Filed under: It's a Living..., Music | Tags: Dalnews, Halifax Commons, Paul McCartney, The Beatles
It’s not often that my blogging life and my professional career crossover. More often than not, I consider McNutt Against the Music an outlet for writing in styles and on subjects that I don’t get to play around with in my day-to-day communications work with Dalhousie University.
However, this Saturday’s Paul McCartney concert provided a unique opportunity to mashup my two worlds with one another. Often when a big cultural event comes to town, we’ll put together a story for Dalnews – our online newspaper – that interviews our resident experts on the topic. But our local Beatlemaniacs are very familiar faces to our readers, as we’ve done extensive coverage on both of them (especially Jason Brown, who got a ton of attention this past fall for solving the opening chord of “A Hard Day’s Night” using mathematical theory).
So my editor gave me the freedom to try something a bit different this time – sharing my own McCartney experience from Coachella earlier this year and my thoughts on the Beatle’s legacy, as well as comments and observations from our rock and roll researchers. The result is a weird amalgam of a blog post and a news article, and it’s the sort of thing I’d like to find more opportunities to do in the future.
A quick disclaimer before I share the link. In the second part of the story, I write the following:
Being a younger music fan in the 21st century sometimes feels like an endless search for a party that’s already come and gone. We’re constantly told about a mythical “golden age” of rock and roll that we missed out on, canonized in best-of lists and classic rock radio stations. Making matters worse is that so few of those iconic figureheads are still with us for my generation to experience first-hand.
What I cut out of the story in the editing process is the part where I explain the problems with this approach: namely, that it unfairly reduces the music made after the “golden age” to second-tier status. It’s an idea that I’ve explored briefly here at the blog – “…in which McNutt thinks the kids wanna rock, but struggles to figure out why” – but it’s a topic I’d like to return to at some point, and is probably good addendum to make to the story as a whole.
But now, to the story:
It took a pilgrimage to the desert to find the elusive Beatle.
I was standing shoulder-to-shoulder with 160,000 concertgoers on a massive polo field in the town of Indio, California, about 200 kilometres east of Los Angeles. It had been an exhausting first day of the Coachella music festival as I frantically rushed from stage to stage, hoping to catch as many hipster-approved artists as possible, artists such as Franz Ferdinand, Conor Oberst and the Hold Steady. But as Morrisey left the main stage and the crowd condensed, all the collected exhaustion seemed to dissipate into the cooling California night. The buzz began to grow for what would become, for almost everyone, the defining performance of the weekend.
That’s when Sir Paul McCartney walked onto stage and blasted into Jet.
Read the rest of “McCartney and me” at dalnews.dal.ca.
Maybe it’s just my circle of music geek fans, but there seemed to be more discussion and debate about this year’s Polaris Music Prize process more than in years past. This, obviously, is a good thing – I know that the organizers have put a lot of time, effort and heart into making Polaris a legitimate celebration of Canadian music and it’s great to see them working to continuously improve not only the process but the promotion of the award.
Today, the longlist of 40 records got reduced to 10. I predicted six out of the ten correctly (I really wish I hadn’t pulled Elliott Brood off my list at the last minute). Here’s the finalists:
- Elliott Brood - Mountain Meadows
- Fucked Up – The Chemistry of Common Life
- Great Lake Swimmers - Lost Channels
- Hey Rosetta! – Into Your Lungs
- K’NAAN – Troubadour
- Malajube – Labyrinthes
- Metric – Fantasies
- Joel Plaskett – Three
- Chad VanGaalen – Soft Airplane
- Patrick Watson – Wooden Arms
A few personal favourites of mine in there (Hey Rosetta!, Metric), a few records that I’ve been meaning to explore but haven’t gotten around to yet (Fucked Up, Elliott Brood) and, yes, a couple that I think aren’t the artist’s best work but are just the kind of bands that do well in this sort of thing (Plaskett, Great Lake Swimmers). And I should have learned this from two years ago, but never bet against Patrick Watson, clearly.
The gala to present the award will take place on September 21, 2009 at the concert hall in the Masonic Temple in Toronto. As a sign of the increased attention this year, the show will not only air on Sirius radio and CBC Radio 3 online, but will be video webcast on MuchMusic.com and will air on MuchMusic thereafter. Great to see Canada’s “music television station” jumping on board.
