Category: Pop

Album Reviews 25/08/14

Friendly Rich, The Birds of Marsville (We Are Busy Bodies Records)

It’s not often that I mumble “Oh shut up” at a record, but the spoken introduction to the first of these two 18-minute experimental-cabaret tracks had me doing that. Once the babbling (mostly chatter about how he’s — Rich Marsella — chasing a Ph.D. in musicology and how bizarre his music is, etc.) finally stops, the tuneage reveals itself to be something the steampunk crowd will go wild over. I’ll make it even easier: This guy is the Captain Beefheart of steampunk, and I won’t be surprised in the least if I happen upon him someday at some nerd convention and get mad at myself for not remembering how on Earth I first heard of him. Contents: Calliope (you know, the mechanical organ stuff you hear on a merry-go-round), tempos changing with no rhyme or reason, Hammer horror frightwig soundtracking, spastic Bride Of Chucky ballistics, bell-and-whistle stuff out of Monty Python, you get the idea. He’s gathering a following, fair warning. B

Still in Love, Recovery Language (Church Road Records)

Always cracks me up to be presented with an informational one-sheet from a hardcore punk or extreme-metal band, and when it gets to the stuff about the musical messaging, the verbiage suddenly starts looking like an ad for a yoga retreat. In this case, I’m informed their new album “delves into themes of personal struggle, resilience, and emotional catharsis, offering a sonic journey through the complexities of the human experience,” all of which is, I suppose, more elegant than just writing “GRAHHH” in 52-point font, which would be more succinct. Either way, yes, more of this please. The band is something of a supergroup, composed of members of the biggest (for want of a better word) hardcore bands stomping stages and breaking stuff in the U.K., and boy are they out to break stuff. Two-minute songs that aren’t speed races, no gimmicky screamo yowling, no nonsense, and the guitar sound is absolutely filthy. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Wuh-oh, frantic fam, the new albums of Aug. 15 are afoot (and I assume that’s what most of them are going to smell like when I go check them out in a minute), but in the meantime I’m sure that parenthetical segue will only serve further to convince my small platoon of haters (they’re out there, folks, and I mean that in more ways than one) that the only music I actually like is made by noise bands from Boise, Idaho. As someone once said to me, “Just what the world needs, a music column written by someone who hates music,” after I’d mentioned that I thought AC/DC has been hilariously overrated since Day 1 (obviously your mileage may vary, but I don’t really want to know about it), but either way, that’s not part of my actual mission statement. I don’t view this column as a platform for me to change people’s minds but instead to find and promote the occasional artist/band I find worthy or interesting. This isn’t a Nylon column written by a 23-year-old intern who lives for getting free CDs from the big record companies; if I think something’s dumb, I can say so, and in the meantime, sending me a Facebook message in ALL CAPS that’s basically the music-related equivalent of “Maybe if you weren’t such a poopyhead you’d appreciate the exotic, tantalizing flavor of a freshly made peanut butter and guacamole sandwich” isn’t going to change my mind any more than my strapping you into a chair and forcing you to listen to Kiss albums is going to make the lights come on in your attic. OK, with that completely unaccomplished, let’s turn our attention to this week’s slate of decent things and peanut butter and guacamole sandwiches, and there’s tons of ’em, so let’s start with the big one, Maroon 5’s Love Is Like! Ha ha, I totally changed my mind about Maroon 5 and love them now ever since the other week, when they put that AI CEO guy in an old pickle by shining the Kiss Cam on him and his “Chief People Officer” lady friend while their spouses waited for them to finish “working late,” wasn’t that the stupidest — oops, wait, someone in my earphone just informed me that that wasn’t Maroon 5, it was Coldplay, my bad, doesn’t Andy Grammer sing for both those bands anyway, nothing to see here! Whatever, the new single, “Priceless” is a bootylicious yacht-hip-hop tune featuring Lisa Manoban from the South Korean girl group Blackpink, who does a fantastic job sounding exactly like Kesha, but wait, there’s more, OK actually there isn’t.

• Recently divorced nepo baby Chance the Rapper shows he can still rhyme in half-speed-reggae-triplet-rhythm just like everyone else on the planet on the title track from his second full-length album, Star Line! His fans are hoping this LP is a lot better than The Big Day; the tune is pretty edgy but there are so many people who can’t wait to diss the album he probably should have just had Lil Wayne guest-rap on the whole thing or at least just stuck to mixtapes.

