Nobody Even There to Bluff (2014)

It seems redundant at this point--I’ve already posted on Facebook and ILX--but I should make note here of the book I just self-published, Interrupting My Train of Thought. It collects stuff from here, various ‘90s fanzines, Nerve, year-end ballots, Facebook countdowns, rockcritics.com, the Voice, Cinemascope, and elsewhere. Originally I was aiming to keep it around 350 pages, but because of a formatting error (I initially had the margins set incorrectly) and publishing costs that ended up being much less than I expected, it runs around 450 pages. I’m glad--it’s a one-time thing, so may as well get as much in there as possible. Scott Woods and Tim Powis (editing), Karen Watts (cover art), Vaughn Dragland (layout), and Rob Sheffield (foreword) all helped make the book exactly what I’d hoped it would be.

You can buy it from Amazon (here's the Canadian link, but the book is also available from other countries).

Two other links:

A fantastic website set up by Scott;

A Spotify playlist that Jer Fairall has been nice enough to set up (replacing the dead Grooveshark playlist), with over 150 songs from the book and growing. I've spent the last year making fun of Spotify playlists ("Is there a playlist? Is there a playlist?"), but now I have my own, so everything's okay.

(Interrupting My Train of Thought deathwatch: 54 copies sold.)

Drifting Ballads, Blakean Journeys: A Stranded Playlist (2014)

When Scott told me he was developing a website devoted to Greil Marcus’s writing, I immediately started thinking of a way I could weasel myself into the proceedings. Grooveshark, a streaming service (at least for now; it’s been taken to court), gave me the in I was looking for; when Scott started compiling a playlist of all the singles included in the Stranded discography, I offered to compile a parallel playlist of album cuts. My goal was to include one song from each album listed in “Treasure Island,” with no overlap with the singles playlist, a distinction that Marcus may have taken care of in advance--I’ve never systematically checked, but I don’t think any of the singles he chose appeared on any of the albums. Working backwards from Warren Zevon’s “Poor Pitiful Me,” I finished the playlist a few days ago. Two hundred and thirty-nine songs in all, one from every “Treasure Island” album--sometimes, for better sound quality, I pulled the songs from compilations rather than the albums proper. There’s one very conspicuous omission: you can’t find a single Beatles song on Grooveshark, nor can you upload anything by the Beatles yourself. I encountered the same problem with Van Morrison, but I was able to work around that by ID’ing a few songs I uploaded as being by “VAN” (uppercase), which links them to a Hungarian folk group who do something called “Bodrogkozi Szerelem,” which sort of sounds like something Van Morrison might sing when he starts scatting and speaking in Irish tongues. But there are so many Beatles LPs in the Stranded discography, and such a strong likelihood that anything I was going to upload would have been taken down immediately, I didn’t bother. An alternate way to hear Beatles songs is to go out and live in the world. They’re out there.

There were a few other times--bootlegs, stray compilations--where I got to something and thought, “I won’t be able to find this.” Hardest of all was Alan Freed’s Rock ‘n Roll Dance Party, a Coral LP from 1957. Literally nobody on Soulseek had it, an ominous start. Couldn’t find it via a Blogspot search, which was a good way to track down old albums a few years ago, less so now. Of all things, I found the whole thing posted on YouTube, so I was able to download it as one 30-minute file using Real Player, edit out a single track using Audacity, then upload it onto Grooveshark. Just like Alan Freed planned it when he used to sit in his Cleveland studio 60 years ago.

A by-product of putting together the playlist was that, after 30 years of thumbing through “Treasure Island,” I finally took the initiative to get hold of some of the albums that fell outside my usual listening habits. I won’t lie: I took the easy route of downloading them via a file-sharer. That’s in fact the primary reason why I didn’t buy certain “Treasure Island” LPs years ago; I simply never encountered them in my record-buying travels. I have never, for instance, laid eyes on a physical copy of Moldy Goldies: Colonel Jubilation B. Johnston and His Mystic Knights Band and Street Singers Attack the Hits in my entire life. But when I hooked up with Soulseek 10 years ago, that was one of the first albums I searched for, and I was burning it onto a CD within a matter of days. “Treasure Island,” or at least its more esoteric inclusions, was like a weird peek into the future of file-sharing 20 years before the fact.

(An opportune time to mention Hackamore Brick’s One Kiss Leads to Another, also one of the first albums I downloaded a decade ago, long before its recent rerelease--it was then still kind of a secret “Treasure Island” rumour, as Greil himself might put it. I didn’t get much out of it at the time, and though I burned [and shelved] the whole album, I didn’t save any individual songs on my hard drive. For the playlist, I looked it up online and quickly listened to a bit of each song. Still nothing. Without much enthusiasm, I went with “Someone You Know.”)

