Live Music Review: Old Ceremony

Art has a hard time continuing to breathe and grow when in hostile environments. The competition of New York and LA are great places for artists to go once they are established so they can test their mettle against other established artists, but as for the original creation, that is best kept in the safety of a little supportive hometown. The indigenous culture of the south, unapologetically and uncontrollably comfortable in its own skin, fosters original voices as readily as the rain forests breed new forms of life.
Friday, I had the great pleasure of experiencing the proof of this influence in person. Reacting on a whim, after having heard Old Ceremony on the radio earlier in the day, I decided to venture into the rainy evening to measure their quality in person against the quality I heard on the radio, which was very high. They met and exceeded my expectations by a long shot. Having followed an excellent, upbeat band from Asheville called Floating Action, Old Ceremony had their work cut out for them.
The skinny lead singer, wearing a black suit with a red shirt, reminiscent of the cars front man Ric Ocasek, exuded the cool and his band backed him up with the musical chops necessary to fill out the show. The crowd exuberantly nodded in an uncontrollable connection to the melody driven lyrical prowess of the band and the small club connected by an invisible tether. Like their song "Plate-tec-tonics," the ground seemed to move underneath the club and everyone's feet rummaged against the floor in unison. The show escalated in intensity as the band fed off of the crowd and hands came out of pockets to clap to the beats. The diverse crowd slowly shook off their cool exteriors as they inched towards the stage in a hip grooving undulation.
The show climaxed in a cover of The Velvet Underground's "I'm waiting for my man," which fittingly cast a glance back to the founders of the music that allowed groups like Old Ceremony to exist. The final song of the evening was an acoustic, non-amplified version of "Wither on the Vine," that drew the crowd into an irish pub sing-along mode of comradery reverent of the The Band's Last Waltz or a good episode of Cheers. Satisfied with the expenditure of all of the 800 cents necessary to gain entry to this show, upon exiting there was a feeling that we had all experienced something that created a community. The crowd will see each other in other scenarios, wink and nod, with the knowledge that hey, that person knows what good music is, and I'm glad to say that I do now too.

Hipster Films must stop!

Between 500 Days of Summer and Paper Heart, I have officially grown a massive hatred of hipster movies. If I see any more handicams, sixties retro, chuck taylors, michael cera, sweater vests, long sleeve shirts over short sleeve shirts over long sleeve shirts or indy rock soundtracks I am going to puke. If I had known Garden State would have caused such an onslaught of crap, I would have gone back in time to snipe Zach Braff and save the world the heartache of all the talented filmmakers being homogenized into, at best, what a great salmon dinner tastes like when it repeats on you.

A message to all of those out there who think that sadness makes your film great: you're a fucking asshole. If you write a movie about not actually falling in love with the same mechanical schema as regular romantic movies then all you do is dissapoint. People don't watch movies to be disapointed they watch them to escape. Escape from the banal existence where people don't get the one they love, where they don't get their dreams, where they aren't able to pull it out and make the impossible possible. There's plenty of that in the real world, stop fucking putting it into my movies where I go to get away from all the bullshit. Movies should be an inspiration. 500 Days of Summer is obviously a movie that tells itself that its ok to have 2 hours of sad painful horribleness as long as you have a 30 second snippet of faith renewal, well guess what, it doesn't take the math classes you hipsters loathe to figure out that the time doesn't equate. You still feel like shit after and your movie is still pointless as fuck.

Enough.

Finally! Rap endorses drunk driving!

For years Rap music has been the apex of both coolness and criminal activity in modern society. Although it began in the humble slums as a unified symbol of the black will to be more educated and stand by one another, ala KRS-One; CL Smooth, EPMD etc. Rap quickly devolved into what was more prevalent in the poor neighborhoods of America: crime. No one chooses to live in a ghetto unless they've already been convinced that it's their home. Certainly no one with money would live in a ghetto unless they were getting it illegally or they loved the place. Rap started with love and has been leaning more and more towards the illegal ever since the early nineties, "Fuck the police!" anyone?

