christopher cocca

World Cafe on XPN is playing Irish music (and music by Irish artists) today in honor of St. Patrick’s Day.  David Dye played “Cypress Avenue” by Van Morrison (see “Happy St. Patrick’s Day” a few posts down) and said that Van Morrison is the best-known Irish musician in the world, better-known, even, than U2.  

I love Van Morrison.  His influence upon and contribution to popular music can’t be overstated but is often under-appreciated nonetheless.  That said, there’s really just no way that he’s better-known than U2.  This isn’t a comment on the artistry or talent of Van or U2, but it’s just quite frankly the case the U2 is better-known on a global scale, and recognized more immediately by the balance of people born, say, after 1970.  In parts of the world where English isn’t a first language, I’d bet U2’s fame-edge is even greater across most age-groups.  It’s just the case that they’ve been in the spotlight for 30 years, and have either been called or actually been “the biggest band in the world” for much of their history.  Van is brilliant, but his fame, as it were, doesn’t add up the same way, and  I think any claim to contrary is probably hipster wish fulfillment.   Maybe Van should be more famous than U2, and even though modern music as we know it wouldn’t exist without him, he’s not more famous.  Just to be clear, I’m not defining fame as some kind of worth-barometer or even as measure of true success.  I’m just saying.

So, that said, I just so happened to download Them’s cover of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” a few days ago.  Van is freaking out of this world. I admit that even though I’ve known about his genius for a long time, I’d never actually heard this track.  That also means that I spent the last 13 years not knowing that the  spacey arrangement loop in Beck’s “Jack Ass” is a direct sample from Them’s version of “Baby Blue.”  Yes, I thought iTunes cued the wrong song for a second.  I was 16 when Odelay came out and I played the crap out of that record…”I remember the way that you smiled when the gravity shackles were wild…” just a great track…one of my favorites maybe even of the 90s. But now I have to think about how awesome it would have been to hear that space-jam for the first time in 1969.  Them’s whole arrangement of “Baby Blue” is righteous. Their cover is (gasp!) better than Dylan’s original.  

Listen to both tracks in the order you were meant to.  Perhaps “meant to” assumes too much 40 years after the fact.  Who’s to define the order in which we discover our favorite tracks and albums?  I think only our parent’s record collections, our friends with older brothers, the kids in the back of the bus, and the heartbreak-y pop zeitgeist of being an adolescent.  My God, if I were 16 now I’d be playing “Grapevine Fires” and crying to the video.  I kind of want to now.  It’s like “Karma Police” for this year’s sophomore creative writing class.  I’m not being ironic, by the way.  I love it.

A few months ago,  I heard John Mellencamp talking on public radio about why people like him disappeared from mainstream charts in the late 90s.   (Remember when they used to play Tom Petty videos on VH1?).  Johnny Cougs was waxing about the switch to the SoundScan rating system in which one spin of a record (the old standard) can equal more than one spin depending on where the track is spun.  One play in New York City, for example, is worth more spins than a play at JCMHQ in Bloomington, Indiana. 

You could sort of hear the nerves ratcheting up on the righteous NPR cat that was doing the interview when Cougs extrapolated the logical conclusion that ScoundScan skews in favor of urban markets and, hence, urban audiences.  From there, there rise of hip -hop at the end of the last century was inevitable, so the theory goes, and at the same time, a little old performer named Garth Brooks was heating up.   End of the mainstream exposure line for the Cougar.  

Now, the stereotypes conjured by this explanation are clear, but there are other issues with the account.  Brooks first broke in the early 90’s (along with others referred to in country circles as “the Class of ‘91″, I believe).  By the late 90s, wasn’t he doing the Chris Gaines project?  Sure, he was at the height of his popularity then, but the Garth Brooks machine would have happened even if DMX hadn’t.   Brooks’ career certainly wasn’t birthed by the rapture of classic rockers from FM radio or cable.  This exodus itself may have been instigated by SoundScan, but that’s also highly indicative of the rise of young buying power and the ascendence of the teenage market demographic.  It wasn’t just urban kids buying urban records, and it never, ever has been.  50 years ago, Pat Boone covered Little Richard for a reason, but suburban kids still sought and bought the Granddaddy.  25 years ago, the Beastie Boys and Rick Rubin and Run DMC showed how the phony lines in rock music where just as phony in hip-hop. Ten years ago, the same kids buying Jay-Z at Best Buy had little sisters buying Britney and Backstreet with their suburban allowances.  

