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Everyday is both the title of DMB’s most recent blockbuster disc and the frequency with which you’re likely to hear the band’s music, regardless of whether you actually want to. Let’s be honest, though. There’s lots to cherish about Matthews and his groove-heavy, love-hungry pop. Die-hard fans tend to get hung up on a recent shift in the group’s MO. Early on, it was their jammy, almost jazzy disposition that endeared the band to alt-rock fans. These days, it’s an increasing penchant for brevity and outright radio-readiness that move Matthews units. The extended jams and hyper-athletic solos are still a primary ingredient of the live set—if only to justify the $44.25 ticket—but the band has certainly reined in its aesthetic, creating something that’s more instantly saleable. For better? For worse? Judge for yourself. Meanwhile, we can’t help but observe that, for a guy who seemed hell-bent on emulating Sting at the outset of his big mid-’90s breakthrough, Matthews appears to be a little behind schedule—he still hasn’t 86’d his bandmates, starred in a sci-fi movie, or grown totally aloof. Tick-tock, sir, tick-tock.

In the rock world, cover bands are too often dismissed as cop-outs who either can’t or won’t be bothered to come up with their own original repertoire. There’s more tolerance for such cribbing in the jazz realm, where so much of the genre’s best music still cries out for spontaneous reworking. Still, it’s a rare recording artist who’ll cover the Monkees without so much as a wink, let alone a jazz singer as competent and captivating as Cassandra Wilson. Proven as a fearless, well-rounded interpreter of familiar standards and unlikely selections from the pop, rock, and blues canons, the Mississippi-born and Manhattan-transplanted Wilson consistently surprises. Belly of the Sun—her first new album since 1999’s Miles Davis tribute Traveling Miles—falls right in that same beautifully crooked line, offering emotive twists on songs like the Band’s “The Weight” and Glen Campbell’s classic “Wichita Lineman.” We’d be tempted to write off this brand of calculated spontaneity as novelty. But she’s got killer pipes, spellbinding presence, some lovely originals, and genuinely eclectic musical ideals to back it up. Great taste in the studio, too, but the live stage is where this lady shines.

We can’t speak to the current whereabouts of Bubbles the Chimpanzee, but among the rest of Michael Jackson’s former sidekicks, Sheryl Crow (an ex-backup singer for his freaky pop Highness) seems to enjoy the most far-reaching success. The sunny pop-rock of her long—awaited new record may not rewrite the rule book on Top 40 escapism, but at least this fetching singer-songsmith knows her way around a guitar. C’mon, C’mon even delivers the best musical tribute to an actor (“Steve McQueen”) since what’s-her-name did that “David Duchovny” song. Indeed, if Madonna ever manages to curb her tendency toward Jacko-like self-absorption, she’ll do well to follow Crow’s example by letting her own personality come through in her music again. In Sheryl’s case, that means knocking out a thoroughly believable mix of humor and hurt, even spinning a few golden threads in a duet with fellow VH1 mainstay Don Henley (“It’s So Easy”). Go on, girl. Speaking of duets, that’s Liz Phair singing backups on a Jolly Rancher of a single, “Soak Up the Sun,” lending credence to our suspicion that the two may be related.

The folks at Island Records assured us we’d be on the guest list for last month’s Ryan Adams show at the Orpheum. We weren’t. Bent on revenge (we paid for parking and everything!), we threw a dart at the label’s spring release calendar and vowed to publish a ruthless slag of whichever forthcoming album met its menacing steel tip. Lucky for them, the would-be victim turned out to be Elvis Costello, who’s way too cool to be swept up in our petty little grudges. In his own words, Elvis’ When I Was Cruel is “a rowdy rhythm record,” marking a full recovery from his recent bout of balladeering alongside the likes of Burt Bacharach and Anne Sofie von Otter. Good timing, El—that whole retro-lounge thing was, like, so 90s. Distorted guitars abound on the new album, as do the tactile and literate phrasings that earned Britain’s most fiercely human rock star his rep. He doesn’t get name-checked as often as Nick Drake these days, but Costello’s influence is manifest; post-post-punk comers from Ben Folds to Phantom Planet owe him big, and Rhino’s recent reissue of This Year’s Model is just one piece of material evidence. It’s about time a four-eyed 40-something other than Spike Lee got us pumped up for summer.

It’s easier than ever to love movies, yet harder than ever to prove yourself a bona fide movie-lover. When home theaters have displaced pool tables as the most prevalent rec-room fixture, and the guys on KFAN are just as likely to jaw about box office figures as T-wolves stats, it takes a certain amount of dedication and genuine curiosity to set yourself apart from the multiplex masses. In that spirit, your office Oscar-pool winnings are well-spent on a pass to this year’s MSPIFF, and not just for an all-you-can-watch value that rivals anything in your Happenings coupon book. Now in its 20th year, the region’s biggest and best film fest makes the Independent Film Channel look like the WB, boasting more than 100 films from all over the planet (browse the full schedule at www.ufilm.org). Director and consummate film geek Peter Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show) headlines the opening night kickoff at the State Theatre, appearing in the flesh to introduce The Cat’s Meow, his new movie starring Kirsten Dunst and Eddie Izzard (cast as a Prohibition-era hottie and Charlie Chaplin, respectively); promising series include roundups of Chinese and children’s films. Homegrown highlights include the premiere of the locally shot Wooly Boys (featuring Peter Fonda and Kris Kristofferson) and a revival of 2000’s hilarious I Hate Babysitting! from local filmmaker Tara Spartz. But there’s nothing provincial about this globe-spanning, genre-swirling event. Our butts are already aching in sublime anticipation!

