I’m not a politics junkie, really. I know that might be hard to believe based on some of my columns over the last year. You’d find support in your disbelief from my family members as they recount the agony I go through while running through the Sunday morning roundtable tortures.

This Sunday, much like last Sunday and the one before it, the buzz was about how John McCain has co-opted Barack Obama’s tentpole strategy of change. Some argue that he is only flipping his deck of cards around, that he utters change while he shuffles out constancy. Others are saying that he actually has presented change, but only one, yet that single one has all but assured him a close run to the White House - Sarah Palin. The other big topic for the talking heads was the collapse and eventual sale of Lehman Bros. Investments and the rapidly plummeting stock prices for Washington Mutual (WaMu) and other notable lenders.

It all started me to thinking about the notion of change beyond the rhetorical slings and arrows. What changes are we actually looking for in this country? Who among us are secure? Who are hanging in, and who have given up? Despite optimistic numbers all summer long, unemployment is at a five year record high, so pervasive that those once rose-tinted figures had to be retro-actively adjusted to gel with the facts. I posed the question to some of my fellow Popdose writers: how are you doing? We’re presenting the responses here as an invitation to you, the readers. Feel free to share your situation with us in the comments section.

A point worth mentioning: this article has been several months in the making and while individual circumstances may have changed from person to person, the viewpoints are still valid, the message still has merit and is presented in that respect.

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There are several degrees of expectation, but the key ones are low expectation, high expectation, and original Metallica fans. You’re aware of the first two, I’m sure, but number three may be a mystery to you, and for good reason, as satisfaction requires nothing less than a wormhole in time, a crate of Jagermeister, and just maybe the reanimated dead. Intrigued?

Friday marks the release of Metallica’s latest, Death Magnetic, and already the fists are flying. Some are claiming it’s a return to the sound somewhere between … And Justice for All (1988) and the eponymous “Black Album” (1991), and they’re not too far off. Balancing between the hard rock Metallica’s been working for the past decade and the guitar-solo heavy thrash of their earlier benchmarks, Death Magnetic is a study in compromises. Yes, it was produced by Rick Rubin, who made his early mark producing Slayer. (He’s also produced Jay-Z, Johnny Cash, and Red Hot Chili Peppers.) Yes, it has that dry, reverb-adverse sound that dogged Metallica’s previous album, St. Anger (2003). Yes, guitarist Kirk Hammett gets to wail again. No, this is not Master of Puppets II.

That last bit is key — after having been promised and teased that those young and angry lunatics had returned, we have the album you would expect to have followed the previous ones. Robert Trujillo is a fine bass player, but, to paraphrase Chevy Chase, Cliff Burton is still dead. Thank you and have a pleasant tomorrow.

This is where the divide becomes clear: those who appreciated “The Black Album” will find much to like about the new one, and not unintentionally. There’s a reason why the dominant graphic tone on the cover is a stark, blinding white and why we’re now up to “The Unforgiven III.” But to those who thought of “The Black Album” as some kind of heresy, this is another injustice (pardon the pun).

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Multiple choice time on Popdose, kids. Make sure that pencil is a #2 and don’t forget to fill your circles completely. Your future depends on how you do on this test (snicker, snicker.) Okay, let’s begin!

1. The Alan Parsons Project was:

a) a pop / prog band from the late 1970s to the early 1990s

b) an adult contemporary band from the same time period that your parents thought were “neat”

c) a punchline in an Austin Powers movie

d) all of the above.

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It’s a cynical world, and there isn’t much to do about it. I grab rare glimpses of virtue whenever I can, but I’m seldom overwhelmed with opportunities. A couple weeks ago, however, we all caught sight of incredible bravery, strength of character and guts, and I couldn’t let the event pass without taking note.

But before I go into that, I need to clarify what I believe Hollywood’s standard definition of an actress is: a body. If the body can recite lines of dialogue somewhat convincingly, so much the better.

As an actress moves into the field of celebrity, how she looks becomes even more important to the grist mill. Is she getting fatter? Is she sickly thin? Is her hair short, long, thick, thinning? None of this really relates to her acting ability, but all of it seems to be preeminent on the minds of the Tinseltown machinery. I haven’t seen Angelina Jolie’s turn in last year’s A Mighty Heart. Maybe she’s really great in it. I don’t know. But I know that her biggest roles, from the animated Beowulf to the Tomb Raider flicks and this summer’s Wanted, have relied very heavily on her looks. That’s just Hollywood and, in all honesty, it’s always been that way. Above and beyond possessing talent, an actress has to look good, and so the maintenance of the body becomes almost an all-consuming task.

Cut to the shocking announcement. Christina Applegate, only in her 30s, was diagnosed with breast cancer. We came to know her almost 20 years ago as the ditzy, slutty Kelly Bundy on Fox’s Married … With Children. She was, to be blunt about it, the eye candy of the show, but she also had sharp comic timing. She wouldn’t get enough credit for it until a couple decades later, when she held her own with the big silly boys in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004), and even though the premise of her role was, again, the hot object of affection, she handled it beautifully as the nemesis of Will Ferrell’s egomaniacal newscaster.

