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The Media Poll 05
From xx609@prairienet.org Sat Mar 29 08:27:23 1997
Date: Sat, 29 Mar 1997 00:09:00 -0600 (CST)
From: Media Poll <xx609@prairienet.org>
To: ftp@etext.org
Subject: The Media Poll - No. 5
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THE MEDIA POLL Number 5 March 28, 1997
_______________________________________________________
By John Marcus
Featuring:
-YOU HEARD IT THERE FIRST: "In Your Face"
-POPULAR ARTS IN REVIEW: Luscious Wayne
-REVISITING THE GRAMMYS ("Do We Have To?")
--------------------------------------------
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xx609@prairienet.org]
YOU HEARD IT THERE FIRST: "In Your Face"
It's one of those phrases that just won't go away. First it was the
Beastie Boys ("Some voices got treble/some voices got bass/we got the
kind of voices that are in your face") in 1989, then about 10 million
other would-be wags, then the Chicago Tribune in 1996, when it declared
that its arch-traditionalist sports section would now, in the spirit of
the '90s, be IN YOUR FACE. My face just hasn't got room for that part of
the paper, thank you very much. Try someone else's.
IT'S A RAP THING, it's a sports thing, it's a cultural bloody phenomenon.
The 1994 Republican Congress even wanted to get in your face. "Face" has
its proponents and its detractors. In August 1994, according to the
Richmond Times-Dispatch, Virginia "state Health and Human Services
Secretary Kay Coles James told young people not to be victims and urged
them to overcome life's obstacles with an 'in your face' attitude." But
in a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Op-Ed piece in April 1995, Frederick J.
Rokasky took "face" to task, blaming talk radio, Newt Gingrich, and Pat
Robertson for fostering an in-your-face cultural climate (for over "a
decade and a half") that led to an action as hateful and full of
unchecked anger as the Oklahoma City bombing. And in the San Antonio
Express-News earlier that year, one Larry Hufford suggested that the
attitude was so pervasive in our culture that is has become "fully
integrated into mainstream American values." Without significant
discussion and analysis, he lamented, " there is little
hope for the commonweal."
Because our electronic archives don't recognize the word "in", it is
impossible to quantify the trend without dirtying the methodology up with
thousands of instances of "egg on your. . . " and "plain as the nose on
your. . ." But for all you slanghounds dying to know, the first known
published instance of "in your face" was:
February 17, 1982
The Daily Oklahoman
In an article on college basketball of all things, two of the Big Eight's
newer coaches--Oklahoma's Billy Tubbs and Oklahoma State's Paul
Hansen--were said to prefer "wide-open, up-and-down-the-floor,
in-your-face basketball."
Now you know who to blame.
__________________________________________________________________
POPULAR ARTS IN REVIEW
Pop Music: Luscious Wayne
By Mimi Schneider
MY FAVORITE ERA in the history of my relationship with any pop record is
the precise moment when I've heard the record often enough to become
acutely aware of its various musical and lyrical twists and turns--and
avoided enough of the work of the Professional Rock Press to remain
blissfully unaware of the details of the lives of the Artistes in
question. I am now enjoying such a relationship with the current
recordings by two of New York City's finest youth orchestras, Fountains
of Wayne and Luscious Jackson.
The name is self-consciously dumb, but the two wiseacres who make up
Fountains of Wayne are bright enough to have single-handedly
(well--four-handedly) brought power pop back from the land of the
reissues Time-Life forgot. These guys know the sources (Raspberries,
Paley Bros., Shoes, the inevitable Big Star) well enough to dispense with
slavish imitations of them. With enough post-grunge crunchiness in the
guitars to establish contemporary rock street-cred and enough
blippy-bloopiness in the occasional keyboard filigree to conjure up
appropriate retro-pop references, FOW would have already made a killer
record...and we haven't even gone into the songwriting, all
"coffee...cream...Xerox machine" and "PATH train" specific and "funny how
the ground can't find my wheels/I'm drivin' where the road ain't there"
fantastic about the lives and loves of young Lower
Manhattanites-on-the-make circa 1996.
THESE DOWNTOWN BOYS want their grrls to "leave the biker, break his
heart" kick the bozo "reading Playboy on your couch" to the curb, and
take a ride in their "Survival Car," just so they can "Sink To The Bottom
With You." I've seen some in the Professional Rock Press try to interpret
that song as the album's obligatory post-Cobain homage, but to me the
most poignant sounds on the record are the blended quotations from
"Surrender" (Cheap Trick) and "Clowntime is Over" (Cheap Costello) which
waft through "Something I Do Well." FOW do it well indeed; the only "bad"
thing I could possibly say is that it's amazingly hard to believe that in
1996 in New York City one could make a pop record which is so singularly
uninfluenced by Black music.
LUSCIOUS JACKSON DON'T HAVE that problem. Teaming up with Daniel Lanois,
the Anne Rice of the recording studio, these four New Yorkers have vastly
expanded on their original white-girls-in-the-Beastie-Boys-orbit gimmick.
"Fever In, Fever Out" is chock full o'maturity, yet finds the band's
principal songwriters, Jill Cunniff and Gabrielle Glaser, keeping in
touch with the concerns of young women everywhere. The opening track and
first single, "Naked Eye," is ultra-catchy textbook hip-hop, with samples
and loops that set the tone for the rest of the album's clattering and
clanging mixes and live, if rudimentary, drumming. The soul and blues
touches which have worked their way into Cunniff's songs over the years
are given the musical settings ("Mood Swing") in which they can fully
flower on this record, which even veers into pop with the brilliant "Why
Do I Lie," an antidote to commercial grrlie-rock that every fourteen year
old girl (and every woman who can accurately recall being a fourteen year
old girl) should long for. Glaser's "Electric" is another highlight; the
sentiment "It feels so good to be alive " may hold no relevance in my
pathetic life, but I'm still enough of a romantic to cheer it on when I
hear it on a record.
-MIMI SCHNEIDER is a singer/songwriter and the producer of the Roots
of Lounge web site <http://www.gonix.com/rol>
____________________________________________________________
REVISITING THE GRAMMYS ("Do We Have To?")
I MUST SAY there was a small but very tangible sense of satisfaction upon
hearing the news that Celine Dion won album of the year. Not that I've
ever heard the singer's disc let alone sung along to it in my sleep, but
rather because it validated my crackpot scheme to predict Grammy winners
based on media coverage volume during the year. But alas, I'm only
batting .500, as that crumb bum Eric Clapton of Hackney took record of
the year away from Alanis Morissette, the other woman Canuck upon whose
fortunes my theory was resting.
One reader suggested, however, that rather than measure coverage during
1996 (during which time all the records in question were released), I
should look at media coverage during the time from when the nominations
were made public until the awards were announced. Now, I don't know how
soon after the nominations are announced that votes are actually cast,
but I thought I'd take a look just the same.
TAKING INTO ACCOUNT the period of January 7 until February 26, then,
guess what happens? Neither prediction comes through. But
interestingly, the artist with the most coverage in both categories was
Smashing Pumpkins, who won in neither of these slots but took away a
statue for best hard rock performance, one of seven nominations they'd
received. And take away the hype those seven chances of winning
generated (i.e. remove the Pumpkins from our competition), and Celine and
Eric take the top slots in their respective races, allowing the MP10 to
show its face in public once again. . .
______________________________________________________________
GRAMMY FOR BEST INSULT IN A LYRIC:
"He was a miserable bollocks and a bitch's bastard's whore."
-Shane Macgowan, *Boys From the County Hell*, 1984
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The Media Poll is Copyright 1997 by John Marcus
