Whenever I feel depressed, I remind myself to listen to some Stevie Wonder. Because even when he sings a sad song, even one heavily bowed down by hopelessness, a glimmer of the underlying ecstasy and hope that once existed still remains. On top of it all, it’ll probably come with the added bonus of a great harmonica solo:

Now, I apologize for using one of those pretty dull vids that show up on Youtube that just feature the album cut and, at best, a slideshow of album art and photos, but there were no great live performances of Stevie Wonder doing the song. Instead, there was this performance of a bunch of kids from Maine doing it. Don’t watch this video unless you want feel hopelessly and irredeemably untalented, because these little fuckers are great:

Honestly, that’s the sort of thing I love about YouTube. It’s effectively an open mic for the world, with all the hazards and pay-offs such a thing would entail. But the pay-offs are so great that, when I see something like this—real people making real music right there, just like we have for 10,000 years—it just makes me fly. Because these kids, from Fryeburg Academy in Fryeburg, Maine, are so awesome, here they are again, getting smooth with a classic by Michael McDonald and the Doobie Brothers.

So smooth! I also like hats!

The subjects of the TV show “Whale Wars” are idiots.

Chief dope among the crew of the Steve Erwin is captain Paul Watson, one of the founders of Greenpeace who got kicked out for being too radical. In the show, Watson leads a band of land-lubbing sailors into battle against a fleet of Japanese whaling ships, intent on throwing enough stink bombs at them to stop their rape of the seas (this show runs on Animal Planet).

Only here’s the thing—they’re not really raping the seas. The Japanese fleet takes a total of about 935 Minke Whales and 50 Fin Whales each year. The International Whaling Commission estimated there are as many as 45,000 Fin and over a million Minke Whales in the sea (Correction below). Compare that tiny harvest to humans’ ability to decimate stocks of Atlantic Cod, Salmon, or Blue Fin Tuna, and what the Japanese are doing looks like a study in sustainable fishing.

I’m not saying it should be open season on whales just because they’re not about to go extinct—far from it. I think the IWC should continue to strictly police whaling habits. But ban it? Why bother?

“But whales are intelligent, defenseless creatures!” you say. Well, you’re right. But so are pigs and octopuses. Unfortunately those animals also taste good. So the Japanese think whale meat tastes delicious? Fine, let them eat whale. It’s their funeral.

Whale meat is essentially poison. Human activity spews tons of industrial chemicals into the sea that slowly make their way up the food chain, concentrating PCBs, DDT, mercury and other compounds in the tissue of the biggest predator. In this case, that means whale meat.

This is not news—just ask people living in the Faroe Islands. Their kids’ immune systems are shot and many have developmental disorders brought on by mercury poisoning that came from eating whale meat. That makes Japanese people just as dumb for eating the stuff as the crew of the Steve Erwin is for trying to stop them. And after mercury-laden shellfish killed thousands of Japanese people in the 1950’s and 60’s, you think they’d know better.

As for the inept sailors of the Steve Erwin (if you think I’m being harsh, watch the first episode of “Whale Wars”), ever hear of climate change? The global water crisis? Polar bears?? There are better ways to spend millions of dollars towards conservation. -Michael Reilly

Image: JapanSugoi

Correction: The IWC numbers are outdated, as my colleague Kieran Mulvaney has informed me. While no reliable numbers for these whale populations exist, a more correct figure for Minke Whales is in the neighborhood of 500,000, with a less likely possibility that they number as few as 250,000.

Here is a clip that I’ve been loving for quite a few months now. When Fallout 3 hit at the end of October, I was completely hypnotized by the licensed tracks that your character can listen to being broadcast from the heart of the DC Wasteland, relayed through a radio antenna at the top of the Washington Monument. Some of these songs are appreciated ironically, what with the retrograde gender and racial politics of their lyrics resting on beds of chipper accompaniment. But one song always genuinely broke my heart, particularly when it came on at night as my character trekked lonesomely from one blasted-out building to another: Billy Holiday’s Crazy He Calls Me.

