Brandon's Buzz

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs — “Maps” (from Fever to Tell) —

It has been crystal clear to me, at least as far back as late April 2011 — roughly around the time that he called out Donald Trump as being a “carnival barker” the exact same weekend that he gave the order to kill Osama bin Laden — that our President, Barack Obama, was destined to be re-elected to a second term, wholly in spite of the fact that the primary Republican talking point of the past four years has been that Mr. Obama is a failed president (and, even worse, a weak-kneed leader) without a credible record to run on. (Float that asinine argument past the world’s most prominent terrorist networks — a non-trivial number of whose principals have been taken out by bullets between the eyes — or the multiple millions of employees once again manufacturing American automobiles, or the tens of millions of folks who were previously deemed uninsurable for one reason or another, and see how far it flies.)

Even that far back, it was clear to me that the Republicans were sunk from jump, because after their sparkling A-listers (Governors Haley Barbour, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie), a handful of promising second-stringers (Mitch Daniels, Rob Portman, Paul Ryan), and the reigning king and queen of their solipsistic sideshow (the aforementioned Trump and that inimitable ignoramus Sarah Palin, she who has to write her staunchest principles on the palm of her hand like some sort of makeshift Cliff’s Notes to remind her of what her core beliefs are supposed to be, and she who, on a bet, couldn’t tell a room full of reporters just what Paul Revere was really doing the night he took his famous midnight ride) all declined to throw their hats in the ring, the party was left to stitch together the most ramshackle patchwork of clown-car candidates ever witnessed in modern American politics (Herman Cain! Michele Bachmann! That gruesome twosome of Ricks, Perry and Santorum!) to drag through the grueling gauntlet of their primary process.

Of course, the primaries were just an amusing — or, rather, amusingly frightening — formality, because the 2012 Republican presidential nominee was always doomed to be Mitt Romney, because, regardless of his quite evident flaws — which are far too great in number to list, though I’m certainly about to try anyhow — it was his turn in the batting order, and that party is nothing if not strictly structured with regard to whom they hand the keys to Daddy’s T-bird. (As the great strategist Mary Matalin opined last year: Democrats fall in love (witness: JFK, Bubba Bill, and Mr. Obama himself, who needed all of one electrifying speech to propel himself onto the national stage), and Republicans fall in line (to wit: Romney is perceived to have paid his dues four years ago after suffering a stinging loss to eventual nominee John McCain, who himself had to wait eight long years after being painfully shoved aside for a baby Bush in 2000, eight years after Poppy Bush’s reign as a one-term wonder was essentially the equivalent of a third round of Reagan Republicanism).)

They never liked him, or trusted him, or believed for a second that he was one of them — indeed, to such an extent that they very nearly gave both the stunningly undisciplined Santorum and that slithering lizard Newt Gingrich the upper hand against him — but in the end, the Republicans did as was divinely decreed and cast their lot with Romney. The problems were immediate and immense: Romney is rich and privileged, in an era in which the lines of demarcation between the 1% and the rest have never been more starkly defined; Romney was a money man, a hardcore Wall Street-walker, in an era in which faith in and respect for Wall Street has plunged; Romney’s single proudest achievement as the governor of Massachusetts was a massively successful overhaul of the state’s healthcare system, in an era in which governmental intervention in same has suddenly become anathema in conservative circles. The irony of the biggest and most vulnerable chink in Romney’s armor is as delicious as it is dizzying: eight years after the Republicans literally leveled Democratic nominee John Kerry for being for the Iraq war prior to being against the Iraq war, they have managed to nominate the ultimate flip-flopper, a man who has, depending on whichever way the wind was blowing on any given day, taken every conceivable position on every conceivable issue, social, fiscal, or mineral, under the sun. (Not for nothing did Jon Huntmsan call ol’ Mitt a “well-lubricated weather vane” during the hazy run-up to primary season one year ago.)

Romney’s laughably gaffe-prone candidacy has been one of the most consistently inept operations in the entire history of modern presidential politics, and indeed, the blunders and boneheaded statements can be listed by rote: from “Corporations are people too, my friend!” to Michigan’s trees being the right height to trying to goad Rick Perry into a $10,000 bet on national television to “I like being able to fire people!” to Etch-a-Sketch to the continued bungled, secrecy-shrouded responses about tax returns to those paralyzing 47 percent comments, it’s truly a marvel to wake up on election morning and see a race as close as this one is, given how largely one-sided its triumphs and its travesties have appeared to be.

In the coming days, you’re going to hear a lot of noise from America’s punditocracy about why Mr. Romney has suffered such a crushing defeat at the end of what seemed like such a close horse race. High among the reasons you’re likely to hear thrown about: Hurricane Sandy, which slammed into News Jersey and York a week ago and basically froze the news cycle in place for days on end, and while I’m not naive enough to believe that fact will have had absolutely no effect on what will certainly be tonight’s end result — after all, Romney was essentially a non-entity in the entire closing week of the campaign, whilst the President was afforded wall-to-wall television coverage of himself being, ahem, presidential — I am also cynical enough to believe that Sandy unleashed her wrath far too late in the game to make any discernible difference.

