Paul McCartney performs with what's left of Nirvana — Dave Grohl, Krist Novoselic, and Pat Smear.

At the Concert for Sandy Relief, they played a new song:

It was a stomping riff like a grunge homage to the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter,” and it looked like Mr. McCartney was having fun belting lyrics like “Mama, watch me run/Mama let me have some fun” as the band bashed away. 

Would Kurt Cobain have approved? On the one hand, why should that matter? He checked out. But also:

The Beatles were an early and lasting influence on Cobain; his aunt Mari remembers him singing "Hey Jude" at the age of two.

That was Paul McCartney he was imitating.

"My aunts would give me Beatles records," Cobain told Jon Savage in 1993, "so for the most part [I listened to] the Beatles [as a child], and if I was lucky, I'd be able to buy a single." Cobain expressed a particular fondness for John Lennon, whom he called his "idol" in his posthumously-released journals, and he admitted that he wrote the song "About a Girl," from Nirvana 1989 debut album Bleach, after spending three hours listening to Meet The Beatles!

So maybe he preferred John, but Paul's the closest you can get to John these days, and there was quite a bit of Paul on "Meet The Beatles."

"Excessively efficacious" cops pull the plug on a McCartney/Springsteen concert that went on past the licensed time.

"Guitarist Steven Van Zandt, a member of Springsteen's E Street Band, was angered by the forced curtailment, accusing 'English cops' of preventing '80,000 people having a good time.' 'When did England become a police state?'..."

Ironically, England is having a hell of a time coming up with security personnel for the Olympics.

Newspaper accounts have told of recruits hired for essential security tasks at more than 100 sites — including the main Olympic stadium, which seats 80,000 — falling asleep during training sessions. Instructors for G4S, the private company that has a $440 million contract to provide 10,400 guards for the Games, have complained of facing rows of recruits who speak little or no English.

One tabloid published a photograph, which it said had been taken at a training session, that showed a young woman slumped at her desk, apparently sleeping, with a youth alongside her apparently listening to music through earphones.

Music, maybe by Paul McCartney or Bruce Springsteen.

From the old Beatles catalog:

Mister City Policeman sitting, pretty little policemen in a row
See how they fly like Lucy in the sky, see how they run
I'm crying, I'm crying....

ADDED: Remember the old Beatles rooftop performance in "Let It Be." The police clownishly shut it down. There's a funny dramatic arc as the playing begins, people gradually notice and realize it's the Beatles, and eventually the cops arrive at the notion that it needs to end and do their their piddling duty.

The 69-year-old Paul McCartney announces he's quitting smoking pot after 50 years.

For the sake of his 8-year-old daughter (not that he hasn't had other children over the years).

"I smoked my share... When you're bringing up a youngster, your sense of responsibility does kick in, if you're lucky, at some point."

And that point, for Sir Paul, is age 69.

I'm glad The Grammys...

...  weren't too much about Whitney Houston dying. It wouldn't make any sense to overshadow Adele, whose night it was, who seems like a sweet person, who said "snot," which seemed to amuse the crowd immensely. I liked The Band Perry. Paul McCartney was okay, still slim and spry. Good of Springsteen to play with him in the end, on "The End." I was happy to see Brian Wilson still sitting upright... and Glenn Campbell able to remember the words as he journeys into the sunset of his life. Most of the music I could barely put up with. Lots of flashy lights. Costumes. Hugely long eyelashes. I know: It's for the kids. But this was the first time I'd ever watched The Grammys. Oddly enough. Wanted to see what they'd do about Whitney.

ADDED: And then there was Lady Gaga, always only in the audience, with her head encased in thick black netting. She didn't win anything last night, but she got to see — through that net — all the elaborate stage acts that seemed to want to be like her — notably Nicki Manaj — caught in her net. But it was Adele everyone likes now. The one lady standing center stage, emoting in music. I guess we'll be getting more of that, as the followers-on look to catch the next wave.

It's "easy" to answer the question what would John Lennon be like if he were alive today.

"He would love today’s TV with all the channels that are available."

Says May Pang, laughing (and reminiscing about how Yoko assigned her the task of being John Lennon's girlfriend).

ADDED: Oh, yeah, Paul McCartney got married again. That didn't interest me as something to blog about, but having jumped at that Pang bit — portraying John as a guy who would mainly like to watch a lot of television — I find it amusing that Paul's wedding didn't register on my bloggable-o-meter.