You can learn more about the finalists and the entire Polaris process at the award’s website.
Early prediction for the winner? I said when the longlist was announced that Newfoundland’s Hey Rosetta! had a damn good chance of walking away with this thing if they made the shortlist. They fit the victory model set by Final Fantasy, Patrick Watson and Caribou in years past – notable but not super-popular, a quality record but not off-putting or abrasive, unique but not TOO unique. For now, I’m sticking with them.
Watch: Hey Rosetta! – “Red Heart”
Do we overvalue novelty in rock music?
If the best rock music thrives on the tension between the novel and the familiar, why is it that us critical types always focus our attention and praise on the former? Perhaps it’s because we condescendingly feel as if the mass audience gravitates too strongly towards comfort food in their sonic palate, leaving it to us enlightened listeners to provide a counterbalance. There’s a case to be made that our endless search for the unique says more about ourselves and our own anxieties than it says about the music.
Sometimes, though, even the most hardened, uptight music geek will succumb to the pleasures of the comfortable, especially if the songs are there to back it up. Radiohead’s In Rainbows – my top album of 2007 – was probably the least innovative record the band had put out in ten years. It’s also one of their greatest works, successfully weaving a decade of experimental tendencies in and out of a collection of fantastic songs to create a record that felt warm, lived in and instantly familiar.
Though not quite a success at the same level, Wilco (the album) succeeds in almost exactly the same way. It’s the sound of a band raiding its back catalogue for inspiration, mashing what they find against their current raison d’etre and producing their most rewarding record in years.
This is an aural arms open wide / A sonic shoulder for you to cry on
So states “Wilco (the song),” the awesomely self-aware call-to-arms that opens the record. What I love about the statement is that it’s a view of the relationship between art and artist that is rarely acknowledged rock and roll’s world of personality cults and the inseparability of biography and discography. Instead of focusing on what they’re trying to say, Jeff Tweedy and company are inviting you to find your own comforts within the songs. And they’ll love you no matter what.
Thankfully, there’s plenty on Wilco (the album) to love back, especially in light of the boring, meandering disappointment that was their last release, Sky Blue Sky. That record felt like Wilco’s current membership trying to find a sound for themselves in a vacuum, independent of their band’s long and storied history. By pulling in the sounds from that history – a bit of Being There, a bit of Summerteeth and a pinch of A Ghost is Born here and there – the six-piece incarnation of Wilco finds its identity as a comfortable, insanely capable amalgam of its past, present and future.
There are a couple of lesser moments – “Country Disappeared” is a bit slow and “Deeper Down” continues the band’s three-records-in-a-row streak of totally cramping their style on track two – the record is mostly hit after hit. You get the brilliantly claustrophobic, kraut-rock riff of “Bull Black Nova,” the country stomp of “You Never Know,” and two of the band’s best ballads in some time with “You And I” and “Solitaire.” None of these don’t tread any ground that the band hasn’t covered before, mind you, and there’s a case to be made that Wilco (the album) is the least distinctive record in the band’s career. But the title is accurate – it’s the most distinctively Wilco record that Wilco have ever made.
This is normally the part of the review where I would explain why that’s a problem. But it’s not. Because sometimes, it’s the familiar that will love you baby…
Watch: Wilco – “You Never Know” (live on at the Wiltern – bootleg)
Filed under: Music | Tags: Dinosaur Jr., halifax, Handsome Furs, Hey Rosetta, metric, Plants and Animals, The Offspring, The Tragically Hip, virgin festival
To say that this was a complicated week for the Halifax edition of the Virgin Music Festival would be an understatement.
First was the announcement circa Thursday/Friday that tickets were not only available at a two-for-one price, but that the deal was retroactive: people who’d already purchased tickets could now bring along a friend to the gates at no extra charge. Festival organizers spun this with almost hilarious confidence, saying that ticket sales were “brisk” and that this was merely a way to let more Haligonians take advantage of a great show. That, my friends, is what we call “bullshit.”
