Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Fall songs

There was a time in late October 2005 when I was riding my bike across 36, and down its frontage road Moorhead on which I lived, and Billie Holiday’s “As Time Goes By” came on my iPod. Now, there is not much of a Fall in Colorado, before the snow sets in, but there was sort of one that week – golden Cottonwood leaves that were quickly swept to the side of convex streets and were brittle and crunched like tight plastic when you stepped on them. Of course, I was riding to my bike and listening to my iPod so the sound was a figment then. Billie’s voice was the only sound I heard.

I’d downloaded the song from a number of things I stole off my friend Mitchell’s computer in Washington, D.C., and, sure enough, this was the first time the song had played on my iPod, which was always on shuffle. Now, that iPod at that time seemed always to know the right song to sing, like a friendly bartender, but this was a pretty incredible moment. “You must remember this, a kiss is still a kiss, on that you can rely.”

I was wearing a lightweight t-shirt and no jacket, and it struck me at the time that it was late in the year to not need a jacket of any sort. I thought it wouldn’t be like that for long, most certainly not, maybe within the week the snow would fall. Maybe it did, it’s hard to remember now. The truth is it wasn’t important what happened afterwards, it was the moment – the last moment of calm breezes and atmospheres, of things feeling just as they should be, with an understanding of discomfort to come but pleasant and warm right then – something that was, for the last time that year, just right.

That’s what the song is, I think – just right. It is a song that hardly needs my input. I couldn’t possibly count the versions of it that have been recorded after Humphrey Bogart asked Sam to play it again back in 1941 – most recently, that Casablanca version acted as ironic commentary during the ending credits of The Sopranos’ “Cold Stones” episode in 2006 – a literal comment on Carmela’s visit to Paris combined with the stinging line “the world will always welcome lovers,” which spoke brutally to the fatal beating of Vito, the outed mobster killed by Phil Leotardo’s goons (the world most certainly did not welcome those lovers). That was a thrilling use of the song, but then too it was perfect, and then too, it felt like Fall – the episode took place, in that Sopranos storyline, just before Thanksgiving.

That is what I think a Fall song needs to be – calm and accepting in the fate of oncoming gloom. Today I played the Billie Holiday version on a rare warm October day. For us in Seattle this year, there wasn’t much of a summer as we rushed into a perennial autumn, beautiful, enormous, kaleidoscope of leaves that mat streets and sidewalks in gooey glaze. On your shoes the leaves don’t crackle, they feel like bug guts smashed in your soles, and make you wonder the nature of the grime they track onto your rug. I rolled the windows down in my car and blasted the song along 45th Street through Wallingford. Again, it was perfect.

Plenty of people talk about Summer songs, and even Winter songs – songs that are frothy and fun, or spare and cold. Fall is something different, a calm aware of the storm. I’ve heard songs that strike that mood before too, but not often. They certainly aren’t like Billie’s version of “As Time Goes By,” but they come to mind – songs I’ve heard during the same time of year to the same effect. Leona Naess’s “Calling,” which played its bittersweet piano cords to me on a bus ride through the changing trees around Green Lake. Neko Case’s “Fox Confessor Brings The Flood” driving through rain storms. They’re there, Springsteen’s “Two Faces,” Dylan’s “Shooting Star,” Fiona Apple’s apropos “Pale September.” They’re the leaves as they near the end of their year, beautiful and final, unconcerned by everything that might be ahead.

Friday, October 19, 2007

Radio Nowhere

I've said it before that music is, in a sense, impossible to review since it's the most subjective of all media, but at the same time you know the experience of reading a review you think captures the truth - and one that seems to be on Mars. They're all on Mars these days - in taking a quick look at the responses to some recently released albums by artists I love, I've found, I think, some proof that the reviews have mostly missed the boat. Here is my take.

The World Has Made Me The Man of My Dreams Me'shell Ndegeocello
She's not the most fashionable woman to get behind, but I truly believe Ndegeocello is one of the great female artists of our time, and our time is the one when there are a million of them to choose from, so that's a worthy distinction. She's done it subtly - becoming an indie star in the 90's through her funk albums Plantation Lullabies and Peace Beyond Passion, but somehow managing to get even more popular with her acoustic, piano-and-string soul disc Bitter in 1999, which probably sold less than 100,000, but leads to seething allegiance, and got her a Grammy nomination.

