Sunday, December 28, 2008
S.O.S. - Save Our Sooj
Friday, December 26, 2008
Winter of Our (Dis)Content?
Certainly, retailers would agree. The season of mass consumption that so many American (and European) companies use to pull themselves into the black is proving this year to be a black hole instead. Although the malls are still full (*1), people aren’t buying like they used to. Sales aren’t making projections, and the economic talking-heads are filled with gloom. Hell, even the “war on Christmas” crowd is quieter than they’ve been in years. Add that to the worsening global economy, vast swaths of investor fraud, a couple of shootouts, a crushed Wal-Mart temp and a forced miscarriage or two, and things look truly dismal this Christmas season.
Unless you take a good, hard look at our priorities and realize it’s about damned time they changed.
Now, I’m no Grinch. Pagan or not, I love the Christmas season. Regardless of the religious trappings hung around its neck, I’ve always enjoyed the festive bustle this time of year. I like the lights, the decorations, the Ranken-Bass cheesiness of it all. Hell, I even enjoy most of the music up to a certain point. To me, it’s appropriate even when it’s tacky. Looking at the real “reason for the season,” we see societies in the midst of winter who needed – and enjoyed – a reason to celebrate. Long before Catholic Churchmen decided to assign a December date to celebrate their savior’s birth (*2), people living (and dying) by Nature’s favor celebrated this season as a time of reflection, renewal, community and generosity.
This last part, however, has gotten a little out of hand.
Look, I love presents. Love getting ‘em, love giving ‘em. As anyone who’s read my oft-reprinted essay on presents (*3) knows, I enjoy both giving and receiving gifts. My family has always been a generous one, and my holiday memories involve large heaps of neat stuff under various trees. When I can, I add plenty of goodies to those piles myself; last year, with a few good paychecks in my wallet, I blew over two grand on my friends and family, and thoroughly enjoyed the process. So no – Scrooge McSatyr I’m not.
Still, I’ve worked more than my share of retail holidays, and I hope never to do it again. Each year, people and employers have grown more and more absurd in their demands. Staggering amounts of resources (natural and otherwise) go into staging an explosive and frankly unsustainable orgy of production, consumption and disposal. Trees, plastics, people, even land are used, then thrown away to feed “the Christmas Spirit.”(*4)
In a sickly ironic counterpoint to the words and deeds attributed to the Christ, people are often the first casualties of the modern “holiday season.” The appalling story of poor Jdimytai Damour and his grieving co-workers – topped off by the fatal shoot-out in a fucking toy store between a couple of gangsta assholes later that same day – underscores a litany of complaints familiar to anyone who reads the customers_suck community. The fact that Wal-Mart shoppers resisted leaving the store even after they learned that their greed had just murdered a man says all we really need to know about the nature of this insanity.(*5)
The insanity doesn’t begin or end with shopping, either. While evangelical hordes howl their pride about “the reason for the season,” corporate Scrooges & Marleys indulge in a more insidious “war on Christmas” – the one you won’t be hearing about from Bill O’Reily. For the last decade or so, the season that’s supposed to celebrate generosity and community has become the traditional time to lay off employees “for the greater good (*6).” Such annual “housecleaning” supposedly makes for a stronger bottom line at the end of the year. Fifteen years ago, this postmodern take on A Christmas Carol was an obscenity; now it’s expected that your “Christmas bonus” may be a pink slip instead. Too bad about the kids, huh? Drive yourself into debt buying those gifts, and then lose the job that was supposed to pay for them. Merry Christmas, dude.
The irony of this is sickening. Despite the Christ’s aversion to selfishness, Bebbie Jayzus Amen™ has become the patron saint of greed. A perfect example can be seen just a few weeks ago, when weeping employees at Aseptico, a local company, were laid off without warning or compensation; meanwhile, as people who thought they’d had stable jobs were escorted off the premises by armed security guards, their erstwhile CEO Doug Kazen floated off the Inner Sound on a cruise liner, schooling a well-heeled Christian group in the virtues of… wait for it… compassion and selflessness in business.
Ho, ho, ho, indeed. Where are Santa, Jesus or icebergs when you really need ‘em?
We can expect this coming January to suck even worse than usual. Low Christmas sales, combined with the insane traditions outlined above, will make for some pretty bloody bottom lines. It’s a vicious cycle, folks, and it should be telling us something.
It’s time to knock it off.
We must reassess our priorities, or they will be reassessed for us.
Two of the many elements that drew me to postmodern Paganism are the principles of cycles and consequences. The first principle asserts that Creation is filled with obvious and discernable cycles, while the second maintains that all things have consequences, usually revealed and manifested through those cycles. In contrast to the linear progression of Western science and religion (in which you start at Point A, move through Point B and finish up at Point C), these principles assert that “what goes around, comes around” – and that if you’re smart, you’ll watch those comings and goings for clues about how to live. It’s not rocket science, really – the doctrine shows up in everything from biblical psalms to Karmic sutras, folk wisdom and playground rhymes. For one insidious reason, however, the principle that “You reap what you sow” (*7) has been shunted aside for over a century.
And that reason is consumerism.
For the last 120 years or so, the human political struggle has been generalized as the battle between communisim (also called “socialism” by folks who don’t understand either one) and capitalism, the great forge of the modern world. (*8) Thing is, the greedy beast that wound up feeding on shoppers, employees and environments alike originally came crawling out of the catalogs and magazines of Victorian England (*9). For despite its age-old pedigrees, many of the “Christmas traditions” we know so well – including those piles of brightly-wrapped gifts – originated in Dickens’ London, Ground Zero for the true gospel of the 20th century: consumerism. Before then, holiday gifts were modest tokens exchanged between intimates, or displays of generosity (and bribery…) given by those who could afford them to those who could not. It was Victorian England that turned holiday gifts into cultural requirements, and linked spiritual celebration with economic necessity.
You won’t find consumerism listed as one of the soci-economic movements of the past century. Even so, consumerism is the basis for the current world economy, an economy which demands even-greater consumption of ever-greater amounts of goods by ever-greater numbers of consumers. Without a perpetual increase in consumption, however, that economy starts to tilt into the red. On paper, this concept is called “forecast profits” and “global trade.” In reality, it’s an unsustainable, unsupportable, and frankly insane form of economic suicide.
Everybody’s doing this. No nation is immune. From the theocratic sands of Saudi Arabia to the pseudo-communistic halls of Chinese government, consumerism literally makes our world go ‘round. Everyone is counting on everybody else to BuyBuyBuy in a ponzi scheme of global proportions. It’s all based on an expectation of endless consumption and endless expansion without collapse – a violation of several laws of physics and consequence. As Nature tells us, that which goes up will come down. The higher it goes, the harder it falls. And here it is, falling like winter snow.
I hope it’s not as hard a winter as it could be.
I hope we can stop being spoiled brats and learn to appreciate what’s truly important in life while we still have a chance to do so without complete disaster.
Personally, I think we’re getting a cosmic smack upside the head. As Dami and I were discussing yesterday, in a sad sort of way, the current crisis is good for us all. Because, friends and neighbors, the wheels are seriously coming off this bright little buggy of ours. When people are being shot and stamped to death in the name of Christmas cheer, we need new definitions and expectations about Christmas. When the world’s economy depends on a single holiday based around waste, it doesn’t take a Grinch to realize something’s wrong.
Whatever you call it, “the reason for the season” has got to change.
So, yeah - this is gonna be a scant holiday for me and mine. Almost everyone I know has been either pay-frozen, laid off or seriously beggared by this economic “downturn” of ours. For the first time in my 43 years, I’m not able to be with my family this year; even if I could, there’s no real money in my bank account to get them anything, thanks to a semester-long drop in enrollment at my college. Meanwhile, merchants all over Seattle are looking at their balance sheets and tearing out what little’s left of their hair because the old expectations are coming up short, thanks to the economy, the snowstorms, and a general lack of good old-fashioned cash-n-credit consumerism. The Godzillian bloat of St. Consumerism has left us all in the lurch this year, and if Little Timmy’s getting even half of his usual holiday horde, he’s the luckiest kid on the block.
And y’know what? I don’t think that’s a bad thing for us in the long run.
Like I said, I like stuff. I like giving and receiving. But if the last 10 years of writerly vagabondship have taught me anything, it’s that stuff is fleeting. It looks nice on the shelf, but when you need to pare down and consolidate, it really gets in the way. Ten years ago, I was a successful author and game designer with a great line of credit, a wonderful spouse, savings, investments, and an apartment – soon afterward a house – filled with cool stuff. Now, a decade later, almost all of that material stuff is gone, along with my former wife. What hasn’t been sold has been given away, thrown out, or stashed in storage somewhere. Aside for my book and CD collections, almost none of it exists in my day-to-day world. And y’know what? Although the divorce was painful and I still miss the person whom I had hoped was my lifetime partner, I feel no great loss over the lost stuff. Sure, financial stability was kinda nice. The stuff, though, was just stuff. I haven’t really missed it much at all. (*10)
So as yet another snowfall coats the Seattle streets, I think that yeah, we need this. It’s painful, but it’s good for us.
