At the outset I must confess that I am not a “musical theater person.” I sincerely wish I was, but I simply am not (yet at least. I’m going to try to broaden my horizons). My collection of musicals can be counted on two hands, and is primarily limited to things I have heard about on NPR and Stephen Sondheim classics.
Confessions aside: I cannot stop listening to “The Book of Mormon” soundtrack. I don’t have any sort of aversion to musical theater so it’s no big coup that I find it tolerable. But tolerable does not describe how I find The Book of Mormon. I have listened to almost nothing but this soundtrack for weeks. I cannot stop listening to it. And more importantly, there are choice moments where I still get chills (aside from this it’s basically Bruce Springsteen, a few Morbid Angel tracks, and the Mountain Goats that can do that to me consistently). I was flapping my arms around like an idiot during the Tony’s performance. LIKE AN IDIOT. WHAT DOES FLAPPING ONE’S ARMS EVEN HAVE TO DO WITH ENJOYING A PIECE OF MUSIC. I DO NOT KNOW.
Until just a few days ago, I couldn’t really figure out why. Now, however, I’ve sorted it out. As an introduction I need to present this clip from Annie Hall:
Focus on the “I need the eggs” bit and the pieces start to fall in place pretty easily. The crux of Annie Hall and of “The Book or Mormon,” in my mind, is essentially the same and two-fold, though they deal with different surface material (religion and love). Point one is that human relationships and religion (respectively) are insane and on the surface have no discernible objective value (those eggs/golden plates are fake!). At least not until they are approached (until you approach them) from the right direction. The second half is that we desperately need these things. Check out the “everybody worships” part of David Foster Wallace’s “This Is Water” for another variation on this truism. That he concludes that the only choice we get is what to worship is vital, if complicating. It’s also something I’m going to deal with shortly.
First though, a side note: the assumption among religious types (and, full disclosure, I kind of consider myself a “religious type” in a complicated and embattled way) and hopeless romantics is that religion and love are prescriptive phenomena. They are reality, they create it, they manage it, etc. Religion (and from here on out I’m going to hope you’ll forgive me for not typing “religion and love” every time since it’s a bit tiresome. With minimal variation, I am convinced that what I am saying about religion can also be accurately said about love, as well as various other things) to some is that set of beliefs from which reality springs. God created the universe. God set the clock in motion. So on and so forth. And I think this is an important fundamental element of any sort of real belief. You have to believe at some point that your religion was the first cause in this universe. That it’s not the thing doing the reacting, but the thing that is being reacted to. Joseph Smith did not make up the golden plates, God really put them there.
I think though, the conclusion that “The Book of Mormon” arrives at rather explicitly (and that Annie Hall arrives at implicitly) is that religion is actually descriptive. That is, it is created by people after the fact to negotiate, for instance, AIDS, baby raping, genital mutilation, and anything else in this world (see “Making Things Up Again” and “Joseph Smith American Moses”).
And this is where Wallace’s notion of choosing comes in. We have to choose not only what to believe, but also to believe that what we believe is a prescriptive actor within the universe. This is why I get chills when Andrew Rannells proclaims that he believes the increasingly ridiculous tenets of Mormonism in “I Believe.” (Please, I beg of you, watch him on the Tony’s if you haven’t already). By sheer force of will he is switching from a descriptive to a prescriptive angle. That is tough. The act of creating faith is probably one of the single most difficult mental feats people can undertake. Because as I understand it, faith is belief without “proof.” It’s unscientific and deeply troubling to a lot of people. The man in Woody Allen’s joke is already there — even though his psychiatrist encourages him to turn in his brother, he doesn’t because he is getting substantive results from his beliefs. Elder Price gets there when he trusts in Heavenly Father to protect him from the “warlord who shoots people in the face.” In order to get on the level of the man in the joke and Elder Price, one must not only choose to believe but also completely discard not doubt, but the fact that anything other than the truth he’s chosen can even begin to exist or could have ever existed at all.
So so so, and to sum up what was really supposed to be like 200 words, “The Book of Mormon” taps something fundamental in the way that humans live their lives — which, to put it bluntly and incompletely, is the constant pull between faith and cynicism. That’s at least a real part of why it’s amazing. It is, of course, hilarious and catchy as well which really really helps.
WHY IS NO ONE SAYING WHAT IS OBVIOUS?????
