June 19, 2012 On Music You’re at a Justin Bieber Concert By Evan James About a year and a half ago—when we were all still riding high on the platinum-certified Justin Bieber of My World 2.0; we didn’t even have the very spirited Christmas album, Under the Mistletoe, yet—I spent a day as a guest educator at an elementary school in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. In my role as underqualified outsider, I oversaw a battery of improv activities I had made up the night before (taught being too strong a word, for I taught those wee lads and lasses nothing, save that pretending to be in a school-bus accident is more fun than learning how to write in cursive). At my command, the Midwestern moppets acted out one fantastical situation after another: they walked through imaginary mansions in a game called “Real Estate Agent,” took turns delivering absurd one-word-at-a-time answers as a guest on my daytime talk show, “Three-Headed Expert.” When the time came for a relatively simple activity that required them to act out situations as I named them (“You’re at the grocery store!” “You’re coming home from school!”), I provided a couple of mundane prompts, and then, unable to control myself any longer, played my ace. “You’re at a Justin Bieber concert!” Some of the girls threw themselves on the ground in a shrieking rapture; others ran around the classroom in hysterics, shouting “Justin! I love you, Justin!” One young lady, offended by the suggestion that she ought to join this breathless frenzy, stood unmoving and angry, her arms hanging at her sides. “I hate Justin Bieber!” she whined. Most of the boys were with her, groaning, pretending to vomit, plugging their ears. Of all the scenarios I guided them through that day, the imaginary Justin Bieber concert was the hardest to break up. It took me several minutes to regain their attention. Read More
May 22, 2012 On Music Endless Endless: Kraftwerk at MoMA By Hua Hsu I always feel a pinch of unease whenever someone begins busking on the subway. Part of this is born of a purely selfish anxiety, a personal calculation of whether I should compensate this performance or merely pretend that I’m not listening. But mostly, my discomfort owes to how strange it is to witness something so naked and earnest in a space that is so broad and impersonal. The riders of a train avoid making eye contact with each other, yet once someone starts singing, we cohere into an audience, if an unwilling one. It feels uniquely cruel to ignore something so heartfelt and unafraid in such close quarters. I was on my way to see one of Kraftwerk’s multimedia performances at the Museum of Modern Art when a middle-aged man with longish hair and a guitar boarded my train and began singing David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold the World.” He strummed his guitar like someone who had been playing since he was a teen, and there was a ragged beauty to his voice, as though the words of this song were not inscrutable but in fact described his own melancholy. I was hypnotized by his impossibly sad rendition of a song I’ve heard hundreds of times but never understood. As the train skidded into the station, I regretted how short this leg of my journey was. I chased down the guitarist and gave him a few dollars. A guy in a hooded sweatshirt remarked to him, “Hey man—you should be on X-Factor.” Searching the crowd for anyone else who had shared in this soulful interlude, he caught my eye. “He should be on, right?” Read More
May 18, 2012 On Music A Mark So Fine: Joe Henry and You By Sam Stephenson Photograph by Michael Wilson. In November of 2001, I picked up Joe Henry’s album Scar and was stunned by the opening track, a slow blues number called “Richard Pryor Addresses a Tearful Nation.” Henry, a white man, sang from the point of view of the black icon, expressing the comedian’s love-hate relationship with himself and his audience. Henry had the audacity and sensitivity to pull it off, with help from a spiraling, dipping, dripping saxophone solo by Ornette Coleman. Scar was released in May of that year. Henry couldn’t have known how tearful the nation would be that fall. He closed the album with these lines from the title track, sung in a careful, mournful tempo: The blade of our outrageous fortune, Like a parade, it cuts a path. Light shows on our foolish way And darkness on Our aftermath. If I love you, to save myself And you love me because we are So fool to think that our parade Could leave a path And not a scar. And I love you with all I am And you love me with what you are, As pretty as a twisting vine A mark so fine But still a scar. The album resonated with me throughout that first post–September 11 holiday season, more than Dylan’s “Love and Theft”, which was released on that particular Tuesday, a coincidence that generated new claims of clairvoyance from Dylanologists. Henry’s album cuts deeper. Read More
April 30, 2012 On Music The Magnetic Fields Tour Diary, Part 3 By Emma Straub There comes a point on every tour—very early on, after about the third show—when I completely forget that my traveling companions play music. We sit in airports together, we ride in crowded minivans, we play games, we eat both terrible and amazing meals. I think of them as my older siblings, some of whom are grumpy in the morning, others who always want to chat. What happens onstage is so separate from the rest of the experience that I really do forget that they all speak this other language—when I duck into the crowd every night, for just a few minutes here and there during the down times at the merch booth, it’s like waking up and realizing that the rest of my family is fluent in Japanese. When all together, we talk about the merch more than the music. That is not a joke or an exaggeration. Is that because it’s easier to talk about T-shirts (a quantifiable object) than the experience of playing music? I don’t know. But it was bothering me, this distance, so I decided to ask the band what they enjoy about the act of playing music. The first three responses came to me live, while we were all sitting in our hotel’s lobby bar in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Because they were (sick? warm? perverse? besotted?) individuals, the people in charge of the hotel sound system played nothing but the Magnetic Fields for the entire first day of our stay, and so while we were talking, we were also listening to their albums, played on shuffle. When there was an unusually long pause between songs, Stephin Merritt said to me, “We are listening to the absence of ourselves.” Read More
April 24, 2012 On Music Big Squeeze By Ezra Glinter On a recent Tuesday afternoon I was sitting with Walter Kuehr in the back room of Main Squeeze Accordions on Essex Street, asking questions about the accordion business. He said he mostly does repairs these days, and he conducts the Main Squeeze Orchestra, a fourteen-piece all-female accordion band he founded in 2002. Photos of famous accordion players line the wall: Myron Floren of the Lawrence Welk Show; John Linnell from They Might Be Giants; Texas conjunto star Flaco Jimenez; “Weird Al” Yankovic. They’ve all played in Main Squeeze, often in exchange for instrument repairs. On a shelf piled high with books and accordion music there’s an advance copy of Squeeze This: A Cultural History of the Accordion in America, a study of the piano accordion by ethnomusicologist Marion Jacobson. She was once a student of Kuehr’s, and they keep in touch. “Something drew me in,” Jacobson said later, recalling her first visit to Main Squeeze, in 2001. “I had been thinking for some time that the accordion would be my next instrument. How could I not have this thing that makes even the simplest melodies sound so danceable, so rich?” Though Jacobson got her ruby-red Delicia Carmen elsewhere (she traded for it with her piano, which is now the house instrument at the Brooklyn music venue Barbes), she returned to Main Squeeze to learn how to play. Read More
April 9, 2012 On Music Music of the Heart? By Sadie Stein When Mad Men featured a kittenish cover of Gillian Hills’s “Zou Bisou Bisou,” it promptly started making waves on iTunes. One hopes their ending with the perennially macabre 1962 Crystals single “He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)” won’t have the same effect, despite the song’s enduring place in both the camp and gender-studies canons. It’s jarring to discover that Natural Woman Carole King was behind the lyrics (apparently inspired by Little Eva’s disclosures about her boyfriend’s domestic violence) and even more so when you think that Phil Spector masterminded the arrangement. Public outcry ultimately forced Spector to pull the record. Grizzly Bear is only one of the recent bands to cover the song (it was a Hole staple, too), and it makes us wonder if some things, even today, can’t be safely padded with irony.