Surfing with Joseph Arthur.

So, my hipster friend, you went to South by Southwest and you're a friggin' trapstar, while I have not left the house in months. And did you see Joseph Arthur? Did you see him sing this song? It's called "Rages of Babylon" and it's (drumroll...) a Protest Song About Iraq!



You might expect that there'd be lots of current songs likening Iraq to Babylon, and you'd be absolutely wrong. Not to say there aren't lots of songs about "Babylon," because they emerge, hot and steady, like a flow of burbling oil from beneath the sandy ground of collective unconscious. It's just that, by and large, they have nothing to do with Iraq. Mr. Arthur's song is an anomaly. (Well, OK, there's Lili Haydn. And Sheryl Crow, sort of... but only sort of.)

Where exactly is this "Babylon" that people keep writing songs about? It depends. Sometimes it depends on your genre. For instance, if you're a rock 'n' roll band that someone would conceivably describe as "rock 'n' roll," Babylon is likely a land of 24/7 debauchery, where cocaine and vomit and virgins that YOU DEFLOWERED all mingle together into some unholy mess, maybe on the floor of a temple. Think of this as the Faster Pussycat/Dolls/Turbonegro nexus.

If, on the other hand, you're a rock 'n' roll band that nobody would conceivably describe as "rock 'n' roll", and you blow your per diems on issues of Artforum, you probably see Babylon as a dead civilization or as hell. If you're honest (which you are... unrelentingly), you'll find this dead civilization/hell inside your own heart. Bands in this category include Rainbow, Celtic Frost, and Symphony X.

BUT--if you're a rock 'n' roll band that people describe as "freestyle" and you're Pajama Party, your take on Babylon is visionary and defies interpretation. You're like Herman Hesse or the Yahwist. You titled this blog. Thanks!

If you're a Rasta, you're not reading this, but everyone who is reading it is an integral cog in the Babylon machine. Don't worry, they'll soon be destroyed! If you're a mainline Christian singing a setting of Psalm 137 ("By the Rivers of Babylon"), Babylon is whichever oppressive society oppresses mainline Christians-- because, let's face it, you're just as oppressed as any impoverished descendent of the Middle Passage! Watch out, though. If you're Sinead O'Connor singing Psalm 137, Babylon is mainline Christianity. And if you're Boney M singing Psalm 137, your take on Babylon is visionary and defies interpretation.

As you may have guessed from all those choices, Mr. Arthur's more literal approach is just about the least interesting option available. It's a pretty tune, and disrupted family life is always a good angle for a protest song, but this one just seems to sit there. For one thing, there's no image as immediately affecting as Springsteen singing "Too much room in my bed, and too many phone calls" in "You're Missing" (for example). So the narrator's intimacy never really hits home.

But then, it's hard to tell whether he was going for intimacy. I mean, he did call the song "Rages of Babylon" and not "Rages of Iraq." ("Doooooo you know who has got yer back/ Throuuuuugh the rages of this Iraq?") ("Rages of This Iraq" would be much better, you're right.) He obviously wanted to stick in some metaphorical heft, to make this thing resonate beyond our current skirmish and speak to the ages. So ultimately, I'm disappointed he didn't run with the metaphor and appeal to "Babylon" in the larger sense of any of the above uses. From this song, all we learn about Babylon is that it's sandy and unpleasant for American soldiers--which I'm guessing is also the case with Iraq.

Langhoff Unpublished: Cesium 137's Intelligent Design

Another gem from the Metropolis goody wagon. I sent this off to Chuck shortly before he was canned, and he replied with a diplomatic "Probably not, but I'll hang onto it if space opens up." Understandable, as this review is long and nobody else has heard of these guys and Metropolis seemed not to care about this release at all, instead focusing their attention on Gary Numan's awful new album. When Harvilla came aboard, he said he'd try to run this review, and thus did I love him--but to no avail. Anyway, somebody oughtta hear this CD, cos it's one of my three favorites of the year... possibly. I still need to figure that out and listen to Pitbull. So, all you anonymous commentators who keep talking shit about Carman, go out and listen to Cesium 137, will ya?

Oh, and in re the final paragraph, I wrote this shortly after the '06 Grammy awards, at which U2's "Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own" won Song of the Year and Green Day's "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" won Record of the Year. I hate both songs.


Cesium 137
Intelligent Design
(Metropolis)

What if there was a godlike computer that could quantify impossible data? I’d first ask it: During my life, what song have I heard the most? If it’s the Friends theme, how much should I hate myself? Is “Bizarre Love Triangle” really my favorite song? When writing music, what’s the most beautiful chord that could possibly follow the notes I just put down?

Philly’s dynamic darkwave duo Cesium 137 seem to have accessed the computer for that last one--or maybe they are the computer. Whoever came up with the chords on Intelligent Design, their answer seems to have been, “Throw some 7ths and 9ths on top of some IV’s and vi’s, maybe a suspension every so often, and you’re set! Humans eat up that shit.” It’s true, I do. Cesium’s chords oscillate through waves of yearning, and every chorus is lovely, if not necessarily memorable.

I’m not fool enough to think these overwhelmingly diatonic chords and tunes are interesting, but the songs’ forgettableness isn’t usually a problem. Cesium’s point isn’t the chords so much as all the different synth parts providing notes for the chords. This is, simply, some of the busiest pop polyphony I’ve ever heard. Four or five repetitive patterns of laser blasts, alarm clock shrieks, and bass farts are usually flying around the melodies. The patterns often sync up with the basslines to provide those split-second 7ths and 9ths and whatnot that people, through centuries of musical evolution, associate with anguished prettiness. But as soon as the synth lines hit their marks, they’re gone, back about their business until the next pleasure moment locks into place.

Not that this is anything new. Counterpoint’s been around for-freakin’-ever; classical and pop musicians love exploiting the tension between independent horizontal lines and what those lines are doing vertically with one another. Since Cesium’s counterpoint uses diversely timbred non-melodic patterns more than hummable melody lines, it often feels like something new, but the difference is more one of quantity than quality. That is, I’m amazed they’re able to coordinate all the different elements of each song, without anything sounding extraneous or random. Each part plays its necessary part, and the precise interactions bring the songs to life as organic wholes, like beehives or something.

Take “Gravity,” which is not a scientific treatise! The bassline gallops out the Lone Ranger rhythm from Rossini’s “William Tell Overture,” only shifted a fourth of a beat earlier. When Cesium pair this up with the 16th note squiggly pattern speeding through the song, the composite sounds remarkably like Angus Young’s bouncy “Thunderstruck” riff, no doubt a big influence. Then there are the two different synth melodies--one a mirror of the vocal refrain, played by both thick techno chords and airy legato synths, and one a shriller filler during the verses. Over the top runs an ethereal line that performs the same function as the strings in a Johnny Mathis song. Put it all over the relentless cymbals and snares and the big old backbeat--there’s one in every song; the Cesiums clearly learned from Chuck Berry and Huey Lewis--and you get a whole mess of stuff that somehow coheres into a fine chipper melancholy.

I’m gonna go out on a limb and say Cesium 137 will never win a Grammy for Song of the Year. Based on the evidence of Intelligent Design, their songs divorced from instrumental context--the way you’d find them in a fake book--aren’t much. At least I can remember the chorus of that damn U2 song! But since Cesium’s music is all about production, performance, and intermeshing synth lines, tunes like “Gravity” and “Forsaken” should be a lock for ‘06 Record of the Year. “Forsaken”’s 1999-era drums, two levels of bass throb, and three revolving synth patterns swell around the climactic line, “Divine inspiration isn’t worth much these days,” which is more moving than anything in that idiotic Green Day song. I should now admit that I have no idea what these 10 magisterial songs are “about”. How much do I care? Let’s ask the divine computer…

Another review of an offensively named band!

Would you like to read a review of the Revolting Cocks and Ministry? I thought you might. This was edited by new guy Rob Harvilla, in what turned out to be a pleasant exchange.

As it's June and we're halfway done with the year, I'd like to point out my favorites from the pitifully small amount of new ('06 or late '05) music I've heard. A public service for no one.

Yolanda Perez's Esto Es Amor (I think; can't find it) seems to do something new (but whaddo I know?) by mixing banda horns and tunes with reggaeton beats. The opening horn riff is really exciting, and when I listen to the title tune I'm transported into some spiralling blissful heaven. The coda just keeps singing about love and repeating itself over and over, and it's really happy. But the kind of happy that makes a man cry.

Damone's Out Here All Night is MySpace hair metal with a chick singer and a fine power ballad, "Stabbed In the Heart." Their modulations in all the right places make me laugh. You know, I was marvelling the other day at how Neptunes beats are funny in and of themselves, because they're somehow self-aware. This is not a phenomenon I can currently explain; I dunno if it's just because they sound like they're referencing past kitsch or what, but whenever I hear Britney's "Boys" or Mariah and Snoop Dogg's latest hit (sorry--"Say Somethin'"?), I laugh not at the singers but at the backing tracks. So those Neptunes really know how to tap into our pop-kitsch zeitgeist (ouch!), I surmise, and Damone seem to do the same thing, but with rock. Not that they're any more ironic than, whoever, Little Richard. They mean it and I mean it, but their musical (not even lyrical) funniness lets me know we speak the same language. But some of the later songs are pretty rote. They do make me wanna get a MySpace, though.

The Coup's Pick a Bigger Weapon is standard issue Commie goodness from them, and I really like how "I Just Wanna Lay Around All Day in Bed With You" (words separated for your ease) builds and builds and sounds really evil. Haven't listened to this in, like, a month, so it may be better or worse than I remember.

Falkenbach's Heralding the [something]blade is earth-scorching one-man Viking metal from some cold European country that also has a triumphal oboe riff (ok, maybe a trumpet) on the first song. Reading these synopses, who else is amazed that I've ever made money writing record reviews? I guess I usually do more research. But Falkenbach's loads of fun, and when Mr. Falkenbach isn't growling his singing voice is charming, like Dan Fogelberg or someone. Not that I've ever heard Mr. Fogelberg, but the Dan Fogelberg of my mind sounds like Dan Falkenbach.

The Brazilian rock albums by Nacao Zumbi and Cabruera have some fine grooves, and Julius Eastman's Unjust Malaise comp is fascinating and enjoyable post-minimalism, or probably just minimalism in some cases. I need to listen to all those more.

OK, but that's it. A disgrace! I mean, I've heard some more, but that's all I can wholeheartedly endorse at this point. Pitiful, not the "state of music," but me! Some fine singles on the radio now, though, including the Mariah and Snoop listed above, Ne-Yo's "When You're Mad" and "So Sick," Shakira's "Hips Don't Lie," Nelly Furtado and Timbaland doing "Promiscuous," Sugarland's "Down In MS and Up to No Good," and the All American Rejects' "Move Along." And whatever gospel song I keep hearing on WGCI, "Just Can't Make It Without You." I'll go research at Radio and Records now.

Langhoff Unpublished: Electric Six's Senor Smoke

Metropolis is the only label I get promos from on a regular basis, so I was excited to see this one come down the pike. A real album that people care about! Man, was I gonna write the heck out of it! And I think I did--at least I got off some good lines and I didn't say "Jack Black." So imagine my chagrin when I sent it to Chuck at the Voice without Googling first, and he replies that Mike Barthel's review of the damn import already ran last August! "Don't be a fool: use Google," is my message to all you aspiring freelancers! So then, desperate to beat all the other freelancers no doubt chomping at the bit while feeding at Metropolis's trough, I sent it off to the still no-go Matos at Seattle Weekly, who kindly replied that it was already assigned. Sure enough, the affable Anthony Miccio's review appeared before too long, furthering my envy if not my embarassment. Neither Chuck nor Matos still works those jobs. Now, I'm not saying it's because they didn't run this thing, but...

Electric Six
Señor Smoke
(Metropolis)

Dance rock is here to stay! How do I know? Because fully a third of the songs on Electric Six’s Señor Smoke use the words “dance” or “disco”! And their drummer, the “amusingly” named Percussion World, occasionally plays some syncopated hi-hat! Which is the universal signifier for “disco”! Seriously, I’ve heard Nonesuch recordings from distant corners of the world with disco syncopatin’ that’ll knock yer boots off!

Much more than disco, though, the Six aspire to the hope and the curse implicit in Loverboy’s Get Lucky album cover. A parody of the iconic cover shot, of fingers crossed behind a red leather butt, appeared in Charlie’s Angels II, whose soundtrack featured the Six’s first hit, “Danger! High Voltage,” thus establishing the kitschy trash-rock connection. The fingers are crossed, of course, in the hope of “getting lucky,” and we all understand what that means to the leather-clad. Leather’s uncomfortable! You wanna take it off!

But you also cross your fingers when you lie--well, I do--and that coy insincerity mixed with horniness is all over the Six’s music. The mixture usually comes out sounding like forced aggression to which the band realizes they have no real claim. The same mix is all over Loverboy’s muisic, too--don’t think they didn’t understand the double meaning of their album cover, or that their lyric “When I say jump/ You better jump!/ When I say walk/ Well, you better get ready to say goodbye!” wouldn’t fit seamlessly into les Six’s repertoire. All it would need is Dick Valentine rasping the ends of the words into curls like Captain Beefheart doing Tom Jones, and ironi-hipsters everywhere would laugh their leather asses off.

Truth is, Valentine’s better than nine of ten rock singers today. He’s got attitude, recognizable sound and phrasing, good pitch, and Lord knows he sticks to themes. Throughout Señor Smoke, he’s able to use the depth of his tone and his overwrought vibrato to marshal the sound of his band into a legitimately rockin’ force. Even on Queen’s “Radio Ga Ga,” the combo of distorted guitars, decent drumming, synth squelches and the Valentinian voice spirals into a dark potency. But of course, the song still uses the word “ga ga.” If former label Warner indeed forced them to cover it, that’s plenty worse than all the shit they did to Wilco.

So are there any good songs, you ask? Sure! Churning arena rockers with solid backbeats and fun rhymes? See “Bite Me” and “Rock and Roll Evacuation.” Synthy sci-fi rockers that the Epoxies should cover? Sure, “Future Boys” and “Vibrator.” Pretty decent stabs at, yes, disco rock, to which I’ve invented some lovely dances? Yep, “Devil Nights” and “Dance Epidemic.” A song that sounds like fake Talking Heads Africana? Well, “Future Is In the Future,” if you must. And if you were looking for a song that sounds like the guy from Crash Test Dummies singing Bush’s “Glycerine” with lyrics that name presidents and cite the Backstreet Boys and Don DeLillo, there’s one of those too. Though it doesn’t work.

I'm sure the world is still beautiful, but...

New for you: a Test Icicles review!

Hello to the beautiful world!

New: a nearly comprehensible review of the We Are Scientists CD!

I'm currently sick of music, going on three weeks, so I've been listening to a book on CD in the car. It's by Tom Wolfe. It's good. Hopefully my sickness will end soon, as I've got a Riot CD and a Frank Kogan book at work waiting to be bought, plus a couple thought-provoking Morton Feldman CDs I wanna listen to some more. Plus a paper on Carman to write. His fundamentalism is much more entertaining on tape than it is in book form, so if you were thinking of shelling out a penny to buy Raise the Standard from Amazon, save it for the toll instead.

Right... new posts!

A recent Brandi Carlile review!

My favorite music of 2005!

If I had more gumption, I'd create an Imaginary Popscape 2005 page to include the above. Gumption and time, though, are currently at a premium. Plus, somewhere in the distance, a baby cries. More soon!

Langhoff Unpublished: 12"/'80s Box Set

Unpublished probably; I sent it to Chuck at the Voice, but before he could find the space for it, a volume II came out and sort of rendered this one less relevant. Not as au courant. I keep thinking I'll buy the volume II and update this thing and send it back, but so far I've had other fish to fry, and it's not like this was my favorite set of CDs in the world, as you'll see below. Gave me a chance to employ a hoary metaphor, reminiscent of the ones buddy Karl and I useta come up with in HS typing class.

