ABOUT RAR: For those of
you new to this site, "RAR" is Rick Alan Rice, the publisher
of the RARWRITER Publishing Group websites.
Use this link to visit the
RAR music page, which features original music
compositions and other.
ATWOOD - "A Toiler's Weird Odyssey of Deliverance"-AVAILABLE
NOW FOR KINDLE (INCLUDING KINDLE COMPUTER APPS) FROM
AMAZON.COM.Use
this link.
CCJ Publisher Rick Alan Rice dissects
the building of America in a trilogy of novels
collectively calledATWOOD. Book One explores
the development of the American West through the
lens of public policy, land planning, municipal
development, and governance as it played out in one
of the new counties of Kansas in the latter half of
the 19th Century. The novel focuses on the religious
and cultural traditions that imbued the American
Midwest with a special character that continues to
have a profound effect on American politics to this
day. Book One creates an understanding about
America's cultural foundations that is further
explored in books two and three that further trace
the historical-cultural-spiritual development of one
isolated county on the Great Plains that stands as
an icon in the development of a certain brand of
American character. That's the serious stuff viewed
from high altitude. The story itself gets down and
dirty with the supernatural, which inATWOOD
- A Toiler's Weird Odyssey of Deliveranceis the
outfall of misfires in human interactions, from the
monumental to the sublime.The
book features the epic poem"The
Toiler"as
well as artwork by New Mexico artist Richard
Padilla.
Elmore Leonard
Meets Larry McMurtry
Western Crime
Novel
I am offering another
novel through Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing service.
Cooksin is the story of a criminal syndicate that sets its
sights on a ranching/farming community in Weld County, Colorado,
1950. The perpetrators of the criminal enterprise steal farm
equipment, slaughter cattle, and rob the personal property of
individuals whose assets have been inventoried in advance and
distributed through a vast system of illegal commerce.
It is a ripping good yarn, filled
with suspense and intrigue. This was designed intentionally to
pay homage to the type of creative works being produced in 1950,
when the story is set. Richard Padilla
has done his usually brilliant work in capturing the look and feel of
a certain type of crime fiction being produced in that era. The
whole thing has the feel of those black & white films you see on
Turner Movie Classics, and the writing will remind you a little
of Elmore Leonard, whose earliest works were westerns.
Use this link.
EXPLORE THE KINDLE
BOOK LIBRARY
If you have not explored the books
available from Amazon.com's Kindle Publishing
division you would do yourself a favor to do so. You
will find classic literature there, as well as tons
of privately published books of every kind. A lot of
it is awful, like a lot of traditionally published
books are awful, but some are truly classics. You
can get the entire collection of Shakespeare's works
for two bucks.
Amazon is the largest,
but far from the only digital publisher. You can
find similar treasure troves atNOOK
Press(the
Barnes & Noble site),Lulu,
and others.
ARTIST NEWS
Music Listening Habits and Your Radio's Playlist
What is Cool Now?
By RAR
So
among the current firmament of new musical celebrities, who from your
perspective is cool? Or
even any good, for that matter?
If you were going to rely on your smartest local commercial radio
station for your answer to that question, you were likely going to limit your
sampling – your possibilities – to fewer acts than you can count on the
fingers of your two hands (even if you've lost a few). That is true whether you are an Alternative
Rocker or a Modern Country radio listener. Commercial radio stations
have developed a standard programming format that offers seven or eight
new tunes, a sampling of similar size of recent releases, and another
sampling of like size from the radio station’s historic library. The
rotation of the new tunes will be woven into the overall playlist with a
higher level of spins per hour than the rotation rates of the latter two
categories of product, so there will be those few that you will hear a
great deal. But how exactly did it get on my radio station?
While there has been a robust Do-It-Yourself (DIY) model at work in the
universe of music makers over the past decade or so, only acts supported
by big record labels, with promotions staffs, are getting their songs in
those new release rotations. That is as it always has been. The practice
of "payola" -- PR people paying money to radio
owners to get their artist’s records played -- was criminalized a long
time ago, but the practice still
happens under a variety of workarounds. Labels have promotional
campaigns that are designed to build radio audiences, so radio station
owners receive payment in that way. You also see the big radio stations
producing big-ticket festival shows in the summer, and the acts they
play on their stations always are on the roster for those events, which
is another way the stations turn label sponsorship into money. Up until
2006, label reps were still delivering cash payments to radio stations,
but doing it through third parties that were not covered by payola law
up to that time. That it was obviously still going on as recently as
that is evidence of how central it is to the relationship between
well-funded record labels and radio station executives.
