Ruth Fowler – The Problem With Hugs

Link to an article by Ruth Fowler:

“The Problem With Hugs”

This reminded me of a story on a local Fox affiliate TV news show in which they said that residents were trying to rebuild from the Ferguson protests, and I immediately thought they were going to show white people painting over graffiti.  The broadcasters proceeded to show what appeared to be a single family of white people painting over graffiti.  It perfectly symbolized papering over legitimate complaints with a self-serving plea to just return things to “normal” conditions of inequality and injustice that favor the white people painting over the graffiti.

Willie Nelson – Always on My Mind

Always on My Mind

Willie NelsonAlways on My Mind Columbia FC 37951 (1982)


Willie’s star soared in the late 1970s and early 80s.  Red Headed Stranger was a big hit, but Stardust blew it away with multi-platinum sales.  Riding high on that success Willie even began an acting career, culminating in a starring role in the film Honeysuckle Rose.  However, after Stardust he had released mostly soundtracks and niche albums like a holiday one, a gospel one, a tribute to Kris Kristofferson and an assortment of duet/collaboration outings.  He also issued what remained for a long time his definitive “best of” compilation: Greatest Hits (& Some That Will Be).

Always on My Mind proved to be Willie’s highest-charting album, and one of the best selling releases of his entire career.  He still had chart-busters left in him, but this represented the high-water mark of his popularity.  It also marked another departure for him, in a career that always veered (or some might say lurched) in unpredictable directions.  This was the arrival of Willie the 80s pop singer.

Producer Chips Moman comes on board.  He would work with Nelson a lot in the coming years.  Moman has an uneasy legacy, in hindsight often criticized for his clinical, overproduced destruction of numerous albums, from Townes Van Zandt in the late 1970s to The Highwaymen and Johnny Cash in the 1980s.  But, that legacy aside, Always on My Mind is among his more durable efforts (eclipsed of course by ElvisFrom Elvis in Memphis).  He lets this ride on the strength of the performances rather than a suffocatingly synthetic layer of studio and mixing gimmicks.  Willie is singing lots of pop and rock fare, tending toward lighter, slow-burn ballads and torch songs.  These are much much more contemporary tunes than on Stardust.  He takes somewhat of a cue from Elvis, who recorded the title track, Simon & Garfunkel‘s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and “Let It Be Me (Je t’appartiens)” during his 70s comeback.  Willie possibly edges out The King on the title track, though Willie hits the top of his vocal range on “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and noticeably can’t go as high as he seems to want to go (no pun intended).  Much of the material is well-selected, like “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man” and Procol Harum‘s “A Whiter Shade of Pale.”  A couple of obligatory re-recordings of old Nelson hits make appearances as well.  One can forgive, somewhat, the fact that Moman seems to be pushing a few too many of his own songs because they happen to work, particularly the opener with its guest appearance by Waylon Jennings.  But this album does exhibit some serious lapses in judgment.  When a saxophone enters on “Let It Be Me,” it is as if Gato Barbieri stumbled into Nelson’s recording session amidst a marijuana haze and thought he was redoing the Last Tango In Paris soundtrack, or somebody was warming up for the “Lethal Weapon” soundtrack.  That sax (from John Marett) is probably the album’s biggest liability.  It is unredeemable.

If Always on My Mind represented some of the worst tendencies of Willie Nelson’s music in the coming decade, it would be hard to tell from this evidence alone.  At its best, this ends up being one of his stronger pop outings.  Aside from some slight unevenness, it delivers a classic in the title track and has enough other successes to keep things interesting.  Warts and all, this is probably something that will appeal to casual fans of pop music, even without any particular interest in the artist, and ranks as a worthwhile second-tier Willie Nelson effort for the fan.

