Final, Mk. II

Writing for this class has helped me to come into my own in a number of ways, and it has also helped me to learn a lot about ways in which I could improve.

One thing that I’ve learned is that despite my deliberate attempts to expand my tastes, I still carry a lot of prejudices. For instance, if I see a band filed under the “Christian” section of the record store, I tend to ignore it. In fact, if I’m wandering through a record store and find myself in the Christian music section, I tend to dash out of it as fast as I can. I’m not a fan of Christian Rock, Christian Alternative, or any of that. There are a few guys that I listen to. Switchfoot actually used to be a pretty great, musically tight, jazz-infused rock-and-roll ensemble that dealt with a lot of theological and philosophical issues in their music. Larry Norman, the grandfather of Christian rock and roll, is pretty fun to me as well. But by and large, when I listen to these bands play, I hear the sound of people trying to cash in on the earnest faith of their fellow human beings. Like, if you’re not cutting it as a shitty rock band, then just be a shitty rock band that sings about Jesus and you’ve got yourself a guaranteed audience. I know that’s really cynical, but as a professor of the Christian faith, it offends me when I see (and sometimes this is transparent, and obviously isn’t just me) musical groups that are cashing in on other peoples’ deeply-held beliefs. My problem is that I generalize that to everyone who sits on that Christian shelf at the music store. One day someone brought in a song, “Wedding Dress” by Derek Webb into class. I actually have a Derek Webb album on my computer that the guy offered for free a while back, but I never got around to listening to it because I really wasn’t that enthusiastic about it. But “Wedding Dress” was incredible. It was a raw, emotional, deeply searching song about the faithfulness of God in light of the overwhelming hypocrisy of the singer. It was beautiful. The music was beautiful, the lyrics were haunting…it was a fantastic song. And I realized that I hadn’t noticed it belongs to a musical world to which I have shut my eyes. And I can’t ever, ever afford to shut my eyes, or I’ll be like those people who say they like everything except rap and country. Gotta keep delving. (By the way, I prefer East Coast to West Coast hip-hop and Outlaw Country to Pop-Country. There is beauty EVERYWHERE, if you look for it.)

As for my limitations, as far as a consumer of media, I have way too many interests to really get into any of them the way that I want to. I have my fingers in too many genres of music, I want to see too many films, read too many books for me to ever really appreciate them. Sometimes great CDs go unnoticed by me because I picked them up in a torrent of other new music that I was more in the mood for at the time. Sometimes I’ll get a DVD and not have a chance to watch it for a year or so. The other thing is that, as evidenced bits of that previous paragraph, I can get uppity. And I don’t like that. As a writer and as a person in a conversation about our culture, I want to be as open to new things and as willing to like them as I possibly can be.

My aspirations for criticism are sort of wide open. I’d like to look into video game criticism or music, and honestly, the extent of my ambition probably only goes as far as entertaining a few people, maybe educating a few others. I don’t want to change the face of criticism and I really don’t plan on making any money doing this, although that would be cool. I do hope to keep it up, though. I think that maybe when the space is all mine and I’ve got more wiggle room as to what to post and I don’t have any deadlines, I might be a little more apt to drone on about music and fun things. Or I’ll just stop posting. But I really, really don’t want to do that. (As for reviewing games, I’m afraid that seat’s already been taken by Internet superstar Yahtzee, but that’s okay, because he more than deserves the throne.

As for other aspirations, I want to continue my current attempt at liking things. I enjoy liking things, and Donna in particular has helped me to do so unabashedly. I guess that my ultimate goal is to reach a point where I can defend all of my tastes, but am secure enough that I don’t feel like I have to do so. I guess that sort of ties back into the issue of prejudice in musical genre. Took another blow to my elitism, incidentally, when someone showed King of the Hill in class. That show was pretty great, but I had ignored it for years (maybe coming up on a decade)? Because I was never really a big Mike Judge fan, and because if I want to see examples of life in the South, I could just look out my front door. I vastly underestimated that show.

I guess that’s my problem, really. I underestimate things, and then I miss out on cool stuff. I’m pretty good about finding things to like about what I am watching or listening to, but at the same time, my sorting process can be a little harsh because there is so much to get through.

My writing style and voice are usually pretty clear. I know that I’m kind of verbose, but at the same time, by the time I’m finished writing, I usually feel like I have communicated my thoughts pretty clearly. This blog’s posts don’t usually see much of a revision process, and I’ve felt really bad about that because I can usually rein myself in pretty well on a second or third draft. I’ve never really known what tone to take with this blog, though. My experience with Les Parapluies de Cherbourg was intensely personal, but I didn’t really post it here because I wasn’t sure if this was the right place to do so. At the same time, I couldn’t detach myself and just talk about the film from a technical perspective. And so what came out was really conflicted-sounding, very tense, I’m afraid. The same thing happened with a number of other reviews. Another thing is that I still haven’t learned how to end these things. Part of that problem may be the subject matter. Saying, “Go see this movie in theaters” feels a little more pertinent to say than, “Go rent this 40-year-old film on DVD.” (By the way, go see Iron Man. It’s awesome. Best comic book movie ever made, and one of the best action flicks I’ve seen in a long, long time.) Even if the film needs the attention, I have a hard time convincing myself that a critical review site is the place to do it. Other people can and have done it well, but considering the low volume of output here, I really tend to think that I need to pick an M.O. and stay with it; I need to be either a current or a nostalgic critic. The other thing is that I never know how technical to get. I discussed a lot of music theory, or at least it felt like I did, when I was writing the John Williams post. I was really proud of that piece; I think that I was more proud of that than anything else that I wrote for this class. At the same time, I often worry that people already know everything that I have to say, or that I’m going over peoples’ heads. Worst of all, I imagine falling into that middle ground where people who are really into music either already know everything I’m trying to say or (worse) see that I’m doing everything wrong, and people who are interested in music but don’t know much about it find it all soaring over their heads because of my poor writing, and then no-one is happy. So while I feel pretty comfortable with my writing style as a whole, I guess I’m still just trying to find a way to work it into this context

I guess that I talked about a lot of my writing strengths and weaknesses just above. My greatest strength as a writer is precision; my greater weakness is concision. I can just be a little too descriptive. and a little too proud of myself at times.

This class has been an eye-opener in a lot of ways. We only had a handful of students, but we all came from some pretty different backgrounds, at least as far as the popular culture is concerned. But everyone learned a lot in that class, I really do believe so. I’ve already mentioned a couple of examples, but I think that everyone has contributed to my taste in there. And that’s weird, because it’s like they’re shaping me. That’s a stupid-as-hell sentence, but what I guess it means is that I can point to something specific and say, “This person has affected me in this way.” The blogs have done that a lot. People have gotten me to reconsider movies, to look into music I’d never heard before…the emphasis on local musical artists in this class has delighted me, and the Internet being what it is, I can just go look these people up now…It’s amazing.

I don’t feel like I’m going anywhere anymore; I feel like whatever narrative or rhetorical thread I had going kinda started unraveling in that last paragraph. I’m okay with that. I got carried away, but I’m going to leave it there as a testament to how easy it is to get excited about this class. This group of people, this shared experience, has changed me for the better. If that’s not worth getting excited over, I don’t know what is.

Discovering King of the Hill

NOTE: This is all well and good, but immediately prior to this is a critique of John Williams’s career that I really poured myself into, so if you only read one thing on this blog today, skip back one and check it out. Sorry I posted both on the same day.

Over the course of this class I encountered King of the Hill for the first time. It may not be fair to say the absolute first time, because I’ve come across it before, but I’ve never really paid it much attention. I grew up hating Beavis and Butthead – I’m not sure if that’s because I wasn’t allowed to see it or because I was an elitist fop as an eight-year-old. It’s probably a little of both. At any rate, I hated Beavis and Butthead, and seeing Mike Judge’s name on something else didn’t exactly thrill me. Moreover, the show was set in Texas and while I’ve always appreciated the chance to gently deride the culture in which I grew up, I wasn’t really sure that I could stand being saturated in it that deeply for thirty minutes every week. I guess that the other thing is, there’s a fine line between satire and glorification. (Jeff Foxworthy used to walk that line pretty well.) I never could tell which side of the line King of the Hill fell on, and again, I never really felt any compelling reason to look into it.

Then I started noticing Mike Judge doing things that were cool. I still haven’t seen Idiocracy, but nearly every friend I have who watched it has greatly enjoyed it. He teamed up with Don Hertzfeldt for The Animation Show, garnering my respect not only for giving unknown animators a chance to shine, but for working with Don Hertzfeldt, whom I adore. I was starting to warm up to the guy just a little.

Then in class, when we were asked to bring clips from a TV show that we thought was funny, a classmate brought a clip from King of the Hill where Bobby, the son, chooses to study martial arts by taking women’s self-defense classes. There, he learns to scream things like “That’s my purse! I don’t know you!” and kick people in the groin. His diligence in shouting the things he was told to shout in class creates some beautiful non-sequitur moments, and let’s face it – kicking people in the groin is funny. I think that it may have won me over, at least enough for me to give it a closer look. I haven’t yet checked out the King of the Hill DVDs for lack of time, but I fully expect to soon.

John Williams

John Williams is one of the most underrated overrated composers in the history of film music. By which I mean to say, he is widely loved, but very seldom given the credit that he is actually due. Composer of some of the most widely recognized (and easily recognizable) themes of the 1970’s and every decade since, Williams is perhaps best known for his bright, bombastic fanfares, and for his expert use of leitmotif. (Leitmotif is the idea of assigning themes to specific characters or locations, then integrating those themes into the rest of the score as they appear or gain prominence.) With 45 Academy Award nominations to his name, he has certainly been recognized for his skill. However, he possesses many gifts, including great versatility and a subtle tenderness, that frequently go unnoticed.

Williams began composing for television in the 1950’s, eventually writing music for shows such as Lost in Space. He became known as a composer for disaster films, writing music for movies with titles like Earthquake and The Towering Inferno. Williams changed gears completely for the Faulkner adaptation The Reivers, garnering the attention of a young Steven Spielberg, who had him score his feature-film debut, The Sugarland Express. The two developed a close relationship, with Williams scoring all of Spielberg’s films save two.

Williams delivered a one-two punch in the early 1970’s that propelled him to national prominence. In 1971, he adapted the score of Fiddler on the Roof for the motion picture version, picking up an Academy Award along the way. In 1975, a year after The Sugarland Express, Spielberg had him compose the score for the suspense/horror film Jaws. Williams’s use of a building two-note motif to accentuate the building suspense of the film was a brilliant move. His simple theme associated forever with sharks in the minds of billions, securing him a second Academy Award.

Williams’s collaboration with Spielberg has produced one of the most unique and fruitful director/composer teams in Hollywood. Indeed, apart from Tim Burton and Danny Elfman, “director/composer team” is an unheard-of idea, and the extent to which Speilberg’s films benefit from his intimacy with his composer is immeasurable. In addition to some of his most memorable themes, their work together has also led to some unique moments in film score history. For instance, for the chase sequence at the end of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Williams could not get the kicks in the score to align with E.T.’s running. (It is a common practice to score fights or chases in films with “kicks,” sharp, short, syncopated notes that accentuate the action in the scene.) When Spielberg became aware of the problem, he told Williams to conduct the score as he saw fit, that Spielberg would re-work the scene around Williams’s composition. That a director should cater to a composer is unprecedented. A prior collaboration, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, saw the musical ideas for the film being fleshed out in conjunction with the script, the two creative drives shaping each other as each took form. Again, this is an incredibly uncommon arrangement in Hollywood. Altogether, John Williams and Steven Spielberg have been partners on some two dozen films.

Williams’s work is a laundry list of memorable themes: six Star Wars movies and all their attendant glory, the Indiana Jones films, the aforementioned Jaws, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, the first three Harry Potter films, Jurassic Park…blockbusters all, with BIG scores. What is seldom recognized is the fact that Williams commands a far greater variety than what this list of films calls to mind.

For example, consider Indiana Jones. The one piece most people associate with this entire series of films is “Raiders March,” the trumpet solo used as Harrison Ford’s theme. However, even within the first film’s score, which Williams himself considers to be the weakest of the three, there is a multitude of solidly crafted music present. “The Basket Game,” heard in the scene where Indy is looking for Marion in the streets of Cairo is a pizzicato piece which manages to sound jaunty and urgent at the same time. Marion’s theme, frequently played on the flute or oboe, puts the broad intervals which typify Williams’s music to disarmingly tender use. And the Ark theme itself, dark and moody, is exemplified in “The Map Room: Dawn,” in a chilling performance by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

That’s just the overlooked content of one of Mr. Williams’s scores. One of his most famous ones, at that.

