K-pop Is Koming

The post below was published in September of 2012. Recently––December of 2012––a brouhaha erupted over Psy's impending performance for President Obama and some lyrics he performed in 2004 regarding deaths caused by the U.S. military in South Korea and around the world. This article from the Guardian U.K. offers some much needed perspective on the situation. Please read.

His moniker is Psy (for Psycho, nee Park Je-Sang or Jaesang). He may not be a part of the Korean pop music scene AKA K-pop, at least he'd rather not think so. In South Korea he is called "The Bizarre Singer." (This passes for bizarre in Korea?) In the U.S. he may also be a sign of things to come. Americans have traditionally had phobias about music with non-English lyrics but this may be changing. I may be attracted to this for all the reasons that I liked the Archie comic as a kid. Archie wasn't handsome or smart, had freckles and red hair (like me), no ball skills, no money, and no friends outside of Jughead. What he did have was the two hottest girls at Riverdale High fighting over him (at least on the covers, inside the books Veronica was usually more blasé). Psy has the chicks and also no illusions about his quotients of coolness, trimness, or danceness. (See him splash in the bath and sit on the toilet.) But who cares? He still has the chicks and the most virulently watched video in K-pop history. He may also something of a subversive in Korea (see link below).

I was alerted to this video by my 14 year old daughter. She is part of the post-modern generations that care nothing about gay marriage, cultural miscegenation, or music with lyrics that can't be understood. Perhaps they are the Brave New World at last. That should keep the Tea Partiers awake at night.





The Atlantic looks into Psy and gives some context to his video here. Adult son and his 60 year old mother bust a move Gangnam Style here.

Addendum: The records-keeping authority announced Friday morning that Psy’s Gangnam Style broke the record for “Most Likes on YouTube” with 2,141,758. That breaks the previous record set by LMFAO’s Party Rock Anthem (1,574,963), Justin’s Bieber’s Baby (1,327,147) and Adele’s Rolling in the Deep (1,245,641). (It should also be noted that Psy is edging close to 100,000 dislikes as well.) Gangnam also has racked up 227 million views [over 823 million by Nov 25], which puts it just outside of YouTube’s list of the 30 most-viewed videos ever. [Gangham Style is now the Most Viewed Video Ever.] Postscript to the addendum: Gangnam Style now has the distinction of being the first video to break the billion mark.

Addendum excursus, etc: Gangnam is now moving into future trivial pursuit territory. Proof is this Berkerly, CA based Korean-American group giving Psy the Nouvelle Vague treatment. Together, the group is adorable but the girl is adorable cubed. Her hand gestures are just so.

In praise of cranky old geniuses

This has been making the rounds: With furrowed brows and evermore furrowed face, Dylan obliged yet another The Rolling Stone Interview, this time in support of his newest album. And that furrowed aspect of that face––the gestural lining, the graying cloud of hair, and the more recent addition of a mustache that is the car salesman's version of debonair––is very much in effect in his words. But then Dylan has always been more dark matter than shining star. As a guy edging ever closer to overripe maturity myself, I have nothing but respect for the old guys who can still deliver big––Leonard Cohen, Noam Chomsky, Richard Dawkins, Ian McKellen, etc. (sorry Clint)––and Dylan, now 71, delivers here epically.

The newsy red meat from the interview has been popping up on the interwebs news sources like juiced time lapsed mushrooms. That old crank Mr. Zimmerman just brought slavery fresh into the national conversation again! And, yes, his music referenced the material of others as have many other songwriters in history in a longstanding musical tradition: To this he responds, appropriately: So what of it, m*****f*****? If the new record Tempest has half as much salt and spice as the interview then handle this disc like you would a jalapeña pepper: It may leave some eye-searing burn on your on your fingers. See what all the fuss is about here.

Slightly less geriatric but none the less for it, is one of my favorite bands of all time, Television, heard in a vintage performance captured in their fully muscled prime from 1977 and available for download at Aquarium Drunkard, a blog I humbly submit as one of the best and longest running music sites around. Better yet, if you've been deprived of the experience of this band up till now, then hear it here, now. I've had a crush on this record since discovering it in high school. For me, this record is a rare diamond, un-occluded from start to finish. Really. It's that m*****f***ing good.

