Surviving the Super Bowl

By Kara Tucker

Rather than be put in Twitter jail, I'm keeping track of the game in real time here. Then compiling to post
5:09 p.m. -- Studio crew shilling, awkwardly, for a fast food chicken purveyor. Perhaps that telestrator can be used to show where the dignity disappeared.
5:25 -- Russell Wilson interview. Nice to see a former Rockies farmhand land on his feed.
5:30 -- The Fox Sports 1 promo. Trying too hard, too many ex-jocks on the show, but when the hosts are doing "Fox Sports Live"'s scores and highlights, it's enjoyable.
5:34 -- Terry Bradshaw waving at a skyline, as if Peyton Manning had never been in New York City and New Jersey before.
5:35 -- You can see their breath. The Russell Wilson interview was in a studio. So much for Peyton not performing in cold weather.
5:40 -- Muppets pre-game show. Would have been more appropriate for the red carpet stuff.
5:42 -- Sources are reporting that sub sandwich franchise shill Jay Glazer is on our television.
5:44 -- Hipsters have me cornered. lol
5:44 -- Beverage joke...out-of-date with Bloomberg out of office.
5:45 -- Noted homophobe Chuck Norris is protecting the city. Greeeeeat.
5:55 -- Declaration of Independence. said by players, Buzz Aldrin, with members of our military, first responders. Good sentiment, albeit a bit stiffly staged.
5:56 -- I bet the racist tweeters are getting carpal tunnel with Michelle Obama's appearance.
6:01 -- The Super Bowl cold open brought to you by Mad Libs, apparently.
6:06 -- New Richard Sherman Beats commercial, almost as if the post-Niners game rant were pre-planned
6:10 -- Gay wedding performer Queen Latifah sings "America the Beautiful", which I always preferred to "Star Spangled Banner", personally. Performance remains thankfully Macklemore-free.
6:15 -- A Kurt Russell sighting. Snake Plissken has aged, as have all of us. He still exudes that air of cool.
6:21 -- Renee Fleming performing the national anthem, clearly not dressed as if she just came from a tailgate. One does not wear a wrap like that whilst consuming a chili brat.
6:28  - Joe Namath is on the field, but that coat says "Clyde Frazier."
6:33  - Broncos open the game with a play that starts with the word "Cluster." Mistimed snap, safety, 2-0 Seattle.
6:37 -- Percy Harvin with a big play. And NOBODY was talking about him before the game, forgetting what he could do in Minnesota.
6:43 -- Seeing Reggie Watts in the beer commercial makes me want to see some "Comedy Bang Bang."
6:45 --- Potential tactical error there, wasting a timeout on a replay challenge when Russell Wilson was clearly short of a first down.
6:46 -- All things considered, I think the Broncos will take only being down 5-0 after that first offensive miscue.
6:47 -- Animal husbandry being used to sell Chevy pickups. That's new.
6:54 -- So far, this is looking like an Eli-led offense for Denver.
6:58 -- It's a little early for the Peyton Manning Struggleface, but there it is.
6:58 -- Troy Aikman uses the phrase "natural rubbing action." Skip Bayless squirms uncomfortably at home.
7:04  -- If drinking Bud Light puts you on stage with One Republic, give me a different brand, please.
7:07 -- Seahawks are dominating, but settling for field goals. That could come back to bite them later.
7:12 -- It won't come back to bite them in Denver's offense remains this inept.
7:13 -- The Cheerios ad that no doubt confused Richard Cohen airs.
7:16 -- Pondering back to that Radio Shack commercial where a 2014 Hulk Hogan is supposed to be '80s Hulk Hogan.
7:17 -- Where was the lowest common denominator GoDaddy commercial? A woman with a puppet? Just starting a business, not licking her lips in slow motion, while hair band music plays. Guess the company figured that stuff was played out, especially after last year's ickfest.
7:24 -- As overexposed as he was, I have to give Tim Tebow credit for having a sense of humor about himself in those commercials. Funny stuff.
7:27 -- The first Seattle player dinged up and it's not Percy Harvin. That's a good sign, as it is that the player, Kam Chancellor, appears to be okay.
7:38  -- Somebody throw a tent over this circus.
7:38  -- Startling ineptitude by the Broncos. Absolutely startling. That pick was less Manning's fault than the previous.
7:41 -- That pistachio ad with Steven Colbert was disturbing. So far, we have bovine pimping and now, the implication of Colbert eating his own head for sustenance.
7:49 -- FOX News will HATE this Coca-Cola ad. All those non-English speakers. "This is not our America" anymore and all that.
7:54 -- Of course that pass was incomplete. The Broncos are doing their best impression of a team looking to draft Johnny Football with the first pick in the draft.
7:55 -- Fritos? On the sub? Jay Glazer keeps saying "cruncha muncha." Sources report Fox NFL Insider Jay Glazer has officially lost his last shred of dignity.
7:59 -- Today's Super Bowl halftime show with the Red Hot Chili Peppers will be the first appearance at it by an act with socks on their junk since the dreaded Up With People Fiasco of 1978.
8:00 -- My favorite part of that Verizon ad? The dad walking in on his daughter and friends watching game film.
8:08 -- Here we go, a Super Bowl halftime show with Bruno Mars and some middle aged men known for appearing onstage with socks on their genitals.
8:10 -- Bruno Mars, rocking the drum kit AND a hairstyle I think K.D. Lang had once.
8:11 -- Bruno Mars, also a believer in matching band outfits, complete with 1981 new wave power pop skinny ties.
8:12 -- Mr. Mars is also a believer in green lasers.
8:16 -- Beyonce already finished, but Bruno Mars is putting on a better show.
8:18 -- Pepsi's ad budget clearly did not include money for shirts for the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
8:19 -- Awkward transition from a party-mad Bruno Mars/RHCP segment to greetings from members of our armed forces over the intro to a love song.
8:27 -- Jerry Ricecake? Oy.
8:28 -- Scientology? Double oy. Triple oy. Quadruple oy. Pi oy.
8:33 -- Percy Harvin takes the second half kickoff for a touchdown. 29-0 Seahawks.
8:33 -- So long, Denver, and thanks for playing. There will be a lovely version of the home game for you on your way out, along with a year's supply of Rice-a-Roni, the San Francisco treat.
8:44 -- Ted Koppel is coming out of retirement to report on the Denver offense being held hostage.
8:45 -- And now Axe is getting all hippy dippy with its commercial. It's as if the dudebros at the company offices have been taken over by alien pod people. It's not a bad thing. MUCH less obnoxious.
8:47 -- Camera shows John Travolta in a luxury box at the stadium. Sadly, there will be no happy ending for the Broncos.
8:52 -- What the heck is this Kia commercial?
8:53 -- Still better than the two Matrix sequels.
9:05 -- Ho hum. Another Seattle touchdown. 36-0 Seahawk lead. This is not football. This is torture porn.
9:06 -- The Denver Broncos ARE the Jacksonville Jaguars, starring Peyton Manning as Blaine Gabbert.
9:16 -- Denver finally showed up. Way, way too late. Starting the fourth quarter down 36-8.
9:16 -- Cue Skip Bayless saying the Broncos would have won the game with Tebow at quarterback in 3....2....1....
9:20 -- We need a blizzard to perk things up a little here.
9:24 -- Time to take Peyton out and put in the Play 60 kid.
9:28 -- You liked him in "Gandhi." You'll love him in a car commercial.
9:31 -- No word yet on whether Fox NFL Insider Jay Glazer is warming up vocally to say "wubba wubba wubba" while wearing a sandwich board at a Subway location off the Jersey Turnpike.
9:36 -- Scarlett Johanson for Occupied Lands soda. Taste the oppression.
9:39 -- The viewing audience that's left gets to know Robert Turbin. Fantasy players will want to know his name as the mileage wears down Marshawn Lynch in the future.
9:43 -- Eli Manning shown in his seat, looking miserable as he's watching the Broncos looking worse than his Giants did against Seattle. As awful as New York was that day, that's saying something.
9:46 -- This has been a thorough dismantling. Denver couldn't run the ball. It couldn't have a passing game downfield. It couldn't avoid turnovers. Seattle made far fewer mistakes while controlling the game physically. Total domination.
9:50 -- This isn't the first time someone's been buried in the swamps of Jersey.
9:57 -- Game over. Seattle 43, Denver 8. The Seahawks zero turnovers, the Broncos four. Game over.
10:06 -- Glanced at a bigoted right-wing pundit's feet. He responded with predictable racism to the Coke commercial. Nice Pavlovian response.
10:11 -- Question that won't be asked -- "Pete, you left USC to take the big probation hit for things that happened under your watch. What's it like to win the Super Bowl?"
10:11 -- After the Sonics moving and the Mariners staying, it's hard to begrudge fans in Seattle their enjoyment of this.
10:14 --One good thing about tonight is that we're one week closer to a new episode of "True Detective."
10:19 -- Howie Long is right, but, really, it started with Denver being unable to handle Seattle up front. As much (deserved) publicity as the Seahawks' secondary gets, this game started with their ability to dominate Denver at the line.
10:20 Game over. Time for sitcoms. Some potential laughs after that horror show.
10:21 Red Hot Chili Peppers finally find their shirts (happens offscreen).
10:22 Sources report Fox NFL Insider Jay Glazer is now personally hovering over people eating their Subway sandwiches, saying Chumbawumba and doing the Batusi.
10:23 Even though the game has been over for almost 30 minutes, Peyton Manning just threw another interception
10:24 ESPN plans hours of "Embracing Debate" over Peyton Manning's legacy, as if he was solely the reason they lost the game.
10:34 Seattle's defense in particular put on a performance to appreciate, even if the game itself was a dud. The commercials were okay. There weren't the big highs nor what-the-heck lows of previous years.
10:44 The Super Bowl has finished. The season is over. Football fans can now start pondering the next big news in the league. No, not the draft. The Browns interviewing candidates to be the team's head coach in 2015.

