The worst-kept secret in pop music

The first time I heard of Nellie McKay, I was reading the New York Times at my parents’ house in Indiana. The top story of the Arts section was a breathless account of Nellie’s dismissal from Columbia Records on the day her second album was due to be released. I thought, who is this musician who I’ve never heard of who’s getting top-tier attention from the NYT?

I suppose many people have had the same thought in the ensuing years. When she first hit the scene as a precocious 19-year-old with arguably the first double-disc debut album from a female artist, music critics went nuts. The NYT magazine did an enormous and mostly smitten feature. The attention was deserved. “Get Away From Me” was an astonishing smorgasbord, a stylish mash-up of cabaret, classic pop and even hip-hop tethered by Nellie’s piano-playing and cotton-candy vocals. It was the arrival of a major new talent.

One of these things is not like the others

The footer on a page on the Orlando Sentinel’s website. I was too scared to click on Casey Anthony’s boozy photobucket album.

What, no ‘Numb’?

So while I’m still thinking about U2 a lot, here’s an expression of my love for them in dream setlist form. It’s funny, I always considered myself more of an “Achtung, Baby” girl than a “Joshua Tree” devotee. Apparently not in concert form. Anyway, I think this touches on most of the band’s incarnations without risking too much randomness.

Here goes:

Two Hearts Beat As One
No Line on the Horizon
The Fly
Gone
Elevation
Even Better Than The Real Thing
Beautiful Day
Original of the Species
Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of (Bono and Edge)
Sweetest Thing (Bono and Edge)
A Sort of Homecoming
All I Want Is You
In God’s Country
Angel of Harlem
Out of Control
Mysterious Ways

Where the Streets Have No Name
I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For
Trip Through Your Wires
Running to Stand Still
She’s a Mystery to Me/One

Window in the Skies
Stand By Me
40

Still dreaming out loud

Through appliance of science, we've got that ring of confidence.

I lived in a self-imposed U2 news embargo during the European leg of the band’s current tour. Oh, I’d seen photos of the giant claw-like stage – they were hard to miss – but otherwise I managed pretty easily to avoid setlist news and other items of spoiler-like import.

I don’t know why I should have. I was lucky enough to score a ticket off some grad school friends (thanks, friends!) to the band’s Chicago show, its first outdoor concerts in the US since 1997 and my first time since 2005. And U2’s show, despite the no-doubt revolutionary technology of its massive LED screen and the sheer audacity of its spacecraft 360 degree stage, followed a fairly predictable path.

I know I should read this article about the decisions made by doctors in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The story apparently cost the New York Times and ProPublica $400,000 to report, a feat that will only become more rare. And I’m sure it’s very important and casts an unblinking light on events tied to one of our nation’s biggest natural disasters. But 18 pages? Really?

A sort of U2-logy*

*Yes, that title heading is a terrible, terrible pun.

If great art is meant to seem effortless, then U2 must not create great art. Most of the notable songs in the band’s canon are clearly meticulous creations designed to arouse a particular emotion, sometimes wistfulness but often euphoria, an elusive one to pin down in three minutes. For such a lofty goal, the band has been successful, and in the process created an immediately recognizeable blueprint for pop music at its most sublime, from “Where the Streets Have No Name” to “Window in the Skies.”

But with “No Line on the Horizon,” the band’s 12th studio album and only its third in the last decade, the effort shows, badly. This album was released in February; I bought it earlier this summer and have listened to it half a dozen times since then – and I am a longtime fan of the band, so this is not a promising sign.

“No Line on the Horizon” completes a trilogy that began in 2000 with “All That You Can’t Leave Behind,” the improbably titled return to form that brought the band back to relevance with a wealth of classicly constructed pop songs; the album gave the band its first real smash-hit single in the U.S. (“Beautiful Day”) since “One” in 1991.

Artifice

A couple of years ago I saw that documentary “My Kid Could Paint That,” about a four-year-old girl who sold expensive paintings on the premise that she, well, painted them. They were pretty much smudgy abstract things, but with an appealing use of bold colors that suggested agency on the girl’s part. The documentary eventually revealed that the girl’s father played a seriously heavy-handed role in the child’s painting, stopping short of saying he did it all himself.

I’m not a four year old, nor do I have one. But I do have some posterboard and four tester vials of house paint from Home Depot, not to mention a really strong desire to stop organizing stuff in my new house.

I call it “Castro.” It’s for sale – inquire within.

Twitter litter

I’m not into Twitter. It appears to me to be just another tech trend that will eventually be swept away as the user audience gloms onto another novel medium, and I lack the energy to want to keep up. I’m not interested in Ashton Kutcher or Kevin from The Office. I resent the further packaging of information into ever-smaller nuggets. I think it appeals to the inner narcissist in its users – that you would want to create the maximum output with the minimum input from the surrounding world, and often with the minimum import. I don’t conjugate “to twit” that way.

So imagine my surprise when I read a Twitter from top to bottom, or bottom to top, in whole – writer Dan Baum’s juicy description of his hiring, and subsequent firing, from the New Yorker, hitting refresh like a total Twitter tweaker until the sordid tale was done. You could say that Baum was making a kind of statement, going from long-form narrative, employed staff writer, to short burst static Twitterized freelancer (without benefits). But I don’t know. The medium didn’t become the message, and the story is probably best read the old-fashioned way.

I’m going to have to go with Kanye West on this one:

I DON’T HAVE A FUCKING TWITTER… WHY WOULD I USE TWITTER??? I ONLY BLOG 5 PERCENT OF WHAT I’M UP TO IN THE FIRST PLACE. I’M ACTUALLY SLOW DELIVERING CONTENT BECAUSE I’M TOO BUSY ACTUALLY BUSY BEING CREATIVE MOST OF THE TIME AND IF I’M NOT AND I’M JUST LAYING ON A BEACH I WOULDN’T TELL THE WORLD. EVERYTHING THAT TWITTER OFFERS I NEED LESS OF.

Athiests also zombies?

The only group that grew in every U.S. state since the 2001 survey was people saying they had “no” religion; the survey says this group is now 15 percent of the population. Silk said this group is likely responsible for the shrinking percentage of Christians in the United States.

- 15 Percent of Americans Have No Religion

Almost famous

 

This doesn't resemble me at all.

 

About a year ago, I took a cab from Georgetown to the Dupont Circle metro. My cabbie was a gregarious Haitian guy listening to NPR. As these things did, inevitably in Washington at the time, our conversation turned to the presidential primary. “Who do you think it will be?” I said, and he said with confidence, “It will be Mrs. Clinton.”

It was around the time that Hillary Clinton was just beginning to lose her place as the establishment choice. Obama was still something of an upstart. I supported Obama, but I saw the cabbie as something of a soothsayer: slightly exotic, just outside the conversation, with a perspective that maybe the rest of us lacked. 

If you give the cabbie a name (Jean Claude Excellent) and change me into Jean Kennedy Smith (daughter of Rose and Joseph, sister of Teddy), then you’d almost have an installment of this week’s Talk of the Town in the New Yorker. I could have been famous, if only I had told the right people about my encounter. Oh, and if I were a Kennedy.