JONI MITCHELL BURNS DOWN THE WORLD

Don Juan's Reckless Daughter -- Joni Mitchell

Listeners have taken joy in Joni Mitchell's continual insistence on changing her musical approach, so it wasn't unusual that the release of Hissing of Summer Lawns was hailed, for the most part, as a bold step towards personal and artistic growth. But while this release and the subsequent, and her subsequent and less commercially successful Hejira,  showed Mitchell expanding herself to more adventurous motifs - broader song structures, an increasingly impressionistic lyric scan, jazz textures - the trend toward a more personalized voice has virtually walled her off from the majority of her fans. Don Juan's Reckless Daughter,  her now double record effort, takes the ground gained from the last two albums and converts it into a meandering, amorphous culmination of half-formed concepts. The primary emphasis, musically, is towards jazz modernism, with a number of songs exceeding ten minutes in length as they ramble over Mitchell's vaguely comprehensible piano chords. She reveals a tendency to hit a strident chord and to let the notes resonate and face as she vocally ruminates over the lyrics - while her side heR, Jaco Pastorius and Wayne Shorter from Weather Report, and guitarist John Guerin, do their best to add definition. 

The lyrics, following suit, are an impressionistic hodgepodge, a string of images of ungrounded gravitas references, and ineffective epiphanies that should have been edited with a blue pencil.  It has the feeling of someone who has had too much coffee attempting to simulate that half-awake/half dreaming aura that is the expected hallmark element of surrealism as even the theoretically naive would        understand the term. The lyrics , their elliptical manner and quizzical vagueness, sound deliberate , a tone that  is contrived instead of one that arose organically, from whatever complex of stimuli happens to engage the muse for the better. 

While the more hard-nosed defenders may defend latest with the excuse that a poet may express his or her self in any way they see fit, one still has to question the worth of any effort to dissect Don Juan's Reckless Daughter the way one used to mull over Dylan albums. Though any number of matters that Mitchell chose ] to deal with may have value to her audience - spiritual lassitude, the responsibilities of freedom, sexuality into middle ages - she doesn't supply anything resembling hooks, catchphrases or accessible points of reference for them to latch onto. Instead, she gives them art, whether they like it or not. 

The paradox in Mitchell's stance is that she has thrown craft well outside the window while trying to measure up to "Art" in the upper case. One may step anywhere they want on the path (or paths) they've chosen to walk, but those of us who instinctively cringe when melodic structure --and the attending ingenuity of musical and lyrical phrase joining together to create that both stimulates one's critical faculties and rarefied pleasure centers resting outside the intellect-- all but vanish in short order, only to be replaced with a workable but altogether wholesale variation on thrift store modernism, we needn't be expected to sing or praises beyond her belief that her work will survive the scorn heaped on. She has gone from being an artful songwriter to being merely arty, which is a state of mind that takes hold of many of public personalities who think they know it all and who conceive themselves as no longer being bound by conformity. In her own way, Mitchell has joined the ranks of John Lennon, Yes and other bright talents who've OD'd on their own importance.

LOOK NOW: a brief exchange

TED BURKE:

LOOK NOW--Elvis Costello
and the Imposters

Look Now, the new Elvis Costello, is, at first listening, a highly finessed and fussed -over a collection of songs that seem amorphous, meandering, structurally inert. Lyrically, long Costello's strong suit in addition to being a strong melodist reveals a man who has had a few too many harvests from the same unreplenished acreage. It's understandable that his vivid imagery has been tamed by decades, but we witness here an attempt, over and over, to remain allusive, elliptical, sketching in just enough narrative to provide that this might be a tune that actually has something to say, buried under the happenstance blankness of the lyrics. Those who want to excavate for deeper meanings can leave their shovels and pickaxes in the shed. At age 64, Costello has nothing new to say. Worse, it would seem at his age, is that he now lacks the knack, or interest, to finesse his established themes. This is a missed opportunity of somewhat huge proportions, as it's been one of the more intriguing aspects of being a close observer of songwriters as they age and seeing how they deal with the unavoidable of becoming older, less nimble of body and mind, simultaneously confronting the advantages and shortcomings of getting older. 

We had it in the late work of Lou Reed, a writer who regretted nothing in later albums and who tried to extract something like wisdom and balance from his life  of self-created crisis, or from Leonard Cohen, who kept his oddly effective blend of religious undertones and Laurentian erotics while emphasizing the intellectual paradoxes and oppositions of instinct which a longer view of experience make possible; Cohen embraced it, and went on to offer a late body of songs that took the problematic events of a life and ventured into musings that traced a higher, profound kind of irony. Costello does none of this , really, and appears obsessed with the awful curse of Miles Davis, a jazz genius who found his genius for quick changes in styles and manner of presentation resulting, late , late in life, in work that might be better described as collaborations between rhythm sections, synth players, producers and engineers , with cameo appearances by the top-billed trumpeter. 

Some time ago this artist decided to become a master-of-all-genres and seemingly wanted to be thought of as a Modern Master than as a consistently good-to-great songwriter. This pains me to say this, but this hero of mine has been a superficial, over-stylized drudge for some two decades. There is nothing that was preventing EC from becoming a latter-day Bacharach or Newman, of course. It wouldn't have been an unworthy goal. I think, though, that Costello neglected the aspect of both Bacharach and Newman that, except for occasional lapses, neither lost their sense of song construction. Eclectic as both were about musical sources, their material was generally sharp and melodically defined. The record demonstrates his increased interests in vague atmospherics; the introduction of horn sections seems intrusive, an afterthought. Had these songs been tighter in the arrangement, more purposeful, that is too say, "catchier" for the listener to go along with mood, narrative perspective and psychology, I might have forgiven the slack lyric writing. But I'm afraid this is a case of one bad habit holding hands with another. Finally, the melodies here are slight and ephemeral, a nod, I suppose, at creating moods dark, opaque, with all things said hanging on the sketchily articulated notes in a manner suggesting the mannered atmospherics of substandard horror movies. They don't linger in the mind, much like an Alka Seltzer tablet dropped in water, fizzy, bubbly, full of hisses and subtle sounds, but gone, finally, unmemorable. 

___________________________

Barry Alfonso:

LOOK NOW--Elvis Costello
and the Imposters

Sorry to hear it, Ted. You might find this New York Times dialogue between Elvis and Carole King of interest. In his heart, EC was always more like a '70s singer-songwriter than a true punk-rocker, though playing up his Avenging Nerd persona suited him pretty well for a number of albums. He is no longer "fascinated by the weird edge of town" - and more's the pity. I think his best album was Get Happy!!, where he balanced his more conservative and abrasive qualities admirably think EC is trying hard, maybe too hard. 

