John Lennon's Walls and Bridges (1974)

The idea of what the world was like when I was around but too young to remember it is fascinating for me, so I’ve decided to write a series of posts on music from 1974, the year of my birth. I hope the blend of music, history and memoir will be interesting for readers, and I would love to hear others’ reflections on the times and the music, either in the comments section below or via Twitter here. I’ve been picking up vinyl from 1974, and I’ve decided to start with John Lennon’s Walls and Bridges.

 

Lennon’s fifth studio album was released in September 1974. That was four years after The Beatles broke up and one year after the last U.S. troops left Vietnam. A month before, Richard Nixon had resigned as president, and a month later Muhammad Ali would defeat George Foreman in the “Rumble in the Jungle.” Those were the times and they outline a cultural matrix that has since faded as new scandals, new wars and new superstars have come to dominate our immediate cultural background.

As far as Lennon albums go, Walls and Bridges is more on the personal than political side, with lyrics inspired by his separation from Yoko Ono (“Going Down on Love”), girlfriend May Pang (“Surprise, Surprise”), and feelings of personal weakness (“Nobody Loves You”). Accordingly, the album artwork features an excerpt from a book detailing the Irish origins of his last name, drawings he did as a child, and pictures of him making funny faces.

Foldable flaps allow the listener to join in the fun.

Musically, Walls and Bridges has a disco-funky side which is on full display in “Whatever Gets You Through the Night,” a song Elton John helped round out by stepping in to play piano. Later, the album presents quiet reflections like “Old Dirt Road” and occasionally turns dark, as in “Steel and Glass.” This last is my favorite song on the album. Actually, I first encountered it as performed by Candlebox on the 1995 tribute album Working Class Hero. According to legend, the song is about Beatles manager Allen Klein, but I hear a dirge for soulless, high-power professionals everywhere:

               There you stand

               With your L.A. tan
               And your New York walk
               And your New York talk
               Your mother left you
               When you were small
               But you’re gonna wish
               You wasn’t born at all…
               …steel and glass.

Another favorite is “#9 Dream,” which I seem to remember from my childhood. It’s a strange song based on a dream Lennon had and containing nonsensical lyrics like “Ahhh! Böwakawa poussé, poussé!” It’s also quintessential Lennon in its intimacy and beautiful, unforgettable melody.

 

Lennon has always been the Beatle who resonates with me most. Perhaps it has something to do with hearing the album’s songs as I was going through my early childhood drama. (“#9 Dream” was released as a single the day before I was born, so it may very well be the first Lennon song I heard, on the car radio on my way home from the hospital.) Or maybe I’m just a bit like Lennon. My parents named me John after John Lennon, I feel an affinity to his creativity and sensitivity, and I have similar views on social issues. I’m even married to a Japanese woman, which has always made Lennon's final studio album before his death, Double Fantasy (1980), especially poignant for me.

Lennon wasn’t the only ex-Beatle to release an album in 1974, but I’ll get to the others when the time comes. The Seventies were a time when old masters evolved, but also a time when new masters, and new sounds, rose to prominence. Next stop: E.L.O.’s Eldorado.

 

Are Woody Allen's Films Really That Sexist?

The other day, I ran across an opinion piece on The Huffington Post about Woody Allen’s latest film, Café Society. The headline declares a destination: “How Woody Allen Still Gets Away With Writing Sexist Movies.” And the subhead plots a course: “Café Society is set in the ’30s to match the director’s retrograde views on women and love.”

This take on Woody Allen is nothing new, so at first I gave it little attention. But then I watched Magic in the Moonlight (2014) and saw in the two main characters an example of the views in question. Emma Stone plays Sophie, a poor American who claims to have clairvoyance. At first glance, she conforms to the pretty, young and dumb archetype. Colin Firth plays a rich Brit named Stanley, a famed debunker of charlatans. He’s older and believes he’s wiser, and at one point vows to take Sophie under his wing. Central to the film’s themes is the dichotomy between reason and magic, and here too the characters conform to stereotypes. Sophie is emotional and full of wonder at life, while Stanley sees everything in the stark light of reason.

 

Thus, Magic in the Moonlight would seem to support criticisms that Allen’s work is sexist, because, among other things, it employs outdated gender stereotypes. And if Magic in the Moonlight is sexist, then much of Allen’s work is sexist, because these themes, even analogues of these very characters, run throughout his work.

However, the kind of criticism that casually declares Allen’s work sexist is usually the kind that begins with a number of assumptions--about gender, sexism and Allen himself--and simply applies them to the work in question without listening to what the work says. This approach rules out, before interpretation has even begun, the chance of the critic hearing anything but an affirmation of preexisting convictions, such as those under which feminism tends to labor.

