A few quick words about the president:

I’m sure virtually everyone who tuned in to the State of the Union Address noted that W.’s speech was actually two speeches – the “compassionate conservative” bent of his domestic-oriented first half, marked by phrases like, “That’s what a caring society does,” and the paranoid, crazed war-mongering of his foreign-oriented second half. Among the surprises was an admission (delivered somewhat gleefully) that the U.S. Government has been tracking down suspected terrorists abroad, one by one, and killing them, which may not be exactly the sort of thing a lot of people want their tax dollars going to support. I may be wrong on that count, but vigilante justice never sat right with me.

Anyone who still thinks we may not go to war with Iraq is, at this point, probably deluded. That doesn’t bother me as much as W.’s insistence on hiding the whole truth from the public – we may be invading Iraq partially because of a perceived threat to our national security, but we’re also undoubtedly hoping to set up a puppet government in Hussein’s place, one that will grant us really cheap prices and a measure of control over that region’s oil. All this after announcing an initiative to develop alternative energy sources “to decrease our dependence on foreign oil.” We all know that the gas and oil companies that own our government would never allow that to happen, and would much rather dig up the Alaskan reserves than pursue some ecologically-minded alternative.

I honestly have never been more scared of my government than I am right now. Reports from across the globe substantiate the notion that the rest of the world thinks W. has lost his freaking mind. (For an eye-opener, go check out Tom Morello’s piece in the new Rolling Stone.) This is a government that does not ask the public what it wants, but charges forward in single-minded determination toward its own goals. Bush even broached Phase One of his pro-life agenda – did you catch it? He cautiously buried it among other applause-baiting domestic policy ideas. This is not a government of the people, by the people and for the people – it’s a government that dictates to the people, and when necessary, forgets that there is a people all together.

Plus, it just drives me nuts that the elected leader of our nation can’t wrap his tongue around the word “nuclear.” It’s new-CLEAR, not new-cue-LAR. Man, that makes me angry.

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I am becoming increasingly certain that Chicago is going to win Best Picture this year, which I think is a shame.

Now, keep in mind that I haven’t seen Chicago, the film, but I have seen (and heard – again and again and again) Chicago, the stage musical. If Rob Marshall’s film stays true to the stage play, which I’ve heard it does, then it will definitely be a crowd-pleaser: a fluffy, safely ironic comment on fame with some fluffy, safe songs populating its edges. Not by any means a work of genius, nor by any stretch of the imagination the best film of the year.

That award, as of this writing, goes to Adaptation, a stunning work of recursion by the Being John Malkovich team of writer Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze. I have yet to see a film this year as fully and skillfully realized as this one, in which every scene can be enjoyed and marveled at on any number of levels. Adaptation pulls off the mind-boggling trick of making the audience a participant in the film’s creation, and through the whole thing, Kaufman and Jonze make rewriting the rules of conventional cinema look easy, and never less than completely engrossing.

And it probably won’t even be nominated.

What bothers me about Chicago is not just that it’s aimed at mass acceptance, but that its award will be nothing more than covering up for the Academy’s unconscionable snubbing of Moulin Rouge last year. At the time, the Academy’s nomination of Moulin for Best Picture without extending the same honor to its visionary director Baz Luhrmann seemed a ridiculous oversight. Now, however, it feels like the Academy is saying that they wanted to reward a musical, just not that musical.

Which makes a twisted kind of sense. Moulin Rouge is several leagues above the usual MGM-style movie musical, both in its visual style and in its use of six decades of popular tunes in a whirlwind summation of the emotional impact of music. Moulin is about that grand, epic, doomed love that’s been the subject of at least 75 percent of all pop songs ever written, and it uses those pop songs mainly for the direct emotional connection they already possess with the audience. Basically, my point is this: Chicago is just a musical, and a pretty empty one at that. Moulin Rouge is a musical about musicals, and about popular music in general, which tries to answer the question of why these little songs have such power over our feelings. It says more than Chicago could ever hope to.

