What do the Democrats want?
According to the Senate's vote yesterday, the Democrats want to bring home combat troops from Iraq by March 31, 2008. However, I'm not sure if they really want to be responsible for the results of that proposal. I sure wouldn't.
Here is this morning's BBC article about Bush's rather unsurprising and underwhelming response:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6504105.stm
The dialogue between the parties has been so frustrating lately that I can't really decide where I stand on this war. I can't believe that the Democrats have set themselves up for failure again by taking the opposite extreme from the Bush administration. When I say failure, I'm talking about the 2008 presidential election.
Let me go on record with my prediction right now, but let me preface it with one of Bush's quotes from the article:
"If Congress fails to pass a bill to fund our troops on the front lines, the American people will know who to hold responsible."
Congress (aka, The Democrats). The Democrats will be responsible. Bush is doing what American politicians do best; he is spinning this thing from the very beginning so that his party comes out on top. My prediction: If Congress stops funding the war and Iraq collapses, the Republicans will find a way to blame the whole disaster on the Democratic Congress, and will win the 2008 election by spinning the whole thing just as Bush did above.
My prediction, however, is nullified by the fact that this bill isn't going to pass anyway. I believe Bush will veto this one (rather than bypassing the veto process with signing statements as he has done unrelentingly so far), and there is not a chance in hell that Congress will find a 2/3 majority to overturn the veto.
So we will be back to square one. The Democrats will go back to the drawing board and try to plot their next attack, encouraged by the fact that Senate actually took formal action against the war (fruitless though it may have been). They will continue to act as if the political momentum is on their side, even though that attitude is exactly what made them lose an impossible-to-lose election in 2004. The Senate Republicans will go back to their side and argue about who they should support for their party's presidential nomination (which is another way of saying "Who among us wants to inherit this DISASTER of a war and try to justify our persistence in the Middle East to an intensely skeptical voting public?").
Meanwhile President Bush and Vice President Cheney will continue to make speeches in which they talk about Iraq as if it is a child learning to ride a bike without training wheels. "Come on Iraq, you can do it, I've got you!" But the problem is that Iraq is learning to ride a bike on a gravel road...full of potholes...filled with insurgency explosives. And as we run behind them holding onto them and keeping them stable we step in the potholes ourselves, gradually losing our will (and our limbs) while our congress...ahem...I mean our conscience keeps telling us that maybe Iraq doesn't want to learn to ride a bike, or maybe we're not qualified to teach them considering that we aren't their parents, in fact we killed their parents in 2003 (but it's ok becuase their parents were assholes). Besides, our bike hasn't worked for more than 40 years. This kid named Vietnam had just learned to ride a bike back then and said that if someone would let him borrow a bike he would be their friend forever. Too bad The Soviets beat us to it and let Vietnam borrow a funky Soviet bike. Then Vietnam said our bike was girly and couldn't go as fast, so we kicked him right in his Gulf of Tonkin. Then he stole our bike for a while and it took us ten years to get it back, but the gears were all messed up and the back wheel never seemed to be going in the same direction as the front one. Since then we haven't had the money to get it fixed, and every time we do have the money we spend it on toy tanks and guns. We can't just let Iraq go now, because they'll fall over. But if we don't let go soon all the other neighbors are going to start to notice and wonder why we think we're qualified to teach Iraq how to ride a bike.
The fourth anniversary of our invasion of Iraq came and went recently and the press didn't even make a big deal of it, as if we are already bracing ourselves for a decade-long debacle reminiscent of Vietnam. The problem is, my friends, that America is in the twilight of its time as the most powerful nation on Earth. I've been saying it for a few years now, but it's becoming a frightening reality. We can't keep acting like we are somehow qualified to dictate the world's actions, because our economic, diplomatic and military influence is waning rapidly. Audacity without influence is going to be our undoing. Mark my words. I'll write more about that next time.
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Monday, March 26, 2007
Changes
As if in response to my final statement in the last entry, The New York Times published an article today in its Business section called "The Album, a Commodity in Disfavor." The article essentially outlines a trend that anyone who has been paying attention to the music industry already sees: the gradual replacement of the album as the primary unit of music sales by the single.