But that was just her first about face - in 2002, she released Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape, a masterpiece of Jazz, hip-hop, spoken word, and social consciousness - it was, for an artist of eclectic provocation, an album that one works up to. 2002 was secretly a terrific year for music, and Cookie is one of its best albums. Listen to a song like "Hot Night" and try not to feel revolutionized, or a song like "Trust" and not feel a little titillated. Still, that wasn't enough either - her 2003 release, Comfort Woman, was all spaceage, synth-driven reggae full of stoner love songs (its best song is the supremely seductive "Come Smoke My Herb"), and 2005 saw her releasing Dance of the Infidel, full of Jazz of such purity, she doesn't even sing on the album (however, the singing, when it occurs by artists like Lalah Hathaway or Cassandra Wilson, is extraordinary - "The Chosen" from that record has to be one of the finest modern jazz compositions you're likey to encounter).

So here she goes again with her consciousness raising genre-bending. The World Has Made... reflects her interests in Afro-punk and reggae, but also political ire. Her first song, "The Sloganeer: Paradise," incites Muslim suicide bombers to kill themselves already and save us the trouble. "Headline" rallies with a sneer, "I heard in the paper/ that war will bring peace." "Evolution" sings with subtlety that it all signals the end of times as "Evolution's ending," and it opens with a sound clip called "Haditha," in which a voice describes the Muslim signs of the end of time - wearing shorts in public, having sex in front of other people, having headphones on your head.

It has to do with Ndegeocello's lingering popularity - which is to say, her lack of it - that leads to the size of reviews publications can devote to her records, but the scant coverage is surprising. I'm happy at least Entertainment Weekly gave the record an A and is on the right track with a review noting, "her eye on global events and her heart gnawed at by mixed emotions," but I'm afraid it's a little too lavish in the name of promoting Ndegeocello. EW has long been a fan of Ndegeocello - the only one, I think, that follows her work so closely - but I think it speaks to support to devote more column inches and detailed analysis.

The truth is the record is highly ambitious and nearly great but suffers from a lack of direction. In its first half, you feel like you're listening to Ndegeocello's second work of consciousness-raising greatness, a more outraged Cookie. It climaxes in the sweet soul-jazz "Lovely Lovely" and moves into the more gentle "Elliptical," a beautiful song hard to take seriously with its refrain of "I received a message from god/ in the form of a rainbow/ instructions from Captain Gerard who said - 'see how it feels/ when you make love/ and you look them in the eyes'" (that's a lot of layers to go through for a pretty simple sex tip - god, her rainbow, and her captain could have just pointed her to a Barnes & Noble), gets more gentle on "Shirk," and then moves into its hardest-hitting, most energetic number "Article 3." The combination is tonic, but its second half is rather lackluster and makes you feel like a journey with no discernable destination - all buildup to lots of filler. Her climactic song should be "Michele Johnson," an ostensibly personal statement, but its "I do some right/ I do some wrong/ I pray/ I'm just a soul on the planet trying to do good" falls pretty far short of her declaration on Cookie "Let's talk about the sign of the time - politics, and the fight of a revolution era soul singer" on "Hot Night." It ends in the bizarre bonus track of "Soul Spaceship," that's a funky, catchy nothing. As a record, it works, but not entirely if you stopped to look at Ndegeocello's work - she's a born provocateur and her music is alive on her endless, fearless reinventions, but this album isn't the complete work like her others. It is, however, the work of a real artist - would anyone mind hearing that?



White Chalk P.J. Harvey
If Ndegeocello is ambitious but flailing without direction, Harvey's White Chalk is the opposite - minimalist in scope, and fulfilled and made thrilling by strong direction and drive. You hear it in the opening track - the piano keys that come floating in on "The Devil" with its high, girly singing, like a quaint and uneasy dream escaping a Victorian attic - it's like The Others set to music. "As soon as I'm left alone/ the devil wanders into my soul," she sings with a high mutter climaxing, in a way, into a cry of "Come here at once!" The woman who 12 years ago, in "Meet Ze Monsta," cried "Big black monsoon/ take me with you" is hardly, at this point, courting new territory asking to be whisked away by the devil. But this is long after the dark, grinding punk guitars, and it sounds like a Harvey you've never heard before - quiet, imposed, a soul suffering
with such unease that the only word she can find to describe her hidden desire is "the devil."

