The Pop View

This is definitely catch-up weekend, with posts I meant to put up weeks and months ago.

In July, Zune Arts ( a division of Microsoft) announced the release of The Lost Ones, “a graphic novel written by celebrated writer Steve Niles” and illustrated by “visual artists Dr. Revolt, Gary Panter, Kime Buzzelli and Morning Breath.”

Niles is best known for writing the graphic novel 30 Days of Night, that was also turned into a motion picture. He chiefly specializes in the horror genre.

My friend Larry owns a store in Burbank, CA that sells collectibles from comics books, movies and television. Earlier this year, on the occasion of the release of the 30 Days of Night DVD, Steve Niles was at this store Blast from the Past to do a signing. I happened to be in town, so I stopped by. Niles turned out to be very gracious and smart and well-versed in the horror genre.

In July, I read that Niles was going to be doing a signing of The Lost Ones in Maryland — along with Gary Panter! Panter is best known for his comic Jimbo and his production design for the TV show Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.

So, I knew I had to go. There are some photos of the event at the Big Planet Comics website. Niles was again quite gracious when I met him for the second time. Panter was drawing pictures in copies of the book; he drew a surfer, inspired by the shirt I was wearing.

I must mention that aside from Panter’s work, I was really impressed by the section in the book illustrated by Morning Breath, a design studio. And here’s an interview with Niles about The Lost Ones project.

Tags: Steve Niles, Gary Panter, The Lost Ones

I was saddened to read the news (via UBM) that jazz musician Johnny Griffin passed away three weeks ago. The reason for the emotion was that it has been only a few months since I had seen him celebrate his 80th birthday with a concert at Ronnie Scott’s.

As an Anglophile, I had long heard of Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club as one of the most famous joints in London. It opened in late ‘59 and quickly became a center of jazz — anybody who was anybody in the U.S. or England played there.

I was headed to London in May, when I was offered the opportunity to go out for some music. The club seemed perfect and the Griffin gig sounded excellent. Roy Hargrove and Billy Cobham were playing with him. Seriously, what’s not to love?

You can see a QuickTime VR image of the club in 360 degrees. When you picture a jazz club in your head, this is the place. It oozes cool and class.

Griffin — a.k.a. The Little Giant — a.k.a. “fastest gun in the west” — did stints with Lionel Hampton, Thelonious Monk, Art Blakey, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, and Kenny Clarke. One of his best-known techniques, besides his fierce speed and improvisational skills, was quoting short musical bursts of famous tunes.

The night I saw Griffin, they were selling copies of a new biography of him by Mike Hennessy (interesting life; not-so-well written). Here’s how Hennessey described Griffin’s playing:

One of the salient characteristics of Griffin’s improvisational style is his predilection for decorating his solos with phrases borrowed from well-known, and predominantly unlikely, compositions. On a live recording… the Little Giant managed to include in his solos extracts from ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’, a Chopin ‘Polonaise’, Charlie Parker’s ‘Cool Blues’, ‘The Surrey with the Fringe on Top’, Mendelssohn’s ‘Wedding March’, ‘The Foggy, Foggy Dew’, ‘The Kerry Dancers’, Thelonious Monk’s ‘Rhythm-a-ning’, ‘Mairzy Doats’, ‘Turkey in the Straw’ and ‘Rhapsody in Blue’.

Griffin did exactly this on the night I saw him, somewhat akin of hip-hop sampling. He really was a little guy, maybe 5′6″. He played like a man half his age.

Towards the end of the set, a woman got up and approached him onstage. She was clearly plastered. She danced up against him, kind of grinding. He made funny faces and sort of played along, until she was ushered away.

I had bought the book during the intermission, so as soon as the set was over, I rushed up to hover around and try to get an autograph. Another drunk woman, sitting at a table by the stage, kept engaging him in stupid, senseless conversation. Up close, he looked his age. The drunk woman seemed to confuse him. He was looking for his case, so he could put his sax away. I was annoyed at the drunk woman for wasting his time and mine, and I was reluctant to press him for the autograph while he was confusedly looking to put away his instrument.

