Cribbed from my monthly newsletter The Smoke Signal, your guide to consuming pop culture smarter.
December is the month of Best of 2015 lists, all 7 million of them. It can be crazy intimating which ones to pay attention to, how much and what to do with the three dozen, "ohh I missed that's" these lists are meant to stir up. So this issue's Pop! Hacks! will be all about how to make Best of Lists work for you.
Music:
NPR Music's Best of The Year coverage is both thorough, varied and beautifully organized, by genre, curator, by song or album. Their website also has an app which will play their favorite songs of the year in random order. Let it run for a half hour while returning emails and see what new music you discover. Rule of thumb (ear?): Look to discover 2-4 new artists, half in your favorite genres, half in genres you know less well. If you're music skews toward one genre, focus there. I usually take 30 seconds and crosscheck the artists I discover with the Village Voice's legendary Pazz & Jop poll, just to see if I'm being an over-40 white guy cliche' and swallowing whatever NPR hands me.
Once you've found 2-4 new artists you like, stop looking. Explore the other work of those artists on the streaming music service of your choice. Make new friends not new music you say hello to in the hallway.
Sit-down meals not snacking.
Books:
If reading 2015's "big books everyone talked about" is your priority, the New York Times Notable Books of the Year coverage will more than suffice. Again, 3-5 titles that stir your interest. More than that and by the time you finish them, it'll be March and 2016 bookish temptations will already be clawing at the front door.
For a more personal take, Maris Kreizman, who runs publishing projects over at Kickstarter does a magnificent Best Books list that I return to year after year.
Tempting here to just wait and see what gets nominated for your Oscars or Golden Globes's and catch up on films you missed. Don't. Award nominations too often focus on movies released after Thanksgiving and whose studios spend a king's ransom on publicity campaigns. Instead of catching up on great movies, you'll be wasting time catching up on 2015's Best Movies at Stuffing the Ballet Box.
Instead, make a quick trip through Rotten Tomatoes Top 100 movies of 2015 or Roger Ebert.com's annual Four Star Reviews feature. Focus on movies you've heard of but didn't get a chance to see. Then for films you haven't heard of but would like to try, watch their trailer on Apple Trailers.
If you like something, add it to your queue of record (Netflix, Hulu, Google Play, a legal pad) immediately to remember it.
Location isn't usually important in film comedies the way say, Los Angels is vital to dramas like Chinatown or Chicago to action-thrillers like The Fugitive. Comedies trade in laughs and laughs come from people and situations and animals with digestive ailments. Places don't crack us up.
Then why do I never forget that one of my favorite comedies–Trading Places (1983)–takes place in Philadelphia? We can thank its unforgettable opening flipbook of the city's icons next to images of ordinary people going to work and the city's poor not having any. The montage is set to Mozart's 'Overture to the Mariage of Figarro,' which we've heard a million times but never quite like this–as an argument for the artistry of comedy rather than an affirmation of its frivolity. Listening to Mozart does not make you smarter. But in Trading Places, Director John Landis and his composer (the legendary Elmer Bernstein) use Mozart as a shorthand reminder that comedies need not make you dumber either.
The plot of Trading Places has been called a modern update of Mark Twain's "Prince and the Pauper." A rich stuffed shirt (Dan Aykroyd) and a street hustler (Eddie Murphy) are made to switch social places by Ackroyd's conniving uncles who like to conduct social experiments of such things. When the two uncover the uncles' sneaky plan to game the commodities market, they strike first, beating them at their own scam and getting rich in the process. It being the early 1980s, defeating old, inherited money through fleet footed stock trading was seen as the rebellion of youth, blows against the empire, a victory for tweed over eh, tweed.
Trading Places did great with critics and has endured mostly because its a fantastic silly comedy (SNL veterans Ackroyd and Murphy and a sequence with a horny gorilla made sure of that) that doesn't scrimp on the fundamentals. The supporting cast bench–Jamie Lee Curtis, Ralph Bellmany, Don Ameche and Denholm Elliott–is embarrassingly deep. The script has nary a wasted line. And hiring Elmer Bernstein to score a summer comedy is like hiring Steve Jobs to oversee the launch of a lemonade stand.
It's in his choice of Mozart to open the film that we see that Landis is up to more than talent overkill. Once you've seen the film (and have a modest knowledge of opera) the choice of 'Overture' is a cheap gold star for the viewer. 'Figarro' is a comic morality play about a servant outwitting an aristocrat, a nod at Trading Places's gentle theme of money not equalling intelligence or even refinement. But one level deeper is Landis's bigger goal: an unsmiling reminder that comedy has as gloried a cultural history as classical music and the grandparents of Trading Places are not pratfall artists and music hall crass but great cinematic comedians like Billy Wilder and Ernst Lubitsch from a generation before.
Of John Landis's first 10 films (1977-1988) 6 can fairly be called classics. One (National Lampoon's Animal House) is in the Library of Congress, an honor also held by his contemporary Harold Ramis (Groundhog Day). Throw in the best work of Ivan Reitman from that time (Stripes, Ghostbusters) and you have a body of comedy movies that not only crack you up but used legendary composers who created memorable themes, made room for 40-year veterans in the supporting cast and had stars that later were nominated for Oscars and had 20-30-year careers ahead of them.
This was broad comedy given the time, care and resources of high art. I've no idea if in hindsight we'll regard contemporary laugh factories like the work of Judd Apatow and the Frat Pack the same. I tend to doubt it.
