Pop Tones

Best Music of 2011

2012-01-06T12:03:00.013-05:00

If my blog archive is to be believed, I only managed six posts in 2011, after ranging from 10 to 13 posts for the four preceding years. Some of the difference can be attributed to my having moved during the year and re-entered graduate school, not to mention my total inability to come up with anything coherent to say about Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, my favorite film of the past three or four years and one I desperately wanted to write about (might try again at some point). But I think the fundamental problem is that I’m a lazy, deadbeat blogger who tends to not get much done outside the discipline of editors, deadlines, etc. I would say that I’ll do better this year, but most of my previous pronouncements to that effect have been nothing but horrible lies, so I’ll refrain from making any predictions and just hope for the best. Which is my basic attitude toward the world in general these days.

Looking at my Top 10 lists from the past two years, I couldn’t help but notice that both featured a relative crowd-pleaser in the top spot, followed by a slice of more esoteric electronica. I couldn’t bring myself do it a third year in a row, but the top two below are more like 1 and 1a. Anyway, it was another pretty good year for music, so enjoy.

1. Tim Hecker—Ravedeath, 1972
It started in a church in Iceland. That is, the Frikirkjan Church in Reykjavik, where on a single day in July of 2010, Canadian producer Tim Hecker laid down the basic tracks for what would become Ravedeath, 1972, playing guitar, drums, and most vitally, the church’s 100-year-old pipe organ. Back in the studio, Hecker and Australian producer Ben Frost added layers of digital distortion to the recordings, the digital effects blending with the natural echoes of the church acoustics to create a powerful envelope of ambient sound that seems to be decaying in real time. The interplay between the organic power of the pipe organ and the swirls of digital noise provides the basic drama of the album, particularly on extended multi-track compositions like “In the Fog” and “Hatred of Music,” peaks of tension between melody and noise that are punctuated by pastoral interludes like “No Drums” and “Studio Suicide, 1980” This music is simultaneously warm and cold, off-putting and strangely comforting, its disparate layers flowing over one another in an ocean of sound, creating fragile combinations of rhythm, mood, and texture that disintegrate as soon as you get a fix on them. Ravedeath, 1972 is an experience of duration and subtle variation, but it’s also experimental music at its most functional, the perfect rainy day album or an ideal late-night listen, with even its noisiest edges subsumed in a hypnotic buzz. (“In the Fog II” “Hatred of Music I”)

2. Fleet Foxes—Helplessness Blues
The first Fleet Foxes album was always going to be tough to follow, but Robin Pecknold and company pull it off triumphantly and with seeming effortlessness on the masterful Helplessness Blues. The band’s baroque instrumentation and eclectic blend of Americana styles is as confident and seamless as ever, and the songs bring an impressively light touch to some heavy material—lost love (“Sim Sala Bim”), the inevitability of aging and death (“Battery Kinzie”), and the limitations of any lone individual vis-à-vis the vastness of the world (“Helplessness Blues” “Blue Spotted Tail”). While not a radical departure from the band’s previous work, Helplessness Blues runs deeper, pushing the envelope of the band’s sound a bit (dig the free-jazz sax breakdown on “An Argument”), while still embracing the spirit of truly classic rock. (“Bedouin Dress” “The Shrine/An Argument”)

3. PJ Harvey—Let England Shake
There’s long been a huge rock-critical bias against non-confessional work—to say nothing of poetry or of women over 40—so I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the critical acclaim for Harvey’s best album in a decade. A seemingly impersonal yet deeply felt meditation on home, country, and war, Let England Shake is also a testament to the importance of non-musical influences and a challenge to the notion of what political art can be. But I already wrote about that (see “Black Paintings,” posted March 10). (“The Glorious Land” “On Battleship Hill”)

4. The Field—Looping State of Mind
Axel Willner’s third album is his most musically expansive, introducing hints of dub and noise into his distinctive brand of shoegazer techno. At this point, you either like Willner’s music or you don’t (or you get your music from MSM sources and have never heard of him). I don’t necessarily prefer Looping State of Mind to 2009’s underrated Yesterday and Today, but Willner surely can’t be accused of repeating himself this time around, and it’s starting to look like he may be capable of maintaining this level for quite a while. (“Burned Out” “Then It’s White”)

5. St. Vincent—Strange Mercy
For better or for worse, this album and the one that follows began to feel increasingly topical as the year drew to its close. Annie Clark’s America may be a bit less specific than Polly Harvey’s England, but there’s no denying she’s onto some kind of zeitgeist here (I don’t want to be a cheerleader no more, either). Clark’s vocals are detached without feeling disengaged and she fills in the lush settings of Strange Mercy with some of the most original electric guitar work I’ve heard in quite a while. (“Surgeon” “Cruel”)

6. Kurt Vile—Smoke Ring for My Halo
Ever get the feeling your whole life’s been one long running gag? Kurt Vile feels your pain. The songs on Smoke Ring for My Halo contrast the often foolish vitality of youth with the worn-out wisdom of adulthood, without taking sides. It sounds depressing on paper, but far from being enervating, Vile’s wry, deadpan vocals are positively uplifting, with Vile himself scanning as an indie Tom Petty. Call it inspirational music for hipsters, or motivational music for slackers. So forget your bootstraps; if it ain’t working, take a whiz on the world and punch the future in the face. (“Runners Up” “Jesus Fever”)

7. tUnE-yArDs—w h o k i l l
A relative latecomer to pop music following an abbreviated career in theater and some time studying music in Kenya, Merrill Garbus has forged an original sound from bits of various black-music genres—Afro-pop, R&B, reggae—along with her own sui generis vocal stylings. And despite operating at what would be a fatal level of self-consciousness for most people (that the album’s pervasive liberal guilt never lapses into p.c. prissiness is a minor miracle), she manages to pull it off, creating music that’s thoughtful yet playful, intricate yet accessible. (“Riotriot” “Powa”)

8. Oneohtrix Point Never—Replica
Built from synthesizers and samples, the latest from Brooklyn’s Daniel Lopatin is a dense and difficult work but ultimately a rewarding one. Recalling classics by masters like Eno and Aphex Twin, Replica requires repeated listening before its singular workings begin to open up. Many of the tracks here seek to capture the emotion and drama of pop music and freeze them in time, as if re-creating a motion picture as a disjointed series of stills, devoid of narrative movement. If I were to redo this list a year from now, I wouldn’t be surprised to see this one a few spots higher. That’s the trouble with these lists: they’re just a snapshot, and you only get to make them once. (“Power of Persuasion” “Nassau”)

9. Florence and the Machine—Ceremonials
A lot of reviewers knocked this album for lacking the variety of Florence’s 2009 debut Lungs, but when you’ve got a fastball as good as hers, you don’t need much off-speed stuff. Now having said that, this one might have ranked a bit higher had a couple of the more adventurous tracks not been banished to “deluxe edition” status in what’s becoming a disturbing trend in major-label releases. For about a month, at the height of Occupy Wall Street, “Shake It Out” felt like the song of the year. Then I was made to realize that it wasn’t. (“Shake It Out” “No Light, No Light”)

10. Wild Flag—Wild Flag
Supergroups rarely live up to the hype, but Wild Flag, consisting of Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss of Sleater-Kinney, Helium’s Mary Timony, and Rebecca Cole of The Minders, avoids that trap by virtue of craftsmanship and sheer force of will. Corin Tucker’s inimitable voice is missed, but Wild Flag preserves most of the best of Sleater-Kinney (along with that band’s unfortunate love for cheesy extended-metaphor conceits), and the result is the best pure rock’n’roll album in years. As that description might suggest, Wild Flag feels in some respects more like the end of something than a new beginning. But even if it’s a bit self-conscious, the joyful celebration of the “four [girls] in a room” vibe feels wholly earned. And Helium was seriously underrated, by the way. (“Glass Tambourine” “Something Came Over Me”)

Now that I’ve done this once, I guess I have to keep doing it: five runners-up. Again, these are listed in alphabetical order and shouldn’t necessarily be thought of as 11 through 15 per se, but all are interesting records that merited some Top 10 consideration.

Kate Bush—50 Words for Snow
Probably the artist I listened to more than any other in 2011. If the whole album were as good as the ethereal first three tracks (one of which may or may not be about making love to a snowman), then it would have made the Top 10. (“Snowflake” “Lake Tahoe”)

Clams Casino—Instrumental Mixtape
Background music as foreground, a trick that’s rarely worked as well as it does here. (“Numb” “Illest Alive”)

Cut Copy—Zonoscope
This is such a summertime album that the February release date initially struck me as odd. Then I remembered that they’re Australian. (“Take Me Over” “Where I’m Going”)

Radiohead—The King of Limbs
A solid effort, although not one of the band’s best and not nearly as radical as it appears on first listen. (“Bloom” “Lotus Flower”)

The Weeknd—House of Balloons/Thursday/Echoes of Silence
The first of the trilogy, House of Balloons remains the best entry point, although the late-breaking Echoes of Silence is the most sonically coherent. But these three mixtapes from the year’s breakout artist are best conceived as segments of one long, sprawling work. (“The Morning” “Montreal”)

Top 10 songs not on those albums

1. Real Estate—“Green Aisles”
Winter was coming, but that was all right.

2. M83—“Midnight City”

3. James Blake—“The Wilhelm Scream”
After the thrilling innovation of the early EPs, James Blake’s first proper album felt like a baby step backward, but tracks like this one are a reminder that we’re still dealing with a major, major talent.

4. Curren$y—“This Is the Life”

5. Frank Ocean—“Novacane”
If we consider My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy a genre at this point—and why wouldn’t we?—then this was the year’s best entry therein.

6. R.E.M.—“Uberlin”
Reaching back one last time.

7. Lady Gaga—“Bloody Mary”
I didn’t dig most of the singles, but for an album summarily dismissed by much of the cognoscenti, Born This Way has more than its share of interesting tracks.

8. Wye Oak—“Civilian”

9. ASAP Rocky—“Peso”

10. Lana Del Rey—“Video Games”
Tragedy rendered as comedy, or vice versa.

It Was 20 Years Ago Today...

2011-11-19T17:26:00.013-05:00

“It’s no secret ambition bites the nails of success.” That’s Bono, halfway between a whisper and a scream, on “The Fly,” the seventh and greatest song from U2’s seventh and greatest album, Achtung Baby, which turns 20 today. I turned 13 in 1991, and this has been a year fraught with musical anniversaries from one of the watershed years of both my life and the rock era. Lest you think I’m merely conflating the two, it’s worth noting that I didn’t catch up with many of that year’s classics—such as Loveless, Laughing Stock, Blue Lines, and The Low End Theory—until years later. But then again there was also Out of Time, Nevermind, and of course, Achtung Baby.

Not that I thought it was a masterpiece right away. When I first picked up the album (on cassette, at a grocery store) shortly after its release, I was only sure of two things: I didn’t like it, and I couldn’t stop listening to it. It’s hard to communicate in today’s era of cross-pollination and porous genre boundaries how radical the album’s sound was back then, at least by the standards of mainstream pop. Hip-hop was ascendant, with the likes of Public Enemy, NWA, KRS-One and many others having made inroads into the mainstream, but it would be another year before Dre and Snoop completely blew the lid off. Bands like Talking Heads and New Order had successfully brought the sonic innovations of funk and disco into the rock world, but a few hits notwithstanding, they remained a bit outré, fine for the hipsters but not quite fully accepted into the rock mainstream, at least in America. U2 on the other hand had broken all the way through with The Joshua Tree (1987), a megahit album that spawned a pair of No. 1 singles. Some of the stodgier classic-rock types still scoffed at the band’s heavy use of digital delay pedals and other electronic gimmickry, but U2 was indisputably the biggest band in the world and had largely cemented a reputation as heirs to the classic-rock legacy. Which they then proceeded to shred to pieces.

The first hints that something was afoot came on New Year’s Eve, 1989, the last night of the ’80s, when a rambling Bono told the crowd in the band’s hometown of Dublin that U2 needed to “go away for awhile” to “dream it all up again.” Many fans took it as a hint that the band was breaking up. As it turned out, they were just getting started. U2 soon decamped to Berlin, a city just emerging from the schism of the Cold War, with the goal of reworking their sound in the same studio used by David Bowie and Brian Eno for the Low/Heroes/Lodger trilogy of the late ’70s. The ensuing sessions with producer Daniel Lanois nearly did break up the band, but the album got done, thanks in no small part to a well-timed visit from Eno (not officially a producer on Achtung Baby, but absolutely essential to bridging the gap between Bono and Edge’s progressivism and the more traditional inclinations of Lanois and drummer Larry Mullen).

Aggressively postmodernist and self-consciously cool, Achtung Baby culls elements from 20 years of hipster music—everything from the fractured pop of Eno’s ’70s albums and the jagged rhythms of the Heads to industrial rock, Manchester-style acid house, and the otherworldly din of the Bomb Squad. What emerges from the stew is too eclectic to be called rock—it’s still basically guitar-bass-drums, but suspiciously danceable and dangerously unmoored. On tracks like the opening “Zoo Station,” Bono’s voice emerges from under heavy distortion and you can hear Lanois and engineer Flood twisting the knobs. The effect is simultaneously mystifying and demystifying, emotionally indirect, yet giving the listener a peek at the men behind the curtain.

But as radical and influential as the album’s sound was, it was the change in the band’s attitude, indicated by the cheeky title, that really threw people. U2’s political and spiritual commitments largely survived the transition, but were now fused to a wicked satirical bent and a radical embrace of uncertainty. On the follow-up album, 1993’s post-apocalyptic Zooropa, very much a companion piece to Achtung Baby, Bono sang, “And I have no compass and I have no map/And I have no reason, no reason to get back,” words that registered as both a mission statement and a battle cry for the moment when modern rock went postmodern, the most thorough reinvention of a world-famous rock band’s image since…well, you know. Bono in particular was utterly transformed, from a painfully earnest liberal do-gooder railing about IRA terrorism or Martin Luther King into a glib, sunglasses-sporting shyster capable of deadpanning a couplet like “Every artist is a cannibal/Every poet is a thief/All kill their inspiration/And sing about their grief” on “The Fly,” a song described by the singer as “a phone call from hell” stuffed with lyrical “untruisms.” Another song, “Even Better Than the Real Thing,” used a Coca-Cola slogan as a jumping off point. Clearly, we were a long way from “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and there was no going back. And needless to say, not everyone agreed that this was progress.

The ensuing Zoo TV tour pushed things even further, radically deconstructing the arena rock experience in ways never seen before or since. Giant video screens simulated the sensory bombardment of satellite television with rapid-fire video montages drawing from sources ranging from Nazi propaganda films to contemporary news footage. The clips were intercut with Godardian bits of text-as-graphics, including more anti-truisms like “Contradiction is balance” and “Everything you know is wrong.” Of course 1991 was also the year of the first Gulf War, a mere footnote in the history of modern warfare but, as the first war to be covered extensively by satellite and cable news networks, a watershed in the history of media spectacle. The ensuing displacement of the reality of the conflict by its mediated representation had been anticipated in the writings of Jean Baudrillard. In “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place,” (1995) an essay as widely misunderstood as Zoo TV itself, Baudrillard would write of the “exile of the virtual” supplanting the “catastrophe of the real.” Yes, television reflected the reality of the Gulf War, but that wasn’t the half of it. In an almost literal sense, it became the reality.

Zoo TV functioned on the same principle. Critics complained that the visual bombast overwhelmed the band and the music, as if that weren’t the point; that it was superficial, as if it could have been anything else. Again, Baudrillard: “One cannot help thinking that in the West we still have a hypocritical vision of television and information, to the extent that, despite all the evidence, we hope for their proper use.” Like much of Godard’s work, the spectacle was intended to be overwhelming and resistant to interpretation. In between songs, Bono, dressed up in full Fly regalia—dark shades, black leather jacket and pants—would literally flip channels, offering wry commentary on whatever happened to pop up. There were also the nightly phone calls to then-president George H.W. Bush during the American leg of the tour in 1992, and of course, the night Bono ordered 10,000 pizzas for a crowd in Detroit. The European leg featured another character, MacPhisto, a vain rock star dressed in a red devil suit complete with horns, although the band decided, perhaps wisely, to keep him offstage for the American shows (Americans, satire, etc.).

The devil suit was telling, as Achtung Baby had been noted by some U2-ologists for its relative absence of overtly religious content, atypical for this most Christian of secular rock bands (or is it the other way around?). One major exception is “Until the End of the World,” a casual retelling of the betrayal of Jesus told from the perspective of Judas, looking back regretfully on that fateful Thursday and awaiting final judgment. The song effectively locates the whole album on that ultimate dark night of the soul, evoking The Divine Comedy as much as the Gospel of John. God is present in his absence, a theme the band would deal with more directly on Pop (1997).

Most of the other tracks deal with romantic love, a ubiquitous topic of pop music that U2 had mostly eschewed during the ’80s. The epic “One” and slinky “So Cruel” detail troubled relationships, a theme that seemingly crests with “Tryin’ to Throw Your Arms Around the World,” in which the wandering male protagonist apparently conquers temptation and returns home. The song ends on the uplifting, redemptive note of previous U2 closers like “40” and “MLK.” Except that there are still three more tracks to go.

Those last three songs hit a different register entirely, plumbing a darkness that U2 had only hinted at on previous albums. “Ultra Violet (Light My Way)” is another celebration of monogamy, but one tinged with desperation (“I remember when we could sleep on stones/But now we lie together in whispers and moans/When I was all messed up and I heard opera in my head/Your love was a light bulb hanging over my bed”). The mood darkens further with “Acrobat,” a portrait of full-on existential crisis, in which Bono’s anxiety about his shifting public persona bubbles to the surface (“And I must be an acrobat/To talk like this and act like that”). Belying his history of religious and political identifications, he sings, “And I’d join the movement/If there was one I could believe in/I’d break bread and wine/If there was a church I could receive in.” But not tonight. It’s still Maundy Thursday, the Last Supper is history, and there’s no redemption in sight, not for three more days—or three more albums anyway.

Instead of a benediction, the band leaves us with “Love Is Blindness” (cf. “God is love”), perhaps the bleakest song in the U2 catalog, even if, 20 years later, I’m still not sure what it’s about. Over a ghostly midtempo shuffle, Bono’s lyrics evoke suicide, terrorism, prostitution, divorce, I don't know what. It climaxes with perhaps the most wrenching solo of Edge’s career. Squeeze the handle, blow out the candle, love is blindness. And it was night.

Feeling Gravity’s Pull

2011-09-24T12:32:00.012-04:00

So now that I’m back in grad school and once again hanging out with 24-year-olds on a regular basis, I’ve been contemplating my advancing age a bit more than usual lately. Not necessarily in a bad way, but I’m just saying. I’ve already got one backward-looking music post on tap for November and remain ever wary of nostalgia, but the passing of R.E.M. this week after 31 years deserves some comment. If you’re looking for a definitive obit, I’d recommend this terrific Grantland piece from Jon Dolan. I’m more interested in the timing of the band’s decision, which most fans seem to think came none too soon.

In the movie Trainspotting (1996), coincidentally released the same year as New Adventures in Hi-Fi, the final R.E.M. album to feature the band’s classic lineup with original drummer Bill Berry, one of the characters expounds on his theory of life—“At one point you’ve got it, then you lose it, and it’s gone forever”—before reeling off a damning list of musicians and other cultural figures who’d achieved greatness and been unable to recapture it (Elvis, Bowie, Lou Reed, etc.). It’s hardly an unfair way of looking at R.E.M.’s post-Berry output, which came on the heels of 15-plus years of uninterrupted greatness: ten albums, including two indisputable masterpieces, Murmur (1983) and Automatic for the People (1992), as well as several other excellent-to-classic works, and nary a dud in the bunch.

So we’re left with a problematic late period, five more albums including a mostly failed experiment (1998’s Up), a better-than-you-think last gasp (2001’s Reveal), an outright disaster (2004’s Around the Sun), and a pair of solid-but-unexciting workmanlike efforts (2008’s Accelerate and this year’s Collapse Into Now). I might be tempted to rank Reveal ahead of Green, the weakest of the Berry-era albums, but in general I’ll stipulate that the late work was categorically worse than the band’s pre-1998 output. It’s easy to blame Berry’s departure for the subsequent decline of this most democratic of rock bands, and it was certainly a crucial factor, but the real problem, to these ears at least, was the creeping self-consciousness of singer Michael Stipe’s lyrics and vocals as he became increasingly aware of himself as a mega-celebrity. This was beginning to become a problem as early as 1994’s Monster—unfortunately, Stipe wasn’t completely kidding when he said in an interview that he liked the album’s noisy sound because it meant the lyrics didn’t need to be as good. By the time of Around the Sun, his vocals resembled the efforts of a struggling ESL speaker reciting lyrics that he sounded like he’d never even read before, let alone written. You’ve got it, you lose it, and it’s gone forever.

All right, so that was a bit harsh. But it speaks to the heart of the problem for fans who become emotionally invested in favorite performers. Inevitably there’s a point where they become like aging relatives and we’re mainly hoping they won’t do anything to injure or embarrass themselves. I remember thinking that R.E.M. should have broken up after Around the Sun. In retrospect, I’m glad they didn’t. It would’ve been a sorry way to go out, and even though I’ve been unable to get all the way through Accelerate or Collapse Into Now more than a dozen or so times, at least it feels like the band’s leaving on its own terms now, rather than being quietly whisked out the door. But I have to admit that I greeted the release of both albums less with anticipation than trepidation and was mostly just relieved that they didn’t suck. So I’m not disappointed that there (probably) won’t be any more.

So when should a band call it quits? Setting aside the obvious fact that it’s not our choice to make, there’s the more objective tradeoff between the odd diamond in the rough on otherwise mediocre late albums and the toll that said mediocre albums take on a band’s legacy. Even the prototype for this argument, the Rolling Stones, who have now been mediocre for far longer than they were great, have had a vintage song or two on most of their late albums. I’m not unsympathetic to the view that R.E.M. should have broken up when Berry left, but what of those scattered late gems? Speaking only for myself, while I have a much easier time imagining a world without “The Lifting,” “Imitation of Life,” or “Uberlin” than one without, say, “Shaking Through,” “Driver 8,” or “Find the River,” it’s hard to see how it would be a better world. I’d rather just try to forget that “The Outsiders” ever existed. Maybe it’s better to fade away after all.

Medicare Madness

2011-08-26T11:02:00.003-04:00

It’s been even longer than usual since my last post. In addition to my usual slothfulness, I’ve recently moved out of New York and back to the Midwest for another round of graduate school (just in case you care, which you shouldn’t). The upshot is that I’m feeling more energized these days and will hopefully be posting more often, particularly on economics-related issues.

I’m now going to put my newfound sanity to the test by dipping a toe back into the world of politics. I’d rather not rehash the whole ridiculous debt ceiling episode, but let’s just say that the whole debate, along with the subsequent S&P downgrade, had me thinking a lot about Baudrillard. More than usual, even.

Still, the devil is in the details, and it’s now emerged, at least if you believe what you read on Politico, that President Obama and Speaker of the House John Boehner had agreed, as part of a possible grand bargain, to gradually raise the eligibility age for Medicare from 65 to 67.

This is a terrible, terrible idea. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that it’s the single worst idea for reducing the deficit that has any chance of being enacted anytime soon. And the fact that Obama would agree to such a thing less than 18 months after pushing an ambitious (albeit flawed) health care reform bill through Congress raises serious questions about the coherence of his policy agenda and/or the strength of his political character.

Why is raising the Medicare eligibility age such a bad idea? Clearly, many people (myself included) would find the idea of shifting more of the health care cost burden onto 65- and 66-year-olds, many of whom are already retired or otherwise ineligible for employment-based insurance, reprehensible in and of itself, but even if you don’t share this view, there are plenty of reasons to be opposed to this proposal. Chief among them from a fiscal point of view is that throwing 65- and 66-year-olds off Medicare would actually increase overall health care costs, as illustrated in this study by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Money saved by the federal government would be dwarfed by a combination of increased out-of-pocket costs, increased costs for employers, increased premiums for other Medicare beneficiaries (remember that 65- and 66-year-olds are, on average, the healthiest Medicare beneficiaries, so removing them from the pool necessarily increases costs for everyone else), and increased Medicaid costs for state governments.

This issue illustrates the myopia inherent in Washington’s current fixation on the national debt. Contrary to what you may have heard, we do not have a debt crisis in this country. We are not “broke,” and the current debt load is easily manageable with a few relatively minor policy changes, such as full repeal of the Bush tax cuts. We do, however, have a significant issue with escalating health care costs. Our health care system needs to become more efficient, regardless of what proportion of its costs are borne by individuals, employers, states, or the federal government. Any reform that saves the federal government money by increasing overall health care costs is a step in the wrong direction. The fact is that Medicare is the most efficient provider of health insurance that we have, and we should be expanding eligibility to everyone, rather than further restricting it.

Black Paintings

2011-03-10T10:49:00.016-05:00

Back in the dark days of late 2002/early 2003, the period of the foredoomed protests leading up to the Iraq war, I often pondered the essentially nostalgic nature of the whole enterprise for many, if not most, of its participants. Nobody who thought about it for longer than five seconds could have believed we had any chance of stopping the invasion, but we had to go out and march anyway because we’d missed the ’60s and the Vietnam War and all that. But the protests were still based on 1960s models that no longer had any political valence in the age of contemporary mass media and right-wing backlash. It was now a simulation, pure and simple, a pathetic token of resistance that could be shown on CNN to reassure viewers that democracy was still just fine, thank you. This wasn’t political action; it was a manifestation of nostalgia for political action. We wanted to protest, but we also wanted to be home in time for dinner. (For an example of real protest with achievable political goals, I would refer you to ongoing events in Wisconsin.) What was lacking was any more rigorous notion of what does and does not constitute political action.

The same could be said for music. Every once in a while, even at this stage in the late-capitalist endgame, we’re subjected to some self-righteous jeremiad about how musicians never write any political songs these days. Such complaints usually come from the left-liberal end of the political spectrum; thus the lack of political content in pop music is usually ascribed to artists’ being self-serving corporate whores, or, if the complainer is a bit smarter, to the consolidation of the music industry into the hands of a tiny number of large, risk-averse conglomerates. I don’t mean to suggest that such claims are without merit, but there is another factor as well. That is, the fact that no one wants to hear it. As a culture, we’ve grown much more sophisticated/cynical (it’s a fine line) about listening to musicians or other celebrities opine on issues about which they don’t necessarily know any more than you or I do. (Of course, they don’t necessarily know any less either.) Obviously, much of this sentiment has been driven by mindless right-wing backlash, but all in all, I don’t think a little skepticism about pop-cultural sloganeering is such a bad thing.

But whither the political artist? Perhaps what we need is a more expansive notion of what that means, one that goes beyond gooey sentiment or propagandistic posturing, one that goes beyond 1960s-era models. So let us consider Polly Jean Harvey, a mercurial genius who’s been many things over the course of her 20-year career—wry feminist, mad blueswoman, sad goth girl—but could never be anything as unbearable as a protest singer, and her new album Let England Shake, a carefully crafted set of songs about World War I and its effects on England’s national culture and sense of identity. I should note here that Harvey has been something of a white whale for me in that I’ve attempted to write about her in the past but never succeeded, which speaks to how difficult she is to pin down as either a musician or an artist. Harvey emerged in the early ’90s as a raw postpunk-blues rocker on a series of noisy albums that culminated with a (mostly) quiet one, 1995’s To Bring You My Love, still Harvey’s masterpiece and one of the only modern blues albums, in the sense of being both truly blues-based (letting out Nirvana, etc.) and truly modern (excusing Jack White and his ilk). But her work since then has been much more diffuse—and controversial—defined less by what it is that what it isn’t: dark, blues-based guitar rock about sex, longing, passion, and womanhood. In other words, defined by its difference from Harvey’s early work. Even Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea (2000), until now Harvey’s only universally acclaimed later work, largely dispensed with her customary angst in favor of upbeat melodic rock. (The disjointed, wheel-spinning Uh Huh Her [2004] is a partial throwback both musically and lyrically.)

Back in 2007, I thought I’d conceived a good idea for a piece centered on Harvey's guitar playing and how she’d upended the traditional gender hierarchy of rock and roll by essentially beating the guys at their own game (“You oughta hear my long snake moan” etc.). I’d planned to peg the piece to the release of her then-forthcoming album White Chalk—which turned out to be a cycle of somber piano-based songs with nary an electric guitar or gesture of masculine bravado in sight. Lesson learned. Given my esteem for Harvey as an artist, it was foolish to think that I could anticipate where she was going next.

