The January inauguration has thrown everything into twisted new context: trauma gloat turns prosaic, overstimulation mocks innocence. Suddenly, Severance’s cult of Kier feels cartoonish, like a miniature theme park. The many sex-driven scripts that wrapped in 2024 now feel like quaint throwbacks, and given the cowering media, the confusion-is-sex meme has ballooned in a puff. You can’t play that P. Diddy testimony for comedy, but parsing these soundtracks cues the gap between intent and effect.

#Metoo has already produced some swell movies, like Bombshell, 2019 (an easy target that might have faltered), or Promising Young Woman, 2020 (fierce enough to spawn a backlash), and She Said, 2022 (which almost made the New York Times seem respectable again). But of course, Hollywood’s true nature circles around pulp, and the male gaze reasserts itself despite the relentless impulse to expose taboos. Anora’s Best Picture Oscar accented this conundrum: we root for the emotionally armored professional gal (Mikey Madison), but do we really want her to end up with… a Russian mobster? Any non-rapist will do? These are her choices?

In Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (2022), Emma Thompson honors her desire enough to pay for a male prostitute (Daryl McCormack), and disrobes with disarming physical candor that makes her folly feel like charisma. The quietude of The Assistant (2019) underplays the mundane yet grating humiliations of an office drone (Julia Garner). As the latest Harvey Weinstein trial overlaps with Sean Combs’s freak-offs (rappers vie with moguls in debauchery), the Gods fret at how quickly outrage turns supercilious.

Sex is the “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” of liminal spaces. Spread the word.

Hollywood’s box office might suggest that the high road to an erotic thriller with a 58-year-old female star lies in tapping a female director-screenwriter (Halina Reijn). Babygirl, a huge streaming hit, plays out a fairy tale about a flush CEO processing some intimate demons by cheating on her saintly husband (Antonio Banderas), realizing some stark truths about the Big Turn-On of High-Stakes Humiliation, and trading corporate success for honest orgasms. It’s so thin and manipulative you’d swear it was written by a misogynist. But no, Reijn, a highly regarded Nordic thespian directs this schlock and shoots for sincerity, even pathos. Disrobing at 58 gets treated as “brave.” In this soap opera it’s more like the shallow characters from Eyes Wide Shut return twenty-five years later for… more of the same phony outrage. And doesn’t Kidman already play some variant of this cliché in The Perfect Couple?

The music underlines the confused messaging. After Samuel (the daunting Harris Dickinson, from Triangle of Sadness) dares Romy (Kidman) with a glass of milk at a bar, Mozart’s Lacrimosa swells up in the soundtrack, because of course a pivot into darkness calls for his Requiem, some algorithm deemed it so. In the scene where they get down to business, INXS’s “Never Tear Us Apart” from 1987 circles the characters, as if that song provides mysterious allure. Oh please: He-Man Michael Hutchence, Model Feminist. Then we get George Michael’s “Father Figure,” that hack 1980s take on dime store bedroom psychology. These choices belie the piece’s forced earnestness.

Because it treats grim situations with whimsy, you take the stakes a lot more seriously, and the characters live with you offscreen—you’d kill for this kind of bracing sanity in the face of death, and the characters seem to live outside the script.

Nobody “understands” much about what turns them on, and kinks by definition confound political correctness. This does not resemble a sophisticated idea. And while everybody deserves their private fantasies, you don’t have to betray a partner to figure out your favorite positions. Reijn presents a false playbook, a completely narcissistic plunge into over-calculated carnality, where risking a family gets framed as the Ultimate Turn-On, and the scene that maps out permission and consent redefines hairy puppeteering.

Gangster flicks put us in high-stakes scenes with low-IQ felons and ask us to sympathize. But what characters do we relate to here? Dickinson’s Samuel intuits what other people want, and he surfs that free-lance dom scene. He’s like a Sex Whisperer—in fact, Romy first spies him calming a mad dog on the street. After some defiantly unoriginal fisticuffs, Banderas’s husband complains, “Female masochism is a male fantasy,” to which Samuel replies “That’s a very narrow view of sexuality, actually.” That’s code for “nobody’s slumming here.” The interaction gets staged as the kid undercutting the husband with wise words of the newly enlightened. This Samuel character moves through these peoples’ lives with impunity, and the husband earns an extra halo because he learns how to bring Kidman to sincere orgasm. The bookend bit reinforces all this: in the “climactic” scene, Reijn crosscuts between Banderas servicing Kidman set against Dickinson in a hotel room—charming a dog.

