Cultural Detritus, Reviews, and Commentary
Link to an article on the substitution of prisons for social welfare programs in the USA by Loïc Wacquant, author of Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (2009), which came out around the same time as Michelle Alexander’s similar (but more well-known) The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010).
“Crafting the Neoliberal State: Workfare, Prisonfare, and Social Insecurity”
Various Artists – The Golden Age of Movie Musicals: The MGM Years MGM P6S 5878 (1973)
While showtunes and soundtrack music might not be things that I personally enjoy all that much, you can’t go wrong with this set if you want an introduction to those genres. I really respect what was done here. From a historical perspective this collection of recordings is amazing. It features some of the most well-known music of the 20th Century. People who wouldn’t consider themselves music listeners in the slightest probably still know the melody to “Over the Rainbow” and “Singin’ in the Rain”, or could recognize “Theme from ‘A Summer Place'”. The common denominator of this music is its simplicity. In terms of rhythm, nothing here is beyond a remedial level. The melodies are all straightforward and uncomplicated. The vocals often lack much subtlety, but instead focus on brute force vibrato. The instrumental film music on the final two “bonus” discs deals only in broad strokes, with lots of syrupy string arrangements and melodramatic surges. Despite the enormous popular recognition of this music, it would seem that already most of it is nothing more than a historical oddity. The theatrical and vaudevillian aspects of this stuff — cartoonish, larger-than-life emoting that doesn’t leave any room for a reaction other than the one intended — isn’t all that common outside of Bollywood just a few decades on. It’s a wonder how tastes change so fast. I guess that Bollywood comment might make for an interesting comparison: is this music something that is borne out of socioeconomic conditions to fill a gap between the general public’s cultural sophistication and its more rapidly rising disposable income? At its worst, that is probably exactly what it does. But here we get some of the best and brightest moments, where there’s something more at work. “Over the Rainbow” and “Singin’ in the Rain” are so well known because they simply are great songs. And there are plenty more great songs here. There was also a book of the same name by Lawrence B. Thomas released just before this LP box set, which might be of interest. There are no liner notes to speak of with this set, so perhaps the book has more information about the music (I haven’t read it).
Tom Waits – Rain Dogs Island ILPS 9803 (1985)
Easily Tom Waits’ greatest achievement. It’s a ramshackle wreck of a thing, and no two songs are great for quite the same reasons. This one will stay with you for a lifetime.
Waits met his wife Kathleen Brennan while working on the film One From the Heart (1982). He relocated to New York City from Los Angeles. This album succeeds in part by jettisoning the last vestiges of his LA sound and fully embracing the freaks, the losers, the rabble — what Barney Hoskyns called a focus on “the urban dispossessed,” inspired by Waits’ recent contribution of music to the documentary Streetwise (1984) about homeless kids in Seattle.
Brennan introduced Waits to the work of composer Harry Partch, known for inventing his own instruments and referencing the lifestyle and language of hobos. Wait uses all kinds of junkyard percussion and sounds made without musical instruments as such, with a percussion-heavy emphasis on idiosyncratic rhythms. Partch looms large, and is frequently mentioned as an influence. This is apparent straight from the opener “Singapore” and then doubly so on the next track “Clap Hands.”
Another influence, or at least close comparison, is Lotte Lenya singt Kurt Weill (1955). A gem of a post-WWII look back at the Weimar-era theater songs of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. These were songs from a time of vibrancy, desperation, and possibility, of contradiction and grand change. The songs reflect those circumstances. And Leyna’s 1955 recordings capture the shambolic yet determined and cutting theatrical sensibility that made this music so iconic and emblematic of those times. Here, on songs like “Tango Till They’re Sore” and “Anywhere I Lay My Head,” the piano and horns tap some of the same slightly seedy and bawdy cabaret energy. Marc Ribot‘s flamboyant guitar continues that effect across much of the rest of the album. Waits, who also developed an acting career, always had a flair for theatricality. Rain Dogs turns those impulses toward something shorn of campiness, more gritty, knowing, and subversive.