Walls Hold Up To MBV's Wall Of Sound

By Kara Tucker
A testament its original construction and subsequent renovations, the Hammerstein Ballroom held together in a trip through space and time Monday.
That challenge was certainly not made easier by the return of My Bloody Valentine, making its first appearance in New York, since releasing “MBV”, the long (and I do mean long) awaited follow up to its classic “Loveless” album.
This was the same My Bloody Valentine who, on the Loveless tour, played loud enough to knock plaster off the walls of the Ritz, threatening to make the floors there whiter than they were during that building’s heyday as Studio 54.

The band, which last played the city in 2008, clearly hasn’t lost any volume in the intervening 21 years. It’s safe to say they were testing the walls of the Hammerstein. That isn’t to say they were purely about loudness for loudness’ sake, even though those signs on at the entrance urging usage of ear plugs were not kidding.
The sound, either to build up to the climax or perhaps to puckishly lull folks into a false sense of ear security, began as “Pfft, it’s not that loud” before getting louder with each song. Before long, it moved to “Oh, crap, it is that loud” as one began to feel the music coming from the floors and into the chest.

Monday’s setlist played like a deluxe edition of that ’92 Ritz gig (when the band opened for Dinosaur Jr.). Not only were there a few more older songs, the band worked in four songs off “M.B.V.” an often stellar album, even if it plays like three separate E.P.s.
Those three facets all got an airing Monday – “Only Tomorrow” and “Who Sees You” from the first third of the album that plays like “Loveless 2”, “New You” when the band emerges from the swirling hypnotics into swooning territory not unlike a more organic Stereolab and “Wonder 2”, a rushing whir of ambient rhythm that closes the record.
All four songs fit seamlessly into the older material that dated back to the years 1988-1991.
The whole thing could be dismissed as loud for loud’s sake if not for some key factors.
For one, underneath it all, MBV has pop in its DNA. Even if the hooks are buried in the mix, under the tremolo and feedback and heavy ethereal sound, they’re there on record and they were there again live.

The band, with its same core lineup since ’87, is also not just throwing out noise, but exploring space within that volume, creating an experience that was immersive more than assaultive, no mean feat at those levels.
While 14 of the set’s 18 songs were at least 22 years old, the trip through time and space wasn’t straightforward. MBV’s always sounded like a band ahead of its time or rather, a band in a time of its own.
To be sure, there were bands influenced by them, there really weren’t any bands in their wake who sounded like them (unlike such other visionaries as, say, Velvet Underground).
For all its explorations, the show was pretty straight forward. One could fit the between-song banter on the back of a matchbook cover. Even if the band projected its own air of cool, this wasn’t a night about connecting with the audience as people, but rather through sound.
“Loveless” certainly didn’t get short-shrift with seven of its 11 tracks making an appearance. That’s no shock for an album that’s made all sorts of lists, including Rolling Stone’s top 500 of all-time, a legacy that daunted bandleader Kevin Shields, who reportedly scrapped multiple follow-ups and hit writer’s block because he felt none of it measured up to it.

The material from it was as brilliant as ever, with its swirling, feedback, reverse-reverbed guitars bringing its sound to the fore with additional power with Blinda Butchers soothing vocals sometimes reduced to a losing battle for space which made them seem only more ethereal.
The pre-Loveless material benefitted from the approach, as those early EPs, as good as they were, felt like blueprints for what the band would be up to later. They feel fleshed out live, enveloped by the guitars and embraced by the bottom end.
Indeed, for all of the results produced by Shields’ intensive studio tinkering, it’s the underrated rhythm section of bassist Deb Googe and drummer Colm O’Cloisig that allows those flights to take off.

The end result Monday was an immersive, tactile experience unlike much of anything else that’s out there. Feedback was made pretty. Quiet swoons cushioned of gnarled shards of heavy enough that one felt pummeled and caressed at the same time.
The show reached its apex perfectly down the stretch – “To Here Knows When” swooned transcendently, “Wonder 2”skittered hypnotically, “Soon” kept its heavy groove, “Feed Me With Your Kiss” burst with punkish energy.
That led up to the evening’s finish, and perennial MBV set closer, “You Made Me Realise.”
In its original recorded form, the song is propulsive psychedelia punctuated by passages of soaring chaos. Live, those passages take on a life of their own in the “holocaust section”, lasting for several minutes, pushing the song to 15, 20, even up to 30 minutes in some legendary instances.
Monday’s version was shorter, but didn’t sacrifice any power in the process. O’Cloisig bashed away on the drums, Googe pounded away, Shields working way more out of that one chord than anyone had a right to. This was the moment the maelstrom stopped playing around and swallowed the audience whole, an experience both disorienting and soothing.

It was the penultimate show of My Bloody Valentine’s touring this year and the last scheduled show for now.
“M.B.V.” was a better album than it had a right to be given its stops and starts and overtinkering. In fact, it was a damn good album, period that gave at least a sliver of hope that Shields’ talk of a follow-up E.P. and the band’s next album isn’t just talk.
Even if it exists in a universe mostly of its own, My Bloody Valentine is still an impressive force to be reckoned with and a vital entity that deserves to take off free from studio obsession more often. Here’s hoping Shields is revitalized and doesn’t consider 2013 some sort of victory lap.
Because My Bloody Valentine still has plenty of brilliance left in the tank and, besides, the walls at the Hammerstein aren’t going to just test themselves.

My Bloody Valentine Hammerstein Setlist
November 11, 2013
1. Sometimes
2. I Only Said
3. When You Sleep
4. New You
5. You Never Should
6. Honey Power
7. Cigarette In Your Bed
8. Only Tomorrow
9. Come In Alone
10. Only Shallow
11. Thorn
12. Nothing Much To Lose
13. Who Sees You
14. To Here Knows When
15. Wonder 2
16. Soon
17. Feed Me With Your Kiss
18. You Made Me Realise

Five Apiece: Lou Reed

This is no attempt at a definitive best-of by any stretch and it is NOT a damn slideshow. Rather, these are songs that meant something personally to the two of us, five each. By all means, if all you know of Lou Reed is “Walk on the Wild Side” or “Sweet Jane,” feel free to start digging. There’s a lot of good stuff to find.

