In answer to the question on the cover above, it seems that Britney has at least outlasted Blender. This morning I got an email from one of my editors there, Jonah Weiner, giving me the news, which was a nice courtesy, considering that I've only written a handful of reviews for the magazine. This is the first time that a publication I actually work for has joined the print-media death march, though I'm sure it won't be the last. (Though to those who wonder, despite the layoffs I am fairly confident The Globe and Mail will survive for the forseeable future.) My sincere condolences to all the staff and to Blender readers.

The shocking part is that I had figured Blender was the most commercially savvy one in the music-magazine market - they built their business on photos (especially of scantily clad pop starlets), best-ever/worst-ever/most-outrageous sorts of lists, titillation and trivia, backed up for credibility with a review section full of some of the best working music writers struggling (for a good paycheque) to squeeze wit and insight into tiny little capsule reviews. I hated its glibnesss, but it wasn't snobby - it was pro-pop, pro-hip-hop and pro-indie all at once - and it certainly seemed saleable; if even they can't survive, I'm not sure there really is a music magazine market. Curiously, a lot of the more niche-oriented publications - rap magazines and metal magazines in particular - seem to be doing well still, when I thought they'd probably be the most easily displaced by fan sites and blogs. Perhaps cliqueishness (and even snobbishness) is actually a safer marketing bet?

I still think there is room in the market for one more readership-oriented music publication, one aimed at the same audience that buys books about music. Something close exists in the UK (Mojo and, to a degree, The Wire) but a North American one might bring less of that musty British muso feel - like a general-interest version of No Depression, a great mag that was hampered by the narrowness of its "alt-country" focus. (ND continues to live online and as a twice-yearly "bookazine".) Given events like Blender's closing, though, I am less hopeful of ever convincing a publishing company of that idea. Sigh.

PS: Does this include the Indian edition of Blender, which I just discovered 5 minutes ago? If not, I want a subscription.

In response to my interview on this week's Spark show on CBC radio about music and technology, in which I talk about ringtones, mp3s and the like, John Meyer sent me this link to a relatively new project rating the sound of various media - which concludes that listening to a 16kbs mp3 is the fidelity equivalent of listening to a wax cylinder! How steampunk, kids. (Maybe the Decembrists are on to something with their annoying neo-Edwardianism after all.) Any comments from audiophiles, anachronists and audio-anarchists?

Today Peli and I talked about Gossip Girl, Britney, poptimism and finding a happy medium between Bourdieu and Adorno or something like that.

I talked to Nora Young of CBC Radio's tech program Spark this morning about ringtones, MP3s, computer speakers, iTunes, Auto-Tune and all the other gadget-adjustments that are changing the sound of pop music. In shorter form, it'll be part of their special music-themed March 25 show (re-aired on March 28) but, impressively, you can already listen to the full interview today on their site.

Speaking of tech and transition, you may have heard the newspaper business is having a rough week. Those who take this blithely because they assume that Twitter is going to take care of everything - or that, for example, somehow the same job can be done by the 20 reporters the now-online-only Seattle Post-Intelligencer is retaining as by the 165 it formerly employed - might benefit by reading this Globe & Mail Focus piece by my colleagues Sinclair Stewart and Grant Robertson (which I edited). I also recommend the Clay Shirky piece on "Newspapers & Thinking the Unthinkable" on the parallel between the Internet revolution & the Gutenberg one - only this one of course is much, much faster. The conclusion I draw from both is that, yes, newspapers are mostly doomed (I think weekend papers remain a viable model for now at least), but no, nothing exists to replace them. And we may be in for a rough decade, democratically, until something emerges that can.

Hi everyone. That hiatus was a bit longer than intended. Back to regular Zoilus business this week, but first a couple of links and notes from my psychic-teevee jaunt.

First, in case you missed it, here is my interview on the Colbert show in a link for Canadian viewers and here it is for the Yanks.

A lot of folks have been asking me about the experience, and it's difficult to sum up, except to say that it was very positive. [... continued after the jump ... ]

Everyone I met at the Colbert show seemed to be smart, relaxed and really enjoying their job, which is frankly a contrast to the stressed-out, often grumpy crews I've met on a lot of Canadian TV shows - no doubt that's a function of having more adequate resources to work with, but I think it must also reflect the strength of vision and sense of purpose on the show itself.

