Reviews
 Keep It Simple
Van Morrison
Roger McGuinn @ the Huntington IMAC, Long Island, NY - April 4, 2008
Emily Saxe @ the Allen Room/Jazz at Lincoln Center - April 5, 2008
Another Country
Tift Merritt
Be Your Own Pet
Get Awkward
Paul McCartney – The McCartney Years (DVD)
Juno – Music from the Motion Picture
Various Artists
Yes - Their Definitive Story
Day and Night Driving
Seven Mary Three
InterMedia Arts Center 2/2/08
Huntington, NY
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Michael Penn
As the 90's set in, the compact disc had fulfilled its inevitable destiny by overtaking both vinyl and cassette sales, changing forever the way prerecorded music would be marketed. Once the CD was readily available, record companies wasted no time at all in discontinuing the availability of vinyl, which of course sounded the death knell for the once so popular seven-inch single. With alarming immediacy, turntables were becoming as old-fashioned as wind-up Victrolas, with most people packing up their albums into storage or selling them off for cash.
The profitability of the shift in focus to CDs was staggering. Once the record companies determined that the market could easily bear the exorbitant price increase, the move away from vinyl was almost cathartic. Consumers were mostly pleased with the technological marvel of the new format and didn’t complain about the ridiculous pricing increases, believing the initial claims of the CDs’ alleged indestructibility and perfect digital sound, as well as the myth that they were much more expensive to produce. Now that everybody owns a few CD's that refuse to play because of surface damage, and record companies now complain that albums are too expensive to manufacture cost-effectively, we know better. Nevertheless, it’s too late to resurrect the now-dying vinyl format, and instead of laying out seven or eight bucks for an LP, we pay almost twenty bucks a pop for a compact disc. All hail Western consumerism and the system of free enterprise. Compound the increased interest in new releases that resulted from curiosity over the new format by the proliferation of fans who were suddenly interested in re-purchasing large portions of their collection and you end up with windfall profits for the record labels and the artists who specialized in the classic album format. Losers were the singles artists and the vinyl single that once provided their income. By the 90's, songs could obtain the #1 singles position with only a fraction of the sales that were required fifteen or twenty years ago.
No doubt about it, the long-playing compact disc ruled. Other formats - the three-inch CD single, for example, or the cas-single, or even the twelve-inch vinyl single - competed for consumer dollars by trying to become the format of choice for the new short-play format. Unfortunately, none caught on to any great degree, making it necessary for an artist to complete full-length recordings before they could be deemed marketable (and more profitable). This paved the way for somebody as marginally talented as M.C. Hammer to come on as though he were going to be the next Beatles or Michael Jackson when, in fact, he was little more than a precursor for someone as completely untalented as Vanilla Ice. Hammer's single, "You Can't Touch This", was only available on twelve-inch vinyl (unless, of course, you wanted to buy the full-length CD) so it rose no higher than #8 while the CD that contained it went to #1 for twenty-one weeks. Vanilla Ice was the next to benefit, with his singles "Ice Ice Baby" and "Play That Funky Music" reaching #1 (for one week) and #4, respectively, while the full-length CD, To The Extreme, was a #1 record for sixteen solid weeks. With a dearth of format choices, individual songs that got a lot of airplay caused long-playing compact discs and cassettes to sell in quantities that were once reserved for the inexpensive 7” vinyl single. In this way, rap had finally conquered the charts, with one rule of thumb; the more benign the artist, the more successful the act.
This affected Michael Penn no more and no less than anybody else who existed on the fringe of the major labels’ interests, except that his label needed to figure out where he fit in to the equation. Penn (yes, actors Sean and Christopher are his kid brothers) presented a problem because his label (RCA) had trouble categorizing him, and actually had to do some work to get his record heard, but it turned out to be worth the effort. He was aided in this by the rebirth of contemporary hit radio as a viable format, which welcomed concise, melodic music for constant rotation between commercials. He wasn't as readily packageable as other C.H.R. stars - such as New Kids On The Block, Wilson Phillips, Paula Abdul or Janet Jackson - so he was going to have to make it or break it solely on the appeal of his material. Luckily, Penn was plainly talented as a songwriter and performer, with a penchant for catchy pop hooks and intriguing words. "No Myth" cracked the hit radio market, as well as MTV and VH-1, while his follow-up, "This And That", broadened his base by charting simultaneously on the Modern Rock, Album Track, Adult Contemporary, and Hot 100 charts. He may not have been pleasing all of the people all of the time, but he was doing a good job of pleasing most of the people some of the time. By writing intelligent and artistically sound music, Penn was able to beat the music industry at its own game. While cyclical grooves, rhythm work-outs, and predictable commercial ditties dominated the charts, Penn implanted some substance into the marketplace by writing honest-to-goodness songs. While much of the rest of the industry had grown jaded and detached from something as old-fashioned as a melodic pop song, Penn reveled in his inventions. He didn't escape unscathed, though, as far as can be determined by his lyrics. "No Myth" lacks the innocence of a simpler age, which the singer recognizes is long gone, yet he longs for it and resents being trapped in an age of post-whatever.
As a well-regarded New-Age theorist from the Washington based think tank, the Rand Corporation, was expounding, "History" already happened (The End Of History And The Last Man by Francis Fukuyama). In a severely encapsulated nut-shell, Fukuyama attempts to prove that liberal democracy is the ideal arrangement for humanity, and now that it has conquered the world (thus ending our ageless search for a perfect ideology), it has satisfied the need for individuals to seek personal recognition. I don't know how to test the logic of such a theory, but I'm willing to bet next week's pay check that Fukuyama was a baby boomer. In one very unsettling sense, this was the ultimate insult that could be paid to anyone born after 1965, since it attempts to prove that anything of historical substance ended before they could influence a change.
This seems to be the cross that post-baby boomers have been destined to bear. How self-serving can we (I say 'we' since I myself was born at the tail end of the baby boom) possibly be? Is it possible that the rapidly graying ‘60’s set could get out of the way and let the next generations have their own identity? My God, we were a pain in the butt coming in (perhaps justifiably so), and now we're being a pain in the butt going out. We bombard our children with our own culture and shove our experiences down their throats, but we never let them share in them. As a result, their lack of identity becomes a means of identity, and we pretend that we can't figure out why. Contemporary culture does not have to be woven through the past, however. If this were true, then invention, creativity, ambition and romance are all already dead.
What bothers me most about this is the blithe acceptance of our myths by the present generation. It must have occurred to them that the “history has already happened” theorists could be very wrong- "What if I were Romeo in black jeans? What if I were Heathcliff? It's no myth." Penn denies the argument of fatalistic inevitability that his generation has become entrenched in, but he also remains warily realistic: "Maybe she's just looking for somebody to dance with." Either way, he deserves praise for trying to prove the value of artistic integrity, particularly since it came at a time when contemporary culture seemed to be ostracized from pop music as a means of identity. Paradoxically, Penn became an iconoclast by embracing tradition, while the cut-and-paste styles he competed against identified the pop culture of the early ‘90’s as little more than an assemblage of previous styles. While trying to convince us that the modern age is “No Myth” the cultural remains of a marketplace that ought to belong to an entirely new generation tries doggedly to prove otherwise.
 
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