Salon.com > Robert Christgau

Reading the financial crisis

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 18:00:00 +0000

Last March, seeking a readable take on the prospects of my retirement savings, I picked up Michael "Moneyball" Lewis's character-driven financial crisis tale "The Big Short." Soon a word Lewis favors there caught my fancy: quant. A quant is a math whiz who sells his skills to the banking industry. Quants invented, elaborated and tailored the collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and credit default swaps (CDSs) that wrecked the world economy, and like everyone in the banking industry, albeit at a higher level of difficulty, they think more in numbers and less in words than I or probably you. The term stayed with me because I was given my college scholarship to become a quant but stubbornly trained instead to become a wordsmith. Soon my math aptitudes atrophied, as did any chance I had to internalize the fast-evolving language that would so profoundly affect my material well-being. In this I'm like most civilians -- it's not an easy language.

Does ’50s music still matter?

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 00:20:00 +0000

The deathless doggerel I want to share is from Teddybears' "Devil's Music," where it's preceded by an electronically treated 22-second snippet from a Charles Bukowski documentary about tending sparks that can start fires. Personally, I prefer rapper Eve's kicking "Rocket Scientist": "I am the robot Elvis rocking my bionic pelvis / I'm Technotronic sipping vodka tonic yeah I'm selfish / I am the Killer shaking up some more rock and roll." And then the capper, from an electronically treated Teddybear: "Them drum machines ain't got no soul."

The music business’s real shady history

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 01:01:00 +0000

Although it's long accommodated a few idealists and loads of fans, the music industry is not for the faint of heart. On the contrary, it's always been long on tough guys and worse, for reasons that are not hard to figure out. Cash businesses conducted at night in places where alcohol is served would have their shady side even in nations where the liquor trade wasn't illegal for 14 crucial years, and although jukeboxes didn't catch on until well after Prohibition, the Mob was positioned to take them over, and get its mitts on record distribution into the bargain. Nor is it all about the Benjamins. If by popular music you mean domestic palliatives from "Home Sweet Home" to Celine Dion, OK, that's another realm. But most of what's now played in concert halls and honored at the Kennedy Center has its roots in antisocial impulses -- in a carpe diem hedonism that is a way of life for violent men with money to burn who know damn well they're destined for prison or the morgue.

Kicking Bob Marley from his pedestal

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 01:01:00 +0000

As Chris Salewicz's "Bob Marley: The Untold Story" isn't the first to report, many human beings worldwide -- he cites Hopis, Maoris, Indonesians and, of course, Africans -- regard Bob Marley as a "Redeemer figure coming to lead this planet out of confusion," and some consider him nothing less than the literal second coming of Jesus Christ. Say what you will about the adoration accorded John Coltrane, John Lennon, Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, Um Kulthum, this is another order of iconicity. Say what you will about the religious dimensions of pop fandom, Marley's Rastafarianism renders the metaphor literal. These mystifications bode ill for Marley's biographers, who number at least 15 or 20 by now. Take, for instance, Stephen Davis, who closes with two triple-indented lines: "Bob Marley lives. He's a god./'History proves.'" And Davis' bio is one of the good ones.

The new bohemians

Sun, 29 Oct 2006 09:30:00 +0000

Purity is always a misleading ideal. With the Gypsies, or Roma, an outcast people who've survived by syncretic adaptation since they left India a millennium ago, it's an impossible chimera. Charles Keil, one of many to search hard before concluding that "the real Gypsy music" is a myth, quotes a Kosovo musician: "We do not care whether it is Turkish, Serbian or Albanian. We just play it livelier." Such commonalities as "natural" singing, idiomatic phrasing, behind-the-beat attack, and minor chords don't distinguish it drastically from all the other folkish musics that stick it to Western classical strictures. And the counterclaim that Gypsies don't play their music for gadje, non-Gypsies, merely renders the "real" stuff a tree falling in the forest for gadje who follow various Gypsy musics whether they're pure or not.

“In Griot Time”

Mon, 06 Nov 2000 20:00:00 +0000

To read about Afropop is to put oneself at the mercy of folks for whom tourism means vocation rather than vacation: the intrepid obsessives who set out from Europe and America to experience the stuff in situ. Academic or journalistic, good or bad, the most putatively objective overviews begin with some wanderer's adventurism, aka fieldwork.

"In Griot Time," Banning Eyre's tale of seven months he spent studying guitar in Mali, falls into a more candid sub-subgenre: the first-person narrative in which the white bwana-acolyte turns his or her quest into travel literature. This has proven to be an engaging gambit elsewhere. Helen Q. Kivnick's earnest "Where Is the Way" gains so much readability from its subjective point of view that you don't mind the way it glosses over the internal contradictions that have glared since apartheid fell. A similar benefit befalls even Lewis Sarno's embarrassing "Song From the Forest," in which the author goes so native that he's tricked into marrying a Pygmy who doesn't like him any more than you will.

Pop before rock

Fri, 27 Oct 2000 19:00:00 +0000

The theory that rock is the mongrel offspring of blues and country music is an oversimplification that nobody takes literally anymore. But its spirit lives on in the authenticity quests of the best recent rock books -- Greil Marcus' folk-friendly "Invisible Republic," say, or Robert Palmer's "Rock & Roll: An Unruly History," which counterposes rock Dionysianism against "faux-Apollonian" pop. As a result, readers who suspect it's more reasonable to see rock as a triumphal stage in the evolution of the popular music that predated it -- its dominant species, so to speak -- are hard-pressed to figure out exactly what the details of that evolution might be.