yet another fascinating article by thomas cooney
posted on caughtinthecarousel.com, linked by corrine and andy from swing out sister
Decade in Review
By Thomas Cooney
We may not face a decade like this in a long, long time; for many of us perhaps never again. Even though the past ten years have been mostly consumed by two wars that are hardly more important to Americans than updating their Facebook profiles, there were many great artistic achievements began before September 11th and thus informed by the terror and drama of the interior self. Even in the aftermath of that initially-bright Tuesday September morning, artists tried to draw us away from the canvas of a new world and return to the drama of the quiet moment between you and yourself in the dark hours past midnight when life is most honest. Here then are my choices for the best of the decade.
Literature:
Cinema: There were so many great films this past decade (Habla Con Ella, Mulholland Drive, Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Clayton, Y Tu Mama Tambien) but upon reflection, I keep coming back to three films and the way each of them deal with loss and longing and loneliness in ways that seem devastating and hopeful and entirely new:
Music: Somewhere along the way we became Starbuck's customers about our music. Just as we wanted a guarantee that a tall, nonfat, extra shot, no whip, Caramel Brulee Marshmallow Mocha to taste the same in Sedona as it does in Seattle or Savannah, we seemed to want all our singles to sound alike. We played "Crazy In Love," until it became ragged and tired and we put that whore out to pasture and brought in "Umbrella" before moving on to "Put A Ring On It." Thank God for moments like OutKast's "B.O.B.," and the best single of the decade, Gnarls Barkley's infectious "Crazy." Cee-lo's pitch-perfect voice and Danger Mouse's production made the sound of this song a narcotic whose high you never had to keep chasing. As for the albums of the decade, here are my choices, year by year:
Album of the Decade: Kate Bush Aerial (2005).
Thousands if not millions of fans the world over must have really thought that Kate Bush had called it a career after 1993's thudding Red Shoes. Where had she gone? In her absence Björk's and Fiona Apple held our interest now and again; Tori Amos was a very pale and sentimental replacement, more saccharine than Aspartame. There were also hundreds of others who seemed direct descendants. One can't listen to Goldfrapp without hearing 1980's Kate Bush, for example.
Kate Bush has always seemed thoroughly uninterested in trends, so just as iTunes began its assault on what an album meant, how songs followed another on an album, she comes out with a double album. Naysayers called it a concept album (though it seemed there were very very few naysayers). Disc One, A Sea of Honey is filled with songs of recluses ("King Of The Mountain"), the sensuality of the mundane ("Bertie," "Mrs. Bartolozzi") and strange narratives of saints ("Joanni"). The disc ends with "The Coral Room," a song to a dead mother that is so elegant in its imagery and metaphor that it has to come at disc's end so that there is time to gather oneself before heading off to the second disc A Sky of Honey. When Aerial first came out I was skeptical of the first half. Did she really have a song about her young son? With him talking on the track? Oh no. And are those his drawings in the liner notes? Yikes. But this is Kate Bush we're talking about here. She has earned her stripes, and so I withheld judgment as "Prelude," kicked off the second disc.
In David Sedaris' I Will Wear Corduroy he writes about coming home after an afternoon walk and thinking birds have invaded his home. No, it's just the new Kate Bush album playing. A Sky Of Honey opens with the cooing and thrushing of birds. Then Bush's son speaks: "Mommy? Daddy? The day is full of birds. Sounds like they're saying words." By the end of this disc, on the title track, "Aerial," Kate sings in that mad brilliant way that she owns: "What kind of language is this?" and the second disc has bookended itself between that wonder of language and nature, and in the middle of those bookends are the most engaging, wondrous, astonishing and original 40 minutes of music of this decade.
If the world seemed entirely new after September 11th, Kate Bush simply begged us to turn inward, to find ourselves again in the landscape of our most private, intimate lives. Start here. Like language learned anew. In the penultimate track, the gorgeous "Nocturne," she writes: "We tire of the city/We tire of it all/We long for just that something more" and then leads her listeners and her loved ones to the shore: "We stand in the Atlantic/We become panoramic/The stars are caught in our hair/The stars are on our fingers/A veil of diamond dust/Just reach up and touch it/The sky's above our heads/The sea's around our legs." More than any artist I know of Kate Bush manages to make the domestic life sexier than the glamorous life. In her world, we are most brilliant in our own smallness.
