The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach

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  • The defining feature of modern Republicanism

    It’s not small-government. It’s not anti-tax screeds or culture war crusades. It’s not being pro-big business or pro-gun. It’s not being anti-choice or anti-gay. It’s not suport of “traditional marriages” or of non-traditional “special interrogation”. It’s not being pro-Gitmo or anti-drone or pro-Keystone or anti-FEMA. It’s not even being sexist or being racist.

    It’s a complete and utter lack of empathy, and an unhealthy disdain for the same in others.

    How else do you explain the sudden 180? shifts in philosophy once the consequence of the party line hits home? Dick Cheney supports gay rights, because his daughter is a lesbian. Bob Portman now supports same-sex marriage, because his son has come out of the closet. Mark Kirk suddenly understands the value of government health care, once he has a brush with death. It’s how Republican governors can decry federal spending on disaster relief… right up until their state needs it.

    Republicans like to claim that they’re the party of grown-ups, reining in those rascally irresponsible Democrats. But a hallmark of maturity is the development of empathy — the ability to think beyond the confines of your personal experiences and to imagine, however imperfectly, the life lived by people who are not you. On that measure, the Republican Party is a haven for toddlers and crybabies. I applaud Senator Portman for revisiting his philosophy in light of new evidence, but if we have to wait for a singular personal experience for each and every Republican, it’s going to be a long long slog.

  • Rest for the Weary (30 Days of Marc Cohn – Day 19)

    “Rest for the Weary”
    The Rainy Season

    One of the things I like about Marc Cohn is that his songs aren’t all about finding, having, and losing the girl. Every album includes very personal songs that nonetheless seem to be universal. I’m also struck by how well his songs, without generally being all that upbeat, convey a certain subtle, almost unreasonable, hopefulness. More than optimism, it’s faith that, despite all appearances, there is something wonderful in even the most mundane times.

    For a while this song was a touchstone in my life. It doesn’t really reflect any details of my personal history but I was very moved by the thought that someday, there will be rest for the weary. I think it’s both telling and fantastic that he passes by “love for the lonely” so quickly and dwells on “rest for the weary”. A lot of the time, that’s what we hope for: Not a surplus of joy but a cessation of struggle — just quiet time to enjoy life and life’s blessings.

    I hope there was some laughter
    Cause I know there were some tears

    That is just an amazing line. It captures the whole arc of a family’s life. It’s also genuinely sad, in that he knows there were tears but he is unsure of the laughter.

    Now I’m just another traveler
    On another winding road
    I’m trying to walk some kind of line
    I’m trying to pull some kind of load
    Now sometimes I move real easy
    Sometimes I can’t catch my breath
    Sometimes I see my father’s footsteps
    And man it scares me half to death

    These are the lines that made the song resonate with me. No child of suicide can ever think about his parent’s death without wondering, at least once, if there’s any difference — if the same siren song will call out. You try to understand but at the same time, you fear understanding. You don’t want to think the choice was senseless, but you don’t want it to make sense, either. And you always worry, in some corner of your mind, that you might have made the same choice, that you might still. For me, it’s never been a strong urge but I know that I shy away from thinking about my father’s death in part for this reason.

    Although it probably wasn’t written that way, this is why the song is hopeful, for me: It gives voice to a hope I have, which is that after everything, my father found peace and rest.

  • The Rainy Season (30 Days of Marc Cohn — Day 18)

    “The Rainy Season”
    The Rainy Season

    The Rainy Season is not a happy album and “The Rainy Season” is not a happy song. While Marc Cohn held a wide mix of songs and styles, Cohn’s sophomore album is generally dark. What comes through more than anything is how hard love can be to maintain, especially when you’re on the road and apart for large stretches.

    Clouds move in
    From off the horizon
    Feels like nighttime
    In the middle of the day

    This is a nice working of metaphor, which will extend to the refrain and indeed the entire album. Not only does he evoke memories of actual storms really well, but the threat of the future is pretty palpable here. When it gets dark in the middle of the dark, it’s not just any old storm. We’re talking flash-flood thunderstorm activity, something with lots of lightning and thunder and howling wind.