What I find more interesting is that they just seemed to jump straight to murdering felons from near saints. Finally, modern rap is taking a turn towards the moderate: the party animal. Rappers chose to talk about respecting their women and then jumped straight to rape and buying women's attention while still severely disrespecting them. Now, rappers are talking about getting girls drunk, smoking weed, driving nice cars, and now finally with Kid Cudi, there is a song that talks about drinking and driving, the crime most white people do.

Enjoy:

Music Makes me believe in God

Music makes me believe in God. Some sports teams transcend their competition by way of the inspiration of one player who just alters your idea of what’s possible. Jimi Hendrix, Thelonius Monk, Stevie Ray Vaughn, these are all the Michael Jordan’s of their bands. The band exists as a competitive entity as a result of the singular effort and talent of the one individual. Although this music frequently amazes me and inspires me to what could be construed as a higher level of consciousness, the music that makes me believe in god juxtaposes the jarring rhythms of the street with a confluence of mind, body, spirit, instrument, and audience in a way that confounds the reaches of all logic and science.

When you see the Avett Brothers emotional effusions sprout from the porch-strummed banjo picking ensemble, or John Lee Hooker’s Hobo Blues rock up from the seat of your pants like you were sitting on the tracks of an impending train, you feel the hand of god reach down and infuse the inanimate in a way that only something supernatural could. Dictionary.com defines faith as “belief that is not based on proof.” The best bands exhibit their faith in one another every night; playing every song with a new soul-infused faith: faith that their bandmates will fill the silence with a beautiful solo, faith that they won’t mispluck or crack their voice at the wrong moment, faith that everyone will “get it.” The greatest moments of any band create a third entity, the song, an entity that does not exist in any of the musicians individually but intimately flows between them all simultaneously like one heart pumping the blood of every member.

Blake, as well as many others during the early romantic period, argued that man was created in the image of god not by his literal appearance but because god infused man with the ability to create, the ability to mimic gods greatest achievements, his greatest creations. The best band mixes music like a recipe in which the chefs are held at gunpoint for all misappropriations, all miscues, ruin the entire recipe, starving the audience from the soul feeding bread that they came to enjoy in unison. The best concert creates an invisible entity that everyone can see; the feelings, the ups and the downs that the band creates, the crescendos and valleys sway the heads of onlookers, homogenized by the power of the music.

The equal dispersion of talent across a band allows the listener to take responsibility for the feelings they share with the other listeners. The struggle of man is to fend off loneliness by communicating and the good band provides a forum for all to communicate simultaneously without speaking a word. The mere acknowledgement of the music allows one to recognize in another that which aches in him or herself. God, for me, never posed atop a cloud flinging lightning bolts on sinners and dividing humanity into the hell-bound and the heaven driven. God is the eventual breakdown of the mental barriers that make people think that they are unlike one another. God is the beauty of the conjoined efforts of humanity, and music presents the disease for God’s cure. When music itches, we all scratch and the unified scratching helps us to realize that we all have itches, we all hunger, we all thirst, we all need, and we’ll all die, but somehow humanity, as a whole, trudges on towards a greatness—a greatness that is irrefutably evident in the efforts of melding musicians.

Impolite Politics: Why Obama never had a chance

Edmund Burke wrote “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” while the bloody revolution that decapitated the monarchy in France usurped the king and queen, subsequently ending the line of succession at the gallows. The resounding influence of this revolution was heard worldwide as the progression of the French monarchy could so easily be reflected back on the possible progression of an English, or any other, hierarchy. Burke’s concern largely stemmed from the posterity that such a system of inheritance maintains. He writes “All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle, and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason.” He continues “On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings…laws are to be supported only by their own terrors…On the principles of this mechanic philosophy, our institutions can never be embodied, if I may use the expression, in persons; so as to create in us love, veneration, admiration, or attachment.” He concludes that without the precept of the monarchy, “Kings will be tyrants from policy when subjects are rebels from principle.”

Our current political climate suffers the worst from the exact sort of horrors that Burke describes. The American democracy, supposedly driven by reason, is being helmed by a mass of uneducated barbarous miscreants who only look to politics as a means to justify their own personal failings. Each of the last three presidents has had their party wither under their “reign.” Bill Clinton, although winning his second term, had the congress switch to a republican majority; George W. Bush suffered the same fate; and it appears that President Obama will fall in line. Merely by nature of possessing power, our politicians fall out of favor.

