the half- baked nothingness of Billy Joel

The awfulness of Billy Joel, explained.:

Slate contributing editor Ron Rosenbaum asks rhetorically early on in his hissing hate note on Billy Joel about why he should spend a column excoriating the songwriter at length after the artist has been maligned by critics and snobs alike for decades already? Well yes, why another hate jerk off at the expense of the much and justifiably maligned Billy Joel? The author needed something to write about that would less use of brain power and more use   of embedded knee jerk responses to Billy Joel's name. This wasn't an overview of a bad musician's career, it was an allergic reaction with a vocabulary. Rosenbaum couldn't help himself, Joel is that rash he was incapable of not scratching.  Truth needs to be told, though. Billy is a bit better than naysayers would have you think. A bit better, not a whole lot better.  

Billy Joel is a mixed blessing. Effective and versatile vocalist, a genuinely gifted writer of not so obvious pop melodies, a frequently maudlin, pretentious lyricist (although he redeems himself when his pop sensibilities rule over his desire to Be Meaningful), a technically proficient pianist, a smarmy hambone. One may not like him on principle--I don't care for him--but I have t admit he's done some work that merits a second and a third listen. He's a cross between Harry Chapin and Elton John, I guess, with a strong after taste of the worst brands of smugness that typifies pop music in general. 

What sinks Joel is his lack of any ironic sense of himself and the material he writes to address foul matters brewing in the world; despite his working class roots, the idea of an unfathomably successful pop star sing a catchy-hummable, all so meaningful ballad to the laid off factory workers of "Allentown" informs us that his protest songs are not about the poor nor the destitute, but in making Billy Joel feel good about himself and looking good to the fan base at the same time.

Joel's sins of pretentiousness are numerable over a long career , something I noted with his first hit "Piano Man", a bloated imitation of  Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man" , to the point where I stopped paying attention to him altogether with the name-checking orgasm that comprised the hit "We Didn't Start the Fire". The obviousness of his conclusions, the cartoon likenesses of his characters, the cliched contours of his examples, the barely concealed arrogance of his narrative air are the kind of thing that makes the smart people like you, I and Rosenbaum slap our foreheads and make us desire to grab either a gun or a cold beer. Unlike Rosenbaum, I am simply unwilling to get up the steam needed to pillory Billy Joel yet again. I will forgo the oratory and leave my summary judgement on BJ's body of work as this, a skilled journeyman with delusions of being something greater.

JOE BONAMASSA v GARY MOORE!

Blues guitarist Joe Bonamassa seems to be the white blues guitar saviour of choice for this part of the 21st century, a situation that has me tipping my hat to his technical acumen, his taste in guitar heroes, and the obvious work he put into his woodshedding to have those fancy chops at his disposal on demand. It's just too bad that all I get when listening intently to his long and frequent solos is the work involved in the effort to get all this text-book perfect. This is superhuman execution without commensurate passion. No fire under all that smoke. At a younger and less discriminating age, I might have been a fan, excited by his melodramatic playing and the authenticity of his rasping growl of a voice. No so much these days, not after a lifetime debating the merits and demerits of Clapton, Winter, SRV and the legions of other guitar heroes that populated the sports arenas off American cities in the 70s, Bonamassa seems no more than the advanced student who's perfected every cliche he could from the generation previously holding court without working on his own style, that rare item called an individual voice. What's the point, I suppose, is the enlightened way to take all this in, or ignore it outright. The last white blues guitar slinger to give me the figurative kick in the head was the late Gary Moore.


Moore was the last of the great ones, I think, less so for the originality of his chops--save for the speed tested relish and elan of his riffing, little in the way of his velocity seemed new. Moore came by his flashiness naturally, as he loved the work of his defacto mentors--B.B., Albert and Freddy King, Buddy Guy, Peter Green, Erick Clapton--that he didn't want to insult what he perceived their greatness to be by merely mastering their licks faithfully, performing them on command with machine-tooled precision. His work sounds like the energy of someone who picked up on the tweaks, twists, and inventions of all his heroes and sought to find his way to play the blues Over the Top. There is a beautiful aggressiveness to his solos, a sublime benevolence to his fastest and flashiest note clusters. His lengthy expositions are not to everyone's taste, and ours is not a time when music fans of a younger generation speak obsessively of guitar heroes as a concern as essential as food, clothing, and shelter, but to the degree to which this musician committed himself to a style and particular approach to that style, Gary Moore's guitaring--to my tastes --was an inexhaustible font of inspired, riffing epiphanies. Moore mattered, or at least impressed the Dickens out of me, because of the obvious glee with which he took command of the blues-rock form. He might not have invented it, but he certainly ownership of it. He knew what to do with the prize he commandeered.

