Tom Waits for no man (or 14 year old girl)

I’ve had two encounters of the Tom Waits kind this week. The first was finally seeing the gent in the Jim Jarmusch film “Coffee and Cigarettes” where he discusses with Iggy Pop that the previous generation was the “coffee and pie generation, but" he brilliantly declares "we are the coffee and cigarettes generation”. A few days later I caught him being interviewed on The Late Show with Jon Stewart, being gruff voiced, irreverent and delightful as ever. After the interview he returned to sing “Day After Tomorrow”a lovely song about soldiers, war, and futility, which was depressingly cut off so the network could go to commercial. Even on cable there is hardly a respite from capitalism!

20 years in, Waits is able to convey so much that is both intimate and true, yet profound and global with his music. There are a few imitators (more artists who have drawn on his work for inspiration, like Reverend Glasseye and His Wooden Legs) but no one I'd quite call a 'contemporary.' He remains one of the few musical artists I can think of who is onto himself a genre. And what exactly is that genre? Well, I remember seeing Waits interviewed (I think) by David Letterman probably more than a decade ago. The question was "What are you listening to lately?” and Waits replied “I’m listening to the sound of the radio in the other room, when it’s tuned between two stations and there’s a lot of static...” Yes, that seems about right.

I’m beginning to believe that the people most worth listening to musically are the unfashionably old and the very young. The former because they know exactly what they’re doing, and know how to use their talents to convey a message eloquently; the latter because they haven’t yet arrived at having their honesty and passion beaten out of them in favor of what (they believe) will sell. Witness my blossoming interest in Smoosh, a band comprised of two pre-pubescent sisters whose music, although not always perfect, is pleasingly experimental, and oddly adept, yet not nearly as painful as The Shaggs.

Do you have to be a 14-year-old girl or a 57-year-old man to be able to breathe the heady air of uncontaminated creative selfhood? You shouldn’t have to be, but lord knows it certainly doesn’t seem to hurt.