The current economic crash, this slide down Mazlow’s Hierarchy of Needs, the whittling of expectations from “I need everything in sight” to “I just realized what I truly need” – these are good things. We’ve all gotten spoiled in this Big Box world of ours, and it’s about damned time we recognized the need to cut back while we can still do so with relative ease.
Because, as Nature tells us, environments do correct themselves.
That’s what Winter is for.
It’s time for the earth to rest.
Maybe it’s time we gave consumerism a rest as well. Before the world we know is laid to rest by the greed we forgot to control until it was too late.
So take a deep breath, spend time with your loved ones, and let Creation’s cycles and humanity’s myths remind you what’s important in life.
Love. Balance. Sharing. And above all else, Gratitude.
For all its terrors, this Life is a gift.
Enjoy it, cherish it, and share it.
(As for Mr. Kazen: I refer you to the parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man. And may Bebbie Jay-zus shit in your stocking.)
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1. - Except here in Seattle, where the worst snowstorms in recorded history have paralyzed large portions of the marketplace.
2. - A date utterly at odds with the scriptural story in Luke 2:1-21… which, by the way, is the only gospel that treats the subject of Christ’s birth in any detail. The first mention of a December Christmas occurs in 354 AD.
3. - Which I’ll probably repost here later.
4. - A voracious entity of apparently Cthulhoid proportions.
5. - Don’t even get me started on the Third-World sweatshop labor used to create those endless acres of holiday junk.
6. - …of the stockholders, upper management, and other warriors of the Golden Parachute Brigade.
7. - See Job 4:8 and Galatians 6:7.
8 – This is a gross simplification, as it ignores imperialism, theocracy and fascism. Even those movements, however, have usually dressed themselves in the trappings and practices of either Capitalism or Communism since the 1800s.
9. – See Inside the Victorian Home, by Judith Flanders, to see just how much our ideas of “social propriety” have been governed by merchants who finance advertising and entertainment that tell us how dearly we need the things they produce.
10. – I do miss my former wife a LOT, and being able to travel freely, help friends out, and go to the doctor when I need to do so really didn't suck, either.
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Sunday, December 21, 2008
R.I.P. Sir Sable LePlume
Snow and Mortality
As anyone who's seen the news (or the ground outside) knows, Seattle has been hit with its third snowstorm in a week. This one dumped roughly a foot of snow here in Cap Hill, then sheened it over with a coat of ice. Anyone going out on the roads around here is out of their fucking minds today, so we're gonna sit at home, watch movies, read, and...
Well, we've also been nursing Sir Sable lePlume, aka, The Cat Who Will Not Die. A 20-year-old long-haired black cat, Sable won my heart upon our first meeting last year. Cantankerous, fussy and utterly endearing, Sable embodies the truism that cats and people domesticate each other. Despite arthritis and extreme old age, Sable has - until this weekend - remained strong, alert and pretty much healthy for the entire time I've known him. He's survived strokes, fits, illness, moves, dogs, fur mats, stitches, clumsy people, and more years on earth than some readers of this blog. Sadly, he took sick a few days ago, and has since dwindled to a handful of fur, bones, dry skin and attitude.
We figured that Sable was on his way to the Great Passage Friday night. Thursday evening, he ambled over to our futon and laid down on it in a way he hadn't done in months. That morning, he could barely walk. After he stopped eating and bundled himself into a pile on the floor, we thought he was ready to pack it in. Friday afternoon, Dami and made him a warm bed on the couch, then (after he climbed off the couch) settled him on the floor in front of a heater. Blowing off our usual Friday date night, we placed a heating pad underneath him and started straw-feeding him water and milk, saying our good-byes to him as he seemed to slip into that borderland between this world and the next...
...until he got up and decided to stagger to his feet, walk across the living room and go to his food bowl. He collapsed there, though, so we fed him some more, took him back to the makeshift bed, and read there, more or less in silence, each of us with our hands on Sable, letting him know we were there.
As we started to nod off, Sable remained more-or-less conscious. He didn't seem to be in pain - just deeply tired. So we took him to bed with us, set him up at the foot of our futon with a space heater aimed at him, the heating pad still beneath him, and a thin blanket over him. Again, we let Sable know that we loved him, and that it was okay if he wanted to slip away.
