Category: Music

For other fans of the Mountain Goats only: One of the members of tMG forums started a blog with review-essays about Mountain Goats albums. At first it seemed as though that would be an ample category definition, since John “New Father” Darnielle has released about 3,158 albums, EPs, supplementary collector’s item cassettes, and one-off fundraiser recordings. But I’m complicit in an overlap already — forum colleague Fever and I both offered to write about We Shall All Be Healed. Fever’s essay is more of classical a song-by-song analysis, a kind of essay I specifically didn’t want to write because I feared that I’d make it boringly didactic (a danger Fever deftly avoided); Wild Creature (the sponsor of the enterprise) has in turn now posted my contribution over at Sad Young Cardinals”, and if I hit the correct note, it’s more of a free-prose impression of the narrative world that the album’s songs populate. Anyway, if you like the Mountain Goats, or are just curious to see what my reflection on the world of WSABH (and, for good measure, of Philip K Dick’s A Scanner Darkly looks like, the link to my piece at Sad Young Cardinals is here.

I have some of the ambivalence about Graceland that many politically-concerned listeners have expressed. I admire Paul Simon’s New York craftsmanship in composing infectious, compelling pop melodies, arrangements, and lyrics; his work isn’t always to my taste, but it’s always well done. And I don’t begrudge him the brilliant contribution that his African colleagues made to the album; that would be a weird form of racism (“no, you may not record with African musicians, white man”). Nor do I want simply to indict him of exploitation or inauthenticity. I gather that the performers all appreciate the Western audiences’ attention that he brought to their work, and I haven’t heard that any of them grouse about working with him. The album is a stunning gesture of incorporation; it’s a Paul Simon album, but it’s an African-flavoured Paul Simon album, and that’s just kinda weird.
 
And he pulls it off, by and large. As I get older, I remember a smaller and smaller proportion of the tracks I hear, but Graceland has impressed itself on me, track after track. Well done, sir!
 
Simon being a consummate musician and craftsman, the album abounds with compelling touches, but there’s just one that makes my heart gasp every time I hear it (and I’ve gone back to listen several times over, to make sure of what I’m hearing). “You Can Call Me Al” wins much of its audience, I suppose, with the whimsical-nonsensical lyrics playing over a bed of rich pop hooks (“bed of hooks” — I’m going to remember reuse that phrase), or the charming video with Chevy Chase cheerily miming/lip-synching the lead vocals as Simon sits dolefully beside him, pushed to the margin during his own song.
 
The melody prances blithely along, with the African contributions held in the background: a few “Aaa-ohhhms” in the vocal tracks, and the irrepressibly funky rhythm tracks. Over the top, though, the horns and synthesisers and guitars sound mostly like an ordinary, jazzy Paul Simon number, and the very Manhattanite lyrics affirm that familiarity of the most prominent instrumental tracks. At the first bridge, the recording introduces a pennywhistle break to great effect — that’s fine, but it’s at the second bridge that the arrangement makes room first for a drum break (is that Isaac Mtshali, or Ralph Macdonald, or both?) and then the marvellous moment when Baghiti Kumalo tears off a breath-taking lightning-like bass line. Oh, my goodness! The last few notes sound as though they’re going backwards, presumably through studio manipulation, but that short break recast the whole track for me. I loved going back and hearing it several times over, alone and in the full context of the song, in order to write it up for the blog. Mmmmm.
 

I finished my article on biblical interpretation in the songbook of The Mountain Goats a couple of weeks ago, and since a couple of people from the tMG web forums had been very helpful and interested, I contacted one of them — Nigel — and asked if he’d like a squint at the final product. He liked the essay a lot, and suggested that I share it with the rest of the forum; I was a little abashed about putting up a post that said (to a longstanding forum constituency with a core group whose strong sense of mutual affiliation sometimes risks generating in-group vs out-group dynamics), “Hey, everyone, come read what I wrote.” Nigel thought it still ought to be shared with the forum, so he wrote a positive summary of my essay and suggested that other forum members contact me for a copy.
 
Since then, a steady stream of forum members has followed up with requests for copies, many more than I expected. I’m glad of that not just because I like it when people read my stuff, but also because “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”: I don’t know the tMG corpus well enough to survey all 500-600 of the songs in their repertoire, and some forum members have been listening to tMG since before their first recordings in 1991 — so by running the essay past a number of forum members, I could be spared the embarrassment of overlooking some important (but neglected) fact. Thus far, no one has had a complaint more problematic than noting the misspelling of the street name in one quoted portion of lyrics. Whew!
 
The forum’s approbation is all the more comforting to me because I’ve spent twenty-plus years learning how to write fluently as a biblical scholar/hermeneutician, but I’ve never publicly written a piece of music criticism. Having seen numerous occasions when academics produced articles or presentations which did little more than say, “Here’s a band I like ”n” I think this song is really good. You should listen to it. Oh, and this one too. Listen, she mentions Jesus in this one.” Since I’m fierce with my students about composing papers that make a real argument, I fretted a lot about whether my tMG paper would amount to much more than “You may not have heard of the Mountain Goats, but I think they’re really good, so there.” Again, the first readers have affirmed that the essay has a real argument and doesn’t fall into “Look, here”-ism.
 
