For all that I will complain about William Orbit’s production on Blur’s 13 – and I will, just be glad I haven’t really started here – his involvement in “She Cries Your Name” almost absolves him of any aural sin in my book; the swooping strings, double bass and shuffling drums in this song gave Beth Orton’s solo career the best launchpad it could get, and a far more interesting surrounding than almost everything that appeared on the following album, Trailer Park. There’s a jazz influence at play in this song that matches and sounds wonderful next to Orton’s at-times-overwhelming folk meandering, giving the song a snap and drive that, judging by her other songs from the same period, it may have missed otherwise. If only Red Snapper had been her backing band for that first album…
“He Was Operating, Most of The Time, Without A Safety Net”
Lehrer’s transgressions are inexcusable—but I can’t help but think that the industry he (and I) work for share a some of the blame for his failure. I’m 10 years older than Lehrer, and unlike him, my contemporaries and I had all of our work scrutinized by layers upon layers of editors, top editors, copy editors, fact checkers and even (heaven help us!) subeditors before a single word got published. When we screwed up, there was likely someone to catch it and save us (public) embarrassment. And if someone violated journalistic ethics, it was more likely to be caught early in his career—allowing him the chance either to reform and recover or to slink off to another career without being humiliated on the national stage. No such luck for Lehrer; he rose to the very top in a flash, and despite having his work published by major media companies, he was operating, most of the time, without a safety net. Nobody noticed that something was amiss until it was too late to save him.
From here, an article by Charles Seife, the man hired by Wired.com to look into whether Jonah Lehrer’s (unedited) blog posts for the site contained the same kind of recycling, plagiarism and lies that he has been found guilty of in his books and at the New Yorker. Short version: Yes, so much so that Seife suggests that Lehrer’s “moral compass” may be broken when it comes to journalism. Which, you know, is kind of a bold thing to say, really.
Over at Poynter, Seife is interviewed about the article, and he says something that really resonates with my experience as a blogger-turned-journalist (If that’s what I am?):
Seife worried that this sort of instant publishing “is a double-edged sword.” Editors might have slow you down as a writer and robbed you of some freedom, but “at the same time they protected you,” he said.
“They made sure they challenged you. They forced you to think harder about your work, and if you screwed up, they kicked your ass. Lehrer, I think it’s really sad because I do think he’s a very clear writer, he’s able to distill ideas very well.
“And I think that if he had a bit more oversight early on in his career, if he had a good editor or two to kick his butt, I think he might have become a star that would never have fallen.”
I remain compelled by this whole thing, for selfish reasons. I can’t stop myself hoping that someone writes a book about it, weirdly.
366 Songs 244/245/246: Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End
If you look past the growly vocal from Paul McCartney, there’s a sense of age evident in the final three tracks from the final Beatles album (Except, in both cases, not really; although recorded last, Abbey Road was followed by Let It Be in terms of release, and “Her Majesty” follows “The End” on the album, anyway); it’s in the grandiose orchestral arrangement of “Carry That Weight,” with the horns parping their importance before the song segues into an unbilled reprise of “You Never Give Me Your Money” from earlier in the album, or the strings surrounding the band as they sing “You’re gonna carry that weight, a long time” afterwards, like some John Barry Bond theme gone wrong. There’s a syrup-y sound here, something that feels at odds with the way the band had treated their arrangements before this point.
The age thing makes itself apparent in the lyrics, too; “Once there was a way/To get back homewards/Once there was a way/To get back home,” McCartney sings, with the clear implication that that’s not there anymore. Everyone joins in to remind themselves that they’re gonna carry that weight a long time, and McCartney goes on to admit, “In the middle of the celebrations/I break down…”
(That the “Boy! You’re gonna carry that weight” part is a group vocal has always made me wonder whether it’s meant to be supportive or taunting, the sound of the Beatles talking to Paul with disdain or understanding. Chances are, even McCartney himself didn’t know when he wrote it, so complicated were his relationships with the band at the time.)
And then, before everything gets too maudlin – because this is a sad suite, a collection of melancholy and loss, of the bad kind of nostalgia where you look back with regret that things aren’t the way they used to be – “The End” kicks in. Oh yeah! Alright!
Here, let’s listen to the track as released on the Anthology album decades later, without the “Oh yeah!” introduction, just to hear the band jam their little hearts out, but also with the orchestral elements more noticeable (And, yes, the final chord from “A Day In The Life” added at the end):
I love “The End,” in either version. Again, it’s very un-Beatles in a lot of ways, because when did they do solos like this? Because, at its heart, that’s what “The End” is: A collection of solos, whether it’s Ringo’s drum solo to start off, before John, George and Paul trade lead guitar lines as the race to the vocal pay-off. There’s a sense of playfulness, of trying to outdo each other with the music, of fun, in “The End” that almost balances out the sense of loss in the earlier two chapters of this medley; despite everything, they can still communicate through song. And then, the lyrics, again the work of someone feeling old, addressing a conclusion. What makes the end of “The End” so emotional for me, though, isn’t the “And in the end/The love you take/Is equal to/The love you make” by itself, but the harmonies immediately following, soaring upwards. It’s so sad, and so optimistic, at the same time.
I love that above animation (from the end of the Beatles Rock Band videogame); it’s very informed by the iconography of the ’60s and of the Beatles themselves, but it’s also… I don’t know. Empty enough, silent enough, to get something about the melancholy present even in those final notes across in a beautifully subtle way.