Death of the Monster

Remember the monster album? It blasted out of the studio, or it crept up from under the charts. It came winged with anticipation, or it slithered into the playlists. Either way, it defined pop music. It was, for a time, inevitable, shooting out hit after hit like a Roman candle. Certain summers of my life are defined by certain albums, even if I never bought them or liked them. "The Wall." "Rumours." "Born in the USA." "The Joshua Tree." "Parallel Lines." "Tapestry." "Thriller." "Nevermind." "Frampton Comes Alive."

When did it die? And which hook-fest was the last? Off the top of my head I thought mid-1990s: Live (1994), Hootie and the Blowfish (1994), Alanis Morissette (1996). After that? Late '90s: Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, were they monsters? There was that one Linkin Park album.

Anything since 2000? Is it safe to say the monster rock album died with the millennium?

On Account of You I Nearly Heard

The Opry.

In Which It Gets Worse

I wish it wasn't so easy to bash the public school systems. Sometimes when I read stories that send me in that direction, I stop and think possibly they're reacting to the material they get from the homes and streets. Surely most teachers are doing their best.

Then I hear what's going on in my 17-year-old son's classrooms. Now, my son's school district is rural and not especially geared toward sending every kid to college. Mine was suburban, wealthy, and highly competitive. Yet where his seems to me to fail him is not institutionally, but on the level of individual teachers. His middle school education was quite good. Some of his high school teachers have been inspirational. But more of them have been flops.

He's in 11th grade. His course in American history -- or whatever name they disguise that by these days -- is coming to an end and the finale is a big project that will largely determine his grade for the quarter. In my high school, the college-tracked kids were taking electives by that time, and I remember writing two 20-page papers, on topics of the student's choice, approved by the teacher. One of mine was on the legal challenge to Reconstruction after the Civil War, the other was on the Congress of Vienna.

My son's comparable assignment: To write about the significance of the lyrics of "We Didn't Start the Fire" by Billy Joel.

And it gets worse. I might be able to grasp that assignment if this was a class of low-achievers who were hyped about nothing but pop music and this was a current hit song. It's not, they're not, and it's not. These are the the district's college-bound kids. And this is the best the school district has to offer them: Analyze the lyrics of some dimwit pop star's ripped off (from R.E.M.) oldie. A third of the references even the writer didn't fully understand (but he'd heard of them), I bet, and anything that can't be jammed into a rhyme isn't in there. This is called "studying history."

And it gets worse.

They don't even have to listen to the whole song! The teacher broke them up in groups and gave a little bit of it to each clump of kids. My son's group's verse is 1952 to 1956. "When I was a boy" comparisons are tiresome, but how else am I to judge this? My son is as smart as I was, as capable of mental work as I was. On his own, books he's read include Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist" and John Dower's book on the society and culture of post-defeat Japan. When I was a senior in high school I took an elective history course called "Crucial Years," which covered 1945 to the present, the present being 1978. We spent half a year on the Cold War, in other words. My son for the equivalent part of his public school education will spend a few days on a part of a song from the 1980s about the early 1950s.

And it gets worse.

The students don't even have to research everything in their assigned verse. They were told to each take one angle on it: one to write about the political, or social, or foreign policy, or pop culture qualities of the words. And then one of them has the job of putting it all together for a presentation.

And it gets worse.

When they got the assignment, they started researching it the way kids do nowadays: by doing Google searches. The first term they plugged in was "Brigit Bardot." The first thing they discovered, besides racy pictures, was a Web site in which someone went through the song, line by line, and wrote about the identity and significance of each thing in it.

Research done. No reading required. No learning required. The slim chance that the project would lead to something bigger than the song died aborning. But when the generation that is about to get the ability to vote makes its mark on America, it's good to know they'll have Billy Joel as their touchstone.

Does it get worse than that?

I'd Like to Sell the World a Bra

Another Flower Child dream has its petals plucked.

Remember "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing"? That anthem of utopian youth? Turns out it was like that "Star Trek" episode where the space hippies commandeer the shuttle and go to the planet that is supposed to be paradise and it's full of toxic plants.

Or something.

When The New Seekers were at the height of their fame, they had five records in the American charts at the same time and played to packed stadiums across the world. Their best-known song, "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing", adopted by Coca-Cola for its famous "Hilltop" advert, sold 96,000 copies in one day and recorded a total of 12 million sales.

But due to a contract dispute about her entitlement to the proceeds of further sales, Ms Graham has not had a penny in royalties since 1973. She left the band in 1978 and after trying to forge a solo career eventually decided in 2000 to find another career.

And so that earnest alto ended up ... fitting bras on customers at a department store in Colchester.

"I started as an assistant in womenswear and moved to the lingerie department. Then I became a qualified bra-fitter; a representative of a bra company offered me training. It was great work, making women feel good about themselves and how they looked. Everybody moves on from the different phases in their life."

Just Under the Radar

Nick Lowe never got to big to play a club or a riverfront stage, which is the only place I like to see live music. Thank the radio gods for that, because he's always been one of my favorites. Here he tells the story of how to age gracefully in rock while avoiding success:

Q: You were an influential figure in punk and new wave, and there was a time when what you were doing was right in step with popular music. Then on your later albums it seemed that your styles starting going backward in time toward pre-rock sounds. Did you make a conscious choice to not absorb current musical fashion?

