We saw Bon Jovi last night at Madison Square Garden. It was my birthday present to Miss Clap, and by all accounts, she had a fantastic time.

It was a really enjoyable concert, both on the visceral level of it being a great show with great music, and on the more distanced level of constantly feeling like we were in an 80s video, which, since I only started listening to pop music in 1989, is something I missed out on. There were no pyrotechnics, sadly, but that was really the only thing lacking. If you're curious, the set list is here, nicely alternating new stuff and old stuff. Although, yes, "Good Love" is the song you think it is, more's the pity.

I'm a little too groggy right now to detail all the various high points, but there were two particular moments that would have to rank among the best I've experienced this year. The first was a predictable, staged one, though no less enjoyable for its stagey-ness. The second moment, however, was much more unexpeted.

Number one: we were already pretty impressed with the seats. They were floor seats toward the back (section 11), but they were on risers, and we were smack dab in the middle, so we had a straight line to center stage and full exposure to the PA. This was all apparent during the opening act and we were very excited for the full Jov experience.

So then the opening music kicks up, which is, for some reason, "Rock Superstar," and the big LCD screen flips over and down and covers up most of the stage, although we can see the musicians coming onto it, and there's this big grid of metal poles and it's awesome and it flips up and the risers are colored neon blue and there's the band but when will Jon come on, is he going to make a big entrance, and then there he is, not on the stage, but five rows in front of us--Jon Bon Jovi, playing his acoustic guitar and singing on a platform in the middle of the audience. It's stagey but undeniably thrilling, plus we get a close-up view of his butt, which Miss Clap attests is still pretty good. We can see his butt because he is wearing tight black jeans. He is also wearing a black leather coat unzipped so we can see his chest when he turns around to gesture at us during the guitar solos. It's exactly what you would want, and that's why it's so fantastic.

Number two: I knew from looking at previous setlists that they were going to do an acoustic version of "Always," one of Miss Clap's favorite songs, and I figured that since they were also doing acoustic versions of "I'll Be There For You" and "Blaze of Glory," it would be like what Prince did--taking some of their best-known songs and putting them in a slightly different context. And indeed it was a more somber take on the song, so much so that he even changed the melody. But as the song, and the night, wore on, it became clear that changing the melody was less an artistic decision and more a practical one.

Take it from someone who's tried to cover it: "Always" is a really, really hard song to sing. Between the low point at the beginning of the verse and the high point of the chorus, it'll take up all of your range, if not more than all of your range. Now, when he changed the melody, he changed the chorus melody to make it lower, and when he did this for the first chorus, it seemed like a nice little gesture, kind of a "we're gonna keep it restrained here" thing. But when he then continued to do it for the rest of the choruses, when you'd expect him to start rocking out a bit (especially since "acoustic" in this context just meant "full band but with more acoustic guitar" instead of "just a singer and an acoustic guitar" as it often would, so the possibility for rockin' out was ever-present), he didn't go back to the original chorus melody, the high one. He stayed low, and he stayed low, we came to realize, because he couldn't go high.

Moments during the rest of the show confirmed this: he changed the melody of a few other songs to be lower, and on other songs, when they reached the high parts, he would just stick out the mic for the audience to sing. And we would oblige--we were singing anyway--but he just never sang those parts, sticking the mic out over and over again, which was especially noticable since the high parts in Bon Jovi songs tend to be in the choruses, and the choruses tend to repeat quite a few times. Once the key change hit in "Livin' on a Prayer," he just pretty much stopped singing entirely.

Now, Jon Bon Jovi is nothing if not a rock star, and he is a really good one, running around the stage, grabbing people's hands, playing to the camera (which there were four of, projecting a live movie up onto the huge screen hanging behind the band), grinning, using all his space, drawing us in, pumping us up. So while doing this acoustic version, he nailed all the sensitive signifiers, including the classic stage-sit. But by the end something unexpected happened. He turned his back to the audience and faced a camera that he'd faced before, and the camera obliged, projecting his expressions up onto the screen above. But where before he'd struck poses of triumph or ecstacy--stretching his arms up, pumping his fists, dropping to his knees--now his face registered what looked like real defeat. And it was real defeat--he couldn't sing one of his best songs anymore because he'd gotten too old.