I had problems sleeping that night. Sable and I bonded fairly early into my stay with Damiana. I've been one of the few people he allows to pick him up and hold him, and although his litterbox habits have sometimes gotten on my nerves(*), he's been an adorably stubborn companion. As recently as Thursday morning, his senses were so sharp that he could hear Dami and I whispering in bed (on the other side of a closed door) and demand loudly to be fed and watered in his favorite drinking-place, the bathtub. I've often remarked that Sable survives on a combination of wet food and attitude (until this weekend, he'd earned the nickname Food Hoover for his voracious eating habits), and that he's had more comebacks than The Who, The Rolling Stones and The Kinks put together. In his refusal to let age get the better of him, Sable earned my affection and respect. I love this cantankerous scrap of fur, and I will miss him deeply when he's gone.
He has not yet decided to go.
So about 3:00 AM, I was awakened by a feline sneeze. I reached down and felt Sable's head hanging over the edge of the mattress. Apparently, he'd decided to go have a walk, but couldn't quite get off the bed. Gently, I pulled him back onto the heating pad, tucked him back in, and began talking to Dami. Somewhere in the middle of our conversation, he pulled himself out from beneath the blanket by his front claws, and wound up almost hanging off the bed again. Despite all indications, Sable had continued to kick the Reaper's ass. Giving him water and milk and making sure he was as comfortable as possible, we went back to sleep.
The next morning, Sable pulled himself up, got off the futon, peed (on a pile of laundry next to the bed - ah well, it'll wash), and walked shakily but determinedly out to the kitchen. I put him in the bathtub to see if he wanted to drink from it, but he didn't seem to be interested in that. Clearly, though, he could see, was responsive to sensation, and was able to purr. His legs gave out again, though, so we cuddled him for a while, bundled him up, and set him back on the bed (this time a bit off from the heating pad). He seemed comfortable enough, so I went to an audition at the LRS(***) . Walking a fair distance for an off-schedule bus, I made it downtown just in time for the audition. Dami joined me downtown afterward, and we did some holiday shopping. As the snow began to fall downtown, we caught one of the last buses back to our vicinity and hiked back amidst a stunningly beautiful landscape of snow.
Sable was till on the bed, sleepy but aware. Again, we fed him, watered him, and curled up in bed, reading. As we fell asleep, he remained there, still cognizant and purring softly. As of a few minutes ago, he's still with us.
Now, under other circumstances, I might have decided to take Sable to a vet and put him to sleep. By now, he's stopped eating (except when fed by hand), stopped meowing, and seems unable to stand, much less walk, on his own again. Problem is, our roads have been covered in snow and ice since Thursday morning; buses aren't running out to our neighborhood, and a long walk in the cold while stuck in a cat carrier would be, we feel, more distressing to Sable than simply passing away at home in the presence of people who love him. He hasn't seemed to be in real pain - uncomfortable, but not in obvious distress - and... well, as of this writing, he just doesn't seem to be willing to die just yet. And after a hideous experience my sister had a few years back with a dog who seemed ready to die but wasn't(**), I'm not willing to put an animal down unless that animal appears ready to pass over or is in obvious pain. As of now, Sable is neither.
As I mentioned, I felt incredibly sad on Friday night. Sable has a dear place in my heart, and I kinda identify with the rugged little furheap. My affection for "the old man" runs deep enough for me to put up with his less-endearing habits, and as someone who's not always the easiest person to get along with sometimes, I can identify with that element of his personality, too. The last few days have also tapped into some old memories of my death-watches over Warren, my mother's late husband(****), and Salome, my 18-year-old cat who passed on shortly before I left Atlanta. For a while, I couldn't sleep. And then, after his 3:00 AM revival, a bit of reading and some quiet words with my Higher Powers, I realized that Sable's time of passing is his choice, not my responsibility. More to the point, I understood the values of silence and stillness. As an American in the Media Age, I feel so conditioned to constant activity and stimulation that it's often hard to recognize when it's time to slow down and be quiet. Sable is obviously choosing to take a little time before he goes. He's had plenty of opportunities to slip away quietly... and he will do so soon. Despite my sadness, though, I'm not willing to rush him along.
As a Pagan, I accept death as an inevitable part of Creation's cycle, not as some abhorrent thing. Even so, there's a cold quality to passing on. Symbolically, it matches the snow and ice now packed across our streets. The implacable beauty of mortality and snow defies our illusions of control. So for now, I contemplate both and savor the life that is so obviously and precariously a gift.
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* - He left hard little "messages" on area rugs when he felt he hadn't received his share of attention... but at least he's done so in predictable places that are easy to clean up afterward.
