Music Notes

The musical criticism you want to read right now is Tressie McMillan Cottom on Dolly Parton. She has a long essay thinking of Dolly’s enormous popularity in terms of race and what she ultimately represents:

With that appetite at the ready, a Southern-womanhood Frankenstein, like the pastiche of the region’s white cultural iconography Dolly grafts onto her childhood poverty, is powerful stuff. And Dolly can really sell it. Her authenticity rings with the charm we demand of Southern womanhood. We let her performance disarm us because we come to her wanting to be disarmed. Dolly gives us that in a package that also calls out to the imperative that the soul of America prevail and, above all else, prevail without consequence. It is an inconvenient truth that no one gets as rich as Dolly Parton in this country without trading in some aspect of our worst impulses. It simply cannot be done, not even by Dolly Parton. 

As important as her songwriting is to her success, Dolly’s most important writing is the monomyth she stitched from Southern crises and American exceptionalism. She is a working class warrior who got rich, but no one hates her for it. She turned herself into a feminine ideal that trades in the most grotesque ideas of eugenic whiteness — pale skin, blonde hair, thin body, big breasts. Yet no one calls her out for being sizeist or ageist. And, she has remained Southern in affect and performance, while pursuing a non-Southern audience from the outset of her career. That she has held our interest so long and could still be relatively unblemished enough to ascend to an unproblematic fave in the sixth decade of her career is owed to Dolly’s craft — and to something more. Her performance of blondeness is a very particular thread of race and gender and class. How Dolly has gotten away with performing so many challenged identities while completely escaping critique resonates with audiences that consume the South precisely for the hope that whiteness still matters. As for the rest of us, well, we are here for the blonde ambitions.

When you think of “a blonde,” you aren’t thinking about Beyoncé or Jennifer Lopez no matter how blonde they are at the moment. It isn’t because their hair color is unnatural. Almost all of the world’s “blondes” get that way through chemical intervention. But a blonde is a body with a cultural history of purity, power, and inheritance. Dolly Parton could have chosen any kind of poor Southern woman to caricaturize, of any size or hair color or shape. She certainly is enthusiastic about body modification and performative gender. And the performance she chose is a blonde. When pop culture leverages “blonde”, it is always as an unmarked racial identity. Blonde is code for white. That code channels oppression and desire, beckoning us only to exclude most of us. Dolly massaged that dual power to infuse her ambition with enough charm to become famous, as she has wanted since she was a child. Watching her wield that power is seductive, and it doesn’t just work on cultural tourists and Southern purists. 

Cottom, like the rest of us, loves Dolly, but her critique of Dolly as the nation’s ultimate post-racial artist with all the problems that leads to really is first rate criticism. She followed that up with a discussion of the drag side of Dolly:

I wrestled with the subversiveness of Dolly’s drag. It certainly provides a critique of gender and class. But I could not get over why that drag did not, well, liberate. I parsed this as the difference between subverting an oppressive stereotype and revolutionizing the oppression that stereotypes. Dolly may subvert, but does she revolutionize?

The proof is in the pudding, as we might say. There is a clear color line in Dolly drag performances. Apparently, we know Dolly is for cosplaying whiteness even if we have never thought about it. For as much as drag has expanded our repertoire on gender and sexuality, mainstream drag deflates when it approaches the boundaries of our racial imagination. If a drag performance subverts a gender stereotype by reifying a racial stereotype, just how radical can it be? I still do not have a satisfactory answer to that question but thinking about the revolutionary capacity of Dolly’s white, trashy drag pushed me into a surprising space of discovery.

Can we think of Solomon Burke as a country star? I don’t really see why not. I am far from the first person to point out the many, many similarities between country and R&B between the 50s and 70s. There’s a reason Ray Charles recorded multiple albums of country songs and lots of country artists also covered R&B songs. They are both musical genres of straightforward songs about working class people dealing with life, love, and loss. In many cases, the biggest resistance to think about these connections comes from the fanbases of both genres and that’s primarily for racial reasons and the cultural work both genres have done over the years. But the musicians? They were listening to everything.

On the astounding king of modern jazz, William Parker.

If you insist on paying me $500 to slap you for your music video, I suppose I can oblige.

The University of Montana is in abject collapse, with enrollment numbers plummeting and the liberal arts being eviscerated to the point of barely existing. It’s sad because as this oral history project of Missoula musicians demonstrates, the liberal arts can offer so much to the entire community and world. Alas.

Clubs are back open for live music in West Virginia. We’ll see how that goes….

Paul Jackson died this week. He was the bassist in Herbie Hancock’s astounding Headhunters band, probably the best of the fusion bands outside of Miles himself. I didn’t really know what happened to him after that band broke up, but I guess he was a session man on a huge number of recordings. So that’s good. Total badass.

Also, in the larger realm of non-musical popular art, we have a lot of drinks to pour out, for Larry McMurtry, for George Segal, for Jessica Walter, for Beverly Cleary, for Bertrand Tavernier. Tough week. Lot of greats are gone.

Album Reviews:

Tony Allen, The Source

One of the last albums by the great Nigerian afrobeat drummer, this is basically a straightforward jazz album with African influences. Most of the musicians are French jazz players and of course Allen brought his magic. This is effectively American music; Allen’s previous Blue Note release had been an Art Blakey tribute album. And yet the beauty of the playing shows that jazz has no national boundaries.