E.T. makes extensive use of the Lydian mode to create a sonic atmosphere that is eerily alien, but at the same time melodically inviting. The Lydian mode is one of seven musical modes; the term “mode” refers to a specific type of scale. You know how music can be major or minor? What “major” and “minor” really refer to are two commonly used modes of the seven (The scale most commonly called “the major scale” is the Ionian mode, and it begins on the first note of the scale. If you’re in the key of C, your scale stars on C, and what you get is a very traditional-sounding Western scale. The most commonly-recognized “minor scale” is the Aeolian, which begins on the sixth note of the scale you’re in. If you’re in the key of C, then, you base your piece around the A scale. This basically creates tension between the two, because the intervals – the sharps and flats, whole steps and half steps – aren’t where they sound like they should be. The Lydian mode begins on the fourth note of the scale and is very, very seldom used at all, but it has nevertheless been associated with positive feelings since the days of Plato. This combination of warmth with the unfamiliar found in the Lydian mode is a perfect parallel to the overall themes of the film itself, and JW uses it perfectly. Perhaps left over from his days as a jazz musician, his expert use of such an unusual technique illustrates a versatility seldom credited to him.

In addition to the hidden gems on his widely-known scores, there are the lesser-known scores that reveal a great deal about him, as well. Scores for films such as Hook and Home Alone reveal his more carefree and playful sides, while works such as Sugarland Express, The Reivers, and Stepmom show a gentler Williams.

He is also quite skilled at slowly building works over time. As mentioned above, the score for Raiders of the Lost Ark, while still musically rich, is the simplest of the Indiana Jones scores. As the series progressed, Williams introduced more and more themes into the musical lexicon of the films, so that Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade doesn’t rely on the “action button,” as Williams puts it, of the “Raiders March.” Rather, Last Crusade features a texturally rich tapestry of leitmotifs and mood music that change rapidly, the main theme used subtly and sparingly as appropriate. He did the same thing for the Harry Potter films. The score for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone is perhaps one of the simplest of his career, leaning on a small handful of leitmotifs. However, by the third film, the level of complexity was building. (It’s a shame that he didn’t stick around to score the entire series. This misfortune is mitigated by the fact that other composers have very capably continued in the direction that Williams was going, and the fact that he may well return to score the final film in the series.) He can build musical grandeur, not just over the course of a movie, but over an entire film franchise. The discipline involved in that sort of musical growth is astounding.

Between my adulation and the music theory I’ve tried to include to make the text more understandable, I left word count behind awhile ago. I’ll just finish by saying that as future generations discover William’s music, he will garner acclaim not just for his “greatest hits,” but for his entire body of work. Not only does he make a strong case for the legitimacy of what is often derogatorily called “pop classical,” he has given the world over fifty years of powerful music that is as broad in its emotional scope as it is beautiful.

Les Parapluies de Cherbourg

I will never forget the first time that I saw Les Parapluies de Cherbourg. I was in my French IV class, and our professor had decided that showing us actual French cinema would ultimately be more culturally rewarding than showing us Dumb and Dumber with the French voice track on, which was also part of the lesson plan that year.

Parapluies is a French jazz opera from 1964. Set against the Algeria’s war for independence from France in the 1950’s, the film follows two lovers, Guy and Geneviéve. When Guy is drafted into the war with Algeria, Geneviéve discovers that she is with child, and her mother begins pushing her towards marrying a diamond merchant who passes through town. The story is an important, beautiful, powerful part of the film, and I wouldn’t dare ruin that for anyone else, so I won’t go into it into too much depth here.

A lot of things about that movie struck me, even as a youth, and it was only as time went on that I began to unravel them. The first and most obviously moving aspect of the film is its score. Parapluies is a jazz opera in which every line of dialogue, however trivial, is sung. Michel Legrand, one of France’s foremost jazz composers, scored the film, and its haunting melodies (which were often translated and reworked into more traditional pop songs in the United States) stand up nearly half a decade later. Besides, there’s something memorable about seeing Guy bounding down the stairs, cheerfully belting out “Merde!” (roughly translated, “Shit!”) to a chorus of energetic, syncopated trumpet riffs. At once playful and tender, Legrand creates an emotionally rich musical environment for the film to play out, and if it is at first a bit disconcerting to hear small talk being quietly sung, it only serves to lead into the beautiful musical tapestry that the film becomes. The score has very few arias in the traditional sense, leaving them behind in favor of a wandering musical undercurrent that flirts briefly with pieces of melodies before moving on to other ideas, leaving you aching the entire time to hear each melody played out in full.

Another aspect of the film that captured my attention early on was Catherine Deneuve, perhaps the closest that arthouse cinema has ever come to producing a stone cold fox. This was a breakthrough role for Deneuve, who went on to acquire enough Palm d’Ors to fill a small house and who may be the only person to retain their critical credibility after playing a lesbian vampire in a motion picture.

