John Nolte, on his Dirty Harry's Place film blog, spots Roger Ebert making quite an interesting analogy in his latest review, which revisits Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous Triumph of the Will:

Try to imagine another film where hundreds of thousands gathered. Where all focus was on one or a few figures on a distant stage. Where those figures were the object of adulation. The film, of course, is the rock documentary “Woodstock” (1970). But consider how Michael Wadleigh, that film’s director, approached the formal challenge of his work. He begins with the preparations for this massive concert. He shows arrivals coming by car, bus, bicycle, foot. He show the arrangements to feed them. He makes the Port-O-San Man, serving the portable toilets, into a folk hero. …

By contrast, Riefenstahl’s camera is oblivious to one of the most fascinating aspects of the Nuremberg rally, which is how it was organized. Yes, there are overhead shots of vast fields of tents, laid out with mathematical precision. But how did the thousands eat, relieve themselves, prepare their uniforms and weapons and mass up to begin their march through town? We see overhead shots of tens of thousands of Nazis in rigid formation, not a single figure missing, not a single person walking to the sidelines. How long did they have to stand before their moment in the sun? Where did they go and what did they do after marching past Hitler? In a sense, Riefenstahl has told the least interesting part of the story.

Wow, who knew that the famously leftwing Roger Ebert was such a fan of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism?!

But such a comparison is ultimately futile: Freddie Mercury and Queen weren't even bandmates when Woodstock occurred in 1969, and they were history's first fascist rock and roll group--just ask Rolling Stone.

When I first started playing guitar, I remember reading a sort of dual-interview published in 1982 in the now sadly-deceased Musician magazine between Robert Fripp of King Crimson (a pretty amazing guitarist in his own right) and John McLaughlin, who, as I've written before, I think can safely be considered amongst the greatest guitarists alive:

McLaughlin: I don't meditate or fast or anything, but I reflect on the ramifications of what I do. For example, there's a relationship between two chords that you've known, that I've known, for a long time, and only recently do I begin to discover this more intimate relationship, what it means. Even though I've looked at these chords from every possible viewpoint, I'm looking for a way that maybe exists up there, but I don't know where it is. Then, a little while ago, I discovered it, it just arrived. So the work that we do, I don't think we benefit from it until later. But once we have colors and palette, the richer the palette is, the richer the music can be.

Fripp: That D major chord which changed you from a pianist to a guitarist, what color would that be for you?

McLaughlin: What color...? (pause) I think it could be green.

Fripp: Exactly what I would've said...

McLaughlin: It's got to be yellow and some blue.

Fripp: A major for me is yellow and A minor inclines toward white, which is my C major. Graham Bond said it was red.

McLaughlin: C major, red? No, E major, I would say, is red.

Fripp: E major for me is very blue, a kind of royal blue, and when you get to E minor it becomes more of a night blue, with kind of stars...

McLaughlin: That's very interesting...

Fripp: G is very greenish, but not quite.

I've long thought that this passage was simply musical hyperbole, but perhaps its an example of a condition that Oliver Sacks describes as "synesthesia".

(I wonder if Jan Hammer "suffers" from that...?)

Much like his lyrics, Dave Matthews puts a typically goofy ironic spin on what numerous conservatives--and even some musicians--said last year: "The whole joke of Live Earth was how wasteful it was":

The May 29 edition of Rolling Stone looks ahead to the summer concert season, and the rock-music mag is praising the Dave Matthews Band for their use of biodiesel for buses and "biodegradable goods for catering." But this exchange was interesting, about Al Gore's "Live Earth" concerts.

ROLLING STONE: Some people argue that the live experience is sort of inherently "un-green."

DAVE MATTHEWS: There’s no doubt that it is. The whole joke of Live Earth was how wasteful it was. But the idea that touring will end is sad. I’d like to think that the traveling minstrel is not a thing of the past, but the methods of travel have to be improved.

As I wrote last year, right around this time:

I wouldn't have as much of a problem with Live Earth if it really were The Last Rock Concert by those who participated in it. It takes an enormous amount of cognitive dissonance to simultaneously believe that the planet's ecosphere is soon to be doomed, but the solution is a blowout concert in two different football stadiums.

Or as Glenn Reynolds said at the time, "I'll start acting as if it's a crisis when the people who are telling me it's a crisis start acting as if it's a crisis."

Ann Althouse discusses her favorite driving songs here. One of my favorites--at least as long as our overseas betters actually allow us to drive--is this:

Given the song's stately, rolling feel, it's not a coincidence that its working title was "Driving To Kashmir".

I once dubbed Pink Floyd's Roger Waters the Pat Buchanan of British rock: both, in retrospect, would have been quite OK with appeasing Nazi Germany; both are anti-Israel. But Julia Gorin has an excellent suggestion (and yes I'm very late to this) for Waters' next destination on his bringing "The Wall To The Wall" tours.

Of course, I could see why Rogers wouldn't want to Meddle there, not when his prospective audience would likely shout "One Of These Days, I'm Going To Cut You Into Little Pieces!" The Final Cut would then be followed by the Great Gig In The Sky, unless Waters plans to Run Like Hell after the gig.

OK, I'll stop now, before Brain Damage occurs...

So many on the left seemed perpetually trapped in the past, usually in the 1930s, '60s, or the 1970s, but recently, Jonah Goldberg spotted the slightly more recent epoch that has made Barack Obama so bitter:

There’s always been a certain cultural lag time to Barack and Michelle Obama, a kitschiness that’s hard to pinpoint. But I think I’ve got it: They’re self-hating yuppies straight out of the 1980s, which were to the Obamas what the 1960s were to the Clintons.

For those too young to remember, “yuppie” was shorthand for young urban professionals — think Michael J. Fox as Alex P. Keaton in the TV series “Family Ties” — who allegedly represented the collapse of ’60s values and the triumph of ’80s greed. Yuppies sold their souls for a BMW and a condo.

Ironically, the biggest complaints about yuppie materialism came from self-loathing liberal yuppies — like the Obamas.

The Obamas still seem stuck in that time warp, clinging to ’80s-style resentments and political assumptions. Michelle Obama is never so eloquent as when she’s complaining about the burden of student loans for her two Ivy League degrees and covering the high cost of summer camp and piano lessons for her kids on her family’s half-million-dollars-a-year income.

“Don’t go into corporate America,” she exhorted low-income working mothers in Ohio in February, even though she is a highly compensated hospital executive. She admits to being consumed with “a constant sense of guilt” over having to balance work, politics, and family. “It’s guilt, feeling guilty all the time.”

It’s telling that for the Clintons, JFK defined politics, but for Obama, Ronald Reagan is the role model. Last year, Obama admitted to admiring the Gipper’s “transformative” leadership (though not his policies). Indeed, not only did Reagan restore confidence in the nation while reducing confidence in government, he put a stake in the heart of the “Vietnam syndrome” and the blame-America-first ethos of the Democratic Party. The Reagan Revolution moved the country durably to the right — so much so that even Democrats saw the writing on the wall. Obama wants to erase that writing.

And as Abe Greenwald of Commentary writes, so does someone else with a Brilliant Disguise, whose artistic career peaked just before the decade the Gipper made:

It’s true that Obama speaks to the America Springsteen usually writes about. But I’m not sure what he’s referring to in this description. Springsteen’s America is a soot-covered wasteland of junked cars, violent townies, shotgun weddings, racist cops, closed factories, and endless unemployment lines. If you think Obama was tough on small town mentalities, consider the lyrics of Springsteen’s “Born to Run”:

Baby this town rips the bones from your back
It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap
We gotta get out while we’re young
‘Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run

* * *

When, in 1980, Springsteen wrote...

I got a job working construction for the Johnstown company
But lately there ain’t been much work on account of the economy
Now all them things that seemed so important
Well mister they vanished right into the air
Now I just act like I don’t remember, Mary acts like she don’t care

...who could blame him? It was less than a year after Jimmy Carter had gone on television and made a speech diagnosing the country as clinically depressed and spiritually bankrupt:

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us.

Springsteen took the nation’s pulse and wrote about it. The problem is that his sense of America–forged during the Carter years–has not changed since. Sure, he came out with an inspirational post-9/11 album. But that came and went as fast as Yasir Arafat’s blood donation to the victims.

Springsteen said in his Obama letter: “After the terrible damage done over the past eight years, a great American reclamation project needs to be undertaken.” But it’s hard to imagine what exactly he wants to reclaim. The last time Springsteen’s lyrics reflected any consistent sense of romance and adventure in connection with America was during the Nixon years. Personally, I’d love to see him make music like that again. But somehow I don’t think that’s what he’s getting at.

Sadly, as Slate of all publications once noted, Bruce's second manager, Jon Landau, who went from Rolling Stone critic to rock Svengali, took that Springsteen away from us, transforming Bruce in his formative years from an exciting quirky apolitical musician to just another leftwing product on the showbiz assembly line.

(And speaking of Slate, nice of them to create a fun anti-Obama ad, which will have a little traction even after this week's PA primary has passed.)

Proof that your 1970s-era leather jacketed populist hero to the working man persona may be looking a bit threadbare these days--when you actually say with a straight face, “I’ve found enormous sustenance from Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd”.

