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May 30, 2007
Chunks of coal
The coal industry has licensed John Anderson's 1981 Top-5 version of Billy Joe Shaver's best-known song, "I'm Just An Old Chunk Of Coal (But I'm Gonna Be A Diamond Someday)", as the soundtrack to its newest television advert extolling the virtues of their product.
The spot features some hapless actor concealed beneath a human-sized fabricated hunk of coal running around an anonymous downtown while city dwellers follow, hapless and happy. Or chase it, I don't remember. The ad is notable neither for its intelligence, nor its creativity, which probably reflects the industry's assessment of its target audience. The spots have been timed to air at the same time the coal industry, along with powerful congressional delegations from Kentucky and West Virginia, is appealing to the federal government for subsidies.
"Among the proposed inducements winding through House and Senate subcommittees," writes The New York Times' Edmund L. Andrews, "loan guarantees for six to 10 major coal-to-liquid plants, each likely to cost at least $3 billion; a tax credit of 51 cents for every gallon, or 13.5 cents per liter, of coal-based fuel sold through 2020; automatic subsidies if oil prices drop below $40 a barrel; and permission for the Air Force to sign 25-year contracts fo ralmost a billion gallons a year of coal-based jet fuel."
The licensing of popular songs to commercial purposes has drawn the ire of no few readers. I have long believed that making a living as an artist is difficult enough that anybody who can figure out a way through to prosperity should be encouraged, whether they be the Backstreet Boys or the fortunate writer of a popular song. (And goodness knows if the IRS doesn't take Billy Joe Shaver's next check, his defense attorney probably will.)
That said, hearing "Lust For Life" behind an ad for a cruise ship line is a little disorienting. How can music which was once so radical be so utterly neutered by careful editing and the passage of time? The song's comparative obscurity works for and against it, for certainly its placement suggests those of us who knew it in its original context might now be ready and willing to entertain the prospect of a long, sodden, sun-drenched cruise. (Not me. Please not me.)
So I do not wish to fault Mr. Anderson, nor Mr. Shaver, for this particular commercial deal. Nor do I know enough about how such things work to be certain that either artist had anything resembling control over the licensing of that track. One hopes they do, and one hopes they made the choice not simply because they needed the money. But very few artists have Pat MacDonald's dedication and tenacity and would have refused millions for "The Future's So Bright." I am grateful that he did, by the way, and saddened to hear The Who's once revolutionary "Won't Get Fooled Again" as the theme song to one of the crime lab dramas, and I don't even remember which one. I would've hoped for better, would have thought they'd made enough money.
In any event, I am deeply disturbed by what the "Chunk Of Coal" ad and this new congressional action portends. Make no mistake, no matter how it may be clothed -- energy independence, dubious greenhouse gas benefits -- this is purely and simply about money. Lots of money.
The coal industry does not have a good reputation. It is and long has been a bully. It has placed its representatives throughout government so as to weaken enforcement of safety and environmental standards. It has learned from Hollywood to create a fresh corporate entity for each mine, thereby shielding owners from any liabilities and simply filing bankruptcy should something go wrong. It refuses even to pay the modest fines levied when its most egregious actions destroy pristine environment or cause the death of miners.
No industry which sanctions the removal of entire mountaintops can ever claim the moral high ground.
The whole notion of any established energy industry putting its hand out for government guarantees and subsidies utterly undermines the Republican Party's theoretical concern for the free market.
I do not pretend we can do without coal. I do not pretend that the coming energy and global warming crisis -- we need to think of them as being conjoined, for they are, inextricably -- will be anything but ruinous, all around.
But the best thing that can happen, both for U.S. energy independence and to slow global warming, is for us to begin paying the real costs of the energy we consume. Only then will the free market respond by committing significant resources to the research and development of alternative energy sources (coal isn't a renewable alternative, it's a fossil fuel that will, in its own turn, run out, just as petroleum is bound to). Only then will we re-examine the automobile-driven suburban sprawl and big box retail nightmare. Only then will we wean ourselves from cars and SUVs that get half the gas mileage they should.