Once again, the Academy is trying to cover its ass. Witness Denzel Washington last year, finally (finally!) winning the Oscar for Malcolm X and Philadelphia and countless other films in which he has stolen every scene in which he appears. What got him there? A piece of elevated genre trash like Training Day. It’s the same story here – Chicago will be unfairly honored for Moulin Rouge‘s vision, and it’s a shame because Luhrmann paved the way. Without his film, which many decried as an impossible project simply because it was a musical, something like Chicago would never have been made.

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The recent avalanche of release dates just goes to show that I should never do one of my preview columns in January. Here’s the latest:

Out next week are new place-holder projects by Jars of Clay (Furthermore: From the Studio, From the Stage) and the Pet Shop Boys (Disco 3, a remix EP). The week after that (2/11) sees new ones from Mistle Thrush (Drunk With You), Supergrass (the U.K. hit Life on Other Planets) and John Mayer (a 2-CD live album called Any Given Thursday). The Mayer album is kind of disconcerting, considering he only has one album and one EP from which to draw material. It just proves that record labels will run any successful artist into the ground if he/she lets them.

Also on the 11th is the debut album from Glassbyrd, called Open Wide This Window. This is interesting to me because both Marc Byrd and Christine Glass, who make up this project, are auxiliary members of the Choir, one of my favorite bands.

On the 18th comes Ministry’s long-awaited Animositisomina, which initial reviews have sounding quite a bit like Filth Pig. Shame, really. Additionally, the 18th will see the debut by Office of Strategic Intelligence, which includes folks from Dream Theater and Fates Warning. Could be good, could be crap.

And then the floodgates open on the 25th, with new stuff through the month of March from Lyle Lovett, Wilco, Aphex Twin (a compilation of remixes winningly titled 26 Mixes for Cash), Third Eye Blind, Ani DiFranco (a set she’s called Evolve, which reportedly puts the capper on her last five years of growth), Joe Jackson Band, Allman Brothers Band, the Lost Dogs, De La Soul, Type O Negative and Portishead, to name a few. I’m most excited, however, about the April 1 release date for Infinite Keys, the second full-lengther from Ester Drang. It may give me a chance to make up for missing their phenomenal first one, Goldenwest, in 2001.

And there you have it. Hope I have a job soon.

* * * * *

We’re not going to be able to discuss Zwan without discussing Billy Corgan, so let’s do that first. Corgan has a reputation as a raving egomaniac, as a tyrannical genius who molds his bands in his image. Smashing Pumpkins certainly fit that bill – Corgan wrote all of their songs, sang and played guitar, and seemingly dictated the band’s larger-than-life public persona. The Pumpkins were kind of winningly arrogant, and none more than Corgan, especially around the time of their double-disc spectacular, 1994’s Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. It was the first major double-record of the digital age, and at more than two hours, it presented the Pumpkins’ vision in an unbroken slab of noise and melody.

And then it all fell apart somehow. The band toppled under its own weight, most remarkably on their swan song, 2000’s MACHINA/The Machines of God. Here was a 70-plus-minute grand guignol that kept the noise while sacrificing nearly every inch of the melody. It was a chore to sit through – plodding and graceless, furious without direction. It was no real surprise that the Pumpkins broke up shortly thereafter, and that none of them have gone on to do anything remarkable since. (In fact, James Iha’s solo work only seems to prove that he, at least, lacked the vision to step out from Corgan’s big bald shadow.)

So what’s a prolific songwriter like Corgan to do? Well, it seemed obvious – he would go on to slog his way through a solo career dripping with importance and gravity, and we’d all ignore him until he went away. (Well, not me – I’d obsessively buy everything he put out for the sake of completeness, but you know what I mean.) Such a move felt inevitable, like Corgan’s installment of Behind the Music had already been written.

Lo and behold, though, Corgan went and found himself another band, this time with ex-members of Slint, Tortoise and Chavez, indie stalwarts all. He brought Pumpkins drummer Jimmy Chamberlin with him, and dubbed this new unit Zwan.

