VHS of the Month: "San Francisco 49ers 1989 Video Yearbook"

[VHS of the Month covers movies only - or best - commercially available on VHS.]

The 1989 San Francisco 49ers were perhaps the finest team ever assembled. It's rightfully remembered as an offensive juggernaut, having featured the game's smartest, most clutch quarterback and greatest ever wide receiver, both in their prime; a runningback/fullback duo that combined for over 2400 yards and 8 TDs; and a backup quarterback who threw for 1000 yards and 8 TDs. People forget, though, that they also featured a dominant defense, featuring stars Ronnie Lott, Charles Haley, Keena Turner, and Bill Romanowski, and ranking 3rd overall in the NFL that year. It's true that the team's explosive offense helped it score an astonishing 126 points in 3 playoff games, but it was the defense alone that yielded 100 fewer points - that's 26 in total - to opponents in those same contests. And of course, the year culminated in an unprecedented laugher of a Super Bowl, a 55-10 thrashing of John Elway's hopelessly outmatched Denver Broncos. The 1989 Video Yearbook presents a game-by-game recap of the 14-2 regular season, and a more in-depth look back at the 3 playoff games (including the Super Bowl XXIV highlights advertised on the cover). Featuring the same glorious melodrama that has endeared NFL Films to sports fans for generations, the Yearbook has nonetheless fallen out of print, like all of the original team videos celebrating the Team of the 80s. However, it's an excellent testament to a squad whose unbelievable prowess was poetry in motion and is ideal to track down for any hardcore football fan, whether a member of the success-starved 49er Faithful or not.

My Top 10 Albums of the 90s: (1) OK Computer - Radiohead

[This is the last in a series of ten posts.]

Radiohead's towering landmark OK Computer is probably chosen as the best album of its decade more frequently than any other album from any other decade. Unsurprisingly, it has been analyzed from all conceivable angles, its every attribute dissected and submitted for critical approval. Most of its critics sing the same praises, and most of these are merited. In the scope of the band's career, for instance, OK Computer does mark a quantum leap. For all its shining moments on The Bends, it was here that Radiohead transcended its Jeff Buckley-esque wails and grunge-derived guitar roars and emerged sounding like no other band in the world. Inevitably, though, reviewers of OK Computer feel obliged to discuss the album's significance as a product of the 1990s: they portray the decade as one of greater uncertainty than any other since the 1960s, and go on to praise frontman Thom Yorke's prescience and name "Fitter Happier" the most "important" track on the album. In doing so, they forget that every era in human history was seen as a time of transition by those living through it (see: Dylan's times a-changin' in 1964; Dickens' best of times and worst of times in 1859; or Shakepeare's winter of discontent in 1591). More importantly, though, amidst all the grandiose stabs at significance, they also tend to completely overlook the album itself. OK Computer is not the album of the 90s because it captured some angsty zeitgeist, preserving the feel of war in Kosovo - or of life after the death of Cobain or the birth of the internet - for posterity. Rather, its success lies in Radiohead's newly expanded sound, accompanied by tighter songwriting that belied the group's burgeoning confidence. While songs like "Airbag" still featured the powerful angularity in Jonny Greenwood's guitars that had made "Creep" a worldwide hit, the majority of OK Computer's tracks explored different textures. On "The Tourist," Greenwood's guitar is subdued to a languid wash, while the superlative "No Surprises" lends it Beach Boy reverb, echoing cleanly off into eternity; significantly, "Climbing Up the Walls" features Greenwood's emergence as an arranger, showcasing the measured dissonance that would later define such pieces as "How to Disappear Completely." The high standard set by Greenwood and human drum machine Phil Selway - the precision on "Airbag" is truly impeccable - is matched step-for-step by Thom Yorke. His lyrics are sharp and poignant, yet (generally) free of their standard, occasional descent into melodrama. His vocals, meanwhile, are perhaps his strongest ever, effortlessly ranging from his snarling growl ("Electioneering") to his trademark, soaring falsetto (the end of "Karma Police") - sometimes, as on the epic "Paranoid Android," in the course of a single song! The story of the album is, if anything, more dramatic knowing that within three years, Radiohead would scrap most identifyable aspects of its sound and recreate itself for the album's equally acclaimed follow-up, Kid A. On its own, though, OK Computer stands as an album of very nearly incomparable quality - made of and for the 1990s, but extending forever beyond them, note-perfect.

Wayman Tisdale - "The Fonk Record"

