The Tris McCall Report
The latest mail-bag stuff
Marc Maurizi at Maxwell's, as the Brokedowns say goodbye on April 11th, 2003
Tris,
You never seem to pan any of the local acts that you talk about. Of course, you could be a) only writing about acts you like, or b) only seeing good acts (which is possible but seems less likely). This doesn't surprise me, given your investment and sincere passion in the local music scene, but I do wonder if it makes you less credible somehow.
Bring It To Black, Central Jersey
Dear BITB,
For now, at least, I'm not inclined to write about something local unless i'm going to praise it in some way. You know how it is, slamming some band nobody but a small circle of indie rockers have heard of -- why bother? That said, I've had some harsh words for Mooney Suzuki and Interpol (though I do like Interpol quite a lot), and you can't duck those guys; they're always around. If they wanted to get their goons on me, they definitely could. So it's not like I'm running scared.
Most people believe I'm far too catholic in my taste, and that goes back years now. Well, that's just the way it is -- I do like an awful lot of what I hear. It's not too hard to please me. I have to hope that I have enough words that the differing character of my reviews can compensate for my unwillingness to, say, give stars or a letter grade.
Dave Marsh might be my favorite rock critic, and my model when writing about mass culture, but when i'm on about the subculture, Lilian Roxon's Rock Encyclopedia is my guidestar. The great thing about Roxon is that more than any other critic, she gave you the sense that rock music was this wonderful force that could manifest itself in an infinite number of forms, none intrinsically superior to any others. and she made you feel like you were standing in the midst of that primal force, just watching it swirl around you. In her '69 edition of the Encyclopedia, she reviews about seven million groups, and I think there's only one (The Left Banke, ironically) she even damns with faint praise.
TMC
GOODBYE, RUBY TUESDAY
Tris,
If you update the calendar every Wednesday, you give short shrift to shows on Wednesday nights. As someone with a show coming up on a Wednesday, this struck me as particularly relevant.
Anti-folkist, Hudson County
Dear Auntie,
You're right, I really should write these on Monday nights. But I've got to admit it -- I have to see how Buffy The Vampire Slayer ends. So that puts me on the computer Tuesdays, and I tend to upload the text around midnight. Come mid-May, this'll change.
TMC
I DON'T WANT TO KISS YOU, I DON'T WANT TO TOUCH
Tris,
Did you ever write a review of Elvis Costello's When I Was Cruel?
Ruben Saanich, Catskills, NY
Dear Ruben,
I never did. I was originally going to write a British Inversion column that took on Oasis/Gomez/Elvis Costello, but then I realized that all three acts were on majors, and no indie press would touch it. And there was only a short period of time when I was listening to it, anyway, and I didn't have all that much to say about it beyond that it was really sad.
As a Costello fan who could best be described as dedicated, I thought When I Was Cruel was an interesting genre experiment, but ultimately one with too many duff tracks to merit much repeated listening. Oh!, now I remember, I was going to draw a parallel between When I Was Cruel and Mighty Like A Rose -- both experiment with genre, both present very verbose songs. Both are ambitious/uneven, and both have some of his klutziest lyrical moments. In an interview once Costello did with Bill Flanagan, he explained that "Uncomplicated" was one of many failed efforts to write a song without changing chords, and it's clear that trip-hop is attractive to him in the same way that synth-soul was counterintuitively compelling to Paul Weller during his Style Council experiment. Cruel and Mighty feature intermittent attempts by one of the most hyperactive and ornate songwriters in pop music to make songs that drone.
