music
>Music has broad shoulders
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Gregg Williard remembers the childhood comforts of movie soundtracks @ Artocratic.
If I said I used to hear particular music all the time, I expect you’d nod with recognition. Maybe, if you’re from my generation, you’d recount how you used to spin Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” or Miles Davis’ “Round About Midnight” until the worn needle skated clean off the vinyl on a dust bunny cloud. Or more recently you’ve programmed your iPod to repeat some Arcade Fire song for 80 hours of obsessive to autistic easy listening. Then I’d say, well, it was even worse, and you’d reassure me that, hey, you’d been there too, maybe citing one of the TV commercial jingles that have jujued generations. Or themes from the ’60s and ’70s such as The Brady Bunch, The Addams Family or Green Acres. Everyone has their own sound worm war stories, right?
Yes. But. The music I heard wasn’t quite like any of that.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )It started on a Friday night at 10:00. I was eight years old. It was the first season of a new TV show called The Twilight Zone. I watched as the optical diaphragm of the CBS eye spiraled open, and heard the first tones of what would become a 40-year-long soundtrack to my life. Like I said, it was music of a very particular kind: not jingles or croons, not my sister’s rock ‘n’ roll or my mother’s classical standards. It was so different that it seemed to be something beyond music itself. It took me a long, stunned time before I thought to watch for the end credits and learn the name after “music by”: Bernard Herrmann.
>Remember the New Romantics?
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Nicky Charlish wonders why the New Romantics lack a literary recognition @ 3 a.m. Magazine.
This January saw a small but select gathering in London’s Covent Garden- the Blitz Club reunion. This wasn’t war veterans reminiscing about the London Blitz when the city was pounded by Nazi bombers night after night during the Second World War but the celebration of a club which played a leading part in the New Romantic scene of 30 years ago. Remember the New Romantics? Blind with mascara and dumb with lipstick, their leaders – singers like Boy George and Adam Ant, bands like Duran Duran and the Human League – cavorted across the nation’s television screens to the accompaniment of ethereal electro music and tedious tabloid shock-horror (’is it a boy or a girl?’). That night, the dance-floor heaved to old New Romantics – and young Neo-Romantics who weren’t even alive the first time around – bopping to tribal favourites like Bowie’s ‘Ashes to Ashes’, Visage’s ‘Fade to Grey’ and Kraftwerk’s ‘The Model’. Onlookers wondered whether all this heralded the return of decadent glamour to the capital’s nightlife.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )But this event raises another question. Almost every youth cult has its novels by which it’s defined, remembered. The Bright Young Things of the 1920s had Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies and Michael Arlen’s The Green Hat. A decade later, Soho’s young criminals had The Gilt Kid by James Curtis. The youth of the Forties didn’t have novels – they’d be remembered by history books and war memorials. The early Mods of the 1950s hadAbsolute Beginners by Colin Maclnnes, whilst the Chelsea Set wide-boys of the Sixties had The Crust on Its Uppers by Robin Cook (later to reinvent himself as crime writer Derek Raymond). The 1970s skinheads would have the Skinhead series of novels by Richard Allen. Given their impact on youth culture – more of this in a moment – you might expect the New Romantics to have been similarly commemorated. But it remains the one cult conspicuous by its absence from literary recognition.
>All art comes from art
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| Greg Salvatori @ GRGphoto/ |
Bill Morris on writing, music, and the origins of originality @ The Millions
Everybody loves a train wreck. This one started when Jonathan Lethem came barreling down the tracks with an essay in Harper’s called “The Ecstasy of Influence,” in which most of the lines were cribbed from other sources and then ingeniously stitched together to argue in favor of appropriation and against the tired old 20th-century notion that an artist owns what he or she makes – that dinosaur known as copyright. Then right behind him on the same tracks cameDavid Shields with last year’s sensational freight train of a book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, an expanded echo of Lethem’s themes made up of a pastiche of Shields’s own words and the words of many other artists. Among Shields’s words: “Reality-based art hijacks its material and doesn’t apologize.”
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Then suddenly – watch out! – along came the little engine that could, Marco Roth chuffing down the tracks in the opposite direction with an essay in the journal n+1 called “Throwback Throwdown,” in which he set out to derail the two speeding locomotives. He called Shields’s book “an authentic act of copying” that fits snugly into the “pervasive and growing fantasy of the writer as hip-hop DJ.” Roth added, “To a certain kind of white writer, engaged in the increasingly professionalized and seemingly ‘nice’ work of churning out novels, poems, essays and reviews, the rapper DJ comes to stand for this brazen, unapologetic appropriator, regardless of whether actual rappers think of themselves as heroes of ‘copyleft,’ Proudhonists of the ghetto.”
