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Thursday, July 3
A SONG FOR TODAY: MEXICO
by
Lloydville
on Thu 03 Jul 2008 12:02 AM PDT
 Not the James Taylor song of the same name, but a somewhat obscure Elvis track from Fun In Acapulco. Thanks to Tony D'Ambra of the invaluable films noir web site for reminding me of it, in a post about The Big Steal, a prime example of fiesta noir -- a film that starts out noir but goes goofy when it gets south of the border. Elvis's "Mexico" is a slight bit of material but Elvis makes it fun -- and manages to remind me how much I miss Baja California and La Paz. Listen to the song here.  1 AttachmentsThursday, June 26
A FELLA WITH AN UMBRELLA
by
Lloydville
on Thu 26 Jun 2008 02:08 AM PDT
 I'm just a fella, A fella with an umbrella, Looking for a girl who's saved Her love for a rainy day. Easter Parade, a film from 1948 produced by Arthur Freed and directed by Charles Walters, featured a cascade of songs by Irving Berlin, including a few of his great ones, but Berlin told his daughter that his favorite song in the film was "A Fella With An Umbrella". This surprised her, because it seemed so simple and modest -- almost a throwaway. But it's not really simple and modest at all -- or no more simple and modest than a stolen kiss. A bit of doggerel is transformed by a surprising twist into an image of sweet, lyrical gallantry, echoed precisely by the lilting melody. What it is . . . is perfect. The song is sung in the film by Peter Lawford and Judy Garland on a New York back-lot street, in pouring studio rain, mostly under an umbrella. Lawford delivers his part of the duet with charming amateurishness -- the choreography of their stroll is also simple . . . and just as charming. As in most Freed musicals, the perfectly calculated musical arrangement adds yet another level of enchantment to the number. Check out the film, which is full of such moments. Thursday, June 19
A SONG FOR TODAY (TONIGHT): WYOMING LULLABY
by
Lloydville
on Thu 19 Jun 2008 12:09 AM PDT
 Click here to listen to a home demo recording of Wyoming Lullaby (© 2002 Fonvielle-White) performed by J. B. White, who wrote the music. It can be freely copied and shared with credit to the composers and this site. If you're having a hard time getting to sleep at night, this song should do the trick for you. Image above © James Bama. 1 AttachmentsTuesday, June 3
HEY, BO DIDDLEY!
by
Lloydville
on Tue 03 Jun 2008 10:17 PM PDT
 You thought you were in bad shape. You thought you couldn't go on. Then the angels sent Bo Diddley to remind you of an eternal truth -- as long as you can move your hips, life is good.  The angels have taken Bo Diddley home, but his message endures. Listen to some Bo Diddley today. Wednesday, May 28
THE CARROT SEED
by
Lloydville
on Wed 28 May 2008 01:47 PM PDT
 The Internet can be a spooky place -- wandering through it can be like wandering through the subconscious of the culture, its deep, shadowy memories. When what you find there connects with your own subconscious, your own, deep, shadowy memories, the Internet can seem like a precinct of your self. Some of my earliest childhood memories, from when I was three or four, include distinct images of the old record player in my grandparents's living room -- a fancy console with a door that opened onto a turntable that played 78s and 45s. Another door opened onto a storage place for records -- including albums that really were albums, bound volumes of record sleeves that contained 78s. My grandparents had bought a bunch of kids' records for when the grandchildren came to visit, and I caused a sensation at the age of four or five when I could identify particular titles in a loose stack of disks, even though I couldn't read the labels. I had simply memorized the colors and designs of the labels and remembered what recordings they were associated with. The fact that some of the labels had pictures on them which related to the titles of the records did not lessen the admiration of my parents for my early signs of genius, which basically amounted to no more than the kind of trick a dog can be taught. I had taught myself this trick, however, because the records were very important to me and I wanted to be able to play my favorite ones without having to depend on adults to pick them out for me. One record in particular captured my imagination and has never left my consciousness for too long since, even though I haven't heard it for perhaps fifty years. Recently I found it again, virtually, online, at a site called Kiddie Records Weekly, which has posted a very impressive collection of old 78s for kids, along with scans of the albums they came in. I couldn't tell you how I found this site. It appeared at the end of a twisting series of links from various music blogs, most of which offered downloads of old out-of-print LPs ripped from vinyl. But there it was, suddenly -- the cover of The Carrot Seed, a downloadable MP3 of the record, even a scan of the record label:  It was especially spooky to see