Makers and consumers of music, there is no other conclusion but that the future of the medium lies in your hands. …more

Frank Zappa was a gateway drug for me. …more

The intractable problem of the moment in the arts—in music, in books, in movies, in almost every area of contemporary culture—is the problem of inattention. …more

Note: to the readers of this intermittent bulletin, I recognize in what follows that I am violating the compact I made a couple of months ago, to cover only unsigned, unreleased, or self-released music, and I want to assure you that I take that compact seriously, and will return to it very soon. Nevertheless, I have spent the last ten days or so having the following exchange with my good friend, the poet (and critic) Michael Snediker, on the new album by Antony and the Johnsons, The Crying Light. Since in the meantime I am trying to finish for this venue some notes on repetition in the genre known as grindcore, I’m attaching my exchange with Michael as a stopgap, with the hope that—despite its subject being a more established artist—it will be of some genuine intrigue to people interested in the voice and point of view published herein. I promise to get back to my regular beat very soon. In what follows, Michael goes first, and I reply, etc. …more

I love the city of Tucson, Arizona, because I like places that have run out of luck, and I think running out of luck makes for good music. Running out of luck makes for a lot of good things, in fact. Good writing. Good sunrises. Complicated futures. Everything easy is dead inside somehow. I assume that Tucson doesn’t think it has run out of luck, but you only have to visit to know what I mean. Maybe Tucson never had any luck in the first place. Many places have none, and yet people relocate to these places nonetheless.

Among Tucson’s areas of especial bad luck: it has virtually no water. It’s drier than almost anywhere in the USA. The aquifer underneath it has been sucked mostly dry and is on the point of collapsing, or so the doomsayers say, and the pools outside of town that are supposed to replenish the underground aquifer are just evaporation pools, or so it is said, and the doomsayers are probably right. Then there is the nearness of the border and the country to the south. This makes for a brisk trade in undocumented people coming and going, bringing about the complicated and ambiguous and electrifying border culture phenomenon. Which around Tucson is noteworthy, in part, for its hard luck and poverty. While it is true that South Tucson is its own city, that can’t disguise the fact that the struggling South Tucson and the struggling south side of Tucson proper are one and the same thing, dangerous, with lots of gang activity, lots of crystal meth, lots of people who are having trouble finding work, lots of people who don’t speak English and who don’t have much to lose, making Tucson, this city I love so fervently, a hive of car theft activity and violent crime, much more so than the city where I nominally live, New York City. (I should also say that the south side is more colorful, literally, and has amazing food.) If all of that weren’t enough, Tucson is startlingly hot much of the year. It’s also paved over in amerciless way. The heat shimmers off the blacktop, you see it when you’re driving, which you are bound to do a lot, and reality goes all hallucinatory, shimmery, as if they put mescaline or peyote in the water supply; you move slowly from curb to vehicle, because there is no other approach to life that makes sense, in summer, and the animals from the desert, as desperate as the residents, crowd into town, the coyotes, and the javelinas, the overly tanned homeless population, and occasionally, the mountain lions crowd in too, especially in that rich neighborhood up by

the canyon, up there the mountain lions get out into the carefully xeroscaped yards of the rich people, and they get habituated to trash-picking, and then they will attempt to take out the occasional jogger or overly tanned homeless person. Anyway, a lot of Sonoran Arizona is like this, is like nowhere else in the USA, and that’s why I like it, because it’s crime ridden and physically dangerous and poisonous, what with all the snakes and cacti. I like Tucson because it seems like it just can’t go on this way. Oh, and it’s a college town, too, so it has its share of kids with purple hair and fishnets and jump boots. These kids look like they are part of the indigenous landscape.