So Moldy Goldies and One Kiss I already had, but here’s the folder of stuff I downloaded before putting together the playlist--things I just wanted to hear so I could say, “Okay, I’ll put this song on, instead of this other one that’s more famous”:

Big Youth: Screaming Target

Roy Brown: Good Rocking Tonight

Burning Spear: Garvey’s Ghost

Justin Hines & the Dominoes: Jezebel

Chris Kenner: Land of 1000 Dances

Jerry Lee Lewis: Old Tyme Country Music

Steve Miller Band: Children of the Future

Van Morrison: Into the Music, St. Dominic’s Preview, Tupelo Honey, Veedon Fleece

Mother Earth: Living with the Animals, Make a Joyful Noise

Aaron Neville: Tell It Like It Is

Graham Parker: Howlin’ Wind

Elvis, etc.: Good Rocking Tonight

The Many New Sides of Charlie Rich

Boz Scaggs

Swamp Dogg: Total Destruction to Your Mind

Koko Taylor

Wailers: Burnin’, Catch a Fire

Muddy Waters: Sail On

Johnny Winter: Second Winter

Strange to listen to these albums for the first time after committing Marcus’s words on some of them to memory. Many fall into one of three categories--electric blues, reggae, or Van Morrison--the first and third of which I’ve often named as two prominent blind spots of mine. Having listened to all of them now, I don’t think I’m any closer to a feeling for electric blues--maybe a little closer. The one Muddy Waters song I put on the Grooveshark playist, “Louisiana Blues,” has an appealing drone to it, and I liked driving around to Sail On (a late-‘60s reshuffle of a ‘50s best-of) for a few days. Koko Taylor and Johnny Winter go right past me, though, ditto the non-electric but bluesy Roy Brown. With those albums, I think I deferred to whatever Greil singled out in the book.

The biggest breakthrough I had was with Van Morrison. I’ve written about my ambivalence about Morrison elsewhere, so here’s the short version: never really took to Moondance or Astral Weeks in high school, didn’t give much else a chance after that. (Wavelength and Common One are the only other ones I have on vinyl; I’d hear the ‘70s singles on the radio, and they were okay.) But I found stuff I quite liked on every one of the four albums listed above, and Veedon Fleece was especially good driving down the Lakeshore between Burlington and Toronto one summer afternoon. I’ve spent the last couple of months bemoaning the fact that I never bought them all on vinyl when they were in every used store in the city for four or five dollars.

Almost all the rest of the albums yielded at least one song I felt good about putting on the playlist. My favourites: Swamp Dogg’s “The World Beyond” (dystopian sci-fi soul), Boz Scaggs’ “Sweet Release” (sounding very much like Van Morrison), Charlie Rich’s “I Can’t Go On” (already a big fan of The Fabulous Charlie Rich), Aaron Neville’s “You Think You’re So Smart” (his ‘90s stuff seemed kind of precious to me; this is beautiful), Mother Earth’s “Down So Low” (the kind of bluesy torch song I never thought I’d love in a million years--I do, I do), Steve Miller’s “Baby’s Callin’ Me Home” (the best kind of hippie spaciness), Chris Kenner’s “I Like It Like That” (always liked the single; the album’s my favourite of the batch above). And Graham Parker’s “Between You and Me,” which sounds very much like Van Morrison. One thing I’ve learned is that the whole world sounds like Van Morrison.

When it came to choosing songs for the rest of the playlist, there were different rules in play. If it was an album I didn’t have, and for whatever reason didn’t feel like seeking out, I’d either go with a song I knew and liked (“Feelin Alright” from Traffic) or audition a few songs on YouTube or Grooveshark and choose whatever sounded best (“I’m Not Ashamed” from Bobby Bland’s Two Steps from the Blues). If it was an album I had and knew well, and Greil singled out something in the book that I also happened to love, that’s what went onto the playlist. Examples: the Impressions’ “For Your Precious Love,” the New York Dolls’ “Human Being,” Buffalo Springfield’s “Rock and Roll Woman.” But if my very favourite songs on certain albums weren’t mentioned in the “Treasure Island” entry, I went with my own picks. I’d estimate they account for a quarter to a third of the playlist. Examples: “I Can’t Reach You” from The Who Sell Out, “You Got the Silver” from Let It Bleed, the Miracles’ “Way Over There,” Steely Dan’s “King of the World.” I would assume Greil thinks most of these songs are pretty great too, but I don’t know. One of the best accidents of this project was discovering a fantastic song tucked away on an album I bought years ago--found it in Rockford, Illinois, as a delete in the early ‘80s--and shelved after one or two listens: “I’m Up and I’m Leaving” from Manfred Mann’s Earth Band. (An album I associate even more with Christgau’s ‘70s guide.)