I like "45", the admittedly annoying title track, and "Little Blue Window"; those all could slot onto a Costello also-ran compilation. "Spooky Girlfriend" is kind of a bluff. "Doll's Revolution" -- Elvis Costello is giving me gender bendy nonsense now? I thought I could count on him to dispense with that kind of crap; this is the man who wrote "Honey Are You Straight Or Are You Blind". I have sat through way too many episodes of The Practice for me to get with "Soul For Hire" -- it sounds like an "adult" TV theme, and it was one. The two takes on "Dust" are pretty nice in their moody way, but small. "Dissolve" isn't even really a song, just an excuse to make a racket and give us a "Woe-Is-Me" act (hey, it worked for Plastic Ono Band.) "Daddy Can I Turn This" is just a racket. I definitely would have left that one off the album. "Alibi" is the seven minute epic that Costello needed to hit out of the park, but he can't bring the goods: "Maybe Jesus wants you for a sunbeam"? "Sorry that your mommy doesn't love you"? There's no art here, it's just first-person venting. "I love you just as much as I hate your guts". Come on, how many times are we going down that road with this guy? "Radio Silence" is a very sad closing statement from a guy who's almost always super-defiant on his final album tracks, compare to "Riot Act" or "Next Time 'Round", or "Last Boat Leaving", or anything, really.
That leaves us with the three tracks that contend with greatness, and ironically, they're the ones that most resemble Mighty Like A Rose. "Episode Of Blonde" revisits "Invasion Hit Parade", but from the perspective of a funnier narrator. Costello nails the gossip column point of view perfectly. The chorus is amazing and echoes some of the gonzo writing on Spike -- the "fire engine red", it's like the siren in "...This Town" all over again. And fading out on the final verse is a great touch. "Tart" is his best ballad since Brutal Youth. I can really get with the arrangement -- when he brings the guitar in, you know you've got a quorum. His distraught soul-man vocal on the chorus is worthy of Darren Hayman. Which brings us to "Fifteen Petals", the song that justifies the whole project. Here, he gives you a break-up narrative that is brilliantly written, and he pushes the imagery to its limits, at which point he dissolves in a tortured shriek. Costello is the best straight-song singer in rock history, and he gives you everything he's got here. The horn charts are delirious. "I'd write it down, but I can't concentrate". I believe him.
Ultimately, behind the artifice, there's a human tragedy here. It's too bad that he broke up with his wife. When I Was Cruel is among the saddest albums I've ever heard. I think he was probably really distraught when he was doing it, and he just threw himself despondently into the process withing doing the kind of meticulous shaping work (on the compositions, I mean) that he usually does. He probably thought "Dissolve" was raw. To me, there's no there there.
TMC
SWEDISH TABOO
Tris,
ABBA was not an overrated band. First of all, who's overrating them? Secondly, who from that era matched their combination of cuteness, histrionics and tunefulness with as much consistency and sheer volume as they did? And, who has since? ABBA were The Shangri-Las of their generation. But, you probably don't like them either.
Leader of the Pack, Brooklyn
Dear Leader,
They've become overrated in their old age. Their critical rehabilitation has been much like that of the Monkees: their contemporary critics despised them because they felt they would be remembered as period schlock, only to find that many future critics heralded them precisely because they were period schlock. The Rolling Stone Record Guide from '82 gives all their albums two stars, which sounds about right to me. Ken Tucker calls ABBA "pleasant but forgettable", and says the music induces "sleep and cavities". That pretty much echoes what I remember from the block as a little kid: if you were listening to ABBA, that meant you lacked the capacity to handle anything tough or complicated. ABBA was for little kids and old women.
Ten years later, on the cusp of the alternative revolution that would permanently segregate radio, the Third Edition of the Rolling Stone Record Guide had bumped all of ABBA's records up by a star, and given four stars to the Greatest Hits collection. A note of brainwashing paranoia and crypto-fascist apologism creeps into Michael Coleman's review -- ABBA's "calculated inoffensiveness still offends people", but "these aren't the kind of hooks one argues with", and "ABBA tends to inspire total devotion or none at all". By using the language of indoctrination and mass social conditioning, Coleman showed he had a vague awareness of what was, in part, driving ABBA's rehabilitation, but in the review, he's content to hint at it.
