HOW TO LISTEN WHILE WAITING FOR HURRICANE IVAN WITH BUSTED FOOT
Introduction: San Francisco's Crime was/were not punks. That's what they said, and I believe them. That's why they called themselves Crime and also Ron the Ripper and Hank Rank and Johnny Strike and Frankie Fix and were long known to me only by "Hot Wire My Heart" (covered by Sonic Youth on something or other), and also "Baby You're So Repulsive."Actually they were known to me only by those titles, because I'd never heard a note. They must have been bikers. Yeah, that's it. Also ex-glam, and reaching back through silver-coated Berry licks to the science-fictionalized rhythm & blues and blues of Jorma. So their newly expanded, expansively tight-assed (you can come in, butt you can't sit down) blacklist, SAN FRANCISCO'S *STILL* DOOMED, is stomping something juicy. (They broke up in '81, just as "hardcore punks" Talibanned all banana appeal).(Swamirecords.com, Outlawpress.net)
CHAPTER ONE: "Theme From GONE WITH THE WIND": I'm doing forestry with/for Scarlett. On the last hour of the last day, at dusk, as we make one last inspection of the loggers' wake, a stick in a pile of debris stabs the base of my shin, and I fall down, breaking the bone in my little toe, which leads back towards the base of my shin (give or take a few strata). Only connect. Worth it, because we've never spent so many (eventful!) hours together in a single week, despite having known each other for 40 years.
CHAPTER TWO:Carla Bley/Steve Swallow/Andy Sheppard/Gary Drummond: THE LOST CHORDS (Watt)
Past her legendary JCOA and other orchestral experiments/hijinks of late 60s and 70s, Carla's small groups have often seemed to me like well-groomed small potatoes. But here and now, on Ivan Eve, listening on headphones while stuck on the couch, rather than pumping my head full of stinky old metal while riding exercycle, I find this music's pulse, its focus, and even excitement: What *shall* we find tonight, children? Move over Miss Frances, Miss Carla's taking over Ding Dong School (TV nursery school that got me so stoked for First Grade man, later for your kindergarten). Not Latin American, but they know from that, not Euro (except for Andy, if you count Brits), but they got the wee wee Paree moderne. The beats, the double-jointed chords,the intentness, the chamber breath, all occasionally get stuck circling the lamplight, but, especially as the album proceeds, I hear schoolin' like rigor as such a given you can slide on it, not slack but slide into the cockpit, as you get older, losing your hair (many years from now).C.O.B.(Cool Old Broad). It's that kind of assurance.Sha-ha-ron! "These are blues you can play sitting down. You might have to lean forward a little," thanks for the tip, Mr. D. Focus on the keys, then, while playing, you can tilt your head all the way back, as your coulda-been-the-inspiration-for-the-whole-LION-KING-on-BROADWAY-production-design mane slips back(if you're Carla), and: watch the skies, couch potato.
CHAPTER THREE: RIO BAILE FUNK:FAVELA BOOTY BEATS (essayrecordings.com, dist. by Darla): Ruffantuff as Jorge Ben and toasting, persistent as them and dancehall too, audacious and tunehead as Tom Ze, inescapable as Jobim, flamboyant and all-the-above as the best Miami Bass, incl. Bass Tribe's JUNGLE BASS (Pandisc), catchy and clever and simple and straight ahead and never ever as easy as the time it seems to be having, or the world, not being *that* dumb, would be made of it. Redeeming even 80s-style soundtrack synth cheese I abhor by gnarling it to tiny crunchy stars in the devil's sidewalk (on the one about the slum called City of God, re an actual movie, justly enough).The final track is a medley of the kind of voice-and-drum-choir, concrete canyon reveries of awesome length and intimacy, that you find at yard sales for twenty-five cents, if you live in the kind of Air Force town where Staff and Command students from Classified are constantly getting transferred, having to ditch a little more ballast. Only this medley's down to one voice, one K-Mart Casio "drum," and yet as one-to-one as the favela multitudes ever were.(A favela's a ghetto yknow.)(Paul Simon tried to bite the choral on RHYTHM OF THE SAINTS, but I've barely heard any of that.)Rap's in there too, but only a couple of tracks fall behind the language barrier hell even a lot of AMERICAN hiphop albums do worse than that (not that I don't *think* I understand what they're saying, but the hiphopping takes a dive when the rapper opens his mouth, too often, not the words but the sound that's done). So!Get up! And schlep that foot-thick plastic! Bang that plywood over here, and spray paint it: YALL AINT READY IVAN. Except for not really, cos I don't live on the coast like Scarlett (cue:"Word On the Wing," then "Wind Cries Mary," but don't even think of "All Along The Unowatt"). Say a prayer for her, and then the lights go out.For five days, and landlines and cells for two of those But it turns out she didn't go back yet, she's safe up here for now. She was when I wrote most of this. She's gone back now. I wonder what she's found. One of these days, and it won't be long, she's gonna look out her window and find THE LOST SESSIONS, of our late mutual friend Stan Getz, that is, whom she introduced me toom not tomb.
THE END.
Tuesday, September 28, 2004
Tuesday, September 21, 2004
Over half a year ago (yeesh, has it been that long?), as my inital post to this site, I took one track each from five random CDs I was getting rid of as part of a grand apocalyptic sweep through my recollection and measured them against one track each from five random CDs I was keeping; the idea was to see if the saved sample would be obviously superior to that being tossed. They were.
About four months later I finished that laborous exercise and compiled my favorite tracks from the albums deemed wanting onto a large pile of CD-Rs. I got rid of so many albums that three of the CDs I reviewed as "keepers" wound up getting tossed as well.
So here's the new test: which will be superior, five random tracks on the all-wheat/no-chaff CD-Rs or five random tracks from my still-hefty-for-a-commoner collection of full-lengths? It seems logical that the CD-R's have a higher batting average of awesomeness (using the stoplight scale there shouldn't be a single red), but I feel like finding out for sure).
OK. Green=I need to keep this track, Red=this track is worthless and Yellow covers all that falls between.
THE FULL-LENGTHS!
==
Track #1 - Drive Like Jehu, "Luau!"
Taking its sweet time starting. Indie-trudge drums and guitars...Drive Like Jehu? AND HOW! "Luau!" Shit, talking about opening with a bang. I prefer the snap and concision of Hot Snakes overall, but if I was going to keep only one Jehu track, this would be it. Guitars being bent and squoze like tubes of toothpaste over the loping beat as Rick Fork yelps golden phrases like "THIS FUCKING SUCKS!" and "WHEREFORE ART THOU?" (at least I think he is) before sliding into the climactic chant of "Aloha, aloha, suit up! Luau, Luau, Luau, Luau." More bands should just throw the novellest of seeming non-sequiturs over their plod. Especially if they've got Fork's ability to keep it from seeming cutesy-poo. Green, baby. GREEN.
Track #2 - X, "In This House That I Call Home"
Rockabilly with distorted guitars. X? Yeah, X. Ok, I've got to turn this up a little cuz the mastering on this Los Angeles/Wild Gift two-fer is wack. Sigh. I like X, don't get me wrong, but I don't love them yet. The Doe/Cervenka harmonies annoy - they're always out of tune in the same way, no matter what the song's emotional content is. Their allegedly awesome lyrics aren't particularly audible. "In this house that I call home"? I don't even remember if that's the name of the track. Sigh, yeah I'm keeping this around in case I grow into it or somethinhg. Either I'll toss this in two years or I'll wonder why I never understood it before. YELLOW.
Track #3 - Talking Heads, "The Big Country"
Meanwhile, this song has been knocking me out for longer than I've had chest hair. We only had one CD player in the house, so I would play my stuff in the living room when my parents were home or when they felt like putting up with it. They were usually cool with the Talking Heads. My dad even started doing the cha-cha around the room one time this was on. Part one: objective description of small town life. Part two: bitter dismissal and sudden bitch about touring life. Part three: Goo Goo, Ga Ga Ga. GREEN.
Track #4 - Eminem, "Drug Ballad"
Hahahahaha! Man the CD-R's are gonna have to work real hard to beat this line-up. One of my favorite Eminem tracks - right from "back when Mark Wahlberg was Marky Mark." Catchy, playful, inspired. One of the few tracks that have the calm rational detail of "Marshall" with the humor of "Shady." "I still got a lot of growing up to do, I still got a WHOLE lot of throwing up to spew." GREEN.
Track #5 - Strokes, "When It Started"
I forgot the name, but it's the track that replaced "NY City Cops" on Is This It?. Room On Fire was disappointingly draggy compared to the original (one of the six tracks I kept might show up for the opposing team, who knows?), but anybody who dismisses the Strokes outright can bite my ass. Julian may be the son of Iggy Pop and Eeyore, but the crisp beats and layers of nervous guitars make for something as caffeinated as the finest Feelies with a staccato attack that makes the sound entirely their own. Nikolai's bass burblage makes this one kinda jiggy. It's been too long since I threw this album on. GREEN.
THE CD-RS!
==
Track #1 - Gomez, "Shot Shot"
Grifters! No wait, Gomez! Hi, Matt! This is off of In Our Gun, I think it's "Shot Shot." Yeah he just said "Shot Shot." Great grody little groove; that sax part reminds me the one they use on that one rap track repeatedly used in Bring It On (Chuck Eddy and Frank Kogan voted for the soundtrack back in 2000 P&J, I think. I should check it out). Hey, Matt, did you ever explain how the new Gomez album DOESN'T suck? Only song I liked was "Sweet Virginia." This song's pretty quick, but I need that hook. GREEN.
Track #2 - Giant Sand, "X-Tra Wide"
Wow, how many slack-ass G bands are there? This is from Chore Of Enchantment the best Giant Sand album I've ever heard (and I've heard most). Still didn't make the cut. Why own a bunch of albums that depress you in their relative mediocrity when you can make a truly enjoyable CD-R or two of your cherrypicked faves? Besides, some indie dink's going to see all those albums in the used rack and have a big ol' dump just like you did when you first found 'em. And the clerk, who was there when you bought it AND when you sold it back, can either laugh or question your rockism. "Dusted" and "Shiver" are the crucial tracks, sorry. YELLOW.
