PolyBlurt

Will Hoge Is Back

2010-10-05T08:00:00.000-07:00

I'm one of those who started losing interest in Will Hoge with 2007's Draw the Curtains, a moody and country-inflected effort that critics seemed to really like. To me, he broke faith with those of us who fell in love with the carthartic hookiness of Carousel and the even more adrenaline-fueled Blackbird on a Lonely Wire. With The Wreckage he's splitting the difference, and the result is genius of a slightly more reserved sort. There's still a twanginess to his sound and a tendency towards the acoustic in his arrangements, but he's also back to his high-octane best on hair-raisers like "Hard to Love" and "Highway Wings." No one's saying he shouldn't grow up; it's just that when you have a gift for hooks as indelible as his, it seems like a shame to waste it. My faith is restored.

Best. Library. Blog. Ever.

2010-09-08T07:26:00.001-07:00

Are there lots and lots of library-related blogs out there? Yes. Heaven help us, yes. Is any of them as excellent as A Librarian's Guide to Etiquette? Absolutely not.

Glenn Beck, Mormonism, and Social Justice

2010-08-03T18:56:00.000-07:00

“I beg you, look for the words 'social justice' or 'economic justice' on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes!"
-- Glenn Beck

I’m going to say this right up front: I’m glad Glenn Beck is a Mormon. Not because I have any particular use for the man, but because I have a strong testimony of the restored gospel and, therefore, I believe that joining the LDS Church is the right thing for someone to do. (And for that reason, I’d be equally happy if Noam Chomsky joined the Church.) I’ll also say this: I’m embarrassed that Glenn Beck is a Mormon. Not because I disagree with him in every particular, but because he encourages the kind of dangerously lazy, knee-jerk thinking that bothers me no matter what political position it comes from, and I hate the fact that people watch him bloviate and say to themselves “That guy’s a Mormon.” Beck and I probably actually agree on some points, but in my opinion he’s a blowhard and an ideological bully who tries to gather disciples rather than encourage independent or even critical thinking about the issues he addresses. The Book of Mormon has a term for that kind of behavior—the term is “priestcraft” (2 Nephi 26:29)—and it seems to me that it’s wrong regardless of whether the particular viewpoints you’re advancing have merit in themselves.

But my point was going to be about social justice, not about priestcraft. Generally, I shy away from terms like “social justice” and “economic justice” because they strike me as more resonant than meaningful; they’re great for eliciting an emotional response, but don’t do much to help you solve real-world problems. Both phrases are like warm Play Doh—they can be manipulated to mean whatever the speaker wants them to mean. For example, which is more “just”: that I be allowed to keep the money I earn by the sweat of my brow, or that I be required to share some of the money that I’ve gained at least in part because of my (modestly) privileged place in society? Both propositions have some merit in terms of justice, but they’re also fundamentally at odds with each other. (Which is why most rational people argue about the proper blend of those two propositions, rather than asserting that one of them is completely right and the other absolutely wrong.)

To some degree, I sympathize with what Beck is saying about churches that preach “social justice.” When I hear that phrase in a sermon or read it in a pamphlet, I often get the feeling that it’s a spiritual cop-out, a cowardly rejection of difficult but absolute truths in favor of easy but contingent ones. It seems to me that many churches are increasingly embarrassed to preach anything that might conceivably offend anyone other than those we all agree are fair game (the rich and comfortable), and are especially unwilling to say anything that might sound in any way conservative. This makes it very difficult for them to preach much of what has historically constituted Christian doctrine, while simultaneously making it very easy to preach social justice.

However, speaking as a Mormon, to have someone like Glenn Beck inveighing against churches that preach social justice is pretty amusing. He claims to be a believing Mormon himself, yet he doesn’t seem to have delved very deeply (or even superficially) into either the Church’s scriptures or the teachings of its founding prophet. He certainly can’t have read much in the Doctrine & Covenants. If he had, he might have been startled to come across passages in the D/C in which the Lord specifically and unambiguously prescribes economic equality among the Saints (see D/C 49:20, 51:3, 78:6, and, especially, 104:16). The Book of Mormon prophets inveighed frequently and at length against social pride, the seeking of wealth, and economic inequality (see 2 Nephi 9:30, 3 Nephi 6:15, Alma 4:8, and Helaman 4:12). Depending on what you mean when you say “social justice,” Beck may be counseling himself to run away from the church he recently joined.

Here’s the thing, though, and it’s something that strengthens my testimony whenever I think about it. In the LDS Church, we practically never use the phrase “social justice.” That may be because many of us are so conservative that a phrase like that never even enters our heads, but I think there’s a much better and deeper reason: it’s that we talk about consecration instead. To me, “justice” is a lightweight word; “consecration” is a heavyweight word. (It’s like the difference between “wedding” and “marriage,” or between “commitment” and “covenant.”) Because I’m a temple-going member of the Church, I have accepted the law of consecration, which means that everything I own (including my time and my abilities) is dedicated to building the kingdom of God. Living up fully to that covenant is the work of a lifetime, but to the degree that each member of the Church does live up to it, questions of economic justice become irrelevant—not because justice isn’t important, but because justice becomes a natural byproduct of the pursuit of something much deeper and more eternally significant. If I consecrate everything I have to the Lord, then there’s no question of whether I’ll be richer than my neighbor, because I won’t hesitate to share everything I have. None of it is “mine” anymore, and I no longer covet my own property (D/C 19:25-26). In reality, I don’t claim to be anywhere near that level of faithfulness, but I do think that’s the ideal we should be preaching and to which we should be aspiring: if all of us make and keep those covenants, then social and economic justice will follow naturally. If we focus instead on what most people mean when they say “social justice,” then I think we treat a symptom without dealing with the disease, which is covetousness and selfishness.

Why "We Are the World" Is the Worst Song Ever Written

2010-02-02T18:34:00.000-08:00

First of all, before I embark on this rant I must bow publicly to the infinitely smarter and more articulate Greil Marcus, whose "Number One with a Bullet" said everything about "We Are the World" that needs to be said back when the original version was released in 1985. That version of the Worst Song Ever Written featured the full register of pop royalty circa 1985: Lionel Richie, Michael Jackson, Ray Charles, Bruce Springsteen, Huey Lewis, Kim Carnes, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson -- even Cyndi Lauper. It was recorded as a charity project in support of African famine relief.

Since asserting publicly that "We Are the World" is the worst song ever written, I've had several people ask me, quite reasonably, why I think that. Is it really a more obnoxious song than "You're Having My Baby"? Is it more bathetic than "The Night Chicago Died" or sillier than "Footloose"?

My answer is that while each of those songs is arguably dumber than "We Are the World," none of them beats it on all of the following Criteria of Revulsion:

Self-congratulation

This is not a song about people in need. Rather, it's a song about the invincibility of goodhearted pop singers. "When you're down and out, there seems no hope at all," the participants sing -- and then Huey Lewis steps up to the mic, clenches his fist, squeezes his eyes shut and delivers the punchline: "But if you just believe there's no way we can fail!" Right, because aid programs never, ever fail, and neither do pop singers. Also: if all I have to do is believe, then why would I donate money?

Self-importance

Really, the song title says it all, even as it says nothing. "We are the world"? What does that actually mean? The answer is that it means nothing by meaning everything, and it means everything by meaning nothing. It's a classic example -- maybe even the pure, distilled essence -- of meaninglessly resonant rhetoric. It's a phrase designed to shut down thought by making anyone who questions it look like a curmudgeon and a crank, while simultaneously stimulating the feel-good glands of everyone involved in the project. But since this is a pop song, that kind of rhetorical emptiness is excusable. What's inexcusable is...

Confusion of Selves with the Victims in Question

As Marcus pointed out in his 1985 essay, the key lines of "We Are the World" are "There's a choice we're making/We're saving our own lives." What, for crying out loud, did the songwriters believe they were actually saying by repeating these lines over and over? Is the message "You'd better buy this record, because the profits will go to feed starving children in Africa and if they die, we all die"? (If so, the song is absurd.) Was it that by giving of ourselves, we achieve some kind of salvation? (If so, the song is unforgivably coy.) But what's ultimately so awful about this aspect of the song is the fact that all it talks about is the singers. If you didn't know the backstory, you would never guess what the song's point is, or who it was intended to help. Even the song's multiple references to "the children" don't help in this regard, since Michael Jackson was one of the songwriters and he mentioned "the children" every time he opened his mouth.

Pure Concentration of Cliché

Every single line of this song either contains a cliché or consists entirely of a cliché. Don't take my word for it; check for yourself.

Confusion of Jesus with Satan

If you're going to invoke God in a song, it's probably a good idea not to get him confused with Satan. With the line "And God has shown us by turning stones to bread" (shown us what? they never say), songwriters Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie were probably thinking of the miracle of the loaves and fishes, but accidentally referred instead to Christ's period of fasting and temptation in the wilderness, when Satan suggested that he turn stones into bread to relieve his hunger. For the record, Christ refused. Folks of a Christian persuasion are going to find this particular gaffe fairly offensive on a theological level; everyone else can be offended at a literary one.

Cyndi Lauper's Solo

See/hear for yourself.

"We Are the World: 25 for Haiti," a 25th-anniversary remake of the Worst Song Ever Written, is scheduled to be released on February 12, as part of the opening festivities for the Winter Olympics. If it actually generates money that actually succeeds in relieving some of the horrible suffering in Haiti, then tant mieux. But it won't make the song itself any less terrible.