the label again, which I had once taught myself to "read" by its color and design alone -- it put me in touch with my pre-literate self, for whom the words on the label were abstract signs. The record itself had a moral -- you can listen to it here -- and it's not too much to say that it helped form my character, taught me the value of following my own lights in the face of the world's skepticism. The heroism of the little boy who believed his carrot seed would grow in spite of all opinions to the contrary is a kind of heroism I still admire. His vindication still stirs me. I couldn't have appreciated the allusion to sexual potency in the chant of the doubting brother -- "Nyah, nyah, it won't come up, your carrot won't come up" -- but who knows how it might have echoed in my psyche down through the years? I had forgotten that the cover of the record was drawn by the great cartoonist Crockett Johnson, author of the classic Harold and the Purple Crayon. I've always had an especially warm feeling for Johnson's work, and obviously that feeling had its roots in this cover. The record derives from a book by Ruth Krauss, who was married to Johnson, which is still in print, having celebrated its 60th anniversary in 2004. It all seems very strange -- that people took the trouble to collect and preserve this record, to scan its cover and label, to digitize its audio and post it all on a web site . . . that I stumbled upon it by chance while looking for albums of vintage lounge music on the Internet. My memory and the collective memory floating eerily out there in cyberspace had merged. Wednesday, May 21
THE BEATLES LIVE
by
Lloydville
on Wed 21 May 2008 09:15 AM PDT
 Go here for a short live set the Beatles did on Swedish radio in 1963. The recording levels weren't set properly and there's a little distortion, but John Lennon once said the recording was the best ever done of the Beatles playing live. You can investigate other rare live recordings of the Beatles here. Wednesday, May 14
JIMMY GIUFFRE
by
Lloydville
on Wed 14 May 2008 12:05 AM PDT
 Jimmy Giuffre died last month, at the age of 86 -- I just heard about it. Giuffre was a jazz clarinetist with a cool, mellow style, influenced by Lester Young. He was a fixture of the laid-back West Coast jazz scene in the 50s and 60s and I was lucky enough to hear him play once in the 60s at my boarding school in New England where he and his small group (a trio, I think it was) were hired for one of our rare entertainment treats. I can't imagine how that happened -- I never identified anybody on our faculty who had a passion for jazz -- but I'm sure glad I got to hear the cat blow in person. Friday, May 2
SAMBA!
by
Lloydville
on Fri 02 May 2008 04:06 AM PDT
 In a previous post about Orson Welles's ill-fated Brazilian film It's All True I mentioned that Welles came to see the history of the samba as the key to Brazilian culture. I wondered if there might be a CD collection that showcased that history. Of course there was, and of course it was French -- the French having a knack for combining passion about American music with a logical approach to presenting it. Fremeaux & Associates offers several historical surveys of Brazilian music which give a good idea of what Welles found when he visited the country in 1942. The one above surveys the samba alone, which originated around 1917 as music for the Carnival and eventually became a highly commercialized form of dance music throughout the Americas in the 1940s.  The great revelation of this set is Carmen Miranda in her pre-Hollywood days. Before she became a musical comedy star, famous for her tall fruit-basket hats ("Bananas is my business!"), she was one of the musical treasures of Rio -- a terrific and very sexy singer.  But samba, as it turns out, is just the rio into which all streams of Brazilian music flow. The oldest style it incorporates is choro, an instrumental form meant for listening, not dancing. It usually features ornate flute lines accompanied by various stringed instruments. It started out very European in sound, with African rhythms adding flavor, but later became a bit more rambunctious. Its evolutions are charted in the collection illustrated above.  Other subsets include brass marching-band compositions and various regional styles, many of which are charted in the Fremeaux & Associates collection above. Fremeaux offers a couple of other historical surveys, but these three will give you a comprehensive picture of Brazilian music in the first half of the 20th Century. The pleasures they deliver are not primarily scholarly, however. There's hardly a song on any of the two-disc sets which is less than marvelous, and all of them will set you either dreaming or dancing. (The imported sets can be found on Amazon, most cheaply through their Amazon Marketplace sellers.) Listening to these CDs you'll see right away what so enchanted Welles back in 1942 and grieve anew that he never got a chance to finish his film about Brazil and the samba. Saturday, February 9
