This weekend, my review of La Toya Jackson's second memoir, Starting Over, ran in The Daily. I didn't write the headline, so at first I freaked out a little, since much of the book is about her trying to correct misconceptions about her mistakes of the past. But then I thought about it and it's ultimately true: she's not sorry. She voices regret and points a lot of fingers (only on rare occasions at herself), but the weird thing is that she is unapologetic. I don't think she should be (there's nothing wrong with Playboy!), but she acts like she should be? She's pulling a Linda Lovelace and it's weird. I really didn't like Linda Lovelace (her memoir is such a crock of shit!) and I don't want to not like La Toya!
Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed Starting Over for many of the same reasons that I loved her first book. La Toya Jackson is adorably clueless. There's no recognition, for example, that we have no reason to trust her after she basically admits to deceiving us in her first book (Jack Gordon, her dead scumbag of an ex-husband, was the guiding hand behind the salacious allegations against her family members, supposedly). Who's to say that in 20 years' time, she won't come out with another book that said that Jeffré Phillips and his overemphasized syllable didn't force her to fabricate much of Starting Over?
Anyway, all of the abuse stuff aside (which is awful and harrowing if not gratuitous, as it stretches on for about 150 pages), Starting Over is fun and funny! I recommend it! Just a few more points/lines that I couldn't fit into my review, but still think are worth another chuckle:
As a followup to yesterday's Whitney Houston pride post, here's some vintage raw interview footage of Bobby and Whitney on one of his birthdays. As far as I know, this footage has never before been shown in its entirety. As far as the content goes, they are so flippant and aggressive! Not to mention passionate about black history! It's easy to look at this stuff and think, "Path to destruction," if in fact you feel these people are now destroyed, but I love how spontaneous and devil-may-care-about-media-training they are. They didn't need anyone but themselves to make an interview work. How many celebrities can you say that about today?
The other night, while watching Deniece Williams' Unsung episode, I started tweeting shots from it, and then all of a sudden there were way too many to tweet so I'm putting them in a post. Don't get me wrong, I love Niecy -- if having a good voice qualifies a person as brilliant, she is a genius. Also, there was recent footage of her falling offstage and then getting back up and performing! What a pro! However, the woman's eye makeup and nails alone could have made her a legend. Un. Real. And seeing it in HD only emphasized that. She was made for 1080p; clearly ahead of her time.
You can click on all of these (except the gif) to make them bigger. You'll probably want to do that:
I recently unearthed some old tapes (and by "some," I mean "hundreds")...and now you have to pay! Kidding. Ignore this all you want. In this post are very specific relics from a very specific childhood: six mixes worth of songs taped off the radio. My obsessive media gathering began as soon as we got a VCR and hasn't really changed since -- I burn shows obsessively in the event that they'll somehow cease existing (not everything goes to iTunes, I'll have you know!). Music's a different story, though -- thank god I no longer have to rely on timing to have in my possession new songs that I may or may not want to listen to recorded until they're officially released! The medium contained in this post is officially extinct.
As opposed to whole listening experiences, these tapes mostly represent cataloging -- I recorded many of these songs as I heard them for the first time, and given the obscurity of much of this junky, poppy house stuff, it was also the last time. I was completely justified in my paranoia of never hearing this stuff again with good reason: not much of it was worth hearing again.
But still, I listen to this stuff and I'm mesmerized -- being exposed to this much dance music as a 14- and 15-year-old kid certainly shaped my current listening. The comparably small proportion of hip-hop I apparently listened to from 1992 to 1993 (when these were made) has remained pretty much constant. That said, when listening to these tapes again after almost 20 years, what hit me the hardest was hearing Grand Puba's "360 Degrees (What Goes Around)" (on Radio 8) -- hearing that joyous, tactile hip-hop coming off tape felt like home to me.
I was also clearly obsessed with Janet Jackson and Luther Vandross' "The Best Things in Life Are Free" (it pops up no fewer than three times), as well as the weekly countdown American Dance Tracks, hosted by the excruciating Downtown Julie Brown (stick around for a bit and you'll hear her assert that she was "gettin' down" with every single artist on her weekly lists). That countdown was particularly great because it allowed me to finally hear so much of the stuff that I'd read the names of when I'd scan the Billboard dance charts (which I would do whenever I could, though I remember as a child only rarely being able to swing the $6 per issue that Billboard charged).
It's funny how much this stuff seemed to matter then and how little it matters now. This used to be my playground, truly.
(Added bonus: My voice can be heard on a few of these, mostly calling in with hot-or-not type of votes for new songs. This happens immediately after the first song on Radio 4.)
While watching Janet Jackson perform this weekend in Atlantic City's Borgata Event Center -- a venue less than 60 miles away from but over six times smaller than that in which I first saw her in Philadelphia 17 years ago -- it struck me how much this woman has in common with Pee-wee Herman. Both were famously exposed and immediately shunned, their public careers yanked out from under them (though Paul Reubens faded into obscurity seemingly without struggle; Jan wouldn't go down without three failed albums worth of fight). Janet's most recent attempt at recorded relevance, 2008's Discipline, staggered down a hall of sounds already perfected by her contemporaries to the extent that it was the musical equivalent of, "I know you are, but what am I?" (The question in this case was earnest, not a taunt.) And, in the past year, both Janet and Pee-wee returned to the stage, in venues smaller than those that held these performers' previous glory but that radiate enough audience appreciation to make the size difference feel negligible.
Both The Pee-wee Herman Show revival and Janet's Number Ones: Up Close and Personal are angled on nostalgia, and that is enough to carry them. In my informal survey of the presentation of The Pee-wee Herman Show that aired two weekends ago on HBO, a third of the audience's audible responses came as a result of a simple reference that either that materialized in physical form (Miss Yvonne, Pterry, Penny, the foil ball) or expression ("I'm a rebel!"). Though there were plenty situational attempts at humor (some hit, many miss), I got the feeling that the show would be plenty satisfying to a large part of the population even if there were no real jokes to be had (and still many of the jokes were based on references themselves, like "If you love her so much, why don't you marry her?").
The rapturous response Janet received in Atlantic City almost always resulted from a reference -- the show is just a string of them, really. Janet's trek is no mere hits tour, but a No. 1's tour -- it is a testament to the former enormity of her success that she's able to construct an entire setlist out of songs that hit No. 1 on at least one Billboard chart (the one exception is "Nothing," which sounds like its title -- it's a bit of pseudo-emotional musical stasis that fittingly scored Tyler Perry's Why Did I Get Married, Too?). The show is a concentrated presentation of Janet's former glory, with hit interrupting hit in breathless medleys that pack about 30 songs into under 90 minutes. Janet trots out the iconic dance moves that accompanied many of them in their videos, and even adheres to her Rhythm Nation 1814-era sense of monochrome. In the first half of the show, she dons a camel-toe defying liquid-shiny one-piece that's part Flash Gordon, part Catwoman. She is dressed to look like she's presenting the past from the future. I can't imagine more appropriate attire.
During her show, Janet leaves the stage several times, and the self-tribute kicks into overdrive. We see a montage of her acting through the years (including a scene from Good Times depicting Penny's abuse, which is really not the best look for a celebratory gathering) and one of pictures spanning Janet's eras. A third time she leaves behind no visual, but a particularly heavy full-band rendition of The Velvet Rope's abuse anthem "What About?" Given the show's brevity, the amount of time Janet spends off stage is strange as it conflicts with her work-horse aesthetic. Hardly blessed with a virtuoso voice but famously thrust into the spotlight regardless, Janet's always made up for her shortcomings with palpable, thrilling effort. Her meek pipes have held their own amongst the clatter of Jam & Lewis' drum machines and samples and steam-letting and giant ideas (about love, society and the self), a sonic flower pushing through a dissonant asphalt. The amount of breaks and the length of them betray everything we've understood about Janet's devotion up to this point. Perhaps she is slowing down -- age seems not to have taken any toll on her physical appearance and it must manifest itself somewhere. Perhaps they are a new way of her asserting herself ("You'll wait for me, when I say so"). After all, it would fall in line with Janet's polite persona that her diva moments occurred out of the public eye.