My choice of station in the San Francisco Bay Area is
Live 105, an
Alternative Rock station that was a Modern Rock station when it was born
in the ‘80s. It extended the legacy of the great San Francisco station
“The Quake”, which in the early to mid ‘80s was playing the coolest
music I had ever heard in my life. KITS, Live 105, has never been quite
as edgy as The Quake had been, and over the years their new release
playlist has been uneven, to say the least. Music is, of course, a
subjective thing, but the current new release playlist includes
Mumford
& Sons, Imagine Dragons, Walk the Moon, Foo Fighters, and
George Ezra.
This is Live 105, for Christ’s sake! This is what they’ve got? This is
what they have decided to play in quick rotation?
Radio is still the place where most U.S. radio listeners find their new
music. This is according to a recent survey conducted by Edison Research
and Triton Digital, which revealed that 35 percent of the respondents
rely on the radio to find out what is currently hip. That is pretty low
– only roughly one in three people reported this – but it still vastly exceeds
the other reported sources, including "suggestions from friends" and
"searching streaming services". Radio remains worth the budgets that
labels expend to get stations to play their products.
The horrible thing about this current state of radio/music affairs is
that listening to the radio could leave you with the impression that pop
music has just become a putrid corpse that happens to be rather well
produced. The truth could not be further from that rotten perception.
There is more music of all kinds in the world today than there has ever
been before. The trick is finding the type of music you seek.
One might think that in the age of music streaming services, and the
Google search engine, that finding the good stuff in the musical mine
might be easy, but it’s not! About the closest you can come is to use
the “other artists you might like” type of features provided by many music
services, but those are spotty and one wonders how such results are
sorted. It is, after all, possible to buy your way into better search
engine results, too. One can imagine Tom Petty, for instance, showing up
on the “other artists like this” lists regardless of the type of music you are
listening to.
Sound Cloud has been a nice find for me. I often listen to indie artists
on Sound Cloud and then, because artists using that service associate
themselves with libraries of material from artists they enjoy, I find
myself listening to some other band I probably had not previously heard
of, and liking it. YouTube has a pretty good macro, as well, providing
interesting links to related content. At www.Gnoosic.com
there is a search engine that allows you to provide the names of three
artists that you like, and then it provides a series of other artists
you may also like based on your input. It is fun, though I am always a
little hesitant to profile myself for the sake of any Internet service,
their revenues all coming on the back end through the mining of such
data.
Besides, the profiling tools used by the National Security Agency can be
pretty hard on people who show certain tastes in pop music. I am
told you really don’t want to fall into the Hozier bin.
So who is out there that you call cool?
The videos on
the right are lifted from Little Stevie Van Zandt's Underground Garage
"Coolest Song in the World 2014" collection. It must be qualified by
Stevie's boss Bruce Springsteen winning the top spot for "This Is Your
Sword", a song that no one remembers though it's only a year old.
Check out the videos to the right, then
use this link to look at some
other, possibly better candidates for cool.
Nominees for Consideration
Nick Waterhouse:
Grew up in Orange County, but a stint working a vinyl record
shop in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury District turned him on to
the R&B that allowed his particular brand to emerge.
Steve Conte:
His resume includes the New York Dolls and the
Company of Wolves.
The Muffs:
Singer-songwriter Kim Shattuck's L.A. band has been around since
1991, though the band took a decade off before coming back in
2012.
Mark Rivera:
Billy Joel's saxophone man has developed quite a following of
his own.
Decoding
As We Go
As a
person spending a lot of time working in the Information
Technology sector, I am reminded on a daily basis that what is
required of us as users of language, in a technology-based
society, is going through an evolution as head-spinning as the
technologies we produce. In fact, adapting to that change by
developing the skills required to decode what we read and hear,
within the context in which this often arcane language is
presented, has become the single most
important skill of the digital age. It cuts across
all sectors and it is made more profound in its importance by
the myriad ways in which technical language has developed. Every
aspect of business administration, every business sector, and
every specialized field has its own vocabulary, and its own
shorthand. And, of course, anyone who has enjoyed
www.AcronymFinder.com
can tell you that industries use the same acronyms and
initializations, but with meanings specific to their own
purposes, so the decoder is required to understand the arcana of
the sector of interest.
People in all fields share a need
to limit their communications to brief packages of readily
understood cipher. The reasons for doing this are many:
It saves precious time.
It protects trade secrets.
It identifies those who are
a part of the tribe.
