Sausage Mahoney.

Smooth Criminal

In the 1980s, DC Comics introduced an antihero character called Deathstroke the Terminator.  He was an ex-soldier whose prior career as an unwitting military guinea pig had gifted him with fabulous powers.  Deathstroke had a killer gimmick, built on a pop-psychology factoid in heavy circulation at the time—that, at any given time, a human being uses only a limited percentage of her brain.  Some said 5%, some said 10%, but everybody agreed there was a lot of brain out there going untapped.  Deathstroke, as a result of being dosed with various sera by unscrupulous medical personnel, could use 90% of his brain, which enabled him to be a thoroughly badass assassin and a robotics genius and essentially unbeatable in hand-to-hand combat.  From my vantage point as a geeky 12-year-old with arms the circumference of Pixi Stix, he was stylish, extremely well-costumed, and indomitable.  I was never the sort of kid who felt comfortable rooting for the bad guy, but with Deathstroke I was tempted to make an exception.  His main foils, the Teen Titans, were by and large lame, acnelescent drama queens.  The Titans were probably invented to appeal to my age cohort by reflecting the gravity of the issues we all faced as post-pubescent losers, but who wanted that from a comic book?

Deathstroke was a psychopath and murderer, but his life had seen its share of tragedy.  When we first met him, an association of hooded criminal masterminds called the H.I.V.E. (which acronym hilariously stood for "The Hierarchy for International Vengeance and Extermination"—no mistaking where they were coming from) had done some voodoo on his oldest son Grant, who for years had been laboring in vain to win Deathstroke's approval.  Playing on Grant's insecurities, the H.I.V.E. turned him into a new-and-improved Deathstroke called The Ravager by altering his brain chemistry so he could use the full 100% of his brain, every last single cell.  You'd think we should all be so lucky, but no.  Full deployment of Grant's mental faculties literally sucked the life from his body.  After burning very brightly for a very short time, he expired a withered shell in his father's arms.

This concept—magnificent powers that, when used, inevitably destroyed the user from within—was not new to comic-book land.  In the mid-60s, the legendary Wally Wood created a group of superpowered cold-war cops called T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents for the declasse (and rapidly defunct) Tower Comics.  (Since you're undoubtedly dying to know, "T.H.U.N.D.E.R." abbreviated "The Higher United Nations Defense Enforcement Reserves," which is syntactically incoherent but was the best they could do.)  One of the agents was code-named Lightning; he wore a suit that allowed him to move incredibly fast, but, every time he triggered his super-speed, the suit aged every cell in his body.  By the time T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents enjoyed a brief comeback in the mid-80s, Lightning was decrepit, shriveled like a raisin inside his costume, and could barely cross the room without collapsing.

Michael Jackson died this week, and for me he was basically a real-world Ravager, a Lightning without the goofy outfit.  (I concede Jackson had plenty of goofy outfits of his own.)  No question he had superpowers of the highest order.  His singing voice was the equal of anything we've ever heard—supple, powerful, emotive, equally comfortable growling down low or yelping up high.  On the mic he was a literal force of nature—uncontrollable, even by himself.  His sense of rhythm was unimpeachable; even his casual, grunted asides were like rocket fuel to the songs he sang.  He was not a prolific songwriter—he made a record only every half-decade or so, and most of his hits were written or co-written by other people—but the man did write "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough," "Billie Jean," and "Beat It."  I have never particularly been a Jackson fanatic, but I'd like you to name anybody else responsible for any three songs that impossibly great.  Maybe even greater were his non-musical contributions—the exuberant showmanship, the choreography, the meticulous way he presented himself visually, the larger-than-life and unknowable personality.  His musical talent was so singular that he was hard to copy persuasively, but visually he is everywhere in modern popular music.  If you're a young performer bent on world domination, whatever your genre, Jackson wrote the textbook you study.  It was no wonder that, for a few years there in the 80s, the Earth basically orbited Michael Jackson.  His raw power compelled the planet to pay attention.