He finally made his way backstage. I waited a while, but he never came back out.

Tags: Johnny Griffin, Roy Hargrove, Billy Cobham, Ronnie Scott’s

I still haven’t written anything about The Dark Knight, a movie I loved. This has been a good summer for comic book fans, what with Iron Man and Hellboy II. I’ve been thinking a lot about the themes of The Dark Knight, but before I get to that, I have to respond to this idiotic A.O. Scott article in today’s NY Times (no disrespect meant to Tony Scott).

It’s a look at the superhero movies that have come out lately, complete with an attempt to define the limits of the genre. Let me start by saying that it’s a shame that superheroes dominate comic books. The format has been around for 70 years. There have been romance comics, private eye comics, kids comics, porn comics, war comics, autobiographical comics, and on and on. But superheros have long dominated and continue to do so.

However, Scott asks if superheroes are “basking in an endless summer of triumph, or is the sun already starting to set?” Gee whiz. This is the time when Hollywood finally gets comic book adaptations right and Scott is already calling the game over. He gives this summer’s best films credit for trying harder, but then says that they also “discover the limits built into the superhero genre as it currently exists. ”

“‘The Dark Knight’ has rules, and they are the conventions that no movie of this kind can escape,” Scott writes. Why can’t they do so? He says: “Of course every movie genre is governed by conventions, and every decent genre movie explores the zones of freedom within those iron parameters.” No kidding! Almost every mainstream Hollywood movie follows the conventions of its form, whether it’s an action movie, a romantic comedy, or whatever. Think of Top Gun, Rocky, Star Wars, and so on. Each follows movie conventions.

In contrast, Scott says that there were Westerns in the Fifties that were able to go beyond the expected, films like The Searchers and Rio Bravo that were able to find “ambiguities and tensions buried in their own rigid paradigms. ” He thinks that superheroes will never be able to do this, because such films need to make big profits and be successful worldwide.

I don’t think he’s right. Yes, most superhero films will need big budgets and studio backing. But not all. There have been some great comic books that really stretched the conventions of superhero movies. These stories don’t necessarily feature big explosions and massive physical conflict. If the superhero genre can get a toehold in the American consciousness again, then there’s no artistic reason why we couldn’t see such films in the future.

(And isn’t it ironic that Scott calls for ambiguities, when both Hancock and The Dark Knight find those ambiguities in their heroes?)

Tags: A.O. Scott, superhero, The Dark Knight, Batman

I’ve been rather sketchy as of late, lots of thoughts on my mind, but very few committed to keyboard (but that’s the beauty of Twitter - the micro part of it).

Anyway, to make up for it, here is a listing of albums I’ve been listening to. Up until a few months ago, I wasn’t really listening to any recently-released music at all. But the last three months have seen a veritable tsunami of new stuff in my iTunes library, so here we go.

