Cool Sounds

The weather outside is frightful—“bone-chilling,” as the saying goes, in order to suggest, I suppose, the coldness of the grave. Hence, given the bitterly cold weather, it seems entirely appropriate to ponder the ecology of ice. As Eric G. Wilson has shown (The Spiritual History of Ice), at the turn of the nineteenth century, ice became auratic—it was endowed with aura, or believed to have magical or perhaps holy (spiritual) qualities—frozen shapes were not, in fact, dead, “but bearers of vital powers.” Wilson argues crystals, glaciers, and the poles were seen “as revelations of life as well as models of poetic composition” (or perhaps, re-composition). Indeed, ice came to embody scientific, psychological, and even occult insights. Jungian scholar and psychologist M. L. von Franz, in Man and His Symbols observed:

In many dreams the nuclear center, the Self, also appears as a crystal. The mathematically precise arrangement of a crystal evokes in us the intuitive feeling that even in so-called “dead” matter, there is a spiritual ordering principle. Thus the crystal often symbolically stands for the union of extreme opposites—of matter and spirit. Ice still carries that symbolic power, linking matter and spirit.

Yet the dreaded image of the so-called “ice princess,” alluring and beautiful, but emotionally (or spiritually) dead, has captured the modern imagination. Flattened expressive affect, or emotional “distance” (as opposed to proximity or closeness as authenticity), became metaphorically imagined as both blue and cold, as in Hank Williams’ country-blues standard, “Cold, Cold Heart.” Some say the world will end in fire, and some say ice (both used as spiritual emblems, incidentally), but I think the singers of the following songs say ice.

An Ice Cold 12-Pack Of Tunes:

AC/DC – Black Ice
Pat Benatar – Fire And Ice
Albert Collins – Icy Blue
Duran Duran – Silent Icy River
Foreigner – Cold As Ice
John Hiatt – Icy Blue Heart
Jefferson Airplane – Ice Age
Joy Division – Ice Age
Gucci Mane – Icy
Sarah McLachlan – Ice
Pink Floyd – The Thin Ice
Vanilla Ice – Ice Ice Baby

Thoughts On Year Two

Yesterday represented the second anniversary of 60x50. As of yesterday, I have posted 395 entries on this blog, which averages out to about one post every forty-two hours over the past two years—or one every other day for the past two years. The number of posts this past year was down from the first, which I’d predicted in my reflections on year one at this time last year. I realized that I could not continue to blog at the same pace. The first year I managed to write 219 posts, while this past year I posted 174 entries—down 45 posts from the year before. That may seem like a substantial decline, until you do the math—on average, down fewer than four posts a month. As I have stated before, the research component for many of my posts is extensive, although I don’t mind doing it, and while I hope readers have found my research valuable, I have done it “for free.” But that’s fine, because I’ve taught myself something, and that’s the whole point of blogging in the first place, at least for me—to learn something I didn’t know.

Therefore, the task I set for myself with 60x50 (you can read the full explanation on the right)—to find a process that will bring about new things I would not have thought of if I had not started to say them—has, for the most part, been successful. I have discovered things by writing on this blog, things I would not have learned had I not imposed this writing requirement upon myself. All in all the experience has been a positive one. I’ve also found it interesting, for instance, to learn which of my posts has received the most hits over the past year—the entry on Gram Parsons’ Nudie suit. I never would have predicted that, but that’s one of the interesting things you learn by maintaining a blog. The post titled When the Whip Comes Down, prompted by some thoughts I had on re-watching Elvis’s Jailhouse Rock (the whipping scene, obviously), has also done quite well (posted December 2008, however, not in 2009). Interestingly, there is a high number of web searches on the subject of “whipping scenes in movies,” for reasons I cannot imagine. Perhaps more surprising is the fact that the post in which I discussed the meaning of “the great speckled bird” has also received a rather significant number of hits.

