Lou Reed - The Blue Mask

I think the second track of an album, and the second verse of a song, and the second line of a verse, should usually bring extra weight, as it comes after the listener has settled in but before they can drift away.

Though it has long been one of my favorite albums, today I can’t figure out why Reed made most of the choices I notice on The Blue Mask. “The Gun”, repeating the line “carrying a gun” over and over, is the only song I can understand, but it is about such a twisted bunch of stuff that it still won’t make it onto a list or anything.

“Women”, the second track, succeeds at grabbing the attention and the bass in this song is still the awesomest thing on the album, but today the bass seems overdone, too harmonically complex and muddy, and the lyrics (“I love women, I think they’re great…”) seem like what you would write while conferring with your psychologist.

On the other hand, I still remember most of these songs even though I lost my cassette dub ten years ago and just now found it to hear again. I was a bit disappointed, though, because I remembered the song “The Power of Positive Drinking” being on this album - that’s a great song too, and one which I will probably be utterly flummoxed by should I ever hear it again.

  • DianaSkip Spence

Alexander Spence - Oar

To explain this album’s wild incoherence and striking directness, the assembled personages generally take up the skip-spence-moby-grape-went-crazy-fire-axe-hotel-door-motorcycle narrative. Who needed to commit to tape before being himself committed to life beyond the fringe, exhaling his final gasp of accumulated genius, and his friends let him do exactly what he wanted to, their love mixed with fear. As much as that narrative may tempt us, however, in whatever context, from Syd Barrett to Daniel Johnston, it fails to tell us what mysterious possibility makes a few mad ramblings so fruitful, while there are plenty more fools out there just dusting the wind.

I want to think rather that a certain clear and strong frame of mind prefers not to polish every speck of ruin away from a piece of once-perfect marble dug up. At bottom we love the noise because we’re sick of dredging ourselves, and no amount of new spotty garbage layered upon crafted perfection can recreate the burnt carcass of original sin.

Insanity is sometimes just a cover for genius left untampered, and too bad if it is then relied on for forming expectations. We let these people have one unmixed drink from the well, and then write their names on a list. It’s a better fate than quietly suffocating under the scrutinizing temperance of people who mean well. Listening to Barrett’s official post-Floyd albums is like watching a man three nights into his last week in hell, as the nightly news dresses him up for an interview. Opel, on the other hand, shows Barrett as he ponders down into himself.

Or is it Skip the madman… He terrifies his friends even without an axe, and Wal-Marted strangers are dead on with their screwed-sideways stares. Craft is easy to love precisely because it reconfirms a comfortable position in society, it provides a place to hang our expectations while we visit someone’s inner life. He has a coat rack, so how dangerous can he be?

Here on Oar, I think the songs, which can dredge the hippie marsh a bit too thickly at times, could be just another bit of music without the haywire performances. It’s the stumbling wince of the guitars and drums at war, combined with the weight of Spence’s singing, with its 2 AM train station opposite-bench staredown.

This is where the beauty of composed music really sits. In the interval between when the idea is formed and when it is executed, a dozen different impressions apply to the same work, all of which at once strike the listener’s own bundled frames of reference. The actual work is a collection of mutually reflecting possible works.

For example, the mixed-up meters of “Diana” create tension and failure that the song itself seems to try to avoid. It’s as though in a moment of lucidity Spence polished away the songwriting’s dirty beginnings, but when it came time to record, that lucidity had passed. The song has a sort of swollen instrumental tag that should release just before the chorus comes back again, but in practice it just retreats. You can hear what he imagined and expected, but also what he ended up with, which is going to sound like a ridiculous failure to almost any pair of ears. Ridiculous failure which still comes around for one more stab at that guitar lick.

Taylor Swift - Speak Now

Though it is a mark of poor character, and probably unkind, I hereby rant against the pervasive claim that Taylor Swift is a songwriter. Hopefully I am where’s-waldoed into an army of detractors, although I have not seen evidence that a wall of spears is welling up behind my “charge!”. Faced with impending disagreeable consensus, I am compelled to act contrarily, to my own detriment, and likely to yours.

