Of "American Idol" and its discontents

Scott Woods dismisses Jody Rosen's claim that "American Idol" has been "good for popular music -- an assertion that forced me to blink blankly like the "South Park" kids at school. Sure, you get classic flukes like Kelly Clarkson's "Since U Been Gone"; the trouble is, none of the ballads she wraps those bold pipes around aren't even pasable Bacharach-Sager (And don't get me started on Toni Braxton and Prince's appearances last night. Performing on TV's most popular variety show gives your sales a kick in the ass). AI winners are as carefully scripted as extras in a musical. But is there room for anything weird? Nay, Hicks writes:

I can't imagine Missy Elliott even getting through the first round of "American Idol." I can't imagine Madonna in 1982 getting through the first round ("You clearly have no ability to sing--and that wardrobe is hideous"). Or M.I.A. Or Pink. Or Courtney Love. Or Annie Lennox. Or (heh) Neil Tennant. (The equation becomes beyond absurd, of course, if you start predating MTV: "Sorry, Mr. Fagen, you'll need to comb your hair and wipe that permanent scowl off your face.")

Of course, inquiring minds want to know how well this Taylor Hicks cat did.

On potatoes, frozen saints, and Sam Cooke

Mike Powell cites Stephen Malkmus and Donna Summer as examples of how being "open-minded" about music allows you to experience the pleasures of their "emotional disconnect." But do Malkmus and Summer project emotional disconnection? It's more a distrust of emotion, or better, a distrust of the modes of discourse available to musicians for the expression of emotion. The key Pavement lyric (there are certainly reams from which I can cite) for me is in 1999's "Major Leagues," a ballad which uncurls with the limpid grace of koi in a pond, the pigtailed little sister to Public Image Ltd's "This Is Not a Love Song": "You kiss like a rock/But you know I need it anyway." This distrust (if not disgust) is a trope most canonical figures have used in some form; think of all the idiot winds Dylan has blown since "Love Minus Zero" or "It Ain't Me Babe"; or the contempt Mick Jagger shows his factory girl; or the narrator of a certain Pet Shop Boys tune admitting "I love you/you pay my rent."

When I was 18 I wanted to be Bryan Ferry. There is a sense in which loving Bryan Ferry meant attempting to become the Love God that Ferry himself couldn't hope to be (a lot like loving Cary Grant, I'd argue). Liking Ferry also meant noting the abyss between himself and the guilelessness of Otis Redding and Sam Cooke. Mike notes this phenomenon in Donna Summer's "I Feel Love":

Donna Summer didn’t pretend to be cool, she sort of pretended to be hot. And she was hot. But she was more like Kim Gordon, in that sense: sounding so unbelievably passionate that you, well, didn’t exactly believe her

Before Ferry discarded irony as one more mode of discourse he distrusted – when on songs like 1980's "Over You" he sort of pretended to be cool – his insincerity signified his willingness to believe in the emotion behind the expression while maintaining a wary distance from both. I don't know how else to describe what he does on 1972's "If There is Something," in which he declaims lines "I'll put roses 'round your door, sleep in the garden/growing potatoes by the score" like The Count in "Sesame Street." I suspect he wrote and sang like this because he couldn't hope to match Otis and Sam; but so what, right? In wanting to have it every which way he confused the hell out of me, and it was wonderful, especially for the gay man I wasn't quite yet. As an ineffectual heterosexual I emulated Ferry's sincere insincerity in my relations with women, but especially with men; it worked as an ideal subterfuge, acting camp to defuse growing suspicions among the guys about my real tastes.

I crushed on Malkmus almost as hard as I did Ferry, but for all his syntactical games and abstruse Ashberyian wordplay he was a lot more human – if by "human" we mean willing to discard said games when your audience blinks confusedly. I've known plenty of guys like him: cute in a scruffy way, his heterosexuality as comfortably rumpled as the argyles he probably wears to prove he's suburban prep underneath it all. It helped that he was a better singer and guitarist than Ferry was a singer and keyboardist. Moreover, he was always more comfortable playing the Love God than Ferry was in 1972; note his skill at crafting slowies like 1992's "Here" or last year's "Freeze the Saints," which for direct expression are at least as good as the protracted ambivalences of "Gold Soundz."

Emotional disconnection/distrust works in art, less so in life.

Thanks to You Tube, you too can appreciate the marvels of Grace Jones. It's the video for 1986's "I'm Not Perfect (But I'm Perfect for You") [love the title, Grace!]. Andy Warhol and Nile Rodgers offer effusive testimonials.

All the windmills in Holland

I'm ambivalent about lots of Frank Kogan's ideas (I hope to explain why when I finally get around to writing the review) but he's a damn fine miniaturist, and such an active listener that even a seemingly coruscating review reads like praise because his attention to surface is almost ascetic in its intensity. My oatmeal went out my nose upon reading this review of Whitney's "I Will Always Love You" found in Real Punks Don't Wear Black (apologies to Whitney fan Thomas:

I talked in Radio On #2 about her animal competence,' but really thre's no animal in it, it's more lke a jet engine preening and showing its pats. Which can be powerful enough. She kind of loses control about two-thirds of the way through this song, however – it's the section in the video where the camera moves in close and she smiles bright and meaninglessly and opens her mouth and lets loose while the camera pulls back again and you can see her now sitting in a chair in the snow (?) wearing noting but a thin suit jacket. And from there on she's just blaring away, trying to power all the windmills in Holland, and the song disappears in the whoosh.

"A loose affiliation of millionaires..."

Brian Eno confirms that he did reunite with Roxy Music, and he did contribute songs, thank you very much. He also offers insight into collaborating with Paul Simon, including his thoughts on Graceland, an album whose Western-African hybrid initially rankled the co-creator of Talking Heads' Remain in Light:

"I realise now that what I was feeling was envy," he says, briefly collapsing with laughter. "It was like I'd found this wonderful private beach, and suddenly Paul Simon moved in and brought all these people along with him. I was sort of annoyed, but whenever I happened to hear something from Graceland, I found myself liking it. And I found out from one of the percussionists who'd worked with him that, contrary to my initial suspicions, he hadn't exploited the musicians at all. In fact, he'd treated them extremely well."

To prepare myself to listen to the new Simon I played Graceland a lot; it holds up marvelously well, despite a patchy second side (I want to be repulsed by "Under African Skies," in which Bwana Paul notes Joseph's face "black as night," but the melody -- thank you guitarist Ray Phiri -- is too beguiling). The sinuousity of the rhythm tracks mitigates Simon's irritating preciousness, producing unexpectated permutations: the joke's on Simon-the-wannabe hipster ("I Know What I Know"); or else both rhythm and lyrics elevate him into something perilously close to shamanship ("The Boy in the Bubble" -- the best song he's ever written?). Christgau was so right: "[Graceland] gives up a groove so buoyant it could float a loan to Zimbabwe."

I'll also defend The Rhythm of the Saints (not as sinuous, nor as beguiling) against all comers.

Random Thought Inspired In Part By Frank Kogan's Real Punks Don't Wear Black: the first 20 seconds of the Stones' "Get Off Of My Cloud" – those drums, how Keith Richards and Brian Jones' guitars grind, how Jagger's vocal turns the most mealy-mouthed of protests into an imprecation of indescribable malevolence – convey more danger than the entire recorded output of the Velvet Underground. Discuss.

I only started reading the book last night but I heard the song at a Mother's Day party, after which the euphoria at said party faltered, then vanished (quickly restored by a sudden dose of Sade).

Reading Republican and right-wing websites the day after President Bush's immigration speech has just been a barrel of roffles. The faithful can't decide whether to dab at their eyes with lace hankerchiefs (American made, of course) or hurl cries of "Apostate!" up 1600 Pennysylvania Avenue. NRO's The Corner should be renamed Lachrymose Lane. Here's John Derbyshire, the newest Jeremiah:

I am sunk in gloom. Our politics is, and apparently can only be, reactive. Nobody will do anything about our borders, or about our rules for residency and citizenship. Soon — I'd say in the 5 to 10 years ahead window — we'll lose a couple of cities to terrorist nukes. Then something will be done, fast and fierce and probably not very nice. Until then nothing will be done. The President is clueless; the Senate is a joke; the House has some stalwarts, but it will have fewer after November.

We can always count on Michelle Malkin for deft commentary too: "They should send Bush out in the helicopters with a super hi-def scope so he could peer into their souls and see if they were gonna be hard-workin or no."

No Surprise

My review of the Paul Simon album. I'm struck by the number of people these days who tell me they own Hearts & Bones.