A-

Julia Wolfe, Fire in My Mouth

Brilliant set of compositions about the Triangle Fire by this composer increasingly interested in writing orchestral pieces about American labor history. These are big orchestra pieces with a 146 person women’s choir, one singer for each of the people killed in that sweatshop in 1911. There are four pieces: “Immigration,” “Factory,” “Protest,” and “Fire.” Each takes us through these women’s lives in quite evocative ways. I guess this was designed as a full multi-media presentation and some critiqued the visuals as not nearly as inventive as the music. But I can only discuss the album and I thought it was great. Sure, yeah, I like the politics, but that’s not really it. It’s that Wolfe makes good art. Good politics in bad art is not useful. Bad politics in good art is deeply problematic, but I can live with it if I like the art enough. But good politics in great art, that’s something that really inspires. The New York Philharmonic is the orchestra here so you sure can’t critique the quality of the musicianship.

A

The 1975, Notes on a Conditional Form

I really don’t get what is going on here, but it’s a good counterpoint to the discussion of the relationship between politics and art I discussed above. This album starts off with a 5 minute Greta Thunberg speech over a minimalist electronic background. OK, I only need to hear that once, but fine, it’s going to be an introduction to a political album. Then it goes into “People” which is a heavy-industrial protest song. I’m like, OK, this is interesting. But then much of the rest of the album is pure sap cheese, confessional in all the worst ways, boring, and musically uninspiring, whether the songs are the political ones or not. The reviews for this album are among the most polarized I’ve ever read, with a few reviewers loving it, a few despising it, and quite a few deeply ambivalent. I tend more toward dislike than ambivalent. Despite some interesting moments, most of this is eminently forgettable and nigh well unlistenable. In addition, the album goes on forever, clocking in at an unforgivable 80 minutes. Make this a 40 minute album that cuts out most of the crap and you might have something worth keeping.

C-

Rodrigo y Gabriela, Mettavolution

How much flamenco and rock influenced Mexican-style acoustic guitar does one want to hear? That’s the fundamental question when deciding to embark on a Rodrigo y Gabriela album. This question is even more critical when it gets to a live album, which either means they are going to take a style you love and expand upon it or that the songs you don’t much care for anyway are going to extend interminably. I am mostly ambivalent on the question, but in a live setting, ambivalence is going to get one to trend into the annoying side of the equation. In the end, I just wanted it to be over with. They are both outstanding guitar players with good rock and pop sensibilities, can’t deny that. I’m not really complaining about the 21 minute cover of Pink Floyd’s “Echoes.” And I’m not complaining about their compositional skills either. I am however saying that this is a fans only release that I don’t need to hear again.

B-

Deathprod, Occulting Disk

OK…….this “anti-fascist ritual” as the liner notes claim is a series of tones from the Norwegian artist who goes by death rituals entering into the darkness of silence. The extent to which someone is going to appreciate this is pretty well precisely based on how that description sounds to you. The idea of pulses of energy as music has plenty of roots in both contemporary classical, in ambient music, in metal, and in electronica and there’s a bit of all of that in here. Someone on the Bandcamp site described it as “Mahler for the 23rd century,” which may be helpful. For me, I get it intellectually, but I really don’t need to hear an hour of it. Hard to actually evaluate something like this.

Surprisingly, there doesn’t seem to be anything from this on YouTube, so here’s another work by the same artist.

C+

Bob Dylan, Rough and Rowdy Ways

The latest Dylan was met with acclaim. That’s because he’s Bob Dylan and every time he releases a decent album, it’s considered a major cultural event. Well, this is a fine album. That’s what it is. Fine. It’s not better than fine. It is fine.

Dylan can’t sing anymore but that’s not it. Lots of artists, old guys especially, can’t really sing. And this has nothing to do with his execrable live performances. It’s just that the songs are mostly just alright. The JFK assassination song is a full 16 minutes long but feels like 16 hours of Boomer reflections. There are some good tunes here, for sure. But here’s the thing–most of Dylan’s albums have been no better than fine and often quite a bit worse than that for the last 45 years. Like Love and Theft and Time Out of Mind, this is a worthy addition to his canon. It’s probably a tick below both of those. After those, the quality gets quite a bit lower.

But the thing is that no artist should get the benefit of the doubt from their past work. The work is the work. It needs to be evaluated on its own merits. This work, if it’s not by Bob Dylan, is a minor release of some good but often quite too long songs. What is surely is not is a top 10 album of 2020, as so many year end lists had it.

B

Bjork, Utopia

I always feel the same way about Bjork, which is why I don’t really listen to her that much. When I hear one of her albums, I know I am listening to well-crafted music by a real genius. But I also feel like it’s a lot of work for me to get through it. Given that I like free jazz, working through an album usually doesn’t bother me much. I think it’s that her preferred microbeat palette just isn’t my cup of tea. Anyway, I finally got to her latest album and it’s pretty much the same. Huge talent that I just don’t enjoy that much.

B

Katie Melua, Album No. 8

This is a perfectly nice set of tunes from this pop-rock singer who is a huge star in England and some other European nations but a lot less so on this side of the pond. It’s fine. Way too Laurel Canyon 70s scene (the death influence of so many albums) combined with some interesting post-punk moments and as a good divorce album contains some solid lyrical moments.

B

Welp, still didn’t get to a 2021 release this week. Maybe next week!

As always, this is an open thread for all things music and art and none things politics or disease.