Author: Addison Engelking

Like many of my fellow Americans, I spent Friday the 11th in mourning. I set aside some time for a moment of silence before I dedicated my own mini-memorial to a fallen idol: a genius who transcended his field and became a colossus in American life; a hero whose questionable politics were often forgiven by his generous, eternally optimistic public persona; and a man whose footsteps were so deeply imbedded in the country’s cultural pathways that they were no longer recognizable through the scrim of history.

I played Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music full-blast for two hours, and I mourned for Ray Charles.

I know that Charles has kept a low profile in the last few years, but with a little imagination, it is easy to retune the chorus of Ronald Reagan hagiographies from the commemorative issue of Time and make them sing praises for the Genius: “What remains is Charles’ largeness and deeply enduring significance.” “If Charles were not the greatest popular musician, he was one of the best actors of the popular musician we have ever had.” “Charles utterly remade the American musical landscape.” Forget the Gipper. At least Ray Charles’ blindness didn’t do irreparable damage to the country.

In fact, I’ll always prefer Ray Charles to Ronnie the Populist, because, even at his most cartoonish, Charles rejected the illusions that gave Reagan life. Brother Ray shilled for Pepsi, made small talk with Big Bird, and sang for the Republicans because that’s what he wanted to do, and those were the people with the dough. Besides, he’d created enough masterworks to coast anyway. He had a leader’s honesty, not a leader’s image. Charles knew art couldn’t be faked.

This isn’t supposed to be a political article, so I am sorry if I keep conflating presidents and presidential elections with creative works of lasting significance. But thanks to new releases by Mekons founder Jon Langford and stand-up comic David Cross, I can’t help it. The two opposing pictures of the U.S.A. that emerge from Langford’s All the Fame of Lofty Deeds and Cross’ It’s Not Funny provide more specific cultural assessments and truer alternatives to the way we live now than anything I’ve heard from the two dolts running for the White House.

The musician takes the braver path. Although All the Fame of Lofty Deeds is supposed to be a concept album about a disillusioned country singer, it’s a portrayal of the country’s convulsions every bit as accurate as the Mekons’ 2002 OOOH! The twist this time is that Langford has decided to believe that the sun will shine again someday. (Ray Charles would approve.) But it’s a long, hard climb. Langford warns on the opening track, “You have your reasons to believe in people/But people aren’t all the same,” and images of surrender and oblivion are everywhere: Langford sings and writes about going over the cliffs, living lies, and moving to Switzerland. At the end, though, he’s smiling in fellowship at his backup band during (what else?) a pedal-steely cover of “Trouble in Mind.”

This conflicted yet exalted spirit comes across in both his passionate, warm vocals and the disembodied roots rock that frames them. Langford’s a stylistic cosmopolitan — there’s some Nashville honky-tonk, some Depression-/recession-era banjos, some saloon piano, some slide guitar, some accordian, some dobro, and even a youthful blast of punk guitar. The music is skillful yet casual, intimate yet absolutely solid and certain. It’s some of the best white blues I’ve heard since the Rolling Stones’ heyday, and it reinforces a portrait of a country that is “not stupid/Even though it’s silent/It still has eyes and ears/It just can’t find its mouth.”

As seasoned pros who have been in their respective games long enough to earn legendary status, Langford and Cross share an obsession with youth. Langford mournfully insists that “the country is young,” on the brilliant U.S.A.-as-enfant terrible metaphor/song of the same name. On the other hand, fellow fortysomething Cross concludes a stand-up tirade against al-Qaeda and American gullibility when he whines, “Are we a nation of 6-year-olds?” Recorded earlier this year in Washington, D.C., the best bits of It’s Not Funny refine the most scathing, hilarious, and intelligent political consciousness since Bill Hicks (who earned his bread by brutalizing Bush senior in his stand-up comedy 15 years ago). Courageous and smart, Cross has provided the country’s loud mouth that Langford’s seeking, and while that may get him panned in the New York Post, it has earned him raves in the alternative press and dinner plates at at least one former presidential candidate’s fund-raisers.

