Not even Lester Bangs could eulogize Michael Jackson as effectively as has the collective car stereo of my New Haven neighborhood. Each time I went out this weekend—for pizza, for a library book, for a mind-clearing walk—two or three vehicles per block were blasting Jackson’s music, mostly at CD quality. My favorite example was a panel van, vaguely associated with the construction industry, in which two largeish, rough-looking men, one black, one white, nodded silently to “Billie Jean.”

Of course, this happy occurrence didn’t stop critics from assessing Jackson’s death, and many of them have made the same point. I’ll let Slate’s Jody Rosen stand in for the masses: “Weeping for Michael, we are also mourning the musical monoculture—the passing of a time when we could imagine that the whole country, the whole planet, was listening to the same song.”

Given the structure and citizenry of today’s pop world, this seems true enough. But it’s also a truth we’ve heard before—for example, in the final paragraph of Bangs’s seminal “Where Were You When Elvis Died?”:

If love is truly going out of fashion forever, which I do not believe, then along with our nurtured indifference to each other will be an even more contemptuous indifference to each other’s objects of reverence. I thought it was Iggy Stooge, you thought it was Joni Mitchell or whoever else seemed to speak for your own private, entirely circumscribed situation’s many pains and few ecstacies. We will continue to fragment in this manner, because solipsism holds all the cards at present; it is a king whose domain engulfs even Elvis’s. But I can guarantee you one thing: we will never agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis. So I won’t bother saying good-bye to his corpse. I will say good-bye to you.

The entire essay is this good, if not this positive. (“Elvis was perverse; only a true pervert could put out something like Having Fun with Elvis On Stage, that album released three or so years ago which consisted entirely of between-song onstage patter so redundant it would make both Willy Burroughs and Gert Stein blush.”) But it’s worth remembering that the Village Voice (which has inexplicably never put it online) published Bangs’s Elvis obit on August 29, 1977—a full five years before Thriller, the album named by Rosen et al. as the moment of Jackson’s pop apotheosis.

Now, when an artist reaches the level of an Elvis or a Michael, comparisons seem beside the point. But so do conclusive socio-historical death knells.

When it comes to David Cook, last year’s American Idol, the best “road report” focuses on the ticket buying, not the concert going. See what I mean over at Splice Today.

A few months ago, the New York Times ran a front-page story on Accolade, a Saudi Arabian rock band composed of female college students. Most of the reaction to this story focused on the band—their MySpace friend count went from 17 to more than 1,000 in 24 hours—even as no one seemed willing to admit that they sound like a watered-down Evanescence (a thought that didn’t even seem possible five minutes ago).

Anyway, a few of the story’s quotes come from a young Saudi reporter named Hasan Hatrash. Hatrash is a musician too, but he also writes about the Middle-East music scene from the inside. He’s a fascinating and thoughtful person, and, in a new interview at Gelf, I talked to him about rock and roll, at home and abroad.

(Thanks to my editor, Michael Gluckstadt, for the original story idea.)

In an excellent review of Guns N’ Roses’ excellent new album, Chuck Klosterman writes, “The weirdest (yet most predictable) aspect of Chinese Democracy is the way 60 percent of the lyrics seem to actively comment on the process of making the album itself.” I’ll see Chuck’s point and raise him—the reviews of Axl’s opus also spend 60 percent of their space commenting on the process of making the album.

Of course, we shouldn’t judge the reviewers too critically since they rarely get 17 years and $13 million to work with. But one thing that keeps recurring in the assessments of Chinese Democracy, in addition to those two numbers, is the phrase “banshee [noun].”

• Spin (on the album’s title track and first single): “Once the overture of muffled voices, ominous drums, and plinky Edge-ish guitar gives way to a thick, muscular four-chord riff and that Axl banshee wail, only the most stubbornly jaded will manage to suppress the goosebump reflex.”
• Entertainment Weekly: “At times it’s possible to hear the world-changing CD that Rose—whose banshee howl remains gloriously intact—must have had in his tightly braided skull all these years.”
• Slate: “On Chinese Democracy, his voice is still an amazing, bludgeoning instrument, rising from demonic low rumble to piercing banshee wail.”
• TimeOut: “The only salient elements throughout are Axl’s outlandish banshee howl and numerous ludicrous guitar solos.”
• Blender: “. . . a blast of iMax Lynyrd Skynyrd complete with string section, a couple na-na-na refrains, several bridges to nowhere and lord knows how many latticed layers of Axl’s bandana-banshee singing.”

This raises the obvious question—what the hell is a banshee? My first guess was that it’s a flexible, downright lazy bit of rock-critic shorthand. Just in the archives of Rolling Stone, whose review did not deem Chinese Democracy banshee-fide, the phrase “banshee whatever” covers bands from AC/DC to the Replacements; it seems the guitars on Pearl Jam’s Vitalogy sound like a “banshee,” as does the Divinyls’ entire fifth album. Also banshee-like: Sinead O’ Connor.

Maybe it’s better to ask what was a banshee? The Oxford English Dictionary defines “banshee”—and the word dates back to at least the late eighteenth century—as “a supernatural being supposed by the peasantry of Ireland and the Scottish Highlands to wail under the windows of a house where one of the inmates is about to die.” But now that Chinese Democracy‘s actually out, it seems time to move past the mythological allusions to death, failure, and disease. Based on the album’s early success, might I suggest the “Orpheus croon“?

Chuck Klosterman’s first book, Fargo Rock City, is really, really good. I know a lot of people share this opinion—most famously, David Byrne—and it’s a book I enjoy both musically (having long loved Guns ‘n Roses) and geographically (having recently left Indiana).

Klosterman’s more recent stuff seems to polarize readers, especially when those readers are other writers. In a new essay for Gelf, though, I try to evaluate his turn to sportswriting and fiction in a somewhat sober fashion. If you’re a fan of Chuck, or just curious about his new novel and new direction, check out “The Cure for the Common Cusack.”