The downside, of course, is the amount of work this blog requires, but I’m repurposing it for the next few months so as to have it function in a new, and I think better, way for me. I’m going to incorporate my blog as part of a class I’m teaching this spring on “electronic literacy.” One of the requirements of the class is for the students to start up a blog (which they may take down at the end of the semester) not only in order to experience writing in an electronic environment, but also to require them to flex their writing muscle more than they may do normally. Therefore, once in awhile my posts may seem focused on narrowly academic issues or questions, but that doesn’t mean I’m giving up my usual ruminations on the subject of popular music. In fact, I’m teaching my “Writing About Popular Music” course again this spring, so some topics may pop up as a consequence of teaching that course as well. Students will be free to visit my blog to learn my thoughts on various subjects related to class discussions, in addition to the Blackboard discussion board I will also moderate. Hence I’m going to make this blog work for me in a way that it hasn’t done the past couple of years, making it a part of my teaching duties rather than an “outside” activity that seems disconnected from them. I do hope that returning readers continue to find my blog as engaging as ever, but a consequence of this slight change in purpose may change occasionally the nature of the posts, at least for the next four months.

Devil’s Dictionary of Pop I

A short list of caustic aphorisms inspired by Ambrose Bierce (pictured), who wrote the first Devil’s Dictionary (1911).

British Invasion: Sound bite, descriptive of a marketing phenomenon as much as an actual movement.

Acid Rock: Sound bite, once (mistakenly) used to refer to any song that referred to drugs; no longer an especially useful collocation, for which we can be thankful.

Bubblegum: Psychedelic rock with its objectionable (drug) elements removed; the contemporary equivalent of a fat-free product.

Groovy: Antiquated term for anything about which the speaker expressed approbation; now déclassé, for which we can be thankful.

Rock Festival: Once the name for the logistical nightmare of holding a sock hop outdoors. Legendary for the wasteful expenditure of non-renewable natural resources, now highly impractical.

Schlock Rock: Any rock music that is considered “trash,” as long as one understands there is worthwhile or valuable schlock, and actual schlock.

Jam Session: Another name for noodling, meaning to play without purpose or direction. Intoxicants are essential.

Space Rock: See Schlock Rock.

Country Rock: Dismissed by the late Gram Parsons as “plastic dry-fuck.” See also Schlock Rock.

45: Antiquated music storage technology in the form a vinyl record 7” in diameter, typically with a song on each side. Now repurposed as coasters.

Blue Moon

Roughly every four weeks, or about every twenty-eight days, a full moon rises, which normally means there are twelve full moons a year. But last month, there was a full moon on December 2—and another last night, on December 31. The second full moon in the same month is conventionally referred to as a “blue moon,” the source of the expression, “Once in a blue moon.” Since a blue moon occurs only every two to three years, there are therefore only forty or so blue moons in any given century. It also means that the year that features a blue moon has thirteen moons, as did 2009, for instance. Has the association of the number thirteen with the blue moon led to the popular superstition that a blue moon is a sign of bad luck, or at least some sort of misfortune?

Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” released by Columbia Records in 1947, is a conventional country (hillbilly) ballad that speaks of the sorrow of heartbreak:

Blue moon of Kentucky, keep on shining,

Shine on the one that’s gone and proved untrue.

Blue moon of Kentucky, keep on shining,

Shine on the one that’s gone and left me blue.

It was on a moonlight night, the stars were shining bright,

And they whispered from on high, your love had said goodbye.

Blue moon of Kentucky, keep on shining,

Shine on the one that’s gone and said goodbye.

As is clear, the song isn’t about a blue moon in the conventional sense—rather, it puns on the conventional meaning of a blue moon—but is an instance of the so-called pathetic fallacy, the description of inanimate natural objects in a manner that attributes to them human emotions, sensations, and feelings. John Ruskin coined the term “pathetic fallacy,” and used as an example of it the lines from Kingsley’s Alton Locke:

They rowed her in across the rolling foam —

The cruel, crawling foam.

George P. Landow explains:

According to Ruskin, grief has so affected this speaker’s mind, so distorted his vision of the world, that he attributes to the foam the characteristics of a living being. In so doing he tells us more about his state of mind, his interior world, than he does about the world which exists outside his mind, and it is this psychological truth that moves and delights the reader. The distorted version of reality does not itself please us, but we can ignore it, for “so long as we see that the feeling is true, we pardon, or are even pleased by, the confessed fallacy of sight which it induces: we are pleased, for instance, with those lines of Kingsley’s above quoted, not because they fallaciously describe foam, but because they faithfully describe sorrow.”