I should mention the one CD I ordered online as I neared completion: Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica. I had avoided that record for at least three decades. My first-year roommate in university had a copy, and though I can’t remember him specifically playing anything from it for me, I had a good enough sense of what the album might sound like--from reading about it (Langdon Winner’s essay included), from the copy of Doc at the Radar Station I bought at the time--to be close to 100% sure I wouldn’t like any of it. I can now report that a) I don’t like a lot of it, and b) I really like two or three songs. What I chose for the playlist: “Moonlight on Vermont.” No kidney stones, and it sounds just like--or something like--rock and roll.

I don’t know how long the playlist or Grooveshark will be around. Stranded keeps going.

(Originally published in greilmarcus.net)

Consider the Source (2014)

Buried somewhere near the beginning of this blog's existence, there’s a piece on the film Rushmore wherein I went back and re-read The Catcher in the Rye for the first time in a decade-plus. The movie reminded me of the book; more specifically, Max Fischer reminded me of Holden Caulfield. I don’t know--thinking about that now, the connection seems a little tenuous beyond the prep-school angle.

I’ve just finished rereading Jim Bouton’s Ball Four for something I’ve been working on, a rereading that in this case spans at least 25 years. I remember getting Dave MacIntosh to read it during the Nerve days, and also Scott Woods, although Scott tells me now that he’d already read it at that point. I probably read it again myself around that time. That would have been the mid-‘80s, so let’s say 25 years. Jim Bouton turned 75 this year. He’s older now than Casey Stengel was when he managed the Mets.

Unlike my revisitation of A Catcher in the Rye 15 years ago, Ball Four held up just fine this time around. Much better than that, actually--I’ve never felt surer about naming it as one of the key influences on my writing, on me as a baseball fan, and on my general outlook on life. Yes, I have a general outlook on life. I’m not sure if mine is any more philosophical than the one espoused by Joe Schultz in Ball Four--“Well, boys, it's a round ball and a round bat and you got to hit the ball square”--but I bow down to Joe in the philosophy department, so no shame there.

When I first read Ball Four in high school, the thing I most gravitated towards was its jaundiced view of the player-coach dynamic. Bouton’s two managers in the book--Schultz in Seattle, and then Harry Walker after he’s traded to Houston--mostly got a pass, but the inane proclamations and less-than-forthright maneuvering of some of the other coaches, particularly Sal Maglie, had special resonance for me at a time when I lived out my own version of Ball Four as the mop-guy on my high-school basketball team. I loved the humour, loved Schultz (a character beyond the powers of literary invention), and pretty much loved anything having to do with baseball in those days, but it was the book’s confirmation of my growing sense that the people running the show were clueless that meant the most to me then.

That part is still there, of course, and it still makes me laugh. Eddie O’Brien (“Mr. Small Stuff”) checking up on every last pointless detail, Maglie second-guessing so often that Bouton has to invent the concept of the first-guess second-guess, Sibby Sisti puttering around on his little cart for no discernible reason beyond qualifying for a pension--Ball Four remains my Catch-22, Dr. Strangelove, and Mad magazine all rolled into one, the book that more than anything else hyper-sensitized me to the clear and present absurdity all around. (Sisti does get off what is possibly my favorite line in the book, after the Pilots’ first and last annual father-kid game: “Forty runs, for crissakes, and nobody gets knocked down.”) But it was a couple of other things that jumped out at me even more this time. The fact that I’m a coach myself now, and a teacher who nags my students about every last pointless detail, I’m sure none of that has any connection to my evolving viewpoint.

The first was how incredibly good Bouton is on the major issues of the day, primarily race and the war. Ball Four was written squarely in the middle of a famously chaotic moment, the events of which should be familiar, and far from dodging what was playing out in the rest of the country, Bouton tries to make sense of things. He closely observes the interactions between white and black players on both the Pilots and the Astros, noticing key differences between the two clubs. He ridicules the idea that Houston would be asking for trouble if they traded for Dick (“Richie,” as he was called against his wishes then) Allen down the stretch: “Humph. I wonder what the Astros would give to have him come to bat just fifteen times for us this season.” And he’s open about his own fallibility, admitting that his views on integrated marriage--remember, this is a notoriously conservative sport almost 50 years ago--have been upended. With regards to Viet Nam, he’s completely on the side of those protesting the war. So much so that he (along with kindred spirits Steve Hovley and Mike Marshall) senses reluctance among the other players to engage him on the subject. Which is not always a bad thing--in the case of hardline farm guy Gene Brabender, Bouton describes him as someone who looks like he’d “crush your spleen” if you got under his skin.

