Brainwash - Cillie Barnes
This song answer the question that I never knew I needed to ask: what if Cat Power wanted to combine the smooth lyricism and melodies of late 60s Motown with the liquid feel of modern chilled out electro-pop? What you end up with is a languid and wonderfully smooth beat with hints of folk and brass, all of which provides the backup to a soulful vocal performance.
Television - You Won’t
So simple, so warm, so great. There almost couldn’t be less going on here musically. It’s the same simple refrain sung again and again – wafting above a slow round of handclaps and a line of nine piano chords on repeat. Really, after the first ten seconds, there is nothing new to discover musically in the rest of the song.
But that’s precisely what makes it so great. This is one of those short little songs that somehow manages to feel like it’s been going on for decades. it’s folk music in the old sense – you can imagine it begin sung around campfires on the frontier, or dancing around a maypole in the old world.
Transistor Radio - Cloud Cult
It is a little known fact that intelligent life is, in fact, alive and thriving on several other planets in our very own solar system. The reason scientists have failed to discover them is simply that they have not wished to be seen…until now.
A peaceful morning in Everytown, America. Children are lined up waiting to get on the school bus like any other day. Today, however, is not quite any day. As the door to the bus opens, they realize the driver is no longer the lovable rascal, Dennis “Doofus” Simpson. Instead, staring at them from behind the big wheel is Zorro! The children step back in consternation only to realize Zorro has bounded out of the van brandishing a sword. “On the bus, puny earthlings, we set sail immediately.” The children do not go to a particularly good school or else someone might have noticed the bus is not currently equipped with any sails. But that is neither here nor there.
Fearfully, the kids get on one by one until only little Joey remains. Do you remember Zack from Saved By the Bell? Joey looked nothing like him. He did get beat up a lot, though, which had drained him of all fear. Compared with the daily threat of losing his Magic playing cards money to the school bully, Zorro’s sword was nothing. He refused to get on the bus. Zorro certainly was not going to stand for this. He had a schedule to keep, after all. His sword flashed three times, cutting an entirely predictable Z across Joey’s shirt, causing the sour patch kids that had been safely contained in his shirt pocket to spill onto the ground.
Now Joey was a man who knew what he liked and he LIKED sour patch kids, so this naturally made him burst into tears and run away. Zorro was getting bored with the story by this point so he let Joey go and returned to the bus.
What he didn’t know, though, is that the sour patch kids were MAGICAL. Where the landed, they began to quickly grow in a manner reminiscent of Jack in the Beanstalk. Except this time, instead of plants, they produced giant replicas of the hungry hungry hippos. Zorro tried to drive away before they became too big, but since he was more used to riding horses than driving buses, he didn’t know about keys and things, so the bus didn’t move until it was swallowed up by the purple hungry hungry hippo, which certainly didn’t care that it was never explained why Zorro was from another planet or what he was doing kidnapping children in a school bus. It was pretty pissed about the tense changing halfway through, though. Hippos are like that sometimes.
Drugs And Kittens I’ll Drink To That - Mighty Mighty Bosstones
Today is National Drug Take-Back Day. The idea is that you can dispose of your expired or unused prescription drugs in a safe manner.
Let’s compare that idea to gun buybacks. Famously, because of the ‘gun show’ loophole, the private sale of guns is basically unrestricted. This was made extremely evident at a gun buyback a couple months ago, when a guy simply stood outside and offered to out-bid the government.
If the same fellow wanted to do this today at a drug take-back event, he wouldn’t be allowed to do it. Why? Because selling prescription drugs for non-medical use is illegal. After all, someone might get HURT.
Crazy world, huh?
On a related note: here’s a nice thinkpiece from John Cassidy at The New Yorker: What If the Tsarnaevs Had Been the ‘Boston Shooters’?
Texas - Magic Man
I don’t miss the 80′s. It was a terrible decade mostly full of terrible people. And on the whole, the music wasn’t great either. But every rule has exceptions, and in this case it’s synth pop. Sure, like all genres it has some trainwrecks. But when done right, there isn’t much that sounds better.
Magic Man seem to agree. They are the logical heirs to that tradition, blowing some of the more famous bands of recent years (The Killers, The Bravery, etc.) clean out of the water. Just listen to that synth line, those thumping drums, the ode to sunshine and nights spent on a rooftop and a whole lot of sex. This is one of those songs that sounds so simple that you’d think anyone could do it, but which would turn saccharine and chintzy in the hands of all but the most deft musicians.
Thankfully, Magic Man do it right.
Best of Friends - Palma Violets
It’s got that messy garage rock feel, but I can also hear a lot of Springsteen in the guitars and the shouted chorus. And it sure sounds like they consumed a fair amount of Strummer and Jones while writing this one.
All of which is to say: there’s nothing particularly new here. But who cares? It sounds great, and the world will never have enough shouted punk anthems. As long as there continue to be young guys armed with guitars, songs like this are worth listening to.
If you want a contemporary reference, Palma Violets are basically the Arctic Monkeys for 2012. They burst onto the scene in the UK, and the question now is whether they catch any ears over on this side of the pond. Based on this song, you have to like their chances.
The album is called 180, and it came out last month.
So we all know that 90% of people support background checks. A fact which has caused Maureen Dowd to become a parody of herself (seriously, that column has to represent the exact moment when we hit Peak Dowd, right?). But some new polling helps to splash a bit of cold water on that number – and clarifies some of the confusing elements at work in our contemporary political environment.
According to a Pew poll:
The key Senate vote that halted gun control legislation last week is drawing a mixed reaction from the American public: 47% express negative feelings about the vote while 39% have a positive reaction to the Senate’s rejection of gun control legislation that included background checks on gun purchases. Overall, 15% say they are angry this legislation was voted down and 32% say they are disappointed. On the other side, 20% say are very happy the legislation was blocked, while 19% say they are relieved.
That doesn’t sound like 90% support. So what’s up?
Well, a couple things. First, there are ‘background checks’ and then there are background checks. People might support the general concept that there should be some sort of check without supporting the specific things that were up for debate here. That said, I think you would find many people who fell into the ‘relieved’ and ‘very happy’ category who couldn’t really explain what precisely was wrong with this bill. Which leads to the second – and far more important – point.
The way people feel about policies is VERY STRONGLY connected to larger themes of partisan/communal identification. For many people, strong NRA rejection of a proposal indicates that it’s the ‘wrong sort’ of background check, and strong Republican opposition signifies the same thing. Conversely, a strong push from Obama might well dissuade a lot of these people from supporting the idea. If you think that Obama is a socialist Fifth Column for global UN domination, then you’re just never going to trust him to implement this stuff in a good manner.
The larger point here is that MANY policies fall into this confusing area, where theoretical support evaporates as soon as actual ideas are on the table. Lots of people want to cut spending, but they aren’t very happy about the actual proposed spending cuts. Lots of people in 2009 were pretty sure that health care was broken, but hated every single idea for improving things. Even up in the Supreme Court, you can find Anthony Kennedy: who thinks that states are not allowed to impose ‘undue burdens’ on women seeking abortion, but never seems to think that any actual policy constitutes such a burden.
Sunglasses - Saturday Looks Good to Me
Am I crazy for thinking this song basically sounds like someone laid an indie-pop vocal track on top of an old ska song and then threw a bunch of old girl group harmonies into the mix? One thing I can say for sure: it’s pretty damn catchy.
This is off their upcoming album One Kiss Ends It All, which promises to be a festival of jangle pop the likes of which we haven’t seen since…well, since Allo Darlin’ last year.
San Francisco (Little Daylight Remix) - The Mowgli’s
This is such an exuberant song. I’ve probably listened to it 30 times or more in the last week. I just can’t get over how good it feels to hear “Do you feel the love? I feel the love” over the sound of fireworks and sunshine. This is one of those songs that sounds like chorus layered on top of chorus on top of chorus. It’s big and bright and joyous and too much fun to even describe.
Last weekend I was at the Midwest Political Science Association conference in Chicago. While there I attended a neat roundtable on the 2012 election, featuring blog-stars Nate Silver and Ezra Klein, as well as some political science folks with pretty prominent online presences (Larry Bartels, John Sides, Drew Linzer, Simon Jackman, Lynn Vavreck).
One interesting question was posed: was the result of the presidential election inevitable? Now, you can think about this a few different ways. Obviously, there’s always a possibility of radical changes. I mean, if there had been a terrorist attack that was clearly Obama’s fault and did significant damage, you’d have to think Romney wins. That is, of course, what the Right wanted Benghazi to be.
But assuming all external conditions remain the same, was there a pathway to Republican victory?
One panelist (Jackman, I think) suggested that Romney could have got it done if he had a better message. Basically: “Obama’s a nice guy but he’s out of his depth. Bring me in and I’ll get things done.” Another panelist responded (I think quite rightly): we should be deeply skeptical of any argument that says the election would have gone differently if a politician had said something different.
I think that’s true for a couple of reasons. First, you’ll almost always find that whatever language they’re ‘supposed’ to use is already IN USE. If it doesn’t become the meta-narrative of the campaign it’s usually because it simply doesn’t have the stickiness that the pundit thinks it does.
Second, while I’m intrinsically skeptical of this argument, it nevertheless seems like we should assume that the pros know what they’re doing. If they are not using a certain argument front and center, it’s most likely because they have good poll-data or good reasons to think it won’t sell well. Of course, simple deference on stuff like this would be crazy. Political science certainly can play the role of sabermetrics to the traditionalism of political institutions. But the political campaigns have SO MUCH more data to work with than political scientists. These are not fly-by-night operations, Mark Penn notwithstanding. All of which is to say: our impulse should be to assume that the campaigns are doing a pretty good job.
Third, while it’s very easy to see how certain kinds of appeals could garner new votes, it’s often harder to see how the sort of campaign that would be necessary to get those votes will erode their base of support. But, of course, if you gain one new vote and lose an existing one then you haven’t actually gained anything.
And that’s the real rub of it. Romney in retrospect looks like a somewhat weak candidate to some people, for a variety of reasons. But almost all of those reasons stem from the basic obligations imposed by his potential voter pool. He lost a lot of Hispanic voters due to his support for ‘self deportation’ but it’s not like he could have simply adopted a pro-immigration stance. The party wouldn’t have allowed it. Lots of people lamented that the Romney of the first debate wasn’t the Romney of the whole campaign. But if that guy was front and center, his support from the right would likely have plummeted. And so on.
None of which is to say that it’s impossible to imagine a Republican winning the election, but it really is difficult to figure out where the extra 4% of votes could have come from, without eroding the 47% he did get. Which also helps to explain why Romney was pretty much the ‘inevitable’ nominee – at least after Perry imploded, Pawlenty backed out, and the other viable names (Jeb Bush, Christie, Mitch Daniels, etc.) didn’t pursue campaigns. It’s not that Romney was a perfect candidate; it’s just that no one else was going to be able to construct a coalition of voters that could hold together for any length of time.