    And I don’t know why
    But it’s still so suprisin’
    How a love grows stronger
    Or it just fades away

    The segue to the relationship is smooth, so smooth you hardly notice how much it hurts. He’s clearly not writing about a love growing stronger, is he?

    But you look older today
    Than I’ve ever seen you

    I’m not expect on relationships, but things rarely go well when you tell your lover, “You look older than I’ve ever seen you”. But it’s a bit more than that: She looks older today — something’s changed, something that’s bringing the rain.

    I think I know the reason

    While I’m just making this up, I’ve always assumed that “the reason” is that she’s found out he’s cheated on her. (I think that’s backed up by “Paper Walls”) That’s the culmination of a process, of course, but the cheating (and her discovery of it) provide the singular act that cause her to look older today.

    We might wash all our tears away
    But you got to bundle up baby
    For the rainy season

    Here he’s holding out the hope — thin as even he sees it must be — that this won’t be the end of things. They might get through, wiping away their tears. But it’s going to take a storm to do it, and she’s got to be ready to walk through that storm.

    I hear you breathing heavy
    On the telephone tonight
    I can feel the air is thick as thieves

    If he’s calling her on the telephone, I’m not exactly sure how he knows she looks older today than he’s ever seen her. But let that slide. This line implies (to me) that he’s cheated; she knows he’s cheated; he knows she knows he’s cheated — but no one has said or confessed anything. That’s why the clouds are stil gathering. The unspoken accusation trembles in the air; it’s why he can feel the storm coming. Moreover, this opens the possibility that she doesn’t know and he’s just projecting his guilt.

    Sometimes I just want to tell you
    We’ll be all right
    At least that’s what some part of me believes

    Here, the forlorn hopefulness is just heartbreaking. He’s trying to offer comfort but he has none and (in my theory) it’s his own fault. He wants to think they can weather the storm but he knows, deep down, it’s unlikely.

    Oh, oh I’ve been holding on so long
    Holding on and holding on so long
    Oh, oh I’ve been holding on so long

    It’s interesting that he focuses on how long he‘s been holding on. This might upend my model of the relationship. Maybe the root cause lies with her. Or maybe he’s trying to justify his own failures. In the live version (which I prefer to the studio version), there’s an interesting twist: He says he’s “been holding on so long — holding on maybe just a little too long“. That signals, to me, that he’s come to understand things aren’t going to work out and that it’s been unhealthy for a long time.

    All in all, you have to wonder what his wife thought when this song and album came out.

  • “Girl of Mysterious Sorrow” (30 Days of Marc Cohn — Day 17)

    “Girl of Mysterious Sorrow”
    Burning the Daze

    I’ll make a confession.  I did not get, at first, that this song was about graveside remembrance.  In fact I felt quite clever to figure it out.  Listening to it again, it now seems pretty obvious and I was just dense the first time around.  There is cleverness in the song, in that he never comes out and says he’s at a graveside, but it really isn’t as subtle as I had thought. In any event, it seems clear now that this is a part of his Missing Mother triptych (along with “Ghost Train” and “Momma’s in the Moon”). It would be trite to comment that losing one’s mother, especially when young, will be a formative experience that naturally influences everything else that comes in life.  It’s no surprise that he’s moved repeatedly to engage with that loss on every album.  Here he tackles head-on the lack of answers to questions he never had the chance to ask.

    I’m coming to see you, tomorrow sometime
    Gonna bring you some roses, gonna tear off the vines
    Gonna talk to the wind that blows through the trees
    Kiss you like always from down on my knees
    Gonna ask you some questions, get no replies
    Wipe all the tears, falling down from my eyes
    ‘Cause the one that I wanted, I never could know

    I think I was misled because I was still in my literal stage of lyric comprehension.  I probably should have remembered that roses grow in bushes, not on vines, and thus the second line is about clearing a tombstone.  The first of many heartbreaks comes with “Gonna ask you some questions and get no replies”.

