Dial "M" for Musicology

Boy, Drummer, Little

Jonathan Bellman

Friend Eric sends a link to this Lewis W. Thompson article about “The Little Drummer Boy,” originally from the Los Angeles Times and reprinted on Christmas Eve by the New York Times.  Thompson characterizes the little tune as one of the most loathed songs in history; its incessant Yoda-like syntax and pa-rum-pa-pum-pums apparently symbolize all that is awful about the holidays.  To him, or to other people, or something.  Anyway, the point of the article is that more than one principal involved (the composer, a foundational arranger) have willed their substantial royalties to music schools, so that generations of music students can pursue performance study on the most serious level, at Wellesley and at Yale, all paid for by the Little Drummer Boy.  So, presumably, shut up for once and stop complaining about it!

Per usual, I am not in harmony with prevailing opinion.  First, anything that supports music departments in institutions of higher education better than their usual last-stop-on-the-resource-delivering-line level is fine with me.  Second, I’m  grateful to Thompson for clearing up such matters as the composer (one Katherine K. Davis), the fact that it was written long before a Christmas TV special with which it is often associated, the fact that the composer’s “Czech Carol, freely transcribed” notation was puckish humor (this is the age of Kreisler’s “arrangements” of nonexistent works, remember) and that it was nothing of the sort, and so on.  So there is some solid information here, which I appreciate.

Now: I have always liked “The Little Drummer Boy.”

Save the superciliously raised eyebrows.  If you can stand “White Christmas,” “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” Frosty the Snowman, “Rudolf” etc. you have a far greater tolerance for abject crap than I.  “Frosty” sounds like a Eurovision Song Contest contestant (minus the risk and raw power, of course) and the movie songs give lounge-lizard wimp-chords (a technical musical term, for those keeping score at home) a worse name than they already have.  At least the Drummer Boy has good honest amurrican triads (not major sevenths and twee Jazz 6ths and other devices that adulterate what I at least think of as a Christmas sound).  Moreover, it’s got a beat, which the aforementioned don’t have.  Plus, I’ve heard the Platonic ideal of the “Little Drummer Boy”—a muzak arrangement that seeks to evoke the Robert John version of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” as closely as possible.  Now, that is wit!

Brother Joel once played me a bootleg recording of Jimi Hendrix playing around with it (going into Scotland the Brave and God knows what else, if I recall; my single listening was more than a quarter of a century ago).  But I hear it with that wailing guitar, and I’d love to hear a creative, patient resourceful rock drummer underneath, keeping the grooves, with just rum-pa-pums to keep the thread, but with all kinds syncopations and fills and crazy stuff over it—maybe with brushes.  Some fifth-doubled, bluesy, by-third root movement in the guitar, maybe, and…

Of course, what I’m hearing in my head is completely out of step with the text—hard to imagine the infant Jesus smiling benignly at a locked-in-the-groove guitarist and drummer, because I’m not exactly conceiving a lullaby, here.  As far as the ox and lamb keeping time, well, I’ll leave that to your imaginations, because mine isn’t up to it.

I’ll trade all future hearings of “White Christmas” for it, though, in a hot second 

 

Those who celebrate Christmas: have a merry remainder of this one, and stay safe!

Holiday Music: Jump-Off-A-Bridge Edition

 

Jonathan Bellman

Friend Eric (I initially typed “Fiend Eric” by accident and, in fact, almost left it that way) passes along the following: a Chanuka song written by Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, someone whose politics, behavior, and self-righteousness I absolutely detest.  Apropos of a conversation he had with Jeffrey Goldberg, a columnist for the Atlantic, he wrote a song for our odd little eight-days-of-light-and-cholesterol holiday.  Goldberg’s—um—heartwarming article is here; or you can cut directly to the song and video. 