"Nocturne," fades into "Aerial," and everything we have known and loved about Kate for almost thirty years is on full display. Laughing, singing, shouting, celebrating the fact that, given the chance, given just 80 minutes, this Bush might rescue a decade destroyed by another Bush. The British have long been admired for the manner in which they went about their ways during the endless bombings of London in World War II. This legacy has always been part of Kate Bush's subtext, especially in the notion of the mettle those chaotic years imparted upon her parents' generation. Yes, if this album went awry, it might have all seemed indulgent and out-of-touch. But very little on this album goes awry and most of the loopier moments hit their marks with frightening accuracy (check out the 90 seconds in "Aerial" where Kate's laughter is in conversation with the birds. Simply jawdropping).
What I said after the first week of listening to this album in November of 2005: "What I wouldn't give to see the look on Tori Amos's face after listening to this album. That slow understanding that it's time to pack it all in." Four years later, I wonder why anyone would even try to be as daring as this. It's artistic achievements like this that makes one want to point out that the Eiffel Tower's been built, Guernica has been painted, Venice exists, The Satanic Verses has been published. Aerial has been released.
2010: Too early to call yet, of course, but there seems to finally be hope on the horizon, coming in on the back of that genius born of a white mother and an African father. And no, not our current war-President. I'm talking about Sade, whose album Soldier Of Love is slated to come ashore in early February, and the first single, the title track, already sounds like the finest work that band has ever produced.
Decade in Review
By Thomas Cooney
We may not face a decade like this in a long, long time; for many of us perhaps never again. Even though the past ten years have been mostly consumed by two wars that are hardly more important to Americans than updating their Facebook profiles, there were many great artistic achievements began before September 11th and thus informed by the terror and drama of the interior self. Even in the aftermath of that initially-bright Tuesday September morning, artists tried to draw us away from the canvas of a new world and return to the drama of the quiet moment between you and yourself in the dark hours past midnight when life is most honest. Here then are my choices for the best of the decade.
Literature:
- Justin Cronin's astonishing linked-narrative Mary and O'Neil had the great misfortune of a late 2001 pub date. The book, however, is thoroughly transporting and real and anguishing in its despair-hued beauty. I did not read a more satisfying and searing book this decade.
- In nonfiction, I still cannot read the last paragraph of Too Close to Call, Jeffery Toobin's definitive examination of Gore's victory in 2000, and not go weak in the heart and the eyes. Consider this closing paragraph: "In the cynical calculus of contemporary politics, it is easy to dismiss Gore's putative victory. But if more people intended to vote for Gore than Bush in Florida-as they surely did-then it is a crime against democracy that he did not win the state and thus the presidency. It isn't that the Republicans 'stole' the election or that Bush is an 'illegitimate' president. But the fact remains: The wrong man was inaugurated on January 20, 2001, and this is no small thing in our nation's history. The bell of this election can never be unrung, and the sound will haunt us for some time."
Cinema: There were so many great films this past decade (Habla Con Ella, Mulholland Drive, Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Clayton, Y Tu Mama Tambien) but upon reflection, I keep coming back to three films and the way each of them deal with loss and longing and loneliness in ways that seem devastating and hopeful and entirely new:
- I was completely unprepared for the grave sadness and soaring grace of Heath Ledger's performance in Brokeback Mountain. That final scene with his embrace of Jack's still-hangered-clothes is so wide in its despair that one realizes that it doesn't matter who or what one loves, what matters is the life that must be managed without it. A sailor can love the ocean and can sense the ocean loving him back, but he will wither and die if resigned to a landlocked country or state. Ledger's performance (but especially in that final scene) takes the most intimate emotions and asks us to fill in the equation with that one or two persons (or things) that are no longer tangible. Remarkable.
