The Guardian can't spell Kolaveri

I've cribbed about the art and food components of the Guardian's Bombay guide, and here's an interesting new blog taking on the audio-visual interpretation of the city created by the music collective B.L.O.T.
The Guardian's never been strong on India, but a recent article about the hit song Why This Kolaveri Di seems a low point even by the paper's standards. To begin with, the writer, Priya Virmani, gets the spelling of Kolaveri wrong. Then she translates Kolaveri Di incorrectly: the phrase does not mean "killer rage", only its first word does. The second word, Di, has no English equivalent, but defines the addressee as female. Why this Kolaveri Di? is equivalent to, "Why this murderous fury, girl?"
I'd have let this slide, but Virmani goes on to suggest the singer strings words together, "in a very James Joyce-like stream of consciousness". Now, I'm a bit protective about Joyce, and once Virmani's brought him into the picture, I take it personally. She digs herself deeper in the hole by asking, "Is this Joyce's 20th-century symbolist writing making a comeback in a 21st-century guise?" Do sample, here, the most famous example of Joyce's stream-of-consciousness style, the final chapter of Ulysses, and decide for yourself if it has anything in common with symbolism, or with lines like these from Why This Kolaveri Di:
Aa.. distance la moonu moonu
Moonu colour-u white.
White-u background night night-u
Night-u coloru black-u
Haan.. why this kolaveri kolaveri kolaveri di

White skin-u girl-u girl-u
Girl-u heart-u black-u
Eyes-u eyes-u meet-u meet-u
My future dark-u
Why this kolaveri kolaveri kolaveri di

There have been hundreds of articles written about Kolaveri Di, but I'm yet to read a satisfying analysis of why the song works. Sure, as pointed out here, here, here and here, it's a catchy tune that employs demotic Tamil-English to amusing effect, but that's far from enough to explain the song's crossover success. Asking the singer-lyricist Dhanush isn't much help either, because he sees it only as a nonsense verse scribbled in under half an hour.
The song is very meta, and though that's true of pretty much every cultural product these days, it is still worthwhile underlining, as few writers have, that the singer switches regularly from a depressed, rejected loser to somebody commenting on the melody itself, using phrases like 'flop song', 'rhythm correct', 'maintain please', 'what a changeover mama', and 'OK, now tune change'. The music also contains ironic passages. It starts folksy with a nadaswaram beat, before shifting to a wedding band atmosphere and a trumpet going dreadfully, and comically, out of tune.
The distancing effect created by the words and music is greatly enhanced by an element that analysts have mysteriously missed: the visual dimension. Kolaveri Di's popularity exploded primarily through YouTube, where its viewership is about to hit the 50 million mark. The video focuses on four young, good-looking people in a recording studio: Dhanush, the singer; Anirudh, the composer; Dhanush's co-star Shruti Haasan; and his wife Aishwariya Rajinikanth who's directed the film featuring Kolaveri Di. Whether or not we know they're among the wealthy darlings of the nation, the video conveys an impression that these people have it all, in glaring contrast to the poor protagonist of the song.
The emotion felt by the 'soup boy', then, is twice filtered: first, through a pidgin tongue that varies from faintly to wholly ridiculous; and, second, through a visual rendition entirely at cross purposes with the song's theme. The two negatives end up making something like a positive. Whereas melodrama of the Devdas variety begs to be deflated, the Kolaveri Di singer -- endowed with the requisite props of moonlit night, glass of scotch, and teary eyes -- ends curiously validated. The multiple distancing, Brechtian alienation if you will, results in the condition being described floating free of its particular anchor -- the soup boy's tale of woe -- and assuming a general or universal aspect. The song's mildly nonsensical quality facilitates a disentangling of the fundamental state of being jilted, or of loving without requital, from any narrative specifics. This precipitates a recognition in ourselves of having felt a similar emotion, or been in an analogous situation, and therefore to identify with the singer and song. Viewing any incarnation of Devdas, my primary response for three hours straight is, "What an idiot". With Kolaveri Di it's more like, "This guy's foolish, but I've been there myself, or can imagine being there". I can't imagine being like Devdas, ever.
As one's identification with the singer and situation evolves, the silly lyrics, jotted in a hurry with no forethought, begin to appear clever, even eloquent, if some way short of Joycean in stature.

