These groups of artists, many of them men, live together and play music night and day. Easily identified by their patchwork clothes and the instruments they carry, they live as outsiders, rejecting social hierarchies in favor of a collective mindset.

No, I’m not talking about an anarchist folk-punk band in Seattle, but the Baul musicians of Bengal, their more spiritually minded Eastern kin. Musician and writer Valentine Harding writes in the September-October issue of Resurgence about visiting a group of Bauls in West Bengal, India, who carry on this centuries-old folk tradition. A musician named Ananda welcomes her to his ashram, or “place of spiritual practice,” a small communal group where the Bauls live in harmony with nature:

Every morning and evening, Ananda and others play kirtan and bhajan devotional songs, their music greeting the dawn or fading into the night sky. All Baul music is intimately connected with Nature’s rhythms. Ananda says, “The birds, trees and animals listen to our music, and when we sing, we connect with their inner being.”

One of the Bauls’ biggest fans, Harding writes, was the Bengali poet, writer, philosopher, and social reformer Rabindranath Tagore, who became entranced by their music and their ideals and incorporated Baul themes into his poetry, music, and drama:

Tagore’s praise of Bauls and his adoption of their themes in his work enhanced their reputation, because in spite of being regarded as saintly musician-mystics, they nonetheless had a low status and lived on the fringes of society. Fortunately, today in West Bengal and Bangladesh, Bauls are becoming more respected by many people for their way of life, their spirituality and their music, and are often seen as representing ideals for a more equal and just society.

Baul music’s higher profile has put in onstage at the World Sacred Music Festival, the Morocco-based event that now has touring offshoots around the world, and the Fireflies Festival of Sacred Music in Bangalore, Bangladesh. Singer Kartick Das Baul (pictured), one of the form’s better-known exponents, has even sung in many Bengali films and has performed with the Kolkata-based jazz band Just Us at Fireflies, according to the Indian arts and entertainment website Buzz18.com.

Kartick Das Baul’s main gig, though, is with the Baul folk band Oikyotaan, which according to its website “aims at reaching a space where folk and contemporary music complement each other.” The band has made a film titled Notun Projonmer Baul (New Generation Baul) and hopes to establish a Baul foundation to promote and preserve Baul culture.

Listen to samples of Baul music at the Resurgence website; listen to samples of Oikyotaan’s music at the band’s website; and see the New Generation Baul trailer here:

Sources: Resurgence, Buzz18.com, Oikyotaan

Image by mdemon, licensed under Creative Commons.

Americans are peculiar. We like ethnic food, as long as it’s not too ethnic. We like foreign films, as long as they’re not too foreign. But we draw the line more starkly at non-English pop music. We don’t widely embrace music that is not sung in our tongue.

What is it about non-English lyrics that so repels us? Elyse Franko proposes on the travel website World Hum that we’re driven by overblown fears:

We English speakers are terrified of not understanding. We’ve gotten so used to speaking the coveted lingua franca that we’ve neglected to give other languages a chance—even if doing so would somehow benefit us. At this point, neglect has turned to fear: fear of miscommunication; fear of traveling outside the realm of English-language tours; fear of ordering the wrong dish from a non-English menu; and fear of misunderstanding the non-English lyrics to an otherwise excellent song.

Franko notes that many artists seeking a large audience are pressured to learn English, and that 19 of last year’s 25 Eurovision song contest finalists sang in English. But she also holds out hope that the tide is turning. After all, she notes, the Swedish “swing-rap-jazz combo” Movits recently performed on The Colbert Report—in Swedish!

OK, so maybe it wasn’t a cultural watershed, but Franko’s central point is well taken: “In this, the Age of the Internet, new music can travel over continents in seconds—why should we ignore good tunes just because they’re not performed in a language we can understand?”

To do our part, we’ve included two songs with non-English lyrics on our downloadable October Utne Reader music sampler: “Culpa de la Luna” by Rupa and the April Fishes, which is in Spanish, and “Surprise Hotel” by Fool’s Gold, which takes the multicultural prize: It’s African-style music played by non-African Los Angelenos and sung in Hebrew by the Israeli-born son of parents from Iraq and Russia. Touché!

Source: World Hum

Image by pocuswhiteface, licensed under Creative Commons.

The legendary Nigerian musician and dissident Fela made big, powerful music that celebrated a reborn Africanism and made funky fun of colonial powers. But he also had plenty of rough edges, and they are on display right away—along with his caustic, critical sense of humor—in the 1982 authorized biography Fela: This Bitch of a Life by Carlos Moore, which has been out of print but has been newly republished by Lawrence Hill Books. Here is how it starts:

After three years of waiting, my mother and father really wanted a baby. But it wasn’t me they wanted. No, man! No! They wanted any fucking baby.

You know, the meek, quiet type. Well-mannered. Yes-Sir this. Yes-Sir that. They didn’t want a motherfucker like me, man! Well, here I am now. I came. In spite of them. . . .

When I was born my father wanted to imitate his own father. They were both Protestant reverends. So to make some white man happy, my father asked this German missionary to . . . name me. Can you imagine that, man? A white man naming an African child! . . .

You know what that motherfucker named me? Hildegart! Yes, man. Hildegart! Oooooooooh, man! That’s how much I wasn’t wanted. Me, who was supposed to come and talk about Blackism and Africanism, the plight of my people. Me, who was supposed to try and do something to change that. Oh, man. I felt that name like a wound.

Fela’s sense of destiny, along with his arrogance and aggrieved psyche, continues to drive the narrative throughout This Bitch of a Life. It’s a riveting read as Fela describes the police-state brutality that only solidified his political opposition and drove him to ever-more intense personal and political extremes—and eventually wore him down.

One disturbing undercurrent is Fela’s over-the-top sexism and patriarchy. Sam Baldwin at Mother Jones notes that “Sexism, sadly, is what comes through most strongly” in the book, adding, “Well, sexism and police brutality.”

A new epilogue by Moore adds valuable perspective on Fela’s legacy, which has taken on Marley-like proportions and spawned a string of reissues such as the impending 45-album onslaught from Knitting Factory Records, tributes such as the multimedia Fela Project, and even a Bill T. Jones-directed Broadway musical, which opens November 23. As Fela’s legend grows ever larger, This Bitch of a Life reminds us that the man behind the music was full of mystery, paradox, and pain.

Sources: Fela: This Bitch of a Life, Fela Project, Mother Jones, World Music Central, Playbill

"In the garden of my house there's a tree with lots of randomly grown twigs," writes sound artist Diego Stocco, explaining his extraordinary video Music from a Tree. "It looks odd and nice at the same time. One day I asked myself if I could create a piece of music with it." It's striking how accessible experimental music can be with the help of a video camera.

Diego Stocco - Music From A Tree from Diego Stocco on Vimeo.

We sing with our children constantly when they’re small—lullabies when they’re babies, all kinds of on-the-fly songs when they’re toddlers—but as kids get older, families seem to stop singing together. Some quality time with the singsongy kids’ show Wonder Pets made Toner Quinn, editor of The Journal of Music, wonder why we lose our voices.

When kids hit school age, Quinn writes, parents tend to channel their musical impulses into instruments—piano lessons and trumpet practice come in, and singing goes out. “From a toddler-hood of joy in singing,” he writes, “parents suddenly emphasize playing an instrument, as if singing just wasn’t substantial enough. Instruments are purchased, music stands are put up, practice is emphasized, and slowly that natural instinct to sing out at the drop of a hat is left behind.”

Part of it stems from a widespread belief that while musical instruments can be learned, a good singing voice is innate. “Our language is full of phrases to inhibit us singing—‘she’s tone deaf’, ‘he doesn’t have a note in his head’, ‘I never had a voice’. Very few people are actually tone deaf. Not being able to sing in tune is little more than a matter of practice.”

Society—the bulk of it—has become shy about singing. . . . Family occasions that cry out for a song—not just weddings and funerals, but lunches and dinners—are bereft of the practice of calling for hush, and asking the one or two in the family who are known to have a voice to release it. Do we know today if any of our nearest or dearest even have a voice?

There’s no easy solution, of course, which Quinn acknowledges. But his assertion that “music clearly needs a champion in the home” is a good place to start.

Source:  The Journal of Music , August-September 2009 (excerpt only available online)

The latest word on the sexual cleansing of Iraq is that militias have been scanning internet chatrooms used by lesbian, gay, and transgendered Iraqis as part of a grotesque and tragic campaign of kidnapping, torture, and murder.

There was an endless parade of celebrities speaking out on behalf of Iraqis in the months leading up to the bombardment and invasion of Iraq in 2003. Nearly seven years later few raise their voices for the welfare of people in Iraq (not to mention the estimated two million who have fled the violence there).

Enter Antony Hegarty, the achingly beautiful voice of Antony and the Johnsons who posted an article about the killings, followed by a desperate declaration, written in all-caps:

ALLAH TREASURES HIS GAY AND TRANSGENDERED CHILDREN, HIS PRECIOUS HOMOSEXUAL CHILDREN.

JESUS ADORES HIS GAY CHILDREN AND RESERVES A SACRED PLACE FOR THEM IN THE FOLDS OF HIS CLOTHES.

IT IS A SIN TO HURT A GAY OR TRANSGENDERED PERSON. YOU HURT ALLAH WHEN YOU HURT ONE OF THESE MEN OR WOMEN, BOYS OR GIRLS.

Make a tshirt. Tell your friends.

love from Antony, crying

If you want to learn more about the situation for gay and transgendered Iraqis, here are a few resources:

Sexual Cleansing in Iraq (Utne Reader, May-June 2009)

The Sexual Cleansing of Iraq Intensifies (Utne.com, May 5, 2009)

Exterminating Lesbian, Gay, and Transgendered Iraqis (Utne.com, August 17, 2009)

Iraqi LGBT, an organization that publicizes hate crimes in Iraq

They Want Us Exterminated: Murder, Torture, Sexual Orientation and Gender in Iraq, a report published by Human Rights Watch

Source: Antony and the Johnsons 

The proverbial bird sitting on a utility wire. It’s the image that, as the story goes, inspired Leonard Cohen to begin composing the legendary song “Bird on a Wire” in the 1960s. Fast forward 40 years to our present, technology-enabled day, and the iconic avian image is still inspiring musical art. Check out this charming music video on Vimeo by film director/musician Jarbas Agnelli, who interpreted birds sitting on utility wires as “notes” on a “musical staff”—just to discover what song the resting avians were silently singing. 

Birds on the Wires from Jarbas Agnelli on Vimeo.

Source: Jarbas Agnelli’s Vimeo

Will somebody please pay me to follow David Byrne around with a camera? Remember the video tour of his office? I do. Now we have Byrne literally playing a building, specifically the Roundhouse in London. Creative Review explains:

The installation sees Byrne convert the main space at the Roundhouse into a huge musical instrument, which can be played by visitors via an old pump organ keyboard that sits in the centre of the space. Attached to the organ are numerous pipes and strings that are linked to elements of the building’s structure to create noise. Some of the sounds are made by wind being forced through the pipes, eliciting a whistling sound, while elsewhere small strikers clang and bang the metal columns, and other machines cause the metal crossbeams in the building to vibrate, causing a humming sound. The disorganised and at times cacophonous results reveal a new way of thinking about the building, as well as about the creation of music.

Byrne's Playing the Building instillation has been around for a few years. Here's a video from its appearance in New York City. Delightful:

Source: Creative Review 

For today’s classical composer wishing to be taken seriously, writing a film score is a step in the wrong direction: Critics tend to snub those who engage in such lowbrow pursuits. Writing in the classical music magazine Listen (July-August), Damian Fowler assesses what he calls “The Fickle Genre” and points out that it can be hard for even very talented composers to shake this stigma.

One who has succeeded to some degree is John Corigliano, who created the Oscar-winning score for the 2000 film The Red Violin and then adapted it into a violin concerto that was recorded by Joshua Bell and hailed by critics. Another composer who’s still battling perceptions is Elliot Goldenthal, who scored Frida and, more recently, Public Enemies but feels he gets short shrift for his concert works, which include the Pulitzer-nominated opera Grendel. “I would like to change my name when I write orchestral pieces,” he says. Writes Fowler:

A student of both Aaron Copland and John Corigliano, Goldenthal says that people misunderstand the function of a movie composer. “It’s not as strange and different as it may seem, writing for the cinema and for the concert,” he says, pointing out that in the nineteenth century many composers wrote incidental music for plays. “Even Beethoven wrote incidental music, which he adapted for other works.”

Things may be changing. Composer wunderkind Nico Muhly, who has plenty of critical bona fides, wrote the score for the Oscar-nominated film The Reader. He harbors no preconceptions about film music: “I certainly never grew up with any thought that it wasn’t great music,” he says. “For me a culture high water mark is the score to Lawrence of Arabia.”

Source: Listen (article not available online)

In case you haven’t heard the robotic voice announcing its return, the vocoder is back in a big way. From electro-rockers like Black Moth Super Rainbow and Daft Punk to hip-hoppers like Snoop Dogg and Lil’ Wayne, it’s all the rage for singers to haul out this cheesy effect and make themselves sound like cyborgs. Will the same thing happen for the vocoder’s cousin, the talk box? The new issue of the vinyl collectors’ magazine Wax Poetics profiles an artist who helped bring the talk box to the masses in the 1970s, Zapp leader Roger Troutman.

A brief studio lesson: The vocoder and the talk box can make similar sounds, but they employ wholly different processes. The vocoder essentially makes the human voice sound like an instrument by deconstructing and reconstructing it electronically, while the talk box makes an instrument sound like the human voice by directing a note through a tube and into the singer’s mouth. The mouth then acts as a sound chamber.

“You’re shaping the sound,” Lester Troutman, bandmate and brother of Roger, tells the magazine.

If you’re familiar with the vernacular of ’70s radio, you’ve heard the talk box: Think of Peter Frampton’s “Show Me the Way,” Joe Walsh’s “Rocky Mountain Way,” or Zapp’s “I Want to Be Your Man” and “More Bounce to the Ounce.”

“Talk boxes and vocoders are confused more than good and bad,” writes Wax Poetics, noting that perhaps the talk box would be better known if it had adopted some of Roger Troutman’s or Bootsy Collins’ nicknames for it.

Troutman called it the Ghetto Robot, the Electric Country Preacher, and the Nasty Straw (the drool-drenched tube could be a source of infection), while Bootsy called it the Magic Babbler, the Snake Charmer, and the Cosmic Communicator.

Check out the accompanying Analog Out column by Peter Kim, who traces talk-box history and links to several videos, including Stevie Wonder using the talk box on Sesame Street, Roger Troutman using it in the studio, and a clip about how to make a “ghetto” talk box.

Source: Wax Poetics (article not available online)

Image by daniel spils, licensed under Creative Commons.

“If the Beatles hadn’t broken up, what would their 1970s albums have sounded like?” asks  David L. Ulin in the 2009 music issue of the Believer. “I’ve been asking myself this question off and on since I was a teenager.” There’s no answer, of course, so he invented one.

Any invented record has to make sense as a Beatles album, to reflect the amalgam the band was, the formulas on which they relied. For all their innovations, the Beatles were formulaic as well, building albums that had a standard architecture (one or two songs from George, a balance of John and Paul, and a quick dash of Ringo). You can’t forget that when considering what they might have done.

After taking readers on a tour of post-breakup Beatle solo albums, Ulin fashions four hypothetical Beatles albums. Here’s one:

Too Many People

SIDE ONE

Imagine (John)
Crippled Inside (John)
It Don’t Come Easy (Ringo, cowritten with George)
Teddy Boy (Paul)
All Things Must Pass (George)
Another Day (Paul)

 SIDE TWO

Too Many People (Paul)
Jealous Guy (John)
Gimme Some Truth (John)
Awaiting on You All (George)
Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey (Paul)
Monkberry Moon Delight (Paul)

We needed to hear this hypothetical blockbuster, so we brought it to life over at imeem. Enjoy:

Source:  Believer  (full article not available online).

Image by Chamko Rani, licensed under Creative Commons.

Sit down on a porch with someone from the American South and you’ll learn why the region is renowned for its storytelling tradition. In the book Something’s Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal (University Press of Kentucky), authors Silas House and Jason Howard tell the story of mountaintop removal coal mining through the voices of 12 Appalachians who’ve been directly affected by this devastating practice. Each subject is introduced by a vivid profile, and then House and Howard get out of the way and let them speak. Studs Terkel, no slouch himself in the oral history realm, has called Something’s Rising “oral history at its best,” and I have to concur: Although I was familiar with the mountaintop removal issue, these personal accounts brought it home for me in an incredibly powerful new way. I recently spoke with House and Howard about their book, the growing movement against mountaintop removal, and the outlook for the future.

This book is largely an oral history. Why did you choose to let your subjects tell their stories in their own words?

Howard: We chose to go with oral histories because we felt that the art of storytelling is something that mountaintop removal is destroying. Mountaintop removal isn’t only destroying the land and water and trees and animal habitat and mountains and things like that; it’s also destroying peoples’ lives and Appalachian traditions and culture. For generations, these mountains have sheltered us and provided us with stories and protection. The storytelling is something that’s been lost today because as those mountains are leaving, our culture is leaving, too. It’s becoming more homogenized. So it’s a political statement in doing that. It’s also a tribute to people’s words.

House: We wanted to allow people to tell their own stories in their own words, without any filters whatsoever—without turning them into sound bites—so that it can all be put into complete context for the reader. There is a real storytelling tradition in this region, and we think that really comes through in these oral histories. It’s just our way of saying, look, this is another thing that could be scraped away forever if we don’t stop this.

One of the ongoing threads in the book is the social pressure against speaking out on this issue. There seems to be an unwritten rule in Appalachia that you don’t criticize the coal industry. Can you tell me a little bit about where that comes from, and whether it might slowly be changing?

House: That’s what happens when you live in a mono-economy, and the coal industry has been really good at creating a mono-economy. [We live in a] place whose natural resources are coal, timber, natural gas, and tourism. Well, getting out the coal, the gas, and the timber destroys your chances of tourism. And so you’re completely dependent on an environmental economy.

The coal company has been really smart over the years, saying over and over again, “If it wasn’t for us, you all wouldn’t have anything,” when in fact, there are other parts of Appalachia that are so blessed that they didn’t have coal, and they have survived and become more prosperous than the coal areas. I mean, you take a section of Appalachia like western North Carolina where there’s no coal, and it survives very well on tourism. That’s the main source of income, and it works very well for them—and it’s much less destructive than coal mining.

Howard: It comes from years and years, almost a century now, of being, for lack of a better word, brainwashed by the coal companies. The coal companies came in here and have used up our people, used up our resources—the resources have been shipped out for years. … You can go back and look at the fight for unionization in the ’30s and ’40s, which was a really bloody fight, and the coal companies tried to stamp that out. They had company towns, which were closed societies in and of themselves. They paid the miners in scrip, which wasn’t hard cash money. It was just a token, and that token could only be spent at the company store, which was owned by the company. The schools were owned by the company, the churches were owned by the company—so you had that whole mentality of just things being dominated by corporations.

And that legacy is still alive and well today in the mountains. So people’s feelings about coal are complicated: One the one hand, when you have your great-grandfather smothered by black lung, that has an impact on you. There’s a certain level of resentment there. That was my great-grandfather on my mother’s side. On my father’s side, my great-grandfather was a union organizer, and he was murdered in the coal mines. So there’s that side of it, that people feel like the companies just chew you up and spit you out. But then there’s the other side that, you know, you sort of realize that coal has sometimes allowed families to rise up out of poverty or at least ascend to the middle class. So it’s complicated, and there are all those pressures that are still alive and well today.