Probably for all these desertified reasons, Sonoran Arizona has produced its share of interesting and rather strange bands. Among my favorites is the Tubes. The Tubes, you may recall, were a kind of boring band from the early MTV era who produced a mediocrity called “Talk To Ya Later.” I think I can say without fear of contradiction that we should be suspicious of any song with “Ya” in the title. But this is not an exemplary Tubes song. “Talk To Ya Later” comes from a period when the best songwriter in the band, Bill Spooner, was already fallen on somewhat delinquent times. On the other hand, the first three albums by the Tubes (The Tubes, Young and Rich, and Now) from when they had first moved from AZ to San Francisco, are remarkable and strange. There was no genre the band could not burlesque and reinvigorate, and they were such great players that they could do all this while flourishing with the occasional brilliant lick and bizarrely ornate arrangement—just enough to show that they knew how, without sounding showoffy. Their live shows were legendary. Their first album is remarkably hilarious and singular, with its science fiction synthesizer blips and nihilistic lyrics and choral arrangements.

Another unusual Arizonan band was the Meat Puppets. Again here, you have to locate the earlier material. Which glistens with a stoned, offhanded quality— Meat Puppets II, e.g., or Up On the Sun, or Huevos Rancheros—somewhere between Captain Beefheart, Black Oak Arkansas, and Rush, but with less professional credibility. Along the same lines, and perhaps from the same moment, were the Sun City Girls, a real favorite of mine for their world music fixations and their bad attitudes. Torch of the Mystics, their best album, manages to sound pyrotechnically dazzling and international without sounding like a Ry Cooder project. It also manages to preserve some of the punk rock creepiness and menace of their earlier albums. In this case, the band got older and stopped touring without losing what they once had, though I believe one of them, the drummer, recently passed away. They also started the Strange Frequencies label of “found” world music, any release of which is completely fascinating for those who want to get beyond the rigid formulae and predictable gestures of Western pop.

In Tucson itself, there is the two-headed monster of local popular music, viz., Giant Sand and Calexico. Calexico is perhaps the better known now, having sundered itself from Howe Gelb of Giant Sand with whom they earlier collaborated. But to my ears Calexico, while having all the requisite skills and a charming Mexicali inflection, is the less interesting of the two. They are very skillful musicians, sensitive renderers, but they are not writers. Whereas Howe Gelb has vision, and the vision is deeply melancholy, and slow-moving, in a really Tucson-like way. You can imagine that it takes Howe a fair amount of time to get started in the morning; Howe could easily abandon the project, no matter what the project is; Howe understands the complexities of life in the Southwest, and thereby he understands some of our national difficulties, entire, because (arguably): as the Southwest goes so goes the nation. The Southwest suffers cruelly under the lash of the Big Collapse of Capital, the Southwest had a speculative real estate market, the Southwest is a bellwether for what comes next, in immigration, in environmental policy, in water rights.

Now, when I began composing these notes for this site, I remarked that I was interested in hearing from people out there about some of their favorite unsigned and unreleased musicians, and in the course of this attempt to reach out I fell into communication with a musician from Tucson called Maggie Golston. I don’t know very much about Maggie Golston, except for one tantalizing fact: she used to operate a very good bookstore. One thing about Tucson that is consistent with its desperate qualities (as catalogued above): it has nowadays a wealth of mediocre bookstores. The best bookstore in town, actually, is the used bookstore, called Bookman’s. (Which also does a fine business in used CDs.) For new books, you are basically shit out of luck in Tucson, unless you want to go to one of those fucking horrible paved over strip malls that have raped much of the town, where you will no doubt find an understaffed and underserved Border’s or Barnes and Noble, and a few lonely souls pawing over the latest murder mystery. Anyway, Maggie Golston had this bookstore, and no longer does, and this I assume has to do with the cruel realities of mercantile life in a town that balances its budget by selling condos to retirees.