As for Mr. Colbert himself, though he was rushing around and only had a few seconds before and after the show, he came across as a very solid, thoughtful & kind man. He had the affect of a 1950s TV dad - firm handshake, meets you right in the eye, focuses all his attention on the person he's speaking to. His voice is about a half-octave deeper than his vocal mask on the show. He has a little routine he goes through to make sure guests aren't caught unawares by his character if they aren't familiar with the show (it runs in part: "I do the interview in character - my character is a complete idiot, he knows nothing about you or your work or anything else, and your job is to disabuse me of my ignorance"). They also ran through the prospective questions for me, though their list was twice as long as the ones used, and clearly Colbert improvises as he sees fit throughout.

The green room was not lavish. I will sum it up in two words: Fruit plate. There was a swag bag, mostly containing product samples like Starbucks energy drinks, NY-company chocolates, miscellaneous makeup, etc. (apparently the gift bags aren't customized even by gender). But there was also a nice gift of a $100 coupon to be used to support the charity of Stephen's choice, which allows you to donate to projects in impoverished classrooms (my desk is a mess so I can't link to the specific one, but I will when I find it later).

For those who thought the interview seemed a bit clipped - it was. On set we talked for another minute or two but they jumped to the end, although apparently I had my memory-chip set on "don't worry, it's being recorded" as I don't recall what we talked about then, though I think there were a couple of good moments. For those who thought I seemed nervous - no, that's just my regular jittery personality, a bit heightened by the situation but mostly exaggerated by being framed on a TV-sized screen. And no, those weren't joke teeth; sadly, mine own.

It was a roller coaster - the whole interview seemed to last 30 seconds to me - but Colbert was fairly gentle and let me make my points. My instinct was that he felt a bit conflicted about where to take it, humorously, since after all the book is already a kind of ju-jitsu topsy-turvy act; but moreover I sensed that he was genuinely intrigued by the topic.

Which makes sense, if you think about it. His whole schtick is already a kind of cultural boundary-crossing exercise; even though he is being satirical, his jabs hit both liberals and conservatives for their intolerance and knee-jerk points of view, a feat he's able to carry off by walking the identity borderline that he does. So there's a kind of meta-level to him discussing a book about attempting to get inside and have empathy with a set of cultural positions and personae different than one's own. In fact, I had hoped to find an opening in the interview to point that out in a subtle way - without breaking the implicit contract to play along with the illusion - but I wasn't quite deft enough.

My greatest regret, though, is that I didn't have the wit and timing to echo the super-straight-man Colonel from the segment before me by cutting Colbert off during his recitation of fake "hipster" band names and saying wearily, "Stephen, there's no such thing as Ogre Milk."

Although, of course, that would have been fibbing.

As for the "Colbert bump"? In full effect. The next day the book jumped to #1 on Amazon among music books, and nearly two weeks later it remains in the top 10. Because Amazon stats are arcane and occult, I don't know yet how many sales that represents, but it must be substantial. And the book is now on Kindle and is being recorded for an audio book from Audible.com (I'll let you know when that's out). All of which means more readers and more discussion, hopefully, of the themes and ideas, which is what counts.

Thanks to long-time readers of Zoilus for helping create the climate in which such nutty things can happen. It's a mystery but a delightful mystery.

The details of the many exciting papers and panels at this April's EMP Pop Conference on the theme of "Dance Music Sex Romance" are now posted, including mine.

Otherwise, I'm on the move this week - see below for the reason. Torontonians, some folks are gathering on Wednesday night upstairs at The Pilot on Cumberland St., to watch the Colbert show but also listen to some live music and readings, featuring my friends Laura Barrett, Angela Rawlings, Andrew Kaufman and Sean Dixon plus MC Sean K. Robb. Doors at 9, entertainment at 10, TV at 11:30. Here's the Facebook page - I didn't organize it but I appreciate it.

See you, as they say in the teevee biz, "after the break."

