Charles Hughes writes:

Recently, Jay Sean’s “Down” (feat. Lil Wayne) knocked the Black-Eyed Peas’ “I Gotta Feeling” from the top slot on the Billboard Hot 100, after it had spent 14 weeks at #1.  “I Gotta Feeling” itself replaced “Boom Boom Pow,” also by the Black-Eyed Peas, which was the number-one single for 12 weeks.  All told, then, the Peas spent 26 straight weeks atop the Hot 100, a record-setting feat that further cemented the prominence of the quartet—Will.I.Am., Fergie, apl.de.ap and Taboo—in the ever-splintering world of American popular music.   The album from which these two singles emerged, The E.N.D. (The Energy Never Dies), also debuted at #1, and quickly went platinum.

What might be lost in this steamroller of success is that The E.N.D. is surprisingly ambitious, blending hip-hop, electro and pop rhythms into a symphony of digitally-constructed tracks.  Across this layered soundscape, the Black-Eyed Peas stretch a thematic tendon, unifying many of the album’s disparate tracks together under a general motif of futurism.  More specifically, the group suggests that facing the future, particularly at a moment of obvious transition, requires a process of both destruction and reinvention. Even the album’s title, explained in an introduction at the beginning by an electronically-distorted voice, illustrates this duality, noting both the closing of one chapter and the continuation of a stronger, longer “energy” which lives on through any moment of rupture.  Fittingly, I suppose, the group presents themselves as on the vanguard in this transition, particularly as it relates to music.  In a line from the suitably explosive “Boom Boom Pow,” which follows the spoken introduction and serves as the album’s sonic and lyrical manifesto, they declare that they’re here to rock “digital spit/Next-level visual shit” even as their competitors are “stuck on super-8 shit/That lo-fi stupid 8-bit.”  Such references are sprinkled throughout The E.N.D., sometimes tinged with a consideration of not just the music, but the music industry.  They declare, for example, that they’ll continue to “rock the beat” even though there is “no longer a physical record store,” and, in interviews surrounding the album’s release, Will.I.Am—the group’s primary producer and spokesman—has been open about the degree to which he assembled individual cuts, with their hollowed-out arrangements and rhythmic patchworks, in order to appeal to the cut-and-paste listening styles of DJs, remix producers and iTunes customers. “There is no album any more,” he told Billboard, and he links this change in music’s consumption to the reformulation of the “energy” which he and his group are intent on harnessing on The E.N.D.  It’s a concept that screams pretentiousness, and they don’t fully pull it off, but, in nearly every important aspect, it’s difficult to listen to The E.N.D. without sensing the Peas working towards their central project of creating music that, as Fergie rhymes in “Boom Boom Pow,” could truly sound “so 3008.”

But there’s something else going on here, too.  While the most insightful reviews I’ve seen (Ann Powers’ and Jody Rosen’s come to mind) have touched on the level of complexity within The E.N.D., I’ve yet to read one review that even begins to capture what I hear as the darkness and uncertainty that lie at its heart.  (Most, in fact, don’t acknowledge any darkness and uncertainty at all.)  To my ears, and perhaps only to my ears, The E.N.D. comes off sounding like a meditation on the post-economic collapse United States, and the record’s focus on destruction-and-reinvention suggests something that extends beyond the music business.  Given our recent history, where systems failed and promises revealed themselves to be lies, the Peas’ determination to break down and rebuild strikes me as both relevant and admirable.  Beyond the programmatic concern, though, I find this album to contain moments of serious reflection.  In this record’s cold, synth-driven grooves and surprisingly ambivalent lyrics, I hear the current kings (and queen) of party R&B/pop/hip-hop trying to figure out how to keep the party going as the world outside falls apart.  Sometimes, they even seem to be asking if it’s worth partying in the first place.

In short, their escapism is anything but lighthearted.  Instead, like late-period disco, the music on The E.N.D. sounds cautionary and almost desperate, warning listeners that—whether they know it or not—the party is over.  Titles like “Party All The Time” might signal a carefree blow-out, but the track’s hook—“If we could party all night and sleep all day and throw all of my problems away, my life would be easy”—doesn’t sound all that careless to me, especially when sung by the Peas in a subdued, even defeated-sounding wail.  Thanks to that, “Party All The Time” reminds me of Joan Morgan’s insight about gangsta rap, namely that its focus on short-term pleasures—partying, drinking, casual sex—often masks a larger disillusionment, and even depression, about the protagonists’ lack of belief in a workable future for themselves.  While no one should mistake the Black-Eyed Peas for N.W.A., I hear this same disaffected spirit throughout The E.N.D., where even the most pleasurable activities are presented only as brief respites from a larger and more painful world.

Of course, even that doesn’t sound like all that much fun. “Out Of My Head,” for example, is ostensibly just another anthem to losing oneself through a night of clubbing, but it’s driven by a bracing, even pissed-off Fergie vocal which turns her description of her plans for the evening, from getting dressed up to getting picked up, into something less like a hedonistic party plan and something more like a desperate attempt to enjoy oneself in spite of it all.  (“I’m sick and tired of all those motherfuckers,” she spits, “I don’t give a fuck what you think.”)  Fergie’s vocal—like the chorus on “Party All The Time” and several other spots on The E.N.D.—turns the party from a communal event into a solitary quest, suggesting a kind of alienation that sounds quite lonely in its execution. Fergie’s section then transitions into a fascinating, mid-1970s-Marvin Gaye-style coda, where Will.I.Am, sounding woozy and distant, evocatively repeats “Let’s go…disco” over swirling synths and a driving backbeat, before abruptly ending.

Speaking of satisfaction, there’s “Ring-a-Ling,” an ode to late-night booty calls which is bathed in restless keyboard riffs and a minor-key vocal hook that makes what initially sounds like a casual-sex anthem into something more ambiguous.  In fact, by the end, it’s unclear whether or not the protagonist gets any sex at all (“You don’t want to have sex with me?/Then why you keep texting me/Alright, I’m-a hit you back later”), and the claim in the chorus—“if you’re callin’ at 2 in the morning, it only means one thing”—is neither affirmed nor denied by the open-ended question of the potential hook-up.  This mystery is compounded by the skittering arrangement, which bubbles under the vocals like Morse code.  At the beginning, the quivering arpeggios are pregnant with anticipation and excitement, but by the end they just sound like frayed nerves.  It’s an unsettling experience, regardless of whether or not the union was consummated.  (And, on some level, does it really matter if it was?)

