Just a heads-up…. My Edgar-nominated and Shamus-winning novel, Twice the Trouble, is a Kindle Deal all this month. You can get the ebook for just $1.99. That’s less than half the price of a Starbucks’ latte (and it will last a lot longer)!
There is a great documentary on Netflix about the legendary record producer Clive Davis. One of the more interesting moments in the film is when Davis describes some of the fine artists he didn’t sign to his label, either because someone else beat him to punch or because he thought the artist in question just didn’t fit in with his catalog.
One example he gives of the latter is John Mellencamp, who, despite being saddled with the dumb, management-invented stage-name of John Cougar, hit the airwaves like a thunderbolt in the early 1980s. Mellencamp, Davis lamented, seemed too similar to another of Davis’s great artists, Bruce Springsteen, in that they both played soaring, electrified dirges about working class America (i.e., so-called “Heartland Rock,” even though Springsteen is famously from New Jersey). So, to his later regret, Davis passed.
Too bad for him. Mellencamp sold a bazillion records over the years, while gradually ditching the John Couger moniker and returning to his own, real name. As he did so, I gradually came to like him more and more. His early hits like “Jack and Diane” didn’t speak to me, perhaps because I was in high school at the time (just like Jack and Diane), and while the song was a paeon to lost youth and spirit, I was miserable in high school. (Later, I would realize that I probably would have liked high school a lot better if I had gone to Mellencamp’s, nestled somewhere in small-town America, full of cool, down-to-earth, nice kids instead of the jocks and preppies I was used to. And, yes, I eventually fell in love with and married a girl named Diane.)
But my opinion of Mellencamp’s music changed when his “Authority Song” came out. Not only is it one of the most danceable songs of the 80’s, it’s also one of rock music’s most defiant and rebellious rejections of… well…authority.
I’ve liked Mellencamp ever since. In fact, I think he’s a bit of genius.
Rock on…
One of my favorite films of all time is Michael Mann’s first feature, 1981’s Thief. That movie was not only the beginning of my life-long love of Mann’s movies, but also with the soundscapes of the German band Tangerine Dream, who composed the score.
When I saw the movie, I had never heard of Tangerine Dream, and thus had no idea that they were one of the iconic avant-guarde bands of the 1970s, producing legendary albums like Phaedra and Zeit. All I knew was their music was hypnotic and unbelievably powerful.
In fact, Tangerine Dream was sort of the Hans Zimmer of their day, creating some of truly great soundtracks. One of their other great scores was for William Friedkin’s 1977 suspense film Sorcerer. If you haven’t seen it, you should check it out. Nominally a thriller, it’s about four guys from totally different backgrounds, all hiding in out from the law in South America. When a local oil platform catches fire, the guys are offered a big payday if they will drive two trucks full of leaky nitroglycerin through the mountains to put the fire out. That’s the stated plot of the film. I have a theory, however, that its really about four guys who are in hell and just don’t realize it yet. They all have much to atone for, and each suffers and grows (or fails to grow) in his own way.
The score brilliantly evokes that sense of menace and evil that lies just around the corner. It’s a great piece to listen to when you’re in a dark and somewhat demented state of mind (or if you want to be in one, for whatever reason).
I just watched a great inteview by Rick Beato of Ed Roland, the lead singer and mastermind of Collective Soul. I enjoyed the interview so much that I decided to re-post an essay I wrote on my old blog some years ago for my on-going “Battle of the Bands” series. Enjoy…!
The 1990s were a strange time. It was the decade between the two George Bushes—after the Gulf War but before 9/11—but it was also the first decade of the Internet and cell phones. The first truly digital special effects began to appear in films like Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park. The Soviet Union had fallen, only to be replaced by a globalized Russian mafia. Genocide was being committed in both Africa and Europe, all televised via the 24/7 global news cycle.
In short, this was the time when technology and social chaos really started to put the zap on our collective brain. And no bands were better at capturing this zeitgeist of psychological disintegration better than these two—Collective Soul and Garbage–although each did so in its own way.