Mangled Anthems

Christina Aguilera's been singing the Star Spangled Banner at public functions since she was a kid, but evidently hasn't learned the words yet. She flubbed the fourth line of the national anthem sung at the start of the Super Bowl. Should a singer do something like that to the Indian national anthem, she would have a dozen criminal cases filed against her in far flung courts ruled by attention-seeking magistrates.
We take our national symbols seriously. Three years ago, Sania Mirza was accused of insulting the national flag because she put her bare feet up while resting after a Hopman Cup match, and a photographer clicked a low angle shot that suggested the feet were in close proximity to an Indian flag placed on an adjoining table. This was enough for a criminal charge.


There's a folded khadi flag in a cupboard in our home, which used to be flown during Independence Day and Republic Day in the idealistic days of the 1950s. Somewhere down the line, the government forbade citizens from hoisting flags because of the potential insult to the nation, should they be flown upside down. It took a petition filed by Naveen Jindal and a Supreme Court verdict to reverse the idiotic policy, but those who inadvertently put the green above the saffron can expect to be hauled off to jail.
All of which makes a Borat-like performance impossible in India. I mean, a guy could pretend to sing the Kazakh national anthem to the tune of Jana Gana Mana at a public function, but once the film was released (abroad that is, it would be banned in India) PILs, extradition demands, and death threats would inevitably follow. Luckily there are places where expression is freer, and so we have Sacha Baron Cohen's fabulous mangling of the Star Spangled Banner to laugh at. The horse rearing and falling at the end of the sequence, which can be seen here, is an unexpected bonus. Like the bird flying to the centre of the frame and diving straight down into the water at the end of Barton Fink.

Bhimsen Joshi

Listening to Bhimsen Joshi was like consuming a comforting meal in a top quality restaurant, a meal based on hearty fare, devoid of frippery. I can think of singers who soared higher (Kumar Gandharva), dug deeper (Amir Khan), and had more refined voices (Pandit Jasraj). But nobody approached Bhimsen Joshi for the all-round satisfaction he always provided.
A concert by him seemed somehow basic, fundamental, even though his practice was highly sophisticated. One came away satiated. Meat and potatoes on a cold winter night; or fish curry, rice and beer by a sunny Goa beach.

Rasta to Zion, cut and paste

Bobby Farrell, of Boney M died in St.Petersberg yesterday, in his hotel rather than during a performance of Rasputin. I wrote a column about Boney M and geopolitics a few weeks ago, but since Yahoo! is in the midst of a reorganisation, and all our columns have temporarily gone off line, I'm cutting and pasting the piece here.

Rasta to Zion

The Palestine International Festival of Dance and Music, designed to draw attention to water shortages in the West Bank, isn’t exactly the hottest ticket on the global performance circuit. The only reason the disco band Boney M’s gig in Ramallah gained coverage was that organisers asked the band not to play one of its greatest hits, Rivers of Babylon. The lyrics, derived from the Old Testament’s Book of Psalms, are words spoken by Jews lamenting their exile from Jerusalem, which is frequently referred to in the Bible as Zion:

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down

Yeah we wept, when we remembered Zion.

When the wicked

Carried us away in captivity

Required from us a song.

Now how shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?

Any mention of Zion is a tricky matter in the Arab world, where the state of Israel is frequently disparaged as ‘the Zionist entity’. The Wachowski brothers discovered this when their film The Matrix Reloaded was banned in Egypt. The authorities claimed they objected to the portrayal of a Creator, but the real problem probably lay with the rebel stronghold in the movie being named Zion.

The Wachowskis, aware they might be labelled Zionist propagandists, had taken precautions, like putting the rebel leader Morpheus in charge of a ship called the Nebuchadnezzar. That gentleman was a king of Babylon who conquered Jerusalem in 597 BC, and returned to crush a revolt a decade later. The Jews captured or driven into exile in this period constituted the first Diaspora. Nebuchadnezzar may have constructed one of the wonders of the ancient world, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, but it counted for little in the minds of those who composed the Bible. There, he is forever the wicked king carrying the Chosen into captivity. It is commonly held that history is written by the winners. The Old Testament appears to disprove that theory, as do a few Rajput tracts I know.

