Category Archives: Music

Bands, albums and live reviews

Now playing: David Byrne’s How Music Works

Received David Byrne’s book How Music Works for Christmas from my wife. I’m only on the first chapter but already love it. 20121230-080209.jpg

Byrne’s got a bit of the sly raconteur in him and it marries well with the goal of the book: to discuss how music comes to be through its performance, sale, distribution, recording and audience. His style combines a college lecture (especially in the way Byrne uses photos to illustrate his points) with the experience of talking to a clever person at a party.

If you’re one of those people who enjoys the feel of a book, track this one down in a bookstore just to weigh it in your hands. For a modern work, it has a surprisingly classic feel from its soft, faux-leather cover to the care that went into binding it. It’s only 300-some pages but suggests more. McSweeney’s published it and they’ve given it the same bespoke sensibility they give to other things they create. It’s an approach that suits Byrne’s text well.

A brief roundup of my relevant interests

Bits and pieces…

Comics: DC relaunched and renumbered its entire line last week. I’ve read Justice League and Action Comics so far. Justice League didn’t reveal where it was headed while Action suggests the new Superman is a mix of Spider-Man, Batman and…a 1930s-era Superman (with nods to that era’s mob and wife abuser villains). So both are wait and see. This post from AV Club explains why that’s a good idea when it comes to comics arcs (starting with the third graf of the Justice League review).

Politics: Elizabeth Warren is gunning for Scott Brown’s seat. I think she got hosed by the Obama administration and I wish her all the luck in the world but unless I’m missing something, he’s not exactly vulnerable. Kerry’s caucusing with the dude, for crying out loud.

Internet: Pat Bruno was fired from the Sun-Times and wants to start his own food blog. The Atlantic Wire discusses why this might be harder than he thinks. Why do professional writers – particularly print writers – wait until they are fired to develop an online presence? It’s much easier to do this when you’re employed at a publication that will help you build your audience and, fair or not, it lends your efforts a credence it might not otherwise have that you can leverage into a larger online buildout or a new job.

Media: Spent the better part of 36 hours recovering from what your grandma would call a stomach bug. Upside: I got caught up with a bunch of Quantum Leap episodes I missed when they first aired. Downside: I only missed episodes of the fifth season when the show jumped the shark so…blergh.

Music: An e-mail with the subject line Here is your FREE ukulele lesson book brightened my day.

From my Tumblr: A couple 9/11-related posts, skepticism about Playboy going retro and I’m going to miss Alex Kotlowitz’s writing at chicagomag.com because of posts like this.

Top five moments from last night’s @MayorEmanuel event at Hideout

Jeff Tweedy recites “My Humps” from Jasmine D on Vimeo.

A totally subjective list but…

5. The Chief Technology Officer of the city of Chicago, John Tolva (@Immerito), DJ’ed the party last night which is probably the best commentary on how this whole project brought the Chicago tech and arts scenes together in one crazy mashup.

4. The Young Chicago Authors kids from Louder Than A Bomb who turned in one of the best live poetry performances I’ve ever seen. In particular, were two girls around 16-17 whose piece on sexuality, body image and adolescent relationships was wisdom so far beyond their years I felt as if they knew more about life than I do, twenty years their senior.

3.The actual Mayor Emanuel showing up, shaking hands and doing an Entourage-like walk through the club before signing @MayorEmanuel author Dan Sinker’s book with “You are an asshole. Mayor Emanuel.” *

2. Jeff Tweedy singing “I Gotta Feeling” and reciting the lyrics to “My Humps” (above via). Just go watch those videos now and be in a good mood the rest of the day.

1. Dan reading the fermented baby food in the crawlspace bit where @MayorEmanuel meets Sweetness, hugs Studs Terkel’s heart and talks with Curtis Mayfield. If anyone still thinks this whole project was just a bunch of vulgar tweets, the literary passion Dan poured into that reading – and this whole event – put the lie to that notion.

