Music that Matters, pt 5

42. Naked City, Latin Quarter: Naked City figurehead and instigator John Zorn is another one of those mad geniuses who has far more respectability than listeners. His is music as conceptual art. Zorn describes the music of Naked City as akin to the experience of turning the dial on your radio (for those who remember what that might've sounded like). This song represents Naked City lite but it's good description of what they do: changing tempo, rhythm, mood, and volume abruptly and often jarringly, not unlike the WeeGee photos featured on the cover (see above). The band loves to go from melodic sweetness to violent anarchic noise on a dime. Naked City is a bipolar thought experiment that wants to expand the possibilities and boundaries of art and pretty much does.

43. Blonde Redhead, I Still Get Rocks Off: Critics have categorized their sound variously over the years but I find such labels mostly useless. Twin Italian-born, Montreal-raised males and a Japanese female living in New York is probably as good a description as anything else. Add heavy strains of Europeanness, a deep sack of smart influences too difficult to trace, cool embroidered guitars, astute drumming and the resulting sound is unlike whatever you're used to––which is a good thing. Plus, I think a girl singing about getting her "rocks off" is just a plain great idea––a whole onion's worth of subtext worth peeling there. I've loved this band since the beginning and they've never disappointed.

Here's the song with diced up random Tarantino images that're pointless but seem to work anyway.



44. Yoko Ono, Plastic Ono Band; Why?: I make my case here.

45. Television, Marquee Moon: A brief comment made earlier here but to add: I still regularly listen to this album from 1977 and submit that it's still as good as it ever was. This is the essence of a classic sound––musicianship from both heart and head, a sound too wiley to categorize, lyrics both smart and abstract that avoid the topical, guitarsguitarsguitars, and a rhythm section that kicks the ass of your rhythm section. No one ever got laid because they were in this band but, to paraphrase Tom Wolfe, the glistening nodules and stiffening giblets will explode in your mind and not your pants and that's OK. They may just be the Stephen Hawking of Garage Rock.

46. David Bowie, Let's Spend the Night Together: I often argue that Bowie's career has produced more A-list albums than just about anybody. Someone then may counter with "What about Neil Young?" Of course, a reasonable argument could be made for Young but not on my compass. For me, Bowie's ingenious reworking of this warhorse goes interstellar when Mike Garson's piano comes in. Garson is one of those supremely chopped jazzers who often get creatively manacled with their own impressive technique. Jazz is full of guys like that (Stanley Clarke, Al Dimeola, etc). Somehow Bowie wisely foresaw the magnitude of possibility in their collaboration. Garson is amazing elsewhere on this album too (Aladdin Sane, Lady Grinning Soul) as his piano strikes ring with the caliber of an anti-aircraft gun. That he'd later go kind of obnoxious on David Live is OK because the sludgy viscosity of the chords here––which are as close to heavy metal as a piano gets––are worth whatever his other misdeeds. Also: THIS is what a cover song should sound like.

47. Ian Hunter, eponymous first album, the first three on side one: I was in middle school when this came into my life and those first three may've been my virginal teenage version of kundalini. They flew off the record like a flurry following an Ali Shuffle in good part because of the combustible petards of Mick Ronson's space-age Chuck Berryisms. As a singer I think Hunter is way underrated––his combination of unctuous ardor and male bravado with a thick slathering of humor are the true heart of rock and roll. (Elvis understood this once, briefly.) Arguably, for Hunter and Ronson both this was a career high point. (See a promo for Once Bitten Twice Shy from 1975 here; Who Do You Love and Lounge Lizard.)

48. Afghan Whigs, Fountain and Fairfax: I've often made the argument that anger and despair make for the best kind of art. This album could be that argument's quintessential case study. Greg Dulli wrote a great record about the many cuts one makes on the double blade of drunkeness and the bitter despair contained in this cocktail is masterful and as rancidly fresh as can be––when the bandages are pulled off they're going to be dirty. A great album but Fountain and Fairfax is its jagged peak. (A rousing version of the aforementioned and another song, Going to Town, here.)

49. Julie Driscoll and Brian Auger, Indian Rope Man: Julie Driscoll was a swingin' London chick with a face like Twiggy and a voice like a soul sister virago. Her taste for ultra-mod hairdressers and trendy stylists didn't mean that she wasn't the real thing. England produced several of these white chick singers that never quite caught on in the U.S. and maybe it's because compared to the bad ass American soul singers of the time they were a little fey. Still, Julie deserved her place and her timely hybrid of psychedelic R and B has aged remarkably well. Brian Auger for his part was quite the Hammond chopper and together they cooked some spicy noodlings. Indian Rope Man was one:




50. The Byrds, So You Wanna Be a Rock and Roll Star: Production may be the invisible hand that propels greatness into immortality. How many beloved Beatles songs are just so because of the acute production layers? (To wit, the Indian sounding gamaks of Baby You're a Rich Man––an explanation of some of the magic here.) So, when a folky (and later, country) outfit like The Byrds hang some trumpet and latin percussion onto a great riff and McGuinn's brilliant nude-descending-a-staircase style lead guitar, it raises an otherwise Top 40 ditty to the everlasting life of a classic.