 

 

The remarks that follow the article provide find a microcosm of Jewish interior life (including the non-Jews weighing in).  They love the song; they hate the song.  Hatch Is A Friend Of The Jews; With Friends Like This Who Needs Enemies.  If He’s Such A Friend Of The Jews Why Doesn’t He Vote With Jewish Values In Mind Like For Health Care; How Dare You Try To Define Jewish Political Values.  And on and on.  I was raised by old-school, provide-for-everyone-but-YOU-work-harder-in-school-and-WHY-AREN’T-YOU-PRACTICING-MORE Jewish liberals, and I’m squarely within that tradition myself, so to my ear the mealy-mouthing about the great respect Hatch has for us is pretty annoying—for a variety of reasons, some of which are best left unstated.  But never mind; that’s neither here nor there. 

What is relevant is the song itself, and anxiety over the dearth and or plentitude and or quality of Chanuka songs.  In the early-to-mid 1960s, at San Jose School in Pomona, CA, we all sang Christmas carols, and the teachers would try to be inclusive (for the six Jewish kids in the school, two of which had my last name and three of which shared another one) and also sing the dreydl song.  Now, Adam Sandler aside, this is a kiddie-song piece of crap, and every musical sense I had would just wither when all my classmates would look inquiringly at me when, after “Lo, How A Rose Ere Blooming” and “Hark!  The Herald Angels Sing” and so on, the teacher would bravely start that damned thing and Jon-with-the-piano-lessons would more or less have to join in.  The sense of “you guys sing…that?” was unmistakable.  Not anti-Semitism, not contempt, not judgment, just honest-to-God little-kid bafflement.  I never blamed them.

So, such crossovers as Mendelssohn’s music in “Hark!” and Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” aside, there is a much anxiety about Jews and Holiday Music.  Should the kids sing it or not, is it participating in society or losing our heritage, how shrilly should we act like “Don’t Let the Lights Go Out” (don’t ask) is as good as the classic Christmas tunes, etc.  The fact is, of course, that Christmas and Chanuka are by no means equivalent holidays (despite the way my incompletely educated grandfather used to speak of them), so it is no surprise at all that a huge majority of those in the western world would evolve a large repertoire of lovely music inspired by one of their two most important holidays while a tiny minority there—to wit, my tribe—would not be as successful doing the same for a minor and, as Goldberg points out, odd and problematic holiday.  Some of the remarks after the article speak to this, and I don’t need to get into the history and theology of it here; suffice to say that the origins and subsequent interpretations (appropriations, really) of Chanuka are complicated and much argued over.   Shall we talk about the music?

From composer Madeline Stone we get poppy minor-key Ashkenaziana (it opens with a  sort of tip ’o the yarmulke to the Yiddish classic, “Khanike, oh Khanike”) produced according to the School of the Eurovision Song Contest—the bouncy beats and paleosynths of the early eighties, it sounds like.  From the uncomfortable-looking Sen. Hatch, we get a couple of verses of the explanatory doggerel typical of Chanuka songs, feloniously compounded with such rhymes as place with days, believe with history etc.  I’m sure Sen. Hatch did this as a gesture of friendship (the bygone Mormon practice of baptizing deceased Jews aside, a lot of Mormons feel close to Jewish religion and culture and so on), and certainly there are let-there-be-peace-on-earth-and-let-it-begin-with-me points to be granted to Syrian-American Rasheeda Azar (of Terre Haute), who does a creditable job singing it.  All that said, the thing still just makes me writhe and wince. 

It is, um, a gesture of something.  It’s no classic; it’s not anything I want to hear again, even.  Why must every Chanuka song lecture, or retell the story?  Christmas songs aren’t Cliff Notes, are they?  Why the neo-shtetl music, for heaven’s sake—how is that relevant in 2009?!  WHY ARE YOU ROLLING YOUR EYES AND RETREATING?  TURN THOSE LIGHTS BACK ON

I gotta grade.

 

Hello, or Thinking of Nico

Ryan Dohoney

Greetings. I, like Michael, am new around these parts. Phil kindly asked me to contribute to Dial M on occasion and it’s a pleasure to be a more active part of a blog I’ve come to love. So as my inaugural post, I’d like to address an under-sung figure of our musical life: Christa Paffgen, better known as the incomparable Nico.