Two final Grant McLennan obits, one by the Go-Betweens' most ardent American fan Robert Christgau, and one by Popmatters writer and Stylus colleague Justin Cober-Lake, the latter of which has a particularly salient insight into McLennan's genius ("McLennan doesn't need to describe the street you've been on, because you're invariably on the street he's describing"). Meanwhile Christgau reports that on the night of his death McLennan was going to celebrate a housewarming party, at which he planned to propose to his girlfriend Emma.

Listening to "Put You Down" off his 1995 solo album Horsebreaker Star, I kept thinking, "Shit, shit, shit."

Finally: a Slate music piece that doesn't allude to EMP or rockism

No one's written much about this quiet Hua Hsu essay on New Order, which is a pity; the rockcrit world needs another attempt to define rockism like it needs another Village Voice Corporation purge of editors. Near the essay's conclusion we find a succint, perfect description of what made New Order sui generis:

New Order's music described new feelings, new possibilities of experience: lost in thought at a club, Godlike (or bored) on drugs, anxious about nothing in particular, hesitant to say anything too direct, alone but unafraid of modern life.

Among other points: NO's obsession with packaging and compiling their catalogue, as if they themselves recognize that they're "a set of signifiers" in need of frequent recontexualization. Watch for: "Age of Consent" played over the trailer for Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette.

Righteous anger vs rhetoric

Regarding Pearl Jam's new eponymous album, my usual objections apply: Mike McCready can't distinguish between liquid transparency ("Parachutes") and power-chord testosteronama ("Big Wave"); when it's not content to thud the rhythm section just sits. But most of these songs are anthemic in all the right ways, and if Eddie Vedder's righteous anger is more convincing than his rhetoric maybe that's enough (well, no: it bothers me that he still enunciates like he's gargling pebbles instead of weighing the syllables of his never-better lyrics).

It all comes together in "Unemployable," in which Vedder allows the W.M.A. stereotype with the Jesus Saves ring (I'll let you guess whether he lives in a red or blue state) an admission of fear. As a patient non-fan who thinks their post-1996 work is consistent enough to rival their live shows, I think this is their best since at least Yield if not Vitalogy. And "Come Back" might be their best ballad, period (overwrought can be good).

Love goes on anyway

My Grant McLennan obit. A few challenges. It was difficult to avoid sentimentality, and I wanted to describe for the uninitiated what McLennan's music sounded like.

Robert Forster on the Go-Betweens' official message board:

Today I went to the website and read some of the magnificent tributes that have flown in for Grant. People for some days have been telling me of the beautiful things written there. And today I felt well enough and strong enough to go in and read. I thank you all. In time I shall read every one of them. I see familiar names scattered from our past. The vast majority I don't know. All of you Grant and I have met through our music. Your words and thoughts I find very, very moving. I sense the love and understanding for Grant and his music, and I take the support you send to me to my heart.

These last days I have Grant in my head. He talks to me in odd moments. I hear him... and I always will.

"Maybe I think too much for my own sake"

Stephen Thomas Erlewine's review of the new Brian Eno-helmed Paul Simon record Surprise (sorry: the credits read, "Produced by Paul Simon, Sonic Awareness by Brian Eno") has got me intrigued. Simon's always been the kind of singer-songwriter maligned for being what he isn't, by which I mean: people would admit to liking him if he was more like James Taylor or Jackson Browne, instead of being uncategorizable. Anyway, as someone who hates Simon & Garfunkel almost as much as the Eagles and the Doors and adores Graceland, I'd love to know if Surprise is aptly named. He even plays lots of guitar, which is always a treat.

"Whatever I have is yours, and it's right here"

I remember when I first heard "Bachelor Kisses." In the spring of 2000 I was visiting Manhattan for a journalism convention. I bought the Go-Betweens' Spring Hill Fair, after years of Robert Christgau encomia and memorizing Eric Weisbard's entry in The SPIN Alternative Record Guide. Like all the best McLennan, "Bachelor Kisses" tugged at the memory: specific yet avoiding the literal. I hadn't yet experienced what the beautiful vernacular of his bridge spelled out ("Don't believe what you've heard/`Faithful''s not a bad word"), but he convinced me that I could, and the inexorable tug of McLennan's voice and guitar did the rest. I fell in love.

Here's an ILM thread, filled with reminiscences of critics who interviewed him and fans who loved him.

