Super Bowl Winners & Losers

Once again, the Super Bowl was an exciting game that provided us with heroes (Drew Brees, Tracy Porter, Sean Payton) and goats (Peyton Manning, Pierre Garçon, Hank Baskett). And just like the action on the field, the commercials (and pre-game and halftime entertainment) gave us some obvious winners and losers. Here’s how I scored it at home:

WINNERS

Jay-Z – I’ve never been a big fan of the Jigga Man, but pairing him with Rihanna, a full orchestra, and action clips from the Saints’ and Colts’ season-long drive to the Super Bowl (favorite quote: a Colts defensive player screaming in the huddle “ALLS I WANT IS EVERYTHING YOU GOT!!!”) was an appropriately adrenaline-pumping way to kick things off.

Queen Latifah – I’ve heard and read speculation that she was singing with a backing track (more on this phenomenon in a bit), but regardless, her stirring version of ‘God Bless America’ was right on the money.

Jack White – He got paid to let some advertiser use the tune to ‘Fell In Love With A Girl’. The fact that just 24 hours later I can’t remember the company behind that ad bodes as a win-win for Mr. White.

Stevie Wonder – He didn’t sing, but Stevie Wonder once again revealed his good sense of humor with a cameo in VW’s ‘Punch Buggy‘ spot.

Arcade Fire – The NFL’s promotional use of their song ‘Wake Up’ – paired with shots of ecstatic fans – was sublime…

*****

LOSERS

The Who – Let’s count the ways: they looked and sounded stiff and old, Roger Daltrey blatantly flubbed his lip-sync with a backing track during ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ (oh, the irony), they were totally upstaged by their stage (possibly a first in rock history), and the corpse of Keith Moon would have been more interesting on drums than Zak Starkey. Better than the infamous Elvis Presto Super Bowl halftime show, but nearly as pathetic…

KISS – OK, I get it, Gene Simmons is a whore who would sell his grandmother’s soul for a nickel. But seeing my once-favorite band hawking Dr. Pepper and sharing the stage with a group of midget Kiss impersonators made me want to lose my chicken wings.

Carrie Underwood – I went into her rendition of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ wanting to be won over. “What am I missing here?” was my thought. The answer, after a fairly flat performance: “Not much.”

Bill Withers – Sure, he got paid for it, but his lovely ballad ‘Ain’t No Sunshine (When She’s Gone)’ was totally miscast in a commercial for a blood and guts video game. A sadly inappropriate use of a great song.

The Chicago Bears Shufflin’ Crew – Note to Boost Mobile: The 1984/85 Chicago Bears were one of the greatest teams in football history. If you’re going to rip off their legendarily kitsch performance of ‘The Super Bowl Shuffle’, at least have the decency to do something interesting (and preferably tasteful) with it. And double shame on you Mike Ditka, for pimping out an idea you weren’t even part of in the first place.

Buried Treasure: Surf’s Up

[Today: Beached...]

For most of America, The Beach Boys died when Brian Wilson became consumed by a combination of artistic ambition, a fragile ego, and too much LSD. Wilson literally climbed into his sandbox, took an incomplete on his would-be masterpiece Smile, and retreated from public view. But he and his Beach brothers soldiered on well into the 80′s, releasing much of their most interesting music once they’d fallen out of public favor. Far from the sun & fun of their earlier singles, their music between 1967 and 1973 was often emotionally complex and sometimes paranoid.

Perhaps no other release captures the frustrating fruition of their Brother Records era than Surf’s Up. It’s a weird amalgamation of the strengths and weaknesses of the group during this time, and on one level its radically eclectic sounds come off as the work of a band throwing everything against the wall and hoping something sticks. This is a dark, disjointed album constructed from the splintered pieces of what made them so compelling in their heyday – here their trademark honeyed harmonies and all-American naivety are twisted into a knowing acceptance that things haven’t turned out well, and the future doesn’t look good.

