800 Words: Evan Listens to Rolling Stone's Top 50 Songs of 2012 - (31-50)

Before I wrote this post, I tried doing a mini-essay on Die Meistersinger which had the potential to turn into a 10,000-word monsterpost that I’ll be nowhere near finishing for the next few years. So to cool off, I decided to finish my mini-reviews of Rolling Stone’s top 50 songs of last year. As always, I am truly amazed by how efficiently popular culture allows me the chance to turn my brain off completely :).

31. Low Cut Connie - Boozophilia: Harmless, catchy, kind of fun in a I want to dance drunk next to 200 people way. I like the idea of a paean to the low-life hangout dives around America. Certainly a few cuts above generic pop with some interesting piano work. But both Rolling Stone and Christgau rave about these guys like they’re the best thing since Blues itself. If this is the best they can do, we’d better turn in our music card America.

32. Bruce Springsteen - We Take Care of Our Own: The Boss in Born in the U.S.A. mode, so much so that it can almost be heard as a sibling song. Bruce does irony, and does it well, but every time I hear one of his ironic songs it comes as a complete shock, and it takes me a few minutes to realize that I don’t have to re-examine everything I ever knew about life. On the surface, his ironic music sounds exactly like his sincere music. I don’t know whether this is because Springsteen has a complete lack of self-understanding or because he understands himself all too well. It’s extremely effective, but what it ultimately does is to undercut the exuberance and hope which so many of us gather from Bruce in sincere mode. But perhaps that’s the point, so either way, it just proves that The Boss is still boss (I can’t believe I wrote that phrase down...).

33. Miguel - Adorn: Two reviews. From Rolling Stone: “Up to the minute fresh, yet steeped in Soul Tradition.” From Youtube: "hey if it only takes him 2mins and 34 sec muuuust be good ;) :D lolololololol" - One of these reviews is correct.

34. Kendrick Lamar - Swimming Pools: I am kind of shocked to say that I liked this song. I mean, it’s not THAT good. But the alternate voice in which he ‘portrayed’ his conscience did make me laugh. I can do without most of the rest, but it least shows that this guy’s got talent.

35. Icona Pop - I Love It: Who’d thunk that “Euro-slut club jam” music would be this dumb? I could go on a rant about the fascist evil of pop dance music, but everybody reading this would know exactly what it would say.

36. Himanshu - Womyn: Well, it’s dumb, but it’s pretty funny. One youtube comment descirbed it as Mitch Hedburg reincarnated as a song. That pretty much sums it up. If you think Mitch Hedburg a genius rather than a mildly funny stoner, listen to this right away. I can pretend that I’ve ever said anything smarter about wome(y)n than anything here, but... well...

37. Muse - Madness: Prog Rock simplified. No amount of finely constructed music (and it really is) can cover for the fact that the lyrics are insipid in that way which makes you know that their writer thinks he’s brilliant (hey, it worked for Wagner...). Still, the music here is really, really good.

38. Teen - Better: If the girls from Girls made a girl-band... it would probably be more entertaining than this. I mean,... it’s not bad, in fact it’s slightly better than your average band with a label. It’s just not up to the extravagant claim of the song.  …And what the hell is it with indie bands and believing that putting a full chord on every sixteenth note generates energy?

39. Dwight Yoakam - A Heart Like Mine: I’m not sure when I’ve ever listened to a Dwight Yoakam song. This is, almost, exactly what I expected. Competent, but sentimental, overly sincere, and no more ulterior meanings or unexpected harmonies than the dullest-witted listener can understand. Songs for the lowest-common-denominator. Nice yodels, but I’ll stick with his old-country cousin Eugen.

40. Craig Finn - Rented Room: One of those songs that is not quite as dark or shocking or moving as it thinks it is. Drug addiction is terrible, this song isn’t. But it’s not exactly a moving depiction of it.

41. Danny Brown - Grown Up: It’s a dumb rap song that doubles as a smart one. I mean, it’s clearly a true rags to riches story with a morally neutral point of view as to whether he deserved his good fortune. Whether you like it depends on which side of the pillow you woke up...