Despite the bad notices in the Holy Book, Nebuchadnezzar has attracted his share of fans down the ages, like a certain Saddam Hussein who dreamt of becoming the second ruler from what is now Iraq to conquer Jerusalem. Unlike his predecessor, however, Saddam was a mediocre general. The Nebuchadnezzar division of his Republican Guard found considerably less success in battle than the Nebuchadnezzar of the Matrix series, leave alone the army of the ancient Babylonian king.

Those who saw The Matrix Reloaded might have noticed a preponderance of dreadlocks at the dance party within the rebel camp before the crucial battle. This arguably echoes a different tradition of longing for Zion, Rastafarian rather than Jewish.

The Rastafarian faith traces its origins to the Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey, who launched a Back to Africa movement in the early twentieth century. In one of his more fervid speeches, Garvey proclaimed, “Look to Africa for the crowning of a Black King; he shall be the redeemer”. When, some years later, Ras Tafari Makonnen became Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, it was interpreted by many Jamaicans as the crowning Garvey had spoken about. In Rastafari theology, Haile Selassie, who claimed descent from Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, came to be regarded an incarnation of Jesus. Ethiopia was considered Zion, the land to which the African Diaspora would return from its exile in Babylon, variously seen as Jamaica or the West.

Ethiopia, the Promised Land? What were those guys smoking, you might ask. The answer is: preparations of Cannabis Indica, a plant indentured labourers from the subcontinent introduced to the Caribbean. Rastafaris believe, as do some dreadlocked sadhus, that ganja has spiritual properties. Smoking it is a sacrament.

The songs of the most famous Rastafari convert, Bob Marley, are saturated with the political and philosophical beliefs of the movement. When Marley sings Iron, Lion, Zion or Zion Train; or when he speaks in Exodus of leaving Babylon and returning to the fatherland; he’s referring to places outside Israel and Iraq, and even Asia. This is also true, as it happens, of Rivers of Babylon, originally recorded by the Rastafarian reggae group The Melodians before being covered by Boney M in a version that achieved worldwide success.

Maybe that’s what Maize Williams of Boney M should have told the organisers of the Palestine festival. It’s not Jerusalem the people in my song are remembering, it’s obviously Addis Ababa. There’s more than one Zion in the world.

There’s also, as it turns out more than one Boney M in the world. There are as many Boney Ms, in fact, as there were members in the band’s line-up in the late 1970s. After disco collapsed as precipitously as Arab defences had during the 1967 war, the group spent years in the wilderness before the nostalgic revival of the early 1990s brought them back to the limelight. Each of the four toured separately as Boney M; the only problem was, just two of the four had ever sung a word in the band’s studio records. The other two were there to dance attractively and lip sync in concerts. Maizie Williams, who rocked Ramallah a few days ago, is one of the non-singers. How would she sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? Out of tune, unless helped by backing vocalists, with the volume turned low on her microphone.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, 1

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows ended up being as tedious as the first half of the book from which it is adapted. I wish they'd junked most of those interminable scenes in the tent and concentrated entirely on the Horcruxes, basically made it into an action film instead of a tragi-romance of the kind that fourteen year-old girls seem to love. By which I mean HP7:1 is quite close in mood to the Twilight series. Hermione's even begun to look a bit like Bella, all pale and frail.
I liked the opening a lot though. The melancholy hits you hard right at the start, and the music has a lot to do with it. Nine out of ten Hollywood films use the same soupy sound to tug at heartstrings, but I felt the score of the Deathly Hallows had something profound to it. Maybe I'd change my mind on a second viewing, I'm never confident about my musical judgment anyway.
As soon as the first chase gets under way, one realises the director David Yates is on much firmer footing in emotional scenes than slam-bang ones. That was the case in Order of the Phoenix as well. In Half-Blood Prince, Yates chose a classical pace, and I think that resulted in the most successful of the three Harry Potter films he's directed. Perhaps not coincidentally, it's also by far the best of the last three books in the series.