I investigated further. Golston has some songs up on her MySpace page, and these are good, but when I wrote to her that I was liking some of the songs there, she told me that the “best song” on her album, her words, was not available on MySpace (though it is now). I got myself a copy. As to the song, let me first say that one thing a lot of desert music is not: Goth. The Goth thing just doesn’t seem to play well in Sonoran Arizona, maybe because layers of black clothes are contraindicated in overpowering dry heat. There’s hardcore in AZ, there’s twang, there’s the skatepunk stuff, but not so much Goth. Maggie Golston, however, writes, and therefore she has a writer’s interest in song forms that leave a lot of room for the words, and mood, and that means that she likes people who have Gothic aspects to what they do, like Nick Cave. Maybe there’s a little Leonard Cohen in her diet of influences, too, and some Tom Waits.

Because of her strange stew of influences, and the way these go with her local landscape, “Black Capsules,” the best song according to Maggie, is, yes, very, very interesting, very compelling. First, Maggie has a really alluring (and nicely uninflected) voice. It’s alto, slightly smoky, and with an urgent prosody to it, sort of like Debora Iyall from Romeo Void. Or maybe she’s a more urgently feminine Carla Bozulich. In “Black Capsule,” she has lots and lots of reverb ornamenting her voice. Sounds almost like it was recorded through an intercom or in the echoing interiors of a semi-demolished mall corridor. “Black Capsules” is structured according to rules derived from the Bob Dylan school of multiple verses, lots and lots of verses (9:02!), without feeling a great need to develop rapidly. The ensemble is small and simple—acoustic guitar, drums, accordion (mixed way back)—and the percussion, which was apparently recorded late at night by a battery of infrequent drummers, slips in and out of the pulse, giving the whole thing that woozy, slightly drug-addled feeling that I associate with Tonight’s the Night, by Neil Young. Upon repeated listens, the song only gets better, more grim, especially as it slips into some scalding white noise toward the end of its momentous journey. And that is before you gaze upon its allusive and unsettling lyrics:

I can still see the dashboard that carries your face past the checkpoint
You’re bending your words with the frequencies I had to teach you
I can follow your trace with machines whose long names will escape me
A machine is a heart is a galaxy trying to reach you

You’re an engine with pistons that kick up the dust of a presence
You’re a laser that cuts me to ribbons from light years of distance
You’re a mirror, a pistol, an airplane propeller that hisses
You’re the space where I put all that matters, you’re only an absence

These lyrics, as I understand them, are full of Neruda’s brokenheartedness, Hispanic and Latin American fatalism, admixed with the strange desertified hallucinatory quality, of which you should now consider yourself informed. The results are sometimes like a Goth version of Garcia Marquez, or maybe a Hispanic version of P. K. Dick. The narrator alludes again and again to the black capsules in her pocket, though we are not always sure of their particular chemistry, their makeup (could be NASA-prescribed cyanide, could be something with a more sedative purpose). There are also ghosts in virtually every verse, and what of the “spaceman” and the “checkpoints,” of which we hear so much?
It all reminds me of a couple of a trip I once made to Portal, AZ, a town on the New Mexican border, a town with almost no one living in it. I love towns with almost no one in them. They can see you coming from a great distance. On the way to Portal, I stopped in the last berg with a Safeway. The big city, comparatively speaking. This berg, whose name I am excising, was a true ghost town. The roads there were still. There were people living there, somewhere, because someone was going to that Safeway and the drive-thru MacDonald’s, but all the trailers had tinfoil in the windows to reflect away the violence of the topography. A great place for a meth lab, and there were billboards dotting the empty roads warning about the horrors thereof. There were the occasional border patrol guys, parked, leaning out of rolled-down windows, looking lost and bored. Actual tumbleweeds. The dirt roads led from there up into the mountains, but in such a winding and irresolute way that no car could ever have made that passage.

What did the desert offer the residents of that town? Did they know anymore of their surroundings than they tuned in on their satellite televisions? Did they know only empty spaces and an absolute paucity of economic opportunities, or, the extermination of their people for the greater glory of European expansionism? Did they long for families back on the other side of the border? Crystal meth? Safeway burros that you just throw in the microwave? Did they, these heliotropes, wander out into their landscape, and glory in the expanses, or were they so used to these expanses that they didn’t even see them?

