Music Monday: The Gandharvas and The Commodores

The Gandharvas — Watching the Girl

I grew up in New York state, right across the St. Lawrence Seaway from Ontario, Canada. So most of my youth was spent listening to Canadian radio, which is required by Big Brother law to broadcast a certain amount of nationalistic propaganda made-in-Canada media content.

Living now in the heartland of America, it’s strange to casually mention any number of Canadian bands — Barstool Prophets, The Tragically Hip, The Gandharvas — and get slackjawed stares in return. A few here and there remember Our Lady Peace, but nobody in Ohio has heard of Econoline Crush or Cowboy Junkies.

So here, American friends. Let me act as an ambassador for my penguin-eating, maple-syrup-snorting, hockey-puck-humping, bomber-hat-and-flannel-wearing cousins in our 51st state to the north. Let me share with you a taste of the boys from London, Ontario, the pride of Toronto’s 102.1 The Edge.

Even in the band’s height (they broke up in 2000, shortly after I headed to college in the Great Lakes Region) they didn’t grab a whole lot of airtime. Watching the Girl seemed to ignite a red-hot fan base for about a month, and then it was gone — which is strange, considering how I always thought its artistic invocation of Norse (Ouroboros) and Greek (Sirens) mythology was extremely attractive.

The Commodores — Lady (You Bring Me Up)

My father is a short, compact, curly-haired white man of German and English decent. If he slapped a yamika on his head, he could easily pass for a rabbi. But that never stopped him from thinking he was black, at least when it came to his LPs.

His vinyl collection (still very much in use to this day, and I am hoping to inherit it) is built around prog rock classics like Styx’s Grand Illusion and, strangely, soul brothers like The Commodores, Earth, Wind and Fire, Stevie Wonder, The Four Tops, Michael Jackson, Smokey Robinson & The Miracles, and Marvin Gaye.

When I was little, he would crank up Brick House or Easy and dance around in a pitiful white man’s mockery of rhythm. The memories of that dancing still burn.

But now that I’m quickly approaching 30 and have lived through a full generational cycle of musical styles, a horrible truth is sinking in: My father, though I rail against the idea, had excellent taste. Lady (You Bring Me Up) probably isn’t the coolest song I could have mentioned here, but Dad would be able to tell you it’s got tight composition, a jumpin’ signature bass line, and just the right mix of brass to make it indelibly good, and a more or less permanent fixture on my iPod.

Justice League: The New Frontier — Kennedy-era problems, Art Deco packaging, grim trappings

FROM JASON’S 42-INCH PLASMA – My wife hates cartoons. Can’t stand them. Thinks they’re worthless, for kids. Immature.

Honey, I love you. But you’re an idiot.

(She really liked that line, looking over my shoulder in bed.)

What she just doesn’t understand is that cartoons are just a medium, like paintings, friezes, sculptures, sitcoms, musicals, or ink drawings. There are vapid hour-long dramas on television; there are comic book literary masterpieces; there are ingenious marionette plays; there are worthless 1,000-page epics.

Just like any other medium, there are trashy pulp cartoons and amazing works that can stand with Candide or Beethoven’s 9th Symphony.

This is the argument the wife and I waged Saturday night as I tuned into Justice League: The New Frontier (2008) on Cartoon Network. Her verdict: Stupid comic book animations with no scholarly value. But if she had bothered to look beyond the pretty colors and the usually-for-kids channel on which they appeared, she would have seen a surprisingly thoughtful story.

This is a tale that starts with a third-person suicide and a point-blank wartime killing in silhouette. It’s grim-edged throughout, exploring justifications for revenge slayings by rape victims, nationalist jingoism, government intrusion on individual rights, space-bound nuclear ethics, profound self-esteem issues, McCarthyism, and the tension between pacifistic and survivalist ideals.

None of these topics get a Boston Legal-level analysis. But they are used to exact a wide range of pressures that drive the protagonists to act as heroes, far more than any of the superpowers that have been thrust upon them. A web of origin stories show why J’onn J’onzz decides to help Earthlings, how Hal Jordan’s resolute pacifism allowed him to wield the unimaginable power of the ring, and how Barry Allen came to terms with his role as a “lesser” hero.

