Ron Rosenbaum may be wrong, Billy Joel may be crazy
Last Friday, Slate ran an essay in which Ron Rosenbaum becomes the Zell Miller to Billy Joel’s John Kerry, a castigator so cartoonishly vehement, so intensely vengeful, that his attacks say more about the speaker than their target. In “The awfulness of Billy Joel, explained,” Rosenbaum launches an aimless and ineffective diatribe against the Piano Man, which as writing is sub-par (we expect better of Rosenbaum) and as intellectual argument is laughable.
TV on the Radio won Pazz + Jop…last week!
This year's Pazz + Jop cover
Pazz and Jop results were posted a whole week ago, and are thus old news in the blogosphere. But this here blog will be launching its best-of-2008 feature in February 2009, for reasons as diffuse as I’ve been sick for half of January, or I have a job and a life to maintain, or I have actual deadlines to meet, or it’s my fucking tiny pocket of the web and I can do whatever the fuck I want with it. Besides, the Internet makes history immediate, and as long as Christgau’s comprehensive website is running, Pazz & Jop (now Pazz + Jop, apparently), the Village Voice’s annual music critic’s poll, offers a historical snapshot of the year just past. Like most historical snapshots dictated by the whims of a small, fairly insular group, P&J can be infuriating and baffling, but the attempts of rock-criterati to make sense, even achieve consensus, of music-in-whatever-year is reliably enthralling.
753 celebrity death prognosticators could be wrong!
In what is sort of a Pazz & Jop for deathlisters, Stiffs.com has tallied up its most popular deathlist names for 2009. Unsurprisingly, the Kennedy-Swayze double whammy is the landslide pack-leader. Neither made my 09 list, because it’s too easy and obvious, and I frankly don’t expect both to drop this year. Maybe one of the two—probably Swayze, given recent events. If I recall correctly (Stiffs unfortunately does not archive these lists), the number one name on this list hasn’t actually died since Pope John Paul II in 2005. Hell, nobody in the 2008 Top Ten died last year, and only two of the 2009 Top Ten (and three of the Top 30) made my 2009 list. Here’s how the names on my 2009 Top Shelf list stack up against the 753 Stiffs ballots (list ranking in parentheses, followed by total ballots).
Rock Hall to Gen Y: Your music doesn’t matter yet!
If there’s a mustier-than-usual odor emanating from Cleveland this April, it just might be the 2009 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees. In keeping with recent patterns and eroding relevance, the 2009 class enshrines two freshly eligible no-brainers (Metallica and Run-DMC) alongside three great-but-not-groundbreaking oldies/classic rock acts (Jeff Beck, Little Anthony and the Imperials, Bobby Womack), acts whose talent is far less debatable than their influence. Despite exceeding three of the five inductees in most forms of measurable importance, The Stooges (passed over for the seventh time, worsening an already shitty New Year), Chic (rejected for the fifth go-round) and first-time nominees War were all snubbed. Furthermore, Wanda Jackson, though initially nominated as a Performer, was appropriately if suspiciously, inducted under the Early Influence banner. (She blazed more trails for women in rock than she did for rock itself.) Three seminal sidemen were also inducted: Spooner Oldham, and Elvis Presley’s Blue Moon Boys—bassist Bill Black and drummer D.J. Fontana.
Mayeral election
I’ve been periodically viewing CNN’s pre-Inauguration coverage, and noticing that they keep cutting to commercial with John Mayer’s “Waiting on the World to Change.” Because the historic new administration will apparently still make room for bland, horrendous music that struggles to make some sort of “deep” statement.
Obama’s first order of business ought to be a binding resolution that this song is a. horrible and b. meaningless. Beyond meaning that ol’ John is looking to bang activist chicks, and will resort to the most blatant pandering to do so. But then again, anybody who heard the Grammy-winning (what the fuck?!?) “Daughters” knows that Mayer is hardly above pandering.