Track #3 - Rocket From The Crpyt, "U.S. Aim"
Ah! One of the sweet Holly Golighty-assisted tracks they made around RFTC but didn't release. Not sure what it's about (the military, I'm guessing) but that chorus...wtf. Why don't more people give it up for Speedo's hookcraft? Horns, riffs, chants, melody - all stellar (Chuck E thinks the rhythm sections flat or something but this stuff makes me move, albeit pogo-wise, a whole lot more than Boney M does - save "Rasputin"). Speedo's shit is so consistently chewy (though the rarities comps have a little too much filler to keep around in their entirety) and with Live From Camp X-Ray he's upped his lyrical game too. They've been around for ages too. Where is the critical LOVE? GREEN.
Track #4 - Tubeway Army, "Me! I Disconnect From You"
It's been a while since I said that I don't get Simon Reynolds. I don't get Simon Reynolds. He gave Replicas a 9 in SPIN, so that's the Gary Numan I picked up when curiousity struck. It's fun, don't get me wrong, but unlike somebody like Christgau, who just has a different value system, I wonder if I'm even listening to the same album Reynolds is (I'm probably missing historical context or lacking the correct drug supplement or something). I find the Human League more fascinating than Numan cuz Numan's a sad human who wishes he was a robot and Phil Oakey's a robot who wishes he was a sad human. Numan's type is way more common. I kept Dare and only kept the catchiest, peppiest stuff from this album (and this is one my of my faves). I forget what he said the big deal was about this album, but I'm sure he's wrong. GREEN.
Track #5 - Killing Joke, "Requiem"
Does Alex In NYC from ILX read this site? I highly doubt it. This song is nearly identical to Adam Ant's "(You're So) Physical." I can rarely tell what Jaz Coleman is yelling about and Girls Against Boys put some sex into these searing sonics. I don't feel like honouring the fire right now, sorry. YELLOW.
Man this was WAY more pleasurable than the one in March! Close match, and two of the yellows were due to me giving the alt-canon more credit than it deserves! I did a good job keeping stuff I enjoy and getting rid of songs I don't like. Thanks for bearing witness.
About four months later I finished that laborous exercise and compiled my favorite tracks from the albums deemed wanting onto a large pile of CD-Rs. I got rid of so many albums that three of the CDs I reviewed as "keepers" wound up getting tossed as well.
So here's the new test: which will be superior, five random tracks on the all-wheat/no-chaff CD-Rs or five random tracks from my still-hefty-for-a-commoner collection of full-lengths? It seems logical that the CD-R's have a higher batting average of awesomeness (using the stoplight scale there shouldn't be a single red), but I feel like finding out for sure).
OK. Green=I need to keep this track, Red=this track is worthless and Yellow covers all that falls between.
THE FULL-LENGTHS!
==
Track #1 - Drive Like Jehu, "Luau!"
Taking its sweet time starting. Indie-trudge drums and guitars...Drive Like Jehu? AND HOW! "Luau!" Shit, talking about opening with a bang. I prefer the snap and concision of Hot Snakes overall, but if I was going to keep only one Jehu track, this would be it. Guitars being bent and squoze like tubes of toothpaste over the loping beat as Rick Fork yelps golden phrases like "THIS FUCKING SUCKS!" and "WHEREFORE ART THOU?" (at least I think he is) before sliding into the climactic chant of "Aloha, aloha, suit up! Luau, Luau, Luau, Luau." More bands should just throw the novellest of seeming non-sequiturs over their plod. Especially if they've got Fork's ability to keep it from seeming cutesy-poo. Green, baby. GREEN.
Track #2 - X, "In This House That I Call Home"
Rockabilly with distorted guitars. X? Yeah, X. Ok, I've got to turn this up a little cuz the mastering on this Los Angeles/Wild Gift two-fer is wack. Sigh. I like X, don't get me wrong, but I don't love them yet. The Doe/Cervenka harmonies annoy - they're always out of tune in the same way, no matter what the song's emotional content is. Their allegedly awesome lyrics aren't particularly audible. "In this house that I call home"? I don't even remember if that's the name of the track. Sigh, yeah I'm keeping this around in case I grow into it or somethinhg. Either I'll toss this in two years or I'll wonder why I never understood it before. YELLOW.
Track #3 - Talking Heads, "The Big Country"
Meanwhile, this song has been knocking me out for longer than I've had chest hair. We only had one CD player in the house, so I would play my stuff in the living room when my parents were home or when they felt like putting up with it. They were usually cool with the Talking Heads. My dad even started doing the cha-cha around the room one time this was on. Part one: objective description of small town life. Part two: bitter dismissal and sudden bitch about touring life. Part three: Goo Goo, Ga Ga Ga. GREEN.
Track #4 - Eminem, "Drug Ballad"
Hahahahaha! Man the CD-R's are gonna have to work real hard to beat this line-up. One of my favorite Eminem tracks - right from "back when Mark Wahlberg was Marky Mark." Catchy, playful, inspired. One of the few tracks that have the calm rational detail of "Marshall" with the humor of "Shady." "I still got a lot of growing up to do, I still got a WHOLE lot of throwing up to spew." GREEN.
Track #5 - Strokes, "When It Started"
I forgot the name, but it's the track that replaced "NY City Cops" on Is This It?. Room On Fire was disappointingly draggy compared to the original (one of the six tracks I kept might show up for the opposing team, who knows?), but anybody who dismisses the Strokes outright can bite my ass. Julian may be the son of Iggy Pop and Eeyore, but the crisp beats and layers of nervous guitars make for something as caffeinated as the finest Feelies with a staccato attack that makes the sound entirely their own. Nikolai's bass burblage makes this one kinda jiggy. It's been too long since I threw this album on. GREEN.
THE CD-RS!
==
Track #1 - Gomez, "Shot Shot"
Grifters! No wait, Gomez! Hi, Matt! This is off of In Our Gun, I think it's "Shot Shot." Yeah he just said "Shot Shot." Great grody little groove; that sax part reminds me the one they use on that one rap track repeatedly used in Bring It On (Chuck Eddy and Frank Kogan voted for the soundtrack back in 2000 P&J, I think. I should check it out). Hey, Matt, did you ever explain how the new Gomez album DOESN'T suck? Only song I liked was "Sweet Virginia." This song's pretty quick, but I need that hook. GREEN.
Track #2 - Giant Sand, "X-Tra Wide"
Wow, how many slack-ass G bands are there? This is from Chore Of Enchantment the best Giant Sand album I've ever heard (and I've heard most). Still didn't make the cut. Why own a bunch of albums that depress you in their relative mediocrity when you can make a truly enjoyable CD-R or two of your cherrypicked faves? Besides, some indie dink's going to see all those albums in the used rack and have a big ol' dump just like you did when you first found 'em. And the clerk, who was there when you bought it AND when you sold it back, can either laugh or question your rockism. "Dusted" and "Shiver" are the crucial tracks, sorry. YELLOW.
Track #3 - Rocket From The Crpyt, "U.S. Aim"
Ah! One of the sweet Holly Golighty-assisted tracks they made around RFTC but didn't release. Not sure what it's about (the military, I'm guessing) but that chorus...wtf. Why don't more people give it up for Speedo's hookcraft? Horns, riffs, chants, melody - all stellar (Chuck E thinks the rhythm sections flat or something but this stuff makes me move, albeit pogo-wise, a whole lot more than Boney M does - save "Rasputin"). Speedo's shit is so consistently chewy (though the rarities comps have a little too much filler to keep around in their entirety) and with Live From Camp X-Ray he's upped his lyrical game too. They've been around for ages too. Where is the critical LOVE? GREEN.
Track #4 - Tubeway Army, "Me! I Disconnect From You"
It's been a while since I said that I don't get Simon Reynolds. I don't get Simon Reynolds. He gave Replicas a 9 in SPIN, so that's the Gary Numan I picked up when curiousity struck. It's fun, don't get me wrong, but unlike somebody like Christgau, who just has a different value system, I wonder if I'm even listening to the same album Reynolds is (I'm probably missing historical context or lacking the correct drug supplement or something). I find the Human League more fascinating than Numan cuz Numan's a sad human who wishes he was a robot and Phil Oakey's a robot who wishes he was a sad human. Numan's type is way more common. I kept Dare and only kept the catchiest, peppiest stuff from this album (and this is one my of my faves). I forget what he said the big deal was about this album, but I'm sure he's wrong. GREEN.
Track #5 - Killing Joke, "Requiem"
Does Alex In NYC from ILX read this site? I highly doubt it. This song is nearly identical to Adam Ant's "(You're So) Physical." I can rarely tell what Jaz Coleman is yelling about and Girls Against Boys put some sex into these searing sonics. I don't feel like honouring the fire right now, sorry. YELLOW.
Man this was WAY more pleasurable than the one in March! Close match, and two of the yellows were due to me giving the alt-canon more credit than it deserves! I did a good job keeping stuff I enjoy and getting rid of songs I don't like. Thanks for bearing witness.
Thursday, September 16, 2004
"Ballroom Blitz," Sweet, 1974.
When I was in third grade, my best friend, S., lived across the street. We were geeky sports nerds together, did plays and wrote sci-fi stories, etc. His older sister C.J. was kind of a hermit, she sat in her room doing homework listening to the radio. Once, when me and my friend were kind of bored with each other, I went to go talk to her, asked her what she was doing with that huge bunch of paper. She said, "I make a list of every song I hear on the radio. Then, when I hear it again, I put another tally mark beside it."
Made perfect sense to me. I went home and did the same thing. But I kept losing that list, so I started to make lists of my 100 favorite songs, updated weekly like it was a chart. I remember that "December 1963 (Oh, What a Night)" by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons and "Have You Seen Her" by the Chi-Lites used to jockey between #1 and #2 a lot, "Bohemian Rhapsody" was always a top tenner, "Shannon," the song about the dog dying, was more like #33, etc. I wish to god I still had those lists.