51. Violent Femmes, Country Death Song: Murder ballads probably go back to the time of medieval troubadours: Tuneful tales designed to be compelling enough to loosen coins from reluctant pockets. Gordon Gano goes beyond troubadour here and sings this song as if he were making a confession. Maybe one of the greatest murder ballads ever. And according to this, he wrote it when he was in 10th grade! This song––and album––may have the dubious honor of inspiring many a lessor band, but here pushing a child down a well has never been so chill-worthy.

2013: The Year We Made It Possible

People who know me––or any reader of this blog––knows that I'm not one for puffy platitudes or buffed-up optimisms. That doesn't mean I don't believe there aren't rosebuds to be gathered, coffee to be huffed, and days to be seized––and today would be a good one. The first step in a blister-inducingly long journey ahead that, whether we end up where we'd planned, is worth going on because it's the going that transforms us. Another weekend medicating in front of the TV with the complete seasons of some industrial entertainment ain't the way there: Bet on that. But, to go somewhere we've never been, to expose some new part of ourselves in a new project, to endeavor to better understand the people around us, as well as the plentitude of new music and books to devour, that may very well be. It's worth the experiment. 

The world gets better one individual at a time: That could be us. Believe this: It won't come delivered by a man wearing a suit. Do something new and love it. Let's make 2013 the year when we didn't wait.  

Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.  Picasso

The Girl From Ipanema, in Body and Song

Her voice is as cool and mildly effervescent as champagne left overnight in the bucket. Nearly subdued to the point of sedation with a tone that dances on the flat side of the notes, Astrud Gilberto appears to have absorbed all the confident insouciance of the Carioca girl of whom she sings. Add to this that ultra cool saxophone––the archetype of sex and titillation going back to the days of burlesque––that in the mouth of Stan Getz gets a full porn work out. Add a pulsing samba rhythm –– samba, possibly an Arabic word corrupted in Portuguese, translates as a “blow struck to the belly button area”–– and you may've the sexiest song ever recorded on the subject of a stalker’s blue balls. (The man who watches the Girl walk by “each day,” smiles while developing a festering “love” for her could warrant a restraining order.)

The song apparently represented more than just someone's wet projection of a Brazilian babe. The composers admit it was inspired by an actual person and her name was Helô Pinheiro (pic at top). Pinheiro would’ve been a girlish 19 when the song was written. After the song was a big hit, it went on to be the Brazilian bossa nova standard (originally released in 1962) and possibly the second most recorded song in pop history. Pinheiro would attempt to capitalize on some of that success. Being the Girl led to modeling gigs, public appearances, her own boutique named for the song (Garota de Ipanema), and posing for Playboy twice (in her less girlish years): once as a Playmate (1987 at age 44) and again in a pictorial featuring her with her daughter (in 2003, she would’ve been a ripe and cougarish 60): As seen here at right––The Brazilian Waxes of Ipanema––even as a grandma she’s still tall, tan, and very tappable.

This just in: Want to see what she looks like in a bikini at age 63?

Thanks to the blog Crying All the Way from the Chip Shop for the heads up.

Music that Matters, pt 4

32. Sam Cooke, Bring It on Home to Me: There's a long tradition of wordless yelping in music, that space where no word can express the inexpressible so well as an unadorned jet of hard wind thru the pipes. I love this song for so many reasons but especially this: Before every refrain of "bring it to me" both Cooke and Lou Rawls launch a long, loud "Oh!" For me, this is the highest form of prayer; What sums it up better for our Maker than that?

33. Sparks, Propaganda: From 1974 but ageless. Helium-fueled vocals no one else on earth could sing over intricate melodies that keep the music's skin taut and wrinkle-free after all these years. My sister thought they sounded like a bad dream (she said that a lot about my record collection) and she was probably right. But once we begin our working life the dreams are mostly bad anyway; better to marry with it a melody that could raise you up like a meat hook.

Something for the Girl with Everything on German TV done sometime in the 70s.