Joe Bonamassa just bores me with all his pro forma shuffles, boogies, rockers, and rave-ups. Slick, well constructed, and stiff as Disney robots. Technique without spirit, that distinguishing attribute that gives mastery of complex concepts a personality that distinguishes it from other virtuosos-in-waiting, isn't art but merely mechanics.

"Toku Do"-- jazz guitar with Larry Coryell

The late Larry Coryell recorded about 100 albums in his career, an amazingly prolific guitarist indeed, but as with the case of a gifted improviser with a desire to stay engaged with their art through ongoing collaborations, not every disc clicked with me. Toku Do is one of those gems, however, a crisp and swinging set of standards combining Coryell's fabled swiftness of phrase with a ongoing feeling of melodic invention and snappy delicacy of touch. There is, in fact, an uncharacteristic lightness of touch for Coryell, a musician who's hard attack at times spoiled a splendid phrase or a quicksilver run. Here, is lines are fluid, smooth, not slick. When he wanted,his technical mastery was matched by transcendent grace. More than one guitarist has mentioned that when playing with him on tour, it wasn't unusual for them to marvel at Coryell's inventions, running through ideas no other guitarist could create. Yes, he was that good, and Toku Do is the proof. These are fine readings and reinterpretations of Monk, Ellington and Rogers and Hart, with Coryell weaving, pirouetting, and otherwise coaxing delightfully animated extemporizing from the classic material. The band of Stanley Cowell on piano and Buster Williams and Beaver Harris on bass and drums, respectively, keep matters effectively swinging and rhythmically nuanced--Cowell is a sterling foil for the leader, providing richly shaded color and brightly elaborated solos of his own to the session, with Williams and Harris making sure all of this has a heartbeat the swings gladly.

COLOSSAL

Just got out from seeing Colossal, a fine indy film written and directed by Nacho Vigalondo. The premise is this: a young woman loses her job and boyfriend in NYC and, unable to find work and broke as well, moves back to her hometown to stay in her parent's empty house. At the same time, a giant monster begins to destroy Seoul, Korea. The woman realizes after a while that she has a mysterious but very direct connection with the monster destroying a city a half a planet away. 

Science fiction, romantic comedy and psychological thriller in a well executed fusion of what would conflicting genres, writer, and director Galondo does not merely mash together disparate kinds of pop culture, but instead weaves them together. Without going into tidbits that would spoil the film, I would just add that the script is as tightly constructed as it is wildly imagined, and it requires suspending our disbelief a little further and, in a more challenging aspect, to suspend it in ways not usually demanded of us as viewers. Think of this: if one's actual life seems to slip, merge, evolve and abruptly change tones, perceptually, from being a comedy, tragedy, romance, and soap opera while a month, a week, a day, why wouldn't this also hold for a fictional, more fantastical world? 

Colossal does, I promise, contain all the elements I've mentioned, and they are pertinent to the story being told, but this is a narrative with the varied genre restrictions removed. For all that seems fantastic and scary, the players and their situations and how they respond to the changes that happen to them are, (ahem) human, all too human. Odd, quirky and defying genre expectations, this is a splendid and engrossing story, with a perfect ending to seemingly unresolvable complications that you didn't see coming. Fine performances by Anne Hathaway and Jason Sudeikis.

making Sinatra grate, again

Mikal Gilmore is a good critic overall, a fine writer with a literate style. He is very much a fan of the musicians he praises, and I've read him at times where he displays a reasonable skepticism at some of his heroes' less appealing efforts. Above all else, Gilmore's rock and roll writing is vital because he's a writer who never stopped believing that music had the power to change the way people see the world and that music, as well, could inspire, empower and embolden generations to create a more perfect union. Even when I feel that all that is lost to us now, that music, even when it was routinely superb during a period in the Sixties, was always about parties getting paid their due (and more), Gilmore could convince me, for a moment, that cynicism was a callow response to world events that didn't behave according to my own private timetable. 