The divisive nature of our current politics allows for nothing but a stalemate. At least Burke’s “Kings” could resort to tyrannical behavior to affect change when necessary but our figureheads flounder in the quagmires of stalemate, incessantly achieving nothing in the face of the moderation that is being called for in every possible political arena. The influence granted by money on our politics has driven down our quality of life to such an extent that people are no longer being educated. In the current recession, most are opting out of the absurdly expensive but worthwhile private post-secondary institutions and instead veering towards practical community college degrees in which they hone trades but never consider what it means to be an American, what it means to be free. A democracy in which the public is poorly educated is a democracy manipulated by the highest bidder. When a “maverick” and a woman who’s now “Going Rogue,” almost thrust their cowboy image onto America enough to gain the majority of their favor to man the most prestigious and powerful post in American politics, we know that Americans are resorting to vote with their hearts rather than their heads, and, unfortunately, it is their mouths that will suffer the most as a result.

Now, wisely, we have a president who promoted an image of change and hope for his entire campaign. The one word, change, is all that was needed to sell the American people on a young fresh senator from Chicago, allowing him to prevail over any number of candidates steeped in decades of experience. Obama understood that his greatest advantage is that he had not been in the government long enough to have to compromise on anything and so he appeared stronger than the other candidates, more pure. The nature of current politics is comprised of nothing other than compromise. It was not an advantage that Obama possessed by not having compromised, it was a naiveté.

Surprised at every turn, the nation now turns on the man for having to compromise in the face of the fierce ignorant fear-driven moderation that blasts back at him for every idea he may support. And, what is worse, because he lacks the prestige and pomp that a more experienced candidate may have had, the office he presides over is defamed and cheapened. During his own address to congress, who should revere the man as their commander in chief, members called out absurd accusations or completely ignored him on the basis of their politics. Politics do not excuse a lack of civility; but rather, vindicate those who wish to act with a similar lack of civility elsewhere. If the president does not deserve respect in the chambers of congress, then why should a student respect his teacher? Why should a criminal respect his judge? Why should anyone respect a rule that only serves to hinder their own selfish will? Also, within the same year, the president had an address that he wished to be broadcast in all public schools which received pushback to which he immediately acquiesced. His weakness allowing the idea to pervade that, even while already having achieved the presidency of the United States, our leader is merely a leader of a political party and should be deterred by all those who favor a different political philosophy.

The controlled information being provided our youth will merely continue this sort of divisiveness. While our educational system drowns in debt and cutbacks, attempting to fight a war on ignorance with one hand and a butter knife, our military budget continues to explode to allow our continued presence in a war against an idea: terrorism. While our youth, who never had the chance to learn why they fight, die by the droves, they fight an enemy that hates us in a jealous rage largely for the gluttonous ignorance that we revel in. The American “obesity epidemic” rages on while they starve and we meet their hungry mouths with bullets and hand grenades. We uprooted the Taliban in the early 2000’s to put the country into the hands of the greatest heroine dealers the world has ever seen, spending billions upon billions of dollars, hundreds of lives all on a country that had a GDP at the time of approximately 40 million dollars. That coupled with the war with Iraq played into the rebellious political pundits as an obvious gambit for oil. I fear that even that corrupt vision was giving too much credit to those in power. In reality, the gambit was for the minds and attention of the ignorant masses and it worked masterfully. The population suddenly bled red, white, and blue; and yearned for blood in the face of our most catastrophic loss on our own soil, the September 11 attacks while all those who contradicted were pegged with almost the same sort of treasonous “terrorist” rhetoric that met the communists during the red scare.

