The Man Who Invented Male Camel Toe

According to the book A Deeper Shade of Blue, Scott Walker really didn't care for the trumped-up competition between him and Tom Jones. "Every time I hear Tom Jones I want to jump out of a window," he griped in 1967. "And yet he and I are always being compared as singers."

You can't blame the guy for rejecting the association, or steaming over a phony rivalry that was manufactured by the music press. Outside of the fact that they could both sing, there was just no comparison. Walker was emerging as a painfully conscientious artist at war with his own fame. When he began to make serious and meaningful music, sales dwindled. Decades later he remains vital, fascinating, and obscure.

Jones was a counter-revolutionary pub singer more interested in pussy than posterity. He was a vapid trouser snake with smug hair and the guy who invented male camel toe. He was and he remains obscenely successful. That's not to say that Tom Jones makes bad music -- he's made some great music. And his roguish and cheery demeanor was pretty lovable in its own way. Also, Jones' fearless exploration of bad taste in the '70s has renewed currency in our post-ironic culture tumbler, and his reinvention in the '80s had its charms, I suppose.

But is he capable of depth? This summer, Jones released Praise & Blame, a collection of blues, spirituals, and gospel numbers he recorded with Ethan Johns and a genuine live band in London. Critics have lined up to kiss his redeemed hem, claiming that the septuagenarian belter has finally -- in his twilight years -- made his Johnny Cash-shaped statement of authenticity. But they forget that Johnny Cash-shaped statements of authenticity are becoming de rigueur for any cheeseball who wants to remain a commodity. Just ask Glen Campbell and Neil Diamond. Or maybe ask Island Records VP David Sharpe, who drummed up a lot of pre-release publicity for Praise & Blame when he authored a suspiciously leaked email complaining that "We did not invest a fortune in an established artist for him to deliver 12 tracks from the common book of prayer."

In any event, Bob Dylan's "What Good Am I?" opens Praise & Blame on an impressively dark and pensive note, and Jones actually sounds like an old man on the track. A version of Susan Werner's "Did Trouble Me" fares even better against a handsome backdrop of harmonium and Salvation Army Brass. Matters proceed through a barrelhouse version of Sister Rosetta Tharpe's "Strange Things," ragged takes on John Lee Hooker's "Burning Hell" and Jessie Mae Hemphill's "Lord Help," and a clutch of pre-war chestnuts.

Ironically, Jones sounds remarkably like auto-pilot Scott Walker on Billy Joe Shaver's country lament "If I Give My Soul." It might be the best track on the record. It's certainly better than a hammy "Nobody's Fault But Mine" (complete with coughing musicians in the background -- how very real!). As with "What Good Am I?" I can't help but discern a smirk beneath Jones' delivery. It'd take radical surgery and a brutal program of re-education to really challenge Tom Jones' genetic predisposition to kitsch, no matter how much black hair dye he isn't using these days. But it's okay -- I've never wanted anything more than cheap fun from the guy, and if I don't entirely buy the sincerity behind Praise & Blame, I'm not jumping out of the window, either.