If there was a time that Nico entered my consciousness it was really this moment in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums:

Hooks, Ultimate

Jonathan Bellman

A head's-up:  Steve Smith, a Philosophy/Religious Studies guy at Millsaps College, has a blog/chronicle/study of hooks, specifically hooks in rock songs.  Smith's project is off to a fine start, and while I admit that our definitions of "hook" differ, it still makes for enjoyable and thought-provoking reading.  Just to explain the difference: my idea of a hook has always been an instrumental riff that grabs you by the collar (or something else) and doesn't let go—ever.  Obvious examples would be the the opening electric piano lick from "Summer in the City" (Lovin' Spoonful), the closing piano lick from Paul McCartney's "Venus and Mars," the signature guitar licksfrom the Beatles' "Day Tripper" (yes, Clapton did it first in the Bluesbreakers' version of Ray Charles's "What'd I Say," but still), Sugarloaf's "Don't Call Us, We'll Call You," the Byrds' version of "Mr. Tambourine Man," the Move's "Do Ya" (much superior to ELO's), etc.  You know what I mean, right?  It's a hook!

According to Prof. Smith, the definition is somewhat broader, including "Trying," "Odd Meter," or even "The Greatest 'F--- You.'"  So, on that basis, I'll suggest one.  The category is the greatest dismissive laugh, the most devastating (in laugh form) negation of a girl, all her ancestors, her entire gender…by a wronged singer.  My nomination: the second (not the first, which is a mere "ah"), laugh in Dion and the Belmonts' "Lovers Who Wander."  The line is "Look at me now (hah!); you'd never know it"  and the second time it's pretty much fatal.

Agree?  Disagree?  Let Steve know.

Classical Pop

Jonathan Bellman

Apologies for the lack of blogging.  It was an extremely active year, and the summer is continuing in the same vein—after the wonderful Hawaiian idyll, another trip to California, teaching a class, more book-related stuff, pre-concert lectures, and (to be honest) before too long there is going to be the saddest of return visits to California.  It’s the price we pay for being here.

Not sure about the future of the blog, to be honest.  We’ll let you know.

Last Chanuka, I was given an Ion turntable—a very nice little gadget that converts vinyl tracks to .mp3s.  So I’m starting with the oddities from my record collection: “Gwin” by the Ship (a Champaign, IL band), “Lakeshore Drive” by Aliotta, Haynes, and Jeremiah (Chicagoland stuff—a couple of other tracks too), other weirdness.  This evening, I started on my old Classical Pop archives—the late sixties’ classical-rock, experimental bands, from the pre-ELO, pre-ELP, pre-stadium grandeur era.  So here’s Ars Nova, here’s the Left Banke (“Pretty Ballerina,” Walk Away Renée” plus the lesser-known “Barterers and their Wives” and “Something on my Mind”), and—real obscurity now—here’s Montage (“I Shall Call Her Mary” and “Grand Pianist”), the post-Left Banke project of Michael Brown.  I mean, who except me and ten other people even knows about Montage, for God’s sake?  I was borderline obsessed with this kind of music when I was a junior and senior in high school, some years after it was recorded.  This was the seventies, remember; anything that suggested musical creativity was like water to a parched man.

So I’m listening to this material again.  My first realization is that these things were recorded very crudely, rather like old Beatles records: different instruments and voices in the different stereo channels.  So you initially think you’ve lost hearing in one ear, and then the other half of the texture comes in, you have all the instruments but no depth.  Forget the texture and recording depth, then; what do we have?

Harmonic changes and vocal ensemble writing that did not remain in the pop music vocabulary, for a start; the sorts of meta-Beatles, meta-Association vocal ensemble writing that soon became too interesting for the pop charts.  Clear attempts to capture, even for a couple of moments, soundworlds from the art music repertories: pseudo-Baroque harpsichord clinking, Rachmaninov piano thundering, and so forth.  (The Montage album even has what I think is an attempt at a twelve-tone melody in the song “She’s Alone,” which is less than successful, at least in my opinion.)  Both “Pretty Ballerina” and “Walk Away Renée” have chamber-music interludes, and the first of these even has a Lydian melody. 

