Suzanne Vega has been such a part of my growing up. I think every little girl needs a smart, sensitive red-haired woman for a role model. I’ve had a lot of role models over the years, and I’m not saying all of them were notorious for their drug consumption, but yeah, a lot of them were. There’s a lot to be said for the “Fuck you society imma shoot up and get ugly” school of empowerment, a la Marianne Faithfull or any number of genius lunatics. But there also needs to be some real-life-appropriate inspiration as well, which is where Suzanne Vega comes in, being all smart and articulate and resolutely not insane. Because while I’d love to be that kind of DO ALL THE DRUGS!! kind of person who flies around the world fucking everything that moves, that’s just not a realistic goal for anyone not bearing a death wish, and honestly I – and we all in general – would be better off with the more settled life of a writer or an artist who just watches the world and quietly makes observations.
Here we have some fine, clean, upstanding young men from Seattle, who are in no way into drugs or cross-dressing – I give you, Nirvana! Well, maybe not so much, depends on how you would define ‘fine and upstanding’. Honestly, I think that Kurt Cobain was about as fine and upstanding a person as you could hope to share needles with. He didn’t become the voice of his generation for being a dingbat, you know. That title, of course, is a heavy one, and unfortunately, Cobain couldn’t handle bearing it. He didn’t set out to be the voice of anyone but himself and he had enough problems without being forced to personify the collective self-image of all the young people alive in America at that time. His suicide, besides illustrating why suicidal people shouldn’t own guns, did two things; it turned him instantly and permanently into the pop cultural figment he didn’t want to be, and it cemented him in the public mind as, understandably, a very gloomy, depressed and depressing individual. Obviously, he was gloomy and depressed. But, as you can see from that video, or if you’ve ever seen or read any of his interviews, he had a pretty wicked sense of humor. He got off some real zingers in his time.
I was just looking for the lyrics to this song, but they’re not online. I always do this and I should just give up, because I already know that Black Uhuru fans don’t have internet-literacy for some reason (um, because they’re old?) and almost none of their lyrics are available. Kind of a bummer, because Black Uhuru always has a great message to impart. The only problem is I don’t always catch the entirety of it, because accents. Enunciation is just not highly prized in the music world, I guess. Still, you can get the gist of Black Uhuru’s message easily enough; peace, love, justice, liberty, solidarity, good sinsemilla. And that’s just from the song titles. Also, they are very much one of those bands whose music is easy to enjoy even if you don’t speak a word of English, or you can enjoy it so much that whatever the words are doesn’t even matter.
David Bowie for the younger generation. Do not discount his latter day work if you are an older fan either, of course, but I think the nineties and 2000′s records belong to young fans who heard them with fresher ears. It’s hard to make objective judgement about an artist like Bowie in any case, because his music has been so diverse and there’s just so much of it. I can’t deny having a sentimental affection towards the albums that I actually had the experience of going out and buying, as we all get attached to the things we discover for ourselves. But trying to listen objectively, I honestly can’t see any downward turn in quality over the years (except for a short bit in the 80′s.) There’s just no way that anyone could deny that this is as magnificent a song as Bowie has to offer. Or that Hours… has enough such moments to qualify as at least medium-classic. If anything, Bowie has become a more visibly open performer as he’s got older. He was in his early years, by his own admission, a bit of an iceman, someone who had trouble expressing his feelings without hiding behind an outlandish persona or disguising emotion as theatre. I find that his later songs are so much more heartfelt and affecting the more he appears to be himself. He isn’t being an alien from Mars or some depraved Peirrot anymore.
Epic. This is one of my favorite songs from Benin’s global music ambassador and all-around good-deed-doer Angelique Kidjo. It’s been a couple of years since she’s made a new album, but she tours all the time (don’t miss any chance you have of seeing her!) and of course stays very busy working for UNICEF, Oxfam, and her own Batonga Foundation, among many other good causes. Kidjo is just one of the ultimate examples of an artist who finds great success and then uses it to do everything in their power to make the world a better place. Makes you go all weepy thinking about it. Kidjo’s dearest cause is empowering girls and women in Africa, which Batonga does through financing and supplying schools and raising money for scholarships. A lot of stars on all levels of fame go through the motions of doing charitable work, but very few truly dedicate themselves to it. Kidjo is one of those whose humanitarian work is at least as big a priority as her day job, and certainly more important than maintaining a glamorous lifestyle or purchasing castles and yachts, or whatever it is rich people do to be conspicuous.
