‘We teeter at the brink of a fully deceptive world’

I’ve become increasingly concerned at how much my fellow humans have seemingly adopted and accepted artificial intelligence programs that emulate human creativity and output. It’s here, they say collectively. There’s no stopping it, so we might as well play around with the technology and have fun. We now have programs that can write lyrics, poems and essays, churn out songs, emulate famous singing voices and create photography and artwork that so closely resembles manmade projects that many people can’t tell the authentic works from the rendered ones.

Indeed, German artist Boris Eldagsen fooled judges when he submitted an AI-generated image to the Sony world photography awards and later admitted the picture was not a real photograph.

This is not a photograph. Image by Boris Eldagsen.

And a band named AISIS recently wrote a record’s worth of songs in the manner of real British rock band, Oasis, using a computer generated voice of singer, Liam Gallagher. Since I’ve been an Oasis fan since the early 1990s, I could definitely tell a difference between the computer voice and Gallagher’s, but the singer himself said the project was “mad as fuck” (whatever that means), and he said that he sounded “mega” on the recording. I guess that means “good.”

While AI-generated artwork, poetry and music is in its infancy, the music industry has been using computers to “fix” defects in live vocal and instrumental performances for the last two decades, starting with the advent of Auto-Tune in 1996, first made famous by Cher’s 1998 song, “Believe.” Starting in the early 2000s, music producers have used a tool called quantization to “line up” drum hits and musical notes along a grid so that the instrumentation perfectly matches the beat in rhythm. Used too heavily, Auto-Tune can make vocal performances sound robotic or otherworldy; even used conservatively, it gives voices a bizarre-sounding “sheen” that does not exist naturally. Likewise, quantization takes the nuance out of live instrumentation. When used together, as is almost always the case in studio recordings this day and age, the music comes out sounding too perfect, too sterile, too sanitized.

Modern music production tools used in the last couple decades aren’t exactly AI, but they prefigured what we are seeing today: human creativity and achievement either being improved or replaced by AI. Chat GPT can generate high school level essays and poems on nearly any topic imaginable. Programs like Midjourney and others have the ability to render extremely detailed and fantastical landscapes or “portraits” of celebrities. And elsewhere in the AI-sphere, pop songs imitating the voices of Drake and The Weeknd can be fashioned out of nothing more than prompts and code. One of the songs in question, “Heart On My Sleeve” —  one struggles to imagine a less imaginative song title — fooled millions of listeners and was eventually removed from all streaming services by Universal Music Group when word spread that it was a fake.

For now, humans are still behind the wheel of all this faux-creativity, but in the future, given the rather loaded implications of artificial intelligence, this will surely not always be the case.

As a musician, songwriter and a fan since before digital music production when every vocal performance heard on the radio came from a natural recording — vocalists simply stood in the booth and sang their parts until they got it right — I am particularly interested in the use of computers in music because it’s my contention that even before AI veered us closer to the precipice, something valuable had already been lost.

The mainstream public often can’t tell when a song is excessively autotuned because of more than two decades of conditioning, or, listeners just don’t care whether it was or not. In general, so long as there is a beat — apparently any beat, no matter how much the same beat was used in countless other songs — an uber repetitive melody and vapid lyrics, the public will happily consume it. And now, it is nearly impossible to find a studio recording, in any genre, that isn’t quantized to the hilt and soaked in Auto-Tune.

Further, because many, if not most, mainstream pop songs use very simple, repetitive melodies and beats, people can’t tell the difference between manmade and computer-made songs either.

We teeter at the brink of a fully deceptive world, where truth, creativity and authenticity crumbles and we can no longer trust our senses.

In the age of AI Oasis, there’s no point being ordinary,” NME

This quote was a rare moment of self-awareness in an article that I thought was otherwise severely short-sided in its view that, while AI may be able to make pop music that is at least as good as its human counterparts and may even take over the streaming industry, there will always be space for manmade musical innovation.

Writer Mark Beaumont imagined a few pathways toward human flourishing in this area. Volume-based streaming services would either become a very large collection of bland human and computer generated pop, catering to people who don’t care which is which, and the “real” songwriters would be free to rise above and make better music:

The established platforms, then, could shrug, tacitly embrace the fact that their sites have become a hyper-speed circle-jerk of robots making music for robots to listen to and eye up their fifth superyacht. If most humans decide they’re just as happy listening to AI music as human music then the streaming dream will have fulfilled its foundational purpose to provide a truly limitless source of cheap, characterless background muzak ringing out across every night bus in the land.

Another potential scenario in this new landscape, according to Beaumont, is that listeners might grow weary of AI content, but if users already can’t tell the difference between computer generated music and human-created works, I find this option to be implausible. Alternatively, record labels might eventually give “preferential treatment” to real artists. I would hope so, otherwise the music industry as we know it would cease to exist.

Beaumont’s rosy grand finale:

In either scenario, one thing actually rises in value: human creativity, and all the inventiveness, imagination, unpredictability and star power it entails. …

If Spotify goes full-on AI, alternative platforms will spring up championing nothing but human music, where the most innovative artists reimagining what music can be will flourish above more formulaic fare that computers are doing better elsewhere. …

Only the most visionary will survive. Music is about to enter a magnificent new phase of man versus machine – it’s time to blow their hive-minds.

While admirable, the optimism here is misplaced and premature.

Judging by how accepting, acquiescent and complacent everyone seems to be about AI, in a man versus machine scenario, the machines — and the machine — will most likely win, and there isn’t a scenario, financially or creatively, in which humans come out on top.

Creativity wont pay in an ai world, if it can be knocked out in cheap mass production line fashion by (effectively) robots. As time moves on the human input level required to create these things will get less and less too. It will be pushed by the execs at top as it will mean less outlaying on labour an maximising profits, which is basically all ai will ultimately benefit… top end profit!

Thomas Hodge, Facebook comment on the NME article

And as far as creativity itself, if AI is currently able to pull off assembly line pop music as well or better than actual human creators of said pop, who’s to say it won’t eventually be able to replicate music on the level of “Dark Side of the Moon,” “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness” “Are You Experienced” or Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos?

How does human creativity rise in value if AI becomes capable — and it will — of being just as innovative and inventive as we are? The Beatles, fully human as they were, created new genres of music. Who’s to say AI won’t also fashion new genres of music and push the boundaries harder and faster than humans, in all of our tinkering slowness, ever could?

I worry for our creative future, especially when so few people, hardly anyone, as far as I can tell, is voicing the kinds of concerns I’m raising here. It is true that so far, AI currently needs human beings to input prompts and to tell it what to do, but this will surely not always be the case. And what then? Self-sustaining AI uploading its own music to the streaming services or its own rendered artwork or photography to galleries? Picasso V6.1 Build 10.4.874040a becoming the first AI program to get a plaque in the Louvre or MOMA alongside the greatest human pieces of all time? It’s all light, fun and games now, but this slope is slippery and steep, and it’s probably already too late to pull back the reins. I have a grim feeling that AI will win, and in our acquiescence, we’ll let it.

Jay Briscoe and the path to redemption

Well, I didn’t really think that professional wrestling was going to be the thing that would pull me out of my blog sabbatical, but here we are.

To the right is wrestler Jamin Pugh, who went by the in-ring name Jay Briscoe. He died two days ago in a car crash when an oncoming SUV came into his lane and hit his vehicle head on. His two daughters, who were in the vehicle with him, were in critical condition after the wreck. He also left behind a wife.

In 2013, Briscoe made a homophobic comment on Twitter. In the days after the tweet, he apologized, and his company, Ring of Honor, said he was going to donate his next two event paychecks to an anti-hate charity. In the ensuing decade, he has apologized multiple times for the comment and has emphasized how wrong he was for saying it. He said his tweet was actually informed by his faith in Christianity, noting that he thought he was “taking a stand for the lord” at the time. He said it was “the most dumbest, immature, obnoxious shit I’ve ever done.”

Despite this, he had been essentially canceled and blacklisted by executives at Warner Bros. Discovery from appearing on any of its wrestling programs, namely AEW on TBS and TNT. In addition, AEW owner Tony Khan was prevented from putting together a tribute show for Briscoe this week. Khan was only allowed to air the above picture at the start of the most recent show. Briscoe was mentioned on the air a couple times and some wrestlers chose to wear “Jay Briscoe” arm bands by way of a tribute. AEW is being forced to relegate a tribute show for Briscoe to its YouTube channel.

Jay, with his brother, Mark, wrestled as The Briscoes tag team and developed an underground following among the wrestling community as part of Ring of Honor. The team gained some national notoriety last year when Khan purchased ROH and booked a series of matches between The Briscoes and former AEW tag champions, FTR. The Briscoes, who played amplified versions of themselves as self-described country boys, were known for their hard-hitting matches, in-ring psychology and old school promo work recalling a nearly bygone era in which wrestlers did not break “character” in public. Thus, some defenders of Jay have argued that he was “in character” when he wrote the offensive tweet, but even if that were true, some lines should never be crossed, and the tweet was just as inexcusable in 2013 as it would be now or at any other time. Jay apparently recognized it as such, saying that The Briscoes have tried to follow the example of their faith and love everyone.