Various Artists
12”/'80s
(Family)

Beware, nostalgic dilettantes! There are two overlapping versions of Family Recordings’ 12”/'80s box set floating around, and one has “White Lines” and one doesn’t, which fact would seem to make your decision pretty easy, except the one with “White Lines” doesn’t contain Echo and the Bunnymen’s “Never Stop (Discotheque),” whose pizzicato string propulsion has changed my… well, it made my sad little whole grain breakfast much more enjoyable. If you’re not that dependent upon “White Lines,” no fear, because both sets boast Simply Red’s “Money’s Too Tight to Mention (Cutback Mix)” and Grace Jones’s “Pull Up to the Bumper,” my other morning revelations among 37 or 38 remixed British Chart Hits (some only climbing as high as Slayer’s “Criminally Insane,” not included, but hits still) by Predominantly British People. Most of these 12” singles are interchangeable and quite useless, which fact doesn’t necessarily make them art.

In fact, whether the terms 12” and 80s deserve equivalence depends on whether both sides are equally well served by the association. In this case, the 80s are a wealthy landowner whose skillful pruning of the twin forests Punk and Disco produced an incomparable series of pop wind-up-toys, resulting in much public goodwill and critical acclaim. Though we may question the 80s’ murder of that hoary beast Prog, the decade’s slightly smug patrician benevolence seemed to invite nostalgia from the get. By contrast, the 12” is a wastrel tinker who mistakenly wandered onto the 80s’ estate, got lost in Punk’s self-sufficiency and Disco’s vast repetitions, and used the landowner’s ample resources to force his way into the public eye. By now, the damn tinker’s reputation is way overblown, his contraptions too often empty of invention or joy. The 80s may have produced as rich a legacy as her sister decades, but she suffers from proximity to the 12”.

All except the stuff I said before and anything by New Order, not included.

Langhoff Bound: Mercenary's 11 Dreams and Samael's Reign of Light

These aren't available on the web, but they did show up in the April '05 issue of Decibel, this fantastic metal magazine that's about a year old. I actually understand very little of the magazine when I get it, but it's witty and my main outlet for reading Scott Seward, probably the best pure stylist currently criticizing records. So far Decibel hasn't made me buy anything I can't live without, but the Mercenary disc (which I got free) is sure to be on my year end top 10 list. It's a scorcher!

Mercenary
11 Dreams
(Century Media)

The thing Mercenary do most, and they do it well, is to pit impassioned not-quite-Broadway melodies against a scorching rapid-fire kick drum attack, with guitars and bass in between, playing both sides. After an orchestro-synth prelude, the band’s dreams (or “songs,” if you’re dead inside) #2-5 adhere to this successful formula. The Sandager brothers, Mikkel and Morten, provide Rent-worthy caterwauls and keyboards, the guitarists arpeggiate, and founding bassist/growler Kral brings the requisite violence, but the whole thing comes off a little restrained and wearing--too much of the same good thing.

So it’s a relief when the boys start mixing things up during dream #6, “Sharpen the Edges.” They deepen the minor chords from the preceding pleasures and add ominous male-chorus intonations. “Supremacy v2.0” is similarly dark and nightmarishly Neapolitan of chord, but the real shocker is just ahead: in a twist worthy of Million Dollar Baby, but giddier and more danceable, our gothic heroes cover Kent’s pop tune “Music Non Stop,” and it can’t, won’t, and don’t. Drummer Mike Park gets to rest his ankles and provide a syncopated livinonaprayer (Danish for “swinging like fuck”) beat while Mikkel invites the world to dance to the music he hears inside his head. Blogs and message boards are currently lighting up with cries of sellout, but I say if you’ve ever longed to hear Ryan Seacrest utter the phrase “Scandinavian metal gods,” this is the way to do it.

That’s the peak, but the rest doesn‘t let up. Add on an extreme atonal thrasher, a piano/guitar ballad, and a chunky modern-rock-chorded closer and you’ve got one of the more intriguing side twos, capping one of the more impressive stateside debuts, in recent memory.


Samael
Reign Of Light
(Nuclear Blast)

Samael’s eighth album differs in many important ways from Rammstein’s Sehnsucht, the watershed for gothy Euro-tech metal. To begin, Vorph is a hipper vocalist than Till--he sounds more relaxed, he barks around the beats and sometimes you can picture him shimmying with his friends the clanking machines. We can probably attribute this looseness to Swiss neutrality. It’s funny, though--Vorph “sings” in English, but I’m sure I could transcribe Till’s Sehnsucht vocals far more accurately, though I can’t understand a lick of German. With Rammstein, everything sounds clean and in its place--one part of the song ends, a title hook repeats four times, the volume drops and a synth plays a little tune, the loud guitars start back in. Samael are messier and the mix isn’t as clean, so you can’t always understand what Vorph is demanding of you. The rhythms are still lockstep and repetitive (we’re not talking Converge here), but there are more dirty guitar lines and fewer shiny song components. We can probably attribute this relative messiness to rebellion against Swiss banker parents. What this means is that individual Samael songs are harder to distinguish than individual Rammsteins. “Telepath” is the one where Vorph pronounces grace “guhlaysse,” and the bonus track is a remix of “Telepath,” but the others are more difficult, which isn’t to say bad because they’re enjoyable while they last. You could attribute indifference towards posterity to Swiss watchmaking or something Jungian, but I chalk it up to another classic archetype. A prancing vocalist you can’t understand because the mix is muddy and all the songs sound alike? Samael are the Stones to Rammstein’s Beatles, and I can’t wait to hear the new Paul Revere and the Raiders!

Langhoff Unpublished: Black Mountain's Black Mountain

In a fairly embarassing chain of events, I initially submitted this to M. Matos at Seattle Weekly; he politely informed me that he'd already run a review of the thing. Indeed, Jessica Hopper's review appeared several months before; it's far more informative than mine, but the musical effects to which she devotes so much detail are really not all that interesting. So then I sent it off to Chuck at the Village Voice; he politely informed me that Frank Kogan's review was appearing online as we emailed. As with most of his writing, Frank's review gets to the heart of the musical matter well and offers a closer musical analysis than mine; I didn't think the CD was worth much more than some drug jokes. I haven't yet brought myself to go back and listen to the two tunes cited in the Kogan review, but I sure didn't notice them the first three or four times. Anyway, I've submitted it to a third outlet, but haven't heard anything back yet. Looks like it'll live here. (That whole explanation may be better than the review, if only for the links.)

Black Mountain
Black Mountain
(Jagjaguwar)

The Black Mountain credits thank “members of the Black Mountain Army,” which is funny because, dude, that’s gotta be one seriously stoned fuckin’ army. Listening to Black Mountain is like enlisting with the Swiss, whose latest model Army Knife includes a killer flashlight, as they take off the month of August to hang with their buds in Amsterdam--these Canuck guys/gal are totally Euro when it comes to their blues-psych. Don’t get me wrong, they can play loud and heavy, but mostly the BMs drift from riff to riff, firing one off and watching amused to see where it’ll land. The most concise song lays out an appealing twang-piano gallop to back up its Westerbergian refrain of “I can’t get no satisfaction.” The next most focused is the floppy soul single “Druganaut,” whose brilliant lyrics include “Are you freedom, man? We’re young and fast/ lighting up the sky.” I like to imagine mopey NASA engineers reciting those lines into their Scotch. The other tunes are decidedly Unfocused, which isn’t to say “Bad,” at least not for the first half; and even when the band runs out of ideas halfway through and you stop paying attention, the music remains an inoffensive backdrop to foraging for food or waiting for a man.

Langhoff Unpublished: Suzzy and Maggie Roche's Why the Long Face?

This represents my first unsuccessful attempt to get into Seattle Weekly; I never heard back from editor Michelangelo Matos. I enjoy the review quite a bit, mainly because it seems very light on its feet, even with the elaborate 7 Habits joke.