• British Sea Power - Do You Like Rock Music?
  The answer is sort of. I like it. I don’t love it. Although I am entranced by the opening track, “All In It” (and its reprise “We Close Our Eyes”).
• Charles Hamilton - DJ Green Lantern Presents: Outside Looking
  Terrific hip-hop mixtape from this young Brooklyn rapper. Not all the tracks are equally strong, but Hamilton has an interesting voice and I’ll certainly keep an eye on him.
• Coldplay - Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends
  Yeah, yeah. Everybody else has heard this too. Sure, they’re Radiohead Lite, but the new album is loads better than their last one, has great production and many of Chris Martin’s annoying vocal stylings have been reined in.
• The Unofficial Soundtrack to Dr. Horrible’s Sing-A-Long Blog!
  An official soundtrack should be released soon, but in the meantime, this gives you an opportunity to really appreciate how good the songs are from this terrific Web mini-series.
• Elvis Costello and the Imposters - Momofuku
  It’s that classic Elvis sound. Which means you’ll either love it or think he’s a big sell-out. Honestly, I haven’t found his various experimentation efforts to be nearly as compelling.
• eMC - The Show
  The debut album from the hip-hop supergroup, consisting of Masta Ace, Punchline, Wordsworth and Strick. Good, not great, but it makes you wish this was as bad as all hip-hop got.
• Girl Talk - Feed the Animals
  The latest work from the Pittsburgh DJ and mash-up artist. Good stuff, but even for an ADHD sufferer like me, it jumps around a lot. Believe me, if you love this, there’s plenty of other people doing the same thing.
• My Morning Jack - Evil Urges
  Again with the rock. Fine album, but my appetite for this sort of thing is limited. If you’re the kind of person who still listens to Neil Young, Dylan, or the Allman Brothers, at least get something new like this. No knock meant; good stuff.
• N.E.R.D - Seeing Sounds
  I posted on this already, but still listening to it. Not great, but some great moments. And I’ll still buy anything they put out.
• Nine Inch Nails - The Slip
  Their second free album in a row. Okay, but I kind of liked the instrumental work Ghosts I-IV better.
• Nostalgia 77 - One Offs Remixes & B-Sides
  I mentioned this one before as well. I haven’t listened to them before and I was very pleasantly surprised by this collection. Jazz, rock, Latin, R&B - it’s all here.
• Portishead - Third
  Not new, since I wrote about this in April, but it’s worth noting that this is a great album. Just buy it already.
• Ratatat - LP3
  Pretty much any Ratatat song is like every other song; every album is like every other album. But I happen to like that one thing they do over and over, so I enjoy this anyway.
• The Raveonettes - Lust Lust Lust
  Good combination: Primitive garage rock, surf, Everly Brothers harmonies, and a punk edge. The lead track, “Aly, Walk With Me,” sounds like a Depeche Mode cover until the unbelievably loud guitar solos start.
• Sigur Rós - Med sud í eyrum vid spilum endalaust
  Boy, here’s another band that kinda does the same thing over and over, but they’re just so damn good at it. The new album is *slightly* poppier than their usual spooky majestic sound.
• The Kills - Midnight Boom
  I used to think I couldn’t tell these guys apart from The Raveonettes and White Stripes. All male/female duos with similar influences. These days, that seems silly. They all don’t really sound anything like each other. This also sounds poppier than some of their previous stuff, but they punk it up when they need to.
• Tricky - Knowle West Boy
  Not as dark as his old classic albums. Better than some of the mixed reviews I’ve been reading would suggest.
• Wale - The Mixtape About Nothing
  A hip-hop mixtape based on the sit-com Seinfeld. Almost lives up to that sales pitch.
• Weezer - Weezer (a.k.a. Red Album)
  I’ve mostly treated Weezer as a singles band and loved them for it. But when I listen to their albums, I don’t like ‘em quite so much. This new album is pretty much the same thing. Perfect for buying selected tracks online.

And while they’re not really new, I’ve also enjoyed these:

Louis Armstrong and His All Stars - Louis Armstrong Plays W.C. Handy (1954), Willie Hutch - The Mack (1973), Alice Cooper - Billion Dollar Babies (1973), The Tubes - Love Bomb (1985), Grant-Lee Phillips - nineteeneighties (2006), J Rawls & Declaime - It’s the Dank & Jammy Show (2007), The Dynamics - Version Excursions (2007), Wu-Tang Clan - 8 Diagrams (2007)

Finally, thanks to this recent Soul Sides post, it became clear that Stephanie McKay was going to become the next hot soul singer out of Britain, even though McKay lives in East Harlem. I got a copy of her debut album McKay, produced by Portishead’s Geoff Barrow, and am loving it. The new stuff sounds great too.

Tags: British Sea Power , Charles Hamilton, Coldplay Dr. Horrible’s Sing-A-Long Blog, Elvis Costello and the Imposters, eMC, Girl Talk, My Morning Jack, N.E.R.D, Nine Inch Nails, Nostalgia 77, Portishead, Ratatat, The Raveonettes, Sigur Rós, The Kills, Tricky, Wale, Weezer , Stephanie McKay

It’s been made clear — I’m a pretty weak intellectual. I have the interest, but not the capacity. I can appreciate and be moved by Gershwin or Bach, but throw on some Erroll Garner or The Pixies and my heart sings.