The flip side of all this was that the guy's life was almost certainly torture.  From basically infancy his father pressed him to sing and dance and perform and be on his toes at all hours of the day and do it all perfectly and in time under threat of the lash.  He was never a child, which maybe accounts for his endless efforts to make himself into one once he hit adulthood.  He went solo, distancing himself from his family and proving once and for all that he was the special one, the straw that stirred the drink—and wound up with no one to turn to.  He surgically replaced basically his entire head, blew through kazillions of dollars.  He married Elvis's daughter; no one is sure why.  He wasted the GNP of Sweden at a cheesy antique store at Caesar's Palace in that famous BBC special.  Four years later all that stuff was auctioned away to repay his mushrooming debts.  Most notably, he lured other people's children to his secluded estate for go-kart races and sleepovers, with well-known and totally predictable consequences.  Joe Jackson got what he wanted from Michael—he got rich, his kids got world-famous.  Most importantly, to hear him tell it, his family escaped from Gary, Indiana.  But what did Michael get?  The more he used his powers, the weirder and sicker he became.  And eventually the powers were no longer so powerful, and they could no longer distract from the sickness and despair, and the gossip drowned out and poisoned the music.

Now we're all free.  Michael is free from a life I can't imagine he enjoyed, to the extent he was aware of it.  The rest of us are free to remember the dark-skinned Michael of Thriller—or, better yet, the dark-skinned and broad-nosed Michael of Off the Wall.  We're free to watch him on Motown 25 make the entire crowd flip their wigs so profoundly they would never come unflipped in all the decades since.  We're free to enjoy a national treasure who left us a long time ago.  Personally I am happy to have him back.

Man Crush

I have loved David Letterman for years, of course.  But he's such a fixture in our lives, like it or not, that sometimes we sleep on how much he has to offer on a daily basis.  You can say he's not the comedic and cultural force he used to be, and most certainly you'd be right.  Times have changed; his influence is 150% assimilated into modern comedy, which renders him somewhat invisible.  That happens to nearly every innovator eventually.

But forget all that for a moment.  I'd like to focus on the positive.  In just this misbegotten decade the man has given us the most touching personal gesture I've ever seen on television and the most unselfconscious and decent response to our leading national tragedy.  Now he gives us this richly satisfying haymaker.  Dave's ire is frequently raised, or at least he acts like it, but rarely if ever has he directed his contempt at so deserving a target.  I will say it if you won't: the guy is the greatest broadcast star of my lifetime, maybe the last genuine star of broadcast TV we ever will see.

UPDATE: Links fixed, hopefully.

I Will Not Fall for the Okey-Doke

So the best rapper alive (no, not that fool) has a hot new album out.  Critical response has been predictably tepid, focusing on the alleged lameness of the beats and the emcee's supposed self-contradictions.  I'm not having it.  You can say what you want about Nasir Jones's determination to choose backing tracks that do not unduly distract from his rhyming—I can't front, I've joined that chorus on occasion and still would love to see Nas respond to some truly forward-thinking production—but to fixate on that is to miss the point.  I buy my ticket because the man is the nicest on the mic.

Hip-hop is, and always has been, about more than just the voice of the emcee, but it would take a fool not to recognize the pendulum has swung a long way from the days when deejays like Eric B. and Jazzy Jeff got top billing over rappers, even legendary ones.  There's a reason for that, too.  Beats may speak louder than words from time to time, but humans conceive, articulate, and process thoughts through language.  The voice of the poet will always slice through the even the most compelling wall of funky sound, even more so when it's speaking truth.  Give me superlative vocal ID, sound concepts, diverse vocabulary, credent similes and metaphors, verbal dexterity, flow, attitude, brains, and a sense of adventure, and I will take it, no matter what beat the lyrics are spit over.  Nas has all of this in spades, so it doesn't bother me that his new Untitled is probably his most anodyne set of beats yet.  If anything, that just brings focus and coherence.  Compared to Hip Hop Is Dead, which felt overstuffed with manufactured choruses and unproductive guest shots, Untitled is a model of economy.  Nas is the rare hip-hop artist that bows, at least somewhat, to the convention of rock-era album structure.  Illmatic was just nine songs, and even if his subsequent joints have been a little longer, he's never been a big fan of skits, remixes, or posse cuts.  You can call that selfish, but the man knows what he does well.  Bravehearts aside, he's always seemed like the type of fellow who wouldn't want to join any club that would have him as a member.

But complaints about boring-ass loops have been secondary to questions about the emcee's motives.  Many of you probably know that Nas originally intended to call the record Nigger.  Eventually he was persuaded otherwise, as he recounts on the cranky, defensive lead single "Hero."  (Props to Nasir for suggesting he has a peer-level relationship with Billy Joel.)  I don't want to wade unnecessarily into a minefield here, but I don't think Nas was trying to explore any area with the original title that others haven't surveyed before in various contexts.  A couple years ago Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy wrote a book with the same title, which caused a micro-furor but was largely reviewed respectfully.  And nobody freaked out when A Tribe Called Quest released this song, even though it basically just posed a question and then shrugged at the possible implications.

