War, Tragedy, and Country Music

Laura Cantrell has a new electronic-only “EP” out and it’s fantastic. I put the term EP in quotes because, while it is the term Laura has chosen to apply to this release, it is actually long enough, at 34+ minutes, to qualify as an album. I guess it’s not an album because it is all covers, and includes some tracks that have been floating around for a while.

But it is great, simple, stripped down country music, perfectly adapted to her evocative and understated voice. Three tracks are highlights, the kind of tunes you would have built mix-tapes around back in the day. The greatest of all is her version of New Order’s “Love Vigilantes.” Now, recording 80s hits in in the idiom of very different musical genres is no longer a revolutionary gesture, given that there is a band out there that does nothing but record 80s music in Bossa Nova form, but this one is a stunner. I remember lying on my bed and listening closely to the lyrics when the New Order single came out, and being totally caught up in the bizarre sentimental tragedy being described. The song’s narrator comes home from the war only to witness his wife receiving a telegram informing her of his death. The lyrics were extremely out of place in a 80s club dance track, to put it mildly.

Laura Cantrell performs another dizzying act of estrangement with the song, but she does so by appropriating it to a genre (country weeper) and to a historical moment (an endless, tragic war) for which the song makes perfect sense: “you just can’t believe the joy I did receive/ when I got my leave.” She has made an excellent choice in actually keeping close to the original rhythmic structure of the song (although the arrangement has transformed the pulsing beat from dancey to ballad time, the beat is still emphatic).

Coupled with her compilation cover of “Sam Stone,” Laura has now recorded two of the most interesting war-themed songs during the Iraq debacle, both notable for being narrated by very sympathetic soldiers.

The other absolutely killer tracks here are the title tune, a Burt Bachrach number that also sounds utterly at home as a country standard, so much so that listening to Laura sing it made me forget where it came from and I had to go look it up, and one of my very favorite Merle Haggard songs, the picture-perfect composition “Silver Wings,” about a lover flying away on an airplane, that manages to sound both ultra-country and ultra modern despite being composed in the mid 70s.

There are many other great moments on the EP too, these are just the ones that stand out the most. If you download it, make sure to go over to Laura’s website and throw in some of the great free covers she has made available there, such as her (in my mind definitive) version of Elvis Costello’s “Indoor Fireworks.”

to recap:

Trains and Boats and Planes EP at Emusic

More free DLs at Lauracantrell.com

And listen to “Love Vigilantes” and “Trains and Boats and Planes” at her Myspace

The Politics of Cheesesteak

These two pictures of the Dem candidates were on the front of my print copy of the NY Times today, despite the NY Times claiming to have printed a picture of HRC celebrating under a rain of confetti instead.

I find the pictures very interesting from the perspective of the semiotics of food. Although it is cropped out in the version of the HRC picture on the web, the words “On A Roll” clearly hover over her head in the print edition. Is this an example of the AP photog being “in the tank” and on message for Hil? She’s “on a roll” given her PA victory? Or is the implication, given the context, that she is lunchmeat? Most crucially, the salads and sandwiches mentioned on the awning above her are adorned with adjectives like “innovative.” Is she using the awning to claim that she is indeed the candidate of change?

This blog posting claims she’s in trouble because of the lack of evidence that she actually ate her cheesesteak. Indeed, for all we know, she actually has an innovative salad in that closed bag.

In contrast, Obama was photographed holding a visible sandwich, unwrapped and ready to eat, and he also had his Cheesesteak photo op set for Pat’s, the temple of the cheesesteak. But here’s the problem. He seems to be claiming gritty, urban authenticity with his “real” Pat’s in his own hand, as opposed to HRC’s random suburban cheesesteak, purchased at an inauthentic cheesesteak shop which even serves salads!! However, I think that rather than connecting Obama with the “lunchpail” crowd as it might seem to, Obama’s overly obvious bid for authenticity via Pat’s could backfire. After all, who makes a bigger deal out of “authentic” urban food like Pat’s than chowhounds… And who is more likely to be a chowhound than the kind of urban, latte-sippin’, college teachin’, elitist snobs who write blogs and are already totally on the Obama bandwagon??? He needs to dissociate himself from people like that, not embrace their values. After all, there is a picture of Kerry actually biting a cheesesteak floating around the web. How well did that work out? Plus why is Obama looking up like that? Is he ruining the meaty goodness of having a cheesesteak in his hand with another easily mockable messiah moment?

Bitter Midwesterners for Obama

My pal at Moonraking is embracing the bitterness, so I am joining his movement… Depending on which part of the “bitter” remarks you hear, Obama either sounds like a condescending jerk (“they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations,”) or, with others (“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them…And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not“), like he is just giving a savvy summary and update of one of my favorite recent books on US politics, What’s the Matter with Kansas.

It is interesting, if unsurprising, even in his own terms, to see a version of Thomas Frank’s economic populism–one that has been consistently a part of Obama’s message–reframed as elitist condescension due to the phrasing Obama chose. But it was also heartening to hear the crowd behind Hilary in the audio clip on NPR this morning reacting negatively as she tried to make hay out of this. Maybe it will help Obama in the end by finally getting us past the Rev. Wright BS, and giving him a chance to emphasize the ways he wants to reach out to the justifiably embittered.

Of course, the “worst” part of what he’s saying is actually a central part of his campaign and his appeal, and something that was praised as brave and insightful in his “race” speech: ie, that the divisions that keep the country split apart are a distraction from our real issues, and that we can have hope to get past those divisions if we can instead focus on coming together to address the real problems. (In the race speech, he was praised for bravely acknowledging the that economic and social pressure on the white working class can produce anger at blacks and immigrants.)

Of course, I am clearly both bitter and a member of the liberal elite…

PS: After posting this I followed some links through and found that Talking Point Memo had put up a clip from a 2004 interview with Charlie Rose exploring the same issues… And Charlie even brings up What’s the Matter With Kansas.