Uh. Huh. Wed., March 4, 11:30 pm EST, on The Comedy Network and Comedy Central.

I woke up this morning to various emails and frantic Facebook "wall messages" conveying the news that James Franco (Sean Penn's boyfriend in Milk, Peter Parker's frenemy in Spider-Man and, of course, bad-boy Daniel in Freaks and Geeks) name-checked my book on the Oscars red carpet last night. Turns out that not only did he mention it, he gave it a more on-point quick summary than almost any of the reviewers.

Now, besides acting and preparing for his bar mitzvah (as he discussed earlier in that interview), Franco's currently doing simultaneous MFA's at Columbia and NYU, so it's not really so weird (however it feels to me!) that he's plugged into stuff like this. I hope he passes the book along to a few of his Hollywood friends - the movie industry could stand to unthink some of its assumptions about the "mass" audience versus the "prestige" audience, no?

PS: Apologies to Idolator for ripping off their headline, but I just loved it too much.

Following up on my piece last week about Charles Spearin's The Happiness Project, in which he turns the cadences of his neighbours' conversations about happiness into the melodies and rhythms of songs, I've put together a quick (well, not so quick) cultural history on how musicians have tried to transform human speech into music through the ages (but particularly, often thanks to technology, in the 20th century).

[ ... continues on the jump ...]

Prehistory to Gutenberg: Chant, lyric, epic
Sacred texts and epic poetry in many cultures are transmitted orally as chant/song long before they are written down, from the Hindu Vedas to Homer's Odyssey to Gregorian chant. The Vedas, in particular, use a tonal system that places them very much in the twilight zone between speech and song.

Mantra Pushpam - Vedic Hymns: This mantra is from Taithreeya Aranyakam of the Yajur Veda.

c. 8th-13th Century: African talking drums
Griots in the ancient Ghana empire use drums whose tones imitate speech to communicate across distance in villages; even in their musical use in various places in Africa they operate with a kind of grammar related to language, though of course they can be and often are played without reference to those systems.

Nigerian-born drummer Rasaki Aladokun, "Master of the Talking Drum" and former King Sunny Ade accompanist, demonstrates and explains.

1580s: Florentine Camerata, monody
Renaissance humanists in Florence create more intelligible vocal style (voice-and-accompaniment rather than polyphony) to emulate their suppositions of how ancient Greek drama was spoken-sung (their suppositions were wrong, but...); an influence on operatic aria and recitative in particular (and western musical history in general).

Giulio Caccini (c.1550-1680), "Amor, io parto," for soprano voice, from "Le nuove musiche, 1601" set on an anonymous text (Montserrat Figueras, soprano; Hopkinson Smith, baroque guitar; Harmonia Mundi).

1868: Modest Mussorgsky, Zhenitba
Russian composer attempts to write opera in heightened but naturalistic speech patterns; he abandons it after Act 1 but uses a moderated version of the technique in later works such as Boris Godunov.

Boris Christoff in the death scene from Boris Godunov. Vienna, 1980s.

1904: Leos Janacek, Jenufa
Moravian composer incorporates his own notation of local "speech melodies" into his opera, though how directly he did so remains a debate among musicologists.

The end of the first act of Janacek's Jenufa from The National Theatre in Prague in 2005 with Tomas Cerny and Dana Buresova.

The great Czech violinist-vocalist Iva Bittova sings Janacek's song "Muzikanti" (Musicians) from "Moravian Folk Poetry in Songs" (Moravska lidova poezie v pisnich) with the Skampa Quartet. See a past Zoilus post about Bittova.

1912: Arnold Schoenberg, Pierrot Lunaire
German modernist composer uses sprechstimme ("spoken voice") as a less-tonal extension of traditional recitative; the technique is taken up by Alban Berg in operas such as Lulu.

Glenn Gould & Patricia Rideout perform Pierrot Lunaire on the CBC in 1975.

1914: F.T. Marinetti, Zang Tumb Tumb
Italian Futurist leader performs manic nonsense-syllable sound poem, which influences Luigi Rossolo's "art of noise" as well as Dadaists such as Kurt Schwitters, whose Ursonate (1922-1932) extends sound poetry into four movements of gibberish lasting nearly 45 minutes (though today, Canadian poet Christian Bök can perform it in under 19 minutes, from memory - download from UBU Web).

