Broadcasting from Crocker-Amazon

Geeshie Wiley, "Last Kind Words Blues."

noreply@blogger.com (Bill) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 11:53:12 PST

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Geeshie Wiley, "Last Kind Words Blues," from American Primitive, Vol. 2: Pre-war Revenants 1897-1939. Download from archive.org.

A very good friend had saved an article from Harper's (for subscribers only--go to the library and dig through the old issues for free) that dealt with old sound recordings of traditional song and the people who collect them, focusing on the late John Fahey, his Revenant Records, and in particular the second volume of "American Primitive." By and large the article was good, though it possibly inevitably left one with the impression that Fahey was completely unmanageable as a person, and a total freak. Who knows who he or anyone else really was, but regardless it is clear that some people take their interest in traditional song beyond a mere love for the music into an obsession.

Those of us who just love the music obviously owe a lot to these peoples' obsession. This isn't a record review, more, like everything I write on this blog or on my other, a response, but the collection referenced above, which I ordered directly from Revenant immediately after reading that Harper's article, is fantastic, if a bit slanted toward oddities. Fahey himself certainly seemed on the surface to relish his own role as an oddity, and I have to confess that I've never had too much of an ear for his own music--too self-consciously off-kilter for my taste. I prefer in my avant-gardists more of a Welles or a Monk, someone who is indeed completely off-kilter but is so so naturally that their work makes the "norm" seem off, rather than the other way around. I never get that feeling with Fahey's own stuff.

Fahey the archivist, however slanted his tastes may be, without question has impeccable taste. I suppose the most obvious point of comparison would be Harry Smith and the volumes of his Anthology Of American Folk Music, released, famously, on Folkways. The difference really is that where Harry Smith went for the best performances he could find while leaning when given a choice to the more unorthodox, Fahey goes for the most unorthodox and then given a choice takes the best. The Smith Anthology is therefore the more essential, but Fahey had the undoubtably great sense to know that the world did not need another attempt at the Folkways Anthology. As such, this two-disc collection is one of the more worthy things I've bought in the last couple years. I'll admit that it takes a lot for me these days to put down hard-earned money on a physical CD, but this is absolutely worth it. The packaging is as handsome as for any disc I own, and the notes, consisting of essays and commentary on the songs, are profuse and worth reading.

As I noted above, the collection as a whole is worthwhile--again, buy it, directly from Revenant Records as it gets a greater proportion of the sale directly to a company that's as much service- as profit-oriented. That said, everything on it is an oddity in some sort of way. This isn't a bad thing. We all know that a lot of what passes for folk, particularly after the folk revival of the 1950's, is really trite crap. In reality, before sound recordings more-or-less homogenized not only the marketplace for music but the cultural production of it--yes, that's a link to Horkheimer and Adorno, worth a slow read--local production, local relationships, and local traditions carried within themselves as much diversity as the national, mainstream marketplace carries within it today. So when you put a bunch of people who fit on the fringes of those local scenes onto one record, it's almost shocking to hear when one expects a certain type of "folk."

This is the thing with Geeshie Wiley that is so striking to me. I've never heard anything quite like this, but it is so solid and whole, and of the highest quality, that I don't know where I can fit her. She is still a very obscure artist, and I have a feeling that this was the initial appeal to Fahey, and I had never heard of her before I read this Harper's article, though her work was by no means entirely unknown to people more in the loop than me. She only recorded six sides. "Last Kind Words" seems to be the consensus pick for her best tune, but the others are by no means cut from a lesser cloth. I think of Skip James when I hear this, above all for the absolute artistry involved but also for the structure and tonality, but Wiley is entirely her own player--quite a guitarist, too, though subtle enough that one might not notice it unless one sits and pays attention to how elegantly she syncopates her guitar part while keeping a steady rhythm and singing all the while on top of it.

I suppose this is the kind of stuff I am drawn to. Geeshie Wiley is not well-known, and was therefore new to me at 39--I actually ordered the disc as a present to myself for my 40th birthday but heard the mp3 version above from archive.org about a week before it happened. She is by no means, however, odd. She is rather in a class by herself. I appreciate the Faheys of the world who consciously seek out the strange as the strange, because they dig up a lot of great stuff, but strangeness by itself is not enough for me.

Gordon Lightfoot, "Carefree Highway"

noreply@blogger.com (Bill) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 18:44:20 PDT

Cover of Sundown

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Gordon Lightfoot, "Carefree Highway," from Sundown (download until 10/16/09)

I'm very aware that this is far from a creative choice when it comes to Gordon Lightfoot's music, but as much as I'd love to be hipper to things than I am, I'm not. My exposure to Lightfoot came as a kid, with my father's copy of Sundown. I know the big, popular tunes of his, and that's it.

So I'm as guilty as anyone else when I say that Gordon Lightfoot deserves a lot more attention than he gets. I've occasionally posted to my Facebook status something mentioning that I've just listened to one of his tunes, and everytime I have a bunch of people commenting or liking my status than if I'd made a brilliant observation of some sort. Clearly, people have very positive associations with his music, and positive associations are really the most important thing there is in music.

I have something of a feeling why he's mentioned less often than his work merits--it sounds on the surface very mid-'70's, and those of us who were kids at the time have mixed feelings, or ought to, about the period. The music industry really started its downhill slide in the era, as recording technology became increasingly sophisticated, refining the process away from the playing of music to the producing of it. Lightfoot's stuff sounds "produced," for sure. Note the guitar solo, which repeats more than once, basically note for note. I don't go for this kind of thing, generally, as someone ought to be able to improvise a guitar solo properly: it's just correct in my book.

Yet, I'm amazed. Something in me actually likes hearing the same guitar solo twice. Dylan flirted with a more "produced" sound here and there, and even with the best of those efforts, Infidels, even based solely on the best tunes, it really doesn't work. There's an unnaturalness to those Dylan records that's like a stain, wrecking a good shirt. This, on the other hand, is totally natural, in a way that's almost bizarre for someone like Lightfoot with such serious folkie/singer-songwriter credentials.

The thing that Gordon Lightfoot had and I'm very sure still has though I'm ashamed to say I didn't pick up his most recent record, Harmony, is an approach to song that conforms simultaneously to folkie and pop conventions. Of course he's capable of a more typically folk structure, as "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" amply demonstrates, but here his song is song-y in a pop way without being a pop song and nothing more. Significantly, "Carefree Highway" is light on actual narrative. One can glean some sort of story from it, but to do so requires itself a creative imagination. Take this:

Picking up the pieces of my sweet, shattered dream
I wonder where the old folks are tonight

It's a great start to a tune, but there's absolutely no causal link between the two lines. I wouldn't suggest that you can't find a couplet in the piece that's linked by more than just rhyme, but I would assert that the ideas of the tune are only loosely and thematically linked, rather than held together in a tight, narrative structure. At the same time, the entire piece is incredibly evocative of a sort of melancholic regret at roads not taken combined with a genuine sense of ease borne of a lack of attachments. Free and easy wandering, as Chuang Tzu wrote. Lightfoot keeps both emotions in balance, perfectly, I'd say, throughout, and this requires an absolute focus and grasp of the craft.

There are certainly much more writerly songwriters than Gordon Lightfoot, but I'd caution that it does violence to a form to apply another form's criteria. It's wrong to say that a sculptor lacks a painterly touch, wrong not as in incorrect, but wrong as there ought to be a law against it. Indeed, one should watch out for songwriting that boasts literary merit, because generally talk of the literary merit of a songwriter is inversely proportional to the quality of the writer's melody. While the best song lyrics stand with any written verse as art--please witness my piece on Skip James--there needs to be a reason that the writer chooses song as her or his medium rather than the printed page. That reason must be because the writer has an ear for a tune. It would be wrong to say that Lightfoot is all about melody, but everything with Lightfoot supports the melody, and it's his melodies that really put him among the top writers of song. His words give his melody a place to be, and in turn the melody ties the words together more tightly, as I noted above, than any narrative would, in this form.

The Turtle and the Flightless Bird

noreply@blogger.com (Bill) — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 07:36:06 PDT

Cover of Lonely People of the World, Unite!

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Devin Davis, "The Turtle and the Flightless Bird," from Lonely People of the World, Unite!(download from Davis' website).

I heard about Devin Davis from George Zahora, editor of the late and lamented Splendid E-zine, who had and certainly still has one of the finest musical palates around. I had missed the review on the website, but it came up in an email I received from him. Here was, he said, the Splendid pick of the year. Everyone was buzzing about it: the record, Lonely People of the World Unite!, was one of those few things put out in the CD era that held together as an album. As an aside, it’s interesting how much of a bust the CD was as far as the effect of the physical form of the product on the music is concerned. I’ve never been a vinyl fetishist in terms of sound, largely because I’ve never had enough of a hi-fi to notice whatever difference I might, but having two sides of 18 to 25 minutes in length sets some constraints that clearly facilitated better music than 80 uninterrupted minutes has.

I was told to buy the record without hesitation, and, ever the skeptic begging to be disproved when it came to new music, I downloaded the pair—or was it a trio? Memory fades—of free downloads from Davis’ website. They were great, this was one of them and, yes, I paid to download the album, back in the proverbial day of DRM-“protected” iTunes downloads.

The record did not and still does not disappoint. What is disappointing about the album is that so many musicians making such transparently inferior music make so much more money than Devin Davis. I don’t mean the popsters, either: I mean the indie flavors of the week whose pictures pop up briefly on the hip websites but who in that week sell more music and generate more “buzz” than Devin Davis has in his entire career, which, unfortunately, consists to date of this single album, though a second is apparently on its way at some point. I imagine that two things stand in the way of the record gaining wider acceptance. Davis’ vocals, great as far as I’m concerned, don’t fit the mold of either someone with real pipes (always a pleasure, to be sure) or hipster, “I can’t sing but I’m too cool to care” singing. He is genuinely earnest, in the best of ways, and this is for some people always a deal-breaker. Second, he packs a lot of musical information into what by 21st century US standards is a small amount of musical space. That is, he asks, or really demands, that people actually pay attention to the record. That was fine in 1966 or 1967, but it kills sales these days.

So—the point: I can’t recall a record made by someone more or less my age that more ably references the music we grew up with, transparently no less, is a truly authorly way that is, like a writer references others’ texts, A lot of people do it, and it gets labeled “post-modern,” a so, so-unfortunate term, full of sound and fury, and signifying, as they say, nothing. Questions of authenticity are always, inherently, problematic, but as there was something of a misunderstanding in a prior post in which I called Tom Waits inauthentic and a couple readers—thanks for engaging to be sure: the error is mine for my lack of clarity—thought I was saying he wasn’t any good. Probably it would be good to offer a working definition of authentic. Authentic is, for our purposes, being who you are, and not pretending to be anybody else. It doesn’t mean you don’t or can’t borrow or steal from others. It doesn’t mean you don’t mimic your elders, in this case musical. It just means that when you do it, it’s because there’s some of them in you.

