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January 31, 2008

A top-shelf discovery: Hope Nunnery

The top shelf of the cabinet in which I house all the music I don't know anything at all about, but which has arrived here regardless, can be a sad place. So many foolish dreams. So much stultifying mediocrity. It makes one deaf, drowns hope and joy.

And then, blinding, a glimpse at what is possible. What is hoped for. The reason I do try to listen to pieces of almost everything which comes my way.

So let me, somewhat belatedly (the album arrived in early September), introduce you to the magnificent Hope Nunnery. Though a Google search suggests she's had a bit part in a King Kong movie and now lives somewhere in New York, a clipping reproduced within her album Wilderness Lounge argues Hope Nunnery is not a stage name and that she comes from South Carolina. She is partnered with dobro player Steve Tarsshis, who produced this...debut? Is it possible that this is a debut?

Judging from the photo inside, Nunnery and Tarshis are of middle age. It seems improbable that anyone this accomplished, this assured both as a writer and a singer should only now be recording her first album. But life takes strange turns, and it is not for me to say.

Her voice has a wild, keening quality. It is astringent (an over-used, but apt word), and reminds on occasion of a somewhat mellower -- and substantially more powerful -- Catherine Irwin, from Freakwater. Her songs are bone-shaking. From the opening lamentation "All My People" through the brilliant story (something I imagine from one of Silas House's novels) within "Little Pink Radio" and "Wilderness Lounge" she offers a loose and powerful voice. More than that, the woman can flat write. And swing (see the gospel "Spare Me A Set Of Wings"). These are ancient, timeless tones. Desperate and free. Not blues, not country, not folk: All of those. Something primal and hand-shaped, and thoroughly sophisticated.

Deadline pressure make this brief, so I will finish here. I have not been so struck by a singular and original talent since the Diana Jones debut ended up on that same top shelf. And Nunnery is better.

Posted by Grant at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

January 26, 2008

Today's frightening factoid

Now, let's be clear. I don't traffic in Britney Spears. Couldn't pick her song out in a blind test, and probably wouldn't recognize her on TV if there weren't paparazzi all around her. But a wire service report in this morning's paper indicates that the new Portfolio magazine reckons Ms. Spears contributes $110-$120 million to the U.S. economy. Simply by existing.

Not so much of that is sticking to her fingers, of course. The paparazzi, this story says, clear $4-million simply photographing the woman. Kevin Federline, to finish this sad litany, apparently makes $1-million a year simply showing up at nightclubs as the ex-Mr. Spears.

Well, there's one more bit. The Portfolio article says the media does $75-million in business a year chatting about Ms. Spears. Tabloids sell 33 percent more copies when she's on the cover.

The shame of belonging to the fringe of that caste.

This is what, in Japan, they call the water trade: work which adds no value to society, though I'm probably approximating that phrase badly as I ran onto it twenty years ago.

On the other hand, how many of us can claim to be worth anything like $100-million to the U.S. economy.

Yeah, OK. Speaking of the economy...about those rebates. You've got to be kidding. THIS is what we can get the Democrats and Republicans to agree upon? All they're doing is adding to the deficit -- which needs no help growing at an exponential rate -- and throwing a quick burst of consumer fast cash at the megacorps. Nobody is really going to be helped by these rebates, but it gives the politicians plausible deniability: "See we did something."

Dear elected officials: Try wrestling with the fundamental problems we face. We're in the middle of an expensive and idiotic war. We're destroying the environment. We've allowed the megacorps to usurp many if not all of the prerogatives necessary to sustain a democratic society. There are few (if any) jobs available to the working and middle class who happen to be tool smart instead of computer smart, which means fewer and fewer U.S. citizens are able to drive the consumer economy. We have eroded if not destroyed the American dream. Affordable housing, decent health care, the national highway infrastructure, port security...you name it. We've got big problems. Problems no one-time rebate is going to solve. None of us are running for re-election.

And the truth is this: So long as the megacorps have influence in the electoral process, none of it is going to change.

The truth is also this: We get what we pay for. Taxes have to go up if we're to live in the society we claim to desire.

Sorry...that's a long way from Britney Spears. Or maybe it's not.

Bread and circuses.

Posted by Grant at 1:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

January 25, 2008

John Sayles' Honeydripper

There was a time when I saw -- in the theater -- well over 100 movies a year, and occasionally wrote about them. But then I moved to Los Angeles and ran into the dull edge of that cliche about laws and sausage, which applies to Hollywood in ways I didn't stick around long enough to discover fully.

