"The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades is out to get us!"

Flowers Never Bend With The Rainfall - Simon & Garfunkel

Through the corridors of sleep
Past the shadows dark and deep
My mind dances and leaps in confusion.
I don't know what is real,
I can't touch what I feel
And I hide behind the shield of my illusion.

So I'll continue to continue to pretend
My life will never end,
And flowers never bend
With the rainfall.

The mirror on my wall
Casts an image dark and small
But I'm not sure at all it's my reflection.
I am blinded by the light
Of God and truth and right
And I wander in the night without direction.

So I'll continue to continue to pretend
My life will never end,
And flowers never bend
With the rainfall.

It's no matter if you're born
To play the King or pawn
For the line is thinly drawn 'tween joy and sorrow,
So my fantasy
Becomes reality,
And I must be what I must be and face tomorrow.

So I'll continue to continue to pretend
My life will never end,
And flowers never bend
With the rainfall.

It knocks you down

There is some music that hits you so hard - that touches your core so deeply - that you cannot logically quantify or qualify the experience. Why, why now, and why this? There is synchronicity at work here, the collective unconscious. It is for this reason above all others that the Beatles are still selling records in record numbers.

I read a music article today that made a lot of sense logically. The argument was that the Beatles became famous and well-loved originally because of the simplicity of their musical/lyrical combinations; their accessibility, their generality, their universality, as opposed to some kind of intangible singularity. Everybody knows what it feels like to want to hold someone's hand, right? Right.

The only hitch in this argument is that they were rather singular as opposed to universal: their story is not common and neither is their music. Even people who aren't "fans" of the Beatles know their music. They know the rhythms, the melody, and the lyrics. If this were due just to simplicity and universality, then most pop songs would fall into the same category. So what was different about the Beatles?

There is something greater at work. I know this sounds like an overstatement of talent, but bear with me for a minute, there is more of an argument to come.

Have you ever met a person in your life who you knew was pushing for a higher consciousness with every inch of their being? They vibrated with their own urgency. Have you ever had a late-night conversation with a stranger that brought you more peace of mind and honest insight than your everyday interactions with your best friends? What about that moment when you are doing the thing you love best of all, and you move into what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi would term a "state of flow"? Or maybe you were reading a book and a sentence made you really think for a long time, and dig for something more that was hiding inside of you. Or maybe a name or an idea followed you around for months, and when you finally came to it - opened yourself to it - you found exactly what you were looking for all along. Or you were almost magnetically drawn to another person, without any reason or sense at all, and yet things happened to work the way you knew they had to all along because you could feel it. These things happen everyday, and it is an impoverished person who does not notice and crave them every moment of their life. There is something greater at work, but it isn't happening far away from you. It's happening inside you and all around you at every moment.

Now the Beatles had a member/members pushing for a higher consciousness - maybe not completely knowingly, and maybe not in those words, but their music vibrates with too high a frequency for that not to be true. There is something universal about it, and it is the same thing that is so special that takes place in every person and living thing. It is the Emersonian Spirit. It doesn't fall into place every time, with every song, but it happens often enough that people start to notice.

You listen to Abbey Road while walking in the rain,
between the trees on the quad that were planted hundreds of years ago,
and will live hundreds of years longer than you if there is any justice in the world,
and you can feel the heartbeat of the universe under your feet,
and just as you notice it,
you also notice that "Golden Slumbers" is mimicking that heartbeat,
like a baby on its mother's chest,
and it progresses with the beat of your feet,
and the tick of the rain on your head,
and the leaves shake with you,
as your back shudders,
and the world is bigger in your mind because of a song in a moment.

That's what makes them great, and it is the same thing that makes any music great. It is an ability to tune into the universe, and discover it in words that anyone can sing along with, and that anyone can understand, and maybe hope to understand better and grow alongside.

Certain things follow me around...