This is all a minor point ultimately because when Janet is onstage, she owns it as she has for the past 25 years. She not only pulls off self-tribute, she does it with such grace it feels only appropriate. What makes Janet Jackson's current career downturn so frustrating is its redundancy -- her paradoxical shyness, her muttering singing style, her publicly admitted abuse and depression make her an underdog before the public even gets a chance to cast its vote. And because of all these fragile traits she brings to the fold, she is the perfect superstar: asserting her ego (i.e. what superstars do and what we end up hating them for) feels like a triumph for Janet. Nobody truly deserves to be a superstar, but when a prematurely discarded celebrity like Janet or Pee-wee can come back doing exactly what made us love them in the first place, it feels like good karma. It also suggests that whoever said you can't live in the past was a quitter.
Any negative treatment of a person of color is worth examining for racism. Ignore history if you like, but without perpetuating itself, the status quo would not exist. Regarding it warily, and giving minorities the benefit of the doubt represents the bare minimum of human decency.
And so, it's reasonable to momentarily wonder if Chris Brown's lingering reputation as a not-so-nice guy has anything to do with the fact that he's also a black guy. If his Rihanna-bashing were an isolated incident in an otherwise spotless track record then, it might be easier to make that case. But what I said about Brown a year and a half ago holds true: he's a hard person to like. This is based entirely on his behavior -- at this point, the only color the guy could be to improve his public profile is invisible. His charmlessness spans his earliest public address of the assault, in which he seemed more focused on how it might impact his career than in expressing accountability, to a recent one when he referred to it as a "mishap" (like the kind explained away with a chain that says, "Oops!"?). In between, there's been whining about a judge's orders to stay away from Rihanna and the possibility of him becoming, gulp, a "mixtape artist." There was an incident in which he mocked Raz B's alleged sexual abuse on Twitter by calling him a "dick in da booty ass lil boy," and then, when his fans took exception, he offered, "I'm not homophobic! He's just disrespectful!!!" Bigotry, after all, is about entitlement.
People have pointed out that the public seems to be picking favorites in our pool of celebrity women-beaters -- Charlie Sheen is the go-to guy for illustrating the perceived racial underpinnings in anti-Brown sentiment. In Anna Holmes' great New York Times op-ed, "The Disposable Woman" (which I otherwise agree with), she wrote, "The privilege afforded wealthy white men like Charlie Sheen may not be a particularly new point, but it’s an important one nonetheless. Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears are endlessly derided for their extracurricular meltdowns and lack of professionalism on set; the R&B star Chris Brown was made a veritable pariah after beating up his equally, if not more, famous girlfriend, the singer Rihanna. Their careers have all suffered, and understandably so." Perhaps a Times reader himself, Brown echoed the sentiment today, when after his window-smashing tantrum at Good Morning America, he tweeted: "I'm so over people bringing this past shit up!!! Yet we praise Charlie sheen and other celebs for there bullshit." If you read this as a plea for fairness, Brown's words sound like those of a child who can't wrap his head around the fact that not everyone wants to celebrate his feces like his mommy does.
The thing is that very few are praising Charlie Sheen for his "bullshit" (which I assume refers to his extensive history of abuse). As Holmes point out, what people have actually done is overlook it. A big reason for that is that Sheen has made it easy to overlook. His performance art is fascinating in itself. Sheen's media-mastery is savant-like and his way with words is diabolical. Chris Brown, a professional writer if you believe his albums' credits, would be lucky in his entire career to stumble once on something as absurdly clever as the shit that just rolls off Sheen's tongue (unlike Sheen, I get the feeling that Brown's boogers and brain are the same age). And that is to say nothing of the fact that the women who Sheen has been accused of brutalizing are not nearly as publicly beloved as Rihanna. Everyone deserves to live a life free of abuse equally, but the fact of the matter is that if you hurt a superstar, you can expect super-sized backlash.
Not that super-sized backlash is what Brown has received. Yes, his sales took a slight, momentary hit. Yes, he has his detractors, but he also has a legion of loyal fans who unleash questionable grammar and vague Biblical references the minute anyone intimates Brown's feces are less than praiseworthy. In the past year, he's had three Top 20 hits on the Billboard 100, and three Top 5 hits on Billboard's R&B chart (including the No. 1 "Deuces"). It would not be surprising if he sold out a tour the size of Sheen's upcoming one (after all, Sheen isn't filling stadiums but theaters). Given the consistent mediocrity of Brown's output and thinness of his voice, the guy is doing fine. His job provides him with an obscene amount of money and the ability to do what he says he loves on a national stage. His work in his other medium of choice, the outburst, regularly gets national coverage, too. If attention is the bottom line or at least close to it, being praised for his bullshit is exactly what Brown is experiencing. If that isn't winning, I don't know what is.
