Author: rakemag

With due respect to Dirk Diggler, there’s never been a better film about empty sex and failed optimism than 1975’s Shampoo. As dim-witted hair stylist Warren Beatty dutifully knocks boots with Goldie Hawn, Julie Christie, Lee Grant, and Carrie Fisher, you can almost hear the cynicism of the Nixon era grabbing hold of the American consciousness. A new print of this titillating and politically tinted gem is the centerpiece of an inspired Oak Street retrospective, revisiting the career highlights of the late director Hal Ashby. He may never have picked up a Best Director prize on Oscar night—he was only nominated in the category once, for 1978’s fearless Vietnam flick Coming Home, which will be included here—but he remains responsible for some of the coolest and most distinctive movies this side of whatever Wes Anderson is working on now. From the dark comedy and unorthodox romanticism of the cult-favorite Harold and Maude to the gently intrepid satire of the classic Peter Sellers pic Being There, Ashby specialized in sharply scripted, character-driven fare.

Here’s the feel-paranoid hit of the season. Nicole Kidman was originally slated to star in this dark, suspense-filled doozy from director David Fincher, but one too many can-can kicks on the set of Moulin Rouge forced her to back out at the last minute. Thankfully, her replacement is the all-too-scarce Jodie Foster. Fans of the original Clarice Starling can count on more than a little of her sizzle in this claustrophobic thriller. Panic Room centers on a hellacious night in the life of a New York divorcee whose spacious new brownstone is invaded by a trio of treasure-seeking felons (Forrest Whitaker, Dwight Yoakam, and a brutally corn-rowed Jared Leto). She and her daughter hole up in a special high-tech mini-fortress built into the house for just such a terrifying occasion. With a tension-monger like Fincher (Seven, Fight Club) at the helm, you can smell the shadowy interiors and perilous scenarios already—no wait, that’s the stale popcorn and “butter-flavored” topping. But you get the idea.

What ever happend to alt-rock? By now you’d think lanky white twenty-somethings armed with cheap guitars, drum kits, lightweight keyboards, and the odd sampler would’ve more or less exhausted the possibilities. Think again. In different ways, both Washington state’s Death Cab for Cutie and Washington, DC’s Dismemberment Plan prove there’s still room for growth in the American indie rock marketplace, even if most of their peers are content to spend semester after semester in a dreary post-Archers of Loaf purgatory. True, you can hear Death Cab for Cutie’s pretty collegiate pop for free on Radio K any day of the week. But the Dismemberment Plan’s Change is a roundly rewarding album you prolly won’t hear on the airwaves here. The lowest common denominator between rock and rap isn’t Fred Durst. It’s urgent self-affirmation. Plan singer Travis Morrison flaunts his anxious affinity for everything from quirky art-core to lovelorn poetics to Public Enemy and D’Angelo, and he never fakes the funk. Even though they’ve opened for Pearl Jam, these guys are not rock stars, nor will they ever be. Which tells you, after nearly ten years of fiercely independent music-making, there’s lots more to them than a graduate-level interest in literature and a really bad name.

An anonymous friend recently referred to Alison Krauss as the “prom queen of bluegrass,” and as snarky as that sounds, she oughta take it as a compliment. Already a favorite among fans of credible new-country and sprightly contemporary folk, her profile was raised a few extra notches last year by the unexpected success of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack and the old-tyme-music feeding frenzy that followed. Besides her lack of facial hair, a major difference between Krauss and other bandwagon beneficiaries is that her skill as a musician is both immediately apparent and way beyond novelty. She’s been a first-rate fiddler since puberty, and her versatile voice can muster high-lonesome laments the same as rollicking down-home pop. She’s gifted, popular, and easy on the eyes—which might make some of the cool kids jealous, but that’s their problem, isn’t it. If she’s as smart as we think she is, Krauss will acknowledge our appetite for the uppity old-school folk she and her Union Station cohorts do best, though they’ll undoubtedly dig into a few of the deeper, more modernist tracks from last fall’s New Favorite, too.

Cynics say he’s “pulled a Santana” by collaborating with Matchbox Twenty’s Rob Thomas and a host of other greenhorn superstars—Kid Rock, Sheryl Crow, and Lee Ann Womack among them—on his latest album, The Great Divide. But you can’t accuse Willie Nelson of selling out, because his plainspoken country-folk has lost none of its substance in his decades as an eclectic master of the singer-songwriter mode. The new stuff is less twangy and lots more radio-ready than 1998’s captivating Teatro, or even the best of his outlaw heyday, but if re-entering the pop charts after a long, awkward hiatus is such a crime, then that Bono guy should have been deported months ago. Live, Nelson is no more prone to stage dives or explosive outbursts than he is to getting a crewcut, and that’s as it should be. Even when he’s indulging a jones for drippy romance on the Thomas-penned “Maria (Shut Up and Kiss Me),” or dusting off a nugget like “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In),” he’s the kind of sturdy, soulful, instantly engaging cowboy poet that more jukeboxes could use. Nobody needs a “comeback” less than this handsome stranger, and though his output shows no signs of slowing, it’s a good idea to catch him while you can.

