Growing Up Is Getting Old*

The thing is, especially if you’ve become little older, is that you probably prefer the music that first got you excited about listening to music. Over the course of your years, you’ve had “phases” and “progressed” but if Led Zeppelin was your first love- you’re going to want to buy the next re-packaged, re-issued box set anthology with DVD.

I believe Bob Dylan’s Desire was one of the first records I ever spun by choice (among Simon and Garfunkle, Neil Diamond, Billy Joel and Elton John and because these were the records in the house that weren’t Dan Fogleberg). I still love Bob Dylan.

I also soon fell in love with Neil Young (by way of CSN&Y). And over the last month I’ve been harassing anyone who will listen about the respective merits of the albums Rust Never Sleeps and Live Rust (the former is better).

Thereafter I realized that classic rock rocked and, as a teen, when I realized that I was primarily listening to the music of my parent’s generation I got into “alternative” and “grunge”.

It began to get confusing and messy. I got real into jam bands (I know, I know) and jazz. I was convinced that the only music worth listening to was music where the performer was a virtuoso. In college (of course) I discovered punk and indie rock and managed to couple it with an obnoxious pretension and belief that obscurity equaled merit.

I like to believe I’ve become some shadow of an adult these days and I like to believe all of that past has come to give me a pretty wide overview of pop music, its history and a decent ability to judge what I like. I’ve come to realize that I shouldn’t really be trying to impress anybody with what I listen to (as few are impressed and those who are may not be those whose respect I necessarily want) and that, when it boils down to it, every genre has those who excel at it and they are in the minority. If you only listen to punk rock, you’re going to listen to a lot of bad punk rock and the same goes for jam bands. The trick may be to listen to the top of the heap from every genre.

But I can feel it. The tug of my tired, old ears to only listen to Dylan, Young, Pavement and Nirvana and tell everybody all other music sucks. With the exception of Love As Laughter (who are essentially Neil Young on Sub Pop) and The Hold Steady (an amalgamation of pretty much my entire musical history), I’ll just succumb to the belief that rock and roll simply lost it’s way after 1999.

What’s weirder still is that I’ve even started to wax nostalgic for bands I never really even listened to that much. I’ve been playing a lot of Mudhoney lately and really feeling like it’s 1995 but I barely listened to them growing up and totally preferred Pearl Jam who I don’t ever listen to anymore. I realize that over time, I’ve perfected my mind’s image of my past and the truth is: Pearl Jam just wasn’t as cool as Mudhoney and so my memory’s pulled a switcheroo (truth be told, regardless of memory’s manipulation, it’s also just simply more enjoyable to listen to Superfuzz Bigmuff than Ten).

And this is the battle we wage with age (that was an unfortunate rhyme).

It’s important (maybe?) for me to understand why I love the music I love. Digging folk rock has very much informed the narrative styles I prefer in literature and film. I will probably always prefer a tale of an individual battling internal forces via his interaction with the outside world (what I kind of believe the “dude with guitar” genre is essentially all about). Folk music also, very much, informed my left leaning politics. “Alternative” rock and “Grunge” turned me on to irony and the folly of ever really taking yourself too seriously. Liking both singer/ songwriter/ folk music and Grunge also worked in tandem to teach me the aesthetic value of lo-fi production and to understand the thorny issue of “authenticity”.

However, what I need to keep reminding myself of is that as important as it is to know where you come from and what you value; the battle is against failing to realize that the world is moving around you. We work so hard to become people we can respect and we work so diligently to decide what it is that we believe that we sometimes focus on those things to the point of missing factors which could very much influence those very stances.

Which is to say, if I decided a while ago that I just wanted to listen Neil Young, I could very well be playing “Cowgirl in the Sand” one more time at the exact moment when I could have been listening to a different CD. Perhaps this other CD is something I’m not used to, something that somebody who I don’t have a lot in common with likes. Maybe I give it a spin and I’m intrigued, maybe I talk about it with this other person. Maybe in doing so, I realize that this other person is pretty interesting.

What I’m saying (kind of clumsily) is that we need, as we get older, to know who we are but to not sink into the simplest version of that person. That’s stagnation. And I’ll go ahead and say it, in 2008 with a presidential election in America, there are a lot of people who already decided the type of person they were a long time ago. These people will cast their ballots accordingly.

In fact, a lot of people are entirely comfortable being apologists for someone who is, clearly, unqualified to be Vice President of The United States of America simply because the type of person they’ve decided to be votes Republican.

If Neil Young’s next record sucks, I’m going to make sure I’m keeping myself to the standard where I recognize that fact.

*This very clever title is not my own but the chorus of a song by Adam Thorn of Greensboro, NC and can be found on the album Where’s The Freedom. This CD is on the Ernest Jenning record label and is totally great. The songs are great, the lyrics are great, the production is great. You should buy it.

Brutal Truth

I haven’t done this in a while for a couple of reasons. One is that I’ve been busy. A friend got married (the ceremony included an electric guitar and a horse-drawn carriage) and one of my favorite people has moved away. Secondly, I was working at trying to get a part time gig writing about music.

I failed.

And I’m not going to drag you through the subsequent emotional landscape (it’s ugly).

The story does have a pretty funny climax, however, with me actually bumping into the editor I was trying to write for on the night I submitted my piece. He opened it up then and there and razed the thing. Even though my insides felt like they were trying to escape from beneath my fingernails while it happened, I ended up with some good pointers.

At some point, while I was being taken to task for using the passive voice (I really don’t understand, 1: why this is such a terrible thing and 2: how, being a guy who went through an affluent school system and then studied English (for chrissake) in college, this is the first time this issue has come up) and trying to keep from launching into an aria while throwing up, the quote came up.

That fucking quote. It haunts me and my reaction to it sums up almost exactly why I hate it’s progenitor (I don’t really know what that word means, but I think I may have used it correctly).

Apparently, at some point along the line, Elvis Costello said (and it pains me even to type the words), “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”. What a jack ass. And when the clearly buzzed editor slid those words across the table to me, I wanted to say, “While I wouldn’t, for a second, question the merit of This Year’s Model or “Watching the Detectives” I would have to recommend that one consider that quote in the context of his consistently shitty later work as well as that Lexus commercial that comes off somewhere between offensive and unintentionally hilarious.”.