But this was also the mid-1980s, the era of big pop tunes. And this album has those too. Kathleen Brennan features large here, co-writing “Hang Down You Head” (released as a single) and exerting influence in that direction. There are quite a number of melodic pop tunes here, including the ballad “Time” and “Downtown Train,” the latter being covered extensively. These more pure conventional pop expressions manage to sit comfortably among the more experimental offerings.
And there is more. “Blind Love,” with guitar from both Keith Richards and Robert Quine, is an achingly sad/sweet country-twinged song replete with a fiddle. And there are plenty of tunes like “Big Black Mariah” and “Union Square” that lean on bluesy rock with Waits’ voice barreling forward at its gruffest, not far from Captain Beefheart. These elements of American weave throughout the album.
Not yet has been said yet about Waits’ own performances. His voice is gravelly here. Yet it still draws, subtly, from his early career trying to make a name for himself as a California soft rock singer trading on sentimental emoting, and his ability to cover a wide range of material and deftly push a song into new areas owes to his time singing barroom jazz, and his ability to deliver, with clever and precise phrasing, a memorable mood or sentiment, like on “Walking Spanish” or “9th & Hennepin,” is a more subdued and, at times, unique and personal form of the kind of beatnik monologues he traded in more crudely in the 70s. So, yes, Waits’ vocals help make this album what it is. But, to his credit, this album comes off as a collective effort built on more than just his own presence. Of course, what that makes that possible is the songwriting.
One thing that still impresses about this album decades later is how consistently good the songs are. There are some great songs here. They are full of menace and beauty, characters drifting on the fringes of society, like from a Genet novel, and the eclectic bohemianism of hanging out with the legendary denizens of the storied Chelsea Hotel of the day. And yet these songs are understated, without ever feeling forced or contorted. Perhaps just as important as there being great songs, there is not a bum track to be found.
This remains an essential statement from the 80s, one of those classics that is woven through with signs of the times yet also pointing back to deeper history and standing firmly in its own category.
Public Image Ltd. – The Flowers of Romance Virgin V 2189 (1981)
Wife: “This music is upsetting to me.”
Drunk History Comedy Central (2013- )
There is a silly television show called “Drunk History” on a cable network in which comedians consume alcohol to the point of drunkenness and then re-tell the story of some historical incident or personality. Well-known actors reenact the story and lip-sync to the narration of the drunken storyteller, with absolutely meticulous fidelity to the words of the storyteller, belches and all. There is a hidden secret as to what makes the premise of the show intriguing. The reenactments are not faithful to “historical fact”. Instead, they are faithful to the inebriated ramblings of the storyteller. The historical accounts are like myths. The drunk storytellers clearly have some sort of script in hand, and have done some amount of research beforehand. But they act (or maybe really are) too drunk to tell the story in an articulate and nuanced manner. So the show dramatizes the myth in a way that makes the act of mythologization evident–that’s the funny part. This is like the famous line from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” It also makes the show a “pragmatic reflective history,” according the G.W.F. Hegel in Reason in History (1837), because it “nullifies the past and makes the event present.”