This clip is not that version—which nearly drowns in a flood of strings (fortunately, I like that sort of thing)—but I honestly like this one is better. With its straightforward combo arrangement, the vocal performance of Etta Jones is the full focus. Sure, it’s just another one of those “over-committing lover” songs, with its laundry-list of impossible promises. But maybe the hopelessness of those vows only accentuates the song’s general heart-brokenness. In some ways, it sounds like a song from someone who already knows that they’ve failed to live up to their own hype. Or maybe it’s the voice of a person who realizes that the one that they love will never let them prove that they could.
one

James Jamerson is the finest bass player in the history of recorded music. I know that sort of declaration is usually pretty absurd, but I can’t listen to the first half of Marvin Gaye’s album What’s Going On without almost crying, and I think it’s Jamerson’s fault. Oh I guess the singing and the hand percussion and the sweeping strings might be the culpable too, but it’s that endlessly swirling, syncopated bassline that burrows right into my spine and rides the nerves right out to my hands and feet and fingers and toes.

When I first heard that album, I had no idea who James Jamerson was and he became my favorite musician after approximately four bars. Then I realized that not only did he play on What’s Going On, but pretty much every Motown hit the label released before it moved to LA. This clip, which comes off of one of those great Reelin’ in the Years DVDs, shows the man onstage with Marvin, in easy mastery of his instrument. Pay attention: you’ll notice that Jamerson never uses more than his pointer-finger to pluck, no matter how complex or difficult the bass part gets.

Pursuant with our goals to improve the caliber this thing and heighten its beneficence for the culture of humanity, here is a clip of Joni Mitchell singing Help Me, one of her biggest hits, I think, but also the perfect marriage between her early ’70s pop sensibilities and the slippery melodies and unexpected harmonies that characterize her best works. Plus, her singing is remarkable, delicate, but with commanding control.

of emily gould. Seriously, who gives a shit about some obnoxious brat who wrote for some ridiculous blog? These things don’t matter. But most of all, I’m pretty fed up with having to look at her flip me off from the front of my blog every time I come here to remind myself that I have nothing to say. Your rebelliousness is not edgy or transgressive, it isn’t impressive, it isn’t cool, it isn’t funny and it isn’t even cute. It’s stupid.

So even though I have nothing to say (evidenced by the month between posts), I’m just gonna keep typing here until I feel like there might be enough words to drive that fantastically obnoxious picture right below the figurative fold. Who shot that piece of crap anyway? Was it some special team of NASA scientists committed to condensing self-satisfied arrogance into a space-shuttle worthy mini-packet of mission-suitable awful? Was it some alien life form attempting to catalogue with a single image the most important reason to steer the flying saucer right around this solar system? Was it an idiot man / chimp hybrid desperately flailing at the buttons of a digital camera that he fears and will never understand? Was it your mom? What the fuck?! Who told this woman that those sunglasses looked good? She looks like the most obnoxious girl in your high school drawing class. Why didn’t the photographer feel some sense of duty toward all humanity and just push this obnoxious Internet non-celebrity right off that building into the throngs below? Doesn’t he understand that the only thing needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing?

Did Emily Gould ever win a Quadfecta Trivia Tournament of Champions? Even if she did, did she look deep into her heart and realize that—no matter how many bar trivia tournaments she sweeps—she is still a disgusting, self-absorbed narcissist. (It’s not redundant to put those two together when either “self-absorbed” and “narcissist” alone would fail to convey the true scale of the massive, putrid, unbridled ego on display.) I did win a Quadfecta Trivia Tournament of Champions, but none of you knew that, because I didn’t make a big goddamned fuss about it, on this blog or anywhere, even though it’s arguably a greater achievement than getting evicted from the Gawker Blog Sweatshop for being too smug for even the Internet. I’ve gotten better achievements than that just from looking at an Xbox 360 from across the room. Remember, not 2 months ago, when you could come to this site and see the ebullient faces of Stevie Wonder, George Clinton, Sly Stone and Brit Winterknee smiling up at you? You’d listen to their music and absorb their joy and then muster the strength to make it through another day? Yeah, well, I promise, those days are coming back. And the first step is to drive that self-satisfied smirk deeper into the shit-can of the web, back with the imbedded midis, gif animations and the rest of the waste from another more obnoxious Internet era. Say goodbye, Emily Gould, you’ve been flushed.

