Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Going Solo

Five years ago I read Chris Willman’s book about the political affiliation of country music artists and how this affected their songwriting and careers.  Willman was inspired to write the book after profiling The Dixie Chicks during the political brouhaha over Natalie Maines badmouthing of George W. Bush.  Country music at the time became an interesting battleground for the political soul of the nation.

It’s funny how things have changed.  In the book Gretchen Wilson suggested that it wasn’t really proper to discuss politics with folks (see subsequently campaigned with Sarah Palin), Chely Wright was the poster girl for red-state military pride (she’s since come out as a lesbian), and Toby Keith was actually a presence on country radio (what happened to his career?).

I also distinctly remember an anecdote about a drunken Ronnie Dunn railing about the left and generally being an obnoxious idiot.  The book did not paint a flattering portrait and so I got it in my head that he was probably just a jerk.  So when he announced he was going solo and releasing an album without his former duo partner I thought for sure he would simply become part of the necrotic intellectual ulcer of the country scene left festering by Mr. Keith.

But to my surprise his latest album, Bleed Red, is actually fucking great.  Dunn has interestingly chosen two slow numbers as the first singles.  The eponymous lead single was a heartfelt apology song.  And the new single, “Cost of Living,” is simply spectacular.  It’s on repeat on my iPod regularly.  It’s a first-person number about a guy in a job interview who’s just trying to make ends meet.  It’s quiet, touching, and—surprise—not at all cloying.  It’s definitely some grade-A material and Mr. Dunn sings it beautifully.

Anyways, this is much to say that this album has been a surprise.  Five years ago I was ready to write him off as an industry dirtbag.  Turns out all these years it was Kix Brooks that was holding him back.  Who knew?

Sunday, May 29, 2011

An Inspiring Op-ed

A truly inspiring op-ed in the Times today about committing to love.  Jonathan Franzen manages to combine cultural criticism, thoughtful pop psychology and a sentimental anecdote into a brilliant piece free of crankery.

“Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/opinion/29franzen.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

Saturday, May 14, 2011

The Real Deal

Ask any pop music aficionado about their preferences and they’ll likely justify many of their choices based on the notion of authenticity.  That word—“authenticity”—is an especially loaded one in cultural studies.  Those in the popular press bandy it about as a badge of honour; academics will often poo-poo it as a chimera, a fantasy of rock snobs.  There are many academic justifications as to why “authenticity” doesn’t exist, but underlying these is a primarily philosophical argument.

In the seventeenth century Descartes famously pronounced that “cogito ergo sum” (I think therefore I am).  In three words he encapsulated a fundamental notion of human character: we are extensions of our thoughts.  Everything we do, therefore—our actions, choices, music preferences—are results of our essence.  Being “authentic” means being true to who we are.  In some ways, the Cartesian concept of consciousness is strangely “new age,” avant la lettre

The history of the “self” over the past 350 years is a slow shift from Cartesian essence to fraudulent pastiche.  First French and then American philosophers and aestheticians of the past forty years have finally called out humanity for its duplicity.  Our actions, choices, and, yes, music preferences, they argue, are not reflections of our inner minds, but rather conscious choices meant to reflect the kind of people we would like to be.  They usually refer to this as “decentered selfhood.”  We have no essence or “authentic” self, only a vague collection of aesthetic choices meant to reflect some imagined version of ourselves.

Enter country music.  Populist journalists of course venerate the genre as the expression of an “authentic” American spirit.  Cynics and academics, of course. deride it as a commercial construct meant to reflect a fantasy of rural life—a fantasy ever less tenable as we become more urban, sophisticated and middle class.

But as I’ve argued in this blog many times, country music at its best speaks to the way we actually live our lives.  The “Jesus and my truck” variety, as I call it, of course has no relevance to me or, if I may say, the vast majority of country music listeners.  That kind of country is indeed a fantasy of fidelity, piety and patriotism that does not nor has ever existed.  But songs about love found, love lost, household chores, drinking too much and being jealous are not imagined realities—these are experiences far more human than even most hip-hop and r&b can speak to (and I’m not knocking either of those genres).

