Mancini the Melodist: Why Charade Slayed

Melodist: A composer/songwriter known for writing great melodies.

Henry Mancini, Charade (1963): Someone once described the greatness necessary for winning a pro golf tournament as something within the reach of a rarified group of extraordinary players. Some may have a moment when they're able to transcend limitations, anxieties, etc., and do the unlikely. But the circle of greatness is far smaller for those that can do it again and again. Same with music: The Beatles are used often as exemplars of the pinnacle of extraordinariness. But considering the history of pop music, they were many progenitors of serial slaying – Richard Rogers, Scott Joplin, George Gershwin, Brian and Eddie Dozier, Duke Ellington, John Barry, Michael Stoller (of Lieber & Stoller), Stevie Wonder, Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, Carole King, Brian Wilson, and somewhere near the heap’s top: 

Mr. Versatile, Henry Mancini.

But unlike most of the above, he was exclusively a composer of soundtrack music. The demands on his compositional and color range were far greater than any of those other nine-to-fivers. Compare Baby Elephant Walk, Peter Gunn, Moon River, Shot in the Dark, The Pink Panther, or The Days of Wine and Roses. Also, no small accomplishment, he may’ve co-invented the spy genre with Monty Norman (the James Bond Theme) and John Barry (Goldfinger, Thunderball, Diamonds Are Forever, etc.). And while Henry was no rocker, rock and roll without Peter Gunn would be too awful to imagine.

The maestro getting to the chorus

And this: a suite from the 1967 suspense film, Wait Until Dark – a phantasmagoric outline of insanity. The detuned piano is transcendently horrifying.

As to why Charade slayed

That melody: It's been argued that music is melody, way on top in a hierarchy including rhythm, harmony, timbre, and form: Music is the emulsion and melody are the flavor bits that separate, say, the dull greasy saltiness of canned gravy from the sensual orgy of a Bernaise. It's also something humans have a knack for recognizing beginning at birth. Melodies connect with us emotionally, like a virus to some cellular receptor. The best of them fit instantly. And that some melodies will connect profoundly to millions while others don’t is the mysterious voodoo that is music.

Mancini was a master at understanding the colors of the emotional spectrum and how they converted into manipulative sounds. The pointy heads describe it thusly:

Different types of melodies also help to convey different emotions, for example chromatic melodies or melodies belonging to a minor scale...the emotions of melodies mirror the emotions of speech. Just as sad people tend to talk in a monotone, sad music tends to move in very small intervals within a narrow range. In contrast happy people talk within a greater tonal range, and happy music follows this pattern using larger intervals over a wider range.

Charade from four angles:

1) Charade elevated on the ridiculously smooth bordelaise that is Johnny Hartman’s voice.
2) The master’s original from the film it was written for.
3) A loungey, fake jazz version from the cool 90s San Francisco outfit, Oranj Symphonette – their roster included Dave Brubeck’s son Matt and P.J. Harvey alum Joe Gore, to whom we owe the ingenious guitar riff.
4) My Canadian crush, Holly Cole: breathy and mature, satin and gloves to the elbow, knowing and still cute.

Music That Matters, Pt 28

274) Garbage, Garbage (1995): From the rough coupling of a nascent Pro Tools and a blossoming remix culture came this beautiful bastard, Garbage. If you were alive in the 90s, you might remember a culture besotted and remade with software tech – music, graphics, video, design, etc. – and Garbage was one of the more visible parts of that steaming heap. The band’s scaffolding would form from a meeting of a sound engineer and two musicians who’d migrated into producing. Based in Madison WI, these three nerds appealed to a singer a world away (Scottland) after they’d seen her on MTV’s 120 Minutes ca. 1994. At the time, Shirley Manson was showcasing with the local band Angelfish. To this stateside squad of knob-twirlers and mouse-jockeys, she represented a fresh departure from the grunge that was both the trend and their bread and butter as producers. She had the darker quality they were seeking – not Riot Grrl nor Lilith Fair – and had none of the “chirpy or light” vocal sound they wanted very much to avoid. What they got was a tone as cold and gray as the fall North Atlantic sky.

