Expanded blog post, July archive (complete).

Music: current count 31831 [31798] rated (+33), 257 [259] unrated (-2).

Got a good start last week, even while I delayed posting Music Week, then lost most of three days with company and cooking, before partially recovering while I wrote up Weekend Roundup. The reason for last week's delayed posting was that I was tied up in one of my favorite wastes of time: compiling several dozens of mid-year ("so far") best-of lists. I've scoured through 66 lists, where each mention counts as one point regardless of rank (most lists are unranked, and many are are short compared to EOY lists, so this scheme is just easier to build the EOY list aggregate on top of. I've also included letter grades for Robert Christgau and myself (although only so far for records mentioned on other lists), using { A = 5, A- = 4, B+/*** = 3, ** = 2, * = 1 }. This introduces a slight skew, but it's diminished as I've added more lists. And since I'm actually more interested in using this as a tool to guide my own listening than as some sort of value-free social science research, I've included a few lists from friends and allies, including at least one I scraped off the unlinkable Facebook. (I suppose it might be possible to link to it, but common decency suggests otherwise.)

One thing I found odd is that I literally didn't find a single jazz list. Maybe I'll write one up later this week. The other thing I'm tempted to do is to add in points for AOTY 80+ ratings. For a few years I actually collected those ratings, but gave it up 2-3 years ago as too much work. On the other hand, some record of those ratings would round out the picture.

Without further ado, here are the top 30 records (so far), with point counts in braces and my grades in brackets:

1. Billy Eilish: When We All Fall Asleep Where Do We Go? (Darkroom/Interscope) {43} [A-]
2. Lizzo: Cuz I Love You (Nice Life/Atlantic) {40} [A-]
3. Tyler the Creator: Igor (Columbia) {38} [**]
4. Vampire Weekend: Father of the Bride (Columbia) {38} [**]
5. Sharon Van Etten: Remind Me Tomorrow (Jagjaguwar) {38} [*]
6. Solange: When I Get Home (Saint/Columbia) {37} [*]
7. Ariana Grande: Thank U Next (Republic) {33} [**]
8. Big Thief: UFOF (4AD) {32} [A-]
9. Little Simz: Grey Area (Age 101) {32} [A-]
10. James Blake: Assume Form (Polydor) {25} [B-]
11. Carly Rae Jepsen: Dedicated (604/School Boy/Interscope) {25} [***]
12. Jenny Lewis: On the Line (Warner Bros) {24} [*]
13. Charly Bliss: Young Enough (Barsuk) {23} [A-]
14. Jamila Woods: Legacy! Legacy! (Jagjaguwar) {23} [A-]
15. Stella Donnelly: Beware of the Dogs (Secretly Canadian) {22} [***]
16. Slowthai: Nothing Great About Britain (Method) {22} [***]
17. Weyes Blood: Titanic Rising (Sub Pop) {22} [B-]
18. Dave: Psychodrama (Neighbourhood) {20} [A-]
19. Flying Lotus: Flamagra (Warp) {20} [**]
20. Fontaines DC: Dogrel (Partisan) {19} [***]
21. Megan Thee Stallion: Fever (300 Entertainment) {19} [***]
22. Anderson .Paak: Ventura (Aftermath/12 Tone Music) {19} [***]
23. Better Oblivion Community Center (Dead Oceans) {18} [*]
24. Denzel Curry: Zuu (Loma Vista) {18} [**]
25. The National: I Am Easy to Find (4AD) {18} [**]
26. Maggie Rogers: Heard It in a Past Life (Capitol) {17} [**]
27. Billy Woods & Kenny Segal: Hiding Places (Blackwoodz Studioz) {17} [***]
28. Nilufer Yanya: Miss Universe (ATO) {17} [A-]
29. Rico Nasty/Kenny Beats: Anger Management (Sugar Trap) {16} [**]
30. Kevin Abstract: Arizona Baby (Question Everything/RCA) {14} [**]
31. Julia Jacklin: Crushing (Polyvinyl) {14} [B]

Cutoff just above {13}: PUP, Quelle Chris, Toro Y Moi; {12}: Malibu Ken, Khalid, Bassekou Kouyate; {11}: 2 Chainz, Chemical Brothers, The Comet Is Coming, Aldous Harding, Priests, Todd Snider. Highest ranked records I haven't heard: {10}: Holly Herndon: Proto, Jessica Pratt: Quiet Signs; {8}: Deerhunter: Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?; {6}: Baroness, Gary Clark Jr., Flume, Foals, Cate Le Bon, Mark Ronson, Yola. I didn't bother with metal lists, so only noted 35 records as such, 0 heard by me. The overall list collected 745 titles (only 64 jazz, 50 heard by me).

I can't draw many conclusions from this data. The point scheme tends to keep any record from breaking out, with the top nine records (down to Little Simz but not James Blake) on most of the same lists. My guess is that if I had consistent ranking information Tyler, Vampire Weekend, and/or Solange would advanced a bit (also Weyes Blood, which topped two lists). Indeed, without the RC/TH grade points, Tyler would have come in first, with 36 points, vs. Eilish (34), Vampire Weekend/Van Etten (33), Lizzo (32), Grande (28), Blake (25), Big Thief/Little Simz (24).

I will probably add a few more lists as I find them. For instance, I have two specialized lists at Noisey open in tabs now (33 Essential Albums You Probably Missed So Far in 2009 and The 37 Best Ambient Albums of 2019 So Far) but held them back in case I found a more general list there. I may also, as noted, come up with a way to factor some grading data into the list.

Most of the non-jazz albums I've listened to in the last two weeks were suggested by these lists. They haven't been especially reliable, but have generated a couple surprise finds (e.g., Christina Barbieri and Queen Key last week). But two of this week's top records came on CDs from a friendly publicist. I dragged my feet on the Bill Evans and Wes Montgomery label best-ofs, thinking I'd prefer to hear the original albums they were selected from. Finally broke down and graded them last week, then found some of the missing records (badly misfiled by Napster). We're still missing the latest releases -- Evans in England and Montgomery's Back on Indiana Avenue: The Carroll DeCamp Recordings. Turns out that the compilations do a good job of picking hilights from the series, and help round out a view of the artists beyond their masterworks (still Sunday at the Village Vanguard and Incredible Jazz Guitar).

I wanted to write a few words about DownBeat's Critics Poll results, but don't have the time (or possibly the stomach) for that right now. I missed the official deadline to vote, but was able to submit a ballot, which evidently was counted (my name is in the voter list, and they sent me a T-shirt). On the other hand, the disconnect between my votes and the charts is almost complete. Their HOF picks were especially paltry: I can sort of understand Nina Simone, who could be a great singer on occasion, but released a lot of bad-to-worse albums; but the Veterans Committee picks of Scott LaFaro and Joe Williams are hard to imagine. I might be OK with Williams if Jimmy Rushing was in, but even then he wouldn't be an obvious pick. LaFaro died at 25, having played with Bill Evans for two years, and with Ornette Coleman for considerably less. I've been touched by some of his work, but I have no idea how to compare his tiny discography against that of many other bassists not in the DBHOF. (On the other hand, the similarly short-lived Jimmy Blanton is in, as are such obvious contemporaries as Oscar Pettiford, Paul Chambers, Milt Hinton, Ray Brown, Ron Carter, and his predecessor with Coleman, Charlie Haden.)

Forthcoming week relatively open. Hope to get some work done on the Christgau website.

New records reviewed this week:

• James Blake: Assume Form (2019, Polydor): [r]: B-
• Julia Jacklin: Crushing (2019, Polyvinyl): [r]: B
• Judy and the Jerks: Music for Donuts EP (2019, Thrilling Living, EP): [r]: C+
• Aubrey Logan: Your Mom's Favorite Songs (2019, Resonance, EP): [r]: B+(*)
• Charlie Marie: Charlie Marie (2019, self-released, EP): [bc]: B+(**)
• The Mauskovic Dance Band: The Mauskovic Dance Band (2019, Soundway): [r]: B+(**)
• MC Frontalot: Net Split, or the Fathomless Heartbreak of Online Itself (2019, Level Up): [r]: B+(**)
• Nots: 3 (2019, Goner): [r]: B+(**)
• Nubiyan Twist: Jungle Run (2019, Strut): [r]: B-
• Karen O & Danger Mouse: Lux Prima (2019, BMG): [r]: B+(**)
• Old Man Saxon: Goldman Sax (2019, Saxon Kincy, EP): [r]: B+(**)
• William Parker/In Order to Survive: Live/Shapeshifter (2017 [2019], AUM Fidelity, 2CD): [r]: A-
• Joel Ross: KingMaker (2019, Blue Note): [r]: B+(*)
• Mavis Staples: Live in London (2018 [2019], Anti-): [r]: B+(**)
• Wreckless Eric: Transience (2019, Southern Domestic): [r]: B+(*)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Bill Evans: Smile With Your Heart: The Best of Bill Evans on Resonance (1968-69 [2019], Resonance): [cd]: A-
• Jazz Piano Panorama: The Best of Piano Jazz on Resonance (1968-2011 [2019], Resonance): [cd]: B+(*)
• Wes Montgomery: Wes's Best: The Best of Wes Montgomery on Resonance (1956-66 [2019], Resonance): [cd]: A-
• Sing a Song of Jazz: The Best of Vocal Jazz on Resonance (1956-2018 [2019], Resonance): [cd]: B
• Neil Young + Stray Gators: Tuscaloosa (1973 [2019], Reprise): [r]: B-

Old music:

• The Legendary Bill Evans Trio: The 1960 Birdland Sessions (1960 [2005], Fresh Sound): [r]: B+(***)
• Bill Evans: Some Other Time: The Lost Session From the Black Forest (1968 [2016], Resonance, 2CD): [r]: B+(***)
• Bill Evans: Another Time: The Hilversum Concert (1968 [2017], Resonance): [r]: B+(***)
• Franco, Josky, Matalanza Du T.P. OK Jazz: A Paris 1983 Missile (1983 [1996], Sonodisc): [dl]: A

• Wes Montgomery: In the Beginning (1949-58 [2016], Resonance, 2CD): [r]: B+(**)
• Wes Montgomery: Fingerpickin' (1957-58 [1996], Pacific Jazz): [r]: B+(**)
• Wes Montgomery: Far Wes (1958-59 [1990], Pacific Jazz): [r]: B+(*)
• Wes Montgomery: One Night in Indy (1959 [2016], Resonance): [r]: A-
• Wes Montgomery: Smokin' in Seattle: Live at the Penthouse (1966 [2017], Resonance): B+(***)
• Kristi Stassinopoulou/Stathis Kalyviotis: NYN (2016, Riverboat): [r]: B+(**)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Moy Eng/Wayne Wallace: The Blue Hour (Patois)
• Pearring Sound: Nothing but Time (self-released): October 4
• Fabrizio Sciacca Quartet: Gettin' It There (self-released): September 1

Weekend Roundup

Lots of links below -- probably more than usual, although as always I feel like I'm leaving a lot of stuff untouched. Some topics I only decided late in the game to break out (Boris Johnson under Mackey, impeachment under Reich, Iran under Simon/Stevenson) could have picked up more links had I acted earlier and more consciously. I meant to write more on Mueller under Alksne when I first found the piece, but by the time I got to it I had scattered Mueller links all over the page.

Some scattered links this week:

• Cynthia Alksne: No knight on a white horse: "House Democrats have spent the last two years waiting for someone else to solve the Trump conundrum."

• Josh Barro: The T-Mobile/Sprint merger remedy makes no sense.

