Cultural Detritus, Reviews, and Commentary
Hozier – Hozier Island 3792808 (2014)
Basically a white person singing in an African-American style, much like Adele et al. There is some catchy guitar on “Jackie and Wilson,” for example, but mostly this album seeks to simply appropriate riffs, vocal tones, and other musical elements that have been built up by others rather than forge anything new or unique. Pass.
John Cale – Paris 1919 Reprise K 44239 (1973)
Few albums defy categorization like Paris 1919. Though not popular at its original release, it is an album extensively referenced by critics and is a captivating work appreciated best upon extended reflection.
Is it pop? Is it classical? Is it experimental rock? Maybe it is country or blues? Don’t they call this guy a “godfather of punk”? Categorizing John Cale is as productive and interesting as staring upward and counting holes in ceiling tiles. He made his own way. Few have attempted such sweeping musical portraits of home and history that shape a life.
Paris 1919 is a personal album for Cale. It reflects himself, rather than the racy crowd he ran with. Cale focuses on fond memories. He envisions a future built on the distilled successes of his past or at least the most profound questions that passed his way. This makes the album more endearing than the equally brilliant Fear. Paris 1919 takes the sophisticated pop of his solo debut, Vintage Violence, to a higher level by replacing naïve (in a good way) exuberance with calm confidence. Exposing anything personal makes an artist vulnerable, but truly great art requires some kind of revelation. Even metaphysical statements must usually come with a personal attachment. Cale achieves this in every respect.
Cale could expertly handle the sometimes-tedious task of composing new works. The results can be deceptive. A casual listen may suggest this is a straightforward album. Closer inspection reveals his placement of pulsing vamps, sharp dissonances, and sonic swells. These techniques are merely a means to realize his vision, as the lighthearted joys of the material always supplant technical considerations. The album is not an assemblage of independent components. Instead, Paris 1919 works as a unified whole always trained on the basic principles Cale held most dear.
Though not particularly known for his lyrics, Paris 1919 holds some of his best. He even includes reference to fellow Welshman Dylan Thomas. Cale’s greatest success is in making music uniquely his own. This isn’t a performance-heavy album for him. Most of his efforts lie in guiding his vision. Against Cale’s Welsh lilt the studio band sparkles, featuring Little Feat members Lowell George and Richard Hayward.
Despite difficulty in comparison, Paris 1919 is a unique artistic triumph. A work like this rarely fits into the preconceived notions of pop culture since it goes beyond what once seemed to be the outer limits. Paris 1919 is uplifting and intimate without heavy-handed sentimentality.
Scott Engel – Scott 4 Philips SBL 7913 (1969)
Scott 4 is easily one of my favorite albums. I do recognize that some people won’t be able to relate to this music and therefore probably won’t bother to understand it. But I think that for what it is, Scott 4 is perfect. Its compassion, realism and sincerity have always impressed me.
Over the course of thirty years Noel Scott Engel (under the stage name Scott Walker) went from pop heartthrob adored by swarms of teenage girls to cult icon to reclusive mystery man and dark experimental maverick. Scott Walker was born in America, but his fame in the 1960s and 70s came in England.
Most amazing is that this music exists at all. All attempts to categorize it fail. Is it part of the counterculture, or part of the establishment? Or both? Perhaps it’s the directness. Scott Walker takes his music directly into a soft vortex of emotion and intellect.
Scott Walker’s craft seems like bad idea on paper. Scott 4 isn’t an album you can convince people to like. Most of its supporters are the types that have heard everything under the sun and have come back to what less discerning ears would lump with much more forgettable music. Scott Walker’s voice may sound flip, but he made some of the most heartfelt music you may ever hear. Scott 4 is personal. It takes a certain something to appreciate the album’s depth, but that doesn’t lessen its achievement.
If I were to sum up Scott Walker’s career in the 1960s, I would say that his greatest accomplishment was taking the music of extroverts and turning it into music for introverts. He took the kind of orchestral pop that has a lot of immediate and superficial appeal, and was the epicenter of the “old guard” of the institutions of the music industry, and turned it into music that is edgy and subtly a countervailing force against the establishment. He obliterated the notion that orchestrated pop had any sort of deterministic, essentialist qualities. It was a form that could serve any ends. You won’t understand Scott Walker by listening to this album just once. The craftsmanship and brilliant songwriting are surprisingly elusive. It is like he could hide things in plain view. And it is as if he founds the seeds of something that included the old and the new, together, moving forward in a world where the all sorts of perspectives and musics have a chance to exist simultaneously and harmoniously with all their differences still intact. Brilliant.