I am sure Nas was happy the title attracted media attention; the guy is a capitalist, and he did call his previous album Hip Hop Is Dead, which didn't exactly discourage press coverage.  It's fair to suggest he's flirting with getting a rep as a content-free provocateur and in the process obscuring his undeniable mic skills.  But critics need to see the other side, too.  You can't listen to Untitled without admitting that, in his own episodic way, Nas is trying to confront something serious here.  I'll leave it up to someone else to decide whether his ambitions are serious enough to justify using America's most famous racial slur as a title.  But it seems to me like many people have used the title controversy as an excuse not to engage with the album's content.

I can tell you what I take from Untitled, and it provides a definitive answer, at least for me, to charges that Nas is cynically exploiting racial issues.  Some people see hypocrisy in the fact that Nas doesn't maintain a consistent personality—let alone a continuous, sustained take on Race in America—throughout the record.  I'm happy to concede the multiplicity of perspectives.  Sometimes he plays the revolutionary, sometimes the thug; he talks about how much he loves weed, champagne, diamonds, and pussy, then he calls out his Caucasian fans for mistaking their enjoyment of black music for a meaningful understanding of black culture.  He rails against stereotypes when they're used as weapons; he chuckles to himself as he admits he embraces the power they can offer.  After castigating mass media for its unexamined institutional racism, he concedes he relies on that same media to distribute his message.

What I can't concede is that these multiplicities undermine the power of the record.  They are the power of the record.  It's like that old Gandhi quote: "It is not my aim to be consistent with what I have said, but to be consistent with the truth as it reveals itself to me."  It seems to me Nas's ultimate goal is to show (not tell) exactly why racial slurs and stereotypes should be unacceptable to thinking people: they reduce rich individual complexities to demeaning generalities.  In reality, each of us contains multitudes of conflicting impulses.  Nas is a militant and a baller, a burnout and a scholar; and so are you.  Untitled is not just about the various facets of Nasir Jones; it's the emcee's take on the glories and flaws of his community and culture, the achievements and the self-sabotage, the defiance and the submission, the shit people do each day to get by.  Fundamentally, it's about the way slurs and stereotypes demean, define, and diminish the people they purport to describe, and how, in return, those people struggle against, embrace, and even find power in those words and concepts.  It's really not such a complicated idea.  If you didn't pick that up, listen again to the erstwhile title track "N.I.*.*.E.R.," with its travelogue and its pep-talk chorus: "We are the slave and the master/What you lookin' for?/You the question and the answer."  Sometimes you're a prisoner of the past; sometimes you're in control of your present and future, but ultimately you are an individual at war with yourself.  Whatever group you belong to.

This is not to say Nas is lyrically above criticism.  As always, he's morose and self-pitying.  He benefited substantially from living in the era of the digital download, because leaked pre-release versions of the album included some tracks that were kinda wack.  Recently the rapper NYOil has been raising a ruckus about Nas being "one of the most overrated emcees ever."  Now, I don't begrudge anybody the right to battle Nas over content,* but I obviously disagree and would point out that it doesn't sound like Oil has listened to too much Nas over the years.  Even so, I think Oil had the better of this argument about "Be a Nigga Too," and I'm glad it didn't make Untitled's final cut.  Sometimes Nas is provacative without thinking things through.  By now you've undoubtedly dimissed me as an apologist, but I think even that can be a blessing: it allows him to be multiple things to multiple people, probe different sides of various issues, question himself and answer those questions and answer those questions again in a different way once his perspective shifts.  Basically he's open to new shit and doesn't live by dogma, and guys like that are always going to reverse field from time to time.  But like they say, foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.  Would you really like it better if he was 100% on a consistent message, like Chuck D on Nation of Millions?  Don't you think that would get a little airless after about three songs?