Update: Bruuuuuuce! is Reason #4 of the 20 Reasons Why Frank Martin Is Bitter. And I'm even more bitter than he is over Reason #17:

17. I now own 'Blade Runner' in 5 different DVD formats.

Heck, in addition to owning multiple DVD copies, and writing about the movie for Pajamas, I've owned it on VHS, and two different laser disc versions. And reading in Billboard around 1987 that there was this new company called Voyager with something called a "Criterion Collection" that had released Blade Runner as a letterboxed laser disc (back when letterboxing was new and controversial!) and was planning to release a letterboxed 2001: A Space Odyssey later that year is why I bought my first laser disc player.

I mean, you go into these small colonies near Clavius and the Tycho Magnetic Anomaly and, like a lot of small earth colonies in the Sol Sector, it's not surprising that when people get bitter, they cling to laser discs, DVDs, or (via Lileks) space age prunes...

Matthew Sheffield writes, "If you've always thought her music was hackneyed and dull now you may have another reason to dislike Alicia Keys: she's apparently a racist conspiracymonger", as this AP report highlights (ellipses in Matthew's post):

There's another side to Alicia Keys: conspiracy theorist. The Grammy-winning singer-songwriter tells Blender magazine: "'Gangsta rap' was a ploy to convince black people to kill each other."[...]

Keys, 27, said she's read several Black Panther autobiographies and wears a gold AK-47 pendant around her neck "to symbolize strength, power and killing 'em dead," according to an interview in the magazine's May issue, on newsstands Tuesday.

Another of her theories: That the bicoastal feud between slain rappers Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. was fueled "by the government and the media, to stop another great black leader from existing." [...]

Though she's known for her romantic tunes, she told Blender that she wants to write more political songs. If black leaders such as the late Black Panther Huey Newton "had the outlets our musicians have today, it'd be global. I have to figure out a way to do it myself," she said.

Matthew adds, "All this nonsense really should come as a surprise to Keys's mother, Teresa Augello, who is white. Is this just a phase? In any case, it's hard to see how a white entertainer or a religious-oriented entertainer making statements like this and it not doing significant harm to their career."

She's not alone of course; Keys' remarks regarding her profession sound much like those expressed by Rev. Eric Lee of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, who featured prominently in several recent articles over on the main Pajamas site this past week, including this one:

“In a very small part of my presentation, I referenced a meeting I had with Rabbi’s and other community leaders. A Rabbi stated in that meeting that the close relationship between the African American and Jewish communities had been disconnected after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. I further referenced in my speech that my response to the Rabbi was that the Black Power Movement emerged after the assassination of Dr. King and it was a direct response to the negative characterizations of African Americans through the silver screen, TV and the music industry, industries that are influenced by many in the Jewish community. I then stated to the Rabbis that the Black Power Movement was our effort to define for ourselves our own identity rather than be defined by anyone else. I then indicated in my presentation that I told the Rabbis’ that before a genuine coalition could be rebuilt between our communities, there would have to be dialogue and efforts made to deal with the negative characterizations of African Americans.”

But Keys' and Lee's conspiratorial ravings ignore a crucial element of the success of "Gangsta" rap: nobody twisted the arms of performers to record those records, or to strike thugish poses in videos and magazine covers to promote them, or consumers to purchase them. As Mark Steyn wrote last month regarding another prominent conspiracy theorist:

The Reverend Wright believes that AIDs was created by the government of the United States — and not as a cure for the common cold that went tragically awry and had to be covered up by Karl Rove, but for the explicit purpose of killing millions of its own citizens. The government has never come clean about this, but the Reverend Wright knows the truth. “The government lied,” he told his flock, “about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. The government lied.”

Does he really believe this? If so, he’s crazy, and no sane person would sit through his gibberish, certainly not for 20 years [as Obama had].

Or is he just saying it? In which case, he’s profoundly wicked. If you understand that AIDs is spread by sexual promiscuity and drug use, you’ll know that it’s within your power to protect yourself from the disease. If you’re told that it’s just whitey’s latest cunning plot to stick it to you, well, hey, it’s out of your hands, nothing to do with you or your behavior.

Rather than conspiracy theories about "the government and the media" as Keys believes, the latter "influenced by many in the Jewish community" as Lee believes, and the former fermenting "genocide against people of color" as Wright believes, where are the calls for personal responsibility, by three people who are all voices of influence in their respective circles?

(Onion video originally found here.)

I've been a bit surprised to see ascots appearing in my latest Brooks Brothers catalogs; I think it's still a look that's far too affected, even for me, but Betsy Newmark wonders if we aren't seeing the aura of a penumbra of its comeback:

According to USA Today, we are seeing glimmerings of a comeback of the ascot. A handful of guys in the public eye are wearing them. The most public practitioner is American Idol contestant, Michael Johns. While I really like Johns and he's my favorite on Idol, I hope he starts to resist such advice from the Idol stylist as this:

And yet: American Idol contender Michael Johns sang a bluesy number last week while wearing a pink-and-purple Alexander McQueen ascot, chosen by Idol stylist Miles Siggins. The contestants need "a recognizable brand, and I was thinking dandy rocker," says Siggins, who has picked out a vintage ascot for Johns to wear this week.

