Sic Semper Tyrannis

James Taylor's Sweet Baby James, (with apologies to Naomi)

When you're working your way through the Rolling Stone Top 100 Albums I am finding out that you have to wade your way through a lot of singer/songwriter sensitivity. (See also the post on Van Morrison's Astral Weeks and the post I didn't have the heart to write about Joni Mitchell's Blue.) Maybe the early seventies was the magazine's heyday, so they proclaimed a larger amount of the cultural artifacts to be "genius." Whatever the reason, I've probably said before that this type of "guy-and-a-guitar" stuff is not really my specialty. I don't worship at the church of the holy lyric.

Well, James Taylor's second albumSweet Baby James is another one of those revered albums that I just don't understand. While "Fire and Rain" is admittedly very pretty and his re-working of "Oh Susanna" with extended-voiced jazz chords is interesting to me and a demonstration of how able Taylor is as an acoustic finger-picker, it doesn't cover up the fact that there is a grievous musical sin present on this album.

It is called "Steamroller."

It is your basic twelve-bar blues, the standard form for improvisers in bar bands the Western World over. And I'll let that idea sink in a little bit...James Taylor...singing "blues."

I'm talking about one of the most pleasant, non-confrontational voices in all of pop music. When he sings "Well, I'm a cement mixer/ A churning urn of burning funk," it is mind-blowingly wrong on a couple different levels.

One, the blues idiom is certainly no place for clever word play and alliteration. Save that for the college-sweater-and-tie crowd.

But more importantly, when that kindly, soda-jerk-with-a-heart-of-gold, voice sings "I'm a churning urn of burning funk," it is self-reflexively false and impossible. Kind of like writing "This sentence contains no words."

I can't think of anything less funky right now than James Taylor's voice and music. (Actually, I can: Mozart. Bill Gates. Stephen Hawking... But you get the point.) It would be like Mister Rogers rapping some Tupac or Biggie Smalls. Just not believable. Now... Prince. Albert King. George Clinton. James Brown. Marvin Gaye...I'd believe it if one of those guys told me they had some "burning funk" within them.

And "Steamroller" is just the most notable of two or three blueses performed by Taylor on this album. And each time I played them I think I also heard the sound of Howlin' Wolf, John Lee Hooker, and Muddy Waters rolling over in their graves.

posted by Mike @ 7:26 PM