To my eye, there has always — or, at the very least, there has for the last eighteen to twenty months — been one clear fact about this election (with a number of related tributaries draining back toward that one clear fact), and that is this: this race is going to be decided by the people who live in this country’s so-called “rust belt,” which is to say the voting citizens of Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. That’s where not only the lion’s share of this country’s cars get built, but where the lion’s share of this country’s cars’ accessories — your headlights, your seatcovers, your dashboards, your frickin’ fenders — get built. And all the people who do all said building are able to do so today because three years ago, when America’s automobile companies stood on the brink of utter and irrevocable collapse, President Obama and his team made the very unpopular decision to bail out General Motors and Chrysler using government funds and keep the lifeblood of this country’s industry pumping by somewhat artificial means until its beating heart could be restarted. In the days immediately following President Obama’s 2008 election victory, Mr. Romney — who, it bears noting, is a child of the American car industry (in the dead center of the 20th century, his father George was a die-hard advocate for American automotive engineering and successfully served as president and chairman of American Motors Corporation before turning to politics himself) — penned his infamous New York Times op-ed piece, which ran with a staggeringly simple headline: “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” (To be fair, he didn’t write the headline — newspaper editors generally handle that pesky task — but he did write the sentiments that the headline brilliantly and succinctly encapsulates.)

I guaran-damn-tee you this: the people whose vote matters today, to both of these men, have jobs. And they know why they have jobs. They see the choice we as a nation face on this day more clearly than anyone else in any other swath of the country can fathom. It’s a choice between a man who has seemed to understand in his bones the fact that America’s crowning achievement (laying aside that we are a free populace and govern ourselves) has always been that we build things here — it is incontrovertibly central to our psyche as a powerful nation — and a man who has seemed to put his faith in money above all, and who basically told every last one of those workers in the rust belt that only the strong survive, and that those who are already strong carry NO responsibility to extend their hand down the ladder and help those who are weak to become strengthened. Today, this day, the choice couldn’t possibly be more clear.

(A visual postscript: Just for kicks a few weeks back, A — who has been extraordinarily patient with my daily obsession on this race over the past year, and who is about as fed up with the whole notion of politics as anyone I’ve yet met — printed out a blank map of the country, gave it to me, and asked me to predict how I thought each state was going to lean in the final electoral college vote. And like a third grader, I literally sat at my kitchen table with my map colors and a pencil sharpener and painstakingly shaded in hues of red and blue all fifty states based on my gut feeling of how things were moving. That very map can be seen at the bottom of this post. You’ll note that New Mexico looks odd, because I originally colored it red by mistake, and when you try to put blue on top of red, you only get purple. You’ll also note that I put Virginia in Romney’s column, even though the polling coming out of the state has been awfully fluid in the past couple of days, so even though my final electoral vote tally is Obama 290, Romney 248 — and the first one to 270 wins — you could well see the President soar past 300 electoral votes tonight, which might be as close to a landslide victory as you’re likely to see for the foreseeable future.)

Jason Mraz — “93 Million Miles”
(from Love is a Four Letter Word) —

Longtime readers of this website know how hard I work to keep this as Mraz-free a zone as humanly possible. But one or another slips past the goalie urry now and then, and so it happens with this harmless tune, a lovely treatise on the lonely journey traveled by sunlight, all just to keep us foolish mortals warm and, occasionally, help us find our way home.

Barbra Streisand — “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today”
(from Release Me) —

For the record, you’ll nevah, evah convince me that Bette Midler’s bravura cover of this Randy Newman chestnut isn’t still the best I’ve ever heard. (This scene from Beaches still chokes me up, every damn time.) Notwithstanding that declaration, all the hoopla over Streisand’s just-unearthed version (which, heretofore, has been buried in Babs’ own personal vault for some forty years, and which anchors her brand new album of rarities and little-heard gems) is certainly well-earned: backed by Newman himself on piano, the diva turns inward, those still-evolving pipes wise beyond their impossibly young years, laying down an exquisitely crystalline vocal that crawls through the speakers like quantified, tangible grace.

