Aussie Aussie Aussie

Of the four majors, the Aussie Open is the one I pay the least attention to. The reasons are numerous. It comes on the heels of the holiday season, the French is still months away, and most of the action happens during the middle of the night. This year, however, with ESPN3 streaming and bit of insomnia, I've seen quite a few matches. Another reason my interest is peaked is because this year's tourney has some major storylines. Rafa could win the Serena Slam, and I don't care how good Laver was, holding all four trophies in this day and age would be an unbelievable achievement, perhaps on par with Roger's career titles record. Couple that with Rafa's streak at the French and I believe he has cemented himself in the top five all-time already, and he's only 24. I could go on and on, but instead I'll list my preferences for who I want to win. This list might include people already eliminated.


Men's Draw:

1. Andy Roddick - He's getting pretty old in tennis years and he still hasn't developed the third shot in his game to make him a Slam winner again. His serve still makes him capable of beating anyone on a given day, but the holes in his game are only going to get more glaring as his foot speed wanes. Now is the time for Andy if he wants another major title.
   I wasn't a fan of his in the early 2000's. He seemed as if he didn't want to win, but rather crush his opponent and rub it in. Whereas, Federer never cared  who he beat, he was only interested in winning. but then Andy ran into the Fed Ceiling for 7 years and somehow turned into the loveable underdog. Not to mention that he held it down for American men in tennis when there was literally NO ONE else doing anything significant.  I love Jimmy Blake and Mardy Fish, Dent and Gimmelstob but those guys just never threatened the top tier at all.
    We've seen Querrey and Isner come along and make some noise the past couple seasons, but from 2005-2008 Andy was the Lone Ranger. And he never quit and seemed to work harder than almost anyone on tour. Despite not being as quick or having some of the shot-making abilities of Fed, Rafa, Murray or Djokovic, Andy is always knocking on the door of a major final. And in 2009 he gave us the greatest Wimbledon final ever. I don't care what people say about 2008 Rafa/Fed, Andy holding serve for 14 games against the greatest all-around player ever was unparalleled. Isner/Mahut was the greatest match of all time for reasons other than their actual tennis-playing. Roddick and Roger played the best tennis I have ever witnessed in that final. No one will convince me of anything to the contrary
    He's married to one of the prettiest girls on the planet, but seems to realize he hit the pulchritude jackpot unlike a certain football QB from new England. He's frequently a prick in interviews, but he's always funny, and just self-deprecating enough to let everyone know that he's only playing the heel. If I were him, I'd rather be hanging with Brooklyn Decker than trying to explain to reporters that, "Yes I'm a damn good player, but Roger Federer is simply the best. Stop asking me about it."
    So I want Andy to win. If he doesn't, I'll still be rooting for him until he hangs up his Babolat. Which I'm guessing won't be too long from now.

2. Andy Murray - Great competitor. Needs a slam title to shut the British Press up and to make the two at the top play even harder.

3. Roger Federer - Roger will hit the invisible wall this year. He will turn 30 and play in his 43-47 grand slam tournament. As far as I can tell, no men's player has won a title after their fiftieth slam appearance. Stop with the Martina jokes.
  Fed is arguably the greatest of all-time, and his five years from 2003-2008 are unparalleled. I want to see him get at least one more.

4. Rafael Nadal - There may be a day when we say Rafa was as good as Roger. Right now, I can't say that. But if he gets the ConsecuSlam, or Serena Slam or whatever you want to call it, he will leap-frog Bjorn into #4 behind Roger, Pete, and Laver. If he could follow it with the French and win five in a row? It's just him and Roger.
     I'm ambivalent. While I love when athletes break records, particularly guys like Nadal who are hyper-competitive, but also fun and nice, I don't necessarily want to see the era of Federer ushered out just yet. When sports dynasties end, it is a bit sad, even if they are extinguished by the rise of another dynasty.

At any rate, this is one of the greatest times in Men's tennis in quite awhile.

The women's draw isn't quite as lively, but I do have a few horses I'd like to see win.

1. Kim Clijsters - Like Roddick, I didn't really have much of a feeling for her early in her career. But after her hiatus to get married and have a baby, she's come on like lighting. She's far more confident and waaaay more interesting of a person that she was as a slightly timid teenager, as we all are.
  
