Call it life imitating art.  Life, that inherently shitty substance that has an imaginatively cruel way of showing you paradigmatic beauty for the sheer purposes of illustrating how utterly incompatible it is with a creep like you:  that painting you lose and lose and lose and lose, and still lose some more, even as the inspiration pulses with paramount fecundity behind your very eyes; that metaphor that won’t come, leaving bare, clumsy potholes in your speech, guttering it in the mediocrity you set out to repair; maybe just a face in the world you encounter every so often upon which you still cannot seem to produce a smile.  Shitty, shitty, and still shittier that stuff.

But like all the classic unattainable things you never get, you are compensated.   There are things that follow, perhaps, you feel, not of equal beauty.  Okay, of markedly lower orders of beauty, existing in entirely different dimensions of aesthetic integrity.  But oh what they do, those delusional miracles there to net the vagrant listener!  Whether it comes in the form of an incoherent voice of consolation whispering in shuffles, pops, and crackles beneath your aged John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman record, or the immoveable sales-pitch seduction-grin of a billboard model for teeth whitener who, without judgment, watches through a shamelessly gaping window of your apartment as you drink rye, listen to Nina Simone records, and with a duly lachrymose sense of ceremony, open your grades and the accompanying words of stern advice and adieu from the Administration.  Yes, that same abhorrent substance has its magic.  Look your ivory-toothed spectator in her unflinching eyes, maybe run your fingers through your unkempt hair—you know appearance is important—and let her know you have a few miracles of your own.  The Gentle People’s crush-fluff epic is just such a thing.  For almost ten minutes you’re not sure if you’re at the prom, or in Tron.  It could be both.

“Groovin’ With You” was recorded for Aphex Twin’s Rephlex label.  Like other notable singles by this sparsely documented trip-hop group, its charm is in being unnecessarily epic, a fifty-foot chocolate-covered cherry, parodying the artistic fetish with size, duration, and scale.  Was Scarface a good movie, or was it, like so many other two-tape rentals that waste a quarter of your waking day building to an ultimately disappointing sense of cinematic spectacle?  Jesus, that movie sucked!  Likewise, the mid-nineties, a time when electronica captured the feeble, well-coached imagination of popular cool, sold a similar breed of overkill.  For a short while drum and bass snapped and thumped from every intelligent-thinking moron’s dorm room with the pretentious irony of a Salvador Dali poster.  One in fifty managed to clock in under 75 minutes.  Hell, copies of Goldie’s infamous Saturnz Return bought the week it debuted are still winding down—given they haven’t been duly destroyed.

So without grandeur, and with no design to reinvent the turntable, ‘Groovin With You’ serves as an ideal point of commencement, guarded from the harsh realities of rye on your breath, and expulsion in the mail.  Smile, there’s a ten-foot tall woman with great teeth lookin’ your way.

The discovery of an alien civilization among our very own history books is the subject of Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, the first part of his Ficciones. In this 1941 text he produces a rather thrilling notion of history as a palimpsest of stories, some more competent than others, yet all equally fallible.  And as readers we are doomed to embracing the popular version of written history above all others.  Borges treats the reader to a sleuthing expedition through encyclopedias, literary journals, and anecdotes framing the documented, though improbable existence of the lost land of Tlön.  Two things, near as I can figure, derive from this metahistory lesson.  First, is the understanding that we are fools to ever swallow the history lessons before us whole.  Our gospel is an impossible one.  Sure truth is out there, but extricating it, and consequently validating it reveals an impossible project.  Have we the common sense to take such a revelation with a grain of salt?  Let’s hope so.  For the second revelation requires it.  Given equal parts skepticism, and imaginative liberality we are presented with a miraculous gift, and the second revelation:  the unparalleled responsibility of the interpretive voice.