Before I continue, let me address any concerns someone reading this might have as to my bias, either related to the Briscoes or wrestling in general because this site is written for a general audience, not a niche wrestling crowd. Yes, I’m a wrestling fan and have been since the mid-1980s. Yes, pro wrestling has a troubling history of homophobia, sexism, misogyny, steroid and hard drug abuse, untimely death related to said abuse and even suicide and murder. A popular TV show titled, “Dark Side of the Ring,” explores all of them and more in detail. Fortunately, most of those blights on the art form that many of us have come to love, with a couple notable exceptions (See: Vince McMahon and the MeToo movement), have largely been relegated to the past. AEW, which is run by Khan, a millennial of Pakistani-American heritage, has a diverse roster full of millennials and Generation Z members, including multiple members of the LGBTQ community. Many or most of the roster would probably identify as “woke.” Like society, professional wrestling has matured to become more inclusive and more accepting of people from all walks of life and from all continents.

Jay seems to have grown and matured alongside the business that he cherished, and he deserved a chance at redemption. Warner apparently didn’t think so. They have a reputation to uphold, after all, which is why — I’ll add, with heavy notes of sarcasm — Dana White of UFC fame, who made news recently for having a slap exchange with his wife in a bar, was nonetheless allowed to move forward with his new show, Power Slap, even though it was delayed a week because of the bar incident. Power Slap, which features contestants simply slapping each other from a standing position, airs in the 10 p.m. timeslot after, you guessed it, AEW Dynamite on TBS. White and his wife getting into a domestic altercation wasn’t enough for Warner to distance itself from White and his show, but an offensive tweet from 10 years ago was beyond the pale.

Warner refusing to let indie wrestlers like The Briscoes onto their TV programs or to let AEW honor the team’s achievements in the ring and Jay as a father and husband, was on odd hill to die on, especially after Jay apologized and seemed as if he had become a better person. Do people inside Warner really think no one else under their very large umbrella have skeletons in their closets and have said or done things that they wish they could take back?

I’ve been writing on a specific issue between Warner and Briscoe, but the larger consideration is this: What good is it to cancel someone for making an offensive comment if there is no path to redemption? Once people are branded as homophobic, is there even a path to redemption among the woke crowd?

Jay Briscoe deserved every bit of criticism and sharp rebuke he received for his tweet. But did he deserve it indefinitely? Some people may truly be irredeemably bigoted, but perhaps those who apologize numerous times for an offensive comment should be given the benefit of the doubt that they actually have become better people. The entire philosophy behind the justice system in America, broken as it may be, is rehabilitation, not perpetual punishment and banishment. If we can’t at least live up to that ideal in civil society, if we can’t give people a second chance to prove that they have grown, to show that they are better today than they were yesterday and if cancel culture is as closed off to redemption for contrite individuals as racists and bigots are to true acceptance and equality, then we’re in real trouble as a society.

Following are comments from two people who knew Briscoe. The first is a drag queen performer, columnist and wrestler named Paul E. Pratt, who goes by the stage name, Pollo Del Mar. In addition to the tweet below, he recently reposted a photo of himself in the center in full drag, with Jay and Mark smiling on each side with the text, “Those smiles were all genuine.”

The second tweet is from a gay wrestler named Effy.

As far as I know — I just checked — Anthony Bowens, who is an openly gay member of the AEW roster, has not commented on Briscoe’s death. Nyla Rose, a trans member of the same roster, tweeted, “Damn.” with a tear emoji.

On Life, Death and Pro Wrestling

Brodie Jr., center, Jon Huber’s son, receives the TNT Championship from AEW Executive Vice President Cody Rhodes, second from right, and AEW CEO Tony Khan, far right, this past Wednesday on AEW ‘Dynamite.’

I will try not to make what I’m about to say here feel disjointed, but I believe that in talking about a professional wrestler who died way too early in life, some common themes about how to move forward in 2021 might emerge. But first, here is a brief look at the life and career of Jon Huber.

***

Although professional wrestling’s sole purpose is to entertain fans and to “put smiles on people’s faces,” as WWE CEO Vince McMahon never tires of saying, those inside the industry and its loyal fanbase have had to grapple with a disturbing number of untimely deaths the last few decades. Whether the conversation inevitably comes back around to complications from steroid abuse, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, wrestlers enduring untold hours of physical abuse in the ring or just bad luck, we wrestling fans somehow find ourselves mourning a new round of fallen superstars year after year. Some of these are the result of the natural progression of time, and some are more shocking.

The death of Jonathan Huber, 41, known as Luke Harper in WWE and Mr. Brodie Lee in AEW, on Dec. 26 shook the wrestling community seemingly to the core. Huber, who is listed at 6-foot, 5-inches tall and 275 pounds, recently succumbed to complications from a “non-Covid related lung issue,” according to his wife, and his death, almost two weeks later, is still being mourned across the industry, as fans, colleagues and friends share memories of the man many say was a genuinely good person, a loving husband and father of two children and a loyal friend.

‘We Fought Like Brothers’

Huber began backyard wrestling in 2003 before debuting with the indie promotion, Chikara, in 2007. Huber bumped around in some other indie promotions up until 2012 when he signed a developmental deal with the WWE to work in the company’s NXT developmental promotion before being called up to the main roster.

On WWE’s main shows, Huber was part of the hugely popular Wyatt Family faction and the Bludgeon Brothers tag team as the character of Luke Harper, and in AEW, he was the leader of the Dark Order under the name, Brodie Lee, which is a combination of his name on the indies, Brodie Bruce, and actor Jason Lee. While he, along with his partners, Bray Wyatt and Erick Rowan, had a lot of success as the Wyatt Family in WWE, perhaps punctuated by the stable’s feud with one of the greatest factions in the company’s history, The Shield, beginning in 2014, the common thought among wrestling fans is that Huber was not given a chance as a singles competitor in WWE.

In AEW, however, he was put at the head of his own group and was given the freedom to shine on the mic and in the ring. He took part in a dog collar match in October against Cody Rhodes, which was one hell of a contest, and he was then taken off TV. This would turn out to be his last match. Fans simply thought he was injured. Much to our dismay, however, the truth was much more saddening, and the reality of such a robust superstar stricken down in his prime has forced a lot of us to reevaluate life once again in the face of our own mortality and the humanity of larger-than-life heroes in the ring that we sometimes mistakenly think are invincible.

His friend and leader of the Wyatt Family, Bray Wyatt — real name Windham Rotunda — penned a touching send-off that deserves a full airing:

You were my best friend. My brother, my partner, my Terry Gordy. We changed this whole game because we refused to do it any way but OUR way. We were always at our best when we were a team I think we both knew it. We fought like brothers because we were. I’m so goddamn pissed. This isn’t how it was supposed to be, it was supposed to be us fat, bald and useless running Wyatt Family spots in high school gyms in our 70’s. Where do we go now? What do I do knowing I’ll never hear your condescending sarcasm as I am riding high.

I miss you so fucking much already. I would do anything just live through our worst moments again I can’t believe you’re gone. I’m so sorry brother. I’m so sorry. You will always be a part of me, whether I like it or not without you everything is different and I hope Amanda truly knows that I am here not just to say it but because I love them too. I will make sure your son knows the incredible man you were. Not the legends people will tell but the real you that very few people got to see. I promise I’ll put him over clean in dark matches when he’s old enough just like I promised. I’m hurting so bad. I wish I had a chance to say goodbye. But then again, it’s Saturday and you know what that means…. save me a seat next to you wherever you are, that’s where I belong. I’ll be there when it’s my time. Goodbye forever Brodie. I love you.

You will always be a part of me, whether I like it or not without you everything is different. — Bray Wyatt

I wasn’t the biggest Luke Harper fan in WWE, but when he came to AEW this past March and I got to see the full breadth of what he could do on the mic and in the ring if given the opportunity, I began to appreciate his body of work and was looking forward to seeing him progress in the company. He had incredible potential.

This past Wednesday, AEW gave one of the most touching and emotional tributes to a wrestler I have ever seen. The entire episode of AEW’s show, “Dynamite,” was devoted to Huber. His son, Brodie Jr., picked all the matchups, and a member of Brodie Lee’s old group, the Dark Order, came away with the victory each time. Brodie Jr., who was in attendance donning a Dark Order mask, was named an honorary member of the group earlier in the week and now holds the name “-1” because each member of the group is assigned a number and that is their in-ring name. The child was also given Brodie Lee’s TNT Championship, and he became the lifelong titleholder.