    Gonna park in the street, gonna open the gate
    Walk to the spot where you always wait
    I’ll be shaking my head like I usually do
    ‘Cause the name and the dates tell me nothing about you

    Here we see why he keeps coming back:  He has the facts of his mother’s life but not the truth of it.  She died when he was very young, before he could know her as a person at all.  One imagines he’s had family stories (although most likely people have been circumspect even in those), but he has nothing to connect them to.  He’s looking for meaning, for a connection that was broken far too soon, and this patch of ground is the only place he has to look for it.

    But I’ll sit in the shadows and let you explain
    All of the sadness and all of the pain
    Did it all seem so hopeless you just had to let go?

    This is odd at first.  How can he wait for her to explain?  She’s dead.  But that’s the point: He’s spent his whole life waiting for understanding that simply isn’t going to come.  There’s also the first hint of something even darker here.  I have no knowledge of the circumstance under which Marc Cohn’s mother died but this line makes me think it might have been suicide.  If not that, then the end of a long drawn-out illness.  People who die suddenly, unexpectedly, usually wouldn’t be described as having “let go”.

    Yeah I’m coming to see you but I really can’t stay
    There’s just a few things I needed to say
    Like why were you hiding so much of yourself?
    Why were you living for somebody else?

    The lyric site I consulted has this as “but I really can’t wait”, but that’s pretty clearly wrong.  First, why would he be eager to visit?  The rest of the song sounds resigned and reluctant.  Second, of course, is the deeper meaning.  His life, unlike hers, moves on.  He can visit her in the past but he can’t linger there.

    It might be putting too much import on a word choice probably motivated by rhyme scheme, but I think it’s significant that he doesn’t ask the questions; he says them.  He isn’t really expecting to understand.  He’s just expressing bemusement and confusion.  He might not even believe there is an answer.

    Well I know that I’ve always been looking for you
    But lately it’s not such a hard thing to do
    ‘Cause it seems like inside every woman I know
    There’s a girl of mysterious sorrow

    A bit of self-analysis for Cohn, here.  He knows that his mother’s death has cast a shadow over everything he’s done, even when he wasn’t conscious of it.  Her death informs his life, all the choices and desires and hopes and fears.  He’s been searching his whole life for the connection he can never make.  And then he’s explicit:  He’s been looking for his mother in all the women he’s known.  He senses there’s something universal to her story, to her plight (which is one reason why I believe it might have been a suicide).  The “mysterious sorrow” is that unbridgeable ineffable something that he can’t quite puzzle out but which he sees reflected around him.

    This song speaks to me on two levels.  First, I recently lost my mother in a car accident.  Although I haven’t visited a grave yet, and though I had the joy of knowing her throughout my life, I can’t hear Cohn’s plaintive loss without feeling an echo resonate in that empty place that has erupted in my heart.  There’s something primal about losing one’s mother, something universal and personal all at once.

    Second, I did lose a parent to suicide, though it was my father and not my mother.  I was closer in age to when Cohn lost his mother, too, right on the edge of teendom and looking for answers and guidance as I grew into a man.  It took me four years to even begin asking the questions, much less finding the answers, and like Cohn, I really can only say them, not genuinely ask them.  There is the same unbridgeable gap between what I feel and whatever my father felt.  Part of me worries I will never understand.  Part of me is terrified that someday I will.

    More on my father and I when this compilation hits “Rest for the Weary”.

     

  • Time to put away childish things

    Update (2013 Feb 4): Noah Smith has an awesome response to the attack on Prof. Krugman, too.

    Paul Krugman today discusses a post on “How to Debate Paul Krugman”, which by all appearances is a serious piece.  The answer can be boiled down to “Ask questions like a child”:

    This seems to me to be a basic divide between liberals and conservatives (or, at least, the conservatives who dominate the right at the moment).  Liberals see the world as data-rich, model-complex, and infinitely varied.  Conservatives want the world to be simple, precept-driven, and authority-based.  They want bumper-sticker policies.

    Each side accuses the other, with some justice, of hubris.  Conservatives say that liberals are so arrogant that they think they can change human nature and upturn thousands of years of received wisdom. But conservatives suffer from their own arrogance:  The delusion that the world is static and simple; that human nature can be comprehended in a not only finite but small set of precepts;  that you can reason from rules-of-thumb that work on small scales to vast interlocking systems; that what is true is always obvious — the delusion that no one, in fact, is smarter than a fifth grader.

