The 14th Annual Jaybee-bies: 2024, or Love Among the Ruins

Billie Eilish

You don't need me to tell you how f*cked up 2024 was. I'll try to identify some silver linings.  

Executive Summary:

Music: Pop music good, if not exactly in my comfort zone. Jazz, Blues, and Oldies wonderful. Weirdos thriving. (More to come on that).

Music/Personal: No longer striving for competence on guitar. 

Personal: Retired and grandfather of two. Getting old fast.

Politics: Everybody knows the war is over, everybody knows the bad guys won. Fascism is cool again, apparently. The young folks - men, mostly - let us down.

Humans:

Best:

• Jimmy Carter
• Adam Kinzinger
• Liz Cheney
• Many, many others who, in my current state, I just can't bring to mind. Feel free to write in some names.

Worst:

The ever-expanding "Usual Suspects", as I called them last year, make a repeat appearance here. I'll only make special mention of their Rookie of the Year, Nancy Mace, whose popularity confirms the existence of a new mini-industry busily producing Awful Women, like veterans Elise Stefanik, Nicole Malliotakis, Marsha Blackburn, Kristi Noem, and others. However, I will risk being accused of sexism by saying they'll never quite match the production of Awful Men. But keep up the bad work gals!

Best Books:

During this, my first year of retirement, my ambition was to "just lie down on the damn couch and read a f*cking book or two". 

And I did! I read all of the following books with great enthusiasm:

• A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman: A remarkable history of Europe (mostly France) in the 14th century. 
• The Spy and the Traitor by Ben MacIntyre: A true-life spy story and a great one.
• Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain: A true-life restaurant story, and a very entertaining one.
• Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett: What's an "I", anyway? Mr. Dennett tries to explain.
• Karla's Choice by Ken Hardaway: John le Carre's son admirably continues the George Smiley saga.

The following are part of my World History Project, which has now reached the end of the American Civil War. I read a lot more than these five, but these are the best of the lot:

• The Good Lord Bird by James McBride: A hilarious and tragic retelling of the John Brown story.
• The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery by Eric Foner: Notorious flip-flopper's views on slavery. 
• Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson: The entire Civil War, miraculously, in a single volume. 
• Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin: Lincoln and his Cabinet. Possibly the best history book I've ever read.
• Lincoln by Gore Vidal: Vidal could be pompous in interviews and lectures but he did work his ass off to get his historical fiction right. I read this alongside Team of Rvals, and was in awe of his grasp of the details. And, like Burr, it's funny too.

Best Movies:

I did manage to get out and see a few movies, but the only one worth mentioning here is A Complete Unknown. What it may be lacking in specific details, it more than makes up for with Timothee Chalamet's performance (and performances). Ed Norton is also great as Pete Seeger. The music is pretty great, too.

Best TV:

• Somebody Somewhere
• I May Destroy You
• Insecure
• Bodkin

Best Concerts:

Still none. I'm still waiting for one that's worth time/trouble/$.

Music Awards:

Most Work (But Worth it): 

    Billie Eilish

Most Work (And Possibly Not Worth It): 

    The Dirty Projectors

Most Surprising (and Not Necessarily in a Good Way): 

    Nico

Best Nostalgia:

    Jimi Hendrix 

Best Artist:

    Daniel Nigro, producer of both Olivia Rodrigo and Chappell Roan

Best Albums of My Year:

1. Billie Eilish: Where Do We Go When We Fall Asleep? - The key to this young lady, and what eventually wore me down - is not the loopy sound effects (that's her brother). It's the songwriting that stays consistent from beginning to the very end.
2. Cannonball Adderley: Somethin' Else - NOT "worse" than Billie. Just a slower burn.
3. The Quintet: Hot House: The Complete Jazz and Massey Hall Recordings - Ditto.
4. Jimi Hendrix: The Cry of Love - Not a masterpiece. Just a very consistent (that again!) yet relaxed set of tunes with great guitar playing.
5. Chappell Roan: The Rise and Fall of a Midwestern Princess - I'll get to this at another time, but in short, she edges out Olivia by the sheer volume of hooks and emotion she brings to the table. Geez!
6. Olivia Rodriguez: Guts - A smart young woman. NOT worse than Chappell. Just a bit more professional sounding, which is both a plus and a minus.
7. The Chills: Brave Words - Another one for a later time. RIP Martin Phillips.
8. The Feelies: The Good Earth - "Only" rock n' roll and I love it.
9. John Cale: Paris 1919 - Professed weirdo plays it straight with lovely results.
10. Low: I Could Live in Hope - Just how depressed can you get? Find out here and come back alive.

