Top 10 albums of 2018

This was a sneaky great year for music, in that I didn't truly appreciate the amount of great stuff that was released this year until I sat down to process it as a whole.  And that's why I continue to make lists (and read year-end pieces) despite all the changes in how I discover, acquire, and listen to new music.  December really is the best month of the year to be a music fan.

I've become so disconnected from the mainstream music press that perhaps it's not a surprise that this list contains so many acts that I've been familiar with for years.  But most of them released their best work in eons, even though I'd assumed that their prime years were long since over. 

Honourable mentions:

Not necessarily #12 and #11 on my list, but in the spirit of old faves making new music, I wanted to write something about these two albums:

Woob, 新 プログラム, Time Limited

After a quiet couple of decades, Woob returned out of the blue and became a prolific artist, with upwards of ten albums released over the past several years.  Most of what I've heard is standard Buddha lounge fare that can't touch his still classic 90's albums.  But this one comes closest to capturing the old Woob formula of bizarre field recordings, blunted beats, and icy cold extended ambient passages.   

Spiritualized, And Nothing Hurt, Bella Union

Despite what Jason has alluded to in interviews, I don't believe this is the final SPZ album, but it does come off like a long slow goodbye.  The transformation from space rock outfit to full fledged gospel wannabes is complete.  Everything here is solidly hummable, but it's the lack of a truly classic song to rank along the best of their 28-year career that keeps the album from reaching another level.

10.  Animal Collective, Tangerine Reef, Domino

The reviews for this album were mostly negative, in part because AC have steadfastly refused to make "MPP II" for nearly a decade.  Is there really such a demand for more bouncy, reverb-filled pop with intelligible vocals from AC?  Be careful what you wish for -- listening to "FloriDada" on a loop for one hour might sober you up.  I loved how "Tangerine Reef" brought the mystery back to Animal Collective, recalling the days when they'd appear on stage wearing masks playing weirded out improvisations.

9. The Caretaker, Everywhere at the End of Time Stage 5, History Always Favours the Winners

Less abrasive than Stage 4, but arguably more terrifying.  Once all traces of the original music become completely smoothed out by noise, the inevitably frigid end of this series starts coming into view for the first time. 

 8.  Abul Mogard, Above All Dreams, Ecstatic

This year I suddenly became overwhelmed by the amount of great ambient music out there, largely due to sites like Mixcloud.  Abul Mogard relies largely on elements from analog masters (Tangerine Dream, Steve Roach) to create maximalist, yet billowy atmospheres that can leave you in a daze for hours.

7.  Gas, Rausch, Kompakt

Last year's comeback album "Narkopop" has some awe-inspiring textures but ultimately wasn't epic enough.  A great Gas album is more than lo-fi minimal isolationist disco with photos of dense forests.  The music should be smoky, blunt, and entirely overwhelming, with recurring themes a must.  "Rausch" delivers all that in spades.  The bass!

6.  No Age, Snares Like a Haircut, Drag City

Taking a step back from the more experimental, less rock "An Object", No Age returned after a five year absence with another great album.  It finds a balance between their more boisterous albums of a decade ago, and the abstract anti-rock of "An Object" (which has grown on me a lot over the past couple of years). 

5.  Autechre, NTS Sessions, Warp Records

There is plenty both wrong and right about Autechre's latest gargantuan filedump.  With so much material, there are bound to be some misses, and even the best stuff on "NTS Sessions" can be difficult to digest for durations longer than one hour.  Autechre started their career at a time when every IDM album had roughly the same format -- a double album of roughly 70-75 minutes running times, with most tracks falling neatly into the six to seven minute range.  None of their contemporaries have done more to take advantage of digital formats and destroy that antiquated album formula.  Seven hours of material?  Nobody buys CDs anymore, so who cares how long the album is?  Almost no tracks under ten minutes?  Without LP side/CD length to worry about, every track can be as minimalist or as maximalist as they want it to be, with no self-filtering, and editing only optional. 

4.  Anna von Hauswolff, Dead Magic, City Slang

This feels like the first fully realized Anna von Hauswolff album.  It goes far beyond the gimmicky marketing points of previous albums ("she plays a really huge church organ!") and combines her distinctive vocals and playing with the epic grandeur of black metal.

3.  Beach House, 7, Sub Pop

There are countless Sonic Boom-styled details imprinted on this album that I can't unhear now that I've become completely attuned to them.  On one hand, "Dive" is one of the best two or three songs on "7", but on the other hand, you could slot it midway through side one of the worst Spacemen 3 album (i.e."Recurring").  Can this really be an upgrade in studio composition and technique for Beach House if they're churning out content for the contractually obligated final album of a past their prime, unmotivated Spacemen 3? 

2.  Ancient Methods, The Jericho Sessions, Ancient Methods

It's no secret that Ancient Methods have been one of my favourite techno acts for years. AM's Michael Wollenhaupt might claim that it took ten years to make his debut album because he simply didn't get around to it, but after more than a dozen stellar EP's, he must know that it's still the ideal format for his work.  Crush the listener with heavy beats for twenty minutes or so, go hard, and get out.  However, when I think about my hopes and expectations for a full Ancient Methods album, "The Jericho Methods" delivers exactly what I'd envisioned.  The album format allows him to explore some ambient and experimental textures, but the focus is squarely on AM's signature hard techno style.  It features a number of tasty collaborations (Orphx, Regis, Prurient), which are the calls you make when you need to pull out all the stops on your debut album.

1.  Low, Double Negative, Sub Pop

If there was any band that could be fully at peace with themselves despite falling into a comfortable creative rut, it was Low.  That's not to say that they never deviate from their signature style, their catalogue is scattered with many examples where they dabbled in electronica or cranked up the noise.  But twelve albums into their career, I expected that Low would be content to tour forever on the back of pleasant yet benign new records.  The kinds of records that get middling grades from music publications because they're always solid enough to keep up the legacy of the band, but never good enough to be memorable except among hardcore fans.

"Double Negative" took a sledgehammer to all these expectations.  Even after reading the online reactions of many fans, most of whom were struggling to pick their jaws up off the floor and properly describe what they were hearing, I was unprepared for the total deconstruction all my associations with Low and their music.  Andy Stott wandering through a depressed, harmony-laden haze?  Bursts of static pulsing along to pitched down vocals filtered through one of William Basinski's tape-eating machines?   No description could properly do it justice.  But to borrow from the most common online sentiments -- who does this twelve albums into their career?  Who has the guts, the ambition, and the vision to pull this off?

