Archive for the ‘Music’ Category

The Gospel according to Jim Krane: Dubai as savior of the Middle East, Palestinians

Monday, September 7th, 2009

Note: Posting will be more sporadic going forward. Now’s the time, if there ever was one, to hook up Google Reader and add this blog as an RSS feed, so your Reader will magically tell you when I’ve written something new.

Dubai in the 1960s.

Dubai in the 1960s.

Over at Steve Clemons’s The Washington Note, guest poster Jim Krane whipped up a storm last week by claiming that Dubai offers up an ideal model, one that other countries in the region should emulate. Call it the “Arabs need to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps” theory. I’m actually having a really difficult time trying to summarize the post, which is just all over the place, but I’ll give it a shot anyway:

  • The U.S. is prolonging the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and otherwise bringing destruction to the region.
  • The U.S. can’t fix the Middle East. The U.S. didn’t help Dubai. Arab countries need to serve their own interests.
  • How?  Follow Dubai’s business-before-politics model. Don’t bother trying to help the Palestinians or complaining about Israel.

Then, watch how Krane parries the straw-man counterargument!

But wait, Dubai is in financial trouble. How could it be a role model?

Dubai’s downturn is temporary. Being one of the world’s most globalized cities, it couldn’t help but be infected by a global recession. The contagion kneecapped each one of its economic pillars: Shipping, logistics, tourism, and its binging real estate sector. Most of these pillars remain sound.

I guess he meant to say temporarily kneecapped? Bit of a strong word for something that remains “sound.”

The whirlwind, logic-free tour continues, with a reminder of the controversy from 2006 when a Dubai-based firm bought the operations of some U.S. ports.

Then we arrive at my favorite part of his incoherent evangelism:

The Dubai model is a mixture of social freedom, unbridled immigration, and raw capitalism. It is overseen by a government that is one of the world’s least democratic. This is no accident. Dubai avoids both elections and the Arab obsession with politics, especially the syndrome of feeling slighted by the West.

The writing is, if you haven’t been able to tell already, a train-wreck. “Unbridled immigration”? I suppose by unbridled he means to say unregulated and prone to coercive practices. Near the end, he concedes that the labor market is “abusive,” the dependence on the real estate market is crippling, and “raw capitalism” and its attendant consumerism also mean unbridled pollution and general deterioration of the environment.

But let’s ignore all that, and focus on the best part of Dubai: it is undemocratic, so it doesn’t have to deal with pesky elections or ideas of citizenship that demand engagement and involvement from the people of the country. Instead, citizenship in Dubai is predicated purely on transfers of wealth and privilege from the government to its citizens.

If Dubai wasn’t autocratic, think of how terrible it would be! Guest workers would (hopefully? eventually?) have a voice, or at least the ability to advocate for themselves without being subject to arrest.

Putting aside arguments about the inherent strengths and weaknesses of democracy, it’s absolutely daft to call Dubai a model that could be replicated elsewhere in the Arab world. I’m sure that if the Palestinians had a booming real estate market and large petroleum/natural gas reserves, the Emirati self-help model would serve them well. But as it stands, I don’t think the Gazans can count on tourism to fix their problems.

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Posted in Middle East, Music, Policy, Politics, Satire | 1 Comment »

PIRATES IN EUROPE?!

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009
Comparisons to the Barbary pirates are imminent. Prepare thyself.

Comparisons to the Barbary pirates are imminent. Prepare thyself.

I was going to write a follow-up post about how inevitable it was that the coverage of the Holbrooke event would center around an off-hand line (or “flippant quip,” as Katherine Tiedemann at the Washington Note/NAF/AfPak Daily Brief would have it, who admits that much more substantial items were discussed, and then proceeds to write about nothing but the “flippant quip”:

I’ve just come from live-tweeting a conference with Amb. Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, and members of his interagency team hosted by the Center for American Progress. While there were certainly substantive issues discussed (the role of Iran, the upcoming presidential elections in Afghanistan, the state of the Pakistani Taliban post-Baitullah Mehsud), what caught my attention was a flippant quip by the ambassador.

Yes, the parentheticals in my writing are getting out of control. I’ll try to keep that in mind.)

But I think the final straw was Spencer Ackerman’s self-twittered/promoted/described “omnibus thinkpiece about the shape and the stakes of the current Afghanistan debate,” entitled “Obama Faces Rising Anxiety on Afghanistan.” The only anxiety rising was mine, as I slogged through his lengthy summary of progressive handwringing in the nation’s capital. So that’s that for that topic, at least for me and for now.

