Terminated for Reasons of Taste: Other Ways to Hear Essential and Inessential Music
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Terminated for Reasons of Taste: Other Ways to Hear Essential and Inessential Music
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822373896 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/25/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 344 |
| File size: | 9 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Terminated for Reasons of Taste
Other Ways to Hear Essential and Inessential Music
By Chuck Eddy
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2016 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7389-6
CHAPTER 1
B.C.
THIS SECTION covers more or less a half-century of music, which is obviously ridiculous. It's also nothing: the Ronald L. Davis History of Music in American Life volume I've been wading through lately runs 1620 to 1865. And back in the early '90s, Robert Christgau put together a "Prehistory of Rock 'n' Roll" timeline for Details that started with courtly loving jongleurs of 1227, jumped to colonialist British explorers praising Gambian drum rhythms in 1623 and then to Viennese waltzers dancing as couples in 1815, and advanced forward from there. Interviewed by Michaelangelo Matos two centuries after those waltzes, Christgau explained that in teaching music history at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, he now reads "one of the oldest pieces of prose known to exist — 4,500-odd years old," an order from "the boy-king named King Pepi to 'bring a pygmy dancer to the court.'" By comparison, my own B.C. begins almost yesterday: in 1930, with a slightly abridged version of one of several "50 Best Songs of Whatever Year" pieces that accompanied playlists I programmed for the streaming website Rhapsody in the past half-decade. I dip back into the 19th century here and there on subsequent pages, but only momentarily.
So basically, here's where I put my writing about music made before I wrote about music. Where subsequent sections increasingly go heavy on real-time criticism, "B.C." necessarily comprises pieces written almost entirely in hindsight, mostly in a recent era of so-called Internet "listicles" that had websites trying to maximize page clicks and monetize eyeballs — which was also, as it happens, an era in which downloads and the so-called cloud theoretically made all of recorded musical history available at will. So editors were increasingly open to critics writing about archival music, if frequently as bite-size blurbs rather than at length.
A disclaimer: I do not in any way consider myself a historian. The oldest baseball card I owned growing up was a 1949 Vernon Bickford on Bowman, so if some music I'm writing about seems like ancient history, you're not alone. The further back I go, the more of a tenderfoot I am. And while I grow ever more fascinated tracing that backward path, I also realize I'm extremely selective about which route I take. You'll find nothing here about Jenny Lind or John Philip Sousa, jubilee singers or parlor piano players, trilingual-at-the-same-time late 1910s drum-whistle-rattle Dada power trios at Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire or the tragic but titillating whore songs of 1920s Berlin literary cabaret. And though I touch at least a few times on the intriguing if unsavory legacy of 19th-century minstrel shows, especially as they prefigure southern artists ultimately marketed as hillbilly music, anybody whose curiosity I spike should seriously consider seeking out the work of authors and academics whose expertise on the topic (and concurrent music from before the World Wars) puts mine to shame — a short list might include Amiri Baraka, David Cockrell, Ken Emerson, Karl Hagstrom Miller, Paul Oliver, Nick Tosches, Elijah Wald, David Wondrich, David A. Jasen and Gene Jones, and Yuval Taylor and Jack Austen, for starters. (Fill up your library card — I did!)
I know I'm treading on potentially dangerous ground here. I'm a middle-aged white guy, and much of what I write about early country music takes into account race — always a lingering issue in a South that, 150 years down the line, still hasn't gotten over losing the Civil War or let go of its collective amnesia about slavery, the rollback of Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan, or Jim Crow. In 2009 I moved to Texas, where a year later the governor was still arguing for "states' rights" and where you couldn't miss the ominous Confederate flags along U.S. Route 290 long before Dylann Roof massacred nine black people in a historic South Carolina church. The Sambo and golliwog caricatures and dialect lampoons fostered by minstrelsy's "Negro delineators," nostalgia for antebellum plantation life, and razor-toting "coon songs" of the 1890s are inextricable from centuries of racial oppression and violence that still make the front page.