** - Litle Red Studio, and it's okay. If the guy who was cast is the one I suspect was cast, I'd have chosen him over me, too.
*** - Buster had a huge cancerous tumor, and could no longer walk. My mom and sister took him to the vet, but it took three shots, almost five minutes and horrible distress from the dog before Buster passed over. No thanks.
**** - Another scrappy piece of work. I was with Warren when he passed on, and although that was a wrenching time on many levels, I'm very glad to have been there with him.
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Unleashing on a Pet Peeve: "The Wise Ancients Believed [FILL IN THE BLANK]..."
The following is a response to a friend of mine, who had re-posted a third-party comment about what ancient Egyptians "really believed." As a postmodern mystic Pagan fantasy author who's spent decades with his face buried in occulto-spiritual/ historical texts and who has read a metric shit-ton's worth of "facts" regarding people and societies whose daily lives remain virtually inconceivable to us, I have a Kong-sized pet peeve regarding this sort of thing. Sure, we can make educated guesses about the "real facts" of bygone days. But - as the Internet reveals about the age we live in - the subtle totality of human experience and belief, even now, is a vast enigma, not a certainty.
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I'm gonna get smacked for saying this, but...
We have no earthly idea about who meant what to the ancient Egyptians. All we have to go on are a reconstructed language that was translated from a Greco-Roman transcription tablet found accidentally by French soldiers almost two centuries ago. The fragments of that language are based on suppositions, little bits of modern Egyptian interpretation, a predominantly male academic tradition, and a whole lot of guesswork. Even then, the fragments of authentic Egyptian lore are pictograms (often incomplete) gleaned from the few remaining fragments of temples and government records. Those pictograms are extremely basic, with little nuance, no distinct subtle grammar, lots of room from interpretation, and a very high percentage of erroneous interpretation.
Saying "the ancients really believed such-and-such" is an absurd proposition. Even when we have detailed transcriptions in still-living languages (say, the Bible), the "real" meanings behind an author's thought are suppositions at best. The idea of insisting that "the ancient so-and-so's believed [Bleh]" is as accurate as assuming that a Sino-Hindustanian visitor from the 25th century would know what you "really believed" because they'd read a reconstructed version of English based on fragments of a menu found at an excavated Dennys. In France.
Pet peeve on the loose! Run for your lives! :)
Monday, December 8, 2008
Late Celebrity You Miss Most? Wendy O. Williams
No question: Wendy Orleans Williams of The Plasmatics. (1949-1998)
The band's first several album-length releases - New Hope for the Wretched and Beyond the Valley of 1984, plus the EP Metal Priestess - (**) remain some of my all-time favorites. Sadly, The Plasmatics began to decline, first by releasing a fairly lame Metal album called Coup d'Ea't and a weird concept album called Maggots. By then, the band and its schtick were wearing thin. Wendy broke away for a solo career - jump-started by Gene Simmns and several members of Kiss - and that's when I finally got to see my beloved Demon Queen of Destruction live.
Saturday, December 6, 2008
"Information Should All be Free?" Really? Think About It...
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I agree with you in theory about the MP3/Internet revolution. In most regards, it's been good for artists and fans, if lousy for an admittedly bloated record industry. Your "information should be free" statement, however, comes from from people who don't make their living creating intellectual properties - ie, music, books, etc. As one of the people who does make my living that way, my perspective is, shall we say, somewhat different. It's a nice idea in theory, but creating that "information" involves a LOT of WORK - inspiration, emotion, skilled labor and innate talent. And just as you wouldn't expect a stranger to come tile your bathroom, grow your food or fix your car for free, it's unreasonable to assume that an author or musician should just create neat free stuff for everyone with a computer.
File-sharing in small, consensual doses is viral marketing; on the scale it had attained before the Napster suit, however, it had become a one-sided "deal" in which hard-working musicians, producers and the labels that had put up thousands (if not millions) of dollars to record their work were having that work taken by people who were offering nothing in return. Sure, it's easy to say, "Dude, Metallica doesn't need a the money - they have plenty!" Thing is...
1: Metallica works REALLY GODDAMN HARD for that money. You think it looks easy? You try becoming a world-class musician, writing, composing and recording albums worth of material, than then spending most of your life on the road promoting it, playing it near-perfectly several hours a night for months on end. It's not easy, trust me. Just ask S.J. "Sooj" Tucker
2: Metallica and their label spend thousands of hours and millions of dollars creating that material. Why do you think you should be entitled to have it for free? Just because of some shop-worn hacker slogan? Fucking please.
