http://blogcritics.org/ A sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, politics, and technology - updated continuously. en Copyright 2005-2007 by the authors Thu, 5 Dec 2002 15:10:10 EST http://backend.userland.com/rss Blogcritics.org custom software http://blogcritics.org/ Phillip WinnSunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding. Administration0@blogcritics.org Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2002/12/05/151010.php Kenan HebertNeal Pollack interviewed on Bookslut:"I think the word 'pretentious' applies to a lot of literature. It's pretending it's something it's not. You know, slam poetry pretends that it's poetry. Most literature pretends that it's culturally relevant, when in fact, if it's not the most irrelevant of popular art forms, it's certainly up there. Considering the people who care about it, and the amount of headspace they give it, it has surprisingly little relevance to the rest of the world."(Yes, I'm essentially linking to myself. Sue me. It's a good interview.) Books2138@blogcritics.org Thu, 5 Dec 2002 15:10:10 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2002/11/04/211614.php Kenan HebertA must-read. Thrill! to the sound of Townshend stroking his own ego. Laugh! at the presumptuous pomposity of his opinions. Cry! as you realize he's absolutely right.What follows appear to be the scribblings of a crazed and depressed drug-addict in the midst of what those of us who have been through drug rehab describe as 'stinking thinking'. That is, the resentful, childish, petulant and selfish desire to accuse, blame and berate the world for all its wrongs, to wish to escape, or overcome and, finally, to take no responsibility for any part of the ultimate downfall. Me? An expert? Of course. Been there, done that.And don't miss the link at the bottom, wherein the Observer publishes excepts from the diaries. Books1673@blogcritics.org Mon, 4 Nov 2002 21:16:14 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2002/10/22/041849.php Kenan HebertFound on 12 Apostles:Nick Hornby counts down the ten songs he simply could not live without. That's a pretty big list to make -- one I would not even attempt. My reaction:1) Bruce Springsteen - Thunder Road - You must be kidding. Already, Nick and I are very different people, I can see.2) The Clash - (White Man) In Hammersmith Palais - Excellent pick, and were I to ever make such a list, this might very well be on it. But then again, maybe not... it's a bit predictable, isn't it?3) Marah - My Heart is the Bums on the Street - Have to look this one up. Thanks for throwing in the obligatory unheard-of recommendation, Nick.4) Teenage Fanclub - Your Love is the Place Where I Come From - Ick.5) Marvin Gaye - Let's Get It On - I wish I'd have kept the MPEG I had of a girl doing a striptease to this song in her dorm room -- I'd post it. It's appalling, the way she slinks in this mock-sexy way, mouthing the words and gesturing at the camera every so often. Oh, I know. None of that's Marvin Gaye's fault, and there's a very limited degree to which any artist is responsible for the audience he attracts. But after some time, and a certain level of cultural permutation, the audience does begin to ruin it for me. Kinda the same way I can never listen to Stevie Ray Vaughan again, because I've lived in Austin too long.From here on out, the list gets ever weirder, including LL Cool J's "Going Back To Cali" and Prince's "Sexy MF," to name two. Good songs, I suppose, but... why pick "Sexy MF" when he could have picked James Brown's "Funky Drummer," which the song is an obvious rip-off of? Why pick LL Cool J in a world that has known Public Enemy? Couldn't he do better than this? Music1438@blogcritics.org Tue, 22 Oct 2002 04:18:49 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2002/10/20/134452.php Kenan Hebert Bloodshot Records Release date: August 20, 2002 On her third album, Blacklisted, Neko Case finally invents herself. Her last album, Furnace Room Lullaby, was a straight torch-and-twang affair, attracting all the obvious (and warranted) k.d. lang comparisons that come with that. Her vocal work on The New Pornographers self-titled debut showed us another Neko Case entirely - the voice that had so recently been weighed down with thick drawl and forced yodeling now rang clear, pinning together fierce pop-rock songs. Now on Blacklisted, she divides herself (and maybe her audience) yet again, casting off almost all of the country theatrics that made her a name only two years ago. She has relaxed for this album, keeping things a bit on the country side, but determined not to lay it on too thick this time; and in doing so, she has found a completely new and distinctive style. This is, of course, the ultimate goal for a