,I quite like this Spiegel Online article.

This November, two kilometers worth of gigantic dominos will be erected between Berlin's Brandenburg Gate and Potsdamer Platz along a portion of the strip that once separated East and West Berlin. In celebration of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dominos will be set tumbling and the barrier will collapse in roughly half an hour's time.

"We want to knock over the Wall once again," Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit said at an opening ceremony for the project last week.

The 43-kilometer Berlin Wall -- the most famous symbol of the Cold War and of divided Germany -- fell on Nov. 9, 1989, after having stood for nearly three decades. The domino project, which is headed by the Berlin group Kulturprojekte, hopes to inspire reflection on that day by toppling 1,000 eight-foot tall Styrofoam slabs.

Each of the dominos will be individually decorated, most by young Berlin residents. Part of the project's aim is "to encourage young people to reflect on what the fall of the Wall meant," Wowereit said.

Roughly 20 of the dominos will also be sent abroad to be decorated in other parts of the world where aggressive divisions and separating walls have left an impact. "It's important that we not only bring Germany to the world but that we also bring the world to Germany," Michael Jeismann of the Berlin office of Germany's federal cultural foundation Goethe Institut, which developed the foreign component of the domino project, told SPIEGEL ONLINE.

Any number of my friends have commented on how they experienced it, on how the saw the Wall and how they saw the Wall fall and how they felt about that. I was only nine at the time, but I was impressed by the euphoria. I don't have to remind you that I own some chunks of concrete accredited as chunks from the Berlin Wall.

Close-up 1
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

I think that the biggest sensation that beset the world in those halcyon days. I'm a big fan of 1980s music, as people who've seen my music video posts on Facebook can say, and one thing that has always stuck out for me is the sheer number of nuclear catastrophe-themed songs: "Dancing with Tears in My Eyes", "99 Luftballons", "Forever Young". That wasn't the only way the fear of Cold War-themed nuclear gigadeath was in popular culture. Take Threads and its perhaps optimistic depiction of life in a post-apocalyptic United Kingdom; take Hackett's fictional Third World War histories; take the obnoxious heavy metal song in Star Trek IV that claimed the only thing left for us to decide was "how many megatons"; take the desperate protests of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and its European peers during the early 1980s' missile deployments; WarGames that saw Matthew Broderick race to try to prevent the reliable artifical intelligence the generals put in place of unrealiable men from starting a nuclear war. And then, take the TTAPS study of 1983, the only that confirmed that just as Mars cooled during its planet-wide dust storms, so would Earth because terribly, unliveably, chill.

Comes Gorbachev, and there's hope that the future won't be as bleak. Comes November 1989, and things just can't be as horrible as they were. It's worth noting that the first thing Berliners did after bringing the Wall down was have a huge days-long party.

We're safe now. There's problems in the region, sure, eastern Europe hasn't fared nearly as well as one might like and entire generations have been left adrift. There's still nothing like that existential fear, little that I can remember and nothing that younger generations can remember. The world has its rivalries and it has its problems, but it's a normal world safe from the fear that one year everyone could die. Ours, after all, is a world that's relaxed, so relaxed that we can take a geography that marked the sternest border of the sternest ideological conflict ever and make it a game of dominos while others smile at the idea, at least a little bit.

As Christine Negroni in notes in Halifax's Chronicle-Herald, United Airlines could have done better than to have lost the luggage of Dave Carroll, a Nova Scotia-based musician now famous for his music video criticizing the airlines' response to a damage claim that he'd filed.

David Carroll’s boyish face has become a symbol for the embattled consumer ever since baggage handlers at United Airlines broke his guitar on a flight last summer and the airline refused to pay for the repair.

Frustrated, the singer-songwriter created a music video titled United Breaks Guitars that became an Internet sensation.

The video got the attention of United Airlines and the Canadian guitarist met with top level executives, who promised to do better. But Mr. Carroll’s already tenuous confidence in United’s promises has faltered because, on arriving in Colorado over the weekend to speak at a conference on customer service, his old nemesis was at it again.

One of the three bags he’d checked in Saskatchewan failed to arrive when he did.

For more than an hour on Sunday, Mr. Carroll said he was told he could not leave the international baggage claim area at Denver International Airport because his bag was delayed, not lost, and he must be there to claim it when it came down the conveyor belt.

"I’m the only person pacing around this room," Mr. Carroll said, describing how he was caught between the order from United to stay and a U.S. Customs official telling him to go.

