This could be fun. Ye Olde Rolling Stones recorded most of their new album A Bigger Bang, released on September 6, as a threesome.Jagger even played drums:
"I was playing drums and all that sort of stuff I usually never do and that was fun," he says. "Happily for the fans, my drums never made it on the record apart from one or two little hits that were saved. Keith and I were just having a laugh with a lot of it."
Me on this week's singles. Winners: Mariah Carey (who really should lose her marbles more often) and Black Eyed Peas.
Arianna Huffington, over at the aptly-titled Huffington Post blog, conjures a pretty interesting theory. What if jailed NYT reporter Judy Miller actually was the source behind the entire Valerie Plame/Karlito Rove affair/leak/sock hop:
But a very different scenario is being floated in the halls. Here it is: It's July 6, 2003, and Joe Wilson's now famous op-ed piece appears in the Times, raising the idea that the Bush administration has "manipulate[d]" and "twisted" intelligence "to exaggerate the Iraqi threat." Miller, who has been pushing this manipulated, twisted, and exaggerated intel in the Times for months, goes ballistic. Someone is using the pages of her own paper to call into question the justification for the war -- and, indirectly, much of her reporting. The idea that intelligence was being fixed goes to the heart of Miller's credibility. So she calls her friends in the intelligence community and asks, Who is this guy? She finds out he's married to a CIA agent. She then passes on the info about Mrs. Wilson to Scooter Libby (Newsday has identified a meeting Miller had on July 8 in Washington with an "unnamed government official"). Maybe Miller tells Rove too -- or Libby does. The White House hatchet men turn around and tell Novak and Cooper. The story gets out.
This is why Miller doesn't want to reveal her "source" at the White House -- because she was the source. Sure, she first got the info from someone else, and the odds are she wasn't the only one who clued in Libby and/or Rove (the State Dept. memo likely played a role too)… but, in this scenario, Miller certainly wasn't an innocent writer caught up in the whirl of history. She had a starring role in it. This also explains why Miller never wrote a story about Plame, because her goal wasn't to write a story, but to get out the story that cast doubts on Wilson's motives. Which Novak did.
The sad reality for Democrats chomping at the bit to send Rove to the guillotine, is that this theory -- as of now -- holds as much water as any "Rove did it!" tales.
Read the rest here.
Josh Love's take on the problem with indie generates more questions than answers, but given that Miami's at the epicenter of the fault lines of indie, dance, and pop, his ambivalences seem revelant.
It's official: Paul McCartney has lost his mind. Apparently George Harrison so valued the encouragement Macca gave him as a budding songwriter at the height of Beatlemania that he has gallantly consented to help The Beatles bassist from beyond the grave. A song on Paulie's upcoming album was finished thanks to George's intervention:
Sir Paul said he was remained unsure about the meaning of the song's lyrics.Maybe this is a subtle dig at George, as in: "For all your griping, you were often as banal and uninspired as I seem to be with greater frequency these days. Care to help, mate?" Someone cut his fucking rope, burning or otherwise.
"I thought, OK, the 'waiting on the other side' is also a little bit loaded, it can be crossing the river Jordan or whatever, that sort of thing. There's a little bit of double meaning there," he said.
"It was funny, particularly the second verse: 'I've been sliding down a slippy slope, I've been climbing up a slowly burning rope.' I just thought - it's a George song."
No need to despair, cautions The Village Voice. For those liberals (and, by extension, their counterparts in the right wing) protesting the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court, Chisun Lee has a better idea:
Why not take that energy and begin to mobilize a long-term, popular movement? Build toward 2008. Try to assemble, despite gerrymandering, a more accountable Congress next year. Not just with slogans, but with real change—easier and sounder voting processes, minority-supportive districting, inclusive leadership rather than cults of personality. That could bring more power to people most vulnerable to shifts in criminal, property, and civil rights laws—people who are currently shut out of the processThe great social movements of the last century -- woman's suffrage, civil rights, legal abortions -- counted on popular support to sway the court. May it be so again.
Nice Kelefa piece on Kanye West in the studio. He's right about the new Common: it's solid and overrated; but I'm surprised he let Kanye get away with this without comment:
"I've always been rhyming - that's why I've always been a good producer," he explained afterward. "I just wasn't the greatest rapper. Now that I rap better, I make simpler tracks."
NYT provides a solid recap and overall to the Karl Rove-Valerie Plame saga, and also points out a very interesting factoid that directly brings our president into question:
Then there is the broader issue of whether Mr. Bush was aware of any effort by his aides to use the C.I.A. officer's identity to undermine the standing of her husband, a former diplomat who had publicly accused the administration of twisting its prewar intelligence about Iraq's nuclear program.