Pete Shelley RIP

For years, the sum total of my knowledge of Pete Shelley was the video for his 1981 non-hit "Homosapien".  I still love everything about that song.  Years before the likes of New Order perfected their formula, Shelley fused rock, electro, and disco into a coherent whole that still sounds ahead of its time.  The video had a hazy, artsy "Ashes to Ashes" type of feel but Shelley was this relatable geeky character as opposed to Bowie's air of impegnability. 

Years later, I learned that the Buzzcocks were the punk icons who gave Joy Division a big break by inviting them on tour.  But I didn't start listening to their music until years after that.  Welcome to the filesharing era, and my dl'ed copy of "Singles Going Steady". 

The story of punk that I knew had always drawn a line from reggae as the music of rebellion straight through to Sex Pistols and the Clash working to smash the system.  Even though the Ramones were in plain view as punk (and alternative) heroes, the idea of punk as fun, bouncy rock and roll was overlooked, and to some extent still is.  Punk could be an outlet for teen angst, a safe haven for complaining about boredom or bad habits or getting dumped.  Buzzcocks helped teach me that. 

I was lucky enough to see them live twice, post-reunion in 2006 and 2011.  And more recently, I learned even more about what a generous soul Pete Shelley was from reading Peter Hook's Joy Division bio.  Buzzcocks were elder statesmen (despite being in their early 20's themselves) to virtually every young, hungry band in Manchester at the time, and went out of their way to mentor young musicians and help grow the scene.  

Diary of Musical Thoughts Podcast Episode 40

"November 2018 techno comeback", 59 minutes

My first mix in over a year.  A comeback of sorts for the long dormant podcast.  And dare I say it, this mix is a banger.  Simple but effective, featuring many of my techno favourites of 2018.

"A Star Is Born", dir. Bradley Cooper

There are plenty of things to appreciate about this movie (the always great Cooper, riveting stage scenes, at least two thirds of the music) and plenty of negatives (the horrible miscasting of Dave Chappelle, the completely one dimensional sleazy manager albeit played to maximum effect by Rafi Gavron).  But the movie ultimately fails due to two, huge reasons that completely blocked me from suspending my disbelief:

1) Bradley Cooper is completely convincing as a broken down, insecure, drunk and drug addict.  However, I couldn't buy him for one minute as one of the world's most famous rock stars, not when his act amounts to (at best) a cowboy-fied version of Dave Matthews. 

2) Lady Gaga had zero "it factor" as a genre-transcending pop star.  Think about that for a second.  They cast Lady Gaga in a film as a working class songwriter who turned to the pop side and became a huge star but stripped away all the intangibles that mirrored her real life rise to superstardom.  I could practically hear Simon Cowell saying "I've always said that it's not just about the voice" as a voiceover during half  of her scenes.  

Her character could have fully embraced pop music and foresaken the rootsy blues and country style of her husband, which would have led to friction between them and all the necessary plot points.  But I can understand the decision to feature Lady Gaga unplugged and nearly free of makeup, in which case her character could have gone full blown Adele.  That's who she is by the end of the movie anyhow, singing eye-rolling sub-Diane Warren love songs at Kennedy Center style galas.  Instead, the movie tried to split the difference and I found myself constantly asking myself "why is she a Grammy-winning singer"?     

The Caretaker, "Everywhere at the End of Time Stage 5"

The fifth installment in the series assumes the same basic format as the fourth, with four long (20+ minutes) tracks of blended noise posing as garbled memories.  Stage 5 is less abrasive than Stage 4 and at times makes for a pleasant, even blissful listen.  Stage 4 was more "noisy" because stabs of melody would constantly pop in and out for fractions of a second, as the brain ceaselessly tried to jumpstart the re-formation of coherent memories.  In Stage 5, at this point in the deterioration into an increasingly formless dementia, the mind is too weak to fight the condition.  The songs that formed the basis of Stages 1-3 are only discernible if a person of sound and astute mind makes the point of trying to listen for them. 

However, once the brain admits that the fight is lost, there are extended periods of peaceful contentedness.  By the end of Stage 5, it would appear that the next step could only be a formless swirl of dark, isolationist noise.  But I have a strong feeling that I'm going to be surprised.   

Kim Gordon, "Girl In a Band"

Kim Gordon is a private person by her own admission, often shy and introverted, a reluctant star for an industry that sought a marketable personality for her band Sonic Youth.  Reading about her LA upbringing, as the child of academics, brutally teased by her schizophrenic brother, was the most engrossing part of her memoir.

Those looking for blow by blow accounts of Sonic Youth's rise to the top of the 80's and 90's alternative pile, or even for wistful philosophizing about how and why they made such an impact, will be sorely disappointed.  It seems that a major motivation for writing the book is to show that her life has been far more than just being one half of the power couple behind Sonic Youth.  However, this leads to the book becoming a bit too insider-y into goings on in the arts world.  It may not be an exaggeration to state that fans of fine art will get more out of reading the book than music fans will.

I've thought a lot about Sonic Youth's near-breakthrough.  "Kool Thing" is one of the most perfect songs ever written. For a band debuting on a major label and looking to make a splash, courting new fans while maintaining all the elements that made them legends to existing hardcore fans, "Kool Thing" could not have achieved their goals any better.  It had all the elements for getting played on the radio and MTV -- a slick, yet lo-fi video that maintained all their underground cred, a brilliant guest spot from Chuck D, an air of dissonance and danger that absolutely screams "soundtrack to the counterculture", and a brilliant, endlessly repeatable chorus.

The third single from the album, "Dirty Boots", tries to be "Smells Like Teen Spirit" before "Smells Like Teen Spirit", or at least, its video does.  It features kids moshing to the band in a cramped club, audience crushes on the band, and twee crushes been slackers in the audience.  It might have been appropriate for second gen faux grunge nerds like Weezer, but it couldn't possibly have been less fitting for Sonic Youth.  Eventually SY would have modest commercial success working with Butch Vig, who famously produced "Nevermind".  But it was their least interesting period creatively, and Gordon has very little to say about their music during these years (but has many interesting personal memories of Nirvana).

Slash: The Autobiography

I bought the e-reader version of this book and it was so cheap that I wasn't expecting much beyond endless tales of mindless debauchery in order to get my money's worth.  This book delivered the excess in spades, but wasn't the superficial read I was expecting.  It's a moderately heavy book (160K words -- hardly a quickie, grade school level read that you'll plow through in a day, like certain other cash grab memoirs are) and contains quite a bit of depth.  For instance, the years in LA leading up to Slash joining GNR are recalled in fascinatingly vivid detail.  The writing (and/or ghostwriting) is superb, Slash's writing persona comes off as affable and highly believable. 