Golston’s song, with its uncanny lyrics, so full of desert resignation and, as she puts it, “bad excuses,” is a great artifact of this lonesome Southwest. If you offer her money for her songs, on MySpace, maybe she can amass the capital to reopen her bookstore.

I was going to start this post by talking about Bruce Springsteen. I was going to start by saying that there was a certain moment in the output of Bruce Springsteen when I realized I was no longer interested—because he had become too professional. The moment was: “I’m On Fire.” I was going to say -since “I’m on Fire” was coeval with “Born In the U.S.A.,” among his finest compositions- that maybe our greatest success sows the seeds of imminent failure. Maybe our beginning is our end. Maybe we’re born astride the grave, professionally speaking. Maybe it’s inevitable in music and literature (and art generally) that we get promoted to a point of incompetence. Or maybe there’s just something perverse in me that gets bored once an artist ascends to the peak of cultural impact. Maybe it’s really hard to make a masterpiece—whatever that is, whatever culture needs for it to be—and upon doing so, upon making a masterpiece, it’s really hard for the artificer to want to bother with the heartache of the thing all over again. Maybe most musicians, at the end of the day, just want to be professional. Maybe that great ambition of the rock and roll player, to quit his day job, is the beginning of the end. Maybe you should always keep your day job.

Also: I was going to say that my late sister turned me onto Springsteen, ahead of the curve, giving me The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle some months before that other record came out and made him a household type of name. And maybe because my sister is no longer living, The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle is one of those albums (along with Zuma, by Neil Young, and Collaboration, by Shawn Phillips) that will always seem like an unsurpassed masterpiece, even as it seems, for me, wreathed in death. Maybe what’s great about music is what we use it for, and not its innate qualities. (I can remember driving to the beach in Rhode Island, in 1983, listening to “Sexual Healing” by Marvin Gaye, and for me that’s what that song will always summon.) Maybe music, even more than literature, is owned by the listener. Every artist, when contemplating quitting the day job, when contemplating a profession in music, should remember that the casual listener is no auteur theorist. They give a shit mainly about what’s playing on the radio on the way to the beach.

Meanwhile: I’m trying to write an essay about Antonin Artaud right now and in this capacity I was reading Jacques Derrida’s essay about Artaud’s drawings, where I came across the following lines, concerning Artaud’s total inability to render in “professional” way: “The awkwardness . . . comes from another source and is submitted to. Artaud means to reappropriate this hand and this body against what he calls ‘the drawing principle,’ that is, against the strict organization of that kind of know-how which regulates itself by foreign forces and compromises with them.” What a strange, beautiful thought! That awkwardness (inability, refusal to improve) is to militate against an academy of compromises! This is, for me, exactly what “unprofessional” music does. Having said this, I should say that I do understand that when Bob Dylan commenced to imitate the singing style of the late Woody Guthrie he was, in truth, making just this sort of compromise. And thus I know that Dylan, the trickster, is just as guilty of professionalism as, e.g., Whitesnake. And I further know that all the indie rock kids with their constructed inability and their Will Oldham-style imperfect intonation, can be just as calculating.

Still, it’s with the guilessness of the truly unprofessional musician, the crudity of means, the foregrounded impulsiveness of the unprofessional musician, that you occasionally get a glimpse of what music really is, and what human psychology really feels like. The unprofessional musician really cares about what she does, because she only does it when she cares about it. The professional musician has a mortgage, a contract, kids, a model girlfriend, managers, and hangers-on, and he can’t stop playing even if he wants to. He will flog the horse until the horse collapses between his legs.