The official ABC News obit.

A list of the songs you should download, like, now:

"Your Turn, My Turn"
"Two Steps, Step Out"
"Cattle & Cane"
"Slow Slow Music"
"In the Core of a Flame"
"Right Here"
"Bye Bye Pride"
"Streets of Your Town"
"Easy Come, Easy Go"
"Put You Down"
"Lighting Fires"
"Stones For You"

Finally, Steve Kilbey, late of The Church and McLennan's collaborator (Jack Frost), has written the most touching obit to date, going to the heart of Grant's singularity:

grant seemed to have a way of opening up his mouth
and singing instant choruses
hed plucked outta the ether
words flew to him
he walk with melodies at his beck n call

R.I.P.

Grant McLennan - R.I.P.

I just heard. Apparently he died in his sleep. As soon as I find out more information I'll edit and update. Likewise if anyone has learned anything else, drop me a line.

Anyone who knows me knows how much The Go-Betweens' catalogue has meant to me over the years, so I'm not sure what to write just yet.

See ya

One more domino falls. With Porter Goss gone, speculation mounts: conflicts with Director of National Intelligence John Negraponte? the President got wind of the burgeoning Randy Cunningham-Brent Wilkes imbroglio (which I am only now trying to understand)? If there's anything else I'm missing, let me know.

Adolescence: the disease for which there is no cure

Keep your eye on Mallory O'Donnell; he's got the goods. In this reevaluation of The Cure's rather forgotten 1990 remix album Mixed Up, Mallory evokes without condescension the adolescence mindset for which Robert Smith's miserabilism serves as the ideal soundtrack. The essay is too long, and its diffuseness makes certain ideas hard to parse (Mixed Up representing "the exact moment at which profound self-reflection commingles with pure sensuality" sounds right, even though I'm not sure what he means), but, of course, so is adolescence; and for many of us in high school Robert Smith's so-smooth-it-even-feels-like-skin fantasias conveyed the erotic languor which sure smelled great when we were bored of Morrissey's strained attempts at distance. Conveyed it too well, perhaps: these days The Cure remind me of earnest conversations in vacant lots, watching the video of "High" after mediating a frigid confrontation between two best friends, and my own strained attempts at heterosexual courtship.

(As for Mixed Up: the place to go for the super remixes of "Lullaby" and "Hot! Hot! Hot!!" and one of the best singles, "Never Enough." The mild heresy of a "rock" band issuing a remix album in 1990 now looks like a shrewd hipster move -- now looks like orthodoxy).

"And I ride and I ride..."

I'm in agreement with Pauline Kael that, with the wondrous exception of L'Avventura, the rest of Michaelangelo Antonioni's oeuvre doesn't quite hold up. A montage -- like the one the Academy of Motion Picture Farts and Biases played to a befuddled audience when he received the honorary Oscar in 1995 -- seems the best way of honoring him: Jeanne Moreau's night walk in La Notte, her senses alive to the excitement and terror of city life; Alain Delon's feline torpor in Eclisse; that waiting-for-a-Woody-Allen-parody tennis match between mimes in Blow-Up.

Thanks to Sony Picture Classics, I got a chance to rescreen The Passenger, his second and last American film. Yawning loudly upon watching the crappy videocassette edition that was extant in the early '90s, I was riveted this time by Antonioni's beautiful, unsettling juxtaposition of man and architecture, of man and landscape, whether it's David Locke (Jack Nicholson) sharing a smoke with a Tuareg nomad in North Africa, or standing before an Andalusian mountain, gradually accepting the consequences of his identity-theft (Clair Denis has obviously paid close attention). A Borges-ian riddle, The Passenger is also -- if not just -- a swanky head trip. You can take the identity swap folderol seriously or not; Antonioni's so genial a director that while you're arguing about the film's metaphysical import he's already moved on to photographing the quotidian (a girl chewing bubble gum, a man pushing a bike up a mountain) with an affectless curiosity that David Lynch no doubt admired. Affectlessness does have its limits; we should be grateful that, despite Kael's ministrations, the zombie-like Maria Schneider never did become the international icon for aging male lions which Last Tango in Paris positioned her as. As for Jack, with superstardom awaiting him (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was released a few months later), his commitment to the project never flags. He doesn't do much but walk, brood and frown puzzlingly at Schneider (no wonder we love Jack: he's human like the rest of us), but this is one of his more unheralded quiet performances: his character's self-contempt oozes from every pore.

