The Classroom Conservative

David Byrne And Brian Eno, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today

Listening to the NPR "All Songs Considered" podcast on a recent drive to Calgary, I heard "Strange Overtones," a new song from David Byrne and Brian Eno. Bob Boilen, the program's host, told a story about meeting Byrne in the late 1970s as Eno was readying production on the Talking Heads' sophomore album. Eventually, Byrne and Eno collaborated on a side project, and it was during the re-release of My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts that the two began working together again, for the first time in about twenty-five years. "Strange Overtones" is one of the eleven songs that makes up Everything That Happens Will Happen Today.

It is worth noting that the NPR podcast, downloaded automatically from iTunes each week, has become for me an indispensable source of music information as record stores crumble. Whether or not our big box stores have adequate depth of catalog, it is impossible to search for what you do not know exists. There are few places where you can be sure to find a full range of new music options. The reliable Mr. Boilen told me that this exciting new collaboration had been released, and so - because I was going to be in the big city, anyway - I thought I would drop by Megatunes, one of the few true record stores operating in Southern Alberta. Located along the so-called "Red Mile," a busy thoroughfare with little parking, the Calgary location can be a challenge to reach. So, I got myself dropped off and made a dash for the door. The knowledgeable staff, their authority bolstered by tattoos and piercings, had been spending the afternoon inventing unlikely album titles, and so when I asked for Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, they thought I was a plant. They had not heard of it.

Had Bob Boilen let me down? No, as it turns out, the album has been released on the internet, much like Radiohead's In Rainbows last year. Unlike Radiohead, though, Mr. Byrne and Mr. Eno have set prices. There is a deluxe set, including a film, but the two most common pricing options allow you to download the album for nine dollars; for twelve dollars you can get the download now and receive a real disc at some point between now and November.

I like this idea a great deal. Those of us who need a real, plastic object with liner notes included can indulge ourselves. I encourage you to check out the associated website here. The only problem, of course, is how to browse these new, virtual record stores. These new finds of mine, like Bowerbirds and LCD Soundsystem, feel like I stumbled across them. What will I do if Mr. Boilen leaves NPR?

It occurs to me that I have said little about the music here. I am a big fan of the Talking Heads, and I have enjoyed the eclectic solo work of David Byrne. But if, like me, you find that solo work impossibly ambitious, as broad-ranging across two or three albums as your whole record collection, you will find him on firm and familiar ground here. You will be hard-pressed to find anything elsewhere this Fall as catchy as "Strange Overtones." In fact, I caught CBC Radio using it in its theme music last week. Byrne writes lyrics across this album for music Eno had lying around, essentially, and the first single takes a gentle poke at his collaborator for a "beat" that is "slightly out of fashion." Perhaps only "Poor Boy" is as up-tempo as that track, but all are equally melodic - "proper songs," as Byrne has described them - and highlights can be found in "Home," "My Big Nurse," and "Life Is Long." David Byrne plans to tour with this music, and I expect it will be a series of memorable shows.

My download was uneventful, and the sound quality is super on my iPod. Still, I look forward to receiving my CD in the mail. It is the conservative in me.

Billy Bragg, Mr. Love and Justice

Billy Bragg gave the best concert I ever attended.  It was in the early 1990s in a school gymnasium in St. John’s.  Mr. Bragg was, so the story goes, on vacation in Newfoundland, and he took some time from his whale-watching adventure to play a charity gig.  He appeared onstage with a guitar and a small amplifier, and he ran through a thoroughly-entertaining, stripped-down set of many of his already-stripped-down favorites.  This, you see, was the success of Mr. Bragg’s early career.  An angry young man with a keen sense of humor and a knack for connecting with his fans, he could draw you in with his take on relationships in “The Saturday Boy” and “Must I Paint You A Picture,” and you would follow him to darker spots in the human heart on “Levi Stubb’s Tears.”  His clever songwriting on “The Milkman of Human Kindness” and “A New England” carried the day.  An unapologetic Labour Party advocate, he was never shrill in his openly partisan politics, on songs like “Between the Wars,” “Waiting for the Great Leap Forward,” and even “Help Save The Youth of America.”