Lennon, Imagine and Come Together

I'm late with a 70th birthday homage to John Lennon, but that's because I've been shuttling between cities too much.


Anytime there's a tribute concert or any memorial event for Lennon, there'll be hordes of people swaying and singing Imagine. I understand why. Imagine is free of inputs from Lennon's band-mates. It is a simple, moving and radical song. But its emotional impact and political message have been dampened by overuse, turning the song into a cliche (though some chap on American Idol a couple of years ago refused to sing the 'no religion' verse, reminding us of its better days). Imagine, moreover, lacks the sardonic wit that enlivened Lennon's songs and interviews.
I find Come Together from Abbey Road a good antidote to Imagine, and think of it as the most representative Lennon song (you can hear it here). Take the title, for a start. It seems to seek peace and harmony in a manner similar to Imagine, but also contains, as Lennon once pointed out, 'the other meaning'. The refrain goes, 'Come together, right now, over me'. The first two words are flower-child-y enough, but what's unusual is the imperative mood, as if we were being commanded to inculcate tolerance and liberalism. This feeling is heightened by the next phrase, 'right now'. Not only must we learn to live as one, but we are ordered to do so immediately. And then the mysterious 'over me', which doesn't have a pindownable meaning. The line starts out in one place and ends somewhere else altogether.

These are the words of the entire song:

Here come old flattop he come grooving up slowly
He got joo-joo eyeball he one holy roller
He got hair down to his knee
Got to be a joker he just do what he please

He wear no shoeshine he got toe-jam football
He got monkey finger he shoot coca-cola
He say "I know you, you know me"
One thing I can tell you is you got to be free
Come together right now over me

He bag production he got walrus gumboot
He got Ono sideboard he one spinal cracker
He got feet down below his knees
Hold you in his armchair you can feel his disease
Come together right now over me

He roller-coaster he got early warning
He got muddy water he one mojo filter
He say "One and one and one is three"
Got to be good-looking 'cause he's so hard to see
Come together right now over me

The song's frequently interpreted as a description of Lennon, or of all four Beatles in succession, but it's pointless seeking that kind of coherence in words deliberately written as gibberish. We have the protagonist described as 'flat top' at the start, but two lines later this is transformed into 'hair down below his knee', as if a marine suddenly turned into a hippie. The protagonist doesn't come across as a winning personality: joo-joo eyeball, toejam football, monkey finger, walrus gumboot, muddy water, spinal cracker, while all largely undecipherable, certainly don't constitute attractive features. The 'feel his disease' bit more or less settles the case. What worth are we to ascribe to such a man's viewpoint?
The protagonist wants two things of us: first that we come together; second that we be free. These two desires encapsulate the contradictory nature of the freedom envisioned by sixties' counterculture. To explain what I mean, let's turn to the two sources Lennon used in creating the song. The first line is pinched from Chuck Berry's You Can't Catch Me, a song that also inspired Lennon's tune. Though Lennon, on McCartney's advice, slowed down the rhythm of Come Together, he was sued for plagiarism and settled out of court.



You can hear the Berry song here. Lennon's 'flat-top, grooving up slowly' is a riff on lines in the third stanza:

You Can't Catch Me

I bought a brand-new air-mobile.
It' custom-made, 'twas a Flight De Ville.
With a pow'ful motor and some hideaway wings.
Push in on the button and you will get a scene.

Now you can't catch me,
Baby, you can't catch me.
'Cause if you get too close,
You know I'm gone, like a cool breeze.

New Jersey Turnpike in the wee, wee hours,
I was rollin' slow because of drizzlin' showers.
Here come a flat-top, he was movin' up with me,
Then come wavin' goodbye a little' old souped-up jitney.
I put my foot in my tank and I began to roll.
Moanin' siren, 'twas a state patrol.
So I let out my wings and then I blew my horn,
Bye-bye New Jersey, I' become airborne.