So, I’m not saying I completely believe this, but I found amusing the quote below. It’s from a critique by Joe Queenan of contemporary classical music. It’s tempting to buy into his argument that classical music fans are no more knowledgeable about the form (and perhaps are less so) than pop music fans. I suspect it’s true, but I hesitate because it seems a bit self-serving.

…after attending roughly 1,500 concerts in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Paris, London, Berlin and Sydney, I no longer believe that fans of classical music are especially knowledgeable - certainly not in the way jazz fans are. American audiences, even those that fancy themselves quite in the know, roll over and drool like trained seals in the presence of charismatic hacks phoning in yet another performance of the Emperor Concerto. The public likes its warhorses, but it doesn’t seem to care how well these warhorses get played. They are particularly susceptible to showboaters like Lang Lang and Izzy Perlman and Nigel Kennedy; they turn out in droves to hear Andrea Bocelli warble his way through the Shmaltzmeister’s Songbook. These people may think they care more about music than the kids who listen to hip-hop, but I’ve been eavesdropping on their conversations for 40 years and the results are not impressive. They know that Clair de Lune is prettier than Für Elise, that Mozart died penniless, and that Schumann went nuts. That’s about it.

I thought he was pretty right on, even though I like the occasional piece by Glass, Reich or Adams, but then Terry Teachout offered a rejoinder to Queenan: “If we are to take him literally, everything composed after [1899] belongs in the same garbage can…” I suspect that’s not what Queenan meant, but after re-reading his essay, it’s not clear where Queenan draws the line.

At various points, he seems to suggest it’s between two extremes.

• Music you’ve heard before versus music you’re hearing for the first time
• Composers with familiar biographies full of “romance and drama” versus “Modern composers, their stories largely unknown”
• “brutal, fragmented” “atonal” “harsh, unpleasant, gloomy, post-nuclear” compositions versus (presumably, since he doesn’t say) pleasant and life-affirming melodies
• works by “a truly great composer” versus not-a-great composer

It seems a little like Queenan’s beef is with performance music that’s “discordant” and “abstract,” rather than with music of the 20th & 21st Centuries. In other words, not when the piece was written, but in how it sounds. So, why is “new music” the framing of the argument?

Because, even though he’s suggesting old is better than new, one assumes he’s not rejecting such 20th Century favorites as Debussy’s “Clair de lune,” Satie’s “Gymnopédies,” Holst’s “The Planets,” Stravinsky’s “The Firebird,” Prokofiev’s concert fave “Peter and the Wolf,” Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring,” and Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings.” These are probably exactly the kind of pieces that would be popular with audiences. In part, because of their quality, but also because they’ve heard them before and heard them used in movies and advertisements.

To what extent do today’s listeners treat (so-called) classical music as just popular culture? In other words, a popular composition is a piece familiar from repetitious exposure through the media.

Tags: Joe Queenan, Terry Teachout, classical music

Via Matt Yglesias, I found this to be really odd. I keep meaning to write more about the extremely “off” racial attitudes displayed by some white folks in this election season.

The latest New York Times/CBS News poll was conducted earlier this month. In with all of the other questions was this one: “Just as your best guess, about what percentage of all Americans are black: less than 10%, between 10 and 20%, between 20 and 30%, between 30 and 50%, or more than 50%?”

According to the last U.S. Census, the racial breakdown goes like this: Whites are 75.1% of the U.S. population, Blacks are 12.3%. And even if you don’t get the exact percentage right, it’s important to get the overall sense that African Americans and other racial groups are called minorities because they don’t make up a majority of the population.

Less than a quarter of respondents, both White and African American, got it right. You can kind of see that some African Americans, depending on where they live, might overestimate the numbers. But it also shows that most whites overestimated the numbers. For example, 33% of white respondents think African Americans make up one-third to a half of the population and 8% think they make up more than half.