Now, what should happen next but the giant screen--the one exposing that expression to our hungry eyes--died, the connection shorting out in a hail of fuzz on one half and blackness on the other. Jon turned around, and the expression he'd had before was just intensified--the song and the spectacle, both wonderful in their own way, were also in another way a failure. He had preceded the song with an odd little bit of banter where he said the album the song was from and then chastized the fan club members for not liking the album, noting that the song was their biggest hit ever. He had laid it out as a challenge to the audience, and he had failed to meet it.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not plying some sad-old-rock-star trope here. That evocation of defeat went perfectly with the song itself, which, in contrast to Bon Jovi's other love songs that tend to focus on the strength or possibility of love, instead deals with love's aftermath, and while in isolation, the chorus--"I'll be there till the stars don't shine / Till the heavens burst and the words don't rhyme / Even when I die, you'll be on my mind" etc. etc.--seems like a traditional "here is much I love you" kinda thing, instead it's this utter wallow of desperation, because the baby in question is gone gone gone. The chorus is uplifting, but it's just self-delusion on the singer's part, an attempt to recast his groveling in a favorable light, and while it works at the time, any reflection brings the whole thing down. There's even a line about being unable to sing: "Now I can't sing a love song like the way it's meant to be, well I guess I'm not that good anymore." That moment at the end of the song last night, then, was a perfect interpretation of the song's core, a resetting, however practical in intent, that cut through the delusion in the original version to something remarkably honest.

Now, I came to that show for artifice, and I got it in abundance, and it was wonderful. But that little moment of honesty is probably, for all I might wish otherwise, what I will keep with me.

Along, of course, with the awesome lighting rig and the close-up view of Jon's butt.

God I love pop music.
posted by Mike B. at 11:07 AM 0 comments

Monday, November 28, 2005

There's something really appealing about the following excerpt from the story about marble falling off the Supreme Court building:

Ed Fisher, a government worker, said some of the marble pieces shattered, spraying the terrace four floors below the pediment with smaller chunks of stone. A group of students from Columbus, Ohio, tried to pocket some of the fragments as souvenirs, Fisher said.

"A few of us attempted to. The police officers were like 'you have to put that back,'" said Sarah Rosenblum, 13, a member of the 8th grade class.

I like that she first used the word "attempted" because she realized she was talking to a reporter, then lost her resolve and went back to teenager-ese. I guess it helps that this is the best possible way to tell that story.

Also, it's probably not a good sign that I see the headline "Pieces Fall From Supreme Court Facade" and think they mean this figuratively. They do not. If Sarah Rosenblum was writing the headline, she would have added "(The Supreme Court Like the Building, Not Like the Institution).")

I forgot that I had a review in Flagpole on Wednesday of T. Raumschiere's Blitzkrieg Pop. Man, talk about false advertising...

posted by Mike B. at 3:33 PM 0 comments

Normally I would not bother you folks with this stuff here, but since I already posted my in-progress, here's what I ended up going with:

Maxi Geil - Making Love in the Sunshine
Roman - I Found Love
R. Kelly - Sex in the Kitchen (Remix)
Missy Elliot feat. Ciara - Lose Control (Jacques Lu Cont Remix)
Rihanna - Pon De Replay [look, I can google!]
Amerie - 1 Thing
Vitalic - My Friend Dario
Robyn - Be Mine
Backstreet Boys - Incomplete
Rachel Stevens - I Said Never Again (But Here We Are)
Bratz - So Good
Art Brut - Good Weekend
Brooke Valentine - Girlfight
Kelly Clarkson - Behind These Hazel Eyes
Ludacris - Pimpin All Over the World
Juliet - On the Dance Floor
Weezer - Beverly Hills
System of a Down - BYOB
Akon - Lonely
Basement Jaxx - Oh My Gosh

The fourth one will probably end up getting folded into the non-remix votes and the first two won't register. I also had a hard time deciding what Juliet song to vote for, but I assume it'll end up being a moot point. Half of the songs or so are "meh, these could go anywhere in my top 50, really" choices.

Songs I almost voted for that may end up in a later edition of this list:

Ralph Myerz - L.i.p.s.t.i.c.k.
Kathleen Edwards - Back to Me
Hot Hot Heat - Goodnight Goodnight
M83 - Teen Angst
Dragonette - Competition
Ashlee Simpson - Boyfriend
Girls Aloud - Grafitti My Soul
Spoon - I Turn My Camera On

Spoon and Ashlee I haven't heard enough, the latter I actually forgot to get from Abby and so only heard for the first time this Thursday on Radio Disney, but daaaaamn, it's good. I really like "Teen Angst" but can't in good conscience vote for M83. The Ralph Myerz track I almost went with but Basement Jaxx got in instead. I don't really know if that Dragonette song or that Kathleen Edwards song were singles. The Girls Aloud will most likely end up in the Rachel Stevens slot, but I need more time.

Anyway.

posted by Mike B. at 12:28 PM 0 comments

Friday, November 25, 2005

Hey, lookit me, I'm on the radio. (I haven' t actually heard it yet, but so I am told.)

ADDENDUM: I've heard it! It sounds good. If you're curious, the first song played is called "Magotty Vagina" (for now, anyway) and will not be on the album, but if you come see the band, we often play it. The second one will probably be called "Abu Ghraib" and will be on the album; I wrote about half the lyrics for it yesterday while riding around central New York and looking at snowy hills and like that.

posted by Mike B. at 9:55 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, November 23, 2005

Also, apparently a certain website wants its top 20 singles of the year voted for by Monday, and as I will pretty much be incommunicado until Monday, I need some help. Please give me suggestions. Here is what I have so far:

Maxi Geil - Making Love in the Sunshine
Roman - I Found Love
R. Kelly - Sex in the Kitchen (Remix)
Missy Elliot - Lose Control (JLC Remix)
Rhiannon - Pon De Replay
Amerie - 1 Thing
Vitalic - My Friend Dario
Robyn - Be Mine
Backstreet Boys - Incomplete
Rachel Stevens - I Said Never Again (But Here We Are)

I have put almost no thought into this so far, though. (I assume some part of the fifth song is innaccurate, whether it be the artist name, the title, or the spelling.)

ADDENDUM: Also, probably:

Art Brut - Good Weekend

posted by Mike B. at 12:10 PM 0 comments

I have an article in Flagpole this week about Thanksgiving and music, sorta. You should read it, and discuss it here, but keep your damn hands off me. I'm sorry, I don't know where that came from.

posted by Mike B. at 11:42 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

Hi all--I know everybody'll be leaving for their Thanksgiving breaks in the next day or two, but just wanted to give you a heads up that I'll be included in an NPR piece about NaSoAlMo to be broadcast on All Things Considered sometime in the next week. I'll post an update when I get more specific info, so watch this space if you get a chance and/or check in with Douglas. The piece may or may not feature my song "Your Sweater Says Twee But Your Ass Says Goddamn," which is about pretty much what it sounds like.

The album's actually going very well--I have three songs totally finished, three songs finished except for vocals, and two songs I still need to work up, but I'm hoping to get almost everything but the vocals done before the break and then write lyrics on the Amtrak, which has been productive in the past for some reason.

Titles I am considering for the album itself:

Beaver Fever (as a song will be called)
Four Matched Pairs and One Outlier, Bounded (this assuming I end up filling out the half-hour with an instrumental intro and outro)
Ooh This Is Going to Make Simon Mad

Please note that I am really bad with titles, so any other suggestions are welcome. Here's one of the finishers.

posted by Mike B. at 2:18 PM 0 comments

Monday, November 21, 2005

The things you learn:

Gordon recalls that he and his colleagues fancied themselves the intellectual descendants of George Orwell and Edmund Wilson, with bits of Evelyn Waugh and P.G. Wodehouse thrown in for levity's sake...Jacob Weisberg, Slate's editor and a former Yale Daily News staffer, says, "Harvard is the place where people make more aggressively oracular pronouncements. At Yale, it was more like covering the anti-apartheid rally as if it were the invasion of Grenada."