Begin Again

As I listened to multiple colleagues and podcasters talk about Huber’s life, I teared up more than once when I thought about the fragility of life and that it doesn’t matter how robust a person is, time can claim any of us in an instant. As I have said, his death rocked many people in the wrestling community, and I was certainly not excluded. And for it to come at the end of 2020, a year in which more than 330,000 Americans died from the pandemic; a year in which hundreds of businesses were either shuttered or have struggled to remain open; a year in which the wrestling business, sometimes to a fault, tried to keep people entertained in the mist of so much suffering; a year in which the wrestling world had already lost at least 15 notable superstars, including Pat Patterson, Rocky Johnson (The Rock’s father), famous ring announcer, Howard Finkel, Shad Gaspard, La Parka, Road Warrior Animal, Kamala and others; was all the more stultifying.

Suffice it to say that last night, Dec. 31, 2020, I didn’t much feel like celebrating. I slept a lot. I vegged in front of the TV. I gazed with something like contempt as gleeful partiers cheered and danced in front of screen with a lot of hope but not much else, as if a pall of death and stupidity hadn’t just been unleashed in 2020.

I gazed with something like contempt as gleeful partiers cheered and danced in front of screen with a lot of hope but not much else, as if a pall of death and stupidity hadn’t just been unleashed in 2020.

Like almost every other New Year’s on record, we had high hopes for 2020. But we were quickly disappointed as winter bled into spring. Our great and fearless leader was one of the most heartless presidents in the history of the country who contributed to more human misery than he prevented. Beyond the 330,000 people who are now dead because of Covid-19 and the incompetent federal response, millions of other family members have been directly impacted by the virus and are currently grieving for those who will not be around to celebrate this “joyous” holiday season.

And what of the rest of 2020? Many more unarmed, innocent black people were killed by police this year, and despite protest after protest in states all across the nation, only some modest reforms have taken place thus far. Despite a fucking Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the struggle for civil rights well into the 20th century, America is still defaulting on Martin Luther King Jr.’s promissory note and simply cannot wrap its collective mind around that little independent clause, “all men are created equal.” Seditious Republicans are still, more than a month after the election, attempting to subvert the Constitution and our democracy. And finally, something like half of this nation has exposed itself as deeply selfish, unloving, racist and conspiratorial.

So, no, forgive me, given the wreckage of 2020 and Huber’s untimely death, if I was not in a festive mood yesterday with these realities still in view.

Personally, I have spoken to friends about 2020 as a bittersweet affair. I, like many, have gone through bouts of depression, loneliness and anger. As an immunecompromised individual, only in the last month or so have I gotten to see my girlfriend and my family. I have been able to make some good things happen this past year. I have tried to strengthen my relationships. Creatively, I have written about 10 new songs since the quarantine, my most productive single year to date. I have begun recording some of my original songs in a studio in the hopes of releasing some singles and either an EP or full album sometime in 2021. I have listened to about 100-125 albums that I had never heard before and have tried to expand my general music knowledge. Even as I have been limited in where I can go the last nine months, I have taken a considerable number of nature photographs by simply driving around my neighborhood and staying away from people as much as possible. And through all of the Covid scares, I have remained healthy during quarantine by following medical advice and staying cautious and diligent, and no one in my immediate family has been impacted by the virus.

I didn’t want this piece to be all doom and gloom, and I hope it has not been. I’m cautiously hopeful for 2021, but I simply could not forget, or erase from my mind, even for a few hours of enjoyment last night, the severe losses that we have suffered, the immense challenges that we still face and the anger that still bubbles to the surface when I think about the wanton intolerance and ignorance that still threatens to cripple the progress we have made.

Joe Biden is going to take office with or without the support of the seditious House Republicans, and under his leadership, America will renavigate our onward path toward science, reason and progress. Covid will eventually be defeated, and we will slowly get back to normal.

Tragically, though, it’s too late for Huber, and it’s too late for 330,000 Americans, but it isn’t too late for we who remain to set a different course, both personally and nationally, as we strive to heal a broken nation and a lot of broken hearts.

If the events of 2020 have taught us anything, it is that we have the chance to right the ship. The chance to bend the arm further toward justice. The chance to love our neighbors and to care for each other. The chance to really listen to and learn from each other. The chance to reinvite bipartisanship into our public discourse. The chance to bring this nation ever closer to the imperishable ideas outlined by the Enlightenment principles that inform our Constitution. The chance to grow, love and live. The chance to hope when hope was once out of reach. The chance to tell the people we love how we feel, not later, but now.

The chance to start over. The chance to begin again …

10 Ways to Improve WWE TV

Credit: ringsidenews.com

For years now, WWE’s television ratings have been on a sharp decline, such that the last edition of Monday Night Raw drew 1.5 million viewers, the lowest in the history of the show. During the last conference call with investors in April, WWE CEO Vince McMahon attributed the decline mainly to new stars who haven’t had time to get themselves “over,” a wrestling term for how popular wrestlers are with fans. He also said the ratings were sagging because of the absence of Brock Lesner. Lesner, possibly the biggest draw in the company, has been MIA since the beginning of the pandemic, and in any case, isn’t a regular competitor. Of course, blaming new talent for ratings decline seems like a direct indictment of McMahon and his creative team since they are ultimately responsible for pushing the wrestlers and putting them in positions to have success in the ring and on the mic.

In any case, WWE likely won’t read this post because the company’s executives and many of the wrestlers themselves seem to have a dim view of their own fans, on the working assumption that if a person isn’t in the wrestling business, their opinion is somehow less legitimate. I only want the programs to improve and the whole industry — WWE, AEW, NWA, Impact Wrestling and others — to thrive. I would say that I have a pretty good idea of what makes an entertaining wrestling show as a 35 year fan of the business. And let tell you, just about anything else I could be doing on a Monday or Friday night is more entertaining than Raw and SmackDown as of late.

Here is what I would do to improve Raw and SmackDown:

  • Fire people who can’t talk or are can’t go in the ring, or both.
  • Fire people who are just dead weight and don’t draw money and ratings. Admittedly, this is most of the roster, but that leads into the next point.
  • Get over the idea that the company needs to stifle people and keep them at a certain popularity so they don’t get “too big.” For an industry that lives and dies on creating larger than life superstars, this is ludicrous logic. WWE seems to purposefully hold people back. John Cena was the last true legend they have created. Roman Reigns is close, but everyone is a notch below him. Because Reigns has a history of leukemia, he hasn’t been on TV in months, so everyone else is expected to carry the load. The ratings show that they have not created anyone capable of drawing the kind of TV ratings that are anywhere comparable to The Rock, Stone Cold Steve Austin, Shawn Michaels or John Cena.
  • Stop relying on nostalgia acts. It only works in the short term to create a temporary pop in ratings.
  • This might seem obvious, but be more creative with characters, storylines and backstage segments, and fire writers who don’t have a bold creative vision for the present and future direction of storylines and character development.
  • Don’t insult the intelligence of your own fanbase. WWE does this routinely. Also, don’t drive your fans away by hammering them over the head with your promotional pitches. After 30 minutes on Monday, I lost count of how many times a wrestler or announcer said “The Horror Show at Extreme Rules.” When a wrestler says that whole long title in the middle of an interview, it sounds forced and unnatural.
  • Every match on free TV doesn’t have to be a barn burner, but use more creativity in matches with fewer roll-ups and more clean finishes. Fans hate roll-ups, and they usually do nothing to further feuds between two characters. Have higher quality matches at the PPVs. WWE has gotten into a lazy pattern of giving us one or two good matches at a PPV, and the rest is usually completely forgettable.
  • Give wrestlers more creative freedom on the mic and in the matches. WWE’s promos, a wrestling term for a talking segment that is supposed to further a feud or storyline, usually sound forced and unnatural. This is because what the wrestlers say is heavily scripted, and the company allows little wiggle room for improvisation. Wrestlers have even been punished for going off-the-cuff in promos. This has to end if you want a better product. As for matches, more times than not, they are generic and predictable, as if the producers of the show are operating from a template. This does not create must-see television.
  • Be less generic and predictable, and offer more surprises. Most of the time, Raw and SmackDown are so generic, bland and lifeless that I want to either go to sleep or cut the TV off and do something more entertaining with my time.
  • Keep Somoa Joe, Corey Graves, Beth Phoenix and Mauro Ranallo and fire everyone else on commentary. Get rid of the stupidity and pandering and let the announcers be more organic with what they have to say about in-ring action.

Of course, none of this will happen until McMahon is gone and the company undergoes a complete change in upper management and creative. I would say go TV-14 and be edgier, but it doesn’t matter how much cursing, blood or sex appeal the show has, a la the Attitude Era, if the creative product on the screen is next to unwatchable

[Photo Credit: ringsidenews.com]

‘Inlet’: The Perfect Hum Album

I feel they know that I’m all alone
The stars are strange and this isn’t home
— “In the Den,” Hum

Note: This is not going to be a journalistic review of Hum’s new album, “Inlet.” Hum is one of my favorite bands, so I am biased. This is just a fan’s reaction.