Deb: “Venus in Furs”
Yeah, it's pretty much a direct cop of the erotic novel that was stolen lock, stock and barrel for 50 Shades of Grey, but in the context of pop music from that era, this is about as adventurous as it gets. Juxtaposing "taste the whip, now bleed for me" against the "transgressive" notion of Mick Jagger mewling "let's spend the night together" is like screening Last Tango In Paris after Beach Blanket Bingo.
Kara: “Heroin”
For all the taboo subject matter the Velvets covered over four albums or so worth of songs, they and Reed didn’t do it more compellingly than this track from the first album. It presents the user matter-of-factly. It doesn’t condemn his use, but it doesn’t glorify it by any stretch. Musically, the track begins with a slowly strumming, gets more and more frenzied with Cale’s manic viola sounding as if it might go supernova at any second , mimicking the initial rush of the drug as the user’s no longer in control. A dark masterpiece.

Deb: “Pale Blue Eyes”
Proof positive that Lou Reed and Smokey Robinson shared at least a shred or two of DNA. It's one of the purest expressions of unfulfilled desire these ears have ever heard -- right up there with "The Love I Saw In You Was Just a Mirage." The "linger on" aspect lends a permanence, a sense that this guy is not only in love with you, but entangled in a way that's going to destroy him, you, and pretty much everything else in sight. Sigh.
Kara: “Candy Says”
Yes, “Lola” and “Dude Looks Like a Lady” were hits written by other bands. But they were more about encounters of a sexual nature. Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side”, while showing a better understanding (note the proper pronoun usage) of the trans folk in the song, it was still somewhat of a surface view.
But Reed clearly was capable of an empathetic view of trans folk. He later was in a relationship with Rachel, a trans woman who inspired the “Coney Island Baby” album and its terrific title track in particular.
But, his most empathetic and saddest song empathized with what it can feel like to be transsexual or transgender. Written about Candy Darling, one of the trans women in the Warhol scene, the lead song from the third VU album, addresses both the dysphoria (“I’ve come to hate my body and all it requires in this world”) and the desire to be free, not just to be one’s self, but arguably of the stresses of the decadent scene (“I’m gonna watch the bluebirds fly over my shoulder. I’m gonna watch ‘em pass by me, maybe when I’m older”).
The song’s melancholy weariness became more poignant in retrospect, as Darling passed away in 1974 from cancer before she reached the age of 30, the types of freedom yearned for in the song ultimately out of reach and taken away.

Deb: “Caroline Says II”
Reed dealt with pain as pleasure and pain as pain in the Velvets. This character study is one that posits pain as the inevitable byproduct of love. Caroline -- like Stephanie, who inhabited the song in an earlier version -- is so cold that "all her friends call her Alaska." But who can blame her, given the lover who looms just out of frame, forcing her into a steely state where another beating is something to be shrugged off. "You can hit me all that you want to," Reed sings, demonstrating a dark understanding that's as disquieting as it is moving. "I don't love you anymore."
Kara: “Kill Your Sons”
From one of Reed’s weakest albums comes one of his strongest performances. Its genesis is in the harrowing abuse he suffered as a teenager in 1956, where his parents had him treated for his bisexuality (this was 17 years before the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from the list of mental disorders). Electroshock therapy was used in an effort to “cure” him.
This 1974 song features Reed’s deadpan vocals done in one take, lending an almost indifferent air to the grim subject matter, whether it’s the shock-induced memory loss in the opening verse or the choking from getting shot up with thorazine in the third.
There’s a stinging guitar that’s buried in the mix early, then sounds as if it’s fighting to be heard above a greasy, murky mix of drums, bass and keyboard, going into a solo before a mysteriously abrupt fade.
On an often plodding, cynical and lazy record, this song avoids the laziness. A powerful, harrowing piece of angry personal reportage, it’s another prime example of Reed’s ability to turn darker subject matter into an amazing song.

Deb: “Dirt”
As eloquent and simple a statement of pure disdain as rock has ever produced. Dylan wove a web around his prey in "Positively Fourth Street," but Reed just backs his into a corner, poking the hapless foe in the chest with a sharp index finger, staring unblinkingly and mocking. Whoever this song was meant for, and it's honed to a sharp enough edge that it's clear someone is intended to be on the receiving end, probably had nightmares about it for years.
Kara: “Street Hassle”
Where Reed’s grittiness is used in service of an epic. The title track to his 1978 album, it’s three parts merged into a mini rock opera where sex, death, drugs and regret are all part of one mesmerizing piece, bobbling up at different moments.
The opening “Waltzing Matilda” (not related) piece opens with insistent cellos before Reed details (and I do mean details) a sexual encounter between two people, ending with the line “Neither one regretting a thing.”
The middle section “Street Hassle” opens with soulful, choral vocals before it details a conversation about a woman who’s overdosed, with the guitar part offering echoes of the earlier cellos and Reed calling back to part of the first piece with a “Sha la la man.” It’s harsh cinema verite stuff, especially as the character instructs the deceased’s partner, “But why don’t you grab your old lady by the feet and just lay her out on the darkened street? And by morning she’s just another hit-and-run.”
It’s like an earthier, grandeur-free version of city lives than those that populated the poetically epic “Jungleland” by Bruce Springsteen who, naturally, shows up in the third section – “Slipaway.”
This time, bass opens in the same groove as the cellos and guitars with more muted strings coming in.
Springsteen speaks the first third section, his voice put under the music in the mix to create a mumbling effect, with a sly reference to “tramps like us.”
Reed takes over to sing, revealing a person’s loneliness (“Love is gone away. And there’s no one here now. And there’s nothing left to say”), but the pronoun made it atypical for the time again, as the person being missed is “him.”
The cumulative effect is of turning around and seeing moments and dialogue from some part of the city like one epic long tracking shot in a movie. It’s an ambitious success.

Deb: “The Blue Mask”
Another of Reed's forays into self-immolation, this time rife with imagery plucked from across the philosophical and spiritual spectrums -- including a vivid conjuring of St. Sebastian as modern-day martyr. It's one of his most breathless, breakneck compositions, one that was clearly as exhausting and exhilarating for him to perform as for the listener to hang onto. Brilliant.
Kara: “Halloween Parade”
I’m not going to lie. Given the at times dark and tough subject matter elsewhere on this list, I was tempted to pick a song like “Egg Cream” with its undeniable hook and sheer joy as a reminder that not all of Reed’s catalogue is all dark subject matter.
But I had to go with this song, the second track on “New York” and its emotional centerpiece.  Using the annual gay celebration in Greenwich Village as the backdrop, it’s an elegy for those lost to AIDS, a disease that claimed too many people who lived in the scenes and on the corners painted in Reed’s earlier work.
Reed draws the picture of all these people and characters he sees, from a “downtown fairy singing Proud Mary” to “five Cinderellas and some leather drags” to “Born Again Losers and Lavender Boozers”, but he also deftly weaves in those gone – “But there ain’t no Harry and no Virgin Mary, you won’t hear those voices again. And Johnny Rio and Rotten Rita, you’ll never see those faces again.”
He weaves in the most mournful lines with ones of determination. He doesn’t want to hear the bad news anymore, but asks for “no consolations please.” He confesses that he was afraid that the news was true that the person he’s singing the song to was gone (it was), but ends by saying, “See you next year at the Halloween Parade.”
It’s a brilliant piece of work, expressing clear sadness and pain without being maudlin and expressing a determined spirit of those still here without veering into false rah-rah sentiment. In a way, it’s as perfect an example of Reed’s strengths as a songwriter as anything he ever cut.

Lou Reed: 1942-2013

By Deborah Sprague and Kara Tucker

Deb
In the wake of Lou Reed’s death, a lot of folks came forward to say that the man was a great artist despite the fact that he didn’t give a damn, which isn’t the case – he was a great artist precisely because he didn’t give a damn.