2. Venus Williams - She's already retired due to injury, and with Serena out indefinitely there is no Williams left. And majors are always better when one of the sisters is playing. Much like Roddick, Venus and Serena have held it down for the USA when virtually no other ladies have done squat.
 Plus Venus has the crazy sexualized outfit/Jehovah's Witness dichotomy going on. Man that family is crazy. Crazy GOOD.

3. Maria Sharapova - Mascha hasn't won a major in awhile and if she wants to secure any kind of legacy she needs a couple more. Plus she's easy on the eyes. If her serve doesn't kill her, she has a chance. Her forehand is the only one that has compared to Venus and Serena in the last five years.

4. Sveta Kuznetsova - She's just fun to watch play because she looks like she should be playing in a USTA league in municipal park, but somehow she's won two majors and is never an easy out. And she looks like Ashton Kutcher, not necessarily in a good way.

I Just Killed a Mouse

       John Wilkes Booth was very handsome. His father and brother were the most famous actors in the country up to that point in American history. Abraham Lincoln was as midwest ugly as they come. I don't think that mattered when the trigger was pulled in Ford's Theater. I do think that J.W. Booth was emblematic of the personality type observed time and again in political assassins: Intelligent enough to identify the seat of power and plan a way to get to the seat-holder and murder them, crazy enough to think that their own politics trump the will of millions of voters. Mental health services could have been useful to any one of the people in history who've pointed a gun at the President and pulled the trigger.

      I don't purport to know how to best identify people who are on the brink of committing gun violence. All I know is that I had to smash a small mouse to put him out of his misery this evening and it made me sad and proud of myself and disappointed in humanity. The proud of myself is because, over the years, I've developed a rather intense phobia for rodents. Not just that I dislike them and wish them to be elsewhere, especially out of my house, no, something more.
       It derives from experiences with half-dead rats and numerous squirrels and chipmunks killed by my grandparents' cat, the bodies of which I'd discover underfoot while mowing the grass. the sensation of squishy squirrel beneath your Adidas is...unpleasant. Nowadays, my adrenal glands start firing like mad when I see a mouse. When I had to clean up a dead and putrifying opossum in my back yard, I nearly hyper-ventilated and a minute after I disposed of the bloated body, running away from a stench that verged on vomit-inducing, I was so jacked on fear hormones I bashed my shovel into the ground a dozen times, finally breaking the handle.
       So tonight, when confronted by a mouse that found its way into our house, I set to work. I reset our spin-traps. I baited them with new peanut butter and waited to hear one of the traps snap. These traps hide the smashed mouse body in a larger housing, so that I don't have to see the little sucker after the kill. Very civilized, indeed. Hoping to take care of the problem quickly I set-up surveillance by the kitchen door. I waited and waited, and still no telltale snap.
       Instead, as I surveyed the online clips of commentary and journalism regarding the attempted assassination of Gabrielle Giffords and the murder of six other living souls, I heard a little scratching in my cabinets. Sure enough, my beady eyed tormentor reappeared. He carefully avoided the traps I set, running back and forth between the toe-kicks in my kitchen. Not willing to spend the night with a Beatrix Potter Character, I broke out the big guns. Glue-traps. They are hardly humane, no matter how much anesthetic they might have in the glue. But I did not care.
      And just like that, the little feller ran right into the sticky-icky. I peeked my head out and hoped he would expire quickly. He did not. He wriggled and writhed for a minute and I could stand it no more. I got my shoes on, picked up a dust pan, and scooped up Stuart Little in his gluey infernal device.
      We went outside, Stu and I, and I apologized to him and told him I was sorry if he had suffered. And then I set him in the snow and dropped a large flagstone on him. I am not proud of killing the mouse, I would have rathered he just left on his own. My pride comes from the fact that I didn't leave him to pull his own arms off and suffer through the night, and I'm glad I put aside my own phobia to do so.