Susan Boyle -- a fair chance blown

2010-01-28T10:32:00.000-08:00

A colleague passed along a copy of Susan Boyle's album this morning, and I really did give it a fair hearing. Verdict: yes, she has a lovely voice. Yes, she does indeed nail "I Dreamed a Dream."No, there is absolutely no reason to do "Daydream Believer" as a voice-and-piano ballad -- and to do it within two tracks of "How Great Thou Art" is just bizarre. But her version of "Wild Horses"? Not bad, not bad.

My Freakish, Impossible, and Maybe Immoral Family Life

2009-12-21T15:41:00.000-08:00

I'm a 44-year-old man, happily married for almost 20 years. My wife and I have three kids, all of them born to us since we married. I work full-time and supplement our income as a freelance writer. My wife stays home with our kids, who range in age from 11 to 17.

Note that I referred to "our income." While I'm the sole wage-earner in our family, the way I see it is that my wife and I both have the same full-time job: the job we both have is that of making a home for our family and doing our best to raise smart, well-adjusted, happy kids who will make the world a better place for having passed through it. While we both have the same job, our primary daily tasks are different: by mutual agreement and in accordance with our religious beliefs, my primary daily task is gathering resources from outside to keep us fed and sheltered and reasonably comfortable, while my wife's primary daily task is organizing our home and caring for the kids while I'm out gathering resources. That distribution of tasks isn't absolute, though. When I get home from the office, my workday hasn't ended because our work isn't done -- our work is raising a family. That means my wife and I are both still working until the kids go to bed, and sometimes afterwards. When I get home, one of us cooks dinner (often me, because I like cooking and find it relaxing). Afterwards, whichever one of us didn't cook supervises the kid whose turn it is to clean up -- assuming that we're not jumping up immediately from the table to run to soccer or dance or whatever, which is about 50% of the time. Still, we almost always eat dinner together, even if that means "dinner time" has to be a bit flexible from day to day. I probably fail at this, but I do try hard to hold up my end of the housework. On Saturdays one of us tackles the bathrooms and one of us does the vacuuming while the kids do smaller chores, and I almost always do the grocery shopping (because I enjoy it and my wife doesn't particularly).

This arrangement has required a certain level of sacrifice. Supporting five people on a single librarian's income has sometimes been difficult, and while we've never really been poor, it's only in the last few years that our financial situation has started to feel "comfortable." We have no summer home, no boat, our two cars are base models, and we have no plans to travel by airplane as a family in the foreseeable future. We have very little consumer debt, but we also have very little savings (though I do have a good retirement account). But the sacrifices we've made have been deliberate and feel pretty modest compared to the benefits we've realized. We knew what we were going to give up and what we'd be likely to get in return, and it has never seemed like a bad trade. We made these decisions early on, together, before we were married.

Does this all sound like a parody of a parody? Like the kind of unrealistic domestic scenario that would never pass muster with a half-decent fiction editor? Well, wait -- there's more. Not only were all three of our children born to us after we were married, but our sex life began after marriage as well. And I don't mean we technically refrained from intercourse before marriage -- I mean we didn't have sexual relations of any kind. We're not prudes, and we don't believe that the sole purpose of sex is procreation. But we do believe that sex matters: that it actually does have purposes beyond pleasure, that there is a moral as well as a logical connection between sex and procreation, that sex is powerful, and that its power has to be respected if you want to avoid heartache.

What's the catch? So far, there doesn't seem to be one. Our marriage isn't perfect; like most people, we've struggled to learn how to be a husband and a wife, but we knew that would be a struggle and we're making good progress, and we're not going to give up. We're not perfect parents; I yell at the kids too much and with far too little provocation, and my wife argues with them when she ought to just smile and say "OK" and let them be wrong. Our kids aren't perfect either; in addition to being smart and beautiful and sweet they are also snarky and oblivious and sometimes disgusting. As a family, we don't do everything we know we should, and we screw up every single day. But our home is happy and warm and we laugh all the time, and I can't wait to get home from work. I'm pretty sure my wife and kids feel the same way.

So here's the thing: I feel like we're really pretty normal. In some ways we look like a very "traditional" family of the type that Republicans are supposed to approve of, and in some ways we're not that traditional at all. We've made some good choices, some of them fitting a traditional model and some of them not, but we make bad ones too, just like everyone else.

And yet, and yet. I read a lot, and I listen to NPR every morning and I watch the news, and pretty much everything I read and hear tells me that what we're doing is unreasonable if not impossible, that my wife and I are sort of freaks. It's apparently not actually possible to refrain from sex before marriage; it's not possible to support a family on a single modest income; intelligent, accomplished women like my wife can't possibly feel fulfilled doing noncommercial work; men don't do housework even if they say they do, and if they try they're too stupid to do it right; it's not even reasonable to try eat dinner together regularly as a family. Sometimes what I read tells me that we're not just abnormal, but that we're actually a bad influence in the world. My wife is selling herself short and making the world a worse place by keeping her talents out of the market economy; teaching our kids to save sex for marriage just means that they're going to avoid contraception and therefore get pregnant in high school. It goes without saying that I'm a patriarchal fascist for my role in this whole arrangement. Every day I get the message that a) we're weird, and b) we should feel guilty for our particular brand of freakishness.

I don't get it. If these things are impossible, how did we manage to do so many of them (even imperfectly)? If it's wrong to do them, why do we have such a happy life, and why do people constantly tell us how wonderful our kids are?

If it sounds like I'm complaining or feeling victimized, it's because I'm explaining myself clumsily. Honestly, I'm not up in arms about the "liberal media" or about some kind of "war on traditional values" (as devout Mormons, our religious beliefs inform our nontraditional choices as much as our traditional ones). And I'm not going to get on anyone's case for choosing a different kind of family life from ours, though I'll very happily talk to anyone who's interested about why we've chosen the life we have. I'm mostly just bemused, and sometimes a little bit frustrated. Every time a smug news commentator or magazine essayist takes it as a given that what my wife and I are doing cannot be done, or is only done by wackos, I want to jump up and down and wave my arms and say "No, no -- seriously, you can do it, and it's not that hard, and you don't even have to be a conservative." But I feel like I can't say that, because if I do I'll just come across as some kind of religious zealot or sexist tyrant or unrealistic yahoo. I don't think I'm any of those things, and my wife isn't a stunted sycophant (trust me on this), and our home isn't a cold, regimented prison. We're just normal people with a happy life, and I'm pretty sure that what we have isn't really that far out of most people's reach. If they want it. And if they don't, okay.

The Best Christmas Album Ever, and You've Never Heard It

2009-12-09T21:17:00.000-08:00

Lots of people think they know what the Best Christmas Album Ever is, and they're all wrong. It's not Nat King Cole's The Christmas Song, nor is it John Rutter's Music for Christmas. It's not Cherish the Ladies' brilliant Celtic Christmas album On Christmas Night, nor is it even the Academy of Ancient Music's 1980 recording of the Messiah with Emma Kirkby and Judith Nelson as the soprano soloists, though all four of those albums are absolutely essential.

No, the Best Christmas Album Ever is one that I can promise you you've never heard. It's by an obscure British-American folk ensemble called Nowell Sing We Clear, and it's called (cheesily enough) Just Say Nowell. Why is it the Best Christmas Album Ever? Several reasons: first, the best, most rollicking and swinging version of "The First Noel" you'll ever hear; second, the New England Harmony classic "London," into which they interpolate material from William Billings' "Shiloh"; third, the utterly brilliant and powerfully moving modern carol "Chariots," written by Britfolk legend and concertina virtuoso John Kirkpatrick; fourth, the crooked rhythm of the 19th-century carol "Babe of Bethlehem." The group's nucleus is the duo of John Roberts and Tony Barrand, expatriate Brits now based in the American Northeast and engaged in a variety of academic and nonacademic musicological pursuits, many of them involving the collecting of songs in bars. Their voices are completely unique and blend together like some kind of weird but delicious emulsion -- like a good, vinegary salad dressing rather than a smooth milkshake. All of their albums are delightful, but Just Say Nowell is simply stunning. I look forward all year to the four-week period between Thanksgiving and Christmas when I can play it over and over.

Reality TV and the Myth of Human Progress

2009-11-15T14:46:00.000-08:00

The Victorians saw human history as a long, upward trajectory: slow but constant progress in scientific knowledge, cultural refinement, human health, social justice, etc. To some this progress was a biological inevitability; for others it was driven by inexorable historical forces.

The Book of Mormon describes the human journey differently -- not as a long upward slope of progress, but rather as a repeating cycle: from prosperity to pride to materialism to decadence to degeneracy to calamity to repentance, at which point the cycle begins again. (For a good example of the way this cycle plays out in the Book of Mormon, see Alma chapter 4.)

Every time I encounter a new reality show on TV, I become more convinced that the cyclical model describes the human experience more accurately than the progressive/evolutionary one. What bothers me so deeply about reality programming isn't that it shows us sliding one more step down the scale of pop-entertainment inanity, but rather something more disturbing: I think it demonstrates that we've made a quantum leap from empathy to callousness. TV shows have always been, in varying degrees, crude and stupid -- that's a given (and it's all-too-rarely stopped me from watching and enjoying). And they've frequently dealt with violence, cruelty and degradation in ways that have been less than uplifting. But the violence and cruelty have generally been make-believe. Even when people's despair and pain was presented to us for our entertainment, we always watched with the understanding that what we were seeing wasn't actual cruelty being inflicted on people in real situations -- it was all manufactured and pretend.