Suzzy & Maggie Roche
Why the Long Face
(Red House)

Amid the Folk Society syncopatin’ and self-deprecatin’ highlights of Why the Long Face, the second CD from the Roches-minus-sister-Terre, Suzzy cheerfully opines that she read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People only to discover she had none of the habits. I don’t believe her for a minute! I mean, New York folkies probably don’t Synergize or Begin With The End In Mind a whole lot, but I bet they Think Win/Win and always Seek First To Understand--they’re such Proactive sweethearts! (And their bluesy delivery on that Seven Habits song sure makes me wanna Sharpen My Saw, if you know what I mean!) The jig’s up--the Roche sisters are now busking for NY Arts Foundation grants instead of spare change, and have become, if not rich and famous, at least responsible adults; so their scatterbrained mode can start to seem disingenuous and set your teeth on edge. And when they Put First Things First and sing the words of a community prayer group or a kid with Asperger’s Syndrome or Brian Wilson, I’m tempted to set my CD player on pause. So instead I skip back to the first two songs, which are gorgeous, heartfelt, plainspoken acoustic chugalugs. Or ahead to the one where they sing bitonally, “Set down your key and trumpet/ Go have a dream and hump it.”

Langhoff Unpublished: Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver's A School of Bluegrass

This was admittedly a bit long for something that would likely garner no interest from Village Voice readers; I never heard back from Chuck. I actually placed it in my Pazz & Jop Poll Top 10 for 2004, which was kind of an overstatement, but I didn't hear that many CDs last year. And it is a really interesting CD, if exhausting.

Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver
A School of Bluegrass
(Crossroads)

Bluegrass didn’t make it into Derek Bailey’s 1980 Improvisation treatise, but probably just because he couldn’t interview any practitioners by deadline--I bet Derek’s right at home with the deprecating wit, oral tradition, and even the tight constraints (YOU try playing “free” without breaking into “Autumn Leaves” or something) that bluegrass players embrace. Of all the hot playing on Doyle Lawson’s brilliantly-titled silver anniversary comp, the hottest moment comes from young roving fiddler Hunter Berry, who slashes his way through “Twinkle Little Star” (his only track) with wild invention, while still landing on the ones. But mandolinist Doyle makes sure everyone else in his revolving lineup has a great time, picking and swinging and filling any dead air with matter-of-fact melody.

That’s improv in micro--this two-disc live-and-rehearsal overview also documents the macro-improvisation of Doyle Lawson as a bandleader. As the notes point out, bluegrass folks “experiment” too; they’re just not WEIRD about it. Over 25 years, Doyle and the boys play around with sacred and secular, black gospel standards and ‘75 Bee Gees, fiddle and non-fiddle, piano and nose trumpet, all while maintaining exceptionally tight instrumental and a cappella ensemble. There’s an unfortunate patch where evangelism overwhelms the shredding fun, so when Doyle advises “Please listen to the words,” you can skip ahead a few tracks. Outside those, 40 of the 50 tunes create a monument to music-as-everyday-work that grows more mysteriously satisfying with every listen--not unlike 50,000 Fall Fans Can’t Be Wrong, with which this package shares more than you’d think.

On another blog...

New! Check out this forced analysis of The Witches of Eastwick over on the 1984 wing.

Langhoff Unpublished: The Beatnuts' Milk Me

Welcome to Langhoff Unpublished, a sad series of unpublished record reviews that's sure to grow longer and longer until hope is gone. This one I sent to Chuck Eddy at the Village Voice some months after he listed the album in his "Eddytor's Dozen" column, thus some months after its release, which usually isn't an issue there, though maybe it's more of an issue when the review is as dorky as this thing. I had a heck of a time figuring out which Beatnut was which, and I'm still not sure I've got it right. Fun record, though.

Beatnuts
Milk Me
(Penalty/Ryko)

I don’t know about you, but when I see a milk-soaked woman wearing a bikini on an album cover, I expect message rap. Blame my unreasonable expectations on a childhood diet of trenchant P-Funk and Ohio Players sleeves, but these “Beat Nuts” seem nothing more than what their name implies. I suppose “Confused Rappers” taught me more industry lessons than any song since Tribe’s “The Business” (now THERE were some social commentators par excellence), and if pressed, I’ll admit the double time march “We Don’t Give a Funk” flipped my helplessly crunk body off the walls with its motherfunking mad synthesized stabs and Mr. Juju’s promises to, “all jokes aside,” piss on my head. He really made the prospect sound appealing. As did (if I must) the completely banging “Find Us (In the Back of the Club),” during which hands were clapped, and all the over-the-top celebrity name-checking in “Buggin,’” (“You need to do like Kanye and fix your face” addresses that outstanding young man’s real-life torment), and… Well, I guess the first half is a funky fly dance party masterpiece. For safety’s sake, I’m currently listening to the second half and still having trouble remembering what it sounds like. Now that’s what I call message rap!

Songs are Better than Albums.

All right, the best songs for every year, same criteria! An altogether more interesting list, if you ask me. Though harder to compile.

'64: "I Saw Her Standing There," the Beatlez
'65: "Don't Worry Baby," Beach Boyz (is that the right year, Kyle?)
'66: "Under My Thumb," Rolling Stonez
'67: "Incense and Peppermints," Strawberry Alarm Clock
'68: "This Girl Is a Woman Now," Gary Puckett and the Union Gap
'69: "Ramblin' Gamblin' Man," Bob Seger System (very close: "Baby, I Love You," Andy Kim)
'70: "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)," Sly and the Family Stone
'71: "Life On Mars," David Bowie
'72: "Highway Star," Deep Purple
'73: "Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting," Elton John
'74: "The Lord's Prayer," Sister Janet Mead
'75: "Kashmir" or "Born to Run" or a couple things off Babe Ruth, who can say?
'76: "As," Stevie Wonder
'77: "Somebody to Love," Queen (or maybe "Bodies" by the Sex Pistolz)
'78: "Hollywood Nights," Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band
'79: "Tropical Hot Dog Night," Captain Beefheart
'80: "The Glow of Love," Change
'81: "No Reply at All," Genesis
'82: "Don't Stop," Sylvester
'83: "Making Love Out of Nothing at All," Air Supply
'84: "Neverending Story," Limahl
'85: "A Little Bit More Conviction," Carman
'86: "Bizarre Love Triangle," New Order
'87: "The Water Is Fine," David Meece
'88: "When It's Love," Van Halen
'89: "Blue Savannah," Erasure
'90: "I Saw Red," Warrant
'91: "Can't Truss It," Public Enemy
'92: "Chariot Song," King's X
'93: "Go West," Pet Shop Boyz
'94: "Film At 11," the 77z
'95: "Heartspark Dollarsign," Everclear
'96: "You're Still Standin' There," Steve Earle
'97: "Stomp," God's Property feat. Kirk Franklin
'98: "Breathing Apparatus," the Coup
'99: "Heartbreaker," Mariah Carey
'00: "Cartoon Heroes," Aqua
'01: "Anticipating," Britney Spearz
'02: "Let's Not Shit Ourselves," Bright Eyez
'03: "99 Problems," Jay Z
'04: "This One's For the Girls," Martina McBride
'05: "The Knock Is There," Young Gunz

Lots of album tracks in the '90s and '00s--I'm not sure if that supports, refutes, or has nothing to do with Kyle's theory of album decline.

Oh wait, I'm supposed to UPDATE this thing?

Kyle, if no one else, will get a kick out of this. Here's my favorite albums for every year since '64. "Favorite" is currently defined as "the album that, when I think about having to sit through it again, feels like the least amount of work." (I'm kind of in a bad mood.) Thus My Fair Lady beats Meet the Beatles even though it boasts nothing so great as "I Saw Her Standing There" and possibly not as many great songs--listening to the whole thing seems marginally more enjoyable. '64's the first year I can reference more than 10 albums--the '63 winner is currently The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, but who knows what else is out there?