Apparently, I’m in good company. Sasha-Frere Jones, in an atypically lazy dismissal of Let England Shake for The New Yorker, does an inordinate amount of complaining about the direction her artistic path has taken. Praising the “visceral” Harvey of the early-to-mid ’90s, Jones decries the lyrical, outward-looking Harvey of recent years, which included a two-year hiatus dedicated to studying and writing poetry. While Jones allows that “Harvey is allowed to change, and to chase any muse she wants,” he seems to be trying to talk himself into it. He then goes on to spend the remainder of the piece talking about how much he hates England, the English, and poetry (just kidding!).

The question is one of authenticity. For Jones, the visceral Harvey is somehow “real” in a way that the lyrical one is not. And of course, authenticity is also key to the ethos of the political popular musician as it’s commonly understood, with political art arising exclusively from the personal convictions of the artist. Although, historically speaking, this is hardly the only way to make political art—let alone art about politically interested subjects. And more generally, the whole notion of authenticity in pop music is under assault right now. It’s no coincidence that the best album of the past few years, Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, explicitly rejects the ethos of authenticity, which has dominated hip-hop for more than 20 years, in favor of fantasy.

Harvey takes a different approach on Let England Shake. The songs have a painterly sensibility that's drawn comparisons to Goya's. The album has less in common with White Chalk than with 2009’s A Woman a Man Walked By, the second of two albums credited jointly to Harvey and John Parish, which also dealt with the subject of war and seems to have been an artistic turning point for Harvey. The overriding tone of Let England Shake is that of a lament. Harvey takes both war’s intrinsic evil and basic inevitability as givens, but the stirring, mournful tone of songs like “On Battleship Hill” is neither resigned nor complacent.

Throughout the ’90s, Harvey’s records suffered from overly intrusive producers. Steve Albini’s egotistical stifling of Rid of Me still has its defenders, but Flood’s work on Is This Desire? (1998) often loses the plot, leaving the songs feeling unmoored (although he mostly gets the balance right on To Bring You My Love). Let England Shake appears to have been a more collaborative affair, “made” by PJ Harvey, Mick Harvey (of The Birthday Party), Parish, and Flood, and mixed by Flood. The resulting arrangements, mostly guitar-and-drum-based with other instruments—saxophone, autoharp, organ, bass harmonica—worked in as needed, are nuanced without being delicate, providing ideal settings for Harvey’s eloquent lyrics. The sound feels full but never cluttered. With the possible exception of the hard-charging “Bitter Branches” this music is both too eclectic and too gentle to qualify as rock per se, its beautiful textures belying some gruesome subject matter.

Harvey’s recent poetry sabbatical pays off in the often imagistic lyrics of Let England Shake. The song titles give a sense of the elevated language and contemplative, at times somber, mood of the songs: “The Glorious Land,” “The Last Living Rose,” “The Words That Maketh Murder.” Songs like “On Battleship Hill” employ a battery of literary devices, its grand thematic statement emerging from a tangle of metaphor and concrete detail:

The land returns to how it has always been
The scent of Thyme carried on the wind
Jagged mountains, jutting out
Cracked like teeth in a rotten mouth
On Battleship Hill I hear the wind
Say, “Cruel nature has won again”

The music has a gorgeous sense of dynamics, with an early verse in which Harvey explores the higher end of her register, her voice rendered weightless by Parish’s guitar strumming, then moving easily into a light guitar-piano-drums backdrop, the last two verses bridged by a descending piano figure. Like the land, the music is ultimately undisturbed by the death and carnage to which it plays host.

“All and Everyone,” a somber ballad depicting the 1915 battle at Gallipoli, an eight-month campaign fought under brutal conditions that saw some 400,000 casualties, gazes long and hard at the battlefield and beholds the face of Death itself:

Death hung in the smoke and clung
To 400 acres of useless beachfront
A bank of red earth, dripping down death
Now, and now, and now

And later:

Death was in the staring sun
Fixing its eyes on everyone
It rattled the bones of the Light Horsemen
Still lying out there in the open
As we, advancing in the sun
Sing, “Death to all and everyone”

The stately rhythm and the lyrical emphasis on the aftereffects of combat, rather than the act itself, provide some formal distance between Harvey and her material without allowing the listener to escape the, yes, visceral horror of corpses left on the beach to rot and stink. Indeed, the sights, sounds, and smells of combat are all over Let England Shake (“Flies swarming everywhere/Death lingering, stunk/Over the whole summit peak/Flesh quivering in the heat”). Even the more upbeat songs, like the jangly title track, which recalls the They Might Be Giants classic “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” (Gallipoli again?), are imbued with forebodings of national decline (“Weighted down with silent dead/I fear our blood won’t rise again”). “The Words That Maketh Murder” tells of soldiers who “fell like lumps of meat/Blown and shot out beyond belief/Arms and legs were in the trees”), before abruptly pivoting into a twangy sing-along, as Harvey and Parish (following Eddie Cochran) faux-naively ask, “Why don’t I take my problem to the United Nations?” several times. It’s the album’s most sardonic moment.

All right, yes, you say, it’s clever, but is it political? Well, if your idea of “political” stops at “Give Peace a Chance,” then no. But beyond the occasional topical reference—the quavering refrain “Oh America, oh England” from “This Glorious Land” can’t help but evoke the war in Iraq—burns a cosmic anger at the devastation and human suffering endemic to war. Gallipoli was a horrible slaughter that need not have happened, but there’s not much point in shouting about such an obvious fact. Sometimes it’s enough, like Goya, to show—and then look away.

So to summarize: Let England Shake is visceral, but not personal. It’s political, but in a disinterested way not predicated on conventional notions of authenticity. It doesn’t sound much like any of Harvey’s other records. And I have no idea what she’ll do next.

The Critic's Speech

2011-02-26T12:57:00.007-05:00

How quickly things change. As recently as the Golden Globes six weeks ago it looked like The Social Network, David Fincher’s fast-talking flick about the founding of Facebook, would be this year’s big winner, continuing a recent Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences trend of honoring slightly more adventurous fare, including The Hurt Locker (Best Picture, 2009), No Country for Old Men (2007), and more arguably The Departed (2006). But now that the various industry guilds have weighed in, it looks like a virtual lock that Best Picture will go to The King’s Speech, a far more conventional drama about the relationship between Britain’s King George VI and his speech therapist, played, respectively, by Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush.

The dramatic mid-January turn in the race set some Oscar talking heads yapping about an unprecedented split between critics’ groups and the industry. But it’s actually quite precedented. I’ll admit to having been sold on The Social Network as the inevitable Best Picture winner before The King’s Speech starting winning nearly every guild award in sight, but I should have reserved judgment. Nothing's ever set in stone until the guilds begin to weigh in. After all, we’ve seen this sort of dichotomy before—consider 1990 (GoodFellas sweeps the critics’ awards; Dances With Wolves takes the Globe and the Oscar) or 1997 (same deal for L.A. Confidential and Titanic). The difference today is that there are now a bazillion redundant critics’ groups, making their influence on the process appear greater than it actually is. The only real oddity here is The Social Network’s victory at the Globes, but that could be just another sign of their declining influence as an Oscar precursor.

The King’s Speech is by no means a bad film. Firth and especially Rush are quite good, and director Tom Hooper clearly put some thought into his camera placements. I can only assume that most AMPAS voters will be willing to look past (a) the predicatable way the film puts you through the paces of its story and (b) the fact that the whole movie is about a freakin' speech impediment. So it goes. But my favorites never win (although at least they get nominated more often now). Caring too much about the winners is a fool’s game and always has been—I mean, they gave Best Picture to Crash a few years ago for goodness’ sake.

But having said that, this year’s group of Best Picture nominees is a solid overall bunch, with Black Swan and Winter’s Bone joining The Social Network as contenders for my oft-postponed Top 10 list. (I’ll have more to say about these three when I finally get around to posting my Top 10 sometime next month.) The Fighter, directed by David O. Russell, was a well-acted and heartfelt, if highly conventional, boxing drama. Others would make the case for the Coen brothers’ dull remake of True Grit or Christopher Nolan’s "deep" Inception, a movie utterly devoid of serious formal ideas or intellectual content. (Compare the overall feel of the movie with that of any of David Lynch’s better films, and you’ll see what I mean.) I hadn't endured so much expository dialogue in one place since Attack of the Clones. Joining Inception among the presumed also-rans that failed to land a Best Director nomination (I’m officially ready to go back to five BP nominees, by the way) are the look-how-normal-we-are lesbian-family comedy The Kids Are All Right and the taut Ozarks drama Winter’s Bone, featuring a breakout performance from Jennifer Lawrence, as well as Toy Story 3 and 127 Hours, both unseen by me.

Predictions and preferences (where applicable) below. I should note that, in the 10-or-so years I've been doing this, I've never been less confident in my predictions than I am this year, so if you’re putting any money on this, please take my picks with a bigger grain of salt than usual.

Best Picture

One of the few locks on the board in what looks to be a very tough predictions year.

Will win: The King’s Speech
Should win: The Social Network

Best Director

For some reason, Hooper beating Fincher seems much harder to take than The King's Speech winning Best Picture (Aaron Sorkin’s excellent script for The Social Network could easily have come off as a series of glib one-liners if not for Fincher’s crisp pacing and mastery of tone). Perhaps for this reason, many prognosticators are predicting a split decision from the Academy, but with Hooper having taken the Director’s Guild award it’s hard to see a different result here.

W: Tom Hooper, The King’s Speech
S: David Fincher, The Social Network

Best Actor

Colin Firth seems destined to win this for the second-best performance in The King’s Speech. I preferred Jesse Eisenberg’s steely, implosive take on Mark Zuckerberg, but I don’t see any chance of an upset here. And I'd like to give a shout-out here to the unnominated Edgar Ramírez, who gave the performance of the year in the title role of Olivier Assayas’ satirical terrorism epic, Carlos.

W: Colin Firth, The King’s Speech
S: Jesse Eisenberg, The Social Network

Best Actress

This one will almost surely go to Natalie Portman, whose naturalistic turn in Black Swan effectively anchors the deliberately cartoonish performances of the film’s supporting cast. Some are predicting an upset from Annette Bening, but this feels like one of those inevitable Best Actress coronations to me.

W: Natalie Portman, Black Swan
S: Jennifer Lawrence, Winter’s Bone

Best Supporting Actress

Anyone could win this one.

W: Melissa Leo, The Fighter
S: Amy Adams, The Fighter

Best Supporting Actor

Four terrific perfomances in this category, as well as a pretty good one from Mark Ruffalo. Bale triumphs over Rush, but just barely.

W: Christian Bale, The Fighter
S: Christian Bale, The Fighter

Screenplay, Original
W: The King’s Speech
S: Another Year

Screenplay, Adapted
W: The Social Network
S: The Social Network

Animated Feature
W: Toy Story 3

Documentary Feature
W: Inside Job

Foreign Language Film
W: In a Better World

Cinematography
W: True Grit
S: The Social Network

Art Direction
W: Inception
S: Inception

Editing
W: The Social Network
S: The Social Network

Visual Effects
W: Inception
S: Inception

Costume Design
W: The King’s Speech
S: Alice in Wonderland

Makeup
W: The Wolfman

Sound Mixing
W: Inception
S: The Social Network

Sound Editing
W: Inception
S: Unstoppable

Original Score
W: The King’s Speech
S: The Social Network

Original Song:
W: “We Belong Together,” Toy Story 3

Animated Short
W: Day & Night

Live Action Short
W: Na Wewe

Documentary Short
W: Strangers No More

Best Music of 2010

2011-01-06T15:12:00.026-05:00

I didn’t have the time to see a ton of movies this year, so I didn’t vote in any end-of-year film polls and probably won’t be posting a Top 10 list until at least March. However, my music list is ready a bit earlier than usual. For the first time in a while, I don't need to spend January scrounging for albums to fill out the bottom of my list. By my reckoning, this was the best year for new music since at least 2005; any of the first six below would have been top-three in an average year.

1. Kanye West—My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
The word narcissist gets thrown around a lot these days, yet it remains a rare privilege to watch a true narcissist at work. Kanye gets his defensiveness about the tabloid stuff out of the way on a pair of early tracks (reminding us of his black balls on “Gorgeous”; declaring his independence on the majestic “Power”), but only to ultimately pull us deeper into his self-obsession. The whole album is strong, but beginning with the thumping tagteam of “Monster” My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy begins living up to its title, taking off on the most mind-blowing half-hour in the recent history of pop music. The key track for me is “So Appalled.” Kanye, of course, is not a moralist, but he wants you to know he’s concerned: “Niggas is goin’ through real shit man, they outta work/That’s why another goddamn dance track gotta hurt/That’s why I rather spit somethin’ that gotta purp.” Only trouble is that his verse is already up and he never makes it back to the mic except to repeat a couple lines, presumably spending the rest of the song stumbling around in a haze of champagne and dirty white bitches while his supporting cast spits meaningless bon mots like “If God had an iPod, I’d be on his playlist.” It’s like that sometimes.

Kanye’s point-guard precision as a producer strikes again with his brilliant deployment of the Teflon Don himself, Rick Ross, who keeps the sleazy vibe going on “Devil in a New Dress,” a drifter built on a Smokey Robinson vocal sample. By the time we get to the assorted douchebags, assholes, and jerkoffs of “Runaway” and the pornstar fantasies of “Hell of a Life,” it’s hard to describe the tone exactly. The nearest antecedent to this music’s uneasy relationship with the freewheeling decadence of the lyrics is probably Sly Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On, but Kanye hardly sounds like he’s on the verge of burnout. A more apt comparison might be U2’s Achtung Baby, another confessional mid-career work by a classic narcissist hitting his thirties and seeking to escape the trap of earnestness (irony taking the place of fantasy). Like Bono, Kanye reaches for the heavens and crawls in the muck, often at the same time. Sublime or ridiculous, he’s never indifferent.

Also included: Chris Rock’s funniest bit since Bigger and Blacker and what will almost certainly be the last-ever reference to former USC Trojans quarterback Matt Leinart in a hip-hop song. Or any kind of song.
(“So Appalled” “Runaway”)

2. Flying Lotus—Cosmogramm
The spirit of Coltrane—more immediately, Alice, the late great-aunt of Steven Ellison (aka Flying Lotus) who inspired the album’s title, but also John—hovers over the fractured rhythms, horn samples, skittering bass lines, and dense arrangements of the year’s most innovative electronic album. Drawing from sources as disparate as free jazz, krautrock, IDM, and two-step/grime, Cosmogramm achieves a remarkable fusion of textures. As with Madlib’s best work, it’s all about the flow, with even Thom Yorke blending perfectly into the mix. (“Nose Art” “Arkestry”)

3. Deerhunter—Halcyon Digest
“Hey little boy, I am your friend/And I understand the pain you’re in,” sings Bradford Cox, evoking the siren song of rock music and its appeal to art-damaged adolescent boys (among others), one of the key themes of this remarkably unified album, a not unpredictable yet highly satisfying breakthrough for the Atlanta group. Halcyon Digest continues Cox’s career-long reworking of the music of his own halcyon days, also sprinkling in elements of late-’60s pop. The more delicate tracks, like the stoner-nostalgic “Memory Boy” and the depressive “Sailing,” are well complemented by a pair of rockers from guitarist Lockett Pundt, particularly the extended centerpiece jam, “Desire Lines.” (“He Would Have Laughed” “Revival”)

4. Four Tet—There Is Love in You
The latest album from the indispensable Kieran Hebden may sound like a retreat at first, eschewing the eclectic rhythmic excursions of 2005’s Everything Ecstatic, but it’s really a retrenchment, a deliberate paring down to essentials, a bid for musical and spiritual purity. I wouldn’t call this music minimalist, exactly, but it’s certainly efficient—in the warmest possible sense of the word—mining tremendous depth of feeling from the most basic materials: gentle electronic tones, simple melodies, and looped vocal samples. (“Love Cry” “Circling”)

5. Beach House—Teen Dream
The pop album of the year. This sounds so West Coast to me that it’s hard to believe they’re from Baltimore. Definitely not to be confused with Teenage Dream by Katy Perry, who might be the worst person on earth. Just kidding, of course. Sort of. Not really. (“Norway” “Walk in the Park”)

6. Joanna Newsom—Have One on Me
Clocking in at over 120 minutes, Have One on Me might be both the most musically conventional and artistically radical work to date from Newsom. As befits the woman who once sang about the difference between the sprout and the bean, the subject here is growing up and dealing with—no, embracing—the challenges of adulthood. “Do you think you can just stop when you’re ready for a change?” she asks on “Go Long,” one of many songs apparently centered on a dying relationship, and one of several that suggest the ways in which the choices we make in life eventually come to define us—whether we like it or not. Taken seriously, this album’s a real kick in the teeth to its presumed audience of self-involved hipsters, many of whom no doubt preferred the comforting nostalgia of The Suburbs. I’m impressed with her command of English folk idioms or whatever. But I’m more impressed with her maturity and her quiet self-confidence in putting out an album full of long songs and allusive, oblique lyrics, one that both demands and rewards close attention—in short, an album that's not easy. I’ve never seen Joanna Newsom live, but I bet she could command a room without ever raising her voice. (“In California” “Good Intentions Paving Co.”)

7. Big Boi—Sir Lucious Left Foot…The Son of Chico Dusty
I’ll never be able to look at David Blaine in quite the same way. (“Tangerine” “The Train Pt. 2”)

8. Women—Public Strain
These combative Calgary garage rockers tap some classic indie influences (The Velvet Underground, ’80s Sonic Youth, Slint, etc.) but find an original sound rooted in an ominous bass-heavy drone. Like Halcyon Digest and Have One on Me, this is a carefully constructed album, showing there’s some life in the longform yet. (“Locust Valley” “Narrow With the Hall”)

9. Pantha du Prince—Black Noise
German techno being possibly the chilliest of the major technos, it took me a long time to get into this early-year release, and I kept expecting it to fade away—but it never did. The third album from German DJ/producer Pantha du Prince (né Hendrik Weber) could just as easily have been called Negative Space—it’s all about what’s not there, the infinite silences between the sounds. (“Es Schneit” “Welt am Draht”)

10. Crystal Castles—Crystal Castles [II]
I yield the floor to my E&F colleague David Nelson Pollock.
(“Baptism” “Celestica”)

I wouldn’t normally do this kind of thing, but it was such a rich year that I’m also going to list five runners-up. I wouldn’t call these #11-15 per se, but at least a couple of them would have made the Top 10 in an average year. These are in alphabetical order; Caribou was the closest to making the final cut.

Caribou—Swim
The latest from the ever unpredictable Dan Snaith is more dancefloor-oriented than anything else in the Manitoba/Caribou catalogue, while retaining some of the psychedelic/shoegazer elements of previous albums like Up in Flames. This one was truly Top 10-worthy. (“Kaili” “Bowls”)

Brian Eno—Small Craft on a Milk Sea
Solid work from one of the all-time greats. The more beat-oriented tracks here make me wish he’d attempt a full-on techno album. (“2 Forms of Anger” “Written, Forgotten”)

Gorillaz—Plastic Beach
Some interesting guest shots on this one, with several gravelly-voiced singers providing a nice counterpoint to Damon Albarn & Co.’s sci-fi settings. (“Some Kind of Nature” “On Melancholy Hill”)

Janelle Monáe—The ArchAndroid
Overlong and more than a little pretentious, but she’s still young enough to grow into her ambitions. The lyrics need work, though. (“Tightrope” “Neon Valley Street”)

Spoon—Transference
These indie-rock masters are so consistent that they risk being taken for granted. This disjointed, uneasy outing tries on various rock styles but lacks a knockout song and never quite rises to the soulful heights of Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (2007). Still, it’s good enough to make five winners in a row for the band. (“The Mystery Zone” “Got Nuffin’”)

Top 5 songs not on those albums

1. M.I.A.—“Born Free”
In retrospect, it feels like a bait-and-switch, but still.

2. James Blake—“CMYK”

3. Arcade Fire—“We Used to Wait”
Sometimes they never came.

4. The Chemical Brothers—“Escape Velocity”

5. Bilal—“Restart”
Post-Prince neo-soul (I think that was redundant) from yet another major-label casualty.

Midterm Madness

2010-11-01T16:52:00.010-04:00

I don't have much to say about the midterm elections per se. I've mostly given up on political blogging (1) for mental health reasons and (2) because too many other people are doing it better than I can. If you want an educated guess about what's going to happen tomorrow, I recommend this guy's. My general view is that elections are largely decided by economic fundamentals, which would point to huge losses for the incumbent Democrats this year.

The nonstop horse race coverage has become exhausting for all but the most dedicated political junkies. If it were up to me, I'd implement something resembling the British electoral system (no television advertising, wrap the whole thing up in no more than a couple months), but as this would require changing the Constitution multiple times, it's probably never going to happen. It would appear that the nonstop freak show that is American politics is here to stay.

Liberals are understandably downcast about the likelihood of significant Republican gains tomorrow, but let's can it with all the wailing and gnashing of teeth. It may not look like it now, but these past two years have been pretty good ones for the progressive agenda, the headwinds of a depressed economy and unprecedented political obstructionism notwithstanding. Those headwinds may have diminished some of the accomplishments of the Obama administration, but they have not stopped the president's agenda (with the noteworthy exception of the Senate's failure to pass climate-change legislation).

Most significant, Obama won a historic victory on the issue of health care, shepherding to passage a bill that, while flawed and hardly the last word on the subject, forever enshrines into American law the principle that the government must act to ensure its citizens have access to the health-care system. The next Congress will not be able to undo that, nor will any future Congress. Electoral majorities come and go, but these kinds of substantive victories are what it's all about.

Blissfully Yours

2010-09-25T18:45:00.002-04:00

The 48th New York Film Festival kicked off last night with David Fincher’s highly anticipated The Social Network. I haven’t yet seen it (word from friends and colleagues is almost uniformly positive), but I would like to briefly highlight another movie showing twice at the festival this weekend: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, winner of the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and the latest unclassifiable whatsit from Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Over the past decade, Apichatpong has risen to the top tier of global art-cinema directors with a series of allusive head-scratchers including, most recently, Tropical Malady (2004) and Syndromes and a Century (2006). His latest feature abandons the bifurcated structure of his past few films for something more diffuse and intuitive. The plot, such as it is, centers around Uncle Boonmee, who’s not long for this world due to an unspecified kidney problem. As he nears death, he’s visited by various entities from the spirit world, including his late wife and a son who’s been transformed into a red-eyed ape-like creature. Like Boonmee’s relatives and caretakers, we’re surprised at first by the visitors but soon begin to take it all in stride.

Uncle Boonmee is full of references not only to Thai animism but also to various aspects of the country’s history and popular culture, none of which I’m remotely qualified to write about. Fortunately, no background in these areas is required to appreciate the sheer beauty of Uncle Boonmee, which, like Apichatpong’s previous films, gets a lot of mileage out of the rugged landscapes of Thailand’s rural north, nor to marvel at the director’s effortless integration of all the disparate material. As Apichatpong indicated at his NYFF press conference earlier this week, each reel of the film was given a distinct look, a strategy most salient during a magical scene involving a princess and a rather libidinous catfish. Arguably, the film’s highlight, it’s one of several sequences with an ambiguous narrative relationship to the main action. (I hate to resort to the old critic’s trick of using one film as a club to beat on another, but the way Apichatpong integrates dreams and fantasies into not only the film’s action but its very DNA highlights how pedestrian and unimaginative something like Inception really is.)

Those familiar with Apichatpong’s sui generis brand of cinema can imagine how matter-of-factly all the fantastic happenings play out onscreen, but for the uninitiated, it’s important to emphasize what a profoundly generous filmmaker he is, the polar opposite of arch or pretentious. Like Apichatpong’s previous films, Uncle Boonmee is full of wry comedy, but the laughter never comes at the expense of either his characters or his audience, instead arising from a shared sense of absurdity at the collision of worlds onscreen. It all adds up to an often thrilling, occasionally confusing, and always restful experience, with the deliberate pacing giving you just the right amount of time to let it all sink in. A masterpiece is one thing, but a masterpiece that lets you breathe—now that’s something special.

You Know Who I Am

2010-08-13T19:14:00.006-04:00

I haven’t yet heard the new Arcade Fire album. I watched them on The Daily Show last night and thought they sounded pretty good, so I suspect I’ll catch up with it eventually, maybe even sooner than later. But without getting off on a self-involved tangent here, it’s worth pausing for a moment to consider my reluctance to embrace this band. After all, I’ve mostly enjoyed their other records, this one is attracting lots of positive reaction, and I like what I’ve heard from it. And yet, I hesitate. Why? The obvious answer is that I’m merely reacting against the obnoxious level of hype around the band. There may be something to that, but this is hardly a phenomenon unique to Arcade Fire. Perhaps it’s more a question of sensibility. To put it another way, I don’t feel a connection.

This is not, of course, an entirely rational response, but it is a real one, and it’s crucial to the way most serious music listeners, as well as many casual fans, relate to pop artists—that is, in ways that go well beyond music per se. I’m not talking about anything as deadly dull as an artist’s “philosophy” or even worldview. What I have in mind is something more analogous to Andrew Sarris’s notion of “interior meaning,” a fully formed artistic sensibility that both encompasses and transcends form and technique, as well as thought and feeling.

Which brings us to the case of M.I.A. In the three years since the release of her second album, Kala, she’s become a pop-cultural lightning rod, celebrated as a hero by many fans for her backstory as much as her music and condemned as an empty-headed purveyor of radical chic by others. The latter camp has had no shortage of fuel, much of it provided by M.I.A. herself in a series of public pronouncements culminating in a condescending (albeit skillfully conceived and written) New York Times Magazine profile by Lynn Hirschberg, who, it must be said, has made something of a career out of this sort of thing. But anyone reading this obviously has access to Google, so I’m not going to rehash any of that here. What’s interesting is how all this drama relates to M.I.A.’s music. On the surface, M.I.A. signifies rebellion, third-worldism, even revolution, yet her dabblings in business and fashion, not to mention her much-chronicled life of luxury, locate her in a more nebulous space. And her public statements suggest that she’s not particularly well-informed.

I’ll try to explain. Once upon a time, things were simple. There was Society and there were those outside of Society, and you knew exactly which side of that line you and everyone else was on. This is not to say that elements of the counterculture weren’t quite regularly co-opted by Society, etc. etc., but merely that this used to be an operational distinction in popular culture. Now its last vestiges are disappearing. Nearly all of the true zeitgeist figures in the current poposphere—Barack Obama, Lady Gaga, Lebron James, Don Draper—are to a large extent blank screens onto which we can (and do) project our own fantasies of who they “really” are. Theirs is a studied opacity. They are both the culture and the counterculture.

M.I.A. fits this mold, although she bears less resemblance to any of the figures mentioned above than to Kanye West, another tabloid-ready superstar given to erratic behavior who, like M.I.A., has made great records despite a lack of conventional musical ability, in the sense of vocal or instrumental prowess. Both Kanye and M.I.A. are less artists in the traditional sense than musical and cultural curators, guides to certain sensibilities. (This is particularly true of M.I.A.—as a producer, Kanye is at least directly responsible for the sound of his records.) This is why questions about authenticity rankle so much. She’s identified herself with a certain political posture, and if she can’t deliver the goods, then…well what? My own views on the issue were succinctly articulated by Robert Christgau in his review of Maya: “The notion that M.I.A. isn't politically meaningful because her motives are mixed and her ideas are screwed up is clueless about how pop music works—namely, all kinds of screwy ways.” Yes, exactly. Pop (music or otherwise) is a medium of grand gestures and unintended consequences.