42. Bear Hug - The 2 Bears: Even if this song didn’t sound like it was about pedophillia, it would be creepy as hell.

43. Tanlines - All of Me: One of the two most repeated lines in the song is ‘cut off emotions.’ Were there any?

44. The Wanted - Glad You Came: Apparently this is the Irish equivalent of the Jonas Brothers. But the Jonas Brothers never used accordions, nor did they talk so clearly in double entendres about teen sex. I guess that’s a good thing?...

45. Justin Bieber - Die in Your Arms: I’ve listened to perhaps one Justin Bieber song in all “these years.” It’s unfortunate to know that his music is exactly as annoying as the rest of his phenomenon. This is so unbelievably scripted and packaged for an exact demographic so as to be as noxious as carbon monoxide. Hopefully some pre-teen girl somewhere accidentally downloads a Heinrich Biber track and it changes her life forever.

46. Maroon 5 - Payphone: What must surely be a masterpiece of non-annoyingness in the history of a truly irritating pop group.

47. Superchunk - This Summer: Almost moving. It would appear that indie rock has matured to the point that it can ‘do’ nostalgia. I’m impressed. Not quite impressed enough, but still impressed.

48. Deadmau5 - The Veldt: Much has been made about the way this song was made (by the children, apparently...). But if songwriters are worried about the potential for crowdsourced songs to eclipse them, they can rest easy for a while. Songs by committee are usually a bad idea, but this song takes that idea to the next level, and is colossally terrible. If you saw the video that accompanies a 3-minute version of this song, you’d come away thinking it’s a bland song that accompanies a rather more interesting video. But if you sit through all 8 minutes, you’d be overjoyed that there are only two songs left in this list.

49. Kacey Musgrave - Merry Go’ Round: I’m shocked, stunned, and completely embarrassed. This song restores my faith that Country Music written after 1970 might be worth listening to. And it’s some 24 year old I’d have probably dismissed as another country music ditz before I’d ever heard the song. A masterpiece? Not quite, too much repetition, but this is damn good. Watch this girl.

50. Carly Rae Jepsen - Call Me Maybe: It’s inescapable, and it just might pass for bland and non-annoying if we hadn’t heard it 50,000,000,000 times in the last year.

So, from these fifty, I’ll make my own list of what’s worth listening to:

Greatness:

1.Bob Dylan: Pay in Blood

2. Donald Fagen - Weather In My Head

3. Randy Newman - I’m Dreaming

Excellence:

1. Kacey Musgrave - Merry Go’ Round

2. Bruce Springsteen - We Take Care of Our Own

3. Fiona Apple - Hot Knife

Goodness:

1. Fun - Some Nights

2. Alabama Shakes - Hold On

3. Passion Pit - Take a Walk

4. Grimes - Oblivion (begrudgingly)

Virtuously Flawed:

Muse - Madness

Superchunk - This Summer

Leonard Cohen - Going Home

Himanshu - Womyn

Craig Finn - Rented Room

Kendrick Lamar - Swimming Pools

Teen - Better

BUT. The best song of 2012 clearly did not make this list at all. We all know what the real #1 song of the year is; the song which expresses the folly of our country, the spirit of the age,and mankind’s eternal longing for transcendence and pure being:

The Birthday Song (Thanks Ethan...):

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800 Words: 30 Mini-Essays (4-6)

