Sonata for Jukebox: Pop Music, Memory, and the Imagined Life

Rating:
Summary: Listen to Gob. Tell me this isn't genius.
Review: If Michael O'Donoghue's nickname is Mod, then Geoffrey O'Brien's nickname is Gob. Not verb-gob as in "spit" but noun-gob as in "mouth". If Frank Sinatra is The Voice, then Geoffrey O'Brien is The Mouth.

Gob said: "So lovers need music more than anyone. Any other form would be too gross to suggest the implications they breathe in and out almost casually. Do you remember lying on the floor lost in each other's eyes as we heard, for the thousandth time but as if the first time, the Beatles singing THINGS WE SAID TODAY? The intensity with which we pretended that our own immediate reality was embodied in 'we' and 'today'---they were singing about us! right at this indelible moment!---was compounded by the simultaneous realization that while this moment was fleeting, was already evaporating in the instant we became aware of it, the record would always be there. Years later it would be the reliquary of a union otherwise dissolved. A song becomes sacred to the memory of a kiss, or at least that is the way a 14-year-old girl might record it in her diary. The first premonitions, by the young, of the horror of time's passage are as beautiful as carnival masqueraders. Flashbacks---the kind accompanied in movies by soft focus and a dense cluster of violins---are anticipated like parties. Won't it be fun to have a past? To be haunted by the smoke curling from long-extinguished cigarettes? To be launched into inexhaustible meditation by the opening bars of a once familiar song?"

"The horror of time's passage". Now there's a phrase that's spot-on (as they say in Limeyland). But Gob forgot to mention the exquisite cheeziness of that one line in THINGS WE SAID TODAY: "Love to hear you say that love is love." Another example of Paul McCartney's lazy-minded love-mongering. Which reached it's pinnacle in AND I LOVE HER: "I give her all my love. That's all I do. And if you saw my love. You'd love her too. I love her." And have you ever noticed that THINGS WE SAID TODAY posits a future nostalgia from a present-tense perspective? Paul is enjoying (let us say) a hypothetical hot date with Annika Sorenstam in her mod-a-go-go putting-dungeon. But he's oblivious to the here & now because he's so busy rhapsodizing about the pleasant memories that he's gonna have.

Gob said: "But in many ways it was more appealing to build a new world out of the fragments. Put them together according to your needs: string together the fetish-songs denoting a particular person, a particular desire, a love affair consummated or otherwise. The song was present, the singer was absent, the person the singer sang about was even more absent. SHE'S NOT THERE, THINGS WE SAID TODAY: everything had already vanished. THE WAY YOU LOOK TONIGHT: gone. THEY CAN'T TAKE THAT AWAY FROM ME: they already took it. The song, ultimate analog, made what wasn't there somehow stay put."

Gob's inclusion of THEY CAN'T TAKE THAT AWAY FROM ME is due to that emetic line: "the memory of all that". And by the end of the tune, Ira Gershwin has fully resigned himself to the past tense: "But I'll always always keep the memory of the way you hold your knife. The way we danced till three. The way you changed my life." Which implies that the singer cherishes his nostalgia more than the girl herself. It's bad enough to be in love with love. It's arguably cheezier to be in love with your nostalgia about having been in love with love.



Rating:
Summary: O'Brien Pens Another Flawless Volume of Really Cool Stuff
Review: Sonata for Jukebox: Pop Music, Memory, and the Imagined Life is yet another stunning collection of cultural observations from poet/writer/critic/editor Geoffrey OÕBrien, "the thinking manÕs thinking man."

While framed as a series of essays on the history of American pop music, Jukebox is to the average collection of non-fiction pieces as JoyceÕs Dubliners is to a run-of-the-mill short story grouping. OÕBrien is just firing on so many cylinders, operating on so many levels, that the book pretty much transcends classification: one is tempted to appropriate musical terms of art in order to do the thing justice.

These essays use 20th Century pop tunes as touchstones for exquisite, haunting riffs on family, radio, loneliness, love, commercialism, companionship, loss, youth, ageÉ they give voice to ideas that loop and rise and fade, only to crackle forth again when we least expect them--like a snippet of BBC commentary on a shortwave, or some phrase of oboe melody in a Mozart piece--before evanescing once more.