Strangely, my concept of the “The 90s” didn’t really form until almost mid-decade. This was about the time that the amazingly vital Grunge movement began to fade from the scene. In its wake came a more diverse and accessible series of alternative rock bands. At the forefront was a five-man ensemble called Collective Soul, which had its first big hit in 1994 with “Shine.” While not their best song, “Shine” is an ambitious and even inspirational bit of rock that displays the band’s two great strengths: hard-edged, soaring vocals from frontman Ed Roland, and a vicious main riff from lead guitarist Ross Childress.
But the really cool thing about “Shine” was that despite having a very modern alterna-dude vibe it felt extremely retro. As Jon Pareles wrote in the New York Times, “Collective Soul breaks old ground. Its songs are comfortable where Southern-rock overlaps folk-rock, with solidly serviceable riffs in the usual places.”
Collective Soul was not trying to be Nirvana. It was trying to be Lynyrd Skynyrd.
Just one year after Shine, a band from Madison, Wisconsin named Garbage released their first album, Garbage (a.k.a. Garbage I). When I first heard the band, I was struck by lead singer Shirley Manson and her fabulously expressive voice—at times monotonal, at other times growling. This pale goth girl from Scotland had somehow tailored her vocals to exactly fit the manic-depressive zeitgeist of the 90s.
Indeed, I would argue that the band’s premier song, “Stupid Girl,” is the definitive song of the period (yes, even more so than Nirvana’s brilliant “Smells Like Teen Spirit”). In the song’s now-famous lyric, the narrator accuses an unnamed girl of being…well…stupid. In fact, the aspects of her stupidity are those evidenced by practically every person under 40 in modern urban America: vanity, self-absorption, consumerism, nihilism.
And fakery. Especially fakery. “[I] can’t believe you fake it…” as Manson sings portentously to the stupid girl in question. What is she faking? Being human.
Garbage I firmly established Garbage as the pre-eminent art-rock act of the decade, much as Collective Soul had ensconced itself as the pre-eminent hard-rock act. Collective Soul quickly cemented its position with their follow-up album (also eponymously titled), which included some of its greatest hits: “December,” “Where The River Flows,” and “Gel.” “December” went on to become the band’s second biggest hit (after “Shine”) and it remains my favorite, with Roland’s soulful lyrics counterpointed perfectly by Childress’s diamond-edged guitar work. I tell you, the Allman Brothers couldn’t have done better.
The song was so successful, in fact, that it engendered an almost immediate backlash which continues to this day. As far as I can tell, detractors of the song (and of Collective Soul in general) are upset by the fact that it not very Grungy. But wasn’t that the point? Grunge was a great period in American music, obviously. But in the end, it was just Punk’s Second Act. Like Punk, Grunge ran out of gas rather quickly. This is not surprising. Rage can only sustain an artist for so long; at some point, you have to write a song that works on multiple levels, and I think Collective Soul achieved that.
As for Garbage, the band was able to build on its initial success with the album Version 2.0 (which was produced under the delicious working title of Sad Alcoholic Clowns). The album has some good songs—I especially like the trippy and propulsive “Temptation Waits”—but none quite achieved the sublime level of “Stupid Girl.”
Ultimately, both bands were able to sustain themselves through the rest of the decade and beyond. Collective Soul suffered a near-fatal rift when Childress left the band in 2001. Even so, it has fared better than Garbage since the Millennium, producing some really fine albums especially 2004’s Youth. From that album come two of my favorite songs, “Better Now” and “There’s a Way”, which pick me right up whenever I am feeling lazy or down.
And yet, whenever I think of the 1990s, I remember “Stupid Girl,” with its techno-crazed background noises and jangly guitar riffs, all overlaid by Manson’s dirge-like vocals. To this day, “Stupid Girl” warns us like a klaxon just outside the entrance to hell: Don’t fake it…
I am very honored to have received such a generous review in the Sun Sentinel, penned by Ms. Oline Cogdill.
Had a great talk with Thriller 101 podcaster David Gwyn a few weeks ago. Check it out…
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1841589/14673494
A few weeks ago, I’d never had any review (good, bad, or indifferent). Now, the fine people at @ALA_Booklist have given my debut novel, Twice the Trouble, a starred review!
WHOOOO!!! I’m stoked.