Davis pulls it off for a couple reasons. First, when he straight-up references another, older artists like Bowie or Pink Floyd, you know it immediately, at least if you know “Suffragette City” or “Dark Side of the Moon.” He doesn’t hide it, or hope that his audience is too young to know from whom he’s stealing. On the contrary, the goal is to bring a smile of recognition to the listener’s face. A goal accomplished is the sign of a successful artist. A lot of people try to pull off some sleight of hand with their models, so they stay behind the proverbial curtain. Davis respects us enough not to do that.

“The Turtle and the Flightless Bird” is a case in point of the second reason Devin Davis pulls it off: he’s as good as his models. This tune, while surely not feeling old, whatever that means, most definitely is built on a set of musical assumptions more from the late ‘60’s and early ‘70’s than the nonsense people buy when they try to make it, popularly defined, in the music biz today. It moves through related but distinct sections, seamlessly, and maintains a sense of coherence all the while. Davis is the equal, as a melodist, of anyone from that earlier era outside of Stevie Wonder, Paul McCartney, or Brian Wilson, and as a musician and writer broadly put he’s by all means on that level.

It’s simple in some basic way, but his secret is to sound precisely like himself. That, he does. I don’t want to wade too deeply into the authenticity question, and I probably am very un-hip to even bring it up. We know that authenticity as a concept has come under some kinds of attack, for good reasons. Let’s say, though, for our purposes here, that authenticity in people is being who you are, and nobody else. There’s a palpable level of self-consciousness in from whom Tom Waits chooses to steal. None with Devin Davis. And, no, it’s not about race, though like anything in this country you can’t disaggregate race from it. Davis is just Davis. When you hear him, others echo, but it’s still him. That’s the secret.

Season Two on its way.

noreply@blogger.com (Bill) — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 08:26:11 PDT

Just a note: Broadcasting from Crocker-Amazon has been on quite a long hiatus, as the gap between posting dates will show. Season Two, so to speak, is on its way. It's been a long summer of job hunting--ultimately unnecessary as my pink slip was rescinded--and, better still, producing my own music, but I'm compiling the next mix I'll listen to on the train, which will form the next set of blog posts.

Have fun, and keep an eye out in the next week for the next post.

B.I.A.

noreply@blogger.com (Bill) — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 08:48:37 PST

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Floyd Westerman, "B.I.A. (alternate version) (download until 2/28/09), from "Custer Died for Your Sins/The Land Is Your Mother."

Great political music has to be completely authentic, whatever that means, or else it loses its effect and in fact becomes counter-productive. You can tell in a song if the writer said to herself or himself, "gee, I want to make a statement about this issue." When political music reflects the real course of a musician's life, it takes on a completely different power, because it is itself the issue.

I wouldn't want to suggest that it's not possible for a writer to do real justice to a subject that she or he hasn't exactly lived, because one's mental existence, one's ability to step, so to speak, in another's shoes, is as real in its way as the physicality of going to the supermarket or to work. At the same time, anyone who is serious about political music, who, while perfectly happy to make a lot of money, wants to take a musical gift and try to help people with it, treads very cautiously when writing outside of one's direct or, possibly semi-tangential experience. One needn't have lived a precise experience, the stuff of which constitutes the political song, but it helps to have lived next door to it or at least in the same neighborhood.

So having finished the preface, we can look at Floyd Westerman, whom I only came across in the last year--last six or seven months actually, not to my credit--and who made some of the best political music of the 20th century. The politics of his music are on the surface pretty easy to explain. He was involved in AIM--American Indian Movement--and made songs as part of that movement. He didn't release a ton of music, and got into acting which is, it's pretty clear to me, where he actually made most of his money. His first record took its title from Vine Deloria's "Custer Died for Your Sins," often referred to as the AIM manifesto, not without reason.

So all of this, for anyone who's not Indian, or in AIM, could very easily be misunderstood or misused. I don't purport to be an expert on AIM, and I don't want to do the hip white guy "I'm not an insider but I'm aware that I'm not an insider so I can judge other white people as if I were an insider" thing, but what got me to buy Westerman's music was a number of things I read and a couple podcasts I heard in which people in the movement responded to his death. Really, the affection with which people wrote or spoke about him and the sense people communicated that "he was really ours" gave the impression that this was a musician to check out. Indeed he was.

However, what is--this is more from a socio-political angle than a musical one--so fantastic about Floyd Westerman is that he was/is a Johnny Cash fanatic, and has a brilliant bass voice to boot. He doesn't make "Indian sounding" music in any way that one would expect from the stereotypes one gets out of Hollywood or run-of-the-mill U.S. history books, though he did record more traditional music as well. Rather, he played music like he liked, and it's worth noting that Vine Deloria, too, was a country music buff.

People are, each in their own way, completely authentic. Making music as you hear it is really the way to go, especially if you want to be political. Country music, in its appeal to the bulk of its audience, has--this is more of an industry issue than about any individual musicians--taken some pretty foul political stands in the past, and makes an appeal to whiteness that has been and continues to be totally retrograde. It doesn't fit the white hipster liberal assumption to have the great Native political musician be not only a country music buff but a veritable country music master, with his own very real voice. But this just shows that there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamed of in your philosophy, or politics as the case may be.

Wear Clean Draws

noreply@blogger.com (Bill) — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 05:00:00 PST

Cover of Party Music

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The Coup, "Wear Clean Draws" (download until 2/23/09), from "Party Music."

So I'd heard of the Coup for some time, but never listened to them. A very good friend of ours, one weekend we were staying with them on a visit, played them for us and bam!, I was hooked. This particular song my wife latched on to, and her fantastic taste in music is of course spot on.

This, to me, is hip-hop, and it's worth stressing that this is Bay Area hip-hop. There was a little hip-hop boutique run by a kid in Daly City that we'd go to, that we actually patronized--bought a number of very cool t-shirts there, and even a painting that now hangs in my classroom. In any event, we would talk, to this really cool kid--really, a young man in his early 20's. We'd just moved up here, and I'd been teaching a bit, and had only just started to get a sense of the whole Hyphy thing. As in, student sitting in the middle of class bouncing up and down shaking his head insisting he was "going dumb" and not "going spastic." I wasn't, nor am I now, impressed.

Anyway, this cool kid with the boutique lamented Bay Area hip-hop and praised L.A. L.A. had a more diverse hip-hop scene, he said, with more room for "positive" and political music. I knew this, despite appearances, because I had some students years ago (Speak, for one) who made beautiful hip-hop and who would go in from Riverside County to L.A. and became participants in that whole process. They'd clue me in to things, and I paid them back with encouragement.

I was really surprised and very disappointed in Bay Area hip-hop. I suppose teaching high school gave and gives me a perspective that more or less necessitates that I oppose Hyphy. Yes, we love localism, but "going dumb on the yellow bus" is not going to help anyone. I should add that because of various circumstances I ended up, my first year teaching up here, taking a Special Ed position because there were literally no history jobs to be had. Talk about the "yellow bus" does nothing to help kids in Special Ed actually use the considerable intellectual abilities they all have. Remember--most Special Ed kids have perfectly normal IQs but have some learning disability. Like I was a history ace who blew math problems. But because I was a white kid, I was "idiosyncratic" rather than "Special."

While it's true that lots of people pronounce Hyphy dead, and have for years, I can attest that the kids still go on about it, though not as often as a couple years ago, and that there hasn't been a massive movement in Bay Area hip-hop toward real positivity, back to real hip-hop. One must always look, though, to the antithetical examples to look forward to a more positive synthesis, and the Coup, simply by being the Coup, points the way forward.

Just some quick praise: I don't think I know of a more straightforward, loving piece of music than this one. Che pointed out the fact--not "made the argument," but "pointed out the fact"--that revolutionaries are motivated by love. No love, no revolution. This is an excellent case-in-point.

Gravity Rides Everything

noreply@blogger.com (Bill) — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 05:00:00 PST

Cover of The Moon & Antarctica

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Modest Mouse, "Gravity Rides Everything" (download until 2/23/09), from "The Moon and Antarctica."

I was told once by a good friend to check out Modest Mouse, as he said their writing and singing reminded him of me. I bought this record. Truth be told, I wasn't insulted by the comparison and I appreciated a number of the tunes on it. Unfortunately, it was a small number. That said, there certainly are some tunes on it that I still, after some years now, come back to, and this is one.

I have a long pattern of actively avoiding the indie flavor of the month, going all the way back to when R.E.M. broke to the extent they did. I think I first read about R.E.M. in Rolling Stone around the time of "Reckoning," so it should be said that I was paying attention but I wasn't so cool as to get into them around "Murmur" time. What I can say, though, is that one of my good enough friends in high school--or was it middle school?--was into R.E.M. enough, and she was going on and on about how cool they were, and so I avoided them like the plague, even though she was cool and we thought at the time that Rolling Stone actually had valid points to make. I didn't end up getting into R.E.M. at all until "Lifes Rich Pageant," when they got so popular I couldn't avoid them.

Now, Modest Mouse are, like basically all indie flavors of the month, overrated. The question in this case is, "how overrated." R.E.M. is the most overrated band of all time, as far as I can tell. Even U2, seriously, seriously overrated, or Radiohead--wow...now there's an overrated band--has more to offer than R.E.M. The thing with R.E.M. is that there's not really anything they're great at. Certainly not lyrics. That crap might have impressed people in the high school lit mag, but putting them to the public takes some serious chutzpah, or plain idiocy. Likely both. Musically, they're fair, at best. It comes together for them in a moderately original way, about as original as you can be while remaining fundamentally derivative. That's really the indie flavor of the month formula: derive the music from a particular combination of sources that the hipsters already know. The particular combination is what's new, not the sources.

So if you mixed this track a little differently, you'd have an outtake from My Bloody Valentine, something left on the floor while they were recording "Loveless." Drop the vocals way down so you can't make out the words--not a bad idea in this case--add a log drum, overdub the guitar swoops so that there are a number of tracks playing close to the same thing so that the slight variations in performance, slightly out of sync with each other, have that beautiful feeling of comfortable, vague disorientation you get with Kevin Shields, and there you go. The structure of the song itself is much more conventional than anything MBV would do, but that doesn't mean it's not good.

I wonder if someday we'll go back to the point where popular music is great and great music is popular. Maybe, if only on a microscopic level. Each producer of great music will be able to reach the small social network she or he has through Myspace, Facebook, or whatever, and we'll each have our own little click. Not a bad world, but a world without the Beatles, for sure.

My Carolina Sunshine Girl

noreply@blogger.com (Bill) — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 08:10:01 PST

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Jimmie Rodgers, "My Carolina Sunshine Girl" (download until 2/22/09), from "The Singing Brakeman."