House: When you’re told something for 150 years, it gets in your DNA. You start to believe it, and it’s hard to get around that mindset after more than a century of being told that, which is what’s happened in this region. And to some extent, [the coal companies] have made that come true—they’ve made it so that it is hard to get other kinds of economy. I mean, who wants to come in and set up a big factory to employ a bunch of people when people from the company don’t want to come to a place that looks like a war zone that’s torn all to pieces and people are being killed left and right on the roads by overloaded coal trucks, et cetera? The only people that are benefiting from it are the corporations.

Howard: In the early 1980s, President Reagan was preparing to go to the Soviet Union for a visit, and when he got there, he went to Moscow and he saw these grand boulevards where people were out cheering. Actually what had happened is that the Soviets, in preparation for his visit, had put up all these false fronts on their deteriorating and decaying buildings—so Reagan didn’t actually see the real Moscow.

And I think that scenario is exactly what is happening in Appalachia today. The coal companies like to put up those big fronts for people, saying, oh, look, we provide jobs, we provide wealth, we provide health care. Don’t worry about that slurry pond up the road—it’s not going to break. Don’t worry about the stream that runs by your house; don’t worry about the blasting—it’s all OK, we’re going to take care of you. And people have bought into that for far too long. Luckily, now a lot of people are waking up and are realizing that that’s not the case. So it is still complicated, and it is still hard at times for people to stand up and speak out against the coal companies, but they’re doing it. So that’s good. It’s progress.

You guys aren’t just carpetbagging journalists. You both have Appalachian roots and coal miners in your family tree, don’t you?

House: Right. We’re both from central Appalachia and are both grandchildren of miners, and we grew up very much immersed in the world of coal mining. Both of us have very close family members who worked in the mines, we both have lived very close to mines. We’ve seen it from every angle. If you’re an Appalachian, you always have a love-hate relationship with coal, but it just became more and more obvious to both of us that this was wrong—and we felt it would be morally wrong to sit by and not say something about it.

Did the fact that you’re Appalachians grant you some access, perhaps make it easier to get inside these stories?

Howard: I think it did, because with the legacy of the coal industry—with people coming in from outside the region and exploiting our people and our resources and then turning around and leaving—some Appalachians are at first leery of outsiders. We didn’t have to go through that because we both have been raised in the mountains and we spoke the language, we knew the shorthand, and we knew the culture, inside and out. So I think that people were more open and free to say what was on their minds.

How did you come to team up on the book, and what did you each bring to the project?

Howard: I met Silas at a writer’s workshop about four years ago, when I was living in D.C. I’d gone to school up there and was working and was in the process of trying to move back to Kentucky. I had watched the anti-mountaintop removal movement from afar, and I moved back shortly after that workshop and got really involved. We began traveling together and working on songs together. We were both in a band called Public Outcry that went around and sang against mountaintop removal, which opened up a whole new audience.

We were seeing so many ordinary people—quote-unquote ordinary—who were fighting back and who were very courageous and brave and who deserved recognition. And so it was born out of that—out of attending community meetings and rallies and marches and singing—that we decided the book needed to be done. And we are both different types of writers. Silas is more known as a novelist, although he’s done a lot of really great nonfiction, so he brought a lot of storytelling elements to it. Whereas I am totally a nonfiction writer. I’m a journalist who’s written extensively for lots of different magazines, and I’m also a creative nonfiction essayist. So all of those things blend, and we sort of balance each other out. I also have a political background, having gone to school in Washington, D.C. and worked on Capitol Hill for a government agency and on some campaigns. So I knew that side of the issues.

Silas, you’ve gone from being a novelist to being an activist of sorts who has spoken at rallies. What’s it been like to come out of your literary shell and be part of a grassroots movement?

House: Well, it’s certainly not something that I wanted to do or ever saw myself doing. It’s just something that I felt like I had a responsibility to do. I’m still not comfortable calling myself an activist. I think that I’m just a citizen who’s saying what he believes in, and that’s about it. I think that’s all that any of us can do—and what we should all do.

It’s interesting that you bring up that you were in a band together, because I want to ask you about music. Appalachia has a strong musical culture, and in your book you interview two musicians, country artist Kathy Mattea and folk singer Jean Ritchie, who are involved in fighting mountaintop removal. What’s the role of music in this movement?

Howard: Well, the role of music in the anti-mountaintop removal movement is growing by leaps and bounds. First, in Kentucky, it started out being just totally a writer’s movement, and then a lot of artists got together and said, OK, we were successful with getting writers on board to get the word out about mountaintop removal—so let’s go to musicians. And there are a lot of different bands and solo artists out there who are singing about it. Public Outcry, the band that we were in, was one of them. Now you have two really amazing musicians from Kentucky who are getting really big names nationally: Ben Sollee and Daniel Martin Moore, who has teamed up to record a whole album to raise awareness about mountaintop removal, and it’s being produced by Jim James of My Morning Jacket, which is a huge band.

I think that music reaches a whole different demographic than writing. You can get people out to a live show or concert who maybe wouldn’t read an op-ed or a letter to the editor or go to a rally or a protest. Music is sort of comforting. It allows people to stay within their comfort zone, and I think a lot of artists are realizing that and in the process are challenging people in a back-door way.

House: This is a fight where the people are up against huge corporations. These huge corporations have coffers overflowing with money, and all the people have are words and music. That’s all we have to fight this fight, and I think that the words and the music are winning so far—and I think that’s an amazing thing, that music and the arts are that powerful. I think that you can take a song and get somebody to understand something that they may have never understood before. You take a song like “Which Side Are You On?” which was written in the 1920s and was basically saying, are you on the side of the people or are you on the side of these big companies? It was written in a coal camp in Eastern Kentucky in the 1920s, and since then it’s been used all over the world in all kinds of social justice movements. And it changed the world. So it’s amazing what a three-minute song can do, or what a piece of literature can do. As for myself, those are some things that I know how to do, so that’s the only way I have of fighting back: telling stories or singing songs.

I see the anti-mountaintop removal movement has had some allies from the entertainment world lately. The actress Ashley Judd spoke at a rally, and the Coen brothers made a parody of a clean coal TV ad. Is it encouraging to see a little help coming from Hollywood?

House: Yeah. In our culture, people listen to celebrities, and I think these celebrities who are getting involved are getting involved not because they want to toot their own horn, not because they want any more spotlight on them—it’s just that they, too, are citizens who are standing up for what they believe in. So I appreciate them for that, and it’s good that people who are more widely known are stepping up to the plate and saying this is wrong. There are lots of people within the country music world who are getting more involved, too, which is an amazing thing because country music depends a great deal on people who wouldn’t normally identify themselves as environmentalists, I don’t think. They would probably identify themselves as conservationists, but not as environmentalists—so that’s a great thing.

Religion plays into this, too: Some of the people profiled in your book have gotten involved in the movement in part because they believe it’s a sin to destroy God’s creation. Do you find that spiritual approach to be a powerful force in the movement?

House: I definitely think it is. The main thing is that a lot of churches in the region are sort of backwards in their way of looking at environmentalism, and they have this attitude of, well, it doesn’t matter anyway because, you know, God’s going to come back and set everything right, so there’s no use in us spending much time on fighting things like this. But then you have churches within the region who are saying, no, we have to be stewards of the land, and we have been charged to do this in the Bible—it’s clearly set out in the Bible that we are to be stewards of the land and to protect it. And so it is a real moral issue for lots of people, and they’re getting more and more involved in the fight and standing up for the land—and also speaking out against the greed. Because that’s what this is—it’s an issue of greed. There’s absolutely no reason a company would do this unless it was just to make a bunch of money. They’re certainly not doing it for fun. They’re doing it because it’s the easiest way for them to make a huge amount of money as quickly as possible. So I think that a lot of churches are stepping up and pointing out that this is wrong, and that it can’t go on—it’s not morally right.

Howard: We’re seeing more and more churches and pastors and priests and laypeople getting involved. A couple of years ago, we went on a religious leaders’ tour in Kentucky. It was a very hot day, and we hiked up to the top of this mountain and looked over at this valley fill that was right under us. The coal company saw us and started blasting, and the sirens went off and everyone sang “Amazing Grace”—so it was really powerful and ironic. But on that trip there was a nun who accompanied us, and she was in her 80s. On that hot day, she was so persistent in climbing to the top of that mountain. I just remember sitting and looking at her struggling to cross little ditches and to grab hold of trees to pull herself up, and I just marveled at her. It was just like her faith was pulling her along.

And that’s just one story. Appalachia is a spiritual region, and there are lots of people out there who are like that nun, who just hate what mountaintop removal is doing to creation.

Are you hopeful that things are changing under the new administration?

House: I think it’s been more hopeful than not. The Obama administration is doing so much better than the Bush administration. This is not a partisan issue. I mean, the Clinton administration wasn’t much better on mountaintop removal than Bush the second. And so it’s not about party, but I do think that Obama is thinking things through in a much better way, and he’s getting educated on the subject as much as he can, and that’s really all we can ask of a president. It’s certainly more than Bush did. He didn’t try to get educated at all—he just did everything he could to make it as easy for them to mine as possible. So I think things are much more hopeful than they were.

Howard: I’m cautiously optimistic about the new administration. We have a few troubling signs, like the whole debate over who will be the Office of Surface Mining director. But by and large, the Environmental Protection Agency has finally got its teeth back after eight years of being reined in and of utter corruption. They have announced that they will be looking at and reviewing these mountaintop removal permits with the strictest standard, and that they will be following not only the letter but the spirit of the law. We of course would like to see a total ban on mountaintop removal, but I’m a realist and I know that we’re not there yet. Coal is still here, and it’s something we’re going to have to transition away from, and that’s going to take time. But I am hopeful.

Mountaintop removal foes have held several big marches and engaged in civil disobedience in recent weeks. So the battle goes on.

House: It does, and I think it’s going to heat up. There’s going to be more civil disobedience, mainly because when you sit by and you watch the law uphold laws being broken, sometimes you have to break the law to bring attention to that. People’s lives are at stake here. And it’s not just about creeks and owls and trees—and all those things are important—but it’s even more so about human beings. It’s about children and people who don’t have clean air to breathe—and we’re talking about the water. I mean, of all things to mess with, you don’t ever, ever mess with the water. It’s mind-boggling to me that we’re having to put forth bills that protect our water.

Have you engaged in any civil disobedience on this issue, or do you have plans to?

House: I have to some degree, but yeah, I plan to. I’ll do what it takes to protect my children. And that’s what I think it’s about—this is a matter of life and death, and we just have to do what we have to do to protect the place and the people.

Images of Silas House and Jason Howard courtesy of  University Press of Kentucky ; billboard image courtesy of  Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition .

 

 

In a recent Utne Reader article, I wrote about crate-digging bloggers who are posting all kinds of obscure and fascinating world music on the web. But I only scratched the surface of the websites doing this kind of excavating. Nathan Salsburg at the self-described music “blob” Root Hog or Die has gone deeper and come up with an amazing list of websites and blogs that run a huge gamut of sounds. Visit the site to check out the whole smorgasbord, but here are a few of my favorite nutshell descriptions:

FarsiTube : Outfitted like that one site with all the videos, Farsitube also has a prodigious music section, with tunes running the gamut from classical, folk, rock (from killer psych to the chintziest and most vapid of ’80s material), to contemporary pop. You kinda just have to jump in and start clicking …

Honking Duck : A digital hillbilly goldmine of banjo-hyper-collector Jim Bollman’s stacks of 78s.

Iranian.com: America might be Ahmedinejad’s “Great Satan,” but he should keep an eye on the electric guitar riffs gracing some of the unbelievably guiltily-pleasurable pop tunes available here.

Juneberry: The Roots Music Listening Room : Lock yourself in your room with a Coleman camper stove and some cans of soup and an internet connection and this website and maybe we’ll see you later.

Public Domain 4 U: The title’s an anticipation of how Prince’s catalog will be described in 50 or so years, but this totally sketchy looking site is actually a nice little stop for some wonderful old-time and blues tunes.

Source: Root Hog or Die

Image by  oddsock , licensed under Creative Commons.

Using people’s brain waves as the notes, scientists have created music. The researchers from China took brain wave readings from EEGs as the original source and used complex math to create pitch and rhythm for the waves. If their methods were improved, according to the Neruotopia 2.0 blog, the music could be used to detect Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, or other irregularities in the brain. 

 

Here are a few of the tracks that the researchers have created so far:

Brain with eyes open 

Brain in REM sleep 

Brain in slow-wave sleep 

Right now, Neruotopia 2.0 points out, the notes sound more like a cat on a keyboard than real music:

Source:  PLOS One , Neruotopia 2.0 

Image by Csaba Segesvári, licensed under Creative Commons.

Music by Dan Wu, Chao-Yi Li, De-Zhong Yao, licensed under Creative Commons.

What are they listening to in Paris? Gareth Murphy at the new and impressive Journal of Music fills us in on the expansive playlists of Parisian radio stations:

Classical, jazz, electro pips and boinks, apocalyptic gangster rap from the Paris hoods, gay house, Congolese rhumba, chanson française, Hebrew religious songs, arty hip-hop from New York, Zouk from the Antilles, salsa from Havana, crooner slows from the 1980s, accordion cheese, Arabic trad, Algerian raï, French R&B for suburban girlies, weird cinematic soundtracks about geese flying to Moscow. Parisians approach music rather like food: they want to taste every dish that human civilisation has ever invented.

Murphy attributes this wild eclecticism to several factors. France is better known for painting, literature, and cinema than for music; hence its relatively small music industry “does not possess the arrogance and influential export market that the pop music scene in London is renowned for” and is free to play what it wants. He also posits that theater is a subliminal artistic reference point for the French, resulting in a strange combination of musical tastes:

Caught in a split personality between the brooding of Northern Europe and the simplicity of Mediterranean culture, it’s almost as if the French still don’t know whether music is supposed to be stupid or serious, ironic or first degree.

Murphy notes that many talented artists who failed to launch their careers in their homelands end up being the toast of Paris. For example, have you ever heard of the U.S. folk singer Alela Diane? Neither had I. But Murphy reports that this “rising genius” has gotten huge exposure through repeated plays on France Inter, the country’s news, society and culture broadcaster, launching her on national tours. “The Paris music scene does not have any special secret to teach the world’s musicians,” he writes, “except maybe that the expectations and values of your audience will denote the ambitions and content of your work.”

Source: The Journal of Music (subscription required for full article)

How much does it cost to spread 650,000 pennies on the floor in a delicate wave pattern, atop a bed of oozing honey? Including the tableau attendant and accommodations for the sheep, about $13,791.36. (1989 dollars, of course.) The installation in question is Anne Hamilton’s “privations and excess,” which The Believer details in the latest installment of Creative Accounting, a series that’s plainly perfect for those among us who love both the arts and getting down and gritty with the details. Ahem.

In past issues, the magazine has unpacked the fiscal details of an unnamed Flaming Lips album ($158,338.53); a modestly-made indie film ($15,4800), and a less-modestly made yet nonetheless indie film ($18 million), which kicked off the series last March.

 Source: The Believer 

Image by kevindooley, licensed under Creative Commons.

I’ve been haunted, or is it blessed, by the song “Pulling on a Line” by the Canadian band Great Lake Swimmers from their new album Lost Channels. It’s a simple but gorgeous folk song, deploying a sly fishing metaphor, gently strummed guitars, and a persistent melody that, once you’ve heard it, doesn’t easily drift away. Moreover it strongly evokes a sense of place, with images of water, snow, and “electric flushes” in the “dark sky” conjuring a northern landscape of natural wonders.

It turns out that head Swimmer Tony Dekker is all about soaking up his surroundings. He and his band recorded the album in the Thousand Islands region off the coast of Ontario, laying down songs in places that included a castle, a church, and a theater repurposed as an arts center, according to an article in Thousand Islands magazine:

The native of Wainfleet, Ontario, near Lake Erie, said the band wanted to record the album in a setting reflective of the group’s name as well as the spirit of its folk rock music.

“I grew up along the Great Lakes,” said Dekker. “I like that through music you can tell the story of the place where you’re from.”

Dekker’s fondness for rustic recording sites is also the focus of an article in the May-June issue of Tape Op magazine (article not available online), which presses him for the technical details of wiring an empty grain silo for a session, as he did for the band’s 2003 debut album. But he’s not just interested in the way sound bounces off the walls:

“The space becomes an instrument in a way. You can see it as providing texture, but I think it does more than that—it helps tell the story. The effect of singing or playing in a room changes the way you perceive the sound.”

And in an interview with Stereogum, he allows that there might be more than one metaphorical thread running through “Pulling on a Line”:

“The line being pulled in the refrain could be the act of writing or creating. … Sometimes I think the creative process is a lot like fishing, or like flying Benjamin Franklin’s kite, in the waiting for inspiration to strike.”

 

Sources: Thousand Islands, Tape Op, Stereogum

Click on any square in the grid and it lights up, pulsing a single musical note. Click on another, and you’ve got the beginning of a looping, tone-drenched pattern. Flashcoder Andre Michelle describes his ToneMatrix as a “simple sinewave synthesizer triggered by an ordinary 16step sequencer.” How about rephrasing simple as addictively delightful?

(Thanks, Brandon Ivers.)

 

 

It’s a gut reaction thing. When confronted by a musical composition called “Burning Piano” that involves, yes, playing a piano as it burns, you’re probably going to be curious or dismissive: It sounds either brilliantly subversive or like a horrible waste. Here at Utne Reader, we were so taken by composer Annea Lockwood’s description of “Burning Piano” from an interview in the New Zealand arts mag White Fungus that we’re reprinting an excerpt in our July-August issue. (Look for it soon on Utne.com.)

“It’s very magnetizing,” she said in describing her first performance of the piece decades ago. “It turned into an event of itself, almost a funny little ritual, something in its own right.”

Too bad we didn’t know that “Burning Piano” was about to be performed in our backyard as we read those words. Some lucky students at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, got to partake in the ritual April 30 in a “Burning Piano” concert attended—and ignited—by the composer herself. The student who instigated the project, Carleton senior Caitlin Schmid, confirmed our impression of the polarizing effects of torching a piano.

“Watching Lockwood’s performance really generated a lot of discussion among the students,” Schmid told the Minneapolis-based Star Tribune. “Some of us were really moved by the piece, while others were deeply offended. They couldn’t get past the idea of destroying a piano and calling it ‘art.’ ”

The ensuing reaction in the newspaper’s “Comments” sections turned—as it too often does, unfortunately—into a partisan battle, with one commenter even speculating that “this flaming idiot ‘performance artist’ also likely voted for Obama.”

Perhaps. But sometimes maybe a burning piano is simply a burning piano.

Sources: White Fungus, Star Tribune

Images by Nate Ryan, courtesy of Nate Ryan.

As anyone who’s lived in an urban apartment knows, it’s nearly impossible to turn off your sense of hearing. Plug your ears, and you can still feel vibrations echoing in your head. Knowing this, US soldiers in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay have used popular music to “break” detainees into giving up information. Pundits tend to focus on the absurdity of using the theme song from the kids shows Barney and Sesame street as an interrogation technique, but Martin Cloonan writes for the New Humanist, “musical torture is far from being a laughing matter.”