I remember, from those days, the names of a handful of filmmakers whose work I came to trust, whose aesthetic seemed consonant with the one I was developing: Francis Ford Coppola, Bernardo Bertolucci, Akira Kurosawa, Spike Lee, and, probably, John Sayles. Those are all pretty obvious names, I suppose; at the time I could have suggested less prominent auteurs (the Polish director of the Decalogue, the Persian director of Water, Wind & Sand, the Russian director of To The Museum), but I remember fragments of their films, and not their names. And the point, because I haven't written about film in ages, is simply to disclose my frame of reference before moving along.

Sayles' latest, Honeydripper, is nominally about the blues and takes place in an Alabama town called Harmony, ca. 1950. A thoughtful publicist sent me a screener DVD, and so I watched it last night, and wrestled with what Sayles was and wasn't trying to do as I went to sleep.

Honeydripper was written, directed, and edited by Sayles, and I am always warmed by the presence of another control freak with a gentle touch. The story is transparently obvious: Danny Glover's character, an aging blues piano player, is about to lose his club if he can't pull off one big night, improving to replace a no-show star with an unknown young fellow and his hand-made new-fangled electric guitar. There are no unexpected plot twists, and so one ends up incautiously waiting for the movie to wind toward the inevitable live performance. The big night.

Incautiously rushing, because, I think, Sayles is a more subtle storyteller than all that. To some extent his camera is more central to the film than any of the actors (and familiar faces dot the cast, including Mary Steenburgen, Keb Mo, and Stacey Keach as an archetypal debauched sheriff); there is, for example, a funeral scene during which the pallbearers split around an unmoving camera, a curiously and intentionally intrusive moment.

But I'm guessing that Sayles has set this whole thing up to a different purpose. The most interesting pieces of Honeydripper (the name of the roadhouse Glover is threatened with losing) are just that: pieces. Steenburgen has one long scene, with the actress playing Glover's wife (she is on the constant cusp of finding her religion; I should note that I'm typing without press notes and don't have ready access to the names of all the actors), a rich white woman in 1950 Alabama talking with and to and around her maid. It's a rich movement within the film, and there are others.

And it's beautiful to look at.

But it moves too slowly to do much box office, I should think, and I doubt too many casual viewers will get past the simple plot. And, honestly, I wanted the music to have more fire. It could have; it should have. Whatever it is Sayles is after, I don't think he got it said. Which happens. But the things he did get said -- and I am intentionally leaving fair bits of that out of this little digression -- he said beautifully.

In a few years I will be able to share Sayles' The Secret of Roan Inish with my daughter. And a few years after that, perhaps, I shall have to explain why Mr. Sayles is now busy writing Jurassic Park IV.

Posted by Grant at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

January 24, 2008

Still Grateful for the Dead

The Grateful Dead have sparked one of the more contentious discussions we've had — in print, but mostly among ourselves — about the roots of the music we seek to cover in ND. They are either crucial carriers of the torch, or no part of nothin'.

Long-time will have noticed that we assiduously avoid covering the jam band world, and may conclude from that observation that the matter of the Dead has been settled. Well, not quite. We avoid the jam band world because it is well served elsewhere, and because one of the things we have come to understand about the instincts which drive our editorial choices is that ND is a song-driven magazine. And songs, per se, are not what make the jam band world spin. (And...if you want to listen to jazz, listen to jazz. The jam bands seem unrelentingly tedious to my ears; perhaps if I smoked pot they'd wear better. Perhaps.)

No matter. I have a modest fondness for the Dead, and it seems perfectly reasonable to me to draw a straight line between the folk revival of the late 1950s and the impulses which formed the Dead in the 1960s. More to my point, I ran onto a goodly handful of classic roots songs through the Dead; like George Thorogood, they became an entry point to a broader, deeper, endlessly interesting world.

The story goes like this. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, for a period of maybe two years, I worked for a place called Western Ski Promotions as typesetter and editor of a little newspaper/magazine called Northwest Skier & Northwest Sports. I managed to be editor of a ski magazine during one of the Northwest's periodic droughts, and it was a grim season. Still, another employee and I were given the company station wagon and sent to Lake Tahoe for the John Denver Celebrity Pro-Am Ski Race, where we saw Denver from afar, George Hamilton on the slopes where I was taking pictures, and Barbie Benton, the playmate. Gambled a little, and with no luck at all.

