Why I Hate Bon Jovi
My youngest sister is 25 years old and she loves Bon Jovi. I am guessing it has something to do with Jon Bon Jovi, who I think she thinks is “hot,” even though his face betrays clear evidence of various injections and surgeries.
I’ve always thought of Bon Jovi as “Springsteen for dummies,” with all due respect to my sister, who’s not dumb. We all have our weak spots. She likes Bon Jovi; I watch Jersey Shore. It happens.
As I watched their performance on the Grammys last night, the real reason I dislike them came to the fore: They’re absolutely uninspiring performers. Granted, they’re older guys now, so maybe back in the day they set the stage aflame with the heat of their music. But last night, on an internationally televised program and whilst accompanied by an awkwardly-strutting blonde woman in too-tight pants, their performance felt thick, bloated, OLD. It felt nothing like a dynamic live event and more like a Performance Of A Hit Song By A Band. No nuance or texture to the music; no frills or riffs or standout moments that indicated that anyone involved on stage was doing anything other than going through the motions.
(It’s also helped me learn a good general barometer for these types of bands–if your drummer needs to wear special gloves, they’re probably not a great drummer. Max Fucking Weinberg doesn’t need special gloves. He just ROCKS OUT WITH HIS STICKS AND HANDS.)
There was even a very minor element of surprise to their performance; the final song in the band’s short set could be voted on via the internet. I held out small hope for some kind of random upset or vote-rigging that would force the boys to play an unrehearsed rare album cut or even better a weird cover. Instead, we got “Living On A Prayer,” or at least about a minute of it. It reminded me of the album version. It sounded exactly like it.
Because they’re a Jersey band and they themselves seem to consider Springsteen an inspiration, it’s hard not to compare them to the E Street crew, who play with finesse, creativity, nuance and unbelievable ENERGY pretty much every time out. Look at any of the other Asbury Park scene artists and you’ll find the same ethos.
I don’t think Jon and the boys from Bon Jovi realize they don’t give a shit, but they really don’t seem to give a shit, so neither do I.
1 comment February 1, 2010
No Hiding Place
More Elvis Costello, from his 2008 release Momofuku, a shockingly tight record considering I’m pretty sure it was thrown together in a week so he’d have new product on the shelves when he opened for the Police on their final tour.
To me, this is the ultimate “fuck you” song to the internet.
In the not very distant future
When everything will be free
There won’t be any cute secrets
Let alone any novelty
You can say anything you want to
In your fetching cloak of anonymity
Are you feeling out of breath now?
In your desperate pursuit of infamy
Add comment January 15, 2010
Back to the Late Shift
Andy Ihnatko has a great post up that takes stock of the current kerfuffle in NBC’s late night and the historical background. Like him, I was a huge fan of The Late Shift, Bill Carter’s tell-all book about the last major battle back when Carson retired and it was Leno vs. Letterman for the Tonight Show crown.
Of course, Leno won that battle, and lost in ratings for a bit, only to come back and basically take the lead over Letterman for a good long time. Then Conan O’Brien got named the new Tonight Show host, Leno was given this disastrous 10 p.m. five-nights-a-week series, that series tanked hard, and NBC seems to think it can hit some big reset button and make everyone happy and get Leno back at 11:35 p.m. and then there will be dancing in the streets.
I’m highly skeptical, and I think that’s what’s going to be the ongoing disaster to watch here: Will this mythical Jay Leno fanbase who have had no interest in him at 10 p.m. suddenly return to the 11:35 p.m. timeslot to watch his show again? Why would they? Was it really that they just HAD to have Jay Leno at that specific time or they weren’t interested?
Just as a mess, I think it’s also done untold damage to Jay Leno’s “image,” such as it was. Sure, he was #1 in 2004 when the “Conan gets Tonight in 2009” scheme was hatched, but as Andy points out, he went along with it and seems to have done so happily. Now he’s stuck in a bad timeslot doing a bad show that no one is watching, and his response is to act like he’s being somehow wronged by a strategy he went happily along with until it turned against him? Meanwhile, Conan seems to have gained universal support as far as I’ve seen, approaching the situation with class and restraint and humor.
You also have to wonder, overall: Does The Tonight Show matter anymore, and if so, how? Ratings have gone down with Conan, but his audience may not be solely the eyeballs that Nielsen ticks off. All he needs is one good viral bit on Hulu to ignite his awareness beyond where it is now. Or are his viewers like me and not making it till 11:35, but happy to DVR the show to watch on the weekends or in the early evening?
And how does this address the true issue, which is that NBC’s 10 p.m. timeslot has become a desperate graveyard of abysmal ratings? Obviously canceling Leno at 10 is a good idea at this point, but how does fucking up late night at the same time help anybody but NBC, who I guess gets to avoid paying out any contract penalties, but would I think also lose a shitload of money by continuing their ratings tailspin, now not just in prime-time but in late night as well?
Anyway. I fucking hate Leno. He’s a sucking hole of comedy failure. He needs to get off the airwaves. Read Andy’s piece, it’s more articulate than I could ever be.
And GO TEAM COCO.