Obviously, the whole point of reality TV is that it's no longer just pretend. Casts are chosen carefully and specifically for maximum volatility, and situations are contrived specifically to make it as likely as possible that there will be screaming, hitting, tears, and the throwing of objects. What draws viewers is the hope that they'll get to see actual damage being done to real people. It seems to me that the difference between traditional TV and the Roman gladiator shows is a difference of kind: it's the difference between watching people pretend to be hurt and killed, and watching people actually get hurt and killed -- whereas the difference between reality TV and the Roman gladiator shows is only a difference of degree: the difference between watching people really being cruel to each other, and watching people really kill each other.

I realize that many "reality" shows are actually heavily scripted, and that the reactions of the participants are often contrived. But that's actually beside the point -- it only means that people aren't really being hurt as much as they seem to be. It doesn't change the attitude in which we're watching, or the fact that we're taking more and more pleasure in other people's putatively real pain. In other words, after 2000 years of "progress" we're all back in the coliseum again, cheering the blood sport. It kind of seems like the only real progress has been technological.

Not Expressing Myself Through Music

2009-11-07T19:49:00.000-08:00

For some reason, I've been thinking a lot lately about self-expression. I've always struggled with the fact that I can't write songs and can barely write instrumental music -- I've written a few fiddle tunes and a couple of them are pretty good, but basically I'm not one of those people who has music inside of him bursting to get out. I love music, music is a huge part of who I am, but not the way it is for a composer or a songwriter. Basically I'm just a guy who loves it, who has a pretty good sense of pitch and of time, and who has a facility for playing instruments.

What I've finally come to terms with is this: for me, music just really isn't a matter of self-expression. If you hear me play a Quebecois fiddle tune on the banjo or an Irish tune on the flute, or sing the tenor part to a hymn, you're not going to learn anything about my Inner Self. For me, playing a tune is not a way to express who I am deep inside; it's more like finding a beautiful shell on the beach and showing it to someone. It's not that my playing says nothing about me, only that what it might say about me is both incidental and kind of beside the point. I think that's why it always confuses (and, frankly, irritates) me a little bit when people ask me why I don't smile when I'm playing. Smile? Why are you paying attention to my face? Listen to the tune -- the tune is the point. What matters is the music, not whether or not I'm enjoying myself.

Though the fact is that when I'm playing, if I'm playing well and the tune seems to be coming out without any conscious effort on my part, then I really am enjoying myself, tremendously. That fact probably says something about who I am -- but the tune I'm playing doesn't.

Two Cheers for Media Bias

2009-11-03T06:56:00.000-08:00

A few years back I wrote an essay on bias in the media for the Reno News & Review, and (somewhat surprisingly) it's still available online and (even more surprisingly) I think it still holds up fairly well, despite being a bit long-winded.

Bottom line: I think there's nothing wrong with Fox News having a conservative bias or NPR having a liberal bias. In fact, I'm kind of fascinated by the different ways liberal and conservative biases are manifest in different media neighborhoods. Here's a link to the piece:

http://www.newsreview.com/reno/content?oid=42374

Lee "Scratch" Perry, Herbal Diplomat

2009-10-31T16:36:00.000-07:00

Lee "Scratch" Perry is one of the two or three greatest reggae producers of all time. He is also almost certainly certifiably insane, in ways that can sometimes be kind of hilarious (praying to bananas, claiming to be from outer space) and sometimes disturbing (drinking gasoline, burning down his studio). There are thousands of great Lee Perry stories, but my absolute favorite is this one.

In 1980, Paul McCartney was caught trying to enter Japan with a quarter kilo of marijuana in his luggage. He was arrested and thrown in jail. When Perry heard about this, he sprang to action immediately, composing the following telegram:

(From)

Ark of the Covenant

5 Cardiff Crescent Dr.

Kingston, Jamaica

Air White Smoke Signal

Earth Moon Base

Juda Only Law House

Israel Light House

(To)

Minister of Justice

1-1-1 Kasumigaseki

Chiyoda-Ku

Tokyo, Japan

Dear Sirs,

I LEE PIPECOCK JACKSON PERRY would LOVE to express my concern over your consideration of one quarter kilo to be an excessive amount of herbs in the case as it pertains to master PAUL MCCARTNEY.

As a creator of nature's LOVE, light, life and all things under the creation sun, positive feelings through songs, good times and no problems. I find the Herbal powers of marijuana in its widely recognized abilities to relax, calm and generate positive feelings a must.

Herbs is his Majesty's. All singers positive directions and liberty Irations. Please do not consider the amount of herbs involved excessive.

Master PAUL MCCARTNEY's intentions are positive.

(Signed)

Baby Blue Green Star

Pipecock Jackson

Lee "Scratch" Perry

Banana I Pen JA

Natures Love Defender

There are so, so many things to love about this message, but I think its ultimate charm lies in Perry's fundamental point, which isn't "Paul McCartney is innocent" or even "marijuana should be legal," but rather, "Come on guys, a quarter kilo? That's hardly enough to make a fuss over."

These things are relative, of course.

Elitism, the Media, and Sarah Palin

2009-10-30T12:06:00.001-07:00

It occurred to me recently that I used to hear "elitism" as a charge leveled largely by the Left against the wealthy, the well-born and others with social power. Today, I seem to hear it mostly leveled by the Right against the intelligentsia.

In this second sense, the charge strikes me as pernicious because, if successful, it undermines our ability to make sense. Take, for example, the media and political world's various responses to Sarah Palin. Those in the media who ridicule Palin for her folksiness, her hairstyle and her blue-collar background can reasonably be accused of elitism. But those who point out that Palin frequently has no idea what she's talking about and regularly spouts complete nonsense are not being elitist -- or at least, can't be accused of elitism simply for pointing that out. To put it another way: the fact that Palin comes from small-town Alaska doesn't make her fair game for criticism; the content of her messages absolutely is fair game, and must be.

Those who take the media to task for documenting and pointing out Palin's ignorance are sending a subtle, but real and dangerous message. That message is: being informed makes you suspect. This is a dangerous attitude generally, for obvious reasons, but it's especially dangerous when applied to those who aspire to political power. It's important to note that "informed" doesn't necessarily mean "formally educated" -- you don't have to have a PhD in order to know what you're talking about when it comes to governance, foreign relations, domestic policy or economics. You just have to know what you're talking about; you have to be informed. One of the beautiful things about our current information environment is that you can be common as muck and still become very well informed, as long as you're willing to do the work, and there's nothing "elitist" about insisting that candidates for high political office (or, for that matter, anyone who passes him- or herself off as an authoritative political voice) do that work. If the media didn't call public figures on their ignorance, it wouldn't be doing its job.

Now, the question of whether the media treat conservative ignorance and liberal ignorance evenhandedly is an important but separate question -- and it's one for another posting.

Why I'm Neither a Conservative Nor a Liberal

2009-10-28T19:52:00.000-07:00

Because I take my religion seriously, and because it addresses what I believe to be issues of eternal importance, it seems to me that my politics ought to be shaped by my religion, rather than vice versa. I don't for a minute claim to have harmonized my politics and my religion perfectly, but it does seem to me that when I succeed at letting my religion inform my politics, my politics end up fitting badly into a single, easy category. As far as I can tell, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine & Covenants, and the guidance offered by modern prophets give very inconsistent comfort either to doctrinaire conservatives or to dogmatic liberals. What I think this means is that if I follow the scriptures and the prophets, I'm likely to sometimes agree with liberals and sometimes with conservatives and sometimes with neither. The challenge, then, is to make sure that my political positions are determined by an accurate understanding of eternal truth, rather than by my personal biases and preferences.

I have friends and colleagues who are Mormon and who consistently align themselves with either the Right or the Left. Am I saying they're wrong? No, though I may well disagree with them on particular issues. But it seems to me that all of us have to figure out for ourselves how to reconcile the way we live in the world with our eternal obligations, and I'm not well placed to judge others in that regard. I will say this, though: I've seen people turn against my religion because they think it's too conservative, and I've seen people do the same because they think it's too liberal. That doesn't prove anything in and of itself, but I do think it's suggestive about the degree to which Latter-day Saints need to be able to "stand independent" (D/C 78:14) rather than let the world -- whether it's the conservative part of the world or the liberal part -- shape our attitudes and positions for us.

Getting All Multifaceted Up In This Blog

2009-10-27T20:37:00.000-07:00

Having gone several months without posting anything to this blog, and having had several ideas for postings that I refrained from writing because they weren't music-related, I've finally come to the realization that while I like having a blog I don't really like limiting it to one topic. The fact seems to be that while I enjoy writing music reviews, I don't have tons of thoughts about music generally that feel like they're worth sharing with the world (or the small handful of people who know about and read this blog, anyway). On the other hand, I do find myself wanting to write about issues related to politics, religion, social issues, contemporary events, etc., and wanting to solicit the input of others on those topics.

So "MusicBlurt" is now "PolyBlurt," and I'm going to talk about whatever I feel like. The first thing I want to talk about is why I say that I'm neither a liberal nor a conservative. Probably tomorrow.

What Makes a Pop Song Great?