Honorable Mention: Arto Lindsay, Fishermans, Steely Dan, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Stars of the Lid, David Behrman, Elliott Smith, Beyonce

Best Compilations:

1. Muddy Waters: Anthology
2. Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings
3. The Shirelles: 25 All-Time Greatest Hits 
4. Fats Domino: My Blue Heaven, The Best of...
5. Sir Warrior etc: Heavy on the Highlife!

The Album I Listened To Most but Had the Least to Say About It Due to Density (Mine, not the music's.):

Bach: Violin Concertos

Some of the best songs I heard this year can be found here.

Oh, and Mrs. Jaybee's Favorites:

1. Beyonce: Cowboy Carter
2. Billie Eilish: Where Do We Go When We Fall Asleep?
3. Gorillaz: Cracker Island
4. Bill Withers: The Ultimate Collection
5. Amy Winehouse: Back to Black

Conclusions:

Now with two granddaughters, I'm slowly beginning to understand what life is all about. I hope I'm not too late. 

Pop continues to grow - sometimes away from me. That's okay. I don't have to be in the middle of it. As long as I can find some electric guitar music - now a small sub-section of pop - I'll be okay.

Jazz and blues (and oldies, and older pop) will always be there to fill the gap. I was hoping to keep you informed about new stuff, but if old stuff is new to both of us what's wrong with that?

And finally, I have come to realize that most of my countrymen think a dictator is someone who is NOT popular. A little more education might have helped. One can only hope the bad guys form a circular firing squad.

Happy New Year!

Nearly 24, And So Much More

The Artists. Get Used To It.

Kids These Days:

Since I retired and became a grandfather, I've been waiting for any random young person to walk up to me and say look at my life, I'm a lot like you were. So far, no takers.

The young folk just don't care, and - aside from Neil - they never have. I know I didn't. During my childhood, the older folks listened to Lawrence Welk and voted for Nixon. We loved our Beatles yet felt defensive about this brand-new culture of ours. 

These days, young folk who are far more secure about youth culture than we ever were just laugh at our music and call it things like yacht-rock, or worse, dad-rock (two words that should never go together). 

Their reaction to us - utter indifference - could be a lot worse. And it will be, once climate change really kicks in. We'll have to buy plastic sheets to cover our graves for when they start pissing on them. (I'm smelling, so to speak, an opportunity here... Time for a patent?)

And they go on making and loving their music. Our opinion of it means nothing to them. How can an old geezer/blogger - who still believes there's something worth hearing there - keep up?  Should he even try? (Asking for a friend.)

Diamonds in the Rough:

It doesn't help that the music industry continues to pump out ever more "product". You'd think I'd be happy about that, but it just makes it that much harder to locate new music to love among the bazillion albums released yesterday. I know it's out there. It's what keeps me going. The results, alas, have been hit or miss. 

I'm tempted to liken the current rate of music production to the thousand proverbial monkeys typing away, theoretically on their way to eventually producing Hamlet. But that's not a fair comparison. After all, this is about guitars, not typewriters, and bands that know how to play them. On a good day, they're producing maybe Henry V. Not bad and often very good. Alas, I'm looking for Hamlet.

This is unfair, of course. I'm chasing that first high (or in my case, the second and third ones, too, meaning the Beatles ('64), Allmans/Dead ('73), Punk/New Wave ('78)), that hit of ecstasy that a new album could provide back when I was seven/sixteen/twenty-one. It's exceedingly rare to begin with and my aged synapses are worn down, much like my taste buds (thank you, Frank's Hot Sauce) Would I even recognize "great" if I heard it? Possibly not, yet I'm certain it's out there. It's just a question of finding it.

Don't Look at My Life, I'm Not Like You Were:

So I bide my time and explore other genres. I retreat to jazz, blues, etc. for a while and when I return, pop, if anything, is even more dominated by high-energy-dance-oriented-female-vocal-calisthenics, the singer intent on ruling the Earth. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But it can be exhausting. Carly Rae Jepsen's Emotion, for instance, is quite good but I don't play it much. It feels too much like getting run over by a truck. One with high heels.

Is this what it means to be old? When any display of sustained energy by a young person is by definition exhausting and thus depressing because I am much closer to dying than they are, and I don't like being reminded of it? 

