Singles 1/27
In which Faith Hill and Jason Mraz outscore The Shins and Nicki Minaj’s latest collaboration.
Songs graded on a ten-point scale. Click on links for reviews.
Faith Hill – Come Home (6)
Nicki Minaj – Stupid Hoe (6)
Jason Mraz – I Won’t Give Up (5)
The Shins – Simple Song (5)
Tyga – Rack City (5)
B.o.B ft. Andre 3000 – Play the Guitar (4)
Wonder Girls – The DJ Is Mine (4)
Nelly ft. T.I. and 2 Chainz – Country Ass Nigga (4)
The Maccabees – Pelican (2)
50 Cent ft. Tony Yayo – I Just Wanna (2)
DJ Fresh ft. Rita Ora – Hot Right Now (2)
David Guetta ft. Nicki Minaj – Turn Me On (1)
On growing old
Donald Hall’s brief threnody on aging has the cracked-bark fragility of a late Wallace Stevens poem:
Each season, the writer’s balance gets worse, and sometimes he falls. He no longer cooks for himself but microwaves widower food, mostly Stouffer’s. If he flies to do a poetry reading, his dear companion Linda, who lives an hour away, must wheelchair him through airport and security. New poems no longer come to him. Generation after generation, his family’s old people sat at this window to watch the year. There are beds in this house where babies were born, where the same babies died eighty years later. After a life of loving the old, by natural law the writer turned old himself. Decades followed each other and then came his cancers, Jane’s death, and over the years he travelled to another universe. However alert we are, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life. They can be pleasant, they can be annoying, but most important they are permanently other. When we turn eighty, we understand that we are extraterrestrial.
Romney: a virtual parody of an inauthentic politician
A week late but worth linking: what Mitt Romney learned from his dad George, a vigorous philanthropist who marched with Martin Luther King’s followers in Selma, Alabama. Rick Perlstein:
When people call his son the “Rombot,” think about that: Mitt learned at an impressionable age that in politics, authenticity kills. Heeding the lesson of his father’s fall, he became a virtual parody of an inauthentic politician. In 1994 he ran for senate to Ted Kennedy’s left on gay rights; as governor, of course, he installed the dreaded individual mandate into Massachusetts’ healthcare system. Then he raced to the right to run for president.
He’s still inauthentic – but with, I think, an exception. Every time he opens his mouth on the subject of capitalism, he says what he sincerely believes, which happens to fit neatly with present-day Republican ideology: that rich people deserve every penny they have, and if people complain about anything rich people do, it’s only because they’re envious.
Bill Murray in his prime couldn’t have played him.
A note on pandering
Embittered by fifty-two years (!) of false promises, my parents have sworn off voting for candidates who promise Fidel’s head on a platter delivered by a dancing girl who can sing Celia Cruz. Their vote for Republicans ticket is inspired by a combination of embracing the sociopolitical part of “conservatism,” parental exposure to the horrors of forced nationalization (at gunpoint in my grandmother’s case; she worked for a bank), and habit. They have accepted that the current version of the GOP has no use for their support of abortion rights, no matter how cogently they argue that their endorsement of choice is the most conservative position a self-professed Republican can make; and having seen its discontents in the airline industry Dad is skeptical of the panacea of deregulation. About other “social issues” my parents remain shall we say uneasy. Although I haven’t asked them about the “viability” of the former Speaker of the House’s campaign for president, I trust that accounts like this won’t endear him to them.
