The genius of John Lydon (Part I):"Two sides to every story / Somebody had to stop me..."

Two sides to every story
Somebody had to stop me
I'm not the same as when I began
I will not be treated as property!

-- John Lydon, in P.i.L's "Public Image"

This item inaugurates a series of posts dedicated to the discussion of the lyrics, singing, songwriting, image, fashion sense, rhetoric, persona and politics of John Lydon. I'll explain more about what I'll be discussing as I go along (since that's when I'll be deciding what I'll be discussing). Lydon -- a.k.a. Johnny Rotten -- is a complex artist, and almost every aspect of his career and life is more or less contentious. I don't intend to get to the bottom of any deep debates, particularly not as regards Lydon's significance in the United Kingdom, because his career draws from and contributes to the UK cultural consciousness in ways that will always remain partly beyond the scope of my comprehension.

In fact, my chief goal in hammering out these brainstorms about John Lydon is to make a case that people in the United States should take his contributions to music and culture more seriously; also that the US is now in many respects ready to understand Lydon's work, because the country has gone through plenty of growing up since the late '70s: a period not noted for American optimism, but which in retrospect appears to have been extremely naive, especially in comparison to the culturally revolutionary activities taking place in London contemporaneously.

I also should make clear that I'm not much going to be talking about Lydon's work during his creatively bankrupt phases, of which there have definitely been a few. To the extent that I touch upon, for instance, the Lydon of Public Image Ltd.'s 1983 release Live In Japan (not recommended!), it will be to point out how his work at its best is so good and so important that such missteps carry zero weight in a serious assessment of the quality and impact of Lydon's overall career.

I. Three general hypotheses.

It's my intention to argue that John Lydon, despite being held in high esteem by many punk rock enthusiasts, record collectors, and otherwise 'tuned in'-types, has not been given the sustained critical attention that is his due for his innovative and enduring contributions to arts and culture. For evidence of this, we need look no further than archived film, video and news articles about the Sex Pistols, which are quite often so hyperbolic, so full of clichés, so superficial, as to demean their subject. This is true, by the way, irrespective of whether the article or television spot in question is favorable or unfavorable!

For example, unfailingly they'll refer -- either blithely or enthusiastically -- to Lydon's lyrics or attitude as 'nihilistic', which in fact is a terribly wrong-headed term with which to describe his work. They'll read sarcasm into his moments of greatest sincerity, they'll mistake honesty for braggadocio, and they'll mistake braggadocio for hate. They'll read his odes to self-centeredness as disdain for that which is external to the self. And let's pause on this for a moment: just think about the kind of mind that thinks "self-centered = bad thing," instead of, for instance, asking itself "bad in relation to what, exactly?" And then going on to think, "Mighn't there be some things in relation to which self-centeredness is good? And what might those things be?"

Obviously, journalism and particularly music journalism isn't going to give us the latter mind. So I therefore am undertaking to brainstorm about what more people would know, were the latter mind out there writing for USA Today. But to begin with, we would be well served to explore what cultural or historical trends might hold regular media back. To account for this failure to give Johnny his due on the part of journalists and other types who are in the business of 'due-giving', I have a host of hypotheses. Just to list three rather general examples:

1. Plenty of ink has been spilled particularly in England on the subject of John 'Johnny Rotten' Lydon. Believe it or not -- despite all the dust kicked up by London's famously lowbrow tabloids, beginning with The Sex Pistols' famous appearance on the UK's Bill Grundy tea-time television show
   
   
   
   -- at least a respectable percentage of the commentary on Lydon's projects over the years in the UK actually treated its subject seriously. However, paradoxically, because the impact of the Pistols exploding into English culture was so seismic, a lot of what Lydon represents is by definition left unsaid by commentators from within that culture, even those commentaries that are most wildly sympathetic to Lydon's work and point of view. A gruesome but nonetheless instructive point of comparison in the United States is September 11th. If we were to look back at newspaper articles in the months and years following that event, it's unlikely that after an initial period we would find references to the details of that day. You just take it as a given. There's no reason to talk about all of its details explicitly. *
   
   
2. By its very nature, The Sex Pistols' -- and especially John Lydon's -- persona and media presence is/was oppositional. Therefore, the band's and the singer's impact is measured most fruitfully by the degree to which media reports and the rantings of the commentariat reacted to rather than assessed soberly the phenomenon of The Sex Pistols. There's nothing wrong with this fact as such. But it means that the articles or commentaries have a very short shelf-life. They appear to contemporary eyes -- especially if those eyes are American -- to be as ponderous and obscure as, say, The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (not recommended!).
   