• David Barsamian: Noam Chomsky: Life expectancy in the US is declining for a reason.

• Zack Beauchamp:

  • 5 losers and 0 winners from Robert Mueller's testimony to the House of Representatives: "Yes, it really was that bad." The list of losers: Robert Mueller, the House of Representatives, impeachment, President Trump, the Mueller report.

  • Mueller said Trump could be indicted once he leaves office.

• Russell Berman: Robert Mueller kept his promise:

  Democrats can't say Robert Mueller didn't warn them.

  For months, the former special counsel told them in every way he could -- in private negotiations, in his sole public statement on his investigation, through letters from the Justice Department -- that he did not want to testify before Congress, and that if he did, his appearance would be a dud.

  Today, Mueller fully delivered on that promise.

• Alexia Fernández Campbell: Puerto Ricans pushed out a sitting governor for the first time in history: "The massive protests worked." Related: Zeeshan Aleem: Puerto Rico's week of massive protests, explained.

• Leticia Casado/Ernesto Londono: Under Brazil's far right leader, Amazon protections slashed and forests fall. Also: Alexander Zaitchik: Rainforest on fire: "On the front lines of Bolsonaro's war on the Amazon, Brazil's forest communities fight against climate catastrophe." For a comment, see David Wallace-Wells: Could one man single-handedly ruin the planet?

• John Cassidy:

  • Why the Mueller hearings were so alarming.

  • Donald Trump and the GOP confirm their fiscal conservatism was a sham.

• Jonathan Chait:

  • Why Trump spent his summer vacation sending racist tweets: "His entire adult life is devoted to associating nonwhites with crime, filth, and disorder.":

    It does not occur to Trump that the patriotic requirements of his office require representing the whole of it. It is not merely that Trump is unfit for his job. He refuses, almost literally. to be president of the United States.

  • Trump tries to think up crime by Obama, comes up with 'wrote book'.

• Zak Cheney-Rice:

  • Profiling doesn't bother conservatives unless it targets white people. Well, you are what you are, and it isn't hard to imagine how an offense (like profiling) might affect people like yourself. Harder to see how it affects people unlike yourself. And conservatives, almost by definition, are people who believe it's ok to treat other people poorly, especially people unlike themselves. Note quote from Trump: "You know, in Israel, they profile. They've done an unbelievable job -- as good as you can do."

  • The death penalty is already a farce. William Barr's plan might make it torturous. Related: Winnie Wong: The Trump Administration's death penalty cult.

• Gareth Cook: The economist who would fix the American dream: "No one has done more to dispel the myth of social mobility than Raj Chetty. But he has a plan to make equality of opportunity a reality."

• Adam Federman: How science got trampled in the rush to drill in the Arctic. Related: William deBuys: The 'drill, baby, drill' crowd wants access to this arctic reserve.

• Crystal Marie Fleming: The composure and civility of "the Squad" against Trump's attacks.

• Kathy Gilsinan: Dan Coats spoke truth to Trump. Now he's out. Oh? Now? Gilsinan also wrote Don't expect Mark Esper to contain Trump (you know, the new Secretary of Defense), and The impossible job of speaking truth to Trump. Coats' replacement is John Ratcliffe, a Texas Congressman in the press last week for his attacks on Robert Mueller.

• James Gleick: Moon fever: On the Apollo 11 moon landing, 50 years ago.

• Danny Goldberg: Goodbye to free-thought icon and merry prankster Paul Krassner.

• Tara Golshan:

  • The House just passed a budget deal, taking a key step toward averting a massive fiscal crisis.

  • Joe Biden has questions about Medicare-for-all. We answered them.

  • The surprising thing about older voters: they're moving more to the left.

  • Study: the US could have averted about 15,600 deaths if every state expanded Medicaid.

• David A Graham:

  • Forget the theater criticism -- Mueller's conclusions are the real news.

  • The overhyped feud between Nancy Pelosi and AOC.

• Ali Harb: How Iranian MEK went from US terror list to halls of Congress.

• William D Hartung: Trump's Saudi arms vetoes, deconstructed.

• Nathan Heller: Was the automotive era a terrible mistake?

• Edward Hellmore: 'Unprecedented': more than 100 Arctic wildfires burn in worst ever season: "Huge blazes in Greenland, Siberia and Alaska are producing plumes of smoke that can be seen from space."

• Umair Irfan: 108 degrees in Paris: Europe is shattering heat records this week.

• Sarah Jones: An other person has died after rationing insulin. Jones had previously warned (Jan. 31, 2019): Rising insulin costs are a life-or-death political crisis. I've been rather taken aback by these stories. My first wife had diabetes. I never remembered any particular problem with insulin expense, but she died over 30 years ago, so I've been out of touch. Best explanation I've found for recent insulin pricing is here: 8 reasons why insulin is so outrageously expensive. The big one here is patents, which is the public's way of saying: rape me, pillage, take it all. There's no good reason why governments should create or even allow patents. Take them away, and the problems with biologics and biosimilars will become purely technical -- real, but much more manageable. And if private industry cannot find the motivation to bring the price of insulin back to a reasonable level, governments could finance non-profit manufacturers aiming at the lowest possible cost. Moreover, the cost savings go way beyond direct costs. Failure to properly regulate blood sugar levels leads to all kinds of further expense -- my wife being an especially dramatic example of what all can go horribly wrong.

• Ben Judah: The millennial left is tired of waiting: "Saikat Chakrabarti, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's chief of staff, is working to build a generational movement."

• Peter Kafka: Facebook will pay the US government a $5 billion fine for privacy failures -- but it won't have to change the way it does business.

• Ed Kilgore:

  • Is 'doing the right thing' worth increasing the risk of a second Trump term? More rationalization against trying to impeach Trump.

  • Trump's hate offensive could turn off white working-class women.

• Catherine Kim: The Trump administration is bringing back federal executions.

• Natalie Kitroeff/David Gelles/Jack Nicas: The root of Boeing's 737 Max crisis: A regulator relaxes its oversight.

• Ezra Klein:

  • The case for a universal basic income, open borders, and a 15-hour workweek: Interview with Rutger Bregman, author of Utopia for Realists.

  • How "Medicare Extra" gets to universal coverage without single-payer: Didn't make much sense of this in a quick read. I'm skeptical that you can actually achieve universal coverage while requiring so much paperwork, and using a means-tested sliding scale that guarantees pinch points. Or I suppose you could pitch this as system that defaults to single-payer but allows people to opt out to select inferior private insurance -- with the added costs of public subsidies to the private insurance companies (if not direct, then at least by allowing them to piggyback on universal negotiated pricing). But then you have to ask yourself: why go through this charade of pretending that private for-profit insurance companies can compete meaningfully against a non-profit single-payer service.

• Lucas Koerner/Ricardo Vaz: Western media losing enthusiasm for failing coup in Venezuela.

• Paul Krugman: Trump's secret foreign aid program: "He's giving away billions to overseas investors."

• Amanda Cohen Leiter: Justice John Paul Stevens and the slow evolution of the law.

• Christopher Leonard: How an oil theft investigation laid the groundwork for the Koch playbook: "In the late 1980s, Charles Koch faced a federa probe, rallied all of his resources to fight it off and came away with lessons that would guide the Kochs for decades." Leonard has a book coming out Aug. 13: Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America.

• Daniel Lippman: 'It's a disaster over there': Commerce reaches new heights of dysfunction: "Under Secretary Wilbur Ross, the department is chaotic and adrift." Related: Matt Stieb: Wilbur Ross is falling asleep in Commerce Department meetings.

• Martin Longman:

  • By cutting food stamps, Trump will starve kids.

  • The Democrats can't cede Facebook to Trump again.

• Robert Mackey: Donald Trump praises Boris Johnson, who once called him "unfit to hold the office of President of the United States". Also on Johnson:

  • The Guardian: The next prime minister will be Boris Johnson. What now? Our panel responds.

  • TJ Coles: The tragic inevitability of Boris Johnson PM.

  • John Feffer: Boris Johnson and the new battle of Britain.

• Chase Madar: Ilhan Omar's anti-semitism is becoming a load-bearing myth for American politics.

• Madeline Marshall: How Trump took over America's courts.

• Jonathan Martin/Maggie Haberman: Trump relies on populist language, but he mostly sides with corporate interests: Trenchant reporting from the New York Times.

• Jane Mayer: The case of Al Franken.

• Middle East Eye: Israel destroys Palestinian homes in biggest demolition push since 1967. Also: Michelle Nichols: US blocks UN rebuke of Israeli demolition of Palestinian homes.

• Alec MacGillis: Jared Kushner's other real estate empire in Baltimore. Related: Beatrice Dupuy: Jared Kushner's family company faces more than 170 Baltimore violations.

• George Monbiot: From Trump to Johnson, nationalists are on the rise -- backed by billionaire oligarchs.

• Anna North: Al Franken needs to stop comparing his resignation to death.

• Ilhan Omar: It is not enough to condemn Trump's racism.

• Andrew Prokop:

  • The Democratic divide over impeaching Trump, explained.

  • Mueller's testimony, and what it means for President Trump, explained.

• Robert Reich: The real reason we need to impeach Trump immediately: Actually, he offers close to a dozen, but they're just examples of a more fundamental contempt Trump holds for law and order:

  Every child in America is supposed to learn about the Constitution's basic principles of separation of powers, and checks and balances.

  But these days, every child and every adult in America is learning from Donald Trump that these principles are bunk.

  More impeachment talk:

  • Shaun King: Racism is an impeachable offense.

  • Charles P Pierce: Impeachment is not an exercise in futility; also: This is an impeach by any other name.

• David Roberts: Ohio just passed the worst energy bill of the 21st century: "A corrupt bailout for dinosaur power plants that screws renewable energy in the process." Also: Ryan Grim/Akela Lacy: Ohio Republicans balked at a nuclear bailout, so the industry elected new Republicans -- and walked away with $1.1 billion.

• Jacob Rosenberg: "Love it or leave it" has a racist history. A lot of America's language does. I've always heard "love it or leave it" as "be complacent, or get banished," because you're not entitled to your own opinions, or in any way to criticize your government, and if you dissent, you're not entitled to keep living your life where you grew up. Racism is one of many things that we weren't allowed to question (and the "back to Africa" movement was largely a concession to this dictate), but there are a great many more things that triggered this demand -- in my time, most memorably, America's imperialist war against Vietnam.

• Aaron Rupar:

  • Devin Nunes's behavior during the Mueller hearing was bizarre -- unless you watch Fox News.

  • It took the Trump campaign 2 minutes to lie about Mueller's testimony.

  • Trump now: Criticizing America is unpatriotic. Trump then: America "is going to HELL."

• David E Sanger/Catie Edmondson: Russia targeted election systems in all 50 states, report finds: I don't doubt Russian machinations, nor excuse them with the fact that the US routinely and methodically attempts to interfere and influence elections in Russia and damn near everywhere else. But one should bear in mind that Republicans are much more active underminers of democracy. And that the common interest that Russia and Republicans share is their dedication to oligarchy.

• Kori Schake: The bill for America First is coming due: "Two of America's closest treaty allies have announced military efforts explicitly designed to exclude the US." As Trump's foreign policy becomes more arbitrary and erratic, it's inevitable that other countries will go their own way -- in this case, UK and Australia, reverting to their basest imperialist roots. Not a good sign, although anything that reduces the American bootprint on the world's neck can't be all bad. Schake directs a UK security think tank, IISS, and her recent pieces offer various hints at how Trump's vacuous foreign policy is perturbing America's former clients. For example, see: A Middle East peace plan built in un-American principles, and Worse than Obama's red-line moment: taunting Trump for not bombing Iran ("Trump has now shown himself just as willing as President Obama to make empty threats that damage American credibility").