Coming full circle from the high-school me, the other thing that really came through this time was how much of an unabashed fan Bouton is. I think I always picked up on that sentiment, but never so clearly. There’s a love and a reverence for the game all through Ball Four, often for those very same absurdities that otherwise exasperate Bouton. You see this especially in his back-and-forth with Brabender and Fred Talbot, or Wade Blasingame over on the Astros, guys he has zero in common with beyond the game itself. But they’re all able to make him laugh--they’re all bonded by the somewhat surreal nature of what they do for a living, bonded by their derision for the coaches and owners, and bonded by the same insecurities that were a given with guys who existed at the margins in the years before free agency. (The emergence of Marvin Miller and the player’s growing labor awareness is one of the book’s most vital subplots, as is Bouton’s ongoing struggle to master a schizophrenic pitch, the knuckleball.)

There’s a heavily-trafficked website called Baseball Reference where you can sponsor a player’s stat page. You pay them a set amount, you get your name on the page as the sponsor, and you get to write a line or two about the player. If you want to sponsor Willie Mays or Ted Williams, forget it, unless you’re willing to pay a few hundred dollars a year. (Mays and Koufax are both available at the moment, somewhat surprisingly; Mays goes for $455, Koufax for $305.) But you can also sponsor pages for as little as $10 a year, and yes, the Seattle Pilots were just waiting there for me, alone and unloved and unsponsored. Right now, I’ve got three Pilots: Merritt Ranew, Talbot, and--quite possibly my proudest possession in the world--Joe Schultz. I plan to sponsor a few more, I’ve just been lazy about following through. Bouton himself, unfortunately, looks to be out of reach--the “Law Offices of Jeffrey Lichtman” have had the page for a number of years now (probably out of my price range anyway).

The sponsorships are just one of many ways in which Ball Four has stayed with me through the years. More than a great baseball writer, Bouton--like Bill James, like Robert Creamer, like Joe Posnanski--is simply a great writer. I can’t think of a better illustration of that than the book’s famous closing sentence:

“You see, you spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball, and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”

Honestly, that’s as good as The Great Gatsby’s closing sentence.

3/5 of a Mile in 10 Seconds (2014)

Recently, the Dylan Farrow letter and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death have underscored for me a couple of things I’ve come to find very alienating about the internet--or at least my corner of it, which amounts to a message board and Facebook. I’d rather post these thoughts here than there; people would take personal issue, and, as I think I’ve said before, I don’t have the stomach for such arguments anymore.

There’ve been hundreds of ILX posts about Dylan Farrow, and, as with virtually every emotionally charged news story that flares up over there--Trevaughn Martin, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Aurora--the thread followed the usual pattern: a few dozen posts, someone says something in not exactly the way that someone else thinks it should be said, people start sniping at each other, the word “idiot” makes its first appearance, and before long somebody’s telling somebody else to go fuck himself. Every time. If you end up on the wrong end of that, you’re lucky if only one person takes issue with you; usually there’s a pile-on, with one person surrounded on all sides. I’m very careful about posting on such threads. Most of the time I avoid them completely (posting, I mean--I read them, or at least as much as I can keep up with, largely in anticipation of the train wreck), and if I do post, I’ll let at least three or four days go by and studiously stay clear of saying anything that’s going to cause me grief. I wanted to go on there and say that I wasn’t sure if Allen was guilty or not; by way of contrast, I felt a lot more sure that Michael Jackson was guilty. Didn’t dare--I never would have made it back alive.

Celebrity death. I liked Philip Seymour Hoffman a lot--first noticed him in Boogie Nights (don’t think I connected him with Twister at the time, which came a year earlier), wrote a bit about him on this site soon after, saw many of his films over the coming years. I was glad to see him win an Academy Award for Capote; beyond just his performance, it’s an excellent film that should be seen. If a lot of actors reach us because they’re either glamorous JFKs or schlubby, everyman Nixons we can more easily relate to, PSH was a consummate Nixon. And he seemed revered by the people who worked with him.

But, his everyman qualities aside, I didn’t personally know him. I don’t feel gutted or devastated, and I have a hard time understanding the online chorus of people who say they do. Maybe that’s a failing on my part, I don’t know. I mean, if anything, a film actor leaves more of himself behind than any other kind of artist--we can actually watch Hoffman’s performances for as long and as often as we want.

I spend a lot of time on ILX, and enough (though less) on Facebook. There’s a lot I get out of both. But these are two phenomena I find odd and annoying.

The Status of the Gay Question (2014)

Getting this interview transcribed--or, even better, digitized and posted--was something Scott and I first discussed a few years ago, but there wasn’t any real context for doing so at the time. I wasn’t even sure I could still find the cassette where it resided--I knew I had two or three boxes of cassettes stored away downstairs, a mad scramble of mix-tapes and esoterica and some of the interviews I’d done in the ‘80s, but I hadn’t looked through them for quite a while. Deterioration had also crossed my mind.

