Okay, the best moments according to my inevitably limited exposure and my fairly narrow (read Indie Rock tossed with a bit of World and R&B) tastes.

This isn’t a Top anything list. It’s a mix for the year. The order is determined by what flows, not by ranking or chronology.

Enjoy!

1. “I’m Gonna Start” - The Netherfriends - Barry and Sherry
A hometown (Chicago) band that crafts gorgeous songs that narrate a late teen/early 20-something urban life that is both mundane and complex. This song never fails to set the mood.

2 & 3. “We Used to Wait”/”Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” - Arcade Fire - The Suburbs
Arcade Fire’s relative popularity and unabashedly anthemic sound scares critics from liking them too much.  At least that’s my attempt to explain why The Suburbs isn’t at the very top of every year-end list. It is both the most rousing and the most literary of this year’s albums. To capture the literary aspect, you need to listen to the album from start to finish – the consistency of theme (a commentary on the personal and political consequences of the postmodern condition, growing up in an image-driven, hyperreal world), point-of-view (Arcade Fire apparently is getting older, but no one captures a kids’ perspective  — or the perspective of an adult looking back on being a kid — better, with the perfect combination of anxiety and wonder), and the musical and lyrical motifs that intertwine it all. For the mix, of course, I just picked the two most rousing pieces of the puzzle.

4 & 5. “Dance or Die” and “57821″ - Janelle Monae - The ArchAndroid
I can’t say I get the whole album yet — the profound allegory of oppression and emancipation that my most trusted critics assure me is there. Until then, while I certainly appreciate the ambition and the sheer variety, some of the songs just don’t do it for me. Having said that, the songs I do like have a power and energy like nothing else — as well as some of the most pointed politics.  From “Dance or Die”:

Ghettos keep a crying out to streets full of zombies
Kids are killing kids and then the kids join the army
Rising and a waking, yes sir here comes the sun
March into the war and with the kick of the drum
The wiser simians have got the bombs and the guns
So you might as well keep dancing if you’re not gonna run

I include “57821″ because it’s a beautiful contrast in sound that shows Monae’s jaw-dropping range.

6 & 7. “White Sky”/”Cousins” - Vampire Weekend - Contra
I thought of making some hard-and-fast rules for this mix — like only one song per artist — but I clearly break them too easily. One rule I really wanted to keep was to exclude any artist that sold a song for purely commercial purposes. And if you’ve had a TV on the past month, you’ve heard Vampire Weekend doing it twice, as “Holiday” is shilling for both Tommy Hilfiger and Honda. On a related note, I’ve also tried to convince myself that I must be sick of the slick world-pop sound that Vampire Weekend puts out seemingly effortlessly. Yeah, I’m a weak, weak man (who also thinks the conventional wisdom that portrays Vampire Weekend as vapid and shallow preppies or purely ironic jokers misses a fairly consistent social and, yes, political engagement in their lyrics — which admittedly can be a bit obtuse).

8. “Dance Yrself Clean” - LCD Soundsystem - This is Happening
I saw LCD live this year at Pitchfork — and it was a transcendent experience. But I have a really tough time enjoying the songs out of a concert — or club (if I went to clubs) — context, even though I dig the musical (and intellectual) smarts of James Murphy. My one exception is a big one, though — as “Dance Yrself Clean” is a multi-leveled musical journey that liberates me from chains I didn’t know I had.

9. “Fembot” - Robyn - Body Talk, Pt. I
This is vintage Robyn — fun, feminist, and irresistible.

10. “Get Some” - Lykke Li - (single)
This is dark, with questionable gender politics … and irresistible.

11. “I Walked” - Sufjan Stevens - The Age of Adz
I’m going to spend the rest of my cultural life waiting for the sequel to Sufjan’s 2005 Illinois, which might be the most beautiful thing ever created.  So, yeah, it’s a bit hard for most of the stuff on the new EP and album to live up to expectations … other than this song, which pretty much recaptures all the magic.

12. “I’m a Pilot” - Fanfarlo - Reservoir
Technically, I think this was released at the end of 2009 — and the band’s been around for a few years — but SXSW this year seems to have been their real coming out. Anyway, I’m claiming it.  It’s an anthem that counter-intuitively invites you to kick back and chill … pretty cool.

13. “Swim Until You Can’t Meet Land” - Frightened Rabbit - The Winter of Mixed Drinks
They were a disappointment live — not because they didn’t bring the energy or because their Scottish anthemic folk-rock didn’t translate well — but because their fans were a bunch of drunk-ass jerks.  It’s a testimony to the escapist power of a song like “Swim” — that by the middle of it I’ve forgotten that experience and am drifting on the emotional extremes where most of their music exists.

14. “King of Spain” - The Tallest Man on Earth - Wild Hunt
This shouldn’t work. A Swedish Bob Dylan?  But watch his Take-Away Show at La Blogotheque and tell me you don’t just want to take him home. He also knows his way around a guitar and a melody.

15. “O.N.E.” - Yeasayer - Odd Blood
Yeasayer makes me feel the sheer joy of musical possibility — the blending of American Pop and a World rhythm and sensibility. “O.N.E.” is the best of a strong bunch.

16 & 17. “Tell ‘Em”/”Rill Rill” - Sleigh Bells - Treats
Okay, I’ve tried, but I can’t really listen to any other songs on this album, and there’s a good chance their sound will not endure. But I can’t stop listening to this pair of songs from opposite ends of the album. They both do the pop-industrial thing really well — while, as a counterpoint, capturing a youthful, feminine vulnerability that is undeniably genuine.

18. “The Queen of Lower Chelsea” - The Gaslight Anthem - American Slang
It was going to be hard for them to recapture the authentic, old-fashioned rock passion of The ‘59 Sound — and most of this album is a slightly inferior but still worthwhile listen. But “The Queen” brings it all back, while its slightly more restrained jangling might hint at something new.

19. “Stay Close” - Delorean - Subiza
The best background music of the year — and I mean that is the most complimentary way possible. It’s simple but thoroughly enjoyable.

20. “Zebra” - Beach House - Teen Dream
Somewhat disappointed when I saw them live — their soft sound didn’t really transfer — but if it’s quiet and you want to lose yourself in harmonic ecstasy, this one was made for the headphones.

21. “Terrible Love” - The National - High Violet
I couldn’t decide what to pick off this album — so I just grabbed the first track, which never fails to grab me in its slow-building web. Somehow, The National constructed an album that didn’t stray much from their formula but that contains a set of utterly distinct and substantial songs.

22. “Sweet Talk, Sweet Talk” - The New Pornographers - Together
I’m a late arrival to The New Pornographers party, coming through the Neko Case back door.  But, especially when Neko lends her voice, I’m – what shall we say – hooked?

23. “World Sick” - Broken Social Scene - Forgiveness Rock Record
Most of Broken Social Scene’s songs are quirky and resist a coherency that would provide a type of pop satisfaction (and I’m sure they like it that way). This is not to say that “World Sick” is a pop song — it’s too weary and wandering for that — but it holds together in a way that give the listener faith that while the world might suck, a good song can carve out a few minutes of respite.

24 & 25. “A More Perfect Union”/”The Battle of Hampton Roads” - Titus Andronicus - Monitor

Now that George W. Bush’s career in politics is over, the time has come to figure out how he created the persona that mesmerized so many people for such a long time, and how he can remain in denial about the effects of his disastrous years in office.

Although he was a self-made man, he lacked serious professional or business credentials. He wasn’t talented enough to create a persona for himself, as Cary Grant did, and he wasn’t smart to do what Bill Clinton did: tweak the persona he grew up with. So, how did he do it?

He borrowed a persona that was readily available to him, one that met with the approval of the men at the country clubs and private compounds where he grew up. Bush modeled his public persona on that of Frank Sinatra.

Taking on this persona solved some crucial problems for Bush, both in relation to his father and to the rest of the world. More than anything else, Bush was the product of the marriage of politics and show business.

“When I get out of here, I’m getting off the stage,” Bush said at his . “I believe there ought to be one person in the klieg lights at a time, and I’ve had my time in the klieg lights.”

He thought of himself first and foremost, not as a politician, but as a performer. And not just any performer, but as a star — like Sinatra.

Continue reading "Ralph, Frank and George: The Persisting Cultural Logic of American Individualism"

From its modest beginnings at the AFL-NFL Championship Game in Los Angeles in 1967, through to this year’s , Super Sunday has grown exponentially and, in the process, has become a bloated monster. Over the past quarter century or so, Super Sunday has illustrated the ability of a sporting event to offer a distorted and exaggerated version of social reality and social values in America, and it has done so on a grand, glorious and obscene scale.

It is difficult to say precisely when the Super Bowl reached larger-than-life proportions, but certainly by the end of the 1970s it was there. At Super Bowl XV in 1981, a claimed that 70,000 fans made “New Orleans Throb with Super Bowl Mania.” Gerald Eskenazi’s account described a “gridlock” of people in the French Quarter and an influx of “tens of millions” of dollars into the New Orleans economy.

The extravagances of the fans and everyone associated with the game had reached extraordinary proportions. Only the vocabulary created by , the Norwegian-American economist who tracked the habits of the rich in the late 19th century, was capable of fully capturing the scene with such brilliant phrases as “conspicuous consumption,” “conspicuous leisure” and “conspicuous waste.”

The fact that all of this takes place around a football game would have delighted Veblen, who once observed that football is to education as bullfighting is to agriculture. Indeed, Veblen’s use of the phrases “predatory barbarism,” “pecuniary emulation” and “vicarious consumption” also seem particularly well suited to any description of our distinctive national holiday.

One of the most common measures of excess has been the . At the first Super Bowl, a 30-second commercial sold for $42,500 on CBS and $37,500 on NBC (both networks broadcast the game). By the early 80’s, the price for 30 seconds reached $400,000, and by the end of the decade it was a whopping $800,000. Thirty seconds of advertising reached the $1 million mark in 1995 and climbed to $2.1 million in 2000. In 2007, the price tag was $2.6 million, and estimates for this year range from $2.6 to $3 million.

Continue reading "Super Bowl History: "Our National Exaggeration" Through the Years"

December closed with a remarkable flurry of headline sports stories. It was not only one for the memory bank, but it may have been the most fitting way to end the decade known as the Naughty Aughties. What seemed like an awkward tag at the beginning of the new century has become a most appropriate signature phrase.

The first shock was the fall from grace of the poster boy for clean living and family values. Tiger Woods instantly went from the slickest brand in the American pantheon of commerce to the butt of jokes and ridicule.

IMG, the International Management Group, had persuaded nearly all major sport corporate sponsors that Woods was their man: the perfect golfer with the perfect image, the quintessential sportsman. Everybody loved Tiger, admired Tiger, wanted to be like Tiger.

We all got on board, even though we should have known better. America still wants its sports heroes cut from the Frank Merriwell at Yale mode, and Tiger Woods of Stanford looked like one of them.

Instead, Tiger is the perfect hollow man, lacking a center and lost without a compass — except for the one on his yacht that has become his shelter from the firestorm.

Typical in cases like this, the media that touted the Tiger Brand as the genuine article turned with fury and self-righteousness on its former model of perfection. Even more amusing is how quickly the corporate world cut its ties to the feline philanderer.

Accenture, one of the major corporations that identified its brand with his brand, quickly began removing all images of Woods from company advertisements. Tag Hauer, the Swiss luxury watchmaker, announced it would scale down its association with Woods. Procter and Gamble lowered their Tiger profile by withdrawing its Gillette ads featuring Woods. Then on its Woods connection.

Only Nike has remained completely faithful, with Phil Knight saying that this whole thing was but a minor blip. There have been no TV commercials featuring Woods on television since late November. Tiger Woods has vanished from public view and from the branded world in which we live. It is doubtful, however, that sex has disappeared from the PGA tour or other sporting venues.

Sex and sport are inextricably linked. Faux sex surrounds all our sporting events, where young women called “cheerleaders” and “dancers” decorate the landscape with wiggles, jiggles and giggles passing as a cross between glamorous role models and purveyors of sexual titillation. Then there’s the real sex, as women make themselves available to athletes, and star athletes take it as a perk of the position.

The is an adjunct to the Tiger Woods affair. Sending young women from the University of Tennessee out to a high school football game on a recruiting trip is about as bad as it gets. The stories of attractive young women traveling hundreds of miles to see and be seen with naïve high school athletes who are targets on the football recruiting board point to issues of sexual access and the insane pressures surrounding intercollegiate athletics.

Such insanity was on display in Florida recently as Urban Meyer, head football coach and minor deity, from coaching, citing his health. An outpouring of grief and angst flowed throughout Gatorland. Then Meyer reversed his decision. He will now take a leave of absence until he gets control of his world. This is comparable to most of us giving up breathing until we could live without having to do it constantly.

Continue reading "A December to Remember: The Wide World of Sports Turns Wackiest Before the Dawn"

After the latest entry in Richard Crepeau’s annually devastating catalog of the that is the Super Bowl, I am still amazed that Bruuuuce Springsteen has finally agreed to play the halftime show.

But he’s not.  Speaking in an with Jon Pareles of the New York Times, he argues that it is an inevitable extension of the creative process and part of his “big tent” strategy for letting his songbook have a life of its own:

It’s not just my creation at this point, and it hasn’t been really for a long time …. I wanted it to be our creation. Once you set that in motion, it’s a large community of people gathered around a core set of values. Within that there’s a wide range of beliefs, but still you do gather in one tent at a particular moment to have some common experience, and that’s why I go there too.

Before you start thinking this is one big rationalization for selling out, realize that he has never sold his songbook for commercial purposes, and he is someone who still berates himself for little things like an association with Wal-Mart during the marketing of a recent “Greatest Hits” collection:

We were in the middle of doing a lot of things, it kind of came down and, really, we didn’t vet it the way we usually do. We just dropped the ball on it.  Given its labor history, it was something that if we’d thought about it a little longer, we’d have done something different. It was a mistake. Our batting average is usually very good, but we missed that one. Fans will call you on that stuff, as it should be.

