I didn’t know until Sunday that Michael Showalter and Michael Ian Black were performing on Saturday at the 6th & I Synagogue. But I did see the NYT article about Showalter, and I found myself fuming at this particular passage:

After a year and a half on the road he had perfected enough material for his debut album, “Sandwiches and Cats,” released late last year on the JDub label.

“Sandwiches are very funny to me; I don’t know why,” Mr. Showalter said between bites of a turkey hero. “I love eating them. I’m eating one right now. Actually” — he paused to take a bite — “I just finished eating one.”

His love of sandwiches was so profound, he explained, that he was once asked to write a column for a sandwich Web site. “For whatever reason that never panned out,” he said. “But I had written these ‘Sandwich Commandments,’ so I started reading them in a stand-up context and then added music.” The bit, sort of a mash-up of poetry and a Jane’s Addiction song, is one of the album’s more inventive tracks.

This is some fake-ass sandwich posturing. Dude, if you’re really a Sammich Man, you don’t have to advertise it. You don’t have to be all coy about it, dropping it into interviews, like, oops, oh, excuse me while I eat this sandwich. People will know instinctively if you’re that man. It will be in your walk, your style, your presence, your aura, your breath and your gaze. So, yeah, Mr. Showalter, I’m callin’ bullshit on your sandwich love.

NME is reporting that Barack Obama has racked up another endorsement, this one from Arcade Fire’s Win Butler. On the band’s website, the Canadian resident writes:

I am watching Hillary Clinton in her victory speech in new Hampshire…they just threw a bunch of college kids behind her, and had her talk about student loans, and had her daughter come out for a long awkward hug…does anyone actually buy it? Surely young people are too media savvy to be fooled by this kind of shit.
do we live in a democracy so we can just keep electing the same families?
Barack is the first candidate in my lifetime to strip some of this bullshit away, and I just hope we don’t blow this chance.
man if we miss this opportunity we don’t deserve it…how bad does it have to get?

fuck!!!!!!!!!

(Do you think he kisses his mother with that mouth?)

When asked, in an earlier interview, if he and bandmates ever considered moving to the United States, the Texas-born singer-songwriter said the following:

Not really. There wouldn’t be much reason. Two of us are dual citizens, two of us are U.S. citizens, and the rest are Canadians. So I guess we could really go wherever we want. But I kind of imagine keeping Montreal as sort of a home base. That’s where I’ve been the last four years and that’s where my wife, Regine, is from.

It’s understandble why someone who equates our current President with “a genuine deep, dark evil” wouldn’t want to live here. Fine. But do you ever hear about American indie rockers meddling in Canadian political affairs?

I guess I wasn’t paying much attention the first week/weekend of 2007, probably because there was no Black Plastic Bag then and I was still trying to catch up with the 2006 year-end stuff. But I’m looking at venues, record stores, and whatever other musical possibilities I can find, and there’s no getting around it: This weekend is pretty damned dead.

Now in all fairness, there’s Mose Allison at Blues Alley, just as he is several times a year. Ozzy’s at the Verizon Center, but you’re probably saving your Verizon mojo for Hannah Montana next week. On the club scene, the best bet is Telograph, who’ve made a nice reputation on the local scene in the last year and are having a CD release party tonight at Black Cat. But that’s it, unless you count clubs booked with bands neither you nor I have ever heard of. As weekends go it’s pretty lifeless - even by the too-much-maligned standards of DC.

What gives? Is it because it’s the New Year? Or the NFL playoffs? Or the cold weather? Or is this weekend an anomaly even for D.C. in the first week of January?

Every year–or nearly every year–fucking Hoboken gets to celebrate Hanukkah in a very cool way. They get Yo La Tengo at Maxwell’s for eight straight nights. These shows have turned into huge deals–for the charities, the eBay profiteers, and of course the Jersey nerds.

This past weekend, I went up for the Saturday show. The band was super fun. Ira Kaplan stayed away from ending every song in a wank meltdown. He even laid off the guitar face a bit. And Georgia Hubley’s voice just keeps getting better. The special guest that night was Alex Chilton. Man, he looks old. But so fucking what? He was amazing, even if he did have to read off the lyric sheet.

For the last few days, I couldn’t help but wonder why the District doesn’t start up its own holiday traditions. The end of the summer used to be marked by Fugazi at Fort Reno. But why don’t bands take the next step and rock three, eight, whatever nights–with special guests! nods to charity!, etc. Who wouldn’t want to see Chuck Brown sharing a stage with Thievery Corporation?

What acts would you want to see paired together? And what bands could get a decent crowd for three straight nights?