3. Metallica's label depends on the money generated by that "information" to pay its employees. If everyone suddenly downloads the music without paying for it, who pays those employees for their labor - and with what?
When you're talking about "information" like stories, music or artwork (as well as computer software), your "information" becomes someone else's labor - and very probably their living as well.
If those parties choose to share it for free (as I do when I blog), then that's cool. However, if you just download my books - books I had written to pay my rent and without which I could not eat - because you thought you had a "right" to them, then we, my friend, have a problem.
Ditto that - and square it - if you think you've got the "informational right" to take my work and claim it as your work (maybe even profiting from it) just because - hey, it should be free and unregulated. Now you know why copyright law exists. :)
You may still buy CDs from artist you support. Many other folks, though, don't bother. And who defines "support," anyway? "Yeah, I kinda like that dude's music, but it's not like I support him or anything." How does "that dude" pay the bills or get compensated for his labor if even a small part of his audience says something like that? And given that situation, why should he bother putting anything out at all? Is it his "right" to work for nothing so you can share it with 10,000 of your friends?
Sure, I believe in small-scale personal-use copying, especially when the source of the work is publicly attributed to the creator. There's s huge gulf, however, between that usage and a "totally free and unregulated flow of information" - a gulf that we're only now beginning to address.
And Sooj
Friday, December 5, 2008
End of an Era: Forrest Ackerman R.I.P.
Dammit.
Forrest J. Ackerman dies at 92.
Popular culture, geeky and otherwise, would not be what it is without the Ackermonster's gentle hand. If not for his groundbreaking fan clubs, his musem, his endless convention appearances, and most of all his magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland, the world might lack Star Wars, Close Encounters, White Zombie, Fahrenheit 451, "'Repent, Harlequin,' Said the Ticktock Man," and many other mainstays of geek and popular culture.
A generous, enthusiastic fan of weird and science-fiction media, Ackerman discovered (and sponsored) young Ray Bradbury, coined the term "sci-fi," made Boris Karloff, King Kong and Vincent Price into household names for thousands of readers (including George Lucas, Stephen Spielberg, Rob Zombie, Tim Burton and Yours Truly), and introduced those readers to everything from Kikaider to Harlan Ellison to A Clockwork Orange to Plan 9 From Outer Space. Much to Ellison's disgust, the term "sci-fi" has become the shorthand term for the most influential form of fiction in the last century. And throughout the near-century of his life, Ackerman not only witnessed the future he both feared and adored come to pass, he himself became an agent of its fruition.
Rest well, Ackermonster, and thank you for all you have inspired, created and shared with us.
Has Rock Finally Rolled Away for Good?
Yesterday afternoon, I was listening to Pearl Jam's masterpiece Ten, when the thought hit me:
The early-mid '90s were the last time a Rock music movement really sounded interesting to me.
Let me clarify: I don't mean that I haven't heard a decent Rock(*) record since the '90s, nor am I indulging in that patented old-fart chestnut You kids today don't know REAL music - why, when I was your age... It's not that I like only the stuff that came out at the age when my musical tastes were supposedly set in stone. Nope. I've heard some pretty damned good Rock albums these last few years (Thea Gilmore's Songs From the Gutter, Muse's Absolution, Flogging Molly's Within a Mile of Home and The Sword's Age of Winters, among others), and really enjoy a number of recent artists (again, Thea Gilmore, Flogging Molly, Muse and The Sword as well as Placebo, Gnarls Barkley, The Decemberists, Nouvelle Vague, She Wants Revenge, and more). Still, I can't remember an explosion in Rock music that has really lit the world on fire since the early 1990s. Since then, even the best artists have been riffing on earlier achievements by earlier bands.
Really, think abut it: Thea Gilmore sounds like a distaff Neil Young; Flogging Molly is a direct descendant of The Pogues; Muse melds Queen with U2 and Pearl Jam, while The Sword records the best Black Sabbath albums that Sabbath never recorded. P!nk riffs on Madonna, She Wants Revenge riffs on Bauhaus, The Killers riff on Queen, and Gorillaz riff on everybody. Almost everyone in popular music these days sounds like earlier artists. I had hoped at one point that the Neo-Cabaret sound of bands like The Dresden Dolls, The Decemberists and The Ditty Bops would break into something larger, but... nope. The best Rock albums of the last decade or so have either come from older artists (Velvet Revolver**, the Rolling Stones) or from new artists who sound like older artists (Coldplay, Nickelback, Muse, Placebo, Flogging Molly, etc.).
