Cultural Detritus, Reviews, and Commentary
Jim O’Rourke – Bad Timing Drag City DC120 (1997)
If you followed what Jim O’Rourke was up to with Gastr del Sol, his fascination with John Fahey so evident on Bad Timing should come as no surprise. It’s a decent album, perhaps a bit bland. The thing is, why not just listen to a Fahey album instead? Anyway, O’Rourke would go on to bigger and better things in the next few years, particularly the magnificent Halfway to a Threeway and Insignificance.
New York Dolls – One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This Roadrunner 168 618 045-2 (2006)
Can’t say this is likely to ever please me to the extent the album title implies. Now, I’m certainly not opposed the the idea of the New York Dolls reuniting with a drastically different lineup, decades later. In fact, I rather like Cause I Sez So (especially its title track and “Better Than You”) and Dancing Backward in High Heels. The secret to this band is undoubtedly David Johansen and his songwriting and vocal presence. Here the focus is a little nostalgic, with a sound updated but still rooted in that of the classic Dolls. I just prefer the change for the next studio outing, with its emphasis on a more mature and contemporary sound, complete with bolder attempts to take chances messing with the formulas old and new. And I much prefer the overtly pre-Dolls retro pop of Dancing Backward.
Lou Reed – The Bells Arista AB 4229 (1979)
Named after the Edgar A. Poe poem, The Bells is a cerebral album with a soft touch — unlike so much of Reed’s other work.
The way Reed recorded The Bells (with a quickly defunct technology) definitely sounds like something from the 1970s. It sounds like it has an inbred echo. Hearing it feels a bit like sonic vertigo, if vertigo was a pleasant feeling. The album does open itself up, though, after you get a sense of it.
“I Want to Boogie with You” has the old time sentimentality of Springsteen but more depth. Reed recants stories of family life. He doesn’t feel compelled to make it a pretty picture though. The dysfunctional “Stupid Man” or the vaguely autobiographical “Families” mark the arrival of a changed songwriter. On “Families,” he shakily cries “momma” as Lou Reed brings his struggles for transcendence to new contexts. He still had a passion of old fashion rock and roll, but was tackling that with a renewed energy. This makes up-tempo rockers like “With You” a natural environment for Reed, as well as for his band that previously backed Alice Cooper.
Reed’s lyrics over the years changed contexts but always retained core themes. His music, however, varied widely. The Bells teams Reed with the legendary Don Cherry, who co-wrote “All Through the Night.” Cherry is quite effective playing with a Harmon mute on “City Lights,” a tribute to Charlie Chaplin. The irrepressibly charming trumpet toots recall so well Chaplin’s Little Tramp. The lyrics, “Don’t these city lights/ bring us together?” are very worthy of being called Chaplinesque. The improvisational closer, “The Bells,” wants to be wrong, to fail, but Cherry turns out a baffling, lingering success of a song in just a few notes. Cherry always did play well in a rock context, as was certainly clear a few years later playing with his stepdaughter Neneh for Rip, Rig & Panic.
“Disco Mystic” with only two words worth of lyrics is sharp commentary on the vacuousness of the genre, even if disco commentary (good or bad) is of marginal interest. Fortunately, the plain groove of the song will never fade away.
The Bells is dense in sound and content. The whole thing is legitimate. It’s ambitious. Despite years of writing, recording, and performing Lou Reed still uncovers a wealth of inspiration. The album jacket too, with Reed gazing away from his reflection in a mirror, is a fine indication what might be his least indulgent work.
“Weird Al” Yankovic – The Essential “Weird Al” Yankovic Legacy 88697-58543-2 (2009)
Weird Al has forged a career much longer than anyone would have guessed when he first started making parody songs in conjunction with the Dr. Demento radio show. The essential character of his music has been to appeal to individuals, mostly young men, whose aspirations and expectations extend beyond their realistic chances for social advancement in life. He appeals to people with more time and (pop) cultural interests than money, whose lives tend to be dominated by people and forces outside their control — his career tracks pretty closely a time when a gap expanded between worker productivity and real compensation and his popularity came when the gap proved to be a real long-term trend (plus his biggest commercial successes were after the 2007-08 financial crash around the time this collection was released). His humor tends to play on an awareness of the base and trifling nature of consumer pop culture. It kind of stops there though. He winks with his audience in making fun of trashy mass media artifacts, all the while resigning himself to the dictates of that mass media and all its whims. Al’s music kind of resigns itself to the pop culture ghetto, and in many respects breeds dependency on it.
He performed parody songs but also wrote original comedy songs. Those who like Weird Al best always express a fondness for his originals. Some of this songs are more medleys of popular songs, done in a novelty manner. Take “Polka on 45” (from his second album In 3D). He does a medley of mostly pop/rock songs played as polkas with his accordion. This sort of mashup of the “hip”, contemporary pop with passé and all-to-ethnic polka might be compared to some of Robert Mapplethorpe‘s photography, or other such “high” art, but no one does. Al gets a laugh from the incongruity of throwing the different styles together that normally appeal to mutually exclusive audiences who listen to certain genres of music to separate themselves from the other genres, obliterating those attempts at social distinction. “One More Minute” (from his third, and maybe best album Dare to Be Stupid) is a retro rock/doo-wop romantic put-down tune in the style of The Mothers of Invention (like “Go Cry on Somebody Else’s Shoulder” from Freak Out!), but pushed to absurdist extremes in its lyrical exaggerations.