THE SIXTIES BEGIN
by
Lloydville
on Sat 09 Feb 2008 06:50 AM PST
 9 February 1964 -- I'm 13 years-old, an 8th-grader, in my first year at an all-boys New England boarding school. No access to television -- required to be in study hall between dinner and lights out in our dorms. The Beatles are appearing on the Ed Sullivan show for the first time. What to do? It's possible to sign out of study hall to work in the library. Three friends and I do this. Just before the Sullivan show goes on we sneak out of a bathroom window in the library, move from shadow to shadow across the campus to the math building, where there is a television which juniors are allowed to watch. We enter the room with the television where about twelve juniors are gathered. The moment of truth arrives. If the older boys decide to bust us, we're in serious trouble with the school authorities, with so many demerits it will take us the rest of the term to work them off on campus maintenance details, with all privileges suspended. For the first time it strikes me what a strange thing it is I'm doing. I was a nerdy straight-arrow of a kid back then -- I don't think I'd ever knowingly broken a school rule in my entire life. Somehow, though, the Beatles seem bigger than school rules. The juniors smile and stare at us for a few moments, giving us time to sweat -- then wave us in. We watch the Beatles on the show.  This is the same television, in the same room, where we were allowed to watch coverage of the JFK assassination not quite three months earlier. Hard not to process the Beatles, purveyors of joy, as a kind of answer to Lee Harvey Oswald.  We sneak back across the campus, climb back in the library window . . . undetected. The librarian, a plump, genial woman, looks at us wryly as we sign out -- I've always suspected that she noticed our absence over the course of the evening but decided not to bust us, either. The decade of rock music and assassinations, desire and transgression had begun. The Sixties were on. Sunday, November 25
JOKERMAN
by
Lloydville
on Sun 25 Nov 2007 12:28 AM PST
 Well, the rifleman's stalking the sick and the lame, Preacherman seeks the same, who'll get there first is uncertain. -- Bob Dylan, Jokerman To call Bob Dylan the greatest Christian poet of the 20th Century (and the 21st Century so far) is probably to damn him with faint praise. There just weren't that many great Christian poets in the 20th Century. His Christian poetry, however, is more alive and vital than the work of other poets with greater reputations, like Auden and Eliot, who were nominally Christian but whose poetry is less concerned with expressing passionate faith than with charting the ennui of a faithless age. And Dylan is not quite a poet in the modern literary sense -- his words don't live on the page, only in conjunction with the music that is inseparable, expressively, from those words, and mostly only in his own voice. Very little of his poetry survives in cover versions of his songs -- although it can. (Hendrix knew how to sing Dylan, and Dylan's Gospel songs come gloriously alive in the versions of them by black Gospel singers collected on the recent CD Gotta Serve Somebody -- most other versions fail because the artists who attempt them don't realize how deeply Dylan's work is steeped in the blues, or have no great feel for the blues themselves.) Dylan wrote two types of Christian songs, one type that fits more or less directly in the Gospel tradition, however quirky his take on that tradition might be, and one type that follows the image-collage strategy of another American tradition, what might be thought of as Whitman by way of the Beats.  Jokerman is of the second type. It's a powerful evocation of the image of Jesus, or rather the images of Jesus, but it's hardly a catalogue of familiar icons. It's more like a passionate torrent of Dylan's own various imaginings of Jesus, his own various attempts to comprehend him. The momentum of the work seems to be deeply personal -- not an intellectual or aesthetic meditation but a desperate attempt to record a racing stream of thought in which one image of Jesus is instantly rejected as insufficient, replaced with a corollary or opposing image. The ultimate effect is a kind of lyrical portrait in the round -- but a portrait in which the subject just won't sit still. Standing on the waters casting your bread While the eyes of the idol with the iron head are glowing. Distant ships sailing into the mist, You were born with a snake in both of your fists while a hurricane was blowing. Freedom just around the corner for you But with the truth so far off, what good will it do? The first quatrain presents us with the image of an almost pagan figure -- a terrible Jesus who stands in conflict with the ancient false gods, the iron gods. Dylan, too, was born with a snake in both of his fists and did not reject the terror of the predicament. (Just try to imagine Auden or Eliot with their hands full of venomous reptiles -- they would certainly faint