Onto the topic at hand. The A.P. filed a story early this afternoon:

First the ship reported it had been attacked in waters off Sweden. Then it sailed with no apparent problems through one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes. And then it disappeared.

The Arctic Sea, a Maltese-flagged cargo ship, was supposed to make port in Algeria with its cargo of timber on Aug. 4. More than a week later, there’s no sign of the ship or its Russian crew.

Piracy has exploded off the coast of lawless Somalia — but could this be an almost unheard of case of sea banditry in European waters?

Naturally, near the end, the article cites a number of experts who say no:

”There have been no attacks in European waters,” said Pottengal Mukundan, director of the London-based International Maritime Bureau. ”It’s not the kind of area where pirates would find it easy to operate.”

Nick Davis, the chief executive of the Merchant Maritime Warfare Centre, told the BBC that if anything had happened to the ship, cargo would have been found.

”I strongly suspect that this is probably a commercial dispute with its owner and a third party and they’ve decided to take matters into their own hands,” he said Wednesday.

But that’s never stopped inane journalistic parallels before!

UPDATE: A very belated thanks and HT to RAG.

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Posted in Music, Policy, Politics, Uncategorized, journalism | 1 Comment »

For all you loyal consumers

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009

The Beatles are coming! Again? In reissue form? [Note: Insert better joke about British Invasion/Paul Revere/Revolutionary War]

Finally. After watching the Beatles’ company, Apple Corps, devote the last few years to developing a site-specific show in Las Vegas, a video game and a line of pricey memorabilia, Beatles fans are finally getting something they’ve been demanding for at least the last decade: sonically upgraded reissues of the group’s original British albums, in both stereo and mono. Apple Corps and EMI announced on Tuesday that the much-postponed remasters would be released both on individual stereo CDs and in two boxed sets — one stereo, the other mono — on Sept. 9, the same day the Beatles edition of Rock Band, the music video game, is scheduled for release.

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Yisreal Beitenu/Isra’il La Beituna

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

Israel is certainly in a strange position right now (though it thankfully allows me to combine two recent topics: the Eurovision song contest and Israeli politics!)

The Israeli entry into said song contest has stirred some controversy: of course, you might say, a left-wing peacenik with an Arab collaborator, at a time when Israelis voted for right-wing parties and, during the recent invasion of Gaza, told peace protestors to stay home on this one.

More accurately though, the left is mad (though to be fair, the artist has had to cancel threats because of bomb threats from the extreme right, so confusion is warranted).

Chosen by Israel to represent the country at the Eurovision Song Contest — this year being held in Moscow in May with an expected television audience of 100 million — Ms. Nini asked if she could bring along her current artistic collaborator, an Israeli Arab singer, Mira Awad.

The selection committee liked the idea of having both Arab and Jewish citizens in the contest for the first time. But coinciding as it did with Israel’s Gaza war and the rise of Avigdor Lieberman the ultranationalist politician who threatens Israeli Arabs with a loyalty oath, the committee’s choice was labeled by many on the left and in the Arab community as an effort to prettify an ugly situation.

A petition went around demanding that the duo withdraw, saying they were giving the false impression of coexistence in Israel and trying to shield the nation from the criticism it deserved. It added, “Every brick in the wall of this phony image allows the Israeli Army to throw 10 more tons of explosives and more phosphorus bombs.”

Neither Ms. Nini, 39, nor Ms. Awad, 33, has been deterred. But since they consider themselves peace advocates, they are a bit surprised. The antiwar movement, they say, seems to have turned into a Hamas apology force. That, together with the political turn rightward in Israel, means that while the two are being sent to represent this mixed and complex society, they also feel a bit orphaned by it.

Not to detract from the seriousness of an issue, but permit an aside: slightly provocative to use the word “collaborator” in such a context?

A quick thesaurus search doesn’t provide the WWII (dare I say it?) connotation of the word, as a traitor, unless you happen to know what a quisling is (and I suppose fellow traveller if you’re Joseph McCarthy … perhaps confederate if you’re Abraham Lincoln):

assistant, associate, co-worker, colleague, confederate, fellow traveller, helper, partner, quisling, running dog, team player, teammate

Running dog? Anyway…

Both singers and their collaborator, Mr. Dor, say that they spend many hours arguing over the meaning of a Jewish democratic nation, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and how to do their part to make things better.

Ah, if only we all had the leisure time to do so. Just you and your running dogs.

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Georgia to Russia: We don’t wanna PUT IN

Sunday, February 22nd, 2009

But we do want fake facial hair and disco dancing!

Get it? Pretend there’s no space between the last two words of the song’s title.