"Ballroom Blitz" probably wasn't too far up on the list because it scared the bejeezus monkeys outa me. First of all, it's got about three pre-choruses, always the buildup, inexorable and maddening like Gerald Ford. The extremely high-pitched harmonics on the actual chorus itself. The refusal to commit to either bubble-gum or metal. The fact that I always kept forgetting and thinking that it was "Barroom Blitz." The football chant of the chorus at the end, which I didn't know from having never actually heard one. The introduction of the band members at the beginning, which I knew was the punkest statement ever, only two years before anyone had heard the word "punk" in music.
And then, of course, there's the not inconsiderable fact that the lead voice is constantly devolving into madness. This is the single most unhinged vocal performance in the history of songs that got played on my little blue transistor radio. We cranked that thing up when we went to 7-Eleven to buy the new X-Men or Avengers comics, nothing but all my life coming out of that tiny speaker, me and my brother(s) and neighborhood friends singing along, me correcting them on the lyrics and telling them what the song was really about, I heard it on Casey Kasem's American Top 40!
These lyrics, about the freaks in the scene who instigate some kind of danzehall putsch riot, were never going to be figured out by anybody. To this day, I don't know if it's a narrative or just an impressionist fry-up. But this thrilled, and repulsed, and intrigued my young self too. It was just the most unhinged song and therefore perfect.
I just listened to it again and it all goes double. Those guitars really do chug, the drums are rocking some kind of schaffel train rhythm (and go all Burundi at the end! Malcolm Mclaren, you done been caught!), everyone gets his little "Radar Love" two-bar solo moment, God's in his heaven, all's right with the world.
Because Chinn and Chapman were clearly trying to start a revolution of little girls and boys here. It's a call to arms, mostly, as are "The 6-Teens" and "Teenage Rampage," The Man at the Back who says "Everyone Attack!": Stalin? Mao? Nixon? Even when I was young, I realized that it would take some powerful womanmojo for someone to kill me with a wink of her eye--then, one day in the carpool to St. John Fisher School, I saw that wink from my NEW best friend, L., and fell in love with her (and all dark-haired blue-eyed girls and women) forever.
So this song shoulda been higher on my lists. C.J., if you're out there anywhere, I hope you're still keeping your weird OCD book, still rockin' that radio, still holding it down until the band starts leaving cause they all stop breathing.
When I was in third grade, my best friend, S., lived across the street. We were geeky sports nerds together, did plays and wrote sci-fi stories, etc. His older sister C.J. was kind of a hermit, she sat in her room doing homework listening to the radio. Once, when me and my friend were kind of bored with each other, I went to go talk to her, asked her what she was doing with that huge bunch of paper. She said, "I make a list of every song I hear on the radio. Then, when I hear it again, I put another tally mark beside it."
Made perfect sense to me. I went home and did the same thing. But I kept losing that list, so I started to make lists of my 100 favorite songs, updated weekly like it was a chart. I remember that "December 1963 (Oh, What a Night)" by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons and "Have You Seen Her" by the Chi-Lites used to jockey between #1 and #2 a lot, "Bohemian Rhapsody" was always a top tenner, "Shannon," the song about the dog dying, was more like #33, etc. I wish to god I still had those lists.
"Ballroom Blitz" probably wasn't too far up on the list because it scared the bejeezus monkeys outa me. First of all, it's got about three pre-choruses, always the buildup, inexorable and maddening like Gerald Ford. The extremely high-pitched harmonics on the actual chorus itself. The refusal to commit to either bubble-gum or metal. The fact that I always kept forgetting and thinking that it was "Barroom Blitz." The football chant of the chorus at the end, which I didn't know from having never actually heard one. The introduction of the band members at the beginning, which I knew was the punkest statement ever, only two years before anyone had heard the word "punk" in music.
And then, of course, there's the not inconsiderable fact that the lead voice is constantly devolving into madness. This is the single most unhinged vocal performance in the history of songs that got played on my little blue transistor radio. We cranked that thing up when we went to 7-Eleven to buy the new X-Men or Avengers comics, nothing but all my life coming out of that tiny speaker, me and my brother(s) and neighborhood friends singing along, me correcting them on the lyrics and telling them what the song was really about, I heard it on Casey Kasem's American Top 40!
These lyrics, about the freaks in the scene who instigate some kind of danzehall putsch riot, were never going to be figured out by anybody. To this day, I don't know if it's a narrative or just an impressionist fry-up. But this thrilled, and repulsed, and intrigued my young self too. It was just the most unhinged song and therefore perfect.
I just listened to it again and it all goes double. Those guitars really do chug, the drums are rocking some kind of schaffel train rhythm (and go all Burundi at the end! Malcolm Mclaren, you done been caught!), everyone gets his little "Radar Love" two-bar solo moment, God's in his heaven, all's right with the world.
Because Chinn and Chapman were clearly trying to start a revolution of little girls and boys here. It's a call to arms, mostly, as are "The 6-Teens" and "Teenage Rampage," The Man at the Back who says "Everyone Attack!": Stalin? Mao? Nixon? Even when I was young, I realized that it would take some powerful womanmojo for someone to kill me with a wink of her eye--then, one day in the carpool to St. John Fisher School, I saw that wink from my NEW best friend, L., and fell in love with her (and all dark-haired blue-eyed girls and women) forever.
So this song shoulda been higher on my lists. C.J., if you're out there anywhere, I hope you're still keeping your weird OCD book, still rockin' that radio, still holding it down until the band starts leaving cause they all stop breathing.
Saturday, August 28, 2004
This is the craziest thing I have ever done here.
The great Steve Mannion just spent a dog's age tabulating the results from the ILX/NYLPM music poll asking people to nominate their favorite albums and tracks from 2000 to 2004 so far. Below, I publish an annotated version of that list.
1. Radiohead - Kid A**
2. Daft Punk - Discovery~
3. The Streets - Original Pirate Material**
4. Dizzee Rascal - Boy In Da Corner~
5. The Avalanches - Since I Left You~
6. Basement Jaxx - Kish Kash**
7. The Streets - A Grand Don't Come For Free~
8. Jay-Z - The Blueprint~
9. Interpol - Turn On The Bright Lights@
10. Basement Jaxx - Rooty~
11. Radiohead - Amnesiac@
12. Radiohead - Hail To The Thief@
13. Kanye West - The College Dropout*
14. Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot@
15. Boredoms - Vision Creation Newsun~
16. Belle & Sebastian - Dear Catastrophe Waitress+
17. Missy Elliott - Miss E...So Addictive*
18. Boards Of Canada - Geogaddi@
19. The Rapture - Echoes~
20. PJ Harvey - Stories From The City Stories From The Sea~
21. The Junior Boys - Last Exit~
22. Eminem - The Marshall Mathers LP+
23. The White Stripes - Elephant*
24. Sigur Ros - Agaetis Byrjun@
25. Ghostface Killah - Supreme Clientele~
26. N.E.R.D. - In Search Of...~
27. The Notwist - Neon Golden~
28. Broken Social Scene - You Forgot It In People+
29. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Fever To Tell~
30. Sleater-Kinney - One Beat~
31. The Fiery Furnaces - Gallowsbird Bark~ 32. Justin Timberlake - Justified~ 33. Le Tigre - Le Tigre~ 34. Fugazi - The Argument~ 35. Broadcast - Haha Sound~ 36. Lambchop - Nixon@ 37. Primal Scream - XTRMNTR** 38. Fennesz - Endless Summer~ 39. The Scissor Sisters - The Scissor Sisters~ 40. Cat Power - You Are Free~ 41. Cannibal Ox - The Cold Vein* 42. The Clientele - Suburban Light+ 43. Low - Things We Lost In The Fire+ 44. Richard X presents - X-Factor Vol. 1~ 45. Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven@ 46. Bubba Sparxxx - Deliverance* 47. Luomo - Vocalcity~ 48. Ladytron - Light And Magic* 49. Life Without Buildings - Any Other City+ 50. Felix Da Housecat - Kittenz And Thee Glitz~ 51. Ted Leo & The Pharmacists - Hearts Of Oak* 52. Lifter Puller - Fiestas & Fiascos~ 53. The New Pornographers - Mass Romantic+ 54. Mclusky - Mclusky Do Dallas+ 55. Andrew WK - I Get Wet+ 56. The Beta Band - Hot Shots II@ 57. Royksopp - Melody AM@ 58. Aaliyah - Aaliyah~ 59. The RZA/Various Artists - Ghost Dog: The Way Of The Samurai (OST)~ 60. The Liars - They Threw Us All In A Trench And Stuck A Monument On Top@ 61. Lightning Bolt - Wonderful Rainbow~ 62. Sonic Youth - Murray Street+ 63. Madvillain - Madvillainy~ 64. Sufjan Stevens - Greetings From Michigan+ 65. Big & Rich - Horse Of A Different Colour* 66. Cornelius - Point** 67. Goldfrapp - Black Cherry+ 68. Gillian Welch - Time (The Revelator)+ 69. Ghostface - The Pretty Toney Album~ 70. The Fall - The Real New Fall LP~ 71. Gorky's Zygotic Mynci - How I Long To Feel The Summer In My Heart~ 72. Shellac - 1000 Hurts+ 73. Spoon - Kill The Moonlight+ 74. Sonic Youth - Sonic Nurse+ 75. The New Pornographers - Electric Version@ 76. Michael Mayer presents - Immer~ 77. The Wrens - The Meadowlands~ 78. Junior Senior - D-d-don't Stop The Beat* 79. D'Angelo - Voodoo** 80. New Order - Get Ready~ 81. Atmosphere - Lucy Ford+ 82. Xiu Xiu - Knife Play+ 83. Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks - Pig Lib+ 84. Queens Of The Stone Age - Rated R@ 85. Stephen Malkmus - Stephen Malkmus@ 86. Calexico - Feast Of Wire~ 87. Hot Snakes - Automatic Midnight+ 88. The Exploding Hearts - Guitar Romantic+ 89. Mogwai - Rock Action+ 90. Johnny Greenwood - Bodysong (OST)* 91. The Microphones - The Glow (Part 2)~ 92. Low - Trust+ 93. The Delgados - Hate~ 94. Goldfrapp - Felt Mountain+ 95. David Banner - Mississippi: The Album& 96. Emma Bunton - Free Me~ 97. Ryan Adams - Heartbreaker+ 98. Wiley - Treddin' On Thin Ice~ 99. Bob Dylan - Love And Theft@ 100. Max Tundra - Mastered By Guy At The Exchange+
*heard it, voted for it
**heard it, cannot remember if I voted for it or not
@heard it, didn't vote for it
~didn't hear it but want to and/or heard it but didn't remember it very well so didn't vote for it
+didn't hear it, no interest in doing so
&only heard screwed and chopped version
If I were to re-order this list, leaving out the ones I haven't heard and the ones I don't really care about, it would go like this:
Missy Elliott, Cannibal Ox, Big and Rich, David Banner, Bubba Sparxxx, Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, Junior Senior, D'Angelo, Radiohead (Kid A), White Stripes (Elephant), Ladytron, Kanye West, Cornelius, Jonny Greenwood, Basement Jaxx (Kish Kash) The Streets (Original Pirate Material), Godspeed You Black Emperor, Primal Scream, The Liars, zzzzzzzzzzzz
Things I learned about myself:
1. That I clearly am way out of the loop. I'd better start downloading or something.
2. That when my wife says I spend too much money on music, she's high. Well, okay, I do spend too much money on music. But it's not any of this stuff, and think what would happen if I actually had all these records!
