All the dictionaries in my house are rather old, but I’m pretty sure the following definitions (from the Second College Edition of Webster’s New World Dictionary) still apply:
capitalism: the economic system in which all or most of the means of production and distribution … are privately owned and operated for profit
democracy: government in which the people hold the ruling power either directly or through elected representatives
Among the many, many problems with Michael Moore’s new film, Capitalism: A Love Story, perhaps the most basic is his apparent inability to distinguish between economic and political systems. His conclusion – one he repeated at length on Bill Maher’s show last week – is that we need to “abolish capitalism and replace it with democracy.” It’s a populist idea, to be sure, intended to rouse the (liberal, upper-middle-class) rabble to head directly from the theater to the local Home Depot for torches and pitchforks. But no matter what Moore actually meant – and what he meant is that we need to limit the overwhelming influence that corporations and financial elites currently wield over American life – his message is inevitably lost (at least amongst his decently educated audience) in his nonsensical juxtaposition of capitalism and democracy as mutually exclusive.
Sadly, little else about the scattershot Capitalism: A Love Story makes much sense, either. The film is a jumble of macro- and micro-economic diatribes that fails almost completely to show the link between the collapses and bailouts on Wall Street and the current struggles on Main Street. Moore wants desperately to make us see that link, and to get us angry about it, but he gets no closer than anyone else has to illuminating the complex financial instruments (derivatives, credit default swaps, etc., etc.) that played a major role in the banking catastrophe – or to showing us how they affect the lives of ordinary people through foreclosures, job losses and the like. (more…)
Nick Hornby is Exhibit A in defense of the crusty old adage “write what you know.” He built his reputation on a pair of books that traded on his twin obsessions – football (the autobiographical Fever Pitch) and pop music (his debut novel High Fidelity) – while exploring the impacts of such fixations on interpersonal relationships. His next novel, the brilliant About a Boy (1998), didn’t explore fandom directly, though one of its main characters was a former pop singer who used the residual income from his one big hit to keep the world at bay.
Since then, Hornby has broadened his thematic horizons to encompass religious fervor (How To Be Good), suicide and therapy (A Long Way Down), and teen pregnancy (the “young adult” novel Slam) – all, unfortunately, with returns considerably diminished from his earlier work. In fact, his most essential work of the last decade was a nonfiction immersion into his music fandom: the essay collection Songbook (titled 31 Songs outside the U.S.), which explores his emotional attachments to tunes by artists ranging from O.V. Wright to Royksopp. Any Popdose loyalist who has not already picked up a copy of Songbook should do so immediately.
With all that in mind, it was welcome news indeed when Penguin’s Riverhead Books subsidiary announced that Hornby’s new novel would return him to the world of those who create and devour popular music. Indeed, the setup of Juliet, Naked is almost impossibly juicy … at least from the perspective of a 21st-century music writer like me (and many of you). If you read the excerpt we posted here last week, you already know that Duncan is an obsessive fan of singer-songwriter Tucker Crowe, who walked away from his middling career under mysterious circumstances 20 years ago and has since become the subject of endless conjecture about his past and present lives. As leader of the “Crowologists,” and administrator of a website devoted to picking apart every detail of the singer’s career, Duncan receives a preview copy of a new CD featuring “naked” demos from Crowe’s most acclaimed (and final) album, Juliet. (more…)
The new benefit album from Neil Finn’s 7 Worlds Collide collective, The Sun Came Out, doesn’t aspire to the sorts of Grand Gestures that mark so many multi-artist charity compilations. Instead, its charms are subdued and homespun, and its songs (such as “Learn to Crawl”) are intoxicating in their low-key tunefulness. Those same qualities, along with an enormous generosity of spirit, are the ones that have sustained Finn through three decades as a recording artist — perhaps the most underrated artist of his era, as wearepronetosuggestfrequently here at Popdose.
The album comes by those characteristics naturally. Finn and his family opened their home (and his home studio) in New Zealand for three weeks last Christmastime to most of the crew from the previous 7 Worlds incarnation — Johnny Marr, Ed O’Brien and Phil Selway from Radiohead, Sebastian Steinberg, Lisa Germano — as well as newbies including Wilco, KT Tunstall, and down-under singer-songwriters Don McGlashan, Bic Runga, and Glenn Richards. The sessions were, by all accounts, full of frivolity, on-the-spot collaboration, and various forms (this being the holiday season) of good cheer; they also marked a musical reunion for various Finn family members including brother Tim, sons Liam and Elroy, and — singing on record for the first time — Neil’s wife Sharon.
In addition to preparing and publicizing The Sun Came Out (which emerges tomorrow in the U.S.), Finn has been readying a new Crowded House album for release this winter and has recently found time to play a few gigs (with and without his 7 Worlds compatriots) in London and Los Angeles. His interview with Popdose, patched in from New Zealand through his U.S. publicist’s office (thus saving your intrepid interviewer a whopping phone bill), found him answering queries about the minutiae of long-past Crowded House gigs as well as reader questions ranging from the profound to the ridiculous. (Sadly, dear reader who calls himself “maxus,” he had no answer whatsoever for the question, “Imagine if writing songs in flat keys suddenly became a major felony. How would you imagine a day in Neil Finn’s Violent Life of Crime, circa September 2010?”) Here’s a live clip from the first 7 Worlds Collide project:(more…)
If you’re buying into my obnoxious stereotype so far – and if you’re part of the distaff sector of the species, I sincerely apologize for it — then you know where this is going. Because if you’re old like me, you sat around with your buddies and called that girl “Janis Ian.” But by the time I got to graduate school in 1990, her name was “Indigo Girl.”
This album is why. And at this point I’ll pull out of the Neanderthal mentality of my opening and state, simply, that Indigo Girls was one of the finest major-label debuts of the ’80s. Its long-term impact is undeniable, not only upon the duo’s career but upon an entire generation of female singer-songwriters who gained a path to popularity on the radio and the concert stage in part because of its success. (more…)
Reader questions are becoming almost de rigueur for our higher-profile Popdose Interviews, so we thought some of you might like to be part of our upcoming conversation with one of our very favorite artists, Neil Finn. Submit your questions here before midnight on Monday, and we’ll fit in as many as he can (or is willing to) answer. Feel free to touch on the Split Enz years, the Crowded House era, his solo work, or his many collaborations with Tim, Liam and the whole Finn brood — including the new 7 Worlds Collide album, The Sun Came Out, which itself dawns on September 29 and benefits Oxfam.
Janis Ian is in career-retrospective mode lately, but she’s handling it – as usual – in thoroughly modern fashion. The confessional singer/songwriter, creator of the boomer-icon hits “Society’s Child” and “At Seventeen,” has long since abandoned the major-label merry-go-ground – she’s been releasing new music on her own Rude Girl imprint for more than a decade. Nevertheless, she is getting the “Essential” treatment from Sony/Legacy with a two-disc anthology that arrived in stores and online last week. But there’s a twist: The Essential Janis Ian is essentially a reprint of a compilation titled Best of Janis Ian: The Autobiography Collection, which she self-released last year in conjunction with her critically acclaimed memoir, Society’s Child: My Autobiography.
The book begins with a clear-eyed portrait of her troubled upbringing as the child of leftists under constant FBI surveillance, and her early blossoming as a songwriter – her first song, a haunting Childe-ballad update titled “Hair of Spun Gold,” was published in the folk-music periodical Broadside when she was 12. She recorded the controversial, interracial-romance drama “Society’s Child” when she was 15; the single had to be re-released twice before it became a Top 20 hit in 1967, despite being banned by radio stations across the South, and Ian recounts a live performance that engendered so much racial hatred that she briefly feared for her life. Here she is performing the song on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. (more…)
The words were spoken in London, casually, almost flippantly, and were directed at an audience that was sure to treat them in the spirit they were intended. It was not until the words traveled to the United States, and were heard by an audience of narrow-minded hypocrites for whom they were decidedly not intended, that they created a ruckus that led to censorship, destruction and even death threats.
No, silly, I’m not saying that Natalie Maines is bigger than John Lennon (or Jesus, for that matter). What I am saying is that both of them – all three of them, actually – learned one very important lesson the hard way: Speaking your mind can be a very dangerous business. It can even get you killed.
Here at Popdose and throughout the Western world, this week’s (admittedly consumerist) Beatlemania revival has offered plenty of opportunities to reflect on their music, their influence … the astounding greed of their record label over a 45-year period … (Did EMI really have to sell the stereo and mono mixes separately, particularly considering that every album from Please Please Me to Revolver was short enough that they could have easily crammed both versions onto a single CD?) But as long as we’re sitting around dissecting the effects of the remastering process on “Happiness is a Warm Gun,” or tapping colored buttons in time to the scrolling visuals on the Rock Band version of “Revolution,” we may as well pause to marvel at the historical import of the Beatles’ efforts – and John’s in particular – to use their stardom to advance causes and engage in social commentary. In this, as in their music, they created a template that has been imitated and amended by generations of celebrities in their wake, for better and for worse. (more…)
Sick to death of Beatle hype? Too bad! Today’s the one before the one before 9/09, and you’re just gonna have to shine it on a little longer.