This ignorant nationalism, so shamelessly harnessed by the previous administration, is a tactic that Obama is unwilling to soil his hands with now that he has taken office. On the campaign trail he unyieldingly tapped into the fervor that the nation explodes with at the mention of its achievements, its greatness; the fervor that allows only pride as the humility of the individual is dissipated over the entire country the same way that the responsibility to help an innocent person being murdered is dissolved across an on-looking crowd. The ideas he molded with clouds during his campaign could never be shaped with the clay of real legislation, not because they did not hold merit, but because the politicians strive to take every bit of credit that they can muster, regardless of their involvement or commitment to the ideas at hand, and avoid blame like the black plague that the H1N1 virus is threatened to become. It is no fault of Obama’s ideas, but practically speaking, those ideas never had a chance unless he was willing to sully his hands in the dirt of modern politics. He needs to heap thick helpings of blame with his presidential butter knife across the entirety of congress, as their inability to take even the remotest of chances will kill our nation the same way that a person will die if he does not risk the bacteria from the food he puts in his mouth. He needs to trap them in their failure so the country can see their inefficacy for what it is, a big room full of pigs too busy reveling in the loot from their lobbyists to risk getting anything done, especially anything that could hurt the companies those lobbyists represent.

Our foolish reverence of the major corporation as a job creating structure will suffocate our nation from any sort of international competition. It is the entrepreneur willing to risk a small business on a new idea that allows our economy to thrive on innovative new technologies, improvements on every day life, the building of wealth with those who do not possess it. The small businesses have no chance in the current economic climate though. Wal-Mart has been given free reign to saunter into any town, open up several stores to give people jobs, kill all the local businesses and then shut down most of those stores; effectively sucking the soul out of entire regions. Microsoft and Apple have created a false dichotomy over all computer software between PC and Mac that rivals the false dichotomy between our two political parties. Other options are out there, we’re just not allowing for them to exist. Consider these other false dichotomies that allow for duopoly over entire segments of our economy: Pepsi or Coke, Amd or Intel (which was just Intel until Amd successfully sued Intel recently over their predatory and unfair practices) and that’s for the parts that are lucky enough to have two options. Look at sports, there’s one football league, one baseball league, one basketball league, one hockey league and one soccer league in America. In Europe there are competing soccer leagues all over the continent, competition increasing the level of play and making the global events all the more exciting.

When one has a foreseeable influence on the company for whom they work, they are always more productive employees. Major corporations, on the other hand, are the only place where people feel comfortable as they provide security that small business cannot. They provide insurance benefits at a cheaper cost, retirement benefits, paid time off, all of which are amenities that every American deserves but only those granted positions at huge institutions actually receive. A generation of brilliant thinkers, having been trained to pursue a “safe” option for their careers, subsequently entered the fields of finance and business. The raising of the business world’s IQ has brought all of the innovation that should have gone to curing cancer and interplanetary space travel has, instead, allowed these corporations to brilliantly circumvent all the pre-existing laws regarding monopolies and fair trade resulting in a slew of banks and companies that are “too big to fail.” Ironically, the bubble has burst on these companies and their imminent failure has prompted our government to dole out more money at one time then ever in the history of our country, merely to prop up the sagging deflated carcass of the bubble that was our dysfunctional economy.

Now the brilliant youth of the boomerang generation, previously harnessed for shadows and facades of success in business, are unemployed and living back with mom and dad. A gross failure by the standards of the explosive growth of the 1990’s and even the mid 2000’s, the boomerang generation faces some difficult choices. They have experienced first hand the suffering from being laid off on a whim by a giant monolithic corporation that never really cared about them; yet the public image in America is that the only “safe” job is with one of those giant monolithic corporations that so quickly threw them out with the bathwater in the first place. The dismay they face causes many to go back to school--cheap schools: community colleges are being flooded as a result.

My hope is that the boomerang generation, when they come out of the shock of the economic meltdown, look to each other to create new innovative companies out of mom and dad’s basement, new companies where their friends can get jobs and help them to create an overall, community-invested, caring and prosperous nation again. I hope that they return to school for liberal arts, to remind them of why each person deserves respect and to prove Burke wrong when he says about the democratic revolutionary of the 1790’s that “Their liberty is not liberal. Their science is presumptuous ignorance. Their humanity is savage and brutal.” Hopefully, a growth of education in the liberal arts will allow us to prove that we have progressed beyond the fears of more than 200 years ago to a new era of polite democracy where atheists can be trusted without the ethical backing of a religious schema, where academics can be trusted for their intelligence, where politicians can be trusted to do what is best for the country rather than their party, where liberty can return to being liberal. Burke claimed that “there ought to be a system of manners in every nation which a well formed mind would be disposed to relish. To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.” I hope that from the ruins of these card-house companies we can build a lovely country that returns to form, rising above the cold unfeeling tentacles of capitalist greed to see the humanity that we should all be truly striving to achieve. Obama possesses the capability to solicit that kind of humanity from us in American politics but we have to be willing to buy it first, we have to trust him.

