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Sunday, June 14, 2015

We'll start with Richard Crowson's cartoon this week, since we can't seem to escape Brownbackistan. The Kansas state legislature had to go way into overtime to finally come up with a deal to patch up a $400 million shortfall in state tax revenues opened up by Brownback's 2011 income tax cuts (the one which notoriously exempted businessmen from having to pay any state income tax). It's hard to get Republicans to raise any kind of taxes, but some reconciled themselves by coming up with the most regressive tax increases they could find. And some held out to the bitter end, hoping instead to wreck the government and all the evil it stands for. Brownback himself took both positions at one point or another, and reportedly broke down and wept during one of many hopeless meetings with state legislators. The final scheme they came up with satisfied no one, but Brownback did manage to keep some semblance of his signature programs in place (story here). One downside of keeping the legislature in session so long was that they passed even more dumb and vicious bills than they had time for during the regular session -- see the Rosenberg piece below.

Chuck Powell sent in a link to a piece posted on Tyler Cowen's blog (thankfully not written by Cowen), The political economy of Kansas fiscal policy. The post makes a number of reasonable points, such as the split between rural and urban Kansas, and factors which distort both Wichita and Kansas City from urban/suburban norms. Also that "cutting the size of government was never a serious option," mostly because the costs of education and health care -- the two main expenses of state government -- have been rising much faster than inflation and economic growth. At one point the author says, "Republicans should be wise enough to not depend on luck, and they should be wiser predicting how trend lines go." But he doesn't go into why our current generation of Republicans are so bad at those things. For one thing, past generations were a different story -- you could argue that their priorities were wrong, but you rarely doubted their basic competence: something which Brownback and many others make you wonder about daily. One could write a whole post on this one question, but for now I think there are two main reasons: (1) the Republicans have created a very effective grass roots political organization, largely peopled by gun nuts and anti-abortion fanatics, backed by local chambers of commerce and big money, and they have become very effective at scamming the system; one result of this is that Republicans rarely have to worry about losing to Democrats -- their only meaningful debate is among themselves, which makes them increasingly isolated from and ignorant of other people and their problems; (2) in other words, they live in a bubble, and this bubble is increasingly saturated with Fox News and other right-wing media, which mostly just teaches them to scapegoat while making them stupid and mean. The latter, of course, is a problem with Republicans all over the nation. What makes Kansas worse than the rest is how hard it is to beat them at the game they've rigged. In 2014, Republicans ran 5-8% above the best polls all across the ballot, on top of the gerrymander that guaranteed them legislative majorities. I wouldn't rule out fraud and intimidation, but most likely that's their superior get-out-the-vote organization.

Some more scattered links this week:

• Tom Carson: H.W. Brands: Reagan: The Life: Book review of the new H.W. Brands biography of Ronald Reagan, Reagan: The Life, with a look back at Edmund Morris: Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan. I've read two previous books by Brands: Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (2008) and American Dreams: The United States Since 1945 (2010), and have found him to be a fair and compiler of history, though not much of an interpreter. The limits that Carson notes are plausible -- especially if, as seems to be the case, he feigns admiration for a character I've always regarded as a shill and a fraud, and whose political legacy, both actual and imaginary, has brought us nothing but grief. I've also read Sean Wilentz: The Age of Reagan: A History 1974-2008 which also goes way too far into buying the myth that Reagan was anything more than an aberration. For more sober views, see Will Bunch: Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future (2009), and William Kleinknecht, The Man Who Sold the World: Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America (2009), or Carson here -- my only real gripe with his review is that he buys into the notion that Reagan deserves some credit for the collapse of the Soviet Union ("something only a churl would deny him any credit for" -- I'll grant that his early sabre-rattling may have resulted in some unforced errors that weakened the Sovier Union, and that later on Reagan swung against the hard core cold warriors giving Gorbachev some breathing room). Carson is right when he writes: "All these years later, it isn't just outrage that keeps his political opponents from managing or even trying to see him in perspective; it's disbelief." The roots of that disbelief are firmly grounded in reality. Unless you're extremely rich, it's impossible to see how anything that Reagan accomplished -- and beyond all the sleight-of-hand horseshit (like the rejuvenation of "morning in America" or his triumph in the cold war and the vanquishing of Communism) he clearly did accomplish a lot -- has in any way made our lives better.

  Many interesting comments here, like this one:

  Brands also doesn't grasp the extent to which industry politics -- that nerve-wracking combo of power, fickle fashionability, ambition as a form of submission, and submission as an expression of ambition -- were Reagan's Harvard and Yale. During much of his showbiz career, his agent and patron -- note that contradiction and you'll understand Hollywood -- was Lew Wasserman, the legendary head of MCA. Because Wasserman's links to the Chicago Mob known as "the Outfit" are what makes a man endow hospital wings to burnish his image, whole books could be written about the dark side of Ron's debt to Lew; indeed, one or two have been. But Wasserman's name shows up in Reagan: The Life's index just once, and the reference turns out to be anodyne.

  Why dwell on what Brands gives short shrift? Because Hollywood stayed Reagan's primary frame of reference even after he found the ultimate golden parachute, that's why. When he was an actor facing the glue factory, he couldn't shut up about politics. Once he was president, he had the definition of a captive audience while blathering away about his life in movies as the phone never rang.

  Up to then, we'd never had a professional fantasist in the White House. Nixon needed to be awfully drunk to think gabbing at portraits on walls was a good idea, but Reagan could do it cold sober. His fabled remoteness was eerie enough to disconcert his own family -- even wife Nancy confessed it sometimes unnerved her -- and his most immovable mental furniture seems to have been fashioned with such disregard for most people's notions of corroborating evidence that he and Michael Jackson, his '80s pop-culture counterpart at flights of Peter Pan fancy, really could have been long-lost twins. But Brands doesn't even quote the most celebrated blooper of his man's career: the farewell speech to the 1988 Republican convention in which John Adams's "Facts are stubborn things" came out as "Facts are stupid things -- stubborn things, I should say."

  Even at the time, I viewed Reagan as primarily a front man, the real power residing in his famous "kitchen cabinet" -- the cabal of rich businessmen who had recruited him and backed his political career from the start. (At the time, I wasn't aware that Reagan's real initiation into politics was as a corporate spokesperson for General Electric, a company whose management still nursed grudges over the New Deal.) His was not the first administration where the president seemed blithely unaware of the rampant corruption within -- Ulysses Grant and William Harding were obvious examples -- but Reagan was way more disconnected: to call him a "fantasist" is rather generous. As I frequently said at the time, under Reagan the only growth industry in America was fraud. The HUD scandal, the Savings and Loan fiasco, Iran/Contra all bore that out, but it was evident even earlier, all the way back to the "voodoo economics" behind Reagan's signature tax cut. Carson notes:

  What you'd hardly guess from reading Reagan: The Life is that the United States went from being the world's No. 1 creditor to its No. 1 debtor nation during his tenure. His zest for replacing red tape with red ink ended any pretense that the GOP was the party of fiscal prudence, but when Brands mentions toward the end that the Reagan era's hemorrhaging deficits had tripled the public debt from $700 billion to $2 trillion by 1988, it's the first time the subject has come up [ . . . ] and it's virtually the last one, too.

The problem with Reagan's deficits isn't that he created them, and certainly not that we enjoy scolding the Republicans for their spendthrift ways (not to mention hypocrisy), but that Americans got so little of real value out of the extravagance: a lot of worthless military hardware -- the Star Wars-marketed anti-missile system still doesn't work, but the stuff that did work and has since been deployed in wars all around the world has been far more damaging -- and a small number of billionaires with their correspondingly inflated egos. Perhaps even worse, that explosion of debt is now commonly seen as crippling our government -- originally conceived of, by, and for the people as a tool for securing the general welfare -- from doing even relatively simple things that need to be done. The single most damaging thing Reagan ever did was to make a joke about "the scariest words in the English language: I'm from the government and I'm here to help." That such a joke can be turned into a full-blown ideology is a testament to a deeper innovation that Reagan wrought: he liberated American conservatism from the bounds of reality, allowing them to focus on imaginary problems, oblivious to whatever consequences their madness may produce. Back in the 1980s he was said to have "Teflon" -- a non-stick coating that protected him from any of his scandals. Looking back, it now seems that the key to his innocence was his very disconnectedness. Maybe someday a biographer will manage to identify the point when his fantasy gave way to Alzheimer's, but for all practical purposes it hardly matters.

• Michael Knights: Doubling Down on a Doubtful Strategy: Subhed: "Why the current US plan to win back Iraq only guarantees the Islamic State won't be defeated." Knights seems to be arguing that the US should take over and greatly escalate the war despite his analysis that what the US is actually doing can't possibly work. Still you have to wonder whether any amount of commitment could overcome the mental blinders the US military brings with it to Iraq:

  Time is decidedly not on the side of the United States. As then-Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki told me in March 2014, the Iraqi government had been requesting U.S. airstrikes and Special Forces assistance against the Islamic State since the end of 2013. The U.S. unwillingness to act then did not save it anything: Its Iraqi ally collapsed, and now it has been forced into another military campaign.

  When U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter opined that Iraqis "showed no will to fight" in Ramadi, he demonstrated a complete lack of empathy for the situation of the Iraqi combat troops on the front lines against the Islamic State.

  America's Iraqi allies are exhausted, and many units are barely hanging on. They've been demonstrating plenty their "will to fight" in the 12 months since Mosul fell, in the 16 months since Fallujah and Ramadi were overrun, and in the decade since Iraqi forces came to outnumber U.S. forces as the main security force in Iraq.

  No U.S. service member serving in Iraq ever had to stay in the combat zone for as long as the Iraqi troops have. Many of these Iraqis have no safe place to go on leave, allowing no respite for years on end. No U.S. unit in recent history has ever had to suffer the chronic lack of supply and near-complete lack of good officers that Iraqi soldiers live with every day.

  If the United States can totally misunderstand the conditions its allies are experiencing, it's fair to ask what else it is getting wrong about how Iraqis are going to behave in the future.

  Knights offers a list of "faulty assumptions" the US has about Iraq, but two of them are just clichés ("The more we do, the less they do" and "We cannot want the stability of Iraq more than Iraqis want it themselves" -- both assume Iraqis want what we want but just don't want it bad enough) and the third is false ("The Islamic State is a terrorist group, not an army" -- ISIS is both and will fight according to its opponent, so the more you Americanize the war, the more ISIS will adapt with techniques proven effective against the US military). Consider Knights' final pitch:

  If America is only in Iraq to kill Islamic State fighters, it is eventually going to face the reality of an unfixable collapsed state that will demand an open-ended counterterrorism campaign. The alternative is that the United States help Iraqis preserve the fabric of their nation to whatever extent is still possible. To do so will require a different outlook and greater decisiveness. Deliberation is understandable, but U.S. policy in Iraq has been verging on paralysis.

  This is not rocket science: The U.S. options are clear. If the Obama administration wants to fully commit to the hard work of rebuilding Iraq, it should commit 3,000 to 5,000 U.S. Special Forces and support elements as combat advisers, so that Iraqi ground forces and coalition airpower can become far more effective. Secondly, it should use this intensified U.S. military commitment as leverage with Baghdad to win more sustained federal Iraqi government engagement of the Sunnis and the Kurds. Finally, it should accelerate the training of Iraqi forces to leave the next president with a better chance of responsibly downscaling the U.S. commitment in Iraq.

  Without these steps, we should not expect to expel the Islamic State from Iraq. In the absence of undeniable U.S. commitment, our Iraqi allies may define victory down into something that looks more like defeat. And that is a risk that neither Iraq, nor the United States, can afford.

  What exactly can we not afford? The worst case scenario is that ISIS occupies about a third of Iraq -- it has no appeal in the Shiite south or in Kurdistan, and Baghdad is effectively Shiite now -- and the rump state in Baghdad concedes those gains, thereby ridding themselves of a lot of people they don't like and who don't want them. That allows ISIS to focus on Syria, where the US has no real interests or concerns. Why can't we afford that? That represents no real US investment or trade, so we have nothing to lose in that regard. We wouldn't be spending anything bombing and killing them, so that would be a gain. US trade with and investment in Iraq and Kurdistan would be more stable with an end to Iraq's civil war. ISIS might eventually threaten Jordan or Saudi Arabia, but those nations would be much easier to defend than Iraq is. ISIS might try to export terrorism, but they'd have much less reason to do so if the US wasn't bombing them. Sure, ISIS rule would be bad for some of the people living under it, but that's true of other nations and is much easier to remedy diplomatically than through war.

  On the other hand, fighting ISIS means we have to somehow reform Iraq's government to make it more amenable to the Sunnis who have deserted it in favor of ISIS. This is something the US has repeatedly proved incapable of doing. It's something the present government of Iraq doesn't want, and that government is backed by a democratic mandate, so who are we to tell its people they didn't make the right choices? It also means coming to a solution in Syria, which either involves some deft diplomacy that the US has repeatedly failed at or a massive ground invasion and occupation, which is what the US tried in Iraq and failed so miserably at. One might fantasize, but really, why should anyone think the US might do a better job there? One obvious downside is that everyone who might conceivably oppose us -- which is to say everyone -- is already armed and fighting. At least with Iraq the US had a grace period until the resistance got up to speed and changed the US mission from "nation building" to force protection. That's the point where we throw all the humanitarian ballast overboard and decide that the war is only about us. That's the point where we're lost, even if we haven't technically lost yet, because if anything has become clear through America's post-WWII wars, it's that we can't look into our own hearts and see the arrogance and contempt that reside there.

  When people like Knights say that the US can't afford to lose in Iraq, what they mean is that the US can't continue if people get the idea that we're not omnipotent. The obvious first riposte is that it's a little late in the day to be worrying about that. The second is that would make us like everyone else, and what's so bad about that? It doesn't mean that desirable outcomes to world problems can't be worked out. It just means that the US would have to work with other countries to reach agreement, on terms that are mutually inoffensive. It means the US would have to learn to respect others, rather than just dictating to them. But it would also steer US foreign policy away from the maxim that power corrupts (and absolute power corrupts absolutely). But even if all we did was curl up into an isolationist ball and mope, that would probably be better for all concerned than bumbling our way into a holy war we don't have the slightest understanding of -- which is pretty much what Knights wants us to do. Perhaps the "paralysis" Knights complains of is really just because there's an irreconcilable division in the foreign policy elite as more and more people sober up and realize the lack of good options. For one example of this shift, see Stephen M Walt: What Should We Do if the Islamic State Wins? His answer: "live with it." Really, you think "die with it" is a better answer? Even Donald Rumsfeld (see George W. Bush Was Wrong About Iraq) is thinking that it would be better to counter ISIS with ideas ("more like the Cold War") rather than bullets. By the way, what Rumsfeld thinks Bush was wrong about wasn't invading Iraq; it was thinking that the US could build "an American-style democracy" there. As a long-time Cold Warrior, Rumsfeld always had a preference for compliant strong men over democracy.

• Heather Digby Parton: The Koch brothers just took a huge step toward a GOP civil war: Having created a system where money is everything, the Republican Party is now turning into a plaything for a handful of billionaires, especially the Kochs, who seem intent to use their deep pockets to launch a hostile takeover of the RNC.

  One of the more enduring metaphors of this political era is bound to be that of the Republican Dr. Frankenstein and his Tea Party monster. What was once a staid, mainstream political party full of Rotary Club businessmen, hard-scrabble farmers and pillars of America's communities has become a boisterous bunch of rebellious revolutionaries. [ . . . ]

  Its ideology became a matter of faith-based adherence to abstract principles about "freedom" and "small government" even as the Republican Party made a devil's bargain with both the religious right, which sought to enforce "family values," and the military industrial complex, which grew to gargantuan proportions under both parties. These alliances were strategic moves by the Party elders seeking a winning governing coalition and it worked beautifully for decades. They formed a strong "conservative" identity out of this coalition, while demonizing the identity of liberalism to such an extent that liberals were forced to abandon it altogether and adopt another name to describe themselves.

  Meanwhile, the party banked on overweening victimization among its mainly white, resentful voters in the wake of the revolution in law and culture that began in the 1960s with civil rights for minorities and the economic and social changes that sent women pouring into the workplace and changing the traditional organization of family and home. This too worked very well for quite some time. Fear, anger and resentment of everything from racial integration to middle class stagnation to imaginary foreign threats became intrinsic to the Republican identity.

  All of this was of great benefit to the Republican party's electoral success and the message discipline within the echo chamber of their partisan media ensured that the ideology among the various strands of the Republican coalition held together in what sounded like a coherent program. But it never really was coherent. [ . . . ]

  But the irony of the Party that fetishizes money now becoming a victim of the 1 percent monster it has coddled, nurtured and enabled is overwhelming. Unfortunately, that particular beast has been unleashed on all of us and it doesn't seem as though anyone knows how to stop it. The Tea Partyers who come together and vote out a stale incumbent they don't like in favor of a right wing zealot is not something that's good for the country, to be sure. But at least it's democratic, however unpleasant the result. The idea that a vastly wealthy pair of right wing fanatics could literally take over one of the two major American political parties is more than a little disturbing. It's downright monstrous.

• Paul Rosenberg: Sam Brownback guts Kansas even more: This is life under America's worst Republican governor: Brownback, then a Senator, ran for President in 2008. He expected to do especially well in Iowa, but got no credit for coming from the corn belt, and lost the holy rollers to Mike Huckabee (a baptist minister, whereas Brownback's a convert to high church catholicism). He was polling about 2% when he dropped out. He then regrouped, giving up his safe Senate seat to run for Governor, with the hope of proving himself such a brilliant state executive that party and nation would have to bow down to his next presidential campaign. He won handily, then proved himself to be, as the headline says, "America's worst Republican governor" (not that several others I can think of, including Bobby Jindal and Scott Walker, have a lot of breathing room). First thing he did was pulling a Reagan and hiring Arthur Laffer to prescribe a round of pro-business income tax cuts, including an exemption for business moguls from all state income taxes. That saved one Republican legislator $60,000 per year (do the math and that means he's raking in about $10 million; he actually proposed reducing the break). That probably saved Charles Koch a lot more. But the economy didn't respond as advertised, and Kansas has been facing budget gaps on the order of $400 million/year, and responding with drastic spending cuts -- which have further tanked the economy -- and increases in regressive sales taxes, "sin" taxes, and local property taxes. Brownback has another signature program where he's promising tax exemptions to out-of-staters to move into depopulating counties in rural Kansas. Presumably the people struggling to hang on in those counties will be happy to pay for their new neighbors schooling and services. That, of course, hasn't cost Kansas much so far, because hardly anyone is desperate enough for a tax break to live in Gove or Hodgeman counties. Indeed, hardly anyone lived there before the breaks (my relatives got out of Hodgeman, where my great-great-grandfather homesteaded in the 1860s). When not appealing to tax cheats, the state legislature has passed an extraordinary number of dumb and/or vicious bills this session. Rosenberg writes about one that allows Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a notorious partisan hack, to prosecute anyone he sees fit for voting fraud. Back in Brownback's first term Kansas passed one of the most restrictive anti-voter registration laws in the country. I'll let Rosenberg describe another law:

  This past week drew national attention to two of those aspects in the form of new laws Brownback signed. The first law would defund the state courts if they rule against a 2014 law which was seen by many as retaliation for the Gannon decision. That law stripped the Supreme Court of supervisory functions established in the state constitution. Hence, Brownback and the legislature are defying the power of the court to decide constitutional law. This is the very opposite of the true meaning of "limited government" -- government limited by the rule of law (as opposed to absolute government, limited by nothing.)

  Another of the new laws in Kansas is one that drops the requirement of a license (and some minimal training) for concealed carry of guns. By contrast, see: Katie McDonough: This is the NRA's worst nightmare: The new gun safety study that gun nuts don't want you to hear about:

  A law requiring people to apply for a permit before buying a handgun helped Connecticut quietly reduce its firearm-related homicide rate by 40 percent, according to a new study out from Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research. And this week, announced in conjunction with the research, lawmakers from Connecticut introduced a measure to encourage other states to adopt their own permit programs.

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Saturday, June 13, 2015

Another month (plus one day) since last one, this one by far the largest of the year so far, but actually the new records are way down: 59 (including new compilations) compared to 103 last month, and before that: 101, 114, 97, 132. The difference is a mop-up operation in the old music section, focusing on bands which placed records in a list published by Spin of their Top 300 Albums: 1985-2014. What I've tried to do was not just to fill in grades for listed albums I had missed but to pick up most of the previously unrated records of those artists. In some cases those records were highly recommended by others. In others I just felt like the context would help me out. And for completeness sake, I list the previously rated albums in the Notes below. (The file linked above has the complete list plus all of my grades to date.)

That exercise was made possible by streaming from Rhapsody, and in some cases was limited by it. I've only gotten a little more than half way through the list, but thus far I've looked for the following records but not found them:

34. Metallica: Master of Puppets (1986, Elektra)
80. Bikini Kill: The Singles (1998, Kill Rock Stars)
100. Guided by Voices: Bee Thousand (1994, Scat)
105. Dr. Dre: The Chronic (1992, Death Row)
121. Kate Bush: Hounds of Love (1985, EMI America)
176. Primal Scream: Screamadelica (1991, Sire)

The second half will have more records to look up. I was originally missing 81 records from the list (27%). Thus far I've whittled that down to 46 (15%). Not surprisingly, as Spin's list gets more obscure, my coverage of it becomes a bit more scanty. Among the missing record artists to come: Aaliyah, Aerosmith, Tori Amos, Animal Collective, The Books, Boredoms, Neko Case, Cursive, The Deftones, The Field, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Green Day, Janet Jackson, Jimmy Eat World, The Killers, Frankie Knuckles, Lil Wayne, Mastodon, Maxwell, M83, The Microphones, Mobb Deep, My Chemical Romance, Nine Inch Nails, Oasis, Orbital, Ride, Sigur Rós, Slint, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Sunny Day Real Estate, Swervedriver, System of a Down, Teenage Fanclub, The Unicorns, 2Pac, Wilco, Yo La Tengo. Most of those I've heard at least one record by. Just evidently not the right one.

During the first two decades of the years in question, I only heard records I bought, and I made a point of only trying to buy records I would probably like. Rhapsody has allowed me to listen to more stuff I wouldn't have bothered with before, and more often than not it proves my instincts right. (Admittedly, I'm not a big alt/indie fan, and my hip-hop proclivities run away from gangsta and toward underground, so Spin has never been a very good predictor of my taste.) Indeed, of the records I've filled in so far, the grade breakdown suggests that I was mostly right to skip those records: A-: 4, B+(***): 4, B+(**): 6, B+(*): 5, B: 13 (40.6%) -- that split suggests some of the latter should have been graded lower, as probably would have happened had I bothered to play them more than once. By the way, Christgau had two of my four A- records at A- (both hip-hop), the other two at ** (but he had a different Built to Spill at A-).

Even before the Spin piece, I started on this path by trying to clean up a pair of long-owned but never-graded Bright Eyes CDs. And at the last minute, I added a couple jazz albums while I was working on my Ornette Coleman post. Not big news that the unheard Colemans made the A-list, but I was surprised by two records with sideman appearances (not something he ever did much of).

I'll keep chugging away on the Spin records next month, so the new record count may remain depressed. On the other hand, I have been skimming fairly efficiently, coming up with 12 A-list new releases this month vs. 8 last month (albeit 15 in April and 14 in March). Some of what I found this month was due to a premature mid-year best-of from Spin. I expect we'll see more "so far" lists at midyear approaches, so that should help identify prospects.

As for the new records, this is landing at a point when Robert Christgau's weekly Expert Witness column has been suspended. I don't have any idea how to get the attention of Medium/Cuepoint and apply any pressure to renew the column -- I gather this isn't hopeless at this point, even if the odds aren't great. If he stops publication, there will certainly be worthwhile new albums that I (or pretty much anyone else) will never notice. I figured I could illustrate that with stats from this column, but it looks like he's only reviewed 2 of my 55 recent releases -- Cracker and Slutever, ones I was totally unaware of before he wrote them up (and don't like as much as he does). Still, those are things I wouldn't have heard of otherwise, and most month there are more of them. It also seems likely that he would eventually weigh in on several albums I like below: Bassekou Kouyate, Shamir, maybe Mbongwana Star and Willie & Merle. I also wonder whether he'll find something in Jason Derulo that eluded me. (And to a lesser extent, in all respects, Young Thug.) On the other hand, he's only noticed Murs on occasion (White Mandingos but no ¡Mursday!), and thus far he hasn't noted Colin Stetson (who may be a jazz guy but that isn't his fan base) at all.

Most of these are short notes/reviews based on streaming records from Rhapsody. They are snap judgments based on one or two plays, accumulated since my last post along these lines, back on May 12. Past reviews and more information are available here (6549 records).

Recent Releases

Aguankö: Invisible (2015, Aguankö Music): Latin jazz septet led by Alberto Nacif on congas, with trumpet, trombone, sax/flute, piano, bass, more percussion, and guests (including a vocal). Four (of nine) cuts are cha cha chas, two each mambos and guaguankos. B+(**) [cd]

All Included: Satan in Plain Clothes (2014 [2015], Clean Feed): Scandinavian freebop group, one I file under saxophonist Martin Küchen's name because he organizes lots of groups like this, but Thomas Johansson's trumpet and Mats Äleklint's trombone are every bit as prominent, and the bass-drums of Jon Rune Strøm and Tollef Østvang keeps it all roiling -- so, yeah, all included. Just not sorted out as well as Küchen's Angles groups. B+(***) [cd]

Aimée Allen: Matter of Time (2013-14 [2015], Azuline): Singer-songwriter, born and raised in Pittsburgh but moved to Paris (some songs in French), fourth album, about half originals, half standards, including a particularly nice "Corcovado" with Romero Lubambo. B+(**) [cd]

American Wrestlers: American Wrestlers (2014 [2015], Fat Possum): Scottish singer-songwriter Gary McClure, formerly of Working for a Nuclear Free City, moved to St. Louis and came up with this understated but tuneful album. B

Priscilla Badhwar: Mademoiselle (2014 [2015], self-released, EP): Not clear where she comes from, but this 6-track (21:17) CD was recorded in Austin, TX, featuring French tunes, some in French, some in English. B+(**)

Blur: The Magic Whip (2015, Parlophone): First group album since 2003's Think Tank, although Damon Albarn has been busy in the meantime, with last year's solo album and various projects, most famously Gorillaz, perhaps best 2002's Mali Music. I take it the band has been periodically touring all along, and this album came together when they found themselves with some free time in Hong Kong. Less guitar and more pop than their 1990s albums; likable and professional. B+(**)

Randy Brecker/Bobby Shew/Jan Hasenöhrl: Trumpet Summit Prague (2012 [2015], Summit): Three trumpet stars backed by the Czech National Symphony Orchestra and St. Blaise's Big Band, arranged and conducted by Vince Mendoza. The trumpets are fiery enough, but the only tune that gets everyone swinging is "Caravan" (so they play it twice). B [cd]

Built to Spill: Untethered Moon (2015, Warner Brothers): First album in six years, only their third since 2001, the new group (aside from leader Doug Martsch) ever farther removed from the old group, except inasmuch as it was only the guitar that really mattered. Opens fiercely, then settles in for the long haul -- recapitulating the band's career. B+(*)

Cannibal Ox: Blade of the Ronin (2015, iHipHop): Underground hip-hop duo, Vast Aire and Vordul Megilah, dropped their debut album, produced by El-P, in 2001 (The Cold Vein), went on to three or four solo albums each, and finally regrouped for their second album here (mostly produced by Bill Cosmiq). B+(***)

François Carrier/Michel Lambert: Io (2013 [2015], FMR): Alto sax-drum duets, force the former to work harder which usually pays off but leaves some rough edges. B+(***) [cd]

François Carrier/Michel Lambert/Rafal Mazur: Unknowable (2014 [2015], Not Two): Recorded live at Alchemia Jazz Klub in Krakow, in most ways comparable to the alto saxophonist's many recent records, with sidekick Lambert on drums, but Mazur's electric bass guitar rounds out the sound, adding a resonance that is missing in the duo. A- [cd]

Hugo Carvalhais: Grand Valis (2014 [2015], Clean Feed): Portugese bassist, third album, a lovely avant-chamber thing with Dominique Pifarely on violin, Gabriel Pinto on keyboards (including organ), and Jeremiah Cymerman credited with "electronic manipulation." B+(**) [cd]

Joan Chamorro & Andrea Motis: Feeling Good (2012 [2015], Whaling City Sound): Motis is a 20-year-old singer -- 16 when this was recorded -- from Spain who plays up the cuteness in her voice and works her way one fine standard after another -- "Lover Man" twice, once with strings and one without. Charmorro plays bass and tenor sax, leading a band that grows or shrinks almost unnoticeably. Motis also contributes some trumpet and alto sax. B+(***) [cd]

Lorin Cohen: Home (2014 [2015], Origin): Bassist, from Chicago, based in New York, first album. I guess we can call the group a hornless septet, unless you want to count Yvonnick Prene's harmonica; the rest of the line up is piano (Ryan Cohan), vibes (Joe Locke), drums, steel pan, and percussion. B [cd]

Colours Jazz Orchestra: Home Away From Home: Plays the Music of Ayn Inserto (2013 [2015], Neu Klang): Maybe I should refile this under Ayn Inserto, the conductor as well as composer. She studied at New England Conservatory, most notably under the late Bob Brookmeyer, and teaches and has her own big band in Boston. CJO is based in Italy, where this was recorded. Some nice passages, especially when they mix in that Latin tinge. B+(*) [cd]

Cracker: Berkeley to Bakersfield (2014, 429 Records, 2CD): Former Camper Van Beethoven frontman David Lowery's country-rock outfit, off-and-on since 1992, but I don't think I ever noted the connection before. The Berkeley disc is straight-ahead rock, with occasional barbs about billionaires. The Bakersfield one breaks out the steel guitar and goes country, for better music if not politics. B+(***)

Cuir: Chez Ackenbush (2014 [2015], Fou): French avant-jazz group: John Cuny (prepared piano), Jérôme Fouquet (trumpet), Jean-Brice Godet (clarinet), Yoram Rosilio (bass), Nicolas Souchai (trumpet) -- part of Jean-Marc Foussat's crazed stable. Rough going at first before they find some sort of interplay. B+(*) [cd]

Dan Deacon: Gliss Rifter (2015, Domino): Plays synths and sings, his electronica not especially danceable, most interesting when the beat gets jumbled and trash avalanches from the shelves, but he has yet to marshall that into a real noise aesthetic. B+(*)

Jason Derulo: Everything Is 4 (2015, Warner Brothers): I liked his 2014 album Talk Dirty as much as (nearly) anyone, and expected more here. First couple tracks seemed plausible, but then the first guest feat. (K. Michelle) tripped on a pet peeve then got worse. More slumming with the stars doesn't help. B+(*)

Deux Maisons: For Sale (2013 [2015], Clean Feed): Avant-chamber group, two French (brothers Théo and Valentin Ceccaldi, violin and cello respectively), two Portuguese (Luis Vicente on trumpet and Marco Franco on drums). The strings scratch and itch, the drums and trumpet help pass the time. B+(**) [cd]

Chris Dingman: The Subliminal & the Sublime (2013 [2015], Inner Arts Initiative): Vibraphonist, second album, commissioned by Chamber Music America, an impressive group with Loren Stillman (alto sax), Fabian Almazan (piano), Ryan Ferreira (guitar), Linda Oh (bass), and Justin Brown (drums). Aims for sublime but sometimes that just means pretty, or plodding. B+(*) [cd]

The Eye: The Future Will Be Repeated (2015, Ba Da Bing): Experimental rock group from New Zealand, early albums (like 2005's Black Ice) have minimal cover artwork, perhaps with drones even simpler and starker than this minor klang. B+(**)

Scott Hamilton: Scott Hamilton Plays Jule Styne (2015, Blue Duchess): Tenor saxophonist, a retro-swing throwback in the late '70s who's scarcely budged an inch since then, except maybe to deepen his feel for ballads. Styne's tunes range from "Sunday" in 1927 to "People" in 1964, a few you'll know instantly. With Tim Ray on piano, Dave Zinno (bass) and Jim Gwin (drums), plus a bit of guitar on one tune. Had I given this a casual spin, I would have said "typically fine," but it's been stuck in my changer for three days and I'll be sad when I have to move on. A- [cd]

Fred Hersch Trio: Floating (2014, Palmetto): With John Hébert on bass and Eric McPherson on piano, starts with a rip roaring "You & the Night & the Music," ends with "If Ever I Would Leave You" (Al Lerner) and "Let's Cool One" (Monk), the filler originals dedicated to various contemporaries (as near as I can tell), and all the more exquisite when he slows down. (Came out last year and made a lot of lists.) A- [dl]

Joe Hertenstein/Pascal Niggenkemper/Thomas Heberer: HNH2 (2013 [2015], Clean Feed): Drums, bass, and cornet respectively, the latter with the more substantial career (credits back to 1987 including some with ICP Orchestra, at least five albums under his own name), but the drummer gets much larger type as well as first billing (compositions: Hertenstein 4, Heberer 3, group 4). Nothing on the cover to distinguish this title from 2010's HNH but the liner notes refer to HNH2. Free jazz, not very flashy but engaging. B+(**) [cd]

I Love Makonnen: Drink More Water 5 (2015, OVO Sound): Rapper Makonnen Sheran, released a legit EP last year and hitched a big single to Drake but returns here with a mixtape, his thirteenth since 2011. Not easy to find a streamable source of this, and I don't quite know what to make of it -- least of all a video I snagged with lots of drugs and exploding heads. Probably meant to be funny. B+(**) [dl]

Christoph Irniger Trio: Gowanus Canal (2012 [2013], Intakt): Swiss tenor saxophonist, trio with Raffaele Bossard on bass and Ziv Ravitz on drums. They play free jazz, but mostly at a moderate pace you can follow, logic you can appreciate, and none of that screech or yowl. B+(***)

Christoph Irniger Pilgrim: Italian Circus Story (2014, Intakt): Quintet, the leader's tenor sax still the only horn with Stefan Aeby on piano and Dave Gisler on guitar -- Aeby gets a lot of space. B+(**)

Christoph Irniger Trio: Octopus (2014 [2015], Intakt): Once again, a mild-mannered free jazz tenor sax trio, impressive logic that sneaks up on you without threatening to blow you away. A- [cd]

Eugenie Jones: Come Out Swingin' (2015, Open Mic): Singer, second album, wrote 8 (of 12) songs here, the covers covering ground from "Begin the Beguine" and "All of Me" to "Bye Bye Blackbird" and "It's a Man's Man's Man's World." B [cd]

The Knocks: So Classic (2015, Big Beat, EP): NY duo, Ben "B-Roc" Ruttner and James "JPatt" Patterson aim for dance pop, with singles back to 2010 (including one called "Classic" dropped in here in two mixes) and an album in the works. Five tracks, 20:54. B+(*)

Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba: Ba Power (2015, Glitterbeat): Ngoni player from Mali, his group featuring his wife, powerful singer Amy Sacko. Broke out a bit with 2013's Jama Ko, and this is comparably intense. A-

Brian Landrus Trio: The Deep Below (2014 [2015], BlueLand/Palmetto): Usually a baritone saxophonist, has at least thre previous records, offers a tour of the deeper single reeds -- six cuts on bari, five on bass clarinet, two on bass flute, one with bass sax. Lonnie Plaxico gets some bass spots too. Billy Hart is the drummer on an album that is not only deep but softly understated. B+(***) [cd]

Deborah Latz: Sur L'Instant (2013 [2015], June Moon): Standards singer, also acts, based in New York but recorded this third album in Paris, backed by piano (Alain Jean-Marie) and bass (Gilles Naturel). B+(**) [cd]

Ingrid Laubrock Anti-House: Roulette of the Cradle (2014 [2015], Intakt): Tenor (and soprano) saxophonist, from Germany, adopted this group name from a 2010 album, and you can see why she wants to keep the group going: Mary Halvorson (guitar), Kris Davis (piano), John Hébert (bass), and Tom Rainey (drums), joined on two tracks by Oscar Noriega (clarinet). Davis and, especially, Halvorson enjoy some remarkable runs here. B+(***) [cd]

Major Lazer: Peace Is the Mission (2015, Mad Decent): Dancehall project of hip-hop producer Diplo, originally with British house DJ Switch (Dave Taylor), although Diplo has a new crew of collaborators here, plus adds featured vocalists on most cuts. B+(*)

Mbongwana Star: From Kinshasa (2015, World Circuit): From Congo, led by two musicians (Coco Ngambali, Theo Nsituruidi) from Staff Benda Bilili, at first seem to fall short of the classic soukous romps, but a ballad (of all things) convinced me they are for real, and they pick up the pace when Konono No. 1 drop in to resuscitate the beat, a bit of thumb piano that sweetens the guitar. A-

The Gary McFarland Legacy Ensemble: Circulation: The Music of Gary McFarland (2015, Planet Arts): McFarland (1933-71) played vibraphone, but is probably best remembered (when at all) as a composer and associate of Bill Evans and Bob Brookmeyer. Drummer Michael Benedict directed this quintet, with Joe Locke (vibes), Sharel Cassity (sax), Bruce Barth (piano), and Mike Lawrence (bass), as they skip through eleven McFarland pieces. Mostly breakneck bop, the leaders get a terrific workout -- most impressively Locke, his best performance in a long time. A- [cd]

Monster Rally & Jay Stone: Foreign Pedestrians (2014 [2015], Gold Robot): Ted Feighan, with several previous albums as Monster Rally, does the beats, while Stone raps -- sometimes: second half is instrumental, sort of like Clams Casino. B+(*)

Murs: Have a Nice Life (2015, Strange Music): Underground rapper Nick Carter, ninth album since 1997, although lately he's been most impressive on side projects, like White Mandingos' The Ghetto Is Tryna Kill Me and ¡Mursday! (with ¡Mayday!). Rapid-fire raps run rings around the ups and downs of ghetto life, the usual topics but not the usual take. A-

Willie Nelson/Merle Haggard: Django and Jimmie (2015, Legacy): Reinhardt and Rodgers on the tribute, adapted but not penned by the leaders, and not exactly proven here or elsewhere, though they're not the sort of fools not to be fans. Another tune written for them is "It's All Going to Pot," which starts like a Haggard rant but winds up in Nelsonland. Haggard does claim four credits, including a "Swinging Doors" remake and a yarn about Johnny Cash, while Nelson shares four with Buddy Cannon, including a plug for "Alice in Hulaland." The other cover you know is from Bob Dylan, but don't give it a second thought. A-

Pixies: Indie Cindy (2014, Pixiesmusic): Band reformed after a 23-year break, evidently a better brand than Frank Black and the Catholics, reuniting with Joey Santiago (guitar) and Dave Lovering (drums) but not Kim Deal (bass). Album is actually a compilation of three EPs, a strategy that diffused the reunion's impact. B

Jeff Richman: Hotwire (2015, Nefer): Guitarist, more than a dozen albums since 1986. Credits are broken out cut-by-cut, but most pieces feature Jimmy Haslip (bass, producer), Vinnie Colaiuta (drums), and George Whitty (keybs), with guitarist Mike Stern present on a couple cuts -- only two cuts have horn bits. That all points back to '80s-vintage fusion, with hot guitar in the lead. B+(*) [cd]

Shamir: Ratchet (2015, XL): First name, last name Bailey, twenty years old, dropped an EP last year that lots of critics liked, returns with debut LP this year. Sings like a girl without overdoing it, beats are understated, the whole finish leans toward matte so nothing blows you away, but it's still sneaky catchy. A-

Slutever: Almost Famous (2015, self-released, EP): Philadelphia-born, Los Angeles-based, two women (nameless on their website but reportedly Rachel Gagliardi and Nicole Snyder), eighth release on Bandcamp but that includes a digital track, a "cassingle," a 7-inch with two songs, 4- and 6-song EPs, an 8-track Demos. This 6-track, 15:51 EP supposedly shows their bigger sound and more accomplished songcraft, and it sort of does. B+(**) [bc]

Enoch Smith Jr.: Misfits II: Pop (2013 [2015], Misfitme Music): Pianist, second album, what makes this one "pop" is the vocals, mostly Sarah Elizabeth Charles although the only one I'd hang onto is Dee-1's rap. B [cd]

Colin Stetson/Sarah Neufeld: Never Were the Way She Was (2015, Constellation): Saxophone-violin duets, with Stetson's saxes on the low end (tenor and bass sax, and contrabass clarinet) and probably responsible for some evident percussion, while Neufeld is also credited with voice (possibly processed, no clear lyrics). All live, no overdubs (something they're proud of, partly because it isn't obvious). Nominally jazz although Stetson's distribution and following slops over into rock and the duo have some soundtrack background. A-

Davide Tammaro: Ghosts (2014 [2015], self-released): Guitarist, from Naples in Italy but a Berklee grad based in New York, first album. With alto sax, various keybs, bass, and drums, pleasant groove without pushing unpleasant fusion buttons. B [cd]

Henry Threadgill Zooid: In for a Penny, In for a Pound (2014 [2015], Pi, 2CD): Four album with this group (more or less); Jose Davila (trombone, tuba), Liberty Ellman (guitar), Christopher Hoffman (cello), Elliot Humberto Kavee (drums). Threadgill seems to play less flute this time (or more bass flute), but it's the alto sax you notice, rotating against Davila's low notes, the strings swirling around. He called an earlier band Very Very Circus, but he's rarely juggled this adroitly. Might have squeezed the music onto a single disc (40:14, 38:58). A- [cd]

U2: Songs of Innocence (2014, Interscope): First album in five years, backed by producers like Danger Mouse who never sounded like this elsewhere and won't again. Unlike the 1990's albums (below), this captures the grand sound of the band -- i.e., what's always made them rather annoying. B

Universal Indians w/Joe McPhee: Skullduggery (2014 [2015], Clean Feed): Seems like McPhee will play with anyone, a trait which has helped maked him such an inspiration to free jazz musicians around the world. He plays pocket trumpet and various saxes in this live recording from Belgium, with John Dikeman on more saxes, Jon Rune Strøm on bass, and Tollef Østvang on drums (the rhythm section from All Included). B+(***) [cd]

Frank Vignola & Vinny Raniolo: Swing Zing! (2015, FV): Guitarists, Vignola a specialist at swinging standards, Raniolo previously unknown to me but has an album and acted in Boardwalk Empire. Guests include guitarists Bucky Pizzarelli, Gene Bertoncini, and Julian Lage -- the first two did much to invent Vignola's style, enough for a PBS special on Four Generations of Guitars -- and singer Audra Mariel. B+(**) [cd]

Kamasi Washington: The Epic (2015, Brainfeeder, 3CD): Saxophonist, has quite a few side credits since 2001, including groups Young Jazz Giants and Throttle Elevator Music, plus work in Gerald Wilson's big band, with Phil Ranelin, also with Flying Lotus (who produces here) and Kendrick Lamar. His debut album is a monster, not just in length but in the 10-piece funk band, 32-piece orchestra, and 20-voice choir he blows over, through, and up. Still, I find the masses turn anonymous, even the singers (and there's much too much of that). He finds firmer ground when the third disc goes historical, with a sharp take on "Cherokee," some first-rate trumpet, and a Malcolm X sample. B+(**)

Juan Wauters: Who Me? (2015, Captured Tracks): Former front-man for Queens-based lo-fi postpunk band the Beets, goes solo, as singer/songwriters do. B+(*)

Young Thug: Barter 6 (2015, 300/Atlantic): Originally named Carter 6 in a cheap stab at grabbing some Lil Wayne biz, still hard to take him seriously but perhaps it's better that way. B+(**)

