Picture a shrimpy little 5-year-old kid living in Las Cruces, New Mexico in 1958. When my mother would go shopping I would sit in our '56 Mercury Monterey and listen to the radio. Oh, I could fib and say that the first record I remember was "Peggy Sue," recorded just 300 miles away in Clovis, but the first record that made an impression on my tiny brain was "Purple People Eater" by Sheb Wooley. It never occurred to me at the time that one could actually buy a record.
My father, a young rocket scientist at the nearby White Sands Proving Grounds, had suddenly died the year before, leaving behind his 10" 78 rpm record of "St. George and the Dragonet" by Stan Freberg. I had no idea who or what Freberg was parodying, but I could tell it was funny - and I could tell that my late father had good taste in records. He didn't pass on the "rocket scientist" part of his genetic legacy, but my taste in records would make him proud, I'm sure.
I had no older siblings to guide me. There were some interesting, almost random 78's around the house including some Jimmy Yancey boogie-woogie records that my uncle had collected, but one of my mother's records, a monstrosity called "Onesy Twosy, I Love Yousy", made me glad that the 1940's had come and gone. As I recall, there were no LP's or 45's around. None at all. And no hi-fi, of course.
My aunt later told me that I had been enthralled a couple of years earlier by an evening classical concert performed one night on the River Charles in my native Boston, but I have no memory of it. The first concert I remember attending was a performance by... get ready, this is the truth, I couldn't make it up... none other than Aunt Jemima at my Las Cruces elementary school in 1959. This was obviously a clever pancake-batter promotion, but they hired an actual gospel singer to play the part, and she was phenomenal. My little mind was totally blown. I particularly remember her thrilling rendition of "Sittin' On Top Of The World." I got giant goose bumps on my puny arms.
We moved to Los Angeles in 1959, and I benefited from a nonstop radio diet of great pop and r&b records. I was tempted by the Beach Boys, I was tempted by The Crystals - but what finally drove me to the record store in 1962? "Ahab The Arab" by Ray Stevens. Yeah, yeah - it's a novelty record, but the top Nashville session cats were playing on that record, and it still rocks. I was perplexed and fascinated by all of the unfamiliar cultural references in the lyrics. It was like reading Mad Magazine: intoxicating, but heavy-going for a 9-year-old. Unfortunately, I felt cheated because the flip side was... a ballad! I was crushed. It wasn't funny, and it didn't rock. But a lot of life is like that, isn't it?
P.S. While duplicating reel-to-reel tapes for the audiobook project, I met Stan Freberg at a recording studio. To my amazement, he was amazed that I knew who he was, and he was delighted when I told him that my father had also been a fan. True geniuses always turn out to be nice guys. Which reminds me, Art - thanks for inviting me to the bowling parties! Neal McCabe is the co-author of Baseball's Golden Age: The Photographs of Charles M. Conlon, and the co-producer of the audiobook version of The Glory of Their Times by Lawrence S. Ritter.
April 27th I was walking the dog (Phoebe, the little dachshund who thinks she’s a 100-lb German Shepherd) around our hill in Hollywood and was nearly bowled over by pockets of night-blooming jasmine, the stuff Brian Wilson sang about on his first album. It normally emerges in the A months, and this year it really came out after a two-day heat wave when it erupted violently and drenched L.A with perfume. I call it The Garden of Al (L.A.)h.
The Past Is Disappearing
No point in living in the past - many who did aren’t - but it’s nice to have some connection.
Like a downtown. L.A.’s was built early in the 20th century, and it’s mostly intact. But in 2000 I was driving up the coast and got off at the exit for Paso Robles, where there were a couple of antique/junk stores, and couldn’t find it. The ‘93 earthquake had leveled the old bldgs, and ... there was no Paso Robles. You drove the same street but found only chain stores with enormous parking lots.
On Hollywood Way and Victory, by the Burbank Airport, was a drug store that was not a chain. (I know of two others!) I’d go in and find nothing to buy, but it was delightful that the shelves held useless old merchandise covered in dust. (Not 1920s stuff, 1970s.) It’s gone.