Ok, look. Titus Andronicus are a really great band. We’ve established that. The Monitor is tight as hell, and The Airing of Grievances is similarly (if not equally) tight as hell. And they’re a great live band.
But this has been gnawing at me all day.
Why is no one saying that their cover of “Birdhouse In Your Soul” on the Onion AV Club site is bad? It’s horrible. Ok, that Bukowski intro is pretty cool, but the actually song itself is bad cover band material. Like, and I’m going to level with you here, it sounds like something Michael and I would jam on after having a few beers on a Friday night when there was nothing to do aside from randomly cover songs that we like, provided that we did things like that (which, I mean, we do sometimes, but usually with much simpler songs than “Birdhouse” e.g. “Where Eagles Dare.” [Not the Iron Maiden one, the Misfits one, oh how I long for them to cover each other] [Important sub-point, I concede that "Birdhouse In Your Soul" is not the easiest song to just pick up and cover. But Titus Andronicus, being the generally great band that they are, should know better]). The difference is that we would be fully aware that no one else wanted to hear it. Or we would, you know, use our awesome rock powers to make it much better than it was the first time we ran through it (“awesome rock powers”).
I’ve been throwing around some big music industry conspiracy theories for the past ten minutes or so: “does the band or their label have some deal with with Pitchfork/Stereogum/the whole interent?” I wonder. They must b/c this thing is no good. It sounds lazy. It sounds tired. It is not tight (and I don’t mean “tight” in the “cool” sense, I mean it in the “musically together” sense) at all. It has none of the energy that we all know and love from Titus Andronicus- for Christ’s sake, Stickles never gets above an almost gentle-by-comparison-coo, not to mention the fact that he is ridiculously out of tune. And the keyboard. It sticks out like a sore and also probably infected thumb. No one wants that.
But that Bukowski sample is pretty cool.
And I will allow some of it might have to do with the AV club being used to cute folky versions of things and not being prepared to properly mix the rock monstrosity that is Titus Andronicus.
But, still, don’t listen to it.
Okay, listen to it if you want/haven’t already b/c you got excited when you saw that one of your favorite current bands was covering one of your favorite songs from your second (or third depending upon the day of the week) favorite album from another one of your favorite current bands (maybe that was just me).
Music criticism, man!!
But seriously, I love Titus Andronicus. If you haven’t listened to them yet:
1. Shame on you.
2. Do it now.
OMG Nicolas Jaar
You read that right, Nichoals Jaar has got me exclaiming to extant deities up in here with his fabulous full length Space Is Only Noise. It appeals to me particularly because although it is very certainly an electronic record, it’s got the pacing of a pop and or rock record i.e. it ebbs and flows instead of building steadily intensifying layers or sound or establishing grooves like most electronic music. Nothing against the establishing of grooves or the intensifying of layers, I’m just saying that (to paraphrase a friend of mine with whom I was talking about this sort of tangentially last night) if forced to choose I’d pick electric guitars over drum machines and strained throaty vocals over the cut up ones which is to say, I tend to like the pacing and tropes of rock music more than the pacing and tropes of electronic music. As is evident from my dubstep post, this has been changing ever so slightly lately, but I still love the gut level punch of Neil Young’s guitar more than most things including but not limited to, “connecting” with other people, chocolate, and campy science fiction (this last one, if you know me, is especially revealing of the power of my love for Neil Young’s guitar). Nicholas Jaar is an excellent transitional record for me because it sort of/kind of has the best of both worlds.
Also, it’s not the type of electronic music that insists on me dancing to it, which I totally dig because I hate dancing more than I hate most things.
And, to pull my head out of my own personal hang ups for just few sentences, this record is fantastic from an entirely objective standpoint as well. The main thing it’s going for it is the sparseness. A lot of “weird” electronic music tries to fill in every sonic hole with as many bleeps/bloops/screeches and etc. as computerly possible, not so with Jaar. The space let’s you contemplate how truly strange that little interlude where the conversation snuck in was, and how creepy in a defamiliarization of pop sort of way that quasi single “Space Is Only Noise If You Can See” was. And, Lord Almighty (again with the deities, he says) the use of piano on this album is magnificent. Again w/r/t this album as liminal between pop and IDM, the piano (and even occasional acoustic guitar) grounds the record in the “real” so it doesn’t completely fly off in to incomprehensible outer space. It’s a foothold for the listener. It’s the perfectly apt sonic underpinning that coheres the record and makes it just approachable enough. It reminds me of that episode of Farscape (after research, “That Old Black Magic” from season 1) where John Crichton is wooed by pitch man presenting him with facts he shouldn’t be able to know about his (Crichton’s) life, and then, once he submits to the pitch, he’s suddenly and mystically transported somewhere else entirely from which he can’t escape. The piano is that pitch man.