I bring all of this up as regards a songwriter I really like. A somewhat “unprofessional” type. Timothy Bracy, you’ll probably remember, was in a band called the Mendoza Line (named for the lowest acceptable batting average for a professional baseball player), who broke up in 2007 after making nine or ten albums over a ten-year period. The band, after some years of shifting constituencies, eventually hardened into a lineup that featured Bracy and his wife Shannon MacArdle as singers and songwriters—backed up by some really good players streamlining the vision. In this way, they made three very fine albums, culminating in 2007′s “farewell” package, 30-Year Low. This is one of my favorite albums of recent years. It’s really, really great, and not enough people heard it. 30-Year Low is mainly a country and folk-rock inflected affair, with a little Velvet Underground around the edges, likewise a little post-punk (especially on Shannon’s songs). But the whole never feels like one of those genre exercises. Because, most importantly, these are songs with words, songs that glory in words, and which, in their rush of images, shy away from nothing, from no confession, from no unsavory incident: “I’ve seen the whole three-act play, I’ve seen the poster and trailer,/and I never thought I have to pay so much attention to one girl just to nail her.”

Why was this the last album, you ask? Well, apparently paradise wasn’t so paradisal. Maybe it was never paradise at all, because the songs seemed sad as hell even before Tim and Shannon’s marriage fell apart. But by the time of 30-Year Low the principals could, if the songs are any indication, barely tolerate each other. The songs, whether autobiographical or not, are full of savage accusations (“She follows all your work/she’s got a fucking kitty on her shirt”), and there is the implication that many drinks were apparently drunk, and there was bad behavior on the tours (they even have a song called “Mistakes Were Made”), episodes of middle-of-the-night histrionics, and then the marriage was over, and what was left behind was one of the very finest documents in song about love and the lack thereof ever. Right up there with Blood On the Tracks and Rumours.

After that? Shannon made a solo album and seemed, well, extremely adept at getting in the last word, while Bracy sort of kept to himself, except for a few solo shows (he also holds down the keyboard spot in the band called Bird of Youth, which mainly features the preternaturally talented Beth Wawerna). But in retrospect, upon reflection, it seems it was Bracy who was the real writer in The Mendoza Line, not McArdle. Bracy’s voice, which is to Bob Dylan’s voice as John Prine’s voice is to George Jones’s voice, is a brokedown and sodden thing, perfect for giving up entirely. His voice sounds like surrender was written on his birth certificate. His voice sounds like it never met a melody that couldn’t be improved on by mumbling and deciding not to bother. But the words, the words (“Baby, don’t you think you’re being a little too drastic/there are things in this world you can’t buy with plastic;/you blew threw your cash like a Klondike miner/you made me feel the lash of the intelligent designer”), the words are so frigging great that you don’t care about his voice (you come to love it, in fact) likewise his by-the-book rhythm guitar playing (ditto). He writes like almost no songwriter of his generation, with an absolute vision of and a total commitment to the ugly truth, even if the truth emphatically does not flatter him in this his third decade (“Trading’s mixed, the dollar’s weak, productivity has reached its peak, now you’re lying in the basement contemplating a 30-year low”).

And so we come to the bulletin: in this unprofessional present, this disagreeable now, Bracy is attempting to get a new band off the ground. Fitfully, with mixed emotions. Is it taking so long because he associates the whole band thing with unadulterated pain? Is there any point, when your ex-wife has become so efficient at the deployment of her side of the story (taking a page from the Mia Farrow and Claire Bloom finishing schools), to making another album? Why bother? Still, against all the prevailing wisdom, Bracy intends a new band. The band, so far, is called the Collection Agency (a growth business with which Bracy has apparently had acquaintance in the time since his divorce settlement). And Bracy has a running sequence for his album, and a number of really good demos, many of them leaning on the 12-bar blues more than on recent Mendoza albums, and all of them appropriately skeletal, even naked.

