Latest Newsletter Project Vol 1
Van Morrison hasn't released interesting music in three or four decades (depending on where you stand on, say, Hymns to the Silence), but he is getting a relatively high amount of press for his most recent release: Latest Record Project Vol. 1. This is not because his musical approach has suddenly become relevant again, but rather because he's followed up his year of Covid denialism with an album full of conspiratorial ranting, including songs like "The Long Con," "Big Lie," and, most despicably, the anti-Semitic "They Control the Media." Presumably he's saving "They Killed Jesus" for Vol. 2.
It's an obvious heel turn, but by no means Morrison's first. It seems to be part of his perverse idea of artistic integrity to periodically alienate his fans and to indulge his narcissistic grievances in unrelatable songs. (One of my favorites is "The Great Deception" from 1973: Having recently divorced from a woman named Janet Planet, he is suddenly intent on telling us about "plastic revolutionaries" and "so-called hippies" and how he "can't stand living in this world of lies.")
As several reviewers have suggested, Latest Record Project Vol. 1's anti-imaginative title, mind-numbing length, and simplistically confrontational lyrics are a callback to his infamous contractual obligation recordings of 1967 (featuring "Here Comes Dumb George" "Dum Dum George" and "Goodbye George" among other standouts), but it's not really clear what obligation he feels compelled to fulfill here. After the seventeen albums he seems to have released over the past six years — including Three Chords and the Truth, Versatile, Keep It Simple, Keep Me Singing, Born to Sing: No Plan B — does anyone really need to hear more from him? No one is asking for his opinion on "Where Have All the Rebels Gone?"
But I will admit to having my interest piqued by the song "Why Are You on Facebook?" which, for a cranky rant, turns out to be surprisingly breezy and jaunty — kind of like "Bright Side of the Road," only he's castigating his audience about trending topics and "second-hand friends." He also asks listeners if they "have any shame" and tells them to "get a life — is it that empty and sad?" If you weren't paying attention, however (and it certainly doesn't demand careful listening), you might think the song was an ad for Facebook — he and his backing vocalists certainly repeat the word Facebook enough times to indelibly stamp it on your mind.
A commenter at the song's YouTube link complains, "I love how recognizing the toxicity of social media somehow means you're a conspiracy theorist." But of course, slotting an anti-Facebook song next to "They Own the Media" will tend to create that impression. It's impossible to take Morrison all that seriously about anything, but it is a bit demoralizing for social media critique to appear here as another dismissible form of Boomer disgruntlement, as though it were as fundamentally out of touch as being on Facebook itself is at this point. "Why are you on Facebook?," or any platform for that matter, is a good question to ask, even if Morrison's answers and insinuations about it ("You're on Facebook because you are a moron") are inane. Why do these platforms have the place they have in our lives? Why do they generate so much negative affect, yet also so much "stuckness," as John Herrman calls it here?
Rolling Stone's reviewer likened Latest Record Project Vol. 1 to "a collection of shitposts, subtweets, and Reddit rants." Along those same lines, you can regard "Why Are You on Facebook?" less as a condemnation of Facebook than a re-enactment of what it is like to be on it: an old man making clueless complaints amid a falsely cheery ambiance while the larger question of what we're all doing with the limited time left to us on this earth looms unavoidably. Each time he sings "Why are you on Facebook?" during the interminable fade, it seems to take on broader existential implications. Maybe I'm there so I can ask myself that same question and never have to figure out the answer.