I'll begin by noting that the Amazon.com links for this record are to the six-disc collection that Bear Family put out of Jimmie Rodgers' music, not to a smaller collection. It's worth it. I have it. Please, note that there are some really reasonably-priced used copies for sale there, too. Get it. You will not regret it.

When I was a little kid, the first poet I remember really liking, even more than Shel Silverstein, was Robert Frost. I did a report on Frost in the fifth grade, and I can remember typing it--my handwriting was so bad that I started typing in the third grade, I kid you not. I really liked "Fire and Ice" because I was already having nightmares about nuclear war and it of course spoke to me. But I also dug his bit about two roads diverged in a wood, and I of course (like everyone else) knew that I, too, was on the road less traveled. In hindsight, that poem's a bit stupid, because everyone is on their own path and therefore everyone's road is the road less traveled. Frost must have been quite blind to human experience to miss that fact.

He might, however--Frost, that is--been referring not to himself, but have been writing in the persona of Jimmie Rodgers. Here we have the "Father of Country Music." Country is a pretty problematic genre if one looks at it as a social question rather than a musical matter, because country is so inextricably wrapped up with whiteness. I play country music, I love country music (not indiscriminately, of course), and I'm white, so I make these points from, I would think, the inside. I often make a point to friends that the most critical musical comparison one can make, looking at the 20th century, is between bebop and bluegrass. Both are virtuoso musics, but bebop innovated itself into the cool, then into post-bop, and into free. Bluegrass set up a structure against which musicians' worth was judged according to how strictly they conformed to it. Bluegrass became not really a tradition, but a straightjacket. The vested interest the bluegrass audience had in maintaining the social status quo manifested itself in a musical conservatism, even reaction. Bebop was always about change.

So it's really quite depressing how thoroughly country music missed the boat that Jimmie Rodgers got going, despite the fact that so many fantastic musicians came out of country. Jimmie Rodgers was eclectic and cosmopolitan, one might imagine because of the travels he had on the railroads. Listening to his collected works on the Bear Family collection, I can't help but think of Prince. He's that wide-ranging. Yes, it's true that jazz was just becoming popular when Rodgers' musical career began, but unlike most white people who imitated jazz, Jimmie Rodgers did his own thing with what he heard. I can't think of a more natural combination of different genres than "My Carolina Sunshine Girl."

Country as a social phenomenon seems to me to have followed the Carter Family model, to its detriment. We love the Carters, no doubt, and appreciate all the traditional tunes they preserved in their recordings, even if A.P. Carter took writers' credit for traditional tunes. The precendent, though, that the Carters set looked backwards, rather than forwards, quite the contrary of Jimmie Rodgers.

Part of Jimmie Rodgers' secret--this will be a quick observation--is his sense of form. I don't know another popular musician with a more unique sense of musical form outside of Duke Ellington or possibly Brian Wilson. In this, as in his most interesting tunes, we don't have simply a repeating form, like in a folk tune, or a Tin Pan Alley formula. Any number of Jimmie Rodgers tunes--"Daddy and Home" is another good example, or "I'm Sorry We Met"--follow no particular pattern, but move bar to bar along a musical logic unique to each tune. This is an almost absolutely lost art in popular music.

Audio Player issue

noreply@blogger.com (Bill) — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 08:08:43 PST

Hey all--I am aware that the audio players have for some reason started all playing at the same time. This is a drop.io question. Drop.io works brilliantly for my purposes but this obviously isn't what we want on this blog. I'll figure something out but until then, accept my apologies and just hit "stop" on the players.

Breathe and Stop

noreply@blogger.com (Bill) — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 08:31:44 PST

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Q-Tip, "Breathe and Stop" (download until 2/22/09), from "Amplified."

I never happened to get really into A Tribe Called Quest, wrongly feeling I think that I didn't have room in my brain for both De La Soul and these their colleagues, and probably also because while I was really into hip-hop at the time I was into so many other things too, like in 1988 or so especially Ornette Coleman, that I really only approached hip-hop like someone who likes to eat at a different restaurant every night. I enjoy the meal but it's not a staple. It's not a question of like or dislike, but simply of time and space. Both are limited, and so I don't pursue everything deeply. Thus, I never really got into Q-Tip.

I was in the Guitar Center in San Bernardino one afternoon, looking if I remember for a mixing board, a cheap mixing board, and in the room that equipment was in they were playing this song. I was immediately bowled over. There is something one gets in really stellar hip-hop--and while I wouldn't say that this is strictly a legacy of Rakim, Rakim manifests this tendency archetypically--of excellence for excellence's sake. That is to say, "Breathe and Stop" is not, like "Fight the Power" or something like that, going to change the world in an obvious, political way. But what we have here is excellence, and excellence, for a Black man in America, is a political act, among other things. This is why there are so many great rappers. Rapping well, in a country that has since its inception functioned against your humanity, is an assault against the system.

A lot of people who criticize hip-hop as a monolithic enterprise--I know these critics are straw men of a sort, but bear with me--miss this real point. Above all, yes, one can and should call out misogyny. "Breathe and Stop," is not at all, we are clear, however, misogynistic. It's on the surface a seduction piece, a little bit ribald, maybe a lot ribald. Now right there, anyone who would shy away from this is either a hypocrite or a freakish prude. If you've never been seductive, feel free to critique but get yourself quickly to a psychologist. There's no hatred in this rhyme, so it's just fine.

What is interesting, though, and what is radical, is the pairing of the explicit subject matter with the raw excellence of the technique. "We are excellent in all things, at all times," is the implicit message of the piece, the explicit message of which is, "it's nice being in your pants." Both are human experience, and--anti-dualistic thinking is becoming a theme on this blog--this is the point not just of Q-Tip here but of great, real hip-hop. One is great simply because one can be, and one does not compartmentalize one's greatness.

Hard Time Killing Floor Blues

noreply@blogger.com (Bill) — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 08:15:27 PST

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Skip James, "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues" (download until 2/21/09), from "The Complete Early Recordings of Skip James."

I remember reading when I was a kid, about 17 or so, some book about Delta blues, I think Robert Palmer the critic's "Deep Blues," or possibly it was Elijah Wald's "Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues," or something like that, but I kept getting these impressions of Skip James as someone too hip and mysterious even for me to connect to. At least, that might explain why I didn't actually hear Skip James until I was 35. Nobody I knew had a Skip James record, even though his praises were sung in every single book I'd ever read about blues of any sort.

I got into Delta blues because a friend had gone from Clapton to Robert Johnson--this was back when it was cool to think that Clapton was actually serious, and anyway we were only in high school--and told me that I absolutely had to listen to Robert Johnson. I did, and was of course bowled over, though I still expected a type of virtuosity from "blues" that Robert Johnson didn't actually provide. Fast guitar licks like the white players play, etc. But that said I had ears enough to know beauty when I heard it, and while it took me years to really connect to what Robert Johnson had to offer, and especially what distinguished him from so many other players--it's his writing and arranging, how he creates structures as solid as Ellington's using just guitar and voice--I certainly loved his music from the start.

So when I say like so many hipster cognoscenti that my favorite Delta blues player is Skip James, I really want to stress that I came to this conclusion in a very un-hipsterish way and I take nothing away from any other players in the process. It's more about taste than quality, and it took me almost 20 years to actually hear Skip James from when I started listening to Delta blues. Not cool.

I got the Skip James record while in the middle of reading the aforementioned Elijah Wald book, on his recommendation. He sounded intriguing--a bit off his rocker given what were described as two completely different styles of blues on guitar and piano. Indeed, it is remarkable that he took such different approaches on the two instruments, but I'd be hard pressed to imagine that there are many people who prefer his piano work to his guitar work. I certainly don't, and while I don't skip the piano tracks when I listen to him, I wouldn't listen to him if all there were were the piano tracks. It's not entirely an accident that when he got "rediscovered" (what a pernicious term) in the 1960's, he got gigs as a guitarist rather than a pianist.

It's on pieces like this one that seem to me of such high quality that one can't describe them--I'll try in some way--but that they simply exist. I have never come across a more elegant and well-put lyric in my entire life. Worth including in their entirety:

Hard time here and everywhere you go
Times is harder than ever been before

And the people are driftin' from door to door
Can't find no heaven, I don't care where they go

Hear me tell you people, just before I go
These hard times will kill you just dry long so

Well, you hear me singin' my lonesome song
These hard times can last us so very long

If I ever get off this killin' floor
I'll never get down this low no more
No-no, no-no, I'll never get down this low no more

And you say you had money, you better be sure
'Cause these hard times will drive you from door to door

Sing this song and I ain't gonna sing no more
Sing this song and I ain't gonna sing no more
These hard times will drive you from door to door

I think much of the talk about Skip James' mysteriousness is a reflection of his work rather than his actual life, even if he hesitated to give too much biographical detail to people. I imagine, as I'm sure many people do, ghosts, like Buddhist wandering ghosts, drifting door to door, finding no heaven, when he sings that line. Find me a more powerful couplet in any music you choose and I'll buy the beer.

What nails it is that this is a completely concrete tune. He wrote this in 1930, and it's about current events, and I imagine that this tune pops into my head so often these days because of the historical resonance of the Great Depression with its current sequel. It takes a powerful mind to perceive in one's immediate world--surely James in describing people wandering door to door saw a lot of that in daily life, because it was happening all the time in 1930. It's more than seeing the transcendental in the mundane. Seeing the transcendental in the mundane is a very false kind of depth, or rather its not depth at all, only smugness. Skip James knows there's no mundane and there's no transcendental at all. Things are just there and he finds the words to pass them on.

Balla Daffe

noreply@blogger.com (Bill) — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 10:08:23 PST

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Orchestra Baobab, "Balla Daffe" (download until 2/15/09), from "Pirates Choice."

I've been very fortunate to see Orchestra Baobab a number of times, in Dakar. Their records do actually do them some justice, but what one gets on record, particularly their beautifully recorded two records made since they reformed, and in performance in the United States and Europe (from what I can see from videos--I've never seen them in the States), is a bit more dressed-up than what I saw in Dakar. Not better or worse in the least. Baobab are nothing if not professionals, and they tailor what they do to fit the situation. If I had to recommend a single Baobab record to someone I'd pick "Specialist in All Styles," and not just for the nostalgia the artwork inspires. It's one of the more beautifully performed, recorded, tight records I know of. Moderately long if you watch the clock, but it speeds by when one just listens.

However: the Baobab I heard in Dakar is closer to this Baobab, the Baobab of "Pirates' Choice," than anything on their recent records. I heard them in 2005-6, I'd note. Their performances are no less tight than any of their other records or performances, but they are more buttoned-down. We have a rare thing in Orchestra Baobab: a group of (more or less) elder musicians who haven't lost any joy at all in playing music or playing music with each other. You can't fake personal relationships when music is involved, even if the relationship between the players is strictly musical, like that between Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli. I have a feeling that different members of Baobab are closer to each other than to others, but that they're really family.

