Paul McCartney is the Scariest Old Guy Ever

Well, all my best sources tell me that Buddy Holly would be 75 this year if a plane crash hadn’t killed him and inspired the most overrated tribute song in all of American music (sorry kids, but I don’t see the appeal of “American Pie.” I realize that I’m in the minority here, but this is my damn blog). So someone somewhere decided to cobble together a tribute album to honor that fact. Why not, right?

Holly’s would-be 75th is the stated raison d’etre for Rave On Buddy Holly, a 19-track extravaganza (of sorts) of Holly hits re-imagined, for better or worse, by some of today’s… well… what are they, exactly? The roster ranges from relative unknowns Karen Elson (you might know her as Jack White’s most recent ex, but she’s actually in a group called The Citizens Band) and Jenny O. (I didn’t know who she was before I got this album) to chart-topping superstars Paul McCartney and Kid Rock. Might lead a critical thinker to wonder who exactly Rave On is aimed at (or if it’s aimed at all, considering the buck-shot lineup of performers).

The answer is staring me in the face as I listen to it for the fifth or sixth time now. For some reason, when I ripped the disc to Songbird, that otherwise excellent media player refused to sort the tracks in order. So fuck it, I’m listening to the album on random. And you know what? It makes absolutely no difference. This is the consummate album for the iTunes generation – people will buy the songs by artists they like (and some of these tracks are very much worth your 99 cents – we’ll get to them in a second) and consign the rest to the dustbin of internet history. Unfortunately, I suspect Kid Rock’s rendering of “Well All Right” will sell a lot more than it deserves to.

This seems like a good time to admit that, while I have enjoyed the original versions of many of these songs, I’ve never been super into Buddy Holly. I get why other people are, but there are no sacred cows on Rave On Buddy Holly to be slaughtered by the contributors, at least not to my ears.

So let’s start with the good news. There are a handful of pretty awesome renditions on this here tribute record, including Cee Lo Green’s playful take on “(You’re So Square) Baby, I Don’t Care,” which is one of the more inspired choices on the album, although it’s awfully brief at a minute and a half. Fiona Apple and Jon Brion turn in a lovely version of “Every Day,” and Jim James casually asserts himself as the finest male vocalist in rock music on My Morning Jacket’s gorgeous entry, “True Love Ways.” Modest Mouse does a menacing take on “That’ll Be the Day,” Lou Reed sounds like a dirty old man on “Peggy Sue,” and X’s John Doe sounds like a sad old man on “Peggy Sue Got Married.” I’m leaving one dirty old man out here, but we’ll deal with him a little later.

There are a bunch of middling tracks here too – Julian Casablancas does okay on “Rave On,” She & Him’s “Oh Boy” is predictably satisfying, if not stunning (“stunning” would adequately describe the version of “I Put a Spell On You” that they did when I saw them live a couple years ago) and the Black Keys open things well enough with “Dearest.” See what’s happening here? You don’t really need Rave On Buddy Holly to exist as an album; every one of these artists (I use the term loosely in a few cases here) could just as easily have recorded these tracks as one-off charity singles. I’m not sure what could have made this album feel more cohesive; perhaps its whole purpose is to remind us that Buddy Holly was pretty cool and maybe lead a few new people to his music.

There are a couple of missteps here and, sadly, Florence and the Machine make one of them. I kinda get the early 80s Tom Waits vibe they were going for on “Not Fade Away,” but Rave On Buddy Holly would be way, way better if the producers had just stuck the Rolling Stones version on here instead. Kid Rock, on “Well All Right,” is continuing his apparently life-long mission to become the retarded offspring of Bob Seger and Ted Nugent and so it’s hardly surprising that he turns in – by far – the most insipid track on the album. I guess I don’t have a huge problem with Graham Nash’s take on “Raining in My Heart,” but I do think it would’ve been better if they just had Kermit the Frog sing it. What can I say? I’m not a big Graham Nash fan.

And then there’s Paul McCartney’s version of “It’s So Easy.” It’s not bad per se (it’s actually pretty good), but the parts where he stops and barks/speaks things like, “I’m gonna getchu, baby” followed by, “Yeah, we’re gonna do it,” I get really nervous. He says it like a guy who wants to fuck the shit out of every living thing and he’s not gonna take no for an answer. I should add that it sounds like he really wants to do all that stuff (and by “all that stuff,” I mean “embark on a rape spree of epic proportions”) but he’s never actually understood how his sex parts work. It’s like he’s trying to psych himself up for something he’s never actually done when he bellows, “‘Cause it’s so easy, baby/ so easy for me/ so easy for you!” If it’s that easy, what’s all the shouting about? To me, McCartney’s shouts carry a readily detectable subtext of, “Okay, Paul. You can do this. You take your pointy thing, you get it nice and big, and you go rape all the stars right out of the sky. Because it is so easy.” Lest I stand accused of ageism, I am not against old men being raging fuckin’ horn-dogs; but I am against hearing about their raging fuckin’ horn-dog exploits. Paul McCartney’s “It’s So Easy” simultaneously makes me fear him and hate sex and that’s a position that is undignified to say the least. Worse – I just looked up McCartney on the Wikipedia and he’s 69 years old. The universe is playing a cruel joke on me.

Getting back to Rave On Buddy Holly for a second, if only to cleanse your mind of the image of old people having awkward, shouty sex, I don’t find the album very satisfying as an album. I think I would have preferred it if someone had started a website with a snappy-but-serious name like The Buddy Holly Project where they feature maybe five different covers of Buddy Holly tunes each month and you can just wait for artists you like to do awesome versions of Buddy Holly tunes.

In conclusion: Paul McCartney’s wang!