Where does this road meet up with a school of Tibetan musicians?  Well, for me, until reading the dedication by the Dalai Lama in the jacket of their cd, it didn’t.    As a showcase for the exiled musical culture of Tibet, the Dalai Lama christens the assembly as that of escaped voices, voices that history threatens to consume.  And as American global priorities converge on our Middle Eastern concerns, along with sufficient weaponry to efface such rudimentary aspects to humankind as electricity and breathing from the surface of the planet, such marginalized histories within our civilization grow increasingly closer to disappearing from the story.  Anthropologists aeons from now will unearth Rosetta chips of propaganda in Hebrew and Arabic (are we so arrogant to think Texas-drawl English will make the apocalyptic cut; that universities in the year 30 million will teach Yinzer?) that sew shut the mysteries of global annihilation, one in Hebrew, “we dare you”, the next in Arabic, “we dare you”.  The scientists will think they discovered our binary code, not our apocaypse!

‘Gya-Iu NAM-thar’ is an aria from the fourteenth century opera entitled, “Dro-Wu Sang Mo”.  Apart from describing what little can be gleaned of the story from the lyrical translation, the opera is a heroic epic, its plot akin to Homer’s Odyssey.  Boasting zero insight into the language in which it was written and performed, or as our friend Mr. Borges would agree, little into the historical context from which it is derived I can only defend it upon the virtues of its sound.  The ultimate lesson from Borges’ Tlön allegory seems to be that the best resource for contextualizing the diverse cultures of our universe is that innate sense of empathy.  Listening without foolhardily demanding fixed meaning, without needing the story (or knowing the language) to detect, and explore the emotions.  Throwing this song into the mix, I felt it was virtually impossible not to get that overwhelming sense of connection.  See for yourself.

It’s so easy to see what provokes the standards fanatic, musicians and listeners alike.  The possibilities of a composition will yield such diverse results that they transcend the fixities of the text.  It ceases, as different artists tackle the same number, to be the same song.  The standard isn’t so much a complete statement as it is an autonomous question.  The answer is something that emerges through intonation, diction, and the dynamic of arrangement. In Bob Dylan’s ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright’, the line “There ain’t no use in turning on your light babe/I’m on the dark side of the road” is read with such self assurance.  His farewell to his lost love is practically arrogant in its coolness.  There’s nothing like that, however, in Nick Drake’s bedroom recording of the same song.  In the latter the same lyric is read completely free of confrontational tension.  There’s no longer anything at stake.  Dylan sings to convince his bygone lover that there is no need to bother considering the mess any further, reassuring himself of the finality of the situation.  Drake, surrendered to his loss, imparts only a wistful sense of consolation.  Dylan enjoyed darkness because it was a place to hide.  Drake knew he couldn’t.  It’s a great example of where the language of a song is capable of so much more than the author ever gave it credit.  It’s like a growing thing.

The standard in this case is Kurt Weill’s ‘September Song’.  It could be a May-December romance, or a lamentation of aging.  Willie’s version accommodates both possibilities.  Perhaps upon recording the 1978 sessions from which this was taken—at the age of 45-- he was beginning to see the scale of his musical contribution.  The wild country singer wouldn’t so much fade inside him, but it would age.  Like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, Nelson is one of those people committed to portraying the artistic life with realism, where others opt for grandeur.  The vulnerability and sense of reckoning heard in this song forge as strong an impression of the aging, and vital country singer as anything he could put in his own words.

A great many people scorn Brit-pop.  And if you aren’t one of them you still probably hate the shit out of Reef.  They’ve been called an English Pearl Jam rip-off act (an English Pearl Jam without the “rip-off” wouldn’t be bad enough?)  But what America trashes, England—for a while—will treasure.  And as is so often the case I’m siding with the U.K.

What better way to go to bat for Reef than by adding this cover of the Jam’s “That’s Entertainment”?  It illustrates why all the Pearl Jam wannabe static went around, but at the same time why it’s largely unfounded.  At worst their hearts are in Humble Pie, or maybe—God forgive me—Free.  Still, there’s good fun to be had here.