God, what a shitty year it's been for pop music so far! Even stuff that's caught my attention long enough to make my brain move has felt underwhelming -- divorced from the context of their superstar singers, I doubt "Hold It Against Me" or even "Born This Way" would have inspired me to write about them. The only pop album I've reviewed all year has been Adele's 21, which: BORING. Nice, pleasant, mom-pandering, sung exquisitely, very promising -- all yeses. It itself? Mild enough to lull me into a coma. (I, however, challenge 2011 to deliver me a more satisfyingly miserable dose of pop wallowing than "Someone Like You." The BBC's Ian Wade calls it a "future standard," which sounds about right. I also challenge Adele to deliver a live performance as moving as the album version -- the chafed strain on her voice in the chorus is what that song is all about. I understand going there live is risky, but the payoff would be immense.)
But things are looking up. Chris Brown's F.A.M.E. just leaked, for one thing (haha, just kidding - the only thing worse than Chris Brown the person is Chris Brown the "artist"). Updated: Come to think of it, it's a draw as to whether I hate his music or his persona more. I'll give him that he's consistent, though.). Sky Ferreira's As If EP does a lot to justify the heretofore puzzling hype surrounding this girl (mytweets about "99 Tears" don't even do my obsession justice). On the dancier side of things, the just-leaked Holy Ghost and Wolfram albums have me hooked in a way that nothing has so far: I actually look forward to listening to them repeatedly. That's pathetic, but at least I have love in my life again.
There have been a few bright spots in the form of individual tracks. Some stuff that didn't make me question my life path is embedded below...
"The word normal was never used to describe me," Janet Jackson claims in her new...erm, nonfiction book, True You. Perhaps this is true, but True You should cause at least a few to label her boring and pointless. If no one has yet, I'm happy to be the first. I had no idea what True You was before I read it, and after reading it, I still have no idea what it is.
Lauryn Hill is weird, but she isn't crackhead weird. She's more Beyond the Valley of the Dolls party scene weird. At least, that's how she struck me when she stepped on the stage Tuesday night at New York's Highline Ballroom. It was a make-up show for a date that was canceled at the end of December, thanks to the (first) Snowpocalypse. Doors were at 8; Ms. Lauryn Hill (that's how she's billed everywhere -- tickets, marquees, posted notes around the venue -- as if we needed pre-show warning of her eccentricity!) was set to take the stage at 11. The Highline, or maybe Lauryn's people, or maybe Lauryn herself, or maybe everyone working together to get through this thing called life has realized a thing or two since she embarked on this career-reminding tour (it could be called the Might as Well Do Something With This Talent of Mine Show). Namely, what's clear is that homegirl is preternaturally late. She's spent more time the past two decades not releasing records -- she was active for seven years beginning with the Fugees' Blunted on Reality in 1994 (fine, eight years beginning with the Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit soundtrack in 1993). It's been almost 10 years since Unplugged No. 2.0. For a moment on Tuesday night, it felt like we'd wait another eternity to see her again -- 45 minutes after she was supposed to hit the stage, her DJ announced that she was feeling under the weather and would be later than she already was. What did that mean? 12:30? 1? 2? Never? Would she seriously make us come out with a winter storm brewing for nothing? Assessing the moment and stops and starts and teasing and mess of her career of the past 10 years, all I could think was: this woman is such a pain in the ass.
But that all melted away (like I wish the snow that's vandalizing our city all year would) when she finally joined the stage at the merciful hour of 12:10, rolling and bopping her head, taking weird, tiny steps as if walking through a wading pool of mayonnaise. (Mayonnaise!) Her thrift-store mannequin chic found her in a muumuu, with neck, arms and fingers full of gaudy jewelery. "New York! New York! New York! New York! New York!...New York, New York!...New York City! New York Citay! New York City, I said! I said, New York Cit-tay!" were her first words to us. Immediately, she reminded me of Whitney Houston right before the Just Whitney era (hits included "Crack is wack!" and the Wendy Williams interview). Fantastic, I thought. It's not that I wish devastating, career-sucking addiction on anyone, I just like character. Flamboyance. Unpredictability.Skittishness as performance art.