These tracks both demonstrate that the reflective, uneasy tone I hear in The E.N.D. is really a product of the production and vocal performances.  There isn’t as much in the way of direct lyrical reference to current societal turmoil, although the spoken introduction—and the overall theme of destruction-and-reinvention—takes on a new relevance in the Great Recession than they would have, say, six years ago.  That’s when the Peas dropped their most directly political hit, “Where Is The Love?,” which countered the bleakness of Bushworld with a blast of gospel soul.  Nothing here is that direct, but there are moments when individual references burst through.  On the deconstructed drone of “Imma Be,” for example, Will refers to a woman who he plans on picking up despite the fact that she’s “in debt, bouncing them checks.”  There are some Obama shout-outs, and a milquetoast, though agreeable, call to worldwide harmony in “One Tribe.”
The only time that the group tries to openly address today’s society comes with “Now Generation.”  This intriguing track begins with a spoken prelude, where the distorted voice from the introduction returns, provocatively asserting that “the most powerful force on the planet is the energy of the youth.  One can stimulate the economy, but when this powerful youth is activated and stimulated and collectively decides not to buy things, what will happen to the economy?”  These are the only mentions of the word “economy” in The E.N.D., but they are noteworthy.  The first time “economy” is spoken,” the voice stutters over it, stopping the flow and forcing listeners to give it greater attention.  At the end of the speech, “economy” is repeated three times and further distorted, before moving without pause into brooding alt-rock chords.  These chords then explode into a Who-style strut, and “Now Generation” begins in earnest.  Driven by Fergie’s wailing chorus and Will.I.Am’s snarling, sarcastic verses, “Now Generation” is a strongly-worded critique of today’s youth, many of whom, of course, are the Peas’ target audience.  A full-blast rip on entitlement culture, “Now Generation” attacks their greed (shouts of “I want money!” repeatedly between the verses), their reliance on material things (Will.I.Am’s sneering protagonist celebrates his Wi-Fi, HD and iPod), and even their impatience (“I just can’t wait/I want it immediately”). Within this, though, they subtly—for the Black-Eyed Peas, at least—suggest that this gimme-gimme-now-now culture, promoted by an over-reliance on digital-age technology, contributes to the kind of short-term lapses that lead to long-term crises. “I want money, I want cold hard cash/I’ll take your dollar and your Euro and go have a blast,” Fergie shouts near the song’s climax, “so take your day and your credit and stick it up your ass and do it now!”  This stuff might not be revolutionary, and it’s definitely not very nuanced, but I find it pretty remarkable nonetheless, especially given that the Peas are directly attacking, and even mocking, the very people and process through which downloaded sales of “Boom Boom Pow” and “I Gotta Feeling” skyrocketed. 

It’s even more remarkable given that, generally, lyrics have never been the Peas’ strong suit.  In fact, particularly since the addition of Fergie helped propel them into superstardom, their work has possessed one of the most consistent levels of stupidity in pop music.  They even welcome this association.  This is the group, after all, that called on their listeners to “get stupid” in the celebratory “Let’s Get Retarded” (later re-titled to the inoffensive “Let’s Get It Started” after an NBA tie-in helped launch the single into the stratosphere).   I don’t mind the mindlessness, of course, especially since much of the Peas’ most infectious material is glibly, happily goofy.  Still, there’s also plenty of plain old dunderheadedness sprinkled throughout the Peas’ catalog, including their mega-hit “My Humps,” which no amount of club-bangin’ beats or Fergiliciousness could turn into anything other than a pedestrian nursery-rhyme.  “My Humps” is just the most egregious example of how easily the Peas’ formula drifts into a deconstructed, cynical-sounding manipulation of pop cliché.  There’s plenty of that on The E.N.D., and it mars even the most effective tracks.  “Alive,” for example, scores with a soaring, moaning Will.I.Am chorus and pulsating early-80s rhythm track, before Fergie and apl.de.ap deliver rhymes that rank with the group’s absolute worst.  (I would be miffed if either one of them used a line using the phrase “you were my best friend and boy/girlfriend, now it seems like you’re my worst friend,” but, for God’s sake, did both of them have to say it?)  The mega-hit “I Gotta Feeling,” a guitar-driven club jam, is the group at its most effective and the album at its most hopeful.  (The footage of 20,000 people dancing along to a live Chicago performance on Oprah was pretty compelling stuff.)  Unfortunately, “I Gotta Feeling” also contains random shouts of “Mazel tov!” and “l’chaim!” which sound forced and out of place.

These weaknesses, and the presence of a few straight-up clunker tracks, mean that The E.N.D. is probably not going to make it very high on my Best of 2009 list.  When I’m thinking about what pop music I’ll remember in ten years, though, and look back to as a snapshot of the world as it was in 2009, I have a feeling that I’ll return to The E.N.D.   It’s one of the only major releases I’ve heard this year that attempts to so fully engage with the past, present and future, and to draw out the connections between the music we hear and the world we hear it in.  It asks me questions to which I haven’t figured out answers, while also offering me potential avenues through which to understand them.  In that way, I consider it a major accomplishment.

Danny Alexander writes:

One reason I’ve got to write this is as a feeble effort to say thanks to my wife, Lauren. She fell in love with Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit’s self-titled second album around the same time that she developed a similar affection for a collection of Bottle Rockets’ gems compiled by our good friend David Cantwell.  Now, my wife and I more or less bonded around R&B and hip hop, and I’ve spent most of the last decade with some sense of alienation regarding the postpunk and alt-country that offered refuge to so many of my brethren. 
 
But they are my brethren.  When I was in high school embracing the punk insurgency against the dominance of rock stardom that seemed to have no connection to our lives, I also picked up the allusions to Hank Williams, Carl Perkins, George Jones and Buck Owens.  When I was in college in Stillwater, Oklahoma, I heard the call in shows by Dwight Yoakum and Steve Earle (opened by our local Santa Fe band, fronted by my college town’s ubiquitous lounge singer, Garth Brooks).  Later, I recognized my kin in bands like the Gear Daddies, the Starkweathers, and (slightly missing the Uncle Tupelo moment) the Bottle Rockets.
 
Still, the same references that led me back to honky tonk and the blues also pointed me toward modern day connections.  If I have a rep, I guess I’ve made it writing about contemporary R&B women singers, but I’ve also spent a lot of time writing about their gangsta rap brothers who hold up the other end of the richest conversation about class, race and sexuality I’ve ever heard.  I also spend a lot of time writing about Rock En Espanol and norteno music, a legacy I inherited when I bought my first Los Lobos tape the same day I bought the Del Lords’ Frontier Days.  I also spend a fair amount of time with metal.  It’s all Hank Williams fault, even if he hadn’t sung “Jambalaya (On the Bayou),” or if he hadn’t had a head-banging grandson, or if Al Green hadn’t sounded so sweet singing, “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.”
 
That said, this summer ended on a beautiful note, with Lauren’s interest seemingly sparking a return of the Bottle Rockets working with producer Eric Ambel, who has given four of their studio albums the fire and crunch characteristic of their live shows.  The new one, Lean Forward, is a record I need.
 
In a way, it starts in the middle, with another lyric by Scott Taylor (“Kerosene,” “Welfare Music”) about “the kid next door” who went off to war and never came back.  Avoiding a traditional melodic structure, singer Brian Henneman’s vocal just calls out in mournful repetition, decorated only by simple, spiraling guitar riffs.  In the same way “Born In the U.S.A.” might be heard as an answer to the emerging political voice in rap, “The Kid Next Door,” obliquely pays homage to the “loud hip hop” the neighbor kid played on his “kick ass stereo.”  There’s no sarcasm here, only an effort to reach out and make sense of his relationship with the kid and its loss.
 
I wouldn’t call “The Kid Next Door” the best song here, but it is a reach that helped me embrace the fine, tough record that surrounds it.  And one of the beauties of Lean Forward is its constant sense of reach.  Whether it’s the Bo Diddley beat of “Nothin’ But A Driver,” the honky tonk blues of “Shame on Me,” or the Southern soul of “Slip Away,” this music refuses to be confined by genre.  And on a song like “Hard Times,” the legacy of Katrina in the wake of the recession is personalized with funky riffs and percussion that sound like they’re popping south of the 10.  The album begins its journey, appropriately enough, with “The Long Way,” a wild ride co-written by Bottle Rockets originals Mark Ortmann and Henneman, featuring clarion call guitars and a relentless rhythm section that pushes the music around one hair pin turn after another, ending in a crescendo of drums and ringing guitar.
 