• Eric B Schnurer: Facebook doesn't just need to be broken up. It needs to be broken into. "To create real competition, let other social networks operate on the architecture Mark Zuckerberg built." I haven't digested this yet, but my general response to proposals to attack web service monopolies is to provide public funding to stand up open source alternatives. This subject is worth a much deeper discussion.

• Adam Serwer:

  • The press has adopted Trump's reality-show standards: "The reaction to the special counsel's testimony shows how deeply the president has conditioned the media to treat political events like reality television."

  • What Americans do now will define us forever: "If multiracial democracy cannot be defended in America, it will not be defended elsewhere.".

  • Trump tells America what kind of nationalist he is: "In a series of tweets attacking four Democratic congresswomen, the president reiterated his belief that only white people can truly be American."

  • Trump lied to the Supreme court, and four justices don't care.

• Steven Simon/Jonathan Stevenson: Iran: The case against war. More recent pieces on Iran:

  • Patrick Cockburn: Brexit, Britain and the permanent crisis in the Gulf.

  • Juan Cole: How Bolton tricked clueless UK Conservatives into confrontation with Tehran.

  • Jason Ditz: US poised to send 500 troops to Saudi Arabia amid Iran tensions.

  • Fred Kaplan: Sleepwalking into war with Iran.

  • Tony Karon: Iran is gambling that Trump is afraid of war.

• Danny Sjursen: Could Donald Trump end the Afghan War?

• Maggie Stevens/Derek Willis: How conservative operatives steered millions in PAC donations to themselves.

• Emily Stewart: Elizabeth Warren sees "serious warning signs" of an economic crash. Warren's piece: The coming economic crash and how to stop it. Another important Warren piece: End Wall Street's stranglehold on our economy. Yves Smith writes about this latter piece: Elizabeth Warren seeks to cut private equity down to size.

• Matt Taibbi:

  • The Iowa circus: "Clown Car II: The Democrats. God help us." He wrote a great campaign book once, but it wasn't his 2016 effort (Insane Clown President: Dispatches From the 2016 Circus -- it was his 2004-based Spanking the Donkey: Dispatches From the Dumb Season). But clearly he's just running on auto-pilot now, not even considering whether to revamp his circus metaphors -- it's like he's forgotten that there's a distinction between a sequel and a parody.

  • Banks sued for LIBOR collusion -- again!.

  • The myth of Robert Mueller, exploded.

• Siva Vaidhyanathan:

  • Why conservatives allege big tech is muzzling them.

    [Sen. Ted] Cruz knows that conservatives need Facebook and Google and that they benefit greatly from the algorithmic amplification that occurs in both systems. Trump's 2020 campaign manager is Brad Parscale, who ran digital operations for the president's successful 2016 campaign. Parscale declared that his mastery of Facebook for advertising, amplifying pro-Trump videos and memes, and fundraising won the 2016 election.

    Scholarship supports this conclusion. As the sociologist Jen Schradie demonstrates in great detail in her new book, The Revolution That Wasn't: How Digital Activism Favors Conservatives, Facebook and Google work better for top-down, well-funded, disciplined, directed movements. Those adjectives tend to describe conservative groups more than liberal or leftist groups in the United States. In our current media ecosystem, right-wing sources of news and propaganda spread much further and faster than liberal or neutral sources do, according to a rigorous quantitative study of communication-network patterns by Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. Internet platforms are demonstrably not silencing conservative ideas. If anything, the opposite is true.

  • Billion-dollar fines can't stop Google and Facebook. That's peanuts for them.

• Anya van Wagtendonk:

  • Trump launches another racist attack on a lawmaker of color: Elijah Cummings, and his "rodent infested mess" of a district.

  • A controversial deal between US and Guatemala could reshape the asylum process.

  • In a victory for Trump, the Supreme Court frees up $2.5 billion for the border wall.

• Katrina vanden Heuvel: The transpartisan revolt against America's endless wars.

• Alex Ward:

  • Trump says Daniel Coats, director of national intelligence, to step down.

  • Navy SEAL platoon sent home from Iraq over rape allegation and drinking while deployed: "SEAL scandals are piling up."

  • Senate confirms Army Gen. Mark Milley as new Joint Chiefs chair.

  • Mueller explained why he didn't push to interview Trump: "Trump would've fought a subpoena, and that would've taken too long.".

  • Trump says he could wipe Afghanistan off face of the earth in 10 days: "Trump said he doesn't want millions to die, but mused about wiping out Afghanistan, a country we are supposedly trying to help."

  • Iran says it arrested 17 people spying for the CIA. The US says it's fake news.

• Peter Wehner: George Will changes his mind -- but stays true to his convictions: Proving his convictions were always the problem with him. While it's tempting to admire people who are so consistently dedicated to wrong principles that they occasionally stand up against more opportunistic evils, they're ultimately not that useful, and never reliable. This turns into a puff-piece interview, not unlike Wehner's previous David Brooks's journey toward faith. Wehner's own mission is to rescue evangelical Christianity ffrom the shame of association with Donald Trump. That's a decent and noble endeavor, but misses the problem in favor of a bogus solution.

• Kelly Weill: MAGA bomber's lawyers blame Trump, Sean Hannity for his radicalization. Related, from Oct. 27, 2018: Rick Wilson: Of course Donald Trump inspired Cesar Sayoc's alleged terrorism.

• Philip Weiss: Ilhan Omar's case for foreign influence is more convincing than Mueller's.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • New GDP data confirms Trump's tax cuts aren't working. Seems to me they're doing exactly what they were intended to: help the rich get even richer, and weaken the government by piling up debt, which they can later use as a cudgel against spending by a future Democratic government. Sure, tax cut propagandists trotted out a few macroeconomic rationalizations, but they were such obvious horseshit at the time that their thorough debunking here offers no surprise and scant comfort. Or, as Eric Levitz reviews the same issue: The Trump tax cuts worked (as a scam):

    In the Trump era, Republicans have become masters of rationalizing the indefensible. But even they couldn't defend running up the deficit (and clamping down social spending) to boost corporate profits at a time when such profits were already high. Thus, they insisted that the president's tax cuts would neither increase the deficit nor benefit the wealthy much at all. . . .

    There was little empirical evidence to support this argument when Republicans were making it two years ago. There is even less today. In May, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) found no sign that the Trump tax cuts made any discernible contribution to growth, wages, or business investment. Corporations did not plow their windfalls into exceptionally productive and innovative ventures. Instead, they mostly threw their handouts onto the giant pile of cash they were already sitting on, and/or returned it to their (predominantly rich) shareholders. . . .

    If you take Republicans at their word -- and assume that they earnestly believed they could massively increase business investment by slashing corporate rates -- then the Trump tax cuts have been a miserable failure.

    If, however, you assume that the party's goal was always to prioritize the bottomless avarice of its megadonors over the pressing needs of the American people -- without paying a huge political price -- then the president's signature legislation has worked like a charm.

  • Democrats should run on the popular progressive ideas, not the unpopular ones.

  • Mueller's testimony matters even if he doesn't say anything new.

  • Al Franken did the right thing by resigning.

Expanded blog post, July archive (in progress).

Music: current count 31798 [31749] rated (+49), 259 [262] unrated (-3).

I had a lot of stuff I wanted to write about this week, but never found the time, and it doesn't look like that'll change over the next several days. Therefore, let's just dump this out, and try again next week.

New records reviewed this week:

• 100 Gecs: 1000 Gecs (2019, Dog Show): [r]: B
• Jay Anderson: Deepscape (2018 [2019], SteepleChase): [r]: B+(**)
• Caterina Barbieri: Ecstatic Computation (2019, Editions Mego): [r]: A-
• Michael Bisio/Kirk Knuffke/Fred Lonberg-Holm: Requiem for a New York Slice (2018 [2019], Iluso): [bc]: B+(*)
• Black Midi: Schlagenheim (2019, Rough Trade): [r]: B+(**)
• Blood Orange: Angel's Pulse (2019, Domino): [r]: B+(**)
• Daniel Carter/Tobias Wilner/Djibril Toure/Federico Ughi: New York United (2016 [2019], 577): [r]: B+(***)
• Cheekface: Therapy Island (2019, New Professor Music): [r]: B+(**)
• Stef Chura: Midnight (2019, Saddle Creek): [r]: B+(*)
• Flying Lotus: Flamagra (2019, Warp): [r]: B+(***)
• Future: Future Hndrxx Presents: The Wizrd (2019, Epic/Freebandz): [r]: B+(**)
• Hilliard Greene: Spirituals (2019, Unseen Rain): [r]: B+(*)
• Augie Haas: Dream a Little Dream (2019, Playtime Music): [cd]: B+(**)
• Rich Halley: Terra Incognita (2018 [2019], Pine Eagle): [cd]: A-
• Aldous Harding: Designer (2019, 4AD): [r]: B
• Randy Houser: Magnolia (2019, Stoney Creek): [r]: B+(**)
• Jelena Jovovic: Heartbeat (2018 [2019], self-released): [cd]: B-
• Juice Wrld: Death Race for Love (2019, Interscope): [r]: B-
• Steve Lacy: Apollo XXI (2019, 3Qtr): [r]: B+(*)
• Lady Lykez: Muhammad Ali EP (2019, Hyperdub, EP): [bc]: B+(*)
• Alex Lahey: The Best of Luck Club (2019, Dead Oceans): [r]: B+(**)
• Lil Nas X: 7 (2019, Columbia, EP): [r]: B+(*)
• Maluma: 11:11 (2019, Sony Music Latin): [r]: B+(**)
• Mannequin Pussy: Patience (2019, Epitaph): [r]: B+(**)
• Rico Nasty/Kenny Beats: Anger Management (2019, Sugar Trap, EP): [r]: B+(**)
• Jai Paul: Leak 04-13 (Bait Ones) (2013 [2019], XL): [r]: B+(**)
• PUP: Morbid Stuff (2019, Rise/BMG): [r]: B
• Queen Key: Eat My Pussy (Again) (2019, Machine Entertainment Group): [r]: A-
• Resavoir: Resavoir (2015-19 [2019], International Anthem): [bc]: B
• Maggie Rogers: Heard It in a Past Life (2019, Capitol): [r]: B+(**)
• ShitKid: [Detention] (2019, PNKSLM): [r]: B+(*)
• Skepta: Ignorance Is Bliss (2019, Boy Better Know): [r]: B+(**)
• Sote: Parallel Persia (2019, Diagonal): [bc]: B+(*)
• Emily A. Sprague: Water Memory (2017, self-released): [r]: B+(*)
• Emily A. Sprague: Mount Vision (2019, self-released): [r]: B+(**)
• Supa Bwe: Just Say Thank You (2019, Freddy Got Magic/Empire, EP): [r]: B+(*)
• Kate Tempest: The Book of Traps and Lessons (2019, Republic): [r]: B+(*)
• Yves Theiler Trio: We (2018 [2019], Intakt): [r]: B+(**)
• Turning Jewels Into Water: Which Way Is Home? (2018, FPE, EP): [bc]: B+(**)
• Turning Jewels Into Water: Map of Absences (2019, FPE): [r]: B+(***)
• Faye Webster: Atlanta Millionaires Club (2019, Secretly Canadian): [r]: B
• The Yawpers: Human Question (2019, Bloodshot): [r]: B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Johnny Shines: The Blues Came Falling Down: Live 1973 (1973 [2019], Omnivore): [r]: B+(**)

Grade (or other) changes:

• Rodrigo Amado/Chris Corsano: No Place to Fall (2014 [2019], Astral Spirits): [cd]: [was B+(**)] A-

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Ezra Weiss Big Band: We Limit Not the Truth of God (OA2): August 16
• Mark Wingfield & Gary Husband: Tor & Vale (Moonjune)

Weekend Roundup

We spent much of the past week arguing not about whether Donald Trump is a racist -- some might prefer not to discuss it, but hardly anyone doubts or denies such an abundantly settled fact. A week ago we faced what struck me as an artificially inflated schism between Party leaders like Nancy Pelosi and the more determined reformers in "the squad," but that division vanished instantly thanks to their common enemy -- Trump, for starters, and the racism he and his party so naturally indulge in. Pelosi may be jealous of the squad's popularity with the Democratic base, and she may be overly concerned with her reputation as a Washington power broker. But the fact is that since the 2018 election, the right-wing media has been most obsessed with raising alarms over the squad. Given that context, Trump's tweets strike me less as recurring racist bluster (to which he's certainly prone) than as confirmation that the Republicans' campaign strategy for 2020 will be to try to turn every local election into a referendum on Ilhan Omar. Pelosi knows that better than anyone, because Republicans have tried for years to make her the public face of Democratic-Socialist-Liberal dread.