“The title of the song, sung in accented English, is “We Don’t Wanna Put In,” a barely successful play on words involving the Russian prime minister’s name,” says the nytimes.

The song, by a Georgian group called Stephane and 3G, was chosen by popular vote on Wednesday as Georgia’s entry for Eurovision, the megapopular and kitschy European song contest that will be hosted by Moscow in May.

Georgia was planning to boycott this year’s event to protest Russia’s de facto annexation of two Georgian separatist regions after the August war, but it apparently settled on taking a musical swipe at Mr. Putin right in the Russian capital.

This song is unbelievably bad, perhaps because the group’s front man said the song is supposed to be a “marketing trick.”

“The most important thing for us was to create the project that would attract as much attention as possible,” said Mr. Mgebrishvili, a slight man of 29 who in a YouTube video performs the tune in a large black wig with sideburns as his three bandmates dance in spandex and hot pants to a disco beat that evokes “Saturday Night Fever.”

“We don’t wanna put in / the negative mood / is killin’ the groove,” goes the chorus.

Mr. Mgebrishvili, who participated in street protests against Russia in Tbilisi during the August war, said his group received “moral support” from some government ministers.

If only all derivative disco enjoyed government support! Although we’d probably have quite a few more diplomatic incidents. Certainly, Russia won’t take this lying down.

The news has already begun to excite patriotic passions in Russia, where anti-Georgian sentiment remains high after the war, which many in Russia believe Georgia started.

“In my opinion, this is amoral,” Yana Rudkovskaya, the Russian producer for Dima Bilan, last year’s Eurovision winner, told the Echo Moskvy radio station. “I think that the Eurovision board and the heads of Channel One should forbid this song because it insults our country.”

Not immoral, but amoral. Because it insults the country. (Which of course requires the equation Russia=Putin).

Is that really an insult? I don’t particularly want a Put In either, but I’m still not really sure what it means (beyond being vaguely dirty).

The state-controlled Channel One will broadcast the competition live. If Georgia makes it to the final round, it is unclear how the station will handle such an affront to Mr. Putin, who receives little but fawning coverage by Russian federal television.

Dmitri Peskov, a spokesman for Mr. Putin, called the song “hooliganism” and told the Ria Novosti news agency that he thought it unfortunate that Georgia would use the song competition to “promote pseudopolitical ambitions.”

Those pesky little countries with their pseudopolitical ambitions!

After the jump, a close reading of the bridge, which appears to be about South Ossetia!

(more…)

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Uh-oh.

Tuesday, February 17th, 2009

Apparently, I should watch out, after criticizing Stanley Crouch.

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in the Village Voice:

Stanley Crouch is a gangsta rapper. Throughout his career, Crouch has moved through black nationalism, bohemia, and places we haven’t yet developed the vocab to name. But if there’s one thing we’ve gleaned from Crouch’s recent assault on novelist and critic Dale Peck, it is this—we have found Crouch’s muse, and his name is Suge Knight.

The backstory is simple, and for Crouch routine. On July 12, out for lunch at Tartine in the West Village, Crouch spotted Peck, who’d trashed his book Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome a few years back. After greeting Peck with one hand, Crouch smacked him with the other. “What I would actually have preferred to happen,” says Crouch, “was that I had the presence of mind to hawk up a huge oyster and spit it in his face.”

Of course! Who doesn’t have regrets that they did not spit phlegm upon someone who had criticized them?

Crouch’s literary mean-streak is well-known, going so far as to pen vitriolic, ad-hominem attacks against his critics. Who knew that streak extended to fisticuffs? Well, apparently the entire Village Voice staff:

“Stanley deserves better than his own temper” says jazz writer Peter Watrous, who also worked here with Crouch. “There are two things that happen at the same time—one of them is that Stanley is a utopian. He strongly believes people should behave in certain way. That combines with an inability to control his own temper, and it makes for a bullying streak.”

There was the time Crouch was arguing with jazz writer Russ Musto and told him that if he were a foot taller he’d knock his block off. Musto kept arguing, since he knew he wasn’t growing any. Crouch went back on his word, and swung at him anyway. After the two men were separated, Crouch calmed down and offered to buy Musto a drink. Musto says they’re friends to this day. Then there’s what happened to Guy Trebay, whom Crouch stalked through the Voice’s old offices threatening to kill him, relenting only after writer Hilton Als intervened. Another time, writer Harry Allen approached Crouch, hoping to exchange some notes on hip-hop. Instead Crouch, evidently in a bad mood, caught Allen’s neck in the cobra clutch, prompting the Voice to give Crouch his walking papers.