Music as a weapon is often characterized by an “assault on identity and the lack of control,” Cloonan writes. He points out that British soldiers used white noise to attack Republican detainees in Northern Ireland, and classical music is still being played in various public places to keep young people from congregating. While researching music in neighborhood conflicts, Cloonan found, “Often what began as a request to turn sound down escalated into another form of sonic warfare, resulting in court injunctions and physical violence – including murder.”

Bands like Rage Against the Machine and Massive Attack are pushing back against the torturers, showing support for the Zero dB campaign, aimed at banning music for the purposes of torture. Jonathan Mann, on the other hand, has used his music to call attention to the torture memos that were recently released. You can watch that below.

Sources: New Humanist, Zero dB, Jonathan Mann 

The “Marsalis mafia” of young musical neoconservatives who took jazz by storm in the ’80s keep making vibrant, piquant music that both challenges and enriches tradition. (If only the political neocons had half as much sense and historical scholarship.) On Watts, drummer “Tain” Watts delivers original compositions that variously enable saxophonist Branford Marsalis and trumpeter Terence Blanchard to joust over rugged post-bop and revel in their New Orleans heritage. Watts is a creatively turbulent timekeeper who pays heed to the tom-tom and bass drums as much as to the cymbals and snares. He turns himself up in the mix and completes the quartet with stentorian superbassist Christian McBride as a worthy rhythmic foil.

This review is from the  March-April 2009 issue of Utne Reader.

Listen Now to a Streaming Track:
Katrina James by Jeff "Tain" Watts 

Internationally, Baaba Maal is one of Africa’s most renowned musicians. Inside his native Senegal, Baaba Maal’s role is more like an elder statesman and conflict mediator. Where he grew up in northern Senegal, Rachel Aspden writes for the New Statesman, “Master musicians become community leaders, spokesmen and arbiters of disputes; hence the audiences that queue to consult Baaba Maal after a show.” 

Unlike the celebrity activists of Western culture, Baaba Maal’s roots his social work in Senagalese tradition. “We’re all part of the same community,” he says, “we just sit down and talk together.”

To watch a clip of Baaba Maal’s music, click on the video below:

“Not the least wonder of science is its ability to convert shellac—excreted by an insect—into a vehicle for profound emotional experience,” wrote research physicist George R. Harrison in the November 1938 issue of Technology Review. The January/February 2009 issue resurrects his spirited description of the industrial process behind phonographs and his prescient thoughts on the ways improved recording technology could change the art of music making.

“The sight of hundreds of steam-heated presses stamping out phonograph records is likely to give rise to that exaltation which is occasionally felt on viewing one of man’s accomplishments in fashioning nature to his ends…At one moment we see a mass of dough; 30 seconds later it emerges from the press transformed—the “Prelude to Lohengrin”!

“At least one scientist with a musical bent, who possesses a home sound recorder, has gone so far as to play string quartets with himself…If the quality of the recording can be made such that the music does not lose appreciably by successive re-recordings, the only limitation on any performer who wishes to make a full orchestral rendition by himself should be his own virtuosity! Of course there is also the less pleasing possibility that an amateur tenor might equally well thus take advantage of the wonders of science and produce his own barbershop chords.”

Listen to an 1897 gramophone recording below:

A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight 

Image by sogni­­ hal, licensed under Creative Commons.

 

Part of the appeal of South by Southwest is the joy of surprise: happening upon a band that you’ve never heard before, and might never hear again, and being drawn into their musical world for a short time. I left room in my itinerary for such happy accidents by veering off any schedule at times and following my wandering ears. One particular night turned into a series of unexpected revelations—some fleeting and ultimately disappointing, but revelations nonetheless.

The first occurred when I was exiting a restroom at the Austin Convention Center and heard what sounded like Bjork being tortured by a metal band. I just had to check this out. I homed in on a music hall where the L.A. group Shiny Toy Guns was blasting out full-on rawk music with metal, electronic, prog, and pop elements. The band was visually intriguing, with a gothy drummer on the left side of the stage, a hunched-over keyboardist at right, and between them a guy on guitar and a woman on bass. She was the besieged Bjork. For a time their music was completely mesmerizing, a pure sonic blast of adrenaline, deep and loud and tight. But alas, they could not sustain this, and soon slower tempos and intelligible lyrics revealed the cracks in their metal armor. They were entering power ballad territory when I split, fast.

I strolled several blocks to the Cedar Street Courtyard, where a much more sedate sort of rocking was occurring: The duo Beach House was doing their Mazzy Star/Nico thing, creating a gauzy haze of music that cushioned listeners’ heads like pillows.

I was becoming hypnotized and sleepy by the time Toronto’s Bedouin Soundclash took the same stage and ratcheted up the energy level with their hopped-up ska music. Sporting two horns, a rock-steady rhythm section, and a throaty vocalist, they sounded as natty as they looked in their black shirts and jaunty hats. The singer’s Canadian-Jamaican patois was clearly an affectation, but a damn good one. A crowd sing-along with “Stand by Me,” though? Time to go.

The Felice Brothers were as ragged as Bedouin Soundclash was sharp, in both appearance and musicianship—and yet their gig over at the Habana Café Backyard was equally fun. A roots-fueled band of brothers from upstate New York, the Felices played washboard, accordion, fiddle, and other trad instruments with abandon, ripping through songs like “Whiskey in My Whiskey” and “Ain’t Gonna Think About Trouble Anymore.” Two drunk dudes danced Western swing-style in front of me, their lit cigarettes nearly burning each other’s face as they whirled. (I love you, man.) Ending the show, one Felice tackled another and wiped out the drum kit. “We didn’t mean no harm,” one said as they cleaned up the wreckage. Like the stage, their music was a glorious mess.

 

With so many types of music acts from so many places, South by Southwest often feels like anything but Texas: Hairball Japanese metal bands, Brit-poppers, and electro-geek ensembles don’t exactly shout “Howdy!” But the Doug Sahm tribute at Antone’s, sponsored by Utne Reader and the Americana Music Association, was fully steeped in the Lone Star State.

Sahm had a passion for “American music—blues, jazz, real country, Tex-Mex, garage rock. He loved it all,” music journalist Tom Surowicz, a friend of Sahm’s, told me. There were tinges of all of these and more on the Antone’s stage as a rotating cast of Texas musicians took a whirlwind spin through Sahm’s good-time music to honor him and promote a new album, Keep Your Soul: A Tribute to Doug Sahm, on Vanguard Records.

The tribute kicked off with guitarist Jimmie Vaughan, who along with his late brother Stevie Ray is a legend of Antone’s stage; Austin roots-rockers the Gourds; Sahm’s son Shawn Sahm and the Tex-Mex Experience; California folk-blues tunesmith Dave Alvin, who wore a Stetson and a bandana for the occasion; and the boot-kickin’ band Sarah Borges and the Broken Singles. All delivered spirited versions of Sahm classics to a rapidly filling house.

Then things started to get legendary. Shawn Sahm brought out surviving members of his dad’s band the Texas Tornados, including keyboardist Augie Meyers and accordionist Flaco Jimenez, and proceeded to lead them through blazing renditions of more Sahm favorites, including the biggies “Mendocino” and “She’s About a Mover.” Shawn, a wiry, slight guy in a cowboy hat and a black Beatles shirt, was giddy with excitement, grinning ear to ear like his dad, tossing his head back to laugh, and wagging his tongue as he put the all-star band through its paces. When he shouted out “I love you, Dad” near the set’s end, it was clear from the crowd’s enthusiastic response that they did, too.

 

It’s all about the rhythm. The entire premise of rock ’n’ roll is built on a solid backbeat, of course, but many of the bands at the Utne Reader-sponsored Team Clermont showcase at South by Southwest were notable for using extra drums, cymbals, tambourines, and sampled beats to infuse their music with an even more deeply percussive undertow.

The first two of the six bands were lessons in the basics. First act Ruby Isle, a keyboard-keyboard-drum trio, delivered manic electro-power pop fueled by a propulsive drummer in the classic style. Singer-keyboardist Mark Mallman was a complete spazz in a sleeveless flannel shirt, tight black jeans, and yellow track shoes, often perching on the utility ladder that served as his keyboard stand to gesticulate and grandstand. The trio used extensive sampled instrumental tracks to make up for their lack of guitars.

Telekinesis, a Beatles-infused Seattle quartet, also stuck to the standard beat prescription, but as a drummer-led band it stood out for its configuration, placing drummer, singer, and bandleader Michael Benjamin Lerner front and center. He came off as a fresh-faced schoolkid compared to the unhinged Mallman, focusing his intensity on the music instead of the audience as he played his hook-packed, often joyous pop.

Then things started to get farther out. Slaraffenland, an experimental-leaning outfit from Denmark, had a starting lineup of two guitars, sax, keyboards, and drums, but ended up switching in clarinet and trombone and sending some of the members back to the kit to help the drummer work the tom-toms and cymbals. Their highly unconventional songs had constantly shifting textures, traversing sounds from pop, rock, jazz, and art rock as each composition built to a controlled cacophony. One song deployed an unconvincing chant of “I won’t track you down,” which they repeated over a building techno beat; another deconstructed to a marchlike cadence; and another ended with three members drumming at once in a tribal exercise that felt like some sort of art-rock invocation.

The Modern Skirts from Athens, Georgia, tilted more toward pop but also brought an enhanced rhythm section as the keyboard player had both a piano and a snare drum. Despite their Athens pedigree and their ties to R.E.M. (whose Mike Mills produced a track on their album), they were more jumpy than jangly, often literally: Singer Jay Gulley spent half the gig in the air as he bobbed up and down. Still, their music would seem perfectly at home in the college-radio realm, and Gulley’s vocal similarities to Oasis were unmistakable.

Things slowed down for the next set, which was no surprise, since the band was called Casiotone for the Painfully Alone: Yes, it was downbeat electronica. Stationed behind a stack of keyboards and a tangle of wires, beefy, bearded Owen Ashworth sang in a beaten-down baritone about what appears to be a sorry mess of a life. I didn’t much care for his lo-fi, cheap keyboard sounds or his aggressively disaffected voice, but I’ll concede that more so than most of his electronica peers, he writes actual songs to hang his beats on.

Pulling us back from the brink was Mirah, a singer-songwriter who sang winsome, personal tunes with a folkie feel. Using soft mallets and standing, her drummer forged a soft pulse to underlay these confessional numbers. Mirah’s slight, quiet songs were sometimes lost in the din of a distracted audience, and I could see her going over well in a coffeehouse or similarly low-key venue.

The penultimate act of the day was Loney Dear, a Swedish outfit led by Emil Svanangen. He writes songs that in an earlier age could have passed as folk, but his electronic ornamentation makes them fully contemporary. Again, the rhythm was king, with a driving drummer, tambourines, and backing tracks fleshing out the beats. Loney Dear held the re-engaged audience rapt by mixing up moods and tempos, and a new song called “Summers” was a real treat, triumphant and wistful at once. At one point, Svanangen whistled the unmistakable melody from “Young Folks” by Peter, Bjorn and John, a sly nod to his fellow Swedes who became an international pop sensation. If he keeps this up, he could do the same.

 

In the 1980s, when “alternative rock” connoted something other than a marketing template, the boutique London-based record label 4AD was one of the most distinctive labels around. Bands like This Mortal Coil, the Cocteau Twins, Wolfgang Press, and the Breeders didn’t necessarily all sound alike, but there was an aesthetic consistency to 4AD releases that made the label a trusted source for seekers of new sounds.

After that early heyday, 4AD registered as a smaller blip on the hipster radar, but now the label is back at the fore, with newer artists like Bon Iver, M. Ward, and the National bringing back its cutting-edge reputation. A 4AD showcase at the 2009 South by Southwest made a convincing case that it fully deserves its recaptured respect.

A long line outside the Central Presbyterian Church, one of the more unusual SXSW venues, was one indication of the label’s resurgence. When I got inside, singer-songwriter, M. Ward had just finished his set, and the crowd was abuzz. “It was just him and his guitar and he was a total master,” said a fan behind me. Both of Ward’s 4AD albums, 2006’s Post-War and the new Hold Time, have cemented his reputation as one of indie rock’s more craftsmanlike tunesmiths.

The next act to take the stage under the giant crucifix was Department of Eagles, a four-man band that delivered a set of lurching songs with off-kilter rhythms that often built up into towering crescendos of sound. Steadfastly refusing to lock into a predictable rhythm or even a melody, their songs seemed to strain to break free of these idiosyncratic forms, but never did, creating a tension that held the crowd on the edges of their pew seats.

Following them was St. Vincent, an Austin act that clearly had lots of local fans in the house. Their sound is perhaps best described as arty chamber rock, and like Department of Eagles many of their songs swell toward cathartic, unsettling conclusions. But singer Annie Clark’s voice, which recalled the great 4AD singer Elizabeth Frazer, added a sweeter edge, especially on the love-soaked plea “Marry Me,” in which she sang, “We’ll do what Mary and Joseph did, without the kid.” And some of their songs took a more decidedly pop tilt, especially the brief but brilliant “Actor Out of Work,” which might have passed for power pop if not for the shards of electric guitar that punctuated it.

Scottish “twee” band Camera Obscura, newly signed to 4AD, concluded the night’s arc perfectly, playing pure pop that doesn’t challenge so much as delight. Singer Tracyanne Campbell, her hair in a bob and wearing a dress fit for a Sunday picnic, was an anti-rock-star frontwoman, making no effort to drop her inner geek or, for that matter, her Scottish accent. “This is our first shew in the steets for a while,” she said, “and our first shew in a warking church.” My wishes were fulfilled when they played “Let’s Get Out of This Country,” a perfect pop song from their last album that gave me solace in pre-election America. Their first 4AD album, My Maudlin Career, is due out next month.

All through the night, the intermission music consisted of great songs from the 4AD back catalog, like "You and Your Sister” and “Song to the Siren” by This Mortal Coil. While it was wonderful to hear these tunes, if they were intended to demonstrate the label’s excellence, they were superfluous: The music emanating from the stage did that very well.

It was obvious that this wasn’t just another flight as I got on my plane to South by Southwest. Hairstyles, fashion choices, and a surfeit of indoor sunglasses clearly indicated that this was a rock and roll crowd. Musicians struggled to fit guitar cases into overhead bins, and I spotted Minneapolis singer-songwriter Gary Louris making his way down the aisle.

In Dallas, I chatted with Louris as we waited to change planes. He’s got four shows scheduled for the conference to promote his new album with Mark Olson, his ex-bandmate in Minneapolis roots-rock band the Jayhawks. The disc, called Ready for the Flood and released by the New West label, is an acoustic, stripped-down album that highlights the Louris-Olson harmonies that were a Jayhawks trademark.

My Dallas-to-Austin connecting flight was even more rocking as the ratio of SXSW-bound music industry folks increased to the saturation point. Peter Jesperson, the New West A&R exec and former Replacements manager, hopped aboard. In Austin, baggage claim bustled with instrument cases, and outside the terminal a limo driver walked around with a sign reading "Bar Kays" as he looked for the legendary Memphis band.

 

A shuttle van to the hotel turned into a networking opportunity for the passengers, which included one hip-hop tour manager; two guys from a graphic design firm; two women from an “orchestral pop” ensemble; and one magazine journalist, me. Business cards were exchanged, gigs announced, and war stories traded. The tour manager spent half the ride on his cell phone discussing the cost, in British pounds, of concert gear for an upcoming tour. Business taken care of, we disembarked and prepared to immerse ourselves in the festival.

Later that night, after midnight, I found myself looking for one more gig to catch after the excellent 4AD showcase  at Central Presbyterian Church. Aha—I recalled that one of Louris and Olson’s gigs was just two blocks away. I hustled over to the Victorian Room at the Driskill Hotel, where Louris, Olson, and their two acoustic guitars were holding a crowd spellbound with just their acoustic guitars and voices.

Their new material fit seamlessly alongside the Jayhawks classics that sprinkled the set, namely, “Over My Shoulder,” “Two Hearts,” “Waiting for the Sun,” and, as the closer, their biggest hit and perhaps my favorite Jayhawks song, “Blue.” The crowd let out an exuberant cheer at the distinctive opening notes, and as the honeyed harmonies filled the room, it seemed to me that at South by Southwest, business as usual is sometimes transcendent.

Musicians are able to identify emotions more quickly and accurately than non-musicians, according to research reported in LiveScience. For the experiment, participants watched a subtitled nature film and listened to a 250 millisecond clip of a baby crying. Using brain scans, the researchers found that musicians were more sensitive to the emotional content than non-musicians.

The test samples were quite small—only 30 people—but scientists hope the information could lead to innovative treatments for people with dyslexia or autism, who often have trouble processing the emotional content in sounds. Neuroscientist Nina Kraus told LiveScience, “It would not be a leap to suggest that children with language processing disorders may benefit from musical experience.”

Other brain scan tests have revealed that musicians’ brains actually sync up when they play music together, according to Science a GoGo. Researchers from the Max Plank Institute recorded the electrical activity in the brains of pairs of guitarists, and found that the brainwave patterns synchronized when the musicians played together. The tests aren’t done yet, however. The results don’t show whether the synchronization happens from watching and listening to the other person play music, or if the brainwaves sync first, and then facilitate the coordinated action.

Image by Tom Marcello, licensed under Creative Commons.

Sources: LiveScience, Science a GoGo

Utne Reader had so much fun at South by Southwest last year that we’re going again. This time out, we’re sponsoring two wildly different concert bills and blogging daily from the mega-music conference in Austin, Texas.

Both our events take place on Thursday, March 19. The Official SXSW College Party, presented by Utne Reader and Team Clermont, begins at noon at the Flamingo Cantina with a roster of up-and-coming indie rockers: Loney Dear (5 p.m.), Mirah (4:10), Casiotone for the Painfully Alone (3:20), Modern Skirts (2:30), Slaraffenland (1:40), Telekinesis (12:50), Ruby Isle (noon), and Rafter (DJing between sets). I’m most keyed about the Scandinavian folk-pop of Loney Dear and the lo-fi musings of Telekinesis, but I’m keen to see all of these promising acts. I’ll be wearing my western-style shirt in ironic hipster style at this event, which goes until 6 p.m.

At 8 p.m., after a break just long enough for a takeout burrito and a Mexican Coke, we kick off a completely different sort of affair over at Antone’s—a roots-rock bill called Keep Your Soul: A Tribute to Doug Sahm, featuring the Texas Tornados, Shawn Sahm, Augie Meyers, Flaco Jimenez and the West Side Horns, Jimmy Vaughan, Dave Alvin, Sarah Borges and the Broken Singles, and the Gourds, along with Justin Townes Earle, Carrie Rodriguez, Raul Malo, and Band of Heathens. I’ll still be wearing my western shirt, but I’ll ditch the irony for a long, tall cold one and a bunch of twangy guitar solos.

Sponsored by Utne Reader and the Americana Music Association, the show is curated by Vanguard Records, which is just about to release a Sahm tribute album also called Keep Your Soul. If you don’t know who Sahm was, well, he was a character akin to Gram Parsons in that he mixed rock and roll with country music—but threw in some R&B and Tex-Mex, too—and scored a few pop hits along with a cultish following. The sheer talent lineup of this show and the attendant album (which includes Los Lobos, Alejandro Escovedo, Charlie Sexton and many others) is a testament to Sahm’s long-lived legacy.