Things took a turn for the even worse on Friday afternoon, when headliner The Tragically Hip announced they would be unable to perform due to an unspecified urgent family emergency. Now a festival that was already literally GIVING tickets away no longer had its top draw. When you add in the fact that Halifax has been going through the worst stretch of summer weather in years – rain and drizzle for almost two weeks straight – with a forecast for more dreariness on concert day, things were looking crazy bleak for Halifax’s first Virgin Fest.
So give credit to Virgin Mobile for making the best of very bad circumstances. Cutting their losses for the sake of brand promotion, Virgin announced that not only would they be refunding everyone’s ticket costs, but the show would go on with the rest of the lineup still intact. Oh, and it was going to be free and open to anyone in Halifax.
Those that took advantage of the desperate generosity got treated to a rather impressive – if muddy – day of alternative rock. Days of dampness followed by torrential rains in the morning left the Wanderers Grounds on Citadel Hill a muddy mess, easily the worst sludge the city’s seen since the Rolling Stones concert three years ago. But the music was solid and, for many, would have been worth the ticket price.
After sets from Dog Day, In-Flight Safety and the Arkells, Montreal three-piece Plants and Animals put on a solid demonstration for why they’re one of the best up-and-coming indie bands in Canada and were followed by a typically crowd-pleasing performance from Hey Rosetta, although both sets felt quite short. Originally V-Fest was supposed to have two alternating stages, eliminating downtime between bands and allowing for longer set times. As a cost-cutting measure only one stage was used, so most of the earlier bands got shortchanged.
My two favourite sets of the day belonged to the Handsome Furs and Dinosaur Jr. The Furs actually performed while Dinosaur Jr.’s gear was on stage, which was a bit of an amusing juxtaposition: this punky, minimalist duo surrounded by J. Mascis’ Stonehenge of Amplifiers. But they were the two highest energy performances of the day, the Furs with their blistering stage presence and Dinosaur Jr. through sheer volume. I expect that the latter’s cover of “Just Like Heaven” – a standard of their set – was a highlight for many.
I’ve now seen Metric twice outdoors and twice indoors, and no matter how much they try they never quite seem as comfortable in the elements. They also made some weird set choices: “Twilight Galaxy” was as strange an opening as “Stadium Love” was underwhelming as a closer, and the absence of hits like “Combat Baby” and “Poster of a Girl” was noticed. But the big tracks still kill: I never tire of how they reinvent the bridge of “Dead Disco” different every time.
As for the Offspring, well, I won’t lie and say that there wasn’t some nostalgic entertainment going on – there’s a photo on a camera somewhere of my mid-late 20s peers and I dancing an awkward white punk jig to something off of Smash – but there’s always something a bit strange about seeing a band going through the motions only a decade past its prime. A fun set – I had heard disastrous things about Dexter Holland’s vocals, and they weren’t terrible by any stretch – but a somewhat forgettable one.
All in all, the music of Virgin Fest Halifax hardly dissatisfied. The disappointment, then, was the festival’s failure to attract an audience. Admittedly, it’s a difficult summer to put together a festival (with a competitive calendar and an economic downturn) but last year’s SummerSonic was also a turnout disappointment. And while the V-Fest lineup may not have been populist enough to pull in huge numbers, festival organizers were budgeting for a reasonable 15,000; even at free, they only got just about 9,000 according to “estimates.” It seems like our city’s standing on the alternative rock touring circuit is in an awkward in-between state: we would get more fans out with bigger bands, but we can’t turn out enough fans for the smaller acts to justify those bigger bands. We’re stuck in the mud.
EDIT: After initial news stories – such as The Chronicle Herald – claimed 9,000 fans, promoters are now claiming a crowd of double that. I have no idea quite who to believe.
After the break, photos of the day’s acts…
This would be so much easier if I could just tell you that Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a bad movie. And if you’re just looking for a simple “yay/nay” reaction, I assure you that it’s about as “nay” as it can get. But leaving it at that would be doing you, dear reader, a great disservice.
You see, Revenge of the Fallen is not just a bad movie. It is one of the most mind-bogglingly, absurdly, incomprehensibly bad films that I’ve ever sat through. It’s not the kind of bad movie that you laugh off and forget once it’s over – its awfulness sticks with you, lingering for days as you wrestle with how any combination of human beings could put so much blood, sweat and tears into such a colossal disaster. Did they know? Were they powerless to stop it? What the hell happened?