IN THE COMMENTS: ndspenelli says:

John Lennon channel surfing...Imagine.

Imagine there's 2,000 channels/It isn't hard to do/Most of them are HD/Video on Demand too...

"[T]he worst pop song designed to reflect a profound moral conscience. I.e. the smuggest, most pretentious pop song in history."

Andrew Sullivan sets up a poll for what he (a bit inaptly) calls the "Shut Up and Sing" award. You can't really shut up and sing. He's just looking for bad lyrics of a particular sort.

I only know 4 of the 10 songs on his list, and they don't really bother me. I mean, it's fun to knock Sting, but other than that, who cares what Madonna was actually saying in "American Life"? And if Stevie Wonder wants to sing with Paul McCartney about racial harmony using a piano keyboard metaphor, that's too sweet to get upset about. As for "Okie From Muskogee," that song has aged fabulously well. I was around in the 1960s when we hippies loved hating Merle Haggard for the things he said in that song, but it's nuts to take it the way we did back then:

"Okie From Muskogee," 1969's apparent political statement, was actually written as an abjectly humorous character portrait. Haggard called the song a "documentation of the uneducated that lived in America at the time."... "I wrote it when I recently got out of the joint. I knew what it was like to lose my freedom, and I was getting really mad at these protesters. They didn't know anything more about the war in Vietnam than I did. I thought how my dad, who was from Oklahoma, would have felt. I felt I knew how those boys fighting in Vietnam felt."

That text is from Wikipedia. "Abjectly humorous character portrait"? Somebody doesn't know the meaning of "abjectly." But I'm inclined to say that Andrew Sullivan is abjectly humorless... at least when it comes to marijuana....

"We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee..."



Smug? Pretentious? Absurd!

You know what deserves to win the award Sullivan defines. It's damned obvious and it's not on the list. Imagine all the peeepull....

Really, this award is no fun if you take shots at lightweights like The Partridge Family and the New Kids on the Block — as Sullivan does. Get the guys who've been taken seriously, like Bob Dylan. ("He that gets hurt will be he who has stalled...") Pick a worthy target or... as they say... shut up.

Did you see Paul McCartney on "Saturday Night Live" last night?

Oh, that wasn't last night. That was back in 1993. Here's a report of last night's show, and here's the clip of him doing — of all things — "A Day in the Life." I don't think The Beatles ever did that live. It was weird having Paul sing the John part (as well as the comb-across-my-hair Paul part), and the last verse was replaced by the chorus of "Give Peace a Chance" — in case you didn't pick up on the tribute to John (a few days after the 30th anniversary of his death.)

"I wasn't really dead," says Paul, in that 1993 clip, when Chris Farley asks if the "Paul is dead" thing was a hoax. And now, Paul lives on, and poor Chris is dead. Chris was born here in Madison and is buried here, in a cemetery at the end of a street named Farley.

"I'm not a big opera buff in terms of going to opera, but there are days where Maria Callas is exactly what I need," says Barack Obama.

He was answering Jann Wenner's question: "What music have you been listening to lately? What have you discovered, what speaks to you these days?" I wonder what Callas arias are fulfilling his needs these days. He also says his iPod is "heavily weighted toward the music of [his] childhood: "a lot of Stevie Wonder, a lot of Bob Dylan, a lot of Rolling Stones, a lot of R&B, a lot of Miles Davis and John Coltrane." And a "lot of classical music." He makes a bow to rap music — his personal aid Reggie Love has helped him with that. And "Malia and Sasha are now getting old enough to where they start hipping me to things."

Wenner pushes him about Dylan, who recently performed at the White House. He says:

Here's what I love about Dylan: He was exactly as you'd expect he would be. He wouldn't come to the rehearsal; usually, all these guys are practicing before the set in the evening. He didn't want to take a picture with me; usually all the talent is dying to take a picture with me and Michelle before the show, but he didn't show up to that. He came in and played "The Times They Are A-Changin'." A beautiful rendition. The guy is so steeped in this stuff that he can just come up with some new arrangement, and the song sounds completely different. Finishes the song, steps off the stage — I'm sitting right in the front row — comes up, shakes my hand, sort of tips his head, gives me just a little grin, and then leaves. And that was it — then he left. That was our only interaction with him. And I thought: That's how you want Bob Dylan, right? You don't want him to be all cheesin' and grinnin' with you. You want him to be a little skeptical about the whole enterprise. So that was a real treat.