Does anybody really think betrayal leads to better sex?

Comedy provides more possibilities, and more embrace. With laughs you get dividends, and less preaching. In 2002’s joyous Secretary, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader, sly smiles to the camera juiced up the tension, and a cool understanding of risks draped the encounters. It confused only the right-wing that’s constantly poised for outrage.

In Hulu’s gut-busting Dying for Sex, Michelle Williams confronts a cancer diagnosis with a hard-won goal: to finally reach orgasm with another person (the script by Liz Meriwether and Kim Rosenstock stems from a podcast memoir from Molly Kochan). Because it treats grim situations with whimsy, you take the stakes a lot more seriously, and the characters live with you offscreen—you’d kill for this kind of bracing sanity in the face of death.

Leaving her husband up front (good move) lands her on dating apps, a hilarious Nice Guy turn from SNL’s Marcello Hernández, and a deepening bond with her best friend, Jenny Slate (human kryptonite). Slate matches Williams for spark and resolve, and the stiff, prim Dr. Pankowitz (David Rasche) even gets a comic arc. The social worker Sonya (the striking Esco Jouley) signals early on her willingness to go past norms, and you sense a synergy of writers, players, and material that recoils at conventional solutions. Williams’s face radiates a complicated clutch of emotions, from sadness and confusion to delight and dismay. Rob Delaney (from that other marvel, Catastrophe) plays her gung-ho neighbor who enjoys playing sub, and the awkward choreography of their encounters enhances their realism, the opposite of Kidman seeking relevance on all fours. Williams’s gleam points this material far beyond Kidman’s glum.

Once again, the soundtrack confirms all your best hopes about clashing emotions: “I Touch Myself,” by the Divinyls, immortalized by Austin Powers; “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” by Cyndi Lauper; “Rebel Rebel” by David Bowie; “I Will Survive” by Gloria Gaynor, and “Tainted Love,” Soft Cell’s swanky remake of the Gloria Jones original from 1965. Can anyone imagine any Babygirl scene featuring “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”?

Dying For Sex’s final act features an essay on mortality that lends all the sexcapades some earned depth. Do some great movies carry insufferable soundtracks? Sure. Do some great soundtracks get wasted on awful scripts? Of course, although which happens more might make a great social media spat. When these forces blend and set off boomerang flashes, you feel a great team chasing ideas, generating tensions, and making uneasy sense of situations that defy words.

more

Imdb pages for Dying for Sex, BabygirlRotten Tomatoes pages Dying for Sex, BabygirlMetacritic pages for Dying for Sex, BabygirlTime magazine’s Stephanie Zacharek offers a different point of view on KidmanDying for Sex podcastMolly Kochan’s memoir Screw Cancer: Becoming Whole (Donnie B Inc., 2020)

noises off

* From earlier this year: Preston Lauterbach’s riveting Before Elvis: The African American Musicians Who Made the King (Hachette, January 2025): “Like the hint of deism in the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, Elvis teases the Spirit without delivering an overly heavy dose of God…”

* Next month: The Simpsons by Alan Siegel, the Guarneri String Quartet box set, and Bruce Springsteen’s forgotten ticket scandal

* riley rock index: obits, bylines, youtube finds, reference sites, pinterest, beacons.ai, random deep link

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rileyrockreport.substack.com

Historian Preston Lauterbach works the backstreets of rock’s story, the many accidental and circuitous paths the music takes before congealing into a popular style. With Before Elvis, he lands a major statement about how Presley immersed himself in the Memphis of 1948-1945, what he heard on the radio, in churches, and in clubs. We started by talking about one of Presley’s key mentors, the Reverend Herbert Brewster, the preacher who’s style and songwriting shaped the young Elvis…

Preston Lauterbach: So the Reverend William Herbert Brewster was a minister, African American minister who came to Memphis from rural West Tennessee. He was born in the latter part of the 19th century and was raised by, you know, highly spiritual parents and grandparents, in fact. So he had all these great memories of his elders singing spirituals around him. And that’s really what brought him up. But he also was determined to become a learned man.