Oh, he cared plenty about the work he was doing – in nearly a half-century of making music, it’s hard to pick out more than a handful of things that came across as half-assed or tossed off, not even in the days when he was a piece-work staffer hired to jump-start a new dance craze or conjure up images of the wild surf from a warren in the bowels of the Big Apple. What he didn’t care about was what you – or me, or anyone else for that matter – cared about the finished “product” (a word that’d no doubt elicit an epithet from Reed if he heard it applied to his work).

That tunnel vision didn’t translate into pretense – well, not too often – when it came time to actually put his ideas into practice. That’s because Lou Reed was his generation’s archetypal New York musician: Not only did he constantly write about the city – sneering at the slumming debutantes of  “Downtown Dirt” and celebrating one of its culinary treasures in “Egg Cream”– he embodied it.  His sense of place was immutable. Reed  absorbed the sounds that surrounded him, from the street corner doo-wop that permeated the Brooklyn streets of his earliest youth to the sentimental journeys of the post-Sinatra balladeers that sprang up all around the tri-state area in those ostensibly fallow years before the Beatles and Stones came along to shake things up again.

Reed never discarded the lessons he picked up in those early days, the harmonies, the lyrical economy, the straightforward structures – remember, he’s the guy who matter-of-factly noted that when you get to “three chords, you’re into jazz.” He applied them a lot of different ways, ways that his progenitors probably never would’ve dreamed of (although Dion, who Reed would lovingly induct into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, knew the needle and the damage done every bit as well). But even at his most ostensibly outlandish, Lou Reed bared, as he put it in one of his most straightforward songs, a rock and roll heart – a leather-cloaked, but infinitely vulnerable spirit not all that far removed from Brando’s Wild One character, who, when asked “what are you rebelling against,” shot back, “whaddaya got?”

Rebellion was everywhere in Reed’s work. Allies, virtually nowhere. In  the Velvet Underground, he and his bandmates created a counter-counterculture that was as alien to the hippies on the left coast as it was to the so-called squares in middle America. They did their best to disperse the mellow haze of weed and good vibrations conjured up by those peers by painting red doors – and everything else – black, then pulling the walls in and practically force-feeding the listener the brown acid that the “good guys” tried to warn people away from.

Heroin, violence, obsession, sado-masochism and other alternate sexualities – these were Reed’s lyrical stock in trade, but rather than make them seem exotic, he took them at face value and presented them as part of everyday life. There was no rubber-necking in something like “Waiting for the Man,” just a sense of, well, time to go grab the 6 train and my wallet, I need to go grab a bag of smack. His deadpan delivery sealed the deal. The guitars might’ve screamed through “Sister Ray” with monumental violence, but Reed never raised his voice above a calm monotone, making things all the more foreboding.

He took that aesthetic with him when he split the band to embark on a solo career that clearly harkened back to his roots, a self-titled first album that kicked off with the Brooklyner-than-thou “I Can’t Stand It,” resplendent with mop-wielding landladies and blaring radios – but a nod to his own reality in the form of asides to Candy Darling, the transsexual Warhol superstar that remained dear to him even as he discarded his other peers from the era.

Throughout the early ‘70s, Reed wrangled with rock and roll -- with his audience, with the world for that matter – like a champion boxer, thrusting and parrying, sometimes playing rope-a-dope and sometimes stinging like a bee. He knew how to tease, how to please and how to infuriate, and his mercurial nature made figuring out which he’d do on any given day something of a crapshoot.

But even those who thought they could predict when Reed might zig or zag were likely given whiplash by his most divisive, spectacular, ugly, beautiful project – Metal Machine Music.  The four movements of that set  -- created, as the notes sneer, with "no instruments, no synthesizers, no panning, no phasing" -- split the difference between machine-shop audio vérité and the sort of eerie drones one can hear walking beneath transformers in the middle of nowhere. Move around the room while it plays, and you'll be amazed at the subtle but discernible differences created as the air shifts. Of course, you may find that it works just as well if you're merely trying to scare off a den of pesky squirrels.

Reed used that album the way old-fashioned farmers used controlled fire – to burn off the chaff around him and start over, charting a clear path with steely-eyed precision and sticking with it for the next decade-plus. Yes, he ventured into the abyss (on much of Street Hassle and The Blue Mask), and occasionally steered into the seas of cheese (on the oddly bouncy New Sensation, one of the mercifully few documentations of Reed seemingly paying attention to popular culture), but for the most part, he cast an aura of a man who was – to borrow the title of one of his more underrated offerings – Growing Up in Public.

By and large, Reed removed himself from the rock and roll arena a while ago . He’d made his peace with John Cale --  a reunion that redoubled the poignancy of Songs For Drella, itself an olive branch of sorts to Andy Warhol, who was both a mentor and a bête noire in Reed’s life – then stepped to the precipice to address mortality in an even more close-up fashion with Magic and Loss, a painfully elegant dissertation on death that conjured both of the titular elements in spades.

By the dawn of the new millennium, Lou had settled into an odd-but-appropriate position as an elder statesman of the “other” – a guide, not to the self-conscious, flamboyant outré stylists that command headlines, but to those traveling art’s underground railroad, those who move unblinkingly into the storm, like modern-day Flying Dutchmen. In death, as in life, he and his work reveal the most to those willing to peel slowly and see.

Kara
At some point on his 1978 spoken word/Lenny Bruce-inspired standup comedy/live music double album “Live: Take No Prisoners,” Lou Reed deadpanned the line, "I do Lou Reed better than anybody, so I’d better get on it.”
Reed passed away Sunday at the age of 71, less than a year after he had a liver transplant.
While it wasn’t the sudden shock of, say, Joe Strummer’s passing years earlier, that didn’t keep it from feeling like a punch in the gut to anyone who had the slightest bit of appreciation for Reed’s career.

One could make the argument that a good chunk of various strains of rock would not have existed in the way and time they did had Reed not opened the door. Of course, Reed would probably bristle and cop an attitude at being given a sobriquet like “Godfather of Alternative Rock”, “Godfather of Punk”, “Godfather of Glam” or any other such title that would be extremely apt and correct.
Reed could often come off as a pretentious, prickly jerk in interviews and other situations. He knew his stuff and gave off the air of someone who didn’t give a shit, because, well, he didn’t. This was no practiced air of indifference. He really didn’t give a shit.
In retrospect, it’s easy to see that it certainly served a purpose. By keeping some things at arms length, Reed was able to maintain a level of artistic freedom few get to enjoy. He took full advantage, both musically and lyrically.

The Velvet Underground were Reed’s first serious foray into music of his own, with some songs having been written on the side while he worked a day job as a staff writer for Pickwick Records, a label known for cheesy capitalizations and outright knockoffs.
Their four albums with Reed came out from 1967 through 1970. Television was squeamish to show married characters sleep in anything other than separate beds and here were songs dealing with subjects like homosexuality, sadomasochism, transsexuality and domestic violence.

Reed’s material wasn’t just running counter to the prevailing mainstream, it also wasn’t in line with the prevailing counterculture, either.
Lyrically, it’s a different sentiment to go from “Turn off your mind. Relax and float downstream” as Lennon sang in 1966 to “I don't know just where I'm going.  But I'm gonna try for the kingdom, if I can. 'Cause it makes me feel like I'm a man, when I put a spike into my vein” as Reed sang a year later (in a song written before the Beatles’ one, mind you).
Whether lyrically or in the presentation, dressed in black and wearing shades on stage, it all seemed to say, “Fuck this hippie shit.” Given the response to the VU’s live act in San Francisco, the feeling was mutual.