The sad epitomes of this trend arrive with the hype over new albums from Metallica (Death Magnetic, their best in nearly 20 years because it sounds like what they did 20 years ago) and Guns-n-Lawyers... *ahem* I mean, the Axl Rose Ego Experience. Both dangle brand names with over two decades of shelf life, and while neither album is bad, exactly, they're just... OLD.
In contrast, think back to 1990-95: Nirvana. Pearl Jam. Nine Inch Nails. Ministry. Hole. L7. The Smashing Pumpkins. Tori Amos. The Indigo Girls. White Zombie. Soundgarden. P.J. Harvey. Alanis Morrisette. The Offspring. Live. Their names and music still have a classic sound to them. That's the last time I can recall turning on the radio and actually wanting to listen to it for more than a song or two. Yes, those artists were also riffing on the music they grew up with, but... I dunno, there just seems to have been something more exciting and innovative about the movement as a whole. Before the scene turned into Whiny White Boy Wave (Candlebox, Creed, Matchbox Fucking 20), heroined itself into oblivion (Ministry), or disappeared up its own ass (with The Smashing Billy Corrigans being the prime offender), there was a visceral power to the era's ROCK that reverberates even now. I didn't wanna pump my fist in the air to Ten yesterday because it came out during my impressionable teens - I was almost 30 when it was released. I found my heart pounding to every song on that album because it's still a great fucking album. I haven't heard its like in years.
I'm not saying there are no good Rock artists out there. I have yet, however, to see a movement where a torrent of artists combine into something memorable - a new "wave" of Rock that sweeps over the shoreline of popular culture again.
So, thoughts? Am I just getting old, or has Rock finally rolled itself out? What am I missing? Or is it Rock itself that's missing in the age of Rock Band?
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* - I'm not referring here to Hip-Hip, Soul, Electronica or Rap, although those genres seem pretty played out right now, too. The most intriguing artists in those arenas are mining their old influences to death as well - yes Kanye West, Joss Stone, Thievery Corporation and L'il Wayne I am talking about you.
** - Aka, the real Guns-n-Roses.
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Albums You Probably Haven't Heard Yet: Rats (1994)
Music and drugs have a long and checkered history. No cause, perhaps, has racked up more corpses among the popular music set (Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison and Presley are only the biggest names on a very large, very black wall). Yet, paradoxically, no other human experience besides sexual passion has inspired more powerful popular music. And during the 1990s, the queen of popular music drugs was heroin.
In the early 1990s, a friend appalled my former wife Cathi and me with the desire to try heroin. “Why the fuck would you do THAT?” we replied: “They’ve known that shit would kill you since the ‘60s.” Apparently, our friend knew something we didn’t, because she wasn’t alone in curiosity. Heroin was THE glamour drug of the 1990s. Crack cocaine may have given that era the musical mystique of Gangsta Rap, but heroin gave it Grunge. Immortalized in songs like “Under the Bridge” and “Mr. Brownstone(*)” as well as rocker flicks like Trainspotting and Pulp Fiction, heroin exerted a sick fascination over popular culture. And while Kurt, Courtney and Kate reigned as the (un)holy trinity of heroin chic, an obscure Canadian Blues singer named Sass Jordan was forging her own testament to the drug.
Rats depicts the harrowing relationship between Jordan, her lover, and her lover’s addiction to smack. Vomited up with raw vocals and naked emotions, this album sweeps through your room like a storm of glass. Although it’s usually shelved with Rock, Rats is essentially a Blues record in the hybrid tradition of Susan Tedeschi, Kenny Wayne Sheperd and Faces-era Rod Stewart. Shot through – almost literally – with that genre’s gut-wrenching love stories, Rats must have been an excruciating experience to record. Already acclaimed for her powerful pipes, Jordan became one of the few singers who could accurately be mentioned in the breath with Janis Joplin(**). Her shredded singing on tracks like “Damaged,” “Honey” and especially “Pissin' Down” literally makes my throat hurt in sympathy. The rusty guitar-slinging (courtesy of Stevie Salas) cuts like a complimentary buzz saw. This is the Blues the way they should be played – with a dirty broken bottle down gritty steel strings. The rhythm section (Brian Tichy on drums and a variety of players on bass) rocks hard behind the groove while a selection of other instruments (Hammond organ, harmonica, and occasional strings and piano) adds polish to the mix. Every track on Rats is hit hard out of the park by Jordan and her band. And though each song is distinctive, the arrangement of them drives – or, more truthfully, drags – the listener through Jordan’s personal hell.