But there is the habit of seeing everything particular artists do as evidence of genius when in fact what is served is dried out, tired, mannered, lifeless as a stain. Sinatra and Dylan, though, are two seemingly fault-free icons of Americana that Gilmore, like more than a few old guard reviewers, goes into a bubble of a kind and create their very own mythology, a homemade dialectic. In this case, it's the convenient narrative that Sinatra and Dylan represent the thesis and antithesis of American pop music and that what's happening with Triplicate amounts to a fabled synthesis. Gilmore gets disconcertingly close to aping Greil Marcuse's worst habit, which is to treat a trilogy of albums as a Major Historical/Cultural Event. In making such claims against a word limit, it is necessary to exclude practically everything and everyone else in the historical record. His four-star review is premised on the assumption that one thinks Dylan's performance of this material is arguably good on considers other than technical skill. One can make such an argument, of course, but I don't find them especially convincing. Willie Nelson has a reedy, nasally voice, but he does have range and color and a demonstrated mastery of his abilities as a vocalist; his renditions of old standards ala "Over the Rainbow" or "Blue Skies" work rather well and are effectively reimagined, as that atrocious phrase goes. We can push this even a bit further by remembering Elvis Costello's moving and too-brief reading of my "My Funny Valentine", choice ballad one would associate with the soaring and splinter texture of Tony Bennett's offhand croon, or the rich tone poems that Mel Torme turns his vocal performances into. 

Costello style, at the time, noted for being nasal, untrained, bellowing, only occasionally tuneful in straightforward line readings, demonstrates on "My Funny Valentine" that he, like Nelson, could shore up is supposed limitations and turn them into virtues that could make the performance memorable; while we can continue on  and on that Costello's rendition doesn't come near to achieving the definitive version Bennett imprinted upon the culture, that would be to miss the point of interpretation. Costello's version is his own, his vocal apparatus had richer registers to use to approach the delicacy of the melody and simple poetry of the lyrics, the result being, I think, is that great songs are written for a great vocalist. The further point is that Costello's voice had the technical qualities to make his version worth a listen or ten.  

"Redefined "is perhaps the better word. Sinatra's songs were written for Sinatra's voice, or voices similar in color, nuance, range, and regardless of what style you wish to cast the material in--soul, reggae, country, folk, blues--the requirements for voice remain the same. Dylan's appeal as a vocalist was that he wrote his own songs and that those songs fit the limited apparatus he had. His original material, and the songs by others (early on) he selected to perform fit his voice, his rage, his tone, which he was able to manipulate in effective ways. I am quite a bit more reductionist in my opinion of Dylan's attempts to interpret the great American songbook. I think it's awful stuff, a grating and embarrassing display. That said, I am also willing to admit my view reveals my limits more, perhaps, than they do anyone else's.

Rolling Stone's record review section turns 50

The record review section of Rolling Stone turned 50 years old in 2017, and I'll admit from the first sentence that I haven't held the critical opinions in high regard for the better part of thirty years. I tend to question RSs motives in who they cover and the reasons for the favorable reviews so artists seem to get every time they release something. Music critic and pop cultural historian Jim DeRogatis, author of the Lester Bangs biography Let It Blurt, was once the editor of the RS review section and shared with at a book event that Jann Wenner, founder and very hands-on editor, decreed that there are artists who will never get a negative review, among them Dylan, The Boss, Tom Petty,...the usual suspects. 

 I'm convinced Wenner corrupted the integrity of his reviewers; the section isn't a place of true criticism, the practice of discussing thins at length, in detail, with the instance of rendering an honest estimation. It has been, for a long time, a tedious exercise in rubber stamping new albums with praise that rarely rise above the corroded cliches and platitudes that have haunted music reviewers for decades. There are notable exceptions, of course, chief among them Mikal Gilmore, a sterling prose stylist and a man given to nuanced consideration of history and tradition and contextualizes his praise against high standards. It should be said as well that the record review section was my most essential writing laboratory. As in the already mentioned Marcus, Bangs, Landau and RJ Gleason (and Robert Christgau at the now defunct Village Voice and Duncan Shepard at the SD Reader), these were my models for what I thought a fine critical prose should read like. For that I am grateful. 