This is all much to say that I still believe in some notion of “authenticity.”  I don’t mean to apply it in some patronizing way (as it so often is).  “Authenticity” usually only works as a label when you apply it to something both simple and exotic: Chinese pottery, Aboriginal handicrafts, the Hon. Jack Layton.  But something can indeed be authentic (no scare quotes) when it speaks to something common, shared, everyday—something real.

This week I’ve been listening to Lori McKenna’s new album.  Six summers ago I was utterly obsessed with Faith Hill’s album Fireflies—a stellar country album made all the better by two songs written by Lori McKenna.  An appearance on Oprah and a attempt at mainstream country success later, Lori McKenna is back with an indie album with more songs about being a mom (she has five children), a wife (she married young, but is now 41) and living in a working class Massachusetts town (Stoughton, a half hour’s drive south of Boston).

McKenna’s songwriting range, like her vocal range, is limited.  Almost all over her songs are about the three defining characteristics I’ve listed above.  They’re intensely personal—you almost feel a bit bad listening in.  But the specificity she brings to her songwriting is what makes her so stellar.  You might think that songs that mention Fisher Price are beyond the artistic pale, but I swear to you that nothing is more moving than her lyrical turns of phrase.  Her melodies are little more than short exclamations—sometimes pleading, sometimes exalted—but always direct.  But nothing feels more real than this.  It’s funny how songs which are so specific to one woman’s life can touch someone else so deeply.

I think that’s because she scratches below the “Jesus and my truck” version of working- and lower-middle class life.  McKenna’s not trying to convince herself to be happy with the things she has.  She’s trying to tell us about the joys and sorrows that make up her days.  And so when she sings about the television flickering in the hallway, going to her kids baseball games and hugging her husband after work, it doesn’t feel like she’s preaching about the virtues of this life.  She’s just telling you how it is.

Listening to this album makes me want to cry.  I’m not a Massachusetts housewife, but I’ve stood in the hallway after a long day, in the glow of the television, and tried to make sense of what my life is, what it’s been and where it’s going.  This music feels authentic to me.  Call me an old fashioned Cartesian.  But we are what we think.  And I think Lori McKenna is the real deal.  Check out her new album, Lorraine.

Saturday, March 26, 2011

Dissertation Wordle

My dissertation (now completed) distilled into a small visual diagram. I think it looks like a potato.

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

On the Truly Excellent Miranda Lambert

This past Sunday Miranda Lambert was robbed.  She did take home a Grammy Award for “Best Female Country Vocal Performance” for “The House that Built Me”—an award she surely deserved.  But the award for country album of the year went to multiple-winners Lady Antebellum for Need You Now.  I like that album and its eponymous single a good deal.  But I don’t love it.  I understood why when I read Jody Rosen’s recent take on Lady A in Slate.  The subheadline of the article christened them “the dullest band on earth” and Rosen suggested that “the group's defining quality is a kind of nebulous in-betweeness.”  This kind of banality was the perfect tonic, says Rosen, for the very immoderate age in which we live.

I certainly don’t begrudge Lady A their success.  They are certainly capable songwriters (if a bit unoriginal).  They even co-wrote a very sweet song with Lambert on her album (“Love Song”).  But Rosen is right: this is a band that you lavish with only a moderate amount of affection.  I do not feel the same way about Miranda Lambert’s Revolution.

Released on September 29, 2009, this is an album that rewards you with repeated listenings.  Its not that its a staggering work of genius—or even that every song is of unimpeachable craftsmanship.  But on the whole, this album is one of the most touching and quietly profound country albums I’ve listened to.

First, we have to discount a couple of songs which are fun diversions but not integral to the main action of this album.  “White Liar” is a too-brassy specimen of Lambert’s revenge fantasy oeuvre; “That’s the Way that the World Goes Round” is her obligatory novelty song cover (though, like Gillian Welch’s “Dry Town” from her previous album, Lambert choose a grade-A songwriter to cover in John Prine).