I was so proud to be a Chicagoan last night.

* A couple other folks I know got the actual mayor** to sign their books and he signed all of them “Mayor Emanuel” as if to say “No, motherfucker, I’M THE MAYOR. It takes more to get this shit than starting a fucking Twitter account.” @AnnaTarkov told me she asked the mayor if he was a fan of the book and he said no. That answer may have been more persona than anything else (another friend of mine said the mayor exchanged good-natured f-bombs with Hideout co-owner Tim Tuten) but it’s also worth noting how he goes out of his way to show he’s a good sport about the whole thing.

** I love how I keep having to say “the actual mayor” to avoid confusion.

Apparently, I am the reason why Lady Gaga is blonde now

Over the weekend, my sister called me and said that E! Online was reporting that Lady Gaga said she changed her look from brunette to blonde because she was once mistaken for Amy Winehouse. I found the same story in The UK Sun this week.

Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? But this is what Lady GaGa used to look like:

I think it would be easy to mistake her for Amy Winehouse, especially if she was sporting a makeup job similar to Winehouse. In fact, I know it would be…

Because I did.

Here’s what happened, excerpted from my original post about a 2007 Lollapalooza afterparty:

“Standing next to me was a short, dark-haired, woman with heavy eye makeup who was being fawned over by someone else. “Ah ha,” I thought. “Amy Winehouse, my first sighting.” Despite the “no-that’s-not-her” protestations of my fellow partygoers, I decided to open with a question that would get me an easy “yes” and go from there. “Excuse me,” I said, “are you still touring with the Dap Kings?” She looked me dead in the eye, smiled – with suddenly worrying perfect teeth – and said:

Amy Winehouse: “I’ve never toured with the Dap Kings.”
Me: “…”
Totally Not Amy Winehouse: “I’m Lady GaGa.”
Me: “Ohhh. Um, hi. I’m sorry, I thought you were someone else.”
Lady GaGa: “Who did you think I was?”
Me: “You know, I….it doesn’t matter. Say, you’re from New York, right?”
Lady GaGa: “Yes, I’m from Man-haht-tan.” (in the thickest New Yawk accent ever)
Me: (determined to salvage this opportunity) “And you’re playing the MySpace stage tomorrow, right?”
Lady GaGa: “BMI.”
Me: “Oh-KAY! Well, it was nice meeting you, have a nice night.”

I turn back to Whitney and her friend, who are looking at me as if they’ve just witnessed someone willingly throw themselves through a plate-glass window. “So, that wasn’t her,” I said, confirming the obvious.

So…yeah. It’s entirely possible I’m not the sole person responsible for her dive into a bottle of peroxide. But at the very least, I’m a contributing factor.

Alderman Carothers, allow me to educate you on James Brown lyrics

Earlier this week, Alderman Ike Carothers said the following re: his indictment on charges of fraud and bribery:

“There’s a song that James Brown made which is very prominent,” he said. “That song is, ‘You’ve Got to Deal With It’. And that’s what I have to do. I have to deal with it.”

Now, I’m not well-versed in matters of fraud and bribery – or no moreso than most people in Chicago and Illinois, which is to say “more than most of us would like to be” – but I do consider myself one of the top 20 experts on James Brown (Caucasian division). And I’m here to tell Alderman Carothers that, no, there is no “prominent” song by James Brown called “You’ve Got To Deal With It” (or even “You Got To Deal With It” as he was quoted by the Sun-Times). Would that make a good James Brown song title? Absolutely. But no such song by the man exists.

Now, there IS a song by James Brown called “The Payback” in which a variation on those lyrics figures into the song.

To wit:

Took my money, you got my honey
Don’t want me to see what you doing to me
I got to get back I gotta deal with you! [x4]
Hey let me tell ya!
Get down with my woman, that ain’t right! You hollerin’ and cussin’, you wanna fight!