Willie Nelson – Tougher Than Leather

Tougher Than Leather

Willie NelsonTougher Than Leather Columbia QC 38248 (1983)


Anthropologist F.G. Bailey wrote in his book Humbuggery and Manipulation: The Art of Leadership (1988) that a leader has a need for an entourage, who make up a buffer and a sort of subordinate set of leaders to insulate the ultimate leader from the mundane.  But, such a leader must control his entourage, usually through strategic use of uncertainty and discord among the ranks.  If we take Bailey’s theories (right or wrong) and apply them to Willie Nelson, then maybe they provide an explanation of what went wrong in the 1980s.  Nelson developed a Pollyanna-esque “positive thinking” approach to life and steadfastly refused to focus his energies or attention on anything negative.  He did have an entourage, which between his backing band, drivers, bodyguards and assorted others, had grown quite large by the early 80s.  But his laid-back approach to life didn’t allow him any room to control this entourage.  So he was too often enveloped in a strange cocoon of celebrity.  His recordings, increasingly pop- and easy listening-oriented, suffered because of it.

Near the peak of his popularity Willie collapsed a lung, and had to recuperate in the hospital for a time.  While there, he planned his 1983 album Tougher Than Leather.  It marked a return to the stripped-down old-time acoustic country sound of Red Headed Stranger.  It ends up being Nelson’s finest album of the decade by a fair margin.  He had a lot of range, but he was always known first and foremost as a country artist for a reason.  He plays to his strengths here.  There are some old tunes and even some traditional chestnuts like “Beer Barrel Polka” tossed together with another loose (and barely recognizable) concept.  This time it has to do with reincarnation — a topic Nelson genuinely believed in.  The time spent on thinking this through provides warm returns.  This is the most consistent and convincing album Nelson would deliver for a while.  The reason may well be that being less reliant on his band and having more time to himself in the hospital Nelson freed himself briefly from the confines of his entourage.  This may not be his finest moment compared to the entirety of his career, but renditions of the likes of “My Love for the Rose,” “Changing Skies” and “Summer of Roses/December Day” (and more) are very good.

Willie Nelson & Family – Willie Nelson & Family

Willie Nelson & Family

Willie Nelson & FamilyWillie Nelson & Family RCA Victor LSP-4489 (1971)


Another middling offering from the time just before Willie really broke through.  He veers into the territory of singer-songwriters, with a cover of James Taylor‘s hit “Fire and Rain.”  The nagging problem is that Willie is making this music too grandiose, and is still clinging slightly to a crooner’s style in his vocals.  That, and the glitzy, Vegas-style backing singers, horns and strings on “I’m a Memory,” “Today I Started Loving You Again,” and “Kneel at the Fee of Jesus” seem too much for Willie’s style of guitar playing and singing.  Rather than take simple, spare music and dress it up as he does here, his next album Yesterday’s Wine would instead strip things back to simple, spare performances with greater success.  This plays well enough all the way through, and is better than some of Willie’s early Nashville albums, but it still pales in comparison to what was just around the corner from him.

Willie Nelson – City of New Orleans

City of New Orleans

Willie NelsonCity of New Orleans Columbia CK 39145 (1984)


This turd of an album went platinum, which is more an indication of Willie Nelson’s overall name recognition in 1984 than the quality of City of New Orleans in and of itself.  Willie is in easy listening mode, again.  Chips Moman produces, and he ruins yet another recording with oppressively sterile sound.  Listeners won’t doubt for even a second that this album was from the mid-80s.  In truth some of the performances — like the title track — aren’t bad.  But does anyone need to hear Willie do “Wind Beneath My Wings?”  Ever?

The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology

The Pervert's Guide to Ideology

The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2013)

Zeitgeist Films

Director: Sophie Fiennes

Main Cast: Slavoj Žižek


Making a film about philosophy is not an easy task.  The main problem being: how to keep the audience awake?  Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami has said that good films can put you to sleep.  But these sorts of films are not always widely appreciated, for very much that reason.

Enter Sophie Fiennes and Slavoj Žižek, with a documentary — the sequel to The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006) — that makes contemporary philosophy as entertaining and engaging as possible.  Some may say it is still not engaging enough.  But the intellectually curious should find a lot to wrestle with, and at least will walk away with a list of interesting movies from around the world that they have probably not yet seen.  Ultimately, the film paints a beautiful and horrifying picture of how movies stage our dreams, where desire arises, and how ideologies correlate those desires to objective circumstances to create meaning.

Desire comes from the symbol of the “Big Other”: a god, or, in this case, cinema.  It provides meaning to otherwise meaningless, solitary existence.  In Fiennes’ and Žižek’s earlier collaboration, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, Žižek said, “Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn’t give you what you desire – it tells you how to desire.” It would have been helpful to repeat that assertion here, to better explain the new film’s title.  Still, the underlying concepts of importance are revisited here.  A key one involves Žižek’s attempts to philosophically preserve free will, as a small but crucial factor set against a backdrop of philosophical concepts that increasingly explain relationships traced back to determined, objective conditions.

“[M]an is not simply a product of objective circumstances.  We all have this margin of freedom in deciding how we subjectivize these objective circumstances, which will of course determine us:  how we react to them by constructing our own universe.”

The way these objective circumstances are subjectivized is through ideology.

“Ideology is our spontaneous relationship to our social world – how we perceive each meaning and so on and so on.”

But every ideology has to “work as an empty container, open to all possible meanings.”  He illustrates with deft examples from Cabaret (1972) to The Fall of Berlin (1950) how different efforts to portray fascist or communist propaganda can utilize the exact same ideological frameworks, the same “empty container”.  This analysis of ideology can be applied to anything. To look outside this film, take “business management” gurus. They recommend, for instance, setting a big hairy audacious goal, but it should be attainable. This might help explain why business attracts (and selects for) unhealthy people. They seek simple pleasures from defined goals within the existing organization and obtain excess enjoyment from the social prestige and career advancement that comes with achieving those defined goals.

“How come it is easier for us to imagine the end of all life on earth — an asteroid hitting the planet — than a modest change in our economic order?”

He suggests not waiting for such a magical event to produce change from without, but rather,

“It depends on us, on our will.”

“We should draw a line of distinction, within the very field of our dreams, between those who are the right dreams — pointing towards a dimension effectively beyond our existing society and the wrong dreams, the dreams which are just an idealized, consumerist reflection, [a] mirror image of our society.  We are not simply submitted to our dreams – they just come from some unfathomable depths and we can’t do anything about it.  This is the basic lesson of psychoanalysis — and fiction cinema.  We are responsible for our dreams.  Our dreams stage our desires — and our desires are not objective facts.  We created them, we sustained them, we are responsible for them.”

He takes a complex view of desire.

“A desire is never simply the desire for certain thing. It’s always also a desire for desire itself. A desire to continue to desire. Perhaps the ultimate horror of a desire is to be fully filled-in, met, so that I desire no longer.”

There are different ways to control desire.  Žižek is quite explicit about the methods he favors.

“The conservative solution is we need more police.  We need courts, which pass severe judgments.  I think this solution is too simple.”

Taking a page straight from filmmaker John Waters (“I thank God I was raised Catholic, so sex will always be dirty.”), Žižek talks about how religion, using the example of catholicism, puts in place prohibitive injunctions with a hidden message to enjoy transgressing those limits.  This is too simple, though, because it takes away freedom, and responsibility.

“Freedom hurts.  The basic insight of psychoanalysis is to distinguish between enjoyment and simple pleasures.  They are not the same. Enjoyment is precisely enjoyment in disturbed pleasure — even enjoyment in pain.  And this excessive factor disturbs the apparently simple relationship between duty and pleasures.”

Rather than seek something superficial and take unhealthy enjoyment from an excess, Žižek suggests pursuing deeper desires that will likely not be fulfilled and accepting the superficial pleasure that arise along the way.  He cleverly illustrates this while eating a Kinder Egg chocolate candy, the chocolate covering a simple pleasure and the toy inside something further.