Feminist critique is certainly necessary and interesting--and it has the potential to be enlightening when applied to Allen’s oeuvre--but it all seems cut by the same cookie cutter these days, especially online. We all know, upon seeing the headlines, what we’re going to read and could tick off the main points without even reading them. At this point, the same old lines of attack are boring and obfuscate more than they disclose. There’s more to any work of art than any ideology will allow.

You could also try looking at Allen’s work this way: The typical Allenesque neurotic male is always the fool in the drama. Male rationality is not elevated to a virtue but rather ridiculed--and not just by supposed female irrationality. The men themselves are always shown to be confused romantics and the women to be shrewder, smarter and more capable. Allen purposely subverts the very stereotypes he employs. On the surface, the characters are one way, but just underneath they are another way, and this isn’t hard to see.

In Magic in the Moonlight, Stanley sneers at others’ fanciful notions and he mocks Sophie for being uneducated, but his overbearing rationality leaves him cold and empty, unable to see anything in a starry sky but a vast, menacing universe. His fear that his orderly world will fall apart blinds him to Sophie’s love for him and his love for her, leaving him a clown who is victim to his emotions. The voice of wisdom eventually comes through conversations with acquaintances, most notably Sophie and his aunt, who function like psychoanalysts by providing the “talking cure” that leads to self-realization.

 

Allen’s films do often speak an older language when it comes to the tug-of-war between the sexes, but that language was--and in the works of great artists and the lives of many regular people remains--often more egalitarian and sophisticated than our current polemical narratives regarding gender will admit. We shouldn’t abandon forward-thinking narratives for “retrograde” ones, but we do stand to learn from throwing more than one narrative at a work to see to what degree they all stick.

And we might try no ideology at all.

The dictates of ideology will only get us so far, but probably not very far. This is exactly Sophie’s--and Allen’s--point in Magic in the Moonlight: Thinking outside the constraints we impose on ourselves is liberating.

 

 

Previous post on Woody Allen:

Myths About Woody Allen's Oeuvre

 

Dhalgren: A Book for Our Times

Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren was copyrighted in 1974. A lot has changed since then, but the issues it addresses all ring relevant today, and its treatment of those issues is ahead of even our time. Reading it, I couldn’t help but think that everyone fighting their own little culture wars today would benefit from this book.

Dhalgren is about a city called Bellona where fires still burn from an unidentified catastrophe. A man who has forgotten his name enters the city and there continues life amidst the ruins and survivors. Usually described as science fiction, Dhalgren has precious little in it of what usually gets that label. Instead, it's speculative in the way it addresses social issues related to class, race, religion and sexuality. What would American urban society be like if cut off from the rest of the world and every remaining person were left to fend for her or himself?

 

 

One issue the novel addresses is rape. In a powerful scene, a discussion between an accused rapist named George and a woman named Lanya reads like something you might run across in the comments section under a feminist piece on rape culture. George is that troll who wants to somehow downplay the guilt of the crime, while Lanya is having none of it. Eventually, George gives his account of an incident that happened on the night of the city’s catastrophe, an incident that has made him a notorious rapist:

 

“We was in this alley, and there was this light flashing on and off, on and off; and people would run in, run out, and we just didn’t care! Or maybe that made it better, that there wasn’t nothing they could do, or that they wanted to do . . . And she got hit and she got punched and she got thrown around and she was yelling and screaming, ‘No, no, oh, don’t, oh please don’t.’ so I guess it was rape. Right? But when we finished—“ George nodded—“she was reaching for it. She wanted some more, awful bad.”

And it appears to be true, because the girl he's talking about, June, spends most of the novel looking for him so they can repeat that night. This is troubling. It’s easy to discount George as a sleazeball, but where does June fit into today’s narratives about rape culture? What about women and men, of all sexual orientations, who like it rough? Dhalgren is full of sexual situations--and more than one sexual marathon is described move by move--that push buttons and raise questions.

Author photograph by James Hamilton.

Delany pushes buttons with class, race and religion as well. George is a man of the streets, while June’s family tries desperately to maintain a sequestered middle-class lifestyle. George is described as a hulking and well-hung black man, while June is a timid little white girl--which maybe shouldn’t matter, but the fact is that race does matter in some way to most people. George has become a kind of deity in a new religion propagated by a woman pastor who spreads the faith through posters showing him dressed in nothing but a leather jacket, cap and boots.