…or How Being a Blogger Can Chew You Up and Spit You Out

Emily Gould, former editor of Gawker.com has an interestingly self-indulgent piece in this Sunday’s NYT Magazine. I have never and probably will never ascend to the levels of blogging celebrity that she has, as former editor of Gawker Media’s flagship blog Gawker. But I blog twice a day (for money. Not here, obviously) and I can say this: much of what she writes in the article is true — blogging has a way of consuming some portion of your brain. After you do it long enough, firing up your computer and spitting out a post becomes as reflexive as that little kick your leg gives when a doctor hits your knee.

Gould’s a good writer for being just 27 years old, and she does a handy job of being a fly on the wall of her own panic-stricken existence during her time as blogging celebrity and gossip extraordinaire (Gawker’s like US Weekly, except snarkier). But she never said whether she thought being a blogger was a good thing or bad — simply that it happened.

Let me fill that opinionless void — her story is something of a coming of age tale. It’s instructive, and probably cautionary for a lot of people. I don’t know if Emily is a better person now that she’s been through the Gawker ringer, or just an older person, but I’d offer that what Gawker did to her was to teach her a little something about herself, mainly that she has a problem with overexposing herself (and the people she writes about) to her audience.

I give her credit for weathering justified storms of criticism about libel and slander against the celebrities she preyed upon. Even though her article describes daily panic attacks while blogging, the seems to still be sane enough to write a cover story for a major magazine, so she gets points for mental toughness. And I give her major props for posting 12 times a day for the better part of two years. That’s bitch work, straight up.

Still, her story reads like a tragedy. Even though her blogging for Gawker was cruel, petty, self-aggrandizing, sometimes not even factually correct, and it epitomized the sleaziest aspects of the media (new or old), she seems to tacitly acknowledges that she simply can’t help herself. She was, and maybe is still out of control when is comes to blogging.

After a while it becomes almost an afterthought that she made it her mission in life to annoy people and intrude upon their private lives, and that’s a little weird. Instead she focuses on how her relationships melted down and a bunch of other self-centered, angsty crap, but that only acts to build the case she’s making for us — she has a problem with over-exposing herself to the world but what I get from it is that it’s not really her fault. She’s demented, she needs help.

It’s hard to say if the blogging medium made her this way, or if she were born twenty years earlier she would’ve found some other outlet for her exhibitionist ways…maybe she would’ve starred in porn movies, who knows.

Either way, the cautionary aspect of the tale is to would-be bloggers. Emily just barely had enough mental grit to get through the pummeling she took from commenters, the pressure of posting, her bosses, and Jimmy Kimmel on CNN (and maybe she didn’t, if her exhibitionist tendencies were developed instead of innate). I think a lot of people, attracted as she was by the glamour and glitz of a high-profile job, would’ve collapsed under that avalanche.

This is a clip of the man who, anecdotally, gets called the funkiest player alive. They say, give him a stick and some ground to stamp on, and he could make that funky. Remember, it’s the same gentleman who totally destroyed the album version of “Funkentelechy,” who co-wrote big big tunes like “Up For The Down Stroke,” “Tear the Roof of the Sucker,” “Mothership Connection,” “Bop Gun,” etc, etc, etc. It’s the same ghost who wrote a song called “Munchies For Your Love” and got away with it. At the age of 17, he came up out of Cincinnati, OH, and joined James Brown’s band just in time to revolutionize that man’s sound on cuts like “Give It Up Or Turn It Loose” and “Sex Machine.”

Here he his soloing during one of his unfairly awesome ballads (because how fair is it that the world’s greatest funkateer also writes the genre’s best ballads).