Taylor Swift – 1989 Big Machine Records BMRBD0500A (2014)
A political theorist famously declared the “end of history” in the year the Berlin Wall fell. Even decades on that argument has marked out a very particular debate. Is the political left dead and finally defeated? Anyway, what the hell does this have to do with a pop music album by Taylor Swift? Well, Swift, once associated with pop country music, has made an album firmly committed to revitalizing synthesizer-driven pop, and has named it 1989, the very year that the Berlin Wall fell and when history supposedly ended. It is also an album set up to carefully avoid confronting moral issues.
1989, the album, is a weird proof that history isn’t over. The entire album is very good pop music. Let’s be perfectly clear. This is excellently crafted work, demonstrating vast command of pop music history in the songwriting and delivering impeccable performances. This is a smash hit album, and deservedly so. But let us look beneath that, because it is also an album that essentially tries to re-argue that history has ended. Since the 2007-08 financial crash, which became a pretext for “austerity” policies that divert wealth from the poor and middle classes to the extremely wealthy, and financial speculation as a diversion from the “real” economy has reached unprecedented heights. Stephen Thomas Erlewine wrote that the album’s opener, “Welcome to New York,” is “an anthem for carpetbaggers reaping the spoils of rampant gentrification . . . .” He characterizes the entire album as “a sparkling soundtrack to an aspirational lifestyle.” 1989 was still part of what was called the “me generation” after all. By re-producing the simple pleasures of 1980s synth pop, and only offering any emotional attachments of the lyrics as something extra beyond that, this kind of posits that pop music did peak around 1989, and everything since then just spins in circles at the cul-de-sac that is the end of (musical) history.
Really, the sustaining fantasy behind 1989 comes from deeply reactionary politics. Most of the songs speak to the idea that a person can freely drop in to the competitive milieu of the “big city” (from, presumably, “flyover country”), grab some success there, in the form of more fun and “happiness”, then check out. There is a pervasive sentiment that a person can somehow avoid any real risk of such competitiveness, that you always have the possibility to drop out of the city life and secure your place where you were to begin with. It is the idea that you can get all the benefits of this, and the problems one faces, well, they aren’t major problems and can easily be shrugged off by resuming your place where you started. In other words, there is no risk of abject failure by sinking lower than where you started, and the people who succeed never do so at anyone else’s expense. All of this suggests that people have more meaningful freedom than they do in the real world, and it completely trivializes the risks and social costs presupposed by the structural frame of reference that this relies upon. After all, the songs here that gravitate toward the notion of “more bling and better hedonism” assume there is a kind of social treadmill that a person can just hop on, as if that treadmill goes only in one direction, it was always there and always will be, it is available to anyone who chooses to step onto it, and it is never already occupied by someone else.
The self-obsessed, hyper-individualistic attitude of Swift’s album is a rather arrogant testament to accepting change only to the extent it preserves and recreates the basic system upon which it relies, and then only to advance the protagonist’s position within that established frame. This is a Hobbesian world in which life is nasty, brutish and short, but in the meantime people can at least grab some cash and related accoutrements. The people at the top of this grim battleground are, of course, better than those who sink to the bottom — so we are to assume.
Think this is too pessimistic a view of Swift? Well, she did write an op-ed in the conservative newspaper Wall Street Journal. It is laced with all the usual reactionary tropes about the rarity of the good, the prevalence meritocracy, inferences that privatization is necessarily the best social order, suggestions that we should not accept envy as an inevitable consequence of inequality but as something dangerously deviant, cynically commenting that there are no path-dependencies that might hinder a nearly absolute personal choice to succeed or not, and, of course, no recognition of the institutional structures that reinforce the uneven playing field and tilt it in favor of some but not others. The fact that Swift promoted her album with a Wall Street Journal piece is strong evidence of where her sympathies lie, and more generally, that there is an element of class warfare subsumed in it. Swift merely aligns herself with the overlords, like a collaborationist.
So, this album is not so bad, but what it does is celebrate the worst things about the Western world: the long con that a brutally unequal world is inevitable, so we shouldn’t even notice the foundations of a system constructed to be unfair. Why did I say this was a well-crafted album deserving of success? Because it is as pure an expression of the banality of evil as you might find today.