dead away, once they realized that the snakes weren't metaphors.) But the last couplet jolts us back to a different kind of complexity. Jesus, the lord of nature, the destroyer of false idols, is not free like the gods of old. His power is useless in the absence of truth within the hearts of men. This is the difference between Jesus and the other, older gods. His power and his freedom count for nothing if they can't be shared, communicated, translated into the language of simple men. This fact defines his mission, his incarnation. Jokerman dance to the nightingale tune, Bird fly high by the light of the moon, Oh, oh, oh, Jokerman. Why "Jokerman"? Because the paradox of Jesus's mission is like the paradox of a good joke -- too surreal to be taken seriously by a slow-witted humanity. Many of the climaxes, the final unexpected twists, of Jesus's parables are like the punchlines of jokes. Laughter is not an inappropriate response to them. In Dylan's recording of the song, listen to the yearning, the hopelessness in Dylan's voice as he sings the last line of the chorus above. He is bemoaning the limits of language and music and human thought. Well, the Book of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, The law of the jungle and the sea are your only teachers. In the smoke of the twilight on a milk-white steed, Michelangelo indeed could've carved out your features. Resting in the fields, far from the turbulent space, Half asleep 'neath the stars with a small dog licking your face. In the first couplet above, the paradoxes are almost resolved. Jesus has come to fulfill the law and the scriptures, to reconcile them with the laws of nature. The message of Grace will find unsentimental expression in light of a harsh view of this world and its inexorable destructiveness. The issues, the stakes, won't be fudged. (See the couplet at the beginning of this post.) In the next couplet above, Jesus is exalted, aestheticized -- worshiped as he's worshiped in art:  But Dylan can't leave Jesus here -- a figure carved in marble.  The last couplet above startles like a bolt of lightning -- because suddenly Dylan is back imagining Jesus as he walked the earth, sleeping rough, on the road between two villages, as he must have done on so many nights, getting just a little rest, and alone, probably grateful for the affection of the little dog who undoubtedly showed up at the disciples' campfire looking for a handout. This is a good man, the dog senses -- he won't kick me. All the allegories and all the art fade away. The image of Jesus won't be fixed by any convention. It always returns to the dust of the earth and to mystery. There are no "answers" in Jokerman -- just a question . . . who is this guy, who is this joker? It's the question Dylan is asking himself, and it's unanswerable. Lyrics copyright © 1983 Special Rider Music Friday, November 9
Thursday, November 8
Wednesday, November 7
Tuesday, November 6
Thursday, October 25
THEME TIME RADIO HOUR
by
Lloydville
on Thu 25 Oct 2007 11:37 AM PDT
 This is a poster designed by Jaime Hernandez, of the awesome comics duo Los Bros Hernandez, for Bob Dylan's great show on XM Satellite Radio, which might be the best radio music show of all time. Each week Dylan plays songs he likes on a given topic. The songs are great, but it's also great to see how Dylan organizes music in his mind. It's much the way he organizes images in his songs -- according to associations and affinities that don't follow conventional rules or categories. I don't listen to the show much because like more and more people these days I have a hard time dealing with scheduled entertainment -- unless it's something live like a baseball game. If it's digital and I can't download it or get a copy of it to enjoy at my leisure, it's too much trouble, too annoying -- too much about the convenience of the provider and not enough about my convenience. [With thanks to Boing Boing for the link.] Friday, September 21
OFF THE ROAD
by
Lloydville
on Fri 21 Sep 2007 02:58 AM PDT
 This month marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Jack Kerouac's On the Road and the book is getting a lot of attention. (That's Kerouac's design for the book's cover above.) It was certainly an important book -- crystalizing the odd malaise that gripped America after WWII and presenting an image of the way American youth would react to it, in increasing numbers, by cutting loose from everything, drifting into a world of sensuality and drugs, hitting the road in search of . . . something. The book's freewheeling, lyrical prose was brilliant enough to allow one to take it seriously as a work of art, to place it in the picaresque tradition of Huckleberry Finn.  