Many organizations stress the supposed importance of reducing or eliminating entirely the “appearance of impropriety”. These policies should be viewed for what they really are: attempts to reduce transparency, encourage misinformation, and concentrate power. Shouldn’t the real goal be to reduce or eliminate actual impropriety? And should an organization that is engaged in actual impropriety not visibly reflect that actual impropriety to the public? This latter question gets to the heart of the matter. These “appearance of impropriety” policies are all about manipulating public confidences to maintain power within a small group, to the exclusion of others. Organizational leaders attempt to control the flow of information. They only reveal to the outside world selected facts. Any that tend to portray the organization as corrupt, inept, malicious, etc. are suppressed, as best as possible. The public is thereby cajoled and misled to form an opinion of the organization, and of individuals within it, that is not based on all available facts, but rather only those that portray the organization in a positive light. This ideological “filtering” is a form of coercion, albeit one that does not rely directly on the use of physical force. Robert Lee Hale noted this long ago. For that matter, so did Leo Tolstoy in The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894). They argued against a very old concept though. Plato’s endorsement in The Republic (380 BC) of a “noble lie” used by elites to maintain social harmony within a system of their design is one of the earliest recorded examples. The question of the “appearance of impropriety” comes up extensively when dealing with the lawyers and the judiciary (see the Judge Kopf affair), but also with other governmental branches, businesses, churches, journalistic publications, or any other organization. These sorts of policies, at worst, protect the social status of the relevant organization–especially the leaders of those organizations–while suppressing actual impropriety involving particular individuals. Quite hypocritically, many calls for reducing of the appearance of impropriety simultaneously call for increased transparency, without noting that these are contradictory objectives in the end, when viewed from the standpoint of public welfare rather than from a self-interested viewpoint of the organization (and its leaders) involved. With these ideas in mind, it is actually quite brazen that organizations publish any guidelines seeking to limit the “appearance of impropriety”. Such rules speak in condescending, anti-democratic tones. They imply that the public cannot properly assess facts. Nonsense.
Link to an article by William Blum that puts the recently reported influx of Latin American immigrants to the USA in context:
David Ruffin – My Whole World Ended Motown MS685 (1969)
Take a hundred albums at random, no ten thousand, and chances are you won’t end up with even one with the depth and sweetness of My Whole World Ended. It’s hard to go wrong with Motown’s golden age soul, which practically offers a guarantee of one or two classics somewhere on a full-length LP. But it was rare before the 1970s for Motown to produce an album that felt like a classic as a whole. To that short list add David Ruffin’s solo debut.
Ruffin was a singer gifted with a one-of-a-kind voice, but he was also someone who paid his dues and put in the work to learn what it takes to be a soul singer. Through his teens, he was touring in gospel shows and had first-hand experience with just about all the biggest acts on the gospel highway, Mahalia Jackson, The Blind Boys of Alabama, The Swan Silvertones, you name it. He was even in The Soul Stirrers briefly. A gospel background was the secret weapon of many great soul singers, and Ruffin had that pedigree too.
Of course, the reason most people know Ruffin is as one of the lead singers of The Temptations. He might be the only lead singer they recognize, from his lead on one of the most instantly recognizable pop songs ever recorded, “My Girl.” Fans might also know his lead on other greats like “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” too. A few other things might come to mind if you know anything beyond Ruffin’s music. He developed a reputation as a prima donna. He wanted The Temptations to rename themselves “David Ruffin & The Temptations.” Through the years he developed a massive cocaine habit as well.
After finally exiting The Temptations, Motown gave Ruffin every opportunity for his solo debut. He got the best songs, the best producers, and of course probably the best studio band around, The Funk Brothers. This album came out of the Hitsville, U.S.A. assembly line. It bears all the hallmarks of the classic Motown sound, with throbbing bass from James Jamerson punctuated with horns, strings, woodwinds, and backing vocals. With the handful of producers on board this never settles into any sort of rut, but these musicians worked together so much that there is still a cohesion. The best part is that almost nothing repeats. These songs grow and evolve. They don’t just extrapolate a simple riff. The embellishments vary too. One moment it’s horns, the next strings, the next some vocals, then a harpsichord, elsewhere a flute, and a few time some hints of bells are draped over the top. A light touch keeps the arrangements from crowding out Ruffin’s vocals, and, as one of the supreme achievements, the orchestration fits the core electric soul instrumentation like a glove. Take the backing vocals too. They don’t resemble what The Temptations did. These have no doo-wop roots. They come across casually. It’s like some friends wandered along and just couldn’t help but sing along. But they keep their voices down, to be polite and supportive.
