Sweetness Follows

When I walked into Skip's Records a few days ago, the first songs off Reckoning were playing. Well, R.E.M.'s broken up, so it makes sense to throw on a classic album. I hadn't been into the store for a while, so there were lots of nooks of vinyl to investigate; while in the rock section I found myself flipping through records, singing

So don't go back to Rockvi-i-i-lle!!

Good times. I'm digging this album, cause it pretty much rocks.

In easy listening, absentmindedly- and accompanied by involuntary head movement-

Seven Chinese brothers swallowing the ocean

Seven thousand years to sleep away the pain

And then, in classical music, I realize that I am enjoying R.E.M. in a way I haven't been able to in years. What's happening?

Did you never call? I waited for your call

These rivers of suggestion are driving me away...

....I'm SORR-Y! I'm SORR-Y!

Ryan was behind the counter, pen scribbles and upper-lip-biting concentration, but came to the register when I heaved my stack of records onto the counter.  For the first time in the passage of three mediocre albums, a smile found my lips at the same time R.E.M. escaped them.

"Ryan, I finally know how I feel about R.E.M. breaking up...relieved!"

Dorm room Colleen had a heart-expanding love for a band who created two of its best albums after losing their center, Bill Berry, but college graduate Colleen had to witness them deliver disappointment and unnecessary bombast for seven years.

One of the first albums Ryan lent me was Fables of the Reconstruction. I stalked every record store in P-town filling in my collection of their cds. I remember early R.E.M. albums jangling into my subconcious ("up the stairs to the landing, up the stairs, to the ha-i-wa-ah-aall"!) and humming through my extremities on cold hikes up the hill at Lewis & Clark. The first song I played on my beloved, be-stickered, Panasonic stereo in my dorm was, "Walk Unafraid," my favorite R.E.M. song. It's a song of release, courage, and grace.

R.E.M. and I have seen some highway miles together.

Finally, finally, the weight of R.E.M.'s last albums has been lifted off my shoulders; they are not becoming the next Rolling Stones. They knew they had to call it quits. My heart is filling up with the sweetness of R.E.M.'s songs again...and I've missed them so much.

How can I be
What I want to be?
When all I want to do is strip away
These stilled constraints
And crush this charade
Shred this sad masquerade
I don't need no persuading

Love you, R.E.M. Thanks for being there for me.

The Heirs of Jeff Buckley

Like Eddie Vedder before him, the voice of Jeff Buckley has been copied shamelessly by a number of singers, but very few have evinced his influence on their work in meaningful ways. There have been peers haunted by his presence-- as I mention in regards to PJ Harvey's "Memphis" in a previous entry entitled "Backsides Only"-- but who are his musical heirs? Who's inherited the genetics of the golden man's intensity, darkness, and love? The musicality of his telecaster?

I've been occupied with this consideration for some time, but more so since hearing Anna Calvi for the first time a few weeks ago...there was something so Buckley about her songs. Besides Calvi, the only other person I can think of that captures something of the fierceness and vulnerability, the darkness and light, a bit of the sonics of the artist, is Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond. These women aren't the knock-offs that the male forgers-of-Jeff-Buckley-vocal-craft are, but instead seem to be circling a sun in the same galaxy.

Below is Anna Calvi's "Desire." Enjoy getting caught up in the sunburst of the red-lipped blonde dressed in a male flamenco dancer's garb, so like the sunburst of the telecaster.

This was the first song I heard by My Brightest Diamond, "Golden Star." Shara's a classically trained singer. There's a similar resonance to Jeff Buckley here, and the final notes of the song sound exactly like what JB would go for if he were singing "Golden Star." I opted for a live version of the song because there was no official video made.

She is Not Here to Make You Laugh

 

Sometime during my stint as a student at the U of O, I found myself standing amidst clearance books on the busy ground floor of the Duck Store, patriotic students garbed in green and yellow bustling by with their coffee and smoothies. I was peering intently at the back of a book, when a voice commanded, "SMILE!" I glanced up, and a man was looking at me pointedly from across the stack of books. Having been absorbed in what I was reading, I didn't know what to make of him. I wish I had already developed my saucy middle-school-teacher skills, but instead I gave him a fake smile akin to something Bart Simpson might manage for a family portrait.

The appalling thing is that this man, who insisted that I needed to smile at all times, is not that unusual. It is incredibly difficult for some people to figure out that women don't need to smile to be doing just fine. I've witnessed this with female students, seen it happen to peers, and observed it in music culture as well. The music industry proclaims,

IT IS NOT OKAY FOR WOMEN TO BE SERIOUS 

and

IT IS NOT OKAY FOR WOMEN TO BE SERIOUS ARTISTS

It's infuriating that people treat women in the music industry like they are in a separate sports league from men, comparing them only to other female songwriters, charting musical descendents without including the men they begat, and insisting that if any of two female artists play the same instrument they are essentially the same person writing the same tunes. Even more perturbing, when a woman writes an album about pain, fear, love, power, anything that authentically empowers the artist, makes her real rather than plastic eye-candy, she becomes a COW, a WHINER, SCREECHY, etc. Is there nowhere a woman is allowed to yell?

WE WILL WRITE YOU OFF

and

WE ARE WRITING YOU OUT OF HISTORY

In the burgeoning era of garage-rock rediscovery, who will tell the story of the Riot Grrls?

I was reminded of all this upon reading the closing paragraph from Kate Bush: The Biography, covering one of the greatest English music acts of the last century.

"The new album and how Bush fits in with today's music scene brings us round to the question of her place in musical history. Without a doubt she is one of the most talented, most enigmatic, most unusual and most successful female performers of all time. The only downside seems to be the lack of humour in her work. There is a little, but you have to look pretty closely to find it. Surely no one likes everything to be taken too seriously...

"The relentless drive for new ideas and perfectionism from this five-foot-three woman with the cute dimples is legendary."

What male artist would be burdened with such preposterous criticism?

It is not our job to fix ignorance.

But who else will do it?