Roxy served raw a la 1973

Roxy Music: One of the great twisted voices of the 70s whose musical skid marks were left all over the 80s. They were a band that understood the importance of total integration of branding. In their early period, as evidenced below, their every aspect was a highly overdriven exercise in style: music, hair, make up, glittery fashion, PR, graphics, ambiance, milieu, and all with a quotient of cool as envisioned through a group of mascaraed, ersatz art school twinks. They were stylistically glam and yet miles away from it. They bore vestiges of prog yet had none of its excess or pretension. They had the insolence of punk and the self consciousness of New Wave at a time when New Wave was only used to describe French cinema. Their songs represented shovelfuls of music hall, cabaret, vaudville, showtunes, a thimbleful of The Beatles, and generous dollops of misappropriated Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Blue Cheer. And all of it done in a way that was quintessentially British.

Later on they'd smooth out the kinks and become the sleekly mature and buttoned up sound so favored by the AOR mainstream (see Avalon). It was a respectable move but nowhere near the prime of their kinkier origins. In 1973, their glory was in those kinks. You should love them if you don't already.

See here for an earlier post on one of the great songs from their early mid-period.

1) Do the Strand
2) Editions of You
3) In Every Dream Home A Heartache
4) Re-Make/Re-Model



Thanks to Dangerous Minds and Art Chantry for the prompt.

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.

Reconnecting with Tissue

Those of us growing up in Southern California during 1978-1983 may remember the Long Beach-based Suburban Lawns. Their rise accelerated and gained certain acutity when Jonathan Demme (Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia) directed their first video Gidget Goes to Hell. A happenstance that no doubt had everything to do with it being aired on Saturday Night Live. Local radio airplay and print attention followed (their Slash cover at right) leading to a respectably successful album (by local band standards). The Lawns are also one of the few bands of the period that in retrospect don't come off as hopelessly dated. (Or, like all of 80s music, for that matter.) To prove the point, check the local bounty of material available at this site.

The Suburban Lawns sound eschewed the trendy posturings of digital synths and de riguer flanged guitars. making the sound practically classic rock by today's standards. And singer/keyboardist Su Tissue herself (nee Sue McLane), with all her quirks, conceits, vocal sound effects and coloratura—a kind of bottled-up Yoko Ono—still sounds innovative. Features that keep the band's sound as perky and collagen fresh as it was when it was recorded. You might think Tissue's vocal stylings were a mirror to her soul as her onstage persona radiated both an extremity of adorableness and a nerd-like unsocialized quality. Clearly, the band was far less interesting when she wasn't behind the mic. (She was a good piano player too.) Her personal style had its adherents: One fan described her as able "to pull off of a remarkable mix of Little House on the Prairie meets the Manson Girls, beautifully." (I don't agree with the sinister angle of the Manson family, but okay.) Google the band now and find a robust amount of ongoing interwebs activity: Their cult is still very much alive. A legacy that's owed all to her.



The band's complete canon included a couple of singles, an album, and a five song EP before the internal momentum fizzled out. The final recordings pointed toward interesting new possibilities, a kind of Cocteau Twins cum slightly funkier Bowie-Eno trilogy direction, but with more humor. Post-Lawns, Tissue continued studying at the Berklee College of Music (after earlier attending Calarts—poor little rich girl) and recorded a short album of ambient instrumental music—30 minutes of slight variations on a groovey piano figure with added layers of ambiance (done in the days before digital loops). It would've made an arresting soundtrack to a wistful French film at a seaside. All of this would've had us hoping for bigger things to come from her. Alas, it was not to be.

A recent interview with former member Frankie Ennui offers some insight. Find it here.
An original pic sleeve of Gidget Goes to Hell is on eBay for $55.

All of these should be long out of print now.
Download:

Suburban Lawns: Gidget Goes to Hell self-issued 7" inch single (1979)

Suburnan Lawns: Baby from Baby EP (1983)

Su Tissue: 2nd Movement from Salon de Musique (1982)