Of the songs I’ve heard the best is one called “Doug Yule.” Doug Yule, it will be recalled, was the guy who joined the Velvet Underground after John Cale was dispatched, and who, with reliable if barely inspired work ethic, played Lou’s foil on Loaded. After even Reed had left the band, Yule insisted on making a last Velvets album by himself. This album is effaced from nearly all accounts of the Velvets. Doug Yule, the very height, therefore, of professionalism! Let me quote: “Nico said ‘I cannot make love to Jews anymore’/That’s what she said when she broke it off with Lou./And a man can work, but can he pay his dues anymore?/Like the Velvets in the time before Doug Yule./Doug Yule, Doug Yule/Life just can’t be this cruel/Why can’t I feel the vestige of new beginnings?/Doug Yule, Doug Yule/Spare me one more year through/I swear I have another album in me.”

It’s a duet, on this demo, between Tim and Beth Wawerna, she singing the part that Shannon might once have sung with warbly southern dipthongs. You can feel Bracy’s grief, here, his good humor (despite everything), his foreboding, and his absolute love of music history, which undergirds everything he does. But you can also feel, in these demos, Bracy refusing to do something, refusing to finish, committing to some of what neglect offers, which is exile and cunning and pathos, committing to awkwardness, in the face of excess professionalism, in a song about excess professionalism. Which is to say, for good or ill, that Bracy is another gifted songwriter, a sublime songwriter, laboring mostly outside of the music business, making songs for his MySpace page, biding his time. And as a result, in “Doug Yule” he has quite a bit more to say than you’ll find, e.g., in that new single, the one with the preposterous whistling on the bridge, from the famous New Jersey bar band.

**

See Also: Rick Moody’s Music Blog Swinging Modern Sounds

I think it was in 1986 or thereabouts that my friend Jim Lewis gave me a bootlegged cassette of a live radio appearance by Peter Holsapple and Syd Straw (with, I think, Ilene Markell, on bass and backing vocals–all of it taking place on KCRW). Jim was my close friend in college, and he went on to become a novelist and journalist. These days he lives in Austin, Texas. Chief among the many bands that Jim made me aware of, back then, were the dB’s, featuring Peter Holsapple and Chris Stamey, and I became such a devotee of the dB’s and the other architects of the “Hoboken sound” that I actually moved to Hoboken (in 1985), and lived there for about seven years. I lived a couple of blocks from Yo La Tengo, and used to see Chris Stamey on the bus going into the city. I went to Maxwell’s, the club that served as the epicenter of the Hoboken sound, a lot. I got Bob Mould’s autograph there once. Anyway, the Straw/Holsapple cassette had something really luminous about it. Peter and Syd played a bunch of dB’s songs, those from LIKE THIS and THE SOUND OF MUSIC, as well, as some of Straw’s songs from the Golden Palominos album, BLAST OF SILENCE, on which she sang. And I’m pretty sure they covered their amazing duet, “Never Before and Never Again.”

Somehow I’d missed the Straw era of the Golden Palominos. I had their first album, a much artier affair featuring Arto Lindsay, Bill Laswell, and John Zorn, et al. And I’d heard some of VISIONS OF EXCESS on the radio station, including “Omaha,” the song on which Michael Stipe sang. But it wasn’t until I heard the KCRW show that I understood what incredible singer Syd Straw was. I admired Holsapple already (and I ran into him on a plane once, when he was touring with Hootie and the Blowfish–and let me tell you there’s something strange about running into the heroes of your young adulthood when they are playing in Hootie and the Blowfish), and he shines on the bootleg, too, but Syd’s voice, which is part faux-country, part Broadway, and a fair amount Vaudeville, really struck something in me. Especially on songs like “Diamond,” Holsapple’s song from BLAST OF SILENCE, and “Listening to Elvis,” a Straw song from a Hoboken sampler called LUXURY CONDOS COMING TO YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD, Syd had some bittersweet (emphasis on bitter) and tragicomic (emphasis on tragic) quality that could not help but move even the casual listener. I wore out that cassette.

