Breaking Us in Two Saturday, January 08, 2005

I haven't written a word about the tsunamis, and I'm about to launch into a post about Joe Jackson. Oy: A hard rain's a-gonna fall. Click here, or your charity of choice, to help out.

At any rate, Joe. I liked him quite a bit back in the day: Not so much the early poppy stuff, but the mid-period, vaguely pretentious stuff--six-to-eight-minute songs, "jazz odysseys," shaking his fist at the Hateful Eighties, that kinda thing. I dropped him when he went into orchestral stuff, the Slough of Despond from whence no rocker returns. But the other day I heard a new (a year ago or so old) song of his on the radio, and it stuck with me. I iTuned the first three songs off the album (the ever-reliable AllMusicGuide said the record was "front-loaded"), and...

Well, they're decent. He knows his craft: The music sounds vital, the lyrics are clever (and even include a nifty little hat-tip to Steely Dan's "Barrytown"). But they're not "great." Robert Christgau, whose judgment I trust about what albums to buy but not which ones to avoid, had a great line about Leo Kottke, to the effect that Kottke was technically lovely but was missing something like genius. (Which Kottke's mentor, John Fahey, demonstrably possessed.) I think JJ is brilliant as a writer of a certain kind of pop song, and I commend his stretching into other musical forms. But it doesn't stick with me anymore. It's cheeseburger music.

Like Kottke, JJ is an exact contemporary of, and directly comparable to, a significantly better musician: Elvis Costello. I've soured on EC lately also, but he has brought down the power more often, and more consistently, than JJ ever has.

More later; I just realized I gotta go.

@ 11:42:00 AM,

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home