Meet John Roby — a writer, musician, composer, and Canadian citizen who says he is sick and tired of Stephen Harper, his big Conservative family, and the political turmoil that the Prime Minister’s leadership has produced. In the wake of Ottawa’s recent wave of political scandals (Bev Oda, Bruce Carson, and Conservative contempt of Parliament, just to name a few), Roby felt himself compelled into action. “In the March [2011] edition of The Walrus I read Erna Paris’s provocative essay, ‘The New Solitudes,’ on Harper and the erosion of democracy in this country during his tenure,” Roby reports. “It made me, usually the most complacent of political souls, want to exchange my usual cocktail for a Molotov and run to the barricades.”
And so he wrote a bodacious little ditty about his feelings (which, it must be noted, neither The Walrus nor The Walrus Blog specifically endorse — we are merely messengers here). Earnest, gutsy, with a Joe Cocker-ish growl and a melody in the vein of Randy Newman’s best tunes, “The Harper Song (Steve, It’s Time to Leave)” was born. We present it here as one voter’s heartfelt take on Canada’s fourth federal election in the past seven years. (more…)
A feminist take on Liz Phair, half a lifetime after her landmark Exile in Guyville
Darren AnkenmanWhen Liz Phair released Exile in Guyville in 1993, I was fourteen years old and only beginning to understand the less than optimal implications of growing up female in a man’s world. Phair has described herself as a “diamond of pressurized anger” in creating the collection of songs that became a soundtrack for disgruntled, dissatisfied girls, and that has ranked on Rolling Stone and Spin lists of greatest albums of all time. So many of us latched on to her sentiments of anger and dismay, buoyed by the accessibility of her lyrical rage, sexual agency, and unabashed “fuck the haters” attitude. Given our culture’s recent wave of nineties nostalgia, typified by this month’s Matador at 21: The Lost Weekend in Las Vegas (where Phair performed), this seems an appropriate time to revisit her status as a feminist icon.
Now I’m thirty-one, sitting with Phair at a hotel bar on Robson Street in Vancouver, watching her drink an herbal tea. Five albums later, she’s candid about everything from music industry drama to (almost-too-personal) emotional trauma, much like Exile was over fifteen years ago. When I apologize for rambling from early morning flight exhaustion, she leans forward and touches my leg reassuringly, still fulfilling the unintentional promise she made to teenage girls so many years ago: that someone should and will listen to you.
Meanwhile, I’m trying not to be distracted by how stunning she is. I remind myself that detailed descriptions of her “shiny blonde hair” and “striking blue eyes” do not a feminist interview make. When I confess I’m a culture writer, not a music critic, Phair is eager to strike up a conversation about gender. “It’s so hard for me to just say small things for you,” she admits. “I’ve shut up about (feminism) for the last five years. I’ve been patted on the head. But when I start it’s hard to stop. It feels like I’m vomiting because I repress so much. And then I have to dial it down, dial it down.” (more…)
New albums by Leonard Cohen and Nick Cave’s Grinderman, reviewed
There’s something sinister and sad and kind of ugly about the first seconds of Leonard Cohen’s latest live album. Songs from the Road opens with a recording made one year ago today at Ramat Gan Stadium in Tel Aviv; the crowd applauds in 2/4 time as Cohen takes the stage to sing “Lover Lover Lover” from 1974’s New Skin for the Old Ceremony. The knee-jerk, gut-level reaction is that there’s something awfully gauche about clapping to a dirge whose refrain pleads, “Lover, lover, lover, lover, lover, lover, lover, come back to me.” It elevates the song to the status of arena rock standard, reducing this later-life Cohen to showman, to vendor of spectacle: a role which has been imposed upon him in the past five years.
It’s a part he’s played out of necessity and, one imagines, with great uneasiness. The elephant in the room is Cohen’s financial problem, the result of long-time business manager Kelley Lynch siphoning millions from his retirement account, leaving the usually reclusive poet/novelist/songwriter with little recourse but to churn out more work, and exhaustively tour the globe.