And that, with some help of what appeared to be a coked-up bravado (she barely took a break from dabbing herself with a towel), is what Ms. Lauryn Hill delivered. Multiple times throughout the two or so hours she was on stage, I thought to myself, "If this weren't what it is, it could be so boring." Imagine Lauryn bringing her drum machine to rehash past hits in a perfect voice. Imagine if she were a Stepford pop star who was simply too busy cleaning and straightening pillows for the past 10 years and simply lost track of time. Imagine Unplugged 3.0. The alternative she offered -- a giant band that included at least two keyboard players, multiple guitarists, three back-up singers, a drummer and a DJ -- was so much more thrilling. She acknowledged her "raspy" voice ("But that’s OK. We’re gonna do it anyway, you understand?") through a 10-or-so song, stretched out journey that found her performing radically altered renditions of her solo and Fugees hits. "I've been doing these same songs forever. We gotta keep it interesting. I don't want to come up here and be phony for you. I wanna come up here and feel it, you understand?" she told the crowd on these new arrangements. She said it defiantly but it wasn't clear if it was in response to audience complaining. I can't imagine anyone in the room having the balls to stand up to this woman, really. She was too unhinged, and so was her show.
This was no well-oiled machine before us -- Lauryn regularly directed her band, the sound guy, the lighting guy and the audience throughout. After all, why sound check before when you can just integrate it into the show? It was hard to tell if the scowl that accompanied her directions was one of anger or concentration -- either way, I cannot imagine that her band is anything but scared shitless of this woman. She was as much a conductor (at times wildly failing her arms and body to bring out sound) as she was a singer and rapper that night, and she displayed a tendency to repeat directions as though they were chants to a power higher than the mere mortals she shared space with ("Builditupbuilditupbuilditup!"). That repetition was something of a musical aesthetic, too, as she'd spiral into tangents for minutes on end. The repeated ad-libs of "When It Hurts So Bad" ("I just stayed a little too long," "I gave too much of me," "If you just let it...") lasted seven or so minutes -- way longer than the structured song that came before them. She ran through a particularly hard, thrashy cover of "Ex-Factor," only to play the song again immediately in its entirety, but in a slightly less thrashy arrangement. The entire suite lasted about 25 minutes. "OK. I like 'Ex-Factor,'" I thought. I certainly wasn't arguing. She did her "How Many Mics" two times in a row -- lest you even thought of going there, she was making you think twice, mon frère.
It's impossible to imagine how crippling megastardom is unless you've experienced it, but very soon after The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill won the hearts of the globe's entire English-speaking population, Lauryn voiced her displeasure with her industry and the very concept of fame. I got the impression that she felt like an outsider who'd magically slipped inside. I interpreted her frequent repetition onstage as her negotiation of herself within pop music's constraints (loops and choruses and the like). After all, unpredictability within repetition is a pretty amazing trick to pull off. And she did and it was singular and captivating.
My only complaint is in response to her music's tendency to rev into high gear to stress fraught emotion. Not only was I less than jazzed about being presented what was essentially a rock show, Lauryn comes from the soul tradition and should show that it was her job to interpret her songs -- it is not her songs' job to interpret her. There's thinking out of the box, and then there's abandoning your essence. Luckily, Lauryn's messy humanity, weathered voice and all-around imperfection was there to remind us not only that she still has plenty of soul, but that for the past 10 years, this woman has been living.
The video above focuses on her often-hilarious between-song banter, so I'm including some music below (namely, "Ready or Not," which has an ad-libbed section about her finding her audience again and us finding her that's moving despite how manipulative it was intended to be, and "Killing Me Softly," to give you a sense of her voice and how different these arrangements are). I haven't been keeping up with YouTubes of her recent performances since I wanted to keep it all a surprise for when I finally attended this show, but my new Zoom cam's mics are made for concert recording, and I doubt you'll find a better-sounding audience video of Ms. Lauryn on all of the Internet.)
For the next several days, I'll be touching on stuff that happened and/or was released last year that I never got around to writing about. We all need ways to make our year-to-year transition easier -- this is mine.
Everything you need to know about my love of Beyoncé can be explained in the following gif:
OK? Stop reading this post now, because it gets no better than that, obviously. In fact, stop reading this blog now for the exact same reason.
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