There is no better song for insomnia than Cowboy Junkies’ magnificent “Misguided Angel,” a three-chord composition so good that some nights it hurts just to listen to it. An anchor point of  their utterly incomparable 1988 album The Trinity Session (importantly, singular), it is, in my view, one of of the most brilliant country songs ever written or recorded.

I used to play and sing this song to my friend Jonathan, back before I could sing worth a good goddamn and when I was first learning to play the acoustic guitar. Once, I told Jonathan to imagine it as a gay love song, and frankly…it was pretty funny. Back then, obscurely coded homophobia seemed good to me for some college-age LOLZ. But it was actually kinda Monty Python amusing, at the time.

Regardless, this song is three chords of echoey heartbreaking beauty, period. It sounds magnificent on rhythm guitar even if you can’t play leads worth a damn; seriously, five minutes of lessons and with a knack, you could play this thing and break hearts from El Paso to Christopher Street.

Nowadays, I HOPE it’s a gay love song, for somebody, somewhere, dreaming in darkness. It makes the departure-from-the-family theme in the lyrics positively eerie for anyone who’s ever questioned who they are, what they want, and what they stand for:

He says ‘baby, don’t listen to what they say
There comes a time when you have to break away’
He says ‘baby there are things we all cling to all our life
It’s time to let them go and become my wife’

Jeebus Hussein Christmas, did you ever hear anything so gorgeous? I’m getting chills right now. And one of the many best things about “Misguided Angel” is that it’s followed up by THIS piece of death-obsessed heaven, “Blue Moon Revisited (Song for Elvis)”:

And then you only have to wait another fifteen minutes or so — and they’re not bad minutes, not even remotely — before you get to THIS slice of working-glass genius, a profoundly religious ancient gospel hymn popularized in 1936 by The Carter Family and performed over the years by the likes of Elvis, The Oak Ridge Boys, the St. Thomas Baptist Church in Memphis, and Del McCoury, among many others, but given its most ethereally terrifying performance here, on The Trinity Session, where it builds to a crescendo that won’t leave you standing…unless, of course, you’re a heartless automaton:

Jesus, with tuneskis like this in the world, what does a guy do for encores?

Maybe some…SLEEP?

Nah, where’s the @#$*!#$*!-ing fun in THAT?

David Bowie next, maybe…

Insomnia: Where music geeks go to die, slowly, in agony, with enduring adherence to Billy Joel fanaticism and a Star Trek fans love of music made by drug fiends, all without the slightest sense of cognitive dissonance. Here, obscure psychedelic band The Zodiac opens their truly weird 1967 album “Cosmic Sounds.” Truth is beauty, right? Am I right?

Then there’s this, coolness personified; with every gooey slide on the fretless bass, Dave Brubeck and Mark Sandman are Bogarting cigs in heck:

And, just in case you think I’m cool, here’s what I consider to be one of THE greatest songs ever written:

Oh, also, from the Velvert Turner Group:

And also:

Oh, and:

Plus:

Also:

Sleep nao? Probably not.

Recently, Jack White of The White Stripes was said to have slammed Lady Gaga in an interview. According to White’s recent statements, this never happened. The “journalist” who quoted him in Esquire added a few choice words to his quote — a couple of important ones, namely “Lady Gaga.” White was talking about culture in general. Apparently Esquire thought they’d just, you know, pinch-hit for him. White clarified on his website, and even has laudatory comments for Gaga over her passionate advocacy for gay rights and sexual freedoms. If there is or ever has been a feud between the two, then it does not derive from what White said to Esquire.

What troubles me most, however, is this MTV article, which is how I found out about the controversy. When one bookmarks or shares the article in question, supposedly about White’s “clarification” — it retains the original inflammatory headline as a header, even though the headline itself has been corrected. (Sadly, the MTV author also hasn’t bothered to rewrite the early paragraphs enough to convey with any degree of accuracy what White “clarified,” but that’s another issue.)

