A Wandering Grayhead in the Millennials’ Swamp, Vol 3

Angel Olsen, Lilianna Saumet (Bomba Estereo), PJ Harvey

Old man meets new music: Here are the results.

21) Brian Jonestown Massacre, Seven Kinds of Wonderful (2012): Not sure what’s going on here, if what we’re hearing is a sample of the advertised Tess Parks’ vocalizations or something else. The warbling lines of the female vocals intermixed with the flutey sounds and the synth string pads form a nice lattice of support for the groove. The lyrics are French which, having no idea what they mean, sound preachy and sexy at the same time – like being scolded by your teacher crush.




22) Ought, Pleasant Heart (2014): Formed in 2011 in Montreal, Ought was immediately greeted with gushing praise from Pitchfork and others. The plucked rage of the guitars, the stumbling drunk drum beat, and the fatigue in the vocals all convey well that pained and stressed sound that guitar rock does so much better than anything else on the planet. The unobtrusive and eery keyboards add effective atmosphere. It’s not a pleasant sound but one that makes an appropriate soundtrack to the loathing of a toxic working life.



23)  Preoccupations, Continental Shelf (2015): Yet another from Canada – Calgary in this case: The ambiance of Continental Shelf is as wide and inhospitable as the Canadian tundra itself. The guitars add a welcome but strained orchestral backdrop and offer just the right platform for the down-spiraling lyrics.

When all is said and done/You'll be around until you're gone
Crystallized, canceled eyes/Illegitimate merchandise

The band was originally named Viet Cong, a name that was a far more interesting choice, I thought. But, alas, one that proved to be too controversial – claims were made that it was “racist” and “culturally appropriating.” Gigs were canceled over it. Old wounds and their denials of the war period still live on, it appears. Given the United States and Canada’s involvement in the Viet Nam debacle – but only Canada on the low – you’d think people might have a more enlightened appreciation of the reference. But, sadly, that’s not the world we live in.



24) Dilly Dally, Know Yourself (2018): What’s up with Canada? Dilly Dally hails from Toronto. This Drake cover pushes away the THC clouds of the original and moves the needles into the red where they should be. Her scream is a delight.



25) White Lung, Dead Weight (2016): Continuing the trek across the inhospitable North: last stop Vancouver. Usually, it’s the vocals that are the vector of the best in punk. The spitting mouth being the proper and most direct font of the most effective rage. And in between the screamed lyrics, some light thrown into the dark corners of our messy urbanized existence. The rest of the accompaniment is generally perfunctory but the listener goes with it. This was famously the case with the Ramones. 

Not so with White Lung – that guitar player is the messenger here. He eschews the crunchy buzzsaw chords that are standard issue and goes for a more fluid, surreal kind of gloss. He’s digging into new territory and it elevates the otherwise generic proceedings into something far more noteworthy.



26) Flying Lotus, Never Catch Me featuring Kendrick Lamar (2019): Flying Lotus is the stage name of Steven Ellison. Beat music is what it’s called. I’m guessing that hip hop doesn’t apply here because of Ellison’s style involves a more intricate and academic musicality, much more than isolated and repeated grooves and oblique jazz references that we usually come to understand as the form. I also hear many tips of the hat to Parliament/Funkadelic and for me it’s about f--kin’ time. The sound Ellison drops here sparkles down like mylar confetti interspersed with streamers of fuller themes, plus a few leans toward what might be considered avant-garde.

This may be the future so we’d better get used to it.




27) Bomba Estereo, Fuego (2008): From Columbia and as sexy as only someone saying exotic stuff you don’t understand in a dayglo bikini top can be. (Props to the bilingual!)




28) Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band, Waiting for the D Train (2009): AllMusic called her “one of the most gloriously influential and notorious women in the history of rock.” She’s likely the most reviled non-political public figure in history. No one has endured more ire and condemnation for so little. She’ll forever be the Dragon Lady and Beatle-killer to many. Her childhood was ruled by upheaval and racism–moved to the U.S. from Japan during WWII where she was hated, returned to Japan, tainted by her American experience and was hated. Her very life has been an act of resistance.

Her art was often confrontational but joyful too. Her music could be difficult, her vocals pitchy, and words too often treacly and a wee patronizing in that heavy-handed, drugstore greeting card way. Though she’s had her moments, including a few great ones. Her album Between My Head  and the Sky was written “in six days and recorded quickly.” And she was 76 (!) at the time. What have your grandparents done lately?

I once dug deeper into Ono’s backstory here.



29) Silvia Pérez Cruz with Raúl Fernández Miró, Carabelas Nada (2014): The Spanish Cruz (b. 1983) works a variety of genres including fado, jazz, native folk, and flamenco. Her style tends toward the eclectic and goes between hard and a MOR* kind of soft. (Hear a softer treatment of the same song here.) For me, it’s the harder stuff that’s the more interesting, as is this one.

*Middle Of the Road



30) PJ Harvey and John Parish, My Black Hearted Love (2009): Deep in her career when a less alloyed artist might be spinning toward creative entropy, Harvey voices this masterpiece.



Bonus! Angel Olsen, Lark (2019): The brilliant if overwrought histrionics of the orchestrations grabbed me right away. Wiki claims she grew up listening to punk, noise, and Christian “rock.” She clearly has a record collection loaded with 80s selections – probably also spent some time with her parents’ Joni Mitchell records.