The page 8 jump to Andrews' story adds this: "...coal-to-oil fuels produce almost twice the volume of greenhouse gases as ordinary diesel, in part because the production process creates almost a ton of carbon dioxide for every gallon of liquid fuel."
What would happen if our next president proclaimed energy independence and the development of renewable energy sources to be of the highest national priority, just as we once resolved to beat the Russians to the Moon? (And let's forget President Bush's pipedream of going to Mars, eh? He seems to have, though it's a pity in some ways.) It won't be Barack Obama; part of Illinois is coal country.
The way out of the Middle East is to get out of the Middle East. We can only do that if we don't need petroleum. (And that doesn't mean abandoning Israel.) The way out of global warming is to quit burning fossil fuels. There is no higher national interest than peace and the continued health and prosperity of our species, of every species left on this planet.
Except money. I suppose that's a higher priority, at least among the ruling elite.
Posted by Grant at 9:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
May 27, 2007
Our long national nightmare
"Follow the money," Deep Throat said, and it still seems good advice.
Conspiracy theories rarely seem plausible. People don't keep secrets, and complex behind-the-scenes machinations require too many disparate actors with discrete agendas to pull off long-term deception.
We on the left have taken some weird solace in the presumption that President Bush is stupid, for only a fool would have invaded Iraq based on such threadbare intelligence and with such a poorly drawn plan. Some years ago Geffen sought to convince journalists that Kurt Cobain's European suicide attempt was merely a drug overdose, a very peculiar form of public relations jui-jitsu that reveals far too much about our morality.
All this "worst president ever" hype is unconvincing. What if all this mess is on purpose? What if we assume Bush isn't an idiot, but is simply smart and venal? Where, then, does the money take us? The blindingly obvious fact is that Vice President Dick Cheney was most recently President and CEO of Haliburton, whose bills and cost-overruns for the Iraq excursion have been enormous and legendary. We are somehow supposed to blink twice and say, "Oh, no, Dick Cheney is an honorable man, there's no connection."
Who else has benefited? Oil company profits are ridiculous and they have the audacity to claim that it's because environmental regulations have kept new refineries from opening in the U.S. And never mind that, like paper mills and countless other large businesses, they manipulate plant closures and retrofittings so as to maximize profits, and work assiduously to keep independent operators out of the marketplace. You know things are weird when an investing group led by the evangelist Pat Robertson can't reopen a closed refinery.
Kentucky politics seem particularly rawboned, poor counties where votes still sell for $50 and political jobs -- up to and including the governor's -- are widely seen as opportunities for patronage, not policy leadership. Small towns in which interconnected networks of businessmen and politicians quietly make decisions which shape the lives and prospects of the entire community. And so I am, perhaps, more jaded than usual this morning. (And no day is good which begins with Junior Brown's doleful face staring out at the day from the end of an otherwise forgotten dream.)
This is why people don't trust their government, why so many are unwilling to pay taxes, to pay their fair share, to ask the rich to pay their fair share. We are divided along cultural fault lines and conquered by the worst kind of economic imperialism. Picture Wal-Mart as a feudal empire, and ask why your tax dollars and charitable donations pay the health benefits of so many of their uninsured employees.
If George Bush isn't an idiot, he's up to something. And somebody benefits. It's not us, it's certainly not the soldiers in the field, and it's assuredly not the Iraqis. I don't know who it is, but I'd sure like to see somebody who knows the field follow the money down all its ratholes. Somebody's getting paid, and I think we're all getting played, no matter our political affiliations.
Happy Memorial Day.
Posted by Grant at 9:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
May 24, 2007
The Paper Chase
This is a simple thing. I do not have a paperless office, I have an office covered in paper, and I'm running out of the stuff. Paper for the laser printers, and, even more importantly, the notebooks I use to keep track of the minutae (color builds, phone numbers, photo credits) which go into the making of each issue of our little magazine.
And envelopes. I'm out of the envelopes in which I mail sample copies of the magazine to contributors.
All of which is easy to solve, except that our family has a buy-local focus these days, and so I don't wish to drive to Wal-Mart; having the goods shipped in from Staples or Office Depot isn't better (though the quality probably is), but the simple fact is that there's no other place to get a reporter's notebook or a steno pad or a ream of good computer paper.
