32. Tightrope

Excited as I am to hear Janelle Monaé speak at the EMP Pop conference this weekend (with Nile Rodgers no less) I am jealous of those who’ve been catching her latest shows. I’d like to see her do her new single Tightrope live, since it’s already one of my favorites from her (admittedly still quite small) catalogue. While everything she does is in the mode of creative anachronism, Tightrope takes me back not to the 1920s or 1950s, but to the 1990s when everyone, even Prince, was reckoning with the rap revolution, and trying to find an authentic voice within it. Now that rap stars all want to be rockstars or disco queens it all seems quaint, but the rollicking rap-singing of Monaé on Tightrope is as appealing as I’ve heard since Ya Kid K, another tiny dynamo who scrambled gender and genre for a brief and glorious moment. With any luck Monaé’s will last more than a moment. Since she’s proving skilled at walking the tightrope of today’s music business with her head held high, it seems likely it will.

31. Lightspeed Champion, “Marlene”

Stop being cool … oh oh.

The video to Lightspeed Champion’s Marlene seems like the plot was lifted from the ending of Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which is appropriate, since, like Diaz’s protagonist, Devonté Hynes a.k.a. Lightspeed Champion is a prince among ghettonerds. His nom de rock “comes from a series of comic strips Hynes drew as a teenager,” and he is still releasing comic books. He is no slouch in his primary vocation either: his second album Life Is Sweet! Nice To Meet You is stronger than his debut, and even if Marlene isn’t my favorite (my favorite is Faculty of Fears, as befits an academic), it is still good fun.

30. Habanera

Real Carmen… from Tablao Albyzin., originally uploaded by egold ..

L’amour est un oiseau rebelle …
L’amour est enfant de Bohème,

I saw my first opera last night at the Staatsoper on the Unter den Linden. George Bizet’s Carmen, and all I really knew going in, although I didn’t know I knew it until Carmencita began to sing, was her opening aria, “L’amour est un oiseau rebelle,” known to the cognoscenti as the Habanera Watching a French opera set in Seville in a German opera house (with German overtitles) was a delirious linguistic overload. The set design and staging was quite modern. In contrast to this “quintessence of Spain” image I’ve chosen, the design was quite stark, grey, and severe. Teutonic basically, which made the little uses of color (dripping bright red of course) all the more effective.

I was gifted a recording of the opera with Teresa Berganza in the role of Carmen. Have been listening to it and launching into impromptu arias in the shower, on the U-Bahn, in the midst of conversations, ever since.

Si tu ne m’aimes pas,
Si tu ne m’aimes pas, je t’aime!
Mais, si je t’aime,
Si je t’aime, prends garde à toi!
Si tu ne m’aimes pas,
Si tu ne m’aimes pas, je t’aime!
Mais, si je t’aime,
Si je t’aime, prends garde à toi!

29. Crossroads

I say all you demons go back to hell,
I’ll save my soul, save myself.

Tracy Chapman’s musical output has always been a bit of a puzzle to me. Since her incendiary debut, her albums have seemed increasingly indistinguishable from each other. Clicking through her catalog this morning on iTunes, I realized that even though I own all her albums, after the fourth or so I can’t recall the individual tracks well enough even to rate them. After awhile, the suspicion creeps in that Tracy Chapman is one of those artists who really only had one album’s worth of great songs, but those songs are so imprinted on a generation of fans that we will keep buying new music so long as she keeps recording it.

Or is it me? Growing older? I first heard her debut on a tape my older brother had: Crossroads was the first album I bought on my own when I was about 16. The title track isn’t my favorite, but it does fit the angels and demons theme I have going. An obvious reference to the mythic bluesmen selling his soul to the Devil for musical skills, and the album art has Chapman posed with her guitar in a parched landscape.

But the demons that torment her in this song are not those that promise creative genius in exchange for personal destruction. They are the demons of worldly success — of selling out — and all the pressure that being Best New Artist brings with it. Insisting that she will save her soul (a promise she repeats on the final, finest song of the album, All That You Have is Your Soul) she revises the crossroads myth, subtly de-Christianizing it by refusing the separation between sacred and profane musics that underpins the crossroads myth.

At times, this refusal has seemed to take her songwriting in a New Agey direction: she can rarely plumb the depths of Afro-Christian apocalyptic angst that MeShell NdegeOcello reaches, for instance, on “Leviticus: Faggot.” Chapman’s demons seem almost domesticated. But although she did save her soul from the demons that produced “Fast Car” and “For My Lover,” her long slow burn of a career has still produced quietly mysterious songs of heartbreak and commitment that sound much more contented than they are.