I guess I can understand Carothers twisting James Brown’s lyrics around to suit his own purposes since the actual lyrics don’t exactly serve him well in this instance. For example, I don’t imagine he ought to be saying to U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, for whom he wore a wire for a year:

Sold me out, for chump change (Yes you did!!)
Told me that they, they had it all arranged
You handed me down, and that’s a fact
Now you’re pumped, you gotta get ready for the big payback!! (The big payback!!)

Although I really wish at some point he’d say:

Don’t do me no darn favor
I don’t know karate, but I know KA-RAZY!

James Brown – “The Big Payback” – MP3 stream

Selling out revisited…again

I’ll be honest: I didn’t read Miles Raymer’s follow-up in the Chicago Reader to his previous column on selling out. I thought his original piece fell apart once you looked at the evidence (and I said so here). Plus, on this issue, I think he’s being contrarian just to get a good column out of it (not that there’s anything wrong with that), so I didn’t bother with it.

On the other hand, Anne Elizabeth Moore did read it and had some interesting things to say about it in a letter to the editor.

Read more of my own navel-gazing musings on the concept of selling outhere.

Fat, indulgent and stupid is no way to rock and roll, son

Let me preface this by saying, I didn’t see any of the Smashing Pumpkins shows in Chicago. The opportunity presented itself, and I passed. Was this an event? Absolutely. I’m a casual fan—at best—and I assumed (rightly, it turns out) I’d bear witness to a self-indulgent two-hour-plus tantrum, and decided I had better ways to spend my evening. (I don’t mind failure, so long as it’s interesting.)

Having read more than a few reviews of the Pumpkins shows here and elsewhere, I’m left with one conclusion: If you can’t say something in two to three hours, I’m not really interested in what you have to say in four to six.

Corgan and Co. planned to do four shows here, two performances at two venues. The first night of each stand was called “Black Sunshine,” and the second “White Crosses” and apparently you needed to see both to really get what Corgan was putting down.

There’s something particular about the form of artistic expression that is the live performance, from the moment the audience enters the performance space to the moment they head out into the night. During this time, the band and the audience enter into a contract together, and agree to make a statement on who the band is, and what they’re about in a larger sense, not just what you see in their promo materials or hear on their records. We might buy tickets thinking we’re trading money for audio/visual goods, but our presence there changes the performance in ways both subtle and deliberate, especially if you are one of those dipshits who yells out “Freebird”. We might not know what will eventually result, but both we and the band have our intentions.

As part of that contract, the artist owes* the band an attempt at a singular statement within that performance. So expecting an audience to see two of your live shows—especially when the tickets for those shows are expensive and hard-to-get—in order to truly understand your artistic vision of a single performance—is some bullshit. It would be like an audience member saying “I’m only going to applaud a little tonight. You’ll have a better idea of how much I enjoyed your show tonight when I come back tomorrow.”

I’ve got not problem with using individual live performances to create a larger artistic statement. It’s no different than an author writing many books about the same character, a television writer serving an overarching theme throughout several episodes of a season, or a visual artist painting many works to express their views on the fragility of life.

In all the previous cases, an artist is dealing with the structures of his or her expression. He or she should be encouraged—nay, expected—to push against those boundaries (and by all accounts, Corgan certainly did, going so far as to berate the audience as a calculated part of one performance). Ultimately though, if the artist can’t, or refuses, to express himself or herself within those smaller units, then they’re clearly of limited talent and discipline. Unless you can say something, you’re saying nothing.

As a side note, asking the loyal fans you have left to cough up considerable amounts of money in order to truly perceive your art is as mercenary a tactic as releasing multiple versions of your album in different stores. That’s not art, that’s capitalism.

* Yes, owes. If these matters are not worth discussing in these terms then music’s not worth caring about, and that’s not a world I care to live in, so onward goes the indulgence.

Note: This piece is dated now, but still one of my favorites.