• I’ve gushed over bluegrass/Americana artist Molly Tuttle before; she’s won awards for her “clawhammer” guitar-picking style and for being awesome in general. However, the single “That’s Gonna Leave a Mark” from her new album So Long Little Miss Sunshine is pretty basic, sounding like a cross between Amy Grant and Reba McEntire, but if that sounds great to you, well, peanut butter and guacamole it is, you do you.

• Ending this week’s exercise on a positive note, synthpop/trip-hop singer Alison Goldfrapp releases her second LP as a solo artist, Flux! “Reverberotic” is an electropop single in the tradition of Britney Spears and ’90s-era Madonna, nothing too innovative but it’s, you know, nice.

UnWorld, by Jayson Greene

UnWorld, by Jayson Greene (Knopf, 224 pages)

If you could upload your memories and experiences into the cloud, would you? There’s an obvious benefit — having a backup copy of your brain when the original starts to fail. But what if the alternate “you” was just different enough to develop its own will, different from your own, and wants to strike out on its own?

These questions are explored in Jayson Greene’s UnWorld, set in a not-so-unimaginable future where human beings are still the dominant life form on Earth but increasingly surrounded by sentient technology. This world is full of “uploads” — beings composed of the uploaded memories of the person they came from, the person to whom they are “tethered.” This has created an ethical quagmire for society — what happens when an upload wants to be emancipated from its tether? Should uploads qualify for personhood and be granted rights?

In the midst of all this, the everyday experiences of human life go on, with adjustments: self-driving cars are the norm, household chores are obsolete, the elderly in medical settings are cared for by robots. And despite all the technological advances, human beings are still dying.

Anna and Rick are grieving, having lost their only child, a teenage son, in what was either an accident or suicide — no one can say for sure. Neither is coping well; Anna, in particular, is bewildered by how quickly people expect life to resume its normal shape. “My pain was meant to crack the earth,” she thinks, while trying to get through an evening of socialization. “And here I was, not even half a year later, one of grief’s private citizens again. Were people’s memories really so short? Or was it just that you could never stop performing — falling to your knees, rending your garments — if you wanted to keep their attention?”

Compounding her anguish, Anna’s upload, who has been with her for eight years, has suddenly requested emancipation. The upload was a gift from Anna’s husband, and although she was unsure about it at first, she came to realize that the relationship was “the first and only time I’ve ever enjoyed my own company.”

“When we synced, my memories suddenly stood up straight, marched in line. Somehow, in that moment when I transferred the millions of little impressions I had gathered through the chip in my ear, up to her, and that tunnel feeling was established, the one that provided the link between her and me, I felt like my memories were being polished, pored over. Each one became clear, clean, interesting.”

Anna is distraught about the loss of her alternative self, whom she relied on for companionship; uploads, in addition to being storage, also serve as de facto friends. But she consents, and the upload disappears into the world, taking on the name Aviva.

The story unfolds through four points of view. After Anna, we meet a professor named Cathy who specializes in the “transhumanities” and upload personhood, and who has ingested a biomechanical chip in hopes of communicating with an emancipated upload. “It didn’t look too much like freedom to me, this new state of being: conventional uploads could vote on behalf of their human counterparts, but they couldn’t vote once they left their tethers…. We didn’t so much set them free as snip their tethers and let them float free like balloons loosed into tree branches.” Some scholars were talking about “fleshism” — what they considered the false idea that beings only had worth if they were encased in human flesh.

After Cathy, the first-person narrative flows seamlessly to Samantha, who had been the best friend of Anna’s son. Samantha and Alex were children when they’d met, two years apart in age and so close emotionally that “they rhymed.” The two were making a horror movie together when Alex died. Now Samantha keeps going back to the cliff where Alex either fell or jumped to his death, trying to figure out what happened, while she processes her own loneliness and grief.

Finally, we get to the perspective of Anna’s upload, Aviva, who, despite not having a physical body, feels pain when she disconnects from her human, not having neurochemicals that can rush in to numb it. Pain, she says, is “blinding, indescribable. It runs in all directions. I am made of this pain, I realize, and so is everything. … God made borders; he made solitude and alienation and loneliness and all the small cherished lockets we stuff our feelings inside just so we can hear something rattle when we shake them.”

It is in Aviva’s musings that Greene’s writing and imagination really take off. Thinking she might be dying, Aviva says, “I don’t even get to watch my life flash before me. What I get is a spilled bag of someone else’s memories, which float around me now, glinting in the cold way of all stolen things.”

All these beings are intertwined in ways we will not fully understand until the story’s end, when their connection, and the truth of Alex’s death, becomes fully realized. Along the way, Greene invites the reader to consider the future that might lie ahead of us, perhaps not the exact world that he has imagined here, but something similar. It hints at where we could go wrong, like when one of the personhood scholars writes a paper suggesting uploads would need to “create their own language, possibly out of range of human understanding, to communicate the privacy of their subjective experience.”

That’s exactly what we need, right? A world full of invisible sentient beings communicating with each other in a language that humans can’t understand?

Greene, whose first book, Once More We Saw Stars, was a memoir about the loss of a child, knows first-hand the terrible landscape of grief he navigates here, and his writing is compelling, even though at times, the voice that comes through these four female characters feels a bit masculine.

And some of the technology that is presented here as commonplace takes a suspension of disbelief for sure — but then again, so does most of the Mission: Impossible series. UnWorld is a cautionary tale in an age of artificial intelligence, while also a reminder of what it means to be human in that world. B+

Featured Photo: UnWorld by Jayson Greene.

Album Reviews 25/08/07

Tulip Tiger, Da Meanz of Production (self-released)

This collection of (purportedly) throwback Aughts-era electronica comes to us from Los Angeles sound-artisan Augustus Watkins, who attempts here to combine big-beat (Chemical Brothers/Prodigy etc.) explosiveness with “genre-shaping soundtracks from films like The Matrix and Blade.“ Or so he’s said, but once you get past that mission statement, what this experiment proves is that the latter vibe tends to cancel out the former, which some might find appealing. I could be wrong of course (that did happen once in 1993 or 1995, I forget), especially given that these beats aren’t block-rockin’ (insert snobby production-nerd comment here); I’m saying that it’s probably better suited to movie soundtracking than dance floors. And that’s OK if you really liked the soundtrack to 1987’s The Running Man (there’s plenty of cheese afoot here, so if I were to concur with Watkins’ info-sheet and tell you people it’s 1998-reminiscent that’d be a disservice). No, my impression is that it’s variations on the first Terminator’s soundtrack with some Meat Beat Manifesto stuff in there. The producers of Stranger Things would probably love it. B

Maia Sharp, Tomboy (self-released)

This singer-songwriter, the daughter of Grammy-winning country songwriter Randy Sharp, is, like her dad, one of those largely unsung folks who’ve racked up a pretty near endless list of behind-the-scenes credits over the decades, having collaborated with such artists as Cher, Carole King and, interestingly enough under the circumstances, fellow note-Tetris-ing wonk Bonnie Raitt, who’s one of her influences. The title track of this one is quite ’70s-radio in its way, with some smooth intricate vocal work you’d rather listen to while relaxing than try singing along with, which is to say that it comes off as slightly academic but in a very colorful, deeply unworried manner, a la late-career Otis Redding and that sort of thing. “Counterintuation” is a clever one that’ll appeal to Norah Jones fans, and in fact there are hints of a Jones tune in there that I can’t think of at the moment, not that that detracts from the richness of the songwriting. The record ends on a hauntingly pretty note, a Joni Mitchell-ized version of U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” A