The pissy commotion, the juvenile fury that underscores great punk rock, which epitomized Paul Weller’s social contract with pop audiences is vagrantly, and most reverently celebrated on this recording.  A loose semi-acoustic approach to the song generates an alley brawl noise behind Gary Stringer‘s abrasively discontent tirade.  To hear Weller sing the song is to understand the monotonous putrescence of Margaret Thatcher’s England.  To here Reef do it is to hear how England’s youth must have felt enduring it.

Admittedly I got to know the Stones’ version of this way before the name Solomon Burke ever meant a thing to me.  I suppose that in and of itself is useful to, if nothing else, demonstrate the commercial betrayal of popular music’s autochthons.  Solomon Burke might not hold the currency as such soul singers as Otis Redding or Sam Cooke, yet his vocal presence on songs like this mark a cavity in our conception of popular music history, and how it evolved the way it did.  As the music industry progressively hones its tactics artists like Burke, shuffled off after a lucrative stint, are now revered simply because that reverence will make their records (reissues!) sell better.  A real kick in the ass.  This is quite simply a miraculous song.

In Quentin Crisp’s gushing praise for the works of novelist/artist, Mervyn Peake, he develops a term to distinguish his subject’s imagination from that of lesser beings.  Those below the likes of Peake, he accuses of practicing “comparative authenticity”.  Too many of them, he criticizes, are complacent with merely distinguishing themselves from others.  In the distinction from one’s peers resides the quality of artistic expression, an inferior will artist will surmise.  It is the project of a great artist to set to the margins such distinctions.  The very act of working with or against someone else’s standards prohibits true authenticity.  And even if our culture has evolved into a state where artistic production without imaginative comparison is impossible there is still truth to be found in Crisp’s words.  It reveals itself in moments of such extravagant and unique expression that the ceaseless current of comparison is forgotten.  Let art be known by its other, more flattering name, invention.

The artists we embrace tend to be of similar stock to Crisp’s conception of Mervyn Peake.  Weirdness and difference are mere illusions of innovation.  Consequently the shock and awe generated by such radical artistic expressions become associated with the artist’s persona.  Must the artist not be like the art he or she created?  It’s what makes you want to have a beer and a shot with Paul Westerberg, have circus sex with Bjork, or get down on your hands and knees behind George W. Bush while Mos Def shoves him ass over appetite into the filth he continues to subject us to.  Persona is a drug of unparalleled addictiveness.

Quintron cuts a similar shape in our notion of persona.  The listener develops an Alice in Wonderland sense of dislocation.  Every sensation becomes subordinated to the way he portrays them.  We become human cartoons.  Suddenly the imagination is not the place to where we’d like to escape, but the place where we consciously are.  And it’s scary.  ‘Dungeon Master’ is the blues that John Waters gets, the rock and roll weekend that Robert Downey Jr. rips through.  It’s Strom Thurmond arm-wrestling George Jones for that last rock of crack cocaine while Junior Wells leads a choir of angels, singing “Riot in Cell Block Number Nine” while the tenebrous face of God appears in a cross-cut slash of mango sun, revealing the corporate logo of the 700 Club on a ragtag remnant of denim by which George reverently recalls the sensation of caressing Tammy Wynette. He pleads, ‘Aw darlin’, don’t sell me to the angels just yet’.   In short, it’s everything for which comparison so vainly reaches, and never grasps.

An incident from my kindergarten class comes to mind when I think of glitch-core music such as this.  One peaceful midmorning as the class broke from its industrious work with large inflatable dolls who taught us concepts such as honesty and cleanliness we sat down to the daily consumption of milk and cookies.  As Miss Morgan passed out cookies, a classmate seated nearby voiced his irritation at his portion.  In laying the portion before him, it seems his cookie broke in half.  Holding before him, as evidence, the bifurcated object, he proceeded to request a replacement.  Were it that times were better, and that the Carlisle Area School district had the money to supply it, an emergency provision might’ve stood ready for just such a crisis.  However, times being what they were, they did not.  Miss Morgan reasoned with my classmate, “In a moment everyone’s cookie will be broken.  They’re much too large to force, whole, into your mouth.”   But what Miss Morgan had failed to grasp was that, for this unsatisfied child it was not the future of the object with which he was concerned—it was the present.  The principle of the matter resided in him settling for a fragmented version of something his peers possessed whole.  I for one wasn’t about to trade for the broken cookie.  No one else would either.  Not based on the logic set forth by Miss Morgan of its impending break, nor for the magnanimity I would undoubtedly demonstrate, defusing an unpleasantness as such.  Enduring his ongoing complaints I, like the rest of my classmates went about eating my cookie, breaking it first, of course.

