Slate eBook Club - Best of 2003

by Slate. com

  Everything Must Go sports some of Steely Dan's catchiest hooks and grimmest lyrics. The disc's first song is about the closing of a mall, the final song about the end of a corporation. But the grand theme of the whole album is the merciless meltdown of all sure bets. Truly everything must go, including the ultimate man upstairs. "Godwhacker," the album's destined classic, might have inspired mass disc-burnings had Fagen sung the words more clearly. ("In the beginning/ We could hang with the dude/ But it's been too much of nothing/ Of that stank attitude/ Now they curse your name/ And there's a bounty on your face/ It's your own fault daddy/ Godwhacker's on the case.") Some early reviewers have interpreted the song as a portrait of terrorists or an attack on Bush. Nonsense. It's a pitch for Götterdämmerung, the cool ravings of a modern Job turned nihilist, Nietzsche crossed with Shaft.

  So, we've come full circle from The Nightfly, Fagen's 1982 solo masterpiece, which wistfully evoked the bright-eyed early '60s, the New Frontier of Cold War vigor and limitless possibilities: when Fagen was a restless teen in the Jersey suburbs, dreaming of the day that he and his girl, Maxine, could "move up to Manhattan/ and fill the place with friends/ drive to the coast and drive right back again"; and when the future was imagined as a "streamlined world" run by "a just machine that makes big decisions/ programmed by fellas with compassion and vision."

  Now the millennium has arrived, and not even the bomb shelter Dad built can provide protection from the fallout. On "Blues Beach," the narrator talks to "my hypothetical friend." Real life and sexual desire have merged with computer games, programmed by very different sorts of fellas, as in "Green Book" ("The torso rocks and the eyes are keepers/ Now where'd we sample those legs?/ I'm thinking Marilyn 4.0 in the Green Book"). The long-unnerving Steely Dan fetish for vapid underage girls ("Hey, Nineteen" on Gaucho, "Janie Runaway" and "Cousin Dupree" on Two Against Nature) is supplanted by swoons for "Pixeleen," the teeny-bop heroine of an anime spy-thriller ("Pixeleen/ Rave on, my sleek and soulful cyberqueen").

  That name, Pixeleen—could it be a VR recombinant of The Nightfly's Maxine ("pixel" + "ine")? There's an intriguing reverie in the middle verse, lasting just a couple of lines, where the melody segues into a Leiber and Stoller-style lilt, similar to that long-ago song "Maxine," and Fagen reminisces, "Flashback to cool summer nights … in the room above your garage"—before the pixel-pixie lures him back to Matrix-land. It's the one moment of unmasked elegy on Everything Must Go, when the flippant irony dissolves and lays bare the heartbreak of what's been lost.

  Fagen said in a recent New York Times interview that he regards all Steely Dan albums as "comedy records to some degree," and of course he's right. Fagen and Becker are not Lou Reed; they have no urge to wallow in the miasma. Take the album's finale, the title song, which, after a long, wistful, party's-over tenor-sax solo, begins: "It's high time for a walk on the real side/ Let's admit the bastards beat us/ I move to dissolve the corporation/ in a pool of margaritas/ So let's switch off all the lights/ and light up the Luckies/ crankin' up the afterglow …"

  This isn't mere whistling-in-the-dark denial. The Dan know, and well capture, the subversive sexual thrill of letting it all go up in flames. But there is also a deep, sweet sorrow in the final lines:

  Talk about the famous road not taken

  In the end we never took it

  And if somewhere on the way

  We got a few good licks in

  No one's ever gonna know

  'Cause we're goin' out of business

  Everything must go.

  And you can dance to it.

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  Here's another way to read this contrast between Fagen's vocals and the music: A Steely Dan album is a trip through the warped mind of our unreliable narrator (as played by Fagen), and the ultra-polished instrumentals reflect the idealized soundtrack that he hears in his head as the stories and fantasies unspool. (Don't we all, at certain times, to some degree, amble through life with a soundtrack playing in our heads, lending rhythmic drama to the random humdrum?)