This air of obligation hangs heavy over most of his recent work, from the rushed-to-market feel of 2006’s Book of Longing, a compilation of poetry and illustrations that reads like the B-side to much of Cohen’s more accomplished writing, to the 2009 release of Live at the Isle of Wight 1970 (also not very good), and now to this Songs from the Road — the second live album, following 2008’s Live in London, to survey his last two years of touring. But where the London release documented an entire, solitary concert, Songs from the Road stitches together various sets recorded in Tel Aviv, Helsinki, Glasgow, San Jose, England’s London, Ontario’s London, and elsewhere. It’s a best-of live album, padding out the catalogue of an artist whose output has been compiled into a bulk of best-of albums, including The Essential Leonard Cohen, The Best of Leonard Cohen, and the uninspiringly titled More Best of Leonard Cohen. (more…)
You’d think I’d know better. After spending the better part of three years examining the course of American pop culture in the Muslim world, I’ve waded into another fraught cultural cage match, thus inviting a second volley of apparently endless, staggeringly well-argued commentary and hate mail. Woe is me, and all that. The reaction to “Cape Flats Calling,” my Walrus Blog post on the so-called Zef-rap outfit Die Antwoord, along with the general interweb frenzy regarding the band, is a reminder that 150 years after Manet outraged the Paris salon with his Olympia remix, art can still get folks hot under the collar. Millions of Die Antwoord–related bits and bytes have been uploaded, a fair bit of actual ink has been spilled; it thus appears that a quick revisit is called for.
Die Antwoord are a white South African rap group, lead by a gangly fellow named Ninja, who channel (or appropriate, or ape, depending on your view of these things) Cape Town Flats–coloured gang culture, creating a mash-up of grime, rave, and old-school hip hop. In early February, after a number of influential blogs picked up on their free-to-download album $0$, they became the first genuine internet phenomena of this brand new decade. Entirely complicit in all the promotional brouhaha, Die Antwoord have surfed the capricious wave of Web 3.0 on, some say, the backs of a marginalized community who will decidedly not be joining them on the stage at Coachella. The band is now negotiating with the home of the Black Eyed Peas, Lady Gaga, and M.I.A., Interscope Records. Them’s the big leagues.
If journalism is literature in a hurry, then web-journalism is literature at warp speed. In my first post, I made a number of errors — since corrected — that somehow escaped the sentinels at my normally impenetrable factual firewall. For those, I was rightly taken to task. Interestingly, a measure of the criticism directed my way comes from a piece on indie music Mecca Pitchfork, in which Ninja called my assessment of their music “quite fuckin’ brilliant.” I have thus been labeled a Die Antwoord booster, as if the brokest band in the known universe sent a Lear Jet round to schlep me off to gigs, softening me up with tik, coconut bongs, and luxury guided tours of Cape Town’s ghettos. There was also some suggestion that Die Antwoord’s popularity was driven mostly by the fervour of people just like me, white South African expatriates who spend their time in Australia, the UK, and Canada trawling the net for: (a) anything that confirms the fact that SA is now an unlivable disaster zone rife with violent crime, thus validating their decision to emigrate, and (b) anything that scratches their paradoxical itch for home. But Interscope does not consider signing bands based on the listening requirements of white ex-Johannesburgers; Die Antwoord must thus be considered a genuine global pop cultural phenomenon. It’s worth considering why that may be. (more…)
Twenty years ago today, in the single most important moment in 360 years of South Africa’s blood-drenched history, Nelson Mandela walked away from Victor Verster Prison a free man. February 11* is a hallowed day in the local calendar. It may therefore seem inappropriate to profile a noisy, profane rap act named Die Antwoord (Afrikaans for “the answer”) by way of celebration. But, as Mandela marched out of jail into the future, he knew that his release posed a difficult question: Can South Africa transform into a nation united and governed by principles other than race? Die Antwoord, who appear to occupy an entirely different universe from Mandela, are the most articulate answer he could have hoped for.
Over the course of the past ten days or so, the band have been propelled by the likes of Boing Boing, Twitter, Pitchfork, Reuters, et al into the very maw of Fame 3.0. As lead rapper Waddy, a.k.a. Ninja, puts it: “Look at me now! All over the interweb.” Indeed, only two weeks ago, Ninja and his sidekicks Yo-landi “Rich Bitch” Vi$$er and the flabby DJ Hi-Tek were paying dues; now they’re rolling in nunchaku. For their international fans, Die Antwoord are exotic, furious, and, most importantly, new. But what their lyrics mean — or what they stand for precisely — no one in Brooklyn or Paris or São Paulo can say.