R.E.M.’s First Great Album of the Twenty-First Century

R.E.M. has released three studio albums so far in the twenty-first century. Collapse Into Now, out tomorrow, will be number four. Before we get to that, though, you should know that I’ve been a huge R.E.M. fan since I was about 18 years old. So when I tell you that their efforts since 2000 have been less than consistently satisfying, I hope you’ll understand what I mean. I mean that, if we’re being honest with ourselves, Collapse Into Now doesn’t have to do a whole lot to be R.E.M.’s best album of the last eleven years. It’s their fifteenth record; many of their peers when they started over thirty years ago haven’t made it this far and the ones that have are mostly making worse music (when was the last time you put on U2′s No Line On the Horizon? Be honest).

To some extent, I feel like the band cheated on 2008′s Accelerate, indulging in precious few of the textural quirks that make some of their earlier work so memorable (“Houston” and “Sing for the Submarine” notwithstanding). The album was full of straight-up rockers and it worked pretty well in my estimation. I think it was a sort of refocusing that R.E.M. desperately needed in order to shake off the malaise of Around the Sun.

But if I’m gonna imply that Accelerate was a sort of calisthenic warm-up, aren’t I suggesting that Collapse Into Now should somehow be bigger and better than its predecessor? That’s exactly what I’m suggesting and the album delivers. I said Collapse Into Now didn’t have to do much to be the best R.E.M. record since 2000; that it may well be the band’s first great album of the century is a welcome surprise. The sonic scope is considerably wider here than it was on Accelerate: there are more blips, bleeps, string arrangements, vocal effects, and, yeah, Peter Buck plays the fucking mandolin on a song or two (I read an advanced review of this album on Spin‘s website that belabored this point by titling their review “Finding Their Religion.” I can’t stand shit like that – Spin wants you to think the new R.E.M. album sounds like old R.E.M. radio hits, conveniently forgetting that Buck played the mandolin way before “Losing My Religion” [the song is not about religion either, goddammit]. He played it on the sublime “You Are the Everything” from Green). Mike Mills, the best background vocalist in rock, is all over Collapse Into Now and Michael Stipe finally bows to the inevitable and has Patti Smith make an appearance as well (the album’s title was apparently her idea) on a couple of tracks, including the indulgent (in a good way) album closer “Blue.”

Lyrically, Stipe isn’t afraid to mine R.E.M.’s past – “Oh My Heart”, in addition to having one of the most musically gorgeous refrains of any recent R.E.M. song, is a sequel to Accelerate‘s “Houston” (both songs deal with Hurricane Katrina). On “Houston”, “if the storm doesn’t kill me/ the government will” and on “Oh My Heart”, “the storm didn’t kill me/ and the government changed.” The aforementioned “Blue” stylistically reminds me of “E-Bow the Letter”, a song I enjoy more than probably most other R.E.M. fans and it ends with Stipe saying, “20th Century/ collapse into now”, a clear nod to New Adventures in Hi-Fi’s excellent closer “Electrolite.” This sort of self-reference is tough to pull off with panache, but it’s pretty well-executed on Collapse Into Now.

Stipe also seems preoccupied with age (his age specifically) on this album, but not – I’m happy to report – in a pathetic way. On “All the Best,” he’s ready to “show the kids how to do it” and “Every Day is Yours to Win”, trite title notwithstanding, is the sort of song I think Mark Everett has been trying to write for a while now. Rather than looking to the past and feeling like he’s said everything he’s got to say, it would appear that Mr. Stipe can reflect on his experience and look ahead with some hunger left to drive him. On the silly-but-catchy (I would argue that some of R.E.M’s finest songs, going all the way back to Chronic Town, are silly-but-catchy) “Alligator Aviator Autopilot Antimatter,” he admits, “I have got a lot/ a lot to learn” and he’s “thrilled to be alive” on “Blue.” So rather than the sourpuss seriousness of Around the Sun or the wicked-prankster antagonism of Accelerate, Collapse Into Now finds Stipe in a place of earned comfort and optimism.

Words like “fresh” and “rejuvenated” are bound to pop up in reviews of this album (they did for Accelerate too), and it’s not hard to see why. Collapse Into Now, in a lot of ways, sounds more spirited than anything the band’s done since the vastly underrated Monster (Monster, along with New Adventures in Hi-Fi, is unfairly maligned by the internet indie kids but it contains one of R.E.M.’s all-time most beautiful songs, “Strange Currencies”). The word I think I’ll use is “assured” – R.E.M., once again, at last, sounds like they’re confident in who they are and what they’re doing.

The one thing Collapse Into Now has in common with Around the Sun is that it’s positively stuffed with musical ideas. The difference between the two is that I think Around the Sun was stuffed because of a sort of lack of decision making where Collapse Into Now feels focused yet still loose. Michael Stipe has two underrated collaborators in Peter Buck and Mike Mills, both of whom know how to structure songs with a sense of economy (if you want to know how much you should admire Mike Mills, you should consider two things: first, as I’ve said, he’s a phenomenal backing vocalist. Second, he wrote the piano part for “Nightswimming”). While some of the advanced reviews I’ve read of Collapse Into Now come dangerously close to using the phrase “return to form” (Masslive.com calls it a “comeback” which is why I’m not linking to them. Color me surly if you want), I think that’s a lazy way to describe it. What’s been frustrating about other recent R.E.M. albums isn’t that they’ve forgotten how to make awesome music (“Leaving New York”, which opens Around the Sun and manages to be its best song, is a pretty classic R.E.M. ballad), it’s that they’ve been incredibly inconsistent in their execution. What Collapse Into Now really is then, is a reminder that at their best, R.E.M. is almost unrivaled as a pop/rock band.