But as I got older, I realized that I was watching a really well-put-together film. The cinematography displays great attention to detail, with unique shots of the French coastline and the streets and back alleys of Cherbourg. The other thing that jumps out is the sense of color. The opening sequence shows strikingly vibrant umbrellas being carried through the town, and the clothing worn throughout the film, as well as the décor of the interiors is prominent enough to almost be a character in the movie. The colors used in this film are so impressive that this actually marks one of the first times that I ever paid attention to the visual elements of the film as an art form rather than focusing on the story itself. (I learned recently that the director, Jacques Demy, knew that the film would fade and so made three black-and-white negatives in three different color bands, similar to the old Technicolor process, so that the color would be preserved and that later, the three bands could be brought together to re-create the saturated color of the film. Demy’s widow saw this process to completion for the DVD release of the film. I guess I wasn’t the only one who thought that the color was important.)

Demy’s film also goes beyond the black-and-white moral treatment that seems so common in any form of mainstream storytelling. There are no clear villains – even Cassard, the diamond merchant who tries to woo Geneviéve while Guy is in Algeria, is not an antagonist in any way, even less so if you see Demy’s previous film, Lola, which is actually about Cassard’s life and troubles before his appearance in Parapluies. One of the fundamental messages of the film is that you don’t have to have the fairytale ending,at least not the one you expect, to be happy. It’s not about the overarching triumph of love, or about the perseverance of the human spirit in the face of adversity, or anything like that, but three important things happen:

1. Things don’t turn out the way anyone plans them.

2. That’s okay.

3. I guess this is a bit of a cheat, because it is sort of a film trope, but love comes for people when they absolutely least expect it.

Beyond the novelty of the operetta format, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg is a unique spectacle. Magnificently scored, impeccably acted, beautifully shot, the film stands out as a treasure even in the midst of a renaissance for French film. It’s definitely one to seek out.

Blade Runner

People watch movies for many different reasons. Some people want to be immersed in a story, while some want to be immersed in a mood, a blend of light and shadow and music that transports you convincingly to another world. Some want to watch their favorite actors perform, and some pay attention to the technical details – the cinematography, the sets, the lighting, and all of the other things that make a movie work. It is rare that everyone has something to look for, but every now and then, a film comes along wherein all of the elements fall together in glorious unison, a sparkling cinematic gem so clearly superior to most movies that it belongs to a category of film all its own. Ridley Scott’s magnum opus Blade Runner is such a film. Twenty-five years after being underappreciated and having the rights bandied about by studios that hated it, the film has blossomed from a failure to a cult classic to a masterpiece that is finally getting its due praise.

Scott’s movie shines today as beautifully as it did when it was released. Aesthetically, it’s an incredibly appealing film. Long shots of police cars hovering over the streets of a dystopian Los Angeles, for all of their bleakness, have a profound, muted beauty accented perfectly by Vangelis’s moving score. Futurist Syd Mead provided a vision of the future for the film that refuses to look dated, coming from an era in which even the most classic films bear the marks of their era, and the film’s cinematography brings that vision to life perfectly.

The narrative itself is as thought-provoking as it is entertaining. On its surface,, it is a detective story, ableit one with sci-fi trappings. A group of genetically engineered humanoids called “Replicants” have escaped the off-world colonies where they were working and returned to Earth, where there presence is illegal. A detective named Deckard (Harrison Ford) who specializes in hunting down replicants is pulled out of retirement to track them down and destroy them. Deckard discovers that some of the replicants have been implanted with memories, in order to help them develop faster emotionally. As he finds himself falling in love with an unwitting Replicant, he begins to wonder what exactly it means to be human and if he is, in fact, human himself.

Actors such as Harrison Ford, M. Emmet Walsh, Edward James Olmos, and Rutger Hauer all give outstanding performances in a film that uses noir trappings to advance disturbing philosophical issues and the art of filmmaking itself, all at the same time.

Kinks

The Kinks’s impact on the world of rock and roll music is incalculable, with artists from The Who’s Pete Townsend to The Killers citing the band, especially Ray Davies’s songwriting, as a massive influence. Their career was as prolific as it was enduring, from their early hits like “All Day and All of the Night” to the thoughtful, subtly satirical masterpiece The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society and onward, into a successful period in the 80’s that was far more critically respected than similar periods by other classic rock bands of the 1960’s.

The Kinks legacy continues today. Davies is often credited as the grandfather of entire movements of music (Britpop, in particular, regards him fondly) and far more recently they have reached the charts again, due to the inclusion of the classic “A Well Respected Man” on the soundtrack of the hit film Juno.