I Second That Emotion - Smokey Robinson and the Miracles


Maybe you want to give me kisses sweet
But only for one night with no repeat
Maybe you'd go away and never call
And a taste of honey is worse than none at all
(oh little girl)


Oh little girl
in that case I don't want no part
I do believe that that would only break my heart
Oh, but if you feel like loving me
if you got the notion
I second that emotion
Said, if you feel like giving me
a lifetime of devotion
I second that emotion

Maybe you think that love would tie you down
You ain't got the time to hang around
Maybe you think that love was made for fools
So it makes you wise to break the rules

Oh little girl
in that case I don't want no part
I do believe that that would only break my heart
Oh, but if you feel like loving me
if you got the notion
I second that emotion
Said, if you feel like giving me
a lifetime of devotion
I second that emotion

Ohgosh August

I cannot possibly make up for my blog-related laziness this summer, but maybe the Muppets can (with a little help from Harry Belafonte of course)?

I've got that Summer soul

Soul Man by Sam & Dave

My new anthem

Jay Brannan: Covers for Thought

Earlier this year I posted a Jay Brannan song ("Can't Have It All"), not knowing that he was due to release a new album this year. Well, kind of new. The album, entitled In Living Cover, is composed almost entirely of folk and pop cover songs. There are two originals by Mr. Brannan: the sad and gorgeous (and heartening with the lines "She'll feel the burn, and make the choice to put the fire in her voice..." among others) "Beautifully" is a gem that makes me wish and wish for a full album of originals, while "Drowning" is lush and deep, cushioned by chilling waves of piano that send shudders down my spine as I listen.

What about the covers? Here is a break down, song by song:

"Say It's Possible" (originally performed by Terra Naomi) is a soft and sweet cover. The words "Armageddon Lullaby" come to mind as I listen, and I find Jay's voice so soothing and also so sad. Terra Naomi's original has a good dose of Natalie Imbruglia-style anger and frustration, but Jay Brannan's is vulnerable and weary. (Side note: I am listening to this song on a particularly dark and dreary day, and I would not recommend this setting for In Living Cover to most people. Wait for the warm sun and an aura of earned laziness, or maybe even restlessness, so you can appreciate the sound fully, without contemplating morbidly.)

"All I Want" (originally performed by Joni Mitchell) is grounded by Jay Brannan's voice, or maybe not quite grounded, but channeled and floated along a streamlined path to your ears. Joni's voice is flighty and capricious on almost all of her songs, and her guitar work follows, bouncing along behind her melodic twanging whisper-wails. Brannan, thankfully, does not attempt to cover in the same spirit, but brings his on strengths to the table to lend the song a steady form and pace. It all sounds wonderfully heartfelt and romantic, and puts me in the mood to listen to both songs.

"Blowin' In The Wind" (originally performed by Bob Dylan) is a very different animal, and although I appreciated the strengths of the Jay Brannan cover (not the least of which is a vocal delivery that enables the listener to hear and understand all of the beautiful lyrics without trouble), I do miss the growl and harmonica of the original. It is very difficult to cover Dylan, and Brannan succeeds in many ways, but in the end his form and delivery are almost too pristine for this song. The ugliness is missing, and the imperfections that give the song body, but it is still beautiful and heartfelt. Crisp, clean, and clear.

"The Freshmen" (originally performed by The Verve Pipe) is one of those remembered songs from childhood radio-listening; the kind that I sang along to (as well as I could without really knowing the words) but never understood, and then never really heard again, except maybe in passing on a radio station that plays hits from the last three decades. It is strange to hear a cover, because the song is both old and new to me, and brings together that person/version of myself who loved Polly Pocket and that person/version of myself who knows about the movie Shortbus, and understands at least most of the references. It's a big leap! The cover is very similar to the original, although Brannan makes the piano the most important musical voice in the song, and so the pop-rock aspect is lost with the electric guitars. Still a little muddled by the song (I am the kind of person who can fail to understand something for years until I read about it) I looked up the lyrics, and well, it is a sad sad song. I don't think I ever really want to listen to this song again, but if I did, I would definitely pick the Jay Brannan version. His forté is making sad things beautiful.