But paradox or not, remnants of those offensive ancient shticks lent verve and humor to more 20th-century music than we'll ever know — examples referenced in pages ahead barely skim the surface. There was, for instance, Jack Benny–associated midcentury band leader and "The Thing"–maker (among other things) Phil Harris, whose "singing style is basically a sort of rhythmic talk coated with the glib overtones of the circus barker," explained the liner notes to 1958's That's What I Like About the South — so basically, he rapped — with "an obviously deep admiration for the work of the great Negro comedian Bert Williams, who, like Harris, talked his songs." On 1974's Stone Mountain Wobble, Ohio's Hotmud Family were still passing off chestnuts like "Georgia Camp Meeting" and "Bully of the Town" as "country ragtime," complete with a Mr. Bones stand-in known as Mr. Spoons. Even four decades later, you could still go to a Civil War reenactment and observe outfits like the Second South Carolina String Band play Dan Emmett songs about "darkies," and blackface Otellos were commonplace at opera houses well into the early 21st century. Less blatantly, lines could be drawn through the talking blues, Hoagy Carmichael, and Dean Martin's 1955 Swingin' Down Yonder all the way to Old Crow Medicine Show, Pokey LaFarge's 2011 cover of Fiddlin' Arthur Smith's 1936 "Chittlin' Cooking Time in Cheatham County," or casually wistful references to fried chicken, watermelon, and the flood-and-race-riot-prone river juncture town "Cairo, Illinois" on 2015's Something in the Water, and even today's hick-hopping "bro country." Some aesthetics never go away.
So while I don't want to be insensitive to evils of the era that spawned the stereotyping, and while I acknowledge that exercising entitlement as a person of non-color means I risk being complicit in the original sin, I also don't want to deny that a willing misconstruction of African American culture helped give white artists — minstrels to string bands to rockabillies to Kid Rock — a freedom to let their music be loose, raunchy, funky, and funny in ways it clearly wouldn't have been otherwise. No amount of deserved moral outrage is going to stop me getting off on it. Much of it remains reprehensible, but at very least you might benefit from knowing it's out there.
Anyway, that's not all this section is about, and maybe some background is in order. I was born in 1960 in Detroit, and didn't pay all that much attention to music for the first 18 or so years of my life. I was vaguely aware of Paul-is-Dead clues on Beatles album covers because classmates talked about them, but the most I've ever written about the band since was five blurbs on Ringo solo songs forrollingstone.com in 2015. A guy named Jim Tierney, signing my senior yearbook, claimed I quoted Frank Zappa once, which is odd because I don't remember listening to any Zappa albums until the late '80s. I learned about the band Styx when some hilarious vandals painted "Welcome to the Grand Illusion" across the front of West Bloomfield High School once, and I'm pretty sure the closest thing I read to rock criticism at the time was when some other graffiti artist and perhaps fellow busboy scrawled a rant on a back kitchen wall at Maple House pancake restaurant about how rock was on the skids now because the New York Dolls were long gone and Kiss weren't making good albums anymore and something else about Ted Nugent and Aerosmith. Yet more smart-asses from school had a band called Luke Mucus and the Phlegm that I mainly remember as a talent show parody (other members: Runny Buttz, Lew Putrid, Yid McForeskin, Burrito, har har; songs about "fartin' in a pool" and sniffin' Sheila Young's bicycle seat), and when they finally compiled their 1979–'80 recordings and those of their more Romantics-commercial 1980–'81 incarnation Luke Warm (local 45 "hit": "Jesus Chrysler") on two archival LPs in 2013, I was amazed how much the Cracked/Creem / Ron Sweed / Alice Cooper / Dictators / B.T.O.-riffs-as-faux-punk sound and sensibilities prefigured (even shaped?) the Midwest-suburban wisenheimer critical stance I not much later made public.
Wouldn't be surprised if those guys were as cynical about John Denver–loving "granolas" as I was, or at least pretended to be in the one ancient piece I've included that I actually wrote for West Bloomfield's student newspaper. Or maybe I was just self-consciously obsessed with taxonomical peer classification in general. I'm not quite sure where I would have categorized myself, clique-wise, though I was geeky enough to be on the debate team both my freshman and senior years, taking sides on resolutions to overhaul the presidential election system and instigate national health care. One of my favorite books as a teenager was What Really Happened to the Class Of '65? by David Wallechinsky and Michael Medved, the latter of whom went on to become a hardline Zionist right-wing talk radio host. The Palisades High student in the book I most identified with back then was Jamie Kelso, a brainy little neurotic who later resurfaced as a prominent white supremacist. Funny — neither seemed like a budding neo-fascist at the time.