Nicholson's commentary track, to which you can listen without cutting into your film time since there's so little dialogue, is a model of intelligence and concision (and stamina; Jack sounds like he's got strep throat). If L'Avventura intimidates you, as it should (two hour-plus rendering of the spiritual isolation of vapid rich people), The Passenger is an excellent condensation of the Antonioni style.

You get that? As bad as James Buchanan

Daring the posters at The Corner to defy him, Sean Wilentz (author of the mammoth The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln) penned an article in the new Rolling Stone entitled, "The Worst President in History."

I know. This is the same magazine which cooed delightedly when Bill Clinton wished that the Constitution didn't set a term limit for the Chief Executive so that he could run for a third term. But the catalogue of failures makes for grim reading, and, Wilentz suggests, it ain't gonna get better:

Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties -- [James] Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, [Herbert] Hoover and now Bush -- have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust. Bush, however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has not only stumbled badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common among the greatest presidential failures -- an unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic adjustment to changing realities. Repeatedly, Bush has undone himself, a failing revealed in each major area of presidential performance.

Meanwhile I looked at smilin' old Tony Snow, the White House's new press secretary and someone I've always sorta liked, and wonder how he's going to give coherence to an adminstration that ain't got none anymore.

Auto-erotica, X-Men style

X-Men star Sir Ian McKellen bitched that his character Magneto doesn't get enough nookie -- with Professor Charles Xavier.

"He hasn't been given a love line, which I think is a pity. It would be wonderful if the camera hovered over Magneto's bed, to discover him making love to Professor X."

The idea sounds delicious in theory, of course; but it would be unfair on Magneto, since Professor X can manipulate him into orgasm.

Scenes

Since I watch more films these days than I listen to music (D.W. Griffith would have loved Netflix), I want to write more about them. I've published a couple of reviews in Stylus already, and I'm going to be contributing to a new section called Scenes, the film counterpart to Seconds, in which a writer "dissects a moment in song."

For my first entry I chose Ernest Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise (1932), as close to perfection as romantic comedy gets, with a tone and glamour as alien to cinema as David Bowie's ethos was to most rock music. Get thee to Criterion's special edition, like, now.

"Can't you give me something else to talk about?"

Regarding Alexander O'Neal's Hearsay, Justin can hear little beside affirmation of what he disliked about late '80s R&B: "Hearsay doesn't separate itself from everything I wouldn't listen to when it came out." Meanwhile I have no hesitation in affirming its status as an all-time fave, probably in my top 10 -- quite an achievement considering that I only heard the album last December.

Elsewhere Josh reminds us of the eccentric Janet Jackson-Jam-Lewis troika. How does someone so vocally innocuous convince us over the course of five albums that she's a Superbowled sex kitten with aberrant notions of what makes a good time?

The lovers win every time

As producers of and songwriters for Cherrelle, the S.O.S. Band, the Human League, Alexander O'Neal, Karyn White, New Edition, Mary J. Blige and, of course, their greatest collaborator Janet Jackson, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis would probably make my list as the best creators of chartbound pop music of the last 20-odd years.

Stylus Magazine had dedicated the whole week to Jam & Lewis, beginning yesterday with Thomas Inskeep's fine omnibus essay and Jeff Siegel and Mallory O'Donnell's takes on Janet Jackson's "Nasty" and New Edition's magnificent "If It Isn't Love." Today I re-assess Jam-Lewis' work on Human League's misbegotten Crash.

Tomorrow: two very different analyses (by Justin Cober-Lake and myself) of Jam-Lewis' greatest non-Janet Jackson opus: Alexander O'Neal's Hearsay. Look for: a panel review of assorted Jam-Lewis goodies, a comprehensive study of their association with Janet, their post-Janet highlights; and, on Friday, the English perspective, by Marcello Carlin.

Even George W. Bush Has Got Soul

Neil Young's set to record an anti-Bush album. One tune is rather cryptically titled "Impeach the President." The music world holds its collective breath. Neil initially liked Reagan, you know.

"But your lyrics spoke gold and honey..."

I cannot describe the rush provided by the Jesus & Mary Chain's "Happy When It Rains" when driving home on a Saturday night with a bellyful of wine and good eats.