Huh. See, during my four years at a college newspaper, I mainly thought of myself as me, and my concerns were writing well and possibly getting people to write angry letters about me. (I failed in the latter ambition.) I also had no idea I was supposed to be angling for a plush summer internship. If only I could have traveled into the future and watched episodes from last season's Gilmore Girls!

Of course, I also turned down an offer to be arts editor because I didn't want to deal with not sleeping one night a week, i.e. I was lazy. So it's less that I'm bitter and more that I'm surprised. I didn't even know this kind of thing was an option!

posted by Mike B. at 3:25 PM 0 comments

Thursday, November 17, 2005

Not really much time today, but a few little things to tide you over.

Two commercials that have been bugging the hell out of me lately: the version of the Walk the Line trailer (the "targeted at men" version, I assume, since the other one I've seen was kinda fluffy) that has a bunch of critical quotes and uses as its soundtrack what sounds like porno music, kinda bland funk with electronic drums. People! It's a movie about Johnny Cash! Why would you choose porn music when you could have "I Walk the Line" or "A Boy Named Sue" or, uh, anything he's ever done? Jesus.

The other one that's been driving me nuts is the Hallmark commercials they're running right now. All of them are offensive in some way or other but the one that really makes me depressed shows a bunch of people standing around a living room in sweaters, singing, and then you pan down to see one of those goddamn free-standing toy ornaments they sell, this particular one being a snowman at a piano that sings songs, and the people are singing along to the goddamn toy. Not singing along to an actual person at an actual piano but a toy snowman. And then they cut to the dining room, where the meal has been abandoned and a cat jumps on the table to eat the food. No one is eating because they've all joined a toy snowman choir. It's the saddest goddamn thing I've ever seen. It's like Christmas at the Anorexics'.

Speaking of Christmas, New York has been in the upper sixties until today, and humid as hell. And yet everyone acts like it's the weather we should be having in mid-November. I passed a baby in a stroller yesterday wearing a wool hat and a down jacket. It's sixty-eight degrees, people! This wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that decorations have already gone up, including the horrible Christmas Village in Union Square, a bunch of candy-striped stalls where people sell gifts. This in and of itself wouldn't be so bad if it didn't make it much harder to get anywhere because it makes the most heavily trafficked parts of Union Square really crowded. Argh. I could conceivably have enjoyed these last few moments of warmth if we hadn't all been pretending it's Christmas.

You do all realize George Bush keeps absurdly pushing back against the criticism of pre-war intelligence because it's effectively distracting people from the fact that we're coming reeeeaaaal close to invading Syria, right?

If you wanted to discuss Tuesday's Gilmore Girls, this would be a good place to do so, as I have apparently forgotten the other thing(s) I had to say.

posted by Mike B. at 11:19 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, November 16, 2005

Here is a Madonna review in Flagpole that is sort of the compacted version of a longer analysis I hope to get up later today. So if it leaves you wondering what the hell I'm talking about, just give me a few hours. (Lord willing.) But, of course, I do think it works on its own. Mostly.

posted by Mike B. at 11:36 AM 0 comments

Just last night, like a bolt from the blue, I realized why much of the NYT's (pop) cultural coverage, while good, is also hilarious. It's not really the cluelessness of it--I grew up reading an indescribably clueless local newspaper, to say nothing of Newsweek, who once claimed Nine Inch Nails was a rap group, and trust me, the Times is a lot more on the ball than the vast majority of their competitors.

No, it's hilarious because every article falls into one of two categories:

1) Look at this thing we found! Let us introduce you to it!

...or...

2) Look at this thing people are doing without us introducing you to it first! Why would they do something like that?

#1 is inherent both in the house style (formal, just a wee bit didactic) and their audience, which is big enough for a certain segment to be so aware of the subject for any article about it to seem obvious, another segment to be vaguely familiar with the subject and grateful for the article, and another segment so totally outside any field of reference that would include the subject that they pretty much need to be educated about it from the ground up. And this goes both ways--just as I would assume a society lady on the UES falls into the latter category when it comes to, say, Art Brut (the band, not the movement), so would I need a ground-up education when it comes to anything involving Staten Island. It's a little charming, a little insulting, and mildly hilarious.