 

But when he was in St. John’s, he was basking in the relative commercial success of Don’t Try This At Home (1991) whose lush musical accompaniments were hard to replicate alone.  Perhaps this was a sign of trouble, a sign of things to come.  Marriage, fatherhood, and the eventual revelation that Tony Blair’s government advocated things that might have made Margaret Thatcher blush had to be reflected in Bragg’s music.  How could he be that clever young man anymore?  I was less pleased with efforts that tried to build on the triumphs of the early 1990s: William Bloke (1996) and England, Half English (2002) left me cold, for the most part, where musical proficiency and lyrical variety stood in for early magic.  An exception must be made for his two albums of newly-discovered Woody Guthrie songs, prepared in collaboration with Wilco in the late nineties, which freed Bragg to connect with his material.

 

So what to expect from Mr. Love and Justice, a brand new album from one of my favorite voices, a voice muted for so long that NPR recently listed him in a program naming people we’ve “grown out of”?  Well, I took a flier, and I couldn’t be happier.  I bought the deluxe version of the album: two discs, one solo and one with the band.  I listed to the solo album first, and I listened to it repeatedly.  I found tracks, like “I Keep Faith,” “M For Me,” and “Something Happened,” that stand up amongst his best relationship songs.  There are even rough gems, musically, like “I Almost Killed You” and, lyrically, like “The Johnny Carcinogenic Show.”  The complex politics of contemporary Britain emerge in “The Beach is Free” and “Sing Their Souls Back Home.”  There are a dozen songs here with which to fall in love, and in this form they would not have been out of place in a set in 1988 or 1991.

 

But this need not be an exercise in nostalgia; the fully-arranged versions on the other disc have their own warmth, I must acknowledge, and these may be of greatest appeal to new fans, people for whom “How can you lie there and think of England / When you don’t even know who’s in the team” has no resonance, people who are too young to know about “Red Wedge.”  I would even admit that “I Almost Killed You,” “Something Happened,” “O Freedom,” and the title track may be better with the band.  That’s what happens when you fall in love with the songs: they transcend the arrangements.  And two versions of each track lets old fans and new do just that.

Maxim's Poor Etiquette

Maxim magazine is enduring a rough ride these days for its premature review of the new Black Crowes album, Warpaint.  Now, I have to tell you that I do not immediately associate Maxim with CD appreciations, and it is not the publication to which I turn when I want information on music.  But the fact that it printed a lukewarm “review” of an album long before advance copies of the disc were available should be of concern to anyone who does.

 

I spent a long time writing music reviews, as I have said before in this space, and I have to admit that I am pretty skeptical about the whole thing.  I would listen to something in a rush, try to connect my observations with the biographical material I was given, and publish a brief appreciation to deadline.  Now, the last thing I want to suggest is that is impossible to write well about music.  We all know that it can be done, and some people are very skilled at it.  But we also know that our appreciation of music we like deepens over time.  After playing a record a few dozen times, I likely think differently of it than I did after a first, hasty play.  In the wake of my entertainment writing career, I did meet people who told me they enjoyed what I wrote, but what they really meant was that they shared my musical interests.  And, having determined that they might like what I liked, initially, they could be enticed to try something they had not heard but I had.

   

This is a valuable service, but it is something that is done very well on the internet today.  I have subscribed to music services that, based on a list of my favorite artists, can recommend new artists to me.  This is as imprecise as you might imagine, though I have occasionally discovered something really interesting this way.  I download various podcasts that play and discuss new records.  And, of course, iTunes will play me 30 seconds of anything I might be interested in downloading.  When you consider how long in advance print reviews of anything may have to be filed, the problems for the genre are compounded.

   

What, then, might be the value of the print review for music?  Unlike a book review, where the opinion must be more considered – after all, it takes a longer time to read a book than to play a song – and the subject of the review seldom endures repeated exposures, the record review catalogs a fleeting impression.  It does little more for me, in my reading, than establish the existence of something I might not know had been recorded.  It could, however, also suggest a general trend for me: “Bob Dylan’s latest record continues his invocation of a bluesy heritage,” or “Thom Yorke’s solo work is more melodic than Radiohead’s music.”  While I can say with hand on heart that I would not buy something based on any such recommendation, I might hesitate if “trending” information troubled me.

 

In the case of Maxim’s two-and-a-half out of five-star rating, the reviewer judged that the Crowes “sound pretty much like they always have: boozy, competent, and in slavish debt to the Stones, the Allmans, and the Faces.”  After a seven-year layoff, the band might have a hard time attracting new fans based on such an observation.  The magazine’s editor is now suggesting that the piece was to be an unrated “preview,” but for a publication that is not known for objectivity – consider “Ten horrendous television shows that deserved to die” and “These five men turned the White House black” – the claim seems quite ludicrous.  While I do not accept that their discussions of music are of much value to the artists or to the audience, they are usually humorously opinionated: they just need to be written from genuine knowledge and not from the hackneyed generalities of the unskilled reviewer.

Tom Cochrane and My Year at The Newfoundland Herald

I had, by the summer of 1988, completed my first year of university and had been (due to extreme bashfulness) submitting anonymous record reviews to The Newfoundland Herald in St. John’s. Indeed, some of the things I reviewed were still on vinyl. I was so concerned about what Geoff Meeker, its talented editor, would think of me that I dared not sign my name. Due to a disagreement about the influence of advertising staff on editorial content, Mr. Meeker left the magazine, and there was tremendous upheaval amongst its editors and writers. I promptly left school, dropped the nom-de-plume “Tim Finn” or “Tim Flynn” – I could never keep them straight! – and found a place for myself on the masthead of the magazine, eventually crawling up to the role of “Assistant Editor” for something like $7 or $8 an hour.

I thought I was in heaven. My professors at Memorial University were less thrilled about losing what they thought to be a fairly promising student to an entertainment magazine, and after a year I resigned and crawled back to the classroom. As you can see, I never again left it. But the experience of a year as a paid writer on deadline was an important one. I really enjoyed the positive reinforcement that came with writing regularly. Most Wednesday and Thursday mornings, I could count on at least a couple of people telling me how much they enjoyed what was coming off the press. (Of course, it was crushing when no one could muster any enthusiasm about my adolescent prose.) The downside was that I had to find something to write about each week, and with all the contacts you can imagine a shy boy from Conception Bay South would have accumulated in two years with a driver’s license, the task was not always easy.

I was allowed to keep up much of the entertainment writing once I joined the staff, formally, but I did not have the flair that Mr. Meeker brought to the job. When I left, Bob Hallett (of Great Big Sea fame) took over and tapped into a network of connections only a practicing musician could possess. Although I was never allowed to write book reviews, during the last months of 1988 and the first months of 1989, I enjoyed going to some concerts and even talking to some musicians. Then, as now, Warner Brothers Music was a behemoth that did not need to go out of its way to promote itself to a magazine in Newfoundland. But some companies, like PolyGram, for example, would arrange telephone conversations for me with third-string musicians from bands like The Cult and Hothouse Flowers. It would be much more common to speak to Canadian artists from all labels, many of whom were planning trips to St. John’s. The least pleasant interaction I ever had with a musician was with Andrew Cash, who had been signed to Island Records some time before. Apparently, Mr. Cash had answered many times a question about his relationship with his record company, and he shut me down before my pedestrian little enquiry got out of my mouth. It made for an uncomfortable subsequent fifteen minutes, I can tell you. Although I have obviously not forgotten this after twenty years, I can hardly fault the man for losing patience with someone so ill-prepared for an interview. I gather that Mr. Cash is now a journalist, himself, and I hope he has never gotten the brush-off he gave me!

There was one Canadian music celebrity that distinguished himself by the compassion he showed a mousy little entertainment reporter from Newfoundland, though: Tom Cochrane. I had grown up listening to Red Rider, and they were one of a few bands who could be counted upon to play St. John’s now and then. Mr. Cochrane was emerging from the band by this time; their albums had started carrying the “Tom Cochrane and Red Rider” billing, and the man himself was on the telephone with me to discuss Victory Day. (I believe they were coming to play the old Thomson Students’ Centre at Memorial, and as it turned out my tickets for the show were never reserved. I was thus fated to be escorted from the venue in yet another humbling journalistic embarrassment.)

The Newfoundland Herald is owned by the same folks who run OZ-FM and NTV, and each week a production assistant would come across the parking lot from the radio and television station with the chart from Casey Kasem’s “American Top 40” to be broadcast the following Saturday. Anyway, “Big League” was the big single from this album, a rather dark bit of pop fare, to tell you the truth.  But as I stared down at the chart that was handed to me by the production assistant, I saw that, somehow, improbably, it was Number One. “Whoa,” I thought, as I started to ask Mr. Cochrane a question about his big American success. Back then, the pressing issue was always about what Canadian acts would "break" in the United States. Today, we have Avril Lavigne and Michael Buble and Nickelback, entertainers who seem to appear in multiple markets at the same time, but back then we wondered if Blue Rodeo or Luba or The Tragically Hip could ever mean to Americans what they already meant to us. “So,” I blundered on, “how does it feel to achieve this incredible success south of the border?”