Recent Reissues, Compilations, Vault Discoveries

The Ornette Coleman Quartet: The 1987 Hamburg Concert (1987 [2011], Domino, 2CD): On the alto saxophonist's superb 1987 then-and-now album, In All Languages, these guys were billed as "The Original Quartet" -- Don Cherry (cornet), Charlie Haden (bass), and Billy Higgins (drums) -- as opposed to his new-fangled Prime Time fusion group. Live, the old guys play classics, which sound as tricky then (and now) as they did when they knocked the jazz world on its ear back in 1959. A-

The Red Line Comp: A DCHC Compilation ([2015], self-released): Twelve-cut compilation of DC-based hardcore bands, presumably of recent vintage, only one cut exceeding 2:04 -- Genocide Pact's "Trials in Nihilism" -- totalling 18:24. B+(*) [bc]

Willi Williams: Unification: From Channel One to King Tubby's (1979 [2014], Shanachie): A minor roots rasta singer, had a 1978 hit called "Armagideon Time" that was covered by the Clash. This set was recorded a year later with Yabby You, so predictably it's a bit softer than the era's classics but still sounds terrific. A-

Yabby You: Dread Prophecy: The Strange and Wonderful Story of Yabby You (1972-85 [2015], Shanachie, 3CD): Vivian Jackson, left home at age 12 and was hospitalized for malnutrition at 17, leaving him with crippling arthritis but eventually he found Jah and King Tubby, had a signature hit in 1972 called "Conquering Lion," and recorded a good deal of dub in the following decade-plus, more sporadically until his death in 2010. Shanachie took an interest and released two albums -- One Love, One Heart (1983) and Fleeing From the City (1985) -- and now they've assembled this memorial box. To call the first disc "Classics" is a stretch but they sketch out his minor hits, only slightly better known (and better) than the "Rarities" on the third disc. Better still is the middle disc, "The Many Moods of Yabby You," including some of his production work. Reportedly comes with a 30-page booklet which may make the difference. B+(***)

Old Music

Aphex Twin: Selected Ambient Works 85-92 (1992, R&S): Presented like a compilation, as far as I can tell all the pieces were initially released on the album. The alias belongs to Richard D. James, from Ireland, his debut album an elegent set of simple synth pieces, less quiet than Eno's early ambient, and not without a few disruptive squiggles. B+(***)

Aphex Twin: I Care Because You Do (1990-94 [1995], Sire): Skipping over a second (2CD) volume of Selected Ambient Works, some EPs (later collected as Classics), and an album as Polygon Window (Surfing on Sine Waves) we get to his next (in some ways first) proper album. Mostly drum machine loops with analog synth washes, nothing very ambient. Tempted to dock it for the self-portrait cover, but there's something to be said for the geek moving up front. A-

Aphex Twin: Richard D. James Album (1996, Elektra): For the cover, James swapped his crude self-portrait painting in for a more menacing self-photo, perhaps to emphasize his transition from analog synths to digital. The change produces faster beats and some sharper sounds, but it also tempts him to work in some processed voice vocals. B+(***)

Beyoncé: B'Day (2006, Columbia): The breakout star from Destiny's Child, second solo album although the intervening group album gives you a chance to forget how bad the first was. This starts out promising enough, but it seems inevitable she's going to pull out something truly wretched (e.g., "Resentment"). B+(*)

Beyoncé: I Am . . . Sasha Fierce (2008, Music World/Columbia, 2CD): Divide at the ellipsis to get the concept, originally spread out over two discs to emphasize the contrast, but the combined run-time only comes to 41:40, so later editions crammed it all together, then tacked on a second disc of videos -- her real talent? I suppose the two-disc trick is worthwhile. The second runs at dance tempos, but the first is deadly. C+

Björk: Debut (1993, Elektra): Not really a novice after three albums fronting Iceland's original pop-rock group, the Sugarcubes, though even earlier she appeared in a punk band called Spit and Snot and in a jazz fusion group called Exodus. Has an art streak that threatens to get the best of her, but only "The Anchor Song" risks her beat, which "Violently Happy" raised. B+(*)

Björk: Post (1995, Elektra): Her electropop shows some promise, but she also has this penchant for arty dramaturgy which can (and in the future will) spoil an album. B

Björk: Greatest Hits (1993-2001 [2002], Elektra): I never regarded her as a singles artist, just a wildly slapdash album conceptualizer, so I'm impressed by how consistently strong the rhythm tracks are at least two-thirds of the way through this, so much so I'm prepared to accept her warblings without trying to make sense of them. B+(***)

Mary J. Blige: What's the 411? (1992, Uptown/MCA): Debut album, about 21 at the time, has a strong voice but rather than going all diva on us, exec. producer Puff Daddy goes for a hip-hop beat and framework. B+(**)

Mary J. Blige: No More Drama (2001, MCA): Long, ran 76:55 in its original edition, before being reshuffled and reissued in 2002 with a different cover. She knocks out eighteen songs here, like some sort of assembly line, which means for once she doesn't oversing them, or overwrite them. B+(**)

Blur: Leisure (1991, SBK): First album by one of the top British rock groups of the 1990s, the sort of group that shows up repeatedly in UK all-time lists (along with Oasis and Manic Street Preachers) but never in US lists (unlike Radiohead). Guitar riffs remind me of the Kinks and the Jam. Songs don't. B

Blur: Modern Life Is Rubbish (1993, SBK): After an unsuccessful US tour, the band doubled down on their Britishness, so while the music stayed upbeat the lyrics slumped, and the music occasionally turned circusy. B-

Blur: 13 (1999, Virgin): Hit and miss, which I guess is the definition of a singles band. B+(**)

Bright Eyes: A Collection of Songs Written and Recorded 1995-1997 (1995-97 [1998], Saddle Creek): I.e., roughly from when Omaha native Conor Oberst was 15-17, a period when he led a group called Commander Venus but this starts out solo vocal with guitar, adds occasional backing but not clear who does what. He doesn't have an appealing voice, and much of this is crudely done, but it feels way too grizzled to be labeled juvenilia. B+(*)

Bright Eyes: Letting Off the Happiness (1997-98 [1998], Saddle Creek): Second album, first conceived as such, figure it as more of a band album in that Oberst aims for a coherent sound -- still lo-fi, masking his folkie voice with rough-hewn guitar and bass. Final piece runs 25:46, mostly static drone with too little payback at the end. B

Bright Eyes: Fevers and Mirrors (1999 [2000], Saddle Creek): For once I have detailed credits, which show they're not really a band -- Mike Mogis adds something trivial to nearly every cut (piano, guitar, vibes, pedal steel, lap dulcimer, hammer dulcimer, mandolin, guiro, percussion, "atmosphere"; but drummer Joe Knapp only appears on 7 (of 14) songs, and a half-dozen others come and go. Includes a prying radio interview, where he reveals, "I want people to feel sorry for me." Sometimes it's hard to get what you want, and vice versa. B+(*)

Bright Eyes: Lifted or the Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground (2002, Saddle Creek): This is where Oberst started to get noticed. Starts with a grumble then an exaggerated Dylanish grunt, then seems to evolve before your ears, picking up polish if not quite hooks, and turning into someone you might want to spend some time with. Still only 22, but he's starting to get hold of his voice. B+(**) [cd]

Bright Eyes: I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning (2005, Saddle Creek): Conor Oberst has finally worked out all the kinks in his voice and songcraft, in the process shedding his connections to folk music -- economic as much as any other -- yet remains as odd as ever, serenading a woman in a crashing airplane, favoring the winning side in senseless wars, and so forth. B+(***) [cd]

Broken Social Scene: You Forgot It in People (2002, Arts & Crafts): Canadian alt/indie group led by Kevin Drew, second album, stretches out with some impressive guitar grind but can still back off for a ballad. B+(***)

Broken Social Scene: Broken Social Scene (2005, Arts & Crafts): Third album, Brendan Canning shares all song credits with Kevin Drew. Again they push the guitar hard before opening up into something odder. B+(**)

Built to Spill: Ultimate Alternative Wavers (1992, C/Z): Alt/indie band from Boise, first album, murky as you'd expect but sometimes the thrash turns into rave. B+(***)

Built to Spill: There's Nothing Wrong With Love (1994, Up): Second album, shows solid advances in songwriting and poise, so the guitar is sparser, but used to greater effect. A-

Built to Spill: Keep It Like a Secret (1999, Warner Brothers): Fourth studio album, first to chart (120 US), the sort of group -- guitar-heavy '90s alt/indie -- I tend to find boring, but this is eminently listenable, maybe even substantial. A-

Built to Spill: Ancient Melodies of the Future (2001, Warner Brothers): What happens when a group that has always gotten along by framing everything with its distinctive guitar sound tries to change its focus, here to melody -- nice enough, as far as it goes. B

Built to Spill: You in Reverse (2006, Warner Brothers): Continues in the previous album's "melodic" vein, but with more muscle, a shift you were probably hoping for. B+(**)

Built to Spill: There Is No Enemy (2009, Warner Brothers): The band is clearly slowing down, really just Doug Martsch's vehicle, and he's doing things he's done many times before, including stellar guitar solos. B+(*)

Kate Bush: The Kick Inside (1978, EMI America): Not quite 20 for her debut, her warbly voice doesn't seem like much of an asset but does the trick on "Wuthering Heights." B+(**)

Kate Bush: Lionheart (1978, EMI America): Just 20, no doubt a hero for bookish young girls, her increasingly sophisticated music reminds me first of opera -- the arena where her soprano is most abused, but I note a comic twist both to her voice and to the shifting melodies. Not sure that it's intentional, but it helps cut the bombast. A very ambitious young lady, and talented enough she's worth indulging. B+(**)

Kate Bush: Never for Ever (1980, EMI America): Third album, adds a couple singles for her best-of, otherwise more professional chops, less inspired innovation. B+(*)

Kate Bush: The Dreaming (1982, EMI America): After two plays I still have no idea. I do know that she was sole producer this time, and that she threw the kitchen sink into the mix -- dozens of exotic instruments, and I noted Danny Thompson and Eberhard Weber among the bassists. [Also that Spin's actual pick, 1985's Hounds of Love, isn't on Rhapsody.] B

Ornette Coleman: Twins (1959-61 [1971], Atlantic): A little something Atlantic cobbled together out of scraps a decade after the fact: outtakes from most of the album sessions, including the 16:56 first take of "Free Jazz" -- the five cuts are spread out on as many discs in Rhino's session-oriented 6-CD Beauty Is a Rare Thing box (which with its booklet is the one you probably want, and not prohibitively expensive). The comp was reissued in 1982 with a different cover, reverted to the original cover for a 2005 digital release by Rhino, then was picked up by Water for a 2008 CD. The opener gives you a good sense of the double quartet album, and there's no obvious reason the rest was shelved -- in fact, the quartet sides are so good this could be a box sampler. A-

The Cure: Three Imaginary Boys (1979, Fiction): First album from Robert Smith's long-lived band which later on became an icon of art school intellectualism. At this point they were fashionably new wave, with echoes of Wire on occasion and Joe Jackson more often -- although more strained. B+(*)

The Cure: The Head on the Door (1985, Elektra): Sixth studio album -- 1980's Boys Don't Cry isn't on Rhapsody, and the rest are so poorly regarded I didn't see any need to bother. But this starts a run of 1985-89 albums that do have a critical rep (and substantial sales), and it's easy enough to see why. Robert Smith has gained flexibility and range as a singer, and the music sports new looks -- even if they're as derivative as his early new wave, he's kept his models up to date. B+(*)

The Cure: Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me (1987, Elektra): Originally 2-LP, squeezed onto a single CD by droping one song (restored in the 2006 reissue). The extra length lets them air out a more expansive sound, more suited to the larger venues their newfound popularity opened up. Louder, but not necessarily better. B

The Cure: Disintegration (1989, Elektra): The band gets bigger, as does its music, which by contrast makes the personal impression of Smith that much smaller, not to mention less interesting. B

Daft Punk: Homework (1993-96 [1997], Virgin): French electronica duo, big enough they moved into arenas and talented enough to make their arena-pomped sound work, at least on Alive 2007 (if not the more relevant here Alive 1997). Still, this debut seems rather sketchy and gamey. B

Depeche Mode: Speak & Spell (1981, Sire): Debut album by British synthpop group, a sizable hit (gold, peak 10) in the UK, barely grazed the US charts (192), a pattern which would gradually improve as they got their videos on MTV, but their first US top-10 album was nine years later. Aside from the last cut, the vocals seem distant, buried under unimpressive beats, none of which prepare you for the "Schizo Remix" of their third single, "Just Can't Get Enough." B

Depeche Mode: A Broken Frame (1982, Sire): Second album, where Martin Gore (keyboards) takes over songwriting duties from departed Vince Clarke (keyboards, everyone but lead singer Dave Gahan plays keyboards) -- not that the songs offer much to brag about. Sound is more consistent, but less catchy. B-

Depeche Mode: Construction Time Again (1983, Sire): Third album, Alan Wilder (keyboards, of course) joins and writes two songs, Martin Gore the rest. Some evidence of an evolving political consciousness ("the grabbing hands grab all they can"). B

Depeche Mode: Some Great Reward (1984, Sire): The dour vocals seem typical of British bands of the period -- Ian Curtis proved more prophetic than Johnny Rotten, at least of the Thatcher era -- but the extra blips on the keyboards offer small delights, and when they sparkle enough you get a single. B+(*)

Depeche Mode: Catching Up With Depeche Mode (1980-85 [1985], Sire): US alternative to the UK-released Singles 81-85, dropping four songs (notably "People Are People" -- their highest charting pop single, 4 UK, 13 US) while picking up two B-sides. Their albums suggest they may be a singles band, but roll them up and they sound more like a decent but forgettable album. B+(**)

Depeche Mode: Black Celebration (1986, Sire): Dark gloom as a formal aesthetic, even though the keybs would be happier shining up dance grooves. B

Depeche Mode: Violator (1990, Sire/Reprise): Their biggest album to date, the scale coming through in the music even if it isn't clear that it signifies anything. B

Depeche Mode: Songs of Faith and Devotion (1993, Sire/Reprise): Their only album to top the charts in US as well as UK, followed by a 14-month "Devotional Tour" which ended without Alan Wilder. Heavier, denser, dumber too. B-

Destiny's Child: Destiny's Child (1998, Columbia): R&B vocal group, often termed teen pop since the four singers, including lead Beyoncé Knowles, were 16-17 at the time. Still, the producers got an adult sound, blending the voices and inserting guest rappers Wyclef Jean, Jermaine Dupri, Master P, and Pras. B+(*)

Destiny's Child: The Writing's on the Wall (1999, Columbia): Second album, still four faces on the cover although they're starting to separate out, with LeToya Luckett and LaTavia Roberson soon to split. This is where they blew up, with two number one singles and the album selling over six million copies. Very professional but not much to get excited about. A personal turn off was the a cappella "Amazing Grace" at the end. B+(**)

Destiny's Child: Survivor (2001, Columbia): Down to three, with Beyoncé clearly first among unequals. The title cut always struck me as a cliché, but it's the catchiest single here, even if "Bootylicious" sounds more appetizing. B+(**)

J Dilla: Donuts (2006, Stones Throw): Detroit hip-hop producer James Yancey, also recorded as Jay Dee, released his best-known album on his 32nd birthday then died three days later, suffering from the blood disease TTP. This is a pastiche, 31 short pieces, most built around a single loping beat with sampled vocal bits that never turn personal. B

Dinosaur Jr.: You're Living All Over Me (1987, SST): Second album, group led by J. Mascis, who has kept it going although he's recorded more solo than group albums since 1996. The singer's drawl could (and eventually would) imply folkiness, but at this point they're still young, and all they really want is to let the guitar(s) squeal. B+(**)

The Flaming Lips: The Soft Bulletin (1999, Warner Brothers): Neo-psychedelia from Oklahoma City, the group led by Wayne Coyne already had eight albums I haven't heard before this one got dubbed "the Pet Sounds of the 1990s" -- presumably for the lush melodies, thick vocal harmonies, and shimmering synths, although I could just as well aver kinship to Frank Zappa, as artists who make farce without being particularly funny. B

The Flaming Lips: Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (2002, Warner Brothers): Robot synths and comic characters mixed in with a few things that are nicely shaped as songs. B+(***)

Rolf Kühn & Friends: Affairs (1997 [1998], Intuition): German clarinetist, started recording in 1957, called in a lot of favors for his front cover: Randy Brecker, Ornette Coleman, Eddie Daniels, Buddy DeFranco, Wolfgang Haffner, Dieter Ilg, Dave Liebman, Chuck Loeb, Albert Mangelsdorff -- Coleman and Mangelsdorff only appear on one track each (duets with Kühn), Liebman and Brecker two (the latter on a track called "There Is a Mingus Amonk Us"). But the clarinet reigns, especially when all three join together for "Just Friends" and "Three Bopeteers." A-

John Lewis: Jazz Abstractions (1960, Atlantic): Fuller title: John Lewis Presents Contemporary Music 1: Jazz Abstractions: Compositions by Gunther Schuller & Jim Hall. Not clear what MJQ pianist Lewis is doing here, other than that he seems to have cornered the market on Third Stream, a phrase that Schuller invented to describe a jazz-classical fusion. The actual pianist here is Bill Evans, but the strings are more prominent (violin-viola-cello, also George Duvivier and Scott LaFaro on bass and Hall on guitar), the drums supplemented by Eddie Costa's vibes, and the horn section is limited to Eric Dolphy and Ornette Coleman. The first cut is very avant for the period. The others explore their abstractions in various ways, each fascinating in its own way, all expertly done. A-

Nas: Illmatic (1994, Columbia): Legendary debut album from Nasir Jones, son of jazz/blues guitarist Olu Dara, it doesn't really grab you from the first spin but grows on you, the beats subtle but richly textured, a rapper who has something to say and the flow to put it over. A-

Neutral Milk Hotel: On Avery Island (1995 [1996], Merge): This is singer-songwriter Jeff Mangum's debut, produced by Robert Schneider of Apples in Stereo, the latter playing organ and fuzz bass, with a few guest spots for accordion, violin, flute, and trombone -- folkie lo-fi with a dash of exotica. B

Neutral Milk Hotel: In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (1998, Merge): Jeff Mangum's second album, got off to a rocky start but gradually built a substantial cult following. Mangum's voice is rough, his strumming emphatic, a harshness that grates at first then picks up speed and threatens to cohere into an irresistible force. B+(**)

Pixies: Come On Pilgrim (1987, 4AD, EP): Boston alt/indie group led by a guy known as Black Francis, cut a demo tape before signing, roughly half of which (eight songs, 20:28) were quickly dumped onto this mini-LP (originally a cassette). I never really got into them for reasons I never bothered to figure out, but their sonic appeal was clear even here, their penchant for slipping in and out of time something that can now been seen as anticipating 1990's groups like Pavement. The rest of the demo tape was released in 2002 as Pixies, but I haven't heard it. B+(*)

Pixies: Surfer Rosa (1988, 4AD/Elektra): Official first album. Again, the appeal is primarily sonic, fancy guitar riffs over an urgent beat with little else especially clear. One thing that throws me is a short rant called "You F*ckin' Die" that doesn't seem to be on the original album. B+(*)

Primal Scream: XTRMNTR (2000, Astralwerks): Scottish group, best known for their third album, Screamadelica (1991, not on Rhapsody). Dense, industrial-grade guitar-bass with synth washes, often danceable. One might worry about lyrics like "Swastika Eyes," but not the music. A-

Radiohead: Pablo Honey (1993, Capitol): First album from one of the biggest groups to emerge in the 1990s. One of the first lyrics I noticed was "I want to be Jim Morrison" -- OK, but at this point this is more of a guitar band, and more impressive for that. B+(**)

Radiohead: The Bends (1995, Capitol): Second album, on most songs the guitar gives way to sweet, lonely vocals, so it's good to bump into something like "My Iron Lung" where you get some actual thrash. B

Radiohead: Hail to the Thief (2003, Capitol): Sixth studio album, runs 14 songs, 56:31, a lot to focus on for an album that doesn't focus on much of anything. B+(*)

Slayer: Reign in Blood (1986, Def American): Speed (and/or thrash) metal group, fast anyway, wish I could quantify that for you but not one of my skills. Words are probably full of shit, but they're fast too, no point pondering. I enjoyed the first wave of bands dubbed metal -- roughly Led Zeppelin to Blue Oyster Cult -- but something happened in the early 1980s that turned metal into a cult music and made it incomprehensible to me, and damn annoying as well. Looking at this band's pics, I'd guess that was Kiss, a group that was always a joke but also provided a seed for young bands that wanted to push their logic into ever more extreme directions. Slayer, I suppose, is transitional, which makes this rather tolerable. (Or maybe it's just Rick Rubin producing?) B

Slutever: Sorry I'm Not Sorry (2010, self-released, EP): First recording, notes that "Rachel & Nicole both play guitar, drum, and sing" and that it was "recorded in a bathroom and hot, sweaty room, Philadelphia" and "overdubbed in bedrooms, Seattle and Los Angeles." Six songs, 12:22, sound so tinny I can't make out a word. B

Slutever: Slutever Demos (2013, self-released, EP): At eight tracks, 27:53, their most substantial effort ever but they're not the sort who'd risk their no-long-player strategy by packing on too much weight. Two songs they later released as a single ("1994/Spit") verify that these are indeed demos, even if they are much better recorded than their first EP. B+(*) [bc]

Smashing Pumpkins: Gish (1991, Caroline): A rather proggish band that emerged on the artier end of the 1990s grunge spectrum, led by Billy Corgan, who eventually became the only constant through their discography. First album, demonstrated their ability to fill a stage. B

Smashing Pumpkins: Siamese Dream (1993, Virgin): All Christgau had to say: "hooked on sonics." I'm afraid I didn't even get that much, although "Sweet Sweat" does sound better after the sonic freak-out than it would have on its own. B