4. Reuniting with West Side Story - an epilogue: 

In the original post, I didn’t emphasize the difference in quality between the live show and the movie, you can’t overemphasize it. There simply is no equivalent on the silver screen to seeing the live dancing in person - during which these dancers threaten to spill out from the stage and beat the shit out of you in your seat. No Broadway stage show, before or since, offers a score with this daring in rhythm and harmony. No Broadway show is about such life-and-death issues, both dramatically and sociologically. Rodgers and Hammerstein gave Broadway a mould for how to construct a good stage show, Robbins, Bernstein, and Sondheim constructed a great stage show by breaking it. Much was made of those realistic shots of the New York streets, but why are there realistic New York streetscapes if the characters populating them are completely unrealistic (they dance for chrissake! What would happen to an actual gang in NYC which spontaneously broke out into a Mambo in front of another gang?)? Why are there so many closeups when the dubbing deadens the immediacy of the singing? Why doesn’t Tony speak with a New York accent? Why does Maria’s Puerto Rican accent go in and out? The movie could have been half the length, shot on a surreal streetscape, with charismatic Broadway unknowns who could sing their own parts as well as they could dance them, and it would have been one of the great movie-musicals. Yes, the stage show’s far from perfect, and there were things which improved on the transition from stage to screen, but there is simply no equivalence between the two. One is greatness with some flaws, one is badness with redeeming qualities.

5. The Secret of Abelard and Heloise - Conclusion

Great as they are, there is something more than a bit insufferable about these letters. From the vantage of 2013, it’s painful to read Abelard’s ceaseless lecturing to this woman who ‘tempted’ him to give herself up to God at the expense of her own happiness and talk about how much he hates what she made him do (sex) at the same time that he still loves her. It’s even more painful to read Heloise’s pathetic servility, taking joy in Abelard’s celebrity and accomplishment even though he caused her a life of ascetic misery. She idolizes this man as only a Stockholm Syndrome’d woman could. It’s a bit like the life which Dorothea Brooke from Middlemarch might have envisioned for herself, and the misery which would have followed had she gotten what she wished. There’s a kind of delusionally grandiose masochism to the whole booklet. Abelard knows precisely how much suffering he engendered in Heloise’s life, and he constantly berates himself for it even as he entreats her to abide by a code of honor which is plainly... well... medieval. Abelard did not want an equal, he wanted a servile admirer. Heloise speaks like someone who’s only known servility her whole life and feels blessed to engender the attentions of a world-famous intellectual which aids her in getting out from the snare of her obviously brutal uncle, Fulbert. The suffering of this book is outsize, masochistic, and inflicted by grade-A narcissist. Yet it is genuine suffering, to be looked at with compassion because how could these people know any better?

Like it is for all of humanity, the love of Abelard and Heloise was completely absurd and neurotic, full of bad judgement, delusions, and recriminations delivered in the form of guilt trips. It is irrational and full of psychological illogic. But it lasts, oddly enough, because it is a love built on mutual suffering. The best moments in this exchange of letters, the moments which make these letters still worth reading, are the ones when they stop trying to guilt one another into believing the other the more misfortuned and honestly recount the pain of their lives. Here is Heloise in her most revealing moment:

Dear Abelard, pity my despair! Was ever any being so miserable? The higher you raised me above other women, who envied me your love, the more sensible am I now of the loss of your heart. I was exalted to the top of happiness only that I might have the more terrible fall. Nothing could be compared to my pleasures, and now nothing can equal my misery. My joys once raised the envy of my rivals, my present wretchedness calls forth the compassion of all that see me. My Fortune has been always in extremes; she has loaded me with the greatest favours and then heaped me with the greatest afflictions; ingenious in tormenting me, she has made the memory of the joys I have lost an inexhaustible spring of tears. Love, which being possest was her most delightful gift, on being taken away is an untold sorrow. In short, her malice has entirely succeeded, and I find my present afflictions proportionately bitter as the transports which charmed me were sweet.

Anyone who has felt an excess of emotional pain in their lifetimes will recognize this sentiment; the feeling of having, for whatever reason, felt as though life has blessed us, and then robbed us of everything which makes such blessings worthwhile. Life giveth, life taketh away. Blessed and accursed be life. We struggle as best we can to make sense of why life treats us the way it does, we tie our lives into knots of emotional baggage from which we will never be free, and along the way we cause suffering to those who most want to help us. All we human beings can do is to love one another for the dangers we have passed, and love one another that we do pity them. Or at least attempt to do that as best we can, but perhaps it’s precisely that effort which leads us to the greatest possible misfortune.