singer-songwriter. She's reached it. This is an excellent album.Blacklisted is, above all else, a triumph of delicate, late-night moodiness. Case has a long, dark highway in the back of her mind, and even while the songs are usually short and occasionally incomplete (the album packs 14 tracks into 38 minutes), the expansive production together with the evocative not-quite-country instrumentation of Calexico and other friends blows the sound up to occupy a huge amount of empty and lonely space. The ensemble playing only serves to accentuate the alone-ness at the center of the music, which is a neat trick - even with talent as large as Howe Gelb on board, everything points toward Neko herself, and her lyrical sensibilities, spare and solid and introspective.For newcomers to Case, of which this album will surely breed many, her most immediately striking talent isn't her voice, clean and sharp as it is. It's the lyrics. Nothing on either of her last two records even hinted at the poetry she had in her -- a dense, frighteningly evocative matte of dark words, sung plainly enough to be startling. Gone are songs about Wal-Mart, replaced with lyrics like "it looks a lot like engine oil / and tastes like being poor and small / and Popsicles in summer." (On second thought, that could be about Wal-Mart after all, or a score of other things.) On "Outro with Bees," she sings, "red wine is fast / at the lip of your glass / saying 'I'm gonna ruin everything.'" She's sticking to a country-western iconography here - drinking, driving, etc. - but in execution, she's creating something quite apart from mere country. Where many a singer-songwriter would be content to let the obvious speak for itself, Case keeps you leaning into the speaker for more meaning, and more words.Her voice, while being more direct than on any of her previous work, is evocative of many other voices. Many of the tracks have definite Alison Krauss overtones. On "Tightly," she sounds strikingly like Bettie Serveert's Carol van Dijk. And although she doesn't reach for it, it's easy to imagine "Deep Red Bells" coming from the throat of Kristin Hersh. But rather than give the impression of being unfocused or cluttered, this style shifting actually helps to focus the album by letting the natural mood of a piece dictate its delivery. Whereas on Furnace her voice constantly strained to make everything as country-fried as possible, here it serves many different purposes -- the purposes of individual songs. When a style fits a song, she uses it, displaying at once an ultimate respect for the music and a devout desire not to be pigeonholed as anything, least of all k.d. lang.And I hear another, much less obvious influence in the music as well. Case spent a good deal of time in Vancouver, studying art and joining the punk band Maow, and I find it difficult to imagine after hearing Blacklisted that she wasn't during that time influenced by the sound of fellow Vancouver resident Veda Hille. Much of Blacklisted takes the same kind of chances that Hille takes, in terms of unconventional song structure and fractured, hallucinatory lyrics, even while adhering to tunefulness. Case seems to find on Blacklisted a middle ground between her last album and Hille's carefully skewed (if not downright bizarre) pop ideas. It's a daring gambit of a record, really, not as country as many will be comfortable with, and certainly not as verse-chorus-verse as most music that uses banjo and pedal steel. It steps back from the near-formula of her former music, gives the whole thing some thought, and attacks it from an entirely different direction. That's a brave thing to do, and it pays off in spades. Music1402@blogcritics.org Sun, 20 Oct 2002 13:44:52 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2002/10/14/205655.php Kenan HebertRegarding my scathing review of the new FSOL:If you search on Soulseek for "amorphous androgynous the isness" you get an old demo version of the album. It's oddly better. It's not strikingly different, mind you, but it's minus a few of the flourishes and vocals that push the retail version of the record past unpleasant and into outright annoying. I wonder what the record sounded like two years before this demo was recorded... was it better still? We may never know.This "history of The Isness" that I also downloaded from Soulseek sheds a little light. Music1299@blogcritics.org Mon, 14 Oct 2002 20:56:55 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2002/10/14/024002.php Kenan HebertI'll call it the Little Fat Policeman effect. When I was a kid, my uncle bought me a Disney 45 whose label said contained songs from the movie The Aristocats. It didn't. The record was a misprint, and instead contained two songs about a Little Fat Policeman. I can still hear