  As evidence for this interpretation, I direct you to The Nightfly, Fagen's 1982 solo album, not just one of the great pop albums but one of the great pop album covers (which you can see here). The front cover shows Fagen as a disc jockey at 4:09 a.m., chain-smoking Chesterfields, a Sonny Rollins LP on the turntable. The back cover shows a suburban house, one of a row of identical houses, except in this one, a light glistens through an upstairs window. The sky shows the hint of dawn. By inference, it's 4:09 a.m., and the kid upstairs—the only person awake in the neighborhood—is listening to the disc jockey. Fagen's liner notes suggest that The Nightfly is autobiographical. It's about the adolescent Fagen listening in the wee hours to cool jazz on the radio—while also imagining that he's the DJ, "Lester the Nightfly" of "WJAZ," as the album's title song calls him, spinning "sweet music/ … till the sun comes through the skylight." Or maybe it's about Lester, spinning records while reminiscing about the all-night listening sessions of his youth. Either way, the covers (both in gleaming black-and-white) present an image of music as the perpetual soundtrack and the creative fount of an imaginative life.

  I would also cite the technical credits (clearly written by Fagen, Becker, or both) on Steely Dan's 1975 album, Katy Lied: "Steely Dan uses a specially constructed 24-channel tape recorder, a 'State-of-the-Art' 36-input computerized-mixdown console … some very expensive German microphones … a Neumann VMS 70 computerized lathe equipped with a variable pitch, variable depth helium cooled head." There's a deliberate stratagem to these gushings. They convey the clear impression (even to a reader who doesn't know what they're talking about) that the boys of Steely Dan get to play with dream-fantasy gear in a dream-fantasy studio: the hi-fi geek's equivalent of driving an Audi TT, lounging in a comfy Eames chair, or dating a girl like Tuesday Weld—to name a few dream-fantasies mentioned by the narrator in some Steely Dan songs. It all reinforces the sense, if only subconsciously, that this record you're listening to is a dream-fantasy, the inner soundtrack to an ordinary guy's secret story, for else how could a voice like Donald Fagen's—in other words, like yours or mine—get backup from a band that sounds so damned impeccable?

  Moscow in the Meantime

  Bering Strait is a country band from Russia, but you wouldn't know it from their album.

  By John Morthland

  Posted Thursday, May 15, 2003, at 7:20 AM PT

  Right now, after five-plus years in the music biz, Bering Strait is still a full-fledged media event. As a musical event, though, the Russian country band remains a question mark. For that they can thank mainstream Nashville, which has cannibalized itself so fully that producers and artists there seem to be incapable of creating something that doesn't sound just like everything else; artists and producers blame this on radio, for having such restrictive playlists, while radio blames you and me, for having such bad taste. One upshot of this is that the best way to break a fledgling act is not with new, different, and interesting music but with a new, different, and interesting story. And that, Bering Strait has. Perhaps you've already heard it on NPR or 60 Minutes. Here's the short version, as detailed in The Ballad of Bering Strait, the recently released feature-length documentary film.

  Now between the ages of 22 and 29, the original six classically trained members were all still teenagers when a music teacher assembled them into a bluegrass band in Obninsk, a town of nuclear scientists two hours from Moscow. In 1998, after being spotted in a Moscow Mexican restaurant by an American art dealer who knew somebody who knew Nashville executive Tim DuBois, the band moved to Music City. Glasnost followed quickly. They jettisoned their Russian music-teacher manager for a Nashville veteran, hooked up with producer Brent Maher (best known for his '80s work with the Judds), and signed with DuBois at Arista in 1999. Then, Bering Strait got the business. DuBois promptly lost his label in a power struggle, and the band floundered until their patron was named to run the new label Gaylord. But that company never got off the ground, and DuBois resigned a
fter five months. Though the musicians had been recording with Maher all this time, they couldn't legally hold other jobs due to visa restrictions, and all were living in a one-bathroom ranch house with their manager and his wife, who were going broke. The bass player got canned. Two weeks after some Straits were finally able to lease an apartment in town, it burned to the ground. Finally, DuBois and Tony Brown, another done-it-all Nashville exec, formed a new label, Universal South, under the aegis of the powerhouse Universal Music Group. The movie ends with the band signing its deal and then busing off to D.C. for its first American concert.