    After all, that’s the origin of the wildly misleading “If a family has to balance its budget every month, why doesn’t the government?”  (We’ll leave aside the fact that families in fact do incur debt, and have good reasons to do so.)  The national economy is not a household budget, of course, and to argue that it should be run the same way is silly at best and perhaps insane.  Things that work at the household level are unlikely to extrapolate to an intertwined world economy.  Even if there are broad principles to be deduced, their application will necessarily be complex.

    To get back to my main point:  Although conservatism used to have intellectual giants who correctly confronted liberal theorists with hard questions, those days are apparently over.  (Witness the coup within the Cato Institute and the general decline of the Heritage Foundation; witness the concurrent meteoric ascent of Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Rick Santorum, Herman Cain…) Conservatives no longer want sound answers to important questions; they want comforting answers to simplistic questions.  They have abandoned the “reality-based community” and forsaken the “evidence-based world”.

    This is a slightly more genteel version of the virulent anti-intellectualism that defines the conservative movement of the day.  To the right, when you hear data that confounds your expectations or worse, your desires, the instinct is to reject not only the data but the idea of data.  That’s how you get climate deniers, birthers, poll “unskewers” —  a vast sweep of people whose commitment is to the idea that numbers are meaningless.  These are not isolated outbreaks of irrationality that mar the otherwise-pristine right.  They are surface symptoms of an interlinked pathology, and “ask a child’s questions” is just another expression of it.  You can’t spend forty years reflexively demonizing “intellectuals and elites” without driving them from your party, either literally or by self-selection.

    Why is the “right” way to debate Paul Krugman to repeatedly ask questions a child would ask? Because their philosophy isn’t fit for grown-ups.  It takes maturity to appreciate nuance, to rely on data (even when it says things you don’t like), to reason deeply.  Modern conservatism seems to be inherently infantilizing (which is actually funny, considering their knee-jerk abhorrence of the “nanny state”): Grab with both hands, define “fair” as “what benefits me”, put yourself at the center of the world; rely on totems; fear the monsters under the bed.

    The world is more complex than that.  The principles (and intellect) of a five-year-old are not equal to the challenge of understanding it.  There is a difference between being childlike and being childish — modern conservatism has dived deeply into the latter.

  • Strangers in a Car (30 Days of Marc Cohn — Day 16)

    “Strangers in a Car”
    Marc Cohn

    Now we reach the final song of the “car trilogy” (after “Listening to Levon” and “Silver Thunderbird“).  It certainly wasn’t planned to make automobiles the pivot point of my 30-day exploration of Marc Cohn, but it’s worked out nicely.  “Listening to Levon” is Cohn thinking back about a relationship about to end in a car; “Strangers in a Car” might well be that same encounter about to happen.

    There’s a stranger in a car
    Driving down your street
    Acts like he knows who you are
    Slaps his hand on the empty seat and says
    “Are you gonna get in
    Or are you gonna stay out?”
    Just a stranger in a car
    Might be the one they told you about

    This is an unusual second-person song.  We assume that this is not literal truth — that the narrator isn’t watching someone get into a car with someone they don’t know.  The strangers are more metaphorical, of the “Does anybody ever really know anybody?” type.  The driver acts like he knows who she is — he should know.  Indeed, the action is casually intimate:  A car pulls up, a boyfriend gestures for his girlfriend to hop in.  The question is so wonderfully ambiguous.  It could be a friendly welcome, but it seems to contain just the hint of menace.  The driver is forcing her hand, leading her to a choice she might not be ready to make — elsewise, why would she have been hesitating once the car pulls up?  It’s probably no coincidence that, whenever I find myself humming this song, I think the line is “Might be the one they warned you about” (which carries a darker connotation than the actual line).

    Well you never were one for cautiousness
    You open the door
    He gives you a tender kiss
    And you can’t even hear them no more

    I’ve always heard the line as “Can’t even hear him no more”, though admittedly it’s hard to pick out from the vocals. Although the lyric as found online links up to the “All the voices of choices”, I prefer my (mis)-hearing. It underlines the gulf between the driver and his passenger. It’s an almost-cliche moment in a dying relationship, when both parties are going through the motions but aren’t really invested.