In Hollywood, I try and patronize Hollywood Rubber Stamp Company. It’s between Highland and Vine on a nondescript - a car dealer, muffler shops, little theaters - stretch of Santa Monica Blvd. It’s in a square bldg with an empty center used for parking. I figured the odd configuration meant it was once a motel, but they told me the upstairs had long narrow rooms because it was a parachute factory in WW2. This was terrific enough, but HRSC’s offices are low and ink-smelling, and the guy talking to me had hair back in a ponytail and wore a long black rubber apron. It was like visiting Benjamin Franklin! I told him I was good to write a check because coming in every two years I was a steady customer, considering they’ve been in business 150 years. “No, just 73 years” he said.
In Tarzana, or maybe it’s Woodland Hills, there’s a motel that is such a gem I am afraid to tell anyone about it. The Tokyo Princess Inn is on Ventura Blvd next to a car wash a few blocks east of White Oak. It has a narrow driveway entered through a break in a bldg, that leads you to two rows of rooms, each with its own parking space (though it seems you could also tie up a horse there). The place was built by John Wayne in the 1950s, I think after “Barbarian & The Geisha.” (I remember this story from my first visit, but have not checked it lately.) I learned about it from my friend Jimmy Angel, who has been a star in Tokyo for nearly two decades and always stays at the Tokyo Princess when he’s in L.A.
The rooms are magnificent. The decor is intense, deeply embellished with wonderful Asian stuff, and the room number is embedded in the bathroom floor tiles. A couple of the big rooms have a gong. It is not kitsch, it is not camp, it is glorious. Last time I checked, the small rooms were $89 a night, the big ones $99.
Of course, my first thought when I saw the place was “This is too good. This place is doomed,” but in the ensuing ten years local real estate didn’t skyrocket. But that doesn’t mean it won’t (tick, tick, tick ...).
Moments 1
I don’t like guitars. I don’t dislike them either, I just don’t separate them within a record. When someone says “I love how he plays guitar” I think “I’m amazed anyone CAN play one.” How do you do it? And why? Pressing metal strings strikes me as uncomfortable. Why not buttons for frets?
Songs are it. The song comes first, the singer second. I say singer, but I’ve liked instrumentals, and usually they’re guitar led. But it isn’t really rock & roll unless it has a sax and a piano. Everyone knows that.
Guitar solos I notice? The best is the one at the end of “Goodbye To Love” by the Carpenters followed by the weeping steel guitar in “Take & Give” by Slim Rhodes 2 on Sun. The former is a fuzz-tone, and that matches runners-up “The 2000-Lb. Bee” by the Ventures and the solo on “Hurdy Gurdy Man” by Donovan. Dave Edmunds’ fine records are guitar-driven and he drives quite terrifically. And let’s don’t forgot Elmore James.
Drum moments, for me, are the solo in “Woo Hoo,” the delayed last drum break in “Carol” by Chuck Berry 3 , the whip-crack overdub 5in “Lonely Weekends” by Charlie Rich and two boards snapped together at the beginning of “Reach Out I’ll Be There” by the Four Tops. Piano moments (not continua, as in Jerry Lee records) are the first notes of the break in “Every Little Bit Hurts” by Brenda Holloway and, going back a wee bit, the two- or three-note solo by Ivory Joe Hunter in ”I Quit My Pretty Mama” and Fats Domino’s oft-used but especially-slamming intro to “You Done Me Wrong.”
1 Title of a great album by Judy Mayhan. (“Only Moments Matter” is another matter. That’s a good Paul Hampton song.)
2 The player is Slim Rhodes. The singer is Sandy Brooks.
3 That ‘figure’ was employed by drummer Bill Bateman in a song recorded early in the Blasters’ “Non Fiction” 4 sessions. Later, he used it VERY EFFECTIVELY at the climax of “Long White Cadillac,” (original cassette tape available somewhere) but took it out ‘because I used it already.’
4 Often, jokes have to be explained to me. That album’s cover featured Batemen, greased up, wearing a mechanic’s outfit, holding a rose. I went nuts (I was titular manager) about the contradiction of this with the album title, but the joke was on me. Always was.
5 This fundamental, hit-making element was omitted from the version put on Rhino’s 3-CD “Sun Records Collection.” They ran with the raw tape.