The metatag problem is a common error when using blogging or other publishing software. Sometimes it derives from the software (for instance, WordPress) or its plugins. I have no idea what platform MTV publishes on, and I don’t have time to go digging for it, but there’s an important journalistic lesson here, as I see it, one that “real” journalists and “real” news editors, insofar as they still exist, often get wrong.

LEARN YOUR BLOGGING SKILLS, PEOPLE! CHANGE THE METAS WHEN YOU PRINT A CLARIFICATION!

Yes, that means that you have to learn technology. I don’t like it any better than anyone…I’m not a tech guy and I prefer to write for a living and have somebody else

That means, if you don’t know what metatags are, LOOK THEM THE FUCK UP.

Or, hell, what do I care? If you don’t work for MTV, and you’re just blogging on your own, then don’t look them up, and don’t understand metatags…you are certainly under no obligation to do so.

However, as a not-quite-a-journalist with a little journalistic training, and one who respects that dying profession, I must insist that if you are not going to check your metatags, you don’t then publish intentionally inflammatory stuff that you made up.

If you are blogging your poetry, recipes for margaritas or your thoughts about Firefly, you are unlikely to encounter this as a serious and potentially damaging issue. The great thing about blogging is that anyone can be a writer, anyone can publish, anyone can be read, anyone can reach thousands or even millions of readers, or just a few important ones. It cuts out the vast divide between “writers” and “normal people,” a divide that never really existed and never should have existed.

However, the adaptation of the blog format by news media has carried with it a few pitfalls, and this is one of them. It’s partly complicated by the ability to check real-time stats, which means that editors at some major sites are more prone than ever to change headlines to be inflammatory. Not like this didn’t happen in the days of yellow journalism (the Spanish American War, anyone?) Often if/when the headlines change back after public outcry (or someone in-house pointing out that the headline is now inaccurate), they forget to change the metas.

This has happened before my very eyes at places like the UK Bonehead Repository, aka the always inflammatory The Daily Mail. I even wrote an article about Occupy New York for Tiny Nibbles that addressed this issue briefly.

I simply cannot emphasize enough how irresponsible this is when one is publishing a post with a highly inflammatory headline. It means when a story like the one about Jack White’s comments on Lady Gaga is published and then corrected or clarified, and the user “shares” the piece on Facebook or Twitter or another social media platform, the original, incorrect, information is disseminated, because oftentimes all that people see or remember on social media are headlines.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s GREAT that major news corporations can get rid of all those pesky writers, editors, fact checkers, typesetters, print monkeys, etc. I understand it really improves their bottom line, and if there’s one thing I want out of both journalism and social media, it’s greater profits for enormous corporations.

I mean, if MTV turns out to have editorial, quality-control and fact-checking standards roughly on par with Thomasroche.com, which I publish in my underwear between lengthy sessions of lighting my farts and singing “Waiting for the Man” to my dog in a Pepe Le Pew voice, that’s kind of a sad statement.

I also do not like this article on strictly esthetic grounds (the writing is wide-eyed, gooey and amateurish). But what also bugs me is that the author was too lazy to rewrite the first few paragraphs to clarify that the thing is, Jack White did not attack Lady Gaga…he most specifically did NOT attack Lady Gaga. The opening paragraphs still state, in part:

In a new interview with the British edition of Esquire, White takes a swipe at Gaga over what he perceives to be her lack of authenticity.

“I don’t think she lives it, because it’s all artifice,” White says. “It’s all image with no meaning behind it. You can’t sink your teeth into it. It’s a sound bite. It’s very of this age, because that’s what people want.”

Of course, serval outlets picked up the quote, which led White to issue a statement Wednesday (December 5) afternoon that took the media to task for its “tabloidesque drama baiting,” and said that his quotes were taken out of context.