First the bad: ‘Student Demonstration Time’ is an outright embarrassment, the worst song that Leiber and Stoller ever wrote, and the kind of schlocky tripe that made The Beach Boys look like squares at the end of the Sixties. ‘A Day Is The Life Of A Tree’ is just plain strange, no matter how much LSD you’ve been gobbling. ‘Disney Girls’ is a slight piece of pop penned by Bruce Johnston, but even here the Boys’ harmonies feel like the ghosts of good times gone and work pretty effectively. That’s the thing about the band during this era – even when they were striking out they were doing it in interesting ways. The Beach Boys may have become irrelevant, but they weren’t boring (until the late-70′s, and then they were extremely boring).

In spite of its flaws, Surf’s Up mostly works. Hearing the group sing about pollution and litter on album opener ‘Don’t Go Near The Water’ is still shocking – even if the song itself is fairly lightweight. ‘Feel Flows’ sounds like melting hippies, while ‘Til I Die’ and the title track are Brian Wilson’s last great moments on record with the group he made famous. But the surprising crown jewel here is ‘Lookin’ At Tomorrow (A Welfare Song)’, a grim, take-off-the-gloves look at what lay ahead for a band of washed up surfers. “I had to take to sweeping up some floors,” sings Al Jardine, “Well I don’t mind that so much or the changing of my luck/But you know I could be doing so much more.” Even though nobody was paying attention, The Beach Boys did plenty of good things after the spotlight turned away…

Listen: Don’t Go Near The Water

Listen: Lookin’ At Tomorrow (A Welfare Song)

Listen: Surf’s Up

Masterpiece: Los Angeles

[Today: A punk rock soap opera...]

In his book The Simple Art Of Murder, a treatise on writing pulp fiction, Raymond Chandler encouraged fledgling writers to embrace the squalid side of life. “It is not a fragrant world,” he wrote “but it’s the world you live in.” It’s a lesson that wasn’t lost on John Doe or Exene Cervenka, the husband/wife songwriting team behind X’s music. Doe and Cervenka met in a poetry workshop in Los Angeles before forming X, along with guitarist Billy Zoom and drummer DJ Bonebrake, in 1977. Their music dives into the sleazy side of LA, and explores a shadowy metropolis full of S&M, rape, drugs, nausea and despair.

Their 1980 debut is full of songs that scratch beneath the sun, surf and sand façade of Los Angeles, but Doe and Cervenka temper these greasy tales with the best rock harmonies this side of another LA band – The Beach Boys. But where Brian Wilson and company sang angelically about sweet summer days, Doe and Cervenka combine their voices into a keening wail that serves as a unisex indictment of the real Hollywood. ‘Your Phone’s Off The Hook, But You’re Not’ opens the album with a seething girlfriend who has a message to deliver, while ‘Johnny Hit & Run Paulene’ is a spooky tale of drug-induced rape. The title track sees a naive young woman fleeing the city to escape its idle rich, Mexicans and homosexuals, ‘Sex And Dying In High Society’ follows the slow spiritual death of people who can’t comprehend or feel love, and ‘The World’s A Mess; It’s In My Kiss’ might be the only rock song in the world to feature a semi-colon in its title. Secret weapon Billy Zoom provides the acceleration throughout, with driving guitar licks that are equal parts snarling punk and twangy surf.

Musically, X lived a few steps outside the frame of typical punk rock, and they used that remove to expose different perspectives of the LA punk scene of the late-70′s. Each of their first four albums are essential slices of punk/rock, but their middling commercial success caused Zoom to leave the group in 1986. Regardless, it’s no stretch to call X one of the best bands of the 80′s. Their punk rock soap opera begins with Los Angeles…