The moral and spiritual emptiness of On the Road's protagonists was part of the book's truth, of course, but that truth, to me, was a thin one, without any deep humane dimensions -- and this is nowhere better revealed than in the book's depiction of women. It's not just that Kerouac's protagonist's treat them badly, or indifferently, but that they don't seem to see them as human beings -- and, more importantly, that the author himself doesn't seem to see them as human beings. This is quite a different thing from writing women characters badly, unconvincingly -- quite a different thing from ignoring women or even raging against them for their otherness, as Henry Miller sometimes did. Kerouac simply seems to see women as an existential nullity. Some women say this doesn't bother them -- that the freedom and exhilaration of the book's spirit is an inspiration to them as women, however the women in the book are drawn. I can appreciate the sense of that -- but it doesn't lessen my revulsion at the way the women in the book are drawn. It strikes me as revealing a basic truth about almost all beat fiction and poetry -- that once you get past the attitude, the style, there's very little underneath it, and what there is underneath it is often repellent.  William Burrough's magical, fractured prose, best appreciated in his recorded readings of it, is invigorating and exciting -- but a little of it goes a long way. It's like a jazz improvisation on a melody that the musician has forgotten, or never knew in the first place. It's a gesture, an exercise, not an artistic creation.  Bob Dylan was the great inheritor of the beat tradition, but he grounded his improvisations firmly in the blues and folk traditions -- he was engaged, with a great deal of humility, in a conversation with something beyond himself. His early work is marred by some of the same misogyny one finds in the beats, by images of women that alternate between goddess and destroyer, with no convincing human presence in either.  But Dylan, unlike the beats, grew as an artist. He listened to the culture around him, its roots and moods, and talked back to it. His work wasn't just an interior howl, a negation -- he was a rolling stone who could step outside of himself and watch himself roll. When Kerouac tried that he was appalled by what he saw -- or didn't see. He ended his life drunk, stoned, in a state of utter decay and despair. We can see the roots of that in On the Road. Kierkegaard said that the precise quality of despair is that it is unaware of itself. On the Road is a harrowing portrait of a despair that is unaware of itself -- one its author shared, unawares, with the book's protagonists.  Kerouac's defenders say that only the work matters -- not the life. But I say that with Kerouac the life is in the work -- is not transcended in the work. Which is not to say that the book isn't an extraordinary thing, with passages of true greatness, depictions of places and moods that are indelible, an authentic and often moving voice with it's its own kind of feckless grandeur. It's just to say that there's something missing from it -- some element of heart and soul and sympathy that is crucial to any great work of art. Monday, July 16
DALMATIANS
by
Lloydville
on Mon 16 Jul 2007 02:10 PM PDT
 In the list I recently linked to, showing the 100 top-grossing films of all time (domestically), with revenues adjusted for constant dollars, there are, as you would suspect, a number of Disney classics. Many of these films performed only adequately on their initial release but kept making money over the years. Snow White was the only one to make the top ten but I was surprised to see 101 Dalmatians at number eleven. This is one of my favorite Disney films but I always thought of it as a minor work, and certainly not a mega-hit. Apparently a lot of other people have loved it as much as I do. Word is that a two-disc Platinum Edition of the film, loaded with extras, will be coming out next year, which is exciting news. Disney also released a CD of the soundtrack a few years ago -- it's a wonderful, light, slightly jazzy score that really evokes the early, pre-Beatles Sixties. It's now out of print but copies can still be found on Amazon -- and it's well worth tracking down.  Check out the film, too, if you don't know it -- but just rent it, in case you fall in love with it and want to grab the definitive edition when it comes out in 2008. Thursday, June 14
A VINTAGE CELL-PHONE PHOTOGRAPH FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Thu 14 Jun 2007 12:20 AM PDT
Searching For A Gem Alan is also a fan of sci-fi and has passed along a lot of great book recommendations in that genre. I never knew what Alan looked like until he sent this picture -- he lives in England -- but I imagined his jovial smile almost exactly . . . it's just there in what he writes, in his cheerful helpfulness. He was the guy on the newsgroup who always answered the question of a first-time poster with good-natured seriousness, even if it was a question that had been asked a million times before. Sunday, June 10
ICKY THUMP
by
Lloydville
on Sun 10 Jun 2007 12:01 AM PDT