The company station wagon had an eight-track player, and neither of us owned a single eight-track. So we went to Second Time Around Records on the University Avenue, where they still had a handful of them in a case, and picked out about $20 worth. There was a Savoy Brown album, and maybe Dave Mason's Alone Together or something from Traffic. But the album which stuck, and the only one we could tolerate on the drive home, was the Dead's Bear's Choice.

Bear was the Dead's soundman, and he picked these tracks from his tapes seeking to highlight portions of the band's repertoire which weren't on record elsewhere. It's a modest little album -- nine tracks, in all. But it's charming.

The crowd rises up enthusiastically -- one of the few times we hear crowd noise -- when they open with the Everly Brothers' "Wake Up Little Susie." It wouldn't have been a hip song when they played it in 1970, best I remember, but it was a familiar friend nevertheless. That and "Smokestack Lightning" would have been the only tracks I was familiar with, and I was just coming out of my brief immersion in the blues (I have only dabbled since, intermittently). But the other songs -- "Kate Mae," "Dark Hollow," "I've Been All Around This World," "Black Peter," and "Hard To Handle" (hah!) -- were...not quite a revelation, but an easy reminder of some of the folk music I'd been raised with. Only the songs were played with real love, and with life.

Now I live in a dark hollow, and more than a few days that song echoes as I walk down Wilson Avenue into town. And I cannot guess that I would be here, in this place, writing about this music, had that album not dropped briefly into my life.

I saw the band twice around this same period. Once they seemed tedious, but I was tired and hadn't planned to be there (we'd been camping, came down from the North Cascades pretty well trashed, and a friend had an extra ticket). The second time I went with some punk rock friends, and played bridge in line. My memory is that the band was phenomenal for the first half, that Bob Weir and Jerry Garcia were dueling for control of the band with nothing but their guitars. But, y'know. That's just a memory, and it's entirely untrustworthy.

Over the years Rhino has been kind enough to send a lot of the Dead reissues my way. I don't play them often, and haven't opened some. A lot of it's tedious. But I think they meant well, and did well enough. And, at least on the West Coast, where I grew up, they were one of the vital few links one might find to American roots music.

I had a friend years ago who was a DJ at a college station in California. She was pretty new wave, back then (she's a prosecuting attorney, now), but somehow -- perhaps from me, I don't remember -- she had also acquired a taste for the Dead. For her final air shift she broke station format and played nothing but the Dead. It was the most punk rock thing I've ever known her to do. I wish only that I'd kept her aircheck, but, alas, the cassettes mostly went years ago.

Anyhow. We all work around our flaws, and the Dead had plenty. But they weren't so bad, either. And they were certainly part of this, whatever this is.

Posted by Grant at 8:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

January 23, 2008

A quick political reality check

Look, I've got to do something on ad deadline days because I can't write and I can't edit anything substantive and I can't be sure when our clients will be e-mailing large files my way that I'll need to juggle. So I read up on the Tennessee Titans and I fuss around the house and occasionally I drift off into the web of news.

Not simply because I'm an occasional political junkie, but because the best story going, just now, is the nominating process for our next president. Especially with the writers' strike, it's the best story going.

Here, then, courtesy CNN's delegate tracker, is where we stand:

The Democratic party will credential 4049 delegates to its convention, which means one needs 2025 to become their nominee for president. To date they have selected 370 of those delegates, as follows:
Clinton: 202
Obama: 116
Edwards: 51
Kucinich: 1

The Republicans will seat 2380 delegates to their convention, meaning 1191 are needed for the nomination. Their race stands this way, with 126 chosen so far:
Romney: 48
McCain: 33
Huckabee: 28
Thompson: 8
Paul: 6
Giuliani: 2
Hunter: 1

Am I alone in being stunned by how little has been decided, and how much has been decided? Candidates have dropped out, and none of them (so far) made the wrong decision, but, good grief we've spent a lot of money and time and energy to go very quickly down a very slow road.

All this fuss about a handful of delegates in states which are otherwise minor players in the political stage. Which may be the point. Actually, I'm not sure what the point of the process is anymore, though it seems, an oddly dysfunctional way, to be working.

One more thing: What will the Republicans do if Ron Paul holds sufficient delegates (and he well may) to insist upon a place at the podium during their convention?