These songs all have a dark side. Just look through the words in the song titles: worlds are ending, everything is lost, there’s a double-cross, there’s darkness, dreams have been stolen, and this guy’s baby is gone. When you then read a title like “Message from Maria,” could it possibly be a hopeful message? Not in the bleak universe Ruffin crafted.
All this discussion hasn’t even touched on the magnificent vocal performances yet. David Ruffin has a voice that almost any soul singer would die for. There is a grit and coarseness in it that makes every note seem like a bitter and tragic struggle. And that’s every note. When bolstered by the sweet, sumptuous music, Ruffin’s voice conveys a great tragic sense of loss. But not an everyday loss. This is world-crushing loss. It cuts, like a deep wound that might never heal.
“My Whole World Ended (The Moment You Left Me)” opens the album. The first things heard are woodwinds and strings with heavy maracas. Only after a few moments is a syncopated beat introduced. When Ruffin enters, he’s humming. By the time he’s singing, “Last week my life had meaning…,” there is no question that the star of this album has arrived. Some of the lyrics rhyme, but only a few. They are about holding on to find a new world, now that the old is gone. But it almost doesn’t matter what the words are. Ruffin’s voice has all the ache and sadness needed. His voice alone conveys the heartbreak. This is a song perfectly suited to his style of singing. He’s always shifting, singing with a bit of a smooth crooner’s style but marked with gravelly texture, and broken up with melismata and added phrases (“aww, tell me baby,” “oh yes it did, baby, baby”). He’s cataloging ways to cope with loss. This is a song that can make an album. It’s a song that, in the right setting, could just play again and again on repeat and no amount of repetition would ever be enough. Yeah, it’s that good.
“Everlasting Love” has been sung by many others. When Ruffin does it here he seems adrift. He’s mining all the drama in the song. The confines of the rhythm aren’t enough to hold him. He even screams. It seems like a love song, but it’s also a plea, built from regret, longing and loneliness.
So much bleakness and uncertainty…it’s only a few hard-fought personal connections that seem tangible on My Whole World Ended and in that this feels like a grounded sort of music. There isn’t the mysticism of Van Morrison‘s Astral Weeks, but this one feels like a more pubic version of the same searching, longing and obsession that fuelled Morrison’s classic. Ruffin is posed on the album cover almost like Rodin’s “The Thinker,” and (apart from the corny globe in the background) he’s making a thinking person’s album.
There are a lot more great songs here, “I’ve Lost Everything I’ve Ever Loved,” “My Love Is Growing Stronger,” and “The Double Cross.” These tunes run a gamut from slow ballads (“Somebody Stole My Dream,” “Message from Maria”) to mid-tempo, funky rockers (“Pieces of a Man,” “Flower Child”) and even a roiling, off-kilter rocker (“World of Darkness”). My Whole World Ended is just one of those albums that is worth it. It was a hit in its day but for some reason tends to be left off the list of essential soul classics. Rescue it, if only for yourself.
Lou Reed – The Blue Mask RCA Victor AFL1-4221 (1982)
Well, Lou Reed’s career has covered as much territory as anyone else’s in rock. The Blue Mask renewed his critical cachet in the early 1980s. Frankly, it is executed flawlessly. Robert Quine adds some scorching guitar to bolster Reed’s occasionally humdrum fretwork. Let’s face it, Reed was always a risk taker on guitar, but he was hardly ever more proficient than a thoroughly average rhythm guitarist, sort of rock’s equivalent to baseball’s utility infielder. But Quine was willing and able to deliver plenty of explosive guitar excursions, as best summed up by the unrelenting, jaw-dropping abstraction of his solo that concludes “Waves of Fear”.