Now I’m thinking about stretching out to cover some other topics — but not till after I finish the James commentary and begin, at least, to write out my most recent argument about hermeneutics. But it]s fun, as always, to have think-y thinks going on, and to sense an area where my observations can enrich a discourse by a little bit. Oh, and if you’d like a copy of my final draft, I’ll be happy to share it with you, too. (You know: my nickname at disseminary.org, or akm dot adam via gmail).
 

After Apple had been propagating iTunes for a few versions, they (at length) released a version that allows its DJ function a binary option that instructs iTunes to “play higher rated songs more often.” Break out the champagne, everyone! Woohoo! The sad thing is that this still amounted to a large step forward in enhancing apple’s random Shuffle setting.
 
(“Random,” that is, unless you’re one of the believer’s in steve Jobs’s supernatural ability to dictate iTunes to play particular sorts of song more or less often. This used to crop up every now and then, when people who don’t distinguish pareidolia from non-random machine behaviour. Much as I am surprised by the occasions when the entirely separate shuffle routines of my home computer and my work computer turn up the same track on the same day — which really is quite striking, since each has a very, very large database of tracks to choose from — I do not suspect that Apple’s developers have figured out a way to associate my two computers, transmit data about tracks it would surprise me to hear from both, and keep those coincidences subtle and rare enough that they remain unpredictable.)
 
Still, one switch that assigns one (undefined) weight to one variable is very far from a twenty-first century solution to the “weighted shufflke” problem. Since there’s already an “Advanced” menu for the app, and a small “Settings” button in the iTunes DJ view, why couldn’t one of these options lead to a “weighted Shuffle” option that’s more like a Smart Playlist or a Spotlight search? Why, in other words, can’t I set my iTunes DJ to select songs with a one-to-five weighting of multivariate criteria? If a vanilla random track is weighted at “one,” I’d like
 
   Songs from the “Recently Added” list to have a weighted prominence of 3
   Songs by women artists* to have a weighted prominence of 2 (or 3)
   Songs that iTunes’s “Genius” function associates with the current track to have a weight of 4
   Songs from 1967 to 1985 to have a weight of 3
   Songs from 2000 to 2008 to have a weight of 3
   Songs from the last two years to have a weight of 4
   Songs from 1955 to 1966 to have a weight of 2
   Songs that have never been played to have a weight of 5
   Songs that have been played only once have a weight of 4
   Songs that have been played twice have a weight of 2
   Songs rated 5 stars have a weight of 5 (and so on)
    Songs by Scottish artists to have a weight of 2
 
So that a five-star track that I haven’t listened to before (let’s assume I already know that I like it from Pippa playing it for me), just released this year, that I’ve just downloaded from eMusic, by a Scottish woman artist would be very highly likely to turn up on my iTunes DJ in the near future — whereas a track that I’ve heard four or five times, that I don’t ever like that much (say, two stars), from the Dark Interval between 1986 and 2000, that I acquired a couple of years ago, by a male American artist, would be proportionately unlikely to come up any time soon.
 
The database operations to support that — and even more complex weighting — must be much less onerous than programming most of the eye candy visualizers that Apple distributes, and it would change the iTunes DJ from a mostly-random function to something much more like a personal genius-DJ. Since I listen to the iTunes DJ playlist almost exclusively, I’d like this upgrade a whole lot.**
 

* This would take some finagling with the current iTunes database, but I could use the “Genre” category (which I otherwise ignore entirely) to make a category for women artists, or could set up a playlist, songs that appear on which would be double-weighted. Same with Scottish artists.
 
** I realise I might be able to fudge an iTunes DJ list that came somewhat close to this function by rigging an elaborate network of interconnected playlists — I already do this to enhance the Shuffle function on my iPhone — but honestly, it would be vastly easier for Apple to make the database categories more useful than for each user to rig a work-around.
 

A while back I posted the lyrics to Washington Phillips’s “Denomination Blues,” since I was dissatisfied with the extant web resources for that song; this morning I was frustrated that I couldn’t find anyplace on the web that gave the lyrics to the song known variously as “Tell Me Why You Like Roosevelt,” “Sad About Roosevelt,” or “Franklin D. Roosevelt, The Poor Man’s Friend.” To redress that lack, I present that song here:

[Tell me] Why’d you like Roosevelt? Weren’t no kin
Why’d you like Roosevelt? Weren’t no kin
Why’d you like Roosevelt? Weren’t no kin
Lord God Almighty, he’s the poor man’s friend