>A foreigner on your own soil
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Farrah Merali explores the politics of Palestinian hip-hop @ Maisonnueve.
In Jesus’ hometown there’s an underground hip hop studio. It’s tiny, just the renovated basement of a house, with black eggshell foam glued to the ceiling as makeshift soundproofing. The only hint of the studio’s existence is the colourful graffiti collage on the front door. A pit bull with a pink snout—the studio’s unofficial mascot—is chained up on the veranda, standing guard over the city of Nazareth.
Inside, Adi Krayem is sunk low in his chair, his face illuminated by the glow of two side-by-side computer monitors. As a teenager, Krayem practised rhyming in front of the mirror and devoured Notorious B.I.G lyrics online. He was just sixteen when his group, We7, performed for the first time at a classmate’s birthday party. Now, with one hand on the keyboard and the other holding a freshly-lit Camel, Krayem is mixing We7’s new track. Like much of the group’s music, it’s dark and tragic, a mix of nineties rhythms and Arabic instrumentation. He runs a hand up and down his black baseball cap and bobs his head from side to side, cautiously, testing out the beat. “I think this is it,” he says, pointing at the screen. “Just like that.”
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Turning his head, Krayem yells for Anan Qssem, his tall, bulky bandmate, to come back inside. Soon, a small crowd develops as the band’s entourage hovers around the computer. Their eyes fix on the screen, following the moving sound waves. Then, just like Krayem, they start to bob their heads in an unspoken sign of approval.
>Suavity and charm
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Jeff Ousborne considers the importance of the sound of writing and music @ Talking Writing.
We don’t listen to old pop songs for their subject matter: I love my baby; my baby left me; my baby still loves me; I’m leaving my baby; why doesn’t my baby love me?
We listen to them, in Victorian critic Walter Pater’s words, for the “suavity” and “charm” that “gives them a worth in themselves.”
Suavity and charm: two underused words when we consider the highest aspirations of art. Yet both suggest an effortless, seamless, maybe even magical embodiment of style—in a quicksilvered paragraph from The Great Gatsby, in those terraced arches at the top of the Chrysler Building, or in the filigreed verse of an Elvis Costello song.
In his 1877 essay “The School of Giorgione,” Pater also writes that “[a]ll art constantly aspires to the condition of music.”
The oracular quality of his words may seem overly academic. I first encountered Pater’s criticism when I was in graduate school, after I read such disciples of his as Gerard Manley Hopkins and Oscar Wilde. But it’s only since I began writing songs a few years ago—both on my own and with my bandmates—that his claim about art and music has sunk in.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )My songs are scratchy pastiches of the sloppy guitar pop from my teenage years, as well as twice-baked homages to earlier confections by the Velvet Underground, the Byrds, and Big Star. My rudimentary music does not aspire to the condition of “art”; it barely achieves the condition of music. But it has made me reflect on the relationship between form, content, and meaning. And that’s Pater’s subject.
>Murder music
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Ilan Greenberg explores the homophobia of Jamaican dancehall music @ Guernica.
On a breezy evening in mid-April a committee boasting some of Jamaica’s most venerable citizens convened an open-air meeting under the auspices of the department of government at the University of the West Indies. After almost a year and a half of sifting through charts and listening to old vinyl recordings, the committee co-chairmen, which included the president of Jamaica’s National Gallery and a former finance minister, presented to several hundred members of the public their list of the top one hundred Jamaican songs. Pandemonium ensued.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Audience members objected to the choice for number one song, “One Love,” Bob Marley’s sweet paean to togetherness, as being too saccharine. People jammed the open microphone to point out the under-representation of female artists. Others testily questioned why so few of the chosen top songs reflected reggae’s subversive, anti-establishment politics. Several people demanded a more transparent process. But the most passionate complaint from the crowd—which included members of the media, faculty in the university’s department of reggae studies, music industry figures, and ordinary music fans—was voiced over and over again from younger members of the audience: Where on this top one hundred list were the dancehall songs?