Or maybe he didn’t, and that’s the point. Even though he sings every song (and wrote most of them) on Zwan’s just-released debut, Mary Star of the Sea, Corgan has cast himself here as just another contributor, just a regular guy in a band. In fact, Corgan’s name doesn’t appear in Zwan’s lineup – he calls himself Billy Burke, for some reason, as if we couldn’t instantly spot him from the inimitable tone of his voice. Corgan is trying to convince us that Zwan is just another band, a far cry from the saviors-of-rock pose he adopted while in the Pumpkins. Moreover, he’s letting it be known that Zwan is not a puppet band under his control.

And impressively, the record bears that out. Despite its Corgan-esque title, Mary Star of the Sea is marvelous, and oceans apart from what we expect from its primary author. Considering some of the song titles (“Declarations of Faith,” “Ride a Black Swan,” “Heartsong”), I fully anticipated a wall of noise topped by Corgan’s trademark nasal wail – basically, Pumpkins redux. So imagine my surprise when I pressed play on the first track, “Lyric,” and out came a swirl of jangly, acoustic-electric guitars that wouldn’t sound out of place on a BoDeans album.

For most of its running time, Mary Star of the Sea is a light, hooky romp through pop-rock land. The songs are simple, yet winning, and they actually have melodies, with choruses and everything. Even “Of a Broken Heart” is delightfully free of moping. Corgan adapts several traditional spiritual tunes here as well, to decent effect. Zwan has three guitarists, including Corgan, Matt Sweeney and David Pajo, but they rarely combine them into a full frontal assault. Rather, the guitars chime in atop one another, layering sweetness rather than sludge.

Even Corgan himself sounds more relaxed in this environment than he ever has. His voice has thankfully lost much of that pinched quality that weighed down his Pumpkins work, and his melody lines are gracefully sung. It helps that bassist Paz Lenchantin adds high harmonies in her clear, lovely tones as well. If I didn’t think it an inappropriate image, I’d say that Corgan seems to have let his hair down on this record. (How else to explain a trio of songs with the honest-to-Christ real titles of “Endless Summer,” “Baby Let’s Rock!” and “Yeah!” Punctuation originally included, by the way.)

There is one song that reeks of rotten Pumpkins, however, and that’s the 14-minute title track. It lopes onward, saturated in feedback, until it nearly eradicates the light sense of fun in the preceding 12 tracks. Thankfully, Corgan pulls out of it at the end with the dreamy acoustic closer, “Come With Me.” Still, one can feel the old ambitions pushing at the edges of Zwan, and I hope that Corgan has enough sense to stick with the original plan. The accompanying DVD shows little else but the band chumming around, five regular folks who happen to make music, and it rings a little false.

While it’s likely true that Corgan’s one-of-the-guys thing here is just as much a piece of theater as his previous rock-god stature, I hope he can play the part, because Zwan, at least on this album, is the most enjoyable setting in which we’ve ever heard him. If he can just relax and have fun with it, Zwan should be a most pleasant trip. If not, it could be another spectacular failure, but at least we got one zippy little record out of the deal.

Next week, who knows, considering my financial status. Donations are accepted, of course.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Early on in his new live album, Prince admonishes his audience for what he thinks they may be expecting. “If you came here to get your Purple Rain on,” he says, “you in the wrong house.” He goes on to add that he’s not interested in what his audience knows, but what they are willing to learn.

That’s a bold statement from a once-relevant artist like Prince, who hasn’t had a hit in a decade. The general public, as a rule, doesn’t like to be taught things, and also doesn’t like to be reminded of how much they don’t know. America remembers Prince for Purple Rain, 1999 and Sign O’ the Times, and that’s about it. They may remember his contribution to the Batman film, and might recall later hits like “Diamonds and Pearls” and “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World,” but doubtless most of the nation’s consumers are unaware that Prince has continued to make music during the last 10 years.