"Good Mother" (originally performed by Jann Arden) moves far from the early 1990s sound that so epitomizes the original (you know, that short time when artists attempted to use synthesizers tastefully after the excesses of the 1980s, only to learn that the very nature of a synthesizer makes it difficult to use tastefully, it is meant to be so obvious and futuristic-sounding). Luckily, Jay Brannan understands this reality, and synthesizers are not to be heard in his cover, while the vocals highs and lows that made the original worth listening to, are tastefully brought to life by Brannan.

"Both Hands" (originally performed by Ani Difranco) surprises me, because it is the only song on the album that breaks the Brannan mold and still succeeds in sounding delightful different from the original. I have to admit that I am not a big Ani Difranco fan, and I did not particularly enjoy this song before hearing the cover. Jay Brannan uses the dramatic layered affect of a kind of a cappella instrumentation, where the vocals that are laid over each other create a hum that guides the whole song. This cover reminds me of the best work of Imogen Heap ("Hide and Seek," etc.), with fewer synthesizer affects, and the power of the human voice to lend weight to Difranco's beautiful lyrics.

"Zombie" (originally performed by The Cranberries) is a song by one of my favorite bands, but it took no convincing for me to fall in love with this cover. In the original, the rock orchestra pummels you as you listen to Dolores O'Riordan's controlled and ethereal voice laying out the foundation for a story of the strife in Ireland. Jay Brannan deletes the orchestral aspect, retaining only a few strings that can sketch out the aftermath of the epic original. His voice, however, retains the intensity of the original, and carries some of the deep regrets of war of all kinds that made the original song so powerful.

That makes an album, an album that you can hear in its entirety through YouTube (via Jay Brannan), and that you can see performed across the United States, and in parts of Europe through this summer and into the fall. I'll be listening.

"America" - Hugh Laurie & Stephen Fry

Anyone up for a little lounge metal?

I was searching far and wide for some interesting covers of metal classics. I started with Judas Priest's "You've Got Another Thing Coming" on The Hype Machine, and I came across this artist most adorably named Hellsongs. I skip along to "Paranoid" by Black Sabbath, and the name comes up again. Why not give this cuddly-sounding band a try?, I thought. The amusing part is that the band does sound kind of cuddly. They are a Swedish, Metal, lounge, cover band.

They take the lyrics and basic melodic structure of the most loud, rambunctious, infectious, and angry metal songs, and they turn them into piano/guitar based pop songs. Now, I know quite a few music fans who would call this sacrilege, and maybe it does detract from the intention that is behind a lot of metal music (maybe it's like taking "London Calling" and having Fergie do a cover where she spells out the words "London" and "calling" irritatingly frequently). I personally find something precious and sweet about the whole idea of taking a song that is supposed to be dark and making it sound lighthearted. There is no way I could stand to listen to this music all the time, but I don't hate it. It kind of reminds me of Sesame Street's wonderful dips into Indie music culture with guest appearances by R.E.M. singing "Shiny Happy Monsters" and Feist teaching your children how to count (if you haven't seen this, then you are missing out: )

In this vein, Hellsongs covers Megadeth's classic "Symphony of Destruction" with pop song prowess and a nice level of respect for the original. I like the creativity:

Symphony of Destruction

"She's Got You High" by Mumm-ra

This song appears in the new movie 500 Days of Summer, which looks to be my favorite movie of the summer (and I haven't even seen it yet!)

This is too much fun not to post!

Gives You Hell - The All-American Rejects

I wake up every evening
With a big smile on my face
And it never feels out of place.
And you're still probably working
At a 9 to 5 pace
I wonder how bad that tastes

When you see my face
Hope it gives you hell, hope it gives you hell
When you walk my way
Hope it gives you hell, hope it gives you hell

Now where's your picket fence love?
And where's that shiny car?
Did it ever get you far?
You never seemed so tense, love
Never seen you fall so hard
Do you know where you are?