It identifies those tribe
members who are particularly competent, and who are worthy
of your time and energy.
It works well in a project
setting because it is specific and detailed, if somewhat
terse.
And in an increasingly
globalized world, where people from a variety of cultures
and native languages are working closely together, it helps
in overcoming problems with understanding words spoken with
heavy accents, cutting down on syllables that must be spoken
and heard.
Clearly communicating goals,
objectives, and plans is a skill in itself, and hugely
valuable in any organization, and that cannot be achieved in
the world of today (and tomorrow) without having a mastery
of the vocabulary specific to the tasks at hand.
Of course, this trend in
language development has been noticed as having value, and
it has produced a level of detritus in modern
communications. People use coded language as a smoke screen
to hide information they do not wish to reveal, because they
are canny with what they know, or they have no information
to conceal. The last thing you want to be in the modern age
is a person without information.-
RAR
Elmore Leonard
Meets Larry McMurtry
Western Crime
Novel
By RAR
I am offering another
novel through Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing service.
Cooksin is the story of a criminal syndicate that sets its
sites on a ranching/farming community in Weld County, Colorado,
1950. The perpetrators of the criminal enterprise steal farm
equipment, slaughter cattle, and rob the personal property of
individuals whose assets have been inventoried in advance and
distributed through a vast system of illegal commerce.
It is a ripping good yarn, filled
with suspense and intrigue. This was designed intentionally to
pay homage to the type of creative works being produced in 1950,
when the story is set. Richard Padilla
has done his usually brilliant work in capturing the look and feel of
a certain type of crime fiction being produced in that era. The
whole thing has the feel of those black & white films you see on
Turner Movie Classics, and the writing will remind you a little
of Elmore Leonard, whose earliest works were westerns.
Use this link.
Dominic Howard
Muse's
Under-Acknowledged Musical Center
There
are essentially four types of drummers in the pop world of
today: the groove guys, the
bombasts, the
virtuosos, and the
melodists. Players are going
to have elements of all of those types within their tricks bags
but they are also going to have individual personalities that
will make one of those styles their natural forté, and the thing
they are as a player. READ MORE
Better Call Saul
Junior Brown
- Just Right for Jimmy McGill
The first time I saw
Bob Odenkirk and his portrayal
of shifty lawyer "Saul Goodman" (aka Jimmy McGill) on
"Breaking Bad" I thought
immediately that he may have created one of the great TV-Film
characters of all time. Now to put that in perspective, Don
Knott's character Deputy Barney Fife (of "Mayberry RFD) is my
idea of the highest achievement in art that man can humanly
achieve, so...you know. I have loved the first season of "Better
Call Saul", and nothing about it has given me a bigger kick than
seeing that Junior Brown, the steel guitar/electric
guitar virtuoso, has done the series' theme song, complete with
video below.
Junior Brown is one of hardcore country
music's most enigmatic personalities, which is incredibly well
portrayed through a chapter in his back story that could only be known
if you somehow happened to be familiar with a band called Dusty
Drapes and the Dusters. They were a high octane
country-swing outfit of the 1970s that featured band leader
Steve Swenson, still active in
Minnesota as "Cocktail Stevie", and the dynamite country vocalist
Dan McCorrison, who years ago
moved to Nashville, but who may now live in Arizona. They were a
lot like hippies pretending, very effectively, to be
Bob Wills
and the Texas Playboys on cocaine; but really talented dudes. They
got a lot more talented, the story goes, late one night while
driving back to their home base in Colorado from a series of
gigs in Arizona. Out there along the roadway, hitch-hiking
through the desert night, was this dark figure who introduced himself as
Junior
Brown. Hearing this story for the first time, one gets the
impression of a Crossroads type of encounter with the devil
himself. The Dusters gave the stranger a ride and he joined
their band. The insanely talented Brown didn't think the band was
country enough, but he joined as a featured soloist for a time,
and during that period influenced the Dusters to assume a more
authentically country-western stage presence. While he was with
Dusty Drapes, that band was smokin', rivaled only by their
country-swing competitor Asleep at the
Wheel. The country-swing craze of the '70s passed,
closing the door on Dusty Drapes and the Dusters after Asleep at
the Wheel had slipped into the music industry rolodex, and that
is why today we still have to put up with that creepy
Ray Benson while Dusty Drapes
is a fictional character lost in western music lore. Junior
Brown left the Dusters after their prospects ran aground, and
for years has stationed out of Oklahoma, regularly touring his
hot rod sound. It is totally cool to see him associated with
"Better Call Saul", another character with a back
story. Dusty Drapes reunited for a couple shows in the
Boulder, Colorado area in 2013. The talented Dusters included
Don DeBacker (guitar,
trombone), Ted Karr (fiddle,
vocals), Fly McClard
(reeds), Brian Brown (drums,
percussion), Lemuel Whitney Eisenwinter
(steel guitar), R.T. Murphy
(trumpet, vocals) and Ray Bonneville
(harmonica). And, at other times, Rick
Delbert Schmidt and Tommy
Evans. The video above-right is from the Dusters 2013
reunion at Nissi's in
Lafayette, Colorado. Following is the Junior Brown "Better Call
Saul" video.