In among all of the classic rock retreads of grunge that was raging at the time, Garbage seemed like a breath of brisk air and they hit immediately. It helped they debuted with a trove of radio-friendly ware. And despite the overly unctuous hunger for the slicing and dicing of ProTools, these production veterans – unlike many of their studio tanned peers – discovered more of its potential: Note the guitar break on Only Happy When It Rains. 

Also interesting to note that Manson had never written a song before joining up. Clearly, she was a natural.







275) XTC, Travels in Nihilon (1980): Harder and longer than just about anything else in their extensive catalog, this song nearly strays into jam band territory. Composer and singer Andy Partridge often reveals himself as a passion advocate in the singing of his songs, but here he’s shown in rare power. The guitars worm in and out of power chords, funky riffing and the droning provides muscle to the tension. Nihilon adds another facet to the already well cut and polished jewel that was XTC.

276) The Decemberists, The Wanting Comes in Waves (Repaid) (2009): The Decemberists had already proven themselves able modern advocates for the legacy of murder ballads. Songwriter Colin Meloy’s blend of gothic folk, Grand Guignol pathos, and crunchy guitars is given a rocket burst with the muscly guest vocal of My Brightest Diamond’s Shara Nova. Altogether, the mix enforces this Repaid like a loan shark’s debt. Nova’s final breath of repaid at the close pushes the song into an entirely other dimension. This song demands to played on a loop.



277) Thin White Rope, On the Floe (1990): Rootsy faux Nashville riffs and a hard trucker groove matched with a gravelly voice that’s worn like an 80-year-old long shoreman’s tattoo. It all begins with filigreed delicacy and transitions into a full bats-on-oil-drums  groove when the chorus kicks it up. The final out-chorus organ sweeps add a deathly ethereality as the song disappears into a cold horizon. 

If you don't know, a floe is a sheet of floating ice. In this, broken-hearted losers left to wither on a floe like elderly Inuits of legend going to meet their gods. (And it’s not entirely legend.) In the barfly version, the ice floats in a double bourbon with a Budweiser back.

There is a song so hard to steer

I thought it would capsize in bitterness and fear

I look to the sky when I'm tired of the sea

Constellations are moving, they're useless to me

And it seems we've been stranded on the floe

Watching distant shorelines as we go

278) Peeping Tom (featuring Mike Patton & Massive Attack), Kill the DJ (2006): It’s the opinion of the team at Jelly Roll that Mike Patton has collaborated on more vitally interesting work than just about anybody over the last 35 years. His deep résumé combines both the avant garde (Mr. Bungle, John Zorn, Fred Frith) and the more mainstream-ish (Faith No More, Björk, Fantômas) and Peeping Tom fits somewhere to the right of middle. The album was a one-time project taking six years to create and Wiki says this about it: [...Peeping Tom]...is a tribute to Michael Powell's 1960 film Peeping Tom. The album was created by swapping song files through the mail with collaborators such as Norah Jones, Kool Keith, and Massive Attack, among others.

This joint’s got more than enough mood for the darkest game soundtrack, dynamics enough for serious head bang on a movie chase scene, and spunk enough to shake dance floor bound asses —a total package.

279) Pointer Sisters, Going Down Slowly (1975): For those not alive at the time, The Pointer Sisters would become mega-sellers in the 80s (13 Top 20 sellers). By that time they’d mostly wiped clean most of their early soul-shouting edge to improve their market prospects, though stains of the church remained. Some of their early vocal rave ups – Yes We Can Can, How Long (Betcha’ Got a Chick on the Side) – are now classic including this Allen Toussaint roundalay. 

In this singing family slugfest, they brought the brass knuckles. I can’t think of another vocal group, family or otherwise, that ever went this hard and long.

280) Bulgarian State Television Female Choir, Kalimankou Denkou (The Evening Gathering) (1990): Sometimes, cultures across seas and continents can discover joy in similar sounds. Strains of Middle Eastern, East Asian, and some Celtic sounds seem to have been birthed from a similar umbilical cord, united across time and space. I find the strains here remind me of  North American indigenous chants. There’s also a soul-scraping quality that communicates beyond language, it’s more like the code of experience—not a word but a sound in a voice, an emotional salt. Language may be superfluous to the ancient vibe they’re elevating here. Just under three minutes in you can even hear some Westside Story dance choruses. 