“The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react,” subscriber George Bernard Shaw

And so he went off college, went to school in Memphis, the big city. And became involved with the civil rights activities that were already taking place in the city in the 19 teens with regard to mass registration of African American voters. So, the type of activity that we tend to associate with the modern civil rights movement that started, what, over 40 years after this time I’m talking about was, was, really happening on a broad scale in Memphis already.

And so that’s really where Herbert Brewster began to develop this social consciousness. For people who saw the Elvis movie, you know, when Elvis is contemplating what he’s going to perform on his comeback special, and whether or not it’s time for him to make a social statement. The comment that he makes to kind of fire himself up to go out there and do it is. Something along the lines of you know an old reverend told me that sometimes there are things that are too dangerous to say and you have to sing them.

Well, that’s a an adaptation of a quote from reverend Brewster himself, and so even though the Presley character in the movie doesn’t identify who he’s thinking of in this moment, that’s something that Reverend Brewster told an interviewer. Said that, we realized in segregated Memphis, there were things that needed to be said.

And sometimes it was too dangerous to say them, and so you had to sing them. Well, this was Brewster’s motivation for writing a song that became the first million- selling gospel recording called “I Will Move On Up A Little Higher.” And so the context for that song is that the white political boss of Memphis, Mr. E. H. Crump had banished the Black political leadership of the city around 1940. And so this became a, a low moment for people like Brewster, who’d been politically active socially active for such a long period of time. And so from what he felt were the depths of despair, he wrote this beautiful song.

And so I think that’s some of what influenced Elvis, not just, you know, the, the lyrics, “that’s all right, mama,” but the feeling, the way that Crudup conveyed feeling that really moved Elvis…

I mean, I hope that people will go and listen to Mahalia Jackson singing “I Will Move On Up A Little Higher,” and so that’s part of the social context of Reverend Brewster. The musical context, which I kind of mentioned there, is he’s, in addition to being a voting rights activist, he’s a song composer. And he’s really the hub of the African American gospel scene in Memphis. So he’s a promoter. So he’ll put on big shows down at the auditorium featuring a bunch of different quartets. He was known to give you know, several young artists a start by, you know, putting them out on stage and showcasing them for the crowd. After that, he became probably the first African American radio broadcaster in Memphis.

He was certainly like the first really successful Black radio broadcaster. So some people might know that African American formatted radio had its first full time station in Memphis WDIA as of 1949. Well, Brewster was broadcasting locally in like 1938 and onward. So he was broadcasting sermons.

He was broadcasting music. So he was on the airwaves and familiar to people. Fast forward to 1953, Memphis is still under the rule of the same segregationist leader, Boss Crump, who Brewster had been fighting against for his entire, you know, adult life at this point. And segregation was the the, the legal way of life in Memphis.

more

Tim Riley reviews Before Elvis in the Los Angeles Review of BooksPee Wee Crayton’s “Do Unto Others,” the guitar ignition (and lyrical thrust) John Lennon cribbed for “Revolution” Peter Guralnick’s two-volume Presley biographies: Last Train to Memphis (1995) and Careless Love (2000)

Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis (2022)Clambake (1967), with Bill Bixby, more fun than John Wesley HardingThe Searcher (2018), Reinventing Elvis: the 1968 Comeback (2023), both worthwhile

playlist of the month

Before Elvis playlist: from Little Esther Phillips to Calvin Newborn, these influences feel both immediate and timeless (25 tracks)

software update

RightMenu Master, convert, sort, copy to, sync, backup, set wallpaperAlfred 5 (reasonable $): happy customer, mostly for custom search URLS with keyboard shortcuts and boundless clipboardLeaderKey: elegant keyboard launch, customizable, Alfie’s best friendreddit.com/r/macapps, geeks minus additude

noises off

* Last year stomped: roundup of year-end lists Part I and Part II (with the years best marital dialogue, “…Only you could ruin a perfectly good wordless roll in the ashes of a dead union…”; Eric Wolfson on concept albums; and that new Zep doc getting lots of nods, we’re getting right on that

* In the pipeline: Sly Stone, The Pixies, the Simpsons, and Cher’s memoir as read by AI voice as this persona, reader’s choice:

* “Pigs at the pastry trough,” John Updike on critics : the riley rock index: obits, bylines, youtube finds, reference sites, pinterest, beacons.ai, random deep link

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rileyrockreport.substack.com