We obsess over the whole.  Certainly through such institutions as family and trading card sets we have developed a reasonable preference for the whole over the fragmented.  And just as my classmates and I duly illustrated, it is to the fragmented that we return. A Happy family is one that hasn’t broken up yet.  The piñata was made for bashing.  Television gives us characters to tear apart.  Comedy is a form of cannibalism.  But still we are leery, and at times bitter when confronted the concept of our fragmented nature ourselves, when we become the victims of our own shoddy manners of judgment.

So our wry post-WWII culture, which by now is more accurately a post-post-WWII culture gives us Jackson Pollock, Thomas Pynchon, and the glitch.  Like Pynchon’s work, much of our glitch music today is considered aesthetically revolting, by virtue of the disorienting way it presents information.  Pollock is given a little slack because as chaotic as his work is it requires only an instant to absorb the configuration of its text.  You don’t painstakingly follow the painted lines; you don’t connect the splotches, as though they were elements of a conventional narrative.  But when confronted with something that requires real could-be-doing-something-productive time, when patience is vulnerable to being tried, and money is susceptible to being spent the sentiment changes dramatically.  Audiences might toss off a copy of Gravity’s Rainbow after the first fifty or so pages the way they might altogether refrain from investigating Pole after hearing Oval.  Disorientation overrides the nuances of these artists.   Logic detects an enduring sameness where flourishes anti-logical substance.  The concept is the disorientation.  And that, believe it or not, does not make the fragmented composition predictable.  The challenge lies in how time and space are cross-hatched.  Multiplicity and rarity are the properties of our relationship with contemporary media.  We compose as we channel surf, when the disc changer is on random, when the window is left open and the symphony augmented with traffic and screaming.   Pole’s “Tanzen” is a fine sample of the contemporary picture—a belly dance in the snow of February, and a cable station that just won’t come in clearly.  As a species we fall in love exponentially more with people on television falling in love with people, than we do ourselves fall in love.  Songs like this might not gel with radio conceptions of romance, but the way it food-processes that TV love with whatever love we’re still capable of, why, that’s enormously beautiful.

I hate the shit out of favorites, and lists, and ‘best-of’s.  Yet I can’t turn away.  When Rolling Stone magazine purports a list of essential recordings of some sort or another I gawk shamelessly.   You might hate the idea of a car accident, and a body with no head and a punch bowl’s worth of fresh blood littering up a stretch of interstate, but you dare not turn away.  These things are my car crash.  People pick favorites because it provides the ideal opportunity to say to everyone, ‘I have a favorite…find me.  Without the theatrics of me laying down on a couch in your office, and getting prescription mood stabilizers, this is my active gesture, my outreach.  Find me.’  What does it say about you?  Naughty, conservative, perverse, conniving, reticent, gratuitous, flamboyant?--How you feel about Forever Changes or Bitches Brew is bound to draw that out.