ZTT.

>Ursonate.

Christian Bök covers a sound poem in Icelandic (a language he does not speak).

1920s Wah-Wah sounds in jazz.
Jazz solos using mutes and hand flutters over the end of a horn create a sing-talk kind of wah-wah sound, often to humorous effect. Often heard in Duke Ellington's band, for interest. The "wah-wah" pedal later achieves this for guitar.

1943: Harry Partch, U.S. Highball
As many of you will know, this midcentury American eccentric invented a microtonal 43-tone harmonic system and a host of bizarrely beautiful junkyard instruments to play them. What's less known is that Partch's initial motivation was to find a music that could better capture the subtle melodies of speech - to actually score the way people ordinarily talk, rather than (as most of the composers in this list do) "rounding" their tones off to the nearest standard instrumental note. This piece based on overheard hobo dialogue is one of the finest examples.

Partch's piece performed & discussed by Robert Osborne.

1951: Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, Symphonie pour un homme seul
Musique-concrete innovators incorporate speaking voices along with other "unmusical" sound in compositions for records, tape, mixers, soon followed by others such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luciano Berio, Gyorgy Ligeti and John Cage. (For some reason embedding is turned off for this video, which on YouTube is also misattributed to Yoko Ono.)

1957: The bebop/beat-poetry connection.
This year marks the first "jazz poetry" reading at the Circle in the Square, with David Amram and Jack Kerouac. Ken Nordine releases the first of his Word Jazz albums, which explicitly attempt to reproduce the effects of bop in prosody. The jazz-poetry practice (which I should note was presaged by scat singing and Lord Buckley, and one might try to get Vachel Lindsay [though that poet-performer, with his racist views, viscerally disliked jazz] and the Harlem Renaissance poets such as Langston Hughes in too) becomes clichéd so rapidly that it's being parodied already in the following year's B-movies and TV (like High School Confidential and Peter Gunn - "there ain't no jelly doughnut!") and would soon be a staple of sixties sitcoms from The Munsters to Petticoat Junction, not to mention ongoing Dobie Gillis character Maynard G. Krebs.

Amram recalls the Circle in the Square reading in a TV news segment decades later.

Ken Nordine's "Colors".

Ornette Coleman with an unidentified reader (Kenneth Patchen? Herbert Huncke?) and percussionist, while Allen Ginsberg looks on, date unknown.

1960: Charles Mingus & Eric Dolphy, "What Love?"
Two jazz masters take a playful approach to imitating speech on their instruments in several early '60s cuts; this one in which Mingus's bass "argues" with Dolphy's bass clarinet, from Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus (one of my favourite records), is the best-known. Sadly I can't find video evidence online, but if you have or download the recording, go to about 8:30 in the 15-minute track to hear the start of their dispute, though the most uncanny highlights come at about 11 minutes in, here's the relevant section - the interplay becomes more intensely dialogic as it goes on.

What Love? (excerpt)

1960: Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln, We Insist! Freedom Now Suite
Roach's jazz landmark not only united bop and African music, poetry and protest, but in the cadences of many of Abbey Lincoln's performances, linked African-American song to the style of political speech in the Civil Rights Movement.

1965: Steve Reich, "It's Gonna Rain"
American Minimalist pioneer plays two identical tape loops of an apocalyptic Pentecostal preacher out of phase so that his voice gradually begins creating overtones and contrapuntal rhythms with itself - an influence on much voice-based work to follow, including David Byrne & Brian Eno's vocal-sample-based tracks on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, most obviously "Help Me Somebody."

A documentary clip about this period in Reich's work.

1967: You're in Love, Charlie Brown
The muted-horn, jazz wah-wah technique is adapted by Bill Melendez, the producer of the Peanuts TV specials, for the "Charlie Brown's teacher" voice. The incomprehensible (usually scolding) blather of adult talk was actually played on trombone: "Composer John Scott Trotter directed his trombonist to 'enunciate' the teacher's dialog as though it were a trombone riff. Trotter did a great job... he would read the teacher's line, e.g., 'Linus, where's your homework?' then direct the trombonist to repeat Trotter's inflection through his instrument." Here's a clip. (Go to about 1:20.) And here's a pure blast of Peanuts wah-wah adultspeak:

Charlie Brown's teacher voice.