Above is video from the club at which I saw Baobab. Ben Geloun, who on records and on tour plays rhythm guitar, here plays lead. Barthelemy Attisso, justifiably famous for his lead guitar, apparently only joins for tours and recordings. I assume he stays in Togo most of the time. In any event, Ben Geloun is absolutely brilliant, as one can see from the video. The key here, though, is just the ease of the performance, and the clear, casual affection the musicians have for each other.

I have never seen this particular track referred to as one of Baobab's best, but I can't think of one of their tunes I like more. The guitar lead is one of the single most memorable lines I know of, and the way it snakes around the metric structure, syncopating in a way that the word "syncopation" never comes to mind because it's such an obviously correct musical phrase, is absolutely mind-blowing. It's also typical Baobab in taking another society's musical form--reggae in this case--and playing it in a completely unique, identifiably African way.

One really must say "African," because the group itself is as cosmopolitan as African societies are. That's worth mentioning. We often get taught in the States that Africa is fraught with ethnic conflict, and shown the different flash points on the news. The assumption is that somehow the nasty racism that infects our society is somehow normal for people. And indeed, the people who were taken away as slaves for so many centuries so their labor power could build this country were just as prone to ethnic violence as in the U.S. But the violence one sees in post-colonial Africa is very rarely ethnic in origin, even if there are examples of it taking an ethnic form. There's almost always a much more important political or more often economic root cause, and any African can explain this to you. The norm in Africa is cosmopolitanism. Your average African knows three or four languages, plus most often a bit of the colonial language, in varying degrees of proficiency. Dakar is in this sense the African city par excellence. I've never been to a more diverse place in my life, excepting possibly New York City. Baobab, much more than Youssou N'Dour, is the Dakar musical act par excellence, not only for the quality of the music but because of the cosmopolitanism.

Beware Verwoerd

noreply@blogger.com (Bill) — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 07:17:29 PST

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Miram Makeba, "Beware Verwoerd" (download until 2/14/09), from "Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony"

This is one of those amazing pieces of music that can be so short, so simple, and at the same time compelling beyond any objective measure. We can talk about the political content, which is powerful, but what blows me away every time I hear this tune is how it illustrates the difference between real mastery and mere competence.

We can grant that the tune isn't long, but put it on repeat and see how long it takes to get the urge to change it. Me, about 10 minutes. I don't want to privilege any kind of music or any means of musical expression over others, but I can relate the deep personal connection I have to melody. Of course it's cultural, but it's real. And it's not the kind of complex melodies your McCartney ripoff artists peddle. A simple melody, well played or sung, is to me vastly more powerful. This is about as simple as one can get, if one were to note it on paper.

There's a direct connection to a musical phrase like this to something in one's heart or spirit, or what have you. What makes it stick, though, is the performance. We don't have too many examples of phrasing any more like you get from Makeba here. She's playing with the melody almost constantly, shifting it slightly ahead, slightly behind the precise center of this beat or that, but in a way that draws no attention to the fact that she's phrasing it really quite radically. One feels, however, the variety. The structure simply repeats chorus and verse with very slight instrumental variation—were one to notate it on paper. In fact, however, the recording is a series of very subtle shifts of emphasis like one gets in a Morton Feldman composition, only in two minutes rather than two hours. Don't get me wrong, I love Feldman—this just takes up less bandwidth.

Again, simplicity way beyond normal. The harmony vocals are, so typically for South African music, completely compelling, but if they are typical they are by no means average. The trick is enormously simple: one of the singers, on the first beat of the verse, hits the dominant 7th rather than the root. This is one of those tricks that one really can call a stroke of genius. When one hears it and—if one is a musician—identifies it, it's something not at all difficult to pull off, nor is it something difficult to understand. It's in the knowing precisely when to place it that makes it extraordinary. Lots of people can put in a dominant 7th in the first bar that resolves to the four chord, and indeed it's slightly, if only slightly, unorthodox. But doing something a bit unorthodox without sounding “unorthodox” is quite the trick. Monk and Ellington never sound dissonant, Monk not even when he hits the piano keys with his elbow. Easy to be dissonant—difficult to expand the definition of consonance.

I suppose this is the trick with political music. I'm far from original when I note that there didn't seem to be nearly the amount of great political music coming out of the Bush years, now over, OVER!, as one might have hoped. Second Bush, I mean—the first Bush years produced among others Public Enemy, the greatest political music act of my semi-adulthood. It's not that the truly great makers of political music are musicians first and political second, but rather that there is no distinction between the making of music and political action. Makeba is just Makeba. She put into her song what was in her mind and her life. If you haven't lived it, you can't blow it out of your horn, Charlie Parker noted at one point or something to that effect. I have to imagine there has been much great political music made in the last eight or so years, but it hasn't come from types like Neil Young, who just put out crap. My kingdom for some great political music from the Bush II era.

The Nightfly

noreply@blogger.com (Bill) — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 20:15:59 PST

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Donald Fagen, "The Nightfly," (download until 2/11/09), from "The Nightfly."

Obviously, this isn't a Steely Dan tune, but a Fagan record gets sort of lumped into Steely Dan, in a way that Walter Becker's record didn't, and not only for the singing. I have this impression, not that either Fagan or Becker comes clean in an interview, that they really do complete each other despite the fact that Fagan on his own can write a better tune than Becker alone. Becker really does have a way with words, and his words have as far as I'm concerned gotten much more interesting since their reunion than when he was strung out in their glory days. He's more clear in his meaning, which leads me to think that he actually has more to say.

Fagan did a solo record rather than more heroin after Gaucho, and on “The Nightfly” the reasons why he was the together one were clear. Fagan has the Dan attitude just as thoroughly as Becker, but he gives it verbal form less compellingly. Lester the Nightfly is a perfect character, the scene set clearly, no line sticking out at all. I have to think that most people who write tunes would kill—like, really kill—to have knocked out this lyric. What's interesting is that the tune has none of the individual lines that pop up regularly when Becker is involved that have that slight edge, satirical in a way and partially absurd, though not so much as to make it a joke. Becker walks a fine line well. I have no idea—to repeat myself as I have the habit of doing...[repeat instructions...check for understanding...re-teach...]—how the pair actually write tunes but I have to imagine a very lively conversation about the subject, the tone, lines—lines of verse—shared, with Becker tweaking them as they get to paper.

I remember the first time Steely Dan was presented to me as a worthwhile endeavor. I was in a jazz combo my senior year of high school, going to a gig. I was really serious, some thought snooty, about bop and post-bop. I basically shut down after “A Love Supreme.” Anyway, the guitarist, who really could play and was just as dismissive of bad taste as I was, was into Steely Dan. I was really put out until he played “Babylon Sisters.” Then I was hooked. I remember thinking that there wasn't for any practical purpose a melody worth talking about, nor a chord structure worth dealing with. It was more like the kind of crap fusion that had destroyed jazz as a commercial endeavor. Everything seemed attached to everything else in sequence without regard for, really, anything at all. We would joke when one of the players played some terrible chord that they were “abstracting” the harmony. Steely Dan seemed to do that all the time.

And it stuck with me. I still haven't figured out how Becker and Fagan—and obviously here we have to point to Fagan, who to my ears is the one who provides that bizarre melodic and chordal structure that is at once totally off-putting and brilliant. Nothing in any except a tiny few of Steely Dan's tunes have anything in them that I'd call good, at least musically. I'm not talking about execution. It's more that it reminds me of the kind of stuff people I went to school with did in order to feel sophisticated: toss in a chord that doesn't fit to pretend you're “advanced.” Why it works for Fagan is beyond me. I love this song dearly as I do all kinds of others he wrote or co-wrote with no sense of why I do.

Nothing tops “Bad Sneakers” or “Doctor Wu,” though.

You Are Too Beautiful

noreply@blogger.com (Bill) — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 08:02:06 PST

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John Coltrane & Johnny Hartman, "You Are Too Beautiful," (download until 2/8/09), from "John Coltrane & Johnny Hartman."

There aren't any better records than "John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman." I wouldn't want to say that it's somehow "underground" or "only the ultra-hip know about it," because that's not true at all. It's not like Jimmy Scott's "Falling in Love is Wonderful," which only got to the test pressing stage until a few years ago (more on that later--what a record that one is). Somehow though I don't feel like people go on and on about the Coltrane and Hartman record like it deserves, though.

I suppose there are a couple problems that come up when judging works of art. Although we probably have some understanding that the best way to approach art is from an experiential angle--just experience the art, be in it, don't let too much get in the way lest you miss things in it--we all end up judging art most of the time. This is better than that, etc., and our judgements reflect the expectations we had before we experienced the art. When Bob Dylan puts out one of his now-respectable once-every-five-years records these days, it gets weighed against the last one and also against "Highway 61 Revisited," which for me is the Dylan record from the golden age I dig most.

So what do people go to Coltrane for? Spirituality, an intense spirituality, obviously boundary-pushing sorties into different sonorities, long solos that never get boring, etc. We think "A Love Supreme" for Coltrane like I think "Highway 61" for Dylan. You may be past this but though I've progressed I'm quite sure I'm not yet.

The problem with this approach is that it has nothing to do with the musician and too much to do with the memory of the listener. It's like we walk through a park and feel like it's missing architecture. I dare anyone to find a better record of vocal jazz than this one. What makes a good record? It communicates its feelings with clarity and without interference. This record produces in me some of the best feelings I have ever felt.

I've read over and over that Hartman was one of those "musician's musician," totally respected by people who actually produce music and by implication not as commercially successful as others less talented. I wonder if it's a matter of coming up at the wrong time. There were singers after Hartman, like Leon Thomas, who would be cutting edge, but very, very few in jazz. The form had gone in its particular direction. I can't help but feel, though, listening to this, that the record is Hartman's. He's the equal, in his field, of Coltrane. I don't mean this to denigrate any other singers, because there's a ton I love and listen to at least as much as Hartman, but I've come across (proportionally) few musicians who are so obviously masters of what they do in the way Hartman is.

Coltrane himself doesn't hold back in the least, which is what I think a lot of people think he does on this record. He's holding nothing back, even if he plays very little, as he does on this track. Art communicates, and Coltrane is communicating three things: love, gentleness, and respect. That last is one feeling one rarely encounters in popular music, and not only these days. People fake respect at times with stiffness, like one would stop slouching at one's desk when the Headmaster entered the classroom or something like that. That's not respect at all, though. Young people who cover traditional tunes do things like this quite a bit these days. In Coltrane's playing, though, you get respect. I feel as if I can hear him thinking, "Hartman deserves the finest little lines of tenor saxophone that have been played behind a singer since Lester was backing up Lady Day." And that's what he gave.

