In what I suppose in retrospect was a case of protoblogging, I took the first Internet incarnation of Trouser Press as an opportunity to write a monthly (or so) column on whatever...I ended up doing 16 of them, two of which I have no record of. But an E-mail from a reader asked about sharing these old columns again, so here's a couple from the archives...
Surface Noise
Number 3
March 14 1997
Somewhere between the doom of Trouser Press magazine and the rest of my life, I spent three years as the programming editor of Video magazine (which one? the one just called Video--and I thought Trouser Press was a confusing name!). Besides the opportunity for some serious ligging (swank trips all over the goddamn place for little more than the obligation to watch a movie and chat up some stars; tough life, hunh?), the chance to catch up on Andy Sidaris' oeuvre and the privilege of interviewing such personal heroes as Robert Downey Sr. and Alan Abel, one of the few intriguing parts of the job was the debate over colorizing films.
It had come to some marketing director's attention that people young enough to consider color a given in cinema (fair enough, but no one to my knowledge ever attempted to dub dialogue onto Birth of a Nation) viewed black and white movies as inherently inferior old crap. He/she/it alerted Ted Turner of this revelation, and--facilitated by the existence of seriously mondo video/computer technology--cable channels and video company quickly got busy fucking up perfectly good movies by painting them with colors, some credibly hued, others comically unnatural.
The argument at the time went that if you didn't like it, you could just turn down the dials on your TV and classic films would become just as monochromatic as you remembered them. (That wasn't quite true, but that's not the point.) After a while, quality control improved, and creative people (though rarely directors, who invariably voiced indignant objections when queried on the topic) were occasionally brought into the process, but it was still a needless and unnatural act that put color in George Bailey's cheeks, cutting a rift between those who respected film history and those who would blithely give it a new coat of paint.
The occasion for all this medium-crossing history is the newly remixed reissue (on Columbia/Legacy) of Iggy and the Stooges' Raw Power, arguably the greatest--if not simply the earliest and most essential--punk rock album of all time. Without "Search and Destroy,'' "Raw Power,'' "Shake Appeal'' and "Gimme Danger,'' there would have been no properly elevated bar for the Pistols et al. to sneer at.
Monsieur Pop, who produced the record in a cloud of drugs, drink and delirious studio fantasies, attempted (and more or less succeeded) to sabotage the project with a madman's mix, obliterating whatever--other than his singing and a dinky cardboard snare clap--fell in the sonic spectrum between the blistering razor edge of James Williamson's distorted guitar overdrive and the small but rubbery bonk of Ron Asheton's bass. (In a glorious bit of understatement, producer Pop admitted to Rolling Stone in 1987 that "We didn't really understand multi-tracking...'')
Ig's mix was rejected and David Bowie was called in to do what he could to salvage the tapes, inadvertently taking the fall for what everyone agrees was an improvement of some sort on Iggy's insensate sonic concepts. (Well, what do you expect from an album entitled Raw Power?) "The treble was really pushed up and the compression was off all the way and the stuff sort of barked at you, like a yelping dog,'' was how Iggy recalled it.
Bowie's mix--a not-so-distant relative to the thin, unnatural sound he got for Mott the Hoople--was released in 1973 and has since been deeply scratched into the rock canon. This wacky marvel of anorexic aggression focuses the Stooges' wildchild anomie into one white-hot spearhead of earsplitting treble rather than a full-frontal assault containing such audio amenities as bottom or midrange. Like other sonic misadventures (e.g., the Rich Kids' lone album, a pop-rock classic buried somewhere in producer Mick Ronson's cloth ear), Raw Power has been the subject of complaints, adoration and speculation for years. And the harsh CD edition wasn't any sort of useful fix.
Does the album sound like ****? It sure does. Does that matter? No more than, say, the miserable cheap-studio fidelity of "You Really Got Me,'' the incomprehensibility of the vocals on "Louie, Louie'' or the absence of arms and a head on the Venus de Milo--which is to say not at all, unless one is too literal-minded or gear-wonky to apply a little imagination, smoothing over the hifi potholes and filling in the gaps.
Now Iggy's gone and diddled the tapes into a thick and muddy bit-mapped blur that blunts the original's edge and amounts more to an unfortunate compromise than any sort of tangible improvement. By trading away the daredevil intensity of a record no one would ever say sounded right by any accepted technical standards for a tonal balance that, if nothing else, doesn't instantly call attention to itself, a record that once underscored its purpose by going way out on a bent limb now sounds crappy in a thoroughly ordinary way.
