Christos Tsiolkas – Greek Tragedy

Link to an article by Christos Tsiolkas:

“Greek Tragedy: Former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis on Greece’s Economic Crisis”

Bonus links: “The Defeat of Europe” (“Whatever one thinks of our government, this episode will go down in European history as the moment when official Europe, using institutions and methods that no treaty legitimised (the Eurogroup, the Euro Summit, the threat of eviction from the eurozone), dealt a major blow to the ideal of an ever-closer democratic union. Greece capitulated, but it is Europe that was defeated.”) and “Europe’s Big Banks are Fueling the Continent’s Far-Right Fascists”

Johnny Cash – John R. Cash

John R. Cash

Johnny Cash – John R. Cash Columbia KC-33370 (1975)

When Johnny Cash’s popularity sagged in the mid-1970s, his label Columbia stepped in to guide the recording process.  Someone from the label picked out some popular songs, ran them by Cash to see which ones he would record, then went out and recorded all the instrumentals and simply had Cash sing over the top of the finished package.  It was a very conscious effort to make Cash seem “relevant”, from the picture on the album cover of Cash with longer hair and a denim jacket to a warm, muted sound that fairly drips with the ambiance of huge American-made cars, faux-leather chairs, shag carpeting, dim yellow lighting, and other accoutrements of a time when the glory days of the American working man were starting to crumble.  Cash practically disowned this album as a sell-out on his part.  Yet, dated or not, this is a fair and listenable effort.  It helps that there are lots of good songs, and the mellowness makes it a decent period piece.  This may not be representative of anything else in Cash’s large catalog, but it isn’t nearly as bad as some would have it.

Johnny Cash – Look at Them Beans

Look at Them Beans

Johnny Cash – Look at Them Beans Columbia KC 33814 (1975)

A ho-hum affair.  There aren’t any real duds, but nothing to particularly impress either.  The best is probably the rollicking “I Hardly Ever Sing Beer Drinking Songs,” which comes across something like a warm-up for his minor comeback novelty hit “One Piece at a Time” of the following year.  By 1975, Cash was fairly consistently recording in a more contemporary style rather than the folky and frequently acoustic style established with Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.  This new sound often had a kind of Texas barrelhouse or Bakersfield Sound flavor that seemed like a reaction to the Outlaw Country movement and the likes of Jerry Reed.  Elsewhere string arrangements are common.  A few tracks have a horn section, which seems to neither add a lot nor take anything away, it just sort of changes things up in a Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass sort of way.  This is not the Cash album anyone is likely to reach for first, though fans will probably enjoy it well enough once its playing.  He would go on to make quite a few more albums similar to this in varying degrees.

Johnny Cash – One Piece at a Time

One Piece at a Time

Johnny Cash and The Tennessee Three – One Piece at a Time Columbia KC 34193 (1976)

After a few years without any significant chart success, Cash had a mild comeback with One Piece at a Time and its title track single.  The album features a mixture of ballads and bouncy, novelty-inflected, up-tempo numbers.  Easily the best thing here is the title track, a rollicking tale of an auto worker pilfering parts to assemble his dream automobile, only to have things go comically awry.  It’s the best known Cash single of the 1970s, and for good reason.  The piano riff was lifted from somewhere else, though the source eludes me at the moment.  Overall, this one is decent if a little bland.  Sort of a top of the third tier Cash album.

Johnny Cash – A Believer Sings the Truth

A Believer Sings the Truth

Johnny Cash – A Believer Sings the Truth Cachet Records CL 3-9001 (1979)

A relatively unknown album in some ways.  It is perhaps the most eclectic one Johnny Cash ever recorded.  Stylistically it’s all over the place.  Jo-El Sonnier is on the sessions and his vaguely New Orleans second-line/Dixieland styled “I’ve Got Jesus in My Soul,” complete with a clarinet solo and brass band chorus, is something unusual for Cash.  There is a version of Sister Rosetta Tharpe‘s “There Are Strange Things Happening Everyday” that’s decent too.  In his first autobiography, Man in Black, Cash told about going to a Tharpe concert in the early Sixties, as his amphetamine addiction grew.  “Oh Come, Angel Band” is the song most frequently included on compilations.  The horns, boogie-woogie piano, and contemporary backing vocals make this album unlike most others from Cash.  In a way, it seems a little like he was taking cues from what Elvis had been up to earlier in the decade (Aloha From Hawaii Via Satellite, etc.), or maybe even what Bob Dylan was trying to do around this same time (Street-Legal, At Budokan).  Anyway, A Believer Sings the Truth isn’t gonna convince anyone of Cash’s talents if you haven’t heard him in better form elsewhere.  But this one finds him stretching and finding some success with many different approaches.  It holds up fairly well.  It’s too bad he didn’t record any secular albums the same way around this time, because it does seem like producers killed a lot of his albums back then.  Oh, and here’s a spoiler.  “The Greatest Cowboy of Them All” is god.  God is the greatest cowboy of them all.