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Oh, look, it’s the pile of new albums coming out on Aug. 8, isn’t that awesome, rock fans? We’ll get right into this week’s morass with a look at the new album from white-rapper-turned-Dashboard-Confessional-wannabe Machine Gun Kelly, he of someone-with-way-too-many-tattoos and unironically-being-from-Cleveland fame. No seriously, this fellow — whose real name is Colson Baker, how gangsta can you get — was all up in the hip-and-hop for his first few mixtapes; why, he even got into a war of diss tracks with his fellow white rapper, Eminem, a fact of which you’re well aware if you’re a fan of mindless displays-of-media-manipulating opportunism corporate hip-hop. That tedious little fake beef put our boy Colson on the map, but then one day someone in his totally gangsta hip-hop crew fell asleep while he was supposed to be keeping people out of the studio, and Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker snuck in and started randomly producing Colson’s Tickets To My Downfall album, and then Halsey let herself in to “help out” and so did emo-rapper Trippie Redd, and suddenly Colson was no longer just a bargain-bin Eminem but some guy with an idiotic amount of tattoos who couldn’t decide whether he wanted to be Weezer or the Killers. At that point, Transformers actress and terminally insecure person Megan Fox entered the picture: Hypnotized by Colson’s impressive number of tattoos and the fact that Colson’s career was launched by none other than insane sex felon Puff Daddy, Megan unwisely stretched their first date into a four-year relationship. Are you with me so far I don’t care either, so here we are with the new MGK album, Lost Americana, a record that I can’t hate because it has an awesome single: “Vampire Diaries” (no, I’m serious, I really like it, what is even happening in this world)! The tune is like what would happen if Amos Lee got married to Good Charlotte and didn’t do anything stupid. The video is chef’s-kiss too, guys.

• Ack, speaking of famous Maryland-born emo-cretins Good Charlotte, they’ve also got a new one coming out this Friday, Motel Du Cap! Now, it must be said that unlike Machine Gun Kelly, these guys are content to stick to their original genre, and their devotion to their craft has resulted in yet another classic emo song, “Rejects.” I’d say it’s their best ever, except for the little problem with its being nothing more than a cleverly disguised ripoff of Weezer’s “Beverly Hills,” but that being said, it might nevertheless impress the last few toucan-god-worshipping Amazonian tribespeople who somehow still haven’t ever heard that song before, so by all means, a heartfelt “godspeed” to Good Charlotte from everyone at this newspaper!

• Oh, gross, I’ve never heard a song by The Black Keys that didn’t make me not want to be listening to it, but such is my lot, checking out their new one, No Rain, No Flowers! The synth lines are really thick in the aimless title track, which will, I hope, lead to many music journos following my lead and finally writing those guys off as a cheap imitation of MGMT once and for all, I mean can we talk for Pete’s sake?

• We’ll wrap things up with New York City-based chiptune-rock band Anamanaguchi, whose new one, Anyway, doesn’t sound very chiptune-ish if by “chiptune-ish” you mean music that sounds like it was made using 8-bit electronic devices, as opposed to basic unlistenable indie rock. Unfortunately, the new single “Rage” sounds like Pavement with a huge budget and one of those big-name producer dudes. Aaaand we’re barfing.

Cloud Warriors, by Thomas E. Weber

In 2011, one of the most destructive tornadoes to hit the U.S. touched down at 5:34 p.m. in Joplin, Missouri. Although the area had been under a tornado watch for more than four hours and tornado warnings were issued shortly after 5 o’clock, 161 people died and more than a thousand were injured.

In the aftermath, researchers wanted to learn not only all they could about the tornado’s formation, but also why, with ample warning time, there were so many casualties. Among others, they interviewed a man who “was aware that storms were likely, but wanted to get something to eat,” writes Thomas E. Weber in Cloud Warriors, his examination of the past and future of weather forecasting. The man — who was turned away by one restaurant but found another that let him in and served him with the storm bearing down — was lucky to survive despite his “optimism bias,” the idea that when bad things happen, they likely won’t happen to you.

Optimism bias is but one of the challenges of the people who try to keep us safe from tornados, hurricanes, flooding and other catastrophic weather. Weber calls them “cloud warriors,” people whose job is ostensibly to forecast the weather but who have a larger purpose: keeping us safe from Mother Nature.

“Weather predictions are impressively good, so much so that their accuracy may surprise you.” Weber writes, noting that today’s five-day forecasts are as good as a 24-hour forecast was in 1980. While everything from artificial intelligence to the weather balloons that the National Weather Service launches every day (in every state) will continue to improve forecasting, forecasts have limited value if people don’t heed them, which is why Weber, a journalist, wants everyone to improve their weather literacy, especially about four types of weather-related threats: tornadoes, wildfires, extreme heat and hurricanes.

For the tornado chapter, he travels to Norman, Oklahoma, home to the National Weather Center, which, in addition to being populated by very intense and learned meteorologists, pays homage to the Twister movies with its Flying Cow Cafe. Like the stars of those films, Weber goes storm chasing in a tricked-out truck but doesn’t encounter anything more exciting than an ominous wall cloud (a sign of potential tornado formation) and some aggressive hail. (We do learn, however, that the Twister movies didn’t exaggerate the storm chasers on the plains of Oklahoma — a dozen or so companies will take tourists’ money in exchange for putting them in harm’s way.)

