Air to Alan Jackson

Air - Love 2
One of many albums that I collected for collecting's sake from my gig at KSCR (now KXSC). I'd bring a laptop into the studio and rip maybe 4 or 5 CDs in the downtime I spent not listening to the songs I had chosen to play that week. It was a classic left brain ("I need to stay current and find new things to play")/right brain ("FREE STUFF!") rationalization.

ANYWAY, Air is a pair of Frenchmen specializing in chillout electronica whose name has come to stand for "Amour, Imagination, Rêve" - or love, imagination, dream - which should really be the title of a Euro Disneyland parade. But most of the songs on Love 2 would, I think, be an appropriate soundtrack for a designer showcase that didn't have its heart set on being incongruously aggressive (unless they wanted to use "Eat My Beat," which lands too much on the side of abstract and unenforceable commands, e.g. "Smile with your eyes"). It's a fashionable record that sounds like a moon safari (the album-defining "Love") and manages to appear pleasingly vapid while retaining a certain degree of aloofness; ergo, "So Light Her Footfall" is a seductive score that's perfect for the anti-Tyra runway.

Air - "So Light Her Footfall"


You can summarize Love 2 in one word: gentle. "Sing, Sang, Sung" is the best example of this mood, a cross between music for beatific sun worshipers and a Baby Einstein DVD. And there's nothing wrong with that. Sometimes that's what you need the most - tunes that swaddle you in smooth and tell you it's going to be all right. Especially if you're tweaking.


Air Supply
From one gentle foreign duo to another (minus the club drugs)...

Graham Russell and Russell Hitchcock's names make up for what ever their music lacks in versatility. They would be perfect for either a Wheel of Fortune 'Before and After' puzzle or as pitchmen for a multi-disc soft rock compilation. By the way, one of these things actually happened.



The Russell & Russell specialty is the soporific love song that's appealing enough to reach No. 2 on the charts. It is an especially poetic ranking for the two Air Supply songs on my playlist: "All Out of Love," a maddeningly pushy ballad that's the pop song equivalent of someone asking you to decipher what went wrong in a breakup that you had no part in (though I realize a lot of pop songs are like this), and "Making Love (Out of Nothing At All)," which is the real operatic jam.



Clearly the superior of the two songs, "Making Love" is soft rock foreplay that teases and builds until ending in a hilariously euphoric verse boasting of the Russells' prowess in making "all the stadiums rock" and several other abilities that don't seem particularly special or are entirely fabricated, like making the night "disappear by the dawn." Keep shilling that AM gold, but don't you dare take credit for the music of the spheres, Air Supply!


Al Green
A few years ago USC opened the Galen Center, a new multipurpose sports arena, and one of the first events held there was an Al Green concert. Several times during each home football game that season, the stadium PA system would blast an ad that included snippets of "Let's Stay Together" (which was an old favorite of mine) and "Tired of Being Alone" (which was a new discovery) for the crowd in attendance.

If I'm accepting the power of the mellow as a leitmotif in this post, I must say it's oddly cathartic to watch thousands of drunk football fans get their kumbaya on for 90 seconds and hum a few bars of classic soul together, then return to rooting for one man to concuss the other.




Alan Jackson - The Greatest Hits Collection
Country music has a statistically insignificant presence in my library and it's usually not there without a utilitarian justification - I borrowed this particular record to create a playlist for a Memorial Day barbecue - but listening to 23 tracks of Alan Jackson's delicate wallflower-y voice is, in the grand scheme of this project, simple due diligence.

That said, I am a big fan of "Chattahoochee," an effective and evocative song that unabashedly uses the term "hoochie-kootchie." The most intriguing (and revealing) part of the song is the twice-appearing verse that describes Jackson's girlfriend rebuffing his polite request for sex. He does the conscionable, respectful thing and returns her home, but not before dragging her to some local chow house for a hamburger and a grape snow cone. Something about Alan Jackson slaking his intense sexual thirst with syrup and shaved ice really, really gets me. I fancy him the Mister Rodgers of county music.



Maybe, though, Jackson just has gigantic balls; several of these greatest hits are deliberately antagonistic, like a comedian that not only telegraphs his punchlines, but also cracks up before he can even get there. See: "Home," which is a straight-up autobiography that could've been kinda clever if he didn't spoil it in the first few lines or "Dallas," savoring the exquisite irony of someone named after a geographic location going on a road trip.

It behooves me to stop there, before I start making generalizations about country music as a whole. Frankly, the country music artist and the country music fan live in a alternative reality, a completely different local where what seems cornpone is lauded for its sincerity. And just as rock's obsession with New York and L.A. (or places and situations that consciously aspire to reflect the culture of one of the other) both narrows (bad) and deepens (good) the perspective of that idiom, I'd also point to country's hesitancy to acknowledge the world north of the Mason-Dixon line and west of Texas as evidence of this separate sphere. To each his own.

One final highlight from Mr. Jackson - "Mercury Blues," a fun bit of freewheeling consumerism later reworked (with little difficulty) as the Ford truck jingle that it was always meant to be.



Not a lot of country fans are out there driving Montegos and Villagers, I imagine, but they do waterski while wearing cowboy hats.