There's a feel for melody there, kinda early Bacharach or Randy Newman, the sort of stuff he aimed for on Imperial Bedroom. The lyrics are labored, overly clever, with a pang but too premeditated. This isn't a lazy album but maybe an overcooked one. It's a smart person's record that outsmarts itself.  it is generally a really bad sign when a pop/rock musician decides to get SINCERE after building up an audience with the sort of pose or attitude that might be considered theatrical or otherwise self-created. EC seems to have done this in the mid-'80s after repenting various unfortunate public behaviors and outgrowing his angry young man shtick. The thing is, sincerity is also a shtick -- its the whole hand-wringing confessional bit where you drop the "act" and show your "real" face to the public (because you love them, of course). 

Lady Gaga did this a few years ago -- she showed us she was a REAL: singer/songwriter and even posed with a manual typewriter in photos to prove it! Wow! To his eternal credit, David Bowie never laid this kind of bullshit trip on his fans. Bob Dylan has also never made a ballyhooed "honest" record, implying that all of his albums are both honest and artificial. About the only rock artist who ever pulled this off successfully was John Lennon on his Plastic Ono Band album, and that might have been because he actually was going through therapy instead of a bogus act of public self-unmasking.

SONNY STITT

 In the seventies, while a young man appropriately bored with the slamming two-dimensional dynamics of late-period jazz-rock (which had morphed into a stylized arena of tick-rock riffing termed "fusion" that was monotony incarnate), I ventured forth into older jazz forms, bop, swing, big and, Ellington, Davis, Mingus, people who swung over unpredictable tempos and fantastic chords. It was a love affair that hasn't stopped yet. Curiously, though, I formed jazzbo attitudes about artists I hadn't heard, a phenomenon not uncommon among some of us desperate for a hip reputation. You followed the herd-thinking. What I heard was that alto saxophonist Sonny Stitt was nothing but a low down Charlie Parker imitator, technically adept and adroit in extemporizing over a 6/8 time breakdown of a popular tune, but he was a technician only, without a soul. I went with that for years and dug into my Miles Davis phase, binging over a the late eighties and nineties on as Much MD as I could afford, everything from what he'd done as a sideman with Bird and through his various labels as band leader, from the hard bop session he'd done, through the modal experiments and into the blistering jazz-rock he created., noting, as well, the history of his saxophone players, a fine fettle of reed geniuses: George Coleman, Cannonball Adderley, Gerry Mulligan, John Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, Sam Rivers, Dave Leibman. Nothing but the best for Miles. I was one of those who scoured the used CD bins, looking for my preferred artists and one day, lo! I came across a record titled "Walkin': A Jazz Hour With Miles Davis" on released on the now-defunct economy label Laserlight.

 Featuring a previously unavailable live performance in Stockholm in 1952, this was not the classic earlier studio album "Walkin'" (one of MD's many masterpieces), but so what, it was Davis live and on sale. Reading the personal, all seemed worth the purchase despite the misdirection of the title, as it highlighted, worthies like pianist Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers on drums, Jimmy Cobb on drums, on saxophone...Sonny Stitt?? The plagiarist, the rip off artist, the Parker wannabe? The man I relegated to the minor leagues without endeavoring to hear what he played like? With Miles? This wasn't so earth-shaking a revelation as I might want to make it sound and, of course, I didn't ask myself that sequence of disbelieving questions presented in incomplete sentences. I was curious and bought the record. I was more than pleasantly pleased with the hard bop brilliance of the band--Miles Davis of this period is essentially flawless as he applies to his muted, modulated, middle register approach to the hard-charging changes this fine band challenges him with--and came to the conclusion that Sonny Stiff had been given the short shrift as a musician. 

The resemblance to Parker is there, undeniable, and it's understandable how jazz snobs of the time, wanting to consecrate jazz as America's art music in opposition to the tradition of European classicism and establish both canon and criteria for our best gift to the world, would deride particular players, diminish them in stature without fair estimation in an effort to create standards for an emerging aesthetics. Understandable and unfair, because what I discovered was a musician of envious fluidity and lyric invention within his scope as an improviser who could negotiate steeple-chase tempos and obstacle course chord progressions with precision and yet never, or at least rarely lose a song's melodic nuance ; for all the high-velocity bravura bop-related jazz musicians are known for, Stitt had a ribbon-like, sweetly undulating method of teasing notes and shading their sounded presence with variations within the pitch, a legacy from the blues that maintains a vocal quality, a sharp note of surprise as the solo unfolds. 

 Stitt, in any regard, was not a soulless technician. Whatever debt he owed to Charlie Parker is nearly besides the point; the style is something Stitt took possession and made it his means to express something that, in itself, was beyond race, economics and the general ugliness mere existence weights us with; it is simply beautiful and exciting music made by a musician who deserves to be reexamined for his best recorded moments. Life itself does not get rosy, as a unified condition of creation that maintains a just and serene equilibrium merely because a black musician could make beautiful music with a saxophone. Whatever his whole story, Sonny Stitt remained black and a male and, above all, only human when it came to the combined forces of human stupidity, judgment and physical gravity pitted against his too-too vulnerable flesh. He made his music, found some solace for those moments during and after the notes played, and then returned to the eternal struggle of being in the world, dragging our burdens, sometimes easily, sometimes slowly, dirthfully, always toward the grave. But the magic a person can make with imagination, skill, a mind that wants something better than the weight of weather and wealth grinding them into the ground, well, I believe, that much makes life worth living and worth going back. We have the capacity to make this life of ours a better one, if only by the smallest increments, a little at a time, and , let us not forget, we can make the lives of each other better, even if only slightly. 

BIG BANG MUSIC WITH THE DARRIN JAMES BAND

STRANGE STORM-Darrin James Band

Strange Storm, the third album from the Detroit based Darrin James Band, is truth-telling of the bitterest sort, ten tracks naming the slights we do each other, intended and otherwise. Following suit, Darrin James, principal songwriter and singer, growls, rasps, sneers and bellows through the trouble-minded lyrics. James, of course, hasn’t the market cornered in outrage, but he’s not one to wring hands and resign himself to regret and rumination.

The album isn’t a mere scolding for the sins society commits against fellow citizens, but also a grand and roiling work out by an instrumental troupe that cuts a rapid and confident path through a heady number of approaches, be it traditional folk/protest, hard rock and polyrhthmic , through a grainy brand of fusion and wrenching excursions in dissonant free-jazz wailing. It’s refreshing, it’s bracing, it’s a welcome relief from the prepackaged reflexes that dominate the chatter in the major music media. These guys get your attention and don’t waste your time once they have it. The band is adroit, with mastery of varied grooves and rhythms. Generous chunks of hard rock guitar balance against the quick reflexes of a funk and fusion-honed rhythm section underpins the James’ snarled ire. Hardly a droning list of the evils of wealth, power and status seeking; the songs are varied, the rhythms are sharply executed, venturing from more traditional folk protest style as in the opening “Walking in the Footsteps”, through the hammering downbeats and stuttering Meters-style funk of the title track. Suitably, it’s not just lyrics that characterize the outrage, but also the music, especially in two instrumental tracks, “Downdrafts Cold Fronts” and “Covert Mission Anthem”. 