Flip the calendar forward ten more years. Today, the All-Music Guide, that bible of genre pigeonholing, gives most mid-period ABBA albums four stars, Arrival (the one with "Dancing Queen" on it) four and a half stars, and five(!) stars to the Greatest Hits Gold collection. ABBA, according to Bruce Eder, wrote "brilliant material", their music has a "raw power which their detractors overlooked", now, thanks to remastering, it's "impossible to ignore".Throw in the success of the "Bjorn Again" project, the A-Teens, and numerous ABBA tributes and shows, and it's pretty clear that they've attained a level of veneration that has eluded their light pop peers from the Seventies-Eighties cusp (Village People, Maywood, ELO, even the Bee Gees).
Sure, much of this veneration is ironic, done with a wink and a campy acknowledgement that what's being celebrated here is basically cultural run-off. Yet pop culture provides us with gallons of such fluid every year -- what accounts for our collective appreciation of one pint over another has more to do with sociopolitical priorities than any intrinsic virtues that run-off might contain. Scandinavia, in American popular imagination, is a land where everybody and everything is white. Of course that's not actually the case, but that's how Scandinavian signifiers are received stateside. Scandinavian groups become popular in the United States either when there's great ambient hysteria over cultural miscegenation (like the late Seventies and the vicious reaction against disco), or at times when whites are taking victory laps after a great gain in segregation (early Nineties) or co-opting a form that used to be the province of people of color (right now). ABBA became popular at a cultural moment when a tremendous amount of Latin and African influence was seeping into dance music, and white rock bands were being asked to adapt to that pressure.
ABBA, alone, did not adapt, instead, they offered a lily-white alternative. Tucker, in his '82 review, takes the reactive multiculturalist line and disparages their "compendium of white-american pop hooks" and funk-less Eurobeat dance grooves. He didn't mention the cultural meaning of the Eurovision song contest, but the Young Ones sure did -- their bit about Benito Mussolini winning top prize said everything that needed to be said about ABBA's initial platform of prominence.
ABBA's critical reputation exploded in the early nineties at the precise moment when the "alternative" revolution was resegregating the airwaves, and the "alternative" version of rock history -- you know, the one where Nick Drake gets a bigger chapter than Curtis Mayfield -- was beginning to grow frighteningly doxic. ABBA became the tool by which the story of dance music in the seventies could be whitened. Simultaneously, the pop radio whitewash opened the door for a new influx of swedish pop groups (Cardigans, Komeda, Eggstone, This Perfect Day, Ace Of Base) who owed an enormous sonic debt to ABBA.
I'd be loath if I forgot to mention the role crap nostalgia movies play in the process of critical rehabilitation of substandard but popular acts that define a particular moment in time. ABBA songs -- notably "Dancing Queen", but others, too -- have been licensed for use in all kinds of awful studio productions looking for a shorthand evocation of a mystified Seventies experience. This is supposed to be funny: the audience is meant to laugh along (or wistfully shed a tear) at the follies and indulgences of a bygone era. But then we're also encouraged to go out and by the soundtrack album, and what begins as a joke ends up as an artificially-generated "cherished" memory. Movie by movie, the Hollywood establishment continues to roll back all the cultural work done by popular music and those who love it.
I do like the Shangri-Las, and enough to dispute the comparison to ABBA. The Shangri-Las performed histrionic story-songs with characters (stock, archetypical ones, sure) and decently-developed two to three minute narratives. ABBA's lyrics were vague, general, and bland -- they never gave you anything like a character or a story. The Shangri-Las have a camp reputation because of their penchant for melodrama, and I understand why that is. But I prefer to think of their representational strategies as a dry run for the kind of Jewish rock storytelling greatness that would bloom a few years later with Dylan and Paul Simon (and eventually with Joey Ramone, too, who owed a debt to the Shangri-Las' fatalism). ABBA is considered campy, too, and I wish I knew why. It could be the outfits, certainly, but everybody in the Seventies wore stupid clothes. I'm afraid it might have to do with the critical judgement of a certain segment of the gay male writing community who have decided everything that smacks vaguely of fascism is an absolute scream.