Add comment January 14, 2010
High Fidelity
Elvis Costello & The Attractions, “High Fidelity” (1979)
That’s from a 1979 Elvis Costello & the Attractions show \at Lehigh College in Bethlehem, PA. The show was just a month after what’s become known as the “Bramlett incident,” in which Costello drunkenly dropped the n-word referring to Ray Charles in an effort to win a bar argument.
What’s notable about the show is that Costello tried out a few songs later to be included on Get Happy!! his next album. While in the studio, Costello and the Attractions hit upon the concept of framing the arrangements as a tribute/homage to classic soul music; at the time of this show, however, it’s clear he had no such concept in mind.
In its early form, “High Fidelity” loses much of its desperate momentum and instead becomes a heaving, heavy pop punk song that draws a stronger line forward from the sound and style of Armed Forces. You can hear the same vestiges in the gig’s versions of other Get Happy!! songs.
Elvis Costello & The Attractions, “B-Movie (Live)” (1979)
Elvis Costello & The Attractions, “Opportunity (Live)” (1979)
You can also hear a heightened edge of rage in Costello’s attitude throughout the show; clearly his unfortunate words of a month before and the ensuing fallout had left him with a bitter taste about America. He dedicates “Oliver’s Army” to “the bones of all the Redcoats buried around here,” then launches into maybe the most incendiary version of the song I’ve heard, before it became a more comfortable staple of his live act (and before he and the band were sick to death of playing it, I’m sure).
Elvis Costello & The Attractions, “Oliver’s Army (Live)” (1979)
There’s an abundance of high-quality early live EC bootlegs available, as well as the “official bootleg” Live at the El Mocambo, but after this tour there’s a more typical availability–one to two great recordings from each tour, and a slew of audience tapes. This particular show is notable as it captures an artist in a turning point in his career, both in terms of his music and his relationship with his audience.
Add comment January 8, 2010
Teh Funny: Men’s Synchronized Swimming
I don’t know why but I was just thinking of the 1984-85 season of SNL and how I pray they release the whole damn thing to DVD someday.
That was the “hired guns” season where Christopher Guest, Martin Short, Harry Shearer, and Billy Crystal all were cast members. I don’t know how many of them stayed or left after that season but I know that was the only year all four were on the show. I have a beat-up old VHS tape of highlights from that season, including the sketch below.
(I wish SNL would either vastly improve their Hulu offerings or just let fans upload their own old tapes to YouTube. It’s painful to be unable to get good videos of sketches like these easily.)
1 comment January 7, 2010
Why Monster?
There’s a long history of highly successful pop acts suddenly becoming exhausted by their own personas and adopting a new artifice for the sake of a song, a record, or even a tour. The Beatles started it off, as they started all good things, with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. David Bowie became Ziggy Stardust. The Turtles became many groups on their Battle of the Bands album. Hell, even Garth Brooks became Chris Gaines.
R.E.M. became…well, they actually remained R.E.M. They just put out Monster. Following on the heels of Green, Out Of Time and Automatic For The People, it was a pretty hard stylistic left turn. Bombastic, lurching, and glam.
It’s a great record, but it doesn’t seem to have clung very tightly to the pop consciousness. That’s the takeaway from Sean McCarthy’s piece for PopMatters, in which he spends seven long years trying to trade in a used copy of Monster at CD emporiums throughout the country, ultimately tossing it into a bin of “As Is – No Guarantees” discs alongside Hootie and the Blowfish and Alanis Morrisette. An ignoble end, to be sure.
If I had to guess why so many of us have bailed on Monster, it would be that stylistic left turn. Again, I think it’s a great record. It just doesn’t fit easily into the overall shared conception of what R.E.M. is. You can follow the thread pretty easily through their career, from Murmur right on up to Accelerate, and you can see where they definitely incorporated some of the tricks and sounds they learned on Monster on later records (especially its follow-up, New Adventures in Hi-Fi, recorded partially while the band was on the massive Monster tour). But it kinda sticks out like a sore thumb; it’s not an easy fit into the band’s own output, and it’s not an easy fit into the era; it was inspired by but didn’t seem to inspire much around it.
Which I think was ultimately the point. Lyrically, Monster finds Michael Stipe exploring the ideas of artifice and unreality; “How can I convince her/that I’m invented too?” he sings on “Crush With Eyeliner,” and that’s always been the key to the record for me. How we invent ourselves every day and every minute, in each new interaction with other people and the world around us.
I’ve always thought it was pretty damn brilliant – an album about self-invention in which the band themselves engage in a thorough self-invention of their own, defying their audience and their own success to follow where they’re going, which was ultimately nowhere at all.
2 comments January 6, 2010
25 Songs of X-Mas: “Christmas at K-Mart”
“I musta died and gone to heaven, cause hell is Christmas at the 7-Eleven…”
Known as “the Lenny Bruce of the Blues,” Root Boy Slim recorded six albums and allegedly got a $250,000 recording contract based solely on “Christmas at K-Mart.” Worth every penny, I’d say.
Add comment December 9, 2009
25 Songs of X-Mas: “Feliz Navidad”
The Jose Feliciano classic. I live for those horns every year. This song swings and rocks.
(Fair warning: I will someday own one of those light programming machines and bore you every year with my own choreography to obscure X-Mas tunes.)
BONUS: Debbie Harry covers “Feliz Navidad” with Spiraling. They give it a cool Blondie vibe.
Add comment December 8, 2009