“I never said anything about her music, or questioned the authenticity of her songs in any way. I was in a conversation about the drawbacks of image for the sake of image, and that it is popular nowadays to not question an image in front of you, but only to label it as ‘cool’ or ‘weird’ quickly and dispose of it,” the statement read in part. “I don’t like my comments about Lady Gaga’s presentation being changed into some sort of negative critique of her music. If you’re going to try to cause drama, at least get the quotes right. I think journalists should also be held accountable for what they say. Especially publications like the NME who put whatever words they feel like between two quotation marks and play it off as a quote.”

[Link.]

While I may have implied above that the article itself is not the problem, in fact, it is. The metatags are just a symptom of not giving a shit enough to actually “clarify” rather than just tossing a bone to accuracy.

For the record, from the little I know of Jack White, I find it far more likely that White would have slammed Charlie Musselwhite or B.B. King than that he would have attacked Lady Gaga. In any event, I give White the benefit of the doubt, because there’s a documentary out there that features him building a diddley bow from scratch, and then playing it. I think that is pretty bad-ass. The fucker knows his blues, and that gets him mileage aplenty in my book.

And for the record — this one’s important to me — I do not hate Lady Gaga. In fact, I am amazed and horrified by all you assholes who do. The amount of vitriol I see spewing at her from friends on social media is actually upsetting to me. It makes me sick to my stomach.

According to comments voiced in social media by friends of mine whose opinions I usually respect, Gaga is “a Madonna retread,” “hasn’t done anything Alice Cooper didn’t do,” “doesn’t do it as well as Iggy Pop,” is ugly, is skanky, is stupid, is pretentious, is not a “real” queer, dropped out of Tisch because she is unintelligent… need I go on?

Look, I’m not making these sentiments up…I’ve actually read them from people I know, and I just don’t fucking get it. Why the hell pick on Gaga? Who in the living hell gives a damn?

Or maybe I do get it…look, I’m sorry to have to say it, but to my eyes, nose and ears the Gaga-hating looks, smells and quacks like flat-out misogyny. It’s got a different flavor to the hatred aimed at Justin Bieber. But that flavor, to me, is terrifying because it’s blatant anti-female overtones. Too often, people don’t realize just how vicious they’re being toward media figures.

For what it’s worth, I do not generally like the general genre of music that Gaga engages in. All that Autotuned dance music stuff is pretty dull to me. It’s not to my taste.

But I don’t need to slam Gaga for being vapid, and I don’t understand why anyone feels the need to do so. She’s certainly not any more “superficial” than any other pop star, and she’s far less vapid and superficial than most Broadway musicals, which often layer on the schmaltz only disguise their ultimate lack of complexity. And as White said, she’s been out there as an openly bi pop star and taken a stand for queer rights. Um…sorry, friends, how did she suddenly become our enemy because she wears costumes and she’s not David Bowie?

There is an artistry to pop, and it’s never really encompassed concept albums about Anne Frank, oh-so-deep insights into Jung, or deaf, dumb & blind kids who sure play a mean pinball. Those things exist despite, not because of, the pop esthetic; those authors who can meld the two are in my view either overpretentious or brilliant, depending on how they handle it and on my particular mood. (Jeff Mangum, for the record, is ALWAYS brilliant.)

The only thing that bugs me about Gaga is how much the media hopped on the pro-Gaga bandwagon. Before I stopped reading CNN (about a year or two ago), on any given week they would publish on their front page maybe a dozen headlines about any genre of music. I am not exaggerating when I tell you that three-fourths of them were always about Lady Gaga. But there’s nothing wrong with Gaga that I blame on Gaga.

It’s no surprise that there’s a huge anti-Gaga backlash. People want Jack White to pile on, because they want “rock ‘n’ roll” to stand in opposition to pop. But that’s bullshit. Rock ‘n’ roll is a big umbrella. So’s pop. Neither one can be defined with any accuracy. Trying to perceive a feud between White (rock) and Gaga (pop) is like trying to use rock and pop as stand-ins for some kind of culture war…maybe even the war of the sexes. And it pains me to have to repeat this, but I just can’t say this enough times: 90% of the anti-Gaga backlash is misogyny.