Her most recent role, in ABC’s dramedy Samantha Who?, has allowed her to work all of these aspects, showing range, an adeptness at wordplay, and the occasional bit of slapstick here and there. She had proven again and again she was more than a body, but for many, she would always be Kelly Bundy.

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For all my pretensions, all my attempts to present myself as a literate, knowledgeable, and discerning fellow, I’m really a lowest-common-denominator guy at heart. I don’t often allow that to come through. I know that a fart joke is just about the basest, most tasteless thing in the world, especially during Holy Communion, but it can also be the most freakin’ funny thing in the world, especially during Holy Communion, especially if it’s insinuated that it was the monsignor who stepped on the duck.

I’ll tell you about it someday.

That may explain my fascination with the Kids’ WB! animated series Freakazoid!, produced by Steven Spielberg back in the rip-roaring mid-’90s. Warner Bros. Television Animation had been through a resurgence of sorts, propped up by the success of the moody, atmospheric, and terrifically written Batman: The Animated Series. They suddenly had the rest of the entertainment world paying attention, so much so that Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment came to call. From there, a succession of fondly remembered series tumbled out: Tiny Toon Adventures, Animaniacs, and Pinky and the Brain. The word came down that Spielberg’s next series should be a superhero show, so Bruce Timm, an integral part of the Batman show, started spitballing ideas, working up a premise and designing characters. The result was a show far more earnest than Spielberg planned, so he sent back the message to crank up the humor. He should have been more careful with his direction.

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Have you read the entertainment news today? Oh boy. A particularly dreadful tune is set to break some major records for sales, this week’s new movies arriving under a mantle of critical kudos have been trounced at the box office by The Dark Knight, a four-week winner no less, and the spate of mind-numbing reality TV shows, once considered dead in the water by pundits, are not only thriving but multiplying for the 2008/2009 season. It is, as the critics have feared, the grim realization that they have zero effect on the zeitgeist. But then again, we always knew that.

The few critics that actually heard Darn Floor Big Bite, the 1987 release by the band Daniel Amos, were flabbergasted. They praised the textured, atmospheric guitar work as a revelation in contrast to the band’s keyboard-driven previous releases, Vox Humana and Fearful Symmetry. They were keen on the balancing act singer/writer Terry Scott Taylor had struck lyrically, still as literate and mature as before but not as heavy-handed. In a time where guitar groups were hair metal, and regular groups were messing with their synths, Daniel Amos (known at that point as Da to avoid the whole “Which one is Daniel” question. Answer: none) looked to the underground and came up with an angular, nervy winner.

And now you get to say, “Well it can’t be that great, because I’ve never heard of it,” which has been the bane of Da’s musical existence from the start. The band started, of all things, as a thoroughly Christian country act, morphing into a Beatle-esque rock outfit, then fully embracing the original new wave ethic that was coming from CBGB darlings like Talking Heads and Television.

Problematically, they were the antithesis of most bands from the Christian subset. Their Beatles and Beach Boys influences came at a time when outside forces were totally verboten. Their four Alarma Chronicles albums (Alarma, Doppelganger, Vox Humana and Fearful Symmetry) plumbed the sounds of punk, garage, darkwave synth-rock and Krautrock, none of which sat well with the established Christian organizations, record labels and bookstores. They were alternately branded for “consorting,” being too secularly intellectual and just plain too weird. Oddly, the secular music outlets rather much felt the same way in vice-versa terms.

Perhaps the most damning charge thrown at them was that they dared to criticize the Church as equally as they looked toward the scriptures. It has been one of the major drawbacks for people in accepting Christian rock as rock music with the specified worldview that discernment with worldly ways was fine, but when it came to investigating the hypocrisies within the institutions, well, it just wasn’t done. Da, however, dared to go to that thorny place. (more…)

Porcupine Tree has been, for well on a decade now, a cult favorite trying to simply be a favorite, but there has been a problem in making that happen. That problem is the box lead member Steven Wilson refuses to be put in. The band started as a home studio project, a solo affair that leaned heavily on psychedelia, hence the trippy group name. The project would soon be fleshed out into a full group comprising Wilson, bassist Colin Edwin, drummer Chris Maitland (to be followed later on by Gavin Harrison), and former Japan synth player Richard Barbieri. With the expanded group ethic, Wilson found the proper tools to stretch out in progressive rock, pop, and even the current metal sound. That metal sound has, unfairly, caused some to blanch at the group’s Tool-like complexity and weight, which are mixed with Wilson’s harmonious, classic rock vocals.