64: My Fair Lady original soundtrack
65: Tom Lehrer-That Was the Year That Was!
66: Cecil Taylor-Unit Structures
67: The Velvet Underground and Nico
68: Miles Davis-Filles de Kilimanjaro
69: Tony Williams Lifetime-Emergency! (I'm listening to it right now!)
70: Merle Haggard-A Tribute to the Best Damn Fiddle Player in the World (or, My Salute to Bob Wills)
71: Led Zeppelin IV
72: Yes-Fragile
73: Led Zeppelin-Houses of the Holy
74: New York Dolls In Too Much Too Soon
75: (good year!) Sesame Street Cast-Bert & Ernie Singalong
76: Various-Have Moicy!
77: Billy Joel-The Stranger
78: Van Halen
79: Neil Young-Rust Never Sleeps
80: Change-The Glow of Love
81: a crude amalgam of select songs from Genesis's Abacab and Phil Collins's Face Value; that or Kix
82: Michael Jackson-Thriller
83: Weird Al Yankovic
84: Bruce Springsteen-Born In the USA
85: Tom Waits-Rain Dogs
86: Pat Metheny/Ornette Coleman-Song X
87: Guns 'n' Roses-Appetite for Destruction
88: EPMD-Strictly Business
89: King's X-Gretchen Goes to Nebraska
90: King's X-Faith, Hope, Love
91: (good year!)Amy Grant-Heart in Motion
92: Pavement-Slanted and Enchanted
93: Nirvana-In Utero
94: Garth Brooks-The Hits
95: Moby-Everything Is Wrong
96: Weezer-Pinkerton
97: Roni Size & Reprazent-New Forms
98: The Coup-Steal This Album
99: Various-Get Crunk!
00: Eminem-The Marshall Mathers LP
01: System of a Down-Toxicity
02: Paulina Rubio-Border Girl
03: David Banner-Mississippi Screwed and Chopped (haven't heard the original)
04: R. Kelly-Happy People/U Saved Me
05: And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead-Worlds Apart

In other news, it's always nice to see your work criticized by strangers, and in that vein you can check out what looks to be a very interesting Freakonomics blog, which contains an excerpt from my WOW #1s review. Which is (probably correctly) ripped to pieces. Ah, check out Freakonomics anyway, it's a good read.

Recent Additions

What's new?
Imaginary Popscape 1982 ("Elektro Kardio") is up and running.
Check out Ask Darryl Van Horne! for a succinct statement of aesthetic intent, not written by me.
Family and friend sites:
Kyle Young's website features a controversial (to me, anyway) article on mp3s, and highly informed writing on the Monkees and other late '60s dudes.
My sister's blog keeps the family informed on her freshman year at college. If you liked I Am Charlotte Simmons, well, this really isn't at all similar.
My anonymous coworker's blog features thoughtful analysis of restroom graffiti. (Speaking of which: so I go to the dictionary to figure out how to spell "graffiti," and oddly enough the word doesn't have its own entry. You get "graffitist" and "graffito," the latter of which is the singular. According to Mr. American Heritage, you should refer to one instance of graffiti as a "graffito," though this "might seem pedantic outside an archaeological context.")
Well, the smoke alarm's going off, I'd better go!

Mixtapeology: a methodology and manifesto

Bill James, Rock Critic?; Accurate measures of the best songs; 1986; The project at hand; Why you should care; Songs not albums; 1986 again; What makes a song good?; Hypothesis; Self-indulgent bullshit; The myth of influence; Corollary hypothesis; Tiffany vs. U2; Top 15 '80s Songs By '60s Artists; Battle of the Preconceptions; Finally, my preconceptions.
How reasonable is it to call Bill James’s New Historical Baseball Abstract the best rock ‘n’ roll book of all time? Not very, you say? Yeah, you’re right, but check it out—James writes about a popular pastime of little metaphysical importance. He painstakingly creates lists of his field’s greatest participants, he advances controversial arguments, he uses statistics and historical precedent in his analyses, he’s amassed encyclopedic knowledge of his field—all rock critic tasks as well, right? Because of this, James has exerted influence over rock critics, directly and indirectly. Phil Dellio, schoolteacher and creator of the great singles fan/webzine Radio On, cites James as one of his favorite writers. Chuck Eddy, current Village Voice music editor and author of The Accidental Evolution of Rock ‘n’ Roll, found one of his first youthful obsessions in baseball card collecting and cites Radio On as a major influence. We know from High Fidelity (the book and the movie) that rock fans love to list things (hell, we know this from Rolling Stone), and any time you have lists, you have people analyzing those lists and interpreting the results.

So we’ll say that hardcore music geeks and baseball nerds are wired similarly, and that Bill James’s methodology mirrors that of the music geeks, with at least one crucial difference: James’s arguments can be at least partially verified by objective data in the form of statistics. Babe Ruth played 2,503 games and hit 714 home runs with a lifetime batting average of .342. Those are incontrovertible facts. Now, whether you use those facts to name Ruth the greatest baseball player ever is up to you. Hank Aaron played more games and hit more home runs; Ty Cobb played more games and had a higher lifetime average. Of course, you’d hope no statistician is basing his player ratings on three statistics. James has devised an analytical method called the Win Shares system, which incorporates all manner of different numbers and an acknowledged subjective element, to compile his player ratings. Note, though, that while James can choose his method according to his opinion of what best mirrors reality, he can’t do the same with his raw data. Hits are hits, and if you don’t score you don’t score.

Musicians score hits all the time, and Billboard’s charts have been collected and studied for decades, and you can gain valuable insights from these lists, but few people will agree that they’re an accurate measure of the best songs of any given time frame, even though they’re a consensus aesthetic opinion of music fans. The two other prevailing forms of consensus aesthetic opinion are the Grammys (and some other award shows), the consensus of musicians and people in the business, and the "metacritic" (critical polls), or consensus of music critics. These are also unacceptable, for one big reason: they don’t jibe with my musical taste. Sometimes they come close, but if my favorite song isn’t on any of the lists, what good are the lists? I’m guessing that for you, at least 90% of the time your favorite song isn’t the biggest chart hit of the year, or Grammy’s Record of the Year, or the top song on any metacritical tabulation.

Let’s take 1986: New Order’s "Bizarre Love Triangle" was indisputably the best song of the year, but the biggest chart hit was Dionne Warwick and Friends’ "That’s What Friends Are For," which also won the Grammy for Song of the Year. Grammy’s Record of the Year was Steve Winwood’s "Higher Love," and according to the Acclaimed Music website (the most comprehensive of these entities), the critical consensus swelled around Run DMC’s "Walk This Way" collaboration with Aerosmith. "Bizarre Love Triangle" doesn’t appear on any of those lists (well, #17 on the critical one), and I don’t like any of those songs enough to put them on my 1986 compilation. Consensus is fine when it gives people a vocabulary of things to talk about, and it’s thrilling when the consensus matches your independently-formed opinion (like me and Eminem in 2000), but no consensus can determine individual musical taste.

Which brings us to the project at hand. Like Bill James (actually, the more direct inspiration was Chuck Eddy’s discography at the end of Accidental Evolution), I’ve compiled lists of the best. The differences are these: he rates baseball players, I rate songs; he rates over the whole history of baseball, I rate year by year; the foundation for his ratings is a huge body of facts, whereas my foundation is solely my opinion. On each CD, the songs will be ordered from best until the CD runs out (kind of like what Wire did on their A-List compilation, except they used a metacritical tabulation), my idea of the year-end top radio hits in a perfect world (hence the "Imaginary Popscape" title). This should result in 10 CDs that I enjoy listening to very much.

"Why Should I Care?"

How reasonable would it be, at this point, to ask yourself the above question? Very reasonable, so let me try to reassure you. In my man-on-the-street music-fan experience, the aforementioned three types of lists, while useful for information and occasionally fascinating, tend to be sort of bland. Canons in general usually contain some stuff you’re wild about, some stuff you think is horribly overrated, and a whole lot of stuff you agree is pretty good but not nearly as good as this thing over here, and why has no one else ever heard of this? To me, it’s always more exciting to get inside one smart person’s head and see the stuff they’re wild about, and then try it out and see if I’m wild about it too. And if that smart person explains their tastes in an arresting way, that’s even better. So I’ll attempt to be smart, exciting, and arresting, and to make similarly smart, exciting, and arresting musical choices. Right now, I’ll answer some questions I frequently ask myself, to help clarify what’s going on here:

Q: Why songs not albums?
A: Besides the fact that you get the instant gratification of listening to the stuff I’m writing about, songs seem the smallest indivisible piece of musical pleasure. Albums are too often inconsistent; if they’re consistent, too often that’s all they are. For an artist to be consistently inspired over the course of even a 30-minute album is a tremendous challenge.

(NOTE: When I talk about "songs" in here, I refer to the specific recording and performance of the musical materials, as well as those materials—melody, harmony, rhythm, lyrics—themselves. In Grammy terms, I’ll be rating "Records of the Year" as opposed to "Songs of the Year." For our purposes, Prince and Cyndi Lauper’s recordings of "When You Were Mine" are two completely different songs that happen to share the same melody, harmonies, and lyrics. I’ve applied entirely different rules to performances of contemporary classical works and live recordings, and will justify myself as the situations arise.) (Also, "songs" here can be instrumental, though, as the music-camp Gestapo used to point out, a "song" is a "song" only if it can be "sung.")

When critics don’t face up to these facts, they can end up lying to themselves and others to force certain results. To my mind, a typical year produces three or four albums, tops, that could be called "great"—that is (to paraphrase Howard Hawks), three great songs and no (well, maybe one or two) bad songs, or just one very good song after another. Some years (see 1981) produce none. (One caveat right up front, which you should keep in mind throughout all this writing: there’s a whole lot I haven’t heard.) When it comes to recommending the albums of a particular year, I find it hard to get out of the top 5 because, below that, every mediocrity with a couple great songs looks pretty much like all the others. Throughout these CDs I’ll mention notable albums for each year, but the standard unit of measurement here is the song.

Let’s take 1986 as an example. I find five fairly unimpeachable albums (containing only music recorded during 1986; compilation albums will be considered separately, though their individual songs will appear on the appropriate year’s compilation): the Beastie Boys’ Licensed To Ill, Pat Metheny and Ornette Coleman’s Song X (actually recorded Dec. ’85), Salt ‘n’ Pepa’s Hot, Cool & Vicious, Sonny Sharrock’s Guitar, and Slayer’s Reign In Blood. No bad songs, but not as many great songs as you’d hope—only half (Beasties, Sharrock, maybe Ornette) contain more than two. All five albums are extraordinarily consistent and at least "very good." But none contain songs as great as the "Bizarre Love Triangle" 12" single, Van Halen’s "Why Can’t This Be Love" (from an inconsistent album), Bon Jovi’s "Livin’ On a Prayer" (lackluster album), Madonna’s "Open Your Heart" (haven’t heard the album), Michael W. Smith’s "Goin’ Through the Motions" (surprisingly OK album with a couple stinkers, kind of like Van Halen’s), Husker Du’s "Sorry Somehow" (another lackluster album), or Prince’s "Kiss" (bad album). You can see what we’re dealing with here—in most years, the great songs and the great albums are only tangentially related, and there’s little correlation between the two.

But of course, for an album to be great, it’s gotta contain some great (or very good) songs. So throughout, when I refer to great albums or artists or producers or any entity bigger than a song, I’ll be referring to the cumulative greatness of the songs under their jurisdiction. Prince wasn’t great in 1986, and Parade wasn’t great, even though Prince made it (and even though it’s #7 for the year on Acclaimed Music). Prince’s playing and vocals on that album might have been their usual inimitable selves, but aside from "Kiss" and maybe three others, the music’s a chore to sit through. When you work from the song up, rather than from the artist down, it’s easier to avoid overrating albums.

Q: What makes a song good?
A: Bill James asks the question this way: What is the job of a hitter? After throwing out some wrong answers (compiling a high batting average, hitting home runs, maintaining a high on-base %), he proposes that a hitter’s job is to create runs, however he can, and then he devises a system to measure runs created by individual hitters.

Since the song is my unit of measurement, I ask it this way: What is the job of a song? A song’s job isn’t to tell a story, or to be danceable, or to have a pretty melody, or to make listeners want to sing along. A song doesn’t need to be skillfully sung or played, or have accomplished lyrics or chords. It doesn’t have to do anything that hasn’t been done before, innovate, move things forward, push the envelope, etc. A song’s job isn’t to promote an agenda, be it socially conscious, rebellious, commercial, indie, pro- or anti-love, you name it. A song’s language, musical or lyrical, needn’t be au courant or avant garde, and it doesn’t have to find the mot juste or appeal to le monde (not even if it’s by Depeche Mode). In short, most pre-thought-out criteria you can use to evaluate a song are too narrow-minded to be any good. Once you apply some set of criteria, you’ll invariably find exceptions, but exceptions aren’t the real problem; the problem is that such criteria are so far removed from the heart of the matter ("is this song good?"; "what makes it good") as to be ridiculous. Saying a prime bubblegum hit is worthless because "it’s empty" and "soulless" and "the performer didn’t write it or play any instruments" is as silly as calling Mark McGwire a bad baseball player because he only stole 12 career bases.

So, enough negativity. What makes a song good? What’s a song’s job? How’s this?: to engage the listener, in the senses of "winning the listener over" and "holding the listener’s attention." (By "the listener," of course, I mean "me.") That’s just a hypothesis, but it has the advantages of seeming blatantly obvious and covering every song I can think of. Part of the purpose of this anthology is to test out my hypothesis.

I really like a couple things about this hypothesis. First of all, the burden of success falls squarely on the shoulders of the song, or the people creating the song. This gets rid of the possibility that what the song-creators are doing is over listeners’ heads, or that the musicians are too sophisticated and subtle to be appreciated in their time. As Branford Marsalis eloquently put it (referring to Cecil Taylor’s suggestion that his audience should "prepare" for his concerts) in the Ken Burns Jazz documentary, that’s "self-indulgent bullshit." (NOTE: I've happily listened to a couple great Taylor albums, so I don’t think he's full of self-indulgent bullshit.) Musicians are a whiny bunch, and they tend to lie even more than critics, either out of self-defense or lack of intelligence. (When they lie out of malice or cunning, that’s more fun.) If, as a musician, you consider your job creating songs whose job is engaging other people, you’ll be less likely to create boring character studies or psychedelic dreamscapes, and will ultimately need to make fewer excuses for yourself and your music.

Another thing I like about my hypothesis is that it removes any question of "influence," or "importance," or any such self-indulgent bullshit. Too much music criticism equates quality with influence, as though a song becomes better once lots of musicians have emulated it. Or maybe all those emulations just demonstrate the quality of the song, for those of us previously without ears to hear. But no, that gets us back into the realm of sophisticated and subtle musicians, which we’ve established don’t exist. You and I know what’s good and what’s not, correct? Or rather, we know what engages us and what doesn’t; therefore, influence is immaterial to our enjoyment of music in itself.

On the other hand, music history can be kind of fun. (I am adhering to a strictly chronological format, after all.) And I’m pretty sure Harold Bloom, who has some definite ideas about artistic influence, is one of my influences here. So I don’t discount history and influence as legitimate forces that shape music. They are; they do; I just don’t understand how they work. And here’s the thing—I don’t think anyone else does either. Some critics (the ones I like) might have a clue, but your average know-it-all music writer, who cites Robert Johnson and James Brown and the Velvet Underground and the Stooges as profound influences on modern music, is doing impressionable young music fans a disservice by turning these exciting musicians into marble pillars. Eventually you wind up with a heap of too much conventional wisdom, and practical theories (about "soul" and "groove" and "the underground" and "rock-as-rebellion") that explain the wisdom, and Beatles albums winning Rolling Stone record polls, and everyone just going around spouting the same opinions. And that’s not fun at all. (For more on this, see the notes on New Order’s "Blue Monday," ’83.)

So I’ve constructed a second hypothesis, corollary to my initial hypothesis—a corollary hypothesis, if you will. If a song’s job is to engage the listener (i.e., me), I should be able to construct a coherent History Of Music consisting only of those songs that do their jobs. For example, lots of critics in-the-know cite the 1987 singles "Pump Up the Volume" (by M/A/R/R/S) and "Bring the Noise" (by Public Enemy) as being influential to the stuff that came later. Those songs are fine and all (I have trouble hating too many singles), but compared to others, they don’t do much for me. (Nothing personal.) So in my history of ‘80s music, I just leave them out. I contend that the resulting history, as represented by the compilation you’ve got here, will do what a history is supposed to do—say something accurate about the time, reveal some sort of progression (if there was one), and be relevant to our understanding of the ‘80s, or at least ‘80s music. This corollary hypothesis will really come to fruition once I move on to other, older decades, and we can see (I dunno) Spike Jones to the Kingston Trio to Bob Dylan to the Sesame Street Cast to New Order to the Coup (to name some great comedy acts), or whoever. If the hypothesis turns out to be false, that’s why you experiment.

Finally, I like that my main hypothesis is, in this context, recording-focused: it’s the song’s job, not the musician’s, to engage the listener. In any situation, recording or concert, smart musicians use any means at their disposal to engage their audience. In concert, musicians can get away with having lackluster material if they’re funny, charismatic, good dancers, good looking, gifted singers/instrumentalists, etc. Bad songs? No problem, as long as the audience has a good time. On record, musicians can only use those assets to an extent, and then they have to rely on whoever (producer, engineer, svengali) is creating the recording. No doubt you could compile an entirely different list based on great live performances of the ‘80s, but I’m working with a recorded medium here, so I need a hypothesis that’s based on recordings.

Therefore, in this context, lots of considerations become irrelevant. The fact that Prince may have been consistently amazing live doesn’t excuse the bad songs from Parade; nor does the fact that he’d established a fine body of recorded work. Since I’m as human as most people, outside considerations are bound to sneak in, but my method throughout remains: pit two songs against one another; determine which one is better, whatever that means; figure out what that means.

Q: What’s that mean? (You didn’t answer the question.)
A: Since "engaging" is a pretty broad description of good music, it helps if you can tell what specific listeners find engaging. Generally, you can infer a listener’s underlying preconceptions from a writing sample.

Let’s take critic Anthony DeCurtis’s review of Tiffany’s 1987 debut, Tiffany. Upon its release, DeCurtis gave it two stars (out of five) in Rolling Stone for the following reasons:

1. Tiffany was "perfectly content to define [herself] and [her] music as products", evidenced by the fact that she "made a media splash by marketing her record with performances in shopping malls." He contrasted this "adult" commercial aspiration with the themes of earlier, more successful bubblegum hits, which celebrated things like "undying love, inextinguishable passion or… garage-rock authenticity." Also missed were the qualities of "innocence and burgeoning sexuality of youth", and the recognition that adolescence is "a time of life distinct from adulthood."
   
2. Tiffany delivered "sanitized, one-dimensional mimicry of Madonna’s charisma and vital grooves," omitting her "frank eroticism, working-class scrappiness, dance-club roots and ability to shed and assume identities," qualities DeCurtis praised as "subversive."
   
3. The ballad "Feelings of Forever" was "bloated" and "interminable."
   
4. The ballad "Could’ve Been" was "cloyingly sentimental."
   
5. The above two songs "typified" the album’s other six original songs, all of which were "the usual assembly-line hack jobs."
   
6. Tiffany’s cover of "I Think We’re Alone Now" was "sterile compared with previous versions."
   
7. "The funkified ‘I Saw Him Standing There’ [was] a conceptual disaster."
   
8. Tiffany’s album was less satisfying than the concurrently released and reviewed Debbie Gibson debut, because Gibson was "a skillful and expressive singer"; "[e]ven more impressive, Gibson wrote all ten songs on Out of the Blue and had a hand in the album’s production."
   

If you’re any good at spotting rhetorical gambits, you’ve probably guessed that I like Tiffany; in fact, I think it’s one of the best albums of 1987, not as good as the Guns ‘n’ Roses (Appetite For Destruction) or Prince (Sign ‘O’ the Times) albums, maybe, but containing better songs than ’87 albums by Boogie Down Productions, Roseanne Cash, Terrence Trent D’Arby, Husker Du, Kid Creole and the Coconuts, Kool Moe Dee, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, George Michael, REM, the Replacements, Sonic Youth, Bruce Springsteen, and (I’m sure) other critically-acclaimed acts. My wife Lea, who’ll show up in here periodically, introduced me to the joys of Tiffany via her cassette from fifth grade; she also had Out of the Blue, but I think we forgot to remove it from the Ford Escort we sold. So, while I remember Debbie’s tape as being pretty good, I won’t be able to do any DeCurtisian direct comparison.

What I can do is contrast the above review with another DeCurtis review of an album I know, 1988’s Rattle and Hum, by U2. (Note: I’m doing this not to pick on DeCurtis, though he is eminently pickable, but to demonstrate the preconceptions at work beneath the surface of most pop music criticism. And also because he picked on Tiffany.) I’ll tip my hand right off the bat and say I prefer Tiffany to Rattle and Hum: by my subjective reasoning (which, again, is all we’ve got in this context), Tiffany’s album has four great songs to U2’s three; Rattle and Hum’s other listenable songs are altogether less striking and more blah than Tiffany’s other listenables; even Tiffany’s worst song ("Kid On the Corner") is better (thanks to its entertainingly inscrutable metaphor) than about a third of the U2 album; and Tiffany’s Beatles cover kicks the ass of U2’s.

DeCurtis was refreshingly critical of Rattle and Hum, yet he awarded it four stars (Note: In recent years it’s been revealed that individual RS reviewers have less to do with their star ratings than you’d think. Nonetheless, this review is obviously more positive than the Tiffany review, and takes U2 more seriously than Tiffany as "artists.") for the following reasons:

9. The music was "raucous" and "celebratory" and contained "rollicking energy."

10. "[I]t closes off none of the options the band might want to pursue for its next big move—and, possibly, the album even opens a few doors."

11. "Rattle and Hum is in large part a paean to the tradition of Sixties artists that U2 reveres." [This is more descriptive than necessarily positive, but serves as an interesting counterpoint to Tiffany’s two covers of "Sixties artists."]

12. U2’s cover of "Helter Skelter" was "corrosive"; their "live take on ‘Bullet the Blue Sky’" was "searing."

13. The gospel-choir version of "I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For" was "electrifying" and found "new depths in a song that was gripping the first time around."

14. Other songs were "rousing," "soulful," "fierce," "raucous" [again], and "tough." [yadda yadda yadda…]

15. "[T]he quieter songs… provide the record with introspective moments made all the more effective by the generally boisterous context of the album." These songs were, by turn, "hymnlike," a "drifting, poetic" "dreamscape," and "stirring," with "an eloquent string arrangement."

16. "Rattle and Hum is meant to be dynamic," and "to dramatize U2 in motion and transition and to exult in the barrage of influences the band had just begun to admit on The Joshua Tree."

That gives us a convenient eight items to go along with Tiffany’s eight. DeCurtis deducted some points because the album seemed "calculated in its supposed spontaneity," and because it "demonstrates U2’s force but devotes too little attention to the band’s vision," a vision which had evolved through U2’s previous albums. And here we have two primary underlying preconceptions laid bare: U2 are career artists with a "vision," and therefore merit more consideration than an apparent "product" like Tiffany; and, because we can analyze it in the dual contexts of a concept ("spontaneity") and U2’s previous work, even an obviously flawed album like Rattle and Hum is of greater interest than an "assembly-line hack" job like Tiffany.

Without stooping to any useless "Tiffany’s better" bickering over what are just differences of opinion (see the 1987 notes for specific song details), I’d like to focus on some more buried assumptions. The first is that outside matters of lifestyle, marketing, and talent matter to the music. DeCurtis complains (in point 1) that Tiffany is a cynical marketing machine, having toured shopping malls and whatnot, and then weirdly complains (in point 2) that she’s not enough like Madonna, whose entire shtick is media manipulation (maybe not as thoroughly back in ‘87, but still…). What’s more, the qualities he praises in Madonna aren’t immediately apparent in her music—listen to "Open Your Heart" (‘86) and tell me where you here any more eroticism, scrappiness, dance-club roots or assumed identities than in Tiff’s "I Think We’re Alone Now" (‘87). Those "subversive" qualities are things DeCurtis knows by reading magazines, and brings with him to the music. They’re not qualities of the music itself.