Suspension of Judgement But Not Really
I wanted to wait to review the new Mountain Goats record until I could listen to it in the non-low bitrate version that is currently available on the NPR website but, like an impetuous little kid with a candy bar on the table in front of me and absent parents, I’m going to give a few preliminary thoughts in list form so as to limit myself. Also, gonna gut myself off at five for the time being. I love this band so much that I really want to give them a fair and high bitrate shake before making substantive judgments.
1. I’ve been thinking long and hard about this and, The Life of the World to Come notwithstanding, this might be the best tMG record since The Sunset Tree or maybe even Tallahassee. That is, I like it better than Get Lonely, and a whole lot better than Heretic Pride. It might be better than The Sunset Tree although that feels weird to say so probably not. I really loved The LIfe of the World to Come, it felt like the most mature songwriting (which is hilarious to say since I think you would be hard pressed find any evidence of “immature” songwriting in the Mountain Goats’ oeuvre) yet and I straight adored the piano.
2. “High Hawk Season” is my favorite song. The vocal harmonies underneath are delightful. As for the rest of the song, it’s a pretty standard tMG track complete with the climactic moment where Darnielle seems overcome with the emotional force of what he’s trying to express that I basically jones for on a daily basis and that I wish they could make into an easily ingested pill form so I could easily get my fix literally whenever.
3. The Mountain Goats sound like a band now!! Not just like Darnielle with session musicians. The Life of the World to Come also felt a bit like this, but it was sort of mitigated by the lonely piano thing that happened throughout.
4. Is “Estate Sale Sign” the most punk tMG song yet? Probably, yes.
5. Song titles on this record, FTW.
So, Strangely, I’ve Been Digging Dubstep Lately
Who knew.
As background: I’ve never really been too terribly interested in electronic music of really any sort. I’ve tried, I swear I’ve tried, but it’s never clicked. I can step back and respect it as a viable mode of musical expression and indeed a mode of musical expression that is profoundly distinct from most pop music though still accessible, i.e. it doesn’t situate itself as separate from pop music by simply chasing avant-garde weirdisms (at least when it’s done well) (and there is nothing wrong with avant-garde weirdisms, in fact I mostly love them). But it just never hit me on a gut level in the way the Mountain Goats, for instance, do (side note, the new Mountain Goats record is streaming on NPR and it’s great. Really really great. Don’t take my word though b/c I’m pretty much hopelessly in love with anything John Darnielle produces. It’s pathetic really). Read more…
Psychic Bedouin Radio Bonanza #1 – 02/01/11
Today I begin the painful process of getting back on a number of saddles, one of which is radio, the other of which is Verbal Gymnastics.
It’s been too long.
For those unfortunate souls that missed the debut Psychic Bedouin Radio Bonanza this afternoon, fret not, for I will return next week to the airwaves of WIUX bearing more songs from androgynous warblers, creepy satanic metalheads, and dudes who are old enough to be my dad.
Playlist:
Bottomless Pit – “Red Pen”
Gang of Four – “Return the Gift”
Grinderman – “Palaces of Montezuma”
Extra Life – “The Ladder”
Wire – “A Flat Tent”
Polvo – “Beggar’s Bowl”
The Feelies – “Should Be Gone”
Ghost – “Ritual”
Patti Smith – “Gloria”
The Dismemberment Plan – “Gyroscope”
Current 93 – “Black Ships at the Sky”
Swans – “Jim”
Baby Dee – “Teeth are the Only Bones that Show”
I also included audio clips from Dead Alive, From Beyond, Reanimator, and Videodrome.
Michael Fondly Remembers 2010, Part 2: The Meat
Here’s the top ten albums that totally killed my face open this year. I ranked em, even! Note: Bruce Springsteen’s The Promise would have made this list if he only released Disc 2. That thing is SICK. Also, OFF!’s First Four EPs came into my life too late to make this list. Pretty sure that one will get its own article in the future, anyhow. Read more…
Taylor
Michael