Ah. And let me repudiate an earlier prognostication: Clinton and Obama for the Democrats, and I think they're playing far more nicely with each other than the media argues, but the media are trying to make a story up as they go, and that's the best they can find just now (which is probably a good sign, in its perverse way). And I don't think Huckabee can do it, now. He did too poorly up north in Michigan, and not nearly well enough in South Carolina, where he should have been able to win convincingly if he was to wear the mantle. Romney? Surely not, but...McCain? I can't imagine the Republican Party nominating him, but he's probably the toughest candidate they have.

And if Bloomberg enters from the middle with a serious third party challenge, we're stuck with the Electoral College and NO mandate for anybody. Maybe. We'll see. It's a good story, but it'd be more fun if it weren't our lives at stake.

(And, hey, I WAS going to write about the Grateful Dead, but got distracted.)

Posted by Grant at 5:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

January 21, 2008

A small victory for Dr. King's dream

This is as true as any story you overhear, though I will purposely blur it some in the telling. It is a story about a grandmother, raised poor in the country, worked hard in the way working class women were and are slowly physically dismantled. Her husband is gone, her only child has married again, this time to someone who came into the marriage with a mixed-race child. Her first grandchild.

This is a woman, one gathers, who would have used the n-word in everyday speech, and thought nothing of it, whose Christianity may or may not have saved her from understanding the hate in that word. Might have inflamed her to hate, except that she moved to a university town.

Now, once a week, she tends to her half-black step-grandchild.

"My momma's white, my daddy's black, and you're purple!" the little one is reported to have said.

Grandma is delighted with her step-grandchild, couldn't love it more, she says.

Brown v. the Board of Education was decided in 1954, five years before my birth. And yet, when I came to read a series of young adult (and not so young adult) books on the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam war protests swirling around the streets and the media and our dinner table -- this would have been 1969 or 1970; King was assassinated a dozen days before my ninth birthday in 1968, and I do not remember anything about that day (though I still remember Kennedy's assassination) -- when I came to read about the violence and brutality and stone faith of those who labored so mightily that African-Americans in the U.S. might be treated fairly and equally, it all seemed so long ago.

It seemed improbable that humans could and would treat each other that way.

I do know better, now.

Still: We shall be moved. Moved to hope, moved to dream, moved from ignorance to something more like understanding, if only moved slightly and by the hazards of circumstance.

We shall be moved.

Posted by Grant at 9:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

January 20, 2008

Finally, after all these years...

For most of the two-plus decades I've written more or less full-time about music, record labels have fussed about (or pretended to fuss about) the sale of their promotional LPs or CDs by critics to used record stores.

There are several truths here:

First: The vast majority of the promotional music one finds in record stores was sold by promoters (retail or radio or whatever; I don't know, and don't care), not by critics. We don't get boxes of a title, we get one or two.

Second: A great number of music critics are poorly paid. This has not changed over the years. A number of them depend (or depended) on the sale of promos either to support their purchases of new product, or to pay their rent.

Third: It has to have helped audience development, in the old days, to have less expensive copies of albums in used stores. Particularly as the price of the CD itself escalated beyond reason, and no wonder it got tougher and tougher to break new artists.

Fourth: What the hell else do you expect us to do with all those discs? Cabinetry costs money, space is finite, and I've never seen the point in keeping music around I have neither hope nor desire to listen to.

So I had to laugh this morning, trying to catch up on the mail tubs, when I opened a package from a label called Black And Greene. I will type as faithfully as these fingers permit their enclosed note:

dear sirs or madames,

we understand that you receive lots of cds, and that cds can create lots of clutter.
as a small independent label we ask that after you give this a listen or three...if you ever no longer want this cd; please email blackandgreene @ gmail.com and we will pay for you to send it back our way...
2nd hand sales really hurt a label of our size so please shoot us an email instead of hocking it for some extra cash.
again, thanks for the support

Rather than put it in the months-behind queue of music from artists I don't know anything about, I put in the player. My shortest description is that it's prog rock, and if they take umbrage to that description, please forgive an aging critic whose rock muscles do not flex as often as once they did. It's of no use to me, in any event.

So I'll send 'em a note, and wish them well.

Posted by Grant at 10:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

January 18, 2008

Same as the old boss...