the a-side in my head. "I'm a policeman, dressed in blue..."Upon first hearing Future Sound of London's new album, The Isness, I did the same sort of double take. This is not FSOL. Couldn't be. Garry Cobain and Brian Douglas don't make lame, watered-down hippie-styled pseudo-Eastern folk music. I should know; I've listened to their last record, Dead Cities, more times than is probably healthy, and I can tell you definitively that Cobain and Douglas make some of the strangest, most challenging electronic sounds ever committed to plastic. They plumb depths, weave tapestries out of bizarre, nascent organic shapes, and dig bottomless pits of sound. They do not make spineless and uninventive psychedelia. This is not their newest album. This is a Fat Fucking Policeman, or some nonsense.But, after checking my sources, I am unhappy to report that this is indeed the first FSOL album in six years, and it's a stink bomb. Unlike Underworld's new record A Hundred Days Off, which is accomplished even if it lacks some of the edge of some of their older music, The Isness is flat-out terrible. Cobain and Douglas have either let drugs eat their brains to the point that their judgment is severely impaired, or they have surrendered to some sort of nightmarishly upbeat and mind-numbing hippie cult. Either way, it is the worst thing they've ever done, far worse than I had any right to expect. Shame on them.For a clue as to what you're getting into here, just check some of the song titles. "Elysian Feels." "Divinity." "Guru Song." "The Galaxial Pharmaceutical." Or, worst of all, "The Mello Hippo Disco Show." These are all bullshit. The Isness doesn't even attempt to recreate the occasional splendor that was British psychedelia, it just lamely and unflatteringly rips it off, throwing in glockenspiel and flute as if those elements alone make the sound "trippy," and therefore interesting. Nothing here builds, nothing has any drama, nothing assaults or moves or challenges, it just unapologetically sounds all hippy-dippy. By trying to make psychedelic music, but neither trying to build on it or even respect its original spirit, The Isness is something more than bad. It's almost offensive. I happen to enjoy early Pink Floyd, and I hugely admire the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows" (two major and obvious influences on a lot of the music here), and I don't appreciate having them reduced to this. And even when they do throw in a new element, a beat or a sample, it comes off sounding like a bargain-bin acid jazz compilation. What a mess. What a godforsaken mess. I still can't believe that this is the album these two enormously talented men put out. Wait... let me check the label again... Music1283@blogcritics.org Mon, 14 Oct 2002 02:40:02 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2002/10/11/003051.php Kenan HebertAt least we immediately know who to blame for this mess. It's right there on the poster: "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart: a movie about Wilco by Sam Jones." Ah. So it was Sam Jones who made one of the most dishonest and boring movies about rock I've ever seen.Who is Sam Jones? Well, he's a friend of the band, or more likely a desperate, Tweedy-worshipping hanger-on, which is obvious from the movie's idolatrous tone. He's also a photographer, which is obvious from the beautiful cityscapes of Chicago and the long, slo-mo shots of the band walking along the water on a grey day, dressed all in black. Much of the wide-angle photography in the film looks fantastic, and if Sam Jones ever makes an all-Chicago version of Koyaanisqatsi, I'll be there. But that's beside the point. There's a lot - a hell of a lot, in fact - that he does badly. He doesn't realize, for instance, that presenting a challenging viewpoint doesn't necessarily equal being anti-Wilco. We all know the story of how the album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was dropped from its label, Reprise, and languished in limbo for long months before finally coming out on Nonesuch. We all know that the record execs wanted to change the album, and that they are therefore in the wrong, reneging at the last minute on the tacit "creative freedom" deal they had struck with the band before the recording started. And we all know that record execs are bozos. None of this needs to be explicitly pointed out. What we need is some discussion. We do get short interviews with Reprise executives who say vague and expected things about how the record just didn't hit them right, but what we get a metric ton of is Wilco-aggrandizing interviews with David Fricke (senior editor of the most corporate magazine in the universe, Rolling Stone, who has the nerve or the cluelessness to go off about evil executives with their "gold plated cell phones"), and with the band itself, and friends of the band, and even other, more complimentary record executives. This is all dry as hell, and goes on far too long. The movie doesn't seem edited for quality of content, just content. As long as someone is saying something nice about Wilco, it goes in.Even the interviews with the intelligent and well-spoken Tweedy come off sounding like he's interviewing himself, as if it's all rehearsed. A friend is interviewing him, after all. There won't be any hard questions. He's free to talk about himself and his vision and his band as if it's the most important thing in the world, without an ounce of real introspection. This isn't Tweedy's fault, I don't think. Any rock star (egotistical creatures that they are) would jump at the chance at having a whole movie to talk about how great they are, and how put-upon they are. The fault is Jones's for letting him do it. In the act of trying to make Tweedy look good, he ends up making him look more self-involved and self-important than he is. I've heard Tweedy sound very self-effacing at times. Why isn't that in the movie? There's nothing even remotely revelatory about a rock star thinking he's great.And why oh why is Jay Bennett treated like a dog worthy of nothing but kicking? What did this guy do that was so bad? The movie doesn't tell us. In one early scene, he and Tweedy have a misinformed argument about the soundboard, and it's funny because neither man has a clue what he's talking about. They sound like Heckyl and Jeckyl. Then when Jay is expelled from the band, we're supposed to look back on that scene as the reason -- there's certainly no other plain reason, aside from the lingering tension found in most collaborative rock bands. Jones is so single-minded in his veneration of Tweedy, he doesn't even feel the need to explain why Tweedy is right and Jay Bennett is wrong. And then, in the movie's most disgusting scene, he interviews Bennett and gleefully lets him make a jumbled, self-contradicting fool of himself. Well, shit. The guy just got kicked out of the band, and he is still angry and hurt. What did you expect? Poetry? The scene got a cruel laugh from the audience I saw it with, which would be ok, but they didn't laugh when Tweedy talked straight-faced about having his soul ripped out by Reprise, which is arguably a more embarrassing moment. There's more to this Tweedy-Bennett story. My uncharitable guess is that telling it might have made Tweedy look like an asshole, which would be anathema to the point of this movie.This all raises the question: who, exactly, would be bothered if we knew Jeff Tweedy was an asshole? I mean, rock stars are assholes sometimes. It's not a mystery. Power struggles happen, and egos are bruised, and feelings are hurt, and none of this will exactly shock anyone in the audience of this movie. Or will it? Do Wilco fans really see Jeff Tweedy as some kind of kinder, gentler rock star, some sensitive, sulking pretty boy who can't fend for himself? Because Jones certainly does. That's insulting to Tweedy and to the audience, and it makes for a movie so one-dimensional, it's almost unwatchable.Even the main conflict of the movie - band vs. label - is sorely mishandled. We're told that Reprise wanted to make changes to the album. What changes? The band isn't interested to know that, so neither is the movie. I, for one, am. Maybe they wanted to take out some of the more self-indulgent moments of "experimental" noise. Maybe they wanted more of Tweedy's delicate brilliance and less by-rote rocking. Maybe they wanted to make the album better. I doubt it, but we'll never know. And since the movie doesn't tell us what the label wanted to change, it has little right to then assert that the label doesn't know what it's talking about. The working assumption that bands have the right to do whatever they want to do, whenever, and for any amount, is deeply flawed. Say I work for your magazine. Do you not get to edit me, because I am an artist and you have no right to censor art? I can see the bands side in this, I really can, but no strong case is made for their side in the film. Everything is assumed, and nothing is discussed. After seeing this arrogant movie, I was almost willing to side with the label, simply because there's no apparent and logical reason not to.And there is also the grand contradiction - missed by many who have covered the Wilco story - of the money. Wilco slams the label for thinking only about money in their decisions about Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and Fricke chimes in with another hard-to-believe-considering-who-it's-coming-from rant about how music isn't about money, but then the triumph at the end of the film is that they sell the