***

Those familiar with the video game, “No Man’s Sky,” know well the abiding loneliness and isolation players are immersed in when they begin a new campaign. The main character is hurled through the cosmos, lands on a distant planet in an undiscovered region of the universe and has only a host of strange planets and animals to keep him (or her) company. Playing with other actual humans is apparently possible, but the game is so vast that the likelihood of finding a real person with whom to coalesce is slim to none. I have played for years, and I have found no one, other than aliens. And even that is foreign. Over time, the character has the opportunity to learn the vocabulary of various species, but at the start, players are, in every sense of the word, a stranger in a strange land.

From the early part of Hum’s career and their breakout single, “Stars,” from the band’s third album, “You’d Prefer an Astronaut,” fans have sensed a kind of persistence otherness and alienation in singer Matt Talbott’s lyrics (“She thinks she missed the train to Mars. She’s out back counting stars” and “I’m thinking of a number between everything and two”), either from a lonely protagonist in the songs or a pair of people exploring this life alone together, almost outside or beyond the rest of the world. Now that I think of it, it is apropos that this album was released in the middle of a pandemic, in which even some couples have had to isolate from each other. Planet Earth has been lonelier than usual the last four months. Enter Hum to apply the salve.

From the lyrics of several songs right down to the artwork’s desolate, void and unearthly landscape, “Inlet,” drops listeners down into oblivion with what seems like the fullest expression of their signature, heavy drop-D “wall of sound,” thunderous drums and bass underneath Talbott’s mellow and melodic vocals, and finally, rising above it all, soaring lead guitar riffs. In other words, the album has all one could hope for in a Hum album.

The album, which clocks in at 55:13 — another signature feature of Hum’s albums is that they always put the full runtime somewhere on the cover — contains no filler. Only one song (“Step Into You”) is under 5 minutes, and other tracks (“Desert Rambler,” “The Summoning,” “The Folding” and “Shapeshifter”) have an 8- or 9-minute runtime, but they never feel like long songs. Something about the flow of the songs, the melodies, the lead guitar and the structure help listeners almost get lost in the aesthetic and the musical landscapes pushing through their speakers. For those who like more straightforward rockers, the album offers “Waves,” “In the Den,” “Step Into You” and “Cloud City.” For others who favor the more epic pieces, the album has “Desert Rambler” and “Folding.” Similar to some tracks from Hum’s second album, “Electra 2000,” the guitars and drums on “Desert Rambler” relentlessly hammer the same riff for minutes on end, with some flourishes and riffs interspersed throughout for tonal variety. “Cloud City” and “Folding” are the best tracks on the album in my view.

I have listened to many bands that have either been heavily influenced by Hum or have adopted a similar sound, trying to find something to augment the experience of listening to them — The Deftones, Duster, La Dispute, Touché Amoré, Nothing, Cloakroom, Palms, Anakin and others — but I can’t. While I certainly like Duster, The Deftones and Anakin, none are replacements for Hum.

“Inlet,” with its spacial sounds, crunchy guitars and ethereal ruminations somewhere beyond the stars, is Hum perfected. I will always have a soft spot for the band’s earlier works, “You’d Prefer an Astronaut” and “Downward is Heavenward,” but if Hum never puts out another album, this one will stand as their crowning achievement.

Let’s Talk About Pro Wrestling

I don’t write about wrestling much — although it has been suggested to me that I should — because it doesn’t really fit the general tenor of this blog since I normally talk about religion, politics and history.

The fact is that I have been a fan of professional wrestling since I was a kid in the mid-1980s. I grew up watching and revering characters like Ric Flair, Hulk Hogan, “The Macho Man” Randy Savage, Dusty Rhodes, “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, The Rock ‘n’ Roll Express and many others. I had two wrestling rings as a kid and numerous WWE (WWF at the time) action figures. While the NWA has, in the last year, picked up a lot of steam for its unique — unique for the modern era — focus on studio wrestling, in which the promos and in-ring action take place in front of a small crowd with, typically, no musical introductions, I remember the original era of studio wrestling when people like Flair and Rhodes cut some of the greatest promos in the history of the business. My family wasn’t well off and I could not order the PPVs as a kid, but I had a great-uncle who would tape WresteMania and some NWA/WCW shows for me on VHS.

I guess I was ashamed of it in high school because I stopped watching for awhile thinking I would be made fun of about it and it wasn’t “cool,” but when I got to college, I picked it back up, and was a diehard fan of WCW until it went out of business. I then started watching WWF in March 2001 and have watched since, with a few stops and starts here and there. I have watched WWE, more less consistently since 2005. In subsequent years, I have come to appreciate, not just the entertainment value of the shows, but wrestling as an artform.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, wrestling has its roots in the old carny shows in the early 20th-century. It is one of the most unique artforms in entertainment because it includes a mix of microphone work, known as promos, and in-ring skills and usually includes drama, comedy and sometimes salacious material as a way to develop characters and further storylines. Everything that a viewer sees on their TV screens — wrestlers and other on-screen characters, referees, broadcasters, ring announcers, backstage interviewers, promoters, general managers — are all part of the show or the “kayfabe” experience designed to help the audience suspend disbelief and forget that they are watching a predetermined, scripted program. Thus I have come to, over the years, appreciate wrestling on a different level, for the amount of athletic ability it takes, for the skill wrestlers display performing high-risk moves without injuring themselves or their sparring partner, for the pageantry, for the promos, for the unique characters, for the passion of the fans and for that feeling one gets when a feud between two characters has been built up for months and finally, in one fateful match, it comes to a climax with a superb match in front of a raucous crowd. I am what some people call a “hardcore” wrestling fan. I have a passion for the business and the artform and will usually watch it, in spite of myself, in some fashion, even if the storytelling or characters don’t always hold my attention, which has more or less been the case with more recent editions of WWE’s main shows, Raw and SmackDown.

The Allegations

Fan that I am, I must say that the last few months have been one of the darkest periods that I can remember in wrestling history, notwithstanding the deaths of many high-profile wrestlers over the years.

This is the case for a number of reasons, but the main one is the sexual assault and sexual abuse allegations that have surfaced. The last count I heard was that 70 people have been accused of misconduct at the #SpeakingOut hashtag on Twitter. The largest number of cases were reported in the United Kingdom wrestling scene, but every major promotion in the United States, including WWE, AEW, Impact Wrestling, NWA, Ring of Honor and Chikara have not escaped this blight on the industry. There are simply too many allegations to talk about all of them in detail, but to name a few:

David Starr — Starr, who has worked with numerous promotions, was accused of sexual assault by a former girlfriend. Starr denied the allegation and said he wasn’t a sexual predator but admitted to being a “dickhead” in his relationships on his Twitter page, and in one of the most egregious non-apologies I’ve heard, after a lengthy psychological analysis of his own problems treating women with respect in relationships, he had this to say:

By never taking the time to focus on me, I’ve acted like a teenage boy towards partners. Quite simply, I need to grow the f*** up.

I’m trying to do better and I don’t want to hurt anyone anymore.

I apologize to anyone who looks to me as a role model and anyone that I’ve disappointed.

Most importantly, I sincerely apologize to Jackie, Allison, Kali, Victoria, Bella and any other partners I’ve had for any and all torment I’ve put you through because of my own inability to mature and to love myself. You all deserved better than what I gave you.

He doesn’t admit to the specific allegation and issues a blanket apology to those he might have hurt. On his Twitter page, which he has since deleted, he went so far as to suggest that what he allegedly did was “gray rape,” which is just rape and is not recognized in the criminal justice system. Whether both people are drunk or not, if she said no, there is no gray area.

According to a piece from the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center:

I find the promulgation of the idea of “gray rape” deeply disturbing. To be very clear, there is no such thing as “gray rape”. What there is is a rape culture highly invested in not calling this what it is. By telling rape survivors that there was a “gray area” … (by) telling them that the rape was their fault – if only they hadn’t been drinking. If only they’d been saving themselves for marriage. If only they dressed modestly and didn’t flirt. “Gray rape” is nothing but a pseudosociological reframing of classic victim-blaming.

Starr was stripped of his previous championships with multiple promotions and will probably never work in wrestling again.

Joey Ryan — Perhaps one of the sleaziest cases of them all, Ryan, who is mainly known for using his penis to perform wrestling moves in the ring, namely something called the YouPorn-Plex, has been accused several times over for sexual misconduct and sexual harassment. He was fired from Impact Wrestling and had to close his own promotion, Bar Wrestling. Like many of these people, Ryan issued an apology, gave some explanations, or excuses, however you want to read them, about his shortcomings as a person. Two wrestlers, Joey Janella and Ryan Nemeth, confirmed that Ryan had abused women and said he lied in his apology.

Sammy Guevara — This one pains me because I really like the guy, but Geuvara, an AEW talent, apparently said in an interview years ago that he would like to “rape” WWE wrestler Sasha Banks. Geuvara and Banks spoke privately, he apologized to her, and she accepted. AEW sent Guevara to sensitivity training and are planning to donate his salary to the Women’s Center of Jacksonville (Fla.).