Truth be told I miss you
and truth be told I'm lying

When you see my face
hope it gives you hell, hope it gives you hell
When you walk my way
hope it gives you hell, hope it gives you hell

If you find a man that's worth a damn and treats you well
Then he's a fool, you're just as well, hope it gives you hell
Hope it gives you hell

Tomorrow you'll be thinking to yourself
Where did it all go wrong?
But the list goes on and on

Truth be told I miss you
and truth be told I'm lying

When you see my face
hope it gives you hell, hope it gives you hell
When you walk my way
hope it gives you hell, hope it gives you hell

If you find a man that's worth a damn and treats you well
Then he's a fool, you're just as well, hope it gives you hell

Now you'll never see
What you've done to me
You can take back your memories
They're no good to me
And here's all your lies
you look me in the eyes
With the sad, sad look
That you wear so well

When you see my face
hope it gives you hell, hope it gives you hell
When you walk my way
hope it gives you hell, hope it gives you hell

If you find a man that's worth a damn and treats you well
Then he's a fool, you're just as well, hope it gives you hell

When you see my face
hope it gives you hell, hope it gives you hell (hope it gives you hell)
When you walk my way
hope it gives you hell, hope it gives you hell (hope it gives you hell)

When you hear this song and you sing along well you'll never tell
And you're the fool, I'm just as well, hope it gives you hell
When you hear this song I hope that it will give you hell
You can sing along I hope that it puts you through hell

"Love Will Tear Us Apart (Live)" - Nouvelle Vague

Staring at a flying monkey in my local library

I should be hard at work, seeing as I have set aside this time to finish some compulsory summer projects, but instead I find myself staring out the windows willing the giant rain clouds to hold their rains back just until I take my fifteen minute walk to work (my raincoat is good, but it cannot withstand deluge after deluge, especially during the summer months). There also happens to be this odd flying monkey installment art placed ever so precariously on the ledge next to me, and I keep waiting for it to jump off and fly away.

If you are in a similar position, where procrastination has gotten out of hand, I would recommend taking this potentially "wasted" time, and applying it another activity. Maybe even listening to a new polka album? Maybe?

If you choose to take my advice, I have just the polka album for you: Apolkalypse Now by Polkastra. Looking at the iTunes reviews I learned two things about this music: 1) it is incredibly fun to listen to, and very family friendly; and 2) most people think they hate polka music! This is such a sad realization for me. Granted, I have never been a huge fan, but I love klezmer music and gypsy jazz, and polka has always kind of pulled in a close third on that list of the eccentric and otherworldly.

For the polka beginner, Apolkalypse Now is a wonderful, lighthearted introduction to an extremely playful genre of music. Take for example "Clarinet Polka" which falls as song number five on the album, and which you or your children may recognize as the backing music for the "Candy Mountain Cave" song from that YouTube classic Charlie [the Unicorn] goes to Candy Mountain. But seriously, this stuff is good! "Light As A Feather Polka" reminds me most strongly of the circus music that plays during the clown acts, and sometimes when the parade is going on near the end of the show (I have been to my fair share of circuses). "Anta, Romnyev, Mure Roulya" is a slinky, sexy, polka march that sounds like a kind of desert soundtrack. "Flying Gypsy Polka" is a gorgeous accordion and string-heavy whirl that will certainly have you foot-tapping (even when you are in that "quiet study" section of the library, and the woman studying for the bar exam next to you is shooting dirty looks in your direction. Hey, maybe she could use a little injection of Polkastra to jump start her studying!)

Pop music, or pop art?

Girl at school:

Yeah, they were playing M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes" at that party last night, and then all of a sudden it changed to Lady Gaga. It was like 'cha-ching'...'I want to take a ride on your disco stick!'

(pause to eat a forkful of tater tots)
Me:

Who's Lady Gaga?

...and that was how I was introduced to the latest and most viral reincarnation of 1980's synthPOP (and the pop should most definitely be capitalized) in the vein of Madonna's "Vogue" with just the right amount of glam rock tossed in the mix to make something with a little edge. After that barely conversation, I forgot about Lady Gaga until last Friday when I was riding around town with some friends and the song "Poker Face" came on the radio. I revisited that morning in the dining commons with a repeated moment of ignorance:

Me:

Is this P!nk?