The blind hope since the beginning of the internet was that the world wide web would be more than citizen's band radio, more than a porn circus, more than a dating service. That it would democratize our cluttered world. That it would free struggling musicians from the choking bonds of an avaricious and hopelessly unfair (major) label system. That it would level the playing field so that small business might be competitive.

It is now past time to question that premise, particularly as it relates to music.

I have contemplated, perhaps too much, a recent article from the Economist titled "From Major To Minor," forwarded my direction late last night. (It's never a good sign when the financial community turns its eyes toward the music business.) The concluding two paragraphs are, at best, alarming:

By mid-2007, when the majors realised that digital downloads were not growing as quickly as they had hoped, they landed on a more adventurous digital strategy. They now want to move beyond Apple's iTunes and its paid-for downloads. The direction of most of their recent digital deals, such as with Imeem, a social network that offers advertising-supported streamed music, is to offer music free at the point of delivery to consumers. Perhaps the most important experiment of all is a deal Universal struck in December with Nokia, the biggest mobile-phone maker, to supply its music for new handsets that will go on sale later this year. These “Comes With Music” phones will allow customers to download all the music they want to their phones and PCs and keep it—even if they change handsets when their year's subscription ends. Instead of charging consumers directly, Universal will take a cut of the price of each phone. The other majors are expected to strike similar deals.

“‘Comes with Music' is a recognition that music has to be given away for free, or close to free, on the internet,” says Mr [Mark] Mulligan [an analyst at JupiterResearch]. Paid-for download services will continue and ad-supported music will become more widespread, but subsidised services where people do not pay directly for music will become by far the most popular, he says. For the recorded-music industry this is a leap into the unknown. Universal and its fellow majors may never earn anything like as much from partnership with device-makers as they did from physical formats. Some among their number, indeed, may not survive.

The full piece is to be found here: http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10498664.

As I wrote a few months back, it looks increasingly as if the profits from music will accrue to the makers of the gadgets which play them, not to the labels, nor the publishers, nor the songwriters, nor the performers. Music is now an add-on offered, essentially for free, with the purchase of such a gadget.

Think about that, as most of you doubtless will, from the perspective of an emerging artist. How the hell do you make a living if nobody believes they should pay for your music? Touring? With gas prices rising as they inevitably will? T-shirt sales? I dunno.

But music -- owning music -- has been wretchedly devalued. And the piper will be paid.

Hopefully our friends in book publishing will learn from these mistakes.

But anybody who thinks the internet has leveled the playing field isn't playing. It hasn't. It still takes huge and regular infusions of capital to be competitive. The big players can cut deals with each other to cross-promote, but heaven help the indie artist with a couple thousand "friends," a small touring base, and a great debut album.

But, then, as has been noted elsewhere this week, I'm getting old.

http://idolator.com/346435/no-depression-stands-athwart-music-history.

(It would have been nice, at least, to have had my words punctuated correctly, but that is, apparently, too much to hope for from an anonymous snark. So it goes.)

Posted by Grant at 8:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

January 16, 2008

Why is Amy Winehouse semi-famous?

Doubtless because it is awards season, Amy Winehouse's Back To Black album arrived in the mail early this week. Curious, in part because five of my esteemed colleagues deemed it one of the best albums of 2007, and in part because I'd heard often enough she was a talented new neo-soul singer, I put it on.

Huh?

You've got to be kidding me: This is what stars are made of these days?

Fair enough, she's heir to the Courtney Love role as a smart, brassy, talented and dissolute female singer. Courtney is probably smarter and arguably more messed up, not that the latter is a contest one wishes to win. And Winehouse sings better than, what? Paris Hilton?

Doubtless part of my problem is that I simply can't get past the text of her best and opening song, the hit single "Rehab," which opens with the line "They tried to make me go to rehab I said no no no." Frequent readers and friends will know that I have a brother in recovery, had a step-brother who didn't make it, and that I still have a glass of wine or a mug of beer at the end of some days. That I watched this show from the sidelines in Seattle in the early 1990s.

And that I am far from a proponent of censorship.

But the idea that a major label would put that song out as a single, that radio would play it, and that an artist would be celebrated for exulting in this sadness...boy that troubles me, and I am well aware that I come late to an argument which has already become boring.

It's a catchy little song, the only really catchy song on the album. But it's morally reprehensible, principally because everybody watches and prospers from the singer's misery, apparently because tabloid celebrity is more important than anything else.