* I'm going to bite Joe Posnanski and do a long asterisked footnote here.  It irritates me when hip-hop critics review a record without bothering to engage with the emcee(s).  It reminds me of sportswriters who hate sports and the athletes who play them.  I know that it's easier to talk about which old soul songs get looped.  I'm thinking in particular of this review by this individual "Ian Cohen," which, after offering the usual bitches about duff beats, accuses Nas of cynicism—his 2010 record will be called McCain Killa (good one!)—and then proceeds to dismiss the record on the basis of cherry-picked lyrics he has not thought about.  Rest assured that no emcee comes up with winners every time out.  Nas is no exception.  But Cohen reduces each song to a cartoon; he seizes on the fleeting UFO reference on the one-world chillout "We're Not Alone," as if that's what the song's about or renders its actual message mere bong resin.  Worse, he quotes a lyric from the Fox News fuck-you "Sly Fox" ("The Fox has a bushy tail/And Bush tells lies/And Fox trots/So I don't know what's real") and asserts it "essentially means nothing."  Now, I'm not going to claim this is the best rhyme I've ever heard, but it's pretty obvious what Nasir is on about.  Fox News is the propaganda arm of the Republican party; it was founded by the man who helped get the first President Bush elected; its commentators often move to positions in the GOP power structure and vice versa.  Although these connections are sometimes shadowy and hard to document, they're real ("The Fox has a bushy tail"); the network responds to the needs of the GOP ("Bush tells lies/And Fox trots"); and the result is that the truth is consistently obscured ("I don't know what's real").  See, that's not so hard.  All you need to do is read the words and think about them.  Also lost in Cohen's review is the thoroughly ripped third verse of that same tune:

They say I'm all about murder, murder and kill, kill
But what about Grindhouse and Kill Bill?
What about Cheney and Halliburton?
The backdoor deals on oil fields?
How is Nas the most violent person?
Y'all don't know talent if it hit you
Bringin' up my criminal possession charges with a pistol
I use Viacom as my firearm to let the lyrics split you
Who do you rely upon?
To shoot shells at Leviathan
I'm dealin' with the higher form
Fuck if you care how I write a poem
Only fox that I love was the red one
Only black man that Fox love is in jail or a dead one
Redrum, political bedlam
Don't let the hype enter your eyes and eardrum
Murdoch own Fox, not A-Team with Baracus
And he hate Barack 'cause he march with the marchers

So in conclusion and in summary: Take that, yo.  It's not like that's the best verse on the record, either.

Nas is happy to shock you if you're looking to be shocked; that's a great way to separate the wheat from the chaff.  (On "Y'all My Ni**az," he both takes the easy way out and neatly summarizes an important hip-hop First Principle: "If it offends you, it's meant to, it's that simple.")  But he's actually trying to engage a complicated question.  What would you have him do instead?  Lots of critics have unfavorably compared Untitled to Tha Carter III.  I'm not mad at you if you agree; I also dig Lil Wayne.  Dwayne Carter is an outstanding rapper with tremendous vocal ID and force of personality; he's funny and can be substantive too, when he feels like it.  But why are critics (and not just white hipster ones) so much more comfortable listening to Weezy F Baby emote about his promethazine addiction, doing lady cops in the backs of squad cars, and Al Sharpton's similarity to Don King than hearing Esco meticulously dissect present-day reality?  Wait, don't answer that.

The Perennial

Periodically Richard Thompson releases a new record, at which point various people remark about how awesome he is and why it's a crying shame he's not better known.  I have nothing snarky to say about those sentiments, 'cause I agree with them, although it's also fair to point out that a) Thompson has now been active in the music industry for 40 years, so somebody out there must like him; and b) there was never much chance that a laceratingly cynical professor of English folk music would achieve mass acceptance in the USA.  The guy knows a reel from a jig from a hornpipe, but these are not distinctions that impress the general public.

The only time Thompson ever had a US hit was in 1979, with a groovy, soulful number called "Don't Let a Thief Steal into Your Heart"—but he didn't sing it, the Pointer Sisters did.  I remember seeing the video for "When the Spell Is Broken" very late one night on MTV in the mid-80s, but I never saw it again.  The VJ—Mark Goodman, maybe?—gave some spiel about how this guy was just as good a guitar player as all the people we were supposed to revere, like Clapton and Page and Jeff Beck.  Evidently it didn't take.  A few years later, during college, I remember someone listening to a Thompson guitar solo and asking if it was Mark Knopfler.

For the uninitiated, the reason his fans love the guy so much is because he's a true triple threat.  First—although, if you were a Fairport Convention fan in the late 60s, you probably wouldn't have predicted it—Thompson has developed into a tremendous singer.  In his younger days, his vocals were thin and keening and their enthusiasm and self-belief did not necessarily overcome these problems.  For his last record with Fairport, Thompson wrote a killer guitar workout with a great traddish melody called "Poor Will and the Jolly Hangman," but, when the record came out, he realized he hated his vocal so much he insisted the song be deleted from future pressings.  Those days are long gone.  Nowadays, there is truly nothing like his caustic, leathery presence, and he knows it.  His range isn't impressive, but he's equally comfortable shouting from the very top and growling along the bottom.  He's always fully and appropriately committed to each song, by which I mean he knows how to sing a joke tune as a joke and how to induce waterworks with his inevitable showstopping ballads.