No, Cross’ looks at race and privilege are far too barbed and accurate for any political affiliation. Just listen to the way he says “facts” in any routine, in any context; this man cannot comprehend why the truth is ignored, but he will not be silent. That is one definition of heroism, I think. He’s also the only comic I know who’s making anything out of the devastating, confusing days after 9/11. In a striking bit about the “useless information” of the terrorist threat levels, he imagines the following domestic conversation: “Honey, the terrorist alert has been lifted to orange.” “Oh, what should I do?” “Well, get the bread out of the oven and let’s eat dinner.” And the anguish Cross finds in such everyday absurdities boosts him into greater, more outlandish hyperbole and more sharply imagined scenarios. His closing bit, George W. Bush’s rewrite of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, is an appropriate protest similar in tone and structure to Richard Pryor’s horrifying “Bicentennial Nigger” routine from 1976. But Cross’ stunt is far less effective than his portrayal of a soldier in Afghanistan who is told to pray for President Bush while bullets whiz around his head.

So let’s pretend these are the aesthetic options for the future of the country. If you had to vote for an artistic stance that would sustain you for the next few years, what would you vote for? Langford’s burr and finger-popping tunes or Cross’ flabbergasted yelps? Some deeply sarcastic outrage or some weary compassion? Music with an undeniable beat and connection to history or contemporary comedy that still hits you in the brain and guts after a dozen listens? Or maybe there’s a third-party alternative somewhere in the middle? My sincere hope is that Langford’s vision wins out and Cross doesn’t need to make a record like this every year. Unfortunately, I’m not optimistic about anything beyond the original fire that burns within these two fearless creators.

As one of the last intelligent, high-profile women rockers from the early ’90s who is still standing and making good music, Liz Phair shoulders too much of the cultural burden she once shared with shooting-stars-turned-burnouts like Courtney Love and brilliant, unreachable ciphers like PJ Harvey. Phair’s scarlet flower remains embroidered on her baby T-shirt — for all but her most recent converts, she will always embody sex-positive feminism, rebellion against indie-rock patriarchy, and the secret, unspoken, nasty imaginings of girls who go to Oberlin. But Phair shouldn’t be put in a spotlight this bright, although one must credit her for reinventing herself in a fashion that guarantees press and controversy as well as a little more money. Her slick new album and subsequent bid for real, Top of the Pops stardom is nothing to get upset about because A) she’s not quite as talented as she appears and B) she was gonna do it anyway. She helped sing Christmas carols for a Gap commercial a couple of years ago. How could anyone not see this coming?

From the beginning, Phair has had to deal with unusual doses of hype, pressure, and expectations. Her debut was immediately misunderstood because it had 18 songs and shared the same first word in its title as the greatest album of all time. The party line on 1993’s Exile in Guyville is that it blew the hinges off the door of female sexuality in popular music. It was a long-overdue response to the overt cocksmanship of Mick Jagger & Co. because, apparently, women who sang about sex were mute and invisible until the Clinton presidency.

Aside from the fact that Guyville‘s whole concept-album angle is a total sham, any dip into rock-and-roll history will reveal that Phair is not the first female rocker to want some cock. The list of lusty, upfront women in rock does not begin with her. It goes from Chrissie Hynde to Deborah Harry and Poly Styrene to those crazy Swedish chicks in Liliput, all the way back to Dinah Washington in the ’50s begging for “that big old long sliding thing.” These ladies were leading sexual lives on record for everyone to hear; Hynde even sang a song about rockin’ into motherhood, a dilemma that Phair has taken on as well.

It is true that Phair put her words and music before her body in the notoriously white male Amerindie subculture. Or she tried to. But heard today, all of Guyville’s references to blow-job queens, cunts in springtime, and “I’ll fuck you ’til your dick is blue” are more calculating than sexy, and even in her de facto set-closer “Fuck and Run,” the naughty words themselves seem to exist outside what each song is saying, put there by Phair’s then-flat, muttering retreat of a voice. Every single obscenity or innuendo in her songs since then sounds forced and a little desperate, as if she’s trying to impress the boys first with her pottymouth because they won’t pay attention to her poetry.

I’m not bashing Phair for being sensitive or ambitious. I’ll leave that to the other critics and fans who continue to pigeonhole and objectify her as some platonic ideal of Smart Sexual Discourse. As music critic Christina Schmitt wrote in a review of Liz Phair, “[G]rowing up could still bring inspired revelations to her music. Such epiphanies don’t have to come through fucking — but hey, there’s no reason to stop doing it now.” Except for the fact that Phair is much more suited to wider-ranging singer-songwriting than she is to spouting off songs about the moisturizing power of semen like a West Coast hipster version of Kim Cattrall.

Phair’s lyrical reach has been apparent and regularly ignored throughout her career. But it’s one aspect of her persona I keep returning to. One of my favorite songs on Guyville is about little more than flying into Chicago late at night. And I love the rogues’ gallery of disaffected men, women, and relatives on 1998’s Whitechocolatespaceegg; she reaches some kind of peak as a character artist on that record’s “Only Son,” a first-person sketch about a young male runaway. She also writes pretty well about her own identity. There is a high percentage of songs on Phair’s first three albums that are choppy, diaphanous sound fragments from a hypersensitive consciousness obsessed with escape, dislocation, abandonment, and being something else. The most memorable moments of her songwriting career take the form of two pleas from two albums spaced five years apart: “I wanna be mesmerizing, too,” and “I wanna be cool, tall, vulnerable and luscious/I could have it all if I only had this much.”

This obsession with role-playing might almost put her in a class with Emily Dickinson, another strong, smart poet whose personality is further clarified with every new attempt to wriggle out of her skin. Of course, that obscures the fact that Dickinson was a brilliant poet while Phair can and does write some of the most embarrassing lyrics I’ve ever heard. I still wince whenever I recall lines like, “You need not heed the neighbors now” or “And I asked Henry, my bartending friend/If I should bother dating unfamous men.” On Liz Phair, she tops herself with “Favorite,” an old-panties-as-former-lover metaphor that makes no literal or metaphorical sense when it’s not annoying the piss out of me. But she makes even these gaffes work because she has a true, genuine talent that has taken a long time to be discovered: She can really embrace a melody.

This eponymous new LP is her most straightforward offering yet. Her voice is huge and confident, and the guitars are cranked up until they’re almost hard. She sounds like Madonna on the opening track and actually sings “Rock me all night long,” which is one of those public-domain rock tropes that almost always sounds silly; here it sounds nearly perfect. When she’s not living off borrowed or handmade melodic and vocal ideas from The Matrix and Michael Penn, she writes her best lyric ever about how her life as a single mom intersects with her life as a single woman. Part of me thinks this album is her best because it’s straight with itself. Its tunes cannot be missed. It sounds like it should be played everywhere for everybody. I like it for the same reason I like Whitechocolatespaceegg and other moments from her fairly significant career: The songs stay in my head after I play them, and they offer just enough surprises to keep me on my toes. I hope her fans don’t miss out on her, because she’s still got lots of personas left. I also hope she finds one that makes her shitloads of money someday.

Josh Homme and Nick Oliveri, the two permanent and founding

members of Queens Of The Stone Age, are absolutely correct when they

condemn the easy categorization of their music as “stoner rock.” Their mode of

attack is too focused for the chemically altered mind. QOTSA love to

do things over and over — as much as they love the awkward rhythm,

the distorted crunch of the guitar and bass, the faux-operatic vocals

soaring over and diving under the constant, changeless din, they are wedded

for life to the old-time rock game of tension-and-release.

True stoners would have a lot of trouble with this kind of steadiness. They

are usually too forgetful and impatient to do anything more than once without

losing their train of thought, so Phish-y improvisation or Pink Floyd gloss are much

more pleasurable and comforting. And although QOTSA have their arty side, they

do not improvise much. They are perfect road-trip rock in their combination of

miles of static punctuated by startling diversions, and their pleasures are as

tried-and-true as a classic Harley-Davidson chopper. This is a band that should definitely see

if Lemmy Kilmister has some free time to jam.

So why do they find such joy in repetition — even more, it seems, than most

of their hard-rock peers? And why has it proven such a successful commercial

formula for them? Part of the answer to these questions is that the band came along

right around the messy rebirth of commercial metal and was different

enough to attract a less pained and cartoonish following.

And part of it has to do with being in the right place at the right

time. They may not last, but the band sounds

necessary now because its flat, dark music

reflects a flat, dark moral and economic climate. It’s

been done before: The embrace of repetition as a reaction

against industrial and ethical ennui is also found in the works of

Ozzy-era Black Sabbath and the first two Stooges albums. Both of

those bands came from working-class wastelands, and both were adept

at playing stupid — Sabbath’s drummer couldn’t hit more than

one drum in his kit at one time, and two songs in a row on the Stooges’

near-perfect testament Fun House are exactly the same but at slightly

different speeds. Yet their howling, inchoate pessimism has aged better

than many of their contemporaries, from MC5 to the mighty Led Zeppelin.

