Amadou et Mariam, Welcome to Mali

They knew this record had legs, hence the title. Note the expansive syncretism that “world music” was supposed to embody in its era, but rarely did. Amadou and Mariam seem like prodigious music fans: at home with the elements of Euro dance, Carribean music and rock ‘n’ roll as well as their own Afro-pop territory, and confident enough to fuse them all in complex ways that go beyond referencing.

Okay, so their idea of rock is a little antique (signifiers: 4/4 beat, Hammond organ, pentatonic guitar solo) and to these ears, that adds a note of banality. But to these ears, the Malian song forms are exotic, and presumably the duo don’t find them so. Maybe predictably, I like the pastiche best when it slips — like the fiddle on “Bozos,” which starts out like a joke on country/western but does something entirely different with the melody instead. For reasons of rhythm, catchiness and mallets, “Ce N’est Pas Bon” and “Batoman” deserve special mention too.

El-P, I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead

Okay, I’ll admit a bias here: I discovered this during a pretty angry episode in my life, and it was perfect timing. I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead is a furious record, with El-P directing bile and lightning bolts at a slew of targets (war, gentrification, cokeheads, suicide, etc.), but maybe more importantly, identifying feelings secondary to anger (projection, alienation, self-doubt, etc.) that are unavoidable when you’re a reflective adult in the throes of it. It’s sometimes uncomfortable, even self-indulgent — but I’ve never been into the idea that music needs to be comfortable, universal and morally correct.

Sonically, it’s a paradigm shift from Fantastic Damage. The sound is still oppressive and mechanistic, constructed from dissonance and Bomb Squad-esque samples, but where its predecessor was all punchy, mono soundbites stacked on one another, ideal for blasting in cars, this one is cavernous, hi-fidelity — an urban evocation that works best when you can stand inside it. It’s not a headphone album as such, but it’s loaded with nuances and benefits from clarity and surround sound.

Here, El-P’s obsession with dystopia seems more like an idiosyncratic personal language than a delimiting subject matter; the lyrics feel closer to reality. It’s a thematic record, one whose subjects (mostly) reinforce one another, and ought to be heard together, like an old rock record. That said, “Tasmanian Pain Coaster” is also his best rap to date.

Phony Populism

David Brooks is probably correct to argue that there’s more to Obama’s backlash than race. But his explanation is misleading and self-indulgent.

In his version of events, the assorted tea-partiers, birthers and townhall trolls aren’t just the Republican fringe, they’re the American populist movement, and what they’re protesting is:

a government of the highly educated … [which] includes urban politicians, academics, Hollywood donors and information-age professionals.

It’s the righteous anger of Jeffersonians against financial and political elites.

While that may describe supporters of, say, anti-Fed zealot Ron Paul, the 2008 Republican primary results show those are small minority.

David Brooks wants to cast the Obama backlash as a bipartisan phenomenon, ideally one going back to the dawn of America. Congressional voting patterns show differently. The much simpler explanation is that the G.O.P. hardcore are freaking out, just like progressive Democrats did when George W. Bush rolled out his post-9/11 agenda.

Brooks almost certainly remembers that Bush bailed out Wall Street before Obama did. I’m sure he’s aware that the A.M.A. and insurance industry are elite, with top-dollar lobbyists on payroll to prove it.

There are plenty of perfectly consistent, conservative reasons to freak out at the Obama agenda; that should be adequate without needing to claim, as well, that G.O.P. hardcore are today representing “the people against the elites” or some other grand dialectical conflict that only exists on op-ed pages.

Pearl Jam, Vitalogy

As grunge heroes, Pearl Jam suffered from crossed purposes — stodgy classicists sometimes, half-assed formalists others, often the product of too many compromises to escape middle-of-the-road. On Ten and Vs., Ed Vedder’s lyrics were surprisingly impersonal, dwelling on the homeless, the insane and children of dysfunction. The sense of burden he injected into his performances seemed vicarious — well felt, to be sure, but not felt first-hand.