Following an outstanding career at the University of Oklahoma - one which saw his number retired and the national award for best freshman named after him - and a gold medal in the 1984 Olympics, Wayman Tisdale was taken with the second pick in the 1985 NBA Draft. Though his professional career was marked by a number of excellent seasons, Tisdale remained as widely known for his delightful personality and surprising virtuosity on the bass guitar as his performance on-court, and he actually retired early in 1997 to focus on his music. Unfortunately for some of the fans the Tiz made in the NBA, he chose to make his career in smooth jazz. Though his music was always well-played and immaculately produced, it nonetheless was prone to much of the generic feel endemic to the genre, and Tisdale may thus have never enjoyed the full commercial success his extramusical celebrity should have afforded him. In 2007, to the dismay of basketball fans nationwide, Tisdale was diagnosed with cancer that would remain an issue for the rest of his life and lead to the partial amputation of his right leg the following year. He carried on through his illness with characteristic grace, and even founded the Wayman Tisdale Foundation to raise funds for fellow amputees without enough money for prosthetic limbs. However, he died suddenly in May 2009, an abrupt end that not only robbed the world of an inspiring, gentle spirit, but even worse, seemingly took him without a chance to say goodbye. The October 2010 release of The Fonk Record therefore came as an enormous surprise. For one thing, it contained recordings made gradually over the course of 12 years, without any outside attention. It was also naturally strange to hear Tisdale more than a year after his death, not only on the bass, but even singing. Most disorienting of all, though, was that the album's name turned out to accurately describe its contents: it really is nothing less than an honest-to-god funk album, and one that could have been pulled out of a Bootsy Collins time capsule, at that.

Even without the added novelty of Wayman Tisdale releasing an album like The Fonk Record, it would have been odd to find anyone recording this kind of music in 2010. After all, by most any account, though it lived on in derivative forms, the funk proper had died by the early 80s: P-Funk ran out of gas, James Brown was reduced to a used carbon copy of himself, and Sly Stone literally disappeared into a tear in the fabric of time and space. Yet upon investigation, Tisdale's move makes perfect sense. Funk had been born in the context of a sad state of affairs for black Americans in the late 60s and early 70s, when the choice for socially concerned black popular musicians was either to produce a soul-searching affair like What's Going On or simply to forge ahead and (admittedly, anachronistically) Tear the Roof Off the Sucker. In the face of life-threatening - and, according to subsequent interviews with his widow, painfully debilitating - illness, Tiz, like so many of his bass forebears, turned to the fountain of funk as a source of spiritual comfort. It's as much a testament to his strength of character as his musicianship that The Fonk Record genuinely manages to be as good as the story behind it would make his fans hope. Perhaps Tisdale's wisest decision was to remain true to the genre and ensure that the music never feels overly sentimental. So though there are some moments rendered more meaningful by circumstance - when Tiz sings "there ain't never gonna be another jam like this" on his George Clinton duet "This Fonk Is 4U," or when his bandmates transform the breakup ballad "Been Here Before" into a goodbye to Wayman - the album remains, first and by far foremost, an excuse to simply have a great fucking time. It's the most appropriate goodbye conceivable, and convincing proof that he was as gifted a musician as he was a basketball player or a human being.

Out of Print Gems: Smetana, Stauss, & Stravinsky

Since the advent of recorded music, classical music has remained the hardest type to collect: after all, a popular composer is likely to have his pieces recorded by every label in the business, and the process of tracking down the definitive recording of any composition is usually as difficult as it is subjective. A further consequence of the continual rerecording and reissuing of classical music is that inevitably, as record labels change formats, switch owners, or cease to exist, some recordings fall out of print - even those once considered outstanding, or even authoritative.

Two such works are offered here. The first collection consists of the only recordings led by the famous conductor Jascha Horenstein to have fallen out of print, originally issued in 1954 on the Angel label, #35101. The A-side contains Igor Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms; the B-side, Richard Strauss' Metamorphosen for 23 Solo Strings. It has been unavailable commercially since its original release. The second is from a 1965 German release, Telefunken 30237, a 10" record featuring selections from Má vlast by Czech composer Bedřich Smetana, conducted by Joseph Keilberth. These recordings have been sparesely reissued on CD in Europe and Japan but are not available in the United States; these files in particular, like the Horenstein recordings, were ripped from LP. The recordings are uniformly excellent, particularly Horenstein's Psalm CL and Metamorphosen and Keilberth's Vltava. They can be downloaded here.

Eleh Ezkerah

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day - very nearly exactly the 66th anniversary of the final liberation of Germany's concentration camps (the last "big one," Bergen-Belsen, was liberated on April 15, 1945). It's an appropriate moment to remember that there are two components to the "Never Forget" motto so inextricably associated with the Holocaust. The first is to defend the victims themselves: to fight to remember each extinguished soul as an identity, rather than a statistic. There are, of course, any number of ways to connect. Projects like Francesco Lotoro's miraculous KZ Musik series demonstrate how music allowed the spirits of imprisoned composers to escape the darkness of the camps. Documentaries like Alain Resnais' Night and Fog make the overwhelming inhumanity of the Holocaust less abstract, while dramatizations like Steven Spielberg's immortal Schindler's List can highlight the essence of basic human decency even in the face of the unspeakable. (I humbly encourage you to check out a Holocaust memorial journal issue I worked on last year, available here; free hard copies are available by mail on request.)

The second critical component of "Never Forget" concerns the perpetrators, rather than the victims. Appropriately, this evening President Obama announced the death of al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden - a man, much like Adolf Hitler, driven by a virulently hateful ideology, willing and even eager to extinguish the lives of however many innocents stood in the way of the realization of his plans for the world. History tells us with unflinching regularity that mankind is wont to produce men of unrepentant evil. Just as we are bound to protect their would-be victims and remember the fallen, so too are we required to do all in our power to wrest from them the capacity to harm, from rapists to the perpetrators of genocide in Sudan. For so long as evil persists, none of us are truly free.

לזכר ששת המליון

May their memories never be forgotten.