Yoko Still Loco

As far as I'm concerned that's a good thing. I've made my case for Yoko before but what's even more remarkable now is that she's still blowing her trademark electrocuted banshee wail at the crinkly age of 80!

With Sean in the band and her characteristic warble intact, Yoko continues to spread the hippie love and peace message 50 years later and, goddammit, bless her indefatigable spunk.

Dum Dum Girls do Ono

While on the subject (see previous post), here's a band of four young glamorpusses doing a tribute to Ono's legendary Cut Piece (originally performed in 1964 and more recently in 2003).



An even more glamorpuss take on the band can be seen in this video.

A film of Ono perfoming Cut Piece.

A description of the piece:
Ono’s work related destruction to interpersonal, often intimate, human relations. This element was particularly thought-provoking in Cut Piece. Ono sat motionless on the stage after inviting the audience to come up and cut away her clothing, covering her breasts at the moment of unbosoming. Cut Piece entailed a disrobing, a denouement of the reciprocity between exhibitionism and scopic desires [scopic being a belabored way of saying the experience that the subject goes through in its interaction with the other] between victim and assailant, between sadist and masochist: and, as a heterosexual herselft, Ono unveiled the gendered relationship of male and female subjects as objects for each other. Kristine Stiles, 1998

Yoko Oh No

Long before she encountered that Beatle, Yoko Ono blazed a brilliant kind of trajectory of her own. Art critic Peter Frank described her this way:

Well before she emerged into popular awareness as John Lennon's wife, Yoko Ono had established herself in vanguard art and music circles as one of the most daring, innovative and eccentric artist-performers of her time. As one of the founders of the Fluxus movement at the beginning of the 1960s, Ono helped identify and define the playful, subversive, visionary sensibility that has undergirded experimentation in all the arts ever since. Her poem-like verbal scores, her films, and her staged performances anticipated everything from minimalism to performance art, the furthest reaches of new cinema to the most extreme of Punk-New Wave music.

That legacy is mostly pushed aside next to her role as Beatles destroying dragon lady. Of course, this isn't true. That story would be far more complicated. Certainly she didn't deserve much of the grief and slime flung at her, then or now. (Ono addresses this point with her critics in her song Yes, I'm a Witch [1974].) The truth is, she never shaped John Lennon into anything he didn't want to be. (A much stronger defense of her can be seen here.) Granted, she has never been well understood. According to the tattling memoir of a former employee, she may've been more interested in her own musical ambitions than Lennon's. (Ono had already performed at Carnegie Hall in 1961.) Though, for her part, she would give Lennon access to the art world. Where Ono's life or work are concerned it's fair to say that none of it gains much favor with only a cursory understanding. (Like the artist herself, her work is both severely complicated and extremely simple.) What she did have was enough force of personality to be able stand with—with, not behind—one of the strongest artistic characters of the 20th century. (Lennon's first wife Cynthia accused him of an attraction to strong women, and in less charitable moments, having a "mommy complex.") As an artist, in fact, Lennon claimed it was her work that influenced him. (Lyrics for Imagine came as a result of reading her book Grapefruit, he would say.) She made him happy in a way no one else did or could; clearly, he was smitten. But for the legacy of her own work, that may have been better served had she never met him.

(And who hasn't fallen in love at least once in their life with someone their family and friends didn't like?)

In 1970 John and Yoko, along with Ringo on drums and Beatle cohort Klaus Voorman on bass, recorded a group of songs in one improvised session. (One imagines Ringo shaking his head in disbelief from the stool.) With an additional session with avant jazzer Ormette Coleman, the sessions would become the Plastic Ono Band album. Ono's vocals were a series of abstract screams, shrieks, and various throaty calesthenics forged into a kind of vocal tsunami (and a little like the break in Surfin' Bird). In Japanese musical tradition this is very much like hetai, a style born out of Kabuki theater. One critic described her vocals as Zen vaudeville. 

Upon its release the album found little critical support (although, notably, Lester Bangs and a few others would disagree). You can see how Lennon's audience might have thought she was stealing his head. What's particularly noteworthy about this piece, besides Ono, is Lennon's most un-Beatle like guitar playing, a style wild and raging with abandon like Tomorrow Never Knows played through a randomizer. It's easy to see how the collective jaws of Beatles' fans might've hit the floor.

It would be at least 10 years later that some of the material here served as a style guide for a more experimental wave. Upon hearing the The B-52s (admitted Ono fans) even John Lennon was surprised how mainstream her influence had reached.

As it turns out, Ono's life story was loaded with even more tribulation than her singing: Her sensibility and character may be easier to understand once you know that it was forged out of a life of upheaval and coming of age as a constant outsider. The fact that her artwork explores the engagement of both the audience and artist's self-immolation makes much more sense.

The first time I heard Why? I was floored. Even all these years later, it's still flooring—it's music as emotional karate. The fact that John Lennon would embrace this stuff only speaks better of him.

 Maybe Zen slapstick would be the better description.

What I think we should do in life is to keep dancing rather than marching. Yoko Ono, 2009

Just discovered this: Yoko and John onstage with Frank Zappa and the Mothers for an off the cuff performance. May give some hint as to why Yoko wasn't, er, fully appreciated. (Note how some members of the band go Ono at the end.) John is unfazed. Clearly, Yoko is fearless.