David Cantwell writes:

We spend so much of our time here honoring those who’ve passed away that I sometimes think Dying in Stereo would’ve been a better name for what we’re up to. It’s been that way since we started in March of ‘06–two of our first five posts were obits, one for Don Knotts, the other for songwriter Cindy Walker–and it stayed that way in 2007. And, inevitably, this trend will persist in 2008.

This year, like every year, brought the deaths of a dreary litany of good and great artists. We recently mourned the passing here of both Porter Wagoner (1, 2, 3 times) and Ike Turner, and earlier in ‘07 there was Kirk Rundstrom of Split Lip Rayfield, Henson Cargill, and Boots Randolph, as well as rememberances of the deaths of Elvis Presley and Otis Redding.

We did not , but should have, written about so many more musicians, writers, filmmakers, and other artists who died this year: Michaelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, Teresa Brewer, Bobby Byrd, Brad Delp of Boston, Dan Fogelberg, Robert Goulet, Lee Hazelwood, Billy Henderson (of the Spinners), Andrew Hill, Don Ho, Funk Brother pianist Joe Hunter, Luther Ingram, Molly Ivins, Frankie Laine, Norman Mailer, Janis “the Female Elvis” Martin, author and social activist Tillie Olsen, Oscar Peterson, Pimp C, Del Reeves, Max Roach, Hank Thompson, Eric Von Schmidt, Kurt Vonnegut, photographer Ernest Withers, and Joe Zawinul.

There are likely many others I’ve missed.

I don’t want to make it sound as if we are experiencing anything new here. To paraphrase an artist very much alive in ‘07, the singer-songwriter and would-be rock star Tommy Womack (his There, I Said It would make my long list of the year’s best discs), people die, that’s what they do, they do it everyday…always have and always will. But what is new–new, that is, for people more or less my age; I’m 46–is that our artistic heroes, the men and women who helped form our aesthetic sensibilities and, in some cases, got us through tough times as we grew up, are now themsevles of an age where we can expect them to be dropping, as they say, like flies right up until we drop ourselves.

This is especially poignant because we also live in an era when artists don’t necessarily have to fade away once they get older as was mostly the case a decade or two ago. They may not have made music that gets on the radio, but 2007 albums by Porter Wagoner, Mavis Staples, Bettye Lavette, John Fogerty, go-go legend Chuck Brown, Nick Lowe, John Anderson, the Holmes Brothers, Gene Watson, Merle Haggard, Dwight Yoakam, Marie Knight, Mary D. Williams, Robert Plant, and Bruce Springsteen–all AARP eligible–were among the year’s best. And in many instances, among the artists’ career bests, as well.

One development that did my heart good this year, then, was that there was so much new music that seemed to draw upon the work of artists like those listed above–sometimes quite specifically using the sounds of those who’d come before but even more often working similarly full and complex emotional ground.

Not so long ago, irony was king, at least in white boy guitar rock–and I mean irony not just in the sense of contradiction, which is inherent in the world so necessary to art, but irony deployed to distance artist and listener alike from life’s joys and pains. But that kind of irony seemed mostly dead to me in ‘07, replaced again by music interested in an embracing of both the silly and the serious, often simultaneously, an admission that all lives come with pain and risk and joy and that the best (maybe the only) way to make it through is to face the world head on.

This has been building for a while, post 9/11 and post invasion, and as, for instance, U2’s and/or Bruce Springsteen’s influence has made itself more obviously felt among younger artists like Marah, the Hold Steady, Scott Miller, the Artic Monkeys, Arcade Fire, the National and so many others. But to my ears, the New Earnest, if you will, seemed to reach a tipping point this year where it was no longer building but was simply…here.

So, in the spirit of celebrating what was alive this year, here are a few of my favorites, briefly noted…The Avett Brothers’ album, aptly and unabashedly entitled Emotionalism, for instance, and in particular the track “Shame”…Okkervil River’s The Stage Names and their single of the year candidate “Unless Its Kicks,” which combines elements of U2 and the Cure (has anyone else noticed that Robert Smith has emerged as the vocal influence for many of today’s young rock singers?) for an anthem that may well trump both… Country singer Joe Nichols’ “Ain’t No Crime, which insists as Bruce Springsteen did once before that it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.

There were innumerable other examples of what I’m talking about, maybe you can think of others in this shift I sense, but one moment summed it up best for me. Gogol Bordello’s Super Taranta! begins with a thickly accented a capella sing-shout that says to hell with keeping life at arm’s length:

“If we are here not to do what you and I want to do–and forever go crazy with it–why the hell we even here?”

That line reminded me of James Baldwin’s masterpiece “Sonny’s Blues,” and in particular the conversation in that story where Sonny hears his brother tell him that, ”Well, Sonny…you know people can’t always do exactly what they want to do,” and then replies to that caution counsel with real passion: “No, I don’t know that…I think people ought to do what they want to do, what else are they alive for?”

Of course, if we really agree with Sonny, and if we really want to live like that, we are tied to each other to make it happen. And we must necessarily shoulder some heavy burdens along with our new found freedom, the most basic burden being an awareness that life comes with a bright and a sunny side and with a dark side too, with birth and with death–let’s call it Living in Stereo–and so we’d better get to living.

Happy New Year.

The Avett Brothers “Shame” from Emotionalism

Okkervil River “Unless It’s Kicks” from The Stage Names

Joe Nichols “Ain’t No Crime” from Real Things

Gogol Bordello “Ultimate” from Super Taranta!

This entry was posted on Friday, December 28th, 2007 at 5:21 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.