Year of nineteen forty-five
A good president laid down and died
I knew how all of the poor people felt
When they received the message we lost Roosevelt
In his life there were all indications
At Warm Springs Georgia he received salvation
Listen friend, don’t you rush
Elizabeth Shoumatoff she grabbed the brush
She dipped it in water and began to paint
Looked at the president and began to faint
She never painted a picture for him at night
Knew that the president didn’t look right
The time of day it was twelve o’clock
Tell me that Elizabeth had to stop
Great God almighty she started too late
That’s why they call this that unfinished portrait
A little bit later, about one-thirty
Had a cerebral hemorrhage and the world looked muddy
They called Atlanta and Washington too
Like zigzag lightning the call went through
They called long distance to notify his wife
Dr Bruenn said he died at three thirty-five
Great God Almighty weren’t no bells to tollin’
But in less than thirty minutes the world was in mournin’
 
And I cried about Roosevelt (weren’t no kin)
I cried about Roosevelt (weren’t no kin)
I cried about Roosevelt (weren’t no kin)
Great God Almighty was the poor man’s friend
 
Only two presidents that we ever felt
Were Abraham Lincoln and Roosevelt
Way back yonder in the olden days
Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves
Roosevelt’s administration Congress assembled
First time in history ‘ppointed a Negro general
General Benjamin O Davis I’m trying to relate
First Negro general of the United States
After Dorie Miller had shown his skill
They kept sending him to sea until he got killed
Then Roosevelt said that “I’ll back the attack”
Appointed a Negro captain over white and black
This qualified man was Hugh Mulzac
Racial prejudice he tried to rule out
Invited Negro leaders into the White House
He advocated the fair practice of labor
To let the poor man know he was our emancipator
Made Madame Bethune the First Lady of the land
And made part of his will to Mr Prettyman
He endorsed inventions of Dr Carver
This is why that I say he was an earthly father
Cause he took my feet out of the miry clay
Haven’t had to look back at the WPA
 
That’s why I liked Roosevelt (weren’t no kin)
That’s why I liked Roosevelt (weren’t no kin)
That’s why I liked Roosevelt (weren’t no kin)
Lord God Almighty was the poor man’s friend
 
Well, Hoover’s administration Congress assembled
All of the poor folk began to tremble
The rich would ride in the automobile
Depression made poor people rob and steal
Well, look next door at our beloved neighbor
Wasn’t getting anything for their hard labor
But great God almighty they were moonshine stilling
Brought about a crime wave, robbing and killing
After Hoover made the poor man moan
Roosevelt stepped in, gave us a comfortable home
 
It was sad about Roosevelt
It was sad about Roosevelt
It was sad about Roosevelt
 
Well, I’ve told you the history of Roosevelt’s life
Now he’s done with his grief and strife
Great God Almighty but he left a sweet wife
Have been so worried since she was a girl
After Roosevelt’s death what would become of the world
She notified her son across the sea
“Don’t get worried about poor me
But keep on fighting for victory
Your father is dead boys, you all are grown
Wouldn’t worry ’bout your father but the world is in mournin’
 
It was sad about Roosevelt
It was sad about Roosevelt
It was sad about Roosevelt
 
Well, God Almighty knew just what was best
He knew that the president he needed a rest
His battle done fought, vict’ry done won
Our problems have just begun
Your burden get heavy and you don’t know what to do
Call on Jesus, he’s a president too
 
It’s sad about Roosevelt
It’s sad about Roosevelt
It’s sad about Roosevelt
Lord God Almighty was a poor man’s friend

This amalgamates characteristics of the two versions I know, one by the Evangelist Singers and one by Willie Eason. The only word I’m flummoxed by occurs toward the middle, when Eason refers to a certain kind of neighbor; I used “beloved” to fit the meter, but I’m sure that’s not what he’s singing.
 
Several observations about this lovely tribute: Can you imagine a song like this today? The closest I can think of in recent history would be “Abraham, Martin, and John.” but that differs from Roosevelt in a number of ways. Dion’s song retains the comparison to Abraham Lincoln, but lacks the staggering avalanche of specificity with which the song recounts Roosevelt’s actions on behalf of African-Americans and the poor. (I know, and will remember, more about Roosevelt’s relation to Black Americans after hearing this song.) Dion’s song submits only that his heroes “freed a lot of people” and died young, a somewhat questionable claim relative to JFK (however good a president one might have thought him). If you want to argue about Roosevelt, though, be prepared to cite names and dates.
 
The other possible contemporary examples that come to minds are the painful ballads by John Ashcroft and Lee Atwater (I think), about how great America is and what a statesman Ronald Reagan was. Are you tempted to hum along with any of those? I have a hard time enduring hearing them at all, much less singing along.
 
This song rings true to me; it doesn’t sound like campaign publicity (which would, of course, be too late anyway) or partisan shillery. The fact that at least two (African-American) performers recorded it suggests that it appealed to more than just taste-impaired red-white-and-blue political climbers. I don’t subscribe to idealizations of any moment in U.S. history, but “Tell Me Why You Like Roosevelt” burnishes FDR’s standing in my imagination, and impresses me as a popular memorial to that poor man’s friend. (Has anyone been tempted to write, “George W. Bush, The Poor Man’s Friend” or “Ronald Reagan, The Poor Man’s Friend” or even “Bill Clinton, The Poor Man’s Friend”? I didn’t think so.)