George Will turns Sherrod Brown into a straw man

I was going to write something about today’s George Will column effusively praising Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, one of the most progressive members of the Senate, but Dave Weigel beat me to it and did it much better than I could have.

Will’s column is nothing but rank hypocrisy, as Weigel points on Slate. Brown, says Weigel, hasn’t made any noise about running, so raising him as an alternative seems pretty curious.

Weigel takes it a step farther, though, reminding readers of several Will columns in which the pundit praised Republican candidates solely because they were either a) women or b) non-white.

I tried to find a recent Will column in which he took on Republicans for their swerve into identity politics, and their failure to nominate some white guys who might have been better candidates on the merits. Came up short.

Weigel doesn’t ascribe motivation, but it seems from Will’s writing that this was never a column meant to raise Brown as a potential candidate. How many progressives, after all, are likely to take advice from Will? This was all about cutting the legs out from under the two most familiar Democrats in the race — Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren — and Brown was a just a sharp blade that Will found in the kitchen drawer.

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Advice for artists

This is good advice for any artist or writer — like “kill all your darlings.” From Jim Eno of Spoon (in The New York Times Magazine):

“A lot of times, an interesting thing to do is to take out the first thing you recorded and see where it goes from there.”

Basically, the artist needs to be ready to free himself from his own biases and only keep what works. Sometimes it means realizing that what triggered a project no longer has a place, which is difficult.

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How to describe Spoon

I first became aware of the Texas band Spoon when I heard the song “The Beast and the Dragon, Adored” on the radio close to a decade ago. (Exact date? Who knows, but the song is from the 2005 album Gimme Fiction, so we’ll leave it at “close to a decade.”)

The song is mesmerizing, a sinewy bit of rock ‘n’ roll that is not quite blues but plays around the edges. I downloaded the song — it remains my favorite by the band — but didn’t buy the album, — not, anyway, until the 2007 masterpiece Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga came out. I was hooked.

And yet, I’ve never felt comfortable describing the band. What is Spoon? Where does the band fit? It was experimental without sounding experimental, classic without sounding retro. Who is Spoon?

I think I found the answer, in a piece by Dan Kois in The New York Times Magazine. Part feature, part review of their soon-to-be-released album They Want My Soul (coming Tuesday, yay!), Kois writes that

Spoon seems to look at rock songs analytically and figure out ways to deconstruct them, as a molecular gastronomist might do with a traditional recipe. Riffs and instruments stand out in Spoon’s songs, individual sounds in empty space. The result is that their songs deliver a pure rush of musical elation, the distillation of rock music, in the way that sea-urchin foam on an avant-garde restaurant’s plate provides a diner with the essential flavor of ocean. Spoon delivers the power of familiar songs without actually sounding that much like other rock music at all.

Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga certainly has that feel, with nods to pop and soul that feel wholly organic even as they are layered on top of an indie-rock frame. Transference has a rougher, more aggressive sound, though it too feels complete and whole and wholly unlike most of what one usually gets from the dead genre known as alternative.

I’ve heard a few songs from the new album — so far, so good, so varied in approach and sound. I like the atmospherics of “Inside Out,” the sense of floating in unmoored modernity. “The Rent I Pay” is more aggressive, but mines some of the same thematic territory. “Do You” has a pop feel, but is driven by a nasty guitar that snakes into the mix.

This is not a review of the album — I haven’t heard it in its entirety yet — but I do like what I hear so far, (I’ll be listening this weekend  — it is available for streaming via iTunes radio.)

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