>His music was a weapon, his humor was a shield
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| Nigerian Music Movement |
Sefi Atta reflects on the life and music of Nigerian artist Fela @ the new multi-media journal AfroBeat.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )The first time I met Fela, he said something to me that I can’t repeat here, but I wasn’t offended. It was 1986, I was twenty-two years old and could well have been a ten-year-old girl in the presence of a black superhero. Fela was James Brown, Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X. He was “Palaver” on Sunday afternoons, album covers that looked like porn, and every swear word I was not supposed to use. On occasion, he was a revolution.
My husband, Gboyega, who was then my boyfriend, had taken me to Shrine for Sunday Jump. Gboyega had introduced me to Fela and laughed, as I did, at what Fela had said. Then as we walked away, Gboyega shook his head and with a smile said, “Man, why did he have to say that?” Fela was his uncle and he was embarrassed. It occurred to me that Fela was just a regular family member to the Ransome-Kutis, but at the Shrine that evening he was greeted like a god when he stepped on stage. The crowd cheered, “Baba!” and raised their fists. He called out, “Everybody say ‘Yeah, yeah,’” and after they responded, it was almost as if they were expecting a miracle instead of a show.
The smell of igbo was all over Shrine and Gboyega had once told me that growing up, he was called a mu igbo, a pothead, because of his family name, so he vowed to be a Ransome-Kuti who could categorically say he was not. He had good reason: he had just graduated from medical school and was working at Lagos University Teaching Hospital. He did not smoke igbo and neither did I, but anyone who saw me that evening would have thought otherwise.
>Rock of Ages
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| Stephen Alcorn |
Wendy Smith remembers two rock legends forty years after their deaths @ American Scholar.
I was 14 when Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin died within 16 days of each other. It was 40 years ago, the fall of 1970, hardly more than three years since the Monterey Pop Festival had made them both stars, but as far as my friends and I were concerned, they’d always been around. They were part of our musical landscape, along with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan. Drugs, I regret to say, were part of our landscape too; we bought into the counterculture’s glorification of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll as the way to blast our generation loose from the dead hand of conformity and the dreaded prospect of turning into our parents. We shrugged off adult finger wagging over the deaths of two 27-year-olds from heroin overdose and suffocation due to barbiturate intoxication (though Hendrix choking on his own vomit inspired a fair amount of gross-out teen humor). When you’re 14, 27 seems far away, and premature death can seem romantically tragic rather than criminally wasteful.
I accepted that Joplin and Hendrix, both famous for their pursuit of excess as a path to ecstasy, had paid the price for their rejection of conventional wisdom, conventional behavior, and conventional restraint. They were the first members of the pantheon I formed in high school of heroes who had lived hard and died young: Lenny Bruce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Garfield, Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith. Joplin introduced me to Bessie Smith, whom she always cited as her greatest inspiration, though I didn’t start listening to the 1920s’ Empress of the Blues until after Janis died. At 14, to my mother’s horror, Joplin was my model of what a woman could be: a plain, unpopular teenage girl who transformed herself into a flamboyant counterculture diva through sheer talent and audacity.
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>In the Monkey House
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| Enrico Caruso |
David Suisman on the life of Enrico Caruso and the first celebrity trial of the 20th century @ The Believer.
At a key moment in Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982), the title character (played by Klaus Kinski) pacifies a murderous tribe of South American Indians by playing Enrico Caruso records on a portable phonograph mounted on his riverboat. Set in the early twentieth century, the story centers on Fitzcarraldo’s monomaniacal drive to build an opera house in the jungle and have Caruso sing there on opening night. Over the course of the film, both the phonograph and the tenor’s voice act as awesome, transcultural forces, capable of enchanting hostile natives and “civilized” Europeans alike. More than any other vocalist of his era, Caruso enjoyed a reputation for commanding a voice that approached mythical levels of greatness.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )In the first quarter of the twentieth century, Enrico Caruso (1873–1921) was the best-known singer in the world—both an internationally renowned performer and the standard-bearer of the young international phonograph industry. He embodied, in fact, a new kind of public figure, one whose celebrity grew out of the emerging culture industries and circulated through the modern mass media. But Caruso’s stature as a celebrity depended on his charisma as much as his voice. After working with him, Edward Bernays, the pioneering public relations consultant, described Caruso’s star power in his 1965 autobiography. Caruso, he recalled, was like “a sun god” whose “light obliterated his surroundings,” and for those who came in contact with him, Bernays quipped, the experience was “gilt by association.” The pun was ironic: in addition to his groundbreaking fame, Caruso was the subject of the first celebrity trial of the twentieth century.
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