Go Betty Go

Can’t figure out what to listen to this summer? Once again, the PopMatters’ music team presents a highly opinionated, overall quite superlative and even, at times, revelatory examination of 18 artists that, they suggest, absolutely demand your attention.
Ranging from the satirical, hip-hop sensibilities of 29-year-old rapper MC Chris (Windows Media Player required) to the avant-garde emo-rock of the San Francisco-based band, Evening, and the moody rock of The Velvet Teen you’re bound to discover at least some new music to your liking. And, the best part: almost all of the artists have made free mp3s available on their websites.
Meanwhile, the always reliable éminence grise of rock criticism, Robert Christgau, weighs in with another Consumer Guide column in this week’s Village Voice, reviewing the latest releases from Sonic Youth, Bobby Bare Jr., and Arto Lindsay, among a raft of other bands. Needless to say, Mr. Christgau loves the music of each of these artists.

VanRamblings has, this afternoon, downloaded (legal in Canada, don’tcha know?) 18-year-old Norwegian chanteuse Maria Mena’s début album, Another Phase, about to be re-released in North America with the title White Turns Blue. The album’s lyrics may relate to Mena’s junior high school experience, but to this listener the sentiments expressed in the lyrics address universal emotional issues. Mature beyond her tender years, VanRamblings has not been as impressed with a new artist since we first heard Fiona Apple.

And, finally, for this instalment, the strongest possible recommendation for the upcoming 27th annual Vancouver Folk Music Festival (VanRamblings has placed a clickable advertisement for the Folk Fest at the top-right of all ‘pages’). Under the stewardship of longtime Folk Fest aficionada and political activist Frances Wasserlein, and artist cum Folk Festival artistic director Dugg Simpson, the annual Vancouver Folk Music Festival is a summer must. This year’s event promises to be a particular treat.
One of the premiére cultural events that takes place in Vancouver each summer, the Vancouver Folk Music Festival site transforms into an ideal universe of peace, love and understanding, where gays and lesbians stroll about unmolested holding hands with one another, where children run free in the safest of environments, where white cotton is the de rigeur fabric of the day, and where the music covers a broad spectrum of genres (because, after all, folk music is the music of the people, and is not limited, simply, to old-time folkies with acoustic guitars), wafting through the air from any one of the 7 daytime stages, and throughout the evening on the main stage.
In the coming days, VanRamblings will write more on the upcoming 27th annual Vancouver Folk Music Festival. In the meantime, if you haven’t purchased your ticket for this year’s event, you can do so online or by scrolling to the bottom of this page to find out where tickets are available.

The music scene as we know it today was created in 1969, at Woodstock. Half a million musical adherents, dozens of artists, and the politics of the times came together at a ‘big bang’ moment in our history to create what would eventually transform into a corporate behemoth, a multi-billion dollar music industry focussed primarily on revenue generation.
Over the last twenty years, with the advent of Much Music, MTV and compact discs, followed by music industry downsizing, corporate consolidation and Internet piracy, a scenario has been created where a confluence of factors — a ‘perfect storm’, if you will — seems on the verge of wiping out the recording industry as we’ve known it.
In a PBS Frontline documentary, titled The Way The Music Died, which aired this past Thursday, the programme examines how the business that has provided the soundtrack of our lives seems on the verge of collapse. Although incomplete in its coverage, the programme is still worth a look.
PBS will re-air this documentary in the coming days. For those of you living outside of the Vancouver area, consult your local television listings. In the Pacific Northwest region, the The Way The Music Died will be re-broadcast on PBS channel KCTS 9 (Cable 27), at 1:30 a.m. Set your VCR’s.
PBS has also made the programme available online. Click here for access.

Courtney Love flashes the masses

All of this continuous nattering about Courtney Love and what a disturbed personality she is, and what a terrible mother, and how dreadful that her life – from time to time, and certainly at the moment – revolves around drugs.
Who says that Courtney Love has to live like the rest of us? You? Me? Nope, I don’t think so. And, even if we thought so, when was the last time that either one of us composed music as raw and energetic as that which Love consistently produces, even if it is potty-mouthed and substance-fuelled?
Gritty, chaotic, unorthodox, ragged and raw, the life and ‘flash the masses’ times of Courtney Love is to be celebrated.
Turns out that the Executive Editor of the Village Voice finds himself in accord with the sentiments published above, and much much more it would seem. Comparing Love to Janis Joplin, Richard Goldstein writes …

“When I watch Courtney, I see the same failure to distinguish between persona and self, the same refusal to draw a boundary between expressiveness and excess, the same insistence on showing pain that made rock music in the ’60s so intense.”

Celebrating breast baring as an act of power, discussing Love’s ‘signature of civic strength’, and writing about the artist who has chosen “to grin and bare it at an hour when all good children are asleep, having whacked off in their beds”, Goldstein’s very readable cover essay may be found here.

With the 10th anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s suicide days away, The Smoking Gun has published an assortment of Seattle Police Department documents compiled during the investigation of the grunge star’s April 1994 death.
The chilling records range from reports from the first officer on the scene to the receipt for the shotgun Cobain, 27, bought a week before his death. A second group of police reports detail previous run-ins Cobain and wife Courtney Love had with the local cops.
The BBC makes this audio available in their story on Cobain’s regrettable passing, first published April 8, 1994.
In their latest issue, Rolling Stone publishes this Nirvana Anthology.