"Dandy rocker?" You gotta be kidding.

Please, please, stop that. America does not need a dandy rocker.

With the unfortunate death of Robert Palmer in 2003, doesn't Bryan Ferry currently have the absolute lock on that job description? (At least as frontman--Charlie Watts is often the best dressed drummer since Tony Williams.)

Jonah Goldberg goes F-Spotting:

I don't know why I didn't think of this before. Behold a new sport for readers. Send me your examples of people just using "fascist" to describe things they don't like. For example, Kevin Costner in Bull Durham: “Quit trying to strike everybody out. Strikeouts are boring and besides that, they’re fascist. Throw some ground balls. They’re more democratic.”

Here's an oldie-but-a-goodie from 1979 by music critic and veteran Bruce Springsteen hagiographer Dave Marsh in Rolling Stone magazine:

Whatever its claims, Queen isn't here just to entertain. This group has come to make it clear exactly who is superior and who is inferior. Its anthem, "We Will Rock You," is a marching order: you will not rock us, we will rock you. Indeed, Queen may be the first truly fascist rock band.

As an audience member (and Queen was my first rock concert, as I recall, with Billy Squier opening), I would not have presumed to have rocked Queen. It seems reasonable to assume that when one plunked down money to see Queen, one presumed that they would be the core element of the experience which would be doing the rocking during the concert. How that made Freddie Mercury and company fascist, I cannot fathom, but like the man said...

Incidentally, in 1992, Rolling Stone magazine celebrated its 25th anniversary with a lavish party at the Four Seasons in Manhattan, a restaurant whose interior was designed by Philip Johnson.

In the Weekly Standard, Sonny Bunch writes that Martin Scorsese's Shine A Light, his Rolling Stones concert movie, is no Last Waltz. Cold comfort for those of us who also thought the latter was more than a little overrated--or to be more charitable, hasn't been well served by the passage of time.

(Speaking of which, don't miss Bunch calling the modern sixty-something Stones "leather Muppets"! And for a great Rolling Stones concert movie, you can't go wrong with the classics.)

Ace spots this amusing Reuters item:

If you are male and a Led Zeppelin fan, chances are you may be leaning toward voting Republican in the U.S. presidential election, according to a survey of rock radio fans released on Wednesday.

Gosh, never saw that one coming!

One of these two people is 96 years old. Or maybe both...

While New York DJ "Murray The K" may have claimed the title of "The Fifth Beatle" at the height of Beatlemania in a shameless act of self-promotion, in reality, if any man could claim the title, it was Neil Aspinall, who died recently at age 66, according to the Telegraph:

One of his last tasks as their eminence grise had been to remaster the group's back catalogue for legal downloading on the internet. Aspinall's involvement with the Beatles dated from 1960 when the group's original drummer, Pete Best, asked him to become their driver.

Although he protested when Best (his best friend) was replaced by Ringo Starr, he remained with the band, and when a brawny Cavern Club bouncer called Mal Evans was taken on in 1963 to hump their instruments in and out of their battered Commer van, Aspinall found himself in the role of personal assistant.
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As such, he became the Beatles' gatekeeper, guardian of their privacy, security, secrets, and eventually the group's fortunes, over which, as managing director of Apple from January 1968, he exercised a shrewd stewardship. A quietly-spoken but tough negotiator, he was credited with having - single-handedly - turned the Beatles into the world's highest-earning band and, by extension, one of its biggest brands.

In the mid-1960s, at the height of Beatlemania, Aspinall's responsibilities as the group's road manager extended far beyond checking their equipment, stage costumes, meals, venues and accommodation: with Mal Evans, he judiciously vetted the groupies, and saw to the day-to-day needs of the Beatles themselves as they were shuttled from plane to limousine to hotel. "It was an unattractive life," he admitted, "and it went on for years. But at least I could go out. They were trapped." He even stood in for George Harrison, when the guitarist was ill, at a camera rehearsal for the band's first appearance on American television.

Aspinall's role changed dramatically with the death of the Beatles' manager, Brian Epstein, in August 1967, and he effectively took the group over, although he apparently turned down a formal offer of the job from John Lennon. According to one account, the Beatles' musical guru George Martin was unhappy at the idea of Aspinall replacing the public-school-educated Epstein because he lacked the social qualifications needed to speak to the executives at their recording company EMI.