Billy Joel — “My Life” (from 52nd Street) —

Forgive me for showing up late to this party (been swamped with work stuff the past couple of weeks), but I recently ran across a fascinating article regarding the compact disc, which marked its thirtieth birthday last week, and which has brought into my life no small measure of joy for much more than half that number of years. And that led me scurrying to learn all manner of things I hadn’t previously known about the medium and its rocky inception: born of a decade-long competition-turned-collaboration between Sony and Philips (although, by most accounts, Sony — still stinging from the stunning failure of its Betamax technology as a viable alternative to the then-explosive popularity of VHS home cassette recorders — had much more on the line (and arguably much more to gain) from ensuring that the music industry adopt and embrace their stunning entertainment innovation), the very first CD player made its debut in Japan on October 1, 1982, accompanied by Billy Joel’s triumphant Grammy winner 52nd Street, the first album to be released on the new format, which wouldn’t make its way to America until five months later, when the technology — with its crystalline audio and staggering ease of use (no more counting grooves on a record, nor blindly fast-forwarding a flimsy cassette tape that the stereo was likely to eat anyhow) — really took flight. Three decades hence, with the effortlessly ephemeral digital music boom in full ascent and record stores dropping like so many wilted roses, the impending death of the compact disc is being predicted (and, often, cheered) from many corners of the business, but we here at the Buzz wish to raise a glass to our preferred method of delivery for the magnificent music that we celebrate with such glee (and, on our best days, such grace) on this very website. Happy thirtieth, CD.

Delta Rae — “Morning Comes” (from Carry the Fire) —

Not since Kathleen Edwards tore into town with her brilliant breakthrough “Six O’Clock News” — “she says her baby’s a failer / and she don’t want you calling . . .” — nearly a decade ago has anyone dared to put forth such a potently probing, painfully etched trailer trash tragedy. (Also worth checking out: the stunning acoustic mix of “Morning” which appears on Fire‘s digital-exclusive deluxe edition, and which features a bone-chilling four-part harmony that really punches up not only the horror but the hope emanating from the stark story being told here.)

The Lumineers — “Ho Hey” (from The Lumineers) —

Imagine Dragons — “It’s Time” (from Night Visions) —

I’ve seen it happen time and again over the course of my lifetime, but I still never fail to be amused whenever the geniuses who program Top 40 radio in this country suddenly wake the hell up and remember that crowd-pleasing, foot-stomping pop music — which is to say, not homogenized hip-hop and not sound-alike alt-rock — is exactly and exclusively what they do best. That Grammy grubber Adele picked the lock last year with her instant classic kiss-off jam “Rolling in the Deep,” and then those box-busting punks fun. and Gotye tore the gate plumb off its hinges with their infectiously brilliant breakthrough smashes’ year-long assault on the airwaves. Upon whom, now, should we look to carry this torch of momentum into the fall? Bet on these two buzzworthy bands, both making some serious noise and itching for a breakout.

Building on the crossover success laid down by Mumford & Sons, The Lumineers’ warm debut record is a rustic, rollicking force, aided mightily by lead singer Wesley Schultz’s raspy ringer of a voice. (Visualize a more refined take on The Avett Brothers, if whichever Avett brother who does the singing in that ramshackle outfit actually had the ability to stay on pitch.) Meanwhile, mainstream radio has thus far been inexplicably slow to hop aboard the Dragons bandwagon, but seeing as how their pounding, frisky lead single (love that mandolin!) just got the Glee treatment (via a wobbly rendition from the usually impeccable Darren Criss in last week’s season premiere), one would think it’s only a matter of, uh, time. (Isn’t it?)

Whitney Houston & Jordin Sparks — “Celebrate”
(from Sparkle [Original Motion Picture Soundtrack]) —

So, sure, you’re likely never gonna hear anyone argue that this is the finest three-and-one-half minutes Miss Whitney ever loaned her pipes to (or, argue that it’s even that great a tune, to boot). But at the end of this scorching summer, in which we mark with a joy that is equal parts bitter and sweet the twenty-fifth anniversary of the release of “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)” — which still lands high on my list of the ten best pure pop songs of all time — if this is what I have to sit through to get one last lingering taste of Houston’s magnificently miraculous voice, I consider that a pittance to pay.

R.E.M. — “Man on the Moon” (from Automatic for the People) —

Please forgive the tardiness of my reaction to this, as A and I have spent a whirlwind few days in Connecticut and in New York City, and I’ve scarcely had five consecutive minutes with which to blog, but I was saddened to hear of Neil Armstrong’s passing on Saturday. Several years back, I wrote a short story in which Mr. Armstrong himself was something of a recurring character, and in which his 1969 moon landing was a seminal event in the lives of two teenage boys staring up at the stars from the Alabama Gulf Coast. (A visual recreation of this story can be found here.)

I have a sneaking suspicion, after all that you managed to do and see while drawing breath on this plane, that heaven might just be a bit anticlimactic for you, Mr. Armstrong. You nonetheless taught us all with your rocket-fueled flights of fancy that fantasy can be reality, and that reality’s boundaries are only as firm as our imaginations set them to be. May you rest in permanent peace, Neil.