         And I thought about this awful, tortured person named Jared Loughner. And I thought about how I'd like to smash him under a rock. Not because I want to exact violence upon him. I do not. My desire to snuff him out under a large piece of limestone stems from a similar place as my desire to keep the mouse from suffering for eight hours instead an eighth of a second. This poor fuck is disturbed.
         He is no Booth, a racist, politically-savvy narcissist, no Guiteau, a campier Booth. Nor is he a bi-polar Communist like Oswald and Czolgosz. He is a paranoid-schizophrenic and he had guns and the internet. Gabby Giffords was the target he picked to try to silence his paranoia. And along the way, nobody figured out how to save this guy from himself and get him some help.
       Sometimes getting help for the mentally ill is impossible. I have neither the time or will-power to spend hours writing about why and how mental health services need to paid for by the public at large. Why it's an issue of public safety and homeland security. Why our taxes must be used to fund health-care for everyone. All I can say is, humans shouldn't end up on glue traps. They shouldn't be left to pull their own arms off and take their perceived enemies with them on their way to oblivion. Disturbed people can be treated. They can be ushered into the proper programs and facilities before they get stuck in the gooey mind-traps that encircle modern American society. They can and must, for the love of humanity, be kept away from guns.  I don't want to feel like we need to put our countrymen out of their own misery before they start killing people. Because that is almost as disturbing as the thing itself.
        The poor little mouse is dead, and I'm glad it went quick. This awful affair with Mr. Loughner will not go quick, I'm afraid. But I am most fearful of the idea that, at the end of it all, nothing will have changed.

Underrated K Cont'd. - Kill your speakers with razor blades.

So,  my Computer killed itself a few times but I resurrected that poor sucker likesome kind of silicon Lazarus. But my underrated list was stricken from the Itunes record. I'm sure I can recreate most of it, but as you can tell, I'm not rushing things. Winter break will be a time of great writing productivity. And as you can tell by the title of this post, we've got some Kinks to talk about. Ray and Dave, better than John and Paul? No. More important to the overall progress of rock and roll? Maybe.

Underrated K - Knowledge Reigns Supreme?

LaLa died, and with it, much of the fun streaming music I had embedded on this little blog here. So maybe I'll get to creating DivShare players for all the songs I've jabbered about previously. Until then, I hope to get through letter R and post a few chapters of a little project I've been working on by the end of the month.

KRS-ONE & Boogie Down Productions - "My Philosophy," By All Means Necessary.

You could make the argument that KRS and Scott LaRock, as the two primaries of Boogie Down Productions, are responsible for introducing gun violence to hip-hop, creating rap original sin. They certainly weren't the first to inject the gun/gang/gangster trope into hip-hop songs. Schooly D's "P.S.K. What Does it Mean?", with it's overt drug and gun lyrics, as well as it's veiled reference to Philadelphia gangs in the song title, predates BDP's "Criminal Minded." They were not responsible for the idea or language of guns in rap songs (though "9mm" was a rather on-the-nose song title). Rather, KRS and BDP created Hip-Hop's first martyr when Scott LaRock was killed after trying to mediate/intimidate in a fight between D-Nice, a young BDP crew-member, and another kid from the South Bronx. He died only months after the release of their first album, Criminal Minded.

BDP's 1987 Criminal Minded was widely and wildly influential. And while the group initially became famous for their dis tracks and rap battles with Marley Marl and MC Shan, this album paved the way for mainstream hip-hop to expose, embrace, and exploit the violence of the late 20th Century ghetto. The art-form that began as a live-performance experience in city parks and dance clubs transitioned quickly into a highly lucrative niche in the record industry. By 1988 Ice-T had recorded Rhyme Pays and West-Coast gangster rap began in earnest. N.W.A had already released N.W.A and the Posse and were in the process of recording Straight Outta Compton and Eazy-Duz-It. BDP's last album in 1992, before KRS-ONE went solo, was titled Sex and Violence, an obvious commentary on the two most surefire ways to sell records. Eazy-E, Biggie Smalls, and Tupac would be dead less than ten years after Criminal Minded was released.

After the death of their musical leader, LaRock, BDP followed up with By All Means Necessary. KRS-ONE, still a young man of 23, matured quickly while processing the loss of his best friend. As evidenced on the album cover imitating Malcom X, KRS did not immediately distance himself from the idea of ghetto violence. Instead, he became possessed by the belief that hip-hop must address the problems in the poor black neighborhoods, as it was one of the few popular art forms that was explicitly poor and black in its content (as opposed to Jazz, Blues, and Rock which were poor and black in genesis, but were often marginalized when themes of the African-American experience were introduced.) The idea of the white performer as invader or cultural pilferer was far more entrenched in hip-hop as a result of this. Although, D-Nice helped introduce the world to Kid-Rock, so go figure. But that is a story for another thesis project.

"My Philosophy," while perhaps not as dense with poetic devices as a Rakim or B.I.G. track, is lyrically as strong as nearly anything being released today. Sure their are plenty of colloquialisms that sound dated in the minuscule geologic time of hip-hop. But some of his phrases are still quoted and sampled. "It's not about a salary, it's all about reality," ring any bells? "When some clown jumps up to get beat down?" Brand Nubian made a career off that line.

While it took time for KRS to reconcile some of the troublesome dichotomies of conscious rap--strains of misogyny, the idea of solving violence with more violence--he matured much faster than the rest of hip-hop and the world at large. He's still recording regularly and touring, but like many trailblazing artists, his newer recordings can't ever achieve the monumental, sea-change impact of his first two albums.

And not to be an old fogey, but the whippersnappers of today could use a dose of KRS, who has quickly gone from a recognized and respected progenitor to a grossly underrated influence on one of the few genres still actually selling records.

Listen to it Here: "My Philosophy"

Underrated J Cont'd - Juliets and Juke Joints

Is adhering to the alpha-order structure killing my productivity? Hardly.

Anxiety, apathy, and adulthood are the only things keeping me from writing like I want to. And while only one of those three is intractable, the other two have some wicked inertia.
So, on to the rest of the J's it is.

/Blog couch talk-therapy

With LaLa out of bidness thanks to The Notorious J-O-Bs I don't know how I'll link to all these. But I guess I'll have to figure it out by the time I'm done with this post.

Joey Kneiser - "Adelina," The All-Night Bedroom Revival

Joey's already on the list as the lead singer/songwriter for the band Glossary. He is a master of mood, establishing an immediate coherence between the musical tone of each song and the theme or narrative of the lyric. Every album Glossary has recorded has at least one extraordinary song on it, a song that contends for the song of the year on any of the crazy mixed-up lists I make in my head. See this if you need further clarification.

So why should his solo record be any exception? Overall, it is a very good album. Four out of five stars. Four and a half, even? Initially, I wasn't thrilled by the title, too verbose even for little ol' me, but after listening to the whole thing, it grew on me like only a title of true depth can.

The All-Night Bedroom Revival is about a songwriter who locks himself in his sleeping quarters and records an album, because if he doesn't he'll go crazy. It is about a couple who stays up all night talking about their relationship, beating it to death with words, resurrecting it with closeness and copulation, and perhaps killing it once again, the minute they leave the room. The album is a revival in the very Christian tent-meeting sense, but the leaping preacher is replaced by a quiet Southerner with a beat up Gibson guitar, stuck in a ten by ten rented room with worn wood floors and a sputtering ceiling fan. This preacher man favors the power of the word too, the words we speak to each other in our most bare and vulnerable moments. He cherishes the old-time religion of honesty in the face of loss and wants us to be baptized in the tears of love gone wrong and the sweat of love made right.

And once again, on an album full of well-made, intimate songs, Joey brings one that is simply perfect. I wouldn't change a thing about "Adelina." It jangles along like lovers do when they just don't quite know how to make the thing work, but, by God, some of it feels so goddamn good that they just can't quit until they've burned it to the ground. And until a whole lot of people have heard this song, it is most definitely underrated.






 John Hammond - "2:19," Wicked Grin.

I can't imagine what it would be like to be a young man with musical aspirations whose father is credited with discovering Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. Even if you were exceptional at songwriting and were charismatic as hell, people would still always whisper, "Yeah but, his dad was the guy who..." You're either not as good as the other guy, or you only got your shot because of your dad.

Growing up John Hammond, Jr. (actually, The Third) must've felt like making music was nothing less than his destiny. His dad was already an established music producer and helped establish the careers of many music luminaries from the Thirties into the Sixties. The elder Hammond was so important and influential to the popular music of the Twentieth Century that I will not even try to discuss it here. There are many books that address the subject.

His son became a gifted singer and guitarist with a moving Baritone. Hammond Jr. sounded as close to a Delta blues singer as any white boy who'd come along. And while he wrote some excellent tunes of his own, his racially ambiguous vocal chords and his family tree may have dictated the arc his career more than his own musical talent, which was abundant.

Since he was a teenager, Hammond has always sounded best singing other people's songs. No shame in that endeavor at all. But I can't imagine it was all roses and lollipops considering that his father is linked so closely with two of the most important original voices in the history of rock and roll. Nevertheless Johnny seemed to know that a great song could be both venerated and improved by a singer and player who cared about the rendering and fussed, in a good way, over every inch of the song. Whether that meant injecting new tropes into a classic, or just leaving perfect alone, John Hammond was, and still is, a GREAT cover artist.

On Wicked Grin, Hammond takes on the always polarizing Tom Waits. He plays the songs as straight ahead blues, taking care to avoid mimicking Waits' vocal idiosyncrasies. He employs some renowned blues session musicians to aid him in the endeavor, and even brings in Waits himself to help on the "I know I've Been Changed."

Every song is a gem, coaxing out the brilliant songwriting that is often obscured by Waits' madman howl. Waits' lyrical wit is even more apparent when delivered by Hammond, in his dry, off-hand manner. "You know there ain't no Devil, it's just God when he's drunk," becomes a convincing argument when Hammond says it, as opposed to street-corner raving as in Waits' original. The whole album is spectacular. Dance up close to a pretty girl on a hot night. Grab your man and tell him he ain't no good if he don't give you a sip of that whiskey. Get the record.

John Hammond may not have been a Dylan or a Springsteen, but he was one of the great musical apostles of the last hundred years. He knew that great art was more important than one person, in some cases, even more important than the person who created it. And that kind of dedication to continuing the legacy of great artists is always underrated.

Underrated J - Jump on in, the water is solipsistic.

If you have any artists to suggest, you teeming throngs of readers, let me know. If they are in my iTunes library, maybe I'll be swayed and give them the old one-two. To the right, in the blogroll, my friend Gabe has undertaken a similar project as that which I have, here. Be warned, he rather enjoys jam bands.

Otherwise, the next two float at the margins of of Underrated/Under-appreciated.

Musicians, artists in general, are probably best defined by their idiosyncrasies. It allows listeners to distinguish one voice, one guitarist, one group from another. The question of authenticity is then raised when judging an artist's idiosyncrasies. Are they manufactured for effect? Or, are they character traits and natural artistic choices emerging from an organic creative process?
 

Jamiroquai - "Half the Man," The Return of the Space Cowboy.

Jamiroquai emerged from the UK/European Acid-Jazz in the early '90s as a listenable and highly danceable group of excellent musicians with a super-funky, diminutive sparkplug for a vocalist and songwriter. Jay Kay was clearly an intriguing stage performer, and as Jamiroquai grew more popular globally he began to make his performer persona more weird and out-sized, turning into a striking, but sometimes ostentatious caricature. His disco moon-walk on the moving floor in the video for "Virtual Insanity" is one of the last memorable MTV videos, as far as I'm concerned. And while the song is a pretty clumsy deconstruction of modern life and technology, the video was fun to look at.

The song smacked of the same sort of self-importance and silly sociology found in many of their "socially conscious" songs. I'm all for artists making bold and loud political statements, if they can do it well. Jay Kay's affectations, the very idiosyncrasies he created/accentuated to get noticed, killed any chance of being taken seriously past the dance floor.

Which, in the end was fine, because Jamiroquai was best when they were doing dance tunes and chocolaty-rich ballads. "Half the Man" is one of the latter. A trippy lament about break-ups to make-ups that, if you listen to the lyrics too hard, makes no sense in terms of linear narrative. However, the keyboards play with your synapses like lysergic acid and the vocals are perfect Northern-soul--heart stripped bare, soft and smooth until they become full of brass.

It's not what got them noticed by the masses, but it's what they did best. And this song, compared to their inferior hits, is underrated.

Half The Man - Jamiroquai

Jeff Buckley - "Last Goodbye," Grace.

I'm not going to go too far with Jeff Buckley, because there are people--fans, fanatics, Buckley-completists, devotees, acolytes--who know way more about the guy than I do. I could do the whole Wikipedia thing and regurgitate stuff I didn't really know about him, but Buckley, as a figure, is far too important to lots of people, myself included, to give that kind of treatment.

Suffice it to say, I remember (as many my age do) when he died. I remember having heard Grace at the record store listening station, telling myself that I needed to buy the album when I had a few spare bucks. Several music rags had lavished him with praise, describing his live shows as transcendental, calling his voice a once-in-a-generation gift. And then he was dead, washed away on the banks of the Mississippi River. Craig Finn remembers.

He achieved one of the great feats in music, recording a cover version of a very well-known song by a rock and roll HoFer that surpasses the original. It may well be the saddest song ever recorded.

But what got lost in the Qawwali-inflected, strange beauty of his voice and the fugue-like nature of his guitar-work, was that the kid knew how to write a great song when he put his mind to it. Taking hold of the verse/verse/chorus/verse/chorus structure and placing your personal stamp on a well-composed song is a simple goal, but it is a goal not often reached. Buckley absolutely nailed it with "Last Goodbye."

He was venerated for being unique, idiosyncratic, and mourned mightily for the same reason. His live recordings and semi-finished studio work sold well for years after his death. People hunted for clues as to how someone so talented walks into a river late at night to cool off, and is suddenly gone.

I just wonder if he might've made the perfect song at some point in his life, had he lived. "Last Goodbye," underrated despite the feverishness of those who love him, tells me my hunch was well-founded.

Last Goodbye (Album Version) -...

Underrated I - I don't like you, but I love you.

 Some of my favorite humans are Humanists. Maybe that term is too vague or loaded, but I think I'll stick with it.

That is, the people I find most interesting, insightful, and imitable, are primarily interested in people. Particularly when it comes to my favorite songwriters. Whether they are truly Humanists who reject other more dogmatic theological doctrine, or just find humans more interesting and valuable than imaginary wizards in the sky, I don't know. (Not that sky wizards aren't cool, they just don't show up 'round here enough for my tastes. Every two-thousand years is less frequent than the elusive McRib, for goodness sake).

However, these same Humanistic songwriters who seem genuinely concerned with the plight of their fellow man and worry when injustice is done, also like to hold a giant magnifying glass up to the sores of humanity. They don't shy away from sticking their fingers into abscesses or turning on the bright lights to see the boils and scabies even better.

Dylan took this tact often, with songs like "Lonsome Death of Hattie Carrol,"  "The Death of Emmit Till," and plenty of others. Westerberg worried mightily about the plight gender-queer kids in tight pants with wallet-chains long-ago, many years before Pete Wentz married the prom-queen. Fiona Apple might be a co-dependent bore in real life, but in her songs, she will punch you in the dick if you mess-over another girl. Eddie Vedder used to wear a hair-shirt for ever bete-noir teenager in the world. Rhett Miller, even though he married a super-model, has to work very hard to write anyting but songs of romantic lament, sad anthems for every skinny dork in Texas who never got the girl.

Ike Reilly - "I Don't Want What You've Got (Goin' On)," Sparkle in the Finish.

Ike Reilly falls in with this very loose assemblage of songwriters. He is most assuredly disturbed by the callousness with which the modern world treats his fellow man. But goshdarn if he doesn't find his fellow man in equal parts, pathetic, annoying, disgusting and despicable. If there were another form of life on Earth with whom he could cavort, converse and copulate, he would undoubtedly prefer them to human beings. But since there is not, he's thrown his lot in with the Adams and Eves.

A glance at his album titles lets you know he's a bit jaded and not always hopeful when it comes to his brethren. Salesmen and Racists? Pick one, or maybe you're both. Junkie Faithful. Opiate of the masses or Church of Burroughs. I don't know which one makes me less nauseated. Posion the Hit Parade. Music biz got you down, Ike?

That said, he is the most underrated purveyor of cynical folk-rap this side of St. Bob. His songs make you want to shout, dance, lock arms and march, break bottles and fight, and then go back to the bar to tell each other stories as you bleed on the beer-soaked floor. See him live.

I Don't Want What You Got (Goi...