Marty Scurll — In one of the more sickening allegations, Scurll, who is perhaps best known for his work in Ring of Honor, was accused of taking advantage of a drunk 16-year-old virgin who allegedly gave him oral sex. Scurll was allegedly going to take the girl into a closet to have sex with her. Scurll didn’t deny the encounter but claimed it was consensual and was within the bounds of the UK’s age of consent law. Scurll would have been 26 at the time the incident took place in 2015.

David Lagana — Lagana, who was in charge of most of the production of NWA and was running the company with Billy Corgan, was accused of sexual misconduct and has since resigned from the company. NWA halted all shows for the time being while the company attempts to restructure in Lagana’s absence.

Mike Quackenbush — Quackenbush, Chikara promoter and trainer at the Wrestle Factory, along with other trainers, were accused of numerous instances of abuse, most of which were shitty and insensitive, but not necessary illegal. He initially had this to say in response:

I have been made aware of recent allegations about myself, and people in my employ.

I take all allegations seriously – whether they are about me, or members of my team.

Addressing these with openness and transparency is of the utmost importance to me. So these matters can be given the proper time and attention, I am discontinuing CHIKARA and resigning as head trainer at the Wrestle Factory.

I’ll make a full statement on these matters in the near future

Quackenbush then issued a 14-minute video where he fell on the sword and apologized for some of the allegations and denied others. He got very emotional at the end when he talked about being insensitive to a person with autism. He confessed to displaying narcissistic and homophobic behavior in a certain period of his life and confessed that he has said “ignorant things in the past.” I agree with Jason Solomon from the Solomonster Sounds Off podcast that it sounded as if Quackenbush was cutting a wrestling promo in his apology video. It had an odd vibe, but folks in the Internet wrestling community who apparently know the man say that is just the way he talks. I can’t gauge whether the apology video was sincere or not. Current WWE star Lince Dorado, who has a history with Quackenbush and worked at Chikara, certainly doesn’t think so. Dorado had this to say:

Lies! I don’t believe you especially at this moment in your bs video! I tried to reached out through email and friends for over a decade! Tried to meet in person and have closure at the PC, coward! My closure is you being exposed! This will be my last tweet about this POS! See me

Velveteen Dream — Dream, real name Patrick Clark Jr., is a top star in WWE’s NXT brand, was accused of sending sexual text messages to an underage girl. The evidence I heard a few weeks ago on this case was limited to a couple screenshots and a short audio clip of someone, possibly Dream but we can’t be sure, asking, “What school do you go to?” He could obviously have been talking to a college student, but in any case, this source claims WWE is getting ready to release him from the company. I don’t necessarily trust random “news” sites online, so we’ll have to wait to hear from the company.

***

I could go on and on with the names and allegations. It’s disturbing and emotionally exhausting to hear these stories, and to say it’s disappointing is an understatement.

The wrestling business has largely always been an incubator for sexism, the objectification of both men and women and downright lewd and tasteless behavior. I, along with many of my fellow wrestling fans, were apparently lulled into believing that those wild west days of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, with some exceptions, were largely behind us as a new generation of socially conscious younger stars have come up believing in more equality, more ethics in wrestling and more respectful treatment of women and men, both on air and in private.

I was wrong. Frankly, I’m ashamed to call myself a wrestling fan at this moment. What I have been reading in articles and on Twitter and hearing as I’ve listened to several podcasts on these cases is disgusting and embarrassing. Again, I agree with Solomon that it’s simply time to weed out the “riff-raff” in wrestling. Enough is enough. Wrestling, which is already in the shitter, with diminishing viewers and interest, might not recover if this continues. But more importantly, there is no excuse — none whatsoever — for sexist, racist, narcissistic or abusive behavior in the world of wrestling or anywhere else.

Some promotions have responded with a round of firings and proceeded to strip people of their titles, those won in the past and more recently, and some have opened investigations into the sexual misconduct and sexual abuse allegations. I would like to know, however, where was the oversight to begin with? Where was the character vetting process to make sure that the people who are put on TV and promoted for shows are actually worthy, ethically, to represent these companies? This current spate of allegations represents a failure of promoters to hold their entertainers to a higher standard. They apparently held their wrestlers to no standard, other than to show up when they are scheduled to appear and do their jobs. All of the cads and creeps in society can never be weeded out completely. There will always be assholes and scumbags, but we can do a better job in the future as fans to speak out against this behavior, and promoters must do a better job of evaluating the mental and emotional well-being of their wrestlers and getting them help if they need it.

The possibility exists that there may be some, or even many, false allegations in all of this. A lot of the claims were made anonymously, and without hard evidence, so there is no way to know for sure what really happened in a lot of these cases. False allegations can ruin a person’s life and career, and if a preponderance of false allegations have been made out of spite, simply because someone didn’t like a wrestler or the wrestler was an asshole, does a grave disservice to the women who were actual victims of serious crimes and suffer from trauma because of it.

A brief word about all of the “apology” statements and videos that have been published by the accused. I’m not sure they do themselves any favors by giving line-by-line analyses of what they think happened in the incidents and then delving into their own psychological state. Some of them have even said they are in the process of working on themselves and have been looking into self-help or therapeutic resources. I see why they take this approach, but frankly, it comes off as self-absorbed, defensive and invalidating to the victims. They should have stuck with short statements that either deny the allegations or own up to their actions and then apologize to those they have hurt, both publicly (maintaining the anonymity of the victim) and privately, if possible.

As of June 23 — I couldn’t find more recent information — no official charges have been filed against any of the accused wrestlers.

The Pandemic

Wrestling is not wrestling without the crowd, which is part of the show, and since the outbreak of Covid-19, the two main wrestling outfits, WWE and AEW, have been running shows without full crowds and typically, with only a limited number of “fans” — mainly other wrestlers, trainees or family members — in attendance to provide at least a little noise. This was all made possible, of course, when the state of Florida inexplicably declared that professional wrestling, of all things, was an “essential business.”

In the early part of the pandemic, WWE was running the shows with no one in their Performance Center other than the referees, announcers and wrestlers, which made the shows almost unwatchable, or more unwatchable than usual. AEW has run shows with wrestling “fans” pretty much from the start, and the company has been providing Covid-19 tests to everyone who enters their venue, Daily’s Place in Jacksonville, for months.

Weeks ago when WWE began having these “fans” around ringside, WWE announcer Michael Cole told the fans watching at home that the company had tested everyone in the Performance Center. This was misleading, at best, or an outright lie, at worst. Until recently, the company was only taking people’s temperature, and while WWE may consider that proper “testing,” it most surely is not. Everyone knows by now that people can be infected with the coronavirus and not show symptoms. Only taking wrestlers’ temperature was irresponsible and far from an adequate response to the situation.

So, lo and behold, what do we find? Up to 30 people in WWE could now be infected with Covid-19. Either through ignorance or, more likely, stubbornness and “the show must go on” syndrome, the company put its wrestlers, which it routinely calls its “most valuable resource,” in harm’s way. The company put 74-year-old CEO Vince McMahon in harm’s way, or he put himself in harm’s way, and the company jeopardized the health of 71-year-old Ric Flair, who recently appeared in an on-air segment in the ring. I realize Flair probably wanted to be there and the decision to appear was his choice, but the idea that WWE would put a legend like Flair, who has a history of heart problems, at risk, makes me angry. Some stars, like Roman Reigns, Sami Zayn and most recently, Kevin Owens, have opted to stay at home. Reigns has a history of leukemia. Zayn, after the company claimed that no one would be punished if they wanted to stay home in quarantine for safety reasons, was stripped of his intercontinental title, and the word backstage is that some wrestlers are afraid to go home because of possible repercussions. If this last part is true, that is disgraceful.

All of this, every scintilla of it, is disgraceful and embarrassing. If WWE actually cared about its “most valuable resource,” this billion dollar company would have suspended TV tapings until tests became available; it would have purchased as many tests as necessary; and it would not have reopened tapings until all wrestlers, trainers, producers, announcers, cameramen and “fans” were tested and cleared. And it would have continued testing each and every time it opened the doors to the Performance Center. Or better yet, WWE could have suspended shows altogether, but of course, the company has contracts with Fox and USA Network and probably feared losing all that TV money as a consequence.

I know there are some really upstanding people in that company, but the management, the people at the top making decisions, appear to be monstrous imbeciles who have proven over and over that a buck is more important than the talented individuals in the ring. WWE is making all these dangerous sacrifices of their human capital for what? For bland, poorly written programs like Raw and SmackDown that are completely missable most weeks. There’s no other way to put it: it’s irresponsible, disappointing and shameful.