Like millions of others, my family and I have spent part of this year’s Christmas holiday watching some version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Actually, we watched two, starting with Bill Murray’s mad-cap Scrooged and following-up with a much darker made-for-TV film from 1999, starring Patrick Stewart. The production was inspired, in part, by Stewart’s one-man stage performances as the character, and Stuart gives a powerful, tragic interpretation of Scrooge, a man so consumed by his traumatic past that he is unable to experience any emotion other than anger, manifested as a chronic, toxic misanthropy.
A Christmas Carol is, of course, an unabashed Christian parable, perhaps the most influential in history outside the Bible itself. Scrooge is visited by ghosts over three nights (the same number as Christ lays dead in his crypt), until his “resurrection” on Christmas morning, having seen the error of his ways. But the story resonates with people of all faiths, or no faiths, because of its theme of hope. Scrooge is old, but he ain’t dead yet. There’s still time to fix his life. To change. To choose.
I have always thought that the power to choose–the divine gift of free will–lies at the heart of A Christmas Carol, as it does with all great literature. Of course, it’s hard to imagine Scrooge, after seeing the tragedies of his Christmases past, present, and future, to wake up on Christmas and say, “Meh, I’d rather keep being a ruthless businessman. Screw Tiny Tim.” But he could. He might. The ultimate choice given to us is the option to change the nature of our own hearts, our way of thinking.
This matter of free will seems particularly salient this year–this holiday season–because the very concept is under attack. If you Google the term “free will,” you will be presented with a barrage of links with titles like “Is Free Will an Illusion?” and “Is Free Will Compatible with Modern Physics?” Along with the rise of militant atheists like Richard Dawkins, a parallel trend has arisen among theoretical physicists who doubt that free will is even a meaningful concept. After all, if our consciousness is merely an emergent phenomenon of electrical impulses in our brains, and if our brains are, like everything else, determined by the laws of physics, then how is free will even a thing? Every idea we have—every notion—must somehow be predetermined by the notions that came before it, the action and reaction of synapses in our brains.
Our brains, in other words, are like computers. Mere calculators, whose order of operations could be rewound at any moment and replayed again and again and again, with exactly the same results.
Ah, but what about quantum mechanics, you say? The principles that undergird all of quantum theory would seem to imply that human thought, even if you reduce it to electrons in the brain, might be on some level unpredictable, unknowable, and therefore capable of some aspect of free will. Not at all, reply the physicists. The scale at which Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle applies—the level of single electrons and other subatomic particles—lies so far below that of the electrochemical reactions in the human brain that their effect must be negligible. That is, a brain with an identical layout of neurons to mine would have exactly the same thoughts, the same personality, as I do. It would be me.
It’s this kind of reasoning that leads people to hate scientists at times, even people like me who normally worship scientists. The arrogance of the so-called “rationalist” argument—which comes primarily from physics, a field that, in the early 1990s, discovered that it could only explain 4% of everything in the universe—seems insufferable. But more to the point, I would argue that the rationalist rejection of free will leads to paradoxes—logical absurdities—not unlike those created by the time-travel thought problems that Einstein postulated over a hundred years ago.
For instance, imagine that one of our free-will denying physicists wins the Nobel Prize. He flies to Stockholm to pick up his award, at which point the King of Sweden says, “Not so fast, bub. You don’t really deserve any praise, because all of your discoveries were the inevitable consequence of the electrical impulses in your brain.”
“But what about all the hard work I put in?” the physicist sputters. “All the late nights in the lab? The leaps of intuition that came to me after countless hours of struggle?”
“Irrelevant,” says His Majesty. “You did all that work because your brain forced you too. Your thirst for knowledge, and also your fear of failure, were both manifestations of mechanicals in your brain. You had absolutely no choice in the matter.”
“Well, in that case,” replies the now angry physicist, “maybe YOU have no choice but to give me the award anyway, regardless.”
“Hmm,” muses the King. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“So, can I have it?”
“I dunno. Let’s just stand here a minute and see what happens.”
As many critics have pointed out, this kind of materialist thinking inevitably leads to a kind of fatalism of the sort found in some eastern religions. If human beings really have no free will—that is, if we are basically automata in thrall to the physical activity of our brains—then what’s the use of struggle? Why bother trying to improve yourself, to become a productive member of society, or become a better person?
Straw man! scream the physicists. No one is advocating we give up the struggle to lead better lives. That would be the end of civilization. No, we simply mean that this struggle is an illusion, albeit one that we need to exist.
Okay. So, you’re saying that we all have to pretend to have free will in order to keep the trains running? We must maintain the illusion of free will in order to continue the orderly procession of existence? But doesn’t this position, itself, imply a kind of choice? After all, if we have no free will, it really makes no difference whether we maintain the illusion or not.
Doesn’t this very discussion represent a rejection of passivity and the meaningfulness of human will?
My fear is that many young people today will be overexposed to the “rationalism” I describe above, especially when it is put forth by otherwise brilliant people. For those who are already depressed by such assertions that free will is an illusion, I would direct you to the great stories of world history. All the enduring mythologies, from the Greek tragedies to the Arthurian legends to the Hindu Mahabharata, revolve around the choices made by their heroes, their triumphs and failings. As a fiction writer, I would argue that the concept of “story” itself is almost synonymous with choice. A boy is confronted by the wolf. Will the boy run left or right? Will he lead the wolf away from his friends back at the campsite, or will he lead the wolf to them, hoping they can help scare it away (or, more darkly, that it will eat one of his friends instead)?
One can also take hope in the fact that not only can physicists still not explain what 96% of the universe is but they can’t explain what consciousness is. Of course, some would argue that consciousness, itself, is an illusion. But this leads to an entirely new set of paradoxes and absurdities. (As David Bentley Hart once replied, “An illusion in what?”)
Personally, I suspect that consciousness comes to exist around or about the same moment in a specie’s evolution when the individual can choose. That is, consciousness implies a kind of choice. It might be a very elemental, even primal kind of choice—perhaps simply the choice of whether not to swim harder, or fight harder, which I believe even minnows and ants can make—but it’s still a choice, and not merely a matter of pure instinct.
One of my favorite TV shows from my childhood was Patrick McGoohan’s “The Prisoner”, whose every episode begins with the titular character proclaiming “I am not a number! I am a free man!” This assertion, shouted on a beach by the mysterious village in which he has been imprisoned, is followed by the sinister laughter of Number 2, the Orwellian figure who has been tasked with breaking the prisoner’s will. Number 2 is, of course, an awesome and terrifying figure, armed with all the weapons of modern society: technology, bureaucracy, and theory. But he’s still wrong, and he’s ultimately unable to grind the prisoner down.
That’s the hope I cling to, the Christmas message I espouse. Namely, that we’re all able to choose to resist the fatalism of rational materialism. That we can all, eventually, escape the village and be better human beings.
Anyway, that’s my Christmas Eve rant.
(Author’s Note: this is an updated version of a post that originally appeared on my old blog, Bakhtin’s Cigarettes.)
Well, it’s official. My book is now available for pre-order (make that pre-pre-PRE-order) on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, etc. (Yes, even Walmart.com.)
I’m not asking you to buy it (although it would make an excellent gift for that special someone in your life; or for your boss, co-worker, distant relative, crazy uncle, etc.). But if you want to help me out, please request that your local library buy it. Most public libraries have a “Suggest Materials” link on their website. Or you can just ask a librarian. (Duh!)
Here’s a link to the book on the publisher’s distribution site:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/741923/twice-the-trouble-by-ash-clifton/
I find it ironic that, here in America, we have only two socially acceptable ways to identify ourselves with regard to religion: you’re either a believer, or an atheist.
Yeah, this is crazy. For all kinds of reasons.
We all know that the first category—believer—really describes a vast spectrum of religious faith, from rigid practitioners of an orthodox religion (which, in the U.S., probably means some brand of Christianity or Judaism), to non-practicing believers (i.e. lapsed Catholics, lapsed Jews, etc.), to people who believe in God but don’t correspond to any formal religion (we had a whole class of such people in the middle of the 19th Century—the Transcendentalists.)
But what most people fail to realize is that the category of atheism also includes a spectrum, one that is almost as broad and diverse as the believer category.
Continue reading “Jehovah vs. The Force”
Ash Clifton, Writer 