Who the frig are these people? You run the country, you make up most of the population, people with your racial identity are in positions of authority and are visible in the media, and you still feel like you’re outnumbered?

Tags: African Americans, racial demographics, race, politics

News in the NY Times this morning that NPR is canceling the Bryant Park Project. I must confess, I’ve never listened to it, but it sounds like a good idea — in theory — and it also sounds like it was moderately successful online, which would kind of be the point. I’m guessing it was just too expensive to continue, although that does raise the question of what kind of success would then have led to more funding.

Anyway, I bring this up because the only time I’d ever even heard of the Bryant Park Project is the infamous disastrous Luke Burbank interview with the band Sigur Rós.

Burbank was one of the original hosts of the program, when it debuted on October 1, 2007.

In November, Burbank announced he was leaving the program to move back to Seattle to be with his family. The Times says he “quit just before the debut. (He ended up staying through mid-December.)” The Times also said in an April story on a different Public Radio program that Burbank “quit just before the first day,” which confuses me a little. Does anyone other than the Times say that he quit earlier than his public announcement?

His very first week — on October 5th — Burbank interviewed the Icelandic band Sigur Rós. It quickly became a legendarily bad interview. To their credit, the show put video of the interview online. But the one you ought to watch is this dissection of his interview, conducted with veteran music journalist Jancee Dunn.

I realize Sigur Rós is a tough nut to crack. And I don’t mean to dump on Burbank, who seems like a nice guy. But here’s the deal: If you’ve got a great interview, your work is easy. Some artists do all the heavy lifting. They’ll take a dumb question and spin it into gold. They just need to be queued up and the stories start flowing out of them. Show me a tough interview and then you know who’s a good music journalist. [See Lester Bang’s interviews with Lou Reed collected in Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung.]

Problem #1 is that a lot of Burbank’s question about Sigur Rós could be answered by doing a little research. For example, they’re the biggest band in Iceland, does that mean that there are other bands that are ripping off their sound? Well guess what, you could answer that question by looking up what are other bands in Iceland and seeing if they sound like Sigur Rós. Some of the questions he asks are legit questions — just not for asking Sigur Rós about.

Here’s just one example of how Burbank screwed up. He asks Sigur Rós about their lyrics, which are famously done in Hopelandic (a.k.a. Vonlenska), nonsense syllables that sound like the Icelandic language. So, first he prefaces by saying, I know you hate to get asked this question and then he asks them why the nonsense lyrics. Dunn gives him some good tips on how he could have handled the issue better. But here’s the thing: They speak Icelandic. Do you know any Icelandic? Apparently, some of their albums have featured Vonlenska and Icelandic; there have been songs with lyrics in both styles; the new album is in Icelandic with one song in English. Can you tell the difference? No. Why? Because Luke Burbank and I don’t effing speak Icelandic so it’s kind immaterial what language Sigur Rós lyrics are in.

Anyway, it’s one of the great trainwrecks of music and radio, so check it out. All the best to the Bryant Park Project people. Sorry I didn’t listen to your show, which is only on for two more weeks. Luke Burbank appears to be enjoying his current job, hosting a Seattle nighttime talk show called Too Beautiful to Live.

Tags: Bryant Park Project, Luke Burbank, Sigur Ros

So, jazz singer Rene Marie was asked to sing the National Anthem prior to Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper’s annual state of the city address last week. She decided to sing the lyrics of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” (also known as the Black National Anthem) to the tune of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” According to her website, she “had sung the exact same song in May at the Colorado Prayer Luncheon, an event attended by members of the Executive, Judicial and Legislative branches of the state government earlier this year…”

Anyway, she did it (watch video of her performance here). And what do you know? A brouhaha broke out. The Mayor first accepted her apology and then denounced the performance.

