Pennsylvania Anarchoblogs

i do propose taylor swift's red as a seriously good thing. don't hold it against her that she looks like that or is like the lancombe girl or whatever. don't even hold it against her that she sells billions of whatever it is they sell these days. let's run through a few of the songs; i'll leave you some surprises.
here's what you get when you actually make a pop princess out of a writer. i believe part of it is about patti smith. just possibly it is a good thing for our girls to be listening to songs about patti smith.


and here is a songwriting lesson for whoever formulated 'firework' for katy perry:

"we could get married, have ten kids and teach 'em how to dream." i like this as an antithesis to the entire lifestyle portrayed now as the ideal in pop music, namely drunkenness and promiscuity. that one features a typical taylor inversion: she uses a stepped-down version of the chorus as an intro before she launches the persona. or sometimes she just builds a song steadily to a climax, not the sort of thing you're going to get from gaga. it reminds me more of chrissie hynde or joan armatrading.

even i will grow weary of the title track after nothing else has been on any radio station or target ad for a couple of years. but it is something like a perfect pop song: contagious as an apocalyptic plague.


"forgetting him is like trying to know somebody you never met"; everywhere the lyrics are better and more interesting than they need to be. taylor has a lovely touch with a bridge or with the end of a song, which she often treats as a second bridge or just an opportunity to vamp and soar in her inimitable fashion; the transitions and resolutions always come exactly at the right moment, with the right structure, in an intrinsic relation to the narrative (because she essentially sings stories or ballads). the real use of these robotic vocal effects was never going to emerge until they were humanized or combined with some real emotion; an analogy would be what annie lennox did over dave stewart's synth-pop on the early eurythmics records.

and then for god's sake she gives you an extremely simple, pure, naive country waltz, but with a completely characteristic taylor melody so perfectly identical to the lyric that it'll make your heart stop:

that one made me finally cry my eyes out over marion winik. lucinda would be proud to have written that song, and emmylou ought to record it.

and if the light-as-air '22' (below) doesn't make you feel happy and free and melancholy, put it on again until it does. it's going to be ok!

i have of course raved before. really.

watching joe scarborough just kick the ass of david remnick, editor of that politically, aesthetically, and intellectually banal magazine, emblem of the pseudo-intelligentsia and their bland bourgeois crypto-bohemia. maybe i'll try to find a video later on.

insults are the best form of political inspiration; or at least, they're not as stupid and dangerous as 'charisma.' but obviously, only an extraordinarily mediocre person in every respect would vote for barack obama or mitt romney. only a dull person in every sense. a person whose every aspiration is a cliche. keep on doin what you did and you'll keep on gettin what you got. it should all have come down to last night's third-party debate. what do these parties have to do to discredit themselves in your eyes? or they're discredited, but it doesn't matter because no one can manage to think beyond the talking points they develop. song of the american voter: please manipulate me in that hyper-primitive way that social science recommends. i love your billion dollars in ads and your whole incoherent, hyper-repetitive schtick, and now i will reward you with infinite power. 

 

gp

lp

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.

this seems basically right to me; the basic commitment is to redistribution. however, i might also remark that redistribution the other way round sort of lurks at the heart of the actual republican agenda. i know this will cause you to sob uncontrollably, but i won't be blogging tonight's debate. my prediction is that each man will so thoroughly and devastatingly refute the other that no rational person will be left with any alternative but anarchy.

 

In which Crusader AXE examines the reason why he's probably going to move to New Zealand or not; cites the record, Maureen Dowd, Paul Krugman and Jack Kennedy and wonders about how Planned Parenthood contributed to domestic violence in Scott Walker country....

 

it is amazing how disappointed the left is with obama. it all crystallized around that performance in the first debate, which was incomprehensibly described as a kind of treason or betrayal of the holy cause (=important tax code adjustments). the man can't have one non-optimal moment. people who take this line should think about whether they've ever had a bad day, and then they should watch the debate again and try to evaluate the performance with a little more objectivity. ok, cb, i understand the problems with talking about 'the left.' here i mean your basic american mainstream 'progressive.' now 'progressive' doesn't really adequately describe the stance, which is that things are going to get much, much better, because the government will redeem us. obama was the emblem of this, and was the object of a quasi-authoritarian cult: people seriously viewed him as the redeemer. chill out; it's healthy for y'all to realize he, like me and you, is just a human being in a mess of a world. the disappointment was proportional to the wacky expectations. and in my opinion, if you are looking for a leader to inspire us all into a future bright with promise, you should quit and try to stand on your own two feet. the thirst for leadership, of course, is a craving to be subordinated, to stop thinking, and to engage in the bizarre pretense that some people are demi-gods. that people stopped yearning toward obama and started re-yearning for bill clinton: what were they doing and why?

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.

typical tuneless, meaningless, interminable crap: