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.