And so I'm writing on the back of a notebook. Recycling, which is fine up until the moment when I'm tired and hopelessly confused and can't figure out which end is up.
This is a simple thing. We wish to commit to buying locally, but the big box has driven the stationer out of business (his kids turned it into a comic book shop). We wish to commit to buying locally because it's better for the local economy in all sorts of ways. And because, yes, my in-laws own a couple local businesses, and the prospect of a Starbucks landing here, or of a large book section in the coming Super Wal-Mart, for which an entire hillside is being demolished and a babbling brook will doubtless be turned into a cesspool of runoff, all those things have a direct economic impact.
At some other point I'll trot out the statistics which argue for the necessity of buying locally. For now, please remember always to tip your bartender and to buy your music from local retail or mom and pop online ventures.
It's a hard world out there, and we shouldn't paper over the choices we make.
Something like that.
Posted by Grant at 11:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
May 22, 2007
The wisdom of Yosh Nakagawa
For a couple of years around the turn of the '80s, while I still in college, I was editor of the now-defunct Northwest Skier magazine. I started out as the typesetter, but inherited the editing chair when the incumbent disappeared, apparently to get his sexual identity sorted out, or maybe just because he ran out of money to go to college. I didn't ski, and was editor of the magazine for two summers and one winter during which it didn't snow. Ultimately I did the right thing and gave the job to my friend Scott North, who is now, I believe, an investigative reporter for the Everett Herald.
Northwest Skier was part of the late Ian F. Brown's small empire, which included radio and recorded ski reports and an annual ski show at the Seattle Center. I had the impression that it had once been a bigger empire, before I got there, and Northwest Skier folded soon enough after I left.
Ian's chief patron was a man named Yosh Nakagawa who had been interned during World War II and worked his way up from, I believe janitor, to become the CEO of Osborn & Ulland, one of a number of outdoor sporting enterprises (REI would be the best-known; O&U opened in 1941 with a loan from Eddie Bauer) which grew up around WWII and the troops trained to ski during that war. At its peak O&U had a half-dozen stores and ran a huge annual ski sale, SNIAGRAB (bargains spelled backwards; O&U had it trademarked, I believe).
Northwest Skier's typesetting shop, which still used the original cold type computerized Photon paper tape typesetting machine (each typeface was on a glass disc, one side of which -- I never really knew which -- would erase if you got it wet) did outside jobs, inevitably, and produced the SNIAGRAB annual newspaper. I remember Yosh himself coming by and telling me not to worry if it looked bad, it was SUPPOSED to look bad, and to quit trying to make it nice, people would believe it to be more of a bargain if I did the design work as sloppily as possible. Which I was able to oblige, more or less.
Mr. Nakagawa...he was called Yosh around the shop, but I am more comfortable remembering him as Mr. Nakagawa, and believe him to still be alive...was also somehow involved with the various pro sports franchises in Seattle at the time. It seems to me that the Mariners were new, and the Seahawks were pretty new, and the Sonics won the NBA title in 1979. In a previous job, back at the SeaGraphics mother ship, I had briefly brushed up against a couple of guys who were publishing something called Pro Sports West. They went out of business, perhaps because one of them got a real job on radio, maybe because the idea didn't work.
Anyhow. I was close to being out of college and needed a job, and somehow convinced Ian to get us a meeting with Mr. Nakagawa, because I had formed the idea that we could do a monthly tabloid covering pro and college sports in the Seattle area, and that his connections would make it possible, and that Osborn & Ulland's patronage would make it financially feasible. I liked Ski'n Ian, knew his business was shaky (I think a couple of us even looked at buying some of it from him, but memory fades), and thought maybe this bright idea would serve his and my needs by propping us both up.
And, anyway, I had no business writing about skiing. (How? you ask. Sit at the end of the bar and listen to the line the guys are giving the gals when they come down at the end of the day. Remember the good parts, divide by two, write your notes when you get back to the hotel room. My memory was better then. I think.)