For Chuck Berry, freedom is simple. It means fast cars, pretty girls, money, and rock and roll. Authority might try getting in the way, but Berry's quicker, and has a vast continent in which to ride and hide.
The protagonist of Come Together is on a different trip. He 'shoots Coca Cola' and is on a roller-coaster. The suggestion is of physical stasis accompanied by neural stimulation. The rhythm, described by McCartney as 'swampy', creates the appropriate drugged mood, so different from the snappy pace of the Chuck Berry number. The title of Come Together was derived from Timothy Leary's quixotic campaign for California governor against Ronald Reagan. Leary was an advocate of drug use and legalising marijuana. He joined John and Yoko at their Montreal bed-in, and asked Lennon to write a song built around his campaign slogan, 'Come together, join the party'. Lennon didn't comply, but composed the tune we know around the time Leary was jailed for drug possession. Chuck Berry, meanwhile, had finished serving a sentence for pursuing his own brand of freedom: he was jailed for violating the Mann Act, transporting an underage female across state lines. The girl in question was somewhat younger than Sweet Little Sixteen, and Berry's air-mobile obviously not quick enough to evade the flat-tops.
While Berry's view of the world has always been entirely self-centred and pleasure-driven, Leary's journey was different. He began his experiments with drugs after discovering mushrooms used as hallucinogens in ritual ceremonies among natives of South America. Mind-altering drugs, in this tradition, were supposed to be simultaneously a reaching within the self and a reaching out to others, simultaneously an individualistic and communitarian act. That's the ideal enunciated in Lennon's song: the twin injunctions of 'gotta be free' and 'come together'. But the imagery he invents, half nonsensical though it is, undercuts the possibility of reaching out while also being self-absorbed, and thus serves as a critique of himself as well as of sixties' counterculture as a whole.

After this analysis, which will doubtless be received as over-reading by many, it's time for some light relief. In 1972, Lennon and Berry appeared live on the Mike Douglas show, the only time the two greats met. Introducing his guest, Lennon made his famous comment that, "If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it Chuck Berry. Their jam session was a bit of a train wreck, obviously under-rehearsed, and not helped by Yoko Ono on Berry's left punctuating proceedings with the occasional primal scream.
You can see Lennon's introduction here, their attempt at Johnny B. Goode here, a truly catastrophic Memphis, Tennessee here. Don't miss Berry's startled response to Yoko's scream at 3.15.

Rasta to Zion

The Palestine International Festival of Dance and Music, designed to draw attention to water shortages in the West Bank, isn’t exactly the hottest ticket on the global performance circuit. The only reason the disco band Boney M’s gig in Ramallah gained coverage was that organisers asked the band not to play one of its greatest hits, Rivers of Babylon.
Read the rest of my Yahoo! column here.

Column: Tryst with Blasphemy

My latest column for Yahoo! India can be read here.

Beautiful Day ruined

The finale of this American Idol season was a turkey. I supported Lee DeWyze through the series, though not with any great enthusiasm. His performance in the final episode, though, lost him my vote. His opponent Crystal Bowersox was hardly better; after all, screaming in tune is still screaming.
The worst moment of the evening was Lee sleepwalking through U2's Beautiful Day (in case the video has been taken down, just type in the relevant terms and YouTube will offer an alternative). If you want to hear how that song should be sung, try this version by a Norwegian named Kurt Nilsen, who beat out favourite Kelly Clarkson to win the inaugural (and only) World Idol title.
And here, for reference, is the original studio recording and music video.