With nods to P-Funk, Zappa’s more crowded orchestrations and the anguished improvisations of Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra, this a swerving ride between over lapping modes and moods, subdued textures and light embellishments morphing into angular, off-center progressions , with sharp guitar riffs and agitated horn and reed solos traipsing through the coarse density. The abrasive layering of trumpet and sax effectively match James’ excoriations. Strange Storm has impressive brilliance in their harnessing anger and railing against injustice.

GREIL MARCUS WILL PUNCH YOU IN THE FACE

An admirable facet of Greil Marcus's digressive form of criticism is that he's always attempting--essaying forth, essentially--to demonstrate the unities between the high, low and middle portions of culture, insisting, with an impressive range of references and reading that the separations between are more argumentative than substantial. Linking mountain and southern music with Dadaism and neo-Marxist student rebellions with Religious bliss with rock and roll and performance art--an exciting project to stake one's career on, which is precisely what Marcus has done. Famously, though, Marcus, one of the first rock critics for the Rolling Stone publication, the author is given to digression and historical anecdote, musing and abusing the privilege of making metaphor when proofs of his theory are required. Assuming that he had a theory, to begin with. Marcuse is clearly moving in the dialectical mode, maintaining that opposing forces arise in history that then clash inevitably in the violent synthesis and create a new period of existence with new rules and cultural distinctions, all of that creating it's opposite and which will again clash in violent synthesis. But instead of a theory that one can read and argue with, that is, I suppose, a script one can comprehend and modify as new evidence comes to light, Marcus is more impulsive notion than theoretical rigor. It is the joy of reading him, as he seems to relish the chance to  recreate some blessed moment in music history--the Sex Pistols rehearsing "Johnny B. Goode" (in his book Lipstick Traces)  or the tension on the stage at the Newport Fok Festival when Dylan, assuming the stage with an electric band, was booed and called names by a crowd of stalwart folkies. Just when you think he's ready to provide the skeleton key to his musings, the punchline, the point he's taking a good while to get to, Marcus recedes into the mystify murk of his own grandiloquence. That is the joy and the aggravation of reading this writer.   

I read Greil Marcus because I love the way he writes and admits that his prose has been an influence in the way I take fingertips to the keyboard. This is a problematic love of the man's love that has existed for five decades. Lately, though, it's been more prolix than persuasion, as his ongoing effort to make Bob Dylan the central factor of the 20th century hasn't struck a believable insightful note in decades. The Old Weird America is an extended reflection on the songs that appeared on Dylan's famous 'Basement Tapes", strives to provide the secret history behind the songs. In matters of the cross-pollination of cultures, racial justice, the mashing together of folk authenticity, rock and roll and Symbolist poetry, Marcus essentially argues that all roads lead to Dylan and lead through him as well. As criticism, it is more an act of imagination than a weighing of elements; Well read and as well listened as he is across a great spectrum of literature and music types, what is lacking here are the dual duties of establishing how the songs and artists within the folk tradition influenced Dylan and how Dylan assimilated the music who's expressive brilliance he could never equal and yet was motivated by to create his own means, and create a new criteria by which to discuss the success or failure of the work. Dylan is less the artist to Marcus than a saint or something greater, and, even though there is a pleasure to ride the waves, cadences and well-crafted metaphors and similes of the writer's prose, The Old Weird America is a shaggy dog story at heart. Marcus began this habit of epic digression with Lipstick Traces, a tome not without its pleasures--his connection thereof the efforts of Cabaret Voltaire, the Dadaists, Punk Rock and the Situationist provocations of Guy Debord was especially tightly argued-- but now it seems little else than a practiced spiel that's trotted out and exclaimed, regardless of the topic, not unlike an old timer's AA share that is memorized not just by him or her but by the entire meeting that has heard him or her deliver for decades. What I am saying is that Marcus is writing the same book with diminishing degrees of enthusiasm. His fascination with the idea that there is a Secret History of American culture, where ideas High, Middle and Low meet and create odd examples of genius and odd, clarifying perceptions to the exact set of ironies that both inspire and hobble us as a collective society striving for imperfectly stated Ideals has gone from an intriguing and seductive conceit where equally obsessed readers, hoping there is more to rock and roll and blues and country music than guitar chords and drunken hard times, can share the idea that there is a metaphysical aspect to the lovingly embraced sounds that defined the childhood of millions of citizens. This makes for diffusion of argument on Marcus's case, and leaves us more with bold assertion that is no longer the poetic effusions of a critic inspired toward a degree of inspiring interpretation; this is the point where the eloquence no longer rings, soars or makes you want to turn up the volume and study a lyric sheet while scrutinizing the tunes of Dylan, the Stones or the century's end disruptions of Hip Artists and those after them. 

Rock has its own Harold Bloom, likewise an esteemed critic of literary works who, of late, is an admitted Bardolator who has written a number of books concerning the essential genius of Shakespeare as being something much more vast and profound and, shall we say "world creating" than even the wildest essayists have claimed in the centuries previous. Shakespeare, says Bloom, asserts Bloom, proclaims Bloom, created the Modern World, every inch of it, every concept, every psychological profile and alienated nuance we can think of. You can argue with his sweeping conclusions, but the book I'm thinking of, "Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human" is a critical delight. It may be that Bloom is luxuriating in the laziness of a higher caliber. The difference between them is that Bloom has a thesis that he's worked with for decades, a set of subtle arguments crystallized in his landmark book "The Anxiety of Influence", a brief but trenchant discussion where the Professor posits that Shakespeare is the premier genius who casts a long and permanent shadow  over the rest of world literature that came   before him and that his influence is so pervasive that no poet or other literary artists cannot help but be influenced by him. Those great geniuses who've emerged after Bard's time have either engaged their  influence from him and written great works extending, modifying and altering the system of metaphor Shakespeare changed our collective   consciousness with, or there are other genius who've emerged over the centuries who, being painfully aware of the Bard's embedded influence on how sentences about human experience have come to be written, write    furiously in the other direction, against his style, assumptions and rhetoric, experimenting, taking political risks, deconstructing, inverting, abstracting and de-familiarizing the artful language in  ways only a new kind of   genius would conceive and execute. But here's the rub: even for those great writers who've made great art with language that artfully  contains the human impulse to  go beyond mere descriptions of the world and peer at what is behind the veil of enumerated appearances, Shakespeare is present, his aesthetic, his metaphors, his language influencing new writers in one direction or the other. That is a rather crude summary of Bloom's basic premise and there are dozens of other notions woven through his life's work, but the point is that his a set of ideas that make the ideas tangible and convincing once the initial "aha!"  of flashing insight wears off. It's not science, of course, but it is a craft, a profession, this kind of thinking, and what we have in Bloom who has taken his working theory and tested it against new ideas, new writers who writer literature in cultures other what is routinely aligned in the Western Canon. Bloom, who defends the existence of the canon and wrote a book on the issue, believes dually that there are permanent genius and masterpieces of Western Literature,  as he is a man who has made a career judging books with imposing standards. The standards are not fixed, though, and Bloom further asserts Test the Canon is a living thing, like the   American Constitution, a category of books and authors that must be continually revised as matters with human existence come to mean something different. As I've mentioned already, Marcus hasn't put forth a thesis from which his notions can find a more compelling form of argument, a form that would aid others to avoid the frequent bush and thorny bramble that spreads in Marcus's many books and subject his scheme of rock music's claim to art to some respectful but rigorous interrogation. Marcus and impressionistic hot takes on matters of music, and culture, in general, have been brilliant at times, but the later work is actually regressive and without a central premise or premises. I frankly think he's lost in his thoughts but without a map.