By then the Hanging Judge had secured his rep as king of the literal literary brawlers—an accolade that ranks right up there with prettiest journalist. Really now, administering beat-downs to pencil-necked critics is about as macho as spousal abuse, croquet—or gangsta rap.

Much like the acts he derides, Crouch has a taste for swinging that is nothing short of a variation on the “I ain’t no punk” theme seemingly encoded on the DNA of all black males. “I have a kind of Mailer-esque reaction to the way some people view writers,” Crouch once told The New Yorker. “I want them to know that just because I write doesn’t mean I can’t also fight.” Put another way, Crouch wants you know he keeps it gangsta.

Um… I don’t even know what to say.

It’s a shame that this man’s views represent(ed) the idea of jazz to the American public. Or rather, his own demented conception of jazz.

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M.I.A. TO WORLD

Wednesday, February 11th, 2009

“There’s a genocide going on,” Maya Arulpragasam, aka the globalized rap (kinda?) star M.I.A., said about the chaotic civil war in Sri Lanka.

The Tamil minority could probably make a case for ethnic cleansing and forced deportation, but that’s a far cry from genocide:

Although the government has brutalized and killed Tamil civilians over the past 25 years, human rights organizations spread the blame around, estimating that 70,000 people on both sides have been killed in the fighting.“This is a conflict in which both sides have terrible human rights records,” said Yolanda Foster, a specialist on Sri Lanka with Amnesty International in London. “The Tamil Tigers have a long history of child recruitment, hostage taking, forcing civilians to the front lines. It’s complicated to assign blame.”

Don’t forget they popularized the female suicide bomber, an innovation this world could probably live without. (Women of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), or Tamil Tigers, have perpetrated 30–40% of the organization’s suicide bombings, which number more than 200.)

I’m all for M.I.A., and Tamils certainly have a complaint. It’s pretty obvious why: Her father is a leader in the seperatist movement, but it wouldn’t hurt to check out some other sources.

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Shot two: Super Bow-legged

Monday, February 2nd, 2009

Slate’s Stephen Metcalf on Bruce at half-time last evening:

Nothing will ever compete for sheer tone-deafness with Paul McCartney playing a zealous Super Bowl rendition of “Live and Let Die” at the height of the Iraq war. But Springsteen would have put America on its ass—its mind shortly to follow—had he strolled out with a Martin and played “The Wrestler.” (And how about a nice “This one’s for Danny,” aka Danny Federici, the recently deceased keyboardist who was with Bruce for more than 40 years?) The national mood is sober bordering on a galloping panic. Lively as he was, I wouldn’t say the Boss did much to either banish or capture it.

Lively… perhaps more live-ish? Springsteen was hoarse and out of breath for the entire medley

My favorite moment had to have been sliding on his knees across the stage… crotch-first into the camera.

No, that’s a lie. Clarence Clemons, taking a page from George Clinton and Sun Ra: saxaphonist, or priest from Mars!?

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Billy Joel: unearned contempt?

Saturday, January 24th, 2009
Really gives new meaning to the phrase: People who live in Glass Houses shoudn’t throw stones.

Slate’s Ron Rosenbaum writes, after listening to a multi-CD boxset of the Joel’s greatest hits:

I think I’ve identified the qualities in B.J.’s work that distinguish his badness from other kinds of badness: It exhibits unearned contempt. Both a self-righteous contempt for others and the self-approbation and self-congratulation that is contempt’s backside, so to speak. Most frequently a contempt for the supposed phoniness or inauthenticity of other people as opposed to the rock-solid authenticity of our B.J.

He likens the Joel to Holden Caulfield, the phony who condemns phonies and phoniness (and high school idol)… which, following his song-by-song analysis, actually rings quite true. Rosenbaum takes FOREVER to get there, and the rhetorical question answering comes much too late to be of any use to those angered by his criticism. But nevertheless, a fine takedown of an artist that I once detested, yet can now tolerate after years of New York Area Classic Rock Radio.

But his article somehow rubs me the wrong way. Perhaps it’s the lack of humor? and the hyperbolic tone of some of the criticism, bordering on preachy screechiness:

He was terrible, he is terrible, he always will be terrible. Anodyne, sappy, superficial, derivative, fraudulently rebellious. Joel’s famous song “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me”? Please. It never was rock ‘n’ roll. Billy Joel’s music elevates self-aggrandizing self-pity and contempt for others into its own new and awful genre: “Mock-Rock.”

Jeez, relax. He’s still not as bad as the Dan. Or is he?

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Posted in Culture, Music | 3 Comments »