Fire isn’t weather, but is driven by wind, which is why Weber travels to an emergency operations center in San Diego to look into how meteorologists and firefighters try to keep people safe from fires that burn at up to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit and spread at six miles an hour. In this chapter, he examines the Camp Fire, which destroyed much of Paradise, California, in 2018, explains the infamous Santa Ana winds, and delves into why so much of the country is indifferent to the danger of wildlife. He quotes one meteorologist who says: “They don’t comprehend what happens when you have low humidity and wind on a fire. Or when you have a drought or a normal dry summer, what that does to vegetation. They know what it’s like to be thirsty, but they don’t understand what it’s like for vegetation to be thirsty.”

Those of us who pay even fleeting attention to meteorologists like Dave Epstein on social media are familiar with the “European models” that compete with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Strangely enough, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts is best-known for its hurricane models, even though hurricanes are rare in the 23 nations and 12 “cooperating states” that it serves.

To learn more, Weber takes us to the town of Reading, England, where the ECMWF’s supercomputers sit; they can, he tells us, conduct more than four quadrillion calculations per second. And yet, “They’re just rows of big metal cabinets; they look like a bunch of refrigerators placed side by side.”

While many of the questions that Webster poses are really interesting — for example, how do you get emergency weather notifications to the Amish, who shun technology — the book often lacks electricity, it moves sluggishly, bogged down by an unfortunate impulse embedded in every journalist’s DNA: to include every last piece of information you gathered in telling a story.

Therefore, when we learn about why accurate weather forecasting is so important to the people launching delivery drones at Walmart, we are tempted to put the book down and go to the Walmart website and try to order by drone, which is much more exciting. In other words, Weber tells us interesting stories, but not always in the most interesting way. This is not necessarily his fault. He is, after all, interviewing the geekiest of weather geeks and is one himself, being one of your fellow Americans who have their own personal weather station installed in their backyard so they can, among other things, get a phone notification if it starts to rain.

Me, I’m still astounded that the weather app on my phone can announce that it will start to rain in 14 minutes and will rain for 24 minutes, and pretty much be right. Weber tries to explain how that happens, and frankly I still don’t fully get it after 200-plus pages. I’m not fully convinced that I need to be as weather literate as Weber and his sources, so long as my iPhone is. Cloud Warriors, though well-reported, may be a deeper dive into the subject than most readers want or need. B

Featured Photo: Cloud Warriors, by Thomas E. Weber

Album Reviews 25/07/31

Tchotchke, Playin’ Dumb (self-released)

So I said to the public relations lady, three cute 23-year-old babes from New York City on a retro 1960s-pop tip, where do I sign, and 10 minutes later there it was, in my emailbox, this, their second album. Their 2022 debut full-length was a little scattershot, a mishmash of everything from the aforementioned era, from beehive-hairdo girl-group to random Dolly Parton/Harry Nilsson-influenced radio stuff, all with too much cheese in its sound, but this is a little more serious, or at least as serious as you’d want from a pop-vocal-oriented trio who think life must have been a lot more fun when Nixon was president (probably was, given that it was merely the beginning of the end for America). This is more 1970s-centric, beginning with “The Game,” in which the group drapes intricate ELO-like harmonies over Randy Newman-style piano-pop lines, and then it’s “Did You Hear,” a listenable but too flatly produced glam-influenced thingamajig that will make your grandparents think of Big Star and Sweet. “Kisses” is twee-ish proto-pop in the manner of Ben Kweller meets Versus, and so on; altogether the effect is like Au Revoir Simone with three singers who don’t suck. Not to be an annoying production-snob, but someone text me when they grow up, stop obsessing over filling the Brooklyn nightclubs and get an actual studio budget, that’d be great. C+

John Yao, Points In Time (See Tao Recordings)

