Link to an article by Rob Urie:
“Wall Street and the Crisis in Greece: When Only Bad Choices Remain”
Bonus link: “Putin: U.S. Hegemony at Root of Ukraine Crisis”
Author: Syd Fablo
Carpenters – A Song for You
Carpenters – A Song for You A&M Records SP-3511 (1972)
The Carpenters have a reputation for being safe popular music. How wrong! Like F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s The Great Gatsby (1925) is so often described as telling the story of the empty heart of the jazz age, so the Carpenters made music that revealed dark and empty places inside a lifestyle with all the appearance of success. Loneliness, heartbreak, alienation are the hard core of that success. As another reviewer put it, “Not only does Karen Carpenter sing like a wounded angel through out, but their famously exquisite harmonies both purr and soar like you wouldn’t believe.”
A Song for You is considered by many fans to be the duo’s finest album. The first side is for Karen. Her voice is the centerpiece. This, however, is no surprise. Her voice was always the most brilliant feature of all the Carpenters’ hits. Side two, though, is for Richard. He was a talented arranger. Across the album, without being showy or gratuitous, he manages to work in a saxophone solo, a flute solo, an electric guitar solo, layers of acoustic piano and Wurlitzer electric piano, strings, and more. As to the “more,” his biggest stroke of genius is the use of an oboe and cor anglais. Playing sweet melodies, as on “Goodbye to Love,” the woody yet sour timbre of the instruments are the ideal expression of the emotional tone of numerous songs on the album. The instrumental “Flat Baroque” builds from (as the title implies) a baroque chamber pop song to include touches of light jazz. Later on, “Crystal Lullaby” has more Euro-classical orchestration. Then “Road Ode” displays a faculty for convincing contemporary, orchestrated pop jazz (like Antonio Carlos Jobim‘s Wave). “Top of the World” is country — this album version sounds more country than the single version. If there is a glaring flaw anywhere, it is the latin easy listening horn arrangements that arrive in jarring fashion in a few places.
Maybe it is because I was reading Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s St. Paul: A Screenplay, which somehow counseled listening to A Song For You, but there is a way to consider this as a “concept album” statement in atheism. This is especially pronounced when listening to “Goodbye to Love”. Intellectuals have adopted this idea that atheism takes on specific meaning when it comes from christian teachings — these people sometimes call themselves “christian atheists”. Martin Scorsese‘s film The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), based on Nikos Kazantzakis‘ book, ends with this sort of a view. Jesus, dying from crucifixion, asks, “Father, why have you forsaken me?” Then he dies, without being saved from death by a god that doesn’t exist, realizing — and teaching — that everyone must learn that no god will guarantee meaning to our lives and we are each alone with our own freedom. This is precisely what “Goodbye to Love” can be read as saying. “Love” is, of course, the foundation of christian faith and religion, a resolution for an abyss of unknowing. And A Song For You has references to christian themes in other songs like “Top of the World,” “Interlude” and “Bless the Beasts and Children.” So, it is fair to read this song as referencing christian values of love. The songs lyrics include: “No one ever cared if I should live or die . . . So I’ve made my mind up I must live my life alone . . . From this day love is forgotten, I’ll go on as best I can.” What is this, Samuel Beckett? There are traces of agnosticism in the lines, “What lies in the future is a mystery to us all / no one can predict the wheel of fortune as it falls / there may come a time when I will see that I’ve been wrong / but for now this is my song and it’s goodbye to love.” But, still, the core of the song deals with how to live without love, without resolution to the “years of useless search” to know what “god” wanted (or wants) from the protagonist. After all, the lyrics already suggest that “no one ever cared,” which must be treated as saying not even “god” cared. If this is the devastating, subjective destitution of “Goodbye to Love,” then it is important to look to the rest of the album to find out what use this atheistic freedom is put to use toward. I think it comes through on side two, and especially from the reprise of the title song concluding the album.