2009-08-26T20:58:00.000-07:00

Back in June, when I wrote my "25 Perfect Pop Songs" post, commenter Nathan asked a fair and important question: "What makes a pop song great?". Unfortunately, like many fair and important questions, this one has lots of answers, many of them defensible but none of them ultimately authoritative. Here's how it seems to me:

First of all, I think it's important to think about categories and kinds of musical "greatness." Hildegard von Bingen's monophonic hymns and sequences are great, I believe, because they combine melodic genius, philosophical acuity, and deep religious devotion to create music that can be appreciated on multiple levels all at the same time: as inventive and attractive melody; as theological thought; and as what seems to me to be a powerfully impressive example of God-seeking that bespeaks both intellectual rigor and fundamental humility. As an abbess and a female composer and thinker in 12th-century Germany, she could only have accomplished what she did with a tremendously solid sense of herself and her abilities, and yet her music is never about herself -- it's always about things greater than herself, to which she consciously and resolutely (and not quietly) submits.

Palestrina's Missa Aeterna Christi Munera is a great piece of music, I believe, because in it he not only demonstrates mastery of a dauntingly complex art form (Renaissance choral polyphony) but also -- perhaps more importantly -- harnesses that mastery in order to create a musical experience that is both meltingly gorgeous and transcendantly devotional. Gorgeousness and devotion don't necessarily need each other, but when they are coupled I find the results irresistible. I can't listen to the opening measures of the "Kyrie" section without every hair on my body standing on end.

Mozart's clarinet quintet is a great piece of music, I believe, because it begins with a melody that is already heart-stoppingly sweet and melancholy, and then takes its component parts and uses them to build a musical flower that is as perfect, as dense, and as fleshily beautiful as a peony blossom. Where Hildegard and Palestrina achieved greatness by putting beauty to work in support of devotion, Mozart put it to work expressing emotion. To listen to Mozart at his best is, I think, to hear the sound of deep feelings one has had in the past and perhaps forgotten, and to become more aware of the feelings of others. (For some reason, I find his sacred music to be much less compelling than his secular music.)

In each of the three cases I've described above, the composer is working in a musical language that I understand only incompletely. While I understand the basic grammar of tonality, rhythm, counterpoint, development, sonata form, etc., I don't understand it well enough to comprehend everything that is going on in any of those pieces. I know enough to catch glimpses of the genius that informs them, but not enough to grasp the entirety of the musical structure. But I respond to it anyway. In each of these (and many similar) cases, I think what moves me about the music is that its maker has created something with multiple layers: on the surface, a sweet and often inventive melody; below it, a kind of structural ingenuity that can be comprehended at some level even by someone who doesn't completely speak the architectural language; and underlying that, a spiritual or emotional gesture that attracts or at least interests me.

Pop songs obviously have to be judged according to different structural criteria than those you use when thinking about classical music. You don't judge a Buddy Holly song based on his elaborations of the melody in the closing chorus anymore than you judge a Mozart concerto by its beat. But I think a great pop song does do some of the same things that great classical music does, even if it does so by different and undeniably simpler means. Those means aren't exactly the same from one great pop song to another, but the songs that I think are great do all seem to have something of a pattern in common:

Marshal Crenshaw's "Someday, Some Way" combines a sweet, simple and jaunty melody with a wry lyric that simultaneously expresses confusion, affection and commitment.

Matthew Sweet's "I've Been Waiting" combines beautifully chiming guitar arpeggios and a sweet, simple melody with a wide-eyed lyric that simultaneously expresses wonder at his romantic good fortune and a longing for the complete realization of it.

Don Dixon's "Not Giving Up the Ghost" builds musical and emotional tension with a dark and bittersweetly attractive melody during the verse in which he describes in a clear-headed way the fact that his relationship with his beloved is over; then the tension is released in a gentle explosion into the bright, major-key chorus in which he asserts that he'll never give up on her. The song is brilliantly hooky, charmingly romantic, and subtly creepy all at the same time.

R.E.M.'s "Fall on Me" combines a heart-wrenchingly attractive melody with lyrics that are nearly nonsensical but convey a feeling of aching desire for something that is never defined in any coherent way. Because the words make little sense, you can't pin them down -- but they're evocative enough that you can think about them in eight or ten different ways and the song ends up being eight or ten different kinds of moving.

Will Hoge's "Let Me Be Lonely" takes a richly colorful (but thoroughly conventional) chord progression, lashes it to a torqed-up power-pop jet engine, and rides it into the sunset shouting a lyric that sounds simultaneously desperate and exalted. With all the energy of his soul, he's pleading to be left alone by a girl who is obviously both attractive and toxic to him, and he roars through the song in just over two minutes -- verse/chorus/verse/chorus, with no bridge.

What are the common elements here? Great melody; a compelling chord progression; lyrics that both reveal emotion and complicate it. Put all of them together, and you've got what I call a great pop song.

By my criteria, a great rock song is not necessarily a great pop song. "I Against I," by Bad Brains, is a rock masterpiece, but by no means would I call it a great pop song. Same goes for the Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Give It Away," King Crimson's "Frame by Frame," Pere Ubu's "Non-alignment Pact," and Joy Division's "She's Lost Control." ("Love Will Tear Us Apart" is utterly great and comes closer to being a great pop song, but doesn't quite make it -- too desultory, too short of emotional nuance, too self-absorbed.)

My point, I think: a great classical composition and a great pop song have more in common than a great pop song and a great rock song do. And maybe it's significant to my argument that some of the greatest polyphonic masses written during the Renaissance period consisted almost entirely of elaborate variations on pop songs.

That's my version of an answer to Nate's question.

25 Perfect Pop Songs

2009-06-19T22:45:00.001-07:00

Not all of these songs are great, but all of them are perfect pop songs. Also, most of them are great.

Will Hoge -- "Let Me Be Lonely"

Don Dixon -- "Giving Up the Ghost"

Judybats -- "Daylight"

Jennifer Trynin -- "One Year Down"

Richard Thompson -- "Keep Your Distance"

Tom Waits -- "Downtown Train"

Steel Pulse -- "Babylon Makes the Rules"

Aztec Camera -- "Oblivious"

Barenaked Ladies -- "Life in a Nutshell"

Blasters -- "Marie, Marie"

Kirsty MacColl -- "My Affair"

Elvis Costello -- "King Horse"

Marshall Crenshaw -- "Someday, Some Way"

Crowded House -- "Distant Sun"

Echo & the Bunnymen -- "Bring On the Dancing Horses"

Tanya Donnelly -- "The Bright Light"/"Landspeed Record"*

John Hiatt -- "Lipstick Sunset"

Dan Penn -- "The Dark End of the Street"

The Jam -- "Eton Rifles"

Freedy Johnston -- "I'm Not Hypnotized"

Pere Ubu -- "Waiting for Mary"

Eddi Reader -- "The Right Place"

REM -- "Fall On Me"

The Sundays -- "My Finest Hour"

The Cars -- "You Might Think"

* I'm counting these as one because they're equally perfect and they're right next to each other on the same album.

Conscientiously Objecting to The Giving Tree Band

2009-06-12T15:44:00.000-07:00

Here's the opening paragraph from the publicity sheet:

"They camped, they ate locally-grown organic produce -- and for 500 miles total, the Giving Tree Band rode their bikes back and forth to a solar-powered studio in rural Wisconsin, using instruments built from naturally fallen trees to make their second album, Great Possessions. Then when they were done recording, the Chicago-based group manufactured (their) second record with investments in wind technology to keep the project carbon-neutral. The packaging is made from 100% recycled material and printed with nontoxic vegetable inks, covered with biodegradable corn cellulose. Oh, and they are planting trees to offset shipping pollution."

How's the music? I don't know -- I can't bring myself to strip the biodegradable corn-cellulose shrinkwrap off of the recyclable package and find out. Somehow, to do so would feel like giving in to a bully.

John Doe Goes Home Again, for the First Time, Kind of.

2009-06-06T14:35:00.000-07:00

One of the things that set X apart from the rest of the Los Angeles punk scene was its effortless and almost unspoken integration of country music into its revved-up rockabilly punk sound. Its presence was mostly in the vocals: it was most audible in John Doe's rich, resonant baritone voice, which even from the earliest days he was unwilling to fully hide behind a whiny or screamy facade, and in the astringent modal harmonies he sang with his then-wife Exene Cervenka. (Exene's own singing was widely criticized, and not without reason -- but together they made a weird and unsettling sort of magic.) As time went on and X fell slowly apart, its country influences became more and more pronounced, and in Doe's subsequent solo work he has largely abandoned the splenetic punk roar of his youth in favor of a roots-rock approach that is much more suitable to his natural instrument. His rendition of John Hiatt's "The Real One" on Meet John Doe was definitive, and his own "A Matter of Degrees" on the same album is one of the strongest and most affecting songs he's written. He also nodded towards his backward-looking future on that album with a wry but heartfelt rendition of Hank Cochran's classic honky tonk weeper "It's Only Love" (next phrase: "it'll go away").

On his latest album, Country Club, he teams up with Canadian roots band the Sadies. Here he abandons all urban pretense and wholeheartedly embraces the countrified musical past that has clearly been close to his heart for decades. This album includes such tired material as "A Fool Such As I," "Take These Chains from My Heart," and even (I kid you not) "Help Me Make It Through the Night." And while it would be an exaggeration to say that Doe and the Sadies make these songs their own, it's no exaggeration to say that they make them sound new and fresh. And that Doe's voice is still a national treasure.

On Being a Fair-Weather Elvis Costello Fan

2009-06-04T20:13:00.000-07:00

I've been an Elvis Costello fan for over 25 years now, and while I'm not an obsessive, completist Elvis geek, I think I can safely say that I'm a fairly comprehensive admirer of the man. Or at least I could make that claim until the other day, when I finally admitted to myself that I haven't liked much of anything he's done in the past decade. Since coming to that realization I've been wondering why it's true.

