Willie Nelson – Songbird

Songbird

Willie NelsonSongbird Lost Highway B0006939-02 (2006)


The problem with Willie Nelson’s late career has been to find a convincing reason to bother recording yet another album.  He always had eclectic tastes and a fairly broad range to dabble with jazz, traditional pop, rock, and other little undercurrents in his music.  But he has already been there and done that.  Like the toils and troubles of Gene Hackman‘s character in Nicolas Roeg‘s Eureka (1983), who spent his life searching for a big gold strike and then hits it (right at the beginning of the film) only to struggle to find purpose for the rest of his life; it raises the question, “What next?”  Nelson has tried and succeeded in so many ways, there is a tendency to be lazy in the aftermath.  He has long had a lazy streak, which can be exacerbated by his new age fatalism — a sort of lopsided Zen practice that passively hopes for the best (with very much an emphasis on the “passively” part).  Much of his 1980s output smacked of pale attempts to recreate past successes, often with diminished enthusiasm.  It hasn’t helped that his enforced mantra of “positive thinking” largely stripped away one of his biggest talents: putting a good-natured, positive spin on hard, desolate music.  It’s that, plus a lot of Nelson’s increasingly half-hearted efforts in easy listening pap have tended to be quite commercially successful, providing all the wrong sorts of encouragements.

Songbird pairs Willie with Ryan Adams & The Cardinals.  Adams produces too.  This is something of an attempt to recreate the success of Teatro, by again pairing Nelson with a producer having solid rock credentials.  While there’s little doubt that Songbird tends toward pretty muted statements, it’s also a pleasant and consistent listen.  Adams keeps this fairly mellow and inoffensive, but his band The Cardinals succeeds in giving Willie accompaniment that is contemporary without feeling forced into some sort of faddish sound.  The title track is a Fleetwood Mac cover, and definitely the best offering here.  Willie doesn’t exactly turn in many committed performances, but even on autopilot his vocals suffice.  The closer “Amazing Grace” is a spooky, weird rendition, almost as unexpected as John Cale‘s deconstruction of “Heartbreak Hotel” on Slow Dazzle 30 years earlier.  Yet another cover of “Hallelujah” is filler here, but, if you must have filler, why not a classic Leonard Cohen tune?  While Songbird may not be Willie at his finest, and it may not always be exciting, it still works as sort of an inoffensive album of undemanding indie/alt country.

Erykah Badu – New Amerykah Part One (4th World War)

New Amerykah Part One (4th World War)

Erykah BaduNew Amerykah Part One (4th World War) Universal Motown B0010800-02 (2008)


I don’t listen to much R&B these days.  And why should I?  Most of it is that bad…you know, rank, superficial posturing on nothing more than ridiculous and unending “American/Pop Idol” melisma.  I won’t even get into the Amy Winehouse types.  It’s been years since anything close to as good as Voodoo, or even The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, has crossed my path.  This New Amerykah Part One (4th World War) is something though.  Erykah Badu has an unusual voice.  Her lyrical subject matter is, on the one hand, nothing new, but, on the other hand, there is nothing in her songs that is anything less than supremely relevant.  The music leans on hip hop and darker Seventies soul without sounding like it’s trying too hard to sound like either.  If you want soul/R&B that makes an effort to be meaningful, then you’ve come to the right spot.  She released a Part Two that felt considerably more limp and  less engaged.

Willie Nelson – American Classic

American Classic

Willie NelsonAmerican Classic Blue Note 67197 (2009)


These “standards” albums are so common, that you almost expect that mild-mannered jazz combos record piles of them just to leave “in the can,” waiting for celebrity vocalists to come along and drop in some singing on top.  Willie Nelson has done plenty of these before (Stardust, Healing Hands of Time, etc.), this one merely in the format of the revived Blue Note Records pop jazz aesthetic.  It’s stripped of any real charisma, ensuring that it’s a real snoozer.  Yet, this one’s professional through-and-through.  My mom would sure enjoy this, as she loves vapid, lowest common denominator, boring housewife sort of albums like this and Rod Stewart‘s It Had to Be You… The Great American Songbook.  But I’m selling this short!  It is also suited as background music for a genteel businessman’s cocktail lounge or a waiting room.

Willie Nelson – Countryman

Countryman

Willie NelsonCountryman Lost Highway B0004706-02 (2005)


Oh, Willie.  Countryman is his reggae album “10 years in the making” (says the album sleeve — in reality it must be that no one wanted to release it).  The one inspired choice is a cover of Johnny Cash‘s “I’m a Worried Man,” which Cash wrote about a man he encountered in Jamaica, sung here as a duet with Toots Hibbert of Toots & The Maytals.  Otherwise, this tiresome genre exercise has nothing to offer.  “Straight” country versions of reggae songs (like he does for “The Harder They Come” here) would have worked better than Willie singing against a reggae beat.  Still waiting on Willie’s hip-hop album.