28. Devil’s Right Hand

Enough already with the angels, let’s listen to our demons! I first paid attention to Steve Earle’s “Devil’s Right Hand” when it appeared on the Brokeback Mountain soundtrack. It’s a song about how good that bad gun your mama warned you against feels in your hand. The driving guitars are gun-like not in sound but in thrill.
The jolt of pleasure this song gives me never fails to catch by surprise. It’s a doubly guilty pleasure: good ol’ boy redneck music, which I will always, against all reasoning, overwhelmingly identify with, and, internal to the song, the transgressive allure of gun culture. Since I am reading Freud right now, I am wondering if I could say something more precise about the It and unconscious fantasy than the standard “that which is forbidden we desire all the more.” How does a warm gun get into the unconscious? How did one get into mine?
I was forbidden toy guns as a child, and was surrounded by pacifist culture. Contrary to the cliche, I didn’t inevitably rebel against this training (nor did any of my siblings). I am pretty straightforwardly terrified of actual or threatened guns, think the NRA is the devil’s right hand, and have a hard time even with the leftist arguments for the use of force that I intellectually want to accept, but usually end up punking out on.
But I guess fantasy serves to produce that which you neither can bring yourself nor would truly want to bring yourself to enact in reality. It is not simply your repressed wish, but your variation upon someone else’s repressed wish. Josh Kun writes about song as an audiotopia — a sonic space where we can explore what cannot exist in our reality. I don’t think of Steve Earle’s demons as stationed at the gates of my audiotopia, however, but as others that impinge upon and arouse the shelter of my world with their wounded and wounding cries.

29. Halo

Gravity came again, to pull me back to the ground.

I seem to be in an angel rotation, and now I am seeing halos everywhere.

I also cannot get Béyonce’s “Halo” out of my head, not since I heard the version she did for the Haiti benefit concert some weeks back. I know the efficacy of these costly telethons is dubious, more so in the age of text-to-donate. And the contretemps around Wyclef Jean’s charity — which at least had preexisting and ongoing commitments to work on the ground in the world’s first independent black republic — makes me even more skeptical about celebrities who parachute into disaster areas (metaphorically or literally) and lend a  glitzy few seconds to the miniscule  public attention span. Raul Peck’s new film Moloch Tropical (completed before the earthquake but even more awfully resonant now) includes a devastating satire of black emissaries from the Hollywood A-List.

But considered as a song, I was incredibly moved by Béyonce’s performance of “Halo” at the benefit. She took a song about being addicted to a withholding lover — one whose angelic halo casts the singer in its shadow (the inverse of Doveman’s spectral angel whose draught of the whiskey sea is but a thimbleful) — and slowed down the tempo, made the orchestration much more spare and let her voice go even rawer, making very minimal changes to the lyrics to deliver the song not to a man, but a nation.

The risk that I’m taking …
I ain’t ever gonna shout you out …
You’re everything we need and more,
It’s written all over your face.

Aside from the devastation her voice projects, “Halo” was the one of the only songs on the telecast that didn’t so much seek to sympathize or succor the abandoned people of Haiti (not that such sentiments are wrong) but look up to them as heroes, daring to ask whether and how we might come to deserve to look into their faces. I was reminded of Daphne Brooks’ great essay about Mary J. Blige turning U2′s “One” into a pained enactment of African American double consciousness, transfiguring Bono’s quasi-messianic crypto-Christian lyrics through an emphasis that worked as a kind of division, or, following Alain Badiou, a subtraction: “did I disappoint you? Leave a bad taste in your mouth? …. We’re one, but we’re not the same.”

Similarly, what happens to Beyonce’s ironical love song once “Sasha Fierce: is subtracted allowing it to be transfigured into as a fervent prayer for the flourishing of a black people?

(Baby)Haiti (I)we can see your halo,
pray it won’t fail away.

28. Howl for Carl Solomon

James Franco (r) and friend recreate a famous photo of Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky (film still from 'Howl').

I suppose the difference in my attitudes towards Allen Ginsberg and Walt Whitman goes some way to explaining why I became a nineteenth-century specialist, and not a twentieth-century one. There are moments in Ginsberg I find marvelous — “A Supermarket in California” is one — but overall I never understood the mystique of the whole beat generation of poetry until, at some point almost accidentally, I came upon a recording of Ginsberg singing/reading “America” to musical accompaniment. Something I could never get from the poem on the page — the grain of the voice?  — came across in full force in performance.

I am not sure this a compliment to Ginsberg. Where Whitman’s voice comes across fully on the page, it is therefore timeless, in part because it is somehow not his own particular voice but a more general one that both transcends and subtends his particulars, (“if you would find me again, look for me under your boot soles”). Ginsberg’s voice on the other hand is fully, robustly of his time (it announces its allegiance “generation” in the very first line) requires the mechanical ghost of his human presence to sustain its charm or aura.

Ginsberg on tape of course is endlessly idiosyncratic, charming, avuncular. Which is why he makes such a great role for an actor to play, as James Franco discovers in Howl, a film largely given over to the performance of Ginsberg’s most famous poem. Franco basically transcribes Ginsberg onto himself, to mostly comic effect, since Ginsberg is the best and only actor of the role of Ginsberg. In his enthusiastic research, James Franco has not watched the Ginsberg documentary where, towards the end, and quietly, as I recall the subject offhandedly warns his acolytes “do not be Allen Ginsberg.” If he indeed said this, and I didn’t simply imagine he said it, it was spoken with no immodesty but rather, somewhat shockingly, with regret. As if the great prophet of “Yes!” had found the still small “no” around which Rilke also constructed the poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo” that ends:

… for here there is no place

that does not see you. You must change your life.