I do not remember what Mr. Nakagawa looked like, save that he was small up against Ian's bulk. He did not seem, most of the time, to be an intimidating figure, and it was never clear to me why he seemed to go out of his way to help Ian's business. But he did, and he took the meeting. He had a tatami room built off his office at the O&U headquarters, and that may have been where we met. He looked at my idea, and listened, and it wasn't a long meeting, but I have carried his answer with me ever since, and been increasingly grateful for it.
"You should make a business to last a thousand years," he said to me.
At the time, I thought it a particularly Asian way of saying no, without getting into the details of why my plan wouldn't work.
Later I decided that he knew I was looking for a quick hand-hold on the career ladder, that he didn't really know me but knew Ian wasn't in a position to pull such a project off.
And then I came to believe it was both a very smart and a very moral thing to have shared with me, and I am grateful.
As I finished Big-Box Swindle, Mr. Nakagawa's words came back even more forcefully, for we, in our hurry to save a penny and make a dollar, are allowing our economy and our ecology and the ecology of our economy to be savaged. We are building structures to last fifteen or twenty years. We are destroying small businesses which might last for generations.
The last portion of Big-Box Swindle talks about strategies to keep such enormous stores from opening in your community. Alas, it offers no suggestions for those of us living in towns already decimated by these monsters.
And, of course, yesterday, I had to drive to the bloody Wal-Mart because it was the only place in town I could buy a ream of paper.
Yosh Nakagawa was a sharp and sharp-elbowed businessman. Ian came back one day after SNIAGRAB, having watched Yosh sit on the phone and call each of his suppliers, telling them he'd cut a check that day if they'd give him a two-percent discount. They all did, and he made thousands of dollars for O&U that morning. O&U, of course, didn't survive; near as I can tell online, their last store closed in 1999.
Posted by Grant at 9:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)
May 17, 2007
Gretchen Wilson's "Pain Killer"
The day before I first played my advance copy of Gretchen Wilson's third album, the just released One Of The Boys, I went out for a beer with my favorite doctor. (One beer. We both have small children, and my daughter, at least, can smell weakness in her sleep.) He is a good and thoughtful man who reads interesting things and with whom I share little obvious political or philosophical ground, and we both like to talk.
For some reason I got him talking about Oxycodone, and I wish I'd been taking notes. If I need to explain the toll this particular drug, marketed under various brand names (it is, he explained, nothing more than high-test Percoset, and, in his view, serves no useful purpose in the marketplace) takes in its theoretically unsanctioned applications, particularly in rural America, you're lucky. One of his interns ran a small survey at the local hospital to see what was, in the view of its patients, the principal medical challenge it faced was. It wasn't smoking or heart disease or obesity. It was prescription drugs.
In order to explain what this has to do with Ms. Wilson's third album, I need to talk about Bruce Springsteen. Now, I think my Springsteen credentials are in tolerable order. I typeset the headlines for the first issue of Backstreets, the unauthorized Boss quarterly, and worked for Charley Cross, that magazine's founder, for seven years and two weeks, and have written for the magazine a couple times. I even own two or three Springsteen albums, and, because I also have a radio or two, I've heard my fair share of his songs. And Charley once very kindly treated his staff to good seats at the Tacoma Dome, so I've seen the Boss in church, as it were.
But I am not a believer. I think his heart's generally in the right place, but I hear little depth and less subtlety in his words and music, and it simply doesn't speak to me.
And I've never quite gotten over "Born in the U.S.A." I know, because I've been told it and read it dozens of times, that the song's about a disenchanted Vietnam vet, that it's not written or sung as a patriotic anthem. I also know there was a big American flag on the cover of the album and that it caught the mood of the country as it elected Ronald Reagan to office, and that Springsteen -- or his operatives -- allowed it to become a misunderstood anthem, the song which made him a superstar, the enormously successful centerpiece to the album which followed Nebraska, the one album of Springsteen's I almost like, except I saw Martin Sheen play Charles Starkweather on late night TV, too.
Now, that's not fair. He's a singer and a songwriter and can't possibly be expected to control how his audience hears his lyrics, and what they make of them. I know that. Really I do. I got interested in graphic design because I thought it might give me an extra edge making myself understood as a writer, and maybe someday I'll be good enough to find out if that's true.
But at the same time, Springsteen approved that album cover, and, though he turned the Republicans down when they tried to rent his song, he stayed pretty quiet during that election, and we would surely have a different country had Reagan not been elected president. And, no, I'm not saying it's Bruce's fault. I'm just saying it would have been a time to stand up for what one believed.
So I've got my doctor friend's diatribe against Oxy and the memory of an acquaintance whose life has spiraled out of control down that general rathole, and Gretchen Wilson's new album on the stereo while I try to make the coffee last.
And I'm struck, now with a final copy of the album in my hand, that somebody has chosen to give up Wilson's striking, brilliant typographic iconography, the quintessential white trash mailbox letters which spelled out her name on the first two covers. Which would be fine if the new logo were better, but it's not, and which would make sense if she were moving away from her joyously aggressive trailer trash persona, which she's not. If every picture of her in the package didn't flat look like some kinda trouble.
Not the point, but let me digress again: I have enormous respect for Ms. Wilson. She is pure country, she's smart, and she can sing. And she can write. Beyond that, I don't know much, and I can live with that.
But there's this song, the eighth one in, called "Pain Killer." It's about wanting a broken heart to mend and the bottle letting her down, and maybe one night with the wrong man solving the problem. All pretty traditional country fare. But there's this refrain, "I need a pain killer," and the lines "Never been the kind to sleep around/I wish it was a pill and not a lover/It's gonna be so hard to swallow down."
And I had this image, while the refrain rang along, of a bunch of people singing along, meaning it the wrong way, grinding up their Oxy -- or whatever one does with the damn stuff -- and feeling somehow validated by the chorus, even though I know full well that all that means they're completely misunderstanding or misapplying the lyrics. But I had that vision.
Along with the press material accompanying my final copy of the album is a song-by-song commentary written by or with or for Ms. Wilson. Let's assume she wrote it and somebody edited it, because that makes sense and it really doesn't matter. "That song almost didn't make the record. It was between that another one -- same beat, same tempo, and I wrote them both with the same songwriter [Dean Hall], and I was really torn up until the very last minute. I had a dream in the middle of the night and I woke up and said 'Pain Killer's got to be on the record." [punctuation sic] I don't know why. It may just be the sheer fact that I think 'Pain Killer' is a great title. If I was walking through a store and I saw a female artist with the title 'Pain Killer' on there, I'd buy it just to see what the song was."
I wish Ms. Wilson well. I do. But I hope that song's never released as a single, never dropped into the soundtrack of some new rural Drugstore Cowboy because everybody in the audience who knows will know.
If it's just a song, it's just a song. But if it gets marketed, as Oxy was once marketed to rural America as a benign cure for back pain, I am going to think a whole lot less of Ms. Wilson.
Posted by Grant at 9:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
May 15, 2007
Thinking outside the big box and other re-entry notes
The problem with going on vacation is that rest and sleep and reading time remind you how you're supposed to feel. And then real life intrudes. Still, there is little sadder than a bar being held up by people in their late middle age living the Jimmy Buffett dream, drinking cheap liquor in expensive real estate, which we encountered a most nights while picking up dinner to go for eight.
Anyway, the whole lot of us went to the beach — my in-laws, the uncles, Mamaw, Maggie, Susan, and me — and did mostly nothing for a week, except read and eat and try to walk off a few calories while Maggie played in the waves. Think, even, in complete thoughts, though I seem already to have lost that facility. I don't have a laptop, so it's easy to disengage from e-mail once the car starts, and few people use the phone for business these days so that, too, was easy to ignore.
Because my wife's family owns CoffeeTree Books here in Morehead ("Eastern Kentucky's largest independent bookstore," we've started branding it, though there's not much competition for the honor, alas), we covered the hearth with advanced reader copies of various books, and I was able to read at random will. A glorious binge. Sparing the details, I will note only that William Gibson's next novel, Spook Country, which comes out in early August, is more rooted in the present and yet every bit as prescient about the future as Neuromancer and Mona Lisa Overdrive were, and perhaps I should go back and see what he wrote inbetween. And that the mess of post-Civil War reconstruction explains a great deal of what went wrong in this country for the following hundred years, and is probably an object lesson for what we should not do in Iraq, though the slightest interest in history would've kept us out of that debacle.