Ninja is, at first glance, your typical white trash rapper. He wears his hoodie low; his rangy body is marked with crude tattoos. It takes a second or two to realize that Run-D.M.C. were playing Applebee’s buffets by the time they were of Ninja’s vintage: he is closer to middle age than middle school. He raps in a scattershot mixture of English and Afrikaans; his accent is unfathomable. His lyrics reference the minutely specific to the hip-hop generic: “If you don’t like funerals, Ninja says don’t kick sand in his face,” recalls a South African peanut-butter commercial from the ’80s; “too hot to handle, to cold to hold,” fist-bumps vintage MC Hammer. The clue to Die Antwoord’s raison d’être hides in the intro of their astonishing debut album $O$, where Ninja informs us that, “I represent South African culture. In this place, you get a lot of different things…Blacks. Whites. Coloureds. English. Afrikans. Xhosa. Zulu. Watookal. I’m like all these different people, fucked into one person.” Then Ms. Vi$$er pipes in, dismissing him with a high-pitched “Whateva, man.” (more…)
Hawksley Workman has always been something of a Canadian secret. Over the past decade, the Juno Award–winning singer-songwriter has released ten critically acclaimed albums on which he played most, if not all, of the instruments. He has produced records for the likes of Tegan and Sara, Great Big Sea, and Serena Ryder, and plays shows to consistently packed houses across the country. Musically, the Huntsville, Ontario native transcends definition and expectation. On the same album, you might find soft acoustic ballads, sexually charged rock, and glam-cabaret numbers, all enhanced by Workman’s soaring voice and nuanced lyrical sensibility.
Despite his seemingly endless store of hummable tunes, Workman’s name has scarcely risen above a whisper south of the border, leaving his legions of Canadian fans simultaneously puzzled and eager to keep him to themselves. This month, however, the secret is out, as Workman has just released his ten-year-old debut album, For Him and the Girls, in the States. Canadian fans needn’t feel cheated: Workman will soon release his eleventh and twelfth albums. Meat will be out on January 19, and Milk will be digitally released over a five-month period beginning in the new year. In addition, Workman will embark on a twenty-two-city national tour in the spring.
In the midst of preparing for his big year to come, Workman was kind enough to sit down with me and chat about his upcoming albums, the limitations of genre, growing up in rural Ontario, and more. What resulted was a fascinating glimpse into the mind of one of Canada’s most hardworking and gifted musical virtuosos.
You have two new albums coming out in 2010, and one of them, Milk, is set to digitally release all the music before the physical product actually comes out. Why did you choose that strategy?
Now that I’m without a major label (which is a blessing), we just decided that we would do things unconventionally. It’s hard to know how to play the game anymore — there are no rules. For a while, it was sort of our standard idea that [illegal] downloading was somehow helping [the indie musician's] cause. Now I’m not so sure. I’m starting to feel the pinch of it. But using the internet as a way to sell music is incredible.
You’ve always had a very distinctive, cryptic web presence. Your Twitter account and mass emails are full of riddles and ambiguities that really draw people in.
A lot of people I know have decided to embrace the internet in its entirety, and I don’t know if I could go quite there. So I meet in the middle and just do what I feel comfortable with. Twitter seemed like my kind of thing. It’s 140 characters, sort of like Polaroids.
That’s a great way of putting it, because I find that your music is characterized largely by its use of imagery and atmosphere. Your lyrics are much more rooted in poetry than narrative. Is that intentional? Do you generally find yourself gravitating toward depicting a series of images rather than a linear story?
I’m a horrible storyteller. It’s my nature to speak in images. I live in a rather cloudy, constant state of observation, which is a hassle for anybody who’s with me. What happens is a convoluted clump of images ends up being the song. It’s not very tidy. I used to beat myself up about it. I always wished I was a songwriter who could tell a story, but I think I’m more of a songwriter who paints a dozen or so pictures.
Along with being visual, your music is very whimsical. Do you find music to be an escape through which you can shape an idealized world?
I do, now that I think of it. My first couple of records were very idealized. I was a kid who never really experienced anything, so I was trying to write from a place of, “What if I had these experiences? What if I had these great lovers? What if I’d been to these great cities?” And what’s interesting is that when you live a little and you have these experiences, the fantasy kind of morphs into a complicated reality. You don’t realize when you’re young how horrible it can all be.
This growing awareness of the world’s harsh realities is especially apparent on 2006′s Treeful of Starling.
You’re right, Treeful was my big political record. I tried to be elegant about it, because a lot of the political songs that have been written post-Vietnam have not really lasted. “Born in the U.S.A.” has a real shelf life. I’d love there to be more political music. I wish people were speaking out more.
This month, you released your first album, For Him and the Girls, in the States. It came out domestically back in 1999.
Yeah. Weird.
Yeah! Why did you pick that album as your American debut?