I mention this one partly because Spearin told me it was an influence on The Happiness Project, the first place he'd heard an instrument used to simulate dialogue. As a kid, he would listen to his parents' conversations, often not knowing or caring what they were talking about, and listen to low-pitched Dad and high-pitched Mom as if they were two Peanuts voices singing a duet.

1970: Alvin Lucier, "I Am Sitting in a Room"
Composer recites text into tape recording, plays it back to re-record it, over and over, until the text is swallowed up in echoes and resonance and becomes pure tone. Another seminal track in contemporary music and sound art.

A dance-video interpretation of Lucier's work.

1970s African-American spoken word and diasporic dub poetry.
From militant black nationalist vocal group The Last Poets (who called their music "jazzoetry") to soul poet Gil Scott Heron and the great Linton Kwesi Johnson in the UK, the forerunners of rap funked up the linguistic volume, with a steady riddim and a strong vein of political protest, throughout the dismal decade.

1971: The Last Poets, "When the Revolution Comes."

1972: Gil Scott Heron, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised."

1978: Linton Kwesi Johnson, "Dread Beat an' Blood."

1978: Paul Lansky, "Six Fantasies on a Poem by Thomas Campion"
In a highly influential piece, the pioneering computer-music composer processes the sound of his wife reading text by a Renaissance poet. Lansky went on to compose many more voice-based pieces, including this one:

Lansky's "Pattern's Patterns" animated by Grady Klein, from Lansky's CD, Alphabet Book.

1979: Sugarhill Gang, "Rapper's Delight"
First hit rap single is widely mistaken for a novelty rather than the start of a pop-music shift that would make stylized speech nearly as important as singing and sampling (beginning with DJ'ing) as vital as drums.

Original 1979 promo video.

1982: Scott Johnson, "John Somebody"

New York composer uses transcribed pitches and rhythms of taped casual chatter ("You know that guy - John somebody... ?") as the basis for a fully harmonized score with electric guitars. He later used the technique in a piece for the Kronos Quartet called Cold War Suite, featuring the voice of the great journalist I.F. Stone in "How It Happens".

John Somebody part 1.
"Lawless Things" from Johnson's Cold War Suite, featuring tapes of I.F. Stone.

1984: Hermeto Pascoal, "Tiruliruli"
Brazilian jazz giant (a favourite of Miles Davis) accompanies loop of excited soccer announcer; Pascoal develops his own theory of "Som da Aura" (sound of the aura) in which he musically imitates not only voices of ordinary Brazilians but barnyard sounds, inanimate objects, etc., trying to capture their essences, their souls, in sound, to capture the ongoing music of the world. He can even do it spontaneously in concert, with members of his audiences, with remarkable accuracy.

Tiruliruli (from the album Canoa da Lagoa, Municipio de Arapiraca).

Pascoal sets the speech of three blind sisters to music.

Pascoal does the same with the voice of actor Yves Montand.

1988: Steve Reich, "Different Trains"
Interviews with Holocaust survivors weave in and out of train sounds and a string quartet in this moving, Grammy-winning "speech melody" piece, the first place most music fans heard the speech-into-melody technique. Reich goes on to use digital samples of voices in works such as The Cave (1993), City Life (1995) and Three Tales (2002).

Steve Reich discusses Different Trains on ARTS: The South Bank Show on ITV in 2006.

Reich's City Life, part 3: "It's Been a Honeymoon" (1995).

1990: Réné Lussier, "Le trésor de la langue"
In the aftermath of the controversies around the collapse of the Meech Lake Accord, the prominent Quebec "musique actuelle" guitarist composes an album based on the voices of francophone culture, politics and literature (the title means "The treasure of language"). His guitar traces the tunes of everything from Charles de Gaulle's "Vive le Quebec libre" speech and the FLQ Manifesto to warmer, sweeter aspects of Quebec life. Lussier was quoted: "It's remarkable what melodies we speak to each other every day! And no one's the least bothered by these phrases, but transpose them into music and they can become surprising, even disturbing!"