Musically, the material was in uncharted waters as well -- dissonance from Cale’s viola, the primitive drumming from Tucker, the loudness with which they all played, the distortion and feedback, the mix of arty ambitions and pretensions with basic primitivity (basing some songs off two chords or three).
Given the climate these albums were released in, you’d probably say that it was not the wisest commercial strategy. You’d be right. Only one of VU’s albums hit the Billboard chart at the time of release and it peaked at 197.
Unlike perhaps his closest contemporary in terms of following one’s muse no matter what – Neil Young – Reed didn’t always have huge chart success. He only had one chart single, 1972’s “Walk on the Wild Side.”
Of course, even then, he managed to put some very risqué subject matter into a song, as no doubt some fans (and even the censors) got so caught up in all those “Doo Doo Doos” to pay attention to, for example, the line, “But she never lost her head even when she was giving head”, let alone the fact that the she in question was a trans woman.

Reed did manage to one-up Young in another department. The latter basically spent a good chunk of the ‘80s effectively giving the middle finger to his label (and perhaps some of his fans) were either weak genre exercises or lesser versions of turf he’d he traveled before.
As for Reed? He took care of it in one double album – 1975’s “Metal Machine Music.” To a select few (like Deborah); it’s a solid effort exploring the concept of drone and No Wave, territory later explored by bands like Sonic Youth. To the rest of us, it’s an unlistenable endurance test of nothing but minutes of feedback loops without the slightest bit of songs to tether them. They owe more to Reed’s admittedly chemically altered state of mind at the time than any sort of great art (and, plus, he did cacophony better with “Sister Ray.”).
He may have told Lester Bangs, “My bullshit is worth more than other people’s diamonds” but this all-time infamous major label album smells more like an industrial feedlot than West 47^th Street.

While Reed did not have hit songs in the conventional chart sense, he wrote songs that became standards and songs that were highly influential. Even if they weren’t songs that sounded exactly like Velvet Underground or Lou Reed (although there were a ton of those), chances are you heard songs by artists and bands influenced by parts or all of Reed’s songs and approach to artistic integrity.
There’s a certain level of freedom in not having to give a damn as an artist, to being able to maintain that detachment. It allowed Reed to tackle subject matters almost with the eyes of a documentarian as much as a poet. It didn’t matter whether the subject matter was a junkie strung out in some New York City park or the 1 percent (well before that term came into being) or whether it was about the lives of people in Reed’s life or Reed himself.

He tried to avoid judging a lot of the people and scenarios he wrote about, trying to preserve the detachment. But while the metaphorical camera didn’t blink, Reed’s approach, where he chose to point the lens, didn’t necessarily lead to emotionless ironic detachment. He could write songs as affecting and tender as anyone. There was “Pale Blue Eyes”- an achingly lovely, bittersweet song about a love that any sensitive ‘70s singer songwriter would have killed for -- or “Hello, It’s Me,” about Andy Warhol’s death with Reed at his most vulnerable.
Whether that muse, that desire to document what was in the path of the lens was turned inward (“The Blue Mask”), towards the city that was his actual and spiritual home (“New York”), expressed through concept (“Berlin”, “Raven”) or through relatively unbridled happiness (“New Sensation”).

Wherever it was pointed, the results taken as a whole resulted in a body of work that, along with that desire to maintain the detachment and become all navel-gazey, certainly could have played into Reed’s aversion to dealing with the press a lot of the time. Or for that matter, to write anything resembling a memoir.
He told Rolling Stone in 1987, “All through this, I’ve always thought if you thought of all of it as a book, then you have the Great American Novel, every record as a chapter. They’re all in chronological order. You take the whole thing, stack it in listen to it in order, there’s my Great American Novel.”
While Reed had a better career batting average than most with few outright misfires – the aforementioned “Metal Machine Music”, the somewhat tossed off “Sally Can’t Dance”, the ultimately clunky and ill-conceived “Lulu” album with Metallica – the misfires kept it from being THE greatest American Novel.  And heck, even “Sally” gave us the powerful “Kill Your Sons” and the poignant “Billy.”
It also couldn’t be the Great American Novel because Reed’s body of work was also part memoir. Whether he maintaining his detached gaze outward or inward, the career, taken as a whole says a lot about who Reed was than a book would and did so without diverting from wherever his musical desires took him next.

Taken as a whole, Reed was a man who, yes, could come off as an egotistical and needlessly grumpily contrarian at times, but he had the body of work to back it up – an often amazing songwriter and a terrific and influential guitarist behind that career’s worth of material. Behind the detachment and the occasional arms length-inducing assholery was often a man with real heart, kindness, intelligence and integrity and a truly unique giant in the world of rock and roll.
He may have said it with more than a little sarcasm and irony back in 1978, but damned if the man wasn’t right. He DID do Lou Reed better than anybody.