Second, he's a phenomenal songwriter with a broad grasp of styles.  His folkie reputation is well-earned, and he certainly can write jigs, reels, etc. in his sleep, but he can whip out a polka or a mazurka, too.  When he feels mellow, he puts out collections of quietly menacing folk songs, and, although he doesn't bat 1.000 (who does?), there are always a few that sound like standards, or songs that would be standards but for the fact they're too depressing to sing in pubs.  When he's agitated, he releases electric records full of chuggingly melodic modern rock, sometimes branching out into soul—it's really no surprise the Pointers wanted to cover "Thief," or did it so well—or even his own version of ska.  But whatever he does, he sounds like nobody but himself.  Which is because of his voice, by which I mean not just his singing instrument but his lyrical approach, which is sometimes bleak and sometimes totally fucking devastated.  One of the guy's happiest songs is called "Tear Stained Letter."  His catalog is full of baleful reproaches to straying lovers (like "Thief"), heartbroken snapshots of lost youth, narratives of cleansing passion gone horribly wrong, contempt for fools of all stripes, immense contempt for himself.  It is sometimes overbearing.  Thompson is clearly a very funny guy, but probably not so much when you're on the business end of his wit.

But even if Thompson has a limited number of stories to tell, part of his genius is that he can always find new ways to tell them.  For instance, most nights on tour he plays a great maudlin acoustic number called "1952 Vincent Black Lightning."  If you see him and he hasn't played it, you can be sure the audience will be yelling for it until he does.  (Since he really does aim to please, he usually relents.)  Plotwise the song is a little trite.  It's about a macho young criminal with a gorgeous vintage motorbike who falls in love (or so he says) with a beautiful redheaded girl but can't (and really doesn't want to) give up knocking over the local merchants and rolling tourists in alleys.  Eventually, as everyone knew he would, he gets his thorax ventilated by a shotgun.  His girl is brought to his side as he's expiring.  As usual, he's thinking first about his motorcycle:

He reached for her hand and he slipped her the keys
He said, "I've got no further use for these
I see angels on Ariels in leather and chrome
Swooping down from heaven to carry me home"
And he gave her one last kiss and died
And he gave her his Vincent to ride

This is a hoary folk cliche—the misunderstood outlaw cut down before his time, the young lovers cleaved forever.  But it works incredibly well, and not just because it's got a great melody and great lyrics and an awesome vocal and fantastic finger-picked guitar (more on that later).  It works incredibly well because, for Thompson, the love object of the song isn't the criminal, who's an underdeveloped hood archetype, or the woman, who's a cipher, but the bike, the inanimate object.  The bike is perfect, the bike is forever.  The bike markedly lacks our pitiful weakness.  The bike was the criminal's passion, his youth, his untameable idiocy.  When he dies and gives the bike to his girl, for her the bike becomes her passion, her youth, her lost love, and it will be as long as she lives, whether she rides it or not.

"1952 Vincent Black Lightning" is very serious, a total downer.  Three years later, Thompson flipped the script with a song called "Shane & Dixie."  The characters are basically the same—doofus wannabe criminal and the woman unfortunately afflicted with such poor judgment and low self-esteem that she hangs out with him.  Shane enlists Dixie's help in a bank robbery.  He wants them to go down in history, like Bonnie and Clyde, so he concocts a suicide pact—or maybe a murder-suicide plot, since it's never clear whether Dixie has given her consent—and shoots them both, along with several other people, at the scene of the crime.  Shane, being an idiot, successfully kills himself but only wings Dixie.  Eventually the dead bodies begin to stink, which causes the neighbors to complain to the authorities.  The cops arrive and find Shane "all over the walls like paint."  Dixie survives and marries the journalist that writes their tragic story.  Shane is briefly famous, but, after a couple years, everyone forgets about him.  The end.  Unlike "Vincent," "Shane & Dixie" is up-tempo, sneering, sardonic, contemptuous.  The point is that Thompson's work explains why folk music—the parade of often anachronistic melodies, phrases, and gestures handed down for so many generations that they have wormed their way into our bones—still surfaces today in every genre of music ever invented.  Even if there are only four narratives in all of literature, the story is all in the telling.