Once freedom of this degree is put on the table, Žižek is talking about revolutionary potentials.  These have been tried before, and have failed, but he sees them as still worth pursuing.  On failed revolutions, he diagnoses the problem:  “The dreams remained the old dreams; and they turned into the ultimate nightmare.”  All these examples, with movies, Kinder Egg candies, and so forth, provide easily grasped examples of where the breaking points are among the stuff of everyday life.

This is a well-made film.  Its subject is weighty, yet leavened with the constant references to film and pop culture.  Terry Eagleton, reviewing a pair of later Žižek’s books, wrote that “Academic philosophers can be obscure, whereas popularisers aim to be clear. With his urge to dismantle oppositions, Žižek has it both ways . . . .”  This is precisely the paradox that makes The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology such an interesting film.  We have discussions of philosophy that make substantive points worthy of both academic and unschooled audiences.  And along the way, viewers can enjoy the “simple pleasures” of seeing Žižek dressed up in a ridiculous Stalin costume, or sitting in a re-constructed set of the club from Kubrick‘s A Clockwork Orange (1971).  Viewers unfamiliar with anything Žižek has written or said before should still be able to grasp this film, with some mild effort.  It represents one of the most potent distillations of his philosophical worldview.

Bobby Womack – The Bravest Man in the Universe

The Bravest Man in the Universe

Bobby WomackThe Bravest Man in the Universe XL Recordings XLCD561 (2012)


What to make of Bobby Womack’s comeback album The Bravest Man in the Universe?  It’s really two albums in one.  There’s the focus-grouped, calculated part, with guest spots from the likes of flash-in-the-pan indie bimbo Lana Del Rey and overbearing electronic beats by Damon Albarn–oh there’s no chance whatsoever that you’ll think Womack can’t be set against “modern” electronics.  Then there’s the other part, with compelling, funny, charming, mature ruminations on religion, life and relationships, presented matter-of-factly, and as intimately as any Womack recording of old.  These disparate albums meet at times, but also seem to inhabit separate worlds at others.

Parts of the album are best viewed in context.  The electronic soul of The Bravest Man in the Universe seems most directly inspired by Gil Scott-Heron‘s surprise indie hit of 2010 I’m New Here.  That’s made clear on Heron’s fittingly hilarious appearance on “Stupid Introlude.”  But the specifics of the beats lie somewhere else, attired in calm orchestration and stately piano and bolstered by monotone newscaster-style spoken word bits, at times even coming across as reminiscent of the glitchy ambient electronics of David Sylvian from almost a decade ago.  When switching gears to more traditional gospel soul (“Deep River”), Womack reveals something akin to when Sly Stone seemed to drop the act and reveal the weary puppet-master on “Sylvester” from Ain’t But the One Way.

This was a modest hit.  The problem is that the electronics are too superficial for the music.  They are like the new, corporatized Time Square: flashy but fundamentally incapable of soulful resonance.  Womack’s voice powers through most of the time.  But, really, why should it have to?  Trimming a lot of that back, to just a few of the best of the dance-oriented cuts, and adding in a few more smoldering acoustic cuts that leave more space around Womack’s voice might have made this a bit more lasting.  As it stands, this suffers from the same faddish production choices that held our man back in the 1980s (The Poet).   Womack really needs a Rick Rubin, or maybe to pay more attention to how Jamie Lidell‘s career has evolved.

Ariel Pink – pom pom

pom pom

Ariel Pinkpom pom 4AD CAD 3440 (2014)


Ariel Pink’s pom pom, which is credited just to him without the “Haunted Graffiti” moniker, picks up pretty much where Mature Themes left off.  Take “Picture Me Gone,” which draws from a “Heroes and Villains”-like Beach Boys melody with 1970s-styled (Surf’s Up) Beach Boys keyboards.  “Jello-o” has little bits of glam rock guitar riffs, even a fake wash of arena crowd noise and applause.  But, of course, there are lots of reference points to 1980s U.S. culture, particularly child-like things, epitomized by probably the best song on the album, “Dinosaur Carebears,” which goes so far as to incorporate elements of circus calliope sounds with a reference to popular stuffed animal toys (and associated media empire).