Inside Llewyn
Davis
by RAR
In
2014, the Coen Brothers (Joel
and Ethan) released
Inside Llewyn Davis, their
exploration of the phenomenon of the "Folk Music Revival"
of the 1950s and early 1960s, and
most specifically the era in which folk music morphed into
strains that are still a big part of pop music today.
Inside Llewyn Davis was a beguiling
character study of a single representative - roughly based on the life
of folk music hero Dave Van Ronk - and
the societal and psychological forces that were driving fundamental changes
in that dusty and multi-faceted musical form in that era.
Folk music, in
its 20th Century incarnation, was brought to life by a renewed interest in
the 1930s in folk dancing. Perhaps it was a reaction to the hedonism of the
1920s, but for some reason during the Great Depression Americans began to
realize a renewed interest in square dance and other manifestations of down
home entertainment. Folk dance, and folk music, provided an
inexpensive, low-profile way to satisfy ancestral stirrings that had been
brought to life by international conflict, because from the Spanish-American
War of 1898, and thereafter, Americans were reminded daily that the world was getting
smaller, and in the process group identification was receiving greater and
greater focus.
Corey Landis,
who has been featured on this site for years as one of pop music's most
likeable
singer-songwriters, has been showing up on TV of late as the spokesman
for 5-Hour Energy drink. Good for Corey, we say. For a Screen Actors
Guild card-carrying member -- which Corey probably is based on his
network television work ("That 70s Show") and his numerous SciFi channel
movie roles -- there is significant money in landing a national TV
commercial, including residuals for every time the commercial is shown.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, we see Corey's 5-Hour Energy drink
commercials frequently. Established stars like Mandy Patinkin and John
Travolta got their financial underpinnings from such gigs, so power to
Corey Landis. I hope he uses his new-found fortunes to produce more
recordings of his original material, because he is bright contributor.
- RAR
Frank Sinatra and Celebrity
The Beginning and Ending of
the 20th Century Star
By RAR
You know what every
American kid, junior high to high school aged, knows about
Bing Crosby? They know that
he sang all those Christmas recordings that kids still grow up
with more than a half century after their release, and they know
that Bing was a strict disciplinarian as a
father;
maybe a little too strict. That last bit of public perception
developed through books published by Crosby's children after
Bing died of a heart attack in 1973. They described him as
psychologically abusive, and two of his children (Lindsay and
Dennis) committed suicide in 1989 and 1991 respectively. A
commercial spokesman for the orange juice industry, an urban
legend spread that Bing used to beat his children with a bag
full of oranges.
Part of the reason that
people found these scandalous stories so
involving
is that Bing Crosby was the first real "star" of the electronic
age. He was there, established in show business as a
Vaudevillian when the microphone was invented, which changed
everything. Bing and his peers could sing with an intimacy that
was never possible before, because they had never before had
the mechanism that would
allow them to
be
heard over their orchestrations. The Crooner was born with the
microphone, although Crosby referred to himself as "the
Groaner".
In fact, Crosby's style remained rooted in the
period that spawned him, which from his birth in 1903 to his
breakout stardom in 1934, was punctuated with humbling boom and
bust
cycles; war, recovery, and
depression. Crosby's
approach was old school:
what the people want is a show! And you
see that in everything Bing Crosby ever did. He was a
nudge-nudge-wink-wink type of entertainer, standing a little
outside of what was happening,
with a
knowing grin, letting his audience in on the joke he
was
portraying in song, or through his movie
acting. It was utterly charming and one-half of the reason the
Hope-Crosby movies worked so well. Bing, seemingly brimming with
confidence while at the same time being void of ego, was
reassuring, a comforting presence in an era in which Americans
needed comforting. The cushy Christmas season
was created around this fatherly persona that he created over
time. And that's why the rumors of his mistreatment of his
children carried such weight. We couldn't have seen that coming
from Bing. We really didn't have that sense of intimacy with
him, or any other entertainer of his era.
