Music Dump - Oasis' Elvis 'Moves Like Jagger' in 9/11's Nickelback

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A recurring feature where we find this week's best music articles from across the web.

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Noel Gallagher After Oasis by Chuck Klosterman (Grantland): One of the best pop music interviewers sits down with one of the best pop music interviewees, and the results are predictably awesome. Certainly, Noel’s sheer quotability has kept Oasis in the public eye long after most people have ceased caring about the music. And Klosterman’s got a clever way of asking the right questions to draw the celebrity out of their usual comfort zone (not that he needs this with quote-a-minute Gallagher). Klosterman's interest in the nuts and bolts of the interview – about why it is Noel is doing this press junket in the first place - elicits more interesting answers out of Noel than you’d expect.

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The King And I by Ray Connolly (More Intelligent Life): In 1969, over the space of a week, Ray Connolly interviewed Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, and John Lennon. What a bastard. But the funny thing about interviewing Dylan and Lennon, for Connolly, was that when he mentioned he’d seen Elvis’s opening night in Vegas, they were giddy trainspotter fans just like he was, excitedly asking questions about what happened, who the backing band was, and so on. Sitting here in 2011, Elvis is a pop culture joke, in a lot of ways; a caricature who is famous because he’s famous. It’s almost hard to understand why everyone made such a fuss about him. But Connolly does well in putting Elvis into the context of the times, explaining why he was so beloved, and why he became the tragic shadow of who he once was.

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This Is My Favourite Picture Of My First Real Band by Kelly Hogan (Hogan Here): Kelly Hogan is a session musician and singer-songwriter who has played with the likes of Neko Case and Jakob Dylan. Here, she remembers her first late 80s/early 90s band (looking at a picture of the band looking amusingly nerdy and unfashionable). But this isn’t a “Haha, look how nerdy we were,” post. Hogan is very affectingly remembering the two members of the band who died in a car crash coming back from a gig. There’s some tearjerking stuff here, including having to dig through the remains of the car to retrieve their personal effects. And sadly, musicians dying in car crashes is all too common – with all the poor half-exhausted musicians driving late at night in dodgy vans, it’s a wonder it doesn’t happen more often.

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100 & Single: Considering The Album-Chart Class Of 9/11, Ten Years Later by Chris Molanphy (The Village Voice): By now, you may or may not be sick of, ‘We remember a decade of 9/11’ stuff?' But this is a fascinating look at how the charts have changed in the last 10 years (and how they’ve stayed the same). Molanphy takes the top 10 albums that were sold in the week after 9/11 and tries to put them in context – why was the U.S. public buying these albums as they stared in shock at round-the-clock coverage of the ruins? And some very interesting theories come out of the analysis: Nickelback’s ‘How You Remind Me’ (which was on an album in the top 10) was the last straightforward rock song to actually get to the top of the singles charts. In the U.S., there hasn’t been a #1 single that’s a rock song for ten years. Which means that Nickelback killed rock and roll.

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Deep In A Dream by Greil Marcus (Barnes & Noble Review): Greil Marcus reviews a book about Chet Baker, the jazz singer and trumpeter. And as ever, Marcus' prose is worth the price of admission alone (what, 10 minutes of your time?). But the picture he paints of Baker is fascinating also -- the musician started as an acolyte of Miles Davis’ Birth Of The Cool, and was unusually capable of conveying deeply held emotions with his voice and with his trumpet. And he had the kind of unearthly physical beauty that makes all the girls sigh. The Jeff Buckley of the 1950s, perhaps? But, where Buckley died tragically young, Baker got hooked on heroin, like most jazz musicians of the time, and spent decades as a walking corpse, prostituting his gift for enough money for another hit.

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Let’s Analyze The Lyrics of Adam Levine And Christina Aguilera’s ‘Moves Like Jagger’ by Katherine St. Asaph (Popdust): Last week, this column featured an excerpt of a Jagger biography in the New York Times, about where Jagger learnt his moves; where he started to strut like a peacock. One suspects that the reason that the New York Times chose that excerpt was because a song called ‘Moves Like Jagger’ was then the number one single.

Katherine St. Asaph at Popdust has recently started an excellent column on analysing the lyrics of number one singles in the U.S., and her analysis of this one is pretty spot on. (Here in Australia, ‘Moves Like Jagger’ has now spent 7 weeks in a row at #2, coming ever so close but still not quite making it to the ultimate prize of making me write one of my snarkier Number Ones reviews.

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Rock Groupies And Feminism by Rachel Rabbit White (rachelrabbitwhite.com): There’s some debate in feminist circles about whether rocks groupies are feminist or not. After all, they’re women who are actively trying to get what they want and who are comfortable with their sexuality. But on the other hand, what they want is sex with famous men, and a relationship in which the man clearly holds all the power (rather than, say, a more equal pursuit).

Rabbit White here makes the point that groupies changed from era to era, and that some might be more feminist than others; at least, in the 1980s, hair metal groupies may have looked like blonde bimbos, but unlike the (uncomfortably young) 1970s groupies, they now had careers of their own (e.g., Pamela Anderson). And, as of the 1990s, there are now male groupies who try (and sometimes succeed) in sleeping with famous women.

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Message To The-Dream, AKA Terius Nash: Please Stop Sharing by Tom Ewing (The Guardian): Some of your favourite albums are probably full of confessional fare, full of uncomfortable self-insight and deep emotional pain, that resounds with authenticity – think Weezer’s Pinkerton or John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band or Bob Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks or Joni Mitchell’s Blue (or Laura Marling’s excellent new album. And because these albums are the ones we often hold dearest to our hearts, we sometimes start to think that good music is good because it overshares, because it’s a bit TMI. But Ewing suggests that Terius Nash's album 1977 proves that this theory of authenticity may not be entirely correct. Because the album is just embarrassing to listen to. Nash is clearly singing about his life, but instead of it coming across as deep emotional pain, instead he comes across like that friend on Facebook who gets drunk and posts embarrassing things that will probably end up on Lamebook. And nobody wants that.

Tim Byron