Then what happened? She released a solo album about the same time, and based on the popularity of the Golden Palominos, she got a major label deal. The first album has a lot of great New York players on it, Marc Ribot, most of the dB’s, most of the Paliminos, including the elusive Peter Blegvad, and so on. Still, that album didn’t haunt me the way the radio show had haunted me, and I kept it around for a while before selling in some purge of insufficiently-listened-to items. After which, ten years passed. That’s how it goes in stories like this, stories about time and the effects of time: ten years pass. A lot happened in those ten years, but of import for the story is the fact that my music biz friend sent me a promotional copy of Syd’s first album in ten years, War and Peace. By then Syd was living with the guy who managed Wilco, and was recording with this pretty amazing bar band called the Skeletons–in a stripped down format, doing nothing at all as slickly or as homogenously as on her first album. There was a desperation to the record, as though Syd couldn’t bother to take the time any longer to polish up the dark parts of her autobiographical impulse with love song varnish. And nowhere was this more evident than on its hit, a song about the New York that she knew when she first moved there to perform (as, among other things, a backing vocalist for Pat Benetar), “CBGB’s.” A song about a real bartender at that late lamented club, and his band The Nylons, and the moment of chemistry between the real Syd and the real bartender (“I was married for a while/It ended in tragedy/Oh well, enough about me”), and the fact that nothing much ever came of it. ”CBGB’s” ends with a reiterated and entirely painful inquiry by the narrator, “Remember me? Hey, remember me?” But it’s not just the particular bartender that Straw is trying to recover, it’s the time, the ambition, the promise of youth, the belief in music, in the so-called redemptive power of rock and roll, not to mention the belief in love. As on the rest of album, which seems composed of one grim breakup after another, it’s the trying not to give up that commands our attention.

A couple of years later, I was teaching at Bennington College when Loudon Wainwright III showed up to perform. The guy who ran the writing program at Bennington had very good taste in songwriters, and so he invited up Loudon for a show, and Loudon in turn brought along this friend of his to sing on a couple of songs. Syd Straw. I had never seen Syd in person, had never seen her do what she does, and because it was Loudon’s gig, she didn’t steal that dimly lit limelight. But afterward everybody went back to the faculty “dorm” and sat around singing songs. I tried to persuade to sing “CBGB’s” and finally she complied, though she complained a little bit. It was already snowing outside, and while we sat in there, the snow piled up. It was incredible to hear Syd sing her lament for a totally, irreversibly, irrevocably lost youth with just a few people sitting around, a couple of really great novelists, a poet or two, Lucy Grealy, Loudon Wainwright, and so on.

We became pretty good friends after that. Syd and I did. Or, to put another way: ten more years passed. Because that’s how it goes in these kinds of stories. What did Syd do in her next ten year layoff? She played a few shows, especially on Valentine’s Day, got in various kinds of arguments with whoever was booking the show, she found fault with the musicians that were backing her (and usually I attributed this to a) the fact that the players were, in fact, not good enough, and b) that Syd was and is so talented that she just wanted people to play with the kind of grace that she brought to her efforts), and then there were always unsettling stories, gigs where she got arrested for quarreling with the police before the show, horror stories about romance and about her family, her parents, both of whom died after War and Peace, siblings who were either into some dark stuff, or who would scarcely lift a finger to help, and so on. Always the hard way, as Syd always put it, and it sure was the hard way.

Then some years back Syd started talking about making another record. How was she going to do this, exactly, since she’d been dropped by the thieves at Capricorn Records, and she was chronically “financially embarrassed,” as my grandfather used to put it? And she was kind of stuck in central Vermont, forever trying to avoid the punishing winters and their attendant heating bills, and there weren’t any of her awesome musical confreres there, the guys who might be willing to sit in on a few sessions out of love for this difficult, brilliant singer. Over the years, all the labels rejected the album, some motherfucker stole the master tapes, and Syd was, as far as I could tell, five guitar solos from being done. This went on and on, and I for one, because I believe that time is the avenger, that time lays waste to everyone, to every bit of talent that has he hubris to appear in the world, never believed that Syd’s album would be finished. Not because I didn’t believe in Syd, but because I don’t believe in time.