Lost Between the Notes: My Top Album Reviews, Part 3

In a little while, I’ll be gone – Radiohead, “How To Disappear Completely”

Sadly, I can’t recall my initial reaction to Radiohead’s stunning critique and deconstruction of modernity, “Kid A,” from 2000. I just remember thinking that whatever this was, I needed to hear more of it, and so I enthusiastically gobbled up the band’s followup record, “Amnesiac,” upon its release a year later. I was working at a Clemson University souvenir shop called Mr. Knickerbocker at the time and told a fellow employee as I was opening the CD package something to the effect of, “I expect to be amazed at what I was about to hear” in light of the greatness that was “Kid A,” greatness of which I hope to elucidate in this post. Amnesiac continued the artistic and musical themes of “Kid A,” but it was the latter that captured my imagination and my heart.

I came to appreciate and adore Radiohead’s musical innovation and lyrical power fairly late in the game. Somehow I missed a lot of the hype surrounding the band’s first single, “Creep,” and its first record, “Pablo Honey” (1993). I also largely missed out on the band’s 1995 release, “The Bends,” and didn’t listen until sometime in the late 1990s after a friend recommended it. And even when I listened, I was on the fence about whether I actually liked most of it or not. I was a big fan of “Fake Plastic Trees,” but the rest of the album took some time for me to process. It grew on me by slow degrees. In fact, Radiohead’s DVD release, “7 Television Commercials” (1998), which was a collection of music videos from “The Bends” and the band’s next album, “OK Computer” (1997), had a lot to do with me getting into the band in more than just a casual way. The video for “Paranoid Android,” much like the song, was a wild and frantic ride, while the production for “Fake Plastic Trees,” all bright and colorful juxtaposed against the rather dull backdrop of a grocery store or retail outlet, punctuated a statement about the often artificial and superficial nature of society and culture.

But it was the video for “No Surprises” that spoke to me in ways that I hadn’t experienced before that point with Radiohead.

“Twinkle” is more of a visual word, but the opening guitar riff twinkles with the same beauty as the opening flashes of light reveal that Thom Yorke is inside a glass chamber or helmet that is slowly filling with water, which could symbolize the opening lines:

A heart that’s full up like a landfill

A job that slowly kills you

Bruises that won’t heal

As the song continues, the singer is sinking literally and figuratively under the weight of life until he makes the fateful decision:

I’ll take the quiet life

A handshake with carbon monoxide

With no alarms and no surprises

No alarms and no surprises

Silent

And finally, there is a moment of release at the end when he rises out of the water and relishes the sight of a “pretty house” and “such a pretty garden.” Watching this video was one of the most touching and inspiring moments of my early adulthood such that I could write an entire essay on this song alone, but the point is that this particular video symbolized for me the sense of existential dread that I was beginning to feel about life — trapped in this world and this life, surrounded by peril and knowing full well that there was only way out of the world, as Dave Matthews wrote. The feeling was made stronger by the fact that I was suffering from severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease at the time and, however much I felt isolated and alone in my social life, I was even more depressed by my health situation. I couldn’t walk very far without getting tired, and I felt physically trapped by my circumstances. In a word, I was drowning, and no one could stop my slow march toward the grave. So, in this video, in just three minutes, Radiohead summarized for me, in a very personal way, my own struggle and hopeful liberation from certain annihilation. (After living with breathing problems for all of my childhood and most of my adult life, that liberation finally came in the form of a lung transplant three years ago.)

In any case, this is the backdrop for which I arrived at “Kid A” in the early 2000s. I listened to “Kid A” three times all the way through to prepare to write this piece because, number one, it’s a joy to let the pulsating beats and rhythms wash over me again and again, but number two, I wanted to listen for things that I might have missed before or open myself up to any new revelations about the music.

I chose “Kid A” for this list over “OK Computer” because, while the latter certainly has more than a few sublime songs, among them “Exit Music (For a Film),” “Let Down,” “Karma Police,” “Lucky” and the aforementioned, “Paranoid Android,” “Kid A’s” aesthetic and artistic direction spoke to me in the ways that few albums have. First, consider the artwork, which was created by the band’s longtime artist, Stanley Dunwood. The darkened and almost sinister looking background beyond the snowcapped mountains. The erupting volcanos. The rough-hewn lines and jagged edges. The void and barren landscape. The viewer brought almost to eye-level with the mountain peaks, as if floating in suspended animation as the artwork trails off in an ocean of white space and fractured lines.

This approach echoes that of the music, and generally, listeners get a sense that modernity itself is fractured, and the songs, awash with drum machines, synths, sparse guitar and Thom Yorke’s sometimes confident and buoyant, sometimes barely audible falsetto drowned out in a wail of noise, is all part of the plan.

Everything in its right place.

This album holds the position of number three on my list because first, it represents elements of my own existential philosophy, which I more or less adopted as a student at Lander (Greenwood, S.C.) and Clemson University (Clemson, S.C.) after studying the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Albert Camus and others. For more on Radiohead’s tie to philosophy, see The Pennds: An Academic Approach to Radiohead:

Here is how it goes: In OK Computer, we stare into an impending and growing nihilistic despondency. In Kid A and Amnesiac, we are submerged in it. In Hail to the Thief, we are lamenting over it and losing faith. In In Rainbows, we accept it and trudge forward nonetheless. This is the story of a band that grew up and got comfortable, as much as they could, living in a world in which they felt they did not belong.

That leads me to the second reason why “Kid A” holds such a revered position with me. “Kid A” is about not belonging. It’s about losing one’s individuality and identity in a world consumed by consumerism, by popular culture, by all of the trappings of modernity. It’s about being drowned out in the claptrap. It’s about feeling invisible and the erasure of self. And it’s about disappearing completely.

The combination of the tracks, “Everything In Its Right Place;” “The National Anthem” with its blaring cacophonous wonder; “How To Disappear Completely,” with a swirl of strings and falsetto; “Optimistic;” “Idioteque;” “Morning Bell” and “Motion Picture Soundtrack” present a relatively cohesive and bleak musical aesthetic of one who is lost in the modern collective, never to be found.

Finally, I come to the album’s final song, “Motion Picture Soundtrack,” a devastating — devastating — song, with the accompanying video, that never fails to send chills up and down my spine.

The speaker in the song, presumably Thom Yorke or a character of his creation, is addressing his unrequited love and describing how desperate he is for her:

Red wine and sleeping pills

Help me get back to your arms

Cheap sex and sad films

Help me get where I belong

She interjects and says, “I think you’re crazy, maybe” and in the beginning of the video for the song, the words, “I’d really like to help you,” are etched into the sky, as if to suggest that the subject of this guy’s affections really cares for him but nonetheless sees how desperate he has become and must stay away. The music video for the song, which I watched over and over ad infinitum in my Mr. Knickerbocker days, pans through the bleak “Kid A” artwork landscape as if it was a real place. The camera then changes to a wintry scene in which a person is laying in the snow and another person, presumably the subject of the speaker’s forlorn desires, is gingerly walking away from the dying man as frozen precipitation cascades down.

Thus, the one thing that matters above all other more cerebral concerns — philosophy or statements about societal status or individuality — is love, but even in that, the speaker feels lost, alone, isolated and abandoned. What “Kid A” lacks in comfort or optimism — despite a song that is actually titled “Optimistic” — it makes up for in emotion, power and a coherent aesthetic. This album, and knowing that others have struggled with feeling small, alienated and lost by circumstances or by the culture, has helped me through many a dark day and because of that, “Kid A” will always hold a treasured place in my heart.

Lost Between the Notes: My Top 10 Album Reviews, Part 1

Before you run away from me / Before you’re lost between the notes
The beat goes round and round / The beat goes round and round — Radiohead, “Jigsaw Falling Into Place”

***

I’m taking a little break today from more serious topics to start a series in which I review my top 10 influential albums of all time. I selected these albums based on emotional impact on me personally and quality of songs from top to bottom and not necessarily commercial success. I also limited the list to one album per artist. I don’t normally get too biographical here, but I thought this series would be a good exercise — number one, to give a renewed, close listen these albums again and perhaps, pick out elements that I might have missed before either lyrically or musically, and number two, to openly reckon with my own musical past about what these songs and albums have meant to me over the years or what they still mean to me. As such, some of these entries will feel more like traditional reviews of classic albums, while others will have a more personal bent. At the very least, I hope it makes for some interesting reading. And away we go …

Top 10 albums with five honorable mentions:

  1. Counting Crows: “August and Everything After”
  2. Hum, “You’d Prefer an Astronaut”
  3. Radiohead: “Kid A”
  4. R.E.M.: “Automatic for the People”
  5. Smashing Pumpkins: “Siamese Dream”
  6. +Live+: “Throwing Copper”
  7. Death Cab for Cutie: “Plans”
  8. Our Lady Peace: “Happiness Is Not a Fish That You Can Catch”
  9. The Beatles: “Magical Mystery Tour”
  10. Pearl Jam: “Vs.”

