From xx609@prairienet.org Sat Mar 29 08:27:23 1997 Date: Sat, 29 Mar 1997 00:09:00 -0600 (CST) From: Media Poll To: ftp@etext.org Subject: The Media Poll - No. 5 _______________________________________________________ THE MEDIA POLL Number 5 March 28, 1997 _______________________________________________________ By John Marcus Featuring: -YOU HEARD IT THERE FIRST: "In Your Face" -POPULAR ARTS IN REVIEW: Luscious Wayne -REVISITING THE GRAMMYS ("Do We Have To?") -------------------------------------------- [To receive The Media Poll by email, request a free subscription at xx609@prairienet.org] YOU HEARD IT THERE FIRST: "In Your Face" It's one of those phrases that just won't go away. First it was the Beastie Boys ("Some voices got treble/some voices got bass/we got the kind of voices that are in your face") in 1989, then about 10 million other would-be wags, then the Chicago Tribune in 1996, when it declared that its arch-traditionalist sports section would now, in the spirit of the '90s, be IN YOUR FACE. My face just hasn't got room for that part of the paper, thank you very much. Try someone else's. IT'S A RAP THING, it's a sports thing, it's a cultural bloody phenomenon. The 1994 Republican Congress even wanted to get in your face. "Face" has its proponents and its detractors. In August 1994, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Virginia "state Health and Human Services Secretary Kay Coles James told young people not to be victims and urged them to overcome life's obstacles with an 'in your face' attitude." But in a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Op-Ed piece in April 1995, Frederick J. Rokasky took "face" to task, blaming talk radio, Newt Gingrich, and Pat Robertson for fostering an in-your-face cultural climate (for over "a decade and a half") that led to an action as hateful and full of unchecked anger as the Oklahoma City bombing. And in the San Antonio Express-News earlier that year, one Larry Hufford suggested that the attitude was so pervasive in our culture that is has become "fully integrated into mainstream American values." Without significant discussion and analysis, he lamented, " there is little hope for the commonweal." Because our electronic archives don't recognize the word "in", it is impossible to quantify the trend without dirtying the methodology up with thousands of instances of "egg on your. . . " and "plain as the nose on your. . ." But for all you slanghounds dying to know, the first known published instance of "in your face" was: February 17, 1982 The Daily Oklahoman In an article on college basketball of all things, two of the Big Eight's newer coaches--Oklahoma's Billy Tubbs and Oklahoma State's Paul Hansen--were said to prefer "wide-open, up-and-down-the-floor, in-your-face basketball." Now you know who to blame. __________________________________________________________________ POPULAR ARTS IN REVIEW Pop Music: Luscious Wayne By Mimi Schneider MY FAVORITE ERA in the history of my relationship with any pop record is the precise moment when I've heard the record often enough to become acutely aware of its various musical and lyrical twists and turns--and avoided enough of the work of the Professional Rock Press to remain blissfully unaware of the details of the lives of the Artistes in question. I am now enjoying such a relationship with the current recordings by two of New York City's finest youth orchestras, Fountains of Wayne and Luscious Jackson. The name is self-consciously dumb, but the two wiseacres who make up Fountains of Wayne are bright enough to have single-handedly (well--four-handedly) brought power pop back from the land of the reissues Time-Life forgot. These guys know the sources (Raspberries, Paley Bros., Shoes, the inevitable Big Star) well enough to dispense with slavish imitations of them. With enough post-grunge crunchiness in the guitars to establish contemporary rock street-cred and enough blippy-bloopiness in the occasional keyboard filigree to conjure up appropriate retro-pop references, FOW would have already made a killer record...and we haven't even gone into the songwriting, all "coffee...cream...Xerox machine" and "PATH train" specific and "funny how the ground can't find my wheels/I'm drivin' where the road ain't there" fantastic about the lives and loves of young Lower Manhattanites-on-the-make circa 1996. THESE DOWNTOWN BOYS want their grrls to "leave the biker, break his heart" kick the bozo "reading Playboy on your couch" to the curb, and take a ride in their "Survival Car," just so they can "Sink To The Bottom With You." I've seen some in the Professional Rock Press try to interpret that song as the album's obligatory post-Cobain homage, but to me the most poignant sounds on the record are the blended quotations from "Surrender" (Cheap Trick) and "Clowntime is Over" (Cheap Costello) which waft through "Something I Do Well." FOW do it well indeed; the only "bad" thing I could possibly say is that it's amazingly hard to believe that in 1996 in New York City one could make a pop record which is so singularly uninfluenced by Black music. LUSCIOUS JACKSON DON'T HAVE that problem. Teaming up with Daniel Lanois, the Anne Rice of the recording studio, these four New Yorkers have vastly expanded on their original white-girls-in-the-Beastie-Boys-orbit gimmick. "Fever In, Fever Out" is chock full o'maturity, yet finds the band's principal songwriters, Jill Cunniff and Gabrielle Glaser, keeping in touch with the concerns of young women everywhere. The opening track and first single, "Naked Eye," is ultra-catchy textbook hip-hop, with samples and loops that set the tone for the rest of the album's clattering and clanging mixes and live, if rudimentary, drumming. The soul and blues touches which have worked their way into Cunniff's songs over the years are given the musical settings ("Mood Swing") in which they can fully flower on this record, which even veers into pop with the brilliant "Why Do I Lie," an antidote to commercial grrlie-rock that every fourteen year old girl (and every woman who can accurately recall being a fourteen year old girl) should long for. Glaser's "Electric" is another highlight; the sentiment "It feels so good to be alive " may hold no relevance in my pathetic life, but I'm still enough of a romantic to cheer it on when I hear it on a record. -MIMI SCHNEIDER is a singer/songwriter and the producer of the Roots of Lounge web site ____________________________________________________________ REVISITING THE GRAMMYS ("Do We Have To?") I MUST SAY there was a small but very tangible sense of satisfaction upon hearing the news that Celine Dion won album of the year. Not that I've ever heard the singer's disc let alone sung along to it in my sleep, but rather because it validated my crackpot scheme to predict Grammy winners based on media coverage volume during the year. But alas, I'm only batting .500, as that crumb bum Eric Clapton of Hackney took record of the year away from Alanis Morissette, the other woman Canuck upon whose fortunes my theory was resting. One reader suggested, however, that rather than measure coverage during 1996 (during which time all the records in question were released), I should look at media coverage during the time from when the nominations were made public until the awards were announced. Now, I don't know how soon after the nominations are announced that votes are actually cast, but I thought I'd take a look just the same. TAKING INTO ACCOUNT the period of January 7 until February 26, then, guess what happens? Neither prediction comes through. But interestingly, the artist with the most coverage in both categories was Smashing Pumpkins, who won in neither of these slots but took away a statue for best hard rock performance, one of seven nominations they'd received. And take away the hype those seven chances of winning generated (i.e. remove the Pumpkins from our competition), and Celine and Eric take the top slots in their respective races, allowing the MP10 to show its face in public once again. . . ______________________________________________________________ GRAMMY FOR BEST INSULT IN A LYRIC: "He was a miserable bollocks and a bitch's bastard's whore." -Shane Macgowan, *Boys From the County Hell*, 1984 _______________________________________________________________ --------------------------------------------------------------- For now, past issues of the Media Poll are available at: http://www.prairienet.org/mediapoll To subscribe to the email version, email xx609@prairienet.org To complain, email xx609@prairienet.org The Media Poll is Copyright 1997 by John Marcus