Recently in Music Category

I'm trying out a new "mixtape" service. Here's a mix I just made for some friends in December...

I'll post an actual piece of writing one of these days, I swear. In the meantime, admire how cute my child is! Just look at her!

Though it's been a mere six hours at this writing since the news was confirmed that self-proclaimed "King of Pop" Michael Jackson was dead at age 50, everybody and their mother (well, if their mother is of a certain age) has already weighed in with their thoughts on the meaning of his career, life and death. So why shouldn't I join in?

It's hard to reconstruct now, 26 years after the fact, but at the time "Billie Jean" first hit the airwaves, it sounded like nothing else before it. It sounded, well, ominous, but incredibly catchy at the same time. A brilliant song, and everyone responded to it. And then there was the rest of Thriller. Hit after hit after hit. Unlike now, when music stations and charts have fractured into a million subgenres which never find a common audience, everyone heard these songs. And everyone saw "Thriller" the music video. As the line goes, "No mere mortal can resist / the evil of the thriller."

His music also fit the mood of my high school. I always thought of my group of friends as the "not reallys" - not really fitting neatly into any particular clique, category, or race. So Michael Jackson, together with Madonna (who "sounded black") and Prince (who simply enjoyed tweaking everybody's expectations and minds) made the perfect soundtrack.

And the last 26 years? Not so good. It was another four years before Michael Jackson would release another album, and I didn't like it. The one after that was even worse. And then there was the clusterf*ck that was his life... the bizarre marriages, the animals, the money wasted, the dangling baby, the plastic surgery, the lawsuits, the allegations of sexual abuse against children... it went on and on.

I think part of the reason I'm finding it hard to stop thinking about his life and death is that it's sobering to think that he had basically completed his best work by age 25. And that was pretty much it. 50 was young to die, but it was still a quarter century past his peak. He spent more half his life disintegrating in public.

I don't think it had to be that way, and it's a shame that it did (and I feel even worse about his children. Imagine living with that ghost floating over your shoulder for the rest of your life.)

In the meantime, I'll dig into my music collection and pull out my favorite Michael Jackson songs: "Working Day and Night", "Shake Your Body Down to the Ground", "Off the Wall", and "Don't Stop Until You Get Enough". And I hope that even the "haters" can recognize that once upon a time, he really was a genius. 

Edited to add: It's also strange to realize that our president is two years younger than Michael Jackson was, and that he must have also grown up with his music as a soundtrack....

OK. Listen to this song by Kelly Clarkson, the title track off her new album.

Then listen to this: "I Turn My Camera On" a song by Spoon off their 2005 album Give Me Fiction.

Interesting, eh?

Perhaps she should have called it "I Turn My Sound Recorder On."

(Of course, some might say that Spoon's "The Ghost of You Lingers" sounds a lot like Billy Joel's "All for Lena", so perhaps all's fair...)

About a year after the hipsters were onto it, I finally downloaded Hercules & Love Affair's album (of the same name.) Short review: great album.

The most striking aspect of it for me is that I love the vocals. Why is this striking? Because the main vocalist is Antony Hagerty of Antony and the Johnsons, who released a critically acclaimed album, I Am A Bird Now, which I haven't been able to get myself to listen to. I just can't take Antony's voice — too much vibrato, too plummy, too over-emoting for me.

Or so I thought. Because in the hands of Andy Butler, Antony sounds phenomenal. Butler said in an interview that he wrote "Blind" for him because he "just wanted to hear Antony's voice against an electronic texture". To say this was a good call is an understatement. It's the counterbalance to all that rich emotive power. It's what made countless 80s bands like the Eurythmics work too.

Same singer, different band, what a difference. Reminds me of when Rob Thomas of Matchbox Twenty was a guest vocalist on Carlos Santana's hit song "Smooth." In my not-so-humble opinion, Matchbox Twenty was vile beyond belief, and Rob Thomas was responsible for most of the evil in the world. Bad, bad music. But "Smooth"? Smooth! Ten years later, that song still holds up quite nicely. (The same cannot be said either of Matchbox Twenty's albums or Rob Thomas' solo output.)