One musician who was supposed to be on the Antone’s bill is instead recuperating at home from open-heart surgery: Buddy Miller. One of country music’s finest songwriters and a sideman/guitarist to Emmylou Harris and many other rootsy artists, Miller had a heart attack last month. His prognosis for a full recovery is excellent, Jed Hilly of the Americana Music Association tells me, and several tour-bus operators vied for the honor of taking Miller home from Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where he had surgery. We’ll miss Buddy at Antone’s, but we’re cheered to hear that he’s sticking around.

Follow my blogging from South by Southwest at www.utne.com/arts.

 

 

Multi-instrumentalist Andrew Bird aims squarely at the pleasure center of the bookish indie set. His several acclaimed albums of postmodern chamber pop highlight his nimble playing and the warm electronics of his frequent collaborator, the drummer and producer Martin Dosh. 

Only a team as visionary as Bird and Dosh would strive to fix what isn’t broken and transcend this winning formula, as they have with Noble Beast, where suitelike song structures, instrumental interludes, and audacious lyrical constructions build and soar but never topple into excess.

“Masterswarm” begins with a minor-key acoustic prelude to a joyously orchestrated tango of violin flourishes and handclaps. Bird’s whistling and tremolo guitar splice the mood of Strictly Ballroom with that of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. The arrangement employs addition, then subtraction, as the song’s instrumentation is gradually pared away until only the crushed bits of Dosh’s rhythm loop remain.

Indeed, Noble Beast’s most successful moments are its most percussive and experimental, evenly blending Bird’s meticulous performances and Dosh’s manipulated grooves. Lugubrious pitch-shifted drums lumber across “Souverian”; the canter and shuffle of “Not a Robot, but a Ghost” ultimately careens into a spooky, swirling meltdown of queasy violin and bowed bass.

Bird’s favorite instrument is probably the English language itself. He’s still unable to resist a geeky portmanteau (“Anonanimal”), a smirking pun (“Fitz & Dizzyspells”), even the occasional palindrome. But we should be grateful he’s transcending pop clichés. You can get away with plenty of too-clever-by-half lyrical stunts if they’re buttressed by such brilliant arrangements and beguiling melodies.

This review is from the  March-April 2009 issue of Utne Reader .

Listen Now to a Streaming Track:
"Masterswarm" by Andrew Bird from Noble Beast 

Learning to play the violin is part of the program at a drug rehab clinic in Taiwan. At the Taichung Drug Abuse Treatment Center in Taichung, 20 addicts attended a three-hour violin class every week for three months and then gave a “successful concert” at the end of the program, according to the country’s Central News Agency.

“The overwhelming public response to the music therapy program prompted the center to invite the teacher to conduct a second class,” reports Taiwan News, noting that the center’s director believes “that in learning how to play the violin, the drug abusers have built new values in life—and have found the spiritual strength to help them overcome drug addiction.”

(Thanks, Bluegrass Blog.)

Image by TheAlieness GiselaGiardino, licensed under Creative Commons.

Source: Taiwan News

Certain clichés are nearly inevitable when writing about composer Philip Glass. He’s a master of minimalism. He knows when not to play. Postmodern, repetitive, ambient, genius: Choose your adjectives from the well-worn menu.

In previewing a Napa, California, performance by Glass, Gabe Meline at the North Bay Bohemian avoids the peril of a rote profile by writing about a 2007 Philip Glass concert in a style that takes inspiration directly from the composer. A snippet of Meline’s article:

“Sold-out house hangs. On every word. Small man is dry, is plain. Music is anything but. Plain, yes, on the surface, like glass. Dry, hardly. Like a storm. ‘Metamorphosis.’ Right hand goes tinkle tinkle tinkle tinkle tink, tinkle tinkle tinkle tinkle tink, hush hush hush and pouuuuuuuuuur.”

Image courtesy of Philipglass.com.

Source: Bohemian.com

Babies can follow a beat just days after birth, and they can notice when a rhythm pattern is disrupted, according to study results presented by Discover. Some scientists believe the ability to recognize steady rhythms, called beat induction, could be unique to humans. Some, including the study’s authors, also think it’s innate. Lead researcher Istvan Winkler suggests that a sense of rhythm helps newborns process and respond to repetitive baby talk, paving the way for language acquisition. If he’s right, our affinity for music may be a happy evolutionary accident, a byproduct of other essential learning processes.

Image by Kamal Aboul-Hosn, licensed under Creative Commons.

 

Once an obscure subset of reggae, the music known as dub has mutated into a remarkably broad category, with digital-age DJs applying its looping, backmasking, slice-and-dice aesthetic to all sorts of music, from punk to house to world. On A Town Called Addis, veteran British producer Nick Page—a.k.a. Dub Colossus—taps traditional Ethiopian sounds and state-of-the-art mixology to create a modern dub classic.

From the first bright horn bursts, psychedelic sound effects, pulsing groove, and honeyed vocals of “Azmari Dub,” the album grabs listeners’ attention with its hyper-defined sounds. It’s the exact opposite of a murky mix, tantalizing the ear with a Sgt. Pepper–like landscape of sonic doodads and textures while respecting the Ethiopian music at its core. Page creates spectacular settings for rustic instruments such as the messenqo one-string fiddle, the washint flute, and the kraar harp and unveils surprise talents including the singer Sintayehu Zenebe, whom Page has called “the Edith Piaf of Ethiopia.”

If the music at times resembles jazz, it’s the cosmic, far-out jazz of the Sun Ra Arkestra, and if it occasionally enters the Afrobeat realm, it’s the funky turf of the master, Fela Kuti. But the music owes perhaps its largest debt to dub innovators from Lee “Scratch” Perry to the Clash, who were mashing up music long before Pro Tools came along. Dub is no longer dismissed as the work of stoners who spent too long at the mixing board, but has come into its own as a vital form full of endless possibilities. Dub Colossus exploits them to their fullest.

STREAMING TRACK: "Azmari Dub" by Dub Colossus from A Town Called Addis

Mountaintop removal coal mining isn’t just destroying Appalachia’s landscape. It’s also also fracturing the region’s culture, including its traditional music. The "faith, politics, culture" magazine Sojourners reports on the Cowan Creek Mountain Music School in eastern Kentucky, which trains youngsters to play—and be proud of—the old-time music that has been losing its foothold in the hollers.

“East Kentucky is a very poor area, and it gets the short end of the stick in a lot of ways,” school founder Beverly May tells Sojourners. “There are terrible problems of environmental devastation and economic devastation from the strip-mining of coal. The kids see all this, and they know where they stand in the American scene. They’re hillbillies. The Cowan Creek School counters that. It says you have a heritage that is honored all over the world and is one of the main sources of all American popular music. Saving this music is a part of saving this regional community.”

Banjo player Randy Wilson, who teaches at the school, tells Sojourners that coal mining is still a touchy subject in the area: “We got some flak last summer because so many of our music school teachers publicly voiced opposition to strip-mining and mountaintop removal. Some people said we needed to be aware that many of the local people at our events also work for a coal company. It is a shame that we have to pit jobs against honoring our heritage, but that is how it is here in Appalachia.”

This internal conflict is also the thread running through the forthcoming book Something’s Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal, which will be published in April by the University Press of Kentucky. The authors, Silas House and Jason Howard, both grew up in families with coal-mining backgrounds, and in the introduction they describe the pressure exerted on those who dare to speak out: “Many Appalachians find it difficult to oppose this practice because of the coal industry’s long history of convincing people that to protest any form of mining is to oppose an industry that has long been a major supplier of jobs within the region.”

The book goes on to both puncture that argument—mountaintop removal actually doesn’t provide many local jobs—and give voice to 12 courageous local witnesses to the devastation, including many who also draw connections between coal and culture. One is 86-year-old songwriter Jean Ritchie, sometimes called the “mother of folk,” whose music was recorded by famed musicologist Alan Lomax. In a song that still rings true, she sings of “black waters run down through the land” and says, “The memories, they just push right down on me sometimes.”

Look for more coverage of the book at Utne.com closer to April.

Image courtesy of Cowan Creek Mountain Music School.

Aaron Copland’s rousing Lincoln Portrait is on several orchestras’ programs for the weeks surrounding the inauguration. The piece, scored for symphonic orchestra and narrator, integrates text from Lincoln’s speeches and writing with musical material that celebrates the American folk tradition, quoting tunes like “Camptown Races.”  

Here’s a short clip from the Chicago Symphony’s September 11, 2005, performance, with Barack Obama as narrator.

(Thanks, Opera Chic.)

For a guy who listens to John Coltrane, Barack Obama has an inaugural celebration musical lineup that’s playing it pretty safe: You’ve got your Beyonce, your Bono, your Boss. But I suppose we ought to cut him some slack. For one thing, it’s not like the guy booked it personally. He’s got a few other things to think about. Also, if you think about it, the sprawling, middle-of-the-road bill is in keeping with his whole big-tent approach. He’s reaching out to rural America with Garth Brooks, boomers with James Taylor, the hip-hop nation with Mary J. Blige. It’s going to be a party to which everyone is invited. (I guess that’s why 800,000 people are showing up.)

But there’s one performance recently added to Sunday's bill that I’m really keyed about : Soul singer Bettye LaVette will perform Sam Cooke’s classic “A Change Is Gonna Come.” Just watch this clip in which LaVette sings “Love Reign O’er Me” at last month’s Who tribute at Kennedy Center Honors to understand why I think her performance might be the Barackathon’s emotional showstopper. You don’t even have to know, let alone revere, the original version to be swept up in her soul-searing rendition:

 

Billboard’s top 25 songs of 2008 have been compiled into one mashup by DJ Earworm. The result is synthetic, understandably, but surprisingly well done. 

Here’s the video:

(Thanks, National Review, of all places.)

The mainstream media have given Elvis Costello’s new talk show on the Sundance Channel a bit of press, most of it assuming viewers can’t process anything subtler or more sophisticated than an episode of MTV’s Rock the Cradle, but Spectacle demands an unabashed rave. Featuring a rough mix of laid-back, consequently revelatory interviews and flat-out stunning performances from Costello and his guests—who have included Elton John, Lou Reed, Charlie Haden, Pat Metheny, and James Taylor—it’s a gloriously unorthodox “talk show” for people who dig music for music’s sake and draw inspiration from the creative process. In other words, it’s not for everyone—which is why it’s on cable, worth every penny your provider will bilk you for, and probably won’t be around for a season or two. Such is always the fate of tuned-up television. Remember Night Music? How about Stars of Jazz? That’s what I thought.

Make no mistake about it, Costello comes to his subjects as a fan, treats them as vocational peers, and is deeply steeped in pop, rock, and jazz history. So, yeah, as some critics have complained, the musical references can get a bit arcane from time to time. But it’s the rhythm of the conversation as much as the questions and answers that fascinates. You actually feel like you’re seeing a real person ruminate on their craft with a pal, as opposed to an interview subject jousting with (or avoiding) a half-witted, smart-ass host or pitching a project. Plus, a bit of musical history could do the world a lot of good. After all, there’s no rule that a person can’t learn a little something while parked in front of the boob tube.

Best of all, this intimate, somewhat sycophantic atmosphere has so far facilitated inspired performances from all involved: Costello and Reed in perfect pitch on the latter’s “Set the Twilight Reeling,” a soulful Taylor crooning about his “Sweet Baby James,” and Haden and Metheny serenading guest Bill Clinton with the tear-jerker, “Is This America? (Katrina 2005).”

There are nine episodes left, featuring the likes of Tony Bennett, Rufus Wainwright, and the Police. And while watching to see whether Costello can find his way around Sting’s titanic head promises to be memorable, it will be hard to beat the season’s highlight so far: filmmaker Julian Schnabel (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), scotch in hand, reciting the lyrics of Reed’s “Rock Minuet” like a lost poet.

“In the back of the warehouse were a couple of guys/They had tied someone up and sewn up their eyes/And he got so excited he came on his thighs/When they danced to the rock minuet.”

Now, watch every night if you like. But you ain’t going to hear spoken word like that on Leno.

Michael Franti has never been shy about his politics. The latest album by Franti and his band Spearhead, called All Rebel Rockers, mixes the songwriter's progressive-minded lyrics with some of the best music of his career. It’s also been his most commercially successful album, showing that people are hungry for consciousness-raising music.

In the latest episode of the UtneCast, senior editor Keith Goetzman talks with Franti about recording All Rebel Rockers in Jamaica, Franti's politics of inclusion, and his music's role in rallying progressives.

Listen to the interview below, or subscribe to the UtneCast for free through iTunes.

Singer-songwriter Eliza Gilkyson’s Beautiful World is one of the best folk albums of 2008, with lyrics that tackle tough social and political issues set amid crisp acoustic music that makes these themes easy, even enjoyable, to swallow. Gilkyson has clearly mastered the delicate art of the topical folk song, avoiding the cringe factor that plagues so many well-intentioned but ham-handed protest singers. Her dusky voice and lilting melodies are alluring enough on their own; her knack for insightful analysis just adds another layer of meaning to her multifaceted music.

Beautiful World’s lyrics carry warnings about the wages of excess (“The Party’s Over”), an impending “Great Correction,” and the human carnage of Web porn (“Dream Lover”). But the album also has an old-timey ode to a spring-fed swimming hole (“Wildewood Spring”) and offers plenty of handholds for optimists clinging to the cliff of doom, especially on the two closing songs, “Beautiful World” and “Unsustainable.” I recently spoke with Gilkyson by phone from her home in Austin, Texas, about community, collapse, and the still-coming great correction.

Beautiful World came out in the spring. You must be quite proud of yourself for having predicted the economic crisis and the downfall of the Bush regime with “The Party’s Over” and “Great Correction.”

(laughs) “Yes, well, I had read The Collapse, you know, and I think I felt that we were treading on thin ice for a long time. At first, when the record came out and the collapse, the correction, hadn’t occurred, I was thinking, God, everybody’s working so hard for Obama right now that the timing isn’t right on this because everyone’s all excited and everything, and I’m writing a record about a collapse. (laughs) But it turned out that the timing was right.”

What did you have in mind when you wrote “The Party’s Over”? Did it start out as a political song, or a personal song, or something in between?

“I did not mean to write it about the Bush regime, by any means. I was writing it about First World consumers. That’s really what I was targeting in this recording. It wasn’t red state, blue state in my mind. It was First World nations being the major consumers of energy and raw materials—and that it’s unsustainable and we’ve come to the end.”

“The Great Correction” is about a sea change for the better. Is Barack Obama the Great Correction?

“Not in my mind. That’s a blip on the screen. I actually really like Barack, and I’m hopeful that he will at least be honest in his accounting of what he’s doing. But I still see the Democrats and Republicans as being part of an unsustainable system. I think capitalism, the way it is now, is unsustainable, so I don’t see Barack Obama coming up with—he’s going to come up with compromises that I don’t think we can afford, so I still think we’re going to have to see a greater correction than the one we’re seeing.”

I understand that your inspiration for the album Beautiful World sprang in part from a monthly community forum called Last Sunday that you and author Robert Jensen hosted in Austin. Can you tell me what these forums were about and how they led to the album?

“Yes, we had decided that we wanted to address issues that were important to us—everything from immigration, racism, gender issues, economics—but we really wanted to put it over the overarching feeling that things were coming to a huge change. That either we get off fossil fuel now and have a collapse, or we prolong it longer and have another kind of, probably an even more intense, collapse.

“So we thought, let’s get the community together. Let’s see if this is attractive to the community. Let’s see if what I consider to be the progressive community, can we all get together in a room and have meaningful conversations around these issues? We brought in speakers, and we brought in a very left-leaning Presbyterian minister who I think is just brilliant, Rev. Jim Rigby. He’s really thinking cutting-edge thoughts along the lines of spirituality and religion and the real teachings of Christ, in a way. He’s a very far left thinker, and not a particularly religious person.

“The first ones we had were really successful, and then what we found was that we had every manner of left-thinking group or person on board, and each person had an individual agenda, and everybody thought, ‘This is what we need to focus on.’ There was never any consensus about where we are in history, about what needs to be done, who we turn to, how to organize. It was actually a great big lesson in why we haven’t been able to organize a cohesive movement in the left. It didn’t mean there weren’t some brilliant people there, and brilliant ideas, but the ability to agree and to come up with even a session where there was some cohesion, that never really jelled.

“So it was a learning experience for us. I wrote these songs for each of the different agendas. I mean, I didn’t sit down and think, OK, now I’m going to write a song about this, but I just kind of let myself kind of free-form create during that time period, and these are the songs that came out of it.”

So the forums, while they weren’t especially valuable in leading to solutions, at least led you to create an album.

(laughs) “Exactly. Well, what was interesting was that we realized that we didn’t want solutions. We wanted community, and a lot of them wanted solutions right here and now. I don’t feel that we’re capable of coming up with overriding solutions right now. I think it would be more in our best interests to really educate ourselves about how we got here and where exactly is it that we are before we go forging ahead with solutions.

“And I think there’s more analysis that needs to take place. But these songs were about that process more: Where are we as human beings? Where are we—in time, in history, culturally, as individuals? That’s where the songs came from. So that did come out the [forums]—personally I got a lot out of it.”

Here at Utne Reader we’ve long been involved in the salon movement, which is much like the community forums that you’re talking about. So I’m curious: Did you learn anything about how you might better approach forums like this?

“I really wish I had a pat answer for that. If anything, at this point, I think I would rather see us come together first as a community. What I loved best about Last Sunday was [Rev.] Rigby, because what he did was he put everything in a spiritual basis without it being new age, airhead, everything-is-beautiful—he really got into the challenge to us as individuals, the kinds of ways we need to change how we live our lives and how we view the systems that are in place. And he did it in a way that was so moving and touching that I felt that community spirit—I felt that communal relationship between all of us.

“I think the music [on “Beautiful World”] did that, too, and I think the ideas came across better once we had established that sort of spiritual bond. And if anything, I would say that sense of communal bond has to be there first, or else we are a bunch of individuals with a bunch of varying ideas and agendas. I think that is one of the big problems.”

There’s an undercurrent of optimism to the album, with lines about keeping your heart open and the light burning brightest at the darkest time. Are you ultimately an optimist at heart?

“I am. I just default to joy. I don’t know why—it could just be the way I’m chemically made up or something. But I am optimistic. I’ve been trying to train myself to become more open to a collapse of the system that we live under, and not be afraid of that, to embrace it, because it will mean the end of something that just plain hasn’t worked. It hasn’t worked for the last 250 years, the whole capitalist extraction model. It hasn’t worked, and even those of us who lightly prospered by it, we’ve lived beyond our means.

“So I don’t want to be afraid of it. I want to feel joy about what will come instead of the system that’s in place. I want to start looking forward to it. The problem is, of course, that you grieve the losses. There are so many losses, certainly in terms of the natural world—there is this grief that’s going on at the same time that we kind of cling to what is dear to us. And that’s what this record is really about—processing the grief and preparing to do battle at the same time, preparing oneself mentally and emotionally for a transition that will really try even the most emotionally stable of us.”

There’s a real trick to writing songs that are political without beating people over the head or seeming shrill, and you seem to know something about this. What’s your secret?

“I’ve studied this. I really have studied it. First, you want to make good music and good poetry. I mean, first and foremost, it’s got to fly on its own as art, and that’s really what I concentrate on when I’m in the studio, that’s what I concentrate on when I’m writing. There’s a cathartic, artistic process in the writing. You can’t come at it going, ‘Now I’m going to write a song about this,’ and sit down and just churn it out. You have to get into a very creative process with it, and really treat it as art first. And that’s abstract, but that is the process for me. It’s very abstract. It’s got to resonate with some sense of emotional catharsis in a way—so in other words, I’ve got to personalize it.”