The dynamics of this record are remarkable, with the soulful uplift of bassist Keith Voegele’s “Done It All,” countering the depression in the lyric, and Voegele’s sweet love song “Open Your Eyes” calling to mind the stately elegance of the Band.  Henneman’s trademark humor shines forth on a rollicking song about moving slow, “Get On the Bus,” while the gorgeous country ballad “Solitaire” captures the lonely desperate places relationships can find inescapable.
 
Ending with “Give Me Room,” built around a funky, percussive groove that’s downright menacing, this is a record about accepting limits, embracing humility and living for others, on one hand, but it’s also a record about having enough scrap and dignity to fight when you have to.  The belly for the fight couldn’t be more evident than on “The Way It Used to Be,” a song about the dangers of looking backward and the dangers waiting just around the next bend.  In other words, the dangers we have to plunge through.
 
Suffice it to say, I fell in love with this record the first weekend my wife and I found ourselves playing it over and over on a trip to Arkansas, about the same time I fell in love with the new 400 Unit.  So, when Lauren told me the two bands were playing together one night only, in Carbondale, Illinois, I was excited, for her.  When I worked out my scheduling conflicts and realized I could make the trip with her, I knew I was in for something special.
 
I wasn’t disappointed.  In fact, I’ve spent the past several weeks trying to figure out how to express the magic of that evening.  It would have been so much simpler if I’d written it at the time, perhaps on no sleep.
 
Instead, I got to think about it, about why the whole trip is as elusive and beautiful as that new 400 Unit record.  (If you listened to the thing enough to sing along to “Sunstroke,” you definitely know what I mean.)  Part of it was the autumn drive down into a part of Illinois I’ve never seen before, through patchwork towns of varied architecture and at least one near ghost town, with a home in an old gas station (the word “Closed” in spray paint over its rusting sign).  We came home with a trunk full of pumpkins and gourds.
 
Part of it was finding the place, some sort of facility called Sports Blast, far enough off the main road no one we talked to had ever heard of it.  The top floor, something like a chic-ly lit attic, was rented out for this event, and the crowd of a couple of hundred or so gradually filled in an S-shape of open space in front of the stage.  When we ran across the street to check in at the Super 8, we found ourselves waiting behind all 6’5” linebacker of Jason Isbell, who was checking in just ahead of us.  At the breakfast bar, we’d find we pretty much had that place to ourselves with the two bands—oh, and a cranky businessman, whose one obviously redeeming quality was that he knew his way around the waffle machine and didn’t mind dispensing advice.
 
But it was the show that was the real magic, of course.  More than it had to be by far. 
 
The Bottle Rockets played an incredibly hard hitting 21 song set.  After crowd favorites like “24 Hours A Day,” “Every Kind of Everything,” and “Kit Kat Clock,” they played a gorgeous “Happy Anniversary,” off of Zoysia, the album Stephen King helped put on the map.  Then the band launched into seven songs in a row off the new album—firing away with all the funkiest and hardest rocking stuff before launching into a quite literally explosive, “Slo Tom’s” (a fuse went in the middle of the song, and Henneman, more than a little tickled, waved his bottled water and encouraged folks to have another drink because who knew when this was going to get fixed).
 
After picking up where they left off on “Slo Tom’s,” they played perhaps their greatest, simplest song, “Kerosene,” for Jason Isbell.  If it’s possible for such a perfect indictment to take on more force, it carried at least all the weight it ever has in a set filled with songs plagued by economic insecurity and collapse—getting stuck in Indianapolis with your $2000 thousand dollar car, driving other peoples’ cars to make money and drawing on the sounds of southern Louisiana as a reminder “I ain’t broke down, I’m just out of gas.”  “Kerosene” is a song that asks at least three times what kind of just world kills a family just scraping by when they “try to improvise” by substituting gasoline to heat their home.
 
But the most emotional moment in the Bottle Rockets’ set had to come with the closer, the twenty-first century song, The Brooklyn Side’s opener, “Welfare Music.”  With its portrait of a young mother and child playing together, celebrating hope in the midst of hopelessness, it’s another great lyric from Scott Taylor.  But what made the live performance that night so extraordinarily moving was all about the music.  Lead guitarist Johnny Horton and Brian Henneman traded licks in beautiful guitar interplay that quieted to the point where Henneman was picking out his lead near the level of a whisper, so that the whole bar had to grow silent for an exquisite little eternity before he sang the next, crucial lines: 

Baby fall down,
Baby get up,
Baby need a drink from a loving cup.

Then the band kicked back in to finish the number, that extraordinarily intimate focus ringing in all of our ears.
 
After this essentially perfect set, complete with the system blowing out, it was hard to imagine how Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit could provide an adequate follow up.  Of course, part of the answer was intrinsic in the music.  Isbell’s band complements the Bottle Rockets without competing on the level of guitar attack more commonly associated with his old friends in the Drive By Truckers.
 
Throwing the Velvet Underground’s Loaded on before his set hinted at the differences to come.  The movement from “Who Loves the Sun,” as bluesy a lyric as a shiny 60s pop song can conceivably carry, into “Sweet Jane,” with that insistence on human decency—“Anyone who ever had a heart, wouldn’t go around and break it”—to “Rock and Roll,” with that sentiment that’s central to everything good about Lou Reed (and damn near redeems the rest of it), “oh, her life was saved by rock and roll!”
 
The 400 Unit took the stage unassumingly as that sprightly 40 year old jam wound its way to a conclusion, and I found myself yet again thankful at these artists’ insistence on broadening the sense of their tradition.  Opening with his song, “Grown,” which has that great line, “are you still dancing to ‘Purple Rain,’” only drove the point home further.
 
Though the Bottle Rockets hadn’t done “The Kid Next Door,” Isbell followed his opener with a trilogy of songs dealing with the legacy of war, “Decoration Day,” “Soldiers Get Strange” and “Dress Blues.”  “Dress Blues” is a gorgeously painful cousin of the Bottle Rockets song, daring to express the singer’s frustration and ambivalence toward his friend and the family of his friend, whose never coming back—his friend who “showed us what we had to lose.”
 
Though he only played the one song from the new album, sticking to crowd favorites from Sirens of the Ditch and his Drive By Trucker years, Isbell’s set had that sinewy, layered beauty that the new album captures so beautifully, no doubt in large part thanks to the band’s unusual reliance on surprising keyboard turns from Derry DeBorja and supple rhythms from bassist Jimbo Hart and drummer Chad Gamble.  The set took surprising turns like Browan Lollar’s lead vocal on “Psycho Killer” and the haunted blues of “Hurricanes and Hand Grenades,” and most welcome of all, an instrumental turn to New Orleans with the Meter’s great hit, “Cissy Strut.”  This came in response to an audience member’s repeated calls for the band to get crazy, and Isbell took the opportunity to make fireworks of his lead.  Just when it seemed the energy had peaked, the band ramped things up even higher with set closer “Never Gonna Change.”  This was followed by a three song encore that finished off with the great “American Girl,” some effusive audience member near us shouting in our ears how this song had saved his life in Korea.