Now, the issue is NOT that I have come to view Elvis Costello as a joke and that, therefore, any quote is subsequently dismissed. I don’t work like that. The issue is that it’s a stupid quote, the worst kind: one that sounds smart but is really idiotic (as my pal Matt put it). And the problem is that it is emblematic of the fact that, for some reason (I’m thinking the glasses) Elvis Costello is allowed to come off as rock’s intellectual.

That bloody Lexus ad. Have you seen it? Lexus found musicians, put them in one of their cars and had them hold forth on the music that was pumping on the car’s stereo system. John Legend (a black R&B singer) talked about Marvin Gaye (because black R&B singers love black R&B singers) while Elvis Costello spewed out some ridiculousness on Beethoven (because white singer songwriters who were the music industry’s van guard during your youth are actually musical geniuses on par with Beethoven, the context has just changed over time, and as a result that means you are so tasteful that you understand musical genius. Just because Beethoven makes you want to take a nap- that doesn’t mean you’re unrefined or lack some knowledge of music, it’s just that you love the Beethoven of now. Well actually you love the Beethoven of then, but let’s fact it: it’s hard to keep up with music these days and if you did you probably wouldn’t have time to make all the money that affords you the Lexus that you are now really considering buying and, besides, we all know music was perfected in 1979).

Beethoven! Costello informs us that the “poor man was deaf”. Well, I think I learned that from a cartoon when I was seven. He also says that the composer uses “themes”. Oh, I though that-

Nope. I’m going to stop that. It’s too easy. Anyway, it’s a commercial, not a purported essay by a leading scholar on Beethoven’s Ninth.

At some point, he “air conducts” with his eyes closed. Really getting into it, you know. Like there wasn’t a fucking film crew around him.

The point is, that because he’s smug, because a certain brand of educated hipster liked him in their youth, because he puts Classical music on his “best” lists and because he records Classical music he is considered some sort of pop intellectual. Despite the fact that when it all boils down to it, he’s a pop star. And a pop star who’s been putting out music that’s been consistently boring and underwhelming, which really undermines his status as a pop star.

Billy Joel and Paul McCartney put out Classical albums and their output isn’t as good as their old stuff. Where’s their tiara?

But seriously, enough of that. I can take Elvis Costello to task all day long. Don’t even get me started on comparing him to Nick Lowe, a guy who is probably largely responsible for some of Costello’s best work and has aged like a fine wine while E.C. aged like that jar of salsa in my fridge I’ve had since I moved in.

All right, enough. Let’s talk about the quote itself.

First of all, it’s specious logic. By it’s logic, I could say painting about driving is like film making about sculpting.

Oh, so it isn’t even specious logic. It’s actually a totally normal thing to do. Guess what, Elvis (if that even is your real name)? People, dance about all sorts of crazy shit! I guarantee you that on the Saturday evening that I type this, at some art school, some people are stretching in preparation for a dance piece that tells the tale of the colonial conquest of India or some such thing.

“Oh”, you say, “you’re missing the point. Costello is a cultured man, he understands that the world of modern dance encompasses a great range of topics and themes. What he’s saying is that the more removed the theme is from dance, the more expert and master of your craft you must be to skillfully convey that theme.”.

So he’s saying, the harder the thing you’re trying to do the harder it is to do?

Also, people write about all sorts of stuff: music, mountain climbing, fixing cars, quantum physics, french kissing. The whole point of writing is to make people understand what you’re trying to say. And, yes, explaining in writing how to fill a glass with water is easier than writing about how to not ruin a relationship or convince your parents to vote for the Democratic party.

Writing about music in a way that people want to read what you wrote is tough. It’s equally difficult if you’re writing about something else. Good writing is tough (or is it: writing well is tough?)

When people ask me about writing about music (and no one ever has), my stock quote is: “Hey hey, my my, rock and roll will never die” or if I’m feeling particularly clever I say, “Long live rock, be it dead or alive”.

Country Roads OR You Can’t Go Home Again

You cant’ go home again, and yet you do, year after year. And it’s the same, time after time, and you watch the years flout their slow and consistent ravages against everything you held dear. Taking those things that you’ve always taken for granted and changing them, maniacally, the second you blink. Taking those things you’ve hated for fifteen years and showing their inevitability to you in a way you could never have imagined.

You would think the music would be the same.

It would stand to reason that the one cliche you could rely on is your asshole friends, the same knuckleheads you’ve been acting like idiots with since single digits, carousing and singing along to the same shitty music you loved in the tenth grade. Oh, those songs still pop up; but the warm glow of the well-worn sing-along will not get you through this less than gentle night, my friend.

All that’s left is the after image, the skulky shadow of yesteryear’s hit parade.

The one guy still parades the “it” thing before anyone else, but now the race is against Pitchfork (or whatever is cooler than Pitchfork now, you don’t know) and the parameters between the saught after “cool” and “now” and the unforgivable “obvious”are shaded far more subtlety.

You can trace the guy who’s getting married’s big, grinning love for B.B. King and his reverence for James Brown to that obsession with Afro Beat about 5 years ago. Divide that by his unholy love for swing dancing and it explains that creepy techno type groovy World music that floats around you in the cockpit of his Acura as you slice through the deep black wintery nights of rural Jersey backroads.

Your friend, the artist, is somewhere 3,000 miles away- evoking all of those unreasonable demands he’s been asking of music since junior high out of laptops and protools. People finally seem to be taking notice.

The guy you’ve known the longest, always the guy who defined himself by his disdain for what everybody else was so comfortable with, has taken dynamism to an entirely new level. While composing Bach like fugues and cantatas with the eight bit tones of the original NES, his iPod endlessly pumps either bluegrass or deathmetal. Music defined purely by context.

All of this making for gut wrenching and ear bending Christmases where you try to hunt for hints of what you and your friends (your bros!) have become in the tunes that surround you. You are left with the distinct feeling that you’ve been dropped into a mystery thick with aural red herrings.

Thank god for your younger brother who has suddenly become immersed in the road weary tunes of Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson, though while their bourbon soaked melodies create a kind of fire-warmed log cabin of the soul for a poor sap like yourself; retracing his own ridiculous, juvenile past in the shoes of a confused man staring down the barrel of middle age you understand that for your brother; this is the music of now. The music of hitting the road and getting the fuck out and being uneasily comfortable with the bridges you’ve burned behind you.

For you however, these guys rode those roads so they can sing to you of a slightly more existential blues. You’ve only been riding one rail and it rolls from Greensboro, NC to Clinton, NJ. Back and forth, back and forth. But it may as well be the length of interstate 40: Wilmington, NC to Barstow, CA. Or route 66 or the Pacific Coast Highway. Or Highway 61 for that matter.

