Friday Picks of the Week
Yes, picks. Two of them, actually.
I'll be so busy writing about baseball this weekend that I won't have much opportunity to watch it, which is near-tragic, because it's Yankees-Red Sox time. Three games at Fenway, both teams at the top of their division, Manny Ramirez showing signs of coming out of his worst slump ever, A-Rod reminding people how awesome his talent is...(Is there a more graceful swing in baseball?)....
It's early yet, and there are lots more Yankees-Red Sox games coming up, including three at the Stadium beginning next Friday. (Perhaps the temperature will break 50 by then.) But this is not just baseball's best rivalry, it's baseball's best baseball.
My second pick of the week is radically different from the utopian optimism that is, despite everything, baseball.
Some years ago, I fell completely for a woman because—well, for many reasons—but one of them was that we both loved the Nine Inch Nails' song "Closer." We used to joke that if we ever got married, that would be our first dance, which, if you happen to know the song, would pose certain technical issues. (As it turned out, we didn't, so that was all right, then.) Closer had a bizarre combination of an absolutely addictive melody and lyrics of utter, primal desperation. (Romantic, eh?) The relationship didn't work out, but over the years Nine Inch Nails continued to make music that was simultaneously dark and beautiful.
Now Trent Reznor, the mastermind behind Nine Inch Nails, has come out with his first album
since 2005's "With Teeth." It's called "Year Zero," and it is brilliant. In my experience, it's almost impossible to praise a record without making a complete ass of oneself, so I will just throw out a few adjectives: ambitious, angry, complicated, anxious, mature, serious, catchy, beautiful, haunting.
And political. American musicians have, by and large, failed to address the politics of the Bush administration and the war, which is one reason, in my opinion, why the music business is slumping and irrelevant. But Year Zero is both explicitly political—in the song "Capital G," for instance—and implicitly so, in its consistent tone of loud desperation and relentless paranoia. This is a record about a country on the verge of extinction, which is an apt description of the United States in the twilight years of the Bush administration. (We will continue to exist, but everything we stand for, everything that makes the United States distinctive and uplifting and meaningful and special, is threatened.)
In the song "Zero Sum," for example, Reznor sings, "Shame on us/For what we have done/May God have mercy on our dirty little hearts/And all we ever were/just zeros and ones."
It's not easy to listen to; it's surprisingly easy to listen to.
A few more facts about Reznor and Year Zero:
You can hear the whole record online here.
Reznor has an astonishingly good website.
He creates most of his songs on a Macbook.
He gets it: You can download the song "Survivalism" in a format that allows you to remix the song with Garageband.
Reznor's song about drug addiction, "Hurt," was covered by Johnny Cash a year or so before Cash's death.
Check out "Year Zero." For all its gloom, the mere fact of its existence brings hope.
