Music Dump - Best Music Writing Of 2011 - Part 2
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The Ghostwriter by Andrew Romano (GQ): There’s not too many people you can legitimately say singlehandedly invented a genre. But, in a lot of ways: Hank Williams pretty much invented country music. When he passed away in 1952, he left a bunch of notebooks with song lyrics, many of which ended up unrecorded. It took until this year for a group of songwriters to assemble an album (curated by Bob Dylan) with music put to these "lost" lyrics. (Much like Billy Bragg and Wilco’s Woody Guthrie album Mermaid Avenue). Romano traces that story – of why it took so long – and in the process of listening to the various tracks on the album, tries to figure out why some tracks work and why some don’t; that is, what makes a good song.
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Dear Katy Perry by Rob Delaney (Viceland Today): Katy Perry’s ‘Last Friday Night’ has lyrics that (as Katherine St. Asaph identified) come across as an inane focus-group version of what partying is meant to be like. And Vice magazine, let’s face it, probably knows more about mindless hedonism than Katy Perry’s songwriters. And so Vice writer Rob Delaney creates comedy out of the song’s lyrics, replying to each line to point out its absurdity. For example, the line ‘then we had a ménage a trois’ gets the response ‘that’s French for ‘increased your odds of contracting an STD by 500%’.’
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The Boring Beatle by Bill Wyman (Slate): Living In The Material World, a Martin Scorsese documentary about George Harrison, was shown recently on US TV to rapturous acclaim and is now available at your local music store (including in an amazingly expensive deluxe edition). This article is required reading if/after you see the documentary. Wyman (the rock critic, not the former Rolling Stone) wants to puncture the documentary’s myth of George Harrison. Wyman argues that Living In The Material World is ‘schlockumentary’, a glorified advertisement for Harrison – after all, his estate could nix anything in the documentary it didn’t like. Wyman argues, the fact of this nixing means that Living In The Material World doesn’t go into George’s darker side, thus not addressing some of the more interesting and informative elements of who Harrison really was.
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Mic Check by Vivek Menezes (Caravan): A lot of the talk about the rap group Das Racist has been along the lines of "That Heems rapper – he’s Indian?"’. This article in Indian magazine Caravan flips it round: their question is "That nice smart Indian boy from New York – he’s a rapper?!" Menezes talks to Heems’ proud parents, follows him to bars and Hindu temples, etc. And in the process, I think Menezes says some important, interesting stuff about the way that immigrant communities in the U.S. respond to the challenges of fitting into a society like the U.S. (or Australia); when the (quite large) Indian American community is starting to produce rappers who are breaking into the mainstream, it has clearly come to a compromise between its own values and those of society.
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Out On The Perimeter by Dave Graney (Meanjin): Odd things happen to you when you’re a musician; you sometimes get asked to do strange gigs and sometimes you say yes. Dave Graney and his band headed out to the remote Cocos Islands, an Australian territory midway between Perth and Sri Lanka, to play a couple of gigs. Graney has always had a keen eye for odd undercurrents bubbling beneath a respectable surface (a la David Lynch) and he uses such awareness to excellent effect here to describe the strangeness of life on the Cocos Islands.
(Continued next page)
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