I could go on.  The reason why he plays "1952 Vincent Black Lightning" at every concert is because his audience loves it to death, and the reason his audience loves it is the way it simultaneously conveys the dismal awfulness of young love gone forever and reminds us of the hope inherent in youth and love in the first place.  The two best songs off Mirror Blue, his best record of the 90s, each expand more fully on half of "Vincent."  The hopeful half, "MGB-GT," is another of Thompson's car songs, a dark, thumpingly badass, almost funky Celtic reel, carried by an acoustic guitar that rocks way harder than your typical modern-rock electric.  Like the criminal in "Vincent," Thompson carries on about his car's specifications; he compares it favorably to Austin-Healys and TR4s and cites that the young girls in remote English villages nod approvingly at his "retro style" as he putters by.  Or at least that's how he feels when he drives that car.  He doesn't care whether he's right.  The car is its own truth; the car is freedom.  The sad half, "Beeswing," is a long first-person narrative, without the third-person balladeer's remove of "Vincent."  It's about a young guy who comes to London in the summer of 1967 and falls in love with a girl who has no interest in a conventional life.  Back then she might've been called a "free spirit"; today you'd say she has "problems with commitment."  Most guys, thinking of themselves, would call her "crazy" for refusing to submit to a traditional life as tethered wife and mother.  But Thompson doesn't judge; he just tells the story.  Eventually the woman runs away, as the narrator knew she would, and thirty years on all he can think about is having her back, even though he knows he can't and doesn't really want to; what he wants back is his own youth.  He must know that he wouldn't be made any younger if he captured her and took away her freedom.  But that doesn't make the feeling go away.

Anyway, the man can do a lot with four minutes and a few lines of verse is all I'm saying.

Third—well, you really need to hear Richard Thompson play guitar.  You often hear how his ex-wife Linda described his electric-guitar playing as "fork-bending," and she wasn't joking about that.  You listen to him, and you literally perceive that his electric guitar could bend forks.  His tone is thick but piercing, his approach is aggressive but fluid, the result is a series of angular, electric bursts that fluff the hair on the back of your neck.  He doesn't show off much, although he clearly could smoke virtually any other guitarist in the world.  He doesn't play particularly fast, but in every solo he sprays out a quickly-turned phrase or two that shows you just how nimble his fingers are.  His solos tell stories, and, when you're really lucky and you get two solos in a single song, Katy bar the door.  My favorite song off his and Linda's breakup album Shoot Out the Lights (and I guess my favorite Thompson song) is "Walking on a Wire."  Linda's vocal is captivating, but even so Richard's solos steal the show.  The first one is hesitant, moody, unresolved, but by the end the narrator has made up her mind—she's gotta get out of this place—and the second solo explodes with suppressed melody and energy and determination.

My favorite Thompson solo is probably the end of "Hand of Kindness."  Right off the bat he runs in circles at increasing speed and ties himself in a knot, winding up halfway down the fretboard.  He staggers around threateningly and then spins out of control again.  Then, remember about the fork bending?  He bends some forks, and then he rips off a series of miniature four-bar solos, each with its own character.  Then fade out.  This is all in about 40 seconds.  In hardly any time at all, the solo communicates a huge number of ideas with tremendous force.

(Another thing you can understand from "Hand of Kindness" is that Thompson really loves pop music.  It came out six months before Van Halen released 1984, and, to me, it sounds just like the songs of that era when Van Halen would try to groove—a chiming, ascending guitar riff and a distant, steady thump from the rhythm section.  When Thompson put together (in response to a request from Playboy to identify the "songs of the milennium") a revue show called 1000 Years of Popular Music, he included the oldest known round in the English language, a bawdy, heavily euphemistic Italian party tune from late-16-century Italy, some 17th-century English goth, an Appalachian miner lament, GIlbert and Sullivan, Hoagy Carmichael and Louis Armstrong, and then, for the last four decades of the 20th century, the Who's "A Legal Matter," "Tempted," by Squeeze, "Kiss," but "[s]trategically sung about an octave lower than Prince" (but not that well, I have to admit), and finally "Oops! I Did It Again" (sung really well, even if Richard does say "oops" like it rhymes with "cups").  When I saw him do "Oops" live, Thompson made the obligatory comment acknowledging bashfully that, uh-huh, he's pretty different from Britney Spears, but, once he started to sing it, there was no irony whatsoever, because he really loves pop songs.  I assume he's lasted as long as he has mostly because he loves pop songs.)

He's just as good on the acoustic guitar because he respects the difference of the acoustic guitar, as opposed to playing it like an electric guitar.