Past that, Winehouse has a dry voice with not much range and comparatively little expression. Her emotional flatness isn't hip and urban, it's just stunted. Her songs offer the possibility of hurt and pain and insight, if one reads the lyrics, but they're also the kind of bleak faux sophistication which lures teenagers into thinking they're in the presence of deep and profound thoughts.

But this isn't soul; it's the absence of soul.

And it's not a deep well of talent. It's hype.

Sober, and set free of the star-making machine, she might have a good album in her, if she lives ten or fifteen more years and cares to try.

But the fact that she has evidently sold far more albums than Bettye LaVette and Mavis Staples (no, I'm not letting up on that) is just plain wrong.

Posted by Grant at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

January 14, 2008

Further studies in modern technology

Ah, the erosion of certainties. The hardest part of criticism, for me, is sorting out what needs listening to from what's irrelevant, and then finding time to attend to that listening.

I am always afraid of missing something, and feel a moral obligation to at least try to hear bits of everything sent this way. This means my listening run months and months behind, I am constantly apologizing to publicists and artists alike that, yes, I got their album last summer and still haven't played it (I think I'm caught up to September's mail just now) and then I retreat to the blogging software and whine about it!

One develops screening mechanisms to cope. We do not, for example, typically review EPs and singles. There's simply not room, and those brief releases do not offer enough substance -- reflect enough work, to genuflect to the Puritan ancestors -- to merit regular attention. I suspect this will somehow change if Peter is right and we move to a singles musical ecology, in which it suddenly becomes very important to comment on the latest single posted online by the newest and most urgently important creative figure on the horizon. But I do not look forward to that day, not at all.

In any event, waiting for me in the e-mail box this morning was a note from a band wanting me to listen to their album, which is available only electronically. They're a local band -- that is, they have a small following in their home town, which I've no reason to name -- and it's their debut album. Or their debut set of sound files, except that's not quite right, either, as they've doubtless posted songs to MySpace before this.

Am I meant to treat this as a release? It doesn't cross any of the existing thresholds I have built over the years. There's no record label. There's no album artwork. There's no physical product (which is somehow different, in my mind, from labels sending electronic files out to save money, trees, and enhance the speed of musical transmission).

Some day, doubtless, I shall have to treat such a release seriously, but not this one, fortunately. They're a local band. They're not ready -- evident ten seconds in to the first track -- to play on the national stage, no matter how many "friends" they have.

But we have learned to screen, we who look at the small print on albums. Label names mean something, still. They are filters, and tolerably reliable filters, still. The presence of a good graphic designer producing the cover artwork tells me something: It tells me the band has interested other creative people in their music, and that's a good sign. The presence of a producer's name, or a guest musician, that tells me something. But now we are faced with a kind of anarchy (which, as we used to say before high school debate rounds, is better than no government at all; sorry...), a filter-less musical ecology which is going to make no sense until it somehow sorts out.

But, for the moment, I think claiming a set of electronic files to be an album is cheating. If you can't get enough backing to release a proper CD (which ain't that expensive these days), and if you don't have money to promote it to radio and press, if you don't have a distributor willing to place your release in retail (which is still a huge part of the business, no matter its decline), I don't think you're ready to be taken seriously as an artist, at least not beyond the walls of your home bar. That will change, and new filters will emerge. But if your art hasn't attracted investors and hangers-on and interest from people with some tangential relationship to the real and increasingly difficult enterprises of selling music...that's probably a good sign that your songs aren't going to be in demand in the national (or international) marketplace yet. Maybe not ever.

That's not fair? I didn't say it was fair. Nobody ever said it was fair.

If you have the magic, we will find you, for we who listen first, we hunger for that magic. It sustains us, finding that magic.

But it is rare, and it is not handed out evenly, and there's no faking it. And there's no rushing it.

Posted by Grant at 9:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

January 9, 2008

The gospel of Russ Taff

Every once in a while I plumb the depths of my own ignorance. This morning, goofing around when I have way too much to do to justify goofing around, I followed a link to YouTube, and then decided to see what Crooked Still video might be up, and then clicked, by accident, on a version of "Ain't No Grave" by a gospel singer name of Russ Taff.

Some of you are laughing at me already. Taff has been around a good while (he's in his mid-50s), has cut eight or ten albums for various Christian labels, and one for Reprise, features on the Gaither Homecoming series (all homework quickly done once one has the name and the motivation). Just another reminder that we still live behind walls of our own making, even those of us who seek to keep our doors open most of the time.

