where you venture out for coffee after your night of music and find out that the coffeehouse (in this case, Jo’s Hot Coffee on South Congress) has its own house band playing a bang-up set of western swing. A record store mural across the street from the UT/ Austin campus registers the city’s sense of music history: among others, Buddy Holly, Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash share wall space with Dylan, Iggy, and the Clash.

If one figure spans all those influences, it is the provocateur, painter, raconteur and raver Jon Langford. The Welsh-born Leeds-to-Chicago transplant and Bloodshot Records mainstay has—in the 23-year stretch dating from the Mekons’ often-mentioned, seldom heard Fear and Whiskey—done more than just about anyone else to resuscitate the withered heart of post-punk and reclaim the tarnished soul of American country. In Austin, I was thrilled to discover that the Yard Dog Gallery has a fantastic collection of Langford’s visual art, mostly densely layered, distressed images of iconic American roots musicians in graveyard settings. Blindfolded, sullied and marked for extinction, the characters remind me of Chicago artist Ivan Albright’s studies of decay and corruption; constantly “dancing with death,” they are unsettlingly alive and a reminder of the slow death that comes out of greed, fear and homogenization.

As a curmudgeonly first-generation art school punk who writes lines like “John Glenn drinks cocktails with God at a café in downtown Saigon,” Langford is smart enough to realize he doesn’t play or paint “authentic” honky tonk any more than Vampire Weekend is a gang of African tribesmen. And unlike some of his retro-worshipping peers, he acknowledges that the “golden age” of county music had its own problems with pills and pretenders and poor directions. Yet he uses his outsider’s distance as an advantage. While bemoaning the death of country music at the hands of what he calls “suburban rock music with a cowboy hat on,” Langford’s work cuts deeper than that, excavating the signs of life in a cultural landscape pockmarked with interchangeable strip malls and Kenny Chesney records. There’s also a redemptive element in the search; like his protagonist in his Waco Brothers anthem “Hell’s Roof,” he’s reclaiming a lost history, “walking on hell’s roof, looking at the flowers” (and not “walking in a clown suit, looking at the flowers,” as I misheard Langford’s impassioned growl for more than a year).

Jon Langford, “Hell’s Roof”

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