A Very Low Tolerance Level for Stupid Bulls**t

This "National UnFriend Day" pseudo-movement aimed at Facebook users is juvenile (I know, it's not like Jimmy Kimmel has ever said anything childish before). I think George Carlin sums up my knee-jerk reaction to this nonsense.

Don't misunderstand me -- I like Jimmy, especially the much-loved show pieces featuring his late Uncle Frank. And as for juvenile things, I have no problem still being a fan of these guys. But this one idea is rather, well, stupid.

Look, you never know who you'll reconnect with professionally or socially in the future. I think the issue is in Facebook's choice of the word "Friends" when referring to our connections, rather than a more neutral term (which Google+ attempted to remedy with their Circles concept). And hey, if we're concerned that certain contacts (e.g. bosses, parents) might be offended by the content we post, then it's probably not worth sharing in the first place. Not everything needs public airing.

Then again, the Internet is full of people taking cheap shots at each other anonymously. And it's getting tiresome. If you choose to put your opinions out there for friends, colleagues or otherwise...just put your name on it. Seems like the grown-up thing to do.

The Celebrity Value Index (CVI)

After reading Bill Simmons's recent piece about Eddie Murphy's undervalued status as both a comedian and cultural force, I started thinking about the way we view entertainment icons after certain points in their career. Did we undervalue Murphy because he didn't die young and creatively untarnished? Did we choose to ignore him because, quite simply, he survived?

What does this mean for other entertainers that stick around long enough to - God forbid - get older and slow down, like real people? Does anyone still recognize Ice Cube's lyrical prowess now that he's starring in family comedies and light beer commercials? And can we agree on a way to measure this downturn in affection for our favorite performers?

I may have a solution. Using my Celebrity Value Index (or CVI), we can calculate several factors that play a part in how we write off mercurial talents past a certain shelf life. Result: the lower the CVI number, the more likely we are to take performers for granted. Let's take a look:

CVI = (Number of Peak-Era Seasons*) + (Number of Peak-Era Releases, Awards, or Championships) / (Years Lived Past Age 27) + (Number of Embarrassing Sexual Revelations) + (Number of Post-Peak-Era Releases, Awards, or Championships) x 100

(*Note: I'm counting each individual peak year as a season, as in sports. For the formula to be fair regardless of who's being measured, I think celebrity non-athletes should be subject to this. For example, The Beatles released all of their new, official recordings as an active unit between 1962-70, and while that may be a period of 8 calendar years when counting backward in time, it's actually 9 individual "seasons" of releasing new material; 1962 is one season, 1963 is another season, and on.)

With this formula, Eddie Murphy shoots a mere 36 (devalued). Kurt Cobain, on the other hand, scores an incredible 156 (highly revered).


Here's the breakdown:

EDDIE MURPHY

9 (1981-1989) + 10 (SNL cast member, 48 Hrs, Delirious, Trading Places, Beverly Hills Cop, '84 SNL hosting spot, '85 MTV VMAs, Cop II, Raw, Coming to America) = 19

divided by:

23 (he turned 50 in April) + 2 (the tranny incident; Eddie's support of Brett Ratner's gay slur) + 28 (everything after Coming to America; see Simmons's list) = 53

x 100

Total: 36 (rounded up from 35.8)

--
KURT COBAIN

5 (1989-1993) + 9 (Bleach, Nevermind, knocking Michael Jackson(!) off the Billboard #1 Album position, '92 Reading Festival "comeback" concert, '92 MTV VMA performance, Incesticide compilation, In Utero, MTV Unplugged concert, Live! Tonight! Sold Out!! video** = 14

divided by:

0 (duh) + 1 (everything we've learned about Courtney Love since Kurt's death) + 9 (MTV Unplugged  album/video release, From The Muddy Banks of the Wishkah live album, Nirvana (best of), With The Lights Out, Sliver: The Best of The Box, Journals, Kurt Cobain: About A Son, Live At Reading DVD, Live At The Paramount DVD)***

x100

Total: 156 (rounded up from 155.5)

(**Though it's technically a posthumous release, L!T!SO!! was intended for issue, with Kurt's approval, in 1994. The rest of the band oversaw the final edits following Cobain's death in April of that year.)

(***I realize I'm counting a handful of content associated with Nirvana's peak seasons as post-peak releases, because those items were officially released after Kurt's death; that's why you see the Live at Reading DVD listed here. The audio and some of the video from that 1992 show had been popular in the Nirvana trading community for years, but as far as we know, were not intended for official release during Kurt's lifetime. Live at Reading feels like a nostalgia-driven cash-in, which arguably could have also been released even if Kurt had not taken his own life. Bottom line: with Cobain either alive or dead, it's still a post-peak-era release.)