At this point, you’re probably wondering, “What the hell kind of book is this?!” And that’s pretty much what I thought the whole time I was reading its nearly 800 pages of Joycean and Pynchonian tumult. Dhalgren raises a lot of issues, makes you uncomfortable, and makes you ponder what is right, but it refuses to moralize, often leaving you lost.

And that’s why it’s ahead of--or perhaps just outside--our time. Moralizing has its place, but too often today everything is sanctimonious--if not on the surface, then in the subtext. Authors, filmmakers and other creators are always presenting the right message and can be sure it will win approval in certain circles. I’m reminded of the Ellen DeGeneres joke at the Academy Awards in 2014:

It’s going to be an exciting night. Anything can happen, so many different possibilities. Possibility number one: 12 Years a Slave wins best picture. Possibility number two: You’re all racists.

I just saw 12 Years a Slave. It’s a great film that tells uncomfortable truths, but it tells them in a way that’s actually comfortable for most--and indeed it won Best Picture. But I can’t imagine anyone that Delaney’s masterpiece wouldn’t challenge. In 12 Years a Slave, right and wrong are clear to see, but Dhalgren is trickier, forcing you to find your own answers. Much of the time, you may not know what is right with regard to the questions raised, but even when you do, it isn’t because that’s what the author said through the book, but because that’s what you said through the book.

Despite its age, Dhalgren remains troubling, and ultimately it’s beyond my grasp. These are but first thoughts upon finishing the novel, and I’m painfully aware of how uninsightful--and possibly just plain wrong--they are. But that’s part of what I want out of The Gleaming Sword--inquiry over right answers, the labyrinth over the exit.

 

 

More posts on sci-fi books:

The Trials of Dune

Riverworld and the Resurrection

A Review of Clockwork Angels 

 

Oh, The Blog Posts I'll Never Write! Part 3

The time has come again to lay off my blog and focus on other projects. As usual, however, I’ve been turning over some posts and won’t be able to rest until I get them out there at least in rough form. So here is Part 3 in my “Oh, The Blog Posts I’ll Never Write!” series.

 

Good Muslims / Bad Muslims

I’ve been wanting to post an account of a trip I once took from Belfast to the Sahara Desert via Casablanca and back again via Madrid--all in two weeks. It was a fairly hard-core trip, with no tour guide, no itinerary, and little money. During that time, strangers scammed my travel companion and me for money (with tales of U2 tickets that never appeared) and others helped us out of jams (when we got stranded on the edge of the desert).

I did not see this live in Marrakesh:

 

Although I have had other experiences in Northern Africa and the Middle East, and more intimate experiences with Muslims, that trip comes to mind whenever I run across the debate about Islam, because I would assume that most of the people I encountered on that trip were Muslim. Some treated us poorly indeed, but there is no doubt in my mind that those who helped us did so out of a sense of hospitality at least partially derived from their religion. A student named Aziz stuck with us through some tight scrapes and eventually let us crash at his place. The most common forms of Islam, like many other religions, generally encourage treating others with kindness.

I suppose the point of this post would have been that Muslims are just like anybody else, which is to say they are complicated. It should be impossible to have the debate about good Muslims versus bad Muslims without feeling dumber for it--although the times do call for that debate. Personally, I'm even uncomfortable analyzing the issue as I am now because talking about Muslims as them compared to us is othering and hard to pull off without sounding condescending.

 

Who Sticks In the Knife?

Another post I had planned springs from a personal ordeal I’ve been going through. I suddenly found myself in a big international mess due to my tax preparer doing everything wrong for a couple years. One of the ways I alleviate stress is by viewing matters through the framework of ideas, and in this case I felt like Friedrich Nietzsche (as always) and Franz Kafka were relevant.

One of the many soul-crushing aspects of international tax problems is that they take forever to sort out and the sorting is labyrinthine. Imagine if your survival depended not on running through a giant maze as in The Maze Runner, but on filling out endless forms, negotiating tax laws, paying endless bills, making frantic phone calls, and biting your fingernails. The System is coming down on you hard, according to its own secret principles, and will do so again whenever it feels like it.

You are utterly powerless.

Along the way, it occurred to me that despite the injustice of it all, no one was concerned with the morality of it: the gears of interlocking apparatuses were simply grinding away. A great deal of the modern world is like this. The totally administered society, to borrow a phrase from Herbert Marcuse, dispenses with morality in favor of impersonal systems in which no one is accountable for what is right. Each person is a functionary who need only do their job according to the rules, much like--to take a dramatic example--Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt’s face for the banality of evil.