There are moments however. Moments when nostalgia and crystallization and serendipity all collide. When Nightmares on Wax are playing that one song that you could all always agree on through the speakers of the aforementioned Acura as it slices through those black hills on some numbered county road, the hills dusted white with winter’s steady snow and down to the left, sloping away on a valley of a lawn is a feast of crystal white Christmas lights spelling out an entire Christmas village.

Deer lower their heads to the snow to nibble. Three skeletal wise men lit up like cool fire make their way to the white outline of baby Jesus in his creche. The trees hold up thousands of tiny, fragile pin pricks or light; bouncing it off the snow beneath. In the back ground a Lite Brite Santa in white waves to our car. We pull over and suck it in, filtered through the sharp, winter night’s mineralized air. The Nightmares on Wax pulse behind us, assuring us that this little miracle is real and is ours.

It is when I step off the road to piss, however, my cheapily shod foot breaking through the thin rime of ice on a street-side puddle; plunging my foot into icy water and caking my shoe in mud.

It is when, all the way up the winding driveway we parked at the bottom of, I try to scrape my shoe clean in any available patch of clean, white snow.

It is when I see the blond gleam of the clearly hand-lain hardwood floors that I am about to track mud all over at this Christmas party.

It is while we stand in a corner, talking amongst ourselves; occasionally hieing over to the Don Julio, Makers’ Mark and Bombay Sapphire stocked bar.

It is when our hosts, a strikingly attractive young lady who was a few classes behind us in High School and has been developing a little career singing in the city and her mother, whose new husband laid those perfect planks of flooring down himself come over to say hello.

“And who are these fellow? How do you know them?” the mother asks. The daughter does a quick scan, taking us in. I’ve certainly never been a close friend of hers (in fact, I wasn’t really, technically, invited to this party) and now that I think of it, I’m not exactly sure how close she is with these other guys.

Just a beat passes and she says, simply:

“Townies”.

It is then I understand the music that gets me through these visits. When I understand that I too have abandoned the shared good timery of the shit we all listened to together for music that acts as a pain killer when I’m sad and music that sounds the specific song of my soul when I’m feeling “on”.

Slip on some Belle and Sebastian and let the sweet sadness and scalpel-sharp eye for minutiae rock you gently to reverie when you think no one else could relate to the potent cocktail of melancholy and nostalgia only your own hometown knows how to mix.

The last handful of Nick Low albums are great when you feel like you just might be able to pull it off. His stately, gentleman-loser panache echos your swagger when you actually feel like an adult who’s come to things on his own terms. Even if those terms won’t quite impress most of successful, grown up, America.

Crooked Fingers are like a steadying shot of whiskey. Eric Bachman gives it to you straight, doesn’t romanticize a thing but knows how to tell your story so it sounds tragic without being pathetic and thoughtful without being sentimental.

Early Rod Stewart’s the buddy who can always cheer you up, even though your not quite sure how he’s doing himself.

The Hold Steady are for those drunk and too druggy nights. The nights where everyone’s collective desperation grows legs and puts his feet up on the table. He walks around spiking everyone’s drink with something that induces low levels of mania. These nights you keep thinking you see flashes of beauty in your peripheral vision but can’t ever quite draw a bead on it. You usually end up believing that if you keep pushing it, something will give and that it will be something between relief and salvation. That never works out.

And of course there’s Wilco’s sophomore release Being There. Right from the get go, Jeff Tweedy agrees that you’re “back in your old neighborhood” and “the cigarettes taste so good”. He is not quite as explicit but you know what he’s talking about when he sings “OK! I know you don’t love me but you still been thinking of me”. You’re pretty sure “Monday” is about your buddy’s older brother.

You’ve been building what you’d like to believe is yourself over the last twenty nine years and for the last fifteen or so you’ve been mortaring the bricks with songs and records and bands that encourage, back up and validate that self that (let’s face it) has kind of been pieced together on the run. Those songs make you feel better because it’s like someone saying, “Yeah, I’m like that too” or “Funny, I feel the same way”. You realize that this is what that confusing crap your buddies have been listening to is for them as well.

You have an uneasy feeling that you all should have been mortaring those bricks with something different.

Got Live…if you want it…

 

Folks tend to put a pretty high premium on “live” music. You see it scrawled on chalk board easels outside of cafes and bars; tourists walk around like refugees, asking people where they can see some “live music”; local weeklies commit entire quarters of their layout to listing where to catch “live music”; entire bands (yeah, I’m talking to you Widespread Panic) have built their reputation on their live shows, their recorded discography seemingly just a matter of protocol; hell, entire cities have staked their national reputation as towns to see live music.

I prefer a record.

I mean, I love to go to shows. I love to sip on a giant beer while I become entirely aurally immersed in whatever guitar slinging or keyboard banging or sequencer…uh…sequencing is going on. I love it when I can feel the legs of my jeans ripple with the bass frequencies. I love to watch the crowd before, after and during the show; love to keep an eye out for the cliches, the outliers, the confusing.

For a while, at a lot of shows in North Carolina’s “Triangle” region (home of the Cat’s Cradle, mandatory stop for any East Coast indie, alt or punk related tour of a certain size) there was this indie rock couple who would glide through the crowd hand in hand, stoic, wearing matching industrial grade ear protection (like the guys on airport runways). It was great.

But…I think I prefer a record. And I’m not being a vinyl snob here. By record, I mean it in the literal sense: a recorded piece of music. CD, vinyl, cassette tape, MP3, wax disc, whatever. I don’t care.

I understand it. When you see a live performance you are seeing something that will never happen again. That can’t happen again (at least not exactly) and that, by definition, makes it “special”. And I’ve seen some amazing shows.

At least I’m almost positive. I said something about “transcendent performances” once to Sarah and she asked me, “What about you, have you ever seen any ‘transcendent performances’?”.

 

I said, “yes” and I felt synapses firing and memories just out of reach of great shows in big arenas and dingy bars but, memory, man, she can be a real pain in the ass. I remember the feeling that I’ve been to shows that were something different, something special. And there are shows that, for some reason, have maintained their real estate in my mind. Logic would have it at those are one in the same, but I have little faith in that.

 

The shows that remain in my memory may simply be the most memorable. Not in a historic sense or because of something unique, but in the boring, straight-up sense of “memorable”: they were the easiest to remember. Perhaps it was where I was sitting, perhaps I just drank a little less that night, perhaps it was simply the first (or only) time I had been in a certain venue.

