I'd like to meet:
Mark Sinker
Music:
Ashlee Simpson, New York Dolls, Debbie Deb, Ying Yang Twins, Eminem, Collipark, Timbaland, Stooges, James Brown, Rolling Stones, Shangri-Las, Midi Maxi & Efti, L'Trimm, Panjabi MC, Boney M, Donna Summer, Slade, John Shanks, Kara DioGuardi, Bob Dylan, Jefferson Airplane, Bo Diddley, Lily Allen, Ellie Greenwich, Jeff Barry, Marit Larsen, Stacey Q, Fred Astaire, Electric Eels, Spoonie Gee, U. Roy, Deana Carter, Toby Keith, Lisette Melendez, Clif Magness, Shirelles, Roxanne Shanté, Courtney Love, Guns N' Roses, Teena Marie, Fannypack, Aly & A.J., Miranda Lambert, Taylor Swift, Don Ray, Cover Girls, Company B, the Wailers, the Animals, Arthur Baker, Electric Prunes, t.A.T.u., Lifter Puller, Kelly Clarkson, Swizz Beatz. Sorry if I left you off but I've used a lot of space. So let's just end with the song of the day for December 27, 2007, Hoku's "How Do I Feel (The Burrito Song)?" "For the thing that I miss the most/Is missing you." So, what she misses is feeling something, even if what she was formerly feeling was sorrow. Sung in a voice that's pure soda pop. Not even an intimation of regret.
(I probably should change the name of this feature to "song of the week" or "song of the month," since I'm updating it so infrequently, but I'll be optimistic and keep it "song of the day" for the time being.)
Movies:
The Searchers, Donovan's Reef, L'Avventura, Letter from an Unknown Woman, In a Lonely Place, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Night Moves, The Shop Around the Corner, Morocco, The Dirty Dozen
Television:
Magnum P.I., My So-Called Life, Rocky and Bullwinkle
Books:
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Paul Zimmerman (Dr. Z), Brie Larson, Otis Ferguson, Jane Austen, Theodore Dreiser, Rex Stout, Raymond Chandler, Thomas Kuhn
Heroes:
For the time being I'm repeating in my heroes box a modified version of what I put in my first blog post.
"Perhaps the reason the Dolls have been so misunderstood is that they don't play to an existing audience; it's an audience that has yet to reveal itself. More than simply latching onto an audience, the next phenomenon will be that which creates its audience. The Dolls have very little choice: they either create that audience or they have none at all. They don't really belong to anything else." (Ben Edmonds, "The New York Dolls' Greatest Hits Volume 1," Creem, October 1973.)
Here is something I wrote to John Wójtowicz last year while working on my Marit Larsen review. Obviously, I'm identifying hard with teenpop in that just as I don't see a path for the teenpop girls into the future, I don't see a path for myself either - which isn't to say that there's no future for me, or for them, but my path isn't given, my way isn't clear, so we're going to have to invent one.
Current "teenpop" - or the strain within it that most currently is capturing my attention, the part I'll call "rock confessional" - is actually without precedent, kids in their teens and early twenties working with a handful of music pros in their mid thirties, but the kids all included in the songwriting credits and creating (with the aid of those veteran pros) songs that are smarter and more emotionally complex than most of what you're getting from real grownup pop and rock performers (including the grownup pop and rock performers that the veteran pros also work with). But what this means is that these girls have no good models for how to expand and deepen their music as they grow into their twenties, and no preset market or genre to inhabit once they do, unless they create it for themselves. Well, no good models is my opinion. The girls probably all want to be Alanis, not realizing that they're already better. Kelly Clarkson's commercial success is heartening, as she's managed to do her agony and angst without shedding the sugar pop, at least as of last year. But Ashlee, who's the best of the lot, is now only getting middling sales and poor airplay and is probably reliant on the tweeny-market that she'll shortly be losing. Maybe there's a way for Ashlee and the others to carry on with their pop craftsmanship and exuberance yet do Alanis and Fiona and KT Tunstall and Tash Bedingfield and Courtney Love and Craig Finn and Conor Oberst, but without Alanis et al.'s bullshit and obfuscation.
Hmmm, don't know why I didn't tell John the truth, which is that I'm hearing in Ashlee the potential to do Jagger or Dylan 1965 but take it somewhere else, since she's basically a "nice girl," which means for better or worse she won't be tied to the alienation of a counterculture, so maybe she'll grow where Dylan and Jagger stopped dead. These are sketchy thoughts on my part, and I don't know how much to credit to Ashlee as opposed to Shanks and DioGuardi et al., except none of what S & D have done with anyone else shows this promise, so I might as well credit Ashlee. Someone's got to. "Ashlee" is an amazing creation anyway, no matter how many hands are involved.
But it's our own self-creation that's at issue, meaning the people who actually might read this, and the people like them. The journalism model for rock criticism is broken and can't be fixed, but no paying alternative has emerged. So we've got a rock press that refuses to allow its writers to be heroes, and an Interweb where most writers refuse to be the hero, refuse to think through their thoughts, because they're content to imagine that the real conversation is happening elsewhere, in academia or in the legitimate press. So the conversation I began so long ago is barely sputtering. We have to figure out how to finance this thing, we have to figure out how to do this thing, this mad anthropology of mine. No one's going to do it for us.