YOUTUBE CONNECTOR
the late Chris Gaffney: "Yearnin' Burnin' Heart" 6-20-89
Gaff
The Chris Gaffney memorial gathering, one of them, took place April 30 at The Cellar, a truly underground club in Long Beach. When I arrived at 7:30 there was a long line of people waiting for as many people to leave. Personally not fond of crowded basements (memories of that fun firetrap, the Cathay De Grande, in Hollywood) I stood topside and slapped backs, went for Mexican food, and at 9:00 returned and gained entry. Among those on hand: Dave Alvin, Phil Alvin, John Doe, Exxene, Bill Kirchen, Hacienda Bros. I heard a lot of good singers that night, but the best one’s voice was there only in memory.
Bill Kirchen, John Doe 4/30/08
Phil Alvin, White Boy James 4/30/08
Crits
My problem with critics is worthiness. There are no degrees granted, no tests taken. Usually, they are hired by people who know nothing about their specialty, because if the section editor knew their specialty he/she would do it themself, or at least correct the mammoth and arrogant suppositions and mistakes we see.
Due to the nature of today’s newspapers, any reviewer who attracts attention is a good one, because it leads to increased - if aggrieved - readership. In Frisco, they had or have a guy or gal who interviewed with a bad attitude. It was years ago I noticed this thing interviewing Peter Frampton and saying “What happened to your hair?” My first thought wasn’t “What a lively question” but “What a (insert genital here).”
Today others have followed its path. The NY Times magazine has a full-page interview with full-length photo, and there’s always a wise-guy question therein. Lately the L.A. Times has been giving big play to a thing, Choire Sicha, who hurls ugly and impudent questions. Of tv producer Silvio Horton: “Do you know when you’re writing crap?” (He failed to respond, “That’s what YOU do.”) Ho ho!, he/sheeit sure is spunky.
But the quandary of these arrogant questioners is the same as of their doing a review at all. If the reviewer is so “above” the artist, what is their great art? I know a musician who says “How can anyone judge music if they can’t even play?” but that is fallacious: you play a sour note, I can hear it well as Segovia can. Writing in a newspaper is de facto prestigious, but the quality of work is not commensurate. I don’t know a rock critic whose cognitive sense is so sharp that I see things anew. What I see is people in a long daisy chain, getting information from each other and spewing it as a consensus. So, why have more than one?
Don’t miss Gene Sculatti on Ann Powers, at the very end after Mark On The Move
Music Notes
Louis Jordan’s impact on Black Americans was titanic. Speaking in familiar slang about familiar human situations, he was a god to people of Chuck Berry’s generation, a symbol of hope, understanding, knowingness. (For my part in respecting Louis Jordan, I walked out on a show he was doing at a club in L.A. in 1974 because it was “that old stuff.”) I mention this because people smarter than me have pointed out that he was always called Louis as in St. Louis not the more casual Louie that we had in Prima. It’s never too late to learn. The guy never made a bad record .... I’ve been scouring Amoeba’s CD stock, and just got Steve Riley & The Mamou Playboys’ “Dominos” release. My gosh, it’s so great, and the flip side (!) of the CD is a DVD of the band being interviewed and playing live, all in excellent fidelity. I’m not a comprehensive Cajun guy, just like what I find, but this is just terrific ... Same goes for Geno Delafosse’s “Le Cowboy Creole,” brilliant new zydeco, a great mix of R&B, a great voice, great great great ... and to illuminate how behind everyone else I am, I just discovered 6 Lightning Slim. Wow! I knew Guitar Slim and Memphis Slim (the Slim family is tentacular), and I knew Lightnin’ Hopkins ... The very first Crystals album featured an outdoor photo of the group. I asked Phil Spector who took it and he wrote “Was that the one with them outside a car, (station wagon?) holding hands? If so, I took it in New York with my newly bought camera near my one room apt. (240 east 83rd street) across the street from a black church ... On April 16 I ran into Mighty Mo Rodgers at the Hollywood Post Office. I’ve known Mo since he played in Venice Beach in the mid-1970s, but not so much lately. He spends most of his time singing blues, touring and winning awards in europe. He comes back to L.A. now and then to visit friends, but lives primarily in Paris with his wife ....