So without touting my own psychosomatic pierced-side too, too much, I do have something of an affinity for this particular track.  Some filthy gray and white mid-winter day last year I found myself in one of those narcotized moods, unwilling, possibly unable to move.  The phone wouldn’t ring no matter how hard I threw it.  It was like a Quaker prayer group held between yours truly, that wretched gray and white mid-winter weather, Johnny Walker ‘economy’-label, and National Public Radio.  To almost the day it had been one hundred years since Edward Kennedy Ellington, the veritable Homer of contemporary western civilization was born.  So NPR was rolling out the red carpets.  There was a series comprised of interviews, old radio broadcasts, and various recordings documenting Duke’s miraculous life.  And as the sun set, what pittance of it there was, I came to a sublime memoir in Ellington’s own voice--which if you’ve never heard him speaking is quite miraculous in its capacity for reassurance.  Anyway the subject had drifted to gushing praise.  An interviewer inquired about the industry involved with writing a ‘great song’.  So as best he could Ellington recounted the rather prosaic way he turned out some of his more memorable compositions.  The muse didn’t perch and whisper amid the chiaroscuro of heaven, “Duke, get one down today called ‘Sophisticated Lady’”.  No, it had to be a toss off, something trivial, unnoticeable to you and I.  No anecdote illustrated the diligence and inevitability of the composer’s genius like the one he told for ‘Solitude’.  Again, a real throwaway.  By the time the interview was conducted the sound of Ellington’s voice was recognizably aged.  It was a remote, yet unembellished reminiscence.  The composition came about in the evening.  Ellington was home from school.  His father, a butler at the White House had not returned home yet.  Duke Ellington’s mother was cooking dinner.  He wrote it to pass the time until the food was ready.  That’s all.  It took, as he recalled, about twenty minutes to compose.  Emotion itself should be so expedient.

Following the interview snippet the programmer played a version of ‘Solitude’.  It sort of wrecked me to know how infrequently humankind achieves perfection.  And when it does it tends to be quite accidental.  Waiting for time to pass, for dinner to be ready.

That ‘Sing’ was recorded for Blur’s first LP sessions, 1991’s Leisure, only to be omitted from the final cut, demonstrates the untimely curse which follows this band.  Each of their records appears in stores just in time for critical eyes to hail it as the hottest thing of fifteen minutes ago. Parklife hit just right (in England).  Leisure killed the Madchester sound of the Stone Roses, and the Happy Mondays.  And although instrumental in defining the Brit-pop sound, the excellent Great Escape was maligned all the same for exhausting the possibilities of a fad.  Ensuing efforts were seen as expatriate attempts to outrun their Brit-pop past.  They were slanting and enchanting—some say too much, others, not enough.

What makes ‘Sing’ such a gem (as much as 2000’s ‘Music Is My Radar’) is how effectively it functions, dislocated from Blur’s LP curse.  There is no event by which ‘Sing’ can be misjudged, no moment of fashion obsolescing, poised to take it down with it.

Being liberated as such ‘Sing’ is a small masterpiece of popular music.  The emotional parallel to their repeating and mercilessly simple rhythm in this song underscores the one talent for which Blur have yet to be recognized:  their ability to express the most personal emotional concepts with musical singularity.  Even Damon Albarn’s singing divorces the tendencies of many pop mouthpieces to tell what a voice should be showing.  It’s a great deal of cadencing and cold-sweating a metropolitan blues before an unkind jury, well before any tabloid could take it out of context, or any critic could say that Pavement did it first.
 

I don’t know shit about gospel music.  I know even less about metal.  I like the juxtaposition here as it does well to illustrate the ephemeral presence of ideology on the surfaces of music.  Energy is invariably the quintessence of a great song.

When Dorothy Combs Morrison’s voice emerges with apocalyptic intensity at the apex of ‘O Happy Day’, buttressed with the accompanying choir, claiming my fullest attention, I close my eyes, and my agnostic gourd contrives to not understand English.  Why let ecclesiastical idiosyncrasies ruin the moment, right?

That cavalry of sound unleashed when the choir enters is simlar to the instrumental campaign following the final verse of ‘Raining Blood’.  They’re identical sorts.  Each serves as an emotional fulcrum, fleshed out in the noise.  The dynamic of each composition rests on just such a place where musical expenditure yields to catharsis, and the integrity of the message is realized.  Ideology be damned; these are the places where labors of music are rewarded, endlessly.