It may seem strange to pin this kind of worldview on a superficially

arty-smarty band that takes pride in patching little tiny touches of Spanish

guitar, organ, and xylophone in among sky-high guitar fissures. What unites

all three bands is their rage against the sameness and blandness of it all. For

the Stooges, life was no fun. For Sabbath, tomorrow’s dream never became

reality. For Queens Of The Stone Age, well, radio emptiness may or may not strike them as

a larger symptom of cultural decay. The years may yet burn off the ambiguity and

reveal the targets of their hoarse howling.

Then again, maybe not. Their last hit single,

“No One Knows,” is either a druggy paean to the secret thrills of sleeping pills or

a lovelorn lament, but the two-step, tick-tock lurch and the exploding chorus

keep the single fresh and surprising after a hundred listens. The same was true of

Rated R‘s “Feel Good Hit of the Summer” with its mantra of low-budget drugs,

and “Monsters in the Parasol”‘s stalker riff and dizzy-spell bridge. There is nothing

exactly inviting about this kind of music, though there also isn’t any of the

posturing and misery-drenched contortions typical of so many heavy rock bands of the

moment. In fact, QOTSA’s restraint and unwillingness to dive into self-loathing or

rise to coherence lend their work a class not shared by alternative-metal peers.

They sound pissed, and maybe they are pissed because they have nothing to say. No

one knows, but whatever they are saying, they continue to say it again and again.

Which isn’t to say the band hasn’t evolved with each fresh lineup. However,

evolution is too strong and dangerous a word for a hard-rock band that prizes set

patterns. As a collective, QOTSA don’t evolve their sound as much as their sound

mutates from album to album. Their eponymous debut recalls a faster, gloomier

Screaming Trees and a penchant for irritating noise, but it also has ready-made classics

like “If Only” and “Regular John.” The follow-up, 2000’s

Rated R, might be the best record they’ve released so far, downplaying the pummeling rock with some

gorgeous ballads that evoke a simpler, less gangly Meat Puppets. Last fall’s

Songs for the Deaf is a partial concept album about bad radio whose high points are the lead-off

“You Think I Ain’t Worth a Dollar, But I Feel Like a Millionaire,” an

absolutely lethal Dave Grohl drum solo on “Song for the Dead,” a

follow up to Zeppelin’s “Gallows Pole” that we’ve

been waiting for for 30 years (“Hanging Tree”),

and a florid orchestral ode to the common mosquito. Its charms still unfold, though

the loused-up production grates.

And even though all-world drummer Grohl is no longer keeping time, the

best reason to see them live is to hear the best tracks from

Songs for the Deaf freed from the flat production of the album, which seems to mash everything into a tiny

little monochromatic ball no matter how much the stereo is turned up. With the

brakes off, the show should prove whether this band’s noise is heavy or hollow.

I’ve hated the new Papa Roach and Korn albums in an indistinct but deeply felt way for weeks now, and I’ve been trying to find the exact words to say just how much I can’t stand them. Fortunately, others have done a better job describing both bands’ major flaws.

In a recent interview, the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Anthony Kiedis, with uncharacteristic elder-statesman wrath, said of Roach/Korn nü metal, “Even when I was 14, I didn’t have such one-dimensional angst.” And Spin‘s Chuck Klosterman wrote a definitive quasi-dis of Korn in his 2001 memoir Fargo Rock City: “The lovable jackasses in Korn absolutely fascinate me: They are the first band that I can honestly say I don’t ‘get’ and the band appeals to an audience almost entirely composed of aggressive, confused males. Quite frankly, Korn has no relationship whatsoever to the people who invented their art form.” But the most penetrating statement apropos of both bands was made by literary critic John Leonard, whose early-’90s dismissal of Bret Easton Ellis’ novels seems more than apt here: “It’s taken most of us most of our lives, and several momentous occasions, ever to feel as bad for 15 minutes as these kids had apparently felt since Pampers.”