Tom Brokaw, the former NBC Nightly News anchor and author of the best-selling book The Greatest Generation , has just written a new book about what another author has called “The Greater Generation.” Boom!, a collection of I-was-there reminiscences, explores the pop culture of the sixties. It is subject matter that would seem to require some knowledge of, you know, pop culture.

Or maybe not.

In an interview in this week’s Entertainment Weekly, Brokaw offers this as one of his “defining memories” of the music of the sixties: “I remember the first time I heard ‘Lay, Lady, Lay’ by Bob Dylan, played over and over one night. Everybody has those memories.”

Yes, but not everyone has a book contract.

Even more baffling are his comments about jazz. “I was a child of the ‘50s, so I was a student of cool jazz,” he says. “I was with a friend yesterday and we were at a restaurant and he looked up and said, ‘Hey, they’re playing Miles Davis and John Coltrane.’ And I thought, ‘We’re the last generation that still recognizes that.’”

It’s perhaps churlish to mock the musical commentary of a guy who never claimed to be a music critic, but this quote is just baffling. The mere fact that this stuff is programmed at all suggests that there’s a demand for it–and one that extends beyond folks like my boomer dad, who owns several CDs by both Miles and Coltrane, but probably couldn’t ID them if he heard them outside of his living room. How far out of touch–or self-aggrandizing–do you have to be to think that only the Boom! generation knows what Miles and Coltrane sound like?

I missed Wu-Tang pillar Ghostface Killah (a.k.a. Tony Starks, Ghostface, Pretty Toney, Ironman, and Captain America) last night at the 9:30 Club. But a reader, Jeffrey, caught the show—and took care to document a Killah rumination on women and sandwich cookies. Jeffrey paraphrases Ghostface’s rant:

You know, when I’m on the bus, I like to have candy. So I was taking a nap, and I got up from my nap, and went up to the front of the bus to get some Oreos, and they weren’t there, and I looked around, and my man had these bitches on the bus, and they ate my Oreos. Bitches ate my Oreos! Bitches ate my Oreos! And then he didn’t even fuck them. He didn’t get no pussy.

Ghostface then launched into a spirited rendition of “Greedy Bitches,” a song that, by my count, says “bitch” nearly 40 times. How has VH1: Storytellers not picked up on this yet?

The New Republic has a story by David Browne about the decline of protest music–more specifically, he addresses the question of why protest songs don’t seem to matter as much now as they did back in the Vietnam era. In general, he argues, the problem with protest songs these days is that they’re not very good: once upon a time we had fantastic tunes like Creedence’s “Fortunate Son,” the Temptations‘ “Ball of Confusion,” and–in an assertion that makes Browne a lonely, lonely man among his peers–”Sun City.” Now we have Black Eyed Peas‘ “Where Is the Love?”–”Idiot Wind” run through a “My Humps” filter–and Pink’s thoroughgoingly godawful “Dear Mr. President.”

The problem with making a qualitative argument is that people who disagree with you can always cite different songs to dismiss the assertion; that’s something Sasha-Frere Jones learned about in a hurry recently. Me, I can point to a pair of what I think are excellent protest songs of relatively recent vintage: Iris DeMent’s “Wasteland of the Free” (ignore the doofy anti-Bush slideshow; the song came out in 1996) and James McMurtry’s “We Can’t Make it Here.”

DeMent:

McMurtry:

Both songs have a few dumb lines, and DeMent in particular gets confused about what her  targets are. (”We’ve got high school kids running around in Calvin Klein and Guess/Who cannot pass a sixth-grade reading test.” Stop them before they dress again!) But if what you want out of a protest song is a clear tune and a singer who possesses the courage of his or her convictions, it’s hard to argue that the guiding spirit of the protest song has disappeared. (And if the job of a protest song is to piss off those in power, DeMent succeeds on that front too: As this story from our sister paper in Tampa points out, a Florida state senator threatened to pull a public radio station’s funding after hearing “Wasteland” on the air.)

The bigger problem with Browne’s piece, though, is that he speedily skips over this crucial reason why protest songs don’t get over today: he supposes that maybe, just perhaps, “audience (and radio) fragmentation that prevents one genre-specific song from reaching a truly mass audience.” This notion deserves more than the brief mention he gives it; indeed it’s pretty close to the sole reason for the death of the protest song. In the Vietnam era, when a larger proportion of the culture got its current-affairs knowledge from a smaller handful of outlets, a singular protest song had a better chance of becoming a hit. Today, when nobody huddles around war footage at the dinner table–Dad’s reading Little Green Footballs, Mom’s flipping through a shelter mag, and the kids get the news from Facebook or a neighborhood podcast (I’m imagining an extreme division, but you get the point)–nobody’s going to agree with the ideas of a protest song, or even that one might be worth hearing.