Musically speaking Trading Places starts big with an iconic Mozart piece. Afterward, Bernstein's score is restrained and sober. There's no lining the atmosphere with pop songs that would dominate the later years of the decade and few memorable musical passages beyond the opening. Mozart is what we're supposed to remember, its inclusion a wink without a smile. Its as though opening a comedy with more than enough fart jokes and gratuitious nudity with the ultimate icon of high culture was a way of saying "Pay attention. What we're doing here has the same craftmansmenship and dedication as when young Wolfgang sat down at the piano."
I discovered Buffalo, NY's Willie Nile when a track of his called "Best Friends Money can Buy" appeared on a Paste Magazine compilation a few years ago. I liked the jangle, the crisp, singalong chorus, the falling-water harmonies backed by a scruffed-boot guitar. He reminded me very much of Marshall Crenshaw, another singer/songwriter I like a great deal. Both seem heavily influenced by the Byrds (choral harmonies, crystalline melodies) but have also spent some time with music by black people. The vocals here are a shouty gospel instead of technical perfect college a capella band.
Nile (real name Robert Anthony Noonan) is a slow but consistant musican, releasing seven studio albums since his debut in 1980. That self-titled debut is apparently caught up in some record label shenanigans since its both the most highly regarded of Nile's work and not available digitally anywhere.
Since I already own it on vinyl, I just torrented the thing. I give you permission to do the same.
In the meantime (or before your conscience kicks in) I'd go to YouTube and give the leadoff track "Vagabond Moon" a listen. It'll give you a sense of what the man can do and if you can flow with it. If so, I'd jump straight to his 2004 album "Beautiful Wreck of the World," which is available just about anywhere your mouse will take you.
I'm going to be writing occasional short pieces on classical music in cinema for Salon97.org. The first one explores the use of Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" in Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now.
In his 1979 review of Apocalypse Now, Roger Ebert called the scene above “simply the greatest movie battle scene ever filmed.” I’m with him on that one and not because of its pacing, photography or that you could watch it 15 times in a row and not bore once. Try muting the sound and it’s still great cinema. Now turn it back up and the music takes a great battle scene and gives it another life–as historical double entendre and a microcosm for the film’s thoughts on war itself. In a hail of strings we all recognize, the triumphant arrival of our military becomes a ironic anti-climax, a white horse dragging a chariot piled with corpses.
I'm proud to announce that I'm one of the three contributors to a brand new audio series called "The Pick 3 Podcast." a joint project of myself, my wife and my best friend.
Each episode of Pick 3 will offer highlight one movie, one book and one piece of music that may be used to celebrate a special time of year. Our first episode (listen, subscribe) is about the 4th of July.
The idea for Pick 3 came about during a panel at South by Southwest Interactive this past spring. The three of us were sitting together and Cariwyl (my wife) noted that the three of us each ran startup businesses devoted to our passions for books (Me with BookTour.com), music (her with Salon97) and film (Dave with Straight to DVD Movies). Could we do anything with that?
One long walk to lunch later and we'd sketched out the basic idea for the podcast. The specifics came together over email and Google Docs, in the squibs and squabs of free time, that define the existence of anyone with creative projects in the fire.
We think the concept is a gusher of rich possibilities and are excited to see where it takes us. We also want to know what you think. Would you be so kind then as to listen to our first episode? It's only 12 minutes and moves right along.
Of course, if you don't want to miss next shows, subscribe by taking this URL and dropping into the "subcribe to podcast" window in iTunes (it's under the menu marked "advanced").
I'm been talking some crazy jibberish for at least ten years about what a genius MN is, what a gift she is to contemporary music and its fans about how your ears, mind and heart are missing out if you aren't familiar. But after printing out this interview (haven't read it yet), I asked myself why. Why'd I pick this one out of the hundreds in Bomb's archives.
Which lead straight to a list of 8 reasons why I love Me'shell NDegeocello.
She's widely credited with launching the Neo Soul movement with her first two albums Plantation Lullabies (1993) and Peace Beyond Passion (1996). Her breakthrough third album Bitter (1999) came right when the movement was in full flower and is, to my mind one of its crowning acheivements. Right next to D'Angelo's Voodoo and Lauryn Hill's The Miseducation of…
Bitter
is an album written in the wake of a horrible breakup, mostly about
heartache, pain and regret. At the same time, it manages to be
quiveringly erotic and sexy, a get-down album if there ever was one. To
be hot and melancholy at the same time is a feat rarely heard.
Ms. Ndegeocello was the first woman ever featured on the cover of Bass Player magazine. Which probably says more about that publication than her but still…
Her given name is Michelle Lynn Johnson. She choose Me'shell Ndegeocello as a teenager and kept her unpronounceable moniker even after signing a record deal. More than likely, dozens of managers, agents, executives, guys in suits advised her to change it back. She hasn't and more than likely won't.
I heard an interview with her on KPFA a few years ago where she asked an innocent question "Why can't Outkast do a blues record?" She was arguing that blackness (or any race for that matter) should not confine a musician to a specific genre and that Jimi Hendrix, Living Color, Ben Harper and TV on the Radio may have a lot of white fans but that doesn't remove who they are from the music they make. It's an argument we need way more of in discussions of contemporary music and culture which often is about very much about race but insists to the death that it isn't. If it is not, I ask you, how many of the artists in your music collection are of a different race than you?
In the documentary Standing in the Shadows of Motown, Ms. Ndegeocello held Eddie Willis, a white studio musician old enough to be her father whom she barely knew, in her arms as he wept over the demise of Detroit after the city's 1967 riots.
Even though they had broken up, Meshell and her former partner Rebecca Walker raised a son together who undoubtedly grew into an incredible human being like his mothers.
Where to start:
Get thee a copy of Bitter and listen to it, start to finish, preferably on headphones with the lights turned off. Then have a lot of wild sex or wild sexy thoughts.