The “transcendent” shows are the ones that, while you’re seeing them, while you are immersed in what is happening with those musicians, you think “I don’t believe I’ve ever witnessed anything like this before”, you think back, you access your memory- maybe try to take yourself out of the excitement of the moment. However, your excitement just grows as you realize, “Nope, I’ve never seen anything like this, this is perfect, this is something special”. That’s a great feeling but as to whether or not that moment, that realization will be held onto, easily recalled, maintain it’s position in the front of the filing cabinet of your mind: that’s anybody’s guess.

Now, a record- a record is the ideal. Memory, my friend is simply not an issue. Forgot the song? Play the record. Know you love a song, an album; but at the moment can’t for the life of you remember why you think it’s the bee’s knees? Play the record. Love a song but can’t identify why? Listen to the record. Over and over and over again. You may not figure it out but you will feel yourself love, feel yourself stretch for that “why”, feel it on the tip of your tongue, understand it, know it but never be able to quite put your finger on it.

That ridiculous, terrible drum sound as the Replacement’s “Swinging Party” starts up? I can’t get enough of it. So I rewind it and play it back. Over and over and over again. Nothing changes. I used to do it to crack up at how badly people in the recording industry must have hated drums in the eighties. I listened to it over and over and over and kind of fell in love with it. Now, as I type this, I can hear that ridiculous roll and pop in my head but it’s just an itch and there is only way to scratch it. Play the record.

Now, before I’m accused of psychosis, or at least obsessive compulsion; let me tell you that I’m neither and I’ll use a less microscopic example.

 

I heard “Wild Thing” on the radio today. The Troggs’ “Wild Thing”. This is Rock N’ Roll (caps intentional). But THAT recording is Rock N’ Roll, the Troggs’ version. Not the version they play when Charlie Sheen pitches in Major League, not when I saw Steve Earle (my number one candidate for general badass and last American Rock and Roll dissident) play it in Central Park, not the millions of recorded versions that exist in the world and not (certainly not) when whatever shadow version of the Troggs’ play it at boat shows or in casinos in 2008.

What IS Rock N’ Roll about that recording; frankly, what is beautiful and true about that recording is the timbre of Reg Presley’s voice, is the way that super square, bastardized Bo Diddley rhythm guitar doesn’t quite add up with the drum beat. That sound that seems to simply be a real loud foot stomp is just oh, so, perfectly off as well and before we talk about the sheer insanity of having ( I mean, I’m pretty sure it is) a FLUTE SOLO in the song, what about the way- kind of in the background too- the guitar solo dive bombs in like a Japanese Zero in a soundtrack of a WWII movie from the ‘50s?

I am not talking about the “arrangement” here. I’m talking about the performance and that performance being perfectly imperfect and that imperfection, quite simply, being impossible to ever capture again. As many flute solos (is it really a flute? Maybe it’s a weird organ or Rhodes or something) as you lay down, you’ll never get the way in which it seems so desperate to be heard over those thwanging guitars and stormtrooper drums and that pragmatic desperation leading to that solo’s fierce and infectious energy.

A record is a moment, for better or worse, that will never be captured again; a slice of time and, if we’re all lucky, a transcendent and fleeting moment. The culmination of a group’s effort, the ability of a recording staff and the wonderful, statistical anomalies of serendipity encased in black amber for all those who come after. It is time travel. It is stopping time. It is preservation, it is prescience and it is trans-dimensional.

A great live performance by a group is magic. A record is alchemy.

Portait of the Artist as a Locomotive

I recently had to check and see if Guns N’ Roses’ “Chinese Democracy” had been released yet. I honestly didn’t know if I had just missed the news or maybe just forgot. I had the innate understanding that, most likely, when the album did finally come out; the news of it’s release would be a drop in the bucket compared to the steady flowing river of ironic conjecture and easy jokes about it’s seemingly permanent purgatorial status. It’s still not out.

And I breathed a sigh of relief.

You see, ideally, that record will never come out because if it ever does it will ruin about a perfect epilogue to a hard rock narrative whose scope has reached from 1987 to the present with ellipses into the future. A scope that measures the width of my own growth from childhood to adulthood as well as American tales like “Citizen Kane” to Modernist manifestos and literary milestones such as those of Joyce.

In 1988, due to the success of the “Sweet Child O’ Mine” single, the video for “Welcome To The Jungle” was in heavy, heavy rotation on MTV. As such, I witnessed a young William Bailey, nee William Rose (and subsequently, William Axl Rose) stepping off a city bus, all Indiana innocence and naivete, onto the gritty streets of experience that was Hollywood, California. It probably took me months to finally see the video from start to finish as, to be truthful; the images, the song, the tone and my parent’s puritan leanings as well as the fear of God had me too terrified to make it all the way through.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved it, but I had honestly seen nothing like it before. The music was so familiar but at the same time seemed to almost literally spit and piss on the riffs of Poison and Motley Crue. The cartoon sexuality and naughtiness of David Lee Roth were replaced by a gross and frank carnality. The requisite lusty babes had the vacant stares of casualties of some mental urban warfare and any titillation was slammed up against the vision of that hay seed who got off the bus strait jacketed and being visually force fed all the evil of our modern western world through his eyes.

As far as I was concerned, Guns N’ Roses managed to condense all that was bad, maybe even Evil, (and not in a black magick, supernatural, Satanic kind of way, but in a dark recesses of the very real world kind of way) tie it up with whiplash guitar licks and send it directly into my exurbia, New Jersey home. The culture shock was so great that not only did it take me months to finally watch the video all the way through but it also took me years to realize that Axl had told his own future and had introduced his own character into the script of his own life. Foreshadowing his own twilight images in his first burst upon an unsuspecting culture’s consciousness.

I faced my fear and Guns N’ Roses became a part of my life. While I also came to love bands like the Stones and Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith, they were groups from a different time whose trajectories I had stepped into. I still rocked out to contemporary bands like In Living Color and Def Leppard but I viewed the activities of G n’ R as something almost meteorological to pay attention to. Like the weather.

We forget that a band who became so commercially successful, who was so popular was only around (in an “album releasing” and touring state, which may be the definition of “existence” for a band) for about four years. This is, of course, if we act like “The Spaghetti Incident?” never happened.