So where does that leave other legendary performers? Surely Elvis Presley, for all his iconic status, has one of the all-time lowest CVI numbers. Think about it: compared to the number of celebrated singles, TV appearances, and movies in his early career (respectively: "Heartbreak Hotel," his not-entirely-filmed-from-the-waist-up Ed Sullivan Show debut appearance in September '56, and King Creole, to name just a few), his post-Army career is absolutely clogged with inconsistent material and moments. That's 18 seasons (1960-1977) of content to sift through to separate the good from the bad...and that doesn't even take into account the three-and-a-half-decades-worth of compilations, exclusives, and nostalgia releases being sold after Presley's untimely death at age 42.

As if to prove that it's a collective downer to see icons age and/or decline in productivity, Denis Leary infamously proposed a solution to this dilemma. I'll instead offer that both of the following are true: Western society loves to obsess over our heroes' golden years, and, in equal measures, some icons don't always know when to quit. The Celebrity Value Index is, for now, a much cleaner resolution to an ongoing, chicken and egg (or in Elvis's case, peanut butter and banana) question.

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These Go To 11/11/11

At exactly 1:29 in this video (I've cued it for you), Nigel says today's date in full. Awesome.


(Embedding disabled, so you'll have to click through. Trust me, it's worth it.)

Scott Walker - "The War Is Over (Epilogue)"

PROLOGUE: WAIT FOR THE SIGNS

A few weeks back, I had this post about Scott Walker's 1970 song "The War is Over (Epilogue)" locked and loaded, ready to share. At the last moment, I got the bright idea that I could quickly expand the piece to include the entire album on which this song originally appeared, 'Til The Band Comes In, with little effort. Big mistake.

Spending more time with 'Til The Band Comes In as a whole, I discovered some surprising threads connecting Walker's earlier work (crooning, string-drenched, melodramatic) to his more recent material (atonal, avant-garde, and, er, melodramatic). I even wandered down a few side streets exploring the origins of the cover songs featured at the end of Side 2.

This process birthed many new ideas for pieces, all of which were connected in some way to this record, and all of which distracted me from completing my original task: say something about this damn song.

I decided to put those greater and smaller pieces on hold for the moment. So, first thought, best thought: let's take a closer look at "The War Is Over (Epilogue)."



PART ONE: IT REALLY ISN'T FAIR

Scott Walker's 1970 album, 'Til The Band Comes In, is a record that has frequently been dismissed or ignored within Walker's discography. Compared to the praise heaped upon The Walker Brothers' best-selling singles, Scott's solo highlights Scott 1-4, and his post-1978 avant-gardisms, 'Til The Band Comes In seems to exist in a critical limbo, where the album itself is rarely discussed, yet several key tracks turn up on Walker compilations and retrospectives.

One of the better regarded of these songs -- no doubt because it recalls quintessential Scott ballads "It's Raining Today" and "On Your Own Again" -- is “The War Is Over (Epilogue)."

It's the final (non-cover) song, from arguably the final album of Scott’s baroque solo period. The proper endpoint of the "classic Scott" era depends on who you ask: those who feel Scott 4 marks the close of that phase could point to the number of genres Walker plays with on TTBCI, making the record stand alone in his catalog. Alternately, a case could be made that those earlier records moved between pop, jazz, rock, folk, and modern classical as frequently as this album, and hey, if the record had just been titled Scott 5, we'd be telling a different story about TTBCI relative to Walker's solo discography.

PART TWO: OUTSIDE THEY SING

(Note: If you're the kind of person who likes to read about music while listening to it, please cue the track in the video above and continue reading. If not, take a moment to listen to the song at least once without my interference, then read on, and listen again upon reading the end of this post.)

Can a song be simultaneously featherweight and exhausted? This one sure sounds like it. It's a relieved collapse following an extended struggle, fictional, musical, or otherwise. It's loaded with space, something at which Scott and his arranger/conductors (in this case, Peter Knight) excelled.