Public Enemy – Most of My Heroes Still Don’t Appear on No Stamp

Most of My Heroes Still Don’t Appear on No Stamp

Public Enemy – Most of My Heroes Still Don’t Appear on No Stamp Enemy Records ERSD002LC (2012)

It would be easy to write off Public Enemy as a hip-hop group long past its time of relevance, but that would be a mistake.  Most of My Heroes Still Don’t Appear on No Stamp, released in the group’s third decade (and 25 years after their debut album), is about as relevant as anything in hip hop.  There is only one dud (“Rltk”).  The rest might not feature anything as powerfully catchy as their biggest hits of their early days.  Still, the simple, utilitarian beats get the job done.  The group isn’t innovating when it comes to beats — if anything, they are looking backwards somewhat, more so than on The Evil Empire of Everything released the same summer.  Yet these are the sorts of beats that made hip-hop what it is, providing a hardness that provides momentum, and most importantly are ones that fit the talents of the MCs and the message they have to offer.  Chuck D is still one of the smartest and most compelling lyricists in the genre.  On “Truth Decay” he raps, “The truth dies while lies make a living.”  And on “”I Shall Not Be Moved” he goes on about the “senior circuit” in a funny way.  Sure, it might help if he (and the rest of PE) was a little more of a feminist and less prone to advocate for the Nation of Islam, but those are petty quibbles.  On the interludes that talk about “heroes” that should be on stamps, as referenced in the album title (which quotes a lyric from their iconic 1989 song “Fight the Power”), that statement has to be qualified quite a bit.  Without speaking for S1W James Bomb, who wrote and performs the spoken parts, he has to concede that Malcolm X was on a U.S. stamp issued in 1999 (Chuck D cites Malcolm X as a hero on some notes to the album).  When Elijah Muhammad is mentioned on “…Don’t Appear on No Stamps (Part I)” as “one of the great ones,” well, it is hard to agree agree — Elijah Muhammad deserves that honor as much as Richard Nixon, which is to say not at all.  But this is really the wrong way to look at the album title, and the interludes of the same name.  The point is that there are a lot of heroes out there and they aren’t all celebrities.  Chuck D raps, “To some of my heroes/ be most of y’all’s foes,” going on to mention “Belafontes to Bikos / some dying incognegro / Che, Chávezes and Castros.”  Flavor Flav name-checks Huey P. Newton, H. Rap Brown, Marcus Garvey, Angela Davis, C. Delores Tucker, Cynthia McKinney. And those are just a few.  Harvey Milk, John Brown, Leonard Peltier, Subcomandante Marcos and others are mentioned too.

Future president Jimmy Carter gave a speech to a room full of lawyers on “law day” (an occasion created as a rebuttal to the international workers holiday May Day) in 1974 where he sharply criticized what lawyers do, and how they resisted Martin Luther King, Jr.‘s reforms, and concluded by discussing Leo Tolstoy‘s novel War and Peace:

“And the point of the book is that the course of human events, even the greatest historical events, are not determined by the leaders of a nation or a state, like Presidents or governors or senators.  They are controlled by the combined wisdom and courage and commitment and discernment and unselfishness and compassion and love and idealism of the common ordinary people.”

Public Enemy is saying something similar.  They are all over the Occupy Wall Street slogan the 1% vs. the 99%.  As they put it, “Never have so many been screwed by so few.”  As Chuck D said, “While I like artists like JAYZ and KANYE WEST and consider them giants who are afforded to project their opinion through culture, Its been difficult for me to like and respect their viewpoint in theses times. . I must fight for the balanced art projection of the real side of life as opposed to the fantasy world which most likely cannot be attained by many.”  The liner notes to the album, too, are a history of PE’s efforts to use alternative and independent media, and to escape the clutches of greedy entertainment corporations.

It is great that PE is still around, still making music, and just as committed as ever — maybe more so — to making music that matters.  The group’s heart is in the right place, and just as often their heads and fists are in the right place too.