ONCE WAS MORE THAN ENOUGH

Interestingly, it's been two years since Joker came out, and while I tend to rewatch movies I liked in the theaters when they come to a nearby streaming service, I haven't had the interest or the patience to view Joker again. I would modify my initial praise for the movie being well made to it being "slickly avant-garde," with the experimental aspects of that last phrase reduced to being the name of a style a bright film student can study and mimic at will. There is a discussion of this film having a sequel, which would be disastrous. It was a gutsy move by Warner Brothers to allow this extreme (if overcooked) take on one of DC's major characters; it garnered them good reviews, a billion dollar box office. But what story would there be to build on? Ultimately Joker was a fluke and I suspect there is no demand to visit this cynical and arty take on violence and insanity again. 

RICHARD THOMPSON SEEKS HIS VOICE

BEESWING:

Losing My Way and Finding My Voice  

 By Richard Thompson

 

It seems to be a reasonable expectation that people of genius with extraordinary lives and stories to relate would be able to tell their tale in a manner as robust as the lives they've lived. A slight sour truth to accept is that not all extraordinary songwriters aren't the best narrators of their journeys. My expectations were raised by the revelatory musings of Rolling Stone guitarist and songwriter Keith Richards' memoir Life, a memoir that was all sex and sizzle and jaw-dropping revelations.  Richard's witty, regaling truth-telling about his life on the edges of rock and roll had me insisting that any future musical remembrance be equally careening and in your face. 

The demands were cooled considerably by other biographies I read after the vicarious thrill of Richard's enthused embrace of his wild ways. Bob Dylan's book Chronicles, Vol. 1 had the Maestro speaking obliquely about his life, influences, not revealing much that wasn't already in the dedicated fan's knowledge base. That wasn't wholly unexpected since Dylan has been cagey about talking about his personal life. When he wasn't making things up, he simply out large chunks of his coming of age.   Similarly, Jorma Kaukonen wrote of his time as lead guitarist for the San Francisco's iconic Jefferson Airplane in Been So Long: My Life and Music, a memoir of his life growing up in the fifties and thriving as an artist in the swirling 60s counterculture. His prose was flat, and his feelings influences, friends, politics, and the free-love spirituality of that pugnacious decade are soft-spoken. The detachment from his history made it seem like he talked about someone else's life and career. Kaukonen, perhaps, would instead have not been charged with writing about them at all. I suppose the lesson was that although there's an overabundance of rock stars with stories as horrid, funny, and chaotic as Keith Richard's. Some of the stories are quieter in the telling, deservedly so.

  Beeswing: Fairport, Folk Rock, and Finding My Voice, 1967–75, a new book by acclaimed Richard Thompson, guitar hero, songwriter, and singer and co-founder of the influential British folk-rock band Fairport Convention Richard Thompson, is appealing, soft-spoken but overly cautious telling of the facts of his life. Not without sin, sizzle, disaster, or tragedies that need to be overcome as eventual success comes to the music and the music maker. His style is reflective, meditative to a degree, choosing his words and descriptions carefully. There's also a tangible air of hesitancy while he recounts his story, a seeming concern to avoid the dramatic, the sensational. Too much caution, however, as there are moments where eloquent rumination on incidents would have given Beeswing greater philosophical heft. To this day, it's one of my low expectations that old guard rock stars have something resembling a pearl of elegant and lengthy wisdom that's formed over their years of music-making on an international scale. Thompson is the soft-spoken sort, it seems, and the soft written as well. Elegant in his brevity and occasionally minimalist prose, he trades not in a scandal, gossip, or revenge snark; he goes forth like Joe Friday in Dragnet, just the facts as best he remembers them, told as well as he can manage. The album sold meagerly, but it was a fruitful starting point for the legendary band as they progressed. Sandy Denny, a woman blessed with an ethereal and silver-toned voice, replaced original co-lead singer Judy Dyble, Thompson's girlfriend. The addition of Denny to share lead vocals with singer, guitarist, and songwriter Ian Matthews coincided with Fairport's burgeoning desire to grow conspicuous American influence and instead explored and made use of their own rich of British and Celtic music folk styles. The following three records-- What We Did On Our Holidays, Unhalfbricking, Liege, and Lief—marked a band that had invented a new kind of folk-rock, based on a fascinating combination of blues, jazz, and rock filtered through the gossamer textures of British and Celtic melodic construction and overtone. Fired by the unique sensibilities of Thompson's guitar work, the songwriting collective in this band gave the world that singular thing in pop music history, a distinct body of work.