As the group disintegrated, and the members eventually went their separate ways, Aspinall remained a trusted father figure to the famous foursome. Even when they were not speaking to each other he - as the honest broker - remained on good terms with all four.

His role post-Beatles became increasingly entrepreneurial: in 1995 he persuaded Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr to collaborate on three Anthology albums and the accompanying television documentary, which took him five years to compile. It was Aspinall's concept that led to the release in 2000 of the Beatles' greatest hits album, Beatles 1, which has since sold 30 million copies.

There's a direct line from Beatlemania to the most pretentious and overwrought aspects of the 1960s, but there's also hours and hours of brilliant music as well, and short of George Martin, who was recording and actively shaping the Beatles' output, Aspinall had the best seat in the house to watch its production.

New York Post film critic Kyle Smith comes clean:

I worshiped at the Church of Manilow for many years. He is a part of me. I can no more disown him than I can unload my LPs of ABBA’s “Super Trouper” or “The Best of Andy Gibb.” However, I respectfully request that you please not hold any facts against me and start talking about something else.

No word yet on what Obama's grandmother thought of him.

Tom Stoppard describes 1968 as "The year of the posturing rebel". Or as John Lennon confessed a decade later:

"I dabbled in politics in the late 1960s and 1970s, more out of guilt than anything. Guilt for being rich and guilt thinking that perhaps love and peace isn't enough and you have to go and get shot or something, or get punched in the face to prove I'm one of the people. I was doing it against my instincts."

Fascinating though, that the 1960s and '70s, a period that was rife with poseurs such as Lennon, is still influencing us to this day. You can see it in music, in the form of ersatz nostalgia acts such as Lenny Kravitz and Sheryl Crow, who dress in period costume (sort of the tie-dyed equivalent of greasers like Sha Na Na in leather jackets and D.A.s in 1975, or a big band that same year still playing in tan dinner jackets and bow ties). Or much more dangerously, in a politics that still takes it rhetoric from a period now four decades in the past, whether it's John Kerry in 2004, or Rev. Wright in 2008.

But then, when starting from zero, one is always tempted to stay trapped in Year One.

This sounds like a Tiger Beat questionnaire from the Bizzaro universe: Which Beatle's wife you think Hillary would be reveals your true personality!

"Okay, but don't start arguing Hillary's Barbara Bach."

This just in: "Do NOT get Mark Steyn started on 'Show Boat'".

I've had the riffs from this moody Eric Clapton/Michael Kamen soundtrack piece rumbling through my head all weekend. Now it's your turn:

UPI breathlessly reports that "Hearing rap music can spontaneously activate pre-existing awareness of sexist beliefs, North Carolina State University researchers determined."

All together now: I need a study to tell me this?

Celebrating the 40th anniversary of the American Spectator, James Bowman writes, with tongue only slightly in cheek:

The New York Times obituary of Robert Goulet reminded us that "in 1961, The New York Daily News Magazine called him ‘just the man to help stamp out rock ’n’ roll.’" Alas, as the obituarist for The Times added — could it be just a touch wistfully? — "it was an impossible assignment." By 1967, when The American Spectator first saw the light of day in Bloomington, Indiana, most people of the generation of the Spectator’s editors — and your correspondent — would probably have forgotten that in that dim and distant past of six years previous anyone had even wanted to stamp out rock ‘n’ roll. By that time, the parents who had complained about the suggestiveness of Elvis Presley’s stage performances had much bigger problems to worry about. Yet for 40 years the magazine has offered the hospitality of its pages to those who would write the minority report out of the sixties, including even a few would-be Savanarolas who, however belatedly, might still be up for a campaign to stamp out rock ‘n’ roll.

It's actually doing a pretty good job at the moment of finishing the job that Bob started:

Amy Winehouse, Herbie Hancock and Kanye West didn't provide quite enough drama to enthrall television viewers. Preliminary estimates indicate the Grammy Awards telecast was watched by 17.5 million people.

Nielsen Media Research said Monday that would make it the third least- watched Grammy Awards ever if later estimates confirm those numbers.

Viewership is down from the 20 million people who watched last year. The 2006 awards, with 17 million viewers, is the Grammy low point. The show had 17.3 million viewers in 1995.

The industry can't blame this on sales lost to downloading, as we note each year when the typically dreadful postmortem arrives.

Compare. Contrast. Weep.

(Via the vast Manolo empire.)

"While in Berlin for the release of a new documentary he helped produce, music legend Neil Young shocked reporters Friday with the revelation that music cannot change the world."

That painful moment when youthful naivete gives way to wisdom, made even more difficult when you're 62 years old.

The ironically eponymous star of the Beatles' "Sexie Sadie" from the White Album moves on to the next plane of existence, at age 91.

