Rod Serling’s father wanted to invent a hot dog shaped like a hamburger.

This is a short review of J.R.R. Tolkein’s posthumous novel, Children of Hurin. It was first published in the Chicago Reader.

Villains in fantasy novels often seem like stage props: all pro forma cackling and black outerwear. Whatever the failings of his imitators, though, genre-founder J.R.R. Tolkein always got evil right. In “Children of Hurin”— a posthumous text sewn together from manuscript sources — there is, of course, a standard-issue fell sorceror. Tolkein, though, knows that mysterious is more menacing; Morgoth appears in person only briefly to cast a curse on the protagonist, Túrin.

It is the curse itself which is the real villain — and that curse seems almost indistinguishable from simple human weakness. Túrin is brave, honorable, and generous — but at the same time he is short-sighted, selfish, and, especially, proud. His failings make him, as Glaurung the Dragon says, “treacherous to foes, faithless to friends, a curse unto his kin….” Even his love — for friends, mother, wife, and sister— leads him to violence and despair.

For Catholics like Tolkein, of course, sin is both an external doom and an internal failing: Turin and his sister are destroyed because Glaurung deceives them, but also because they choose to listen to him. Evil is a real cosmic force, but its power comes from the corruption in the human heart. In “The Lord of the Rings,” that corruption yields to courage, to faith, and to love. “Children of Hurin” is a bleaker book, but not a worse one,

Like the others I’ve been posting, this review ran in Bitch back in 2007.

Suzanne Vega
Beauty and Crime
Blue Note

Tegan and Sara, Catpower, Joanna Newsome, Mirah —intelligent, heartfelt tweeness is as hip as its ever been. This is good news for Suzanne Vega, who, on her new album, comes across as oh-so-2007 without updating her sound at all. You expect well-crafted, shimmery pop from a Suzanne Vega album, and that’s what you get.

Which isn’t to say that the album is boring or monotonous. Vega doesn’t stray far from her formula, but she varies things enough to hold your attention. Her lyrical concerns range from dreamy nostalgia (“Ludlow Street”), to dreamy romance (“Bound”), to dreamy politics (“Angel’s Doorway”), to all three at once (“Pornographer’s Dream”). And she manages to be musically eclectic in a quiet way that’s thoroughly charming. You might miss it the first time through, but“Zephyr Street” takes its riff from “Smells Like Teen Spirit”; “Pornographer’s Dream” is bossa nova, “Unbound” is edges towards a club beat. .

My favorite song, though, is “As You Are Now.” Vega’s vocals are less mannered, and the production is a bit more polished, but otherwise it sounds like it could have come off her debut. Moreover, there’s none of the precious urbanity that mars some of her other tracks: no clunky references to Edith Wharton or Frank Sinatra or the World Trade Center, thank you very much. “As You Are Now” is a straightforward love poem. It’s still precious, of course (it’s Suzanne Vega, after all), but in a good way. “I will treasure all your teeth/your laughter and the pearls beneath/keep them in a cardboard box/through the tickings and the tocks.” Time’s hasn’t taken Vega anywhere, but it’s nice to think that the rest of us have caught up with her again.

Not Every Stone is Rollin’: Not Every Folk’s a Freak
Here Comes the New Boss: Same As The Old Waif

A version of this review of Merle Haggard’s The Bluegrass Sessions ran in the Chicago Reader earlier this year.

Of the extant viable American pop genres, country music is the most obsessively conservative. Not that it’s completely static, of course — Gretchen Wilson doesn’t sound much like classic Wanda Jackson, who sounded even less like Sara Carter. But country’s innovations always have to be justified or explained by pointing backwards, and, as such, the turnover in sound, and, especially, in marketing tends to be a lot slower than on other parts of the radio dial. Gretchen Wilson does, after all, sound a fair bit like Tanya Tucker.

