speaking of American Idol . . .

Kevin Cowherd, one of many clueless Baltimore Sun columnists who get to prattle on about their demographic's not-particularly-observant observations, weighed in the phenomenon of American Idol in two columns these past two weeks. (Cowherd's columns fill the 'humorist' and middle-aged affluent guy slots for the paper; the first is stated, the second not. That's a bit harsh, actually, because as much as Cowherd isn't generous toward or particularly understanding of the world around him, he doesn't seem to be filled with the kind of hate one might expect from that characterization. In other words, he's not conservative talk radio or anything. But he will talk about golf handicaps like we can all relate)

Anyway, Cowherd's first column last week made the allegation that some of the contestants during this first round of auditions are, gasp, not entirely serious! This has been pretty obvious from early on, when you'd see numerous pranksters come on the show, some pretending to care about the reactions of the judges, and others not even bothering. Now, some who read the first column have had a chance to react and explain that no, the great thing about the show, Kevin, is that these people are really delusional. So Cowherd is now insisting that pretty much all the bad singers know that they're bad.

I agree that this is always a factor. (The Horshack-esque guy who basically recited Laura Branigan's "Gloria"? That was a clear entry in the 'prankster' category, and not particularly entertaining for it, either.) But you'd have to be deeply cynical to assume that every one of those awful but tear-stained attempts wasn't sincere. But the really combustible (or at least amusing) TV action here is the ones that fall through the cracks, where you have to watch closely to determine the delusional from the self-consciously absurd.

The girl in New York who either started to cry or feigned a breakdown, explaining that she was a great candidate because she couldn't sing - who can entirely determine her motivations? I think the guy with the one-and-a-half-note range singing "Amazing Grace" was there to support his cousin, who looked all the more better singing Sam Cooke moments later. The guy who juggled as much as sung and was incensed, I think that was genuine. And there was a disproportionate number of clueless, quiet white guy loners this year who spent too much time in their bedroom working on hopeless falsettos.

I usually skip this round of AI, but now I think maybe I like it more than the later portions. Which are of course about red state vs. blue state and any other America-in-microcosm idea you can throw at it. (Take that, Studio 60!)

unusual TV scoring choices rule

Just thought it was interesting that last night, out of all the songs that they could have closed the show with, American Idol used Steve Harley's "Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me)." This was apparently a #1 hit in the UK in '75 (thanks, Allmusicguide), but it's pretty obscure in the States, and I hardly remembered where it was from when it appeared on the show. I wracked my brain for several minutes going through the possibilities, thinking of various British acts who either recorded in the early '70s or can evoke such a period. Elliot Murphy? That's not it. Badly Drawn Boy? Maybe someone like him with a recent record that I've barely ever played? I suddenly was able to connect it to the closing credits of Velvet Goldmine, and pulled my soundtrack CD, which I've probably played twice. Sure enough, that was it. I guess the lesson here is, given a little wiggle room, the people who score television shows still show depth of knowledge, taste and smarts. I'll remember this later in the year when you're pushing this year's equivalent to Daniel Powter on AI, or scoring 4 wordless minutes of some failing drama with Jeff Buckley's horrific rendition of "Hallelujah."

Beck - The Disinformation

Beck's new album, The Information, has received a curious critical response. Mostly positive, the reviews consistently claim that no, seriously, this is the good one. Maybe the best since Odelay. Isn't this how reviews for new Rolling Stones albums typically read? Best since Some Girls? (And sometimes, less enthusiastically, best since Tattoo You!)

2002's Sea Change was greeted as a masterpiece in most quarters when it came out, and I'll admit that it was a striking simulation of what it would sound like if Alex Chilton sang in a lower register and recorded an entire album of songs like "Kangaroo" from Big Star's Third. But the album gave out as the end approached, and suffered from samey-sounding tunes, not a typical Beck problem.

