music, music, music

On the left are my mp3 players. The monster on the far left is an iRiver iHP140, 40GB player. I bought it about four years ago. It's been just about indestructible, except for getting the display bitten by a golder retriever puppy, but it's showing its age. The hard drive's audible and the data base function hasn't been working correctly for a couple of months now.

On the right is the (I have to admit) elegant iPod Nano (4GB). With this amount of memory, I have to change my playlists just about every day, rather than just dumping everything into the player. It means a more planning. I tend not to get around to listening to new things I've downloaded for a while. This is not necessarily a bad thing as I find I'm less critical of music once I've had it around. The Decembrists are a good example. I hated them the first time I heard them. But after a few months, I found that I liked some of the songs, though the lead singer isn't, well, much of a singer. I just started playing them to go along with this post, but I think I'm back to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, who was a fabulous singer.

I have music on the brain for a couple of reasons. One is we've actually go out to hear people perform, The Dixie Chicks and "West Coast Live", to be specific. I liked the Chicks show fine. It was balanced on some odd boundary between bluegrass and pop/rock. The lead singers has a fine country-style voice. Their songs, although genuine (this isn't a band designed by Clear Channel) don't seem to have a lot of depth to them, despite (or perhaps because of) their appeal to our emotions. I'm not a big country music fan, but there's a lot of it I do like. The songs that really work (old-school style) are these direct little vignettes, like "Jolene" that seem to come from some real person. It's not that Dolly (who wrote it) has to have been the woman singing to Jolene, but she has clearly imagined that woman thoroughly enough to make her real. The songs that seem to work(new-school style) are a bit more abstract. I don't know exactly what's happening in Neko Case's "Star Witness", or John Doe's "There's Black Horse" but like the photos of Robert Frank, Nan Goldin, or Larry Clark, I don't need to know exactly what's in front of me to appreciate it. The music of the Chicks seemed to rely on my being a bit on board already. I'm not sure why this is a problem for me. Maybe because there are no surprises?

The West Coast Live show, on the other hand, was all surprises. There were The Bobs who've been around, with some personnel changes, for ages, but I'd never heard them before. Excellent singing and even more excellent senses of humor. Then there was Oakland's own Interfaith Gospel Choir (a fragment of them really). Finally there was Chirgilchin - A Tuvan group, who had Laurie Anderson along with them. She, much to her credit, hung back and didn't let the impresario (guy with the mic) make her the center of things. That throat singing is a marvel and watching them doing it, instead of listening to a recording, didn't make it any less of a mystery or less beautiful.

I finally got "The Harry Smith Project" dvd and sat through the whole damn thing. God, it was awful. Not uniformly, there were some good performances. But for the most part, what a mess. I am a big fan of "The Anthology of American Music" though to be honest, I didn't hear it back in the 60s. I bought the CDs sometime in the late 90s after reading Greil Marcus go on about it for the umpteenth time. I sat down, poured a glass of wine and listened to the whole thing in one night. I don't love all of it, the sermons and old Cajun stuff don't move me. But the rest of it? I can see why it set people on fire when it came out. These commercial recordings have so much energy. I don't think that we respond to the music because the performers have lots of realness points (being from the hills, the South, being poor) but because they're good and as they sing, even as they sing songs that were old when the were born, they're singing as though the song was being made at the moment it came out of their mouths. The people performing on the "Project" let you know with every note, every look, every pose, that this was old music, this was important music and that you were in fuckin' church. Even when they twisted it as Dave Thomas did to "Fishing Blues" it was still a sort of obeisance.

The last music thought before I go off to make cornbread is that they've been playing a lot of 70s and 80s music at work lately. Someone is very fond of a Fleetwood Mac Greatest Hits compilation. Much to my horror, I could easily sing along to 90% of the songs. And the 80s? I know an embarrassing number of pop songs from the decade, though if you asked me the names of any of them, I couldn't tell you to save my life. I think we have a song sponge in our heads that just sops up lyrics and hangs on to them. So when I'm 100 years old and senile, don't know my own name, I'll still be able to sing Venus by Bananarama.