hilarious article on bad music you can’t get away from

peter jon lindberg on “bad music in public spaces” [pop matters]

It would be revealing to compile an alternative history of Western music, focused solely on Songs Played in Hotel Lobbies and Cruise-Ship Corridors Through the Ages. You’d document a bizarro parallel universe, one where Michael McDonald is more popular than Led Zeppelin and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons trumps everything by Mozart. The Eagles would be more revered than Dylan; Jamiroquai bigger than Springsteen. And at the top of the pyramid, with her Nagel-print cheekbones, would sit Sade.

The quintessential background record of any era, Sade’s “Smooth Operator” (1984) was also the perfect theme for its time: languid, sexy, and reeking of money. This explains why it’s been playing in yacht clubs and business-class lounges since the Reagan administration, despite being a patently ridiculous song (not least for the sax solo). Its popularity highlights a key ingredient of the genre: If you’re going to make sultry, anodyne lounge music, it helps to sing with an accent. Sade’s own inflections—she rhymes Key Lah-go with Chicago—were indeterminate (French? Latin? Nigerian? Who could tell?), yet indisputably cosmopolitan.

An even better tactic for background success? Don’t sing in English at all. Whether it’s Serge Gainsbourg wooing Jane Birkin or Cesaria Evora lamenting her saudade, foreign-language songs are believed to lend any venue an air of sophistication. They’re easy to listen to and easy not to listen to, since the lyrics make no sense. Where would your neighborhood tapas bar be without the worldly stylings of the Gipsy Kings, the Buena Vista Social Club (the Gipsy Kings of the 90’s), and Amadou & Mariam (the Gipsy Kings of the 00’s)?

of course, i actually liked sade when they arrived on the scene, but that was the mid-80s and we all did things we’d rather forget back then. what an awful decade.

but whether you agree with his taste or not, i bet you can relate to the spirit of the piece.

japan’s complete coverage, market-driven healthcare

Japan’s health system provides health care to its citizens as a matter of right. It earns some of the highest marks on various measures of quality, and costs far less per capita than the U.S. system–and less, even, than most European systems.

[unsilent generation]

no more fucking excuses, greedheads.

the new sparks album (!). . .

is a radio musical tribute to ingmar bergman

whom i’m not really into, but i can’t help but be glad these guys are still around.

actual u.s. unemployment over 18%

according to white house advisor

According to official statistics, the unemployment rate in the United States is now 9.8 percent. But those statistics understate the severity of the jobs crisis. The official statistics do not include the 875,000 Americans who have given up looking for work, even though they want jobs. When these “marginally attached” workers and part-time workers are added to the officially unemployed, the result, according to another, broader governement measure of unemployment known as “U-6,” is shocking. The United States has an unemployment rate of 17 percent.

And even this may understate the depth of the problem. By adding the 3.4 million Americans who want a job but have not looked for one in over a year, businessman, philanthropist and Obama advisor Leo Hindery Jr. infers an actual unemployment rate of 18.8 percent. In other words, nearly one in five Americans is unemployed or underemployed.

The sound you hear is the sound of the social fabric in America rotting and beginning to snap. Thanks to the unemployment insurance system adopted during the New Deal years, and thanks in part to the stimulus that the Obama administration and Congress passed earlier in the year, we do not have hordes of out-of-work Americans standing in line at soup kitchens and riding the rails from town to town. Even so, the invisible decay of America’s social order is just as real as the highly visible decay of abandoned McMansions in new developments that are turning into ghost towns across the continent.

if the moneyed class doesn’t get busy, they’re going to have issues they can’t throw a TARP over.

could the smoke finally be clearing?

“The Obama administration will not seek to arrest medical marijuana users and suppliers as long as they conform to state laws, under new policy guidelines to be sent to federal prosecutors Monday.“

if the feds and the states want to shave their police budgets, drug prohibition is the only place to start.

finally, something to cheer about from obamaland.

headlines

MI5 paid mussolini handsomely to dis war protesters in print (he was a journalist in 1917) and even get thugs to beat them up.

obama allows big pharma to molest un-rich americans in the time-honored fashion, including outlawing imported, cheaper drugs. (some eyedrops i needed last year were $25 from a Vancouver pharmacy, $75 here)

simon reynolds on how 80s UK synthpop realized the promise of punk.