 Mark your calendars -- the new White Stripes album Icky Thump arrives on 19 June. Meanwhile, here's a video of the title song to whet your appetite. It seems to have been partly filmed in a Mexican whorehouse, and the lyrics have a message for people obsessed with illegal aliens from south of the border -- "kick yourself out . . . you're an immigrant, too." ¡Viva Stripes! Wednesday, April 11
WRONG MAN, RIGHT MUSIC
by
Lloydville
on Wed 11 Apr 2007 03:35 AM PDT
 The 20th-Century notion of "absolute music" tended to capture the imaginations of composers who wanted to be thought "modern". They generally abandoned the emotional, descriptive and/or narrative ambitions of 19th-Century program music in favor of a more severe system of abstraction. This marked the end of concert music as a popular art form but not the end of program music, which went on its merry way in movies, where it continued to enthrall a large public. Of course, people didn't pay as much conscious attention to this music as they used to in the concert hall, but they could have, with profit. To prove this assertion all you have to do is listen to the many classic film scores now available on CD -- the original tracks recorded for the films or later re-recordings of the scores. Many of them are magnificent pieces of music in their own right. It helps to have the "program" in mind, a memory of the films this music supported, but it's not absolutely necessary with the very best scores -- like those of Bernard Herrmann, for example. Hermann didn't specialize in creating memorable melodies but he was a master at using the colors of an orchestra to evoke mood and he had a great and subtle understanding of the dramatic uses of rhythm. All of his Hitchcock scores are brilliant, even the less famous of them like the score he did for The Wrong Man. Edgy, dark, minimalist, jazz-inflected, it perfectly mirrors the bleak and jagged realism of Hitchcock's 50s-era New York City, its dehumanizing institutions and its spiritual chaos. But it has a lyrical core, too, that echoes the protagonist's yearning for deliverance. It's not absolute music, to be sure -- but it's absolutely wonderful. Saturday, March 10
UNDER BLACKPOOL LIGHTS
by
Lloydville
on Sat 10 Mar 2007 12:05 AM PST
Under Blackpool Lights Wednesday, March 7
DIXIE
by
Lloydville
on Wed 07 Mar 2007 12:40 AM PST
 From my sister Lee: In 1985, I went to see Doc Watson perform at Thalian Hall in Wilmington, North Carolina. When summoned for his encore, he announced, “Now I’m going to sing America’s second national anthem.” And he began to play Dixie. The audience went insanely wild, feet stomping, hysterical cheers. It was thrilling. I was totally swept away. And for years after, it continued to bother me. Why was it so thrilling? What did it mean? I just couldn't figure it out. The Civil War seemed to be so simple for Northerners, and still so complicated for the rest of us. So I forgot about Doc Watson and Dixie, felt embarrassed by it, and rather guilty too, and chalked it up to another mysterious, uncharted connection to my “country.” Then, last summer, after leaving the Civil War battlefield of Chancellorsville with Lloyd, my mom and my two kids, with my head full of ghosts, and a vision of Robert E. Lee swinging his hat over his head, his eyes gleaming with victory, I asked Lloyd if his miraculous i-pod contained within it the song Dixie, and if so, to play it. It did, and he did. Since then, I have located Bob Dylan’s version of Dixie. And I play it a lot. But I’m careful to close all of my windows, so that no one can hear it. My neighbors are African-American. I like them, and I’m worried they will think it is racist to listen to this song. I pause it when the mail man is close to the house. It’s like a dirty secret. And this gnaws at me. So I did some research into the history of the song Dixie, and, like the song itself, I found it both comforting and disturbing. The authorship is generally attributed to Daniel Decatur Emmett, of Turkey in the Straw fame, an Ohioan who allegedly wrote the song in 1859 while living in New York City. A competing account tells us that the song was really an old African-American tune revived by the black musician brothers Ben and Lou Snowden, whose joint tombstone proudly declares “They taught Dixie to Dan Emmett.” Either way, the song was a smash hit, particularly in the North. When Abraham Lincoln first heard the song in Chicago, he shouted “Let’s have it again! Let’s have it again!” By all accounts, it remained one of his favorite songs, before, during, and after the Civil War. “I just feel like marching, always, when that tune is played,” he said. When the war was over, he made a special point of requesting it at public events. “That tune is now Federal property and it is good to show the rebels that, with us in power, they will be free to hear it again...I insisted yesterday that we fairly captured it..and that it is our lawful prize.” It is unconscionable that almost a hundred years later, psycho white supremacists used the song as a sparring partner for We Shall Overcome during the Civil Rights Movement, associating it (really, I believe, for the first time) with institutionalized