Margot @ 19

TRex…
I’d love to hear a little tape recording online of part of that interview. That is too funny!

I looked for it EVERYWHERE.

Maybe you could contact DAVE or Mara directly. I’m sure they tape everything. I, for one, would really, really like to hear that whole thing. Did she actually play “Loser” and say it was Tweet’s favorite song? That is priceless.

Matthews needs to fire his publicist and whoever else thought that it would be a good idea for him to try to sway the elusive Youf Market this way. Di-saster.

No– Matthews needs to fire his life coach. Cuz he ain’t got one.

Matthews is a mystery to me. It seems like he memorized some basic formulae incorrectly in elementary school and has somehow managed to thrive anyway. I can sometimes follow him to a point, like 1 3 = 4, and then comes minus 2 = 17.5. But, maybe it’s me.

Good morning, pups. It’s Bobo and Herbert in the NYT today. Bobo says people have been writing about the fragmentation of American music for decades. But year after year, the segmentation builds. It’s a mystery what Bobo has in mind. It’s not one of his classic mid-life angst pieces. Mr. Herbert writes about “A Swarm of Swindlers” and says like vultures, the mortgage lenders began circling the single-family house with the tiny front lawn on Merrill Avenue. It’s not a pretty story.

http://mgpaquin.wordpress.com/

The coffee, tea and hot chocolate are ready, and I’ve got bagels and lots of cream cheese. It’s the middle of the work week already! Have a great day.

Rock n’ Roll is Dead, Long Live Rock n’ Roll. Bobo asserts that music today is fragmented. That there are few bands that cross genres, and no place where integrating forms with the traditional African American roots are apparent.

Nostalgia is cheap. Since when was the MSM EVER accomodating of such explorations. In the 1930’s whites sneaking away to listen to jazz in Harlem was enough to get one on government “watch lists”. Blues was so marginalized that it was only “discovered” in the 1950’s by folks like Moses Asch and Alan Lomax. In the 1950’s the attraction of a small minority (mainly those “upper class white college students” Bobo derides) to Black Music genres was so threatening that it was decried as Satanic. They would have burned the records if they had been able to find them! Meanwhile the ORTHODOX was the saccharine Sandra Dee pop song or Mitch Miller. Bland, sterile, soulless versions of R&B were generated by Pat Boone ( who made a fortune while the original writer and performers got pennies for Royalties)

Elvis was such a shock because he actually performed Black music (mainly gospel and R&B based). Again his work was staunchly resisted by those that controlled mainstream media sources, but because he was white he was allowed access to TV and radio, unlike Chuck Berry and Little Richard. But even here playing Black Music could be dangerous. The story of how DJ Alan Freed was brought down is iconic. Everyone took payola, and Freed, who was likely the one that was least involved, was brought down for it simply because he was playing music that was corrupting the youth of America.

It was in Europe where the great cultural admixture occurred…with bands like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, The Who, early Fleetwood Mac, the Yardbirds, the Kinks and others taking the Blues and R&B that sold better in England than America and adopting it as their own anthems of rebellion against the bureaucratic uniformity that were the limited avenues of successes in post-war Britain.

That’s why, when the Beatles crossed the Atlantic they shocked America. Nice boys in suits playing American Black Music! But any look at a US AM radio playlist in the mid 1960’s will demonstrate just how decidedly “Straight” music actually was then. A few urban “Top 40″ stations in major urban areas might sneak a few artists on that broke the Frank Sinatra, Jim Nabors, Andy Williams mold.

The advent of FM “Underground stations” really broke things open for a few years in the late sixties and early seventies. Nobody listened to, nor made money from FM stations, which allowed them to be used as experimental platforms for a collage of blues, jazz, international, folk, classical and rock music. Again, these were listened to by “college students”. But even these eventually devolved into more regimented formats of heavy rotations and excruciatingly over-produced rock as the commercial FM’s.

Bobo asserts that “indy rock” (which is derived from the Elvis Costello version of punk rock”) lacks any reference to earlier African American traditions. Yawn! Tell that to the White Stripes, or Beck, the Black Crowes, Ani Di Franco, or going back a bit, the Violent Femmes, the Pixies, the Talking Heads. Americana is steeped in the acoustic East Texas and Delta blues tradition and groups certainly understand their roots (it’s sometimes called “roots rock”). The DJ culture also uses the panoply of generations of black artists and not all of these are “gangsta rappers” and black. Bobo should listen perhaps to a guy by the name of DJ Shadow.

It makes me wonder if Brooks has ears enough to hear what is sitting right there in front of him in the music.

And the critique of these “upper class white male college students” who play indie rock is clearly ignorant that most of these folks are not “upper class” (colleges are very different from Bobo’s days in terms of admissions) and the bands are far more gender and race balanced than he might want to believe. And as for education of the type that Little Steven is talking about? Many of these college town musicians do DJ stints or listen to college radio stations that have pretty deep collections of critical artists of the past. And they play them. They are likely more aware of past artists and their diversity that Bobo is of the current diversity and interconnections between the supposedly fragmented genres.

While it’s true that African-American music of one segment of black youth (and some whites…don’t forget Eminem) has diverged significantly from it’s origins, and there seems to be a large chasm between rap and “alternative music” it is bridged by hip hop artists and bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers. And if you chance to risk going out to the cafes and lower end clubs where you can buy a $2 Pabst in any city in the country you’ll likely see musicians and audience members hopping between shows as diverse as big band, ska, punk, electronica, Americana, Blues, punk, Tex-Mex, psychedelia, Emo, avante-jazz, lounge, rap-metal etc.

Just like Lennie, Matthews still doesn’t know what hit him and I think that–like George–Stewart hated to do it, but he had to.

“I Fought the Law and the Law Won” by the Clash

Pardon me?

I know, I know … but still … ;)

I confess. I want Rachel to have her own show. On TV. With a huge audience.