Are the exile and marginality that are contemplated in the band’s songs the results of consciousness and choice, or imposition by others? Are the characters in the songs pariahs because they are artists and intellectuals, because they are poor, ethnic, female, queer, or other?
Category: Music reviews
Excellence, Three Ladies of Song: Ella Fitzgerald’s Best of the Song Books, Diana Ross’s Blue, and Natalie Cole’s Leavin’
Ethel Waters, Josephine Baker, Lena Horne, and Nancy Wilson are singers whose works contain more than three colors in their palette, singers whose voices are capable of sounding more than tones of anger, lust, and pain, singers whose work is…
In the Shadow of the Past: John Legend, Once Again
The themes of John Stephens’s songs are variations on romance, and the songs resist cliché to the extent that they are imaginative or realistic, as the need (or case) may be. The collection’s first song—in which the singer asks someone…
Troubadour: Eric Bibb’s A Ship Called Love
Beauty is not always simple, and brilliance and excellence are not simple. The relationship of one kind of ethic to another—for instance, an ethic founded in reason, science and civil liberties versus a religious ethic—is not simple. By Daniel Garrett…
Looks Nothing Like Jesus: The Killers’ Sam’s Town
Light percussion, then a speeding beat and swirling music, then tiny techno beats, followed by heavier drumming and a voice and lyric lines about the inertia of others and the singer’s sense of his own energy and destiny begin the…
Images of Women: Beyonce’s B’Day
Beyonce, like Diana Ross before her, knows of the many women performers who have preceded her own arrival on the public stage, and has offered compliments to them: and Beyonce is trying to place herself in a flattering locale within that tradition and that ambition involves manners and methods dangerous, enriching, exciting, and easy to misunderstand.
Masculine, Nurturing: Ben Harper’s Both Sides of the Gun
In a song co-written with Danny Kalb, “More Than Sorry,” Ben Harper sings “Goodbye hasn’t been so good to me” and “We all think that we’re right” and “Too many people say goodbye before they say hello,” and concludes, “What…
The Ordinary Lives of Intelligent People: Belle and Sebastian’s If You’re Feeling Sinister
Boredom and pleasure and violence seem the boundaries of the experiences described in several songs. A girl in “If You’re Feeling Sinister” is described thusly: “She was into S&M and bible studies.” (It is to laugh—or weep: the contradictions are less immoral than merely telling: and they tell of contradictory human impulses so strong that each aspect cannot destroy the other but may reinforce somehow the other.)
Fresh Vision, New Sounds: Bright Eyes’ Digital Ash in a Digital Urn
Does one affirm, then move toward, truth over lie, love over hate, and life over death? (How to make these—and other—choices dynamic, vivid? Present them in art—in books, dance, film, music, painting, and theater. How to emphasize that dualities such as life and death are deeply bound? Explore philosophy.)
Imagination and International Perspective: Devendra Banhart’s Cripple Crow
In “Now That I Know,” Devendra Banhart sings, “You got to pay back every penny you owe,” and Banhart sings in a low, hushed but clear voice, and a guitar’s notes create a solemn mood as the song explores debt, secrecy, time passing, travel, elusive connections, and there are assertions of honesty and talk of glory.