PC can result in some capital feces.  There’s nothing so terrible about celebrating Jennifer Lopez’ coming out as a vanguard for Latin American art that isn’t true about any number of so-called “world” recordings.  Between Peter Gabriel’s Real World label, and David Byrne’s Luaka Bop imprint there is still nothing put down on tape that cannot be reduced to one word: imperialism.  Some anglo-nephew sets his table with the profits from a Burmese dance group’s labor, from the contents of a Saudi woman’s journal.  The message is, ostensibly, one of broad-mindedness, of cultural diversity.  At the end of the day it’s still the haves unwinding over a glass of port beneath the soft witty glow of an Ikea lamp to the tune of the have-not’s life, which is unfathomably shitty.  The American blues is the same way.  Hip Hop is rapidly becoming it.  Ethnomusicology is the polite way of saying trans-global fuck policy.

Cultural diversity is the latest personal hygiene trend, like breath sprays and oxygen bars.  A dandruff shampoo for the cultivated western scalp.  It seems that ignorance to the world has become a nuisance.  Like dandruff this is a condition we wish to rectify.  There’s no good sense in calling these excursions into non-western forms scientific, let alone ethical.  Just one more flavor we haven’t tasted.  As long as we can afford to why not?

And that’s kind of the point--so long as we’re not deluding ourselves here.  No matter where we look--whatever rainforest, whatever regime--it still falls conveniently in the crisp shadow of our own well-tailored sleeve.  Non-western culture, the stuff in recordings like this, is best when acknowledged as western stuff, another gal from the global village harem.  But it is only with unbearable guilt that we admit such things.  So it’s ‘ethnomusicology’:  the westerly distractions audible while the East is fitted with sockets for Coke machines, and signs that will one day, in the noble sentiment of Western competitive markets, read, “Checks cashed”.  This Canadian-Armenian collaboration is no better an indication of foreign ouevres than a fucking Souza march.  But as music, it walks unforgiving steps upon Souza’s carcass.  ‘Freedom’ insists that the value of a sound does not translate cleanly into the language and culture that can afford it best.  It’s like a virus, it just is.

The solipsism is often regarded as a psychological concession made to the artistic ego, an unnecessary exception granted, obscuring the communication between artist and audience.  Rather than venturing outward with one’s message this device is conceived as a route inward.  Solipsism is selfness and isolation.  But the fact remains that solid expression reveals the relationship between internal and external spaces, regardless of how self-involved its productions are.  In our most direct and frank studies we invariably find our frustration stemming from these complex, and seemingly prohibitive relationships indispensable.  The ego is merely a counterpart in this relationship, the solipsism, a setting.

When I heard this recording for the first time I had awful associations with Elgar, all that "Pomp and Circumstance" shit that you’re forced to hear when you do something nice.  To tell the truth I just assumed anything he had written was comparably saccharine.  The "Cello Concerto" had drama like the "Pomp and Circumstance", but in no way resembled those detestable baroque qualities of the latter.

What became essential to my appreciation was the performance of Jacqueline Du Pre.  The composition is one thing, and the performance, on whole, yet another.  It was the friction exposed with Du Pre’s leadership in this particular recital that brought the composition to life.  And really there are a number of contributing factors pointing to why that’s so.  The solipsism, conceptually, is among the most vital of them.

I can remember a moment outside in the winter, having finished a crap evening shift at Ali Baba, walking home with a baked potato along Forbes, when a Concert at the Carnegie Museum let out.  There were people, mostly older than me, and a few about the same age, fewer still younger, holding older hands.  It felt surreal, holding that halved-potato, and walking with it like it was a pet of some sort, just listening to Jacqueline Du Pre on headphones, and wondering how long I would be living like this.  There was a flurrying of voices, and the wind was particularly strong that night.  The sound she put forth accentuated all the deliberate things in the world.  It felt like capitalism was a rasp, like success, a mockery.  I was wearing the same clothes I had worn in the twentieth century.