record back to the same parent company whose label dropped them, Time Warner, for three times the amount that it took to record it. That's right - both Reprise, the label that dropped them, and Nonesuch, the label that understood them, are owned by the same massive multinational corporation. This makes the band happy? On the basis of what principle? I'm genuinely baffled. I can only make another uncharitable assumption - Wilco is confused about its own principles.And finally, where is Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in this movie? It's ostensibly the subject, but we hear only very brief snippets of it. Near the beginning, there are a couple of wonderful alternate versions of songs that appear on the record (most notably, "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart"), but much of what we hear of this record is its inception, and not the finished product. The finished product is what is great. The scenes of them making the record are unimpressive, and, sadly, as self-congratulatory as the rest of the movie, pocked with constant reminders of how collaborative and open-minded the band is (the man who says this is later kicked out of the band). Even the extended live sequences miss the mark, focusing on old material that is largely standard four-bar rock and roll, and doesn't even suggest how daring the record in question is. The one old song that truly belongs in the movie, "Misunderstood," is presented for about one minute of its six or seven minute length. Meanwhile, a song off of their first lackluster album "A.M." gets the full treatment, and bores the audience to sleep with its repetitive bombast.The one bright spot in all of this muck is Tweedy himself, and his voice, and his lyrics. One sequence documents a solo acoustic show he plays in Chicago, and it's a stunner. For the first and last time in I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, I was involved in what was going on onscreen. Here is a very talented man, I thought to myself. This man is going places.But the band in general seems to believe its own press, which is a very precarious position to place yourself in, even in private. This movie makes their self-veneration very public, and does no one - not the band, and certainly not us - any service.For another view, see here. Video1218@blogcritics.org Fri, 11 Oct 2002 00:30:51 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2002/10/06/162343.php Kenan HebertThe American Road is approaching middle age. America has always had roads, of course, and even the occasional highway was built in fits and starts between wars, but The Road didn't appear until after WWII, when the country suddenly had the time and the money and, most importantly, the cars to make massive freeway projects both feasible and necessary. When Eisenhower signed the Federal Highway Act of 1956, allocating billions of tax dollars to the most large-scale public works project in history, he consummated a love affair that Americans had been pining over for some time. They had the cars and the space, and now they would get the roads. Together with these roads grew The Road, not a thing but a place, distinctly American in its simultaneous embodiment of desperation and optimism. The Road was not only a place to travel, but a place to be, and sometimes a place to live. This was Jack Kerouac's Road, the vein that spread out over the land connecting everywhere to somewhere, or, more often, nowhere. It was big and wide and expansive. It went on forever. It was a wonder of the modern world, and a temple of worship. Not incidentally, a lot of songs were written about it.Now the American Road is pushing 50, which seems odd. It is such a fixture in our collective consciousness, it seems either much older or much younger, but certainly not the ordinary, pedestrian, contemplative age of 50. Fifty is too old to even pretend to be wild, too young to be charmingly codgerly, and far too young to be timeless. Here in the new century, the Road is embattled by a stultifying sameness, the same McDonald-ization that threatens many of America's greatest cities. It is no longer a place to escape to, to explore, to run to or from or on. It is a place to travel in hermetically sealed comfort, between stops at identical Denny's. It is a place to avoid flying, or at least paying for a plane ticket. If you live in a city, modern life dictates that most of the roads you will see in your life will be choked with other cars, and will hardly represent freedom. The Road's wild years are over. For now, it is stuck looking back to its past, realizing that it's in a sorry state at the moment, and regretting its former addictions and impunities. Someday all we will have left of the expansive and endlessly fascinating