Country’s obsession with an authentic rural past has often been the occasion for scorn — perhaps most effectively in Richard A. Peterson’s acid 1997 tome, “Creating Country Music.” And the mythologizing has undeniably had numerous bad effects. For one, though ‘30s and ‘40s country artists were able to assimilate jazz and blues, swallowing later musics has been increasingly difficult, which is part of the reason that country radio these days is so aesthetically bankrupt. Similarly, country’s humiliating paucity of black performers has everything to do with its fetishization of its own roots in an era of virulent segregation and racism.

Still, there’s an up side as well: namely, aging country stars aren’t contractually obligated to engage in extended acts of self-parody. Rock, pop, and rap stars are all about being cutting edge, dangerous, and rebellious in various combinations. That looks great when you’re in your twenties. Once you hit forty, or fifty, or seventy, though, you start to look like — well, like late Elvis Presley. Or Paul McCartney. Or Sting, or Michael Jackson…or, day I say, Madonna or Bob Dylan. All of these folks still make bucket-loads of money, of course,. But the cost, to them and their fans, is that they end up looking like greedy, tottering fools, the butt of the very jokes they would have told back when they were young and smart and talented and didn’t suck.

For country stars, getting old certainly presents cash flow problems. But it doesn’t create an identity quandary. Country doesn’t have an ideology of generational warfare, so its heroes have a lot more options when they start to go grey. They can, for example, dump the radio hits and head for bluegrass, as Ricky Skaggs or (somewhat later in her career) Dolly Parton did. Or they can go for higher gloss production and slip into New Age, like Emmylou Harris. Or they can hang out with the rock kids, like Loretta Lynn and Johnny Cash. Not all of these choices result in great music. But neither are they embarrassing repudiations of the artists’ entire raison d’etre. Willie Nelson can make a bum album or two, but I’d still love to see him live. The Rolling Stones, not so much.

Of all the country greats, Merle Haggard is probably the one whose persona has aged most seamlessly. Haggard didn’t even release his first single until he was 27, but even then he had the attitude and fire of an especially cantankerous septuagenarian. Artists like Rod Stewart or Eric Clapton may put off the homages until their careers are in decline, but Hag had barely planted his feet before he started in with the roots explorations : a Jimmie Rodgers tribute in 1969, a Bob Wills one in 1970, even a tribute to little-known blackface performer Emmet Miller in 1973. So when in 2001 Haggard released *Roots*, celebrating classic honky-tonkers like Lefty Frizzell, or when he put out a standards collection (*Unforgettable*) in 2004, it didn’t seem like he was retrenching — just doing what he’d always done.

The same could be said of his latest album, “The Bluegrass Sessions,” which was recorded, naturally enough, on Del McCoury’s label. Admittedly, bluegrass has never been one of Haggard’s primary influences — he’s always worked in the more urbane styles of honky-tonk, and the California Bakersfield sound. Still, as this album demonstrates, those traditions have many of the same forefathers, from the famous Jimmie Rodgers to the less well known Delmore Brothers. As it happens, Haggard cannily includes covers of both of these performers. On “Jimmie Rodgers Blues,” he interjects Bob Willsesque asides between the bluegrass solos, and it works perfectly — as well it might, given the debt that both bluegrass and western swing owe to early jazz. Similarly, on the Delmore Brothers’“Blues Stay Away From Me,” Haggard’s plaintive, almost-yodel points towards the keening of Bill Monroe, while the crack band (led by Marty Stuart), plays low-down blues as if they’ve been doing it all their lives. Which, of course, they more or less have.

Neither do tunes from Haggard’s back catalogue suffer in their new setting.
“Big City,” a 1981 track about escaping urban life, actually makes more sense with a smaller, more rustic-sounding acoustic band. Haggard’s voice has aged, and he no longer has the unerring control that was once his trademark. But he’s learned a trick or two from Willie Nelson, and uses the new waver in his singing to project vulnerability and emotion. His phrasing is smart and affecting, as always, and lonesome harmony vocals by Alison Krauss (on “Mama’s Hungry Eyes”) and guitarist Carl Jackson (everywhere else) fit snugly over his lead.