As for the album…well, you know, it’s all right, neither a Kala-level masterpiece nor the Self Portrait-style disaster that Pitchfork would have you believe. I’m not going to knock her for going all pop-star narcissist on us; she’s entitled to work that vein for at least one album, and it’s not like she didn’t warn us with the title. Following a minute-long intro (that’s why I don’t have an iPhone!), Maya kicks into gear with the industrial grind of “Steppin’ Up,” which strikes a familiar outsider pose, mocking the torpor of mainstream club culture (“Bass lines and ass/Anything fast”), and the savvy pop of “XXXO,” which casts a jaundiced eye on what passes for affection in the age of portable electronic devices. The canny wordplay of “Lovalot” conflates references to suicide bombers with mentions of Obama and Hu Jintao. And of course there’s the scintillating “Born Free” (think Primal Scream’s XTRMNTR with A Thousand Leaves-era Kim Gordon singing), the lead single that raised hopes of a Difficult Third Album in the In Utero/Wowee Zowee mode, even as the song’s “banned” (whatever the hell that means in 2010) video, a risible gloss on Peter Watkins’s 1971 counterculture classic Punishment Park, came off as just the sort of attention-getting stunt that M.I.A.’s grown too fond of. You take the bad with the good; unfortunately, it’s the best track on Maya by a considerable margin. To get there you’ve got to slog through the insipid reggae-pop of “It Takes a Muscle” and the formless muck of “It Iz What It Iz.” The shallow electro-rock of “Meds and Feds” sounds like the work of labelmates Sleigh Bells, which is OK because I can tolerate Sleigh Bells for exactly one song. And while “Teqkilla” is not quite as annoying as its title, “Tell Me Why” has some of the laziest lyrics in the M.I.A. catalog (“Things change but it feels the same”).

The so-called “deluxe” edition comes with four extra songs (are they part of the album are not?), of which only the first, “Internet Connection,” qualifies as a throwaway. Indeed, the perky punk-funk of “Illygirl” and the laid-back Afro-pop of “Believer” would have been better-than-average on the album proper. And the final track, “Caps Lock,” strikes a plaintive note found nowhere else on Maya. “My left side is my right side,” she sings, and no further explanation is necessary. She’s a rebel so she rebels. It’s a good bet that M.I.A. won't be following in the footsteps of Peter Garrett or Bono anytime soon, but that’s not to say there’s no content to her music, even if it’s merely a willingness to say “no” to society’s “yes.” And at least for now, that’ll have to do.

The Meaning of Lebron

2010-07-08T16:05:00.004-04:00

Tonight at 9 pm, Eastern Daylight Time, the man they call King James will speak to us on national television. On that broadcast he will reveal the secret that millions have longed to know and thousands have striven to learn: the identity of the NBA team for which he will be playing basketball for the next five or six years. Or possibly fewer.

So tell me something I don’t know. Obviously the whole ESPN broadcast is a massive ego trip, but accusations of egotism against a man who openly aspires to be a “global icon” are nothing but redundant. Lebron not only transcends sports, but conventional notions of celebrity. He is not only a new kind of superstar, equal parts athlete, pitchman, and free-floating signifier, but a literal superman (he may not be the greatest basketball player of all time, but he's surely the greatest basketball talent). As the likes of Beyoncé have shown, there’s no such thing anymore as overexposure, and backlash is reserved for history’s greatest monsters, like Tiger Woods. It is what it is. Hate the game, I say, not the player. The news that Lebron had opened a Twitter account this week seemed almost quaint. Lebron is the new medium. ESPN has a presence in Lebron, just as it does on television or the Internet. And as with TV and the Web, Lebron is now a part of us, like it or not. Despite a seven-year basketball career that would already rank him among the sport’s greats, what we are now witnessing is not his apotheosis, but indeed the birth of Lebron. It’s sort of like the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, if that helps any.

So whether you’re a basketball fan or not, you too are now bound up in the meaning of Lebron and its implications for our collective future. Hence, the frenzy of the past few weeks, which have seen a deafening vuvuzela-like buzz of reports and rumors, in which it’s become impossible to separate fact from opinion, truth from spin, solid journalism from hope, spite, and wishful thinking. No piece of minutiae has gone unexamined, no stray comment or sartorial detail left uninterpreted. As with all things Lebron, the media attention is unprecedented, and everyone has an opinion. Because, rightly or wrongly, the choice he announces tonight will go a long way toward defining Lebron, forever shattering some cherished interpretations of him while validating others. It is a choice fraught with unintended consequences and hidden meanings, meanings totally unrelated to the idiosyncratic, even capricious, factors that motivate actual human decision-making. With the ever-hapless Los Angeles Clippers and the talent-depleted New Jersey Nets seemingly out of the picture, we’re down to four teams in the running for Lebron: the Miami Heat, the Chicago Bulls, the New York Knicks, and of course the Cleveland Cavaliers, and each has developed its own text, its own commentary on the meaning of Lebron.

Miami. The latest of a series of frontrunners, Miami would pair James with fellow superstar Dwyane Wade, along with all-star forward Chris Bosh. There are a lot of questions about the rest of the roster, and the idea of Lebron teaming up with another of the league’s top five players rankles basketball purists, but it’s easy to see why the Heat are considered the favorite tonight. Miami is The Show, Miami is Amazing, Miami feels like Now. Miami is three friends getting together to play pickup games, to create the nucleus of the kind of fun, freewheeling winner that veterans would sign up to play with for the league minimum salary—that is, if the NBA weren’t looking at a probable lockout in 2011-12. Miami says that Lebron is Spectacle.

Chicago. Chicago is the choice of the serious basketball crowd (unless they’re fans of one of the other teams in the field, of course). Unlike the attempts to build a roster from scratch in Miami and New York, Chicago offers a ready-made cast of talented basketball players whose skills complement each other. Chicago is where Lebron goes to win multiple championships as (unlike in Miami) the undisputed alpha dog. Chicago is rational. Chicago is greatness. Chicago is also a city in the shadow of Michael Jordan, the greatest basketball player who ever lived. Chicago says Lebron is Basketball.

New York. New York is the proverbial big city, the place where dreams are made, or at least the place where Lebron is supposedly most likely to fulfill his potential as a worldwide superstar, while reviving a moribund franchise in a rich basketball market. But New York is a bit nostalgic too, perhaps even more so than the final option below. Nostalgic for the days when it was the undisputed center of the universe, the days before Lebron and all the other new media made everything so confusing and complicated. New York says Lebron is The Big Stage.

Cleveland. And then there’s Cleveland, the team for whom Lebron, a native of nearby Akron, has won back-to-back MVPs without their reaching the NBA Finals either season. The roster is mediocre and appears unlikely to improve much in the near term. Cleveland is the choice of the traditionalists, of finishing what you started. Cleveland is destiny, living by faith and not by sight. Given the excruciatingly drawn out (not to mention nationally televised) nature of this affair, Cleveland doesn’t exactly say Lebron is loyalty, and we can safely pass over Lebron is humility, but mabye Lebron is Home.

Free Jafar Panahi

2010-05-05T09:24:00.004-04:00

I want to take a moment to draw attention to some organizing efforts on behalf of the Iranian director Jafar Panahi. For those who haven't heard, Panahi, the director of several fine films including Crimson Gold (2003) and Offside (2006), was arrested March 1 for "unspecified crimes." He remains in custody and has since been accused of attempting to make a film against the regime, potentially a serious charge in Iran.

Shortly after Panahi's arrest, a number of Iranian filmmakers and other artists signed a petition calling for his release, and this past week a number of major American filmmakers and critics have launched a petition of their own. This post from critic Anthony Kaufman, one of the organizers of the latter effort, briefly summarizes how that petition came about.

The post also touches on a key issue, perhaps the key issue regarding this type of organizing, which is the possibility that such efforts to call attention to government-sponsored injustice could be ineffective or even backfire by prompting backlash from the authorities. I'm no expert on Iran either, but I think Anthony's analysis here is fundamentally correct. The depth and length of the protests in the aftermath of last year's elections clearly showed some major fissures in public support for the current regime, and international expressions of solidarity with the opposition have clearly had a positive impact on morale, if nothing else.

Coming attractions: I'll have something to say about Obama's Supreme Court pick sometime after he gets around to making one. Also, I was going to do a post about the new Arizona immigration law, but found that I don't have anything original to say about it. I will say that I persist in the belief that the right of law-abiding persons of whatever ethnicity to go about their daily business without fear of being randomly harassed by the police cuts close to the heart of what it means to live in a free society.

Health Care Reform

2010-03-24T10:23:00.003-04:00

Basically, what Biden said. The Affordable Care Act is far from perfect and certainly won't be the last word on the subject, but this is a big deal indeed, the most significant piece of domestic legislation passed in the lifetime of anyone under 40 and proof that our political system is still capable of taking on big issues. Forget for a moment all the talk about public options, subsidy levels, CBO projections, etc., and focus on the big picture: the principle that the government should guarantee access to affordable health insurance for everyone is now enshrined in American law. And frivolous lawsuits and Republican talk of repeal notwithstanding, it's here to stay.

Hurt So Good (aka Anything But Avatar)

2010-03-07T13:20:00.007-05:00

A year after fielding one of the lamer Best Picture slates of recent years, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has made some big changes to its headline category for the 82nd Oscars. For the first time in 66 years, the Best Picture field consists of 10 films instead of five. The move was presumably a response to criticism of last year's nominees, which failed to include popular and critical favorites The Dark Knight and WALL*E in favor of bland Oscar bait like Frost/Nixon and The Reader.

For this year at least, it appears to have worked, with the overwhelming majority of cinephiles likely to find something to like (as well as something to hate). If we assume that the five Best Director nominees correspond to the movies that would have been selected for a Best Picture field of five (probably a good bet in light of the various precursor awards), then the five additional nominees include: a sci-fi allegory (District 9), a cynical art movie (A Serious Man), a cartoon about a septagenarian (Up), a literary British prestige picture (An Education), and an MOR populist entertainment (The Blind Side). I haven’t seen the latter two, although I suspect I’ll catch up with An Education at some point. But Up and District 9 are worthy inclusions that wouldn’t have made it into a field of five, and others would make the case for A Serious Man as well. None of the three feel like the traditional middlebrow Best Picture nominee.

Likely to join those five as also-rans tonight is Precious, a mostly bleak drama about a teenage girl (Gabourey Sidibe) dealing with incest, abuse, poverty, and illiteracy in 1980s Harlem. The makers of Precious deserve some credit for putting this kind of difficult material onscreen, but the whole thing made me a bit queasy, and not always in a good way. It made me think about Céline and—well, there’s a reason Céline ended up becoming a fascist. The Jason Reitman-directed George Clooney vehicle Up in the Air, a superficial drama about a man who fires people for a living, looked like a contender back in November but happily seems to have faded. The movie has nothing whatsoever to say about unemployment or the recession or much of anything else, but it’s at least a more competent film than Reitman’s Juno.

Tonight’s contest appears to be a classic David-and-Goliath showdown between James Cameron’s super-mega-blockbuster Avatar, the highest-grossing film in the history of the universe or whatever, and Kathryn Bigelow’s critically acclaimed Iraq war drama The Hurt Locker, about a sergeant (Jeremy Renner) who defuses bombs for a living. Regardless of which way the big prize goes, it appears more than likely that Bigelow will become the first woman to take home a Best Director award.

I didn’t hate Avatar. Cameron’s groundbreaking visual effects kept me interested for the first half or so, but I lost interest in the Pocahantas/Dances With Wolves storyline after a while, and the ill-advised attempts at political allegory, which managed to be both heavy-handed and incoherent, were too much to take. And 3-D still feels like a gimmick to me; if this is the future of cinema, count me out. (An Avatar win for Cinematography would be at least as depressing as a Best Picture triumph). The superbly crafted The Hurt Locker is clearly the superior choice and would rank as one of the most deserving Best Picture winners of the past 15 years or so, but of course deserve’s got nothing to do with it. Knee-jerk futurism combined with the blind worship of money, the venerable civic religion of both Hollywood and America, could well trump everything else. But I hope not.

If there’s a dark horse in this race, it’s Quentin Tarantino’s voluble World War II fantasy Inglourious Basterds, my own favorite film of the year. Shaking off the cobwebs of generations of WWII movies, Tarantino’s film is both fluently conversant with the cinematic past and strikingly original in its appropriations thereof. It also has the most original take on Nazi evil in eons, courtesy of Christoph Waltz, whose comically deranged portrayal of the decadent Col. Hans Landa is tonight’s second-surest bet.

Predicted winners below, along with my personal choices, where applicable. The alert reader will note that I have fewer opinions than I used to, as well as less inclination to see bad movies.

Best Picture

In addition to expanding the field, the Academy changed the voting system for this category only. Rather than voting for one film, each voter is now asked to rank the nominees 1 through 10. After the first-place votes are counted, if no film has more than 50 percent of the vote, the film with the fewest votes is eliminated and its ballots are redistributed among the remaining nine films according to their No. 2 choices (i.e., the highest-ranked choice that hasn’t already been eliminated). This process repeats itself until one film has more than 50 percent of the vote. The upshot of the new system, known as “preferential balloting,” is that the film that gets the most first-place votes won’t necessarily be the winner. My guess is that this favors The Hurt Locker, a film that comparatively few people dislike, over the more polarizing Avatar.

Will win: The Hurt Locker
Should win: Inglourious Basterds

Best Director

Kathryn Bieglow’s one of those directors working on the edge of the mainstream whose name on a genre movie usually means it’s going to be interesting. Like last year’s winner, Danny Boyle, she’s put together a decent, if uneven, career and deserves to win one of these. Unlike Boyle, she has a chance to do it for one of her better films.

W: Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker
S: Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds

Best Actress

Despite The Blind Side’s getting a Best Picture nomination, I just can’t bring myself to believe the Academy’s going to give an Oscar to Sandra Bullock. Surely they won’t go through with it. On the other hand, Helen Hunt won one, so who knows? Early on, it looked like this might finally be the year for Meryl Streep to take home her third Oscar, and first since the early ’80s, for her performance as Julia Child in Julie and Julia. Bullock is the clear favorite, and she’ll probably win…but this reminds me a bit of the Jack Nicholson/Daniel Day Lewis race back in 2002, when Adrien Brody snuck in and took the statue.

W: Carey Mulligan, An Education
S: [no pick]

Best Actor

Back in November, it looked like this might be George Clooney’s year, but Jeff Bridges took control of the race around the end of the year and appears headed to a landslide win. I haven’t seen Crazy Heart, so I’ll just pretend he won for The Big Lebowski instead.

W: Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart
S: Jeremy Renner, The Hurt Locker

Best Supporting Actor

That’s a bingo.

W: Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds
S: Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds

Best Supporting Actress

W: Mo'Nique, Precious
S: Mo'Nique, Precious

Screenplay, Original
W: Inglourious Basterds
S: Inglourious Basterds

Screenplay, Adapted
W: Up in the Air
S: In the Loop

Animated Feature
W: Up
S: Up (close second: Fantastic Mr. Fox)

Documentary Feature
W: The Cove
S: [no pick]

Foreign Language Film
W: El Secreto de Sus Ojos
S: [no pick]

Cinematography
W: Avatar
S: Inglourious Basterds

Art Direction
W: Avatar
S: [no pick]

Editing
W: The Hurt Locker
S: Inglourious Basterds

Visual Effects
W: Avatar
S: Avatar

Costume Design
W: The Young Victoria
S: [no pick]

Makeup
W: Star Trek
S: Star Trek

Sound Mixing
W: The Hurt Locker
S: The Hurt Locker

Sound Editing
W: Avatar
S: The Hurt Locker

Original Score
W: Up
S: Fantastic Mr. Fox

Original Song
W: “The Weary Kind,” Crazy Heart
S: [no pick]

Animated Short
W: A Matter of Loaf and Death
S: [no pick]

Live Action Short
W: The Door
S: [no pick]

Documentary Short
W: The Last Truck: The Closing of a GM Plant
S: [no pick]

Best Albums of the 2000s (part 2)

2010-02-11T14:12:00.018-05:00

Here's 50-1. Last list-oriented post until December, I hope.

50. Graduation—Kanye West

49. Toxicity—System of a Down

Basically prog-metal with one foot in the mainstream, Toxicity was No. 1 on the Billboard chart when the planes hit on 9/11. The music’s jagged rhythms and jumpy transitions aptly represent the chaos of the moment—a sense only reinforced by lyrical references to “self-righteous suicide” and “the toxicity of our city.”

48. Kill the Moonlight—Spoon

47. 808s & Heartbreak—Kanye West

Haunted by the sudden death of Kanye’s mother, 808s & Heartbreak stands as his most radical and introspective album to date, nearly leaving hip-hop behind in favor of a Princely amalgam of R&B and synthpop. I’m not sure where he goes from here, but I look forward to finding out.

46. Ys—Joanna Newsom

It sounds like it should be a pretentious, unlistenable mess: 24-year-old neo-folkie harpist sings five songs, backed by orchestral arrangements, ranging from seven to 17 minutes in length. But somehow it all comes together beautifully, with the arrangements by Van Dyke Parks and Jim O’Rourke’s mix creating the perfect context for Newsom’s cosmic ponderings.

45. Discovery—Daft Punk

44. Rounds—Four Tet

43. ()—Sigur Ros

Recorded in a (presumably dry) swimming pool, this lengthy mood piece lacks the bold melodic flourishes of its predecessor, Agaetis Byrjun, but nearly makes up for it in atmosphere.

42. London Zoo—The Bug

I fell hard for dub reggae sometime in 2007, and this album, released a year later, extends the legacy of that music (as well as that of the original dub revival of the mid-'90s) into the 21st century.

41. Yesterday and Today—The Field

40. Extraordinary Machine—Fiona Apple

39. Fishscale—Ghostface Killah

I initially mistook this album for little more than a retread of Raekwon’s Only Built for Cuban Linx (1995). But if you can get past the de rigueur references to Scarface, this might be the most purely enjoyable of the many Wu-Tang solo albums. And the all-star roster of contemporary producers, including Just Blaze and the late J. Dilla, ensures that it's no mere nostalgia trip.

38. The College Dropout—Kanye West

The first third or so of Kanye’s debut is so great that the rest can’t help but be a slight letdown, making the album somewhat difficult to get through in one sitting. And his anti-education shtick is still stupid.

37. Arular—M.I.A.

36. Amnesiac—Radiohead

Radiohead was on such a roll in 2001 that this album was almost taken for granted. But what seemed at the time like a slightly unwieldy collection of rejects from Kid A now plays like one of the band’s more unified and substantial records.

35. Good News for People Who Love Bad News—Modest Mouse

Isaac Brock and bandmates find a little bit of emotional stability and artistic sustainability. Many of the guardians of indie-rock purity complained about this album, but it has some of the sharpest songs of the band’s career.

34. Fleet Foxes—Fleet Foxes

33. Nothing’s in Vain—Youssou N’Dour

32. The Private Press—DJ Shadow

I suppose you could argue that Shadow was repeating himself a bit. But Endtroducing… is one of the greatest albums of all time, and nobody else sounds like this.

31. The Blueprint—Jay-Z

30. Stankonia—Outkast

29. DFA Compilation #2

Dispositive evidence that James Murphy’s career as a producer has been far more adventurous than LCD Soundsystem alone would suggest.

28. Rooty—Basement Jaxx

The best Prince album of the 2000s.

27. Modern Times—Bob Dylan

26. XTRMNTR—Primal Scream

Opening with a track called “Kill All Hippies” and closing with a cover of the Third Bardo nugget “Five Years Ahead of My Time,” XTRMNTR is the fullest articulation of Primal Scream’s complex relationship with the musical legacy of the 1960s. The album’s bleak tone and pervasive sense of a world falling into chaos, however, were all too contemporary, even prescient.

25. Brighter Than Creation’s Dark—Drive-by Truckers

24. Rings Around the World—Super Furry Animals

Smart, funny, weird, original Welsh indie rock. What more could you ask? Paul McCartney chomping celery? Done!

23. The Further Adventures of the Lord Quas—Quasimoto

22. The Woods—Sleater-Kinney

On their final album, the Washington state post-postpunk stalwarts finally let loose and bring the noise.

21. Smile—Brian Wilson

For obvious reasons, this was the single most difficult item to rank, which may explain how it got pushed out of the Top 20.

20. Third—Portishead

Mid-’90s legends return triumphantly with a new sound, channeling Syd Barrett and the Silver Apples through the Bristol murk.

19. Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga—Spoon

The indie-rock MVPs of the 2000s deliver their most ambitious and consistent album, their signature new-wave-inspired sound expanding to encompass dub, raga, and Memphis soul, among other things.

18. Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea—PJ Harvey

Perennially tortured soul gets happy, accessible. It wouldn’t last.

17. Agaetis Byrjun—Sigur Ros

16. Original Pirate Material—The Streets

Mike Skinner proved to be something of a one-trick pony, but this debut, unburdened by the cramped production and narrative fixations of his later albums, aches with the troubles of drug- and Playstation-addled post-adolescents with little money and limited prospects.

15. Since I Left You—The Avalanches

14. In Rainbows—Radiohead

13. Everything Ecstatic—Four Tet

One of my favorite musicians working right now, Kieran Hebden has made a career out of the joining the dots and loops of laptop music with the fearlessness of free jazz and an obsession with pure sound. The rhythmic restlessness of this album lifts it slightly above his others.

12. No Line on the Horizon—U2

I’ve written enough about this album already. (See “Found Horizons,” posted March 10.)

11. Murray Street—Sonic Youth

Following a series of albums that had moved the band away from the pop mainstream and back toward the experimental noise-rock of the ’80s, Sonic Youth, with new member Jim O’Rourke, tries its hand at classic rock (sort of). The result is the band’s best late-period album, and possibly its best since the epochal Daydream Nation (1988).

10. Proxima Estacion: Esperanza—Manu Chao

That’s “Next Station: Hope” for all you monolingual Americans.

9. Is This It?—The Strokes

Young American rock band arrives to great fanfare. Critics go nuts. Backlash ensues. Nine years down the road, the whole Strokes phenomenon feels less like a rebirth than a last hurrah, but the album’s a stone-cold classic.

8. All That You Can’t Leave Behind—U2

Hardly a return to the expansive sound of the band’s ’80s period, All That You Can’t Leave Behind is basically Bono’s Tunnel of Love, an intimate, soulful plumbing of the hopes and fears of adulthood featuring U2’s sharpest batch of songs to date.

7. Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not—The Arctic Monkeys

Further evidence of the shrinking half-lives of critical acclaim and rock stardom.

6. Vespertine—Björk

Less immediately accessible than her earlier albums, Björk’s masterpiece both demands and rewards close attention. There may not be another great album from the past 10 years that’s so dependent on duration and song sequence for its impact. On the opening track, the singer announces that she’s going to a “Hidden Place” and the rest of the songs—mostly about fundamentals like love, sex, and family—unfold in this private, interior space until the closing “Unison” blows the lid off the whole thing and lets the world back in.

5. Love and Theft—Bob Dylan

Dylan’s late-career comeback with the death-haunted Time Out of Mind (1997) was one thing, but who could have seen this coming? Glossing musical forms ranging from roadhouse blues to cabaret to swing to I-don’t-know-what, the astonishing Love and Theft has the generic range of a Beck album with nary a sample in sight. Less unified than Dylan’s follow-up, Modern Times, it’s warmer and funnier, and its wizened master of ceremonies has never sounded looser.

4. Kid A—Radiohead

Feel the cool electronic breeze.

3. Madvillainy—Madvillain

If there’s a musician more underrated than Kieran Hebden, it would have to be Madlib, who’s virtually reinvented hip-hop over the past decade or so. This (so far) one-off collaboration with MF Doom is all about the flow, channeling the musical spirit of truly classic rock in ways never heard before.

2. Kala—M.I.A.

I’ve already written plenty about this one too. (See “Combat Rock,” posted September 20, 2007.)

1. Late Registration—Kanye West

If Jay-Z is Jordan, then Kanye must be the Steve Nash of hip-hop—a master playmaker who can make the most ordinary of teammates look like a superstar. On his best, most expansive, most fully realized album, he gets terrific performances from inferior talents like The Game, as well as greats like Jay and Nas. The opening “Heard ’Em Say” is so perfectly arranged and performed that you forget that it’s the dude from freakin’ Maroon 5 singing background. “Touch the Sky” must be one of the most obvious uses of a classic soul sample that doesn’t make you wish you were listening to the original song instead. “Gold Digger” takes on the gender wars with humor and generosity. I could go through the whole record like this, but all good things must eventually come to an end.

Best Albums of the 2000s (part 1)

2010-02-06T12:01:00.003-05:00

Below is the first half of my Best Albums of the 2000s list, the third in a series of four posts looking back at the decade in music. Most of what I said in the intro to the Best Songs list applies here as well, particularly as pertaining to the personal and idiosyncratic nature of the list. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology (i.e., iTunes), I have a pretty good idea of how many times I've listened to various tracks over the past six years, and this data did have some effect at the margins in terms of keeping the rankings honest. I'll try to get 50-1 up no later than midweek. Until then, here's 100-51:

100. Lovers—The Sleepy Jackson

99. Party Music—The Coup

98. 100 Broken Windows—Idlewild

Early high point from promising Scottish college rockers before their (in retrospect, perhaps inevitable) descent into overproduced moderate-rock hell.

97. Confessions on a Dance Floor—Madonna

I initially dismissed this as merely Madonna’s roots move, but the sense of effortlessness here is no mean achievement.

96. Phrenology—The Roots

95. Hypermagic Mountain—Lightning Bolt

It achieves total heaviosity. But it moves too.

94. Ta Det Lungt—Dungen

93. Untrue—Burial

92. 604—Ladytron

UK-based back-to-the-future synthpoppers reflect on love and commerce.

91. One Beat—Sleater-Kinney

90. Mesmerize/Hypnotize—System of a Down

89. How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb—U2

This fair-to-middling entry in the U2 catalog finds the band spinning its wheels a bit, but the group’s newfound comfort with its own grandiosity would pay dividends down the road.

88. Thunder, Lightning, Strike—The Go! Team

87. Nouns—No Age

86. From Here We Go Sublime—The Field

Envious people will tell you that anyone with access to a computer could have made this album. But of course that’s part of what makes it great.

85. Rated R—Queens of the Stone Age

84. Songs for the Deaf—Queens of the Stone Age

Dave Grohl brings the thunder, making this the band’s best album by a whisker, despite a relative lack of musical variety.

83. Neon Golden—The Notwist

82. Lungs—Florence & the Machine

81. Gimme Fiction—Spoon

80. Silent Shout—The Knife

Of the many bands who’ve borrowed from ’80s synthpop over the past decade, The Knife has been one of the most original, deploying the genre’s bouncy sounds to cacophonous, menacing effect. And the distancing devices (heavily distorted vocals, raven masks) aren’t just facile alienation effects but function to evoke buried emotions and unspoken thoughts.

79. Hail to the Thief—Radiohead

78. The Unseen—Quasimoto

This stoned underground epic takes hip-hop’s crate-digging aesthetic strain to the next level.

77. Microcastle/Weird Era Cont.—Deerhunter

Evoking classic indie/alternative sources like Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine, these twin albums breathed some fresh air into a late-decade indie scene dominated by turgid hipster music.

76. Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts—M83

A consolidation, not a leap forward. But consolidations can be good.

75. Come With Us—The Chemical Brothers

74. Funeral—Arcade Fire

I remain suspicious of this band, but there are some gorgeous songs here to be sure.

73. Sonic Nurse—Sonic Youth

The second half of a productive two-album classic-rock detour with Jim O’Rourke finds the band stretching out comfortably. “The Dead are all right with me,” Thurston confides on “Stones.” As if we hadn’t known all along.

72. Beauty and the Beat—Edan

A sui generis amalgam of hip-hop and psychedelic rock.

71. Room on Fire—The Strokes

70. The Eternal—Sonic Youth

69. Magic—Bruce Springsteen

Channeling the weary-but-hopeful spirit of the ass end of the Bush administration, Magic easily achieves the political relevance that the post-9/11 The Rising audibly strained for.

68. Specialist in All Styles—Orchestra Baobab

67. Gung Ho—Patti Smith

66. Off With Their Heads—Kaiser Chiefs

Producer Mark Ronson provides some much-needed musical context for the band’s sharp-as-ever songwriting on this album, the Kaisers’ third and best to date.

65. Phrazes for the Young—Julian Casablancas

64. Girls Can Tell—Spoon

63. White Blood Cells—The White Stripes

The White Stripes made more-or-less the same album several times over, meaning that whichever one you heard first is probably your favorite.

62. Speakerboxxx/The Love Below—Outkast

Long, sprawling, self-indulgent, but almost never boring. I still think Big Boi’s disc is better, but you’re welcome to disagree.

