Well, hello again. My ever-declining blog output has slowed to a trickle over the past year, thanks in part to the demands of new fatherhood and a PhD program. But now it’s Top 10 time again, and there is work to be done. So rather than spending the first week of the new year obsessing over the latest simulated crisis coming out of Washington, I’ve produced the following for your reading pleasure. Or something resembling pleasure. This year’s production stars a rock legend, an übertalented R&B sensation, and in the lead role, a girl after my own heart. Enjoy.
1. Fiona Apple—The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do
My favorite Neil Young album is Tonight’s the Night. But if someone who’d never listened to Young asked me for a recommendation, I’d advise starting with something else: After the Gold Rush, Rust Never Sleeps, even a comp like Decade. Great as it is, Tonight’s the Night is not a suitable entry point—too dark, too weird, too forbidding for most neophytes. I feel the same way about Fiona Apple’s fourth album, surely her best to date, but just as surely her strangest and least accessible. Following two albums located within hailing distance of the pop mainstream, Tidal (1996) and When the Pawn… (1999), Apple’s Extraordinary Machine (2005) was an interesting change of direction, more Broadway than Alternative Nation, suggesting that Fiona (I feel like we’re on a first-name basis at this point in our relationship) might be ready to write the Great American Atonal Musical. The Idler Wheel… (improbably not her longest album title ever, by the way) isn’t that, exactly, but does mix traditional pop idioms with decidedly contemporary lyrical content. The key thing is that it is pop, something that becomes clear around the 20th listen or so.
And about those lyrics. Fiona’s never been known as an ace wordsmith, but the new album eliminates the contorted phrasings and strained rhymes that occasionally marred her earlier work. “I stand no chance of growing up,” she sighs in “Valentine,” but clearly she has in her own way. Extraordinary Machine revealed a maturity absent from her ’90s albums, moving beyond petulance and blame toward a new self-awareness and sense of responsibility for her own problems; in short, it was the work of an adult not an adolescent. The Idler Wheel… moves even further toward spiritual maturity and even a sense of self-acceptance. Which is not to say emotional stability. “Every single night’s a fight with my brain,” Fiona sings, and she’s brave enough to give us a ringside seat. The result is the year’s boldest, most original, and best album. But if you’ve never listened to Fiona, start with When the Pawn…. (“Jonathan” “Hot Knife”)
2. Frank Ocean—Channel Orange
Following last year’s promising mixtape Nostalgia, Ultra, the official debut album from the prodigiously gifted 24-year-old Ocean (né Christopher Breaux) demonstrates an astonishing depth and range. Channel Orange encompasses psychedelic funk (“Pyramids”), swelling balladry (“Bad Religion”), and politically tinged soul à la Stevie (“Sweet Life”)—and those are just the highlights. Few albums of recent years have been so weighted down with expectations, from supposed clues about the artist’s autobiography (easy enough to find) to the alleged revitalization of an entire genre (we’ll see), but Channel Orange is more than good enough to bear such burdens with ease. (“Pyramids” “Sweet Life”)
3. Bruce Springsteen—Wrecking Ball
The Boss’s best album in 25 years surveys the fractured landscape of America in the early 2010s and finds some seriously pissed off people—immigrants, activists, and of course the unemployed—as well as glimmers of hope. Channeling folk and gospel influences in a way never before seen in his songwriting, Springsteen once again finds the pulse of the working-class America he’s been singing about for 40 years. (See “The Patriot,” posted April 15.) (“Wrecking Ball” “We Take Care of Our Own”)
4. Beach House—Bloom
Another triumph from the Baltimore duo of Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally, Bloom improves ever so slightly on 2010’s also excellent Teen Dream with a more unified sound and a keener ear for the subtleties of longform pacing. (“Myth” “New Year”)
5. Tame Impala—Lonerism
I was a big fan of Tame Impala’s 2010 debut Innerspeaker, and their sophomore effort is an improvement in every way. Between the copious borrowings from late ’60s/early ’70s psych-rock and bandleader Kevin Parker’s Lennonesque vocals, this Australian band would seem in danger of being wrongly classified as a retro act. But make no mistake, this is thoroughly modern music, every bit as concerned with texture and flow as a record by, say, Flying Lotus. (“Keep on Lying” “Elephant”)
6. Burial—Kindred
Back in 2008, I disallowed Four Tet’s four-song EP Ringer from Top 10 consideration on the grounds that it didn’t count as a full album despite a running time over 30 minutes, a decision that contributed to my including a couple albums on my list that I’ve hardly listened to since. That was a mistake. (“Ashtray Wasp” “Kindred”)
7. Flying Lotus—Until the Quiet Comes
FlyLo’s previous album Cosmogramma (2010) is one of my favorites of the past several years, but many fans seemed to find it too dense and difficult. (Seriously, I can’t remember the last time I saw a record more criticized essentially for being too good.) As its title suggests, Until the Quiet Comes is quieter and more chilled out than that masterpiece, but it’s still adventurous enough to keep him at the leading edge of sonic innovation. As with the Burial EP and No. 10 below, we’ll be seeing its singular sounds percolating into the mainstream in the coming years. (“Getting There” “Pretty Boy Strut”)
8. Killer Mike—R.A.P. Music
The best hip-hop album of the year punches you in the nose with the opening “Big Beast,” then sneaks up on your woozy ass with its impressive variety, both musical and vocal. R.A.P. Music (that’s Rebellious African People) supplements Mike’s literate tough-guy persona with guest shots from the likes of T.I. (reliably better on other people’s records than on his own) and ace production from El-P (ditto). As for the album’s signature song about a certain dead president, my heart and my best intentions tell me it’s unduly harsh. But the facts and the evidence tell me it is not. (“Reagan” “Big Beast”)
9. Bob Mould—Silver Age
Let’s face it: even in his youth, Bob Mould was always well suited for the role of crotchety old man, and the cleverly titled Silver Age finds the now 52-year-old postpunk legend well on his way to claiming that mantle. And he’s not ready for fossilization yet. “Stupid little kid wanna hate my game/I don’t need a spot in your hall of fame,” he snarls on the title track. This year marked the 20th anniversary of Sugar’s Copper Blue, arguably Mould’s best work, and this tight 10-song collection largely reprises the sound of that milestone. Mould’s solo career has been filled with experiments, yielding mixed results, but there’s something to be said for doing one thing and doing it well. (“The Descent” “Silver Age”)