Vitalogy is a mess in classical terms. It never nails a style, departing in a half-dozen directions without capitalizing on any or, failing that, flowing elegantly from one to the next. It’s littered with incomplete experiments and outtakes. But where this approach would damage a less self-conscious band, it frees Pearl Jam from their usual surplus of study. Vedder’s immature scrawls (“Better Man” and, one assumes, “Whipping”) counterpoint Ament-Gossard’s trad-rock input (“Satan’s Bed”) nicely. Plus, the formalism here is sincerely odd (“Bugs”) and occasionally good as well (the faux-Miles intro to “Last Exit”). Pearl Jam would never achieve this balance of intentions again; probably it was an unrepeatable accident.

Sympathy

In Characters & Viewpoint, Orson Scott Card’s how-to for fiction, he writes extensively about the subjective dimension of characterization, what he calls “sympathy.” Writers use tools to make characters more or less likable to the reader, and these don’t necessarily have a lot to do with what makes a person good. For example, we tend to sympathise more with a character who suffers, even an evil jerk — which is why in fiction, evil jerks we’re supposed to tolerate are generally put through a lot of suffering. Pain and fear are hooks for empathy.

Does it make good moral sense? Not really. That Rudolf Hess suffered in Spandau prison doesn’t make him any more likable as a Nazi fuckhead. Nor does it make sense to assume an intellectual is a bad guy, though as Card points out, that’s the rule as often as not. The crux of sympathy is perceived likeness. People being people, they generally like a character if the character is like them. But where do we get our ideas about what we’re like?

I remember, when I was a child, watching cheesy box-office adventure movies and feeling desperately alienated from the heroes. By convention, these were mostly square-jawed football types whose distinguishing feature was a sort of moral “clarity” (i.e. simplicity). My sort of people – science-freaks, skeptics, liberals – were invariably sidekicks and jokes, misguided fools or finks for evil. I often suspect that this kind of cognitive dissonance, with its origin in normatizing fictions, is as much responsible for the appeal of the “gothic” subculture (and other deliberate affronts to popular morality) as anything else.

One of the purposes of The Sender, when I began writing, was to study television’s sympathy ploys and infer something of America’s emotional landscape. So what, then? Well, if we momentarily accept Card’s hypothesis about sympathy, we can guess that Americans still feel stupid; broad popular support for Homer Simpson attests to that. Moral simplicity also remains much-prized; cf. Marge Simpson, sure, but also Michael Bluth, Jack Bauer, John Locke, Buffy Summers, etc., all protagonists who face moral challenges by being conscientious and inflexible.

Card didn’t write about nihilistic irony; perhaps he never recognized it. I’d argue that comedies making heavy use of it tend to employ an inverted value structure. Curb Your Enthusiasm consists almost entirely of unsympathetic, unlikable people — we follow Larry David not because he’s particularly likable (though who can’t relate to faux pas?) but because his flaws are so much more spectacular than the others’.

The Office makes such an explicit hierarchy out of its sympathy claims that it’s often embarrasing. Young, white and clever are the top of the heap, privileged not only to viewers’ presumed sympathy but also their interest (we follow their personal lives without any humorous hook). Black and gay follow, privileged to viewers’ respect and called upon to add moral weight, but from a distance. Viewers are not asked to respect the elderly, the misfit or unattractive women — they’re mostly used for one-note jokes. For the boss and his sycophants, the show asks our occasional pity. Toward the conservative Christian, we are invited to feel mostly contempt.

Card makes a few questionable posits — for one, the tenor of his writing suggests that he believes these claims to be universal, a tedious and predictable assumption. He also seems to believe that the relationship between consumers’ attitudes and fiction is, for all intents and purposes, one-way. Kate Wright offers a more nuanced, if a thousandfold more disturbing, view in her Hollywood how-to Screenwriting Is Storytelling — but I’ll cover that another time.