The Kinks’s debut album, simply called Kinks, is a great insight into their beginnings and a fun album all in all. In many ways, it’s a typical 1960’s rock-band debut, but at the same time, you can hear the beginnings of something great. Perhaps most impressive is the number of original songs by Ray Davies in an era where most bands began, if not built, their career on blues covers.

The album has a fair number of the standard covers, from Chuck Berry’s raucous “Hey Delilah,” and “Too Much Monkey Business” to the hilariously cocky “Long Tall Shorty.” The recordings are fast, loose, and enthusiastic – fun, but fairly typical of the rock and roll records coming out of the UK at the time. It’s loose in a lot of ways, with the recording of the music deliberately unpolished as an affront to the clean-cut generation that came prior.

The whole album is fun, but it’s Davies’s early forays into songwriting that really show off the band’s diversity. “So Mystifying” has a Stones-esque riff and protracted vocals. “Just Can’t Go to Sleep” has brighter, clean-cut sounds more suited to the stage of American Bandstand. “Revenge” is a bawdy, harmonica-fueled blues instrumental, and “Stop Your Sobbing” is softer, reminiscent of the Motown covers being performed by their contemporaries.

Then there’s “You Really Got Me,” a key cut in rock history. Ragged vocals permeate the album, but when combined on this track with a fast-hitting guitar riff and Dave Davies’s slashed speakers, it creates its own sonic world, a world that became crucial in the eventual development of harder rock movements like punk and metal. In some ways, the song is aggressively ugly – at least it’s easy to hear how it would sound that way to parents at the time – but its infectious hook and groundbreaking sound cement it as one of the all-time classics in rock and roll history.

Kinks sounds at first like a typical record from the era, but the stylistic shifts, though subtle, are far-reaching for a band in this early stage of development. They hint at the future greatness the band would come to display, and make a record that is not only fun, but very diverse.

River – The Joni Letters

When his latest album, River – The Joni Letters, received the Grammy for Album of the Year, it sparked a fair bit of public outcry. The general assertion was that singling this record out for album of the year was an indication of how out-of-touch the Academy is with reality. Whether the album is deserving of the Grammy or not is immaterial, honestly: What matters is that it is a spectacular work in an already-outstanding catalog. While River doesn’t contain any of the cutting-edge genre-bending that Hancock’s work is known for, it is still a subtly powerful musical achievement

Hancock gained national attention in the early 1960’s as a composer as well as an instrumentalist. Songs like “Watermelon Man” and “Cantaloupe Island” garnered him acclaim early in his career, as did his position in Miles Davis’s quintet. However, it was his adventurous streak that proved to be his legacy. He pioneered the use of chords seldom if ever used in jazz, guiding the genre out of the bebop era and into new territory.

His 1973 album Headhunters, which perfected a jazz-funk fusion sound that many people had tried and failed to make work, was the first jazz album to go platinum, with a fifteen-minute jam called “Chameleon” finding incredible popularity. Fans at the time accused Hancock of selling out, but the album turned out to be a landmark in the worlds of jazz and funk music alike, and due to frequent sampling is seen as integral to the origin of hip-hop.

After an incredibly prolific ten years, HH released Future Shock, whose lead single “Rockit” became a smash hit in the early days of MTV. Like Headhunters before it, Future Shock was astonishingly avant-garde, blending hip-hop influences with his typical jazz style, and featuring Grand Mixer DST on turntables in a performance that helped popularize turntablism as a legitimate form of instrumental expression.

After such an  illustrious career, River seems on the surface to signify a slowing down or mellowing out for Hancock. However, while the album may not be as cutting-edge as some of his previous work, it is still a masterfully constructed piece of art.

As a tribute, the album works beautifully on many levels. Hancock and Mitchell have been friends since a  1979 collaboration with Charles Mingus, and their friendship lends River a decidedly personal touch. Hancock approaches the material not merely with one musician’s respect for another’s work, but with the care that one would take in handcrafting a gift to a friend. For instance, careful attention is paid to the context in which Mitchell’s lyrics are placed, with Hancock deliberately drawing attention to the them by placing them in unusual settings or framing them in new and unexpected ways. Everything about the album evokes Joni, from its loose, jazzy, interpretative approach, to the selection of other artists on the record, including noted Mitchell influence Leonard Cohen. Not just content to record an album of covers, Hancock also includes two songs that, while not notably recorded by Mitchell, are songs that she cites as crucial in her musical development. The album clearly is an earnest tribute in every possible respect.