Most important piece below is Matthew Yglesias's Trump's racism is part of his larger con. I didn't quote from it, but could have quoted the entire piece. Just read it.

Some scattered links this week:

• Zeeshan Aleem:

  • Trump met a lot of refugees and seemed to learn about their crises for the very first time. By the way, the refugees he met were pretty carefully selected (by Sam Brownback?) to appeal to administration prejudices ("Rohingya in Myanmar, Uighurs in China, and Yazidis in Iraq").

  • Puerto Rico's week of massive protests, explained.

• Andrew J Bacevich: The decline of our nation's generals: "Once powerful titans of policy, today no one knows who they are. Given all the mistakes they've made, is it any wonder?"

• Peter Baker, et al.: Trump employs an old tactic: using race for gain.

• Emily Bazelon: Justice John Paul Stevens had some things to say before he died: Actually, a review of his book, The Making of a Justice: Reflections on My First 94 Years. Stevens died last week, at 99.

• Zack Beauchamp:

  • "Send her back" is where racism and authoritarianism meet: "The viciousness isn't an accident. It's what Trumpism is really about."

  • Trump and the dead end of conservative nationalism. I've scanned through this twice and have no idea what the concept is, probably because conservatism and nationalism these days have little to offer other than bitter and vindictive reactions against whatever they find offensive. Trying to define either as a coherent ideology is hopeless. Merging them both into a synthetic (much less unifying) movement is even more ridiculous. Related:

    • Park MacDougald: What the hell is 'national conservatism' anyway?

    • Jacob Heilbrunn: National conservatism: retrofitting Trump's GOP with a veneer of ideas.

    • Eric Levitz: National conservatives want cultural dominance not 'social cohesion'.

    • Osita Nwanevu: Conservatism nationalism is Trumpism for intellectuals.

• Peter Beinart: By Republican standards, almost nothing is racist.

• Jared Bernstein: What economists have gotten wrong for decades: "Four economic ideas disproven by reality." This starts with the so-called "natural rate of unemployment" ("NAIRU" to its fans):

  The natural rate of unemployment that AOC questioned is one such idea (more on that below). There are three others worth singling out:

  • that globalization is a win-win proposition for all, an idea that has deservedly taken a battering in recent years;
  • that federal budget deficits "crowd out" private investments; and
  • that the minimum wage will only have negative effects on jobs and workers.

  Economists and policymakers have gotten these ideas wrong for decades, at great cost to the public. Especially hard hit have been the most economically vulnerable, and these mistakes can certainly be blamed for the rise of inequality. It's time we moved on from them.

  By the way, not every economist bought into these ideas, even in their heyday. George P. Brockway (1915-2001) was especially critical of NAIRU (see his short collection Economics Can Be Bad for Your Health as well as his masterpiece, The End of Economic Man). John Quiggin wrote about much of this in Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us (2010). By the way, when Joe Biden became Vice President, he picked Bernstein as his economic adviser. I'm not a Biden fan, but that was a smart and gutsy pick at a time when Obama was hiring economists like Larry Summers. Back in 2008, before his appointment, Bernstein wrote an insightful book called Crunch: Why Do I Feel So Squeezed? (And Other Unsolved Economic Mysteries).

• Jamelle Bouie: The joy of hatred: "Trump and 'his people' reach deep into the violent history of public spectacle in America."

• Aleia Fernández Campbell: The House just passed a $15 minimum wage. It would be the first increase in a decade.

• John Cassidy: There is nothing strategic about Trump's racism.

• Jonathan Chait:

  • Welcome to the post-post-corruption era of the Republican Party. Takes a detour from its original subject -- Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta's temporary and more permanent replacements (the former a Jack Abramoff associate, the latter Antonin Scalia's son, Eugene) -- to review the Party's checkered history both for and against corruption.

    Conservatism never fails, Rick Perlstein archly observed at the time; it is only failed. . . . It is almost impossible to overstate how much weight conservatives placed on corruption as their diagnosis of failure. This conviction led straight to their Obama-era posture as a "reformed" party of pure fiscal conservatism. . . . Pizzella may not lead the agency for long, and by Trump-era standards, of course, his offenses barely register as scandals at all. The Trump administration is shot through with corruption, from petty grifts like Cabinet members abusing their expense accounts to legislation written by and for lobbyists. The president himself is taking payoffs from corporate lobbyists and foreign governments through his Washington hotel and other properties.

    The party's whole post-Bush backlash against corruption and deficit spending, and the notion that those values are antithetical to conservatism, has been forgotten. ("Nobody is a fiscal conservative anymore," Rush Limbaugh casually declared. "All this talk about concern for the deficit and the budget has been bogus for as long as it's been around.") Having fulfilled its use by giving Republicans a reason to absolve their ideology of any role in Bush's failure, they discarded it.

  • Republicans baffled why Trump keeps saying racist things.

• Jane Coaston: The Trump racism spin cycle.

• Jelani Cobb: Donald Trump's idea of selective citizenship.

• Chas Danner: Trump shows yet again that he can't even pretend to reject racism.

• Tom Engelhardt: Planet of the surreal: Turning 75 in the Age of Trump.

• Eric Foner: The Supreme Court is in danger of again becoming 'the grave of liberty'.

• Masha Gessen:

  • The weaponization of national belonging, from Nazi Germany to Trump.

    By turning unspoken assumptions into hateful rally chants, Trump is not merely destroying the norms of political speech but weaponizing them. He is cashing in on the easy trick of saying out loud what others barely dare to think. But his supporters are also enforcing the prohibition on his opponents' taking part in the conversation -- as when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was reprimanded for calling Trump's speech "racist" on the House floor. Trump has initiated a radical renegotiation of belonging in this country and then monopolized it. This is what happens first: a political force seizes the power to define themselves as insiders and certain others as intruders. This is done in the name of protection of the motherland, which the newly marginalized are said to hate. Everything else follows.

  • Trump, Pelosi, and the Squad are fighting over who belongs in government.

• Susan B Glasser: "I'm winning": Donald Trump's calculated racism.

• Michelle Goldberg:

  • Defenders of a racist president use Jews as human shields: "Trump's bigoted attack on four congresswomen of color has nothing to do with fighting anti-Semitism."

  • Please, Pelosi, fight Trump, not the Squad.

• Tara Golshan: Mark Sanford is willing to run against Trump for president if people start talking about the debt.

• Emily Holden: Trump drilling leases could create more climate pollution than EU does in a year.

• Caroline Houck: Mark Esper, President Trump's pick for defense secretary, explained: Key point: "former top lobbyist from Raytheon." Also: Thomas Gibbons-Neff: No questions about US wars in Defense chief's confirmation hearing.

• Ed Kilgore:

  • Trump's racism is pushing away the voters he needs in 2020. I don't really buy this. Past history shows that Trump's economic beneficiaries (almost exclusively stock and business owners) care very little about his race messaging. On the other hand, people who have no economic stake in his policies but support him for cultural reasons need reinforcement, which comes not so much because they identify with racism as that they fear and loathe the sort of people who get offended over such. That's in a nutshell why his support figures have increased (marginally, for sure) as nearly every Democrat/Independent has been blasting him.

  • Susan Collins's approval rating dives as reelection contest approaches.

• Catherine Kim: New polling indicates Republicans actually like Trump more following racist tweet controversy.

• Jen Kirby:

  • Trump says US Navy destroyed Iranian drone.

  • Boris Johnson, the frontrunner to be the UK's next prime minister, explained. Related: James Butler: Boris Johnson is how Britain ends.

• Paul Krugman:

  • Deficit Man and the 2020 election. Contrasts Deficit Man with Tariff Man, both Trump attempting to lead the economy, and argues that so far the economic stimulus caused by running high deficits has limited the damage caused by Trump's tariffs. Overall prognosis for the Trump economy is "meh."

  • Racism comes out of the closet: "The dog whistle days are apparently over." Well, that's what happens when you elect the dog.

  • Trump and the merchants of detention: "Every betrayal seems to profit the president and his friends."

  • Trump is losing his trade wars.

• Eric Levitz:

  • Moderate Democrats warn that AOC is distracting from their nonexistent message.

  • 15 ways President Trump has hurt the American worker: Old piece (Sept. 4, 2018), linked from article above, but worth recalling. Of course, a current piece could easily be expanded to 30 ways.

• PR Lockhart: The racism in Trump's attacks should be impossible to deny.

• German Lopez: Cory Booker's latest criminal justice reform bill takes aim at life imprisonment.

• Ella Nilsen: House votes to hold AG Barr and Commerce Secretary Ross in contempt of Congress over census citizenship question.

• Anna North: How 4 congresswomen came to be called "the Squad".

• Jeremy W Peters/Annie Karni/Maggie Haberman: Trump sets the 2020 tone: like 2016, only this time 'the Squad' is here.

• Charles P Pierce:

  • The EPA's new 'no surprise' policy protects everything except the environment.

  • This was a fascist rally down to its bones.

  • The unholy trinity of voter suppression is having a no good, very bad week: Kris Kobach, J Christian Adams, Hans von Spakovsky.

• Andrew Prokop:

  • Michael Cohen documents unsealed as Trump hush money investigation concludes.

  • Jeffrey Epstein's connections to Donald rump and Bill Clinton, explained.

• Jonah Raskin: Paul Krassner, 1932-2019: American satirist. I should note that I started reading The Realist shortly after I dropped out of high school, so Krassner played an outsized role in my discovery that there are other ways of understanding the world than had been drilled into my tiny brain by the official guardians of virtue.

• Aaron Rupar:

  • "Incredible patriots" is the new "very fine people": Trump defends racist chants.

  • "Send her back!": Trump's attacks on Ilhan Omar -- and the response to them -- represent a new low.

  • Trump claims he tried to quell "send her back!" chants. The video says otherwise.

  • It wasn't just Ilhan Omar -- Trump disparaged 8 women during his speech in North Carolina.

  • "What's your ethnicity?": Kellyanne Conway's defense of Trump's racism isn't helping.

  • Trump's threat to investigate Google isn't based on evidence. It's based on Fox News.

  • Trump says he's not concerned about being racist because "many people agree" with him.

