Words & Music

Few weeks back I saw the TO experimental classical combo Toca Loca play an amazing piece called “Coming Together.” It’s written by Frederick Rzewski (who I believe Toca Loca described in the evening’s program as “Salieri to Steve Reich’s Mozart”) & it’s built around repeating phrases both musical & spoken-word. Forming the latter is a reading of excerpts from letters written from Attica by inmate Sam Melville, who was killed in the 1971 riot at the prison. It’s just a few sentences about how Melville is coping with prison life, but the text keeps going back to the beginning & starting over, which becomes an increasingly powerful expression of the monotony & dehumanization of Melville’s situation, while the music ramps up the agitation.

Here’s a performance of the same piece by the classical group Eighth Blackbird, though I must admit I prefer my memory of the Toca Loca version a little, since the vocal performance that night seemed less sensationalized & therefore more unnerving.

• Eighth Blackbird, “Coming Together” (runtime 18:57)

(Buy some Eighth Blackbird here.)

And here’s something from Paddy McAloon’s album I Trawl the Megahertz (with thanks to Trevor for hipping me to this a while ago). McAloon is the ex-frontman of 1980s poppers Prefab Sprout, and the story goes that a few years ago he was suffering frm vision problems & got heavily into shortwave radio. This album is the result; the haunting title track marries an impressionistic short story read by a female voice with a lush orchestral backdrop. I’m listening to side 2 of Bowie’s Low as I write this, and this & that would go together not badly at all.

• Paddy McAloon, “I Trawl the Megahertz” (runtime 22:08)

(Buy I Trawl the Megahertz here.)

Springsteen Does Seeger

When I first heard that Bruce Springsteen was releasing an album of Pete Seeger-identified folk covers, I naturally assumed it would be one of his dreary, tuneless all-acoustic affairs in which the actual record is secondary to the lyric sheet – à la Devils & Dust, The Ghost of Tom Joad, and (someone’s gotta say it) a third or so of Nebraska.

Looks like I wasn’t alone in that assumption. A common theme in the thrilled reviews I’ve read is relief (for example this one and this one) – mainly relief that We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions is a full-band album with plenty of uptempo content. (For the dissenting view, check out this bit of knowing, too-cool-for-school snark from Tim Perlich in Now. But hey, what do you expect?)

I share the relief, and no Perlich am I, but I’m still disappointed in the record so far. It’s fine and all, pleasant for sure, but I guess I was hoping for revelatory. I wish there was more sense of Springsteen’s personality, corner of the world, whatever mixing it up with the material & the band. (Not the E Street Band, by the way – but you can read the real reviews for the background info.) Or failing that, I wish the performances had more of the rollicking urgency that Springsteen promises in the liner notes. I love the instruments, especially the banjo & horns, but they never interact in interesting ways, just vaguely goodtimey ones, & somehow the sound always feels bloated to me, slow on its feet.

On the other hand, these are the firstest of first impressions, so perhaps there are some hidden charms in there. If you want to hear for yourself, buy it here. (And for some past stuff about Springsteen, go here.)

No music today, but thanks for coming.

Tired & Worried

• The Diodes, “Tired of Waking Up Tired”
• Devo, “It Takes a Worried Man”
  

Buy some Diodes here and some Devo here.

Unknown Pleasures

• Diesel, “Sausalito Summernights"

Diesel was a Dutch band that had one big hit – this exhilarating song – in 1981. I’ve always wondered why the track looms so large in my memory but has seemingly vanished from the rest of the world’s. I mean, I admittedly don’t listen much to the mighty Q (our local classic-rock broadcaster), but I do find it weird that for 20 years or more I’ve only ever heard “Sausalito Summernights” by deliberately seeking it out, and in my adult life I’ve only ever talked to one other person who even remembers it (and reader, I married her).

Here’s a fact that may or may not be relevant: according to the All Music Guide, “Sausalito Summernights” was a #25 hit in the U.S., but here in my home & native land it made it all the way to #1.

***

At this year’s Pop Conference at the Experience Music Project in Seattle, one of the big themes is Guilty Pleasures. It’s a fraught subject for people who like pop music & are rightly suspicious about demarcations between art & entertainment, between culture & trash. Admitting that you actually feel guilty about enjoying Song X seems tantamount to reinforcing those phony distinctions, to announcing yourself as a lazy thinker who plods along the path of conventional wisdom. If the limits of what’s acceptably enjoyable, as established by canon & coolness, are inherently political, then the guilty pleasure supports that political structure rather than subverting it (as this here paper promises to point out).