A personal note: Once, I was in a band. We had the opportunity to open for Suburban Lawns at the Cuckoos Nest in Costa Mesa, CA ca. 1981. The Lawns at the time were getting loads of local air play. As was often the case, I'd have school and work the next day (community college, no Calarts for me) so I'd gather up my equipment (an organ and electric piano/harpsichord [pre-digital], a guitar, an amp, cords and sundry other crap that'd require five trips to the car to load) and leave early as was my habit. (During my time we'd play with Jonathon Richman, Violent Femmes, X, The Go-Gos, and other bands long gone from memory. I'd leave before they all went on too. Yeah, I was a fool.) The club was quite packed that night (we didn't often get to play to full houses so it was very exciting—it was the peak of my very, very short musical career). We did very well that night. The audience was loud and enthusiastic and we were beside ourselves. (Our band was also co-ed: two girls and three boys.) Our success had apparently unraveled Ms. Tissue. She paced around the "backstage" loft before going on and talked to herself unconsolably in a kind of repetitive Rain Man way. (This was a secondhand account told to me by another band member.) I could only attribute her reaction to her highly creative and requisitely insecure artistic nature. I never got the chance to see her live but from what I've seen on YouTube, while the band was certainly interesting they could appear a little stiff on stage. As a young man admiring Tissue from afar, she was a nerd's lust fetish of a girl: Cute, physically awkward, unpretentiously brilliant (I'm guessing), socially clumsy, and just diffident enough in ways that young men can ruthlessly exploit (again, I'm guessing). I'm sure I would've loved her. Even now, imagining her in her overripe suburban middle-age with pictures of the kids covering the dust-covered piano she's still the thinking older man's bohemian heartthrob.

Taking liberties with Libertango

Did you ever have to go digging into academic journals for research? Then you know of their prison romance with language: the overuse of overlong words and arcana, words bent, twisted, and hammered into misuse, and language generally used as camouflage. From my experience, art journals are some of the worst offenders of all. (Once, a professor red-inked a friend's paper to "eschew sesquipedalianism." Or said another way: Try using smaller words and bigger ideas. Indeed.) But, if you do have to slog through the art journals in the course of your career then I recommend the Dadaist and Surrealist periods as some of the cleverest noodlings ever committed in the service of Ivory Tower shop talk. A favorite image of mine comes from French poet Comte de Lautréamont AKA Isidore Ducasse: As beautiful as the chance encounter on an ironing board of a sewing machine and an umbrella. For me, a description of how the beauty of words and images of art can, in the best circumstances, make both order and logic irrelevant.

A sewing machine and an umbrella in this case are not unlike the collision between Astor Piazzola and Grace Jones: He being the master of the Nuevo Tango (a mix of tango with jazz) and a demigod of Argentina (so you'll hear in the video below)—and she being the Jamaican-born dance club diva, actress, model, muse, proclaimed friend of Piazzola, erstwhile scenemaker, and general all style bombardier. Libertango is far and away the most most significant tango ever composed, having found its way into about 500 different recorded releases (according to Wiki). This lyrical version, dubbed I've Seen that Face Before, was a hit for Jones in 1981. Well beyond the tango, Libertango is, to my mind, quite likely one of the greatest melodies ever written, anywhere. As a dance, the tango can be like the Kama Sutra on stilts. As a rhythm, its roots are both of Europe and Africa—Africa being the key ingredient to any dance with a sexy wiggle in it. At times the tango takes on a marchy 2/4 beat, but it's a march that walks with a hard on. Though, it's a sexiness that can't be separated from the images of the dance. What Grace Jones did with her version here—the more rigid tango-iness smoothed out, its hide retooled like a vaquero's leather bandolero, and all of it pierced through with an electrocuted club beat—leaving behind a teasing amount of the original melody but with just enough of its own substance to keep things at an intriguing throb. Kind of like the joke comparing sex and pizza: Even when the song is bad it's still pretty good.



Jones was 61 at the time of this performance. Her near golden age voice is still punchy though it ventures closer to Rock of Ages territory than it might've when she still wore a fade. Even still, she seizes the stage with a lusty bravado that her younger peers would have to admire. And fer crissake!, this grandma is wearing a thong!

During her peak in the 80s Jones created a niche for her take on dance club music that drew on slightly more hipster source material—Iggy Pop, Roxy Music, The Pretenders, Edith Piaf—as well as a battery of horny entendre-loaded, synth drenched joints of her own. With her Jean Paul Goude get-ups, iconic style, and ever-present chat show spectacle, she cut a refreshingly notorious figure. If you care nothing for her music, you've still got to admire her durable and unshrinking image.

Here, below, is a more traditional take on the Libertango melody presented in a geeked-up, dry hump musical fantasy. (Here, Yo Yo Ma's even more straight ahead version—minus the hump.) The jagged and yet hypnotic quality of the Libertango melody brings visions of crotch-grinding and high slit leg flashes while still needing nothing of the tango itself to melt all on its own. The song is utterly universal: I can't imagine how anyone, anywhere couldn't love this tune. Just can't. Surrender and just dig it.



That Kama Sutra on stilts in case you need reminding: