Category / Music

by Edward Champion

When Lounge, Lip Syncing, Smoking, and Bad Dancing Collide

[UPDATE: How dare Madison Avenue steal the absolutely kickass bass line from Pino d’Angio! This is a terrible musical crime, and I sincerely hope that Pino gets his justice! (Of course, it’s also possible that Pino lifted it from Risco Connection’s “Ain’t No Stopping Us.” Understand: the objection to Madison Avenue isn’t so much that they ripped Pino (and possibly Risco) off, but that they did so without the cheesy gravitas of the original tune!]

by Edward Champion

She Does Sing “Rehab” After All

Amy Winehouse’s father-in-law is now leading a campaign to boycott Winehouse’s music until she seeks treatment for drug addiction. This is certainly an ethical dilemma but, at the risk of parroting Bill Hicks, has it not occurred to this gentleman that the drugs might actually be helping the music? While I certainly hope Ms. Winehouse conquers her demons, give me a coked out Amy Winehouse over that clean-cut assclown Justin Timberlake any day of the week. Timberlake is about as rock ‘n roll as a Pat Boone heavy metal cover. Winehouse has more soul in her left pinky.

by Edward Champion

Is the Value Now in the Performance?

Prospect Magazine: “Groups used to tour, often at a loss, to stimulate sales of their latest album. Now it’s the other way around. Hence the widely reported decision earlier this year by the Crimea, a band previously signed to Warner Bros, to release their new album as a free download. The band explained this not as an anarcho-hippie gesture in support of the principle that music ought to be free, but as a sensible promotional tactic. Their hope is that by disseminating their music online, they will expand their fan base and increase their returns from touring. Having seen the small size of the cheques they got from Warner, they know where not to look for their future income.”

by Edward Champion

The End of Raucous Late Night Television

And here’s Part 2 of the John Lydon vs. Tom Snyder exchange.

RELATED: Wendy O. Williams smashing a television set and Snyder interview. More on Williams’s Milwaukee charges here. Also, Williams vs. Mrs. Fields.

TANGENTIALLY RELATED: Weird Al Yankovic’s first national television appearance — on The Tomorrow Show — performing “Another One Rides the Bus.”

It’s also worth noting that Tom Snyder’s The Tomorrow Show originally had the 12:30 AM time slot that NBC than gave to a rising standup comedian named David Letterman, who replaced Snyder’s thoughtful and often explosive interviews with “Stupid Pet Tricks” and interviews that involved Letterman more or less slipping into whatever celebrity junket was handed to him. Snyder would return to television thirteen years later — albeit in a more subdued form — to The Late, Late Show for a four year run. He eventually left, and he would once again see his show tailored for mass consumption — with the host replaced with Craig Kilborn and later Craig Ferguson. One might convincingly argue that Ferguson brings at least some smarts to the populist late night talk show. But when one considers the above explosive exchange with John Lydon and Wendy O. Williams’s smashing of television sets, it becomes clear that the days of late night television which attempted to grab viewers by the lapels or seriously challenge conventions are over.

Today, the only real intimate talk show interview — without a studio audience — is Charlie Rose. But compare Rose’s interviews, which involve Rose sucking up to his guests, with those of Dick Cavett’s, who regularly challenged his guests. Or Tom Snyder. Or even Mike Douglas. (Or even the early days of Bob Costas.) Television, which once specialized from time to time in provocative conversation, is now more content to waffle in conversational and intellectual mediocrity. And today’s 18-34 demographic, growing up without Snyder or Cavett, have no idea what they’re missing. (Terry Gross pretends to be a follower of this tradition, but as Curtis White has convincingly argued, she is not a true representative of public opinion.)

The interviews that I conduct for The Bat Segundo Show are an attempt to return to this abandoned long-form approach. I don’t claim to be as good as Cavett or Snyder. But I do hope that one day, radio and television will return to the conversation as a journalistic form, unsullied by avarice and the quids pro quo of publicists. Fortunately, the Internet presents an opportunity for today’s journalists to correct this considerable imbalance.

by Edward Champion

Wait Until This Judge Gets Around to Dylan and the Stones

The August issue of Harper’s contains, in its Readings section, a fantastic sentencing memorandum offered by Judge Gregory R. Todd, in the case of Montana vs. Andrew McCormack:

Mr. McCormack, to the question of “Give your recommendation as to what you think the Court should do in this case,” you said, “Like the Beatles say, ‘Let it be.'” If I were to overlook your actions and let it be, I would have to ignore that day in the life on April 21, 2006. Evidently, you said to yourself, “I feel fine,” while drinking beer. Later, whether you wanted money or were just trying to act naturally, you became the fool on the hill. As Mr. Moonlight at 1:30 A.M., you did not think for yourself, but just focused on I, me, mine. Because you didn’t ask for help, wait for something else, or listen to your conscience saying, “Honey, don’t,” the victim later that day was fixing a hole in the glass door you broke. After you stole the eighteen-pack of Old Milwaukee, you decided it was time to run for your life and carry that weight. But when the witness said, “Baby, it’s you,” the police responded, “I’ll get you,” and you had to admit, “You really got a hold on me.” You were not able to get back home because of the chains they put on you. Although you hoped the police would say, “I don’t want to spoil the party” and “We can work it out,” you were in misery when they said you were a bad boy. When the police took you to jail, they said, “Hello, goodbye,” and you became a nowhere man. Later, when you thought about what you did, you may have said, “I’ll cry instead.” Now you’re saying, “Let it be,” instead of, “I’m a loser.” As a result of your hard day’s night, you were looking at a ticket to ride that long and winding road. Hopefully, you can say when I’m sixty-four, “I should have known better.”

The blog Fifer Traeger has tracked down this alternative version of the sentencing.

by Edward Champion

B.C. Camplight: For Your Consideration

Ladies and gentlemen, denied a label in his native country, I introduce to you (if you don’t know him already) B.C. Camplight (more music here), who may very well be Pennsylvania’s answer to Todd Rundgren — that is, if Rundgren himself weren’t from Pennsylvania. Oh, what the hell, there’s room for two Rundgrens, is there not? I hope that B.C.’s latest album, Blink of a Nihiist eventually gets some kind of American release. The man is also neurotic as hell. Get this: “So nervous is he that he apparently has every doctor in his home town of Philadelphia on speed dial and recently diagnosed himself as suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.”

So there you have it. Batty melodic tunes like “Blood and Peanut Butter” and “Lord I’ve Been on Fire,” more hypochrondia than Glenn Gould, and possibly quite misunderstood in his own country. What more can you ask for in an indie act?

by Edward Champion

New Yorker Contributor Asserts Lockean Right to Write Recycled Claptrap

So Mollie Wilson took issue with John Colapinto’s article, “When I’m Sixty-Four,” a Paul McCartney profile riddled with the kind of spoon-fed, been-there-done-that tone of a bona-fide hack. Why, asked Wilson, would The New Yorker, one of the top magazines in the country, revisit the same tired legends? Any remotely educated culture vulture knows very well that “Yesterday” started off as “Scrambled Eggs.” Further, Colapinto idiotically suggests that some hard-core fan asking for an autograph “could have been another Mark David Chapman” and then has the temerity to put this social gaffe in his piece!

colapintotrue.gifBut the story gets even stranger. Colapinto began leaving comments on Wilson’s blog, including this morsel:

As for my re-telling of the often-told tale of “Yesterday” beginning with the nonsense lyrics about scrambled eggs: any true Beatles fan would know that the point of re-telling that story was that Paul has added vital new info–something of which he’d only lately been reminded: that the actual lyrics to Yesterday were written while on a 3 hour car trip from Lisbon to southern Portugal with Jane Asher.

I’m a true Beatles fan. And Colapinto is dead wrong. The information concerning Jane Asher has been floating around for some time. And while my Beatles books are currently still packed, I do know that this information has been reported since at least 2003. (e.g., see “McCartney’s Yesterday had a nudge from Nat” by Maurice Chittenden, The Times, July 6, 2003). In fact, the far more interesting question, which came up around the same time, is how close “Yesterday” is to Nat King Cole’s “Answer Me.” Then again, since Colapinto is less concerned about the musical origins of one of the most remembered pop music ballads of the past fifty years and more interested in who McCartney was fucking when he wrote “Yesterday,” one shouldn’t look to Colapinto for compelling arts criticism.

This is by Colapinto’s own admission:

You, instead, wanted an essay on the subject. And that’s why you’re a blogger and not a writer. And, if you can handle hearing this, it’s why you’re barely a reader. You should also understand that the New Yorker is divided into sections; there are feature stories, like the kind I write, and there is the critics, at the back; I do not and never will be a critic. I don’t like them. They’re usually up-their-ass on precisely the matters you and I have been discussing here.

So there you have it. A New Yorker writer, vastly uninformed about the origins of “Yesterday” and their ubiquitous availability to any Beatlemaniacs, isn’t interested in writing, much less reading the kind of in-depth music features that you and I might be interested in. This is arrogance of the first order. And I’m truly stunned that the New Yorker would be dumbing down their features by assigning them to clumsy thugs like Colapinto.

If a 5,000 word essay that goes out of its way to investigate in a way that nobody else has tackled the subject makes one a blogger and not a writer, then call me a blogger any day of the week. Even if my “blog post” is published in a newspaper or a magazine.

by Matthew Tiffany

A ghost is bored.

Free from the constraints of a supposedly all-lit lit-blog, here I go with some reflections on music. (I’m allowed – there’s a category for it, see?) Internets, ho!