Friend:

Nooo...it's Lady Gaga...

Again, I would have left myself in blissful ignorance, had it not been for the overwhelming factors that have forced me to cultivate an emotional response to this latest musical craze. In other worlds, this girl is following me around!

Just yesterday I had a conversation with a good friend about how her coworker is both a huge Phoenix fan and one of those Lady Gaga fans who rocks out with glow sticks, bejeweled and face-painted, in the front row (actually, that is unfair. I am not sure that he does any such thing, that just happened to be the image my mind concocted mid-conversation). This morning, I was on Slate and I found this article: How smart is Lady Gaga? by Jonah Weiner. It was the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back.

Here is the section that did it for me (from the article linked above):

Lady Gaga is something of an anomaly: a pretentious pop starlet. To hear her tell it, she isn't the anonymous hookup facilitator you might assume from her robotically decadent techno hits but, rather, a savvy media manipulator engaged in an elaborate, Warholian pop-art project. She sprinkles interviews with references to Warhol's "deeply shallow" aphorism, David Bowie, Leigh Bowery, and The Night Porter. Her outlandish, architectural outfits are meant to evoke the avant-garde designs of Thierry Mugler and Hussein Chalayan. She even has her own Factory-style crew of collaborators, which she calls the Haus of Gaga. That none of this is readily apparent in her actual songs might be part of the point. Her pretentiousness—the heady name-dropping, the high-concept video, the wild get-ups—hangs halolike around her music, encouraging us to consider the songs in a different and more radiant light.

You have to wade through the name-dropping (any hints here that Lady Gaga could be pretentious?) and the hyperbolic - *cough cough* beautifully ironic - descriptions of the superstar creation process to find the references to the actual music - and that seems to be the point here. If she is as intelligent as Jonah Weiner is implying in his article, if she is not only a pop starlet, but a savvy businesswoman and "artist" to boot, then she is bullshitting in a style that is absolutely Andy Warhol. My question is: what is the point?

I am not trying to dis the proprietor of "pop art," but, well I guess I kind of am. Maybe you lovely readers can guess that I am not the biggest fan of Warhol as an artist, and my reasons for disliking his art are basically all of the reasons why they are considered art. The point of his work was to be superficial, commercial, insubstantial in many ways, and also to make money. He achieved all of these goals in some sense. Now, some people will argue that his work was social commentary, but I argue back that if you look at the ways in which he lived his life, he was not being particularly sarcastic or ironic. He did like "plastic people," or he certainly spent a lot of time around them if he did not enjoy their company. He was a rampant consumer, and both pretentious and superficial in his actions and words.

Back to Lady Gaga. If she is attempting to make music that embraces the Warholian aesthetic, then she is succeeding in many ways. Embracing fame, money, and superficiality in her music, she has grown in popularity by assuming some features of pop music that have succeeded through the years (disco, synth, glam rock) while bringing in aspects of today's most popular sounds. She carries the brokenness, bitterness, and sauciness of P!nk into "Poker Face" (and I am not just trying to make myself sound less musically ignorant. Listen closely, and you will hear it as well). She also plays up the edge that Katy Perry and Britney Spears cultivate with their hits ("I Kissed A Girl" and "If U Seek Amy" respectively). This is an intelligent thing for a businesswoman to do, and if you subscribe to Warhol's belief that business is the greatest manifestation of art, then you can consider The Fame and all of its subsequent hype a great manifestation of art.