From a music journalism perspective, that’s almost as lame as forgetting to check your metatags when you republish an article.

Originally published on Techyum.com, August 3, 2010.

From GuitarInternational.com

As if to prove that my life as become as virtual as Lincoln Rhyme‘s, I really cut that shit loose and celebrated blues guitar legend Buddy Guy’s recent 74th birthday by — brace for the scandal — reading his Wikipedia page. I mean, Buddy’s getting close to the big seven-five, so I wanted to majorly kick out the jams, you dig? We’re talking par-TAY.

Anyway, as it turns out, the esteemed Mr. Guy, like many young black men in Lousiana in the 1930s and ’40s, first learned to play music on a homemade Diddley Bow, aka “the jitterbug.” Buddy’s had two strings, but a Diddley Bow typically has a single string, leading to the instrument’s other nickname, the “one-string,” or its formal name, the “monocord zither,” which was also the name of a Lizard Men chieftain in the original Flash Gordon serials (okay, I made that last part up).

The Diddley Bow is usually played with a glass slide or a whiskey bottle, but the best-known appearance of the instrument on film is in Alan Lomax’s movie The Land Where the Blues Began. In the following clip, its best-known proponent Lonny Pitchford plays it sans slide, somewhat hilariously due to the narrator sounding like he just stepped out of a 1954 film entitled How to Survive a Nuclear Attack.

You can watch the entire Lomax movie at Folkfilms.net, by the way.

The instrument gave its name (like, duh) to a guy who arguably could be the most influential guitarist to emerge from the black community in the 1950s, and just maybe the most influential rhythm guitarist between the eras of Leadbelly and Lou Reed. That’d be Bo Diddley, and if you didn’t see that one coming, you might want to brush up on your history of rhumba-influenced chugging guitar sounds or maybe just play it safe and go back to listening to Lawrence Welk.

The Diddley Bow sounds nothing like that chunky-rhythm Panic in Detroit shit, though; it’s all down-home Delta moonshine and I-got-a-bad-feeling-I-cut-my-brother-in-half, as demonstrated in this fine video in which a mullet-damaged rock nerd plays a few gorgeous lines with a 100ml Jack Daniels bottle to show off his homemade diddley bow “Hellhound,” fashioned from a two-by-four with an Altoids-tin resonator and a bridge made outta galvanized pipe.

Said video directs also directs one to the creator’s online store where Hellhound was once upon a time offered for sale, and one-of-a-kind diddley bows are promised “soon.”

The instrument has since been played by a cat named Seasick Steve and NY jazz pianist Cooper-Moore, not to mention, of course, James “Super Chikan” Johnson, shown playing a diddley bow at the “Legendary Rhythm & Blues Cruise” in the image at the top of this post. Jack White of The White Stripes makes one in the electric-guitar documentary It Might Get Loud (watch the clip here or, depending on your browser, it may show up below).

But if you want some serious down-home diddley bow playing, look no further than the clip below, where a gawkish, bewilderingly Aryan mini-redneck plays an electric diddley bow while sitting on a combine.

Incidentally, those fine moves the esteemed Lonnie Pitchford displays in the 1979 Lomax film may seem original to him, but he actually musta learned ‘em from musicians his grandparents age, as he is twenty-freakin’-four in that clip. Pitchford died in 1998 of AIDS at age forty-three.

Pitchford has the final word on the diddley, bow, though. In 2000, Creedence Clearwater Revival cat and longtime San Francisco area resident John Fogarty made a donation through Mt. Zion Memorial, a nonprofit fund that seeks to memorialize the graves of rural black roots musicians, for Mr. Pitchford to get a gravestone worthy of him. At the request of Pitchford’s family, the headstone contains a playable diddley bow, which just might be the only thing cooler than having a woman in black leave flowers on your gave once a year (or not dying in the first place).