And for those who don't know Sparks, this:


34. Piano: I once took piano lessons so I'm a little predisposed to the keys. For my money the piano is the coolest drum ever invented and in the imaginations of Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Scott Joplin, Gershwin, Scriabin, Schoenberg, Janacek, etc, it is the voice of God and not Patrick Stewart or Morgan Freeman like some people may think.

35. Blind Faith: As a child I loved this record from the first listen, a deep melancholy resonance riveted together with great hooks. I always thought Stevie Winwood sounded like he was singing through a mouthful of spicy Pad Thai. As inspiredly crappy as his elocution was, for me it only made his voice all the better. Every song on this record is brilliant; Nearly as enchanting to me as was the naked pubescent girl holding the vintage hood ornament on the cover. (The whole friggin' album can be heard here.)

36. Gang of Four, If I Could Be: Electric guitar had been around for, what, 40 years?, and then this guy comes along. A guitar that sounds like a combination of Don King's hair and growling dogs and unlike anyone else. Anxious white Brit funk with perfect proportions of dissonance and polyrhythms that's neither derivative nor inauthentic; How'd they do that? Who knows, but they did.

37. Carlos Santana & Buddy Miles Live, Them Changes: This Buddy Miles song was decent enough in its earlier incarnations but this version from '72—both in Santana's latinate grooves and punchy rhythm guitar and Buddy's testifying soul shouts that are the vocal equivalent of a Marshall stack—is beyond stellar. Buddy's nearly supernatural screams may only have two or three recorded peers in existence (that I know of). Also, usually a singer's shouts of "say yeah!" are worth little more than eye rolls for the pandering salt licks they are, but here they're utterly brilliant. May've been the career peak for both of them.

38. Creedence Clearwater Revival, Bayou Country: These guys were monstrous when I was a kid. They were in advance of grunge by 30 years and more authentic than the whole of it by at least 100. Fogerty's solo on Born on the Bayou was the quintessential example of Blues Theft 101, no machine gun runs of blazing notes just the guitar solo as haiku narrative. Another reason this record is branded into my psyche: I was 11 years old at our neighbors' Fourth of July party when one of the girls the host and I had been flirting with all night (in the typical under-cover-of-teasing pre-adolescent style) began dancing with a couple of drunk adults in front of the living room stereo. This record played and suddenly on the hips of this beskirted, giggly girl the world changed forever. (Bootleg here.)

39. Thin White Rope, Sackful of Silver: There are many records you learn to love over time, kind of like in an arranged marriage. For me, Sackful was more like the drunken hook up you still wanted to wake up with 10 years later. Their nary-a-keyboard, dual guitar sound carved through with mid-range tempos and streamlined rhythms may've been the de rigueur of 90s alt rock but their harder and darker version was more gestalt than alt––less Sunny Day Real Estate and more Swans (they did cover Can after all). It's a combination of a-fifth-and-two-packs vocal rasps and the clean-and-sober melodic lead guitar lines that can still, to carry on the metaphor, make the bed springs squeak. (On the Floe here.)

40. The Isley Brothers, Fight the Power: Punk rock as testifying shout from 1975; there wouldn't have been enough coke in the world to even make Rick James this punk funky. These guys love to sing even when they're telling you how pissed off they are. The whole of side one is so dense with hard beats, funky synth curlicues, and let-baby-brother-play-like-Jimi riffs that not even gamma rays could pass through. This record should've influenced a whole generation of guitar hard soul bands but didn't. Maybe the problem was the fluffy ballads stuck on side two. Still, a great one-sided record.

41. Funkadelic, Tales of Kidd Funkadelic: These guys also should've influenced generations of bands, black rock especially, but their anorexic legacy has been criminally small (save the Chili Peppers, Prince, & a few others). Wiki credits them as funk fathers: Maybe, but I think they transcend standard forms. (Should sampling count as an influence?) In the early days they were equal parts funk and psychedelia and didn't really jack their stiz until the five albums of the '73 - '76 period. Funkadelic's deep bench included a busload of great guitar players and singers, some James Brown refugees, madman George Clinton, and the amazing Bernie Worrell who steals the show often (how many times is that said about a synth player?). Salted with absurdist humor and inspired insanities, a batch of great riffs, a canon of songs begging to be covered, and those great Pedro Bell covers––they were a band as a brand and one hell of one at that. (I'm Never Gonna Tell It here.)

RIP Dave

A little late on the tribute wagon: The brilliant Brubeck and Quartet bangin' through one of his iconic tunes while on a magic carpet ride over the picturesque freeways of Los Angeles ca. 1962. Dig that mellow Paul Desmond sax tone: smoother than a hookah.