  The documentary is curiously flat, blunting most of the story's drama even as it shows the principals clearly near the end of their financial and emotional ropes. But that just makes it an appropriate companion to their CD, which, despite the rich musical and cultural background of the musicians, is little more than generic Nashville. With the most countrified instruments downplayed in Maher's production, you'd never guess this band once picked and sang the kind of acoustic mountain music repopularized just three years ago by O Brother Where Art Thou?; instead, the fetching but anonymous-sounding voices of lead singer Natasha Borzilova (who also plays acoustic guitar) and backup vocalist Lydia Salnikova (keyboards) are emphasized. Natasha does hit all the notes just right but with no distinguishing style, though in fairness to her, it would take an unusually daring singer to make much out of a lyric like, "I still wear a locket/ With a picture of you and me by the river/ Was it that long ago" (from "I'm Not Missing You"). Such songs, by the kind of Nashville pros who get most of their life experience sitting in cubicles and writing rooms trying to come up with something that sounds like whatever's at the top of the charts that week, could use a little Russian darkness in pondering love's ups and downs; only "I Could Be Persuaded," thanks to a meaty melody, is catchy enough to work as a single (if the label were to release one, which it won't—more about that later). The exceptions are the Grammy-nominated "Bearing Straight," a twangy, band-written instrumental romp featuring lead guitarist/banjoist Ilya Toshinsky, and the traditional "Porushka-Paranya," which evolves into a Russo-American hyper-hoedown.

  The members of Bering Strait are cheerful assimilationists, their classical training and middle-class backgrounds likely easing their transition into America's musical and social mainstream. Certainly that's how they come across on their album—and how they're portrayed, presumably with their approval, in the movie. Though subject to homesickness and longings for Russian food, they take readily to Sex and the City and pancake-house breakfasts. Though drummer Alexander Arzamatsev speaks only Russian in the film, the other men speak good English, and the two women are virtually accent-free. If these well-scrubbed kids have any thoughts about the USA in general beyond the fact that it's where the music business is, they keep it to themselves. Only Natasha shows anything resembling a rebellious streak; halfway through the movie, she gives herself a punk buzz cut (then sheepishly dons a wig to hide it in public). In one of the movie's most telling segments, an old-school DJ who insists that fans won't accept a Russian country group is proved wrong when listener after listener concludes that Bering Strait's music sounds like the real deal (though one caller denounces them as sounding like Yankees, who clearly are worse than foreigners). The album rode saturation media coverage into the country Top 20, though Universal declined to release a single because it didn't want to pigeonhole the band as country.

  And that seems to portend what's happening next. Bering Strait is already hinting that the album represents the malleable kids who came to America five years ago, not the adversity-seasoned young adults they are today. They're supposedly writing their own more pop-oriented material for the second album, due early next year and probably under a new producer; they just switched booking agencies in an attempt to break free of the mainstream country circuit. Given the plainness of their music thus far, it's a good move, assuming they can deliver; a fusion of tradition-based Russian and American sounds along the lines of "Porushka-Paranya" would definitely be an improvement. Then they'll just have to keep their fingers crossed that after failing to live up to their press the first time around, there'll still be an audience paying attention.

  Needles and Pens

  The sportswriter's obsession with steroid scandals.

  By Charles P. Pierce

  Posted Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2003, at 1:39 PM PT

  Len Bias would have been 40 years old in November had he not celebrated by putting the Cali Cartel up his nose on the very night in 1986 that he'd been drafted by the defending champion Boston Celtics. The tragedy was put to immediate use by a bipartisan passel of opportunistic hysterics led by then-Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill, who demanded a tough new law to placate the angry and mournful Celtics fans among his constituents. (You think I made that part up? Dan Baum limns the whoopin' and hollerin' splendidly in his history of the drug wars, Smoke and Mirrors.) That October, President Ronald Reagan signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which was sort of the drug war's Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and which visited upon ourselves a whole number of really fine ideas, including the mandatory minimum sentences so beloved these days by so many judges. Of course, we learned almost nothing from the whole Bias saga and certainly nothing about the perils of making policy by letting the hottest heads prevail.