Instrumentally, I appreciate that this is McCoy Tyner's song. McCoy is one of those players whom one can't call "unknown" but who, while not getting no attention--he will top the bill at festivals, after all--doesn't get the attention he merits. Mass media in this country, as we know, can only have one go-to black person for anything in particular. The go-to jazz pianist is Herbie Hancock, who absolutely deserves all the attention he gets. McCoy is simply not referenced, though, which is obscene, given that he's of that last generation of real jazz greats who were part of the formative period of the music. He's a true treasure, and on this track you can hear why.

Thin Line Between Law and Rape

noreply@blogger.com (Bill) — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 17:19:36 PST

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Public Enemy, "Thin Line Between Law and Rape" (download until 2/2/09), from "Muse Sick-N-Hour Mess Age."

There are few heroes that mean as much to me as Chuck D. I don't have many heroes, really heroes as such. But Chuck always sets my heart aflitter. I was of precisely that age when Public Enemy hit where I was ready for it. 1988, Sophomore year of liberal arts college, ex-prep school malcontent, PE releases “It Takes a Nation...” and I'm done for. To make the point more clearly with another example, one of my high school buddies, then at Yale, described to me his experience in the summer of '89, back from Connecticut, “Fight the Power” just out as a single, driving in his dad's convertible around Mt. Soledad in La Jolla, blasting PE, thinking to himself, “this has all got to come DOWN!” True story, and one of Chuck's major achievements. Chuck never aimed his message at white people, but there are a lot of white people in this country who made choices in their lives for the better because his music radicalized them to a greater or lesser extent.

I think I may have made this point before, or maybe I'm recalling a conversation I've had in the recent past, but while I appreciate the mp3 file, and recognize some real benefits of this new mode of distribution, I'm not sure the way we access music in this age of the internet produces the kind of social convergence I remember from 1988 and 1989. My relic friends from the 60's endlessly discuss, wistfully but with some real enthusiasm, what it was like waiting for the next Beatles or Dylan record. What would they spring on us next? Rubber Soul came out, everybody talked about it with each other. Highway 61, everybody asked what the hell he meant, etc.

By the time I came of age this type of social convergence was lessened partially because of the efforts of the industry to produce it. No longer seeking producers of good music, the industry sought blockbusters which everyone would buy. The records which would seem to appeal to the widest audience got the biggest push, which meant that the industry pushed the familiar rather than the new. The Beatles I imagine would have been a cult act in the 1980's rather than the top sellers, and Dylan would never have gotten a hearing. So Madonna was a big deal, and while she was trumped up to be something new there was nothing new about her music, which wasn't even hers. She stunk then and stinks now, we all know it.

Prince was the one who snuck through when I was in Jr. High and High School. I remember being completely cynical about Prince when he first hit, because my cousin from the midwest thought he was all that, and while I liked my cousin I didn't take her or anyone else's musical opinions too seriously unless they were into Coltrane. But when the pianist in my school's jazz combo told me that Prince was fantastic, I opened up my 14 year-old ears and heard it. I'd been into Kraftwerk for a few years, and here he had all the electronic innovation they did—I feel I can say that—while adding so much more to it. First thing I bought was the single for “When Doves Cry,” which came out before the “Purple Rain” soundtrack. I then checked out “1999.” So if you think about the stretch I went through up until I graduated, it was the entire Golden Age of Prince: “1999,” “Purple Rain,” “Around the World in a Day,” “Parade,” and then capping it off my senior year with “Sign o' the Times.”

My little music buff crew would constantly go over the relative merits of each record as they came to us, and if you look at the list you can see why—each successive year—we had this intense sense of curiousity about what he would do next. The man always seemed to pull some amazing, unexpected ace from up his sleeve to set us talking, anticipating, praising—communicating. Then with “Sign o' the Times” he did everything, literally everything, and we were done for.

PE was the last artist who seemed to galvanize people—this is in my little world, I hasten to say—like Prince did, or Dylan, or the Beatles. Prince it should be said was never just someone who simply had mastered other people's forms and reproduced them. “1999” more than anything was the kind of sui generis creation that gave Prince license to genre hop. Prince was a hedgehog for one record, and then he became the world's greatest fox. PE, however, was the world's most radical hedgehog. I had not to that point and have not since to this day heard a record that was at once such a fully-conceived, integrated, cut-from-whole-cloth, break from the aesthetic past as “It Takes a Nation...” Maybe “Free Jazz,” but “It Takes a Nation...” sold a lot more. Chuck would quickly give credit and say he stood on the shoulders of giants, and he'd give credit to his collaborators, and sure, he should.

Now I start to get wistful, like my 60's relic friends who talk about how everyone was together and things were moving, and the world was changing. But, I swear it, that's how I felt with PE. And when “Fear of a Black Planet” was delayed, and there was the thing with Griff, you know, it produced fear that the whole thing was going to end, and that the machine would take away PE and we wouldn't have someone to look to. I know, I know, look in the mirror asshole, but I was just a kid, really.

“Fear of a Black Planet” came out and I think I was the only one in my group who didn't actually like it better than “It Takes a Nation,” but I respected it, and knew that it was a big deal. “Apocalypse '91” came out, and the sound had changed, it was more modest, but I was all in favor of that. Chuck had earned the right to just make a PE record without all the hype, and who could disagree with any record with “By the Time I Get to Arizona?”

Fast forward three years of gangster rap. I don't use the “a,” thank you. What follows is not my own point, not original, but it does bear repeating. The truth is, as any fool will tell you, that you can make more money if you have a bigger market. And in the US, the big market is white people. You'll make more money selling whatever to white people than any other single group, racially categorized.

This is the dialectic of Public Enemy. It was radical for Public Enemy not only to discuss things as they did and continue to do, but to do so so excellently that white people had to pay attention, and buy it. I've read in more than one place that PE sold more records to white people than black or any other color for that matter, in a dismissive way—white writers burnishing their hipster cred by questioning the authenticity of a black artist who went over with white people. What these idiots (and other words pop into mind) forget is that there are more white people in this country than any other racial group, so it's not surprising that more white people bought PE than black. It was the platter du jour: anyone with any sense had to have had “It Takes a Nation...” committed to memory. I did and do: ask my students. I can still bust out “Bring the Noise.”

Once—and this is the antithesis—you bring white people into the market, you bring white expectations. People buy most often to their expectations. So when N.W.A. hit, it's true, my friend from South Central that I went to see PE with when I was in college was into it, because it was his neighborhood. But to me the guys just sounded like, well...gangsters. Not the kind of people I'd want to associate with. Not really that pleasant. Rakim may have been a stickup kid, but he was no gangster. Gangsters aren't well, and we sensible people avoid them, with all due respect and courtesy. But who fit the expectations of white America in the first Bush era, Chuck D or Eazy E? The record companies knew that peddling the worst racist stereotypes of black people to white America was a much safer economic bet than betting on a black man speaking the truth. And so Chuck produced, like capitalism, his own gravediggers: white people buying rap trying to be hard. Chuck was hard, but gangsters were harder: they were stone killers. Gotta buy it from the safety of my suburb.

How did Chuck respond? He made his best record. Yes, I'll say it: “Muse Sick n Hour Mess Age” is the most well-conceived thing PE ever did, the broadest critique, with a different bag of musical tricks than any of the other records. Chuck had more tricks up his sleeve than Paul McCartney in 1967. Cue the ominous music and recall the Rolling Stone review: published before the record had come out, Rolling Stone gave the record one star out of five. Chuck was out of step with the times, Wenner's rotten rag claimed before anyone had a chance to hear it and decide for themselves. Rap had moved on, gotten harder, gotten gangster. The white kids, save a few die-hards like me, didn't buy the record. Sales were relatively sparse, and PE found itself soon without a label.

“Thin Line Between Law and Rape” is the case in point when I make the claim that “Muse Sick...” is Chuck's meisterwerk. This is not just a rap—just a rap...tell that to Rakim—but a weltanschauung. Legally deprived of the right to make the kind of sample collages he'd raised to high art with the Bomb Squad, we have this beautiful, simple, straight organ on top of the beat. The broader diaspora is present in its Jamaican form. And while, yes, Chuck did use the “B” word previously, and while his first apologies were, like all apologies, of limited value, he does right here. An apology is so many words, but calling white patriarchy by its true name is all right indeed.

Edith and the Kingpin

noreply@blogger.com (Bill) — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 08:06:35 PST

Cover of The Hissing of Summer Lawns

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Joni Mitchell, "Edith and the Kingpin" (download until 2/1/09), from "The Hissing of Summer Lawns."

Joni was one of those players--and we can refer to her as a player, because nobody plays guitar like she does, and people like Wayne Shorter wouldn't play with her if all he liked was her songwriting--who I came to late, not as late as Love, but late nonetheless, in my Junior year of college. I'd gotten into the Band and watched "The Last Waltz." There she was, playing "Coyote," the least Band-like tune of the lot, and very beautiful. I bought "Hejira" soon after and loved it. It's still my favorite Joni record.

It's interesting to me and probably very universal that one's approach to a musician is almost totally conditioned by when one encounters the music. I'm overstating it for sure, but, looking backwards, Elvis is a great example. I can read a text that explains why Elvis was a big deal to people, but it's totally separate from the music, which I really find boring, excepting "Heartbreak Hotel." Even that's merely good to me, not great. You want great Rock 'n' Roll, go for Chuck Berry--on every count he owns everything. To prove that it's not about race...though, I guess it is about race...but to make the point, take Carl Perkins. Completely his own man, not stealing black music in the least, just being true to his broader context, exceptional writer and the only guitarist of the genre to rival Chuck Berry. Etc., etc. You get the point. Elvis means nothing to me, but I wasn't around then. A corollary point is that my students will often listen to both punk and metal bands, and ask me if I know them. Yes, I say, but I never listened to Iron Maiden. They were metal, I did punk. You didn't mix medicines back then, though if you were into punk you listened to AC/DC without telling your friends.

So it was with some shock that, once I got into Joni, I read that this record was almost totally rejected by the hip rock 'n' roll cognoscenti of 1975, Rolling "Good-for-Kindling" Stone above all. "Court and Spark" was cool, I guess, but putting vocals on top of a field recording of Burundi drummers wasn't. "Court and Spark" was cool, is cool, I thought then and obviously now, but not as good as this, for the very simple reason that the tunes are better on "The Hissing of Summer Lawns," though I really have a soft spot for "People's Parties."

So why reject this record when it's so obviously good? I imagine that to the Jann Wenners of the world, it wasn't good because Joni wasn't Joni. Joni was this fragile little thing, like the twig-limbed little sister of Crosby, Stills, and Nash, and Young too. "Blue," that was Joni. Good record, for sure, but not the Joni I love.