The Abstract Sexy of Björk

I love Björk (pronounced something like B-yerk). She being that rebelliously creative, adorably gifted singer-songwriter from the land of ghosts, elves and various huldufolk. She the ruler of an untouchable realm whose greatest natural resource is that voice. I love how she's at once beautiful and delicate as a flower and yet as rough and impervious as rhino skin. To my eye she's also spectacularly sexy and mysterious in that cold clime, northern hemisphere kind of way. I love that she's a mom. I love her cool website, her technophilia, that her new album is called Biophilia, and her heartbreaking performance in Dancer in the Dark. (I love that she streams her new multimedia remix album. Hear it here and other places.)

I'll admit I haven't listened to her in some years. I love her first two albums but for all the reasons listed above her music can also be difficult––a little too heady when a little more heart would do. Not that we shouldn't envy what that head can do. And that's not to say her songs aren't created with enormous passion––her passion is all over the place. It would have to be to follow a muse so otherworldly and personal as hers. She could've easily pandered a career from star producers wanting to trade up her fame and fortune by churning out mainmstream techno-ditties. Instead, she chose a more challenging path, an aspect that only adds more bonafides as to why she's so bitchin'. Maybe it's my fault. Maybe I'm too western hemisphere, too Southern California to at times find her work nearly as cold and remote as her native Iceland. She's kind of like William Burroughs of icy alt-pop: Highly respected by legions, understood by few.

Whatever. I still love her. Here's her latest video. It's sexy but in a very imagistic and abstract way. It's throbs with tumescence and glistens with fiery fluids. Writhing and pulsating thingies float and erupt in loin provoking ways, like a Westside Story dance sequence choreographed for spermatozoa. See if it doesn't stimulate your nethers to oozing as well. But in that northern hemispheric, Eyjafjallajökull-fearing kind of way.



Just discovered this: Here, Björk gets gushingly busy with herself with help from machine enhancements. Whew!

"The Most Shocking Music Video of 2012"

Well, according to somebody but you decide.

Continuing with our recent infrequent theme of highlighting world music gaining Western notice, we present Die Antwoord. A duo hailing from South Africa, their Afrikaner heritage may explain why they think blackface is larf-worthy. Hip-hop/rave is the what they're labeling it. You might consider their self-conscious attempts at offense to be funny, naive, or just plain mean but more likely they're a combination of all three. I doubt American artists would be allowed the same satiric liberty or politically incorrect latitude these exotic-born stunts are perpetrating here. (Americans are supposed to be held to a higher standard of multi-culti political correctness, or as I like to call it, sensitivity.) In my estimation their "satire" is about 25 ticks harder than anything Ricky Gervais or old schoolers like In Living Color have served up (wait till you see what they pull out of "Lady Gaga's" whisker biscuit) and they've got more anti-celebrity venom than Eminem, Trey Parker and Matt Stone combined (and cubed). (In one scene note the wall behind them is painted with various celebrity slams.) The group, which may also include an anonymous hooded DJ as a third member, are not above unabashed fronting: Die Antwoord is only one part of a long running series of naked commercial enterprises that includes merchandising and other media projects. They'll readily admit their work is aimed at the market which could make them more than a little cynical. And this doesn't even begin to address the many potential circular layers of colonialist offense here which could be as deep as a slave ship hold: White South Africans appropriating and exploiting a diasporic African American art form into a apparently successful business model with acute self-aware ironies. You might accuse them of having all of the street cred of, say, a Vanilla Ice but they're already way ahead of you––mastermind and leader Ninja can be seen wearing a Vanilla Ice t-shirt in YouTube interviews.



Yo-Landi Vi$$er's girly squeak of a voice––she being the ultra slender, ultra-blond, ultra sex kittenish member of the duo––lends a well chosen incongruousness to the profane and expletive loaded spew. (She and Ninja have more than a business union, they have a child together.)

Here, Die Anwoord responds to their critics which may be as interesting as the work itself.



Just for comparison's sake, here's something generally considered to be grittily authentic. One could argue––as bell hooks does so eloquently––it's a little too snug within the white supremacist-capitalist-misogynist patriarchy view of blackness. Because of their brand of apparent authenticity they got a free ride on grief for the flagrant political-incorrectness. Even courting anti-homophobe and anti-misogyny advocates like Sinead O'Connor as fans.



Another approach: Here the jesterism is more open-eyed and the violent nihilism eschewed for a more good natured parody approach. Alas, such maturity didn't garner them the kind of sales enjoyed by NWA. (Gangsta Rap, a genre in which NWA would be pioneers, despite bell hooks, would prove to be a huge seller.)



Thanks to Josh Morris for bringing this to our attention.