In many ways, “Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince ” is the end of the first half of his saga. This is the conclusion of Harry as an innocent and a young man. No surprises here: The entire series has been leading towards Harry having a final confrontation with Voldemort.
The certainty of that confrontation, and the uncertainty of what will result, hangs heavily over “The Half-Blood Prince.” Harry’s sixth school year is full of preparations for the confrontation. The wizarding world is on high alert, the Death Eaters are murdering those who will not side with them, Harry’s rival Draco Malfoy is up to something and Headmaster Dumbledore is preparing Harry with the information he’ll need to face Voldemort in the prophesized final battle.
An air of tragedy and tension thus overlay the normal interests of 16 year olds, including the opposite sex, sports and the opposite sex. Romance fully blossoms at Hogwarts at last, but it’s love during wartime, given less time to bloom than it would in more peaceful times.
In many ways, this is J. K. Rowling’s “The Empire Strikes Back”: There are no real conclusions here — even the much-hyped death is so wrapped up in mystery that it will inevitably be the focus of much of the final novel — but merely setting things up for that final conclusion. And as it’s always darkest before the dawn, Rowling makes things very, very dark indeed. Any notion that she would be dumbing down this story, or the depiction of evil, for a children’s audience is finally ground to dust. Death and other evils are treated in a mature fashion, especially the ramifications for the survivors.
Along the way is a great deal of evidence that Rowling has grown up as a writer along with Harry. The structure of the early books is almost entirely gone, and all indications are that the final book will have only a passing resemblance to previous books in terms of structure. Quidditch is here, but it receives its smallest focus to date. Time spent in class is likewise not the focus of the novel, nor is a great deal of time spent with Harry’s non-wizarding relatives, the Dursleys. At this point, Rowling rightly assumes anyone reading her novel is aware of the setting and history, and just jumps right into the story itself.
But this is ultimately a hard novel to judge, as it really forms the first half of the final novel of the series. Indeed, it looks likely that the first chapter of that book will take place hours, at most, after the final page of “The Half-Blood Prince.” It’s going to be a heck of a ride, with confrontations with numerous antagonists likely to be going down in surprising ways, if the twists in this novel are any indication.
On its own, this isn’t the best novel in the series — that’s still “Prisoner of Azkhaban,” for my money — but it’s definitely among the best installments to date.
Now to climb the walls for two more years waiting for the conclusion of this series …
New York Magazine has an article about Liz titled “Miss Independent,” which is probably the first time a big-time magazine has used a song sung by Kelly Clarkson as an allusion that way.
Refreshingly, it looks like the backlash against Liz is now facing its own backlash. While I don’t think her last album was necessarily her best, it also has a lot more depth to it than most critics seemed to catch. The big single off the album, “Why Can’t I?” is not, in fact, a generic love song. It’s a song about two people starting an affair.
Get a load of me, get a load of you
Walkin’ down the street, and I hardly know you
It’s just like we were meant to be
Holding hands with you, and we’re out at night
Got a girlfriend, you say it isn’t right
And I’ve got someone waiting too
This is, this is just the beginning
We’re already wet, and we’re gonna go swimming
And “Little Digger,” “Rock Me” and “H.W.C.” all push other buttons for various reasons, of course. Is it as edgy as her debut? No, of course not. Of course, she’s also not a college student any more, either. Life goes on and (most) people grow and change over time.
And when, in 2003, she released Liz Phair, an album produced in part by the Matrix—the team that brought you Avril Lavigne—and the music sounded stripped of the depth and innovation that made us fall in love with her in the first place, many of us responded like sour, sidelined spouses. Interviewing Phair for Spin, for instance, Chuck Klosterman moaned, “Early in your career you were one of the few people who really talked about sex honestly and insightfully. [Now it’s] more sensationalistic and maybe a little less sincere.� Phair wouldn’t back down. “I think this record is depressing to you because it makes you feel that you’ve lost part of your own childhood,� she told him. And she was almost certainly right.