That just makes it sadder to note that what was indeed the freshest and most invigorating forum for commentary has ceased to be a place for independent thinking and has become, in most part, a section of corporate shilling. Much of the decline in mass circulation criticism that , incidentally, gave an honest and considered evaluation of music, films and books could well be due to changing readership expectations; a cursory glance and a longer examination of the current crop of yammer among online internet outlets seems to require those would-be examiners of to have had a huge gulp of the Kool-Aid that's being served, no matter how ethically loathsome, and suspend critical standards as long as they draw a paycheck, replacing them with talking points and backstories agreed up between skittish media companies and the advertising and promotional departments of big corporations.It's beenI've suspected that if you treat an audience like fools, lemmings and immature hords addicted to fads and fashion, they will behave, in time, accordingly, accepting the faint shadows on the wall as the one reality their senses need to appreciate. 

ALLAN HOLDSWORTH

I was very saddened by the news that guitarist ALLAN HOLDSWORTH has passed away at age 70. The British-born Holdsworth, who had lived in San Diego's North County Vista community for several decades, was quickly the greatest and most original improviser I had the excellent and unreal fortune of seeing live. I first came across him in 1973 at Newport Wherehouse Records, an era where the clerks were as big musician obsessives as you were. I found myself in a long and riffing conversation with a sales clerk about guitarists. At a point, the excited chat veered into guitarists of great speed, accuracy, and original technique. I bemoaned that the realm of the speedster had already been decimated, given the sped-up barrages fashioned by the kings of the hill John McLaughlin, Al DiMeola, and the abusively underrated Larry Coryell. The summary view was that younger guitarists taking up the jazz-rock tempos and swift extemporizing had turned the style into a morass of rapid and repetitious chatter.

I said something to that effect, a typical move among a good many of the music snob community who'd needed to establish their bonafide when they encounter a member of the tribe they hadn't yet exchanged judgments; it was an affectation, and it in my case at least, used frequently to obscure the fact that there were musicians I'd hadn't heard. So I  said this, maintaining my fiction of knowing something I didn't. I kid you not, the clerk snapped his fingers and asked if  I'd heard Allan Holdsworth. No, I said, and he motioned me over to the counter turntable; he took out a disc the read "Tempest" on it, eagerly but carefully slid the disc from the sleeve, and dropped the needle on the disc. What followed was a rather good blues-riff rock in a Cream mode, but with diminished and augmented chords placed in the fuzz-toned mix to add the surprising element of jazzy space, an element enhanced by the jazz background of drummer John Hiseman, who'd been the timekeeper and leader of the pioneer UK jazz-fusion band Colosseum. 

The revelation of the disc was the guitar work, which struck rapidly and dynamically like a bolt of lightning. It was Holdsworth on the frets, racing over the chord changes with runs Joe Pass might have been proud to call his own, mixing up his complex outings with finely wrought blues bends and dissonant accents and bittersweet turns in his phrasing. This was 1973. Van Halen hadn't yet been formed. This was a precursor to the vocabulary that would become the go-to style for a hard rock lead guitarist.  Holdsworth, though, was constantly evolving, challenging himself and his technique by placing it in new contexts. 

He was an improviser more than anything else, a man who'd created his own idiom. His improvisations were a match for Coltrane's high velocity, register jumping runs that did strange and beautiful turns against your expectations of where you thought his ideas might take him. His technique was peerless, and his playing was revolutionary.  Like the brilliant guitarist Larry Coryell who died just a couple of weeks ago, he profoundly and permanently changed the way we would play the electric guitar. This man has given me much pleasure in the decades that I've been listening to him, through his stints with Tempest, Soft Machine, Gong, the New Tony Williams Lifetime, Bill Bruford, UK, Anders and Anders, Jean Luc Ponty, and his own bands and albums. For all those decades, the rest of the guitar world was catching up with what this genius was already doing with unmatched fluidity and invention.