I don’t disagree with any of that, and yet…. I still cling stubbornly to the belief that you really can experience a guilty pleasure without mucking around in the ideological swamp described above.

In my own case, guilty pleasure slithers within me when (a) I realize I’m being coarsely manipulated (look, there’s that moustache-twirling villain you’re supposed to love to hate!) and (b) I find myself responding anyway (I hate him!).

(For some reason, I find it easier to think about this in terms of movies, whose effects are visual & narrative and therefore a little more, um, effable. And I also think film talk is farther along than, say, book talk in being non-discriminatory when it comes to genre. Where music talk fits in there is open to debate, but in any case the general principles surely apply to music too.)

Sure, any movie or piece of art is obviously trying to manipulate you in some way, but that manipulation always exists somewhere along a continuum. At the top end, either the chain-yanking is subtle enough or the work has enough other things going for it (depth, style, urgency) that you don’t notice or don’t mind that you’re being manipulated. At the bottom end, the attempted manipulation is so crass & obvious & insulting that there’s no actual pleasure to be had, & therefore no guilt.

But then there’s that thin strip in the middle. That unnerving dissonance that arises when a work is getting under your skin even though you know you shouldn’t be letting it. When you’re angry because you feel like your intelligence is being underestimated & angry because apparently it’s actually not.

(Both guilty and pleasure are crucial; you’re guilty because you’re pleased. This is not the same as, say, laughing at how kitschy something is – that may be a kind of pleasure, I suppose, but it’s a smug one rather than a guilty one.)

((Granted, in some cases, smugness is actually just a cover for guilt; if you’re ashamed to be enjoying something, you can always pretend you’re not really enjoying it. But on the other hand, sometimes a smirk is just a smirk.))

***

Anyway, I like the model above because it focuses mostly on the work in question & at least has the potential to move things away from the realm of “what will the cool kids think,” a question that’s usually assumed to be at the centre of any discussion of guilty pleasures.

(Though I do think that in our information-rich age, one side-effect on our discourse is a terror of being thought gullible. When I wrote about that Diesel song back at the beginning, I had to restrain myself from writing “strangely exhilarating” or “cheesy but exhilarating” instead of just “exhilarating.”)

((This is a pet peeve in a lot of reviewing I read: the sense that the reviewer’s afraid that if he actually expresses enthusiasm, somebody somewhere might think him a rube. So any admiration must be qualified to death, as if to say, Don’t worry, I kind of like it, but I’m not taken in by it or anything.))

(((Another pet peeve is that I notice & fight against this tendency in myself.)))

But who knows if you can ever really escape the poltiical dimension of tastemaking, the anxiety of critical consensus? After all, everyone would have their own thin strip where their guilty pleasures lie. What seems like a subtle & rich work to me might seem thuddingly patronizing to you. And it’s plausible that our notions of what makes for acceptable levels of “manipulation” could also be distorted without our even knowing it by the maps already laid out by established cultural surveyors. Patti Smith’s “Ask the Angels” is just as bombastic & cheesy in its own way as, say, “Radar Love” (to pick an example from Diesel’s Dutch compatriots Golden Earring), & yet I’ll defend the former far more readily than the latter. The selling points of “Radar Love” seem foregrounded & obvious & not sustainable over longterm listening, which for some perhaps ineffable reason is not true (for me) of the Patti Smith song. I can go back to “Ask the Angels” again & again, and when I do it’s not like “this is the work of a rock & roll legend” is clanging away anywhere in my mind. The appeal is purely visceral.

At the same time, I suppose it’s at least possible that I think this way only because I know Patti Smith is cool and Golden Earring is, well, not.

(Well, OK, Golden Earring is a bad example – I think you could almost argue that “Radar Love” is empirically inferior to “Ask the Angels.” But who knows, maybe there’s another kinda-cheesy song that I actually enjoy just as much as “Angels” but subconsciously undervalue because I consider it historically unimportant or lightweight or something. Just can’t think of one right now.)

• Patti Smith, “Ask the Angels” (live)

Step Aside & Give the Sparrow a Chance, or, A Brief Addendum

In a post about Van Dyke Parks a couple weeks ago, I wrote about loving his album Discover America, & said, “I’ve never had much urge to go educate myself about [its]* source material, which I think/hope speaks more to the record’s sui generis quality than to a general incuriosity on my part.” Since then, weirdly & totally coincidentally (through S’s virtual cratedigging, which is not at all concerned with Van Dyke Parks), I’ve stumbled across the estimable work of the calypso singer the Mighty Sparrow, and learned that “Jack Palance,” Discover America’s fantastic leadoff track, sprang from him. And that although it’s a mere snippet on the Parks record, in its original form it’s a real, full-bodied song.

It’s a happy day. Be happy, all you people. And buy some Mighty Sparrow here.

• The Mighty Sparrow, “Jack Palance”

* I can’t believe I not only just quoted myself but even marked a paraphrase with square brackets! Whatta wanker!

Take Me on a Roller Coaster

In the Department of Self-Promotion, I just reviewed David Mitchell’s new novel, Black Swan Green, for the Toronto Star. You can read the review here. The Roxy Music song referred to in the piece, by the by, is “Virginia Plain,” and here’s an extra-kazookery version.

• Roxy Music, “Virginia Plain #2” (BBC session, July 1972)
  

(Buy Roxy’s debut here.)

And in the Department of More Yakking About Books, a couple recent rollicking good reads I’d recommend are

(1) Paul Glennon’s The Dodecahedron, a short-story cycle made up of 12 discrete interlocking pieces. And by “interlocking” I mean filled with recurring character types & situations, so that each story echoes several others, if not all the others. Brainy & carefully worked out but also a blast, since it keeps distilling narrative down to its rawest delights – brief expository tales of missing fathers & trapped explorers & sinister centuries-long plots. Think Barthelme, Barth, Borges, Calvino, etc.

and

(2) Stephen Wright’s The Amalgamation Polka, a Civil War tall tale about a well-meaning young man’s misadventures in prewar New York state and his horrific experiences during the war. A lumpy, misshapen book that lurches from dry whimsy to high moral outrage to sheer grotesquery, all of it (or most of it) delivered in meandering faux-Victorian prose. I’d like to stress that that last sentence is meant to be nothing but admiring & complimentary: I loved the novel’s crazy tone shifts & anything-goes structure & winding sentences. Though I’d admit that the tone gets too diffuse over the last fifth or so of the book, which doesn’t really come off. (I could go on in more detail, but hey, that would just be noise to anyone who’s not read the thing.)

Jesus Died for Somebody’s Sins

Was thinking about how gospel music so often has a strong appeal for even the most committed of heathens (like S and I, though I’d say I’m slightly more recent in my heathenhood than she). And I know it’s rock-crit-unfashionable to pay any heed to notions of intent or authenticity or “soul,” but sometimes I do wonder if belief simply makes music sound better. I mean, listen to this gospel-blues stuff.

Of course, “belief” could refer to the listener just as much as to the singer. We may not believe in the same things that Son House believes in, but we believe he believes in them, and we convince ourselves that we can hear that belief in the sound coming out of the speakers. The singer asks for our faith in the Lord, but in our pagan age the best we can do is put our faith in the singer.

Anyway, it’s getting late & I’m tired & eternally pressed for time, but happy Easter weekend to all.

• Son House, “John the Revelator”
• Blind Willie Johnson, “Let Your Light Shine on Me”
• Reverend Gary Davis, “Crucifixion”

Sun Rawk

Not feeling too talkative today, since I’d like to just read & listen to music & write (other things) on this lazy Sunday, but I was reading about the MC5 & got the urge to throw up their adaptation (cover might be a tad too literal) of Sun Ra’s “Starship,” from Kick Out the Jams. Be warned, over eight minutes it moves from their furious spluttering rock mode to their freeform angry-ambient soundscape mode.

And also here’s a slightly more accessible (and also fantastic & freaky) Sun Ra cover, a live Yo La Tengo take on “Rocket Number 9.”

And a couple tracks from Mr. Ra himself. Not completely representative, but then, what two tracks could be? I especially love the brittle & beautiful “Love in Outer Space,” with the rolling piano waves & that expressive horn refrain.

Speaking of which, a certain Hendrix tune has always very much reminded me of “Love in Outer Space,” and said tune even has a sci-fi theme itself. I’ve no evidence, alas, that this is a sign of direct influence rather than simple coincidence. But anyway, I’ll put up a non-canonical live bootleg version (ie a version presumably not owned by a major recorded-music empire with too much time on its hands & a sense of investment in the artist in question). It’s a good version, too, with real solar-flare solos.

• MC5, “Starship”
• Yo La Tengo, “Rocket Number 9” (live)
• Sun Ra, “Outer Spaceways Incorporated”
• Sun Ra, “Love in Outer Space”
• Jimi Hendrix Experience, “Third Stone from the Sun” (live)

(Buy Kick Out the Jams here, some Sun Ra here, some Hendrix here, and some Yo La Tengo here.)

