Mavis Staples – Have a Little Faith

Have a Little Faith

Mavis Staples – Have a Little Faith Alligator ALCD 4899 (2004)

Mavis Staples had something of a late career resurgence with a number of well-received recordings.  Have a Little Faith came just before that resurgence.  While she sings well (of course!), the album as a whole is dull.  The songs frequently employ slick formula and cliches as if they are impressive, without any self-awareness or irony.  There is simply too much to take away from Mavis’ voice.  Pass on this and proceed to what came next, the warm and endearing We’ll Never Turn Back.

Neil Young – Chrome Dreams II

Chrome Dreams II

Neil Young – Chrome Dreams II Reprise 936 249 917-2 (2007)

A very eclectic album without being uneven.  You get a real sampling of almost all aspects of Young’s music, from mellow country-rock to angry rockers.  This was the sequel (of sorts) to the unreleased 1977 album Chrome Dreams.  The highlight is “Ordinary People.”  Operating in Bruce Springsteen mode, Young really delivers on a working man’s epic.  It was dug up from the archives (from the This Note’s for You era) for this release.  The only problem at this point is that younger listeners may have no context for a song about factory workers losing jobs.  The song was from just after the first wave of the neoliberal assault on working America, wresting power and wealth away from industry and average folks (labor) to be placed in the hands of the Capital class and the FIRE sector (finance, insurance and real estate).  The first assault was against unions (key in the auto industry), shifting election funding toward purely business sources, with corporate raiders (like in the popular movies Wall Street and Pretty Woman) pillaging assets and pensions, and in adjusting tax codes to drastically reduce taxes on the rich and drastically reducing payments toward programs that benefited the poor and middle class.  The second wave of the neoliberal assault would be completed in a few years, with “free trade” agreements eliminating the possibility that domestic industry could be viable any longer, instead shifting focus to currency speculation that pillaged foreign central banks and with labor arbitrage “offshoring” jobs to distant locations with pauper labor.  So Chrome Dreams II comes during the “post-industrial” era of the USA.  Most factory jobs are long gone, so there haven’t been any to lose in a while.  Its ambitions are futile now, but Young’s “Ordinary People” narrative still resonates with conviction the heartbreak and sadness and grim determination that transcends changed circumstance — today the narrative would be about a Midwest Methland where the factory is long gone and rural methamphetamine labs open up amid the whirlwind of lives and local economies circling the drain.  In the end Chrome Dreams II proves that Neil Young is a more honest and genuine rock and roller than just about anybody else out there.  Here’s to lost causes like that.

Jackie-O Motherfucker – Change

Change

Jackie-O Motherfucker – Change Textile TCD 02 (2002)

Jackie-O Motherfucker’s (JOMF’s) approach to music is syncretic. Percussive elements draw out and expand other sounds lurking in guitars and other noisemakers. The sounds are distantly familiar, but they now seem to slowly rise to a conscious level. Once a part of the music has made itself felt, JOMF move on. The progression is slow. It is also steady. JOMF pull together folk, ragas, turntablism, jazz, blues, rock. Actually, they do a good job summing up their many influences. They look upon those influences as raw material for new combinations and presentations.  This is a strange and friendly mélange of urban and rural elements.  Part of the so-called “free folk” movement, this is vaguely like psychedelic jam band music but far less prone to showiness and guitar wankery than that label suggests.

Change is a very good album. Part of what makes it so good is that each song elaborates its themes. Solos and impressive technical feats aren’t the attraction; the shifting, almost pastoral musical landscape is. This takes attention away from the individual band members. The album offers the chance experience the concepts through many perspectives. The result is big; you have to step back to take it all in. Change is an opportunity to consider where you are, in relation, then to ask if you are ready for whatever comes next. Because whatever music has in store tomorrow, it will have to be different. JOMF have covered a lot of territory, and for anyone to retrace any of their steps would be too boring. And deep under the guitars that sound like sitars, the mumbled vocals, and the saxophone that makes its humble appearances, JOMF have a positive outlook as to where things are headed. Attention: Now leaving the terrordome.