“Hell” is an overused concept in popular music. Certainly, Black Metal and Gangsta Rap make flamboyant appeals to the Pit. But for all that fire-n-brimstone, the musical style that most accurately depicts human suffering and the hope that makes it worthwhile (yet renders it all the more excruciating) is Blues. How? Because the Blues are real. The emotions wrought up through Blues music are archetypal in scope yet shattering in intimacy. The Blues won’t tell you about Satan slaying multitudes – they’ll tell you how the singer’s heart was fed into a meat grinder and the singer helped Satan put it there. Rats is the epitome of this approach. From Jordan’s opening salvo on “Damaged” to the quiet affirmations of “Breakin’” and “Give,” Jordan charts the smacked-out slide of a relationship from rage to giddiness to eventual surrender.
Despite this grim focus, Rats is exuberant, not morose. It kicks off with a ragged yowl and ends with a Gospel organ. In between, the album rocks like a Brewtown bender. The beefy production, courtesy of Nick DiDia (who performed similar miracles with Pearl Jam) and Michael Wagener (Metallica), sounds dirty but not messy. Propelled by monster Blues riffs and that raging voice, Rats sounds wounded yet compelling. Strung out on the tension between allure and rejection, the album plays out a domestic tragedy in which Sass is a willing (if unhappy) partner to her lover’s self-destruction. Rats is not a concept album per se(***), but the sequence of songs cannot be accidental. The Hell they depict is not the conventional horrorshow of beatings and thievery, but a corrosive decay of love into ruins.
The stark artwork within the CD captures the jagged reflection within its music. Despite the denunciations of “Pissin’ Down” and “Slave,” the real object of Jordan’s loathing is herself. She freely admits that “Dirty is my style/ And I like my oil crude/ You’re the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen/ And I think I love you.” After lacerating her nameless lover and his needlephilia on the album’s first four tracks, Jordan owes up to her end of the problem: she likes her bad boy being BAD. The songs “Ugly,” “Honey” and “Wish” reveal that Sass is as addicted to her partner’s dysfunction as he is to “your old lady heroin.” Like a junkie, she tries to kick him cold-turkey with “High Road Easy” and “I’m Not,” yet keeps backsliding. “Sheeeet – ugly sucka!” proclaims guest vocalist George Clinton on “Ugly.” That "sucka" is Jordan’s kind of “Ugly,” though, and even as she shows her lover the door yet again (“Breakin’”), she doesn’t seem at all sure that she can ever truly be rid of him. One of the album’s many epiphanies occurs in the split-second glide between the cacophonous “Ugly” and the smooth intro to “I’m Not”; musically, it’s like a raucous bender followed by the hung-over morning after and its futile resolution to never do THAT again. Despite an insistence that “I don’t wanna kill myself yet,” the album never really resolves the issue. Its last track asks “In this world I’m livin’ in/ Is it cruel or is it kind?” Like love, like heroin, and like Rats, it’s both.
After a harrowing period that Jordan later called “a descent into the Black Hole of Calcutta,” Jordan apparently kicked that Bad Boy’s habit for good. Her subsequent albums are happier affairs (one even got the double-edged title of Present), and she eventually became a judge on Canadian Idol(****). But although her most recent album, Get What You Give, displays some of the old grit, Sass Jordan’s dysfunctional ‘90s relationship(s?) seem(s) to have provided her greatest inspiration. None of Jordan’s albums, before or since, packs the punch of Rats. Sass Jordan still has the voice of a scalded nicotine angel, but her Blues have lightened spectrum and those milder tones of blue just don’t run as deep – or as dangerous – as Rats.
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* - Actually released in 1987, but it’s close enough for government work.
** - Sass later went on to play Joplin on stage in a musical called Love, Janis. How they tamed Jordan’s cover-girl looks down to Janis’ homely appeal remains a mystery.
*** - An expression I’ve been cringing from using since the “Goth kids” episode of South Park, even if it is used correctly.
**** - “Good lord! *choke*”
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Albums You Probably Haven't Heard Yet: Bloodletting (1990)
"The Sky Is a Poisonous Garden" (Moreland, Napolitano) 2:36
"Caroline" 5:30
"Darkening of the Light" (featuring Peter Buck) 3:24
"I Don't Need a Hero" 4:25
"Days and Days" 3:12
"The Beast" 3:52
"Lullabye" 3:56
"Joey" 4:07
"Tomorrow, Wendy" (featuring Andy Prieboy) (Prieboy)