This was deep stuff to me at the time.  Not so much, now; it’s far less mysterious.  Blame the music major curriculum for sharpening my aural skills and historical awareness to the point that I could understand what such bands were doing.  Is it any wonder, though, that I basically didn’t want to devote time to anything else, ever?  This is Unveiling the Mystery, a peek behind the curtain. 

Heaven knows what other Mysteries my vinyl collection will yield up.

O CAT!

Jonathan Bellman

But always keep in mind that he

Resents familiarity.

I bow, and taking off my hat,

Ad-dress him in this form: O CAT!

 

            —T. S. Eliot, “The Ad-dressing of Cats,” Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats

 

It’s that time again.  Last year I blogged about the spring musical at my son’s high school, Peter Pan, and this year the show is an ambitious production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats, based—we all know—on the whimsical poetry of T. S. Eliot.  The poetry is charming, and reflects the influence of the likes of Edward Lear’s Nonsense Books, the mercilessly loving satire of British types that one finds in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, and a real love of cats.  For that last, I’m depending on my wife’s analysis, because I’m not a cat guy, particularly; when she was growing up one of the family’s cats was Her Cat—all praise on Spooky’s illustrious name!—so I’ll take her word for it.  Tomorrow night is the scheduled final performance, which I will attend.  I also attended opening night two weeks ago.  Relax—since Ben broke his foot several months ago, he was given a very minor role, so I’m not going to be doing the adoring-daddy thing.  Here, I mean.

 

Sinful pleasures of my youth to which I am still attached include the Webber/Rice musicals Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Jesus Christ Superstar.  I know, I know.  I have no explanation for this other than I liked the tunes and they call back the times and friends I was with and so on.  No apologies.  I have loathed the later stuff—Evita?!  Ugh.  Other songs I’ve heard all sound alike.  Not interested.  Still: Cats, oddly, was a show I never knew, though at the time I really hated all the hype, the wannabe-feline, narcissistic pseudo-eroticism among the dancy set (where I was spending a lot of time, since my gig then was being a ballet pianist), etc.  Why know a piece if you can judge it without hearing it?  Well, precisely.

 

The opening night performance was therefore my first hearing of the piece (and remember, these are high school performers).  I was ambivalent; I subsequently borrowed my son’s recording and listened again.  So:

 

I am really not  all that enamored of it, but I was struck by the extent to which some of the songs are almost contrafacta.  “The Rum Tum Tugger” is almost a direct steal of Eddy Cochrane’s 1950s rockabilly classic, “Something Else,” and the character is very Elvis, much like Pharaoh from Joseph.  “Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat” is a kind of re-metering of the American railway hobo classic, “The Big Rock Candy Mountain,” a bindlestiff’s vision of the Land of Jubilo—appropriate enough, I suppose.  A pirate cat, Growltiger, sings a bit of opera—wickedly parodistic Puccini, down to the phraseology and overheated pentatonicism. “Magical Mr. Mistoffelees” sounds to me like a combination of two numbers from Superstar: “Look at all my Trials and Tribulations”* and the verse from the song Jesus Christ Superstar itself.  There may be a slight echo of Superstar itself here; Mistoffelees can do works of magic that no other cat can do, and brings back the kidnapped Old Deuteronomy, and so is sort of the Jesus Cat to Old Deuteronomy’s God Cat (if you want to go this far, and if you don’t I certainly won’t be offended**).  And so it goes; I suppose that since musicals usually seek to amuse rather than challenge their audiences, giving them this kind of reworked familiar stuff is well within the rules of the game. 

 

(I must observe that my random comments make no less sense than the actual plot.  Narrative coherence is not in the forefront of this one.)