Shoud Bush testify to the grand jury? Maybe.
This story from The New Yorker, sent to me by Phoebe is too fucking funny for words. I'll give you the title and let you read it for yourself: MY DOG IS TOM CRUISE. Please. Click on the link. And then, look at this:
Cross-posted from my blog and originally seen on DailyKos.
Do people really think this is a good idea?:
A Colorado congressman told a radio show host that the U.S. could "take out" Islamic holy sites if Muslim fundamentalist terrorists attacked the country with nuclear weapons.
Rep. Tom Tancredo made his remarks Friday on WFLA-AM in Orlando, Florida. His spokesman stressed he was only speaking hypothetically.
Talk show host Pat Campbell asked the Littleton Republican how the country should respond if terrorists struck several U.S. cities with nuclear weapons.
"Well, what if you said something like -- if this happens in the United States, and we determine that it is the result of extremist, fundamentalist Muslims, you know, you could take out their holy sites," Tancredo answered.
"You're talking about bombing Mecca," Campbell said.
"Yeah," Tancredo responded.
The congressman later said he was "just throwing out some ideas" and that an "ultimate threat" might have to be met with an "ultimate response."
Spokesman Will Adams said Sunday the four-term congressman doesn't support threatening holy Islamic sites but that Tancredo was grappling with the hypothetical situation of a terrorist strike deadlier than the September 11, 2001, attacks.
I'm ashamed this person represents any percentage of my country.
There's no such thing as sort of undercover, or not-really-that-undercover, y'know. And these agents make sure Congress knows it.
Me reviewing this week's singles. Big thumbs-up to Rob Thomas' latest and especially the new Mario. Guess I'm a sucker for bathetic punch-drunk R&B with crunchy guitar.
You can always depend on George Orwell for bitter medicine. Here's this passage from his essay "No, Not One," written a couple of months before the attack on Pearl Harbor and when Europe's future was looking mighty bleak:
The notion that you can somehow defeat violence by submitting to it is simply a flight from fact. As I have said, it is only possible to people who have money and guns between themselves and reality. But why should they want to make this flight, in any case? Because, rightly hating violence, they do not wish to recognize it is integral to modern society and that their own fine feelings and noble attitudes are all the fruit of injustice backed up by force.As a guy of moderately liberal impulses, this passage chills me. No one likes to consider the origin of his prejudices. It gets better:
They do not want to learn where their incomes come from. Underenath this lies the hard fact, so difficult for many people to face, that individual salvation is not possible, that the choice before human beings is not, a a rule, between good and evil but between two evils. You can let the Nazis rule the world; that is evil; or you cn throw them by war, which is also evil. There is no other choice before you, and whichever you choose you will not come out with clean hands....There it is, without equivocation, in prose as lean and affectless as a reporter can write. Orwell then reaches this conclusion:
We only have the chance of choosing the lesser evil and of working for the establishment of a new kind of society in which common decency is possible...And this explains in part why I supported the war. Despite the lies, compromises, failures, and incompetence.
Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for posting this story: two young men were hanged in Iran for being gay. Here's the photo:
In other news, a British gay civil rights croup claims its leaders have received death threats from Muslim fundamentalists. It's not a stretch to admit, as Sullivan does, that there's no reason it couldn't happen in the United States.
If anyone in the reality-based community wants to burn a Placebo comp for me, I'll be most appreciative.
Me in response to an intemperate early review of New Order's good-not-great Waiting For The Sirens' Call.
So far, unless some convulsive revelation comes forth from David Gregory's trembling mouth, I remain underwhelmed by the Karl Rove-Valerine Plame nonsense. From the beginning Joseph Wilson always seemed like a preening fashion plate, posing with wife Valerie Plame on magazine covers like he was Colin Farrell and Valerie a doe-eyed Audrey Hepburn. And then when the Senate's Select Committee on Intelligence proved, in a report issued last summer, that not only was he a crybaby but a liar, I stopped caring. Christopher Hitchens does his usual expert evisceration.
The real isssue is to what extent the Bush administration sought to control the stream of contradictory information offered by an untrustworthy CIA and the Department of Defense's own intelligence agency which streamlined intelligence to fit a policy set months if not years before (Seymour Hersh's reporting in The New Yorker uncovered lots of evidence that this went on during the fall of 2002 and spring 2003. Or, as Kenneth Pollack, author of The Threatening Storm (the book that convinced me at the time that war was urgent and necessary), told Hersh, the Bush administration:
dismantle[d] the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them.If reporters and commentators studied the big picture for a moment, they would understand what's at stake here: holding a government responsible for its actions by reporting its inconsistencies, exaggerations, and distortions.