Not to feed the man’s ego, but if you’ve lost track of Prince since 1993, you’ve been missing one of the most dramatic and experimental transformations afforded by pop culture. More accurately, the type of musical reinvention that Prince has undergone has only recently been made possible by pop culture, specifically the internet. More than any of his contemporaries, the Minneapolis wunderkind has seized hold of the ‘net, gambling on it to float his artistic endeavors.

Prince calls his online home the NPG Music Club, and for years it’s been his primary form of contact with his audience. Not only is Prince aware that his audience has diminished considerably since his commercial heyday, but he encourages it, shunning the marketplace and refusing to compromise his vision. Most often, it works: the general public has left him well enough alone since he changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol and started releasing three-hour albums at regular intervals.

Prince isn’t content with just avoiding the public, however – he actively seeks to repel it. His major label “comeback” album, 1999’s Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic, was his weakest in many years, and conversely, his independently released 2001 record, The Rainbow Children, was a masterpiece. For the last 10 years, Prince has been all about his core fans, to the point of offering them whole albums through the NPG Music Club that are unavailable anywhere else, and giving club members the best seats at all his concerts. It’s as if he knows there’s only a select few out there who will get what he’s doing, and he caters to them exclusively. The internet has granted him the opportunity to piss off everyone else and still keep his career going.

The kicker is that he’s making the best music of that career right now, and very few people are hearing it. His transformation truly began in the late ’80s, when Prince began working with Miles Davis on the trumpeter’s ill-fated Doo Bop project. We’ve yet to hear the results of those sessions, which were among the great jazzman’s last, but it was around that time that Prince started experimenting with jazz fusion on the spectacular Black Album. Those experiments have fully bloomed on The Rainbow Children, on which Prince embraced the (for lack of a better term) blackness of his sound – part slamming jazz club, and part Baptist revival.

During the years leading up to The Rainbow Children, Prince quietly assembled an amazing band, including mindblowing drummer John Blackwell and sax player Maceo Parker, who played with James Brown for more than a decade. He finally took that band on the road last year, and the results of that tour are documented on his first-ever live record, One Nite Alone…Live. Never one to do anything small, Prince has packed three CDs full of terrific music and packaged them in a lovely box, along with a thick booklet. If you want an excellent primer on where the man is now musically, as well as further evidence of his sheer undiminished ability, this thing is well worth your $50.

But if you’re looking for the hits you remember, well, as the man said, you in the wrong house. The focus is on jazz-funk improvisation here, and Prince’s band rivals Parliament Funkadelic in that respect. Disc one opens with the title track of The Rainbow Children, an 11-minute fusion workout that gives Prince the chance to shine on guitar. (A quick side note – Prince remains one of the most underrated guitarists currently working, jamming with the fire of Hendrix and the melodic agility of the best jazz players.) He follows that up with the mellow “Muse 2 the Pharaoh” before launching into the 12-minute improv assault of “Xenophobia.” At this point, any hopes you may have of hearing “Little Red Corvette” should be dashed.

Disc one goes on to showcase his extraordinary band, and near the end he pulls out some golden oldies with “Strange Relationship” and “When U Were Mine.” Then he sucker-punches you with politics on “Avalanche,” a deceptively smooth piece about racism and slavery. Some may not be used to political statements from Prince, and this one is couched in ill-fitting light jazz, marking it as one of the few failures of his later output. Still, Renato Neto’s piano solo is terrific, and Prince is in fine voice, letting his chilling falsetto carry the tune.

The politics return on the much more successful “Family Name,” which opens disc two. A striking rant about the subjugation of surnames during slavery, the song practically explodes with energy. The band rips through “Take Me With U” and “Raspberry Beret,” Prince’s one concession to his hit-machine past, before careening into “The Everlasting Now,” a sweaty funk exercise. (They recently performed a truncated version of this on The Tonight Show.)

Most of disc two, however, is taken up with a lovely medley performed by Prince himself on piano and voice alone. This is as intimate and unadorned as the man has ever allowed himself to sound, and it’s fascinating. Here is “Adore,” and “Diamonds and Pearls,” and “Starfish and Coffee,” and “Free,” all coming off as classics reborn. Here too is Sinead O’Connor’s hit “Nothing Compares 2 U,” which Prince wrote, sounding like a lost child returning home. The medley culminates with “Sometimes It Snows in April,” an underrated gem, and it’s almost a shame when the band comes back in for the mammoth “Anna Stesia.” But not much of one, since that song is given new, fully organic life.

Much has been made of Prince’s newfound spiritual side, and it’s in full evidence here. “The only four-letter word you’re gonna hear tonight is ‘love,'” he says at one point, and he keeps his promise – One Nite Alone is strictly PG. The later material includes songs about theocratic order, accurate knowledge of Christ, and above all, the enduring love of God. It’s interesting to note, however, that this is not a new development. Prince has been singing about God all along, balancing it (as he still does) with songs about sexual union. Most striking is “Anna Stesia,” from 1988’s Lovesexy, which concludes (both the song and the concert) with the refrain, “Love is God and God is love, girls and boys love God above.”

As fitting a closer as that is for the new Prince, he’s not quite done. One of the benefits of membership in the NPG Music Club this year was an invitation to an after-show party, where the band took the stage again for a loose, funky jam. One Nite Alone includes a third disc recorded at these parties, called The Aftershow…It Ain’t Over, and it’s here that the band really cuts loose. Guests Musiq and George Clinton show up to lend a hand, but aside from those interludes, It Ain’t Over is one hour-long groove, and a stunning one at that. It’s the icing on an already tasty cake.

Through it all, what stands out most is how well Prince has managed the transition from brash young upstart to elder statesman. He’s in a far better and more confident place than, say, Stevie Wonder was at this point in his career, and all the signs point up. Just three years ago, he was wearing glittering blue body suits and sounding ill at ease with his place in the world. Now he’s tricked out in suits and hats and self-assuredly doing what he does best – playing great music. There’s nothing tentative about One Nite Alone – rather, it’s a document of an artist secure in his talent and his vision. Now more than ever, he’s worth listening to.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I wanted to start off this first column of this brave new year with a bold pronouncement. Are you seated? Okay.

I, too, have cloned a human baby.

I’m not going to tell you how I did it, I’m not going to show you a picture or tell you the baby’s name, and in fact I’m not going to provide proof of any kind whatsoever. But I did clone a human baby. Really. I trust that this simple announcement, taken on faith, is enough to run the story on the front page of every newspaper in the country, and give it plenty of coverage on TV. Even CNN. I just love CNN.

Okay, fine, I didn’t clone a human baby. But I did manage to clone this column. Don’t believe me? Go here.

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A few days ago, I was hanging out at a friend’s house listening to old De La Soul tracks for the hell of it. We were waiting to head off to a Christmas party in Malden, and my friend thought he’d show me his expansive MP3 collection, most of which he’s ripped from CDs he owns. There are a few, though, he’s downloaded from the ‘net, including representative tracks from every De La record.

I hadn’t heard “Three Is a Magic Number” in a long time, and it was just as cool as I remembered. Since then, though, I’ve been noticing an almost supernatural recurrence of the number three, and because I’m anal and annoying, I thought I’d share some of those recurrences with my loyal readers. Ready? One, two, three…

Firstly, and most obviously, welcome to 2003. This column kicks off the third year of the online incarnation of Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. as well, and don’t think I haven’t noted the three before the A.M. there, too. It’s taken from the first Simon and Garfunkel album, although their third, Parsley Sage Rosemary and Thyme, is my favorite. (Incidentally, I have bandied about the idea of transcribing and posting the Face Magazine run of this column here, and I hope I never have that kind of free time on my hands.)

Lots of things come in threes – good things, celebrity deaths, triplets. During my not-so-selective sex life, I’ve even come in a few threes myself. (Ach…too nasty?) It took me roughly 15 hours (or five times three) to get to New England, and I have roughly three weeks left here before launching into the next uncharted phase of my life. And since I’ve been here, I’ve seen three movies, including one that’s the middle part of a trilogy.