Pitchfork has a pretty clear-eyed look at Wilco’s new album. The whole thing should be read for the full effect, but here’s the money shot:

Jeff Tweedy’s restlessness has always been one of his greatest strengths. Since Wilco’s inception more than a decade ago, his willingness to explore an ever-widening spectrum of sounds and genres, and to keep the revolving door of the band’s line-up well-oiled, has paid off in a discography that’s as diverse as it is indispensable. Though his songwriting DNA was bound tight during the later days of Uncle Tupelo, Tweedy has nurtured it in different ways with each successive album, from the transitional sunset country-rock of the first two, through the keyboard-thick pop of Summerteeth, the fractured deconstructions of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and the languid abstractions of A Ghost Is Born. Following that last record, Wilco swelled to its largest and (according to Tweedy himself) best lineup ever, with the addition of guitar hero Nels Cline and utilityman Pat Sansone. Charged up and bursting with eccentric and experimental talent, Wilco Mk. 5 seemed poised to generate the band’s finest– or at least most interesting– music yet. Instead, it produced Sky Blue Sky.

An album of unapologetic straightforwardness, Sky Blue Sky nakedly exposes the dad-rock gene Wilco has always carried but courageously attempted to disguise. Never has the band sounded more passive, from the direct and domestic nature of Tweedy’s lyrics, to the soft-rock-plus-solos format (already hinted at on Ghost’s “At Least That’s What You Said” and “Hell Is Chrome”) that most of its songs adhere to. The lackluster spirit even pervades the song titles: “Shake It Off” is probably most accurate (not to mention the album’s worst track), but “On and On and On” and “Please Be Patient With Me” are both strong alternatives.

I agree with this assessment. I’ve listened to this album a whole bunch, with pretty mixed results. “Either Way” and “You Are My Face”, early pre-released tracks, are solid; the latter more so, with some fine singing from Tweedy. “Either Way” is unoffensive, and dad-rock sums it up nicely. (Sums up the whole album nicely. Being a Dad, this is appealing at times; I do like the mellow. Have you heard Neil Young Live at Massey Hall? You should. At other times, Tweedy for fuck’s sake I get a whole lot of being a dad when the kid needs to be carried downstairs at 3 am for a pee break, can I please rock out in my truck a bit, thanks) From there, the album goes completely off the tracks with the horrid “Impossible Germany”. Sorry, that isn’t a good guitar solo. Not at all. “Sky Blue Sky” and “Side with the Seeds” are very nice. “Shake It Off” – god, I want to like it, I want to imagine them wailing on it live, but it just won’t gel. “Please Be Patient with Me” is ok, but Tweedy solo is better for this track. Same with “Walken”, which is pretty bad – I saw one review declaring it to sound just like ZZ Top, which couldn’t be too much more wrong.

“Hate it Here” sucks.

“Leave Me Like You Found Me” seems to be holding up the best under repeated listens. (“Please Be Patient with Me” sounded like I’d heard it 3,000 times the fourth time I heard it. This is not good.) “What Light” is good enough, as is the closer. But as a whole, the album is sub-par Wilco. Comparisons to The Band are legion for this album, but there’s enough rootsy Band-ish tracks on their other albums for you to burn onto one CD that really deserve the comparison. The gentle-Tweedy tracks on this album have too much cliche to them; there are no rockers, no “Spiders (Kidsmoke)” anywhere near this album. And why did they exclude the mighty fine “Is That the Thanks I Get?”

For all my grousing, the album is not destined for the dustbin; some music you need to let soak into you over time. I hope this is the case here. If not, well, pass the Summerteeth.

by Edward Champion

Crowded House Picked the Wrong Place to Launch a Reunion

Stereogum: “When the opening guitar of their smash ‘Don’t Dream It’s Over’ rung out, we looked around, frantically; would any of these kids respond, even in passing recognition of the tune? And they responded alright. With a water bottle straight to Neil Finn’s head! What followed just compounded Neil’s embarrassment: He was rattled, the band audibly contemplated aborting the song, but Finn felt for sure he could rely, at least during this one song, on the crowd picking up the slack by singing along. ‘It’s alright, everybody! Come on!’ Neil waved the crowd on to sing the legendary hook. And … nothing. By this point we were far back into the crowd, and you had to be there to appreciate just how thunderous this silence was.”

by Edward Champion

An Elegy for Listening

Washington Post: “Even at this accelerated pace, though, the fiddler’s movements remain fluid and graceful; he seems so apart from his audience — unseen, unheard, otherworldly — that you find yourself thinking that he’s not really there. A ghost. Only then do you see it: He is the one who is real. They are the ghosts.”

RELATED: Grimes Poznikov: “In 1987, after being ticketed by the police for playing his trumpet 13 decibels above the legal sound limit, Mr. Poznikov quit his act, moved out of his rented apartment and began sleeping in the streets. He stayed with friends from time to time — particularly his off-and-on girlfriend, Susan ‘Harmony’ Tanner — but the freedom of the outdoors always pulled him back to the sidewalk, he told a reporter last December.”