He segues on his own to the subject of Paul McCartney:

Having Paul McCartney here was also incredible. He's just a very gracious guy. When he was up there singing "Michelle" to Michelle, I was thinking to myself, "Imagine when Michelle was growing up, this little girl on the South Side of Chicago, from a working-class family." The notion that someday one of the Beatles would be singing his song to her in the White House — you couldn't imagine something like that.

Wenner asks if he cried, and he starts his response...

Whenever I think about my wife, she can choke me up. My wife and my kids, they'll get to me.

His aides make him stop the interview at that point. No crying in politics! Then he comes back a "moment later" and makes a speech to Wenner — "with intensity and passion, repeatedly stabbing the air with his finger" — about how people need to shake off their malaise lethargy.

"Someone's knocking at the door. Somebody's ringing the bell. Do me a favor. Open the door. Let 'em in.

That's the entirety of the lyrics to the cute little Paul McCartney song "Let 'Em In," from the 1976 album "Wings at the Speed of Sound."

Please familiarize yourself with the original recording.

Now, you are prepared to view the song and dance interpretation from the 1976 Miss America contest — with Bert Parks and 3 male dancers:

***

What long and winding road led me to that door? Back in last night's "rare opportunity" thread, I wrote:

Being tried for murder is a rare opportunity, as is ending your life in the electric chair.

Meade said:

I once had the rare opportunity to become King of England but I turned it down.

I chose romantic love instead.

Then Hollywood called and I said "no." At the time, keeping my private life private seemed like a rare opportunity I didn't want to give up.

Oh, I almost forgot - then I was asked to run for Vice President but I decided I wanted to spend more time with my family.

In hindsight, I'm glad I turned down that king gig. The pay wasn't all THAT great.

Then Lem said:

Good call Meade.

Greetings from Julio "If love calls on your door"

If love calls your door
let it find it always open
never close it, let'm in ...

Open up, don't get distracted
don't let'm go, dont miss it
you don't know when it will call again ...

If love calls your door
let it find it always open
tomorrow is another day, it's God's will ...

Let love be welcome
Today I will stay with you
For a Gifted night without end ...

I want to be more than your friend
it is all I ask
and that you give me a chance.

(painstaking translation by Lem)

"Gifted" — like "God" — is capitalized in Lem's view, and I accept that.

The open door... someone's knocking at the door...

If you'd left that door open somebody wouldn't have had to ring the bell. Maybe you just leave that door wide open — and let love walk in — but at least answer it. Maybe check the peephole first.

"I'm sure Macca's new lady-friend Nancy Shevell is a very nice woman..."

"... but she just willingly, knowingly went out in public wearing leggings that might be made out of Miss Piggy."

To anyone who thinks I drink a lot of wine.

Now, maybe you're wondering, why is Eve talking about amputees? Well, that's from the final segment of the diavlog about sex and economics. On the subject of amputees — and possibly influenced by what's in that glass — I tell a joke:

See the muddy waters rise.

Thanks to Jason for pointing me to The Beatles Search Machine, after I tweeted about wanting a place to search Beatles lyrics, the way you can search Bob Dylan's lyrics at his official website. I wanted to know:

Is the only reference to "water" in the Beatles' lyrics "muddy water"? (Typical of the kind of thing I need to know to blog.)

Don't you think it's interesting that the word "water" appears only once in all those lyrics, and it's muddy water? The "he" of "Come Together" "got muddy water." (I'm not sure how well the "mojo filter" works to clarify said water.) Presumably, the reference is to the musician Muddy Waters, though surely he is not the "he" of the song. (It's Timothy Leary, right?)

The Beatles Search Machine also returned "Mother Nature's Son," but there, the word actually is "waters," so it does not undo the conclusion that the only "water" in a Beatles song is "muddy water." But the "waters" of "Mother Nature's Son" look sparkling clear:

Sit beside a mountain stream — see her waters rise
Listen to the pretty sound of music as she flies.

The usual things that are said about the difference between Paul and John can be said here. John's dark "shoot me" song has muddy water, and Paul's sweet happy song has us listening to the pretty music of a mountain stream. But I must add that "see her waters rise" today makes me think about global warming. Now, I hear that song and picture Paul, Mother Nature's son, in his field of grass, with his swaying daisies, and the mental picture is ruined by big old Al Gore lumbering up and harshing his mellow.