3. That I am very not into the kinds of things that other critics are, but I'd like to be, but I probably wouldn't even love half the things on the list that I've marked as "I'd like to hear this." I pretty much like everything, though. I am quick to like and quick to love. I just don't flip for mumbling Mormons, even if they are pretty and all that, nor do I go gaga for indie hipsters. I am slowly drifting away from ILX, from the zeitmind, from everything.
4. That I am NOT the only person who's ever heard of Bersuit Vergabarat. I nominated Hijos del Culo (you could only nominate one album and one song) and it ended up at #109 on the list, which means that other people voted for it besides the likes of me! I am shocked and happily surprised.
5. That it's not any better if I go down to #s 101-200.
The great Steve Mannion just spent a dog's age tabulating the results from the ILX/NYLPM music poll asking people to nominate their favorite albums and tracks from 2000 to 2004 so far. Below, I publish an annotated version of that list.
1. Radiohead - Kid A**
2. Daft Punk - Discovery~
3. The Streets - Original Pirate Material**
4. Dizzee Rascal - Boy In Da Corner~
5. The Avalanches - Since I Left You~
6. Basement Jaxx - Kish Kash**
7. The Streets - A Grand Don't Come For Free~
8. Jay-Z - The Blueprint~
9. Interpol - Turn On The Bright Lights@
10. Basement Jaxx - Rooty~
11. Radiohead - Amnesiac@
12. Radiohead - Hail To The Thief@
13. Kanye West - The College Dropout*
14. Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot@
15. Boredoms - Vision Creation Newsun~
16. Belle & Sebastian - Dear Catastrophe Waitress+
17. Missy Elliott - Miss E...So Addictive*
18. Boards Of Canada - Geogaddi@
19. The Rapture - Echoes~
20. PJ Harvey - Stories From The City Stories From The Sea~
21. The Junior Boys - Last Exit~
22. Eminem - The Marshall Mathers LP+
23. The White Stripes - Elephant*
24. Sigur Ros - Agaetis Byrjun@
25. Ghostface Killah - Supreme Clientele~
26. N.E.R.D. - In Search Of...~
27. The Notwist - Neon Golden~
28. Broken Social Scene - You Forgot It In People+
29. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Fever To Tell~
30. Sleater-Kinney - One Beat~
31. The Fiery Furnaces - Gallowsbird Bark~ 32. Justin Timberlake - Justified~ 33. Le Tigre - Le Tigre~ 34. Fugazi - The Argument~ 35. Broadcast - Haha Sound~ 36. Lambchop - Nixon@ 37. Primal Scream - XTRMNTR** 38. Fennesz - Endless Summer~ 39. The Scissor Sisters - The Scissor Sisters~ 40. Cat Power - You Are Free~ 41. Cannibal Ox - The Cold Vein* 42. The Clientele - Suburban Light+ 43. Low - Things We Lost In The Fire+ 44. Richard X presents - X-Factor Vol. 1~ 45. Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven@ 46. Bubba Sparxxx - Deliverance* 47. Luomo - Vocalcity~ 48. Ladytron - Light And Magic* 49. Life Without Buildings - Any Other City+ 50. Felix Da Housecat - Kittenz And Thee Glitz~ 51. Ted Leo & The Pharmacists - Hearts Of Oak* 52. Lifter Puller - Fiestas & Fiascos~ 53. The New Pornographers - Mass Romantic+ 54. Mclusky - Mclusky Do Dallas+ 55. Andrew WK - I Get Wet+ 56. The Beta Band - Hot Shots II@ 57. Royksopp - Melody AM@ 58. Aaliyah - Aaliyah~ 59. The RZA/Various Artists - Ghost Dog: The Way Of The Samurai (OST)~ 60. The Liars - They Threw Us All In A Trench And Stuck A Monument On Top@ 61. Lightning Bolt - Wonderful Rainbow~ 62. Sonic Youth - Murray Street+ 63. Madvillain - Madvillainy~ 64. Sufjan Stevens - Greetings From Michigan+ 65. Big & Rich - Horse Of A Different Colour* 66. Cornelius - Point** 67. Goldfrapp - Black Cherry+ 68. Gillian Welch - Time (The Revelator)+ 69. Ghostface - The Pretty Toney Album~ 70. The Fall - The Real New Fall LP~ 71. Gorky's Zygotic Mynci - How I Long To Feel The Summer In My Heart~ 72. Shellac - 1000 Hurts+ 73. Spoon - Kill The Moonlight+ 74. Sonic Youth - Sonic Nurse+ 75. The New Pornographers - Electric Version@ 76. Michael Mayer presents - Immer~ 77. The Wrens - The Meadowlands~ 78. Junior Senior - D-d-don't Stop The Beat* 79. D'Angelo - Voodoo** 80. New Order - Get Ready~ 81. Atmosphere - Lucy Ford+ 82. Xiu Xiu - Knife Play+ 83. Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks - Pig Lib+ 84. Queens Of The Stone Age - Rated R@ 85. Stephen Malkmus - Stephen Malkmus@ 86. Calexico - Feast Of Wire~ 87. Hot Snakes - Automatic Midnight+ 88. The Exploding Hearts - Guitar Romantic+ 89. Mogwai - Rock Action+ 90. Johnny Greenwood - Bodysong (OST)* 91. The Microphones - The Glow (Part 2)~ 92. Low - Trust+ 93. The Delgados - Hate~ 94. Goldfrapp - Felt Mountain+ 95. David Banner - Mississippi: The Album& 96. Emma Bunton - Free Me~ 97. Ryan Adams - Heartbreaker+ 98. Wiley - Treddin' On Thin Ice~ 99. Bob Dylan - Love And Theft@ 100. Max Tundra - Mastered By Guy At The Exchange+
*heard it, voted for it
**heard it, cannot remember if I voted for it or not
@heard it, didn't vote for it
~didn't hear it but want to and/or heard it but didn't remember it very well so didn't vote for it
+didn't hear it, no interest in doing so
&only heard screwed and chopped version
If I were to re-order this list, leaving out the ones I haven't heard and the ones I don't really care about, it would go like this:
Missy Elliott, Cannibal Ox, Big and Rich, David Banner, Bubba Sparxxx, Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, Junior Senior, D'Angelo, Radiohead (Kid A), White Stripes (Elephant), Ladytron, Kanye West, Cornelius, Jonny Greenwood, Basement Jaxx (Kish Kash) The Streets (Original Pirate Material), Godspeed You Black Emperor, Primal Scream, The Liars, zzzzzzzzzzzz
Things I learned about myself:
1. That I clearly am way out of the loop. I'd better start downloading or something.
2. That when my wife says I spend too much money on music, she's high. Well, okay, I do spend too much money on music. But it's not any of this stuff, and think what would happen if I actually had all these records!
3. That I am very not into the kinds of things that other critics are, but I'd like to be, but I probably wouldn't even love half the things on the list that I've marked as "I'd like to hear this." I pretty much like everything, though. I am quick to like and quick to love. I just don't flip for mumbling Mormons, even if they are pretty and all that, nor do I go gaga for indie hipsters. I am slowly drifting away from ILX, from the zeitmind, from everything.
4. That I am NOT the only person who's ever heard of Bersuit Vergabarat. I nominated Hijos del Culo (you could only nominate one album and one song) and it ended up at #109 on the list, which means that other people voted for it besides the likes of me! I am shocked and happily surprised.
5. That it's not any better if I go down to #s 101-200.
Wednesday, August 18, 2004
Some Songs Seem to Make Sense Right Now
Allison Moorer, "One on the House" and "Louise Is in the Blue Moon"
I know we aren't supposed to be into alt.country, it's hella uncool, it's uncooler than anything right now, and mostly I agree. But although I love Big and Rich and Gretchen Wilson, they are not the only game in town, country means a lot of things, it isn't just about shininess and partiness, there's still room for someone who wants to walk away from Ellivhsan. there are a lot of things that I still have to say about Moorer's The Duel that I didn't say here, so I'll start by saying that among the really quite radical things she does on this record is kill off a character without us even knowing it, without us even thinking to look for it, we don't expect country songwriters to do intertextuality especially when they're women.
But check it out: on "Yessirree," from Miss Fortune, Moorer created a bar "called the Blue Moon Taproom" where the bartender laughs at your jokes and gives old alcoholics drinks if that's what makes them happy. It was clearly her vision of heaven, a very country heaven at that, and she sang it like she was already there, like it was the only afterlife she'd let herself believe. (Someday I'll write about Moorer's beef with heaven, something she does on every single album, a legacy to her murdered mom.)