    All the voices of choices
    Now only one road remains
    And strangers in a car
    Two hearts
    Two souls
    Tonight
    Two lanes

    I absolutely love this sequence.  Things escalate so smoothy and so naturally.  Now it’s not just the driver whom she can’t hear.  She’s lost the voices of her inner angels, the whisper telling her it can be better, or at least, what it all means.  All her options have come down to the choice she’s made before getting into the car, and now she’s just along for the ride.  The repetition of twoness divides them and makes them separate.  And of course, on a two-lane road, all traffic is headed in different directions.

    You don’t know where you’re goin’
    You don’t know what you’re doin’
    Hell it might be the highway to heaven
    And it might be the road to ruin

    The theme of dichotomy remains, all the futures laid out bare, but the fact of choice mocked:  She doesn’t know where she’s headed, she doesn’t know what she’ll find there.  All she has left is the ride, and when it ends, much ends with it.

    But this is a song
    For strangers in a car
    Baby maybe that’s all
    We really are

    This has always struck me as full of the odd hope and wistful resignation that runs through many of Cohn’s songs.  It’s as if he acknowledges the ending on the way but he absolves her of it.  The song isn’t about the destination; it’s about the ride.

  • Silver Thunderbird (30 Days of Marc Cohn — Day 15)

    “Silver Thunderbird”
    Marc Cohn

    It really wasn’t planned that this song follow “Listening to Levon” on my countdown, but it’s nice that it worked out that way.

    In “Listening to Levon”, Cohn tells us he was sitting in his dad’s “blue Valiant” but this is the song he really associates with his father.  It’s a very heart-felt piece of nostalgia and, like many of Cohn’s songs, gentle while remaining pop-ish.  Whenever I hear it, I’m struck by how thoroughly successfully it evokes the memory of being a child.  My dad didn’t own a silver Thunderbird (or a blue Valiant — the only car my dad ever purchased new was a 1983.5 Chrysler Reliant K car, notorious as one of the worst cars to ever roll out of Detroit).  But I totally get the vibe Cohn is sending in this song.  There’s pride and wonder and just a hint of loss.

    Great big fins and painted steel
    Man it looked just like the Batmobile
    With my old man behind the wheel

    I just love the line about the Batmobile (even though, of course, the Batmobile is black and not silver  :-P).  That’s exactly what a six-year-old might say describing his dad’s new car. And the pride that radiates through — “with my old man behind the wheel” — is palpable.

    He got up every morning
    While i was still asleep
    But I remember the sound of him shuffling around
    Then right before the crack of dawn
    I heard him turn the motor on
    But when I got up they were gone

    Here too Cohn brilliantly evokes childhood.  Who hasn’t heard their father (or mother) rooting around the house in the early hours, before any children are supposed to be awake?  Who can’t read in there a safe feeling of being provided for?  I can definitely empathize with the thought of jumping out of bed to say goodbye without realizing that, if the motor’s on, he’ll have pulled out long before I get there.  Here is the moment of loss that often informs Cohn’s songs — not teary mourning, but a soft regret.

    I suppose this songs speaks to me because of how and when I lost my father.  By the time the song came out he’d been gone eight years; there would be no chance to sit and reminisce with him.  My memories of my dad are wrapped in the same misty nostalgia that informs this song.  What remain are glimpses and impressions of the man he was, but as a kid I didn’t have the context to weave them into a real understanding of him.  Cohn’s sparse tribute to his dad honors that incompleteness and captures the important parts anyway.  To a young boy, his father is more than a person; he’s the living concept, the very definition, of what it is to be a man.

    Don’t gimme no Buick
    Son you must take my word
    If there’s a God in heaven
    He’s got a Silver Thunderbird

    You can keep your Eldorados
    And the foreign car’s absurd
    Me I want to go down
    In a Silver Thunderbird

     

  • Listening to Levon (30 Days of Marc Cohn — Day 14)

    “Listening to Levon”
    Join the Parade

    This was the pop song leading off Join the Parade, the first studio album from Marc Cohn in a long time — and the first after he was shot.  This gave it some emotional oomph beyond the song. It’s a warm nostalgic tune which probably helped inspire (or at least reinforce) his desire to visit the songs of his youth in Listening Booth: 1970.