In the context of this sense of integrity, it’s beautiful to hear Bruce talk about how the inauguration of Barack Obama has transformed that iconic songbook:

A lot of the core of our songs is the American idea: What is it? What does it mean? ‘Promised Land,’ ‘Badlands,’ I’ve seen people singing those songs back to me all over the world. I’d seen that country on a grass-roots level through the ’80s, since I was a teenager. And I met people who were always working toward the country being that kind of place. But on a national level it always seemed very far away.

And so on election night it showed its face, for maybe, probably, one of the first times in my adult life. I sat there on the couch, and my jaw dropped, and I went, ‘Oh my God, it exists.’ Not just dreaming it. It exists, it’s there, and if this much of it is there, the rest of it’s there. Let’s go get that. Let’s go get it. Just that is enough to keep you going for the rest of your life. All the songs you wrote are a little truer today than they were a month or two ago.

Only Bruce, it seems, can ride the capitalist beast, shake the dirt off and come out feeling cleaner and purer — and “truer” — than ever before.

It is time once again to enter the days of the Roman numerals when excess becomes the norm, hyperbole is accepted as standard English, and the rich demonstrate in no uncertain terms that they are, and you are not. It is also when the middle class, those 85 percent of Americans who identify themselves as such, do their best to wallow in excess.

There is speculation that this Super Bowl may not measure up to the standards of decadence and waste cultivated over the years by the National Football League and those who worship at its shrines. With the economy reeling, Americans are spending less, because they have less, and some think this will slow the madness in Tampa for Super Bowl XLIII.

It is difficult to anticipate how the current economy might mute the holiday celebrations, but a cursory survey of the landscape in the run up to Super Bowl XLIII offers only minor signs of a slowdown. Two of the more notable parties have been cancelled, the most prominent being The Playboy Party. With the Playboy Empire already under some duress, the economic downturn no doubt put severe stress on their bottom line (no pun intended). The other cancellation of note, although certainly not in the same league as the Bunny Hutch, is the Sports Illustrated party. But then we know that print media is another sector where economic problems are not new.

It seems that the number of private and corporate jets coming to the Tampa Bay area for the festivities is down. Last year Jets.com booked 55 jet packages for Phoenix; as of Thursday, there were only 18 bookings. More than 500 corporate jets landed at Super Bowl XLII. That number is not expected to be reached this year, although it is not clear if this is a function of corporate belt-tightening or image maintenance prompted by recent criticism of corporate executive excesses and the GM executive fly-in to D.C.

With or without corporate jets, it still holds, as Norman Vincent Peale once said, “If Jesus were alive today, he would be at the Super Bowl.”

Continue reading "The Economics of Super Bowl XLIII"

One of the most fascinating angles to the Rod Blagojevich saga is the reaction of mental health professionals to everyone calling him “crazy” or “cuckoo.” As the Chicago Tribune reports:

The language offends many and blames mental illness for alleged criminal behavior, they say.

Ann Raney, CEO for Turning Point Behavioral Health Care Center in Skokie, said the center’s board members were so disturbed about the name-calling that they devoted much of a meeting last week to talking about it.

“We need to be clear that unethical or confusing or bad behavior should never be construed as mental illness,” Raney said.

On the contrary, statistics show that people suffering from mental illness are more likely to be victims of crime than they are to be perpetrators, said Fran McClain, program director for the Josselyn Center for Mental Health in Northfield.

of Springfield, IL, want to make it clear that Blagojevich might very well have a “narcissistic personality disorder,” but that does not make him crazy.

While Blagojevich’s outrageousness might be funny to some — it’s clearly the greatest thing to hit the cable news networks since the election — the reaction gives me pause. 

Although the articles don’t explicity note it, it seems obvious that these mental health professionals are trying to fight stereotypes and misconceptions of mental illness that pervade our media.  Television dramas and films rarely treat the full complexities of mental illness, choosing to focus the most extreme and sensational cases rather than the disorders that many “regular” people live with everyday. 

That means — more than anything else – a focus on violence and aggressive, criminal behavior of people with mental illness.  It’s the basis, after all, of more than one horror movie franchise.

I have Tivo’d “Wonderland” — a show about the daily workings of a psychiatric ward, which DirecTV is reviving after an aborted run on ABC a few years back.  I’ll report back if I find anything ground-breaking, but DirecTV’s heavy promotional campaign, which has inundated subscribers for months, does little to change any minds.  The chairs are flying, the patients are screaming … and I imagine real doctors and mental health advocates sighing yet again.

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