 

But—damn it—I would be dishonest were I to pretend that I did not find the show affecting in some ways also.  Particularly the old theater cat, Gus: feeble, well past it, palsied paws, reliving past glories, nattering self-righteously about the untrained kittens in modern productions and reliving his past glories…”when I made history.”  Yes, this is an English type, done to a fare-thee-well by Eliot and then Lloyd Webber.  But is there not a resonance here of every legend-in-his-own-mind artist, whose past accomplishments grow ever larger in the rear-view mirror, and in the retelling?  Maybe it is just where I am in life—my academic scholar/poet father (never successful as a creative writer) is in a nursing facility, and I never became either Horowitz or a rock piano virtuoso—that this comic character strikes me as almost unbearably poignant.  And what to make of Grizabella, the formerly beautiful but now rather wasted and dissipated cat, who had left long ago for a life of unspecified excesses and who has now returned but is shunned by the tribe?  She sings of her past beauty, and is ultimately granted resurrection by Old Deuteronomy—she gets another chance at life, in other words.  What gay melancholic (Eliot) or, perhaps, female who overplayed the hand her beauty dealt her wouldn’t share this yearning to the point of madness: the possibility, granted against Nature Herself, to come back and do it right this time, not to make those self-destructive mistakes?  To, for God’s sake, be happy?  Uncomfortable as it is, there’s a bit of each of us in Gus, whether we strutted the boards or were musicians or even athletes (thinking of Springsteen’s “Glory Days” here).  A standing ovation by high school friends and parents or by a college audience or whatever becomes, in memory, a command performance before the crowned heads of Europe.  The trials and tribulations of student performances become…a career.  Who wouldn’t think twice about another chance?

 

Eliot’s eye didn’t fail him, and Lloyd Webber expands his vision in a  psychologically consistent and plausible way.  So here it is: I’m grudgingly admitting I found something to admire in a hugely popular work that everyone else loved, even though the Webberian idiom is not really to my taste.  It goes against my nature, but there it is.

 

I’m looking forward to tonight’s performance.  

 

 

*LATE ADDITION: Debbie insists the operative referent here is more “Hosanna” than “Trials and Tribulations,” in terms of the use and mood.  Musically, I still think my identification is a closer fit.  Debbie: “Sorry.  Wrong.  Thanks for playing.  Dismissed.”  Figures, but it isn’t the first time I’ve suffered from unfair judging in a music competition.

 

**And, obviously, any cat—however magical—would devour a fish before getting a chance to multiply it, so the comparison will only go so far.

 

 

 

 

The Silliest Degree on Earth

Jonathan Bellman

Liverpool Hope University  is now offering a Master of Arts degree in The Beatles, Popular Music and Society.  (No Oxford Comma [a.k.a. Harvard Comma or Serial Comma]; this is England.)  In fact, let me just quote from the newsy website, though adjusting it for American usage:

 

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Liverpool Hope University has launched a brand new MA in The Beatles, Popular Music, and Society, the first of its kind in the world.

 

The new course, which can be studied both full and part time, covers four modules with specific issues relating to The Beatles and Popular Music, consisting of four 12-week taught modules, plus a dissertation.

 

Mike Brocken, Senior Lecturer in Popular Music at Hope, said, “There have been over 8,000 books about The Beatles but there has never been serious academic study and that is what we are going to address.

 

“Forty years on from their break-up, now is the right time and Liverpool is the right place to study The Beatles. This MA is expected to attract a great deal of attention, not just locally but nationally and we have already had enquiries from abroad, particularly the United States.

 

'”The Beatles, Popular Music and Society’ marks a seminal advance in popular music studies. For the first time in the UK and possibly the world, a postgraduate taught course is offered to research into The Beatles, the city from which they emerged, the contexts of the 1960s, technology, sound and songwriting and the industries that have set up in their wake to capitalize on tourism in the city of Liverpool.”

---------------

 

I’m all for seminal advances, of course.  Still, I can’t get over the idea that this is a Liverpool cash-in on the Beatles for people who actually can’t qualify to study popular music and society at another English University, such as the Open University.  Studying popular music is not unheard-of in Great Britain, for heaven’s sake.  A graduate degree in the Beatles?  To what purpose?  I have a nightmare-vision of the applicant pool, or the new-student mixer:  slightly batty senior citizens and people my age—middle-age, we’ll say—who dress oddly, still occasionally wear their Beatle-wigs and Ringo-boots and whose eyes gleam just a little weirdly. 