It is significant that “Goodbye to Love” is, aside from a brief half-joke hymn in “Intermission,” at the close of the first side of the album. It represents the final loss of faith that was tested and crumbling already. So, the song “Hurting Each Other” follows “Top of the World.” There is no doubt that “Top of the World” is about finding love. It is the most buoyant song on the entire album. But, it is immediately followed by “Hurting Each Other,” which is about a kind of broken relationship, going on while the couple wounds each other. Then “It’s Going to Take Some Time” implies a breakup, with questioning as to how amends could be made. By the time we reach “Goodbye to Love,” there is a crash, a shattering that plays out to take away the faith that was once present. Side two of the album is about a search for something to take the place of that absent faith. “I Won’t Last a Day Without You,” “Bless the Beasts and Children” and “Road Ode,” even “Piano Picker” too, are interesting in this respect. They sort of pull together aspects of things that were present before the crisis of faith, but gives them new significance in the absence of faith. “Piano Picker,” with Richard singing, may be the clumsiest of them, but the song deals with a re-framing of what was in his childhood and young adulthood considered a lack — not being a popular “jock” athlete but instead being alone practicing the piano — and reconstitutes it as a core of what makes the protagonist someone with something to objectively contribute to the world. “Bless the Beasts and Children” and “Crystal Lullaby” both kind of map out aspirations to care for future generations and animals, the most meek and vulnerable (classic themes from christianity).
“I Won’t Last a Day Without You” could be the most problematic song for my interpretation of the album. It follows the very atheistic theme that the scariest thing in the world is the otherness of strangers. But the refrain goes: “I can take all the madness the world has to give / but I won’t last a day without you.” From one angle, this has the trappings of a Jesus song. Yet, if we commit to my interpretation of the album as a whole, maybe the song can be read along those lines, as being about the sense of collective emancipatory potential in non-divine personal relationships. That is, the power of two is collectively greater than what the power of one, alone, can withstand. In a foreword to an edition of the Pasolini St. Paul screenplay, philosopher Alain Badiou notes:
“In our world, in fact, truth can only make its way by protecting itself from the corrupted outside, and establishing, within this protection, an iron discipline that enables it to ‘come out’, to turn actively towards the exterior, without fearing to lose itself in this. The whole problem is that this discipline . . . , although totally necessary, is also tendentially incompatible with the pureness of True. Rivalries, betrayals, struggles for power, routine, silent acceptance of the external corruption under the cover of practical ‘realism’: all this means that the spirit which created the Church no longer recognizes in it, or only with great difficulty, that in the name of which it was created.”
In the song, at least the line “when there’s no getting over that rainbow” might confirm that we are dealing with human social relations, and not divine interventions. Still, this can be viewed as forming relationships for protection, in pursuit of something greater. In the christian world this is the “holy spirit”. If the album makes this point somewhat inconsistently, then it may be the expression of just what Badiou sees as the inconsistency in Pasolini’s St. Paul.
All of this comes full circle at the close, reprising Leon Russell‘s “A Song for You.” A song reprise or prelude can often be a lazy attempt to extend the appeal of a single song through rote duplication. But here, the closing “A Song for You (Reprise)” is more than that. It opens with Karen’s voice, eerie, echoed and only faintly audible — it almost requires turning the volume up to even hear it at all. It soon enough swells to the familiar song that opens the album. Yet the context is now entirely different. After all these songs about crushing pain, heartbreak and loneliness there is still room to return to “singing a song for you.” Significantly, the reprise omits the first part of the song lyrics that first speak of having “ten thousand people watching” but turning away toward a situation in which “we’re alone now.” It instead goes straight to the end of the song, dealing with “when my life is over remember when we were together / we were alone and I was singing this song for you.” Only here, at the end of the album, can the meaning of the opening song be grasped. It was only after the loss of faith, and the recognition that there is no external force to supply meaning, can the protagonist find meaning in being with others and singing. By doing this in a way that returns to the opening song, a cycle is explicitly created. We return to where we began, but with new understanding after the exhaustion and failures contained within the cycle. So even though the album opens dealing with personal relationships, and ends dealing with personal relationships, it goes from being about false, empty relationships to at least understanding better what makes for meaningful, real ones. It allows, at the core, for a process of recognizing a lack of (meaningful, real) relationships, and sets out to try to provide them, if only symbolically.