 The point here isn't to go over Bloom's declarations in, say, Shakespeare and the Invention of Human or Hamlet: Endless Poem , but rather to mention that as in the case of Greil Marcus we have a critic who has stared too long at the page, listened too long to the same old songs, two critics fixed on their respective catalog of ideas and conceits who are now not speaking to a readership, or at least no readership other than themselves. A pity, of course, since criticism, as practice, is to assert, offer proof of argument from the text scrutiny, and provoke discussion or at least some element of usefully invigorating intellection. Instead, possibilities are exhausted the critic's terms, not those of the book or the disc; I find that this kills enthusiasm for the art itself. I don't want to think about anything larger than what's for dinner after reading Bloom murmur through layers of verbal phlegm about the Absolute Appetites of Falstaff, nor do I desire to play air guitar or consider the sweet surrealist mannerisms of Tom Waits after Marcus intones multitudes of repetitively presented riffs, paragraph after paragraph. Those familiar with how the author thinks on the page will note, also, the lack of real verve in the writing, skilled and flowing as it may be.

____________________________________

BARRY ALFONSO: I fear this is an accurate reading of Marcus's book (which I have not read, though I've read Mystery Train as well as lots of Marcus in various publications). If The Old Weird America is a fun read in and of itself, well then I really don't care whether he gets his ostensible topic right or not. But I fear that Dylan's Basement Tapes songs -- probably my very favorite batch of tunes in Bob the Bard's catalog -- cannot stand the critical weight Marcus presses down upon them without collapsing into a batch of nonsensical shards. This IS Chicken Town, after all. I don't want Marcus confiscating the lace, if you know what I am sayin', brother.

ALVIN LEE AND THE NEED FOR SPEED

Alvin Lee, pioneer rock guitar hero and leader of the British blues band Ten Years After, died the other day at age 68 from a complication following what's been described as a routine surgery. Lee was not one of my favorites at the time, the late Sixties through the Seventies, mainly because despite his obvious skills--he played the blues clean and speedy and was the first man in rock and roll whose instrumental reputation was based largely on how fast he could negotiate relatively simple blues changes--I thought his guitar work and songwriting were strictly ordinary. Many bands were writing better blues-rock songs and riffs--Hendrix, Cream, Fleetwood Mac--and any other upcoming white blues guitarists, British or American, were more interesting as stylists. Clapton had the phrasing, Peter Green had the tone and soul, Johnny Winter had the speed, fluidity, and variety of approaches to make the basic structures new and invigorating. Nothing Lee ever put on record equaled the elegance of Mike Bloomfield's blues playing at his best; Lee, as Lester Bangs suggested, was more an IBM punch card: insert and listen to the machine crank it out, dependably fast and nerve-wracking, as all efficient machines do.I would wager that Lee is the guy where the whole who--is-faster guitar theatrics came from. It began with Lee, back in the days when young males were starved for heroes who weren't comic book characters or lead singers and older jazz critics who should have known better than praise what they could not hear correctly when too many people were surprised that rock musicians could have technique and chops, and continued to absurd extremes through the glorious music of Johnny Winter through the galvanic jazz-fusion convulsions presented by John McLaughlin and Larry Coryell and onward, through the Sixties, Seventies, Nineties to this current time, when there is technique and speed to spare, but little that is soulful, moving. Save for the off-center improvisations of Allan Holdsworth, a guitarist. 

He combines speed with a sound that seems to replicate the subtle cues of a voice wordlessly indicating a mood with a sigh, a scream, a slight moan; there is no John Coltrane in the batch of fretsters. Instead of passion, there is the only rage born of computer game shoot-ups and a history of film violence; the guitars are fewer expressions of human emotion than musical wrecking balls, heavy, stupid things connected to severe chains of severe retarded belligerence. Coltrane's serpentine register leaping solos were a high-velocity response to equivalent streams of emotion. Raging, arguing, laughing, crying, singing to praise to God and damning the Devil in his hole, JC's improvisations limned an inner terrain of spiritual conflict with an epoch-changing technique; the rapidity of bebop modernism, with its breakneck time signatures and scalar improvisations, had found an emotional basis.  This was not a replication of the human voice when the persona that owned it felt merely joyous or had the blues; this was the river of emotion where the emotions were multiform and simultaneous. That was the miracle of Coltrane's extemporaneous poetry. What Coltrane had introduced, rapid improvisation as a virtue in service to confirming personal Humanity is lost in large measure among the guitarists who've followed Alvin Lee. By design or by accident, their thinking is in line with Italian Futurism, a school of artists obsessed with machinery and the speed of production they made possible. Destroy the present and the past at once, crash headlong into the future with the biggest steam shovel and wrecking ball you have, and rid Humanity of its faux notions of beauty and truth that only constrict us. There is not much room here to be happy or sensible, only busy and constantly, warily angry. The emphasis on firepower has infected the core fan base for this sort of stuff; it is not friendly from the reconnaissance I've been willing to do.  