From the Talking Heads to Prince to Lou Reed and the Meters, from Doug Sahm (how did I omit the Bottle Rockets’ beautiful “At the Crossroads”?) to the beat of Bo Diddley and the whole MO of Chuck Berry—from St. Louis and Festus, Missouri to Memphis, Tennessee and Muscle Schoals, Alabama—a whole helluva lot of what makes music matter got conjured up in that attic of the Sports Blast that Sunday night in September.  My brothers did the story proud, and I can only hope these words do them some minor note of justice. 

David Cantwell writes:

Long before Elvis departed us prematurely, and even before Hank Williams died at the peak of his powers and fame, there was Jimmie Rodgers…that gone-too-soon pop celebrity prototype who died of tuberculosis in 1933, a mere 35 years young. Known during his daylily-quick career as both America’s Blue Yodeler and the Singing Brakeman—thirty years later, he was additionally dubbed the Father of Country Music—Jimmie Rodgers was a Superstar before the term existed. He was also an International Multi-media Brand before the concept existed, and he was “America’s Original Roots Music Hero.”

That last comes from a great new book by my longtime colleague and dear friend Barry Mazor. One way to describe Barry’s Meeting Jimmie Rodgers: How America’s Original Roots Music Hero Changed the Sounds of a Century is to say it is the biography of an image—or rather of several Rodgers-inspired images as they’ve come down to us through the years and how they’ve been used differently by fans in succeeding generations. In the phrasing of some of Barry’s chapter titles, Rodgers was “A Doomed Singer-songwriter with Guitar,” and he was a progenitor of Western music, “An Easterner in a Cowboy Hat.” He was a yodeler, too, of course, and he was considered a white blues singer, and a rough-and-rowdy antecedent for rock ‘n’ roll, and a hillbilly, and a vaudevillian. Rodgers canvassed all neighborhoods, town and country, and that’s a quality we now understand goes a long way toward putting the “super” in superstar.

Many of Rodgers’ images can appear contradictory at first blush. Barry explains, for instance, that Rodgers was well known to his fans as a one-time railroad employee. At the same time, this “Singing Brakeman” often sang from the point of view of the many hobos who just then were being tossed from trains on a fairly regular basis—and tossed by brakemen, no less, as in one of Jimmie’s most covered songs, “Waiting for a Train”:

I walked up to a brakeman to give him a line of talk
He says, “If you’ve got money, I’ll see that you don’t walk.”
I haven’t got a nickel, not a penny can I show
“Get off, get off, you railroad bum!” He slammed the boxcar door.

Put another way, Rodgers was a voice for many of the same kinds of middle-class desires memorably expressed by his good pal Gene Austin in that crooner’s “My Blue Heaven” and in the very existence of his own famous homestead, Yodeler’s Paradise. But he was also a musical spokesperson for the most down-on-the-ground sorts of Depression-era desperation. “I’m going to California,” he sang in 1928, “where they sleep out every night,” and as the early thirties dawned hard, his fans understood without being told why so many new Californians had no choice but to sleep under California stars. In 1931, Barry notes, he even teamed with Will Rogers for a relief tour in benefit of Arkansans who were at that time dying for lack of food.

Rodgers sang convincingly both of highway and of home, of “Waiting for a Train” and of “Miss[ing] the Mississippi and You.” Or, as two latter-day exemplars of the Rodgers ethos have put it, Jimmie could declare, a la Willie Nelson, that “I just can’t wait to get on the road again,” while also announcing, per John Denver, that “Hey, it’s good to be back home again.” Rounders and homebodies are usually deemed opposites, but they’re actually complimentary types. One will only “Miss the Mississippi and You” when river and lover are beyond sight and reach. No one longs for the horizon more than someone who feels his whole world squeezed into a few dirty blocks. No one nurtures roots like the uprooted.

I write “a few dirty blocks” rather than, say, “a few dusty acres” because like so many of the country stars to follow, Jimmie Rodgers was not actually from the country. Rodgers grew up in Meridian, Mississippi, the state’s biggest city at the time, with over 20,000 people. Of course, to a Chicagoan or a New Yorker, someone hailing from a metropolis of that comparatively humble population would’ve been considered, no doubt, country enough. People up north would later view Elvis Presley similarly, no matter that he grew up not on a farm but in the town of Tupelo and that he came of age in Memphis. Yankees have long been in the habit of using “country boy” as a too-loose, and usually condescending, synonym for “Southerner.” To citizens of the Magnolia state, though, as to Southerners generally, someone from Meridian wasn’t a country boy. He was a city slicker.

Barry shows that this distinction matters for at least a couple of reasons. First, by presenting Rodgers as a city kid, Mississippi division, he’s able to stress as well the necessarily show-biz (Read: commercial and deep-south urban) origins of the music he was to make. Rodgers was a vaudevillian, first off, with a vaudevillian’s pop repertoire and crowd-tested performance style. He played movie houses, sometimes between films, and in medicine shows, and photos of Jimmie show him as often in suit and tie and boater as he is in an engineer’s cap or a Stetson.

This has implications for how we understand the origins of what we today call country music, and for all of the other roots music styles in which Rodgers worked. Today we often equate rootsy with rural, but Barry makes an important distinction by arguing that Rodgers’ broad appeal was grounded not so much in the rural but in what he terms Jimmie’s “rootedness.” This concept of the rooted is, I think, one of the most useful insights offered in a book full of them, and it can help us see why, for instance, Elvis Presley and Hank Williams are correctly understood as roots performers while, say, Michael Jackson, another too-soon-gone pop star, is not. (Indeed, if we want to understand Jackson’s tragic fall, his obvious loss of rootedness is as good a place to start as any.)

Mazor outlines the concept like this:

To be rooted, a singer requires a “place-derived accent” and “lyrics tied to a personal history, a home region, and working class experiences.” He must “[speak] directly to the traditional, downhome, downscale segment of his audience even as he sought broad popular appeal” and he must remain connected to that original audience.  As Rodgers himself liked to say, “The underest dog is just as good as I am, and I’m just as good as the toppest dog.”

Finally, the rooted performer sings with an “emotional immediacy” between voice and the lyric at hand.  Specifically, Barry writes that Rodgers had “direct access to the thick, duality-encompassing sensibility behind black blues…the humor and joy in the blues mingled with the loss, grief and occasional anger, the ‘we’ of implied community balancing the ‘I’ of signifying, boasting and self-expression.” This double vision of Rodgers—Ralph Ellison termed the quality “tragicomic”—is one reason we can still really hear him today, I think, if we only put forth a bit of effort, particularly in the wordless wisdom of his signature blue yodel, and it’s also the very quality I find absent in so much contemporary pop music, particularly mainstream country music.  Every yodel Rodgers ever yodeled was filled with a measure of sadness and joie de vivre, an aural manifestation of a way of being in the world I fear we are in the process of losing.

There is so much more to recommend Barry’s book than what I’ve mentioned here. His opening chapter on Johnny Cash and Louis Armstrong singing Jimmie Rodgers together in 1970 is a tour de force. His discussion of the Rodgers image as including elements of silent clowns Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd is an especially revealing comparison and one that reinforces the cultural context in which Rodgers worked. And his reminder that while Rodgers railroad ties may strike twenty-first century listeners as quaint and old-timey, they made the Singing Brakemen appear to his contemporaries as up-to-date, cutting edge, modern, a 1930s version of a pilot or even an astronaut. My friend’s writing is wonderfully conversational, and his descriptions wonderfully memorable. For example, he writes that Howlin’ Wolf (a big Rodgers fan) had a “steel-wool-and-blood voice” and that Elton Britt’s style was “suede pop.”