61. Chaos and Creation in the Backyard—Paul McCartney

Forced to straighten up and fly right by producer Nigel Godrich, McCartney delivers the most disciplined album of his post-Beatles career—and one of the best.

60. Demon Days—Gorillaz

59. First Impressions of Earth—The Strokes

Not the band’s most consistent album, but an aesthetic milestone, as Julian Casablancas gives voice to the nagging realization that the world might not be worthy of his best efforts.

58. Think Tank—Blur

57. Blue Cathedral—Comets on Fire

Combining neo-psychedelic ambition, indie-rock messiness, and ear-splitting volume, this album deserves to have been more influential by now. But it’s early yet.

56. XX—The XX

55. The Cold Vein—Cannibal Ox

54. Decoration Day—Drive-by Truckers

The Truckers broke into the indie-rock consciousness with their 2001 double-disc Skynrd tribute Southern Rock Opera, but it was this follow-up that established them as a top-echelon band and Patterson Hood as a major American songwriter.

53. Up the Bracket—The Libertines

It’s a shame they couldn’t keep it together for more than two albums, but of course the feeling that it could all fall apart at any moment is crucial to this particular rock aesthetic.

52. Da Drought 3—Lil Wayne

Most people would put The Carter III here instead, but I maintain that Weezy’s mixtape work, while less polished, is a lot more interesting.

51. Gypsy Punks Underdog World Strike—Gogol Bordello

It lives up to its title, and that’s all you need to know.

Best Music of 2009

2010-01-29T14:16:00.012-05:00

I’m almost done with my Top 100 Albums of the 2000s list, but it seemed kind of ass-backwards to post that one before doing my Best of 2009 list. I had thought this year was going to be kind of an afterthought, what with the inevitable end-of-decade hoopla, not to mention that I appeared to be headed for my oldest and most esoteric Top 10 ever, but having now had a chance to catch up on some late-breaking releases, as well as others that I’d missed during the year, I’m now convinced that this was a pretty decent year, one with at least 13 or 14 albums that would have easily made my 2008 Top 10. Even better, 2010 is shaping up to be a monster, with strong new releases from Spoon and Four Tet already making bids for next year's list and new albums on the way from most of my other current faves. Less happily, this is my first rapless Top 10 since…well, ever, I guess. Raekwon’s fine Only Built for Cuban Linx…Pt. II came closest, but, good as it is, it seems like evidence that hip-hop is now entering its classic-rock period. That’s not a good thing, in case you were wondering. On to the list:

1. U2—No Line on the Horizon
U2’s 12th studio album is one of its best, with longtime producers Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois asserting themselves as full-on collaborators. Following the solid but too comfortable How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (2004), No Line on the Horizon reclaims the sense of musical and spiritual searching that has defined the band’s best work. (See “Found Horizons,” posted March 10.) (“Unknown Caller” “Moment of Surrender”)

2. The Field—Yesterday and Today
This supremely chilled out second album from Sweden’s Axel Willner improves on the formula of his 2007 debut, From Here We Go Sublime, adding a little rhythmic variation to his melodic techno. The most striking move is a cover of “Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime,” a new wave hit from the Korgis, which briefly adds a human voice to Willner's mix, but each of the six tracks on this carefully constructed album is subtly distinguished from the others. The result is the most aesthetically realized music of the year. (“Leave It” “Sequenced”)

3. The XX—XX
The debut album from a quartet of British early-twentysomethings who know what a VCR is. Singers Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim trade intimacies in vocals that feel almost whispered against the minimalist precision of the band’s arrangements. Supposedly they’re influenced by early-2000s R&B, but I can’t hear it. I’m thinking their parents must have listened to The Cure. Or possibly their grandparents. (“Crystalised” “Night Time”)

4. Julian Casablancas—Phrazes for the Young
The first solo album from Casablancas continues along the musical (synthpop, crooned vocals) and spiritual (Baudelairean) vectors of the third (but apparently not last) Strokes album, First Impressions of Earth (2006). I’m now convinced he has the stuff to develop into an American version of Jarvis Cocker, should we dare to even hope for such a thing. Included is the funniest/saddest song about NYC gentrification ever (“It started back in 1624…”). (“11th Dimension” “Left & Right in the Dark”)

5. Sonic Youth—The Eternal
Sonic Youth’s 15th proper album, and first for Matador, dissects and reconfigures musical elements from various phases of the band’s music to date—atonality, ironic pop forms, noise, hard-rock riffing, etc. As with U2 on No Line on the Horizon, the result is an album that feels both quintessential and not quite like any of their other records. Returning to the lo-fi sound of their ’80s period, the band stretches out gloriously on extended cuts like the alternately anthemic and meditative “Anti-Orgasm” and the unsettling “Massage the History.” (“Anthem” “Massage the History”)

6. Florence & the Machine—Lungs
With the Amerindie scene increasingly overrun by turgid hipster music (well represented in this year’s Pazz & Jop poll), it was refreshing to hear something hi-fi from a new artist with a big voice and bigger songs. A 23-year-old native of London, Florence Welch combines a variety of influences, mostly of the misfit female variety (Kate Bush, Siouxsie Sioux, Björk, etc.), and musical styles (alt-rock, soul, mainstream pop) on this buoyant, overflowing debut. (“Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up)” “Between Two Lungs”)

7. Fever Ray—Fever Ray
This solo project from Karin Dreijer is in many respects even darker and more disturbing that her work with brother Olof as The Knife. The gothic soundscapes and distorted vocals recall the duo’s Silent Shout, but repeated listenings reveal Fever Ray as a more intimate, if no less mysterious, record, eschewing some of the dissonant sonic flourishes of the earlier album in favor of a haunting ambience. (“When I Grow Up” “Now’s the Only Time I Know”)

8. PJ Harvey & John Parish—A Woman a Man Walked By
For some reason, I didn’t much care for this when it was released in March, but having rediscovered it a few weeks ago, I’m now convinced that this war-haunted album is Harvey’s best since Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea (2000), a reminder of how indispensable her artistic vision remains. The somber tone is similar to that of 2007’s dirge-heavy White Chalk, but here sadness and regret are tempered by anger, and Parish’s presence as collaborator adds some much-needed musical variety. (“The Soldier” “A Woman a Man Walked By/The Crow Knows Where All the Little Children Go”)

9. Dirty Projectors—Bitte Orca
Something from an arty hipster band that I do like. (“Stillness Is the Move” “Temecula Sunrise”)

10. SunnO)))—Monoliths & Dimensions
Try as I might, I’ve never been able to get into metal—most of it tends to lose me as soon as the singer opens his mouth. SunnO))), a duo comprising guitarists Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson, isn’t exactly a metal band, but the music does employ some of the instrumental and, yes, vocal tics of the genre in the service of what the band has termed “power ambient” music, a label that aptly describes Monoliths & Dimensions. The album’s doom-metal sonics are complemented by unexpected elements like a women’s choir and even a French horn. The vocals on the first track still remind me of the orgy scene from Eyes Wide Shut, but it’s a hypnotic song that holds up to repeated listenings, and the album only gets better from there. (“Big Church” “Alice”)

Top 5 songs not on those albums

I half-assed this list so badly last year that I almost didn’t do one this time, but I’m happier with this one.

1. Girls—“Lust for Life”

2. Bob Dylan—“It’s All Good”

The title kind of says it all.

3. Bat for Lashes—“Daniel”

I’m highly ambivalent about Two Suns, much of which is beautiful and mesmerizing, even as other bits feel fraudulent. This is the type of goth-tinged pop song that a band like Love and Rockets might have been able to get on the radio 25 years ago, but which has sadly disappeared from the mainstream.

4. The Arctic Monkeys—“Cornerstone”

I want to hang out at the Parrot’s Beak. Or the Rusty Hook.

5. Patterson Hood—“The Pride of the Yankees”

Also some mention should be made of Edan’s unclassifiable “Echo Party,” a 29-minute track that reimagines the old school hip-hop party jam as some synthetic type of alpha beta psychedelic funkin’, and of The Feelies’ Crazy Rhythms (1980) and The Good Earth (1986), the most significant rock reissues of the year.

Best Songs of the 2000s (part 2)

2010-01-08T11:02:00.035-05:00

Here's the second half of the Top 100 Songs of the 2000s. There were many great songs, but there was only one real contender for No. 1, since nothing else quite captured the, um, shall we say tone of the past 10 years. I'll try to get the albums list up next week. Until then, enjoy...

50. “Galang”—M.I.A.

49. “Upon This Tidal Wave of Young Blood”—Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

The best song I’ve heard about the early days of the war in Iraq, perfectly capturing the thing that made this war different from all the others, that feeling that it simultaneously was and wasn't happening. It’s also about child stars.

48. “We Major”—Kanye West (feat. Nas and Really Doe)

47. “Sawdust & Diamonds”—Joanna Newsom

A moment of almost unbearable vision.

46. “Black Cadillacs”—Modest Mouse

45. “Maps”—Yeah Yeah Yeahs

This classic classic-rock ballad may be the only song from this band that I care about.

44. “Rain Fall Down”—The Rolling Stones

On 2005’s A Bigger Bang, Mick tried actually singing on a Stones album for the first time in about 25 years, and it turns out the old guy can still do it (“Feels like we’re living in a battleground and everybody’s jaa-ah-ah-ah-uzzzzed”).

43. “Weak Become Heroes”—The Streets

42. “99 Problems”—Jay-Z

This masculinist banger was more or less what the whole rap-metal thing was trying to get at all along.

41. “The Hardest Button to Button”—The White Stripes

Jack White channels his inner Iggy Pop.

40. “Hercules Theme”—Hercules and Love Affair

39. “White Winter Hymnal”—Fleet Foxes

38. “House of Jealous Lovers”—The Rapture

Back when hipster music wasn't such a bad thing.

37. “Amazing”—Kanye West (feat. Young Jeezy)

36. “Ms. Jackson"—Outkast

Andre and Big Boi do some brilliant tag-teaming in the service of a song of remarkable emotional maturity and complexity.

35. “A Certain Romance”—The Arctic Monkeys

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Alex Turner: “And over there there’s broken bones/There’s only music so that there’s new ring tones/And it don’t take no Sherlock Holmes/To see it’s a little different around here/Don’t get me wrong though, there’s boys in bands/And kids who like to scrap with pool cues in their hands/And just ’cause he’s had a couple of cans/He thinks it’s all right to act like a dickhead.” I’m not sure how you learn to write lyrics like that, but sitting around listening to records definitely isn’t it.

34. “Pagan Poetry”—Björk

33. “Turn My Way”—New Order (feat. Billy Corgan)

Bernard Sumner lays it all out, with an assist from Billy Corgan. It’s the best track the latter was ever involved in, and that’s not a slam on the Smashing Pumpkins. Well, not a total slam.

32. “And Then Patterns”—Four Tet

31. “Never Gonna Change”—Drive-by Truckers

Southern gangsta rock at its finest. Still, the question lingers: Were the gun-toting, drug-trafficking truck drivers of Alabama really worthy of such a tribute? Yes. Oh yes.

30. “Umbrella”—Rihanna (feat. Jay-Z)

Supposedly this song was offered to Madonna and Britney Spears, but it needed the voice of an unspoiled newcomer (e.g., the 19-year-old Rihanna) rather than that of a jaded pop star (e.g., the 21-year-old Rihanna).

29. “Hard to Explain”—The Strokes

Rollin’ down the street smokin’ endo.

28. “Heat Breeze Tenderness”—Youssou N’Dour

I’m not sure the English translation of the lyrics in the album notes for Nothing’s in Vain quite does justice to what’s happening here, but I think I get it anyway.

27. “The Righteous Path”—Drive-by Truckers

Patterson Hood envisions the American Everyman, circa 2008. The verse about the narrator’s troubled friend is a remarkable blend of empathy and self-delusion.

26. “I Predict a Riot”—Kaiser Chiefs

It was huge in Britain, dammit.

25. “Another Morning Stoner”—And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead

24. “Don’t Panic”—Coldplay

First song on their first album and the best thing they’ll ever do.

23. “Everything in Its Right Place”—Radiohead

22. “Clint Eastwood”—Gorillaz

21. “Modern Way”—Kaiser Chiefs

A rock anthem for our time.

20. “The Rat”—The Walkmen

Ah, the jaded city (“When I used to go out I’d know everyone I saw/Now I go out alone if I go out at all”).

19. “Superheroes”—Daft Punk

I think it’s “Something’s in the air.” Or “Love is in the air.” Or “Throw guns in the air.” It’s the repetition that matters.

18. “Flashing Lights”—Kanye West (feat. Dwele)

That hint of autumn underneath the ocean breeze.

17. “Moment of Surrender”—U2

U2 reached a number of long-sought aesthetic goals on No Line on the Horizon. This 21st-century hymn, mostly recorded in one amazing take in Morocco, represented one.

16. “Good Fortune”—PJ Harvey

Once in a while when the sun is shining and your head’s just right, the city’s not such a bad place after all.

15. “High Water (For Charley Patton)”—Bob Dylan

One of the songs that defined that surreal period immediately after 9/11, as its feverish lyrics took on resonances that even its august maker could scarcely have anticipated.

14. “Star Guitar”—The Chemical Brothers

A dispatch from some mythical place where the sun never sets and the music never stops.

13. “Jenny Wren”—Paul McCartney

Like an aging hall-of-fame pitcher who might not be able to bring it every time out—but can still reach back and throw a gem on a given night.

12. “Heartbeat”—Annie

Tip of the hat to Pitchfork for drawing my attention to this slice of pop perfection from Norway. Stopping brilliantly short after two choruses, the whole thing is pure elemental bliss, but it’s Annie’s distracted reading of the final verse that launches the track into the stratosphere, the dancefloor encounter of the song’s opening now slipped into memory.

11. “Finer Feelings”—Spoon

Memphis meets Sandinista on the best track from the best album of the decade’s most consistent band.

10. “Pyramid Song”—Radiohead

Possibly the most beautiful piece of music in the Radiohead catalog.

9. “Losing My Edge”—LCD Soundsystem

The particular anxieties of the aging hipster, captured with the keen humor and minute precision of one who knows of what he speaks.

8. “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of”—U2

Inspired by the suicide of INXS frontman and F.O.B. Michael Hutchence, one of the best white gospel tracks of all time.

7. “Jesus Walks”—Kanye West

The way Kathie Lee needed Regis.

6. “The Way We Get By”—Spoon

With a litle help from our friends, of course.

5. “B.O.B.”—Outkast

Just obviously great. I have nothing further to add.

4. “Casimir Pulaski Day”—Sufjan Stevens

Sufjan’s theology of suffering.

3. “Unknown Caller”—U2

Brian Eno’s never seemed more like a full-fledged member of U2 than on this majestic 2009 track, in some respects the pinnacle of a 25-year collaboration.

2. “Unison”—Björk

It wasn’t a great decade for love songs, but Björk was never much for following the crowd. Nestled at the end of her finest album is her greatest track ever, a nearly seven-minute fusion of strings and synthesizers, electronic beats and choral vocals. Somehow all the humanity and all the technology comes together, and it’s a glorious thing to hear. Play it loud.

1. “Paper Planes”—M.I.A.

The whole damn decade in 3:25.

Best Songs of the 2000s (part 1)

2010-01-06T14:46:00.030-05:00

At long last, the first half of my Top 100 Songs of the 2000s list. I’ll get the second half up once I finish writing some more blurbs.

I guess I should use this space to say something pompous about “the decade in music” but I think the past 10 years resist any easy generalizations or categorizations. Music from more sources than ever is now far more accessible than it’s ever been, which is all in all a good thing.

It goes without saying that what follows is a highly personal, idiosyncratic list of the decade’s best songs. It's certainly not a list of the decade's best singles, although I did make an effort to include a handful of songs from the pop mainstream. Favorites are played; age is shown. Lots of worthy songs are absent; many more I haven’t heard. I was going to do a worst-songs list too, but it turned out they were all by the Black Eyed Peas. Anyway, enjoy. And if you don’t like my picks, then make your own list. But whatever you do, don’t come bitching to me.

100. “In Houston”—Tapes ’N Tapes

99. “Daniel”—Bat for Lashes

Unlikely hot influence of the moment: Kate Bush.

98. “Ride Around Shining”—Clipse

97. “Somebody Told Me”—The Killers

A lot more fun than the unbearable “Mr. Brightside.” Less emo, more Journey.

96. “When Under Ether”—PJ Harvey

95. “Formed a Band”—Art Brut

Acidic rock from across the pond (“We’re gonna be the band that writes the song/That makes Israel and Palestine get along”).

94. “Still Tippin’—Mike Jones (feat. Slim Thug and Paul Wall)

93. “Romeo”—Basement Jaxx

92. “Sink Hole”—Drive-by Truckers

In which a resourceful Southerner comes up with an elegant solution to his foreclosure problem.

91. “You Know I’m No Good”—Amy Winehouse

Not “Rehab,” which is neither cute nor funny.

90. “Nothing Ever Happened”—Deerhunter

89. “Never Let Me Down”—Kanye West (feat. Jay-Z and J. Ivy)

88. “Let Me Sleep (Next to the Mirror)”—Idlewild

Scottish rockers deliver a punchy power ballad with a title worthy of Morrissey.

87. “Stress Rap”—Cannibal Ox

86. “Never Miss a Beat”—Kaiser Chiefs

85. “Something in the Way of Things (In Town)”—The Roots (feat. Amiri Baraka)

The sort of fusion of poetry and popular music that almost never works. Exceptions: Patti Smith’s Horses; not much else.

84. “Toxic”—Britney Spears

83. “Starálfur”—Sigur Ros

I could easily have picked the more elemental (and better known) “Svefn-G-Englar” instead.

82. “Hounds of Love”—The Futureheads

See No. 99

81. “Hola’ Hovito”—Jay-Z

80. “Mississippi”—Bob Dylan

“You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way,” the man says. He comes close though.

79. “Karen Revisited”—Sonic Youth

78. “Monosylabik”—DJ Shadow

An exercise in sheer virtuosity. Shadow continues to slice and reslice the same beat, goaded on by the recurring taunt “What you gon’ do now?”

77. “Bowtie”—Outkast

76. “A Paw in My Face”—The Field

Axel Willner chills out to some Lionel Richie.

75. “All Falls Down”—Kanye West

“And the white man get paid off of all of that.” Apparently the phrase “white man” was bleeped out on MTV. Standing up for the master race since 1981.

74. “Return of the Loop Digga”—Quasimoto

73. “Lust for Life”—Girls

72. “Float On”—Modest Mouse

The buoyant theme song of the most depressing political year in memory.

71. “Heartbreak Stroll”—Raveonettes

70. “Someday”—The Strokes

In many ways we’ll miss the good old days.

69. “Schism”—Tool

The cry of the madman—or the last sane person in a world gone mad (“I know the pieces fit”).

68. “Stillness Is the Move”—Dirty Projectors

67. “First of the Gang to Die”—Morrissey

It’s hard not to read this as Moz’s typically perverse tribute to his legions of Latino fans.

66. “Chop Suey!”—System of a Down

65. “Shakey Dog”—Ghostface Killah

Dense, vivid narrative rap.

64. “Accordion”—Madvillain

63. “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)”—The Arcade Fire

62. “Hurt Me Soul”—Lupe Fiasco

Lupe can get a bit preachy for my taste, but this track from his debut is a bull’s-eye. The torrential flow of the climactic final verse is too generalized to qualify as political analysis but perfectly captures how overwhelming it all seems.

61. “$20”—M.I.A.

Showing off a tremendous range of influences, Maya raps about the cost of an AK-47 in Africa against a dense backdrop of chants, synths, and the bass line from “Blue Monday.”

60. “I Feel Like Dying”—Lil Wayne

Clearly the product of some serious drug use.

59. “Better Living Through Chemistry”—Queens of the Stone Age

See No. 60.

58. “Earthquake Weather”—Beck

It wasn’t the best decade for Beck, but this track from 2005’s Guero is sufficient evidence that he’s still relevant.

57. “The Rip”—Portishead

56. “Please Please Please”—Fiona Apple

The cry of the frustrated experimentalist. I feel her pain.

55. “Mr. Bobby”—Manu Chao

Can’t we all just get along?

54. “Idioteque”—Radiohead

The October 2000 release date of Kid A seems alarmingly prescient now. It’s almost as though something unbelievably horrible was about to happen and none of us had any idea.

53. “Long Walk Home”—Bruce Springsteen

If Obama had wanted a candid campaign theme song, he could have done worse than this update of “My Hometown.”

52. “Don’t Tell Me”—Madonna

The best of Madonna’s late-period singles and a concise articulation of a particular worldview. It’s not a worldview I share. Truth be told, it’s not a worldview I particularly respect. But it is delivered with conviction.

51. “Get Ur Freak On”—Missy Elliott

Some consensus choices are tough to argue with.

Best Movies of 2009/Best of 2000s

2009-12-15T13:21:00.011-05:00

Once again, 'tis the season of the annual Indiewire film critics poll. In addition to the usual categories, this year's installment features a "Best of the Decade" list, for which critics were asked to rank the Top 10 films released in the United States from the beginning of 2000 through the end of 2009. My full ballot is here and below are my Top 10s for the year and the decade.

1. Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, US)
Quentin Tarantino’s singular World War II drama reimagines the last good war and various cinematic depictions thereof, its glib surface belying a mature reckoning of violence, terror, vengeance, war, history, and the movies. The least that can be said of Inglourious Basterds is that it justifies what’s already one of the great closing lines in cinema history.

2. The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel, Argentina)
The loss of reality, as experienced by an upper-class Argentinean woman who may or may not have accidentally killed a young boy with her car. Lucrecia Martel’s promising career comes to full fruition with her third feature.

3. The Limits of Control (Jim Jarmusch, US)
Jim Jarmusch’s best film since Dead Man and his most abstract ever.

4. Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas, France)
Surprisingly conventional, but no less rich or satisfying for it, the latest from the great French filmmaker Olivier Assayas counts the human cost of globalization.

5. In the Loop (Armando Iannucci, UK)
Some things are indisputable. One is that the British do satire a lot better than us Americans.

6. Police, Adjective (Corneliu Porumboiu, Romania)
Language keeps me locked and repeating.

7. Brüno (Larry Charles, US)
Less beloved by critics and audiences than Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen’s follow-up succeeded in being a truly offensive film to a large number of people. That’s not easy to accomplish anymore.

8. Up (Pete Docter, US)
While lacking the political heft and philosophical richness of WALL*E, the latest from Pixar is an all-too-rare example of artists at a major studio not only having creative freedom but using it. The five-minute black-and-white montage of the geriatric hero’s life with his wife is a mini-masterpiece.

9. Tokyo Sonata (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan)
A grimly topical story of unemployment and its consequences.

10. Antichrist (Lars von Trier, Denmark)
Chaos reigns. (See "Falling From Grace" at Moving Image Source.)

Second 10 (in alphabetical order): 35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis, France); Afterschool (Antonio Campos, US); Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson, US); The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, US); I’m Gonna Explode (Gerardo Naranjo, Mexico); Night and Day (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea); Public Enemies (Michael Mann, US); Star Trek (J.J. Abrams, US); The Sun (Aleksandr Sokurov, Russia); Two Lovers (James Gray, US)

And the best of the 2000s. The listed years are those of US theatrical release, in several cases different from the year of world premiere.

1. Café Lumière (Hou Hsaio-hsien, Japan/Taiwan, 2005)
2. Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch, US, 2001)
3. Dogville (Lars von Trier, Denmark, 2004)
4. Platform (Jia Zhang-ke, China, 2003)
5. There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, US, 2007)
6. In Praise of Love (Jean-Luc Godard, France, 2002)
7. A History of Violence (David Cronenberg, US, 2005)
8. The Wind Will Carry Us (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran, 2000)
9. Primer (Shane Carruth, US, 2004)
10. demonlover (Olivier Assayas, France, 2003)

It's the Money! (part 2)

2009-12-03T11:22:00.009-05:00

I don't particularly wish to add to the Tiger Woods commentary pileup, but I do want to comment briefly on some of the media reaction, the better to illuminate the ongoing education such incidents give us about the kind of society we're living in. Amid the by now de rigueur TV discussions of whether the media is giving "too much coverage" to the story, some talking heads have seized on Woods's ubiquitous presence as a pitchman for everyone from Nike to Buick as somehow justifying what might otherwise be considered unwarranted intrusions into his personal life. Apparently, endorsement deals, which I had previously conceived as merely a contractual relationship between an endorser and a corporation, also create an implied contract with the public. So the upshot, I guess, is that anyone who's ever seen a Tiger Woods commercial is entitled to some small sense of grievance regarding his recent "transgressions."

Now there's an obviously self-serving element to this, with members of the media, some of whom must surely be aware that 90% (I'm feeling generous today) of what they do has no social value whatsoever, eager to defend their role in fanning the flames of this story. But what's more interesting is the implied notion that the act of endorsing a product is some kind of sacred trust that transcends the right to privacy—and presumably other rights as well.

It's the Money!

2009-10-31T17:07:00.007-04:00

So I haven't updated the blog in quite some time, owing mostly to the fact that I have little to say to the world these days. I have particularly little to say about politics, yet here I go again....Here in New York City, we have an election coming up on Tuesday. I know this because the incumbent mayor, Michael Bloomberg, has been pestering me about it for months. His TV spots are omnipresent, his flyers have been a constant presence in my mailbox, and one of his volunteers even knocked on my door yesterday.

Bloomberg's oppenent is supposedly someone named William Thompson. I'm pretty sure this Thompson fellow actually exists, although the visible evidence for this proposition consists almost entirely of his appearances in Bloomberg ads, which are in turn mostly devoted to decrying the various nefarious ways in which Thompson has been attacking Bloomberg. Even if this last bit is true, most voters would never have known it since Bloomberg has outspent Thompson by an order of something like 15:1 (final figures TBA), apparently setting a record by shelling out more than $85 million of his own money. As for Thompson's campaign...I've seen a grand total of one TV spot, which aired twice during a ballgame the other night. It's like our very own Stalinist election, free-market style.

Obviously, I have no intention of participating in this absurd exercise, whose outcome was predetermined long before most New Yorkers had ever even heard of Thompson. I have nothing in particular against Bloomberg, who seems no worse than average for a politician, and I've made no attempt even to form an opinion of Thompson. But I'll be rooting against Bloomberg all the same, for more or less the same reasons I root against the Yankees and Goldman Sachs: some vague, sentimental notion that there ought to be some things (elections, championships, governments, etc.) that can't simply be bought. Ugh.

The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes

2009-06-21T10:23:00.005-04:00

"Iran Leader's Warning Puts More Pressure on Obama."
—actual lead headline of the New York Times website last Friday afternoon

Obviously, if you're looking for breaking news from Iran, this is not the place to find it. But I do want to call attention to this insightful post from the New Yorker's George Packer, which does a good job capturing some of the more pathological aspects of the coverage of this week's momentous events in the American news media. Given the dearth of Western journalists in Iran and the regime's total media blackout, much of the discussion this week has rightly focused on the role of new new-media technologies like Twitter and YouTube in disseminating information about the ongoing protests.

One would think that the immediacy of the words and images coming out of Iran, not to mention the clear historic import of the events currently transpiring there, would be enough to keep even a news culture as narcissistic as ours focused on the outside world for a few days. But one would be wrong. Leave it to the press to keep the focus on the really important part of the story. Take a look at the New York Times headline at the top of this post and think about what it implies about the priorities of the American news media. The not-so-subtle message here is that the events in Iran represent, first and foremost, a domestic political issue in the United States. Any "pressure" being put on say, Iranian opposition leaders or the protesters being injured or killed, pales next to that on President Obama. American political reporters (at least up until yesterday) have been waiting with bated breath, not for any breaking news out of Iran, but to learn what Barack Obama would say about it. And what his political opponents would say about what he said about it. And what their opponents would say about them.

As a nation, we've apparently lost the ability to process a foreign news event, except through the filter of our own domestic politics. As Packer put it (back on Tuesday, incidentally):

And yet the crisis in Iran has flushed out all the pathologies of American foreign-policy thinking, or feeling, in the post-Bush era. It’s become weirdly difficult for commentators on both the right and the left to have anything close to a normal reaction to what the world is seeing. Instead, everything gets filtered through what you think about Bush, Iraq, Obama, Israel, and other subjects that have extremely tenuous connections to internal politics in Iran and the actions of the people and the state there.