Smashing Pumpkins: Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (1993, Virgin, 2CD): A sprawling 28-track album, 121:39 on 2-CD, longer still on triple (or quadruple) vinyl, with an "extended edition" stretched to 351:19, nearly six hours. There is clearly merit both in the harder and softer tracks, but figuring out what/when/where is a task bound to take a lot more effort than I feel up to. B

Elliott Smith: Either/Or (1997, Kill Rock Stars): Singer-songwriter, third album, basically just sweet and melancholy voice over guitar. B

The Smiths: The Smiths (1984, Sire): Big group in England during the 1980s, one I didn't notice until they split in 1987. The group's appeal depended on how you reacted to singer Morrissey -- Slant described him as "a mordant, sexually frustrated disciple of Oscar Wilde who loved punk but crooned like a malfunctioning Sinatra" -- but much of the early hype revolved around guitarist-cowriter Johnny Marr, unfathomably regarded as some kind of genius. Both seem fairly ordinary here. B+(*)

The Smiths: Hatful of Hollow (1983-84 [1993], Sire): A compilation of early singles and several John Peel sessions, not clear how much of it predates the group's first album, appeared in UK in 1984 to much success but was held back in the US for nine years (with some tracks appearing on the 1987 US compilation Louder Than Bombs). The first thing you notice is that it makes a much better case for Johnny Marr the guitarist. B+(***)

The Smiths: Meat Is Murder (1985, Sire): Second studio album, self-produced, I find this rolls past me without anything registering much, even the singer's perpetual whine. Cover photo is from Vietnam, but as they say, "Barbarism Begins at Home." But I think not with meat. B

The Smiths: The Queen Is Dead (1986, Sire): Spin picked this as the 5th greatest album of the last 30 years, or should I say slotted it between Daft Punk's Discovery and Radiohead's OK Computer? Title cut definitely takes the music to a new level, which makes much of the rest sound like filler. B+(**)

The Smiths: The World Won't Listen (1984-86 [1993], Sire): Guessing on the US release date -- this second odds and sods collection appeared in the UK on Rough Trade in February 1987 and promptly went into Sire's sausage machine to be turned into Louder Than Bombs later that year. The singles mix adds some snap early on, but they run short of material. B

The Smiths: Strangeways, Here We Come (1987, Sire): Fourth and last studio album -- Morrissey would move on to a solo career without skipping a beat, while Johnny Marr pretty much vanished (until a 2013-14 mini-comeback). Whatever tension existed between the two is buried in their routine performances, the songs a little wordy but that's the singer's trademark. B

The Smiths: Rank (1986 [1988], Sire): Live best-of, a handy contract filler once the group broke up. Not a group I have any sentimental attachment to, but this seemed to pick up a little when Morrissey introduced "Ask" ("latest single"), and I liked the one they rocked out on. B+(*)

The Smiths: Singles (1983-87 [1995], Reprise): Eleven singles from the four albums (six in album versions), plus seven more that were collected on compilations (six on Louder Than Bombs). They don't strike me as an especially strong singles band, but the selection is consistently tighter and stronger than the source albums. A-

The Smiths: The Sound of the Smiths (1983-87 [2008], Reprise, 2CD): First disc adds five tunes to the 18-cut Singles, and second disc adds more stuff -- mostly b-sides but also the title cut and three other songs from The Queen Is Dead. I figure that makes the first disc a slight improvement over Singles, while the second just broadens the picture. Michael Tatum, who is much more of a fan than I am, favors this option. He could be right, but having slogged through all of this I'm still not sure this is an essential, or even a very important, band. A-

The Stone Roses: The Stone Roses (1989, Silvertone): Manchester band, considered a very big deal in the UK when their eponymous debut album dropped. I missed this one but bought and liked their second and last from 1994 (admittedly one I scarcely remember), so I was surprised to see how indifferently Byrds-ish this one started out. Picks up a bit toward the end. B+(*)

Jamaaladeen Tacuma: Jamaaladeen Tacuma's Coltrane Configurations (2008 [2009], Jazzwerkstatt): Bass guitarist, closely associated with Ornette Coleman during his Prime Time run. Modelled on the Quartet, with Orrin Evans on piano, Tim Hutson on drums, and Tony Kofi handling the tenor role with great aplomb on alto sax. Starts with a 15:23 "India" and closes with a 11:05 "A Love Supreme." B+(***)

Tears for Fears: The Hurting (1983, Mercury): British new wave/synthpop band, principally Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith on guitar and bass, plus extra keyb/drum programming. Debut went number 1 in UK charting three singles that aren't immediately obvious but their cloistered drama grows on you. B+(*)

Tears for Fears: Songs From the Big Chair (1985, Mercury): A bigger hit, at least in the US, although only "Shout" stands out, and the preponderance of slow songs undercuts both the new wave grind and the synthpop bubble. B

Tears for Fears: The Seeds of Love (1989, Mercury): Third album, another bestseller (UK 1, US 8), but the only single is a belabored Beatles rip ("Sowing the Seeds of Love"), and the dramatic vocals elsewhere range from kitsch to sludge. B-

TLC: CrazySexyCool (1994, La Face): Hip-hop era R&B vocal trio (T-Boz, Chilli, Left Eye), cut three albums before 2002 when the latter was killed in a car accident, sold 65 million albums and went bankrupt for their trouble. This is their second, the big one, but I'm having trouble sifting the hits from the filler (OK: "Waterfalls"; "Creep"). B+(**)

TLC: Fanmail (1999, La Face): A stronger album, I think, which has as much to do with production values as anything else -- less hip-hop, for instance, but better pop hooks. B+(***)

A Tribe Called Quest: Midnight Marauders (1993, Jive): Third album, beats soft and jazzed up a bit, several rappers floating around the rhythm, one of those underground things that threatened to break out, partly because they snuck so much tradition inside. A-

A Tribe Called Quest: Beats, Rhymes and Life (1996, Jive): Hard to distinguish this from its two fine predecessors, but I find it a big lighter, airier, and don't deem that a minus. A-

A Tribe Called Quest: The Love Movement (1998, Jive): Fifth and final album -- Q-Tip moved on to release Amplified the following year. They stay well within their limits. B+(**)

U2: Achtung Baby (1991, Island): In the late 1970s I made a point of tracking down everything Eno was associated with -- even the Portsmouth Synphonia albums -- so expected something more out of this big Irish band than they ever delivered, only to give up before their marginal prog move here. "One" at least is one of their better songs. B+(*)

U2: Zooropa (1993, Island): Several surprises here, including receding vocals and electronic textures that finally suggest producer Eno is having an effect -- still, don't believe the reviews that regard this as EDM -- and a country song at the end ("The Wanderer") that sounds like it was written for Johnny Cash, not least because Cash guests on it. B+(**)

U2: Pop (1997, Island): Post-Eno, the new producers get a compelling pop thrash on occasion (e.g., "Moto") but then the result sounds nothing at all like U2, and when it does it doesn't. B+(*)

Weezer: Weezer (1994, DGC): Los Angeles band's first album, one of those 1990s alt-rock groups that drove me to focus on jazz, not that I paid this particular one enough notice to let them annoy me, nor that their simple rock cheer is all that annoying. First of three eponymous albums (of nine albums through 2014), conventionally color-coded (blue here; green in 2001 and red in 2008). B

Weezer: Pinkerton (1996, Geffen): Second album, shows considerable variety compared to the first album's pop-guitar thrash, which isn't always for the better -- a couple of the early rockers are tighter, and the closer is an acoustic ballad, an apologia. B+(*)

Revised Grades

Sometimes further listening leads me to change an initial grade, usually either because I move on to a real copy, or because someone else's review or list makes me want to check it again:

Ornette Coleman: Beauty Is a Rare Thing: The Complete Atlantic Recordings (1959-61 [1993], Rhino/Atlantic, 6CD): Two earlier albums on Contemporary were limited by playing with more conventional jazz musicians, but the young Quartet -- Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, and Ed Blackwell -- is where he blew everyone's mind, a revolution that was consciously reflected in the album titles: The Shape of Jazz to Come, Change of the Century, and This Is Our Music. Then came his fully improvised Double Quartet and their 37-minute jam, Free Jazz. Atlantic went on to squeeze several more albums out of the outtakes, and the box here shuffles them back into order. At the time I wasn't sure that was a good idea, but over the years this has become canonical, the place to start for, well, read those titles again. [was A-]: A

Additional Consumer News:

Previous grades on artists in the old music section:

• Aphex Twin: Selected Ambient Works Volume II (1994, Sire, 2CD): B
• Aphex Twin: Syro (2014, Warp): A-
• Beyoncé: Dangerously in Love (2003, Columbia): C
• Beyoncé: 4 (2011, Columbia): C
• Beyoncé: Beyoncé (2013, Columbia): B+(**)
• Björk: Homogenic (1997, Elektra): B
• Björk: Vespertine (2001, Elektra): C-
• Björk: Volta (2007, Atlantic): B+(**)
• Björk: Voltaic (2007 [2009], Atlantic): B+(*)
• Björk: Biophilia (2011, One Little Indian): B-
• Mary J. Blige: My Life (1994, Uptown/MCA): B
• Mary J. Blige: Share My World (1997, MCA): B+
• Mary J. Blige: The Tour (1998, MCA): B
• Mary J. Blige: Mary (1999, MCA): B+
• Mary J. Blige: Reflections (A Retrospective) (1992-2006 [2006], Geffen): B+(***)
• Mary J. Blige: Growing Pains (2007, Geffen): B+(***)<.li>
• Mary J. Blige: Stronger With Each Tear (2009, Geffen): B+(**)
• Mary J. Blige: My Life II . . . The Journey Continues (Act 1) (2011, Geffen): B+(*)
• Mary J. Blige: The London Sessions (2014, Capitol): B+(***)
• Blur: Parklife (1994, Food/SBK): B+
• Blur: The Best of Blur (1990-2000 [2000], Virgin, 2CD): A-
• Bright Eyes: Cassadaga (2007, Saddle Creek): B+(***)
• Bright Eyes: The People's Key (2011, Saddle Creek): B+(*)
• Broken Social Scene: Bee Hives (2001-03 [2004], Arts & Crafts): B+
• Broken Social Scene: Forgiveness Rock Record (2010, Arts & Crafts): B+(*)
• Built to Spill: Perfect From Now On (1997, Warner Brothers): B+
• Built to Spill: Live (2000, Warner Brothers): B+
• Kate Bush: The Whole Story (1978-85 [1986], EMI America): A-
• Kate Bush: Director's Cut (2011, Fish People/EMI): B+(*)
• Kate Bush: 50 Words for Snow (2011, Anti-): B
• The Cure: Staring at the Sea: The Singles (1978-85 [1986], Elektra): B+
• The Cure: The Cure (2004, Geffen): C+
• Daft Punk: Discovery (2001, Virgin): B-
• Daft Punk: Alive 2007 (2007, Virgin): A-
• Daft Punk: Tron: Legacy [Original Soundtrack] (2010, Walt Disney): B
• Daft Punk: Random Access Memories (2013, Daft Life/Columbia): B+(**)
• Depeche Mode: Music for the Masses (1987, Sire): B+
• J Dilla: Jay Stay Paid (2009, Nature Sounds): B+(***)
• Dinosaur Jr.: Bug (1988, SST): B
• Dinosaur Jr.: Farm (2009, Jagjaguwar): B-
• The Flaming Lips: Embryonic (2009, Warner Brothers): B+(**)
• The Flaming Lips: The Terror (2013, Warner Brothers): B+(**)
• The Flaming Lips: With a Little Help From My Fwends (2014, Warner Brothers): B+(**)
• Nas: I Am . . . (1999, Columbia): B
• Nas: The Lost Tapes (1999-2002 [2002], Columbia): B+
• Nas: Street's Disciple (2004, Columbia, 2CD): A-
• Nas: Hip Hop Is Dead (2006, Def Jam): A-
• Nas & Damian "Jr. Gong" Marley: Distant Relatives (2010, Def Jam): B+(***)
• Nas: Life Is Good (2012, Def Jam): B+(**)
• Pixies: Doolittle (1989, 4AD/Elektra): B
• Pixies: Bossanova (1990, 4AD/Elektra): B+
• Pixies: Trompe le Monde (1991, 4AD/Elektra): A-
• Pixies: Best of Pixies: Wave of Mutillation (1987-91 [2004], 4AD): B+
• Primal Scream: Vanishing Point (1997, Reprise): B+
• Primal Scream: More Light (2013, First International): A-
• Radiohead: OK Computer (1997, Capitol): B+
• Radiohead: Kid A (2000, Capitol): B
• Radiohead: Amnesiac (2001, Capitol): B-
• Radiohead: In Rainbows (2007 [2008], TBD): A-
• Radiohead: The King of Limbs (2011, TBD): B-
• Smashing Pumpkins: Oceania (2011 [2012], Martha's Music/EMI): B
• Elliott Smith: XO (1998, Dreamworks): B+
• Elliott Smith: From the Basement on the Hill (2003 [2004], Anti-): C+
• Elliott Smith: An Introduction to Elliott Smith (1994-2003 [2010], Kill Rock Stars): B
• The Smiths: Louder Than Bombs (1983-86 [1987], Sire): B
• The Stone Roses: Second Coming (1994, Geffen): A-
• TLC: Ooooooohhh . . . On the TLC Tip (1992, La Face): B
• A Tribe Called Quest: People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm (1990, Jive): B
• A Tribe Called Quest: The Low End Theory (1991, Jive): A-
• A Tribe Called Quest: The Anthology (1989-98 [1999], Jive): A-
• U2: Boy (1980, Island): B-
• U2: October (1981, Island): B-
• U2: War (1983, Island): B
• U2: Under a Blood Red Sky (1983, Island): B+
• U2: The Unforgettable Fire (1984, Island): B-
• U2: The Joshua Tree (1987, Island): B
• U2: Rattle and Hum (1988, Island): B+
• U2: All That You Can't Leave Behind (2000, Island): B+
• U2: How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (2004, Interscope): B+(**)
• U2: No Line on the Horizon (2009, Interscope): B

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Friday, June 12, 2015

As I'm sure you know by now, Ornette Coleman died yestertoday, age 85. He was the first jazz musician I developed a real interest in and affection for. That was in the mid-1970s, at least 15 years after Coleman made his initial big splash, about the time he was inventing a second wave of jazz-rock fusion, one much more radical than the funk-oriented Miles Davis or the prog of John McLaughlin.

Coleman was part of the first wave of jazz avant-gardists, a group which variously sought to explore and find novel sounds, rhythms, and harmonics -- to violate the known rules of jazz, to do things that are wrong and somehow make them sound right. (Mingus put it most succinctly: "It's like organized disorganization, or playing wrong right.") Most of that wave wound up contributing to the postmodern synthesis jazz students today are taught: what we call postbop. Martin Williams was so impressed with Coleman that he concluded his Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz with three Coleman pieces (plus a Coltrane), arguing that [early] Coleman was the endpoint of the classic jazz tradition. Yet even today most novices find [early] Coleman puzzling before they are swept away. I saw this at work when my hip-hop-loving nephew wanted to get acquainted with jazz and I handed him The Shape of Jazz to Come.

Later Coleman pushed further and harder, but by the time he cut his last album, 2006's Sound Grammar, all the stars aligned: no jazz record in the past decade (or really, ever -- and I've been involved in a lot of critic polling on such things) has been so universally exclaimed. It even won the Pulitzer Prize that had so notoriously been denied Duke Ellington. Yet it sounded so offhand you could imagine him knocking sequels out every year -- so it seems odd that it came ten years after his previous album, and nine years before his death. He had remained active well into last year -- playing at a tribute concert in his honor in Brooklyn (and suing to keep the ablum from being released). He never got comfortable with the record business as he hopped from label to label, taking long breaks, never settling in -- he didn't even seem to be happy with his own labels, going back to Artist House in the late 1970s. One imagines he has hoards of tapes that greedy heirs will eventually dump onto the market. Or respectful ones, given that his son Denardo has been his preferred drummer ever since puberty in the 1970s. (Denardo first played on an album in 1966 when he was 10, but it took him a while to finally push Ed Blackwell, Billy Higgins, and Shannon Jackson out of the picture.)

My semi-obligatory database dump:

Mainline Albums:

• Ornette Coleman: Something Else: The Music of Ornette Coleman (1958, Contemporary) -- ([1988], Contemporary/OJC): B+(***)
• Ornette Coleman: Tomorrow Is the Question (1959, Contemporary) -- ([1988, Contemporary/OJC): B+(**)
• Ornette Coleman: The Shape of Jazz to Come (1959, Atlantic) -- ([1990], Atlantic): A+
• Ornette Coleman: Change of the Century (1959 [1960], Atlantic) -- ([1992], Atlantic): A-
• The Ornette Coleman Quartet: This Is Our Music (1960 [1961], Atlantic): A-
• Ornette Coleman Double Quartet: Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation (1960 [1961], Atlantic): A-
• Ornette Coleman: Ornette! (1961 [1962], Atlantic): A-
• Ornette Coleman: Ornette on Tenor (1961 [1962], Atlantic): B+(***)
• Ornette Coleman: Town Hall, 1962 (1962 [1965], ESP-Disk): B+(***)
• Ornette Coleman: Chappaqua Suite (1965, Columbia): B+
• The Ornette Coleman Trio: At the "Golden Circle" Stockholm: Volume One (1965 [1966], Blue Note) -- (1987, Blue Note): A
• The Ornette Coleman Trio: At the "Golden Circle" Stockholm: Volume Two (1965 [1966], Blue Note) -- (1987, Blue Note): A-
• Ornette Coleman: New York Is Now! (1968, Blue Note) -- ([1989], Blue Note): A-
• Ornette Coleman: Love Call (1968 [1971], Blue Note): B+(**)
• Ornette Coleman: Friends and Neighbors: Live at Prince Street (1970 [1972], Flying Dutchman) -- ([2013], BGP): A-
• Ornette Coleman: Skies of America (1972, Columbia) -- ([2000], Columbia/Legacy): B+
• Ornette Coleman: Dancing in Your Head (1973-75 [1977], Verve) -- ([2000], Verve): A
• Ornette Coleman/Charlie Haden: Soapsuds, Soapsuds (1977, Artists House) -- ([1996], Verve/Harmolodic): B+
• Ornette Coleman: Body Meta (1976 [1978], Artists House) -- ([1996], Verve/Harmolodic): A-
• Ornette Coleman: Of Human Feelings (1979 [1982], Antilles): A
• Ornette & Prime Time: Opening the Caravan of Dreams (1985, Caravan of Dreams): B+
• Ornette Coleman [The Original Quartet & Prime Time]: In All Languages (1985 [1987], Caravan of Dreams, 2LP): A
• Ornette Coleman: Virgin Beauty (1988, Portrait): A-
• Ornette Coleman & Prime Time: Tone Dialing (1995, Harmolodic/Verve): B+
• Ornette Coleman: Sound Museum: Hidden Man (1996, Harmolodic/Verve): B+
• Ornette Coleman: Sound Museum: Three Women (1996, Harmologic/Verve): B
• Ornette Coleman + Joachim Kühn: Colors: Live From Leipzig (1996 [1997], Verve/Harmolodic): A-
• Ornette Coleman: Sound Grammar (2005 [2006], Sound Grammar): A

Miscellaneous Albums: side-credits, compilations, live albums that only appeared much after the fact:

• Paul Bley Quintet: The Fabulous Paul Bley Quintet (1958 [], Musidisc) -- also released as Paul Bley/Ornette Coleman/Don Cherry/Charlie Haden/Billy Higgins: Live at the Hilcrest Club 1958 (1958 [1976], Inner City), and Coleman Classics, Vol. 1 (IAI): A-
• John Lewis Presents: Contemporary Music 1: Jazz Abstractions (1960 [1961], Atlantic) -- compositions by Gunther Schuller and Jim Hall; other cover names: Coleman, Eddie Costa, Eric Dolphy, Bill Evans, Scott LaFaro: A-
• Ornette Coleman: To Whom Who Keeps a Record (1959-60 [1975], Atlantic) -- ([2007], Water): A-
• Ornette Coleman: The Art of the Improvisers (1959-61 [1970], Atlantic) -- ([1988], Atlantic): A-
• Ornette Coleman: Twins (1959-61 [1971], Atlantic) -- ([2008], Water): A-
• Ornette Coleman: Beauty Is a Rare Thing (1959-61 [1993], Rhino/Atlantic, 6CD) -- collects all the Atlantic recordings: A-
• Jackie McLean/Ornette Coleman: New and Old Gospel (1967, Blue Note) -- ([2007], Blue Note): Coleman plays trumpet: A-
• Alice Coltrane: Universal Consciousness (1971, Impulse): B
• Ornette Coleman: The Complete Science Fiction Sessions (1971-72 [2000], Columbia/Legacy, 2CD) -- collects Science Fiction [1972] and the outtakes later issued as Broken Shadows [1982]: A-
• Ornette Coleman: Ken Burns Jazz: The Definitive Ornette Coleman (1958-75 [2000], Columbia/Legacy): A-
• Charlie Haden: Closeness (1976, Horizon) -- one of four duets: B+
• Charlie Haden: The Golden Number (1976 [1977], Horizon) -- one of four duets: B+(***)
• James Blood [Ulmer]: Tales of Captain Black (1978 [1979], Artists House) -- ([1979], DIW): A-
• Jamaaladeen Tacuma: Renaissance Man (1983 [1984], Gramavision): B
• Pat Metheny/Ornette Coleman: Song X (1985 [1986], Geffen): A-; Song X: Twentieth Anniversary ([2005], Nonesuch): A
• The Ornette Coleman Quartet: The 1987 Hamburg Concert (1987 [2011], Domino, 2CD): A-
• Geri Allen: Eyes in the Back of Your Head (1995-96 [1997], Blue Note): B+
• Rolf Kühn & Friends: Affairs (1997, Intuition): Coleman on 1 cut: A-
• Lou Reed: The Raven (2003, Sire/Reprise): B+
• Jamaaladeen Tacuma: For the Love of Ornette (2010 [2011], Jazzwerkstatt): B+(***)
• Sonny Rollins: Road Shows Vol. 2 (2010 [2011], Doxy/Emarcy) -- one cut: A-
• The Master Musicians of Jajouka, et al.: The Road to Jajouka: A Benefit Album (2013, Howe): A-

Selected albums I have not heard:

• Ornette Coleman: The Empty Foxhole (1966 [1967], Blue Note)
• Ornette Coleman: Ornette at 12 (1968 [1969], Impulse!)
• Yoko Ono: Plastic Ono Band (1968-70 [1970], Apple) -- Coleman played on the one 1968 track
• Ornette Coleman: Crisis (1969 [1972], Impulse!)
• Louis Armstrong: Louis Armstrong and His Friends (1970, Flying Dutchman) -- no dream date: Armstrong only sings, and Coleman's credit reads "backing vocals"
• Cosmetic With Jamaaladeen Tacuma: So Tranquilizin' (1985, Gramavision)
• Ornette Coleman: Prime Design/Time Design (1985, Caravan of Dreams): composition only, played by string quartet + Denardo Coleman
• Ornette Coleman: Naked Lunch [Soundtrack] (1988, Portrait)
• New Vocabulary: New Vocabulary (2014, System Dialing) -- Coleman sued over this "unauthorized" release.