6. Depression

I am thirty-one years old, but I feel fairly comfortable in stating that my life has not been a happy one, and it would surprise me if the rest of my life knew any greater happiness than I’ve experienced thus far. From eight years old onward, I have experienced waves of massive depression followed by massive anxiety which are almost unremitting; a two-headed black dog whose infectious bite has silenced untold hundreds of millions - whether by suicide, or simply by a failure to live well - and I have an obligation to worry may yet one day definitively silence me. The great joys of my life have been few and far between, and the happy periods were merely less unhappy than the other periods. Life has been a fairly boring experience for me, when it wasn’t agonizing at least. Every new day brings new hopes, and these hopes seem to inevitably fall upon a new set of disappointments, with an occasional humiliation to lower the average emotional state still a little more. I watch friends, acquaintances, and irritants, who go about their lives with petty frustrations and disappointments. Less than a lifetime ago, the world described to me by my grandparents was consumed with a level of war and misery which seems to hardly register to anyone my age. Virtually everyone had more cause for depression than I have. Yet compared to me, virtually everybody I know in my own generation seems massively happy. Maybe I know the wrong (right?) people, but oh how I envy them for the fleetingness of their pains; would that I had theirs a while and they mine.

It certainly saddens me to admit this. I have never talked about it on this blog so bluntly. And I’ve learned through hard experience not to talk about it in detail except with family and my closest friends, and that will not change by my writing about it. It is, for the most part, something I place off limits as a conversation topic, and will remain so. And it has, generally speaking, become much easier to conceal the weight of the emotional darkness which follows me everywhere from others than it was when I was younger. But I can't in good conscience say that it has been less difficult in recent years than it ever was before.

Inevitably, there are many, many things which bring me back to delight in life - there are too many conversations to be had, too much music to listen to, too much food to eat, too many books and magazines to read, too many movies to watch. There are moments, many of them, when I'm truly at the peak of enjoyment and feel as though I love my life, and there is too much of life to understand - even if depression so often prevents active participation - to be depressed all the time. There are even moments when the fog has clearly lifted. I can breathe freely without dread or emotional pain, and a wave of relief comes upon me so intense that I wonder - is this pleasure? Is this happiness? But the truth is that I honestly don’t know. In order to find out, I require, I hunger for, I demand, many more of them - because there simply haven’t been enough to understand even what this feeling truly is. But every time one of those anticipated good experiences is disappointing, it makes me worry that the potential activities which give me the enjoyment I need to keep buggering on become fewer and fewer.

But to my shock, life has always continued. Another day comes around, and another new hope carries me through it. The longing to prove oneself not a slave to fate, to be greater than you’ve been, to show that the rest of your life needn’t be defined by what preceded it, to reinvent your life, to show that all this suffering was not in vain, becomes exponentially more intense. I don’t know how likely it is that depression may one day defeat me, and I know it’s possible.

But not yet.

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800 Words: 30 Mini Essays (1-3)

1. Evan Tucker’s Handy-Dandy Guide for How to Prematurely Age: The good news is that I’m the only person I know in my early 30’s who looks almost exactly as young as I did when I graduated college. The bad news is that I already looked at least 40. In my life, it was all too easy to age prematurely. When you combine a long dark history of depression and anxiety with far too large an appetite for food, and then add a college predilection for booze and cigarettes and a hatred of exercise, you’re already far older than most people your age. But when you add to this the verifiable fact that no child ever spent as much time in the company of the elderly as I, you have a kid who could easily be mistaken for the father of his college roommate. When I was a child, my father co-owned and ran a nursing home with his father, who was himself older than most of his patients, and I was there at least once a week. Half of every weekend would be spent at my grandparents house, with the other half often spent going to classical concerts with my Bubbie and her friends. Was there any child in my generation who had more occasion to copy the mannerisms, the habits, and the attitudes of my grandparents’ generation? It was with them that I developed my tastes for old music, old movies, old books, old languages, delicatessen, and elastic waists.