10. Actress—R.I.P.
The third album from British producer Darren Cunningham falls somewhere under the rubric of “ambient techno.” At times reminiscent of the work of Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada, R.I.P. is laid-back enough to work as background music but sonically precise enough to reward close listening. (“Jardin” “Tree of Knowledge”)
Five runners-up (in alphabetical order)
Bob Dylan—Tempest
By my count, this is the master’s 35th studio album, and it may well be his weirdest. As with Wrecking Ball, the reception of Tempest was hurt by the shameless ageism of rock critics (although helped by the reverse ageism of Rolling Stone). (“Long and Wasted Years” “Tin Angel”)
Goat—World Music
This Swedish band arrives complete with some elaborate backstory involving, naturally enough, voodoo rituals that I’m pretty sure is total b.s. But their album is good: hard, funky rock leavened with just the right amount of ’70s cheese (metal, disco) as well as…um, world music. (“Let It Bleed” “Disco Fever”)
Kendrick Lamar—Good Kid, m.A.A.d. City
It’s a bit overlong and the pacing drags toward the middle, but the year’s most celebrated hip-hop album largely deserves its massive critical acclaim. (“Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe” “Swimming Pools (Drank)”)
Andy Stott—Luxury Problems
More British ambient techno, simultaneously cavernous and intimate. (“Luxury Problems” “Hatch the Plan”)
The xx—Coexist
After hearing the self-titled first album by this young British trio back in 2009, I briefly had faith in the future of humanity, which I’m sure must have lasted at least until the next time I logged on to Facebook or turned on my TV. The follow-up doesn’t have quite as many standout songs but continues co-lead-vocalists Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sims’s quiet explorations of the pleasures and perils of intimacy, with appropriately insular production from Jamie xx. (“Chained” “Fiction”)
Top 5 songs not on those albums
1. Taylor Swift—“We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”
Country-pop star reaches for the mainstream, sends up fan base, expresses insecurity about perceived lack of coolness.
2. Cloud Nothings—“Wasted Days”
3. Japandroids—“The House That Heaven Built”
4. Four Tet—“Jupiters”
The tracks collected on Kieran Hebden’s self-released compilation Pink suggest a turn toward a more dancefloor-oriented sensibility, with the two-minute ambient synth intro here providing perhaps the most explicit connection to his previous work. As always, I can’t wait to hear what he does next.
5. Kanye West (feat. Jay-Z and Big Sean)—“Clique”
Even his superficial raps is super official.
04 January 2013
01 August 2012
Critical Mass
The critics have spoken, and we have a new holder of the title “Greatest Movie Ever Made.” Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) has replaced Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) at the top of Sight and Sound’s decennial poll of film critics. In the Twitter era, we’re constantly being bombarded by best-of lists of one sort or another, but the Sight and Sound poll retains a certain air of authority, perhaps as much for the fact that it only appears once every 10 years as for the highly selective list of participants and their (mostly) impeccable collective taste.
For the uninitiated, every 10 years since 1952 the British film magazine Sight and Sound has conducted an international poll asking film critics to name the 10 greatest films ever made. The initial winner was Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist classic Bicycle Thieves (1948). The five subsequent polls were all topped by Kane, playing a major role in that film’s popular canonization as the greatest ever made. Kane out-polled Vertigo by a mere five votes in 2002, so the latter’s ascent to the top comes as little surprise to avid poll-watchers. Since 1992, the magazine has polled directors as well. This year’s directors' champ was Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953), with Kane (the winner in the previous two surveys) coming in tied for second and Vertigo placing seventh.
Here’s the full critics’ Top 10:
1. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
2. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
3. Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)
4. The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939)
5. Sunrise (F.W. Murnau, 1927)
6. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
7. The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)
8. Man With a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
9. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928)
10. 8 ½ (Federico Fellini, 1963)
Before I get to the self-involved portion of this post, a few notes on the critics’ list. As in previous polls, the list is heavily skewed away from contemporary cinema, with three films dating back to the silent era and nothing from the past 40 years. Despite a significant expansion of the electorate to include some 846 voters, seven of the 10 entries on this list appeared in the 2002 Top 10 as well, and two of the other three (The Searchers and The Passion of Joan of Arc) had appeared in previous versions. The lone surprise, and a pleasant one at that, was the inclusion of Dziga Vertov’s experimental silent documentary Man With a Movie Camera in place of Sergei Eisenstein’s more history-bound (albeit massively influential) Battleship Potemkin (1925). All are worthy inclusions on a list like this, with the possible exception of 8 ½, an entertaining relic of ’60s solipsism that feels a bit slight in this company.