What I think threw Rolling Stone was that Joni had stopped doing what a girl ought to do. "Blue is, in fact, a great record, but the narratives are entirely subjective--it's a record about subjectivity. Girls are subjective, the boys say, and this is just how they are. "The Hissing of Summer Lawns" is a feminist record, in the truest and best sense, and I'd point out the most analytical and objective. Joni doesn't pine for a lost lover, she describes patriarchy and its effects on people--its effects not only on women but on the men as well. "Harry's House," "Edith and the Kingpin," "The Hissing of Summer Lawns."

The boys could have dealt with a feminist record, if it was shrill. There are shrill feminists just like there are shrill Marxists or shrill conservatives. The shrillness often gets mistaken for content. It's not. But to the boys at Rolling Stone, a Joni who expressed her feelings, that we can take, but analyzing social situations is muscling in on our turf as men. Get back. You can make a feminist record, but you can't speak: you have to shout.

Joni, however, speaks, because it's not up to the boys to set the terms of what is and what is not feminist. The boys get to listen for a change, and the smart boys recognize this as an opportunity. I said above that my favorite Joni Mitchell record remains "Hejira," and it's true, primarily because of the musicianship, though also because of the raw skill with which she writes the tunes on that record. The political content of her work, which has since this record been present on everything she's done since, has never been clearer or more analytically solid than on this, even as she's broadened her view past this single subject, as of course is entirely appropriate.

I saw this blog post, "Sunday Joni Mitchell Blogging," in which the author posited Joni as a "great songwriter." It's almost so obvious a point that I can't imagine it worth making, but sure enough in the comments some people disagree. What do you want, people? Listen to this, ponder its meaning, and try to come to any other conclusion.

Ambiance Kalle Catho

noreply@blogger.com (Bill) — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 10:17:42 PST

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Grand Kalle, "Ambiance Kalle Catho" (download until 1/31/09), from "African Pearls 1: Congo - Rumba on the River."

I have very little to offer in terms of information about the performers or even the context of the production. I don't know precisely when it was recorded. This was given to me by a friend, and I've never read the liner notes. Just a record (even in mp3 form, it's still a record) I listen to constantly.

One of the huge flaws in the way people in the United States tend to view and discuss "World Music" is that in this country we tend to think of the term in a continental sense, with the sole exception of music from "the Pacific." It might be correct in some circumstances to do this, but unfortunately what tends to happen is that people talk about African music as a thing, but wouldn't dream of lumping Polish music in with French. The categories mirror the 19th century imperialist view of the world which still, as Marx put it, "weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living."

It's not odd for African people to talk about Africa as a generality and have some sense of continental unity, and indeed this sort of suprised me when I stayed in Senegal for eight months. I sort of assumed it would be rude to talk about Africa, and made a point to say to myself, "I'm in Senegal. It's specific. It's not just 'Africa.'" But while people were certainly aware of the specificity of Senegal I was struck by how much talk there was of "Africa."

That said, the category, "Africa," doesn't always make musical sense when you're listening to the music of the Diaspora. One should, depending on the music, categorize it as "Atlantic" music, because that's precisely what it is. Orchestra Baobab and other African salsa groups--though there's a lot more to Baobab than just "salsa"--get portrayed often as somehow taking something of the Americas--something Cuban, in this case--and then working it into, depending on how one discusses it, something unique or something merely derivative.

This misses the fact that Cuba is part of Africa in every sense except the geological. No other way to conceive of it. Salsa is as foreign to Africa as country music was to Bakersfield in the 1950's and 1960's. Different regions of the Diaspora have different accents--like Senegalese salsa is different that Congolese or Cuban--but they speak as it were the same language, if possible in different, though mutually intelligible, dialects.

Of note in this recording is the guitar work. It's absolutely elegant, and the grace with which it builds from backing up the singing to taking a solo is breathtakingly subtle. So, so easy to say, so difficult to actually do.

Live and Let Live

noreply@blogger.com (Bill) — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 18:35:31 PST

Cover of Forever Changes

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Love, "Live and Let Live," (download until 1/30/09) from "Forever Changes."

I always considered myself somewhat in the know about cool, hip, underground things, but in hindsight I know I'm really more of an eclectic dabbler rather than a real authority on anything. Love is the perfect example. Were I really cool, I'd have gotten into Love at the same time I got into Coltrane, in the 8th grade (if I remember correctly). At the very least when I got into Ornette Coleman, freshman year of college. Instead I got into Love at the ripe old age of 36, despite having read for years that “Forever Changes” was the real masterpiece of 1967 rather than “Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

This isn't to bash “Sgt. Pepper's,” which is something of a favorite pastime among people who are somewhat in the know about cool, hip, underground things. I went through all those phases before coming back to that record and hearing it as indeed my second favorite Beatles record, behind the White Album. That said, “Forever Changes” really does get my vote for the masterpiece of 1967 award even if it didn't get whatever notice it deserved. This isn't my favorite tune off the record—that would be “The Daily Planet.” Dammit it's close, though.

Arthur Lee is one of those few people who make (no past tense with this man) being excellent seem like a simple matter of course. I am not sure if I even buy into the concept of mastery, but only the Beatles, in his era, and in a different way Brian Wilson—but with Brian in a completely different way—mastered the form like Arthur Lee did, and they of course made a lot more money. These people take things to a level where it's not just about exceeding expectations but creating a situation where a listener has no expectations at all.

I can't remember if it was in the liner notes to “Forever Changes” or in some article where a critic went on and on about the opening couplet:

The snot has caked against my pants
It has turned into crystal

As good an example as any of Arthur Lee's ability to throw what seems to be almost any lyric on a page and have it really stick, and a vivid image to boot. But what follows is to me what nails it, particular the second line of this second couplet:

There's a bluebird sitting on a branch
I think I'll take my pistol

I have in my head an image of Arthur Lee hurling words at the page like a baseball pitcher with things like these. Not often are words so impenetrable on the surface, so affecting—meaning in this sense rendering an impression on a listener—an impression, while for me completely palpable and just as completely difficult to express in words. This is entirely characteristic of Lee's method, across with ouvre.

Lee's music, and again, “Live and Let Live” is but one typical example among many, always fits where it doesn't follow and follows where it doesn't fit. Transitions are never obvious but, like Wilson and like the Beatles, they're always right in the pocket. Ellington of course had mastered that same game, quite likely to an even greater extent were one able to measure these things, as Andre Previn famously noted in his comparion of Ellington and Stan Kenton. This music doesn't sound difficult, and if there's a mark of a master this is it: simple or complex, it's never difficult. The Coltrane of “Meditations” is not difficult in the least when one is in the right place for it. One may not be in that place often, but when one is, it's easy listening.

Hounds of Love

noreply@blogger.com (Bill) — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 08:56:02 PST

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Kate Bush, "Hounds of Love," (download until 1/25/09), from "Hounds of Love."

It sometimes surprises me which musicians do and don't remain somewhat in popular consciousness and which do not. The persistence of the Ramones, for example, surprises me, until I remember that Johnny Ramone was a right-winger and I become certain--someone ought to do the research on this--that some of those psy-ops funds the Defense Department has went to funding those Ramones t-shirts the kids get at Wal-Mart these days. The Pentagon pays for movies, you know, so don't tell me this is far-fetched.

So why not Kate Bush? Maybe because musicians who were English English, who have some sense that English and United States American are not interchangeable and that a special relationship is more a marriage of convenience. Ray Davies doesn't get a whole lot of attention at this point either--when did you last see a Kinks shirt at Target? No place for them in Bush's--ah, Blair's--ah, Bush's England.

If you were to describe Kate Bush's music to me now--not to me in 9th grade, when I first got into her--I'd either start laughing or give a nasty grimace depending on my mood. Nothing on the surface would appeal to my sense of self. Dramatic singing, and not the cool, on-the-edge-of-your-seat, Jimmy Scott kind, but the she-needs-to-settle-down kind. Lyrical references to dreams and memories of childhood. Celtic flourishes reminding us all of the dancing Druids at Stonehenge. Painstakingly "layered" recordings in which overdub after overdub is piled onto tape so the fact that none of the individual parts needs to actually be good goes unnoticed. None of this actually makes me want to listen to Kate Bush.

But listen I do, because Kate Bush has two things in her favor. The first is that she's really good. The second is more important in a way, because there are lots of really good musicians I really don't want to listen to: she's completely honest. Honesty can't be faked, we understand--if you believed Bush at any point, then you're a sucker who needs to own up to it--and it's especially so in music. Ages ago I read a review of Jonathan Richman which said that he was one of the two great adult children of Rock, capital "R," alongside Kate Bush. Probably not fair to either one of them, but it should be stressed that while the near constant references to childhood one gets on "Hounds of Love," song and record, would be unbearable if they weren't completely honest.

The tune itself, again, doesn't sound appealing to me were I to describe it to myself. "Overdubbed cellos hitting the root and the fifth over and over again to give it a kind of refined sound that appeals to people who are uncomfortable with saxophones." Not my cup of tea, especially because people do this kind of thing all the time to get a kind of Eleanor Rigby sophistication without the actual musical sophistication that George Martin brought to that string arrangement. "Just hit the root and the fifth on a couple cellos over and over, man, nobody will tell the difference." And the truth of it is that almost nobody does, and it gets over. So it is with some astonishment that I say that the strings are absolutely perfect on this tune. "Hounds of Love" has got to be the one case where the "root and fifth over and over on a pair of overdubbed cellos" trick actually was called for and worked to great effect.

It should also be mentioned, remembered, then probably quickly forgotten, that when digital sampling as a musical technology first came out it was embraced pretty quickly by two camps: hip-hoppers and English progressive rock types. We all understand that it was the hip-hoppers who really worked wonders with the technology and the progressive rock types really just found a new technique to distract from the fact that they really didn't have anything to say about anything and give their waning, 1978-9 careers second wind or shot in the arm depending on their habits to get them to 1982-3 before calling it a day and waiting for the reunion tour. A pox on the Fairlight CMI and the awful musical distractions it encouraged, but dammit if Kate Bush didn't use it the most unobtrusively and tastefully among the English folk.

And the Celtic thing--not as prominent here as in a lot of other stuff on the record--it's hard for a recovering Irish-American, meaning someone who went through, through a "discover your ethnicity, white man" phase long enough ago that he can consider himself respectable again, to take Northumbrian pipes on a pop record. But when it's honest, it's honest, and it's very different to do the Celtic thing when you were born on Celtic land and your mom was Irish and actually did traditional dance. It's legit.

Who Do You Love?

noreply@blogger.com (Bill) — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 08:41:27 PST

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Bo Diddley, "Who Do You Love?" (download until 1/23/09), from "The Definitive Collection."