The rest of the album is absolutely enthralling.  I’ve discussed “Makin’ Plans” and “The House that Built Me” on this blog before.  Both deal with the dangers of straying too far from home.  “Makin’ Plans” is about being content with what’s familiar and “House” is an attempt to recapture some sense of place.  Another song on the album takes the complete opposite approach.  “Airstream Song” is about always being on the move.

Sometimes I wish I lived in an Airstream
Homemade curtains, lived just like a gypsy
Break a heart, roll out of town
‘Cause gypsies never get tied down

The music for it is also quite spectacular.  It features a slightly odd amorphous introduction that sounds like the instruments are just tuning up before launching into a loose-limbed take on alt-country Americana.  That a VERY commercial country artist makes room on an album for these kind of Brooklyn-based hipster-chic musical textures is fascinating.  What’s more, however, is that Lambert doesn’t at all adapt any kind of ironic pose.  She’s quite serious, and not in a falsely pious country way.  She’s managed to find a middle way between sentimental commercial country schlock and the kind of fake-folksy shenanigans of urban redneck poseurs.

Even songs which could take the album into truly awful Red-state jingoism, like “Time to Get a Gun,” have such a winking kindness that you just smile even if you disagree with her politics (she grew up the daughter of private eyes, so she’s earnestly an NRA supporter).  What helps is Lambert’s acknowledgement of her politics in relation to the liberal Northeast.  But rather than adopting Country’s usual befuddlement at city-folk ways, Lambert suggests a rapprochement.

So let’s shake hands and reach across those party lines
You’ve got your friends just like I’ve got mine
We might think a little differently
But we got a lot in common you will see
We’re just like you
Only prettier

Her last chorus states that “I’ll keep drinkin’
And you’ll keep gettin’ skinnier.”  How can you not love this?  Clever, fun, culturally aware—appropriating American musical idioms and subverting them with contemporary cultural messages—graduate students will be lining up to document this.

Typically, however, they’ll likely focus on how she embodies some kind of post-feminist ideology and not discuss what I think is her true aim: to capture the sense of living in a post-place world.  A sense of dislocation is present in each song—dislocation from the ideal relationship, from one’s home, from one’s culture.  She confronts a burning question: unbound from any strictures and with limitless choice what makes you happy?  Revolution touches on how this impacts every aspect of our lives.  How we relate to the land, how we look after our neighbours, how we find love, how we find peace with ourselves.  No album in my recent memory more deeply touches the cultural moment in which we live. 

County is often blamed for being culturally regressive.  I’ve rather loved its ability to bring some poetic dignity to our everyday struggles, but I’ll concede that sometimes artists can affect a nostalgia that I don’t share.  But here Lambert has harnessed the most beautiful aspects of the country idiom to our cultural moment.  Listen to this album and it will cut you to the quick. 

But best of all, Lambert brings you great solace as well.  “Heart Like Mine” is about a Christian girl who doesn’t quite live up to certain strict interpretations of good Christian living.  She’s in a place like a lot of us: struggling to square what we are with we and others would like us to be.  But this girl has hit on quite a good idea regarding her slightly immoderate alcohol consumption.

Cause I heard Jesus, He drank wine
And I bet we’d get along just fine
He could calm a storm and heal the blind
And I bet He’d understand a heart like mine

No more Christ-like words have ever been set to music in country.  I love this woman. 

Sunday, January 23, 2011

U Smile, Sorrido Anch’io

Biebs blog

Quick confession: I don’t actually mind Justin Bieber’s music.  Ok, actual truth?  I kind of enjoy it.  Its slick production and lyrical innocence remind me of pop music of the 90s.  Remember them?  The bull market, third way centrism, the tech boom—optimism.  The only tough choice you had was between The Backstreet Boys and Nsync.  I actually preferred 98 degrees, which is, I know, ridiculous.  But don’t tell me that “The Hardest Thing” wasn’t a kick-ass song.  Trust me.  I just watched the video.  I still love it but now miss my fleet of turtleneck sweaters.