Thompson is nearly 60 now, and, as would be true of anyone with 30-some long-playing albums under his belt, he's carved some fairly deep grooves; his recent records haven't ventured too far into new territory.  His new album Sweet Warrior is no exception.  As usual, the best songs involve Thompson's main thematic obsessions.  I haven't discussed how much Thompson loves to mock the fragile male ego, and usually his own; one of his narrators is a guy who admits learning about the female anatomy from Hustler and then is terribly let down when his lady weeps after sex.  David Lee Roth he ain't.  Here, the opening "Needle and Thread" sadly flogs its phallic sewing metaphor as the narrator despondently ticks off all the women who dumped him because his dick was too small.  There's another of his hesitant but creepy warnings to unfaithful lovers, "Take Care the Road You Choose," where the guitar conveys all the menace the smoldering vocal holds back.  And "Guns Are the Tongues," where a somewhat simple young man's desire is sidetracked into a sectarian suicide bombing in Northern Ireland, and the vocal is more menacing than any guitar could be.  Lyrically, Thompson is nearly always straightforward, and in particular his social commentary usually hits with the grace of a tire iron dropped from the top of the Sears Tower.  The father in "Dad's Gonna Kill Me" refers to this country's paternalistic foreign policy, and the "me" is all of us.  In the liner notes for his tremendous Interbabe Concern, the great Scott Miller said, "Everything on this album is on purpose," and that's always been true for Thompson, too.  Even a song as simple as "Johnny's Far Away," a pub hoedown about cheating spouses separated by the ocean, so fully develops its lyrical and musical ideas that it achieves a kind of grandness.

Like all Thompson's records, Sweet Warrior has great moments—even if it's not quite great itself.  I am a tool for using such a hackneyed analogy, but listening to it is a little like watching a great Shakespearean actor playing Hamlet for the 30,000th time; no question he knows every word and gesture by heart, but he never copies himself and has plenty of spark.  He's still fully engaged and understands his motivation, and all his previous performances only serve to generously inform this current one.  This is the sort of thing you really can pull off only if you not only love what you're doing but if you couldn't imagine doing anything else.

Bleaching Our Past, Part CDLXXVI

You may have noticed that this is the 40th anniversary of what people insist on calling the "Summer of Love"—I prefer to think of it, admittedly less catchily, as "1967."  I remember suffering through the 20th anniversary back in high school, and the fuss this time is nowhere near as manic or pitiful, presumably because back then the Baby Boomers were at the height of their power-drunk self-regard and now many of them are dead.  But as the weather's gotten warmer—and I have no doubt this is hitting me harder than most because I live in the Bay Area—we've increasingly been subjected to lengthy I-was-there-at-the-Love-In-man oral histories from the usual suspects saying the usual shit.

There are many things to object to about S.O.L. nostalgia, but for me one of the most irritating is that it always involves the inevitably wrongheaded description of the San Francisco music scene, which, as we all know from documentaries showing painted, glassy-eyed hippies gamboling on the Panhandle in Golden Gate Park, has become shorthand for all the cultural upheaval visited on America in the Sixties.  The band people usually mention first is the Grateful Dead—either them or Jefferson Airplane.  Then you hear about Big Brother & the Holding Company, and Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Moby Grape: a bunch of blues-based rock bands famous for playing free (until Bill Graham intervened) shows at run-down ballrooms in front of sweaty throngs dulled by LSD-25 and psychedelic lighting.  I'm sure you can envision these performances—each band playing a twelve-hour set consisting of four songs.  Other than maybe the Dead, who still have a fading but ardent constituency and whose influence is felt, usually subconsciously, all over the place, no one listens to these bands anymore and they have next to no significance to most modern musicians.

I swear I'm not trying to turn this page into full-court press criticism of the New York Times, but you might have seen a representative example of this sort of thing on Saturday's op-ed page.  Some guy named Michael Walker was trying to make the point that, although San Francisco is commonly remembered as the center of hippie-era U.S. music, the better bands were actually found in Los Angeles.  Now, I agree with a lot of what Walker says.  The San Francisco bands did not tend to make particularly good records, or at least their records never seemed to fully satisfy their potential; their energy did not translate to the studio.  The Dead were rarely better than okay outside the live setting.  Jefferson Airplane's first four records ranged from good to outstanding; then they made Volunteers and it was all over.  Moby Grape's fabled debut is thinly produced and overrated, and they were never the same after Skip Spence, during the recording of the follow-up, went after his bandmates with a fire axe.  Big Brother had a random, bristling, trebly energy that I'm sure was irresistable in its moment, but these days gets me really aggravated after about ten minutes.  But so what?  It's missing the point to slam these bands for failing to explore the studio space effectively; all of them were most, if not only, interested in the fleeting and subjective band-audience linkup that only happens in the heat of the performance.  The fact that it didn't translate to tape was the entire point.  You had to be there is not just an excuse or alibi; it's a free-standing artistic philosophy.