Top image from GuitarInternational.com.

Links from North Mississippi Commentator.

Currently listening to this very entertaining piece of culture, The Rough Guide to the Music of Mali. What’s interesting to me is that a substantial amount of Malian music seems to have an American blues influence, something I knew from my listening to Tuareg fusion group Tinarawen. It’s worth suggesting this might be selection bias on the part of the record label. Regardless, it makes for some gorgeous listening.

It’s hard for me to imagine that anyone has been living life without knowing British folk rock ensemble Oysterband‘s mercilessly tender 1989 rendition of New Order’s ultimate dreamgoth war tragedy haiku, Love Vigilantes, which my friend Michelle introduced me to many years ago. But in case you’ve missed it, here is a live version that feels far too cheerful for the song’s subject matter.

The softer, tighter, almost brutally gentle studio version on their 1989 album “Ride” breaks my heart every single time. So soft, so obvious, so credulous, and yet, here I am again, bleeding on the floor.

This small-venue live version may make you dance, but that’s okay…it’s still gorgeous.

If you like it, it’s worth checking out the whole album, which is filled with gorgeous contemporary British folk. And Oysterband is still around, touring hard in Canada this month, then Denmark in November, then back to the UK for December gigs and continuing into next year. These guys are friggin’ road monsters. But then, I can imagine that their loose, improvisational, emphatic and empathic flavor of folk must be a HELL of a lot of fun to play live. It certainly sounds like it, however heart-rending some of their songs are. Sometimes music feels like a pure shot of joy, a mainer to my vain, and this album, it gots it.

Here’s the original “Love Vigilantes” — a classic. When I first heard the Oysterband version, I had never actually known the title of the New Order song, and didn’t even realize I’d heard it a zillion times while half-drunk on Captain Jack and pining in dorm rooms for gorgeous goth girls with bigger record collections than me.

This is an iconic guitar sound, a breathtaking riff and a great song. Just a little push, and you’ll be living in the ice age:

You know how back in the day — assuming you’re my age and an overgrown art goth who suffered the sneers of your fellows — Joy Division freaks would always badmouth New Order? Well, I was one of them. To me, New Order was middle-class shrubhead music for hoop-earringed trendies with bad taste in boyfriends, whereas Joy Division was pure doomed working-class Baudelaire with a Jim Carroll chaser. I was a pinhead; luckily, at some point my smarter-than-me girlfriend J. set me straight. She did it with the laudable kindness of someone who sees both points of view. But J., more than me, was free of pretension. She knew how to quest for that perfect riff, that most beautiful phrase, that  ecstatic instant when chills go down your spine. If the occasional New Order song doesn’t do that to you, I submit that you oughta check your pulse.

I’ll always prefer Joy Divsion, too, because they were so much further out on the edge. Still, I think it takes an extremely limited palate to love Joy Division and hate New Order. Though their very early work was unquestionably a series of retreads as they got their footing after Curtis’s suicide, New Order later produced some magnificent work in a related but significantly different genre than Joy Division. The thing is, the members of New Order also championed many new bands. Suggesting, as is often done, that Joy Division is influential on a level comparable to the Velvets or the Stooges, but New Order is little more than a new wave footnote, is stark raving crazy. It’s douchebag-punk talk, valuing a simple and compelling aesthetic over complexity and the building of a practical life as an artist. Not everyone is here for the consumer’s amusement. How many friends have I seen plunge down the rabbit hole of “Live Fast, Die Young, Leave a Compellingly Deathrock Looking Corpse?” Too many.

Still, you simply can’t beat music like this:

Nor, just to get totally random about it, can you beat sheer genius like the other bundle of brilliance J. introduced me to once upon a time, during a rough time in our life when her kindnesses were far too many and mine far too few:

I would say I can’t listen to Ani DiFranco’s “Not a Pretty Girl” without thinking of J., except that I’ve probably listened to it 1,000 times since then, so…sorry, some albums are so friggin’ good they obliterate all memories except the ones they implant on their own.