TMC
OUR CHORE IS THE CORE OF THE WAR
Tris,
Is that Baghdad on your splash page? No, I know. It's Jersey City or something. Right?
TR, Manhattan
TR --
My first splash page was a night-time picture of Hoboken taken from here at the Hi-Vue. I thought it looked like a constellation or nebula. This week's splash page is the one decent picture I took of Like Moving Insects at the Williamsburg Public House, and the only reason why it's good is because somebody bumped in to me while I was taking it, and the image blurred artfully.
TMC
A QUIET LIFE WITH NO SURPRISES
Tris,
Your review of Scarlet's Walk I applaud both as a review and as a manifesto for how reviews ought to get written. Have you read John Darnielle's take on Radiohead's Amnesia? -- I know you hate Radiohead, but his even-more-absurdly long take on the album at LastPlaneToJakarta.com is the only other piece I can think of that takes its subject that seriously, and I for one was convinced by him.
Your favorite Boston cultural critic, Boston, MA
Dear Fave Bostonian --
Wow, what a excellent and comprehensive record review. It's a beautifully-designed website, too. You know a reviewer means business and has something worthwhile to say when he bothers to interrogate the lyrics of "The Call" by the Backstreet Boys in seven pages of dense text. I know I'll be checking in on that site pretty frequently.
About Radiohead: my distaste for them is predicated entirely on my dismal opinion of OK Computer and a few of the more popular tracks from The Bends, especially "Fake Plastic Trees". Amnesiac and Kid A essentially eliminate the things the group does poorly -- tight song construction and lyrics -- and replace them with things the group does well, like atmospherics and sonic experiments. I'm still never going to listen to those albums by choice, because no matter how many filters you run his vocals through, Thom Yorke will always sound like Thom Yorke. His presence on a recording places an insurmountable obstacle between me and the land of listening pleasure.
I think Radiohead should never try to write pop songs, because when they do, it's U2 all over again, and we didn't need some bald guy whining about how he still couldn't find what he was looking for the first time around.
TMC
BUGGIN' OUT & RADIO RAHEEM BOYCOTT THE PUBLIK HOUSE
Tris,
Honestly, you should just cancel any show at the Williamsburg Public House. There is a boycott on by locals, and playing there is a crime against music, as the acoustics make everyone who plays there sound like poo.
Area hipster, Brooklyn
Dear Hipster --
I've heard rumors about the boycott; stories of how the owner is a bad landlord who used money that should have gone into apartment repairs to open the club. Is this true? There's no way for me to verify. But I don't get into the practice of rushing to judgement on something so serious, and furthermore, I know full well that if I allowed the personal character of the clubowner to dictate whether or not I played a room in NYC, I'd probably never do a gig.
Beyond that, if the sound at the Publik House is as troublesome as it's currently said to be, how come I keep seeing ace shows there?
TMC
EVERYONE'S A CRITIC
Tris,
I like the content, but it's hard to read. I think the color, bold type (or at least it looks that way), and relation among the distance between lines, width of lines, and size/style of the type contributes to this. (I will not bore you with mention of leading, x-heights, yadda yadda yadda). I'd add some blank space, either on one side or the other or both, and use a lighter, serifed type.
Web vet, Milwaukee
Dear Vet,
I've put these changes into effect on this page, and I'm not sure I like them. The type is a minty green, and that's okay, but serif fonts don't scream "history textbook" the way my favorite typefaces do. I narrowed the spacing between lines and crunched the text by adding big margins, but I'm not sure it's any more readable than it originally was. What do you guys think?
Have patience, I'm learning as I go along.
TMC
Dear Tris,
I am very mad at you for this reason: you have stretched a perfectly interesting photo beyond its recognition as either interesting or pleasing. Please rectify immediately.
BB, New Jersey
Dear BB --
Like Vet, you're up against my bizarre and contrarian aesthetic eye. There's really not much you can hope for. My idea of a pretty picture is a huge block of nine point text. (This is why I'm so proud to write for Jersey Beat.)