   
3. While all of the above holds true particularly on the Right Side of the Pond, here in the US of A, the problem could be described as the converse of both 1) and 2). The music and culture-oriented media here -- to the extent that they can be said to exist -- simply don't know or understand or care about how revolutionary was the impact of The Sex Pistols in their native land. This goes not just for glossy toilet paper like, whatever, Rolling Stone or something, but also for media that should know what the fuck they're talking about but don't. You know, sophomoric middlebrow, middle class crap like Pitchfork Internet Magazine or whatever it's called, which is in a way even worse than Rolling Stone, because it doesn't pay its writers, and its writers write like it.

II. Oppositional thinking ≠ nihilism.

There. I've drawn our attention to the fact that the American press tends neither to know it's history nor to care about the history of cultures outside of its purview/target market, and that this has a lot to do with the fact that it doesn't understand Lydon, and especially didn't understand him during the late 70s. Compounding this problem is another uniquely American phenomenon whose relevance is undeniable despite the fact that it's....erm....extrinsic to the question of the relation between media and Lydon himself.

Our country's free fall into a bucktoothed, torture-promoting, redneck, xenophobic, anti-intellectual, corporate-oligarchic shambles has been set in motion by more than merely the blood-lust alliance brokered between the uneducated and stupid in one corner, and the neurotically fearful and repressed in the other. True, ours is a drooling and masochistic nation, but that's not what lies at the center of its obsession with mediocrity. To the contrary, the USA's real reason for failing to comprehend the nature of Lydon's art, politics and persona has to do with naiveté. Or maybe: a kind of insouciance.

Let me put it this way, it's for largely the same reasons that people in the United States have still managed to trick themselves into believing that there's no class system here. And if we have trouble coming to grips with that now, in the midst of the Second Gilded Age, you can be sure that we had trouble understanding it in the 1970s. Not that the 70s was a by any means prosperous time here in the good old US of A... But it was a naive time. The mainstream could no more have understood Johnny Rotten than it could have produced its very own Johnny Rotten, out of the remotest enclaves of Orange County.

No, the United States was on balance unprepared for the Pistols when they landed here and marched like a counter-clockwise Sherman through the unsuspecting countryside of the Bible Belt. Actually, I think in a weird way those Southern towns were somewhat ready, as evinced by the willingness of their cowboy-dressin' citizens to engage in confrontation,, particularly in San Antonio, where they gave as good as they got. And what they got was Sid Vicious cutting himself, calling the audience (in a righteously inspired moment), "a bunch of fucking faggot cowboys," and thwarting the advance of a particularly menacing faggot cowboy by hitting him over the head with his bass guitar.

Irrespective of the American South's readiness, San Francisco definitely wasn't. By the time Lydon came charging through with the early P.i.L line-ups, there had already emerged nationwide substantial pockets of understanding, receptive people. But the vast majority of culture still wasn't ready; they liked The Clash, maybe (and nowadays, what upwardly mobile professional doesn't like The Clash?), but Lydon was, in the estimation of the mainstream, still too demanding. Too, er....'nihilistic'.....

Tom Snyder: Back now with John and Keith who are with Public Image Limited. You know, it's been so long that I've almost forgotten where we were when we were at it!

John Lydon: Uh, you went into a bit of a tantrum as I likely remember!

Tom: Oh, yes I did.

John: You want to hear about us. Right. We have record commitments with Warner Brothers in America and Virgin for the rest of the world. We will, of course, oblige them, but, in the meantime, there is the possibility of us doing a soundtrack to a film in Hollywood. This interests us greatly.

Tom: What are . . .

John: We are not a band, we are a company. We have many interests. We are also making our own film in England right now at this very moment.

Tom: The music that you will do for the record companies that you mentioned. How will this music differ from what we thought was rock 'n' roll?

John: It's no more of that twelve-bar ditty, waving hair in the breeze, platform boots, flap your flair nonsense. It's not a packaged image of third-rate idiots. It's not a pose. We just do our stuff, hated as it usually is. I was very shocked by the reviews of the last album. I believe none of them. I think they liked us for the wrong reasons.

Tom: Well you told me all the things --

John: Trendy reasons. Can I have a cigarette again, please?

-- The Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder, 6/27/80

Is this exchange -- a video clip of which I have featured previously -- nihilism? The answer is that it so totally and utterly is not. When most former Lydon-naysayers encounter this golden nugget of Lydon lore with refreshed or attentive eyes, they find it exceedingly difficult to deny its brilliance. Fuck the charlatans like David Bowie: in the late '70's and early '80's John Lydon's total immersion in the trappings of a persona of his own invention is truly breathtaking to behold.