But the Bieb’s music also shares an aesthetic heritage with a slightly older genre: the eighteenth-century sentimental opera aria.  Before you declare my argument utter fancy, just compare the lyrics of Bieber’s hit “U Smile” with Don Ottavio’s aria “Dalla sua pace” from Mozart’s Don Giovanni.  Both describe an innamorato’s dependence upon his loved one for his every happiness.  In the eighteenth century, this declaration of one’s entimental nature—of one’s empathy—was a sign of refinement and nobility.  They weren’t called  gentleman for nothing.  Since the mid-century the sensitive man was all the rage.  Teenage girls, it seems, might have liked Don Ottavio just fine.

Bieber: “U Smile” (Bieber/Duplessis/Altino/Rigo)

I'd wait on you forever and a day
Hand and foot
Your world is my world
Ain't no way you're ever gon' get
Any less than you should
Cause baby
You smile I smile
Cause whenever
You smile I smile

Don Ottavio: “Dalla sua pace” (Da Ponte/Mozart)

Dalla sua pace la mia dipende;
Quel che a lei piace vita mi rende,
Quel che le incresce morte mi dà.
S'ella sospira, sospiro anch'io;
È mia quell'ira, quel pianto è mio;
E non ho bene, s'ella non l'ha.



[My peace of mind depends on her / what pleases her gives life to me / what grieves her brings me death / If she sighs, I sigh, too / her wrath and her sorrow are mine / and I cannot be well if she is not]


Don Ottavio is by no means a beloved character of opera.  Despite his highly empathic declarations, critics have often criticized his inaction and even implied his impotency.  His fiancée, Donna Anna, doesn’t seem to have a lot of respect for him.  Poor guy.


His situation is made slightly worse because most opera productions demand that Ottavio sing both his arias (“Dalla sua pace” was added for the Vienna production of 1788, a year after it debuted in Prague).  This means that he spends most of his time onstage singing about how sensitive he is.  What a bore.  Musicologist Joseph Kerman, though, cut him some slack: “Ottavio’s reputation for blandness does not take into account this capacity of his for sympathetic chromatic resonance.  One does not begrudge him his bonus aria.”  In other words, Mozart’s music makes it all worthwhile.


I’m not sure that the Bieb’s music will stand up as well as Mozart’s.  But for the time being, his particular brand of bubble-gum pop makes me smile.  One should not begrudge him his success. 

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

When His Thoughts Was as Free

DSC00780

Many apologies for not updating this blog in several months.  I’m going to try to do better in future.

It has currently reached that point in the day when I require a pep-talk to forge on with work.  The eye of heaven has cast its gaze on parts west and so I feel like I can put my labours to rest.  But humans invented artificial light for a reason, and so I should really continue on.  I will, however, sneak in a short post.  You won’t tell, will you?

Sometimes during long days at the office my mind starts to wonder.  Especially on gray, soggy winter days like today it settles on good memories of careless summer days.  Few poets better captured the simple joys of maidenhood youth better than James Whitcomb Riley (sorry for briefly recalling Camelot).

Riley was a poet who spent most of his life in Indianapolis.  Many of his early poems were published in a Hoosier dialect (like the one below).  His collection “The Old Swimmin’ Hole” (1883) is every bit as folksy as the title suggests.  One of his most famous poems, “When the frost is on the pumpkin,” is published in the volume.  One of my favourites is “The Mulberry Tree.”  It could have been a very grating elegy for a misremembered past.  But there’s a tinge of melancholy in the poem that I think gives it a bit of emotional heft.  Sentimental, of course.  But totally effective.  Here’s the last stanza: 

Then its who fergit the old mulberry

   tree

That he knowed in the days when his

   thoughts was as free

As the flutterin’ wings of the birds that

   flew out

Of the tall wavin’ tops as the boys come

   about?

O, a crowd of my memories, laughin’ and

   gay,

Is a-climbin’ the fence of that pastur’ to-

   day,

And a-pantin’ with joy, as us boys ust to be,

They go racin’ acrost fer the mulberry tree.