Snarky Bubblegum

"I'm From Barcelona" by We're From Barcelona

Okay, I had planned to spend this morning working on my book and writing an insightful post on the sorry state of political discourse in the United States. But along the way I made the tactical error of turning off the classical music I had playing and popping Paste Magazine's latest sampler into my CD player instead. It's now an hour later and I've been to the band's website and MySpace page, and have found the above video to the song on YouTube. If this song and video don't brighten your day, you should seriously reconsider increasing the meds.

Stan Heath: A Nice Guy and a Winner

Leo Durocher once said that nice guys finish last. When I saw Stan Heath’s face on the local news tonight as I sat in the coffeehouse trying to do a bit of work before picking up my son from baseball practice, I knew I was seeing one more instance of Durocher’s Law in practice—or if not Durocher’s Law at least a corollary: In the dog-eat-dog world of big-time collegiate athletics, nice guys tend to get fired. See, until this morning, Stan Heath was the head coach of the men’s basketball team at the University of Arkansas. From a man long on anger and resentment (former coach Nolan Richardson), Heath inherited a team almost entirely bereft of talent. Five years later the UA has a men’s basketball team that has made the NCAA tournament two years running and has been represented by a man with deep pockets where integrity, professionalism, and Christian charity are concerned. I guess an extra win in March matters more.

Here’s to Stan Heath….an exceedingly fine human being and a damned good basketball coach.

A Perfect Pop Song: "A Case of You" by Joni Mitchell

Since my last post was (loosely) about pop songcraft, particularly as it was practiced in the early 70s, I thought I'd post a example of a perfect pop song and performance. It doesn't get any better than this.

The Art of the Popular Song

As a child of the late 60's and 70's, I have the art of the pop song in my blood. Well, let me amend that: I have an appreciation of a well-crafted pop song coursing through me. It's not that I can write or perform one, but I like to think I know (and like) one when I hear it. And I understand the term "pop" in a pretty broad sense--as in the "popular arts." So looking at today's musical landscape, "pop" doesn't refer only to whatever it is that is played on Top 40 radio, but rather to anything that doesn't strive to be a part of the classical arts in contemporary music. So "pop" as I mean it covers everything from rock to hip-hop to bubblegum to country to dance to jazz to anything else you might hear on non-classical music stations. For my money (and my money might well be colored significantly by my status as an old fogey), what matters primarily to a great pop song is the melody, the lyric, the vocal, and the performance. And if these are reasonably good standards, then there is no doubt that the newly released old Neil Young performance Live at Massey Hall 1971 counts as a great piece of popular music. These songs range from folk to rock to (kinda) theatrical even though Neil limits himself to voice/guitar and voice/piano in every case. In virtually every case, the melody haunts, the lyrics arrest, and the vocal pierces. It is a remarkable performance by an artist who has given us 40 years of quality work.

This is an album I can recommend to old coggers like myself and to my university students. If you like popular music (in the sense defined above), you'll find a lot to like here.