But when Elvis got hold of the song, he read it aberrantly, no longer as a ballad. He transformed “Blue Moon of Kentucky” into a song, not of loss, but of love regained. In the process, he also invented rockabilly, which, as Michael Jarrett observes, “was to country music as bebop was to swing.” For rockabilly “signaled a paradigm shift: not harmony and melody, but rhythm and sound—echo from a twangy guitar, slapped bass, pounding piano, or a dixie-fried voice—became the raison d'être of popular music” (Sound Tracks, p. 162).

What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?

So asks the singer of this venerable Frank Loesser tune, covered many times over the years, but first recorded by Kay Kyser and His Orchestra in 1947. Issued toward the end of Kyser's career and at the beginning of the bebop era, it has a characteristically fine vocal by Harry Babbitt, backed by The Campus Kids (consisting of, at the time, I believe, by Gloria Wood, Loulie Jean Norman, Diane Pendleton, Charlie Parlato, and Jud Conlon). Sweet, romantic, and old-fashioned, the song was issued at the end of the Swing Era, which would be all but snuffed out by the recording ban that began early in 1948 and lasted for almost a year.

Incidentally, Gloria Wood, one of “The Campus Kids” backing group on this recording, achieved fame by going on to record many classic jingles for TV commercials, among them the jingles for “Chicken of the Sea” and “Rice-a-Roni, the San Francisco Treat” commercials. Covered many times by many different artists, I was unable to find Kyser’s recording of “What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?” on the web, but it is available as a download on iTunes and at Amazon.com.

So what are you doing New Year’s Eve?

Cat People

There is a famous quotation attributed to Albert Schweitzer, “There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.” If you have to ask what Schweitzer means, to lift a phrase from Louis Armstrong, you’ll never know. At the conclusion of his Tristes Tropiques, Claude Levi-Strauss speaks of the human experience of nature, referring to “the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity, and spiritual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one sometimes exchanges with a cat.” If only one could approach the vicissitudes of life with the calmness and serenity of a cat.

While it is not precisely clear when the word “cat” began to used to refer to another person, most certainly it emerged from American jazz culture. Bob Yurochko observes:

Another phenomenon that rose from bebop [in the 1940s] was a new language or slang used by musicians called “bop talk.” Musicians communicated with each other with words like “hip,” “cool,” “man,” “cat,” or “dig” to form their own lexicon, which became part of the jazz musician’s heritage. Boppers became so aloof that many of their social and musical antics were largely exaggerated, finding much disfavor elsewhere in musical circles. (A Short History of Jazz 103)

To be fair, many of these words were probably invented or perhaps popularized by Louis Armstrong, as Gary Giddens observes in his book Satchmo. To call someone a “cool cat” became a statement of approbation. (Incidentally, a “hepcat,” in Forties bebop culture, was any person who admired, or perhaps played, jazz and swing.) Robert S. Gold calls the word “cool” the “most protean of jazz slang terms” and meant, among other things, “convenient . . . off dope . . . on dope, comfortable, respectable, perceptive, shrewd—virtually anything favorably regarded by the speaker” (A Jazz Lexicon, 65). Since the word “cat” was so strongly associated with jazz culture, as well as the expression “cool cats,” there developed, in comics and cartoons, the practice of using anthropomorphized cats as symbols of jazz musicians. Bob Clampett’s cartoon “Tin Pan Alley Cats” (1943), for instance, features a caricature of jazz musician Fats Waller as a cat – see a discussion of the cartoon here.

Hence it follows that not every song about a cat (or kitten, or pussycat) is really about a cat of the feline sort.

Some Cat (As Opposed To Scat) Tunes:

The Beatles – Leave My Kitten Alone
Bent Fabric [Bent Fabricius-Bjerre] and His Piano – Alley Cat
David Bowie – Cat People (Putting Out Fire)
Harry Chapin – Cat’s in the Cradle
Petula Clark – The Cat in the Window (The Bird in the Sky)
The Coasters – Three Cool Cats
Elton John – Honky Cat
The Grateful Dead – China Cat Sunflower
Tom Jones – What’s New Pussycat?
The Kinks – Phenomenal Cat
The Lovin’ Spoonful – Nashville Cats
Ted Nugent – Cat Scratch Fever
The Rolling Stones – Stray Cat Blues
Al Stewart – Year of the Cat
The Stray Cats – Stray Cat Strut
Norma Tanega – Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog