Loud Family - Music: What Happened?

2002
by Scott Miller

"We Are All Made of Stars" - Moby
The significant thing for me about 2002, besides being the year my first daughter was born, was that 9/11 had just happened. Either this was a year that artists became inclined toward more serious existential declarations in their lyrics, or I was now listening more attentively for that—which of those is really the case, I couldn't say. And speaking of my perceptions that may not be the case, I think of Moby and Eminem as being the last two significant groundswell American artists, and they had pretty different personalities and demographics: Moby was a humble, idealistic humanist, and Eminem was an egotistical, pragmatic populist. I wasn't overly interested in either techno or rap, their areas of expertise, but I'm guessing they have a lot to tell me about how audiences 20 years younger than I am think. I'm still waiting for the inspiration to quote Eminem, so let's go to Moby. "You can't ignore what is going 'round/Slowly rebuilding/I feel it in me/Growing in numbers/Growing in peace/People they come together/People they fall apart/No one can stop us now/'Cause we are all made of stars." That's a pretty song—pretty guitar, and pretty words—but besides being pretty, my 2002 mind also tries to hammer them into a serious worldview thus: there's a growing community to whom peace comes spontaneously. That would be nice; but it's interesting that "we" aren't everyone, there's "we" and then some other people trying to "stop" us. Eminem? Are "we" the people who come together and fall apart? If so, that sounds a tiny bit underachieving—anyone can stop people who fall apart.

"Exit the Inferno" - Transcender
I was a passing acquaintance of Tom Morgan, and to be honest, I always carried around the impression that he had a way to go to get his musical presentation in order. One day he sent me the Transcender CD, and I was suddenly amazed at his proficiency, and then a few months later, he died. I'm glad he left us this way of getting to know him better. An odd combination of sublime and goofy expressions (another song is literally about how good Guided By Voices are), there's also in retrospect an otherworldly premonition of life on earth being tenuous, e.g. an out-of-left-field line like "There are so many people over eighty in Fort Lauderdale."

"Infra Riot" - The Soundtrack of Our Lives
I still haven't heard the apparently respectable Union Carbide Productions, but Behind the Music is one musically together album. "Still Aging" is another very fine cut. So, per my theme, is there a serious lyrical message here? "It's time to take control again and be the only one/It's time to play your role again and be the holy one/Cause I don't think that anyone knows... So welcome to the other side/Don't be afraid to crucify/It's not too late to free your mind." Don't be afraid to crucify? Is that like, "Overcome your reluctace to carry out public lynching?" I suspect what we could have here is not a vote for lynching so much as a version of the great middlebrow sentiment that freeing yourself from the likes of "organized religion" requires bold thinking. But that is simply the herd mentality of our time. Nietzsche, the great self-styled resistor of herd mentality, was no middlebrow, and he would have liked that line, provided you were okay with it actually meaning, "Overcome your reluctance to carry out public lynching."

"Mad World" - Michael Andrews & Gary Jules
I strongly suspect that if I'd been twenty years younger, I'd have thought Donnie Darko was the best movie ever, or maybe tied with Rushmore. This must be just about the most a cover version has ever improved on the original.

"Don't Know Why" - Norah Jones
Jesse Harris's original bears almost the opposite relationship to this one as Tears For Fears' original bore to the last song: Norah succeeds by upping the ante of professionalism, whereas it was professionalism that destroyed the original "Mad World." Jesse's original version is personable, in a Paul Simon way, but Norah's zooming around the notes during the "heart is drenched in wine" chorus really call into being hooks that weren't there before, almost by magic.

"Heavy Metal Drummer" - Wilco
The foregoing outright collaboration with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot's producer Jim O'Rourke, called Loose Fur, was also good, and an interesting exercise in how to stay interesting if you want to stretch a groove out a bit—mostly: make sure what you're repeating is sonically interestic enough to begin with. Summerteeth had a little bit of an Oliver Stone problem: it was the dark, edgy record that was a bit too aware that it was dark and edgy, and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot corrects that. The sound and themes of "Heavy Metal Drummer" are littler, more organic, more intimate—it's the best example of what the album does right, although many songs do ("War On War" was probably my second favorite). The myth created by a major label dropping the album got overblown, and caused some flaws to get glossed over in the rush of enthusiasm, but it's a bright spot of the year no matter how you slice things.

"Any Road" - George Harrison
George Harrison didn't need 9/11 to get serious. Brainwashed is the result of many years working through deep religious commitment (to Hare Krishna Hinduism as I can gather such things), an intruder's serious attempt on his life, and a battle with cancer that ended in 2001 before the album was finished. I consider "Any Road" a major song. It's a beautiful ukelele and slide guitar rock production and I like the intimate, almost fatherly way the lyrics discuss the need for alertness to ultimate concerns—a Bhagavad Gita for peacetime concerns. To me, "If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there" means: unless you bother to find out what the point of life is, life will oblige you with pointlessness. I'll get back to you after my research team confirms that.

"Little Wonder" - Augie March
Though lower-key, Australians Augie March impress me as the leading edge of musical dramatic-irony work as practiced by the Decemberists or Devotchka. Here is some remarkable sensitivity to unseen plight: "You might be amazed/To find the secrets of the city in its alley ways/In the bins behind the swill cafes/Amid the clean-picked chicken bones and cartilage a spirit groans/A small heart beats and a red beak groans/'O pity, where's my little body gone?'" The surprise section of this song that goes into the muted-trumpet jazz blues line, with the room reverb, is a great ear-opening production touch.

"A Better Future" - David Bowie
The graphics of Heathen are great: crossed-out texts, defaced Christian renaissance paintings, Bowie at a desk crossing out pages of writing, bound volumes by great Enlightenment thinkers: Einstein, Freud, Nietzsche. And I didn't mention Nietzsche earlier to tie in with Bowie's graphics, Bowie put Nietzsche in his graphic because he has a far above average understanding of the important events in the human story, and could well anticipate it being something someone like me might one day want to talk about. Whether or not I have an above average understanding of Bowie is less certain, but "A Better Future" strikes me as another middlebrow sentiment, where you threaten God with withholding devotion if he doesn't do you favors. However, Bowie is like Joyce; when he expresses a middlebrow sentiment, there are levels of irony you and I might not be immediately up to the challenge of interpreting—like simultaneously making fun of the sentiment, and expresing sympathy for how people came to feel that way. For serious worldviews, Bowie is your man in the pop music field, at least when Bob Dylan isn't throwing himself at the task.

"Real Bad News" - Aimee Mann
Another album with great pictures--illustrations by graphic artist Seth—is Aimee Mann's Lost In Space. My favorite song on it is "Real Bad News," a song about facing inconvenient facts. "You don't know, so don't say you do/You don't" is typical of Aimee's gift for conversational communication in lyrics. "You paint a lovely picture, but reality intrudes/With a message for you/And it's real bad news." At its best, 2002 could be about waking up to the self-serving stories we tell ourselves.

"PDA" - Interpol
This is a catchy song, what with "Sleep tight, dream right, we've got 200 couches...," but like Augie March, Interpol involve some heavy poetry—and I don't always follow it, yet there's evidence enough that someone is at home. I'm almost certain this was written before 9/11, but with a little imagination the sentiment can be applied to cultural or interpersonal animosities: "But you will not consider sadly/How you helped me to stray/You will not reach me, I am resenting a position/That is past resentment and now I can consider/And now there is this distance."

"Up the Bracket" - The Libertines
Harkening back to London punk/ska, "Up the Bracket" is a fascinating vignette; I can't pick it all out, but someone essentially says a disreputable pair was trying to get to "you" and "I" got rid of them for you at some personal risk, and the conclusion is, "But it's just like he's/she's in another world/Doesn't see the danger on show." At its best, 2002 could be about becoming aware of the danger other people are in.

"La Cherite" - The Soft Boys
Nextdoorland, the Soft Boys reunion album, came and went without much of a splash considering how successful the tour was and how good the album was. Over a dreamy guitar jangle, the singer recites, "Looking for la Cerite/La Shea won't do/Must have la Cherite." I don't know what the spelling or the reference is, but it projects a fussiness that plays against the lyrics' several brilliant one-liners, which in best 2002 manner, are self-indicting: "I enjoyed you/But I couldn't see/That you were a person, a person like me"; "Only a dream can love you this way."

"Jonathon Fisk" - Spoon
Kill the Moonlight (turn off the romantic lighting?) was one of the high-profile artistic breakthrough albums. A band of mine shared a bill with Spoon in Memphis in 1998—there were about twenty people in the audience—and they were very good, but nothing like the perfect economy they hit on here. The very simple elements have an amazing way of making every variation count; "Jonathon Fisk" sounds like a school bully, and the singer musters some perspective and hope as well as condemnation: "I want to turn him around," and my favorite, "Says it's a sin, but to him religion don't mean a thing/It's just another way to be right wing."

"Folk Singer" - Brendan Benson
It was obvious Brendan Benson should be a force from his commercially unsuccessful 1996 debut, but Lapalco, a much more consistent whole, confirmed it emphatically. "Folk Singer" is perfect pop rock, modulating its moods with good humor and effortless musicality. Brendan, too, has macho situations on his mind: "I'm not the kind of man who acts very strong when the girls are looking on." I love the way his girlfriend tries to get him out of bed with, "You're not John Lennon."

"Tear Off Your Own Head (It's a Doll Revolution)" - Elvis Costello
This is the best E.C. pop song since This Year's Model—it's just great. Interestingly, the reunited Bangles did a very good cover of it a year later. The zooming bass part from non-Attraction Davey Faragher is an unexpected thrill. Whatever he's doing on the little half-measure before the word "revolution" hurts so good.

"Something to Talk About" - Badly Drawn Boy
This is a wonderful song, that I think was probably written for the Hugh Grant movie specifically. At any rate, I take it as a set of lyrics that leverage the movie rather than trying to do all the lifting themselves; the melodic crescendos at "You've got to let me in or let me out," etc., feel very well set up. This one gets stuck in my head like nobody's business.

"Arlington Hill (The Baby You Need Jesus Baptist Church Youth Choir Invites You Thus)" - Stew
Besides being the most gorgeous melody of the year and possibly the decade, the genius here is representing the ambient presence of religion, specifically Christianity, in a social reality that doesn't think about it. Here the action is "going to choir rehearsal stoned." The piece is part of the three-song "Drug Suite" which is peppered by Eliot-worthy observations of the loss of transcendence in modernity: "Outside on the patio/The libations flow like song/But the explanation's wrong." There's a hectic dead weight to the partygoers casting around for significance that never quite materializes: "I hung on tight and drank every word/And everything mattered/It's so different now/The ashes were scattered/We moved on somehow." By contrast, the straight luminosity of "suddenly there is a meaning" that in the song is ostensibly associated with the pot is startling. But for some reason, in the community of the kids in the car going to choir practice the meaning stuck, and in more disconnected social environments, it didn't. 2002—plenty of lessons in meaning.