In fact, Slash's life up to the recording of "Appetite for Destruction" takes up well over half the book.  The idea that the journey to become famous is more interesting that actually being famous (and more enjoyable for the protagonist, both at the time it happened and in the present day) is a notion that rings loud and clear.  Once GNR take off, most of the characters practically disappear from the story.  There's a good deal of philosophizing about the Axl Rose that he knew pre-1987 (they even lived together for a short while) but after that, almost nothing.  Like many wildly successful groups do, GNR split into separate camps and Axl become a side plot, a person who turns up on stage (most of the time) but is otherwise a shadow character who only exists via his managers and lawyers who act as his conduit.  This is really a book and Slash and Slash only.  Anyone looking for insight on what the other main players in the GNR story were "really" like at the height of their fame will find almost nothing to chew on.  Thus, the second half of the book is far less interesting than the first half.  Being the biggest band in the world was a succession of gigs and bottomless alcohol and drug binges, but by that point those stories have mostly lost their sordid power. 

After reading this, I'm even more baffled at how GNR became the biggest rock band in the world for a few years.  There was no grand plan to flip the music industry on its head and expel the multitude of wimpy 80's "rockers".  They weren't following existing trends, there was nothing like "Welcome to the Jungle" on the pop charts in 1988, but the public somehow managed to buy into what they were doing.  It may be a cliche, but at its heart, beyond all the drugs and parties, it's a story about never compromising and believing in the artistic merit of what you're doing.  Slash emphasizes it repeatedly as GNR are getting rolling, but the message may be drowned out by all the tabloid-ready stories throughout the book. 

One final note -- this was published in 2008, i.e. years before the GNR reunion tour.  Toward the end of the book, there's no inkling of any reconciliation taking place in just a few short years. Could there be an updated and expanded edition at some point?   

The Caretaker, "Everywhere at the End of Time Stage 4"

The first three installments in the series chronicle a slow descent into the clutches of dementia, with an emphasis on slow and barely discernible.  Melodies, used as a stand-in for memories, were blanketed by the persistent crackle of a scratched record, with gentle shifts in their intonation and overall clarity.  But the fourth installment takes an abrupt turn toward noise and chaos.  "Post Awareness Confusions" is the title shared by three of the four tracks (each running over twenty minutes) and essentially sums up the current diagnosis.  The patient took a sudden turn for the worse since the end of Stage 3 and their personality became unidentifiable seemingly overnight.  Snippets of the old melodies can be picked out here and there, but anything approaching a recognizable tune has vanished completely.  You can't even characterize it as sad, there's simply no trace of the human being who was once there. 

The first half of the album is a trying listen, which is certainly the intention.   The sudden transition between Stage 3 and 4 feels like cheating the concept of the series a bit -- without knowing exactly how to proceed, The Caretaker launched into noise for noise's sake.    The beauty in The Caretaker's music was always in the subtle details, which are now obscured by the change to a more generic noise-based sound.  But the second half of the album is far more alluring.  "Temporary Bliss State" offers nothing in the way of coherent thoughts -- it's not a reprieve where a few memories come back into focus -- but does settle the torment of the previous forty odd minutes. 

As a state of mind, Stage 4 it undoubtedly succeeds, but as an album you'll want to hear regularly, less so.  But like so much experimental and noise music, to enter that state of mind, you'll need to subject yourself to nearly the entire thing.  

Kristin Hersh, "Paradoxical Undressing"

Kristin Hersh's memoir focuses on a single year of her life but doesn't have a beginning, middle, or end.  The writing is based on a diary she kept at the time and the story (or lack of it) picks up with her band and home life in a state of barely controlled chaos, uncertainty and turmoil and ends with her band and home life in a different state of barely controlled chaos, uncertainty, and turmoil.  Along the way, the action (or lack of it) takes in an eclectic cast of friends and bandmates, which is where the real action is.  Scenes, moments, concerts, and conversations are recalled in exquisite and sometimes absurd detail.  The minutiae of daily life gives us a charming, and touchingly personal look at the people involved.  Her writing is beautifully strange and lyrical much like her songs.  Sometimes I found myself humming tunes from her solo albums while reading the words and slotting them in as newfound lyrics, especially in the earlier chapters. 

There's a precocious air to the entire book, and a "smartest kids in the room" vibe at times that could be offputting to some.  But it's a brutally honest memoir, and the well meaning innocence of all involved makes this a great underdog story.  I don't often find myself rooting for the author of music memoirs, but with this one I definitely did.       

Beach House, "7"

Five years ago, when I would listen to Beach House's third album "Teen Dream", it sounded like a dress rehearsal for the fully fledged maximalist dream pop of "Bloom".  When I listen to "Teen Dream" now, I understand why people who were not enthused by "Bloom" considered it to be the quintessential Beach House album.  "Teen Dream" is dewy eyed pop that could have believably been recorded in someone's basement, filled with gorgeous ballads that would burn up the charts in a mirror universe despite being self-recorded on a minuscule budget.  That's the fantasy that "Teen Dream" promoted so well.  "Bloom" was bigger, louder, and more ambitious, but the intimacy and instrumental simplicity of their earlier albums had begun to slip away.

"7" completes a reiteration of sorts of the previous album cycle.  "Depression Cherry" is a final goodbye to the intimate, home studio aesthetic of their early albums, and "Thank Your Lucky Stars" is the quickie demo version of the more expansive sound they'd aim for on "7".  In interviews, Beach House have talked about how "7" was largely conceived in the studio, and it certainly sounds like it.  "Dive" is splattered with producer Sonic Boom's fingerprints, From the droning organ intro to the churning drum machine that crashes in partway through, this is "Recurring"-era Spacemen 3 filtered through a new vessel.  "Dark Spring" is straight up fire, a storming statement of purpose to open the album, Beach House's closest facsimile to MBV, a "Glider"-esque wonder of multitracked wailing guitars.  But immediately afterward, "Pay No Mind" heads in a different direction completely, bludgeoning its way through a murky bass and drums-led dirge that's disguised as a love song.  

Unlike every previous Beach House record, "7" never settles into a signature mood that envelops the album.  It couldn't happen because they were too busy exploring the studio with new producers who forced them to leave their comfort zone.  The result is a creative tour de force, but is it at the expense of the "real" Beach House of the past who still kicking around in there somewhere?  This new version may not know exactly who they are yet.      

Prodigy, "The Fat of the Land"

This is one of those unfortunate cases where I end up defending music that I was never a big fan of to begin with.  But Jesse Dorris' retrospective review is a sad example of reflexive political correctness in contemporary music criticism.  He might as well have written GOTCHA at the end of every paragraph, as he tries desperately to point fingers at 90's fans and critics who bought into the supposed scam. 

The intended centerpiece is the "Smack My Bitch Up" controversy.  The misogyny in the song was most certainly NOT accepted at the time, so sorry, there are no MeToo revelations to be found here.  That's not to say that there weren't arguments made on both sides of the issue (e.g. "it's just a sample" so Prodigy technically didn't say these things), but point being that the review doesn't touch on anything new about 90's masculinity.