When you watch the Netflix Playlist series you get a standard-if-sturdy startup story with legal hurdles and tech geeks coding outside the lines. The labels carry all that golden booty, and they will make Daniel Ek pay. Ek accomodates the gatekeepers and takes over the world; it’s almost weird he didn’t attend last month’s inauguration. Author Liz Pelly agreed that the series works like a genre piece instead of muckrack reporting:

Liz Pelly: I thought that, you know, The Playlist, I watched it also when it came out on Netflix. And I also have read the book that it's based on. So the playlist is based on a book called The Spotify Play that came out in Sweden I think the subtitle is “How Spotify Beat Apple, Amazon and Google in the Race for Audio Dominance.” So it's a little bit of like an underdog narrative. But the reporting in it is really good. And I actually find it to be like, a really, really good resource and I appreciate the, you know, in my book, before the acknowledgments, I shout out that book and say that it was really helpful to me in piecing together the early history of Spotify.

Subscribe now, or get double-crossed and left for dead.

So, yeah, whether you agree with the overall perspective or not, I think that there's a lot of, important reporting in that book. And I would hope, you know, even if someone didn't agree with some of the arguments. Made in my book that they would at least appreciate some of the reporting and revelations that went into it, because it is a work of reported criticism.

“…[Spotify’s founder and CEO] Daniel Ek was actually the beneficiary of public funding for the arts in his public school system growing up in Sweden.”

You know, it has a perspective. It's not like straight forward business journalism, in terms of the New Yorker review, I'm a big fan of Hua Hsu’s writing, sensibility and perspective on music. So I was really honored that he took the time to read my book and spend so much time reflecting on it.

Liz Pelly: There are some general aspects of the, perspective that aren't the same perspective that I have on streaming. And it's funny, this is the second interview today where someone asked me,

Tim Riley: Oh yeah,

Liz Pelly: of the review.

Tim Riley: Well, I realized now that I asked you, it's a bit of a setup.

I don't, I certainly, but here, let me frame it a different way. So I'm seeing, and as a music critic, I get asked a lot, like there seemed to be two different, major viewpoints out there. One is streaming is really killing music. It's bad for artists. It's really, it's a peril. It's a poison. We need to resist it.

And it's just, it's joined all the other evil empires. And then there's Hua Hsu’s, more, he's sort of more soft peddling it and saying, you know, this is, this is just kind of, where we're at and we have to deal with it. And there's actually some upside to it. And, it's not pure evil. And there's a lot of, there's a lot of upside to this.

And my sense is not having finished your book, but that you're trying to really weave a very nuanced path between those two extremes and that you have your own, you know, very well reported take on it. Does that, does that sound like a fair character characterization?

Liz Pelly: Yeah, I mean, by the end of the book, there's definitely straightforward arguments that I make in favor of, certain regulatory interventions and just streaming, into different policy oversights that I think would be really meaningful for not just musicians, but for the public as well.

I do sort of share my perspective that I really do think that if people are concerned with supporting musicians, and contributing to, the ongoing continuation of music as an art form, that reassessing one's own relationship with both participating as an active listener and contributor to music culture, contributing to sustaining the culture that you want to see exist in the world, is really important.

And I don't necessarily think that streaming really has anything to do with that. So there's never a point in the book where I say, Everyone delete your accounts and switch to XYZ service because that's just so simplistic, and I think, I always am of the belief that collective problems require collective solutions and that I think it's too individualistic to suggest that like switching from one streaming service to another or this focus on consumer behavior is, necessarily like any sort of fix all.

So yeah, I take a multi-pronged approach to both laying out these ideas for how streaming might be reformed and then pointing in the direction of different alternative models that artists have been working on, whether it be cooperative alternatives to streaming, or different musician unions that have popped up in the past few years.

I talk about the importance of increased public funding for the arts, including for music because public funding for music is so insignificant in the United States.

Tim Riley: I love how you point out that Daniel Ek [sic] was actually the beneficiary of public funding for the arts in his public school system growing up in Sweden.