Mr. Cochrane paused. It seems to me, thinking back these twenty years, that he paused for about an hour, but I am sure that he paused for only a second or two, tried to measure the insanity of the young man down the line, and without missing a beat proceeded to answer by talking about hard work and ambition, his hopes for his music career. Little did either of us know at the time that I had been given the local music chart by mistake, a list of the most requested songs in St. John’s, Newfoundland. This was, of course, hardly the prize that having the best-selling single across North America would be. But, no matter: Mr. Cochrane talked of international success as if we were measuring it by the ability to sell out a small club in upstate New York. Once I found out my mistake, I was mortified, but I was also deeply grateful to a successful musician who had the generosity of spirit to give a pass to a reporter who should have double-checked his facts. I have, obviously, never forgotten the gesture, one that taught me a great lesson about both preparedness and patience with others.

The last two decades have been very kind to both Mr. Cochrane and me. I am pretty sure that he never did get the most popular song on “American Top 40,” but in that he is touring Canada right now with John Mellencamp, I think everything worked out okay for him. I notice he’s up for a Juno in April at the ceremony in Calgary. Rufus Wainwright’s Release the Stars was my favorite “Adult Alternative” Canadian album this year, but you know I’ll be cheering on No Stranger, nonetheless. Little things can make us fans for life, after all.

Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

When I was a boy following baseball closely, I used to imagine that I was a general manager assembling a team of all-stars.  In those early days of unrestricted free agency, long before salary caps, I was able to field in my imagination, at least, a murderers’ row of sluggers that would strike fear in the heart of any opposing pitcher.  I never stopped to consider how these fellows might function as a team.  Could these guys have fielded worth a darn?  How might they have run the bases?  Who knows if their individual egos would have brought the whole thing crashing down?

   

I wonder if producing a film is like being a baseball general manager.  Director Tim Burton has brought together his dream team for a screen adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: Johnny Depp, who has done his best work under Burton’s direction; Helena Bonham Carter, who bears his children as well as his gothic quirks; Timothy Spall, who rides in with a deserved reputation as the best supporting player going; Sacha Baron Cohen, whose outrageous pedigree threatens the unpredictable; Alan Rickman, who has played some of contemporary film’s most memorable villains.  Such a cast cannot miss, and they do not.  Sweeney Todd has love and song, revenge and gore.  But if utter perfection is its aim, it falls just short.

 

Depp is the title character, the alter ego of Benjamin Barker, wrongly imprisoned by Judge Turpin, who lusts for the innocent man’s wife.  Returning to London, Todd seeks revenge by resuming his trade as a barber, aided by the widow Mrs. Lovett, whose struggling meat pie business is revived through her new tenant’s ability to secure fresh protein.  Both Todd and Lovett are blinded, he by a longing for revenge and she by a longing for love, and the story teaches us, ultimately, about the perils of obsession.

   

Johnny Depp acquits himself well in his singing, though his vacant stare is cribbed from Edward Scissorhands (1990).  The wonderful Dan Savage, writing in The Stranger, takes serious issue with Bonham Carter’s voice.  She tends to be shrill, but I found her presence magnificent.  In fact, both Depp and Bonham Carter are so captivating that they overshadow entirely the love story between Johanna, Benjamin Barker’s daughter, and Anthony Hope.  Baron Cohen delivers the delightful goods, but he gets his scenes stolen from him by newcomer Ed Sanders, playing knavish youngster Toby.  My problem is actually with Rickman and Spall, who for whatever reason are not nearly menacing enough.  As Judge Turpin and Beadle Bamford, respectively, they just cannot match Sweeney Todd.

   

But who could?  If you don’t like blood on the big screen, the songs won’t quite compensate for this experience.  I recommend strapping yourself to the barber’s chair for one of the most unique couple of hours you will spend at the cinema this Christmas.  The look of the film is, itself, worth the ticket price.

Happy Christmas, Faggot

Recent conflicting news: the British Broadcasting Corporation was going to excise the word “faggot” from “Fairytale of New York,” the unconventional Christmas song The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl released in the late 1980s.  Then it was not.  Then it was going to butcher the song on “Radio 1,” its “hip” station, but not on its more staid “Radio 2.”  Huh?  Now “faggot” is back, seemingly, across the board.

   

For those of you unfamiliar with this seminal recording, a couple of frustrated immigrants overwhelmed by the Manhattan experience lash out at each other in the shadow of the drunk tank.  The man calls his partner a “slut,” and the woman counters by condemning her critic as a “faggot.”  You can find the song on If I Should Fall From Grace With God (1988), the band’s most commercially-successful record, and a potent follow-up to Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash (1985).  The duet between ramshackle Shane MacGowan and earthy MacColl captures perfectly the swagger of the whole album, though the musical accompaniment from the boisterous Pogues is here most unassuming.  The song stands out because of its unconventionality, of course.  It has a happy ending only if you think the Christmas reconciliation of a volatile couple is a good idea.  But, I suppose, Christmas is a time of hope, and maybe these two will achieve true peace and goodwill.  As for the language, it just rings true.  An angry man might question a woman’s fidelity, and an angry woman might question a man’s…  Well, she might question his manhood, in a narrow sense of the word.  Should homosexuals be offended?  Sure, but no more than all women should be.  But no one should be surprised that, in the depths of a terrible fight, people fight dirty and say shameful things.  One of the keys to the success of the song, after all, is that it shatters and then attempts to reconstruct our holiday expectations.  It is not unlike hilarious parodies of other Christmas songs, in this regard.

   

Those of us who refuse to surrender this most important season to political correctness, those of us who want Christmas to persevere over generic holiday celebrations, need to relax about these kinds of things.  Christmas is holy, but it is not fragile.  It can certainly withstand some fun – and it can certainly withstand some schoolyard language.

Radiohead, In Rainbows

The last time Radiohead released a new album, I was returning from an early trip to the airport as the electronics store opened, and I became, on the morning it was offered for sale, one of the first people in North America to buy Hail to the Thief.  I believe it cost me $14 plus applicable taxes.  Unless the economics of the music business have changed a lot since I left the retail sector, it probably cost the store about $10-12.  The wholesaler ensured that the chain made a profit before it ever reached the store, leaving the record company what remained to cover its production, marketing, and distribution costs.  Somewhere at the back of this equation, Radiohead made some money.

   

With the release of In Rainbows, Radiohead now becomes the latest act to try to shift the paradigm of music distribution.  The album was released today on a website linked from the band’s official site, and by registering and entering my credit card number, I was able to download compressed versions of the ten files that make up the songs on In Rainbows.  Now, I have to tell you that the connection between the radiohead.com site and the inrainbows.com site was just tenuous enough to give me pause when I opened up my credit to the internet.  I also hate the zip technology that requires me to unpack the files.  It took me a few moments to convert and copy the files to iTunes.  But, all in all, I cannot complain about the transaction.  It was less cumbersome than buying a CD.  But none of this is the most subversive part of the sale.

   

You see, Radiohead left it up to me to decide what I should pay for the album.  When I clicked on the hotlinked “?” on the site, it reminded me a number of times that it really, really was up to me to decide the value of In Rainbows.  Some people have suggested that the music is now almost a loss leader for bands like Radiohead, who make their money on tours and merchandise that are only buoyed by the actual songs I listen to as I cruise the halls here at work.  But with every cent of the purchase price going to the band – they even charged me 45 pence to cover the administrative costs of the transaction – can we say that this tenuous model is less lucrative than keeping the record company and the various wholesalers and retailers in on the transaction?

   

You might wonder how much I paid for In Rainbows.  Well, I paid five pounds, about the equivalent in Canadian dollars of how much the iTunes Store charges for a download.  Interesting, isn’t it, how quickly I adopted a new economic model and used it to guide me when all guidelines were lifted?  How may people, I wonder, paid a single penny?