It's not because he's strayed from his "roots" (please) as a spitting, staggering post-punk enfant terrible, nor is it even because he keeps turning his back on rock'n'roll generally and playing around with other genres. I thought King of America was a great album, and I even liked Almost Blue.

Instead, I think my reasons are four:

1. His desire to be taken seriously as an Artist. This is what killed Leonard Bernstein: not content to be a great pianist and a world-class conductor, he was desperate to be taken seriously as a composer. But as a composer he was good, not great. (West Side Story was a triumph; the Mass -- not so much.) Elvis is an amazing writer of popular songs. He is not an amazing singer, and he is decidedly not an amazing composer of art song. But he just couldn't stop himself from writing The Juliet Letters, a song cycle for solo voice accompanied by string quartet. Not a capital offense, surely -- but not listenable, either. And not an isolated incident in the man's three-decade-long career.

2. His vibrato. There's only one reason why a singer uses vibrato the way Elvis Costello does: it's because the singer has no confidence in his or her ability to hit the notes accurately. The thing is, Elvis can hit the notes -- he may not have a great voice (scratch that: he absolutely does not have a great voice), but he's really quite a good singer. And he has every right to sing torch songs. But he really needs to control his tendency to reach up for those high notes and then wobble around on them for four to six beats at a time. It's not attractive, and it's not effective -- it distracts the listener from the song. The older he gets, the more he resorts to this technique.

3. His procrustean approach to song structure. Elvis's biggest failing as a songwriter has always been his unwillingness to give up a word or phrase in the interest of musical coherence, and that unwillingness has become entrenched as he's gotten older. Remember how he had to overdub his vocals on "Oliver's Army" so that he could sing the last word of the verse and the first word of the chorus simultaneously? Or how, on the same song, the band had to circle around and play the last few measures of the third verse before hitting the chorus because he'd gone a few syllables over ("to Jo-hann-es-burg")? That's not sloppiness: it's ego. It's a writer's fatal unwillingness to kill his darlings, and it's the same problem that keeps Prince's solo albums from being as good as his band albums. When you're the only one in the studio, there's no one to tell you when you're getting in your own way.

And this is the really sad thing: when Elvis does submit himself to discipline, the results are so incredibly good. Consider one small example: the couplet "There was a clown strike/And the clowns threw down their tools." Now, any songwriter could have depicted clowns as evil or angry; that's the most facile paradox there is. It takes a mind like Costello's to portray clowns rising up in the heat of their proletarian dudgeon, and to do it so economically. It's a brilliant, sharp and humorous image, and when he follows it up plaintively with "You don't have to go so far/Because I love you as you are," the resulting emotional balance is perfect: a strange and startling image that juxtaposes politics, industry and children's entertainment is itself juxtaposed both in content and in flavor by a soft, romantic one. The chord progression and the sung melody and the lyrics create a perfect composition of feeling, and it's satisfying in the same way that a good meal or a Holbein painting is satisfying.

This brings us to my last point:

4. He broke up (or, to be fair, drove away) the Attractions. To say that Elvis's work with the Attractions was better than anything else he's done is not just an exercise in middle-aged nostalgia. It's a simple statement of musical fact. Ray Brown was one of the world's greatest bassists, and Jim Keltner is still one of the world's greatest drummers, if not THE greatest. But Pete Thomas's drums speak about ten languages, and can actually howl (listen to "13 Steps Lead Down"). Bruce Thomas and Elvis apparently hate each other, and Thomas also breaks every bass-playing rule there is, constantly adding little fillips and filligrees and calling attention to his own technique. But not even Ray Brown and Jim Keltner could push an Elvis Costello song forward the way Thomas and Thomas could. There's a lesson to be learned from the fact that on King of America Elvis brought some of America's best and most tasteful session players into the studio (including Brown, Keltner, and guitarist Jim Burton) and yet the album's most powerful song, hands down, was "Suit of Lights," for which the Attractions made a quick visit to the studio and which they hammered out in a matter of hours.

I saw Elvis on tour with his Marc Ribot/Michael Blair band in support of Spike, and the concert was very good. Twenty years later I saw him supporting Cruel Smile with the Impostors (two-thirds of the Attractions plus a new bass player) and the concert was seismic. It was a hurricane. Elvis was in control of perhaps the richest, most complex, and yet emotionally direct band sound I've ever experienced. Even when he got a little weird and self-indulgent, Pete Thomas and Steve Nieve were there to keep the structure intact and the combination of tension and harmony was absolutely electric. If Bruce Thomas had been present the building might have levitated. Or collapsed.

But really, Elvis's biggest problem isn't his divorce from the Attractions; it's that lack of lyrical/structural discipline. A week ago I received a review copy of his newest album, Secret, Profane, and Sugar Cane. It's all acoustic, featuring such A-list bluegrass sessioneers as Jerry Douglas and Stuart Duncan. I haven't had the heart to listen to it yet. Not because of the fact that it's not the Attractions, or that it isn't rock'n'roll. It's the title. A man who has learned how to write with care and economy does not call his album Secret, Profane, and Sugar Cane. He just doesn't.

So really, I guess I'm a fair-weather Elvis Costello fan. I will never not love him. But I'll probably never listen to Momofuku or The Delivery Man again, either. And I'll probably only listen to his new album in order to write a review. Then it will go on the shelf next to my worn-out copies of Armed Forces, Brutal Youth and Blood & Chocolate.

Ten Musicians Worthy of Your Attention

2009-06-01T20:31:00.000-07:00

None of these artists or bands is truly obscure, just far enough outside the mainstream that you may not have encountered them unless you've gone out of your way to do so.

Arto Lindsay. Formerly a pillar of New York's No Wave scene, Lindsay was famous mainly for his yelping vocals and his refusal ever to tune his guitar; instead, he'd just crank it up, distort it, and use it to throw sheets of atonal noise at the listener's head. But he'd grown up in Brazil and never lost his love for samba and bossa nova, and he later formed a band called the Ambitious Lovers that explored those traditions in the context of electronic funk -- with the occasional eruption of atonal guitar noise thrown in just to keep you on your toes.

http://tinyurl.com/mzqayv

The Proletariat. The Proletariat was one of the few truly original bands to emerge from Boston's hardcore punk scene. Their music was harsh but sharply disciplined; the lyrics (which were generally chanted rather than shouted or sung) were minimalistic and unabashedly Trotskyist. Melodies? None. But there was something strangely compelling and attractive about their sound, and whatever that something is, it has actually aged pretty well.

http://homepages.nyu.edu/~cch223/usa/prole_main.html

Cornell Campbell. There have been lots and lots of great reggae singers, and a fair number of them have been falsettists. But none could match the sweetness and purity of tone that characterized Cornell Campbell's voice when he was at the top of his game. Songs like "The Gorgon" and "Dance in a Greenwich Farm" are still dancehall classics, 30 years after their original release.

http://www.bloodandfire.co.uk/album_detail.php?id=BAFCD030

T.J. Kirk. The "T" stands for Thelonious Monk; the "J" stands for James Brown; the "Kirk" stands for Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and the compositions of those three artists constitute the entire repertoire of this fez-wearing, crazily funky quartet. Led by guitar wizard Charlie Hunter, T.J. Kirk creates medleys out of what seem like completely unrelated source materials, and makes all of it irresistible.

http://www.charliehunter.com/discs/tjkirk1_dl.html

Asian Dub Foundation. This London collective made the most exciting music of the Asian Underground movement, and its U.S. debut, Rafi's Revenge, is one of the most exciting albums made in the 1990s. The band blended bhangra, jungle, rock, hip hop, metal, and a million or so other pop music elements into a furiously bubbling stew of political outrage and polycultural exhilaration. 14-year-old rapper Master D led the crew with an amazing lyrical flow and a sharp political eye. Since he left things have been a little less interesting.

http://wwww.asiandubfoundation.com

William Billings. America's first important composer, William Billings was a "singing master" in 18th-century New England and wrote some of the most stirring choral music in the English language. His music was like the young country itself: rough-hewn and vigorous, but deeply informed by the European verities. "Jordan" will be sung at my funeral if my children want to be included in my will.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Billings

Gordon Bok. A singer, songwriter and freaking amazing guitarist from Camden, Maine. As far as I can tell he's pretty much completely unknown outside the hardcore Maritime folk music community. His bottomless barrel of a voice and his apparently unlimited guitar technique, combined with a song repertoire enriched by years of sailing schooners up and down the Atlantic coast with colleagues from all over the world, make his albums some of the richest and most satisfying I've ever heard.

http://www.gordonbok.com

Massilia Sound System. The gimmick is that this French dancehall reggae trio comes from Marseille and performs its lyrics in Occitan, the regional language of southern France. What makes their music more than a vehicle for a cultural gimmick is the fact that they write such brilliant hooks, and incorporate local folk music in such catchy and sometimes hilarious ways. I've never heard a bad Massilia Sound System album, but if you can find Parla Patois, their debut on the RAS label, that's the place to start.

http://www.massilia-soundsystem.com

Kate Rusby. A Yorkshire folksinger, Kate Rusby's exposure in the U.S. has been severely limited by her paralyzing fear of airplanes. But most of her albums have been released in the States on the Compass label and all of them are things of crystalline, airy loveliness.

http://www.katerusby.com

Massacre. This was a power trio composed of guitarist Fred Frith, bassist Bill Laswell and drummer Fred Maher. In the early 1980s they gigged around the northeast playing a bracing blend of composed and improvised music, all of it jagged and kind of harsh but also surprisingly lyrical. Their debut album Killing Time is one of the best albums ever made, in any genre. The reunion albums, made 25 years later, were pretty good.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_(Fred_Frith_band)

Sacred Estonian Folk Chorales -- Awwww, yeah, baby.