Anju Dodiya's Necklace of Echoes at Vadehra, Delhi

The UK sales of U2's 2009 release, No Line on the Horizon, were disappointing. The album may have gone multi-platinum, but its predecessors, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb and All That You Can't Leave Behind had sold three or four times as many copies. The relatively low revenues were particularly surprising because the album came after a five year hiatus, and generated positive reviews. The problem was the record sounded a lot like U2's other efforts. The band, recognising the danger of repetitiveness, had brought in Arabic elements, but eventually rejected these as not sounding genuine.
Those familiar with Anju Dodiya's paintings might see the relevance of the story to her work. Anju's show at Vadehra Art Gallery, Necklace of Echoes, has all the qualities we admire about her, notably a great facility with watercolours. She toils to individuate each image, never resorting to the 'stock-figure-against-flat-background' so popular among Indian painters. The theme she has chosen, of using necklace-like forms to tell tales of sacrifice, anxiety and violence, is parlayed effectively across the show's dozen or so large format pictures.
She is, in every way, a more accomplished artist than she was when her first solo was mounted back in 1991. After that series of rather angsty self-portraits, Anju took to splitting her self-image in two. This highlighted the playfulness in the compositions by forestalling easy biographical interpretations. The play-acting was elaborated in the next few years through images in which she appeared as everything from a movie star to a sumo wrestler. She took to using charcoal, partly to undercut some of the prettiness in her pictures. In one group show she painted on mattresses, and subsequently used fabric and embroidery extensively. The solo before the current one had her experiment with printmaking.
This brief history should establish that Anju has been concerned about not repeating herself. And yet a sense of deja vu could not be ignored as I walked around her latest offering in Vadehra Art Gallery's Okhla space. The echoes in Necklace of Echoes, intentionally or not, were of the artist's previous work. In her latest paintings she has largely moved away from the split-personlity mode, and produced works that share the dark mood of her very first show.
Anju's necklaces take on a variety of forms, from Angulimala's garland of fingers to the burning tyres used for 'necklacings' in South Africa. For me they represent a wheel that has come full circle. After two decades of concentrating exclusively on self-images, she has exhausted the role-playing mode and now needs to find a form of expression that does not involve the self-portrait.
Whatever she discovers, I hope it will be more fruitful than U2's aborted Moroccan experiment.

The first disaster concert

As musicians sign on for a gig to aid Haiti, it's worth thinking back to the event that started it all, the Concert for Bangladesh, organised by George Harrison at the behest of Ravi Shankar, and held on August 1, 1971, at Madison Square Garden, New York. Apart from Harrison, Bob Dylan sang a suite of songs, Eric Clapton played guitar, Ringo Starr drummed, and Ravi Shankar was joined at the start by Ali Akbar Khan on sarod and Alla Rakha on tabla. Genius.
The Indian maestros played a tune called Bangla Dhun composed for the occasion by Ravi Shankar. A recording of the performance can be viewed here. If you want one short encapsulation of the sound of India circa 1971, this is it for my money. Having said that, I'm not knowledgable about music.
There's a hilarious moment about 4 minutes in, when Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan adjust their instruments. As soon as they stop, the crowd bursts into applause, at which point Ravi Shankar says drily, "Thank you, if you appreciate the tuning so much, I hope you will enjoy the playing more".

Bob and Shahrukh

Two bits of news caught my attention today. This morning I read about a guy in New Jersey calling the police after spotting "an eccentric looking old man" wandering about the yard of his home, which had a For Sale sign on it. An officer named Kristie Buble answered the call and caught up with the disheveled man a block away. He was walking around in pouring rain. She asked him who he was, and he replied, "Bob Dylan". She asked him what he was doing, he said he was looking at a house for sale. And what was he doing in town? He was on tour with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp. He had no ID, was wearing black sweatpants and two raincoats.
Concluding the man was "acting suspicious", Buble decided to drive him back to the hotel where he said he was staying. He was very co-operative; "He said he understood why I had to verify his identity and why I couldn't let him go," Buble said. "He asked me if I could drive him back to the neighborhood when I verified who he was, which made me even more suspicious".
She was met by her sergeant at the parking lot of the hotel, and told him, "Sarge, this man claims he's Bob Dylan". The man peered into the car and shook his head, "That's not Bob Dylan".
Needless to say, it was Bob Dylan. The officers were left feeling sheepish after the identity of the living legend was verified by staff. There is no indication if Dylan got a ride back to the place from where he was picked up.


A few hours later came news of Shahrukh Khan being held up at Newark for two hours. "I was really hassled at the American airport because of my name being Khan...It was absolutely uncalled for...I felt angry and humiliated," said the actor, who was heading to Chicago to participate in an Independence Day celebration. Coincidentally, Shahrukh has a film coming up titled My Name Is Khan, in which his character is harassed by US authorities and feels angry and humiliated.
You can't buy such publicity.

Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson was an A grade singer-songwriter, an A grade performer, and an A grade weirdo. After 1993, the balance started shifting decisively in favour of weirdo. He gained fame as a child, developed into the biggest star of the MTV generation, and burnished his credentials further in the era of globalisation. His last good album, Dangerous, came out when Russia and China were open for business. As the tallest figure in the entertainment industry at that moment, Jackson could with justice claim to be the first truly global superstar since Charlie Chaplin. Half the sales of his greatest album, 1982's Thriller, had come from North America; in the case of 1991's Dangerous it was less than a third.
The best-known video from Dangerous, Black or White, advertised the new era. It took in sub-Saharan tribesmen, Thai, Indian and Russian dancers, and climaxed with people changing faces and races in front of one's eyes as if by magic. That magic was the technique of digital morphing. It is so commonplace now that the public incorrectly believes any image can be seamlessly replaced by any other. Watching the video today one can identify points where the transitions between actors are rough. Back in 1992, though, one viewed it with wide-eyed wonder; it seemed a perfect match of cutting-edge technology, style and content.
In Jackson's homeland, a number of commentators noted that the singer's recourse to cosmetic surgery to lighten his complexion and sharpen his features cut against the grain of Black or White's message. The weirdo side of his personality had begun to harm his songwriting. When the first allegations of child sexual abuse came out in 1993, things turned ugly. This was not any more a matter of personal eccentricity. There were lawsuits, attacks in the media. Jackson, who never understood why a gentle person like himself who would not physically harm anybody was being hounded for sleeping with his young boy friends, developed a persecution complex. The new songs in the 1995 album HIStory merged his personal grouses with injustices being perpetrated on a global scale. The videos highlighted the uneasy marriage of public and private complaint. When Jackson sings 'They don't care about us' in a Brazilian favela, he implies he belongs with the underprivileged of the world. Who could swallow that?
Beginning with HIStory, joy and playfulness were swept aside in favour of melancholy, tedious ballads, a sententious attention to this or that cause. The life became more interesting than the music, its trajectory spiralling relentlessly downwards: the divorces, the debts and, finally, death. Many fans insist the O2 performances scheduled to start later this summer in London would have afforded Jackson some redemption. I seriously doubt it. I don't believe he had the mental stamina to complete anything close to 50 shows. The weirdo had taken over too completely from the consummate performer.

Road to Hell or Stairway to Heaven?

Barack Obama and Tim Geithner have had a tough couple of weeks, and criticism is pouring in from unlikely quarters. The Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek said yesterday the US administration's stimulus plan is a "road to hell". President Obama might have expected warmer words in the run-up to his Prague visit scheduled for early April. Topolanek gave vent to his feelings at an EU meeting just after his government lost a vote of confidence. I doubt his successor will thump him on the back, saying: "thanks a bunch, Mirek, for telling it like it is".
Damage control operations have commenced. The Czechs now claim the translation was faulty: The suggestion wasn't that the US plan is bad, only that it would be catastrophic for the EU to follow that path. Which still indicates Americans aren't on a stairway to heaven.

And its whispered that soon
If we all call the tune
Then the piper will lead us to reason.
And a new day will dawn
For those who stand long
And the forests will echo with laughter.

With each passing day fewer people believe the piper's name is Barack. Chris Rea reflects the mood of the moment better than Led Zep:

And all the roads jam up with credit
And there’s nothing you can do
It’s all just bits of paper flying away from you
Oh look out world, take a good look
What comes down here
You must learn this lesson fast and learn it well
This ain’t no upwardly mobile freeway
Oh no, this is the road to hell

Update March 28: I wasn't far off the mark. Mirek Topolanek today said his remark about Obama's 'road to hell' was subconsciously inspired by AC / DC's Highway to Hell, which the band played during their Prague gig a few days beforethe Czech PM made his gaffe. The song's words don't seem as prescient as the Chris Rea lyrics, but here's the opening stanza anyway:

Living easy, living free
Season ticket on a one-way ride
Asking nothing, leave me be
Taking everything in my stride
Dont need reason, dont need rhyme
Aint nothing I would rather do
Going down, party time
My friends are gonna be there too

Im on the highway to hell