As a sin against rock'n'roll, the refurbished results are nothing on the order of such record-industry travesties as rechanneled stereo. Still, shouldn't a record's two dozen years of standing as a crucial disc earn it some sort of no-fucking-with-it free agency? (And what do you tell everyone who's learned to love its pointed little head? They weren't really hearing it?)
Any attempt to portray this as artistic wrong-righting is rubbish; what's really going on is a well-intentioned perversion of progress. Just as George Lucas did with Star Wars, Iggy has exhumed and reanimated the past to make it better conform to his current artistic ideals. In the revisionist artist's words, "There's a quirky, odd charm to the original, like a car you have to crank up to start...and I like that. But this is more like a '90s version, an end of the millennium version. This will become the version that people will know, and I'm fine with that.''
I'm not. If this historically suspect enterprise is expected to make the album more commercially appealing to Bush fans, it won't work. At this late date, dawn-of-the-'70s Motor City punk doesn't resemble Helmet or the Offspring enough to register as anything other than a relic, and no amount of mix magic can change that. Rock's lengthening timeline no longer allows easy assimilation of the past--there's simply too much of it--and one generation's courageous innovation can sound pretty tame to another that encounters it only after it's been widely imitated and built upon. While that doesn't compromise the qualities of <b>Raw Power</b> one jot, remixing a 1973 record for 1997 doesn't make it modern, just further out of its element. As with the colorization of old B&W films, time takes a lot more than the occasional cigarette. Some market factors can't be bribed or bought.
"The bottom line,"' says Iggy--who began his career by claiming the right to do whatever the **** he wants and has earned it a hundred times over since--"is that this is a wonderful album but it's always sounded fragile and rickety, and that band was not fragile and not rickety.'' OK, fair enough. But since the liner notes acknowledge that he only joined the reissue project after learning that Legacy was going to remix it with or without him, such claims for artistic determination read more like convenient rationalization for creative tampering that didn't need to be done, with or without him.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SURFACE NOISE
NUMBER 9
1 December 1997
"Everybody I know, what they're good at is being themselves. I've been doing it for 26 years, and all the people who were trying to compromise me are now coming to me, man. You better not compromise yourself, it's all you've got. And you don't have to, I'm a goddamn living example of that.
"People aren't supposed to be like me, sing like me, ball like me, drink like me, live like me; but now they're paying me $50,000 a year for me to be like me. That's what I hope I mean to those kids out there. After they see me, when their mothers are feeding them all that cashmere-sweater-and-girdle bullshit, maybe they'll have second thoughts--that they can be themselves and win. You just have to start thinking that way, being that righteous with yourself, and you've won already." --Janis Joplin, quoted by Michael Lydon in Rock Folk (1971)
Of all the remarkable talents displayed by Janis Joplin in her brief unholy existence, a blindingly accurate insight into the essence of modern pop culture is probably the least well known. In the rock and roll golden rule stakes, "Be yourself and win" is a whole lot better than "get a good lawyer." (Still, with the suicides of Michael Hutchence and Epic Soundtracks fresh in mind, "don't kill yourself" probably trumps 'em all...)
For all of its contrived imagery and theatrical artifice, rock and roll is still, as Ian Hunter once aptly noted, a loser's game--in the best possible sense. Many of those who can't cut it in the real world have been welcomed into rock's dare-to-be-great carnival. True, talent is a not inconsiderable issue, and social incapacity can exceed even rock's casual rulebook (Wesley Willis, anyone? Howzabout Wildman Fischer? Sid Vicious?). But music would be in a far sorrier state than it is if not for colorful eccentrics being themselves.
"...he learned to turn his weaknesses into strengths--mainly by accepting and flaunting them." -- Calvin Tomkins, describing Andy Warhol in The New Yorker
The battle between adherence to tradition and native creativity has been raging since the first uptempo exercise of an electric 12-bar blues. To their credit and detriment, ravers like Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, James Brown and Elvis Presley couldn't help being themselves. Whatever they cared for the past didn't contain the explosion of their individual instincts, whether that meant being in the grip of a spirit or spirits, the rhythms of love or the love of rhythm. The Hamburg Beatles were flying blind, transliterating musical history in their Scouse tongue with the frenzied urgency of youth and pills, but stardom turned them into cultural businessmen. It wasn't until John Lennon's arrogance and rampant drug use forced the issue that the Beatles regained their courage and made music for themselves, not their legions. With the Stones in an open marriage to R&B traditionalism, Bob Dylan was the only '60s pantheon figure who couldn't even guess what people wanted from him. So he followed the only path he could identify--his own--and introduced a generation to its future.
