Observant readers may have noticed that I haven’t linked to many of my stories from the DMN recently. That’s because…I haven’t been writing much to link to. I’ve been off writing a series of stories, and that series finally ran over the last three days.
Sunday: “For a newborn college, the road to respectability runs through accreditation. It can take a school up to a decade to earn the nation’s official mark of quality. But last year some Dallas investors, keen to quickly launch a profitable revolution in higher education, found a shortcut to accreditation. They bought it.” Plus a sidebar.
Monday: “Dallas entrepreneur Randy Best has owned more than 100 companies in his career. Bakeries and defense contractors. Greeting-card makers and health-care companies. Companies that sell telecom equipment and companies that sell cheerleading equipment. But now, at 63, his focus is fully on education. Mr. Best is launching a network of for-profit education companies that he says could revolutionize the way students are taught, both in the U.S. and around the world.” With a sidebar on former Dallas superintendent Mike Moses and his current life in the private sector.
Tuesday: “Gerald Heeger is a newcomer to Texas, but he isn’t afraid to set Texas-size goals. In five years, he wants his company, Whitney International University, to enroll more than half a million students around the world and be on its way to becoming the biggest provider of higher education the Earth has ever seen. ‘How’s that for audacity?’ Dr. Heeger said in his downtown Dallas office. ‘I believe there’s a big problem in the world, and big problems need big solutions.’” Plus a sidebar on the company’s plans to “redefine” high school.
Week Five of MP3 Monday brings a brand new theme: Songs performed live on The Old Grey Whistle Test, the BBC music show that aired from 1971 to 1987. During its lifespan, it was probably the premiere televised source for new music, with particular focus on soul, punk, postpunk, and (since this was early ’80s Britain) reggae.
The BBC has issued a series of DVDs compiling performances from the show, which has resulted in fans uploading videos to Youtube. I’ve ripped the MP3s below from those videos; links to more of those at the bottom.
As always, songs will be available for download for a week, so grab ‘em quick.
Bill Withers got a late start in the music game, not recording until his early 30s and only after careers in the military and aircraft assembly. Of his first album, from which “Ain’t No Sunshine” is taken, he said: “I was just making a record. I didn’t know whether anyone was going to like it or not. Had nobody gone for that first record, I would have probably just gone on with life and forgot about the whole thing.” That would have been a shame, since he has a wonderfully calming, human-scale soul voice.
Judging by the sweat in Bill’s eyes, the lights at BBC Television Centre must have been turned up high the day this track was recorded. Hip-hop heads will notice legendary session man James Gadson on drums. If you saw the great documentary Keepintime — in which Gadson and some other classic soul drummers meet up with the DJs (Cut Chemist, Madlib, J-Rocc, DJ Shadow) who sample their old sides — you’ll remember Gadson as the crazy-looking old dude. Non-hip-hop heads will simply notice his permagrin and great suit.
For those of us who first heard The Police when they had already hit the big time (Synchronicity-era), it’s nice to see them young and scrappy. “Can’t Stand Losing You” was the first single from their first album and it went nowhere initially. This Whistle Test appearance came just as the band was picking up steam.
In the video, a coltish young Sting looks so much more punk than he would in later tantric years, with his bleached spiked hair turned lime green by the overhead lights. Although he would have been around 27 at the time, he looks an awkward 19. Also a good reminder of how great a drummer Stewart Copeland was.
Gang of Four was the British parallel to Mission of Burma, an angular post-punk band that mixed rigid funk, left-wing politics, and names derived from Asian governments. (Brits would, perhaps rightly, prefer to call Mission of Burma the American parallel to Gang of Four.)
Like Burma, Gang of Four has seen its sound become hugely influential among a certain school of contemporary acts (Franz Ferdinand, The Rapture, Bloc Party, et al) and has recently reformed. If you want to buy an album, Entertainment! — which still sounds fresh, abrasive, and fun 27 years later — is the clear recommendation.
The strangest thing about this video is how downright regular the Four look. By which I mean: how dorky they look. They could be your local Class 2A all-district cross-country team circa 1984.