Black Socrates-Cornell West

He speaks buttery effusions and flicks biscuits of artery clogging wisdom to constipate your bitter self with the cholesterol of self-respect. His gap-toothed whistle and long scraggly beard belie his evangelist disposition and the sincere empathetic feelings he has for his earthy brethren still toiling in the muck of poverty. Every time he speaks it's as though an epiphany explodes from his tongue by a god-driven lightning bolt. He's "blessed," as he says, with many well-wishers and perhaps even more neigh-sayers and yet his constant response is to thank them for their, at times horrifyingly offensive, inquiry or insult. In his effort to walk in the path of Jesus, he takes on one of jesus's most astonishing gifts given all of his other strengths--his humility.
"I am but a speck in a long standing tradition," he said while on the NPR radio program "On Point," and his words echoed back to the man who constantly reminded all of Greece that he knew nothing and yet the muses chose him as the smartest man in the world--Socrates. Socrates did not need language, philosophy or anything in his life that would serve to exclude people. He used his skills to include people and lead them to the truth. Cornell West has devoted himself to a similar practice. Just as Socrates never ran from an intellectual debate from any of the greatest minds of his time as he had the self-confidence to know that if he could be proven wrong then there is no greater result. If proven wrong, he would be closer to the truth than he was before. Cornell West plows his thoughts into some of the greatest academic institutions of this or any era with the unyielding passion of a spartan spear.
He claims to be a bluesman by vocation, canvassing the cob-webbed crevasses of his soul to claim a vision of modern truth that all can latch on to and recognize as somehow part of their own humanity, despite, and perhaps better for, the imperfections that may arise in his philosophy. If nothing else, the world a hundred years from now will look across the timeline of american civilization and see a post buried deep deep into the very foundation of american progress with "Cornell West RIP" written on it. As his work, more than near any single man of our time, reaches through to the most gangster of poor black youths and the most elite of waspy ivy league intellectuals and wrenches us by the neck to push us in front of the mirror and see: see just how far we have miraculously managed to progress in this country, and how dauntingly far we still have to go.

Purely Positive Music Review: Avett Brothers

Like a breeze coursing through a dog's teeth in an open window, the avett brothers warm the skin, the soul and the palms of your hands. Their music draws crowds as varied and unforeseeable as possibly imaginable: a five year old girl could scramble between the feet of a big bearded biker and they'd happily commingle while mouthing lyrics like prayers. The Avett's authentic confederate beards and southern style evokes a time long past while their unique blend of banjo, strings, and simultaneous drum stomps show us where music is probably headed. Scott Avett plays the banjo, sings and marches out beats on the kick drum while Seth Avett sings, plays guitar and beats the high hat and occassionally plays keys or full drums...lazy bastards. Meanwhile, they harmonize Scott's middle range bellow with Seth's higher more frenetic voice as successfully as the jets that take off and fly around an aircraft carrier on a naval strike.

In an era of contrived musical mediocrity rated by how homogenized it can become, the Avett's defy critics, radio stations, and experts alike by maintaining their roots and the love for their heritage and their people shines through their melodies like the greek revivalist architecture spotted across the states oldest cities. Up until recently, they had been on Ramseur records with their manager Dolphus Ramseur who does not believe in written contracts, and "signed" the Avett's with a handshake. Under this record label their previous release, despite having little to no marketing involved other than their live performances, still managed to reach number 82 on the billboard charts. Since then, they have been signed by Columbia records and their latest album, I and Love and You, produced by Rick Rubin, promises to have the marketing kindling necessary to burn across radio stations and ipods all across the country. Eagerly, I await their next local concert stop to the Raleigh area as the experience promises not only to be a measure of melodic inspiration mixed with honest beautiful song writing, but also a moment in which I can really feel like I belong in this city as their fans are as warm and embracing as their music.