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Week of December 5, 2004:
NEWS | Man bites Don
MUSIC | Do they know it's not Christmas?
PREVIOUS: November 28, 2004 | NEXT: December 19, 2004
NEWS: DONALD RUMSFELD Q&A
Man bites Don
Matt Drudge reports this shocking revelation about Donald Rumsfeld's confrontation with apparently angry, underequipped, extra-endangered soldiers in the gulf:
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Chattanooga Times Free Press reporter Edward Lee Pitts ... claims in a purported email that he coached soldiers to ask Defense Secretary Rumsfeld questions!
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Some of the right-wing press picked up this item — minus the triumphant exclamation points — as proof of journalistic underhandedness. As Rush Limbaugh puts it:
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So basically what we have here is a "reporter" who went out and created news in order to be able to cover it, by his own admission in a memo.
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There's a name for this kind of journalistic behavior, and that name is "doing your job."
A reporter's job is to observe and ask questions. When somebody ducks your questions, you find some other way to get answers. It actually happens all the time, and you learn fast how to tease out information that nobody wants you to have. It's how you do your job. Anybody with reporting experience (and not just a reporter's fedora) knows what I'm talking about.
Related links:
Drudge article
Limbaugh transcript
December 10, 2004 | 2:17 a.m. | New York, New York
Permanent link: http://www.offoffoff.com/opinion/offofftopic/20041205.php#e68
MUSIC: DO THEY KNOW IT'S NOT CHRISTMAS?
Do they know it's not Christmas?
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| Does this man look a little bit sad? |
I'm sitting in Starbucks listening to what must be Starbucks Christmas Mix #481, which includes the second-worst Christmas song ever produced. "Recorded" would be the wrong word, because this version of "Winter Wonderland" wasn't recorded — it was copy-and-pasted together on a computer by a music producer with the aesthetic sense of an unbalanced washing machine. A radio voice introduces the Paul Whiteman Orchestra and then comes a resampled pastiche of Bing Crosby, chorus girls and a drum machine on the "pounding bass drum and sleigh bell" setting. Apparently the original wasn't Christmasy enough because Paul Whiteman lacked club-music technology. The old songs just don't sound good enough on ecstasy.
The worst Christmas song in history, of course, is "Do They Know It's Christmas," the ignorant celebrity vehicle lamenting how the Ethiopian famine was preventing the Muslims from enjoying Christmas. I just read that it's being re-released this year to benefit the Sudanese, whose problem apparently is not racial genocide but simply not enough Christmas.
For those of us lucky enough not to live in Sudan, we have merely a cultural jihad to suffer through. It's only been about 10 days since Thanksgiving, and the onslaught of joy already has me as uptight as a reindeer prevented from joining in any reindeer games. The fact that New York has undoubtedly the nation's highest percentage of non-Christmas-celebrating non-Christians is utterly lost on the city's merchants, who have gone to an all-Xmas format until probably the third week in January.
Besides the blatant majoritarianism of this annual aural orgy, there's an even more basic problem: most Christmas music sucks. What we have is a vicious cycle in which merchants are afraid to break the ear-wallet connection by playing, oh, let's say 30 percent holiday cheer alongside 70 percent good music; meanwhile, musicians know there's insatiable demand for ever more holiday dreck, so, regardless of insufficient inspiration or talent, they supply it.
The late, great guitar virtuoso John Fahey, whom I met a couple times when he lived in my home state of Oregon, mentioned that his well-known albums of Christmas songs far outsold his pioneering but relatively obscure folk-blues albums. And the problem, for him, was that he got little in the way of royalties for the Christmas albums, since the tunes were written by others. No rational industry hack wants that to happen to him — so the incentive in the music business is to churn out new songs. They can be sheer uninspired garbage (in a clothing store yesterday I heard a singer cooing breathlessly about snow, in a song that went something like: "Oh, it's snow. There's nothing like snow. Snow, snow, snow."), but if they're holiday-themed, they will get played and you will make money every winter for the next 30 years.
So every year we're put on an involuntary musical diet that, if it were food on a Christmas table, would be roast candy canes with mashed candy canes and candy-cane dressing, with candy-cane pie for dessert. Is it too much to hope that some enlightened shopping-music programmer might choose a few of the more tasteful holiday selections (they don't have to have been written by Jews, but it helps) and blend them tactfully in with a playlist of non-holiday music, otherwise known as "good" music? That would require an uncharacteristic degree of independent thought and aesthetic judgement on the part of American business. Sanity can return, but only once someone has the guts to break the cycle.
That somebody won't be Starbucks. I might have to banish myself from their usually patron-friendly premises for the rest of the year. For the moment, I've got my earphones out and have accepted iTunes as my personal savior. I'm thanking the lord for creating Bach. And Motorhead.
December 6, 2004 | 9:53 a.m. | New York, New York
Permanent link: http://www.offoffoff.com/opinion/offofftopic/20041205.php#e67
PREVIOUS: November 28, 2004 | NEXT: December 19, 2004
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