There is a key difference between Lady Gaga and Warhol, and it leads me to the central point of this entire post. It is this: Lady Gaga - even with all of her musical and artistic references - is very much a creature of 2009. Part of the reason she has succeeded in creating interest in her own masturbatory explorations of fame and fortune is that she does have that business intelligence that can be traced back to Warhol, along with an ironic attachment to seemingly deeper themes (as Weiner points out in the article above, she compares love to the exploitative relationships between stars and paparazzi in the song "Paparazzi." What he fails to mention is that she does this while exploiting the relationship between fan and star). Still, I trace her origins and aesthetic to a kind of "pop art" that has really exploded in our Internet Age: pornography. All of those artistic characteristics that can be tied to Warhol, can also be tied to pornography - and I would argue that it is far more monetarily successful (and therefore more artistically successful in Warhol's terms) than Warhol's pop art. In this way, Lady Gaga may outplay Warhol in his own game - by personifying and playing up the most exploitative, superficial, and above all popular "pop art" now in existence.



Someone commented that the beginning of this video for "Paparazzi" reminds them of "soft-core porn." I would argue that Lady Gaga's entire aesthetic rests on a pornographic foundation, and that this is only an appropriately graphic extension of that theme.

"The House of the Rising Sun" - The Animals

The song is wonderful.

The matching suits look horribly uncomfortable.

Alone in the universe

With the first melodic chords of "Division" - the introductory song to Moby's latest release, Wait for Me - I heard sounds both eerily familiar, comfortable even, and strikingly of the moment. I suppose these characteristics are not mutually exclusive: comfort and present mindedness can exist on the same plane spiritually, so why not musically? Still, what I hear in this new album is a lovingly crafted melding of sounds with the genius of a symphony.

Like a symphony, this album requires attentiveness and an application of time that allows the music fan to listen to it in its entirety. Although each "song" is a gem on its own, their individual beauty is magnified when the album is played whole. In the age of singles flying out of the cash machines of pop music, this is an anachronistic album that revisits the age of rock operas and progressive themed albums.

While listening to Wait for Me for the first time, I found myself thinking that it was an album deserving of its own movie - a movie written and shot to emphasize the fact that there is a story being told in this music. The second time around, I rethought my position: this music does not require a visual counterpart, although that would add a different kind of depth to the process of listening. Instead, this album deserves focus and attentive listening. It is a Dark Side of the Moon for 2009, embracing the enormity and loneliness of life with melodic echoes off cave walls, and metaphorical odes to dying stars. There is something here that captures warped and fragmentary glimpses of reality, almost as if Moby was recording and writing in a kind of audio carnival mirror. As you listen, you begin to discover more things about the album. It has a tendency to strike a balance between an immensely calming tone, almost to the point of dull numbness and apathy, followed by points of ecstasy that tumble out of lines of growing anxiety. It takes an artist to achieve such emotional highs and lows with music that is the epitome of a velvet hammer, and after listening to Wait for Me I am convinced that Moby is just that kind of artist.

Listen to Wait for Me in its entirety @ NPR - All Songs Considered: Wait for Me - Moby

"Lust For Life" - Girls

Isolophobia: Fear of solitude.

(Watch this video in HD. It makes all the difference.)

"The Hat (LIVE)" - Ingrid Michaelson

I knitted you a hat all blue and gold
To keep your ears warm from the Binghamton cold.
It was my first one and it was too small.
It didn't fit you at all, but you wore it just the same.

I remember the first time we danced.
I remember tunneling through the snow like ants.
What I don't recall is why I said,
"I simply can't sleep in this tiny bed with you anymore.".

I should tell you that you were my first love.

So it's Christmas time, it's been three years.
And someone else is knitting things for your ears.

I have come to learn I'll only see you interrupting my dreams at night
And that's alright. And that's alright. And that's alright. And that's alright.

I should tell you that you were my first love.

And it's alright. And it's alright. And it's alright.

(And it's alright) We were seventeen again together.
(And it's alright) We were seventeen again together.
(And it's alright) We were seventeen again together.

I should tell you that you were my first love.
I should tell you that you were my first love.

We were seventeen again.
We were seventeen again.
We were seventeen again.

Not to prematurely call the race, but

I feel like on Veckatimist Grizzly Bear is picking up where the Beach Boys left off on Pet Sounds. What do you think?

Here's a side-by-side comparison of "Two Weeks" and "God Only Knows":