 

Thompson doesn't belabor song meanings or origins nor deep dive into the tricks and techniques of his laudable guitar skills, preferring to limn lightly through the scuffling days of the years 1967 through 1975. Again, there isn't much in the way of sordid detail, strong opinion, or linguistic scene-chewing, but the book does provide a breezy, montage-like feel of Fairport and the bands they knew gigged in the same towns at the same clubs, pubs, and meeting halls. The elements of low paying gigs, the band's eventual adapting an abandoned, unheated pub as band living quarters and rehearsal space, creative tensions in the band, and having a singer in Sandy Denny who was as strong-willed and undisciplined as she was brilliant, and alluring are the ingredients of a rich tale that here seems told only by a third. Beeswing has concise and breezy pacing that the book gives off the feeling of being a treatment for a motion picture music biopic. The chronology of events has the air of a "greatest hits" list with the details scantily fleshed out to satisfy the requirements of a screen screenwriter who can squeeze everything into an entertaining and pat 120-minute feature. You want to know more and can't but feel a bit cheated.

 

What might deeper feelings there have been within Thompson when he had to fire Denny from the band? He makes a note of the difficulty in weighing Denny's great talent against her insecurity and hard-drinking. At this point in a much-detailed story, we witness a conflicted choice to make sure that the band he co-founded remains a stable entity for the sake of his free expression and reason to exist. It's apparent that as much as he loved Denny and cherished her talent, he felt it better that he and the rest of Fairport move ahead without her. Thompson writes of this deftly but is sketchy on the emotional details. The book is full of matters that cry for a fuller accounting, episodes such as Thompson's eventual conversion to Sufism, meeting his eventual wife and songwriting-performing partner, encounters, and music with John Lee Hooker and Van Dyke Parks, and Linda Ronstadt. Incidents get mentioned, briefly described, sometimes with significant poetic effect, but too often being a glancing overview of a crowded with meaningful encounters and musical landmarks. In the end, the style and amount of details are suitable for a making-of-the-band movie or an outline for a limited series for a streaming service. As a book, though, it's a slight effort often poetically expressed. Thompson has a reputation as a potent lyricist who condenses emotional states and situations to brief, evocative epiphanies. It may be the case that his habit of compositional mind influenced his decision to avoid revealing too much of his inner life.  The subtitle of Beeswing: Fairport, Folk Rock, and Finding My Voice, 1967–75, tells us that the book covers only eight years of the author's career, hinting that there's another part of the story to be told, another volume forthcoming. With one book done, it would be a sweet deal if Thompson warms up to the idea that he's now a writer and composes the next volume fearlessly, with verve, detail, and nuance.  Thompson is a magnificent talent, and the world needs him to tell his tale of a critical and enthralling time in popular music history with the vividness it deserves.

(Originally published in The San Diego Troubadour. Used with permission).

 

 

 

 

 

A NOTE

Bob Dylan performed at New York's esteemed Carnegie Hall, for which he additionally wrote the program notes.  Titled My Life in a Stolen Moment, it's a long, rambling length of free verse poetry that is an intriguing example of Dylan juvenilia. A self-conscious and entirely awkward combination of Beat style first-thought-best-thought idea and the unlettered eloquence of the deep feeling poor white, it purports to be the true telling of Dylan's upbringing in small-town Minnesota. It's not a reliable document. As an autobiography, I wouldn't trust a word of it. Dylan embellished his story from the beginning. Inconsistencies and incongruities in his stated timeline were noted early on. I remember that Sy and Barbara Ribakove were suspicious of Dylan's accounting of his life back in 1966 with their book "Folk-Rock: The Bob Dylan Story." All the fabulation has certainly given a couple of generations of Dylan obsessives much to sift through and write books about. It's a poem, of course, but not a good one. What had always irritated me about Dylan's writing was his affectation of the poor, white rural idiom. It's dreadful, unnatural sounding as you read it (or listen to it from his early recordings). While it's one thing to be influenced by stories of hobo life, the Great Depression, and to use the inspiration to find one's uniquely expressive voice as a writer or poet, what Dylan does here ranks as some of his most pretentious, awkward, and preening writing. One can argue in Dylan's defense with the vague idea of negative capability, but that holds water only if the writing is great and the writer is possessed by genius. Of course, Dylan is/was a genius, but this was something he wrote when he was merely talented and audacious. Genius hadn't bloomed yet. This bucolic exercise has always been an embarrassment, juvenilia that sounds juvenile.