In anticipation of the new Sight and Sound poll, I began thinking about my own all-time Top 10 a few months ago, an exercise I hadn’t indulged in for several years. Despite having spent far, far too much time pondering my list, I didn’t nail down the last three spots until this morning, about half an hour before the poll results went public. Before I get to my various disclaimers, descriptions, justifications, and assorted comments, let’s just spit it out. I’m not going to do anything as absurd as ranking the films and two of them begin with numbers, so in chronological order:
Sunrise (F.W. Murnau, 1927)
Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944)
Ordet (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1955)
Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959)
Au Hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966)
2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967)
2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami, 1990)
Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch, 2001)
The first thing to be said is that many other films could have appeared in place of some of these, so many that I won’t attempt to list them all. Since the Sight and Sound lists have comprised features exclusively, I ruled out short films, thus eliminating everyone from Chuck Jones to Maya Deren. It should also go without saying that this is a highly personal list informed by my own idiosyncratic sense of film history and aesthetics—i.e., “greatest” here does not necessarily equate to most important or influential. Re-watchability was a key criterion; these are all movies that I’ve returned to multiple times. The point is that while I’m not quite pompous enough to conflate my own tastes with any objective standard of “greatness,” I didn’t create this list in a vacuum either.
So having said that, I’ll make just a few notes about how I arrived at my selections. The alert reader has no doubt already noted that three films on my list also show up on the Sight and Sound Top 10. Vertigo and 2001 have appeared on every version of this list I’ve ever done. With its bravura visuals and elemental storyline, Sunrise seemed a good choice to represent the aesthetic freedom of the silent era; had I had room for another silent, it probably would have been Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s Earth (1930), which has many of the same virtues. In a few other cases, I chose some (slightly) less celebrated favorites in lieu of equally worthy canonical classics: Ordet over The Passion of Joan of Arc (a mostly arbitrary preference for the moral/spiritual/visual ambiguity of Dreyer’s late works over the clarity of his silents); Hawks’s Rio Bravo over Ford’s The Searchers (a purer example of its director's work and a more representative John Wayne character); Meet Me in St. Louis over Singin’ in the Rain, which placed on the 2002 Sight and Sound Top 10 (greater emotional range and gut-punch impact). Au Hasard Balthazar and 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her represent career peaks by two of my favorite filmmakers; several other Bresson or Godard films would have done just as well. Finally, I was determined to get a couple contemporary choices on the list. One of the common complaints about these kind of lists is that they tend to skew toward older films, although this may be primarily an effect of composition—many individuals voted for recent films, just not the same recent films. After much consternation I finally settled on Close-Up and Mulholland Dr., although I seriously considered Dazed and Confused, Sátántangó, Café Lumière, and Dead Man, among others.
Some vital statistics: Six of the 10 films hail from the United States, although one was made in Great Britain by an expatriate director with carte blanche from Warner Bros. and another is a German film through and through that happened to be made on American soil. Of the remaining four, two were made in France, one in Denmark, and one in Iran. Six of the 10 films date from a 13-year period spanning from the mid ’50s to the late ’60s, with only two each from before and after. I’m not necessarily pleased with this clustering, not least because it virtually eliminated Jacques Tati’s Playtime (1967) from serious consideration, but I couldn’t part with any of the six; we call the golden ages where we see them. One film is silent; one is a musical. Surprisingly, only three are black-and-white. All are by pantheon directors, reflecting my own auteurist biases. All are directed by men (and all but one by white men), reflecting the historical realities of film production, distribution, and criticism.
Some vitaler statistics: Two of these films intentionally blur the line between fiction and documentary. Two others have traditional stories, yet defy plot summary. One features a non-human as its protagonist; another, a non-human as its antagonist. Two are steeped in Christian symbolism, one climaxing with a mostly symbolic death and the other with a literal resurrection. Politically, one could be described as a prescient, quasi-Marxist attack on the consumer society, another as a conservative exploration of the nature of moral rectitude. One is about the encounter with modernity; another, made some 40 years later, about its exhaustion and what comes next. Two of these films give me chills every time I watch them; two more, otherwise as different as night and day, I can’t get through without breaking down in tears.
Anyway, I hope some of my overstuffed raving inspires you to check out one or more of these titles you might not have seen. Very few will enjoy them all as much as I have, but I suspect there’s something here for virtually any moviegoer to enjoy. In any event, thanks for your indulgence.
For the uninitiated, every 10 years since 1952 the British film magazine Sight and Sound has conducted an international poll asking film critics to name the 10 greatest films ever made. The initial winner was Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist classic Bicycle Thieves (1948). The five subsequent polls were all topped by Kane, playing a major role in that film’s popular canonization as the greatest ever made. Kane out-polled Vertigo by a mere five votes in 2002, so the latter’s ascent to the top comes as little surprise to avid poll-watchers. Since 1992, the magazine has polled directors as well. This year’s directors' champ was Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953), with Kane (the winner in the previous two surveys) coming in tied for second and Vertigo placing seventh.