 

The Beatles, bless them, weren’t and aren’t a discipline.  Sure, study Musicology and do a dissertation on them, or study Cultural Studies and do a dissertation on them, or Psychology or whatever else.  But a degree in the Beatles per se?  How would that make you anything but a laughingstock?  “Well, I’ve really spent most of my time with the verses of “In My Life”; I’ll have to go review George Martin’s double-speed piano solo and get back to you before answering your question definitively.  This really isn’t my area; I’m an Earlyist, and my dissertation was on pitch bending and blues inflections in the Tony Sheridan sessions, so this is well outside my sub-specialty…”

 

The global economy is in free-fall and Liverpool Hope University launches a Beatles degree.  Sheesh.  I’m sure there are Beatles fans all over the world who should be given the degree on the spot for work already accomplished.  

Fearsomely Authentic

Jonathan Bellman

I have just finished listening to Raising Sand, the T-Bone Burnett-produced Robert Plant/Alison Krauss collaboration that won Album of the Year.  To me, the thing sizzles, and I’m a fan of neither country music nor Plant.  I never liked Zeppelin much; I thought of them as screechy, strutting posers and only really, really liked a few odd songs (“Kashmir,” “Boogie With Stu,” “Hot Dog,” and “Hey Hey What Can I Do” come to mind).  But here the entire thing is magic: Krauss and Plant blend superbly, with no diva-isms from either, and T-Bone Burnett proves, once again, the extent to which he owns the recording process.  Here’s why: Country mawkishness (she done left me, yore dyin’, etc.) are suddenly not mawkish, but nakedly human.  The textures are spare but perfect (banjo, fiddle, and autoharp spice up a lean, taut instrumental and recording aesthetic.  And as for that:

 

Jay Bellerose’s almost impossibly wonderful drumming sometimes sounds random, sometimes sounds as if he’s so tired and sad he can barely get to the beats, sometimes evokes the low-tech industrial drive of an old machine shop, and sometimes crackles with rockabilly energy.  Add to this instrumentalists, including Burnett himself, of such command and experience that the feel of each song is blisteringly vivid and authentic.  One does not think, “Oh, a rockabilly number”; one thinks “My God, I’m hearing not only the best of 1956, I can hear Eddy Cochrane, Ricky Nelson et al. breathing in the background, and the grease and sweat of the time to boot.”  This for number after number: a great song is given a superb interpretation by the singers, unimprovable instrumental treatments, and a recording aesthetic that captures an entire cultural ethos, somehow, be it blues or country or lament or rockabilly or whatever.

 

If this sounds like polysyllabic, pretentious slop I don’t care.  Listen to the CD yourself.  You will admit I’m right.