Working with a number of outstanding artists from up-and-coming Corinne Bailey Rae to Mitchell herself, Hancock showcases a wide array of talents, but also illustrates his uncanny ability to match an artist to a song or style, and to coax the best out of every collaborator he approaches. Tina Turner’s turn on “Edith and the Kingpin” shows that at age 68, she’s still capable of giving one of the most soulful performances of her career, while “Court and Spark” intersperses Norah Jones’s smoky vocals with instrumental moments of abstract tension, for an unexpected but memorable re-imagining. Leonard Cohen delivers “The Jungle Line” like a poetry slam, drawing attention to Mitchell’s lyrics, singer-songwriter tendencies, and jazz roots simultaneously. The album also features numerous instrumental works, including a wildly divergent take on “Both Sides Now” that is really more of a meditation on the song than it is an interpretation thereof. Hancock’s keeps little from the original piece, instead fully exploring the possibilities presented by Mitchell’s framework.

River is a strong album for Hancock in a career full of them, but it’s also notable for the way in which it showcases its subject. Joni Mitchell may be a fixture in the world of singer/songwriter folk-pop, but she has always had jazz in and around her life. Her voice, her delivery, and her own musical tastes have always been firmly rooted in the jazz world. Aside from the fact that the music stands so well on its own, what makes River truly phenomenal is that it takes these tendencies in Mitchell and brings them to the fore. The result is an engaging experience in terms of the music and the goal of the album overall.

The White Stripes – White Blood Cells

I know that I’m a little late to the party, but I picked up 2001’s White Blood Cells by The White Stripes the other day. The White Stripes are Jack and Meg White, (widely believed to be) a divorced couple that combines spontaneous, off-the-cuff recording with hard-hitting rock riffs with a strong sense of rootedness. Their aesthetic is carefully composed and instantly recognizable, and the meticulous control that they exert over their own image is almost as well-known as their music. From the stark colour scheme of their album art and clothing to their surreal, Michel Gondry-directed videos, The White Stripes look and sound like The White Stripes, and it’s hard to mistake them for anything else.

The band uses older instruments and recording equipment almost exclusively, for an incredibly lo-fi sound that hearkens back to the early days of the blues. For a lot of their more stripped-down numbers, where the band eschews distortion and more modern-sounding riffs, their sound evokes early blues greats like Howlin’ Wolf or Robert Johnson. At the same time, their exuberance is reminiscent of old-school garage rockers like MC5. Yet at the same same time, it’s something completely unto itself. The simple recording style connects them sonically to the early days of American recorded music, but it also lends the songs a certain spontaneous joy, as though upon writing the song the band couldn’t wait to share it with everyone. (The band spent three weeks recording their most recent album – the most time they’ve ever spent in the studio.) What their records lack in polish, they more than make up for in enthusiasm.

White Blood Cells definitely fits into that mold, bringing the band’s unique perspective to a surprising range of musical styles. “We’re Going to be Friends” is a lighthearted, acoustic folk tune about going to grade school, while “Fell in Love with a Girl” is a loud, hard-hitting rocker. The album also contains “Aluminum,” perhaps the bands only instrumental, a largely abstract freak-out track reminiscent of The Flaming Lips or Pink Floyd in one of either band’s trippier moments.

Despite the strong sense of style the band has, there’s enough variety on the record to keep it from getting monotonous, and even in its darker moments, it’s somehow refreshing. All in all, it’s fun, which is, ultimately, what a White Stripes record should be.

Post coming soon

I’ve written most of the post for this week’s blog entry, but I am experiencing some difficulty with my computer audio – everything sounds horribly distorted and static-y. It’s not the speakers-when I plug my headphones into the computer, I hear the static through my headphones, and when I plug my iPod into my speakers, that sounds fine. This has been going on for awhile. I went so far as to buy a new sound card, and I haven’t had the problem for a few days, but I guess that wasn’t the problem. If anyone out there has any ideas as to what the problem might be, please let me know. In the meantime, I need to charge my iPod before I can play that much of an album on it, so I’ll try to find another way to listen to the album as soon as possible, but the post is going to have to come later.

Sorry.

Sloan!

Canadian power-pop group Sloan has achieved megastar status, with their albums routinely topping the charts, and winding up routinely on “greatest album ever” lists…in Canada. The quartet has been rocking out for 17 years. Their rejection of a major label sparked the indie-rock revolution, giving us groups like Broken Social Scene, The Arcade Fire, The New Pornographers, and Tegan and Sara, but it seems to have doomed them to obscurity in the United States.