Here is the link to the article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/26/business/media/26music.html?pagewanted=1&th&emc=th
First of all, from a consumer's perspective, the album has been a "commodity in disfavor" for a while now, particularly in the rap and R&B arenas. Overall, the only reason that the album was ever important in pop music was as a vehicle for one or two popular songs. Powerful and influential pop albums are anomalies in the fairly steady flow of mediocre albums highlighted by one or two important singles. You can count on your fingers and toes the number of pop albums that sold millions of copies because of their power as a whole rather than because they have a lot of great individual songs on them.
Classic rock is a different story. There are great albums in classic rock, albums like "Led Zeppelin IV" and "Tommy," that are revered simultaneously as vehicles of classic anthems like "Stairway to Heaven" and "Pinball Wizard" and as needledrop masterworks that secured their creators' musical immortality. There is a reason, however, why pop artists like Simon & Garfunkel and James Taylor became demigods without writing anthems. They managed to write great songs for the radio, like "Cecelia" and "Country Road" and then surround those songs on their albums with comparable and sometimes superior pieces of music like "The Boxer" and "Fire and Rain." It is no surprise that while the singles made these artists famous, the albums are what made them rich.
From what I've seen, the average listener has been aching for a way to easily buy one or two songs by pop artists rather than buying their entire album for decades. The only thing that has changed is that Apple has suddenly facilitated that desire by creating iTunes and making it completely unnecessary to pay for Nelly Furtado's "Loose" just to hear that awesome synthesizer in "Promiscuous." (...Thank God)
Aside: Can anyone name a truly great R&B album that came after "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill?" I'm not an expert and am in some ways talking out of my ass, but I can't see any evidence that anyone in mainstream rap and R&B is trying to make that next great album. (For me, the jury is still out on John Legend, but he should keep up the good work.)
The industry is just as focused on singles as they have always been, but now artists who can't write more than one or two great hooks are going to disappear quickly. Once a single is successful, an artist has to match it almost immediately before it leaves the charts in order to convince even a small percentage of listeners to buy the album. This creates what is, to me, the most frustrating part of pop music: two singles from one artist that sound exactly the same.
Case in point: The Fray. "How to Save a Life" is a decent album, filled with fairly standard but at times poignant lyrics and a refreshingly rich piano-rock sound. The singles are "Cablecar (Over my Head)" and "How to Save a Life." Their chord progressions are, for all intents and purposes, the same. The vocals are in the same range in the lead singer's voice, the piano is less than inventive and the drum intros and outros are essentially identical in both songs. I was extremely disappointed when I heard "How to Save a Life" after absolutely loving "Cablecar." To me it feels like "How to Save a Life" was released to give the listeners who bought "Cablecar" as a single but were reluctant to buy the album a second reason to bite the bullet, but in the process it cheapened the experience of "Cablecar" by showing that The Fray aren't stupendous songwriters.
Don't even get me started on Nickelback, who wrote one song that I liked and then wrote that same song 6 more times and counting. Grrrrrr.
So I suppose my conclusion is that I agree with The New York Times' assessment of the state of the music industry (which is good because it wasn't an opinion article but a report).
However, I draw hope from artists like John Mayer, who's album "Continuum" I have been quick to recommend to anyone who will listen. He has taken a step out of the acoustic, playful, soft, raspy soul-searching that he has done so far (with great success) and has written a richer, deeper, more soulful album, with minimalist songs that speak to his generation without presuming to have everything figured out. He has already shown that he is a creative and highly skilled acoustic guitarist, but until this album he has used that skill to flirt with his female fanbase and to playfully flit around the edges of deep and real emotion. On this album the electric guitar is his means of emoting more truthfully. The guitar does not dominate or justify the songs but instead provides them with the spirit and truth that words are not exact enough to express. To you doubters who have hated him ever since you couldn't understand all of the lyrics of "Your Body is a Wonderland" because his voice was so raspy, I once was one of you! I recommend that you listen carefully to "Gravity," then listen to "Vultures," then listen to "Stop this Train," then listen to "Slow Dancing in a Burning Room." I think those will be enough at least to change your perspective on John Mayer even if it doesn't make you a fan.