Miscellaneous unheard live albums:

• Ornette Coleman Quintet: Complete Live at the Hillcrest Club (1958 [2007], Gambit) -- see above, usually attributed to Paul Bley Quintet
• Ornette Coleman/Don Cherry/Jimmy Giuffre/Kenny Dorham: The Lenox Jazz School Concert: August 29, 1959 (1959 [2009], Free Factory)
• Ornette Coleman: The Great London Concert (1960 [1975], Arista/Freedom, 2LP) -- also released as An Evening With Ornette Coleman ([1967], Polydor, 2LP)
• Ornette Coleman Trio: Live at the Tivoli (1965 [1992], Magnetic)
• Ornette Coleman Trio: Croydon Concert (1965 [2008], Free Factory)
• Ornette Coleman: Who's Crazy? (1966 [1982], Affinity, 2LP) -- previously two separate LPs, 1 and 2 ([1979], Atmosphere)
• Ornette Coleman: Lonely Woman Trio '66 (1966, no label): Copenhagen, Denmark
• Ornette Coleman: Live in Milano (1968 [1989], Jazz Up)
• Ornette Coleman: The Unprecedented Music of Ornette Coleman (1968 [1996], Passport)
• Ornette Coleman: The Belgrade Concert (1971 [1995], Jazz Door)
• Ornette Coleman: European Concert (1971, Unique Jazz): Berlin
• Ornette Coleman: Paris Concert (1971 [1977], Trio, 2LP) -- later Live in Paris 1971 (1971 [2008], Gambit)
• Ornette Coleman: Lonely Woman Quartet '74 (1974, no label): Italy
• Ornette Coleman/Prime Time: Jazzbühne Berlin '88 (1988 [1990], Repertoire)
• Ornette Coleman Quartet: Reunion 1990 (1990 [2010], Domino, 2CD): Reggio Emilia, Italy

I expect many more live albums will appear in the future, especially as his estate swings into action, and as Europe's 50-year copyright limit legitimizes more bootlegs.

An informal scan indicates that at least 500 albums have Ornette Coleman compositions on them (maybe more than 600; I couldn't check, but "Lonely Woman" is undoubtedly the song leader). I'd hazard a wild guess that two dozen or more albums are tributes/dedicated to Ornette Coleman: most obviously, everything by Old and New Dreams (Don Cherry, Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden, Ed Blackwell -- note that Coleman outlived all the members of his ghost band); also (hard to check this precisely): Affinity [Joe Rosenberg], Borah Bergman, Paul Bley, Charlie Haden, Dave Liebman, Pat Metheny, Paul Motian, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, John Zorn.

Ornette Coleman was one of the few jazz musicians Robert Christgau continued to review regularly. His own Consumer Guide reviews are here. This reminds me that the first time I heard Dancing in Your Head was when Bob played it for me. The symphony theme was the most deliriously joyful piece of music I had ever heard. That wasn't the first time I heard Coleman, but it pushed my interest to a higher level.

Some links as others write about Coleman:

• Ben Ratliff: Ornette Coleman, Composer and Saxophonist Who Rewrote the Language of Jazz, Dies at 85
• Jason Gubbels: RIP Ornette Coleman, Who Confounded Most People and Humbled Us All
• Richard Brody: Ornette Coleman's Revolution
• David Fricke: Ornette Coleman: The Man Who Set Jazz Free: Fricke also interviews Vernon Reid: "He set a lot of people free."
• Charles J Gans: Obituaries
• David A Graham: Ornette Coleman, Still the Shape of Jazz to Come
• Howard Mandel: Ornette Coleman, Jazz Iconoclast, Dies at 85
• Chris Monsen: Ornette Coleman, 1930-2015: a few words, with a helping hand from Robert Palmer
• Christopher Morris: Saxophonist Ornette Coleman, Jazz Legend, Dies at 85
• Stef: Ornette Coleman
• George Varga: Ornette Coleman -- Jazz giant dies at 85: quotes Lou Reed, 16 in 1959 when he first heard Coleman at the Five Spot: "Hearing Ornette gave me a license to kill."
• Matthew Kassel: Jazz Musicians Tell Their Ornette Coleman Stories: Calvin Weston: "He set me free."
• Randall Roberts: Why Was Ornette Coleman so important? Jazz masters both living and dead chime in: includes Mingus quote above.
• Milo Miles: R.I.P. Ornette: "Perhaps the most beloved musician in my life."

Some older pieces:

• Robert Palmer: Ornette Coleman and the Circle With a Hole in the Middle [1972]
• Francis Davis: Ornette's Permanent Revolution [1985]
• Ethan Iverson: This Is Our Mystic [2010]
• Robert Christgau: Ornette Coleman in Prospect Park June 12, 2014
• Jazzdisco.org Ornette Coleman Discography

For a final word, Sonny Rollins (quoted in Gans, above):

We're all happy that we had an opportunity to witness the work and life of Ornette Coleman, and the human race is better for it.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, June 8, 2015

Music: Current count 25069 [25024] rated (+45), 432 [422] unrated (+10).

When I counted the number of newly rated records below, I found more than my count this week. I went back and rechecked the database, and found four albums listed as unrated that I should have filled in grades for. Then the count exceeded the list, so I went to the Streamnotes draft file and checked what I had written up against the Music Week lists, and found more discrepancies. I added them to the list below, and now the list is longer than the rated count increase again. Most likely that's the Pixies, who probably should have been reported last week. (At least seems to me like it's been a while.) Of course, if I had a system where I didn't have to update my records 4-5 times when I file a grade, I'd make fewer mistakes. But they'd also be harder to fix, so I guess there's that.

The large quantity of old music is due to my attempt to fill in the holes in Spin's Top 300 Albums: 1985-2014 list. I'm a little more than a third of the way through the list. I'm not just doing albums on the list: if I find something else that has a substantial rep and/or looks interesting, I'll slip it in too. Still working on Built to Spill. Next up is Kate Bush (list isn't alphabetical). I'm not spending a lot of time with them, although the A- records get at least two spins, as do some near misses. I'm also not reviewing anything I've graded before, even though some of them look like I may have underrated a bit. It's impossible to keep a list as long as mine in lockstep.

New records include two jazz A-listers from old favorites, albeit of very different stripes. But I have been dragging my feet on the jazz queue, which has been growing at a surprising rate. The main source of new records this week was Spin's 50 Best Albums of 2015 . . . So Far (my comp list is buried in the June 1 notebook). That led me to: American Wrestlers, Cannibal Ox, Dan Deacon, Eye, I Love Makonnen, Knocks, Bassekou Kouyate and Ngoni Ba, Monster Rally & Jay Stone, Colin Stetson/Sarah Neufeld, and Young Thug -- two more A-list records there, with Cannibal Ox real close and nothing real bad. I expected Jason Derulo on that list too -- it was plugged as "Spin album of the week" on the same page, and has gotten rapturous reviews from critics I usually agree with, and I loved Talk Dirty as much as they did. I played it twice and it irritated me more than my low B+ grade reveals. The other two new A-list records were obvious things to listen to (Murs, Willie Nelson/Merle Haggard). For a while last week I was logging so many A- records I wondered if I was going soft.

As you may have noticed, Medium's music venture Cuepoint hasn't added any new content since June 2, notably missing last Friday's expected appearance of Robert Christgau's Expert Witness. I don't have any inside info on what's happening, but there's evidently some sort of shakeup going on. The basic idea behind Medium is to sucker people into contributing free content, but Christgau at least has been paid from the start. It wasn't unreasonable at first to seed the free content with some commissioned pieces, but sooner or later some bean counter is going to insist on cutting expenses, and freelancers are easy to stiff. So one possibility is that Medium is tightening the screws. Another is that the "vertical" websites like Cuepoint built on Medium's platform haven't clicked. I think one problem with Cuepoint is that they've never had anyone else doing the sort of thing Christgau does -- either as a columnist with a regular schedule or as a reviewer. Everything else is feature writing, and I only recognize two writers on their current homepage, so they're not exactly trying to build a prestige roster. One result is that I've never found anything other than Christgau worth reading there.

You may recall that something similar happened at the previous home of Christgau's consumer guide, MSN Music. They had a slightly better music site, probably because living off the fat of Microsoft's monopoly they had more money to throw at it. They had a few columnists, although none generated as much as 5% of Christgau's comment traffic. They hired Christgau to write some live reports, and occasionally you could find something else worth reading there, but it was never organized very well. There are other music websites that seem to be successful, but they do so by cultivating a niche audience and covering that niche at considerable depth -- I'm thinking of Pitchfork, PopMatters, All About Jazz, not that I know how much money they really make. But both MSN Music and Cuepoint seemed to have the idea that they could build a mass audience by covering music at the most superficial level. That they failed should not be a big surprise.

Christgau wrote for MSN Music and for Cuepoint for the most pedestrian of reasons: because they paid him to do something he wanted to do anyway. If Cuepoint folds this could be the end of Christgau's Consumer Guide. Or he could find another web angel willing to lose money on him (though it's hard to imagine an infinite chain of them). He could even publish a few CG reviews in a non-paying outlet -- he had written a number of them during his last hiatus just because writing had become an integral part of the way he understands records, and was thinking about giving them to Odyshape (which more or less suspended operations last September). I'd be happy to publish them on his website, where at least they'd add value and interest.

Or he could just hang it up -- something I think about, even after I reconciled myself to writing for free. Could be time to start thinking about a post-Christgau website.

Expect a Rhapsody Streamnotes later this week. Current draft has 50 new records, 3 new compilations, and 75 old records, so that should be plenty. I'm also working on a series of book blurb posts. I came back from New Jersey last fall with many pages of notes I took in various bookstores, but technical problems have kept me from working on them. The last Book Roundup was on July 3, 2014, so nearly a year. There should be several hundred books worth mentioning in that time.

New records rated this week:

• All Included: Satan in Plain Clothes (2014 [2015], Clean Feed): [cd]: B+(***)
• American Wrestlers (2014 [2015], Fat Possum): [r]: B
• Cannibal Ox: Blade of the Ronin (2015, iHipHop): [r]: B+(***)
• François Carrier/Michel Lambert: Io (2013 [2015], FMR): [cd]: B+(***)
• François Carrier/Michel Lambert/Rafal Mazur: Unknowable (2014 [2015], Not Two): [cd]: A-
• Dan Deacon: Gliss Rifter (2015, Domino): [r]: B+(*)
• Jason Derulo: Everything Is 4 (2015, Warner Brothers): [r]: B+(*)
• Deux Maisons: For Sale (2013 [2015], Clean Feed): [cd]: B+(**)
• Chris Dingman: The Subliminal & the Sublime (2013 [2015], Inner Arts Initiative): [cd]: B+(*)
• The Eye: The Future Will Be Repeated (2015, Ba Da Bing): [r]: B+(**)
• Scott Hamilton: Scott Hamilton Plays Jule Styne (2015, Blue Duchess): [cd]: A-
• I Love Makonnen: Drink More Water 5 (2015, OVO Sound): [dl]: B+(**)
• The Knocks: So Classic (2015, Big Beat, EP): [r]: B+(*)
• Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba: Ba Power (2015, Glitterbeat): [r]: A-
• Major Lazer: Peace Is the Mission (2015, Mad Decent): [r]: B+(*)
• Monster Rally & Jay Stone: Foreign Pedestrians (2014 [2015], Gold Robot): [r]: B+(*)
• Murs: Have a Nice Day (2015, Strange Music): [r]: A-
• Willie Nelson/Merle Haggard: Django and Jimmie (2015, Legacy): [r]: A-
• Pixies: Indie Cindy (2014, Pixiesmusic): [r]: B
• Colin Stetson/Sarah Neufeld: Never Were the Way She Was (2015, Constellation): [r]: A-
• Davide Tammaro: Ghosts (2014 [2015], self-released): [cd]: B
• Frank Vignola & Vinny Raniolo: Swing Zing! (2015, FV): [cd]: B+(**)
• Young Thug: Barter 6 (2015, 300/Atlantic): [r]: B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:

• The Red Line Comp: A DCHC Compilation ([2015], self-released, EP): [bc]: B+(*)

Old records rated this week:

• Mary J. Blige: What's the 411? (1992, Uptown/MCA): [r]: B+(**)
• Mary J. Blige: No More Drama (2001, MCA): [r]: B+(**)
• Built to Spill: Ultimate Alternative Wavers (1992, C/Z): [r]: B+(***)
• Built to Spill: There's Nothing Wrong With Love (1994, Up): [r]: A-
• Built to Spill: Keep It Like a Secret (1999, Warner Brothers): [r]: A-
• Built to Spill: Ancient Melodies of the Future (2001, Warner Brothers): B
• Built to Spill: You in Reverse (2006, Warner Brothers): [r]: B+(**)
• Depeche Mode: Construction Time Again (1983, Sire): [r]: B
• Depeche Mode: Some Great Reward (1984, Sire): [r]: B+(*)
• Depeche Mode: Catching Up With Depeche Mode (1980-85 [1985], Sire): [r]: B+(**)
• Depeche Mode: Black Celebration (1986, Sire): [r]: B
• Depeche Mode: Violator (1990, Sire/Reprise): [r]: B
• Depeche Mode: Songs of Faith and Devotion (1993, Sire/Reprise): [r]: B-
• Dinosaur Jr.: You're Living All Over Me (1987, SST): [r]: B+(**)
• Pixies: Come On Pilgrim (1987, 4AD, EP): [r]: B+(*)
• Pixies: Surfer Rosa (1988, 4AD/Elektra): [r]: B+(*)
• Primal Scream: XTRMNTR (2000, Astralwerks): [r]: A-
• Radiohead: Pablo Honey (1993, Capitol): [r]: B+(**)
• Radiohead: The Bends (1995, Capitol): [r]: B
• Radiohead: Hail to the Thief (2003, Capitol): [r]: B+(*)
• Tears for Fears: The Hurting (1983, Mercury): [r]: B+(*)
• Tears for Fears: Songs From the Big Chair (1985, Mercury): [r]: B
• Tears for Fears: The Seeds of Love (1989, Mercury): [r]: B-

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Stephen Anderson/360° Jazz Initiative: Distracted Society (Summit)
• Brett Carson: Quattuor Elephantis (Edgetone)
• Casa: Futuro (Clean Feed)
• Linda Dachtyl: A Late One (Summit)
• Benjamin Duboc/Jean-Luc Petit: Double-Basse: This Is Not Art (Clean Feed)
• Satoko Fujii Tobira: Yamiyo Ni Karasu (Libra): July 14
• Vance Gilbert: Nearness of You (Disismye Music)
• Chris Golinski/Tim McNally/Boaz Roberts: Rodeo (Edgetone)
• Dre Hocevar Trio: Coding of Evidentiality (Clean Feed)
• Keith Kelly Ask Not: A Grand Apparatus, Discarded (Edgetone)
• Lona Kozik/Chris Golinski: Spelaeology (Edgetone)
• Lama + Joachim Badenhorst: The Elephant's Journey (Clean Feed)
• Marsa Fouty: Concerts (Fou)
• Bob Mintzer Big Band: Get Up! (MCG Jazz): June 23
• Gard Nilssen's Acoustic Unity: Firehouse (Clean Feed)
• Caili O'Doherty: Padme (Odo): July 7
• Rent Romus' Life's Blood Ensemble: The Otherworld Cycle (Edgetone)
• Wayne Wallace Latin Jazz Quintet: Intercambio (Patois): July 7

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, June 7, 2015

Some scattered links this week:

• Jason Ditz: Senate Votes to Block Pentagon Paying Millions to NFL to 'Honor Troops': You probably thought (if you thought about it at all) that the NFL was just engaging in patriotic showboating, but it turns out they were on the government dole. Precious quote, from Sens. McCain, Flake, and Blumenthal: "the US cannot afford to give 'scarce defense dollars to wealthy sports teams.'" They're talking about $5.4 million, a tiny drop in the trillion or so dollars the US spends on "defense" each year. Indeed, it's probably only a small fraction of what the Defense Dept. spends on PR, the effect of which is to make war more politically acceptable.

• Paul Krugman: Why Am I a Keynesian?

  Noah Smith sort-of approvingly quotes Russ Roberts, who views all macroeconomic positions as stalking horses for political goals, and declares in particular that

  Krugman is a Keynesian because he wants bigger government. I'm an anti-Keynesian because I want smaller government.

  OK, I'm not going to clutch my pearls and ask for the smelling salts. Politics can shape our views, in ways we may not recognize. [ . . . ]

  So, am I a Keynesian because I want bigger government? If I were, shouldn't I be advocating permanent expansion rather than temporary measures? Shouldn't I be for stimulus all the time, not only when we're at the zero lower bound? When I do call for bigger government -- universal health care, higher Social Security benefits -- shouldn't I be pushing these things as job-creation measures? (I don't think I ever have). I think if you look at the record, I've always argued for temporary fiscal expansion, and only when monetary policy is constrained. Meanwhile, my advocacy of an expanded welfare state has always been made on its own grounds, not in terms of alleged business cycle benefits.

  In other words, I've been making policy arguments the way one would if one sincerely believed that fiscal policy helps fight unemployment under certain conditions, and not at all in the way one would if trying to use the slump as an excuse for permanently bigger government.

  But in that case, why am I a Keynesian? Maybe because of convincing evidence?

  First of all, the case for viewing most recessions -- and the Great Recession in particular -- as failures of aggregate demand is overwhelming.

  Now, this could be a case for using monetary rather than fiscal policy -- and that actually is the policy I advocate in response to garden-variety slumps. But when the slump pushes rates down to zero, and that's still not enough, any simple model I can think of says that fiscal expansion can be a useful supplement, while fiscal austerity makes a bad situation worse.

  And while it's true that there was limited direct evidence on the effects of fiscal policy 6 or 7 years ago, there's now a lot, and it's very supportive of a Keynesian view.

  Krugman is generally right that Keynesian macro is preferred because it provides a more accurate and efficient understanding of the interaction between government spending and economic growth, and can back that up with evidence, especially of a predictive nature. But whether you want growth and what kind of growth you want are political issues. Those who do, like Krugman (or Nixon, when he wanted to take credit for a robust economy, and had one that often seemed to be on the verge of collapse), will be Keynesians because they want tools that work. But those who don't care about growth (except of business profits) will disparage Keynes -- after all, why acknowledge an analysis that could work when that's not what you want? Keynes wouldn't be controversial but for the purely political desire to slag the economy. You might wonder why Republicans would want to do that -- some combination of making a Democrat in the White House look bad and a preference for increasing inequality over economic growth.

  The "big government" association with Keynesianism is, as Krugman shows, misdirection. I'd personally like to trim large segments of government -- especially the biggest one of all, the military. That doing so would be contractionary doesn't bother me. One can always spend more elsewhere, and finding more productive investments than the US military should be easy. Or you can reduce taxes and, as Bush liked to put it, let people spend their own money. Strangely enough, anti-government obsessives rarely worry about the military -- even though from the founding of the republic up to WWII many Americans regarded a standing army as the greatest threat to liberty. Rather, what they object to is that government is subject to democratic rule and as such can be used to rebalance private fortunes, whereas their vaunted private sector tends to exacerbate inequities. They object not to the government which they need to secure private property, but to what that government might do to satisfy the masses. Over the ages they've pulled every trick imaginable to keep the belief that the nation was founded upon -- that all men are created equal -- from becoming reality. Denying the efficacy of Keynesian economics is just one such trick.

• Bill McKibben: How mankind blew the fight against climate change: Strange scenes from Exxon Mobil's annual shareholders meeting:

  The meeting came two days after Texas smashed old rainfall records -- almost doubled them, in some cases -- and as authorities were still searching for families swept away after rivers crested many feet beyond their previous records. As Exxon Mobil's Rex Tillerson -- the highest-paid chief executive of the richest fossil fuel firm on the planet -- gave his talk, the death toll from India's heat wave mounted and pictures circulated on the Internet of Delhi's pavement literally melting. Meanwhile, satellite images showed Antarctica's Larsen B ice shelf on the edge of disintegration.

  And how did Tillerson react? By downplaying climate change and mocking renewable energy. To be specific, he said that "inclement weather" and sea level rise "may or may not be induced by climate change," but in any event technology could be developed to cope with any trouble. "Mankind has this enormous capacity to deal with adversity and those solutions will present themselves as those challenges become clear," he said.

  But apparently those solutions don't include, say, the wind and sun. Exxon Mobil wouldn't invest in renewable energy, Tillerson said, because clean technologies don't make enough money and rely on government mandates that were (remarkable choice of words) "not sustainable." He neglected to mention the report a week earlier from the not-very-radical International Monetary Fund detailing $5.3 trillion a year in subsidies for the fossil fuel industry.