You seem to be one of those songwriters who thinks that music has the power to change minds. Is that so?

“I think it has the power to make a person feel safe enough to consider other ways of looking at things.”

“Dream Lover” is about the damage inflicted by Internet porn. What inspired that song?

“Well, Robert Jensen, who is my partner, has written a book called Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. It’s a great book, because this is a subject that the new feminists really don’t touch because they’ve pretty much sanctioned the sex trade industry as being a woman’s choice. But after having really studied this issue, I really see Internet porn as being a huge and powerful bastion of patriarchy that is being allowed to grow at a phenomenal speed and really do treacherous, dangerous work in terms of the social conscience, and the cultural underpinnings of our society. Because, really, what we’re looking at is not the porn that maybe people from my generation remember as pretty much maybe straight or group sex or something—this is violent, degrading, abhorrent treatment of women. And it’s only getting worse, this gonzo porn—it’s like an addiction and it only gets worse.

“And I think it needs to be marked not as a moral issue against these women who are choosing this. What we’re seeing is that these people are suffering. These women are suffering, and they have suffered probably their whole lives. Ninety percent of them were abused as children—I mean, even if a porn queen is telling you this is what she’s chosen to do with her life, you have to really ask yourself, is this a profession that you would want your child to aspire to? I think society has to look at this industry—a huge industry run by men—and ask ourselves the tough questions. And I think it’s really a lot on the men: Is this what I want intimacy to look like?

“I think these are ethical questions we need to be asking ourselves, not hitting yourself over the head with ‘You’re going to go to hell.’"

You’re appearing with Jensen at a few events around the country that are a fusion of music and literature. How are these events structured?

“We’re just starting to experiment with this. Right now I do a few songs, he speaks; I do a few more songs, he speaks: We take turns.”

And you’re tying some of your songs to the things he’s speaking about, or at least loosely?

“Yeah, loosely. I think in the case of a bookstore, where we’re doing this kind of thing, we can be closer to the subjects. Because when I do a show, the issue stuff is very hidden inside a playful night of a broad expanse of topics and music.”

And these events put them more at the fore.

“They really do. People know what they’re coming to hear, and in a lot of ways I’m setting up Robert. He’s such an eloquent speaker, though I don’t think he would agree with that assessment. The songs are kind of a way to get yourself into the emotional space, and then he gets into more specific analysis.”

“Beautiful World” is a very impressionistic, unconventional song, kind of unlike anything you’ve done. It’s almost a meditation. Were you consciously trying to step outside the verse-chorus-verse folk song structure when you wrote that?

“I was—and it’s natural for me to do that. I have stuck closer to the folk format for the last four or five records because I had been labeled as a new age artist years ago, and so I was very cautious. I wanted to really establish my honest roots as a folksinger, because that is really where I come from, and so I spent a lot of time building a foundation around a very simple, straightforward folk approach and production, as a writer and a producer.

“But this record I really felt that I just owed it to myself to just be a little bit more free-form, because I do write that way, especially on the keyboard. So it was kind of fun to just let it go.”

“Unsustainable” is another song that’s unconventional for you. It’s more like a jazz standard than a folk song.

“Mm-hmm. It was so fun to sing.”

“Wildewood Spring” is a more in the vein of a traditional sound. It almost sounds old-fashioned, if not for the lyrics about engines idling and other modern images.

“Yeah, it was kind of old-timey—kind of back hills, almost. And that was the point on that one, because it’s a song about a community, and I just wanted it to be sweet and almost corny. But then of course, it is with the backdrop that when you go into the springs in Austin, especially at 5 o’clock, you can hear the traffic moving, but you’re in this bucolic setting with these sacred springs, and you can see that just three minutes away is this whole other reality in the city. So it was just pitting that one image against the other.”

So Wildewood Spring is a spring right in Austin.

“Yes. Barton Spring pours right out of the ground, and it’s a huge pool that thousands of people can swim in at once.”

Are you already writing songs for your next album? Are you always writing?

“No, I don’t always write. I really have to screw my head on a little different when I’m writing. It used to be, when I was younger, I was able to kind of write songs on napkins as I went, but these days, touring is so grueling that I really just get into sort of a road warrior place, and it’s not as creative a place. It’s really much more about just keeping my body in shape and my voice intact, and getting enough sleep (laughs).”

Image courtesy of Red House Records.

Marnie Stern, the woman Pitchfork calls the “Sorceress of Shred,” has risen to prominence in part due to the fact that there just aren’t that many women doing what she does: frenetic, virtuosic electric guitar alongside high-strung vocals. This is bad news for gender parity in the world of Awesome Guitar Skillz, but good news for Stern, for she is truly one of a kind.

Since the release of her dizzyingly titled sophomore album This Is It and I Am It and You Are It and So Is That and He Is It and She Is It and It Is It and That Is That, Stern has been garnering a lot of attention, receiving a benediction from Pitchfork, who also showcased her hilarious video “Ruler,” a workout/boxing montage a la Rocky. She also stopped by the University of Minnesota’s Radio K for an in-studio performance last week.

This Is It is definitely worth checking out, but might not be for everyone. Its instrumentation is loud and brittle, comprising Stern’s blistering fretwork and the unconventional percussive grammar of Zach Hill, the drummer for freak-prog outfit Hella. For guitar geeks with eclectic taste and a healthy sense of humor, however, Stern’s high-energy music, her playful videos, and her plans for a rock-festival kissing booth ($100 for “some tongue”) will be a revelation. 

Image courtesy of rephlektiv, licensed by Creative Commons.

 

Did hip-hop play a big role in the ascendance of Barack Obama?

Absolutely, hip-hop author Jeff Chang told Eli Lake of the New York Sun on Bloggingheads.tv. It was still before the election—October 29—but Chang already saw change afoot.

“Potentially what [an Obama victory] could mean is the beginning of the undoing of about 40, 44 years of really nasty racialized politics in the U.S.,” he said. “And I think it is in large part due to hip-hop, actually. Hip-hop, in a lot of ways, culturally prepared the way for the U.S. to be able to seriously look at a young, biracial candidate for the highest office in the land.”

It’s a point Chang makes at greater length in the cover story “The Tipping Point” in the November Vibe (excerpt available online).

And it’s one made much more concisely by British hip-hop star Dizzee Rascal in a post-election interview with the BBC. “I don’t think [Obama] could have won it without hip-hop,” Rascal told anchor Jeremy Paxman. “Hip-hop is what encouraged the youth to get involved.”

Rascal also told Paxman Britain could one day follow the U.S.’s example and elect a black leader.

“I think a black man, purple man, Martian man could run the country. Whatever, mon. As long as he does right by the people.”

 

For five years now, Continuum Publishing’s 33 1/3 Series (named for the speed at which an LP record spins) has given music-loving bookworms over 50 hip little volumes that marry their two obsessions beautifully.

Written mostly by musicians and music critics, each book in the series concerns a pop album that played a momentous role in the author’s life, and can take the form of an essay, extended review, memoir, novella, interview with the artist—or some hybrid thereof.

I found my way into the series via one of its more unique entries, penned by erudite pop songsmith Joe Pernice, of the Pernice Brothers. Its subject was the Smiths’ seminal 1985 album Meat Is Murder, but rather than a straight review, Pernice wrote an autobiographical novella about a high school subculture infiltrated by Morrissey & Co.’s angsty opus.

The series boasts a diverse range of authors and genres—both literary and musical. Colin Meloy, of the Decemberists, has published a volume on Let It Be by the Replacements. Eliot Wilder interviews Josh Davis, aka DJ Shadow, about his groundbreaking trip-hop album Endtroducing.... Pitchfork writer Amanda Petrusich memorializes Nick Drake’s Pink Moon.

33 1/3’s catalog is by now expansive enough that it probably includes a book on at least one Album That Changed Your Life Forever. But if you find it lacking, you can take matters into your own hands: 33 1/3’s editors are currently accepting proposals, due December 31, for the series’ next batch of volumes. Pick an album, put on your headphones, and start typing.

From the first words out of his mouth—“I don’t really like recordings, you know”—veteran producer T Bone Burnett is a font of eccentric studio wisdom in a rambling interview with Tape Op (article not available online), which calls itself “the creative music recording magazine.” As the mastermind behind one of last year’s unexpectedly great albums, Raising Sand by Alison Krauss and Robert Plant, as well as many other first-rate recordings, Burnett has the studio cred to back up his sometimes surprising statements and old-school ways. Here are some of the interview's highlights:

Following up on his opening statement, he explains, “I love recording but I don’t really love recordings. I hardly ever say, ‘Wow! That’s a great recording.’ I say, ‘That’s an incredible song or an incredible piece of music.' ”

“I don’t particularly like processing. What I really like is hearing … a group of musicians playing in a room. … I love the sound of an instrument bouncing off a wall and into a room when you hear that pure, deep sound.”

“I never tell anybody what to play. … Usually the first thing a musician plays is the best thing he’s going to come up with. … I take what they give me and I’m very grateful for it.”

“Everyone [in my studio] knows that tape is rolling all the time. There’s no reason not to record.”

“We’ve developed a system for releasing records called CODE. It’s a system for the production, manufacture, and distribution of records in this age. … We’re gonna offer records in three forms: high-resolution vinyl … high-res digital discs … and high-res files. If you buy any one of those three, we’ll just give you anything else that you want.”

“I don’t blame people for not buying CDs anymore because they’re not as valuable as records were … We’re in a position now where, if you go to a show and hear a band and you buy the CD or MP3—it’s like going to a museum, seeing a painting and then somebody takes a photograph of the painting and then somebody takes a Polaroid of that at then somebody’s trying to sell it to you.”

Stories in the Los Angeles Times and Wired go into more detail about Burnett's CODE music format. "Our aim is to democratize high-fidelity," he tells the Times.

Image courtesy of  Tboneburnett.com . 

Until recently, the Puerto Rican dancehall music reggaeton was better known for its sexualized dance moves than political messaging. That changed when musician Daddy Yankee, complete with signature sunglasses, stood proudly on stage with John McCain, talked about immigration policy, and endorsed the Arizona senator for president.

Now, reggaetoneros like Daddy Yankee have taken center stage in the 2008 election, Marisol LeBrón writes for NACLA. Barack Obama’s campaign quickly garnered endorsements from other prominent reggaeton artists including Don Omar, Julio Voltio and Puerto Rican-American rapper Fat Joe. The International Herald Tribune reports that Daddy Yankee turned to more local politics, moderating a televised gubernatorial debate on the island that was designed to attract young voters. 

Unhappy that reggaetoneros “are being used in an effort to attract youth to a political system that systematically ignores their concerns,” NACLA reports that protesters showed up at Daddy Yankee’s moderated debate, burning his albums in defiance. One artist Sietenueve released a scathing single called “Quedate Callao” (“Shut Up”) insulting Daddy Yankee for his political ignorance (video available below).

The problem wasn’t that reggaetoneros were engaging in politics. According to NACLA, Daddy Yankee’s political endorsements and debate moderating “threatened to turn reggaetón into a hollow signifier, separating it from its radical and subversive potential.”

For 13 years and 75 issues, No Depression was a beloved chronicler of the alt-country music world. In February of this year, the magazine’s publishers sadly announced they were halting production, citing insufficient ad revenue, a music industry in transition, and the troubled economy.

“Barring the intercession of unknown angels, you hold in your hands the next-to-the-last edition of No Depression we will publish,” publishers Grant Alden, Peter Blackstock and Kyla Fairchild wrote in the magazine’s March-April issue.

Just eight months later, Alden and Blackstock provide this addendum: “As it turned out, the angels who interceded to preserve No Depression were mostly well-known to us. Some who responded were rank strangers; all were generous and kind.” So begins issue #76 of the resurrected magazine, in the form of a lavish, 145-page, ad-free paperback—or, in the words of its cover copy, “bookazine (whatever that is).”

Published by the University of Texas Press and hitting stands this week, the theme of Issue #76 is “The Next Generation,” its cover graced by Abigail Washburn and the Sparrow Quartet and its profiles mostly devoted to emerging artists like the Infamous Stringdusters, Bowerbirds, and Samantha Crain. Tucked in the back of the issue is a feature on Hanson—yes, that Hanson.

No Depression’s online organ—currently offline, but set to relaunch soon—will continue with news and reviews, along with a near-complete archive of back issues. The bookazine, published semiannually, will contain less time-sensitive content.

In a troubled publishing industry, No Depression’s unique reincarnation might provide a model for other endangered or extinct publications—the bookazine represents one altered, but not necessarily diminished, manifestation of the independent magazine in a changing media landscape.

 

What has happened to great rock concert photography? Is it part of a bygone era, or has the music industry forgone photographers due to control issues? A mix of both, says Mark Paytress in Creative Review’s article "Three Songs and Yer Out! The Dying Art of Gig Photography" (reprinted from a recent issue of M magazine). The "three songs" refers to an industry-wide guideline that photographers are allowed access to the artists only for the first three songs of a performance. The practice started as a courtesy to performers to keep distracting flash bulbs to a minimum. But then it worked its way around the scene and became the rule at most venues. Artists and their management blame the venues for enforcing the rule, while the venues insist they're just doing what they're told by the management.

Blame game aside, it's difficult to capture great images when you know you're racing against the clock. Paytress points out that some of the greatest photos of rock 'n' roll came from the latter part of the set. For example, Pennie Smith snapped Paul Simonon of the Clash smashing his bass at a show in an image that would later be used as the cover for their classic album London Calling.

The three-song rule is a symptom rather than the illness. For the past decade or so, musicians have increasingly gone from being entertainers to being corporations. Case in point: Both Madonna and Jay-Z left their longtime labels to sign with concert promoter Live Nation. The PR departments of these corporations try to control images of their clients all costs, shunning the raw candid shot for staged, vetted images. Add the limited opportunities to the ever-shrinking medium of music imagery (the evolution from LP to CD and CD to digital thumbnail image), and you can see why Paytress and many photogs call concert photography a dying art.

All that's really left for rock photography are studio shoots, where the photographer and the artists can explore their creativity, albeit without the delicious spontaneity of a live show. But with the music industry continuing on a downward spiral, who knows how far budgets for those shoots will stretch.

Although the outlook is bleak, there are still great photos out there. You can find some of them at: Rock Archive ( rockarchive.com ), Redferns Music Picture Library ( redferns.com ), Rex Features ( rexfeatures.com ), Photographic Youth Music Culture Archive ( pymca-library.com ), and Steve Gullick ( gullickphoto.com ).

Image courtesy of flashbacks.com, licensed under Creative Commons.

Being a music fan and a writer, I am very particular about the music I listen to while writing, and am careful to note which artists and albums are most conducive to a good writing session. (This way, if I get blocked or my prose is lackluster, I can always blame it on the background music.)

It appears I’m not alone; many writers give ample consideration to the relationship between music and their own work, and their musings on the subject are gathered by Largehearted Boy, which stands out from the overpopulated music blogosphere with its thoughtful prose, guest columnists, and mp3 downloads. My favorite department at Largehearted Boy is Book Notes, wherein authors “create and discuss a music playlist that is in some way relevant to their recently published books.”

Book Notes includes some big names, like Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Klosterman, who have always made a point of incorporating pop music into their writing. But the roster is dominated by relatively obscure authors and poets (David Breskin, Christina Henriquez, Ander Monson) whose musical tastes are all over the map, from mainstream (The Eagles, Radiohead) to avant-garde (Arvo Part).

There’s also Note Books, which inverts the formula by having indie-rockers write about some of their favorite books. This list includes famously erudite artists like the Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle, the Jayhawks’ Mark Olson, and John Vanderslice.

(Thanks, Minnesota Reads.)

Image by el monstrito, licensed by Creative Commons.

Utne’s own Julie Hanus recently reported on some promising and ingenious ways in which the fair use doctrine is thriving, but technicalities are still tripping up artists who should be protected by fair use.

Producers of the intelligent-design documentary Expelled have been exonerated in court after Yoko Ono and EMI Records sued the filmmakers for including a 15-second clip of John Lennon’s “Imagine”—but not without some difficulty. The film was released on DVD without the clip while the case was pending, which, Cyndy Aleo-Carreira at the Industry Standard argues, is an unfortunate side effect of what should have been an open-and-shut case. What’s more, she points out, fair use might not be enough to protect those who can’t afford to defend themselves in court: “If a film with Hollywood producers has trouble using media clips, what hope does an average citizen have of using something without worrying about huge legal expenses that could result?”

But Anthony Falzone, blogging for Stanford Law’s Center for Internet and Society, hails the case as a victory for fair use, in part due to the efforts of Media/Professional Insurance to cover the legal expenses of Expelled’s producers and others sued in fair use cases.

At Slashdot, Ian Lamont reaches the same conclusion I did: It’s a bit ironic that the song sparking the lawsuit is Lennon’s utopian manifesto “Imagine.”

Image by orsorama, licensed under Creative Commons.

We all know how much fun it is to gather around a television with like-minded friends and shout snide things at the unpalatable speeches being broadcast. Now imagine doing that in a theater filled with 300 drunk liberals. 

That’s precisely what I did last Thursday, at the tail end of Daily Show creator Lizz Winstead’s multimedia satire, Shoot the Messenger. The show holds weekly performances in New York City, where Winstead and her ensemble spoof the week’s headlines during a parodic morning news show called Wake Up World (“America’s only 6-hour morning show!”)

But last week, in dubious honor of the RNC, Winstead’s troupe brought their show to her native Minneapolis for three nights at the Parkway Theater. Each evening’s events went beyond mere theater to include live feeds from the RNC and musical performances from revered protest singer Billy Bragg and local legends Dan Wilson, Jim Walsh, and Grant Hart.

Before the show, the Parkway’s seats were mostly full of chatty people munching popcorn as the onstage screen showed eminently believable ads for the “24/7 Infonewsment Network’s” fake shows, such as Poll Dancing with sexy anchorwoman Emily Rackcheck and MedicAsian with Dr. Vijay Jay.

Winstead and her co-star Baron Vaughn starred as Wake Up World’s chipper, clueless hosts Hope Jean Paul and Davis Miles. Hope Jean Paul is, like her creator, from the Twin Cities area: “I’m originally from Coon Rapids,” she chirped, to which Vaughn (who is African American) replied, “Wow! Sounds like my kind of place!” Naughty laughter erupted and Winstead replied, “Now, Davis, try not to be offended by the name, just because it contains the word Rapids.”

That joke set the tone for the show, whose mix of absurdity and topical satire has made Winstead’s more famous brainchild the Daily Show a media phenomenon for over a decade. Wake Up World, even more so than the Daily Show or its cousin the Colbert Report, is an acerbic and overtly partisan takedown of our leaders’ hypocrisies and the 24-hour news cycle’s vapid excesses.

In true morning-show form, Winstead and Vaughn hyped insipid segments like Lumpy the Cancer-Sniffing Dog, who they promised would find the one lucky audience member with a malignant tumor. A pro–big oil energy “expert” was brought in to discuss his new book The Town Pump: Alternatives to Alternative Energy. And a member of private security contractor Blackwater sat down with the hosts to discuss his new miracle fitness regimen: “Extreme Waterboard Abs.”

Pulchritudinous newsgal Emily Rackcheck delivered hourly news updates in a low-cut sweater and miniskirt. Bloviators Hunter Carlsbad (wearing a bowtie) and Daniels Midland (host of the Complication Room) shouted at each other during a Crossfire-style segment touted as “a debate between both sides of the political spectrum: the Far Right and the Right of Center!”

Winstead also tailored the show to the region with pre-taped biographical puff pieces on Laurie Coleman and Michelle Bachman subtitled “Behind the Taut Canvas.” There were ads for “a 31-part investigative series” called White in America and a gauzy video appeal from Sarah Silverman for charitable donations to private contracting firms.

After Wake Up World concluded, the evening shifted gears for its second segment, where Winstead reappeared as herself and sat down with liberal talk-radio host Ed Schultz to discuss the RNC—specifically Palin, whose fur-coat photo Winstead captioned “Wasilla DeVille.” Schultz was witty and affable, assuring us that McCain’s campaign would buckle under the weight of its own hypocrisy: “Look, everything’s going to be fine. And if it’s not, then we get another vice president who might shoot someone in the face!”

This marathon mix of political discourse, satire, and campy theatre was only a prelude, however, for the evening’s main event: a massive group viewing of John McCain’s speech. The audience, now well-lubricated and ready to laugh not so much with satirical glee as incredulous derision, filed back into the theater as McCain’s hagiographic video was playing on the giant screen, which had been tuned to MSNBC’s live feed from the convention.

As the man himself took the stage, the theater audience erupted with boos and squeals. The people around me gladly obeyed the rules of a drinking game Winstead had announced earlier: that we hoist our glasses every time the word maverick was used. Genuine cheers burst forth when MSNBC’s cameras zoomed in on the IVAW and Code Pink protestors who had infiltrated the hall.

As the speech dragged on and John McCain’s smiling rictus became increasingly creepy, the Parkway crowd got rowdier and my convention fatigue peaked. Around the moment when the last poorly programmed image appeared behind the penis-shaped stage, I fled the theater for some fresh air. When I went back inside a few minutes later, I encountered a completely different scene which cleared my head, the perfect antidote to the televised nightmare we’d just seen: Dan Wilson was playing his ubiquitous and charming hit single “Closing Time” to a much smaller crowd gathered near the front of the theater, kicking off one of Jim Walsh’s famous Hootenannies. Then Grant Hart took the stage, and the aging avatars of the Minneapolis counterculture settled further into their seats to watch their heroes perform, resting after a long evening—and week—of politicized sensory overload.

 

“I wasn’t sure for a minute if this show was going to happen tonight,” singer Zach de la Rocha told the frenzied crowd of Rage Against the Machine fans Wednesday night at Target Center. The people roared. Only a day before, the police had shut down the Ripple Effect Festival at the Minnesota State Capitol just as de la Rocha and his bandmates were arriving to make an all-but-surprise performance.

The resulting fracas put a heady spotlight on Wednesday night’s show—as if Rage weren’t already sufficiently politically charged. Following 9/11, Clear Channel banned every one of the rap-metal band’s numbers on the notorious list of “songs with questionable lyrics.” In 2000, the evening of a Rage performance across from the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles ended in violent protesters/law enforcement conflict, soon after which the band split up—remaining disbanded for six-and-a-half years.

Last night, no rust was apparent. Alert sirens wailing, Rage took the stage in darkness. Fans screamed. Floodlights snapped on. Four figures stood in orange jumpsuits, black hoods over their heads. Even as the bass pounded, the sight of those iconic garments was chilling. Rage played a fever-pitched “Bomb Track” clad in that attire, recognizable only via de la Rocha’s inimitable voice and Tom Morello’s unmistakable finesse with the guitar.

Bassist Tim Commerford and guitarist Tom Morello jam during “Bomb Track.”

After the first number, Rage executed a quick-change off stage, re-emerging in street gear and belting out “Testify” to an ecstatic audience—many of whom, doubtlessly, were seeing Rage for the first time, having either missed the boat or been too young in the ‘90s. At least, there has to be some explanation for the googly-eyed delight splashed across everyone’s faces. This wasn’t standard-issue rock star gawkerdom: It was as if Che Guevara himself had just burst out of Brad Wilk’s kick drum.

Rage cranked through an impressive set with seemingly boundless energy. (At one point I found myself wondering how any of the spry guys have knees left, after years of jumping, bouncing, stomping, and leaping. De la Rocha’s unrelenting vocal chords present an equally vivid mystery, although one perhaps enlightened by this detail: He sipped a mug of what looked to be hot tea between several songs.) Quite frankly, too, I’d be remiss if I didn’t harp on Morello’s fantastic guitar playing; his fingers looked like a piece of cloth fluttering in wind as he poured them over the frets.

At the end of the evening, after Rage closed with “Killing in the Name,” de la Rocha took the pitch down a notch, evenly entreating fans to demonstrate discipline when they momentarily flooded out into the riot-cop-lined streets of Minneapolis. It was a noble effort (and showed remarkable restraint) from the fiery frontman, although the message was somewhat diluted by his politically-stirring between-song commentary and a light display that read: RNC F*CK YOU. But his words clearly came from a place of genuine concern, and, really, there’s only so much you can do when you’re trying to convey nuanced approaches—such as “peaceful, but not passive”—to a stadium arena’s worth of people.

Which is why, almost inevitably, there were some people not content to leave it at that, and a portion of the crowd dispersing into First Avenue began a slow, somewhat disjointed protest that ended with 102 people being detained several blocks away for “blocking traffic.” Minneapolis law enforcement was clearly prepared for the worst: Riot-gear-clad officers were present on foot, bikes, and horseback, as well as in squad cars, motorcycles, and mini vans (plus a small vehicle that looked like offspring of a golf cart and a Hummer). Here are some photos from the post-Rage ruckus:

The aforementioned small vehicle, from which Minneapolis police chief Tim Dolan instructed the crowd—which was blocking the street—to disperse. The area was thick with curious onlookers, most of whom didn’t clear out, presumably because they didn’t consider themselves part of the protest action.

The Minnesota Peace Team, a squad of volunteers trained in de-escalation techniques put together especially for the RNC, was present, as were the Guardian Angels. The two Peace Team members pictured above successfully talked down a shirtless concert attendee, who stepped forward (alone) and danced ridiculously as the mounted police attempted to advance their line.

Eventually, a more organized group of people emerged, hoisting a banner made of four defaced American flags. A group of people collected behind the flag, which the bearers carried forward in a challenge to the police line.

Things seemed as though they would come to a head as the flag-bearers marched into a blockade on Seventh Street; all officers present, including bicycle and mounted police, pulled on their gas masks. If it was a scare tactic, it wasn’t apparently scary enough: The crowd of onlookers remained placidly stationed along the sidewalk. One gleeful fellow (was he protesting? gawking? did he even attend the show?) skipped past me and naively chipped: “We’re gonna get gassed! Something big is gonna happen now!”

When the police barricade dispersed, the protesters made an impromptu march down Seventh—where, eventually, police surrounded and detained them, a “tame” round-up, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune.  All but two individuals were given citations and released. “In a way, for most fans, it was the perfect end to a Rage concert: defiance of arbitrary authority without painful consequences, just enough real danger to get the juices going. (‘Fuck you, I will do what you tell me, but only after shouting at you for a while!’),” writes Peter Scholtes for the Minnesota Independent.

Images by Julie Hanus.

For more of Utne.com’s coverage of the Republican National Convention, click here.

Stepping into the Provention concert on Tuesday night at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minnesota, was literally a breath of fresh air. Clouds of dissipated tear gas hovered in the cool evening outside, and a din of antiwar chants, shouts, sirens, and police helicopters echoed through the downtown canyons as I arrived late, delayed by an encounter with several thousand riot police and protesters. Going through the lobby was like disappearing through the looking glass, and soon I found myself settled in a soft velvet chair, fully ensconced in the music of singer-songwriter Haley Bonar, the sound of conflict swept out of my mind by her acoustic guitar and plaintive voice. No longer in danger of being arrested, I was now being serenaded

While other RNC-related protest concerts this week Raged Against the Machine, staged a Coup, and hoisted the Anti-Flag, Provention was a more thoughtful and less in-your-face affair, meant not so much to fight the power as to create a sense of kinship amid chaos. Joe Spencer, the arts and cultural liaison for St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman who was instrumental in organizing the concert, said as much from the stage in between sets.

“I’m scared by the guys with the face shields,” he said, referring to the riot police, “and I’m scared by people who are picking up bricks from hundred-year-old buildings and throwing them through windows. So I’m conflicted, and when I feel conflicted I long for a strong sense of community.” Musician John Munson, who originally came up with the Provention idea, called the event “a tent of togetherness.”

Bonar, like most of the performers who followed her, chose songs that hewed roughly to the politely political theme. Introducing “Nobody’s Safe,” she noted that she marched in Monday’s antiwar protest but decried the rabble rousers who took things too far. Her reflective, folky songs were disarmingly honest, and when she said, “St. Paul is a great city,” it didn’t sound like an RNC welcoming slogan but a heartfelt sentiment. (Before I arrived, several acts, including Maria Isa, the New Standards, and Jeremy Messersmith, had already played.)

Next up were the Warblers, the duo of Chris Osgood and Dave Ahl, former members of Twin Cities proto-punks the Suicide Commandos, dressed like dude ranch guests and harmonizing on topical old-time ditties like “Everybody’s Going for the Money” and “Wild in the Streets.” All night long, novelty-style acts like this filled the between-set slots, giving the concert the air of a variety show.

The Warblers were followed by another harmonizing duo, the Twilight Hours, composed of Matt Wilson and John Munson, who played sweet and passionate modern pop that occasionally entered the rock and roll zone, as on Wilson’s sweeping “Descender.” Both former members of beloved Twin Cities band Trip Shakespeare, they still have a strong musical kinship and well-matched voices, with Munson holding down the low end and Wilson holding up the high with his still-boyish timbre. Their opening song, “These Dreams Are Killing Me,” and the Big Star classic “Ballad of El Goodo” were especially delectable. They were joined for a while by Matt’s brother, Dan Wilson, also a former Trip Shakespearean as well as a more recent bandmate of Munson in Semisonic.

Potent, literate rockers the Honeydogs next took the stage as a nine-piece and soon grew to 10, bringing an expansive, textured sound that recalled Elvis Costello’s bigger bands, complete with a three-piece horn section. Leader Adam Levy had a special stake in the concert, having stepped in to help an overwhelmed Munson organize the gig. He acquitted himself well as both concert promoter and bandleader—and as usual made a strong sartorial statement, rocking a pinstriped white suit with a red-bloomed boutonniere. “Truth Serum,” Levy’s plea to his soldier son with the line, “You’re too young to die,” was one of the evening’s most powerfully topical songs.

Dan Wilson next played a solo set, drawing on Semisonic material as well as tunes from his solo album, Free Life, and singing his Grammy-winning song written for the Dixie Chicks, “Easy Silence.” He described the Chicks as “bad-ass” for weathering the right-wing attacks on their infamous George Bush critique.

The final act, New York singer-songwriter Nellie McKay, apparently didn’t get the memo about rhetorical restraint, acerbically riffing on Sarah Palin, Ronald Reagan, Joe Lieberman and other ripe targets in song and speech. “She’s a zealot,” Levy noted as he introduced her, and this was not a complaint but a compliment. McKay’s smart wordplay and all-over-the-place sound made for a bracing conclusion to the concert despite a thinning crowd.

When I finally stepped back onto the streets well after midnight, it was quiet and still, with little sign of the night’s earlier chaos. It seemed that Provention, which was billed as “a concert for people, peace, and the planet,” had achieved a bit of good on all three fronts.

Image by Charles Robinson.

The words “music festival” invite rain, and Tuesday was no exception as Ripple Effect, a drizzly but celebratory arts and activism festival, took shape on the Minnesota State Capitol lawn, in jubilant defiance of the convention happening at the bottom of the hill.

The local jam band Wookiefoot was first, featuring the Orthodox Jewish rapper Matisyahu guesting on vocals. Until Tuesday I had been under the (grateful) impression that jam bands fell out of vogue when Phish broke up, but the fervent crowd emphatically proved me wrong, and I was suddenly surrounded by a magnitude of dreadlocks and hemp clothing I haven’t experienced since my college days.

 

During one break between songs, the lead singer addressed the Wookiefoot faithful thusly: “You have heeded the call … the call for all Jedi to galactivate!” Whatever language he was speaking, the audience took it to heart.

 

 

Still, my uninitiated tastes and the intermittent rain were not about to dampen the spirits of the festival participants. There were a number of tents offering political and spiritual shwag, and numerous artistic assemblages, such as this flower art that passerby were invited to help sculpt:

There was also an elegant and affecting memorial comprising some footwear of those killed in the Iraq war:

And not just fallen soldiers, but civilians too: 

 

All told, Ripple Effect seemed a tentative success. The crowd I observed was well short of the 7,000-10,000 people Substance had anticipated, but after I left things apparently gained momentum, as the crowd swelled and the Establishment crashed the party.

For more coverage of the event and links to featured artists, speakers, and groups, visit the Ripple Effect website.

Images courtesy of the author.

For more of Utne.com’s ongoing coverage of the Republican National Convention, click here. 

With over seventy years of musical experience between them and countless musical collaborations, film soundtracks, and multimedia projects gracing their resumes, Brian Eno and David Byrne could be forgiven for resting on their laurels. But the release of their new collaboration Everything That Happens Will Happen Today—their first work together since 1981’s acclaimed My Life In The Bush of Ghosts—marks the beginning of yet another creative chapter for the a capella enthusiast and the bike-rack designer.

With other rock juggernauts like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails devising innovative ways of distributing music in the digital age, Byrne and Eno are placing a premium on their album’s physical packaging. Hardcore devotees can pony up $70 for the elaborate decorative box, Idolator reports, with traditional CD and digital downloads also available. Listeners can preview the album at its website and read Byrne’s characteristically low-key description of the project: “For the most part, Brian did the music and I wrote some tunes, words and sang. It’s familiar but completely new as well.”

People seem to be more vulnerable to earworm infections in the summer, and the ditty that’s been bouncing around my cranium lately is the insidiously catchy “Pot Kettle Black” by Omaha, Nebraska's Tilly and the Wall. The chant-along chorus, the repeating five-note guitar hook, the descending organ line, the big beat supplemented by tap-dance percussion: This is a soundtrack-for-the-season type of tune (and completely unrelated to a song of the same name by Wilco, I might add). It’s also got an amateurish but cool video (see below) in which the band members stage guerilla street performances around Omaha, star in a parade, and whip out some Michael Jackson-esque dance moves. Go ahead, give the song a try. It’s just waiting to find a nice, warm home in your ear canal.

What do the Republican National Convention and rock and roll have in common? Very little, which is why most of the rock concerts in Minneapolis and St. Paul during RNC convention week are renegade events aimed at countering the Republican mania, not fueling it.

On Labor Day, which is RNC kickoff day, a host of national acts with working-class sympathies will rock the Take Back Labor Day Festival at Harriet Island Regional Park, just across the river from the convention site. On the docket of this concert sponsored by the SEIU (Service Employees International Union) are Steve Earle, Billy Bragg, Lupe Fiasco, Mos Def, Atmosphere, Alison Moorer, and Tom Morello, a.k.a. the political hell raiser known as the Nightwatchman.

On Tuesday, September 2, a large roster of local bands plus smartypants New York singer-songwriter Nellie McKay will play at Provention, “a concert for people, peace, and the planet” at the Fitzgerald Theater in downtown St. Paul. (Utne Reader is the concert's media sponsor.)

Finally, on September 3, the eve of the convention’s close, Morello and his briefly reunited Rage Against the Machine bandmates will bring their potent rap-rock to the Target Center in St. Paul’s sister city of Minneapolis. You might recall that Rage broke up shortly after an incendiary gig during the 2000 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles.

Altogether, this show of musical force seems to reinforce the idea that apart from Ted Nugent, the Republican Party doesn’t have many rock and rollers on its side. Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, who’s been getting a lot of buzz as a potential McCain running mate, was famously flummoxed before the 2004 election to learn that his favorite rock artist, Bruce Springsteen, harbored liberal tendencies. As the governor may have figured out by now, it’s not just the Boss who’s blue.

UPDATE (8/15/08): The date and venue for the Provention concert have changed, as noted above, to Tuesday, September 2, at the Fitzgerald Theater. The last we heard, the bill included Nellie McKay, the Honeydogs, Dan Wilson, the New Standards, and Matt Wilson and John Munson, along with several other acts. Get the latest here.

As a commenter notes below, the Ripple Effect music festival (motto: “beyond the convention, beyond partisanship”) will take place on the State Capitol lawn on Sept. 2, with Michael Franti and Spearhead, Matisyahu, Dead Prez, Anti-Flag, and other bands as well as polar explorer/environmentalist Will Steger and Code Pink antiwar activist Medea Benjamin. 

And the Black Dog Block Party is “an all-ages, free-admission, outdoor experience” happening on two nonconsecutive days (Sunday, Aug. 31, and Tuesday, Sept. 2) in St. Paul's Lowertown area. Political funksters Boots Riley and the Coup are flying in from the Bay Area to headline this event featuring several local bands.

Finally, the official Republican entertainment roster is indeed packed with country acts, as Hannah Lobel notes below, but I see that a few glad-to-get-a-gig rockers have signed on with the RNC: Sammy Hagar, Smash Mouth, and American Idol figure Chris Daughtry.  

Image by Andrea Sartorati, licensed under Creative Commons.

We’ll wait to see whether it joins “cool jazz” and “post-bop” in the jazz lexicon, but jazz has entered the “Radiohead Era,” according to Jonathan Zwickel in Down Beat (article not available online).

Down Beat certainly isn’t the first to notice that it’s become common for hip young jazz musicians to cover songs by Radiohead, one of rock’s most sonically innovative groups. The practice has almost become almost de rigueur among a certain crowd. Brad Mehldau, Marco Benevento, the Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey, Petra Haden, and the Bad Plus are among the players to have interpreted the band’s murkily majestic music.

Zwickel attributes the connection in part to Radiohead’s “balancing act between innovation and communication. Radiohead speaks clearly to the masses, but in its own language.”

 “For me and my friends, jazz includes Radiohead,” Reed Mathis, bassist in Benevento’s trio and the Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey, tells Zwickel. “Thom Yorke has synthesized rock ’n’ roll forms with harmony that sounds like Rachmaninoff and Chopin—a weepy, dramatic, late-19th century thing.”

 

Not to be confused with the personalized mixes we make for ourselves and our friends, underground mix tapes—or these days, mixes burned to CDs—are the DIY recordings that unsigned hip-hop acts hawk on the street and at their shows.

Hip-hop mix tapes emanate from an involved subculture that the young magazine Foundation covers with an insider’s expertise. Philadelphia Weekly profiled the magazine’s founders, a trio of young men who began the magazine four years ago, lacking any formal writing experience but recognizing an underserved niche of mix tape criticism and commentary.

While rock bands peddle demos, unsigned hip-hop artists make mixes of themselves rapping over cobbled-together beats. It’s how most major performers, such as 50 Cent and Lil Wayne, got their start, and many major-label artists still reserve their rawest material for the medium, as if to repay their oldest and most loyal fans.