2. If Only We’d Have Listened to President Wilson Part 2 - In recent decades, it has been all too common to defecate all over the reputation of Woodrow Wilson. Yes, Wilson’s presidency must be counted a failure relative to what the world needed - but nevertheless, he was nothing less than a truly great president whose policies gave the world ten years of respite until the Great Depression and a Second World War, and the one sane leader in a world gone mad. Woodrow Wilson did the very best he could in an impossible situation. The age of Great Power Monarchy was over, and no one could put it back together without incurring what would then have been a second world war. Marxist Communism and liberal rule of law were clearly incompatible. The only alternatives left were military dictatorship and democratic self-determination. There were few things which Franklin Roosevelt enacted which Wilson had not first moved heaven and earth in an unsuccessful bid to achieve. Had Wilson not contracted fatal illness during the second term of his presidency, had he enough time to convince America to join the League of Nations, had he enough time to dismember the English and French military apparatus as he had the German, had a League of Nations stopped the Red Army, would the Twentieth Century have unfolded in the disastrous manner which it did? We will never know if Wilson was capable of all this, but fate ensured that we would never know. Because he tried endlessly to do the right thing when no status quo worked, many now look upon his presidency as the century's ultimate disaster when it was anything but.

Today, we have a President who could only give us a shell of a health care program we needed, massive (if still too small) stimulus money unpaid for because Republicans refuse to raise taxes upon the wealthy, a coming social security and medicare boom is likely to triple our financial burden, and perhaps the National Debt as well, yet Republicans were so unconcerned with the collapse of the debt ceiling (which used to be a matter so crucial that it was left unpartisan) that they got our nation’s credit lowered because they wanted concessions merely for allowing the ceiling to be raised. Like Wilson, Obama made inroad after inroad to his rivals, because he knew that peace in our time can only be achieved by cooperation. As a reward, his good sense is rebuffed by a party determined to lead this country to ruination unseen since the days of The Civil War. It is thanks to the religion of Republican intransigence, and ONLY to the religion of Republican intransigence, that in 2008 the world once again stood on the brink of a collapse so massive it dwarved even 1929, when many economists from both wings projected potential unemployment rates of 50% (!). The Obama financial team staved off the collapse, but how much longer can it be staved off before the crazies get their way? If only we’d listen to President Obama...

3. The Arab Winter? - Yet again, I got the Middle East wrong. I supported the Arab Spring. I supported it full-throatedly, knowing that it all might go horribly, terribly awry, but not wanting to stand in the way of the only true shot the Arab world might get to enact liberal reforms for generations. And then it went awry, just as pessimists, cynics, and anti-Arab bigots predicted it would. The Kissinger/Brezhnev-era dictatorships of Mubarak and Qaddafi were certainly bad, but in 40 years, even Qaddafi never committed 1/20th of the political murders which Hafez el-Assad committed in only two.  

What happens in Syria can all too easily happen all around the Middle East. It is, almost literally, the problem from Hell. Russia will block any chance to stop the democide from the UN, and counter any aide to the rebel forces with aide to Assad. Putin will not abide the loss of another Russian ally, and views any further toppling of Russia-friendly dictators as a point of Russian honor. Assad has killed approximately a hundred-thousand of his own people, and could easily kill a million before he decides he’s secure again, but nobody can stop him. If the United States were to get too involved in Syria, World War III could be more than a theoretical exercise. As with all things these days (and usually correctly), the temptation is to blame the Bush Administration. But the actions of the Bush Administration in the Middle East neither caused the Arab Spring nor the bleak Arab Winter which may follow it.  Nevertheless, thank God he was not president when all this happened...

Meanwhile, Libya, a Stasi-like informant state under Qaddafi, is now gripped by the chaos of unpatrolled streets and inter-tribal warfare. What remains of Qaddafi’s loyalists have transformed themselves into an underground terrorist organization, planting bombs all over the country. Tunisia is beset by unemployment and hyper-inflation, an Islamist government with many ministers who want to impose Islamic Law, and a left-wing opposition robbed of its most vocal leader, Chokri Belaid, in February by an assassination. Bahrain is still gripped by a low-level civil war, 3,000 people have been and still are detained without trial, and five have died in custody from torture wounds. The Bahrainian police continues to carry out midnight raids, checkpoint beatings, and instructs doctors to deny medical care to 'potential subversives.'