I’m not really crazy about performers pulling a “switcheroonie” on people who’ve requested a performance. But if you watch her performance, it doesn’t seem like such a big deal. Marie says she wondered if she could “find a way to marry the two ideologies musically by melding the two songs into one harmonic thought…” One of the original intents of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” — first performed in public in 1900 — was for African Americans to have a way of demonstrating their patriotism, while at the same time delivering a subtext that spoke to racist forces, such as Jim Crow laws and lynchings.

Some people disagree. One blog called it the highjacking of our national anthem. At Planck’s Constant, it was referred to an an example of how Some People Do Not Appreciate America.

I’m not talking about immigrants who become citizens and do not appreciate this country, that is at least comprehensible. I’m talking about black citizens who, had they been born in Africa, would have been slaves to some Muslim overlord or dying of hunger, disease, or war.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson didn’t like it either and called it “a risky act for Obama and African-Americans.”

I wonder about people who think our country is so fragile that it’s harmed by somebody burning a flag or messing up a song. Myself, I happen to think our country is a little stronger than that. We survived Hendrix at Woodstock and Roseanne Barr at that Padres game and I think we’ll survive this.

Below is a clip of Kim Weston singing “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” from the film Wattstax.

Tags: Renee Marie, Denver, Black National Anthem, Star-Spangled Banner, John Hickenlooper, Jimi Hendirx, Roseanne Barr, Kim Weston

The new N.E.R.D album has been out for a few weeks. It’s growing on me more slowly that their last two albums.

They’re a problematic act. As The Neptunes, Pharrel Williams and Chad Hugo are great producers. Working with their friend Shay Haley as N.E.R.D, they’re great producers without an act at their level. Mostly, I think it’s that the lyrics are typically a little flabby.

Since I have long contended that lyrics aren’t nearly as important as many people make them out to be, this shouldn’t be a problem. But the underlying foundation to this theory is that it better be a pretty damn good song in every other way: good beat, great melody, clever hook, amazing production, whatever it takes to overwhelm you into not noticing how dumb the lyrics are. Happens all the time.

(Along these lines, check out this earlier post on how Pharrel’s solo album was improved through a remix.)

So N.E.R.D’s first album In Search Of… was terrific. The second album Fly or Die was half pretty good and half just okay. The new album Seeing Sounds… I haven’t decided yet.

I liked the first two singles, “Everybody Nose” and “Spaz.” When I got the album, one track jumped out at me straight off: “Sooner Or Later.” I suppose it’s because the melody and harmonies harken back to their debut album. Also, it has a pop sound reminiscent of the Beatles in the verses and then there’s that big crashing section that goes “It’s over, leaving.”

As a bonus, here’s a bonus track. N.E.R.D recorded “My Drive Thru” with Spank Rock’s Santogold and the Strokes’ Julian Casablancas for Converse’s Century Celebration. Kinda New Wave quirky pop. Dig it.

N.E.R.D - Sooner Or Later — BUY

N.E.R.D ft. Santogold & Julian Casablancas - My Drive Thru

Tags: N.E.R.D, The Neptunes, Pharrel Williams, Chad Hugo, Shay Haley, Spank Rock, Santogold, The Strokes, Julian Casablancas

This past Sunday, we were driving on the Jersey Turnpike when, on a whim, we decided to take a detour to Philadelphia and have a cheesesteak taste-off.

Since I had a video camera with me, I decided to turn this into my first video report, which you can see below.

The whole thing was done on the spur of the moment, and there are technical problems with the video that drive me crazy, but it’s not too bad. However, I kind of screwed up the whole cheesesteak thing.

• I has Jim’s pegged as an anti-tourist destination, when quite the opposite is true. The meat was pre-cooked and piled up on the grill. Tasted like it.
• I avoided Pat’s and Geno’s. I should have considered Tony Luke’s or Dalessandro’s.
• I had the provolone, when the American cheese would have been better. Counterintuitive, but true.
• I had the South Philly at Ishkabibble’s, which has spinach and roasted red peppers. Delicious, but for tasting purposes, I should have had a plain cheesesteak with meat, cheese, onions.

Tags: cheesesteak, Philly, Philadelphia, Ishkabibble’s, Jim’s Steaks