That all came with a guy who idolized and
emulated Bing Crosby: Frank Sinatra.
READ MORE
The
Virtual Reality of Future Reading
It's weird. The Omni by Virituix
folks seem to be counter-engineering the human experience,
substituting natural human movement for that motion that is a
byproduct of the limitations of computer game animation. The
human is forced to simulate the mechanical movements of the
machine in order to make the virtual reality display work.
What, you might ask, does
operating a first person shooter virtual reality sensor pack
have to do with reading books on Kindle? Not nearly enough, I
would say...
READ
MORE
Creative Culture
What's With
all the Speculative Bullshit?
This edition of the
CCJ includes articles on a number of the odd topics that
fascinate consumers of media content these days, from the
supernatural to the conspiratorial. The old days of broadcast
television are gone; the big three networks reduced to also-rans
in a field of niché players competing
on equal footing for audience share. That his fractured the
broadcast message into hundreds of streams of entertainment
information. I find that some nights, when I really need to park
in front of the TV, that I must make difficult choices, like
should I watch Survivorman Les Stroud
wander around the Canadian Rockies utterly terrified at the
thought of finding the Bigfoot species he is allegedly seeking?
Or should I watch Georgio Tsoukalos
tell me those same Ancient Alien stories he has repeated for
years, as his budget for hair product has soared to yield
near-vertical results? These are not easy choices, when the rest
of the 300 available channels, not counting the premiums, are
showing paid commercial programming, exposés
on crazy people who hoard, animals, sports, reality TV,
religion, Asian and Mexican soap operas, and stuff that purports
to be news, but sounds a lot like opinion. Is it any wonder that
Bigfoot seems welcoming by comparison?
Our culture has come to be an incredibly
curious thing, because humans are an incredibly curious species.
We want to know about stuff, to look stuff up, and that is why
Google is the big deal it is
today, and why it has this mission to improve people's lives
through better ways of organizing and delivering information
upon request. Google's sights may be lofty, in one way or another,
but on the output side of their search engine are monkeys trying
to drink from their firehouse of sorted data, and being
overwhelmed in the process. It could make an ape seek help.
What we are requesting most these days is
direction to get us through the reorganization of our belief
systems. Information is disruptive to our established ways of
thinking, whether we want it to be or not. You may still be an
Islamic or Christian fundamentalist, but now your next door
neighbor may well know more about your religion than you do, and
may be asking questions that you can't answer, all because he
has been using his Internet search engine with a passion. People
seeking ways to respond to the challenges they confront will
consume the information they need to reinforce their positions.
This reduces the role of truth in our data management equation;
in fact, it produced Stephen Colbert's word truthiness.
The arbiter of information quality is now the number of Likes
that a piece of information receives on Facebook or YouTube.
That is, of course, bananas!
Sources have agendas, and history is mere
interpretation. Perceptions will continue to change, and that
will drive the direction of society in some way. The uncertainty
of the direction we are headed, as the human species,
contributes to the chaos we feel in our lives. Perhaps it also
creates our need for comfort quests, like never-ending searches
for mythological creatures, the actual finding of which would
likely yield a great feeling of loss.-
RAR
On Being David
Icke
It may be that
one of the problems with being out of your mind is knowing that,
basically, you have things right.
By RAR
Sometimes I try to put
myself in the mind of David Icke.
I imagine that I am a former
professional football player turned broadcast personality – Icke
did BBC sports commentary following his brief soccer career in
Britain, cut short by arthritis – and then one day I hear
this woman tell this story about attending functions where the
British Royal family turned into 7-foot tall reptilian creatures
and ate the flesh and drank the blood of human sacrificial
victims. And I observe the earnestness with which the woman
tells the story, and it crosses my mind that reptiles have
figured into the creation myths of a lot of the world’s
cultures, and as a young person I did hear these wild stories
that former Prime Ministers Ted Heath and Harold Wilson were
both a part of a cult that sacrificed human children. And then
other people hear that I am entertaining such stories, and they
tell me about their weird experiences where someone they were
talking with had, just for a flash of a moment, appeared
reptilian, and I start to think that maybe this is all real.
READ MORE
What the Huh?
California
Contrails
In
1996, there was a paper published by the Air War College of the Department of
Defense titled "Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather by
2025" (use
this link to read the document). That abstract showed pretty clearly
that the Defense Department was conversant at least 20 years ago with the idea of militarizing
weather solutions. Would that include weather modification for the
purpose of influencing the citizens that the government represents?