For your pleasure, vol #4

Morrissey, Ringleader of the Tormentors

I'm euphoric that Moz has finally owned up to liking cock; now he can go get some instead of indenturing poor Tony Visconti to enliven plodding midtempo songs whose lyrical explicitness their creator mistakes for honesty but is really the flipside of a middle aged pussyhound yielding to his urges. And we all know how gross that can be without the requisite irony. Anthony: "I used to laugh about boomer artists given attention long after their sell-through date, but the `four stars for Storyville' impulse doesn't seem so generation-specific now."

Yeah Yeah Yeah's, Show Your Bones

At first this album dragged. It was my fault: all these guys got from me in 2003 was a polite thumbs-up, while under my breath I mumbled something about the half-life of postpunk referents. I was convinced they wanted to make a thick-sounding rock album – what else could they do? But I wasn't convinced they could make a good one. So what if "Gold Lion" is Sleater Kinney-meets-Love-&-Rockets? Not when Karen O wants to belt like Chrissie Hynde, always a good thing (on "Cheated Hearts" she even mimics Chrissie's catch-in-the-throat). The kids won't download "Dudley" when they need a ringtone like they did for "Maps," and I know why: an admission that partying destroys even the most perfect love is not the message teenagers want to hear. Or hot young bands. So I give the Yeah's the credit for saying yeah.

Ghostface, Fishscale

He loves pussy almost as much as Morrissey loves explosive kegs between his legs, loves high-quality coke. He still finds time to hang with the Wu, hates it when black youth get away with, ahem, murder (it's their mama's fault: the kids don't get spanked enough). His ever-more-surreal anecdotes toughened by terse backbeats, most clocking in under three minutes ("Underwater" is creepy like PJ Harvey circa 1995), Ghostface will never blow up like Kanye, but this knowledge doesn't embitter him – hell, if it did, we might have something even more compelling than the album of the year.

Rush, "Ghost of a Chance"

My 17-year-old self, dutifully listening to my best friend's CD copy of Chronicles after being dragged to catch the Roll the Bones tour, would have blanched at 31-year-old me tearing up the second time the chorus to this 1992 ballad-by-numbers comes around. Unmoved by the sub-Zep material and malnourished album concepts of their '70s work (what, lyricist/drummer Neil Peart thought dystopian reveries made better cover art than ELP's Tarkus?), I'm surprised by how compelling their '80s stuff is, when Alex Lifeson's quasi-Police skank did Andy Summers better than Andy Summers and the lyrics – in essence Peart's Guide to Ayn Rand– acquire touching resonance; they're aimed for the kids, and if it helps them get through high school, hey, I'll distribute copies of Power Windows myself.

Yah Condi Be There

Despite what you may have read, invading Iran is not on the Bush adminstration's agenda. It's got other worlds to conquer, of which the most recalcitrant is the classical music world. Ask Condi and Yo Yo Ma.

I can't think of a single issue more dull than "immigration reform" – a total non-starter. Here's Fareed Zakariah's smart take.

Tom DeLay: May the love of God warm your heart

...now that you're going to be out of Congress in a few months.

Singles

This week's singles:

Belle & Sebastian - The Blues Are Still Blue

Stuart Murdoch’s transformation from wannabe folkie miniaturist to wannabe rocker generalist reminds me of Jake Gyllenhaal going from emo dork Donnie Darko to the swaggerin’ cowpoke Jack Nasty, er, Twist: unexpected, ingratiating, and a little awkward, which is probably the point, until you notice the bulge in his crotch; he knows he looks great. Less awkward, however, than Murdoch. Who can say whether his latent fondness for the grand gesture proves to be more than another role; but I’m glad he’s as bored with mumbled miserabilism as his audience. Score: [7]

Toby Keith - Get Drunk & Be Somebody

See, I thought the title was “Get Drunk and Beat Somebody.” At the risk of looking like an asshole, that’s the sort of song I expect Toby Keith to sing, not some limp-wristed empowerment ode qua Gretchen Wilson number. Score: [6]

The Fray - Over My Head

Now that the vein of American rock bands emulating Pearl Jam has been exhausted, young would-be scenesters look across the Atlantic for inspiration. Arena-size intimacy is Coldplay’s specialty, with a dollop of angst suitable for The O.C. I’ve been told that pianos are the new electric guitars. Grade: [4]