inkbluesky

Jonathan Yardley writes in his review of Love, Death, and Country Music By Dana Jennings

He doesn’t draw a parallel between the history of country music and the history of jazz, but one needn’t be a musicologist to understand that both genres reached their zeniths relatively early in their development — jazz between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, country during the period outlined by Jennings — and gradually lost much of their creative spark and originality as they achieved maturity.

[  ]…Jazz went abstruse and elitist while country went slick and pop, but both lost track of their roots.

I’ve lost count of the articles I’ve read over the years that have been in the same price range.  Yardley puts in a good word for Alison Krauss among others, but leaves out stellar modern country talents like Kelly Willis, the Dixie Chicks, Dwight Yoakam and so many others. In jazz he leaves out the entire Marsalis family – Ellis, Wynton and Branford. Without including jazz from the sixties he leaves out Coleman and Coltrane. Without the seventies he leaves out Latin jazz and Stanley Turrentine. The accusation that country became too “pop” was said by someone once and has been repeated so often its taken on a grotesque life of its own. It did go pop, but it also reclaimed some of its jazz sounds,  bluegrass, gospel and rock influences. Country and jazz have both had some shake ups which have served to extend their genres into other generations of music lovers. In turn many of those fans go back and rediscover the classics. Music is art. Like any art if it stands still it dies. As much as I appreciate some older country much of it is like the acting in old black and white western movies from the thirties, stiff and awkward. Even some of the jazz from its golden years seems like they were afraid to let loose, be natural. In acting Marlon Brando ushered in, thankfully the modern era of naturalness. Muscians like Miles Davis did no less for jazz. Unlike rock, jazz had as many chord variations as the composer cared to use; it was only natural that it would evolve, it was a music that begged for experimentation.

the place where change ends

The Beat Satire or Smear: Muslim Barack, Black Panther Michelle

To be sure, the New Yorker cover art is satire — perhaps not as smart or stylish as what you will find in a random issue of The Onion, but satire all the same.

The problem is not that The New Yorker has tried to make a mockery of right-wing efforts to smear the Obamas.

It is that The New Yorker has not done a very good job of it.

Like “serious news” articles that try to cover their salaciousness by offering semi-scholarly “reviews” of rumors about whether one of John McCain’s potential running mates might be gay, the current New Yorker cover takes the crudest political spin, puts it on the rack at Borders or Target and demands that enlightened Middle America laugh along with the joke.

No problem there. People in Iowa sorted through most of the attacks on Obama before New Yorkers were even taking the senator seriously as a presidential contender. Plenty of Americas who have never supped at the Russian Tea Room will “get it.”

So this issue of The New Yorker will be a very big seller.

At one level, that’s very good because Ryan Lizza’s 18-page piece on Barack Obama’s background as a Chicago political player is excellent. Lizza cuts through the ridiculous spin that would have us believe that Obama somehow rose to the top of the Illinois political scene by chance or serendipity. In what for Obama fabulists will be agonizing detail, Lizza explains that, “perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them….he has always played politics by the rules as they exist, not as he would like them to exist. He runs as an outsider, but he has succeeded by mastering the inside game.”

My opinion would add little to the debate though I admire illustrator Barry Blitt’s work in general. Some people took the content internalized it or intentionally distorted it. Whats done is done, there’s no putting the genie back in editor’s bottom drawer. What people can do is talk about and link to the article inside the magazine, Making It, How Chicago shaped Obama. by Ryan Lizza . Obama as the classic American over achiever, the kid that works his way up from modest beginnings. The kind of story booksuccess that his worse detractors tell us we’re supposed to celebrate.

turning things around