American Road is the legend. It's fortunate, then, that some of America's finest artists have taken the trouble to immortalize it. It is with that spirit that I present this, the first installment of Lost Art, a soon-to-be-regular feature on Analog Roam. From thousands of choices, I have selected ten songs that I feel best embody the spirit of something that is slipping away from us. All the leaving and running and wide-eyed exploring that we wish we could do on modern American roads has been done for us in these songs. And while vicarious living may not be the finest sort, at least it's something.1. Little Feat - Willin'Two fixtures of the Road meet in this song: the trucker and the outlaw. The narrator of "Willin'" is proudly both, smuggling cigarettes and Mexicans, drinking and drugging, and getting his job done, all at the same time. It's a strange work ethic, to be sure: "If you give me weed, whites, and wine... I'll be willin' to be movin'." When he says "whites," he's not talking about sheets and underwear. That's good ol' fashioned trucker-grade speed.Few songs so perfectly and plainly combine weariness with optimism. "I've been warped by the rain / Driven by the snow / I'm drunk and dirty, don'tcha know / And I'm still... willin'." In a way, everything you need to know about the oddly determined self-declared underdogs that occupy the better part of North America is right there in that line. There's a bit of bragging thrown in, too, for good measure: "I've been from Tucson to Tucumcari / Tehachapi to Tonopah / Driven every kind of rig that's ever been made." That's both an impressive list of places to have been, and a strange one - what are these places? They are more names than places. He's been from nowhere to nowhere, again and again. Spend enough time on the Road, and that's where you'll end up, too. The difference between the trucker and the rest of us is that he's happy there, and celebrates the place, as if his driving record alone is proof of a life well spent. What could easily have been a sad song about the Road becomes a joyous one when told from the point of view of a man who loves it dearly.2. Bruce Springsteen - State TrooperThe guitar chugs along dutifully at a medium pace, the lyrics echo and fade, and the Road comes into stark, nighttime relief. He's running from something, though he won't say what. "I've got a clear conscience / About the things that I've done." Already you know that whatever he's done can't be good. Judging fom the sound of the song, it's probably pretty grisly. The fact that he doesn't have a license or registration is the least of his problems. This is the ultimate example of the dark side of the Road, a place of temporary and uneasy refuge for people with something big to hide.3. Neil Young and Crazy Horse - White LineOk, so we've covered the trucker and the outlaw, and now the spurned lover. Neil starts out talking about how "You took my love / And put it to the test," and then jumps without unnecessary explanation to the statement, "That ol' white line is a friend of mine / And it's good time we been makin'." He doesn't seem to be going anywhere special. He's not making good time to Chicago, or California. Making good time is a goal in itself, especially when you need to get away from the wrong woman. Meanwhile, the impossible volume of the band churns your ears to butter. A harsh, bitter, overlooked classic.4. The Flying Burrito Brothers - WheelsI remember a recent commercial for some car company (I can't remember which), and the tag line was, "It's not just a car, it's your freedom." There's something sad about that. The Flying Burrito Brothers say, "We've all got wheels to take ourselves away," and they don't even try to mask the sadness and duality behind that freedom. Together with telephones, which help us "say what we can't say," the modern devices we use to connect ourselves can also remove us from others. It's a double edged sword. Is this freedom or alienation? When you "feel your time is almost up" and "destiny is in [your] right hand," one of the greatest freedoms you can enjoy/regret is jumping in your car and driving away. It's all there in the song, from one of the first and best bands to consciously combine rock and country.5. The Allman Brothers Band - Midnight RiderAh, but running can be a rebellious joy, as well. The narrator of this song is giddily defiant: "I'm not gon' let 'em catch me, no." And why should he? "The road goes on forever." The dark tone of "State Trooper" is reversed here, and running from the law is elevated to a thing of beauty, thanks to the always shimmering guitar work of Dickie Betts and Duane Allman, and the deeply soulful intonations of Gregg Allman. The narrator is broke and at the end of his rope, but not scared, and