When Use Your Illusion II earned the distinction of being the only record to ever be explicitly banned from under my parent’s roof thanks to “Pretty Tied Up” (“I know this bitch she lives down on Melrose/ She aint’ satisfied without some pain/ Friday night is going up inside her…again/ I crack the whip because that bitch is jut insane”) I experienced my first trial run in arguing for artistic freedom regardless of moral merit. I had little knowledge at the time that Axl had just put the last brush stroke on the climax of his own artistic oeuvre.

One of the great things about pop culture is the way in which it echoes high culture. While the Romantics endowed literature with the belief that the individual’s spiritual and artistic journey was of the utmost importance and that to make great Art was to look inward, the Modernists took that respect for the “inward examination” and coupled it with the cold belief of a post-Darwin society. The singer songwriters of the 60s and 70s echoed that post-Romantic conceit of the individual’s inward examination tainted by the cynicism of living in a world gone wrong. Guns N’ Roses (by which I mean Axl Rose) took this conceit to the terrifying, barren apocalyptic landscape of post-modernism.

Act I

In 1987 Axl, as far as our cultural memory of him is concerned, stepped off of a bus in Hollywood California. He had just arrived from the Mid-West and the all- American experience of a broken home in which church service was regular and mandatory, as was hypocrisy and abuse. As he steps off the bus, wearing bell bottom jeans, a wheat stalk hanging comfortably from his lips; he gazes around him, seemingly aware that it is there that he will realize his dreams. Before the four and one half minutes of the song are up, he will be transformed from the hayseed with a dream to the nightmare byproduct of the dream factory. This is end of the first act, in which a music video explains to us, like a Greek Chorus, all that will befall our hero.

Act II

The hayseed has been transformed by his surroundings. He has battled with the streets and has come out the victor. Appetite For Destruction sold huge amounts of copies and the boy from nowhere with his gang of comrades has achieved success. They are rock stars. But in our post-modern landscape, in a post-punk world the true success is not entirely buying your own success. In fact, the image from the “Jungle” video with Axl bound and force fed violent, news-feed images ala Alex from A Clockwork Orange may very well be a symbol for what Axl recognizes “success” to be.

The subsequently released “Lies” EP typifies this. A fusing of two, previously released recordings including the incredibly offensive “One In A Million” as well as the Aerosmith cover “Mama Kin” and Rose Tattoo’s “Nice Boys (Don’t Play Rock and Roll)”; the record is simultaneously a middle finger, a recognition of their place in the pantheon of rock and admission of their hyper-awareness of the characters they have written for themselves and will play with perfect acuity.

Add to this the mock-up tabloid which served as a cover (stealing all the slander and libel from out of the mouths of the journalists and nay-sayers and owning it themselves) and the mega-hit “Patience” (adding a disarmingly sensitive counterpoint to the rest of the record) and you have a statement of an artist defiantly comfortable equally in his own commercial success on his own terms and his ability to turn his demons into that success.

Act III

The simultaneous release of two full length records (but not a double album, mind you) is an example of rock bloat on par with the KISS solo albums, however, no one ever became a legend by doing things small. But beyond the cliche is the suspicion that Rose believes that success as big as theirs not only demands a product just as big but also that if we have been following his raw and honest tales of life as Axl Rose (the paranoia of “Out Ta Get Me”, the nostalgia for innocence past of “Think About You”, the screaming realism of “Welcome to the Jungle” through to the brutal anger of “One In A Million”) it would be doing us all a disservice by not dropping us into the void that comes from being the millionaire wannabe Elton John fronting “The World’s Most Dangerous Band” whose own demons have been his truffle sniffing pigs and whose own dastardliness has brought him, in equally huge measures, vilification, unmitigated fame and monetary success.

What one fist notices with Use Your Illusion I and II is that while the first record has November Rain and Don’t Cry, the rest of it is primarily tough, bitchy, punchy rock songs. Use Your Illusion II however, is epic after epic. It opens with Civil War then two songs later Knockin’ On Heavens Door followed immediately by the vitriolic bombast of Get In The Ring not long before Breakdown, Locomotive and Estranged. Use Your Illusion I has it’s own share of long tunes, to be sure, but another marked difference is the tone. While I is mostly fiery white rock and self righteous anger, II’s lyrics have a far more introspective and existential tone.

While the mellow mafia of the seventies offered us the opportunity to look into the troubled psyche of acoustic guitar wielding troubadours and their dilemmas with both their souls and chicks, you got the feeling that everything, ultimately, would be OK; perhaps because the internal strife seemed to be punctuated with the gentle slamming of BMW doors. Make no doubt about it, conspicuous consumerism is by no means absent on Use Your Illusion II. In fact, I believe while making these records, Axl was known to wear furs and custom made sneakers and let’s not mention the production budgets for both records as well as the videos.

However, in this case, the introspectiveness of the seventies singer/songwriter has been dovetailed with the scorching honesty of punk rock with it’s sights on the Frankenstein’s monster of the rock star’s own coddled and damaged psyche.

In Get In The Ring, Rose asks, “Why do you look at me when you hate me?”, a curious question from someone starring in the video for “November Rain” and while he goes on to sing with confidence, “You may not like our integrity (yeah!) / We built a world out of anarchy (Oh, yeah!)”, shortly after this claim his mental and physical integrity seem to crumble and the seeds of living in anarchy seem to bloom.

Get In The Ring’s violent swagger seems to wilt in the face of:

“I’ve come to know the cold / I think if it as home/ When there ain’t enough of me to go around / I’d rather be left alone”

From Breakdown in which, by the end of the song, Axl is reciting a monologue from the ‘70’s cult classic film “Vanishing Point” where a lone hero symbolically fights the powers that would cut down the beauty of Emerson and Whitman’s dissident poet American spirit by driving his Dodge Challenger faster and faster until- at the end of the movie, he simply vanishes…Then:

“I bought me an illusion / And I put it on the wall / I let it fill my head with dreams / And I had to have them all / But oh the taste is never so sweet / As what you’d believe it is / Well I guess that it never is / It’s these prejudiced illusions that pump the blood / To the heart of the biz”,

and:

“Gonna have some fun with my frustration / Gonna watch the big screen in my head / I’d rather take a detour because this road ain’t getting clearer”

From Locomotive which with it’s spastic metric changes and almost frighteningly insistent riffage sounds like a man explicitly chronicling his thought patterns as he distinctly goes off the rails of his crazy train. Unfortunately, after that Locomotive leaves the station you simply become Estranged:

“Well I jumped into the river too many times to make it home / I’m out here on my own and drifting all alone / If it doesn’t show give it time / To read between the lines / ‘Cause I see the storm is getting closer / And the waves they get so high / Seems everything we’ve ever known’s here / Why must it drift away and die?”