I’m one of those artists who thinks the story of my career makes a little more sense if you read it in order. [Meat and Milk] would confuse a lot of people who thought they were coming to me for the first time. But I don’t know how I’m going to draw the parallel between what I was ten years ago and what I am now, because there’s just a lot of life between now and then. Nobody tells you that things are so difficult. They don’t teach you what you really need to know.
Do you still feel good about For Him and the Girls?
Oh, yeah. It’s a scary record for me to listen to. I hear a very young and naïve, very strange fellow on there, who had never been on an airplane, who had never been anywhere, who had never had a real relationship. It’s like time travelling. I don’t even know how I made that record. I broke a lot of rules, and I don’t even remember quite how I did it.
What else can we expect from the new albums?
Both records are cohesive, but they don’t sound anything alike. Milk is an electro Europop record produced officially by a Swedish dude, [Martin Trome,] which I’ve never done before. Thematically speaking, the records are funny because they were written between the end of a devastating relationship and the beginning of an absolutely brilliant relationship. I don’t know how to say that in code; I’m going to have to work on that. I usually try to avoid bringing that kind of stuff to my public life, but it’s kind of inevitable.
Especially when you’re doing something as personal as songwriting.
Somebody said the other day, “How well do people know you just based on your music?” They know me pretty good, because I find it pretty hard to fib in songwriting.
Well, in the early years of your career, you received a lot of press accusing you of developing a false persona. You published a series of personal ads in Toronto’s Now Magazine devoted to Isadora, your fictional underwater muse. [These ads were later collected into a book of poetry, Hawksley Burns for Isadora]. Then, there was a controversial biography on your website [which has been removed] in which you claimed to have tap-danced at a Dutch academy and made a living as a lake ice-cutter. Journalists raised quite a stir about these embellishments.
In the early days, I felt uninteresting to myself. I was a kid who grew up in rural Ontario. I never really fit into my surroundings, but I also really fit in. I grew up a hick and I still am one, but I also had a certain desire for refined things. Journalists definitely felt like I was trying to pull one over on them…People were saying, “Hey, we know you’re a rural kid who grew up pushing cars out of snow banks. You’re not pulling one over on us, you faux feather boa wearing…” But people are completely willing to buy into the artifice of David Bowie or Bob Dylan or any of the great artificials. There’s a certain unproductive nature to it, and I think our culture can use all the help it can get at the moment. That kind of glib dismissal just for the sake of hearing one’s own voice is a bit sad.
You’ve done a lot of collaborative work to boost the careers of other Canadian musicians: you’ve produced albums for Tegan and Sara, Sarah Slean, and most recently, Hey! Rosetta. Do you feel that this collaborative initiative is an important part of Canada’s music culture?
I’ve always wanted that. I’ve always felt like I was a good hub on a wheel that had a lot of very interesting spokes on it. Everyone I’ve worked with has had a remarkable amount of staying power, and I’ve been a part of their careers at a very early time. To think of the people I’ve been able to make records with is a bit of a mind-blow to me. Working with somebody like Slean, for instance. She’s absolutely brilliant. Tegan and Sara, they were eighteen when we made their first record together, so they were so energetic and ready for anything. With Hey! Rosetta, my job with them was to stay out of the way and keep reminding them how good they are. Most of my collaborations now are songwriting, which is, in a way, the most exciting. I realize that I’m getting older and more funny-looking, so my chances of being on MuchMusic are getting slimmer, but it’s interesting for me to write songs for these kids who are doing that.
This communal aspect of Canadian music seems to be something you’re deeply invested in, from the collaborations to your frequent participation in folk festivals.
It’s everything. I think it’s because I grew up in the church. I learned so much of the nuance of writing music and performing music by going to church, realizing that the best part of it was singing and the sandwiches afterwards. When I was in my early teens, I thought I’d go either way — that I’d either be a musician or a preacher. They both involve music and community, which spoke to me at a very young age.
Do you feel influenced by the Canadian folk tradition?
Absolutely. If you’re including Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot, Bruce Cockburn, and Neil Young into that, our folk traditions have inspired and influenced the whole world…It’s because of our observational nature. Americans shoot first and ask questions later, and that’s not the best way to write great music. Canada is all nuance and survival, because it’s too easy to die here. The seasons will kill you. The winter will kill you. The mountains will kill you. Consequently, we’re on our creative toes to keep us warm and safe. I think we sit inside and look out at what’s going on. Then, we have a big, loud teenage brother to the south that does things that embarrass us. Our cultural disposition is very strange, but it has allowed us to develop a refined ability to make songs.