Elsewhere, the Prodigy should apparently be scorned by thinking people in 2018 because they were too male and too white and catered to white male audiences.  The fact that half of the group members were black and their US label boss was a woman and a feminist icon somehow doesn't fit into the argument.  Dorris goes on about macho-ness and male-ness and somehow missed the entire post-1994 "smash the system" ethos of Prodigy. This was intersectionality long before its time, and could have never been born out of a 90's "rock" genre. 

Aretha Franklin RIP

More than any other "genre pioneer" that I can recall, her death truly feels like the end of an era.  Many rock pioneers have passed away in recent years, but rock has evolved so much since the 50's and 60's and its current incarnations would have been inconceivable to the giants of the past.  But everything Aretha touched still feels fresh, current, and vital.  The famous Kennedy Center performance of "(You Make Me Feel Like a) Natural Woman" proved that she still had no equals even a few short years ago.  Not to mention that the R&B superstars who have dominated the pop charts in this generation (Mariah Carey, Alicia Keys, Brandy, Beyonce, and dozens of others) clearly owe a lot to Aretha Franklin, and that influence shows little signs of fading.  

I thought about George Michael, who duetted with Franklin in a pairing that seemed far from obvious at the time.  The British teen pop star with the American soul legend twenty years her senior?  Their voices compliment each other perfectly on "I Knew You Were Waiting", which was a transatlantic number one hit.  And yet I can't help but feel that it would have been Boyz II Men/Mariah Carey levels of huge had it been released ten years later.  I also realized for the first time that Michael's "One More Try" is an Aretha Franklin song in style and spirit.

Peter Hook, "Unknown Pleasures"

I did finally read Hook's JD bio, and it's a more than worthy addition to the wealth of first-person JD literature out there.  He wrote it knowing that most readers would be long-time fans who had already read Deborah Curtis' "Touching From a Distance", seen the "Closer" and "24 Hour Party People" films, knew the Factory Records story inside and out, and so on.  Hook in fact references those works a number of times.  As such, there are few surprises to be found in "Unknown Pleasures", but it's not meant to be an expose or refutation to what others have written.  Hook's book about New Order, "Substance", is an entirely different style of memoir about a band that we knew surprisingly little about considering their volume of output and the length of their career.  It's much more about setting the record straight.   "Unknown Pleasures" is a mostly lighthearted, often funny read about a band that started from nothing and tried to make it big, and very nearly did. 

There are several pauses in the narrative where Hook weighs on heavier issues and provides commentary with the benefit of more than thirty years of perspective.  This book may finally put an end to the Tony Wilson romanticized version of events, where JD might have become bigger than U2 if not for their doomed prophet Ian Curtis.  In Hook's account, they were all having too good a time and too focused on their music to stop and think about what Curtis was going through.  They were young and hungry and driven and finally tasting success when he died.  If anyone comes out of it looking like the bad guy, it was the doctor(s) (unnamed) who prescribed Curtis' epilepsy medications, which were clearly messing with his body and mind to little medical benefit.  Hook states over and over than what Curtis really needed was to take a long break and rest, but nobody -- including Curtis -- could see that (or admit it to themselves).  According to Hook, nobody wanted to see the band succeed more than Curtis, who habitually insisted he was fine no matter much his health worsened.  
 

"Music Sounds Better With You" at 20

Ryan Alexander Diduck examines Stardust's one-off hit for FACT.

It's funny to see which songs from a fairly lackluster year (1998) stand out twenty years later. 

As Diduck notes, it was completely out of step with the electronic music trends of the time.  Chemical Brothers and Prodigy were bridging the gap between rock and techno, making club music palatable for alternative nation fans who wouldn't have gone near the stuff otherwise.  Against that backdrop, Stardust released their unapologetically retro disco track. 

At the time, I didn't really understand if there were artistic undertones I was missing.  Why release something so simple and repetitive?  Why recycle old ideas when the talent involved clearly had the ability to push the boundaries of the music further?  IDM sort of poisoned us into thinking that techno and house had to be complex, thought provoking, worthy of dissection and careful analysis.  But sometimes a fun disco song is meant to be a fun disco song, best heard in a club.  In that sense, "Music Sounds Better With You" had more cultural impact than entire scenes did later on (e.g. electroclash).     

Diduck loses me toward the end of his piece.  Ronald Reagan was a simpleton and was therefore amorphous -- he was whatever voters wanted him to be, which is why he was so popular.  Similarly, the masks and "screens" worn by Stardust in the video allowed you to project your feelings on to them.  Who made the music and appeared in the video?  There were whoever you wanted them to be.  And yet he seems to claim that Reagan's popularity was nothing but cheap hucksterism, whereas Stardust boldly cultivated a sense of community.   Stardust united dance music fans from several otherwise separate spheres (because their song was so damned catchy), whereas Reagan tricked the masses and blurred the lines between parody and reality? 

The McCartney jukebox

The Toronto Star gave a scathing review to Paul McCartney's December 7, 1989 concert at Skydome, part of his 1989-1990 world tour.  The closing line was something along the lines of "McCartney has turned himself into a jukebox, and nobody wants to see that".  It specifically referred to McCartney relying so heavily on Beatles songs to fill out the setlist, something he'd been hesitant to do while leading Wings and in his solo career to that point.

Peter Howell was the Star's rock critic, and he was only expressing what would have been common critical sentiment at the time.  McCartney had been a chart fixture through the mid-80's, but his 1989 album "Flowers in the Dirt" didn't yield any top ten hits.  In terms of pop success, it was the biggest failure of his career, and in fact he'd go thirty years between appearances in the top ten (from "Spies Like Us" in 1985 to "FourFiveSeconds" in 2015, an incredible achievement really and an even better bit of music trivia).  To bounce back from that failure, he turned to a different kind of populism and started trading on past glories more than he ever had before.  To the general critical establishment of the day, it meant he was clearly washed up.  Suddenly the co-lead of the greatest and most influential band of all time was no different that any other oldies act, "reuniting" without most of the original members to make a few bucks off of the wealthy boomers who would pay a premium to hear the same hits from twenty years played over and over.

In McCartney's appearance on the Late Late Show with James Corden, he figuratively becomes the jukebox in a Liverpool pub.  Patrons make requests in the jukebox, and he plays them as part of a cleverly staged "surprise" gig.  The twenty minute "Carpool Karaoke" clip has gone viral with good reason.  In 2018, only the most sour and cynical souls could fail to be moved by Corden talking about his father and grandfather playing "Let It Be" when he was a boy, or Paul playing "When I'm Sixty Four" on the piano in the home he lived in as a teenager, or three generations of fans losing their minds seeing him play down at the local Liverpool pub.