 

 Go to YouTube for performances by Joe Satriani, Buckethead, Malmsteen, and other rock technicians and then scroll down to the viewer commentaries. Sooner or later, the discussions devolve to cruel flame wars regarding who is the most fleet fret monger is. I thought it had been settled in the Seventies when Johnny Winter came on the scene and showed how you could play accelerated blues and still be inventive and soulful. The topic, though, merely mutated and remains, to this day, one of the most absurd of obsessive niches in music fandom. Here's a demonstration of Lee's technique and style, as you're likely to find. He was a solid musician and had good command. He was limited, though, and recorded several albums in a role where he offered substantially the same solo over and over. I stopped paying attention years ago. Still, the good stuff I still listen to; there is a first-rate up-tempo blues called "Me and My Baby" that I can't find at the moment where Lee and Co. just get into a swinging groove and play the blues naturally. His guitar work on that is bittersweet, melodic, spare, and right, in the best tradition of BB King. Would that he had done more of that kind of stuff. Meanwhile, here's his version of "Help Me." It's a perfect demonstration of Lee's technique and style, as you'll find. Even though I lost interest in his music overall decades ago, Mr. Lee deserves respect for helping to change the perception as to what a rock guitarist should be. The ongoing results of his innovation have given us both glorious and grating results, but, I would argue, that is the aim of every artist who wants to be an influence to change the way their craft is conducted. In that respect, Alvin Lee hit it out of the park.

ZAPPA

I saw the documentary Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in his Own Words the day before yesterday and I thought it was a  generally good representation of Zappa the social critic and Zappa the serious musician. The interview segments, which are abundant, span his career, as does the generous inclusion of live performances with The Mothers of Invention. He was extremely intelligent, actually iconoclastic and gifted as a composer, but like many others with vast talents that prefer no constraint and mouths that prefer no editing, you get the feeling he indulged his worst habits as often as he did his best talents. There is a repetition of ideas in his asides, rants, and excoriations, a set of notions that he honed and delivered continuously over the years, libertarian-genius bromides that wear you down toward the end of the film. Still, despite the repetition, you do marvel at the way in which he cuts away the fat and gets to the crude, stupid heart that is the pulse of consumerist culture.  But as a fan of Zappa's music, I was very happy, as the film includes generous portions from live performances that make us realize that above all else, Zappa was an artist, a genius of some sort.  Even die-hard fans and scholars of his work have complained that Zappa didn’t challenge himself nearly enough and often times released albums that were sub-par, highlighting musical ideas from bygone decades that no longer seemed fresh, riveting, or daring. His satire, in turn, gave way to stark cynicism where disdain, undistilled or leavened with much in the way of wit, ceased being funny or witty in large measure and was, for a good number of records released through the Seventies and even though much of the Eighties, merely mean-spirited. The manner he chose to make audiences to laugh, if they did at all, was to position himself as the narrator who knows that the world is composed of willful idiots and that the audience buying his records and concert tickets are among the cognoscenti who are likewise aware the world of man is doomed to collapse under centuries of hubris and bad faith. Even the most critical amongst his fans would have to admit that listening to his verbal riffing found them nodding more in agreement and laughing less and less the more scorn he poured onto the world. His cynicism had conquered his inspiration, likely because he realized that he could make money by being this cartoon character “Frank Zappa”, becoming the man his fans wanted him to be. It was about making money in order to finance his larger orchestral projects and the irony that he needed to compromise his principles and act the way new fans with disposable income expected to behave was likely not lost on him.

Orson Wells had a similar situation, the story goes, as he took a good many demeaning roles in whatever variety of Hollywood schlock came his way so he could finance his own projects. It's an odd curse, I suppose, a problem the working world would have considered a bother at all. How would one have challenged Zappa, though? His comfort zone was a strange amalgamation of influences --Lenny Bruce, Stravinsky, Sun Ra, Edgar Varese, Lord Buckley, Musique Concrete-- that it's probable that few would know what to suggest as a way for him to diverge from his rut. He created his niche, proud that he wasn't dependent on grant money, gifts from government agencies and the like. He was something like a homeschooler, nearly irrational in his belief that government couldn't do anything good for the population. There are times when I have to filter the rants I agree with in principle-and turn up the on this music, a body of work that's confused, amused, confounded, entertained and thrilled me to the marrow since I came across in the 60s.Zappa's work as a serious composer already has a fairly full catalog; one could, I suspect, produce a week or two of special concerts featuring Zappa's "serious " work. But I agree that there was much in the seventies I disliked from the man in the 70s. "One Size Fits All" was actually a solid album, firing on all cylinders, but commencing with "Apostrophe", featuring the egregious "Yellow Snow" and onward, his satire degenerated into a species of juvenile smut. What would have been interesting would have been if he had collaborated with artists of similar stature, on smaller projects, in different musical areas. Not the Elvis Costello grandstanding collaborations, but rather real efforts to work toward the best virtues of another artist. That would have been something had he wanted to make the effort, but his personality was controlling, ironically, despite his diatribes about freedom. There was something of Howard Roark in him that his work would be presented to the world on his terms solely, uncontaminated by meddlers, sycophants and their like. The downside of Zappa's libertarian attitude about his music--my art, my way, at the price I said, or nothing at all--is that much of his output is a remarkably eccentric selection of self-invented cliches. As much as he deserves to be praised for resourcefulness and achieving a crazy amalgam of jazz, classical, comedy and rock, there are go-to moves he never strayed from, bits of business that seemed more treading water than an expansion of established themes. I do wish he'd found time and interest in collaborating with other musicians on equal footing--singers, lyricists, musicians, other composers.. The results might have been interesting and gotten the late FZ out of his comfort zone and lightened the lid on that vacuum packed cynicism that ceased to be amusing long before he passed on.

DAVID BOWIE AND LOU REED: TRAFFIC IN THE INTERZONE

 Lou Reed’s Street Hassle or David Bowie’s Station to Station, which album do prefer, love more, pick if you were going to be stranded on a desert island? A question to that effect appeared on one of the odd corners I visit on the internet, looking for intelligent conversation on art and matters of concern that cannot be calculated by conventional metrics of worth. So, an interesting question, even if the choice between two superb albums makes one asks why these two, which are wildly dissimilar in their respective greatness. Compare and contrast? Perhaps Reed’s album New York, his inspired two-sided screed against the insoluble cruelty that inhabits the deeper and darker corners of a great city, compared and contrasted against Bowie’s Tin Machine project, an angular, Cubist kind of hard rock rage highlighting Bowie’s theatrical pronouncements against human creation of a misery index set against and appealing assault of shrapnel percussion and blood splatter guitar work? A more focused conversation, perhaps, but I remained with the question that was posted.

I would choose Street Hassle if one desires street credibility and genuine amounts of poetic brilliance, both of which Reed, despite his well-known habit of overestimating his overall musical genius. His musical punch was from his words wedded with the simple, scraping movement of his chords wedded with his especially acute and minimalistic detailing of lives in the streets, the doorways, the alleys of New York and its vast underbelly of fallen souls. Reed, at his best, had a feel for the characters in these unapologetic environs--sympathetic but not glorifying, poetic but not conventionally “beautiful” by more timid sensibilities--and on Street Hassle his greatest virtues, as such, are in full force.  Reed was a writer before anything else, living in the shadows of a city that punished its geniuses with poverty, drug addiction and the contempt of the public, the authorities, and even the cast of good souls charged with taking care of them. This was fine with Reed and many of his cohorts; he was a man in the city, a maker of an invisible scene where the atonal heart of the experimental arts were in a social sphere so on the outs with whatever the hip community imagined itself as being that even the most vocally revolutionary of the millionaire rock and rollers and painters and filmmakers of the period wished they would simply evaporate and vanish in a dissipating gust of steam. Reed, Herbert Huncke, Burroughs, Henry Miller, in the belly of the beast, writing poetry, drinking, talking, painting at the outskirts of high towers of a city that provided with cold water flats and long, cold shadows to hide within. This is what Reed saw, wrote about, live among.