Here’s the full critics’ Top 10:
1. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
2. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
3. Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)
4. The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939)
5. Sunrise (F.W. Murnau, 1927)
6. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
7. The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)
8. Man With a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
9. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928)
10. 8 ½ (Federico Fellini, 1963)
Before I get to the self-involved portion of this post, a few notes on the critics’ list. As in previous polls, the list is heavily skewed away from contemporary cinema, with three films dating back to the silent era and nothing from the past 40 years. Despite a significant expansion of the electorate to include some 846 voters, seven of the 10 entries on this list appeared in the 2002 Top 10 as well, and two of the other three (The Searchers and The Passion of Joan of Arc) had appeared in previous versions. The lone surprise, and a pleasant one at that, was the inclusion of Dziga Vertov’s experimental silent documentary Man With a Movie Camera in place of Sergei Eisenstein’s more history-bound (albeit massively influential) Battleship Potemkin (1925). All are worthy inclusions on a list like this, with the possible exception of 8 ½, an entertaining relic of ’60s solipsism that feels a bit slight in this company.
In anticipation of the new Sight and Sound poll, I began thinking about my own all-time Top 10 a few months ago, an exercise I hadn’t indulged in for several years. Despite having spent far, far too much time pondering my list, I didn’t nail down the last three spots until this morning, about half an hour before the poll results went public. Before I get to my various disclaimers, descriptions, justifications, and assorted comments, let’s just spit it out. I’m not going to do anything as absurd as ranking the films and two of them begin with numbers, so in chronological order:
Sunrise (F.W. Murnau, 1927)
Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944)
Ordet (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1955)
Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959)
Au Hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966)
2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967)
2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami, 1990)
Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch, 2001)
The first thing to be said is that many other films could have appeared in place of some of these, so many that I won’t attempt to list them all. Since the Sight and Sound lists have comprised features exclusively, I ruled out short films, thus eliminating everyone from Chuck Jones to Maya Deren. It should also go without saying that this is a highly personal list informed by my own idiosyncratic sense of film history and aesthetics—i.e., “greatest” here does not necessarily equate to most important or influential. Re-watchability was a key criterion; these are all movies that I’ve returned to multiple times. The point is that while I’m not quite pompous enough to conflate my own tastes with any objective standard of “greatness,” I didn’t create this list in a vacuum either.
So having said that, I’ll make just a few notes about how I arrived at my selections. The alert reader has no doubt already noted that three films on my list also show up on the Sight and Sound Top 10. Vertigo and 2001 have appeared on every version of this list I’ve ever done. With its bravura visuals and elemental storyline, Sunrise seemed a good choice to represent the aesthetic freedom of the silent era; had I had room for another silent, it probably would have been Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s Earth (1930), which has many of the same virtues. In a few other cases, I chose some (slightly) less celebrated favorites in lieu of equally worthy canonical classics: Ordet over The Passion of Joan of Arc (a mostly arbitrary preference for the moral/spiritual/visual ambiguity of Dreyer’s late works over the clarity of his silents); Hawks’s Rio Bravo over Ford’s The Searchers (a purer example of its director's work and a more representative John Wayne character); Meet Me in St. Louis over Singin’ in the Rain, which placed on the 2002 Sight and Sound Top 10 (greater emotional range and gut-punch impact). Au Hasard Balthazar and 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her represent career peaks by two of my favorite filmmakers; several other Bresson or Godard films would have done just as well. Finally, I was determined to get a couple contemporary choices on the list. One of the common complaints about these kind of lists is that they tend to skew toward older films, although this may be primarily an effect of composition—many individuals voted for recent films, just not the same recent films. After much consternation I finally settled on Close-Up and Mulholland Dr., although I seriously considered Dazed and Confused, Sátántangó, Café Lumière, and Dead Man, among others.
Some vital statistics: Six of the 10 films hail from the United States, although one was made in Great Britain by an expatriate director with carte blanche from Warner Bros. and another is a German film through and through that happened to be made on American soil. Of the remaining four, two were made in France, one in Denmark, and one in Iran. Six of the 10 films date from a 13-year period spanning from the mid ’50s to the late ’60s, with only two each from before and after. I’m not necessarily pleased with this clustering, not least because it virtually eliminated Jacques Tati’s Playtime (1967) from serious consideration, but I couldn’t part with any of the six; we call the golden ages where we see them. One film is silent; one is a musical. Surprisingly, only three are black-and-white. All are by pantheon directors, reflecting my own auteurist biases. All are directed by men (and all but one by white men), reflecting the historical realities of film production, distribution, and criticism.
Some vitaler statistics: Two of these films intentionally blur the line between fiction and documentary. Two others have traditional stories, yet defy plot summary. One features a non-human as its protagonist; another, a non-human as its antagonist. Two are steeped in Christian symbolism, one climaxing with a mostly symbolic death and the other with a literal resurrection. Politically, one could be described as a prescient, quasi-Marxist attack on the consumer society, another as a conservative exploration of the nature of moral rectitude. One is about the encounter with modernity; another, made some 40 years later, about its exhaustion and what comes next. Two of these films give me chills every time I watch them; two more, otherwise as different as night and day, I can’t get through without breaking down in tears.
Anyway, I hope some of my overstuffed raving inspires you to check out one or more of these titles you might not have seen. Very few will enjoy them all as much as I have, but I suspect there’s something here for virtually any moviegoer to enjoy. In any event, thanks for your indulgence.
15 April 2012
The Patriot
I may have to take a break from Facebook at some point this year. Or even from the internet entirely, at least to the extent that such a thing is possible. Slowly but surely, my feed begins to fill up with straw men, canned talking points, and moral vanities. Yes, folks, it’s an election year. With Rick Santorum having finally given up his zombie candidacy, the general election phase of the campaign has now begun, or so we’re told by the pundits, who also promise with barely concealed glee that this will be the nastiest, ugliest campaign ever. Regardless of whom you plan on voting for, you’d have to be as crazy as this guy to actually enjoy this dysfunctional process.
I've come around to the view that most forms of political partisanship fall under the rubric of mental illness. There are few other forces that so effectively distort the thinking of otherwise intelligent people, provoke strife among otherwise agreeable people, and prevent otherwise rational people from seeing what's right in front of their own noses. This phenomenon has gotten markedly worse in recent years. I could write a book about the reasons for this: the rise of 24-hour cable news, the pseudo-anonymity of the internet, the increased ideological coherence of the two major political parties, etc. For many Americans, political identity now trumps national identity, calling into question the very possibility of a social contract. But that’s not the half of it. I would argue that the real issue is not ideological or even cultural (at least in the sense the word is used by political pundits); rather, what we’re seeing is a wholesale rejection of the social itself.
There’s an interesting book review in The New Yorker this week about the rapidly increasing proportion of single-person households in the United States. The piece as a whole is class-bound and not entirely satisfying, but at one point writer Nathan Heller puts his finger on something vital:
Most people who were brought up in the past half century have been taught to live…by their own rules, building the world they want. That belief—[Eric] Klinenberg calls it “the cult of the individual”—may be the closest thing American culture has to a common ideal.
What Heller doesn’t say is that this attitude—an almost unconscious belief in the primacy of individuality over any kind of social or group identity—arises naturally from the ethic of self-interest that’s central to free-market capitalism. But it’s so pervasive in our society that it rears its head in unexpected places as well. While most of the debate about the role of anarchism in Occupy Wall Street has focused on tactics, there are ideological factors to be considered as well. Anarchist ideology is, in important respects, commensurate with that of laissez-faire capitalism in that both valorize the individual as the ultimate authority. (The cult of Ron Paul splits the difference between these schools of thought.) In my more pessimistic moments, I can’t help wonder if young people today haven’t been so thoroughly indoctrinated in the ideology of American individualism that they can’t even imagine a way out.
This atomized, fragmented America is the setting for Bruce Springsteen’s 17th studio album, Wrecking Ball. Inspired in part by OWS, the new album is being billed as Springsteen’s response to the financial crisis and subsequent economic depression, much as 2002’s The Rising, the album that kicked off what Wikipedia calls the “Return to success” phase of Springsteen’s career, was billed as a response to 9/11. Both characterizations are accurate, but the two albums can also be thought of as pieces of a career-long work about the vanishing American community. And while the reach of The Rising occasionally exceeded its grasp, with Bruce struggling to find his footing in a changed cultural landscape after several years away from the studio, Wrecking Ball sounds fully attuned to the realities of this Lesser Depression. It’s his best album in a quarter-century.
Springsteen’s political views have been the subject of much discussion over the years, but they’re really simple enough. He’s an old-school New Deal liberal who writes songs rooted in a blend of economic populism and social conservatism—not the mean-spirited wedge-issue conservatism of today, but rather a broad-based appeal to old-fashioned values of family, faith, and hard work—that’s largely disappeared from American politics today, although not from American life. It’s a liberalism that predates the cultural battles of the 1960s, which have defined the contours of American politics ever since. During his commercial peak of the 1980s, Springsteen was able to make music that appealed to both Republicans and Democrats. The political bent of the songs on albums like Nebraska (1982) and Born in the U.S.A. (1984) was unmistakable yet subtle—occasionally too subtle, as evidenced by Ronald Reagan’s famous misappropriation of “Born in the U.S.A.” for his re-election campaign. Outside of his music, Springsteen largely kept a low political profile, focusing mostly on nonpartisan issues like veterans’ affairs and homelessness. But by 2004, the time had come to choose a side. And so he did, lending his support to the John Kerry campaign and no doubt pissing off some fans in the process. (He would go on to support Barack Obama’s presidential bid in 2008.)
Now, at age 62, he’s made the angriest album of his career. Wrecking Ball makes the case for a return to New Deal liberalism with far more passion than we’ve ever seen from Obama. In the wake of the worst financial crisis in 75 years, the workingmen and women who’ve populated Springsteen’s songs for the past 40 years now find themselves broke and unemployed, staring down middle and old age with savings depleted and prospects dim. And they have a pretty good idea about who’s to blame. As one of the album’s characters puts it: “Gambling man rolls the dice, workingman pays the bills/It’s still fat and easy up on bankers hill.” Elsewhere we meet a “Jack of All Trades” whose skill set apparently extends to handiness with the steel, hardly the album’s only intimation of violence. “Sing it hard and sing it well/Send the robber barons straight to hell,” shouts another of Springsteen’s working-class heroes on “Death to My Hometown.”