This strikes me as right on. And I would echo Packer's conclusion as well: Trust the evidence of your eyes. The action right now is in Iran, not Washington. And I dare say we should all be on the same side this time.

Standing Up for the White Man

2009-05-31T12:34:00.004-04:00

The big political news of the past week was President Obama’s selection of Sonia Sotomayor, currently a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, as his nominee to replace the retiring David Souter on the Supreme Court. I had planned on doing a post outlining the nominee’s views of the law and discussing some of the issues at stake in the conflict between liberal and conservative readings of the Constitution. I’ll try to do that post at some point before the start of Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings, but for now it’ll unfortunately have to wait.

Sotomayor’s résumé is typical of recent Court appointments. After attending Princeton University and Yale Law School, she worked for a time in the Manhattan district attorney’s office and in private legal practice before being nominated to Manhattan’s U.S. District Court by President George H.W. Bush in 1991 and elevated to the Court of Appeals by President Clinton in 1998. Sotomayor has also worked as an adjunct professor of law at New York University and as a lecturer at Columbia. Her résumé is strikingly similar to that of Samuel Alito, the most recent justice to be confirmed, another Princeton/Yale Law grad who served as an appellate judge and an adjunct law professor in the years prior to joining the Supreme Court. Sotomayor would be the first Latina and only the third woman ever to serve on the Court.

Given these realities, as well as the fact that Sotomayor is nearly certain to be confirmed by the Democrat-controlled Senate, I expected that Republicans would tread lightly on her biography and qualifications and instead try to paint her as some kind of far-out liberal. But I was mostly mistaken. Instead, a number of prominent conservatives have launched a full-scale assault on the nominee on the basis of her race and gender. She’s been labeled a “racist” by both Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh, on the basis of a tendentious reading of a single out-of-context quote from a 2001 speech. Former Colorado congressman and GOP presidential hopeful Tom Tancredo has attacked her membership in the National Council of La Raza, a Latino civil rights organization that Tancredo hysterically (in both senses of the word) labeled “a Latino KKK” (a description that would no doubt come as a surprise to John McCain, who gave the keynote address at the group’s annual meeting in 2004). A blogger on National Review Online has even attacked the pronunciation of her name, calling the stress on the final syllable “unnatural in English” and implying that Sotomayor has been less than properly assimilated into American culture. Others, including Karl Rove on Fox News, have questioned her intellectual ability, despite her Ivy League education.

Perhaps even more disturbing are the quixotic efforts of The Weekly Standard’s Michael Goldfarb, among others, to hunt down examples of “preferential treatment” Sotomayor supposedly received going back to her school days—as if anyone, including the seven white men currently on the Court, achieves such a high professional position in life without someone helping them out along the way. (Apparently, the definition of “preferential treatment” now encompasses behavior that some of us would call racial discrimination. Puerto Rican girls from the projects have so many unfair advantages in our society.) Even the pro-Sotomayor New York Times has now validated this storyline with a piece about how the Sotomayor nomination represents the return of “identity politics” to the forefront of American political discourse.

In fairness, I should also mention that the reaction from Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, as well as that of several non-insane conservatives in the media, has been more temperate, with senators John Cornyn (R-TX) and Orrin Hatch (R-UT) going so far as to denounce the comments of Gingrich and Limbaugh. But nevertheless, with the possible exception of Tancredo, the figures and publications referenced above are all solidly within the mainstream of the Republican Party. They can only be dismissed as “far right” or “fringe” elements if one is willing to acknowledge that such voices now make up a significant proportion of the party, a point I’d certainly be willing to stipulate.

It’s worth noting here that in the Supreme Court, we’re talking about an institution that’s historically been so hostile to white men that a mere 106 of the 110 justices in its history have fallen in that demographic, including seven of the current nine. Given this history and the presence of several more-or-less equally qualified candidates for the Court, it seems entirely reasonable to me that Obama might have seen Sotomayor’s race and modest socioeconomic background as assets to her candidacy. I recognize that some will disagree with this notion, and that’s fine. What’s not fine are the obvious double standards at work here: Why are Sotomayor’s intellectual and professional credentials being picked apart, while Alito’s very similar résumé was accepted at face value? Why is Obama’s selection of Sotomayor seen as some sort of “affirmative action” pick designed to appease a specific political constituency, while Ronald Reagan’s choice of Antonin Scalia, another highly qualified jurist who happened to be the first Italian American justice in Court history, was not? Why are Sotomayor's references to her ethnic background considered evidence of "reverse racism," while Alito's similar comments on the influence of his own Italian-immigrant ancestors on his judicial philosophy were not?

The only logical conclusion to be drawn is that, in the eyes of many of Sotomayor’s critics, her race and gender are, ipso facto, proof that she must be an unqualified hack whose nomination was solely the product of “identity politics.” This is racist nonsense and needs to be called out for what it is. Most liberals in politics and the media are so easily cowed by conservative whining about “political correctness” that they’ve become unwilling to speak out against blatant instances of racial bias. I guess racism—at least racism against nonwhites—is just another partisan political issue now. I can’t remember the last time a national conservative political figure spoke out against an instance of racism, whereas even the slightest hint of “political correctness” is enough to set off howls of outrage across the conservative blogosphere. As Matthew Yglesias has repeatedly noted over the past few months, most prominent conservatives in this country behave as if they genuinely believe that antiracist rhetoric is a bigger social problem than actual racism.

Just to be clear: I’m not referring here to any of the legitimate questions that have been raised about Sotomayor’s judicial philosophy and views on specific issues, including affirmative action. Such topics can and should be discussed at her confirmation hearings. Both of George W. Bush’s successful nominees, Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts, were challenged on legal and constitutional issues by Senate Democrats and both ultimately received many no votes. But I don’t remember any ad hominem attacks on either man that even approached the vitriol directed against Sotomayor over the past week.

Clearly, the country is changing—a mere look at the faces of Sotomayor and Michelle Obama gracing the past two covers of Time magazine is enough to confirm that. But make no mistake about it: even in "post-racial" America, a significant segment of the political and media elite remains heavily invested in protecting the prerogatives of white male privilege. Normally, these prerogatives are effectively masked by supposed concerns with other issues, like “qualifications” or who the “best person” for the job is, but once in a while the mask slips. We’re witnessing one of those moments right now.

Gentlemen, Mark Your Opponents...

2009-05-02T18:25:00.007-04:00

The obvious point to make about Senator Arlen Specter's switch from the Republicans to the Democrats is that this is almost entirely a self-inflicted wound on the part of the GOP. Organizations like the Club for Growth, whose president, Pat Toomey, would almost certainly have defeated Specter in a Republican primary next year (and would likely have been squashed in a general election in increasingly liberal Pennsylvania) have explicitly made it their business to punish GOP moderates who stray from low-taxes, small-government Republican orthodoxy, a stance that has, among other things, made the party almost completely noncompetitive in the Northeast. I hope they're happy.

The Republicans are in a classic political death spiral: as the party gets smaller, it grows more extreme, thus making it less attractive to moderates, and the cycle continues. More startling than Specter's decision was the reaction of GOP hardliners like Michael Steele and Jim DeMint (to say nothing of Michelle Malkin and Rush Limbaugh), who basically told Specter, "Don't let the door hit you on the way out," even though his defection gives the Democrats a filibuster-proof 60-seat majority in the Senate (that is, once Minnesota's recently defeated Norm Coleman runs out of money/runs out of legal options/develops a sense of shame. I'm guessing he runs out of legal options first). Indeed, if the Republican Party gets any more principled, there may not be anyone left in it outside of Dick Cheney's hunting circle.

Still, as entertaining as this has been, it is not a good thing, even for those of us who support President Obama's agenda. Not only is there the danger of overreaching, à la F.D.R. in 1937, that Frank Rich discusses in his New York Times column today, but at a more fundamental level, we need a strong Republican Party capable of representing conservative political principles at their best, rather than at their degraded worst, or at least one that knows how to pick its battles a little more effectively. Think of the fight over the Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which seems to have been the last straw in driving Specter from the party. GOP governors like Bobby Jindal and Mark Sanford had a kernel of a legitimate argument about the issue of unfunded mandates in general. But choosing unemployment insurance—in the middle of a deep recession, no less—as the issue to pick this fight over is strange, to say the least.

Personally, I'm of the view that we shouldn't be worrying too much about budget deficits while GDP is shrinking at five-percent-plus; a public-spending freeze seems like just about the worst possible move under the current macroeconomic conditions. But it would be nice if someone could make the opposite argument without lapsing into no-one-should-ever-have-to-pay-taxes fiscal fantasyland. The Republicans have utterly lost their credibility on economic issues with most Americans, yet many of the party's leaders seem to genuinely believe that its biggest problem is that it's not conservative enough. They seemed to have learned little or nothing from the electoral debacles of 2006 and 2008. It may well require a Goldwater/McGovern-style wipeout in a presidential election before they begin to see the light. It may require more than one.

I've got plenty of thoughts on the retirement of David Souter from the SCOTUS and related issues, but I'll hold off until Obama nominates his replacement, which may be a few weeks yet.

Dept. of Self-Promotion

2009-04-09T11:10:00.003-04:00

Because it's come to my attention that I need improvement in this area. Here's a piece I wrote for Moving Image Source on The Passion of the Christ and The Last Temptation of Christ. Enjoy.

Found Horizons

2009-03-10T15:12:00.018-04:00

In the interest of being less of a deadbeat blogger, I’ve been wanting to transition to shorter, more frequent posts (the first being the necessary condition of the second) here on Pop Tones. Today’s post will not mark the beginning of that trend. It’s hard for me to believe I’ve never written at length on U2, a band whose music I’ve had a long, complicated relationship with over the past two decades, and I’m hesitant to do so now, as anything I write here is bound to be less than definitive.

But onward. In many ways, the arc of U2’s career has been defined by the long process of the band’s musical ability catching up to its artistic ambitions. U2 came to prominence during the 1980s and everything they’ve done since has inevitably been judged according to the dubious aesthetics of that decade, for many of the same reasons that a lot of people persist in thinking of Bob Dylan as some kind of protest singer on the basis of a handful of songs he wrote when he was 21 or something. Rock and roll, and pop culture in general, has always fixated on the young and the new (everyone knows this). Still, there’s something to be said for the value of mature-period works as such; the same auteurist impulse that can trace the development of formal ideas and sensibility, as well as a honing of craftsmanship, through the career of a film director can obviously be applied to musicians as well. In any event, as the new U2 album No Line on the Horizon attests, notwithstanding the claims of either ’80s nostalgics or classic-rock fascists who never owned the group to begin with, they weren’t half the band then that they are now.

U2’s 12th album happily finds producers Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois back on board, along with Steve Lillywhite. No disrespect to Lillywhite, a fine producer who’s made a number of great records with the band over the years, but the presence of Lanois and especially Eno should be mandatory on every U2 album; they’re as essential to the band’s sound as George Martin was to the Beatles’. It’s no coincidence that the five U2 albums produced by the duo—The Unforgettable Fire (1984), The Joshua Tree (1987), Achtung Baby (1991), Zooropa (1993), and All That You Can’t Leave Behind (2000)—are the band’s five best.

Make it six. While the Lillywhite-produced How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (2004) had several first-rate songs, the album wound up being somewhat less than the sum of its parts. More specifically, it was lacking in the spiritual overtones that have helped define all of U2’s best work—whether through their presence or pointed absence. But with the exception of the poignant “Miracle Drug”—and despite the inclusion of a song called “Yahweh”—the album never quite registered on that level.

The best thing about Atomic Bomb was the band’s newfound comfort with its own grandiosity, a sense of ease that also pervades the new album. Following the electro-grooving title track, which unlike epic U2 openers like “Where the Streets Have No Name” and “Beautiful Day” is content to merely put the ball in play, we arrive at the dance-club hymn “Magnificent,” the first of three consecutive knockout songs that define the spiritual and emotional contours of the album. “I was born to sing for you/I didn’t have a choice but to lift you up,” Bono sings, injecting biblical language (“It was a joyful noise”) into an already elevated love song before taking us to church in the chorus (“You and I will magnify/The Magnificent”), which soars to the heavens in classic U2 style, climaxing the first time around with an ecstatic “MAG-NIF-i-cent!” from Bono. It’s a beautifully constructed song, the chorus withheld until after the second bridge, and the Eno-Lanois production encompasses sounds from seemingly every phase of U2’s career—digitally delayed guitars, techno blips and bleeps, programming merging imperceptibly with Larry Mullen’s drums—all fused into a seamless whole. And then it occurs to me that Bono’s been trying to write this song for almost 30 years, at least since 1981’s October, and it’s only now he’s gotten to a place where he could pull it off. As a more secular frequent Eno collaborator once put it, it takes a lot of time to push away the nonsense.

Next comes “Moment of Surrender,” a seven-minute techno-gospel epic about finding the road to Damascus at the ATM that once again finds Bono shutting out the world in a flash of divine revelation (“I did not notice the passers-by/And they did not notice me”). Beginning with a gospel bark and hitting the chorus in a falsetto, the singer shows his range here. Like most of the best songs on No Line on the Horizon, “Moment of Surrender“ develops patiently, in no hurry to get where it’s going, the rhythm tracks gurgling forward as if the band were suspended underwater.

On Atomic Bomb, Bono did some backsliding on his pledge to keep his political activism separate from U2’s music and the album’s lyrics were afflicted with a touch of tepid positivism as a result. On Horizon, the personal largely trumps the political. “I don’t want to talk about wars between nations/Not right now,” Bono growls on the punchy “Get on Your Boots,” although he’s changed his mind by the album-closing “Cedars of Lebanon,” a meditative first-person exploration of the psyche of a jaded foreign correspondent in the Middle East. But even this doesn’t quite qualify as a political song—the journalist’s reflections on his craft make him sound a lot like a songwriter (“The worst of us are a long drawn-out confession/The best of us are geniuses of compression”), and the overall vibe is reminiscent of the ghostly “Ain’t Talkin,” which closed out Dylan’s most recent studio album, Modern Times.

Musically restless, No Line on the Horizon covers a lot of ground. Less immediate than the band’s past two albums, Horizon is closer in overall effect to transitional works like The Unforgettable Fire than to big-statement albums like The Joshua Tree. The Lillywhite-produced “Breathe” finds Bono free-associating à la Patti Smith, scrambling to be heard (“Let me in the sound! Let me in the sound!” he insists at a couple other points on Horizon) over an atypically monstrous riff from Edge, while the atmospheric “FEZ—Being Born” is the only song to explicitly reference the band’s brief stint in Morocco. (Although rumor has it that No Line on the Horizon has a twin, a more meditative, experimental, possibly Sufi-influenced album to surface late this year or early in 2010. Stay tuned.)

But the alert reader has no doubt already noticed that I never got around to the last of those three knockout songs. A mere week after No Line on the Horizon’s official release date, I’m ready to declare “Unknown Caller” one of the half-dozen or so best U2 tracks of all time. Eno makes his presence felt here, as on “Moment of Surrender,” with musical ideas that go all the way back to his 1975 classic Another Green World. His synthesizer arrangement and the song’s rhythmic, robotic vocals blend harmoniously with a classic Edge guitar line to create a song that’s both classically U2 and unlike anything else in the band’s catalog, the thrill of which is exponentially enhanced by the knowledge that this particular combination of sounds, ideas, and musical forms was literally decades in the making. Bono’s lyrics again sketch a portrait of a man in existential crisis (“I had driven to the scene of the accident/And I sat there waiting for me”), before giving way to the majestic chorus: “Restart and reboot yourself/You’re free to go,” chant what sound like the digitally distorted voices of Edge, Eno, and Lanois, their short, clipped phrasings crashing into the song like text messages from God (“Hear me/ Cease to speak that I may speak”) in an inspired fusion of sound and sense. The masterful production climaxes with an unlikely French horn and an unlikelier Edge guitar solo. “Unknown Caller” plays like a gloriously expansive response to Radiohead’s paean to techno-alienation “Fitter Happier,” a joyous dispatch from someone who’s been there and done that and somehow come out the other side.

The Show Must Go On

2009-02-22T10:03:00.016-05:00

Writing about last year’s Oscars in this space, I dared to suggest that the Academy’s sensibilities were finally getting a bit more contemporary. Not only was there no traditional Oscar bait among the nominees but the inclusion of the Paul Thomas Anderson masterpiece There Will Be Blood in the Best Picture race felt like a real breakthrough. I even liked the song that won. Well, either I spoke too soon or 2008 was just a bad year for the voters, because this time around the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has conjured up their worst Best Picture lineup since at least 2004 and possibly even the dreaded 2000, still the worst year in the history of the Oscars, if not of Hollywood.

So I'm feeling a bit less enthusiastic than usual this year, owing to a lackluster group of nominees—not to mention the fact that the world appears to be coming to an end. Indeed, under the dire circumstances, tonight’s stone-cold, lead-pipe lock for the big prize could hardly feel less appropriate: Slumdog Millionaire, a British movie set in India, puts a glossy, contemporary-looking spin on an old-fashioned, bordering on cornball, story. It’s safe, bland, feelgood fluff—nothing special but certainly not the worst imaginable Oscar winner. Indeed, I’d take Slumdog in a heartbeat over three of its four rivals. Quickly: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is an overlong, pointless bore; Frost/Nixon is fatuous nonsense; and The Reader…well, let’s just say that even had the movie not been a moral abomination, it still would have sucked.

Granted, 2008 was a somewhat below-average year for American movies, but in a year with viable contenders like WALL*E, Gran Torino, The Wrestler, and even The Dark Knight, this lineup is pretty inexcusable. At least Slumdog looks and sounds like it was made this century, making it a less retrogressive potential Best Picture winner than Benjamin Button or—perish the thought—The Reader. Hopefully this is one of those two steps forward, one step back things, but I guess time will tell. Most of the heat tonight is in the Best Actor category, a virtual tossup between Sean Penn in the title role of Gus Van Sant’s Milk—the only Best Picture nominee I really like, although it wasn’t even the best film by its own director in 2008—and Mickey Rourke, of all people, as an aging wrestler.

But the two Hollywood movies that defined the year are nowhere to be found on the Academy’s shortlist: WALL*E and its evil twin, The Dark Knight. I wasn’t a huge fan of Christopher Nolan’s brooding and incoherent Batman movie. The editing is a mess; I defy anyone to explain what’s actually happening during the action scenes, which mostly boil down to a meaningless mishmash of cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. And there’s the fact that the ending utterly contradicts the view of human nature that’s informed the movie’s first two-plus hours. But still, The Dark Knight may go down in history as the last film of the Bush era, and it’s elevated somewhat by Heath Ledger’s deranged take on the Joker. I’m not particularly thrilled about the whole posthumous Oscar idea, which promises to be a major buzzkill, but at least the performance deserves it. Hopefully the producers will get Supporting Actor out of the way early.

WALL*E, on the other hand, deserves to be taking home the Best Picture statue tonight. Released in the dog days of a seemingly never-ending presidential campaign, Pixar’s robot tale felt like a fresh breeze from the future, an advance payment on hope and change and all that intangible stuff that’s necessary but not sufficient to fix our country’s problems. WALL*E scans as a sophisticated response to one of my all-time favorite films, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey; just as Kubrick’s film ends with a vision of the human race transcending its physical and spiritual limitations in a blinding flash of starlight, WALL*E brings it all back down to Earth, closing with humble, human-scaled images of rebuilding and renewal. It was the perfect film for a year of daring to start over and dream it all up again. Now we just need Obama to fix the banking system.

Best Picture

I don’t see any chance of an upset here. Titanic was the last winner that felt this locked-in.

Will win: Slumdog Millionaire
Should win: Milk

Director

David Fincher gets a long overdue nomination, albeit for one of his lesser films, and I’m glad to see Gus Van Sant in the field. I was a big fan of Danny Boyle’s 1996 breakthrough Trainspotting, and he’s gone on to an interesting, if somewhat uneven, career.

W: Danny Boyle, Slumdog
S: Gus Van Sant, Milk

Actor

This is probably the major category that the Academy most frequently gets right, and this year stands to be no exception, with the two best male performances of the year going toe-to-toe. Penn utterly disappears into Harvey Milk, playing the role without a hint of self-consciousness, but Rourke’s performance is truly a once-in-a-lifetime collision of actor and character that’s just riveting. It’s a tight race that may come down to whether voters think it’s too soon to give a second Oscar to the 48-year-old Penn, who won five years ago in this category for Mystic River. Considering that Tom Hanks won two in a row before he was even 40, I say no. And between the Brokeback Mountain embarrassment a few years back still and last fall's Prop 8 debacle, Milk has to win something big, and this is its best shot.

W: Sean Penn, Milk
S: Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler

Actress

This should go to Kate Winslet, who’s on her sixth nomination and still looking for a win, even though she should have been nominated for Revolutionary Road instead (not a great movie, but likely to be mistaken for Citizen Kane by comparison with The Reader). Meryl Streep could win for a role as a change-resistant nun in Doubt, but I found her a tad hammy, and I suspect the Academy will wait for another year to give her a third Oscar. I didn’t love any of these performances; aside from WALL*E failing to land a Best Picture nod, the biggest disappointment of the nominations this year was the exclusion of Sally Hawkins for her buoyant performance in Mike Leigh's fine Happy-Go-Lucky. I guess I’ll take Melissa Leo’s naturalistic turn as a hard-bitten mom in the otherwise forgettable Frozen River over Anne Hathaway’s neurotic poor little rich girl in Jonathan Demme’s excruciating Rachel Getting Married.

W: Kate Winslet, The Reader
S: Melissa Leo, Frozen River

Supporting Actor

It's unfortunate this has turned into the Heath Ledger Memorial Award because this is a terrific batch of nominees, top to bottom. Most people think this is a lock for Ledger and it probably is, but I can’t help but think that many of those notoriously status-conscious Academy members would consider it such a waste of an Oscar...

W: Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight
S: Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight

Supporting Actress

Penélope Cruz is the nominal frontrunner for her scenery-chewing performance in Woody Allen’s dreadful Vicky Cristina Barcelona, but I’m feeling an upset here.

W: Viola Davis, Doubt
S: Amy Adams, Doubt

Screenplay, Original
W: Milk
S: WALL*E

Screenplay, Adapted
W: Slumdog
S: Doubt

Animated Feature
W: WALL*E
S: WALL*E

Documentary Feature
W: Man on Wire
S: Man on Wire

Foreign Language Film
W: Waltz With Bashir
S: The Class

Cinematography
W: Slumdog
S: The Dark Knight

Art Direction
W: Benjamin Button
S: Revolutionary Road

Editing
W: Slumdog
S: Milk

Visual Effects
W: Benjamin Button
S: Iron Man

Costume Design
W: The Duchess
S: Milk

Makeup
W: Benjamin Button
S: The Dark Knight

Sound Mixing
W: The Dark Knight
S: WALL*E

Sound Editing
W: WALL*E
S: WALL*E

Original Score
W: Slumdog
S: Slumdog

Original Song
W: “Down to Earth,” WALL*E
S: “Down to Earth,” WALL*E

Animated Short
W: La Maison en Petits Cubes

Live Action Short
W: Toyland

Documentary Short
W: The Conscience of Nhem En

Best Music of 2008

2009-02-16T15:05:00.024-05:00

At long last, my list of the Top 10 albums of 2008. After weeks of scrounging through blogs, MySpace, and other year-end lists in a desperate attempt to fill out the last couple slots, I’m now confident in saying this was a subpar year. For whatever reasons, it seems that the odd-numbered years have been better than the even ones lately. Hopefully form will hold in 2009. Still, while there was no Kala or Late Registration last year, we did get five albums that I’ll probably still be listening to in 2013. Indeed, the first five on the list could have been in almost any order, and for the first time in several years, the No. 1 spot was in play right down to the wire. But in the end, pure sound narrowly trumped high concept.

1. Portishead—Third
When I heard that Portishead was releasing its first album of new material in more than a decade, I was skeptical, even faintly annoyed. Generally when bands stay away for longer than five years, they’re best advised to pack it in entirely (you will find very few exceptions to this rule in the rock era). But Third is no throwback to the trip-hop days of the mid-’90s, but rather a thorough reinvention, combining the band’s moody lounge pop and fractured beats with a bold psychedelic-rock bent, evoking the likes of Syd Barrett (“Small”) and the Silver Apples (“We Carry On”). And singer Beth Gibbons outdoes her mid-'90s self: her haunting, haunted vocals wade tentatively through “Deep Water” and quaver majestically on “Magic Doors” without ever striking a false emotional chord. The result is the band’s best album to date and this year's improbable No. 1.
(“The Rip” “Machine Gun”)

2. Kanye West—808s and Heartbreak
Given Kanye’s prolific rate of production over the past five years, it’s hardly surprising that the obligatory Difficult Third Album arrives one release late. This dark, death-haunted opus provoked some truly idiotic reviews—with a few honorable exceptions, the critical establishment really missed the boat. Musically, 808s moves away from hip-hop to further explore the synth-pop influences that surfaced on Graduation (to the point of including a Tears for Fears cover). Rap yields to Auto-Tuned singing in what amounts to an album-length version of John Lennon’s “My Mummy’s Dead.” A few songs here work better conceptually than musically, but the six-track stretch beginning with the melodically nimble “Heartless” and ending with the gently despairing “Street Lights” was the best 25 minutes of music I heard all year.
(“Amazing” “Love Lockdown”)

3. The Bug—London Zoo
The best album yet to emerge from England’s dubstep scene is not the work of some unknown young producer, but the latest from veteran English writer-musician Kevin Martin, who’s recorded with various collaborators under various monikers including Experimental Audio Research, Ice, Techno Animal, and, um, God. Employing a wide range of vocal talent, from the suitably combative Warrior Queen to the deep-voiced Ricky Ranking, London Zoo is further proof—as if more were needed—that the musical and aesthetic legacy of dub remains far from exhausted.
(“Poison Dart” “Too Much Pain”)

4. Drive-By Truckers—Brighter Than Creation’s Dark
Following the 2006 misfire A Blessing and a Curse, Patterson Hood & Co. return to form and then some (see "The Righteous Path," posted August 9). Never formal innovators, these Alabaman disciples of Lynyrd Skynyrd are only as good as their songwriting, and by my count this album’s got only one dud out of 19 songs. Not too shabby.
(“The Righteous Path” “Bob”)

5. Fleet Foxes—Fleet Foxes
A new band featuring young white guys with guitars that I don’t hate. That in itself is a rare-enough thing these days, but the Fleet Foxes did far better, combining strands of American musical history ranging from Brian Wilson to Appalachian folk songs, and in the process proving there’s still a place for musical virtuosity in the mostly moribund world of indie rock.
(“White Winter Hymnal” “Blue Ridge Mountains”)

6. Lil Wayne—Tha Carter III/The Leak EP
I was half expecting this album to be a disappointment, given its oft-postponed release date and the accompanying mountains of hype, but Wayne largely delivers on his latest major-label outing, scoring with conventional hip-hop tracks like “Got Money” (featuring T-Pain) and proving he can go deep and soulful when he chooses, as on the Katrina-inspired “Tie My Hands” (with Robin Thicke). Personally, I prefer the looser Weezy of his mixtape work, but the all-star roster of producers and guest vocalists on Tha Carter III does at least guarantee some musical variety even as it also guarantees a somewhat disjointed listen. Of the two songs I dislike, one was a No. 1 hit single. I am perversely proud of this. And don’t forget about The Leak EP, where the sonics finally take a backseat to Wayne’s zingers: “I graduated from hungry and made it to greedy,” he boasts on “Gossip,” still keeping it real.
(“A Milli” “Tie My Hands”)

7. Kaiser Chiefs—Off With Their Heads
With producer Mark Ronson on hand to give the Kaisers’ music a shapeliness and sonic unity missing from previous efforts, the third album from these Britpoppers is easily their best. The songwriting is sharper as well, particularly on the single “Never Miss a Beat.” There should definitely be more anti-youth-culture anthems.
(“Never Miss a Beat” “Can’t Say What I Mean”)

8. Deerhunter—Microcastle/Weird Era Cont.
The music of my youth, reprocessed and spat back at me.
(“Nothing Ever Happened” “Dot Gain”)

9. DJ/Rupture—Uproot
With Josh Davis apparently having succumbed entirely to his hip-hop roots and the Avalanches on a decade-long hiatus, there have been far fewer first-rate sample-based albums this decade than I would’ve predicted 10 years ago. This mix album from Jace Clayton (aka DJ/Rupture) touches on an unusual variety of styles and moods, even for its genre. Supposedly his 2004 Special Gunpowder is even better. I intend to find out.
(“Plays John Cassavetes Pt. 2” “Hungry Ghost (Instrumental)”)

10. Erykah Badu—New Amerykah: Part One (4th World War)
I’ll just come right out and say that this doesn’t make the list in an average year, but the always game Badu takes some chances here, with a few standout songs, including two produced by the incomparable Madlib, mingling with the album’s solid but conventional R&B tracks, of which there are many.
(“Soldier” “The Healer/Hip Hop”)

Top 5 songs not on those albums

1. Gang Gang Dance—“House Jam”

2. Hercules and Love Affair—“Hercules Theme”
Dig it.

3. Lindstrøm—“Where You Go I Go Too”
Twenty-nine blissful minutes of Norwegian techno from the man responsible for the year's best album cover.