As the Times of London aptly quips, "Never mind the fundamentalists, here’s Morrissey":

Iran is still suspicious of pop music. Last summer police raided an underground festival in an orchard near the town of Karaj to stop what they called a “provocative, satanic concert”. More than 200 people were arrested.

If the event does go ahead, Morrissey will have to play to an audience segregated by gender. Women would be allowed only if they stayed in roped-off areas and wore modest clothing, including headscarves. All song lyrics would be vetted. Female backing vocalists and mixed dancing in the aisles would be outlawed and beer, of course, would be banned.

I guess that's as good a definition for the current meaning of progressive rock as anything.

Here are two more tracks to add to the CD edition of SCTV's classic Stairways To Heaven album:

Update: Here's an even cooler DIY mash-up.

Back in early 2006, Australia's John Birmingham profiled Tim Blair, amongst others, in his look at conservative comedy:

Blair, the closest antipodean analogue of O'Rourke, is a declared political warrior, with no interest in fairness, unlike traditional satirists such as Patrick Cook or Mike Carlton who are even-handed in their choice of targets. A Blair column is predictable insofar as you know who is going to get whacked - exactly the same people who took a beating in that morning's Miranda Devine op-ed piece. But unlike Devine, Blair consistently rewards attention with little hash cookies of humour such as his obsession with AC/DC's bagpipe player. Does he tour? Does he have groupies? Are they called bag ladies?

He does indeed tour--and gets down with his bad, Utilikilted self!

(Get well soon, Tim!)

Amy Winehouse, this year's answer to the self-destructiveness of Billie Holiday and Janis Joplin, merged with the frightening visage of Patti Smith at her most emaciated, is "headed for rehab the same day The Sun newspaper ran on its Web site a video of her allegedly smoking a crack pipe."

Tremendous passage from the late Michael Kelly, found via Cold Fury:

Sinatra, as every obit observed, was the first true modern pop idol, inspiring in the 1940s the sort of mass adulation that was to become a familiar phenomenon in the '50s and '60s. One man, strolling onto the set at precisely the right moment in the youth of the Entertainment Age, made himself the prototype of the age's essential figure: the iconic celebrity. The iconic celebrity is the result of the central confusion of the age, which is that people possessed of creative or artistic gifts are somehow teachers-role models-in matters of personal conduct. The iconic celebrity is idolized-and obsessively studied and massively imitated-not merely for the creation of art but for the creation of public self, for the confection of affect and biography that the artist projects onto the national screen.

And what Frank Sinatra projected was: cool. And here is where the damage was done. Frank invented cool, and everyone followed Frank, and everything has been going to hell ever since.

In America, B.F., there was no cool. There was smart (as in the smart set), and urbane, and sophisticated, and fast and hip; but these things were not the same as cool. The pre-Frank hip guy, the model of aesthetic and moral superiority to which men aspired, is the American male of the 1930s and 1940s. He is Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep or Casablanca or Archie Goodwin in Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe novels. He possesses an outward cynicism, but this is understood to be merely clothing; at his core, he is a square. He fights a lot, generally on the side of the underdog. He is willing to die for his beliefs, and his beliefs are, although he takes pains to hide it, old-fashioned. He believes in truth, justice, the American way, and love. He is on the side of the law, except when the law is crooked. He is not taken in by jingoism but he is himself a patriot; when there is a war, he goes to it. He is, after his fashion, a gentleman and, in a quite modern manner, a sexual egalitarian. He is forthright, contemptuous of dishonesty in all its forms, from posing to lying. He confronts his enemies openly and fairly, even if he might lose. He is honorable and virtuous, although he is properly suspicious of men who talk about honor and virtue. He may be world-weary, but he is not ironic.

The new cool man that Sinatra defined was a very different creature. Cool said the old values were for suckers. Cool was looking out for number one always. Cool didn't get mad; it got even. Cool didn't go to war: Saps went to war, and anyway, cool had no beliefs it was willing to die for. Cool never, ever, got in a fight it might lose; cool had friends who could take care of that sort of thing. Cool was a cad and boastful about it; in cool's philosophy, the lady was always a tramp, and to be treated accordingly. Cool was not on the side of the law; cool made its own laws. Cool was not knowing but still essentially idealistic; cool was nihilistic. Cool was not virtuous; it reveled in vice. Before cool, being good was still hip; after cool, only being bad was.

Quite a legacy. On the other hand, he sure could sing.

One of the observations that Diana West made in The Death of the Grown-Up is how much of the heavy lifting in the birth of modern culture--with all its pluses and minuses--occurred in the 1950s, though the 1960s gets all the credit.