Morris Berman – The Twilight of American Culture

The Twilight of American Culture

Morris Berman – The Twilight of American Culture (WW. Norton & Co. 2000)

Disappointing. I ended up just skimming through a lot of this. Berman presents an interesting topic, but this feels like a five page essay spun out to book length. His analysis is pretty superficial. In describing the decline of American culture he seems to be “preaching to the choir” as they say. The best parts are his personal anecdotes about teaching experiences, but those alone don’t support his premise.

Sole – Selling Live Water

Selling Live Water

Sole – Selling Live Water anticon. ABR 0026 CD (2003)

Selling Live Water is hip-hop that can’t take for granted that it is hip-hop at all.  It is music made to engage an audience and provoke critical thought.  Hip-hop is just a convenient form that it adopts.  Sole pursues his music with a fervor that concedes nothing but complete, honest commitment to his agenda.  The most appealing part of this is the self-reflexive aspect. Hip-hop has been around long enough now that a more complex look at the genre itself is due. Sole contorts traditions with no hesitation.

On “Da Baddest Poet,” Sole admits how he isn’t smart enough for any techniques other than hip-hop. The necessity of his place amidst hip-hop culture means he really is making some sort of contribution to it. Sole is just trying to keep hip-hop as good as it was, and promised to be, in the age of “conscious hip-hop”, just… different. He says, “in the immortal words of Ice-T/ shoulda killed me last year/ but in the mere mortal words of me . . . ”  There is humility here that is quite the opposite of the materialistic, misogynistic, violent subject matter promoted most heavily in the genre, combined with an awareness that Sole is tilting toward something else.

“Shoot the Messenger” goes off with “I never learned to kill for oil/ but then again I never learned to sit still/ and probably never will.” “Respect pt. 3” even seems to be a little anarchistic.  There are politics all over this album — not in the sense of passing news, but in the sense of a commitment to bottom-up social transformation away from corruption and domination (Sole has noted that material on the album was inspired by Howard Zinn‘s A People’s History of the United States).

Sole is a good lyricist though he has only a passable delivery, something still impressive given what Sole does. His lyrics are very busy, giving him the difficult task of fitting it all in. He is either silent or in vocal bombardment mode. What turns out to make it work is the jokey attitude — full of gags and purposeful contradictions. By some manner of calculation he is aware of precisely how much ferocity separates his mind and his voice. Even though his rhythms don’t stretch and his dynamics are flat, deadly words still ooze from each of Selling Live Water’s cuts.  Nonetheless, he steps up for some more impressive vocal rhythms, shifts and drawls on “Salt on Everything.”

The anticon collective producers on board (Alias, Odd Nosdam, Telephone Jim Jesus) cultivate a sort of blurred, hazy melange of oversaturated sounds, while keeping to a sense of syncopated rhythm.  The beats contribute to the bleary feeling of being overwhelmed by media and the numbing spectacle of mass culture.  This complements Sole’s way of rapping that often seems like shouting out as many words as possible without planning his delivery beforehand.

Sole makes good on the idea of personal hip-hop. He may not have expansive vocal talents to rely on, but he has still made some great music here.  To appreciate Selling Live Water, a listener must accept that important statements can be made without access to large resources or authorization by the powerful, without being a supplicant or sycophant, by anybody who puts in the effort.  If you reject those premises, then realize that this is an album made against what you believe.

Willie Nelson – Let’s Face the Music and Dance

Let's Face the Music and Dance

Willie Nelson and Family – Let’s Face the Music and Dance Legacy 88765425852 (2013)

If you have followed Willie Nelson’s later career — and before his surprise hit Band of Brothers you probably haven’t — he has continued to shuffle between styles.  The occasional effort sounds a little more contemporary, but plenty look back to old-time western swing and early 20th Century pop, and sometimes jazz.  Let’s Face the Music and Dance is a grab bag.  The title track is an easy listening version of the sound from arguably Willie’s best late-career album, the austere Tex-Mex album Spirit.  “Is the Better Part Over” is yet another re-visitation of one of his old songs (from the late 1980s effort A Horse Called Music).  Most of the standards here seem to build on his American Classic, but with his regular touring band providing more country flavor than the jazz combos of that earlier effort.  Not surprisingly, the best here is “You’ll Never Know,” with Willie’s not-so-secret weapon his sister Bobbie featured prominently on piano.  This one is par for the course for Willie’s august years and hardly a standout, but it is more proof, if any more was needed, that he’s still not finished yet.