Music

The first Byrds album was one of the greatest things ever. But this song always seemed to me to be the best of the best, an all-time top ten, everything a pop song is supposed to be — beautiful, simple, classically structured, sad but shining through the sadness. It has been part of the fundamental architecture of my brain for a really long time. God knows when I first heard it, probably on the radio as a really little kid. But as I think about it, my first conscious recollection of hearing this song is on a dusty big-hole 45 that belonged to the big sister of my friend across the street — I’d guess age 11 or 12 (circa 1975). The musical legacy of the period 1965-67 (pre-hippie era) was the peak of American Rock and Pop Music, both famous and obscure. So today I was pleased to run across this video here of “Feel a Whole Lot Better”. The video, for all its poor quality, is an artifact which capture that mid-60s youthfulness and energy and innocence and cool — featuring a tall, dashing young Gene Clarke on vocals, with tambourine, of course.

Go to the Muffs website. The video is off to the left. Great song. Cool video. Cute part where the band is marching.

The world keeps turning round and round, and we mere mortals wither away, but Kim Shattuck just stays as beautiful as ever.

Sigh.

I had to miss the Chicago show. Depths of despair, black and fathomless despair. My wife saw them and they were wonderful, terrific, as good as ever.

Sigh.

(As I said before, go buy the new album.)

One of our totally excellent readers sent me this interesting link. The article is entitled, “The day the album died? It may be soon” and acts like this is a bad idea. Wrong, wrong, wrong. It notes that the song-swapping craze created a demand for songs. Now that this basic approach has gone legit, duh, people still want to pay for good songs they like, and only for that.

“It’s a song economy now,” says iTunes spokesman Chris Bell. “Consumers have come to expect it through illegal file sharing and CD burning, and we’re making sure every song is available for individual downloading.”

The article’s author bemoans this overwhelming display of consumer rationality, and inadvertently displays a rather silly and bigoted misconception of what is and is not good, as well as getting a key part of the chronology wrong.

In the ’50s, rock ‘n’ roll revolved around the 45-rpm single. Albums – if record labels even bothered to put them out – were just ragtag compilations of unrelated singles.

First, the 45-rpm single dominated until the mid-60s. In other words, the golden age of rock and pop, the early Beatles, Stones, Beach Boys, Phil Spector, Motown, Stax and countless others, was the age of the 45-rpm single. You could get by just buying the singles. You didn’t need the albums. But if you bought the albums, far from being “ragtag” the better albums in the period from, say, 1964-67, were compilations which contained several songs good enough to be singles and a bunch of others songs almost good enough to be singles. The “filler” was often oddball tracks which had their own quality or humor. The Beatles’ “Help” or the Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man” are good examples of this period. Not one really bad song on either of them. Also typical was the Beach Boys’ “Surfer Girl,” which had several brilliant songs, a few decent ones, and a few humorous throw-aways, but you got your money’s worth. And the Motown albums of the era were incredible – the odd tracks were usually covers of hits by other Motown artists (some really great) or of other hits of the day, again, often very cool, or interesting even if terrible.

The author then tells us:

Spurred on by free-form FM radio, musicians started writing longer songs and weaving whole albums around a musical or lyrical theme: The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), The Who’s rock opera, Tommy (1969), Marvin Gaye’s socially conscious What’s Going On (1971). Suddenly, rock ‘n’ roll was no longer just a random parade of ditties blaring from an AM car radio. Thanks to the album, rock was an official art form, worthy of being analyzed on hi-fi stereos and dissected in The New York Times – just like jazz or classical music.

This is all wrong. What began to happen is that the business side of the music industry got control of what had been a revolutionary and bottom-up musical explosion. They began to package bands and albums and tours to support them. The deathless glory of the mid-60s singles era this writer disparages as “a random parade of ditties.” Yeah, and Renaissance Florence was just a bunch of random daubs of oil paint on canvas. These few years were a maelstrom of innovation and creativity, which to this day remains incompletely understood and incompletely mapped and cataloged. The number of compilations of 60s bands which had only regional hits, for example, is mind-boggling, both in terms of quality and quantity. This phase ended, for a variety of reasons too lengthy and sad to detail here, and was replaced by a much more cynical, money-driven, predictable, mechanized process. Selling albums, bigger pieces of plastic, with mostly filler on them, became the mainstay. That plus arena-sized shows. All a total scam. As to Rock suddenly becoming, “respectable” and analyzed by the New York Times, that is all nothing, dirt, scraps, words to carve on the tombstone. CDs made all of this worse. With 60 minutes to fill, you just got more filler, most of the time.

One of my great hopes is that the rise of the Internet and modern technology will restore the well-crafted song to its just primacy of place. It is long overdue.

The refocus – customer-driven, fan-driven, on SONGS not albums – may portend a new age of greatness in popular music. The incentives are there, and getting stronger: Write good songs, or you have nothing to sell.

Yeah, I’ve got my opinions.

But, by the time I get a break in the work/kids/life action, events have moved way, way on. Which is good. I don’t want this blasted war to bog down. Not that it will. Roll baby, roll on English-speaking Blitzkrieg, win this thing fast. Then, scrape Saddam’s dead meat out of your tank treads, and come on home.

This war is not over yet, but things will settle down again soon. Then even people who don’t have inside dope, like the teeming millions in Blogistan, will be able to work on a more level playing field and speculate to their hearts’ content. But not yet. For now, better to pay attention, accumulate facts, and stay alert to what is happening.

It is a waste to do too much theorizing right now, or at least for me to. The arguments and “analysis” are not coming out of word processors but off of bomb racks and out of the muzzles of tank cannons.

We are at one of those moments of discontinuity, the dividing point between the “punctuated equilibria” the evolutionary biologists talk about.

OK, I can’t resist. I’ll make one prediction. This short war is a major turning point in history. Not as big as August 1914 or September 1939, probably. But big. Just below that level. The configuration of world politics is changing rapidly and this is the hinge moment.

Let’s agree to reconvene in ten years and see if Lex was right … .

Meanwhile, I have devoted some time to not-the-war. On the highbrow level, I may buy this brand new 5 cd set of Sir Simon Rattle conducting the Vienna Philharmonic playing nine Beethoven symphonies. They are playing it on the radio today. Beautiful stuff. It is apparently not in the stores yet. It is Civilization, it is the West. It is the greatness of the West. It is what we are fighting for.

On the more lowbrow level, I have just been introduced to the incredible Puffy – totally cool Japanese girl pop madness! It is fun, it is silly, it is a high quality product of late Capitalism, it is American happiness being successfully pursued in weird foreign idioms, it is girls being creative, it is a world open and free with money in its pocket. It is Globalization. It is what we are fighting for.

Perhaps I should be more dour in wartime. Naaaah.

Pray for victory. Pray for the dead and their families. Pray for a just and free society to emerge in Iraq which will be a light to the whole Muslim world.

Forward the Anglosphere!

God bless America.

Update: Check out the incredible 6x! (Scroll down to the MP3s and listen to the absolutely perfect song “What Can I Do?”)