"I love Bruce for the simple reason he is, from all appearances, a social phobe and a depressive."

Says Stephen Metcalf, bemoaning the fact that Springsteen gave a powerfully energetic performance at the Super Bowl halftime.

Nothing will ever compete for sheer tone-deafness with Paul McCartney playing a zealous Super Bowl rendition of "Live and Let Die" at the height of the Iraq war. But Springsteen would have put America on its ass—its mind shortly to follow—had he strolled out with a Martin and played "The Wrestler."... The national mood is sober bordering on a galloping panic. Lively as he was, I wouldn't say the Boss did much to either banish or capture it.

Yeah, why doesn't Bruce help us plunge ever more deeply into depression — mental, to go with the economic?

"So what's Shiff's economic prediction for the Obama Administration?"

Noting yesterday's discussion of the unbearable bearishness of Peter Shiff, Instapundit links to the video below. I would love to watch it -- maybe you can watch it for me -- but the background music track -- "Band on the Run" -- is painfully distracting.



Really, if you are capable of watching this, I'm interested in: 1. What did Shiff say? and 2. What is the nature of your brain's capacity for attention that makes it so different from mine?

Also, why "Band on the Run"? Is it sort of like run on the bank?

Update on women I've talked about recently.

1. Heather Mills gets a mere £55 million. And she binds herself to never tell the story of what went on between her and Paul McCartney. It's a settlement of the case, and Mills was proceeding without a lawyer. As you can see from the previous post, Mills had already received a £55 offer and asking for £70 million to £80 million. I speculated that she was going for more money and representing herself to make the movie story of her life juicier with that confrontation in court — remember Angela Bassett telling off Laurence Fishburne in divorce court? — but the secrecy deal rules that out.



2. Jane Fonda apologized. After I lauded her for that deliberate enunciation of the word "cunt" on "The Today Show."

"She didn't say it to be shocking. She was just quoting the title of her scene in 'The Vagina Monologues,'" said Fonda's flack Pat Kingsley. "She didn't come up with the word."

Kingsley said the "Barbarella" actress, who was scheduled to perform the play last night at Madison Square Garden, regretted using the word, insisting "it was a slip."

"She certainly meant no disrespect," Kingsley said.

Oh, bullshit. But kudos to The Daily News. "Flack" — great word. And: "the 'Barbarella' actress." Ha ha. That's not pristine journalism, but so what? Fonda saying "cunt" is not really news.

Maybe she plans to sell the movie rights to her life story.

The role of Heather Mills will be so much juicier with her — not some lawyer — cross-examining Paul McCartney in the big divorce case.

Mills has already refused an offer worth £55 and is seeking £70 million to £80 million, so there is a lot of money at stake, and much of the evidence is about Sir Paul's assets, so you'd think she'd want to keep her lawyers. But apparently she can't get along with them. Couldn't get along with Paul. Couldn't get along with lawyers. Poor girl!

When does a song "demobilize" a word, so that no serious lyricist can use it again?

Laurence Maslon writes a long, interesting article about the song "Over the Rainbow." (Via A&L Daily.) Read the whole thing, but let's discuss this:

In turning to the rainbow as a metaphor for happiness, [lyricist Yip] Harburg also drew on decades of American songs. In 1918, a minor Broadway show, Oh, Look!, gave the world a major tune, “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows”, one of the most popular of its day. (Its closing lyric runs, “I’m always chasing rainbows./ Waiting to find a little bluebird in vain.”) Ten years later, Billy Rose and David Dreyer contrived a popular hit, “There’s a Rainbow Around My Shoulder”....

Why would Yip Harburg, a man of considerable imagination, take yet another drink from such an oft-dipped well? Part of it was his conviction that the rainbow image would be useful for the rest of the picture.... Also, Harburg must have intuited that such an image would have seemed ridiculous and corny if were sung by, say, a Manhattan cigarette girl singing on a penthouse balcony. But for an untutored farm girl from Kansas, living in some indeterminate point early in the 20th century, the very predictability of the rainbow image speaks to her old-fashioned values and lack of pretense....

[The song] is a seminal influence on the imagination of impressionable youths to this day, truly a brilliantly crafted song, with Arlen’s achingly adult melody set off by Harburg’s sophisticated use of childlike simplicity. Rarely has such a juxtaposition yielded such a felicitous result. Harburg’s lyrics are so successful, in fact, that they essentially demobilized the words “rainbow” and “bluebird” from serious use in popular song forever after. (The two exceptions, ironically, are Harburg’s own “Look to the Rainbow” from Finian’s Rainbow and Arlen’s collaborator, Johnny Mercer’s, use of “rainbow’s end” in “Moon River.”)