But while Sinatra was indeed a harbinger of things to come, he was also very much a man of his times. In Gay Talese's epochal 1966 "Frank Sinatra Has A Cold" article for Esquire, you can actually see the cool style of Sinatra’s highpoint ebb into the sunset, and the aesthetic of the late sixties being born, when Sinatra encounters legendarily cranky sci-fi writer Harlan Ellison.

And as Mark Steyn wrote recently, by the following decade dispatches between the two cultures--the post-war showbiz culture and the anti-war culture of mud--were even chillier:

One reason why the Oscar shows of the early Seventies are such a hoot compared to the butt-numbing snoozeroos of today is the tension and sniping between the John Wayne/Bob Hope/Frank Sinatra set and the hipster crowd reading out telegrams from the Viet Cong. Back then, being anti-war meant taking a side. In today’s Hollywood, being anti-war is the only side.

Which means, through the paradigm of The Manchurian Candidate and even programmers like Von Ryan's Express, plus his support of JFK and RWR, we can look back at Sinatra as a remarkably patriotic, all-American guy, in spite of himself, his myriad excesses, and nihilistic cool.

Maybe it was simply that while Sinatra was indeed cool, he never succumbed to its successor pose: irony. Which, in retrospect, may have saved him from himself, unlike those who followed in his wake.

Update: Welcome Libertas and Jules Crittenden readers!

Err, don't bet on it--at least in its current form:

IN 2006 EMI, the world's fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free. “That was the moment we realised the game was completely up,” says a person who was there.

Meanwhile, over at Blogingheads.tv, Michael Hirschorn of VH-1 and Jon Fine of Business Week bemoan what they call "The last days of the rock star".

A fascinating subtext of their conversation is that both are unhappy over the media's continuing fragmentation, as the Long Tail grows longer. In Hirschorn's case, it's awfully ironic: In the decade before the World Wide Web began riding on top of the Internet in the early 1990s, cable television was the Long Tail of the 1980s, as narrowly-themed channels such as his own VH-1 began to demassify the Big Three television networks, ending their 35 year uncontested run.

Back in the mid-1970s, Jimmy Page told an interviewer that "I always thought the good thing about guitar was that they didn't teach it in school." In other words, for Page, and his fellow British guitarists growing up in the late 1950s, rock and roll and the blues were genres you had to be dedicated enough to learn on your own.

Found via Bloggingheads, David Brooks writes that "Miami" Steve Van Zandt, Bruce Springsteen's longtime rhythm guitarist (and eventually, owner of the Bada Bing Club) would like to see that changed:

It seems that whatever story I cover, people are anxious about fragmentation and longing for cohesion. This is the driving fear behind the inequality and immigration debates, behind worries of polarization and behind the entire Obama candidacy.

If you go to marketing conferences, you realize we really are in the era of the long tail. In any given industry, companies are dividing the marketplace into narrower and more segmented lifestyle niches.

Van Zandt has a way to counter all this, at least where music is concerned. He’s drawn up a high school music curriculum that tells American history through music. It would introduce students to Muddy Waters, the Mississippi Sheiks, Bob Dylan and the Allman Brothers. [Gee, not Springsteen, as well?--Ed] He’s trying to use music to motivate and engage students, but most of all, he is trying to establish a canon, a common tradition that reminds students that they are inheritors of a long conversation.

And Van Zandt is doing something that is going to be increasingly necessary for foundations and civic groups. We live in an age in which the technological and commercial momentum drives fragmentation. It’s going to be necessary to set up countervailing forces — institutions that span social, class and ethnic lines.

Music used to do this. Not so much anymore.

Education used to do this as well. Not so much, anymore.

But back to the main point of Brooks and Miami Steve. Jazz was essentially frozen in amber as a creative force once Lincoln Center hired Wynton Marsalis to be its "Musical Director of Jazz." Miami Steve wants to do the same thing to rock. And it's not like education isn't already dominated by Present Tense Culture.

(Or, for another way to look at Brooks' column: this just into the New York Times: Pop culture is fractured and demassified, something that Alvin Toffler predicted 28 years ago.)

Sure John McCain may have picked up this key Hollywood celebrity endorsement, but how can he top the sheer animal power of this?

Err, in this case, Old PowerPoint Presentations. Found via Galley Slaves, it's Rap Music, the spreadsheets:

(And yes, there's a language alert, but that probably goes without saying.)

Drudge has the early line on the Led Zeppelin comeback gig:

LED ZEPPELIN FIRST REVIEW...

...can still rock the house!

Set List...

WHOLE LOTTA HERB TEA...

Some photos here. But is it a one-off night on the tiles, or the precursor to an extended tour of the houses of the holy?

Update: Video added above; elsewhere, the New York Times loves them some Zeppelin. Not sure how that will fly at the New Criterion, though.