Marc Almond wasn’t kidding when he named Soft Cell’s debut album Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret. Soft Cell’s existence as a band wasn’t exactly non-stop, but Almond’s erotic cabaret hasn’t stopped. He has some flair for the sexy and theatrical. And likes his leather dancers. Here, he pays a not-quite-loving tribute to the now close to obsolete glamour of gay cruising. When Almond released this song in 1991, LGBT rights were much more embattled, and for many, anonymous hookups in sleazy parks and alleyways were still the norm for meetin dates. There are a few voices out there objecting to activists who present wholesome middle class couples as the face of the gay community, claiming that the seventies heyday of barely licit nightclubs and non-stop stranger sex were some kind of halcyon time of freedom. That’s an interesting point of view, but a flawed one. Post-Stonewall, society pretty much gave gay people a deal; it said to them “Ok, you can have your nightclubs and your parades, but prepare to die alone, because you can never have real domesticity – that’s a privilege for straight people.” For some, who had found the expectation of domesticity and traditional lifestyles roles stultifying and unattractive, the Studio 54 life of promiscuous partying and eternal bachelorhood was a sweet taste of freedom. Those guys are the ones who can’t understand why everyone’s so hung up on the right to marry – wasn’t escaping from society’s pressure to wed one of the perks of being gay? But for most reasonable people, even the most promiscuous ones, being told by society that they’ll never find love, settle down or have a family – because how could they? – just doesn’t cut it. Nobody wants to be denied the option of being in a wholesome picket-fence family. Even if that doesn’t happen to be the life you want to live, you still want to have a choice in it. So, although the old-timers who still pretend that public restroom blowjobs were the best thing ever rather than an inconvenient necessity don’t really have a leg to stand on in terms of influencing public debate, there’s definitely some mixed feelings within the gay community in regards to the progress being made. On one hand, equality and acceptance. On the other hand, the loss of identity and destruction of a subculture that comes with assimilation. In 1991 Marc Almond sang about skulking around under cover of darkness and anonymity, a thing many people had to do because they had no safe places to be themselves, and it was a very sad song. Today when he sings the same song, it’s in a very different world – not a perfect one, but a better one – and it can almost seem like a nostalgic song, nostalgic for harsher, more dangerous, but possibly sexier times.
I’ve been defending Mick Jagger’s solo records for a long time now, so you must be used to it. Some of them are really good! The only one I don’t like is Primitive Cool. That one sucked. Wandering Spirit is definitely the best one. Mick made some savvy choices of obscure classics to cover. I honestly think his version of I’ve Been Lonely For So Long kicks Frederick Knight’s to the curb. I know in most cases the original is usually better, and anyone with any smarts should aim to be different enough for two (or more) versions to each stand on its own. Well, these two are surely different, but I find the original kind of silly. Maybe I don’t know enough about soul music, but I find the contrast between Knight’s falsetto lead and the deep bass backup singers a bit corny. But that’s just, like, my opinion, man. You could dig it for all you’re worth, that’s fine. But you can’t argue that Mick Jagger sang the hell out of that song. You gotta at least give him points for sheer enthusiasm. We know how much he loves his soul records, and there’s no doubt he had a blast recording this.
I don’t even care if this is supposed to be a pastiche. Does it sound like a pastiche to you? On some level it might be send-up, but that shouldn’t prevent you taking it seriously. That, I guess, is Ween in a nutshell. They’re jokers who you have to have serious respect for, because they’re just so good at what they do. Everything they do. You get the sense they could totally be a chart-topping popular great band in whatever style they wanted to, but they’d just get bored if they had to play it straight all the time. Sometimes it’s a blurry line between playing it straight and making some kind of a cosmic in-joke. As for the so-called country album, it’s not a joke but it is. The joke isn’t the album or the music on it (except for a few songs that are funny.) The joke is on the record industry. Who says a weird, experimental indie band can’t go to Nashville and make a country album if they feel like it? Why does it have to be a joke or a parody if they do? The joke is on society, as it were. The whole concept is a fuck-off to a music industry that insists on pigeonholing every act as narrowly as possible and treats any excursion into new territory as freakishness. Consider it; not very many musicians change their style once they’ve found something that sells (and I don’t mean changing style as in hair color). Well established acts who try new sounds rarely get acclaim for it, partly because most popular musicians are only good at the one or two things that made them popular in the first place, and partly because the fans and critics are so eager to make fun of and humiliate them for turning weird. Even a band like Ween, who became famous precisely for being weird, find themselves having the same problem. Because once they’ve been label the weird guys, if they want to do something not at all weird, like some sad country songs lots of steel guitar, it makes people’s heads spin around. Few styles of music are less weird and experimental than country, so it must by all logic be anathema to Gene and Dean type guys. But maybe they genuinely like it and just wanted to pay an honest homage, but we as a society wouldn’t let them and thrust this whole meta-joke parody concept down their throats. Ever think about that?
Outside. It’s an album that raises questions, dark ones. Like how redeeming is the power of art, really? Questions I’ve discussed here before. Even if you don’t want to delve that deeply into philosophical arguments, you still realize that this is as depressing as David Bowie gets. But I also think there’s a positive message hidden in there somewhere. Some hint of hope. Something about emotion breaking through the cracks of isolation. Maybe even something about love. Not that I could draw a definitive interpretation from something so opaque in meaning. It’s just an impression I get. Or maybe I’m just too attached to this record for sentimental reasons.
At less than two minutes, as charming and esoteric a slice of Ween weirdness as you could ever hope for. The Mollusk was the album that made me fall in love with Ween. It’s almost a concept album, in that most of the songs are about the sea, or resemble sea shanties. There are some fake Irish love ballads and very fake Irish accents and a song called The Blarney Stone, so there’s definitely an Irish theme going on. This little number has nothing to do with sea life or Irishness, but it sets the spirit all right.
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