For all of these reasons, it’s true that with a few exceptions, the adult contemporary mainstays of the 70s, 80s, and even 90s have been trying to find new outlets for the better part of a decade.   Tom Petty made a great album about all of this called The Last DJ.  The Eagles and others signed exclusive deals with WalMart.  Johnny Cougs makes embarrassing statements on national radio.   Eventually, even The Boss feels the pressure.

Which brings us to this story, filed today at Yahoo! in the context of Bruce Springsteen’s forthcoming Super Bowl Half Time Show tonight:  ”Springsteen calls WalMart CD deal a mistake.”   As the short piece explains: 

Some fans were critical because Springsteen has been a longtime supporter of worker’s rights, and Wal-Mart has faced criticism for its labor practices.  Springsteen told the Times that his team didn’t vet the issue as closely as he should have, and that he “dropped the ball on it.” Springsteen went on to say: “It was a mistake. Our batting average is usually very good, but we missed that one. Fans will call you on that stuff, as it should be.”

I’m sorry, but you have to be kidding me.  Springsteen stylizes himself as the political poet laureate of our culture (an accolade his idol Bob Dylan always refused) and, by his own standard, he should know better.  Does anyone really believe that someone as vocally political as Springsteen didn’t see this coming?  Didn’t see the charges of inherent contradiction, or the contradiction itself?  Of course, WalMart is its own contradiction.  For reasons that have been well documented, it’s pretty clear that the big boxes (and especially Big Blue) take heavy tolls on the kind of towns and people Springsteen sings about and sells to.  But it also sells things cheap.  But it also crushes small businesses.  But it also adds jobs.  But it also has a bad labor record and usually only adds jobs after having already destabilized local micro-economies.  With rare exception, suffice it to say that it doesn’t typically empower the folks Springsteen sings about and sells to.  Sings about and sells to.  Sings about and sells to.

I don’t want to pull a Mellencamp here.  The Boss is everyone’s darling.   Public radio, classic rock radio, lefties and righties and whatever.  Poor people that work at WalMart and rich people in politics.  His fan base is deep and wide.  That’s why they call him the Boss.  But I need to ask it again: Does anyone really believe that someone as vocally political as Springsteen didn’t see this coming? 

Turns out the answer is yes.  ”Faux Americana:  Why I Still Love Bruce Springsteen” by Stephen Metcalf  is a ridiculously insightful article I first read almost four years ago.   I think it explains a lot.  Think about it while you’re watching and enjoying the Boss tonight.  And don’t feel bad for being bullshitted.  There’s still a lot of truth in those old songs.  Finding it is your job, your own due diligence.  I think that’s what Bob “I don’t think I’ve ever said anything that’s been a lie. Never told you to vote for nobody. Never told you to follow nobody” Dylan would say.  When’s he doing the Super Bowl?  Oh, that’s right.  He only plays minor league ballparks these days.  Maybe as it should be.    He just does the commercials.

I was reading an article today about Bob Dylan’s so-called “Jesus period”, that part of his life associated with his friendship with the late Keith Green,  his involvement in the Vineyard movement in California, and his baptism and other public presentations of his new-found Christian spirituality (this category includes three albums) in the late 70’s and early 80’s.  

The writer, who I think comes at these things from a more foundationalist place than I do, asked if Dylan’s “Slow Train Comin’” era was a season of religious conviction or another of his many phases, an artistic incarnation of his own mythos and existential narrative.   He asked (if I may paraphrase) whether Dylan was a true convert in the (I suppose) orthodox sense or if he was a sensitive, soulful poet with affection for the old, old story and an impending sense of geopolitical anxiety.  Put another way, when it came right down to it, was he artist or adherent?

The trouble with the question goes beyond in-grown senses of epistemological modesty or the false-choice dilemma.  Aren’t these things, artist and adherent, finally the same?  I’m not suggesting a third-way hybrid between the religiously faithful and the artistically religious…I’m suggesting that the great souls of any spirituality are artists of hope, of dread, of faith, of fear, and then again of hope.  

Consider the spiritual texts Dylan would have been familiar with in his life as the boy Robert Zimmerman growing up in the immigrant Jewish communities of Duluth and Hibbing, Minnesota; the Psalms, the Song of Solomon, Ecclesiastes among others, each of these with their awkward anxieties and yearnings, many with their hope in the wild glimpses of poets and prophets.  Consider the development of monotheism in the ancient communities of the Levant.  Even if you believe that the One True God revealed God’s-self to the Hebrew children and their prophets, you still have to accept that these artists had to be willing vessels of the revelation, that their voice wrestled back with His like their father Jacob, like the baffled, failing David.  The temptation toward fatalism in the face of Yahweh’s singularity was met with song and poetry and story.  Missing from those days is the systematic theology of more modern, recent times.  