2009-05-30T17:46:00.000-07:00

I know, I know. An a cappella sextet that dresses in pseudo-clerical garb and sings ancient traditional religious folk songs in Estonian, interweaving them with early Renaissance polyphony, may not sound like a recipe for a great party. And indeed, Heinavanker (an Estonian word than means "haywain") will never convince anyone to get his or her booty out onto the dancefloor. But if, instead, you'd like to hear some of the most ethereally lovely singing you've ever encountered in your life, then go to the considerable trouble required to track down one of the group's recordings. I recommend Loomiselaul ("The Creations"), which seems only to be available directly from the distributor Qualiton (http://tinyurl.com/m29dmg). To get a hint of what the group sounds like, check out the sample audio clips at http://www.heinavanker.ee. You won't regret it.

Paul Simon vs. the Spectre of Mortality

2009-05-28T20:25:00.000-07:00

The cover of Paul Simon’s most recent solo album (from 2006) shows an infant’s face staring out with an expression that might be wonder, or maybe bemusement, or maybe dull shock. The album’s title is Surprise.

This disc offers an unusually unified body of songs, all dealing with the existential plight of the Baby Boom generation. This is a generation that was initially defined in terms of its infancy. As young adults, its members came to be known for their celebration of the innocence and naturalness of childhood. But now the Boomers are hitting retirement age, and can no longer avoid confronting mortality and the terrifying questions that come with it. While they’ve been following their bliss, expressing themselves, blurring the line that separates work from play, and having the cake of antimaterialistic hipness while eating the cake of unprecedented prosperity, most Boomers have at some point married and/or had children. Now they have grandchildren, and as the Boomers watch them grow, they find themselves standing on the threshold of an eternity that is invisible and mysterious, and that yawns open to engulf them at any moment. All that eternal-childhood stuff turns out to have been something of a cruel illusion.

Surprise!

To appreciate the richness and emotional complexity of this album, you must either be a Boomer or find a way to put yourself mentally inside the Boomer’s existential dilemma. It goes without saying that this isn’t your typical rock and roll. These aren’t songs about romance and passion and anger and ascendancy and triumph. They’re songs about what faith is and what we have faith in; about kids growing up and leaving; about wearing out one’s body and having nothing to replace it with; about whether existence is itself a meaningless joke; about how (and whether) the cosmos regards us and our endeavors.

Simon addresses these issues with his trademark combination of sharp wordplay and wry humor, but with what sounds very much like an underlying edge of despair. Although the songs on this album deal explicitly with issues of love, family and meaning, there are also frequent references to the boring minutiae of everyday life. “Weak as the winter sun, we enter life on earth,” he sings on “How Can You Live in the Northeast,” the album’s opening track. “Name and religion come just after date of birth.” (When and where? On the birth certificate, as in life itself.) “Beautiful” sketches out little details of bourgeois domesticity: a snowman, a go-kart, a water slide. But the growing family into whose life we’re peering is expanding in a particularly postmodern way: by adopting babies from various troubled and faraway countries. Both joy and grief are hinted at here: the babies are “beautiful,” of course, and the family is thrilled to have them, but how did they end up in the land of go-karts and water slides? What kinds of tragedy and bloodshed lie behind them on the path they took to America? (Perhaps none at all – and perhaps events of unutterable horror.) Racial politics adds a hint of uneasiness to this domestic portrait: “We brought a brand new baby back from Bangladesh/Thought we’d name her Emily.”

Both of those songs use descriptions of the mundane and the particular to suggest considerations of the infinite. But for Simon time is running out, and he no longer seems content to address what Hugh Nibley called the Terrible Question by hint and inference. On “I Don’t Believe” he deals with it head-on, though not without ambivalence. In fact ambivalence, with all its terrifying implications, is exactly what he’s facing up to on this track. Where other songwriters might take the easy way out, offering no conclusions while expressing some kind of vaguely waffling hope in the general beneficence of the universe or the goodness that lies in the hearts of human beings regardless of their ultimate place in it, Simon questions whether all of that stuff actually means anything and what the implications are if it doesn’t. His opening line is about the way that human kindness can lead us through the darkness – and then, as the music drops into a minor key, he brutally sings “But I don’t believe, and I’m not consoled/I lean closer to the fire, but I’m cold.” The ambivalence comes later, when he contradicts himself about what it is that he doesn’t believe: watching his wife combing her hair, he says “I don’t believe a heart can be filled to the brim/Then vanish like mist as though life were a whim.” Threaded through this meditation is an allegory: his stockbroker calls him up and tells him he’s lost all his money. Then he calls back, tells him it was all a mistake, and says that he hopes his “faith isn’t shaken.” By the end of the song, Simon is reduced to intoning the agnostic’s prayer: “Maybe and maybe and maybe some more/Maybe’s the exit that I’m looking for.”

The album’s emotional climax arrives gently, at the very end, with the gorgeous “Father and Daughter,” in which Simon addresses his daughter as she prepares to leave home. He tells her he can’t promise that there’s nothing scary under her bed, but he’ll promise what he can: to watch her shine, to watch her glow, and to “stand guard like a postcard of a golden retriever.” And that “as long as one and one is two/There could never be a father who loved his daughter more than I love you.” As the father of a teenage daughter myself, I can hardly think about this song – let alone listen to it –without choking up. How Simon was able to sing it (with his son singing harmony in the background) is utterly beyond me. And there’s something to notice about his son’s voice as well: at the song’s beginning, thanks to producer Brian Eno’s electronic ministrations, it sounds like that of a startlingly talented baby; at the end of the song it has morphed into the voice of a mature woman.

Eno’s production has gotten much attention, and deservedly so: he takes Simon’s organically attractive melodies and acoustic guitar and fills in the spaces with a kaleidoscope of colorful electronic filigrees, African highlife guitars, skittering jungle breakbeats, and all kinds of subtly strange and melodically wonderful sonic extensions. Simon and Eno are an unexpectedly perfect combination. The music is purely enjoyable; the words are deeply affecting, and the questions Simon raises are ones that all of us have to face. That he is able to do so with such honesty, courage and grace makes Surprise much more than just another fine pop album.

Some of my favorite punk rock stage names

2009-05-25T15:23:00.000-07:00

I know, it's pathetic to be amused by these, but I can't help myself. Every single one is real:

Dina Cancer
Lorna Doom
Donna Rhia
Helen Killer
Joy DeVivre
Sharon Needles
Polly Styrene
Marky DeSade
Crash Landon
Pat Smear
Drew Blood

Two Richard Thompson Tribute Albums, Each of Which Is About 50% Successful

2009-05-23T13:27:00.000-07:00

The conventional wisdom is that Capitol got its Richard Thompson tribute album wrong, and Geen Linnet got theirs right. I'd say both opinions are exactly half correct.

On Beat the Retreat: Songs by Richard Thompson (Capitol, 1994), there are undoubtedly some mediocre contributions and one or two inexcusable ones: REM shouldn't have been allowed to get away with turning "Wall of Death"'s joyfully morbid jangle-pop into a sloppy acoustic country drone; David Byrne shouldn't have been allowed to record "Just the Motion" until he learned the chord changes; Graham Parker should have played less to type and picked a more interesting song than "Madness of Love." And while having Beausoleil do "Valerie" as a swampy cajun two-step was a stroke of brilliance, it does have to be said that Michael Doucet's singing makes Richard Thompson sound like Luther Vandross by comparison. And yet, and yet: Bob Mould gives "Turning of the Tide" the Husker Du treatment, and manages to capture and amplify both the song's cynicism and its compassion. The Blind Boys of Alabama reveal "Dimming of the Day" for what it is: a song of religious devotion, written in shockingly direct parallel to the hymn "Lead, Kindly Light". Loudon Wainright and Shawn Colvin add nothing new except a small chord suspension to "A Heart Needs a Home," but make it sound like it was written for them anyway. And best of all, June Tabor and Martin Simpson both bring precious gifts (her coffee-colored voice, his delicately perfect fingerpicked guitar) to the title track and then do something Thompson never did: they give it a beat -- and the result is a blossoming of one of Thompson's very good songs into perhaps the most affecting account of defeated romantic ambivalence ever committed to tape (just think about the symbolic complexity of the lines "I'm trailing my colours/Back home to you"). This rendition of that song alone is worth twice the price of the album.

The first mistake on The World Is a Wonderful Place: The Songs of Richard Thompson (Hokey Pokey/Green Linnet 1994) is its title, a tired snicker of cynicism that is too obvious by half. Its second mistake is the similar weariness of too many of its participants, who capture the gritty surfaces of Thompson's songs all too clearly and his warm humanity and sharp humor all too rarely. Some of them also went too far out of their way to dig up obscure material that wasn't worth the dig: the chamber-orchestra arrangement of "The Knife Edge" and Marvin Etzioni's half-hearted rendition of "It Don't Cost Much" both come to mind in this regard. And there's simply no excuse for Ron Kavana's talking-blues take on "I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight." But Plainsong's a capella arrangement of "From Galway to Graceland" is stupendous, as is Gregson/Hewerdine/Reader's beautifully low-key performance of "Dimming of the Day," and Martin and Jessica Simpson shed new interpretive light on "Down Where the Drunkards Roll." If you're a Richard Thompson fan you're going to want both of these albums, but if you load them to your iPod you'll probably find that only about half of each program ends up on your playlist.