• Jeffrey D Sachs: America's economic blockades and international law: I'm not sure who Sachs thinks has been calling Trump an isolationist, but at least he rejects that label. What's different about Trump isn't the degree the US engages with other countries but the terms of alliance and intervention. From FDR through Obama, the US has generally tried to find agreement on areas of mutual interest, often trading economic help for joint security. Trump's intent is to put American (by which he often means his personal) interests first, reducing everyone else to paying tribute for some degree of privilege within the US-directed world order. If it seems like little has changed under Trump, that's mostly because the US position at the top of the informal world order has, at least since WWII, been rooted in the relative size and wealth of the American economy (although these days it has largely transformed itself into global financial networks, which nation states have little effective power to regulate). Where his predecessors preferred to build alliances based on mutual interest, all Trump sees is the power to extract profit. In the past, NATO was presented as a trade: member countries would open themselves up to global capitalism, and in turn would receive security guarantees. (Indeed, the "carrot" of capital investment was probably more decisive to expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe than fears of Russian aggression.) On the other hand, Trump views NATO as a protection racket, and wants to do what any gangster/boss would do: raise the tribute. As an authoritarian, Trump much prefers his sticks to carrots, much as he'd rather be feared than befriended (not that he minds having friends, as long as they are properly submissive). Short of risking his bloated military, the most powerful stick he has at his disposal is the economic blockade (sanctions), which he's employed more aggressively than ever before (e.g., North Korea, Iran, Venezuela). So far, nothing disastrous (for the US, anyway) has come of this. None of the targeted countries have submitted, but few (if any) nominal allies have yet decided to buck US authority and circumvent the sanctions, so Trump appears to be in control. However, you have to wonder how long China, Europe, Russia, India, Japan, etc., will continue to kowtow to a thin-skinned, thankless bully like Trump.

• William Saletan: Is Trump a racist or a narcissist? Here's a puzzle even Saletan can solve: "He's both." But aren't those just facets of an even broader and deeper sociopathy?

• Theodore Schleifer: A plan to fix inequality would target CEOs who make 100 times more than their employees: CEO pay has been a useful metric for measuring inequality for several decades now, but the most one can hope for by narrowly targeting it is to muddy the metric. CEO's represent a small sliver of the very rich, and as such a small sliver of the money that a more general program could tax. I think it's long been clear that the main reason boards have moved so strongly to increase CEO pay has been the desire to make CEO's act more like owners and less like managers: to focus more on short-term profitability, while allowing more risks to long-term stability.

• Emily Stewart: Elizabeth Warren's latest Wall Street enemy: private equity.

• Matt Taibbi: CNN's debate lottery draw is a new low in campaign media: "If you cover elections like reality shows, you will get reality stars as leaders."

• Robin Wright: Iran's eye-for-an-eye strategy in the Gulf.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • The controversy over Bernie Sanders's low-paid field staffers, explained.

  • Trump's racism is part of his larger con.

  • Trump's racist tirades against "the Squad," explained.

  • The controversy over whether the media should call Trump's tweets "racist," explained.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, July archive (in progress).

Music: current count 31749 [31726] rated (+23), 262 [262] unrated (+0).

Slow getting this out, with Monday wiped out by a house emergency (water heater broke down). Had a nagging sore throat much of the week, but right now mostly feel exhausted. Relatively mild summer so far, but looks like triple digits coming soon and probably persisting. Next couple weeks will probably be worse.

Rated count cut off Sunday evening, but I've added unpacking since then, so the numbers are a little out of whack.

Second straight week with an unusually low rated count (24 last week). Again, spent some time on the Resonance anthologies without writing any reviews, and also found a higher-than-usual split of A- records, plus high B+ that merited extra plays. Most of the finds this week come from Chris Monsen's Jazz favorites list, plus a few more from Phil Overeem's Halfway to Listville. The easiest one was John McPhee's Nation Time: I skipped over it when I was catching up with Corbett vs. Dempsey's Bandcamp a few weeks back, as I had already given Corbett's 2000 reissue a full A, and hadn't noticed the extra cuts. No reason to repurchase if you have the Atavistic release, but the bonuses are just that.

Had a minor role in helping Joe Yanosik publish his magnum opus A Consumer Guide to FRANCO. I have a Guests section on my website, which I've used a few times but never really tried to promote. I've long thought that a better solution would be to set up guest areas on my Hullworks website, perhaps as sub-domains, which could be spun off should the guests decide to pony up for a domain name. I'm in a position where I can host those as well. I also considered hanging Joe's piece at Terminal Zone -- long my pet idea for a music-themed website (named for the zine Don Malcolm and I published back in 1977). In the end, I went with the path that involved the least thought and work.

When Joe first mentioned his Franco project to me, I glanced at Napster's Franco offerings, and spent a week digging around. My own (much more limited) set of Franco grades are here. You can also look up what Robert Christgau has written.

I might as well mention two projects that I've started but haven't gotten very far on. I've started to add recent reviews to the two large book manuscript files I have on jazz. Rather slow work, but I've added 99 pages up to January, 2019, pushing the 20th century jazz guide over 800, and the 21st over 1700. Files are backed up online, in ODT format.

I've also started collecting mid-year lists, as I did last year. This uses the EOY list aggregate format, and most likely will eventually evolve into a full EOY list aggregate later this year. Only have four lists compiled so far (about a third of those collected on AOTY). I'm surprised there aren't more, but haven't really looked yet. The current aggregate is way too sparse to draw any real conclusions from. One issue here is that I'm only awarding 1 point for each list mention. (Two reasons: one is that so far many of the lists are unranked; the other is that it makes it easier to clean up with I replace the midway lists with EOY lists.) The other point I should note here is that I'm factoring in my graces (A: 5, A-: 4, ***: 3, **: 2, *: 1), which currently results in quite a bit of skew. E.g., 6 of the top 8 records now are ones I've graded A- (Billy Eilish, Lizzo, Charly Bliss, Big Thief, Little Simz, Jamila Woods), and the other two (Carly Rae Jepsen and Vampire Weekend) were *** and ** respectively. Expect my picks to slip as I add further lists, while records I like less will make inroads (Solange is the surest shot; maybe also Tyler the Creator, Sharon Van Etten, Jenny Lewis). Record that I haven't heard with the most list mentions so far: Flying Lotus' Flamagra.

New records reviewed this week:

• Maria Faust/Tim Dahl/Weasel Walter: Farm Fresh (2018 [2019], Gotta Let It Out): [r]: B+(***)
• Fire! Orchestra: Arrival (2019, Rune Grammofon): [r]: B
• Alex Fournier: Triio (2018 [2019], Furniture Music): [r]: B+(***)
• Lafayette Gilchrist: Dark Matter (2016 [2019], self-released): [cd]: B+(***)
• GoldLink: Diaspora (2019, Squaaash Club/RCA): [r]: B+(***)
• Bjørn Marius Hegge: Ideas (2019, Particular): [r]: A-
• Megan Thee Stallion: Fever (2019, 300 Entertainment): [r]: B+(***)
• Nature Work: Nature Work (2018 [2019], Sunnyside): [r]: A-
• Gard Nilssen Acoustic Unity: To Whom Who Buys a Record (2019, Odin): [r]: A-
• Pere Ubu: The Long Goodbye (2019, Cherry Red): [r]: B+(**)
• Santana: Africa Speaks (2019, Concord): [r]: B
• Bruce Springsteen: Springsteen on Broadway (2018, Columbia, 2CD): [r]: B+(**)
• Bruce Springsteen: Western Stars (2019, Columbia): [r]: B-
• Zhenya Strigalev/Federico Dannemann: The Change (2018 [2019], Rainy Days): [cd]: B+(*)
• Gebhard Ullmann Basement Research: Impromptus and Other Short Works (2018 [2019], WhyPlayJazz): [r]: B+(***)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Dexter Gordon: At the Subway Club 1973 (1965-73 [2019], Elemental Music, 2CD): [r]: B+(**)
• Clifford Jordan Quartet: Glass Bead Games (1973 [1974], Strata East; [2019], Pure Pleasure): [r]: A-
• Eero Koivistoinen: The Front Is Breaking (1976, Love; [2017], Svart): [r]: B+(*)
• Joe McPhee: Nation Time (1970 [2018], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: A
• Harry Mosco: Peace & Harmony (1979 [2019], Isle of Jura): [r]: B+(*)
• Woody Shaw Quintet: Basel 1980 (1980-81 [2019], Elemental Music, 2CD): [r]: A-
• Sonic Youth: Battery Park, NYC, July 4th 2008 (2008 [2019], Matador): [r]: B+(***)
• Bruce Springsteen: The Live Series: Songs of the Road (1977-2013 [2018], Columbia): [r]: B+(*)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• John Bacon/Michael McNeill/Danny Ziemann: Refractions (Jazz Dimensions): August 1
• Mike Holober/The Gotham Jazz Orchestra: Hiding Out (Zoho): August 9
• From Wolves to Whales: Strandwal (Aerophonic): August 26
• Dave Rempis/Joshua Abrams/Avreeayl Ra + Jim Baker: Apsis (Aerophonic): August 26

Weekend Roundup

Fairly large (7.3) earthquake in Halmahera, Indonesia today. It's in a fairly isolated corner of the nation, an island with about 450,000 people, north of Ceram and midway between the outstretched peninsulas of New Guinea and Sulawesi. Probably not much news on this, unlike last week's similar-sized earthquakes near Ridgecrest, California.

On the other hand, quite a bit of news attention to Hurricane Barry, slowly moving today through north Louisiana and into Arkansas, dumping a lot of rain over already flooded terrain. Two things worth noting here. One is that this is still very early in the season (nominally June 1 to November 30). For a record fifth year in a row, the first named storm (Andrea) appeared before the season officially started. June was quiet, but it's still very rare to have hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico in July. Odder still, where most hurricanes start as low pressure zones over West Africa, then pick up strength crossing the width of the subtropical Atlantic Ocean, this one started in Tennessee, then curved in a clockwise motion through Georgia and Florida before intensifying over the Gulf. I've never seen a storm follow that trajectory, or for that matter one that spent so little time over water developing to hurricane level. Granted, it only briefly achieved level 1 strength, but that doesn't bode well for later storms that traverse much more of the still warming Gulf (currently 86°F). [PS: The Wikipedia page suggests several similar hurricanes, but the only one that comes close is 1940 Louisiana hurricane, which formed in early August off the coast of Georgia, crossed Florida and covered a much longer stretch of the Gulf before making landfall in southwest Louisiana. It is regarded as "the wettest tropical cyclone in state history," with a peak rainfall of 37.5 inches. Barry is forecast to produce up to 25 inches of rain. Actual rain so far appears to be much less -- see Barry downgraded to a depression but still brings risk of flooding from Louisiana to Arkansas. This article also notes that the average date for first hurricane of season is August 10, and that this is the first July hurricane in continental US since Arthur in 2014, and only the 4th in Louisiana history according to records going back to 1851.]

Some scattered links this week:

• William Astore: The riptide of American militarism.

• Aaron Blake: Donald Trump's origin story suffers another severe blow:

  The new report by Kranish also recalls perhaps the biggest revelation undercutting Trump's self-published origin story: how he became wealthy in the first place. While Trump has claimed he got only a $1 million loan to start out with, the Times detailed how the younger Trump "received at least $413 million in today's dollars from his father's real estate empire, much of it through tax dodges in the 1990s." The paper said these tax dodges included "instances of outright fraud."

  And when it comes to Trump's education, he has apparently gone to great lengths to obscure the record and seems to have tapped powerful connections in the process, as The Post's Marc Fisher detailed in March. The New York Military Academy, which Trump attended before college, moved its Trump files to a more secure location amid pressure from wealthy Trump allies. Around the same time that was revealed, former Trump attorney Michael Cohen, who flipped on Trump and pleaded guilty to several crimes, released a 2015 letter he wrote threatening Fordham University with legal action if Trump's records were released.

  The combined picture is one of a president who may not have been able to attend Penn or assemble anywhere close to such a fortune without familial connections.

• Jonathan Blitzer: Trump is poised to sign a radical agreement to send future asylum seekers to Guatemala.

• Frank Bruni: Joe Biden, Closet Republican: "He's the liberal Bob Dole, the looser Mitt Romney, the supposedly safe bet who's owed a shot." I'm not a Biden fan, but this is pretty unfair. For starters, it vastly understates how despicable the vast majority of Republican politicians have become -- ironically, a trait that Biden and Bruni seem to share. Biden has been a reasonably successful politician during the 40-year Reagan-Bush-Trump era, at least in part because he's often been willing to bend with the wind. That bending may have helped lend credence to the Republicans, and that's reason enough to doubt him as a candidate. Still, there's a big gap between Democrats like Biden and supposedly respectable Republicans like Dole and Romney. Bruni's not doing us any favors by papering over that chasm.

• Cristina Cabrera: Trump launches racist attack against 'progressive Democrat congresswomen'. Related: Peter Wade: Of course, Fox News delighted in Trump's racist tweet. The question Fox raised on the screen was "DEMOCRATS DIVIDED?" Actually, the reaction there was pretty united: it speaks volumes that the one thing every Democratic politician in America agrees on is that Trump is a racist, and that it's fair game to put it that explicitly.

• Jonathan Chait: President Trump says only Trump supporters deserve free speech.

• Ryan Devereaux: Border Patrol Chief Carla Provost was a member of secret Facebook group.

• Brian Feldman: FTC fines Facebook $5 billion over Cambridge Analytica scandal.

• Ryan Gallagher: How US tech giants are helping to build China's surveillance state. Same deal here: Middle East dictators buy spy tech from company linked to IBM and Google.

• Masha Gessen:

  • Donald Trump's "inoffensive" war on reality.

  • Mike Pompeo's faith-based attempt to narrowly redefine human rights.

• Tara Golshan:

  • Progressives just got a major win against Trump on Iran. Can they hold on to it?

  • Elizabeth Warren's immigration proposal goes much further than a pathway to citizenship.

• David A Graham: The best way to get fired by Trump: "The president's new strategy for getting rid of scandal-tainted aides: Quickly accept their resignations, but heap praise on them as they leave."

• Ryan Grim: Amy McGrath is challenging Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. She's everything wrong with the Democratic Party. Yeah, but if I was misfortunate enough to be represented by McConnell, I'd cheerfully vote for her anyway. Note that she wound up correcting her faux pas on the Kavanaugh question.

• Neil Irwin: The Fed's new message: The economy can get a lot better for workers: "A rejection of what had been a consensus view of the relationship between the jobless rate and inflation."

• Ed Kilgore:

  • The case for Biden's 'electability' fades under scrutiny.

  • Trump caves on census citizenship question, but hints at broader fight ahead.

  • House votes to require congressional approval for war with Iran.

• Jen Kirby:

  • The UK ambassador to the US has resigned. Here's why it's a big deal. Follow up to Trump tweets "we will no longer deal" with UK ambassador after leaked cables. Richard Wolffe notes: Trump's spat with the UK reveals the bottomless depths of his insecurities.

  • Joe Biden wants to restore the pre-Trump world order.

  • Prosecutors are investigating whether GOP donor Elliott Broidy used Trump ties to profit.

• Michael Klare: It's always the oil: The missing three-letter word in the Iran crisis.

• Ezra Klein: What Donald Trump got right, and Justin Amash got wrong, about conservatives: "Conservatism is an identity more than an ideology, and Trump knows it."

• Carolyn Kormann: The case for declaring a national climate emergency.

  While Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez's calls for a climate-emergency declaration are not solving any problems, they are providing the language that needs to dominate the national conversation. And that matters. The United Nations recently warned that climate disasters are happening at the rate of one per week. This past June was the hottest on record. At the end of the month, a freak storm buried Guadalajara, Mexico, in hail, and on Thursday morning news outlets reported that freak hailstorms in Greece killed seven people. A month's worth of rain fell on Washington, D.C., in an hour on Monday (while Trump completely ignored the climate crisis in his speech on the environment), then more flash floods drowned New Orleans, which is now preparing for a tropical storm that could dump another twenty inches of rain and test the city's levees. The warming that happens over the next few decades could kill all of the world's coral reefs, lead to even more severe storms and wildfires, and set off the sorts of tipping points that most concern scientists -- specifically, the irreversible dissolution of the Greenland ice sheet, where, in June, a heatwave set off melting across half of its surface.

• Josh Kovensky: Rudy Giuliani, Joe Lieberman team up for Albania MEK conference.

• Eric Levitz: Why the GOP might learn to love putting price controls on drugs.

• German Lopez: How to dramatically reduce gun violence in American cities: Based on a new book by Thomas Abt: Bleeding Out.

• Robert Mackey:

  • Pete Buttigieg and Joe Biden condemn Israeli Occupation, as young American Jews urge Democrats to press Isarel. Seems like this is significant, but note that Buttigieg went on to cite Ariel Sharon as saying the occupation must end.

  • Give Elizabeth Warren a break -- even Ariel Sharon said the Israeli Occupation had to end.

  • Trump takes the bait, lashing out at UK Ambassador whose private notes were leaked.

• Dylan Matthews: AOC's policy adviser makes the case for abolishing billionaires: Interview with Dan Riffle.

• Joan McCarter: How Trump swallowed the GOP whole and exposed Paul Ryan's craven moral failings. Refers to a forthcoming book by Tim Alberta: American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump. For more, see:

  • Josh Dawsey: New book details how Republican leaders learned to stop worrying and love Trump.

  • John Nichols: The Republicans who made Trump possible cannot remove the badge of shame.

  • Jennifer Szalai: 'American Carnage' shows how war between Republicans led to their peace with Trump. Ryan looms large in the book, so Trump's already singled him out for opprobrium.

  • Christian Vasquez: Trump: Republicans like Paul Ryan are 'weak, ineffective & stupid.'

  • Jonathan Chait: Trump: Paul Ryan was bribed to call me stupid.

• Rani Molla: Conservatives pretending to be suppressed by social media dominated social media.

• Suzanne Moore: Of course Boris Johnson wants a royal yacht. He's the king of fake-it-till-you-make-it.

• Dina Nayeri: Why they fear Ilhan Omar: "Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson don't think she's dangerous. They hate that she's full of potential."

• Anna North: Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta has no good answer for cushy Jeffrey Epstein plea deal. Acosta wound up resigning, after Trump swore, "I'm with him". For more, see:

  • Jane Coaston/Anna North: Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender who is friends with Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, explained.

  • Annie Karni/Maggie Haberman: Jeffrey Epstein was a 'terrific guy,' Donald Trump once said. Now he's 'not a fan.'

  • Michelle Goldberg: Acosta resigned. The Caligula administration lives on.

• Amanda Petrusich: Going home with Wendell Berry: Interview. Sample quote I should save and maybe use some time: "Every generation is a bridge between something that's past, and something that's coming."

• Charles P Pierce: Nancy Pelosi's leadership now constitutes a constant dereliction of duty. Pierce is the kind of pundit I'd expect to go to the mat defending Party leadership like Pelosi, so I'm impressed first of all that he snapped, second that he snapped this direction. What this shows is that AOC and her "gang of four" have struck a chord that extends even to middling Democrats. Maybe that's because they're scoring points while Pelosi, Schumer, Hoyer, et al. look like mere bystanders. Another non-radical suddenly soured on Pelosi: Andrew Sullivan: Hey, Nancy Pelosi: Please stop coddling Donald Trump.

• Gareth Porter: Lies about Iran killing US troops in Iraq are a ploy to justify war.

• Andrew Prokop: Trump's census citizenship question fiasco, explained. Related: Michael Wines: The long history of the US government asking Americans whether they are citizens.

• Gabriela Resto-Montero:

  • Mayors and protesters remain defiant ahead of ICE raids: "You're going to have to come through us."

  • Mike Pence visits a crowded immigrant detention center: "This is tough stuff." More on this: Nicole Lafond: In 'tough' visit, Pence uses crisis he helped create to push immigration overhaul.

• David Roberts: Coal left Appalachia devastated. Now it's doing the same to Wyoming.

• Aaron Rupar:

  • Trump's latest press conference was a master class in gaslighting.

  • Trump's social media summit was a circus. Its aftermath was even worse.

  • Trump's latest morning of tweets was off the rails, even by his standards.

  • One day encapsulated everything that's wrong with Fox News.

• Matt Shuham: House report shines light on multiple infants under one separated from parents.

• Tierney Sneed: How Trump doubled down on the crazy claim he's immune from oversight.

• Paul Sonne/Karoun Demirjian/Missy Ryan: Sexual assault allegations complicate confirmation of Trump's nominee for military's No. 2 officer: Air Force Gen. John E Hyten, commander of US Strategic Command, nominated to be vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

• Matt Taibbi: Ross Perot had the last laugh. The business mogul and third-party presidential candidates (1992/1996) died last week, at 89.

• Alex Thompson: Elizabeth Warren shuns conventional wisdom for a new kind of campaign: Key sentence: "She's largely rejecting DC's consultant class."

• Marc Tracy: As the world heats up, the climate for news is changing, too.

• Alex Ward:

  • "Trump is quite easy to buy off": how Trump is putting American foreign policy up for sale: "Want to understand Trump's foreign policy? Just follow the money."

  • Biden releases video blasting "the Trump Doctrine" of foreign policy. Defines "five core elements of what Biden calls 'The Trump Doctrine'":

    1. Embrace dictators
    2. Threaten war
    3. Rip up international agreements
    4. Launch trade wars
    5. Embarrass the US

    Lots of problems here, starting with the assertion that what Trump's doing is coherent and consistent enough to imply a "doctrine" (especially when no such thing has been stated). He's pretty selective about which dictators he "embraces," favoring those who align with his worldview, especially those who cater to his personal finances. And while he has no personal interest in democracy, international law, and/or concern for human rights, he's willing to slander his enemies (and only his enemies) for their shortcomings there. Similarly, his treatment of international treaties and trade agreements is unprincipled, riding almost exclusively on his personal (and partisan) economic interest. He's a committed bully, and feels that by virtue of its wealth and power America is entitled to threaten and cajole the little countries around, but he has yet to act as recklessly as his rhetoric suggests. Of course, he's a huge embarrassment. But aside from being somewhat less of an embarrassment, one wonders what Biden would do differently. US foreign policy has been remarkably consistent across parties, both in the Cold War and post-Cold War eras, as if presidents don't actually have many real options. In his long career, Biden has very dependably gone along with whatever the prevailing "wisdom" dictated, so there's little reason to think he won't continue to serve the same interests US foreign policy has long followed.

  • The US has a risky new plan to protect oil tankers from Iranian attacks.

• New leak claims Trump scrapped Iran nuclear deal 'to spite Obama'.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, July archive (in progress).

Music: current count 31726 [31702] rated (+24), 262 [260] unrated (+2).

Rated count down this week. Maybe I didn't focus well while Laura was in Boston, but it's also likely that coming up with a relative bounty of A- records had an effect: they always take more time. Also, I didn't take any dives into old music (the VSOP Quintet shows up in Napster's featured new jazz list, but with digital reissues I usually just cite the original release label/date -- and it wasn't good enough to inspire me to check out their other albums).

This is my first Music Week since Robert Christgau posted his final Noisey Expert Witness column, so it's fitting that I looked a little harder than usual for recent non-jazz. In this I was helped by Phil Overeem's halfway through 2019 list (Freddie Gibbs & Madlib, Peter Perrett, Billy Woods & Kenny Segal, Abdullah Ibrahim), and by Facebook comments from Dan Weiss (DaBaby, Open Mike Eagle, Gibbs again -- he's also big on Denzel Curry's Zuu, which I previously had at B+(**)). Most of the others were picked up by scrounging for new music on Napster.

The most controversial of these is probably Madonna's Madame X. Metacritic average is 70. Rob Sheffield wrote a 3-star pan at Rolling Stone, although it reads better than the rating. Spencer Kornhaber takes offense in The paradox of Madonna's gun-control music video. Took me a lot of plays before I recognized that the number of songs I was pleased to recognize exceeded the number of fingers I had available for counting. I have more doubts about the Peter Perrett album, but I gave How the West Was Won an A-, and this one hit the same pleasure spots. Makes me wonder if I underrated Special View (the 1979 Only Ones album), where I remembered his voice from.

I'll also note that I've given Wes's Best: The Best of Wes Montgomery on Resonance 3-4 plays with increasing pleasure. I'd like to review the albums it was selected from before doing the compilation, but the release schedule hasn't made that possible. Haven't played the Bill Evans compilation yet, but same considerations apply there. I've been wanting to hear those records ever since they came out, but probably wouldn't have bothered with the compilations had they not appeared in the mail. Also got a note in email today asking whether I've downloaded recent AUM Fidelity releases. I've looked for them on Napster, but didn't notice the email invites. I'll eventually dig them out, but if you want my attention, best way is still to send a CD.

There will be a new XgauSez out by Tuesday morning. I'm hope to get this post wrapped up before I take a good look at it, and I've been hobbled by Weekend Roundup running into overtime. Also in my input queue is a lengthy and quite extraordinary "Consumer Guide to Franco" that Joe Yanosik compiled and asked if I would publish. Expect that later this week.

New records reviewed this week:

• 75 Dollar Bill: I Was Real (2019, Thin Wrist): [r]: B+(***)
• JD Allen: Barracoon (2019, Savant): [r]: A-
• Gretje Angell: In Any Key (2018 [2019], Grevlinto): [cd]: B+(**)
• Blind Lemon Jazz: After Hours: New Pages in the American Songbook (2019, Ofeh): [cd]: B+(*)
• DaBaby: Blank Blank (2018, South Coast Music Group, EP): [r]: B+(***)
• DaBaby: Baby on Baby (2019, South Coast Music Group): [r]: B+(**)
• Open Mike Eagle: The New Negroes: Season 1 Soundtrack (2019, Comedy Central, EP): [r]: B+(*)
• Freddie Gibbs & Madlib: Bandana (2019, Keep Cool/RCA): [r]: A-
• Jesca Hoop: Stonechild (2019, Memphis Industries): [r]: B+(*)
• Abdullah Ibrahim: The Balance (2019, Gearbox): [r]: B+(***)
• Mike LeDonne: Partners in Time (2019, Savant): [r]: B+(**)
• Madonna: Madame X (2019, Interscope): [r]: A-
• Buddy & Julie Miller: Breakdown on 20th Ave. South (2019, New West): [r]: B+(**)
• Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real: Turn Off the News (Build a Garden) (2019, Fantasy): [r]: B+(*)
• Willie Nelson: Ride Me Back Home (2019, Legacy): [r]: A-
• Peter Perrett: Humanworld (2019, Domino): [r]: A-
• Mette Rasmussen/Julien Desprez: The Hatch (2016 [2019], Dark Tree): [cd]: B+(**)
• Rebekah Victoria: Songs of the Decades (2018 [2019], Patois): [cd]: B+(*)
• Billy Woods & Kenny Segal: Hiding Places (2019, Blackwoodz Studioz): [r]: B+(***)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Stan Getz: Getz at the Gate: The Stan Getz Quartet Live at the Village Gate Nov. 26 1961 (1961 [2019], Verve, 2CD): [r]: A-
• Sourakata Koité: En Hollande (1984 [2019], Awesome Tapes From Africa): [bc]: B+(**)
• Asnakech Worku: Asnakech (1975 [2018], Awesome Tapes From Africa): [bc]: B+(**)

Old music:

• The V.S.O.P. Quintet: Five Stars (1979, CBS/Sony): [r]: B

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Rodrigo Amado/Chris Corsano: No Place to Fall (Astral Spirits)
• Peter Eldridge/Kenny Werner: Somewhere (Rosebud Music)
• Augie Haas: Dream a Little Dream (Playtime Music): August 30
• Rich Halley: Terra Incognita (Pine Eagle): August 9
• Jelena Jovovic: Heartbeat (self-released)

Weekend Roundup

Donald Trump's big July 4 "celebration" was the week's big non-event, so naturally garnered plenty of press attention. We'll collect the links here, to try to keep the silliness of the event from infecting everything else:

• Jonathan Freedland: Donald Trump wants to be a dictator. It's not enough just to laugh at him.

• Masha Gessen: Donald Trump's "inoffensive" war on reality.

• Philip Kennicott: Forget the tanks. Trump's violation of the Lincoln Memorial is the real offense.

• Osita Nwanevu: Cutouts of J.F.K., Jr., tanks, and adulation at Trump's "Salute to America".

• Adam K Raymond: What you missed at Trump's July 4th spectacular.

• Aaron Rupar: Trump's "Salute to America" speech wasn't as bad as some feared. But it was still weird. "Trump avoided politics, but his over-the-top glorification of the military felt more Moscow than Washington, DC."

Some scattered links this week:

• Ben Armbruster: The Trump administration is trying to make war with Iran inevitable: "We should view Iran's recent posturing for what it is: retaliation to the Trump administration's unnecessary and deliberate provocation." Related: Phyllis Bennis: If war breaks out with Iran, it won't be an accident.

• Dean Baker: Why aren't Democrats talking about ending patent-financed drug research? Good question, especially since "free market drugs are a really big deal." One point I'd stress more is that public funding of drug research is not only more efficient, and much more transparent, but that it would also demolish borders which impose artificial costs. Free market drugs would spread out research investment, allowing all to benefit.

• Julian Borger: Nuclear weapons: experts alarmed by new Pentagon 'war-fighting' doctrine.

• Alexia Fernández Campbell:

  • The latest jobs report is great news for Wall Street. Not so much for workers.

  • Reminder: Trump doesn't need to keep migrants in detention camps: "The administration has better options to enforce immigration and asylum laws."

  • A $15 federal minimum wage won't cost American jobs, new study says.

• Jonathan Chait:

  • How Hitler's rise to power explains why Republicans accept Donald Trump. Back when GW Bush was president and still popular, I bought a copy of Richard J Evans' The Coming of the Third Reich, figuring it might be interesting to compare the machinations of the Bush-Cheney regime to the ascent of the Nazi party in Germany. I never got around to reading that book, but that same question arose again with Trump, and this time I did some reading: Benjamin Carter Hett's The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic, James Q Whitman's Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, and Jason Stanley's How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. The unstated assumption here is that similarities between now and early stages of Hitler's arc to disaster predict the path we will follow if we don't change direction. Given how bad things turned out, it's hard to be shocked by each unfolding step. But Chait makes a key point (leaving out the parentheticals):

    All this is to say that German conservatives did not see Hitler as Hitler -- they saw Hitler as Trump. And the reasons they devised to overcome their qualms and accept him as the head of the government would ring familiar to followers of the 2016 campaign. They believed the responsibility of governing would tame Hitler, and that his beliefs were amorphous and could be shaped by advisers once in office. They respected his populist appeal and believed it could serve their own ends. Their myopic concern with specifics of their policy agenda overcame their general sense of unease. Think of the supply-siders supporting Trump in the hope he can enact major tax cuts, or the social conservatives enthused about his list of potential judges, and you'll have a picture of the thought process.

  • Today in 'Donald Trump's campaign is a garbage fire'.

  • Sorry, Obama: Donald Trump is a populist, and you're not: Sorry, Chait, Trump isn't a populist either, even according to either of your dubious definitions:

    1. "The ideological definition of populist means traditionalist on social issues and interventionist on economic policy -- the opposite of libertarianism, in other words."
    2. "Populism can also be defined as a certain kind of political style. Populists believe the government has been captured by evil and/or corrupt interests, and that it can be recaptured by a unified effort by the people (or, at least, their people)."

    I've long identified with populism (see the little blurb top left: "An occasional blog about populist politics and popular music"), most likely because the political movement it refers to was most identified with the people and place I came from (three generations of Kansas farmers before my father got his job in a Wichita airplane factory). Chait's definitions are wrong for that particular movement, and do little to capture the populist impulse as it has periodically erupted in various situations since then. The essential demand of populism is that power serve the people. It's easy enough to show that liberal technocrats like Obama at best give lip service to real democracy, but reactionary demagogues like Trump veer even farther from the principle. They only appear "populist" to elitist pundits who regard the masses as nothing more than a seething horde of prejudices. The more general historical term for such demagoguery is fascism.

• Michelle Chen: AOC's Green New Deal is just the start. Next let's make it global.

• Jelani Cobb: The Supreme Court just legitimized a cornerstone element of voter suppression.

• Tom Engelhardt: War With . . . ?: "We're not the good guys: why is American aggression missing in action?"

  So here's the strange thing, on a planet on which, in 2017, U.S. Special Operations forces deployed to 149 countries, or approximately 75% of all nations; on which the U.S. has perhaps 800 military garrisons outside its own territory; on which the U.S. Navy patrols most of its oceans and seas; on which U.S. unmanned aerial drones conduct assassination strikes across a surprising range of countries; and on which the U.S. has been fighting wars, as well as more minor conflicts, for years on end from Afghanistan to Libya, Syria to Yemen, Iraq to Niger in a century in which it chose to launch full-scale invasions of two countries (Afghanistan and Iraq), is it truly reasonable never to identify the U.S. as an "aggressor" anywhere?

  One should add that there are two major forms of aggression that aren't even being counted here: cyberwarfare and economic warfare in the form of sanctions.

• Garrett Epps: Where John Roberts is taking the court.

• Jeannie Suk Gersen: The Supreme Court is one vote away from changing how the U.S. is governed.

• Jeet Heer: Democrats don't need David Brooks: Response to Brooks' Dems, please don't drive me away.

• Umair Irfan: Restoring forests may be one of our most powerful weapons in fighting climate change: "Adding 2.2 billion acres of tree cover would capture two-thirds of man-made carbon emissions, a new study found." But we're still cutting down more trees than we plant -- especially in Brazil. See Alexander Zaitchick: Rainforest on fire.

• Jake Johnson:

  • 'We are in a climate emergency, America': Anchorage hits 90 degrees for the first time in recorded history. Meanwhile, France records all-time highest temperature of 45.9C (i.e., 114.6F).

  • After British commandos seize oil tanker, Iran accuses UK of committing 'maritime piracy' on behalf of US.

• Fred Kaplan: Bolton of Mongolia: "The national security adviser's banishment during Trump's big diplomatic weekend suggests his days may be numbered."

• Jen Kirby: Sudan's military and civilian opposition have reached a power-sharing deal.

• Gary Leupp: Thoughts on the impromptu Kim-Trump summit: Regarding the US media: "One doesn't hear common sense: that this was a rational friendly gesture towards a country that Trump has rationally decided not to attack." Related: Christine Ahn: It's time to formally end the Korean War.

• Eric Levitz: Trump's Fed nominee pledges to serve as a partisan hack: Judy Shelton, who established her credentials as a partisan back in 2010 when she lobbied for raising Fed interest rates when unemployment topped 10 percent, but insists that we should lower them now that unemployment rates are at a record low. The difference, of course, is the party affiliation of the president.

• Robert Lipsyte: How the worst values of sports are taking over America:

  A half-century ago, the sporting Cassandras predicted that the worst values and sensibilities of our increasingly corrupted civic society would eventually affect our sacred games: football would become a gladiatorial meat market, basketball a model of racism, college sports a paradigm of commercialization, and Olympic sports like swimming and gymnastics a hotbed of sexual predators.

  Mission accomplished!

  The Cassandras then forecast an even more perverse reversal: our games, now profaned, would further corrupt our civic life; winning would not be enough without domination; cheating would be justified as gamesmanship; extreme fandom would become violent tribalism; team loyalty would displace moral courage; and obedience to the coach would supplant democracy.

  Okay, I think it's time for a round of applause for those seers. Let's hear it for Team Trump!

• PR Lockhart: The Alabama woman indicted after a miscarriage will not be prosecuted.

• Robert Mackey: Stephanie Grisham, new White House Press Secretary, has already been caught lying.

• Dylan Matthews: 3 reasons the American Revolution was a mistake: This questions some of my longest and most deeply held beliefs, but for the record:

  1. Abolution would have come faster without independence.
  2. Independence was bad for Native Americans.
  3. America would have a better system of government if we'd stuck with Britain.

• Yascha Mounk: The more you watch, the more you vote populist: Another entry in the "television rots your brain" sweepstakes, using Italy and Silvio Berlusconi as the example.

• Ella Nilsen: Republicans dominate state legislatures. That decides political power in America.

• Anna North: The legal battle over the Trump administration's "domestic gag rule," explained.

• Kelsey Piper: George Soros and Charles Koch team up for a common cause: an end to "endless war": "The controversial billionaire philanthropists are launching a new anti-interventionist think tank": The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, named for John Quincy Adams ("who said in an 1821 speech that America 'goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy'").

• Robert Reich: There is no 'right' v 'left': it is Trump and the oligarchs against the rest: Actually, that's the very definition of right v left. Such naivete Makes me doubt Reich his own title for the otherwise reasonable Avbolish the Billionaires!

• Aaron Rupar: The viral video of Ivanka Trump at the G20 perfectly captures the problem with nepotism.

• Raja Shehadeh: State of exception: Review of Noura Erakat: Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine, asking "what role has local and international law played in the Occupied Territories?"

• Emily Stewart: Did Justin Amash leave the GOP, or did the GOP leave him? The only Republican member of Congress willing to consider impeachment spared the Party the embarrassment of his presence, writing an op-ed announcing his exit from the party. Trump cheered him on:

  Great news for the Republican Party as one of the dumbest & most disloyal men in Congress is "quitting" the Party.

  Related: Bianca Quilantan: Justin Amash: GOP was broken even before Trump's presidency.

• Nicholas Thompson: Tim Wu explains why he thinks Facebook should be broken up. I will add that buying competitors to put them out of business has been a very business practice for quite a while now. The startup I worked for from the late 1980s (Contex Graphic Systems) was eventually sold off to a competitor (Barco), which shut it down within a year. Other antitrust matters: Steven Overly/Margaret Harding McGill: Google's onetime hired gun could now be its antitrust nightmare.

• Anya van Wagtendonk: Two earthquakes shook southern California this week. More could come, but predicting them isn't easy.

• David Wallace-Wells:

  • The uninhabitable Earth: "Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak -- sooner than you think."

  • The man who coined the term 'global warming' on the worst-case scenario for Planet Earth: Interview with Wallace Smith Broecker.

  • 'The models are too conservative': Paleontologist Peter Ward on what past mass extinctions can teach us about climate change today.

• Alex Ward:

  • Biden believes NATO will cease to exist in Trump's second term. That's a bit far-fetched. And Biden thinks this is a reason to vote for him instead of Trump?

  • Violent protests erupt in Israel over police shooting of unarmed Ethiopian teen.

  • Trump calls Afghanistan "the Harvard of terrorists," says he'll leave intel assets there.

  • Why Iran just violated part of the 2015 nuclear deal.

  • The one big benefit to Trump's diplomacy with Kim Jong Un: "Minimizing the chance of war is nothing to scoff at."

• Peter Wehner: The deepening crisis in evangelical Christianity: "Support for Trump comes at a high cost for Christian witness." Wehner has been described as "an outspoken Republican and Christian critic of the Trump presidency." But the article is less interesting for what he fears Trump idolatry is doing to evangelical Christianity that for its description of how deranged Trump's evangelical fans have become. Wehner has a recent book: The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.

• Philip Weiss: Biden often praises Israeli racists -- but don't expect Kamala Harris to call him out.

• Brett Wilkins: A brief history of US concentration camps.

• Thomas Wright: Trump couldn't ignore the contradictions of his foreign poicy any longer: "The president moves to straighten out his own foreign policy -- and leaves his hawkish national security adviser on the sidelines."

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • Democratic candidates' school integration plans, explained: "Bernie Sanders and Julián Castro have one, Kamala Harris doesn't really."

  • Democrats are learning the wrong lesson from Donald Trump: He ran as a moderate -- and it worked." A moderate, that is, only compared to his fellow Republican candidates, who weren't moderate by any measure. Moreover, since his election, he has regularly surrendered his promises to Republican orthodoxy, except in cases like immigration where he is the lunatic fringe. But Yglesias didn't write this piece to change our perception of Trump. He wrote it to disparage those Democrats who see Trump's extremism as reason to driving the Democratic platform further to the left.

• Gary Younge: Britain is run by a self-serving clique. That's why it's in crisis.

• Matthew Zeitlin:

  • The racial roots of Trump's anti-trade agenda: "The Trump campaign's trade policy can't be disentangled from its rhetoric on race and immigration."

  • There's a huge debate over how the very poorest are doing. There's no debate about whether food stamps help them.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, July archive (in progress).

Music: current count 31702 [31671] rated (+31), 260 [264] unrated (-4).

Noisey has evidently decided to drop Robert Christgau's Expert Witness column, the last one running on Friday. Christgau tweeted:

I do this for money as well as love. So just in case this is the last Expert Witness not just at Noisey, which I'm sad to announce it is, but anywhere, it sticks to albums I'm way late on and albums I wanted to be sure to weigh in on. Enjoy. Consume, even.

Obviously, I should make it a priority to round up these latest Consumer Guide reviews and stuff them into the database. Christgau's first Consumer Guide column was published July 10, 1969, so he's ten days short of fifty years. The whole list is here.

Twice before, Michael Tatum responded to lapses in Christgau's review schedule, first by debuting then relaunching his A Downloader's Diary column. As it happens, he had a new column, his 50th, ready to roll last week when he read Christgau's news, and revised his introduction. (Christgau started the parenthetical numbering scheme, but gave it up after reaching 52 in 1975. I also used it for my Recycled Goods columns.)

I managed to check out a few of Tatum's picks this week, but had previously given A- grades to Big Thief, Coathangers, Control Top, Dave, Billie Eilish, Little Simz, and Jamila Woods -- also a B+(***) to Stella Donnelly, B+(**) to Vampire Weekend. I haven't, however, checked any of his Trash picks.

Streamnotes appeared last week, so this starts a new month.

Don't have anything more to add -- at least anything fit to print. Bad day for me.

New records reviewed this week:

• Ilia Belorukov/Gabriel Ferrandini: Disquiet (2017 [2019], Clean Feed): [r]: B+(**)
• Lewis Capaldi: Divinely Uninspired to a Hellish Extent (2019, Capitol): [r]: B+(*)
• Charly Bliss: Young Enough (2019, Barsuk): [r]: A-
• Sylvie Courvoisier/Mark Feldman: Time Gone Out (2018 [2019], Intakt): [r]: B+(*)
• Caroline Davis: Alula (2017 [2019], New Amsterdam): [r]: B+(*)
• Whit Dickey/Kirk Knuffke: Drone Dream (2018 [2019], NoBusiness): [cdr]: B+(***)
• Sharman Duran: Questioning Reality (2019, self-released): [cd]: B+(**)
• Ethnic Heritage Ensemble: Be Known: Ancient/Future/Music (2019, Spiritmuse): [r]: B+(***)
• Damon Locks/Black Monument Ensemble: Where Future Unfolds (2019, International Anthem): [bc]: B+(*)
• Jan Maksimovic/Dimitrij Golovanov: Thousand Seconds of Our Life (2018 [2019], NoBusiness): [cd]: B+(***)
• Jenna McLean: Brighter Day (2018 [2019], Moddl): [cd]: B+(*)
• Gabriele Mitelli/Rob Mazurek: Star Splitter (2019, Clean Feed): [r]: B+(*)
• Monopiece/Jaap Blonk: Monopiece + Jaap Blonk (2019, Shhpuma): [r]: B
• Angelika Niescier/Christopher Tordini/Gerald Cleaver: New York Trio Feat. Jonathan Finlayson (2018 [2019], Intakt): [r]: B+(***)
• Evan Parker/Paul G. Smyth: Calenture and Light Leaks (2015 [2019], Weekertoft): [bc]: B+(**)
• Evan Parker & Kinetics: Chiasm (2018 [2019], Clean Feed): [r]: A-
• Caroline Spence: Mint Condition (2019, Rounder): [r]: A-
• Aki Takase: Hokusai: Piano Solo (2018 [2019], Intakt): [r]: B+(**)
• AJ Tracey: AJ Tracey (2019, self-released): [r]: B+(**)
• Gianluigi Trovesi/Gianni Coscia: La Misteriosa Musica Della Regina Loana (2019, ECM): [r]: B+(**)
• G. Calvin Weston/The Phoenix Orchestra: Dust and Ash (2019, 577): [r]: B+(*)
• Wschód: Wschód (2017 [2019], Clean Feed): [r]: B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Chance the Rapper: 10 Day (2011 [2019], self-released): [r]: A-
• Detail: Day Two (1982 [2019], NoBusiness): [cd]: B+(**)
• Kang Tae Hwan/Midori Takada: An Eternal Moment (1995 [2019], NoBusiness): [cd]: B+(***)
• Sunny Murray/Bob Dickie/Robert Andreano: Homework (1994 [2019], NoBusiness): [cd]: B+(**)
• Horace Tapscott With the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra and the Great Voice of UGMAA: Why Don't You Listen? Live at LACMA 1998 (1998 [2019], Dark Tree): [cd]: A-
• David Wertman Sun Ensemble: Earthly Delights (1978 [2019], BBE)

Old music:

• Peter Kowald/Kent Kessler/Fred Lonberg-Holm: Flats Fixed (1998 [2014], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Ola Onabulé: Point Less (Rugged Ram): August 30
• Mette Rasmussen/Julien Desprez: The Hatch (Dark Tree)
• Horace Tapscott With the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra and the Great Voice of UGMAA: Why Don't You Listen? Live at LACMA 1998 (Dark Tree)

Jun 2019