It was with some pride that I read the article in this morning’s WSJ about the board game, Settlers of Catan, as “the latest interactive fad to hit high-tech circles.” I say pride because Greg, Marcus, and I were way ahead of our time. We regularly played Settlers during lunch (or when the internet went down, or whenever else we felt like it) back when we had our research bunker in Florida.
Despite devoting a fair chunk of time and energy to that and a few other board games, those research bunker days were probably some of my most productive. I guess these high-tech executives are discovering what we already knew — clever strategy board games help sharpen the mind and teach important skills. I have no idea why they don’t regularly play these games in schools. You could learn a lot about economics, the mutual benefits of trade, etc…
What am I saying? We mostly did it because it was fun.
Matt’s post from last week arguing that the Aughts (the decade about to end) was basically a dud sounds like an invitation for a challenge: What has been the best decade (since 1940 when time began) and why?
As always, The Onion is there to help us get our kids ready to do well as school starts.
My favorite tip: “Develop a working model for a reformed educational system that addresses the needs of every child at a reasonable taxpayer cost. Then become powerful and implement that system.”
I’ve become quite the connoisseur of adolescent fiction over the last several years. One of our sons has trouble with reading comprehension, so he reads aloud with my wife or me so that we can discuss the book and make sure he is following the story. We’ve read a whole lot of books that fall into the predictable pattern of youth fiction — they tend to be mopey, whiny stories about the death or injury of a loved one, family dysfunction, or psychological trauma. Even if they are well-written, which some are, the repetitive, dreary themes are enough to make me want to jump off a Bridge to Teribithia.
I’m not the only one to notice this. Joanne Jacobs had an excellent post a while back about Anita Silvey’s artile in the School Library Journal about how depressing award-winning youth fiction tends to be:
Of the 25 winners and runners-up chosen from 2000 to 2005 [for the prestigious Newbery Medal], four of the books deal with death, six with the absence of one or both parents and four with such mental challenges as autism. Most of the rest deal with tough social issues.
Adults tend to prefer this type of literature much more than kids do. This is especially true for boys, who’ve discovered that their adventure stories involving pirates have been replaced by touching family dramas. It’s true that adolescents may desire books with a fair amount of whining and moping because it appeals to their over-wrought emotional tendencies, but I think most of the dreariness of youth fiction is driven by the depressing preferences of the adults who assign the awards, purchase the books for libraries, and write the books in the first place. It’s as if they are trying to train future generations of therapy-seeking, mopey book-worms.
All of this matters because the award-winning books are the ones the school libraries are more likely to buy and teachers and parents are more likely to push kids to read. If we want to get kids to read, especially boys, we have to offer them something less morose. The solution is not to push the likes of Captain Underpants, Harry Potter, or Twilight. Yes, they are less depressing, but they are also remarkably poorly written, weak excuses for literature. Nor is the solution to push only classic works. Kids also need contemporary works with modern themes and language.
I’m happy to report that there are still a number of quality works of youth fiction being produced. They may not win the top awards, but you and your kids can find them and enjoy reading without having to take anti-depressants. Most recently, we finished reading two really good books: Peak, by Roland Smith, and Among the Hidden, by Margaret Peterson Haddix.
They may not be great art, but they are decent youth fiction. There’s enough mopey whining to appeal to those feelings among adolescents, but there’s also action, politics, self-sacrifice, and triumph. That is, they’re good stories.
In Peakthe protagonist is a 14 year-old child of famous mountain-climbers who gets into trouble for climbing sky-scrappers. He’s rescued from juvenile detention by being sent-abroad with his absentee dad who plans to get the 14 year-old to be the youngest person to summit Everest. But the plan is complicated by an intrusive reporter, Tibetan politics, and oppressive Chinese army officials — not to mention the harsh conditions of climbing the world’s highest peak. Along with the adventurous story of mountain-climbing, the book contains a fair dose of Tibetan-Chinese politics, and a strained father-son relationship.
Among the Hiddenis the first of a 7 book series about a future dystopia in which the government has forbidden anyone from having more than two children to prevent famine and other overuse of resources. The protagonist is a third-child who was secretly born and raised on a remote farm. When housing subdivisions are built near the farm, he is confined to hiding in the attic of his house so that the Population Police don’t discover him. His family strains under excessive taxation, intrusive regulation, and the ever-present fear of being caught with a third child. For a second you may forget that this is a future dystopia. Eventually our hero discovers that he may not be the only “shadow child” out there and that it may be possible to do something to change the government’s oppressive policies.
Earlier we had a lively debate on the obvious superiority of cover songs. This is a good lead in to my grand theory of popular music, which is: there is nothing new under the sun, so you may as well repackage tried and true things.
My theory holds that rock music essentially played itself out in 1974 with the creation of Punk Rock. If Rock and Roll was ultimately about rebellion, then you can’t get any more rebellious than anarchists who don’t know how to play their instruments screaming into a microphone. Of course most punks were poseurs. As Johnny Rotten said in advance of a reunion tour for what remains of the Sex Pistols “I am the Anti-Christ, won’t you buy me merchandise?”
But I digress.
Rock has been dead for ages, what to do then? Answer: take other genres of music, put a fresh coat of paint on them, and sell them to the kids as something new and cool! Much of it actually is cool.