2013 VMAs: As They Happened

By Kara Tucker

Tonight’s MTV Video Music Awards in live blog form.
9:00 p.m. – Is Lady Gaga the Eggman? Goo goo ga joob.
9:03 p.m. – Gaga is clearly premiering her Vegas act. Multiple costume changes on stage..well…a jacket on and off and a variety of bad wigs.
9:04 p.m. – On to the clam shell bikini. Her homage to Botticelli or perhaps Ed’s Clam Shack on Route 52.
9:05 p.m. – That was…underwhelming
9:06 p.m. – Did that guy from One Direction just say, “Whatsup, Brooklyn?”..he did it again. Please don’t say “homies in the hizzouse.”
9:08 p.m. – Selena Gomez wins “Best Pop Video.” Bruno Mars more surprised than Taylor Swift.
9:17 p.m. – Miley Cyrus, apparently appropriating Japanese TV Commercial culture now.
9:18 p.m. – Drake bobbing along to the beat…of a Miley song.
9:18 p.m. – “We Can’t Stop." Is the song subtitled "(Dancing With Furries)"?
9:19 p.m. – One Direction is unimpressed.
9:20 p.m. – Robin Thicke here to do his creepy hit song…with Miley Cyrus.
9:20 p.m. – Miley shaking her butt next to Thicke’s crotch and doing masturbatory moves with a foam No. 1 finger. Robin Thicke is 36 years old. Miley Cyrus is 20.
9:22 pm. – Is this a high school production with these props? Seriously cheap.
9:23 p.m. – Robin Thicke forgot his straw hat to go with that striped outfit.
9:24 p.m. – Song medley is over…ending opportunity for Miley Cyrus to embarrass herself further. Seriously, she was doing something cringeworthy whenever the camera showed her again.
9:27 p.m. – Drinking game…every time Macklemore says “homies,” do a shot.
9:27 p.m. – Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, clearly glad not to be part of that hallucinogenic medley that preceded the presentation for the Best Hip Hop Video award.
9:28 p.m. – Announcement: “Kanye West will be onstage next.”…at least he’s supposed to be this time.
9:36 p.m. – Did Kevin Hart basically do a joke implying Robin Thicke would kidnap a child? Ugh.
9:37 pm. – Jared Leto onstage. Evidently Anthony Kiedis had a garage sale.
9:38 p.m – Kanye West performing the worst song on his new album, the execrable “Blood on the Leaves.”
9:39 p.m. – Please, God. Let his Autotune break down so we have to hear his real voice.
9:40 p.m. – He’s doubling down on the imagery from the “Strange Fruit” sample with the trees. Kanye, your troubles with women (apparently all of them are money-grubbing groupies according to this song) have nothing to do with lynching.
9:41 p.m. – Stop it, Mr. West. For the love of God.
9:41 p.m. – Miley Cyrus came across more dignified than Kanye West did. Okay, no she didn’t. But the fact that Kanye’s even in that ballpark speaks volumes.
9:48 p.m. – Nile Rodgers!  Awesomeness.
9:48 p.m. -- Pharrell, mentioning who Rodgers has worked with but not mentioning Chic? * Cue shaking of head *
9:48 p.m. – The two gentlemen from Daft Punk not speaking. If only Kanye West did the same.
9:49 p.m. – Random thought..that could be anyone inside those Daft Punk masks.
9:50 p.m. – Best female video to Taylor Swift. Somebody clothesline Kanye if he approaches the stage.
9:51 p.m. – Best video with a social message..what? Miley’s twerking video not nominated? Ohh…
9:51 p.m. – Macklemore and Ryan Lewis win for “Same Love.” Good.
9:52 p.m. – Did Gaga just high-five Will Smith?
9:56 p.m. – Commercial break. It just occurred to me that none of the people Kendrick Lamar called out in that verse performed onstage with the Miley Cyrus Furrypalooza.
10:00 p.m. – Justin Timberlake is the “President of Pop” now? Umm…
10:01 p.m. – Timberlake performing as the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard award winner, per-recorded segment of him in the Barclay’s Center. Lip sync-tastic!
10:02 p.m. – What happened to the sound feed on this medley? Sounds like a radio station not tuned in correctly.
10:04 p.m. – Seriously, someone needs to fix this. It sounds unlistenable.
10:04 p.m. – A shame because this would be halfway entertaining if the sound worked.
10:05 p.m. – A Super Bowl Halftime Show has broken out onstage at the Barclays Center.
10:10 pm. – Apparently JT is doing a snippet of every song he ever recorded.
10:10 p.m. – Worst-kept secret of the weekend. Onstage reunion of N*Sync. What a shock. Sound still not fixed.
10:11 p.m. – You can tell the audience is into it. Even one of the One Direction members managed to not look bored.
10:12 p.m. – Reunion over. Timberlake leaves his former bandmates behind. Literally.
10:13 p.m. – “Suit and Tie” or, perhaps more accurately, “I’m The Star Now, Guys.”
10:16 p.m. – The Distorted Timberlake Medley is finally over. Seriously. Who butchered the sound on that?
10:18 p.m. – “N*Sync. What was that?” About two minutes of screen time, Mr. Fallon, if we're being generous.
10:18 p.m. – If Lance Bass and JC Chasez had been under those Daft Punk masks, they’d have doubled their onscreen time.
10:26 p.m. – Kevin Hart back on, playing catch-up in an effort to get more screen time than Timberlake and as many laughs as Kanye.
10:28 p.m. – “Song of the Summer” nominees. Should be Daft Punk. It won’t be.
10:30 p.m. – Of course, it’s One Direction. They win one for the Shipper.
10:32 p.m. – “Hating someone for their sexual orientation is the same as hating someone for the color of their skin”..good sentiment. Incomplete sentiment, but it’s a start.
10:33 p.m. – Macklemore and Ryan Lewis performing “Same Love.” Cue predictable outrage from the usual cast of characters on the Far Right.
10:34 p.m. – “Have you read the YouTube comments lately?” Not if I can help it.
10:37 p.m. – It IS a little easier to avoid crying on Sunday when you have a Moon Man.
10:38 pm. – “To learn more about marriage equality…”graphic on the screen. Times have changed.
10:42 p.m. – Adam Lambert, sadly only a presenter this year. Emili Sande for that matter.
10:43 p.m. – Austin Mahone, a pop flavor of the month. wins Best New Artist.
10:44 p.m. – God gets His first shoutout of the night.
10:45 p.m. -- If you did a shot any time a white person said “Homies” tonight, you’d be dead of alcohol poisoning.
10:46 p.m. – Drake’s turn to perform…getting videobombed by some dude in a backwards adjustable baseball cap and shades. Again, an adjustable cap.
10:50 p.m. – Seeing the house DJ at the VMAs answers the question of “What happened to Robin Thicke’s straw hat?”
10:50 p.m. – Amazingly, this is the first time most of these videos have appeared on MTV when it wasn’t third shift hours.
10:55 p.m. – Time for the Best Male Video. Bruno Mars and his hat win.
11:03 p.m. – Mars (and hat) back onstage to perform his new song. And it has an actual hook. Not sure about the lyric on it, though.
11:06 p.m. – A planetarium laser show has broken out at the Barclays Center.
11:15 p.m. – Video of the Year goes to Justin Timberlake for “Mirrors.”  Thank goodness it wasn’t “Blurred Lines.”
11:15 p.m. – Timberlake has switched to what looks like a bowling shirt.
11:17 p.m. – Timberlake dedicates the award to his grandparents, a genuinely sweet moment.
11:18 p.m. – Katy Perry at the Brooklyn Bridge performing “Roar” doing the boxing theme.
11:19 p.m. – I can’t really begrudge this one. The song has a pretty strong hook. I would have been shocked if it hadn’t been a big hit.
11:21 p.m. – Jumping rope? Mmmmkay. Waiting for "Mama Said Knock You Out" to break out.
11:21 p.m. – Singing from the turnbuckle now before bringing the hook back for the rest of the song.
11:24 p.m. – As the show rebroadcast starts, all in all, no huge surprises. A lot of live “performing”, but not as much singing. Lady Gaga seemed conventional. Miley Cyrus was a trainwreck creating buzz for the wrong reasons. Kanye screamed his way through an autotuned monstrosity of a song that is the worst on the worst-selling album of his career. Timberlake’s performance took over 15 minutes and seemed twice that long because of horrendous sound that was never fixed. The N*Sync “reunion” lasted all of two minutes and wasn’t worth two seconds of pre-show hype for that short of an appearance.
Given how much time the network gives over to shows like “Teen Mom,” it felt like a music show designed by people who hate music – a cynical “let’s put out whatever” affair that offered a few decent performances, but almost no inspiration.

First Listen: Franz Ferdinand, Nine Inch Nails

By Kara Tucker and Deborah Sprague

Franz Ferdinand: Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Action
DEB: When Franz Ferdinand slipped off the radar a few years ago, fans were left wondering what the heck was keeping them out of the fray – was it something pedestrian, like garden variety artistic differences, or a more intriguing predicament….say, Alex Kapranos battling chronic gout due to that restaurant critic moonlighting gig?

The emergence of Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Actions doesn’t answer that question, but it does deliver the same sort of synaptic jolt the quartet seemed capable of mustering up in their sleep around the time they threw down the gauntlet with “Take Me Out.” Just in the nick of time, too – the band’s unlikely blend of urbanity and hyper-activity is sorely needed in these days of faux-hick folksiness and geekily ironic twerk-fests.

The sleek-yet-sweaty tone is set within the first few bars of the de-facto title track, “Right Action,” which lopes along like some sort of bastard grandson of vintage Duran Duran and “Heart of Glass”-era Blondie – propelled by an irresistible bassline and Kapranos’ arch tones (which he wraps around such teasing lines as “come home, practically all is nearly forgiven”). It’s playful, but not altogether jolly, his smile framed by a slightly menacing wisp of Gauloises smoke.

“Evil Eye” ratchets up the rhythmic intensity and the verbal paranoia a level or two, conjuring a mood reminiscent of the Clash’s dancefloor endeavors circa Sandinista –without the unconvincing hip-hop veneer. That vibe, airy without being breezy, has long been a FF trademark, and they capture it more effectively here than on the disappointing You Could Have It So Much Better.

While the band uses a lot of primary colors here, concentrating on stark landscapes without too much detail, there are some bracing dayglo interludes as well – notably “Love Illumination,” which tosses simple, angular solos (both guitar and keyboard) into the mix, adding a spoonful of sugar in the form of lovely swinging sixties backing vocals.

Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Actions isn’t without its missteps – “Stand on the Horizon” aims for a languid ripeness but ends up collapsing under a leaden lattice of synths. “Fresh Strawberries” falls similarly short in its Kinks-wannabe jauntiness, a hollow sort of exercise that’s all too fitting for Kapranos’  blasé assertion that “I believe there’s nothing too believe.”

But that snide mindset doesn’t last long. The spaghetti-surf  “Treason! Animals” – which could pass muster on one of those lost-gem garage collections, if not for Kapranos’ affably cool croon – ranks among their grooviest offerings, while the closing “Goodbye, Lovers and Friends” pokes the listener with lines like “I hate pop music…I hate bright colors,” all the while presenting both, deftly wrapped in a tantalizingly tasty shell and shimmering sexily in a way that would make Bryan Ferry smile.