Liz Pelly: Yeah…

MORE

“Ghosts in the Machine,” by Liz Pelly, Harper’s, December 2024“Is There Any Escape from the Spotify Syndrome?” Hua Hsu reviews Pelly’s book in the New YorkerTed Gioia’s “The Honest Broker” substack links on spotify coverageMood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, by Liz Pelly (One Signal/Atria)The Playlist, based on the book by Sven Carlsson (Netflix, 2022)The Spotify Play: How Daniel Ek Beat Apple, Google, and Amazon in the Race for Audio Dominance, by Sven Carlsson and Jonas Leijonhufvud (Diversion Books, 2021)

PAUL KRUGMAN’s public grievance with his New York Times editorial page implicates both the brass and his colleagues. Editors: if you sense your Nobel Laureate has gripes, you buy him lunch and hear him out. If anything, his flameout tells you how little the enterprise cares about some of its smartest contributors. The silence from his peers tells you a lot… Swift handing Beyoncé her Grammy for Best Country Album felt good, but not good enough… Department of the OVEREXPOSED: Adam Driver… Catching up: Jason “Nepo” Reitman coaxes a series of underrated performances in his SNL biopic Saturday Night, a form that shouldn’t work and feels flukish when it succeeds: Tommy Dewey as Michael O’Donaghue, Cory Michael Smith as Chevy Chase, Rachel Sennott as Rosie Shuster, and JT Walsh—I mean J.K. Simmons as Milton Berle, carried along by a brisk, nonchalant lead from Gabrielle Labelle as Lorne Michaels, who has now starred for Spielberg (as the young filmmaker in The Fabelmans), and as a fetching lout in The Snack Shack.

noises off

* LAST CALL for IG links, we have all but bailed: all Reels and highlights save across these categories: Tools, Journalism, Rock, Beatles, Dance, Posters, and Misc

* Raid the archives for Year in Review issues parts 1 and 2, soulsters sing the Beatles, The Very Great Garth Hudson (especially here, but you know that), and appending Rob Sheffield’s Solo Beatles List.

* riley rock index: obits, bylines, youtube finds, reference sites, pinterest, beacons.ai, random deep link

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rileyrockreport.substack.com

Moondog Matinee, The Band (Capitol, 1973)

Garth Hudson, the last living member of The Band, turned 88 on August 8. Hudson’s Lowrey organ gave the Band regal colors, and he wove in synthesizer lines as if he had three hands. In songs like “Wheels on Fire,” his flourishes evoked the church, the speakeasy, and the carnival, sometimes in the same phrase. Where the Grateful Dead ritualized a long drum passage signaling the set’s final act, Hudson’s long live preambles to "Chest Fever" spun soliloquies of expansive taste (“the Genetic method”). Then he’d strap on an alto sax and ghost Rick Danko’s lonesome vocal on “It Makes No Difference.” On the forthcoming 1974 Live Recordings deluxe box (27 discs) backing Bob Dylan, Hudson’s keyboards ladle hot grease on a runaway locomotive that coughs all around him. I wrote about Moondog Matinee in 2001 for PublicArts, an album that grows in suprise and delight after 50 years.

BEFORE THE EXPLOSION of tribute albums in the 1990s, the subgenre of rock cover efforts was a scrappy tradition that sometimes signaled trouble. The Beatles were the prime example: after releasing The White Album in November of 1968, the fabs returned to the studio in January of 1969 with only tidbits of new material. To fill the time, they collapsed into a stream of oldies, or cover songs, as a source of inspiration. The sessions proved overlong and tiresome, and they shoved everything into the vaults for 18 months until the summer of 1970, when their new manager Allen Klein saw an opportunity to make some quick cash by releasing Let It Be, a cleaned-up version of those sessions (produced by Phil Spector). It included only one of dozens of covers (now circulating freely on the web), and it happened to be one of their own songs, "One After 909," which they had left off their first album in 1963.

Shoot the riley rock report curl with free issues every other Friday…

In similar situations, other bands have followed suit. In 1973, the Band found itself flailing about: after touring with Bob Dylan in 1966 and recording the mysterious Basement Tapes while everyone else freaked out during the summer of 1967, the group released two boldly understated albums, Music From Big Pink (1968), and The Band (1969), which vaulted them into greatness. Pink had three definitive Dylan covers ("Tears of Rage," "This Wheel's On Fire," and "I Shall Be Released"), and one by the inimitable honky-tonker Lefty Frizzell ("Long Black Veil"), which pitched their sound somewhere between cutting edge folk-rock and vintage backwoods C&W. So sure was their attack that in a recent Rolling Stone article about Dylan collectors, "Dylanologist" Mark Jacobson referred to "Long Black Veil" as a Bob Dylan song.

