Songs About Puppies!

The Beauty Myth

I’m very suspicious of beauty. When it’s right there on the surface I immediately suspect it’s only on the surface, and my BS detector goes on high alert.

I also despise music that tries to make me feel like I’m supposed to like it. You know the type I mean. The ones with a big orchestras, like “My Heart Will Go On” from “Titanic” (which I don’t actually hate, but you get the idea). It’s like they’re telling me to buy the record so they can cover the cost of  orchestra’s tuxedo rentals.

Another one of my musical pet peeves involves singers who brag about how much they love someone (Then why are you hear singing to me, I think?).

Any song with puppies should be treated with utmost suspicion.

And then there are those artists who sing about virtue and spirituality after having clawed their way to the top. Yeah you, Madonna. But to be fair, I liked Ray of Light.

Okay, I’m not even convincing myself here. But I’d like to think I’m predisposed to dislike anything “solemn”.

But once I’m convinced the beauty goes deeper, then I’m beauty’s little bitch. And I end up liking even the most shamefully manipulative songs. The bridge from "Lost in Love" by Air Supply is one of the more embarrassing examples of this. Just ten seconds, but I'll forever live in shame.

And this will come to explain a big chunk of what will eventually end up on my Top One Or Two Hundred Whatevers.  

Beck: Suspected Singer of Puppies

Which brings me to Beck. Not Jeff Beck you old geezer you! Beck Hansen. C’mon! You know who I mean!

He started out as one of the coolest people on earth and then slowly (d)evolved into a boring person, just like the rest of us.

The first Beck was the guy who threw everything AND the kitchen sink onto a record. He sampled, he rapped, he even played guitar. He was good at it, and I was good with it. I came to love his first record, Mellow Gold

even though the first time I heard it I though the neighbors from hell had just moved in next door.

Unlike the rest of the world, I didn’t love the even noisier “classic”, Odelay. It was a case of lots of sounds, but none of them sounding great. I’m right, and the world is wrong, of course.

But he got me good with the weird left turn of Mutations. The music was laid back, bluesy and otherworldly. I’d say it was out of character for him, but I wasn’t sure he had any. And it was barely out before he was calling it an anomaly, signaling a quick reversal back to where he was before, wherever that was.

He was clearly a hit or miss kind of guy, and anyway there were plenty of other artists worth checking out, so I figured we were done. I skipped Midnite Vultures.  

But then came Sea Change, which I only caught up with a year or two back, where the young smart aleck was now thirty and heart-broken. The music is spare, sometimes enervated, hinting at substance abuse as a means of dealing with the pain.

And everybody - well the old folks with the money anyway - loved it, and he started getting played on Americana stations. But then he was gone yet again, and so was I.

It must have been tempting to replicate the success of Sea Change. So it shouldn’t have come as too much of a surprise when he announced that he was making a companion record for it. Plus, he was getting older, and after all the genre experiments and noise, didn’t he deserve to make a killing?

Or, to be less cynical about it, maybe he’s just older and wiser, and sees the value in just going for beauty.

On a purely practical level, it sounded promising. But after four CDs I wasn’t sure I’d bite.

Beck: Morning Phase

Well, my son did it for me, giving it to me for Father’s Day. And I’m glad he did.

Not gritty, not overwhelmingly sad, and with less pain, less need for numbing it. In other words, real  pretty.

So what’s wrong with that? Not a whole lot.

But gone is the razor sharp wit. (No lines like “She’s got tofu the size of Texas”)

And when he dispenses with all the noise, you notice he’s got a surprisingly narrow bag of tricks.

And dissonant strings are getting a bit tired. Thankfully he limits them to the short theme cuts. “Wave” does get a little out of hand, though.

And you can’t help but notice that the first song begins exactly the same way as the first one on Sea Change, so you prepare for the worst.

But it doesn’t come. It’s almost as if he’s telling you that although he could be starting from the same point as Sea Change, this time he wants to go in a different direction.

And I have to admit, he’s good at deploying those limited tricks - a banjo, pedal steel, piano and especially those echoey Buffalo Springfield guitar chords - where they’re needed..

Hard core Beck fans who didn’t care for Sea Change, won’t like this even more conservative work. Beck should be re-inventing music, they say. Well, maybe he should, but I’ll take what I can get.

So I won’t judge this record on what Beck is “supposed” to be doing. If I did, Morning Phase comes up way short in that it's nothing new under the sun other than Beck being happy.

If I simply judge it on it's own merits, I have to conclude it's a beautiful record from an unexpected source. Although with Beck I should know by now to expect the unexpected.

Does it really matter that he used to be an innovative twenty-year old? Why can’t he just make a pretty record? It is what it is. Like Nashville Skyline.

So let the young folk scoff. They probably have the time to hunt down more adventurous music than this, but I don’t.

On a weird side note, it wasn’t a great summer fun-wise, but I had all these beautiful songs to go with my malaise. The effect was not unlike the deep bittersweet painful days of Push Barman to Open Old Wounds.

Thanks a lot Beck!  