Hats off to Criterion, which continues to release the most exemplary DVD editions of obscure and out-of-print classics. I screened Robert Bresson's Au Hazard, Balthazar, which toured big cities in a newly restored print in 2003 and made such an impact that several critics voted it one of the best of the year; and Jean Renoir's The River this weekend. I'm still recovering from the former and the latter made a most soothing tranquilizer.
On the way: Jacques Tati's Mon Oncle, which I last screened in 1994 on a videotape copy so moth-eaten I could have stuck my big toe through the reel.
My idiosyncratic list of my favorite films, in alphabetical order. No doubt I've forgotten some. The criteria: films I don't mind watching at any time. Lots of film noir and comedies.
Aliens, dir. James Cameron (1986)
All About Eve, dir. Joseph Mankiewicz (1950)
Before Sunrise, dir. Richard Linklater (1994)
The Big Sleep, dir. Howard Hawks (1944)
Blue Velvet, dir. David Lynch (1986)
Chinatown, dir. Roman Polanski (1974)
Citizen Kane, dir. Orson Welles (1941)
Dangerous Liasions, dir. Stephen Frears (1988)
Dead Ringers, dir. David Cronenberg (1988)
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, dir. Luis Bunuel (1972)
The Earrings of Madame De.... dir, Max Ophuls (1951)
The Empire Strikes Back, dir. Irvin Kershner (1980)
A Fish Called Wanda, dir. Charles Crichton (1988)
The Godfather Saga, dir. Francis Ford Coppola (1976)
Husbands & Wives, dir. Woody Allen (1992)
Imitation of Life, dir. Douglas Sirk (1959)
Jules et Jim, dir. Francois Truffaut (1961)
The Lady Eve, dir. Preston Sturges (1941)
The Maltese Falcon, dir. John Huston (1941)
Midnight, dir. Mitchell Leisen (1938)
My Own Private Idaho, dir. Gus Van Sant (1991)
The Naked Gun, dir. David Zucker (1988)
Notorious, dir. Alfred Hitchcock (1944)
Pulp Fiction, dir. Quentin Tarantino (1994)
Trois Couleurs: Rouge, dir. Krystof Kieslowski (1994)
The Rules of the Game, dir. Jean Renoir (1939)
Spirited Away, dir. Miyazaki (2002)
Strangers On A Train, dir. Alfred Hitchcock (1950)
Stop Making Sense, dir. Jonathan Demme (1984)
Tootsie, dir. Sydney Pollack (1982)
Touch of Evil, dir. Orson Welles (1958)
Trouble in Paradise, dir. Ernst Lubitsch (1932)
Y Tu Mama Tambien, dir. Alfonso Cuaron (2001)
Robert Christgau takes down Gus Van Sant's Last Days, his Kurt Cobain biopic starring Michael Pitt (of Murder By Numbers and The Dreamersnon-fame). His verdict: too pretty. Money quote:
Cobain was a sucker for this kind of project and probably would have dug it. But not counting a few lyrics, in his own art he took a more conventional path, and that conventionality was an essential component of the charisma Van Sant refuses to engage. Cobain was an arty, hypersensitive pretty boy, absolutely. But he wouldn't have been Elliott Smith if he hadn't rocked dynamite hooks like a motherfucker. The self he seemed to inhabit was animated by a populist passion Van Sant has no gift or taste for.Exactly. Nearly 14 years after Nevermind's release fans overlook the fact that Butch Vig's production and mix was probably more revolutionary than Cobain's songs. It was as if Boston auteur Tom Scholz produced a Damned album. What his choice said about where his sympathies truly were led Cobain to hire Steve Albini for In Utero (ever the contradictory cuss, Cobain then had R.E.M. righthand man Scott Litt apply hand cream to "Heart-Shaped Box" and other songs which sounded like hits).
They are the most ennui-filled people in the world, entirely without content. And Van Sant is in love with whiteness in the same eroticized way he's in love with fatality; in his image-world it's all ghosts all the time, moving so slowly they seem for a couple hours to be almost human.The casting of Michael Pitt, who looks like Leonardo DiCaprio cloned as a harmless A student, is not an example of a turbulent force of nature who would upset the project's aura of respectability aura (Brando, or hell, Ryan Gosling he ain't).
It's much harder to defend a maligned album than you think. In asking listeners to set their reservations aside, you can't push yourself; there's a fine line between being an advocate and an apologist.Thomas Inskeep's judicious reassessment of David Bowie's misbegotten Tonight hasn't changed my mind about the album, but at least I accept the possibility that someone can defend an album most people consider an ignoble part of Bowie's resume (and the first step of his slide into irrelevance).