I wish I had an excerpt to share (my copy is on cassette and I don't have conversion capability); if anyone can help, please do.

1990s-2000s: Jason Moran, Vijay Iyer, Rudresh Maranthappa
Influenced by multiculturalism and hip-hop, interconnected young New York jazz musicians compose pieces based on speech in different languages, etc. Here's an NPR story about Moran's 2006 "Artists Ought to Be Writing," based on artist Adrian Piper's early 1970s manifesto. And here's part of a piece Moran and his trio-mates (bassist Tarus Mateen and drummer Nasheet Waits) based on a phone conversation between two Turkish friends, from 2003's The Bandwagon:

"Ringing My Phone (Straight Outta Istanbul)" (excerpt)

2001: Topology, Airwaves.
This Australian contemporary-music group (not well-known in North America) with composers Robert Davidson, Jonathan Dimond and Jamie Clark, create an entire suite of music based on historical radio archives. (Davidson in particular had already done some work on speech-into-song.) They used different genres of music to represent their various subjects, from radio inventor Guglielmo Marconi himself to Churchill, Hitler, Malcolm X, Einstein and more. In this damned-funny example, Bill Clinton's "That woman, Miss Lewinsky" press conference is tartly matched to the jaunty anthem of his own political campaigns.

2006: Diana Deutsch, "Speech-to-Song Illusion"
(aka, "Sometimes Behave So Strangely").

I discussed Professor Deutsch's University of California research in my piece on The Happiness Project. For a fuller explanation of her research on the "speech-to-song-illusion" - not to mention fascinating stuff on the effect of speaking a tonal language (in which words have radically different meaning at different pitches, as in for example Mandarin) on the ability to develop perfect pitch - give a listen to this segment with her on WNYC's Radio Lab. Here's an mp3 of her demonstrating the "speech-to-song effect" - in which any spoken phrase played back in a loop can transform seamlessly into music, in this case a hook so weirdly catchy I can still hum it to myself more than a year after I first heard it. As she explains (to much greater effect) on the radio show, she stumbled on it quite by accident when a tape loop of her own voice caught her ear. (Many more aural illusions can be found on Prof. Deutsch's own website.)

Diana Deutsch's Speech-to-Sound Illusion

2008-09: Political campaign propaganda on YouTube.
During the U.S. presidential race, musical settings of political speeches became practically an Internet trend, including, most famously, Will.i.am's celeb-stuffed "Yes We Can" video, which turned Barack Obama's New Hampshire primary speech into a tune that recalls Bob Marley's "Redemption Song." But much more fun are New York pianist Henry Hey's puckish jazzifications of Sarah Palin, John McCain and George W. Bush.

Hey does McCain & Palin.

Hey does a January press conference by Bush.

Sarah Palin again (with animated typography).

And of course, will.i.am's hugely popular "Yes We Can".

2009: Charles Spearin, The Happiness Project
Which brings us, finally, back to doh.

It's not only an intriguing area musicologically - where, each of these practices implicitly asks, is the actual divide between speaking and singing, and how much is music an extension of language or vice-versa? - there's also something almost inherently spiritual in the question (think of chants and mantras), an impulse that resurfaces in Spearin's project. We sing language and language sings us.

It's also inherently, potently democratic - it's not only the musically gifted who have something to sing but all of us, in our interactions, in our mundane and demotic remarks, are singing the songs of the self, the songs of the social. Many composers have grabbed on to speech-music's potential as a tool of political critique, and as a way of bringing history to life - no doubt partly because when we think of public speech, political speech is at the forefront of our associations (personally I await the first great symphony to be composed with snatches of dialogue from TV shows). An interest in greater naturalism is often involved (Harry Partch and Leos Janacek, each in their different contexts, wanted to represent speech more truthfully, particularly the vernacular of the poor) as is a kind of populism and occasional ethnolinguistic pride, as in the case of, again, Janacek's tributes to Moravian culture or Réné Lussier's to that of Quebec. And will.i.am and YouTube get in here too.