Back in October, I visited the Arlington, Texas Guitar Show. I finally had a chance to come up for air from the PJM Political audio stuff to finish the short video I shot and edited of the action in the main showroom. (And yes, that's me playing assorted electric and acoustic guitars on the backing track):

In case you missed it, yesterday's show on XM satellite radio's POTUS '08 channel is available for downloading here. Pretty nifty line-up, too:

Join host Bill Bradley for thoughts on yesterday's GOP YouTube/CNN debate, plus:

Pajamas CEO Roger L. Simon and Bob Owens of Confederate Yankee interview Sen. Fred Thompson regarding the future of America's War On Terror.

Should Thompson not get the nomination, Ed Morrissey and Duane Patterson (producer of The Hugh Hewitt Show) discuss his chances as a GOP vice presidential nominee.

Glenn Reynolds and Dr. Helen Smith discuss the upcoming Supreme Court case involving the Second Amendment with Robert Levy of the CATO Institute.

Liz Stephans and Scott Baker of Breitbart.TV on the role of YouTube and viral online video in the 2008 presidential election.

Produced by Ed Driscoll.

For extended versions of each of today's segments, and the video of the Thompson interview don't miss this week's PJM Political "Director's Cut Interviews."

For podcasting techies wondering what I used to record the segments with Liz and Scott, and the previous segments from the last two weeks' shows all recorded earlier this month from Blog World in Las Vegas, I simply used my trusty Samson Zoom H4 Handy Recorder (which has a pair of pro-style XLR jacks, visible in the photo that accompanies the Videomaker review), a pair of Shure SM58 mics, and a pair of tabletop mic stands. The Zoom recorder uses an SD card, and an 2-gig sized card provides about two hours of audio, which can quickly be ported over to a PC's hard drive and then into your DAW program of choice for editing and mixdown.

I threw them all into a suitcase before heading to Vegas just as a lark, but I was astounded at how clean the audio was, even with the roar of Vegas Convention Center crowd all around, which is why I ended up doing so many interviews there. The trick, I think, is the Shure SM58s. There's a reason why so many rock groups use them on-stage and on live recordings--their cardioid input pattern makes them great at focusing the loudest sounds (which normally should be the person talking/singing/playing into them) and de-emphasizing the background noise.

Mark Steyn looks at Japan's demographic woes, beginning with a quote from the BBC:

Japan has the world's highest proportion of elderly people. More than 20% of the population are now over the age of 65. By 2050, that figure is expected to rise to about 40%.

Mark writes:

I wouldn't want to be a Japanese teen circa 2020 in a Lawrence Welkified society. But maybe by then the robots will be hot enough to be pop singers and movie stars.

As I wrote a few years ago for Tech Central Station, as far as the technology to create Max Headroom-style pop stars, it really is only a matter of time.

I've been getting numerous visitors today searching on "Deborah Santana"; they've been going to my post with a photograph of Carlos Santana and his wife Deborah at the 2006 Oscars, with Carlos in his dinner jacket and uber-reactionary Che T-shirt, and now I know why: they're declaring their marriage splitsville.

For those who are interested, here are the details from the San Jose Mercury of their divorce announcement.

Err, "except those plastic discs", writes Chris Anderson of Wired and The Long Tail in a good follow-up to our earlier post here.

Libertas's "Dirty Harry" writes that the format war between competing high definition DVD formats has slowed the acceptance of the successor to the DVD, which is now in its tenth year of existence. And the film studios are shooting themselves in the foot, since the money isn't in the player, but the back catalog.

A format war merely slows--or stops--Hollywood's efforts to resell its back catalog yet again, which is where the real long term money is, anway. When I go high-def DVD, I'll be on my fourth or fith copies of some movies, having gone from VHS to 12-inch laser disc (remember those?!), to DVD. And along the way, having bought pan & scan and letterboxed LDs, and original issue and remastered DVDs of some of the titles I was more obsessive about.

Meanwhile, I just downloaded my first MP3-only only album off Amazon.com. It's a complete win-win for both consumer and Amazon: there's no physical product to be inventoried, packaged and shipped, and it downloads so quickly over broadband that it's near-instantaneous consumer gratification. The individual tunes are MP3s so there's complete portability amongst the PC and iPod-style player. It's been licensed by the record company, so there are no Napster legal issues. And the MP3s are rendered in 256 kbps format, which is, I believe the second highest quality format available via MP3. (Per XM's request, we do PJM Political as a 320 kbps MP3, which is the highest quality MP3 format.)

There's little doubt that as broadband speeds increase--and they will--video will be soon be added to the download mix, and not just teeny YouTube clips. Eventually DVD collections such as these will be a download away. I don't think bricks and morter stores will fade away anytime soon, but the Long Tail is becoming incr