Willie Nelson & Asleep at the Wheel – Willie and the Wheel

Willie and the Wheel

Willie Nelson & Asleep at the WheelWillie and the Wheel Bismeaux Records BR 1287 (2009)


Willie Nelson has always loved western swing.  Recent albums like You Don’t Know Me evidenced that fascination.  Teamed with Asleep at the Wheel, Willie and the Wheel is as self-consciously retro as it could be.  Every song reaches to reproduce the sound of a classic 1940s cut by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys.  This record is a ton of fun.  Yet, it also can’t get past its obligations to maintaining its “retro” sound.  So this glides by somewhat on the surface.  Willie has offered quite a lot of music at that level in his later years.  It’s almost a very good one, but lacks a little something hard to put a finger on.

Slavoj Žižek – Guardian Webchat

Link to an online webchat hosted by The Guardian newspaper with Slavoj Žižek:

“Slavoj Žižek webchat – as it happened”

Here’s a select quote:

“I think boredom is the beginning of every authentic act. *** Boredom opens up the space, for new engagements. Without boredom, no creativity. If you are not bored, you just stupidly enjoy the situation in which you are.”

Pescado Rabioso – Artaud

Artaud

Pescado RabiosoArtaud Talent SE-408 (1973)


A bit derivative of a lot of folk/rock of the day, like Richie Havens, Neil Young, Tim Buckley, Bread, America, Wishbone Ash, Roy Harper et al., but at its best Artaud offers a compelling distillation of lots of currents running through popular music at the time.  There is a searching quality here.  Argentina had struggled through power battles between military and civilian rulers.  As a peripheral economy, they made fitful efforts to industrialize.  Just the other side of the border in Chile, of course, 1973 saw the U.S.-sponsored coup against President Allende.  Turbulent times.  In them, Luis Alberto Spinetta and Pescado Rabioso (translation: Rabid Fish) attempted to forge an unique identity among the remnants and detritus of Western rock and folk.  They don’t completely break the mold.  They still do manage to forge something of their own.  Some of the most memorable moments (“Las habladurías del mundo,” “Bajan”) have more burning electric guitar solos than much folk of the day.  Spinetta’s guitar playing has hints of forward-looking modernity in its vaguely hippie rock foundations.  The tone of the album is a little darker than what would have been popular in much English-language singer-songwriter music at the time.  It also bears no resemblance to the bright and brash psychedelic and distinctily South American elements of Tropicália that evolved in nearby military-ruled Brazil in the previous few years.  Little touches, like the slightly bluesy and jazzy flair of “Cementerio club” and “Superchería” and the acoustic intimacy of “Por,” keep things interesting.  On the whole this is eclectic.  It’s no surprise then that it’s also a little uneven (the nine-minute-plus “Cantata de puentes amarillos” drags at times).  It’s a hell of a lot more satisfying than a lot of latter-day acts — almost forty years later — like Jack White that also take a highly derivative approach to songcraft, because when it hits this stuff seems honest and thoughtful rather than being just lazy approximations of what are thought to be successfully established formulas.

On Criticism (2)

Roland Barthes published Criticism and Truth [Critique et vérité] in 1966.  It is a short volume.  It is academic, but still very readable.  He advances a number of important insights, and anyone studying modern theories of criticism should consult it.

One important concept is “critical verisimilitude”.  Barthes adapts this from Plato‘s concept of verisimilitude, that is, the idea that audiences have limits on what they will accept as believable when interpreting an artistic work.  For Barthes, there are certain presuppositions of critical method that work in a similar fashion.  This is critical verisimilitude.  Certainly, Barthes was only articulating something that was already at least intuitively known about criticism.  Take something Amiri Baraka [formerly LeRoi Jones] said in a 1963 Down Beat article “Jazz and the White Critic” (reproduced in Baraka’s book Black Music):

“because the majority of jazz critics are white middle-brows, most jazz criticism tends to enforce white middle-brow standards of excellence as criteria for performance of a music that in its most profound manifestations is completely antithetical to such standards; in fact, quite often is in direct reaction against them.”

This is precisely what Barthes was concerned about with critical verisimilitude.  A counterexample might be found in Ayn Rand‘s The Fountainhead (1948), asserting that such things can “objectively” be defined apart from social context.  When critics insist that there be “clear writing and speech” they are really just reinforcing what is clear from the social position of the critic, which is always an arbitrary position.  From there, one can proceed to something like Pierre Bourdieu‘s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste [La distinction] (1979), which expands upon this point (a topic for another post).