A: I've always liked being an outsider, ever since I had an early brush with stardom at a very early age, and it was awful. I made up my mind then that if I saw myself ever getting really huge - which was very unlikely [because] I'm much too lazy a person - but if I ever saw myself getting that way, I would take steps to make sure it didn't happen because it's always much more fun to just be on the brink of making it. It's just about the most exciting place you can be. It's no fun being unknown and working away, and it's awful being really famous.

Q: Many of your fans feel you haven't been given what you are due.

A: I rest very easy at night with the way things are. Believe me, I've seen [fame] at close range. It's absolutely vile. When my career as a pop star finished, which was about 1981, I saw it coming because I'd been a record producer as well, so I had my feet in both camps. When it did come, I totaled it up: I had a couple of hits, I produced some good records, written some songs for other people.

Which, in some other people, might sound like a post-lack-of-success rationalization. But having followed the man's career and met him in person a few times, I'm inclined to say he means it.

See Sharp

A live musician discovers the last straw. Now I'm Losing Gigs To GUITAR HERO!

I can outsing, outplay and out write most of the American Idol winners and contestants since it's inception and Local Karaoke gives me a fucking nightmare headache inside of 2 minutes. How deep in the minority can I be? Are they majority of people out there THAT fucking tone deaf that they think these drunk college chicks actually sound good screatching their way through a totally off key version of a Carrie Underwood song? And I can play a guitar pretty Damn well...A REAL guitar that is..So you mean to tell me, watching some drunk ass GI or Fratboy attempting to play "Sweet Child O Mine" on a guitar shaped GAME CONTROLLER,. flubbing notes at that, is a more soulful experience then hearing me play and sing? IF so, FUCK YOU! That's what I have to Say...That says it all. Remember....We Reap what we sow and we've got some major fucking problems. I say we who do give a shit, need to vote with our wallets.

THIS IS A CALL TO ARMS. IT'S IN YOUR HANDS PEOPLE.

[hat tip]

Church of the Rock

Mark Steyn charges like Attila through the history of modern pop music here. He's a conservative fellow, so his rampage hits the usual soft targets:

The music biz have been humbug revolutionaries ever since 1955 when Bill Haley and Elvis put them in the permanent-revolution business. The kids tore up movie seats to “Rock Around the Clock,” even though its composer wrote it as a foxtrot, and its lyricist was born in 1890. When Max Freedman was a rebellious teenager, the big hits were “The Merry Widow Waltz,” Kipling’s “Road To Mandalay,” and “When A Fellow’s On The Level With A Girl That’s On The Square.” And, unlike most revolutions, the regime itself — in the shape of RCA, Columbia, Warner Brothers, and the other corporate entities that dominate the business to this day — proved far wilier survivors than Louis XVI. They’ve made a very nice living out of ersatz revolution.

And they're still at it, though lately, as if acknowledging the staleness of the product, they're selling new technologies and repackagings, not new sounds. The boss whom I call Old Hateful is deeply devoted to 1960s rock, and he now owns the same set of Buffalo Springfield songs on CDs in, I would estimate, a dozen different enhanced format and box set incarnations.

And if what I heard the other day in the record store is right, they're about to market it to him again in the newest audiophile format, which will be -- I kid you not -- vinyl. And they know he's going to buy it.

Rock 'n' roll and its bad child rock have been ubiquitous in my lifetime. It's hard to imagine a post-rock era of pop, or how such a future would look back on our experience and comprehend it.

Nothing is harder to recover than a faded fad. I read and read about packed houses in 1840s America making the rafters echo when T.D. Rice performed "Jim Crow." I read a description of the skinny white guy shuffling and preening like a silly black man and spouting those simple, almost nonsensical lyrics. What was so special about any of that?

Well, our future may well ask, what exactly was it about (Sir) Mick Jagger shouting "I can't get no satisfaction" that brought 80,000 of us at a time into arena bowls at $40 a pop?

What Steyn gets at eventually, which has been on my mind a lot lately, is the essential, deeply conservative nature of modern pop. Not topically, certainly. But musically.

Paul Simon and I once had a longish conversation about this and eventually he conceded that even the best rockers had nevertheless been unable to develop beyond a very basic harmonic language: There isn’t enough there to teach in a “music” course.

Sometimes it seems rock is the most conservative music on earth. Mozart's Symphony #40 is dated 1788. Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" was completed in 1824. In 32 years, working in the same genre with the same musical form and the same orchestra, look how the geniuses re-invented the whole notion of music!

OK, "Rock Around the Clock" is released in 1954. Add 32 and you get 1986. Take away arrangements and production, and for my money there's not an inch of daylight, musically, between "Rock Around the Clock" and "Walk Like An Egyptian." Stripped down to just lyrics and chords, they could be from the same year. In fact, a Haley recording of "Rock Around the Clock" charted at #12 as recently as 1974 (When "American Graffiti" was hot).

Measure it against other yardsticks: 32 years is the distance between Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue." Subtract 32 from Sinatra's "Learnin' the Blues" (1955) and popular music is back in the Paul Whiteman Orchestra days. It's not even clear you're talking about the same thing over time, except in terms of popularity in the genre and perceived cultural influence.

Not only is rock conservative; it's positively reactionary. It's a bully-music. Old Hateful doesn't disguise his contempt or scorn for any other form of music (except certain jazz and blues artists he likes for personal reasons). It took rappers a decade to get past old James Brown samples. "Rock Around the Clock" was perfectly cast in "Blackboard Jungle," where Vic Morrow's character and the other delinquents literally destroy the music of the older generation and then substitute for it their own.

This probably is the most degenerative quality it has. It quickly becomes a self-referential loop. Like the teenager's mind itself, which regards every lost love, every dream crushed, as the end of the world. Rock ultimately cuts itself off not only from its roots, but from the references that might enrich it.

The old middle-brow middle-class couples who subscribed to the symphony every season and dutifully sat there through Beethoven, Bartók, Brahms, and Bernstein are all but extinct, and pitied for their inability to cut loose and boogie in the same way we feel sorry for those trapped in a loveless marriage. What a difference it would make if grade-schoolers could know just enough of a smattering of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony to recognize the excellent joke “The Simpsons” makes of it. What an achievement it would be if every high-school could acquire a classical catalogue as rich as that used in Looney Tunes when Elmer Fudd goes hunting Daffy Duck or Bugs Bunny. Carl Stalling, who scored those cartoons, often fell back on formula: If someone was in a cave, the orchestra would play “Fingal’s Cave.” But you can’t even do that any more, because no-one gets the joke.

Along with pop music of the day, it might be noted. When Elmer's Slavic-accented hound dog is about to devour Bugs between two huge slices of bread, Stallings' score plays a jaunty little ditty titled "A Cup of Coffee, a Sandwich, and You." Which itself is a referential riff on "A Jug of wine, a loaf of bread - and thou," from the Rubáiyát, which is based on .... and so forth. There's something comforting to a teenage mind, in many cases, to know the first heartbreak in life isn't the end of everything, that it's all happened before and turned out wonderfully.

Without knowing just a little about music before the current decade, you miss the gems of pop, like the lines penned by Smokey Robinson and Stevie Wonder:

Just like Pagliacci did
I try to keep my sadness hid
Smiling in the public eye
But in my lonely room I cry
the tears of a clown
when there's no one around

[And you also wouldn't realize they didn't quite hit it: "Pagliacci" was the title of the opera; the singing, crying clown in it was named Canio, who sometimes referred to himself as pagliaccio -- "clown" in the Italian singular.]

It was Bob Dylan who once called Robinson his favorite American poet. But it's Dylan who often gets touted as rock's genuine poet, and who was nominated for a Nobel Prize in literature every year from 1996 to at least 2004, the year Newsweek called him "the most influential cultural figure now alive."

Certainly he has had poetic influences, and perhaps his music even sent some of his fans to the library in curiosity over who "Verlaine and Rimbaud" were. But I wonder if anyone other than an academic ever held up their poems to Dylan's lyrics and found the latter better verse.

Steyn writes:

A relative culture ends up ever shorter of any relatives to relate to. In educational theory, it’s not about culture vs. “counter-culture” but rather what I once called lunch-counterculture: It’s all lined up for you and you pick what you want. It’s the display case of rotating pies at the diner: one day the student might pick Milton, the next Bob Dylan. But, if Milton and Bob Dylan are equally “valid,” equally worthy of study, then Bob Dylan will be studied and Milton will languish.

Which is an interesting coupling, because both Milton and Dylan in their way deformed the English language. Milton tended to write in word orders that were idiomatic in Latin but not in English. Dylan just scrambles it at will when he needs to rhyme short lines:

Up on Housing Project Hill
It's either fortune or fame
You must pick up one or the other
Though neither of them are to be what they claim

Which is painful, and not English, not Latin, not any grammar known to man. Not even German. The rest of the verse is actually one of his better bits of poetry:

If you're lookin' to get silly
You better go back to from where you came
Because the cops don't need you
And man they expect the same

Which goes somewhere and makes a memorable statement, but hardly ranks him with Rimbaud. A long time ago, in 1965, the poet question was put to Dylan at a press conference and for once he gave the answer I think was about right: "I think of myself more as a song-and-dance man."

Sort of like T.D. Rice all those years ago.

The Meaning of Soul

Wilson Pickett, live in Africa

Song Of The Week

[Posted by reader_iam]

Musical Literacy

[Posted by reader_iam]

Here is an abbreviated list of authors who have written a novel or novels that have inspired songs, musical works and even albums:

Walker Percy, Saul Bellow, John Steinbeck, Paul Bowles, Paul Gallico, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Jack Kerouac, Kurt Vonnegut, Herman Melville, Lewis Carroll, JD Salinger, JRR Tolkein, Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, Tom Robbins, George Orwell, Robert Heinlein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Roger Kahn, Erich Maria Remarque, Miguel de Cervantes, Aldous Huxley, Umberto Eco, William Golding, Alistair Maclean, Thomas Pynchon, Federico Garcia Lorca, Patrick Suskind, Vladimir Nabakov, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Henry Fielding and ... .

Well, I'll cut that one off there. Note that for the purposes of this post, I'm referring specifically to novels, as opposed to works of nonfiction, poems, plays, Greek lit and so forth, though there's also a rich history attached to those, of course.

Here is an abbreviated list of musicians (and/or musical groups) who have been inspired by, specifically, novels:

Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, Natalie Merchant, Al Stewart, Anthrax, Glenn Frey , Animal Logic, U2, Warren Zevon, Woody Guthrie, Yes, Iron Maiden, Yo La Tengo, Green Day, Jackson Brown, Jimmy Buffett, Joni Mitchell, Kate Bush, John Lennon (The Beatles), Radiohead, Roxy Music, Jefferson Airplane, Bob Dylan, Steely Dan, Steve Earle, Sting (and the Police), David Byrne, Don Henley, The Cure, The Doors, Eurythmics, Ambrosia, King Crimson, Leonard Cohen, Blue Oyster Cult, Bruce Springsteen, CSN&Y, Dan Fogelberg, Elton John, Emmylou Harris, Kenny Loggins, Laurie Anderson, Leon Russell, Nirvana, and ... .

The two lists aren't intended to match up, but rather to give a flavor of the diversity of authors who have inspired musicians and musicians who have been inspired by novels. This interplay between artists and art forms is a lifetime fascination of mine; well, why wouldn't it be? I'm a born reader raised by two professional musicians. You could say it's in my blood, and that I was bred to it.

Quite a while back, while researching a related topic, I discovered Artists for Literacy, a project which brings together a diverse group of musicians interested in using music to promote literacy and "literary and artistic" appreciation. These musicians have "donated" songs of theirs which have been inspired by written material--novels, poems, short stories, plays, and various works of nonfiction--to be used in classrooms and similar settings.

One of the handy tools on the site is the SIBL library, a searchable database of Songs Inspired By Literature, which I immediately bookmarked along with the main site URL, and I have referred to it a number of times since. If you're curious about some of the artists--musicians or writers--included in my lists, you can search for them there, since I deliberately restricted my choices to those you can find there. (The one exception is the group Camel, which produced an album "Music Inspired by the Snow Goose," a novel by Paul Gallico. There are videos available on YouTube.) Go play!

*****

Speaking of inspiration, this post was provoked by these two rather extraordinary comments attached to a post here; the larger context is to be found in an earlier post and its lengthy comments section. Fascinating, those discussions, and the rather heavy amount of unconscious irony with which they're laced, don't you think?

There's a lot to be said for using more history and other nonfiction in earlier grades, including "reading" classes, though--given the problems and controversies surrounding text and textbook selection in the public schools--this would pose more of a challenge than I think Althouse is taking into consideration. But to exclude fiction altogether strikes me as a ridiculous proposition, on a number of grounds. Here are just a few of the questions that jumped immediately to mind:

Why either/or? Do we really think one size does, or should, fit all? Fiction has nothing to teach us about real life, the past, the human condition? Kids are going to be magically drawn to fiction if not introduced to it? Reading fiction well just comes naturally for all kids, with no skill set attached to that? Reading fiction has nothing to offer in terms of sharpening analytical skills, including the ability to choose which analytical tool fits a given situation? Cultural literacy has no place in developing minds? What about the fact that many historical artifacts, such as speeches, which certainly qualify as nonfiction in context, make references to literature? Can you truly understand them without a sense of the heritage that inspired them or to which they refer?

Thoughts?

Back In Rotation

[Posted by reader_iam]

Interesting that this moldy oldy is in rotation in video--that is to say, YouTube. Time was, just a few years ago, that it took a real effort to (successfully) acquire even the audio version of it, just for memory's yearbook sake--not to be confused with either nostalgia or sentiment.



Within the year (back in the day) that this song came out, we strenuously and sincerely practiced this in chorus for the upcoming middle school Concert For Our Parents. In keeping with the times, all subtext was dutifully provided--and, for the most part, we dutifully nodded, and sang, and enthusiastically, as practiced. (My problem, retrospectively, is with the "dutifully," to put too fine a point on it. Extrapolate, in the here and now, at your own risk.)

Back now in 2007, I note that this song by the (actual) same band is still unavailable on YouTube, at least that I can find. On the one hand, glory be! On the other--how curious.

Lord knows I wouldn't want to defend either of these songs, or the band, or even why I have them in our, admittedly, vast library of music: the good, the bad, the ugly, the indifferent, the WTF?, and so forth. Still: Isn't it a fun and interesting thing to ponder why, oh, why ANYONE would want to bring back Paper Lace, publicly? I mean, really: What's that about?

Eh, it's Friday night. What can I say? Time for silly stuff.

In a Station of the Metro

[posted by Callimachus]

Charles Babbage invented the computer while Queen Victoria was still a young woman. Lord Byron's daughter, by Byron's detested mathematical wife, helped him do it in one degree or another that can not now be determined, since the historians who study this question are glamored by the celebrity name, and the feminism, and hopelessly invested on one side or another of the question.

That is, Babbage would have invented the modern computer had the technology been available. He hit upon the exact idea that makes a modern computer work, but the technology available to him was brass and wood. He did the best he could, but his machine never came close to being finished. The discovering had to be done all over again in the 1930s.

Yet Babbage is father to our times, our age, our culture. And it is a little known but significant detail of his life that Babbage detested street musicians. He inveighed against it in print ("Observations of Street Nuisances," 1864). He calculated that 25% of his working life had been destroyed by street nuisances. In part that was because he made his contempt for them so public that the public couldn't resist the urge to torment him "with an unending parade of fiddlers, Punch-and-Judys, stilt-walkers, fanatic psalmists, and tub-thumpers. Some neighbors hired musicians to play outside his windows. Others willfully annoyed him with worn-out or damaged wind instruments."

What called to mind that trivia today (I learned it by reading Hugh Kenner's obscure, perfect little book, "The Counterfeiters") was this.

Edna Souza is from Brazil. She's been shining shoes at L'Enfant Plaza [the Washington, D.C., Metro station] for six years, and she's had her fill of street musicians there; when they play, she can't hear her customers, and that's bad for business. So she fights.

Souza points to the dividing line between the Metro property, at the top of the escalator, and the arcade, which is under control of the management company that runs the mall. Sometimes, Souza says, a musician will stand on the Metro side, sometimes on the mall side. Either way, she's got him. On her speed dial, she has phone numbers for both the mall cops and the Metro cops. The musicians seldom last long.

On a certain afternoon in January, she had another one in her sights. But the modern-day Babbage let him go -- reluctantly.

He was too loud, too, Souza says. Then she looks down at her rag, sniffs. She hates to say anything positive about these damned musicians, but: "He was pretty good, that guy. It was the first time I didn't call the police."

The "pretty good" guy, it turns out, was internationally acclaimed virtuoso Joshua Bell, who routinely sells out stately concert halls where the cheap seats cost a good deal more than the $32.17 in spare change he raked in in 43 minutes of playing in the subway for strangers (one person did recognize him).

Someone got the bright idea to stand him up in the subway like just another scrounger and see what would happen. What happened was pretty predictable, to most of us, I imagine. But what about the stunt? Just another "Borat"-type exercise in proving what a lot of ridiculous rubes we Americans are?

Have you ever stopped in your tracks to listen to a musician in the subway? I have, in New York City. We even have a couple of tapes and CDs from performers first encountered in that venue.

Boos in the Night

[posted by Callimachus]

Name your favourite horror-related song.

"The Creature from the Black Lagoon," by Dave Edmunds.

Hey, We've Been Assigned A Theme Song!

[Posted by reader_iam]

By Bill, of So Quoted. It's jazz! Good move, dude.

Bill's doing all his blogging these days via his own comments section--ask him, why don't you?--and I don't know how to link directly to a coment in Blogger (something to do with putting "#" somewhere?). Therefore, you'll need to scroll down to his 12:32 comment of today to figure out which Rich versus Roach track he picked. (On your way there, you'll see a description of his larger "theme that blog" project at 9:44 a.m. Also, don't miss the comment about the major problems with the WKRP DVD's. I am so bummed!)

So, folks: What do you think of the choice? Who's Rich? Who's Roach? (Bill won't tell.) I think we should have several theme songs around here; goodness knows I couldn't settle on just one for either one of us. Which is why I'm impressed by Bill's self-discipline.

Nominations? (Snark, if clever and, at bottom, good-hearted, more than welcome.)

Sing out, blogreaders! Playing keeps you younger.

Bird Got Pipes

[posted by Callimachus]

Shay, at Booker Rising, has a question:

[W]hy do white females from Britain (Dusty Springfield, Lisa Stansfield, Joss Stone, Amy Winehouse, etc.) do a significantly better job overall than their American counterparts - with Teena Marie being a notable exception - on the soul music front?

Any suggestions?

Just Once

[posted by Callimachus]



"Can I get a 'yeah!' "

Just because the baby and I've been listening to Aubrey Ghent's slide steel version of "Amazing Grace" this afternoon.

O Believers

[posted by Callimachus]

Did Charlie Parker play "Loverman" that way because he was a jazz genius or because he was so blasted on heroin he could hardly stand up at the mic?

What if the answer comes back, "both"?

How can I justify my pleasure in the recording? How can I wipe the blood off the coin I pay to hear it?

Not just that song. All the times he blurted into the studios to cut enough tracks to get enough dough to buy his next fix. Playing a borrowed sax because he had pawned his to buy the last fix. And he spilled brilliant music around the place before he staggered out again into the night. And they knew it all, the bastards, and they sold his records anyway.

Say some god of reversible times visits you and makes you an offer: Rewind the tape and instead of what happened, this time old Charlie Parker leads a nice, quiet, unaddicted life as an insurance salesman and family guy, and never records a lick of music. Do you take that reality instead?

How do you divorce your pleasures from their tortures? Find the maker of great art who wasn't tortured into it. By oppressions, crippling injuries, emotional midnight, thwarted lives. Oh, they exist, the happy writers, but there's not enough of them to make a literature. How else did Dante know Hell so well? Must Wordsworth's child die so that I may admire his sonnet on the topic?

Back in the DDR

[posted by Callimachus]

Hail, hail East Germany
Land of fruit and grape
Land where you'll regret
If you try to escape
No matter if you tunnel under or take a running jump at the wall
Forget it, the guards will kill you, if the electrified fence doesn't first.

One of my favorite Cold War stories gets a good re-telling here, and here. Dean Reed was a mediocre American musician who ended up a rock star in East Germany.

Yes, dear readers, before there was "Christian rap," in which everything is the same and nothing is the same, and the product does honor neither to religion nor rap, there was commie rock 'n' roll. Michael C. Moynihan, author of the "Reason" article, writes, "I get the impression that Reed was popular the same way grass soup is popular in North Korea ...." He's right. Take it from one who was there.

If Western military willpower contained the Soviet Union, it was Western pop culture that ate away its foundation while it was paralyzed in place, by capturing the minds and imaginations of its youth. The DDR sensedw this threat, on some level; its Ministry of Culture even established a Sektion Rockmusik to promote "youth music" without the subversion. Dean Reed, then, was a ham-handed bid at counter-cultural warfare: Hapless, but essential if the East was to stay Red.

Thank the gods it was all doomed to failure. A totalitarian rock 'n' roll may be theoretically possible, but it can't exist on a planet where the real thing is allowed to breathe, because, well, "You've gotta feel it in your blood and guts! If you wanna rock, you gotta break the rules. You gotta get mad at the man!" And "The Man" doesn't get any more The Man-ly than Erich Honecker.

The paradox of Dean Reed is that he owed his success to being an American, and at the same time to rejecting all his native American-ness except the shabby posture of a rock star. Only the Cold War's frigidity kept him from falling through the thin ice. As Moynihan writes, "For teens starved of an authentic native youth culture who were looking enviously west, that was, initially anyway, a mark of authenticity."

The Dean Reed story, as told by Moynihan (in reviewing "Comrade Rockstar," Reggie Nadelson's biography of Reed) goes like this:

In the late 1950s Reed-a moderately attractive, semi-talented guitar player and would-be actor from Colorado-set off for Hollywood with the distinctly un-Bolshevik goal of superstardom on the bubblegum pop circuit. There he met Paton Price, a Daily Worker-reading acting coach and party ideologue. Price schooled Reed in the socialist realism of Brechtian theater, left-wing politics, and, as Reed's sad filmic record suggests, little else.

After a short and largely unsuccessful stint with Capitol Records, Reed abandoned California for South America, where, inexplicably, his singles were outselling those of Elvis Presley. Possessed by his newfound ideology, he underwent a transformation among the bitterly impoverished natives: He shed his "false consciousness" and subsumed the artist's prerogatives beneath those of the Party. After a few years, Reed was expelled from Argentina for agitating against the government and moved to Italy, where he landed a string of minor film roles, including the lead in Karate Fists and Beans, billed as the world's first western/kung fu cross­over film.

Nadelson's account offers few details of what motivated Dean's political journey. Like many radicals of his generation, he claimed to have been inspired by that common inventory of 1960s grievances: Third World poverty, the Vietnam War, CIA machinations in Latin America. So when, in 1966, Reed was approached by a friendly Russian apparatchik offering a truly socialist variant of fame, he boarded a plane for the Soviet Union as an Officially Approved Rock Star -- the genuine American article, playing ersatz rock 'n' roll.

After making the rounds touring behind the Iron Curtain, Reed chose to settle in East Germany, where he became a compliant ward of the state, recording for the GDR's lone record label (Amiga) and propagandizing for the regime. As a reward for his boundless sycophancy, Reed was elevated to superstar status, afforded lavish recording and tour budgets and plum film roles (which he immediately turned to wood), and awarded the Komsomol Lenin Prize. Despite these achievements and an intense disdain for American capitalism, Reed privately craved a second shot at bourgeois success.

In 1985 Mike Wallace extended an invitation for Reed to appear on 60 Minutes. Asked to justify the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Reed happily obliged, arguing that it was merely a defensive action against American imperialism. Ditto for the Berlin Wall. By program's end Reed had successfully propelled himself from obscurity to minor fame as the Lord Haw-Haw of the Cold War.

It was all downhill for him after glasnost kicked in, but I won't spoil the ending.

Deja Vu: Don't take it so hard Nick, life is filled with it's little miseries, each of us in his own way must learn to deal with adversity in a mature and adult fashion. [Sneezes into hands, looks at it in horror, screams, and jumps out window]

Franz List

[posted by Callimachus]

The National Recording Preservation Board at the Library of Congress has announced its additions for 2006. The collection was established to "maintain and preserve sound recordings and collections of sound recordings that are culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant, and for other purposes" (a nebulous phrase that I'm sure inspires some of our friends here to start scanning Congressional Record fine print for any mention of installing Dick Cheney's cryogenically preserved head as Emperor of Neo-America).