KC-135 and C-130 aircraft are being used
for purposes that may include population control, according to federal
government whistle blower Kristin Meghan. She had an eleven-year career
doing bio-environmental engineering: monitoring health and environmental
standards through soil testing and remediation at U.S. Air Force
facilities. After noticing shipments of carcinogenic materials,
documented with Material Safety Data Sheets, arriving at an Air Force
Logistics Facility in California, where she was assigned, she started
looking into the notion of chemtrails and charting contrail dissipation
rates. She did sampling that found berryium (aluminum) in the soil in
the areas in which unusual contrails had been charted.
READ MORE
Ready, Aim
Joshua Fletcher Readies New
Release
Fletcher is often compared to Ryan Adams, but on his
new 10-song LP he will bring Paul Simon to mind, as well. He is a strong
songwriter.
On May 26, 2015
Nashville-by-way-of-Atlanta singer-songwriter Joshua Fletcher will
release Ready, Aim, a ten-track collection of honest, beautiful
pop songs produced by The Damnwells' Alex Dezen, on Portland,
Oregon-based In Music We Trust Records. "Alex Dezen is one of my
favorite songwriters," comments Fletcher on his happiness over Dezen
producing Ready, Aim. "The Damnwells have been one of my favorite
bands for close to ten years, and I never imagined that he would think
enough of my songs to do this for me... We made something about a
hundred times better than what I heard," says Fletcher on the results of
Ready, Aim, when asked if the record came out the way he heard it
in his head. "Alex added so much to my ideas and this thing morphed into
something so much bigger than I imagined it could ever be."
Recorded over a month in Silverlake, Los Angeles By
Dezen, Fletcher recalls his struggle to surrender control and allow
Dezen to lead the way. Though, in the end, he's glad he did. "It was the
longest I've ever spent on a recording project, but it was also the most
intense process. It was my first time working with a producer, and that
process was different than any I'd ever been a part of," he says. "I'm
pretty reluctant to give up full creative control, so it took some work
from Alex's end. In the end, he won most, if not all, of the battles
because I ultimately figured out that he knew better than me. We spent
the majority of the time piecing together some pretty ordinary sounds
and turning them into something familiar, but odd... I think we made
something worth sharing, and I'd like to have the opportunity to share
it with as many people as possible."
The video above is not off his new LP, but rather a
nugget from three years ago.
Kid Harlequin
Netherlanders Debut Wired
Kid Harlequin is
an Amsterdam/Rotterdam contingent fronted by singer/guitarist
Julien Graut. He wears a kilt, for some
reason, and that and his curly hair create a kind of bewildering
androgyny, which has everything to do with the character of this
industrial groove band. Their debut Wired is now available. Graut
is supported by Ari Jo, a female guitar slinger, and a female drummer,
Sharon Harman. Bassist Bronco Kuijt is all male. Kid Harlequin is
inspired by Marilyn Manson, Nine Inch Nails and Placebo, but they have a
ballad sensibility to go with their heavy edge. The video below will
give you an idea of what you'll get from Kid Harlequin.
Break
On Through to the Other Side
Library of Congress Opens Its Doors to the
Doors
The first album by
The Doors —
The Doors, released in 1967 —
has been added to the National Recording Registry at the Library
of Congress, along with 23 other titles at least 10 years old
that have been deemed culturally, historically or aesthetically
significant. The registry, established by an act of Congress in
2000 to preserve the nation’s audio legacy, now has 425
recordings dating back to wax cylinders of the late 19th
century. (As reported by William Grimes on
Bloggerborre.com.)
It is just about impossible to
describe the impact of The Doors on pop culture. They really
went someplace no one had ever gone before - and no one has
really gone since -- where it was way
okay to notice how utterly strange the world around us sometimes
is, and then they had to audacity to embrace that strangeness
through their haunting, vaguely Indian sonic explorations. Their
recognition in the Library of Congress means, in some way, that
50 years after the fact, we have have embraced The Door's own
spacey perception of life experienced in the the new age.
REVIEW: CUSSES
Savannah Rockers Set with June EP
Angel Bond,
Brian Lackey, and Bryan Harder
make a distinctly retro sound that recall '80s era girl pop, ala Dale
Bozio (Missing Persons) and Josie Cotton.
Use this link for a review of the upcoming release.
Those Optimistic Mittenfields
D.C. Rockers to Release Debut LP
As Washington, D.C. indie rock outfit
Mittenfields know, it’s hard to be
remembered. To be fair, it always has been. But we live in a time of
unprecedented access to other people’s creative work; it’s never before
been so easy to move on to the next thing. It’s never been so tempting
to forget, in order to make room for the next.