I have a fascination with gospel which I shan't roll around in just now, for I haven't time to try once again to figure out why a relentlessly secular fellow like me adores the passion of great gospel. Bags must be packed. Laundry folded. Garbage tossed. Time presses. I delay. But I do trip past the TV preachers and the gospel shows on PBS and stop to listen, now and again. Most of the music is as artificial as the hair. But not all of it. The Gaithers, for example, can flat sing.

This guy, Russ Taff? Sweet Jesus, he can sing. Take a listen, especially those of you who don't believe a church can be rocked. And I'd be obliged if somebody knew his recorded catalog well enough to point me to an album or two which rock this hard.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3k-siqVp34

Posted by Grant at 9:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

January 8, 2008

Wither the Blues?

No Depression has always had a troubling relationship to the blues. For a number of years, simply out of respect for existing blues publications (notably Living Blues), we did not much dabble in that music. At some point it seemed clear the music could benefit from whatever little attention we paid it (and Living Blues became part of the University of Mississippi, theoretically, safe there from market forces), and so we began, occasionally, to talk more directly about that music.

There is also, of course, the matter of race. ND came to roots music through traditional country, and no matter how many African-Americans listened to the Grand Ole Opry (and plenty did) nor how much cross-pollination went on from the dawn of recorded music through to the British Invasion (and plenty did), the fact remains that country was music for the white working poor, and blues the music for their black neighbors. (And, alas, our fourth issue, with a previously unpublished photo of Hank Williams and blackface performers Jamup and Honey on the cover, did nothing to start the dialog.)

Part of the reason I have sought to include blues within ND's coverage is that it offers some degree of racial balance to our pages. But not much, because -- with the notable exception of Otis Taylor -- I have not heard a contemporary blues artist who I thought was extending the form with songs that were worth listening to when one wasn't drinking. Taylor is a curious man (in the several ways that word "curious" works), but he's at least middle class, and while his musical structures are innovative, his best songs are set deep in his personal past.

Doubtless readers will name one or two other contemporary blues players of quality and interest, and that's a matter of taste, a question of what sounds one is drawn to. No matter how you cut it, the number is small.

It cannot be a good sign for the blues -- for the music that Albert Murray and LeRoi Jones passionately claimed for their race -- that most of the audience today is white, and that many of the blues albums which come my way through the mail are the work of white musicians. Which isn't to say that white folks can't play the blues, but something happens to music when it is extended beyond the community which gave birth to it. It is, in my old world, the difference between Soundgarden and the Stone Temple Pilots. Or Pearl Jam. Whatever.

Ah. It is also necessary to distinguish between the blues as a musical language, without which rock 'n' roll would not exist (though rock, too, seems not to be flourishing just now) and blues as a unique form of cultural expression. Soul replaced blues, and rap replaced soul, and I'm quite sure it's far more complicated than that, but the outcome seems to be that blues, like rockabilly, and lounge music and probably death metal (about which I don't wish to know, honestly) has become a stylistic cul de sac.

Bluegrass has worked through some of this, pulled between tradition and growth, and still negotiates that terrain. But the audience for bluegrass hasn't changed as dramatically as the audience for blues has.

Maybe, in any event, that's why I'm not hearing great new blues artists. Maybe it's market forces, cultural demands, a flat spot in the music's history. Maybe.

But if ever there were a time, or a time coming, which argued for the power of an angry singer playing a sad guitar -- no matter the place or the race -- well, we sure seem to be coming hard against that time.

Posted by Grant at 12:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

January 6, 2008

Why not Senator Clinton? and other political digressions

Thursday, the night of the Iowa caucuses, one of the MSNBC analysts noted that the U.S. gave -- at least in theory -- African Americans the vote 50 years before women won that right. (I'm normally a CNN guy, but couldn't handle another evening with Wolf Blitzer; I don't know the players on the other network...I think it is Chris Matthews I'm quoting.)

My wife, who has read her autobiography, argues that most of the charges laid against Senator Hillary Clinton would be spun as positive attributes if attached to one of her male opponents.

She may well be right.

I think I can live with any of the top three Democrats (Obama, Edwards, Clinton) just now, though I fear Edwards may be just another Southern demagogue. He says the right things -- many of the right things -- but I'm not sure he can do the job. And...this may not be fair, but if my wife were gravely ill, I don't think I'd be on the campaign trail, no matter the brave face she puts on it.