All of this would have been worthwhile if Egypt, the centerpiece of the Arab Spring which houses 2/5ths of the world’s entire Arab population, seemed in better shape than it is. Within four months of his election, President Mohammed Morsi issued a decree announcing that he would rule by fiat without accountability from the constituent assembly - a constitution-writing body which already conceded to Morsi nearly every power he wanted. The liberal leaders who believed they could mollify Islamic parties like Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood had long since walked out of the constituent assembly. Just as conservatives and realists warned, the post-Arab Spring Middle East may stand on the edge of something so disastrous that we haven’t seen its like since the genocides committed during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. And we liberals let it happen without so much as a word of caution.

How could we be so blind that we didn’t see this coming? The Arab Spring happened without the economic means to support its citizens, without a proper rule of law in place, and with the military being the only strong element in each country. The chances of a functional democracy springing up were no less slim than democracy flowering in Iraq, and yet we jettisoned longtime allies like Mubarak which preserved order and stability - however corruptly and brutally, Mubarak was an authoritarian dictator, not a totalitarian. Liberals who decried the democratic project in Iraq were completely mum when it came to the equally unlikely prospects of democracy in Egypt and Syria. Obama has, wisely, stayed true to his word and interfered minimally in the events of the Arab world. But the fact that he did nothing to prevent Mubarak’s fall could (yet again, the liberal in me screams not to say this), eventually be revealed as the greatest sin of his presidency.

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Jelly Roll Morton - Playlist

Black Bottom Stomp

The Chant

Smoke House Blues

Dead Man Blues

Grandpa's Spells

Original Jelly Roll Blues

Mournful Serenade

New Orleans Blues

Kansas City Stomps

Chicago Breakdown

Wild Man Blues

Clarinet Marmalade

Mr. Jelly Lord

King Porter Stomp

Wolverine Blues

Milenburg Joys

Georgia Swing





Tiger Rag

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Early Louis Armstrong Playlist: Part 2

Weather Bird

Muggles

Beau Koo Jack

Skip the Gutter

Savoy Blues

Savoyager's Stomp

Two Deuces

No! (Papa, No)

Basin Street Blues

St. James Infirmary

Tight Like This

Mahogany Hall Stomp



and just for the hell of it, once again - West End Blues

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800 Words: For James Gandolfini (1961-2013)

Look above to view one of the most darkly hilarious scenes in TV history, and it just got a lot darker. The death of James Gandolfini is yet another blow to the world's fat hedonists. One by one, all my favorite fat actors die before they reach their dotages - no more John Candy, no more Chris Farley, no more Richard Griffiths, no more James Gandolfini, can John Goodman be far behind?

The first thing that should be said about James Gandolfini is this - he gave the definitive TV performance. No show has ever asked so many nuances from an actor as this show which barely made it to television asked from a former bartender and truck driver who was the son of a bricklayer and fell into acting almost by accident. David Chase, showrunner of The Sopranos, compared him to Mozart. I can't imagine that acting on television is as hard as composing, but if it is, then there was something about Gandolfini that was truly extraordinary.  



I did not come to The Sopranos on its original run. My parents didn't have cable, and my college kept picking up and dropping HBO. But there was a bigger reason, the show simply seemed too intense and violent. It seemed to ask viewers to squirm in their seats until the next character was whacked, and that was just too much for me to take. Furthermore, there was a subset of dedicated Sopranos viewers - fratboys, bros, fake thugs -  who made the show seem truly ugly. To them, Tony Soprano was no different than Tony Montana - a simple badass who was 'hardcore' because he made people spurt blood.  