And the best of the rest:

  • Tool: “Lateralus”
  • Alanis Morisette: “Jagged Little Pill”
  • Hootie and the Blowfish: “Cracked Rearview”
  • The Cranberries: “No Need To Argue”
  • Bush, “Sixteen Stone”

“August and Everything After

It’s hard to overstate how much of an impact Counting Crows’ breakout debut album had on my life as a teenager. If, as a younger boy in middle school or junior high, The Beatles introduced me to rock and roll music and unlocked in me an emotional side unlike anything I had experienced up to that point, Counting Crows broke me open and helped me lay bare feelings that I either didn’t know I had or didn’t know how to access. I don’t remember ever crying while listening to a song before “August and Everything After” came along, but even today, when I get a fresh listen to songs like “Anna Begins,” “Sullivan Street” or “Raining In Baltimore,” the emotional weight of the lyrics, combined with the music and the vocals of lead singer Adam Duritz, not just singing the lyrics, but feeling and embodying the lyrics and sounding almost desperate at times in his delivery, often makes me tear up all over again.

Casual music fans will certainly know the high-water tracks “Mr. Jones” and “Round Here.” Indeed, it was on the strength of “Round Here,” a quintessential Counting Crows song with a poetic and vulnerable style of songwriting, and particular the band’s performance of it on “The Late Show with David Letterman” that really jump-started their popularity when fans realized that the band, and Adam’s singing style, reached an emotional depth that only a select number of bands actually achieve.

At the time, I was coming off an interest in 1980s and early 90s country music, oldies rock and roll, Billy Joel and other videos I saw on VH1. I discovered “August and Everything After” at a crucial and impressionable time in my life, and needless to say, the album struck a chord with me because before that point, I had never come across a band or songwriter that touched me to the same depths that Duritz’s songwriting touched me. His songs seemed to get at the core of who I was and what I was struggling with in the mid-1990s, and as I grew up with the band into adulthood and matured with the band, the lyrics remained poignant as I looked back and remembered the well-worn feelings of isolation or longing or despair that troubled me as a youth, and often still trouble me.

Drawn to the emotion of Counting Crows’ music, the band, along with others like R.E.M., The Beatles and Pearl Jam, inspired me to write my own poetry or music, but more than that, the imagery of Duritz’s lyrics, even today, is perhaps responsible for my preference, some 25 years later, for the color gray or for bleak and cloudy winter days.

Tyler Clark, with Consequence of Sound, described Duritz’s various gloomy images on “August” as melancholy snow globes:

In the scenes Counting Crows conjure, the season is a perpetual state of almost-winter, the weather overcast, the time of day always slightly later than it responsibly should be. Within these melancholy snow globes, Duritz grapples with woes both private and interpersonal, lit here and there by a bedroom lamp, a neon beer sign, the dome light of a car speeding all by itself down a long, dark road. 

“August” was the second or third CD I ever owned, and I also had the cassette version for playing in the car and in the Walkman. My obsession with this band and with this album ran deep. I don’t entirely remember the content, but I once gave a school presentation on the symbolic nature of the song, “Rain King.” I remember taking the album along on at least one or two summer trips with my family and either “forcing” my parents to play it over the car speakers — they were actually kind enough to play it for me and endure my new foray into alternative rock and roll music — or listening to the album through my headphones and not so quietly singing along.

And as a lasting testament to the inspiration I drew from Counting Crows, I had taken a Sharpie and wrote the line, “In August and Everything After, I’m After Everything,” on the back of my backpack in the same font style as the album cover above. The line came from a song that wasn’t on the album and was subsequently recorded and released in January of last year, but some of the lyrical fragments were visible on the album cover, and they spoke to me, namely, the line I wrote on the backpack, “I stumbled into Washington Square,” “I’m sorry” and “You look into her eyes, and it’s more than your (heart will allow) …” I couldn’t read the rest of the line in parenthesis, but these spoke to me about regret, longing and not knowing which direction to take or whether to take any direction at all. The actual line, “In August and Everything After, I’m After Everything” meant a lot to me personally because I was a shy or reserved child and struggled, not only to meet friends, but to meet girls, and the lyric suggested a kind of pessimistic hopefulness that things might be different once school started and new opportunities to meet people would abound, in contrast to the often lonely summer months when meeting new people was less likely. Duritz was born on Aug. 1, so for him the meaning of the line may have been more literal, but for me, it was the symbolic hope of a new start, a new start that, admittedly, I didn’t quite believe in.

But I nonetheless hoped.

I’ll go through a few of the songs that had the most impact on me as a teenager. The emotional depth and weight of these selected songs, along with my opinion that the album, as a cohesive piece of art, is strong from top to bottom, is the reason why it gets No. 1 billing on this list.

Round Here

Step out the front door like a ghost
Into the fog where no one notices the
Contrast of white on white.
And in between the moon and you the angels
Get a better view of the crumbling
Difference between wrong and right

The first track of the album, “Round Here,” opens with about 20 seconds of feedback leading into the main guitar riff that sets the tone for a song that seems to be about a person who is grappling with newfound freedom and doesn’t know which direction life is going to take, as was certainly the case for me as a teenager and into my early- to- mid-20s. That person may be living on their own and away from authority figures for the first time, and thus is able to do whatever they want (“We’re never sent to bed early and nobody stays up late”) or newly separated from a partner or both. In either case, the introductory lyrics suggest a narrator who doesn’t know how to find their place in the world.

It’s difficult for me to pinpoint exactly what this song means to me in concrete terms. Like many of these songs, there isn’t a particular person or memory that comes to mind when I listen to “Round Here” today, but it’s more like a feeling, the feeling of teenage angst, the feeling of being locked inside a set of rules under someone else’s roof, the longing for liberation and the bittersweet release of finally feeling free under a vacant sky, yet weighed down by loneliness, indecision and aimlessness or depression. When I’m in the car by myself and there is no one to hear or see me, and thus no self-consciousness, I can sometimes tap into raw emotion, put myself inside the lyrics of this song, wandering through the fog and trying to find my way in life, singing these lines near the end of the song:

Round here she’s always on my mind
Round here, hey man, I got lots of time
Round here we’re never sent to bed early and nobody makes us wait

then, as the swirling feelings of sadness, malcontent and anger mix and build, I sometimes find myself virtually screaming this climax:

Round here we stay up very, very, very late (!)

Perfect Blue Buildings

Just down the street from your hotel, baby
I stay at home with my disease
And ain’t this position familiar, darling
Well, all monkeys do what they see
Help me stay awake, I’m falling …

Adam has said this song is about insomnia, but I have always personalized this track, and particularly the lyrics, “I stay at home with my disease,” to reflect the breathing problems that I dealt with most of my adult life before I received a double lung transplant in February 2017. Over time, chronic breathing problems (“I stay at home with my disease”) breaks your will and in your worst moments, makes you want to stop participating in life (“There’s a dead man trying to get out”). Couple that with social problems — having trouble making new friends or meeting people and the depression that comes with it — and sometimes, you just want to stay inside and be left alone with your “disease,” and you come to prefer the dream world (“Asleep in perfect blue buildings/Beside the green apple sea”), what life could be when you close your eyes, to what life actually is.

Anna Begins

Other than the emotions associated with losing a love or feeling the loss of a love that only existed in the imagination or dreamworld, I, again, don’t have a specific memory or idea associated with “Anna Begins,” but it’s one of four or five songs on this record, along with “Round Here,” “Sullivan Street,” “Time and Time Again” and “Raining in Baltimore” that routinely summon strong feelings in me with each new listen. One thing I have always appreciated about Counting Crows is their ability to take the listener on an emotional journey in their songs, and this song has a buildup into the final chorus that sometimes brings tears and sometimes just makes me sing at the top of my lungs with Adam, feeling the pain of loss and longing and regret alongside the character in the song.

In “Anna Begins,” it seems that Anna and the speaker are exchanging doubts about whether the relationship will work or whether they’re even “ready for this sort of thing.” At first, “when kindness falls like rain,” Anna changes her mind. Later in the song, Anna changes his mind, and he reflects on how he loves even the little things about her (“Every time she sneezes I think it’s love, and oh lord, I’m not ready for this sort of thing”),” but despite this, he holds onto his doubts. Near the end of the song, when he finally decides he is ready for a relationship with her, it’s too late, and she’s gone:

Her kindness bangs a gong
It’s moving me along and Anna begins to fade away
It’s chasing me away
She disappears and
Oh Lord, I’m not ready for this sort of thing

Time and Time Again

I wanted so badly
Somebody other than me
Staring back at me
But you were gone

This is a wasteland of a song — lonely and barren — that comforted me in some of the moments that I have felt most alone. Like so many times traveling in the car by myself on the open road either going back and forth to Boston or South Carolina, listening to this song, I could imagine myself “traveling on a freeway beneath this graveyard western sky” heading deep into the desert outside California with nothing but the sky and the setting sun as a backdrop. This reminds me of another Counting Crows song called “John Appleseed’s Lament,” where the speaker in the song personifies the sky as a girlfriend or partner that keeps him company in the absence of others:

I call the wind Maria because I do not know her face
I call the endless sky Amelia
Because she stays with me from place to place
I call the sun my love Emmanuelle
Because she cradled me in her embrace

Sullivan Street

This one speaks to me of regret in love and loss and the eventuality of knowing that a relationship, sooner or later, is going to end (“Pretty soon now, I won’t come around”) and the ensuing loneliness and despair that will follow. When the first D chord hits whenever I fire up this song, it’s like my heart begins preparing for the emotions that are about to come flooding forth in the next four minutes. In the first verse, he is thinking about driving her home and already describing the relationship or memories of the relationship as “shadows,” and in the second verse, the couple has already broken up, and she is pretending not to know him. He is pretending not to care. By the third verse, he’s describing himself as “just another rider (or lover) burned to the ground.” While I can certainly relate to the experience of driving a girl home all the while doubting that the relationship is going to last, the song’s overall aesthetic — Adam’s voice, combined with the music and lyrics — brings up deep emotions almost every time I listen.