Finally, here are some other interesting videos from Whistle Test. The ones in bold are of particular interest:
Afro Promo, a history of 20th-century black culture through the lens of movie trailers. Featuring Foxy Brown (for those who like seeing Pam Grier shoot people) and St. Louis Blues (featuring Nat Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Eartha Kitt, and more).
Longtime readers may remember all my stories in 2004-05 about cheating on the TAKS, the state standardized test here in Texas. Some state officials said my stories — which found evidence that hundreds of Texas schools may be cheating — exaggerated the size of the problem. To check it out for themselves, they hired a test-security firm to look for cheaters.
About one in 12 Texas schools had unusual TAKS results that suggest cheating occurred last year, according to a consultant hired by the Texas Education Agency.
The consultant, a Utah test security firm named Caveon, was hired after a Dallas Morning News series found suspicious scores in nearly 400 schools statewide, based on 2003 and 2004 testing results.
Caveon’s analysis, using 2005 TAKS results, found even more: 609 schools, or 8.6 percent of the state’s campuses.
Week Four of MP3 Monday centers on my trip back home to south Louisiana weekend before last — some excellent Cajun and zydeco music. As always, songs will be available for download for a week, so grab ‘em quick.
C.J. Chenier is stuck in the same bind as Michael Andretti or Emilio Estevez: going into the same business as your very successful father. His dad Clifton Chenier was the self-proclaimed “King of Zydeco” — even appearing on stage wearing a crown — and no one disputed the title. If anyone could be said to have invented the genre, it’s Clifton.
But C.J. has done well for himself. He initially shunned zydeco music, but his dad convinced him to join his touring band, and when Clifton died, C.J. took over leadership of the Red Hot Louisiana Band. This track (written by his father, with uncle Cleveland Chenier on rubboard) is classic dancehall zydeco — a strong ’50s blues feel and excellent slow-dance potential.
C.J.’s latest latest album, the somber and hurricane-themedThe Desperate Kingdom of Love, came out earlier this month. It features what I am going to assume is his first P.J. Harvey cover.
It sounds interesting, from the excerpts I can find online, but puhleeze can someone in south Louisiana learn how to mike drums? So many Cajun/zydeco bands sound amazing live but flat and indistinguishable on record, and the biggest reason is that the drums get miked all wrong — all bright and shiny and foreground. Most good south Louisiana music needs grit, and that’s hard to get when producers insist on a clean mix. Seriously, throw some punk-rock producer at a good zydeco band and you could make it cook. And maybe you’d get some young people interested, instead of the 50-plus crowd you get at too many Cajun/zydeco shows these days.
(The same is true of most contemporary blues and a lot of jazz — when you smooth all the dirty, skronky, dissonant goodness off it, you’re left with technically sound but boring pap.)
Saw these guys with my friends in Lafayette weekend before last, and I love the fact they have the same goal I just outlined. (Wilson Savoy, quasi-leader of the Pine Leaf Boys, told my friend Julia after the show that their goal is to get hot young women to go to their shows. Now that’s the right way to look at it.) The Pine Leaf Boys are all in their early 20s and play fast and hard — they’re self-proclaimed traditionalists, but with an attitude.
(I love that on their web site they quote my old school buddy Josh Caffery: “The live performances of the Pine Leaf Boys are a revelation of anarchy and reverence and manic exuberance funneled through traditional musical forms.” For fun, here’s a photo of me and Josh C. at age six.)
Wilson comes from a noted Cajun-music family: his dad Marc Savoy is one of the great lions of the culture and a maker of accordions; mom Ann Savoy wrote the best book on Cajun music and is in the Magnolia Sisters; and older brother Joel Savoy was in the great Red Stick Ramblers, which started the nascent Cajun/Western Swing movement, along with Josh Caffery. Not sure what he’s up to these days, but I do know an ex-girlfriend of mine developed a seriouscrush on him after a Ramblers show a few years back.
Anyway, if the Boys ever come to your neck of the woods, trust me: go see them. Here’s another song from that Breaux Bridge show, “Pine Grove Blues.” And here’s video of a recent performance at the best bar in the world. More songs and videos at their web site.