But so here in 2004 she has two related songs that shed light on the story. In "One on the House," our protagonist is begging the bartender for a drink even though she doesn't have any scratch for it. She's lived a hard life: "Wasted my fortune on having a ball / Hit the bottle like a calf at a cow". She knows she doesn't deserve any handouts: "Can't say I'm proud of this life of mine / But begging is brand new to me." She's not anything more than a poor alcoholic at the end of the line: "I'm just a poor soul who wants to get soused / Give me one on the house." Clearly, she's talking to the bartender at the Blue Moon. Who is, obviously, St. Peter. She's begging for more than just a shooter; she's begging for admittance to the Blue Moon, that alco-heaven that her songwriter so meticulously laid out in "Yessirree." SHE IS DEAD.
But who is she? We find out a few songs later. Her name is Louise, and we learn from the title of the song that she's already in the Blue Moon. This is an early Springsteen style number, characters like Skinny and the Coolsville County Sheriff and Old Danny wander through the song, doing whatever they subversively do; Skinny, for example, is "off his rocker," which usually means one is crazy, but then Moorer goes one more and pulls an Edward Lear: "Skinny's off his rocker / He left it on the road / And even though he'll miss it / He had to let it go." This is an LSD trip cloaked in lazy dirty 1970's outlaw country, this is a Jessi Colter song more than it is Martina or Sara or Patti or Jo Dee or Fetchin' Gretchen, I expect to hear Tompall Glaser come squealin' round the corner in a tan El Dorado any time now.
And as for Louise? She's "in the Blue Room / Puttin' up her dukes / Walkin' on rocky socks / Punchin' numbers on the juke." Looks like her entreaties worked. Looks like she made it. Looks like Moorer and St. Peter let this little straggly rummy into the Pearly Gates after all. Looks like a work of compassion for someone whom none of the rest of us would look at twice. Looks like a safety net. Looks like a sneaky work of love by a songwriter whose reach and heart and soul are off the charts, and so therefore is she, but I don't care, I think she's probably written eleven of the year's top songs here and no one knows it. Allison Moorer's writing is like George Costanza's driving, she's doing things up there that we have NO IDEA about.
Allison Moorer, "One on the House" and "Louise Is in the Blue Moon"
I know we aren't supposed to be into alt.country, it's hella uncool, it's uncooler than anything right now, and mostly I agree. But although I love Big and Rich and Gretchen Wilson, they are not the only game in town, country means a lot of things, it isn't just about shininess and partiness, there's still room for someone who wants to walk away from Ellivhsan. there are a lot of things that I still have to say about Moorer's The Duel that I didn't say here, so I'll start by saying that among the really quite radical things she does on this record is kill off a character without us even knowing it, without us even thinking to look for it, we don't expect country songwriters to do intertextuality especially when they're women.
But check it out: on "Yessirree," from Miss Fortune, Moorer created a bar "called the Blue Moon Taproom" where the bartender laughs at your jokes and gives old alcoholics drinks if that's what makes them happy. It was clearly her vision of heaven, a very country heaven at that, and she sang it like she was already there, like it was the only afterlife she'd let herself believe. (Someday I'll write about Moorer's beef with heaven, something she does on every single album, a legacy to her murdered mom.)
But so here in 2004 she has two related songs that shed light on the story. In "One on the House," our protagonist is begging the bartender for a drink even though she doesn't have any scratch for it. She's lived a hard life: "Wasted my fortune on having a ball / Hit the bottle like a calf at a cow". She knows she doesn't deserve any handouts: "Can't say I'm proud of this life of mine / But begging is brand new to me." She's not anything more than a poor alcoholic at the end of the line: "I'm just a poor soul who wants to get soused / Give me one on the house." Clearly, she's talking to the bartender at the Blue Moon. Who is, obviously, St. Peter. She's begging for more than just a shooter; she's begging for admittance to the Blue Moon, that alco-heaven that her songwriter so meticulously laid out in "Yessirree." SHE IS DEAD.
But who is she? We find out a few songs later. Her name is Louise, and we learn from the title of the song that she's already in the Blue Moon. This is an early Springsteen style number, characters like Skinny and the Coolsville County Sheriff and Old Danny wander through the song, doing whatever they subversively do; Skinny, for example, is "off his rocker," which usually means one is crazy, but then Moorer goes one more and pulls an Edward Lear: "Skinny's off his rocker / He left it on the road / And even though he'll miss it / He had to let it go." This is an LSD trip cloaked in lazy dirty 1970's outlaw country, this is a Jessi Colter song more than it is Martina or Sara or Patti or Jo Dee or Fetchin' Gretchen, I expect to hear Tompall Glaser come squealin' round the corner in a tan El Dorado any time now.
And as for Louise? She's "in the Blue Room / Puttin' up her dukes / Walkin' on rocky socks / Punchin' numbers on the juke." Looks like her entreaties worked. Looks like she made it. Looks like Moorer and St. Peter let this little straggly rummy into the Pearly Gates after all. Looks like a work of compassion for someone whom none of the rest of us would look at twice. Looks like a safety net. Looks like a sneaky work of love by a songwriter whose reach and heart and soul are off the charts, and so therefore is she, but I don't care, I think she's probably written eleven of the year's top songs here and no one knows it. Allison Moorer's writing is like George Costanza's driving, she's doing things up there that we have NO IDEA about.
Saturday, August 14, 2004
SPECIAL GUEST MENTALIST--JOHN WOJTOWICZ! Presenting "The Uncanny"(Andy's Robot Mix)
(The following is butt a grain of John's epic account of a Vienna vastness, mounted by Mike Kelley, rising artstar, minion of Deetroit urcore Destroy All Monsters, illustrator of Sonic Oldth's DIRTY, and, most importantly,a RECORD COLLECTOR. If you don't like this mix, blame me, not John. Geek love--D.)
I. The Main Exhibit (excerpt)
Sitting unobtrusively off in one corner is a robot model of Andy Warhol: when he was invited to a TV show to plug his book,THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANDY WARHOL, he chose not to appear live and instead commissioned someone to construct this model, which was also equipped with a tape recording of him reading excerpts from this book. (And note that [i] he was thus hearkening back to his Czechoslovakian roots, since the word "robot" was first coined by Karel Capek in 1923; and [ii] this same idea would later be taken up by Kraftwerk, who have gone on entire concert tours by sending robots in place of themselves.) Ironically, in a gallery full of human figures, the only piece involving human language is a life-size Erector-set-style robot by Jonathan Borofsky, which continually pronounces the word "chatter" in a mechanical voice. And towering over the entire main room of the exhibition is "Ubermensch," a sculpture by Jake & Dinos Chapman, which consists of granite-grey plastic crags, on top of which is precariously perched a cartoonish life-size figure of Stephen Hawking.
II.The "Harems"(excerpt)
At the very end, after viewing the main room, a passageway, and a smaller gallery, one enters the chamber containing "The Harems," whose title is a term taken from classic psychological literature, where it is used to describe the fetishistic activity of the collector. In this room, Mike Kelley has gathered several of his own personal collections, including horror and monster bubblegum cards (several series), marbles, soup spoons, shot glasses, business cards, a half-dozen unbent wire hangers which had been used to break into cars, and the aforementioned squeeze toys. At the podium discussion, Kelley explained that "When you grow up in America, you're surrounded by things like this" and that this aspect might not come across to a European. Placed in the four corners of the room are video monitors which play back DVDs of Kelley's other collections: comic books (from back when they were still in the 12- and 15-cent price range), postcards (several thousand of them), pinups (with hardcore porn stills far outnumbered by fashion shots and cosmetic ads)and, best of all, HIS RECORD COLLECTION. The viewer not only gets to see the covers of all 3000-plus LPs of it, but hears a one-second sample from each one. Entire decades of your life will pass before your eyes. The added bonus, however, is that in addition to the historical and autobiographical, there's a hermeneutic level: when you hear 12 consecutive blasts of James Brown and Parliament/Funkadelic samples, you're also hearing what amounts to a cut-up and condensed history of hiphop. Likewise, when 15 snippets of Donna Summer and/or Giorgio Moroder go by, it becomes a mini-survey of house and techno. My friend Joe Herter, a Friend of Dorothy who, like Kelley, grew up in Detroit and studied at the University of Michigan, insists that "In life, there are two kinds of people: those who are size queens, and those who wish they could be size queens!" If that's the case, Mike Kelley's is not much bigger than mine: he has more James Brown, I have more Parliament & Funkadelic; he has more Sun Ra on vinyl, I have more Ornette. Though with that said, props are due: he's got every record released on JCOA, along with most of Arista Freedom, not to mention all the 90s metal I never want to hear again (NiN, Ministry), exotica like Yma Sumac (are 5 really necessary?) and scads of African folk records from before the days of "world music," when they constituted a form of anthropological doumentation.
I myself propose the dichotomy that in life there are "listmakers," and there are those who consider listmaking to be an unfathomable mental aberration. And the various anti-listmakers and anti-collectionists will simply fume and froth at "the Harems" or, at best, view it with the condescension that a pathological condition deserves. Kelley openly states that he considers collecting art to be a form of compulsion, but I suggest that "the Harems" itself carries additional aspects of the Uncanny:
"The most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them."(Walter Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library")
"For what else is (a) collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order?" (ibid.)
I would go one step further than Benjamin and propose that the uncanniness of a collection lies in its illusion of TOTALITY. This is the same principle by which the I Ching posits that there are only 64 possible situations in the universe; the tarot has it covered with 72 cards. To the mind of the 10-year-old collector, having the entire American League laid out in front of you is something greater than the Britannica and the O.E.D. put together.
Moreover, still another aspect of the Uncanny is that of infinity (for example, in the realization that in order to collect the entire set, theoretically you might have to buy an infinite number of packs of cards, or at least every single one ever manufactured), and likewise, of the process by which something is assigned an imputed economic value (the entire set seems to immediately take on a value at least one order of magnitude greater than the price of the packs of cards that make it up). And lastly, there is a kind of stochastic uncanniness here, in the illusion that assembling (any?) 3000 albums can somehow sum up an entire musical culture.