The video for Estranged was the most convoluted of what was a trilogy of videos, inspired by a book written by Del James, a friend of Axl’s and supposedly with a main character based on Axl. In the book, this character died and this was a theme for the videos for “Don’t Cry”, “November Rain” and “Estranged”.

An additional thematic element showing up only in the Estranged video were…uh…dolphins. It seemed flatly ridiculous at the time I saw the video but bear in mind I was also getting to the age where the bombastic bloat-rock of G n’ R was being replaced for me by “alt- rock” and “grunge” and “indie rock”. Cadres of bespectacled ironic rockers wearing earth tones who made it clear what they thought about Axl Rose.

I know it sounds silly but in the last couple of years, I feel that I stumbled over exactly what the dolphins were supposed to symbolize for a man who’s “jumped into the river too many times to make it home”. Another big part of the Estranged video is Axl drowning in a turbulent ocean (not a river but, come on people, this is art). I’m pretty convinced Axl wanted the dolphins to save him. If you’re a man who has, ahem, estranged himself from the human world and is lost at sea you’d be looking for some dolphins too. You’d be looking for creatures smarter than humans but without the propensity for smallness and meanness. You’d be looking for creatures who have a reputation for saving drowning men.

I seem to remember a story about a dolphin from the olden days who would guide ships up a particularly tricky channel. Apparently, the creature has scars from all the places drunken sailors had gaffed him or shot him and yet he still helped those ships and sailors out. Axl could certainly use a friend like that. We all could.

Epilogue

At the end of James Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” Stephen Dedalus who has been learning to grow as an artist and to cut himself off from all of the provincial and small minded claims to his young mind and purposes, is gone. We are left with only his notebooks still in Ireland while he “takes flight” whether to rise to freedom or to have his wings melt and plummet to earth, we don’t yet know. In Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane” we only see the protagonist through the stories of those who knew him.

In both cases it is the art itself which is the main character’s legacy. The story of Kane is the character, that is to say: it is Kane’s story, the artifice and not Kane the person which is important. Which is further to say that it is Welles’ story and not Welles which is the genius. Joyce (or Dedalus, frankly it’s a little confusing) goes on to make what is generally considered to be the most important piece of literature in the twentieth century vindicating the brash punk who was the Dedalus of “Portrait”.

Welles made many more great movies but estranged himself from any semblance of “the biz”, marking him a tragic victim of his own arrogance to some and a true American rebel and artist to others. In the end, no matter which side you align yourself with, he was fat and drunkenly hawking Paul Masson wine.

Joyce, blind, dictated his final work to Samuel Beckett and created “Finnegan’s Wake”which is generally considered to be the most head scratchingly confusing piece of literature ever.

Despite a handful of live performances with spotty reviews and an additional handful of songs leaked on the internet, Axl Rose has left us. Left us with “Appetite for Destruction”, “Lies” and “Use Your Illusion” I and II (again, acting like “The Spaghetti Incident?” never existed) and headed off to some strange place, glued to the big screen in his head in some Xanadu living room and threatening us with a “Chinese Democracy”. Time will tell if that work is unleashed on us to blow our minds, to simply confound us or to underwhelm us. Perhaps it will be Rose’s “Smile” and dorks will pass around pasted together bootlegs until he returns to record it for us to the response of polite critical acclaim.

Neil Young said it was better to burn out then to fade away and I’m going to be honest with you: I’ve never know what the hell that meant. I do know that a Guns N’ Roses, vanished over the horizon, the tether which links them to the oh-so-corporeal raw rock recordings of their past leading off towards the vanishing point is a better epilogue than most people could write.

Victim of Cool: I Can’t Tell You Why

The Big Lebowski is a great movie and, in an unprecedented show of unity, this is something almost my entire generation can agree on. The fraction who disagrees is not only tiny, but most likely this minuscule percentage is split in half between the genuine (a.k.a.: those without a sense of humor) and the reactionary. I find myself squarely in the majority on this one but I do find something disquieting about the film. I’m pretty sure this movie has such cultural clout that it has convinced an entire generation to dismiss the Eagles without question. Which puts me in an even more disquieting position- hashing out how I feel about the Eagles.

We all know the scene: The Dude finds himself in a cab after a rough day and the radio is playing those Grand Old Fathers of mellowness themselves (I can’t quite remember if it’s “Peaceful, Easy Feeling”or “Tequila Sunrise”). He asks the cabby to change the station or turn it off stating, “I hate the fucking Eagles, man”. Later on, we are introduced to “The Jesus” while the Gypsy Kings play “Hotel California” in a slightly more subtle stab.

Now, it’s pretty clear that the Brothers Coen are setting a more complex dynamic than simply trying to hate on Don and the boys. The Dude is a man who is both part of Los Angles and apart from it. A creature of his environs who defines himself by it and against it and there is no more cliche musical symbol for this “place” than the Eagles. And that’s the bit, but we all know that the unwashed masses like it simple and so now those who consider themselves on The Dudes’ side of that line drawn in the sand know one thing: they hate the fucking Eagles, man.

This all brings up issues a lot bigger than music and cinema and it’s dissemination into our Zeitgeist. At it’s core, this is an issue with the Culture of Cool.

To give you some context, I used to love the fucking Eagles (man). I know for a fact that the first CD I owned was Crosby, Stills, Nash and (sometimes) Young’s “So Far”; given to me by my parents when they bought me my first CD player. I don’t know the order of purchase of the next several CDs but I do know the short list was Lynyrd Skynrd’s “Platinum and Gold” collection, Aerosmith’s greatest hits and both volumes one and two of The Eagles greatest hits (to this day, I love the gulf that separates the country cheese of one from the cocaine sleazery of the other- I just didn’t have the vocabulary for it when I was 12). Not only did I rock the songs on those CDs like it was my job, not only did I take every word of every tune directly to heart (though how a pre-adolescent could relate to either “Desperado” or “Those Shoes” is a question for the ages) but I even remember explaining my love for “Hotel California” to a girlfriend.

“Oh”, she said, “My dad hates that song.”

“What!?” (I’m sure) I shouted, “How can you hate that song? The lyrics! The guitar solo! Your father is crazy! How does he explain himself?”

“He said something about having heard it, like, ten billion times”.

“That will never, EVER, happen to me”.