(If all goes according to plan, you may be hearing excerpts from that Pine Leaf Boys show on a future edition of “All Things Considered.” Cross your fingers.)
As mentioned above, one strain of contemporary Cajun music merges it with Bob Wills-style Western swing (with a schmear of gypsy jazz). Who knows who came up with it first; the Red Stick Ramblers were where I first heard it, but the Lost Bayou Ramblers have been at it for a while too. The focus is on reviving old pre-World War II songs, when Cajun music emphasized the fiddle. With its shuffle-brush drums and jaunty bass, “Tu Peut Pas M’Arreter de Rêver” could be a Django Reinhardt outtake.
Like Bob Wills — who played under the name the Light Crust Doughboys because a flour company sponsored them — the LBR also plays (in slightly amended form) as the Mello Joy Boys. (Mello Joy is the ur Cajun coffee, recently revived.) Their theme song is here.
Only two and a half years late, I’ve posted some photos from my 2003 Pew Fellowship in Zambia.
(These used to be posted on my Zambia blog, zambiastories.com, but that was lost in the last server crash. Hopefully I’ll get around to rebuilding it sometime soon.)
In other music news: Madlib’s 45 mix, a 65-minute mix of old funk/soul singles, free for the streaming. (You can also download the MP3 as the latest episode of the Stones Throw podcast.)
If anyone in L.A. wants to go buy me stuff here, you’ll be my bestest friend forevah.
Friday, May 19 – Sunday, May 21, 2006: Estate Sales Los Angeles is pleased to announce that it will conduct an exciting prop house sale of the contents of one of Twentieth Century Fox Television’s favorite television shows of the past decade “Arrested Development.” Spectacular array of items will include several periods of furniture, magic show accessories and artifacts, interior décor items, art, books, kitchen appliances and kitchen ware, interior/exterior lighting, office furniture, extensive entertainment memorabilia and too much more to itemize. Don’t miss the opportunity to own a piece of this show.
I liked ¡Ask a Mexican!, Gustavo Arellano’s column in SoCal’s OC Weekly, the moment I started reading it a few months ago. It’s funny, and I think it’s actually pretty valuable. There are a whole lot of white folks who, despite living in places like California or Texas, never really interact with Hispanics. When I read that our local weekly, the Observer, was going to be running the column, I was glad to hear it.
(The Observer, OC Weekly, and a host of other alt-weeklies are all owned by the same chain, Village Voice Media.)
But then I read this week’s column. (It’s not online that I can find.) It has a riff on the terms “illegal immigrants” and “undocumented workers”:
The Dallas Morning News stylebook reportedly requires its reporters to describe as “undocumented workers” the men and women you call “illegal.”
That’s curious, for a number of reasons. First, “reportedly” is a weasel word — does the DMN stylebook say that or not? It’s an easily checkable fact. Second, why in the world does a columnist in Orange County know or care about the stylebook of a Dallas newspaper?
And third, it’s just wrong. Since I write for the DMN, I happen to know what our stylebook says. The entry for “illegal immigrant” says: “Use this term to describe someone who is in the United States or another country illegally, either by entering without legal authorization or overstaying an entry visa…Avoid the euphemistic undocumented immigrant.”
In other words, the precise opposite of what the column claims.
It wouldn’t have been hard to check, either. Google News finds 186 stories in the DMN that use “illegal immigrants,” versus 17 that use “undocumented workers.”
Like I said, curious. But then I saw that lots of Village Voice Media alt-weeklies were making the same baseless claim via Gustavo’s column. Here’s the Nashville Scene’s version of Gustavo’s column:
The Tennessean stylebook reportedly requires its reporters to describe as “undocumented workers” the men and women you call “illegal.”
The Orange County Register stylebook reportedly requires its reporters to describe as “undocumented workers” the men and women you call “illegal.”
(I’m sure there are more, but most VVM web sites, like the Observer’s, just link to the OC Weekly’s version of the column instead of reproducing what ran locally.)
Needless to say, the idea that “illegal immigrant” is somehow banned from each of these newspapers is wrong. (OC Register: 53 stories with “illegal immigrants” according to Google News vs. 4 with “undocumented workers”; The Tennessean: 25 vs. 8; Kansas City Star: 221 vs. 49.)