Walker is also right to say that the L.A. bands were better tunesmiths with a way more coherent lyrical approach.  Not to say they were ultimately better bands, but they tried harder to write traditional pop songs and succeeded more often in doing so.  The most Yay Area (feral, beastly, demented) of them, the Doors, were also by far the shittiest.  No sensible person would actually describe the Byrds as "America's Beatles"—that's as lazy and demeaning as calling Richard Thompson "England's Hendrix"—but they wrote a ton of hit songs and invented a jangly, layered, harmonic guitar sound that has haunted hipsters ever since.  Love's Arthur Lee was the second-greatest artist to emerge from 1960s California, with as diverse and idiosyncratic a vision as anyone in American popular music.  Buffalo Springfield was not really that great, but they gave us Neil Young, who dominated the 1970s like Soviet hockey.

But here's the problem.  This conversation, and the typical knee-jerk description of San Francisco in the 60s, omits the band that was not only the best in San Francisco in the 60s but the best in the entire state and maybe in the country.  I'm talking about Sly and the Family Stone.  The other S.F. bands can be plausibly grouped together, but no other band resembled the Family Stone.  They operated from a revolutionary premise.  At the time, the racial dialogue in America was in a touchy place; they were racially integrated.  If you were a woman who wanted to rock, rather than come out like Lesley Gore in frilly petticoats, there was no room on the stage for you; but two of the Family Stone were female.  In Sly himself, they had a frontman worthy of anyone's cult of personality, dynamic and half-insane and just a little out of reach.  In bassist Larry Graham, they had a tremendous instrumentalist holding down the most important position in the lineup.  And let's talk for a minute about their music.  Their music, not to put too fine a point on it, was just fucking outstanding—omnivorously diverse, assertive, constantly evolving, compulsively danceable.  Some of the debut was standard mid-60s R&B, but some some songs were decidedly not, overt acts of musical miscegenation.  (Or just outright weird, like the crazy atonal "Trip to Your Heart," the intro of which Marley Marl later appropriated for "Mama Said Knock You Out.")  The second record was safer—half of it is either "Dance to the Music" or songs with other titles that are really also "Dance to the Music"—but it's still a nonstop party with flawless group dynamics.  The third record was artier, freakier, messier, with more fuzz and less control.  The fourth record was the big number-one crowd-pleaser, wall-to-wall anthems.  This was the material that killed with whitey at Woodstock.  Then they made There's a Riot Goin' On, which is essentially perfect and has set the standard for all other pop records since (and there have been too many to count) that document the decay and despair of the insecure artistic personality.  The sixth record, two fistfuls of stuttering, melodic funk classix, was a tentative step back into the sunlight, somewhat relaxed but still scarred and freaked out.  It also features the greatest, most transformative cover version in rock history.  The wheels started coming off a little on the seventh record, but there's still plenty there, including a single with a chorus that made no sense until the Beastie Boys sampled it 15 years later.

None of their contemporaries come close to matching this output in terms of sheer quality.  The gap only widens when you factor in the formal innovation and cultural uniqueness.  Sly even has the others beat by miles in terms of hit singles—you still hear "Everyday People" and "Hot Fun in the Summertime" and "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)" all the time, both in their original form and as samples.  His music has pervasive influence in contemporary hip-hop and R&B.

So why is the Family Stone so often erased from the history they, by all rights, should be understood to dominate?  You could argue it's because they were just getting started in '67, but the same is true of the Dead and Big Brother and Moby Grape and the Doors and Buffalo Springfield, all of whom put out their debuts that year.  So that won't wash.  I am left to conclude that Sly's omission from the S.O.L. narrative has to do with his race.  I'm not saying this is intentional.  But the people writing the history of the time are mostly white, and their natural reflex is to tell their own stories.  And by now the tales have been told so many times that they've calcified.  People are no longer really telling stories; they're repeating a narrative.  The iconic hippie image is a white face.  The peace sign, not the raised fist.  The acoustic guitar on the park lawn, not the thunder-bottomed bass in the five-story brownstone.  Innocence, not power politics.  Secession from the dominant pig culture rather than war against it in pursuit of a long-overdue piece of the pie.  I know these are all oversimplifications; that's the point.  When we use shorthand, we lose sight of the facts.  The fact is that if you talk San Francisco music in the 60s, you must start with Sly Stone.