Fuck. The first graf had me laughing. Dave Queen even remembers that "Some Like It Hot" made its most memorable appearance as the soundtrack to Rusty Griswold's splendidly lurid fantasy.
For fuck's sake, when is Rolling Stone going to announce that LUTHER VANDROSS IS DEAD on its fucking website!?
This piece in the Washington City Pages provoked a fair amount of discusson on ILM today. While I tend to ignore the blog pseudo-events that are the musical equivalent of discussing Dick Durbin or Karl Rove's latest remarks, the premise of the essay - not to mention the position(s) the reporter took - troubled me. It wasn't just Jason Cherkis' lazy polarity - rock critics vs, ahem, "the average Insound or Pitchfork or blog reader" -or his quiet dignified blubbering over The Death of the Rock Critic As Cultural Force; it was Cherkis' tone, which veered between scorn for the recividism of Dave Eggers and Nick Hornby to sentimentality for the loss in cultural capital that the Serious Rock Critic must accept if she's going to publish anything worthwhile. And the context in which he inserts his quotes defies description:
It’s huge,” says [Matt] Wishnow, [president of Insound], “the fall of the rock critic as celebrity that we used to know—Greil Marcus, the Chuck Eddy, the Christgau. Peer opinion and access to peer opinion have been so elevated and multiplied that people tend to know about [records] from a trusted voice before the rock critic even does."Um, rock critics aren't "trusted voices"?
David Greenberg reminds us that fights between the president and Senate over SCOTUS nominees is nothing new, going back as far as George Washington's nomination of John Rutledge in 1795 (rejected by the Senate because he opposed Jay's Treaty); it's the quiet years that have been the exception. In fact, it got downright ugly during the 19th century:
The Senate of the 19th Century was no rubber stamp. The politics of that period are known for their partisanship, and the judicial wars were no exception. Between 1789 and 1894, 22 of 81 Supreme Court nominees failed to reach the bench, as a result of being either rejected, withdrawn, or left unacted upon by the Senate.As usual, reporters don't know their history.
A review of used CD purchases made at Criminal Records in Atlanta last weekend:
Sonic Youth – Dirty
In the New Rolling Stone Album Guide, Rob Sheffield claims that Sonic Youth are better at sprawl than concision. Apart from overlooking what he loved about Sister, it's a dubious claim in light of all the great noise-nuggets SY have strewn over their most austere atonal skronk-fests. 1992's Dirty, the second of their mainstrream trilogy (1990's Goo and 1994's Experimental Jet Set, Trash, and No Star are the others), is what the title promises: a dirtier Goo, with the vocals as foregrounded as the politics. "Youth Against Fascism" and "Chapel Hill" are their most scathing indictments of fascism to date, although you can bet that if Thurston or Lee had sung "Swimsuit Issue" instead of Kim we'd be accusing SY of succumbing to that old adage: those with condemn fascism can goose-step with the most devoted brownshirt. As it is, Kim makes like a drunken butterfly and eats your créme brulée, inspiring her comrades to record their sexiest music until last year's fantastic Sonic Nurse. Burn Goo's best tracks on a CD-R along with Dirty's and you'll have a real winner. Grade: A-
Eric B & Rakim - Follow The Leader
The best hip-hop album before It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back? Follow The Leader is effortless and relentless while Public Enemy's masterpiece is shrill and relentless, a showcase for the most gifted, ambitious deejay (Eric B) until Prince Paul would supplant him when he inaugurated the Daisy Age and a rapper (Rakim) so quicksilvered that he makes Chuck D look like Heavy D. At once symphonic and insular, Follow The Leader is what happens when artists infatuated with tone and timbre don't settle for just sonic impact – a disease afflicting much hip-hop and, yes, rock (take that 50 Cent and Beck). For Eric B & Rakim, a sound doesn't resonate until the word is made flesh; you hear their joy in their discovery in every one of Rakim's crisp declaratives and Eric B's on-target sample bursts. Grade: A+
Kelefa Sanneh has written the best obit on Luther Vandross and his legacy. As one who came to Vandross late, it's confirmation of what I felt as I listened to the lumpen Essential Luther Vandross I got just days before he died. After a week, I sought relief in Eric B & Rakim, or better, Al Green; returning to those guys after Luther felt as if a soccer ball had winded me in the middle of a triumphant run to the goal.