I shuffled past the television this morning—March 11, the six-month anniversary of the shots heard round the world—in time to see Lisa Beamer on the Today Show, weeping at the behest of Katie Couric. (At 45, the terminally pert Couric is still the cutest succubus on television.) My first thought, I’m ashamed to say, was this: It can’t be very easy anymore, crying on cue that way. In recent months anyone who surfs the news programs has been subjected to Lisa Beamer’s teary face on every outlet worth mentioning. The soundtrack is always the same, a snippet from Elvis Costello’s “Pills & Soap”: “They talk to the sister, the father and the mother/ With a microphone in one hand and a checkbook in the other/ And the camera noses in to the tears on her face…”

Mrs. Beamer, as everyone knows by now, was the wife of the late Todd Beamer, one of the principals in the passenger uprising on United Flight 93, the hijacked jet that crashed in a Pennsylvania field. Lately she’s all over the tube again. There was the birth of her daughter in January, now the 9/11 anniversary—and sandwiched between the two, the revelation that she is trying to copyright her husband’s endlessly regurgitated parting salvo, “Let’s roll!” “We believe we own ‘Let’s roll’ because Todd said it and it was attributed to him,” says Beamer’s attorney, Paul Kennedy. “We’re going to do all that’s necessary to protect that.” Well, a widow’s got to do what a widow’s got to do. Meantime she is also preparing a memoir (tentatively called Let’s Roll!—of course) to be published in September (of course, of course…) by the Christian publishing firm Tyndale House, purveyors of the mega-selling Left Behind novels of religious apocalypse.

I was curious to know just how many times Beamer has spoken to the press since 9/11, so I tracked down one of her publicists, Helen Cook. Cook didn’t profess to have an exact count, but agreed that 200 or so would be a reasonable estimate. No wonder she has a personal media representative and at least two outside PR guns. Even before her book deal she was named one of People’s “25 Most Intriguing People of 2001.” Intriguing, hell. She’s hot—in a wistful, understated way that becomes her young widowhood. She is also articulate and relentlessly upbeat. The media never tire of her.

And God knows she never tires of them. Beamer’s utter lack of compunction about repeatedly baring her grief and the mundane, intimate details of her family’s life on television may be, in her mind, the dutiful expression of her evangelical Christianity (evangelicals are taught never to shy from any opportunity for witnessing, especially an electronic one), but it reaches the rest of us as something else: just another spasm of celebrity self-disclosure, albeit of an unusual sort. Her ubiquity on the news magazine shows has already spawned countless jokes: Hi, this is Lisa Beamer. Could you let Diane Sawyer know that on Thursday I’m going to be taking my kids to the mall for the first time since Todd’s death? Get back to me soon—Jane Pauley is all over me on this one.

All right, one might say, but what exactly is so terrible about that? It may be unseemly, but at worst the only sin of Lisa Beamer and her media patrons is banality. That’s entirely too facile and too generous. There is an irreducibly private dimension to real grief, a point at which one’s own words and the kind intentions of others all run to ground and we can only bear what follows in silence. And that silence is not a bad thing; it’s a measure of respect, for oneself and for what is lost, as well as an acknowledgment of the hard things we all must bear on our own eventually. The media’s incessant flogging of Beamer’s story, and her eager collaboration in it, amount to a grotesque comment on the very idea of grief and loss. They take catastrophic personal tragedy and cheapen it by making it feel like a publicity stunt—a set of gestures repeatedly enacted for the cameras.

The syndicated cartoonist Ted Rall dared suggest as much in his February 28 posting, entitled “Terror Widows.” In a series of six panels it paints the 9/11 survivors making the talk show rounds as callow showbiz apparatchiks. “The unbearable grief of the empty spot in your conjugal bed must weigh down your heart with unimaginable pain,” says a Good Morning America interviewer to one of them. “Huh?” she replies. “Oh, yeah, definitely.” Rall’s cartoon was pulled from the New York Times and Washington Post web sites after some 9/11 families cried foul. To his credit Rall was unrepentant, going so far as to call Lisa Beamer’s behavior “cynical, crass, and gauche.”

Also sinister, for reasons quite apart from her own motives. Remember always that in wartime, propaganda is a chief preoccupation of government and its major media adjuncts. This means, at the most obvious level, a ceaseless and numbing proliferation of caricatured heroes and villains. Yes, the police and firefighters caught up in the events of September 11 demonstrated courage and dedication. But after you have assented to this proposition a few hundred times, it tends to lose its savor and even its meaning. Or rather the meaning changes—genuine instances of heroism and sacrifice become nothing more than veiled warnings, inducements to the rest of us to keep our mouths shut and rally round the flag.

Which brings us to the centerpiece of the six-month anniversary commemorations, CBS’s abundantly hyped 9/11 documentary. It was a mess, frankly, marred by studiously cool narration that talked too much and refused to let the footage on the screen stand on its own as the ultimate verité document it could have been. 9/11 was assembled in a manner that militated against any direct experience by the viewer of what was happening. Watching it you could almost suppose that the Trade Center bombings were staged as the mother of all training exercises, a backdrop against which good men could prove their mettle. Like the Beamer saga and all the other wretched post-attack uplift pieces, it strained too much to present September 11 as all heroism and no horror. And that is the falsest, most demeaning note of all.

Steve Perry is a contributing editor to The Rake. He can be reached at steve@rakemag.com.