Their anger is rooted in a deep sense of betrayal. The opening “We Take Care of Our Own,” with its rousing chorus “Wherever this flag’s flown/We take care of our own,” scans as a patriotic anthem. But you don’t have to dig too deeply to find the tattered ruins of the social contract, as the lyrics recount how the American government—Bruce’s government, our government—has failed its people over and over again (“From the shotgun shack to the Superdome/We yelled ‘help’ but the cavalry stayed home”). The “we” of the song’s title doesn’t extend to the Washington-Wall Street axis that runs the country. We’re on our own. (I read somewhere that Obama included “We Take Care of Our Own” on a campaign playlist, or some such thing, leading me to wonder if he understood the song any better than Reagan did “Born in the U.S.A.” Or if he’d even listened to it at all.)
Springsteen may have grown up on Roy Orbison and Bob Dylan, but the major American artist he resembles most closely is the film director John Ford. Both share a grounding in Catholic values, a taste for Americana culture, and a penchant for sentimentality that occasionally gets the better of them. But more important, Springsteen and Ford share a generous patriotism, one rooted in a communitarian ideal of America. Ford’s greatest films were westerns set in a rugged environment where people had to help each other out to ensure their mutual survival. This is the America of “We Take Care of Our Own,” a place where “nobody crowds you, nobody goes it alone,” as Springsteen put it on 2007’s “Long Walk Home.” It’s an ideal defined by the immigrant experience—Ford was the son of Irish parents; Springsteen’s mother is a first-generation Italian American. The 2005 Devils and Dust closed with the moving “Matamoros Banks,” about a man leaving his family behind in Mexico for better prospects across the river. The rollicking “American Land,” one of two bonus tracks on the “deluxe edition” of Wrecking Ball, is more pointed: “The hands that built the country we’re always trying to keep out.”
The melting-pot ethic extends to the music. The previous Springsteen work that Wrecking Ball most resembles is We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, a collection of folk covers released in 2006. Like much of that album, several tracks here, notably the mock funeral march of “Death to My Hometown,” reference Irish folk music. Springsteen has never been an experimentalist, and his few previous attempts to stray outside the boundaries of classic rock have mostly fallen flat. But the musical stew of Wrecking Ball complements the classic E Street sound of “We Take Care of Our Own” and the glorious title track with elements of folk, gospel, and even a 16-bar rap, which fits seamlessly into the mix. Traditional rock instrumentation is generously supplemented with violins, banjos, and all manner of horns, among many other instruments.
The ascendant gospel influence marks the full blooming of the religiosity that has crept into Springsteen’s late work. Before becoming the unofficial anthem of the civil rights movement, “We Shall Overcome” began its life as a gospel song, written by the Methodist minister Charles Tindley. In covering it, Springsteen recalled a day when the intersection of religion and politics in America meant something very different than it does now. Early on, “Shackled and Drawn” evokes the spirit of an old-time revival, with a sampled female voice exhorting, “I want everyone to stand up and be counted tonight!” (Wrecking Ball must contain more samples than the rest of Springsteen’s catalog put together, many taken from Alan Lomax field recordings of the 1940s.) But it’s on the last three songs that the album’s spiritual undercurrents rise to the surface. “Rocky Ground” is an outright gospel song, mixing imagery from testaments old and new:
Forty days and nights of rain washed this land
Jesus said the moneychangers in this temple will not stand
Find your flock, get them to higher ground
The floodwater’s rising, we’re Canaan bound.
Times are hard, but the promised land is still in sight and right will triumph in the end. This sense of Messianic expectation extends into the following song, “Land of Hope and Dreams,” which has been kicking around for more than a decade (Springsteen and the E Street Band performed it when I saw them in 1999). Alluding to Curtis Mayfield’s epochal “People Get Ready,” Springsteen sings of the great train headed for the promised land, carrying saints and sinners, whores and gamblers, losers—and even winners. All you gotta do is get on board.
The final track, “We Are Alive,” evokes nothing less than the resurrection of the dead. Riding the riff from Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” Springsteen recounts his own people’s history of the United States, a roll call of workers, activists, immigrants, and all those who died trying to turn their American dreams into reality:
A voice cried, ‘I was killed in Maryland in 1877
When the railroad workers made their stand.’
‘I was killed in 1963,
One Sunday morning in Birmingham.’
‘I died last year crossing the southern desert,
My children left behind in San Pablo.’
Well they left our bodies here to rot
Oh please let them know
Their bodies may have been left to rot, but their souls will rise. In the last verse, the singer imagines himself among their number, and it’s hard not to think about the late E Streeter Clarence Clemons, the subject of a moving tribute in the album’s liner notes, whose saxophone shows up on two Wrecking Ball tracks. Hope springs eternal, even in the face of death. As the past few years have reminded us, faith and hope are not sufficient to produce social change—but you’re sure not going to get very far without them.
In that spirit, Wrecking Ball’s most crucial track might be the title song. Apparently inspired by the demolition of Giants Stadium in New Jersey, “Wrecking Ball” is a sweeping rock anthem in the style of “Born to Run,” although the song it most reminds me of (and this is going to be a weird reference even for me) is The Cure’s I’m-so-suicidal-I’m-happy “Doing the Unstuck.” Like that song, “Wrecking Ball” invokes the power of creative destruction in a spiritual sense, the necessity of taking a wrecking ball to the hopelessness and negativity that turn good hearts to stone. Like the OWS protesters, Springsteen doesn’t have all the answers, but to complain that emotion trumps political analysis here is to miss the point entirely. “Hold on to your anger,” he repeats, “and don’t fall to your fears.” I can’t think of a political song by Springsteen that’s less rooted in specificity—nor one more in tune with the spirit of the times.