Sloan is made up of Chris Murphy, Andrew Scott, Patrick Pentland, and Jay Ferguson. All four are singer/songwriters in their own right, and (with one exception) all four contribute to each album. While each of them have a default position within the band, they take turns on vocals, usually depending on who wrote the song, and each musician is entirely comfortable taking someone else’s part – they regularly switch out in their live shows.

Sloan grew out of the Halifax, Nova Scotia music scene. Formed in 1991, their debut album, Smeared, was a well-received grunge album, and they found a hit with the single “Underwhelmed,” which saw heavy play on on Canada’s MuchMusic station.

When Geffen pushed for the band to follow their Nirvana-influenced, grunge sound, Sloan responded instead with a power-pop album inspired by The Beatles and The Who. The band stood solidly by Twice Removed, and refused to back down until Geffen released the record. Ultimately, the label caved, but they refused to support the album promotionally and they dropped Sloan from the label. Regardless, Twice Removed was a smash hit, and continues top “greatest Canadian album” lists to this day.

Sloan founded their own label, murderecords, and they released a trio of albums over four years, each one garnering both widespread critical acclaim and massive commercial success. In 1996 they released One Chord to Another, and ’98 and ’99 saw the one-two punch of Navy Blues and Between the Bridges, more or less a love song to their hometown of Halifax.

I first heard of Sloan through the webcomic Sam and Fuzzy. The artist was listing his favorite bands; he mentioned Ben Folds Five, Reel Big Fish, The Pillows, and Sloan. Anyone who comes up with a list like that is on the fast track to earning my musical respect, so I checked out Sloan. I picked up their 2001 album Pretty Together for about $5 used. At first, I didn’t think that much of it (what the hell was wrong with me?), and I put it aside, until the band’s name kept popping up around me and not going away. I went back to Hastings – I was in a bad mood and ready for some good ol’ consumerism – and picked up (unwittingly) their late-90’s triple smash. I got One Chord to Another, Navy Blues, and Between the Bridges, for a grand total of less than $12. I think I paid $11. Looking back, it saddens me that they’re obscure enough around here that I could get away with that.

A whole new universe of rock possibility opened up in front of me. I was still tentative, but I thought that I liked what I was hearing. What finally hooked me was Navy Blues. The album opens with a fast, hard-hitting guitar riff and a two-part harmony that would pull in anyone. Trying to describe the opener, “She Says What She Means” is useless. It’s good, old-fashioned rock and roll, and it’s too awesome for words. The amazing thing is that the album kept going. “Seems So Heavy” has a bass line straight out of the late-Beatles McCartney catalogue. “Chester the Molester” is a bright, happy piano tune about the creepiest guy at the bar. As I kept going through the record, I realized that there wasn’t really a weak cut on it. I had my favorites, but nearly every song was a knock-out, and every song was at the very least good.

I went on to Between the Bridges. It was arranged in suites. That delighted me. The first four songs especially worked well, and the Beatles comparisons kept coming. Quiet opener “The N.S.” was almost a Lennon track, and the dense harmonies on “Don’t You Believe a Word” almost moved me to tears the first time I heard it (and have moved me to tears on occasion). People accuse Sloan of basically making compilation albums, but Between the Bridges is an incredibly cohesive work, and one of the most solid records that I’ve ever heard. One Chord to Another is perhaps the most varied musically, and if the cohesion of Bridges is an asset, then somehow variety becomes an asset on One Chord. I realized that if you sound this good, then nearly everything you do will be likable, even if you take two different approaches to your work.

This was also the album that made me notice Sloan’s lyrics – their early work in particular is known for being clever, charmingly self-deprecating, and true-to-life. Songs like “G Turns to D,” where the narrator is watching a girl tear him apart with her music onstage and wishing that he hadn’t taught her to play guitar, are as interesting lyrically as they are musically. Chris Murphy in particular, have a penchant for interesting lyrical situations and subtle wordplay.

All of this made me pull out my copy of Pretty Together again. I suddenly knew what to make of it. It was dark, but it was mature, and the thick harmonies that I had fallen in love with were now paired with flowing, Jeff Lynne-esque chord changes that gave me chills.

And then we fell in love and lived happily ever after. I hunted down all of their studio albums, I’m working on the rest, and there’s only one record in the bunch that’s even questionable. There’s too much about Sloan to recommend them to really encapsulate in one place; all that I can do is ask you to go find out for yourself. Start with Navy Blues.