While the mania of the collector, within the context of the exhibition, is meant to suggest repetition compulsion, I think that Kelley is also unintentionally drawing on another aspect of the Detroit myth. After all, to a stoned Surrealist the assembled array of business cards suggests an aerial view of finished cars outside a Michigan factory. To quote Kodwo Eshum quoting Juan Atkins (one of the three Detroit bruthas responsible for creating techno):
"Berry Gordy built the Motown Sound on the same principles as the conveyor belt of Ford...today the plants don't work that way. They use computers and robots to build the cars...I'm probably more interested in Ford's robots than Berry Gordy's music." So all at once, the Detroit auto industry suggests repetition AND robots AND the noise so beloved by not only the Stooges and MC5, but Mike Kelley's own noise band, Destroy All Monsters.
I myself experienced two different senses of the uncanny on separate viewings of "the Harems." One standing case displays a couple dozen announcement fliers of the sort that can be found in any college-town coffee shop or laundromat: "Apartment to Share," "Tutoring in Japanese," "Actor Needed To Play Pier Paul Pasolini"(yikes). The first time that I visited the show, I was struck by their collective uncanny quality, since one has to look very closely to spot any clues as to time or place. (All but two don't list any year whatsoever; only 2 or 3 indicate UCLA as a location.) Kelley cited Edward Hopper as an influence on the exhibition, and the fliers suggest an informational analogue to the visual nature of a Hopper painting: life somewhere in America, in some unspecified decade in some unspecified college town. On my second visit, however, I took a much closer look and discovered announcements for EVENTS THAT I HAD ACTUALLY ATTENDED: specifically, concerts by Sun Ra, James Newton, and Cassandra Wilson at Koncepts Cultural Gallery in Oakland (and to make it even weirder, I was wearing one of my Sun Ra T-shirts when I noticed this).
Most importantly, however, the inclusion of "the Harems" means that there are two very different ways of reading the exhibition. At the podium discussion I mentioned to Kelley that, since the visitor generally reaches "the Harems" only after he/she has seen the entire exhibtion, it seems to be a culmination of the entire thing, and is thereby a commentary on the processes of valorization and canonization with regard to the works on display elsewhere in the show. Kelley demurred, and apparently considers "the Harems" to be almost an afterthought. Nevertheless, one interpretation is that, in a show which is so concerned with representations of the human body, this final sanctum of fetishes and cultural memorabilia amounts to the "brain" of the whole operation.
III. Final Comments(complete)
After the opening I thought about the notable absence of camp at the exhibition (with the exception of Cindy Sherman, who is of course camp by defintion). Kelley's reason for this, given at the podium discussion, is that camp is simply not uncanny. But I maintain that a camp item always has quotes around it, whereas with the show's chockablock arrangement of artworks and non-artworks, EVERYTHING is in quotes vis-a-vis everything else. And there are no camp-style inside jokes here, because Kelley genuinely likes all this stuff; we all do.
And commendably, aside from the pinups of cosmetic ads, there are no brand names to be seen anywhere: given the trash-culture orientation of the show, this is an achievement in itself. Kelley explains: "Mass media has no psychology--it's [only] a psychology of money."
Lastly, there's the issue of where Uncle Sigmund fits in with all of this. For those of you outside Austria, I need to emphasize that, as I was once told, "Freud is not taken seriously here. He was FROM here," i.e. he had to go elsewhere in order to be taken seriously. A couple of years ago, the Sunday book section of the main Vienna newspaper published an article about Freud; the lead to the article basically read, "After nearly a century, Freud's ideas are being seriously contested, while in Austria they never achieved acceptance in the first place."(i. e. "See? we were right all along"). His concepts are not common currency here, and the entire psychotherapeutic culture in the U.S. which derives from Freud exists in a far different form, if at all (and believe me, living in Austria with no recourse to the term "passive-aggressive" is like living among a tribe of Eskimos who don't have any word for snow).
Nevertheless, I imagine that Kelley's exhibition would be utter catnip for a number of Central European writers who appeared around or just after Freud; e.g. Rilke, Musil (cf. "Torless"), Gombrowicz, and especially Bruno Schulz (cf. his "Treatise on Mannikins"). And meanwhile it's one trashy, trippy delight for the amateur semiotician in all of us.JW
Very Special Comments Section ( instigated by template wuss)
(((D.Buttinski on megaphone: Did yall ever see that video in which a scrotal-faced, pube-crowned Lou Reed robot stuck its finger in its mouth and deconstructed itself? That was the whole video, and MTV showed it a number of times, and not at 3 AM. But what *song* was that? Also,for the video of Herbie Hancock's "Rockit," the person who contributed a clothes line chorus line of legs, rippling in tha breeze, plus revolving Rod Stewartoid bumpkinheads and dedicated home appliances, is said to be the same progenitor of rude-thang mechanicals to whom late-60s Fairport Convention once sang:"Whoh, Mr. Lacey, let me work your lovely machine. Why Mr. Lacey, why you do the things you do. It's true no one here understands you, but some day they'll catch up with you.")))
(Blast From The Futcha--Mike Kelley RIP, and in his honor, a robot vs cyborg bonus track. From the I Love Music message board thread Whitney Houston R.I.P.:
(The following is butt a grain of John's epic account of a Vienna vastness, mounted by Mike Kelley, rising artstar, minion of Deetroit urcore Destroy All Monsters, illustrator of Sonic Oldth's DIRTY, and, most importantly,a RECORD COLLECTOR. If you don't like this mix, blame me, not John. Geek love--D.)
I. The Main Exhibit (excerpt)
Sitting unobtrusively off in one corner is a robot model of Andy Warhol: when he was invited to a TV show to plug his book,THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANDY WARHOL, he chose not to appear live and instead commissioned someone to construct this model, which was also equipped with a tape recording of him reading excerpts from this book. (And note that [i] he was thus hearkening back to his Czechoslovakian roots, since the word "robot" was first coined by Karel Capek in 1923; and [ii] this same idea would later be taken up by Kraftwerk, who have gone on entire concert tours by sending robots in place of themselves.) Ironically, in a gallery full of human figures, the only piece involving human language is a life-size Erector-set-style robot by Jonathan Borofsky, which continually pronounces the word "chatter" in a mechanical voice. And towering over the entire main room of the exhibition is "Ubermensch," a sculpture by Jake & Dinos Chapman, which consists of granite-grey plastic crags, on top of which is precariously perched a cartoonish life-size figure of Stephen Hawking.
II.The "Harems"(excerpt)
At the very end, after viewing the main room, a passageway, and a smaller gallery, one enters the chamber containing "The Harems," whose title is a term taken from classic psychological literature, where it is used to describe the fetishistic activity of the collector. In this room, Mike Kelley has gathered several of his own personal collections, including horror and monster bubblegum cards (several series), marbles, soup spoons, shot glasses, business cards, a half-dozen unbent wire hangers which had been used to break into cars, and the aforementioned squeeze toys. At the podium discussion, Kelley explained that "When you grow up in America, you're surrounded by things like this" and that this aspect might not come across to a European. Placed in the four corners of the room are video monitors which play back DVDs of Kelley's other collections: comic books (from back when they were still in the 12- and 15-cent price range), postcards (several thousand of them), pinups (with hardcore porn stills far outnumbered by fashion shots and cosmetic ads)and, best of all, HIS RECORD COLLECTION. The viewer not only gets to see the covers of all 3000-plus LPs of it, but hears a one-second sample from each one. Entire decades of your life will pass before your eyes. The added bonus, however, is that in addition to the historical and autobiographical, there's a hermeneutic level: when you hear 12 consecutive blasts of James Brown and Parliament/Funkadelic samples, you're also hearing what amounts to a cut-up and condensed history of hiphop. Likewise, when 15 snippets of Donna Summer and/or Giorgio Moroder go by, it becomes a mini-survey of house and techno. My friend Joe Herter, a Friend of Dorothy who, like Kelley, grew up in Detroit and studied at the University of Michigan, insists that "In life, there are two kinds of people: those who are size queens, and those who wish they could be size queens!" If that's the case, Mike Kelley's is not much bigger than mine: he has more James Brown, I have more Parliament & Funkadelic; he has more Sun Ra on vinyl, I have more Ornette. Though with that said, props are due: he's got every record released on JCOA, along with most of Arista Freedom, not to mention all the 90s metal I never want to hear again (NiN, Ministry), exotica like Yma Sumac (are 5 really necessary?) and scads of African folk records from before the days of "world music," when they constituted a form of anthropological doumentation.
I myself propose the dichotomy that in life there are "listmakers," and there are those who consider listmaking to be an unfathomable mental aberration. And the various anti-listmakers and anti-collectionists will simply fume and froth at "the Harems" or, at best, view it with the condescension that a pathological condition deserves. Kelley openly states that he considers collecting art to be a form of compulsion, but I suggest that "the Harems" itself carries additional aspects of the Uncanny:
"The most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them."(Walter Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library")
"For what else is (a) collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order?" (ibid.)
I would go one step further than Benjamin and propose that the uncanniness of a collection lies in its illusion of TOTALITY. This is the same principle by which the I Ching posits that there are only 64 possible situations in the universe; the tarot has it covered with 72 cards. To the mind of the 10-year-old collector, having the entire American League laid out in front of you is something greater than the Britannica and the O.E.D. put together.
Moreover, still another aspect of the Uncanny is that of infinity (for example, in the realization that in order to collect the entire set, theoretically you might have to buy an infinite number of packs of cards, or at least every single one ever manufactured), and likewise, of the process by which something is assigned an imputed economic value (the entire set seems to immediately take on a value at least one order of magnitude greater than the price of the packs of cards that make it up). And lastly, there is a kind of stochastic uncanniness here, in the illusion that assembling (any?) 3000 albums can somehow sum up an entire musical culture.
While the mania of the collector, within the context of the exhibition, is meant to suggest repetition compulsion, I think that Kelley is also unintentionally drawing on another aspect of the Detroit myth. After all, to a stoned Surrealist the assembled array of business cards suggests an aerial view of finished cars outside a Michigan factory. To quote Kodwo Eshum quoting Juan Atkins (one of the three Detroit bruthas responsible for creating techno):
"Berry Gordy built the Motown Sound on the same principles as the conveyor belt of Ford...today the plants don't work that way. They use computers and robots to build the cars...I'm probably more interested in Ford's robots than Berry Gordy's music." So all at once, the Detroit auto industry suggests repetition AND robots AND the noise so beloved by not only the Stooges and MC5, but Mike Kelley's own noise band, Destroy All Monsters.