For all his considerable prowess, Vandross never felt quite human; his voice was smooth, sweet, without grit or wear, luscious but not lustrous. It was the human voice as signifier of beauty; a man for whom ritual mattered more than romance – and definitely more than sex. A lot of those '80s ballads for which Vandross has gotten so much praise are rather limp, anchored by the tinny programming and plinky keybs of '80s R&B. Rarely do you sense that the happiness he sang about with such shit-eating intensity in songs like "She Wants Me Back" and "The Power of Love" was earned after a spell in purgatory. It's the lack of tension in his songs, voice, and persona which keep Vandross from attaining the gravitas of Al Green, in whom you sensed real conflict years before The Belle Album.
Only a churl would downplay Vandross' considerable achievements, so let's just say that he deserved the title Greatest R&B Singer. If "great" means disembodied and abstract as much as peerless and untouchable, then I bow before him.
Finally: call me stupid, but I never suspected Vandross was homosexual. It never occurred to me. Now I realize that he played Cary Grant as well as he played Great Singer.
A team of American and Canadian psychologists recently published a study positing that men who call themselves bisexual are either gay, straight, or lying. According to the New York Times, the psychologists measured genital arousal patterns in response to images of men and women. Men who identified themselves as bisexual were "in fact exclusively aroused by either one sex or the other, usually by other men."
My list of my favorite records, starting with the year in which I was conceived:
1973: Steely Dan, Countdown to Ecstasy
1974: Stevie Wonder, Innervisions
1975: Roxy Music, Siren
1976: David Bowie, Station To Station
1977: Fleetwood Mac, Rumours
1978: Talking Heads, More Songs About Buildings & Food
1979: Neil Young, Rust Never Sleeps
1980: Pretenders, Pretenders
1981: Psychedelic Furs, Talk Talk Talk
1982: Michael Jackson, Thriller
1983: REM, Murmur
1984: Replacements, Let It Be
1985: Mekons, Fear & Whiskey
1986: Pet Shop Boys, Please
1987: Prince, Sign 'O' The Times
1988: Go-Betweens, 16 Lovers Lane
1989: New Order, Technique
1990: Public Enemy, Fear of a Black Planet
1991: Tribe Called Qwest, The Low-End Theory
1992: Sugar, Copper Blue
1993: U2, Zooropa
1994: Hole, Live Through This
1995: Pavement, Wowee Zowee
1996: DJ Shadow, Endtroducing...
1997: Sleater Kinney, Dig Me Out
1998: Outkast, Aquemini
1999: Magnetic Fields, 69 Love Songs
2000: PJ Harvey, Stories From The City, Stories From the Sea
2001: Bob Dylan, Love & Theft
2002: Kylie Minogue, Fever
2003: The Wrens, Meadowlands
2004: Sonic Youth, Sonic Nurse
Obviously the point of lists is to piss people off. I could pick these, or I could pick others tomorrow.
So Atlanta was a lot of fun. Sleater Kinney's fierce performance proved that, even in support of an unspectacular album, they're the best live act extant. The setlist included almost all of The Woods, plus a smattering of older material, the oldest of which was an extended version of "Dig Me Out" they're so fond of lately. Doing the admirable feat of seeming motionless while her inimitable yodel pirouetted of its own accord, Corin Tucker made the sanctimony of "Entertain," well, if not entertaining, as compelling as "Jumpers" and "Wilderness." Janet Weiss' drumming matched her, swinging like Charlie Watts with the ferocity of Keith Moon. Carrie Brownstein's sidewinder riffs coiled ever more tightly, even when her guitar was out of tune during "Oh!"
Sidenote: my pals and I spotted Corin and Carrie munching salad at the Brewhouse Cafe. Our gawking was rewarded when Carrie chased our waitress into the restaurant, coming within 12 feet of our table. I waved and said, "Good luck." Carrie flashed a small grin, mumbled thanks, and rejoined Corin, who by this time had slapped on a widebrimmed hat and sunglasses.
A short while later, walking to a rather awful lesbian bookstore, we bumped into a glum Janet Weiss sitting on the curb, with a mobile phone.
Finally, a salute to fellow Stylus writer Josh Love, whom I finally met at the show. My one regret is that I didn't get to hang out with him and his girlfriend some more. That way I could have heard more compliments about my new Roxy Music T-shirt.
How unfortunate -- just four days ago I bought my first Vandross album, the great two-disc Essential comp. He already had my eternal love for helping David Bowie with Young Americans and helming two of Aretha's more consistent '80s albums, Jump To It and Get It Right. I regret it took me years to see what great songs, in every sense (sung, arranged, performed), "Never Too Much, "Give Me The Reason," "Here & Now," and his revelatory cover of "A House is Not A Home" are.