But now aren't you thinking of exceptions? I immediately thought of Lesley Gore singing "Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows" ("Everything that's wonderful is what I feel when we're together"). And for "bluebird"... come on, I feel sorry for Stephen Stills that Maslon threw in the part about "bluebird":

Listen to my bluebird laugh.
She can't tell you why.
Deep within her heart, you see,
She knows only crying.

Somehow I don't feel sorry for Paul McCartney ("I'm a bluebird, I'm a bluebird, I'm a bluebird, I'm a bluebird, Yeah, yeah, yeah"). I don't think he was really even trying there, and besides, he's demobilized "blackbird."

Yet copying the Stills' lyrics, I see that it is obvious that the lyrics without the music don't make much of an impression at all. Perhaps it's not -- after all -- a "serious use" of the word.

So, what songs have used a particular word in such a way as to take it off the list of words a serious lyricist can use? (Do we still have such people?) What does it take to demobilize a word?

Perhaps sometimes this happens only within a particular type of music. Can I think of a good example of that? Betraying my age once again, I think of the mid-60s word "groovy," which spiked in popularity and then became unusable. In 1966, there was "A Groovy Kind of Love" (which was 34 on the Billboard 100 that year -- that great year). When that song came out "groovy" was nearly unknown slang (at least in the U.S.). The following year there was "The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)," the Paul Simon song that was a hit by Harper's Bizarre. It's 98 on the Billboard 100 for that year. And, the same year, there's also "Groovin'" by the Young Rascals (11th). When these songs were hits, "groovy" had become a word that no one would actually use in conversation. You might hear it on a TV show, but it would be embarrassing to say it unless you clearly conveyed that you were making fun of the word. But this is a big digression, because no song lyric killed "groovy." "Groovy" was killed by its own sudden, extreme popularity.

So back to the real question. Can you think of a word that is used so decisively well in a song as to remove if from a good lyricist's vocabulary?

The article about "Over the Rainbow" raises a second issue: "it’s the only adult song in the popular canon to be sung by a child." Is it?

(Here's the recent example of a 6-year-old singing the song -- with the audience melting like lemon drops. And here's Katharine McPhee singing the song to great acclaim on "American Idol." I'm on record hating it, by the way.)

"The phrase Memory Almost Full came into mind, then I realised I'd seen it on a phone - you know, you must delete something."

The Guardian has a nice piece on Paul McCartney, who is about to release a record called "Memory Almost Full," with songs covering his life story and his anticipation of death:

At times, he appears to argue with himself about how autobiographical the songs are. Take Mr Bellamy, which is about a man in a desperate situation - refusing to come down from the roof of his house because he's happier up there with "nobody here to spoil the view, interfere with my plans ... I like it up here without you" - newspapers have suggested this is about his state of mind. But that's too easy, he says - for starters, he began writing this album when he and Mills were happily married, and anyway, this is a character-led vignette, a Beatles-esque short story.

Hmm... well, I think writers start writing things about a marriage going bad before it actually does, either because somewhere in their head they realize where things will go or because in the process of writing they are analyzing a situation and become persuaded that what looks good on the surface is not actually good. But quite apart from that, outsiders don't know whether people who now appear happily married are still or ever were happily married. Happily married is the sort of thing you pretend to be. Happy is the sort of thing you pretend to be. Now, when people look unhappy, you can believe it -- though not always. These songwriter types -- and other sorts of poets and artists -- have reason to play the forlorn, angsty role. But, surely, some of them are sincere.

Anyway, this Mr. Bellamy character sounds like the same guy as "The Fool on the Hill," which was a Paul song.

"The common denominator is me. Even if I try and write, 'Desmond and Molly had a barrow in the market place', inevitably I come through the song."

Yes, as a lightweight nitwit, Paul detractors would say. No, that's not me saying that. I'm imagining other people. I'd give a lot of credit to Paul for choosing "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" as his example, because he must know that it was conspicuously voted the Worst Song Ever. Personally, I think it's a cool song. For one thing, they repeatedly sing the word "bra" completely out of context just for fun (like "tit" in "Girl"). For another, the sex roles get reversed in the end. ("Desmond stays at home and does his pretty face.") But the main thing I like about it is that it is where it is in a sequence of songs on a great album that can't be thought of without all of its parts exactly how and where they are. (A feeling people won't have anymore in the future because of digitized music, and maybe you've already lost it.)