KARA: Scotland’s Franz Ferdinand is perhaps testing to see just how short attention spans can be in the world of 24-hour news cycles and 140-character bursts of response.
There was a four-year wait between their second album – “You Could Have It So Much Better” and 2009’s “Tonight.”
Now comes the Glaswegian’s fourth album after another four year wait.

Franz Ferdinand’s breakout hit  – “Take Me Out” – off their self titled debut was a song full of hooks that also set the template for much of its approach. They specialized in angular post-punk you could dance to with hints of the UK pop of their forebears. Start the album, bop your head, shake your booty, maybe even a little air guitar to the occasional riff, done.
“Right Thoughts..” is not really a deviation from the bands formula for better and worse. When the songs click, catchy smart fun ensues – the kind to get you moving. When it doesn’t, the seams show.
Luckily, Franz Ferdinand has a pretty solid ratio of hits to misses.

“Right Action” starts the album off with an intro ready-made for handclaps and the album title being sung twice in the first 45 seconds. The lead single, it should fit nicely on a future best-of compilation for the band.
“Evil Eye” follows with a funkier feel. Alex Kapranos asks, “What’s the color of the next car?” and the backing voices answer “Red, ya bastard” and the song is off-and-going headfirst into ‘80s Land. The pull it off without feeling dated (no overly boomed up drums here).

Indeed, there’s a bit of spot the influence one can easily play with “Right Thoughts..” – “Oh hey! There’s a Bowie-esque croon! Oh, there’s a little New Order-style guitar!”
But to their credit, Franz Ferdinand manage to keep things from sounding too derivative, in part because they keep things moving briskly enough and in well-crafted fashion as to not sound like copycats.

“Stand on the Horizon” goes from a quiet ballad start (a relief in pace) before going into more familiar territory with that croon, even if it could use a touch more swoon.
Not every song works. “Fresh Strawberries” has the promising line of “Soon we will be rotten, We will all be forgotten, Half-remembered rumors of the old”, but the darker, gothy feel is lost with a sunny-sounded chorus. It’s a graft that doesn’t take.

“Brief Encounters” opens with a track that could be used to the theme for some basic cable show about space in the ‘80s before going into almost reggae-inflected Britpop. Again, the seams show.
On the other hand, the insistently catchy “Bullet” is about as subtle as its chorus implies. They WILL hammer this song into your brain, but it works in spite of its obviousness.

The final song on the album might just be the best, as it combines craft with refreshingly pulling back a touch. There’s a more subtle chorus to go with the reverbed vocals on the percussion-driven verses. It’s enough to make you wish for more subtlety elsewhere on the album.
At the end, Kapanos sings, “So sad to leave you. When they lie and say this not the end, you can laugh as if we’re still together/But this really is the end.”

It could be a break-up with a lover song or it could be a song about the period where the band was facing breakup rumors a couple years ago. Or it could just be more irony piled into a song where he croons about how he hates pop music.
It’s for the best that it’s not a song about FF’s current state of internal affairs. “Right Words…” isn’t quite a return to form as much as it is a simple return. A welcome return it is with pop featuring Brofolkian mandolin circles, teen pop with hip-hop-for-hire bolted on and, well, a certain celebrity offspring’s creepfest.
For its occasional faults, “Right Words…” is another solid effort.
Consider your head bobbed, your booty shaken and your air guitar strummed.
 
Song – Nine Inch Nails: Everything
“
Hesitation Marks”, Trent Reznor’s first album under the NIN name since 2008, will be released Sept. 2.
Three songs have been put out so far. “Came Back Haunted” is a mixture of synths a plenty, a chantable title in the chorus. The song’s over halfway through before the guitars kick in. It was a solid initial shot.
Copy A is somewhat of a grower with its paranoid feel, even if it isn’t prime NIN and sticks more to the light dance side of things.

Now comes…Everything. And, um, it’s, um, different.
It’s Trent Reznor goes pop. Seriously, the verses musically sounds like something someone would write for Katy Perry and the pitch altering on Reznor’s vocals becomes distracting.
Even when the distortion kicks in on the chorus, it doesn’t last, as guitars off a Cure record and layered harmonies appear.
Then distortion, then the “Hey, Think Katy Perry Would Like This?” verse again and then the Cure guitars and it’s all just disorienting.
Of course, odds were that Reznor wasn’t going to write the same way in his 40s that he did in his 20s. And maybe “Everything”, with its lyrics of trying to assure one’s self that things are good, fits better in context of the album.
Or maybe he’s just prepping us for a Slam Bamboo reunion.
But for now, we are left trying to absorb the fact that Trent Reznor has written a song you can do The Carlton to.

What Did Yeezus Do?

By Deborah Sprague and Kara Tucker

It’s been a few months since the self-promotional machine that is Kanye West began to emerge from a cocoon of secrecy.
He stood amidst a hype machine that included a performance of two new songs on the season finale of “Saturday Night Live” and a New York Times interview that amply displayed an ego so large and vast it could apply for statehood.
But while the ever-so-modest West was busy comparing himself to Steve Jobs, Henry Ford and Anna Wintour, among others) or backpedaling further from his fauxpology for crashing the stage to interrupt Taylor Swift’s acceptance at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards and turn himself into an “Imma Let You Finish” instant-meme punchline, there was the matter of one thing..the product.
West was looking to continue a run of five straight No. 1 albums (his debut, “College Dropout” peaked at No. 2). He’d come back from the artistically awkward “808’s and Heartbreak” (full of wretched Autotuned “singing” and a mostly bleak backdrop which still sold very well) with the more expansive “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” and semi-placeholder “Watch the Throne” (an album shared with Jay-Z and various other guest stars) that held up better as art while holding up commercially.
There was much secrecy  for a long time surrounding the album (which would be released with the potential eye-rolling title of “Yeezus”). There were reports claiming that West and producer Rick Rubin were still finalizing work on the album a week before its release.
Was the work worth it? Would West have another hit on his hands? Reviews tended to run heavily in the positive camp.
The album leaked four days prior to its release, but the album still debuted at No. 1 with solid numbers for a hip-hop release, although sales were less than projected. More ominous was the sharp drop (80 percent) in sales in the albums second week, the fourth-largest drop for an album to debut at No. 1 in the SoundScan era.
To date, the album has sold less than half of what its immediate processor. Was this a case where the majority of critics missed the boat or was this a case of a fickle fanbase not able to appreciate a quality effort.
First, let’s look at the album itself.

DEBORAH'S TAKE


Kanye West has never come across as bolder, louder or more aggressive than he does on Yeezus, the most in-your-face album of his career. But as the disc’s final notes resonate their last, it’s hard to escape the thought that the whole endeavor is merely, to borrow one of Shakespeare’s most enduring lines, a tale…full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Not that West is, as the skipped part of that quotation would put it, an idiot. Far from it. He’s sharp enough to orchestrate the press as dexterously as he does the samples that he’s woven together over the course of his career, brilliant at marketing and yes, an on-again, off-again master of that amorphous entity known as flow.

 Kanye’s problem, however, is that he’s really only capable of writing about one topic – Kanye. When he first came onto the scene, he was a middle-class kid with a chip on his shoulder about the same sorts of things most indie-rock middle class kids had chips on their shoulders about – all delivered while wearing the ugliest sweaters since Bill Cosby’s heyday.

These days, things are a lot better for West – in terms of bank account and fashion sense – but you wouldn’t know it by listening to Yeezus. To his credit, he’s taken his bitterness and poured it – like some sort of alternate-universe honey – over some of the most sustained sonic anger hip-hop has seen in years. While there’s nothing particularly new about an MC incorporating elements from the world of hard rock and metal, most have divined their inspiration from guitar tunes that cleave closely to the tenet that it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.

Yeezus ain’t got that swing. It’s got unrelenting thump, screech and discord, a mix that, at its best – the neo-horrorcore “I Am a God” and the hung-over sounding room-spinner “Guilt Trip” – leaves the listener roiled and flailing, without a center to hold onto. It’s a pretty impressive trick to pull off, the beckoning of the sound waves outweighing the sense of doom, luring the listener like a siren.

At times, West and his synth-slinging compatriots channel the spirit of confronto pioneers Suicide to the point that he seems almost willing to see Alan Vega and Martin Rev as co-equals in terms of musical divinity – a holy (smokes) trinity of sorts. That legitimate grittiness transcends studio boundaries, mixing the vibe of a Spanish Harlem street corner, a Crenshaw soul food joint and a tenement rooftop slaked with summer breezes, replacing ‘Ye’s usual constricted coldness with a genuine humanity that plays nicely off the minimal futurism of the backdrop.

But just when you think he can pull you in, West pushes you away violently – well, if you’re female, gay, Asian or (most ironically) wealthy. His misanthropy pokes through the surface of a half-dozen of the pieces here, sometimes in cartoonishly frat-boy fashion (the eye-roll worthy yellow-fever segment of “I’m In It”), but more often in a way that’s more infected than infectious.

When he gives in to his id, the old-enough-to-know better rapper allows himself the “luxury” of wading into a fetid pool of violent sexual imagery, where he wallows with meat-headed glee. His tin ear clangs especially atonally when the aforementioned “I’m In It” reaches its vortex, threatening to “put his fist in [a woman] like a civil rights sign” (a metaphor that no doubt has Malcolm X, not to mention West’s activist mom, spinning in the crypt).

 He hits similar bum notes with “New Slaves,” on which he seems to conflate his own addiction to luxury cars and trophy women to the problems facing actual addicts in the prison system – on which he can be found lingering acidly on the homophobic he-doth-protest-too-much aside “I’d rather be a dick than a swallower”

He saves his worst, however, for the best-constructed, most sonically gripping track on the disc. “Blood on the Leaves” uses the sparse, mournful tenor of the Billie Holiday popularized hymn “Strange Fruit” – a musing on lynching that painted a hellishly dark picture of “black bodies swinging in the southern breeze” – as a vessel to carry his First World grudges about alimony  (“Gold Digger” redux) and the unwillingness of “bitches” to let him put together a harem.

 Kanye’s musical radicalism is undeniable – and he’s to be commended for not merely pushing, but shredding the envelope on that front. But when you pare away the screaming synthesizers and pounding sequencers, the little man behind the curtain sounds suspiciously like a typical Tea Partier – all too ready to point fingers at those who are out to get him, and kick wildly at those on lower rungs of the ladder in order to make sure they stay in their place.

 In other words, Donald Trump, you may have a new golf buddy.

KARA'S TAKE
“Yeezus” is the latest and perhaps purest distillation of West, as the man can be thought-provoking and infuriating, capable of getting both reactions in the matter of consecutive lines.
The album is often hard and abrasive, recalling more spare electronic music and industrial alternative than anything else. Even at first listen, the challenge was apparent – where were the singles going to come from?
The answer to date is “nowhere.” The lead track, “Black Skinhead” only reached No. 69 on the Billboard chart and thus far, no second single.
“New Slaves” is a perfect example of the getting it right, then derailing it that pops up throughout the album.
It starts off as a critique of consumerism (which might strike some as rich given that West hasn’t exactly been a champion consumer restraint before, but I digress).
He finishes the first verse with “Used to only be niggas, now everybody playing/Spending everything on Alexander Wang/New Slaves.”
Could this be a new Kanye rethinking his..oh wait, there’s the hook line “You see there's leaders and there’s followers/But I'd rather be a dick than a swallower.”
Am I detecting a whiff of homophobia there? More than a whiff?
West makes an even stronger (and justified) statement going after the private prison complex, but instead of raging further at the unjust nature of that complex, he brags about taking the privateers’ women with the line – “I’ll fuck your Hampton spouse. Came on her Hampton blouse and in her Hampton mouth.”
Because, after all, what are women there for but Kanye’s sexual pleasure with a side order of revenge..and apparently derailing what he was trying to say about the prison system. And what better way to show he “ain’t a swallower” by coming in the mouth of some woman in the Hamptons? Yeezus is protesting way too much.
“Black Skinhead” is one of the album’s standout tracks, set to a tribal beat that you could almost drop the “Rock and Roll, Part Two” riff over. It’s full-on braggadocio with shots at racism. It’s a strong moment overall.
But Kanye can’t resist and undercuts later with “Blood on the Leaves,” a low point on the album.
It’s a bold move to start with a sample of Nina Simone’s version of “Strange Fruit,” one of the most heartbreaking songs ever written and one of the strongest about racism.
It’s a bad sign when West chooses to start his Autotuned mewling over Simone’s sample vocals. The effect is unwelcome, but once the words he’s tunelessly warbling sink in, it becomes like smearing the waste product of a hog operation over the most sublime meal.
It’s one of the strongest backing tracks on the album..but West opts to take a song and turn it into invective aimed at those evil women who are just after his money or wanting to crimp his or his buddies’ concubine-accumulating style.
Oh, and there’s the whole uneasy introduction of the woman telling her she loved him while under the influence of ecstasy, creating  blurred lines, if you will.
Even though he takes the drug with her in the next verse, it still comes off as extremely creepy and disturbing that he relies on the woman telling her she loved him when she was drugged up.
While a literal interpretation of the themes of “Strange Fruit” might have been obvious, the decision to use its sample to build a rant at groupies, twodels and gold diggers is a poor choice. Not as poor as Lil Wayne’s execrable “poppin’ pussy like Emmett Till” line from earlier in the year, but poor regardless.
“I Am a God” is another standout – claustrophobic, full of pounding (and not just from Kanye’s fists to his chest). It’s an arresting boast track, cut with a smidge of humor (most gods don’t whine for their croissants).
Then again, “I’m In It”, turns to the cringe-inducing side with its line about oral sex about Asian women that wouldn’t be out of place on THAT Day Above Ground song, not to mention the “put my fist through her like a civil rights sign” line that isn’t as clever or transgressive as West probably thinks it is.
Then there’s the part where he raps “Uh, you know I need that wet mouth/Uh, I know you need that reptile” in a single entendre, dexterity-free couplet that wouldn’t be out of place on an old AC/DC album (or a new AC/DC album, for that matter).
“Yeezus” is a fairly claustrophobic affair with its minimal sonics (reportedly a late-in-production decision by West), electronic and industrial noise and general aggro feel. It manages to be arresting much of the time, but the lyrical fumbles make the album feel less immersive than it should be and more like you’re being cornered at the bar by some guy talking about “all the bitches who’ve done me wrong” and about what a “badass” he is. It makes the album feel longer than its relatively short (for the modern CD era) 40-minute (and pretty much single-free) running time.
The ultimate frustration with West is that he seemingly lacks the self-awareness to truly wrestle with the darker demons of his nature or to edit what he’s trying to say. Rather than confront the challenges his ego presents, rather than look in the mirror at the misogyny, homophobia and other –isms he traffics in too easily, rather than look at anything in the world that doesn’t directly affect Kanye West -- he’s intent to lay it all spread out there and insist that it’s all “awesome truth and awesomeness - beauty, truth, awesomeness.”
No, no it isn’t. Some of it is ugly. Some of it is stagnation. By insisting that it’s all a strong statement, ultimately none of it is.
The “Yeezus” experience can leave one teeming with the frustration that West is so drunk on his sense of self-importance that he can’t always tell the difference between wheat and chaff or, more tellingly, that he doesn’t want to.
The result is that one is left being all too aware of West as one thing above all else – aggressive marketer of the Kanye brand.
A fair amount of the time, West gets out of his own way enough to produce product that succeeds as both product  and art anyway. This time, he couldn’t get out of the way and the result is an album that is frustratingly close to great, but so deeply flawed that it leaves one more exhausted than exhilarated. The album is one that not only is, at its best, easier to admire than enjoy, it is one that failed commercially to a degree that none of West’s albums have before. What could have been a career peak is, at the end of the day, an interesting misfire.