    There are some flourishes I like.  The use of detail — his dad’s “blue Valiant”, his insistent remembrance of Mary’s hair and skin — give it verisimilitude.  The listener totally believes this is Marc remembering and sharing this fond memory of his youth.  Except, we learn later that key details are just made up:

    I changed her name
    To protect the innocent
    I might have even lied
    About the car

    That has got to be one of my favorite lines in music.  It’s so playful and mischievous.  You can just see him grinning a wide smirk at us as he admits up-front the song is a sham.  I even love that he “might” have lied about the car.  We’ll never know.  That line struck me when I first heard it because I had been spending the early part of the song thinking — I kid you not — “I thought his dad had a silver Thunderbird”.  So part of me thought “Ah, that explains it” (as if a person only ever owns one car in his life).

    As is typical, there’s more going on here than just reminiscence.  This month-long exploration of Marc Cohn’s songs has made me aware how very many of them involve relationships past their sell-by dates.  Cohn obviously didn’t stay with “Mary” — he doesn’t even know where she is now.  This courtship ended, and one gets the impression not too long after the rainy night in the car.  Apparently Mary felt his lack of attention.  Now, from the vantage of many years, he’s looking back and feeling regret — not that the relationship went no further, but that the ending of it hurt her, that he hurt her, and probably through accidental indifference more than fiery explosion.

    The whole song is sweet but bittersweet.  Cohn is more than distracted — he’s “lost”.  His willingness to own up to his oblivious mistreatment of Mary (even if it has to be done via a broadcast with little hope of reaching its intended recipient) might be evidence that he has finally found himself, or at least made peace with what he did in his youth.  He wryly notes the best possible revenge Mary could have on a singer-songwriter:

    It serves me right if
    You can’t even hear me singing
    If you tuned me out a long time ago
    And it serves me right
    If you already changed the station
    And you’re listening right now to that old boy on the radio

    One hopes that, maybe, Mary did hear the song, and forgave him at last.

  • Walk Through the World (30 Days of Marc Cohn — Day 13)

    “Walk Through the World”
    The Rainy Season

    This song holds a special place for me.  Marc Cohn was a transformative album for me — heck, I even considered attending grad school at the University of Tennessee just so I could be “Walking in Memphis” — and so I looked forward with eager anticipation to Cohn’s sophomore effort.  This was both the first single and the first track on the album, so it burst upon me as the first new Marc Cohn I’d heard since the tremendous debut.  It had a high bar to clear.

    The Rainy Season suffered in public estimation from being the followup to an album that won its artist the Best New Artist Grammy.  It had a different style and a different vibe from Marc Cohn, and it didn’t capture the public in the same way.  That’s a shame, because it’s really a strong album with many different nooks and crannies in which to find beauty.

    “Walk Through the World” seems like an upbeat and cheery opener to the album, and maybe the dissonance this causes with the later, darker tunes helped undermine the popular appeal.  In any event, “Walk…” is catchy enough.  It’s a little unusual for Marc Cohn, in that it appears to be about a relationship that’s actually working.  There’s all the pop and hum of a couple in the middle stages of love, past the awkwardness, not yet pulling away.  There’s longing

    I’m sitting in a lonely room without a view,
    Wishing I was there with you instead

    driven by a physical separation

    I’m writing you this letter from some old hotel
    I can feel the distance between us
    From the Spanish Steps to the Liberty Bell
    I know the angels have seen us…

    But there isn’t yet the wistfulness of, say, “If I Were An Angel” or “Shadow“.