It seems that one of the more limiting aspects of the music business is the idea of genre, and any article that’s written about you will classify you differently. How do you feel about being put into these categories?
Genre is something I’m fascinated by, in that it usually comes with a hairstyle and fashion attire. On the CBC’s website [recently], they described me as hip hop, and I thought, “Well, that’s interesting.” I mean, hip hop is what I listen to almost exclusively now, but I don’t know if I’m a hip-hop artist. When I was young, I was just under the impression that there was good and bad, not that there was a need to define it.
Which of your songs are you most proud of?
If I made the list it would be embarrassing. There are some I’ve written that I think are intimidating, like “Don’t Be Crushed” or “Ice Age.” They’re really good, and I don’t know how to do that. There’s a certain astrological alignment that has to happen. I can write a good song any old day of the week, but something that has that kind of weight to it, that’s not just me. That’s having something a little more special.
You’re participating in the CBC’s Great Canadian SongQuest, for which you wrote a song about Algonquin Park. Are you happy with how it turned out?
Yeah, it’s pretty kooky, but it’s fun. You only are who you are when you write. If you’re going through personal crisis, that’s what ends up on the record; if you’re disengaged with your career, that’s what goes on the record, and it becomes such a human experiment. So unfortunately — or fortunately — I was sick and a bit depressed when I wrote that Algonquin Park song. Maybe that bleeds into it. It wasn’t the song I was expecting to write, but it’s what got written.
(Photo by Ivan Otis)
Full disclosure: for roughly four years in high school, I played in a band called Scare Tactic with Jonah “Guinea Beat/Mr. Jo” Falco, drummer for Canada’s best hard-core punk band, Fucked Up. Long before they won 2009’s Polaris Music Prize, for Canadian album of the year, the Toronto sextet recorded one of their earliest demos in my basement.
There are a lot of good bands out there, but a rare few have It, that intangible quality that one can sense only once they’ve taken the stage. When It happens, you don’t care about your job, you don’t care about your girlfriend — nothing else matters. I recently saw hard rock supergroup Them Crooked Vultures blow out the back wall of Toronto’s Sound Academy. They had It.
Scare Tactic ended amicably, so I was very interested to discover a posting on Fucked Up’s blog announcing a secret concert somewhere in T.O. this week. A phonecall to Falco landed me on the guest list at Lee’s Palace, where the band jumped onto a Wednesday night bill headlined by the U.K.’s The Horrors. The Polaris winners opened their set with a hypnotic four guitar and bass intro. Singer Damian “Pink Eyes” Abraham strode on stage wearing a red baseball hat, white basketball shorts and a blue T-shirt with the pro-dog slogan “Pugs Not Drugs.” The hat held firm for most of the show, but the shirt lasted less than two songs. As is his customary style, Pink Eyes let his gut fly free. (Thankfully, his shorts stayed on.) More impressively, he took command of the crowd in a way that only an experienced front man can. He glared at the crowd, stalked the stage, and climbed onto speakers; he finished the set by prowling around the audience, screaming in people’s faces and standing on top of tables. The band, made up of Falco (drums/guitar), Mike “10,000 Marbles” Haliechuk (guitar), Josh “Gulag” Zucker (guitar), Ben “Young Governor” Cook (guitar) and Sandy “Mustard Gas” Miranda (bass), played with tightness forged by countless tours. Fucked Up made excellent use of their multiple guitar assault. Each guitar added something different to every song, rather than just doubling or tripling specific parts. Despite Damian’s repeated insistence that this was just a warm-up show with a “half-assed,” thirty-minute set, the experience was far better than that.
I left the punk scene shortly after my six years with various incarnations of Scare Tactic. My tastes have since shifted toward metal and rock ’n’ roll. I don’t listen to much hard-core nowadays, but have no doubt why Fucked Up beat out such indie luminaries as Metric for this year’s Polaris. Simply put, it’s because they deserved it. The Chemistry of Common Life, Fucked Up’s winning disc, is a hell of an album. Forget the offensive name (chosen, Falco has told me, because the band was never meant to last); Fucked Up is the real deal, a great band that will undoubtedly enjoy more hard-earned success. They have It.