Still, this can’t be said to be one of Haggard’s best albums. Revisiting one of his old gems would have been nice; four, though, starts to seem lazy. The limited instrumentation also becomes a bit monotonous — by the end I was missing the occasional horns which enliven many of his sets. And, perhaps most importantly, his new songs here generally lack the bite of his best work. “Pray,” and “Momma’s Prayers” are, as the titles suggest, maudlin and moralistic — a strain always present in Haggard’s work, but not one I like to see overplayed.

“What Happened?” though, is the low point, with Haggard rotely complaining about high taxes, high gas prices, and the country generally going to hell. Again, one can’t blame this on Haggard’s getting crotchety in his old age— he’s been bitching about those darn kids for forty years now. But his classic songs in this vein, like 1969’s famous “Okie From Muskogee,” use humor and specific details to open the song up to audiences of all philosophical persuasions. “What Happened?” lacks that depth, substituting an irritating querelousness that reminds me of Lou Reed’s lesser work.

But just because this isn’t Haggard’s high point doesn’t mean the next one won’t be. His albums have always varied in quality, and he’s done some spectacular work in the oughts: *If I Could Only Fly,* from 2000, is probably one of his two or three greatest ever. And even his lesser efforts have their virtues. Like, for example, the one great new song here, “Learning to Live With Myself,” a weary reflection on aging and loss. “It’s hard to face up to the mirror/Leave all the habits on the shelf/Till he gives me my call/The hardest of all/Will be learning to live with myself.” Keeping up an identity can be a bore and a burden–especially when your identity is that of a pop singer. But, whatever his worries, Haggard wears his skin more comfortably than just about anyone else in the business.

This review originally ran in Bitch Magazine in 2007.

A Hundred Miles or More: A Collection
Alison Krauss
{Rounder}

Alison Krauss isn’t the first performer to transform bluegrass from a high, lonesome phallocentrism, filled with instrumental solos and sin, into a polished, gynocentric dream of New Age sentiment and tasteful accompaniment. Emmylou Harris did the same thing on 1980s “Roses in the Snow” — an album that combined matchlessly evocative singing, idiosyncratic song-selection, and a spirituality that packaged blissed-out hippies for God-fearing millenarians, and vice-versa.

Unfortunately, though Krauss’s version of bluegrass/folk/pop has been hugely successful, it has little of Harris’ charm. That is as evident on this collection of duets, movie soundtrack recordings, and bric-a-brac as it is on Krauss’s more coherent releases. When Krauss tries for high spirits ( “Sawing on the Strings”) she sounds like a public television talking head being interviewed about mountain humor. When she tries to mimic the frozen, keening vocal style of traditional singers (“Jacob’s Dream”), she just sounds politely disengaged. And when she tries for eclectic, she comes up with an egregious remake of the saccharine 80s lite country smash “Missing You.”

Worst of all, though, is the production. Mainstream pop uses its over-slickness as a hook, filling up its echoey spaces with layers of processed bleeps. But country is still (barely) wedded to its authentic past. As a result, all Krauss’s studio wizardry does for her is to make every acoustic “plink” sound like the product of a week-long focus group. It’s only when she simplifies — as on the acappella choral version of “Down to the River to Pray” — that she captures some of Harris’s old-timey grace and grandeur. There aren’t nearly enough of such moments, though, to justify this 76 minute slog.

Bill Monroe + Joni Mitchell =: Garrison Keilor

Bela Fleck X James Taylor =: Muzak, but without the conviction

———–

I have some more recent thoughts on Alison Krauss here.

Tucker Stone has a column up on Comixology about marketing and managing the Bat-brand. It feels a bit like a continuation of our back and forth about Bob Haney’s Batman, so I thought I’d continue the continuing continuation. Or something like that.