Then again, neither did Ted Nugent. Long before he started palling around with Texas governors, and back before I became fluent in the lingo of genre, I assumed he and Bob Seger epitomized what my classmates meant when they talked about "hard rock" — a kind of music that I also assumed I didn't like. But you never know with Detroiters. Seger seems fairly progressive politically these days (2014's Ride Out included protesty global warming and gun control songs), but let's just say Nugent plugs into a long tradition. As a little kid I collected toy VW Beetles, but assembly-line mass production and the techno music it ultimately inspired aren't all that Michigan and Germany have in common. Chip Berlet and Matthew Lyons's Right-Wing Populism in America names some names: Henry Ford, Father Coughlin, Charles Lindbergh, plus Joe McCarthy just one state west, where the John Birch Society now has its headquarters. The upper midwest is also where class-resenting rock fans set disco records on fire in the late '70s. Sometimes I even wonder how much the suspicion of elitist northeastern intellectuals certain skeptics detected in my early music criticism owed to my hailing from that neck of the Rust Belt.
What I didn't know until recently is that I had ancestors surnamed Steinberg on my dad's mom's mom's side who came to Michigan around 1880 "from someplace near Posen," which Germany had just taken control of nine years earlier but which belonged to Prussia before that and Poland later. August Steinberg "never revealed his background except to assert he was German, a devout Catholic, and a hard worker," my great-aunt Ethel Wooden wrote in the late '70s, four decades after she'd started a vocational trade school for young women in Toledo. August's son Frank sang mean ditties at family reunions about not having "one drop of Polish blood," unlike lots of guys he worked with as a Grand Rapids mason; Frank's artistically inclined son George designed camouflage during World War I then later got a job at a specialty shop in New York only by showing up with his blonde hair and proving he wasn't Jewish. Eventually he changed his name to Stonehill, and when a heart attack killed him at 53 his wife trashed all his paintings. Also, according to Aunt Ethel, "one of the men could play the small accordion and all were expert with the polka." Which seems relevant here, for some reason.
So uh ... where was I? Oh yeah, the '70s. Halfway through, this section takes a crazy leap forward in time, barely touching on '50s or '60s music except for meager helpings of country and folk, completely ignoring mortality-minded late '60s L.A. jug-jig-and-jive raga-hoedown tricksters Kaleidoscope even though they're just about my favorite band ever right now, then diving whole hog into '70s hard rock that's been buried by history and hence provides excellent blind alleys to wander down. The tone of my writing maybe switches, too, since I'm perfectly comfortable making fun of white guys rocking hard, seeing how that's demographically close enough to making fun of myself. From there, I get a bit old-man-yells-at-cloud about how modern-day alt-indie is no match for new wave back in the day (magnet on my refrigerator, dad to son, sorry: "It's not that I'm old, your music really does suck!"), praise some darts that coked-up record execs threw at the wall and missed while flush from profits of Frampton Comes Alive and Saturday Night Fever and Rumours, and sneak into the '80s defending also-rans who couldn't decide if they wanted to wear skinny ties or not.
Mainstream hard rock was endangered by then — or so some hoped. "Will the marginal fans of boogie and heavy metal decide they're tired of all that calculated spontaneity and putative self-expression? Will they turn from those big, thick cushions of loudness and decorative licks of musicianship?," Robert Christgau wondered in late October 1977, in a long Village Voice essay about the future of a scene he was still calling "Avant-Punk." He picked the Stranglers, Dead Boys, and Eddie and the Hot Rods as good bets to make it with loud-guitar-loving American teens, though none of them ever really did. The same special section had Richard Meltzer writing about his new joke-punk combo Vom and predicting punk would soon "splinter off into Beatnik Rock and College Rock — rockers vs. the mods all over again!" Simon Frith, meanwhile, had just attended a "Music for Socialism" fest in London where all the folkies and avant-gardists in the workshops dismissed punk as "the most reactionary fascist trend in popular culture today." A few ads in the Voice section in question: Rick Derringer, Ram Jam, Karla Bonoff, E-Z Wider rolling papers, Sam Ash, "Korvette Salutes the NEW WAVE of music on SIRE RECORDS."
