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Today in Ynet:

English musician Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, who performed in the Jewish-Arab cooperative village of Neveh Shalom five years ago, is calling on fellow artists to boycott Israel.

He said the Israelis “pay lip service to the idea that they want to make peace with the Palestinians, and they sort of talk around the possibility of a two-state solution, but in the meantime they’re throwing people out of their homes in the Negev, in east Jerusalem. They’re annexing huge parts of the West Bank. So all this talk is they’re quietly getting on with taking over the whole of the land, and what happens then to the Palestinians?

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As the music giants stagger further into the wilderness bereft of their traditional sales tools, they continue to churn out tired, American Idol-inspired pop and rap records scooped up by suburban white boys who have never heard the Beatles.  Aided by industry suckerfish such as Entertainment Weekly and Rolling Stone, they tout their latest officially sanctioned “edgy” release.  Here’s Eminem with another bowl of anger.  Must be hard to stay so angry with all that money.  Here’s Christina Aguilera—or is it Lady Gaga—with another incisive critique of hypocrisy.  Only country music is expanding, due  to, perhaps, country’s insistence on singing about things that matter.

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There is another world out there, young pop bands shunning the traditional channels and using the internet to sell their exquisitely crafted, gloriously melodic pop.  Twenty-ten was another banner year in which it was difficult to limit the top ten to only ten.  Nevertheless, here goes.

1. Oranjuly formed in 2009 joining lead singer and writer Brian E. King who had already been working on these songs for years.  Every year it seems a one-man band emerges to stun us.  In years past it’s been Roger Klug and Josh Fix.  This year it’s Oranjuly’s Brian E. King who says, “I played everything but drums and cello. I did play drums on South Carolina though!”  Now the band is a five piece so they can reproduce these astounding sounds in public.  This time the Jellyfish comparisons are apt.  King also has a knack for sunny Beach Boys-style harmonies which permeate the record.  If architecture is frozen music this is the Taj Mahal. (more…)

”What it comes down to for me is this: Will the technologies of communication in our culture, serve to enlighten us and help us to understand one another better, or will they deceive us and keep us apart?”  - Roger Waters

Roger Waters’ presentation of Pink Floyd’s seminal rock opera The Wall, which I saw at Staples Center in Los Angeles, is nothing short of a total triumph at all levels.  More than just an outstanding rock n’ roll concert, the addition of story-driven spectacle and anti-authoritarian thematics elevate this experience far above any other live music experience one is likely to see.

For those unfamiliar with Mr. Waters’ work, and for those who need a reminder, The Wall charts the autobiographical tale of Mr. Waters, whose father dies in WWII, and how a series of subsequent traumas forces him into a self-imposed isolation behind a metaphorical wall.  This alienation drives him mad, eventually forcing him to face an internal trial, in which his inner judge tears down his wall.

Heady stuff for a rock album, much less a concert.  Yet Mr. Waters succeeds in transcending his personal story, delivering a moving allegory, calling for each of us to tear down the walls we have erected to separate ourselves from the proverbial “Other.”

The work presented is utterly faithful to the original, complete with sound effects and background voices familiar to Pink Floyd fans, played with passion as well as technical sophistication.  It is also apparent that Mr. Waters’ voice is as fit as ever, complete with varying foreign accents, hisses, groans, and whispers. (more…)

It used to take decades and even centuries of cultural transmission by storytelling, theater, ballad, and a general diffusion of knowledge by processes unknown to bring myth and legend into being.  That may be another way of saying that people once had brains, and then came television, Video’s killing of the Radio Star, and the genteel cultural virtues obtained through 24/7 media immersion.

People once heard, told, acted out and retold these tales, taking active roles in creating visions of life and its possibilities in imaginative ways, instead of flopping on couches with a Monster Burger in one hand and a Bucket o’ Suds in the other, passively awaiting the predetermined outcome of one steroid-based extravaganza or another. This says something disturbing about the contrast between ancient and modern civilizations and the ways the perception of reality can either be generated by humans or imprinted upon them, unless you’re the CEO of an international fast food conglomerate or a viewer engaging in a fierce wind-breaking competition during a broadcast’s inevitable male-enhancement advertisements or rain delays.  (more…)