I wish I could find Mr. Maliszewksi and explain to him that this is probably the only time in my life where I remember an adult communicating something to me that I could never understand at the time whose truth blossomed before me like an evil flower as I grew up. I certainly switch the station whenever it comes on the radio now. Which is pretty intense if you think about it, because this guy had to listen to it when it was new and in HEAVY ROTATION, which must have been debilitating. But I guess it’s balanced out by the fact that I now I have to avoid both the original version and that horrendous acoustic “Hell Freezes Over” version.

 

But I digress.

The point is that at one time my love for this band’s able song writing and tight harmonies was pure. I’m not sure if my discovery and immediate passion for Led Zeppelin made me feel that the Eagles were just too “weak” for my now decidedly bad-ass tastes but what I suspect is something far more insidious happened. I tend to assume that I began to tether my musical tastes to things like “credence” and “clout” (though I maintain that I have never stopped loving Creedence since I fist heard them). In other words, the Culture of Cool infected my tapes and CDs like ghonnorea. I’m sure this began somewhere around age 15 and the final nail was slammed into the coffin by that scene in the Big Lebowski.

That bang was loud enough for me to awaken to the faintest whiff of something rotten in Denmark but it wasn’t until an early evening when I was drinking beer on my porch and listening to Randy Newman’s “Little Criminals” record through the window that I really began to stir. I realized that the Eagles were all over that record. Forget Glen Frey and Timothy B. Schmidt’s vocals on “Short People”, what about Joe Walsh and Glen Frey’s respective axes on the titular track? Frey’s guitar and voice on “Baltimore”? What about Henley and Frey on “Rider in the Rain”, which might even be a parody of the types of songs that the Eagles made famous?

THAT made me think of a relatively new entry to my canon of mid-life crisis rock, Warren Zevon. “Desperadoes Under the Eaves”(the most beautiful song about loserdom, panic attacks and self reflection ever penned) has these guys singing harmonies on a song that is definitely both a middle finger as well as a fractured take on the urban, existential, Southern Los Angeles cowboy archetype that the Eagles created.

Surely to have your thumb prints all over two, such cool records has to give you some points? And, to get our terms straight, when I say Randy Newman and Warren Zevon are cool, I believe that, but I understand that this is a different “cool” than how The Strokes were cool in 2001 (or in 1999, if you’re one of those kids). The blame for that stupid distinction can be laid squarely in front of the door of the Culture of Cool, incidently. Though, who to blame for the Culture of Cool is an entirely different question.

Furthermore, look at the Eagles’ stats: Bernie Leadon, who played guitars and sang in the original lineup used to be in the Flying Burrito Brother (cool band, hands down); Leadon was replaced by Joe Walsh who is cool, Eagles or not and was in The James Gang who are almost as cool as The Flying Burrito Brothers but rocked harder; Randy Meisner, the bass player, was in Ricky Nelson’s band when Ricky Nelson finally made the jump to cool and recorded “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” and “Garden Party” with him (I’m pretty sure); Glen Frey apparently played with Bob Seger (though this may only be “cool” to me). Not only did Jackson Browne (who has “coolness sanctuary” by sheer dint of having written “These Days” as well as other songs for Nico’s “Chelsea Girl” and who wrote rock and roll’s only non-pretentious “concept album”) co-write “Take It Easy” but the band was signed to Aslyum records (eventually Elektra records and home of The Stooges, Metallica, Love and Ween). Glyn Johns produced their shit and he was cool enough to make records for The Who and The Clash as well as having produced “Exile On Main St.” and “Sticky Fingers”. Personally, I think Reeves Nevo and the Cinch’s version of “Life in the Fast Lane” as performed during the prom scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High is one of the best incidental live performances in a movie (it’s a short list) AND as I was looking up some info in my “Great Rock Discography” I found this amongst the tiny type: “Even punk champion John Peel was a fan (hipper-than-thou detractors take note!)…”

And yet this preponderance of evidence leaves me with nothing coming close to confidence that the Eagles are cool. In fact, though I may turn up the volume when “Take It Easy” comes on and I am driving with my windows down, in reverie about how sweet it would be to be standing on a corner in Winslow Arizona; I am quite sure they are not.

Is it because the Eagles were SO cool at one point in time? Like some denim-clad Interpol in 2004, did they work the clubs and streets of Los Angles invincible with no prescience that with every free line of blow, every acoustic guitar played across a campfire in Big Sur to some girl who made Stevie Nicks look like Janet Reno that they were exponentially storing up future hipster disdain?

Does the answer have to do with abstract mathematics? Is it simply that Chaos theory dictates that just because a band has the quanta which should spell out legacy, including the personnel, the chops and the cred; that Jeff Goldblum’s “tiny imperfections in the hand” cause outcomes that we would never see no matter how strong the cultural microscope? Is it classical rock and roll mythology that success is inversely proportionate to coolness?

This is the problem with the Culture of Cool. There is a distinct and exquisite beauty in why I could never, in a million years, explain to you why “Fun House” by the Stooges is cool- but I don’t have to. The Culture of Cool, however, engenders confusion rather than embraces mystery. The Culture of Cool peppers white belts across Brooklyn and knows to trample those who would question why and lift high those who never would. The Culture of Cool ensures that on the Saturday night that I type this, kids lucky enough to see a rock show tonight will internally debate whether they should be bored or psyched while they watch it. The Culture of Cool has made sure that no matter that kids’ choice, he will certainly act bored in either case. The Culture of Cool made me waste a lot of time when I was young, confusing rock and roll with abstractions that don’t mean a damn thing.

I have no problem that the Culture of Cool bit The Eagles hard and I’m certainly not pledging my sympathies (those painful solo careers and reunions made sure of that) but I do resent it for those who felt it’s wrath unjustly and loathe it’s predation on the young.

Luckily, it will always be kind of cool to be uncool.

You Can Take The Boy Out Of Mississippi And You Can Take The Girl Out Of Louisiana

(Originally posted on June 29, 2008 on some OtherSpace)

“Elvis was a hero to some but he never meant shit to me”- Chuck D.

The King is certainly a tricky wicket. Now, rock and roll was already dead and resurrected and dying again by the time I wrapped my ears around a radio and Aerosmith and Run DMC had broken down their literal and figurative wall when I was quite young so a lot of the more visceral and pure reasons for which people like Elvis simply don’t apply to me. A lot of people love Elvis and give him credit simply because it was him who showed them rock and roll for the first time and I don’t want to take that away from anyone.