But that's the whole purpose of pop music, isn't it? To celebrate youth. And here I am trying to kick it off my lawn. So keeping up with, and god forbid appreciating it has become a challenge. 

And I look damn silly trying to at my age. Even Mrs. Jaybee wonders what's going on when I get yet another record by yet another often attractive young woman. I try to explain that I've been listening to guys sing about their woman problems for decades now, so it's refreshing to hear women bitch about us. But I'll admit my recent buys are the aural equivalent of hanging around by the local schoolyard. 

Mrs. Jaybee has shown both a forbearance and a healthy skepticism ("Who's this weirdo?"). And while her initial reaction to the music is often a mild dislike, she usually does warm up to it, like she did with me. 

Consulting my no-longer-trusty spreadsheet, I see that it is bigger than ever (8,000 rows>), yet the possible candidates for purchase elicit only a yawn. I keep looking though, and found two artists who, if I hope to just know what the hell is going on, I'd better check out.

And of course, they're young and female. It just gets weirder. As of now, they're both over twenty-one, now. However, these records came out when one was seventeen, and the other was nineteen. Is this even legal?

Billie Eilish: WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP WHERE DO WE GO? (2019)

Wanting to avoid repeating the Carla Rae Jepsen experience, I hoped for something different, and Billie was certainly that, even if I didn't know it. Without knowing who I was listening to, I'd hear a brief snippet of a song on the car radio, barely making it out. She tends to sing in a whisper, you see. And since Mrs. Jaybee hated that, she'd switch the channel before I knew who it was.

But the name was on my radar. While only seventeen when she released this, her first album, she managed to have a bunch of hits, Grammy awards, and critical accolades. Not the usual thing.

It's irritating enough for Mrs. Jaybee when I innocently buy what turns out to be a strange CD.  Knowingly doing so could be considered an act of war. It would take more time before Billie could come into the house. 

It took True Detective using a few of her songs for Mrs Jaybee to reconsider. So I had an opening.

Finally, I took the opportunity when I retired (when everything was about me anyway) to sit her down and inform her that I would be getting Billie Eilish's first CD. I feared a reaction akin to that if I was proposing an open marriage, but she was okay with it. With Billie, I mean.

And we're playing Billie all the time now. She is practically family. And if anything, Mrs Jaybee likes her more than I do.

The whispers, vocal distortions (via her producer-brother), and eerily quiet backdrop are the antithesis of all I have come to fear in pop music. And if anything, it's more like a musical whack-a-mole game. One second, a voice pops out of the right speaker, and a second later it's coming out of the left one. Dodging, and weaving, maybe she's a boxer. Or just shy. And when she dispenses with the sound-affects, and just sings a ballad she's damn near devastating.

After at least a dozen listens I still don't feel I'm at the bottom of it yet. There's always more to hear, even on the very spare ones. And she almost always hits her mark.

And in her unique way, achieving world domination. It's heartening that the young folks would take to such a weirdo.

A-

Olivia Rodrigo: Guts (spilled) (2023)

This one's a slightly expanded version of her second album, Guts, released last year, adding five new songs.

Olivia's not weird, but she does have issues. And she makes the most of them by co-writing a bunch of intelligent, funny, and tuneful songs.

Every song has at least a few things to offer, whether it's her great voice, the thoughtful lyrics, or sturdy melodies, all done in a variety of styles, including rock n roll and country. As a matter of fact, every kind of music - fast, slow, loud, and quiet - is accounted for. And speaking of quiet, the ballads aren't awful (i.e., over-the-top delivery of bad lyrics to compensate for unearned emotion). Quite the accomplishment.  There are no wasted moments or filler. 

When I put it on I braced myself for the onslaught. But right off the mark, I got a different vibe. Okay, she does hit you with the sledgehammer about thirty seconds in, but it's those quieter thirty seconds - with an acoustic guitar no less - that I latch onto. It's like a signal saying, I trust you to listen to the quieter parts. And there are several here. 

This young lady has it all and is just getting started. I'm betting that's her on guitar, too. 

A-

The Kids Are More Than All Right:

Out of caution, I'm being stingy with the grades. They're not quite on the level of So Great I'm Dying to Put It On, but they definitely are I'm So Glad I Did Put It On material. I give the edge to Olivia for now, but Billie may have the staying power. 

They're not GOATs but they give me hope. That's all I'll need for now.