I’ll let others decide whether Eddie Murphy’s “Party All The Time” is Advanced. (”It’s a hit song by a comedian who actually sings better when he’s imitating other people, blar-dee-blar-blar, blabba blabba.”)

I will note, however, that the song’s video is fantastic, but not because of the clothing, the hair, the lighting, the portly white guy with his sleeves pushed up, our own retro-actively ascribed meta-narratives about Murphy’s career, or even the shot at about 2:49 where Rick James looks like he’s either cupping a scrotum or elevating an imaginary heart during a ritual sacrifice. Nor is the video awesome because of what we now know about the relationship between James and Murphy brothers.

No, the video is singular because everybody in it — except maybe for James himself and the hair-metal dude on guitar — is TOTALLY AFRAID to be in the room with Eddie Murphy. You can see it: Oh shit, Rick is so high he actualy LIKES these vocals. Murphy’s own trepidation is obvious, yet different: These dudes would be too scared to tell me if I had a booger on my face. He’s lonely.

Nowadays, the extras in hip-hop and R&B videos act like they’re totally supposed to be there, even if they just happened to stumble upon the shoot. (I suppose people in R. Kelly videos are fearful in one way or another, but it’s also possible that they are also motivated by a strangely elegant form of pity.)

Let’s forget the gooey title of the piece, “Little Fountain Cafe: Sweet Love.” And let’s forget that the title doesn’t even make sense. The little restaurant specializes as the Place for a Dull First Date or the Place You Take Your Parents. As far as we know, it does not specialize in sweets or sweet love.

Let’s forget the odd use of italics, the problems with grammar, and this sentence: “Walking downstairs into the Café you pass by the little fountain, the centerpiece of the restaurant’s most private table, outside, below the chaos of 18th St., Jumbo Slice, and the maddening vehicular escapades of taxis hitting passersby, underage drunkards lining the street for a table at Tryst or gathering together for one last charge to Ben’s Chili Bowl where, inevitably, they will vomit while in line.”

Let’s forget the writer’s description of the place: “the Little Fountain Café resembles that of a sophisticated, older, wiser lover. We’re talking ‘Tell Me You Love Me’ passion here. There’s artwork you want to make love to; there’s food you can savor. It’s a night out that offers glimpses into why you choose to stay monogamous.” So, how does one fuck artwork?

And let’s forget the boilerplate run-down of the chow.

No, let’s linger on this one line–from the first graph no less–that just boggles: “Bono, Coldplay, Billy Joel, and smooth jazz covers by Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald enhance an already private affair.”

There’s a number of things wrong with this sentence. Can you help point out all the wrong?

I can start things off with the obvious: The writer’s belief that Billy Joel enhances anything.

Dear Sting,

I am in receipt today of a copy of your book, Lyrics by Sting, which was sent to me via your public-relations proxies at the Bantam Dell Publishing Group. I’m was quite struck by your efforts to not only create an index of first lines to all of your songs (”Free, free, set them free”; “Oh! Demolition, demolition”), but to write explanatory notes for many of them. I’m relieved to know that “So Lonely” is indeed about feeling lonely, that “Brand New Day” is about optimism, that the lyrics to “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da” “weren’t trying to be coherent,” and that “Fields of Gold” is about the “inherently sexy” barley fields that surround the giant castle in which you live.

You tell so much of yourself! “Seeing a wild creature as beautiful as a fox always takes my breath away,” you write of one song. You explain that you were laying in a garden with your beloved and watching the skies when you thought of the key lines to “King of Pain”:

I turned to Trudie. “There’s a little black spot on the sun today.”

She waited expectantly, not really indulging the mood but tolerant.

“That’s my soul up there,” I added gratuitously.

Is there lead in the paint over at Castle Sumner, Sting? Just asking.

I guess I’m not entirely surprised that your book reveals you as a pretentious ass, but I confess I’m disappointed at how much your commentaries ruin your few good songs. “Message in a Bottle,” I learn, was helped to fruition by your dog. “He [the dog] would stare at me with that look of hopeless resignation dogs can have when they’re waiting for their walk in the park. Was it that hopeless look that provoked the idea of the island castaway and his bottle? I don’t know, but the song sounded like a hit the first time we played it.”

If you must continue writing songs, could please at least stop writing about how you wrote them? Thanks.