I don't think the album will go extinct anytime soon as long as there are intelligent songwriters and musicians who don't want to settle for careers on the singles charts. Every time the music industry has a doomsday theory, some band or artist steps up. Examples include U2's "Joshua Tree," Jeff Buckley's "Grace," Nirvana's "Nevermind," Paul Simon's "Graceland" and R.E.M.'s "Murmur." There is still a lot of good music out there and there are still a lot of people that don't base their taste in music on what they hear on G105. If the past is any indication, all you need are smart listeners and smart musicians.
"I watch the ripples change their size/But never leave the stream/Of warm impermanence and/So the days float through my eyes/But still the days seem the same/And these children that you spit on/As they try to change their worlds/Are immune to your consultations/They're quite aware of what they're going through. Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes."
Here is the link to the article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/26/business/media/26music.html?pagewanted=1&th&emc=th
First of all, from a consumer's perspective, the album has been a "commodity in disfavor" for a while now, particularly in the rap and R&B arenas. Overall, the only reason that the album was ever important in pop music was as a vehicle for one or two popular songs. Powerful and influential pop albums are anomalies in the fairly steady flow of mediocre albums highlighted by one or two important singles. You can count on your fingers and toes the number of pop albums that sold millions of copies because of their power as a whole rather than because they have a lot of great individual songs on them.
Classic rock is a different story. There are great albums in classic rock, albums like "Led Zeppelin IV" and "Tommy," that are revered simultaneously as vehicles of classic anthems like "Stairway to Heaven" and "Pinball Wizard" and as needledrop masterworks that secured their creators' musical immortality. There is a reason, however, why pop artists like Simon & Garfunkel and James Taylor became demigods without writing anthems. They managed to write great songs for the radio, like "Cecelia" and "Country Road" and then surround those songs on their albums with comparable and sometimes superior pieces of music like "The Boxer" and "Fire and Rain." It is no surprise that while the singles made these artists famous, the albums are what made them rich.
From what I've seen, the average listener has been aching for a way to easily buy one or two songs by pop artists rather than buying their entire album for decades. The only thing that has changed is that Apple has suddenly facilitated that desire by creating iTunes and making it completely unnecessary to pay for Nelly Furtado's "Loose" just to hear that awesome synthesizer in "Promiscuous." (...Thank God)
Aside: Can anyone name a truly great R&B album that came after "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill?" I'm not an expert and am in some ways talking out of my ass, but I can't see any evidence that anyone in mainstream rap and R&B is trying to make that next great album. (For me, the jury is still out on John Legend, but he should keep up the good work.)
The industry is just as focused on singles as they have always been, but now artists who can't write more than one or two great hooks are going to disappear quickly. Once a single is successful, an artist has to match it almost immediately before it leaves the charts in order to convince even a small percentage of listeners to buy the album. This creates what is, to me, the most frustrating part of pop music: two singles from one artist that sound exactly the same.
Case in point: The Fray. "How to Save a Life" is a decent album, filled with fairly standard but at times poignant lyrics and a refreshingly rich piano-rock sound. The singles are "Cablecar (Over my Head)" and "How to Save a Life." Their chord progressions are, for all intents and purposes, the same. The vocals are in the same range in the lead singer's voice, the piano is less than inventive and the drum intros and outros are essentially identical in both songs. I was extremely disappointed when I heard "How to Save a Life" after absolutely loving "Cablecar." To me it feels like "How to Save a Life" was released to give the listeners who bought "Cablecar" as a single but were reluctant to buy the album a second reason to bite the bullet, but in the process it cheapened the experience of "Cablecar" by showing that The Fray aren't stupendous songwriters.
Don't even get me started on Nickelback, who wrote one song that I liked and then wrote that same song 6 more times and counting. Grrrrrr.
So I suppose my conclusion is that I agree with The New York Times' assessment of the state of the music industry (which is good because it wasn't an opinion article but a report).