Thick Context

Jonathan Bellman

Hooray for Dial M’s 200,000th hit! On my own side, I just FINISHED revising my book, Chopin’s Polish Ballade, for Oxford University Press. I still have to muck around a bit with the musical examples, printing it out etc. and send it to them, and the copyediting and proof phases lie ahead, but as far as the writing: DONE. Among the things I’ve had on hold because of various other tasks is this blog, now almost two months late. This year, for my birthday, Brother Joel sent me this retrospective of Elektra Records, a 2006 compilation set from Rhino UK. I know, I know. I’m sorry. I’m sure your siblings are also very nice. Another professional note about Brother Joel: when I was doing research for my Raga Rock article in the late 1990s, he was basically my Research Archive: books about the Yardbirds and Kinks and so on, obscure recordings and outtakes, the works. He played different versions of “Running Bear (Loves Little White Dove)” over the phone at one point, so I could compare approaches to rock and roll Indianism, and I remember thinking, en passant, “Perhaps not everyone has these resources…” I gave the paper at a Popular Music meeting, and at the end all the guys in the audience (mostly English, Sociology, Cultural Studies etc. profs from east coast universities) got up and stormed the front. “Where’d you get that stuff? That was wild!” Well, the JB sound archive in Los Angeles. Actually, I’m the only one entitled to use it… Oh, your premium institutions don’t have access to these materials? Really? Their shoulders slumped in dismay. Wa-al, ah jes’ live’n Greeley but, y’know, we do our best… To the point. In addition to some fairly geeky inclusions (photos, postcards, pins etc.) this package contains not only five CDs—four of chronological anthology and a fifth of eccentricities—but also a book about the various artists signed and nurtured during founder Jac Holzman’s tenure there (1950–73). Of course, there are plenty of familiar names: Eric Clapton, the Doors, Judy Collins, Jackson Browne, Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs, Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Bread, Carly Simon, even Queen, etc. But there are plenty of fascinating artists, lovingly chronicled in the accompanying book, of whom you may not have heard: Ars Nova (long among my faves, with my youthful Art Rock fixation, but why “Fields of People” rather than “I Wrapped Her In Ribbons”?), Clear Light, the Rainbow Band, Aztec Two-Step, even the stoner humor of Jack S. Margolis (A Child’s Garden of Grass). I am at minimum a few years younger than the original target demographic for this music, but am culturally close enough that I understand whereof they were singing: love, protest, drugs, weirdness. Take Dave Peel and the Lower East Side: my brother had the original Have a Marijuana LP (1968), and it consisted of 1) what sounds like a live recording in the village, 2) the F-word, 3) tee-hee drug humor (this is category in which the included track, the Alphabet Song, falls: “ABCDEFG, LSD and DMT…”) etc. Not included on this anthology is their “Happy Mother’s Day,” which is darker (“Happy Mother’s Day, Happy Mother’s Day, I am your son, I am a runaway/Living on the East Side, always getting stoned, always getting high: I’m glad I’m not home!”—latter-day reviews of the album, many them justified, may be found here). My enjoyment of this anthology is both that of encountering unfamiliar music and revisiting zeitgeists familiar from childhood, and that of study: this is a profoundly musicological package, with its representative inclusions and documentary materials, and it betrays the deep scholarly passions that have always informed a sector of rock fandom. Spending time with this material is, for me, bliss: Old Bore At Play. But the context! Of course, I’ve always loved Roger McGuinn and the Byrds, and remember reading about Byrdmania. As it happened, though, I never heard any songs by the Beefeaters, McGuinn’s pre-Byrds band. To hear “Don’t Be Long” is to remember the Beatlemania industry and all the copycats trying to latch onto a good idea. (May I say that McGuinn’s subsequent Byrds and solo and folk work was a much, much better idea, but we all come from somewhere, nicht wahr?) Song after song on this wonderful anthology produces similar thoughts: oh, wow, right, School of Joan Baez! School of Peter and Gordon! An interesting folk./art/psychedelic/blues blend… Fascinating, wonderful stuff (with a couple of real turkeys, of course), and illustrative of the almost ridiculous level of imagination and creativity that was bubbling out of the clubs in those years. Recordings like this put the stuff we all do know from those years in a new kind of relief; emphatically, it is not that the artists who eventually achieved commercial success were better; there’s far too much caprice in the music business and audience taste and warring benevolent and malign influences of the stars and planets for there to be any coherent explanation. It is just that to hear an anthology such as this one is a powerful reminder of how deep the musical culture was. Imagine if more survived from other blisteringly creative eras: Florence in the early years of the seventeenth century, Vienna in the final third of the eighteenth, the improvisations of the Parisian pianists of the 1830s… I know; there are only so many hours in the day. For those who enjoy aural time-travel, though, this anthology has my strongest recommendation. Thanks, Brother Joel!

Taboo!

Phil Ford

I was on vacation last week (hence my spotty posting to Dial M) but went back to school yesterday -- time to get my courses in order for the fall. I stopped by the mailroom and was greeted by our ebullient new mailroom person, Karen, who handed me a package I wasn't expecting. And . . . it's . . . my Representations article! Wheee! It's finally out! Look!