What I found most enjoyable about this collection, however, was the accessibility of OÕBrienÕs references. His commentary is profound and original, but this isnÕt the sort of grandstanding "insider" claptrap that so often typifies music writing. ThereÕs no wink-wink nudge-nudge stuff about how it was really the bass playerÕs second cousin filling in on the B-side during that infamous Hamburg session, because (as "we" all know) PumpkinheadÕs ex-girlfriend had bronchitis that week. The author instead accords highly appropriate gravitas to songs we actually know, e.g. "Surfer Girl" and "Walk on By."

ThereÕs just something so pleasurable about reading the work of a guy who totally GETS the music weÕve been inundated with through the years. OÕBrien summarizes "IÕd Like to Teach the World to Sing" as "a Coca-Cola jingle transformed into the kind of song that a chorus of Chinese orphans might have sung in a late Ô50s movie about missionaries martyred by Communists." He articulates that the trouble with "Tie a Yellow Ribbon ÔRound the Old Oak Tree" is its "ineluctable stridency."

Jukebox doesnÕt bypass the contributions of Alan Lomax or Tin Pan Alley or Jimmie Rodgers or Paul Robeson to musical history, itÕs just that OÕBrien doesnÕt have to beat the underbrush for nuggets of footnotable obscurity in order to be taken seriously. He finds meaning in the ubiquitous, and shares this wisdom with an open handÑaccomplishments which are entirely too rare.

Perhaps the best way to summarize this book is with a description from within it:

"He will walk you through the history of music as though it were the history of the world, and as if both were nothing more than the history of this particular evening, the story of how you will somehow reach dawn."

A writer who can achieve that sonority and then observe, "I will know that old age has arrived when even the oldies are unfamiliar songs of younger generations," is a guy deserving both our respect and applause.

Rating:
Summary: O'Brien Pens Another Flawless Volume of Really Cool Stuff
Review: Sonata for Jukebox: Pop Music, Memory, and the Imagined Life is yet another stunning collection of cultural observations from poet/writer/critic/editor Geoffrey OÕBrien, "the thinking manÕs thinking man."

While framed as a series of essays on the history of American pop music, Jukebox is to the average collection of non-fiction pieces as JoyceÕs Dubliners is to a run-of-the-mill short story grouping. OÕBrien is just firing on so many cylinders, operating on so many levels, that the book pretty much transcends classification: one is tempted to appropriate musical terms of art in order to do the thing justice.

These essays use 20th Century pop tunes as touchstones for exquisite, haunting riffs on family, radio, loneliness, love, commercialism, companionship, loss, youth, ageÉ they give voice to ideas that loop and rise and fade, only to crackle forth again when we least expect them--like a snippet of BBC commentary on a shortwave, or some phrase of oboe melody in a Mozart piece--before evanescing once more.

What I found most enjoyable about this collection, however, was the accessibility of OÕBrienÕs references. His commentary is profound and original, but this isnÕt the sort of grandstanding "insider" claptrap that so often typifies music writing. ThereÕs no wink-wink nudge-nudge stuff about how it was really the bass playerÕs second cousin filling in on the B-side during that infamous Hamburg session, because (as "we" all know) PumpkinheadÕs ex-girlfriend had bronchitis that week. The author instead accords highly appropriate gravitas to songs we actually know, e.g. "Surfer Girl" and "Walk on By."

ThereÕs just something so pleasurable about reading the work of a guy who totally GETS the music weÕve been inundated with through the years. OÕBrien summarizes "IÕd Like to Teach the World to Sing" as "a Coca-Cola jingle transformed into the kind of song that a chorus of Chinese orphans might have sung in a late Ô50s movie about missionaries martyred by Communists." He articulates that the trouble with "Tie a Yellow Ribbon ÔRound the Old Oak Tree" is its "ineluctable stridency."

Jukebox doesnÕt bypass the contributions of Alan Lomax or Tin Pan Alley or Jimmie Rodgers or Paul Robeson to musical history, itÕs just that OÕBrien doesnÕt have to beat the underbrush for nuggets of footnotable obscurity in order to be taken seriously. He finds meaning in the ubiquitous, and shares this wisdom with an open handÑaccomplishments which are entirely too rare.

Perhaps the best way to summarize this book is with a description from within it:

"He will walk you through the history of music as though it were the history of the world, and as if both were nothing more than the history of this particular evening, the story of how you will somehow reach dawn."

A writer who can achieve that sonority and then observe, "I will know that old age has arrived when even the oldies are unfamiliar songs of younger generations," is a guy deserving both our respect and applause.