Seeking it out

2009-05-21T15:30:00.000-07:00

"It changed my life. That music -- I sought it out so hard." -- Ron Thomason, on his youthful discovery of the Stanley Brothers

My parents tell me that when I was a toddler, my favorite activities were listening to music and looking at books, and that given the opportunity to do both, I would do them simultaneously for hours. They also tell me that I had favorite composers and asked for them by name, and there is documentary evidence that I had memorized songs from Gilbert and Sullivan operettas by age three. But for some reason I've never fully understood, the first music that really took me by the throat and refused to let go was old-time country and bluegrass. I was fascinated by that music by the time I was ten or eleven years old.

When I was in my early teens and had exhausted my local library's collection of bluegrass and old-time records, I walked to the next town over and exhausted its library's as well. I would set my radio alarm clock to wake me at 7:00 am every Saturday with WHRB's "Hillbilly at Harvard" show. Waking up that early was hard -- I wasn't then and am not now a morning person -- but I would lie in bed and struggle to keep my eyes and ears open so I wouldn't miss a single cut.

I think now that one of the reasons the music became such an obsession for me was that it was an artificially scarce commodity. In reality there was plenty of it out there, but it was scarce to me for two reasons: first, there were no really effective ways to find the stuff that was available for free; there was no Internet and no Google to search it with, and library catalogs were print-based and bitterly ineffective (and my local libraries didn't have much in their collections anyway). Second, I couldn't afford to buy it for myself. Plenty of records were commercially available and I knew where to find them -- the Harvard Coop, Cheapo's in Central Square, Discount Records on Boylston, Briggs & Briggs, the small but lovingly selected record bins at instrument shops like Sandy's and the Music Emporium in Porter Square -- but I had no money. I'd go to those stores anyway just to flip through the records and think about which ones I'd buy first if I ever could, the fire of my ardor stoked by the warm, slightly musty scent of cardboard and vinyl or (even better) the wood-glue-and-varnish smell of guitars, banjos and mandolins lining the walls of the Music Emporium.

The instruments tantalized me even more than the records did. While I wore out the few records I did own I fantasized about making those sounds myself: the growling bass runs that Jimmy Martin would toss off like curling wood shavings from his customized Martin D-45; the throaty chatter and bark of Bill Monroe's and David Grisman's Lloyd Loar-model Gibson mandolins; the brightly flashing cascades of arpeggios from J.D. Crowe's prewar Gibson Mastertone banjo. I felt like an impostor every time I walked into the Music Emporium because I couldn't play any of the gorgeous instruments that filled the store with that wonderful smell, and when I walked on the creaky wooden floor and inhaled the air I felt like I was taking something that wasn't mine. When I saw real customers sitting on stools trying out the guitars and mandolins, their fingers magically making -- right there in my quietly awestruck presence -- sounds that some part of me had always thought could only be created in a make-believe place, I felt as if I were intruding on the playground of a more advanced race.

My musical drive was like a river, and as a river always does, it had its way: I eventually learned to play the banjo (both bluegrass and clawhammer styles, though I would finally settle on the latter), the guitar, the bass, the mountain dulcimer, eventually the Irish flute. And I kept digging up information wherever I could: I read about tonewoods and inlay techniques and scalloped bracing and fretboard binding and block lamination. I learned to hear the difference between Scruggs-style and melodic bluegrass banjo playing, and between the tone of a prewar flathead banjo (like Earl Scruggs played) and a Whyte Laydie (favored by melodic pioneer Bill Keith). I wolfed down every crumb of information I could find, wherever I could find it. Every bit of it was precious and delicious, all the more so because each was so hard-won.

Most of my memories of late childhood and adolescence have something to do with seeking that music out so hard -- either digging like an archaeologist for traces of its past in books and on records, or wearing grooves into my fingertips trying to make the sounds myself.

Now I own more recordings than I have room for, and plenty of books, and I have good instruments and opportunities to play them. I love seeing my fine Chanterelle banjo hanging on the wall in my music room, and I love taking it down and letting the tunes fall away from me like smooth round stones skipping down a mountainside. But there's a part of me that misses the seeking and the struggle, and the thrill that came with every song I heard for the first time and every scrap of biographical information I dug up in a library or a used book store. I wouldn't trade my current abundance for the former scarcity, but I do kind of miss the thrill that came with seeking that music out so hard, and at long last finding it.

When Music Supervisors Should Be Fired

2009-05-19T15:10:00.000-07:00

Have you ever been watching a movie and suddenly heard a song that made no sense whatsoever, and was obviously placed there just so it could be included in the soundtrack album? The practice seems to be getting more and more egregious as time goes on, but it's not new. Here are three of the most glaring examples:

Burt Bacharach -- "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" (in Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, 1969)

Leonard Cohen -- "Hallelujah" (performed by Rufus Wainwright in Shrek, 2001)

Beastie Boys -- "Sabotage" (in the new Star Trek, 2009)

I'd love to hear others' favorites.

Teddy Thompson -- sorry, but genes will out

2009-05-18T20:08:00.000-07:00

The burden that Teddy Thompson will carry for his whole career will be everyone's inability to stop pointing out that he comes by his jaw-dropping talent honestly. As the son of one of British folk-rock's finest guitarists and songwriters (Richard Thompson) and one of its two or three greatest singers (Linda Thompson), his emergence as a top-notch singer and songwriter himself would seem like an almost foregone conclusion. But what wasn't inevitable was the particular distribution of his talents: after all, he could have been born with his dad's pedestrian voice and his mother's underwhelming writing prowess. But no -- the genetic crapshoot came up sevens, and he's got a sharp, powerful, but artfully restrained singing voice that combines his mother's grace with his father's grit, and a songwriting voice that is both personal and deeply rooted. He's made several very fine albums over the past five years, but A Piece of What You Need is something perilously close to a masterpiece. I first listened to it in my car, and by the end of the third song I almost had to pull over, call my wife, and tell her I loved her.

FYI -- Commenting is now open

2009-05-16T21:55:00.001-07:00

Hey, readers -- I just noticed that my settings were precluding anyone who isn't a BlogSpotter from commenting. I've fixed that, so anyone who wants to comment may now do so. Fire at will. (Unless you're mad about what I said about Dylan or Coltrane, in which case let's just get it over with: You're right, I'm wrong. K?)

"Life's Too Short" Music List (#2 of 2)

2009-05-16T16:11:00.000-07:00

Around the time I turned forty I came to the realization that life is too short either to pretend you like music you don’t (but “should”) or to pretend not to like music you do (but “shouldn’t”). In the spirit of that realization, I wrote a previous posting in which I listed some artists, genres and albums that I’m no longer willing to pretend I don’t like. In this one, I list some that I’m no longer willing to pretend I do.

The Residents. I think I liked the Residents as a teenager because they offered a bracing sort of weirdness that helped me define myself against my peer group – a project that was very important to me when I was in high school. Now I’m in my forties, I know who I am, and at this point the Residents sound to me like a bunch of sniggering surrealist paste-eaters. (So why can’t I bring myself to get rid of my copies of Diskomo and Duck Stab/Buster & Glen?)

Crass (and affiliated bands). This anarcho-vegetarian-feminist-syndicalist collective (which included, at various times, Crass, Flux of Pink Indians, Zounds, Conflict, etc.) strummed the over-tightened strings of my adolescent outrage for a relatively brief moment with a combination of thrillingly uncompromising politics, homemade uniforms(!), and a dangerous-looking spray-paint-and-stencil graphical style. But holy cow – the music really was unlistenable, and I’m finally ready to admit it. Also: can someone explain to me why anarchists would wear uniforms?

Serialism. For most of my young adulthood I believed that as long as music was architecturally refined and conceptually complex, smart people should enjoy it. I wanted to be someone who was smart enough to enjoy such music. So on the basis of that belief and that aspiration I tried mightily to enjoy the music of Schoenberg, Webern, Babbitt, Carter, Subotnik and others of similar bent. Then, at an embarrassingly advanced age, I came to the conclusion that just because music follows a set of ingenious mathematical rules doesn’t mean that it’s therefore “good” and you’re under some kind of intellectual obligation to like it. Musical beauty may not always be in the ear of the listener, but I think it’s more reliably there than in the structure of a tone row, however masterfully it may be manipulated. I’m not saying there’s no beauty in serialism – only that for me, the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.

Pere Ubu’s second album, Dub Housing. Of all of Pere Ubu’s many albums, this is the one that makes it onto every serious critic’s “Best of” list. But I just can’t hear what it is that’s supposed to make this one so special. I certainly don’t find it as consistently compelling as its predecessor, The Modern Dance, which includes both “Non-Alignment Pact” and “Real World.” But heaven help me, the shameful truth is that my favorite Pere Ubu album is Cloudland.