6 I listened to a CD I got free 11 years ago.
AF, Mighty Mo Rodgers at the post office 4/16/08
Ian Whitcomb, Jim Dawson, AF. Art Fein’s Poker Party 4/1/08
Local Nuevos
In April, the L.A. Times ran a story sympathetic to a taco truck that parks near a stationary restaurant in a Mexican area of L.A. With the owner of the fixed restaurant saying “I sell Mexican food - what’s this guy doing parked in front?” the Times, with astonishing naivete, has been reporting and somewhat drum beating protests from roach-coach fans. A college student wrote an article about loving taco trucks, and a week later the Times ran another article about people defending taco trucks. (“Who is picking on the poor taco trucks” they reported neutrally from a blogger.)
The restauranteur’s complaint wasn’t about taco trucks. It was about taco trucks parked at his front door. Rolling-restaurants pay no rent. They don’t pay property taxes or other things that keep regular restaurant prices higher. They are quoted “Hey, I’m just trying to make a living,” but they’re doing it by leeching off the local (Mexican) restaurant owners. And no reporter has yet asked the taco truck guy where his patrons go to use the bathroom. My guess would be one of the local restaurants.
The coach proprietor moans that if he’s ejected from the business area he’ll be bankrupt, not noting that the very nature of his business, a restaurant on wheels, permits him to move to another area where he can operate freely. It is the type of business for which he bought a far cheaper license than the landlocked local restaurant owner.
(However, if the taco truck guy wins permanent status, I’m going down there and start selling shoes at below-retail out of my car trunk. I haven’t picked the location yet, just know it’ll be in front of a shoe store.)
Feel My Rock Crit Hat
I’m just a regular guy, wanting to enjoy myself at a show. But with so many people touring their acoustic act, the fun is dwindling.
A friend in Austin was all jazzed up to see a puckish and delightful English singer who had great fame in the late 1970s at Antone’s, a swell R&B/roots hall. But he was accompanied just by his guitar, and sang the lonesome, depressive, reflective songs he’s recently been recording. Great stuff that, but when people are STANDING at a concert, pacing is something to think about. How many veteran acts have you seen slog through new material, then finish off with something lively?
The set-ending joy of, say, “What’s So Funny About Peace Love And Understanding” is a sop given you for your patience, but also a slap in the face saying “This is what you really want, you shallow pleasure-seekers.”
YOUTUBE CONNECTOR
Billy Boy Arnold w/ Phil Alvin : I Wish You Would
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My Movie Crit Hat Is Felt, Too
Flipping stations, I looked at a nondescript movie from the early 80s and thought “I remember seeing this at a theater.” Not so remarkable, my seeing a film then - I was going out on dates, and felt connected to the world at large. But seeing THIS film strikes me now as, Huh?
Then I remembered the process. You scanned the paper (a print medium, no longer popular) for titles and locations and you chose the best you could find - and that includes the least offensive! You went to a movie to go with someone you liked and hold hands (or, if it was a first date, cut a hole in the bottom of your extra-buttery popcorn box and ask her to reach WAY down) for two hours with other similar couples in a dark room damp with pheremonic emanations.
Today I am suffused with entertainment in my house and the cost of a movie (what’s it now? Eighteen dollars?) and a small popcorn box ($14.50?) and a miniature Coke (eleven dollars?) is a firestorm of deterrence, even if I save up for weeks. (Also, you need a knife to cut holes in the bottom of the new popcorn boxes.)
So then, who goes to movies? The same people who buy music - teenagers. And so who reviews the movies in that old communications medium mentioned previously? Old people with college literature degrees. As a result, the movie “Prom Night,” a romp of teenage slaughter, is reviewed by a fussbudget who says “the dialogue is inane.”
Say what? “I’m scared” is held up as an example of twaddle. What, not “Forsooth! Something eldritch this way comes”? 7 What the hell is the reviewer talking about? The dialogue is clear. “Omigod!” “The monster is coming!” and stuff like that is what fills movies that fill theaters theater seats. Just shaddup, Ms/Mr. Monocle!