Speaking of The White Album:

Nowadays, when he tours, he feels at ease with his audience. "It's funny, a couple of American tours ago, I was singing Blackbird and I started to chat to the audience much more. I'm very confident like that now. I remembered stuff that I'd forgotten for 30 years in explaining it. I get a therapy session with the audience, and I go, 'Hold on, I remember what that came from, it was a Bach thing that George and I used to play'."

He gets up to fetch a guitar from beside the Wurlitzer and starts playing the Bach. "Is this in tune? Yes. So that's the Bach. See, that's the bastardisation of it, and then this is how it evolves into Blackbird." He plays beautifully to demonstrate the transition.

They really should identify the Bach piece! Hey, I got the answer in 2 seconds from Wikipedia:

McCartney revealed on PBS's Great Performances (Paul McCartney: Chaos and Creation at Abbey Road), aired in 2006, that the guitar accompaniment for Blackbird was inspired by Bach's Bouree, a well known classical guitar piece. As kids, he and George Harrison tried to learn Bouree as a "show off" piece. Bouree is distinguished by melody and bass notes played simultaneously on the upper and lower strings. McCartney adapted a segment of Bouree as the opening of "Blackbird," and carried the musical idea throughout the song.

Back to the Guardian:

[T]here are things he doesn't want to revisit. His divorce from Mills has not only been horribly public and extended, it has also involved a series of leaked allegations about McCartney's behaviour. The model family man has been portrayed by Mills as selfish, self-obsessed and violent - she has alleged that he refused to allow her to use a bedpan to save her crawling to the lavatory on her one leg, that he discouraged her from breastfeeding their daughter, Beatrice, because he wanted her breasts to himself, that he was a drunken pot addict who had hit her in an alcoholic rage.

Think about how everything you're doing now in your marriage could be restated in divorce allegations. Aren't you a monster?

You know what people want to do to you at the moment, I say. No, he replies. And I reach over and give him a big hug. McCartney smiles. "People actually do that. I get a lorra that off people. I get people I don't even know saying, 'Look, mate'," and he gives himself a sympathetic pat on the arm. "A lot of people come up to you and offer their support. A lot of people have been through similar circumstances and feel they have to communicate it to you."

"A lorra that"... if it means "a lot of," why did they write "a lot of" all those other times? The English!

"[T]here is a tunnel and there is a light and I will get there, and meantime I really enjoy my work and my family. I see people worse off than me, so I can put it in perspective. There's a thing we always used to quote in the 60s when things were rough: 'I walked down a street and I cried because I had no shoes, then I saw a man with no feet.' " It was an Indian parable, and that is one of the lines I live by."

See, I told you! People used to always say that in the 60s! It's just a way to say "It could be worse," but "It could be worse" lacks the gruesome imagery.

Sprezzatura.

Well, I see that The New Republic 's Lee Siegel has gone and gotten himself into trouble by participating in the production of blog comments in support of his own writing. The pseudonymous Sprezzatura went about slamming Siegel's critics, like Ezra Klein, who serves up the details and declines to gloat. And now TNR has killed Siegel's blog and suspended him from writing for the magazine.

The person I know with the best memory reminds me that in the past I've made fun of Lee Siegel's writing -- including once in a post with an update saying that the person I know with the best memory reminds me that in the past I've made fun of Lee Siegel's writing. So, I should be enjoying the poor critic's plight more than I'd realized.

Let's look at the old posts.

April 12, 2004:

"The marriage of comedy and politics is even more unhealthy than the marriage of church and state." So says Lee Siegel, TNR's TV critic. Too many metaphors: marriage and health. And unhealthy comedy is not going to kill anyone, whereas the diseases of the religion-state alliance have produced monumental evils throughout history.