And then without any fanfare, it was done! Pink Velour, it’s called, and most of it orbits around the title song, about Syd’s mom, who not long ago passed away. That’s a beautiful song, but the one I want to talk a little about is last song, “Actress,” which manifestly deals with Syd’s avocational, or occasionally vocational interest in the thespian pursuits, but which is more concerned with the travails of Hollywood failure (“Then I failed my screen test/Fucked up my audition/I’m an actress/In a town that’s full of them/Act as if you care”), as a way of talking about everything that Syd Straw once believed in, as a singer and songwriter (“I’m having that kind of career,/I’m having a kind of career/I came here to become a star, but this is my life so far”). As with a lot of Syd Straw songs, since Syd’s guitar playing is in the beautifully rudimentary category, the song comes to rest on a one-four chord progression, and settles in there for about four and a half minutes, as Syd’s new band (a heterodox group of very talented jazz and rock veterans called Plankton who have the wherewithal to go wherever they are sent by the chanteuse) brings all the dynamics to the part where she mumbles a few more devastating self-lacerations and accusations, during the long slow fade: “Always rely on the kindness of strangers,” and “Who am I anyway, when I’m not acting?,” and “Why don’t you come over and see me sometime?” And so on: trying not to give up.

If this song doesn’t make you cry, you aren’t listening carefully. But what does it tell us about where music is now, because that’s the reason to write about it (besides, that is, writing about it to bring your attention to it). Most popular songs, with their puppy-love advice-column nonsense, tell me nothing about how life is actually lived, and as such, they are incapable of moving me. Doesn’t matter how good the performances are. Probably part of the reason for this is that the record companies, who are not immune to demographic calculations, are chasing the disposable incomes of the young, and so they hew to songwriting that addresses young people. But what about adults? Who the hell, then, is making records for adults? There are a few obvious examples, the baby boomer icons (long past their best work), but otherwise the vast majority of popular music is made not to stand the test of time, but to be wiped away by time. The collateral damage is just about every songwriter of a certain age, every songwriter who tries capture in the amber the heartache of middle age, and the giving out of the ambitions that sustained her when she was young. There’s no mercy in it, there’s no mercy in the world, there’s no mercy in time, unless there’s the occasional glimpse of the fact that we are not, in this suffering, alone.

by Rick Moody

Arthur Danto, the Columbia University philosophy professor and frequent writer on contemporary art, has often referred to this “historical present” as a time after the history of art. What he seems to mean about this, I think, is that once Warhol made the Brillo box pieces, art had come to the end of a certain historical imperative. Anything after that time was at liberty to be whatever it felt like being, there was no urgency to be one thing or another. Pop, abstraction, narrative painting, landscapes, they all could coexist in the strange marketplace of the present. It’s worth asking what Danto would say about jazz. …more

Introduction

Everybody knows the book business is in dire straits these days. The news comes in awful fusillades from the daily press. But in part the book business looks so dire right now because it has mainly been indemnified against the kinds of downturns that have afflicted other media in the digital age. Books are not pirated the way movies are, in Asia, and elsewhere, and the digital storage of the book hasn’t taken off the way it has in the music business. In fact, from my vantage point, the music business, the place where I have probably spent the greatest portion of my disposable capital since my teen years, is the canary in the coal mine of twenty-first century culture. It has lost much of its economic dominance in the last decade, and it has lost control of the form that, through a variety of iterations, has been its shining face for forty years: I speak of the album. The album, insofar as it is a thing that people make and buy from large multi-national corporations, is basically dead. This is not news. However, what happens after the death of the album is, …more