And yet it’s also completely it’s own thing, which the best music, not matter where or when, always is.



281) Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, Bat Chain Puller (1978): This is a sound found nowhere else on the planet: Nightmare rhythms of lurching mummies and the anthraxed footfalls of death-spiraling animals mixed with nursery rhyme bursts of melody, the blues, the anxious vibe of horror movies, souls leaping from bodies, and all capped with the voice of Howling Wolf intermittantly having psychotic episodes and an announcer reading ad copy. Not a bad way to spend 5 minutes and 27 seconds on a sleepless pre-dawn Saturday morning.

From the French Chorus television show ca. 1980:

282) Tanya Tagaq, Aorta (2016): To distill the pain and trauma of a people in song, you can do no better than Tagaq. Her voice is a bleeding flag to be planted into the center of our skull.

 

283) The Fall, Theme from Sparta F.C. (2003): Screams that siphon the flames of every trauma you’ve endured, words twisted to become brilliant effigies of every revulsion and rage that was visited upon you – those would both be wonderful ways of squeezing raw emotion into the kinetic earspace and many of the songs I’ve enthused about here in Music That Matters over the years. But there’s something extraordinary about Mark E. Smith’s utter disdain for melody and the acid-drenched spew of his upper-class insolence (whether he was ever upper class, I don’t know, but he’s got the arrogant disdain down like a pedophile princeling) delivered whenever that voice is paired with whatever version of The Fall is behind him. The revolving door of Fall bandmembers must be like the staff of a fast food franchise. (The working conditions must be insufferable.) Too bad for those itinerant kids. For us, Sparta FC is the dividend of their pain and discomfort.

Bonus! George Clinton, Bullet Proof (1985): Here, Clinton captures some of the jagged juice missing from P-Funk in the late 70s-80s. Forget about the sound’s datedness, the passé synths, the MIDI beat. When it’s alloyed with such an impervious melody, vocal interplay, and hard energy riveted to gated drum thunder like this, it’s a joint as sharp and timeless as anything on this list. 

Rush Revulsion:

A Love for Hating On a Profit-Gulping Dinosaur

I hate Rush—irrationally, hallucinogenically, and with utter malice.  Hate is not what this blog does: this will be the one exception.

I’m not alone:

• This often-cited article calls Rush the Most Hated Band of All Time. This claim, while entirely agreeable, is unsubstantiated.
• iHeartRADIO, substantiates their claim with compiled data and algorithms – Science! – ranking Rush a modest 18th on a list of the 21 Most Hated Rock Bands of All Time.
• The LA Weekly put them at #9, calling them the anchovies of rock music. 
• Rolling Stone Senior Editor David Wild: “Regardless of their success, Rush has never achieved critical acclaim... most of it gives me a headache...Rush really hasn’t done anything unique.”
  
• Brian Cogan, PhD., author, professor, media consultant, pop culture expert, and Rush hater consulted for the Convince Me to Like This Band podcast: “Rush are overrated and pretentious hacks who, with Neil Peart’s lyrics, have provided reckless creedence to offensive political ideologies.” 
• In 2007, Blender Magazine’s Worst Lyricists in Rock named Neil Peart #2. (He was robbed.) As one blogger avered on Peart: An ace on the rototoms, a train wreck on the typewriter.
• Spin Magazine: Rush isn’t cool.

And yet, Rush has cultishly devoted fans – though, the band’s fanbase scaled past cult status back in the Carter administration. They’re rabid, hypertrophic, and raging with album-cover-tattoos levels of psychosis. See r/Rush Reddit and the forums and marvel at how fans pour over song minutiae with an OCD perseveration as if they were Dead Sea Scrolls. It’s fandom at a blazingly insurrectionist level of alarming.

And their fans have only bred like flies: Rush is ranked third for most consecutive gold- and platinum-selling albums in rock history (askmen.com claims they come in fourth)—behind only The Rolling Stones and The Beatles. This devouring public can’t all be incels.

About those incels: The trope is that women hate Rush too. Women have never been big consumers of Prog—not even in this homeopathic, middle school, technophobic version of dystopian sci-fi. Rush concerts were famous as gyno-deserts. (This Salon article disagrees.) But to be fair, near-desert conditions: these audience photos show that there are at least two women here, and a couple more here.