I only started watching the show around 2007 - perhaps not coincidentally, the year which Mad Men began. Even then, I could barely take the intensity of the violence. This wasn't the cartoon violence of genre movies, this was real violence with human cost and real world dimensions. I could only keep going because I wikipedia'd every character to see if and when they'd be killed, and I still haven't been able to watch the last half-season. Am I lazy, or am I really afraid of what's going to happen? I can only imagine what it must have been like to see this show when it first ran, the suspense between the sudden violent escalations must have unbearable.


(spoiler alert...)

Imagine my surprise, however, when I discovered that the show was not in fact about violence. The violence was merely a tool for the show to ask its questions - questions about morality, about self-delusion, about the capacity for violence, and most importantly, about our own complicity in violence. Did even Scorsese or Coppola use their violence to such depth of  effect? Has any writer since Kafka or Dostoevsky used violence to ask larger questions than The Sopranos did? 

The Sopranos does not mark a beginning, it marks an end. In The Sopranos we see the end of America’s fascination with organized crime, the end of America’s white immigrant working class, the end of trust in the nuclear family, and the end of America’s illusions about the price of success.   It is, in every way, a show about deaths. It does not glorify the importance of death, a la Six Feet Under, but it does accept death as life’s natural end. It does not glorify violent people as misunderstood, a la The Godfather, but it allows us to see violent people as humans who have redeeming qualities weighted against their brutality. But whatever else The Sopranos is, it‘s above all a moral parable about humanity’s desire to convince itself that we act in good faith in spite of all evidence to the contrary. We invariably slump into our seats a little as Tony is ‘forced’ to kill friend after friend, Paulie turns violent after the slightest insults, Carmela finds an infinite number of excuses to maintain her lifestyle by staying with Tony, Christopher puts off his desire to find something better than mob-life, and hundreds of peripheral characters who are drawn to the danger of criminals like flies to shit. Like Westerns before them, images about the mafia are embedded in the American DNA. At their beginning both Westerns and Mafia movies glamorized outlaws by portraying them as taking what more privileged people refused to give. As time went on, both gradually exposed the rot behind that myth, until finally a work came along that exploded our illusions finally and forever. In Westerns, it was late John Wayne’s movies like The Searchers or True Grit which showed the hatred and bigotry that motivated the Old West. In mafia movies, we went from the paean to organized crime that was The Godfather to the pathos of Godfather II, to the uneasiness of Goodfellas. And finally, here was a piece that made us realize how dangerous it is to view criminals as heroes even as we became ever more drawn to them. With every season, we became more complicit in the evil perpetrated on the screen. And by exposing the rot at the core of our desire to see glory in violence, The Sopranos both became an elegy for an enormous chunk of the American Dream, and a Premium Cable Requiem for the dominance of a medium that made us feel the American Dream so intensely.  



Some great works languor in obscurity until the world is ready for them. Some are embraced right away, and clearly The Sopranos was one of the latter. The Sopranos was the perfect show for the Bush years. It tapped into that deep-seated, almost unmentionable anxiety of its era; that all of our prosperity, all of our comfort, and all of the joy it gives us, was bought in blood. If American money is blood money, then perhaps we all deserved to die like Adriana crawling on her hands and knees in the woods, or like Cantor Fitzgerald workers in the Twin Towers, or like the millions of Vietnamese war dead. 

Many young men took to The Sopranos because of its violence. But an older generation took to The Sopranos because of its anxiety - an anxiety born of familiarity. Ostensibly, the subject of The Sopranos is mobsters and their lives. But like all great literary works, the real subject is us. People with similarities to Tony Soprano are his contemporaries in every suburb of America. They were born into the Golden Age of American prosperity, and their childhoods are tinged with memories of an older, pre-1970's era when cities were places of innocence and excitement. But crime rates went up, and every family with enough money moved out to the suburbs, where they accumulated wealth and prosperity beyond the dreams of their grandparents. Like Tony, these contemporaries fought with their parents constantly, who told them that they were spoiled and knew nothing about life's hardships. Like Carmela, these contemporaries use every excuse to maintain their upper class lifestyle at the expense both of those beneath them and of themselves. And as the children of these contemporaries grow up, some of them, like Meadow, use their still greater privileges to achieve things beyond even their parents dreams, while others, like AJ, languish in upper-class loafer misery. 