But what I do think about, and somewhat often, is where Ani, after Pretty Girl, failed many of her followers. In one of the dichotomies of my life in those days, J. was utterly alienated by Ani DiFranco’s followup, Dilate. She wasn’t alone.

Dilate can be argued to be a self-indulgent and ultimately shallow attempt by DiFranco to justify her affair with a married man, as far from the bitterly self-empowered punk intensity of Not a Pretty Girl as it is possible for an album to be. I have no idea what J. thinks about Dilate now, or if she’s even listened to it since. But at the time I agreed with her.

That didn’t last long, because, as I see it today, if I were Ani DiFranco I would — unfortunately — be only one-tenths Not a Pretty Girl Ani and nine-tenths Dilate Ani. This is not something I’m particularly proud of, but nobody exactly asked me whether I’d like to be crazy or not. Hell, I’d rather be the calmly menacing, evocatively inspiring No-Drama Obama of Not a Pretty Girl-era Ani any day, since once upon a time she served as an idol to at least half a dozen bi women I’ve known.

With Dilate Ani, there’s less to shake one’s fist at…other than Ani herself, who (I’ve heard argued) deserves it. Certainly, I understand why those looking for Activist Ani did a big “WTF?” when Dilate came out. But while Ani DiFranco’s activist impulses are deeply personal and at times simply incomparable in their visceral qualities, they were never quite what convinced me she was a genius.

Wanna know what convinced me she was a genius? Alongside the fact that she is one of the most innovative, lyrical and brilliant guitar instrumentalists ever to play pop, rock or folk music — and will never, mark my words, get the credit for it — what I like is Ani’s ability to find the place where your heart hasn’t started bleeding yet, and slice it open with a D-string and a capo. She does it as clearly in “Not a Pretty Girl” as she does in “Cradle and All,” but with utterly different agendas, for different kinds of nightmares.

Listening today, what troubles me most is not Ani’s stridency but her claim that “Don’t you think every kitten in a tree figures out how to get down whether or not you ever show up?” I know, and I’m confident Ani knows, that in fact, some don’t. Some of them die up there.

Anyway, within a small number of months after I first heard it, I’d decided that “Dilate” was fantastic. I made up my mind that this deeply human album was brilliant — and that, maybe without intending it, DiFranco had uncovered the nightmarish underbelly of both hero worship and romantic obsession, in perhaps the most awful way conceivable.

To those of you who know the two albums, it is my opinion that Dilate is an album that “Cradle and All” hints at — but Not a Pretty Girl’s equally brilliant title song absolutely does not. It’s the two sides of being a bad-ass chick, or anyone bad-ass if you like. DiFranco may be a frenetic bundle of up-yours and in-your-face and take-it-or-leave-it and not-on-my-watch, but at some point, like the rest of us, she’s got to slow down and put her head on the pillow, and sometimes that’s when things get ugly.

It’s far too weird for words that my next extended relationship after J. featured an extensive mutual fixation on DiFranco’s Dilate, particular the title song above, as well as on The Cure’s Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me.

Especially this song, performed here in 2009 at Coachella in hugely modified form but with the at once brutally anarchist and mystically surgical labor pains of its guitar introduction left largely intact:

With his shrubby hair and his Stevie Wonder sway, Smith feels twenty years wiser — and yet no wiser at all. I feel his pain.

And there, I do not go, out of respect for all the many females “The Kiss” has, in retrospect, been about to me over the years, through no fault of their own whatsoever. None of you had any idea what you were in for, ladies…and for that I apologize. The secret that all of you seemed to know at the end, but never at the beginning, was that every character in a nightmare is a reflection of the haunted. In a dream, we all get to be ourselves.