Listen: Los Angeles

Listen: The World’s A Mess; It’s In My Kiss

Listen: Your Phone’s Off The Hook, But You’re Not

Stuck In My Head: Everything Is Broken

This song has been kicking around my brain for the last several weeks, as I’ve gone through a trying series of equipment failures. From bad hard drives to Darwin errors (don’t ask) to windshield wipers permanently stuck in the ON_FAST position, I’ve got a bunch of stuff that suddenly doesn’t work like it’s supposed to (fortunately it has rained practically non-stop in the Bay Area for the last few weeks). So I’d been grousing to myself and humming this song, but in the wake of the 7.1 earthquake that flattened most of Haiti, it suddenly seemed petty to complain about malfunctioning laptops and windshield wipers, this song took on a darker meaning, and my world looked a lot less broken. The tune is still rattling around my head, and I’m still thinking of the Haitians who are trying to put their lives back together, while the media moves on to the next disaster…

Listen: Everything Is Broken [Bob Dylan]

Doubleshot Tuesday: Glenn Gould/Mac Rebennack

[Today: Eccentric pianists...]

Pianists have hardly cornered the market on oddball behavior among musicians, but the roster of eccentric ivory ticklers – including Sun Ra, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Liberace, Jerry Lee Lewis and Elton John – is impressive. Classical interpreter Glenn Gould and New Orleans gumbo cooker Mac Rebennack are two more lovably screwy pianists. They had unique quirks and make different music from one another, but both are intensely possessed by the spirit of their music (sorry for jumping tenses, Gould died in 1982, while Rebennack rocks on).

Born in Toronto in 1932, Gould was a piano prodigy who played professionally at age 12 and graduated from the Toronto Conservatory of Music at 13. He became widely regarded as one of the finest interpreters of Bach, and was also known for his eccentric behavior. He was extremely particular about the height of his piano and the room temperature when he was recording, and would hum and sing along with the music as he was playing, driving his sound engineers to distraction and earning a few negative reviews in the process. Gould’s methods may have been unorthodox, but his results speak for themselves. In the documentary clip below, he comes off as a mad genius – so lost in his music that the world around him ceases to exist. As his fingers dance over the keys, it’s almost possible to see the music pouring through Glenn Gould’s brain, and it’s a sight to behold.

Mac Rebennack was a longtime professional sideman who changed his persona to Dr. John, The Night Tripper and recorded his debut album on time left over from a Sonny & Cher session. His first four LPs featured deep ‘Nawlins swamp voodoo that bordered on performance art. As Dr. John, Rebennack took to wearing scarves, headdresses, robes and voodoo priest makeup while he and his band conjured a dark, spooky atmosphere. But by the early/mid-70′s, he morphed into a first-line funkateer, and a sartorial precursor to Elton John. While he’s since matured into something of an elder statesman, Dr. John’s music always has a unique flavor. Listen up and laissez les bons temps rouler…

*****

Glenn Gould, from the documentary The Art Of The Piano:

Dr. John, in a 1988 appearance on the TV show Night Music:

Magic Moment: Motörhead Lays Down The Ace

Here’s a metal health break, courtesy of Lemmy and company. This video was shot in Dusseldorf, Germany in 2005 and released on the Stage Fright DVD the following year. If this one doesn’t get your blood pumping, you might not have a pulse…

Back In The Days

Fly sunglasses, gold chains, cool hats and massive boomboxes are just a few of the accessories that make the photographs in Back In The Days seem so fresh. Inspired by the television mini-series Roots, Brooklyn native Jemel Shabazz began photographing the people in his neighborhood, and ended up documenting the birth of hip-hop fashion. “My mission was simple,” he writes in his introduction, “Travel throughout the city and capture the beauty and true essence of a people, starting with the teenagers.” Shabazz took these photos between 1980 and 1989, and many of them represent hip-hop style before its look became codified into Kangol hats and unlaced Adidas.

Back In The Days has plenty of style, but it’s freedom of expression and the joy of youth that give this book its visual spark…

Listen: My Adidas [Run-DMC]

Listen: I Can’t Live Without My Radio [LL Cool J]

Listen: Stoop Rap [Double Trouble, aka Rodney Cee & KK Rockwell]