Here's what made the list this time, with a few comments from me:

• “Uncle Josh and the Insurance Agent.” Cal Stewart. (1904) Damn, I had almost come to believe everyone else but me and Dr. Demento had forgotten about Cal Stewart. When I was 14 or so, I used to comb thrift shops for scratchy old 78s of his hayseed comic act. As the LofC rightly notes, "Stewart’s influence can be heard in the comedy of Will Rogers, in Fred Allen’s character, Titus Moody, and in Garrison Keillor’s stories about Lake Wobegon."
  
  
• “Il mio tesoro.” John McCormack; orchestra conducted by Walter Rogers. (1916) Another nostalgic note for me. This superb Irish tenor is not everyone's cup of tea, but my grandfather loved him and I inherited a stack of his records -- again, 78s -- from my grandfather when he died.
  
  
• National Defense Test. (Sept. 12, 1924)
  
  
• “Black Bottom Stomp.” Jelly Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers. (1926)
  
  
• “Wildwood Flower.” The Carter Family. (1928)
  
  
• “Pony Blues.” Charley Patton. (1929)
  
  
• “You’re the Top.” Cole Porter. (1934)
  
  
• “The Osage Bank Robbery,” episode of “The Lone Ranger.” (December 17, 1937)
  
  
• Address to Congress. Franklin D. Roosevelt. (Dec. 8, 1941)
  
  
• Native Brazilian Music. Recorded under the supervision of Leopold Stokowski. (1942)
  
  
• “Peace in the Valley.” Red Foley and the Sunshine Boys. (1951) I didn't realize until I did some research tonight that Thomas A. Dorsey, who wrote this lovely tune and other gospel classics, was the same "Georgia Tom" I know from some vaguely suggestive blues recordings.
  
  
• Chopin Polonaise, op. 40, no. 1 (“Polonaise militaire”). Artur Rubinstein. (1952)
  
  
• “Blue Suede Shoes.” Carl Perkins. (1955) Thank the music gods Carl Perkins is getting some respect.
  
  
• Interviews with William ‘Billy’ Bell, recorded by Edward D. Ives. Representing the Edward D. Ives Collection held at the Maine Folklife Center, University of Maine, Orono, Maine, and the Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University, Bloomington, Ind. (1956)
  
  
• “Howl.” Allen Ginsberg. (1959) "Hurl." Callimachus (2007)
  
  
• “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart.” Bob Newhart. (1960)
  
  
• “Be My Baby.” The Ronettes. (1963)
  
  
• “We Shall Overcome.” Pete Seeger. (1963)
  
  
• “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” Rolling Stones (1965) But I Can Get a Lot of Cash By Cynically Singing a Simplistic Diatribe Against Materialism for 40 Years Straight.
  
  
• “A Change is Gonna Come.” Sam Cooke. (1965) Beautiful song
  
  
• Velvet Underground and Nico. Velvet Underground. (1967) Overrated. Whose idea was this? Makes me think of this story:
  

  
  Adam Zaretsky once spent 48 hours playing Engelbert Humperdincks's "Greatest Hits" to a dish of E.coli bacteria to determine whether vibrations or sounds influenced bacterial growth. Watching the bacteria's antibiotic production increase, Zaretsky decided that perhaps even cells were annoyed by constant subjection to "loud, really awful lounge music."
  

  
  
• The Eighty-Six Years of Eubie Blake. Eubie Blake. (1969)
  
  
• Burnin’. The Wailers. (1973) Not bad, but I think Marley was much stronger on his own.
  
  
• Live in Japan. Sarah Vaughan. (1973)
  
  
• Graceland. Paul Simon. (1986) Worst choice on the list. Big American fading folk star who's out of fresh ideas vampirizes the world music catalogue to stave off career death for another decade. Bonus points off for including Linda Ronstadt.
  

Classical Fraud

[posted by Callimachus]

The headline reads: Latest News: "I DID IT FOR MY WIFE" - Barrington-Coupe confesses. Sounds juicy! Where do you go to find the story?

Believe it or not, flip to the classical music section -- if you can find it. Classical music has fallen so far out of the pop culture mainstream it no longer is printed on the maps. Which is a shame because there's a fascinating dust-up underway in the trade.

It concerns a stack of piano recordings under the name of one Joyce Hatto, not an unknown, but one considered to have essentially left off performing due to crippling illness more than 30 years before her death last year.

But her husband, William Barrington-Coupe, owner of a recording studio in Cambridge, England, kept recording her and released her works in the 1990s.

By the time of her death, critics were acclaiming her as "the greatest instrumentalist almost nobody had heard of" [Richard Dyer, The Boston Globe].

The publication Gramophone, which is intimately wrapped up in the story, picks up the thread:

It was around a year ago that Gramophone’s critics began to champion this little-known lady, whose discs – miraculous performances, released by her husband William Barrington-Coupe on the tiny label Concert Artist – were notoriously difficult to get hold of. Such was the brilliance of this pianist across Liszt, Schubert, Rachmaninov, Dukas and more in a dizzying range – that it was worth making the effort to seek out Concert Artist to get these discs, and they became much sought-after. By the time she died in June 2006, Joyce Hatto was not only a sudden widespread success, she was a cause célèbre. To love Hatto recordings was to be in the know, a true piano aficionado who didn’t need the hype of a major label’s marketing spend to recognise a good, a great, thing when they heard it.