I thought Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals might shed some light on this, but I’ll never find the time to review that right now. But I also thought of Franz Kafka’s The Trial (free here), about a man named Josef K. who wakes up one morning to find that he is on trial. He never learns his crime or how he can defend himself, but as he spends more and more time trying to satisfy the Law (previous post), his life falls apart. Eventually, he gets the death sentence and the courts send a couple goons to drag him out to a quarry and execute him with a butcher knife. Curiously, however, neither of the goons wants to do the deed, for that would be taking too much personal responsibility, and that is exactly what the systems governing us--and we when we work for them--want to avoid. They would prefer the illusion that we somehow did it to ourselves:

The repulsive courtesies began once again, one of them passed the knife over K. to the other, who then passed it back over K. to the first. K. now knew it would be his duty to take the knife as it passed from hand to hand above him and thrust it into himself. But he did not do it…

Hopefully, I will escape the knife, but other projects demand my attention. Projects within projects within projects. . .  So for now this blog is on a slowdown.

 

 

Related posts:

Oh, The Blog Posts I'll Never Write! Part 1

Oh, The Blog Posts I'll Never Write! Part 2

The Times They Are A-Problematizin'

When I visit the record store, I tend to flip through all the records in several genres, from rock to metal and punk to soul, and then browse other bins (J-pop, hip-hop, alternative) as the mood strikes. This turns each hunt for vinyl into a curious inventory of pop culture imagery across the decades, and the results are often disturbing when seen through a politically sensitive 21st-Century lens.

Rockabilly provides a perfect example. I recently went into Shinjuku to see what I could drum up at Disk Union’s new location. I was hoping for some Stray Cats neo-rockabilly from the Eighties, as well as some old rockabilly from the Fifties. If you’re unfamiliar with the term rockabilly (until recently I associated it solely with the dancers in Yoyogi Park), think old rock-n-roll like Elvis’s “Blue Suede Shoes” and Buddy Holly’s “Peggy Sue.” I found records by these artists and many more, but I was surprised to see that many album covers showed the Confederate flag.

 

So it was time to learn something. Apparently, the “billy” in “rockabilly” comes from “hillbilly,” as in old country music, which has deep roots in the South. Thus, instead of slick suits and greased back hair, many rockabilly musicians sported Western blazers and cowboy hats, and played for record labels based in Tennessee. The sound caught on, moved around the country--and across the Pond--and evolved through blending with other styles of music. In America, however, the ties to Dixie were strong, and thus all the white guys holding guitars and grinning in front of Confederate flags.

I'm sure much of that music is unobjectionable, but I would be willing to bet that some of it reflects nostalgia for the antebellum South, slavery and all. Some listeners might be able to overlook the Confederate flag and troublesome lyrics in favor of the music, but I for one cannot, so as a record shopper, I steer clear of Confederate flags.

One artist whose sound I took an immediate liking to was Wanda Jackson, known as the Queen of Rockabilly. I love her spunky attitude and edgy voice, but she also displays, not Confederate flags, but a propensity to use lyrics of questionable taste for laughs. For example, in “Fujiyama Mama,” she talks about a woman so feisty she levels cities like the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. No doubt many would consider such lyrics to be mere harmless fun, but can events of such extreme horror ever be funny?

Luckily, much of Jackson's music really is just harmless fun:

 

Every genre has its own visual language. Hard rock and heavy metal bands insist on images that sexualize women, show them subordinated, and make them targets of violence. Our reactions to such images do not have to be narrow ideological indignation--depending on the exact nature of the image, we may even see something to celebrate in what others find deplorable--but at the very least, the times have problematized much that often went unquestioned before, and I see that as a good thing because it furthers the discussion that leads toward a better society.

As I’ve written before, we each make our own decisions as to how much we’re willing to overlook disagreeable signals in pop culture, and the choice isn’t always clear. Personally, I won’t waste my time, money or attention on anything with a Confederate flag, but when it comes to Wanda Jackson, I’ll just remove “Fujiyama Mama” from my playlist and enjoy the other songs. Nonetheless, overlook we must--at least sometimes--because in our sensitive times, almost everything is problematic from some angle or another.

 

Kvelertak's Nattesferd: Review

The first two tracks on Kvelertak’s Nattesferd indicate the dynamics of the entire album. “Dendroful for Yggdrasil” is black-n-roll with touches of Seventies Rush, while “1985” immediately calls to mind Eighties Van Halen. The rest of the album navigates the territory around these soundscapes, with results that are never less than metal.

 

Kvelertak is a Norwegian band and Nattesferd, their third release, shows a band that has found a distinct sound. As frontman Erlend Hjelvik screams lyrics in Norwegian about Norse mythology, ancient ones from the stars, berserkers, witches and necromancers, no less than three guitars continually chug and wail, while the drums pound, sometimes reaching blazing speeds. There are no clean lead vocals, there are no ballads. The cover art, in the style of old fantasy paperbacks, features a bearded and armed warrior hunching amid craggy heights beside the band’s mascot, an owl.

