More bad news from Kenya: three of the members of the DC/Nairobi afro-pop band Extra Golden are among those affected by the country’s post-election unrest.

Here are a couple of Washington City Paper pieces on the band: mine and Christopher Porter’s.

And here’s January 11, 2008 radio piece from NPR’s All Things Considered that addresses the band’s current misfortune:

Extra Golden Members Stranded in Kenya
By Joel Rose

The group’s American members are soliciting donations to help their Kenyan bandmates. Here’s the spiel from Pitchfork:

“We are asking for donations of $5. Of course we will accept any amount you can muster, but we believe that with enough contributions of $5 we can make a huge difference in our friends’ lives.

“To make a donation, please go to www.paypal.com and choose ’send money’. When asked for the email address of the recipient, enter ’service(at)kanyokanyo.com’. Please feel free to forward this message. We thank you in advance for your compassion and we hope that your help will enable us to compose a song of thanks for our next album.”

After reading this piece on the folk singer Cat Power’s upcoming album, I revisited a few samples from her latest, The Greatest, to remind myself of why I never bothered to listen to the rest of the album. The music is beautiful, as so many Chan Marshall fans already know, but there’s a distinct whiff of advertising fodder about the whole thing.

Which, of course, is hardly Cat Power’s fault. It’s a slippery slope from the collection of demographic data to the over-saturation of edgy-yet-pleasant music. And it doesn’t hurt that so many listeners think that music should be free or close to it. (Among them was director Stanley Kubrick, who, as Alex Ross points out in his book The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, used György Ligeti’s music in 2001 without paying for it.)

So what’s an artist to do? They either can’t afford health insurance—because so many listeners think that music should be free or close to it—or, if they’re successful at writing edgy-yet-pleasant music, they become primarily associated with images of shiny new hipstermobiles or banks that spring up in Joni Mitchell’s idea of a forest.

If I had a time machine, I always thought I would use it for good. You know, go see a band that I missed because I was born too late—such as Quicksilver Messenger Service, or the classic Coltrane Quartet. But now, every time I hear a breathy folk singer trying to sell me something I don’t need, I think about the “Pink Moon” commercial and what might’ve been done to save future generations from its unintended consequences.

Writer-director Todd Haynes (above, with Charlotte Gainsbourg) first attracted attention with Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, which was staged with Barbie dolls. He later did a fanciful treatment of glam-rock, Velvet Goldmine. His new study of Bob Dylan, I’m Not There, is no more conventional in its approach. The film, which opens today, splits Dylan into six characters, an approach that baffled Hollywood studios when they first encountered the screenplay: “I knew if it if was conventional biopic script, with these actors, and Dylan’s approval, it would have been no problem,” he says. “But there would never have a script that was conventional, because Dylan would never had said yes to it, and I would never have wanted to write it.”

And you wouldn’t gotten the cast.

Well, we wouldn’t have needed six Dylans anyway. It would have just been Adam Sandler.

Have people complained that you don’t explain Dylan?

So much less than I thought I would get. All my films have a strong conceptual or experimental element to them. Usually when you market them, that’s the thing you hide. With this one, it’s the concept that sells the movie. Everyone knows that, [whispers] ‘Oh, it’s the movie with all those people playing Bob Dylan. Cate Blanchett’s playing Bob Dylan! There’s a black kid playing him!’ That’s actually what’s drawing people to the film. Anyone who goes to see it is going to know that.

How does your interest in Dylan compare to that in other musicians you’ve
treated in your films?

I was never a major Karen Carpenter freak. I loved those songs, but they were like little time capsules of when I was a kid. But glam-rock and David Bowie, and Dylan, were instrumental in my psychic, creative, and emotional development. They showed that identity is protean, mutable, and open. People say Dylan is like, an elusive series of shadows. He’s not! He’s mighty and ferocious. He’s just ferociously being this thing today, and then he’s ferociously being that thing tomorrow.

Do the film’s various cinematic styles reflect Dylan, or your own interests?

My own taste was always determining my choices. But the determining factor for me in the styles was always the music at that particular time in Dylan’s life. Like the Jude story, that Cate stars in, I wanted to be black and white. I thought immediately of Dont Look Back, which is a beautiful documentary that I love. But I watched it and I was like, ‘Wait a minute. This is about the music of Blonde on Blonde and Highway 61 Revisited. And yet this movie is cinéma vérité, and that couldn’t be further from what the music is doing at this time — it’s not social realism. I was looking at all the cinema of the ’60s, so I watched 8 1/2 again, and I was like, ‘Now that’s getting close. The baroque, urbane wit and distortion. The collapse of an artist at the peak of his insanity of fame, and his own dream and desires. And the film is about a director being hounded by the press to explain why his movies are weird, and they aren’t the way they used to be.’

Did you follow Dylan’s whole career?

I checked out for a lot of it. I first found Dylan for myself in high school. That was already the mid- to late-’70s. I definitely remember the release of Street Legal and Slow Train Coming. But I loved Blonde on Blonde and Blood on the Tracks and Bringing It All Back Home, and those films, uh, those movies –

Records.

Records! That’s it! But they were like movies, right? Those records, and that voice, will always be associated for me with the thrill of being young, and excitement about the future. Every adolescent should be exposed to that fearlessness in Dylan’s voice. And feel like they discovered it themselves.