- In an otherwise uneven collage, Paris, Je T'aime, writer/director Alexander Payne's "14th Arrondisement" a middle-aged Denver letter carrier looks at her hopeless future, her riddled past, and without a scintilla of authorial/directorial intrusion of irony or mocking, understands the moment. In Paris. Alive. Margo Martindale delivers the finest seven minutes of acting I saw all decade.
- In Man on Wire the viewer can only watch the slow break on the face of Petit Phillip's oldest, dearest friend when he lets us know that even though no body came down to earth, the man who went all the way up into that rarefied air between the twin towers and walked across them, did in fact die up there. On repeated viewings I find myself turning away from this most intimate moment because I don't know how to handle living in the world if that oldest dear friend were still alive in it but inaccessible to me. A brilliant docudrama.
Music: Somewhere along the way we became Starbuck's customers about our music. Just as we wanted a guarantee that a tall, nonfat, extra shot, no whip, Caramel Brulee Marshmallow Mocha to taste the same in Sedona as it does in Seattle or Savannah, we seemed to want all our singles to sound alike. We played "Crazy In Love," until it became ragged and tired and we put that whore out to pasture and brought in "Umbrella" before moving on to "Put A Ring On It." Thank God for moments like OutKast's "B.O.B.," and the best single of the decade, Gnarls Barkley's infectious "Crazy." Cee-lo's pitch-perfect voice and Danger Mouse's production made the sound of this song a narcotic whose high you never had to keep chasing. As for the albums of the decade, here are my choices, year by year:
- 2000 kicked off the decade Y2K-less and with some wonderful musical pronouncements. OutKast's "Bombs Over Baghdad," had the manic energy and prophetic tone of a future arriving far too fast. Their album Stankonia impressed on many fronts, but for me, there was nothing sweeter than the return of Sade with Lovers Rock. The songs here are intimate and sound utterly private; you haven't intruded in on a moment, a moment has intruded in on you. How this band continues to basically release one album every nine years and then sits back and watches the albums fly out of stores, amazes me. Helen Folsade Adu and bandmates seem not to care at all about trends or criticism of their adult-contemporary leanings (attend one live concert and you will re-evaluate everything you thought you knew about the band). The supporting tour showcased Sade's idiosyncratic voice as well as her physicality. To witness her move across a large stage, silken (her posture a secretly seductive weapon), is to realize what it means for a woman to be past forty and sexier than the Patriot Act should allow.
- 2001 kicked off with a rainy Inauguration of a dippy President, and the rest of the decade was waterlogged with torture and war and dishonesty. 2001 marked ten years since my mother's death, and I couldn't stop thinking that the country she loved the way only an immigrant can, had only outlasted her by ten years. September 11th clearly stole some thunder from Björk's masterpiece, Vespertine. The Icelandic thrush matured and the music felt sincere and lovely. However, there was even a better album released that fall. Leonard Cohen's Ten New Songs could have just been titled One New Song and been album of the year if that song were the album's standout track "A Thousand Kisses Deep." His voice is more portentous than ever, and his pen...his pen! In the 1990's he provided that decade's finest lyric in his prophetically spot-on "The Future," and ten years later he gives us the finest lyrical moment of not just the year, but the entire decade: "Confined to sex/we pressed against/the limits of the sea/I saw there were/no oceans left/for scavengers like me/I made it to the forward deck/I blessed our remnant fleet/and then consented to be wrecked/a thousand kisses deep." Around the same time, a reunited Roxy Music hit the concert stages and rocked harder, more elegantly and artful than perhaps any band in rock n' roll has ever done. Swing Out Sister's cinematic soundtrack Somewhere Deep in the Night, helped to make sense of a very un-romantic world, just in time for winter. In light of all that shadows it, 2001 was a very good year for music.
- At the tail end of the 1990's came a very strange story about a man storming the cockpit on a British Airways flight from London to Nairobi. He attacked the pilots and the plane fell, by some reports, 10,000 feet before some First Class passengers intervened and pulled the man away, thus allowing the pilots to right the plane. One of those passengers? Bryan Ferry. In his often-misunderstood humor, he was quoted as saying, he knew from the get-go that that passenger was trouble: "His socks didn't go with the rest of his outfit." Over two years later, Ferry came out with his suitably titled Frantic. Half covers, half-originals, and one co-Eno composition. Though it had some fine moments, I actually was won over that year by Loose Screw the most un-Pretenders Pretenders album. Chrissie Hynde hadn't sounded so alive in years, so sexy and vital again. Her trucker's mouth in these songs fit the songs and didn't seem to be trying to make a point. The sound of the band loosened, took on some reggae undertones and just felt like an antidote to uncertain times.