Where did these Canadians come upon this ineffably American sound? How could a band sound at once so historically authentic and yet so completely original?

It's diffcult to overstate the effect these records and the Dylan connection had on the Band's presence in the early '70s. They were a kind of American Beatles, a band that reached aesthetic heights while commanding a broad, progressive audience. Such heights are difficult to attain, harder still to sustain. The Band's follow-up albums—Stage Fright (1970) and Cahoots (1971)—were curiosities, mostly for the way their elusive sound sometimes eluded even them. While the songwriting could still be sturdy, their inspiration seemed largely spent. After Northern Lights–Southern Cross (1975), they threw themselves a retirement party on Thanksgiving of 1976 with The Last Waltz (1978) and packed off for a studio career that produced only one lackluster album (Islands in 1977) before they fell to pieces.

Now [c. 2001], the Band's catalog is getting the treatment it's long deserved: digital remastering that preserves their fragile tone and extra tracks that give aesthetic clues to their work habits. The leftover take of "Up On Cripple Creek" reveals a lockstep arrangement that's at once loose and refined. (Beware, however, of Rock Of Ages, which while sonically enhanced, contains a lackadaisical Dylan appearance on the second CD with a slow version of "Like a Rolling Stone" that sounds more miffed than energized.) Larger questions still hover over their work: where did these Canadians come upon this ineffably American sound? How could a band sound at once so historically authentic and yet so completely original? If such music had sources, what would they be?

Moondog Matinee makes sense of the Band in ways their original material never could. For starters, there are rich, emotionally persuasive white treatments of black sources: Richard Manuel's humble recitation of Bobby "Blue" Bland's "Share Your Love With Me," and Rick Danko's achingly modest read of Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come." And if Moondog Matinee does nothing more than introduce new listeners to former light heavyweight ("Kid Chocolate") Lee Dorsey, the New Orleans-by-way-of-Portland-Oregon singer, it will have worked a marvel. ("If a smile had a sound, it would be the sound of Lee Dorsey's voice," recalled Allen Toussaint.) Best known for his 1966 hit, "Working in the Coal Mine," Dorsey's influence extends to John Lennon, who sang Dorsey's "Ya Ya" on his solo covers album Rock'n'Roll.

The bonus tracks include a studio version of an original, "Endless Highway" (which only appeared on the essential 1974 live album with Dylan, Before the Flood), and Chuck Berry's "Back to Memphis," which the Band used to open its Watkins Glen set (the "live" version sounds punchier, but it's just got added crowd noise). This ensemble worked the greatest creativity within the strictest of formats, and, like the Beatles, understood how paying tribute could bring out the most expressive originality.

Thanks for reading, please clap by sharing:

elsewhere

Cover Albums Worthy of Their Material

Duran Duran, Thank You (1995)

David Bowie, Pin Ups (1973)

Paul McCartney, Chobba B CCCP (1988), Run Devil Run (1999)

John Lennon, Live Peace in Toronto (1969), Rock ’N’ Roll (1975)

The Bunch, Rock On (1972)

Todd Rundgren, Faithful (1973)

Patti Smith, Twelve (2007)

Bob Dylan, Triplicate (2017)

John Fogerty, The Blue Ridge Rangers (1973)

Bruce Springsteen, The Live Series: Songs Under Cover (2019)

Joan Osborne, Radio Waves (2022)

Willie Nelson, Stardust (1973)

Yo La Tengo, Fakebook (1989)

Dwight Yoakam, Under the Covers (1997)

The Beatles, Live at the BBC I & II (1994, 2003)

The Rolling Stones On Air (2017)

Quote of the month

“This should have been such a happy day,” [investigator Maria] Pevchikh said to me. “But — ” She paused. “This ‘but’ is as big as Earth itself.”

—M. Gessen on the prisoner swap, “Navalny Couldn’t Be Freed Until Gershkovich Was Kidnapped. Gershkovich Couldn’t Be Freed Until Navalny Was Dead,” New York Times editorial, August 4, 2024. If Florida and Utah can outlaw books by Toni Morrison, can we assign Navalny as the one documentary all registered and unregistered voters watch by November?

Amending That NYTimes Book List

Easily the most exasperating thing about the decline in this newspaper’s reputation lies in how it runs Gessen and Thomas Friedman next to wayward headlines and drek like P*mela Paul. This list of "100 Best Books of the 21st Century” opens itself to a number of attacks, and jazz critic Nate Chinen parses some obvious framing issues. Then he lists the ten best music books of this century, and while checking RJ Smith’s masterful and morally dreadful Chuck Berry bio, inexplicably leaves off two titles I’ve been pumping for months: Dan Charnas’s Dilla Time, and Lenny Kaye’s Lightning Striking. Questlove’s new Hip-Hop Is History (with Ben Greenman) dwells in the same territory.

playlist of the month

riley rock trailmix August 2024

We try to get with Rhiannon Giddins singing Tom Petty, morsels from McCartney’s One-Hand Clapping batch, “Radical Optimism,” the source for Dylan’s “With God On Our Side,” and Kacey Musgraves duets with Willie Nelson (“Are You Sure?”). Willie singing Gram Parson features a wild-pitch riff-bound arrangement that lands somehwere on the other side of disbelief.

noises off

* Coming soon: Rob Sheffield’s Taylor Swift book (“Heartbreak Is the National Anthem”) cackles its way through her catalog. Drill down for ripples off that big response to them Kinks in the the archives, and that Texan who ruins classic rock songs keeps everybody rubberneckin’. More Beatles content here.

* riley rock index: music’s metaportal—obits, bylines, youtube finds, reference sites, pinterest, beacons.ai, random deep link. And SmallTalk has big substack potential.

* Note: next issue lands on September 6.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rileyrockreport.substack.com

The Boys, Amazon Prime original (based on the Dynamite Entertainment comic book series written by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, developed by Eric Kripke)

With events in the saddle, even this RNC update suddenly feels dated:

WATCHING THE NEWS break in real time on July 13, it almost felt like reality had sprung directly from a script for The Boys. In Prime’s vicious and profane (and poorly named) satire of MAGA, the Vought Corporation runs the country by puppeteering The Seven “Supes,” humans injected with a potent serum that manifests as a super-power. These comic-book heroes can either stop jets in the air or outrun trains or inhabit some creepy sea underworld. A curdled smile named Homelander (played with understated relish by Antony Starr) leads this team, a fusion of insecurity and narcissism so arch it approximates a real estate developer from Queens. After he wrests control from his corporate overlords, Homelander bullies America into an autocratic dystopia, with politicians pandering to their testosteroned overlords (cue exploding heads). A scrappy troupe of misfits led by Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) and Hughie Campbell (Jack Quaid) mount an unsteady resistance. (“With great power,” Butcher says, “comes the absolute certainty that you'll turn into a right c*nt.")

Share this riley rock report with a frenemy and keep the vibe groovy. Free issues every other Friday, where temptation gets funky…

The show taps such a gusher of the national mood, you could almost eavesdrop on the stage directions as the real Tr*mp dropped to the ground, then insisted on raising his fist and shouting “Fight” as Secret Service agents wrestled him offstage. As many pointed out, a lifetime of media training kicked in to make the moment stick. It was as easy to imagine T’s swift calculus about how to appear defiant in that moment as it was how a slick consultant might have him frame it at the RNC the following week. If anything, The Boys falls short of the cynicism on display from JD Vance, his wife Usha, Melania, Speaker Mike Johnson, and the whole party’s blastoff into cosmic divine intervention. “That chart saved my life.”

As Masha Gessen observed, “We grew accustomed to an ever growing gap between reality as we experienced it and the ways in which it was reflected back to us by politicians and journalists…” Seth Abramson published an epic deconstruction of how much Trump gilded his made-for-reality-TV moment when restraint would have taken him further. By demanding sympathy, Trump made himself mannered and petty when even President Biden seemed to sympathize on a human level.

The Boys has suffered from a fourth season that tilts into overwrought SDM degeneracy. Saved by flying killer sheep, a seductive octopus, the satire has grown cruder, and harder to watch, as it scrambles to keep up with “real life” (this season wrapped before Trump’s felony convictions). Even Biden’s Covid affliction and Judge Cannon’s dismissal of the National Security case had the hairy-hand-of-the-puppeteer gloss of the show’s marketing gurus. The best touch so far lies in a new supe, Sister Sage, a brainiac black woman (Susan Heyward), “the smartest person in the world.” When teamed with Homelander, her impassivity disguises her manipulations with the weight of history. With the Kamala Harris candidacy ascendant, this now rings out in new shades of irony.

Homelander’s self-satisfied grin heaves with rot. And people cower less in fear of his superpowers than his unpredictability, his fecklessness, and all-consuming self-interest ("No God. The only man in the sky is me"). His Barron stand-in of a son makes a fiendishly squalid subplot.

Satire this sharp boomerangs oddly. Hulk Hogan wuz robbed of that VP slot.

elsewhere

* Seth Abramson on Trump’s lies in Proof

* About Amazon season 4 preview

* more sites

* Masha Gesson on the RNC in the New York Times

* Timothy Snyder on Veep Stakes

* “Democracy” by Leonard Cohen (from The Future, 1992)

more on Joe Walsh and the Eagles

We’re tempted to take credit for Hotel California “returning” to the Billboard C&W charts, less a return than an orbit that finally slipped into new gravity. According to Forbes, the album “reappears at No. 47 on the 50-spot ranking of the most-consumed country-only full-lengths and EPs in the U.S…” but I’ll need convincing that it ever charted Country in the first place. If it did, when? In the late ’70s that would have cursed it among rock fans. In 1989, I watched Joe Walsh sing “Desperado” after intermission at Ringo’s All-Star Show, and many mistook him for the original singer. Returns the favor for Don Henley’s Walsh vocal on “Life in the Fast Lane.”

Nobody complained but only after I wrote that piece did I even remember that Henley cut a country record (Cass County) in 2015, including duets with Dolly Parton. The forgetting feels understandable, but we still “regret the omission.” Having said that, I still think the Eagles would have made a better country record than this Henley product, which cuts right down the middle and doesn’t compel many relistenings. How is that Henley makes a duet with Parton feel… cynical? Also, a “template for Dwight Yoakam” overshoots the opinion for emphasis, but Yoakam makes better records than that (If There Was a Way…, Under the Covers).

album of the month

Schubert: Ländler, Pierre-Laurent Aimard (Pentatone)

https://pierrelaurentaimard.com/

noises off

* Raid the archives for recent bangers on Woody Guthrie, the Kinks, and Eric Wolfson on concept albums. Always lots more Beatles content here. Stop the press: McCartney sneezed.

* riley rock index: music’s metaportal—obits, bylines, youtube finds, reference sites, pinterest, beacons.ai, random deep link. And the feisty SmallTalk, where substack earns new stripes.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rileyrockreport.substack.com

Two years ago, this Woody Guthrie piece ran on his birthday (July 14, 1912) to boost awareness and renew anti-fascist history. Given Biden’s “Should I Stay Or Should I Go” moment, Guthrie imparts yet more wisdom: beware cynicism, the right’s lethal stealth tactic. And lo, our first rerun…

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rileyrockreport.substack.com

John Bonham (1948-1980) would have turned 76 at the end of this month (May 31). As a drummer he had chops beyond his years, and ears as big as any Page riff. When I covered Led Zeppelin’s mandatory box set release in 1990, it changed how I heard all those albums…

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rileyrockreport.substack.com

When I spoke with Jewell about her lucid and engaging history of college radio, my Covid case had grown pronounced enough that it bled straight onto the tape. She makes a smooth narrator, though, so the few places I do croak through you can hear just how ill I felt. I started by asking her what kind of history she teaches at Fitchburg State outside Boston…

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rileyrockreport.substack.com

Academic presses now fixing holes and taking risks where giants stutter, and the rest of us await the Big Leap Forward in long-form digital narrative…

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rileyrockreport.substack.com

The quote that leaps out at me now comes from a violinist, who requested anonymity: “He tries very hard with Mozart and Haydn… But he doesn’t know the meaning of the word elegant. He doesn’t have classical ideas about sound. Elegance and charm—he doesn’t know from that. That’s a terrible thing to say, and I feel bad saying it, because he hired me. It’s not like he’s not trying; he’s just barking up the wrong tree, looking for answers in the wrong places.” So note how that New York Times “essential recordings” list lacks core repertoire. I couldn’t get through his Brahms First and never tried the other three. The Haydn and Mozart escaped release. Beethoven, perhaps, gave him more to grab onto, but when people remarked on the Greatest Ozawa performances they’d say mention Schönberg, Bartok, or Stravinsky.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rileyrockreport.substack.com