St. Vincent

In a 2007 article in The New Yorker, music critic, Sasha Frere-Jones, lamented the state of rock music and it's lack of soul after attending an Arcade Fire concert.

There’s no point in faulting Arcade Fire for what it doesn’t do; what’s missing from the band’s musical DNA is missing from dozens of other popular and accomplished rock bands’ as well—most of them less entertaining than Arcade Fire. I’ve spent the past decade wondering why rock and roll, the most miscegenated popular music ever to have existed, underwent a racial re-sorting in the nineteen-nineties. Why did so many white rock bands retreat from the ecstatic singing and intense, voicelike guitar tones of the blues, the heavy African downbeat, and the elaborate showmanship that characterized black music of the mid-twentieth century? These are the volatile elements that launched rock and roll, in the nineteen-fifties, when Elvis Presley stole the world away from Pat Boone and moved popular music from the head to the hips.

As I watched St. Vincent play to a sold out crowd at Mohawk's last night, I thought about Jones' article because it does seem rare these days - white kids with soul - in the world of rock music, but St. Vincent definitely has it. It is, at times, subtle but it's definitely there. And it's funny that Jones would talk about the transition from Pat Boone to Elvis Presley because St. Vincent sounds like a collision of both, more along the lines of Doris Day getting into a fight with Prince. After watching St. Vincent's performance last night, I can safely say that Sasha Frere-Jones has nothing to fear - rock n' roll will never die.

Wilco

I love Wilco but I wouldn't say that I am the most rabid of fans. However, as I watched the premier of Wilco's new live documentary - Ashes of American Flags - at the Alamo Drafthouse tonight, several things swirled through my head...

1- Ashes of American Flags is one of the best live documents of a band around. If you are unfamiliar to Wilco, you should definitely rent or buy this DVD.
2- Wilco guitarist - Nels Cline - is one of the best guitarists of this decade. Period.
3 - Before the documentary got started, they played Wilco's newest album - Wilco(The Album) - and I would have to say that it is definitely one of the best albums of 2009. Gone is the experimentation. Gone is the long guitar solos. It's another notch in their belt of great albums.


Wilco Retro-Moment...

Wilco's legendary album - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot - was released on April 23, 2002. It was originally slated to be released, ominously, on September 11, 2001, but the idiots at Reprise Records refused to release it because they didn't believe it to be a "commercial" album. When I first heard it, I thought it was a post 9/11 political record based on the lyrics...

-"Ashes of American Flags"
-"War on War"
-"Tall Buildings Shake/Voices Escape/Singing Sad, Sad Songs"

...little did I know that the album was recorded in the autumn of 2000 - early 2001, which makes this particular album even more mystical. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot will always be considered Wilco's crown jewel in their discography, made even more important as the making of it was documented by Sam Jones in I Am Trying To Break Your Heart. Years from now, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot will be considered a classic from this decade and nothing illuminates this band's greatness more than the live documentary I saw tonight. By all means, check it out when you get the chance.

Zaireeka

A Zaireeka listening party is the musical equivalent of seeing Haley's Comet - it doesn't come around very often. This Saturday at Clementine Coffee Bar(2200 Manor Road) in Austin, however, Zaireeka madness will go down around 6pm complete with visuals.

Zaireeka is the 1997 four-disc classic by the Flaming Lips meant to be played all at once on four separate cd players to create one psychedelic sound. I've never met anyone who actually owns Zaireeka because very few people have four separate cd players to be able to pull it off, thus meaning you have to attend a listening party to get the full experience. I'm pretty sure that a communal, psychedelic gathering was what Lips' frontman, Wayne Coyne, was shooting for anyways. I've experienced it myself a few years back and it's definitely worth checking out.

We Have Band

If there is a front runner for music video of the year, this is it. It's called "You Came Out" by We Have Band, who I have never heard of before. The song is really good, as well. According to the band's website, the video was shot over 2 days and stop frame animated from 4,816 still images without a single moment of video footage.

Sing It Sister!

In 2003, Rolling Stone magazine published a hotly debated list of what it felt were the 100 greatest guitarists of all-time. I simply shrugged the list off because a)I don't play the guitar and know absolutely nothing about the instrument, not to mention the fact that everyone has particular tastes in music; and b)it is, after all, Rolling Stone magazine - one of the worst music magazines in existence. The list created alot of buzz in the cyberworld:

"This is a silly popularity contest. The author who pointed out that Rolling Stone threw in Robert Johnson as some obligatory nod to "blues roots" was dead on; RS is not a music magazine a la Downbeat, it is a cultural magazine, and as a magazine that needs to pander to its boomer roots and sell copies, which it achieves when the 50-something driving the convertible with his skullet in a ponytail reads this list, nods his head and whispers 'Yeah, man, right on - Robert Johnson was THE MAN'".

"wtf this list is so gay, Eddie Van Halen at 70 whoever made this list is a retard, he should be 2 right behind Clapton!!!!"

"Kurt Cobain gets 12th but david gilmour gets 82 the writers at rolling stone should be fired for this."

"a lot of people seem to forget that being a great guitarist isnt about how much fret wanking you can do, its about trying to create great sounds with a bit of wood, sure guys like slash can play fast complicated solos but..who cares. The reason guys like john f and jack white are near the top is cause they make great sounds with the guitar."