Of course it was rife with internal contradictions, of course it announced ambitions on which it could never ultimately make good. That's all more or less the point. The lines between theater and reality are blurred, and this blurring is always a gift to art, even if, from time to time, it may have cost Lydon his credibility in vast expanses of American straight society, people who are used to having their expectations and assumptions confirmed; people who are used to mediocrity. It's not these people to whom Lydon was or should have been reaching out: rather, it was their disaffected children. Who needs, after all, the kind of 'credibility' that would have accrued to him, to his name, to his brand were he to have on such occasions restrained himself from rocketing at breakneck speed to the spectacularly eloquent rhetorical extremes to which he would push his capacity to negate??

I'll tell you where such restraint would have gotten Lydon -- which is also, by the way, what we'd have gotten from him. Picture a John Lydon who focused not on individual emancipation, but on large-scale political change? A John Lydon who aims for the approval of the broadest possible cross-section of the music- and culture-consuming population. A John Lydon focused upon moderation; a John Lydon whose raison d'etre is consensus-building! All manner of restraint, politeness, dependability, bang for yer buck!, middlebrow-ness, all couched in a facile/sheek rhetoric of radicalism...

A John Lydon, in other words, who is out to uphold such binaries as authenticity vs. disposable pop, manly-man vs. pussy-licker, solidarity through discipline vs. creative, anarchistic utopianism, politics vs. beauty, brotherhood vs. individualism, etc., instead of setting out to dissolve these binaries. A John Lydon who first pauses to consider whether or not you will find what he has to say palatable before letting you know what he thinks. A John Lydon whose idea of respecting his audience is to be nice.

We're not necessarily out there to give people a good time.

-- Keith Levene, describing P.i.L's live performances, 1978.

So, what would this parallel-universe John Lydon look like?

It would look like The Clash, of course!

III. The Clash vs. The Sex Pistols

And, after all, there's nothing wrong with The Clash, in the same way that there's nothing wrong with the Stones's Sticky Fingers. You know, play it at the afternoon barbecue, and I won't complain.

But whereas The Clash was good -- at times, even great -- it was always just a rock 'n' roll band. The Sex Pistols and early P.i.L was and is much much much more than that.

To explain why the Pistols are far-and-away the greatest of the original wave of UK punk bands we could simply point out Lydon's and Co.'s disdain for the term 'punk' -- who the fuck gave you license to label me? insisted ** John Lydon in 1976, when the term first appeared in the UK press, describing him as 'King of the Punks'. And as for 'rock', The Sex Pistols were, after all supposed to be that Last Rock 'n' Roll Band. In other words, rock is "vile. It's dead, it's a disease."

But I'll go a tiny bit further to verify that beyond a shadow of a doubt, that The Sex Pistols kick The Clash's ass every time. As I remarked earlier, just take a look at The Clash's audience:

I give you Stephen Metcalf, Slate's good-natured -- if somewhat mealy-mouthed -- book critic-guy, in whose estimation The Clash reigns supreme. If ever you find yourself participating in the tried-and-true punk rock parlor game of THE CLASH VS. THE SEX PISTOLS: WHICH IS THE GREATEST PUNK BAND OF ALL TIME??, would you really want to find yourself choosing this man's side? Just look at him! It's so clear that he really really likes Bruce Springsteen, and probably what's more, he uses the phrase "creative class" with a straight face. I can't see for sure, but is that a pair of khaki shorts that he's wearing with his winning wrinkled blazer/twice-unbuttoned shirt combo? Try and convince me that he doesn't wear Birkenstocks, that he doesn't in fact refer to them as his "Birks," and that he doesn't wear his Birks while he listens to London Calling on his I-Phone, while sunning himself at his friends' timeshare? Just go ahead and try.

Metcalf reveals that he's partial to The Clash in an article that was published by Slate in 2005. In this article, he refers to the Pistols as "a bunch of lowlifes tossed together by a cunning impresario." I should explain that it's not entirely clear whether Metcalf means this as a dis or as high praise. Frankly, very few things about Metcalf's article are even partially clear, and the few things that are clear are also stupid.

Case in point: Metcalf's pro-Clash stance appears to hinge on the fact that -- unlike The Sex Pistols -- The Clash weren't in actuality a punk band at all. Instead, they were a rock 'n' roll band! And bulwarking Metcalf's thesis is the fact that the Strummer/Jones songwriting team consisted of a (furtively) middle class guy (Strummer) and a partner who was truly working class (Jones). Previous examples he identifies -- after conducting careful research -- are Jagger/Richards (middle class/working class) and Lennon/McCartney.