How did this happen?  When did the "authenticity" requirement die off?  As music gradually loses its cultural impact and becomes just another form of streamable entertainment, more of a premium is placed on the undownloadable live experience.  Concert ticket prices have skyrocketed in the last fifteen years, at least in part to make up for lost income from record sales.  More and more people don't want to feel challenged by live music anymore, they simply want to have a good time singing along to the songs they know.  The hugely successful Pixies reunion may have been the official nail in the coffin (even with new post-reunion albums) that made profiteering palatable even to indie fans who grew up on bands who prided themselves on prioritizing their vision over their courting of a mass audience. 

This is much more fun that the older way of doing things.

Joy Division: Old and new

I was watching a live performance of "Unknown Pleasures" played by Deerhoof with Jamie Stewart of Xiu Xiu on vocals and it struck me -- when exactly did interpretations of Joy Division's by newer artists become more interesting than listening to Joy Division themselves?  Don't get me wrong, the original recordings are still unassailable and essential.  But somewhere along the way, the fallout from Joy Division's immense influence on at least two generations of musicians became more exciting than listening to "Closer" for the 10000th time.

Having a small back catalogue has a lot to do with it.  JD only recorded two official albums and about 50 songs in total, and that's including the early Warsaw era songs and demos from the scrapped 1978 debut.  There are only so many times you can comb over the same small pool of recordings before allowing them to breathe and live on via other artists.  Listening to JD lacks new surprises, which happens with plenty of artists whose music I can imagine without needing to play the recordings.  This doesn't always happen with legendary bands who had short careers, for instance, I don't feel the need to hear anyone attempt a Velvet Underground cover ever again.  The Velvets explored more ground creatively, featured a few vocalists with very different styles, and they were further ahead of their time than just about any band ever was.   There's a lot more to chew on.  JD evolved quickly during the short time they had and the future directions were obviously there (e.g. "Heart and Soul", not to mention everything New Order did).  It's past time to hear more bands' take on their material -- aren't JD a bit "under-covered" for a band of their stature anyway?   
  
Something changed post-Factory when New Order moved to London Records and received the full re-release/re-packaging treatment, finally getting their careers and discographies on a solid financial (and archival) footing.  Fans who grew up idolizing them became music writers, and they went from being indie cult darlings on the level of the Jam to appearing on the shortlists of the best all-time British groups.  Is "Love Will Tear Us Apart" the greatest single ever, as this list from NME from 2002 attests?  Regardless, it would have been inconceivable to see this in a major music publication even ten years earlier.  

That idolization eventually played itself out.  JD worship in 2018 is like Beatles worship in 2008.  It's amazing to think that the Beatles and JD played their last notes together only ten years apart because their music seems like separated by one or two generations.  Even in 2000, when the Beatles' "1" was the top selling album, it felt like everything that needed to be said about them had been said.  We're nearly a decade on from that in the JD timeline, and it's been 23 years since the release of the retrospective compilation, "Permanent".  Is it any wonder that we're all so burned out?

It's possible that I reverse my opinion when I get around to Peter Hook's JD autobiography, which I bought some time ago but haven't yet begun reading ... 

Glenn Branca RIP

Branca was a composer who was singularly of his time, and also of no time.  The rage, grit, and restrained chaos of his early no-wave recording could have only been born out of late 70's New York City.  But the template he mapped out with "The Acension" and his early symphonies were the basis for the next thirty plus years of his career.  These extraordinary recordings have never been duplicated by anyone, probably because his admirers knew better than to foolishly fail in the attempt.  His style truly stood alone.  One can classically train their ear and brain to compose melodies, to imagine how they will sound fully formed before they are written down.  How does one train themselves to hear the sounds that Branca envisioned?  How did he envision in advanc e the dissonance that will be produced by a symphony of 100 guitars?  Branca warned his listeners to play his recordings at full volume to bring out the full range of tones and harmonics.  But this in turn depends on the speakers and the room used for listening.  Could he anticipate how his music would be perceived depending on the habits of the listener, and the quality of their equipment?  I like to imagine that he could.  Branca truly composed sound in a way that nobody ever had, or probably ever will. 

Netta wins Eurovision 2018!

Six months ago, Netta Barzilai wasn't even a professional singer.   Now, she's the winner of Eurovision.  How did all that happen?

Netta was the winner of Israel's "Cokhav HaBa" (The Next Star), a reality show with real stakes -- the winner represents Israel each year in Eurovision.  This largely solves two of the most glaring problems with music reality shows.  First, it provides a basic template for the type of contestant the show wants to promote.  "Vote for the Worst" and Taylor Hicks-style TV characters who won't translate to real music consumers are out.  The "it's a singing competition" vs "it's never just about the voice" debate is definitively settled -- stars win at Eurovision, not voices.  Second, not everybody can get signed and be a winner in the long run.  Only one person can win and go to Eurovision.

Netta wasn't lucky to win her spot, her wild interpretations of pop songs were mind blowing for reality TV (check out her Massive Attack meets Bjork version of Haddaway's "What Is Love") and she soundly trounced her competition on Cokhav HaBa.  Was she lucky to win at Eurovision?  I don't think there's any clear formula for winning there.  Sometimes there's a specific thing that the public latches on to, like voting for a trans girl with a beard.  Catchy dance songs usually do well, but so do overwrought ballads, and both did well in last night's final.  Netta thanked the fans for voting different, and she's undoubtedly different from the usual parade of models and dancers performing at Eurovision.  Different sometimes pays off, like with Lordi in 2006, but sometimes it doesn't, like with Hungary last night.  I thought it was easily a top five performance and it was the only metal song in the final, but voters and judges thought otherwise. 

I know that the new voting format is designed for maximum suspense, but it's deus ex machina suspense.  The judges and public are attracted to totally different things, so the drawn out reveal of each country's douze points amounts to basically nothing. 

"Toy" is a massive, inescapable hit in Israel, and not in the patriotic "we have to convince ourselves we like it for a couple of months for Eurovision" sense.  It's played on every radio station, at every wedding and big event, people genuinely do love it and love Netta.  I really had no idea if that would translate out of a single country's bubble, so I was on pins and needles up until the very end of the final.  

Prurient, "Rainbow Mirror"; Autechre, "NTS Sessions 1-4"

Is it safe to say that there are more niche markets in music than ever before?  These two releases are great examples of that.  I read the Pitchfork review of "Rainbow Mirror" and was immediately sold on the album, even though it didn't get a very good review.  The author of the review, Louis Pattison, completely understands his role as the informed party who is preaching to the converted.  His review won't attract new fans to Prurient's music.  He's the conduit who transmits information to existing Prurient fans about the album's background and  a general idea of what is sounds like.  The rating attached to the review is irrelevant.   Their fans need to know that they're getting three hours of live, improvisational Prurient in an old(er) school abrasive noise style.  