  All in all, a sneering and sad performance by a man paid nearly $100,000 a day, whose company spends $100 million a day looking for new oil and gas even though scientists say we simply can't burn most of the fossil fuel we've already located without devastating consequences.

  The science explaining climate change, like Keynesian economics (above), has become inconvenient for certain well established interests who prefer to think that politics trumps science, or that anything that challenges their personal interests and prejudices must be nothing but propaganda against them. While this is often true, nowhere more so than in the oil industry, where fortunes were built on nothing more than a lottery of land titles, yet every tycoon considers himself a self-made man, not to mention graced by God.

• Daniel Strauss: Brownback May Empower Kris Kobach to Prosecute 'Voter Fraud' Cases Himself: Kobach has been lobbying for this power ever since he was elected Secretary of State in 2010, although it's never been clear who he'd prosecute with this -- as he hasn't been able to get a single county to prosecute one of his cases yet. If anyone should be prosecuted for voter fraud it's Kobach, Brownback, and the state legislature, whose ID laws have prevented thousands of otherwise eligible citizens from voting. Josh Marshall comments: "He can just prosecute anyone he wants." Certainly a dream come true for a self-aggrandizing demagogue.

• Maybe the GOP Candidates Are Just as Self-Deluding as Their Voter Base: Much discussion with little insight into the plethora of Republicans who are mounting campaigns for president in 2016. This keys off a Kevin Drum piece (title: Why Do So Many Obvious Losers Think They Can Be President?) that, in the most pedestrian tradition of horserace journalism tries to handicap the hopefuls. Both pieces are governed by the idea that only candidates with reasonable chances should bother running -- an idea which in the past has mostly been used to avoid considering the issues that "fringe" candidates (Dennis Kucinich is pretty close to the archetype here) run on and for. But Republicans are so ideologically homogeneous that it's hard to think of a candidate with issues to be silenced. (Drum tries to dismiss Rand Paul as having views "just flatly too far out of the tea party mainstream" -- actually, Paul's tea party bona fides are as strong as any candidate's [Cruz being the only obvious competition], his one major unorthodoxy [opposition to the PATRIOT Act] is quite popular among tea party rank-and-file, and he's shown remarkable willingness to shelve libertarian positions on fetish issues like abortion and Israel.)

  Of course, Drum's supposition is fully operative among Democrats. Hillary Clinton's inevitability -- a combination of name, stature, and an almost unique access to a resource base formidable enough to stand up to Republican money power -- doesn't give any other Democrats any real chance at raising the money they'd need to be taken seriously. (This on top of the usual Democratic fundraising disadvantages, such as a lower return on graft.)

  On the other hand lots of Republicans seem to be coming up with the money to run, and the fact that they're all saying the same thing just helps reinforce the brand. (One person's may be a crackpot, but three add up to a trend, and nine gives you a new conventional wisdom even if what they're saying still sounds crazed.) And all saying the same thing reduces the contest to one of personality -- something they'd much rather have us talking about than issues, which usually require a thick layer of packaging to be palatable at all. As usual with the Republicans, one suspects that this is just pre-primary dog-and-pony show to drum up interest, with the fix revealed later at an appropriately dramatic moment.

  One hint here is the recent demise of the candidacy of Dennis Michael Lynch -- a candidate you never heard of, probably because he doesn't fit the profile of "rising Republican star," maybe because his obsessive issue (anti-immigration) is one Republican powers would rather not talk about. On the other hand, there is a role for the nearly-as-obscure Carly Fiorina. Steve M. writes:

  My first impression of [Fiorina's] campaign wasn't that it was a campaign for president or vice president -- it was that, as a candidate, she's like the one female member of a rich accused rapist's defense dream team, the attorney whose principal role is to do a really vicious cross-examination of the victim, because that would come of as sexist if a man did it.

Also, a few links for further study:

• Chloe Angyal: The Subculture of Embattled Abortion Workers: Abortion is one of the very few political issues today where ordinary debate is shadowed and haunted by one side adopting a network of harrassment and terror. Of course, this is not unprecedented in American history: the civil rights movement was met by even more violence, both in the 1960s and throughout the previous century, with much of that violence orchestrated by the various states. The labor movement up to the 1930s comes in a not-too-distant second. Still, while racism and anti-laborism persist, the level of violence and its chilling effects are far less than that experienced by the people who run and work with clinics that provide abortions. (Part of the reason may be the demagoguery of anti-choice politicians like Sam Brownback, playing the role George Wallace and Lester Maddox did on race.) Angyal reviews a book by David S Cohen and Krysten Connon: Living in the Crosshairs: The Untold Stories of Anti-Abortion Terrorism (2015, Oxford University Press), which details much of this history.

• Jared Bernstein/Ben Spielberg: Inequaliity Matters: Lead in:

  Lately, one argument that's been making the rounds is that people should worry less about inequality and more about opportunity. Arthur Brooks, head of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said, "I don't care about income inequality per se; I care about opportunity inequality." Senator and presidential candidate Marco Rubio believes that inequality is but a symptom of immobility and constrained opportunity. Tyler Cowen argued in the New York Times that what matters is not the fact that the top 1 percent is capturing a much larger share of total income growth than they used to, but that the poor are stuck in poverty.

  These individuals have identified a worthy goal. Unequal access to opportunity offends deeply held American values, and poverty is not only a matter of near-term material deprivation -- too often, it also robs low-income children of the chance to realize their intellectual and economic potential.

  But it's not possible to effectively address either poverty or inadequate opportunity if America hives off its opportunity concerns from the broader problem of inequality (nor, as Senator Rubio intimates, can America reduce inequality by focusing solely on increasing mobility). Boosting mobility will require reductions in wage, income, and wealth inequalities.

  The authors back up their initial assertions. One question they don't address is whether opportunity is being deliberately constricted by the rich; e.g., by making elite education both more necessary for advancement and more inaccessible to the unwealthy. It makes sense that a politically aggressive upper class recognizing a stagnant economy with austerity reducing the number of slots near the top would focus more on securing those slots for their own progeny. I don't know that anyone has sorted out the evidence for this, but there are many hints -- e.g., the nepotism boom under the second Bush administration.

• Garrett Epps: Out of Spite: The Governor of Nebraska's Threat to Execute Prisoners: Nebraska's state legislature passed a bill to ban capital punishment. Governor Ricketts vetoed the bill, and the legislature overrode the veto, making the bill law. So what does Ricketts do? Follow the law? No. He vows to speed up the executions of ten prisoners already on death row. Epps surveys many of the issues, including the increasing difficulty that states are having obtaining lethal injection drugs.

• David Himmelstein/Steffie Woolhandler: The Post-Launch Problem: The Affordable Care Act's Persistently High Administrative Costs:

  Insuring 25 million additional Americans, as the CBO projects the ACA will do, is surely worthwhile. But the administrative cost of doing so seems awfully steep, particularly when much cheaper alternatives are available.

  Traditional Medicare runs for 2 percent overhead, somewhat higher than insurance overhead in universal single payer systems like Taiwan's or Canada's. Yet traditional Medicare is a bargain compared to the ACA strategy of filtering most of the new dollars through private insurers and private HMOs that subcontract for much of the new Medicaid coverage. Indeed, dropping the overhead figure from 22.5 percent to traditional Medicare's 2 percent would save $249.3 billion by 2022.

  The ACA isn't the first time we've seen bloated administrative costs from a federal program that subcontracts for coverage through private insurers. Medicare Advantage plans' overhead averaged 13.7 percent in 2011, about $1,355 per enrollee. But rather than learn from that mistake, both Democrats and Republicans seem intent on tossing more federal dollars to private insurers.

• Esther Kaplan: Losing Sparta: The Bitter Truth Behind the Gospel of Productivity: That's Sparta, Tennessee, home of a huge unionized factory owned by Philips and shut down in 2010, the equipment (and business) to be moved to Mexico.

  When Philips announced its plans to shut down the plant in Sparta, the firm was in the black, aided by $7.2 million in federal stimulus grants and contracts. Profits were even better the following year as the firm began to lay off the plant's nearly 300 workers. Even Philips's lighting division was doing well. By late 2010, three years into the recovery, corporate profits, in general, had bounced back decisively, reaching record highs. Yet layoffs continued apace -- 1.4 million in 2010, 1.3 million a year in 2011 and 2012 -- well above prerecession levels.

  Among other profitable firms -- indeed, Fortune's list of America's most profitable firms in 2012, the year the Philips plant finally closed its gates -- closures and layoffs have been widespread: Chevron lays off 103 from a New Mexico mine; Walmart shuts down a New York office, putting 275 out of work; Ford shuts down two assembly plants in Minnesota, laying off nearly 1,700; IBM lays off 1,790 from its business units; Microsoft lays off 5,000. Exxon, ranked number one in profitability by Fortune in 2012, with $41 billion in profits in 2011, shrank its global workforce by more than 15,000 between 2010 and 2012. Chevron, at number two with profits of $27 billion, added only a thousand US jobs during that period. Apple was the only one of the country's five most profitable firms to add more than 10,000 jobs during that time (and Apple's public disclosures don't specify how many of those jobs were domestic). The latest Commerce Department data show that all US multinationals combined added a net total of only half a million jobs domestically between 2002 and 2011, but added 3.5 million jobs abroad, an indication of offshoring on a very grand scale.

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Monday, June 1, 2015

Music: Current count 25024 [25005] rated (+19), 422 [420] unrated (+2).

Missed four days for my trip to Arkansas. Fortunately, caught a break in the moonsoon on both travelling days, although it rained a lot the two full days at my cousin's house. They let me cook. I opted for comfort food on Friday -- boiled chicken with biscuits with green beans on the side -- and for blowout eight-dish Chinese on Saturday. Still, best meal was probably the standard Arkansas breakfast my second cousin put together Sunday morning -- including the chocolate gravy her grandmother (my aunt) was famous for, although I prefer the sausage gravy on my biscuits.

For "old music" I continue to pick off unheard albums from Spin's 1985-2014 list. Sometimes I go deeper into back catalogs I never paid much attention to back in the day, and sometimes not. In the case of Blur I started with a couple of early unheard albums, then skipped to the one selected (13), then checked out this year's reunion album, but I left a few holes I didn't bother with. I started from the git go with Depeche Mode, but doubt I'll go beyond the list album (1990's Violator). Running across more records not on Rhapsody, like Dr. Dre's The Chronic and Guided by Voices' Bee Thousand.

Didn't get to much new jazz last year, but did find two surprises: a teenaged standards singer from Spain, Andrea Motis, and a tribute album to little-remembered vibraphonist Gary McFarland. I wrote a little tweet-review of the former mostly to share the bandcamp link. The McFarland tribute was an even bigger surprise: I hear a lot of fine mainstream postbop, but almost by definition the genre sticks with ordinary conventions. But after sitting on the fence for a couple plays, the sparkling performances paid off here.

New records rated this week:

• Priscilla Badhwar: Mademoiselle (2014 [2015], self-released, EP): [cd]: B+(**)
• Blur: The Magic Whip (2015, Parlophone): [r]: B+(**)
• Joan Chamorro & Andrea Motis: Feeling Good (2012 [2015], Whaling City Sound): [cd]: B+(***)
• Lorin Cohen: Home (2014 [2015], Origin): [cd]: B
• Colours Jazz Orchestra: Home Away From Home: Plays the Music of Ayn Inserto (2013 [2015], Neu Klang): [cd]: B+(*)
• The Gary McFarland Legacy Ensemble: Circulation: The Music of Gary McFarland (2015, Planet Arts): [cd]: A-

Old records rated this week:

• Blur: Leisure (1991, SBK): [r]: B
• Blur: Modern Life Is Rubbish (1993, SBK): [r]: B-
• Blur: 13 (1999, Virgin): [r]: B+(**)
• Daft Punk: Homework (1997, Virgin): [r]: B
• Depeche Mode: Speak & Spell (1981, Sire): [r]: B
• Depeche Mode: A Broken Frame (1982, Sire): [r]: B-
• J Dilla: Donuts (2006, Stones Throw): [r]: B
• Slayer: Reign in Blood (1986, Def American): [r]: B
• TLC: CrazySexyCool (1994, La Face): [r]: B+(**)
• TLC: Fanmail (1999, La Face): [r]: B+(***)
• A Tribe Called Quest: Midnight Marauders (1993, Jive): [r]: A-
• A Tribe Called Quest: Beats, Rhymes and Life (1996, Jive): [r]: A-
• A Tribe Called Quest: The Love Movement (1998, Jive): [r]: B+(**)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Tiffany Austin: Nothing but Soul (Con Alma): June 2
• Kevin Bachelder/Jason Lee Bruns: Cherry Avenue (Panout Music Group)
• Kenny Carr: Idle Talk (self-released)
• Jerry Granelli Trio + 3: What I Hear Now (Addo)
• Brianna Thomas: You Must Believe in Love (Sound On Purpose)
• John Yao and His 17-Piece Instrument: Flip-Flop (See Tao): June 9

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Wednesday, May 27, 2015

Ed Kilgore quotes Mike Huckabee on, well, I guess you'd call this defense doctrine, though I'm not sure you can do that with a straight face:

I'm not a war monger, let me be very clear -- I think the best way to avoid war is to have the most robust military in the history of mankind and the kind of military nobody ever wants to wake up and find on the other end of the fight.

I learned this on the playground as a kid, all of you did. If there is a bully in your school, who does he pick on? He picks on who he thinks he can whip his butt. He never picks on a kid who he thinks can whip his butt. And the day that he picks on the wrong kid, and that kid beats his butt, he never does it again.

This reminds me of a lot of things, but let's start with Robert Fulghum's slim 1989 bestseller, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. Fulghum was a minister, so that may explain why he never needed to know anything about geometry or chemistry or, more generally, history and arts and sciences. Even so, I doubt he really meant to deprecate post-kindergarten learning. Rather, he wanted to make a point about the value of certain things that can be learned in kindergarten. A Wikipedia summary:

The title of the book is taken from the first essay in the volume, in which Fulghum lists lessons normally learned in American kindergarten classrooms and explains how the world would be improved if adults adhered to the same basic rules as children, i.e. sharing, being kind to one another, cleaning up after themselves, and living "a balanced life" of work, play, and learning.

I never read the book, but got the gist from the blurb, and it always struck me as a clever idea with a kernel of wisdom. I thought of it because Huckabee is also a minister, so that got me wondering whether a kindergarten frame of mind is endemic to the profession. On the other hand, I don't recall Fulghum's list -- as I recall, 21 short items (the shortest: "Flush.") -- including anything on the importance of beating down bullies. Maybe that's a Baptist thing? (Fulghum's ministry was Unitarian Universalist.)

Still, there's more wrong with Huckabee's bully analogy than his infantilist mindset. I suppose it's possible that bullies are more of a problem today than they were when I went to grade school -- I knew a couple but I'd characterize them more as thugs than bullies. But while Huckabee is probably right that bullies tend to pick on kids weaker than themselves, what distinguishes them more is their isolation from social norms and their willingness to cross authority. As usual, the best defense was to keep the problem from appearing, which has more to do with good management than stern policing. But one thing I never saw was a "sheepdog" (to use Chris Kyle's term) who would defend the weak (the "sheep") by beating down the bullies (the "wolves"). But then, had one appeared, he would have gotten nabbed by the authorities: bullying is intimidation, so it makes sense that intimidating "bullies" is bullying too.

In Kyle's mind what distinguishes the sheepdog from the wolf is the purity of his intentions. One thing that means is that it is hard, perhaps impossible, for an independent observer to tell the difference. For the US Army, pure intentions are a given -- not something any American politician, least of all a simpleton like Huckabee, would dare examine. If the US Army whips your butt, you had it coming. Still, there are at least four problems with this assumption: one is that pure intentions are real hard to come to and maintain (especially in an individualist/capitalist society which puts so much motivational weight on self-interest); second, even if your intentions are pure, the information you act on is often faulty (which is the main reason we keep killing people we didn't intend to); third, power is seductive and addictive, so as you build it you'll be tempted to flaunt it (cf. Madeleine Albright's tease: "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?" ); fourth, no one else can see (or trust) your intentions, so all they have to go on is your acts.

If the last paragraph seems theoretical, remember that what Huckabee is proposing isn't a hypothetical. The US has had the world's most dominant, most expensive, most far-reaching military in the world at least since 1945, so we have seventy years of history we can reflect upon. No one can doubt that the US had the power to destroy any nation that tried to bully it. As a first approximation, you might even think that strategy worked: no other nation has directly attacked US soil, nor the soil of any nation the US has a multilateral defense treaty with. On the other hand, that hasn't meant 70 years of secure peace. In fact, the US has engaged in dozens of overt and/or covert wars throughout the period. I'm not going to run down the list. The point is that being able to "whip butts" isn't a formula for peace. As practiced by the US for seventy years, it's a formula for perpetual war.

One reason is that lots of people have come to view the US as the bully. After all, what do bullies do? They use the threat of violence, demonstrated on occasion, to intimidate weaker folks, to take advantage of them, to limit their freedom. Arguably the US has done this many times. Bullying doesn't explain every US war -- US support for the Contras in Nicaragua and the Muhajedin in Afghanistan was more malicious, meant not to impose order but to tear down an order we didn't like -- but it is a pattern, and is more often than not never comes to war, the merest of threats sufficing. On the other hand, the bully pose is most explicit when faced with possible defeat: the Bush response to 9/11 was obsessed with reasserting American global domination, while the Nixon response to impending defeat in Vietnam was to raise the stakes, to show the world how much anyone who challenged us could be made to suffer.

On the other hand, the calculus of bullying is more complex, as Todd Snider points out in his song, Is This Thing On?, where he describes a kid who stands up to a bully, not by beating him down but by letting the bully disgrace himself:

Well, that bully just laughed and laughed
Of course, and so did all of his friends
And he beat that kid unmercifully
For days and days on end

Only less and less impressively
To that girl and all his friends
Who would eventually, secretly
Start hoping, the kid might win

You can see this dynamic most clearly with Israel and Palestine, where the former's periodic wars, no matter how overwhelming the result, only generate more sympathy for the latter. But even where the tide of public opinion never turns, overwhelming intimidation may be met not with submission but with greater resolve to find other, more asymmetric, forms of resistance. Guerrilla warfare and terrorism are two such forms, but the range of options is myriad. And while the US has weapons sufficient to kill virtually every living thing on earth, all that power has proven impossible to use with much precision. (The central problem of the "war on terror" is to distinguish friend from foe, but inability to exclusively target the latter has actually led to a multiplication of foes, a trend that portends failure.)

One more point: In the early post-WWII (post-New Deal) period, the US enjoyed a full range of options for dealing with the rest of the world, backed by an ideology which for the most part was democratic, progressive, and anti-colonial. In particular, the US supported international organizations, especially the UN, to provide a diplomatic framework for resolving conflicts, based on a broad and universal declaration of human rights, much as law provides a framework for resolving civil conflicts. The US also had the wherewithal to provide extensive economic aid to other countries. The military only became a significant factor with the Berlin Blockade (1948) and the Korean War (1950), and has become increasingly hegemonic in American thinking, with the CIA gaining ground in the 1950s. This shift in approaches was locked into an ideological sea change, as the US came to side with capitalism against labor, and as such with crony dictators against popular movements. This shift not only makes it harder to justify America's "pure intentions" -- it has led Americans to take an increasingly brutal view of the rest of the world, and indeed of ourselves. One tiny example is the hero worship accorded a stone cold killer like Chris Kyle (the SEAL hero of American Sniper), but you find it everywhere, not least in Huckabee's passion for whipping butt.

I have a little quote from Linda Robinson's review of Bill Russell Edmonds: God Is Not Here:

All that said, Edmonds's time in Iraq did give him an opportunity to capture an essential lesson about the war: Americans' behavior toward ordinary Iraqis contributed actively to frictions, discontent, anger and ultimately a population that was less inclined to assist the United States-backed government than to aid the insurgency -- or at least stay silent. As the violence grew, American soldiers became more aggressive, which, coupled with the protective measures they took and their general ignorance of Iraqi culture, created a highly dysfunctional atmosphere. Edmonds's book is full of Iraqi voices expressing outrage at the Americans. As an adviser, he had to deal with almost daily invective. He concludes: "Our actions, our tactics and our one-on-one American and Iraqi interactions are causing a few civilians to turn insurgent and the majority to look away when the few insurgents act."

Edmonds was stationed in Mosul in 2005-06, and was working as an advisor to Iraqi intelligence officers, so was involved in interrogating Iraqi civilians (the key word in the subtitle is "Torture") He later suffered some sort of mental breakdown, something this book attempts to reckon with. Just one case, but this sheds some light on how the bully army breaks down at the individual level. Many other soldier reports don't show this because most soldiers are more isolated from the people they harrass and kill -- contained within their units, fearing the unknown.

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Monday, May 25, 2015

Music: Current count 25005 [24971] rated (+34), 420 [407] unrated (+13).

Rated count creeped over the 25,000 mark yesterday. Much of last week's haul was picked up on Rhapsody as I've been filling in the previously unheard records on Spin's Top 300 1985-2014 list. Thus far I've filled in all but one of the top 75 slots -- Metallica won't allow their precious music (ranked 34 was 1986's Master of Puppets) to be exposed through a cheap streaming service, so fuck them too. I've only found two A-list albums in this exercise so far -- Nas' Illmatic last week and, more marginally, Aphex Twin's I Care Because You Do this week (not actually on Spin's list but I checked it out and gave it a slight edge over two high-B+ albums on the list, Selected Ambient Works 85-92 and Richard D. James Album). (Oh, already forgot about those two Smiths best-ofs, not on the list but picked up in my sweep.)