I've come around to the view that most forms of political partisanship fall under the rubric of mental illness. There are few other forces that so effectively distort the thinking of otherwise intelligent people, provoke strife among otherwise agreeable people, and prevent otherwise rational people from seeing what's right in front of their own noses. This phenomenon has gotten markedly worse in recent years. I could write a book about the reasons for this: the rise of 24-hour cable news, the pseudo-anonymity of the internet, the increased ideological coherence of the two major political parties, etc. For many Americans, political identity now trumps national identity, calling into question the very possibility of a social contract. But that’s not the half of it. I would argue that the real issue is not ideological or even cultural (at least in the sense the word is used by political pundits); rather, what we’re seeing is a wholesale rejection of the social itself.
There’s an interesting book review in The New Yorker this week about the rapidly increasing proportion of single-person households in the United States. The piece as a whole is class-bound and not entirely satisfying, but at one point writer Nathan Heller puts his finger on something vital:
Most people who were brought up in the past half century have been taught to live…by their own rules, building the world they want. That belief—[Eric] Klinenberg calls it “the cult of the individual”—may be the closest thing American culture has to a common ideal.
What Heller doesn’t say is that this attitude—an almost unconscious belief in the primacy of individuality over any kind of social or group identity—arises naturally from the ethic of self-interest that’s central to free-market capitalism. But it’s so pervasive in our society that it rears its head in unexpected places as well. While most of the debate about the role of anarchism in Occupy Wall Street has focused on tactics, there are ideological factors to be considered as well. Anarchist ideology is, in important respects, commensurate with that of laissez-faire capitalism in that both valorize the individual as the ultimate authority. (The cult of Ron Paul splits the difference between these schools of thought.) In my more pessimistic moments, I can’t help wonder if young people today haven’t been so thoroughly indoctrinated in the ideology of American individualism that they can’t even imagine a way out.
This atomized, fragmented America is the setting for Bruce Springsteen’s 17th studio album, Wrecking Ball. Inspired in part by OWS, the new album is being billed as Springsteen’s response to the financial crisis and subsequent economic depression, much as 2002’s The Rising, the album that kicked off what Wikipedia calls the “Return to success” phase of Springsteen’s career, was billed as a response to 9/11. Both characterizations are accurate, but the two albums can also be thought of as pieces of a career-long work about the vanishing American community. And while the reach of The Rising occasionally exceeded its grasp, with Bruce struggling to find his footing in a changed cultural landscape after several years away from the studio, Wrecking Ball sounds fully attuned to the realities of this Lesser Depression. It’s his best album in a quarter-century.
Springsteen’s political views have been the subject of much discussion over the years, but they’re really simple enough. He’s an old-school New Deal liberal who writes songs rooted in a blend of economic populism and social conservatism—not the mean-spirited wedge-issue conservatism of today, but rather a broad-based appeal to old-fashioned values of family, faith, and hard work—that’s largely disappeared from American politics today, although not from American life. It’s a liberalism that predates the cultural battles of the 1960s, which have defined the contours of American politics ever since. During his commercial peak of the 1980s, Springsteen was able to make music that appealed to both Republicans and Democrats. The political bent of the songs on albums like Nebraska (1982) and Born in the U.S.A. (1984) was unmistakable yet subtle—occasionally too subtle, as evidenced by Ronald Reagan’s famous misappropriation of “Born in the U.S.A.” for his re-election campaign. Outside of his music, Springsteen largely kept a low political profile, focusing mostly on nonpartisan issues like veterans’ affairs and homelessness. But by 2004, the time had come to choose a side. And so he did, lending his support to the John Kerry campaign and no doubt pissing off some fans in the process. (He would go on to support Barack Obama’s presidential bid in 2008.)
Now, at age 62, he’s made the angriest album of his career. Wrecking Ball makes the case for a return to New Deal liberalism with far more passion than we’ve ever seen from Obama. In the wake of the worst financial crisis in 75 years, the workingmen and women who’ve populated Springsteen’s songs for the past 40 years now find themselves broke and unemployed, staring down middle and old age with savings depleted and prospects dim. And they have a pretty good idea about who’s to blame. As one of the album’s characters puts it: “Gambling man rolls the dice, workingman pays the bills/It’s still fat and easy up on bankers hill.” Elsewhere we meet a “Jack of All Trades” whose skill set apparently extends to handiness with the steel, hardly the album’s only intimation of violence. “Sing it hard and sing it well/Send the robber barons straight to hell,” shouts another of Springsteen’s working-class heroes on “Death to My Hometown.”
Their anger is rooted in a deep sense of betrayal. The opening “We Take Care of Our Own,” with its rousing chorus “Wherever this flag’s flown/We take care of our own,” scans as a patriotic anthem. But you don’t have to dig too deeply to find the tattered ruins of the social contract, as the lyrics recount how the American government—Bruce’s government, our government—has failed its people over and over again (“From the shotgun shack to the Superdome/We yelled ‘help’ but the cavalry stayed home”). The “we” of the song’s title doesn’t extend to the Washington-Wall Street axis that runs the country. We’re on our own. (I read somewhere that Obama included “We Take Care of Our Own” on a campaign playlist, or some such thing, leading me to wonder if he understood the song any better than Reagan did “Born in the U.S.A.” Or if he’d even listened to it at all.)
