May 17, 2010

There was a gossip section article in Monday’s edition of “The Daily News” concerning the recording of R&B songstress Jennifer Hudson’s new album, which I normally wouldn’t care about in the least. But this piece of reportage so succinctly illustrates what’s wrong with modern popular culture I feel like I should say something about it. I do, after all, write about popular culture, although, until just a few seconds ago, I don’t think I’ve ever had a reason to type the name “Jennifer Hudson.”

According to the article, Hudson - who made her name on "American Idol," then won an Oscar for being big-boned and better than Beyoncé in “Dream Girls” - was giving a gaggle of industry types a sneak listen to a batch of songs that were set for release on her upcoming would-be spectacular diggity-wow-wow cd. But things didn’t go as expected. During the party, the listeners seemed less than enthralled with Hudson’s new offering to the Gods, which was comprised of fast-moving dance tracks of the Lady Gaga and Rihanna variety.

The music's tone reportedly came as an extreme surprise to everyone at the event, even though the tracks were produced by a guy named Rich Harrison, who was behind exactly the same sort of stuff when it was released by the likes of Jennifer Lopez, Mary J. Blige, and Beyoncé. “The consensus ,” as “The Daily News” source reported, “was the songs were so not J. Hud.” (Yeah. He called her J. Hud. “Jennifer Hudson” is very hard to say when you’re completely full of shit.)

So the general feeling was that the tunes weren’t the sort of thing people expect of Hudson, even though her entire output at this point in her career, if you ignore the “Dream Girls” soundtrack, is a grand total of 13 songs. That’s one more than a dozen, for those of you who aren’t mathematically inclined.

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The reserved response to her new music threw Hudson – and, you can bet, her “people” - off guard. They were looking for stomping and cheering, but instead got only finger sandwiches and sipping. Still, why Hudson should care if a random group of people in a single room didn’t dig what they were hearing is beyond me.

I’d like to believe the music they were listening to was driven by what Jennifer Hudson was feeling during the period when she created it. She put her heart and soul into it, and, when she was done, she had a chunk of her new album in the can. She was just being nice enough to let a few interested people hear it in advance.

I’d like to believe that, but it appears I’d be wrong if I did. In the wake of the listening party, rather than giving everyone a hearty “fuck you, and don’t forget to throw your cups in the trash on the way out,” Hudson reportedly ran back to the studio and started recording new tunes that were more in keeping with her previous work…which is to say, she learned not to surprise unimaginative people, and will no longer be brazen enough to reveal other sides of her personality in her music. That’ll show ‘em, by God.

As Hudson herself quickly Tweeted after the non-response, she’s now "In the studio recording with Harvey Mason! Ryan Tedder & Rich Harrison came up with some heat. We gon' kill the game come September, y'all."

The “game”, then, is pandering to expectations as heartily as possible in order to sell a shitload of cd’s. It’s important to note, however, that Hudson, who obviously didn’t invent pandering, is so willing to send a missive out to her fans saying she’s finally putting her back into the Big Pander. Boy, won’t it be exciting if she manages to sell the crap out of a bunch of overblown gestures and makes a pile of money with them?! Isn’t that, after all, why we listen to music?

Well...no. Not me, and hopefully not you either.

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Depending on the crowd, I still occasionally get viewed by younger people as an old-timer who thinks all the great albums were made between 1964 and 1980, and everything else is tainted by my no longer being a part of the industry’s youthful target audience. But that badly misperceives where I’m coming from.

As I repeatedly said about movies when I wrote reviews for CNN, it’s not a matter of how lousy the offerings are, it’s a matter of the audience standing there and begging to be abused by corporate monoliths, then gobbling up their test-marketed garbage, which in turn encourages the creation of even more garbage. Sooner or later, the audience is asking for it, and the musicians, vocalists, and (if it’s movies) actors, have to fork it over.

Jennifer Hudson doesn’t know if she’s simply a young woman with a big voice or a true artist because, when all is said and done, her goal is to sell as many cd’s as possible and pack arenas at $130 a pop. That’s the modern musical art form, not the creation of a cohesive, moving statement by the person whose name is emblazoned on the cover of the cd.