Given the harsh radicalism of the pose, it was dead easy (and dead wrong) to see '70s punk as the flowering of pure, raw individuality in rock, of innocence as art. But the movement had too few true iconoclasts who could incite the rabble to anything better than joining the club, mistaking community for culture and wearing the uniform, swallowing pre-fab cliches like carefully measured doses of cultural crank. Likewise, despite the far greater incidence of irony and humility (how can you not side with such witty self-deflaters as Vic Chesnutt or Jad Fair?) in indie rock, a lot of geeks with guitars are just foot soldiers in the slacker parade, taking the name of artistic independence in vain while making pitifully uniform music. (For a laugh-out-loud indictment of that little boys' club, check Mary Lou Lord's brilliant "His Indie World.") But at least they usually have the good sense not to be self-righteous about it.
And therein lies the easily missed crux of Janis Joplin's intuition, the bit that gets overlooked by smug "I-am-right" fuckwads from Seinfeld to Stern to Sting. Janis never asked fans to be like her, only to share the great lesson of her life and be proud of being themselves. And even with the enthusiastic endorsement of her flawed persona by millions, she never attempted to redefine society in the calculus of her own character. Turning weaknesses into assets by defining them as such and then demanding acceptance requires the same to be expected of others. If it works for one, it works for all. The only poison in the potion is arrogance. Legitimizing neurotic insecurities can make them funny, but one can't forget that's what they are.
Among other things, Janis was a hopeless mess driven by forces beyond her control to destroy herself, and no woman with the sensitivity to sing the shit out of "Piece of My Heart" like she did could possibly wish those feelings--or any other aspect of her private chaos--on anyone. (Incidentally, Erma Franklin's original soul version of that song is available on Felix Hernandez Presents Rhythm Revue, three discs of nourishing and edifying goodness in a nifty little package.)
It's wonderful that things for which public figures used to get ruined or blackmailed--homosexuality, fornication, fetishism, mental illness, drug use, criminality--are now no big deal. But when they become agenda items in a marketing plan, there goes the line between individual pride and self-exploitation. Is Ellen DeGeneres a cultural pioneer, a woman in love or a media opportunist? Or all of the above?
In the early '90s, Los Angeles trendinistas were abuzz over Life, Sex & Death, an eminently mediocre rock band whose singer--the one-named Stanley--was a cleanliness-impaired homeless stinker prone to insane mutterings and odious social behavior. For some, he was a rad-er version of Perry Farrell, a truly wild individual unhindered by bourgeois civilization; to those for whom that would probably not be a good thing, he was a fraud and an offensive bad joke. Still, a Big Record Company gave these clowns Big Money and attempted (unsuccessfully, as it happens) to sell their shtick to the masses. But when you get right down to it, there's an undeniable commonality between that and any other rocker with a personal gimmick, whether it's Gene Simmons' tongue, the dead Sublime guy or the Gallaghers' brawling boorishness. There is, however, a huge gulf between such nonsense and unavoidable realities like Vic Chesnutt's wheelchair or Daniel Johnston's mental illness. Or, for that matter (but in a very different way), Shane MacGowan's alcoholism and Johnny Thunders' drug addiction.
To me it all comes down to humility, to taking pride in who you are without implicitly criticizing others. Or that the things that intrinsically make you you would necessarily improve others. In All Over but the Shoutin, a fascinating and revealing memoir by a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter who was raised in desperate Alabama poverty, Rick Bragg occasionally overdoes the hair-shirt modesty of a complex and not altogether praiseworthy personality, but the courage to celebrate his failings along with his achievements makes this such a fine book. On page 176, after recounting an ironic professional incident at the St. Petersburg Times, he offers a literary moral that could also serve as a parallel warning to anyone with a strong personality who decides to make that their ticket to the public arena.
"Do not, on purpose, write a bunch of overwritten crap if it looks so much like the overwritten crap you usually write that the editors think you have merely reached new heights in your craft." So when is that new Alanis Morissette album coming out?
Post Edited (07-05-05 21:33)