  I mention all of this because there is one sentence you should remember as the Steroid Hysteria now raging in the sports pages runs its course. This is the sentence: THG, the substance produced by the BALCO Laboratories in California and allegedly consumed by dozens of athletes, was neither illegal nor specifically banned by any professional sports league. Period, as I just typed.

  You should remember this every time you read another sports columnist's explosion of angry moral outrage at The Cheaters. You should remember it every time you read another expression of earnest concern for The Children. No professional athlete who took this stuff broke any law and no professional athlete who took this stuff broke any rule. (And, as far as any definitive scientific evidence is concerned, nobody endangered his health with the stuff, either.) In other words, the scandal that is preoccupying your sports pages these days involves people doing something perfectly legal with their own bodies. Period, as I just typed again.

  Nevertheless, the old rhetoric's heating up again and it's a sign that the rhetoric is starting to float loose of planet Earth. This time around, the part of Ronald Reagan is being played by the hilariously monikered Dick Pound, who developed his fine moral sense by working with the international bagmen and titled unemployables that make up the International Olympic Committee. The part of William Bennett is being played by a guy named Dr. Gary Wadler, who's a member of the World Anti-Doping Agency. "We can't let these seminal events just pass by," Wadler told Ian O'Connor of USA Today. Of course not, not while there's authoritarian hysteria to be whipped up.

  In fact, O'Connor is one of the finest sports columnists in America, so when he writes something like, "This doesn't have to be a fair fight, not with the stakes this high," as he did on Nov. 18, it's an indication that the conversation about sports and drugs is coming unhinged again, the way it did back in 1986. Seriously, what are the stakes here, so serious that we have to engage in another round of the kind of self-destruction that has failed us for almost 20 years? The integrity of the baseball record book? The integrity of Dick Pound's lucrative quadrennial track meet? (Now, there's a concept.) The integrity of the illusions of sportswriters who think they're still 10 years old?

  I don't care if every record book in every sport reads like the Physicians' Desk Reference, and I couldn't care less at this point what happens to the Olympic Games. Given a choice between a non-drug-aided home run record and functioning Fourth and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution, I will side with little Jemmy Madison and not, as Mike Lupica of the New York Daily News apparently would have me do, with Reggie Jackson. Jackson whined to Lupica, "This crap is all about your muscles. Well, guess what the biggest muscle in your body is? Your heart.
"

  I realize that with sports we are talking about the private, and not the public, sphere, but we have allowed the job of abridging our rights to be subcontracted in so many directions these days that the government hardly has to bother itself with doing so any more, and a lot of that has its roots in the days after Len Bias died. Consider, for example, Pottawatomie County v. Earls, in which the Supreme Court decided last year, by the predictable 5-to-4 margin, that high-school students could be tested for drugs if they decided to participate in virtually any extracurricular activity.

  The case concerned a girl named Lindsay Earls, who'd refused a school-mandated drug test. Lindsay Earls wanted to join the choir.

  Now, a society that truly valued its civil liberties would have laughed the Supreme Court majority that promulgated this foolishness right off the bench. But that was not, alas, the case. Now there's a new steroid and a new push to erect another new infrastructure of unworkable and draconian rules. That will last until another cagey scientist invents another steroid that the drug warriors haven't heard of, and then the whole process will start all over again, and we discover that we learned nothing from the tragic passing of Len Bias except how to be idiots with each other.

  Baseball and the Bird

  The national pastime's legacy of obscenity.

  By Josh Levin

  Posted Monday, Oct. 13, 2003, at 10:45 AM PT

  After vanquishing the Oakland A's on a called third strike last week, Red Sox pitcher Derek Lowe spun toward the opposing dugout, dropped his hands to his waist, and indulged in a celebratory groin chop. "I did the same crazy things I always do when I win," Lowe later explained, as he was being bathed in champagne. But several members of the losing side weren't so dismissive. "I saw it. It was completely classless," said A's first baseman Scott Hatteberg. "He's going to get paid back for that," promised shortstop Miguel Tejada.