Then there was last year's entry, the "return to form" Guero album. Most reviews for the album read as if no one had enjoyed a Beck album since Odelay. This was a return to the cut-up sound collage style, true. But what it also was was a return to the near-complete blankness of Beck's Odelay style, always a problem for him, whether he's singing spacy folk tunes or rapping over a Dust Brothers production. Whereas his deliberately obscure antecedents like Dylan and Elvis Costello always at least imply some kind of meaning or general feeling in their songs, however difficult it may be to parse out amongst the rhyming dictionary games, Beck is as blank as can be nearly all the time, even if a song has some central image or narrative that's easy to comprehend. The only people who earnestly thought that Beck believed himself to be a "Loser" in 1994 were the Mr. Jones's writing the umpteenth "Gen X" article for Time or Newsweek.

I enjoyed Guero enough to probably give it a dozen or so spins. The hookarama we expect from him at his best is definitely there. I like it almost as much as I liked Odelay, which is to say, not as much as Mellow Gold, where Beck most effectively cultivated his poet-of-the-junkyard persona. For all of his wordplay, he rarely gives up a memorable phrase, probably because I'm not compelled to think about his meaning, having become so accustomed to his lack of any. On these last few albums, is there a "Drive-by body pierce" in the bunch? Sure, the hispanics in his neighborhood called him "Guero," I get it. But what's the relevance of telling us this? (And would I know it if not for the advance press from rock magazines?)

I can't help but compare Odelay and Guero unfavorably to the Beastie Boys' Dust-Brothers-produced masterpiece, Paul's Boutique. Paul's Boutique is a flashy tour-de-force, but it also has a clear message above the endless references and dense sample collage. The Beasties love New York. The Beasties love hip-hop. The Beasties love the larger culture that feeds their hip-hop. Paul's Boutique creates a kind of secret history of pop culture, where Superfly, Highway 61 Revisited, James at 16, and Galileo co-habitate. Maybe it's unfair to compare Beck's work to one of the best hip-hop albums of all time, but the Beasties, perhaps as much for their aesthetic as their color, have always stood apart from hip-hop as much as they stood in it, and Beck cultivated a similar alt-rock identified audience. And I can't claim to hear any such thematic consistency from Beck. He wants to have a party in the same sandbox, but he's not sure what he'll talk to you about when you come.

I'm annoyed by the gimmicks associated with the The Information. The do-it-yourself artwork, and the DVD of videos that I will never watch - they make for a nice hook in any lazy review or press piece on the new record, talking about how the process of creation was different for this album. Given that, you would think this record would sound substantially different. The truth is, it sounds to me pretty much like the last one. And I like it fine, but like nearly every Beck record before it, I find it blank, lacking in the content we expect from some suggestion of meaning. It's like my response to The New Pornographers - love the band, the melodies, and the hooks, don't have a blasted idea what Carl Newman or Neko Case are singing about and don't get a sense that Newman cares whether we do. Spin, curiously, has run a review that basically says this album finally reconciles the different sides of Beck on one album, which is almost exactly what Rob Sheffield said about Guero in Rolling Stone last year.

So the question with Beck, I think, is not the latest genre hop, or how much he balances the styles he's previously explored. The question is whether he cares enough to share of himself in any way that we can connect cerebrally or emotionally, and the answer, most of the time, is not much.

long absent

You know you haven't posted in a while when you can't remember how you go about logging into blogger.com, or what your password is, for that matter. More to come soon, I hope.

Seattle Mariners, 2001 world champs

Bud Selig took the wrong approach when he decided to have the All-Star game determine home field advantage for the World Series. This is no secret, and sports columnists and fans have thorougly addressed the wrong-headedness of this decision over the past several years. Making the game 'count' (in the sense that a sporting event can 'count' because it has meaning in a larger context, like a team's record for the season) has not changed the manner in which the rosters are conceived or the manner in which the game is played. Your Mark Redmans of the world (5.27 ERA) will still make the team, because of the at-least-one-per-team rule, and middling players from the high profile, large market teams will benefit from ballot stuffing. (I'm looking at you, Red Sox and Yankees.) And most of the starting line-up is gone after a few innings, so as to provide cameos by the backups that barely register. If Joe Buck and Tim McCarver are nattering on over footage of an earlier play, you might miss the single at bat by the guy who actually is the best player in the league at that position that year.