I myself experienced two different senses of the uncanny on separate viewings of "the Harems." One standing case displays a couple dozen announcement fliers of the sort that can be found in any college-town coffee shop or laundromat: "Apartment to Share," "Tutoring in Japanese," "Actor Needed To Play Pier Paul Pasolini"(yikes). The first time that I visited the show, I was struck by their collective uncanny quality, since one has to look very closely to spot any clues as to time or place. (All but two don't list any year whatsoever; only 2 or 3 indicate UCLA as a location.) Kelley cited Edward Hopper as an influence on the exhibition, and the fliers suggest an informational analogue to the visual nature of a Hopper painting: life somewhere in America, in some unspecified decade in some unspecified college town. On my second visit, however, I took a much closer look and discovered announcements for EVENTS THAT I HAD ACTUALLY ATTENDED: specifically, concerts by Sun Ra, James Newton, and Cassandra Wilson at Koncepts Cultural Gallery in Oakland (and to make it even weirder, I was wearing one of my Sun Ra T-shirts when I noticed this).
Most importantly, however, the inclusion of "the Harems" means that there are two very different ways of reading the exhibition. At the podium discussion I mentioned to Kelley that, since the visitor generally reaches "the Harems" only after he/she has seen the entire exhibtion, it seems to be a culmination of the entire thing, and is thereby a commentary on the processes of valorization and canonization with regard to the works on display elsewhere in the show. Kelley demurred, and apparently considers "the Harems" to be almost an afterthought. Nevertheless, one interpretation is that, in a show which is so concerned with representations of the human body, this final sanctum of fetishes and cultural memorabilia amounts to the "brain" of the whole operation.
III. Final Comments(complete)
After the opening I thought about the notable absence of camp at the exhibition (with the exception of Cindy Sherman, who is of course camp by defintion). Kelley's reason for this, given at the podium discussion, is that camp is simply not uncanny. But I maintain that a camp item always has quotes around it, whereas with the show's chockablock arrangement of artworks and non-artworks, EVERYTHING is in quotes vis-a-vis everything else. And there are no camp-style inside jokes here, because Kelley genuinely likes all this stuff; we all do.
And commendably, aside from the pinups of cosmetic ads, there are no brand names to be seen anywhere: given the trash-culture orientation of the show, this is an achievement in itself. Kelley explains: "Mass media has no psychology--it's [only] a psychology of money."
Lastly, there's the issue of where Uncle Sigmund fits in with all of this. For those of you outside Austria, I need to emphasize that, as I was once told, "Freud is not taken seriously here. He was FROM here," i.e. he had to go elsewhere in order to be taken seriously. A couple of years ago, the Sunday book section of the main Vienna newspaper published an article about Freud; the lead to the article basically read, "After nearly a century, Freud's ideas are being seriously contested, while in Austria they never achieved acceptance in the first place."(i. e. "See? we were right all along"). His concepts are not common currency here, and the entire psychotherapeutic culture in the U.S. which derives from Freud exists in a far different form, if at all (and believe me, living in Austria with no recourse to the term "passive-aggressive" is like living among a tribe of Eskimos who don't have any word for snow).
Nevertheless, I imagine that Kelley's exhibition would be utter catnip for a number of Central European writers who appeared around or just after Freud; e.g. Rilke, Musil (cf. "Torless"), Gombrowicz, and especially Bruno Schulz (cf. his "Treatise on Mannikins"). And meanwhile it's one trashy, trippy delight for the amateur semiotician in all of us.JW
Very Special Comments Section ( instigated by template wuss)
(((D.Buttinski on megaphone: Did yall ever see that video in which a scrotal-faced, pube-crowned Lou Reed robot stuck its finger in its mouth and deconstructed itself? That was the whole video, and MTV showed it a number of times, and not at 3 AM. But what *song* was that? Also,for the video of Herbie Hancock's "Rockit," the person who contributed a clothes line chorus line of legs, rippling in tha breeze, plus revolving Rod Stewartoid bumpkinheads and dedicated home appliances, is said to be the same progenitor of rude-thang mechanicals to whom late-60s Fairport Convention once sang:"Whoh, Mr. Lacey, let me work your lovely machine. Why Mr. Lacey, why you do the things you do. It's true no one here understands you, but some day they'll catch up with you.")))
(Blast From The Futcha--Mike Kelley RIP, and in his honor, a robot vs cyborg bonus track. From the I Love Music message board thread Whitney Houston R.I.P.:
Pop music hadn't had time to digest The Terminator
(1984) and Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto" (1985) when Whitney
Houston released her 1980s albums. Thus, they were still in robot, not
cyborg, mode. Fine robot music, for sure, esp. the robodisco of "So
Emotional" and "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" (as well as its proper
homecoming in "I Wanna Dance With Numbers"). But she didn't realize her
cyborgian potential until "Exhale (Shoop Shoop)," her greatest single.
In his essay “An Anthropologist Underwater: Immersive Soundscapes, Submarine Cyborgs, and Transductive Ethnography,” Stefan Helmreich provides an excellent definition of cyborgs that helps get at the distinction between RoboWhitney and CyborgWhitney: "Cyborgs need not be material compounds of flesh and machine; anything that can be described in terms of information dynamics can be considered a cyborg. The boundaries of cyborgs are subject to shifting and expanding as they are networked to other feedback dynamics across scales and contexts" (627-8). RoboWhitney hasn't networked to other feedback dynamics. That's what "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" and "So Emotional" are about. She isn't dancing with somebody but she wants to. She remembers the way that we touched but we're not touching right now (and note how the lyrics appeal to the distancing sense of vision to heighten the sense of disconnection; even the production tends towards discrete sound-images as much as a Wall of DX7). More importantly, the thwarted desire implies the self-presence that identifies all robots from Phil Oakey to the love duo in the underrated Heartbeeps to David in the equally underrated A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. Like the aforementioned, she can't help but broadcast her thereness because she's perpetually letting us know how frustrated she is in her casing (which is how many critics have described her post-"Memories" work in general).
CyborgWhitney makes herself available for networking. Crucially, "Exhale (Shoop Shoop)" is the rare diva song where "I" is never mentioned. She has significantly lessened what Mark Sinker calls "the sense of regality, of dreadful awful majesty of style and skill as a weapon, the sense of renunciation, the sense that her role leaves her the loneliest person of all." She sings it down and invites us commoners in, not eradicating loneliness but finding a temporary prison for it. Nothing is forever in this network save for the infinite play of information dynamics. The song traces not a line from Whitney to a lover but a skein of flickering vectors, a series of points where for every win, someone must fail, where falling in love is sometimes wrong, sometimes right. There's a point where we exhale but a point back to where we're gasping for air. Even our identities are only momentarily whole when networking with another and looking inside ourselves only gets us halfway there. But, and herein is the song's genius, this holds true as much for Whitney here, in this modest moment (it's her shortest #1 single too), as it does for us which means at long last we can interface with her. We say shoop shoop as if to vault over language in an attempt to express the peace in this point of contact but even that is connected to other points back to The Sweet Inspirations and Salt-n-Pepa. It's Whitney Houston's cyborg manifesto and it holds out Haraway's world-changing vision. As Helmreich puts it, "Haraway found an unexpected, ironic, utopian promise in the figures of cyborgs initially created to automate warfare or de-skill workers; cybernetics opened up possibilities for recoding our human bodies and selves, for short-circuiting the idea that a durable 'nature' dictated our destinies. Somewhere in cyborg bodies might whir a liberatory consciousness."
― Kevin John Bozelka, Tuesday, 14 February 2012 09:40 (2 weeks ago) Permalink
Mark Sinker comments:
In his essay “An Anthropologist Underwater: Immersive Soundscapes, Submarine Cyborgs, and Transductive Ethnography,” Stefan Helmreich provides an excellent definition of cyborgs that helps get at the distinction between RoboWhitney and CyborgWhitney: "Cyborgs need not be material compounds of flesh and machine; anything that can be described in terms of information dynamics can be considered a cyborg. The boundaries of cyborgs are subject to shifting and expanding as they are networked to other feedback dynamics across scales and contexts" (627-8). RoboWhitney hasn't networked to other feedback dynamics. That's what "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" and "So Emotional" are about. She isn't dancing with somebody but she wants to. She remembers the way that we touched but we're not touching right now (and note how the lyrics appeal to the distancing sense of vision to heighten the sense of disconnection; even the production tends towards discrete sound-images as much as a Wall of DX7). More importantly, the thwarted desire implies the self-presence that identifies all robots from Phil Oakey to the love duo in the underrated Heartbeeps to David in the equally underrated A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. Like the aforementioned, she can't help but broadcast her thereness because she's perpetually letting us know how frustrated she is in her casing (which is how many critics have described her post-"Memories" work in general).
CyborgWhitney makes herself available for networking. Crucially, "Exhale (Shoop Shoop)" is the rare diva song where "I" is never mentioned. She has significantly lessened what Mark Sinker calls "the sense of regality, of dreadful awful majesty of style and skill as a weapon, the sense of renunciation, the sense that her role leaves her the loneliest person of all." She sings it down and invites us commoners in, not eradicating loneliness but finding a temporary prison for it. Nothing is forever in this network save for the infinite play of information dynamics. The song traces not a line from Whitney to a lover but a skein of flickering vectors, a series of points where for every win, someone must fail, where falling in love is sometimes wrong, sometimes right. There's a point where we exhale but a point back to where we're gasping for air. Even our identities are only momentarily whole when networking with another and looking inside ourselves only gets us halfway there. But, and herein is the song's genius, this holds true as much for Whitney here, in this modest moment (it's her shortest #1 single too), as it does for us which means at long last we can interface with her. We say shoop shoop as if to vault over language in an attempt to express the peace in this point of contact but even that is connected to other points back to The Sweet Inspirations and Salt-n-Pepa. It's Whitney Houston's cyborg manifesto and it holds out Haraway's world-changing vision. As Helmreich puts it, "Haraway found an unexpected, ironic, utopian promise in the figures of cyborgs initially created to automate warfare or de-skill workers; cybernetics opened up possibilities for recoding our human bodies and selves, for short-circuiting the idea that a durable 'nature' dictated our destinies. Somewhere in cyborg bodies might whir a liberatory consciousness."