What I’m assuming happened is that Gustavo wrote the column with the OC Register line, which was then sent out to sister papers. Recognizing that readers in Dallas/Nashville/wherever couldn’t care less about the OC Register’s stylebook, local editors changed the name of the newspaper to their city’s daily.
(Kudos to Phoenix New Times. According to Nexis, it’s the only VVM weekly to have run Gustavo’s column but edited out the false newspaper claim.)
At no point in this process did facts interfere. Alt weeklies have long been known for criticism of the local daily — sometimes legit, sometimes knee-jerk. I just hope they don’t start exporting the knee-jerk stuff to each other.
Mission of Burma is streaming songs from its new album online. They are all very good. I want to grow up to be Clint Conley — in his late 40s, a happy suburban dad (and journalist!), and still bringing the punk rock.
The reason for my lateness in publishing MP3 Monday? I was stuck in Houston after a flight cancellation, my second weather-related flight bumping in a week. I only straggled home to Dallas Monday afternoon.
The current crop of Jeffs was touring the U.S. to learn about energy policy, and I’d suggested to their chaperone Abby that they stop off in south Louisiana. So I ended up showing 12 reporters (from China, Burma, Japan, Indonesia, Singapore, Bangladesh, India, Fiji, and the U.S.) around my homeland — taking them zydeco dancing, checking out Hurricane Rita damage, touring offshore drilling rigs, and feeding them all the local delicacies. Boiled crawfish, boudin, gumbo, raw oysters, shrimp, andouille, poboys, beignets — all the good stuff. It was great seeing all the new faces (and the one old one).
Also, because I’m sometimes told by masochistic readers that I should post photos once in a while, here’s a group photo taken Saturday in front of the glorious Cafe des Amis in Breaux Bridge. (I would be the green-shirted and alarmingly-haired gentleman in the back. The fellow sitting down in the center is Dickie Breaux, the owner.)
Welcome back for Week Three of MP3 Monday. As always, songs will be available for download for a week. Sorry it’s appearing a little later than usual on Monday; an unexpected Sunday night in Houston will do that to you.
This week we have a theme: the wonderful releases of the Numero Group, a Chicago-based reissue label. Numero is dedicated to digging up great old records that never got the respect they deserved.
Numero’s chief series is its Eccentric Soul line, for which it scours the archives of the small regional funk and soul labels that thrived (artistically if not financially) in the 1970s. The first edition centered on the Capsoul label from the big city of Columbus, Ohio: home of Big Ten football, the Ohio State Fair, and my old office when I used to cover the Ohio Legislature.
This Marion Black track highlights his buttery baritone — but the real reason I link is that it may be familiar to the indie hip-hop heads out there. The great RJD2 also hails from Columbus, and “Who Knows” forms the vocal hook for his “Smoke and Mirrors” (from his excellent 2002 album Deadringer.
“Yellow Pills” was a 1990s zine published by one Jordan Oakes and devoted to that most maligned of subgenres, power pop. I say maligned because the basics of power pop are so elementary that it attracts a lot of no-talents — there’s a lot of bad power pop out there, and not everyone who hears a Big Star reissue should then pick up a guitar.
But this compilation, pulled together by Oakes, assembles only the finest acts in obscure power-pop — you’ve never heard of any of these guys, trust me — and the finest of the fine is The Trend. They were a wee small band from Kennett, Missouri, and they released just a single album in 1983. You can tell they listened to Chronic Town, but the burbling bass and speed-freak drums say they were up to something of their own. Also, if you’re like me, you won’t be able to stop humming this song.
Facts about Belize: It is the only English-speaking nation in Central America, a legacy of its British colonial status. Guatemala claims it’s not a nation at all but a renegade Guatemalan province. Belize celebrates Baron Bliss Day every March in honor of some old British dude. Its citrus industry is based around the Hummingbird Highway. And its music is a mix of soul, R&B, calypso, and reggae.
The Professionals’ cover of the Godfather theme has guitar buzz straight out of Iron Butterfly, but a reggae bass line and a calypso lilt. For comparison, here’s a version of the original Godfather track (actually called “Love Theme” officially) performed by the Milan Philharmonic Orchestra.
The Express-News got a nice scoop on Texas considering raising the speed limit on some West Texas interstates to 80 miles per hour. But the story has a classic news-stats error. It quotes a state official saying, in effect, that people are driving that fast anyway and that the change is just reflecting reality:
[Carlos Lopez, director of traffic operations for TxDOT] said the department surveyed how fast cars were traveling on both interstates and found 85 percent of them were driving up to 79 mph.
But that means the opposite of what Lopez is trying to say. “Up to 79 mph” means only that people were driving at that speed or below. It tells you nothing about whether they’re going 78 mph or 2 mph. It’s just as factual as writing:
[Joshua Benton, proprietor of crabwalk.com] said that his blog surveyed how fast infants were crawling across the day-care center’s carpet and found 100 percent of them were crawling up to 79 mph.
What I presume Lopez meant is something like 85 percent of drivers are driving above 79 mph. Or maybe that 85 percent are driving between 75 and 79. Who knows?
As you may have heard, Apple recently won a lawsuit that had been filed against it by The Beatles’ management firm over the right to the Apple name. Once the decision came down, the BBC wanted to interview an expert on the subject, tech journalist Guy Kewney.
Unfortunately for them, when it came time to pull Mr. Kewney on stage for a live shot, they mistakenly pulled up a man named Guy Goma — who was the cabbie set to drive Mr. Kewney back to his office.
Here are the details. The video is here and so worth the download — if not for Mr. Goma’s tech wisdom, for the look of abject horror and then impish glee that comes when he realizes the mixup.
How can you not love Nina Simone? Truly an individual, in her vocal tone, in her politics, and in her general orneriness. (I mean, she shot people. That’s pretty ornery.)
Her voice always sounds to me like a war between restraint and passion, and you can see that in this song from the civil-rights era. She starts out reserved, almost blase. But as the volume turns up, the horns join in, and that bass drum starts to double-thump, she seems to wake up. Lyrics are here.
Gnarls Barkley, the It Band of the Moment, is the merger of DJ Danger Mouse and singer Cee-Lo. (You may remember Cee-Lo from 1990s ATL rap act Goodie Mob. You should remember Danger Mouse from his Beatles/Jay-Z mashup The Grey Album and his project with MF Doom, The Mouse and the Mask, previously pimped here on crabwalk.com.)
The first single off the album is the terrif “Crazy,” which you can hear streaming on their Myspace page. But the rest of the album — which comes out tomorrow in the U.S. — is just as strong. Danger Mouse remains a very accessible producer, with big primary-color beats. And I looooove Cee-Lo. The man doesn’t rap here — he’s really a soul singer of the old school, a la Al Green or the aforementioned Curtis Mayfield. I love me some hip-hop, but I do regret that its prominence has pushed black male soul singing out of the mainstream.
“Just A Thought” is one of the tougher-minded, darker tracks, with a little flamenco guitar underneath the cymbal-heavy thunder drums. As I said in that previous post about the MF Doom project, Danger Mouse makes hip-hop even people who think they don’t like hip-hop can like.
Bonus track: a live version of “Crazy” taken from BBC’s Top of the Pops on April 16. The sound quality’s not amazing, but the slowed-down orchestral take is interesting.
It’s happened to all of us at one time or another: Your girlfriend gets sentenced to 5 to 10 years hard labor. And sure, there’s always the hope of “good behavior” and flirting with the old guys on the parole board — but it still sucks. This song sums up that feeling.
Odessey and Oracle is a largely forgotten psychedelic classic, sort of a midpoint between Merseybeat and Brian Wilson. Trivia: The misspelling of “Odyssey” was the bassist’s roommate’s fault. And the Velvet Crush singles compilation, A Single Odessey, name-checks it. (Although they were closer to being a Byrds cover band than a Zombies one.)
(There remains in the bowels of crabwalk.com a loooooong, thankfully-unpublished post that roughly mirrors that article, written by the all-time-name J. Freedom du Lac.)