Happy to say that I found the tape (along with some other interviews I’m glad I still have: Joey and Dee Dee Ramone, Johnny Thunders, John Candy…Huey Lewis--I won’t get sidetracked explaining that one), and now, with all these podcasts Scott’s been posting, we’ve got something approaching a rationale for putting it out there, and enough technology to avoid the transcribing I was always too lazy to do anyway.

The interview dates back to the fall of 1988, just after Introspective came out. (Possibly just before, I’m not sure--maybe I had been listening to a promo, but I don’t think so, else the copy I have now would be that very same promo, which it isn’t.) For me, it was the exact zenith of the Pet Shop Boys’ Imperial Phase, coming off of Actually and “What Have I Done to Deserve This?” with an instantaneously striking, self-assured album that looked like it was going to sell even more, chart even higher, and be reviewed even better. The interview was done for a magazine out of Toronto named Graffiti, where, after reviewing records and contributing various pieces (some co-written with Scott) for the past couple of years, I’d just been brought on as an associate editor. So it was also the zenith of my own Imperial Phase, even though mine was secret and lasted only three months. Graffiti went bankrupt right before the interview made it to print, which is why it’s been languishing in a shoebox ever since.

What I remember…There was me, Neil Tennant, Chris Lowe, and a record-company woman. It took place at a prominent Toronto hotel (no idea which one), I think up in a swanky room but I’m not sure, and it was one of those junkets where I was slotted in the middle of a whole bunch of other interviews. I vaguely recall wanting to make them realize that I was different than everybody else, that I actually cared about the record and wasn’t just there for a byline and a cheque (cf. Matt Bianco, Men Without Hats, Balaam & the Angel, and some of my other illustrious work from that era). So I made sure we spent the first five minutes talking about Simon Frith. I felt confident that the people from Rock Express and MuchMusic would not be talking about Simon Frith. Something I’d forgotten: that the record-company woman seemed to want to steer the conversation away from Neil and Chris making fun of U2. They weren’t on the same label, and I don’t think there was a great deal of overlap in their audience at that point (probably more true three years earlier), so I’m not sure why that bothered her.

It’s of course an odd experience to travel back twenty-five years and listen to yourself at 27. The one condition I set forth for Scott in following through with this was that there could only be an acceptable level of cringe-worthy moments on my part. After listening to almost the whole thing, I’m 73% sure that that level is indeed acceptable. I’m a little too look-at-me in proclaiming my antipathy towards political music. (Basically true, but I did have “Bonzo Goes to Bitburg” on my year-end in ’85.) I suggest at one point that I’m older and presumably more sagacious than the Pazz & Jop voters who by-passed Actually; again, I’m 27. And as for the best moment of all, well, that’s how you get titles for published interviews. Basically, and surprisingly, I sounded pretty much the same then as I do today.

Excuse all the mysterious ambient crashes and thumps. My best guess is that, just to keep things lively, I threw something across the table at Chris Lowe every 30 seconds or so.

Full interview here.

They Don't Know (2014)

Ten-plus years ago, I posted a long roundup here of all the films I’d seen that year--37 of them, ranked in order, with a comment and a rating for each one. A lot of the comments were brief, but there were some longer ones, too, at both the top and near the bottom of the list. (The Gangs of New York got a long comment--just hated it, and still haven’t gone back for a second look.) The ratings were rather severe. I gave my favourite film that year--Pornstar: The Legend of Ron Jeremy--a 7.5. I’m down to 6.0 for my #5 film, Donnie Darko, and a 5.5 still got you inside the top ten. I think I still compared every film to Nashville back then, and I remember expressing perplexity at Aaron Aradillas a couple of years later (in another year-end piece, a three-way e-mail exchange with Aaron and Brian Abrams for rockcritics.com) for not expecting, or at least hoping for, a masterpiece every time he went to the movies:

Aaron...well, I don't know if we'll be co-hosting any film festivals anytime soon; we disagree about a lot. You actually set the bar at "competently made" when you go to see a film? You don't expect anything more, because you know you'd just be foolishly setting yourself up for disappointment? Wow--that's such a strange mindset to me. I basically want--maybe not expect, but sometimes that too--every film I see to be some combination of The Godfather, Sweet Smell of Success, and Nashville. I'm exaggerating, obviously, but I don't see the point of seeing something if you don't hold out some degree of hope that you're going to get a lot more than just competency.

Do I still feel the same way? I think I do, but I don’t know. Either I’ve become more attuned to the smaller virtues of less-than-perfect films, or my standards have gone down--either way, I’m a little less harsh in my appraisal of newer films. (“Gone down,” I should clarify, only as judged against my standards in 2002--someone else would look at that list and say they were never that high in the first place.)