Anyway, Tucker says in part:

Now, if The Shield had operated the way the Batman comics do—what would have happened to it? Say that Shawn Ryan only decided to write specific episodes of each season that had to do with his overall idea of a long-ranging “important” story, he’d only vaguely described it to the other writers, and they’d decided to just insert various one-shot stories that didn’t match up to the ones surrounding them—characters had sex and then never mentioned it, dead people showed up alive and well with no explanation (just an assumption that the viewer would “figure it out”) and each and every episode was directed by directors of varying talent and wildly divergent style, like Yasujiro Ozu for three episodes and Michael Bay for a couple of bookends…..

It seems to me that you can’t get to that point where you can create great art while operating in a controlled environment until you quit pretending that you’re in the same business that companies like Picturebox or Image Comics are in—super-hero comics, the ones the big two publish, aren’t what people crave when they go looking for art. You stop hiring big name writers and telling them they’re free to do whatever they want, and you instead figure out how you get to the point where you’ve got the people who go into the comic shop every week buying every new issue that has their favorite character in it. It might be fun to cater to the 40,000 of us who want to keep up with Grant Morrison or Paul Dini. But you’d be better off figuring out how you cater to the millions who just like Batman.

Basically, Tucker’s arguing that, if Batman comics are going to be either good or successful, you need to treat them as corporate product, rather than the genius effulgence of individual auteurs. Individual auteurs can do interesting stuff occasionally…but the relentless demands for more product, and the exigencies of a corporate character, mean that all-auteur-all-the-time is going to inevitably involve a lot of auteurs who don’t know their auteurish asses from a whole in the ground, and so you’ll get a lot of dreck. As an added problem, the inconsistency in the vision makes the stupdendously popular property unmarketable to everyone but a small group of cultish fanatics.

There’s definitely something to this. My son has been watching the Batman animated series with some eagerness…as for that matter has my wife. I’ve watched a few of the episodes too, and they do seem to be pretty much exactly what a Batman series should be. Each episode is self-contained; they do have very limited continuity — characters (Superman, Green Arrow, what have you) recur, but not in such complicated ways that you can’ t figure out what’s going on. The style is…well, stylish, and it’s consistent — Batman and Robin look the same in every episode, though I’d doubt it’s the same team of animators working on every single one. The villains are colorful and a little scary, but the episodes are definitively kid friendly — people aren’t getting killed or raped; Batgirl doesn’t get gut-shot and crippled. They’re clearly inspired somewhat by the TV series, somewhat by silver age stories…they’re nice. They’re professional. They’re well done. And you do look at them and say, these must have a larger audience than the shambolic, incomprehensible, bloody-minded comics. These are, overall, better than the shambolic, incomprehensible, bloody-minded comics. Why don’t they make comics like this (of course, there have been comics based more or less on the animated series…but why isn’t that the standard rather than a sort of bonus sideline?)

So there’s that. But then, on the other hand, you’ve got manga, which are each (generally) by one creator, but which often have spin-off which carefully follow the original vision. Nana for instance; the movie version is very faithful to the original, and I think there’s also a faithful anime, not to mention music and other marketing. Yet the fact that the series are, in some sense, often the basis of marketing empires, and the fact that the creators are auteurs, doesn’t put them in the same mess as American comics, either in terms of sales or in terms of aesthetic inconsistency.

One thing is for sure, though. American mainstream comics have somehow reached a point where they can neither effectively market the amazingly popular characters they own to a mass-market, nor can they figure out how to create appealing new products for a mass market. If they’re lucky, they can sometimes get a hit out of their back-catalog, like Watchmen, but that seems to be the extent of their powers. If they were deliberately choosing to forego mass success for individualistic aesthetic excellence, that’d be one thing — but I don’t think anyone would claim that that’s the case. As it is, you just have to shake your head and wonder how on earth they’ve arrived at this pass…and how much longer they can keep it up.

 New York Times ran a column the other day about a man who died and how his old chair at the local Starbucks was covered by cards and gifts and other tokens of remembrance from the people who knew him.