So, yeah —'twas a long time ago. Though not as long ago as the times before that. But how about you step into Mr. Peabody's WABAC machine with me, and see where it takes us?
The Best Songs of 1930
Given that the stock market had crashed just two months before New Year's, it's maybe no surprise that so many of the most notable songs of 1930 — or at least the ones that historians, collectors, collective memory, cinema, and the Anthology of American Folk Music have assisted toward the surface 84 years later — comment on the economy. What's more surprising is how many of them find dark humor in it: old-timey North Carolina banjo man Charlie Poole being booted by his landlord for lack of rent payment in "It's Moving Day" (revived a mere half-century ago by the Holy Modal Rounders); Gene Autry, still more hillbilly bluesman than Hollywood cowboy, sweeping motel floors in "Dust Pan Blues" just as the Dust Bowl was starting to rev up; string bands the Carolina Tar Heels ("Got the Farm Land Blues") and Buster Carter and Preston Young ("A Lazy Farmer Boy") counting corn crops wither away; mysterious proto-blues-style medicine-show hokum songster Lil McClintock losing his bed and frying pan to a debt collector in "Furniture Man"; minstrel-throwback country ancestor Uncle Dave Macon watching banks collapse and the infrastructure pork barrel run dry in "Wreck of the Tennessee Gravy Train." "Of all the times I've ever seen, we're sure up against it now," Uncle Dave rambles, but on some level, people seem to have been laughing about such misfortune.
Cannon's Jug Stompers in "Bring It with You When You Come" and Jimmie Rodgers, backed by Louis Armstrong's trumpet and Lil Hardin Armstrong's piano in "Blue Yodel No. 9," played the parts of hobos and bums, Rodgers smarting off to a cop that his name could be found on his shirttail. In "High Water Everywhere," Delta blues founder Charlie Patton was still reeling from a 1927 flood. And guess what? Every performer I've named so far came from below the Mason-Dixon. Uncle Dave Macon had been fathered by a Confederate officer in Tennessee in 1870, five years after the war ended. In 1930, the year Congress established the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, other southerners both black and white sang about coping with Depression (and depression) via illegal substances: "Prohibition has killed more folks than Sherman ever seen," since boozeless folks were turning to morphine and coke, warned solo Skillet Licker Clayton McMichen's delirium-tremens yodeler "Prohibition Blues"; in Memphis Jug Band's "Cocaine Habit Blues," Hattie Hart confirmed that she preferred white powder even over whiskey and gin.
Up north and beyond, things were maybe more sophisticated, even optimistic, if not so reliable about it. Think of sons of Russian Jewish immigrants Ben Selvin (leading his orchestra through future FDR campaign song "Happy Days Are Here Again") and Harry Richman (enraptured by snobs, swells, "lulubelles," and "high browns" parading through Harlem in top hats and spats in Irving Berlin's "Puttin' On the Ritz"). Ruth Etting complained of taxi-dancing for dimes with "bowlegged tailors" and "rats from the harbors" in "Ten Cents a Dance." But even that wasn't nearly as decadent as Lotte Lenya back in Berlin as the Weimar waned, hunting down the next whiskey bar and little boy in Brecht-Weill's newly penned "Alabama Song." In London's East End right about then, 78-year-old (born 1852!) music hall dinosaur Charles Coborn was slurring about striking it rich in "The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Terminated for Reasons of Taste by Chuck Eddy. Copyright © 2016 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments xiIntroduction. Sold a Decade at a Time 1