It’s an ethos that naturally appeals to DIY enthusiasts in other art forms, like writing. In the Believer, Found magazine’s Davy Rothbart was moved to sing the praises of mix tapes—arguably the sonic analog to his scrappy literary enterprise:

“The sleek and sanded major-label concoctions on sale at Circuit City are counterbalanced by hundreds, maybe thousands of great, unheard albums … I can’t help but respect the punk-rock, DIY spirit of anybody who makes art and tries to sell it to strangers on the street. After all, I do the same shit myself: Every year I hop in a van and go city to city selling my zines.”

Foundation has followed an upward trajectory similar to the artists it covers, from small-time music mag to venerated authority. Its story is heartening not simply because its writers are passionate about their subjects, but also because the magazine is a runaway success—an increasingly rare thing in today’s print-media landscape.

 

It’s been an eventful week for the hip-hop artist Nas. Wednesday afternoon, he joined ColorofChange.org and MoveOn.org outside of Fox News Channel’s New York City headquarters to protest the network's coverage of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign—treatment that he and the groups allege is racist. (SOHH and Racewire have photos of the demonstration.)

The rapper then proceeded to an appearance on the Colbert Report with a 620,127-signature petition demanding that network president Roger Ailes "find a solution to address racial stereotyping and hate-mongering before it hits the airwaves." He also performed the anti-Fox track “Sly Fox” from his new album, which debuted at #1 on Tuesday after months of controversy over its title. Nas originally planned to call the LP Nigger, but abandoned the idea amid qualms from music retailers and his label. Ultimately, he released the album eponymously.

Nas' Fox-slamming and Billboard chart–topping comes at a time of heightened racial tensions in the media: not just criticism of Fox’s Obama coverage, but last week’s New Yorker cover brouhaha and ongoing questions about the role that race plays in Obama’s campaign. This week, the Root explores younger generations’ relationship to race, with a series of essays about Generation Y’s post-racist ambitions, its use of the n-word, and its supposed colorblindness. 

Image by kokuziu, licensed under Creative Commons.

Moneyland, the new album by bluegrass legend Del McCoury, is a scathing indictment of the rampant corruption and greed in America today. The album features both classic bluegrass standards and newly recorded songs, with guest appearances by Merle Haggard, Tim O’Brien, Emmylou Harris, Patty Loveless, Bruce Hornsby, and Gillian Welch.

Having grown up on a farm in Pennsylvania, McCoury has witnessed the decline of traditional rural life in America, but as the consummate gentleman, he isn’t trying to influence people’s politics. He’s just calling attention to the fact that “many working folks all across America are in a tough spot.” For the latest episode of the UtneCast I spoke with McCoury about Moneyland, politics, and rural life.

You can listen to the interview below, or to subscribe to the UtneCast for free through iTunes, click here.

We need more sing-alongs. Before you start picturing barbershop quartets or the Utne Reader staff kumbaya-ing around a campfire, know that the idea comes from musician and producer Brian Eno writing for Resurgence. And he's not writing about office bonding or spangled matching outfits. He wants a capella groups, like the one he started a few years ago, to spring up among friends, without the goal of reaching the stage or recording studio. Giving up the expectation of performing, writes Eno, “gives us the freedom to get it all wrong.” But the activity still has all the benefits of song, including happy old age, according a Scandinavian study, healthy lungs, and an immediate “sense of levity and contentment.” 

To help readers start a capella groups of their own, Eno offers a few tips. First, choose songs with chords common to blues, rock, or country, “the same chords you hear at the beginning of ‘Louie Louie’ or ‘Wild Thing.’” Since the chord sequences are familiar, singers can improvise “without the risk of a catastrophic harmonic train-crash.” 

Other important considerations include finding “vowel-rich” songs that are “rhythmically interesting,” and matching tones among singers. And on the practical level, Eno suggests providing drinks and snacks and warming up before singing. 

“If I were asked to redesign the British educational system,” writes Eno, “I would start by insisting that group singing become a central part of the daily routine.” Just as Eno’s group never performs, neither would students be forced to. “You will do this every day, and you will never be examined on it.”

Image by Superbomba, licensed under Creative Commons.

Because the Internet inspires encyclopedic research and archiving, it’s no surprise that online repositories like Wikipedia and Usenet have rendered no nugget of knowledge too arcane to be exhaustively catalogued by geeks in every field. This is especially true of music, where mp3s and file-sharing networks have allowed songs and albums to be stored and traded by collectors and connoisseurs.

Now some enterprising music archivists have created the Whitburn Project, an astoundingly ambitious endeavor 10 years in the making whose aim is nothing less than the total documentation of every popular song since the 1890s. It’s more than just a listing of pop charts—release date, label, chart position, duration, etc.—all arrayed in a huge 22-megabyte Excel spreadsheet. It’s also a Usenet-based audio archive collecting audio files of every song. That’s several illegal terabytes of more than 37,000 mp3s.

The value of this information to music critics and scholars is limited only by their imaginations. Andy Baio, who wrote about the Whitburn Project on his blog, published a fun analysis of one-hit wonders and chart longevity based on the data, and made a graph showing how the average length of a pop song has fluctuated over the decades. Meanwhile, the video blog Grabb.it has performed the valuable service of reminding those of us in the MTV Generation what videos we were watching instead of the news when, for example, the Challenger exploded.

This isn’t the first project of its kind (though it's far and away the most audacious). There’s the fun little site that tells you what song was No. 1 on the day you were born. (I’m not sure what cosmic significance there is to mine, which happens to be “Afternoon Delight” by the Starland Vocal Band.) Incomplete release data is available on Wikipedia’s Year in Music pages. And Billboard, which owns the rights to chart data, makes it available to the public on a very limited basis, with full charts accessible for a fee.

Which raises the question of legality: The Whitburn Project is breaking copyright laws by making proprietary Billboard chart data available without permission. (This is why the aforementioned blogs, and now this one, won’t post actual links to the project.) But it’s all easily available via Usenet (the pertinent newsgroups are listed in WFMU’s blog entry), so music geeks—and I mean that in the most flattering sense possible, being one myself—should check out this staggering mass of data while it’s still available.

(Thanks, Brendan.)

Image by stevecadman, licensed by Creative Commons. 

Every aesthetic movement has its rivalries, its schisms, its heated battles over who’s keeping it real and who’s already sold out. Hip-hop is, famously, no exception: East Coast vs. West Coast, Tupac vs. Biggie, old school vs. new school—we’re all too familiar with these contentions. But now some of the old-school contingent are hating on a new segment of their new-school progeny: hipster rappers (hipster-hop?).

Hipster rap, as loosely defined by the Chicago Reader, consists of the most recent crop of MCs and DJs who flout conventional hip-hop fashions, eschewing baggy clothes and gold chains for tight jeans, big sunglasses, the occasional keffiyeh, and other trappings of the hipster lifestyle. Mainstream rappers like Kanye West and Lupe Fiasco, along with smaller up-and-coming acts like Kid Sister and the Cool Kids, come under fire from the old-school hip-hop website Unkut, and Jersey City rapper Mazzi has recorded diss tracks criticizing, by name, the rappers he sees as poseurs.

The Reader argues that such criticisms don’t hold much water in a genre that has always reinvented itself, borrowing and remixing until the question of authenticity is at best a slippery one. It’s also superficial: much of the derision directed toward hipster rap barely extends beyond clothes and other accoutrements, while the actual substance of the music never really enters the discussion. Furthermore, hip-hop’s notorious homophobia still lingers; much of the backlash takes the form of overt gay panic as rappers call each other fags for copping the metrosexual appearances of hipster fashion.

Race also complicates matters: the latest crop of hipster rap—or new rap, or independent hip-hop, or whatever we’re calling it—is just as likely to be heard at a party full of white kids slamming back Sparks on the Lower East Side as it is in the black community. The Reader notes, however, that the listener base is increasingly diverse, citing multiple firsthand accounts of shows and parties around Chicago where the audience defies racial and socioeconomic categorization—a compelling rebuttal to those still hung up on racial, social, or artistic distinctions.

Image by  Nev Brown , licensed by  Creative Commons . 

 

If skanky porta-potties, mud wallows, and $5 bottled water weren’t enough of a deterrent to attending many music festivals, there’s always the possibility that the local sheriff is setting up a “drug checkpoint” on the road to the fest, shifting your focus from My Morning Jacket to My Arrest for Marijuana Possession. Phillip S. Smith writes in Drug War Chronicle about the many techniques that cops use to snare unsuspecting music fans, and what festivalgoers should know about their rights.

The tips range from common sense to counterintuitive. Some highlights:

--Don’t smoke pot in your car, and don’t have any paraphernalia in view.

--Don’t ever consent to a police search of your car. It’s your right to refuse. “It might be couched in terms of a command, but it is a request,” Steven Silverman of the civil liberties group Flex Your Rights tells Smith. Be polite but assertive, the experts advise.

--Drug checkpoints per se are unconstitutional, but some law enforcers skirt or defy the law. They’ll call it a “safety check,” or put up a “Drug Checkpoint Ahead” sign, “then watch who turns off the highway at the next ramp or who throws something out his car window,” says Silverman. “Then they pull them over for littering or failure to signal a lane change or something.” Don’t fall for this trap to “lure the freaked out,” Smith writes.

(Thanks, Alternet.)

In a small, dimly lit auditorium, a twenty-something music artist known as Igloo Martian stands behind a table on a blackened stage. Projected on the backscreen are staticky images from a camera focused on his hands and his instruments: children’s audio toys modified with bizarre-looking switches and a tangle of wires. Igloo Martian is a circuit bender, and the noise issuing forth from his machines is reminiscent of a modem dialing up over incendiary house music.

Circuit bending is an emerging sound art in which battery-operated toys, keyboards, and other electronics are creatively short-circuited to reveal new, unexpected sounds. The sounds range from high-pitched wails to bass-drum kicks and everything in between. When layered, the various noises create an electronic, sonic cornucopia.

Earlier this spring, acts from all over the world gathered in Los Angeles, New York, and Minneapolis for the fifth annual Bent Festival, two days (at each location) of concerts and workshops aimed at promoting circuit bending, inviting newcomers into the growing community. Sponsored by The Tank, a New York-based nonprofit arts organization, the festival brought in artists from three continents and at least 10 countries.

Circuit bending falls somewhere in between mad science and performance art, and it can be as complex or as basic as you make it. The bent duo Beatrix*JAR (Bianca Pettis and Jacob Roske) have been instrumental in promoting circuit bending by teaching beginner workshops in libraries and galleries all over the country.

“One of the reasons we started the workshops was because people didn’t know what we were doing,” Pettis says.

She’s absolutely right. Though the performances are interactive (audiences are encouraged to come down to the stage before and after sets to check out an artist’s equipment), it is confusing to see a Speak & Spell spout out an alien-sounding melody over an ’80s Casio keyboard pounding out drum patterns.

The spontaneity of circuit bending is one of the art form’s major draws, explains Igloo Martian (Robert Clark), who likens circuit bending to beachcombing when he was a child. “I remember collecting tons of sharks’ teeth,” he says.

The exploration of seemingly nonmusical electronics is a romantic pursuit for the bent community. “It’s not so much about the sound, but how you find it,” says Roske. “Ten people with the same toy get ten different results.”

Along with exploration, circuit bending is attractive because of its DIY appeal. Old kids’ toys (some of the most popular are Speak & Spell, Speak & Math, and even Furbys) can be picked up at local thrift shops for peanuts and bent for just as cheap. The process is similar to DJs digging through crates looking for promising records and hot samples. The bending process is simple and can be learned in an afternoon.

Circuit bending’s future looks bright, and many of its supporters have high expectations for the nascent genre. Some popular artists like Beck and Björk have already incorporated bent techniques into their music, and the members of Beatrix*JAR, who consider their work a fusion of bent and pop music, hope to be “ambassadors to bring circuit bending to the mainstream.”

 

Beatrix J*A*R:

Igloo Martian:

Aaron Weiss doesn’t fit the stereotype of a Christian rocker. The charismatic frontman of the band mewithoutYou, Weiss is an environmentalist, a Freegan (a person who eats food that others throw away), and an outspoken critic of the Christian right and the Iraq war. In this excerpt from the new book Rapture Ready!, author Daniel Radosh talks to Weiss about politics, pop music, and religion. To hear an interview with Radosh, and to listen to other examples of good Christian pop music, click here.

Image by Informant, licensed under Creative Commons.

Christian pop music isn’t just for evangelicals anymore. In this episode of the UtneCast, Daniel Radosh, a secular Jew from New York City and author of the book Rapture Ready!, talks about why everyone should listen to Christian music. To hear the interview, complete with samples of good Christian pop songs, click on the play button below.

And to read an excerpt from Rapture Ready! visit www.utne.com/Rapture. 

Following in the footsteps of fellow UK imports like the Fratellis and the Kooks, the Rumble Strips are poised to be the next big thing in feel-good indie rock. Their horn-laden debut album Girls and Weather is set for U.S. release August 5. Prepare to have it trapped in your head.

 

 

Just the other day I was visiting an ex whom I still count as a good friend, and she showed me a tiny artifact of our relationship, in the form of a mix tape I made for her nearly 10 years ago. I immediately became both embarrassed and wistful as I studied its faded magazine-cutout cover art and hastily typed-up track listing, a veritable time capsule of indie rock and electronica circa 1998—and, more importantly, a catalog of the songs we listened to regularly when we began dating: Elliott Smith, Yo La Tengo, Cornershop, Daft Punk.

Chances are, if you came of age in the '90s and have an even glancing relationship to music, you made your fair share of mix tapes (and, later, mix CDs) for various friends and lovers. If those parties reciprocated, and if you are a pack rat, their lovingly curated compilations are probably still in storage somewhere in your home. Go dig one up. Maybe play it once or twice, if you’re feeling nostalgic (and if you still have a tape deck somewhere), and let the aforementioned wistfulness wash over you.

Then shake it off, you big sap, and submit it to Cassette From My Ex, where several contributors have already shared their musical mementos of past relationships, along with track listings, liner notes, accompanying essays, and even sound clips. “Because we met during the fleeting moment at millennium’s end when analog and digital media coexisted,” writes one contributor, “we could sign out of our Hotmail accounts and then step over to our stereos to express to our affections through mixed tapes.”

Indeed, those of us who still have actual mix tapes—who remember when they were the de facto album format; who occasionally betray our ages in conversations about our cherished cassette copy of Thriller, purchased at Sam Goody, shortly after its release; who once felt that distinctions like Dolby NR and High Bias and Type IV were important considerations—may find that by revisiting this obsolete format now, in the age of mp3s, our sentimentality is triggered almost as much by the form (that little plastic cartridge) as by its content (erstwhile love songs). In fact, a sort of eulogy for the cassette format was delivered in this space not long ago: “By giving listeners the ability to copy and share music,” Brian Joseph Davis wrote in Utne, “tape not only entered a copyright debate that still rages, but also became a way for an entire generation to express friendship, cultural affinity, and even love.” Davis' piece speaks not only to the cassette's versatile function as a musical love letter, but its role as an arguably populist medium—a convenient and controversial way for people to redistribute music; a sort of precursor to the file-sharing revolution of the late '90s. 

Cassette From My Ex is a natural outgrowth of our culture’s burgeoning need to document experience using various media—in this case, the lost art of charmingly cobbled-together, obsolete cassette tapes—and the proliferation of personal narrative, a formula employed to great effect by Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield in his 2006 memoir Love Is a Mix Tape, which expands Cassette From My Ex’s mission into a moving personal narrative as carefully crafted as the mixes he and his late wife assembled for each other. Cassette From My Ex continues in the spirit of Sheffield’s book, with prose contributions that range from irreverently funny to oddly touching, often within the same piece.

Image by kumar303, licensed under Creative Commons. 

David Berman, the singer, songwriter, and creative force behind the band Silver Jews, is not only a musician but also a respected poet. In 1999, he published a book of poems, Actual Air, that was cooed over by the New Yorker and GQ and praised by Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet James Tate and former poet laureate Billy Collins. Berman is also an accomplished cartoonist whose drawings recently appeared at a gallery event organized by Dave Eggers in New York.

It’s Berman’s musical application of his literary talents, however, that are the wellspring of his success. His Silver Jews have been a going concern since the early nineties, and they’ve released a string of albums known primarily among critics for their lyrics, which tend to be funny, clever and genuinely, oddly beautiful. A quick sampler:

I had a friend, his name was Marc, with a “c."
His sister was like the heat coming off the back of an old TV.
     —“Sleeping Is the Only Love,” from Tanglewood Numbers

 

I love to see a rainbow from a garden hose,
Lit up like the blood of a centerfold.
I love the city and the city rain
Suburban kids with Biblical names.
     —“People,” from American Water

The latest Silver Jews album, Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea, which is due out from Drag City in June, is no exception to the rule of quality Berman has established. His lyrics are poetry in a cracked, catchy, alt-country frame.

And yet the songs seem a little more straightforward this time around, less cryptic and more baldly emotional than on previous albums. Berman has spent the last few years sober, after what sounds like the proverbial drug-fueled haze. So is his work sobering up too? Utne Reader tried to answer this and other questions in a recent chat with the Silver Jews frontman.

“I’m in, let’s say, this business, and I have competitors. Instead of profit, what I’m seeking is influence,” Berman says, his voice markedly less rumbling than his Johnny-Cash-like singing voice would indicate.

For a statement of purpose, this seeking is sober enough, to be sure. As an artist, Berman seems determined to ensure the originality of the content he generates, or, if you prefer, the awesomeness of his lyrics. And when he sings (on Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea’s jaunty “Party Barge”), “Satan’s jeweled lobster has your wife in its claws,” it’s not just uniquely absurd and goofily surreal. It’s serious. The eponymous, barging-in character who sings the song is a party animal turned to 11. His demons, therefore, might be reasonably expected to take bizarre, extravagant shapes. Or maybe he’s the jeweled lobster. After all, Berman makes no disguise of the fact that he himself played the role of “party barge” for a number of years.

Then again, the Silver Jews aren’t simply a stage for autobiographical metaphors. In a world and contemporary music scene where musicians routinely dismiss their own lyrics by saying, “I don’t know what they mean,” David Berman’s current vision of his music rests solely on the idea that he’s offering intellectual objects in the form of country rock songs.

“I think people have taken advantage of the evolution in language toward postmodern pastiche and non-sequitur,” Berman offers. “People who want to be a songwriter or lead singer, but don’t have anything to say, are provided with this sort of loophole in the culture.”

Now, of course, this sounds pretentious. And it probably is—in the past, Berman himself has indulged in oblique, significant-sounding nonsense. But in an indie culture that worships the idea of music as Art, Berman’s take—and the poetry involved in his songs—seems normal, even expected. Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea was made with more than a touch of the tortured artist’s attention to detail, a fact that becomes apparent when you talk to the guy who agonized over it.

For instance, Berman proposes that the album is the most “Googly-sure” of any album—ever. What this means is that he took the time to Google such phrases as “abridged abyss,” in order to find out if they were solely his creations. No hits returned? It’s his; flag planted. A Google search now turns up 44 hits for the phrase “abridged abyss,” and the first page of results shows either Silver Jews’ lyrics or references to a Yale French Studies article on André Malraux. The Malraux reference, which Berman says he found, was sufficiently lonely and obscure that the lyric remains fixed in Lookout Mountain’s leadoff track, “What Is Not But Could Be If.”

All the album’s tracks underwent this kind of surgical construction. Using colored note-cards to write them, Berman set out to wade through “50, 60, 70 chord progressions” and numerous books he was reading at the time. “There’s an Emerson quote at the end of ‘Strange Victory, Strange Defeat,’” he points out, and “Aloysius, Bluegrass Drummer” samples Emily Dickinson.