The following are the names of the members of one of the best funk combos of all time: “Master” Henry Gibson (percussion), Joseph “Lucky” Scott (bass), Craig McMullen (guitar) and Tyrone McCullen (drums). You probably never have heard of them, although watch them in this clip below from 1973 and you’ll probably recognize both the song they’re playing and the singer who fronts them:

These four guys were Mayfield’s symbiotic backup band during those initial, revolutionary solo records he recorded after leaving the Impressions in 1970. Mayfield is one of the closest and most-intimate singers of the soul era, and his band matched the unforced sophistication of his delivery by exhibiting impeccable dynamics, transitioning easily from heavy to subliminal and back again multiple times in the course of the stretched-out songs that made up Curtis’ new funk repertoire. 1971’s Curtis/Live! displays this well, illustrating how funk doesn’t need 16 pieces to get across.

The video performance above is from a new DVD from the Reelin’ in the Years archive, called Movin’ On Up: The Music and Message of Curtis Mayfield and The Impressions. It’s one of about 20 complete live and television performances included in the documentary, making the DVD a spectacular document of this artist. Reelin’ in the Years is quickly becoming one of my favorite companies in the history of humankind. They also have significant catalogs of blues and jazz music performances.

Just for kicks, here is the Fishbone cover of same song linked above:

Not too many people today remember Clementine Rubarb from Corn Tree Bluff, New Hampsher, but residents of Corn Tree Bluff certainly do. They remember the day she played hooky from the one-room school house down on Tricklepee Creek and invented the recumbent hobby horse in a field out behind the old Nickelkettle farm. 100 years latah, that invention would become the backbone of the Apollo Space progrum. I’m Brit Winterknee, and I’ll tell ya the story tonight on New England Chronicles…

Behind me is an old outhouse, pretty similar to any of the outhouses that dot the New Hampsher wilderness like musciphalias robustial—the vibrant and virulently poisonous Weeweecap Toadstool. But this is an outhouse with a difference. For it was at this very outhouse, on a brisk winter’s day in January, 1843, that a young Mary Baker Eddy would pass, and seeing it’s delightful crescent window, become struck with the inspiration that would one day lead to her philosophical religion, Christian Science. She would also shat all over its walls. I’m Brit Winterknee, and I’ll tell ya the story tonight on New England Chronicles…

Andrew Giswald Heddlerock was mayor of Rump, New Hampsher, for almost 78 years, and he always had the most magnificent-looking beards. Of course, I refer not to facial hair, but to his numerous young and beautiful wives. For Heddlerock was one of the Granite State’s most notorious dandies and man-chasers. In between his executorial duties to the town, he would travel the nation by donkey-truck and flat-bed-river-boat, billing himself as “The Grayte Greene Homo-sexualle of the Northe Countrie” and charge a farthing-penny a head for entrance to his extravagant stage-show. I’m Brit Winterknee, and I’ll tell ya the story tonight on New England Chronicles…

People today often forget that the old saying—”ride you out of town on a rail”—used to be quite lit’ral. I learned that the hard way, in 1948, at the ripe old age of 15, when Boots Magovern, the local cordwainer, caught me in a state of ecstasy with his grandmotha. I’m Brit Winterknee, and I’ll tell ya the story tonight on New England Chronicles…

The muzzle-loaded muskets of New Hampsher’s Revolutionary War militia were notoriously fickle weapons that required a ball, a paper, a ramrod, a cotton plug, one-hundredths of a hogshead of goat offal, a jar of fresh-squeezed and fermented potato brandy, a pinch of north-facing moss off the Wimble tree, and two stones worn perfectly smooth by the ceaseless flowing of the Suchaweeboobie River. Even the greatest musketeer could load it but two times in four days. That’s why the residents of Quimblie, New Hampsher, found it much more expedient to burn all 14 membas of the Rumpbritch family to death in their beds when it was discovered that they were nothing but a repellent horde of unrepentant Tories. I’m Brit Winterknee, and I’ll tell ya the story…