Okay, I lied. I blew this list off with one glaring exception - where in god's name was Sister Rosetta Tharpe(1915-1973) on this list? A misunderstood woman in her time(and, apparently, in the modern era), her gospel style was not well received by the secular world and her electric blues style was criticized by many in the church. She was ahead of her time and influenced many in the early era of rock n' roll including Little Richard and Elvis Presley. Her 1945 crossover hit "Strange Things Happening Everyday" was later covered by Jerry Lee Lewis. It wasn't until last year that funds were raised to place a headstone at the barren spot where she is buried in Northwood Cemetary in Pennsylvania, some thirty-five years after her death. One has to wonder how much more Tharpe's legacy would have been acknowledged had she been a male.

Watch this woman SHRED at about 1:25 into this video and remember that she was doing this well before most people on Rolling Stone's list...

Tank Man?

Twenty years ago today, an unidentified man created one of the most enduring images in the world's consciousness by walking in front of a parade of Chinese military tanks, thus causing them to come to a complete stop following the Tianamen Square massacre in Beijing the day before. One lone man against the system. One man against oppression. David vs. Goliath.

He is known simply as "Tank Man" because nobody knows who he is. The footage of him in front of the tanks is all that exists of him. After he was whisked away, it was believed that he was arrested and executed, but nothing can be confirmed.

Other than the tragedy of his disappearance, the other tragedy is that young people today in China have no idea of this event because it has been suppressed by the Chinese government. If you do a Google search of "Tank Man" in China, no images or information regarding this man will appear. The fact that the Chinese government would do this is no surprise, the complicity of U.S. corporations, however, is less well-known.

"Prominent American corporations, including Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Nortel Networks, Websense and Sun Microsystems, have all played a part in quickly equipping China with censoring equipment,” Jill R. Newbold writes in the Journal of Law, Technology and Policy, which is published by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“Cisco’s firewalls help the Chinese government monitor e-mail; Microsoft proxy servers block Web pages; Nortel aids the Chinese government in tracking its citizens’ surfing habits; and Websense contributes sophisticated filtering and monitoring techniques. Democracy, it seems, takes a back seat to profitable markets,” concluded Newbold, an editor at the journal.

Further fanning the flames, Chinese journalist, Shi Tao, was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2005 for "divulging state secrets abroad" based on information given to the Chinese government provided by Yahoo.

"For the sake of market share and profits, leading U.S. companies like Google, Yahoo, Cisco and Microsoft have compromised both the integrity of their product and their duties as responsible corporate citizens," Rep. Christopher Smith(R-N.J.) said at a related hearing in the House of Representatives. Smith, chairman of a human rights subcommittee, likened that cooperation to companies that aided the Nazis in World War II.

If the United States is serious about promoting democratic values abroad, then it should hold accountable U.S. corporations that export the exact opposite.

A Good Woman

Elizabeth Goodman's biography of Chan Marshall(a.k.a Cat Power) - Cat Power: A Good Woman - opens with "Chan Marshall does not want you to read this book." Being the huge admirer of Cat Power's music that I am, I recoiled as soon as I laid eyes upon that sentence thinking that the rest of the book would be some sort of sensationalist piece of gossipy trash that the author could hang her hat on at cocktail parties as being the first to expose the "fraud" that she believes Cat Power to be. I am unapologetically biased towards this artist, so the chips on my shoulder were already starting to build barely a page into the book.

The Cat Power that I and countless others have come to love writes some of the most heartbreaking songs ever recorded and though she plays both guitar and piano, her greatest instrument, in my opinion, is that smokey, fragile voice of hers - a fragility that has often spilled over into her live performances. Ben Ratliff of the New York Times had this to say about one such concert he attended in 1999:

There were a couple of places where Ms. Marshall's concentration held through an entire number. Stepping off the stage and settling down on the floor, she made it through her song ''Cross Bones Style'' with her nose pressed to the ground, while fans patted her on the back to comfort her; later she sang Dimitri Tiomkin's ''Wild Is the Wind,'' achieving the sad, serene state that admirers of her records came to revel in. But for the most part they were watching a train wreck.

Ms. Marshall gave almost every song at least one false start, visibly exasperating her musicians, which she seemed both afraid of doing and consciously trying to do. At one point she asked the crowd, enigmatically, if anyone in the audience had ever felt as if he were walking through a door knowing that a machete was going to fall upon him on the other side. After a silence, she motioned to her band and added, in a trembling voice, ''These guys hate me.''

She forgot lyrics, let the simplest strumming patterns crumble and fall apart, and by the end of her endless set arrived at abject contrition. ''It's not cool,'' she said, berating herself. ''It's not funny. I'm sorry.'' And then she walked off, leaving the crowd in disbelief. Her guitar player strolled to center stage. ''Turn the lights on,'' he instructed. ''It's over.''

This behavior continued for years until she finally hit the wall in 2006 and had to be hospitalized for alcoholism, thus canceling the tour to promote her album - The Greatest. Her inner demons that many considered "calculated" performance art had finally caught up with her and, yet, as the author delves into her poverty-stricken upbringing in the South to a schizophrenic mother and unreliable father, it's really not that difficult to ultimately grasp, to the author's credit, the roots of Chan Marshall's insecurities and self-destruction. She is now seemingly sober and content and has yet to follow up The Greatest with an original album of newly written songs. How the "new" Cat Power will sound is anyone's guess, but even if the "happy" Chan Marshall loses her core fans, at least she's alive to tell the tale.

Nothing in this book could have negatively changed my view of Cat Power. In my opinion, she is this generation's Nick Drake. The author did, however, give me new insight into the world of Cat Power that left me with even more respect for this artist which leads me to conclude that Chan Marshall should absolutely want you to read this book.