racism. It was a despicable and cowardly answer to Lincoln’s generosity. But if “possible use by psychos” is a litmus test for a thing’s viability, then we shall have to throw out a good many things, the Christian church and our own government for starters. In my research, I stumbled on this quote from Howard Sacks, and despite the fact that he is an academic, I quite liked it. He says, “What [Dixie] tells us is that black, white, male, female, southern, northern, slave, free, urban, rural--these aren’t separate realms. The story of the American experience is the story of the movement between these realms.” Which, naturally, brings Elvis Presley to mind. Clearly, it was no accident that Lloyd’s astoundingly brilliant Navigator preceded our tour of Chancellorsville with a visit to Graceland. Elvis sang Dixie, and if there was ever any American who was not a racist, it was Elvis. His heart and his instincts on that score were pretty near perfect. So here’s what I’m wondering: If Abraham Lincoln claimed Dixie as his prize of war, why can’t we reclaim it as a prize for our heartbreak? Heartbreak that we ever tolerated slavery in our country for even a nanosecond, heartbreak that we ever took up arms against each other and heartbreak that all too often we let Lincoln down. I don’t see why we can’t do that. Dylan's version of Dixie can be found on the Masked and Anonymous soundtrack album. Sunday, March 4
GET BEHIND ME, SATAN
by
Lloydville
on Sun 04 Mar 2007 12:00 AM PST
 Amazon's resident critic says that Get Behind Me, Satan is the White Stripes's strangest and least focused album but also their finest -- and that's not a bad summary. As with a lot of great Bob Dylan albums it gives the impression of someone rummaging around in the attic of American music and American culture looking for answers to some desperate personal problems -- and even if the answers aren't always forthcoming, there's still the consolation of realizing that there are a lot of cool and scary things up there. Jack White on this album bumps into a lot of ghosts and has a disturbing encounter with Rita Hayworth as he deconstructs his garage band style and inflects it with deranged pop and country interpolations. He's always done this sort of thing musically, tying it all together with his strong blues-based guitar -- but this time nothing gets tied together too neatly. It's almost as though he's thinking out loud in the studio and letting us eavesdrop on the session. The result is raw and silly and powerful and eloquent by turns, defying the slick sound and off-the-rack attitude that homogenizes most bands these days, even those in the neo-rock movement the Stripes have spearheaded. Jack and Meg are simply continuing their conversation with every tradition of American popular music -- powered by the blues but ranging far beyond them . . . on a spiritual and anguished search for the soul of the times. In his liner notes to the album Jack rails against the sarcasm and irony of pop posturing today -- he wants us to face the terror squarely. The White Stripes, like the great bluesmen that inspired them, are taking on the devil himself -- determined to get at least a few steps ahead of him before it's too late. Here's a link to the music video of one of the album's best songs: Blue Orchid  Thursday, March 1
THE RIAA BOYCOTT
by
Lloydville
on Thu 01 Mar 2007 12:48 AM PST
The
RIAA is one of the biggest, richest and ugliest of the corporate
organizations trying to keep a stranglehold on the conversation of
culture. The RIAA has spent millions of dollars taking kids to court
for sharing copyrighted music over the Web, essentially trying to
criminalize an entire generation, and is now trying desperately to shut
down local wireless hot-spots by promoting a bill that would make any
wireless network provider legally liable for any activity that occurred
over that network, including the sharing of copyrighted work -- which
would effectively end local wireless service. No local provider could
ever hope to match the RIAA's legal and financial resources -- just
responding to one of their lawsuits, even a groundless one, would put the provider out of business. I
don't advocate piracy but the RIAA is trying to create a world in which
the state enforces a monopoly distribution system owned and controlled
by large corporations. The willingness of the record labels
represented by the RIAA to destroy local wireless service in its
infancy is a sign that they've become some of the most vicious mad dogs
of corporate tyranny -- blind to any values or any new technology which
might interfere with their desire to perpetuate outdated business
models and gain total control over the distribution of culture. What
does the boycott mean? Well, at its worst, for one month you don't buy
any Bob Dylan albums, since Sony belongs to the RIAA -- but you can
still go see him in concert. At its best it means that you can buy all
the White Stripes albums you want, because they don't release through
an RIAA affiliate. Go Stripes!