Not everyone is completely on board with pom pom or anything else Ariel Pink has done.  Another reviewer wrote:

“I’m caught in the awkward position of having to simultaneously respect his goofy zeal and quirky taste in lo-fi texture and malign the unctuousness of his low-register Bowie vocal put-ons and his complete aversion to a perspective that isn’t totally nostalgic for the novelty value of the freakin’ 1980s. Enough with the ’80s, folks! They didn’t work the first time! Christ, at least with a Taylor Swift album you don’t have to invest so much brainspace wondering about irony!”

It is somewhat difficult to accept this position.  In longing for “upfront cynicism”, it seems precisely wrongheaded.  The goal of “not having to invest brainspace” seems like a cop out.  The demand for consciousness — that “awkward position” — is what Ariel Pink does so well.  Slavoj Žižek wrote (Absolute Recoil) that every revolutionary event forks into the truly revolutionary path that seems to exceed its causes (influences) and a path of conservative reaction to it that tries to preserve the old order, “Renormalising the breakthrough.”  The historical example Žižek gave in music (probably drawn from Theodor Adorno‘s Philosophie der neuen Musik [Philosophy of Modern Music]) was to contrast Arnold Schönberg — the revolutionary path — with Igor Stravinsky — the conservative reaction.  In pop music, Taylor Swift (1989) represents one of the conservative reactions to the revolutionary content of Ariel Pink’s music.  She hardly goes beyond a kind of Bryan Adams “Summer of ’69” nostalgia that is totally and completely sentimental, and rekindles old, pleasurable feelings to re-inflate the past on its original terms.  Pink mostly avoids sentimentality, though there seems to be more of it on pom pom than probably any of his earlier recordings.

What Ariel Pink does with his music is a lot like what has been termed “kynicism”:

“We must distinguish th[e] cynical position strictly from what [Peter] Sloterdijk calls kynicism. Kynicism represents the popular, plebeian rejection of the official culture by means of irony and sarcasm: the classical kynical procedure is to confront the pathetic phrases of the ruling official ideology — its solemn, grave tonality — with everyday banality and to hold them up to ridicule, thus exposing behind the sublime noblesse of the ideological phrases the egotistical interests, the violence, the brutal claims to power. This procedure, then, is more pragmatic than argumentative: it subverts the official proposition by confronting it with the situation of its enunciation; it proceeds ad hominem (for example when a politician preaches the duty of patriotic sacrifice, kynicism exposes the personal gain he is making from the sacrifice of others).

“Cynicism is the answer of the ruling culture to this kynical subversion: it recognizes, it takes into account, the particular interest behind the ideological universality, the distance between the ideological mask and the reality, but it still finds reasons to retain the mask. This cynicism is not a direct position of immorality, it is more like morality itself put in the service of immorality. . . .” (from The Sublime Object of Ideology)

This distinction might explain the monologue delivered by the late 1980s serial killer and junk bond broker character Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) in the film adaptation American Psycho (2000), based on the Bret Easton Ellis book, when he was pontificating about Huey Lewis & The News:

“Their early work was a little too new wave for my tastes, but when Sports came out in ’83, I think they really came into their own, commercially and artistically. The whole album has a clear, crisp sound, and a new sheen of consummate professionalism that really gives the songs a big boost. He’s been compared to Elvis Costello, but I think Huey has a far more bitter, cynical sense of humor.”

If we take Bale’s murderous Wall Street “psycho” character’s comments at face value, as we probably should, then the “cynical” aspects of Huey Lewis & The News’ music represents, not immoral values, but a kind of morality that happens to service the needs of a cartoonishly immoral status quo power structure, of which the monstrous Wall Street serial killer symbolizes.  Taylor Swift’s music kind of embodies the same sort of cynicism used to reaffirm today the ruthless, parasitic hedonism of “1989”.  Any cynicism found in the “retro” nostalgia of her 1989 album just reaffirms how little has actually changed since the year its title refers to.  Ariel Pink is a more humane reconfiguration of the elements that made up the 1980s.  His very reconfiguration of those elements illustrates the disturbing social contexts in which those elements arose, when the middle class began to be fooled by them.