Harvey states that she's so proud of this record that she's shocked she can listen to it on her own. I think what she's responding to is her lack of personal connection to it - she stated she can't listen at all to To Bring You My Love and Is This Desire? because they were made at such low points in her life. This is an album that's entirely persona, entirely locked in that Victorian attic with an old piano and a broken harp. Yet what a thrill - if this is an exercise in characterization, no one does dramatics like Harvey. More than that, this album is evidence of what a truly great artist can do with absolutely anything, and the truth is that Harvey is one of the greats - not just one of the great women of the 90's or great women in rock, but one of the great artists in rock music, a pillar by which all rock since 1980 can and should be judged by.

The reviews on it are small, however, and I suppose that's how it should be - the album is, truly, not that ambitious, and will not be one of the important records of Harvey's career. But then again, neither was Dylan's Desire or X's Under The Big Black Sun, but those albums are astonishing too. The reviews are positive, for the most part, but a couple surprise me - an EW review, for example, that gives the record a C, saying her "high key strangles the most powerful weapon in her arsenal: her voice." Really? Harvey's voice has always been part of creating the persona in her songs - her melodramatic moan in "Legs," her masculine bounce in "I Think I'm a Mother," her rock star angst in "Big Exit," her timidity in "Pocket Knife." Her voice is a powerful instrument, but she's used it in every conceivable fashion, and this is just another one, creating a sustained atmosphere of anxiety with its spare falsetto.

I'm afraid that Harvey's reviews have long suffered from praise fatigue. People are so busy congratulating her on making another terrific record that they fail to talk about her work as one long, continuous project, taking on new ambition and directions with each album - reviewers like her, but they don't know her that well. White Chalk is another terrific record, to be sure, but what works is Harvey's sense of structural drama - its first half climaxing with the pulse-like nightmare of "When Under Ether" and a ghostly walk on the sand in its title track, and its second half working up to and away from "Silence," the most powefully percussive and theatrical song on the record. This is a record of real conceptual drive, practically scripted in the ebbs and flows of the persona at its center. Even I get weary of naming every Harvey album as the best or second best album of its year, but I think of Harvey releasing another album now as Bergmann releasing another movie - this is another in the grand scheme of advancing Harvey's varied, vital world view.


Magic Bruce Springsteen
Bruce Springsteen's inclusion as an all-time rock great is not very much in question, nor is there a shortage of column inches with which his work can be discussed in popular publications. Its praise is mostly universal (it has a 76 Metacritic rating, which, I have to add happily, is lower than PJ Harvey's), and its most positive press is certainly not short on Grand Statements: Says EW's Chris Willman, it's his "Best record since The River in 1980."

I'm a fan of Willman's writing, so it pains me to say that that assertion is crazy, but that assertion is crazy. For one, The River has to be Springsteen's weakest record of that period - I would think that the best Springsteen record since The River would be Nebraska, released immediately after The River. But that's nitpicky. What drives me nuts about Magic exactly? I think it starts with the glossy cover picture of Springsteen, now 58, staring out with well-groomed hair and too-worked-out shoulders like he's been watching too much of Little Steven's work as Silvio on The Sopranos. That cover and its flip-side back cover - of Springsteen's toned back in a tight white T covered with the track list - are something like the attempt in 1984 to turn Springsteen's ass into a working-class symbol on Born In The USA.

Springsteen's ass, of course, was a working-class symbol with Born In The USA, but now the tough-goombah-Jersey Springsteen presented here symbolizes, to me, the cynicism that pervades the record. Longtime Springsteen producer Jon Landau (The man who, as a rock critic, made famous in 1974 the statement "I have seen the future and his name is Bruce Springsteen") describes the recording sessions for Magic as very pared down, very structured - not a lot of extra material, not a lot of experimentation on the songs, a very clear, goal-oriented recording that went by quickly. This too symbolizes the same cynicism.