Beyond the Columnated Ruins

On the Bandoppler site (via Zoilus), Van Dyke Parks discusses, among other things, his plans to do some arranging for the next Joanna Newsom record, and I like what little Newsom I’ve heard enough to be intrigued. Still kind of ambivalent about Parks, though – or at least, about the first three solo albums, the stuff I know best. (Discounting the Smile factor, which is a whole other conversation & I’m no Beach Boys expert anyway.)

On the one hand, Discover America, Parks’s second album, would probably have to go on any list of my all-time favourites. It’s an overt tribute to Caribbean sounds and 1940s pop music, defined by its tropical lilt, quirky instrumentation (heavy on steel drums and the like), and Parks’s crazily limpid vocals. But it’s not a straight homage, either; the weird gaps in the rhythms, the sometimes echoey tones, the comedy (check “Jack Palance”), and the implied concept-album conceit (complete with spoken-word “Introduction”), all create something more than mimicry, while never implying anything less than respect for Parks’s source material.*

Other than that....

I’ve tried to get into Song Cycle, the debut – believe me, I’ve tried many times. Certainly it has some lovely moments here & there, like the intro and outro to “The All Golden.” But overall the arrangements & song structures seem ridiculously over-ornamentative, decoration that’s not actually decorating anything. There’s really not much of any solidity to discover underneath, it seems to me – you either just golly-gee away at how abstractly pretty it all is, or (in my case) you don’t.

Clang of the Yankee Reaper, the third solo LP, follows more directly from Discover America in sound & approach. It has a great title track (and for that matter a great title), but otherwise it’s always felt to me like Parks’s eccentricities have become a little too normalized or internalized, the songs & arrangements more straightforward & less interesting. (I’ll note for the record that I actually first heard Clang well before discovering Discover, or else I might wonder whether first-come-first-served syndrome is at work in my reaction.)

So anyway, here’s a song from Discover, chosen almost at random. In many ways it’s a disservice, to you and to the record, to isolate one track, since the whole of the album is so much greater than the sum of the songs. But what can you do? Well, you can buy it here.

The title track from Clang, on the other hand, lifts right out, so here it is too. And also a Lee Dorsey/Allen Toussaint record that Parks covered on Discover.** (Buy some more Parks here, and some Lee Dorsey here.)

• Van Dyke Parks, “G-Man Hoover”
• Van Dyke Parks, “Clang of the Yankee Reaper”
• Lee Dorsey, “Occapella”

* I’ve never had much urge to go educate myself about that source material, which I think/hope speaks more to the record’s sui generis quality than to a general incuriosity on my part. (Since I’m usually happy for any excuse to do some cratedigging, or virtual cratedigging these days.)

** I said much urge.

Toronto Juju

As per the previous post, I’m in love with this Danielson song, “Did I Step on Your Trumpet?” But also right now I am deeply in love with this new album from Toronto’s Glissandro 70, a self-titled debut. It’s a collection of five guitar symphonies of varying length, and the sounds & dynamics thereon alternately oscillate, fluctuate, chime, ring, buzz, & more, threatening to exhaust my available verbs. But anyway, this excellent article in the current eye tells you much more than I could about the Glissandro 70 project.

As the piece indicates, the record encourages some spot-the-influence play, with Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, old Arthur Russell singles, and more straightup techno all looming large. (At one point G70 borrow some words from Juan Atkins’ “No UFOs.”) But what I hear in there more than anything else is King Sunny Ade’s Juju Music: the same guitar tones, the same reflective but insistent vibe. And that’s not a bad thing at all.

My favourite song on the record is “Portugal Rua Rua,”a scalp-stirring mix of the sounds described above, some observational poetry, what sounds like Portuguese spoken-word but who knows, and the aforementioned Atkins quote. And it’s astonishing how much anchoring force a simple little thing like a regular triple drumbeat can provide.

However, the record just came out and all (I missed their launch party show the other night, alas), so I’ll refrain from posting “Portugal Rua Rua.” Instead, here’s a piece called “Somethings” (an excerpt from which does appear on the G70 album). You can find this – well, right here, for now, but it seems that you can permanently find it on the Muted Tones site, where it originally appeared.

And here are some related things, too, from one of King Sunny Ade’s own glorious guitar symphonies to “No UFOs” to one of Arthur Russell’s signature tracks, a smooth, 13-minute disco workout. (Buy some Arthur Russell here, some Juan Atkins here, Juju Music here, and, surprisingly, Glissandro 70 here.)

• Glissandro 70, “Somethings”
• King Sunny Ade, “Eje Nlo Gba Ara Mi”
• Model 500 (Juan Atkins), “No UFOs” (remix)
• Dinosaur L (Arthur Russell), “Kiss Me Again”