    More interestingly, if The Rainy Season is a concept album (and I don’t think it is, but roll with me here), then this is the prologue/overture.  And that’s very intriguing indeed.  For while the song is peppy and the vibe hopeful, there are some dark clouds gathering.  First, although the singer sounds full of love, he has to implore his lover to walk through the world with him; they’re not doing it already.  There’s physical separation that, all too easily, could become emotional distance.    He’s writing not just from “some old hotel” room, but from a “lonely” one “without a view” — maybe the same one where things will fall apart in “Paper Walls”.  He’s wandered all over the world — from Rome (the Spanish Steps) to Philadelphia (the Liberty Bell) — but she’s stuck in New York (where I choose to believe Seventh Avenue lies).  Perhaps most importantly, she is just “hanging by a thread” — that phrase never means anything good.

    Even though he’s in a room without a view, he’s “staring out across the rooftops”.  This means the room has a literal window but metaphorically he’s having trouble seeing — perhaps trouble seeing a future together.  Instead he sees the “writing on the wall” (another phrase whose common usage is ominous). And in what may the most brillant connection, he “hears a little bit of thunder” — a rolling tumult that presages the coming Rainy Season.

    In the end, like many another pop-sounding song (say, “Every Breath You Take” or “Luca”), things are much darker underneath the brightly-speckled breezy chords.  “Walk Through the World” is less a paean to a flowering love than it is a self-consciously desperate attempt to will one into being.  Things are slipping away, and he doesn’t know what more to do but to earnestly exhort his lover to take the next step with him… knowing it likely won’t be enough.

  • Review: Tron Uprising (Soundtrack)

    Tron: Uprising (soundtrack)
    Joseph Trapanese

    This is not Daft Punk.  This is not Daft Punk’s soundtrack for Tron: Legacy.

    Neither of those are bad things.  I really enjoyed Daft Punk’s Tron: Legacy soundtrack and thought it evoked the movie’s themes flawlessly.  But Uprising is its own show and should have its own music.  The needle to be threaded was very tight: The show’s sound had to be compatible with the movie but distinct in its own right.  Joseph Trapanese, who collaborated with Daft Punk on the movie soundtrack, does a great job resolving that tension.

    It doesn’t take long in the first episode to notice that the music was going to stand on its own.  “Beck’s Theme” opens sounding thematically similar to “The Grid”, with synthesized strings that sound almost like wind chimes and then a driving beat underlying a motion motif.  Trapanese’s music is a bit faster, a bit more insistent, which it has to be if only because the format is so much more compressed — 22 minutes versus 127.  The Beck/Tron leitmotif is a bit more open-ended than the Legacy one, a little less resolved.

    There is a progression throughout the first (only?) season of Tron: Uprising.  The music begins as distinct from Daft Punk, almost aggressively so, but hints and flavors begin to bleed through.  As Trapanese can be more confident that he’s carved out his own musical landscape, he can afford to allow more and more elements of the Legacy soundtrack to come through.  This makes a sort of meta-sense, as Uprising is a prequel to Legacy — as the season progresses, we are moving closer in time to the film (even if it’s not really clear how they’ll get from here to there).

    Nearly a third of this album is made up of music from one episode, “Scars”.  In a Joss Whedon show, “Scars” would be the so-called WHAM episode … the one when everything changes and what you thought you knew is no longer true and never has been.  A two-parter, “Scars” revisits scenes from the flashback in Legacy:  It fills in details and adds new texture to Clu 2’s rebellion and shades Tron in a bit more fully.  In fact, this episode gives Tron more screen time and depth than the entire Legacy movie.  It’s also a masterful use of the surprise reveal, when we learn that what Legacy implied — that Tron is defeated by Clu 2 and then becomes Rinzler — does not happen immediately.  We even get a cameo of Kevin Flynn (who only appears one other time in the season).

    Fitting for such an important episode, the middle tracks comprise an epic “Scars Suite”.  It has all the major themes and a grand sensibility to it.  There are a lot of issues wrapped up in the story — trust and betrayal, fall and redemption — and the music is comparably complex.  It is really here, in the “Scars Suite”, that Trapanese rises to the level of his material.  In other places the soundtrack can veer from the grandiose to the merely bombastic, but the suite is sparse and deep.

    Overall, it’s a very satisfying soundtrack to a very ambitious series.  Trapanese does a masterful job connecting to what came before without being overshadowed by it.  One of the reasons to wish fervently that Disney sees the light and renews Tron: Uprising is that we might see further development of the musical themes.