The Huffington Post Rips Down an Article Sharply Criticizing Spotify — Here's the Original

The Huffington Post Rips Down an Article Sharply Criticizing Spotify — Here's the Original:

This is worth reading because it makes the case convincingly that musician creators are getting the short end of the stick financially from having their music featured on the Spotify streaming service. The caveat is that I find the author's recollection of the conversation with a Spotify executive about the financial relationship between the service and the creators who make their content reads a little pat. The executive comes across as too stereotypically dense and clueless and the narrator shows himself as a guy who too easily comes up with fast and stunning bits of pithy truth telling from which there is no response. It comes off as stunningly cliched TV drama, and I think Huffington Post was on reasonable grounds to doubt the veracity of the author's account of the meeting. Still, it's worth a read to glean the essential truth herin, that deserving artists are being cheated by the service . Spotify , from what I understand, is "making bank", as the kids say, and can well afford to pay these good people what their work is worth. Also, checking out the author's"I Respect Music" Website can help, perhaps, move the needle in the right direction.

The sublime "The Shape of Water"

"The Shape of Water," directed by Guillermo del Toro, is a splendid Beauty and the Beast story, succeeding to be sweet, menacing, hopeful, thrilling, and finally affirming in. Some of us might blanch at the storybook particulars of this movie obviously--it's hard to do anything fresh with his done-and-done again idea, no?--but del Toro is skillful in balancing the needed balance between the sweet and the dour, the joyful and the threatening. Additionally, this is very much an adult film, not for kiddies, as the characters have genuine emotions expressed in authentic language. 

That is, there is no shortage of f-bombs. Also done incredibly well is handling the sexual element that's usually obscured by sentiment and courtly sentiments; del Toro brings this aspect, and the entire premise, into a world we recognize, in this case, the early 60s in Baltimore. Time, place, inference, and the use of nicely chosen incidental details and art design set up the way the tale is conveyed. Most importantly, there is a human connection here, with the theme of loneliness being a primal driving force to seek love or revenge superbly embodied in fully rounded characters. 

Visually, this is your typical del Toro production, with the deep, rich, dark color scheme, seamless editing, controlled and adequate contrast between the more human and banal world of the 60s and the more fantastical, menacing interiors of the more sci-fi sequences. Stand out performances from Michael Shannon, a grand and messed up baddie, and Richard Jenkins, who seems incapable of doing bad work.

These chops don't cut deep enough

Patrick Yandall would one of those jazz-inflected guitarists I would usually go nuts over.The qualifier "usually" gives you a hint of what I thought   of his new album A Journey Home. The San Diego-based musician is a veteran of the scene, active since the ’90s in many bands and collaborative efforts, and has released 20 albums of his music. His productive longevity is understandable, considering that Yandall is an excellent guitarist, potentially a great one. He is a master of groove, tone, and feel, a fret man able to fill space with Wes Montgomery-like octave chords, punctuate the beats with short blues riffs and , and, when the feeling merits, let loose with an impressive flurry of runs. In its best moments—and there are many sweet spots on this disc—his soloing transcends the often repetitive and simplistic structures of his self-penned material. After the fact, the grooves lack personality; they are placeholders, more or less, existing less to push Yandall  than they to keep his chops from getting too hairy for the average listener.  The guitarist restricts himself , keeps himself in check, careful not to offend. The conservative approach creates conservative results.In another discussion, we might call it being chintzy with the available bounty. A guitarist as technically gifted and as fluidly expressive as Yandall ought to be leaping over such barriers and cutting loose for real on a track or two. Stronger, more varied, more intricate compositions would aid toward that goal, if Yandall were so inclined. The songs on A Journey Home are simple, hardly a sin, and there are some good melodic ideas here,.But there is a formula smooth-jazz/light funk motif they fall into, with incidental keyboards, synths providing a few pale shades of color, an occasional piano solo (played by Yandall, who, as I understand, plays all the instruments). The drum tracks, honestly, are without soul. The burden falls to Yandall’s obvious virtuosity, which raises to the occasion on several tracks, especially on “Passion,” a Latin groove where the artist unleashes what he can do; hot riffs, screaming ostinatos, raging note clusters.  But alas, it is too short a solo, as it fades and we return again to the album’s steadfast sameness, waiting for another moment when the guitarist steps into the spotlight again. You might find yourself fighting an urge to fast forward through a mostly indifferent set of rhythm tracks to find some places where the music starts to cook again. Well, the guitarist anyway, if not the actual tunes to composed to hang his virtuosity on. Agreeably, Yandall,  does a good turn with the last track . a stone cold blues shuffle, “Blue Jay Blues,” highlighting a glorious walking bass, and a pulverizing solo from Yandall, with brief and sharp assertions, serpentine runs weaving between the one-four-five beats, some bittersweet BB King-like vibrato. This track is a rousing, strutting jam. One wants more.This ought to have been an outstanding album. As is, it is only good one, buoyed by Yandall’s spirited playing. A musician this gifted deserves the energy and inspiration an actual band of musicians can provide, and the improvisatory possibilities better material can provide.