How metal is that?

But while Kvelertak may black like Khold and roll like Vreid ca. V, Nattesferd has more polish. The songwriting is pop-tight, with touches everywhere alluding to past decades. Like many metal bands, Kvelertak clearly have roots in Seventies classic rock, but the Eighties influences stand out most, with “1985” hearkening back to Van Halen’s 1984, and “Svartmesses” featuring guitar practically lifted from the opening of Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger.” I would also swear there are Nineties alternative influences, among them female backing vocals on “Nattesferd” and “Heksebrann” reminiscent of The Pixies and Smashing Pumpkins.

 

But for all that, Nattesferd never sounds retro like Wolfmother, The Sword or recent Opeth. It’s as if Kvelertak have adopted as a musical philosophy the statement on the band's website that introduces the lyrics for “1985”:  In the future, the only way forward will be to go back. Kvelertak’s sound has taken a leap forward into new territory for the group, and for metal, by mining sounds from the past for blending with the group's black-metal heritage.

I liked Nattesferd the first time I listened to it, and it only got better upon further listens. There’s nothing wrong with doom and death in metal, but this album, while heavy, only rises. You feel at times like the warrior on the cover--or even better, his owl, gifted with flight--surveying the world as it spreads beneath the blue vault of Heaven.

Rating: 3.5/5 stars

 

Other music reviews:
Queensryche’s Debut with La Torre
Queensryche’s Condition Human
David Bowie’s Blackstar

My Response to Blake Lively’s Booty

This week, Blake Lively invited outrage with an Instagram post. And because these kinds of debates fascinate me, I thought I’d work in a few quick comments. The Instagram post shows two views of Blake Lively on the red carpet--one from in front of her and one from behind, with the caption “L.A. face with an Oakland booty.”

Predictably, the result was outrage. This from MTV writer Ira Madison III:

“L.A. face” refers to the white, American beauty standard. Something you possess. It’s why the Daily Mail publishes your photo so many damn times you’d think you were about to pop out a royal baby. “Oakland booty” refers to a large derrière, an undesirable butt that Jane Fonda workout tape enthusiasts from L.A. wouldn’t be caught dead with. It’s the reason you take SoulCycle classes. It’s why you have Pressed Juicery on speed dial. It’s the type of ass that the Kardashians or white people turn into a circus attraction like Saartjie Baartman. You don’t have an Oakland booty. You have a Burbank booty.

The caption is actually a quote from “Baby Got Back” by Sir Mix-A-Lot, who defended Lively to New York Daily News:

I don't get [the debate] at all. She's saying she's proud of her butt. I'm glad she embraced the look, because that's what I wanted [with the song].

I suppose now I’m supposed to tell you which side is right, but searching for the right side and the killer argument to end the argument is exactly what we have to stop doing. Most of these debates involve interpretation of facts rather than mere facts and as such have no absolute right or wrong or any resource to which we can turn to settle the debate. The right answer isn’t just difficult, it doesn’t exist.

This is hard to accept, but accept it we must.

Madison is the type of writer who should know that and restrain his hyperbole. It never ceases to amaze me how so many in the online outrage factory are highly educated and well-intentioned but have incorrigible writing style, hopelessly confused ideas, and no compunction about publicly branding people racist or sexist over their interpretation of a music video, movie poster or Instagram post.

I’m not saying we should all just get along. Important issues are at stake, and in the absence of absolute right and wrong, there are only arguments, many arguments, none ultimately potent, which sway us one way or another.

Is it all right for Gwyneth Paltrow to tweet the song title “Niggas in Paris”? Is it all right for Beyoncé to use Black Panther imagery in a Super Bowl halftime show? Is putting Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill a sign of real progress or is it mere tokenism? I’m sure I don’t know, not in any way I can prove for all time, but having these debates is not pointless. It changes hearts and minds, encourages action, and shapes our society.

Thus, the fight against social ills must be fought and fought hard--even when it comes to celebrity Instagram posts--but I insist it must be fought with some honor, by which I mean solid thinking and human decency in tactics. Spaz attacks like Madison's do more harm than good.

Related posts:

When I'm Outraged and When I'm Not

The Miley Cyrus Affair

Sex, Chairs and Photographs

Katy Perry and Feminism

Sky Ferreira and Textual Sins

Teen Titans #1 and Choosing a Narrative

Spielberg's Lincoln Is a Racist Mess

An Open Letter to Feminists

Nihilism and Batgirl #41