Barthes makes plenty of other intriguing points too.  He lambasts purely “subjective” criticism that is more about the critic than the work analyzed:

“One usually understands by ‘subjective’ criticism a discourse left to the entire discretion of a subject, which takes no account at all of the object, and which one supposes (in order more effectively to attack it) to be nothing more than the anarchical and chattily long-winded expression of individual feelings.”

The importance of Barthes book is not only as one of the opening volleys in what would culminate in the May 1968 student uprisings, but that it opened up a debate over the question of who had the power to determine the meaning of an artistic work, and made important strides towards revealing possible critical biases tied to social standing.

Nico – Chelsea Girl

Chelsea Girl

NicoChelsea Girl Elektra V6-5032 (1967)


Nico’s Chelsea Girl is an overlooked classic. While certainly a product of the 60s folk movement, this album stands apart from the gritty yet welcoming humanity of the usual folk-rock. It instead cascades through personal trials of someone out of step with the multitudes. The album focuses on the wonder and feeling of experiencing a time without answers. What makes it so unique is the album’s ability to fit within a much larger scheme. Chelsea Girl plays its part magnificently.

A model in Europe, Nico (born Christa Päffgen) managed to get a part in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960). In the U.S., she studied at the Actor’s Studio as a classmate of Marilyn Monroe. Nico also fell in with the Andy Warhol Factory crowd. As a Warhol “superstar” she appeared in movies like The Chelsea Girls (1966) and **** (1967). Warhol was eager to promote Nico’s singing career by pushing her into a role with The Velvet Underground. Nico provided another sonic texture to the Velvets, who changed music forever with their new urban musical experiments. The interpersonal dissonance she created in the group only permitted a short stay.  The Velvets were not a backing band and Nico wanted to be a solo star–like Bob Dylan.

Chelsea Girl is a fantastic debut album, through the combined efforts of many. Nico sings “I’ll Keep It with Mine,” which Bob Dylan wrote for her (but first recorded by Judy Collins). Lou Reed, John Cale, and Sterling Morrison from the Velvet Underground provided five songs between them and perform on a number of the tracks.  Jackson Browne wrote three songs. Browne also plays guitar on the album, having played behind Nico at live shows (alternating with other guitarists like Tim Buckley, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and Tim Hardin).  Renowned producer Tom Wilson pulls the far-reaching aspirations of Chelsea Girl together. The soft strings and flute arranged by Larry Fallon add just enough sweet beauty to the songs. Wilson precisely matches every sound against Nico’s voice.  While Chelsea Girl‘s orchestral chamber folk tracks certain currents in the New York folk music scene at the time, there is an apolitical melancholy to it that other vaguely similar examples lack.

A voice takes this album to new places. Virgin ears, however, may take a moment to adjust. Nico sings with an icy drone that seems to pull all parts of the chromatic scale into just one tone. She is not only guileless, but she seems positively incapable of guile in her voice.  Her English isn’t clean, almost like a low Germanic rumble. The music is isolated. Often tragic, the album echoes a lasting wisdom in its bleak messages. The deepest beauty of the music is its cerebral, existential intrigue. Yet, the calm arrangements make the album still accessible. Chelsea Girl has the same peaceful acceptance of a tragic world found in John Coltrane’s last recordings from about the same time.

The title song flows with a cool but sweet melody, narrating a insider’s look into Warhol’s “Chelsea Girls.” “I’ll Keep It with Mine” has the atmospheric pop qualities you expect from a Dylan song, but seems even prettier after the title track. “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams” falls together perfectly as a metaphor for the entire album. It would never work without Nico’s emotional detachment though. The deep, unsentimental searching in her voice has never been duplicated.  Perhaps the most noted songs on the album are “The Fairest of the Seasons” and “These Days.” You actually have to appreciate the rarity of such pure statements. She may not have a dazzling range, to put it mildly, but Nico had a powerful ability to make moving music.

Chelsea Girl in a way expands on her very first recordings made with Brian Jones, Jimmy Page, and Andrew Loog Oldham.  This album did have a heavy influence by producer Tom Wilson and the rumor is that neither Nico nor the Velvet Underground crowd liked the results.  She certainly never made music even remotely similar again.  Her next few albums established Nico as a goth queen whose music bore more from 20th-century classical than any kind of rock and roll.  Only “It Was a Pleasure Then” hints at her later work, and even then only slightly.

While Nico never went beyond underground status as a singer, the present time would have been kinder to her. She did influence plenty of alt-folk like Tim Buckley and Nick Drake. Never truly understood on its own terms, but the success of latter-day alt-folk artists and the inclusion of some of her songs on The Royal Tenenbaums soundtrack show the world eventually readied itself for the sound of Chelsea Girl. Personal problems and drug additions aside, a model like Nico could have gone far in the realm of music videos as well. She was closely involved with many of the greatest artists of the last century, and her legacy certainly belongs with them.