Responding to the episode, United Airlines spokeswoman Robin Urbanski wrote in an email, "We will fully investigate what regretfully happened."

The rest of his story is hardly unique, as many air travellers can attest. The bag, containing some musical equipment, shoes and CDs, became a frequent flyer, meandering across international borders inching ever nearer to Mr. Carroll’s destination in Colorado Springs, but not quite arriving.

But the bag’s journey is far less interesting than its owner’s. Mr. Carroll has gone from modest popularity in Canada to an internationally known spokesman for the disrespected consumer. His father-in-law, Brent Sansom, has become his business advisor to help him sort thousands of requests to speak and perform.

But there could have been no more appropriate audience to hear the latest instalment in the ongoing adventure between Mr. Carroll and United Airlines than the group of customer service executives to whom he spoke on Tuesday — albeit without his dress shoes and the United Breaks Guitars CD packed in his still undelivered suitcase.

For the past couple of years, every Thursday I've dealt with music, posting a music video and describing my relationship to it. It's been a minor tradition for me, along with Friday [LINK] roundups and Saturday [FORUM] posts.

For the past couple of weeks, however, I've found myself unable to come up with any more songs to post. Even on Facebook, where I only write a line or two after the links before the music videos I posted almost-daily there, I'm stuck.

Will [MUSIC] come back? Who knows? I just thought that I should let you know else I keep you hanging.

The first time that I heard of Meshell Ndegeocello was in 1996, when there was a to-do about single off of her 1996 album Peace Beyond Passion and its associated music video.



I've copied out some of the lyrics of "Leviticus: Faggot" below.

Faggot better run learn to run 'cuz daddy's home
His sweet lil' boy just a little too sweet
Every night the man showed the faggot what a real man should be
The man and the faggot will never see
for so many can't even perceive a real man

[. . .]

No love dreams
only the favors sweet Michael performed for money to eat
'Cause the man kicked the faggot out the house at 16
Amen mother let it be
Before long he was crowned QUEEN for all the world to see bloody body face down
The wages of sin are surely death that's what mama used to say
So there was no sympathy

It goes without saying that this was an immensely controversial music video. It managed to acquire for itself a whole episode of Too Much 4 Much, which saw one of the members of the discussion panel--a gay playright, perhaps Sky Gilbert--storm off the set while the whole things was being debated. (MuchMusic decided to play the video on the grounds that it was anti-homophobic; some saw lyrics like the above as encouraging homophobia. I think that last is ludicrous. Anyone who actually listened to the last lines of the insidiously catchy song would know this.

Let he without sin walk amongst the hated and feared and know true trial and tribulations
See my dear we're all dying for something searchin' and searchin'
Soon mama found out that god would turn his back on her too

Sometimes people deserve to suffer.

In a 1996 interview, Ndegeocello talked about some of her motives behind this unsettling song.

AP: Will it be unplayable because It breaks ground by being openly gay?

MN: But it doesn't break ground. You ever heard a tune by Funkadelic called "Jimmy's Got a Little Bit of Bitch in Him"? You know, a lot of gay men just aren't with it. They won't like "Faggot."

AP: Is that because you'll be misinterpreted as saying that homosexual life is difficult and therefore something to be saved fr

MN: But I am sort of saying that. I feel that way. By that I mean, I went through a period where I thought, Oh God, I'm gay and it's killing me. It's not easy, and I'd like to meet someone [who's gay] who's never felt that way.</i>

A lot of things were killing me at the time. It was my fear of failure, mainly, my fear of failing to do whatever was expected of me in a global sense, sexuality but one element of many, too many. (Best to hide, quietly, and to meep if anything might bring someone's attention to me.) Things have unraveled nicely since those terrible teenage years, continue to unravel, but the memory of that fear can still be paralyzing if I let it. Thank God that unthinking bigotries and reactions of any kind are declining, at least in my corner of the world; thank God that reason is starting to prevail, at least lately and in my environment. As the video above illustrates graphically, especially in the last half-minute, anything is possible outside of the safe environment I've enjoyed. It wasn't luck acting in my favour, but it was something.

The odyssey of Dave Carroll, one of the two members of the Halifax-based duo Sons of Maxwell and an Internet celebrity thanks to his song "United Breaks Guitars", is going to get a very big audience for himself indeed.

Halifax singer-songwriter Dave Carroll will be on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., Tuesday to tell a hearing on airline passenger rights how United Airlines scrunched his expensive guitar and wouldn't compensate him.

Carroll will speak at an airline passenger rights hearing looking into problems with how U.S. airlines treat the flying public. Organizers have been given permission to hold the hearing in a congressional hearing room.

"It will look, smell and act like a real congressional hearing," said Kate Hanni, executive director of FlyersRights.org, a sponsor of the event.

"This is the chance for many victims to speak," she told CBC News. Her organization is supporting legislative proposals that would allow someone to deplane after three hours of extended tarmac delay. Hanni said she founded her group after being stuck waiting in a plane for almost 10 hours.

[. . .]

In the spring of 2008, Carroll and his band, Sons of Maxwell, were travelling from Halifax to Nebraska for a one-week tour when he says they noticed United Airlines baggage handlers throwing around their instruments on the tarmac in Chicago. He later discovered that his $3,500 guitar had been severely damaged.

Carroll said United didn't deny the incident occurred, but wouldn't compensate him. After many months of emails and baggage claims went nowhere, Carroll said he told a United official he would write three songs about his experience with the airline and post them online.

Song No. 1 was called United Breaks Guitars, and the video quickly became a page of internet history. It has been viewed more than 5.5 million times on YouTube and has prompted more than 22,000 comments, many from people telling their own horror stories about airport baggage handling in general and United Airlines in particular. Song No. 2 was posted last month and has garnered more than 300,000 views. The final song in the trilogy is to be released in the fall.

United officials eventually offered some compensation. They said they're now using Carroll's videos as training exercises for new employees.

Thanks to Jerry for showing me the video back in June when it first came out. Trust me, you'll enjoy it just as much.

I've sure I've mentioned somewhere in the past that Québécois popular culture, for all its richness, really hasn't penetrated English Canada to any significant degree. Literature has certainly done well, with people like--say--playwright and actor Gratien Gélinas gaining recognition, while the Anglophone/Francophone 2006 coproduction Bon Cop, Bad Cop was one of the most successful films in Canadian history. Still, official bilingualism aside, there just isn't that much that has crossed the language frontier. Mitsou, as it happens Gélinas' granddaughter, is one of the rare exceptions with her 1990 single "Bye bye mon cowboy". Her music, driven by her sexpot image and controversial music videos featuring nudity and sexuality, didn't last long commercially, don't seem to have been as successful, but there are still some gems. Actually, I can only think of one, her "Comme j'ai toujours envie d'aimer" off of her 1994 album YaYa.



The lyrics are fairly simple. Their core can be found below.

Comme j'ai toujours envie d'aimer
J'ai toujours envie de toi
Oh toi que j'aime

I have always wanted to love
I still want you
Oh, I love you

Still, I like her breathy delivery and the stuttery synth music. Sometimes, this song can make me feel shivers. The way that she ties it in to HIV/AIDS prevention is also interesting, with the others featured in the video revealing their HIV status at the video's end and the song "[becoming] the theme song to promote AIDS awareness in Québec, and all proceeds from the sale of the single went towards AIDS research."

"Comme j'ai toujours voulu aimer" is a simple song, ephemera, really. That doesn't change the fact that I like it, still, and that doesn't change the fact that I wouldn't have come across it if I hadn't been lucky enough to see it while I was watching MuchMusic one day in the mid-1990s. I'd not have had this simple pleasure. As an Anglophone, I enjoy a peculiar amount of linguistic privilege, in Canada as in the wider world. I have French, true, but I don't have nearly the amount of access to la francophonie that I'd like to have. There really hasn't been any pressing need to do so. As a result, things get missed.

It's funny, isn't it, how privilege can sometimes lead to missing out on something?

While I understand the reasoning--as I type I'm listening to a Fischerspooner song on YouTube complete with fan video--but this still makes me sad. MuchMusic used to be so much more.

As MuchMusic marks its 25th anniversary this month, there will be no stylishly produced retrospectives, no neon-splashed '80s videos from the vault, and no nostalgic appearances by former VJs.

In fact, representatives from the network - which has survived by keeping a finger firmly on the pulse of young people - say they will not mark the milestone at all, arguing that their audience just doesn't care about it.

"We will be doing absolutely nothing for the 25th anniversary," said Brad Schwartz, senior vice-president and general manager of Much MTV Group.

[. . .]

Schwartz says MuchMusic was the No. 2 network for 12-to 34-year-olds last year, behind TSN. Overall ratings steadily increased until 1997 and have held steady since, despite an increasingly competitive landscape and the fact that music videos - once Much's lifeblood - are now available at the click of a mouse.