I agree completely with Pattison's review.  You can go about your business with this music in the background and it won't demand your concentration.   I largely stopped buying this kind of music years ago because I'd go to the live shows where the sound envelops you from all directions as you sit frozen in silence in some darkened room.  Then I'd buy the CD and it would sound so ordinary outside of that environment.  Still, "Rainbow Mirror" is about the concept of the three hour live behemoth, close listening is probably unnecessary.  "Buddha Strangled in Vines" is the clear highlight though, an 80's proto-everything analog industrial epic, like to Depeche Mode's "Pipeline" meets "The Hills Have Eyes".

---------------

The Autechre:unfiltered era is turning into quite the highlight reel.  Continuing where "Elseq 1-5" left off, "NTS Sessions 1-4" features eight hours of wild jams and technological oddities.   Fifteen minute tracks fly by in what seems like five, and the mind-bending repetition that made "Elseq" so hypnotic and addictive is found here in spades.  I found Session 2 to be a bit punchless, but Sessions 1 and 3 were fantastic, and Session 4 features the ridiculously great "all end", a 58-minute sprawl of shimmery ambience that many people are comparing to Gas.  It'll take eons to truly absorb all of this content, but Autechre haven't been this interesting in at least a decade and a half.

Moby, "18", "Everything Was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt"

We know that Moby recorded "Play" at his professional and personal nadir, as a self-professed has-been who was planning to get out of the music industry.  "Play" was a pop sensation, moving ten million units and landing in inescapably heavy rotation around the world for three years.  The fact that the album was a bit of a downer (singles included) and contained a few decidedly non-pop instrumental mood pieces didn't affect its monstrous sales numbers or cultural cache. 

Following up a melancholy hit album with an even more melancholy did album can happen.  REM did it with "Automatic for the People", but 1992 and the far more poptimistic 2002 were very different eras.  "18" is a very good album that sticks to the same formula as "Play" -- old blues samples laid over dance beats, piano-field dance-lite pop, and moody downtempo pieces -- but the carbon copy never sells as well as the original, and nobody could have expected that Moby would be a long term A-list pop star.  "Play" was a short lived phenomenon that couldn't be repeated, and on "18", Moby sounds none too thrilled at facing up to the task of trying to recreate the magic.  There are some fantastic tracks here ("We Are All Made of Stars" is an all-time classic) but the sense of nothing-to-lose *fun* that imbibed "Play" tracks like "Honey" and "Bodyrock" is gone.  It's loneliness piled on top of loneliness.  As a pop album with sky-high expectations, it's a miss.  Standing on its own, it's a solid listen and an honest portrait of the artist as an insecure pop star, with a handful of career highlights.

Sixteen years later, Moby clearly has nothing to prove to anyone.  His last few albums were written essentially for his own personal satisfaction because very few people are paying attention anyway.  "Everything Was Beautiful ..." borrows heavily from 90's Portishead and there's not a cheery moment to be found, especially not among song titles like "The Sorrow Tree", "A Dark Cloud is Coming", and "Welcome to Hard Times".  Moby's albums have always been pessimistic about the times we live in ever since the rave days.  Nonetheless, it's an easy listen with many serenely beautiful moments and a few dramatic choruses.   If that's where Moby's head is at, then more power to him.   

Smashing Pumpkins ILM Poll

It caught me by surprise, but this ended up being the most exhilarating of the never-ending ILM poll threads.  The discussion caught fire during the balloting/campaigning thread, enthusiasm was rampant and contagious, and I found myself falling down the rabbit hole of lost SP fandom and going on a bender of their music like I hadn't done in years.  It'll take me eons to unpack all the issues raised, especially since I hadn't thought critically about Smashing Pumpkins in forever. 

They had only one perfect, classic album ("Siamese Dream") and a couple of very good ones with wooly mammoth sized flaws ("Adore", "Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness") during their mid-90's peak.  They reached their peak when most other grunge originals (although SP were never really a grunge band) had become irrelevant, which undoubtedly increased their profile as the band standing from the scene .  And yet their seeming longevity was an illusion because only seven years passed between the era of curly haired, feathery vocals Billy Corgan and the croaking, controlling, desperately searching for acceptance Billy Corgan.  Of course both sides of Billy were present during the entire run, but the narrative emphasis slowly switched from when they were up and coming superstars in 1993 to near afterthoughts in 2000.  In the Machina years, even their fans (myself included) felt they had nothing left to give to contemporary music, which was confirmed when they broke up soon afterward.  Their many comebacks and incarnations with a revolving door of new and classic lineup members haven't really changed that -- most of what Billy Corgan says in interviews is viewed as a punchline or as the rantings of a washed up star who still takes himself far, far too seriously.

Even though their albums were generally flawed, the good stuff tended to be really good, which leaves them with a rich and varied discography full of treasures.  "Adore"-era Smashing Pumpkins has always fascinated me.  They ditched the machismo of MCIS for a more tender, mystic version of themselves.  Live shows were eccentric spectacles with multiple drummers that energized the more subdued sounds of the album, and the on stage chemistry between the remaining three band members was never better.  However, said album was at least 40% too long, and the concerts dragged under the weight of the "Adore"-heavy sets, punctuated with epic, meandering medleys and twisted interpretations of their past hits. 

Upon relistening, I developed an appreciation for the Machina albums that I'd never really had.  I've never understood who the audience was supposed to me for these albums.  The hype was all about the Pumpkins becoming a proper rock band again after the interlude that was "Adore", but nu-metal was taking over and it was a terrible time to be releasing a Cure-infused rock album.  They were too soft for the then-typical rock fan, and too esoteric for their lapsed casual 90's fans.  In 2018, the Machina concept with its fusion of goth, glam, and classic alternative rock sounds great.  In 2000, even the Cure were at their lowest point commercially -- caught between their generation defining classic albums and the money printing touring juggernaut they're become since.  There's a lot of proggy nonsense but also plenty of goth-pop gems, particularly on Machina II, and "Stand Inside Your Love" still holds up as one of their very best singles. 

The thread dives deep into countless pressing issues (pinpointing the exact moment when Billy's voice changed from breathy to a strangled gurgle, guitar tabs and piano chord sequences, lyrics about Courtney Love) and it was all great and immensely thought provoking stuff, and I still can't figure out how I really feel about the "Pisces Iscariot" stuff ("Siamese Dream:the fan club outtakes" or a great standalone album that acts as the bulwark before the MCIS excesses set in) and so on and so on ...