(I've heard it said many times that Lennon -- the writer, after all, of the brilliant "Working Class Hero" -- was not himself working class, but this point has been wildly overstated. Fine, he was upper-lower class then. There just wasn't that much of a difference. My real point, of course, is that the Metcalfs of the world are wasting their and our time by using such dumb criteria to categorize musical or pop-cultural phenomena. And my real real point is that the Metcalfs of the world should just, um...like, NOT write about music or pop culture or punk rock in the first place. [I should add that I do dig the specs he's wearing in this pic.***])

IV. The USA's malaise means that The Sex Pistols & early P.i.L
make more intuitive sense to us than ever.

And so anyway. This is where I would like to enter the conversation. Because, for some of the reasons articulated in the upper reaches of this post, the majority of media in the USA still get Lydon totally wrong. Even -- or perhaps especially -- the media that purport to like him. Doubtless for all the wrong reasons; trendy reasons. It's for all of the same reasons that a sizable portion of the American mainstream did understand the slogan-politics and militarism/machismo of The Clash. (And to give Strummer & Co. some credit, they too were obviously turned into a self-caricature for reasons that were not always the band's own doing.)

Lydon's art is not 'nihilistic'. Nor is it 'ironic'. Nor is it 'stream-of-consciousness'. Nor is or has Lydon ever been a 'bad singer'. In fact, he is the single most superb, innovative, important and influential singer of the last 30 years. Is Lydon's music 'punk rock'? Only if you mean it in the way that recognizes that 'punk rock' has no meaning.

Is Lydon's art 'oppositional'? You fucking bet it is. And herein lies the key.

To be continued...


________________

* Of course, in aftermaths of both the Pistols and of September 11th, people also eventually stopped thinking about it, which is a more complex issue that we won't go into right now.

** I'm paraphrasing here.

*** I should also point out, if I've not made it clear, that I actually like The Clash. I simply don't think they hold a candle to The Sex Pistols. This holds both musically and with respect to cultural significance. Not that I really believe those two things can be separated, but let's save that discussion for another day.....

In appreciation of Robert Christgau. Alternatively: Is Tom Petty dumb, or just from the South?

Are you:

• unemployed?
  
• writing your thesis?
• working a temp job?
• a member of the "creative class"? *
  
• a shut-in?

Day after aimless, plodding, meaningless day, do you find yourself adrift in an ocean of tedium and melancholy, clinging for dear life to the tatters of any minuscule tid-bit of Stuff White People Like-like guffaw-fodder that the chill wind of the World Wide Web doth by happenstance bloweth your way? Growing tired of refreshing Google News every thirty seconds to gawk at the glorious pile of debris where the Gonzales Justice Department once stood? Are you worried that you may have -- in a phrase coined by my brother-in-law -- "reached the end of the Internet?"

Have I got the time-waster for you. At robertchristgau.com, the bored Web-surfer has at her fingertips a complete archive of the music reviews, essays in cultural criticism and -- what d'ya call 'em? -- think pieces published in the long career of Greenwich Village Voice-contributor Robert Christgau. The self-appointed "Dean of American Rock Critics" is fairly often way wrong in his conclusions, but this wrongness makes him no less entertaining and no less weirdly informative. Christgau pioneered the technique of confining each review to a short, snarky blurb, whose density suggests hours devoted by the critic to deliberating over every detail of the music and lyrics, over the aesthetic and political significance of the artist and his work. Or, more likely, it suggests hours devoted to plotting sadistically ways in which the critic shall go about needling the artist for his basic weakness, that of not being Robert Christgau.

Christgau's style -- epitomized by the Consumer Guide collections that he publishes periodically (or used to, anyway) -- is imitated as widely and as hamfistedly as that of his contemporary, the late Lester Bangs. But neither Christgau nor Bangs should be blamed for the naff undergrad shit that predominates on Pitchforkmedia Dot Com. Neither is it Christgau's fault that his habit of assigning letter grades to albums has over the last few decades become standard practice in 'alternative'- and Entertainment weeklies. I'll wager that this practice of his was pretty nifty when he began writing rock criticism in the late 1960s. But of course I have no way of knowing.

Anyway, so let me share with you some of my favorites from robertchristgau.com's bottomless well of erudite snark.

An artist that Christgau has a real problem with is Tom Petty. Now, personally -- after deciding for a while that I disliked Petty for being the worst kind of pandering pseudo-populist -- I have come around (as I had initially done) to respecting tremendously Petty's talents as a craftsman of pop songs and pop records. And anyway, having a broad audience is a good thing. Plus, it turns out he's really just a pretty smart and clever guy. (Any practitioner or connoisseur of songwriting and record-making should really read Paul Zollo's 2005 book Conversations With Tom Petty.)