Didn’t think there was so much to find in a Carpenters album, a group often dismissed as saccharine, safe and boring? In a way, this is revolutionary music. There is definitely more to the brother-sister duo than appears upon a quick glance at their publicity photos that always assure the viewer of their protestant modesty. Look at the liner sleeve that accompanied the original album pressing, printed on “100% recycled paper” as “an anti-pollutionary measure” and replete with slightly ironic cartoon illustrations paired with some of the song lyrics. The real-life Carpenters didn’t manage to hold out the way this album suggests (it is play acting, as the line about going off to the bathroom in “Interlude” establishes). But, indie-rock band Sonic Youth‘s bassist Kim Gordon — an unabashed Carpenters fan — wrote a posthumous open letter to Karen Carpenter re-printed in Sonic Youth etc.: Sensational Fix (2009). She asked, “Who is Karen Carpenter, really, besides the sad girl with the extraordinarily beautiful, soulful voice?” Karen famously died from complications of an eating disorder. Richard had drug problems. Much like Elvis, the Carpenters were crushed under a weighty touring schedule. And just like Pasolini’s view of St. Paul forming the christian church, touring robbed the Carpenters of the music that was their truth and purpose to begin with. But, as listeners, we should not overlook what was there at the start, the kernel of emancipatory potential wrapped in the clothes of the most claustrophobic, conformist MOR pop music of the early 1970s. If this music can appeal to listeners who want sentimental music while at the same time have substantial value under a totally unsentimental interpretation, then A Song for You does transgresses boundaries in a radical way.
David Bowie – ‘Hours…’
David Bowie – ‘Hours…’ Virgin CDV 2900 (1999)
Bowie’s career doggedly refuses to drift into total irrelevance. ‘Hours…’, like so many other later efforts, features one pretty good song — “The Pretty Things Are Going to Hell” — amidst a lot of not bad but definitely boring, pro forma contemporary rock. This is certainly a lot more consistent than Earthling, but that previous record came up with more than one pretty good song (even if those were balanced with some cringe-inducing moments). Now Bowie had largely dropped the electronic industrial sound (except, ironically for the best song here, “The Pretty Things Are Going to Hell”). His next effort, Heathen would improve on this album, again with one really good song (“Sunday”) but with filler that was much better and less boring.
David Bowie – Low
David Bowie – Low RCA Victor PL 12030 (1977)
CAN’s Tago Mago — half full-bore rock half ambient soundscapes — sketches the outlines of Low but this album sounds like no other. It represents is the beginning of Bowie’s “Berlin” period, the creative peak of his long and distinguished career. He made this album as a work of art. It is invigorating to hear someone not content to merely accept the confines of tradition, but try to work out new expression.
Even with its experimentation and avant-gardism, Low is always a pop record. David Bowie always had a flair for the dramatic. Here, his bold use of space and inverted compositions are a different kind of showiness. Bowie’s audacious attitude has purpose. He crafts Low like an artist burning inside.
Brian Eno is a major contributor to Low. He is the perfect foil for Bowie, and side two wouldn’t be the same without Eno’s presence. Even Iggy Pop appears for some backing vocals. Bowie was a major force in Iggy’s solo breakout The Idiot where he began honing the techniques employed here.
While there are some singles that came off the album, the full impact of Low comes on slowly. Deeply textured sounds present themselves with time. Bowie presents himself as an observer but one who’s objectivity has dissolved. His style is reflective of personal discovery. He becomes a part of his songs, and seemingly a part of a barren landscape.
“Be My Wife” is a dense number with pounding lines from the piano, electric washes of guitar and electronically process drum beats. There are few lyrics. An older Bowie comes to accept what he probably has known all along. The music lilts with his carefree pining but swells in gripping climaxes. The rhythm hesitates for each word. The jarring dynamics play into the compositions. They highlight but also mislead. There is simply too much to take in at once, so each time you listen there is another way to hear the songs.
Funky plastic soul (Neu!-beat really) from side one gives way to bleak anti-rock sound collages of side two. “Warszawa” is the centerpiece of the second side. Stark harmonies and unconventional melodies cast a sorrowful shadow on post WWII Europe. Bowie sings a few sounds, then stops as if he can’t go any further. It gets pretty intense. The music is still enjoyable, despite the grim realities lurking around every corner. Europe, of course, has a deeper connection to Euro-classical than anywhere else. Rock and roll is foreign. It makes sense than rock musicians in (of from) Europe have pulled the two together most spectacularly.
Bowie has been called a Warholian manipulator of surfaces. There is some truth to that, but Low could crush you under its weight. On a very basic level, Low maintains the essence of Bowie’s work in adapting broad concepts into his new music. His compositions use chunks much bigger than individual “notes.” Low, through Bowie’s own grammar, painted the perfect picture of a divided Europe. His determination is like a snowplow on some isolated mountain road. There is the risk of becoming stranded in unfamiliar territory but a greater purpose drives him forward. He has purpose, which makes his efforts so enduring.
Low is not just entertaining, it tells us something pure and unassailable about the bleak world from which it came — it evolved from Bowie’s role playing an alien who comes to Earth to save his home planet but gets lost in aimless hedonism in the Nicolas Roeg film The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976). Low is about a change of direction. That change isn’t inherently for the better. Still, the album is the very embodiment of artistic renewal, and so it is both enlightening and inspiring.
David Bowie – EART HL I NG
David Bowie – EART HL I NG Arista 7432143077 2 (1997)
I’ve gone through many phases with this album, Earthling. I rather liked it at first, but then later on it felt dated and I couldn’t stand it. Giving it another go during a period of revisiting some Bowie recordings, it seems like one of his better late-career efforts. It’s clear he’s trying, though sometimes he’s trying too hard to seem “with it”. He jumped aboard the electronica bandwagon, deploying industrial drum ‘n bass, or whatever they were calling the microgenre that month. The whole affair seems a bit uneven, and it’s hard to do anything with “The Last Thing You Should Do” and “Law (Earthlings on Fire)” but cringe. Yet there are a fair number of high points, the highest being “I’m Afraid of Americans,” a song that can rub shoulders with any of Bowie’s best songs from any era. Sure, I was probably right when I though this would sound a little dated, but Bowie seems to be legitimately enjoying making this music most of the time (even if “Looking for Satellites,” “Dead Man Walking” and “Seven Years in Tibet” reveal him to be getting lyrical inspiration from watching movies and satellite TV). It shows most in his vocals, which have both an energy and nuance that he hadn’t mustered in while. One last note: isn’t it odd that Bowie’s better work has come during the periods when he’s been married?
David Bowie – The Buddha of Suburbia
David Bowie – The Buddha of Suburbia Virgin 7243 8 40988 2 7 (1993)
Uneven and ultimately not very satisfying. Part adult contemporary dad-rock, part down-tempo electronic, and part jazzy new age, Bowie isn’t taking many chances. This soundtrack album has a few charms (a high level of craftsmanship in the production helps), and glides by amicably enough. But hindsight makes this seem dated.
David Bowie – The Man Who $old the World
David Bowie – The Man Who $old the World Mercury SR 61325 (1970)
Bowie is still searching for his own sound, and he tries out a wide array of styles here. He still has one foot in Donovan-like folk sounds (“All the Madmen,” “After All”). But he also makes forays into Led Zeppelin style hard rock with a blues twinge (“Black Country Rock,” “She Shook Me Cold”). There are even hints that Bowie could pull off rock opera like he did on Ziggy Stardust (“Running Gun Blues,” “Saviour Machine”). But what makes this album notable is that it marks the arrival of Mick Ronson on guitar, who would prove the key to Bowie making it big. Ronson fuels the proto-glam musings of “The Width of a Circle” and the title track with panache. What separates this from most of what came later is that later on Bowie’s best individual songs had an almost hermetic perfection, with everything so finely tuned that not a single note sounds out of place. Here things are pretty loose and jammy even. If the songwriting wasn’t so tentative and uneven this could have really been something. As it stands, it’s a decent but somewhat undeveloped affair. Bowie fans will appreciate this most for what it does and doesn’t reveal about what came next. This still may be the darkest record in his catalog. Those unfamiliar with Bowie should start elsewhere.