grumble

  A problem of being a self-appointed culture critic is that the longer you hang around the planet breathing the air, the faster it seems your heroes seem to die. That’s a generational thing, your elders and your peers start to pass on, and your tribe is just a little smaller every few weeks. Of course, the cure for that sort of minor depression is getting new heroes, reading new artists, listening to music by younger musicians, and, most obviously, making more friends.  Iggy Pop is over 69 years old, and it’s an irony upon an irony that he enters the last year of his 6th decade of life on the same day we find out that Prince has passed away at the age of 57. Iggy survived the morbid predictions that insisted that he would be the next major edgy rock star to go, joining Morrison, Joplin, Hendrix, Jones, and others as having a bad end to an edgy life lived in the spotlight. Nihilism was at the core of his act, both as Stooges frontman and as a solo artist. 

It seemed that the fabled mixtures of teenage impulse and fantastic amounts of methamphetamines and heroin were willful tools he was using to describe life not just at the edge of existence but also, if he were lucky, a will to narrate the passage through the thick shroud of unbeing. It’s a classic conceit in modern arts that an artist’s demise confirms their greatness/genius/cutie-pie factor; what have you. It’s a species of pornographic thinking, and shame on us for egging it onward in the culture. However, something intervened in that cliche, and Pop has been one of the more interesting elder statesmen for some time, always worth a listen. We benefit from his persistence to remain creative, not to be too terribly sentimental about it. Still, Pop’s longevity improves the quality of my life by his example that you can continue to respond creatively, with imagination, to the short existence we’re allowed to have. Like Bowie, Prince was one of those people you assumed would be around for the final mile of the long haul, a genuinely gifted polymath who would make music into his dimmest twilight. From this fan’s view, what hurts the most is that we won’t get to hear the grander, more experimental adventures Prince would have had as a musician. A straight-ahead jazz album. A record of guitar blitzing? Serious classical endeavors? Movie soundtracks? Big Band Music? A blues thing? Reggae? A stage turn as Othello?

His androgyny/sex fiend persona aside, I marveled at the chameleon nature of his music, the jumping around from style to style. Unlike Bowie, equally eclectic in taste and output, there was a substantial musical virtuosity to Prince’s switching up and mashing up and fusing the elements of rock, fusion, Philly/Motown/Memphis/ soul, jazz, and the occasional bits of classical allusion. Though he never spoke much of his training, self-taught or schooled, he had as solid a grasp of the mechanics of music and controlled his virtuosity like it were a tool to be used judiciously, in service to the music. 

There was little that was excessive in his music, and I rather liked his singing, which was far from your traditional rock or soul voice; thin, reedy, nasal, limited in range and color, he still molded it convincingly over his melodies and lyrics, sounding wise, insinuating, dangerous, alluring, nearly any persona he wanted to get across. Anything seemed possible for him because he was spectacularly good at the varied projects he’d already finished and released.Alas, but no. This makes you want to pause a few moments and consider the breath you are taking at that instant and recognize that life is a gift we are given but don’t own. Embrace the days we have and do something with the hours while we have them.

THE SEX PISTOLS ARE NOW ABOUT GETTING PAID.

According to The Guardian, two of the three surviving members of the  Sex Pistols (Steve Jones and PaulCook) have won a lawsuit they filed against SP singer Johnny Rotten (John Lydon). Lydon who was blocking their right to use Sex Pistol songs for a limited series that's being made about the band, maintaining that the other two needed his consent. The British court awarded Jones and Cook the right to use the iconic and anti-social tunes in what is termed a "majority rules" principle. Essentially, the other two surviving members did not require Lydon's consent to have access to the songs at issue.  We ought not to be surprised that a band famous for being young, angry, and contentious would eventually become quarrelsome in their waning years. Still, the dispute between the parties involved makes pondering about the glaring irony impossible to avoid. It was quite a thing when Gil Scott -Heron declared in 1971 that the revolution would not be televised. It gave us restless, agitated youth comfort to know that the Man would not win this fight. And now The Fucking Sex Pistols, the harbingers of the Judgement to Come against the soul-less corporate machine, have become merely another piece of intellectual property that is being made into a limited series for Disney, that anti-life capitalist Moloch that wears a Happy Face. If anyone ever wondered what Herbert Marcuse wrote about "repressive tolerance" was, this is it. Crudely put, the System tolerates to a degree those social forces that threaten it, assimilates their energy, and turns them into grist for the mill. Johnny Rotten complains about the perversion of the Sex Pistols legacy while Disney and other entities profit off his labors in brasher days. Rotten/Lydon still hasn't realized, it seems, that he sold out the second he signed a recording contract and a publishing deal. He was working for the Man all along. Young angry punk rockers who don't die young suffer the indignity of getting old, bloated, and cranky. This revolutionary contrarian has become the old man yelling, "get off my lawn."