“I think people liked that I stood up for myself and said, ‘Fuck it, I’m doing this.’ They were like, ‘That’s the old Liz Phair,’ � she says now. If Phair is proud of the defiance with which she met her embittered fans and unapologetic about her play for mainstream-pop success, she is also very clear on what her last album was and was not. “I just needed not to be the victim anymore. I was coming out of a really bad relationship�—which ended in divorce—“and I made an album that would drag my sorry ass out of the mess I was in,� she says. “I was literally holding onto my own record, waterskiing out of the place I was in.�
In early October, Phair will release Somebody’s Miracle, her fifth album. “This was more a labor of love,� she says. “This was like a soul record.� And it shows. If you broke up with Liz Phair before (because you felt like you just didn’t know her anymore), you are going to desperately want to get back together with her now. “I sweated that thing so hard. I fought my ass off to make it that way,� she says. “I really wanted to give something . . . I tell my badnesses so you can feel put-together.�
It’s a gift we remember from Guyville. Gone is the unconvincing peppiness of her last album; Phair is once again offering something weirder and more stirring and more confessional. On “Table for One,� she sings about a drinking problem, but more, really, about the existential reality of aloneness. “I want to die alone with my sympathy beside me / I want to bring down all those demons who drank with me / feasting gleefully on my desperation,� she sings. Not that Somebody’s Miracle is a glum album. The flip side of the lonely isolation of “Table for One� is one of the best lone-wolf anthems to come along in years, “Got My Own Thing,� a rocking ode to what it’s like to be finished proving yourself. The chorus is quintessential old-school Phair: “Ooh, boy, I’d love to help / give you enough rope to hang yourself / I hope you’re swinging this way too.�
In other news, iTunes and other sites are allegedly going to have “Everything to Me,” the first single off the new album, in their online stores this week or next.
 iTunes, and I assume other online music sites, have released the new Sheryl Crow single, “Good is Good,” from the forthcoming album, “Wildflower,” which will hit stores on September 27. (The video of “Good is Good” will be on VH-1 on August 8.)
The song is … OK. It might grow on me, but right now, it’s just the sort of song that’s on all of Sheryl’s albums: Sort of morose, sort of country, sort of just there. This isn’t a soaring “Soak Up the Sun” or a rocking “Steve McQueen” or a bouncy “All I Wanna Do.”
And that’s OK. Lord knows, I find Buffett’s periodic desultory attempts to just give the audience what they think they want (more party songs, wooooooo!) to be pretty depressing. But this song of Sheryl’s doesn’t speak to me so far; if I’d heard it after the album came out, I’d have assumed it was just filler.
(See? I care about artists other than Liz Phair.)
 I finally finished Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.” I enjoyed it, even if I’d guessed some of the surprises (from a writing standpoint, some of the twists were a bit obligatory as part of the presumed structure of the series).
I especially enjoyed that she went further than ever in junking the standard format for her novels. I liked the old “Dursleys/train ride/mistaken theory/Quidditch/revelation/end” structure for the first three or four books, but I was ready for something new. And it looks like the next book will toss that structure out the window in a big way. The only thing I didn’t like is the probable long, long, long wait ahead for the conclusion of the series. Anyway, I’ll post a real review to Amazon later this week.
Adults who like Harry Potter might want to check out the forthcoming paperback version of “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.” Be warned, though: This is Harry Potter as done by Jane Austen. If that sounds intriguing to you, I highly recommend the book. I got lost in it for weeks, and loved every minute of it.
From MTV News:
Don’t worry that Liz Phair has chucked it all for teen pop, despite working with Ashlee Simpson’s producer John Shanks on her upcoming album, Somebody’s Miracle, due October 4. “People get very uptight about staying in a certain genre or not breaking out of your expected style,” Phair said. “If I like indie rock, I can’t like pop. Or if I’m a pop person, I have no credibility in rock. But for me, I just decided to go farther and take my aesthetic stand stronger.” Song titles on the more grown-up Miracle include “Leap of Innocence,” “Table for One,” “Stars and Planets,” “Lazy Dreamer” and first single “Everything to Me,” which asks a lover to “take the time to catch me if I fall” while also asking, “Do you really know me at all?” …
Found on Guyville: A New York Times interview with Liz, saying that it’s time for fans who want her to go back to 1993 to move on. The interview is in two scanned-in JPGs over on Guyville. Page One, Page Two. It might require Guyville registration to read them, I dunno.
The official Liz Phair site now has the first single off the album, “Everything to Me,” available for your streaming pleasure in Windows Media and Real Audio.
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