Is what Ariel Pink does unprecedented?  Well, no.  At least not entirely.  Another reviewer wrote:

“I place Ariel Pink as the latest in a long pantheon of winkingly insincere popsmiths from Los Angeles.  Maybe it’s the proximity to all those actors, but LA has been ground zero for musical acts that combine an unwillingness to reveal anything personal and an emphasis on parodic humor. The tradition starts with Frank Zappa in the sixties, continues with Oingo Boingo in the eighties, Beck in the nineties, and we find ourselves here today with Ariel Pink and the impending release of “pom pom,” his third album for 4AD Records.”

This is a more interesting take on where Ariel Pink fits in the context of modern Western pop music.  Yet, it perhaps fails to give Pink credit for how he differs from some of those other acts.  If you look closely at Frank Zappa, for instance, he often mocked the counter-culture (We’re Only In It for the Money).  You can look at Zappa as either a straight-up conservative-libertarian subverter of the counter-culture, or else somebody within it arguing about tactical errors.  Sloterdijk appropriately called this kind of cynicism “enlightened false consciousness”.  That was still somewhat the case with Beck, who broke out of obscurity applying hip-hop to alternative rock at a time (just) before hip-hop became nearly synonymous with mainstream pop music.  Beck relied on the “weirdness” of his appropriations, which in turn depended upon them being outside of mainstream culture.  All those things are worthy in their own ways.  Yet they aren’t quite the same as what happens on pom pom.  Pink is taking up elements of the dominant culture of the past, stuff like The Bee Gees (once mature, but before disco) and AM Gold, and twisting it around.  He is reaching outside the counter-culture.  This is something altogether more daring.  Rather than creating or refashioning a culture that exists strictly separate from the province of dominant commercial media, while maintaining that separation, Pink is grabbing bits of its history and pushing them into a counter-cultural setting, across the gap between them.  Still, he’s straying less from the counter-culture than he used to, which for some will make pom pom more appealing, though at the same time that takes something away from the radical potential of his music.

A better historical comparison for Pink’s music is the French nouvelle vague film movement, which took elements of old Hollywood movies and refashioned them from a new perspective.  This carried through to Jean-Luc Godard‘s much-discussed, multi-part video project Histoire(s) du cinéma (1997-98), which has uncanny resemblances to at least some of what Ariel Pink does in music.  It took fragments of cinema history and warped, overlapped and modulated them to fit entirely new film essays.  As Colin MacCabe wrote in a biography of Godard, the “auteur theory” of the nouvelle vague cinema journal Cahiers du cinema was “the only theory of the author which is formulated from the point of view of the audience, and indeed explicitly formulated as a method to move from the position of the audience to that of the artist.”  As something like the “ultimate” connoisseur of pop of the recent past, much like Godard in cinema, Pink uses that knowledge to become a pop artist himself.  And just like some of the nouvelle vague filmmakers took Cinémathèque Française co-founder Henri Langlois‘ use of juxtaposition in film curation into the fabric of films themselves, Pink takes disparate forms of music (60s sunshine pop and 80s goth rock, for instance) and combines them to create meaning through juxtaposition.  Pink uses kynicism more than most of the original nouvelle vague directors though.

The closest musical comparisons would be the tropicálistas (for instance, Tom Zé’s “Parque industrial”) or Van Dyke ParksSong Cycle.  Those were brief moments in the late 1960s.  Is Pink like a second coming of the revolutionary fervor of the late 60s?  Perhaps.