7 The outraged editors of the L.A. Times assigned TWO reviews of Prom Night, the second contrasting it poorly with the beloved original
Sing “Me Me Me Me Me”
After writing the preceding, I opened the 4-27-08 NY Times Book Review section and read Stephanie Zacharek’s review of a book about three famous 60s female singers. Early on, I gained insights - into Zacharek.
It says she is a senior writer for Salon. ‘Senior’ is an unkind designation for a 47-year-old (she gives her age). From her bellyaching that the book’s cloying dedication (“Were we not the best?”) makes YOU (my caps) reach for a record by the Slits, Sleater-Kinney or Hole, we knew she is one Baby Boomer (ends 1964) who clings to Riot Grrrrl roots. To distinguish herself from people earlier in her generation she prattles for thirty (30) lines about herself dotted with “I wasn’t” Carly Simon and “I wasn’t” Carole King, meaning ... book reviews should be written by the people whom the book is about? It is never made clear why their lives not matching hers makes her angry.
This argy-bargy comes under a newspaper braggadocio opportunity called “Full Disclosure.” While the category was invented to disclose ‘my father managed Carly Simon, Carole King stole my boyfriend or I missed “Both Sides Now” on ‘Jeopardy,’ writers ‘confess’ things like ‘I have a doctorate from Harvard, I am very well known at clubs in Chelsea and Soho, I have been told I am very beautiful,’ etc etc.
When she released me from her forced bio, I mistook the next line, “The grating self-aggrandizement of that dedication” as her apology for that long derailment - but she was harping about the book again!
Writer, know thyself. And keep it that way.
Who Died And Made Me King?
A friend recommended the Quebe Sisters to me, so I went to North Hollywood on Saturday night 4/26/08 to see them at the Universal Bar & Grill. I assumed the venue was in the Universal Studios complex and dreaded the crawl up the hill, the wait, the large parking structure and the tangled walk through the tourist shops to find the place.
But it wasn’t there at all. It was on Lankershim a couple blocks north of Universal Studios. They must’ve grabbed the name when the complex was being built. Ha! It’s a small bar very similar to the Palomino. I’ve driven past it a thousand times.
The Quebe (kwee-bee!) Sisters are three girls - teens, I mean 9- from Ft. Worth who play fiddle together and sing together with tight vocal harmony and some difficulty keeping their Texas instruments tuned in high, dry L.A. (They sounded fine. The tuning complaints came from the stage, not the audience.) But here I was getting a more or less personal concert. There were 15 other people in the club, but I felt like it was my own. Great fun, more like the Andrews Sisters than ... Rose Maddox & Her Brothers. They’re touring the west coast.
9 Their age is sidestepped on their info site. They probably were teenagers recently. They look very young.
Quebe Sisters Band - 4/26/08
A Chance Encounter
Also, there, I ran into Shirley, a gal who comes to the Elvis shows and Ronnie Mack’s Barn Dance. She’d seen the Quebes at the Oaks outside Austin the Sunday after SXSW. Shirley goes every year to SXSW, doesn’t buy a ticket, just cruises from one free event to another. And that’s how she got the jump on me vis a vis the Quebes: by going mostly to ‘badge’ events at SXSW I missed some great shows!
- 57-
Mark On The Move
I went to see Nellie McKay at my favorite L.A. club Largo, which the pessimist in me is already insisting will be ruined when it moves to bigger quarters in the Coronet Theatre next month. McKay continues to baffle me with her combination of train wreck and genius.
I’d been following her music career for years before she issued her debut album Get Away From Me in 2004, when she was barely out of her teens, because my singer-songwriter son Michael was part of her musical circle in Manhattan, centered around The Sidewalk Café open-mic nights, and he often raved about her quirky, wandering, effusive songs. In 2003 he opened a show for her at a Greenwich Village club called Fez, and her set, posted on her website, included a monologue she titled “The Truth About Michael Leviton,” which amusingly detailed one of my son’s drug adventures. McKay songs like “Toto Dies” and “David” sounded like a cross between Kurt Weill and Yip Harburg. I was fascinated.
An accomplished pianist, songwriter and singer, Nellie combined strong familiarity with jazz standards with an interest in the likes of Randy Newman, and she eventually hired Beatles-connected producer Geoff Emerick to produce her first recordings at Capitol Studios in Hollywood. While in L.A. I got to finally meet her when I attended her initial L.A. gig at The Hotel Café, where I also chatted with her stage mother, who kept close. I followed Nellie through her first visit to South By Southwest, and in the wake of a big wave of publicity after the album release, I saw her several more times on the West Coast. Michael told me about her fights with Columbia Records, about her insistence that her first album be released with two sides even though it wasn’t coming out on vinyl (the CD, less than 70 minutes long, was divided into two discs to satisfy her).
She began to wear very unbecoming ball gowns on stage, piled her blonde hair into elaborate styles, composed increasingly unmelodic, knotty quasi-rap songs, and would ramble for many minutes on stage about subjects that had tenuous connections to the songs she was performing. She increased her penchant for putting the f-word in songs. She lost interest in writing witty Rodgers & Hart-type tunes like “I Wanna Get Married.” She fought a public battle with Columbia about her second album Pretty Little Head, and they eventually kicked her off the label and she released it herself to general indifference. Meanwhile, by playing to bigger and bigger audiences in New York dates AND appearing in The Threepenny Opera on Broadway, she lost her momentum in other parts of the country. She was a New York phenomenon, not easily known outside Manhattan.
At Largo she came on more than an hour late and did a show that combined the scattered and the amazing. She had an audience member come on stage to fix the back of her gown which she hadn’t quite finished getting into, borrowed eyeglasses for a prop from another listener, rambled about pet peeves, stopped the show to hand out little slips of paper so we’d give her our email addresses so she could send us a unspecified petition (which Michael subsequently told me is about animal rights), and at one point took a phone call from a friend when her cellphone rang. She did a couple absolutely dreadful, tuneless songs to backing tracks from a work-in-progress, the Broadway adaptation of Alexander Payne’s film Election (which deserves better), and split in two to argue with herself during her closing tune “Zombie.”
She did the best songs from her latest album Obligatory Villagers (“Identity Theft” and “Politan”), and a satisfying bunch from her first two. She also managed to fit in spectacular piano-driven versions of “In a Sentimental Mood,” “If I Had You” and “A-Tisket, A-Tasket,” and played ukulele for a couple tunes including a very touching “Don’t Fence Me In.”
As Nigel Tufnel said, “There’s a thin line between clever and stupid.” Nellie McKay knows exactly where that is.
-- Mark Leviton
(Mark’s sixties-themed radio show Pet Sounds can be heard alternate Mondays 10pm-Midnight PST on KVMR-FM 89.5 in the Sacramento area and streaming at www.kvmr.org )
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Submitted by Gene Sculatti, another newspaper reader who’s had it!
SUPER-POWERS
Like lots of folks, I persist in reading the pop-music criticism in the mainstream papers (old habits die hard), and lately the coverage—perhaps in direct proportion to the dwindling readership—has gotten more grandiose than ever. Like Art, I’ve written about this stuff for too long to remember, and, like him, never deigned to call myself a “critic.” Folks who wear that handle too often display a tendency to go all magisterial, like the fussy Village Voice reviewer dubbed “the dean of American rock critics” by some other critic; in his reviews the guy handed out grades, made snide comments in the margins (“Docked a notch for length”), making it look like detention-hall was a real possibility.
If only writers possessed such power. A review of a Kanye West concert earlier this month by the L.A. Times’ Ann Powers is a good example of how rich the soup has become. True, the 20-point headline announcing “Apocalyptic Space Tour” is more a reflection of the enormous canvases Times art directors now have to fill in the paper’s engorged Calendar section than it is an indicator of the import of West’s performance. But the subhead (“Kanye West seems unstoppable as a cosmologist of hip-hop, taking his daring and bravado out beyond the stars”) and Powers’ text makes it clear this was an epochal event.
First sentence informs us West “staged his ‘Gotterdammerung.’” I’m sure I know less about Wagner’s noisy opera than Powers, but she could’ve, as I did, just checked in with Wikipedia (or some source), which noted the work is “occasionally used in English, referring to a disastrous conclusion of events.”
