The bottle was old and dirty but the brandy when Huber returned with it was tasty in the extreme.

2/ Grateful Dead, “Brown-Eyed Women” (1971):

The bottle was dusty but the liquor was clean.

There’s something to Jane Dark’s suggestion that these blind spots are all about class, but I don’t know if that fully explains it. I mean, hell, in every respect save disposable income and zip code, I’m at the demographic heart of the class their ads are gunning for, right down to Dr. Hakimi’s Art of Oral Harmony. But there I go again, listening to—and, shh, even liking!–country music.

Not that I’m too worried; we all, somehow, find our own ways to survive the diktats of glossy-magazine taste. But still you have to wonder what it’s going to take to make country music safe for the architects of mediated cool, when even the high-profile defections of Jack White, Robert Plant, Jewel, Jessica Simpson, and Jon Bon Jovi couldn’t do it.

You have to wonder, that is, until it hits you: Hootie!

Darius Rucker will save us all.

Photos from the Randy Rogers Band show at Joe’s last week are up here.

The recordings, which range from the late 1930s to recent times, are especially strong in the areas of fiddle, banjo, harmonica, and dulcimer tunes; secular ballads and songs; gospel songs, and the unaccompanied lined-out and shape note singing styles. Included as well are such relative unknowns as the mouth bow with origins in Africa, Cherokee singing and dance music, Swiss-American singing and yodeling, Hungarian-American cymbalum playing, and the jug band sound from the early 1900s comprised of a loose rural-urban mix of blues, hillbilly, and jazz.

In many instances the repertoire and playing styles documented in these recordings date well back into the 1800s. Among the music’s readily detectable influences are musical expressions arising from slavery, minstrel stage music, Civil War military music, and the dance music of Britain, Ireland and, in some instances, France and Germany.

(via Silas House)

On the off chance you take your reading cues from rock stars, here’s something from an interview with Radiohead at the Observer Music Monthly:

Thom’s reading Q by mysterious Italian anarchist group Luther Blisset. I tried to read that once, I tell him.

‘Oh it’s fucking ace! But my missus, that’s her specialist field, so she’s been explaining it to me all the way through. Medieval church carnage. It’s mental. I want to get it made into a film. That’s my next mission.’

Using the In Rainbows profits?

‘Mmm-mm,’ says Thom Yorke, shaking his head. ‘I doubt it. That would cover basically the catering.’

Not to spoil the mystery, but “the mysterious Italian anarchist group” who wrote Q comprised four of the five members of the group currently known as Wu Ming, the authors of 54, Manituana, and the two stories I translated for Chicago Review 52:2/3/4.

The Radiohead/Wu Ming connection is actually apt, since Wu Ming makes all their work available as free downloads.

For the record, here’s what the rest of Radiohead is reading:

Colin is currently reading Piers Brendon’s new The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, Jonny’s re-reading Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Ed’s just finished Man’s Search For Meaning by Victor Frankel (’Brilliant. He’s an Auschwitz survivor’), Phil’s reading Mark Haddon’s A Spot of Bother.

In an article on the dollar’s depreciation in today’s NYT, Katie Hammer and Julia Wedigier write:

The dollar’s fall has been so drastic, it has seeped into the popular consciousness. In his last video, rapper Jay-Z cruised the streets of New York flashing not a stack of Benjamins, but a fistful of euros.

The implication seems pretty clear*; as James Cramer put it last month: “When things have gotten to the point that even people like Gisele [Bundchen] and Jay-Z realize the dollar is too weak, things have gotten out of control” (my emphasis).

Yes, we get it: the point of the anecdote is to add color (no comment) to the story, to break up more mundane sentences like the one that follows. (”The dollar had been at relatively low levels against the pound and euro for most of this year, but in April it broke the $2 for £1 barrier…”)

But stop for a moment and ask yourself: by what standards does Jay-Z count as a representative of the popular consciousness? Consider what it means to be a person “like” Jay-Z:

+ According to Rolling Stone, Jay-Z earned $17.5 million in income during 2005, including $3 million for serving as president and CEO of Def Jam Recordings.

+Were all of his business activities concentrated in a single company, Jay-Z would be 73rd on Forbes’s executive compensation list for that year, just behind the CEO of Colgate-Palmolive and a few steps up from the CEO of Halliburton.

+ This March, Iconix purchased Rocawear, Jay-Z’s clothing line, for $204 million in cash.

+ In October 2006, Anheuser Busch named Jay-Z the co-brand director of Budweiser Select.

+ This report (PDF) suggests that Jay-Z’s net worth is around half a billion dollars.

These facts give us every reason to assume that Jay-Z’s consciousness, especially in when it comes to dollars and euros, is something quite other than “popular.” In fact, I’d guess he counts himself among the people for whom the relative value of the dollar is a datum of signal importance. And so it seems odd that the authors would use him as a kind of canary in the world economic coal mine—as if he were one of the legendary shoe shiners who asked Joseph Kennedy for a stock tip and thereby let him know that the stock market was oversubscribed.

Make no mistake: Jay-Z is our Kennedy and we are shining his shoes.

++++++++

*Note: To be fair, it could be that Hammer and Werdigier are proposing the video, and not the man, as the indicator of “popular consciousness.” But even if that’s true, it’s a neat demonstration of just how much the definition of “popular” has skewed: where once it could mean “of or by the people,” now it almost exclusively means “for the people.” To see what a difference a single shift in preposition can make, try it out on some of your favorite phrases—popular culture, popular government—and see what happens.

Buried deep behind the full-color Beowulf spreads in the Arts and Entertainment section of yesterday’s New York Times was an article on Cross Canadian Ragweed, the red-dirt alt-country country-rock (etc.-etc.) band originally out of Stillwater, Oklahoma. Lines that describe “a concert that was beginning to feel like Porky’s with a rootsier soundtrack” won’t do much to convert the unconvinced, but the article it does get one thing right: Ragweed is a band best appreciated live. (Though their newest album made a more-than-respectable debut at #6 on the Billboard country charts.)

Check here for details on Mission California, their latest album, and here for photos of their show at Joe’s in Chicago last winter.

Mission California, the new album from Cross Canadian Ragweed, debuted at #6 on last week’s Billboard Top Country chart and #30 on the Top 200 chart. Buy the album at Amazon or check out the first single off the album, “I Believe You” (written by Todd Snider), on iTunes.

My photos from the band’s show in Chicago last January are available here.

Mission California, the new album from Cross Canadian Ragweed, is out today. The first single off the album, “I Believe You” (cowritten by Todd Snider), is also available on iTunes.

My photos from the band’s show in Chicago last January are available here.

Photos from the Stoney LaRue concert at Joe’s in Chicago last Thursday now have a home.