Not sure if I'll stick with this exercise. I was only missing 11 of the top 75 albums (14.6%), but I haven't heard 64 of the remaining 225 (28.4%), and wouldn't be surprised if the law of diminishing expectations kicks in. Indeed, it may alraedy have: I played three Smashing Pumpkins albums yesterday (including Gish, not on the Spin list). All three were better than I expected, but pricked no personal interest whatsoever. Slayer (77) comes next. Then Bikini Kill (80), but not on Rhapsody. Then A Tribe Called Quest (84), Pixies (86), J Dilla (90), Daft Punk (93), Blur (96), TLC (99), Guided by Voices (100) -- a stretch of records I can look forward to.

I've been rather slow going through the incoming mail, but this week brought in a new batch of Clean Feeds, two records from François Carrier, three from Ivo Perelman, and a pleasant change-of-pace from Scott Hamilton (I've had to go to Rhapsody to pick up six of his last eight albums). Still, may be a while before I get to them. I'll be out of town most of this coming week.

Memorial Day hadn't really sunk into my consciousness yesterday even though I wrote two Weekend Roundup items on the Iraq War and its beleaguered veterans. Thinking back today, one thing I wonder is when did the military come to dominate Memorial Day (or as it used to be called, Decoration Day). Many of my extended family members served in the armed forces during WWII, including my father, but none of them were killed in the war (one uncle war shot and partially disabled; another uncle saw sailors killed on both sides of him, but came out unscathed, only to die in a car accident six years later). Another bunch got caught up in Korea. One second cousin was killed in Vietnam (probably by a soldier under his command, an utter waste). But I don't recall singling out soldiers when as a child we'd go to cemeteries on Decoration Day -- we'd often wind up at the Flutey Cemetery in Arkansas, where several generations of my mother's family were buried. (Or more rarely at the Spearville [KS] Cemetery, where a comparable set of my father's relatives rested.) It used to be a day of remembering where you came from, one more poignant to my parents, who recalled more of the buried, than it ever was to me.

Before WWII most Americans had little experience with war or the army, aside from two notable instances. My grandfather (father's side, the only one I knew) was swept up in WWI and sent to Europe. A great-great-grandfather and his sons fought for Ohio in the Civil War and settled afterwards in Arkansas. About 405,000 Americans were killed in WWII, but that was still a small percentage of the population (0.307%), so the odds of a family like mine, with a dozen or more WWII soldiers, finishing with no death aren't bad. (Percentage-wise, the wars fought on US soil were much higher: 2.385% for the Civil War, 0.899% for the Revolutionary War. The shorter WWI was 0.110%. For other recent wars: Vietnam 0.030%, Korea Korea 0.020%, Iraq/Afghanistan ["War on Terror"] 0.002% -- source.)

The real difference is that wars up through WWII were exceptions to long periods where the US had virtually no Army. But since 1945 the US has fielded a huge standing Army as well as more clandestine operations like the CIA, and as such the nation has perpetually been on a war footing, more often than not actively engaged. If you look at the table of "United States military casualties of war" cited above, the only post-1945 years without military operations are: well, none. If we exclude the 1947-1991 USSR Cold War and 1950-1972 China Cold War lines, you get: 1954 (Korea ended in 1953, although a state of cold war continues to this day; Vietnam started in 1955, although the US supported France until its defeat in 1954); 1976-1979 (Vietnam ended in 1975, also followed by a cold war; operations in Iran and El Salvador started in 1980), and 1985 (between Beirut 1982-1984 and bombing Libya in 1986). The basic fact is that the United States has been at war all around the world ever since 1945. Of course, those wars produce dead soldiers, and those dead soldiers produce popular sympathy, so it's not surprising that the people who promote those wars should use Memorial Day to reinforce and perpetuate their warmongering. One irony of this is that we no longer have a day of rememberance for the people who actually built this country, the vast majority of our forbears who lived normal and industrious lives, because that day has been turned over to only recognize those Americans who have had their lives snatched away by America's imperial ambitions. That may not be so bad if we took the day to remind ourselves of the folly of those deaths, but officially at least we don't: we fly flags, salute, play taps, sometimes with pride swelling up, more often just self-pity. And we never comment on the deaths and destruction our wars have wrought: the chart above has no column for deaths and injuries we have caused. Indeed, in many cases we have no idea: estimates of Vietnamese dead range from 1.450 to 3.595 million (between 25 and 62 times the number of American dead). Nor could we care less.

Let me end this with a quote from Ray McGovern: How to Honor Memorial Day:

First, let's be clear on at least this much: the 4,500 U.S. troops killed in Iraq -- so far -- and the 2,350 killed in Afghanistan -- so far -- did not "fall." They were wasted on no-win battlefields by politicians and generals -- cheered on by neocon pundits and mainstream "journalists" -- almost none of whom gave a rat's patootie about the real-life-and-death troops. They were throwaway soldiers.

Meanwhile, enjoy the week's new music. It will help you get past today's orgy of necrophilia.

• Randy Brecker/Bobby Shew/Jan Hasenöhrl: Trumpet Summit Prague (2012 [2015], Summit): [cd]: B
• Christoph Irniger Trio: Gowanus Canal (2012 [2013], Intakt): [r]: B+(***)
• Christoph Irniger Pilgrim: Italian Circus Story (2014, Intakt): [r]: B+(**)
• Christoph Irniger Trio: Octopus (2014 [2015], Intakt): [cd]: A-
• Deborah Latz: Sur L'Instant (2013 [2015], June Moon): [cd]: B+(**)
• Ingrid Laubrock Anti-House: Roulette of the Cradle (2014 [2015], Intakt): [cd]: B+(***)
• Mbongwana Star: From Kinshasa (2015, World Circuit): [r]: A-
• Jeff Richman: Hotwire (2015, Nefer): [cd]: B+(*)
• Shamir: Ratchet (2015, XL): [r]: A-
• Enoch Smith Jr.: Misfits II: Pop (Misfitme Music)
• U2: Songs of Innocence (2014, Interscope): [r]: B

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:

• Yabby You: Dread Prophecy: The Strange and Wonderful Story of Yabby You (1972-85 [2015], Shanachie, 3CD): [r]: B+(***)

Old records rated this week:

• Aphex Twin: Selected Ambient Works 85-92 (1992, R&S): [r]: B+(***)
• Aphex Twin: I Care Because You Do (1990-94 [1995], Sire): [r]: A-
• Aphex Twin: Richard D. James Album (1996, Elektra): [r]: B+(***)
• Björk: Debut (1993, Elektra): [r]: B+(*)
• Björk: Post (1995, Elektra): [r]: B
• Björk: Greatest Hits (1993-2001 [2002], Elektra): [r]: B+(***)
• The Cure: Three Imaginary Boys (1979, Fiction): [r]: B+(*)
• The Cure: The Head on the Door (1985, Elektra): [r]: B+(*)
• The Cure: Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me (1987, Elektra): [r]: B
• The Cure: Disintegration (1989, Elektra): [r]: B
• The Flaming Lips: The Soft Bulletin (1999, Warner Brothers): [r]: B
• The Flaming Lips: Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (2002, Warner Brothers): [r]: B+(***)
• Neutral Milk Hotel: On Avery Island (1995 [1996], Merge): [r]: B
• Neutral Milk Hotel: In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (1998, Merce): [r]: B+(**)
• Smashing Pumpkins: Gish (1992, Caroline): [r]: B
• Smashing Pumpkins: Siamese Dream (1993, Virgin): [r]: B
• Smashing Pumpkins: Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (1993, Virgin, 2CD): [r]: B
• Elliott Smith: Either/Or (1997, Kill Rock Stars): [r]: B
• U2: Achtung Baby (1991, Island): [r]: B+(*)
• U2: Zooropa (1983, Island): [r]: B+(**)
• U2: Pop (1997, Island): [r]: B+(*)
• Weezer: Pinkerton (1996, Geffen): [r]: B+(*)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Aguankö: Invisible (Aguankö Music)
• All Included: Satan in Plain Clothes (Clean Feed)
• Bastet: Eye of Ra (self-released): May 26
• François Carrier/Michel Lambert: Io (FMR)
• François Carrier/Michel Lambert/Rafal Mazur: Unknowable (Not Two)
• Hugo Carvalhais: Grand Valis (Clean Feed)
• Joan Chamorro & Andrea Motis: Feeling Good (Whaling City Sound): June 2
• Deux Maisons: For Sale (Clean Feed)
• Chris Dingman: The Subliminal & the Sublime (Inner Arts Initiative): June 16
• Scott Hamilton: Scott Hamilton Plays Jule Styne (Blue Duchess)
• Joe Hertenstein: HNH (Clean Feed)
• Makaya McCraven: In the Moment (International Anthem) [was: B+(***)]
• Ivo Perelman/Matthew Shipp: Callas (Leo, 2CD)
• Ivo Perelman/Mat Maneri/Joe Morris: Counterpoint (Leo)
• Ivo Perelman/Whit Dickey: Tenorhood (Leo)
• Simon Phillips: Protocll III (Phantom)
• Ben Stapp & the Zozimos: Myrrha's Red Book: Act 1 (Evolver)
• Davide Tammaro: Ghosts (self-released): May 26
• Universal Indians w/Joe McPhee: Skullduggery (Clean Feed)
• Frank Vignola & Vinny Raniolo: Swing Zing! (FV): June 5

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Sunday, May 24, 2015

Some scattered links this week:

• Charles Krauthammer: It's Obama who lost Iraq: I don't normally bother citing right-wing propagandists here. I'd rather use links to learn something or at least point out something new, and the insight that Krauthammer is a devious, despicable warmonger is far from new. Nor is Krauthammer capable of the sort of idiosyncracies -- like you might find from Cal Thomas or David Brooks -- that might shed some light into the bizarre thinking processes of conservatives. The one strength Krauthammer has is his ability to proceed from false premise to faulty conclusion: few conservatives are as rigorous, or as ridgid. But I can't let this false premise go unnoted:

  Second, the "if you knew then" question implicitly locates the origin and cause of the current disasters in 2003. As if the fall of Ramadi was predetermined then, as if the author of the current regional collapse is George W. Bush.

  This is nonsense. The fact is that by the end of Bush's tenure, the war had been won. You can argue that the price of that victory was too high. Fine. We can debate that until the end of time.

  But what is not debatable is that it was a victory. Bush bequeathed to Obama a success. By whose measure? By Obama's. As he told the troops at Fort Bragg on Dec. 14, 2011, "We are leaving behind a sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people." This was, said the President, a "moment of success."

  Which Obama proceeded to fully squander. With the 2012 election approaching, he chose to liquidate our military presence in Iraq. We didn't just withdraw our forces. We abandoned, destroyed or turned over our equipment, stores, installations and bases.

  We surrendered our most valuable strategic assets, such as control of Iraqi airspace, soon to become the indispensable conduit for Iran to supply and sustain the Assad regime in Syria and cement its influence all the way to the Mediterranean. [ . . . ]

  Iraq is now a battlefield between the Sunni jihadists of the Islamic State and the Shiite jihadists of Iran's Islamic Republic. There is no viable center. We abandoned it. The Obama administration's unilateral pullout created a vacuum for the entry of the worst of the worst.

  Probably the biggest mistake Obama made in the early days of his presidency was how graciously he let Bush off the hook, not only for his disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq but for his mishandling of the economy and numerous other malfeasances of government. He did this in some sort of unrequited lust for bipartisan appeal, thinking that, for instance, if he expressed confidence that would help the economy. The real definition of the "success" he referred to was that he had managed to extricate American troops from an occupation that went sour from the very start and that would continue to be resisted violently as long as it went on. Those troops left not because they had accomplished any American goals but because the Iraqi government, whose legitimacy we could not dispute, had insisted on their leaving -- indeed, that government would never be regarded as legitimate in the eyes of its own people had the US continued to prop them up. Whether Obama wanted that to happen or not is beside the point. What he tried to do was to buck up the troops is a moment of retreat. Doing so was, I think, a mistake, and not just because it allowed Krauthammer to twist his words around. It was mostly a mistake because he squandered an opportunity to remind the nation that the entire Iraq War was a disastrous misjudgment, principally by George W. Bush. His generous words to the troops not only sullied his own reputation, it denied America a critical opportunity to learn from past mistakes.

  For an example of Krauthammer's weasel wording, consider his line: "With the 2012 election approaching, he chose to liquidate our military presence in Iraq." After the Dec. 14, 2011 "success" pronouncement, this implies that the "liquidation" came later -- perhaps closer to November 2012 election. In fact, the "liquidation" was completed by Dec. 18, 2011, four days after Obama's speech. And as I said, it wasn't Obama who chose to withdraw. All he decided was to honor and implement an agreement Bush signed in 2008 that set a Dec. 31, 2011 timetable for US withdrawal, and that was largely because Iraq didn't offer any other option.

  Perhaps had Obama sided with history, and the vast majority of the American people, that the 2003 invasion of Iraq had been a mistake, and laid the blame for that mistake clearly at the feet of the people responsible for it, he might not have repeated the mistake in sending troops back to Iraq to fight ISIS -- a move which, by the way, Krauthammer applauded. By the way, Ramadi fell to ISIS not in the wake of the US withdrawal, but after Obama sent troops back into Iraq.

  The implication that Iraq had a "viable center" before Obama withdrew is especially scurrilous. Iraq has essentially the same shiite-dominated government now it had in 2011 (or for that matter since the US arranged for Nouri al-Maliki to become Prime Minister in 2006). While a continued US military presence might have meant a few more "allies" ready to take American cash, they would never have developed into a politically significant faction -- in large part because as far back as Bush I the US viewed Iraq as a triad of sectarian forces to play against each other (first urging the shiites to rise up against Saddam Hussein, then helping the Kurds break away, then using both as proxies in the 2003 invasion, and later fomenting a Shiite-Sunni civil war to keep the anti-American Sadr movement from linking up with various anti-American Sunni forces (everything from Baathists to Al-Qaida-in-Iraq). But also because "American interests" in Iraq never extended beyond the military-industrial complex and other corporations (notably in the oil industry), so the US never offered anything concrete to the Iraqi people.

  Krauthammer also has a peculiar argument about 2003:

  It's a retrospective hypothetical: Would you have invaded Iraq in 2003 if you had known then what we know now?

  First, the question is not just a hypothetical, but an inherently impossible hypothetical. It contradicts itself. Had we known there were no weapons of mass destruction, the very question would not have arisen. The premise of the war -- the basis for going to the UN, to the Congress and, indeed, to the nation -- was Iraq's possession of WMD in violation of the central condition for the ceasefire that ended the first Gulf War. No WMD, no hypothetical to answer in the first place.

  He seems to be saying that had Bush known Iraq had no WMD, he wouldn't have even considered invading Iraq. But actually there is little reason to think either that Bush's top security people believed Iraq possessed WMD or that that possession was the real reason they wanted to invade and occupy Iraq. Every scrap of stovepiped intelligence that the administration presented had been refuted well before the invasion -- the Niger uranium buy, the aluminum tubes, the mobile biological weapons vans, what else was there? -- and repeated inspections had failed to find anything. If Bush wanted to find proof he should have allowed the UN inspectors to continue their work, but he cut them short. As for real reason, Bush's people were very forthcoming about their desire to remake the Middle East in America's image -- actually, during the Bremer viceroyship it looked more like the aim was Texas's image -- while Bush himself much enjoyed the political prospects of leading a successful war (something his father nearly managed but lost by allowing Saddam Hussein to survive). The phrase "knowing what we know now" doesn't just mean "knowing Iraq had no WMD"; it means "knowing that the war would last eight year, cost over 4,000 US soldiers lives, kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and leave the country mired in a civil war with no end in sight, hosting groups like ISIS that present threats impossible under Saddam Hussein." Krauthammer doesn't like that question because even now, even given that everyone across the political spectrum from George W. Bush to Jeb Bush would answer the question "no" -- Krauthammer himself would still say "yes," because quite frankly Krauthammer likes disastrous wars as much as he likes rousing wars, because he knows how to spin both into future wars, and that's all he really cares about.

  By the way, in looking up some points above, I ran across Ali Khedery: Why we stuck with Maliki -- and lost Iraq. Khedery was a high-level US operative in Iraq, working for various US ambassadors and General Petraeus, and claims to be the guy who secured US support to make Maliki Prime Minister in 2006. His article supports several of Krauthammer's premises. In particular, he regards Petraeus's "surge" was a brilliant success, and as such he thinks that Iraq was something the US had to lose, then lost it. But he sees this as something that Iran did, not something Obama didn't do. In fact, his only mention of Obama is rather oblique:

  The crisis now gripping Iraq and the Middle East was not only predictable but predicted -- and preventable. By looking the other way and unconditionally supporting and arming Maliki, President Obama has only lengthened and expanded the conflict that President Bush unwisely initiated. Iraq is now a failed state, and as countries across the Middle East fracture along ethno-sectarian lines, America is likely to emerge as one of the biggest losers of the new Sunni-Shiite holy war, with allies collapsing and radicals plotting another 9/11.

  Khedery is arguing that Maliki (his own pick in 2006) should have been removed from power in 2009-10 in favor of an alternative who would have worked to heal the sectarian divisions the US exacerbated since 2003 (actually 1991), as if the US effectively had the power (and insight and wisdom) to manipulate the elected government. Had Obama managed that, and had the reformed government reunited Iraq and sparked widely shared economic growth, then ISIS wouldn't have been able to expand from Syria, and the US wouldn't have gotten dragged back into Iraq's conflict. That's a lot of hypotheticals.

  As for the "radicals plotting another 9/11" that's almost completely because the US continues to be intimately involved in the civil war conflicts of the Middle East, picking allies and attacking enemies on both sides of the Sunni-Shiite divide, because the only coherent allegiance we have is how we favor the oligarchs over the masses -- no big surprise that the Cold War lives on in Washington, firm in the conviction that we'll support any despot willing to do business with us, and we'll adopt any religious fanaticism that seems to help our cause. Long ago sane people realized that this was an insane way to view the world, and we'd be better off just quietly doing nothing. Then all we'd have to worry about is pundits like Krauthammer and Trudy Rubin and their perpetual warmongering.

• Brent Frazee: Tying lures and fishing help put veteran on the road back from war: After reading several articles trying to use vets as pawns in debates over the Iraq War, I ran across this one, which may not be typical but at least is a realistic slice of life:

  When Joe Bragg caught a live well full of big crappies Thursday, it represented one more step on his road to recovery.

  Just two months ago, the Army veteran couldn't imagine such moments would ever be enjoyed again.

  "I was totally stressed out," said Bragg, 36, who served two tours of duty in Iraq. "My life just hit rock bottom.

  "At the time I couldn't see any way out."

  After returning from the war, Bragg's life unraveled. His wife left him, he lost his house, he couldn't find a job, and he suffered from the effects of post traumatic stress disorder.

  That's when he turned to a unique kind of therapy. During the nights when he couldn't sleep, he started tying feather crappie jigs. It was a craft he learned years ago from his father, who looked for unique lures that the fish hadn't seen before. [ . . . ]

  "I started tying jigs so I didn't have to sit in front of Wal-Mart begging for money," said Bragg, who lives in Topeka. "It was that bad.

  "I was a master carpenter before I went into the service, but after you've been in the Army, your body gets banged up. The mind's willing, but the body just can't handle a lot of things." [ . . . ]

  Serving in a war can be tough on a man, he'll tell you. He witnessed horrors that he wouldn't wish on anyone. He saw friends killed. He survived mortar fire 17 times (yes, he remembers the exact number), and he suffered the pain of losing three friends to suicide.

  "Not one of them was over 25 years old," he said.

  Bragg served in the Army from October 2006 to July 2013 and was in a unit that did scouting. He was on the front line, and he and his unit won commendations for their service.

  Personally, I don't think that anyone, ever, under any circumstances, should sign up to join the US Army or any of the other "armed services" (with the marginal exception of the Coast Guard). I don't think the US military has done anything in my lifetime that's been worth the cost, and not just in dead or broken soldiers. Moreover, I think that people should be sufficiently well informed to decide not to join -- as I was and did when my time came. So when they do join, especially now that the draft is no longer trying to coerce them, I think that's a person who doesn't understand what they're getting into, or why -- certainly not someone I can give any credit to. Some survive their ordeal without obvious damage, but many -- it seems like the ratio has increased over time -- come out more/less damaged. Some learn better, and some come out with totally warped worldviews. People like to believe that what they do for a living is worthwhile to the world at large, and sometimes they go to ridiculous lengths to do so.

  One of the veterans pieces I saw was Rebecca Santana: Iraq war question frustrating veterans:

  Veterans of the Iraq war have been watching in frustration as Republican presidential contenders distance themselves from the decision their party enthusiastically supported to invade that country.

  Some veterans say they long ago concluded their sacrifice was in vain, and are annoyed that a party that lobbied so hard for the war is now running from it. Others say they still believe their mission was vital, regardless of what the politicians say. And some find the question being posed to the politicians -- Knowing what we know now, would you have invaded? -- an insult in itself.

  All sorts of comments follow, starting with an ex-Army sniper who "feel such a strong attachment to Iraq that he's thought about going back to fight as the country has plunged into chaos since U.S. troops left." Another vet says he "feels the emphasis really shouldn't be on the decision to invade but on whether the U.S. should have stayed past its 2011 departure date to secure the gains made. Many vets blame President Obama -- not Bush -- for the current state of affairs, saying he was in too much of a hurry to withdraw." The fact is that people go to remarkable lengths to justify their choices and actions, to impart some greater value to them than they ever had. Of course, there are antiwar vets too -- one is quoted, "A mistake doesn't sum up the gravity of that decision."

  No More Mr. Nice Blog cites a story about the mother of a SEAL who died in Ramadi, complaining "my son's blood is on Ramadi soil. Now ISIS has it . . . that's 'gut wrenching' to me." Steve M. replies (emphasis in original):

  Look, I'm sorry it worked out this way for everyone who fought there. But I'm not sorry we withdrew -- I'm sorry we sent these troops to a war we never should have asked them to fight. It's a harsh truth, but yes, their sacrifice was for nothing. That's our fault. They did what we asked them to do. We deserve to burn in hell for asking them to do it.