Billie Myers — “Return to Sender (Am I Here Yet?)” (from Vertigo) —

“Sitting around in my imagination /
using someone else’s logic for loose change. . . /
Well, the speed of light isn’t always fast enough /
so could you hurry up and get another life, if you please. . . ?”

Joss Stone — “Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye”
(from The Soul Sessions, Vol. 2) —

There are probably a hundred thousand reasons why the stunningly gifted Stone has never fully made good — neither commercially nor creatively — on the potent promise set forth by her earth-shaking 2003 breakthrough record The Soul Sessions and its soul-filled smash “Fell in Love with a Boy” (a funked-up gender-bent take on The White Stripes’ instant classic “Fell in Love with a Girl”). Surely not least among those reasons: it’s just freakin’ hard to find songs, any songs, that match up perfectly with Stone’s difficult-to-classify sound and do proper justice to her booming, expansive singing voice (with which she attempts to smother and suffocate the songs she chooses to tackle much more often than is necessary). So sending Joss wading back into the Sessions waters for a sequel — not to mention reteaming her with producer Steve Greenberg, the nifty knob-twister who made the original Sessions such an unexpected delight — feels like an incredibly smart idea. And Stone shines like a diamond throughout, but especially here on the album’s closer, a simple ’60s standard that cowboy legend Eddy Arnold sent to number one some forty-plus years ago and that country star Neal McCoy had quite a big hit with in the mid-’90s. Playing it atypically cool here, with a restrained and riveting performance that starts out at delicious and only grows more tantalizing with each passing note, Stone finally returns to her sweet spot, relishing the moment with a delicate, dazzling grace.

John Mayer — “Walt Grace’s Submarine Test, January 1967”
(from Born and Raised) —

Mayer’s fifth studio album might be a tad too pensive and persistently sleepy (particularly in its heavy second half, where his ponderous mea culpa confessionals tend to blur together), but Born is certainly not without its charms, and none more enjoyable than this story song — one of the first such constructions that Mayer has attempted in his decade-long career — with a deceptively basic limerick-like rhyme scheme (which, oddly enough, helps keep the tune from devolving into a hokey hunk of schmaltzy claptrap) and an ambiguous ending that allows the listener to decide for him or herself the protagonist’s ultimate fate. (Whether “Walt” is nothing more than a compellingly clever allegory for Mayer’s own life over the last couple of years — during which time he ducked out of the spotlight’s unforgiving glare and leapt upon the first bus to Montana following a series of staggeringly stupid and painfully public open-mouth-permanently-lodge-foot comments and quips about his sexual proclivities and preferences — I’ll leave for folks more curious than me about nailing down such details to discuss and debate. Nonetheless, it helps to be reminded (again and again and again and again), does it not, that we are ever but one resplendent triumph away from redemption, and that, sometimes, it is exclusively and only the craziest of our dreams to which we should pay any heed.)

Roxette — “Opportunity Nox” (from The Pop Hits) —

My majestic Marie Fredriksson was (temporarily) sidelined by a debilitating brain tumor roughly a decade ago, but the unflappably brilliant Per Gessle carried on anyhow, and didn’t miss a blazing beat without his magnificent musical better half when he crafted this glam, slammin’ sweatbox of a single, a pure (vo)code red on dancefloors the world over, and as gloriously grand a tasty treat as anything this duo — most sincerely, the Buzz’s vote for most enchanting, exhilarating pop band of the last half-century (dreadful sorry, Arctic Monkeys) — ever conjured up in their late-’80s chart-busting heyday.

Emeli Sandé (with Naughty Boy) — “Wonder”
(from Our Version of Events) —

Rebecca Ferguson — “Nothing’s Real But Love” (from Heaven) —

Adele’s runaway smash album 21 just spent its seventy-fifth consecutive week securely ensconced in the Billboard 200 chart’s top ten, and what fresh hell hath her Grammy-gouging triumph wrought? Record companies worldwide are now turning over every last British pebble hoping against hope to run across the next one of her. And whaddaya know: a pair of compelling contenders have stepped forward this summer, patiently laying in wait for a breakout of their own. Keep a firm eye peeled on the staggering Scottish lass Sandé, whose dazzling debut effort Events — a wondrous, deeply melodic epic that comes off as an incomprehensibly brilliant cross between the best of Alicia Keys and Coldplay — stands alongside Bruce Springsteen’s Wrecking Ball as my favorite album from 2012’s first half. I’m not quite so keen on the uneven first full record from Ferguson (the runner-up a couple of years back on the U.K.’s The X Factor), but man, did she pop out of the box with a dynamite introductory single, a blah lyric that Miss Rebecca — who sangs, honey, with pure sweet soul, like Amy, Aretha, and Annie all rolled into one stunning set of powerhouse pipes — delivers as though Rilke himself wrote it. Love’s real, to be sure, but bracing talent is pretty real, too, and these two young ladies got it. In spades.