This weekend Entertainment Weekly came out with a vaguely interesting, vaguely infuriating list of the Fabs’ “50 best songs,” selected (it seems) by a panel of 10 EW writers (including that other, probably better-paid but infinitely less worthy Jeff Giles). The magazine’s crew did such a lousy job separating the Strawberry Fields from the Norwegian Wood that I figured, I can do better than that … heck, I’ll bet we all can!
And so here we are. Several of my Popdose colleagues have contributed their own lists, but this is no Popdose 100 – we weren’t organized enough this time to compile a comprehensive survey of our Beatle tastes. Still, there are a few generalizations to be reached, particularly on the popularity of such tracks as “A Day in the Life,” “Here Comes the Sun,” “Revolution,” and the Abbey Road medley. Please feel free – no, feel compelled – to offer your own best-of list in the comments, or at least to take potshots at ours. Me first, though (with each song’s EW ranking, if any, in parentheses): (more…)
Like (I suspect) most viewers, I wasn’t too troubled by self-recrimination at the end of Quentin Tarantino’s must-see exercise in “Jewish revenge porn,” Inglourious Basterds. (The description comes from the Jewish Daily Forward, not from me.) I wasn’t worried about Q’s preposterous deviations from history, nor was I concerned that some Jewish folks might not appreciate – indeed, might be appalled by – their forebears’ cinematic transformation from victims to vigilantes. Screw the strictures of morality, the heavy burden of humanity! The way I figure it, most people leave the theater thinking just one thing: Man, if only the Jews had been able to open up a can of whoop-ass on those damn Nat-zees – that woulda been sweet.
My wife – a (sorta) Jewess who emerged from the film similarly exhilarated, and ready to grab a baseball bat for some impromptu strip-mall justice – recovered her faculties quickly and asked to stop in at Big Box Boox (i.e., Barnes & Noble) to pick up some chick lit. So she went off to fiction and I stopped at the bestseller rack, where I was confronted by an entirely different array of “revenge porn.” The titles included Mark Levin’s “conservative manifesto” Liberty and Tyranny (which leaves some question as to where his sympathies lie), Glenn Beck’s Common Sense (the first of two oxymorons in this column), Dick Morris’ Catastrophe and Michelle Malkin’s Culture of Corruption. The latter two tomes, which see fit to pass final judgment on the new administration, were released in June and July, respectively – which, even accounting for the sped-up timeline for publishing political books, means they were written no later than March or April … before the stimulus bill had even been signed into law. (more…)
Ted Kennedy was never one of my heroes. Like most people of my generation and those that came after, the three principal things I knew about him were these: He was the younger, still-alive brother of two really great men who’d both been assassinated; he drove a girl off a bridge; and he screwed up big-time in his one shot at the presidency, in 1980, in the process helping to bring about the Reagan era.
Beyond all that, we younger folks knew that liberals loved him because he was the next best thing to royalty, and his heart (and political positions) were always in the right place. We also knew that conservatives loathed him because, well, they didn’t like the idea of Democratic royalty (and, by the way, did I mention he drove a girl off a bridge?).
All of us on both sides always knew Kennedy was there, the embodiment of an extraordinary legacy who forever seemed to be grasping for his fair share of it, and coming up just short. But without a scorecard of Senate votes, we couldn’t help but wonder what, exactly, he was accomplishing all these years – apart from courting tabloid drama, getting his name bandied about by right-wing jackasses scraping for a direct-mail buck, and presiding over one family funeral after another. Such is the burden of being a senator – even a high-profile one – rather than a president.
I had the honor of meeting Kennedy twice – once in a Senate meeting room during the fall of 1989, when I was covering hearings that would help decide the fate of the National Endowment for the Arts, and again during the summer of ’96 at the 25th-anniversary gala for the Kennedy Center in Washington, where I worked at the time. Our first meeting came at one of his lowest points — he was becoming notorious for his post-divorce carousing and he was clearly drinking too much; it showed all over his face, from his red cheeks to his bulbous nose. The second time he was in much better form, accompanied by his second wife Vicki and flush not with booze, but with the recent success of his legislation to raise the minimum wage, the vanquishing of the “Contract with America,” and Bill Clinton’s pending re-election. On both occasions, though, he was gracious and thoroughly indulgent of a commoner who didn’t quite know how to approach a Kennedy.