While Spearin's project may be less musically rewarding than some of the others, the conceptual marriage of form and subject really makes up for it - he is unearthing its politics in a broader non-ideological way and bringing the question full circle back to its spiritual origins. Many of the other 20th century examples are more formalist or structural in their concerns, but not Spearin (or Partch or Pascoal, I'd venture). These are voices you can breathe in.

Today in The Globe & Mail, I have a feature about Toronto musician Charles Spearin (Do Make Say Think, Broken Social Scene) and his new album of compositions based on interviews with his neighbours, The Happiness Project, released this week. Bonus material coming on Zoilus later this afternoon, er, Thursday.

The Guardian puts brilliant spin on sad news: "It's hard to think of Lux Interior as dead, despite what reports say. Then again, it was always hard to think of him as alive."

Psychobilly was never my drug of choice, but it was a key influence on the first post-punk-alt-indie-underground bands that I saw as a teenager, the likes of Deja Voodoo and the Gruesomes in Montreal or Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet (forerunners to the Sadies) and The Forgotten Rebels in Toronto - not to mention what would become goth culture, and even emo, David Lynch movies, neo-burlesque shows, roller derby and so on. It's impossible to resist the romantic mythos of the Cramps - Erick Purkhiser of Akron (part of the irradiated generation of Ohioddity that would create Devo, Pere Ubu and, lest we forget, Eric Carmen) picks up California girl Christine Wallace hitchhiking in 1970, and by 1973 they're reborn as Lux Interior and Poison Ivy - a marriage of true minds and engine parts that gave birth to a band that would last 35 years and a refraction of '50s and '60s garage-band fashion and noise that seems like it will never end - if only because, in a way, it never began.

Ohio/Texas swamp-blues band The Heartless Bastards, with remarkable frontwoman Erika Wennerstrom, has new disc The Mountain out today. I gave it a four-star review in Blender magazine.

The TLS presents a lively account of the correspondence of Michel Houellebecq and Bernard-Henri Lévy, in which the confrontation between Nietzschean provocateur and pious liberal becomes a parable about the uncomfortable relationship between criticism and compassion. It closes with this remark from George Orwell to Stephen Spender in April 1938:

When you meet anyone in the flesh you realize immediately that he is a human being and not a sort of caricature embodying certain ideas. It is partly for that reason that I don't mix much in literary circles, because I know from experience that once I have met and spoken to anyone I shall never again be able to show any intellectual brutality towards him, even when I feel that I ought to.

I sympathize: It is hard to be harsh or even ironical about people one knows or has met - but rather than giving up meeting people, the only answer I see is to give up the kind of polemic that consists in treating people as caricatures embodying certain ideas. If a statement, a work of art or an action truly deserves a scathing response, its offense must be so deep that you would say the same to the person's face. Otherwise, even though intellectual brutality can be useful and especially pleasurable, it comes at too great a cost to the soul.

As Stanley Elkin (the late American novelist) put it, in a phrase I first read on Dial M that went on to haunt me throughout the writing of my Céline Dion book:

Listen, disdain is easy, a mug's game, but look closely at anything
and it'll break your heart.

Or that's what I think this week. How do others deal with the dilemma: Is it possible and desirable to be civil in private and yet be "public enemies" (as Houellebecq and BHL's collection of correspondence is punningly called), or should we shun human contact with our intellectual/ideological opponents lest it dull our rapiers? Do you find it harder to pass judgment on people's work in public or in print after you've met them, or even if you know they will be reading it?

Just kidding, but one week into the new Age of Nothing's Wrong (I say in fun, though Obama's al-Arabia interview yesterday almost had me believing it!), I happened today to read Carrie Brownstein's transition-day, beating-around-the-Bush-era post on the former Sleater-Kinney guitarist's NPR blog, Monitor Mix.