It was in spring that I heard about the inaugural All Points West Music & Arts Festival. I was examining Radiohead’s website in hopes their tour would bring them close to my locale (then Winnipeg), within a couple of thousand kilometres even. I looked to August’s North American schedule and was puzzled to see not one but two dates booked at something called All Points West. Two consecutive concerts in one place—that must be something special, I thought, before looking up the festival. Little did I know that I would make it to New York—via Toronto—for those very shows. But while they may have been the festival’s biggest attraction, All Points West (APW), August 8-10, was more than a double dose of Radiohead. (more…)
In Turn completes its coverage of Morocco’s Master Musicians of Jajouka with a review of their Toronto performance. Photos by Joel Trenaman. (Read the interview/show preview.)
The nine men of Jajouka arrived at the Phoenix Concert Theatre for a July 15 performance—their first in Toronto in fifteen years — to almost otherworldly expectations.
A tradition passed down over thousands of years. The originators of the world music genre. Spiritual expression rooted in transcendental mysticism. These are some of the heady descriptions that have followed the Master Musicians of Jajouka around the globe for decades.
A week before the show, featured performer and hereditary standard-bearer Bachir Attar told my fellow blogger that, “This music can build, for the human being, mercy in the heart.” So, for a night, I put the details of the history and debates over rightful group representation out of my head, and focused on the visceral experience of a cultural legacy. (more…)
“Legend has it if they ever stop playing the world will come to an end…”
These words appear on a flyer for the upcoming Master Musicians of Jajouka concert in Toronto (July 15 at the Phoenix); the flyer shows the Master Musicians in white robes, with their leader, Bachir Attar, front and center. Is he smirking? Pouting? Keeping a mysterious secret?
Legend certainly surrounds this group of Moroccan musicians, layers upon layers of it. To fully understand the legends, one would have to excavate beneath the recent bohemian myths surrounding them—beneath the mystique of the Interzone-Tangier scene in the 1950s, and the iconic writers and musicians like Brion Gysin, Paul Bowles, Brian Jones, and William S. Burroughs, who brought the power of Jajouka music to Western ears. The deeper mystique is that of the music itself: it has been taught in early childhood and passed down from father to son, through the Attar family, for centuries. Master Musicians would travel with the sultans of Morocco as official royal musicians; in more recent times, the clan performed as royal musicians for the Moroccan king. Trance-like, hypnotic, this Sufi music is reputed to possess power. [Listen to the track "Memories Of My Father", written by Bachir.]
Listening to this music, I wonder: what is “powerful” music, really? Or: what can music do? Most of us would agree that it can lift the spirit. Some would say that music has the power to transport a person; others credit music with giving strength, or even with healing.
Through a stroke of luck, and the wonders of globalized communication, I was able to interview Bachir Attar via a shaky Skype-to-cell connection two nights ago. It was 1:30 a.m. in the village of Jajouka, Morocco, but he was awake and passionate, ready to discuss the power of his music, his musical heritage, and its possible disappearance. (more…)
Picture this: it’s 2012 and a new Rick Rubin-produced American Recordings masterpiece hits the (by then entirely virtual) record store shelves. The album art features, in arty black and white, a solitary figure, perhaps hunched slightly, but with his chin held defiantly high, sitting at a grand piano in the Nevada desert under a vast grey sky, the panorama of the landscape that surrounds him somehow enlarging him rather than shrinking him. When you press play, you’ll hear the sound of a lone artist in an empty room, the absence heavy in the air as the tentative, almost muted simplicity of a few eerily melodic piano keys provides the solemn backdrop for the voice, once a belting baritone, now roughened up by the sandpaper of hard-earned wisdom and tamed by a reluctant familiarity with mortality. Men and women of America, I give you an artist chewed up and forgotten but not defeated. With the great beyond in sight, he’s perched at an elevation to survey the great before that was One Man’s Life — the showgirls and the bubbly drinks, the whole world as a chorus, the highlights and the bright lights alongside all the derision and disrespect — and to whisper in the only voice with which age can address youth; cracking, failing, but insistent: no regrets, no excuses; it’s sad, and lonely, and scary at the end, and though memories of a life lived on your own terms are a poor substitute for a life ahead of you, they become all that remains. Ladies and gentleman, in the tradition of Johnny Cash, the singer-songwriter as American Icon:
Barry Manilow? Nah, right? But if Rick Rubin can work his man-for-the-ages magic on Neil Diamond, you gotta figure it could be anyone. Manilow? Why not. Elton John? Step right up. Phil Collins? Of course, this came to my attention thanks to Diamond’s song “Act Like A Man,” which is frustratingly unavailable online in a form I can link to available for a free listen right here. (more…)
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