Bob Dylan – Shadows in the Night Columbia 88875057962 (2015)
Rock, country, etc. musicians making albums of traditional American pop “standards” are just something that needs to be accepted as some kind of sad inevitability. They sell like hotcakes. If you set aside the category of singers like Scott Walker, who seemed fit for traditional pop from the outset, there is a long history of “crossover” attempts in this direction. Just before The Beatles broke up, Ringo Starr released Sentimental Journey (1970), a collection of standards. The biggest pioneer, though, was Harry Nilsson, with A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night (1973). That was followed by João Gilberto‘s Amoroso (1977) and Willie Nelson‘s smash hit Stardust (1978), and everything from Linda Ronstadt‘s What’s New (1983) to Sinéad O’Connor‘s Am I Not Your Girl? (1992), Rod Stewart‘s It Had to Be You… The Great American Songbook (2002), and beyond. Sure, Dylan had done crooning before, if you paid attention (you probably didn’t). But doing a standards album at age 73, well, it seems to prove Keith Richards‘ claim that Dylan’s “christian” phase was a ploy to sell records. After all, to promote Shadows in the Night, Dylan gave an exclusive interview with the magazine for AARP (American Association for Retired Persons). Who else but old, retired people want to buy an album of standards? Yeah, Dylan sings better here than on Christmas in the Heart, but who cares? His voice is still ravaged, and there are better singers out there to do pure singing. And Frank Sinatra albums are still available…
Willie Nelson – Stardust Columbia JC 35305 (1978)
Here’s the album that (nearly) ruined Willie Nelson. The premise is that he performs jazz and pop standards like “Stardust,” “Blue Skies,” and “Someone to Watch Over Me” soullessly backed by Booker T. Jones arrangements. This was a multi-platinum smash hit. This is not so much country music as easy listening. Yet unlike the subtle pathos that someone like Nat “King” Cole could deliver with such an approach, Willie just coasts along on the surface of the songs, floating by on light, fluffy orchestration. This album helped cement some of Willie’s worst tendencies as a performer, giving him license to continue to avoid the “heaving lifting” of interpretive singing that involves seeking out an emotional or intellectual connection with the material and conveying it in a uniquely-suited performance. If you do like this, you’ll be happy to note that Nelson went on to make a truckload more almost just like it. Others may find this tediously boring. “Georgia on My Mind” is still really good.
Tom Waits – Blue Valentine Asylum 6E-162 (1978)
While not Tom Waits’ most strikingly original work, his Hollywood beatnik shtick is still quite effective here. There are plenty of faux jazz ballads, a showtune, and a few intimations of his edgier eighties songwriting. He even manages to pull off the maudlin “Kentucky Avenue”. Everything seems more polished and sober than Small Change and most people find it far more inspired than Foreign Affairs. This is one of Waits’ most successful albums of the 1970s. It was also his last effort completely dedicated to this particular old time hipster musical persona. His next albums would start to take a left turn toward rogue carnival weirdness.
Tom Waits – Heartattack and Vine Asylum 6E-295 (1980)
Here Waits is still operating within the realm of orchestrated pop balladry (“Saving All My Love for You,” “On the Nickel,” “Ruby’s Arms”), but he’s made a noticeable change in welcoming more harder-edged blues-rock sounds to his palette, with heavier drums and guitar and no piano (“Heartattack and Vine,” “‘Til the Money Runs Out”). This proved to be a transitional album as Waits moved toward his edgier mid-80s sound. But often he is stuck with a slick, “professional”, L.A. kind of sound (“In Shades,” “Downtown”) that is too much of a compromise between the two poles of the album. Even when he does succeed in one firm style or another, it is hard to find people who want to swing between gravelly crooning and gruff R&B the way this album is presented. There is definitely good stuff here, but the sum total is a little unsatisfying. After marrying Kathleen Brennan, whom he met while working on One From the Heart, he basically committed to the style of Swordfishtrombones and stuck with that approach for the rest of his career.
Tom Waits – Small Change Asylum 7E-1078 (1976)
Fans of Tom Waits’ later work aren’t always on board for his earlier stuff, and vice-versa. Aside from briefly dabbling in soft rock, his early period was primarily marked by boozy bar songs, piano ballads, a sprinkling of orchestrated numbers, and a gentle subversion of traditional pop with an eye toward the seedier side of life. Well, for his early period, Small Change might be the best. It opens with the lush, maudlin “Tom Traubert’s Blues (Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen).” The next song “Step Right Up” showcases the off-kilter songwriting talents on which Waits would increasingly rely. The rest of the album focuses more on piano bar jazz and blues, with borderline incoherent vocals and a fascination with the dark corners of down-and-out society. It all works though, somehow. This is right on the pulse of late-night drunken melancholy. If you played this at an AA meeting you’d probably make some people cry.
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.
