Odds and Ends 012

RE: The Wussy Mercury Lounge show in August. For those who don't know, you can purchase tickets at the venue when they are open for a show that day.

 

Che Vauche: Where did you find those Yoko book recommendations?

 

 

When I can wrestle the book away from my wife, I've been reading the mostly, but not exclusively, music-focused essays in John Jeremiah Sullivan's excellent "Pulphead." His reasonably well-known piece on the celebrity cult and grim background of Axl Rose is in there, but one piece in particular, "Unknown Bards," really struck me. It's an impressionistic essay about early-Americana curating and scholarship, involving among other things a profile of John Fahey, reviews of Elijah Wald's "Escaping the Delta" and Marybeth Hamilton's "In Search of the Blues," and a lengthy exegesis of Geeshie Wiley's "Last Kind Word Blues." As far as I know this is the only piece Sullivan's written on early American music. He spends a lot of time talking about Revenant's 2 CD "American Primitive vol. 2: Pre-War Revenants, 1897-1937" (released in 2006)--says it is the most imporant release of its type since Harry's Smith's "Anthology," or that it is the next thing one needs to understand early American music. He does make the case that Fahey and associates unearthed some extremely rare 78s late in the process, and that they did the best mastering they could do with the material. I was wondering if those on this board had heard it and whether it's as essential to understanding early American music as Sullivan claims it to be.

Not uninteresting list of five "must-read" books from Yoko Ono with comments from the same:

A First Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness

Nassir Ghaemi

At first this book first gives you a "reader's digest" version of how the world leaders really were. That's interesting enough. But it goes on to show you how the brain works when a person is depressed, and how to overcome it. It is fascinating and full of important information.

Plundering Appalachia: The Tragedy of Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining

Douglas R. Tompkins

Once our valleys were green - now they look like the bomb-destroyed cities we created in Iraq. Buy this book and see what is quietly being done to middle America because of a few people's greed.

The True Story of the Bilderberg Group

Daniel Estulin

Read this if you want to know about a very powerful group that includes many of the presidents of very powerful countries, and is working to turn the planet into one country. They are systematically trying to make people dumb and poor – letting one group control them all.

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

Neil Postman

We are indeed amusing ourselves to death. This started when Marshall McLuhan stated that the medium was the message. I said right away that the message was the medium. But, alas, my voice was maybe not loud enough, and/or the medium without a serious message is much more amusing to people. So the entertainers became the gods of the people, who screamed: "Keep entertaining us! We want to die being entertained!" The kings of the world wished the same, and they let their countries fall while they were entertained. This is the only book in this list that was published way back in the 1960s. I hope you can get it.

Classified Woman

Sibel Edmonds

A tell-all book by a former FBI translator. A must-read. It's frightening that this is the reality.

And thanks to JeffC for heads up on Bob's review of Daniel Cavicchi's new book on music fans of the 19th century...sounds great.

I hope his mention of Lhamon's Raising Cain will encourage some more folks--go Walter!--to pick up this elegantly written book on 19th century minstrelsy.  The first chapter, on African American and white working class youth meeting over a dance in NYC is some of the best historical writing I have ever read.

Chesnutt's suicide-note-almost At the Cut, which as a harrowing, brittle little song cycle rewards far past its basic documentary interest (particularly the gorgeous, starkly-themed "Flirted With You All My Life") is well worth hearing for Witnesses who haven't, and I insist you give it a shot. End to end the thing is a masterwork of the rawest, brokenest streamlined human emotion - sure kicks Pink Moon's winsomely wistful ****. I figure it was overlooked for review because as sound it fails to offer up a number of our host's usual criteria (as did all of Chesnutt's records) - to make a lame and assumptive attempt, not much thrust or punch, little subtlety or cohesion, the kind of thing you listen to and grow to love largely if not only because the interest has already been planted by something other than the songs (or singer) themselves. Pairing it with an interview he did with Terry Gross given shortly before he deliberately overdosed completes an investigation into his story as what David Lowery wields it as, a message-functional slice of human interest. It's also a heartbreaking worth subjecting yourself to if or if not you're prone to a Lowereyesque bleeding heart. (Which is not to say I disagree with his point or the idea that the debate is reaching a point of necessary mutual engagement, though I think you could say that about a great many aspects of the melting polar ice cap that is This Business [multiple meanings] of Music. In any case, I spent money on the album, but only once it was too late.)

Okay, sure. I think MTV and "classic radio" are peas in a pod in winnowing the variety of music people could discover, but apples and oranges if you put their effects in conflict.

"I think classic rock radio has had a far more egregious effect"

Patrick, this is a, um, classic both/and non-disagreement. Are you gonna get over my comment about you and polls or not? Egregiously gunning for somebody forever is beyond tedious.

I think classic rock radio has had a far more egregious effect as far as providing an influential (and obnoxious and inaccurate) narrative about rock history that an awful lot of people buy into. The Eagles and Journey had no visual style to speak of, and that hasn't stopped a fairly large segment of the public from conceiving them as central to pop history.

"Wasn't that well under way before MTV entered the picture, though?"

Well, you could make a case that it's a constant in pop -- there were fans who didn't know or care where the Beatles come from (a well-known secret punch of the Brit Invasion is that white teenies had never heard the black source material of a bunch of bands). What MTV did, I think, is throw a permanent whammy on performers who either had a poor visual record of their best (many '50s and '60s performers) or never found a proper video identity (the Ramones and David Johansen. say, vs. Blondie). Telling the whole rock 'n' soul story, forever after, depended more on zesty visuals. (Odd exception: kept Devo afloat for ages, but seems to have waned badly for them in the 21st century.) I don't have super-strong feelings about this one way or the other -- MTV was neither the dawn of creation nor the gates of Armageddon predicted when it was on the rise.

Biggest upgrade ever was from a D to an A for Fabian: The Man, The Music, The Brylcreem - course The Professor denies it these days. But my source is someone very close to the throne.