When it starts to get really funny, though, is when those assumptions spill over into #2 and they start condemning things (formally, didactically). Because it's a different kind of condemnation than you'd get from, say, the Post. It's not self-righteous outrage, it's an almost parental sense of disappointment, the impression that you've strayed somehow, and that they're not going to make it a big deal or anything, but you've clearly taken the wrong path, since, after all, it is not a path the Times has chosen for you. And when I say "the Times," I do mean the institution, as I don't think it's necessarily individual writers' fault. Because the house style encourages restraint, propriety, and distance, you end up with an almost passive-aggressive criticism. Of course, this makes the whole thing even funnier since it seems like the Times often criticizes violations of precisely those norms--things that do not show restraint, propriety, and distance. Things, in other words, lacking good taste. Quel drole, no?

posted by Mike B. at 10:56 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, November 15, 2005

styx made my head hurt

Ow. Ow. Ow. Don't listen to "Mr. Roboto" after eating a Big Mac, kids. It's like too much America all at once or something.

(more substantive posts later.)

posted by Mike B. at 1:38 PM 0 comments

Friday, November 11, 2005

Hey sailor boy!

Was anyone else confused by this ad for Pitchfork's NYE "bash"? I just thought it meant Mu was playing, but that was not the case.


Not playing!

I guess they're just saying, "Hey, you should come, there'll be hot Asian girls!" Nice to see then being so open about indie-kid fetishes, I guess. Nothing wrong with that!

posted by Mike B. at 1:37 PM 0 comments

Of course, what is a birthday without a birthday song?

posted by Mike B. at 12:19 PM 0 comments

I just whacked the fuck out of my head on a shelf and have a shit ton of work-work to do today (all of which is apparently making me swear more) so just two quick things for now.

Number one, give a look to Daughters of Invention, a MP3-ish blog that looks to be Toronto-centric and is real good so far.

Number two, here is Miss Clap's comment on the NYT review of Get Rich or Die Trying:

I think Scott also figured out that 50 Cent is actually Kevin. I mean, you don't totally trash the special kid's dreams, but you tell them that they should try a little harder.

Hey, wait a minute--she tells me I should try harder all the time!

Also, if you feel the urge, you could wish Miss Clap a happy birthday, as it is tomorrow. In her honor, here is a picture of Prince with a mustache and a picture of Kofi Annan's Nobel Peace Prize:





(If someone wanted to give her a nice present, they could photoshop in her name to that last one.)

Happy birthday, baby.

posted by Mike B. at 10:36 AM 0 comments

Thursday, November 10, 2005

Janine points us to an interesting Boston Post article (bugmenot) about Def Jam Left, which will I guess be Jay-Z's boutique label for undie hip-hop. Since I've already compared two of his contemporaries to the developmentally disabled, let's start with the positive:

As Jay-Z told Billboard, the label is designed to be ''an artist-driven label with very low deals so people are not pressured by first-week SoundScan [sales], so we can build artists."

This certainly sounds great, although it's maybe worth noting that if any artists get developed at major labels these days, it's hip-hop artists. That said, Jay's A&R choices have been far from inspiring (both as Def Jam president and as a mentor previously), and if there's any better indication that he's simply looking to get a share of that college kid market, it's signing the uber-respectable Roots.

But what's more questionable is nonsense like this:

With Def Jam Left, and his inaugural signing of the Roots, Jay-Z has created a boutique label for rap artists with more on their minds than the run-of-the-mill topics stifling mainstream rap. For the most part, commercial hip-hop is where rock was in the early 1990s before Nirvana and its seminal 1991 album ''Nevermind" flushed away all that brain-dead hair-band nonsense.

There's so many lazy assumptions here it's almost impossible to parse, so let's just zero in on the subtext. The key error in the analogy here is that Nirvana didn't simply differ from Warrant in that Warrant was singing about fucking and Nirvana was singing about...uh, how everything sucked, I guess. (What was Nirvana singing about?) There was also a pretty big difference musically[1], as I think everyone would agree. But there's no mention here of bringing in "forward-thinking" producers[2] to go along with the "socially conscious" rappers. The implication being that you could finally "get" people to listen to raps about global warming if only they could get Just Blaze to give 'em a beat.

But how would this be an improvement over what folks like this writer perceive as the present model, i.e. get a great beat and people won't care so much about the actual rapping? If you think people aren't listening to the words anyway, then what the hell does it matter if the rapper is talking about? If the listeners are so undemanding as to listen to lyrics critics perceive them to not actually care about, why would they care about undie lyrics either?

This seems foolish. You can say "once there were mainstream audiences for both N.W.A and A Tribe Called Quest" but the fact is that even if you took the vocals off, anyone could tell the difference between Straight Outta Compton and Low End Theory. I'm not sure that would be true with the oppositions being proposed here--after all, Kayne did produce songs on both Jay-Z's and Common's albums. In other words, it seems insulting both to mainstream and undie hip-hop to assume that the latter's been unsuccessful simply because the producer suck (I do tend to think undie producers suck, but then I don't particularly like the MCs, either) and the former's been successful despite the fact that no one likes the rappers. This last point is clearly wrong, and not a bit short-sighted: even if they don't like the lyrics per se, there's a musicality about the vocals of lots of mainstream rappers--call it "flow" or whatever--that is a big part of what makes them appealing. "In Da Club" would be great even if he was reading his grocery list both because the beat's great and because of his voice, which is far more compelling than it deserves to be.

It's just all a little too reminiscent of the perpetual indie-rock daydream that if only our bands got promoted, man, everyone would recognize how good they are and they'd be successful. Well, no. For one thing, lots of bands get heavily promoted and don't do well; there's lots of luck involved. For another, the band that I think comes closest to this dream, the New Pornographers, clearly lack the kind of straighforward lyrics that would be necessary to have a radio hit, neither simple enough nor ridiculous enough to really connect. Ditto for undie rappers. I'm not saying there aren't scattered travesties, nor am I going to claim that A&R people aren't generally morons. But to claim that there's this huge untapped underground that just needs a major-label push to break through a la Nirvana seems way off.

[1] Although if you want to be that way, you could argue that in some senses it was just a recentering of influences--early pop-metal's debt to certain strands of punk and 70s hard rock was often noted, and arguably Nirvana just took it back to a different set of inspirations while also adding bits of 80s college-rock.
[2] Like the ones detailed in Making Beats, which I've been meaning to write up a response to for some time.

posted by Mike B. at 11:20 AM 0 comments

Actually, thinking about it more, it's even funnier to think of Trent Reznor as host of a children's television show. Especially if all the music was NIN songs done with toy instruments--you know, like "Head Like a Hole" arranged for Casio, animal keyboard and plastic-stringed guitar. It would be adorable!

posted by Mike B. at 11:12 AM 0 comments

Last night Miss Clap and I watched all of the Trapped in the Closet DVD. A discussion ensued afterwards about how R. Kelly is a bit of a Kevin himself. I disagreed. I would say that if 50 is Kevin, Kells is Dewey:



You know, the kind of kid who you can't quite tell or not if he needs to be in the special class, but you put him there anyway just to be safe. Sometimes he'll bowl you over with a burst of totally unexpected genius, but then other times he'll go nuts and bite someone's leg, and back in the special class he goes. (Let it be noted that Dewey is perhaps one of my favorite characters in all of television.)

posted by Mike B. at 10:43 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, November 09, 2005

...or, rather, it would be time to go home if I wasn't watching videos of Butterstick.



There's a good booty shot at the end, so if someone wanted to cut this to "Baby I Got Your Money" I'd be eternally grateful.

posted by Mike B. at 7:28 PM 0 comments

Ever have one of those random thoughts that make you laugh and you don't really know why? I had one the other day that was just the very basic concept of Trent Reznor as a parent. I think it was specifically the image of his kid wandering around the house and hearing dad in his home studio recording vocals at the top of his lungs.

And hey, Trent's looking pretty stacked these days, huh?