However, I draw hope from artists like John Mayer, who's album "Continuum" I have been quick to recommend to anyone who will listen. He has taken a step out of the acoustic, playful, soft, raspy soul-searching that he has done so far (with great success) and has written a richer, deeper, more soulful album, with minimalist songs that speak to his generation without presuming to have everything figured out. He has already shown that he is a creative and highly skilled acoustic guitarist, but until this album he has used that skill to flirt with his female fanbase and to playfully flit around the edges of deep and real emotion. On this album the electric guitar is his means of emoting more truthfully. The guitar does not dominate or justify the songs but instead provides them with the spirit and truth that words are not exact enough to express. To you doubters who have hated him ever since you couldn't understand all of the lyrics of "Your Body is a Wonderland" because his voice was so raspy, I once was one of you! I recommend that you listen carefully to "Gravity," then listen to "Vultures," then listen to "Stop this Train," then listen to "Slow Dancing in a Burning Room." I think those will be enough at least to change your perspective on John Mayer even if it doesn't make you a fan.
I don't think the album will go extinct anytime soon as long as there are intelligent songwriters and musicians who don't want to settle for careers on the singles charts. Every time the music industry has a doomsday theory, some band or artist steps up. Examples include U2's "Joshua Tree," Jeff Buckley's "Grace," Nirvana's "Nevermind," Paul Simon's "Graceland" and R.E.M.'s "Murmur." There is still a lot of good music out there and there are still a lot of people that don't base their taste in music on what they hear on G105. If the past is any indication, all you need are smart listeners and smart musicians.
"I watch the ripples change their size/But never leave the stream/Of warm impermanence and/So the days float through my eyes/But still the days seem the same/And these children that you spit on/As they try to change their worlds/Are immune to your consultations/They're quite aware of what they're going through. Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes."
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Blogging again
The truth is, I actually do enjoy writing. Here is an excuse to do more of it.
I really don't know what I want out of this blog.
I will probably end up writing a lot about music.
I will probably end up writing a lot about politics.
I will probably end up writing a lot about me.
Hopefully it won't end up quite as over-the-top as my last blog, although that one still has some entries that I am proud of (and it's still on the internet...).
So let's get down to it: blue.
Almost Famous.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
Jeff Buckley when I'm pensive, Paul Simon when I'm in neutral, Ragtime or Into the Woods when I'm driving a long distance by myself, Led Zeppelin when I'm nostalgic, John Mayer's "Continuum" album when I'm trying to renew my faith in pop music, Mos Def when I feel like bobbing my neck with my eyes closed, The Pixies when I'm driving with the windows open in the summer, Beck's "Midnight Vultures" album any day at any hour, Prince when I'm feeling no inhibitions, Death Cab when I'm feeling a little angsty, The Decemberists when I feel like looking up words, James Taylor, Iron & Wine or Guster when I just want to sing along, Billy Joel, Ben Folds (Five) or The Police when I want to shout along, and The Flaming Lips whenever I want to have my mind blown.
That should answer a lot of questions.
I believe that Def Leppard's "Hysteria" marked the end of the rock album, and I hate them for it. Any comments?
I really don't know what I want out of this blog.
I will probably end up writing a lot about music.
I will probably end up writing a lot about politics.
I will probably end up writing a lot about me.
Hopefully it won't end up quite as over-the-top as my last blog, although that one still has some entries that I am proud of (and it's still on the internet...).
So let's get down to it: blue.
Almost Famous.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
Jeff Buckley when I'm pensive, Paul Simon when I'm in neutral, Ragtime or Into the Woods when I'm driving a long distance by myself, Led Zeppelin when I'm nostalgic, John Mayer's "Continuum" album when I'm trying to renew my faith in pop music, Mos Def when I feel like bobbing my neck with my eyes closed, The Pixies when I'm driving with the windows open in the summer, Beck's "Midnight Vultures" album any day at any hour, Prince when I'm feeling no inhibitions, Death Cab when I'm feeling a little angsty, The Decemberists when I feel like looking up words, James Taylor, Iron & Wine or Guster when I just want to sing along, Billy Joel, Ben Folds (Five) or The Police when I want to shout along, and The Flaming Lips whenever I want to have my mind blown.
That should answer a lot of questions.
I believe that Def Leppard's "Hysteria" marked the end of the rock album, and I hate them for it. Any comments?
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