- 2003 gave us the final masterpiece by that greatest jazz singer. Though Shirley Horn's May the Music Never End is autumnal throughout, it reaches that tone with grace and is utterly devoid of bitterness. The inclusion of "Yesterday" gets in the way of the album achieving perfection, but her English version of that Brel masterpiece, "Ne Quitte Pas," oscillates so expertly between joy and pain that it's as if the two emotions were Horn's invention. By the time she closes the album with "May The Music Never End," the listener knows that the wish is more his than Horn's. Within two years of this release, the great Shirley Horn died at 71 years old. But with that intimate Brel track, she left us with the finest five minutes of music of the decade. Prove me wrong.
- In 2001 Corinne Drewery and Andy Connell answered Swing Out Sister's Filth And Dreams (the finest pure pop album I have ever heard) with the cinematic and-at the same time-spare and wintry Somewhere Deep In The Night. Now three years later they resituated themselves under the sun for Where Our Love Grows. The standout track, "When The Laughter Is Over," announces that there won't be a finer album that year... And then: Julianne Moore steps out of a limousine on my television promoting, of all things, Revlon. She seems to be moving in slow motion...or is that the music? And what music is this? I barely knew about Google but I took a crash course in order to find out who or what this was. Ferry-esque production, androgynous vocals as if without sex the human voice is purest, and a sense of the sweeping capacity of music. Within a week I find the band's name, Ilya (San Ilya in the States) and the song was called "Bellissimo." From their debut album They Died For Beauty. My first reaction (and still my reaction these five years later): "this is a sound worth dying for." Joanna Swan and husband Nick Pullin take some of the chill out of the Bristol sound and warm things up a bit. The clichéd British detachment is balanced with Morricone soundscapes and a voice that is obviously the greatest voice in music. Listen to "Bliss," "Happy And Weak," and the title track. These songs never left my playlist for the rest of the year.
- 2005: See album of the decade at article's end.
- 2006: How fitting that the only artist who took that Ilya sound of two years earlier and improved it would be Ilya themselves as they returned with Somerset. The sound is a little less lush and a little more dangerous. Swan's vocals on tracks like "September Rendezvous" are so warm and rich that if you were told it got into your skin like the latest trick of a Bond villain, it would all make sense. The sound, the danger, the beauty. When towards album's end you get tracks like "Sleepwalking" and "Airborne," you're amazed how quickly that poison worked, and even more amazed (given all your transgressions) that you made it to this kind of Heaven.
- In 2007 both Feist and Amy Winehouse had sublime moments in their work (especially Winehouse). But, fair or not, I couldn't get them off my TV, whether via iPod ads or unintentional Public Service Announcements. If Winehouse's album were a 40 minute long "Love is a Losing Game," I'd have called it a year and moved on. However, there are a few spots on the album that get in the way. By year's end I didn't an enjoy an album more than I did Koop Islands by Koop and their retinue of jazz-influenced singers and winsome airy jazzy chill pop.
- In early 2008 it seemed wishful thinking that the newest Swing Out Sister album, Beautiful Mess would get a U.S. distribution. It took over a year, and who woulda thunk that they would ascend to Number One on the Billboard Jazz chart. I wouldn't call this album I mess, but I would call it some kind of beautiful.
- In early 2009 when my editor informed me that he was going to soon be getting an advance on the new Pet Shop Boys album, he seemed, I'll say it, shocked by my blasé response of "yeah, I'll review it." I had felt that the Pet Shop Boys' best days were behind them and though I'd always have an interest in what Neil Tennant has to say, lyrically, a new Pet Shop Boys album was something to pass the time as opposed to a record one loses his time to. So imagine how unprepared I was for Yes. Nine months after my initial review, the album is only getting better.