The Ramones invented punk by taking 50s bubble gum pop songs, speeding them up, and giving them a psychotic twist. The Police were basically a Anglo-American reggae band. Paul Simon went through an interesting and profitable stage of his career by blending African music into an American context. Big Bad Voodoo Daddy and others brought Swing music back into fashion in the 1990s, and Green Day and company did the same with punk, etc. etc. etc.
Bryan Setzer is obviously a master at this- having brought back Rockabilly with the Stray Cats and Swing with his orchestra. His latest album is a fun work that develops swing/rock versions of classical music.
Sting not only dabbled in reggae with the Police, but also jazz and even country music as a solo artist. In Desert Rose Sting wrote an Arabic song and got the biggest Arabic singer to do the song as a duet:
Genre-bending reached it’s natural conclusion with the development of mashups, which I understand to be matching different lyrics and music, with a good bunch of sampling thrown into the mix.
Example: take the tune to Jimmy Hendrix’s Purple Haze. Now do the same tune, but sing the words to the TV theme song to Green Acres in place of those of the original.
There, you just did your first mental mashup!
Some of the DJ’s doing mashups these days are really quite creative. They move in and out of genres within a single song, briefly foreshadow something to come, and then beat you over the head with the best part of it.
Here’s an example of two things you wouldn’t think would work in a fairly basic mashup: Madonna and the Sex Pistols
Ebert once describe Quentin Tarrantino movies as throwing a whole series of big scenes at you. He said that most thrillers might build up to a single shocking or grizzly scene, but that Tarrantino hits you with 12 of them with plenty of homages to previous films thrown in to boot.
A good mashup does the same: rather than having a song build to some single crescendo, they’ll take an alternate path to build to the same crescendo and then flip on to another. You already know how the original got to the crescendo-why not fast forward to the fun part?
How can anyone watch TV news? First we had the media fawning over Susan Boyle, the British Idol singing star. Sure she has a nice voice, but the not so subtle subtext of the coverage was: “How can anyone so homely have such a beautiful voice?!” Wow, we always thought that beauty was an essential ingredient to a good singing voice.
And now we have the sensational coverage of Amanda Knox’s murder trial in Italy. The not so subtle subtext of the coverage is: “How can anyone so pretty be a murderer?”
I know that all sentient beings understand the shallowness of TV news, but it is worth remarking on these egregious examples.
A little known cover of “Love is All Around” by Judy Garland:
Here’s another favorite of mine, goth-rockers Bauhaus cover Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust. The video was filmed in Austin in the mid 1980s, and I volunteered to mosh out in the body bag at the end.
Here is Pearl Jam covering Let My Love Open the Door by the Who:
U2 teams with Bjorn and Benny at a concert in Sweden to cover Dancing Queen
Mrs. Ladner has the kiddos off in the Land of Enchantment visiting their relatives on spring break. Rather than sit around in my boxers piling up pizza boxes and watching tons of NCAA basketball (NOT that there is anything wrong with that!) I am out of town myself, in the Raven, a great coffee bar in Prescott Arizona.
So as long as I’m here, chugging cafe mocha, I may as well blog, so here is a random subject for you: cover songs. I love cover songs. Cover songs are recordings made by one artist that were previously made popular by another artist. For reasons that I’ll try to figure out as I write this, I tend to like a much higher percentage of cover songs. Perhaps it is simply because nostalgia, not gravity, is the most powerful force in the universe. Perhaps it is something more than that, however.
Back in the day, there were songs that were “the standards”and you were judged as a performer based on how well you sang them. More than that, how entertaining you managed to make them.
Needless to say, people sitting around singing the same songs all the time would get boring. There is a reason however that certain songs achieve standard status-there’s something special about them.
My favorite thing about a good cover song is that an artist or producer have recognized something special about a song, even if it isn’t obvious. I remember watching the VH1 Behind the Music on Rod Stewart. Rod had hit a lull in his career, and a producer called him. The producer told Rod that he was a pretty good singer of pretty good songs, but a great singer of great songs. Rod’s next question was classic:
“Do you have a great song for me?”
From this came Stewart’s cover of Tom Wait’s Downtown Train. Here is the original:
I think it’s great that Waits wrote the song, but I can’t say I ever need to hear his rendition again. Stewart said something to the effect of “Tom didn’t know there was so much soul in that song, but there was.” Stewart went on to make a fortune with a series of cds of- you guessed it- the standards.
Here’s another great example: Overkill by Men at Work. The original:
I kind of liked that song back in 1983, but I liked the 1996 cover by Lazlo Bane and Colin Hay much, much better:
My favorite sub-genre of cover songs is the ironic cover song. Here is the Carpenters singing their song Superstar:
Now, here is perhaps the greatest of all cover bands, Me First and the Gimme Gimmes version of the same song from their hilarious cd Ruin Jonny’s Bar Mitzvah. MFATGG is a side project which draws members from several different punk bands to do punk rock covers.
Now of course there are plenty of bad and awful covers, but generally, I like a higher percentage of covers than average. I think the reasons are fairly simple: nostalgia, but also a double quality screen. For the marketing of a typical song, someone is hoping that enough people will like it to buy it. If no one does, you probably never hear of it anyway, or ignore it if you do.
This applies to cover songs as well, but in addition someone has seen something in the song, or a way to put an entertaining twist on it. If it isn’t any good, the paragraph immediately above still applies, but if done well the cover starts with good material but benefits from a new twist and from the nostalgia factor.
So if you know of a cool cover that I’ve probably never heard, post a link in the comment section. It’s time for me to get an espresso.
Posted by Jay P. Greene 
Jay P. Greene's Blog 