I’ll still watch his variety show. Dude’s cracked more funny jokes than written good songs. Perhaps his entire career will eventually be revealed to be one wise-ass satirical mindfuck. A guy can dream…
Burying another Hager…and the rag deep in your face
The TV Land Awards strike again!
I have viewed many episodes of Hee Haw in my 25 years, and I still can’t recall all that much about the Hager Twins. I know they were there, but on a stage with Junior Samples and Grandpa Jones and Buck Owens, there was nothing distinctive about them. Certainly nothing as distinctive as the fact that they died within a year of each other, which is now the case. It was announced today that Jon Hager was found dead, less than a year after his twin brother and performing partner Jim met a similar fate. For men who were only in their mid-sixties, this is an eerily close proximity. Jim Hager died of a heart attack, and Jon had reportedly been in failing health for years, failing health that his brother’s death couldn’t have helped. I can’t think of any famous twins, or even famous siblings, who died, completely separately (i.e. not in the same accident or something), within a matter of months. Even the Delany Sisters died four years apart, and they were both over 100!
The Mike Peters principle
Browsing Yahoo!’s Obituaries in the News page yesterday morning, I got all tingly with excitement, as I thought, on January 6, I had scored my deathlist kill of the year, albeit a bottom-shelver. Mike Peters had died. But alas, it was this guy, not the dude from The Alarm. I’m sure he’s huge in Connecticut, but this is why I specify who’s who in my annual deathlist entry. This Mike Peters was only a year older than the still-living Mike Peters who sang “Sixty-Eight Guns.” And in the grand tradition of Ron Carey and Robert Palmer (perhaps Michael Jackson), perhaps there’s more Mike Peters death news slated for 2009.
Who’s next?
Four men and a newbie
The history-and-death-obsessed ten-year-old I never quite outgrew will never forget the Nixon’s 1994 funeral, specifically the shot of the five living presidents grouped together, chronologically, looking all somber and mournful towards the man who lowered the bar for them. It was a moving, powerful image, the cumulation of 21 years without a presidential death, the sobering comedown after a ten-year span (1963-1973) that wiped out five presidents. While the above pic occurs under slightly more celebratory circumstances, it nonetheless evokes nostalgia for that stunning shot.
They just don’t make music like they did five years ago…
Spectrum Culture has crowned the best albums of 2003! That’s right: 2003. How does a year-end critical consensus look with five years of context? Well, you can view the list here. (Full disclosure: note the byline on the no. 3 album). And compare with that year’s Pazz and Jop results. As if the man currently engaged to Zooey Deschanel needed another reason to celebrate, he apparently recorded two of 2003’s musical touchstones. And while I cannot deny Give Up’s brilliance (as much Tamborello as Gibbard, mind you), I’d swap Transatlanticism in favor of some choices from my ballot that didn’t make the final list: the Libertines’ Up the Bracket, Ted Leo and the Pharmacists’ Hearts of Oak, and the forever underrated Go-Betweens forever underrated penultimate album, Bright Yellow Bright Orange. Quibbles aside, this feature drives home that 2003 was a banner year for pop culture, especially music, one that may eventually rank alongside 1977, 1984 and 1994 for its fertile plethora of cultural breakthroughs. Should the albums list not sell you, just take a look at Pazz and Jop’s Singles list. Plus, 2003 was an amazingly busy death year, with Katharine Hepburn, Strom Thurmond, Bob Hope, Barry White and Gregory Peck all dropping within two very charmed months.
The deadly heather on the hill
Not much going on in the death game right now, aside from a four-time Commissioner Gordon, the Charlie Rose debacle, some forgotten attorney general, and another scientology casualty. So I’ll go ahead and note a shamefully overlooked (on this blog, at least) 2008 death trend, which in the New Year’s Eve/deathlist haze, completely slipped my radar. Namely, that the second and third-billed stars of the 1954 movie musical Brigadoon (an overrated and highly uneven film, to these eyes, with little value even as kitsch) both met their end last year: Van Johnson and Cyd Charisse.