Raining In Baltimore

This is a simple and sad song about missing someone who is far away, and the solo instrument and Adam’s pained voice add to the effect. As I understand it, the speaker is in Baltimore and his love is 3,500 miles away across the country, and he is probably not going to see her again (“What would you change if you could?”).

Nonetheless, he is feeling utterly alone without her. He needs a phone call. A raincoat. A big love. A plane ride. A sunburn. He can’t get any answers or any change; except for the rain and missing her, everything else is the same.

A Murder of One

During Counting Crows’ This Desert Life tour, I got to see Counting Crows in Toledo, Ohio. I lived in South Carolina at the time, and being obsessed with the band as I was and since Toledo was one of the closest places they were coming to where I lived that summer, I took a road trip by myself. The concert was at the Toledo Park Zoo ampitheater. During that particular tour, Adam usually screamed “Step right up!” at the beginning of “A Murder of One,” which was a cue for people in the audience to jump up and down while the rest of the introduction was played before the opening verse. Already having had my fill of beer and under normal circumstances, I probably wouldn’t have budged, but on this night, I, along with couple thousand strangers, started bouncing together in sync, as if there was no longer any real world in which to return, as if we, alone — myself, my fellow Counting Crows fans and the band — experienced life as a singular entity under that dark globe of moonlight and stars. It was one of my more memorable concert experiences.

Jim Farber has said that “August and Everything After” painted a

fully credible portrait of a young man struggling to accept himself, to find some way to be comfortable in his own skin.

And perhaps that explains, more than anything, why I took to the album and the band so much. In 1993 when the album was released, I was in transition, not just musically, but emotionally and as a person. I wasn’t very attuned to my own emotions. I didn’t have great self-esteem, and I had trouble meeting people, especially girls. I didn’t know who I wanted to be, and I was unsure of where I was headed. I didn’t know how I felt about life or that it was even OK to have feelings or to express them as a boy. Even if I sometimes felt alone in life, I somehow felt less alone when I hit play on the album with the knowledge that someone else, somewhere, had experienced similar feelings. In “August” and in Duritz’ lyrics, I found that it was acceptable to have and express deep emotional feelings. Like I suppose many others have in my situation, as impressionable teenagers just beginning to dabble in a new world, a newly discovered amalgamation of poetry and song, I found a kind of kindred spirit in Duritz and the work of Counting Crows, and I found a voice, even if it was someone else’s, in music and meaning that would inspire me to create my own for decades to come.

In August and everything after, I was after everything.

Trump vs. Kelly: ‘Couples therapy’

After finally getting around to watching Megyn Kelly’s interview with Donald Trump — it’s surprisingly hard to find the full video, and most copies online appear to be edited hack jobs for either supporters or haters of Trump  — I can say that, despite Kelly’s assertion that “it’s not about me” when asking Trump about his nasty retweets in which he called her a “bimbo,” that statement certainly seems like a microcosm of the entire interview: It was absolutely, 100 percent about her.

Kelly obviously has no shortage of talent. She hit the ground running at Fox News in 2004 and her celebrity has been on the rise and growing ever since, arguably reaching or eclipsing that of her long-time associates Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity.

To her credit, she claims to be an independent on a conservative network that doesn’t even pretend to be “fair and balanced” anymore, and she hit Donald Trump as hard as anyone during the August 2015 debate when she questioned his character in making numerous “disparaging” comments about women:

But that Megyn Kelly — detached, steely eyed, uncowed — was far from the person who sat across from Trump earlier this week. This Megyn Kelly was soft, amicable, introspective and almost psychoanalytical in her attempts, mostly unsuccessful, to unearth the inner crust of Donald Trump. She asked him about his alcoholic and now dead brother, his perceived mistakes on the campaign trail, his regrets and his emotional wounds. Watch the interview with closed eyes and you may, for a second, forget this is a conservation between two highly privileged celebrities and imagine a psychiatry patient laying on the couch talking to his shrink.

megyn kelly donald trump

Fox

There is no psychoanalyzing Donald Trump. Donald Trump gets out of bed every morning based on the strength of three simple things: his wealth, his power and his own aura. That’s it. Yet, in this interview, Kelly, in pure Barbara Walters wannabe form and not half as probing, asked few follow-up questions and even minimized moments when Trump, seemingly unapologetic and unrepentant as ever, was at his most obnoxious.

During what was probably the most memorable part of the interview, Kelly alerted Trump to the fact that he had called her a bimbo multiple times on social media, to which Trump just donned a boyish grin, leaned in and issued an almost mocking “excuse me,” as if he had just cut her off at the checkout line. Kelly, failing to use that opportunity to reclaim some of her earlier fire and ask a tough question, just recoiled and smiled. After an awkward pause and a creepy, sustained grin from Trump, he continued, noting that he, using ethical discretion like a true gentleman, did not retweet some of the harsher comments on Twitter.

Indeed, the only time Trump revealed anything interesting about himself was when he commended Kelly for coming to him and seeking reconciliation after the imbroglio last year. “I have great respect for you that you were able to call me and say let’s get together and lets talk,” Trump said. “For me, I would not have done that. I don’t say that as a positive. I think it’s a negative for me.”

Aside from that admission, this was, as Poynter Institute’s James Warren noted, far from Frost-Nixon. Here is Warren:

Why might a cynic have wondered if Megyn Kelly’s primetime Fox network interview with Donald Trump would fall short of David Frost’s evisceration of former President Richard Nixon? Might it have been the afternoon tweet and photo from a beaming Trump himself, his arm around a grinning Kelly, her arm around his back, and the declaration, “I will be live tweeting my interview with ‪@megynkelly on the Fox Network tonight at 8! Enjoy!” (@realDonaldTrump) Or was it the night before, on the Bravo cable channel, when she conceded that she’d once not just touched his hair but “run my fingers through it” to see if he wore a wig.

So no, despite the “big fight feel” implied by advertisements leading up to the interview, this was not Kelly’s breakout moment as a long-form interviewer.

This was simply theater masquerading as a hard-hitting interview. I don’t know if Trump and Kelly went over some of the questions she was going to ask beforehand, but did anyone really think that she was going to walk into Trump Tower, recreate a working relationship with the real estate mogul just to pepper him with a relent barrage of questions a la the August 2015 debate? They both realized that to make the interview seem genuine, Kelly was going to have to ask an uncomfortable question or two, but this was never going to be a whole-cloth take-down of Trump.

It was not even about policy or Trump’s character. It was almost exclusively about Trump and Kelly, and as Trevor Noah brilliantly summarized recently, amounted to little more than high-profile “couples therapy” after a breakup. Frankly, if people Connie Chung, Katie Couric and Barbara Walters are the benchmarks, Kelly’s interview looked rather pedestrian by comparison.

Indomitable spirit: A note on Prince

A conversation just before the Super Bow XLI halftime show:

Bruce Rodgers, Super Bowl production designer: We’re in this truck sitting behind Don Mischer. I remember Don said, “Put me on the phone with Prince.” Don says, “Alright. Now I want you to know it’s raining.”

Bruce: And Prince is like, “Yes, it’s raining.”

Don: “And are you OK?”

Bruce: And Prince is like, “Can you make it rain harder?” And I was like, “Right on.”

***

I was never the biggest fan of Prince’s music, but came to appreciate how unbelievably talented he was, especially on vocals and guitar, his untouchable presence on stage and his connection with fans.

Prince was better at playing multiple instruments than many of us will ever be at anything. He played almost all of the instruments on his first few albums and has produced his own work since the age of 21.

I’m not going to do the overdramatic stuff about how it was a real loss because every death is a real loss. But I just appreciate his virtuosic talent and what he meant to the music industry for more than 30 years.

Here’s the video from his performance during the 2007 Super Bowl in the pouring rain:

[Cover photo credit: Getty]