In the late 1950’s, when comics like Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, and Nichols & May were storming club stages across the country, turning stand-up on its head, a mumbling, unassuming accountant from Chicago was supplementing his income by writing and performing comedy bits for local radio. His tapes made their way to Warner Brothers, who propped Newhart on a stage to do his routines before a live audience for the very first time. It was in the Tidelands Club in Houston, and the recording, released in 1960 as The Button-Down Mind, sold over 1.5 million copies. Newhart received a Grammy for Album of the Year and Best New Artist. His follow-up albums led to success in two sitcoms, portraying the same character—that mumbling, stammering, basset hound-eyed Everyman—throughout his career. We can only hope routines like “The Introduction of Tobacco to Civilization,” “Driving Instructor,” and “The Man Who Looked Like Hitler” are in the line-up when Newhart picks up the mike again and stammers live at Orchestra Hall.

More than a decade ago, Thompson released an extraordinary album called Small Town Romance which featured the man and his acoustic guitar unaccompanied, recorded live at the Bottom Line in New York City. It was one of those records that became a soundtrack for unspeakable personal heartbreak. Thompson later asked to have the record delisted—he supposedly wasn’t happy with it—but thank goodness it’s still in print. It’s a wonder he felt that way, since he’s one of the hardest working modern-day troubadors in the business, and this disk comes closest to capturing the man doing what he does best. Never mind all those years Dick spent at the head of folk-rock paragons Fairport Convention, or atop The Best Records Of All Time List (Shoot Out the Lights with ex-wife Linda). Some of us prefer to keep our mistakes within arm’s reach, the better to avoid repeating ourselves—but sometimes there’s nothing as beautiful as a train-wrecked relationship, or a painfully honest live performance.

Now it can be told: When a federal judge ordered the break-up of Wu-Tang Clan Corporation back in 1993, he was acting in the interest of fair competition. The Clan had established a formidable market monopoly with its gritty, esoteric alternative to Cali gangsta funk, bundling cinematic kung fu lore together with its jagged, rubbernecking rhymes, spare beats, and crackling minor-key string samples. Some market rivals cried foul, prompting an investigation that would uncover a wealth of hostile e-mail threads stored on various Wu-Tang hard drives. (“Wu-Tang Clan ain’t nothin’ to [mess] with!” read one particularly damning memo from the RZA, longtime president and CEO of the enterprise.) But dismantling the dominant hip-hop juggernaut served only to strengthen its overall market position as various corporate offshoots—most notably Method Man Inc., Ghostface Killah Ltd., and the much-scrutinized offshore venture Ol’ Dirty Bastard International LLC—continued to outperform their direct competitors throughout the 90s. Subsequent deregulation of the industry at large has allowed for a controlled reorganization of the original company, and with the release of its new product, Wu-Tang Iron Flag, its commitment to tireless power-branding and synergistic hip-hop initiatives continue to yield high margins both fiscally and aesthetically. Now, please don’t come and kill us.

There’s a theory that good economic times breed conservative bubblegum pop and bad times generate the other kind of music, a theory with legs, when you consider the Long Boom’s saccharine soundtrack starring Britney Spears, ’N Sync, the Backstreets, and countless others we begrudge for taking up a whole sentence in the mentioning. Where was Billy Bragg during all this time—our modern-day Woody Guthrie, our English Bob Dylan, our postpunk folknik savior? He sired at least one little Bilbo Braggins, moved out of London to Dorset, and prudently lay low. Who can forget Bragg’s astonishing debut back in 1984, Life’s A Riot With Spy Vs. Spy? More political than any American folkie has ever been, what distinguished Bragg from other British tubthumpers was the fact that his music wailed, and we found ourselves singing all the words a capella in the car. When Nora Guthrie got fresh to him belatedly in the mid-90s, Woody’s daughter and spiritual executor hired him to finish dozens of Guthrie originals that had lyrics but no music. The result was Billy’s celebrated collaboration with Wilco, The Mermaid Avenue disks. That all went so well that Bragg made good his inevitable return—this time fully ensconsed in a five-piece band. Here’s England, Half English, which is a great record not only because it’s a great record, but because it sends us into the closet, digging around behind those old pea coats and suede smoking jackets in search of vinyl, dusting off that filthy turntable to hear secret classics like “Levi’s Stubb’s Tears,” and “St. Swithen’s Day.”

It’s no longer surprising to see rock’s most strident singer-songwriters seduced by the siren ProTools. Nor is it anything new to hear erstwhile guitar gods discovering the joys of the synthesizer (even Eddie Van Halen had a soft spot for that Vangelis flavor) or diving headlong into largely electronic sonic experiments. Still, there’s something unnerving about the opening minutes of Bob Mould’s new solo disc, his first since 1998’s The Last Dog & Pony Show. The digi-pop ditty “180 Rain” opens with a few bars of musical telemetry before the plaintive post-punker’s voice slides in from somewhere off in the ether. The absence of guitars is suspicous enough for starters, but when his vocal steps up into a Vocoder-treated refrain—we swear it’s like Cher’s “Believe” or Kid Rock’s “Only God Knows”—it begs the question: Has Bob lost his freaking mind? The lyrics and linear pop arrangements are definitely more Pet Shop Boys than Autechre though he does achieve some beautifully tweaked textures, especially on the instrumental “Without?” and “Homecoming Parade.” There are plenty of guitars, melodic hooks, and satisfying Mould-school anthemics elsewhere on the album, but anyone still tethered to a bygone Hüsker heyday had better find a sturdy chair. The rumors that the former Sugar daddy has been writing scripts for pro wrestling are true, by the way, but we guarantee you won’t hear anything off Modulate on this week’s episode of SmackDown.