What made all that extraneous noise so integral to the listening experience was how it authored strata atop the music itself.  The unpolluted listening is an idealized thing.  Resolution is corrupted in two irrevocable stages, in the time that a composition is recorded, and then when it is played back.  Both instances reveal the possible infiltration of noises from an exterior world, a world with which the music corresponds. The cello came across deliberate, unmistakably so.  I had a limited frame of reference for women artists, a little Sylvia Plath, and the self-portraits of Frida Khalo, Emily Dickinson, and of course, Angela Davis, whom no one could touch.  But it was so frustrating hearing a woman bitch and spoil nighttime like I thought only I could do.  The solo sounded like a thrashing against a thin bedroom door.  This was the kind of sound that injured people needed:  me, with that ridiculous potato, well half of one anyway.

You see, it was as much about that outside noise, captured in this live recording, as it is the music itself.  If you listen closely you can clearly detect it, the closing and opening of doors, sneezes and coughs, the ambience of the concert hall in which this music was recorded.  Have you ever felt like you couldn’t be outdoors enough for your own good?  Like on the street, or in the woods just wasn’t enough?  That’s the sound she made here.  Really kind of insisting upon a release that has no likelihood of happening.  For a little while the noises hushed-down behind her rallying of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and I began to think that perfection was something that it achieved only after duly settling in, the audience present that night having taken their seats, the ushers respectfully monitoring the silence of comings and goings that might corrupt the sound of music.  But just as soon as Jacqueline Du Pre’s accompaniment had been returned to the reverence of quietness, I heard them, the young, old, and those of the same horrible age as me, straying from the mouth of the Carnegie, unwittingly contaminating her irretrievable musical solipsism, and my best chance of hearing it happen.

I was in a club in Canada, balls-out hammed on well-drinks the first time I heard Daft Punk’s “One More Time”.  I was immediately and impulsively dancing like a perfect asshole. (I sort of dance like Groucho Marx.)  Recognizing the sublime sense of joy released from the music, I was stunned, not by the noticeably buckling dance floor beneath us, but at the people who stood motionless, shepherding more well-drink booze, and doing nothing to help cave us in and make the entire country fall in on top of us.  There are songs that all but show you, in a series of musical contours and pulsations how you’re to go about dancing to them.  I was undeniably hearing one.  My left feet cut the rug that night.

De La Soul’s “Me, Myself, and I” is one of those songs too.  It’s the kind of thing that when I think of the overarching blunders of humankind that an alien civilization is likely to come across in fossils and charred remains I pray this is somehow found instead.  Let the highly-advanced fuckers find it, and learn how divinely we joined sounds--well, Prince Paul did anyway-- and how we made language a benevolent thing that warranted sex and dancing, and rebuked the violence that prevented them—well, at least Posdnous, Mase, and Trugoy did anyway.

Now, Monica could mean just about Monica Anybody.  Our current lexicon, however, has one in italics:  She of the blue dress, indomitable stain, and executive love.  Miss Lewinsky, as Big Bill was wont to refer to her.  And as a Miss of distinction (or notoriety—you decide) her name has the same sense of proportion as Miss Jackson—the one you can call Janet.  So let’s assume that this is the Monica to whom they refer.

Tortoise always struck me as the kind of band whose sense of humor came in the way of musical in-jokes, rather than political or social satire.  It’s intellectual music (whatever that really is), but nothing too topical.  It is aesthetically thoughtful, at times clever, and always technically sound.  But any glimmer of satire always felt tenuous and speculative.  If Tortoise are the musical nerds they seem to be then Standards, their latest LP is, at least, a bit defiant.  From its glitchy deconstruction of Hendrix’ Woodstock recital of the “Star-Spangled Banner” which opens the record to the electric-Miles breed of fusion in “Eden 2” this is a record where the musical references exceed pun; these guys are throwing some zingers.

Standards is, musically, a conventional Tortoise record.  Even if the inspiration for these songs filtered in from the evening news their metaphors are still fundamentally rooted in music culture.  Steely Dan must have looked on with awe, saying, “Why didn’t we think of that?”  And in fact, this discreet fashion of musical satire has its origins in the Becker/Fagen sound.  Songs like “FM” and “Deacon Blues” could hiss with anti-populist downtalk all they liked, the bottom line was they were paradigmatic radio rock.