4. Four Tet—“Swimmer”

5. Hercules and Love Affair—“Blind”
Finally, an Antony Hegarty vocal on a song I actually like.

Best Movies of 2008

2008-12-22T14:43:00.027-05:00

Another year has passed, and it's once again time for Indiewire's annual film critics' poll. Final results are still being tabulated, but as of this writing, 78 ballots had been posted. My favorite film of the year, Hou Hsiao-hsien's The Flight of the Red Balloon, appears to be headed for a somewhat improbable win, with Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale currently running second. My full ballot is here and my annotated Top 10 is below.

1. The Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-hsien, France)
Lyrical and poignant, the Taiwanese master's first film set outside of Asia further plumbs the aesthetic and existential depths explored in his masterful Café Lumière. The film unfolds in large chunks of real time, with Hou's camera gazing patiently at a world of perpetual flux and evanescence.

2. WALL-E (Andrew Stanton, U.S.)
For many Americans of a certain political persuasion, 2008 was, above all else, the year of Barack Obama and the promise of political change. Arriving during the depths of the summer, WALL-E rode that wave, most explicitly in its closing-credits sequence, in which a benign intelligence helps the human race to rebuild the world from scratch. Like Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, the many references to which feel wholly earned, WALL-E ends on a profoundly affirmative note of transcendence and renewal.

3. Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant, U.S.)
Van Sant's Harvey Milk biopic was fine and may well score him a long-overdue Oscar nomination, but this multiply-distanced reverie involving an unexplained death and an introverted Portland skater kid, is the far more interesting of his two films this year. Like Lucrecia Martel's similarly ethereal The Headless Woman (a sure thing for next year's best list if it finds a distributor), Paranoid Park probes the loss of reality and the effects thereof on our moral percpetions.

4. Still Life (Jia Zhang-ke, China)
Located in some twilight zone where documentary meets science fiction, Jia's visually astounding meditation on the physical and spiritual displacement caused by China's rapid economic development triumphs through the sheer force of its images, courtesy of the great cinematographer Yu Lik-wai.

5. Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, U.S.)
As the weather and the economic news both got chillier, this contempoary update of Umberto D began to feel as much a movie of the zeitgeist as WALL-E. Michelle Williams shines as a flawed but sympathetic everywoman on the verge of falling off the socioeconomic map. See "NYFF #2," posted September 27.

6. A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin, France)
Desplechin's maximalist family melodrama really highlights the aesthetic shortcomings of something like Rachel Getting Married, proving that it is indeed possible to make a movie about endlessly combative relatives that's not excruciating to sit through.

7. Mary (Abel Ferrara, U.S.)
The least heralded film on my list, Ferrara's response to Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ continues the Bad Lieutenant director's career-long explorations of the physical reality of New York City and the spiritual aridity of contemporary life.

8. Tropic Thunder (Ben Stiller, U.S.)
Ben Stiller's work as a director has generally either been damned with faint praise (Zoolander) or outright reviled (The Cable Guy). Most reviews of Tropic Thunder tended toward the former but, like its predecessors, this take-no-prisoners satire of war movies, Hollywood insularity, actorly vanity, and human hubris will gain in critical stature in the coming years.

9. Woman on the Beach (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)
Hong's body of work certainly hews closely to Jean Renoir's notion that a filmmaker's career consists essentially of remaking the same film over and over. This dryly comic tale of the romantic misadventures of a filmmaker with writer's block may be his film's best iteration.

10. Che (Steven Soderbergh, U.S.)
See "NYFF #3," posted October 5.

Second 10 (in alphabetical order): Ballast (Lance Hammer, U.S.); The Duchess of Langeais (Jacques Rivette, France); Gran Torino (Clint Eastwood, U.S.); Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh, U.K.); In the City of Sylvia (José Luis Guerin, Spain); Iron Man (Jon Favreau, U.S.); Milk (Van Sant, U.S.); My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, Canada); Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (John Gianvito, U.S.); The Wrestler (Darren Aronofsky, U.S.)

Post-Election Thoughts

2008-11-05T15:40:00.002-05:00

So it's finally over. I'm less elated than relieved. But a little bit elated too. Since I've been trying to give up the dark art of punditry, a fundamentally useless activity that takes up too much of the time of too many smart people, I'll confine myself to a few empirical observations.

1. Barack Obama won this election decisively. As of this writing, with around 97% of the votes counted, he has received over 52% of the popular vote, the second-highest portion for a new president in the past 40 years, and the highest percentage of any Democratic candidate since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. If his 12,000 vote lead in North Carolina holds, he'll wind up with 364 electoral college votes, a two-to-one supermajority.

2. The G.O.P. suffered a total wipeout in the northeastern third of the country, with McCain losing the entire New England and mid-Atlantic regions, as well as a continuous stream of states extending as far south as North Carolina and as far west as Minnesota and Iowa. Normally close states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin went to Obama by double digits. Even Indiana went for the Democrats, for the first time since 1964. With the defeat of Connecticut's Christopher Shays, the Republicans now hold no House seats anywhere in New England (they still have both Senate seats in Maine), and only 3 out of 29 seats in New York state.

3. The polls were right. Obama won the election by about six percentage points in the popular vote, solidly within the range predicted by most pre-election polls. The only battleground states where results deviated significantly from pre-election polling averages were Nevada and Indiana, where Obama did about five points better than expected, winning a larger-than-predicted majority in Nevada and pulling an upset in the Hoosier state.

NYFF #3: Che

2008-10-05T11:39:00.007-04:00

Possibly the most anticipated film of this year's New York Film Festival, Steven Soderbergh's Che gets its sole screening on Tuesday night. The film premiered at Cannes to a fair amount of controversy, largely centered on the film's alleged "omissions" of some of the less flattering episodes of Ernesto Guevara's life. Owing to an odd critical predilection for writing about what's on the screen rather than what isn't, as well as the belief that an artist is entitled to his/her own choice of subject, I'll leave such matters to others.

As for the entirely legitimate question of whether Che glamorizes Guevara, my answer would be a qualified no. Soderbergh's whole approach is based on a studied objectivity. Clocking in at 262 minutes, divided exactly in half by an intermission, Che may be the most plot-driven biopic ever made. The pace of this relentlessly forward-driving film (which certainly doesn't feel like four-and-a-half hours) remains brisk throughout, with a lot of short scenes and almost no time spent ruminating over character psychology. The film makes no explicit effort to valorize or condemn anything onscreen, but merely presents its version of what happened, mostly with as little expressionist fanfare as possible. (The film's first half, devoted to the years preceding the Cuban Revolution of 1959, jived with my scant knowledge of the period, although I'll have to plead ignorance on the second half, set in the wilds of Bolivia in the final year of Guevara's life.)

In its unaccented neutrality, Che is a fitting tribute to a Marxist revolutionary: collective struggle easily trumps individual heroism throughout. This conceptual coherence lifts the movie far above something like Walter Salles's 2004 film The Motorcycle Diaries, which Jessica Winter aptly described as "a well-meaning but ostentatious display of solidarity with a vaguely defined ideal, not entirely unlike making the scene in your Che Guevara tank top."

Che avoids most of the obvious semiotic pitfalls, but only at the expense of refusing to define Guevara entirely, other than as the personification of collective struggle. The rich color palette and exquisitely unobtrusive framings make Che an attractive film to look at, but its superficial beauty eventually makes for an alienating experience. (This is perhaps the whole point.) The first half is sprinkled with black-and-white scenes from a 1964 trip to New York, mostly covering Guevara's appearance representing Cuba at the United Nations and an interview by a female journalist. But this too seems deliberately off-putting, more an excuse for Soderbergh to whip up some '60s-style cinema vérité than to provide any meaningful political or psychological insight into his subject. In a sense, the movie's not really a biopic at all; Che basically remains an icon, albeit one put back into historical context. It is a supremely withholding film. Nearly a week after seeing it, I can't decide if it was empty or brilliant.

NYFF #2: Wendy and Lucy

2008-09-27T12:23:00.005-04:00

One of the highlights of this year's main program is Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy, the follow-up to her justly acclaimed 2006 indie Old Joy. Michelle Williams plays Wendy, a twentysomething drifter passing through rural Oregon on her way to seek work in Alaska. Her sole companion is her dog Lucy, but the two become separated after Wendy is pointlessly arrested following a pathetic attempt to shoplift a few pieces of food. Most of the film's remainder is devoted to Wendy's efforts to find her dog.

If this scenario sounds unbearably sentimental, it doesn't play that way onscreen, thanks both to Reichardt's laid-back, assured direction and Williams's singular performance; beaten down by the world and constantly on the defensive, her Wendy is simultaneously aloof and sympathetic. Reichardt once again demonstrates a good eye for the landscapes of small-town America, but the setting is hardly romanticized. In some ways, Wendy and Lucy is less overtly political than Old Joy—there's no equivalent here to the earlier film's brilliant use of liberal talk radio as purveyor of both consolation and deeper alienation—but the many references to homelessness and unemployment are impossible to miss.

New York Film Festival: The Class

2008-09-26T09:20:00.004-04:00

We may or may not have our first presidential debate tonight, and we may or may not still have a functional banking system, but one thing that appears certain is that the 46th New York Film Festival will begin tonight at Lincoln Center. I'll be blogging about some of the selections over the coming days and weeks.

This year's NYFF opens with tonight's screening of French director Laurent Cantet's The Class, winner of the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes festival. Set at a high school in Paris's 20th arrondissement, The Class is built around the interactions between François, a teacher played by François Bégaudeau, who also wrote the film's script as well as the book on which it's based, drawing from his own real-life teaching experience. The bulk of the movie consists of a series of tightly framed, briskly edited classroom scenes that capture the rhythm of the relentless back-and-forth between François and his students. The initial takes of these classroom scenes were shot with three cameras running concurrently, one on François and two on his students, and Cantet frequently built scenes around material improvised by his cast of nonprofessionals during these first takes.

It's an effective method, with the semi-improv'd acting largely keeping it real, even as the film isn't above the occasional plot contrivance to move the story along. The Class has a lot to say about the nature of rules, specifically about how excessive reliance on rigid principles and policies can escalate situations to the ultimate detriment of all concerned. And it has what may be the best summary of Plato's Republic I've ever heard.

I'll have another post later today or early tomorrow about a few of the other films showing this weekend.

Manny Farber (1917-2008)

2008-08-19T12:05:00.004-04:00

There's an interview piece toward the back of Manny Farber's book Negative Space in which the great film critic opines on the essential uselessness of opinions. Evaluation, he says, is "practically worthless for a critic. The last thing I want to know is whether you like it or not: the problems of writing are after that." It's a trenchant position, but one that I've tried to take to heart in my own writing over the years. And surely the essential truth in these words has never been more relevant than now, with the omnipresence of opionionated bloviators of all stripes on all subjects clogging up our headspace.

Farber, who died Monday at the age of 91, never really considered himself a film critic—he was adamant that painting was his primary vocation—but nevertheless wound up being one of the most influential writers about film in the history of the medium. This wasn't primarily a function of his inimitable prose style, his keen attention to visual detial, or his discerning taste in cinema, but of a certain attitude, one best encapsulated in his famous concept of "termite art." Termite art, as defined by Farber, "feels its way through walls of particularization, with no sign that the artist has any object in mind other than eating away the immediate boundaries of his art, and turning these boundaries into the conditions of the next achievement." This insistence on organically developing one's own aesthetic was both the subject and substance of Farber's criticism, both its content and its form. Farber will be remembered, and rightly so, as an early champion of American action directors—the essential Negative Space contains a pair of key 1969 pieces on Sam Fuller and Don Siegel—but his own termite-like approach was just as effective when zeroing in on the nuances of the more celebrated European art films, whether he liked a given film or not.

Never as widely read as writers like Andrew Sarris or Pauline Kael, Farber remains a somewhat rarefied taste. There's a quote attributed to Brian Eno about the Velvet Underground, something about how no one bought their first album but that everyone who did formed a band of their own. That sort of describes Farber's legendary status as the ultimate critic's critic.

I would try to characterize Farber's writing style, but I know when I'm beat. Instead I'll leave you with one of my favorite bits, the final paragraph of a 1968 essay on Jean-Luc Godard, an art film director who Farber did like (I think). This is also found in Negative Space, which you really must buy today if you don't own it already:

Godard's legacy to film history already includes a school of estranged clown fish, intellectual ineffectuals, a vivid communication of mucking about, a good eye for damp villas in the suburbs, an ability to turn any actress into a doll, part of the decor, some great still shots that have an irascible energy, an endless supply of lists. I think that I shall never see scenes with more sleep-provoking powers, or hear so many big words that tell me nothing, or be an audience to film-writing which gets to the heart of an obvious idea and hangs in there, or be so edified by the sound and sight of decent, noble words spoken with utter piety. In short, no other film-maker has so consistently made me feel like a stupid ass.

The Righteous Path

2008-08-09T22:16:00.005-04:00

One of the innumerable pernicious side effects of the red state/blue state wars of the Bush years has been that it’s once again become okay to bash the South. TV news personalities have smugly railed against the continuing presence of Confederate flags in the region, Democratic political strategists have written books suggesting the party should completely ignore the South, and, in an ironic mirroring of Republican race-baiting, the general idea has taken hold among a lot of otherwise liberal-minded types that this country would be just fine if not for those people holding us back.

I don’t mean to say that none of this is rooted in reality, but of course it’s not the whole reality. Enter Patterson Hood and his band, the Drive-By Truckers, who’ve spent the past decade or so exploring what Hood has termed “the duality of the Southern thing.” Born and raised in the northwest Alabama town of Florence, the son of famed session bassist David Hood began writing songs in grade school. He formed the Truckers in 1996 with Mike Cooley, a friend from his college days a decade earlier. After a couple middling albums, the band scored a major indie rock hit with the double-disc Southern Rock Opera (2001), a loose concept album about Lynyrd Skynyrd. This kicked off a run of fine records including Decoration Day (2003), the gangsta rock opus The Dirty South (2004), and (passing quietly over the 2006 dud A Blessing and a Curse) this year’s Brighter Than Creation’s Dark, the band’s widest-ranging album to date and possibly its best. Of all American rock bands, only Spoon has put together four albums as good this decade.

What’s remarkable about Hood’s songwriting is not that his music and lyrics present a multifaceted, morally complex view of the South; this is precisely what one would expect from an artist of his caliber and background. What’s remarkable is that he does so without a trace of rancor or defensiveness. The closest thing to a mission statement in the Truckers’ catalog is a Southern Rock Opera track called “The Three Great Alabama Icons.” The icons in question are former governor George Wallace, legendary University of Alabama football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant, and Skynyrd frontman Ronnie Van Zandt (who as Hood dutifully notes “wasn’t from Alabama, he was from Florida”), but Bryant and Van Zandt largely take a backseat in a song that develops into an insightful and nuanced meditation on the legacy of Wallace. Forsaking his usual melodic rasp, Hood skillfully intertwines history with his own biography. Noting that “race was only an issue on TV in my house,” he remembers the shock he felt upon leaving the South for the first time and realizing that Wallace (portrayed in the song not as a hardcore racist but as a cynical politician who exploited prejudice for votes) and the venom he spewed were considered typical of the region and its people by most non-Southerners.

The sophistication of Hood and his bandmates about the Southern thing allows the Truckers not only to preserve the best of the region’s history and attitude but to shine a light on its seamier side as well. With the exception of two songs about the war in Iraq—the PTSD-glossing “The Man I Shot” and “The Home Front,” a heartbreaker inspired by Hood’s encounter with the family of a Truckers fan killed in Iraq mere days before he was scheduled to return home—Brighter Than Creation’s Dark features little overtly political material. And with the exception of a pair of outright country songs from Cooley, including a minor stroke of genius about a small-town guy named “Bob,” there’s little here that strays outside the bounds of Southern rock, as defined on the band’s previous albums. As usual, it’s the acuity and empathy of the band’s songwriters—including Cooley and bassist Shonna Tucker, but especially Hood—that carries the day.

Brighter Than Creation’s Dark encompasses the usual assortment of good citizens and shady characters—as well as some who may be a little of both—all portrayed with some sympathy. Whether an alcoholic dad or an itinerant musician, a war widow or a drug dealer, the characters here are all ordinary people stranded in an indecipherable world. We all make our choices in life and Hood’s not here to pass judgment—he’s the type of songwriter who, even while decrying a friend’s descent into crystal meth addiction, feels the need to throw in “I ain’t exactly a no-drug guy.” Hood’s far more interested in the way his characters view themselves. “I don’t know God but I fear his wrath/I’m trying to keep focused on the righteous path,” says one of his southern Everymen in “The Righteous Path," and it’s a sentiment one can imagine coming from nearly any of the album’s characters, including the addicts and criminals. In this version of the American South, everyone’s just trying to get by, and if some are doing so a little differently than others, then well, there’s “no time for self-pity or that other crap.”

It’s a worldview about as far from the programmatic idiocy of partisan politics as one can imagine. Neither of the Iraq songs makes any mention of the politics surrounding the war. Hood surely has his opinions and so do you and I, but it’s all been said over and over again by now and he’s smart enough to know that no one needs another lecture, least of all from a guitar player.

Toward a Unified Field Theory of Bullshit

2008-07-31T18:04:00.004-04:00

Preview of Coming Attractions: I’m working on a post about the band the Drive-By Truckers, which I’ll hopefully have up in the next day or two.

But whenever I sit down to finish it, I wind up getting sucked in to the daily coverage of the presidential race again (this is why I couldn’t blog for four months). I continue to be transfixed not only by the abject stupidity of at least 90 percent of what passes for political discourse in our news media but also by how this stupidity is taken for granted by nearly everyone, including both the producers and the consumers of this junk. I don’t understand how a lot of media people manage to go about their jobs with a straight face, how they avoid becoming overwhelmed with the absurdity of the whole dog and pony show. Anyone who takes this meta-universe of constant chatter too seriously is clearly someone not to be trusted.

Nevertheless, it remains essential, if only out of some abstract duty to history, to single out some of the more obnoxious trends, dumbest ideas, and most ridiculous teapot tempests to come out of this year’s presidential race. But the theorist in me yearns for more, for some greater explanation. So consider this an initial stab toward a set of general propositions—call them first principles of my analysis of the presidential race. Any argument that runs counter to these must be regarded with extreme suspicion:

1. Laziness trumps all. As in most forms of human endeavor, problems in media coverage are far more often the result of laziness than malice. There’s a lot of hand-wringing about so-called liberal or conservative “bias” in the media. And while there are certainly individuals, and even entire news operations, that are indeed slanted this way or that, most of what people think of as media bias is the result of simple human laziness. Given the reality of perpetual deadlines, it’s much easier for reporters to let the campaigns dictate what the “news” will be on a given day than to research and report their own original stories. Hence, we get the daily rounds of dueling press releases from the two campaigns seeking to set the day’s agenda. This is also one of the factors driving the endless repetition of certain stories, including the infantile obsession with showing the same bits of video over and over and over again; sometimes such stories help (or more often, hurt) one candidate and sometimes the other, but the process by which they develop is fundamentally a capricious one.

2. The horserace factor. It is important to remember at all times that the MSM has a significant material investment in making sure that the race is perceived as close all the way to the end. This ironclad reality has led directly to the single dumbest metanarrative of the campaign right now: the idea that Barack Obama isn’t winning by enough. I can’t even count the number of articles I’ve seen over the past week reporting on some new poll showing an Obama lead as being good news for McCain. We’re not gambling on football here. There’s no point-spread. (Except during the primaries, when there kind of was a point-spread on some of the contests, but those days are happily over with).

3. Nature abhors a vacuum. Most coverage of the presidential race is driven not by external events, but by the need for constant content. Like #2, this is fairly obvious, but bears frequent repeating. Hence the large number of pieces to be found on sites like Politico and Real Clear Politics that don’t introduce any new facts or even any new opinions. Most articles labeled as “analysis” or “commentary” exist only for the sake of maintaining circulation, Web traffic, etc. For mostly market-based reasons, such content for content’s sake tends to gravitate toward bogus media-driven stories.

People frequently complain—and usually justifiably—about how the MSM seldom covers serious policy issues during presidential campaigns, but it should be obvious that such policy coverage is completely antithetical to the way the media functions. Detailed coverage of, say, the differences between the candidates’ tax proposals or their contrasting views on energy policy would clearly violate all three of the principles outlined above. Policy coverage requires time, money, and effort for research (as well as reporters with some detailed issue-specific knowledge, a rare species at many MSM outlets), has the potential to upset the horserace coverage by highlighting concrerte weaknesses in the candidates, which may or may not balance each other out, and runs completely counter to the 24-hour news cycle and its constant demand for new content. My next post will have nothing to do with the presidential race. I promise.

No Weak Sister

2008-07-12T12:25:00.000-04:00

Well, it’s been a big week for the Politics of Parsing. Perhaps this shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it seems that the type of non-news news stories that dominate the daily coverage of the presidential race take on particular prominence during stretches when nothing substantial is happening. In other words, the less is actually going on in the race, the louder the media chatter becomes. This became clear during the six-week death march between the Mississippi and Pennsylvania primaries, dominated by crazy-pastor news and the like, and we’re currently in the middle of another slow stretch, with running-mate announcements likely still over a month away. Just in the past week, we’ve seen minor flare-ups over such pressing national issues as whether the Obama children should have been allowed to appear in a TV interview, what McCain’s apparently newfound affinity for the Pittsburgh Steelers might say about his character, and (slightly more substantial) some truly asinine comments by McCain senior economic adviser Phil Gramm.

But there was one interesting incident, involving the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who in a careless hot-mic moment, expressed his desire to do some intimate bodily harm to Barack Obama, apparently over his allegedly “talking down” to the black community (Jackson would know, I suppose) in an otherwise noncontroversial Father’s Day speech exhorting black men to be more involved in the lives of their children. The media, rightly I think, portrayed the incident as a political boon for Obama (you just can't buy this kind of publicity), with some even comparing it to Bill Clinton’s hallowed “Sister Souljah moment,” much beloved by the MSM. For those who don’t remember this transcendent act of statesmanlike courage, the phrase refers to an incident in the spring of 1992 when Clinton used a Jackson-hosted conference as an occasion to browbeat the rapper and political activist Sister Souljah over some comments she’d made about the Rodney King riots (and which Clinton had shamelessly ripped out of context). Jackson was furious, but the incident was widely seen as giving Clinton some street cred with white voters nervous about rioting black city-dwellers.

Obama has shown himself to be a far less cynical politician that Clinton, and his Father’s Day speech was largely on point, but Jackson probably wasn’t wrong in thinking that its intended audience included white people, some of whom may have taken an unseemly delight at the sight of a black politician talking tough to people of his own race. Which brings me to a central truth about Barack Obama: He is, in fact, a politician, and a shrewd and skillful one at that. (One doesn’t become the first black president of the Harvard Law Review without being a shrewd and skillful politician.) To paraphrase Bill Parcells: this is a good thing, not a bad thing. Hence, the genius of Obama’s feints toward the center in recent weeks and the misguided nature of the overheated liberal response (although, of course, the elicitation of such a response was part of the point). With the exception of his disappointing cave-in on the FISA legislation, Obama has been able to broaden his appeal without conceding any substantive ground, an exceedingly difficult feat for a Democrat. In the 40 years since the departure of Lyndon Johnson, one of the truly great operators in American political history, Democratic presidential nominees have too often come off as cynical (Clinton) or weak (Dukakis, Kerry), if not both at once (Gore).

Like all politicians, Obama will disappoint even his admirers from time to time; the FISA vote was one such time and, if he’s elected president, there will doubtless be others. But he is a different kind of Democratic politician and not just because he’d never stoop to using a young activist as a punching bag. We’ll also never see him getting his picture taken in a tank, hiring a consultant to teach him how to be a man, or sitting by idly for a month while a bunch of hired thugs assassinate his character.

Here’s the first electoral-map update. I can’t believe I’m even writing this, but North Dakota, a state that’s only gone Democratic in three presidential elections and none since 1964, appears to be in play, with a new poll showing a dead heat. Everything else stays put for now.

STRONG OBAMA (200): California (55), Connecticut (7), Delaware (3), District of Columbia (3), Hawaii (4), Illinois (21), Maine (4), Maryland (10), Massachusetts (12), Minnesota (10), New Jersey (15), New York (31), Oregon (7), Rhode Island (4), Vermont (3), Washington (11)

WEAK OBAMA (55): Iowa (7), Michigan (17), Pennsylvania (21), Wisconsin (10)

TOSS-UPS/TRUE SWING STATES (62): Colorado (9), Missouri (11), New Hampshire (4), New Mexico (5), Ohio (20), Virginia (13)

WEAK MCCAIN (67): Alaska (3), Florida (27), Indiana (11), Montana (3), Nevada (5), North Carolina (15), North Dakota (3)

STRONG MCCAIN (154): Alabama (9), Arizona (10), Arkansas (6), Georgia (15), Idaho (4), Kansas (6), Kentucky (8), Louisiana (9), Mississippi (6), Nebraska (5), Oklahoma (7), South Carolina (8), South Dakota (3), Tennessee (11), Texas (34), Utah (5), West Virginia (5), Wyoming (3)

Clauses and Effects

2008-06-28T16:34:00.000-04:00

Regarding this week’s Supreme Court ruling in the case of District of Columbia v. Heller: conservatives are too happy and liberals are too upset. While the Court did apparently resolve a fundamental legal question, one that had languished for over a century, by interpreting the U.S. Constitution’s oddly punctuated Second Amendment as protecting the right of individuals to own a gun for non-military purposes, the decision is likely to have very little practical effect. Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion did not endorse the extremist view that virtually any gun-control legislation represents an infringement of the right to bear arms; indeed, he explicitly stated that the Court’s opinion allowed for “laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms” and other gun-related legislation. Only highly restrictive gun laws, such as the one at issue from Washington, D.C., that effectively banned possession of handguns altogether for most people, would run afoul of the Court’s decision. There will certainly be lawsuits in a few cities such as Chicago, but the vast majority of existing gun legislation is safe. Indeed, it’s not even clear whether the Heller decision applies to state and local governments; the Court was able to sidestep this issue because the District of Columbia is under federal jurisdiction.

The fact is, very few jurisdictions, most of them large cities where liberals far outnumber hunters, could even pass a law as restrictive as the D.C. ban, which brings me to a larger legal point about the Heller decision. Notwithstanding Justice Scalia’s endless (and highly selective) historical analysis, which I won’t pretend to have read nearly all of, this decision was not a triumph of originalism, the doctrine espoused by some conservative legal scholars that essentially boils down to the absurd notion that we should continue to be governed by the antiquated standards of 1787 (or 1791). Rather, Scalia’s opinion was an example of living constitutionalism in action, based on the type of reasoning that conservatives have disparaged on other occasions as “judicial activism.” While it may ultimately be impossible to ascertain how the founding fathers may have intended the relationship between the Second Amendment’s prefatory and operative clauses, there can be little doubt that the individual right to bear arms has long been enshrined in practice in this country. The law simply hadn’t caught up yet.

Liberals also stand to gain from this decision in terms of electoral politics. The Supreme Court’s affirmation of the individual right to bear arms should have the effect of taking the gun issue, a perennial loser for Democrats, off the table. It’s now going to be very difficult to make the argument that an Obama administration would be in the business of confiscating people’s guns, a claim the Republicans were able to make very effectively against Al Gore in 2000, despite its lack of any basis in reality. Obama’s own reaction to the decision, a cautious endorsement tempered by an acknowledgment of the need for big cities to have all the necessary tools at their disposal to fight gun violence, will no doubt be characterized as equivocation in some quarters, but seemed appropriately nuanced.