Many have argued that Lee’s voice is the problem. The most often reason cited for Rushophobia. Geddy’s refusal to rein it in was an act of defiance and, maybe, for that he deserves some props. Also to his credit, when Rush began, no one sounded remotely like Geddy (nee Gary Lee Weinrub)—except maybe Tiny Tim. After the rise of Rush, the world would be lousy with Geddy Lee-type squealers—Bruce Dickinson, Sebastian Bach, Justin Hawkins, Vince Neil, etc. In the beginning, Rush was a Canadian bar band version of Dreadful Zeppelin, without the testosterone. But by album #2, Rush knew the hard bar band sound wasn’t going to serve their arena-sized ambitions. For them, the smell of napalm in the morning was the legitimacy of Prog Rock, and they threw in with the tropes of the time. Then, Prog was already rife with Tolkeinisms and anachronistic fantasy. Rush wasn’t the only band to plod through musical suites that clocked in longer than heart-transplant surgery. 

Back to those vocals: Lee’s sphincter-clenching caterwaul was Rush’s most distinguishing feature—like an incel car alarm receiving a surprise prostate exam. Other, even less charitable descriptions: 

• Soprano-ish banshee wail
• Dog-calling falsetto shriek
• A near-chipmunk bawl
• Cat being chased out a door with a blow-torch up its butt
• Sounding less like a bird of prey than a castrato with a gerbil up his ass. 

(The last two were a bit much, even for me. Mine was better.) 

The second time I heard Rush, it was 2112 (1976). The Temple of Syrinx (see below) was like a CIA renditioning technique. And those liner notes: Dedicated to the genius Ayn Rand. (A claim even Peart would later find embarrassing.) Over the years, the band would be accused of being rightwing propagandists.

Sample lyric: I stand atop a spiral stair/An oracle confronts me there/He leads me on light years away/Through astral nights, galactic days

(At least Peart shares Ayn Rand’s need for heartless editing.) 

That’d be the last time I’d ever here Rush again—unforced anyway. Their creep into rock radio was, however, already tragically underway.

I do get why suburban cracker boys worshipped them. They looked like them – the boys left in the grass after the teams were chosen. Rush is The Revenge of the Nerds in band form. (They were famously not a great attractor of groupies.) Rush fanboys may be blinded by the band’s technical proficiency. And the haters, they say, will never understand music as deeply intellectual and arcane—like some kind of Masonic David Foster Wallace. Guitarist and drummer—Alex Lifeson (nee Zivojinovich) and Neil Elwood Peart, respectively, always wielded every chop at their disposal at every opportunity. If they were playing actual axes they could’ve deforested the Great White North long ago. Some of their mid-period work got rather fusiony (like YYZ), and deftly so. I’ll give that to them: Props for platinum-selling an otherwise unpopular, esoteric, and meandering genre to the multitudes.

The Fanboy zeal has allowed Peart to publish a load of books as a writer or co-writer, including seven of fiction. He even has an illustrated quote book. Despite his fan-reputation for “erudite” lyrics, I submit Virtuality (still milking the computer anxiety):

Like a shipwrecked mariner adrift on an unknown sea

Clinging to the wreckage of the lost ship Fantasy

I'm a castaway, stranded in a desolate land

I can see the footprints in the virtual sand

Net boy, net girl

Send your signal 'round the world

Let your fingers walk and talk

And set you free

Geddy would say: “Even I can barely make sense of our concept albums.”

And then, the evolution of the Rush aesthetic: 17 years after their debut album, Geddy Lee matured from his unctuous helium-registers and began to move, at last, into his adult period. While Rush were not Prog innovators, they did help ride its wave into the enormous profitability of Arena Soft-Prog (think Asia, Genesis, Supertramp, Moody Blues). 

With that, the band did something I would’ve thought impossible: they also became less hatable. They became shopping mall music: Whether they went to the mall or the mall came to them is hard to know. Though, until the glorious day when Tom Sawyer takes its spin on the world’s last Classic Rock station, the battle between the haters and the stans will rage on.