“Monica”, likewise, couches its sense of audacity and moral bewilderment with popular music culture in the very trappings of MTV heavy rotation.  The punch-line might recall Moliere, but the sound affects J-Lo.  It’s a slinky show of bling.  And when Tortoise wear it the results illustrate a rather provocative irony:  There is no façade behind which pigeon-toed fear does not crouch.  Since the band could never accessorize their way into the mainstream (I can only imagine them sighing at the very prospect of a crossover) the affectation takes on the sad and confusing spectacle of a four year-old girl wearing her mother’s pumps and makeup in the naïve attempt to associate with the mysteries of womanhood.

Tortoise explore “Monica” resolved to debunk the mysteries of empty style.  What is it that makes people give a shit about sound-bytes of absolutely no consequence?  Ultimately the bold appeal of fashion is as much to do with their statement as the composition it ornaments.  Whereas Steely Dan would gawk at this decked-out infant the way audiences do Britney Spears, Tortoise mercilessly send her out into the world; her awkwardness is a righteous wound.

.I grew up to Steely Dan.  Being, myself, from the dead center of the 1970’s made it initially hard to figure out what was so sleazy about Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, and the music they made together.  It’s like being born in a volcano and not understanding why everyone complains on hot, summer days.  The seventies was the great horsebreaker decade, dragging the vampire cultures of the beats, hippies, androgynoids, metalheads, and bikers into the scorchingly decadent sunlight of the mainstream.

The contours of a Steely Dan song are pornographic, and elaborate.  They constitute theme-music for the mundane life in which a walk from class to the pharmacy co-exists with a Penthouse Forum sex fantasy.  The clichées befriend the gaudiness and magic is born.  Grizzled, and unredeemed, Fagen assesses his college years.  They were messy, but adventurous, and the music that rises around it elevates it.  He might be singing about the great love of his life, about Vietnam, about anything, really, that might more positively reflect on his formative days of enlightenment and maturation.  No, no: bitter, rebound relationships; crap beer; football bets that tanked.  Exquisite.

You could almost say it was a blessing in disguise.  Shoegaze had fought the good fight, but eventually yielded to American grunge as the idiomatic sound of the nineties.  So when it did fade, bands like Slowdive were faced with a creative dilemma as to how they were going to adapt.  It only took a couple of months following their last effort, Pygmalion, for the band to reconfigure as Mojave 3, a Nick Drake-influenced alt-country group.  And though largely overlooked by critics and wayfaring shoegazers in their new Nirvana t-shirts and codified flannels, Pygmalion may very well be this group’s coup de grace.

The predecessor, Souvlaki, had achieved a classic status among listeners.  Bleary and pensive, yet loud as hell, it was the last consolation for a then-anxious flock of tussin-heads and huffers awaiting another sneeze from Kevin Shields.  The avuncular presence of Brian Eno (which would come to fruition on Pygmalion) had struck a resonant chord with the under-spoken culture of experimental music.  If Slowdive had to abandon shoegaze Souvlaki was the record to go out on.  It broke the mold.

The influential English label, Creation seemed to treat their final effort as an Eraserhead child.  It appeared inauspiciously, no one spoke about it, and largely, it went away.  The act upon which much of Creation’s clout was staked, Ride, had broken up.  And the rugged northern soul of Oasis was the signal on the horizon.  So with little push, and even less pop appeal Pygmalion debuted.  It was an astonishing coda for the barrage of drug noise that was breathing its last.  Perhaps addled by the shifting markets, or maybe just sick with it, the band produced a sort of elegy for careless youth. “Crazy For You” stands out among an excellent set.  The hypnotic eclipses of Neil Halstead’s voice circulate like a remote pattern of birds above a minute tinkering piano about to die.  Its dynamic grows as his phrasings press closer together, covering overtop one another.  It is an ambient impression of being lost, and foreign.  Yet there’s nothing confusing or grandiose about it.  Desolation learns its silhouette from such music.