So I would like to suggest a completely different perspective on the games that take place outside of the context of the regular season. Instead of trying to make the All-Star game count more, fuzzying the line between 'exhibition' games and games that 'count,' let's view the entire post-season as a long exhibition as well. When someone refers to the Diamondbacks as the 2001 World Champions, do you honestly believe that they were the best baseball team that year? (Seattle was pretty good that year, I believe.) Whether or not the best team wins in the post-season does bother me, but a merit-based argument on that topic is a different subject for a different day. No, I'd like us all to take this viewpoint because the post-season will continue to be on Fox for another 7 years, at least, and I wish to pout about it.

Of course, there is more to the games than the way they are presented to us on television. But as the entertainment they are, the games are supposed to live with us in real time, not just as box scores the next day. And I feel that if the games can't be presented to me in a fashion that I find watchable and entertaining, I'd almost prefer to pretend that they don't 'exist,' that they don't 'count.'

The corny broadcasters, led by, but not limited to, McCarver and Buck are the most obvious part of the Fox baseball problem. McCarver can't broadcast forever, true, but I don't have faith that the aesthetic of their sports packaging will have substantially changed in say, 2035. It seams like every talking head they have is less charismatic and credible than your local UHF channel's 10:00 news crew. Correct me if i'm wrong about this, but I could swear that I heard Steve Lyons call Chuck Knoblauch a 'gladiator' during the 2000 playoffs. And my favorite McCarver quote, regarding Bernie Williams in the same era: "A powerful swing, from a powerful man."

Their attempts to pander to the 'family' demographic with excessive graphics and the like are so condescending, I can't imagine any young kid smart enough to take to baseball to actually be wooed by them, however well intentioned they may be. The 8:00 PM intro had Americans from all walks of life staring at the sky as stars - get it? - rocketed across the continent to Pittsburgh. And did they still have that talking computer graphic baseball? I slept through part - and by part, I mean most - of the game.

So instead, I'd just like to focus my attention on the regular season and leave it at that. Instead of pretending to care who wins the All-Star game, I'm going to pretend to not care who wins in the post-season, especially because I have to watch Fox to see the games. (Note that I can't committ to not watching the post-season. I'm just saying I'll hold it in low regard.) Whoever has the best record at the end of the season is the true champ, I will insist, if only to myself!

Spin,1985 - ?

I would mourn its passing, but I can't even tell when Spin ceased being Spin anymore. After several years of rapid changes, the latest issues of Spin (epitomized by the current issue with Beyonce on the cover) have totally severed any ties with the magazine's former identity. It's like the Mickey Thomas-led Starship still plugging away in the late '80s, without even Grace Slick to tie it to its roots (as if that was making a difference vis-a-vis integrity). Keeping with the analogy, I guess the Grace Slick figure here is Charles Aaron, the only name in here that I recognize as having been a long-time resident writer, although recognizable rock writers like Will Hermes and Jon Dolan can be found within as well. The individual snippets of writing are not necessarily any worse than before, but the magazine's identity and utilitarian value are completely lost on me.

If you haven't seen it, I'll sum up the changes. As has been the trend in magazines for pretty much ever, the new emphasis is on more graphic design and less text. I actually have no objection to this as long as we're getting real content within this framework, but if it's here, it's hard to tell. There is more of this profiling and showing pictures of readers that I blame on the MTV reality show culture. I really don't need to see people in photos with their favorite musicians, or people who think they look like musicians, or who dressed up like Thor for Halloween, or whatever. New features "The Brain," where Charles Aaron answers reader questions, and "How to Buy," a career retrospective on one artist per month, are directly taken from Blender. (Although in fairness, Blender calls that feature "The Guide." It's Mojo that calls it "How to Buy.") There is a lot, and I mean a lot, of red. Red borders, red text. This is same approach taken by Electronic Gaming Monthly and many other magazines I read over the past few years. Was there some sort of study done that shows we buy more of the advertisers' products if all of the graphic design uses red? Maybe it just works on the key demographic - young men with spending cash.