― Kevin John Bozelka, Tuesday, 14 February 2012 09:40 (2 weeks ago) Permalink
Mark Sinker comments:
can't
really decide if i'm flattered or insulted to be included alongside ms
haraway in the critical theory pantheon of the never-wrong : \
obviously as one of the "founding voices" of afrofuturism as a
framing device, i quite like the science fictification of pop history,
but the idea that this notion stems FROM haraway -- that she wasn't
observing things already long loosed in pop culture -- reliably
irritates me: accurate or otherwise (a lot of it is much too badly
written to be good criticism), cyborg theory is descriptively
conservative and backward-looking, and in no sense visionary
Wednesday, August 11, 2004
Some Albums Will Not Be Denied
Big & Rich, Horse of a Different Color (Warner Bros.), 2004
I don't want to love this album but I kind of do but it doesn't matter, it's got momentum both commercial and critical that won't be helped by my big ups nor hurt by my approbation, and yet I feel I must weigh in on it somewhere, I wrote a preview of their concert for Audra down at the New Times BPB but I have more to say about it even though I don't really want to say it, or have to say it.
No, they're not changing country music as we know it; as I've been saying for a year or more, country music IS hip-hop these days. All those juicy lovely hard-ass drums! All the self-referentiality! All the recycling of better-known riffs in the service of "respecting tradition"! All the love of revenge, the way women get to speak their minds in both genres but only so much and not more, the radio-driven culture! And the way both genres have homes on the coasts but are completely South-driven right now! And the way they both respect God, guns, and personal glory in a way that rock and roll just don't do no more! And [repeat until someone finally offers me a fat book contract to write about this in a not-for-free-anymore-gotta-feed-my-family-dammit sort of way]----
But the two main ways that country and hip-hop mimic each other are the most relevant here: 1) Both musicks are proud of their hybrid status, and driven entirely in the short-term by faddishness about just exactly how those hybrid ingredients are mixed; and 2) Every great album in either genre is actively fighting for the soul of that music.
John Rich and Big Kenny understand this in a way that is not a new way but seems like a new way anyway. They know that everyone is frustrated, that everyone needs to feel the thrill of discovery, that Alan Jackson has had just one ballad #1 too many. They know that everyone else puts their pretty Nashville face on the cover of the record so they don't. They know that everyone else figures out a way to justify their capitulation to the machine, so they proclaim that they're four feet taller than the machine and suddenly it is so. Because that's the way it works.
They have two rap interludes on this record, courtesy of the old-school Cowboy Troy, but that's not the story--the story is that they even want to do this. Country's been sounding like rap periodically since forever, talking blues being what they are, but lately it's been a WHOLE LOT (viz Mark Wills' "And the Crowd Goes Wild"), but covertly, gently, all smooshed in like Reese's Pieces into Steve's Ice Cream. So Big and Rich go the other way with it: actually have a rapper. A black one, who says he's black, and then raps in Spanish too. (Apparently he can also do Mandarin but he doesn't do it on this album.) Is he "great"? No. Is he awesome? Yes.
They have rowdy drinking songs, spaced perfectly at track #4 ("Kick My Ass") and track #10 ("Drinkin' 'Bout You") because that's about when the beer kicks in hardest. They have saved by Jesus songs, which are less fun but kinda metal, like Stryper, except better because they brag about almost killing a man first. They have two boring-ass relationship metaphor songs: "Wild West Show," which I dislike so much with its corny faux-Indian schtik that I wrote them off when I heard this on the radio, and "Deadwood Mountain" which does the same for corny faux-cowboy schtik.
But the wild crazy stuff is so insane that it's undeniable. The speed-bluegrass break at the end of "Real World" is pretty amazing, sonically, but it is rendered classique when they start throwing out non-sequiturs in Marty Robbins voices: "No one knows the name for the brain of the Scarecrow" OMG WTF LOL "I'm a cowboy Stevie Wonder" BEST IDEA EVER "Pro-o-o-o-o-zac" turned into an operatic trope. The metal solo in the midst of the Leon Redbone funk of "Drinkin' 'Bout You"! The way they bring Guns N Roses and Rakim both into the approach on "Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy)," the part about "her interpretation of my cowboy reputation" is so Axl it hurts y'all...I'm in love.
But I would be, because I (like Gerald Manley Hopkins) love dappled things, all things counter, original, spare, strange, whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) with swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim. That's hip-hop, that's country, that's Big, that's Rich.
And, refer to part 2 above, this and the Gretchen Wilson album (and to a lesser extent the Montgomery Gentry album too) are the only things this year from c&w music that seem to want to fight for the soul of the music. They're reclaiming fun, it's a roots move but a roots move for fun is always a great roots move, they want everyone to smile, to laugh, to boogie, to get drunk and get laid. Jimmy Buffett claims he wants these things but he only wants affluent palefaces to do this in their repressed flat-ass way while buying his merchandise. Funk that. Big and Rich know that teenagers and 20-somethings care less about division and more about multiplication, they want someone to fight for the music they make, to not go gentle into that good night, to be willing to throw a TV out of a hotel window or to be buried eight feet under because they're ten feet tall in a six foot town.
The album as revolutionary statement is an outmoded trope that I will embrace until I die.
Big & Rich, Horse of a Different Color (Warner Bros.), 2004
I don't want to love this album but I kind of do but it doesn't matter, it's got momentum both commercial and critical that won't be helped by my big ups nor hurt by my approbation, and yet I feel I must weigh in on it somewhere, I wrote a preview of their concert for Audra down at the New Times BPB but I have more to say about it even though I don't really want to say it, or have to say it.
No, they're not changing country music as we know it; as I've been saying for a year or more, country music IS hip-hop these days. All those juicy lovely hard-ass drums! All the self-referentiality! All the recycling of better-known riffs in the service of "respecting tradition"! All the love of revenge, the way women get to speak their minds in both genres but only so much and not more, the radio-driven culture! And the way both genres have homes on the coasts but are completely South-driven right now! And the way they both respect God, guns, and personal glory in a way that rock and roll just don't do no more! And [repeat until someone finally offers me a fat book contract to write about this in a not-for-free-anymore-gotta-feed-my-family-dammit sort of way]----
But the two main ways that country and hip-hop mimic each other are the most relevant here: 1) Both musicks are proud of their hybrid status, and driven entirely in the short-term by faddishness about just exactly how those hybrid ingredients are mixed; and 2) Every great album in either genre is actively fighting for the soul of that music.
John Rich and Big Kenny understand this in a way that is not a new way but seems like a new way anyway. They know that everyone is frustrated, that everyone needs to feel the thrill of discovery, that Alan Jackson has had just one ballad #1 too many. They know that everyone else puts their pretty Nashville face on the cover of the record so they don't. They know that everyone else figures out a way to justify their capitulation to the machine, so they proclaim that they're four feet taller than the machine and suddenly it is so. Because that's the way it works.
They have two rap interludes on this record, courtesy of the old-school Cowboy Troy, but that's not the story--the story is that they even want to do this. Country's been sounding like rap periodically since forever, talking blues being what they are, but lately it's been a WHOLE LOT (viz Mark Wills' "And the Crowd Goes Wild"), but covertly, gently, all smooshed in like Reese's Pieces into Steve's Ice Cream. So Big and Rich go the other way with it: actually have a rapper. A black one, who says he's black, and then raps in Spanish too. (Apparently he can also do Mandarin but he doesn't do it on this album.) Is he "great"? No. Is he awesome? Yes.
They have rowdy drinking songs, spaced perfectly at track #4 ("Kick My Ass") and track #10 ("Drinkin' 'Bout You") because that's about when the beer kicks in hardest. They have saved by Jesus songs, which are less fun but kinda metal, like Stryper, except better because they brag about almost killing a man first. They have two boring-ass relationship metaphor songs: "Wild West Show," which I dislike so much with its corny faux-Indian schtik that I wrote them off when I heard this on the radio, and "Deadwood Mountain" which does the same for corny faux-cowboy schtik.
But the wild crazy stuff is so insane that it's undeniable. The speed-bluegrass break at the end of "Real World" is pretty amazing, sonically, but it is rendered classique when they start throwing out non-sequiturs in Marty Robbins voices: "No one knows the name for the brain of the Scarecrow" OMG WTF LOL "I'm a cowboy Stevie Wonder" BEST IDEA EVER "Pro-o-o-o-o-zac" turned into an operatic trope. The metal solo in the midst of the Leon Redbone funk of "Drinkin' 'Bout You"! The way they bring Guns N Roses and Rakim both into the approach on "Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy)," the part about "her interpretation of my cowboy reputation" is so Axl it hurts y'all...I'm in love.
But I would be, because I (like Gerald Manley Hopkins) love dappled things, all things counter, original, spare, strange, whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) with swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim. That's hip-hop, that's country, that's Big, that's Rich.
And, refer to part 2 above, this and the Gretchen Wilson album (and to a lesser extent the Montgomery Gentry album too) are the only things this year from c&w music that seem to want to fight for the soul of the music. They're reclaiming fun, it's a roots move but a roots move for fun is always a great roots move, they want everyone to smile, to laugh, to boogie, to get drunk and get laid. Jimmy Buffett claims he wants these things but he only wants affluent palefaces to do this in their repressed flat-ass way while buying his merchandise. Funk that. Big and Rich know that teenagers and 20-somethings care less about division and more about multiplication, they want someone to fight for the music they make, to not go gentle into that good night, to be willing to throw a TV out of a hotel window or to be buried eight feet under because they're ten feet tall in a six foot town.
The album as revolutionary statement is an outmoded trope that I will embrace until I die.
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