The Sopranos is not a show for young people, it's a show for the old. David Chase was already in his mid-50's when The Sopranos began, and before that he was a mid-level TV writer with a long history of depression. At a period when The Movies' influence was waning upon American life, David Chase was an obsessive cinefile who devoured everything from Fellini to silent pictures to b-movie matinees. His life was movies, and he spent thirty years trying to break into an industry that simply wasn't interested. What David Chase did with The Sopranos was not simply to create a grand summation of everything he learned from movies, he also defeated the movie industry who spurned him.

Most of the best TV shows of today (make your own list), are not simply great television. They have completely replaced the movies - giving us a new excellent 1 hour movie every week, and telling stories with a depth and maturity which American movies on their best days now seem barely capable. While moviemakers struggle to make anything that isn't a mega-blockbuster or a barely funded independent project, television becomes ever more baroque, ever freer in its content, and ever more daring - a daring which reached its apogee with The Sopranos. 



For me, The Sopranos and Mad Men stand at the top of the pyramid - no TV drama since I, Claudius has had as powerful an effect on me. But if I, Claudius had reached the achievement of the other two, it would have to have seven times as many episodes with no drop-off in quality. Mad Men is The Sopranos' true successor, not only because Matthew Weiner was a producer on The Sopranos, but because it asks the next logical question that evolves from The Sopranos. If The Sopranos asks (and documents) if America is falling from grace, then Mad Men asks why the fall from grace had to happen. If a historian from the future travelled back in time and asked me what it was like to grow up in America, all I could do is take him to the video store. We'd take out lots of DVD's and watch The Simpsons, Seinfeld, The Sopranos, and Mad Men. But we'd probably start with The Sopranos.




....Maybe The Simpsons.....

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My Favorite Album - Die Myhre

I don't have a favorite album. But one that I like a lot and meant a lot to me in college is Sufjan Steven's "Illinoise."

For my freshman year orientation class, I took a course called "Music, Politics, and Identity." One of my tasks was to analyze two songs from Sufjan Stevens' album "Illinoise." My first listening made me think, "is this a circus?" Second, "Oh my God, what a drama queen. Is everything hard in his life?" Third, "Hmm, wow." Fourth, "Holy shit." Fifth - bazillionth = "please move me again, and make me think, reflect." This is great music for transition, movement.

For my college professor, I wrote a paper about Sufjan Steven's tune "John Wayne Gacy, Jr." It made me think of the ramifications of mental illness. It made me talk with people about whether true "evil" exists in the world. It made me think about the own terrible secrets I hide, you hide, and everyone hides, and what cruelty every being may be capable of. But also the joy and love that people are capable of, if that's their choice. And it is a choice. A hard one, but still a choice.

Now, I listen to "Illinoise" on long road trips on tour, especially when it's late, to reflect, and think about how I've evolved since I was introduced to Mr. Sufjan Stevens.

Die Myhre is a singer, jazz clarinetist, and bluegrass bassist extraordinaire in the Baltimore/DC area.

Click here for Der Mazur's Contribution
Click here for La Cohen's Contribution

Click here for Il Greenwood's Contribution

Click here for Der Thobaben's Contribution

Click here for Doundou Tchil's Contribution
Click here for Eta Boris's Contribution
Click here for HaWinograd's Contribution
Click here for Le Malon's Contribution
Click here for Atomic Sam's Contribution

Click here for La Swaynos's Contribution
Click here for Boulezian's Contribution
Click here for HaZmora's Contribution
Click here for The McBee's Contribution
Click here for Le Drgon's Contribution
Click here for The Brannock's Contribution
Click here for The Danny's Contribution
Click here for The Drioux's contribution
Click here for El Reyes's contribution
Click here for My contribtuion

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