It's all about networking of course—building rather than burning bridges. Other concerns, however, often intervene. Today, the desire, or possibly rather the need, to aim for the head while shooting from the hip will trump any effort to ingratiate this writer to the graying dinosaurs of Rock Journalism.

So Bo Diddley is not primitive, and any “hip” magazine that speaks of him that way should have its pages burned and the steel girders that make up the high-rise office building that houses its offices melted down and returned to the earth from whence they came. The people who work for the magazine will have a chance to publicly renounce their error and name names before entering the re-education camp, but should they choose not to exercise that opportunity all bets are off. Rolling Stone, this is shot from the hip at the head number one.

To see the “primitive” claim clearly, “primitive” meaning among other things “first, we need, for a moment, to consider top 100 lists. Please note that the race of list item number one will always equal the race of the largest target demographic defined racially. And the royal we means “racially,” not “ethnically.” Sit down, sit down. My fellow white people can sit down. The rest of you know what I mean.

In the Rolling Stone universe—like the Marvel Universe, only for evil purposes—of top 100 lists Bo Diddley is Black Music, while Chuck Berry is the proof we're not racist, really. Rock 'n' Roll had its base in R'n'B and white country—leave off the African elements in white country—but, yes, that's the conjunction, “but”—was made more sophisticated by the dynamic geniuses of Rock, the Beatles, the Stones, and Dylan, all three of whose music I rush it, comforting, soothing, to say that I love in the first and third cases dearly and in the second well enough.

In the Rolling Stone universe, neither Bo Diddley nor the relative sophisticate Chuck Berry are dynamic. Each presents his form which is almost Platonic in its constancy but which, once presented simply exists, leaving the musician himself to play to small audiences in small clubs or, at best, theaters while others, will work the raw—how often has Bo Diddley's music been called “raw” by the rock music cognoscenti?—material of the African progenitor into a constantly changing, always new and therefore worthy of a constant re-investment of consumer money into new commodity, cultural product.

We have a teleology of African origins, transmission to the White Man, and then the fulfillment of the original promise of Black music by White people. I'm using capital letters now, that's right. Humanity began in Africa, and developed civilization in Egypt. But Egyptian society was static for 3000 or 3500 years, depending on whom you read. The story of Egypt after the Old Kingdom is the story of outsiders—the Hyksos, and later the Ptolemies. Akhnaten is of course inserted, but as an anomaly, a freak, really. We stress his odd cranium and proclivity for incest. More centrally, we stress not his dynamism but his failure. That the dynamic Pharoah failed is proof of the ultimately static character of Egypt and by extension Africa. It came to the Greeks, to the White Man, to take civilization and make it dynamic.

The static African, Bo Diddley's one chord. European settlers came to North America and saw an empty continent, land unused, despite the fact that the continent was not empty and the land was indeed used.

The problem here is that certain brains can't handle more than one variable at a time. This applies to history, to culture, to beauty, to anything, and it's a characteristic function, to use the hip lingo of the day, of whiteness. If your idea of beautiful hair is how it lays on a woman's shoulder, you will not see the difference between well-kept and poorly-kept locks. You will only see locks, and they won't be as beautiful as that flowing straight hair on the other lady.

If you started a magazine and put a Beatle on the cover, and that was what was hip and good and genius, and you knew with certainty that songs with middle eights and little introductions and tags were good because Lenny Bernstein was saying that there were great things happening with the kids' music, and people were calling Dylan a poet, you probably would focus on that one chord Bo Diddley was playing and think the music simple. Because if you think that musical quality varies in direct proportion to melodic variation, then Bo Diddley would at best be simple music.

But Bo Diddley did not make simple music. He called up a lot of stuff in his song and put it into play. His references to rattlesnake this and cobra were simultaneously satirical and completely serious. He knew he stretched things. It wasn't just his beat—and there's a lot more to Bo Diddley than just “the Bo Diddle Beat” for sure—but the beat, nothing at all like the sterile impersonations people my age learned as the “Bo Diddley Beat,” was very, very old, and when he played it the age in it added the type of complexity that I would think a truly great, properly aged and cellared wine had had I the palate to distinguish these things. Only more deep, and more complex, and at a fundamental level more social. The Bo Diddley Beat—not in its stereotypical form on this track, of course, but rather on “Bo Diddley”a—is in its true form a social phenomenon rather than just a series of taps on a tom-tom. It takes nothing away from the individual Bo Diddley to note that his music is the product of a social, historical development. That development brings the kind of nuance that the musical notation that would impress the Lenny Bernsteins of the world (or the type of obvious complexity that a Jann Wenner could detect) misses.

So too in the lyrics. If your idea of great lyric writing is the Dylan of, take your pick, “Blowin' in the Wind,” “My Back Pages,” or “Tombstone Blues” (my favorite of the three) you wouldn't be bowled over by “Who Do You Love?” That's because you expect the meaning of the words to be contained entirely in the words themselves rather than in the relationship between him singing and them listening. Bo Diddley's words are exceptionally specific in the social response they elicit. They refer to reference upon reference. If you haven't experienced the referential context, you can understand the tune but you miss its impact. It would seem lesser when placed next to “Tombstone Blues.” Lesser, however, it's not.

Boat Train

noreply@blogger.com (Bill) — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 07:14:06 PST

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The Pogues, "Boat Train," (download until 1/22/09), from "Peace and Love."

Joe Strummer generously called Shane MacGowan the best songwriter of his generation, meaning Joe Strummer's generation. Labeling anyone the best of anything is not really a useful exercise, and while I have no doubt that Strummer's sentiments were genuine—because as we all know this was a man who seemingly could never be anything but—I also have a feeling that he knew that saying so publicly would help Shane's reputation and therefore assist his, and the Pogues', career. It would assure Shane at least a minor spot in the pantheon.

This is by no means Shane's pre-eminent achievement, but it is one of the three or four tunes of his that archetypify his approach. Shane is a social songwriter, one might say, and in this he more than nearly anyone I know of from his place, time, and tradition, can rightly be called a real part of traditional music. He sustains and departs from his musical inheritance, which is what tradition is. If it's static, it's not tradition. It's ancient history. This is much more true with Shane than with a guy like Bob Dylan, who of course is the one people talk about, and whose self-conception seems to be (insofar as anyone, anyone at all including Bob Dylan has any sense of what he actually thinks) that he's the bigshot heir of traditional music extending it into the present. Bob keeps the musical, formal aspects of traditional song but drops almost entirely the social aspects of traditional song. Not that this is a bad thing, it just is.

This is to be sure a generalization, and by no means is what I'll next describe uniquely Irish, but there's a lot of Irish traditional song, my favorite among them “The Galway Races,” which takes as its subject a social situation rather than an individual protagonist. Of course many Irish songs have individual protagonists and are written from a single perspective. That kind of subjectivity—while in no way standing in the way of the making of great song—is the fundamental trait of the modern pop song. There's an individual looking out at the world in most song today. So it's not particular interesting to find that kind of subjectivity, individual subjectivity, in a song in 2009, or in 1989, when Shane's “Boat Train” was released.

Quickly recall the aforementioned “Galway Races.” The song reads basically as a long list of all the parties present at the races on a particular day. None of us modern types, myself included, read lists for fun, and despite having insisted that he'd be glad to hear Joao Gilberto sing the telephone book I'm quite sure that Miles would only do so out of stubbornness, gritting his teeth, pretending he was digging it only to prove wrong the naysayers who called him on his nonsense. Yet here at the Galway races we are presented with the most compelling list I know of in traditional song, acknowledging my admittedly thin knowledge of traditional song. I'm no Lomax, or Dylan—because though Bob discarded tradition more than extending it he certainly knew it.

The list of attendance is one of the most important literary forms there is, but in the sickness of capitalism we've completely denigrated it. Why? Because under capitalism things are more important than people, except for the individual consuming and occasionally producing subject. But I can't overstate how often, when reading this or that book about some sort of ancient history, I come across some reference to an inscription that lists who was present at the inscribing. We modern folk think of this as graffiti, but in fact it's an act in the formation of people as a people. We are essentially a social organism, and all of our social neuroses arise in the United States because we've forgotten this. Cheikh Anta Diop made this comment in Civilization and Barbarism somewhere, that all the West's social neuroses derive from an excess of privacy, where all of Africa's social neuroses derive from a lack of it. Not an exact quote, but that's the sense of it.

Yes, there's an “I” in “Boat Train.” Make of this what you will. The I, however, is a very dissociated subject, drunk as hell, one imagines slightly drunk at the start (not completely clear) but increasingly and intensely so as the song progresses. The first word is I, and then progressively the subject re-enters the social environment and though the I remains it becomes increasingly peripheral. The bulk of the happenings in the songs are simultaneously events and sensations. “Some bastard started slagging off the Pakis and the Jews.” “Some bastard started singing 'The Little Cottage by the Lee.'”

This is typical Shane—a brief beginning in which we are introduced to the “I,” who then enters some social occasion, the various and intersecting happenings of which are listed, with the impression that the list is incomplete, after which the song ends. “A Pair of Brown Eyes,” “The Body of an American,” “Fairytale of New York.” It's a brilliant technique. I wouldn't want to overstate it, to be sure—it's not that in any of these songs the narrative subject completely dissipates. Nor is the the only technique he uses, because he structures “Fairytale of New York” and to a lesser extent “A Pair of Brown Eyes” like a film as much as a song. Actually, the narrative subject is a stronger and more linear presence in “Boat Train” than in any of the other songs I've mentioned, which makes me wonder why I picked it as a starting point for this digression. Probably just because it's the funniest thing Shane's yet written. Funny goes a long way with me.

The only other writer that comes to mind immediately that puts forth song as social situation rather than—a pox on Lou Reed—character study, and does it so naturally, unpretentiously, and masterfully, is Chuck Berry. “Ring, ring goes the bell!”

Five (2nd version)

noreply@blogger.com (Bill) — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 05:30:17 PST

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John Cage, "Five (2nd version)" (download until 1/20/09), from "Cage: Music for Eight."

I have seen a very good documentary about John Cage and know about him as well from tangential references in texts about other subjects, but as I don't really follow the European tradition of composed music and I don't really go in for the biographical approach to music as a means to understand it—any biographical references in this or any other post reflect information I've stumbled across rather than sought out—not knowing too much, as I don't, about John Cage, I can't go into too much detail about his process in this piece or generally. Nor can I say I have a real understanding of his intent, because of course he had intent, we as humans function through intentionality, through any of Cage's actual words.

Increasingly over the course of his long career Cage came, it is axiomatic, to rely on chance operations in composition. That is to say, as a composer he delineated a set of variables rather than a series of notes. The precise notes musicians played, when, for how long, and in what order, varied according to chance. This piece is as good a brief example of the results as I've heard.