Bowie wanted some of that, to be all of that, but he was a tourist and didn’t stop being a mere borrower until Station to Station. Bowie coveted that kind of brutalism, evident in his band Tin Machine, which tried to be street, noisy and savant gardish in the shrieking sense of the Velvet Underground but which were undermined by Bowie's autodidactic habits and Anthony Newlyesque vocalisms, reminding you that he was, above all else, an actor. Bowie’s overt theatricality often made me roll my eyes, but he was a man who knew how to turn what can be used against him critically into an asset that elevates his art when his inspiration moves him to do so. He was a far superior synthesizer of many styles and moods and texture, and had a genius for texture and color in the studio. Philip Glass, Brian Eno, funk, disco beats and plenty of chomping, comping guitar made this a revolutionary fusion masterpiece; Bowie, as well, reined in his persona to a dimension that suited him, that of a post WW2 soul,,, weary unto death, a witness to yet another large and irreparable crack in the foundations of a great and honored culture and attending traditions. Bowie was always musically more ambitious than Reed. That's pretty self-evident and not really worth the bother to point out unless your preference is competence over the kind of brutalism Reed specialized in. Reed's lyrics, in my view, have a substantial edge over Bowie, who was plagued by a prevailing sense of who wanted to sound like. The atmospherics and production garnishes of Station to Station did free Bowie from any obligation to sound like he was trying to say anything that could be interpreted as philosophical. His words became more diffuse, full of associative leaps, ellipsis, images that were and remain private mysteries so far as what they reference but which provide a rich and vaguely mystical and definitely European tone to the inspired constructions he released from this point onward. As a lyricist, as a writer, as a storyteller, Reed was the authentic genius here; he was a blend of a mind that made equal use of his library card and his street smarts and provided a skill to be expansive while maintaining a hard, stripped-down veneer. Bowie the tourist became Bowie the innovator with Station to Station and, in his way, achieved parity with Reed as an expressive artist.

I think for all the comparing of the two over the last four decades, I'm inclined to think that the similarities are slighter than one might think and that it is their differences that make them both equally enthralling and perplexing. Bowie was pretty much a trend jumper as much as he was a trendsetter, someone with an ear to the ground and finger in the wind to see where the new breezes were blowing in from. He was eclectic, performance oriented, obsessed with texture, image, and atmosphere. Investigating almost of his regards in the post-Ziggy career shows someone who could synthesize music forms that wouldn't go together in prior decades but who could, courtesy of superb musicians, brilliant production and an exquisitely developed ear for sounds (as well as fascinating imagination for layering all the qualities he made use of). I also find an element of pretense, pretending, a certain showbiz fakery that goes along with his aesthetic; he was an actor above all us, by his own accounting, and the variety of personas and the music he collaborated on to make them effective both as record and concert experience were certainly evocative often, often to the level of genius, but I always regarded him as more evocative than wholly authentic. To that end, I can't take much of his lyric writing seriously--he was a splendid arranger of musical styles but not a particularly interesting or insightful wordsmith. Reed was a writer over everything else, a man in love with songwriting forms, in love with old doo-wop, blues, rhythm and blues, and, though he did wander into explicitly abrasive avant gard noise making, I consider Reed to be a genuine artist, a true poet, a man whose best work was minimalist, Reed, from accounts in articles and books, was typically a prick, an asshole, but there was an amazingly soft, reflective and occasionally sentimental side to him, both facets of which he gave equal expression to. There is a tension to Reed's songs, genuine conflicts 

 One is better positioned when approaching Bowie if they have it in mind not to believe that he was laying out a philosophy beyond that of style and certain aesthetic for the short attention span. He seemed to jump from project to project, musical style to musical style more as a means of proving that yeah, he could do that too, only better, smarter, snappier. Not unlike the way I imagine Quentin Tarantino's working aesthetic as a film writer and director, someone who loves movies but seems obsessed with taking up genres and forcing him to his will. Tarantino's films are overblown, overpraised and have an ongoing monotony to them--there are stylistic moves and devices he goes to each time regardless of plot, period, genre, and excruciating lengths of verbosity that defuse the bright ideas he does have. In contrast, though, Bowie's music will always sound like Bowie, but in each release, he has a sense that he may be repeating himself. He worked hard to avoid the impression that he was a human assembly line, snapping on parts where he can fit them. 

Both  were obsessed with creating art objects, stand-alone items that the results as much of virtuoso endeavor as they were of imagination. Indeed, there is something of an icy sheen around Bowie's music that prevented me from warming up to it even more; perfectionist I might think I am, Bowie was a shade too ruthless in achieving his wonderful constructions. Ironically, that is also a large part of what currently attracts me to his work. Lou Reed was a man of letters, un homme de literature, indeed, that rare thing, an actual poet expressing the ironies, cruelties, celebrations, and catastrophes of urban life, a view of existence mere steps from the curb, from an apartment window overlooking an alley, through the steam smeared window of a coffee shop whose sign has half its letters burned out, with the other words blinking weakly, clinging to what life remains. There was more than enough material in Reed's body of work to say he was unreasonably cruel, putatively blasé or too willing to engage in cootie monger bathos as a means to get from points A to C when his imagination lagged, but then again I remember that he was extraordinarily creative, vital and often times simply amazing in his late work, with discs like The Bells, THE BLUE MASK, and MAGIC AND LOSS, among other worthies, showing an artist dealing with age, loss, political skulduggery, and love above all else. There is much to nitpick with Reed's work, but I think he was the more forthright of the two men we're talking about. Bowie's impatience caused him to “make things happen”, as it were, and fortunate for us, he had a massive talent for such a helter-skelter method. Reed's greatness comes from a more natural evolution. He's learned from his experience, mistakes and all, and deepened as a thinker more than a little.