For artists, naturally, that’s an
anxiety-inducing thought. That anxiety, and no small amount of anger,
color the songs on Optimists, the debut LP from Mittenfields. But
the songs in this collection of raucous shoegaze and noise pop are both
memorable and memory-inducing, calling up Doug Martsch’s widescreen
scope, the raw simplicity of Kim Deal and the shouty quaver of Win
Butler circa Funeral.
It
feels pretty grim sitting through the
Curt Cobain (Montage of Heck) and
Frank Sinatra (All Or Nothing At All)
documentaries showing on HBO these days. It is almost always
disheartening to pull back the curtain to discover who your heroes
really are. This is partly because they always represent some side of
your self that you particularly like, blown up bigger than life, which
is what you respond to in them. Discovering that they have other sides
that aren't like you at all, and in fact are recognized to be frailties
and fetishes, may tend to make you feel sad, and so the heroic myth is
constantly built to be shattered.
There is a ton of sadness in the Cobain
and Sinatra documentaries. The part that has to do with the hollowness
of fame is present in both but doesn't move us much anymore; the story,
in all of its permutations, has been told a thousand times over in
"Behind the Music"-type documentaries. More alarming is the
contrast of these two
big stars at around the same age and at similar points in their careers. Sinatra was living the high life in a time
when people still wore suit and tie on a daily basis. WW II was being
won and optimism lie ahead. Cobain, 50 years later, was living the high life as a junky in his underwear
in grungy Seattle. There was no optimism ahead, and the Cobain home
movies portray something like a dementia suffered by victims who don't
yet know that what they have is the plague. Sinatra was a self-absorbed
player, while Cobain was a self-absorbed fluke of the universe. Both
were suicidal, subject to despair over the improprieties of their love
interests, and essentially weak characters who were motivated by base
emotions of lust and fear.
At least Sinatra, for all of his flaws,
comes across as an artist: a guy who was working hard to master his
craft and improve his skills. Cobain, on the other hand, had broken big
during a dead era in rock, when hip-hop had first broken onto the scene
and changed the entire playing field of popular music. Cobain's
documentary has the effect of revealing the limits to Cobain's musical
horizons. He seemed to only imagine one musical expression, that he more
or less repeated song-after-song. That is, of course, the formula for
fame into which Cobain had been born, which leaves very little room for
popular artists to "change" or vary from what made them famous.
Sinatra, in his era, had no alternative realms into which to stray, so
he too was stuck on a certain track, but at least he had the advantage of working with a variety of songwriters, with
a variety of musical approaches. And, of course, they had optimism that
Cobain never had.
The Cobain documentary certainly does not
help the popular images of Cobain's Nirvana band mates.
Chris Novoselic and
Dave Grohl come across as two of the
luckiest guys in the world, who for some reason got to ride on the train
wreck of Curt Cobain's life. Seeing them in their native states reminds
us of how incredibly un-special they are, and it makes us wonder what
that says about those of us who gave ourselves to their music back in
the 1990s, when there just wasn't much else going on with the radio.
And then, finally, there is
Courtney Love, whose presence in the
Cobain documentary brings to mind those tales of the Grim Reaper, who
would show up in fields outside of medieval towns and spread the Black
Plague with his scythe. Love's weapon was her own lethal personality,
and her poisonous powers to seduce an ill-fated innocent and rob him of
his fame and fortune.
Contrast Love to Sinatra's femme fatale,
Ava Gardner, and you have changing
America in a 20th Century nut shell.
________________
There's
Our Plucky Boy!
George Lucas' Poverty Patch
As anyone who has ever lived and/or worked, or even
gone anywhere near, Marin County, California knows, the species of human
found there represents a nadir in human development. They are among the
wealthiest citizens of these United States, and particularly
well-endowed with that sense of entitlement that means they always go
first, whatever the situation. This makes driving in Marin County a
jaw-dropping nightmare, and things don't get that much better on the
sidewalk.
Movie mogul George Lucas has been having a hard time
with his Marin neighbors for years, and of course it has to do with them
not allowing him to do something he wants to do. He wants to build a
263,701-square-foot Lucasfilm production studio on his Grady Ranch
property, and local residents have killed the project with protests over
increased traffic, ruined views and potential damage to the local
environment.