Over time, Al kind of got formulaic. That isn’t to say his music ever got bad. But the early material was something a little new. There were no guarantees that it would be popular, any more than a passing fad. Al’s kind of self-aware musical irony was a way to normalize and humanize the vacuousness of pop culture. Over time, that seemed less daring and more of a favor to the institutions of the music industry. There are many stories of celebrity musicians being proud that Weird Al parodied one of their songs. That sort of confirms Al’s insider status. This was the same problem the pop/punk band DEVO faced.
Weird Al is kind of a great musician for kids to listen to, because his self-awareness provides good lessons for young people. Yet adults should, in theory, kind of move on to deeper, more informed critiques of pop culture. That isn’t to say this music can’t be enjoyed by grown-ups. It can. This collection, which was selected by Al himself, if nothing else proves how good Al’s band was, how astute his awareness of the nuances of pop culture was (including which songs were worth parodying), and how his broad humor managed to avoid quickly dated jokes based on easily-forgotten current events. This particular collection isn’t exhaustive, and it omits multiple albums. But it still makes a decent introduction to his career.
Dinosaur [Jr.] – You’re Living All Over Me SST 130 (1987)
A classic of 1980s rock. When I want music for the slacker in me, it’s either You’re Living All Over Me or Flipper‘s Album: Generic Flipper — the former for the harmless, cute type and the latter for a more depraved and comical type. J Mascis‘ guitar + vocals = the shit. Other than the Lou Barlow clinker “Poledo” (thankfully it’s last) this is about perfect.
Bob Dylan – Bringing It All Back Home Columbia CS 9128 (1965)
The first side, where Bob Dylan makes his first real attempt at rock music, feels like a mere warm-up for Highway 61 Revisited. That side is good — very good even — but not great. Side two, with a more familiar folk sound, is better, truly achieving greatness with “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).”
Van Morrison – His Band and The Street Choir Warner Bros. WS 1884 (1970)
Van Morrison was really something in his prime, and His Band and the Street Choir came right in the middle of his prime years. He drops the mysticism of the last records almost entirely. For some, that makes this fare poorly by comparison. Yet, setting aside the fact that both Astral Weeks and Moondance are some of the best albums of the era, His Band is a wonderful record all on its own. It feels a little more extroverted, alternating between sort of a bar-room soul/R&B sound (“Domino,” “Give Me a Kiss,” “Call Me Up in Dreamland”) and more intimate folk (“Crazy Face,” “Gypsy Queen”), and a few tunes that fall somewhere in between (“If I Ever Needed Someone,” “Street Choir”). So much of this is so good-natured, fun and impassioned, still with touches of poignancy, that it should be easy to love. Some fans find a way not to love it — making it a black sheep in Morrison’s early discography. Their loss. This one is pretty great.
Radiohead – Amnesiac Parlophone 7243 5 32764 2 3 (2001)
Radiohead were to their time what U2 was in the mid-1980s. Both achieved a great deal of success adapting underground music to mainstream tastes. With U2, it was about taking post-punk and smoothing it over to make it more accessible. With Radiohead, at least tentatively starting with OK Computer, they adapted the styles a host of cult favorites like Aphex Twin, CAN, Merzbow, and others into a more streamlined, melodic and stadium-friendly package, tied up with well-intentioned, if slightly superficial, lyrics. So, as Keith Moliné put it, for “seasoned adventurers in modern music,” the claim that Radiohead’s music was a revelation “fell flat, raising a smile or sneer depending on temperament.”
Despite a plethora of reviews to the contrary, Amnesiac is the better of Kid A. This is an altogether more straightforward (and therefore more focused) album than its predecessor. Amnesiac sticks to Radiohead’s strengths. The group doesn’t overextend themselves. They don’t try too hard. Thom Yorke still has his paranoid wailing caught on record. What is gone is the labored complexity of Kid A that fundamentally never worked. The songs here hold up much better.
Radiohead just isn’t that great of an experimental or prog-rock outfit. They do make good anthemic songs geared towards the college-educated demographic. At that, they excel. Especially when the music is informed by more advanced influences, like here. Amnesiac is the group’s very best work — even if it could have been improved by dropping the filler cuts “Dollars and Cents” and “Like Spinning Plates” and replacing them with Kid A‘s superior “The National Anthem” and “Idioteque”.
Bob Dylan – Under the Red Sky CBS 467188 2 (1990)
There are a few essential Bob Dylan albums, quite a lot of decent but still mediocre ones, and a few that offer little or nothing to even the most hardcore Dylanite. Sadly, Under the Red Sky is one the man’s most forgettable offerings. In his defense, Bob invests in a musical palette that is broader than anything since Empire Burlesque, yet the songwriting here never quite delivers. Add to that the always questionable tactic of an “all-star” lineup of guest appearances and the fact that producer Don Was‘ efforts to polish this up were vetoed by Dylan makes this sound as sterile as possible, and the merits this has evaporate pretty quickly.
John Lennon & Yoko Ono – Double Fantasy Geffen GHS 2001 (1980)
To me, this is the late 70s/early 80s equivalent of Nilsson‘s Nilsson Schmilsson, a well-executed grab bag of mainstream rock/pop songs.