 Don Juan's Reckless Daughter - Joni Mitchell (Asylum)

Listeners have taken joy in Joni Mitchell's continual insistence on changing her musical approach, so it was not unusual that the release of Hissing of Summer Lawns was hailed, for the most part, a bold step towards personal and artistic growth. Nevertheless, while Hissing and her subsequent and less successful Hejira did indeed show Mitchell expanding herself to more adventurous motifs - broader song structures, an increasingly impressionistic lyric scan, jazz textures - the trend toward a more personalized voice has virtually walled her off from the majority of her fans. Don Juan's Reckless Daughter, her new double record effort, takes the ground gained from the last two albums and converts it into a meandering, amorphous culmination of half-formed concepts. Musically, the stylistic conceit is towards jazz modernism, with several songs exceeding ten minutes in length as they ramble over Mitchell's vaguely comprehensible piano chords. She reveals a tendency to hit a strident chord and let the notes resonate and fade as she vocally ruminates over the lyrics - while her sidemen, Jaco Pastorious and Wayne Shorter from Weather Report, and guitarist John Guerin, do their best to add definition. 

The lyrics, in kind, are an impressionistic hodgepodge, a string of images, indecipherable references, and gutless epiphanies that needed a good pruning. While the more hard-nosed defenders may defend the latest with the excuse that a poet may express themselves in any way they see fit, one still has to question the worth of any effort to dissect Reckless Daughter the way one used to mull over Dylan albums. Though any number of matters that Mitchell chooses to deal with may have value to her audience - spiritual lassitude, the responsibilities of freedom, sexuality into Middle Ages - she does not supply anything resembling hooks, catchphrases, or access points, of ' reference to steady the voluminous diffusion of the stanzas. Instead, she gives them art, whether they like it or not. The paradox in Mitchell's idea has thrown craft well outside the window while measuring up to "Art" in the upper case. She has gone from being an artful songwriter to being merely arty. What is remembered is the artifice and gloss used to make this double record enterprise seem a higher caliber of music. 

DEAD MALL

 

In future years the younger folks might be nostalgic as they reminisce about the supposed fun and convenience of down San Diego's Horton Plaza Shopping Center before it eventually became a dead mall, now being repurposed as office space for tech companies. 

The truth of the matter is that even in its prime, it was an alienated space, full of architectural distractions, detours, and dead ends that seemed designed to magnify your unease and increase your desire to escape your sense of uselessness by exhausting your credit limit and begging creditors for an increase in your credit line.

 I  worked there for several years as a bookseller and made my number one spot to see new movies. Over time you couldn't help by note the waning numbers of people coming to the Plaza, the number of stores advertising off-Holiday Sales with things up to 70 percent off, the closing of stores, and the draping of butcher paper over the display windows with a sad sign promising a new retailer coming in soon, watching the calendar pages fly away and noting again the stores were still vacant and that more stores had joined them.

Horton Plaza had become an empty series of angular paths, walkways, bridges to more locked up storefronts, a structural case of architectural schizophrenia where all the eaves, overhangs, arches, and such unusual twists cast deep, despairing shadows over the dead concrete, few have reason to walk.

ONCE UPON A TIME... IN HOLLYWOOD

As of today, the question remains whether the former glory boy of independent American filmmaking will finish his career with one last film, rounding off his body of work with ten full-length motion pictures. Doubtless, he wants to go down in film history like Orson Wells or Preston Sturgis, writer-directors who have a short filmography that, though brief, highlights movies of extraordinary brilliance. 1.       I have not liked a Tarantino film since Kill Bill Vol.2 and regarded him as a spent talent. It seemed that he had used up all his good ideas early on and was bound to repeat them as he tackled one movie genre after another--2 Westerns, a WW2 movie, an exploitation film. 