Now, before you make a quick judgment and claim that I obviously dislike metal as a genre, I should say that I’m more pro-metal than I care to admit, and I bet you are too. Who among you does not love Led Zeppelin? Who among you has not purchased Appetite For Destruction on vinyl, tape, CD, and then CD again after you lost it that one crazy night when you were home for Thanksgiving break? How many of you have spent significant time in any bar on a Saturday without hearing “You Shook Me All Night Long” on the jukebox and smiling in appreciation at the lines “She told me to come/But I was already there”?

Bands from Judas Priest to Queens of the Stone Age have shown that metal can be an addictive, if silly, renewable resource for rock-and-roll Kix er, kicks. This music taps into the basic desire for speed, power, and volume that draws lots of boys to rock-and-roll — and football and BMX races and premature ejaculation — in the first place. At its best, metal hits you in the balls like an errant football, and, yeah, it’s like a smack to the nuts because metal is mainly a boy thing: Not one single member of any band who had a record on Spin‘s recent “Top 40 Metal Albums Of All Time,” with the possible exception of Dave Mustaine, was a woman.

But the good metal on Spin‘s list was almost always fun. (Slayer is, of course, the exception that proves this rule.) Even on something as scary as Appetite or as dreary as Alice in Chains’ Dirt, you can sing along to the choruses. And groups like KISS and Mötley Crüe never once took themselves seriously, which made their pleasures even more shamelessly enjoyable. Metal’s thrilling brainlessness is now a rite of passage.

Years down the line, though, something has gone horribly wrong in the heavy-metal shop: Bands such as Korn and Papa Roach have suddenly decided that they have Something To Say. They have become The Voice Of The Young Generation, and we’d better listen up.

Korn makes this task difficult because their new record is so aggressively unlistenable that I almost respect it. Throughout my numerous forays into Untouchables, I kept thinking, Maybe this is how Steve Allen felt when he first heard Little Richard! And while Korn occasionally indulges in the glossolalia that possessed Richard at his most demonic, they sound a lot more like a gruesome three-way between Marilyn Manson, Napalm Death, and the Thompson Twins, only not as good or as fun to watch. Lead singer Jonathan Davis howls very serious lyrics about how awful it is to be young (and, presumably, a Korn fan), and the band rarely stoops to melodies or hooks or deviations from their low-register grind that might explain the record’s double-platinum success to grown-ups.

Papa Roach is easier to take, and they too are aiming for the youth market. But in contrast to Untouchables‘ cover illustration of hollow-eyed preadolescents in various states of molestation or defeat, Lovehatetragedy shows a baby with headphones on flinging the devil sign. Papa Roach approximates “fun” more than Korn does, but though their songs are more radio-friendly, they never let you forget that they have Something To Say, even if the social dilemmas they deplore make no sense at all. After too many listens, the meaning of the metaphor “life is a bullet” from the song of the same name remains a deep, abiding puzzle to me, and the koan “Born with nothing/Die with everything” is nearly Zen in its circularity. The bonus Pixies cover only adds to Papa Roach’s status as the thinking man’s idiot-metal poets.

This is the stuff the kids listen to these days, and I say it’s hazardous to America. Not because it’s so bad, but because it is bad in such a way that it makes it easier for adults to stereotype kids who listen to this music as burnouts or would-be assassins. It’s taken me too long to realize that bad taste in music does not make you a bad person, but the monochromatic, miserable picture of adolescence these bands create encourages a two-dimensional image of kids as fountains of pain and woe that simply isn’t true.

As a high school teacher, I deal with young adults on a daily basis, and not one of them is as cookie-cutter boring or pathetic as the collective audience both bands seem to speak for. Some kids may love Korn, but they also love poetry and art too. Their lives are not as horrifying as these bands want them, and us, to believe (though, in some cases, it certainly isn’t great either). The music is hateful, but the kids who buy it need love and compassion and understanding more than anything else. Does this mean that metal needs to escape its black and solipsistic little closet? Definitely. How it will do so is anyone’s guess. Maybe the members of Papa Roach and Korn and their audience are just sensitive thugs who all need hugs. And after they get them, everyone can evolve and leave the reactionary, self-pitying bullshit on Untouchables and Lovehatetragedy behind.

Addison Engelking is a high school English teacher and frequent contributor to the Flyer‘s music section.