And so it goes that radio programmers who need clear-cut lines of demarcation don’t know where to stick Porcupine Tree. For the most part it’s a cop-out, especially with their two most pop-centric releases, Stupid Dream (1999) and Lightbulb Sun (2000). While some songs do go off into eight-minutes-or-more fantasia, the majority on both releases are solid examples of pop songcraft, little marvels of production and eminently worthy of obsession. Amsterdam label Tonefloat knows very well about such obsession — they’ve been releasing Wilson’s music on high-quality vinyl for years, not just the recent Porcupine Tree album Fear of a Blank Planet (2007) but also his ambient forays as Bass Communion and his duo with vocalist Tim Bowness called No-Man. It’s a treat for fans of the band to finally have a vinyl version of Lightbulb Sun in their sweaty mitts. It couldn’t have come at a worse time, though.

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The Police make me thankful The Beatles never had a full-fledged reunion.

It was a strange Sunday evening in the wilds of Holmdel, New Jersey. The PNC Arts Center usually allows patrons onto the property two hours before show time at 6:00 PM, and so I found myself on the Garden State Parkway with Elvis Costello’s Brutal Youth CD on the stereo and thoughts of scoring a sensible parking space bouncing in my brain. Little did I know that, as a courtesy to the weekenders, the venue let people in at 4:00. They dumped me out into the adjacent woods to park! This did not bode well.

I’ll freely admit I was more excited to see Costello and the Impostors and was not disappointed. Mixing older fan favorites like “Pump It Up,” “Every Day I Write The Book,” and the requisite “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love And Understanding” with newer songs like “45″ from When I Was Cruel and “American Gangster Time” from the current and very worthwhile Momofuku album, Costello covered the necessary bases. Performing them with the gusto and spastic fire of a man half his age was wonderful to see, especially after hearing all the rumors that things would be toned down for those tender Jerseyan sensibilities. And just to give the set an extra dash of coolness, Sting came out to duet on “Allison.”

Now, had the evening ended there, I wouldn’t have walked away from this performance completely baffled. It would have been my shortest concert experience, but we all would have felt like we wanted to be in the same room with each other, band included. We’re all aware of the behind-the-scenes tensions purportedly happening in Camp Police. We’re also aware that even back in the early days, Sting commanded the majority of the attention, a position that could quickly irritate, and while hearsay shouldn’t color one’s impressions so early in the game, it was evident when Sting, Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland took the stage that they were plainly irritated.

The PNC Arts Center is a weird venue to start with. It is essentially a large, round coffee table where you and the stage are placed beneath. It is both an indoor and outdoor theater and, at the same time, neither. So there is a tendency to rig the electronics and the mix to accommodate all seats, including the uncovered lawn seats to the far back. The upshot is that the mix tends to be louder than it truly needs, causing all the music to come at you as a bass-heavy muddle. It can be compensated for. A few years back, Megadeth played the main Gigantour stage and the sonics were perfectly fine. An hour earlier, Dream Theater was on and the sound was that of a seal being clubbed (miked from the inside of the seal, no less). The Police, by contrast, were much louder than either of those bands, louder than any other show I’ve seen there this year, and easily the most sonically murky. (more…)

It was quite a thing to hear.

The big U.S. auto manufacturers, finding their sales affiliates smarting over the loss of business for the once-profitable mammoth, 4X4 luxury monsters in deference to smaller, fuel-friendly models and higher prices at the pumps, started testing the waters to see what would happen if… they sold those divisions? Maybe they might just close the Hummer and Escalade plants down, seeing as how the time for them had come and gone. A part of me, the part that never could afford one of these stupid counties on wheels and was gleeful in spite, cheered the announcement. Sure, it wasn’t a concrete plan of action — merely a “f’rinstance” — but the merest mention of the possibility was enough. At least, it momentarily was.

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I said something that sent a jolt of disbelief through the ranks of Popdose. I have been known to take my opinions to the far side, but this one threatened to betray an ignorance I didn’t know I harbored. Let me spell it out and see if I’m as far off base as some have claimed me to be:

Madonna will not be remembered for her music as much as her controversies. In fact, the latter is likely to shadow the former so much that her output as an artist will become an afterthought. And while Mariah Carey’s vocal acrobatics have become the standard pop style (thereby irreparably screwing everything up), Maddy’s antics have become the standard conduct by which all young up-and-comers must match or else not be noticed at all.

Your first salient question would be, “Dunphy, do you even like Madonna’s music?” Honestly, it’s not that I dislike her music at all. No, I’m not a fan and no, I don’t own any of her albums, but I can say unequivocally that she’s made three truly great songs in her career, a lot that I like in passing, and some that are total crap for the sake of spiking the media. The three great songs are, in no particular order, “Live To Tell,” “Oh Father,” and “Frozen.” All three indicated to me that she could radically depart from her patterns and deliver. There is nothing on her latest, Hard Candy, that comes close to the style and sentiment of the aforementioned tunes, even though that album is being hailed as a return to form.

Ideally, that’s what we should be talking about, right? That album? The music? Sure, Maddy’s a PR animal and seeks attention the way sharks seek chum, but she’s a singer and that ought to be the first thing that comes to mind, no? (more…)