Instruments pan around the track, nearly empty, barely playing. First, chimes, then bass, guitar, piano, vibraphone, finger cymbals; left to right, center, and back again. A gently picked arpeggiated guitar continues throughout. Now, the voice. Scott is autumn and woodgrain, phrases ending in vibrato:

Everything still
everything silent
as after the rain
we lie here listening to night close down

Seriously, go back and listen to this part again. The lyric and music complement and further each other's actual sound. When Scott sings "everything still," the musicians barely move. When the instruments create droplets of sound, Scott sings, "as after the rain." You don't often hear this kind of marriage between singer and band, word and music, each intentionally underlining the other's mood and tenor. We continue:

Stare like a child
Wait for the signs to decide once again
Just when they looked here to stay

Scott holds out that last word - "stay" - in a highly romantic fashion, almost an exaggeration of the MOR ballads of the day. Only he's not singing a love song. This is something stranger, darker, more melancholy. That word cues the string section's entrance and the bass guitar's descending line.

Where to leave
Our world, our air
It really isn't fair

From the plea of "stay" to the motion of "leave." The music is now moving, just like the lyric. That balance again: interlocked (sturdy), ethereal (light). And another chord change on "our world." The track has motion, but still it floats: "our air."

Outside they sing, "the war is over,
raise your blinds, the war is over"
Sell your deepest dark
Goodbye

The horn section, often used in music in a cheerfully drunken manner, announces sobriety this time, memory, context for what came before. The weight is in Scott's voice, the horns, the timpani. The lightness is in everything else, even the drum kit. And a head-fake here: not really a "goodbye."

A distant waltz
turns in the head of an old lady's night
waiting hands unfold within the dark

There are brief moments in the verses where nearly everything drops out, leaving only a picked guitar figure, the reverberations of the other instruments hanging the air. This song is as much about the moments when the musicians stop playing, as when they combine into a larger picture.

Lighting her lamp,
seeing Prince Albert,
recalling the sight

Scott was an American living in London in the 1960s. Somehow, I don't think the above lyric was referring to this (NSFW).

They waltz again
through the park

That last phrase, however, recalls another similar, dramatic late 60's production, composed by the man who also wrote this song. Was Scott aware of Jimmy Webb's work? Hell yes. Scott covered several of Webb's songs during his 1970s "lost" period.

Floorboards creak
beneath the moon
the room below just sighs

The mention of a room, a floor, the moon, is an unexpected lyrical link to Scott's future: "Clara," his terrifying 2006 song about Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci.

Outside they sing, "the war is over,
raise your blinds, the war is over"
Let me get some sleep
Tonight.

The recording studios of the day were designed to house orchestras, and condenser microphones (and multi-track recording) helped capture that enormous, enveloping sound effectively. No wonder so many of these records are compact cathedrals, sonic architecture. Coupled with dramatic vocals, stark drumming and punchy horn arrangements, the sum total of these songs are towering things. "The War Is Over" is no exception.

EPILOGUE: EVERYTHING SILENT

There's some revisionist history about Scott becoming a recluse in the early 1970s: the story goes that he "disappeared" due to an intense fear and loathing of commercial success and the attention celebrity brings, only to resurface, dramatically, puzzlingly, with a more avant-garde sound in the 1980s. It probably makes for a better story, but at best, it's an exaggeration, and at worst, a load of PR bullshit.

The reality is that he continued to release major label records right up until, and including, the Walker Brothers' 1975 reunion. When was the last time a recluse did that? Indeed, he was likely frustrated by the fame game, and his move into MOR covers albums suggests he was equally dissatisfied with either the presentation of, or the response to, his own original compositions. Most likely, he simply involved himself less in the promotion of those records based on the standards expected of celebrity of the day.

Then again, Scott also spent those years, in his own words, doing "a whole lot of drinking."

Everything still
everything silent
as after the rain

So then: Scott's early-to-mid 1970s. Movie music and cover songs, one short-lived Walker Brothers reunion, and lots of booze. As a writer, however, he came out the other side around 1978, rediscovering his muse in frightened soundscapes, with four highly original pieces for the Brothers' Nite Flights album.

Let's consider 1970's "The War Is Over (Epilogue)" as a glance through a closing door, from the title, to the lyrics, to the ache of the strings.

Still we are,
after the rain.

Still and silent. Featherweight and exhausted. Goodbye classic crooning, hello modern terror.

END
--

Note: a (very) highly condensed version of this piece originally appeared in a blog post I wrote on my old band's Tumblr account in 2010.

Hey, aspiring felons!

It used to be that your only mainstream career options were in governments, churches, and big business. But thanks to the folks at Penn State, now you can add "elite universities" to your checklist! Come on, don't be afraid of Greek letters, pencil-pushers, and football boosters who care a little too much. You'll get all the protection and cover-ups a criminal could want. What are you waiting for? Apply to a major university today!  [Disgust-fueled sarcasm over]