But here in its entirety is Christgau's reaction in 1985 to what is admittedly Petty's worst album (not that I've ever heard the entire thing), Southern Accents, a 'concept album' about the South (Petty was born in Gainesville, Fla., from which he fled in his late teens/early 20s for L.A., fame and fortune):

Petty's problem isn't that he's dumb, or even that people think he's dumb, although they have reason to. It's that he feels so sorry for himself he can't think straight. Defending the South made sense back when Ronnie Van Zant was writing "Sweet Home Alabama," but in the Sun Belt era it's just pique. The modernizations of sometime coproducer Dave Stewart mitigate the neoconservative aura somewhat, but unmitigating it right back is Petty's singing, its descent from stylization into affectation most painful on side one's concept songs. Side two is less consequential, and better. Note, however, that its show-stopper is "Spike," in which a bunch of rednecks, I mean good old boys, prepare to whup a punk. It's satire. Yeah sure. B-

Ever the anti-elitist's elitist, and first and foremost a lover of hooks and back-beats, Christgau strives always to gives credit where credit is due, even if he never quite lets Petty off the hook for either his whiny rasp or for what I suppose Christgau detects to be traces of Petty's closeted, ongoing affinity for the reactionary backwardness of the part of the country from under whose thumb he was so quick to escape. Here's Christgau's blurb on Petty's 1993 release Greatest Hits:

Sometimes it's hard to remember what a breath of fresh air the gap-spanning MTV figurehead was in 1976. So revisit this automatic multiplatinum, a treasury of power pop that doesn't know its name--snappy songs! Southern beats! gee! Like Billy Joel, say, or the Police, his secret isn't that he's a natural singles artist--it's that he's too shallow to merit full concentration except when he gets it all right, and maybe not then. Petty is the formalist of the ordinary guy, taking his musical pleasure in roots, branches, commerce, art, whatever gets him going without demanding anything too fancy of his brain or his rear end. Footloose by habit and not what you'd call a ladies' man, he often feels confused or put upon, and though he wishes the world were a better place, try to take what he thinks is his and he won't back down. He has one great virtue--his total immersion in rock and roll. A-

Christgau nails something in the last sentence. And he also nails the thing that makes enjoying Petty's music sometimes feel icky -- its preoccupations with ordinariness. What he doesn't seem to give its due of course is just how singular Petty's gift is. TP does, after all, create things that are sublime, even if he's fashioning these things out of the bric-à-brac of ordinary, self-centered white guy experience in consumer society. And there's nothing wrong fundamentally with doing that, nor is there anything inherently icky about the joy that accrues therefrom, even if there's something shallow and momentary about it.

Where Christgau's characterization holds force is in its cognizance of the fundamental conservatism or at least quietism of the consciousness that inheres in Petty's songs. It supplies something life-affirming to millions of us, but some of us among those millions know that there is an element of pandering -- of pity and of charity, if you will -- that may help people to hold on for dear life when the times are tough, but that responds only rarely and fleetingly to the ambition to rise above. There is a stank that wafts off of much of Petty's work that is instantly recognizable as an opiate, that functions to deflect the listener's attention -- and now the soaring, memorable chorus -- away from her desire for change.

Take for example the once-ubiquitous radio smash-hit "Into the Great Wide Open": rebellion stripped of its politics, in which youthful dalliances with hedonism are tagged with familiar moral valances and lack any potential for creative growth, improved self-understanding, or emancipation from prevailing cultural and moral values. The "great wide open" that the song's male and female protagonists behold, stretching out to the horizon before them, is at all times implicated by the song's narrator as at least ironic and probably futile. A not-unsubtle message is that the freedom to make and follow your own dreams is always a chimerical kind of freedom, its pleasant 'reality' perceptible only through the lens of naïveté or in the impetuosity of youth. Finally, the determining forces by which the protagonists either sink or swim in quicksands of the San Fernando Valley desert are in the end the forces of the marketplace, of the extent of one's popularity, of one's net worth.

All of this would be fine if "Into the Great Wide Open" were specifically a cautionary tale, a critique of the status quo. Were the song an exposé of the structure of cheap myths at the hands of which the protagonists are hoodwinked, a structure whose stranglehold upon popular culture -- in whose grasp the protagonists had been seduced -- is tightened as a result of their participation in it (more grist for the mill). I don't mean a cheesy moralizing tale, but a narrative whose scope is sufficient to incorporate this particular angle. The "great wide open" is, after all, chimerical. What could be wrong with that?