With all of that in mind, I must admit that I often respond perversely to news of death and tragedy — and yesterday morning was no different. I like to blame this on my friend and Popdose colleague Bob Cashill, who many years ago dismissed the death of a prominent actor or director (I forget who) by saying, “He was good; now he’s dead.” But it’s unfair to blame Bob, really; after all, I was the one who couldn’t stop myself from snickering at the horrified looks on my classmates’ faces when we heard Reagan had been shot, and I was the one who (much later) offended my work colleagues by inexplicably breaking into song as we were evacuating our building at the United Nations on 9/11. (more…)
Among the many, many problems with Michael Moore’s new film, Capitalism: A Love Story, perhaps the most basic is his apparent inability to distinguish between economic and political systems. His conclusion – one he repeated at length on Bill Maher’s show last week – is that we need to “abolish capitalism and replace it with democracy.” It’s a populist idea, to be sure, intended to rouse the (liberal, upper-middle-class) rabble to head directly from the theater to the local Home Depot for torches and pitchforks. But no matter what Moore actually meant – and what he meant is that we need to limit the overwhelming influence that corporations and financial elites currently wield over American life – his message is inevitably lost (at least amongst his decently educated audience) in his nonsensical juxtaposition of capitalism and democracy as mutually exclusive.
The new benefit album from Neil Finn’s 7 Worlds Collide collective, 
Reader questions are becoming almost de rigueur for our higher-profile Popdose Interviews, so we thought some of you might like to be part of our upcoming conversation with one of our very favorite artists, Neil Finn. Submit your questions here before midnight on Monday, and we’ll fit in as many as he can (or is willing to) answer. Feel free to touch on the Split Enz years, the Crowded House era, his solo work, or his many collaborations with Tim, Liam and the whole Finn brood — including the new 7 Worlds Collide album, ![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=e93b2baf-9e35-401d-8f4d-88ed55a0c529)
Janis Ian is in career-retrospective mode lately, but she’s handling it – as usual – in thoroughly modern fashion. The confessional singer/songwriter, creator of the boomer-icon hits “Society’s Child” and “At Seventeen,” has long since abandoned the major-label merry-go-ground – she’s been releasing new music on her own Rude Girl imprint for more than a decade. Nevertheless, she is getting the “Essential” treatment from Sony/Legacy with a two-disc anthology that arrived in stores and online last week. But there’s a twist: 
Here at Popdose and throughout the Western world, this week’s (admittedly consumerist) Beatlemania revival has offered plenty of opportunities to reflect on their music, their influence … the astounding greed of their record label over a 45-year period … (Did EMI really have to sell the stereo and mono mixes separately, particularly considering that every album from Please Please Me to Revolver was short enough that they could have easily crammed both versions onto a single CD?) But as long as we’re sitting around dissecting the effects of the remastering process on “Happiness is a Warm Gun,” or tapping colored buttons in time to the scrolling visuals on the Rock Band version of “Revolution,” we may as well pause to marvel at the historical import of the Beatles’ efforts – and John’s in particular – to use their stardom to advance causes and engage in social commentary. In this, as in their music, they created a template that has been imitated and amended by generations of celebrities in their wake, for better and for worse. 
Sick to death of Beatle hype? Too bad! Today’s the one before the one before 9/09, and you’re just gonna have to shine it on a little longer.
My wife – a (sorta) Jewess who emerged from the film similarly exhilarated, and ready to grab a baseball bat for some impromptu strip-mall justice – recovered her faculties quickly and asked to stop in at Big Box Boox (i.e., Barnes & Noble) to pick up some chick lit. So she went off to fiction and I stopped at the bestseller rack, where I was confronted by an entirely different array of “revenge porn.” The titles included Mark Levin’s “conservative manifesto” 
All of us on both sides always knew Kennedy was there, the embodiment of an extraordinary legacy who forever seemed to be grasping for his fair share of it, and coming up just short. But without a scorecard of Senate votes, we couldn’t help but wonder what, exactly, he was accomplishing all these years – apart from courting tabloid drama, getting his name bandied about by right-wing jackasses scraping for a direct-mail buck, and presiding over one family funeral after another. Such is the burden of being a senator – even a high-profile one – rather than a president.