Meeting Jimmie Rodgers joins a crowded but welcome bookshelf of contemporary music history and criticism that’s self-consciously revisionist in the most necessary since of that term: Barry lets us see anew a musician/artist/entertainer/man who many perhaps thought we’d already seen more than enough of—and who many more have seen only in terms so caricatured that they may as well never have laid eyes (or ears) on him at all.  Like Elijah Wald’s Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, Diane Pecknold’s The Selling Sound: The Rise of the Country Music Industry, and Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk about Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, among several other recent titles (including, if I may, Heartaches by the Number), Barry has complicated here, has given flesh to, a subject normally reduced to one or another not very complex abstraction. Among other tasks, then, Barry liberates Rodgers from dehumanizing single-vision tropes like “authenticity,” arguing instead for a worldview more bittersweet and fine, more like life.

Insert blue yodel here.

Danny Alexander writes:

Maybe it’s because the percolating bass and percussive claps at the beginning of this record call to mind the funk that would prefigure hip hop, but it’s not a hip hop record I first think of when the Knox Family’s “In These Streets” comes on.  It’s not a funk record either, although the band I’m thinking of was certainly influenced by both funk and early hip hop.  No, it’s the Clash’s “Somebody Got Murdered” that wells up out of my subconscious the moment MC Jerm raps “Yo man, I don’t think they heard you” and a voice cries out in the dark, “a murder!”

And that makes sense.  A big part of the Clash’s appeal was a bracing honesty that confronted the walls that keep us apart. Seattle’s The Knox Family takes us from behind any four walls we might like to think protect us and out into the darkness.  Guest singer Toni Hill’s beautiful vocal is key to the intimacy of that journey as she reminds us, “Somebody’s praying in these streets/somebody’s dying in these streets/somebody’s hustling in these streets” and then takes it all in her immediate embrace with, “Somebody’s singing for you and me.”

The rest of the record goes further into the muck and mire that’s the current human condition than anything I’ve ever heard.  What’s more amazing?  It shines a light through.

In verse one, Julie C’s sassy and knowing rhymestyle catalogues a mind-numbing list of offensives in the “all out war against poor populations,” including intimidation tactics carried out by everyone from the FCC to the beat cop,  gang legislation, privatized prisons and deaths caused by “non-lethal” weapons.  This verse and the second are rapped against sirens that spiral between the left and right channels of the speakers and another voice in the night, making an unclear sound but plainly in distress…Somebody hustling or somebody dying.

And then Hill sings again, backed by a 5 note key progression that mines the same territory Timbaland’s been working lately but suggests a bigger, explicit dream— hope for every voice that currently goes unheard and faith in those voices to change the world.

Julie C’s second verse starts at the heights of Wall Street  and follows the “global economic collapse.”  She somehow hits on all of it, from the political stakes that lead to bank bailouts to the foreclosure of the homes of those small enough to fail.  Before she’s finished, Julie C describes a globalized war between the rich and the poor.

With the stakes this high, Hill begins to tic off more of what “singing for you and me” means: “We gotta get together/’cause we need/ to heal the sick and hopeless/ yes, indeed/to strive for peace and justice/ equality/love for you and me.”  With keys washing in behind her, Hill’s voice grows more reassuring and inspiring as she touches on each key to the future. 

The third and final verse starts after the record’s turned the corner toward a fade out.  Julie C raps a sign off and then, like James Brown throwing off his cape, she launches into, “Yo, violence is a symptom not the disease.”  The dissonant sirens are gone now, replaced by flute-like keys and more percussion including high hat and snappy wood block beats.  Something’s different about this last highly charged verse, though the signs stay grim, “Why is the city of Seattle dropping another 110 million to open a new jail we don’t need, while the district can’t even find a measly 3.6 to keep our schools from closing?”

And the difference is the cape-dropping intimacy.   This last verse feels like an urgent whisper being passed on a streetcorner.  “Want to know what’s really going on?” Julie C asks.  “Just follow the paper trail to downtown Olympia, Wall Street, D.C./As long as poverty pimps keep profiting from our problems/We can’t wait for change/We gotta create our own solutions/Straight from the peoples’ movement.”

And with that, the Knox Family’s debut Ep is out.  It’s the end of something very rich , though only 7 full tracks long.  From the opening “Make Love,” DJ B-Girl has produced an infectious party record with a laid back, minimalist style that communicates class-conscious strength and unity. Though it’s laid back and minimalist, it also uses multi-colored keys and beats in continuously fresh and surprising ways. “In These Streets” is the perfect ending, justifying all the tough talk and hard play that come before.

But it’s more than that.  It’s a singular piece of revolutionary art unlike anything else.  It’s the blues of “The Message” wedded to a concrete basis for political unity.  And it’s a spiritual, with Toni Hill’s refrains insisting that the human spirit was made to fulfill our dreams.  It’s a song to suggest a new genre—not protest music so much as revolution rock—good for dancing, crying, shouting and even (especially?) blueprinting our dreams into reality.

For more information: B Girl Media

David Cantwell writes:

Michael Jackson’s death at age 50 was startling but hardly surprising. The strange saga of Michael Jackson had been outdoing itself for at least a quarter of a century—lately by the repulsion it provoked, mostly by the sheer pleasure it inspired, and always in just plain weirdness. It was only the timing of this final chapter that caught us off guard. We all expected, I think, that this story was bound to end badly, sooner or later, and we’d expected a bad end for a very long time. Indeed, as far back as 1986, critic Dave Marsh published a book on Michael Jackson that he knowingly titled Trapped. The first words of that book’s open letter to Jackson posed a question that people were already asking, even then, and that they have been asking ever since: “Dear Michael: What happened?”

At first the weirdness that was Michael Jackson was of the entirely delightful variety. How in the hell could a little kid sing like that? What did an 11 year old know, after all, about the anguished hindsight of “I Want You Back,” a single that is still as viscerally thrilling a record as any I’ve ever heard? Or of the devotion expressed in “I’ll Be There,” a pledge of unity and spiritual succor as sustaining as any other from its era, which is saying something since the early seventies was a pop moment largely defined by such songs: “Lean on Me,” “I’ll Take You There,” “Family Affair,” “You’ve Got a Friend,” “I’ll Be Around,” “Love Train.” On a similar theme and no less moving, 1972’s “Ben,” Jackson’s first solo chart topper, featured what will now go down as the most fetching melody of his career. But it will also be remembered as the most prescient of his early hits because it presents Michael singing oh-so-delicately (a vocal tact he mostly lost in his post Thriller years) to a best friend that just happens to be a pet rat. The real Michael, who would eventually afford a zoo’s worth of critters, upgraded to a chimpanzee.

Off the Wall, which produced four top ten pop hits and sold eight million copies in 1979, made Jackson into the biggest star in the world, its own brand of weirdness. Three years later, Thriller rendered such merely terrestrial claims meaningless and left Jackson with nowhere to go but down. Thriller remains a stunning achievement, and not only commercially. Someday that album will be universally recognized, if it isn’t already, as being as important to its time and to the sounds it inspired as Sgt. Pepper’s was to an earlier moment. And Thriller will hold up better, I think. Most eighties music has for a long time now sounded very much like eighties music, but “Billie Jean” and “Beat It,” “P.Y.T.” and “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” besides anticipating the Rhythm Nation that was to come, and in which we all now reside, already have a timeless feel.