Sorry that I’m a little lost here; I’m informed I gave this elite New York-based trombonist/bandleader a big thumbs-up in your Hippo for one of his recent albums but I can’t find it for the life of me. That’s OK, though, because he and his 17-count-’em accomplices are all about big-band jazz, a genre that’s always guaranteed a glowing review on this page unless I sense the slightest bit of incompetence, which I don’t at all here. This full-length reflects upon what Yao’s learned and experienced (and stars many of the musicians he’s accumulated) over the 20 years that’ve passed since his first big-band album, Flip-Flop, which All About Jazz pronounced, in their inimitable obfuscatory writing style, as heralding the arrival of “a strong compositional voice and effective band-leader able to use his 17-piece band to paint across a wide spectrum and infuse his complex…” blah blah blah (someone needs to introduce AAJ’s writer-nerds to the word “awesome”). So yeah, this is awesome, from the pensive “Early Morning Walk” to the irrepressibly upbeat “Song for Nolan”; if you like big band (and you should, I tell you), you’ll definitely want this. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• This week’s “new CD release Friday” falls on Aug. 1, summer’s just about over and it happened so fast, why did we even bother, and now for a mindless tangent in which I congratulate myself for reviewing Black Sabbath’s second-worst album, Never Say Die, the other week, given that the band’s been a trending internet topic for what feels like 40 years now, between the farewell concert and then the tragic passing of the band’s singer Ozzy Osbourne just a couple-three weeks later. I feel like I deserve a gold sticker for indulging in current-month’s hottest pop-culture-trending thing, which, as you know, I don’t usually do, but in this case, Sabbath was my favorite band during my boyhood days. I’ll have you know I even commented on social media about his passing, which I also never do, considering that everyone does that so I feel like I can’t; as a wise person once said (and I’m editing this quote for consumption by a more general audience), “Every time a celebrity dies, Twitter turns into 5,000 people trying to flush the same gum wrapper down the same toilet.” I mean, it’s not illegal to be the zillionth person to post “thoughts and prayers” about someone they never met even if it should be, but what amazed me was how all sorts of people leapt out of the woodwork five seconds after Ozzy’s death announcement to condemn him for his politics (seriously, go look). I sympathize with his critics for what they were trying to illuminate, but honestly, one would think we’ve got more important fish to fry these days than trying to posthumously cancel a fellow who once bit into an actual fruit bat for the entertainment value of it, but you do you, and meanwhile I digress, because we need to talk about The Starrr Of The Queen Of Life, the second album from Nigerian-Canadian techno artist Debby Friday, who in 2023 won Canada’s Polaris Music Prize, which comes with a lump-sum cash award of $50,000, did you even know what a Polaris Music Prize is, I didn’t either! Arcade Fire won it in 2011, which is something of an unsettling omen for Ms. Friday, but regardless, let me try to get my train back onto its rickety tracks by listening to this album’s new single, “Lipsync.” Hm, I don’t mind it, it’s like a cross between Goldfrapp and some underground goth band — yikes, the more I listen to it, the more it sounds like Birthday Massacre covering a Kylie Minogue song. It’s pretty boring, but the overall feel is okey-dokey.

• Reneé Rapp is an actress-singer who played the part of Regina George in the 2019 Broadway musical version of Mean Girls and starred in last year’s film adaptation of same, all of which is news to me, why didn’t any of you people inform me about all that nonsense? Bite Me, her second album, spotlights its title track, a drank-addled sleaze-a-thon whose video features scantily clad models having a pillow fight, in case you’ve never seen anything remotely like that in all the years you’ve been online.

• The Armed is an experimental hardcore punk band whose members are anonymous, but they’ve had so many famous guests on their albums (people who are well aware of who they are, obviously) that they might as well drop that whole “anonymous” shtick, don’t you think? The band’s new LP, The Future Is Here and Everything Needs to Be Destroyed, includes the single “Well Made Play,” a messy mess of a tune that combines black metal and ad-lib noise just to be weird.

• Lastly it’s Australian hip-hop miscreants Hilltop Hoods with their new album, Fall from the Light. Focus track “Don’t Happy Be Worry” is a fun-enough tune.

Class Clown, by Dave Barry

Class Clown, by Dave Barry (Simon & Schuster, 244 pages)

One thing that has been lost with the decline of newspapers is the syndicated humor columnist that most everyone knew of and read. For three decades, one of those was Dave Barry, whose home base was, and still is, the Miami Herald.

For many people, reading Barry’s “year in review” columns was a December tradition. He’s still writing them; it’s just that with paywalls and such, they seem harder to come by. (“Some readers look forward to it; others view it as an opportunity to inform me that I used to be funnier,” Barry says of the column now.)