I am not sure that this is music that's meant to be described, and I'm really fairly sure it is mean to not be described. But I can describe my response. I've had this recording for years, and nearly every time I listen to it I feel sensations of real cold, though a cold that's not uncomfortable. Again, nearly always, I remember a lake my family used to go to in winter, in Montana, surrounded by trees and frozen solid, and white. It's very comforting to me. I've lived basically all my life in California with a couple of extra-continental interludes varying from six weeks to eight months, and not in the cold parts of California. Crocker-Amazon is as cold as it's been in any of my homes. But this image of that frozen lake, brought on by this piece, is more present to me when I hear this than my immediate surroundings.

I've read more than one biographical sketch or article about Brian Eno which made the claim that his accomplishment was to more or less bring Cage's ideas to a wider audience. This is unfair to both, though probably more unfair to Cage. In no way did Eno popularize Cage's ideas, because Cage's ideas were not fundamentally musical, but rather social. I am very sure that Cage inspired Eno, because Eno has said as much more than once and in particular in an interview I read in which Eno himself interviewed Cage. This was more than 20 years ago now and I have no recollection of the magazine. But one can be inspired by someone without actually understanding them.

Cage wanted to produce a social situation in which participants needed to set aside intentionality and simply experience the presence of sound. This is why we get Buddhism mentioned in the context of discussing Cage. Cage became furious with musicians who would improvise with his scores. Yes, it was not planned, but it was intended. Reliance on chance operations put musicians in positions of simply have to accept outcomes just as much as an audience, and was a form of letting go. This is good for people.

Above is a Youtube clip of a performance of the same piece. The actual music is not to my ear as lovely, and indeed on the album this is on there's a "(1st version)" which I find less beautiful than this. But this is the point of the piece. It exists in these different forms, it's none of the particular forms, it's neither in the form nor not in the form. Cage's music produces this existentially, and in that it isn't so much influenced by Buddhism but it's a Buddhist practice itself.

This is why Eno really didn't popularize Cage's ideas. Eno used machines where Cage used chance. The results of both are beautiful, but socially they're very different. Cage revises or more properly demolishes the identities of composer, musician, and audience, except, it has to be said, to the extent that he made money off composition. Eno makes (or made--haven't been as impressed lately, as I've noted) unique and spectacularly beautiful records, but ultimately conforms to the social roles of music he inherited. There's an artist that records a commodity, and a record-buying public.

Synchro Feelings

noreply@blogger.com (Bill) — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 08:47:52 PST

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King Sunny Ade, "Synchro Feelings-Ilako," (download until 1/18/09), from "Synchro System."

Very rarely do I prefer versions of music from traditions that don't adhere to a 3-5 minute song format that have been edited, reduced, transformed, commercialized, or what have you, to the original versions. This is an exception.

I've owned--the best one unfortunately got stolen from my office in the radio station I worked in during college--a few of Sunny Ade's original African releases, LP's, and they were uniformly fantastic. A lot of his stuff has now been reissued in the "West," and it's worth the money for sure. Sunny Ade cannot make a bad record.

Different West African musics obviously, because West Africa is a big place, take different contours, and some forms fit more nicely into the expectations of the marketplace in North America. The reduction of music to the commodity form, originally shellac and then vinyl but by technical as opposed to musical necessity limited to two to three minutes for a long enough time (roughly the first half of the twentieth century) that musical forms themselves adapted to the technology and song itself shrunk to fit the size of the medium. Lots of great stuff came about because of this: you wouldn't have Duke Ellington's great 78's or the type of concision you get with a Cole Porter tune without at some level the time pressure of the technical medium of the 78 rpm single. Later, with the development of magnetic tape and the LP record, musicians seemingly "pushed the boundaries" of the medium and apparently began to harbor larger ambitions. Jazz musicians were first, with increasingly long performances on record in the 1950's and 1960's, the first "concept albums," like "Kind of Blue," and then album-length pieces like "Free Jazz." Rock musicians were slow to get the idea but came around with "Pet Sounds" and "Sgt. Pepper's." You know the story.

Really what was happening is that people made what seemed to be discoveries, but like Columbus in the Caribbean, in fact people were already there. Any society in that period--the heyday of imperialism in its classic form--where people in general were prevented access to modern technologies by the imperialists as a means of subordination and control, any society like that would, particularly in the British colonies, where the plan was to simply steal the stuff that was there rather than, on the French model, spread culture, retain indigenous musical form. The British weren't going to bother, in general, in trying to get Africans to stop playing their own music. If they paid up in kind or in labor, that was plenty. There are exceptions to this of course.

So you have in Nigeria in the late twentieth century, after independence, you have musicians, most importantly you'd have to say Fela Kuti, but also the whole crew of juju musicians, Sunny Ade but also Ebenezer Obey, whose sense of form was not culturally conditioned most importantly by the three-minute pop song but rather indigenous form, but who, in the context of independence, now had access to all kinds of culture--music from the United States, for example--that under the imperialists was denied.

Where Fela took this independence and went for James Brown, Sunny Ade incorporated electronics. It's not my original observation, but it should be stated clearly that the most important developments in electronic music in the late 20th century--insofar as they actually mean something to people in their lives around the world--came not from the "technologically advanced nations of the world" but from Jamaica. Lee Perry, rather than Kraftwerk (whose music I love, and who themselves always have taken the correct attitude toward their place in the musical world), is the father of techno.

Sunny Ade surely was not and is not the technical innovator Lee Perry is, or Kraftwerk, or Fela was in his different way. Sunny Ade offered and offers one thing above all, and that's raw quality. He is so exceptionally good as a musician, bandleader, melodist, recording artist, and performing artist, that he blows all competition away. I've seen Sunny Ade perform three times, all in the 1980's, and saw him on the "Synchro System" tour. Never seen a better show.

So the story behind this record, really more behind his previous, first US release, "Juju Music," is well-known but bears repeating. Bob Marley, third-world superstar #1, died, and Island Records lost a big money-maker. Looking for another to shake, they looked toward Africa. I don't know if Fela was approached but I can imagine he'd have nothing but disdain for the suggestion that he would follow Bob Marley or anyone else for that matter. Sunny Ade, then, was the choice.

He was not a good choice from a commercial perspective. Island put out three records. The first two, "Juju Music," and "Synchro System," took Ade's LP-side-long songs and cut the length to 4-5 minutes each, creating albums more or less in the form expected by the huge US market. "Juju Music" even included a song in English. But there is the obvious error in Island's thinking. Marley sang in English, and Sunny Ade sung in Yoruba. The big, white American audience can't deal with anything not in English. After a third record, Ade was cut loose.

The shocker, though, with his first two records in particular, was that though the songs were severely edited in terms of length to fit the target market's expectations, they were edited extremely well. That's the thing, I suppose. Another good example is Arthur Waley's translation and abridgement of "The Journey to the West," published as "Monkey." 2000 pages in an unabridged translation I read some years ago, 350 or so in Waley's version. But Waley's version works, absolutely. So too with "Juju Music" and "Synchro System," and to my ear a much lesser extent with "Aura." A piece well-abridged is legitimate. Very rarely does this kind of thing actually happen, but it happened with Sunny Ade. One has to think that it's Ade who deserves the credit and his producer Martin Meissonnier for knowing to stay out of the way.

Musically, I don't think I've heard a piece that makes me smile the way this does. There are about 20 musicians playing on this recording at the same time. Not a one steps on another's toes, and nobody is holding back. Try getting Americans to be as aware of each other.

Making Flippy Floppy

noreply@blogger.com (Bill) — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 10:18:56 PST

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Talking Heads, "Making Flippy Floppy," (download until 1/17/09), from "Speaking in Tongues."

For some reason, I'm finding myself coming back to tunes which I think are objectively mediocre but come together in a way that makes them great. This is one of them. Every single variable in the tune, from the melody, to the arrangement, to the words, is, by classic Talking Heads standards, fair to middling. Admittedly, the Heads made truly great music with alarming frequency between 1979 and 1983, and that raises both the ceiling and the floor. Most people would give their eyeteeth to write a tune like this one.

The Talking Heads are open at some level to all the same critiques I leveled at Tom Waits and Beck, tangentially. At the same time, though David Byrne has had a very chequered career since this record--in hindsight, "Little Creatures" is both derivative and weak, and seemingly a very forced change of pace, and then it's downhill from there--somehow the band, and it was a band, was able to draw on a variety of sources and make them their own.

David Byrne does not get let off the hook, and particularly the racial hook--which I didn't even wield with Tom Waits, I'm aware, could've, should've--but there's also the fact that one can make really good music while maintaining awful racial politics. David Byrne and Brian Eno both deserve any crap they get for their criminal exoticization of black people, and black music. It's worst on "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts," which is at the same time the best record they made together, truly, though I'd add it's the best record only in its originally released form, not with the added tracks of the reissue, with "Qu'ran" and not with "Very, Very Hungry."

I would think that at least Brian Eno (am I being unfair?) and possibly David Byrne had read the Amos Tutuola novel of the same name--at least I hope they did. How many of the white, college-boy hipsters who read the book, let alone bought it, remains in my mind in little doubt: about a tenth of a percent. I actually did--brilliant novel, included in my edition with Tutuola's first, "The Palm-Wine Drinkard," which I preferred. Tutuola was sort of disowned for admittedly good reasons by a lot of educated Africans because of his imperfect grasp of formal English (as opposed to Chinua Achebe, who for my money is the model of English prose from the mid-twentieth century), and his editors reviled for more or less marketing him as an exotic, essentially savage African, untouched by civilizing influence and thus "authentic." Accepting all this, Tutuola's imagery is about as astonishing as any I've read, and he's very clearly conscious of his place in the linguistic world.

There certainly is a problem with this music, with this project. I'll cite a line--and in defense of the artists, this is not a quote from them, but from the critic--from the allmusic.com review of "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts":

The songs on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts present myriad elements from around the world in the same jumbled stew, without regard for race, creed, or color.

There you go. Colorblindness, the surest sign of a white liberal. The Talking Heads are very liberal in this sense. Now some people are getting tense. Don't worry, my great, human, white friends, you're ok. But next time you're hanging out with one of your friends of color, just ask them if they can afford to be colorblind in America. Then, if you are really a friend, you won't be hurt. In fact, you should be proud that you're a white person that, if you can listen, is moving toward a solution.

This is the thing, though: the music is good. This tune would be great, too, if it weren't on the same record with other things that are better, as unsound as that logic might be. And it doesn't hold a candle to "Once in a Lifetime," for sure. We must be suspect of any band that hires P-Funksters for an album and tour, forms a sound that not only uses those players but requires them, and then proceeds to move on. This doesn't reduce, however, that a record with Bernie Worrell on it is always worthwhile. Everything he touches turns to gold.