Frankly, I can only envy the idea of living in a Pat Boone world and, suddenly one day, clicking on my radio or TV and having my mind blown by some hip-swinging cracker hollering the white boy blues while the grease runs out of his hair and down his face. But most of what people celebrate about Presley simply does not matter to me. I’ve really never found those Sun recordings to be particularly hot and this whole legend of the white boy with the black sound who, magically, turns suburbia onto the devil’s music has always seemed, let’s just say, “off” to me.

What interests me much more is a particular narrative of the Presley story. It is undoubtedly a story of the transformative power of rock and roll but it is also something for the psychology books, a darker take on the American dream, a drugstore “Great Gatsby”. It is the story of a poor, white trash Mississippi kid; maybe even a little too dull to be bad. A boy going nowhere, not even turning his hands to hard labor. A boy with sleepy, dull eyes who- at his tender but not so tender age- knows a couple of things: he can sing and he loves his mamma.

The cat combines the two, some shit happens and all of a sudden (well…not really all of a sudden) this kid who moments ago was nothing, just opens up that yap and (with the help of cut-throat business management and striking good looks) the world makes him everything.

Have you every seen those clips of the press firing questions at him in those pre-war days? (or after, for that matter) It’s like some weird negative version of Dylan in ’66. The kid just falls back on some tried and true interview techniques. One being etiquette. He is the most polite motherfucker ever. The Presleys may have been low-rent back in Mississippi but he’s been raised in a way only the American South raises a boy and his canonical dedication to politeness creates an intense dynamic with the hip thrusting shouter who was just up on that stage (one which I believe may have been an underrated secret of his success). The second is, in a way, a subset of the first: he doesn’t say a damn thing. He talks, but I don’t think you could ever pin him down to ever actually having made any type of statement.

All of this is adorable but I also think of it as the first sign of a kid who’s never become himself; who, in that early adolescence, when there are myriad men who you could become in just years’ time was plucked out of any normal existence. A mike was placed before him, he sang, people reacted (viscerally, jubilantly, monetarily, demonically) and he moved on to the next town and repeated. When it got too tiring, they popped a pill in his mouth. When they wanted to wring more out of him they made him do movies. The boy from Mississippi knew he was on the gravy train and maybe he hated every other part of it but he bought his mamma a house, bought himself some big ol’ rings and a couple Cadillac cars and when all of this couldn’t make him feel allright, nor the peanut butter and banana sandwiches he could sing. How could that boy argue with himself when breaking through all of the shit, he could sing and own the stage, the moment, the world with his voice?

We all know how the story goes. Dylan and The Beatles showed up and turned a rock and roll singer into a thing of the past, songwriting and being an “artist” was where it was at, or at least where it became. Maybe if he hadn’t wasted so much time making those stupid movies, he would have shifted; competed, grew as an Elvis for the Age of Aquarius or have recorded for Atlantic or…something. Instead he retreated West like some reverse cowboy, finding himself a Casino to play in the desert for the same girls who screamed when it was 1956, now with beehive hair-dos and cat eye glasses.

I couldn’t possibly put in to words the sad way it ends. I can only recommend watching his last recorded performance on the documentary “This Is Elvis”. The Bloated, pasty-faced King holds the lyrics to “My Way” in his hand as he plays some sort of civic center. He mumbles incoherently, his eyes are glassy, he is…gone. He begins to sing, reading the lyrics from the sheet, dousing it with sweat…he sings…the voice rises; you can’t ever place the moment when you stopped being embarrassed and depressed and simply became captured by the song, by the voice…the lyric sheet disappears. The song crescendos. Elvis has left the building.

There is another moment I love of Elvis’s, luckily captured by the good people at RCA. The 1969 Memphis sessions are what brought us “Suspicious Minds”, “In the Ghetto” and “Kentucky Rain”. The record has scads of other songs most of them blowing away those aforementioned hits, at least in terms of raw power, funk and performance.

Based solely on the accompanying liner notes of Peter Guralnick, I’ve come to understand that somehow, via the grace of god perhaps, between “Roustabout” and the standing gig in the desert; after the tepid “’68 Comeback”, Elvis found himself in a dingy studio in a bad part of Memphis with a solid crew of southern-fried musicians and a producer who knew how to get the job done. This boy, who’s ability or opportunity to ever make a decision for himself had long since atrophied, found himself in the one place that could let him do what he did to the best of his ability: sing. And sing raunchy, soulful, deep blues and R&B.

Listen to Elvis fuck via a microphone on “Power of My Love”, listen to him yell like a kid, “Yeah! Give me the handclaps!” on “I’m Movin’ On”, wait for the climax in “Long Black Limousine”. What it is, is a crystalized moment in time where a man who has been corrupted and manipulated for years let’s the wind of soul blow across the last glowing embers of the coal of song deep, deep in his heart. And it rocks.

So that’s why I think Britney Spears is the new Elvis.

Let’s get the main difference and my argument’s greatest stumbling block right out of the way: she can’t really sing that well.Though that may be the case, Britney is the NEW Elvis and in this post MTV world, you don’t quite need such quantafiable merit to become a star. You do need something, however, and Ms. Spears has “something” in spades. You think we would still be paying attention to this train wreck if she didn’t have something? You think she’s the first girl to rocket to fame, to plummet to madness and to have babies and act crazy in the interim?

I think we pay attention for the same reason Elvis’ narrative captures us. We see in this young girl from Arkansas, the American dream realized and the corruption that that dream realized will inevitably create. The dream realized and that dream becoming nightmare is no new tale. In Britney; as in Elvis, however, we still see that girl from Louisiana- no matter how shadowy at times.

She was a young girl, plucked from nowhere for her talent. We can only imagine what sort of bleach job the Disney people subject Mouseketeers to, she was packaged as the squeaky clean Lolita- made to be conflicting fantasies: the empty role model, virgin until marriage; and the male fantasy, uncorrupted school girl, waiting just for him. She was awarded huge success for it and vilified for it. She owned it, not through rhetorical argument or business savvy but by sheer will, by something they teach you in Louisiana, probably. Along the way she fell in love, had her heart broken, wrote a book with her mamma, became a mamma, drove with her baby in her lap (and maybe Mountain Dew in the bottle?) and we laughed at her the whole way.

I’d like to believe we laugh because we are a small and desperate species but that we also pay attention because we are waiting for her 1969 Memphis sessions. Honestly, that may have come and gone with “Black Out”, a record that- via good producers, “good” songs and good timing is raw and powerful in it’s own right but I’d like to hope that we get another one and I wish and pray for a much happier ending for her.