But, seriously, thank you. A-

“Blackbird Chain”

When Listening is Work

One factor that may have encouraged me to run screaming from respectable music was the time I spent working in a large office in my early twenties. We had the misfortune of having an office manager who insisted that, instead of the glorious cacophony of fifty radios all tuned to different stations playing at the same time, only one radio station should be allowed. She chose the one with the format which at the time was known as Easy-listening.

Back then, the purveyors of Easy Listening music were people like Percy Faith and Mantovani, whose job it was to do lame versions of the recent hits of the day. They could always be counted on to re-make a good record in the worst possible way. Anything that had a beat was rendered beatless (that extra “s” makes all the difference, doesn’t it?), anything with a brain was lobotomized. Forget about anything with genitals.

It was painful to listen to, but it was only when I heard their version of John Lennon’s “Love” (from “Plastic Ono Band”) that I knew that I was my own customized circle of hell. You’d think that such a song would be right up their alley, but alas it’s so fragile and beautiful that it must be handled with care. They, of all people should have known this, but what did they do? They sped it up and made it…snappy. In other words, they tarted it up. It was like finding out that the lovely, shy girl you had a crush on snapped her gum and loved “Three’s Company”.

When enough of us got fed up with this (I’ll admit it’s not a major chapter in labor history), management took the bold step of changing the station to the one with the then-new “Lite” format. Although the decision was universally applauded, it proved to be of only momentary relief to me. The main difference between Easy Listening and Lite was that the former was comprised of lousy versions of decent songs, while the latter was made up of the original versions of awful songs.

It’s hard to remember now, but besides the power ballads and dance music of the day, there existed another genre of which most dare not speak. Remember “Mellow”? Oh, sure you do. It was the early eighties version of Easy Listening. Melissa Manchester, Peabo Bryson, Heinrich Himmler. Okay, maybe not him, but you get the idea. In a way, it was even worse than Easy Listening, which you could at least share a good laugh over. When I ridiculed Lite FM, everyone looked at me like I was nuts. For once, unjustly.

Now, there were an awful lot of middle aged ladies who would sing along wistfully to “Sailing” by Christopher Cross, that is, when they weren’t cursing you out for misfiling something. So there was obviously an audience for this stuff. Middle aged ladies in offices, I guess (which begs the question what the hell was I doing there? That’s a whole other blog.) But to this day there are songs for which I have nothing but revulsion – most of the Lionel Ritchie catalog, Air Supply and others who shall not be named.

And to be fair, this kind of experience isn’t confined to the business setting. Around this time, I was in a wedding party and on the way to the reception when Dan Fogelberg came on the radio. Now I will admit to going through brief non gay (I guess) Dan Fogelberg phase, but his song “Longer” was like a bucket of ice water thrown in my face, and I shipped him off to James Taylor Island where sensitive male singer songwriters have no females to feel sorry for them, and eventually cannibalize each other. (Did I hear someone say reality show?) So on comes “Leader of the Band”, one of his more shameless tear-jerkers, and the female members of the wedding party sang along in unison. Thinking I’d just stumbled onto some kind of cult, I looked to my fey fellow ushers for assistance. They could only shrug and shake their heads.

And then there was the time back before we had a car and had to get a ride home from a weekend at the beach. The driver was the friend of a friend, and although my girlfriend and I appreciated the ride, the two hours it took seemed much longer because of the radio station he had on. He seemed to prefer ‘70s top-40 to 60s. There was an awful, late-period Grass Roots song he sang along with to his girlfriend. For her part, she liked, and felt she needed to explain the moral of the ditty about the woman who had a wild life and then settled down. This seemed like the normal order of events to me, so I didn't know what the big deal was. I think the singer was trying to persuade the listener to skip the wild part. Not bloody likely. (Some basic survival instinct has blocked out the memory of the song titles. Please don’t feel obligated to remind me.) My girlfriend and I spent most of the drive with our eyes thoroughly rolled, which made me almost lose a contact lens. If I wasn’t such a cheapskate, on top of the gas money, I would have given him a few extra bucks to change the station.

And now I find there’s a new format called “Fresh”, which is essentially Easy Listening for the new millennium. I guess it’s what I’m hearing when I go into the local Walgreen’s. And you know, it could be a lot worse. They sometimes even find songs that I like. However, I rarely get to fully enjoy them. They always seem to get interrupted at the best part. (“Hey, Jude…DON’T MISS TODAY’S SPECIAL ON THE EXTRA LARGE TUBE OF PREPARATION H FOR $6.99. …And make it better”, and in a totally different key to boot.) If I were more conspiracy minded, I’d say that they were consciously replacing the hooks with the promos, just so that we get conditioned to enjoy them.

All of these formats are based on the mistaken notion that there is music we all like. Not! And while I can always hang up when I'm on hold, drive my own damned car and listen to what I want in private, workplace music has a captive audience, and is thus a form of musical Fascism. Now you may feel that the use of such a term trivializes the deaths of millions of people, especially when compared to one person’s urge to change a channel. But please bear in mind that I’m that one person.

But seriously, those poor people who work in a place where they are forced to listen to the same music all day long must surely go mad. Whenever there’s a workplace massacre, we re-run our debates about gun control and a culture of violence. But my first question is always What was playing on the radio?