These are Kennedy-era heroes facing Cold War problems with a modern perspective. And they’re coated with an Art Deco face that is as much Mad Men retro cool as it is Andy Warhol-ish. The animation style is at once Golden Age in its optimism and Silver Age in its pesimism.

These are all very familiar hallmarks of the animated DC Universe, and for good reason. The man driving the action is Bruce Timm, creator of Batman: The Animated Series, Batman Beyond, and Justice League. The New Frontier takes Timm’s progressive darkness to a new intensity, and a marked plateau in terms of talent. No sci-fi production is complete without the help of Keith David, and TNF also makes use of David “Angel” Boreanaz, geek hero Neil Patrick Harris, Lucy “Xena” Lawless, Kyra Sedgewick, Brook Shields, John Heard (you’d recognize him if you saw him), and Kyle MacLachlan (think Twin Peaks).

Luckily, this iteration of the Justice League of America lays off the attention to Superman and Batman, opting instead to probe the motivations of “second tier” characters. And it uses the threat posed by a malevolent, Cthulu-esque, psychic, flying island that spawns prehistoric monsters (The Centre) as a plot-driving device and characterization catalyst rather than the focus of the story.

It’s worth a watch, scoring a respectably modest 7.3 on IMDB.

Music Monday: Louis Jordan

More than Chuck Berry, Bill Haley, or Elvis, Louis Jordan (1908-1975) is responsible for rock and roll.

Back in the 1940s, he fused boogie woogie and big band sounds to create “jump blues,” an up-beat kind of bebop that he crafted with both alto sax and his outrageous lyrics.

In a time of barbaric racial divide, Jordan demolished segregation on the charts by hitting the Top 10 on both the white and “colored” lists, selling about four million records. With help from his band, The Tympany Five, he had 54 singles on the charts in the 40s alone. Eighteen of them his number one.

I’m a child of the 80s, and far removed from those old rock-jazz roots. The first I stumbled on Louis Jordan was on hearing a cover of Knock Me a Kiss in 1996’s Swingers (one of the few times I’ve liked Vince Vaughn).

As soon as I heard it, I had to have the song. It took a long time to find it, mainly because YouTube — not even MP3s — didn’t exist at the time. When user-submitted video content started hitting the web, very few Jordan videos were among them, and authentic vids of many of my favorites (Saturday Night Fish Fry, Beans and Corn Bread, Knock Me a Kiss) still can’t be found.

Here are a few that are definitely worth watching:

Beware

Jordan was reportedly married five times, so he purported to know all about the vices of manipulative women. Sure, the song is a little misogynistic. But take it from another married guy — that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s wrong.

And if you go for a walk, and she listens while you talk / She’s tryin’ to hook you.

If she grabs your hand and says, “darling, you’re such a nice man” / Beware, I’m telling you.

Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby

I put this in Jordan’s three best songs. It’s simple. It’s short. But it’s got a very catchy melody and a smoky trumpet hook that’s impossible to resist.

Of course, the grammar is loathsome, but if you can forgive Horse with No Name, you can forgive Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby.

Caldonia

This song is arguably more about Jordan’s personality than musical merit. It’s wrapped around what we consider today to be a very elementary bass line, but where it shines is in its indictment of the title woman’s faults, and Jordan’s insistence on loving her anyway.

I mentioned he was a little sexist, right? To prove I can be just as bad, I’m going to say the cheesecake on the piano sure had some nice gams.

Knock Me a Kiss

This song is terrific, but I had to cheat to find a version worth posting. This isn’t Louis Jordan’s rendition, but Ina Ray Hutton’s 1943 performance tour to US military installations.

A quick question…

FROM ANDREW’S MIND AT 2:30 IN THE MORNING–Why does the media and the public refer to the head of special political positions “czars” in America? It just seems like a slap in the face of our government to call an elected official the title of an eastern European monarch.