TMC
OUTRAGED POP FANS ASSAIL THE ABSTRACT
Tris,
I have to say.. I LOVE NORAH JONES!!!! I was just listening to her in the car yesterday -- LOVE HER!!! LOVE HER!! You should look up TARA MCCLAIN -- Totally underrated.. You might like her -- Do you like Willy Porter.. Jeff Buckley -- Rufus Wainwright?!!! I love these people!!! ;)
J. Diver, Somerville NJ
Diver --
There's a question on our critics poll that's usually formulated as "young upstart who needs to be sent down to the minors for more seasoning" to identify a new artist who isn't exactly overrated, but who seems a little, er, ill-equipped for prime time. For whatever reason, the artist I put for that category in January always goes on to sweep all the Grammys. This year, I thought it couldn't be possible, because I figured there was no way Norah Jones would be nominated for any Grammys -- and then she was, and I was like, oh man, it's going to happen again! So it's clear that whatever it is in these artists that seems incomplete to me is being received as mastery by the rest of America, or at least the music industry.
Willy Porter -- a little "adult alternative" for my taste, but he is certainly a good guitar player. I like him better than that surfer dude from Southern California who's been getting so much attention this year. Jeff Buckley -- the man responsible for so many bad trends in current pop music, which doesn't mean he's necessarily to blame for them. His records are way too vainglorious for me, and that mock-operatic singing voice has got to go. In a sense he repeated his father's mistakes -- oversinging to the point where he was crushing the fragile pop potential of his own material -- but because of the emo movement, Buckley the younger found followers willing to take up his mantle after he died. Tim Buckley wasn't so lucky. Rufus Wainwright -- I prefer Ed Harcourt, who is kind of like Wainwright minus about 50% of the affectations and most of the gratuitous flamboyance. Obviously Wainwright is a talented writer, but I find sitting through Poses from start to finish is kind of like eating an entire box of chocolate truffles.
TM
THE LAST WORD
Tris --"God Bless America" is a very corny song and it's surely not wonderfully written. It's used and abused terribly by Jock-O fast food storm troopers across the U.S.A for sure. And it makes me ill to hear it sung by all of these low-lifes who would see the bill of rights burnt in an oil fire.
...But, it's really just bad context. The song lyrics are perfect. Some guy, who's not a trained musician by any stretch and he's not a native English speaker, writes a canned love song about the country to make money in a review. In doing so, he sub-conciously, accidentally:
A: shows how happy he really is not to be in the Ukraine or Siberia where he came from living as a natural-born resident alien for life who everyone depises including the king. He has a home, sweet, home. He really means it.
B: shows that he has no idea what the rest of his country that he's never seen looks like, so he praises it like a Siberian villager or a Pole would praise his homeland in 1900 with its mountains and valleys and oceans. ("White with foam" IS a terribly written image but it's still more evocative than most crappy pop country lyrics.)
C. Blesses his little pauper's god in thanks and humility because he's too ignorant to understand the historical and economic factors that have brought him to be where he is. He loves the guy -- that's the limits of his imagination's ability to ponder creation. He's not legislating faith based initiatives or getting mad at me because I don't dig theism.
I always liked the song because it was carved out true conviction in the true idiom of a poor man and it works as a melody. As far as "stand beside her and guide her" goes... Berlin never went to school. In his first language there was no such thing as a genderless noun, except neuter words that he never learned fromally either. The narrator of that song, loved America like he loved his girlfriend and his thinking wasn't formalized enough make the destinction between the types of love.
Just like sports fans singing "The Star Spagled Banner" without understanding the great dark words of that poem and like Ron Reagan using "Born in The U.S.A" as a Republican campaign song, what I hate about "God Bless America" is how it's enforced and bastardized, not how it was written. The forced theism and pig-headed positivity piss me off.
Walking Around In The City, NYC