My name on it and everything! And in rather august company. (The Representations website has a comprehensive list of past issues and authors.) Sorry, it's probably unbecoming to show too much enthusiasm for your own journal articles, but I'm proud of this one. If you're wondering what my article ("Taboo: Time and Belief in Exotica") is about, here is the abstract:

In the 1950s, exotica was a genre of pop music that specialized in depicting imaginary exotic paradises and conventionalized natives. By the late 1960s, exotica pop had disappeared, but its tropes of temporal and spatial disjuncture persisted, structuring the music, visual art, and social theory of the utopian counterculture. While 1950s and 1960s kinds of exotica differ in their preferred imaginary destinations, both raise the question of what intermediate shades between belief and disbelief are demanded by aestheticized representations of human life. This essay theorizes exotica as a mode of representation governed by a peculiar mode of reception—one of willed credulity enabled by submission to its spectacle. What exotica demands is what intellectuals are least likely to give, though, and the peculiar pleasures of exotica spectacle are denigrated or rendered invisible in the hermeneutic regime.

And here is the article itself, free for all who might want to read it.

There seems to be something of a boom in what might be called exoticism studies in music at the moment. Ralph Locke in particular has a book called Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections coming out from Cambridge University Press, and I am keenly looking forward to reading it. I read his Journal of Musicology article "A Broader View of Musical Exoticism" only when my own article was in final proofs, so it doesn't show up in the notes, but Ralph's way of thinking about musical exoticism is very congenial to mine. In his gentlemanly and unassuming way, he revises much of the conventional understanding of musical exoticism by showing that exoticism doesn't happen only when the music sounds weird, alien, non-western, etc. Against this "exotic style only" paradigm he posits an “all the music in full context” paradigm, in which an audience's understanding of exoticism takes place within the music's larger narrative frame. Which is a much more satisfying way of dealing with the matter. In one part of my article I write about "Blue Jungle," from the Les Baxter album Jungle Jazz. The theme of this album is South America, as the liner notes tell us in the usual bombastic exotica-album style :

Les here ventures forth . . . this time on a musical exploration into the wilds of South and Central America. Here are the spectacular results. Here the timeless meets the modern in a breathtaking, pulsating whirl of sound. This is music of high adventure with a beat—exotically presented in a Baxter blend of ‘Jungle Jazz.’

And Jungle Jazz is adorned with a particularly, uh, problematic album cover:

But the music itself -- particular "Blue Jungle" --  doesn't sound "South American." It sounds like cop show music, or what I call "jazz exotica." I have an article on jazz exotica just out in the Journal of Musicological Research (this has been an exotic year for me) where I define jazz exotica as "music that attempts to conjure filmic images of the urban demimonde perennially associated with jazz and the narrative subject that traverses it." Which is a highfalutin' way of saying that jazz exotica is not so much jazz as music whose topic is jazz. But what does that have to do with the guy on the album cover? In the "exotic style only" paradigm we wouldn't look at the album cover or liner notes, but would insist that whatever the album means is to be found in its musical style only. But popular music just doesn't work that way. You never pay attention to the music exclusively-- otherwise it wouldn't matter if KISS performed in business suits or full kabuki drag. Likewise here: as I say in "Taboo," an exotica album "is a system of representations in which music plays the main but not exclusive role in creating an ethnographic fiction." And that "system of representations" is the music plus liner notes, cover art, and what academical types like to call the "discourse" (i.e., talk and hype) surrounding the album. And from that point of view, why yes, this is the music of the mysterious South American native folk! At least it pleases us to think so while we're listening to it. Or, as Heather Hadlock put it to me once, the audience is a participant in its own delusion. (Thanks Heather!)

Which reminds me: thank you, Ralph, for stepping in and writing for Dial M this summer. Those of you who aren't in the biz, this was a little like having Dr. J come and play a little one-on-one on your neighborhood blacktop.