But even as he was thrilling the world with a vision of possibility, and just plain fun, a vision of both both in human community and human distinctiveness, the joy seemed to slip from his own performances. Unlike his only commercial peers in the eighties—Springsteen, Madonna, Prince and U2—Jackson never seemed to be having a blast in the spotlight; even his most amazing dance steps came off like very hard work, and work he had to do alone. The young man’s sense of self seemed to slip further away along with his joy, and it was then that the weirdness of Michael shot through the roof. First, the nose job, then the skin lightening. There were the high profile though usually short-lived relationships with child stars of the past (Elizabeth Taylor) and of this or that particular present (Emmanuel Lewis, Ryan White). There was Neverland. The hyper-baric chamber. The creepy crawling-down-his-face hair. The marriage to Elvis’ daugther. The final Lon-Chaney-as-Phantom-of-the-Opera visage. And, of course, the charges of pedophilia…those despicable, unforgivable acts… As Carl Wilson put it, Jackson died last week, yes, but only “after a long illness.” Indeed, Jackson’s long weird illness was something we couldn’t get enough of, that we encouraged, and therefore for which we are partly culpable. Our individual and collective acts in nurturing today’s culture of celebrity constitute our own chronic illness.  I think Michael understood this, too, at some level. “You’re just a buffet, you’re a vegetable,” he blurts breathlessly, over and over, in “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’.” “They eat off of you, you’re a vegetable.”

One thing we ‘re after in our fascination with celebrity is the way shared pleasure can make us feel connected to other people, make us feel part of something larger than ourselves while at the same time validating our need to see ourselves as individuals, unique in the universe and therefore worthwhile on our own terms. The danger in this obsession for the celebrity, especially for the rare celebrity who has achieved the thin-air heights of a Michael Jackson, is that it leaves the star feeling connected to no one in particular, no one at all.

I think that’s what stands out most to me about Jackson in the years following his Thriller triumph. Michael always seemed alone. He was alone. Even when dancing, he danced alone.

The unassailable greatness of the Jackson 5’s music aside, and any nostalgia aside too (I’m almost 48, Michael’s contemporary; we grew up together), I love “I Want You Back” and “ABC” and “Dancing Machine” and the rest so dearly because Michael looks and sounds like he’s having fun, with his brothers. Some of the most soul-sustaining, emotionally-perfect musical moments I know are those times in J5 hits when Michael’s high sweet voice gave way to the voice of one of his brothers’, usually Jermaine’s, who would spell Michael for a line or a verse or a bridge, the older sibling with his musical arm around the shoulder of a kid brother.

What’s probably my favorite moment in Michael’s solo work, and the saddest, comes at the end of “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin.” As that skittering, mechanical-sounding high-hat pulse fades in and out of the dance beat, Jackson tries to strike a deal with us:

Lift your head up high
And scream out to the world
I know I am someone
And let the truth unfurl
No one can hurt you now
Because you know what’s true
Yes, I believe in me
So you believe in you

I don’t think he really believed it, though. And maybe one reason he couldn’t believe it was because, most of the time, we don’t believe it either, not really. We crave freedom, we want to believe in each other, to believe in ourselves, to achieve ourselves, but we are also terrified of exposing ourselves that way. So, instead, we cling to that which has robbed us of ourselves and of one another all along. Michael Jackson clung to that which had robbed him, too, as people will.

Charles Hughes writes:

The death of Barry Beckett – who passed away last week at the age of 66 – marks a truly unhappy milestone in American musical history.  With his passing, the second Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, which is among the most significant studio ensembles of the twentieth century, loses one of its core members.  Beckett’s is not the first death in the larger ranks of prodigiously talented Shoals musicians and songwriters, given the losses of Arthur Alexander and Eddie Hinton, among others.  But Barry Beckett’s stature, not only as primary keyboardist in the studio ensemble, but also as co-owner of the immensely successful Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, makes this a particularly momentous loss for the Shoals, as well as for Nashville, since – like many who made their name in the Shoals’ numerous recording studios – Beckett later moved to “Music City” and found great success there.  In each place, he helped define genres, launch careers, and create a vast catalog of classic, hit recordings that continue to shape our listening.

Beckett, who grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, came to Muscle Shoals under the wing of “Papa” Don Schroeder, the Miami-based DJ/producer who – like many during the period – came there to work at Fame Studios, where producer Rick Hall and a cadre of talented players and songwriters had established themselves recording soul, pop and country sessions.  Beckett arrived at Fame at a fortuitous juncture, as Hall was in the process of rebuilding his core group of studio musicians following the 1964 departure of his first rhythm section, who moved to Nashville and became some of the most sought-after players in the city.

Beckett’s fluid style fit perfectly into Fame’s model of musical professionalism, which favored the efficiency and versatility necessary to service Fame’s growing roster of paying clients.  Beckett quickly became a cornerstone of the new, second group, along with drummer Roger Hawkins, guitarist Jimmy Johnson, and – later – bassist David Hood.  Beckett’s spare, supple work on piano and organ helped establish Fame as a Southern soul center, a reputation that only intensified once the studio (and its musicians) became a favorite of Atlantic producer Jerry Wexler.  In Fame’s heyday, Beckett played on records by soul greats like Wilson Pickett, Etta James, Arthur Conley and Aretha Franklin.  This Aretha Franklin session – which produced her breakthrough single “I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Love You)” and “Do Right Woman (Do Right Man)” – gained infamy for a race-related confrontation between a white horn player and Franklin’s husband.  This fracas ultimately led to Franklin’s (and Wexler’s) departure from Muscle Shoals, with a half-completed recording and plenty of tension between Wexler and Rick Hall.  Despite his ill feelings about the politics at Fame, Wexler remained committed to the musicians, and ultimately flew the Rhythm Section to New York to finish the session in semi-secret.  Although Franklin never physically returned to Muscle Shoals to record, Shoals musicians, including Beckett, appear on her pivotal early Atlantic albums.

In 1969, after a series of disputes with Hall over money, control and fallout from the Franklin/Atlantic controversy, the core Rhythm Section – Beckett, Hawkins, Hood, and Johnson – split from Fame and opened their own studio, across the river, at 3614 Jackson Highway.  Their hit-making reputation, and the support of Jerry Wexler, brought quick success: R.B. Greaves hit the Top 10 with “Take A Letter, Maria,” and the Rolling Stones visited Muscle Shoals Sound to record three tracks for what became Sticky Fingers.  This visit, chronicled vividly both by author Stanley Booth and filmmakers Albert and David Maysles, symbolized the increasing prevalence of rock and pop artists in Muscle Shoals, a trend which, throughout the 1970s, brought Beckett and his colleagues into collaboration with, among many others, Bob Seger, Paul Simon, Cher and Traffic, with whom the Rhythm Section toured in 1973.  Additionally, artists from Willie Nelson to Herbie Mann to Jimmy Cliff (whose “Sitting In Limbo” bears the unmistakable throb of Beckett’s organ) visited the area during these years.  The Rhythm Section – whose nickname “The Swampers” gained international recognition following the shout-out from Lynyrd Skynyrd – worked dozens of sessions a week.

