Anarchoblogs

how many classic country songs have appeared in 2012? i have a count: at least one.

 

ask yourself what you would make of that composition and that performance if you didn't know it was sailor twift. what if it was some kind of homely chanteuse getting good reviews on her small club tours and funding her record on kickstarter?

watcha watchin, crispy? well as you might imagine or not, the abc seres nashville. i am a sucker for a soap, and i love nashville the city, where i lived for some years. the city is lovingly portrayed, with such real places as the bluebird cafe and the loveless hotel, where you might have found little crispy playing the open mic or chowing down on the biscuits long about 1991. i had sort of read the ingenue character played by hayden pannetierre as a stand-in for taylor swift, but not really. the plot is essentially itself the subject of many a country song: "catch a falling star." and son, t-bone burnett is the musical supervisor.

the music is interesting. first of all there are versions of every nashville sub-genre: pop country, hotel band, superstar, opry, alt, almost down to the buskers, but it is all originals. these are not exactly parodies, but re-enactments, rather bravura 'i could do a song like that' throwdowns. but i am so far rather disappointed with the songs that are proposed as serious music or great or pure country songs. they just have not particularly moved me, and i'll tell you this: they can do better. there are, quite as depicted in the series, hundreds of amazing songwriters in nashville; they are your server tonight or they are 40-year vets.

just one more element to put me in the tank, the thing features one of those people who grew up in the cast of general hospital: jonathan jackson aka lucky spencer. he plays in a band analogous to, say, jason and nashville scorchers.

meanwhile: taylor swift the queen of all media, and of the hearts of all twelve-year-old girls and their daddies! this 'red' thing is really a great record.

i've already posted a version of this, but i am obsessed with this song by imelda may, the irish queen of rockabilly.

apologizing to rik in advance, i'm going to do to the velvet underground what lately i've done to springsteen and michelangelo. let me make a few methodological remarks. if you really like the music of springsteen, let's say, you might actually feel personally insulted when i leave it at 'sucks.' however, he is not you. maybe i sound angry, and in some ways universal adoration for stuff i think is bad does rather irritate me. but i just say: let's play! i'm gonna formulate my attack in the sharpest or even most extreme way i can; ok come back at me! dude i listen to country music. attack! this is more or less what art is for, so we can all yell at each other. i definitely grew up in a high fidelity world. my brothers were all complete pop music fanatics, archivists, etc. we'd spend whole nights just wrangling about the the or whatever. so i just think this kind of thing is fun.

plus, note the sort of people that i'm always emperorsnewpantsing. it's people whose gigantical hugeness actually puts them above criticism. (i should make a list: oh you know beatles, wittgenstein, dylan, picasso, michelangelo.) now i think that these sorts of reputations do not necessarily arise by genius standing the test of time, but rather by (a) stampede of the usual human sort, and (b) the fact that a big enough reputation stupefies and intimidates people; only an idiot would say ulysses was jive, so if you do not want to appear to be an idiot, you don't say it. but it would take thousands of me working for decades even to corrode the solid-gold plating slightly. so i don't see as saying what i actually think could harm anyone or anything, while it might interrupt our annoying worship of others of our own species.

 to vu, certainly one of the most idolized groups in rock history. now, what exactly was good about them? maybe lou reed or nico could really sing? oops lou wasn't exacty otis redding. maybe they played the shit out of those instruments, like the yardbirds or something. not exactly. they were opposed to melody in all its pernicious forms, preferring extreme monotony, which i guess could be an aesthetic, as long as i am not required to listen to it. no one who has available a martha reeves and vandellas song and a velvet underground cover of that song could rationally put the velvets' version on the turntable.

let me put it like this: the point simply could not have been the music, which is incompetently performed and extremely boring. the point is the cultural liberation they represented, and then their influence on punk. i can see how it might be important for many kids of the era to suddenly see gayish people onstage, so i'll give them that. but in my opinion, the aspects of 60s/70s culture they represented were precisely those that made the whole social transformation of the era essentially meaningless: mindless hedonism pursued to the point of total annihilation. you thought you were helping to liberate humanity from its narrow strictures and doing something important. i say you just fucked everybody and did all the drugs because you wanted to, in a total commitment to narcissistic self-indulgence and the destruction of oneself and others. it's all heroin and lou reed taking a dump on someone during an eightball orgy (see please kill me). millions of people all over the world reacted like that was what freedom meant, though one might with as much plausibilty say it is what unfreedom means. good luck with that, and thousands of people are dead because they thought this sounded like a good idea. i don't blame the velvet underground; i blame the bad taste of the deceased. it doesn't help that i kept having to see lou reed in the '80s and writing it up. these may have been the very worst gigs i ever witnessed; he fucking despised the audiences for adoring him, which i admit is rational. you think he's deep and changed everything. i think he's a completely uninteresting lout, and that that is exactly what every one of his records represents.

i'd say that bruce springsteen has devolved into self-parody with stuff like 'land of hope and dreams,' currently the baseball playoff theme song. but actually i never really didn't hear the stuff that way. here he just bellows in his overwrought, quasi-operatic, extremely mannered manner: really he could skip the lyric and just emote pseudo-hysterically. he hits basically one tone in all his rock-type songs: humorless, grandiose, converting 'ordinary american lives' into huge symbolic clouds of hooha: every fucking beer another tragedy, every verse another bludgeon. the melodies are extremely samey, liltless, charmless, monotonous, profoundly unimaginative. the lyrics could have been generated by a simple turing machine; he's written so many of these anthems to america that i think it's time for the country to disband, just to shut the man up. 

here are versions of the talks i'm giving at etsu in johnson city next week: on bluegrass and pictorial realism.

speaking of my personal cult of iiird tyme out, ii'll be giving talks on bluegrass and on realism in pictorial arts at east tennessee state u on sep 26 and 27. maybe i can put the texts and even the powerpoints up on google docs? actually, the bluegrass thing, thur sep 27 in ball hall at 6 (wait. 6? won't everybody be eating? bring pizza?) will be on hippie grass like muleskinner (embedded below), as well as the seldom scene, newgrass/"progressive bluegrass", the dc bluegrass scene etc.