Her “great accomplishment” is not in writing songs, but in manipulating popular culture. She does not have “the skill of a songwriter beyond her years”, although she clearly has sucker-punched several writers who ought to be beyond her years.

Now, of course she is not a Dylan, Joni, Bill Callahan or Lisa Germano, nor should we listen only to the deep and / or dark. Her clear predecessor in pop-country is Shania Twain. While Swift has nothing to write about, beyond her immediate behaviors and impressions, Twain has endlessly sought some unification with the universal. “Gonna Getcha Good” is a song which depends for its effect on my own inherent joy, while “Dear John” requires me to vicariously invest in Swift’s latest dalliances - yet her observations of these travails stop at letters and river-banks. Only Twain could write a song about secretly planning to wed like “No One Needs to Know”, entirely personal yet utterly accessible - “I want the bells to ring, the choir to sing, the white dress the guests the cake the car the whole darn thing, but no one needs to know right now. I’ll tell him someday, some way, somehow, but I’m gonna keep it a secret for now.” Swift’s marriage-song here, “Speak Now”, is frustratingly specific and, to boot, sulkingly bland - “I sneak in and see your friends, and her snotty little family all dressed in pastel.” Even if we identify with Swift’s rapidly spoiling “other-girl” subject, she does not transcend the image, but reinforces it. Twain is full of uncertain hope, Swift of overconfident disdain.

Further, listening to Swift’s music and then abruptly switching to Twain, you can understand the utter mastery with which Twain and Mutt Lange approached the record making process. In comparison Swift’s recording just sounds like music. Yet this too is regarded by the assembled personages of taste as some great success.

Take even a cautiously produced Twain/Lange song like “No One Needs to Know”, which is essentially a straight country song with little of the synthetic gloss beaming up from Nashville on later productions. It positively explodes with inventive, effective music. There is a harmonica solo! What could it mean that Lange harmonizes these lyrics? The song’s acoustic guitars could happily loop unaccompanied for several minutes. In comparison “Speak Now” sounds cloying, like an festive interlocutor who has run out of things to say but wants to hold your attention.

Simply put, Swift is generally self-indulgent, from her over-long track times to her topics, to her shtick as the fragile country princess, to the artificially crafted singing voice. She’s obviously intelligent and aware - perhaps she will someday take up music and put down self-congratulation. For now, her success seems symptomatic of a general hopelessness and lowering of standards in America.

So I waste a bit of time ranting against the latest attempt to create a universal moment. Of course I’m frustrated - if the beyond-her-years crowd can be believed, every new pop-country singer-songwriter seems on the verge of replacing Shania’s missing work, but I have yet to hear them succeed.

Tim McGraw - “Don’t Take The Girl”

It’s just a classic song. It may be a perfect country song.

The chords and melody are typical of country, the lyrics are precise and recharacterise one line in three contexts, “Don’t take the girl.”

The question of its perfection regards the line, “Give it a whirl”. The narrator, now romantically involved with a girl he once implored his father not to bring on a fishing trip, is mugged after a date at the movies. He offers the delinquent a number of things in return for the safety of “the girl”. It’s quite touching, until, having handed over the keys to his car, he suggests that the fellow “give it a whirl.”

It’s a stunning moment of gaiety in the middle of a scene of horror. Imagine being mugged, handing over your wallet, and saying, “There’s a two-for-one card in there for Denny’s. I recommend the Moons Over My Hammy sandwich.”

Other rhymes that could be used:
“a gift from my daddy Merle” or Earle
“It’s shiny new like a pearl”
even “watch the speedometer whirl” would be less goofy… ok not that one.

It’s not an easy rhyme, but given time something else would do. Why then does McGraw make this choice? Perhaps he is intentionally lightening the mood. The next verse places the girl in a life threatening childbirth situation; perhaps the song needs to hold back until then.