Consider the root of Christ’s own Gospel, the holy inversions of the manger, the birth of God’s self-giving into straw-poverty.  Mary’s trepidation.  Joseph’s.   John’s gospel prologue.  The expectation, handed down from those old prophets, that the order we take for granted will be subdued, that the old will be relevant with their visions even as the young are given dreams. That what we know is not everything.  That, as Dylan himself then put it, “death is not the end.”

These prophets, poets, mystics, their trembling and hopeful art, these holy ones holding out for deliverance even as the balance of history pours evidence for their lunacy on every generation, these people coming after them telling of their visions, their imperfect, sloppy dreams — these people are adherents in the only sense worth knowing.  These riders of the storm, these who refuse the psychic copout of uncompromising certainty.  

I’m drawn back to the art of faith when nothing else makes sense.  To the idea that that which found us here has voice and heart and purpose, thinks enough of us to speak in broken, confused voices as much as in what is, when we’re honest, always-fleeting confidence.  In voices like our own, in the poetry we’re formed as.  To artists as an artist.  

Ha–remember Winamp? That was the coolest.  Anyone still rocking that?

Ever since I saw the Liverpool Nativity and the Manchester Easter I’ve been thinking about what other popular songs could tell these stories.

Picture Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You” done with “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” as counterpoint, Jesus on the cross singing the former, Judas the later.  ”No Woman, No Cry” at the Garden Tomb.   “All These Things That I’ve Done” by the Killers  as the Jesus Christ Superstar resurrection reprise.  I wrote some others down to share with folks at the Barn the other day but that scribble is somewhere else at the moment.   I think it’s on a napkin in a pocket somewhere.

I was thinking “Winterlong” by Neil Young (or at least parts of it) as a sunrise gathering song.  Last year we did “Here Comes The Sun” and “The Rising.”   

Liturgically minded readers might get worked up about Easter talk before we’re even at Candlemas (yeah, I didn’t know about that one either, but its existence means I don’t have to feel bad about leaving my Christmas stuff up until February), but apart from the year-end, cyclical, wintery pathos/catharsis I talked about in the Advent posts, the liturgical seasons seem superfluous.  Advent too, actually.  It’s just that Advent fits so well with what’s going on in nature.  The same can be said for Easter (“I’ve waited for you winterlong, you seem to be where I belong…”) but the short drama of Holy Week is harder for me to act.  I admit that I don’t get the whole business of re-creating it.  That’s my rebel Anabaptist rearing right there.  But I do love Faschnacht Day.  And I do love Easter in its churchy, syncretistic form, but only because it’s a chance to think artfully about the story with more people than might usually be interested.  And what’s going on in nature works then too.  

Speaking of that cycle, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the fact that I’m more cathartic about Spring Training and Opening Day than I am about Lent and Easter.  I mean, I really can’t wait for Spring Training.  Perhaps the launch of the MLB Network on New Year’s Day is what has me fast-forwarding. (Or maybe it was the Milton poem).  

Suggestions for the Winamp Lent and iTunes Easter?

On a tangentially related note, shortly after the election our friend Nathan said here that the Obama narrative would soon give way to SuperBowl narrative in terms of our penchant for redemptive story.  I think he’s right about how we tear and cycle through these stories.  Perhaps that’s the wisdom of liturgy. 

Featuring a piece I made in collaboration and other great content here.

I just got the galley proof for next month’s issue of AdmitTwo which will feature a hundred-word piece by me that I combined with a creative commons licensed picture from Flickr (with appropriate credit and permissions from the photographer.  It’s the Dylan story some of you have read.

Now that that’s ready, I’ll be getting in touch with those of you that wanted to work on some pieces for future submission to this unique venue.  

This might be my favorite remix yet. The image is from clickykbd on flickr and it looks to me like found art. The text is a 100-word story I wrote after watching footage of the ‘66 Newport Folk Festival. The action of the story is all in the footage, so this is creative historical nonfiction. Enjoy. (Click to enlarge).

Zimmy doesn’t care why they’re booing. “That’s it. Let’s go man, let’s go.” The devil disappears. Yarrow comes out: “Bobby’s going to get his axe.” Someone makes a Seeger joke. “Bobby’s going to get an acoustic guitar.”

“Does anyone have an E harmonica?” He picks one from the footlights. More self-conscious poetry. No stray-cat-whisker strings curling the machinehead. No Woody Guthrie work shirt but everyone is clapping. The first set was too short and he says “It’s all over now, baby blue” like someone planting a bomb. In 2007, Dunkin’ Donuts sponsors the Newport Folk Festival. The chimes of freedom flashing.

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