1. B.C.
The Best Songs of 1930 11
Depression Music 13
Country Rap Prehistory 15
Country Songs I 17
Niela Miller: Songs of Leaving 25
'60s Catholic Folk Mass 27
Country Songs II 28
CB Jeebies 39
Can't Fool Mother Nature 40
Prog on the Prairie: Midwestern Bands Roll Over Beethoven 41
Past Expiry Hard Rock Dollar Bin 44
Sonic Taxonomy: Fake New Wave 56
Inventing Indie Rock 64
Urinals→No Age 67
2. 80s
Sonic Taxonomy: Unsung '80s R&B Bands 77
Country Rap: The 80s 85
Sonic Taxonomy: Old Old Old School Rap Albums 87
Public Enemy Do the Punk Rock 96
Beastie Boys: Lay It Down, Clowns 98
Aerosmith, Endangered No More 105
Metallica: Kill 'Em All Turns 30 110
Fates Warning and Possessed Open Up and Say . . . Ahh! 113
Dead Milkmen vs. Thelonious Monster: Battle of the Lame 114
Einstürzende Neubauten / Killdozer: The Graystone, Detroit, 11 June 1986 116
New Wave über Alles 118
Frank Chickens→M.I.A. 124
Owed to the Nightingales 127
Mekons Stumble toward Oblivion 130
Mekons: So Good It Hurts 132
Pet Shop Boys: 18 Shopping Days Left 133
Billy Joel: It's Not His Fault! 135
John Hiatt: Bring the Family 139
John Anderson Serves the Doofus Majority 140
Country Songs III 142
The '80s: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back 145
3. 90s
TLC and Kris Kross: Women and Children First 157
Cause & Effect: Trip 160
The Cure: Spectrum, Philadelphia, 16 May 1992 161
SOS from the Metal of Nowhere 163
Motörhead Überkill 164
Pankow and Treponem Pal Ring in Desert Storm 168
How Nirvana Didn't Kill Hair Metal 170
Sponge: From Grunge to Glam 171
Radio On Reviews I 172
Travis Marries a Man! 178
John Mellencamp: Dance Naked 179
Sawyer Brown: Café on the Corner 181
Patricia Conroy: A Bad Day for Trains 182
Grupo Exterminador: Dedicado a Mis Novias 183
When FSK Plays, Schnitzel Happens 184
Radio On Reviews II 185
Alanis Morissette: Addicted to Love 189
4. '00s
Singles Again: Backstabs in the Material World 197
Bruce Springsteen: Working on a Dream 202
Frat Daze, Clambake, Anyways, It's Still Country Soul to Kenny Chesney 204
Country Music Goes to Mexico 204
September 11: Country Music's Response 204
Battle of the Country Hunks 214
Country Songs IV 217
The Ladies of Triple A 222
Anvil Won't Go Away 225
Excellent Boring Metal from Germany 227
The Many Ideas of Oneida 228
Next Little Things 232
5. '10s
Singles Jukebox Reviews 248
The Dirtbombs: Ooey Gooey Chewy Ka-Blooey! 252
Redd Kross: Researching the Blues 256
Mayer Hawthorne←Robert Palmer 258
Kanye West: VEVO Power Station, Austin, 20 March 2011 261
Taylor Swift and Ke$ha: Not So Different 263
Ke$ha: Warrior 267
Strange Brew: Metal's New Blare Witch Project 269
Metal's Severed Extremities 275
Walking Dead: The Divided States of Metal 278
Voivod: Target Earth 281
Merchandise: Totale Nite 285
Mumford and Sons: Babel 287
The Gospel Truth 289
Southern Soul Keeps On Keepin' On 293
Jamey Johnson Sprawls Out 297
Country Songs V 300
Bro-Country Isn't as Dumb as It Looks 302
Ashley Monroe and Kacey Musgraves Are What They Are 304
When the Angels Stopped Watching Mindy McCready 308
Conclusion. I Am the World's Forgettin' Boy 311
Index 315
What People are Saying About This
"Chuck Eddy's breezy style and far-ranging genre enthusiasms may obscure the acute critical insight and fan's appreciation he brings to this dizzying collection of his piecework. It's like running amok at a record fair with a knowledgeable enthusiast who sees all music as having a place in the pop firmament, and can't wait to show you the next hidden treasure, or reveal a truth about a song you've heard many times before."
"Chuck Eddy, who possesses a rare knowledge of the process, sum, and esoterica of popular music making, manages to make familiar music seem fresh and suddenly open to new and even unlikely interpretations. He is also an electrifying guide to a wealth of music that you may not know or care about. Spirited, friendly, and highly energized, Eddy pulls readers in, exciting and surprising them."