Hope and deranged: The Ides of March
In which sandpapery-voiced political consultant Steve Meyers (Ryan Gosling) realizes that the Democratic governor and candidate for president (George Clooney) is a louse, and, as a bonus, realizes that he’s a louse too. That’s all that’s at stake in what Tim Robbins’ louse of a Hollywood executive in The Player would classify as a cynical political thriller with a heart. The dialogue, written by director Clooney, Grant Heslow, and Beau Willimon, based on a play, is recognizable to anyone seduced by the chipper chihuahua excitement of Mark Halperin monologues on the cable talk shows, which I suppose adduces the film’s verisimilitude: it’s as shallow and “process”-driven as any “issue” hot enough to raise a tingle up Chris Matthews’ leg. Clooney as director errs in showing Clooney the actor’s point of view (e.g. the Sensitive Moment between the candidate and wife in the car); for this thing to work at all the candidate has to remain in the shadows, a smirking non-entity. At least Gore Vidal’s The Best Man, ladling irony like cold soup, offers a few rancid bon mots. I was especially offended by how Evan Rachel Wood exists to get seduced and abandoned for the sake of a gross and obvious plot twist in the sort of film for which the just as gross buzzword “homosocial” exists.
Clooney The Actor is the problem too — an example of a performer famous for what makes him least interesting. Called upon to express warmth, he’s merely self-absorbed; when he gives himself a blackguard moment he projects TV-actor malevolence. After Up in the Air, The Descendants, and this, Clooney better watch out: William Holden got trapped in the same place by the mid sixties. Would that he and Gosling have switched roles.
Or: how the other half lives
A few conservative concessions to liberalism’s strengths were made without qualification; others were begrudging. Nonetheless, in the conservative assessment, common themes emerge:
Liberals recognize the real problems facing the poor, the hardships resulting from economic globalization and the socially destructive force of increasing inequality.
Liberals do not dismiss or treat as ideologically motivated scientific findings, especially the sharpening scientific consensus that human beings contribute significantly to climate change.
Liberals stand with those most in need, and believe in the inclusion of such previously marginalized groups as blacks, Hispanics, women and gays.
As I sifted through the responses, it became clear that a widely shared view among contemporary conservatives is that liberals are all heart and no head, that their policies are misguided — thrown off track by an excessively emotional compassion that fails to recognize the likelihood of unintended consequences.
Or, as Kevin Costner’s Jim Garrison reminded us in JFK, “We’re through the lookin’ glass, people!”
Fandom stepping out: Disco Inferno
A close to definitive oral history of Disco Inferno, a band about which I knew little until last year. I’ll need this: even after listening with growing pleasure to the reissue of The Five EP‘s last fall my reservations still stand. Ian Crause’s vocals, wry in the undistinguished way of a funny political science adjunct at a public university, don’t reward concentration, so I’ll have to take Ned’s word about the intelligence of his lyrics. Learning how, like New Order, they produced haunting sounds from a less than adroit grasp of sampling technology validates a method, not the results. As creators of ambient musics, however, these men are first-rate – dig the rattling dishes, whooshing train effects, and heard-from-the-woods piano in “From the Devil to the Deep Blue Sky,” or “Love Stepping Out,” which sounds like the offspring of Orbital and Steve Reich. Essays in shoegaze (“A Rock to Cling To”) and jangle (“The Last Dance” and its better produced successor “The Long Dance”) are as compelling but impossible to imagine on any college station. Disco Inferno were meant for studious concentration on headphones; they reward the attention.
Rhymin’ and schemin’: Ross Forever
To the scolds who still think hip-hop is too shallow or something, Rick Ross accepts their charge. When it comes to Bugattis, ring-size seats, and copers, he’s like an animist priest worshipping a fern or stone. He’s gone from disciple to master quick. “Keys to the Crib” is what Jay-Z couldn’t quite manage on 2007′s “Roc Boys (And The Winner Is…),” for those keeping track of such things. Ross’ triumph on this track lies less in what he does to Mr. Empire State of Mind’s attempt at horn-drunk R&B nostalgia (Styles P’s verse wipes the floor with Kanye’s whined “we in da HOUSE,” another in a growing list of howlers) than the ease with which he assumes that the opulence of the long-ago The Blueprint days can be negotiated and bought for the right price. On Rich Forever, the new album he has mindlessly relegated to mixtape status, Ross grunts in the faces of critics who dismissed him as a stentorian hack. He no longer sounds like he’s laying down verses like cinder blocks at a construction site. If you’re at his table now, he reminds us, you eat what he eats. It’s too long, and Diddy’s contributions are barely competent, but its sumptuousness makes 2010′s Teflon Don sound like a mixtape it isn’t.