But Powers’ description of the show makes it sound anything but disastrous. Kanye, she informs, “cares deeply about what it means to be a hero” (what a swell guy: he could’ve joined the fire department, but no…), and he “confronted terror, doubt and filial grief in a show that carried his braggadocio into the realm of myth itself.” Come again? How exactly does one take immodesty and petulance (this is the guy who threw a public hissy when he missed out on a Grammy. And the guy depicted on the cover of Rolling Stone as a persecuted Christ?) and haul it into Joseph Campbell’s backyard?
So what was it specifically that folks fortunate enough to attend his $60-$100-a-seat “Glow in the Dark” tour stop at Nokia Theatre got to see West do? Apparently, if they had a good seat, they could’ve seen Powers renew her membership in the Society of the Spectacle. As a multitude of screens “showed scenes of whirling galaxies and cataclysmic weather,” West “announced himself as an astronaut on a mission to bring creativity back to Earth” and “narrated his journey from spaceship crash to alien encounter to self-realization and escape.”
This certainly supports the braggadocio claim, but, really, are readers, especially those of us who didn’t get off the bus just this morning, supposed to be impressed? Didn’t Bowie and George Clinton (to say nothing of Zolar X) stop here some time ago?
Well, yes, but, you see, “West is a conceptual artist who works in visuals as well as sound,” which places him in the hallowed tradition of the unimpeachable U2, whose absolutely unforgettable “Zoo TV” tour of ’92 is Powers’ standard for great performances. West’s show, says Powers, “was that innovative and galvanizing.”
And here’s where it all gets really silly, where the adjectives pile up (and, in all fairness, Powers can turn a phrase) but as they do so—just as in advertising—start to shed all meaning. In Rock-crit World, acts like U2 and West don’t merely get up and play in front of an audience. They conduct in-depth “meditations on rock in the media age” (man, what a drag pre-media-age rock ’n’ roll was, remember? Those poor Piltdown Men gigged in total anonymity). So Zoo TV wasn’t an inflated arena event of precisely the kind punk-rock was supposedly sent here to destroy (by some other force in the universe; Kanye must’ve been tending to bid’ness in a farther off galaxy). And West’s wasn’t a perfectly good hip-hop concert enjoyed by those who attended. Rather, it was West’s meditation “not so much [on] how a hero’s story unfolds, but what a hero might say if he were to rap—and how he might appear onstage.” These days, it seems, nothing is ever just what it seems.
Later in the review, we learn that the mythic hero (or the conceptual artist playing with our preconceived notions of how a hero might behave if, in fact, a hero were to occupy this stage and deliver his heroics in a hip-hop mode) “roamed the slanted proscenium under violent skies heavy with asteroids and whirling clouds” and “played the grim son of destiny.” Helluva role, innit?
I’m sure the folks who paid to see “Glow in the Dark” dug it deeply, but how was it any different from what we’re all used to seeing every day? Different from the threshold-volume, flame-spouting entrances on Friday Night Smackdown or the rough-and-tumble graphics of an ESPN sports show or next week’s Dodge Trucks ad? Different from overdone film adaptations of Marvel Comics that, at best, raised a chuckle in their original cheap-paper editions long ago? Different from the spikes and surliness of heavy metal (celebrating its 40th anniversary this year)?
Different even from the standard riff of hip-hop itself?
Just how, one wants to ask Powers, are West’s declarations of independence and assertion in songs like “Stronger” and “Can’t Tell Me Nothing” more significant or compelling than those of the last 50 rappers who did the same thing? Guess what? This rapper let up for only a brief moment—and it was to dedicate a lachrymose ballad to his mom (he really loved her), and he even admitted, for the length of one song anyway, to the existence of an alternate spiritual force in the universe, when he performed his hit “Jesus Walks.”
C’mon, man. This is what the worst writing about pop music was always about: inflating the subject for the general readership (and media management), who may’ve thought this low-born creature never deserved a bunk at the High Culture inn in the first place. They’re writing about this in the Times? Well then it must be important.
A carnival by any other name is still a carnival. It doesn’t have to be transcendent. As the great ’60s sage Barry McGuire put it, “Why not stop and dig it while you can” and let it go at that?
Gene Sculatti produces Vic Tripp’s ‘Atomic Cocktail’ radio show at www.LuxuriaMusic.com Wednesdays, 6-7 p.m. PDT