At 77, somehow still possessed of a twenty-something head of hair, Barry has written a memoir to add to his oeuvre, which is populated with titles like Dave Barry Turns 40, Dave Barry Turns 50 and I’ll Mature When I’m Dead. It’s hard to imagine that there are any stories he hasn’t told, and sure enough, many make encores here. (Stop him if you already know he’s been in a rock band with Stephen King, but he’ll probably keep going.)

As someone who was reading Barry in the 1980s, when he was new to the Herald and newspapers were still a big deal, I feared this new book would feel overly familiar, like so much tired schtick turned out by long-in-the-tooth authors unwilling to hang up the typewriter. But he surprised me.

Not that there isn’t a certain predictability about Barry’s style and delivery; the surprise was in what he was willing to reveal when he wasn’t working to be funny.

He wallops us in the beginning with a story that promises to be boring — the title is simply “Mom and Dad” and he begins it, “Like so many members of the Baby Boom generation, I started out as a baby.”

Barry recounts his formative years in affluent Armonk, New York, where his own sense of humor was cultivated with decidedly quirky parents. Just when we think this is an idyllic story of shiny happy people having more fun than us, Barry reveals the problems his parents struggled with as they grew older. Juxtaposed with the wholesome upbringing the Barry children were given, the end of the parents’ stories is jarring and deeply poignant, reminiscent of some of the darker family stories told by the humorist David Sedaris. It’s unexpected, and reminds us that so often there is sadness behind the veil that funny people have to try to overcome.

After high school, he studied English at a (then) all-male college founded by Quakers, Haverford College in Pennsylvania, where he says he “read roughly a third of the way through many great literary works.” (When he later escaped the draft during the Vietnam War as a conscientious objector, he says that Society of Friends connection may have benefited his case.) It was at Haverford where he was first published, assigned to write an article about the opening of a Nixon for President office. “As a long-haired, pot-smoking hippie,” he had no interest in the subject and submitted a humor column, which may or may not have been published (he doesn’t remember).

Not knowing what else to do with an English degree, he flirted with straight-up journalism, even working as an intern with Congressional Quarterly, got hired as a reporter for a daily newspaper, and went on to work for the Associated Press, all the while writing humor columns when he could. Unhappy with the constraints of the AP, he quit that job to work at one of the most humorless writing jobs out there: that of a business-writing consultant, but he continued to work as a freelancer, and when a humorous piece he wrote on natural childbirth, focusing on the birth of his son, ran in the Philadelphia Inquirer, his humor writing career really took off. Barry no longer had to pitch his columns; editors were asking him to write for them.

Barry sails through the rest of his career with stories studded with famous people and irate readers and snippets of his columns and articles. There have been so many that unless you’re a 30-year subscriber to theHerald, many are fresh and riotously funny, despite their age. There is, for example, an excerpt of an “interview” Barry did with then Florida Gov. Bob Graham, in which the governor, as Barry puts it, “flipped a switch and went into Zany Mode,” and the two bantered as if they were on a late-night show.
“Barry: What can the state do about harmonica safety? I don’t know if you have any idea how many Floridians die every year in harmonica accidents….

Graham: Well last year we actually made some substantial improvement. In 1981, there were four people who died of harmonica accidents. Now actually, I think it’s only fair to count three of them, because the fourth one was actually, I would say it was more of a swimming pool accident.”

It goes on, gloriously, and it makes you long for the day — of what, I’m not sure. Newspapers? Politicians taking themselves less seriously? There is something in Barry’s career that hasn’t been replaced by a newcomer, let’s just say. The same when we lost Erma Bombeck, Lewis Grizzard, Art Buchwald and so many others.

Barry subtitles this book “the memoirs of a professional wiseass,” drawing on his mission in high school, which he says was wiseassery. He had a friend with whom he basically pranked his way through school without serious consequence. He recalls life events with the nostalgia of the Boomer he is, and sometimes he almost seems Forrest Gump-like as he romps his way through historic events, growing ever more famous, writing screenplays and novels, and even winning a Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Class Clown is unlikely to win any elite literary prizes, but Barry proves that on the cusp of 80 he can still make America laugh. B

Featured Photo: Class Clown by Dave Barry

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