But even so, an entirely different concept may be better for the second verse than “Give it a whirl”. I believe the second verse should be about a competitor for the girl’s affections, someone who could be captain of the football team and have his own car, maybe a friend of the narrator. In fact, in that telling, “give it a whirl” fits, because it is in a less dire context. The “other guy” theme must actually have been considered and rejected, but why?

Madonna - True Blue


(hear “Papa Don’t Preach)

Madonna - True Blue

Surprisingly, given the lasting effect of Like A Virgin and in particular its title track, True Blue is a much better album, although its title track confusingly bland. The hits are generally better constructed. If they are less memorable it is because they are perhaps not as shocking, but shock wears out. If Papa Don’t Preach, Open Your Heart, Live To Tell, True Blue, and La Isla Bonita are lower high points, White Heat, Where’s the Party and Jimmy, Jimmy are higher lows, and as a result the album seems like it was made to listen to, rather than just to further Madonna’s career like Like a Virgin’s virginal slugfest.

These songs were written by someone thinking, though not quite thinking of anything more important than pop music. Out in the world of knowledge, it must be common that Papa Don’t Preach is a response to Billie Jean, given how directly inverted is its theme. As such it’s effect in the culture must have been incredible, counterbalancing the cocky force of male dominated pop music. That the song touches on sex and religion (even obliquely on abortion, as if to show that controversy’s ante can always be upped) puts it right in the heart of Madonna’s 80’s persona, which is the only persona that can be called truly hers. While Like A Virgin must instantly spring to mind when you think of Madonna songs, it doesn’t catch her religious spirit, which begins of course with her name.

Papa Don’t Preach has a truly obscene bass line. It sounds like the sort of smarmy fellow that a father would warn his daughter about. (I mean the one panned hard right, which almost sounds like a keyboard slap bass simulation…)

Meanwhile Madonna manages to sing like a genuinely perplexed human being stuck between confronting, pleading with, and seeking advice from her father, especially on the line “I’ve made up my mind”. The lyric “Maybe we’ll be all right” speaks deeply to this confusion, especially when found among the mostly determined, declarative song.

The ambiguity of the word “baby” is finally put to use in a popular song. She says “I’m not a baby” in the beginning. I remember that as a naive 10-year-old I only heard her speaking of her boyfriend with the line “I’m keeping my baby”. “My friends keep telling me to give it up” - the relationship? A child? Or is it just a slang expression for not taking something too seriously? One ambiguous term would be suggestive, but both together make it clearly intentional. While the general consensus is that the song is about abortion, there is no specific determinant in the lyrics that it is.

What is going on with rhyming on this album? Open Your Heart rhymes “me” with “key” with “me” with “key”, Papa Don’t Preach rhymes “baby” with “baby”.

True Blue and La Isla Bonita are the sort of genre pieces which people rely on when they don’t have better ideas. Here, at least Madonna manages not to be embarrassing, like, for example, Shania Twain’s “Juanita” on Up(!) or Bill Callahan’s fiddle-faddle on Woke On A Whaleheart. The reason these songs succeed is that Madonna’s voice has evolved into a tool which, though it can never be as joyous as on her first album, can sort of flatly interpret everything that comes through it without getting in the way. While it’s not in itself a great sound, she must be seen as a genius for flattening it instead of trying - and failing - to increase it in the manner of your average egotistical singer of popular genres.

Madonna - Like A Virgin

A pop album like this one is - or should be - a kind of black hole, warping everything around itself by pulling it all into itself. You can’t even see it clearly because what light isn’t consumed is bent. Before it reaches you, any sign of the album has passed through decades, spurring reactions and derivatives.