I saw a fair number of films this year, and liked enough of them to draw up a Top 20 list. If I were rating them, even my #20, Ginger and Rosa, would get a 6.0 or a 6.5. I’ve commented on all these films over at ILX, usually quick first impressions right after I’ve seen them. I thought about cutting-and-pasting those comments here, but between looking lazy or looking lazy and somewhat creepy, I’m going to opt for plain old lazy and just go with the list. The first two stand a little bit apart from everything else.

1. Room 237

2. Nothing Can Hurt Me

3. At Berkeley

4. Enough Said

5. I Am Divine

6. Nebraska

7. Frances Ha

8. Good Ol’ Freda

9. Our Nixon

10. Everybody Street

11. Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia

12. Fruitvale Station

13. American Hustle

14. Inside Llewyn Davis

15. The Trials of Muhammad Ali

16. Continental

17. Greenwich Village: Music That Defined a Generation

18. Mud

19. Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf's

20. Ginger and Rosa

Twenty’s a Nice Round Number, Else I’d List These Too: Anita, History of the Eagles

Varying Degrees of Okay: Side Effects, The Bling Ring, This Is the End, Berberian Sound Studio, Casting By, Teenage, Terms and Conditions May Apply, Filthy Gorgeous: The Bob Guccione Story, Iceberg Slim: Portrait of a Pimp, Something in the Air, Bert Stern: Original Mad Man, Watermark

Didn’t Care For: Computer Chess, Behind the Candelabra

Transgressively Silly: Spring Breakers

Dreadful: The Wolf of Wall Street

Too Tired That Night: Design Is One: Lella & Massimo Vignelli

Still Plan to See: Blue Is the Warmest Color (today), Her, Dallas Buyer’s Club, Gravity, Like Someone in Love, a bunch of documentaries I didn’t get around to (there’s one on Gene Clark?)

Don’t Really Want to See: Before Midnight, 12 Years a Slave, An Act of Killing

I've Been Getting Messages (2014)

2013 YEAR-END BALLOT

1. “Knowing We'll Be Here,” Daniel Avery: Occupies some space between bliss and grace, like “Inspector Norse” from last year, minus the crazy drug fiend in Todd Terje’s video. Words like “bliss” and “grace” are the limits of my ability to write about a song like this--sometimes I’ll throw in “serene,” too, and that’s about it. I was checking one publication’s list of Top 50 Dance Songs online, and along with every video clip there was a capsule write-up, seemingly all of them by the same writer. As I idly read a few while playing the clips, I found myself more and more impressed by the writer’s ease and assuredness in micro-differentiating between songs and sub-sub-genres that would blur together for almost anyone, me included. Not that the songs all sounded the same, they didn’t, but the language this writer was able to summon went above and beyond the call of duty. I couldn’t do it.

I’m also impressed, and amazed, by the way “Knowing We’ll Be Here” and “Inspector Norse” are able to reach me. I’m as far away from their intended audience as possible. My only connection to the clubs where they were meant to be heard is when I drive across Richmond Street, through Toronto’s club district, after a late film at the Lightbox. Drunken sparkly people half my age spill onto the street--I’m worried one of them will pound the side of my car as I come to a stop at an intersection, which might cause me to want to intentionally run that person over, and that’d be bad. I navigate my way through, drive the rest of the way home, listen to “Knowing We’ll Be Here,” and construct my own club in my head.

2. “Echelon (It's My Way),” Angel Haze: I’m so enamored of this song, I want to quit my life and go help her out in all these feuds she’s having with record companies and rivals. “These bitches is awful”--such a great line; I hate them all. The Mary-Kate and Ashley clones, I hate them too. (I thought it was Mary J. clones until I checked a lyrics page.) I’m starting to get worked up just thinking about these people. I’m starting to get aggy. The anomalous celestial-choir voices that pop up initially threw me, but I’ve come to love the way Angel Haze cuts across them, followed by my favourite part of the record, the “killing those motherfuckers” chorus that sounds like, I don’t know, the Go! Team or something else I can’t quite figure out. Listening to this young black woman curse and fulminate probably amounts to the same illicit thrill that’s been placing profane hip-hop songs on my year-end lists since Schoolly-D in 1986. I’m so white, it’s awful.

3. “I’ll Be Around,” Yo La Tengo: My favorite video this year was, predictably, the one that Vania Heymann put together for “Like a Rolling Stone.” Next--I see very few videos these days--would be Yo La Tengo’s for “I’ll Be Around.” I can’t imagine where it would ever get played, so I’m sure it exists nowhere except on YouTube. Close to 200,000 views, though, some of them not by me.