the song is one of the finest examples of highway-as-cathedral. He puts his faith in the Road as another man would put his faith in Jesus. This isn't Southern rock, it's gospel music.6. Simon and Garfunkel - AmericaA song as necessary to this list as it is obvious. If you want America, there's only one place to look: the New Jersey Turnpike. Or if you live on the opposite coast, perhaps Highway 1 would suit you better. Or down south, I-10. America is always there, on any highway you want to take. The sense of being lost expressed so well in the song is an integral part of the experience, but so is wonder and grandiosity. And being out of cigarettes, a problem that "America" shares with Roger Miller's "King of the Road."7. Creedence Clearwater Revival - LodiSometimes the worst punishment is not being on the road. Lodi, California is situated uneasily east of San Francisco and south of Sacramento, in a place that is really no place at all, but a brief stop that, for the narrator this song, turns into a curse. The road is full of these places. If he thinks Lodi is bad, he should try El Campo, Texas sometime. It's a song about being poor as much as anything else - he's "stuck in Lodi" because he's flat fucking broke -- but the Road has always been full of the poor and dispossessed. For every success story or gloriously romanticized account of the joys of traveling or running, there's one poor sucker who just can't seem to hack it in the big, mean world. This song is his story.8. Little Walter - Key to the HighwayCovered at length on Derek and the Domino's Layla album, this Big Bill Broonzy song about leaving gets right to the black heart of the matter. "I'm gon' leave here runnin' / Cos walking's just too slow." Thank God for good Roads. They almost make up for bad women.9. The Grateful Dead - Friend of the DevilThe more obvious Grateful Dead song for this list is "Truckin," but "Friend of the Devil" captures the spirit of unholy alliance with the Road much better. Again we see the theme of running from criminal activity, a motif that pops up so much, one wonders if all American have criminal tendencies. They very well may. But the distinctive thing about this song is its easy-going feel, which buries the tension of what is probably a terrible situation. That's a very hippie thing to do, I have found.10. Ry Cooder - Paris, TexasThe title song from the Wim Wenders film of the same name, this is a Road song only because I think it is. There are no lyrics, and nothing to explicitly link it to the idea of the Road, but it shares many of the same qualities. It is spare and wide and dusty. It echoes. It is musically laconic, as if it's so knowing, it doesn't have to say much to get its point across. It is not a traveler on the Road, it is the Road itself, the place that is not a thing, the cause and the consequence. God bless it.Downloads of these songs are available from Analog Roam. Music1121@blogcritics.org Sun, 6 Oct 2002 16:23:43 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2002/10/06/124948.php Kenan HebertSpainish music rag Rockdelux is celebrating its 200th issue with a list of the 200 Best Albums of the 20th Century. As one commenter points out, "I guess the 20th Century beats the hell out of the 19th Century for albums."The list gets weird at times, being from Europe and all. I've never heard of "BENY MORE EL BARBARO DEL RITMO," and I doubt I'm alone in that. But the list is interesting for the non-canonic stuff that it does include: Laurie Anderson's Big Science, or Robert Wyatt's Rock Bottom. By and large, I love this list. It's daring and different.Talk amongst yourselves. Music1117@blogcritics.org Sun, 6 Oct 2002 12:49:48 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2002/09/25/015622.php Kenan HebertPeter Gabriel's new single and video, "The Barry Williams Show," has a great beat, a tight melody, tremendous production, and it stinks to high heaven. In it, he takes on trash talk shows. How very ten years ago of him. I'm not sure if it's his age or his ivory-tower status, but he comes across as painfully behind the times here, stating the obvious in an obvious way. Couldn't he have made another album about relationships? Because "Secret World" still hits me in the gut. Or, how about a concept album about how it feels to be 52 years old and skirting musical irrelevance with his every breath? That could have been fun, and would almost certainly have been more fitting than singing headlines from a rag he found in a forgotten closet. Hopefully, I'm misplacing my agression, and the rest of the album sounds nothing like this song.On the upside, that creepy grey swirled goatee does win the "Facial Hair of the Year" award, hands down. Music803@blogcritics.org Wed, 25 Sep 2002 01:56:22 EDT