PROFESSIONALISM MAKES YOU STERILE

Rock and roll is all about professionalism , which is to say that some of the alienated and consequently alienating species trying to make their way in the world subsisting on the seeming authenticity of their anger, ire, and anxiety has to make sure that they take care of their talent, respect their audience's expectations even as they try to make the curdled masses learn something new, and to makes sure that what they are writing about /singing about/yammering about is framed in choice riffs and frenzied backbeat. It is always about professionalism; the MC5 used to have manager John Sinclair, the story goes, turn off the power in the middle of one of their teen club gigs in Detroit to make it seem that the Man was trying to shut down their revolutionary money shot. The 5 would get the crowd into a frenzy, making noise on the dark stage until the crowd was in a sufficient ranting lather. At that point, Sinclair would switch the power back on and the band would continue, praising the crowd for sticking it to the Pigs. This was pure show business, not actual revolutionary fervor inspired by acne scars and blue balls; I would dare say that it had its own bizarre integrity, and was legitimate on terms we are too embarrassed to discuss. In a way, one needs to admire bands like the Stones or Aerosmith for remembering what it was that excited them when they were younger, and what kept their fan base loyal.

It's not a matter of rock and roll ceasing to be an authentic trumpet of the troubled young soul once it became a brand; rather, rock and roll has always been a brand once white producers, record company owners, and music publishers got a hold of it early on and geared a greatly tamed version of it to a wide and profitable audience of white teenagers. In any event, whether most of the music being made by Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and others was a weaker version of what was done originally by Howlin Wolf, Muddy Waters et al is beside the point. It coalesced, all the same, into a style that perfectly framed an attitude of restlessness among mostly middle-class white teenagers who were excited by the sheer exotica, daring and the sense of the verboten the music radiated. It got named, it got classified, the conventions of its style were defined, and over time, through both record company hype and the endless stream of Consciousness that most white rock critics produced, rock and roll became a brand. It was always a brand once it was removed from the black communities and poor Southern white districts from which it originated. I have no doubt that the artist's intention, in the intervening years, was to produce a revolution in the conscious of their time with the music they wrote and performed, but the decision to be a musician was a career choice at the most rudimentary level, a means to make a living or, better yet , to get rich. It is that rare to a non-existent musician who prefers to remain true to whatever vaporous sense of integrity and poor. Even Chuck Berry, in my opinion, the most important singer-songwriter musician to work in rock and roll--Berry, I believe, created the template with which all other rock and rollers made their careers in music--has described his songwriting style as geared for young white audiences. Berry was a man raised on the music of Ellington and Louie Jardin, strictly old school stuff, and who considered himself a contemporary of Muddy Waters, but he was an entrepreneur as well as an artist. He was a working artist who rethought his brand and created a new one; he created something wholly new, a combination of rhythm and blues, country guitar phrasing and narratives that wittily, cleverly, indelibly spoke to a collective experience that had not been previously served. Critics and historians have been correct in callings this music Revolutionary, in that it changed the course of music, but it was also a Career change. All this, though, does not make what the power of Berry's music--or the music of Dylan, Beatles, Stones, MC5, Bruce or The High Fiving White Guys -- false, dishonest, sans value altogether. What I concern myself with is how well the musicians are writing, playing, singing on their albums, with whether they are inspired, being fair to middlin', or seem out of ideas, out of breath; it is a useless and vain activity to judge musicians, or whole genres of music by how well they/it align themselves with a metaphysical standard of genuine, real, vital art making. That standard is unknowable and those putting themselves of pretending they know what it is are improvising at best. This is not a coherent way to enjoy music. One is assuming that one does, or at one time did, enjoy music.

All entrepreneurs are risk takers, for that matters, so that remains a distinction without a difference. What matters are the products--sorry, even art pieces, visual, musical, dramatic, poetic, are "product" in the strictest sense of the word--from the artists successful in what they set out to do. The results are subjective, of course, but art is nothing else than means to provoke a response, gentle or strongly and all grades in between, and critics are useful in that they can make the discussion of artistic efforts interesting. The only criticism that interests are responses from reviewers that are more than consumer guides-- criticism, on its own terms in within its limits, can be as brilliant and enthralling as the art itself. And like the art itself, it can also be dull, boring, stupid, pedestrian. The quality of the critics vary; their function in relation to art, however, is valid. It is a legitimate enterprise. Otherwise, we'd be treating artists like they were priests. God forbid.

MATTERS CONCERNING IGGY POP AND THE STOOGES

No band embraced nihilism with more profound off-handedness than The Stooges. Part of their genius lies in t their lyrics, hardly cliché but not conventionally poetic, these were rhymes that were spare and simple, and powerfully to the point, talking about the small matters of frustration that send the young mind into paroxysms of rage and self-recrimination. Ever say something or overheard a phrase from someone else uttered in exasperation or another kind of brain locking state where what is said is so starkly simple and clear and unadorned by apology or other sorts of mental equivocation that it resembles brilliance? That’s my take on the collective lyrics of the Stooges, words as an instinctive reflex, Nor was their music dependent on the trivial concern of instrumental virtuosity. This was the sticking point with a majority of critics at the time when their first album, The Stooges, was released in  1969. In a counter-culture that was ironically putting premiums on the extreme professionalism of well-trained musicians who could hit notes precisely and improvise at length over increasingly tricky time signatures, the Stooges were the textbook example of the anathema, an insult to the taste-maker elite. Reviews were generally insulting to the band’s repetitive slam and clang approach, and it is one of the wonders of staying alive long enough to see a groundbreaking band, unfiltered from the start, outlast the negativity and change the critical consensus. The intelligentsia had to catch up with them.  The Stooges rejected formal instruction on their musicianship and, in turn, weren’t about to suffer the instructions the snoots, snobs and snoids demanded they follow. What’s ironic is that Rolling Stone, the arbiter of quality in matters of the New Rock, still had integrity in their record reviews at the time and allowed one of their original rock  critics, Ed Ward, to let the air out of the inflated importance of over-serious rock music and the earnest critiques they inspired with his review of the album.  The first two paragraphs have Ward offering a thumbnail sketch of the band’s background, quickly followed the expected litany of sins, that Iggy is a bad Jim Morrison imitator, the lyrics are sub-literate, the guitar and drum work is lifeless and lacking even the dignity of being mechanical. The something wonderful happened halfway through. He summarized his feelings thusly “Their music is loud, boring, tasteless, unimaginative and childish.”  Then something wonderful happened.

With the grievances listed and the verdict delivered,, Ward added, in a single sentence, standing alone , unencumbered by other sentences, “I kind of like it”,  Ward performed an endearing bit of proto-deconstruction, using the aforementioned deficiencies in the music as examples of  virtue, value, honesty, artistic vision. It was, I think,one of the great pieces of rock  criticism because here Ward created the basis of real aesthetic argument that maintained, essentially, that the Stooges were the true face and sound of a rock and roll that was relevant to life as it was being lived by millions, a voice, sound and poetry from the curb, alley and shuttered doorway that wanted nothing to do with millionaire musicians with long hair striving to achieve legitimacy by mimicking and misreading the most superficial elements of High Culture.  Ed Ward established the concerns that Lester Bangs soon picked up and turned into a masterful argument with the dying of the light. We can thank Ed Ward and the Stooges for that relief.