She makes a fine list of songs of anger/angst/protest from the period. But then comes this summary, which hit home on first reading because Brownstein's such a convincing and clear writer:

"In the last few years, the songs and struggles have tended toward the internal: A lot of music has become as personalized and intimate as the means of recording it. There's a widespread sense of weariness and reflection in place of fury, alongside a hard-earned desire to dance, celebrate and escape. But, like the end of the Bush era itself, those recent musical trends are the denouement. The lasting musical embodiment of the Bush administration will be the songs with teeth - the ones that weren't afraid to snarl back at bared fangs."

No disagreement on the tendency to privatization of sentiment and thought in the songwriting of the past couple of years, which I agree is technological as much as it is zeitgeisty. But on reflection, while the Bush administration itself - or let's say the Cheney administration - was eager and willing to snarl, I'm not sure the songs that got traction or will have lasting impact actually are the angry ones, at least not the explicitly politically angry ones. This may be a Canadian point of view - one at a bit more distance from the action - but I think the songs that will end up embodying the era will be the ones that reflect what it feels like to have your government relentlessly snarling at you, and living in a society whose leaders openly sneer at "reality-based" perspectives.

Songs of escape such as Hey Ya (with its weirdly fucked-up family-romance narrative lurking under its chirpy surface) as well as the shelter-offering Umbrella aren't going to be forgotten soon, and the hip-hop fixation on "the club" seems to fall into the same area - recalling the way that escapist songs of the 1930s have endured. Even in the parenthetical, indie category from which Brownstein primarily draws, there was the ascendance of soothing folk/classical/nursery-song-influenced sounds, a lot of punk-disco party music, the Flaming Lips' dance-this-dada-around moves and so on.

The non-escapist music of 2000-08 that endures may include more generalized expressions of anxiety than explosions of anger. There was that initial post-9/11 backlash against critical thinking - which coincided with pop's most ferocious trickster, Eminem, withdrawing almost completely from the limelight during 2001-2008 (save for his brief intervention in the 2004 elections). That seemed to me to be followed by a wave of cynicism about the worth of calling down power in art (except in satire), and much of the music of the age reflected a sense of panic - some acted it out, like the "yelpy" school of indie (Modest Mouse et al) or songs like Crazy, while some staged it through withdrawal, such as Animal Collective and the other more insular sixties-revival-slash-experimentalist groups, or the mournful goth/emo bands such as My Chemical Romance.

There are exceptions, and Brownstein's right to celebrate them, from Green Day to Arcade Fire - the latter's mix of pessimism and optimism and nerve really does seem more heroic to me now than it did before November. And Sleater-Kinney's own muscular engagement with both social and sonic dynamics seemed heroic to me right away, so I'm happy Brownstein's not too shy to give herself and her comrades a nod. Finally, leaving aside veterans such as Young and Springsteen (who were really just taking up their appointed roles), there is the saga of The Dixie Chicks (pictured above on the notorious Entertainment Weekly cover that, in its 'aughties, Britneyish way, was an attempted show of strength that nearly pitched over the threshold of abjection): Not Ready to Make Nice seems likely to hold onto its place in pop history as a cry against the very deep-freeze in the culture that prevented a lot of other protest music from getting a real hearing.

What strikes me about that song is the way that it adopted not so much the language of traditional political songs to make its point, but the rhetoric of a relationship song. And that's a final development worth noting: I could be wrong, but it seems to me that breakup songs have had a real heyday in the past five years particularly. It doesn't take a Slavoj Zizek to read the political-cultural subtext in such expressions of frustration at being disrespected and abused and of the yearning for a fresh start - such as Hollaback Girl and Irreplaceable and Since U Been Gone.

And at the end of that cycle comes Single Ladies, which in that context almost seems like a triumphant kiss-off - for "single ladies" read "swing voters" (or non-voters) who at the start of 2009 can sneer at the sleazy chumps who underrated them and set their sights on someone who dares to "put a ring on it," which (while a retrograde image) still can stand for commitment and integrity and square dealing.

One could go on - I haven't touched on the re-emergence of the sentimental homefront ballad in Iraq-wartime country music, which has gone too little noticed outside the genre, or for that matter the newfound respectability of heavy metal, which maybe be a point for Brownstein's snarlers. But as for which music posterity will eventually elect to represent that messy era, well, as Bush himself once put it, "history takes a long time for us to reach."