   

But what is more interesting to me is how this new method of distribution, and how all electronic delivery of music for that matter, ignores the commodity value of collecting.  The use value of music, the practical worth of it to distract us, to inspire us, to help us get through a day at work, could just as easily be achieved by my humming the songs or even waiting for them to come on the radio.  The commodity value of music, the esteem we derive from collecting and displaying it, from taunting our friends with rare artifacts, is forgotten entirely here.  I don’t even have an album cover; I had to download an image from the website to paste into my iPod.  Now, I should tell you that I was given the option to order, for more than $80, a vinyl version, a traditional CD (with bonus tracks), and various other items that would appeal to the collector.  But these objects will not appear until December.  In the meantime, does this not strike you as a crude way to divide commodity value from use value, a crude way to divide collectors from pimply-faced internet pirates?  Is a jewel box, some liner notes, and a CD to hold in my hands now too much to ask?

   

If I am equivocal about this new development, the most important thing, certainly, is that I really like the album.  Gone is the raw anger of Hail to the Thief, and some people might welcome that.  Gone, as well, are the frantic, ambient beats of Kid A, and some people might lament that.  This music is decidedly more introspective, more driven by guitar, bass, and drums, more melodic.  It is still Radiohead, undoubtedly, but they have forged ahead – and, as you have seen from what I have written above, they have dragged the whole music industry with them.

Farewell To The Record Store

From behind a two-way mirror in the back of the store I watched them.  It was a holiday crowd, and John Mellencamp’s The Lonesome Jubilee was on the CD player.  All the customers, all seventy-five of them, say, were dancing to “Cherry Bomb” as they browsed.  It was a remarkable moment of Christmas cheer in the early 1990s, a testimony to the power of music, a wonderful memory of how much fun it was to work in a record store.  With all apologies to my current employer, it was the best job I ever had, and I did it for five years at $5.75 an hour.  It struck me last week that this memory truly belongs to another era, like working as a blacksmith or perhaps the person who went around lighting streetlamps.  I bet the VCR repairman thought he had a job for life, too.  You see, with a few minutes to kill after work, recently, I wandered by my local record store and found it shuttered.  Out of business.  And I am left to lament the end of the record store as I knew it.

   

Now I want to be very clear here: I worked for Sam the Record Man in St. John’s, Newfoundland from 1987 to 1992.  It was part of a large chain, though in my earliest months there it had all the charm of a small, independent store like that in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity.  Similarly, the store that closed here in Lethbridge was an outlet of A&B Sound.  But what these chain stores had in common, and had in common with the independents, was a deep back catalogue and a staff that was legitimately interested in music.  (Scott, wherever you are: you were smart enough to jump before the roof caved in, and I hope you’re gainfully employed.)  Many of the large stores today have clerks who would just as soon be serving in the food court if there was an extra buck in it, and these places really exist only to move a few hundred units of the newest releases, anyway.  The small music store – two of my favorites are Fred’s in St. John’s and Megatunes in Calgary – cannot compete pricewise on these chart toppers, squeezing then what can be devoted to the overhead necessary to maintain that back catalogue.  I dare you to try to find a copy of Camper Van Beethoven’s Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart or Graham Parker’s The Mona Lisa’s Sister or Danny Wilson’s debut at Best Buy.  I dare you to find a clerk at Future Shop who has heard of them.  The used CD shops are cool, but more often than not they have only a dozen copies of Celine Dion’s last record, discarded by teenagers trying to pay their cellphone bills.

   

The record stores of the future will surely be organized around downloads.  Many American bookstore chains have developed hybrid book and music collections that are hinted at in some of our larger Chapters stores.  I suspect that once Heather Reisman figures out that I do not want to buy bric-a-brac from her, Chapters will move faster in this direction.  Starbucks partnering with iTunes to encourage coffee shop downloads hints at the ultimate convergence.  I hope only that, having sampled a song, I’ll still have the option, ultimately, to buy the CD, hold it in my hands, and not simply download more.  For while the ability to buy an individual selection is fantastic, there will never be anything quite like having the disc, keeping it on the shelf with all the others, safe against hard drive implosion.  Surely, these new places will sell expensive coffee, but maybe the local metalhead or the garage musician or the college radio DJ will get to brew it for us, talking about music as they do so.  Maybe, if we’re really lucky, the best of these new record stores will still have a back catalogue where I’ll be able to buy a copy of The Lonesome Jubilee.