Some singers manage to be brilliant no matter where they are. But sometimes, maybe what a singer needs is to go someplace else and sing somebody else's material for a change.

What a performance, on such a day.

Last night we went to see Jonathan Richman at the Great American Music Hall. I was excited to see him, less excited that there was an opening act, some group called the Felix Dukes I'd never heard of. Oh dear. You see, when I first saw him in concert, sometime in the early to mid-nineties, the opener was a band called Daisy Spot, whom my friend Kimberly and I mutually found quite loathesome. (We still have horrible memories of the lead vocalist singing "Sil-ly Bil-ly. Sil-ly Bil-ly" over and over.)

So when I heard the first tentative notes on the guitar, I thought, "Oh no. Here we go again." Then suddenly there was a blast of power chords, and the band launched into a set of power pop that made me think of Weezer and Franz Ferdinand and early 80s New Wave, but managing not to sound exactly like anybody else either. Every song was tight and insanely catchy. A very pleasant surprise. So I went home and Googled them. They don't seem to have any music on Emusic yet, but they do have some songs available for streaming onine, which is what I'm listening to as I type this.

And then their set ended, and Jonathan Richman arrived, and he was as great as I hoped. (And I'm shocked that he's now 57 — he's still very high-energy. Not that 57 is ancient or anything, but I still can't help but think he must have a picture of himself aging badly in his attic.) He did make one major concession to the fact that he's no longer in his 20s with his closing number, a melancholy song about watching his mother fade away and die in bed.

The one sour note was in an otherwise sweet song about how people shouldn't be afraid to live their lives and feel bad, when he basically criticized taking antidepressants, namechecking Zoloft. Like many people, he assumes that depression = feeling deeply, when for many people, it just means feeling numb, or worse.

Oh well, maybe it's just a generational thing. Back in his day and all...

Amazon is selling 50 MP3 albums for a mere $5 each. I'm downloading stuff from Portishead, TV on the Radio, Death Cab and Flight of the Conchords as I type this. They even have Metallica's latest album on there. Doesn't quite atone for their asshat attitude about filesharing before, but it helps.

Of course, you can also get High School Musical 3 for $5. But why would you want to do THAT?

I'm listening to a playlist I made a while ago, "Maybe 2008 won't be like 2004." The mix of songs matches the mix of my emotions: one minute optimistic, the next minute despairing, the next minute simply really pissed off.

1. Don't Make Me a Target - Spoon
2. Yes We Can Can - the Pointer Sisters
3. War Pigs - Cake
4. 16 Military Wives - the Decembrists
5. Free World - Kirsty MacColl
6. Big Hollow Man - Danielle Dax (this one goes out to Sarah Palin!)
7. Mentira - Manu Chao (this one goes out to John McCain... and just about every Republican lying sack of s*** who has opened his or her mouth this election)
8. Peace Love & Understanding - Amy Rigby
9. Ride the Fence - the Coup (this one goes out to all you "undecided voters.")
   
10. The Revolution Starts Now - Steve Earle (a defiant anthem... and a reminder of the heartbreak last time)
11. It's a New Day - the Skull Snaps
12. There Won't Be Trumpets - Bernadette Peters (are we the ones we've been waiting for?)
13. Yes We Can (pass 3) - Tano Sokolow, ingenious mashup artist

If you hear a gentle crunching noise in the background... that's just me nibbling my nails down to the quick. Hoping for the best, trying to be braced for the worst...

(The toddler requests music thusly)

I've gotten to go to a fair number of concerts over the last couple years, including the Decembrists, Manu Chao, Hot Chip, Hot Hot Heat, Death Cab for Cutie, Charlie Hunter, Spoon, Nick Cave, the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival where I heard (if not saw) Elvis Costello and Gogol Bordello, and this week, Stereolab. I'm sure I forgot a couple more. Not bad for a mother, although most of the credit needs to go to my friend Edith, who keeps urging me to get out of the house and has an uncanny ability to score great tickets.

Next up: Charlie Hunter again, and Jonathan Richman...