It’s set in a forest clearing, then in a kitchen. Text is all over the screen--what looks to be a short story but on closer inspection is a mishmash of Yo La Tengo lyrics past and present, excerpts from said mishmash, and a recipe for Spicy Tortilla Soup. Once inside the kitchen, the band putters around and makes their soup, they sit down to dinner, then a couple of cops come and take James McNew away. Ira and Georgia look perplexed. I’m not sure...maybe the joke is trying to introduce some adventure and intrigue into three of the most domesticated lives imaginable. (A title card early on says “Based on Actual Events,” which is then amended to “Inspired by Actual Events”--there may be some poetic license.)  Or maybe McNew is about to leave the band, and this is their way of breaking the news. It’s quite cryptic.

Fade has everything you might love or despise about Yo La Tengo. After two or three songs I don’t care for (including “Om,” the one song that seemed to get some attention), I think it’s a perfect album. “I’ll Be Around” continues a tradition (shared by Neil Young) of stealing titles from famous songs; the Spinners’ “I’ll Be Around” is one of my favourite songs from my favourite year ever, and I think I like Yo La Tengo’s “I’ll Be Around” even more. Their whispery ambience has never felt closer, or, at the same time, just as out of reach. Always just out of reach.

4. “Nothing Is Real,” Boards of Canada: My favourite most-hated film ever is American Beauty, and my favourite most-hated scene--quite reviled--is Wes Bentley’s paper-bag monologue. You know the scene--the one where he gets a catch in his throat and starts tearing up because he can’t find the words to adequately express the beauty of the world. “It was one of those days, when it’s a minute away from snowing,” and off he goes--so overcome by the benevolent force that watches out for him and makes him not afraid, an “entire life behind things,” that he says his heart’s going to cave in.

I’ve written about that scene before. I bring it up here because I’d ask anyone who shares in the widespread revulsion to give “Nothing Is Real” a listen and decide whether it isn’t trying to capture something similar. Maybe the objection is simply Bentley, maybe it’s spill-over from the rest of the movie, or maybe it’s simply the presumption and pretension of trying to find words for feelings that can’t be contained by words. I watched the entirety of Six Feet Under for the first time earlier this year (same writer as American Beauty), and it aimed for some of the same feelings--and every so often found them, I’d say.

“Nothing Is Real” reminds me of a song by the Hylozoists, “Soixante-Sept,” about Canada’s centennial in 1967. Same stillness, same calm--the Hylozoists overlay French horns, and some audio of Montreal’s then-mayor, Jean Drapeau. This is the first Boards of Canada song I’ve ever heard. Reading that they took their name and something of their approach from old National Film Board documentaries makes sense when I think about “Soixante-Sept.”

5. “Avant Gardener,” Courtney Barnett: Australian--same part of the world as Lourdes, give or take a time zone or three. I thought “Royals” was striking the first few times; skip forward a few weeks of hearing it constantly as my grade 7 art classes listened to the radio, and I’d had enough of “Royals” for several lifetimes. Would that be true of “Avant Gardener” if it had been the fluke hit instead? I don’t think so--or rather, I think it's a song that would eventually emerge on the other side and sound fabulous again. That happened to me with “Loser” once. When I finally had a chance to write about it in my old fanzine, soon after it had fallen off the charts, I was so tired of it I just gave it a rating and left the gushing to everyone else. Today, it again sounds like the greatest thing in the world.

“Avant Gardener” does in fact meld Beck, one of his spacier slide-guitar songs, with Liz Phair. Instead of fragmentary gibberish about loveseats and chimpanzees, I’m guessing Barnett is an actual asthmatic singing drolly of her actual daily ordeals. (I don’t know--tried to confirm this and couldn’t.) She neologizes as imaginatively as Clipse: “I’m breathing but I’m wheezing/Feel like I’m emphysemin’.” I’ve never seen an episode of Breaking Bad, but “I guess the neighbours must think we run a meth lab/We should amend that” makes me want to catch up. As everything winds down, there are a few seconds of noodling around that sound like they’re lifted from Three Dog Night’s “Mama Told Me (Not to Come),” which was also about someone who had trouble catching his breath.

6. “Adjustments,” Benoit & Sergio: “Sometimes I think the DJs don’t understand”--contemplative, like when Hot Chip’s “The Warning” ruminated on silence, broken melodies, and getting lost. I can never make out the next line, though, so I’ve never found out exactly what it is that the DJs don’t understand. But the rest of the song makes that clear anyway--no need to check a lyrics page. Silence, getting lost, it’s all there.

7. “Work Bitch,” Britney Spears: A lot of songs on here appeal to--embody--my sense of beauty, so I’m glad to include this one bit of insanely funny shamelessness. Britney Spears has been pretty much the most useless pop star on the planet for me the past 15 years--I think the only song of hers I didn’t mind was her first single, which at the time inspired me to rewrite the Who's "Pictures of Lily" as "Pictures of Britney" and submit it to Chuck Eddy at the Voice, a somewhat obscure bit of rock-critic silliness. Somewhere along the way, critics started to like her, with “Toxic” doing very well in year-end polls. Couldn’t stand it; just checked, still can’t. I could have listed her twice this year, though--also like “Scream and Shout” a lot. The first time I heard “Scream and Shout,” via video, I thought that if any song ever had a chance to redefine gruesome, this was the one; before long, it added to my sense that Will.i.am possesses a peculiar kind of pop-music genius.

“Work Bitch” makes me think back to TLC’s “Waterfalls,” where they counselled moderation and patience right around the time they were setting things on fire and declaring bankruptcy. Here, the lecture is on initiative and perseverance--if you want stuff, really important stuff like parties in France, you need to stay focussed, hold your head high, call the governor, make the bubble up...well, she starts speaking in tongues a bit, but the message is clear. And if it isn’t, there’s always the helpful “You better work, bitch/Now get to work, bitch!” to clear things up. Good show: if I could hold up one person for my students whose every public action exemplifies the very meaning of work ethic, Britney Spears would be my first choice. (Cheap shot--I imagine she works 40 times harder than I do, albeit with a little bit of messiness attached.)

The music here is amazingly propulsive. I think it’s “Superstition,” more or less, trashed up and amped up and sped up beyond lawsuits. It slows down and coalesces in all the right places. She throws in a fake English accent on the word “hot.” Why, I don’t know. She says “bitch” at least as well as Angel Haze, and better than Young Thug. She’ll probably make the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame one day--everyone except England Dan and John Ford Coley does now--and because of this song, I’ll be okay with that.

8. “An Impression,” No Age, and 9. “North Sea Girls,” Wussy: This is the fourth year in a row I’ve voted for Wussy, so I’m running out of things to say about them. Wussy, you’re not going to be famous. Looking forward to Attica--great meet-me-where-I-come-from title. I’m late to No Age. At first I was going to list “C’mon, Stimmung,” which is about as melodic as skronk ever gets, but here and there the vocal bugs me. No such problem with “An Impression”; quite beautiful, especially when it morphs into Another Green World. I want to go back and hear all their previous records.

My exposure to both bands came via Christgau. A few months ago, the Consumer Guide bowed out for the second or third (fourth?) time. (It hasn’t always been called the Consumer Guide, but as long as there were capsule reviews with letter grades, it still felt like the Consumer Guide.) My guess is it won’t be back this time, and that saddens me more than I would have expected. After devouring his ‘70s book in my 20s, and then really caring about Pazz & Jop results all through the ‘80s, I basically shut out Christgau through the ‘90s. I’d been writing for a few years by then, and was putting out a fanzine with a number of Pazz & Jop voters as contributors. I was mad that I wasn’t getting a ballot myself (why I thought Christgau would know about my fanzine without someone actually giving him a copy, I’m not sure). Somewhere in there a friend and I put out a book on pop music in the ‘70s, and I made sure that we omitted Christgau in the acknowledgements, where we listed a few key music books covering the decade--against mild objections from my friend, as I remember it, but he didn’t make an issue of it. One review made mention of Christgau's ‘70s book, hinting that it was an odd omission. Anyway, for as long as it lasted, it was an excellent grudge. Like many of my grudges it was secret, so the world went ahead as before.

These days I defend Christgau when message-board posters pick over some CG entry from 40 years ago. (“How did he not know that Black Sabbath would have critical cachet in 2013? What the hell was he thinking?” I’m exaggerating, somewhat.) Not that there’s a great deal of that right now--after he left the Voice, the number and intensity of arguments about him seemed to diminish. People who were edited by him almost always single him out as the best line-editor they ever had. I wish I’d had that chance, but I don’t know how enjoyable that would have been--whatever stylistic influence he had on me disappeared soon after I started writing, and I like to leave in all the “well”s and “I don’t know”s he obviously had no patience for, so maybe it would have been a demoralizing experience. But as someone who got into my bloodstream early on--I continued to check the Consumer Guide reflexively, through all its incarnations and right to the very end (if it is...)--he belongs up there with Kael, Marcus, Bill James, and Stanley Kauffmann as a compass. Kauffmann died this year, and I paid tribute to him elsewhere. Call the Wussy and No Age songs partly my belated tribute to Christgau.

10. “Picacho,” Young Thug: Not sure what he’s going on about. The very un-thuggish backing track is pretty enough that he could be singing about Pikachus for all I care.