My iPod Hates the CRTC

Okay, it is not really the CRTC it hates, I suppose. But the antiquated media in this country is somehow symbolized for us by the CRTC, right? It represents all that is backward thinking, slow-to-react, and nanny state-ish about the way we are organized. It is the reason why I had to wait years before Fox News was introduced in this country, long after it had established itself as the most popular cable media outlet in the United States. It is the reason why I have to buy my favorite television channels “bundled” with things in which I have no interest. It is the reason why the songs I like on the radio are paired with songs aired only because their airing helps achieve a mandate of promoting something labeled nebulously as “Canadian culture.” I suspect it is the reason why our cell phone service is so lousy in this country, and I am wondering if they might not be behind global warming and third-world hunger somehow, as well.

Woody Guthrie’s guitar used to have a slogan on it that read “This machine kills fascists,” in bold letters. “This machine kills old-fashioned media,” my iPod should say.

If I am late to the MP3/MP4/podcasting thing, I apologize. But having caught the fever, I am an enthusiastic advocate. I leave my house in the morning with all the songs I want to hear. I can play Richard Thompson’s 1991 album Rumor and Sigh without rummaging for it, and if this reminds me that I have not heard Fairport Convention’s “Matty Groves” in some time, I can click to hear that, too. Inevitably, this takes me to Sandy Denny’s solo work. For someone with a short attention span, this revolutionizes how I listen to music. I can happily pay a dollar to hear OutKast’s “Hey Ya!” without a whole album I do not want. But if, having bought Serena Ryder’s cover of “Good Morning Starshine,” I like what she is about, I can go to the record store and buy her whole If Your Memory Serves You Well.  (I did; you should, too.)  Similarly, I leave with the podcast of the New York Times book review and National Public Radio’s program on popular culture. I can even listen to Chris Evans, the British media darling of the mid-1990s, try his comeback on BBC radio. But Canada’s mothercorp need not worry: I can load lots of CBC programming, but I can make my CBC a George Stroumboulopoulous-free zone!

There are still drawbacks, of course. I am always a day behind in listening to Pardon the Interruption, ESPN’s sports talk program. And this program, like Bill Mahar’s excellent Real Time, is still audio without video. Even though I have the most memory yet available on iPod, I assume anything beyond a few minutes of video is prohibitively large. I love talk radio, and live talk radio is best. We still need to integrate, say, satellite radio with podcasting more effectively to combine the thrill of live programming with full choice. I still cannot control podcasts fully. If I miss a title of a book reviewed, I have to wait to get back to my computer to browse to the part of the hour-long program to retrieve it. But the revolution has started in the palm of my hand, and these little obstacles will not stop it. I do not even care that I have to listen to commercials or that I will, eventually and inevitably, have to pay for more content. I just want control.

It is the fault of the media nanny state. There is no doubt. By forcing conventional media to program to our differences, they have not brought us together: they have driven us away into our narrow little worlds. I can sometimes get the news I need, but I have to watch Peter Mansbridge do a slow survey of every little pocket of the globe to get it. On a recent Sunday night before a holiday, we lost electricity service for a couple of hours, an uncommon occurrence in the land of buried power lines. I could get all kinds of media reports about the diversity of the global village, but I could not find out what was happening to me, here. Then, at the point that we lose sight of ourselves in this multitude of images we see, we are encouraged to see ourselves without defining features at all. Unable to arrange holiday programming for every possible combination, for example, the system collapses onto itself with generic “happy” greetings. This is why, the rest of the year, popular programming is so milquetoast. When I have to wait in line for my niche programming or accept some generic pablum, I go off and create a world of my own, down the end of the little earbuds coming out of my iPod.

I assure you that know the dangers of insularity, incestuous thinking that is never challenged. I am not looking for an escapist little world of my making. On-line music services automatically review your purchases and listening habits and suggest things of which you have never heard. This is how I discovered folk singer Jolie Holland, for example. (I recommend, most heartily, Escondida from 2004, if you have not heard it.) This is the answer to the “Canadian content” issue, by the way. Are you listening to Kris Kristofferson? How about some Murray McLaughlin, then? Like Elvis Costello? Do you know that he recommends Ron Sexsmith? I think it is important to balance my Fawlty Towers with my King of Kensington, my Bill O’Reilly with my Rex Murphy. But I do not need to CRTC to tell me that. Oh, and incidentally, when my computer is networked, I instruct iTunes to share its contents freely. No one can “steal” my music, but they can freely choose to sample the widest range of my interests. That is more than the CRTC, on a broader scale, lets me do, willingly.