Lost

The new season of Lost will also be the last, unless (God, I hope not) they follow with a movie. This means that we’re rapidly approaching the point where Lindelof and Cuse can no longer defer answers about their knotty plot. Fortunately, season 5 ends strong, suggesting at least that explanations do exist. Interestingly, what “The Incident” supplies in the way of confidence isn’t clues to the direction of the story as much as answers about the theme – and that’s a strange way to pivot on television.

The opening scene gives us a new flashback — the furthest back to date — and two new characters: Jacob, a hidden actor about whom we’ve heard plenty, and a black-clad mystery man. Jacob (Mark Pellegrino, better known as that goofy hit-man from Mulholland Drive) munches on red herring and reveals that he’s bringing people to the island to prove a point about human nature — namely, that people can change. His nemesis complains bitterly that “it always ends the same,” to which Jacob replies coolly that it only ends once, everything up until then “is just progress.” Cue ominous music. His nemesis says, “Do you have any idea how badly I want to kill you?”

So, this is the dualism of Lost: one person sees the ends and determines to get there, unconcerned with how; the other sees the means meaninglessly repeat themselves, and suspects there’s nothing more to it. Lost is Catholic where Twin Peaks was Protestant – less concerned with the nature of evil, than with the limits of humanity’s capacity for good. It’s also suitably ambivalent from the perspective of mortals, something it shares with the best Catholic apologia. Jacob, ostensibly the good guy, is aloof and assured throughout, explaining not one iota to the people he manipulates — whereas not only does his nemesis get great lines, but (to appearances) comes down on the side of empathy for sufferers. It also seems as though the time contrivance — recollect and prediction, time travel, time loops — goes past storytelling and enmeshes with the show’s theology, though to what extent we’re yet to find out.

Slayer, Christ Illusion

2006’s Christ Illusion is the best thing any 80’s metal band has done in a decade. It’s like vintage thrash in sound, quality level and raison d’etre, but with a few tricks borrowed from post-death metal to add dimension. It’s also a full-blown protest record, nearly every song preoccupied with the folly and fallout of war, the horror of warmongering politics, and of course religion, on which they lay the blame for it all. Okay, that’s a simplistic assessment given Dick Cheney’s one-would-assume atheism, but it’s not ridiculous – pro-war popular sentiment did often seem inseparable from religious partisanship.

Slayer works in slight adjustments, not complete reinventions, and they’ve continued here — edging out the nu-metal flavor, pushing the pace of the songs up a notch. They’ve also got drummer Dave Lombardo back, and while his playing (more agile than forceful, a joy to hear) surely contributes to the record’s solidity, it’s worth adding that King and Hanneman have become very distinctive and peculiar guitar sculptors themselves — at the peak of their powers even — and these are some compelling sculptures, especially “Flesh Storm” and “Eyes of the Insane.”

New Format

Some maudlin citizens will think that they can send something edifying, not realizing that sending is evil. Scientists will say: ‘Sending is like atomic power . . . if properly harnessed.’  Artists will confuse sending with creation. They will camp around screeching ‘a new medium’ until their ratings drop off. Philosphers will beat around the ends and means hassle not knowing that sending can never be a means to anything but more sending, like junk. Try using junk as a means to something else. Some citizens with ‘Coca Cola and aspirin’ control habits will be talking about the evil glamor of sending. But no one will talk about anything very long. The Sender, he don’t like talking. The Sender is not a human individual. . . . it is the Human Virus.

- William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

You knew it was coming: The Sender will have a slightly new format going ahead. Media, news and very likely music will be joining the format. This is a pragmatic move on my part. I don’t watch as much TV as I used to (nor am I quite as fascinated anymore with mimicking Charlie Brooker’s format), and while I still believe there’s value in the “cryptography of mass media,” a writer is also a living organism, and maybe it’s better that my blog be a reflection of my actual thoughts more than a book-in-progress.

I will be re-categorizing everything so you can look at just the TV stuff, if that’s what tickles your pickle. You disgusting, unimagintive, joyless, intolerant nitpicker.

Inkblots

If we can’t trust the people and we can’t trust the elites, who can we trust? How can change be effectuated? This is one of the problems National Affairs is going to have to think through in the years ahead.