It is not so much that repeating his stylistics is terrible by default; it's annoying, and I think lazy that the moves were so loud, protracted, and utterly, utterly predictable in the scheme of things. ONCE UPON A TIME... IN HOLLYWOOD, though, has all his virtues and little of his vices. The characters sound like they are talking to each other about jobs, love, bad luck, random stuff, rather than giving hammed-up, over-written, self-announcing speeches to each other. The era and the pace are perfectly recreated, the music on the soundtrack is excellent--I think it was inspired to have what was on the AM top forty featured rather than the expected FM "underground" stuff. I mean, Jesus, I love that QT gave Paul Revere and the Raiders some love. Also, much appreciate the actor here is a B -Lister, a character actor trying to manage his demons and shortcomings and acquire an acting gig that he won't be embarrassed by.

 It is a big, appealing shaggy dog story. One of the best cast movies I've seen in a while. I was surprised how much I liked a movie by a director whose films I think are repetitive, overblown, and without any residue of charm. It's a Tarantino movie indeed, and their bits I found needless or excessive, but the plus side is that there is SO MUCH LESS of his bright-boy didacticism that it's easy to mistake it for being flawless. If you want to call it that, the genius moves here is that QT decided to tell a story, or several stories, rather than be an auteur. This is only the second movie where I felt he was not trying to prove anything, the other one being Jackie Brown, his adaptation of Elmore Leonard's superlative novel Rum Punch. 

That is a movie I think film hounds will be returning to when they come to discuss this man's work. So far as his motive and meaning go, I am content that he regards the period as intrinsically exciting and figured out how to contrive an engaging "what if" tale with the particulars. Let us consider Mailer knocking off that grandiose third-person hat trick when he happened up Gary Gilmore. His decision to tell the story rather than grandstand was a sensible approach. QT's efforts to blue pencil much of the verbal dexterity of the dialogue was an equally shrewd move.

PUNK

 

Punk had several meanings prior to it becoming a label for a music and fashion style representing a coopted idea of resistance and rebellion. None of those meanings were good or complimentary when I was a kid. If you called someone a punk you had to be ready to fight, and if you were called a punk, you had to defend yourself or slink away ashamed and humiliated in front of your peers. Punks were assholes, delinquents, sneaky, thieving, conniving, lying bastards no one else wanted to be around. They grew to be criminals, rapists, drug addicts and hobos. There was nothing admirable about them. In prison, to be sure, the word "punk" meant, as I understand it, a smaller, weaker male inmate who sexually services a larger, more dominant inmate. 

Not the kind of thing one aspires to be, I would think. Somewhere along the line the term was assimilated into the counterculture idea of resistance against the corporate-capitalist-military state, the -enemy -of -my -enemy -is- my- friend rationale. Some of us remember when Hells Angels were considered cool, and hip and Jefferson Airplane sang that we were all outlaws "in the eyes of Amerika..." Then Altamont happened and changed the view of the HAs, but it stops the definition of punk from changing and being adopted and adapted by any number of would-be tribes of rebels, whether poets, musicians, painters, performance artists or pretentious lay-abouts desiring a blunt, monosyllabic term to give themselves and their alleged and varied ethos. And like anything else that becomes central to rock music, the term is hollowed out entirely of whatever useful meaning it had and is now a marketing term and codified musical style that in these latter days inspires more parody than fear among the population.

The Eagles take over the City Dump

Quit defending the Eagles! They’re simply terrible - Salon.com:

The first thing that one has to do is give the Eagles their due, which is their ability to write tunefully, maintain tight harmonies and sustain an impressive level of musicianship. To their credit, these guys have always had a sound that makes them stand out in a crowded field, and they've always sounded like a real band, not an assembly of hired professionals. Normally those would be items that would lead to being an additional 500-700 words of praise for a particular album or live performance, but I've always hated this band. They are distinct and professional the way Disney Products, especially Marvel Movies, are professional, which is to say their efforts are superbly assembled works composed of elements skillfully, artfully, cynically chosen for their capacity to appeal to a mass audience of males who have a self-righteous and self-pitying chip on their shoulder and the women who love all those misunderstood and misunderstood men. Don Henley's voice is a nasally and grainy combination of Rod Stewart and Neil Young and reduces the calculated pathos of the lyrics to an aggravating noise like the ice machine goes off next to the motel room you rented just when you're entering a select acre of nod. Their sense of telling sagas of heartbreak, stoicism in the face of a hard choice, and despairing about the end of innocence after the party balloons have shriveled and the last flake of cocaine has been wiped from the mirror and rubbed some last-gasper's gums are unsoulful, overwrought, overwritten, and overacted. 