The DAT/pretape show

A few weeks ago, I saw Ivri Lider in concert at a private party held in a club.  Through admittedly limited exposure to his music, he had never made much of an impression on me.  What's more, he comes off as a stuck-in-the-mud blowhard as a judge on X-Factor, with a Simon Cowell-like limited worldview of what can and will sell in the modern world.  It turns out that private party Ivri Lider is nothing like the introspective singer-songwriter Ivri Lider whose songs I'd been hearing up until now.  He transformed all of his songs (even the sensitive ballads like "Zachiti Leehov") into party-starting rave-ups.  Everything got the pseudo-trance remix treatment with Lider as the vocalist/party host, frequently heading into the audience to dance with fans and happily pose for photos and selfies.  It was something I never thought he could pull off, quite frankly.  Even amongst an audience of people from his age bracket (myself included), this type of show could have flopped miserably -- nothing is less cool than a forty-something artist trying to reinvent themselves for a younger audience.  Obviously this was no experiment on Lider's part, for he's clearly polished and perfected his private concert persona, but I personally needed to see it to believe it.  I also could have never believed I'd have so much fun watching it.

All in all, it was either the best or second best DAT/playback concert I've ever seen.  Oh yes, Lider appeared with a guitarist and a DJ/percussionist, and the entire concert save for Lider's vocals, and possibly some sparse bits of guitar and percussion were pre-taped and mimed.  For me, only Moby's set from the See The Lights tour in 1993 comes close.   I don't have a recording of that gig, but here are snippets from New York and Sydney from the same year.  In the New York show, you can see that most of the audience stands around looking puzzled, treating the entire spectacle as a piece of performance art, while the first few rows lose their minds.  When I saw Moby, I was one of those people losing their minds, possibly oblivious to the apathy taking place behind me.  I recall a wild party atmosphere in the entire club, but I was smashed up against the front of the stage, so who knows what I wasn't able to see? 

Those Moby shows don't hold up at all (there are plenty of alternate clips on youtube).  The vocals are terrible, and rave was already out in a big way by 1993.  Moby had been grandfathered in because he had been so instrumental to the scene, but he was swiftly being ushered out.  The speed of his fall was discussed in detail in his autobiography, "Porcelain".  I think that's the lesson of the DAT shows, and the reason why more people don't do them even today -- they're best enjoyed in the moment, with no apologies, and no aspirations for creating a piece of art that will last beyond the moment that the last person files out of the club.  The only thing that's changed in the past quarter century is that now we have the selfies to prove we were there.   

The Tragically Hip, "Long Time Running"

At the time, I wrote that the broadcast of the band's final concert was a disappointment, in that it didn't rise to the majesty of the moment.  It looked like just another arena concert recording, and didn't capture the connection between the fans and a legendary band almost certainly playing their last ever show.

Fortunately, "Long Time Running" fills that void and perfectly captures the emotional long goodbye to The Tragically Hip.  There's little in the way of philosophizing about why the band means what it does, and no critics appear to explain the appeal of the Hip.  It's an intensely personal (sometimes uncomfortably so -- details of Downie's treatment and recovery can be difficult to hear) look at the band's final tour from their innermost circle.  Everyone who appears is part of their extended family, from the neurologist who performed Downie's surgery (a longtime fan and friend of the band), to Downie's hatmaker who saw her work as a way to give back to the band for providing decades of memories, to their tour, sound and security staff, most of which have worked with them for over twenty years.

The filmmakers (Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier, two more long time friends of the Hip) were asked to do the project only five days before the start of the tour, and yet with such little preparation, they almost telepathically knew how to wring the best possible footage from the band and their audiences.  They try hard not to turn their film into the Downie Show, but like the tour itself, it couldn't not be.  Frail and shirtless, standing in his underwear before a show, Downie could look any less of a maverick poet rockstar.  Then he begins his pre-show ritual, which includes shining his own shoes -- he explains that it's something he's done for his entire career.  Amazingly, Downie brings the same determination and intensity to monotonous shoe shining that he does to his on stage singing.  Then he gets dressed in that night's pair of shiny pants and outrageous hat and suddenly he looks twenty years younger, a gleaming larger than life rock star.  The transformation would have made David Bowie proud.  The confused, emaciated, bearded singer we saw in his first post-chemo rehearsal in Toronto one year before is a distant memory.   

Vinyl sales in 2017

Yet another weeks late posting ... but one could spend a lot longer than that digging through these amazing statistics.

According to this article in Billboard, vinyl sales have been rising for twelve straight years.   Data from the RIAA's website shows that downloads never gained in sales over twelve straight years.  Since 1973, CDs once had a thirteen year run of rising sales (sixteen straight years in revenue), and cassettes once gained in fifteen straight years (seventeen straight years in revenue).  Vinyl in the peak classic rock era in the 70s never gained for more than six straight years, revenue-wise.  Point being, twelve years of gains is a lot more than a fad. 

But that was only the third most mindblowing stat in the article!  The second most is this: vinyl accounted for 14% of all physical album sales in 2017.  That hasn't happened since 1988.  Since vinyl's early 90's nadir, sales numbers have increased tenfold, but total revenue has increased by a factor of forty!  That points to vinyl being a niche product like never before in its history, with a fiercely loyal minority group of fans willing to spend increasingly more money for a premium format.

The most amazing stat was that top ten sales list.  Where to begin ... The Beatles with the top TWO sellers ... Guardians of the Galaxy mixtape of 60's and 70's rock at #3 (proving that the success of The Beatles "1" at the height of Napster was the rule, not the exception -- people will pay for music if it's packaged and marketed right even if the songs are available in a million other places) ... Ed Sheeran with the only contemporary (i.e. 2017) entry in the top ten ... "Thriller" continues to steadily sell after 35 years ...

Avraham Tal, Petah Tikva Cultural Hall

The closest equivalent to Avraham Tal in American music might be Gwen Stefani.  Both had successful careers as singers in underground rock bands whose style wouldn't necessarily have been earmarked for mainstream success based on the chart standards of the time.  But they did break through in a huge way and could have cruised indefinitely, their reputations secure thanks to two albums worth of megahits.    Before that could happen, their bands broke up and they launched their solo careers, going full-fledged pop. 

Both are charismatic but not in a larger than life way that transcends the many genres they've worked in as solo artists.  Both have even been coaches on their respective countries' versions of "The Voice".  However, Stefani doesn't have "the voice" that Avraham Tal has.  Not even close.   He boasts a high end that would strain the vocal cords of almost any male pop star anywhere in the world.  And as I discovered during his concert, he can sustain that style of singing throughout a ninety minute concert and make it seem effortless. 

