Contrary to what its title might suggest, the debut album by British singer-songwriter V. V. Brown, Travelling Like the Light took a while to make, and took almost a year from its original July 2009 release in the U.K. to finally land in American stores. But very much as its title would suggest, her single “Shark in the Water” has been stealthily stalking its unsuspecting prey – a mainstream pop audience – for months now. It’s been on my radar since earlier this year when it started showing up on the Logo network’s NewNowNext video playlists, but it’s only recently that the song’s relentless retro-pop grooves have started to rip my limbs apart (figuratively speaking, of course) during my morning commute.
This is great driver’s seat dancing music. It marries a kind of harmlessly sunny, hippie-folky-strummy verse (think Jason Mraz, or think of Train shamelessly ripping Jason Mraz off), with a roaring diva wail of a chorus, turbo-charged by a rocking horn section and devilishly chipper doot-do-doot back-up vocals. She seems so nice, and then you realize (like that guy in those Nicorette commercials) that she’s chewing your arm off and she’s not gonna let go. This is viciously catchy pop, and at a time when most female pop singers (even the ones who can actually sing, Christina) sound like robots, “Shark in the Water” definitively demonstrates a way to make sweetly edgy, playfully relevant pop in 2010, and still sound like a human being.
It’s Memorial Day Weekend, and you know what that means, don’t you? You’re right! It means that once again, Madison, Wisconsin is hosting The World’s Largest Brat Fest. Four solid days of local music, carnival rides, and German sausages, often served by local politicians, television personalities, and other such notables, with proceeds going to local charities. The festival began in the 70s as a customer appreciation event held by the Metcalfe Sentry grocery store held in their parking lot. I used to work in a building a block away from the Metcalfe Sentry and used to live for those Friday afternoons before Memorial Day weekend and Labor Day weekend (Yes! Brat Fest is held twice annually!), when the alluring smoke from the grills would call to us office drones and cube farmers like an aromatic pied piper, with its promise of a really cheap, really tasty, and really, really bad-for-you lunch.
Although in recent years, Brat Fest has outgrown the Sentry parking lot and is now held on Willow Island at the Alliant Energy Center just south of downtown Madison, it’s still organized by the Metcalfe brothers, sons of the festival’s founder. Each new Brat Fest aspires to break the world record for bratwurst sold, a record that, inevitably, Brat Fest already holds. There’s always a telethon-style tally board set up to record the number sold for the current Fest. The current record, set last Memorial Day is 208,752 bratwurst – a little more than 40,000 pounds of sausage, topped by about 4,000 pounds of sauerkraut. This year’s Brat Fest got off to a roaring start, with nearly 63,000 brats sold on Friday, and it’s been hot and sunny all weekend which bodes well for a record-shattering brat-stravaganza.
Today’s playlist then, is, like Brat Fest, both a celebration of summer and, well, a “sausage fest”. First up is a song by country singer-songwriter Phil Vassar, which is probably just about the most perfect expression of what today feels like here in Wisconsin.
The music of the Beach Boys has been synonymous with summer for most of the last 50 years now, but listening to oldies stations, you find that they grind out the same old standbys – “California Girls”, “Good Vibrations”, etc. – which, make no mistake, are still amazing songs. But there are so many latter-day Beach Boys songs that never really get much play, and wholly deserve it. One of my favorites is “This Whole World” from their truly awesome 1971 album Sunflower. In terms of the music and the vocal arrangements, it’s not all that different from where they started out in the early 60s, singing about cars and girls and surfing. But lyrically “This Whole World”, for all of 110 wonderful seconds is a simple celebration of, y’know, everything. “And when I go anywhere, I see love. I see love. I see love…”
In 1997, British dance music trio Dario G took a sample from one of the quintessential late autumn songs – The Dream Academy’s “Life in a Northern Town” – set it to a dance beat, with some airy pianos and chirpy synths, and built it into a great summer song they called “Sunchyme”. The song hit #2 in the U.K., and was later used in a television commercial here, although I have no memory of what the commercial was actually for. (It was, like, ten years ago.) Its video features people dressed up as lions and tigers and zebras (oh my?) re-enacting scenes from National Geographic documentaries.
Johnny Rivers‘s 1967 hit “Summer Rain” is, simply, a beautiful, beautiful song. I love how its tensions build, how its emotions heighten over its verses, how the simple descending chord progression is repeated over and over, but with the increasing urgency of strings and horns, from the hint of a drizzle in the opening to a full-on downpour as Johnny sings about a summer love that wants badly to be something more. There’s something about this song that just sounds like the feeling of a rain shower on a hot August afternoon. It’s the audio equivalent of that it-just-rained smell.
Huey Lewis and the News, like the Beach Boys, are a band that just sounds better between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Something about their lack of pretense, the way they recycled sounds from the 60s with the benefit of 80s technology, the way they never seemed to be anything more than a really great bar band, and somehow that was always going to be more than enough. Their songs may not be specifically about hot fun in the summertime, but they sure provide a great soundtrack for it, and I have very specific childhood summer vacation memories inextricably linked to songs like “Do You Believe In Love”. All that said, their 1984 video for the song “If This Is It” from their breakthrough third album Sports is basically a typical 80s summer sex comedy in 4 minutes – only without the sex.