I am not sure Walt Whitman has ever been portrayed on film, which if true then thank heaven for small favors. There is something here about the distinction between persona and personality in the poem which Hollywood enthusiasts of poetry like Franco misunderstand (Franco is now making short experimental films on gay and sexually transgressive themes. A latter-day would-be beat, he won a prize for his film of “The Feast of Stephen” at the Berlinale).

27. The Angel’s Share

Sweet Angel, originally uploaded by MiriamBJDolls.

“You always played a stonewall game, but I’ll get passed you anyway. A flick of the wrist and its straight through your heart”

I tried to resist Doveman’s The Conformist, but resistance proved futile. He had already stolen my heart with his genius cover of the entire soundtrack to Footloose. This sounds like a Nouvelle Vague move, but is way better since, instead of bleeding the angst and edge out of punk, he developed, through characteristic restraint, the emotional nuances that were already present in overlooked and overproduced 1980s bombast.

The Conformist has been on steady rotation these past weeks, and “The Angel’s Share” has been at the top of the list. I have gone, as some friends puts it, into a Doveman tunnel. The song takes up a series of angles on love, beginning with the bravura of Cupid (“a flick of the wrist”) before shifting into reminiscence about a relationship that is already over in a flash, and the song then turns into an elegiac drinking song, as deeper, stronger voices join in to support Thomas Bartlett’s quaver, urging the “pretty baby” to “drink down the whiskey sea” but “please don’t rescue me.”

The image I especially love is that of “the angel’s share” of the drink, an image I associate with the libation poured to the ancestors, the dregs left at the bottom of a mug, and also with the medieval theological debate over the size of angels (how many angels can fit on the head of a pin?) which somehow for me also raises the question of how much whiskey can an angel drink? What does it take to inebriate an immaterial being? Putti in renaissance paintings take part in the festivities of wine, dance and song. So perhaps the idea of the angel’s share is a mythic quantum marking the imperceptible difference between “paradise” and the “here below” that the protagonist of the song wants to bring together but can only do so temporarily: in love, in his cups.

Even as the drunkards sing to the heavens, Cupid wants to be weighed down by liquor and descend below.

26. Pullin’ Back The Reins

Mirando as “nuve”…, originally uploaded by Eduardo Amorim.

You know I finally learned to break the run, and gently harness the love of someone …

Absolute Torch and Twang was one of the first CDs I owned. Consequently I associate the crisp digital fidelity of that then-new technology with the lesbionic force of k.d. lang’s voice. Of the many excellent tracks, “Pullin’ Back The Reins” especially fulfills the album title’s promised fusion of countrified chanteuse singing, an excess of vocal pleasure that was the diva’s signature before that term, ‘diva’ became commodified and debased in the 1990s by VH1, reduced to spastic melisma instead of actual interpretation. The lyrical conceit of the song — that a love affair is like breaking in a stallion — is so corny that naturally my teenage self,  innocent of either love affairs or the tumultuous frontier life, had to completely succumb. I am not sure I was aware of anything particularly queer about my k.d. lang obsession, at least not until college and her Ingenue album. But I was instinctively drawn to the song’s image of desire as something out of control that humbles us, and its gentle mocking of our “trying to remain tall in the saddle when all we had ran away with of its own.” And now, from the other side of innocence, I suppose this self mockery is needed even more.

25. The Four Insurgent Generals

The president of Venezuela Hugo Chavez has called for the founding of a Fifth International to oppose capitalism and coordinate the fight for socialism in the twenty-first century. There is supposed to be a convening of this group in Caracas this coming April, which should be interesting, to say the least. I wonder if any U.S. Americans will show up? We seem to be the nation that most desperately needs some socialism right about now.

Thinking about American socialists brought me back to the incomparable voice of Paul Robeson, whose Songs for Free Men, a collection of recordings from 1940-45 that, for me, is the sound of a once and future internationalism. The songs on this collection range from the popular front “Ballad for Americans,” to Negro spirituals, to songs in Russian and Chinese.

“The Four Insurgent Generals” is a loyalist song from the Spanish Civil War in which Robeson, like other American black internationalist leftists, was involved. His solidarity with the people of Spain led to an honorary membership in the Abraham Lincoln Brigades, the American volunteers who fought fascism. As Robeson then said, at a concert broadcast from London: “The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative.”

In our era of hypersensitivity about cultural appropriation on the one hand, and, one the other, ‘human rights’ interventionism, the warm and generous fellow feeling Robeson’s singing opens up across languages, cultures and causes is an untimely historical memory. When he assures “mammita mia” that “the four insurgent generals will soon be hanging,” it’s a defiant tribute to a lost cause, since the insurgent generals won, fascism that prevailed, and anarchists and communists who hung. But it is precisely in defense of lost causes that “The Four Insurgent Generals” is worth listening to now.