We came home to the usual stack of newspapers, which I looked through quickly to see if there were any news about UK basketball worth knowing and any clues as to who I should vote for in the gubernatorial primary next week. (No, to both.) But above the fold on the Lexington Herald's Sunday opinion section, was a month-old column by the Washington Post's Kathleen Parker, noting that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has eliminated its book editor position. http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/opinion/columnists/orl-parker2507apr25,0,3784142.column
Halfway through Parker's piece I figured out why I'd stopped to read it, beyond tribal loyalties to unemployed editors: "Ironically," she writes, "book publishers are partly to blame for the disappearing book sections, as they've cut advertising in print media. Instead, they prefer to spend on front-table book placement in stores that costs as much as $1 a volume and reportedly delivers more bang for the buck."
No, we don't see any of those placement bonuses at CoffeeTree, if you were wondering. (Retail consolidation doesn't make publishing a music magazine any easier, either.)
And that's the point. Those incentives aren't available to stores of our size, and we sell a lot of books. (They do, I just change the lightbulbs occasionally.)
Because the book to which I would most like to draw your attention is Stacy Mitchell's Big-Box Swindle, published by Beacon Press in Boston, which is associated with the Unitarian Church. I note the publisher because Mitchell writes, a few pages before my present bookmark, that this book was turned down by several larger houses simply because they feared Barnes & Noble and Borders wouldn't carry it. (They do, at least online, as does Amazon. To their credit. Or perhaps it's the certainty of their confident market positions.)
Now, I need and want to be careful here. Both those chains are very good to No Depression, and, with the decline of the record store and of many independent booksellers (see the rub?), they are among the most important purveyors of new and even fringe ideas in today's marketplace.
But please buy Big-Box Swindle from your local independent bookseller. Or check it out at the library. Or buy it from one of the boxes. But read it. Please.
Mitchell has not written another screed against Wal-Mart, though it can, in part, be read that way. She has assembled a great deal of information which argues for the importance of local business (which circulate dollars through the local economy and are far more involved in civic affairs), and for the destructive consequences of our big box, category-killer economy, from Wal-Mart to Bass Pro Shops to Victoria's Secret. All of which she addresses far more eloquently than I have time or need to do here, though finding food to eat on the interstate that doesn't come from a chain these days is nearly impossible.
What I would note here, today, is simply that we have been force-fed the notion that saving a penny justifies everything which follows, that the lowest possible cost is the highest public good. (And never mind that we're not necessarily saving money at Wal-Mart.)
Some of you will remember an earlier blog posted here about the new postal rates, written by major publishers to favor their economies of scale and revising the USPO's historic commitment to the diversity of ideas, which diversity this nation's founders believed (as do I) to be essential to a function democracy.
A reader sent a link to an NPR story, which interviewed Robert McChesney on behalf of we small publishers, and a woman from the postal regulatory commission. http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2007/05/11/06 He also noted that the media hadn't done much to pick up this story. But, of course, since these regulations benefit big media, why should they?
Listen carefully to what the woman, whose name I've not committed to memory, and shan't, has to say, for she argues blithely that magazines are going to die anyhow in the face of the internet (no, we're not; we do quite different things, serve quite different purposes; bad magazines will die, and some good ones won't adapt); that all publishers can save money if they follow these new regulations (which have to do with how magazines are packed and such), leaving off the additional costs which go along with that, or its sheer impossibility for some of us; and that the tradeoff to this new rate structure would have been another penny increase on First Class stamps.
Balderdash, all around, but that last one really galls. The rate increase could as easily have been spread among all publishers, and ignoring the USPO's historic role in promoting diverse opinions is, at best, offensive. But it's that penny that gets to me. The higher good here is saving consumers a penny on the stamps they use to pay bills and, for those without internet access, to write their relatives? That is the higher good, that penny? We would — and I know this is hyperbole, but it's good hyperbole, so indulge me — we would sell our democracy for a penny?