Another is: Can the state do anything to effectively promote virtuous behavior? Because when you get into the core problems, whether in Washington, California or on Wall Street, you keep seeing the same moral deficiencies: self-indulgence, irresponsibility and imprudence.

When David Brooks gets into the core problems, he keeps seeing the same moral deficiencies: self-indulgence, irresponsibility and imprudence. Surely, other moral deficiencies are out there (violence, avarice, morbidity, power-lust, etc.), but these are the ones he lights on, failures of childhood discipline a stereotypical “your dad” would reprimand you for.

Though not as florid in its Freudian auto-exegesis as this anti-Obama screed by Michael Knox Beran, it’s still a pretty telling inkblot. A columnist’s job is hard, of course; to construct a pleasing, digestable story out of something as broad as “society” or “gender relations” or “politics” takes finesse, especially as every factual assertion will be challenged by some two-bit with a blog.

In many ways, there’s no safer vantage than your own private subjectivity.

But a columnist, like a critic, must also pretend to objectivity if he’s gonna see a wide audience. If it’s his subconscious he’s trawling for bodies, he’s gotta claim to be society’s dumping ground. Which is fine, but society is ultimately big beyond your power to conceive, and self-differing within — which is why the aforequoted paragraphs are so hilarious in their unreflective specificity.

You go looking, as a matter of professional pride, for society’s disease, but mostly you find your own. (Self-indulgence is David Brooks’ projection, just like “anti-realism” is mine.)

Axe’s Sexism

There’s a lot of anti-male sentiment in today’s TV ads. This seems natural enough. Ads play on the target demo’s desires, prejudices and neuroses. It’s been true of beer commercials that objectify women for male audiences; the converse is only to be expected when the target demographic have paired X chromosomes.

Axe commercials are unusual in that while the product is aimed squarely at men – and the appeal made in an essentially masculine syntax – the covert message is cartoonishly misandrist.

For example, an early ad for Axe deoderant implies that getting accosted violently by women is not only acceptable, but a desirable outcome for most guys. Now, you may find this all pretty innocent — after all, we’ve seen this pitch before, and it’s obviously meant as comic hyperbole. Besides, men basically want it, don’t they? What guy wouldn’t prefer sex over masturbation, even at the point of coercion? But the Axe ad goes beyond the usual tepid cliché, invoking tropes of criminal violence such as line-ups and mugshots, so there’s no ambiguity: they mean sexual assault.

Another ad, for Axe hair products, suggests that public humiliation at the hands of angry hairstylists is only justice, if girls don’t approve of your hair. You wouldn’t want this to happen, so “get girl-approved hair.” (Newer versions of this ad substitute angry hairstylists with cooing, sexy hairstylists; still forceful, but now it’s friendly force, and their unfashionable subject laps it up like a bemused Spaniel terrier. I’m not exaggerating.)

Gender theorist Warren Farrell wrote in the 70’s about mens’ pathological identification as “success objects.” In his view, institutional power uses gender roles to control both sexes; in particular, controlling men by objectifying them as material providers for others. Axe disagrees. The world they depict, for all its decorative machismo, is institutionally yonocentric; female sexuality, in particular, is its moral center. Men are at womens’ disposal, and it’s your choice whether they rape you or mark you for social contempt on account of your hair. That this patently isn’t the case, that Axe are only focusing a view held by their target demographic — are not excuses.

Lest you feel any incidental sympathy for that demographic, though, consider the (apparently successful) ad for a loofah that Axe rebrand a “shower tool.” The commercial implies that a properly manly shower is like the treatment a car receives at a body shop. Never mind the ludicrous suggestion that exfoliating is analogous to detail work; what’s despicable is the idea that on the one hand, gender ought to be a code of honor and shame (in which eating vegetables is a shameful admission of failure) but on the other, totally mutable to such superfices as color scheme and choice of metaphor. This, more than any of Axe’s other ludicrous suggestions, reveals serious bullshit in gender as the consumer unconscious conceives it.