At
its very best it means that you can look for and buy new music by
artists who reject the madness of the corporate distributors . . . on
MySpace or at Internet music distributors like eMusic. If you want to find out what music is covered by the RIAA just go to RIAA Radar and do a simple search. It's only a month, it won't bring the RIAA to its knees -- but it's a start. Do it and tell everyone you know about it. For more info on the RIAA and the boycott, go here.
Thursday, January 18
LOVING YOU
by
Lloydville
on Thu 18 Jan 2007 03:32 AM PST
 This film, has nothing -- whatsoever -- to recommend
it . . . except Elvis Presley in his prime and a bunch of decent early
Elvis songs. Of course, that's enough. The story, which riffs superficially on Elvis early
career, is contrived, the dialogue thuds along without even a whiff of
wit or believability, the photography is dull and the directing is
ham-handed. But the young Elvis prowls through this wasteland of
mediocrity with an almost feral grace -- as innocent as a panther, and almost as beautiful. He
doesn't seem to realize himself the power his
combination of virility and sweetness projects, and that naivete is
part of his charm. Unless you were there, and of a certain age, it's
probably impossible even to imagine the effect his persona had when it
appeared as if from nowhere in the middle of the Eisenhower years.
America still hasn't gotten over it, and probably never will. He's
become part of what it means to be American. Friday, December 22
ORLANDO GIBBONS
by
Lloydville
on Fri 22 Dec 2006 04:19 AM PST
 I've been reading a lot about Shakespeare recently and somewhere in that reading I ran across a mention of Orlando Gibbons, the other great English composer of the Tudor era (besides William Byrd.) I decided to check him out, particularly after leaning that he was Glenn Gould's favorite composer. Gibbons can be appreciated as a sort of alternative to Bach, with the same logical clarity but more theatricality, whimsy and lyricism. You can hear the cultural giddiness of Elizabethan England in Gibbons's work, as you can in Shakespeare's poetry.  Gould only recorded a few pieces by Gibbons but they're fascinating performances. Highly expressive, Romantic even, they violate historical style but somehow evoke the essence of the music, in ways stricter interpretations, on more appropriate instruments, sometimes fail to do. There are worse ways to spend an evening than listening to the music of Orlando Gibbons. If you have a fire and a glass of good red wine and some strong English cheese -- an old cheddar or Stilton would do perfectly -- so much the better. Monday, December 4
MODERN TIMES
by
Lloydville
on Mon 04 Dec 2006 03:59 PM PST
 Bob Dylan's new album "Modern Times" sounds as though it was made by people playing musical instruments, by a man singing with his voice, all in some sort of space that might actually be encountered in the real world. This is very unusual in modern popular music, and you might call it revolutionary, even though it harks back to the sound of recorded blues, rhythm & blues and rock & roll well into the 70s. (A sign that the album's title might be ironic is that its cover sports a black-and-white photograph from the Forties.) Beginning in the 70s, popular music began to take on what Theodor Adorno would have called a "phantasmagorical" quality -- a process which he explained in terms of the modern commodity culture, which tends to produce objects which do not easily reveal how exactly they were made. The commodity seller benefits from this because it obscures the fact that he himself has not made the object he's selling but appropriated the labor of others to make it (perhaps unfairly.) Adorno saw the same process at work in the music of Wagner, where a great wash of sound enchants us away from an appreciation of the fact that the music is produced by individual musicians playing individual instruments. (Stravinsky, who hated Wagner's music, once wrote passionately against the practice of listening to live music with one's eyes closed -- he felt that one should never forget the physical process of making music.) R & b and rock sounded revolutionary in the Fifties quite apart from their raucous beats and suggestive lyrics -- they sounded revolutionary because they sounded as though they were made by individual musicians, not by workers in corporatized music factories. But with the rise of disco and synthesizers and multi-track recording in the 70s, all fine things in themselves, the recording industry had tools for resubmerging individual performance into a corporatized "sound". It commodified rock and roll -- made it phantasmagorical, in Adorno's sense. For some reason hard to fathom, "Modern Times" debuted at #1 on Billboard's charts and has been one of Dylan's most successful albums ever. Perhaps it's attributable to the nostalgia of baby-boomers, hearing music that takes them back to the golden age -- perhaps it's attributable to younger listeners having their ears and minds opened up by something that sounds different, new. Most likely it's a combination of the two -- part of the old rascal Dylan's strange alchemy whereby old forms and old language are somehow deconstructed and recombined to reflect the peculiar aura of the present moment. |
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