Conveniently, these singles ["i feel love" & "trans-europe express"] arrived at a time when synths got vastly more affordable, portable, and user-friendly. As the BBC4 doc Synth Britannia reveals, what once cost as much as a small house (and therefore stayed the preserve of prog superstars) became something you could buy for a few hundred quid, or cheaper still if you mail-ordered a build-your-own-synth kit and were prepared to spend weeks assembling the bugger. Groups who’d been inspired by punk’s confrontational rhetoric and sartorial provocations but who found the actual sonic substance of punk rock to be too ye olde rock’n'roll seized on the cheapo synth as the real coming of do-it-yourself.

chinese immersion class

buffalo ny high school to start chinese language immersion class in a year or so

expect to see more interest in chinese culture in these united states, as the empire winds down..

that’s what i was wondering

mark fisher on accelerating technology in a time of decelerating culture [paste]

Those of us who grew up in the decades between the 1960s and the 1990s became accustomed to rapid changes in popular culture. Theorists of future shock such as Alvin Toffler and Marshall McLuhan plausibly claimed that our nervous systems were themselves sped up by these developments, which were driven by the development and proliferation of technologies. Popular artefacts were marked with a technological signature that dated them quite precisely: new technology was clearly audible and visible, so that it would be practically impossible, say, to confuse a film or a record from the early 1960s with one from even half a decade later.

The current decade, however, has been characterised by an abrupt sense of deceleration. A thought experiment makes the point. Imagine going back 15 years in time to play records from the latest dance genres – dubstep, or funky, for example – to a fan of jungle. One can only conclude that they would have been stunned – not by how much things had changed, but by how little things have moved on. Something like jungle was scarcely imaginable in 1989, but dubstep or funky, while by no means pastiches, sound like extrapolations from the matrix of sounds established a decade and a half ago.

Needless to say, it is not that technology has ceased developing. What has happened, however, is that technology has been decalibrated from cultural form. The present moment might in fact be best haracterised by a discrepancy between the onward march of technology and the stalling, stagnation and retardation of culture. We can’t hear technology any more. There has been a gradual disappearance of the sound of technological rupture – such as the irruption of Brian Eno’s analogue synth in the middle of Roxy Music’s “Virginia Plain”, or the cut-and-paste angular alienness of early rave – that pop music once taught us to expect. We still see technology, perhaps, in cinema CGI, but CGI’s role is somewhat paradoxical: its aim is precisely to make itself invisible, and it has been used to finesse an already established model of reality. High-definition television is another example of the same syndrome: we see the same old things, but brighter and glossier.

lately

been distracted lately by personal transformation issues, particularly finding out susan has (most likely treatable) endometrial cancer

she’s doing ok, but since there are only 2 gynecological oncologists in az, and she’s on the state health support plan, we still haven’t even got her into the office to see the specialist. it’s been 3 weeks since the diagnosis.

any prayers/good thoughts are appreciated.

eric hobsbawm in 2004

“Frankly, I can’t make sense of what has happened in the United States since 9/11 that enabled a group of political crazies to realize long-held plans for an unaccompanied solo performance of world supremacy. I believe it indicates a growing crisis within American society, which finds expression in the most profound political and cultural division within that country since the Civil War, and a sharp geographical division between the globalized economy of the two seaboards, and the vast resentful hinterland, the culturally open big cities and the rest of the country. Today a radical right-wing regime seeks to mobilize “true Americans” against some evil outside force and against a world that does not recognize the uniqueness, the superiority, the manifest destiny of America. What we must realize is that America global policy is aimed inward, not outward, however great and ruinous its impact on the rest of the world. It is not designed to produce either empire or effective hegemony. Nor was the Donald Rumsfeld doctrine — quick wars against weak pushovers followed by quick withdrawals — designed for effective global conquest. Not that this makes it less dangerous. On the contrary. As is now evident, it spells instability, unpredictability, aggression, and unintended, almost certainly disastrous, [i]n consequences. [Jonathan Rosenbaum.com]

and things have changed far less than many expected, haven’t they?

meanwhile, several states harbor mutinous intentions which might seem trivial now, but may not in years to come.