But the song isn't a critique, nor is it an exposé. It is in fact a celebration of this very naïveté, of the 'exuberance of youth', in the most mainstream and cartoonish sense. Petty's narrator -- and no doubt the actual Tom Petty -- sees himself in the male protagonist (the Johnny Depp character, if you've seen the video). He locates in the protagonist Petty's own improbable escape from the reactionaryland of redneck northern Florida "into the great wide open" of sunny California and into his insanely successful career as a rock star. The irony in the song is that he, now a multi-platinum artist many times over, now knows that fame and fortune aren't all they're cracked up to be. He still has his ups and downs just like anybody else. He's grateful for his success, and satisfied with where his hard work and ambition have gotten him, but he's still searching for the right path, just as he always had. As before, his "future is wide open." 12-string guitar cadence.

So, far from deconstructing in specific terms what fallacies are inherent in the clichéd 'exuberance of youth', Petty's looking back wistfully and even nostalgically upon the vicissitudes of his own participation in this process. He's showing that he got banged up pretty good, but he made it through all right, and although things are never what you think they're going to end up to be, he's still happy to be alive, still up and at it. So don't fret.

This element of stasis, of things turning out to be all right in the end, characterizes much of Petty's work. It's a perfectly valid thing to think and talk and sing and feel about, but that doesn't change the fact that at its core is a kind of acceptance of the way things are. Petty is very sincere in what he communicates, and clearly feels love and affinity for his audience. That's not in question. The thing is that he does in effect pander to this audience, and there's no getting around it. I doubt that it's intentional, but this is why I say that Christgau is correct to detect and decry the pervasive ordinariness in Petty. His songs are imbued with a morality that is strongly felt and consistently held -- from which he "won't back down." But none of this changes the fact that it's basically shallow.

Of course, principles about which Christgau and I agree generally tell you nothing about whether or not we agree on a case-by-case basis (and that's part of the fun). For example, this is the totality of Christgau's review of 1991's Into The Great Wide Open, on which the eponymous track under discussion appears:

grant [sic] him this--he's a hooky sumbitch ("Into the Great Wide Open," "Two Gunslingers) *

Oh, and the asterisk means 'honorable mention'. These items are rated on a scale of *, **, or ***, instead of receiving the letter grades that are reserved more worthwhile fare. So, it's a positive review, as far as that goes, just a not a very important record. Christgau does, however, assign a letter grade to Petty's Rick Rubin-produced Wildflowers (1994), an album that I and a near-consensus of everybody else everywhere consider without question to be Petty's chef d'oeuvre:

If he were a flower, he'd be wilted, but since he's really more a dick, call him torpid. That Rick Rubin, what a laid-back guy. B-

All right, that's enough CG on TP.

Moving on to another ultra-mainstream -- in fact, even ultra-mainstreamer -- act: the mega-hyped, chart-topping, globe-trotting, longevity-having, sartorially phase-shifting, rich-as-shit u2, beloved by ordinary punters and despotic heads-of-state alike. And, of course, don't forget The Children. Christgau on their first offering, 1980's Boy:

Their youth, their serious air, and their guitar sound are setting a small world on fire, and I fear the worst. No matter where they're starting off--not as big as Zep, maybe, but not exactly on the grunge circuit either--their echoey vocals already teeter on the edge (in-joke) of grandiosity, so how are they going to sound by the time they reach the Garden? What kind of Christian idealists lift their best riff from PIL (or from anywhere at all)? As bubble-headed as the teen-telos lyrics at best. As dumb as Uriah Heep at worst. C+

Note his recognition that U2's The Edge nicked the riff of "I Will Follow" from Keith Levene's incendiary performance on PiL's "Public Image," the latter a vastly superior song in every respect imaginable. That wins Our Critic some brownie points, awarded by Our Blogger. By 1987, which saw the release of the, erm..., let's face it, seminal LP The Joshua Tree, Christgau -- recognizing that the conquering of the world was at this point not only inevitable but within the Irish foursome's grasp -- has a lot more time for l'antics de Bono and his Band of Nominally Christian Soldiers:

Let it build and ebb and wash and thunder in the background and you'll hear something special--mournful and passionate, stately and involved. Read the lyrics and you won't wince. Tune in Bono's vocals and you'll encounter one of the worst cases of significance ever to afflict a deserving candidate for superstardom. B

Although he seems already to be sharpening his fangs in preparation for the band's eventual Wrong Turn, Christgau hands out an even higher letter-grade for U2's shrilly political and hysterically earnest 'four newly-jet-setter-level rich Irishmen return to their American roots' extravaganza, 1988's Rattle And Hum (and, if you didn't already, now you know what eux means):