Despite the studio’s growing focus on rock and pop records, and despite the growing feeling among many Black artists that Muscle Shoals was abandoning R&B, the studio continued recording R&B artists like Bobby Womack and Millie Jackson, both of whom did much of their most famous work at Muscle Shoals Sound, as well as a number of artists from Memphis’ Stax Records.  Stax President Al Bell sent nearly half of the label’s expansive 1970s roster to Muscle Shoals, including Mel & Tim, Johnnie Taylor and – most prominently – The Staple Singers.  The recordings made in the Shoals by the Staples – including their #1 hits “Respect Yourself” and “I’ll Take You There” – are near-perfect representations of the area’s musical alchemy, with the Staples’ rich mix of gospel, funk and Civil Rights/Black Power messages meshing perfectly with the Swampers’ wide catalog of influences.  “I’ll Take You There,” for example, emerged from a studio jam, where Mavis Staples began improvising a series of lyrics – infused with affirming messages from both the church and the Movement – over a skittering beat, which the Rhythm Section admitted was lifted from one of their favorite records, Harry J. and the All-Stars’ ska instrumental “The Liquidator.”  On the finished recording, as each member of the band – including Barry Beckett – takes a brief, grooving solo, Mavis Staples calls them out in celebratory fashion.  Although Southern soul’s racial politics, and interracial quality, has been both romanticized and simplified in subsequent years, “I’ll Take You There” is one of the truest symbols of the promise represented by this musical and racial collaboration.

The studio kept up a full slate of bookings through the 1970s, with Beckett always a key contributor.  Beckett even branched out alone, producing and playing on three Bob Dylan albums, including two – Slow Train Coming and Saved – which Dylan recorded at Muscle Shoals Sound.  By the 1980s, though, the success and energy began to dissipate, and – in 1985 – Beckett officially ended its tenure when he followed in the footsteps of the first rhythm section (as well as other Shoals originals like Billy Sherrill and Arthur Alexander) and moved to Nashville.  It may have broken up the Swampers, but the move proved profitable for Beckett, as he quickly established himself as an in-demand producer and A&R executive.  He won CMA Awards, charted numerous hits, and helped guide the careers of Hank Williams, Jr. (who’d briefly worked in the Shoals in the 1970s), Alabama, and – eventually – Kenny Chesney.

Although his primary commercial and creative interests settled firmly into the country world, albeit a country world that was fundamentally changed by the soul and pop music he’d made in Muscle Shoals, Beckett still made time to work with some of his old collaborators, including Etta James, whom Beckett produced in the 1980s.  In her autobiography, James remarked that she worked well with Beckett because he “liked his shit funky,” and some of the spark of James’ original Shoals sessions was reignited on their later collaborations.  (He also produced Phish’s breakthrough album, Rift, in 1994.)  More recently, Beckett was deservedly inducted into the Alabama Music Hall of Fame, along with Hawkins, Hood and Johnson.  (None of the foursome has yet entered the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame, an omission which will hopefully soon be rectified, especially given the recent induction of fellow Shoals mainstay Spooner Oldham.)  Upon their inclusion in the Alabama Music Hall Of Fame, the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section released their first self-titled album, a collection of instrumentals which demonstrated their love and talents for a variety of styles, from rock to jazz to funk. 

Barry Beckett was among the most prolific studio musicians of the twentieth century.  He leaves behind a treasury of music which speaks not only to his talents, but also to a particularly fertile moment in American musical history, when a small city in Northern Alabama could legitimately lay claim to being – as its Chamber of Commerce called it – “The Hit Recording Capital Of The World.”  Although the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section is less famous than their contemporaries at Motown, Stax, Philly International, or elsewhere, the group deserves to be included with those more celebrated ensembles, and no one was more important to that group than Barry Beckett.  He will be missed, but his legacy is present in nearly every aisle of the record store, in a majority of sizable iTunes playlists, and in most facets of today’s pop music.  

David Cantwell writes:

This is neat: My very favorite music critic is going to be on my very favorite show. Our friend Carl Wilson sits down with Stephen Colbert on the Wednesday, March 4 edition of The Colbert Report. On the Oscar red carpet last week, the actor James Franco had nice things to say about Carl’s entry in the 33 1/3 series, Let’s Talk about Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, and that apparently got the wheels turning. I’ve gone on before about the book–word for word, and ounce for ounce, I’d call this little volume the best music book ever–so if you don’t have a copy, get one. And Carl, a music writer for the Toronto Globe and Mail and the man behind Zoilus, is certainly a great fit for Colbert: Stephen is a big music guy and likes artists that critics have deemed both cool and uncool (his show’s featured the Decembrists and Toby Keith, TV on the Radio and Rush), he likes big ideas (the authors he books are often so little known that the only explanation for their being there in the first place is that Colbert is interested in their work), and his Col-burt/Col-bare persona split certainly gives him a big personal interest in the issues of taste and identity that Carl tackles in the book. I am so happy!

(Carl, if you can somehow get yourself animated into one of Colbert’s Tek Jansen adventures, I will worship you like unto a God!)

Charles Hughes writes:

I figured that Etta James had something to say about the sudden prominence of Beyonce’s version of her classic hit “At Last,” and the fact that Ms. Knowles—and not Ms. James—sang it at the Obama inauguration festivities.  Still, I wasn’t quite expecting the legendary singer to say this to an audience in Seattle: “You know your President, the one with the big ears?  He might be yours.  He ain’t my President.  And, I tell you, that woman he has singing my song, she’s gonna get her ass whipped.  The great Beyonce.  Now, like I said, she ain’t mine…but I can’t stand Beyonce.  She had no business up there singing, singing on a big old President day, gonna be singing my song that I’ve been singing forever…I’m gonna whip her butt as soon as I see her.”

To be fair, James has since claimed that this was a joke.  Judging by the audio clip available at Crown City Media, she doesn’t sound all that jocular to me.  She’s also quoted earlier as being proud of Beyonce’s performance of “At Last” at the Inauguration. Even given these caveats, though, the words were powerful, evidenced by the reaction of the Seattle crowd, who tittered at the Obama criticism, before exploding with applause at the first diss of Knowles.

I think James’ criticism is misdirected, since I don’t think Beyonce deserves to be personally called on the carpet for this.  (Was she supposed to say no?)  I also hope that James’ belief that Obama is “not her president” is based on something deeper than this snub.  (It might be, and maybe it should be.)  Still, I feel her when she speaks of her frustration, and I don’t think her sentiments should be quickly dismissed.

Like I said, I don’t think Beyonce’s to blame.  Beyonce’s “At Last” comes from the film Cadillac Records, which featured Knowles as Etta James, along with Mos Def as Chuck Berry and Jeffrey Wright as Muddy Waters. In full disclosure, I haven’t seen the film, so I can’t really comment on it or its quality, but—from what I’ve heard—Beyonce’s performance is one of the highlights of a film that I’ve heard get very mixed reviews.  I also happen to like Beyonce more generally: I find her work to be among the most consistently engaging and interesting in pop music, and I wish she were taken more seriously for her work as a songwriter and producer.  (Here, I share the views of Sasha Frere-Jones, the controversial New Yorker critic who just penned a piece on the James/Knowles beef, and Beyonce more generally.)  She’s been great since Destiny’s Child, and I love the fact that—from “I don’t think you’re ready for this jelly” to “You must not know about me”—many of her most famous lines are expressly directed towards asserting her status as a strong, multifaceted Black woman.  Admittedly, I found her most recent album, I Am…Sasha Fierce, to be kind of a mess, but I value her sense of experimentation and keen ear.  I even kinda dig her alter ego, Sasha Fierce, even though I think she’s got a ways to go before it’s more like Camille than it is like Chris Gaines.