So if there are complaints to be heard bout The Blue Mask, they have to be about the concept. And what of the concept? Basically Reed takes up the challenge he more tentatively presented on earlier works of making a middle-aged rock album. Conventional wisdom is that rock and roll is a young person’s game. The Rolling Stones touched on the issue with Jagger’s “It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll,” which reviewer BradL describes as “a song about the relationship between the musician and his audience, and the inevitable gap that arises as he gets older and his audience stays young[.]” Well, truthfully, that’s just one possibility. The “other path” is for the aging rocker to change, and essentially leave behind “rock” per se in favor of more of a sophisticated pop sound, to wit Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds and others. But Reed’s version of middle-aged rock will have nothing of the latter. This is rock. His lyrics are about domestic life and ordinary concerns of life in Western Civilization. But those lyrics are as much about contentment as fear, uncertainty, and disturbing undercurrents running through everything else.
Lou Reed is certainly writing about what he knows. The casual autobiographical style of so much of this album attests to that, like his expressed adoration for his writing, his motorcycle and his wife on “My House,” his supposed worries about crime waves in the streets on “Average Guy,” and the emotional outpouring for then-wife Sylvia on “Heavenly Arms.” But honesty and the act of conveying something that the artist knows are not enough, else any self-indulgent claptrap would pass for something special. It doesn’t, unless it touches on something elemental and grand, something lasting and universal. It is there that almost all argument with this album lies. Something serious and lasting is here, if you are willing to accept it. The psychiatrist C.G. Jung postulated “individuation” as the process of maturing to where a person is conscious of both the personal and collective unconscious. In a practical sense individuation is about accepting and resolving supposed contradictions, and about assimilating opposite characteristics. Jung’s genius provides the key to this album really. But because individuation rarely starts before you are in your thirties, if it ever starts at all, it is no wonder that the standards of youthful rock and roll hardly seem to apply to something unmistakably middle-aged.
If you reject what you just read, you still probably fall into the camp where you can appreciate some of the harder stuff here like “The Gun,” “The Blue Mask,” and “Waves of Fear” just for its drive. But to really get behind this whole motherfucker, it takes some kind of appreciation for the notion that purely adult themes have a place in rock and roll. Not everybody will agree with that premise, but The Blue Mask is one of the better arguments for it.
Willie Nelson – The Words Don’t Fit the Picture RCA Victor LSP-4653 (1972)
Willie Nelson languished in near obscurity as a solo artist through the 1960s and early 1970s, despite recognition penning a number of hits for others. In his early days he conformed to the whims of his producers, with a typical “Nashville” sound. As time went on, he — like a lot of Motown stars like Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder — sought to assert himself more in the recording process. His vocals changed. Rather than holding notes for a long time and adding a lot of vibrato like a pop crooner, he sang ahead of the beat more forcefully and sang with more clipped, staccato phrasing. The backing vocals, string backing, and other Nashville trappings fell by the wayside too, and Willie’s accomplished guitar playing featured more prominently — characterized by his trademark pauses interrupted by staccato runs on his iconic converted classical acoustic guitar.
The Words Don’t Fit the Picture is something of a forgotten item in the Nelson catalog — AMG gives it only a one-sentence review, RYM has no reviews and only a few ratings and it’s not even mentioned in Graeme Thomson’s biography Willie Nelson: The Outlaw. It was released around the time Nelson moved to the Austin, Texas area and hired a new cutthroat manager from the rock world, before his big break with Shotgun Willie. It has elements of the Nashville sound, but also plenty of moments that foreshadow the ways Nelson would breakthrough to superstardom in a few years. He wrote or co-wrote everything here. Though it would be hard to call any of these standouts, there’s not a bad tune to be found. And this set is nothing if not eclectic. Nelson’s wide interests in jazz, western swing, traditional pop, soul, etc. subtly make their presence felt. In essence, Willie takes the Nashville sound as far out as it can go, right to its furthest boundaries. Take “London,” for instance, which sounds like a countrified version of a beatnik monologue off a Tom Waits album.
This may be a transitional effort, but it wonderfully captures a lot of strengths of the different elements at play. It also shows that Nelson was certainly a professional, delivering crisp songs in an assured manner, even when they have “typical Nashville” written all over them. Listeners who can forget about where this stands in relation to other things Nelson has done may find that this is simply a damn fine country album.