14 書香人生 B O O K S & R E V I E W S SUNDAY, AUGUST 15, 2010 • TAIPEI TIMES Hardcover: UK CD Reviews Displaced in the aftermath of lake Shelton is not a stoic like Trace Adkins, a sunbleached hobo like Kenny Chesney or an avatar of rural pride like Jason Aldean. He’s not a guitar hero like Brad Paisley, a moody bruiser like Toby Keith or a repository of living history like World War II George Strait. What a relief that turns out to be. Shelton is among the most versatile of By Peter Preston contemporary country singers, an amiable rapscallion one minute and a thoughtful brooder The Guardian, London Bthe next. His new EP, , is a variety-pack of country styles, each song a Publication Notes All About Tonight In the months after the end of World War different pose for Shelton to try out, with varying success. (It’s his second EP this year, I, some 40 million people died amid a after Hillbilly Bone in March.) worldwide flu pandemic. Three million On All About Tonight he’s soused, flirty and convincing: “Tomorrow can wait ’til perished from typhus; 5 million Ukraini- tomorrow,” he insists. But Suffocating, a slow dirgelike ballad about being stuck in the ans starved to death. No more battles, but past, asks more of his voice than it’s prepared to give. no food, no medicine, no shelter, no resis- That’s because as a singer, he wrings feeling from emphasis and flexibility, not strength. tance, either: just milling chaos. The fight- On Got a Little Country, about seducing a city girl, he pronounces Manolo Blahniks “Milano ing had ended, but its baleful, destructive Blahniks” though you sense he knows perfectly well what he’s doing: The gaffe is funnier. legacy lingered on. And the question for Really, mischief is Shelton’s game — it’s telling that the funniest song here is the one the Western allies, immersed in another with his fiancee, Miranda Lambert. Draggin’ the River is about a couple who fake a car world war some 25 years later and brood- All About Tonight crash in order to steal away for a secret wedding — a tale that would make Tim McGraw ing on consequences long before Hitler Blake Shelton and Faith Hill blush. admitted defeat, was whether they could Warner Brothers Nashville  — JON CARAMANICA, NY Times News Service do better second time round. Ben Shephard sets out to provide the answers of formidably researched history. He can’t pull every strand The Long Road Home: together: There were millions of human stories. The challenge to the embryo The Aftermath of the Second World War “world community” of allied concern By Ben Shephard and its chosen solution, UNRRA — the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation 486 pages t the beginning of Deja Vu, which arrives midway through Mike Posner’s debut Administration — was likewise immense Bodley Head album 31 Minutes to Takeoff, the 1990s R ’n’ B greats Boyz II Men appear, and infernally complex. For not performing some of their signature post-doo-wop, all slick, airy harmony and crisp everybody wanted to go home — or even fingersnaps. Twenty-four seconds later they’re gone, and one second after that knew where their true homes were. the most powerful friend of Israel’s they’re deeply missed. UNRRA’s tally of “displaced persons” creation. Patton reflected a widely At that point Posner’s vaporous electro-soul returns to its natural state, unfettered byA depth or texture. A vocal and emotional naif, Posner has an easy way with harmless included Poles, Ukrainians, Balts, prevailing opinion in top US military Russians and many more who’d kept circles (and, frankly, much of US melodies, which are all over this flat album, notable only for its odd choices: frat-boy Hitler’s factories turning as Germany ran society). Britain’s sometimes saintly come-ons (“Get Your Red Bull on/’Cause I’m ready”) and what’s probably the first-ever short of infantry to hold the frontline. Labour government struggled might sample of a Ray LaMontagne tune (Do U Wanna?). Some were forced labor, some willing and main to fob off David Ben-Gurion Posner released a pair of mix tapes while still a student at Duke, from which he volunteers. Some were happy enough and keep Chaim Weizmann’s softer recently graduated. The sense of humor, however slight, that he showed on songs like to go back to Poland, some would brand of Zionism in time-consuming Drug Dealer Girl is nowhere to he heard here. Instead, he toggles between petulant cad do anything to avoid living under diplomatic play. (Gone in September) and wounded child (Save Your Goodbye), convincing at neither. He encroaching Soviet communism. Ukraine, “Give me your tired, your poor, your has a grating voice, heavily nasal, with a seeming inability to wrap his lips around all of then as now, was split two ways, one side huddled masses” read the words on the the necessary syllables, meaning that even when he’s at his angriest, he sounds as if he’s looking east, the other West. The Balkan Statue of Liberty. But the laws passed on holding back. states were their usual mess. Italians, Capitol Hill were quite different: Keep the Sometimes, though, Posner feels the need to make things uncomfortably clear. On once Mussolini departed, proved neither huddled masses away. America already 31 Minutes to Takeoff Cheated, he actually names the woman who he’s lashing out against: Boyz II Men would friends nor foes, but a burden. Germans had strict immigration legislation and Mike Posner never be so gauche. driven from their farms in Poland and tough, inflexible quotas. Public opinion J  — JON CARAMANICA, NY Times News Service Czechoslovakia flocked to find safety in in 1945 was resolutely against easing their beaten, battered fatherland. And such rigidities. Truman was a hero here, then, of course, there were the Jews. leading where he could have lain low, In part, but only in part, Shephard taking risks, even telling George Marshall charts the founding of Israel and, he could claim the credit for the master fascinatingly, sets it in a context few plan that helped to rescue Europe politicians (or readers) would recognize because a “Truman Plan” would never six decades on. How did UNRRA deal make it through the Senate. with the horror of the Holocaust? It Just as dismayingly, the British, left didn’t. Nobody in the 1940s talked about as well as right, did not leap to help the aven’t we been here before? Deja vu, the new album by the pianist-composer- holocausts. One Fabian Society report homeless or defenseless. “Let them be producer George Duke, answers that question in the affirmative. Proudly slick, it’s managed half a paragraph mentioning displaced,” said the Daily Mirror, com- a throwback to the sounds of Duke’s early career, in the 1970s: funk, fusion, Stevie 2 million Jewish deaths in 26 pages plaining we’d taken in “most of the scum” Wonderish soul and the milder stirrings of then-nascent smooth jazz. Neither a examining Europe’s displaced persons. from Europe and given others the cream. stretch nor a new strategy for Duke — Dukey Treats, from 2008, had a similar There was the casual anti-Semitism of We don’t want the “illiterate, the mentally scope — it’s a way to play to his strengths, and to the tastes of a core audience that has stayedH with him over the years. General George Patton as his conquering deficient, the sick, the aged, the politi- army scythed across Europe. The Jews he cally suspect and behaviorally disruptive” For all its familiarity, Deja vu is not a complacent album. Duke has seized the chance found and freed were, he declared, “lower working here, said the New Statesman. to dust off an arsenal of keyboards — Minimoog Voyagers, Fender Rhodes and clavinets than animals.” There was, still more And yet slowly, patiently, sometimes with — in the service of his vintage ideal. Some songs are impeccable period pieces: Oh Really? surprisingly, an antipathy in the White judgment, often with luck, the problem has him playing a Wurlitzer electric piano in unison with the guitarist Jef Lee Johnson, House that would set Washington implod- was solved — or at least moved on to against a pocket funk groove. The title track, which features a Nord synthesizer solo meant ing today. “The Jews,” President Truman another stage and another generation. to evoke soaring electric guitar, feels like his nod to first-generation jazz-rock bands like wrote in his diary, “are very, very selfish. Shephard does not draw pat lessons Return to Forever and the Mahavishnu Orchestra. They care not how many Estonians, or modern conclusions from any of this. Elsewhere the album adopts more of an adult-contemporary gloss. Stupid Is as Stupid Latvians, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get He is content to tell us what happened Does enlists a sharp horn section, with Hubert Laws on flute, Nicholas Payton on trumpet murdered or mistreated as long as the next, in detail, and often vividly. But you and Bob Sheppard on tenor saxophone, but never surmounts its own glibness. What Goes Jews get special treatment. Yet when they can’t read The Long Road Home without Around Comes Around, written with the saxophonist Everette Harp, sounds like hold have power, physical or political, neither jolts of sudden relevance — whether of music, or something heard in the waiting room at the dentist’s office. Ripple in Time Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for political frailty, electoral insularity, or resembles an outtake from the Miles Davis album Tutu. cruelty or mistreatment of the underdog.” from registering the basic factors, such as Deja vu Those aren’t the greatest lapses of judgment here. Duke sings on half of the tracks on Shephard’s strongest suit as he existing immigrant communities to join George Duke Deja vu, in a style blandly geared toward Quiet Storm radio programming. His soggy lyrics on Bring Me Joy and Come to Me Now might have worked with a more remarkable singer. chronicles these and other explosions up with, that make some migrations far Heads Up International of frustration or prejudice is that more successful than others. You Touch My Brain probably never had a chance, despite its strong approximation of a he leaves in all the raw edges and A good story or a bad one for Parliament-Funkadelic groove. And 6 O’Clock Revisited has Duke’s voice multi-tracked profound contradictions of the mankind? In the end, more good than like a one-man Take 6, cooing about a lover’s untrustworthiness. As the title implies, it’s a shattered world of the 1940s; he bad — but full of awful warnings. And, redo of an older track from his own discography. But he did it better the first time. doesn’t try to smooth them into some from Shephard, a riveting and often  — NATE CHINEN, NY Times News Service conventionally heroic narrative. entirely fresh story, shrewdly assembled, Remember, Harry Truman was also very well told. Softcover: US Bad vibes: Anti-gay message takes root in Japanese subculture Marvin D. Sterling’s new book offers thoughtful insights into Japan’s take on all things Jamaican, but fails to properly address its homophobic ideology

By BRADLEY WINTERTON murder of gays is common, and in dreadlocks, chant “Battyman Indiana University, has written an strange that Sterling, sane and of the colonial British, and a law Contributing Reporter several countries have granted fi bun,” apparently chanted ad Publication Notes interesting account of this scene. objective though he undoubtedly is, stipulating a maximum 10-year This is an academic study of the Jamaican gays political asylum nauseam in Jamaican dancehalls. His writing is admirably free of should refrain from a more blanket prison sentence for some gay followers of Jamaican reggae because of the real danger of death It means “Gays must burn.” theoretical jargon, and he evokes condemnation of this culture. It sexual activities is still in place music in Japan. It naturally makes should they return home. In 2004 It’s all very well to say that Japanese partying scenes he has does result in people’s deaths, after on the island. Nevertheless, it’s for fascinating reading — the two the founding member of the island’s perhaps these young Japanese himself witnessed, conveying the all, not to mention the day-to- hard to believe that the general cultures could hardly, you would only ever gay rights organization, would-be Rastafarians don’t really atmosphere cool-headedly but also day living in terror of thousands, antipathy to homosexuals in most have thought, be more different. Brian Williamson, was stabbed to mean it, that they shout such things vividly. In the relatively short space perhaps hundreds of thousands, of of Africa today doesn’t play some But the Japanese are nothing if not death at his home the day he was on Saturday nights but then go he devotes to the homophobic ele- others in Jamaica itself. part in the evolution of Rastafarian ardent imitators in many fields, interviewed by a Human Rights home to peaceable, largely tolerant ment in the story he’s clearly trying This extreme Jamaican culture in general, a culture that and nowhere more so than in Watch researcher. She arrived homes and think no more about it. to be even-handed and just. At one homophobia is not unrelated to believes Jamaica is “Babylon” (i.e. music. And thus it is that Jamaican back on the scene to find a crowd But the sentiments on the lips of point he says that the Japanese fans other aspects of the country’s the corrupt West), and the only reggae, dancehall, and Rastafarian dancing with joy and singing “Boom their MCs and DJs are nevertheless of this music cannot be absolved cultural life, where women are true salvation lies in re-migration cultural manifestations generally bye bye,” a line from a Jamaican unambiguous. This author quotes from blame for the cruel sentiments strongly subordinated and male back to Africa, home of the have a significant following among reggae singer Buju Banton about one Japanese MC as introducing they give voice to simply by saying adultery and promiscuity generally movement’s god-king, the benign some young Japanese. the need to execute gay men. Banton’s Boom Bye-Bye song they are only imitating their Jamai- are, reportedly, widely viewed as and good-natured late emperor of It’s all very admirable, you might “Battyman he get killed,” they as follows, here translated into can mentors. The weakness of the admirable qualities. Ethiopia, Haile Selassie. think, a feature of an international chanted, using the abusive term for Rastafarian English: book, however, lies in just this Examples in this book of Japa- A campaign under the name youth culture, and even of a benign gay men common in Jamaica. academic nature of its approach. nese reggae artists penning anti- “Stop Murder Music” was launched form of globalization — until, that So how does this go down So, all who no like battyboy, On the one hand, academic gay lyrics include Nanjaman, who in the UK in the 1990s, specifically is, you come across one horrific in Japan? Japan is not a notably Hand up inna di air now! works are not meant to be sings of an America “that enslaved aimed at the anti-gay lyrics of element in the situation. This is that homophobic society, and in Me, I really love reggae! BABYLON EAST: protest pamphlets. The ethos of black people ... that dropped the Jamaican reggae. But to date it Jamaican reggae and Rastafarian addition violent crime of any kind And there is one thing I hate Performing Dancehall, Roots the university is rightly one of atomic bomb on Japan … [and] seems to have had little effect. culture is vehemently, even is comparatively rare. But because especially! Reggae, and Rastafari in Japan observation and comparison. But where men marry men,” as if these This, then, is an important murderously, anti-gay. the young Japanese followers of And that is: homos, it can be, and in this case should were crimes of equal standing. book, but one that could have By MarVin D. Sterling Being perceived as gay, or even Rastafarian fashions want to be transsexuals, lesbians, be, one of evaluation as well. The Where the lethal Jamaican been a very different one. We can being suspected of being gay, is as authentic as possible, and do same-sex lovers! 300 pages prevailing orthodoxy in American hatred of gays might have come only hope Professor Sterling will literally life-threatening in Jamaica everything that their Jamaican Duke University Press socio-literary academic circles from is briefly dealt with in this make up for his sins of omission in — it has been called the most musical mentors do, they too, Marvin D. Sterling, an Assistant is strongly pro-gay, or at least book. Contributing factors were less mild-mannered observations homophobic society on earth. The in addition to growing their hair Professor of Anthropology at anti-homophobic, and so it seems undoubtedly the anti-sodomy laws on the same topic elsewhere.