I also, of course, love Etta James.  I admire the fact that she bridges blues, R&B and soul genres with enough skill to master them all, yet enough fluidity to avoid being pigeonholed into any one sound.  I find her recordings in Muscle Shoals—including “Tell Mama” and “I’d Rather Go Blind”—to be on the top-shelf of any Southern soul work.  I appreciate that she beat back her addictions, and talks about them with blues honesty and steely determination.  Finally, I love the fact that she steals the show from Chuck Berry in the great film Hail! Hail! Rock And Roll, with her piss-and-vinegar version of “Rock And Roll Music.”

So I’ve got no real rooting interest, although I guess that my appreciation of James’ status as a soul survivor does sway me slightly in her favor.  The larger issue is far more interesting to me, as are its contexts.  First of all, several things puzzle me about the fact that Beyonce was so quickly and thoroughly embraced as the singer of “At Last” at the inauguration.  For one, her version wasn’t really a hit, especially not before it was used in the inauguration festivities.  It’s one thing for the popularity of a remake to outstrip (at least temporarily) that of the original—as with the Aguilera/Eve/Lil Kim/Pink version of “Lady Marmalade,” or even The Blues Brothers’ version of “Soul Man.”  But I don’t see that happening with Beyonce’s “At Last.”  Nor was her version an artistic triumph in the manner of Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah” or Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” where an artist adds so much to the material that he or she serves to reinvent it.  As pleasant as Beyonce’s “At Last” might be, I think even the most hardcore admirer of Sasha Fierce would be hard-pressed to claim that she reinvented the James classic.  In fact, that seems like the whole point, given her performance as James in Cadillac Records, and given the intricacy with which the soundtrack’s producers recreated the sound of the original.   She was supposed to recreate Etta James’ performance, and—given the better job done by Mos Def, Jeffrey Wright, and Beyonce herself, on her version of “I’d Rather Go Blind”—I find her “At Last” especially stale and unmemorable.  (In the New Yorker, Sasha Frere-Jones praises the track, which I find odd.  I like that he draws parallels between the lyrics and the Obamas’ historic accomplishment, but I can’t see how that is made any stronger by having Beyonce sing the tune, rather than Etta James, who’s performed the song since the Jim Crow era.)

I’m further puzzled, and somewhat disappointed, by the fact that the complete absence of James from any of Obama’s inauguration proceedings (or the accompanying hoopla) isn’t at all consistent with the new administration’s clear love and appreciation for American music and musicians.  The “We Are One” concert surely had plenty of cheeseball moments, but I, at least, was moved by several moments throughout the event: Bruce Springsteen singing “The Rising” with a gospel choir, Stevie Wonder joining with Shakira and Usher on “Higher Ground,” Bettye Lavette (!) and Jon Bon Jovi delivering “A Change Is Gonna Come,” and Pete Seeger’s astounding singing of the banned verses of “This Land Is Your Land” as a climax.  Aretha Franklin recalled Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson when she sang at the actual inauguration.  Obama quoted “A Change Is Gonna Come” in his election-night speech.  His campaign soundtrack included Brooks And Dunn, U2, The Staple Singers and Will.I.Am.  He loves Blood On The Tracks. He listens to Rihanna on Air Force One.  Hell, he even happily endorses his children’s love for The Jonas Brothers.

So it’s a strange series of events.  I don’t want to overlook the personal element to this: James surely feels affronted that the song she made a classic is now being sung by somebody else.  James’ sense of ownership over “At Last” reveals that—no matter who owns the copyright—the association of a performer and a song works very deeply into our cultural memory.  Still, this incident strikes me as symbolic of something more than the simple yet significant question of artistic ownership.  It’s also about history, specifically the often tense relationship between the soul and hip-hop generations.

The brilliant Mark Anthony Neal has actually referred to a “post-soul” generation of African-Americans, whose desires and responsibilities—whether political, social or artistic—can’t be fully understood in the older soul paradigm.  (Kinda like Obama’s relationship to the Civil Rights generation of Black leadership, actually…)  It’s not that either James or Knowles is invoking this dynamic through their words or actions in this spat, nor do I imagine that Beyonce’s “At Last” will ultimately be more famous or revered than Etta James’.   Still, the fact remains that Knowles is the one who will be associated with “At Last” at this pivotal moment in African-American history (or American history, for that matter), and it seems a shame that the long journey to this moment couldn’t include a bit of room for Etta James.  (This is in spite of the fact that she may or may not personally support Barack Obama.)  If nothing else, James’ outburst is a reminder—from a surprising source, directed at a surprising target—that we’re not only a far way from being “post-racial” in these United States, but also that even this great moment of symbolic triumph is seared through with divisions and unfinished business, particularly for those who bridge these two key epochs in Black history.  Jesse Jackson cried when Obama was elected; he also threatened to (figuratively) castrate Obama during the campaign, over a disagreement in rhetoric and tactic.  This kind of disagreement within Black politics (or anybody’s politics) ain’t new, of course, but Obama’s election understandably makes those questions all the more acute.  Maybe it’s a stretch to connect the Jackson/Obama incident to that of James/Knowles…but maybe it’s not.

There’s also another, more obvious, precedent for this.  Remember, this is the second time in a year that Beyonce has been called out by an R&B legend over her sense of musical history.  Last year, Aretha Franklin vehemently criticized Knowles for calling Tina Turner “the queen” during the Grammy ceremony, and now—almost to the day—Etta James fires back with her own rebuke.  They are different cases, surely, but each traces back to the belief among a legendary woman of African-American music that a member of the newer generation isn’t properly respecting the soul-generation elders who came before her.  I’ve read several people refer to both Franklin and James being “divas” in their public smackdowns of Knowles, or to the situations being some kind of “battle of the divas.”  I won’t deny that there’s some serious ego-tripping going on by all concerned.  Let’s also remember that Beyonce embraces the term, and asserts that “a diva is a female version of a hustler,” on the new album’s “Diva,” a strutting dance track that’s drenched in the sounds of Houston hip-hop.  There’s a damn blurry line, though, between “acting like a diva,” and simply being assertive, especially when you’re female.  (In fact, don’t songs like Beyonce’s “Diva” represent an attempt to reveal and even celebrate that fact?)  So to simply chalk this up as a “battle of divas,” or even a “battle of the female versions of a hustler,” would be to not only lose sight of the ball, but also to fall into a gendered trap that makes the issue less serious than it is.

Race and gender politics are everywhere in popular music, as are battles and negotiations over the meanings of musical history, and what music means to history more generally.  I don’t think that the hope I felt (and still feel) over the election of Barack Obama and the events that surrounded it are in any way dimmed by this.  In fact, my hope is strangely strengthened, since—like the best soul music—this incident reminds me that the recognition of conflict, and the attempts to work through it, are part and parcel of achieving the true community that Obama’s election symbolically represented.   Moreover, it also reminds me that popular music and the musicians who make it are going to help us on that journey.  Even if it’s only because they, like us, don’t always get along.