• Paul Krugman: Hypocritical Sloth: Notes Politico posted a "hit piece on Elizabeth Warren, alleging that she's being hypocritical in her opposition to a key aspect of TPP," because, well, I'm not sure -- something. Krugman sees this as "another illustration of the poisonous effect the determination to sell TPP is having on the Obama team's intellectual ethics." He goes on to generalize:

  And more generally, the whole affair is an illustration of the key role of sheer laziness in bad journalism.

  Think about it: when is the charge of hypocrisy relevant? Basically, only when a public figure is preaching about individual behavior, and perhaps holding himself or herself up as a role model. So yes, it's fair to go after someone who preaches morality but turns out to be a crook or a sexual predator. But articles alleging that someone's personal choices are somehow hypocritical given their policy positions are almost always off point. Someone can declare that inequality is a problem while being personally rich; they're calling for policy changes, not mass self-abnegation. Someone can declare our judicial system flawed while fighting cases as best they can within that system -- until policy change happens, you have to live in the world as it is.

  Oh, and it's very definitely OK to advocate policies that would hurt one's own financial interests -- it's just bizarre when the press suggests that there's something insincere and suspect when high earners propose tax increases.

  So why are charges of hypocrisy so popular? Mainly, I think, as a way to avoid taking on policy substance. Is Elizabeth Warren right or wrong about TPP? Never mind, let's sneer at her for having been a prominent law professor.

  The same motives drive the preoccupation with flip-flopping. You once said that deficits were bad, now you say that they're OK. Hah! Never mind whether deficits are in fact OK right now, and whether either the situation has changed or you have learned something. (As someone pointed out, both Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton have rejected policies they used to support -- but Romney has rejected policies that worked, while Clinton has rejected policies that didn't. A bit of a difference.)

  I think it was Violent Femmes who did a song that went America is the home of the hypocrite. I remember hypocrisy being a big deal when I was a teenager and seemed to be running into it in every corner. The writer then known as Leroi Jones (you know him as Amiri Baraka) wrote a novel -- one of the first "adult" books I read -- called The System of Dante's Hell where he noted that he would assign hypocrites to a lower spot in hell than Dante had, because they were a more egregious problem now than then. Some early examples were pompous public preachers getting caught in sex scandals -- the sort of thing that returned as farce with this week's Josh Duggar scandal -- but the worst cases always struck me as political, like J. Edgar Hoover as the defender of freedom, or the refrain "kill for peace." I suspect that charges of hypocrisy often have instant resonance for ex-believers. Still, these days I worry more about consistent, relentless liars -- like Charles Krauthammer up above, who always has an agenda to make the world a more miserable place. And it hardly matters whether his interest in doing so is because he's a paid hack or a true believer (in God or the ruling class or the principle of sheer greed or something equally loony). On the other hand, hypocrisy is starting to look like part of the human condition, a failing we should probably forgive lest we lose everything. For instance, Thomas Jefferson is well known to us as a slaveholding hypocrite, but his declaration that "all men are created equal" should still matter to us.

• Cathy O'Neil: Kansas redistributes money from the poor to the banks: Reaction to a recent Kansas state law which imposes a long list of restrictions on welfare recipients, intended to prevent them from enjoying any "luxuries" at the state's expense. One such restriction is that one cannot withdraw more than $25 from an ATM at one time. As O'Neil points out, most ATMs (certainly all the ones I use) only deal in $20 bills, so that is the effective limit. Also, most charge fixed fees per transaction, the same amount for $20 as for $200 or more, so forcing people to make more transactions is effectively a subsidy for the banks. O'Neil doesn't note that this part of the state law is contrary to federal law and will probably have to be dropped unless the point is to kill off the state welfare program by disqualifying it from federal money -- that is, after all, where the money comes from. (That may seem insane, but Kansas is one of the states that refuses Obamacare's Medicaid expansion, much to the consternation of the program's real beneficiaries: the state's hospitals, doctors, and their corporate support networks.) There's also much more to the state law than this banking proviso. Among the prohibited "luxuries" are movie tickets -- note that Wichita has a discount second-run theater where shows are $2 on Tuesdays, but that's still a prohibited luxury. I've seen a lot of discussion about this law -- the sponsor, by the way, is Michael O'Donnell, a young Republican who unfortunately represents my state senate district; he is what we used to call a PK [preacher's kid], and is a textbook example of how ignorant and unrealistic a sheltered and pampered young person can be -- but one thing I've never seen discussed is how the hell all these restrictions are going to be enforced. Are movie theaters going to be held responsible for making sure no welfare recipients buy tickets? Are ATMs going to be reprogrammed to enforce limits on withdrawals? (That, at least, would be easier given that the accounts could be flagged.) Maybe they could hire auditors to comb through the books of the poorest people in Kansas? Or they could set up a hot line so nosy neighbors could rat on the welfare cheats? If there is any enforcement, it is bound to be sporadic and arbitrary -- just the thing to impress on poor people that government is hostile and views them as probable criminals. Indeed, that seems to be where this anti-welfare mindset is heading, even if someone like O'Donnell is way too clueless to figure it out. If they succeed in making the welfare system so onerous that no one will deal with it, they will wind up driving more people into crime, and into prisons -- the most expensive and destructive of "safety nets." They forget that welfare, even with the stigma that it is unearned, is the least destructive and least expensive remedy for people who lack the skills and/or opportunity to earn a living -- and increasingly for people whose jobs don't pay enough to live on. Welfare could be done better if government put more effort into developing skills and personal discipline, in increasing opportunity by growing the economy, and in providing affordable services -- especially banking. (For one thing, free bank accounts would kill off the predatory check cashing/payday loan industry; for another it would give poor people the chance to manage their money the way the better off do.)

  By the way, as the Kansas state legislature tries to plug the budget hole caused by Brownback's income tax cuts (especially, exempting business income from taxation) and their inverse Laffer Effect (rather than stimulating the economy, they forced cutbacks which depressed it). They've been scrounging around for ways to make the tax code more regressive -- a favorite has been increasing one of the nation's highest state sales tax rates -- and they've finally found a real winner: eliminate the earned income tax credit (EITC). Conservatives have traditionally supported EITC as a way to make low-wage jobs more attractive -- a break to skinflint employers as much as to their workers. The only problem with such poor-get-poorer strategies is their isn't much tax revenue to be raised there. Sooner or later they're going to have to tax the rich if for no other reason than that's where all the money is. (The state legislator who's trying to write the new tax bill admits that the exclusion for business owners goes too far. He's one of the beneficiaries of the scheme, but he's pushing a compromise, whereby his current $60,000 savings would be reduced to $32,000. As I recall, the top state income tax rate is about 6%, so that means his pretax income is about $10 million.)

  Max Ehrenfreud: Kansas has found the ultimate way to punish the poor is also about this.

• Nancy LeTourneau: President Obama is "Deeply in Touch With the Heart and Spirit of the Jewish People": Mostly taken from an interview Jeffrey Goldberg did with Obama, including a long quote where Obama expands upon his sense of how the principles of "Jewish democracy" are inextricably linked with his commitment to civil rights. This is Obama:

  And I care deeply about preserving that Jewish democracy, because when I think about how I came to know Israel, it was based on images of, you know -- Kibbutzim, and Moshe Dayan, and Golda Meir, and the sense that not only are we creating a safe Jewish homeland, but also we are remaking the world. We're repairing it. We are going to do it the right way. We are going to make sure that the lessons we've learned from our hardships and our persecutions are applied to how we govern and how we treat others.

  In other words, Obama's stuck in a time warp, believing in an Israel that probably never existed but was constructed as myth and embraced by distant, hopeful admirers. Josh Ruebner, in Shattered Hopes: Obama's Failure to Broker Israeli-Palestinian Peace, has a long section on Obama's tutelage and mentorship by liberal Jewish political figures in Chicago, offering many examples of why Obama has such deep sentimental affiliation with Israel. So sure, this quote rings true as something Obama believes, and it helps explain why he is so ineffectual in his efforts to realign Israel with its supposed ideals. I find it especially ironic that he cites Dayan as one of his Zionist icons. Dayan once said "Our American friends offer us money, arms, and advice. We take the money, we take the arms, and we decline the advice." When you revere Dayan, as Obama does, you don't even notice the latter. You're so convinced of Israel's moral authority it never occurs to you that their failure to achieve peace or to manage a society that is even remotely just and equitable could be their own fault. It must, you know, be those evil Palestinians, so full of hate they constantly provoke good Israelis to tear down their houses, rip up their land, jail and kill them. What's that Golda Meir line? "We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us." Obviously, they don't, because we don't have peace yet. So when Obama reiterates his belief in Jewish/Israeli ideals, all the Israelis have to do is smile and agree. Acts are never required.

  By the way, after writing the above, I found this link: Donald Johnson: The grotesque injustice of Obama's speech at the Washington synagogue. Much the same language, but also a joke that "Palestinians are not easy partners."

• Nancy LeTourneau: President Obama Helped Moved the Overton Window to the Left: The "Overton Window" is defined as "the range of ideas the public will accept," which for all practical purposes is equivalent to "the range of ideas the mainstream media will discuss seriously." The latter is a more conservative formulation since, well, mainstream media is by definition owned by rich people, who as a class skew well to the right. One can think of things like, say, nuclear disarmament that the public may very well endorse but are never seriously discussed because few elites feel like bucking the status quo. Until recently, marijuana legalization was in that category. LeTourneau expects Clinton to run a much more progressive presidential campaign in 2016 than she did in 2008, and attributes this to Obama moving "the Overton Window to the left." Clearly, some things (like marijuana legalization) are on the table now that weren't a few years ago, but it's hard to relate most of them with anything that Obama has done (Cuba is an exception here, and maybe Iran). Rather, it looks to me like the window has shifted partly because conditions on the ground have worsened -- e.g., it's harder to pretend that inequality isn't a problem, that the rich are undertaxed, that government services are extravagantly inefficient, or that the US military is the answer to all the Middle East's problems -- and partly because Republican nostrums for common problems have fallen off the deep end, becoming so implausible Democrats are losing the fear they developed during the Reagan era. It's also notable that while Democrats in Washington have been prevented from enacting any remotely progressive legislation -- there wasn't even much to show for the large 2009-11 "fillibuster-proof majority" (not that the finance and health care laws were nothing; indeed, they've clearly helped, even if not as much as we wanted) -- left-leaning think tanks and bloggers have kept working on real problems, advancing real solutions. I think all of this does add up to a slight leftward shift in public opinion, not that there aren't plenty of well-moneyed obstacles (including a mainstream media that cares little for "public interest journalism"). So I wouldn't be surprised if that drift shows up in Clinton's polls as something she needs to cultivate, regardless of her disinclination. And in the long run, Obama will probably deserve some credit: although I'm much more struck by how deeply conservative his conventional liberalism is, he clearly has broken some barriers, and the nonsense spouted by his crazed enemies will soon enough fade into the shameful dark corners of American history.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, May 18, 2015

Music: Current count 24971 [24940] rated (+31), 407 [402] unrated (+5).

Still closing in on 25,000 records rated -- odds about 50-50 that can be announced next week, although it still seems like a tall order. My "new records" count was way down last week, so the only way I cleared 30 was with "old records" -- more on that below.

Rhapsody Streamnotes appeared last week, so some of the following list was scooped there -- although at this point that seems like a long time ago. Dmitry Baevsky appeared there. The Fred Hersch set was well-regarded from last year, but I wasn't serviced on it and couldn't find it on Rhapsody. Turns out that a friendly publicist did handle the record and a download link showed up in a back catalog mailing. Maybe they figured I shouldn't be bothered with a mainstream piano trio, and that's probably a fair rule. However, it's a damn good one, and not the first A- Hersch has scored (OK, it's the second, along with dozens of eminently fine B+ records). Chris Monsen had it on his A-list last year.

Zooid (Henry Threadgill) will be a serious top-ten list contender. I was tempted to give it a full A, but felt that grade needs more time, and as a double I didn't feel like giving it that much time now -- I think I played one disc twice and the other three times. The group has historically done better in critics polls than on my lists, so go so far as to rank it the current favorite for EOY polls. (Main competition so far is the Lovano-Douglas Sound Prints album, and maybe the Jack DeJohnette title I haven't heard, Made in Chicago.) My list is still topped by Chris Lightcap's Bigmouth: Epicenter, fewer critics have heard it.)

Cracker's Berkeley to Bakersfield was a Christgau pick last week, and I gave it three plays before deciding it fell just short (though had they split it up I would have given the Bakersfield disc an A-). Turns out it was a late 2014 release, getting 1 point in last year's EOY Aggregate. The Willi Williams rasta-reggae disc was also a 2014 release, and didn't make the EOY Aggregate at all. I saw a review in Downbeat and gave it a chance.

Spin published a list last week with their picks for the 300 best albums of 1985-2014. I copied their list down here and added my grades, mostly to get a sense of how much I've missed over the years (initially, 81 records, for 27%). A fair number of those are albums I've been credibly warned against, but still I thought I'd make an effort to fill in the cracks. Working my way down, the Smiths' The Queen Is Dead was number 5 on the list, so I started there, followed by Nas (Illmatic was number 23) and Weezer (their first eponymous album was number 31). I skipped Metallica (Master of Puppets at 34, but not on Rhapsody), and I'm working on U2's Achtung Baby (number 37) as I write this. Coming up: Elliott Smith, Neutral Milk Hotel, Flaming Lips, Björk, Aphex Twin, The Cure, Smashing Pumpkins, Slayer, Bikini Kill (number 80). Given that I've already rated 25 B, 13 B-, and 3 C+ records from the list, I don't expect much, but I also have slightly more than a third (103) at A- or above, now including Illmatic.

I suppose the thing that most disappointed me about the list was the seemingly inevitable first place finish for Nirvana's Nevermind -- a record (and for that matter a group) I find utterly ordinary, totally uninteresting. (I'm on record, after all, saying that I turned to jazz in the mid-1990s in reaction to my disinterest in grunge and gangsta.

Of course, the bigger issue is what's missing, which is quite a lot. Here's a first draft list of 44 omissions (not including jazz or best-ofs or compilations of older music), only one per artist (with some "also" notes). Everything here is A or higher, and I could probably double the list without dipping into A- records.

1. The Beautiful South: Welcome to the Beautiful South (1990, Go! Discs) -- also 0898 Beautiful South (1992)
2. Pet Shop Boys: Very (1993, Capitol) -- also Introspective (1988) and Behaviour (1990)
3. Lily Allen: It's Not Me, It's You (2009, Capitol)
4. Cornershop: When I Was Born for the Seventh Time (1997, Warner Brothers) -- also Handcream for a New Generation (2002)
5. Buck 65: Talkin' Honky Blues (2003, Warner Music Canada) -- also Square (2002)
6. Iris Dement: My Life (1994, Warner Brothers) -- also The Way I Should (1996)
7. Laurie Anderson: Strange Angels (1989, Warner Brothers)
8. The Roches: A Dove (1992, MCA)
9. Jimmie Dale Gilmore: Spinning Around the Sun (1993, Elektra) -- also Jimmie Dale Gilmore (1989)
10. Lucinda Williams: Car Wheels on a Gravel Road (1998, Polygram) -- list includes Lucinda Williams (1988) -- also Sweet Old World (1992)
11. Sonic Youth: Dirty (1992, DGC) -- list includes Daydream Nation (1988), Goo (1990), and Sister (1987)
12. Hurricane Zouk (1988, Earthworks)
13. Leonard Cohen: Live in London (2008, Columbia) -- also I'm Your Man (1988) and The Future (1992)
14. Willie Nelson/Hank Snow: Brand on My Heart (1985, Columbia)
15. Manu Chao: Proxima Estacion: Esperanza (2001, Virgin) -- also Clandestino (1998)
16. They Might Be Giants: They Might Be Giants (1986, Restless)
17. The Music in My Head (1998, Sterns)
18. Camper Van Beethoven: Camper Van Beethoven (1986, IRS)
19. Maria Muldaur: Richland Woman Blues (2001, Stony Plain)
20. Los Lobos: Colossal Head (1996, Warner Brothers)
21. Neneh Cherry: Raw Like Sushi (1989, Virgin)
22. John Prine: In Spite of Ourselves (1999, Oh Boy) -- also Lost Dogs and Mixed Blessings (1995)
23. Mzwakhe Mbuli: Resistance Is Defence (1992, Earthworks)
24. M People: Elegant Slumming (1994, Epic)
25. Blackalicious: Nia (2000, Quannum Projects)
26. Guitar Paradise of East Africa (1991, Earthworks)
27. Bob Dylan: Love and Theft (2001, Columbia)
28. Neil Young: Freedom (1989, Reprise)
29. Todd Snider: The Devil You Know (2006, New Door) -- also East Nashville Skyline (2004) and Agnostic Hymns and Stoner Fables (2012)
30. Amy Rigby: Diary of a Mod Housewife (1996, Koch)
31. Mavis Staples: We'll Never Turn Back (2007, Anti-)
32. Youssou N'Dour: Nothing's in Vain (2002, Nonesuch) -- also Rokku Mi Rokka (2007)
33. Carlene Carter: I Fell in Love (1990, Reprise)
34. Lyrics Born: Later That Day . . . (2003, Quannum Projects)
35. The Cucumbers: The Cucumbers (1987, Profile)
36. Pere Ubu: The Tenement Year (1988, Capitol)
37. Beats International: Let Them Eat Bingo (1990, Elektra)
38. Stevie Wonder: Characters (1987, Motown)
39. The Feelies: Time for a Witness (1991, A&M)
40. Lost in the Stars: The Music of Kurt Weill (1985, A&M)
41. Gogol Bordello: Super Taranta! (2007, Side One Dummy)
42. Pulnoc: City of Hysteria (1991, Arista)
43. NERD: In Search of . . . (2002, Virgin)
44. The Streets: Original Pirate Material (2002, Vice/Atlantic)

I went long on the Smiths, partly because I had Michael Tatum's Downloader's Diary Guide. He's more of a fan than I am, and also paid much more attention and writes at much greater depth. I miss his writing since Odyshape closed shop. Bright Eyes placed one record on Spin's list, but I just got to it before the list appeared. I had two of their CDs that I bought used a decade ago and found on the unrated shelf, so I thought I'd do some housekeeping, and wound up checking out the earlier albums for context. The unrated albums are organized better now, and I'll try to do a better job closing them out. (Unlike Bright Eyes, most are freebies I never had any interest in -- lot of soundtracks and gospel albums -- so we'll see.)

New records rated this week:

• Aimée Allen: Matter of Time (2013-14 [2015], Azuline): [cd]: B+(**)
• Dmitry Baevsky: Over and Out (2014 [2015], Jazz Family): [cd]: A-
• Best Coast: California Nights (2015, Harvest): [r]: B+(*)
• Cracker: Berkeley to Bakersfield (2014, 429, 2CD): [r]: B+(***)
• Cuir: Chez Ackenbush (2014 [2015], Fou): [cd]: B+(*)
• Dead Sara: Pleasure to Meet You (2015, Pocket Kid): [r]: B+(*)
• Fred Hersch Trio: Floating (2014, Palmetto): [dl]: A-
• Brian Landrus Trio: The Deep Below (2014 [2015], BlueLand/Palmetto): [cd]: B+(***)
• Rhett Miller: The Traveler (2015, ATO): [r]: B+(**)
• Opus: Definition (2014 [2015], BluJazz): [cd]: B
• Henry Threadgill Zooid: In for a Penny, In for a Pound (2014 [2015], Pi, 2CD): [cd]: A-
• Kamasi Washington: The Epic (2015, Brainfeeder, 3CD): [r]: B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:

• Art-i-facts: Great Performances From 40 Years of Jazz at NEC (1973-2008 [2010], New England Conservatory): [cd]: B+(***)
• Willi Williams: Unification: From Channel One to King Tubby\'s (1979 [2014], Shanachie): [r]: A-

Old records rated this week:

• Bright Eyes: A Collection of Songs Written and Recorded 1995-1997 (1995-97 [1998], Saddle Creek): [r]: B+(*)
• Bright Eyes: Letting Off the Happiness (1997-98 [1998], Saddle Creek): [r]: B
• Bright Eyes: Fevers and Mirrors (1999 [2000], Saddle Creek): [r]: B+(**)
• Bright Eyes: I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning (2005, Saddle Creek): [cd]: B+(***)
• Nas: Illmatic (1994, Columbia): [r]: A-
• The Smiths: The Smiths (1984, Sire): [r]: B+(*)
• The Smiths: Hatful of Hollow (1983-84 [1993], Sire): [r]: B+(***)
• The Smiths: Meat Is Murder (1985, Sire): [r]: B
• The Smiths: The Queen Is Dead (1986, Sire): [r]: B+(**)
• The Smiths: The World Won't Listen (1984-86 [1993], Sire): [r]: B
• The Smiths: Strangeways, Here We Come (1987, Sire): [r]: B
• The Smiths: Rank (1986 [1988], Sire): [r]: B+(*)
• The Smiths: Singles (1983-87 [1995], Reprise): [r]: A-
• The Smiths: The Sound of the Smiths (1983-87 [2008], Reprise, 2CD): [r]: A-
• Weezer: Weezer (1994, DGC): [r]: B

Grade changes:

• Young Fathers: White Men Are Black Men Too (2015, Big Dada): [was: B+(*)] B+(**)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Colours Jazz Orchestra: Home Away From Home: Plays the Music of Ayn Inserto (Neu Klang)
• Devin Gray: RelativE ResonancE (Skirl): June 9
• Christoph Irniger Trio: Octopus (Intakt): June 1
• Deborah Latz: Sur L'Instant (June Moon)
• Ingrid Laubrock Anti-House: Roulette of the Cradle (Intakt): June 1
• The Gary McFarland Legacy Ensemble: Circulation: The Music of Gary McFarland (Planet Arts): May 29
• Florian Wittenburg: Aleatoric Inspiration (NurNichtNur)

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