Schwartz remembers when viewers had to stay glued to their sets to watch the latest offering from their favourite artist - and even sit through videos they didn't like to get to videos they did.

"Remember, when MuchMusic was playing music videos, it was the only place to get music videos," Schwartz said.

"You couldn't get them anywhere else, so you had to tune into MuchMusic and watch the countdown. If you wanted to watch the Michael Jackson 'Thriller' video, you had to watch videos six, five, four, three, two and then finally get to it.

"Today, you don't need to do that. If you want to watch the 'Thriller' video, you go online and you watch it, you watch it 10 times in a row. ... Today's music is so on-demand that you don't need to watch a Beyonce video to get to a Britney video, you can just go straight to a Britney video."

As a result, videos have largely been pushed to the margins of the network's programming. Meanwhile, Much has found higher ratings with in-house fare such as "Video on Trial," in which comics poke fun at popular videos; reality shows including "So You Think You Can Dance" and "Pimp My Ride;" and with teen dramas including "One Tree Hill" and "Degrassi."

Much still devotes 50 per cent of its programming to music videos, as per the requirements of its CRTC licence. But once-beloved Much mainstays such as "The Wedge" and "Rap City" have been relegated to late-night airings - where the network tends to tuck much of its video-centric programming - while "The NewMusic" was cancelled outright in 2008.

Back in 2005, Andrew Sullivan--in what is surely just one gaffe among many--complained about iPods in the Times of London. Even though he himself confesses to being an iPod user, he feared that the iPod would destroy society.

What was once an occasional musical diversion became a compulsive obsession. Now I have my iTunes in my iMac for my iPod in my iWorld. It’s Narcissus heaven: we’ve finally put the “i” into Me.

And, like all addictive cults, it’s spreading. There are now 22m iPod owners in the United States and Apple is becoming a mass-market company for the first time.

[. . .]

Atomisation by little white boxes and cell phones. Society without the social. Others who are chosen — not met at random. Human beings have never lived like this before. Yes, we have always had homes, retreats or places where we went to relax, unwind or shut out the world.

But we didn’t walk around the world like hermit crabs with our isolation surgically attached.

Music was once the preserve of the living room or the concert hall. It was sometimes solitary but it was primarily a shared experience, something that brought people together, gave them the comfort of knowing that others too understood the pleasure of a Brahms symphony or that Beatles album.

But music is as atomised now as living is. And it’s secret. That bloke next to you on the bus could be listening to heavy metal or a Gregorian chant. You’ll never know. And so, bit by bit, you’ll never really know him. And by his white wires, he is indicating he doesn’t really want to know you.

[. . .]

We become masters of our own interests, more connected to people like us over the internet, more instantly in touch with anything we want, need or think we want and think we need. Ever tried a Stairmaster in silence? But what are we missing? That hilarious shard of an overheard conversation that stays with you all day; the child whose chatter on the pavement takes you back to your early memories; birdsong; weather; accents; the laughter of others. And those thoughts that come not by filling your head with selected diversion, but by allowing your mind to wander aimlessly through the regular background noise of human and mechanical life.

Over at Reason (yes, I know, but it's still a good article), Katherine Mangu-Ward pointed out that Sullivan's point isn't very new or original.

In blogging his horror, Sullivan joins a long line of worrywarts who have fretted about the cultural and political impact of portable music. But in The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness (Simon & Schuster), technology reporter Steven Levy argues that the ability to check out of the public sphere is one of the many virtues of Steve Jobs' minuscule machine. As the sociologist Rey Chow said of the iPod's predecessor, the Sony Walkman: "This is the freedom to be deaf to the loudspeakers of history. The Walkman allows me...to be a missing part of history."

There are parts of history that nearly everyone would be happy to miss out on. In New York's mayoral campaign of 2005, Levy relates, one candidate complained how hard it was to hijack peaceful pedestrians on their way to work when they have those white earbuds plugged in. "We have to come up with something to jam the iPods," he whined. But that's the beauty of the iPod. There's no jamming it. It's a self-contained unit, not reliant on a radio signal or even on the output of a record company.

Just as importantly, I'd like to point out that for me, at least, portable music players don't exclude the world. Whenever I go walking with my device, I don't shut out the world, I can't if I'm to walk safely or interact with other people. What I get is additional stimulation, another factor to enjoy along with the slant of the sunshine and the sight of other people and the rhythm of my feet. Multitasking's not something that humans do well, true, but who said that multiple stimulants are bad things? Walking along Dupont Street and listening to a Depeche Mode remix can't be a bad thing. Sullivan, I fear, projects too much.

(Besides, there has always been an "I" in music. Did everyone ever enjoy the same music in the same way? Silliness.)

"Being Boring", the second single off of the Pet Shop Boys 1990 album Behaviour has inspired a fanatical fan base. It's the only song that I know of which has an extensive 10 Years of Being Boring fan site for instance. The right kind of minor European hit can be vital nearly twenty years after its first release.



A quiet song, "Being Boring" is drenched in a quiet, somewhat sad, nostalgia. The Rossetti translation of Villon's famous line, "Where are the snows of yesteryear?", work perfectly.

I came across a cache of old photos
And invitations to teenage parties
Dress in white one said, with quotations
From someone's wife, a famous writer
In the nineteen-twenties
When you're young you find inspiration
In anyone who's ever gone
And opened up a closing door
She said: we were never feeling bored

My teenage years were never spent being boring, but were instead spent depressed and afraid. Still, 29 is the new 19 (right?), and my life has progressed to the point where I can really understand the sense of happy nostalgia re: the joys of the past, regarding the sort of energy and drive that makes my life worthwhile." [I]f youre not careful/You'll have nothing left and nothing to care for"? Please.

Tennant and Lowe thinks this will all come to the end, as adulthood approaches and things start to fade. "Being Boring", as it turns out, is the middle song in a trilogy relating to a friend of Neil Tennant's who died of AIDS, the first song "It Couldn't Happen Here" relating to his belief that the HIV/AIDS epidemic wouldn't hit Britain, the final B-side "Your Funny Uncle" recounting the funeral.

Now I sit with different faces
In rented rooms and foreign places
All the people I was kissing
Some are here and some are missing
In the nineteen-nineties
I never dreamt that I would get to be
The creature that I always meant to be
But I thought in spite of dreams
Youd be sitting somewhere here with me

Still, "I never dreamt that I would get to be/The creature that I always meant to be" may be the most hopeful couplet I've ever heard. Memento mori, sure, but before that we all live. We all surely have to walk through at least one door!

Two songs really caught me after MuchMusic came to my home: Annie Lennox's "No More 'I Love You's" and Everything But the Girl's "Missing"

Below is a fine live performance of the song.



Below is a YouTube video carrying the song, the Terry Todd remix, as it was heard on the radio and seen on the music video channels.

I've no problem with Wikipedia's summary of the song's background and success.

Prior to "Missing", Everything but the Girl was most known as a folk and jazz group. They had released eight albums prior to Amplified Heart and had a number-three UK singles chart hit in 1988 ("I Don't Want to Talk About It"), but were relatively unknown in the United States. "Missing" was recorded as a laid-back guitar-based pop song that had earned modest airplay on U.S. Adult Contemporary radio. The duo gave the track to house music producer Todd Terry to remix for clubs. The resulting dance version of "Missing" became a worldwide smash, matching Everything But the Girl's UK best chart position of number three in November 1995 and hitting number one on the German singles chart. The song became the duo's first U.S. Billboard Hot 100 entry, and after a long climb up the chart, it peaked at number two in 1996 (in its twenty-eighth chart week), eventually spending fifty-five weeks on the chart (a record at the time which has since been broken — the single is today the ninth-longest charting song on the U.S. Hot 100.).

Tracey Thorn later explained to Rolling Stone that "Missing" was originally intended as a dance-oriented track: ^[1]

"It was written with that idea in mind, totally... we put on sort of a laid back house groove instead. Then when we gave it to Todd, he took it in a really, really strong New York house direction, which had a real simplicity to it, but it was very infectious."

</blockquote>

Here come the lyrics.

I step off the train
I'm walking down your street again and past your door
But you don't live there any more
It's years since you've been there
But now you've disappeared somewhere like outer space
You've found some better place
And I miss you - like the deserts miss the rain
And I miss you - like the deserts miss the rain

The song's fundamentally about a story of loss: Someone goes to an address, looking for someone, knowing that they're not there and are never going to be there, but going out of a sense of grief. That narrative, told in Tracey Thorn's heartbreaking voice against Todd's brilliant subtle electronica, got me hooked, made me as huge of a fan as I could, waiting for the video or listening to the album. It resonated.

Could you be dead?
You always were two steps ahead of everyone
We'd walk behind while you would run
I look up at your house
And I can almost hear you shout down to me
Where I always used to be
And I miss you - like the deserts miss the rain
And I miss you - like the deserts miss the rain

Back when "Missing" came out, I remember an article in Spin that suggested that one way the song became as big a it as it did was through gay clubbers, who by the mid-1990s peak of the HIV/AIDS epidemic were certainly aware of any number of their friends, vital energetic people who mattered, leaving their friends and the world in a horrible way hopefully for a better, unreachable, place. The stunned survivors could do nothing but watch as the suffering continued and the death toll rose, perhaps sometimes even making it impossible to track the fate of one individual, or many.

Back on the train
I ask why did I come again?
Can I confess I've been hanging around your old address?
The years have proved to offer nothing since you moved
You're long gone
But I can't move on
And I miss you - like the deserts miss the rain

Freud's thinking on loss comes to mind.

Freud’s essay proposes an analogy between the pathological phenomenon of acute depression, or “melancholia”, and the universal phenomenon of mourning which inevitably follows loss. Freud acknowledges that this similarity was adumbrated by Abraham in his 1911 paper. In fact, however, the connection had interested Freud since at least 1895. In an early text known as “Draft G” – which was not published until more than a decade after Freud’s death – he had remarked that “The affect [i.e., in this context, the emotional state] corresponding to melancholia is that of mourning” (1985, 200). During a discussion on suicide at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1910 Freud had also insisted that the starting point for any understanding of suicide must be a comparison between these two phenomena. The intuition which propelled such as yet embryonic remarks was the key conviction that at the core of melancholic illness is always a “longing for something lost” (1895, 200).

The song's subject is similarly trapped, melancholic and depressed because of something that was lost, something causing the subject to mourn. The subject might well be able in theory to move on, find new people and a better life, but how can that be done, really? The past may be past, but it still shapes the subject, just as it does other people, and that lost person, those possibilities so cruelly shut off--these are losses that are irreversible. How can you recover from these scars?, I ask for the song's subject

Yes leaves me unimpressed. The album just sounds like so much sonic wallpaper, unworthy of sustained listenings, unworthy my unfortunate expenditure of money. Very was their last great original album, I think, and the B-sides collection Alternatives is their last good album full stop. They've had good singles since then--"New York City Boy" comes to mind--but they're only a singles group now. Frankly, my money's better spent buying these singles as downloads.

Two people on my Livejournal friends list have made Jackson-related posts which deserve further propagation.

• brunorepublic covers the exciting news that Michael's abusive svengali father, Joe, has launched a new record label that's bound to be successful. "In essence, he motivates the artist with pain until they achieve the desired results. It's not easy to reach the top. Many people simply lack motivation; they aren't able to push themselves there. So, Papa Joe does the pushing for them, and he pushes hard! After just a few years of physical and emotional torment, it's amazing what people will do for a moment of relief. Their desire for success is genuine. When they perform, you can really see it in their eyes."


• Elsewhere, lord_whimy examines the extent to which Jackson's transgressiveness related to his talent. "I think transgression has become a cheap artistic tactic, a short cut: it's all impact, no resonance. It's too obvious. It starts out novel, but then quickly becomes tiresome. There's a law of diminishing returns that sets in with transgression: once it gave us Bowie, but now it gives us Insane Clown Posse. Jackson's transgressions did nothing to serve his art; he was great in spite of them, not because of them."

Via absinthe_dot_ca.

Pop star Michael Jackson was pronounced dead today after paramedics found him in a coma at his Bel-Air mansion, city and law enforcement sources told The Times.

Los Angeles Fire Department Capt. Steve Ruda told The Times that paramedics responded to a 911 call from the home. When they arrived, Jackson was not breathing. The paramedics performed CPR and took him to UCLA Medical Center, Ruda said.

I'm so sorry for the man.

When I blogged about the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil" and the Eurythmics' "Missionary Man," I didn't include this mix, my favourite of the seven cover versions on Laibach's 1988 Sympathy for the Devil EP



"She's made you some kind of laughing stock
Because you dance to disco, and you don't like rock"

I like rock, don't get me wrong, but techno's at least as fun.

Not all too frequently, Torontonians have been graced with beautiful perfect blue skies, perhaps the colour of robin egg blue, perhaps not. I invite you to judge.

Blue Sky
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Blue Sky and Moon
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

If you want music to go along with your appraisal, this remix of BT's song "Blue Skies" featuring Tori Amos comes highly recommended.

I've been thinking about writing about Major Tom for three years--talktooloose can testify to this.

David Bowie's character of Major Tom is one of the longest-running characters in popular music, featuring in three songs--1969's "Space Oddity," 1980's "Ashes to Ashes," and 1995's "Hallo Spaceboy"--that are all frankly iconic songs covering a timespan of more than twenty-six years. The "Major Tom" character, as the Wikipedia article indicates, is one that has entered into broad use in popular culture--Peter Schilling's 1983 "Major Tom (Coming Home)" comes most readily to mind, but there are other pieces of pop culture out there that reference him. For parsimony's sake, here, when I take a look at Major Tom I'll only consider the official trilogy of songs touching upon him and not any deuterocanonical literature. Although Bowie characteristically complicates things by referencing the lonely Mars-bound astronaut in Elton John's "Rocket Man". Eh, I'll cope.

Major Tom appeared first in "Space Oddity", the 1969 single that started off his career, capturing the zeitgeist thanks to its closeness in time to the Apollo moon landing. The official video, the one that starts with the oscilloscope, is here; an alternate version is below.



This song, unlike the others, is devoted entirely to the character. It begins with Ground Control reminding him to "Take your protein pills and put your helmet on," that they're "Commencing countdown, engines on/Check ignition and may gods love be with you," and that he has "really made the grade," with the papers wanting to "know whose shirts you wear" and reminding him that "it's time to leave the capsule if you dare." But then, after he floats, something goes irretrievably wrong.

For here
Am I sitting in a tin can
Far above the world
Planet earth is blue
And there's nothing I can do

Though I'm past one hundred thousand miles
I'm feeling very still
And I think my spaceship knows which way to go
Tell me wife I love her very much she knows

The song ends with Ground Control trying to reach him though his circuits are dead.

Major Tom's next appearance is in 1980's "Ashes to Ashes", a #1 UK hit taken off of the fantastic album Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps). The trend-setting official video is here, another video is below.



This song certainly deconstructs the Major Tom mythos. Once a heroic astronaut venturing worth into infinite space, taking a fatal risk to see what else lies beyond, perhaps on the pattern of 2001's Dave Bowman, it turns out that Tom's story has ended on on a much more depressing note than anyone would have feared.

Do you remember a guy that's been
In such an early song
I]ve heard a rumour from ground control
Oh no, don't say its true

They got a message from the action man
I'm happy, hope you're happy too
I've loved all I've needed love
Sordid details following

[. . .]

Ashes to ashes, funk to funky
We know Major Tom's a junkie
Strung out in heavens high
Hitting an all-time low

Time and again I tell myself
I'll stay clean tonight
But the little green wheels are following me
Oh no, not again
I'm stuck with a valuable friend
I'm happy, hope you're happy too
One flash of light but no smoking pistol

I never done good things
I never done bad things
I never did anything out of the blue, who-o-oh
Want an axe to break the ice
Wanna come down right now

It's common knowledge that this references the existential despair that characterized the depth of Bowie's frankly terrifying period of drug addiction in the mid-1970s, with Bowie presumably using Major Tom as a voice for this sort of thing. It resonated, though--how else could it be a #1?

Bowie's final reference to Major Tom--so far--came in the 1995 song "Hallo Spaceboy", one of the many songs off of the concept album Outside that marked his continued recovery from his horrible nadir around 1990 with Tin Machine and everything. The Pet Shop Boys remix that featured in the single release is below.



Originally, the song didn't include any direct references to Major Tom at all, but when the Pet Shop Boys remixed the single they added a line. After due consideration, Bowie agreed to leave in the new lyric in so long as Neil Tennant sang it.

NT: Ground to Major, bye bye Tom
DB: This chaos is killing me
NT: Dead the circuit, countdown's wrong
DB: This chaos is killing me
NT: Planet Earth, is control on?
DB: So sleepy now
NT: Do you wanna be free?
Don't you wanna be free?
D+N: Do you like girls or boys?
It's confusing these days
DB: But moondust will cover you
Cover you
D+N: So bye bye love
Yeah, bye bye love
Hallo spaceboy

Major Tom began his career as a brave astronaut venturing forth into the beyond, was later revealed to have a sordid secret life, and finally assigned an ambiguous sexual orientation. Major Tom's evolution has reflected the changing zeitgeist, from the era of easily ambitious and optimistic space travel that characterized the summer of '69 to the drug-fueled dissolution of so many of those easy optimists by the end of the 1970s to the conventional and entirely public voicing of sexual difference of the 1990s. (That last song is excessively binary, mind. "Or"?)

There's something funny about "Hallo Spaceboy," though. Bowie sings about Tom being covered by moondust, but on the selenologically dead Moon that would take hundreds of millions if not billions of years, while another line about how his "silhouette is stationary" suggests either Tom's extreme stillness or extreme distance. Maybe he hasn't come back, after all?

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.

The more that I think about it, the more that I'm certain that the 1861 US Civil War classic, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic, is one of my favourite songs. I first learned it in choir practice at L.M. Montgomery Elementary School, back when I was in Grade 5 and under the tutelage of Mrs. Gay. I love its rousing music, its lyrics' call to determined holy war against a pitiless enemy, its uplifting chorus. I say this as a citizen of a nation, I might mention, that probably formed only as a confluence of mostly Civil War-related factor: official sympathy for a Confederate secession that would weaken the Union, popular opposition to slavery, cross-border terrorist raids that the post-Civil War Union let bitter Irish-American wages against Britain's remaining North America possessions, et cetera. The ungovernability of the Province of Canada is probably the chief cause of Canadian unification that's internal to Canada.

It's still a powerful song for me. It might be my vestigial interest in Christianity post-secularization that attracts me to the language, it might be the knowledge of Confederate society under slavery that makes me think as well of the song aimed against the Confederacy as I do (and, incidentally, gives me one of several reasons not to take to Firefly), it might just be because it's a good song written for a good cause. Regardless, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" is grand.

The Eurythmics' 1983 song "Here Comes the Rain Again" is one of my favourite songs.



The original video, featuring Lennox wandering about a storm-swept Scottish isle, looking for someone, is here.

Wikipedia's quite right when it sways that "[t]he track is similar in musical style to past Eurythmics singles and its melancholy lyrics draw a comparison between the painful and tragic feelings of unrequited love with falling rain. Notably, the group adorned the recording with the composition and arrangement skills of Michael Kamen, resulting in more natural feel to the overall finished product (versus the heavily synthetic aesthetic of the Sweet Dreams album and its singles)." The music, all synthetic with tense strings, is great. The lyrics, as talktooloose suggested to me five years ago, rank among the Eurythmics' most sophisticated.

Here comes the rain again
Falling on my head like a memory
Falling on my head like a new emotion
I want to walk in the open wind
I want to talk like lovers do
I want to dive into your ocean
Is it raining with you

Too often, it was raining with me. Tall Penguin wrote recently about how, when she felt isolated growing up, elements of popular culture like books and music helped keep her going, helped her feel grounded. I understand that kind of thing entirely. Growing up on Prince Edward Island, too often I felt isolated and detached, trapped in a place far away from the metropolitan centres that generated the kind of cultured I desperately wanted to belong to, to take part in. The Eurythmics are one of the groups that helped me feel grounded, and "Here Comes the Rain Again” was one of the several songs I recognized off of their Greatest Hits album. Lennox’s voice and the taut songwriting were the sorts of things that grabbed me, that still grab me, and “Here Comes the Rain Again” remains one of the songs that continues to do it, just as much as it did when I spent a half-hour dissecting the songs in front of my Grade 12 English class.

The Sam the Record Man building on Yonge above Dundas, photographed by me here after its 2008 demise is no more, with only part of the word "Sam" visible on the site. Visible instead is the blue and gold of Ryerson University, set to expand its facilities west to Yonge.

The Eurythmics "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) is a song that defines an era, a transatlantic hit (#2 in the United Kingdom, #1 in the United States) that helped make a duo most notable for coming up with a cover of "I Only Want to Be With You" (in The Tourists) international stars, introducing the Lennox/Stewart songwriting pair and the strikingly androgynous and soulful-voiced Lennox to the world. The song's irresistible music has made it a favourite of samplers: among other artists, Pink used in a remix of her 2001 "Get the Party Started" and M.I.A. used in a mashup on her album Piracy Funds Terrorism

The striking official video is here, but an interesting promo video made before the official video is below.



Here's a live video of a performance of "Sweet Dreams" in the London club Heaven.



The significance of the Eurythmics for me lies in the fact that, after my embarrassing flirtations with Roxette and Ace of Base, I followed Annie Lennox from "No More 'I Love You's" to her work with Dave Stewart in their rather popular duo of the 1980s. When I got the Eurythmics' Greatest Hits album, "Sweet Dreams" was one of the songs, with "Here Comes the Rain Again" and "There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart," with "Sweet Dreams" and "Here Comes the Rain Again" being and remaining my favourites. Their music introduced me to synthpop and New Wave, and without their songs my listening tastes would be much different and probably more risible. "Who am I to disagree?"