MUSIC - Motown Classics: Gold

Score: 9.8

Holy crap what a collection. Usually when I'm listening to two CD's worth of various artists, there isn't a whole lot of good stuff to say. Quality varies so much from artist to artist, from time to time for each artist, and the huge changes in sound that usually come with anything that spans fifteen years is often too much to take in, even if quality isn't an issue.

But for the 13 years covered here, Motown was at its best, and America knew it. The Temptations, The Supremes, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder (I didn't even know he performed when he was young enough to be labeled "Young Stevie Wonder"), The Jackson 5, Four Tops, etc. These were huge names singing hugely popular songs, and they were all doing so under the guidance of Motown records. These songs have had such an impact on popular culture that I recognized half of them without having ever "heard" them before, on their own, as music. That means they were used in TV, movies, in shopping malls, or were simply relics of my parents' meagre music collection in the 80s which I mostly blocked out. These are great pop songs, without any doubt.

The more critical part of me wants to question the ingenuity of such mass-produced tracks (the HDH songwriting team apparently wrote 25 number one hits, as many as Lennon-McCartney, which is itself simply amazing) and the artistic "integrity" of the artists who performed them, but I simply can't. I don't care that every song was in 4/4 time, or that few of the artists wrote their own material, or that certain tropes were repeated time and time again; all I care about is hearing another tune, because I know it will be good. That this collection just scratches the surface of most of these artists (all of whom brought special touches to the songs, and delivered them with a professionalism and soul rarely heard amongst the pop stars of today) makes me happy, because I know there are more songs (perhaps not of the same quality, but probably not far off) just waiting to be discovered and rediscovered. I'm sold, I love Motown.

U.S. Economy.

Score: 2.8

Headlines like the one for this: "Dow jumps more than 250 points after prior day's big drop" make me even more scared every day that the United States is headed into a huge recession, possibly even a Depression (yes with a capital D). Nobody knows what the economy is doing, quite obviously. The fact that the DOW hasn't fallen much more significantly than it has is evidence of only one thing in my mind: the true effects of the housing bubble, the war in Iraq, job losses, oil and other commodity prices, and any number of other smaller forces, have not yet been felt properly in the market. With Bush's massive tax cuts, America is in the best consumer position in its postwar history (in terms of imagined disposable income) yet the Fed and Whitehouse seem to think "economic stimulus" (ie. quicker tax refunds, lower taxes, etc.) will somehow create income in middle class households. It won't. Wages have simply not matched inflation, good-paying jobs have disappeared due to globalization, and the credit crunch may soon mean a prime rate nearing 0. All this to avoid a recession that was brought on by stupidity all around. The people who didn't predict the housing bubble and the GDP contraction that is on its way, are the same people that are causing huge fluctuations in the day-to-day stock markets. In other words, the people who have no idea what's going on, but are trying to predict it anyways. I have little faith.