Perhaps this makes it sound as though the songs on Lookout Mountain exercise a literary posture. But they certainly don’t scan that way. Cheeky fun is one of the first phrases that comes to mind when I think of them. A Google search, by the way, yields 21,400 hits for cheeky fun, so it’s not any stretch of the critical vocabulary. Lookout Mountain is just a good album, with a couple great songs. It won’t raise the dead, at least not for long, but how often does that happen?

“If someone buys a Silver Jews record, they get to buy some freedom from the ickiness,” Berman hopes. The craft and thought he’s put into the album probably merits the description. Berman is, after all, a lauded poet, though he says that he has “less of a claim to originality [in poetry] than I do in, for instance, lyric-writing.” In lyric-writing, actually, Berman feels “like I could be in the Olympic finals; I could be in ninth place.”

Still, he says, his music “flies under their [listeners’] standards; the music and the singing is not technically adept.” For this reason, he feels that the context for his career is very important. As a poet, artist, and musician, his multiple-hat-wearing “sticks him out,” gives him an outsider-ish edge. Which is in some ways bullshit. This is a guy who, as a writer, critics compare favorably to Bob Dylan.  

But it works for him. Feeling he’s on the aesthetic outskirts motivates him to feel justified in continuing to make albums. In some ways, the contradictory conceit of indie rock culture—idiosyncracy and the pretense of art all wrapped up as a not-quite-commodity—is realized perfectly in Berman’s approach. He says he’s not lauded, but he’s garnered considerable acclaim. Moreover, his music sounds and plays itself off as both friendly and accessible; the absurdity and weird braininess are just along for the ride.

Really this is the dream of rock and roll, since it first scandalously waggled off of Elvis’ hips or whatever: The fringe product as a rock in the mainstream. Then again, just because it’s fallen through the cracks of the industry machine doesn’t mean it didn’t roll off the conveyor belt. Pop music is pop music, right? Silver Jews melodies have straight-up hooks aplenty; the poetry involved looks more like a bonus.

But do these distinctions matter? David Berman is a serious craftsman, and seems intent on taking up the mantle of the struggling artist. And the mantle might fit: Berman certainly isn’t rich, and he was, at one time, a genuine “party barge” (he probably still has the tugboat marks to prove it). Similarly, Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea has its moments of earnest, downtrodden poetry, but Berman certifies his tone with life-giving variety. He’s funny when laughter is a little relief from the model-parade of hard times.     

The Silver Jews’ last record, Tanglewood Numbers, also explored the new world of sobriety. So Lookout Mountain may be more a refinement than a definition of Berman as a recovered sage. Nevertheless, he uses his addled wisdom as a launching pad for little poetic rocket ships (on fighting: “He came at me with some fist cuisine”; on divorce: “Living in a little town with my pedigree in shards,”). And, as Berman takes pains to point out, the language is plainer on this album. He has stories to tell and ideas to convey.

In the end, it may be a little stupid to emphasize Berman’s multidisciplinary career. The guy is a writer. And maybe he can’t sing, but I love it when he does.  

 

Smooth jazz is dead, reports Will Layman in Popmatters, citing the format shift at a couple of major-market radio stations (in New York and D.C.) as evidence of the genre’s demise. “Dentists in the two most powerful cities in America are panicking,” he writes, seizing the chance for some easy gags before settling into a surprisingly well-rounded and illuminating look at the form, from its sonic origins in the late ’60s to its naming by a focus group participant to its “overriding aesthetic of cheesiness” and its “explicitly economic” inspiration in recent years.

I suspect it will take more than a presumptuous obituary to draw a death rattle from Kenny G’s horn. After all, the Yellowjackets have a CD coming out next week, and elevators and hotel lobbies everywhere have dead air to fill. But Layman’s treatise is fun and engaging and even a bit provocative, floating the notion that smooth jazz may have actually fulfilled a noble purpose during its pathetic life: “It likely served to bring some listeners to the real thing, giving them the courage to like Miles Davis or Sonny Rollins.”

Orchestral conductors are responsible for keeping two different large, often unruly groups of people in line--the orchestra and the audience. A perfect performance can be ruined by a cell phone, an unstifled cough, or ill-timed applause.

Writing in the Threepenny Review, Wendy Lesser describes observing Simon Rattle leading the Berlin Philharmonic in a rehearsal at Carnegie Hall. Along with adjusting the group's sound for an unfamiliar space, Rattle warns the players of the relative rudeness of New York audiences. During the performance, a loudly coughing audience member throws the orchestra off, and Rattle, between movements, kindly but firmly explains to the audience how important it is to avoid such disruptions. Later, Lesser admires Rattle's warmth and ease with a schoolchildren's dance ensemble and with their parents, many of them fish out of water at a classical performance. Conducting, it turns out, requires not only tremendous musicianship and leadership but also great diplomacy and grace.

- Steve Thorngate 

Image by Monika Rittershaus, licensed under Creative Commons.

So-called indie music loves to flash that glittery “outsider” label, but when you play the music of someone like Sufjan Stevens in the car and realize that your mom and your 5-year-old alike are tapping their toes, something seems amiss.

“Indie rock and adult contemporary have for the last few years, been publicly and happily holding each other’s hand,” writes Greg Burgett for the New York Press. “The indie kids … on their way to their 10 a.m. start times, their casual Mondays-through-Fridays, their five-dollar-a-day coffee habits … assembled a so-appropriate soundtrack … that keeps their cred intact, their superiors pacified (even at audible-over-the-cubicles volume) and their New Yorker reading appropriately soundtracked.”

While there’s always going to be someone screaming for the music to be louder, noisier and more difficult, Burgett has some fun throwing bombs at bland music and those young professionals who wear it like a leather wrist strap.

—Jason Ericson

For people who’ve wasted too many migraine-inducing hours staring at optical illusions (like the old and the young woman, or that darn elephant) the special music issue of New Scientist offers some respite. One article features five examples of effective auditory illusions, which offer insight into how the brain processes music and other sounds. The auditory mind tricks are  less painful and easier to figure out than their optical cousins, but no less interesting.

—Morgan Winters

Ever since Brendan Benson, Jack White, and company formed a band and rescued the word “raconteur” from semantic obscurity, two ever-present companions tagged along in reviews: “supergroup” and “Jack White side project.” Notice the tension there. True, White’s star has always shined brightest, but if anything, Consolers of the Lonely, the Raconteurs’ new album released March 25, makes the band look like a Benson vehicle, a welcome extension of his long-underappreciated solo work—happy-sounding pop songs about being a lonely, misunderstood guy.

Recorded, mastered, and released in less than a month, the album received no advance promotion. Yet rather than feeling like a slacker vanity project, like all of those excessive double-disc live albums (with concert DVD!) bands are rushing out lately, Consolers of the Lonely sounds fully developed, even masterful, thanks in part to the excellent additions of Dirk Powell on fiddle and Stax favorites the Memphis Horns. The casual brilliance of it all makes you wonder if there is any way this group could fail to produce great music.

—Jason Ericson

Last week, Utne Reader senior editor Keith Goetzman went down to Austin, Texas, for South by Southwest. In the latest episode of the UtneCast, Keith talks about a side of the raucous music festival that’s not often seen by fans: the quiet side. Hear music from Kaiser Cartel, Daniel Lanois, and Eliza Gilkyson, whose album Beautiful World is due out May 27.

—Bennett Gordon

Baby blue cowboy boots with pink hot pants. Plaid shorts worn over patterned pajama bottoms. Jet-black stretch jeans as tight as shrink wrap. John Deere caps and full untrimmed beards. The South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, is as much a fashion show as it is a music-biz gathering, and frankly it would be hard to dress weirdly enough to really turn heads in downtown Austin this weekend. (Perhaps if I donned penny loafers, pleated Dockers chinos, and a pastel polo shirt, I’d at least get some attention for being a dork.)

Walking down the main promenade, Sixth Street, I took out my camera and captured some choice examples of rock and roll style. Not one person I approached refused to have their photo taken; this is a crowd that wants to be seen. Caution: Adopt these looks at your own risk.

—Keith Goetzman

“Everyone who’s under 30 is probably sick of hearing how great the Clash was,” Billy Bragg told the crowd at the Utne Reader party at South by Southwest as he introduced his new tune “Old Clash Fan Fight Song.” It’s not just younger folks, Billy: Just last week, Utne editor in chief Dave Schimke told me he didn’t want to hear one more word about Joe Strummer, the heavily lionized subject of a recent biography and documentary.

The ghost of the Clash was everywhere at South by Southwest, however. I saw it in the black armband worn by the singer for the hard-rocking L.A. band Monte Negro. I heard it in the energetic reggae-punk of the Aggrolites, another L.A. outfit. And plenty of SXSW attendees, yes, some of them under 30, wore T-shirts that celebrated the band.

Then I saw something that was no ghost: Carbon/Silicon, the new band fronted by the Clash’s Mick Jones. Playing to an appreciative crowd at the Austin Convention Center, Jones proved that he’s not living in the past as he and his band ripped through a blazing set that left the crowd awed and sated. Their beefy, guitar-drenched tunes ran on punk energy and crafty pop hooks, with Jones and fellow guitarist Tony James clearly relishing their return to the spotlight (James was in iconic punk band Generation X).

For us old Clash fans, it was a thrill to see Jones enjoying himself so much and still delivering the goods. Carbon/Silicon isn’t just a hobby or a lame attempt at a comeback, but a real band, and a very good one at that. Jones promised that they’d be touring the U.S. soon. “We’re coming to your house—everybody’s house,” he quipped. Don’t miss them when they come knocking.

—Keith Goetzman

Image by Nikolai36, licensed under Creative Commons.

The South by Southwest music festival is in full swing, with a horde of hipsters and music-biz people clogging the streets of downtown Austin, Texas. There’s a band playing around every corner, a tattoo on every forearm, hair in every hue.

The big-name performers on the opening night of this year’s festival—Van Morrison, Daryl Hall, R.E.M.—lent the event a somewhat geezerish vibe. All of them have new albums, and all are here to revive careers in various stages of dormancy and/or mediocrity. Their reputations attracted hordes of concertgoers regardless of the merits of their new work.

I was lucky to catch a set by another older performer, singer-songwriter Paul Kelly, who’s never been famous except in his home country of Australia. Kelly’s gig at a theaterlike venue called Esther’s Follies didn’t attract a line around the block like his contemporaries, but he too has a new album, and he proved that he’s still got the songwriting and performing chops to hold an audience in thrall.

Playing an acoustic guitar and accompanied by a talented young bloke on electric, Kelly revisited great songs from past albums, including “Dumb Things” and “Careless,” then rolled out some numbers from his forthcoming disc. “Stolen Apples,” the title track, is a clever retelling of the Adam and Eve tale. “Keep on Driving” rolled along with a rootsy feel, and while “God Told Me To” didn’t mention George W. Bush by name, its inspiration was clear as Kelly spit out the acidic lyrics. Before playing it, Kelly simply intoned, “God told me to, so I must be right.”

Then Kelly tackled a new song that cut right to the heart of the age issue. “You’re 39, You’re Beautiful, and You’re Mine” played off of Ringo Starr’s “You’re 16, You’re Beautiful, and You’re Mine” in its lyrics, but Kelly’s heartfelt song conveyed a deep and abiding love that’s nowhere to be found in Ringo’s pedophilic pop ditty. To be sure, a 39-year-old girlfriend would still be a spring chicken compared to Kelly, who’s 53, but the song conveyed a sentiment quite foreign to the youth-worshipping crowd at South by Southwest: Getting older doesn’t have to be a drag, and it can even be sexy.

—Keith Goetzman 

After watching Roger Clemens stutter through a House committee hearing regarding his alleged steroid use, one could be excused for wanting to escape the locker-room stench surrounding professional sports. The Rocket may have been sweating from the strain of dodging questions, but for those of us watching from home, bearing the tedium was like 40 minutes on the elliptical machine. Most of us would rather hear about the latest strung-out musician’s drug-induced public tirade. And that’s because nobody does drugs like musicians. Barry Bonds can stick a needle in his butt cheek and smash a baseball 600 feet. But Ozzy Osbourne can chase a line of cocaine with a line of ants. Way cooler.

In an article for Fort Worth Weekly, E.R. Bills compares the steroid craze in baseball with the drug experience in music. Bills wonders why we have such different expectations for the practitioners of the two forms of entertainment since, he suggests, musicians use recreational drugs for the same reasons athletes use steroids. The difference, of course, lies in the level and brand of competition in the two worlds. There is certainly competition in the music industry: to sell records, win awards, make the cover of the music glossies. But in sports, the competition is the art. And because performance-enhancing drugs may define the outcome of the competition, their impact is completely different than the impact illicit drugs have had on music.

—Morgan Winters

Utne Reader has had a presence at the South by Southwest music festival for years, but this time around, we’re going whole hog. We’re teaming up with one of our favorite music labels, Anti-, to host a big outdoor showcase headlined by Billy Bragg and DeVotchKa, and we’re joining with other partners to throw a party headlined by Bragg and Rogue Wave. For more information on the Utne Reader/Anti- Records showcase on Thursday, March 13, and the Utne Reader party on Saturday, March 15, click here.

The March-April issue of Utne Reader has a special treat for music fans, a 10-page section called “For the Love of Music” that focuses on people and places where pure passion for music is the driving force:

• Really Fresh Air by James Diers
  A public radio station that seriously rocks
• Good Karma in Stereo by Marc Weingarten
  At the Anti- label, it’s all about the music
• Play That Funky Vinyl by Rob Harvilla
  Wax Poetics keeps obsessive record collectors obsessing
• For the Love of Music: Scenes
  Four great venues for live music

Also, read editor in chief David Schimke’s note on Billy Bragg, South by Southwest, and the enduring influence of truly great music.

Both Utne Reader events at South by Southwest are open to everyone, though you’ll need a South by Southwest music festival badge to attend the showcase.

—Keith Goetzman

Order us a double whiskey and put a sad country song on the jukebox. We just learned that music magazine No Depression is about to stop publishing. Its May-June issue will be its last after a 13-year run.

Here at Utne Reader, we’ve long been fans of No Depression, nominating it five times for arts coverage in the Utne Independent Press Awards (including last year) and passing around each issue to browse its smart, clear-eyed coverage of American roots music. We admired No Depression’s trend-bucking moves, like putting 79-year-old Porter Wagoner on the cover, its general avoidance of music-mag clichés, and its ability to take us deep into the back corners of this country’s rich trove of homegrown music. In a world full of guys wearing Western-style shirts, they helped sort out the real deal from the posers.

No doubt, No Depression had a challenging mission in getting its hands around an amorphous category of music, most often called Americana, alt country, or No Depression, that at times encompasses folk, country, blues, soul, gospel, Cajun, zydeco, bluegrass, and various subsets of rock. But it navigated this broad landscape with pluck and verve, attracting a loyal readership that according to its editors hasn’t dropped significantly. What did drop was the amount of record label advertising, a result of “the precipitous fall of the music industry,” they write in their farewell notice.

No Depression was an earthy antidote to the glossy, glib, trend-obsessed coverage we often saw in the mainstream music press, like drinking a quenching brew instead of a gimmicky stunt martini. Looks like we’re going to go thirsty more often.

—Keith Goetzman

A music instructor and guitar shop owner in Vermont uses the popular video game Guitar Hero as a part of his lessons, not only because it gets kids interested but also, as Dan Bolles reports in the alternative weekly Seven Days, because it instills the player with a sense of rhythmic timing and a subconscious recognition of melody lines. “Essentially, what players see as little colored dots scrolling down a TV screen are actually a form of guitar tablature,” Bolles writes. “And when you connect those dots, you’ve got the makings of a real guitar player.”

Normally, I don’t buy these arguments about the vast benefits of video games (hand-eye coordination, anyone?), but this is the theory being put into practice by real music teachers. If only they’d had Saxophone Hero when I was in sixth-grade band.

—Jason Ericson

A Russian Orthodox church is an unlikely venue for a rock concert, but in Tehran, musicians take what they can get. In These Times writes about a 2001 concert the Iranian alternative rock band O-hum (pictured at left) played to a packed, excited, moshing crowd in the neutral ground of a church. It was one of the few rock shows to have been staged in the country. Iranian alternative music, from rock to rap, has been stymied by censorship and repression.

The country officially bans Western music, so young people usually have to content themselves with illegal satellite MTV and Persian pop produced by Iranians living in LA. Websites like MySpace and Tehran Avenue have allowed the 1 in 4 Iranians who have Internet access a chance to sample native artists like O-hum. But there’s still much work to do.

The life of an artist in America, at once glamorous and poor, seems discouraging enough. But the life of an artist in Iran, where the state actively tries to stop your efforts, must be especially difficult. I wonder: How many potential Iranian Bob Dylans, Mozarts, and John Lennons have been discouraged by censorship and indifference and just gave up?

Curious about O-hum’s music? The band’s LP and EP are available for free download at its MySpace page. Also check out Iranian folk crooner Mohsen Namjoo.

—Brendan Mackie

My, how time flies. It’s been 20 years since Dr. Dre first invited us to “witness the strength of street knowledge” on NWA’s seminal sophomore album Straight Outta Compton. The group’s raw appeal and trailblazing history has kept the album fresh, even two decades after it was first released. To honor the anniversary, and calling attention to the album’s recent re-release, Hannah Levin writes for Seattle Weekly about Dr. Dre, Eazy E, and Ice Cube’s wide-reaching impact. Levin waxes nostalgic about the first time she heard Straight Outta Compton on cassette tape, the group’s place in the musical canon, and what it says about American culture that an album about selling crack, abusing women, and dissing police still resonates so strongly today. 

—Morgan Winters 

Jina Moore of the Christian Science Monitor reports that in the world music industry, many bands are “snagging the spotlight with their biographies.” Groups like the Sierra Leone Refugee All Stars have reeled in a fan base due in large part to their interesting back stories. The All Stars met in refugee camps, and their rags-to-recording-studio tale resonated with audiences who’d seen Blood Diamonds and heard about Sierra Leone in the news. The result was an outpouring of compassion for the band and fascination with their music.

Other world musicians have taken a similar path to world stardom. Moore cites Emmanuel Jal, K’naan, and Andy Palacio and the Garifuna Collective as artists who’ve reaped the benefits of an intriguing band history.

“People interested in world music are looking for that kind of meaning,” says Jacob Edgar, head of music research for the Putumayo label. “They want to be connecting with other cultures, enjoying music that has more spirit and soul to it than just another rock band trying to create hits.” —Cara Binder

 

For almost 50 years, the Arbitron survey-research firm has been paying select radio listeners to keep a handwritten log of every station they listen to. Once the logs are completed, Arbitron does its survey-research company fandango, throws the results back to the radio stations, and radio listeners everywhere are stuck listening to the same 50 songs over and over.

Wired (article not available online) reports that Arbitron recently introduced a new, allegedly more precise, way to log peoples’ listening habits. The Portable People Meter will clip onto listeners’ clothing and will automatically record every radio song they listen to, based on hidden tones embedded in the music. The devices will go nationwide in 2010, when 70,000 of them will be sent out to snoop into listeners’ music lives.

These paid listeners can forget about secretly tuning in to “Karma Chameleon” and conveniently forgetting to write it in their log. Arbitron knows all. -- Cara Binder