My Heart Is Drenched In Wine

I’d only ever read about Norah Jones in two ways – either in frivolous industry shill “new faces in pop” fluff magazine pieces, or as a person maligned in other publications for being a shiny, packaged “new face in pop”. I remember a Wall Street Journal article about her, in which the writer was going on about how she’s on Blue Note and how that’s bothering a lot of people cos she’s not really a jazz performer so much as a lite adult pop singer and that the label’s future might have more to do with folks like her than with traditional jazz. I’m not too concerned about Blue Note, so I don’t really care what new artists the label wants to promote so long as they keep their back catalog in print. The point is, I think that from what I’d read, I had made up my mind that I didn’t care about actually hearing Norah Jones, not even enough to form a positive or negative feeling about her. This goes for a lot of new artists on major labels – I’ve come to distrust those labels so much that if the artist isn’t imposed on me somehow, I don’t feel particularly motivated to hear their artists at all.

Last night, I saw Jones’ video for “Don’t Know Why” while channel surfing, and I was very pleasantly surprised – it’s a really nice little song. It’s not going to change the world, it’s not original, it’s just a good little song sung by a girl with a pleasant voice. It seemed really out of place on MTV2, too – it’s slow, quiet, understated. I’m not used to hearing anything this gentle and calm on music television either, so that’s a plus. It’s also extremely unhip in a way that appeals to me a lot right now, after spending half of the past year hearing far too much music that in spite of its quality still seems a little too selfconciously “now”. The song was worth downloading, and I’ll probably try out the rest of the record too. If nothing, it’s a good substitute for Fiona Apple until she ever makes another record.

Yeah, I like Fiona Apple. Fuck off. I like a lot of square music.

Can’t Hear The Revolution

Here’s a very interesting post re: mainstream vs. underground hip hop from Dead Pirate Crunchy on Barbelith:

if the argument is about lyrical politics, i would much rather listen to and think about the complex politics of ‘apolitical’ commercial pop than the semipolitical liberal posturings of self-consciously ‘conscious’ pop intellectuals – i.e. bootylicious is every bit as political as sarah jones, but since it doesn’t try to resolve its contradictions into a polemic it leaves more room for thought. classic example of this is the abysmal ‘we need a revolution’ by dead prez, where they attempt to ‘improve’ aaliyah’s ‘we need a resolution’ by dropping her (soft, feminine, emotive) lyrics and replacing them with their own (hard, masculine, political). the result is little more than whinging socialists with patently dubious sexual politics telling us we need revolution – a terrific insight, sure, but nothing on the way aaliyah’s voice combined with timbaland’s faltering beats on the original to evoke the tensions and doubts of a failing relationship (which has more application in my political projects than ‘one solution, revolution’ leninist crap). moreover, aaliyah says more to me about revolution than anyone who actually says ‘revolution’ ever has.