Anyway. Time to go home.

posted by Mike B. at 7:19 PM 0 comments

Not to stir up shit or anything, but is David Brooks saying Jews have no character? He starts his review of a book about admission policies at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton like this:

A few years ago, I wrote a book about the rise of a new educated class, the people with 60's values and 90's money who go to Starbucks, shop at Whole Foods and drive Volvos. A woman came up to me after one of my book talks and said, "You realize what you're talking about is the Jews taking over America."

My eyes bugged out, but then I realized that she was Jewish and she knew I was, too, and between us we could acknowledge there's a lot of truth in that statement. For the Jews were the vanguard of a social movement that over the course of the 20th century transformed the American university system and the nature of the American elite.

This is a large part of the story Jerome Karabel, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, tells in "The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton."

...and ends up here:

Furthermore, while he leaves the impression that he believes academic merit should be the dominant criteria for college admissions, and can't fathom why anybody would want to have jocks running around campus, he never steps outside the story, the way an essayist might, to measure what was lost and gained with the decline of the chivalric ethos and the rise of the meritocratic one. Those old WASP bluebloods may have been narrow and prejudiced, but they did at least have a formula for building character. Today we somehow sense that character matters, and it still vaguely plays a role in admissions decisions, but our thoughts about character - what it is and how to build it - are amorphous and ineffectual.

I'm just sayin'. (Emphasis mine, obvs.)

(ADDENDUM: Forgot to mention that this all just reminded me of Gilmore Girls.)

In other book news, there are certainly things I could say about this, both positive and negative (positive: good point about American literature seeming unable to address politics without only condemning it, although this is hardly the only subject it treats in such a way [pop culture, cough cough], negative: telling people for approximately the ten gazillionth time they should Write More Like Orwell--we know, we know--and not even bringing up The Public Burning), but maybe it would be easier to point you to the final paragraph of this (very good and admirably restrained) review, which makes a similar point in much less space:

Seth speaks of the "evil century past" and ends his book with the wish that we "believe in humane logic and perhaps, in due course, in love." If the new century seems set on disregarding these earnest hopes, that may be, at least in part, because we're still learning the lessons of the "evil" recent past through the literary romanticism of the 19th century.

Zing!

posted by Mike B. at 6:38 PM 0 comments

Over at The Rambler, Tim has a series of good posts up about the idea of "applicability" in music and how this might be a better way of talking about it than "relevance" i.e. it's not about whether the work itself seems to be addressing events in your life, either world-historical or personal; it's about whether the work makes itself a part of your daily life and an event in and of itself. It gets started here and there's a little more here, but for my money, he really gets rolling with this post. Key bit for me:

...a bugbear of mine is that music (especially classical music) is almost invariably talked about as though its components are such things as melody, harmony and rhythm, when in fact it is more useful to talk about music as formed of time, sound, memory, quotation, distortion, and so on. What's more, these terms actually apply to all music, rather than the small subset of Western art music 1600-1900, so they're doubly useful (if admittedly nebulous). These are qualities, like light, colour and space in the visual arts, that listeners encounter in every moment of their daily lives, and it is at these conjunctions that music can attain 'applicability'. Because when a work has something to say, or to reveal, about one of these things, that revelation can be passed through the listener into their daily experience.

After this he goes somewhere I'm not entirely sure I'm willing to follow him--it leans a little too heavily on the questionable idea of art as something grandly life-changing, and I'm not sure what he's describing (to be more than a little snarky about it, you're walking down the street, and then bang, Messiaen!) is in any way unique to art, at least not in any way that wouldn't be better accomplished by making the now-standard argument for a widening of the definition of art. (Isn't anything that changes our perspectives art?) But the bit I've quoted above is very good, and, it seems to me, very important. Although we're primarily concerned with different things (I think Tim's working on the vitality of art music whereas I'm dealing with understanding pop), it reminds me of something I used to blather on about: the necessity of discovering the meaning of pop songs not just in the lyrics but also, maybe primarily, in the music, and not through the shallow, uninformed "semiotic" readings that are usually the best we get on this score. Tim here is, in part, explaining why this is so important: it's these qualities, not the formal elements, that follow you out into the world.