“One Got Fat,” a creepy 1963 bicycle-safety film that answers the age-old question: What should you do when all your friends have been killed or maimed?
The suspect “stopped short as he spotted me in the crowd and shouted, ‘What the [expletive] is Target doing here?!’ ” Nelson said. “I still love that one.”
In all-about-me news, I’m a finalist again for the Livingston Awards, in the international-reporting category. The Livingstons are “the nation’s largest all-media, general reporting prizes” and go to the best work by a reporter under 35.
This is my third time as a finalist, and so far I’m batting a bit fat .000 when it comes to winning. This time I’m up for my Nigeria stories from last spring.
Congrats to all the other finalists, in particular my DMN colleague Paula Lavigne.
Observant crabwalk.com readers will notice a redesign debuting today, the first in crabwalk.com’s nearly five-year (!) history. It’s not perfect yet — the comments section on entry pages is laid out kinda screwy, there are some sticky CSS problems in IE/Win, and the new look isn’t yet applied to all the subpages — but I figured I’d put it out there. Please let me know if anything looks screwy on your computer, or if you have general thoughts.
Some highlights of the new look:
The “Recently Played Tracks” section in the sidebar, which tells you the last 10 songs played on my home Mac’s iTunes. (I almost always have it on shuffle, so you’re generally seeing a random subset of my songs.)
The pulldown archives menu, which brings crabwalk.com’s technological sophistication all the way to 2002.
The “Most Recent Stories” in the sidebar, which automagically pulls my three most recent stories for The Dallas Morning News.
A wider column width, which makes it much easier to include photos and video in posts. And, with that, larger type for us older types.
A much-disputed increase in white space, which means it looks better on big monitors, although potentially worse on small ones.
Comments, criticisms, and plaudits all equally welcome.
Welcome to a new feature here on crabwalk.com: MP3 Monday. Every Monday, if all goes according to plan, I’ll post three MP3s, with a little background on each. They’ll be available for download for a week, or until the next MP3 Monday goes up.
As it happens, I’ve been listening to a lot of early-’70s soul/jazz/funk the last few months, so be prepared — there likely won’t be as many whiny white English majors as there were on my last music-sharing endeavor, the CD Mix of the Month Club. Not that there’s anything wrong with whiny white English majors!
The R&B family act The Sylvers was meant to be a Southern copy of the Jackson 5, with Foster playing the role of Michael (here, at age 11). He even kind of looked like MJ.
This track has all the bounce of early ’70s Michael, but none of the pedophilia of ’90s and ’00s Michael. I found Foster on the excellent Saint Etienne mix CD The Trip, which pretty well defines “groovy.”
Truly, could there be a worse situation for a twentysomething woman than to have her heart broken by both her boyfriend and her car? Maybe it’s not cool to still love lofi DIY twee — it does smell of 1994 — but these 99 seconds are good for headbopping. Here’s a video for the song.
Sanders was a sax understudy to John Coltrane, and his career was mostly in the vein of Coltrane’s later period — spacier and more spiritual.
He did much fine work — here’s “You’ve Got To Have Freedom” from 1980’s Journey to the One to prove it — but “Sun Song” isn’t anything special musically. The greatness comes in the guest vocal by Leon Thomas, who alternates baritone verses with a bizarre and wonderful warble/yodel. It’s downright otherworldly.
(For the record, I came across this via Journey to the Dawn, a compilation of tracks from California jazz label Theresa Records.)
And, although I plan to have three songs in each edition of MP3 Monday, here’s a bonus track in honor of the first go-round: Stevie Wonder’s cover of the Beatles’ “We Can Work It Out,” from Signed, Sealed, Delivered. Stevie shifts a relationship song to a optimistic take on race relations. I have heard rumors that there are still people in the world, perhaps in Mongolia, who do not yet realize the scope of Stevie Wonder’s genius. I hope to remedy that.
One of my favorite parts of the old CD Mix club was hearing people’s thoughts on the songs, so please speak up in the comments.
Joshua Benton is the director of the Nieman Digital Journalism Project at Harvard University, among other things. Before that, he was a staff writer and columnist for The Dallas Morning News. (More.)