Skronk. A particular kind of harsh, chaotic experimental music came churning to the surface at the nexus of avant-garde rock and classical modernism in downtown New York in the 1980s, and was given this onomatopoeic designation by Robert Christgau. I used to genuinely love skronk – or at least certain strains of it, particularly as manifest in the work of Fred Frith, Bill Laswell, John Zorn, Christian Marclay, and No Wavers like DNA and Lydia Lunch. I was extremely excited when DNA’s entire output was reissued on a single CD a couple of years ago. I wangled a review copy, listened to it, and realized… that I wasn’t nineteen anymore, and that all of sudden hellacious noise just sounds like hellacious noise to me. When I was at Ricks College I needed a certain amount of hellacious noise just to keep my head straight. Now I seem to get all I need from my kids and my dogs. John Zorn blowing duck calls into a bowl of water now seems surplus to requirements.

John Coltrane. I have to tread carefully here. Many, many people whose taste I genuinely admire and before whose musical insight I unreservedly bow believe that Coltrane was a genius, and – just to reiterate – I fully acknowledge that they’re probably right. So I mean it sincerely when I say that there must be something wrong with my ears, because when I hear Coltrane (especially as a leader, less so as a sideman) all I hear is a nasty, watery, vinegary tone, little to no harmonic development, and a real lack of melodic interest. Again: it’s surely me, not him. But life’s too short, so I’ll take Sonny Rollins.

Bela Bartok. As a college freshman, instead of studying for my classes I read a really great book about Bartok’s musical formation in Hungary and his declining years in New York. I was fascinated by the ways he gathered folk tunes and songs in the field and then incorporated them into his compositions, and the combination of folk elements and forward-looking, harmonic crunchiness in his music really appealed to me in theory. But much to my dismay, even in my most adventurous moments I’ve found just about all of his music unlistenable. Even the string quartets, which everyone seems genuinely to love. I’ve been trying to listen to Bartok for more than 25 years now, and I just can’t hack it.

J.S. Bach. This one is really, really hard for me to admit. It’s not that I don’t enjoy Bach, it’s just that I rarely enjoy him as much as I really think I should. Often I find his chromaticism tiresomely academic; sometimes I find his choral music a bit too overbearing. And his organ music? Oy. Too much noise, too much reverberation hiding the objectively brilliant counterpoint. There’s a ton of Bach in my CD collection, but when I’m in the mood for baroque music I almost always turn to Telemann or Rameau first – or to one of Bach’s sons, especially C.P.E. or the more classically-inclined J.C. That said, I do love the sound of Bach on the piano and could listen to Peter Serkin or Glenn Gould play the two- and three-part inventions all day.

Sinead O’Connor. I used to think she was a tormented musical genius with an amazing voice. Now she strikes me as a pathologically self-indulgent narcissist who would really benefit from a voice lesson or two. (Sinead. Baby. Listen to me: sometimes pitch matters more than intensity.) Again, I don’t know whether she changed or I did. Or both.

Bob Dylan. See, here’s the thing: BOB DYLAN CANNOT SING. Or at the very least he chooses not to, and no matter what the Baby Boomers say, the fact that he can’t/won’t sing adequately is not a silly non-issue to be waved away in the interest of the Greater Good. Not in light of the fact that Bob Dylan makes his living as, you know, A SINGER. OK, granted: he doesn’t really make his living as a singer, he makes his living as a royalty collector, and more power to him – he’s certainly a fine songwriter, and I’ll freely acknowledge that forty years ago he mattered as much as it is possible for a pop music artist to matter. But it seems to me that as soon as you start asserting the Greater Significance of a pop music artist, you’re maybe beginning to miss the point of pop music. “The Times They Are a-Changin’” still hits hard in spite of the fact that it mattered in 1969, not because of it. It hits hard because it’s a good song, and it would actually be a far better one if it were less the product of such a narrow time, place and mindset, and if it didn’t wear its affectations (“A-changin’”? Really?) so proudly. “Like a Rolling Stone,” on the other hand, still hits hard precisely because it’s a great song that was written from a perspective outside of those limitations. And both are much, much better songs when someone other than Dylan sings them. Yeah, I said it.

Bill Frisell makes me want to weep with happiness.

2009-05-14T19:37:00.000-07:00

I once told my wife that when you listen to Bill Frisell play guitar, you think "What a nice guy." She snorted. So I put a Bill Frisell CD on the stereo and she said "Actually, you're right." (And is there a more magical three-word phrase?)

"Life's Too Short" Music List #1 (of 2)

2009-05-14T19:06:00.001-07:00

"Life's Too Short" music list #1

Around the time I turned forty I came to the realization that life is too short either to pretend you like music you don’t (but “should”) or to pretend not to like music you do (but “shouldn’t”). So I’ve decided to swallow my pride and stop pretending not to like the following artists and genres, even if it means that my wife raises her eyebrows at me from time to time when she hears what I’ve put in the car stereo. Mildly freaking out your wife is one of the few pleasures of male middle age, anyway.

* Scritti Politti – in particular, the gloriously cheesy Cupid & Psyche album. Now, granted: Gart Greenside’s Marxist/situationist politics was a bunch of posturing twaddle, and he sang like a simpering part-time drag queen, and yes, those glistening Stratocaster funk licks and candy-coated synthesizer parts are the distilled essense of all that was wrong with pop music in the ‘80s. But there’s just no denying the hooks, and the shorter my life gets the more I care about hooks. Also, that’s Ranking Ann toasting over the dub mix of “The Word Girl (Flesh & Blood).” Ranking Ann, people.

* Mariachi music in general and Linda Ronstadt’s mariachi albums in particular.I love it all. I love the trumpets, I love the violins, I love the tight harmonies, I love the glorious sound of La Ronstadt’s voice soaring above everything and holding those notes for highly improbable lengths of time. And I love the sobbing/laughing cries from the gitarron player.

* Buck Owens. When I was a young kid, desperately in love with early country music, I absolutely hated Hee Haw. I thought pretty much everything about the show was stupid, but worse was the way it made genius musicians complicit in their own ridicule by a culture that didn’t appreciate them. Actually, I still feel pretty much the same way. But my disgust was never enough to temper my once-secret love for Buck Owens, architect of the Bakersfield Sound and composer of some of the finest and most tightly constructed popular music of the 20th century. I’ll go out on a limb and say that “Above and Beyond” is one of the best love songs of the past 50 years.

* Phil Collins. As a longtime Peter Gabriel fan, I still harbor some resentment of Phil Collins, who I believe stole both his vocal style and his signature highly-compressed drum sound from Gabriel. And it’s also true that his songs pretty much exemplify 1990s schlock. But as Steve Reich once said about Wagner, the man’s a musical genius and you simply have to lump it. Collins has a great voice, he writes fantastic songs, and he has a sense of humor. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a Phil Collins song I didn’t like, whether I was willing to admit it at the time or not.

* Hall & Oates. It’s time for us to just give up and acknowledge the fact that Daryl Hall had (maybe still has) one of the two or three finest voices in the history of popular music, and he wielded it with both taste and power. These guys were easy to hate, but every single one of their (many) hits was a genuinely great song. If simply reading the words “Rich Girl” doesn’t hook that song in your head for the next three days, then chances are you’re either tone deaf or under 30.

* George Jones. He’s been called the greatest pure singer in country music, and that may actually be understating the case. In the complexity and soulfulness of his delivery he is rivaled only by Ralph Stanley, a completely different singer with a similar level of genius. Jones’s voice was shaped and inspired by the barroom in the same way that Stanley’s was by the mountains of southern Virginia; Jones can break your heart with a single syllable the same way Stanley can make every hair on your body stand on end with a single melodic ornament. Jones’s wispy Dry Look hairstyle and goofy glasses are distractions. Ignore them, and listen to how he lands (and avoids landing) on each and every note that he sings, as well as the brilliantly counterintuitive way that he clamps down on the most intense phrases in the lyric rather than giving way to them. I’m not even sure he actually knows what he’s doing – I think he may just be that kind of scary-intuitive talent.

* The Kingston Trio. Among the purveyors of what my uncle lovingly calls Crass Commercial Folk Music in the 1950s and 1960s, the Kingston Trio was nearly unique in its perfect blend of humor, chops, and taste. They weren’t above bending the knee to the standard golden calves of the era (Bob Dylan covers, etc.), but neither were they able to hide the sheer joy in songcraft that led them to their best material. And their voices – none of them especially noteworthy in a solo setting – blended beautifully. They also generally avoided political material, which was in some ways a cop-out and in some ways quite courageous – what it did do was keep the focus where it belonged: on the songs themselves.

* Luther Vandross/Anita Baker. Two giants of the Quiet Storm school of bedroom R&B, both of them a pure joy to listen to. I’ve heard it whispered that Baker is a raging diva, which I hope isn’t true – she’s such a cutie pie.

* Sade. Jazz? Please. But there’s nothing wrong with jazz-inflected pop music, and Sade’s weird combination of cool reserve and throaty, smoldering passion (along with top-notch schlock-jazz session players) made all of her albums interesting and some of them brilliant. I consider her the thinking lounge lizard’s Grace Jones, with an actual voice.

* Bob Wills. I was once channel-surfing and came across an amazing thing: a music video, vintage 1940 or so, featuring Western swing titan Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. My astonishment turned to rage when I realized it was being shown as part of a program highlighting “Great Moments in Musical Kitsch” or something to that effect. Bob Wills? Kitsch? OK, I guess I can see where it comes from, but still. Western swing is one of the purest musical pleasures still available in a world gone rotten – I mean, come on: a country band with a big horn section? What could be better? – and Bob Wills is still the king. If I had a Bob Wills t-shirt, I’d wear it every day. And my wife would raise her eyebrows at me.

(List #2 will cover the music that I’m no longer willing to pretend that I do like.)