Madonna isn’t really a good enough singer or writer to sustain the weight of a collapsed galaxy of influences. Though the vocals sound uncannily close to being autotuned (two decades before Auto-Tune existed, though perhaps a manual pitch shifter was used), the tools of the day were not as up to the task of fabricating tone in the studio as modern tools. Indeed they generally help develop the labored, hard-working Madonna style that would come to be her trademark delivery, as opposed to the almost unthinking sound of her first record.

Without the culture reinforcing her claims to popular adulation, the album rises and falls on the strength of the songs, which are occasionally brilliant, but which surprisingly often can be quite boring. Other than Material Girl, the title track, and Dress You Up - and Into The Groove, which was actually a B-side - the songs pretty much just retread tired cliches, lyrically and melodically. Of course, those four songs are incredible, and did a great job reinforcing the 80’s culture’s assessment of Madonna.

Her debut also had a ridiculously bad song or two, like “I Know It”, but there she sounded like she didn’t care, where here the pretense attempts to raise songs which would be better left low.

Now, I am not entirely against filler, but it should be the fun part of the album. Neutral Milk Hotel’s In The Airplane Over The Sea isn’t all hole and no filler either, but when they aren’t dropping classics they’re off on some wild interesting tangent.

Bobby Charles - Bobby Charles

Decent songwriting. I like “Long Face” and “I Must Be In A Good Place Now”.

Bobby Conn - The Golden Age

Ironic like a starched white shirt. Wild Jim O’Rourke production with lots of instruments, typical of the O’Rourke sound of that period, I guess.

Syd Barrett - Opel

Great weird songs. The lyrics are expressive and imagistic without sounding arbitrary. This is very difficult. There’s a tendency to make “poetry” lyrics, by throwing in a few references to atmospheric phenomena or using synechdoche and metonymy. What is necessary is to have significance - a word can’t be used simply because it makes some image, it must mean something.

Andres Segovia - The Segovia Collection disc 2

I like this composer Federico Mompou - in the past I would have bought his work (sheet music) immediately, now I think rather of transcribing it. I don’t love Segovia’s tone the way I thought I would - I don’t remember loving it when I used to listen to him, but since then my impression of good classical guitar tone has been affected by the tone in Antonioni’s movie The Passenger. Listening to that now, I have the impression that part of what characterizes it is not the guitar at all, but wow and flutter from the tape recording. This Segovia collection has been remastered, which would attempt to remove any residual effects of the recording process, details which in my view are as part of the character of that music as the performance.

The Flaming Lips - Zaireeka

sample and method

I finally succumbed to the temptation to go against Wayne Coyne’s instructions regarding this 4 CD album - listen with 4 CD players, and four persons to synchronize the players, making the music come from four sources, and then reveling in the chaos of play-button finger failure. I remember buying the album soon after it was released, in 1997, and sheepishly trying a disc or two, but mostly I’ve waited patiently for opportunity. Opportunity is like the guy on the street who takes dope-fiends’ money, says “wait here”, and then goes up a flight of stairs.

I wouldn’t characterize these 13 years as needing will power, because listening to their next album, The Soft Bulletin, I found it sort of uninvolving, so that the lure of the great unheard Flaming Lips album was lessened.

I wanted to be able to hear things on different speakers, so I set up two stereo pairs, one on each side of the room. Then I thought of Zaireeka, still shinily waiting on the shelf. Instead of just routing each disc in mono to one speaker, I sent each disc to two: disc 1 to speakers one and two, disc 2 to two and three, disc 3 to three and four, etc. Essentially I turned it into a mere “surround sound” album, although this album uses multiple sources much more creatively than what is typical. I would greatly prefer to have a group of people play the album correctly, but I have never known enough interested people simultaneously enough. Sucks because it’s such a great concept.

Basically, the album KICKS ASS.

I can’t stress enough how wild and interesting it is. Crazy noises come from everywhere and interlock across the discs in all kinds of ways. It has the effect of a Flaming Lips album, and the songwriting is not that different from The Soft Bulletin, but where the songwriting bears maybe 65 percent of the burden of that album, here the Lips are mostly doing what they do best.