He's also (though I think he's dancing around the point) making a great case for the importance of personal criticism. Personal criticism is oft-condemned these days, especially when folks who actually get paid to write things are feeling threatened by "bloggers." But when it's done right, personal criticism addresses the phenomenon Tim describes: the way music interacts with the rest of your life, with those horrible banal bits we seem to dislike associating with art, and this is maybe the primary way we experience music. Personal criticism isn't an excuse to write about yourself instead of the subject you're criticizing, it's an opportunity to take music into the social realm in which it actually functions. Personal criticism isn't narrow, formal criticism is, because it puts the subject in a box and tries to observe it in isolation; personal criticism lets it run free in the world, talk to other people, go to parties, drive to work, cook, clean. And, if anything, this gets us closer to the truth.

posted by Mike B. at 6:35 PM 0 comments

Yay, the internets is working again.

Anyway, you will find two new reviews by me in Flagpole this week: The OC Mix 5 and the Fiery Furnaces. They're both pretty good reviews, I feel, so check 'em out. Although maybe I shouldn't have leaned on the Bitter Tea crutch at the end of the Furnaces review. Meh.

posted by Mike B. at 6:28 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, November 08, 2005

I saw 50 Cent on Letterman last night and they made the mistake of interviewing him. While undeniably painful, the interview plus the performance (with the Late Show band doing the backing OMG most painful thing ever and a totally unresponsive audience of middle-aged midwestern tourists) made me realize something about Mr. 50: he's sort of like that one kid in the special needs class--let's call him Kevin--who likes thinking he's really tough and so the teachers always tell him he's tough and he says things like "I'm really tough!" and yells a lot when they play whiffle ball. You know that kid? Yeah. That's 50 Cent.

Don't get me wrong, I love the Kevins of the world--they're awesome and they don't take shit from anybody--but when they start doing things like this, you just have to say, "Kevin, calm down. Time for a nap, OK? You can promote your biopic later."

posted by Mike B. at 11:41 AM 0 comments

Monday, November 07, 2005

This may be slightly outside my readership's field of reference (as, honestly, it's pretty much outside my field of reference), but does anyone have anything to say about When Music Resists Meaning: the Major Writings of Herbert Brün? I saw it in St. Mark's Books and was intrigued, but it's a bit pricey for my blood (though it does come with a CD of his music) and I wasn't entirely sure it was up my alley. Anyone read the book itself or any of Brün's writing?

posted by Mike B. at 12:06 PM 0 comments

There are those of us who remember Esselle, although we appear to no longer even have the ability to "dig around," as Hillary used to direct us to do. (Ah! memories.) I probably should have realized something was up when I stopped getting referral links from the post about Brent's Beastie Boys review.

At any rate, it is sorta back, in group form, and is called Recidivism. It is very good and takes very little time to read because when things are short they are funnier. You should check it every day, or else you might miss something you would be sorry to have missed. Am I not selling this very well? Fair enough.

In somewhat related news, if you haven't been checking Quo Vadimus lately, you should.

Finally, the comments are actually working again, so Blogger's get turned off. Weep quietly.

posted by Mike B. at 11:47 AM 0 comments

Friday, November 04, 2005

OK, I'm just going to bite the bullet and turn Blogger comments back on. So, comment away if you'd like.

posted by Mike B. at 11:51 AM 2 comments

Uh, hi. I am here, it's just, well, things are busy. Also, what's up with no comments? Damned if I know. Last time I wrote a nasty note to the commenting company (who I pay, BTW) I got back one line of snark denying everything.

Anyway, I should let you know that I'm doing NatSoAlMo, a fact I am trying to post in as many public places as possible so I actually finish the damn thing. I currently have about half the songs finished except for vocals and another 2-3 partially written. It'll be mainly rocky electro-pop with some electronic pop-rock. And klezmer. Nothing but klezmer.

After this I think I'm going to start writing songs with real key changes (as opposed to truck driver's gear changes)--you know, like real composers do, with pedal chords and everything. Sticking with one key is working fairly well but I'm worried I'm getting too dependent on certain shifts, primarily to the fourth and sixth.

If I get time, I will write up a producer's critique of the new Madonna album. It does not seem terribly likely, however.

posted by Mike B. at 11:21 AM 0 comments