Ariel Pink remains one of the more interesting musical acts of his day.  Rather than fall into the trap of “beautiful soul syndrome”, passively moralizing at a distance, he’s actively critiquing the influences he appropriates.  Take “Black Ballerina.” It’s a strange tale of desire, and being denied.  Pink is mocking the libidinal excesses of pathetic loser males.  Yet at the same time, he’s kind of mocking himself, because he wouldn’t really have a clue what he’s talking about unless he was kind of one of them too.  Aside from the specifics circumstances that song is about, it captures much of what Ariel Pink’s musical project as a whole conveys to its audience.  This is music that speaks of empowerment to actually share in the control of the meaning of dominant popular culture.  It uses the forms of old-ish popular music and allows audiences to enjoy the superficial pleasures of the sweet harmonies, lovely melodies, and all that, but at the same time it cuts apart and undermines those pleasures, suggesting an aim at a larger, deeper project.  It is that negation of its influences that makes this so very intriguing, by rendering problematic his influences and the desires they represent.

Why mine from 80s pop?  Well, Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello wrote a book called  Le Nouvel esprit du capitalisme (1999).  According to their thesis, “The ideal capitalist unit is portrayed as a self-organized team that has externalized its costs onto sub-contractors and deals more in knowledge and information than in manpower or technical experience. *** [However,] the freedoms of this new organization of labour come at the expense of the sense of security . . . .  *** Boltanski and Chiapello proceed to outline a model of the new moral framework of this emergent order, whose ideal figure is a nomadic ‘network-extender’, light and mobile, tolerant of difference and ambivalence, realistic about people’s desires, informal and friendly, with a less rigid relationship to property — for renting and not absolute ownership represents the future.”  Isn’t this the context for almost everything Ariel Pink does?  Rather than make “new” musical concepts he relies on others who have already done this.  And 80s pop music strikes the perfect balance between rejected, “valueless” raw material and something recent enough to find resonance in the minds of listeners.   The lack of security in contemporary capitalism is represented by the ways in which he picks up the trashy remnants of forgotten consumer culture, as if renting them, and applies his historical knowledge of them to create culture value through recombinations.  In this way Pink might almost be seen as a consummate capitalist.  And yet, that rather superficial view seems like entirely the wrong label for him.  It is more likely that he’s engaged in a dialog with capitalism, but his music goes in another direction, aware of capitalist strictures but mocking and undermining them as he goes in his banal application of its most widely used mechanisms — almost like the lulz of the hacker collective Anonymous.  While he has formally approached the techniques of modern capitalism, at the same time he violates the unwritten injunctions that sustain it.  The tacit exploitation and elitism is gone, in its place something that rather explicitly undermines itself at every turn, working with scraps of cultural legacies that are acknowledged as scraps, with a kynicist leveling effect that reveals the supposedly enlightened vision of contemporary capitalism as basically just as stupidly crass as the desires of a juvenile fuck-up like Pink.  He isn’t extending the “network” of 80s pop influence to reinforce what it stood for.  He is dry-humping it to death.

There are plenty of duds on pom pom, but Ariel Pink hits more than he misses.  His technical proficiency certainly keeps growing.  Here’s hoping this is just one more stop on a longer career of great music.

Willie Nelson – A Horse Called Music

A Horse Called Music

Willie NelsonA Horse Called Music Columbia CK 45046 (1989)


More pop than country, A Horse Called Music finds Mr. Willie Nelson mastering the synthetic sounds of 1980s pop.  That’s right.  This one is much more of a pop record than a country one.  There are strings and lush background vocals on much of it, returning to country briefly, such as for yet another rendition of his “Mr. Record Man” and the opener.  This thing fairly reeks of the 1980s, yet, the songs are by and large much better choices than on so many of his other albums of the era.  He’s also singing fairly well.  “Is The Better Part Over” was written five years earlier about Nelson’s third marriage to Connie, the wife his band liked best.  “Nothing I Can Do About It Now” was the hit, Nelson’s last really big one until a duet with Toby Keith more than a decade later, but it’s really one of the lesser cuts on the album.  The best stuff here is actually the orchestrated traditional pop.  It does bear mentioning that this has one of the most amazing album covers on any Willie Nelson album, and the title is quite funny too.