But I agree with Siegel that right now politics is ruining comedy, especially The Daily Show (as I said here). Jon Stewart gets so much good press--the NYT never misses an opportunity to praise him--so it's really almost shocking to read strong criticism like this:

Stewart weighs down his jokes with a kind of Government 101 knowingness. He's not just funny about politics, you see, he's savvy about the way the system works, and he's going to help us through the maze. In Washington, "you have to cut through the partisan gridlock just to get to the bureaucratic logjam." Stop, you're killing me. But when it came to Richard Clarke and his controversial book, Stewart gave up even the pretense of being funny. ... Here was a slick, malleable, professional political advisor/operator, who had the choice of resigning in protest against an invasion of Iraq months before it took place, when such a protest might have had consequences, but chose instead to wait until his slighted ego burst at the seams--this Clarke, a true embodiment of human foible and folly, deserved to be manhandled by the spirit of laughter every bit as much as his accusations deserved to be defended by the spirit of truth. But like everybody else in public life, from politicians and pundits to performers and poets, Stewart wants to seem edifying and instructive. He wants to seem good.

Wanting to seem good is really bad for comedy. And, of course, picking a political side to be what is good is just bad for so many reasons. Siegel thinks Stewart is pandering to his audience, but I would think he's losing half of his audience. He's lost me. And (unlike Siegel) I was completely in love with him.

I'VE JUST GOT TO ADD: If I didn't independently agree with Siegel's opinion of The Daily Show, I would have been quite reluctant to trust him, because I think his instincts about comedy are a bit off, since he seems to have meant the following sentence to be taken seriously:

Politics hates the naked unbridled ego that laughter sets free; it hates it with the intensity with which laughter heaps its furies on the naked unbridled ego that hides behind the highflown sentiments of politics.

As Jon Stewart would say: Whaaaa?

From February 7, 2005:

Baby, you can't do my media criticism.

Here's the free link to get to Lee Siegel's TNR essay about why football provides the perfect showcase for ads. Assuming you want to get to it. It reads like this:

Last night, the brunt of the commercials during the first quarter were for cars, mostly SUVs and minivans. Even a very unexcited-looking Paul McCartney ("Thank you Super Bowl!" he kept shouting) sang, as the first of four songs in his halftime show, "Baby You Can Drive My Car." The interesting thing about a car is that it's a piece of property that you can inhabit while traversing, or entering, other people's property. That's what Brady's team was doing as it moved down the field. So what was happening in the stadium and what was occurring on the tube were mutual reinforcements of this illusion of sovereign motion.

Well, first, that really is not the interesting thing about a car. But second, what laughably tedious writing! The weird thing is that it reminded me a lot of the great old George Carlin routine comparing football and baseball.

Funnily enough, over at Klein's post, you can see that Sprezzatura said things like this:

There's this awful suck-up named Ezra Klein--his "writing" is sweaty with panting obsequious ambition--who keeps distorting everything Siegel writes--the only way this no-talent can get him. And I ask myself: why is it the young guys who go after Siegel? Must be because he writes the way young guys should be writing: angry, independent, not afraid of offending powerful people. They on the other hand write like aging careerists: timid, ingratiating, careful not to offend people who are powerful. They hate him because they want to write like him but can't. Maybe if they'd let themselves go and write truthfully, they'd get Leon Wieseltier to notice them too.

Ha! Lee Siegel is a ridiculously bad writer.

"Get up in the morning, slaving for bread, sir, so that every mouth can be fed. Poor me, the Israelite."

Goodbye to Desmond Dekker. The ska legend's biggest hit was "The Israelites." In 1969:

The Jamaican rhythm of ska had already generated hits in the United States, notably Millie Small's 1964 hit, "My Boy Lollipop." But that song was treated as a novelty. "The Israelites," with its biblical imagery of suffering and redemption, showed the world reggae's combination of danceable rhythm and serious, sometimes spiritual intentions.

Yes, I remember loving that hit and experiencing it as a novelty song (though that doesn't mean that we American kids didn't pick up the spirit of suffering and redemption). Another seeming novelty song that we heard and loved that same summer was "In the Year 2525."

In the year 7510
if God's a-comin' he ought to make it by then
maybe he'll look around himself and say
"guess it's time for the Judgement Day''

In the year 8510
God is gonna shake his mighty head
he'll either say "I'm pleased where man has been''
or tear it down and start again...

I remember listening to "The Israelites" and "In the Year 2525" -- both were played on the radio constantly -- and feeling really strange in that really strange year 1969. Two infectiously poppy songs with a painful, religious edge.

Did you know that Paul McCartney named his "Ob-Bla-Di, Ob-Bla-Da" character "Desmond" after Desmond Dekker?

Desmond has a barrow in the market place...
Molly is the singer in a band...
Desmond says to Molly "girl I like your face"
And Molly says this as she takes him by the hand...