Pretentious? Eux? Naturellement, mais that ain't all. Over the years they've melded Americana into their Old World riffs, and while Bono's "Play the blues, Edge" overstates this accomplishment, their groove is some kind of rock and roll wrinkle. This partly live double-LP is looser and faster than anything they've recorded since their first live mini-LP, with the remakes of "Pride" and "Silver and Gold" and "Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" improved by both practice and negligence. A good half of the new stuff could knock over unsuspecting skeptics, the B.B./Hendrix/Dylan cameos are surprising and generous, and as a token of self-knowledge Bono concludes a lecture on South Africa with a magisterially sarcastic "I don't wanna bug ya." Yet as usual things don't get any better when you decide to find out exactly what he's waxing so meaningful about. B+

It's funny, because a lot of other critics and ordinary schmoes felt that with Rattle And Hum itself, U2 was ripe for backlash. For all of the reasons that Christgau lays out, no less. This is part of what's so fun about sifting through his reviews. Despite being poised to move in for the kill, he suddenly changes tack. This is an example of his occasional tendency to tip his hat and let 'em run a victory lap, perhaps in a compensatory gesture his failure to laud sufficiently the artist's previous masterstroke.

And sure enough, the Dean of American Rock Critics once more catches his unsuspecting readership unawares by thumbing his nose at what everyone else deems to be U2's remarkable Second Moment of Triumph, if not the band's true watershed moment in and of itself. Here is what Christgau offers on 1991's Achtung Baby:



This is Christgau's way of saying that it's "A Dud," which he further explains "is a bad record whose details rarely merit further thought. At the upper level it may merely be overrated, disappointing, or dull. Down below it may be contemptible."

As is often the case when Christgau decides that a record is somewhere between overrated and contemptible, we have to wait a couple of years or more for his explanation, when and only if he feels that the band in question once again merits his attention. His review of 1993's Zooropa adheres to this pattern, and it's opening line is vintage Christgau:

I've never seen the point of hating U2. Their sound was their own from the git, and for a very famous person, Bono has always seemed thoughtful and good-hearted. I liked what I read about their pop irony, too. Problem was, I couldn't hear it--after many, many tries, Achtung Baby still sounded like a damnably diffuse U2 album to me, and I put it in the hall unable to describe a single song. But having processed this blatant cool move, I'm ready to wax theoretical. Achtung Baby was produced by Daniel Lanois, and Daniel Lanois isn't Brian Eno--he's Eno's pet romantic, too soft to undercut U2's grandiosity, although I admittedly enjoy a few of its anthems-in-disguise now. Zooropa, on the other hand, is half an Eno album the way Low and "Heroes" were. The difference is that Bowie and Eno were fresher in 1977 than Bono and Eno are today. Each must have hoped that the other's strength would patch over his own weakness--that Eno's oft-wearisome affectlessness would be mitigated by Bono's oft-wearisome expressionism and vice versa. But tics ain't strengths, and although these pomo paradoxes have their moments, when I'm feeling snippy the whole project seems a disastrously affected pastiche of relinquished principle. B-

Does Christau ever come around to just dole out some unqualified props for the band that he doesn't see the point of hating? Well, no. But he comes awfully close at yet another unlikely moment. Most critics declared 2002's All That You Can't Leave Behind to be U2's 'return to form' -- with all of the good and bad that this implies. Christgau applauds the album as the group's finest record to date:

I know they're with a new label if not corporation, but the transformation I imagine was simpler. They woke up one day, glanced around a marketplace where art wasn't mega anymore, and figured that since they'd been calling themselves pop for half of their two-decade run, maybe they'd better sit down and write some catchy songs. So they did. The feat's offhandedness is its most salient charm and nagging limitation. If I know anything, which with this band I never have, their best. A-

Lest, however, we miscast Christgau as a contrarian for contrarianism's sake, The Dean's high regard for the now-defunct band Pavement -- whom critics venerate pretty much unanimously -- is generous and laudable, if not exactly magnanimous. Now, obviously, he and everyone else is absolutely 100% correct to praise Malkmus & Co. to the high heavens and beyond.

As far as I've seen, no other artist comes close to a track record this consistently good in Christgau's oeuvre, and nor should she. (Even the good name of his beloved Velvet Underground was tarnished in its last years by charlatans who stood where Lou Reed was supposed to be.) Here's a listing of Pavement's LP's, each accompanied by the letter grade Christgau awarded it:

Slanted and Enchanted [Matador, 1992] A
Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain [Matador, 1994] A
Wowee Zowee [Matador, 1995] A
Brighten the Corners [Matador, 1997] A
Terror Twilight [Matador, 1999] A-

The last one is a bit of a gift, methinks. It probably deserves a C+. That's love for ya, and we all know that "love is blindness." Anyway. For now, I leave you with Christgau's review of Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, for my money, a brilliant -- or anyway, right-headed -- piece of writing:

Whether the tunes come out and smack you in the kisser or rise from the clatter like a forgotten promise, this is a tour de force melodywise, which is not to get dewy-eyed about its market potential. They'll never truly sell out until they take voice lessons--as alternarockers from Stipe to Cobain know full well, soulful strength is the pop audience's bottom line. Me, I find their eternally pubescent croaks and whinnies exceedingly apt, and though in theory I always prefer songs that aren't about music, any bunch of obscurantist jokers who can inject the words "Stone Temple Pilots they're elegant bachelors" into my hum matrix have got a right to sing the rocks. A

___________________

* Breaking news: Turns out there's no such fucking thing.

Strange Season featured in Ball of Wax Audio Quarterly, Volume 12

The Seattle-based musician Jack Shriner, leader of the band Strange Season is a singer-songwriter, a multi-instrumentalist and an exceptionally talented guitar player.

All of these qualities are on display in his contribution to the current edition of the Ball of Wax Audio Quarterly. His song "Inside Voices" -- like most music worth listening to -- is kind of difficult to describe. A track culled from Jack's eclectic second album A Tour of Brief Reunions (available through Jack's Myspace page), "Inside Voices" concerns a zigzagging bass groove that is put through its paces by the jazzbo-tribalism of Dave Flaherty's drums. Flaherty's timekeeping is precise, as close attention to his high hat and bass drum will confirm. However, his toms and snare are engaged in a fascinating dialogue with this metronomic pulse, while Jack's melodic and jerky precision bass slips in and out of the gaps between beats.

All right; enough crap metaphors. Alongside the above-described activity, an interesting ambience emerges from the interplay of 1980's plastic Yamaha synth-stringscapes, swirling piano chords, and obscenely inventive electric guitar lines.

Jack plays lots of shows these days in the pacific northwest, sometimes as a solo artist, and sometimes with his band Strange Season. In addition, his guitar playing and vocals appear on the début album by the Chicago-based band National Tryst, to be released this upcoming fall.

Reckless Records review of Smallwire début

Smallwire's début album Songs for Sleeping In, issued by the Japan-based Moor Works label, is now available at Chicago's Reckless Records. To hear some of the songs that feature on this album, won't you have a listen at Smallwire's Web site and Myspace page?

Here is the Reckless Records review of Songs for Sleeping In, reproduced in its entirety:

SMALLWIRE
SONGS FOR SLEEPING IN (JAPANESE IMPORT)
MOORWORKS
Chicago's SMALLWIRE caught our attention a few years back with their self-released e.p. "Death of a Snowflake." Since then, they've been slowly crafting this very strong debut album. The most striking quality of the group is the rich & ethereal vocal harmonies that recall bands such as LUSH & STEREOLAB. The arrangements are sparse & restrained with the rhythm section sometimes sitting out almost entire songs. There's a maturity to the songwriting here that bands often don't hit upon until their third or fourth release. Along with the 1900s & SCOTLAND YARD GOSPEL CHOIR, SMALLWIRE are paving the way for a new wave of orchestral pop groups in Chicago. If you like BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE, GALAXIE 500, Slumberland bands etc... then this is an album you really need to hear.

Available at: All Stores
New CD $14.99

"Brutal" by The Mekons

The lyrics to one of my favorite songs by The Mekons, from the band's 1991 album The Curse of the Mekons. It is maybe a blueprint for good political songwriting. If only you could hear Sally Timm's celestial deadpan wrapping itself around this song's gorgeous and spooky melody:

Brutal
The Mekons

Here comes McDrug

The english love for China tea
Brought deficit to the economy
What could we sell back?
Send in the army to deal some smack

Drugs and guns and slavery
Live together in perfect harmony
Where the poppy grew
The soil is dead

The East India Company scum
Flooding China with opium
The soil all washed away
Flooding Bangladesh today

Here comes McDrug

Drugs have long been the currency
Of the Central Intelligence Agency
U.S.A. and E.E.C.
A long dull story of corruption

Now a clown steps over the Berlin Wall
With a burning cross and pills to go
His Perestroika dependency will
Sit in your gut like a golf ball

Noiseless rocks as clear as ice
Nursed at home with loving pride
Crystal goblets of sherbet
Heaped up, flaked up, rosewater snow

Needles washed up from the sea
On a beach in Californ-i-ay
Help me get me through the day
Here comes McDrug

Needle searches for a new enemy
Locks onto targets in the big city
That was built on the profits
From the opium trade

Here comes McDrug

The duffer rests in a Fenland graveyard
On his way to Alderman Roberts
He's got the tinctures in his bag
To take away our daily hurts