By the way, I like Tortured Poets Department. Late night pop. Swift is a clever lyricist. She knows how to make the most out of telling concrete details; she had to be a hit with her English teachers. I'm exhausted by her romantic travails but I'm an old crank. But not so cranky that I'm unmoved by a sentimental fool with so much resilient strength. Swift gives every bittersweet note a melodic turn, ringing clear as a bell with hope and grit and all heart. Plus she's a pop superstar that recognizes right from wrong. Extra bonus!
Still don't believe me? You think I'm just shilling for her endorsement? Try this one.
She's big and kind of wonderful, no? That bit where she runs out, more like skips out onstage with her guitar from backstage. It's just a few moments, and flickers by. From the dark of backstage she skips with her guitar through a doorway into the the bright lights of her huge stage like an Orson Welles shot, a singularly iconic personification of Elvis and Madonna and going on a century of live rock & roll hitting the stage. Love that and the whole thing, really. "I Can Do It With A Broken Heart." Faking it until you make it. She makes her story anthemic and fun. She's an independent working woman, like a Mary Tyler Moore for the 21st century, making pop songs for the broken hearted in all of us.
The shocking rise of solar is reshaping the energy landscape
“I simply cannot believe where we are with solar,” says Jenny Chase, the BloombergNEF analyst and quite possibly the person in the world who knows the most about the business of turning the light of the sun into electricity. “And if you’d told me nearly 20 years ago what would be the case now, 20 years later,” she continues, “I would have just said you were crazy. I would have laughed in your face. There is genuinely a revolution happening.” By just 2030, Chase estimates, solar power will be absolutely and reliably free during the sunny parts of the day for much of the year “pretty much everywhere.”
The expert on turning solar into electricity thought free solar was crazy 20 years ago and I could swear people were still complaining only 10-15 years ago that solar would never be cheap enough to compete with natural gas or whatever fossil fuel. So what I want to know is how the experts got this so wrong? Not so much so as to have someone to blame but maybe their skepticism reflects some old ways of thinking, free market ideology, innovation must come only from private investment based on market demand, stuff like that, that we ought to be rethinking sooner rather than later? Maybe with some common sense "Industrial Policy" 20 years ago we might already have free solar power? As for 'What Will We Do With Our Free Power?' Well, if we leave its production and distribution entirely up to private industry I'm going way out on a limb and guessing we won't likely be giving it away free to anybody any time soon.
"Old Guy," Wimps (2015): Kill Rock Stars. House party in a rec room bar; mustachioed and non-mustachioed peoples strutting their stuff. Old time rock&roll as in Amerindie cross-dressing punk rock thriftshop nerds. Also, the Wimps are "The mountains are out today" true-blue Seattleites. Making the most of your frustrations; post-punk power pop.
"Yes I'm the old guy at the party, alright All the stuff you have done I've seen one thousand times before No, I'm not your dad No, I'm not the landlord shutting you down No, I'm just a man with no plans
trying to spend some time at night getting out of the house"
Liberatory Zambian 1970s interpretation of American R&B, 1950s-1970s, vocal groups, hard rock, and electric garage jam band soulfulness. WITCH stands for "We Intend To Cause Havoc." Makes me think of Eddy Grant's '60s group, The Equals ("Baby Come Back," "Police On My Back) or The Wailers doing "Simmer Down" (1963). Original Zamrock.
"It Happens Everyday," The Lemon Drops (1966): From Chicago, formed in high school. Hard-edged sunshine pop. The fuzztone guitars are exquisite. The vocal group next door Nuggets attitude another psychedelic pop ideal in single form. They don't want to hear about it anymore but bash it out with punk style nonetheless.
"STOP," B.W.H. (1983): Also known as Blackway and Helene; a Dj-producer and his film actress wife. The groove is impossibly tight but it's the spare woozy vocal chorus that throws everything off kilter and gives it that trippy psychedelic feel. Minimalist electro funk masterpiece. Some of the best of Italo-Disco.
For his part, Trump says his wandering speech is deliberate. He calls it “the weave.” I’ll talk about, like, nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together, and it’s like, and friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say, ‘It's the most brilliant thing I've ever seen.’”
Back when I was doing social media and Grump was launching his meteoric career as a statesman I remember this poster who made it her mission to document Trump's every lie. Before the end of 2017 it was apparent that this would be a daunting task. And by the end of his four years WaPo counted his lie totals at over 30,000 lies. I always figured it would be much easier to count the things he says that are actually more or less true, so another whopper comes as no surprise (part of the reason the media still don't know how to deal with him) but as I've said many a time should we survive the nightmare of the Trump Era the comic gold in this guy's lying mendacity is seemingly bottomless.
It's like that classic line from George on Seinfeld, "Remember, Jerry, it's not a lie if you believe it." Only here it's not a lie if Trumpworld believes it and if Trumpworld believes it the major media will platform it because to do otherwise would be liberal bias and unfair partisanship, and they all know such critical commentary is frowned upon by their Donor Class publishers.
And so, alas, here we are. But you have to laugh too. No English professor ever said that. It's like his boast that he's the best thing to ever happen to Black people since Lincoln. Bigots love this stuff. He's storming the Overton window; fighting back against the 'woke mob.' And his chutzpah is so upside-down stupid that you have to chuckle at the audacity of his narcissism.
That announcement [Trump pandering and flipflopping over abortion rights] has given wings to the Democrats’ messaging about Republicans’ determination to end abortion rights.
The Dems messaging needs a boost on this issue?! For crying out loud, with the Dobb's decision Trump's packed court ended women's reproductive rights. And if that wasn't bad enough his monumental assault on women's rights has unleashed vindictive laws at the state level that persecute and endanger pregnant women. The Dems don't need "wings" on this issue, they need the fucking media to do their jobs and lay out the stakes for women in the election. That's all.
"The Harris campaign said: “Let’s be clear: Donald Trump is the reason Louisiana women who are suffering from miscarriages or bleeding out after birth can no longer receive the critical care they would have received before Trump overturned Roe. Because of Trump, doctors are scrambling to find solutions to save their patients and are left at the whims of politicians who think they know better. Trump is proud of what he’s done. He brags about it. And if he wins, he will threaten to bring the crisis he created for Louisiana women to all 50 states.”
Boom! What she said.
Keynes warned us, I will remind you again. Let the capitalists run amok, unfettered, laissez-faire, and they will chisel and lowball workers and labor until their predatory behavior provokes social unrest and reaction. And that reaction is rarely radical leftism, as elite panic fantasizes. Or even workers recognizing Bernie or Warren or AOC as champions, as they should. But those without much education are more likely to line up behind some demagog telling them Jews or immigrants or gays or communists or liberals are threatening their jobs and communities, and urges people to act violently against political enemies and forces for reform.
In short, corporate economic austerity eventually generates bigot pogroms, it should be recognized as a historical rule at this point. Or until the people tire of the conflict and division and support living wages and a fair tax structure on the rich. What corporate rule precisely resists most (or maybe also throw in there getting out of paying for the costs they externalize onto the environment), as should be obvious to all.
HCR is super good at finding evidence that we are getting there, turning the corner towards progressive populist reforms, but we are not there yet. Vote Blue No Matter, up and down the ballot!!!
And Yay Isaac Hayes Jr.'s estate for filing a copyright infringement against Trump's use of his music. And, by the way, Hot Buttered Soul, 1969, is a stone cold psychedelic soul classic. If you don't know, check it out, and if you do, enjoy. Can't get enough of it right now:
And the White Stripes are also stepping up as well. Jack White wrote on Instagram: “Don’t even think about using my music you fascists. Law suit coming from my lawyers about this (to add to your 5 thousand others).” The music machine sues fascists!
We await Taylor's public endorsement of Kamala. Make it big, please.
The Dems don't do enough for workers and labor, true. They signed on to the Republican economic model that has gutted living wage working class jobs over the past two generations, putting up little protest and in a few egregious instances aiding and abetting the class war destruction that has ensued since 1980; namely, Clinton deregulating financial markets and Obama picking Wall Streeters to fix the Great Recession. But Biden/Harris have been the most pro-worker/pro-labor government since Roosevelt. And as is documented in the attached story, only Harris/Walz stand on a record of consistently supporting worker's rights and promoting good jobs and living wages. While, as the record shows, Trump and his Republicans have consistently opposed worker's rights and labor organizing, perpetuating the exploitation of labor that is the bedrock of corporate rule in the neoliberal era.
One particularly cool thing about how Can take inspiration from the Velvet Underground is how they did so without ever sounding slavish about it. One particularly cool thing about this 18-minute monster jam from Can is how the beat, '71, sounds like a 1991 cold chillin hiphop sample. Even if hiphop doesn't really get around to sampling this song until A Tribe Called Quest's "Lost Somebody" in 2016. "Halleluwah" is an extended jam, 18-minutes worth, with beat flow and exotic, squiggly, jazzy interludes. Minimalist, but not excessively so; more like a keep-it-simple ethic. Vocalist Damo Suzuki only joins in for two buildups. He strikes largely indecipherable poses, like some inspired Karaoki street performer crashing Can's jam session, working himself up to a rat-a-tat-tat eruption of "Halleluwah, Halleluwahs." The first ten times I heard this song I had no idea he was saying "Halleluwah," sounded more like "Yeah, yeah, yeah-yeah-yeah." A rhythmic repetition of one syllable in a catchy barked tempo. Anyway, it's hypnotic and frenetic and inscrutable. Krautrock is many things but it strikes me right now like progressive music for people bored with the high-culture pretensions and all the fantasy Medievalism of British and American prog rock. Or how about Krautrock is for people when you really get down to it who prefer post-punk to prog rock? I don't go to live shows any more (or I haven't since Covid, anyway) but I still fantasize about dream triple-bill live shows: Miles Davis, Hawkwind, and Can at the Fillmore West, 1971. Hard experimental psychedelic bliss.
"But what I really got from that pioneering rock critic world in Riffs and Creem was what happened if you took something seriously that you weren’t supposed to. A lot flowed from that. You could write like you weren’t supposed to, and that wasn’t just about being slangy, or vulgar, or amateur. You could be personal, be wrong, be arty, tell lies—forbidden stuff, like thinking something was important that wasn’t supposed to be important."
Dibbell, Xgau's better half, wrote the piece hyperlinked above. She also shares some fun, interesting reflections about the story, those heady rock critic times (see quote above), and her 2015 novel, The Only Ones. I liked the latter a lot and would recommend it: A post-apocalyptic story about motherhood with a gritty punk rock feel. And by the way, one of the lines she quotes from Dub Housing, "Boy that sounds swell," combined with a song, "Wellsville," by a garage band from Lawrence, Kansas, The Embarrassment, both of which were on heavy rotation on my record player at the time, were how I came up with the name "Swellsville," the commercial-free fanzine (all moonlighting coffee/weed binging projects) I put out sporadically in the 1980s.