The most recent film I saw was a documentary by Michael Moore called Bowling for Columbine that’s probably my favorite film of 2002, partially for lack of competition. It’s his third documentary, and while we’re on the subject, I’ve also noticed that many of the younger directors like Moore don’t hit their stride until their third film. David O. Russell, for example, didn’t knock one out of the park until Three Kings, which also has a three in the title. Kevin Smith delivered on his promise with his third, Chasing Amy. Even Spike Lee floundered around for a bit before his third film, Do the Right Thing, hammered it home.

And Moore’s third (not counting his foray into fiction, Canadian Bacon) is a wonder to behold, and should be mandatory viewing for every American, especially those with a shiny, happy, post-9-11 vision of this nation. For an exhausting two hours, Moore digs deep into the culture of violence in the U.S., quickly discounting the easy answers (guns, violent movies). He presents some interesting statistics – the U.S. leads every nation on Earth in shooting deaths per year, for example, by about 10,000. Other countries have the same violent films and TV shows we do, and even a similar number of guns. Canada, for example, has a number of guns equal to roughly 70 percent of its population, yet only a few hundred shooting deaths per year.

Along the way, he makes convincing cases for contributing factors, such as economic policies and a media that feeds on violence, but he comes away from this film with no clear-cut answers, a first for this often swaggering liberal. He does offer his most affecting examination of America yet, including first-hand testimonial and footage of the shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. He helps two Columbine survivors make their case to K-Mart by trying to return the bullets still lodged in their bodies for a refund. And he even tries to wake up poor Charlton Heston to the realities of gun violence in an uneasy, uncomfortable scene of great power.

Many bands don’t get where they’re going until their third album, either. Notables include U2, whose War really solidified their sound and style; Wilco, who decided with Summerteeth that they didn’t want to be Uncle Tupelo or the Rolling Stones; and Radiohead, who famously made the best album of the 1990s with OK Computer. And with that clumsy segue into this column’s stated purpose, here’s a look at the next three months of new music:

January is traditionally barren, and this year is no exception. Near month’s end, we’ll start to see a trickle, including new ones from King Missile and P.M. Dawn, two bands that also came into their own on their third albums Happy Hour and Jesus Wept, respectively. Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy launches his side band with Jim O’Rourke, called Loose Fur, on the 28th, and Billy Corgan also stages a comeback with his new band, Zwan. The album even has a typically Billy Corgan title: Mary Star of the Sea. Three words: get over yourself.

February has a few more interesting ones, including Ministry’s Animositisomina, Marilyn Manson’s The Golden Age of Grotesque, the Lost Dogs’ Nazarene Crying Towel, and the U.S. release of Life on Other Planets by Supergrass. Also coming in February is the Wilco-Minus 5 collaboration, Down With Wilco, that was dropped from its original label. Seems to happen to those guys a lot.

March, the third month, should see the new one from Ryan Adams, called Love Is Hell. I wonder if he paid Matt Groening any royalties for that title? Also in March, new ones from Anthrax, the Joe Jackson Band and Radiohead, who promise pop songs instead of quasi-atmospheric drivel this time. And if you haven’t gotten enough of Jeff Tweedy yet in 2003, the third of his projects hits on March 11 – a complete remaster and re-release of the three Uncle Tupelo albums.

Speaking of remasters, the complete Queensryche catalog is also slated for the repackage treatment in 2003. They fall into the previously mentioned category of bands, having been little more than a competent metal outfit until their third album, Operation Mindcrime.

Okay, enough of this. I’m off to watch one of my Christmas presents – the complete first season of South Park on DVD. Three DVDs, to be exact. I’m still waiting for another of my Christmas gifts – a box set of Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVDs. Season three, in fact. Next week, I promise I’ll get to that Phish review, but the week after that, the third week of 2003, I’ll be tackling the new live box set from Prince. Guess how many CDs? Yep, three.

See? It’s everywhere.

See you in line Tuesday morning.