This was a band that went in the other direction when they began their quest to find what lay beyond avant-garde posturing in Music during the 60s away from trudging drum solos and long-form guitar essays. Iggy and the Stooges were primitive, out of tune, irritated and irritating in turn. It was a matter where the band and their front man, Iggy Pop (nee Stooge) blended perfectly, given their ability to turn something that sounds horrible and repetitive into a crashing, sustained drone of attitude, and Iggy's serpentine stage presence and clipped verbal dexterity. He was the guy who couldn't sit stand and would stand for nothing less than what he wanted in full, and they were the grind of the city turned into a droning inner voice prodding him to smash down whatever walls came before him. It wasn’t that he was a bad boy going contrarily to the niceties of all things middle class and calcified, it wasn’t that he as a sentient being had identified an artifice he disliked and defined himself in opposition to it; it was more like Iggy Stooge was unaware of the feelings of others, greater ramifications of dangerous self-gratification, or any code of behavior the rest of us depend to keep drivers and pedestrians, for example, on the streets and the sidewalks, respectively. He was unadulterated id, a squirming mass of impulse that transgressed boundaries, mashed together poetry and porn, and displayed no interest in theorizing about what he had done or about what he was thinking of doing.  His was the case of living in the present tense solely, and whatever sensation at the moment was utmost. Let us not be mistaken about this, as Iggy Stooge’s persona and psyche had the virtue of being monochromatic; his immediate impulse was not the only thing that mattered. There simply wasn’t anything else.  All this play against the quarrelsome insomniac raunch of Ron Ashton’s guitar work, very simple, rudimentary, undeniable effective, endlessly influential. What he lacked in technique he made up for in essence, a counterpoint to the corrosive thrills of Iggy’s distilled juvenile delinquency; his guitar work might be politely described as “steady”,  but this a dodge against the annoyance factor this band turned into a new aesthetic. “Persistent” is more apt, like a dislodged bit of a fender dragging along the highway, kicking up sparks near the gas tank, or a door slamming for hours in a strong wind, or jackhammers at night carving up your street at precisely the moment your brain demands you sleep or die inanely. Obnoxious,  profound without knowing. We should all be grateful these guys wielded musical instruments, not guns. Or worse.
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Iggy Pop is the man to go against expectations, especially in the sense that he hasn't yet died. For decades he was on the list as The Next Rock Star to Die, in the wake of Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and the lesser known musicians who've died young. Iggy's tale is as horrendous as it got for pop musicians, all sorts of bad habits and tough breaks visited him like spirits to a hard knocks convention, the culmination of such things usually being fatal, as in dead, as dead as a beef jerky, if not as tasty. Pop pulled out of the tailspin, though, cleaned up and, thanks in large part to the recently belated David Bowie, became, even more, the artist than he was before. An icon and proof that one can survive from the Edge and have the severe experience lend authenticity to the angry three chord bashing you perform in front of. His legacy is such that he could just about sing anything he chooses and have critics slobber over with foamy superlatives. Apres, his album of covers of French songs, is that bridge collapsing.It's an album worth skipping. It is his version of The Great American Songbook fad, where fade rock belters like Rod Stewart, Linda Ronstadt, and Cyndi Lauper attempted to become "real singers" but offering piecemeal versions of very old tunes. The results varied wildly artist to artist; there were not enough interesting interpretations of old ballads and standards for it to be anything more than a fad, like the notion that Rock and Roll is an art form on a par with, say, professional wrestling. Iggy tackling French tunes just seems pretentious; Mr. Pop has an expressive range midway between a car alarm and a beluga impaled on a bendy straw. It is a voice best saved for the personal bits of self-defining rage that continue to be his genius. Everything else he might try is baloney by definition.
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A problem of being a self-appointed culture critic is that the longer you hang around the planet breathing the air, the faster it seems your heroes seem to die.  That's a generational thing, your elders and your peers start to pass on, and your tribe is just a little smaller every few weeks. The cure for that sort of minor depression is, of course, get new heroes, read new artists, listen to music by younger musicians, and, most obviously, make more friends.Iggy turned 69 April 21st, 2016 and it's an unending round of cheap ironies that he enters the last year of his 6th decade of life on the same day we find out that Prince has passed away at the age of 57. Iggy survived the morbid predictions that insisted that he would be the next major edgy rock star to go, joining Morrison, Joplin, Hendrix, Jones, and others as having a bad end to an edgy life lived in the spotlight. Nihilism was at the core of his act, both as Stooges front man and as solo artist, and it seemed that the fabled mixtures of teenage impulse and fantastic amounts of meth- amphetamines and heroin were willful tools he was using to describe life not just at the edge of existence but also, if he were lucky, a will to narrate the passage through the thick shroud of unbeing . It's a classic conceit in modern arts, that an artist's demise is confirmation of their greatness/genius/cutie-pie factor, what have you. It's a species of pornographic thinking and shame on us for egging it onward in the culture. 

 Something intervened in that cliche, however, and Pop has been one of the more interesting elder statesmen for some time, always worth a listen. We benefit by his persistence to remain creative; not to be too terribly sentimental about it, but Pop's longevity improves the quality of my life by his example that you can continue to respond creatively, with imagination to the short existence we're allowed to have. Prince was one of those people, like Bowie, you assumed would be around for the final mile of the long haul, a genuinely gifted polymath who would make music into his dimmest twilight. What hurts the most, from this fan's view, is that we won't get to hear the grander, more experimental adventures Prince would have had as a musician. A straight-ahead jazz album. A record of guitar blitzing? Serious classical endeavors? Movie soundtracks? Big Band Music? A blues thing? Reggae? A stage turn as Othello?  His androgyny/sex fiend persona aside, I marveled at the chameleon nature of his music, the jumping around from style to style. Unlike Bowie, equally eclectic in taste and output, there was a substantial musical virtuosity to Prince's switching up and mashing up and fusing the elements of rock, fusion, Philly/Motown/Memphis/ soul, jazz and the occasional bits of classical allusion. Though he never spoke much of his training, self-taught or schooled, he had as solid a grasp of the mechanics of music and controlled his virtuosity like it were a tool to be used judiciously, in service to the music. There was little that was excessive in his music, and I rather liked his singing, which was far from your traditional rock or soul voice; thin, reedy, nasal, limited in range and color, he still molded it convincingly over his melodies and lyrics, sounding wise, insinuating, dangerous, alluring, nearly any persona he wanted to get across. Anything seemed possible for him because he was spectacularly good at the varied projects he'd already finished and released.  Alas, but no. This makes you want to pause a few moments and consider the breath your taking at that instant and recognize that life is a gift we are given but that which we don't own. Embrace the days we have and do something with the hours while we have them.