Their narratives are goon show narcissisms that are designed to impress, not express; they skip the dramatic altogether and settle over the melodramatic. Theirs is the suicide-prone "code" of Hemingway, the arrogance that rather than cope, grow, move on with a life to which change, a significant change has inevitably come to , one instead nurtures the hurt privately, does not complain and carries on as before, exhibiting a pretense of "grace under fire" (Hemingway's coinage) while stewing in their own private hell of resentment, jealousy, anger, self-loathing and compensating arrogance in the conceit that their ability to take a punch, to take many blows to the head and to the ego, makes them a higher caliber of a human, male human, white male human, than the lesser masses who inhabit the planet. Everything about their message and sound--the guitar work that is too tasteful in country accents and too rubbery with the more rocking workouts--props up this multi-platinum hoax. I am very fond of Joe Walsh, having seen him a few times from my Detroit days when he played with the James Gang at area venues and festivals, but his personality seemed all but erased when he joined this egregious unit. His persona, a bohemian for whom there are no big deals and that what whatever travails and tragedies befall are likely because he made a decision that was ill-chosen and that life, such as it is despite the bad luck, is good so far ("Life's Been Good"), seemed an odd fit for this professionally pessimistic posse. His sense of humor and life-preserving irony couldn't keep them from absorbing Walsh into their uniform sense of weltschmerz. Even Joe's famously chunky brand of blues-rock guitar couldn't lift the band's music anymore. The truth of this band is plain: The Eagles blow.

The serious Eagles fan would come to the defense of this band--seemingly as much despised as they are loved by fans--and maintain that their cynicism, despair, and weariness were anything than the routine posturing of experience-glutted rock stars, the more being that they were artful and could write good song hooks and manage to keep their songs under a certain length. Granted, although a tune like "Hotel California" , paced at a tortoise crawl and it is slow in duration, is a notable exception, notable in that it contains everything that is objectionable to this band a collective projection of the zeitgeist. The lyrics are laden in downcast metaphors where the secreted meanings are grandiosely proclaimed, exhibiting a "you know what I mean " vagueness that is a bullet to interests in whatever forbidden knowledge these musicians gleaned from their adventures at the edge of their own limitations.  An amazingly successful rock band with some indisputably talented musicians, the Eagles are a band I never cared about. Even in their best songs they seemed, smug in the depths of despair, depression and bad-luck stories their songs evoked. Tuneful, well crafted, laden with nicely arranged guitar textures and incidental instrumentation, the sweetly harmonized lyrics were the first-rate evocation of bankrupt imaginations trying their best to out-bottom the rest of rock and roll's iconic desolation row residents. In meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, there is the tradition of having a leader "qualify" , that is, telling their tale of what it was like, what happened and what it's like now. The telling, or testimonial, if you will, would normally contain some sordid tales of their past that their powerlessness over alcohol led them to, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly; the point is to make the listener understand the inevitable destruction this path results unless the alcoholic or drug addict has their moment of clarity and grasps a solution, which are the components of the "what happened" and "what its like now" parts of the formula. There is the habit of some members with years of recovery (such as it might be for them personally) who eschew the solution and instead tell one horrible anecdote after another; this is not generally appreciated by other group members seeking confirmation of the hope that is supposed to be contained in the rooms where those meetings are held. This turns testimony in a drunkalogue and the effect is of someone who takes inordinate pride in the horrible things they have done--each instance of bad luck, lying, theft, jail time, divorce, traffic accidents, job loss,  sexual misbehavior become like bullet points on a resume. 

Whether they intended to or done, those who overshare such things wallow in the gloom and their words become pointless. So with the Eagles, who have spent decades writing songs as if they are the only witnesses to the end of the world, a world where only they are citizens worth listening to. Theirs was a music akin to an old car with a great, shiny new paint job; attractive surface gleam, noisy and tired under the hood. For all their gold records and fanatical fan base, they have proven to be even more tiresome than U2. 

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