These songs are, frankly, the most transparent of Springsteen's career - and I say that loving most of his work. Even on The Rising, I felt like the Springsteen of old was alive and well, if showing his bones a little. Here, it's all bones - songs like "Your Own Worst Enemy" and "Girls In Their Summer Clothes" wear their generic pop dress proudly and Bruce sounds bland over them. Songs like "Gypsy Biker" and "I'll Work For Your Love" are even half as interesting as that, sounding like democratic E-Street Band jigsaw songs - each band member adds his/her portion dutifully, and the result is as it should be, I suppose - it sounds as natural as a Destiny's Child song.

But I think the problem persists even in the good songs, and that problem is that the thing is too calculated, playing like Springsteen at his least convincing and most arrogant. The emotional closer "Devil's Arcade" stings, in its way, but it's also too coyly constructed - it's a first date! It's a dying soldier! I found myself equally liking the song and feeling manipulated by it, and knowing that so much of Springsteen's career has been calculated, this one felt more intrusive. The opening rocker "Radio Nowhere" is wildly energetic, but it's also standard for Springsteen, and a little cloying at that - described by some as a "plea" (the chorus rings "is there anybody alive out there"), I hear it as Springsteen's taunt of modern music, a song, truly, about there being 57 Channels with nothing on.

But should he really be objecting so much making music that sounds this standard? 2005's Devils and Dustwas derided by money, but I have to say I loved that record, and it was for exactly what's missing on Magic - the spirit of invention. In fact, prior to writing this, "All I'm Thinking Bout" popped on my iPod, and with its high-pitched squeal sounding much like Bruce walking the Vegas strip at 7 a.m., it conveyed the feeling of real romantic longing. That album was decried by many as one Bruce-goes-acoustic record too many, but the surprise with that record is how much more than acoustic it is - the sexy "All The Way Home," the strings and harmonica of "Jesus Was An Only Son," the shouldn't-have-seen-this-hooker tale, "Reno" - it was, truly, a risky and bold record that sounded like Bruce just wanted to do something he hadn't before. Magic is the opposite - a calculated, dull record of Bruce trying to prove he can sound like he always did. It'll sound great in concert, I'm sure - this is Bruce Springsteen, after all - but I think it's the least interesting work of his career.

Saturday, October 06, 2007

The foreign film section

As someone who listed "list making" as one of my favorite activities well into my life in college, it gets hard for me to admit how obnoxious I find "best of" lists for movies and entertainment in general these days. Maybe it comes from an understanding of the mindset for these things - the need for list makers to vaunt themselves into a position of expertise simply by creating a list, the need to manufacture contraversy to by creating a few "edgy" choices in order to defend their viewpoint, thereby exerting that expertise again. I know because I've done it, and because I still do it, really - make lists at the end of every year of the best movies and music. I still love those lists, honestly, and it may be because I just think in lists, or maybe things on an annual basis are just manageable enough that I don't feel like I'm straining, and I can still write an opinion or two, which is clearly something I love.

But in any case, I found myself upset about one of those lists recently - a daily IMDb link to eddieonfilm.com, another blog on this site, which listed the "Top 100 Foreign Films Ever Made." I read lists like those (and they pop up every damn day by some blogger and get linked to IMDb, whose daily posts these days are half E! news castoffs, half geeks-only contentious minutiae) to get movie recommendations, as much as to cringe of the idea. I made a post on there, actually, first because the description of Jean-Luc Goddard's Contempt read "more terrifying than a Joan Didion novel" as if she were Dean Koontz (was the history of Caliornia pioneers in Where I Was From supposed to be terrifying? The description of rain in Run River?), but also at the idea in general:

"Joan Didion novels aren't terrifying, that's a weird comparison.

And "foreign movies" isn't a genre - why are you putting so much privilege on the American movie, making it the default from which these other movies compare to. Those Top Ten movies are just great movies and are each pretty essential to the history of all movies. This list seems like an elaborate way to brag about an inclusive knowledge of movies, but it only points out how ghettoized you see non-American movies."