Lucas has now decided to spend $150 million of his own
money to develop the land for affordable housing, including Section 8
housing. Some of the housing will be allocated to specific groups, such
as seniors, nurses and teachers. The complex would include a community
centre, a pool, an orchard and small farm, a barn, interior roadways and
a bus stop.
Marin County is one of the most affluent locations in
the US, with a median household income of $90,839, and 7.7 percent of
people living below the poverty line. According to his lawyer, Gary
Giacomini, Lucas said, "We've got enough millionaires here. What we need
is some houses for regular working people."
I Want to
!?#! You Like a Corporation
Trent Reznor Redesigning Apple's Beats Music
App
Apple is moving forward
with a long rumored overhaul of its streaming music services lineup that
will incorporate a reworked Beats Music app developed with the help of
Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor, as well as a revamped iTunes
Radio service.
Less than a year after buying Beats for $3 billion,
Apple is working hard to position the audio firm's streaming service as
the flagship in a new digital music initiative.
According to the New York Times, Reznor, who was previously
Beats' chief creative officer, is heading up development of a redesigned
Beats Music app that could see release as part of iOS 8.4.
Priced Out of the NOLA Jazz &
Heritage Festival
Give something good
enough time, and it will find a way to turn bad. It is not that the
New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival
is bad - in fact, it is one of the premier music festivals in the world,
to the extent that it features New Orleans' own homegrown talent - but
it is most assuredly being bastardized in ways that have nothing to do
with the culture it was designed to celebrate.
Many parts of the
music press, and even Internet politics and policy trolls like
The Daily Beast, have
shrieked over ticket pricing at the 2015 event, with sky-high festival
prices turning the festival into an well-to-do, all-White snob fest, too
expensive for most New Orleans natives to attend. This year's bill
includes The Who
and The Eagles,
neither of which have anything at all to do with New Orleans music; in
fact, have more to do with exploiting the potentials of an established
venue to attract big name pop acts that drive ticket prices through the
roof.
Bozz Scaggs Finds His Inner Voice
The video below is a snippet of an
interview that Bozz Scaggs did recently with radio personality Tavis
Smiley. In this interview, Scaggs reveals that it has taken him years to
find his inner voice, and that it embarrasses him to listen to his hit
"Lowdown" in its original version.
The CCJ was struck by a couple things.
One is that it is interesting to hear a guy who has been as successful
as Bozz Scaggs has been talk about how long it took him to become the
singer he wanted to be. This is interesting in that most hit pop singers
win their laurels at a young age before they could have experienced the
type of growth that Scaggs discusses in this interview.
Possibly more eye-opening: Bozz Scaggs
thinks of himself as a singer? Who knew?
_______________
New Study
Music
Trends
Imperial College London has published the
findings of a study they sponsored to trace the evolution of pop music.
A group of researchers used 30-second snippets of 17,904 songs that
appeared on the Billboard Hot 100 list from 1960 to 2010. This digital
music library represented 86% of all the singles that made it on the Hot
100 list during that 50-year span.
They assigned each song to one of 13
style groups, based on the patterns they found. They looked for musical
diversity and they identified points at which music style evolution took
great leaps to different overall profiles. By calculating rates of
change between songs over time, the researchers pinpointed three periods
of rapid evolution: 1964, 1982 and 1991. They concluded that the arrival
of Hip-Hop, in 1991, represented the most profound stylistic change
overall, having the greatest stylistic impact.
This sounds right to me. The 1964 British
Invasion was really an extension of traditional musical forms. The 1982
New Wave era was also an extension of existing forms. Hip-Hop, on the
other hand, was a radical departure, and understanding exactly why this
represents something truly profound was outside of the intent of this
study.
For Baby Boomers who have lived through
all of those changes, the Imperial College study will tend to confirm
something they felt instinctively: the world changed at those points
identified. And by the time of the Hip-Hop revolution of 1991, the world
that Baby Boomers knew was gone, replaced by what would likely feel like
a complete different reality.
Speaking personally, as the father of two
kids born after 1991, I see on a daily basis that the cultural contexts
within which my kids have grown up has created something beyond the
age-old "Generation Gap", but rather has signaled a new age of new
values.
A Baby Boomer, like myself, may find that
the measuring sticks we have always used to estimate the quality and the
intrinsic value of the cultural artifacts of our time are going to yield
some very unsatisfying readings. Trying to figure out whether this is
something to be alarmed at may be a waste of time, however strong the
urge. The values and the quality characteristics that are being
developed in 2015 belong to those who will be around for years to come
to experience their effects.
The old world, and all of that which it
considered its riches, is gone. - RAR