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This is Van Morrison’s 1967 album, “Astral Weeks.” You undoubtedly know who Morrison is, and maybe you’re even a fan to one degree or another. But you may not know about “Astral Weeks.” It was voted the #2 rock album of all time by “Mojo” magazine in 1995, and “Rolling Stone” ranked it #19 in 2003. That doesn’t make it either the #2 or #19 most significant album of all time, whatever that’s supposed to mean. It does suggest, though, that there’s something particularly gripping going on with “Astral Weeks,” since thousands of music lovers are still hugely enthusiastic about it some 40 years after it was originally released.

There’s a moody, organic beauty to “Astral Weeks,” a feeling that the music is pouring out of a naturally flowing stream of consciousness shared by Morrison and a group of superb, closely interacting musicians, most of whom were jazz artists who had no idea what the famously withdrawn Morrison was even shooting for. Nobody at Morrison’s record label really wanted him to record “Astral Weeks,” though, because his previous single was the undemanding, super-catchy “Brown Eyed Girl,” which became an enormous hit the previous summer. And, boy, wouldn’t it be great if he could come up with a “Brown Eyed Girl, Part Two!”

“Brown Eyed Girl”

That Morrison had vastly different plans, that he was feeling something stirring in his musical soul and, with almost ridiculous ambition, set out to orchestrate it, runs wholly counter to what performers like Hudson - and that would include a significant chunk of the most popular performers on earth - do when they record albums.

Morrison wrote and arranged the songs on “Astral Weeks” by himself, then, due to extreme budget limitations, recorded it in three days, churning cellos and all. And he wound up with a record that sounds like it grew out of the ground, or was plucked from the air when it passed by during an eternal echo. It’s one of the most mysterious, strangely moving albums ever put to tape.

"Sweet Thing"

The famous, self-consciously insane rock critic, Lester Bangs, once glowed over the album with these lines: "Van Morrison was twenty-two or twenty-three years old when he made this record; there are lifetimes behind it. What ‘Astral Weeks’ deals in are not facts but truths. ‘Astral Weeks,’ insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend."

Any bets on whether that’s what Jennifer Hudson will end up with?

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I’m not saying Hudson should aim to make an artistic statement as profound as the one found in the grooves – yes, they were grooves once - of “Astral Weeks.” I’m not even saying you’re guaranteed to like “Astral Weeks;” it’s a uniquely challenging album that simply may not be your cup of tea. But I’m trying to illustrate what I, personally, look for when I delve deeply into our popular culture, and I know from the reader responses I’ve received over the years that there are others out there like me.

There are still terrific, human-sounding albums being made these days. But the machinery of the industry has grown so overwhelming, the performers you’re most likely to encounter, if you don’t dig and dig and dig, might as well be recording their music in cubicles. They’re clock-punchers with fleet fingers and memorable voices, but clock-punchers nonetheless.

When I carry on about my favorite recording artists, I may sound like the old guy who quit loving music when Reagan was president. But I’m just yearning for the days when major stars, whether you’re talking about the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen, Sly Stone, Lou Reed, Stevie Wonder, The Clash, Marvin Gaye, or piles of others, were allowed to go for it, to break down the barriers of their stardom and actually reach for the brass ring— to try to deliver a piece of work that speaks about the times in which they live, or to illuminate the concepts that drive them as human beings.

I want to know who that guy is playing that guitar, or who that woman is singing that song. And I don’t give a flying fuck how many records they sell, just as I couldn’t care less how much a movie has made at the box office. Why the hell should I?

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Oh, by the way— “Astral Weeks” didn’t go gold until 2001, 33 years after it was released, and Van Morrison is not exactly hurting for cash at the moment. Significant careers should be able to survive an album or two that not everyone wants to listen to. If music labels won’t allow those albums to be made, and the artists themselves don’t stand up and insist that they’re making them, do we really have nothing left to look forward to but careful insignificance?

To paraphrase Peggy Lee, “Is that all there is to a dying industry?”

Paul Tatara