The writer of the website, Edward Copeland, points out that I really meant non-English Speaking movies (guess I see movies as pretty American by default too), but still - the list is strange when it's not just self-important. Of those top ten movies, it seems to me that 9 are obvious, as they helped change the history of movies, and the tenth - Warner Herzog's Aguirre: The Wrath of God - is thrown in for good measure, to add a movie shot in color, a movie that feels "modern" in order to disguise the list as something other than fodder for film majors discussing the same "important" international releases over and over again. Don't get me wrong - Aguirre is an auterist masterpiece, a distinctive work made unlike any other movie before or since, and is the central movie of Herzog's incredible career. But it is a kind of ahistorical film classic - it's not The 400 Blows or 8 1/2 or The Rules of The Game, it's just its own entity.

Not that these sort of unique aberrations can't stand alone on top ten lists, but it leads to the central problem of Best Ever lists - it says more about popular opinion at the time the list is being made than it does about "Ever." My dad pointed out to me once that on the lists of "Best Ever" albums, there's a rotation every decade of which Beatles album tends to show up on top - in the 70's, it was Sgt. Pepper's, in the 80's it was Abbey Road, in the 90's The White Album, and now Revolver. Just like the most recent Best Ever list of songs in Rolling Stone - these days the popular opinion on Bob Dylan is so high that "Like A Rolling Stone" feels appopriate on top (and why wouldn't it appear on top then - when compiling lists from any number of sources, they are popular opinion, and the list is compiling those opinions), whereas even five years earlier, the same magazine said the Best Ever song was the Beatles' "Yesterday."

In the same sense, Herzog is perhaps more popular a filmmaker now than ever - after Grizzly Man and Rescue Dawn, two of the most accessible movies of his career. How strange was it two years ago in that summer o' documentaries that Grizzly Man, a movie about man's imbecility in the face of nature, became a crowd pleaser. The eddieonfilm.com list also represents the current strain of popular opinion about Ingmar Bergman (always amongst the greatest of all filmmakers, but, it must be said, is perhaps more popular now due to his still-fresh death), that Persona is his best movie, and not The Seventh Seal or Wild Strawberries.

But what I was initially calling ghettoizing non-English speaking movies I think is true, but also shortsighted. The truth is the history of movies is one tennis match between the English language movies and the international movies - those obvious 9 of the top 10 in the eddieonfilm.com list come from times in which international cinema was such a force that it influenced every American director who watched those movies - they may not look the same, but it's true: without Bicycle Thieves there is no Midnight Cowboy, without Breathless there is no Mean Streets, without Belle du Jour, there is no Blue Velvet.

However, when including non-English movies after the 70's, the opposite is true - Herzog notwithstanding, these are artistic accomplishments made becasue of American movies. Run Lola Run or Croughing Tiger, Hidden Dragon are movies made for international audiences. Almodovar, probably the most famous of European directors in the past 25 years, is an admitted film packrat, a postmodern collector of intertexts using old movies to create modern pastiche.

Frankly, the only thing that connects pre-1970 and post-1970 foreign movies is a subtitle. International movies after that point are often great, of course, but they're typically made as movies for the international marketplace and are made of certain recognizable tropes - the Cinema Paradisos or Burnt By The Suns or Central Stations that are typically congenial movies about cranks and the kids who soften them up, and wind up winning Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film. Or, they're the Asian regime-change epics - Farewell My Concubine or The Emperor and the Assassin or Yellow Earth or Not One Less or Raise The Red Lantern or... well, you get the idea.

Even the distinctive foreign movies get churned into international commodities these days - Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was famously a bomb in China, but it hasn't stopped China from trying to make that thing a dozen times since with diminishing effect each time. Tom Tykwer, the German kineticist of Run Lola Run could easily be prosecuted for plaigarizing himself in movie after movie since then (although, I sort of like that movie he keeps remaking, The Princess and the Warrior is just as good). Danish Dogmatists made Breaking The Waves a masterpiece, but then just added their poorly lit aesthetics to movies you swear you've seen made in English. And then of the real international artists? There should be no distinction in discussing their careers or American movie director's careers - take Almodovar or Krzysztof Kieslowski for what they are, modern auteurs, just like Robert Altman or David Lynch or Spike Lee (and often times, even more popular).

I pick this battle because ultimately, I think, while Best Ever foreign film lists do ghettoize foreign movies, it limits them even more to think of non-English movies throughout the history of film as a continual experience - there's a million stories waiting to be told about each era of movies, and continuing to think of them all as the same thing means only nitpicky film geeks will get to it - or worse, apparently, they're not getting to it either.