(This was published in slightlydifferent form in the San Diego Troubadour. Used with kind permission)

Show some grit for the MC5

(In the spirit of Lester Bangs, exaggerated even by his standards, I wrote this fever dream as a tirade demanding the induction of the MC5 into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It occurs to me that the 5, in their prime, could give a damn about such a corporately bestowed honor. Still, I thought this should have a home on this blog as  well.-tb)

This is important shit , folks: To this day , the MC5 are not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame despite the impressive argument that they have been one of the most influential and , ergo, most important rock and roll bands in history. In any event, here is a choice cut not discussed much even my 5 aficionados , James Brown's "It's a Man's World". Agreed, the song is more than patronizing and winds up placing women on the damnable pedestal and back in the kitchen at the same time, but you have to hand to these guys for their odd choice. They loved black music and their choice of a song only JB could pull off is a classic punk gesture: "Fuck you guys, we're gonna play this goddamned song because WE WANT TO." Vocalist Rob Tyner did not, as has been remarked around a trash can full of burning rubber, give a FLAT FUCK if he sang worse than a horse thief gagging at the end of a dirty rope of justice. Rob Tyner sang like a man who had his head wrapped in a thick sheet of bubble wrap and then had his noggin stuffed into a burlap bag that reeked of diesel stained wagon timber and mildewed hemp. He sounded like he'd swallowed his fist in a freak accident that might have occurred when he he was chewing on his knuckles in machomechanical panic while watching an astroid streak a fiery, smoky path to Cobo Hall. When he wrapped his crackling squawk to  It's A Man's World, satellites stopped broadcasting and Gabriel drove over his trumpet in a huff of overriding despair. His was the voice of percolating whiteness, personified grieving love handles with a microphone. There was a time when an attitude like that would inspire otherwise stoned and clueless teens , all of them too late for the absurd counter-culture vanities of Haight Ashburyand Greenwich Village, to yell "fuck yeah" and babble their rendition of dumb cliches about offing the pigs and serving the people. So yeah, the MC5 were really punks, macho black bad boy wannabes and crazy mofos in their right who were willing to stick it in your eye." Hah. Hit me again." The rest of the guys crammed their guitars into the cones of their amps and ground their strings against the microphone stands.The drummer, Dennis Thompson, rattled on over the snare, performed an encyclopedia's worth of imagined sexual amnesia drills over the head of the snare drum and punched a hole in the base drum with nothing other than a random disease he picked up for kicks at the last Room Temperature Ale House he was located  within. Some one in the middle of what was left of the audience that wasn't yet unconcious, bleeding or deceased hooted. "SUCK MY DICK" countered Tyner, "GAG ON MY GOODNESS, JARHEAD." After that, it started to get weird.

Name Brand Kvetching

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 amongst.

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.

Zsa Zsa Gabor Deserved all her Close Ups

One year ago today actress, comedienne, professional celebrity Zsa Zsa Gabor died at the age of 99. Although my memories of her are mostly for being a go-to punch line for nearly six decades, she was in Orson Well's noir masterpiece "A Touch of Evil" and in John Huston's "Moulin Rouge". Not bad at all. And she had a solid grasp of her own absurdity as a Professional Celebrity. She wasn't just the punch line of jokes about her, she created the set up. If someone wanted to insult Gabor by citing her many marriages, her superficiality, her rampant materialism and heedless self -regard, she likely would make a move worthy of Cyrano and turn the game around, insisting that slights and curses at her expense be at least as good as as though she'd furnish herself. She was tougher than the public suspected. We tend to lavish praise and critical analysis of performing celebrities who create personas on which they could hang and adjust their aesthetic, whether that be Madonna, Lady Gaga, Bowie or Prince. Zsa Zsa Gabor certainly deserves some of that.Her self-creation is worth a tip of the hat and a round of applause.

WE DISCUSS OUR DIFFERENCES IN A BAR AT THE EDGE OF THE WOODS

for Jill Moon 

"Well yes", I said to her," I do dwell on the absurd in life, but mostly I like the problems our use of language gives us to solve . Things we say that are meant to clarify the metaphysics latent in awkward pauses in small talk, or worse, where there is no trivia left and a sense of embarrassment starts to come over us, as if we're naked, are concepts invented on the fly, with the perspiration still burning our nostrils, word structures that have terms enjambed to the degree that the brain , the outer periphery of the human capacity to feel ashamed and to blush, stops digging itself deeper into a metaphorical hole and instead convinces itself the world is more a cartoon, something rendered by an unseen hand and the will that guides it, than cartoons themselves." 

She tilted her head, her shoulders arcing in the same direction, her posture a hard question mark of unconvinced arms and ready hand gestures of another version of this same moment, saying finally, but not finally "I cannot consider myself as a badly drawn and poorly scripted caricature of stammering awkwardness.I am a painter and I paint things that are not there , even in spirit. " She picked up a pencil and drew an apple, making it appear fresh and shining under an undisclosed ray of sunshine or tolerant light bulb.

"This," she continued, placing pencil down, "represents an idea of a fruit that does not exist. It is a lie , posing as a portrait of a fresh apple. But there is a lie in this thing that is already a fabrication, which is that this apple is extraordinary for being an apple and that it is a thing for all time and will always be as such. But this apple is already rotten , shriveled with skin like snake hide, or it is eaten , conceptually,and made into another idea of energy, an expression on another note pad, configured, perhaps, as a box of cherries or a glass of wine , or perhaps a dung heap, a representation that fails as representation...." She paused and lit a cigarette while I check for messages on a phone I paid too much for. She pointed t the phone. "There's no one out there" she whispered, "there are no messages from your friends. They are ghosts of conversations you only dreamt...of..."

There's too much cogitating in here said Romulus, who'd been in the corner doing a Sunday crosswords before realizing he didn't knew enough angry words to fill all the boxes. 

"What's a ten letter word for Migraine?"