Also extra-musical is the bit about Debbie Gibson, whose album also received two stars, but whom DeCurtis clearly preferred because she was more talented. The Debbie vs. Tiffany wars were fought long and hard in the pages of 1987 teenybopper magazines, though I think they centered around who was prettier or more badass; I’m not sure the teenyboppers cared that Debbie wrote and coproduced her own songs, and, in a sense, neither do I. Maybe Debbie and I would have more to talk about at dinner (though on the other hand, Tiffany probably has entertaining stories about posing for Playboy and trying to explain it to her kids), but you listen to music because you relate to the music, regardless of who actually made it. Respecting a musician’s talent and enjoying her music are two completely different things, and they’re not always related.

Q: This is boring! Make a list!
A: Fine. Here’s a list, and then we’ll get back to compare and contrast.

Top 15 ‘80s Songs By ‘60s Artists (active pre-1970)
"Wrecking Ball" by Neil Young (’89)
"Late In the Evening" by Paul Simon (’80)
"Princess And the Magician" by Sonny Sharrock (’86)
"G-Man" by Sonny Rollins (’87)
"First Movement (Fast)" from Desert Music by Steve Reich (’84)
"Real Emotional Girl" by Randy Newman (’83)
"What Have I Done To Deserve This?" by the Pet Shop Boys featuring Dusty Springfield (’87)
"Funeral Ikos" by John Tavener (’81)
"First We Take Manhattan" by Leonard Cohen (’88)
"Jokerman" by Bob Dylan (’83)
"Mob Job" by Pat Metheny and Ornette Coleman (’86)
"Who’s Zoomin’ Who?" by Aretha Franklin (’85)
"This Little Girl" by Gary U.S. Bonds (’81)
"We Built This City" by Starship (’85)
"The World’s a Mess, It’s In My Kiss" by X featuring Ray Manzarek (’80)

Q: Starship? Really?
A: Sure. (As a kid, I always thought it perceptive that Starship, as city planners, were worried about "who counts the money underneath the bar," an issue most people wouldn’t remember if they set out to build a city. That line made the band sound frankly overwhelmed with the task they’d set before themselves, and it was kind of poignant: the despair of the micromanager!) Is that song really as awful as everyone (fucking Blender!) pretends?

Back to the reviews!; and specifically, to Tiff’s and U2’s takes on ‘60s icons. DeCurtis noted in points 11 and 16 that U2 "reveres" and "exults" the Beatles, Dylan, and Jimi Hendrix, all of whom are covered and/or otherwise appear on the album. (He also used the word "paean.") The obvious difference here is that U2 treated their predecessors with a respect bordering on awe, while Tiffany treated hers as the bubblegum artists they were and subjected them to updated bubblegum treatments, a concept DeCurtis regarded as "disaster." This unveils a big (here oversimplified) battle of the preconceptions that will forever rage in the arts: the respectful historicists (or neoclassicists) vs. the disrespectful modernists (if you want, though I doubt you do, we could posit U2 as Leonard Bernstein to Tiffany’s Pierre Boulez—yeah, let’s not do that). In rock writing, this battle shows up (again oversimplified) as a triumvirate: "classic rock values" or "rock as Art," vs. "alternative values" or "let’s push Art forward," vs. "bubblegum values" or "fuck Art, let’s dance." DeCurtis comes down pretty hard on the side of classic rock as Art, and most conventional wisdom sides with the alternative values, whereas my favorite critics tend to like the bubblegum stuff.

But the fact that we’re even having this argument gets us back to our "extra-musical" presuppositions—DeCurtis assumed that U2’s reverential attitude towards their musical forebears had some effect on their music, and I assume that Tiffany’s brilliant take on "I Saw Him Standing There" was inspired by some desire, however subconscious, to turn her back on rock history and speak directly to her audience, or engage her audience. But, while artists’ intentions undoubtedly affect their work, there’s little correlation between artists’ intentions and the quality of their work. Reverential U2 could easily have made better, more engaging music than irreverent, popwise Tiffany. They actually did so in 1991 and ‘93, and while their aesthetic intentions may have changed, they were probably in the same ballpark as ‘88, just with an added dose of My Bloody Valentine and electronics. (The jury’s still out on ‘87’s The Joshua Tree, whose songs I know and love by heart but am unable to listen to because some guy on my cross-country team stole, that’s right, my copy many years ago and I’ve never felt the need to replace it.) The only trustworthy way to gauge musical quality is to gauge your response to the music itself, divorced from any extra-musical considerations.

Except, can your response to music ever be divorced from extra-musical considerations? Of course not—because your response is what counts, and your response is itself an extra-musical consideration that’s shaped by all sorts of things. Responses to music depend on who we’re in love with, who just died, how we like our jobs, what instruments we play, how much we like to dance, our guilt over not doing anything with our Bachelor of Music degrees, and our beliefs in the importance of aesthetic theories and intentions, among everything else. While Quality in the Platonic/ Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance sense probably exists, I’m more interested in how songs fit into the conversation of my, and your, life.

(NOTE: One last bit about the purely subjective adjectives in DeCurtis’s reviews (points 3-4, 6-7, 9, 12-15): again, you can’t argue people’s opinions without sounding like a petulant 3rd grader, but you can switch the adjectives. In other words, try thinking of Tiffany’s covers as "raucous" and "celebratory," her wonderfully scratchy voice as "corrosive" and "searing," her ballads as "stirring" (though maybe not drifting, poetic dreamscapes). By the same token, I’ve always thought U2’s "All I Want Is You" was "bloated" and "interminable," and Bono’s contrived Lennon-cynicism on "God Part II" was a "cloyingly sentimental" "conceptual disaster." Which segues into my personal preconceptions, which you deserve to know, and which may help explain some things.)

Finally, my preconceptions. In their book The Worst Rock ‘n’ Roll Records Of All Time, critics Jimmy Guterman (who I place in the Classic Rock school) and Owen O’Donnell provide an entertaining list of "The 33 1/3 Rules Of Rock ‘n’ Roll," mostly funny extra-musical tidbits like "Do not go to art school" and "Do not record for Arista Records," but also containing such Great Bubblegum Truths as:

"Good politics are not what make good lyrics,"

"Formidable technical proficiency is never sufficient," and

"Heavy metal should be fast."
Similarly, Chuck Eddy’s pithy Accidental Evolution criteria are that music should be
"unstifled, urgent, sexy, catchy, and fast. Or else just real pretty."

All of those resonate with my tastes, as do the following:

1. Good execution counts for more than innovation. All other things being equal, the more innovative song is probably better. However, all other things are rarely equal.
   
2. Music, particularly its delivery, counts for more than lyrics. A great song can contain bad lyrics—indeed, they can be part of its appeal—but the best lyric can’t redeem crummy music.
   
3. Humor is the most surefire means of engaging an audience.
   
4. Christian rockers are capable of making great songs.
   
5. So is Phil Collins.
   
6. And Weird Al Yankovic.
   
7. None of the above makes great songs as often as you’d hope; but then, who does?
   
8. Punk didn’t change everything. Maybe a third of everything, but the other two thirds carried on pretty much the same.
   
9. If they’re good, classical and jazz pieces should engage you just the same as pop songs, though you may need to listen to them more times. (Of course, classical and jazz lovers may need to listen to Guns ‘n’ Roses songs more times to relate to them—I certainly did.) Academic appreciation is never enough.
   
10. Songs, at their best, are alive. They communicate with us and we can communicate back, and their meaning changes. They can embody emotions, conscious ideas, and ways of thinking more complex than anything their creators put into them. Like great literary characters (at least as Harold Bloom sees them), great songs get away from their authors and develop lives of their own.
    
11. Similarly, great songs teach me things I didn’t know and prove the smallmindedness of my previously held opinions. They prove any underlying preconceptions irrelevant, and thus I love them even more. As the great aestheticians Wilson-Phillips put it in 1990’s "Impulsive":
    

"I never imagined you could
blow my theory apart,
but now you’re running away with my heart."