Johann Hari – The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered
Link to an article by Johann Hari:
“The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is Not What You Think”
The Fall – Hex Enduction Hour
The Fall – Hex Enduction Hour Kamera KAM 005 (1982)
If there is one Fall album that rises above a number of other really great ones, it is Hex Enduction Hour. This came somewhat at the tail end of the early period, when they were still abrasive as hell. The sound draws heavily from Jamaican deejay music, like Big Youth‘s Natty Cultural Dread, of all things. There is a relentless throbbing bass line, and steady drums. Mark E. Smith doesn’t exactly sing on top. It’s more of a sustained, shouting rant. Structurally, this is a lot like what the Jamaican deejays did with dub tracks. But the similarities are mostly structural. Craig Scanlon‘s guitar is something else entirely. It breaks in with a cutting, shattering, noisy sound. The rather primitive synthesizers do the same. The band mostly just jabs at the keyboard with blocks of dissonant sounds. Everything vamps over and again, with little melody. This draws some further influence from krautrock bands like CAN.
“The Classical” opens the album on a high note. It is one of The Fall’s most memorable songs. It is a rant that just gets angrier and crazier. The instrument that gets the most space to roam is the drum kit — something that seems to anticipate the “math rock” genre. But the nearly eight minute “Hip Priest” matches the opener, with a slow bass line and faint tapping from the drums, M.E.S. drawls on and on sarcastically about a vaguely angry unappreciated loner (with allusions to rock critics). It is one of the most well-known Fall songs thanks to its use later on in a popular thriller/horror movie. “Fortress/Deer Park” settles into a great groove. There are two pulsing chords played on the keyboard that just see-saw back and forth. Even though they are just two chords, there is a forward movement implied in the rhythm simply by holding each chord for different lengths of time. The groove keeps rolling on the two parts of “Winter.” Songs like “Just Step S’ways” and “Jawbone and the Air-Rifle” are catchy too. Some of the only clear melodic statements on the entire album are found in the single-note keyboarding bridging the two parts of “Winter” and the repeating guitar line of “Just Step S’ways.”
This is music that is intelligent without ever adopting the voice of the powerful. In other words, this is music that comes from the proletariat, freed from the sorts of things (education, religion, etc.) that bind people to the hierarchies of power. It comes from the bottom. Just like the band’s debut album Live at the Witch Trials, the title Hex Enduction Hour implies a kind of revolt coming from outcasts and the persecuted minority. That point is driven home on the songs “Mere Pseud Mag. Ed.” and “Hip Priest” that rail against music journalists that hold sway over a working rock band. This is kind of an anarchic impulse. That Fall pull it off better than most of the bands of the day that were more explicitly “anarcho-punk” in political orientation. The rhythmic consensus on a Fall record makes the music more organized than the freewheeling mess that so many anarcho-punk recordings seem to devolve into.
What made The Fall so great, and this album in particular, is that it takes what seems like a rather simple formula and proves it to be much more flexible, nuanced and enduring than anyone would have guessed. It is a testament to concept having a greater role than complexity of execution. They find ways to adopt catchy riffs and beats though the most rudimentary means, while contrasting those elements with a tremendous effort put towards the sorts of things that many other rock groups would have excised. There is room here for stranger, less controlled expression. In many ways the crushing rhythms and occasional melodies set up the wacky bursts and plunks of keyboard noise and the scratchy, distorted guitar chords. Sometimes it fails. “Who Makes the Nazis?” has an interesting lyrical premise, extending the concept of “the banality of evil,” but the song falters due to a most tedious bass line that repeats across the entire song. But mostly, it succeeds.
In a lot of ways, The Fall represented a lot of the best of what the punk movement put forward. This is inclusive music, drawing from all over the place. Yet it also put forward its own standards and eschewed what was considered proper. There was no “professionalism” here. But there is cleverness, and there is heart. This music rallies its supporters. It finds the people who were meant to hear it. Hex Enduction Hour belongs on the short list of 1980s rock achievements.
The Fall – Bend Sinister
The Fall – Bend Sinister Beggars Banquet BEGA75 (1986)
Somewhat lesser than its predecessor This Nat-ion’s Saving Grace, due to a lack of consistency, Band Sinister finds a bit more of the vamp-driven music of the pre-Brix period reasserting itself. The poppier style of recent years is still intact though. “Mr. Pharmacists” is a great straight rock tune with a hint of rockabilly. “Shoulder Pads #2” has a killer beat. This isn’t a Fall album I reach for often, but there are a few great individual tunes here.