By now the mask has frozen around the face; Ross plays the hustler he wanted to be so well that he can afford (literally) to sublet the gravity to Deep Thinkers like Nas, who contributes one of his best recent verses to “Triple Beam Dreams,” and market-validated aggro-introspection to Drake, who doesn’t (e.g. “Stay Schemin’”). Sometimes he essays the introspection himself (“Last Breath”). Ross Forever is, as Jordan Sargent writes, a record that uses nastiness to cement the character “Rick Ross” as three-dimensional.
Singles 1/20
In his best single in years, Tim McGraw shows the empathy that’s his strength. Van Halen meanwhile acts as if David Lee Roth sported all his teeth and hair.
All scores on a ten-point scale. Click on links for full reviews.
Tim McGraw – The One That Got Away (8)
Van Halen – Tattoo (7)
Asher Roth – Common Knowledge (6)
Tyrese – Stay (6)
Medina – Kl. 10 (6)
Cher Lloyd ft. Astro – Want U Back (6)
Mia Martina – Burning (5)
Anjulie – Stand Behind the Music (4)
Oh My! – Bad Date (3)
Train – Drive By (2)
Taio Cruz – Troublemaker (2)
Adam Lambert – Better Than I Know Myself (1)
“Wait, wait…don’t tell me!”
From David Margolick’s story on National Public Radio’s woes:
…it’s gone decidedly mainstream. True, in story selection and sound, NPR retains a tincture of elite liberalism. (Anyone seeking evidence need only listen to the insufferable “Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!”) But as its critics on the left contend (yes, there are lots of them too, every bit as over-heated as those on the right), on NPR these days there’s far more comforting the afflicted than afflicting the comfortable. NPR has traded much of its early edginess and eccentricity for reach and respectability, stability, and an almost compulsive inoffensiveness. (When, not long ago, Leon Panetta called Osama bin Laden a “son of a bitch,” NPR felt compelled to bleep out the “bitch.”) Apart from the occasional stories about gays or Palestinians (and maybe even gay Palestinians), there’s precious little on NPR these days for conservatives really to hate. For them, despising NPR and cutting off what amounts to the few pennies it collects from the federal budget has increasingly become more a matter of pandering, or habit, or sophomoric sport, than of conviction or serious policy. The editor of the Weekly Standard, Bill Kristol, once confessed to former NPR ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin that he really didn’t believe NPR was liberal; he just said so “to keep you guys on the defensive.”
Meanwhile Juan Williams is presented as a luguburious hack who wrote a Thurgood Marshall biography I probably won’t read.
(h/t Eric Harvey)
Last bit of housecleaning…
As the entire music community knows by now, The Village Voice published its Pazz & Jop poll yesterday. I got a few comments published here, here, here, and here.
The winners:
1 tUnE-yArDs, w h o k i l l
2 PJ Harvey, Let England Shake
3 Jay-Z and Kanye West, Watch the Throne
4 Wild Flag, Wild Flag
5 Tom Waits, Bad As Me
6 Adele, 21
7 Destroyer, Kaputt
8 Drake, Take Care
9 Bon Iver, Bon Iver
10 Shabazz Palaces, Black Up
Singles:
1 Adele, “Rolling in the Deep” * **
2 Beyoncé, “Countdown” **
3 Nicki Minaj, “Super Bass”
4 M83, “Midnight City”
5 Jay-Z and Kanye West, “Niggas in Paris”
6 Azealia Banks, “212″
7 Lana Del Rey, “Video Games”
7 Britney Spears, “Till the World Ends”
9 Adele, “Someone Like You”
10 Foster the People, “Pumped Up Kicks”
10 Tyler, the Creator, “Yonkers”