Against Interpretation

2008-06-19T14:58:00.000-04:00

Hello again. I've been neglecting the blog over the past several months; most of my blogging time has gone into obsessing over the presidential election, which I've been unable to write about due to the stomach-churning dread that seized me whenever I began to seriously contemplate the prospect of another Clinton administration. John McCain, particularly in his recent, base-pandering incarnation, would make a far worse president than either of the Clintons in any number of important respects, but I must confess he doesn't quite have the same visceral effect on me. Or it may just be that I don't think he's going to win.

There will be much more time to discuss the race over the next four-and-a-half months, and I'll certainly do so here. But today I'd just like to highlight one aspect of the primary season that will continue to be of relevance going forward. One of the major themes of this campaign has been the tension between Obama's conception of a "new politics" that aims to lower the temperature of partisan discourse in Washington and a news media establishment that's heavily invested in creating conflict for its own sake to provide fuel for the narratives that drive the day-to-day news cycle. Among the deadliest weapons at their disposal for this task is that of interpretation. Ten years after we asked ourselves what the definition of is is, we are now smack in the middle of the Era of Parsing, in which no word, expression, or gesture is too small to provoke the all-important question: What does it mean?

I could easily cite dozens of examples of the politics of interpretation from the recent Democratic primary campaign just by recounting the daily rounds of overheated press releases and conference calls by which the campaigns of all candidates feed the beast. But the purest examples are the stories that seem to gain their own momentum, usually lasting from a few days to a few weeks. Among the greatest hits: Obama's alleged "snub" of Clinton at the State of the Union address, the recent flap over Clinton's RFK comments, and the slightly less recent flap over Obama's "bitter" comments, which approached self-parody when one blogger declared that the problematic word in Obama's statement (made off-camera at a private gathering, let us not forget) was not "bitter" but "cling" (apparently "surprising," "people," and "to" were considered unobjectionable).

I'll continue to expand on this analysis over the next several months, but I'm not above some horse-race coverage as well. I'm a bit suspicious of the predictive power of polls this early in the race; I don't think they have a lot of meaning before Labor Day or so. (Bear in mind that a poll taken five months before the start of the primary season would have indicated that Clinton and Rudy Giuliani would be the nominees.) Nevertheless, a pair of frequently updated electoral-college maps based on polling data can be found here and here. The lists below represent my current take on each state based partly on polling data, demographic trends, and historical patterns but also on my own subjective sense of how the race is going, the same sense that told me Obama was going to lose the New Hampshire primary, no matter what the polls and pundits were saying.

STRONG MCCAIN (157): Alabama (9), Arizona (10), Arkansas (6), Georgia (15), Idaho (4), Kansas (6), Kentucky (8), Louisiana (9), Mississippi (6), Nebraska (5), North Dakota (3), Oklahoma (7), South Carolina (8), South Dakota (3), Tennessee (11), Texas (34), Utah (5), West Virginia (5), Wyoming (3)

WEAK MCCAIN (64): Alaska (3), Florida (27), Indiana (11), Montana (3), Nevada (5), North Carolina (15)

TOSS-UPS/TRUE SWING STATES (62): Colorado (9), Missouri (11), New Hampshire (4), New Mexico (5), Ohio (20), Virginia (13)

WEAK OBAMA (55): Iowa (7), Michigan (17), Pennsylvania (21), Wisconsin (10)

STRONG OBAMA (200): California (55), Connecticut (7), Delaware (3), District of Columbia (3), Hawaii (4), Illinois (21), Maine (4), Maryland (10), Massachusetts (12), Minnesota (10), New Jersey (15), New York (31), Oregon (7), Rhode Island (4), Vermont (3), Washington (11)

"Strong" states are those that I don't currently see becoming competitive, whereas in "weak" states, I can easily imagine the other candidate pulling an upset. This is merely a baseline for the race; states can and will move among the categories as conditions warrant. The alert reader will note that I've already moved Iowa, a state where President Bush beat John Kerry in 2004, into the Obama column. It's also worth noting that Bush won all six of my true swing states at least once, and most of them twice.

R.I.P. Tim Russert, a journalist who always knew the next question and seldom failed to ask it. He will be missed.

There Will Be [Fill In Your Own Joke]

2008-02-24T14:02:00.000-05:00

One-year wonder or sign of things to come? Either way, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences delivered an unusually defensible group of nominees for the 80th Oscars. Not only is there nothing in this year’s Best Picture field that I hate (rare enough in recent years), but for the first time in nearly a decade, my favorite movie of the year made it onto the Academy’s shortlist. Indeed, Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, a bold, strange, and deeply impolite film about a misanthropic oilman in early-20th-century California, tied for the most nominations with tonight’s heavy favorite, Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men. And had Jonny Greenwood’s dissonant score, one of the best in modern cinema history, not been disqualified on a technicality, There Will Be Blood would almost certainly have led the field with nine nominations.

I hesitate to even say this, but it looks like the Academy’s tastes are finally getting a bit younger and hipper. None of the five films nominated for Best Picture this year feel like a typical Oscar winner. At first glance, Atonement might seem to fit the profile: epic World War II romance based on a well-known novel, but beneath all the lavishness lurks a resolutely contemporary sensibility. It’s hardly a great movie, but Atonement deserves props for being literate, not just “literary.” Likewise, the teen comedy Juno and the legal thriller Michael Clayton are far from spectacular, but both have their merits. Juno suffers from severely overwritten dialogue and a directorial style shamelessly pilfered from Wes Anderson, but it’s also a refreshingly female-centric take on its genre. And there’s nothing really wrong with the modest, solidly crafted Michael Clayton aside from its overall ordinariness.

And this isn’t just a one-year phenomenon: You have to go back five years now to find a “typical” Best Picture. The last four winners have been a fantasy epic, an intimate auteurist drama, a hysterical ensemble piece (yes, Crash was terrible, but it was terrible in new and interesting ways), and a stylish cops-and-criminals flick.

The big narrative coming out of tonight will be Hollywood bestowing its top prize on a pair of indie stalwarts, but it’s fair to say that the Coens met Hollywood halfway. No Country for Old Men is well acted and impeccably made, but it mostly lacks the oddball humor of the pair’s best work (Fargo, The Big Lebowski). It’s a good movie, I guess, but it was all a bit nihilist-chic for my taste; the somber tone, verging on self-importance, didn’t feel wholly earned.

Still, it would have to be considered an above-average Best Picture winner. And the nomination of There Will Be Blood really does represent a massive leap forward for the Academy. Nakedly ambitious, morally complex, and lacking either a sympathetic hero or any romantic interest, it’s precisely the type of prickly art film that the Academy has dismissed out of hand in the past. At 37, Anderson is the best director currently working in American cinema, and as long as his movie takes home at least one or two prizes tonight, there won’t be any complaints from me.

Best Picture

Going into the season, I thought No Country For Old Men would feel too much like a critics’ film for the Academy to embrace, but the inclusion of There Will Be Blood makes it appear positively mainstream. I don’t see an upset happening here. Atonement failed to land a Best Director nomination, Juno and Michael Clayton are too small, and There Will Be Blood is just too weird.

Will win: No Country for Old Men
Should win: There Will Be Blood

Director

This isn’t quite the slam-dunk that Best Picture is, but the Coens remain heavy favorites. With the brothers a virtual lock for the top prize, it’s conceivable that the Academy could honor Anderson for either director or screenplay, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

W: Joel and Ethan Coen, NCFOM
S: Paul Thomas Anderson, TWWB

Actor

It’s no secret that merit has never had a whole a lot to do with winning Oscars, but once in a while a performance comes along that’s so incredibly good, it can’t be denied. Day Lewis’s Daniel Plainview is well on his way to joining the likes of Charles Foster Kane and Ethan Edwards among the iconic characters of American cinema. Clooney and Depp could both win one of these in the next five years, but not tonight.

W: Daniel Day Lewis, TWBB
S: Daniel Day Lewis, TWBB

Actress

Julie Christie’s quietly tragic performance as a woman losing her mind to Alzheimer’s stands to be the deserving winner. Her main competition is Marion Cotillard in the Edith Piaf biopic La Vie En Rose, which remains unseen by me.

W: Julie Christie, Away From Her
S: Julie Christie, Away From Her

Supporting Actress

The toughest call of the night. Any of the five nominees could easily win.

W: Ruby Dee, American Gangster
S: Saoirse Ronan, Atonement

Supporting Actor

The easiest call of the night. Will Americans ever tire of serial killers?

W: Javier Bardem, NCFOM
S: Casey Affleck, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Screenplay, Original
W: Juno
S: Ratatouille

Screenplay, Adapted
W: NCFOM
S: TWBB

Animated Feature
W: Ratatouille
S: Ratatouille

Documentary Feature
W: No End in Sight

Foreign Language Film
W: The Counterfeiters

Cinematography
W: TWBB
S: TWBB

Art Direction
W: TWBB
S: TWBB

Editing
W: The Bourne Ultimatum
S: TWBB

Visual Effects
W: Transformers
S: Transformers

Costume Design
W: Atonement
S: Atonement

Makeup
W: La Vie En Rose

Sound Mixing
W: Transformers
S: NCFOM

Sound Editing
W: Transformers
S: TWBB

Original Score
W: Atonement
S: [reserved for Jonny Greenwood]

Original Song
W: “Falling Slowly,” Once
S: “Falling Slowly,” Once

Animated Short
W: Peter and the Wolf

Live Action Short
W: Freeheld

Documentary Short
W: Le Mozart des Pickpockets

Best Music of 2007

2008-01-24T20:05:00.001-05:00

It took me a few extra weeks to absorb some late-year releases, but here are my top 10 albums of 2007. This year's list runs a lot closer to the critical consensus than usual. I am not sure how to feel about this.

Top 10 albums

1. M.I.A.—Kala
Her plans to record with Timbaland derailed by visa troubles, M.I.A. traveled around the world and conjured up a stateless, genreless masterpiece (see “Combat Rock,” posted September 20). Kala effortlessly blends a cornucopia of musical styles and references, and M.I.A.’s lyrics feint at sloganeering while also embracing the world in all its contradictions. The most politically complex, artistically ambitious, and musically adventurous album of the year lands at number one by a wide margin.
(“Paper Planes” “Birdflu”)

2. Spoon—Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
The most consistent American band of the decade follows up a trio of excellent albums with this, their best to date. Synthesizing an unusually broad array of musical tendencies for a group usually consigned to the dreaded “indie rock” ghetto, Spoon touches on blues, dub, new wave, and Memphis soul as frontman Britt Daniel sings about love, war, and even commercial appeal.
(“Finer Feelings” “You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb”)

3. Radiohead—In Rainbows
So much attention was justifiably paid to Radiohead’s groundbreaking distribution model (see “Karma Police,” posted October 16) that it took me 10 or 12 spins to realize how good the record actually is. Like Spoon, Radiohead has made the loosest album of its career. It’s also the least-brooding effort in the band’s catalog, suggesting that Radiohead, most of whose members will be 40 by the end of the year, should settle into middle age nicely. (“Reckoner” “Bodysnatchers”)

4. Bruce Springsteen—Magic
After meandering through the ’90s, Bruce Springsteen has made a series of solid albums over the past several years, so it’s no slight to say that Magic is the Boss’s best in 20 years, an album that effortlessly achieves the political relevance that the post-9/11 The Rising audibly strained for. Never one to preach, Springsteen keeps the politics mostly low-key. Bruce on the 2004 election debacle: “Woke up Election Day/Skies gunpowder and shades of gray.” Bruce on the war: “To him that threw you away/You ain’t nothing but gone.” Bruce on torture: “Your flag flyin’ over the courthouse/Means certain things are etched in stone/Who we are, what we’ll do, and what we won’t.” But the album hits its peak with the remarkable “Girls in Their Summer Clothes,” on which the 57-year-old Springsteen splits the difference between early Brian Wilson and late Philip Roth.
(“Girls in Their Summer Clothes” “Long Walk Home”)

5. Kanye West—Graduation
Kanye’s third-best album is his weakest as a rapper but Graduation is Kanye the producer’s most musically unified work to date. West may soon be the only artist left who can still afford to clear samples and he takes advantage here with snippets of Elton John, Steely Dan, Can, and of course Daft Punk. The Eurodisco-inflected tracks are good enough to make you wish he’d really gone balls-out with the concept. There’s nothing as sharp and savvy as “All Falls Down” on this outing, but “Homecoming,” which features the Devon, England-born Chris Martin reminiscing about “fireworks on Lake Michigan,” is an ingenious take on dislocation and loss of identity, and the album-closing “Big Brother” is a surprisingly candid reflection on Kanye’s relationship with mentor Jay-Z.
(“Flashing Lights” “Homecoming”)

6. Lil Wayne—Da Drought 3
It’s surely significant that two albums on my list were essentially given away for free over the internet. But while Radiohead’s gambit attracted a lot of fanfare, the underground hip-hop mixtape scene has been thriving for years with relatively little attention from the mainstream (i.e. white) music press. That may finally change thanks to the insanely prolific (and perpetually stoned) New Orleans rapper Lil Wayne, who released two mixtapes this year to wide critical acclaim and has a new official album coming out next month. This two-disc set, available for free download at http://www.datpiff.com/, goes a long way to back up Lil Wayne’s oft-repeated claim to the title of Best Rapper Alive. Lightning-quick musical references collide with semi-obscure sports metaphors and Wayne twists other rappers’ beats to his own diabolical ends, even daring to take on Jay-Z himself.
(“Ride 4 My Niggas” “I Can’t Feel My Face”)

7. Arcade Fire—The Neon Bible
I’m not quite as enthusiastic about this album as I was upon its release back in March (see “The Neon Bible,” posted April 27), but it remains a solid effort, whose reach only slightly exceeds its grasp. I saw the group perform on Randalls Island in October. The rumors are true: they’re markedly better live than on record. It was a great show, but there was something a bit disconcerting about the sight of a crowd full of politically alienated, debt-ridden, middle-class 20- and 30-somethings chanting along with lyrics like “I guess we’ll just have to adjust.”
(“Keep the Car Running” “Ocean of Noise”)

8. The Field—From Here We Go Sublime
This is what used to be called “techno.” The beats here are pretty straightforward for my funk-damaged tastes, but this debut from Swedish producer Axel Willner nonetheless makes for a chilled-out and exceedingly pleasant listen. From Here We Go Sublime is unusually melodic and accessible for its genre, with its best song built around a sample from hipster icon Lionel Richie.
(“A Paw in My Face” “From Here We Go Sublime”)

9. Modest Mouse—We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank
Isaac Brock & Co. aren’t breaking any new ground here, but the first half contains some of the band’s very best work, not to mention the most bitter good song about the Bush administration that I’ve heard. (“Parting of the Sensory” "Dashboard")

10. PJ Harvey—White Chalk
This was a tough nut to crack, but clocking in at a scant 33 minutes, she can afford to be difficult. (“When Under Ether” “Broken Harp”)

Top 5 songs not on those albums

1. Rihanna-“Umbrella” (feat. Jay-Z)
Just when you thought they didn’t write lyrics like that anymore (“Ella ella eh eh eh”).

2. LCD Soundsystem—“All My Friends”
I didn’t like the album as much as I wanted to, let alone as much as a lot of critics did—too many tracks gave it up far too easily. But this poignant dance-rock epic about the beginnings of getting old is an impressive formal achievement: a seven-minute-plus New Orderish pop song built around a synth pattern worthy of Steve Reich.

3. Paul McCartney—“Ever Present Past”
When I’m sixty-five.

4. Lil Wayne—“I Feel Like Dying”
From Carter 3 Sessions, Weezy’s other big mixtape this year.

5. Amy Winehouse—“Tears Dry on Their Own”
I’m still a little suspicious of the whole retro-soul thing, but this gorgeous song, evoking early-’60s Smokey Robinson, is a fine showcase for Winehouse’s tremendous vocal talents.

Best Movies of 2007

2007-12-20T23:48:00.002-05:00

Results are in for the second annual Indiewire Critics Poll. The good people at Indiewire polled more than 100 North American film critics, including myself, and our collective choice for the best film of 2007 was the yet-unrleased Paul Thomas Anderson oil epic There Will Be Blood, which hits theaters in selected cities next week and should go nationwide in January.

Below is my own Top 10 list for 2007. I missed a few interesting-sounding films this year, including the Palme d'Or winning 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, out of Romania, and Colossal Youth, by the Portuguese director Pedro Costa, which finished #5 and #8 respectively in the Indiewire poll. I'll have more comments about the year in movies in my Academy Awards preview in February.

1. There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, U.S.)
2. Black Book (Paul Verhoeven, Netherlands)
3. Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand)
4. Offside (Jafar Panahi, Iran)
5. Zodiac (David Fincher, U.S.)
6. Southland Tales (Richard Kelly, U.S.)
7. Lady Chatterley (Pascale Ferran, France)
8. Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, U.K.)
9. Death Proof (Quentin Tarantino, U.S.)
10. Bamako (Abderrahmane Sissako, Mali)

The Vote in Venezuela

2007-12-03T13:48:00.001-05:00

Yesterday in Venezuela, supporters of President Hugo Chávez failed to muster a popular majority for an ambitious package of referenda that would have, among other things, changed the country’s constitution to eliminate presidential term limits, allowing Chávez, whose current term expires in 2012, to continue running for re-election indefinitely. Far from concealing his ambitions to be president for life, Chávez used them as a central selling point for his initiatives, which went down yesterday by a vote of 51 to 49 percent.

For Chávez, who, owing to a new constitution that he pushed through early in his presidency and a recall vote orchestrated by his political opponents in 2003, has been elected president by a resounding margin four separate times, yesterday’s vote represents a rare electoral defeat. But once the initial sting fades away, Chávez may realize that, in several important respects, this may be the best thing that could have happened to him. Unlike in other recent Venezuelan elections, no international observers were on hand to verify the legitimacy of the results, leading many to believe that the government would raise cries of fraud in the event of a narrow defeat. But when that narrow defeat came late last night, Chávez conceded immediately, congratulating his opponents and saying of his reforms, “For now, we could not do it.”

Chávez’s government has its problems, but if he were really the crypto-authoritarian thug that his critics—a group that includes the vast majority of the mainstream American punditocracy—claim him to be, it’s unlikely he would have taken the loss so well. By accepting a narrow electoral defeat, Chávez stands to gain far more political legitimacy than he would have from a narrow victory. One of the basic hallmarks of a functional electoral system is that it produces results that all parties believe to be legitimate. In this respect, yesterday’s vote can be seen as a sign of the health of the democracy over which Chávez has presided for the past nine years.

For residents of a country like the U.S., with a democratic tradition that dates back more than two centuries, it’s easy to sneer at the notion that something so fundamental as the willingness to accept the outcome of a close vote should be counted as an accomplishment, but in a country lacking such a tradition, and in a region with a history of authoritarian politics, such fundamentals can’t be taken for granted. It’s also worth noting that our own democracy failed a similar test in 2000, yielding an electoral outcome that millions of Americans consider to have been illegitimate.

Find the Cost of Freedom

2007-11-03T14:36:00.001-04:00

The Reverend Fred “God Hates Fags” Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church were back in the news this week after being hit with a $10.9 million judgment in a civil action brought by Albert Snyder, the father of Matthew Snyder, a Marine lance corporal who was killed in Iraq in January 2006. Phelps and some of his church members picketed the funeral, as they have other military funerals in recent years, in the belief that (here’s where things get weird) U.S. deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan represent God’s punishment for American tolerance of homosexuality.

Not surprisingly, the verdict has been applauded across the political spectrum. Liberals, moderates, and many conservatives are repulsed both by Westboro’s views and its tactics, while even those religious conservatives who share some elements of Phelps’s views on homosexuality are appalled by his actions, not to mention mystified by his logic, and are generally embarrassed to be associated with a philosophy best captured by the oxymoronic label of “Christian nihilism.” (The group is fond of declarations like “God hates the world and all her people” and “Thank God for 9/11”).

Still, there exists a minority opinion that Fred Phelps’s constitutional rights have somehow been violated here. The lawyer who defended Westboro in the case made a statement to the effect that the church’s actions were protected under the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech and that the verdict was likely to put a chill on political protest in the U.S. As someone who takes a broad view of freedom of speech, it’s an argument that I take seriously.

But is freedom of speech truly the issue at stake here? The answer to this question may lie in the distinction between civil and criminal law. The right to freedom of speech, like other protections in the Constitution, is intended primarily to protect citizens from the actions of their government—in other words, to protect us against the criminalization of speech, except under certain well-established standards, including incitement to imminent lawless action (e.g. “shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater”) and, more problematically, obscenity.

The situation is somewhat different in the realm of civil law, which deals primarily with legal actions taken by citizens against one another. The necessary role of government in mediating such actions leads to a legal gray area in terms of the extent to which government can be involved in restricting speech, an area that remains highly contested. Courts have consistently allowed citizens to being lawsuits restricting speech that violates established principles of tort law, particularly that of defamation (i.e. slander and libel). Snyder’s suit against Phelps and Westboro is a civil action; in other words, his claim is not that their speech constitutes a criminal act, but rather that it amounts to harassment and an intentional infliction of emotional distress, two well established principles of tort law.

I don’t know enough about either the specifics of the case or the vagaries of tort law to know whether Snyder’s suit has merit on these grounds. I suspect that, once the appeals process has taken its course, the verdict will be upheld but the size of the award will be reduced. My point is merely that a blanket appeal to freedom of speech is not necessarily a legitimate defense against this type of action. It is one thing for a government to protect the sanctity of free speech by its citizens; it is quite another to protect those citizens from the consequences of that speech, which in this case take the form of a civil lawsuit. Fred Phelps and his church may have the constitutional right to continue their hatemongering, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t be compelled to, quite literally, pay for their actions.

Karma Police

2007-10-16T20:55:00.000-04:00

As nearly everyone has no doubt heard by now, Radiohead has released its new album In Rainbows exclusively (for now) through its website. For a group of Radiohead’s commercial and critical stature, this would be news enough, but of course there’s more: The band is allowing customers to set their own price for the album, meaning that, aside from a minuscule credit card processing fee, it’s possible to download the album for free. Legally.

I preordered In Rainbows and downloaded the album when it became available the morning of October 10. I chose to pay around $10, which according to most economists, would place me somewhere between Forrest Gump and a brain-damaged squirrel on the intelligence scale, since I voluntarily paid for something that the seller was offering more-or-less for free. But as the legions of Pop Tones readers are no doubt already aware, I don’t think like an economist. Neither do a lot of other Radiohead fans, apparently. According to one British survey, the average price paid for the first million downloads (yes, the album went “platinum” in less than a week) was around $8, and only one-third of customers chose to pay nothing.

Nevertheless, I was buying something with my money, and I’m not talking about the ten songs on the album. I was buying into a new distribution model, one that has the potential to fundamentally change the way music is bought and sold. Radiohead may or may not care how much money they make from this experiment (although I predict they’ll wind up doing quite well), but if the offering is a financial success for the band—or rather, if it’s perceived as a financial success—more artists will be encouraged to emulate Radiohead by cutting out the middlemen and selling music directly to the public. (The band plans to release a conventional CD version of the album next year, but no hard date or distribution details have yet been announced.)

Why is this a good thing? For one thing, it should ultimately lead to artists earning more for their work, as well as lower prices for customers. But it's also a matter of justice: the music business is finally getting what it deserves. With the possible exception of the airlines, it’s difficult to think of another industry that has shown such callousness and hostility toward its own customers, overcharging them ridiculously for CDs and now randomly suing people who’ve chosen to rebel against this price regime through illegal downloading. Earlier this month a judge in Minnesota—apparently now ground zero for all manner of legal idiocy—awarded the industry $222,000 in a lawsuit against a woman who had allegedly downloaded 24 songs. If this seems like a reasonable decision to you, here’s a thought experiment: 24 tracks, multiplied by the 99-cent rate charged by Apple’s iTunes store for legal downloads, comes to $23.76 worth of “stolen” merchandise. If someone were convicted of shoplifting $23.76 worth of merchandise from a discount store, would you consider a $222,000 fine to be an appropriate punishment? Unless you can honestly answer “yes” to this question, you now have some sense of the warm feeling I get every time I read a news story about how much money the music industry is losing because of illegal downloading. It’s satisfying to see the public exacting some revenge on the industry, and doing so in the only terms it understands.

Of course the labels are fond of responding to complaints about their high prices and recent litigiousness by saying they’re merely protecting the interests of their artists—an argument that would carry a lot more moral weight were it not for the fact that most artists with major-label record deals make only about a dollar for every CD sold, and many end up in the hole once promotional costs are recouped. For a lot of these musicians, $8 an album might not sound so bad.

Combat Rock

2007-09-20T23:00:00.000-04:00

Sarcasm as an artistic mode is problematic at best. There are, of course, some glorious exceptions—Bela Tarr's 450-minute long-take extravaganza Satantango and Sly Stone's 1973 cover of "Que Sera Sera" jump to mind—but too often sarcasm is the province of the smug, the lazy, or those just not smart enough to be witty.

Certainly none of the above qualities apply to the Sri Lankan-British singer-rapper-producer M.I.A., whose just-released sophomore album Kala surely qualifies for that list of exceptions. First, some recent history: Flush with the artistic and (relative) commercial success of Arular, M.I.A. (aka Maya Arulpragasm) was apparently planning to record her second album with the ubiquitous Timbaland, before visa troubles derailed the collaboration. Indeed, if Rolling Stone is to be believed, M.I.A. was only able to re-enter the United States after Bono, of all people, put in a good word for her at the request of the president of Interscope Records.

So perhaps we have the Bush administration to thank for the globe-trotting Kala. Recorded on several continents, the album draws from sources as musically disparate as Bollywood film scores, raga, hip-hop, and the Modern Lovers—and that's just on the first track, the booming "Bamboo Banger," which reimagines Jonathan Richman's "Roadrunner" as a portrait of a kid running alongside a tourist's hummer. Not menacing but not exactly friendly, the image establishes an uncertainty of tone, a sense of unknown intentions, that pervades the whole album.

The first three cuts revise and extend the eclectic globo-club music of Arular, while rocking harder and dirtier than anything from the debut. The squawking and clattering "Bird Flu" aims squarely for the central nervous system; the Trinidadian-inflected lead single "Boyz" rides the album's biggest beat. With the fourth track, an interesting development: The album's first conventional "song" is "Jimmy," a lush rendering of a 1980s Bollywood disco tune that a young Maya used to dance to for money at her mother's behest. After a barely decipherable opening verse about Africa ("Take me on ya genocide tour/Take me on a truck to Darfur") she lunges headlong into the original lyrics, attacking the insipid chorus ("You told me that you're busy/Your loving makes me crazy") with girlish (or by her own account, drunken) enthusiasm. It's clear we've entered uncharted territory. What's not clear is exactly what is undercutting what here. Are the casual references to genocide merely a sarcastic send-up of disco vapidity, or also a bitter acknowledgment that the political game is rigged and that those who can might as well dance the night away until the other shoe drops?

M.I.A. may "represent the world town," but she's also pursuing her own singular vision and becoming a global star in the process ("I hate money cos it makes me numb," she says in another song.) Referencing the Pixies' "Where Is My Mind?" the genre-bending "$20" melds digitally processed Middle Eastern chanting with the deathless bass line of New Order's "Blue Monday". M.I.A. sings "I put people on the map that never seen a map," a boast she's just made good on with a pair of tracks featuring, respectively, a teenage Nigerian MC and a group of aboriginal Australian rappers. Still, as elsewhere on Kala, political ambition is inextricable from the threat of unrepressed violence (the song's title refers to the cost of an AK-47 in some necks of the woods in Africa) and any pretensions to sloganeering are immediately lost in the woozy indeterminacy of the music. Throughout the album, even as M.I.A.'s lyrics reach toward a brave new world, the grooves drag everything back to the grime of the hear and now.