If I didn’t know any better, I’d be tempted to believe that Revenge of the Fallen was a deconstructionist satire of a Michael Bay film, taking all of the things film snobs deride the director for and amplifying them to a comic extreme. For example:
- Bay doesn’t just give the audience cookie-cutter characters, but actually forces us to spend FAR more time with them than the robots. (Don’t believe the trailers – this is more a Shia/Megan movie than an Optimus/Megatron movie.)
- The movie attempts to adapt Bay’s trademark slo-mo, always-moving camera work to heartfelt love scenes, with hilarious results.
- Not only does the film use recently-released rock music to soundtrack its big scenes, but it actually re-uses the same Green Day song (”21 Guns”) FIVE TIMES, just to drill the point home.
- Instead of just off-colour humour, we get a film full of awful jokes that range from the juvenile to the out-and-out racist (not just the “jive talkin’” robots you’ve heard about, but a quick one-shot of a buck-toothed black man that has to be seen to be believed).
- Forget a “by the numbers” plot – Revenge forgets entire subplots, characters and story arcs at various points in its running time. The moment you stop to think – why, if a Transformer can appear human to wreck havoc in hiding, don’t they ALL do this? – you’re whisked away to another location for another incomprehensible adventure.
- Bay’s saving grace has been his action scenes, but in Revenge they make as little sense as the plot. There’s no visual organization to them other than “loud.” Bay introduces a ridiculous amount of new Transformers and then just has them smash up against each other incomprehensibly. I’m still not quite sure who lived and who died when all was said and done.
Now these are the standard complaints that most critics level against dumb action movies, including the first Transformers. But deeply flawed and unbelievably stupid as it was, the first Transformers was also endearingly fun (you can read my review from two years ago here). Moviegoers – even those of us with blogs – are usually willing to forgive glaring imperfections if the overall experience comes together. Revenge, in contrast, spends 2.5 hours smashing you in the face with its colossal imperfections, using sheer unadulterated force to try and convince you that what you’re seeing is ACTUALLY awesome, in spite of all evidence to the contrary. It’s more akin to a short-term abusive relationship than a filmgoing experience.
What’s particularly confounding is how the same creative team could follow Transformers with a sequel that basically takes everything you hated about it and builds a movie around it. I mean, seriously, did anyone sit through Transformers and think, “They’re spending too much time on character development with these robots. Let’s devote more screen time to the humans instead!” Or how about, “I loved the part when the robot urinated on the other robot. Hey, if robots can piss, shouldn’t they have testicles too?” Or how about, “This Optimus Prime guy who does all the talking isn’t really that important. How about in the sequel we just get rid of him for most of the running time?”
If the answer to any of these questions is “yes,” Revenge of the Fallen is the movie for you.
There’s part of me that could conceivably forgive ALL of this if Revenge of the Fallen was still fun. Most damningly of all, it’s actually an incredibly boring movie. Bay has done such an extreme job of excising the foundations of filmmaking from his “film” that even its action scenes are rendered impotent on arrival. The best scene in the movie is the forest battle at its midpoint – its ONLY other two action beats (the opening and closing) are quick-edit exercises in confusion, where you really don’t know what’s going on because Bay has spent so little time focusing on his robots as characters. Bay spends a good 3/4 of the film following around LaBeouf and Fox as they piece together a plot hardly worth remembering and then expects us to be entertained by shiny machines crashing into one another.
Two years ago, while reviewing the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie, I talked about “The Death of Wow” – the idea that North American audiences had reached a point where CGI animation alone was no longer enough to entertain without plot and character driving it. I’m not certain how on-target I was with that because Revenge of the Fallen feels like it’s both the TRUE Death of Wow while also representing its twisted, morbid ressurection as an ironic joke. Every shot of Revenge feels both exepensive and cheap, laboured and underthought, intentional and manic. The film is loud and assaultive and yet, somehow, also slow and plodding at the same time. No matter how you try and make sense of it, Revenge of the Fallen is a confounding meta-masterpiece, as befuddling as it is breathtakingly bad.
Watch: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen trailer