Springsteen may have grown up on Roy Orbison and Bob Dylan, but the major American artist he resembles most closely is the film director John Ford. Both share a grounding in Catholic values, a taste for Americana culture, and a penchant for sentimentality that occasionally gets the better of them. But more important, Springsteen and Ford share a generous patriotism, one rooted in a communitarian ideal of America. Ford’s greatest films were westerns set in a rugged environment where people had to help each other out to ensure their mutual survival. This is the America of “We Take Care of Our Own,” a place where “nobody crowds you, nobody goes it alone,” as Springsteen put it on 2007’s “Long Walk Home.” It’s an ideal defined by the immigrant experience—Ford was the son of Irish parents; Springsteen’s mother is a first-generation Italian American. The 2005 Devils and Dust closed with the moving “Matamoros Banks,” about a man leaving his family behind in Mexico for better prospects across the river. The rollicking “American Land,” one of two bonus tracks on the “deluxe edition” of Wrecking Ball, is more pointed: “The hands that built the country we’re always trying to keep out.”
The melting-pot ethic extends to the music. The previous Springsteen work that Wrecking Ball most resembles is We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, a collection of folk covers released in 2006. Like much of that album, several tracks here, notably the mock funeral march of “Death to My Hometown,” reference Irish folk music. Springsteen has never been an experimentalist, and his few previous attempts to stray outside the boundaries of classic rock have mostly fallen flat. But the musical stew of Wrecking Ball complements the classic E Street sound of “We Take Care of Our Own” and the glorious title track with elements of folk, gospel, and even a 16-bar rap, which fits seamlessly into the mix. Traditional rock instrumentation is generously supplemented with violins, banjos, and all manner of horns, among many other instruments.
The ascendant gospel influence marks the full blooming of the religiosity that has crept into Springsteen’s late work. Before becoming the unofficial anthem of the civil rights movement, “We Shall Overcome” began its life as a gospel song, written by the Methodist minister Charles Tindley. In covering it, Springsteen recalled a day when the intersection of religion and politics in America meant something very different than it does now. Early on, “Shackled and Drawn” evokes the spirit of an old-time revival, with a sampled female voice exhorting, “I want everyone to stand up and be counted tonight!” (Wrecking Ball must contain more samples than the rest of Springsteen’s catalog put together, many taken from Alan Lomax field recordings of the 1940s.) But it’s on the last three songs that the album’s spiritual undercurrents rise to the surface. “Rocky Ground” is an outright gospel song, mixing imagery from testaments old and new:
Forty days and nights of rain washed this land
Jesus said the moneychangers in this temple will not stand
Find your flock, get them to higher ground
The floodwater’s rising, we’re Canaan bound.
Times are hard, but the promised land is still in sight and right will triumph in the end. This sense of Messianic expectation extends into the following song, “Land of Hope and Dreams,” which has been kicking around for more than a decade (Springsteen and the E Street Band performed it when I saw them in 1999). Alluding to Curtis Mayfield’s epochal “People Get Ready,” Springsteen sings of the great train headed for the promised land, carrying saints and sinners, whores and gamblers, losers—and even winners. All you gotta do is get on board.
The final track, “We Are Alive,” evokes nothing less than the resurrection of the dead. Riding the riff from Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” Springsteen recounts his own people’s history of the United States, a roll call of workers, activists, immigrants, and all those who died trying to turn their American dreams into reality:
A voice cried, ‘I was killed in Maryland in 1877
When the railroad workers made their stand.’
‘I was killed in 1963,
One Sunday morning in Birmingham.’
‘I died last year crossing the southern desert,
My children left behind in San Pablo.’
Well they left our bodies here to rot
Oh please let them know
Their bodies may have been left to rot, but their souls will rise. In the last verse, the singer imagines himself among their number, and it’s hard not to think about the late E Streeter Clarence Clemons, the subject of a moving tribute in the album’s liner notes, whose saxophone shows up on two Wrecking Ball tracks. Hope springs eternal, even in the face of death. As the past few years have reminded us, faith and hope are not sufficient to produce social change—but you’re sure not going to get very far without them.
In that spirit, Wrecking Ball’s most crucial track might be the title song. Apparently inspired by the demolition of Giants Stadium in New Jersey, “Wrecking Ball” is a sweeping rock anthem in the style of “Born to Run,” although the song it most reminds me of (and this is going to be a weird reference even for me) is The Cure’s I’m-so-suicidal-I’m-happy “Doing the Unstuck.” Like that song, “Wrecking Ball” invokes the power of creative destruction in a spiritual sense, the necessity of taking a wrecking ball to the hopelessness and negativity that turn good hearts to stone. Like the OWS protesters, Springsteen doesn’t have all the answers, but to complain that emotion trumps political analysis here is to miss the point entirely. “Hold on to your anger,” he repeats, “and don’t fall to your fears.” I can’t think of a political song by Springsteen that’s less rooted in specificity—nor one more in tune with the spirit of the times.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