It all comes to a head on "Paper Planes," a song that distills Kala down to its essence. Over the buoyant midtempo pulse of the Clash's immigrant paean "Straight to Hell," M.I.A. raps about a hustler making faking visas, the mock-triumphalist lyrics ("Everyone's a winner/We're making our fame") setting up the ballsiest chours I've heard in years: "All I wanna do is [gunshot] [gunshot] [gunshot] [gunshot] and [gun cocking] [cash register ring] and take your money." By the time she give a shout-out to "third world democracy," the joke's already on us. A masterstroke of world-weary vitriol, "Paper Planes" both returns the gift and swallows its own tail. Just as "Jimmy" is simultaneously pop and anti-pop, it's both political and anti-political.

Nothing could possibly follow it, and so the Timbaland-produced "Come Around" seems deliberately positioned as an afterthought, an ironic nod to the commercial second album that could have been. Timbaland himself sleepwalks through a couple rote verses about picking up some girl in da club, and while the track satisfies in conventional hip-hop terms, its inclusion feels nearly as sarcastic as that of "Jimmy." Or maybe it's just that Tim's beats sound relatively tame compared to what we've been listening to for the past 45 minutes.

What with M.I.A.'s recent bristling at critical insinuations that Arular was masterminded by her former boyfriend/producer Diplo (who worked on three Kala tracks), the type of tired bullshit that, even at this late date, still seems to attach itself to our best female artists, it's tempting to read "Come Around" as an act of aggression: M.I.A. swallowing up and regurgitating in her own image a famous male collaborator. But by this time there's no doubt: Despite the presence of Timbaland, Diplo, primary co-producer Switch, and many other collaborators, this album is no one's but hers. And if anyone makes a better one this year, I'll be amazed.

Mr. Bonds

2007-08-08T21:03:00.000-04:00

At long last Major League Baseball has a new all-time home run leader. Last night San Francisco Giants outfielder Barry Bonds hit No. 756, putting him one ahead of Henry Aaron on the career list and giving him sole possession of the most revered record in baseball or any sport. I watched it live, but after months of soul-crushing hype, the event itself seemed little more than an anticlimactic footnote. Events are not what they used to be.

People don’t like Bonds. People, in fact, dislike Bonds so much that there was much talk of whether he would be booed if he broke the record during an away game, a scenario that fortunately didn’t come to pass. Bonds is aloof, egotistical, and difficult to deal with. And then of course there’s the little matter of steroids. Is Bonds’s accomplishment “tainted” by his alleged use of performance-enhancing drugs?

As with much else in our increasingly degraded public discourse, in which every issue of the day is presumed to have two and only two “sides,” discussion of Bonds and of steroids in baseball has been dominated by two simplistic positions. Either steroids are the worst thing that’s ever happened to baseball and Bonds is an affront to humanity or Bonds is the greatest player ever and this whole steroid controversy is a product of that sinister beast known as “the media,” a bogus scandal that real baseball fans don’t care about. The latter view is easily dismissed, predicated as it is on the implicit assumption that baseball fans are nothing but beer-swilling morons interested only in dumb spectacle. Proponents of the “nobody cares” argument have attempted to support their position by interpreting the steady attendance at MLB ballparks over recent years as a referendum on steroid use, an argument that makes no sense whatsoever. In any event, polling data tells a different story entirely.

Not generally a fan of drug-testing in the workplace unless public safety is at stake, I do support aggressive testing programs for athletes in baseball and other sports in the belief that players shouldn’t have to risk their long-term health in order to be able to compete on a level field. Having said that, I do not think steroids are the worst thing ever to happen to baseball. Or even the worst thing to happen to baseball in my lifetime. Or for that matter, even the second-worst. The 1994 work stoppage, which led to the cancellation of the World Series for the first time in 90 years, was by far the lowest moment the game has seen in living memory. And nothing of which Bonds has been accused rates comparison with the actions of the still-beloved Pete Rose, whose gambling cut to the very heart of the baseball’s integrity. Rose’s crimes against the game were worse than Bonds’s. Orders of magnitude worse. Yet polls indicate that most baseball fans are willing to forgive Rose despite his having done absolutely nothing to deserve it.

No, what we’re talking about here is merely cheating, pure and simple, a subject that has a long and ambivalent history in baseball. (For some reason when pitchers cheat it’s considered cute and charming, while when hitters cheat it’s considered some horrible affront to the sport.) This particular form of cheating is more dangerous than spitballs or corked bats because of the aforementioned health effects of performance-enhancing drugs, but ultimately the issue has been blown out of proportion, absorbed into a larger social hysteria about drug use, a topic that Americans have been largely incapable of having a rational conversation about since the Reagan administration, if not earlier.

Discussion of whether the record is “tainted” misses the point in at least one important sense. More than fans of any other sport, baseball fans tend to value statistics, records, and history. We love to compare players from different eras, to imagine how today’s hitters would stack up against the likes of Aaron and Babe Ruth. But underlying it all is (or at least should be) a wry acknowledgment that comparing players from different eras is ultimately a futile pursuit. Much is made of the fact that Babe Ruth never had to face any black or Latino pitchers, playing as he did in the era of segregation, but then there are also the advantages that today’s hitters have in terms of smaller ballparks and strike zones, not to mention video technology, which has probably benefited hitters more than pitchers. It would be one thing if Bonds were the only MLB player accused of taking steroids, but contrary to the impression one might get from some of the anti-Bonds folks in the media, this is not the case. Perhaps steroids are best regarded as part of the baseline of this particular era in baseball history, the "Steroid Era” as sportswriters have taken to calling it. And like it or not, Bonds is indisputably the era’s greatest slugger, as were Aaron and Ruth in their own times. Records and numbers may be hallowed things in baseball, but ultimately, when discussing athletic greatness, statistics are only a starting point, not the be-all and end-all.

It was nice to see Aaron last night, albeit via pre-recorded video, graciously offering his congratulations to Bonds. His reaction was a stark contrast to the ridiculous behavior of baseball commissioner Bud Selig, who offered only tepid public statements after both the tying and record-breaking home runs, qualifying his congratulations with dark insinuations about Bonds being “innocent until proven guilty.” (Related topic for another day: When did “he’s innocent until proven guilty” become one of the most damning things you can say about someone? This meaning of this phrase appears to have completely reversed itself.)

Selig was nowhere to be seen in last night in San Francisco—supposedly, he was to meet today with former senator George Mitchell, the head of MLB’s quixotic “investigation” into steroid use, which seems from this vantage to be little more than an attempt to nail Bonds. It’s hypocritical for Selig to attempt to distance himself from Bonds’s accomplishment when so much of the Steroid Era unfolded on his watch. Along with the owners, the players, the media, and of course the fans, the commissioner chose to ignore the issue for years, and now he’s dealing with the consequences. But for today, Selig and Bonds, along with baseball fans of all stripes, can unite in one sentiment: relief that the home run chase is finally over.

Bergman and Antonioni

2007-08-01T14:08:00.000-04:00

It's not exactly John Adams and Thomas Jefferson dropping dead within hours of each other on the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, but the passing this past Monday of two of the most significant European filmmakers of the past half-century or so, the 89-year-old Ingmar Bergman and the 94-year-old Michelangelo Antonioni, both towering figures of cinematic modernism, certainly qualifies as an odd coincidence.

In his commercial heyday, from the late 1950s through the 1970s—a run that included such films as The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, and the remarkable Persona—Bergman was perhaps the best-known foreign filmmaker in the United States, his reputation rivaled only by that of Federico Fellini. As has been the case with Fellini, Bergman's critical stock has fallen a bit in recent years (not that one would get a sense of these shifting currents from Monday's New York Times obituary, which may have single-handedly set the cause of film history back 25 years), but he remains a great artist possessed of a singular vision, whose work is instantly recognizable for its religious/spiritual fixations, high-contrast lighting (courtesy of his two great cinematographers, Gunnar Fischer and Sven Nykvist), and baroque dream sequences. A tireless worker during his prime, Bergman divided his career between theater and cinema, and in a way his achievement was ultimately more theatrical than cinematic: finding ways to dramatize the innermost conflicts of the human mind and soul.

If Antonioni strikes me as an artist of a wholly different order, it's in part because he was first and foremost a filmmaker—the awkward English title of the documentary portrait "To Make a Film Is to Be Alive" accurately captures his view of himself and the medium (it is telling that the most dramatic scene of Antonioni’s best-known movie depicts a photographer in the act of developing film). Few have done as much to expand the possibilities of that medium: Filmmakers since the dawn of the talkie era had shown people in conversation, but how to show them in silence?

Almost all of Antonioni's greatest films—L'Avventura, Eclipse, The Passenger, and of course the oft-misinterpreted Blowup—can be described as mysteries without solutions. L'Avventura is the purest example: Ostensibly about the disappearance of a young woman during a daytrip to a barren island, the movie ends up focusing on the subsequent relationship between the woman's lover and best friend, who like the movie itself, soon forget about her entirely (this unprecedented thwarting of viewer expectations contributed to the film's being roundly booed at the Cannes Film Festival—where it went on to win a prize). But that description doesn't begin to do justice to L’Avventura, a masterpiece of rhythm and pacing that seeks nothing less than to represent the unrepresentable. The movie's ultimate subject is not "relationships" but their inverse—the insoluble gaps, silences, and unanswered glances of which people's lives are often made, particularly people born in the West and into a certain amount of money.

Alfred Hitchcock once defined drama as life with the boring parts cut out. In Antonioni's anti-dramas, the boring parts are most definitely left in. In almost any movie made before 1960, if a character takes 10 seconds to cross a room, the director will edit the scene so that the process only takes three or four seconds of screen time. In Antonioni's middle and late films, if a character takes 10 seconds to cross a room, then it takes 10 seconds on-screen. People don't always look at each other when they're talking and the human figures themselves are often overwhelmed by the landscapes surrounding them, whether natural (the barren island in L'Avventura) or manmade (as in the shot from Red Desert where the sickly yellow smoke of a factory smokestack slowly fills up the screen).

I could go on for hours, but I'll leave off here with one definitive Antonioni scene, the last of Eclipse. The man and woman at the center of the film's story have made plans to meet on a street corner. It's hardly shocking when neither of them bothers to show up. But Antonioni's camera does show up, and rather than ending, the movie simply goes on, depicting the sights and sounds of an unremarkable urban evening for what must be seven or eight minutes of terrifying emptiness. Background has suddenly becomes foreground and there's nothing left to distract us from the spiritual aridity of the world we've been watching for nearly two hours. For half a century, over the course of 16 features and a handful of shorts, Antonioni cast off the conventions of screen drama and trained his camera resolutely on such absences, voids, and silences, illuminating the darkness of contemporary life by inventing whole new ways of seeing. And we're all a little richer for it.

I didn't break the law! I am the law!

2007-07-21T14:22:00.000-04:00

Our president has struck again. In a move that's thus far attracted disturbingly little media attention, the Bush administration has expanded its claim of executive privilege in the ongoing Congressional investigation into the firings of eight U.S Attorneys last year, essentially saying that it will not allow the Justice Department to pursue contempt of Congress charges against any current or former White House officials that it deems covered by a presidential assertion of executive privilege.

The phrase "executive privilege" is mentioned nowhere in the Constitution, but as outlined in case law, the concept has been understood as a limited right of the president to get confidential counsel from his advisers. One problem in this case is that Bush has repeatedly maintained that he was not personally involved in firing the attorneys, so it's very difficult to see how executive privilege could apply here. Moreover, as the Supreme Court made clear to Richard Nixon in the Watergate tapes case, a president's right to privacy may be outweighed by the necessity of investigating possible criminal activity.

Even so, Bush is entitled to make his arguments in court, his very low probability of success notwithstanding. What is outrageous, and what could ultimately lead to a constitutional crisis, is Bush effectively ordering the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia to ignore a Congressional contempt citation, which as federal law makes clear, the attorney is legally compelled to bring before a grand jury. Bush appears to be attempting to manipulate the legal system, such as to make it difficult or impossible for Congress to challenge his expansive conception of executive privilege in court, by simply ordering the Justice Department not to pursue any contempt cases. In other words, a preisdential claim of executive privilege trumps all. Bush's arguement, in essence: I control the enforcement mechanisms, therefore I am the law.

The legal rationale for Bush's position is a piece of pernicious nonsense known as the doctrine of the "unitary executive." This notion, until recently confined mostly to the ruminations of far-right legal scholars, more-or-less holds that the president has nearly unlimited authority to direct officials within the executive branch. The Bush administration, led by Dick Cheney with legal expertise provided by his chief of staff, David Addington, has expanded the doctrine even further, claiming the power to ignore and/or reinterpret acts of Congress in accordance with the president's conception of his constitutional authorities. Such declarations have largely taken the form of so-called "signing statements," the most notorious of which claimed the authority to ignore the McCain amendment prohibiting cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees in American custody. If this idea is taken seriously, it amounts to a negation of the concept of separation of powers, an idea so fundamental to the Constitution as to shape its very structure.

A follow-up piece in today's Washington Post indicates that the Democrats plan to roll over and play dead on this one (imagine my total lack of surprise)--several former members of the Clinton Justice Department are quoted, thus providing invaluable political cover for the Bush position. One can only imagine that a President Hillary, given the authoritarian inclinations she's expressed in the past, would like to have the power to basically ignore Congress and the courts whenever it suits her fancy.

Woke Up This Morning

2007-07-21T13:57:00.000-04:00

Monday, June 11, 2007

Last night's brilliant installment of The Sopranos, the series' last episode and one of its best, has stirred up a bit of controversy this morning. At issue is the final scene, which played against viewer expectations, not only avoiding the expected melodramatic spectacle but ultimately cutting out in abrupt fashion (anyone who doesn't want to know what happened should check out here).

Going in to last night's finale, I was afraid we might be in for a slow and ponderous affair, particularly given the dire events of the previous week's episode—one of the most brutal and death-haunted of the entire series, which ended with Tony going to sleep in a safe house, holding a shotgun across his chest. The finale opens with the same image, but despite some dark moments, stays light on its feet—indeed, what with A.J. accidentally blowing up his car, some business involving Paulie Walnuts and a stray cat, and a memorable scene in which the villainous Phil Leotardo is dispatched in signature macabre fashion, this was one of the funnier episodes of the final season.

By the final scene, Tony's crew has reached a truce with the New York mob but he's learned that one of his associates is testifying before a federal grand jury, raising the specter of a likely criminal indictment. He arrives at the quaint-looking diner where he's meeting his family for dinner. Soon Carmela and then A.J. join him. The camera keeps cutting away to suspicious-looking strangers all over the diner, including a shady-looking character who walks into a men's room, unmistakably echoing the oft-alluded-to shooting scene from the first Godfather. There is also some crosscutting between the restaurant and the street outside, where a frustrated Meadow is making repeated attempts to parallel park. The editing is nervous and it's clear that we, the viewers, are running out of time. Will she make it in time? In time for what? Finally she gets the car parked and heads for the restaurant. Back inside we hear the front door's chime, prompting Tony to raise his gaze toward the doorway . . . and then nothing. A blank screen for several seconds. What happened? But then the credits roll, and the greatest dramatic series in the history of American television has come to an end with an unanswered look—in cinematic terms, a shot without a reverse shot. Does Tony see something horrible? Or is it finally the hit, the one you never see coming? Maybe, but there's no reason to think so. Most likely it's just Meadow coming through the door, better late than never.

Some commentators are bemoaning the lack of either narrative resolution or crowd-pleasing spectacle (an argument that takes its most venal form in the suggestion that David Chase somehow "owed" a big finish to HBO subscribers—the popular arts apparently being, like pretty much everything else in America, first and foremost a consumer product). Some are even likening the ending to the almost universally despised Seinfeld finale from nine years ago, which likewise played against audience expectations. But the comparison doesn't fly. The Seinfeld ending felt empty and forced because its tone was completely different from that of any other scene in the history of the show. The opposite is the case here—Chase may be needling the viewer a bit with all the red herrings in the final scene, but he's doing so precisely by appealing to the cinematic codes he's created over the past eight years—the same nervous cuts, looks, and gestures that might have preceded a whacking in a previous episode are here absorbed into an atmosphere of more generalized paranoia. As ever on this most Freudian of dramas, no anxiety is ultimately resolved, only repressed for future recycling. The show doesn't even really end; it just stops.

It's an ending far truer to the spirit of the series than some nihilistic (or moralistic) spectacle would have been. The last nine episodes have made it clear—if indeed it wasn't before—that The Sopranos is less a mob drama than a dissection of the contemporary upper-middle-class American family. The scathing critique of American moral blindness manifests itself not only in Tony's sociopathic acquisitiveness, but also Carmela's self-serving rationalizing, the forcible suprression of any occasional qualms about where her lifestyle comes from—a quality apparently inherited by Meadow, who gives an eyebrow-raising speech in the finale about how seeing her father's supposedly unfair treatment by the authorities, which she frames as a mere consequence of his being "Italian," inspired her to study law. Clearly, it's time to close ranks. Only A.J. is able to see beyond the horrible moral logic of The Family, albeit in halting and callow fashion—his recent suicide attempt and newfound obsession with Islamist terrorism represent a sort of return of the repressed—but he too is finally bought off; Tony and Carmela dissuade him from enlisting in the army to fight terrorists in Afghanistan by getting him a job on a movie set.

Despite lives scarred by violence and horror, the Sopranos continue to float through reality on a tide of affluence, paying no heed to the forces that may be closing in. In a minor stroke of genius, the final scene is set to the Journey anthem "Don't Stop Believing" (which Tony plays on the diner's jukebox), recontextualized here as an ironic commentary on dunderheaded American optimism. Friends and relatives are dead and Tony may soon be headed for trial, but the family endures, suspended in time, waiting for the other shoe to drop, the reverse shot. As Sydney Pollock put it in Eyes Wide Shut, "Life goes on. It always does. Until it doesn't."

Justice on the Court

2007-07-21T13:54:00.000-04:00

Wednesday, May 16, 2007

The sports world is atwitter with controversy today over the suspensions of Phoenix Suns center Amare Stoudemire and forward Boris Diaw from tonight's pivotal fifth game of the Suns' best-of-seven playoff series against the San Antonio Spurs. For those who have no idea what I'm talking about, a quick summary: In the closing seconds of Game Four, Suns guard Steve Nash, a two-time NBA Most Valuable Player, was leveled by a hockey-style cross-check from Spurs forward Robert Horry. Horry was suspended for two games for the hit, but the resulting incident also led to the one-game suspensions of the two Suns players for violating a ridiculously inflexible NBA rule about leaving the bench during an "altercation." Neither player came anywhere near the incident—in the case of Stoudemire, probably the Suns' second-most important player, he took only a few steps toward Nash, who at this point was still lying on the floor near the sideline, before being restrained by one of his coaches. Nevertheless, he was suspended for one game. If online polls and message boards provide an accurate gauge of the public's feelings, a vast majority of NBA fans appear to find the suspensions of the Suns players unjust. Commentators like TNT's Charles Barkley and ESPN's Skip Bayless have complained about the league's excessively literal enforcement of a stupid rule and have rightly pointed out that the suspensions effectively reward the Spurs for starting a fight, since the Suns will lose one of their best players for tonight's critical game while the Spurs only lose a bench player for two games. Others have responded by defending the NBA's decision with some variation of the "a rule's a rule" argument.

Rather than explaining all the reasons why the NBA's decision is moronic, wrong-headed, infuriating, and sadly typical, I'd like to focus on an aspect of the controversy relevant even to non-basketball fans. NBA enforcer Stu Jackson may have summed up the philosophical issue at stake here best when he said yesterday in defending his decision, "It's not a matter of fairness. It's a matter of correctness." Asked to clarify that comment today on ESPN radio, Jackson explicitly equated the two concepts, saying that his decision was fair because it was correct—that is, because it represented a consistent application of a rule that he deemed to have been clearly violated. But is fairness always the same thing as correctness? The equation seems to preclude the possibility that a rule itself can be unjust or that it should be interpreted in light of the specific circumstances of a given situation, notions that I think would seem reasonable to most people. Even so, the idea that fairness is the same as correctness informs much of our social life in this excessively literal-minded era, when everyone from sports commissioners to high school principals boasts about "zero tolerance" policies and our law books are cluttered with mandatory-minimum sentences and "three strikes" statutes. In order to change these policies, it is first necessary to free the concept of justice from the bonds of legalism in the public mind. Many fans hope that this week's incident will lead the NBA to finally rethink the leaving-the-bench rule over the offseason, but it's also an occasion, however trivial, for a more fundamental sort of rethinking.

The Neon Bible

2007-07-21T13:43:00.000-04:00

Friday, April 27, 2007

It's been a good spring for new music. So far I've been very news-oriented here but I'd also like to use this space to comment on books, movies, music, and other cultural goings-on. Since I like to be able to live with a record for a while before talking too much about it, it's going to take me a while to catch up on the music alone. There have been strong new releases this year from the likes of Modest Mouse, Amy Winehouse, and the Arctic Monkeys (subject of a future post), but my early favorite for album of the year honors is The Neon Bible from Arcade Fire (not "The Arcade Fire" anymore, apparently).

What's most interesting to me about The Neon Bible is its full-on embrace of rock's epic mode, by which I mean less a style of music than a form of address marked by hi-fi sound, salient vocal tracks, and an overriding concern with all things big. Politics being much in the air these days, the latter tendency finds its clearest expression in the Arcade Fire's obvious drive to create some kind of emblematic Bush-era artifact. The album's most moving song climaxes with the rueful refrain "All the reasons I gave were just lies," and there's also a real toe-tapper of a 9/11 tune ("Antichrist Television Blues"). Elsewhere the band contemplates the encroachments of government ("Black Mirror") and religion ("Intervention") and the entire album is suffused in the sense of paranoia and lowered expectations endemic to the era of homeland security (although nothing here is quite as politically pointed as the despondent "Parting of the Sensory" from the new Modest Mouse album).

Normally all this straining after topicality would be a flaw, and possibly a fatal one, but such is the power of the epic mode. To put it bluntly, the band has made a Springsteen record. Much of the The Neon Bible plays like a lost third disc from The River. Thrilling, propulsive rockers like "Keep the Car Running" and "The Well and the Lighthouse" recall The Boss at his exuberant best and everything from the prominence of the organ to the repeated automobile references evokes epic-mode Bruce. Unusual production choices result in a sound that's simultaneously ornate and austere; guitars, strings, brass, choirs, harps, and other instrumentation are relegated to the corners of the mix, leaving Win Butler's vocals front-and-center, suspended in the band's rhytmic thud.

Butler rises to the challenge, rasping and wailing with enough conviction to survive the occasional cringe-inducing lyric ("Workin' for the church while your family dies"). That he inevitably sounds like a more burdened, less confident Springsteen (I'm hardly the first to observe that one of the most frequently recurring words on The Neon Bible is fear) gets to the crux of the whole thing. The essence of this album is precisely its self-consciously nostalgic appeal to the epic gesture. U2's latest album, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, was notable as the first album on which the band fully embraced its own outsize ambitions—it was, as Rob Sheffield approvingly observed in Rolling Stone, "grandiose music from grandiose men." But for the creators of The Neon Bible and others of their generation, such ambitions remain tantalizingly unrealizable; their reach will always just exceed their grasp and they know it. Even as it emulates the likes of Bono and Springsteen, The Neon Bible shows that these men are already mythic figures, products of a more comprehensible era that's receded behind some historical vanishing point. By the end of the album, Arcade Fire has left its models behind and is already covering itself: the penultimate song is a gorgeous, balls-out rendering of the band's 2003 "No Cars Go." Amplified in every sense, the new version is a career highlight, resolving an entire album's worth of dread and longing into a blind ecsatic rush of speed and volume.

Gonzales and Iraq

2007-07-21T13:38:00.000-04:00

Friday, April 20, 2007

Thursday's disastrous appearance by Alberto Gonzales before the Senate Judiciary Committee brings President Bush and the Republicans in Congress closer to a moment of reckoning that the party clearly wishes to avoid. I'm not going to waste time here explaining why Gonzales needs to go. We're talking about a guy whose greatest accomplishment prior to becoming attorney general was the concoction of a legal rationalization for torture. And about a guy who claims to believe the Constitution does not guarantee the right to habeas corpus. He should never have been confirmed in the first place. As for the U.S. Attorney firings, let's just say that I'm far less interested in what the eight in question did to get fired than in what the remaining 80-plus may have done to keep their jobs.

Instead, let us look at the Gonzales controversy from a crass political perspective. Yesterday's hearing saw Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) add his name to the list of Republicans calling for the attorney general's resignation. Indeed of all the Republicans on the committee, only Orrin Hatch (R-UT) seems to support Gonzales, albeit tepidly. Yet as of this writing, President Bush has not asked for the attorney general's resignation, setting the stage for a showdown in the coming days between congressional Republicans, who are tiring of the embarrassment and distraction the Gonzales affair has caused for the entire party, and President Bush, who has been unwilling to abandon his old friend even in the face of significant evidence of corruption and incompetence.

So why is this important? The events of the next few days could serve as a dress rehearsal for an inevitable showdown over the Iraq war. By the end of this summer, the so-called "troop surge" will have demonstrably failed and the Republicans in Congress, all eyes on the 2008 elections, will have to decide what they're going to do about an increasingly unpopular war. If congressional Republicans and the party as a whole can't find a way to insulate themselves from Bush's failed policies, it could wind up being a disastrous election season. But if they're unable to find the political will to stand up to the president over something as ultimately trivial as the fate of Alberto Gonzales, then how are they going to be able to challenge Bush on the war that has become the centerpiece of his presidency?

With the exception of Nixon is his very last days in office, there hasn't been a president in living memory more isolated from his own party than George W. Bush is right now. Will the Republicans find a way to distance themselves from Bush over the next year and a half or will they passively follow the president as he leads the party over a cliff?

Comments on Comments

2007-07-21T13:29:00.000-04:00

Thursday, April 12, 2007

So once again we have a bona fide media frenzy over some so-and-so's controversial "comments." It seems like this type of story is taking up an ever-greater proportion of our news media's collective headspace. It goes like this: some random celebrity makes some "comments" that some other person or persons deem offensive, or pretend to deem offensive; said celebrity is subjected to a public berating by news anchors, talk show hosts, heads of advocacy organizations, etc.; celebrity responds with disavowal, defiance, or remorse, as appropriate; celebrity is punished or exonerated or the whole thing is forgotten after somebody else says something stupid, thus restarting the whole cycle.

The latest of these tempests, of course, surrounds radio talkshow host Don Imus, who last week in the midst of what otherwise seems to have been a harmless rant about the Rutgers women's basketball team, offhandedly referred to some of the players as "nappy-headed 'hos." The "comments" generated a firestorm that has led CBS radio to suspend Imus for two weeks and MSNBC to drop his show entirely amid growing calls for his firing by the likes of Al Sharpton and Bob Herbert. There can now be no doubt that it is a very, very bad thing to refer to women of color as "nappy-headed 'hos."

Well I guess we can all agree on that. Still, I can't help but wonder what it is about such trivial incidents that triggers such a grotesquely disproportionate response in the national media. I've never listened to Imus much, but it seems like a good part of his appeal comes from his propensity for just the sort of cartoonish jag that got him in trouble this time. Obviously, his remarks can be construed here as racist, sexist, or just plain tasteless, but they certainly weren't malicious, which prompts the question of exactly how low the threshold is for one of these week-long spirals of sanctimony.

The whole incident highlights a few other noteworthy contemporary phenomena that I'll no doubt be returning to in this space. In brief:

1. The Career-Threatening Gaffe In which a public figure commits some sin of speech or action that seriously damages his/her credibility, either reparably or irreparably. Other recent examples range from John McCain's ill-fated stroll through a Baghdad market to Mel Gibson's drunken anti-Semitic rant.

2. The Public Apology Imus has apologized repeatedly for his comments, but it's unclear if he'll be forgiven. Michael Richards attempted to apologize for his racist tirade, but just kept digging himself in deeper. Other sins may be forgivable: John Edwards has apologized for his vote authorizing the war in Iraq and seems to have been taken seriously by most Democrats; Hillary Clinton has refused to apologize for casting the same vote. Is this actually significant? Will the "apology issue" matter in next year's primaries?

3. The Ritual of Public Humiliation Sometimes it's not enough merely to apologize. Some sins are so bad that one must submit to a public berating by some recognized dispenser of justice. As author James Frey willingly submitted to the demands of his Oprah moment, so did Imus dutifully report to Sharpton's radio on program on Monday to get his tongue-lashing in what was otherwise an unfathomable act of masochism.