Category: You Have Got to Check This Out

Song performed by JC Brooks and the Uptown Sound
Written by Jeff Tweedy

I am an American aquarium drinker…

Damn, that is a great line that any writer would give his eye teeth to create and find some appropriate way to use. Sometimes, it takes courage to use the crazy, but it still needs to serve the message if it is going to succeed as art. I admit that I listened to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot over and over, loving it, denying it, deciphering it, and just bathing in it. I knew I liked it, but it felt like it was fighting me all the way.

So, I can’t imagine what JC Brooks and the Uptown Sound heard that one of them stood up and said, “You know, there is a great soul song hiding in that mass of noise and angst.” Cover bands are often rated for their slavish loyalty to the original tune. That can take remarkable ability, but it denies the imagination. I recognize that a good Elvis Impersonator is one thing, but give me the one that fronts Dread Zeppelin any day of the week.

But that would not be enough, would it? Just knowing that there is an acapella version of Strawberry Fields Forever out there or a fully fleshed out performance of Dylan’s Tambourine Man in existence does not make the cover versions into art. Those are concepts, like the Bauhaus Manifesto or the recipe for tomatillo salsa. The art happens between the outline and the finished piece.

Consider John Sebastian’s beautiful Darlin’ Be Home Soon. The Association were a fine pop band and you could happily spend a couple hours listening to their live album, but their cover of Sebastian’s song pales after you hear what Cocker and Russell could do with it on Mad Dogs and Englishmen (more on that magnificent opus some other day).

So what do Brooks et al bring to the table? They seemingly straighten the song out, deconstructing the density that imbued Wilco’s original with such power. They play to their strengths, as they should, but they latch onto that braggadocio at the heart of the song and invest it with all the power of soul music. The original version, which may well verge on creepy for some, suddenly becomes a song less sinister and more in the vain of Ain’t Too Proud to Beg. Granted, the chorus always sits there as a well-placed warning for the skittish.

I can’t imagine the Doors were sitting there with their organ driven dark ride, Light My Fire, thinking that it would be a hit re-worked as a folk song, but songs are that rare art form waiting to be appropriated by anyone with a little inspiration. Music is hard and songwriters learn by tearing apart the work of others, to say nothing of a long tradition of separating the songwriting from the performance. Only the producer ever hears the Broadway show performed by the composer. Many can carry it off onstage, but they can’t do every role.

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 278 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out are released regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry are posted irregularly. Notifications are posted on Facebook which you can receive by friending or following Craig.

Film directed by Parvez Sharma
Written by Parvez Sharma, Sajid Akbar, and Alison Amron

I will never visit Mecca or see the Black Rock in person. Not being raised in Islam or inclined to conversion to it or any other faith, I will not live to see a day when a non-Muslim may travel to the destination of so many pilgrims. Moreover, filming the Hajj is also forbidden, though it remains unclear to me who has done the forbidding- the Saudi government or religious authorities or, most likely, a collaboration of both. A few years ago, the Vice people smuggled out some long shots of the rituals around the Kabba. That is the first film that I know of that captures the complete stages of the pilgrimage, though there may be others.

Sharma is a gay man born in India, now married and living in New York City. As an outsider within his religion, he proves a remarkably adept guide to the entire journey asked of every Muslim at least once in their lives. Even so, this could have been Rough Guide to the Hajj. Throughout his time in Saudi Arabia, the danger of being both gay and filming the sacrosanct lend an exceptional tension to the film. Yet, I don’t know if that would have raised the whole enterprise beyond the level of watching Anthony Bourdain eat the parts of some poor animal prepared as a local delicacy someplace with questionable hygiene. Really, we’re all reduced to waiting for the inevitable unfortunate backlash, hoping the filmmaker merely pays for their transgressions with a little discomfort and a quick flight home.

No, the art here is the open-hearted invitation from Sharma to join him on a journey to understand the faith of his mother and his ancestors. He longs to appreciate the necessity of the Hajj. True, his innate questioning throttles the power of the experience back from transcendence, but he is not alone. Many of those around him have clearly had enough of the bullying by the authorities too intent on keeping the crowds moving to provide adequate water, shelter, or sanitation. I am not denying that the experience of following the steps to redemption prescribed has a powerful affect on many of the participants, but rather that sustaining their focus on the transcendence of their journey has been significantly more difficult on an already difficult path. Sharma himself has moments of honest reflection on the significance of the stages, without which the film loses its heft.

Time and again, I find myself drawn back to works of art where the creator reveals something of their soul. Outside the world of A Sinner in Mecca, the rest of the world has not always welcomed Sharma as an openly gay Muslim who has revealed the censored. Much like Emile Zola and Woody Guthrie, the art is as much courageous as it is high craft. Comfort makes it too easy to remember that the artist must remain true to himself and sometimes proclaim that which no other will say.

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 279 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out are released regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry are posted irregularly. Notifications are posted on Facebook which you can receive by friending or following Craig.

Book written by Patricia Highsmith

Few authors inspire such strong reactions as Patricia Highsmith, even from those who have not read her work, but only seen movies made from her writings. She started out writing a classic, Strangers on a Train, and proceeded to create the ultimate serial killer, Tom Ripley, whom she chronicled for thirty years. In the meantime, she wrote brilliant short stories about animals (not children’s stories and not for the faint of heart). Her memoirs revealed much, though the clues always seemed to be there in her tales.

Highsmith is an incredibly seductive writer. By now, you don’t crack one of her books without being vastly aware that bad things are going to happen. Even so, the prose lulls the reader into a state of comfort. No, she is not dull because she always gets to the point quickly, but rather she luxuriates in the emotions and surroundings that make life a commonplace around the world. She is always the observer, taking in the feelings and the choices that we all make and putting them back out there for us to see just off kilter.

Ripley is the perfect avatar for this style, as he is undoubtedly a psychopath, as well as extremely talented at mimicry. As a youth, that involves stealing the lives of others by inhabiting those lives better than the original. Amazingly, he grows beyond such thefts and instead takes on the role of country squire in the French countryside. Here, his skills are turned to emulating the emotions and behaviors of those around him (albeit with a thin skin too often affronted). Throughout his tales, Ripley is always observing and assuming the appropriate part for the moment.

Highsmith’s animal stories demonstrate another fascinating take on her distancing effect. I don’t know where the average elephant might score on the psychopathy index, but it might well surface some tendencies that make Dumbo rather frightening. Either way, I doubt animals view the world in any fashion like people, no matter how much we anthropomorphise. In Highsmith’s hands, the creatures around us do not view humanity in benevolent terms; often they do not view the world in anything resembling kindness. It is life and it must be lived. You observe and you react. Of course, that sounds an awful lot like Tom Ripley.

No one can read a lot of Patricia Highsmith without dabbling in pop psychology. From the very beginning of her writing, the crimes often touch that reptilian brain at the core of our reactions. The characters have blank spots about the warmer feelings upon which most of us base our behaviors. Hope and love often land one in a very bad place. Even simple curiosity can be a remarkably bad idea. I can’t say there is really anyone to root for, although the occasional victim of abuse gets to mete out some justice.

Maybe it speaks more about her dedicated readers, but I don’t find all this depressing. The shenanigans are plotted so well and seem to arise so naturally that every story is like getting into a rowboat with a slightly off oarsman, just hoping for the best.

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 280 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out are released regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry are posted irregularly. Notifications are posted on Facebook which you can receive by friending or following Craig.