Album of the Decade: Kate Bush Aerial (2005).
Thousands if not millions of fans the world over must have really thought that Kate Bush had called it a career after 1993's thudding Red Shoes. Where had she gone? In her absence Björk's and Fiona Apple held our interest now and again; Tori Amos was a very pale and sentimental replacement, more saccharine than Aspartame. There were also hundreds of others who seemed direct descendants. One can't listen to Goldfrapp without hearing 1980's Kate Bush, for example.
Kate Bush has always seemed thoroughly uninterested in trends, so just as iTunes began its assault on what an album meant, how songs followed another on an album, she comes out with a double album. Naysayers called it a concept album (though it seemed there were very very few naysayers). Disc One, A Sea of Honey is filled with songs of recluses ("King Of The Mountain"), the sensuality of the mundane ("Bertie," "Mrs. Bartolozzi") and strange narratives of saints ("Joanni"). The disc ends with "The Coral Room," a song to a dead mother that is so elegant in its imagery and metaphor that it has to come at disc's end so that there is time to gather oneself before heading off to the second disc A Sky of Honey. When Aerial first came out I was skeptical of the first half. Did she really have a song about her young son? With him talking on the track? Oh no. And are those his drawings in the liner notes? Yikes. But this is Kate Bush we're talking about here. She has earned her stripes, and so I withheld judgment as "Prelude," kicked off the second disc.
In David Sedaris' I Will Wear Corduroy he writes about coming home after an afternoon walk and thinking birds have invaded his home. No, it's just the new Kate Bush album playing. A Sky Of Honey opens with the cooing and thrushing of birds. Then Bush's son speaks: "Mommy? Daddy? The day is full of birds. Sounds like they're saying words." By the end of this disc, on the title track, "Aerial," Kate sings in that mad brilliant way that she owns: "What kind of language is this?" and the second disc has bookended itself between that wonder of language and nature, and in the middle of those bookends are the most engaging, wondrous, astonishing and original 40 minutes of music of this decade.
If the world seemed entirely new after September 11th, Kate Bush simply begged us to turn inward, to find ourselves again in the landscape of our most private, intimate lives. Start here. Like language learned anew. In the penultimate track, the gorgeous "Nocturne," she writes: "We tire of the city/We tire of it all/We long for just that something more" and then leads her listeners and her loved ones to the shore: "We stand in the Atlantic/We become panoramic/The stars are caught in our hair/The stars are on our fingers/A veil of diamond dust/Just reach up and touch it/The sky's above our heads/The sea's around our legs." More than any artist I know of Kate Bush manages to make the domestic life sexier than the glamorous life. In her world, we are most brilliant in our own smallness.
"Nocturne," fades into "Aerial," and everything we have known and loved about Kate for almost thirty years is on full display. Laughing, singing, shouting, celebrating the fact that, given the chance, given just 80 minutes, this Bush might rescue a decade destroyed by another Bush. The British have long been admired for the manner in which they went about their ways during the endless bombings of London in World War II. This legacy has always been part of Kate Bush's subtext, especially in the notion of the mettle those chaotic years imparted upon her parents' generation. Yes, if this album went awry, it might have all seemed indulgent and out-of-touch. But very little on this album goes awry and most of the loopier moments hit their marks with frightening accuracy (check out the 90 seconds in "Aerial" where Kate's laughter is in conversation with the birds. Simply jawdropping).
What I said after the first week of listening to this album in November of 2005: "What I wouldn't give to see the look on Tori Amos's face after listening to this album. That slow understanding that it's time to pack it all in." Four years later, I wonder why anyone would even try to be as daring as this. It's artistic achievements like this that makes one want to point out that the Eiffel Tower's been built, Guernica has been painted, Venice exists, The Satanic Verses has been published. Aerial has been released.
2010: Too early to call yet, of course, but there seems to finally be hope on the horizon, coming in on the back of that genius born of a white mother and an African father. And no, not our current war-President. I'm talking about Sade, whose album Soldier Of Love is slated to come ashore in early February, and the first single, the title track, already sounds like the finest work that band has ever produced.