Singer-songwriter Mark Kozelek, as leader of Red House Painters in the 90s, and Sun Kil Moon in the now, has developed a reputation for recording unwieldy and deeply melancholic covers of classic rock songs, including an entire record’s worth of AC/DC songs, and, most infamously, a relentlessly dreary 10-minute plus take on “Silly Love Songs” that sounded a lot more like a Crazy Horse jam from one of Paul McCartney’s nightmares than it did the corny 70s pop hit. As much as I love some of Red House Painters’ longer songs (“Down Colorful Hill” and “Make Like Paper” are both awesome in completely different ways), I think Kozelek’s best at his most succinct, as with his 1995 single “Summer Dress”, a languorous whisper of a song.
Finally, probably the most popular “summer” song of the last century, “Summertime”, from the George Gershwin opera Porgy and Bess, is also one of those songs that has been worked over by so many different artists in so many different styles (and that’s just in nine seasons of American Idol) that it’s hard to be surprised or thrilled by it anymore. But then I saw Stuck On You, a Farrelly Brothers movie about conjoined twins played by Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear. It’s not that great a movie. It’s the kind of movie Comedy Central might show on Sunday mornings, so I’ll have it on the TV while I’m vacuuming the bedroom or folding laundry. But for all its flaws, it culminates in one fantastic musical number in which Greg Kinnear, in a community theater production of his Bonnie & Clyde musical (co-starring Meryl Streep, who plays herself in the movie), channels 60s R&B singer Billy Stewart in a performance of “Summertime”. These three minutes pretty much redeem the rest of the movie.
Back around maybe the second or third season of American Idol, when the show was becoming the established pop cultural phenomenon it is today, we started hearing about similar shows being developed by Lord of the Idols Simon Fuller and 19 Entertainment in other countries like Sweden and Poland and Indo(friggin)nesia. To date, there have been approximately 30 various Idol-esque franchises created around the world. I remember reading around that time about Kurt Nilsen, the first-season winner of Idols Norway – just how cool he seemed. He was a guitar player and unlike earlier seasons of American Idol, he could actually accompany himself on the show. I don’t remember that I ever heard him sing until he did a duet with Willie Nelson on the song “Lost Highway” in 2008 (at which point I was duly impressed), but I remember thinking that he sounded like – well, like an artist. Specifically, the kind of singing-songwriting-guitar-playing artist that our own American Idol showed seemed to hold in contempt.
It’s easy to trash the pop we Americans produce because we’re fairly buried in it. And just like any landfill, you can bet that there are a few treasures in that giant mound of refuse (future ski-hill?), but the smell from the rest of it is way too powerful – even if we thought the Hope Diamond were buried in it, would that be enough for us to throw on the haz-mat suits and go digging? Instead, we see from a distance pretty flowers growing on what looks like a majestic purple mountain shrouded in the soft fog of an early spring morning, and we think: All those international Idol competitions are actually producing, real, good, legitimate stuff. Or at least better than that awful Kelly Clarkson that we’re stuck with. She’s never gonna last. (Editorial Note: This is my 2003-4 self speaking. In gross ignorance. I didn’t watch any of Season 1, and Clarkson hadn’t put out Breakaway yet, which I contend is one of the best start-to-finish pop records of the last decade. Carry on.)
But maybe that majestic purple mountain is really just another gigantic, disgusting, depressing landfill, and maybe its shroud of early morning spring fog is really just a cloud toxic fumes rising out of it.
Maybe it’s just my deeply ingrained musical Europhilia, but I think it’s always easy to fall into thinking that Europeans are just naturally more artsy than we are; that they’re more willing to hear songs in languages other than their first, more open to genuine weirdness in the name of art; and thus, easier to romanticize their Idols – Kurt Nilsen, for instance – as more talented, more legitimate, more worthy. But in 2010, American Idol‘s metamorphosis from mere singing competition to artist farm team is complete, a metamorphosis that probably began around the time of Taylor Hicks‘s win in Season 5 (the show’s peak ratings season, by the way) and has culminated with the coronation of an Idol, Lee DeWyze, not so very dissimilar from that chunky (for a Scandinavian) blonde troubadour from Norge; and this against Crystal Bowersox, a very white girl from Ohio, with white-girl dreadlocks, a serious Janis Joplin jones, a long-standing residency at one of her local pubs, and really bad teeth, who not only writes her own songs, but writes them well enough that one of them was actually featured in an Idol video package last week. American Idol has become the very epitome of the Idols I’d always imagined all those Euro Idols to be. (And yet, this season, I couldn’t have been less interested in watching it.)
Meanwhile, the most recent winner of the German Idol equivalent Deutschland sucht den Superstar , 29-year-old Iranian-born singer Mehrzad Marashi has just released the follow-up to his debut, show finale single “Don’t Believe”, which is still charting in Germany’s Top 10 this week. The song, “Sweat (The A La La La La Long Song)” is a pop-reggae duet with openly gay former Superstar winner Mark Medlock, the German franchise’s most successful winner to date. If you are still harboring any romantic notions about the presumed artistic superiority of the artists developed by international (read: non-American) Idol franchises, let the video you’re about to see be your reality check.
BTW: Marashi’s the one whose ridiculous, Guido-er-than-thou facial hair doesn’t form the weird trident points on his chin. And did I mention Medlock’s gayness? Also: Andy Samberg should sue.