That said, I'm still uncomfortable with Senator Clinton for what I think is a very old, very American reason: I don't like dynasties. We have had a Bush or a Clinton in the White House since 1980. Granted the Bush family accounts for more of those years than do the Clintons, but I still think it's time for some fresh perspectives. I think Senator Clinton could do the job, and I think it would be more than good for this country to put a woman in charge. But she is a nibbler at problems, and we need something more just now. Plus I think she's an incredible asset in the Senate, which seems to play to her strengths. And -- this is hardly fair -- but I don't think former President William Jefferson Clinton can provide the kind of template we will need for a first gentleman. (This has nothing to do with his trousers, and everything to do with his temperament.)

Some time back I noted concerns that Senator Obama's support for the coal industry -- appropriate as it may be for someone representing a coal producing state -- did not reveal the kind of statesmanship I want from a leader. And I think it is fair to question whether he can do the job, though he has vastly more legislative experience than Edwards, who lasted two years as a U.S. Senator -- and that says something, to me. His is also a very different face to show a world which has lost much of its trust and respect for the U.S., and that point was made to me by one of my Republican friends, a retired fighter pilot.

In the end, Obama or Clinton or Edwards will be as good and as bold, if elected, as we will let them be. And they will be as smart as the advisers they listen to.

Governor Richardson, incidentally, still seems to me to be the leading Democratic candidate for the vice presidential nomination, though New Mexico's few electoral votes may mitigate against that.

Governor Huckabee...scares me. Not what he stands for, though mostly I think we disagree, but how he approaches (or doesn't approach) problems. We do not need another executive in the White House who has no taste for the gray areas and little demonstrated ability to identify the important details within a problem. And proposing elimination of the income tax and the IRS -- much as I dislike my coming date with Guido the Lump -- when the offered replacement is a sales tax is hideous and regressive. It won't help the poor, it won't help the middle class, and it certainly won't help the retail industry. It would, inevitably, benefit the rich.

As my dad always says, them as has...git. (Which is to say, the rich get richer. Those who have the gold rule. All that.)

I do not think the Republicans will nominate Romney, in part because I do not believe the evangelical community will be comfortable with a Latter Day Saint. It troubles me that I, too, am not comfortable with his religious affiliation, and I wonder how I would have felt about JFK had I been sentient in 1960. (My earliest political memory is being outside a polling place in Seattle telling people not to vote for Goldwater, which was probably just as cute and annoying as it sounds typing it today.)

Some things never change, eh?

One other positive glimpse from my sporadic campaign watching (college basketball, NFL playoffs, and the primary season -- it doesn't get much better if you're me) was of Senator McCain, bless his heart, who stood before a room of people in New Hampshire and said the thing I most want our next leader to say: Even if the scientists are wrong about global warming (and they're not), working to solve the problem can only benefit us. It reduces our reliance on foreign energy sources, it cleans up our environment, and it places an emphasis on new and environmentally friendly technologies. And whoever solves that last problem first wins a huge economic windfall.

One last thing which will be fun to watch. The self-proclaimed centerists, led by New York Mayor Bloomberg, former Senator and Secretary of Defense William Cohen, and, if I remember this right, one-time Democratic nominee for vice president, Senator Lieberman, are still stirring around the possibility of a third party campaign.

A lot of the talk this week has been about concentrations of power, and our growing restlessness as an electorate with corporate giants and their political flunkies. Change is in the air, they say. It won't stay there, not long, but it's a nice, fresh scent nevertheless.

But if the evangelicals become frustrated with the Republican Party and run a candidate, and Bloomberg runs from the center, frustrated with the partisan bickering of the two major parties, with, say, Romney v. Clinton...be prepared to read long and tiresome discussions about reworking the electoral college, no matter who wins.

It's fun sport, but...it's also our lives and our future at stake.

Yeah, I know. You came here for music.

In fact, I wrote this and walked away for a couple hours and very nearly deleted it when I sat back down. But I didn't, obviously. If we can't talk about politics and religion and race in this mostly free society, and if we can't have those conversations with people who disagree with us, what's left that matters?

I'm just thinking aloud here. We are, again, at a crossroads. Which path we take matters greatly to me, and I hope it matters to you. So I'm thinking aloud here looking for a discussion. That's all.

Posted by Grant at 10:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)