The only thing that's even slightly interesting about this latest change is how slavishly they're imitating Blender. I don't know much about the rock magazine market in terms of circulation, but I can only surmise that Blender is the only one that is succeeding by the industry's standards of success, and that's been obvious for several years. Both Spin and Rolling Stone have been increasingly Blender-fied for several years, but with RS it actually worked out for the better. The lengthy dissertations on Robbie Robertson lyrics that passed for record reviews in RS 15 years ago were replaced with succinct, pointed writing, and Rob Sheffield's editorial voice dominates with genuine wit. RS is a pop culture magazine that emphasizes music, and has thoughtful journalism that educated people might want to read. Spin too had imitated Blender's high review volume and low-brow, pandering picture captions for several years, and has changed up their review format often in the past several years. (A 1-10 scale, then letter grades, now 1 to 5 stars.)

But what was once a trend is now outright slavish imitation. It smacks of desperation, and Spin no longer has an identity of its own that I can see. Blender itself is almost completely useles in its front sections each month, written for the sort of materialistic knucklehead who reads the parent magazine Maxim, but surprisingly showcases many of the best rock writers (Douglas Wolk, Ann Powers, Robert Christgau) in the back. I have no idea if any of the aforemented knuckleheads end up buying the King Suny Ade and Au Pairs reissues recommended in the back, but it's an interesting contrast, at least.

Imagining the staff meetings that led to this latest and most extreme change, I am reminded of an episode of The Larry Sanders Show, from circa '95 or so. Phil, Larry's head gag writer, is pitching sitcom ideas to the network. They tell Phil that they want something "Friends-like." After some frustrating experiences with their negative feedback, Phil finally asks, "do you want Friends-like, or Friends?" "We want Friends," they reply.

(I can't remember if this is the same episode where his sitcom premise about the tribulations of a ska band is reconceived by his network-chosen collaborator Dave Chapelle as a show where a club DJ in Baltimore solves mysteries each week. They have to put out the later seasons on DVD.)

Spin in its heyday was often indulgent and a little erratic in its taste. An issue from 1990 put Jandek and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan on a list of the ten most significant artists alongside the likes of Morrisey and Madonna. But there was genuine passion behind the occasionally misguided enthusiasm. Mark Kemp and Jim Greer had me convinced that the first Teenage Fanclub album would be a debut on a par with The Clash or Marquee Moon. (I finally acquired it a couple years back. It's not.) This version of Spin struck a nice middle ground between the underground-boosting likes of Option, and the head-up-the-ass fogey-ism of Rolling Stone. (Robbie Robertson's Storyville album was given 4 and a half stars!? Can you tell I think Jann Wenner overrates Robertson?) I learned about Can and countless other artists in those pages during the latter years of high school.

So rest in peace, Spin. Unless the last few issues on my subscription give me some indication that this magazine has anything to offer that RS and Blender don't already, I can't imagine renewing.

First Post

My intention with this blog is to talk primarily about music, but other media as well, as I am inspired to do so. "Skronk" is a term coined by Robert Christgau (or at least Lester Bangs attributed it to him in his "A Reasonable Guide to Horrible Noise") to describe the music made by musicians in the late '70s art-punk movement No Wave (i.e. DNA, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, etc.), and like-minded noisy or 'difficult' pieces of music. While I had an affinity for this sort of thing as a teen, and it will always have a sentimental place for me, it is not the sort of music that I would want to focus on primarily, or even regularly. So forgive the mis-naming of this blog - it was the best music related pun I could think of at the time.