Unrelated final thought, or at least I think it's unrelated. The accident of a shared cab ride during SXSW has led to this little life during wartime playlist, on MTV's Urge site. Because I'm a Mac user, I can't see nor use the site, but I promised to link to it and I seek to keep my word. http://www.urge.com/launch/?page=playlist&id=92631&referrer=nodepression&source=grantalden_playlist
Posted by Grant at 8:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
May 3, 2007
The Duhks have a new lead singer
And I'm not surprised. Apparently, as of March 1, Jessee Havey quietly left the Duhks and was replaced by Sarah Dugas, who played some on the band's debut. It is, however, curious that Sugar Hill -- who gave us a year and a half warning that Nickel Creek were going on hiatus -- apparently didn't send a press release (at least not to me) to announce that the singer of the Duhks' Grammy-nominated song had left. Understandable, since the label is down to one publicist, but curious.
It is also curious that Jessee Havey's MySpace page www.myspace.com/jesseehavey lists no label affiliation. I used to hear about something called a "leaving member" clause in label contracts, and while I've never fully understood what that meant, I'd have thought Havey was bound to Sugar Hill, and that Sugar Hill would have wanted her. And maybe she is and they do. Meanwhile, the lone track on Havey's MySpace page is called "Can't Be Bothered" and it opens with "I can't be bothered by the things they might say anymore." It sounds terrific.
Doubtless there are stories. Bands are hard things to hold together. I don't care about the stories. I would note that the Duhks' site suggests she might be back, and her blog says she won't. I only saw them once, really (the AMA awards show two years back doesn't count), last year at the Cannery Ballroom during the AMA convention. The sound was wretched, and it seemed to me as if Havey was a star in a band that didn't want there to be a star, and didn't wish to make room to enable her to be a star.
That's an ego thing, sure, but I mean here to draw attention to the musical differences which are usually cited when somebody leaves a thriving band. In this case, I suspect, on the basis only of what my ears detect in their music (and the fact that the band toured with Railroad Earth most recently), that the Duhks wish to play a more ethnic, jam-based music than suits Havey. Havey has (at least in the studio) a big, rich voice, full of emotion and depth, and she needs to be in a more song-based, lyric-driven setting. Jazz maybe, and I keep thinking of Lizz Wright for some not very explicit reason.
Peter saw the Duhks at Merlefest, and said via e-mail that he thought Dugas may be a better singer than Havey. But, then, he isn't nearly as drawn to Havey's voice as I am. I'll suspend judgment until I hear Dugas sing songs I don't associate with her predecessor. In any event, you can hear her in a couple quick live tracks on the Duhks' MySpace page http://www.myspace.com/theduhks.
And I'll wait for Havey's next album, for hers is a big personality and a special talent.
Posted by Grant at 9:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
May 1, 2007
Two more digital dilemmas: Who are we?
Mulling over all the untyped and half-formed ideas spilling out around my response to Peter's recent blog, his celebration of the rise of the digital single, two more notions kept insisting that attention be paid.
One of the presumptions behind music criticism is that the critic and the listener are attending to identical texts. That is, that we're all listening to the same record, and in the same sequence. But we seem to be moving toward a world in which listeners download songs a la carte and sequence them according to their own sensibility, and that presumption seems likely soon to fade and, with it, the presumption of a common listening experience.
While Dave Marsh and others (notably my colleagues David Cantwell and Bill Friskics-Warren, in their book Heartaches by the Number) argue eloquently for the possibilities of long-form writing about individual songs, the premise of the traditional musician feature is that we have and share the text of an album to discuss, and all the doors it opens. If criticism is now to be focused on individual tracks, I fear we will continue to see one- and two-sentence reviews and an even greater emphasis on celebrity journalism. Which ain't writing, it's typing, to borrow a friendly cliche. And, anyway, if we start writing features about singles, won't we end up emulating the British music press, turning our fangs on pop stars before they've had even a chance to create a measurable body of work?
This also poses a somewhat technical question for we gatekeepers; most stories in most music magazines are written around the occasion of a new release, and artists are made available to we ink-stained wretches because the labels have an interest in spreading word of that release. But what constitutes a release in the digital era, much less a release schedule? There is a certain useful Darwinism to obliging artists or their agents to actually mail a copy of the CD to critics. And fairly accurate judgments can be made based on packaging and who does the sending; that's how the triage of listening gets done. Do we need now to study the hierarchy of websites? Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
(I suppose there is no small possibility we gatekeepers will be deemed unnecessary, too, but art without a critical tradition is just advertising. And even advertising has a critical tradition at this point.)
And then, of course, are we all listening to the same music? It seem likely to me that artists will take advantage of the intangibility of digital music to alter mistakes, change words, doodle and noodle on what would otherwise be finished songs. I suppose this is called interactivity and is, in many circles, considered to be a good thing. But imagine that a critic notes an awkward phrase in a song, the songwriter concurs (which would be a shock, but might happen) and alters that phrase, thereby obliging the watchful critic to rewrite and, once again, change history.
Are we even listening to the same thing? Doesn't the very nature of file compression and competing reproductive technologies (sorry) make it even less likely that the sonic issues critics attend to, particularly on reissues, will become increasingly murky? (And, yes, I realize that critics couldn't presume that their readers had identical stereos, but there was at least a more or less identifiable standard for good sound which has now eroded.)
Here's the other problem with a singles economy: The labels -- the big ones who stroke the star-making machine -- can't recoup their expenses selling digital singles. The marketing budgets which fund videos and radio tours and press junkets, hair and make-up and "Good Morning America" appearances and all the rest run to seven figures in the creation and promotion of major stars. Either the single has to become much more expensive to purchase (which, I suspect, nobody thinks is a good idea), or consumers have to buy albums because the promotional costs can be amortized much more easily over a $10 or $20 purchase than over a .99 download.
Now, I can already hear a number of readers celebrating: No more Shania Twain, or whomever! (Or, good riddance to the labels.) Part of the fabric which knits our scattered society together is the common cultural language created by singers and songwriters whose work reaches a mass audience. (And I shan't trouble to say one more time -- at least not at length -- that it is the quality of the work, not the quantity sold, which matters.) And the financial success of the Shanias of the world has historically funded the careers of less-affluent, less accessible artists. Do we really wish to leave the creation of stars to "American Idol"? We need the common language that big hit records provide, even "Who Let The Dogs Out?". And I think, though their behavior has often been reprehensible, we need big record labels.
I continue also to believe that the now-inevitable transfer to a digital ecology is a disaster for music, for all of us. A system has been created by and for 18-year-olds who don't believe they should pay for intellectual property. In doing so we have destroyed the brick and mortar world in which new artists were incubated, in which casual consumers occasionally succumbed to the temptations of in-store play or celebrity or just simple good taste and bought a record once in a while. We have also slaughtered countless jobs which allowed young and struggling musicians to make a kind of a living surrounded by music all day, listening to what is new and old, ingesting sounds they'd not have sought elsewhere, socializing with like-minded people, meeting and greeting their potential audience. We have destroyed hundreds of community meeting places, and sitting at this screen typing to imaginary friends is no substitute for walking into Second Time Around on Saturday afternoon when Uncle Kenny had just found a new treasure and had to play it as loudly as possible.
My in-laws and my father and countless other casual consumers of music with whom I am acquainted are never going to go online and seek out songs. They don't have time for that, and they view the computer as a tool, not as an entertainment device. As do I. By converting the ecology of the music business to a download-only system the industry has just cut off the casual consumer, perhaps for all time. Not to mention those who live in rural areas cut off from the highspeed internet we take for granted.
In some ways this is all the culmination of the industry's broad failure to acknowledge the interest and buying power of mature consumers. O Brother and Buena Vista Social Club were blips on the radar, in the end, but lots of people who didn't typically buy music responded to those albums. The industry sniffed and called it a fluke, rather than embracing the possibility that adults, too, will still spend money and time listening to good music.
We just don't want to get fooled again. What's new is not necessarily what's best.
Posted by Grant at 8:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)