There were persistent rumors that this all was too good to be true. But the audiophiles pushed back against it hard, embracing the Hattos as masterpieces.

On February 15, the story took an odd turn, when Gramophone's website published an article by editor James Inverne questioning the authenticity of at least several of Ms. Hatto's performances. "Several days ago, Gramophone critic [Jed Distler] decided to listen to a Hatto Liszt CD, of the 12 Transcendental Studies," Inverne wrote. "He put the disc into his computer to listen, and something awfully strange happened. His computer's player identified the disc as, yes, the Liszts, but not a Hatto recording. Instead, his display suggested that the disc was one on BIS Records, by the pianist László Simon." Upon retrieving Simon's disc from his collection, Distler said, "they sounded exactly the same."

Of course, it is always possible that the computer's iTunes music recognition software misattributed the disc ....

So the tech guys were called in. Their verdict? “Without a shadow of a doubt, 10 of the tracks on the Liszt disc are identical to those on the Simon.” The other two études were by another pianist, Nojima, from a 1993 recording. They even posted up the waveform evidence on their site.

What interests me in this story is not Hatto or Barrington-Coupe. What interests me is László Simon, Nojima, Yefim Bronfman, Carlo Grante -- the various toilers in the thankless mills of classical recording, who never will taste the deliquescent fruits of Kid Rock's luxury tour bus and groupies. They've just discovered their recordings were hailed as works of pure genius -- so long as they were thought to have been done by a cancerous old Englishwoman.

The recordings are authentic: They are real things. Whatever artistic qualities they had, they still have. Yet now they've been thrown back into the discount bin in the back of Sam Goody. What was different? What happened?

The counterfeiter doesn't fake an artifact. The artifact he makes is real. What he counterfeits is a setting: The circumstances of its making. Two men on the same day take paper and ink and make a $100 bill. One is a mob financier in Paterson, the other is a U.S. mint employee in Philadelphia. The difference is not their work, which may be indistinguishable, but the circumstances of its creation.

Able art forgers have painted works that have been hailed by critics as lost masterpieces from, say, Vermeer. But when exposed as modern-day creations, they are dismissed. Yet it is the same painting. If it was good enough to hang in a museum yesterday, why not today? Do the circumstances matter more than the art?

Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even the dull and ignorant, they too have their story.

If you're old enough, you remember the meditative piece that opened with that. It was called "Desiderata" and it was a favorite of late '60s-early '70s flower child types. It was "an unsigned document found in Old St. Paul's Church, Baltimore, dated A.D. 1692" according to most versions I've seen, including the one my mom had hanging on her wall. She was too old to partake of the 1960s directly, but she did so enthusiastically, and vicariously, in part no doubt as rebellion and disgust against my father, whose interests and sympathies lay elsewhere.

As the inimitable Barbara Mikkelson sums it up, the beauty and quiet strength of the "Desiderata" is bound up in the "A.D. 1692."

It's comforting to believe that some truths are universal, that the beauty of the human spirit is unchanging, ever present, and inviolate. A poem rife with applicability in today's world being found in a church so many centuries ago supports those comforting beliefs. That it's an unsigned piece makes it all the more beautiful: one sees these inspirational words as the anonymous writer's gift to the world. His humility kept him from signing it ... and maybe there's another lesson for us in that.

So does it matter that this is a mistake, and that the "Desiderata" was written in 1927 by a lawyer and wanna-be poet named Max from Terre Haute?

There was no forgery here. The misattribution came about via a series of understandable errors and acts of laziness. However, the mistaken belief that the work was 17th century, and thus public domain, means my mother's reprint of it on the wall was in fact a copyright violation, and there have been lawsuits by Max's heirs, including one against the Grammy-award-winning (1971) vocal recording of "Desiderata."

What do you do with great forgeries that have been taken as authentic for sufficiently long periods to have influenced the history of the world? Paul warned against forged letters in his Epistles, and modern textual analysis strongly suggests that while most of "Paul's letters" were written by the same person, a few probably were by another writer. Did some of the forgeries he warned against slip into the canon?

The cycle of ancient Celtic poems by Ossian had enormous influence on the literary tastes of the late 18th century, and shaped the works of living poets like Thomas Gray. Napoleon, among other figures, was passionate about Ossian. Franz Schubert set some of them to music.

But "Ossian" turned out to be James Macpherson, the Scottish poet who claimed to have translated the works from ancient sources. In fact, he collected much traditional material, but shaped it into a false unity and gave it so much of his own stamp and filling that "Ossian" is a work of the 1750s, not prehistoric times.

The letters of Phalaris were held up by some during the English renaissance as among the finest examples of classical writing. Yet they turned out to be late classical forgeries that mention towns and imitate authors which did not exist in the time of Phalaris. Yet are they less for having been written in the second century A.D., rather than in a time not long after Homer?

Perhaps this little scandal will push classical music back into the mainstream of pop culture. It's already attained enough attention to rate a spoof.