Avraham Tal is too talented for his songs, which is a nice problem to have as far as biggest flaws go.  He's not a top tier songwriter but has had a knack for knowing what the public wants and with whom to collaborate at the right times.  During his show I was hoping for more slower songs that allow him to showcase that voice -- the most intimiate portion was his duet with his former "The Voice" protege Nitzan Shayer.  But it's hard to complain about the string of uptempo hits that we actually got.

Bibio, "Phantom Brickworks"

This is my favourite album of 2018 so far ... or rather, the best album of 2017 that I've only just discovered now.  It's more or less a tribute album to classic 90's ambient records, assembled in some mutant chill ambient laboratory of discarded drones and piano loops by Bibio's heroes.  All the best stuff is cannibalized here, most notably Aphex's "Selected Ambient Works II".  William Basinski's fingerprints are all over this album too, with the way that gentle sounds seem to endlessly loop and slowly drift about.  The coldness of SAW II is also balanced by an overwhelming peacefulness that spreads throughout the entire album, reminiscent of Global Communication's "76:14".  And I detect a whiff of Seefeel's queasy near-masterpiece "Succour" too (at least the quieter bits). 

Billy Ocean, "I Sleep Much Better (In Someone Else's Bed)"

Billy Ocean was a huge crossover success story in the 1980's.  Born in Trinidad, raised in Britain, he was a fixture on the American R&B and pop charts in the mid and late 1980's.  His multi-genre and multi-generational appeal led to a string of six top-five pop smashes in five years from 1984-1989, three of which went to number one.  His chart resume in those years can stand up to just about anyone's.

His 1989 "Greatest Hits" collection (which I was listening to this past week) contained a new song that was carefully crafted to modernize his sound and launch his career into the new decade.  Switching from R&B/funk to the then white-hot New Jack Swing sound and featuring a guest rap/monologue by The Fresh Prince, "I Sleep Much Better (In Someone Else's Bed)" had all the makings of a hit.  Except it wasn't a hit.  It didn't even chart on the Hot 100.  In fact, after 1989, Billy Ocean never again placed a song in the Hot 100.

I often think about why so many music stars of the 80's turned quickly into afterthoughts at the start of the 90's.  The neat and tidy explanations (Nirvana happened and killed off hair metal!  Hip-hop took over!) haven't stood up to close scrutiny.  Tastes are constantly changing and no "big event" or revolutionary bands were needed to vanquish the genres that were falling out of favour anyway,  History makes for a cleaner read when it's "Band X took over from Band Y" but any music scene is a complex continuum whose evolution shouldn't be easily summarized by the actions of one or two bands.  Still, a LOT of turnover happened between 1989-1992 -- or it could be my generational bias talking?

But maybe one needn't resort to the sorcery of grand assumptions to figure out what happened to Billy Ocean:

1) Mutt Lange was the wrong producer in the wrong place at the wrong time for this record.  There's something to be said for loyalty and familiarity with a producer, but his attempt at producing New Jack Swing comes off as flimsy and fake compared with other records from the era.

2) NJS stars were trending much younger than the then-40 year old Billy Ocean.  Downtempo R&B, led by the likes of Boyz II Men, would be huge in the 90's and Ocean would have had more success in that scene rather than trying to pass himself off as younger, hipper, and more club-ready.

3) The 90's in general were more about authenticity than presentation.  A singer with a street smart fashion sense seemed real and believable, but a singer in a suit was a poseur in a fancy costume  Groups like Boyz II Men did wear suits, but not exclusively so, and in their presentation they always came off like soulful street crooners, rather than supper club puppets.  In this sense there wasn't anything Ocean could do, since he was typecast into his image.

Reason #3 is the most puzzling one, for in principle there was no reason why Billy Ocean, and many other 80's stars, couldn't reinvent themselves.  Sure, not everybody is David Bowie or Madonna and can credibly pull that off, most stars are who they are and their careers live or die based on that.  But was there a bias (or let's call it bigotry) against black artists in that respect?  Most big late 80's acts lost their way in the early 90's, but some tweaked their image and became even more successful (Depeche Mode, U2, Tom Petty), remained popular as album oriented touring acts (Bon Jovi, Rolling Stones, Def Leppard), or kept themselves relevant and respectable on the charts in part due to soundtrack work (Elton John, Phil Collins).  So were black artists more likely typecast as outdated hasbeens and dismissed?  Even Prince, who could adapt himself to any genre he put his mind to, never truly managed to fit in during the 90's, at least not after 1991.  The industry as a whole was more likely to pigeonhole black artists into a certain mold and not allow them to branch out. 

Lady Gaga, "Five Foot Two"

The temptation to make a Madonna comparison usually looms large with many things Gaga.  In "Truth or Dare" there's the famous "neat!" scene where Madonna rips on Kevin Costner once he's left the room.  In "Five Foot Two", Lady Gaga ensures that the circle of celebrity criticism remains unbroken by ripping on Madonna ... because Madonna once ripped on her.  Through the media and not to her face.  Why couldn't she contact me directly, says Gaga (to the cameras filming this documentary, rather than to Madonna's face)?  And so on, forever.

After dressing up under different personas for most of the 1980's, "Truth or Dare" purported to show a more genuine, unfiltered, more human side of Madonna.  It accomplished that goal, but it's "realness" was still a delicately crafted promotional tool.  It helped repackage her as a serious artist and aspiring actress who had moved on from the superficial glamour of the "Material Girl" character.  "Five Foot Two" has the same goal, but I can't help but feel that I'm watching a similarly calculated form of "realness".  After "Evita", Madonna had gotten the acting bug out of her system, and it was time to hit the reset button again with "Ray of Light".  I think Lady Gaga is similarly addicted to reinvention, it's worked too well for her in the past to give up on it so easily.

The most uncomfortable, insincere scene in the film involves Gaga's family.  She plays back a song on her phone that she wrote about her aunt who passed away nearly forty years earlier.  The scene seems engineered to release a flood of emotions from her grandmother, leading to a big cry for the whole family that will look good on camera.  But her grandmother apparently didn't realize that she had to play along.  She says it's a lovely song, but don't worry, her daughter is gone but will never be forgotten.  She's dealt with the grief for decades already, there's nothing a song can do to help her tap into new emotions.

However, there are a number of raw, beautiful scenes in the film.  The friendship and respect between Gaga and Mark Ronson.  Her difficult, but ultimately inspiring battle with chronic pain.  The stunning, piano-led rendition of "Bad Romance" sung at Tony Bennett's 90th birthday party.  But I never got a sense of how she deals with the adversity in her life.  The film informs us that yes, she does have health and relationship struggles like the rest of us, and then cuts to a studio session or photo shoot or meeting with industry bigwigs (unlike the rest of us).  How does she overcome and still maintain her career at such a high level?  We see the good times and the bad, but it's like they're happening to two separate people.